Ontology

Or the

Theory of Being

By

Peter Coffey, Ph.D. (Louvain)

Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Waynooth College, Ireland

Longmans, Green and Co.

London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras

1918

Contents

[pg vi]

To
The Students
Past And Present
Of
Maynooth College

Preface.

It is hoped that the present volume will supply a want that is really felt by students of philosophy in our universities—the want of an English text-book on General Metaphysics from the Scholastic standpoint. It is the author's intention to supplement his Science of Logic[1] and the present treatise on Ontology, by a volume on the Theory of Knowledge. Hence no disquisitions on the latter subject will be found in these pages: the Moderate Realism of Aristotle and the Schoolmen is assumed throughout.

In the domain of Ontology there are many scholastic theories and discussions which are commonly regarded by non-scholastic writers as possessing nowadays for the student of philosophy an interest that is merely historical. This mistaken notion is probably due to the fact that few if any serious attempts have yet been made to transpose these questions from their medieval setting into the language and context of contemporary philosophy. Perhaps not a single one of these problems is really and in substance alien to present-day speculations. The author has endeavoured, by his treatment of such characteristically “medieval” discussions as those on Potentia and Actus, Essence and Existence, Individuation, the Theory of Distinctions, Substance and Accident, Nature and Person, Logical and Real Relations, Efficient and Final Causes, to show that the issues involved are in every instance as fully and keenly debated—in an altered setting and a new terminology—by recent and living philosophers of every [pg viii] school of thought as they were by St. Thomas and his contemporaries in the golden age of medieval scholasticism. And, as the purposes of a text-book demanded, attention has been devoted to stating the problems clearly, to showing the significance and bearings of discussions and solutions, rather than to detailed analyses of arguments. At the same time it is hoped that the treatment is sufficiently full to be helpful even to advanced students and to all who are interested in the “Metaphysics of the Schools”. For the convenience of the reader the more advanced portions are printed in smaller type.

The teaching of St. Thomas and the other great Schoolmen of the Middle Ages forms the groundwork of the book. This corpus of doctrine is scarcely yet accessible outside its Latin sources. As typical of the fuller scholastic text-books the excellent treatise of the Spanish author, Urraburu,[2] has been most frequently consulted. Much assistance has also been derived from Kleutgen's Philosophie der Vorzeit,[3] a monumental work which ought to have been long since translated into English. And finally, the excellent treatise in the Louvain Cours de Philosophie, by the present Cardinal Archbishop of Mechlin,[4] has been consulted with profit and largely followed in many places. The writer freely and gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to these and other authors quoted and referred to in the course of the present volume.

General Introduction.

I. Reason of Introductory Chapter.—It is desirable that at some stage in the course of his investigations the student of philosophy should be invited to take a brief general survey of the work in which he is engaged. This purpose will be served by a chapter on the general aim and scope of philosophy, its distinctive characteristics as compared with other lines of human thought, and its relations to these latter. Such considerations will at the same time help to define Ontology, thus introducing the reader to the subject-matter of the present volume.

II. Philosophy: the Name and the Thing.—In the fifth book of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations we read that the terms philosophus and philosophia were first employed by Pythagoras who flourished in the sixth century before Christ, that this ancient sage was modest enough to call himself not a “wise man” but a “lover of wisdom” (φίλος, σοφία), and his calling not a profession of wisdom but a search for wisdom. However, despite the disclaimer, the term philosophy soon came to signify wisdom simply, meaning by this the highest and most precious kind of knowledge.

Now human knowledge has for its object everything that falls in any way within human experience. It has extensively a great variety in its subject-matter, and intensively a great variety in its degrees of depth and clearness and perfection. Individual facts of the past, communicated by human testimony, form the raw materials of historical knowledge. Then there are all the individual things and events that fall within one's own personal experience. Moreover, by the study of human language (or languages), of works of the human mind and products of human genius and skill, we gain a knowledge of literature, and of the arts—the fine arts and the mechanical arts. But not merely do we use our senses and memory thus to accumulate an unassorted stock of informations about isolated facts: a miscellaneous mass of mental furniture which constitutes the bulk of human knowledge [pg 002] in its least developed form—cognitio vulgaris, the knowledge of the comparatively uneducated and unreflecting classes of mankind. We also use our reasoning faculty to reflect, compare, classify these informations, to interpret them, to reason about them, to infer from them general truths that embrace individual things and events beyond our personal experience; we try to explain them by seeking out their reasons and causes. This mental activity gradually converts our knowledge into scientific knowledge, and thus gives rise to those great groups of systematized truths called the sciences: as, for example, the physical and mathematical sciences, the elements of which usually form part of our early education. These sciences teach us a great deal about ourselves and the universe in which we live. There is no need to dwell on the precious services conferred upon mankind by discoveries due to the progress of the various special sciences: mathematics as applied to engineering of all sorts; astronomy; the physical sciences of light, heat, sound, electricity, magnetism, etc.; chemistry in all its branches; physiology and anatomy as applied in medicine and surgery. All these undoubtedly contribute much to man's bodily well-being. But man has a mind as well as a body, and he is moreover a social being: there are, therefore, other special sciences—“human” as distinct from “physical” sciences—in which man himself is studied in his mental activities and social relations with his fellow-men: the sciences of social and political economy, constitutional and civil law, government, statesmanship, etc. Furthermore, man is a moral being, recognizing distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong, pleasure and happiness, duty and responsibility, in his own conduct; and finally he is a religious being, face to face with the fact that men universally entertain views, beliefs, convictions of some sort or other, regarding man's subjection to, and dependence on, some higher power or powers dwelling somehow or somewhere within or above the whole universe of his direct and immediate experience: there are therefore also sciences which deal with these domains, morality and religion. Here, however, the domains are so extensive, and the problems raised by their phenomena are of such far-reaching importance, that the sciences which deal with them can hardly be called special sciences, but rather constituent portions of the one wider and deeper general science which is what men commonly understand nowadays by philosophy.

The distinction between the special sciences on the one hand and philosophy, the general science, on the other, will help us to realize more clearly the nature and scope of the latter. The special sciences are concerned with discovering the proximate reasons and causes of this, that, and the other definite department in the whole universe of our experience. The subject-matter of some of them is totally different from that of others: physiology studies the functions of living organisms; geology studies the formation of the earth's crust. Or if two or more of them investigate the same subject-matter they do so from different standpoints, as when the zoologist and the physiologist study the same type or specimen in the animal kingdom. But the common feature of all is this, that each seeks only the reasons, causes, and laws which give a proximate and partial explanation of the facts which it investigates, leaving untouched and unsolved a number of deeper and wider questions which may be raised about the whence and whither and why, not only of the facts themselves, but of the reasons, causes and laws assigned by the particular science in explanation of these facts.

Now it is those deeper and wider questions, which can be answered only by the discovery of the more remote and ultimate reasons and causes of things, that philosophy undertakes to investigate, and—as far as lies within man's power—to answer. No one has ever disputed the supreme importance of such inquiries into the ultimate reasons and causes of things—into such questions as these, for instance: What is the nature of man himself? Has he in him a principle of life which is spiritual and immortal? What was his first origin on the earth? Whence did he come? Has his existence any purpose, and if so, what? Whither does he tend? What is his destiny? Why does he distinguish between a right and a wrong in human conduct? What is the ultimate reason or ground of this distinction? Why have men generally some form or other of religion? Why do men generally believe in God? Is there really a God? What is the origin of the whole universe of man's experience? Of life in all its manifestations? Has the universe any intelligible or intelligent purpose, and if so, what? Can the human mind give a certain answer to any of these or similar questions? What about the nature and value of human knowledge itself? What is its scope and what are its limitations? And since vast multitudes of men believe that the human race has been specially [pg 004] enlightened by God Himself, by Divine Revelation, to know for certain what man's destiny is, and is specially aided by God Himself, by Divine Grace, to work out this destiny—the question immediately arises: What are the real relations between reason alone on the one hand and reason enlightened by such Revelation on the other, in other words between natural knowledge and supernatural faith?

Now it will be admitted that the special sciences take us some distance along the road towards an answer to such questions, inasmuch as the truths established by these sciences, and even the wider hypotheses conceived though not strictly verified in them, furnish us with most valuable data in our investigation of those questions. Similarly the alleged fact of a Divine Revelation cannot be ignored by any man desirous of using all the data available as helps towards their solution. The Revelation embodied in Christianity claims not merely to enlighten us in regard to many ultimate questions which mankind would be able to answer without its assistance, but also to tell us about our destiny some truths of supreme import, which of ourselves we should never have been able to discover. It is obvious, then, that whether a man has been brought up from his infancy to believe in the Christian Revelation or not, his whole outlook on life will be determined very largely by his belief or disbelief in its authenticity and its contents. Similarly, if he be a Confucian, or a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan, his outlook will be in part determined by what he believes of their teachings. Man's conduct in life has undoubtedly many determining influences, but it will hardly be denied that among them the predominant influence is exerted by the views that he holds, the things he believes to be true, concerning his own origin, nature and destiny, as well as the origin, nature and destiny of the universe in which he finds himself. The Germans have an expressive term for that which, in the absence of a more appropriate term, we may translate as a man's world-outlook; they call it his Weltanschauung. Now this world-outlook is formed by each individual for himself from his interpretation of his experience as a whole. It is not unusual to call this world-outlook a man's philosophy of life. If we use the term philosophy in this wide sense it obviously includes whatever light a man may gather from the special sciences, and whatever light he may gather from a divinely revealed religion if he believes in such, as well as the light his own reason may shed upon a [pg 005] special and direct study of those ultimate questions themselves, to which we have just referred. But we mention this wide sense of the term philosophy merely to put it aside; and to state that we use the term in the sense more commonly accepted nowadays, the sense in which it is understood to be distinct from the special sciences on the one side and from supernatural theology or the systematic study of divinely revealed religion on the other. Philosophy is distinct from the special sciences because while the latter seek the proximate, the former seeks the ultimate grounds, reasons and causes of all the facts of human experience. Philosophy is distinct from supernatural theology because while the former uses the unaided power of human reason to study the ultimate questions raised by human experience, the latter uses reason enlightened by Divine Revelation to study the contents of this Revelation in all their bearings on man's life and destiny.

Hence we arrive at this simple and widely accepted definition of philosophy: the science of all things through their ultimate reasons and causes as discovered by the unaided light of human reason.[5] The first part of this definition marks off philosophy from the special sciences, the second part marks it off from supernatural theology.

We must remember, however, that these three departments of knowledge—scientific, philosophical, and revealed—are not isolated from one another in any man's mind; they overlap in their subject-matter, and though differing in their respective standpoints they permeate one another through and through. The separation of the special sciences from philosophy, though adumbrated in the speculations of ancient times and made more definite in the middle ages, was completed only in modern times through the growth and progress of the special sciences themselves. The line of demarcation between philosophy and supernatural theology must be determined by the proper relations between Reason and Faith: and naturally these relations are a subject of debate between philosophers who believe in the existence of an authentic Divine Revelation and philosophers who do not. It is the duty of the philosopher as such to determine by the light of reason whether a Supreme Being exists and whether a Divine Revelation to man is possible. If he convinces himself of the existence of God he will have little difficulty in inferring the possibility of a Divine Revelation. The fact of a Divine Revelation is a matter not for philosophical but for historical research. Now when a man has convinced himself of the existence of God and the fact of a Divine Revelation—the preambula fidei or prerequisite conditions of Faith, as they are called—he must see that it is eminently reasonable for him [pg 006] to believe in the contents of such Divine Revelation; he must see that the truths revealed by God cannot possibly trammel the freedom of his own reason in its philosophical inquiries into ultimate problems concerning man and the universe; he must see that these truths may possibly act as beacons which will keep him from going astray in his own investigations: knowing that truth cannot contradict truth he knows that if he reaches a conclusion really incompatible with any certainly revealed truth, such conclusion must be erroneous; and so he is obliged to reconsider the reasoning processes that led him to such a conclusion.[6] Thus, the position of the Christian philosopher, aided in this negative way by the truths of an authentic Divine Revelation, has a distinct advantage over that of the philosopher who does not believe in such revelation and who tries to solve all ultimate questions independently of any light such revelation may shed upon them. Yet the latter philosopher as a rule not only regards the “independent” position, which he himself takes up in the name of “freedom of thought” and “freedom of research,” as the superior position, but as the only one consistent with the dignity of human reason; and he commonly accuses the Christian philosopher of allowing reason to be “enslaved” in “the shackles of dogma”. We can see at once the unfairness of such a charge when we remember that the Christian philosopher has convinced himself on grounds of reason alone that God exists and has made a revelation to man. His belief in a Divine Revelation is a reasoned belief, a rationabile obsequium (Rom. XII. 1); and only if it were a blind belief, unjustifiable on grounds of reason, would the accusation referred to be a fair one. The Christian philosopher might retort that it is the unbelieving philosopher himself who really destroys “freedom of thought and research,” by claiming for the latter what is really an abuse of freedom, namely license to believe what reason shows to be erroneous. But this counter-charge would be equally unfair, for the unbelieving philosopher does not claim any such undue license to believe what he knows to be false or to disbelieve what he knows to be true. If he denies the fact or the possibility of a Divine Revelation, and therefore pursues his philosophical investigations without any regard to the contents of such revelation, it is because he has convinced himself on grounds of reason that such revelation is neither a fact nor a possibility. He and the Christian philosopher cannot both be right; one of them must be wrong; but as reasonable men they should agree to differ rather than hurl unjustifiable charges and counter-charges at each other.

All philosophers who believe in the Christian Revelation and allow its authentic teachings to guide and supplement their own rational investigation into ultimate questions, are keenly conscious of the consequent superior depth and fulness and certitude of Christian philosophy as compared with all the other conflicting and fragmentary philosophies that mark the progress of human speculation on the ultimate problems of man and the universe down through the centuries. They feel secure in the possession of a philosophia [pg 007] perennis,[7] and none more secure than those of them who complete and confirm that philosophy by the only full and authentic deposit of Divinely Revealed Truth, which is to be found in the teaching of the Catholic Church.

The history of philosophical investigation yields no one universally received conception of what philosophy is, nor would the definition given above be unreservedly accepted. Windelband, in his History of Philosophy[8] instances the following predominant conceptions of philosophy according to the chronological order in which they prevailed: (a) the systematic investigation of the problems raised by man and the universe (early Grecian philosophy: absence of differentiation of philosophy from the special sciences); (b) the practical art of human conduct, based on rational speculation (later Grecian philosophy: distrust in the value of knowledge, and emphasis on practical guidance of conduct); (c) the helper and handmaid of the Science of Revealed Truth, i.e. supernatural theology, in the solution of ultimate problems (the Christian philosophy of the Fathers of the Church and of the Medieval Schools down to the sixteenth century: universal recognition of the value of the Christian Revelation as an aid to rational investigation); (d) a purely rational investigation of those problems, going beyond the investigations of the special sciences, and either abstracting from, or denying the value of, any light or aid from Revelation (differentiation of the domains of science, philosophy and theology; modern philosophies from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century; excessive individualism and rationalism of these as unnaturally divorced from recognition of, and belief in, Divine Revelation, and unduly isolated from the progressing positive sciences); (e) a critical analysis of the significance and scope and limitations of human knowledge itself (recent philosophies, mainly concerned with theories of knowledge and speculations on the nature of the cognitive process and the reliability of its products).

These various conceptions are interesting and suggestive; much might be said about them, but not to any useful purpose in a brief introductory chapter. Let us rather, adopting the definition already set forth, try next to map out into its leading departments the whole philosophical domain.

III. Divisions of Philosophy: Speculative and Practical [pg 008] Philosophy.—The general problem of classifying all the sciences built up by human thought is a logical problem of no little complexity when one tries to work it out in detail. We refer to this general problem only to mention a widely accepted principle on which it is usually approached, and because the division of philosophy itself is a section of the general problem. The principle in question is that sciences may be distinguished indeed by partial or total diversity of subject-matter, but that such diversity is not essential, that diversity of standpoint is necessary and sufficient to constitute distinct sciences even when these deal with one and the same subject-matter. Now applying this principle to philosophy we see firstly that it has the same subject-matter as all the special sciences taken collectively, but that it is distinct from all of them inasmuch as it studies their data not from the standpoint of the proximate causes, but from the higher standpoint of the ultimate causes of these data. And we see secondly that philosophy, having this one higher standpoint throughout all its departments, is one science; that its divisions are only material divisions; that there is not a plurality of philosophies as there is a plurality of sciences, though there is a plurality of departments in philosophy.[9] Let us now see what these departments are.

If we ask why people seek knowledge at all, in any department, we shall detect two main impelling motives. The first of these is simply the desire to know: trahimur omnes cupiditate sciendi. The natural feeling of wonder, astonishment, “admiratio,” which accompanies our perception of things and events, prompts us to seek their causes, to discover the reasons which will make them intelligible to us and enable us to understand them. But while the possession of knowledge for its own sake is thus a motive of research it is not the only motive. We seek knowledge in order to use it for the guidance of our conduct in life, for the orientation of our activities, for the improvement of our condition; knowing that knowledge is power, we seek it in order to make it minister to our needs. Now in the degree in which it fulfils such ulterior purposes, or is sought for these purposes, [pg 009] knowledge may be described as practical; in the degree in which it serves no ulterior end, or is sought for no ulterior end, other than that of perfecting our minds, it may be described as speculative. Of course this latter purpose is in itself a highly practical purpose; nor indeed is there any knowledge, however speculative, but has, or at least is capable of having, some influence or bearing on the actual tenor and conduct of our lives; and in this sense all knowledge is practical. Still we can distinguish broadly between knowledge which has no direct, immediate bearing on our acts, and knowledge that has.[10] Hence the possibility of distinguishing between two great domains of philosophical knowledge—Theoretical or Speculative Philosophy, and Practical Philosophy. There are, in fact, two great domains into which the data of all human experience may be divided; and for each distinct domain submitted to philosophical investigation there will be a distinct department of philosophy. A first domain is the order realized in the universe independently of man; a second is the order which man himself realizes: things, therefore, and acts. The order of the external universe, the order of nature as it is called, exists independently of us: we merely study it (speculari, θεωρέω), we do not create it. The other or practical order is established by our acts of intelligence and will, and by our bodily action on external things under the direction of those faculties in the arts. Hence we have a speculative or theoretical philosophy and a practical philosophy.[11]

IV. Departments of Practical Philosophy: Logic, Ethics and Esthetics.—In the domain of human activities, to the right regulation of which practical philosophy is directed, we may distinguish two departments of mental activity, namely intellectual and volitional, and besides these the whole department of external, executive or bodily activity. In general the right regulation of acts may be said to consist in directing them to the realization of some ideal; for all cognitive acts this ideal is the true, for all appetitive or volitional acts it is the good, while for all external operations it may be either the beautiful or the useful—the respective objects of the fine arts and the mechanical arts or crafts.

Logic, as a practical science, studies the mental acts and processes involved in discovering and proving truths and systematizing these into sciences, with a view to directing these acts and processes aright in the accomplishment of this complex task. Hence it has for its subject-matter, in a certain sense, all the data of human experience, or whatever can be an object of human thought. But it studies these data not directly or in themselves or for their own sake, but only in so far as our acts of reason, which form its direct object, are brought to bear upon them. In all the other sciences we employ thought to study the various objects of thought as things, events, realities; and hence these may be called “real” sciences, scientiae reales; while in Logic we study thought itself, and even here not speculatively for its own sake or as a reality (as we study it for instance in Psychology), but practically, as a process capable of being directed towards the discovery and proof of truth; and hence in contradistinction to the other sciences as “real,” we call Logic the “rational” science, scientia rationalis. Scholastic philosophers express this distinction by saying that while Speculative Philosophy studies real being (Ens Reale), or the objects of direct thought (objecta primae intentionis mentis), Logic studies the being which is the product of thought (Ens Rationis), or objects of reflex thought (objecta secundae intentionis mentis).[12] The mental processes involved in the attainment of scientific truth are conception, judgment and inference; moreover these processes have to be exercised methodically by the combined application of analysis and synthesis, [pg 011] or induction and deduction, to the various domains of human experience. All these processes, therefore, and the methods of their application, constitute the proper subject-matter of Logic. It has been more or less a matter of debate since the days of Aristotle whether Logic should be regarded as a department of philosophical science proper, or rather as a preparatory discipline, an instrument or organon of reasoning—as the collection of Aristotle's own logical treatises was called,—and so as a vestibule or introduction to philosophy. And there is a similar difference of opinion as to whether or not it is advisable to set down Logic as the first department to be studied in the philosophical curriculum. Such doubts arise from differences of view as to the questions to be investigated in Logic, and the point to which such investigations should be carried therein. It is possible to distinguish between a more elementary treatment of thought-processes with the avowedly practical aim of setting forth canons of inference and method which would help and train the mind to reason and investigate correctly; and a more philosophical treatment of those processes with the speculative aim of determining their ultimate significance and validity as factors of knowledge, as attaining to truth, as productive of science and certitude. It is only the former field of investigation that is usually accorded to Logic nowadays; and thus understood Logic ought to come first in the curriculum as a preparatory training for philosophical studies, accompanied, however, by certain elementary truths from Psychology regarding the nature and functions of the human mind. The other domain of deeper and more speculative investigation was formerly explored in what was regarded as a second portion of logical science, under the title of “Critical” Logic—Logica Critica. In modern times this is regarded as a distinct department of Speculative Philosophy, under the various titles of Epistemology, Criteriology, or the Theory of Knowledge.

Ethics or Moral Philosophy (ἤθος, mos, mores, morals, conduct) is that department of practical philosophy which has for its subject-matter all human acts, i.e. all acts elicited or commanded by the will of man considered as a free, rational and responsible agent. And it studies human conduct with the practical purpose of discovering the ultimate end or object of this conduct, and the principles whereby it must be regulated in order to attain to this end. Ethics must therefore analyse and account for the distinction of right and wrong or good and bad in human conduct, for [pg 012] its feature of morality. It must examine the motives that influence conduct: pleasure, well-being, happiness, duty, obligation, moral law, etc. The supreme determining factor in all such considerations will obviously be the ultimate end of man, whatever this may be: his destiny as revealed by a study of his nature and place in the universe. Now the nature of man is studied in Psychology, as are also the nature, conditions and effects of his free acts, and the facilities, dispositions and forms of character consequent on these. Furthermore, not only from the study of man in Psychology, but from the study of the external universe in Cosmology, we amass data from which in Natural Theology we establish the existence of a Supreme Being. We then prove in Ethics that the last end of man, his highest perfection, consists in knowing, loving, serving, and thus glorifying God, both in this life and in the next. Hence we can see how these branches of speculative philosophy subserve the practical science of morals. And since a man's interpretation of the moral distinctions—as of right or wrong, meritorious or blameworthy, autonomous or of obligation—which he recognizes as pertaining to his own actions—since his interpretation of these distinctions is so intimately bound up with his religious outlook and beliefs, it is at once apparent that the science of Ethics will be largely influenced and determined by the system of speculative philosophy which inspires it, whether this be Theism, Monism, Agnosticism, etc. No doubt the science of Ethics must take as its data all sorts of moral beliefs, customs and practices prevalent at any time among men; but it is not a speculative science which would merely aim at a posteriori inferences or inductive generalizations from these data; it is a practical, normative science which aims at discovering the truth as to what is the right and the wrong in human conduct, and at pointing out the right application of the principles arising out of this truth. Hence it is of supreme importance for the philosopher of morals to determine whether the human race has really been vouchsafed a Divine Revelation, and, convincing himself that Christianity contains such a revelation, to recognize the possibility of supplementing and perfecting what his own natural reason can discover by what the Christian religion teaches about the end of man as the supreme determining principle of human conduct. Not that he is to take the revealed truths of Christianity as principles of moral philosophy; for these are the principles of the supernatural [pg 013] Christian Theology of human morals; but that as a Christian philosopher, i.e. a philosopher who recognizes the truth of the Christian Revelation, he should reason out philosophically a science of Ethics which, so far as it goes, will be in harmony with the moral teachings of the Christian Religion, and will admit of being perfected by these. This recognition, as already remarked, will not be a hindrance but a help to him in exploring the wide domains of the individual, domestic, social and religious conduct of man; in determining, on the basis of theism established by natural reason, the right moral conditions and relations of man's conduct as an individual, as a member of the family, as a member of the state, and as a creature of God. The nature, source and sanction of authority, domestic, social and religious; of the dictate of conscience; of the natural moral law and of all positive law; of the moral virtues and vices—these are all questions which the philosopher of Ethics has to explore by the use of natural reason, and for the investigation of which the Christian philosopher of Ethics is incomparably better equipped than the philosopher who, though possessing the compass of natural reason, ignores the beacon lights of Divinely Revealed Truths.

Esthetics, or the Philosophy of the Fine Arts, is that department of philosophy which studies the conception of the beautiful and its external expression in the works of nature and of man. The arts themselves, of course, whether concerned with the realization of the useful or of the beautiful, are distinct from sciences, even from practical sciences.[13] The technique itself consists in a skill acquired by practice—by practice guided, however, by a set of practical canons or rules which are the ripe fruit of experience.[14] But behind every art there is always some background of more or less speculative truth. The conception of the useful, however which underlies the mechanical arts and crafts, is not an ultimate conception calling for any further analysis than it receives in the various special sciences and in metaphysics. But the conception of the beautiful does seem to demand a special philosophical consideration. On the subjective or mental side the esthetic sense, artistic taste, the sentiment of the beautiful, the complex emotions accompanying such experience; on the objective side the elements [pg 014] or factors requisite to produce this experience; the relation of the esthetic to the moral, of the beautiful to the good and the true—these are all distinctly philosophical questions. Up to the present time, however, their treatment has been divided between the other departments of philosophy—psychology, cosmology, natural theology, general metaphysics, ethics—rather than grouped together to form an additional distinct department.

V. Departments of Speculative Philosophy: Metaphysics.—The philosophy which studies the order realized in things apart from our activity, speculative philosophy, has been variously divided up into separate departments from the first origins of philosophical speculation.

When we remember that all intellectual knowledge of things involves the apprehension of general truths or laws about these things, and that this apprehension of intelligible aspects common to a more or less extensive group of things involves the exercise of abstraction, we can understand how the whole domain of speculative knowledge, whether scientific or philosophical, can be differentiated into certain layers or levels, so to speak, according to various degrees of abstractness and universality in the intelligible aspects under which the data of our experience may be considered. On this principle Aristotle and the scholastics divided all speculative knowledge into three great domains, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics, with their respective proper objects, Change, Quantity and Being, objects which are successively apprehended in three great stages of abstraction traversed by the human mind in its effort to understand and explain the Universal Order of things.

And as a matter of fact perhaps the first great common and most obvious feature which strikes the mind reflecting on the visible universe is the feature of all-pervading change (κίνησις), movement, evolution, progress and regress, growth and decay; we see it everywhere in a variety of forms, mechanical or local change, quantitative change, qualitative change, vital change. Now the knowledge acquired by the study of things under this common aspect is called Physics. Here the mind abstracts merely from the individualizing differences of this change in individual things, and fixes its attention on the great, common, sensible aspect itself of visible change.

But the mind can abstract even from the sensible changes that take place in the physical universe and fix its attention on a static feature in the changing things. This static element [pg 015] (τὸ ἀκίνητον), which the intellect apprehends in material things as naturally inseparable from them (ἀκίνητον ἀλλ᾽ οὐ χωριστόν), is their quantity, their extension in space. When the mind strips a material object of all its visible, sensible properties—on which its mechanical, physical and chemical changes depend—there still remains as an object of thought a something formed of parts outside parts in three dimensions of space. This abstract quantity, quantitas intelligibilis—whether as continuous or discontinuous, as magnitude or multitude—is the proper object of Mathematics.

But the mind can penetrate farther still into the reality of the material data which it finds endowed with the attributes of change and quantity: it can eliminate from the object of its thought even this latter or mathematical attribute, and seize on something still more fundamental. The very essence, substance, nature, being itself, of the thing, the underlying subject and root principle of all the thing's operations and attributes, is something deeper than any of these attributes, something at least mentally distinct from these latter (τὸ ἀκίνητον και χωριστόν): and this something is the proper object of man's highest speculative knowledge, which Aristotle called ἡ πρώτη φιλοσοφία, philosophia prima, the first or fundamental or deepest philosophy.[15]

But he gave this latter order of knowledge another very significant title: he called it theology or theological science, ἐπιστήμη θεολογίκή, by a denomination derived a potiori parte, from its nobler part, its culmination in the knowledge of God. Let us see how. For Aristotle first philosophy is the science of being and its essential attributes.[16] Here the mind apprehends its [pg 016] object as static or abstracted from change, and as immaterial or abstracted from quantity, the fundamental attribute of material reality—as ἀκίνητον καὶ χωριστόν. Now it is the substance, nature, or essence of the things of our direct and immediate experience, that forms the proper object of this highest science. But in these things the substance, nature, or essence, is not found in real and actual separation from the material attributes of change and quantity; it is considered separately from these only by an effort of mental abstraction. Even the nature of man himself is not wholly immaterial; nor is the spiritual principle in man, his soul, entirely exempt from material conditions. Hence in so far as first philosophy studies the being of the things of our direct experience, its object is immaterial only negatively or by mental abstraction. But does this study bring within the scope of our experience any being or reality that is positively and actually exempt from all change and all material conditions? If so the study of this being, the Divine Being, will be the highest effort, the crowning perfection, of first philosophy; which we may therefore call the theological science. “If,” writes Aristotle,[17] “there really exists a substance absolutely immutable and immaterial, in a word, a Divine Being—as we hope to prove—then such Being must be the absolutely first and supreme principle, and the science that attains to such Being will be theological.”

In this triple division of speculative philosophy into Physics, Mathematics, and Metaphysics, it will naturally occur to one to ask: Did Aristotle distinguish between what he called Physics and what we nowadays call the special physical sciences? He did. These special analytic studies of the various departments of the physical universe, animate and inanimate, Aristotle described indiscriminately as “partial” sciences: αἱ ἐν μέρει ἐπιστημάι—ἐπιστημαὶ ἐν μέρει λεγόμεναι. These descriptive, inductive, comparative studies, proceeding a posteriori from effects to causes, he conceived rather as a preparation for scientific knowledge proper; this latter he conceived to be a synthetic, deductive explanation of things, in the light of some common aspect detected in them as principle or cause of all their concrete characteristics.[18] Such synthetic knowledge of things, in the light of some such common aspect as change, is what he regarded as scientific knowledge, meaning thereby what we mean by philosophical [pg 017] knowledge.[19] What he called Physics, therefore, is what we nowadays understand as Cosmology and Psychology.[20]

Mathematical science Aristotle likewise regarded as science in the full and perfect sense, i.e. as philosophical. But just as we distinguish nowadays between the special physical and human sciences on the one hand, and the philosophy of external nature and man on the other, so we may distinguish between the special mathematical sciences and a Philosophy of Mathematics: with this difference, that while the former groups of special sciences are mainly inductive the mathematical group is mainly deductive. Furthermore, the Philosophy of Mathematics—which investigates questions regarding the ultimate significance of mathematical concepts, axioms and assumptions: unity, multitude, magnitude, quantity, space, time, etc.—does not usually form a separate department in the philosophical curriculum: its problems are dealt with as they arise in the other departments of Metaphysics.

Before outlining the modern divisions of Metaphysics we may note that this latter term was not used by Aristotle. We owe it probably to Andronicus of Rhodes († 40 b.c.), who, when arranging a complete edition of Aristotle's works, placed next in order after the Physics, or physical treatises, all the parts and fragments of the master's works bearing upon the immutable and immaterial object of the philosophia prima; these he labelled τὰ μετὰ τὰ (βιβλία) φυσικα, post physica, the books after the physics: hence the name metaphysics,[21] applied to this highest section of speculative philosophy. It was soon noticed that the term, thus fortuitously applied to such investigations, conveyed a very appropriate description of their scope and character if interpreted in the sense of “supra-physica,” or “trans-physica”: inasmuch [pg 018] as the object of these investigations is a hyperphysical object, an object that is either positively and really, or negatively and by abstraction, beyond the material conditions of quantity and change. St. Thomas combines both meanings of the term when he says that the study of its subject-matter comes naturally after the study of physics, and that we naturally pass from the study of the sensible to that of the suprasensible.[22]

The term philosophia prima has now only an historical interest; and the term theology, used without qualification, is now generally understood to signify supernatural theology.

VI. Departments of Metaphysics: Cosmology, Psychology, and Natural Theology.—Nowadays the term Metaphysics is understood as synonymous with speculative philosophy: the investigation of the being, nature, or essence, and essential attributes of the realities which are also studied in the various special sciences: the search for the ultimate grounds, reasons and causes of these realities, of which the proximate explanations are sought in the special sciences. We have seen that it has for its special object that most abstract aspect of reality whereby the latter is conceived as changeless and immaterial; and we have seen that a being may have these attributes either by mental abstraction merely, or in actual reality. In other words the philosophical study of things that are really material not only suggests the possibility, but establishes the actual existence, of a Being that is really changeless and immaterial: so that metaphysics in all its amplitude would be the philosophical science of things that are negatively (by abstraction) or positively (in reality) immaterial. This distinction suggests a division of metaphysics into general and special metaphysics. The former would be the philosophical study of all being, considered by mental abstraction as immaterial; the latter would be the philosophical study of the really and positively changeless and immaterial Being,—God. The former would naturally fall into two great branches: the study of inanimate nature and the study of living things, Cosmology and Psychology; while special metaphysics, the philosophical study of the Divine Being, would constitute Natural Theology. These three departments, one of special metaphysics and two of general metaphysics, would not [pg 019] be three distinct philosophical sciences, but three departments of the one speculative philosophical science. The standpoint would be the same in all three sections, viz. being considered as static and immaterial by mental abstraction: for whatever positive knowledge we can reach about being that is really immaterial can be reached only through concepts derived from material being and applied analogically to immaterial being.

Cosmology and Psychology divide between them the whole domain of man's immediate experience. Cosmology, utilizing not only the data of direct experience, but also the conclusions established by the analytic study of these data in the physical sciences, explores the origin, nature, and destiny of the material universe. Some philosophers include among the data of Cosmology all the phenomena of vegetative life, reserving sentient and rational life for Psychology; others include even sentient life in Cosmology, reserving the study of human life for Psychology, or, as they would call it, Anthropology.[23] The mere matter of location is of secondary importance. Seeing, however, that man embodies in himself all three forms of life, vegetative, sentient, and rational, all three would perhaps more naturally belong to Psychology, which would be the philosophical study of life in all its manifestations (ψυχή, the vital principle, the soul). Just as the conclusions of the physical sciences are the data of Cosmology, so the conclusions of the natural or biological sciences—Zoology, Botany, Physiology, Morphology, Cellular Biology, etc.—are the data of Psychology. Indeed in Psychology itself—especially in more recent years—it is possible to distinguish a positive, analytic, empirical study of the phenomena of consciousness, a study which would rank rather as a special than as an ultimate or philosophical science; and a synthetic, rational study of the results of this analysis, a study which would be strictly philosophical in character. This would have for its object to determine the origin, nature and destiny of living things in general and of man himself in particular. It would inquire into the nature and essential properties of living matter, into the nature of the subject of conscious states, into the operations and faculties of the human mind, into the nature of the human soul and its mode of union with the body, into the rationality of the human [pg 020] intellect and the freedom of the human will, the spirituality and immortality of the human soul, etc.

But since the human mind itself is the natural instrument whereby man acquires all his knowledge, it will be at once apparent that the study of the phenomenon of knowledge itself, of the cognitive activity of the mind, can be studied, and must be studied, not merely as a natural phenomenon of the mind, but from the point of view of its special significance as representative of objects other than itself, from the point of view of its validity or invalidity, its truth or falsity, and with the special aim of determining the scope and limitations and conditions of its objective validity. We have already referred to the study of human knowledge from this standpoint, in connexion with what was said above concerning Logic. It has a close kinship with Logic on the one hand, and with Psychology on the other; and nowadays it forms a distinct branch of speculative Philosophy under the title of Criteriology, Epistemology, or the Theory of Knowledge.

Arising out of the data of our direct experience, external and internal, as studied in the philosophical departments just outlined, we find a variety of evidences all pointing beyond the domain of this direct experience to the supreme conclusion that there exists of necessity, distinct from this directly experienced universe, as its Creator, Conserver, and Ruler, its First Beginning and its Last End, its Alpha and Omega, One Divine and Infinite Being, the Deity. The existence and attributes of the Deity, and the relations of man and the universe to the Deity, form the subject-matter of Natural Theology.

VII. Departments of Metaphysics: Ontology and Epistemology.—According to the Aristotelian and scholastic conception speculative philosophy would utilize as data the conclusions of the special sciences—physical, biological, and human. It would try to reach a deeper explanation of their data by synthesizing these under the wider aspects of change, quantity, and being, thus bringing to light the ultimate causes, reasons, and explanatory principles of things. This whole study would naturally fall into two great branches: General Metaphysics (Cosmology and Psychology), which would study things exempt from quantity and change not really but only by mental abstraction; and Special Metaphysics (Natural Theology), which would study the positively immaterial and immutable Being of the Deity.

This division of Metaphysics, thoroughly sound in principle, [pg 021] and based on a sane and rational view of the relation between the special sciences and philosophy, has been almost entirely[24] supplanted in modern times by a division which, abstracting from the erroneous attitude that prompted it in the first instance, has much to recommend it from the standpoint of practical convenience of treatment. The modern division was introduced by Wolff (1679-1755), a German philosopher,—a disciple of Leibniz (1646-1716) and forerunner of Kant (1724-1804).[25] Influenced by the excessively deductive method of Leibniz' philosophy, which he sought to systematize and to popularize, he wrongly conceived the metaphysical study of reality as something wholly apart and separate from the inductive investigation of this same reality in the positive sciences. It comprised the study of the most fundamental and essential principles of being, considered in themselves; and the deductive application of these principles to the three great domains of actual reality, the corporeal universe, the human soul, and God. The study of the first principles of being in themselves would constitute General Metaphysics, or Ontology (ὄντος-λόγος). Their applications would constitute three great departments of Special Metaphysics: Cosmology, which he described as “transcendental” in opposition to the experimental physical sciences; Psychology, which he termed “rational” in opposition to the empirical biological sciences; and finally Natural Theology, which he entitled Theodicy (Θεός-δίκη-δικαιόω), using a term invented by Leibniz for his essays in vindication of the wisdom and justice of Divine Providence notwithstanding the evils of the universe.

“The spirit that animated this arrangement of the departments of metaphysics,” writes Mercier, “was unsound in theory and unfortunate in tendency. It stereotyped for centuries a disastrous divorce between philosophy and the [pg 022] sciences, a divorce that had its origin in circumstances peculiar to the intellectual atmosphere of the early eighteenth century. As a result of it there was soon no common language or understanding between scientists and philosophers. The terms which expressed the most fundamental ideas—matter, substance, movement, cause, force, energy, and such like—were taken in different senses in science and in philosophy. Hence misunderstandings, aggravated by a growing mutual distrust and hostility, until finally people came to believe that scientific and metaphysical preoccupations were incompatible if not positively opposed to each other.”[26]

How very different from the disintegrating conception here criticized is the traditional Aristotelian and scholastic conception of the complementary functions of philosophy and the sciences in unifying human knowledge: a conception thus eloquently expressed by Newman in his Idea of a University:—[27]

“All that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact.... Now, it is not wonderful that, with all its capabilities, the human mind cannot take in this whole vast fact at a single glance, or gain possession of it at once. Like a short-sighted reader, its eye pores closely, and travels slowly, over the awful volume which lies open for its inspection. Or again, as we deal with some huge structure of many parts and sides, the mind goes round about it, noting down, first one thing, then another, as best it may, and viewing it under different aspects, by way of making progress towards mastering the whole.... These various partial views or abstractions ... are called sciences ... they proceed on the principle of a division of labour.... As they all belong to one and the same circle of objects, they are one and all connected together; as they are but aspects of things, they are severally incomplete in their relation to the things themselves, though complete in their own idea and for their own respective purposes; on both accounts they at once need and subserve each other. And further, the comprehension of the bearings of one science on another, and the use of each to each, and the location and limitation and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, one with another, this belongs, I conceive, to a sort of science distinct from all of them, and in some sense, a science of sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by Philosophy....”

Without in any way countenancing such an isolation of metaphysics from the positive sciences, we may, nevertheless, adopt the modern division in substance and in practice. While recognizing the intimate connexion between the special sciences and metaphysics in all its branches, we may regard as General Metaphysics all inquiries into the fundamental principles of being and of knowing, of reality and of knowledge; and as Special Metaphysics the philosophical study of physical nature, of human nature, and of God, the Author and Supreme Cause of all finite reality. Thus, while special metaphysics would embrace Cosmology, Psychology, and Natural Theology, general metaphysics [pg 023] would embrace Ontology and Epistemology. These two latter disciplines must no doubt investigate what is in a certain sense one and the same subject-matter, inasmuch as knowledge is knowledge of reality, nor can the knowing mind (the subjectum cognoscens) and the known reality (the objectum cognitum) be wholly separated or studied in complete isolation from each other. Yet the whole content of human experience, which forms their common subject-matter, can be regarded by mental abstraction from the two distinct standpoints of the knowing mind and the known reality, and can thus give rise to two distinct sets of problems. Epistemology is thus concerned with the truth and certitude of human knowledge; with the subjective conditions and the scope and limits of its validity; with the subjective or mental factors involved in knowing.[28] Ontology is concerned with the objects of knowledge, with reality considered in the widest, deepest, and most fundamental aspects under which it is conceived by the human mind: with the being and becoming of reality, its possibility and its actuality, its essence and its existence, its unity and plurality; with the aspects of truth, goodness, perfection, beauty, which it assumes in relation with our minds; with the contingency of finite reality and the grounds and implications both of its actual existence and of its intelligibility; with the modes of its concrete existence and behaviour, the supreme categories of reality as they are called: substance, individual nature, and personality; quantity, space and time, quality and relation, causality and purpose. These are the principal topics investigated in the present volume. The investigation is confined to fundamental concepts and principles, leaving their applications to be followed out in special metaphysics. Furthermore, the theory of knowledge known as Moderate Realism,[29] the Realism of Aristotle and the Scholastics, in regard to the validity of knowledge both sensual and intellectual, is assumed throughout: because not alone is this the true theory, but—as a natural consequence—it is the only theory which renders the individual things and events of human experience really intelligible, and at the same time keeps the highest and most abstract intellectual speculations of metaphysics in constant and wholesome contact with the concrete, actual world in which we live, move, and have our being.

VIII. Remarks on Some Misgivings and Prejudices.—The [pg 024] student, especially the beginner, will find the investigations in this volume rather abstract; but if he remembers that the content of our intellectual concepts, be they ever so abstract and universal, is really embodied in the individual things and events of his daily experience, he will not be disposed to denounce all ultimate analysis of these concepts as “unprofitable” or “unreal”. He will recognize that the reproach of “talking in the air,” which was levelled by an eminent medieval scholastic[30] at certain philosophers of his time, tells against the metaphysical speculations of Conceptualism, but not against those of Moderate Realism. The reproach is commonly cast at all systematic metaphysics nowadays—from prejudices too numerous and varied to admit of investigation here.[31] The modern prejudice which denies the very possibility of metaphysics, a prejudice arising from Phenomenism, Positivism, and Agnosticism—systems which are themselves no less metaphysical than erroneous—will be examined in due course.[32]

But really in order to dispel all such misgivings one has only to remember that metaphysics, systematic or otherwise, is nothing more than a man's reasoned outlook on the world and life. Whatever his conscious opinions and convictions may be regarding the nature and purpose of himself, and other men, and the world at large—and if he use his reason at all he must have some sort of opinions and convictions, whether positive or negative, on these matters—those opinions and convictions are precisely that man's metaphysics. “Breaking free for the moment from all historical and technical definition, let us affirm: To get at reality—this is the aim of metaphysics.” So writes Professor Ladd in the opening chapter of his Theory of Reality.[33] But if this is so, surely a systematic attempt to “get at reality,” no matter how deep and wide, no matter how abstract and universal be the conceptions and speculations to which it leads us, cannot nevertheless always and of necessity have the effect of involving us in a mirage of illusion and unreality.

Systematic metaphysics—to quote again the author just referred to—[34] is ... the necessary result of a patient, orderly, well-informed, and prolonged [pg 025] study of those ultimate problems which are proposed to every reflective mind by the real existences and actual transactions of selves and of things. Thus considered it appears as the least abstract and foreign to concrete realities of all the higher pursuits of reason. Mathematics is abstract; logic is abstract; mathematical and so-called “pure” physics are abstract. But metaphysics is bound by its very nature and calling always to keep near to the actual and to the concrete. Dive into the depths of speculation indeed it may; and its ocean is boundless in expanse and deep beyond all reach of human plummets. But it finds its place of standing, for every new turn of daring explanation, on some bit of solid ground. For it is actuality which it wishes to understand—although in reflective and interpretative way. To quote from Professor Royce: “The basis of our whole theory is the bare, brute fact of experience which you have always with you, namely, the fact: Something is real. Our question is: What is this reality? or, again, What is the ultimately real?”[35]

The wonderful progress of the positive sciences during the last few centuries has been the occasion of prejudice against metaphysics in a variety of ways. It is objected, for instance, that metaphysics has no corresponding progress to boast of; and from this there is but a small step to the conclusion that all metaphysical speculation is sterile. The comparison is unfair for many reasons. Research into the ultimate grounds and causes of things is manifestly more difficult than research into their proximate grounds and causes. Again, while the positive sciences have increased our knowledge mainly in extent rather than in depth, it is metaphysics and only metaphysics that can increase this knowledge in its unity, comprehensiveness, and significance.

A positive increase in our knowledge of the manifold data of human experience is not the aim of metaphysics; its aim is to give an ultimate meaning and interpretation to this knowledge. It is not utilitarian in the narrower sense in which the positive and special sciences are utilitarian by ministering to our material needs; but in the higher and nobler sense of pointing out to us the bearing of all human knowledge and achievement on our real nature and destiny. True, indeed, individual leaders and schools of metaphysics have strayed from the truth and spoken with conflicting and uncertain voices, especially when they have failed to avail themselves of Truth Divinely Revealed. This, however, is not a failure of metaphysics but of individual metaphysicians. And furthermore, it is undeniable withal, that the metaphysical labours of the great philosophers in all ages have contributed richly to the enlightenment and civilization of mankind—particularly [pg 026] when these labours have been in concord and co-operation with the elevating and purifying influences of the Christian religion. Of no metaphysical system is this so entirely true as of that embodied in Scholastic Philosophy. The greatest intellect of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, gave to this philosophy an expression which is rightly regarded by the modern scholastic as his intellectual charter and the most worthy starting-point of his philosophical investigations. The following passage from an eminent representative of modern scholastic thought[36] is sufficiently suggestive to admit of quotation:—

Amid the almost uninterrupted disintegration of systems during the last three centuries, the philosophy of St. Thomas has alone been able to stand the shock of criticism; it alone has proved sufficiently solid and comprehensive to serve as an intellectual basis and unifying principle for all the new facts and phenomena brought to light by the modern sciences. And unless we are much mistaken, those who take up and follow this philosophy will come to think, as we do, that on the analysis of mental acts and processes, on the inner nature of corporeal things, of living things, and of man, on the existence and nature of God, on the foundations of speculative and moral science, none have thought or written more wisely than St. Thomas Aquinas. But though we place our programme and teaching under the patronage of the illustrious name of this prince of scholastics, we do not regard the Thomistic philosophy as an ideal beyond possibility of amelioration, or as a boundary to the activity of the human mind. We do think, however, on mature reflection, that we are acting no less wisely than modestly in taking it as our starting-point and constant standard of reference. This we say in answer to those of our friends and enemies who are occasionally pleased to ask us if we really do mean to lead back the modern mind into the Middle Ages, and to identify philosophy simply with the thought of any one philosopher. Manifestly, we mean nothing of the kind. Has not Leo XIII., the great initiator of the new scholastic movement, expressly warned us[37] to be mindful of the present: “Edicimus libenti gratoque animo recipiendum esse quidquid sapienter dictum, quidquid utiliter fuerit a quopiam inventum atque excogitatum”?

St. Thomas himself would be the first to rebuke those who would follow his own philosophical opinions in all things against their own better judgment, and to remind them of what he wrote at the head of his Summa: that in philosophy, of all arguments that based on human authority is the weakest, “locus ab auctoritate quæ fundatur super ratione humana, est infirmissimus.”[38]

Again, therefore, let us assert that respect for tradition is not servility but mere elementary prudence. Respect for a doctrine of whose soundness and worth we are personally convinced is not fetishism; it is but a rational and rightful tribute to the dominion of Truth over Mind.

Modern scholastics will know how to take to heart and profit by the lessons of the seventeenth and eighteenth century controversies; they will avoid the mistakes of their predecessors; they will keep in close contact with the special sciences subsidiary to philosophy and with the views and teachings of modern and contemporary thinkers.[39]

An overweening confidence in the power of the special sciences to solve ultimate questions, or at least to tell us all that can be known for certain about these problems, a confidence based on the astonishing progress of those sciences in modern times, is the source of yet another prejudice against metaphysics. It is a prejudice of the half-educated mind, of the camp-followers of science, not of its leaders. These latter are keenly conscious that the solution of ultimate questions lies entirely beyond the methods of the special sciences. Not that even the most eminent scientists do not indulge in speculations about ultimate problems—as they have a perfect right to do. But though they may be themselves quite aware that such speculations are distinctly metaphysical, there are multitudes who seem to think that a theory ceases to be metaphysical and becomes scientific provided only it is broached by a scientific expert as distinct from a metaphysician.[40] But all sincere thinkers will recognize that no ultimate question about the totality of human experience can be solved by any science which explores merely a portion of this experience. Nay, the more rapid and extensive is the progress of the various special sciences, the more imperative and insistent becomes the need to collect and collate their separate findings, to interrogate them one and all as to whether and how far these findings fit in with the facts and conditions of human life and existence, to determine what light and aid they contribute to the solution of the great and ever recurring questions of the whence? and whither? and why? of man and the universe. One who is a sincere scientist as well as an earnest philosopher has written à propos of this necessity in the following terms:—

The farther science has pushed back the limits of the discernible universe, the more insistently do we feel the demand within us for some satisfactory explanation of the whole. The old, eternal problems rise up before us and clamour loudly and ever more loudly for some newer and better solution. The solution offered by a bygone age was soothing at least, if it was not final. In the present age, however, the problems reappear with [pg 028] an acuteness that is almost painful: the deep secret of our own human nature, the questions of our origin and destiny, the intermeddling of blind necessity and chance and pain in the strange, tangled drama of our existence, the foibles and oddities of the human soul, and all the mystifying problems of social relations: are not these all so many enigmas which torment and trouble us whithersoever we turn? And all seem to circle around the one essential question: Has human nature a real meaning and value, or is it so utterly amiss that truth and peace will never be its portion?[41]

A final difficulty against philosophical research is suggested by the thought that if the philosopher has to take cognizance of all the conclusions of all the special sciences his task is an impossible one, inasmuch as nowadays at all events it would take a lifetime to become proficient in a few of these sciences not to speak of all of them.

There is no question, however, of becoming proficient in them; the philosopher need not be a specialist in any positive science; his acquaintance with the contents of these sciences need extend no farther than such established conclusions and such current though unverified hypotheses as have an immediate bearing on ultimate or philosophical problems.

Moreover, while it would be injurious both to philosophy and to science, as is proved by the history of both alike, to separate synthetic from analytic speculation by a divorce between philosophy and science; while it would be unwise to ignore the conclusions of the special sciences and to base philosophical research exclusively on the data of the plain man's common and unanalysed experience, it must be remembered on the other hand that the most fundamental truths of speculative and practical philosophy, the truths that are most important for the right and proper orientation of human life, can be established and defended independently of the special researches of the positive sciences. The human mind had not to await the discovery of radium in order to prove the existence of God. Such supreme truths as the existence of God, the immortality of the human soul, the freedom of the human will, the existence of a moral law, the distinction between right and wrong, etc., have been always in possession of the human race. It has been, moreover, confirmed in its possession of them by Divine Revelation. And it has not needed either the rise or the progress of modern science to defend them. These fundamental rational truths constitute a philosophia perennis: [pg 029] a fund of truth which is, like all truth, immutable, though our human insight into it may develop in depth and clearness.

But while this is so it is none the less true that philosophy, to be progressive in its own order, must take account of every new fact and conclusion brought to light in every department of scientific—and historical, and artistic, and literary, and every other sort of—research. And this for the simple reason that every such accession, whether of fact or of theory, is an enlargement of human experience; as such it clamours on the one hand for philosophical interpretation, for explanation in the light of what we know already about the ultimate grounds and causes of things, for admission into our world-outlook, for adjustment and co-ordination with the previous contents of the latter; while, on the other hand, by its very appearance on the horizon of human experience it may enrich or illumine, rectify or otherwise influence, this outlook or some aspect of it.[42]

If, then, philosophy has to take account of advances in every other department of human research, it is clear that its mastery at the present day is a more laborious task than ever it was in the past. In order to get an intelligent grasp of its principles in their applications to the problems raised by the progress of the sciences, to newly discovered facts and newly propounded hypotheses, the student must be familiar with these facts and hypotheses; and all the more so because through the medium of a sensational newspaper press that has more regard for novelty than truth, these facts and hypotheses are no sooner brought to light by scientists than what are often garbled and distorted versions of them are circulated among the masses.[43]

Similarly, in order that a sound system of speculative and [pg 030] practical philosophy be expounded, developed, and defended at the present time, a system that will embrace and co-ordinate the achieved results of modern scientific research, a system that will offer the most satisfactory solutions of old difficulties in new forms and give the most reasonable and reliable answers to the ever recurring questionings of man concerning his own nature and destiny—it is clear that the insufficiency of individual effort must be supplemented by the co-operation of numbers. It is the absence of fulness, completeness, adequacy, in most modern systems of philosophy, their fragmentary character, the unequal development of their parts, that accounts very largely for the despairing attitude of the many who nowadays despise and turn away from philosophical speculation. Add to this the uncertain voice with which these philosophies speak in consequence of their advocates ignoring the implications of the most stupendous fact in human experience,—the Christian Revelation. But there is one philosophy which is free from these defects, a philosophy which is in complete harmony with Revealed Truth, and which forms with the latter the only true Philosophy of Life; and that one philosophy is the system which, assimilating the wisdom of Plato, Aristotle and all the other greatest thinkers of the world, has been traditionally expounded in the Christian schools—the Scholastic system of philosophy. It has been elaborated by no one man, and is the original fruit of no one mind. Unlike the philosophies of Kant or Hegel or Spencer or James or Comte or Bergson, it is not a “one-man” philosophy. It cannot boast of the novelty or originality of the many eccentric and ephemeral “systems” which have succeeded one another so rapidly in recent times in the world of intellectual fashion; but it has ever possessed the enduring novelty of the truth, which is ever ancient and ever new. Now although this philosophy may have been mastered in its broad outlines and applications by specially gifted individuals in past ages, its progressive exposition and development, and its application to the vastly extended and ever-growing domains of experience that are being constantly explored by the special sciences, can never be the work of any individual: it can be accomplished only by the earnest co-operation of Christian philosophers in every part of the civilized world.[44]

In carrying on this work we have not to build from the beginning. “It has sometimes been remarked,” as Newman observes,[45] “when men have boasted of the knowledge of modern times, that no wonder we see more than the ancients because we are mounted upon their shoulders.” Yes; the intellectual toilers of to-day are heirs to the intellectual wealth of their ancestors. We have tradition: not to despise but to use, critically, judiciously, reverently, if we are to use it profitably. Thomas Davis has somewhere said that they who demolish the past do not build up for the future. And we have the Christian Revelation, as a lamp to our feet and a light to our paths[46] in all those rational investigations which form the appointed task of the philosopher. Hence,

Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;

That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster.[47]

[pg 032]

Chapter I. Being And Its Primary Determinations.

1. Our Concept of Being: its Expression and Features.—The term “Being” (Lat. ens; Gr. ὤν; Ger. Seiend; Fr. étant) as present participle of the verb to be (Lat. esse; Gr. ἔιναι; Ger. Sein; Fr. être) means existing (existens, existere). But the participle has come to be used as a noun; and as such it does not necessarily imply actual existence hic et nunc. It does indeed imply some relation to actual existence; for we designate as “being” (in the substantive sense) only whatever we conceive as actually existing or at least as capable of existing; and it is from the participial sense, which implies actual existence, that the substantive sense has been derived. Moreover, the intelligible use of the word “being” as a term implies a reference to some actually existing sphere of reality.[48] It is in the substantive meaning the term will be most frequently used in these pages, as the context will show. When we speak of “a being” in the concrete, the word has the same meaning as “thing” (res) used in the wide sense in which this latter includes persons, places, events, facts and phenomena of whatsoever kind. In the same sense we speak of “a reality,” this term having taken on a concrete, in addition to its original abstract, meaning. “Being” has also this abstract sense when we speak of “the being or reality of things”. Finally it may be used in a collective sense to indicate the sum-total of all that is or can be—all reality.

(a) The notion of being, spontaneously reached by the human mind, is found on reflection to be the simplest of all notions, defying every attempt at analysis into simpler notions. It is involved in every other concept which we form of any object of thought whatsoever. Without it we could have no concept of anything.

(b) It is thus the first of all notions in the logical order, i.e. in the process of rational thought.

(c) It is also the first of all notions in the chronological order, the first which the human mind forms in the order of time. Not, of course, that we remember having formed it before any other more determinate notions. But the child's awakening intellectual activity must have proceeded from the simplest, easiest, most superficial of all concepts, to fuller, clearer, and more determinate concepts, i.e. from the vague and confused notion of “being” or “thing” to notions of definite modes of being, or kinds of thing.

(d) This direct notion of being is likewise the most indeterminate of all notions; though not of course entirely indeterminate. An object of thought, to be conceivable or intelligible at all by our finite minds, must be rendered definite in some manner and degree; and even this widest notion of “being” is rendered intelligible only by being conceived as positive and as contrasting with absolute non-being or nothingness.[49]

According to the Hegelian philosophy “pure thought” can apparently think “pure being,” i.e. being in absolute indeterminateness, being as not even differentiated from “pure not-being” or absolute nothingness. And this absolutely indeterminate confusion (we may not call it a “synthesis” or “unity”) of something and nothing, of being and not-being, of positive and negative, of affirmation and denial, would be conceived by our finite minds as the objective correlative of, and at the same time as absolutely identical with, its subjective correlative which is “pure thought”. Well, it is with the human mind and its objects, and how it thinks those objects, that we are concerned at present; not with speculations involving the gratuitous assumption of a Being that would transcend all duality of subject and object, all determinateness of knowing and being, all distinction of thought and thing. We believe that the human mind can establish the existence of a Supreme Being whose mode of Thought and Existence transcends all human comprehension, but it can do so only as the culminating achievement of all its speculation; and the transcendent Being it thus reaches has nothing in common with the monistic ideal-real being of Hegel's philosophy. In endeavouring to set out from the high a priori ground of such an intangible conception, the Hegelian philosophy starts at the wrong end.

(e) Further, the notion of being is the most abstract of all notions, poorest in intension as it is widest in extension. We derive it from the data of our experience, and the process by which we reach it is a process of abstraction. We lay aside all the differences whereby things are distinguished from one another; we do not consider these differences; we prescind or abstract from them mentally, and retain for consideration only what is [pg 034] common to all of them. This common element forms the explicit content of our notion of being.

It must be noted, however, that we do not positively exclude the differences from the object of our concept; we cannot do this, for the simple reason that the differences too are “being,” inasmuch as they too are modes of being. Our attitude towards them is negative; we merely abstain from considering them explicitly, though they remain in our concept implicitly. The separation effected is only mental, subjective, notional, formal, negative; not objective, not real, not positive. Hence the process by which we narrow down the concept of being to the more comprehensive concept of this or that generic or specific mode of being, does not add to the former concept anything really new, or distinct from, or extraneous to it; but rather brings out explicitly something that was implicit in the latter. The composition of being with its modes is, therefore, only logical composition, not real.

On the other hand, it would seem that when we abstract a generic mode of being from the specific modes subordinate to the former, we positively exclude the differentiating characteristics of these species; and that, conversely, when we narrow down the genus to a subordinate species we do so by adding on a differentiating mode which was not contained even implicitly in the generic concept. Thus, for example, the differentiating concept “rational” is not contained even implicitly in the generic concept “animal”: it is added on ab extra to the latter[50] in order to reach the specific concept of “rational animal” or “man”; so that in abstracting the generic from the subordinate specific concept we prescind objectively and really from the differentiating concept, by positively excluding this latter. This kind of abstraction is called objective, real, positive; and the composition of such generic and differentiating modes of being is technically known as metaphysical composition. The different modes of being, which the mind can distinguish at different levels of abstraction in any specific concept—such as “rational,” “sentient,” “living,” “corporeal,” in the concept of “man”—are likewise known as “metaphysical grades” of being.

It has been questioned whether this latter kind of abstraction is always used in relating generic, specific, and differential modes of being. At first [pg 035] sight it would not appear to be a quite satisfactory account of the process in cases where the generic notion exhibits a mode of being which can be embodied only in one or other of a number of alternative specific modes by means of differentiae not found in any things lying outside the genus itself. The generic notion of “plane rectilinear figure” does not, of course, include explicitly its species “triangle,” “quadrilateral,” “pentagon,” etc.; nor does it include even implicitly any definite one of them. But the concept of each of the differentiating characters, e.g. the differentia “three-sidedness,” is unintelligible except as a mode of a “plane rectilinear figure”.[51] This, however, is only accidental, i.e. due to the special objects considered;[52] and even here there persists this difference that whereas what differentiates the species of plane rectilinear figures is not explicitly and formally plane-rectilinearity, that which differentiates finite from infinite being, or substantial from accidental being, is itself also formally and explicitly being. But there are other cases in which the abstraction is manifestly objective. Thus, for example, the differentiating concept “rational” does not even implicitly include the generic concept “animal,” for the former concept may be found realized in beings other than animals; and the differentiating concept “living” does not even implicitly include the concept “corporeal,” for it may be found realized in incorporeal beings.

(f) Since the notion of being is so simple that it cannot be analysed into simpler notions which might serve as its genus and differentia, it cannot strictly speaking be defined. We can only describe it by considering it from various points of view and comparing it with the various modes in which we find it realized. This is what we have been attempting so far. Considering its fundamental relation to existence we might say that “Being is that which exists or is at least capable of existing”: Ens est id quod existit vel saltem existere potest. Or, considering its relation to its opposite we might say that “Being is that which is not absolute nothingness”: Ens est id quod non est nihil absolutum. Or, considering its relation to our minds, we might say that “Being is whatever is thinkable, whatever can be an object of thought”.

(g) The notion of being is so universal that it transcends all actual and conceivable determinate modes of being: it embraces infinite being and all modes of finite being. In other words it is not itself a generic, but a transcendental notion. Wider than all, even the widest and highest genera, it is not itself a genus. A genus is determinable into its species by the addition of differences which lie outside the concept of the genus itself; being, [pg 036] as we have seen, is not in this way determinable into its modes.

2. In what Sense are all Things that Exist or can Exist said to be “Real” or to have “Being”?—A generic concept can be predicated univocally, i.e. in the same sense, of its subordinate species. These latter differ from one another by characteristics which lie outside the concept of the genus, while they all agree in realizing the generic concept itself: they do not of course realize it in the same way,[53] but as such it is really and truly in each of them and is predicated in the same sense of each. But the characteristics which differentiate all genera and species from one another, and from the common notion of being, in which they all agree, are likewise being. That in which they differ is being, as well as that in which they agree. Hence we do not predicate “being” univocally of its various modes. When we say of the various classes of things which make up our experience that they are “real” (or “realities,” or “beings”), we do not apply this predicate in altogether the same sense to the several classes; for as applied to each class it connotes the whole content of each, not merely the part in which this agrees with, but also the part in which it differs from, the others. Nor yet do we apply the concept of “being” in a totally different sense to each separate determinate mode of being. When we predicate “being” of its modes the predication is not merely equivocal. The concept expressed by the predicate-term “being” is not totally different as applied to each subject-mode; for in all cases alike it implies either actual existence or some relation thereto. It only remains, therefore, that we must regard the notion of being, when predicated of its several modes, as partly the same and partly different; and this is what we mean when we say that the concept of being is analogical, that being is predicated analogically of its various modes.

Analogical predication is of two kinds: a term or concept may be affirmed of a variety of subjects either by analogy of attribution or by analogy of proportion. We may, for instance, speak not only of a man as “healthy,” but also of his food, his countenance, [pg 037] his occupation, his companionship, etc., as “healthy”. Now health is found really only in the man, but it is attributed to the other things owing to some extrinsic but real connexion which they have with his health, whether as cause, or effect, or indication, of the latter. This is analogy of attribution; the subject of which the predicate is properly and primarily affirmed being known as the primary analogue or analogum princeps, those to which it is transferred being called the analogata. It underlies the figures of speech known as metynomy and synechdoche. Now on account of the various relations that exist between the different modes of being, relations of cause and effect, whole and part, means and end, ground and consequence, etc.—relations which constitute the orders of existing and possible things, the physical and the metaphysical orders—being is of course predicated of its modes by analogy of attribution; and in such predication infinite being is the primary analogue for finite beings, and the substance-mode of being for all accident-modes of being.

Inasmuch, however, as being is not merely attributed to these modes extrinsically, but belongs to all of them intrinsically, it is also predicated of them by analogy of proportion. This latter sort of analogy is based on similarity of relations. For example, the act of understanding bears a relation to the mind similar to that which the act of seeing bears to the eye, and hence we say of the mind that it “sees” things when it understands them. Or, again, we speak of a verdant valley in the sunshine as “smiling,” because its appearance bears a relation to the valley similar to that which a smile bears to the human countenance. Or again, we speak of the parched earth as “thirsting” for the rains, or of the devout soul as “thirsting” for God, because these relations are recognized as similar to that of a thirsty person towards the drink for which he thirsts. In all such cases the analogical concept implies not indeed the same attribute (differently realized) in all the analogues (as in univocal predication) but rather a similarity in the relation or proportion in which each analogue embodies or realizes some attribute or attributes peculiar to itself. Seeing is to the eye as understanding is to the mind; smiling is to the countenance as the pleasing appearance of its natural features is to the valley. Rain is to the parched earth, and God is to the devout soul, as drink is to the thirsty person. It will be noted that in all such cases the analogical concept is affirmed primarily and properly of some one thing (the analogum princeps), [pg 038] and of the other only secondarily, and relatively to the former.

Now, if we reflect on the manner in which being is affirmed of its various modes (e.g. of the infinite and the finite; or of substance and accident; or of spiritual and corporeal substances; or of quantities, or qualities, or causes, etc.) we can see firstly that although these differ from one another by all that each of them is, by the whole being of each, yet there is an all-pervading similarity between the relations which these modes bear each to its own existence. All have, or can have, actual existence: each according to the grade of perfection of its own reality. If we conceive infinite being as the cause of all finite beings, then the former exists in a manner appropriate to its all-perfect reality, and finite beings in a manner proportionate to their limited realities; and so of the various modes of finite being among themselves. Moreover, we can see secondly, as will be explained more fully below,[54] that being is affirmed of the finite by virtue of its dependence on the infinite, and of accident by virtue of its dependence on substance.[55] Being or reality is therefore predicated of its modes by analogy of proportion.[56]

Is a concept, when applied in this way, one, or is it really manifold? It is not simply one, for this would yield univocal predication; nor is it simply manifold, for this would give equivocal predication. Being, considered in its vague, imperfect, inadequate sense, as involving some common or similar proportion or relation to existence in all its analogues, is one; considered as representing clearly and adequately what is thus similarly related to each of the analogues, it is manifold.

Analogy of proportion is the basis of the figure of speech known as metaphor. It would be a mistake, however, to infer from this that what is thus analogically predicated of a number of things belongs intrinsically and properly only to one of them, being transferred by a mere extrinsic denomination to the others; and that therefore it does not express any genuine knowledge [pg 039] on our part about the nature of these other things. It does give us real knowledge about them. Metaphor is not equivocation; but perhaps more usually it is understood not to give us real knowledge because it is understood to be based on resemblances that are merely fanciful, not real. Still, no matter how slender and remote be the proportional resemblance on which the analogical use of language is based, in so far forth as it has such a real basis it gives us real insight into the nature of the analogues. And if we hesitate to describe such a use of language as “metaphorical,” this is only because “metaphor” perhaps too commonly connotes a certain transferred and improper extension of the meaning of terms, based upon a purely fanciful resemblance.

All our language is primarily and properly expressive of concepts derived from the sensible appearances of material realities. As applied to the suprasensible, intelligible aspects of these realities, such as substance and cause, or to spiritual realities, such as the human soul and God, it is analogical in another sense; not as opposed to univocal, but as opposed to proper. That is, it expresses concepts which are not formed directly from the presence of the things which they signify, but are gathered from other things to which the latter are necessarily related in a variety of ways.[57] Considering the origin of our knowledge, the material, the sensible, the phenomenal, comes first in order, and moulds our concepts and language primarily to its own proper representation and expression; while the spiritual, the intelligible, the substantial, comes later, and must make use of the concepts and language thus already moulded.

If we consider, however, not the order in which we get our knowledge, but the order of reality in the objects of our knowledge, being or reality is primarily and more properly predicated of the infinite than of the finite, of the Creator than of the creature, of the spiritual than of the material, of substances than of their accidents and sensible manifestations or phenomena. Yet we do not predicate being or reality of the finite, or of creatures, in a mere transferred, extrinsic, improper sense, as if these were mere manifestations of the infinite, or mere effects of the First Cause, to which alone reality would properly belong. For creatures, finite things, are in a true and proper sense also real.

Duns Scotus and those who think with him contend that the concept of being, derived as it is from our experience of finite being, if applied only [pg 040] analogically to infinite being would give us no genuine knowledge about the latter. They maintain that whenever a universal concept is applied to the objects in which it is realized intrinsically, it is affirmed of these objects univocally. The notion of being, in its most imperfect, inadequate, indeterminate sense, is, they say, one and the same in so far forth as it is applicable to the infinite and the finite, and to all the modes of the finite; and it is therefore predicated of all univocally.[58] But although they apply the concept of being univocally to the infinite and the finite, i.e. to God and creatures, they admit that the reality corresponding to this univocal concept is totally different in God and in creatures: that God differs by all that He is from creatures, and they by all that they are from Him. While, however, Scotists emphasize the formal oneness or identity of the indeterminate common concept, followers of St. Thomas emphasize the fact that the various modes of being differ totally, by all that each of them is, from one another; and, from this radical diversity in the modes of being, they infer that the common concept should not be regarded as simply the same, but only as proportionally the same, as expressive of a similar relation of each intrinsically different mode of reality to actual existence.

Thomists lay still greater stress, perhaps, upon the second consideration referred to above, as a reason for regarding being as an analogical concept when affirmed of Creator and creature, or of substance and accident: the consideration that the finite is dependent on the infinite, and accident on substance. If being is realized in a true and proper sense, and intrinsically, as it undoubtedly is, in whatever is distinguishable from nothingness, why not say that we should affirm being or reality of all things “either as a genus in the strict sense, or else in some sense not analogical but proper, after the manner in which we predicate a genus of its species and individuals?... Since the object of our universal idea of being is admitted to be really in all things, we can evidently abstract from what is proper to substance and to accident, just as we abstract from what is proper to plants and to animals when we affirm of these that they are living things.”[59]

“In reply to this difficulty,” Father Kleutgen continues,[60] “we say in the first place that the idea of being is in truth less analogical and more proper than any belonging to the first sort of analogy [i.e. of attribution], and that therefore it approaches more closely to generic concepts properly so called. At the same time the difference which separates both from the latter concepts remains. For a name applied to many things is analogical if what it signifies is realized par excellence in one, and in the others only subordinately and dependently on that. Hence it is that Aristotle regards predication as analogical when something is affirmed of many things (1) either because these have a certain relation to some one thing, (2) or because they depend on some one thing. In the former case the thing signified by the name is really and properly found only in one single thing, and is affirmed of all the others only in virtue of some real relation of these to the former, whether this be (a) that these things merely resemble that single thing [pg 041] [metaphor], or (b) bear some other relation to it, such as that of effect to cause, etc. [metonymy]. In the latter case the thing signified by the name is really in each of the things of which it is affirmed; but it is in one alone par excellence, and in the others only by depending, for its very existence in them, on that one. Now the object of the term being is found indeed in accidents, e.g. in quantity, colour, shape; but certainly it must be applied primarily to substance, and to accidents only dependently on the latter: for quantity, colour, shape can have being only because the corporeal substance possesses these determinations. But this is not at all the case with a genus and its species. These differ from the genus, not by any such dependence, but by the addition of some special perfection to the constituents of the genus; for example, in the brute beast sensibility is added to vegetative life, and in man intelligence is added to sensibility. Here there is no relation of dependence for existence. Even if we considered human life as that of which life is principally asserted, we could not say that plants and brute beasts so depended for their life on the life of man that we could not affirm life of them except as dependent on the life of man: as we cannot attribute being to accidents except by reason of their dependence on substance. Hence it is that we can consider apart, and in itself, life in general, and attribute this to all living things without relating it to any other being.”[61]

“It might still be objected that the one single being of which we may affirm life primarily and principally, ought to be not human life, but absolute life. And between this divine life and the life of all other beings there is a relation of dependence, which reaches even to the very existence of life in these other beings. In fact all life depends on the absolute life, not indeed in the way accident depends on substance, but in a manner no less real and far more excellent. This is entirely true; but what are we to conclude from it if not precisely this, which scholasticism teaches: that the perfections found in the various species of creatures can be affirmed of these in the same sense (univocé), but that they can be affirmed of God and creatures only analogically?”

“From all of which we can understand why it is that in regard to genera and species the analogy is in the things but not in our thoughts, while in regard to substance and accidents it is both in the things and in our thoughts: a difference which rests not solely on our manner of conceiving things, nor a fortiori on mere caprice or fancy, but which has its basis in the very nature of the things themselves. For though in the former case there is a certain analogy in the things themselves, inasmuch as the same nature, that of the genus, is realized in the species in different ways, still, as we have seen, that is not sufficient, without the relation of dependence, to yield a basis for analogy in our thoughts. For it is precisely because accident, as a determination of substance, presupposes this latter, that being cannot be affirmed of accident except as dependent on substance.”

These paragraphs will have shown with sufficient clearness why we should regard being not as an univocal but as an analogical concept, when referred to God and creatures, or to substance and accident. For the rest, the divergence between the Scotist and the Thomist views is not very important, because [pg 042] Scotists also will deny that being is a genus of which the infinite and the finite would be species; finite and infinite are not differentiae superadded to being, inasmuch as each of these differs by its whole reality, and not merely by a determining portion, from the other; it is owing to the limitations of our abstractive way of understanding reality that we have to conceive the infinite by first conceiving being in the abstract, and then mentally determining this concept by another, namely, by the concept of “infinite mode of being”[62]; the infinite, and whatever perfections we predicate formally of the infinite, transcend all genera, species and differentiae, because the distinction of being into infinite and finite is prior to the distinction into genera, species and differentiae; this latter distinction applying only to finite, not to infinite being.[63]

The observations we have just been making in regard to the analogy of being are of greater importance than the beginner can be expected to realize. A proper appreciation of the way in which being or reality is conceived by the mind to appertain to the data of our experience, is indispensable to the defence of Theism as against Agnosticism and Pantheism.

3. Real Being and Logical Being.—We may next illustrate the notion of being by approaching it from another standpoint—by examining a fundamental distinction which may be drawn between real being (ens reale) and logical being (ens rationis).

We derive all our knowledge, through external and internal sense perception, from the domain of actually existing things, these things including our own selves and our own minds. We form, from the data of sense-consciousness, by an intellectual process proper, mental representations of an abstract and universal character, which reveal to us partial aspects and phases of the natures of things. We have no intuitive intellectual insight into these natures. It is only by abstracting their various aspects, by comparing these in judgments, and reaching still further aspects by inferences, that we progress in our knowledge of things—gradually, step by step, discursivé, discurrendo. All this implies reflection on, and comparison of, our own ideas, our mental views of things. It involves the processes of defining and classifying, affirming and denying, abstracting and generalizing, analysing and synthesizing, comparing and relating in a variety of ways the objects grasped by our thought. Now in all these complex functions, by which alone the mind can interpret rationally what is given to it, by which alone, in other words, it can know reality, the mind necessarily and inevitably forms for itself (and expresses [pg 043] in intelligible language) a series of concepts which have for their objects only the modes in which, and the relations by means of which, it makes such gradual progress in its interpretation of what is given to it, in its knowledge of the real. These concepts are called secundae intentiones mentis—concepts of the second order, so to speak. And their objects, the modes and mutual relations of our primae intentiones or direct concepts, are called entia rationis—logical entities. For example, abstractness is a mode which affects not the reality which we apprehend intellectually, but the concept by which we apprehend it. So, too, is the universality of a concept, its communicability or applicability to an indefinite multitude of similar realities—the “intentio universalitatis,” as it is called—a mode of concept, not of the realities represented by the latter. So, likewise, is the absence of other reality than that represented by the concept, the relative nothingness or non-being by contrast with which the concept is realized as positive; and the absolute nothingness or non-being which is the logical correlative of the concept of being; and the static, unchanging self-identity of the object as conceived in the abstract.[64] These are not modes of reality as it is but as it is conceived. Again, the manifold logical relations which we establish between our concepts—relations of (extensive or intensive) identity or distinction, inclusion or inherence, etc.—are logical entities, entia rationis: relations of genus, species, differentia, proprium, accidens; the affirmative or negative relation between predicate and subject in judgment;[65] the mutual relations of antecedent and consequent in inference. Now all these logical entities, or objecta secundae intentionis mentis, are relations established by the mind itself between its own thoughts; they have, no doubt, a foundation in the real objects of those thoughts as well as in the constitution and limitations of the mind itself; but they have themselves, and can have, no other being than that which they have as products of thought. Their sole being consists in being thought of. They are necessary creations or products of the thought-process as this goes on in the human mind. We see [pg 044] that it is only by means of these relations we can progress in understanding things. In the thought-process we cannot help bringing them to light—and thinking them after the manner of realities, per modum entis. Whatever we think we must think through the concept of “being”; whatever we conceive we must conceive as “being”; but on reflection we easily see that such entities as “nothingness,” “negation or absence or privation of being,” “universality,” “predicate”—and, in general, all relations established by our own thought between our own ideas representative of reality—can have themselves no reality proper, no actual or possible existence, other than that which they get from the mind in virtue of its making them objects of its own thought. Hence the scholastic definition of a logical entity or ens rationis as “that which has objective being merely in the intellect”: “illud quod habet esse objective tantum in intellectu, seu ... id quod a ratione excogitatur ut ens, cum tamen in se entitatem non habeat”.[66] Of course the mental process by which we think such entities, the mental state in which they are held in consciousness, is just as real as any other mental process or state. But the entity which is thus held in consciousness has and can have no other reality than what it has by being an object of thought. And this precisely is what distinguishes it from real being, from reality; for the latter, besides the ideal existence it has in the mind which thinks of it, has, or at least can have, a real existence of its own, independently altogether of our thinking about it. We assume here, of course—what is established elsewhere, as against the subjective idealism of phenomenists and the objective idealism of Berkeley—that the reality of actual things does not consist in their being perceived or thought of, that their “esse” is not “percipi,” that they have a reality other than and independent of their actual presence to the thought of any human mind. And even purely possible things, even the creatures of our own fancy, the fictions of fable and romance, could, absolutely speaking and without any contradiction, have an existence in the actual order, in addition to the mental existence they receive from those who fancy them. Such entities, therefore, differ from entia rationis; they, too, are real beings.

What the reality of purely possible things is we shall discuss later on. Actually existing things at all events we assume to be given to the knowing mind, not to be created by the latter. Even in regard to these, however, we [pg 045] must remember that the mind in knowing them, in interpreting them, in seeking to penetrate the nature of them, is not purely passive; that reality as known to us—or, in other words, our knowledge of reality—is the product of a twofold factor: the subjective which is the mind, and the objective which is the extramental reality acting on, and thus revealing itself to, the mind. Hence it is that when we come to analyse in detail our knowledge of the nature of things—or, in other words, the natures of things as revealed to our minds—it will not be always easy to distinguish in each particular case the properties, aspects, relations, distinctions, etc., which are real (in the sense of being there in the reality independently of the consideration of the mind) from those that are merely logical (in the sense of being produced and superadded to the reality by the mental process itself).[67] Yet it is obviously a matter of the very first importance to determine, as far as may be possible, to what extent our knowledge of reality is not merely a mental interpretation, but a mental construction, of the latter; and whether, if there be a constructive or constitutive factor in thought, this should be regarded as interfering with the validity of thought as representative of reality. This problem—of the relation of the ens rationis to the ens reale in the process of cognition—has given rise to discussions which, in modern times, have largely contributed to the formation of that special branch of philosophical enquiry which is called Epistemology. But it must not be imagined that this very problem was not discussed, and very widely discussed, by philosophers long before the problem of the validity of knowledge assumed the prominent place it has won for itself in modern philosophy. Even a moderate familiarity with scholastic philosophy will enable the student to recognize this problem, in a variety of phases, in the discussions of the medieval schoolmen concerning the concepts of matter and form, the simplicity and composition of beings, and the nature of the various distinctions—whether logical, virtual, formal, or real—which the mind either invents or detects in the realities it endeavours to understand and explain.

4. Real Being and Ideal Being.—The latter of these expressions has a multiplicity of kindred meanings. We use it here in the sense of “being known,” i.e. to signify the “esse intentionale,” the mental presence, which, in the scholastic theory of knowledge, an entity of whatsoever kind, whether real or logical, must have in the mind of the knower in order that he be aware of that entity. A mere logical entity, as we have seen, has and can have no other mode of being than this which consists in being an object of the mind's awareness. All real being, too, when it becomes an object of any kind of human cognition whatsoever—of intellectual thought, whether direct or reflex; of sense perception, whether external or internal—must obtain this sort of mental presence or mental existence: thereby alone can it become an “objectum cognitum”. Only by such mental [pg 046] mirroring, or reproduction, or reconstruction, can reality become so related and connected with mind as to reveal itself to mind. Under this peculiar relation which we call cognition, the mind, as we know from psychology and epistemology, is not passive: if reality revealed itself immediately, as it is, to a purely passive mind (were such conceivable), the existence of error would be unaccountable; but the mind is not passive: under the influence of the reality it forms the intellectual concept (the verbum mentale), or the sense percept (the species sensibilis expressa), in and through which, and by means of which, it attains to its knowledge of the real.

But prior (ontologically) to this mental existence, and as partial cause of the latter, there is the real existence or being, which reality has independently of its being known by any individual human mind. Real being, then, as distinguished here from ideal being, is that which exists or can exist extramentally, whether it is known by the human mind or not, i.e. whether it exists also mentally or not.

That there is such real being, apart from the “thought”-being whereby the mind is constituted formally knowing, is proved elsewhere; as also that this esse intentionale has modes which cannot be attributed to the esse reale. We merely note these points here in order to indicate the errors involved in the opposite contentions. Our concepts are characterized by abstractness, by a consequent static immutability, by a plurality often resulting from purely mental distinctions, by a universality which transcends those distinctions and unifies the variety of all subordinate concepts in the widest concept of being. Now if, for example, we attribute the unifying mental mode of universality to real being, we must draw the pantheistic conclusion that all real being is one: the logical outcome of extreme realism. If, again, we transfer purely mental distinctions to the unity of the Absolute or Supreme Being, thus making them real, we thereby deny infinite perfection to the most perfect being conceivable: an error of which some catholic philosophers of the later middle ages have been accused with some foundation. If, finally, we identify the esse reale with the esse intentionale, and this with the thought-process itself, we find ourselves at the starting-point of Hegelian monism.[68]

5. Fundamental Distinctions in Real Being.—Leaving logical and ideal being aside, and fixing our attention exclusively on real being, we may indicate here a few of the most fundamental distinctions which experience enables us to recognize in our study of the universal order of things.

(a) Possible or Potential Being and Actual Being.—The first of these distinctions is that between possibility and actuality, between [pg 047] that which can be and that which actually is. For a proper understanding of this distinction, which will be dealt with presently, it is necessary to note here the following divisions of actual being, which will be studied in detail later on.

(b) Infinite Being and Finite Beings.—All people have a sufficiently clear notion of Infinite Being, or Infinitely Perfect Being: though not all philosophers are agreed as to how precisely we get this notion, or whether there actually exists such a being, or whether if such being does exist we can attain to a certain knowledge of such existence. By infinite being we mean a being possessing all conceivable perfections in the most perfect conceivable manner; and by finite beings all such beings as have actually any conceivable limitation to their perfection. About these nominal definitions there is no dispute; and scholasticism identifies their respective objects with God and creatures.

(c) Necessary Being and Contingent Beings.—Necessary being we conceive as that being which exists of necessity: being which if conceived at all cannot be conceived as non-existent: being in the very concept of which is essentially involved the concept of actual existence: so that the attempt to conceive such being as non-existent would be an attempt to conceive what would be self-contradictory. Contingent being, on the other hand, is being which is conceived not to exist of necessity: being which may be conceived as not actually existent: being in the concept of which is not involved the concept of actual existence. The same observations apply to this distinction as to the preceding one. It is obvious that any being which we regard as actual we must regard either as necessary or as contingent; and, secondly, that necessary being must be considered as absolutely independent, as having its actual existence from itself, by its own nature; while contingent being must be considered as dependent for its actual existence on some being other than itself. Hence necessary being is termed Ens a se, contingent being Ens ab alio.

(d) Absolute Being and Relative Beings.—In modern philosophy the terms “absolute” and “relative,” as applied to being, correspond roughly with the terms “God” and “creatures” in the usage of theistic philosophers. But the former pair of terms is really of wider application than the latter. The term absolute means, etymologically, that which is loosed, unfettered, disengaged or free from bonds (absolutum, ab-solvere, solvo = se-luo, from λύω): that, therefore, which is not bound up with anything else, [pg 048] which is in some sense self-sufficing, independent; while the relative is that which is in some way bound up with something else, and which is so far not self-sufficing or independent. That, therefore, is ontologically absolute which is in some sense self-sufficing, independent of other things, in its existence; while the ontologically relative is that which depends in some real way for its existence on something else. Again, that is logically absolute which can be conceived and known by us without reference to anything else; while the logically relative is that which we can conceive and know only through our knowledge of something else. And since we usually name things according to the way in which we conceive them, we regard as absolute any being which is by itself and of itself that which we conceive it to be, or that which its name implies; and as relative any being which is what its name implies only in virtue of some relation to something else.[69] Thus, a man is a man absolutely, while he is a friend only relatively to others.

It is obvious that the primary and general meaning of the terms “absolute” and “relative” can be applied and extended in a variety of ways. For instance, all being may be said to be “relative” to the knowing mind, in the sense that all knowledge involves a transcendental relation of the known object to the knowing subject. In this widest and most improper sense even God Himself is relative, not however as being, but as known. Again, when we apply the same attribute to a variety of things we may see that it is found in one of them in the most perfect manner conceivable, or at least in a fuller and higher degree than it is found in the others; and that it is found in these others only with some sort of subordination to, and dependence on, the former: we then say that it belongs to this primarily or absolutely, and to the others only secondarily or relatively. This is a less improper application of the terms than in the preceding case. What we have especially to remember here is that there are many different kinds of dependence or subordination, all alike giving rise to the same usage.

Hence, applying the terms absolute and relative to the predicate “being” or “real” or “reality,” it is obvious in the first place that the potential as such can be called “being,” or “reality” only in relation to the actual. It is the actual that is being simpliciter, par excellence; the potential is so only in [pg 049] relation to this.[70] Again, substances may be termed beings absolutely, while accidents are beings only relatively, because of their dependence on substances; though this relation is quite different from the relation of potential to actual being. Finally all finite, contingent realities, actual and possible, are what they are only because of their dependence on the Infinite and Necessary Being: and hence the former are relative and the latter absolute; though here again the relation is different from that of accident to substance, or of potential to actual.

Since the order of being includes all orders, and since a being is absolutely such-or-such in any order only when that being realizes in all its fulness and purity such-or-such reality, it follows that the being which realizes in all its fulness the reality of being is the Absolute Being in the highest possible sense of this term. This concept of Absolute Being is the richest and most comprehensive of all possible concepts: it is the very antithesis of that other concept of “being in general” which is common to everything and distinguished only from nothingness. It includes in itself all actual and possible modes and grades and perfections of finite things, apart from their limitations, embodying all of them in the one highest and richest concept of that which makes all of them real and actual, viz. the concept of Actuality or Actual Reality itself.

Hegel and his followers have involved themselves in a pantheistic philosophy by neglecting to distinguish between those two totally different concepts.[71] A similar error has also resulted from failure to distinguish between [pg 050] the various modes in which being that is relative may be dependent on being that is absolute. God is the Absolute Being; creatures are relative. So too is substance absolute being, compared with accidents as inhering and existing in substance. But God is not therefore to be conceived as the one all-pervading substance, of which all finite things, all phenomena, would be only accidental manifestations.

Chapter II. Becoming And Its Implications.

6. The Static and the Changing.—The things we see around us, the things which make up the immediate data of our experience, not only are or exist; they also become, or come into actual existence; they change; they pass out of actual existence. The abstract notion of being represents its object to the mind in a static, permanent, changeless, self-identical condition; but if this condition were an adequate representation of reality change would be unreal, would be only an illusion. This is what the Eleatic philosophers of ancient Greece believed, distinguishing merely between being and nothingness. But they were mistaken; for change in things is too obviously real to be eliminated by calling it an illusion: even if it were an illusion, this illusion at least would have to be accounted for. In order, therefore, to understand reality we must employ not merely the notion of being (something static), but also the notion of becoming, change, process, appearing and disappearing (something kinetic, and something dynamic). In doing so, however, we must not fall into the error of the opposite extreme from the Eleatics—by regarding change as the adequate representation of reality. This is what Heraclitus and the later Ionians did: holding that nothing is, that all becomes (πάντα ρέι), that change is all reality, that the stable, the permanent, is non-existent, unreal, an illusion. This too is false; for change would be unintelligible without at least an abiding law of change, a permanent principle of some sort; which, in turn, involves the reality of some sort of abiding, stable, permanent being.

We must then—with Aristotle, as against both of those one-sided conceptions—hold to the reality both of being and of becoming; and proceed to see how the stable and the changing can both be real.

To convince ourselves that they are both real, very little [pg 052] reflection is needed. We have actual experience of both those elements of reality in our consciousness and memory of our own selves. Every human individual in the enjoyment of his mental faculties knows himself as an abiding, self-identical being, yet as constantly undergoing real changes; so that throughout his life he is really the same being, though just as certainly he really changes. In external nature, too, we observe on the one hand innumerable processes of growth and decay, of motion and interaction; and on the other hand a similarly all-pervading element of sameness or identity amid all this never-ending change.

7. The Potential and the Actual. (a) Possibility, Absolute, Relative, and Adequate.—It is from our experience of actuality and change that we derive not only our notion of temporal duration, but also our notion of potential being or possibility, as distinct from that of actual being or actuality. It is from our experience of what actually exists that we are able to determine what can, and what cannot exist. We know from experience what gold is, and what a tower is; and that it is intrinsically possible for a golden tower to exist, that such an object of thought involves no contradiction, that therefore its existence is not impossible, even though it may never actually exist as a fact. Similarly, we know from experience what a square is, and what a circle is; and that it is intrinsically impossible for a square circle to exist, that such an object of thought involves a contradiction, that therefore not only is such an object never actually existent in fact, but that it is in no sense real, in no way possible.

Thus, intrinsic (or objective, absolute, logical, metaphysical) possibility is the mere non-repugnance of an object of thought to actual existence. Any being or object of thought that is conceivable in this way, that can be conceived as capable of actually existing, is called intrinsically (or objectively, absolutely, logically, metaphysically) possible being. The absence of such intrinsic capability of actual existence gives us the notion of the intrinsically (objectively, absolutely, logically, metaphysically) impossible. We shall return to these notions again. They are necessary here for the understanding of real change in the actual universe.

Fixing our attention now upon the real changes which characterize the data of our experience, let us inquire what conditions are necessary in order that an intrinsically possible object of thought become here and now an actual being. It matters not [pg 053] whether we select an example from the domain of organic nature, of inorganic nature, or of art—whether it be an oak, or an iceberg, or a statue. In order that there be here and now an actual oak-tree, it is necessary not only (1) that such an object be intrinsically possible, but (2) that there have been planted here an actual acorn, i.e. an actual being having in it subjectively and really the passive potentiality of developing into an actual oak-tree, and (3) that there be in the actual things around the acorn active powers or forces capable of so influencing the latent, passive potentiality of the acorn as gradually to evolve the oak-tree therefrom. So, too, for the (1) intrinsically possible iceberg, there are needed (2) water capable of becoming ice, and (3) natural powers or forces capable of forming it into ice and setting this adrift in the ocean. And for the (1) intrinsically possible statue there are needed (2) the block of marble or other material capable of becoming a statue, and (3) the sculptor having the power to mould this material into an actual statue.

In order, therefore, that a thing which is not now actual, but only intrinsically or absolutely possible, become actual, there must actually exist some being or beings endowed with the active power or potency of making this possible thing actual. The latter is then said to be relatively, extrinsically possible—in relation to such being or beings. And obviously a thing may be possible relatively to the power of one being, and not possible relatively to lesser power of another being: the statue that is intrinsically possible in the block of marble, may be extrinsically possible relatively to the skilled sculptor, but not relatively to the unskilled person who is not a sculptor.

Furthermore, relatively to the same agent or agents, the production of a given effect, the doing of a given thing, is said to be physically possible if it can be brought about by such agents acting according to the ordinary course of nature; if, in other words they have the physical power to do it. Otherwise it is said to be physically impossible, even though metaphysically or intrinsically possible, e.g. it is physically impossible for a dead person to come to life again. A thing is said to be morally possible, in reference to free and responsible agents, if they can do it without unreasonable inconvenience; otherwise it is considered as morally impossible, even though it be both physically and metaphysically possible: as often happens in regard to the fulfilment of one's obligations.

That which is both intrinsically and extrinsically possible is said to be adequately possible. Whatever is intrinsically possible is also extrinsically possible in relation to God, who is Almighty, Omnipotent.

8. (b) Subjective “Potentia,” Active and Passive.—Furthermore, we conceive the Infinite Being, Almighty God, as capable of creating, or producing actual being from nothingness, i.e. without any actually pre-existing material out of whose passive potentiality the actual being would be developed. Creative power or activity does not need any pre-existing subject on which to exercise its influence, any subject in whose passive potentiality the thing to be created is antecedently implicit.

But all other power, all activity of created causes, does require some such actually existing subject. If we examine the activities of the agencies that fall within our direct experience, whether in external nature or in our own selves, we shall find that in no case does their operative influence or causality extend beyond the production of changes in existing being, or attain to the production of new actual being out of nothingness. The forces of nature cannot produce an oak without an acorn, or an iceberg without water; nor can the sculptor produce a statue except from some pre-existing material.

The natural passive potentiality of things is, moreover, limited in reference to the active powers of the created universe. These, for example, can educe life from the passive potentiality of inorganic matter, but only by assimilating this matter into a living organism: they cannot restore life to a human corpse; yet the latter has in it the capacity to be restored to life by the direct influence of the Author of Nature. This special and supernatural potentiality in created things, under the influence of Omnipotence, is known as potentia obedientalis.[72]

This consideration will help us to realize that all reality which is produced by change, and subject to change, is essentially a mixture of becoming and being, of potential and actual. The reality of such being is not tota simul. Only immutable being, whose duration is eternal, has its reality tota simul: it alone is purely actual, the “Actus Purus”; and its duration is one eternal “now,” without beginning, end, or succession. But mutable being, whose duration in actual existence is measured by time, is actualized only successively: its actuality at any particular instant does not embody the whole of its reality: this [pg 055] latter includes also a “was” and “will be”; the thing was potentially what it now is actually, and it will become actually something which it now is only potentially; nor shall we have understood even moderately the nature or essence of any mutable being—an oak-tree, for example—until we have grasped the fact that the whole reality of its nature embraces more than what we find of it actually existing at any given instant of its existence. In other words, we have to bear in mind that the reality of such a being is not pure actuality but a mixture of potential and actual: that it is an actus non-purus, or an actus mixtus.

We have to note well that the potential being of a thing is something real—that it is not merely a modus loquendi, or a modus intelligendi. The oak is in the acorn in some true and real sense: the potentiality of the oak is something real in the acorn: if it were not so, if it were nothing real in the acorn, we could say with equal truth that a man or a horse or a house is potentially in the acorn; or, again with equal truth, that the oak is potentially in a mustard-seed, or a grain of corn, or a pebble, or a drop of water. Therefore the oak is really in the acorn—not actually but potentially, potentia passiva.

The oak-tree is also really in those active forces of nature whose influence on the acorn develop the latter into an actual oak-tree: it is in those causes not actually, of course, but virtually, for they possess in themselves the operative power—potentia activa sive operativa—to educe the oak-tree out of the acorn. These two potential conditions of a being—in the active causes which produce it, and in the pre-existing actual thing or things from which it is produced—are called each a real or subjective potency, potentia realis, or potentia subjectiva, in distinction from the mere logical or objective possibility of such a being.

And just as the passive potentiality of the statue is something real in the block of marble, though distinct from the actuality of the statue and from the process by which this is actualized, so is the active power of making the statue something real in the sculptor, though distinct from the operation by which he makes the statue. If an agent's power to act, to produce change, were not a reality in the agent, a reality distinct from the action of the latter; or if a being's capacity to undergo change, and thereby to become something other, were not a reality distinct from the process of change, and from the actual result of this process—it would follow not only that the actual alone is real, and [pg 056] the merely possible or potential unreal, but also that no change can be real, that nothing can really become, and nothing really disappear.[73]

9. (c) Actuality: Its Relation to Potentiality.—It is from our experience of change in the world that we derive our notions of the potential and the actual, of active power and passive potentiality. The term “act” has primarily the same meaning as “action,” “operation,” that process by which a change is wrought. But the Latin word actus (Gr. ἐνέργεια, ἐντελέχεια) means rather that which is achieved by the actio, that which is the correlative and complement of the passive potentiality, the actuality of this latter: that by which potential being is rendered formally actual, and, by way of consequence, this actual being itself. “Potentia activa” and its correlative “actus” might, perhaps, be appropriately rendered by “power” (potestas agendi) and “action” or “operation”; “potentia passiva” and its correlative “actus,” by “potentiality” and “actuality” respectively.

In these correlatives, the notion underlying the term “actual” is manifestly the notion of something completed, achieved, perfected—as compared with that of something incomplete, imperfect, determinable, which is the notion of the potential. Hence the notions of potentia and actus have been extended widely beyond their primary signification of power to act and the exercise of this power. Such pairs of correlatives as the determinable and the determined, the perfectible and the perfected, the undeveloped or less developed and the more developed, the generic and the specific, are all conceived under the aspect of this widest relation of the potential to the actual. And since we can distinguish successive stages in any process of development, or an order of logical sequence among the contents of our concept of any concrete reality, it follows that what will be conceived as an actus in one relation will be conceived as a potentia in another. Thus, the disposition of any faculty—as, for example, the scientific habit in the intellect—is an actus or perfection of the faculty regarded as a potentia; but it is itself a potentia which is actualized in the operation of actually studying. This illustrates the distinction commonly drawn between an “actus primus” and an “actus secundus” in any particular order or line of reality: the actus primus is that which presupposes no prior [pg 057] actuality in the same order; the actus secundus is that which does presuppose another. The act of knowing is an actus secundus which presupposes the cognitive faculty as an actus primus: the faculty being the first or fundamental equipment of the soul in relation to knowledge. Hence the child is said to have knowledge “in actu primo” as having the faculty of reason; and the student to have knowledge “in actu secundo” as exercising this faculty.

The actus or perfecting principles of which we have spoken so far are all conceived as presupposing an existing subject on which they supervene. They are therefore accidents as distinct from substantial constitutive principles of this subject; and they are therefore called accidental actualities, actus “accidentales”. But the actual existence of a being is also conceived as the complement and correlative of its essence: as that which makes the latter actual, thus transferring it from the state of mere possibility. Hence existence also is called an actus or actuality: the actus “existentialis,” to distinguish it from the existing thing's activities and other subsequently acquired characters. In reference to these existence is a “first actuality”—“Esse est actus primus”; “Prius est esse quam agere”: “Existence is the first actuality”; “Action presupposes existence”—while each of these in reference to existence, is a “second actuality,” an actus secundus.

When, furthermore, we proceed to examine the constitutive principles essential to any being in the concrete, we may be able to distinguish between principles which are determinable, passive and persistent throughout all essential change of that being, and others which are determining, specifying, differentiating principles. In water, for example, we may distinguish the passive underlying principle which persists throughout the decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen, from the active specifying principle which gives that substratum its specific nature as water. The former or material principle (ὕλη, materia) is potential, compared with the latter or formal principle (μορφή, εἶδος, ἐντελέχεια, forma, species, actus) as actual. The concept of actus is thus applied to the essence itself: the actus “essentialis” or “formalis” of a thing is that which we conceive to be the ultimate, completing and determining principle of the essence or nature of that thing. In reference to this as well as the other constitutive principles of the thing, the actual existence of the thing is a “second actuality,” an actus secundus.

In fact all the constitutive principles of the essence of any existing thing, and all the properties and attributes involved in the essence or necessarily connected with the essence, must all alike be conceived as logically antecedent to the existential actus whereby they are constituted something in the actual order, and not mere possible objects of our thought. And from this point of view the existence of a thing is called the ultimate actualization of its essence. Hence the scholastic aphorism: “Esse est ultimus actus rei”.

The term actus may designate that complement of reality by which potential being is made actual (actus “actuans”), or this actual being itself (actus “simpliciter dictus”). In the latter sense we have already distinguished the Being that is immutable, the Being of God, as the Actus Purus, from the being of all mutable things, which latter being is necessarily a mixture of potential and actual, an actus mixtus.

Now if the essences of corporeal things are composite, if they are constituted by the union of some determining, formative principle with a determinable, passive principle—of “form” with “matter,” in scholastic terminology—we may call these formative principles actus “informantes”; and if these cannot actually exist except in union with a material principle they may be called actus “non-subsistentes”: e.g., the formative principle or “forma substantialis” of water, or the vital principle of a plant. If, on the other hand, there exist essences which, being simple, do not actualize any material, determinable principle, but subsist independently of any such, they are called actus “non-informantes,” or actus “subsistentes”. Such, for example, are God, and pure spirits whose existence is known from revelation. Finally, there may be a kind of actual essence which, though it naturally actualizes a material principle de facto, can nevertheless continue to subsist without this latter: such an actual being would be at once an actus informans and an actus subsistens; and such, in fact, is the human soul.

Throughout all distinctions between the potential and the actual there runs the conception of the actual as something more perfect than the potential. There is in the actual something positive and real over and above what is in the potential. This is an ultimate fact in our analysis; and its importance will be realized when we come to apply the notions we have been explaining to the study of change.

The notion of grades of perfection in things is one with which everyone is familiar. We naturally conceive some beings as higher upon the scale of reality than others; as having “more” reality, so to speak—not necessarily, of course, in the literal sense of size or quantity—than others; as being more perfect, nobler, of greater worth, value, dignity, excellence, than others. Thus we regard the infinite as more perfect than the finite, spiritual beings as nobler than material beings, man as a higher order of being than the brute beast, this again as surpassing the whole vegetable kingdom, the lowest form of life as higher on the scale of being than inorganic matter, the substance-mode of being as superior to all accident-modes, the actualized state of a being as more perfect than its potential state, i.e. as existing in its material, efficient and ideal or exemplar causes. The grounds and significance of this mental appreciation of relative values in things must be discussed elsewhere. We refer to it here in order to point out another scholastic aphorism, according to which the higher a thing is in the scale of actual being, and the more perfect it is accordingly, the more efficient it will also be as a principle of action, the more powerful as a cause in the production of changes in other things, the more operative in actualizing their passive potentialities; and conversely, the less actual a thing is, and therefore the more imperfect, the greater its passive capacity will be to undergo the influence of agencies that are actual and operative around it. “As passive potentiality,” says St. Thomas,[74] “is the mark of potential being, so active power is the mark of actual being. For a thing acts, in so far as it is actual; but is acted on, so far as it is potential.” Our knowledge of the nature of things is in fact exclusively based on our knowledge of their activities: we have no other key to the knowledge of what a thing is than our knowledge of what it does: “Operari sequitur esse”: “Qualis est operatio talis est natura”—“Acting follows being”: “Conduct is the key to nature”.

A being that is active or operative in the production of a change is said to be the efficient cause of the change, the latter being termed the effect. Now the greater the change, i.e. the higher and more perfect be the grade of reality that is actualized in the change, the higher too in the scale of being must be the efficient cause of that change. There must be a proportion in degree of perfection or reality between effect and cause. The [pg 060] former cannot exceed in actual perfection the active power, and therefore the actual being, of the latter. This is so because we conceive the effect as being produced or actualized through the operative influence of the cause, and with real dependence on this latter; and it is inconceivable that a cause should have power to actualize other being, distinct from itself, which would be of a higher grade of excellence than itself. The nature of efficient causality, of the influence by which the cause is related to its effect, is not easy to determine; it will be discussed at a subsequent stage of our investigations (ch. [xi.]); but whatever it be, a little reflection should convince us of the truth of the principle just stated: that an effect cannot be more perfect than its cause. The mediæval scholastics embodied this truth in the formula: Nemo dat quod non habet—a formula which we must not interpret in the more restricted and literal sense of the words giving and having, lest we be met with the obvious objection that it is by no means necessary for a boy to have a black eye himself in order to give one to his neighbour! What the formula means is that an agent cannot give to, or produce in, any potential subject, receptive of its causal influence, an actuality which it does not itself possess virtually, or in its active power: that no actuality surpassing in excellence the actual perfection of the cause itself can be found thus virtually in the active power of the latter. There is no question of the cause or agent transferring bodily as it were a part of its own actuality to the subject which is undergoing change[75]; nor will such crude imagination images help us to understand what real change, under the influence of efficient causality, involves.[76] An analysis of change will enable us to appreciate more fully the real difficulty of explaining it, and the futility of any attempt to account for it without admitting the real, objective validity of the notions of actual and potential being, of active powers or forces and passive potentialities in the things that are subject to change.

10. Analysis of Change.—Change (Mutatio, Motus, μεταβολή, κίνησις) is one of those simplest concepts which cannot be defined. We may describe it, however, as the transition of a being from one state to another. If one thing entirely disappeared and another were substituted for it, we should not regard the former as having been changed into the latter. When one thing is put in the place of another, each, no doubt, undergoes a change of place, but neither is changed into the other. So, also, if we were to conceive a thing as absolutely ceasing to exist, as lapsing into nothingness at a given instant, and another as coming into existence out of nothingness at the same instant (and in the same place), we should not consider this double event as constituting a real change of the former thing into the latter. And although our senses cannot testify to anything beyond sequence in sense phenomena, our reason detects in real change something other than a total substitution of things for one another, or continuous total cessations and inceptions of existence in things. No doubt, if we conceive the whole phenomenal or perceptible universe and all the beings which constitute this universe as essentially contingent, and therefore dependent for their reality and their actual existence on a Supreme, Necessary Being who created and conserves them, who at any time may cease to conserve any of them, and produce other and new beings out of nothingness, then such absolute cessations and inceptions of existence in the world would not be impossible. God might annihilate, i.e. cease to conserve in existence, this or that contingent being at any instant, and at any instant create a new contingent being, i.e. produce it in its totality from no pre-existing material. But there is no reason to suppose that this is what is constantly taking place in Nature: that all change is simply a series of annihilations and creations. On the contrary, the modes of being which appear and disappear in real change, in the transition of anything from one state to a really different state of being, do not appear de novo, ex nihilo, as absolute beginnings out of nothingness; or disappear totaliter, in nihilum, as absolute endings or lapses of reality into nothingness. The real changes which take place in Nature are due to the operation of natural causes. These causes, being finite in their operative powers, cannot create, i.e. produce new being from nothingness. They can, however, with the concurrence of the Omnipotent Being, modify existing modes of being, i.e. make actual what was only potential in these latter. The notion of change is not [pg 062] verified in the conception of successive annihilations and creations; for there is involved in the former concept not merely the notion of a real difference between the two actual states, that before and that after the change, but also the notion of some potential reality persisting throughout the change, something capable of being actually so and so before the change and actually otherwise after the change. For real change, therefore, we require (1) two positive and really different states of the same being, a “terminus a quo” and a “terminus ad quem”; and (2) a real process of transition whereby something potential becomes actual. In creation there is no real and positive terminus a quo; in annihilation there is no real and positive terminus ad quem; these therefore are not changes in the proper sense of the term. Sometimes, too, change is affirmed, by purely extrinsic denomination, of a thing in which there is no real change, but only a relation to some other really changing thing. In this sense when an object unknown or unthought of becomes the actual object of somebody's thought or cognition, it is said to “change,” though the transition from “unknown” to “known” involves no real change of state in the object, but only in the knowing subject. If thought were in any true sense “constitutive” of reality, as many modern philosophers contend, the change in the object would of course be real.

Since, therefore, change consists in this, that a thing which is actually in a given state ceases to be actually such and begins to be actually in another state, it is obvious that there persists throughout the process some reality which is in itself potential and indifferent to either actual state; and that, moreover, something which was actual disappears, while some new actuality appears, in this persisting potentiality. The abiding potential principle is called the matter or subject of the change; the transient actualizing principles are called forms. Not all these “forms” which precede or result from change are necessarily positive entities in themselves: they may be mere privations of other forms (“privatio,” στέρησις): not all changes result in the acquisition of a new degree of positive actual being; some result in loss of perfection or actuality. Still, even in these cases, the state characterized by the less perfect degree of actuality has a determinate actual grade of being which is proper to itself, and which, as such, is not found actually, but only potentially, in the state characterized by the more perfect degree of actuality. When, then, a being changes from a more perfect to a less [pg 063] perfect state, the actuality of this less perfect state cannot be adequately accounted for by seeking it in the antecedent and more perfect state: it is not in this latter state actually, but only potentially; nor do we account for it by saying that it is “equivalently” in the greater actuality of the latter state: the two actualizing principles are really distinct, and neither is wholly or even partially the other. The significance of this consideration will appear presently in connection with the scholastic axiom: Quidquid movetur ab alio movetur.

Meanwhile we must guard against conceiving the potential or material factor in change as a sort of actual but hidden core of reality which itself persists unchanged throughout; and the formative or actualizing factors as superficially adorning this substratum by constantly replacing one another. Such a substitution of imagination images for intellectual thought will not help, but rather hinder, all accurate analysis. It is not the potential or material factor in things that changes, nor yet the actualizing or formal factors, but the things themselves; and if “things” are subject to “real change” it is manifest that this fact can be made intelligible, if at all, only by intellectually analysing the things and their changes into constitutive principles or factors which are nor themselves “things” or “changes”. Were we to arrive only at principles of the latter sort, so far from explaining anything we would really only have pushed back the problem a step farther. It may be that none of the attempts yet made by philosophers or scientists to offer an ultimate explanation of change is entirely satisfactory,—the scholastic explanation will be gradually outlined in these pages,—but it will be of advantage at least to recognize the shortcomings of theories that are certainly inadequate.

We are now in a position to state and explain the important scholastic aphorism embodying what has been called the Principle of Change (“Principium Motus”): Quidquid movetur, ab alio movetur: “Whatever undergoes change is changed by something else”. The term motus is here taken in the wide sense of any real transition from potentiality to actuality, as is evident from the alternative statements of the same principle: Nihil potest seipsum reducere e potentia in actum: “Nothing can reduce itself from potentiality to actuality,” or, again, Potentia, qua talis, nequit per semetipsam ad actum reduci, sed reducitur ab alio principio in actu: “The potential as such cannot be reduced [pg 064] by itself to the actual, but only by some other already actual principle”.[77] This assertion, rightly understood, is self-evidently true; for the state of passive potentiality, as such, involves the absence of the correlative actuality in the potential subject; and since the actual, as such, involves a perfection which is not in the potential, the latter cannot confer upon itself this perfection: nothing can be the adequate principle or source of a perfection which is not in this principle or source: nemo dat quod non habet.

We have already anticipated the objection arising from the consideration that the state resulting from a change is sometimes in its totality less perfect than the state which existed prior to the change. Even in such cases there results from the change a new actuality which was not in the prior state, and which cannot be conceived as a mere part or residue of the latter, or regarded as equivalently contained in the latter. Even granting, as we must, that the net result of such a change is a loss of actuality or perfection in the subject of change, still there is always a gain which is not accounted for by the loss; there is always a new actual state which, as such, was not in the original state.

A more obvious objection to the principle arises from the consideration of vital action; but it is based on a misunderstanding of the principle under discussion. Living things, it is objected, move themselves: their vital action is spontaneous and immanent: originating within themselves, it has its term too within themselves, resulting in their gradual development, growth, increase of actuality and perfection. Therefore it would appear that they move and perfect themselves; and hence the so-called “principle of change” is not true universally.

In reply to all this we admit that vital action is immanent, remaining within the agent to perfect the latter; also that it is spontaneous, inasmuch as when the agent is actually exercising vital functions it need not be actually undergoing the causal influence of any other created agent, or actually dependent on any such agent. But it must, nevertheless, in such action, be dependent on, and influenced by, some actual being other than itself. And the reason is obvious: If by such action it increases [pg 065] its own actual perfection, and becomes actually other than it was before such action, then it cannot have given itself the actuality of this perfection, which it possessed before only potentially. No doubt, it is not merely passively potential in regard to such actual perfections, as is the case in non-vital change which results in the subject from the transitive action of some outside cause upon the latter. The living thing has the active power of causing or producing in itself these actual perfections: there is interaction between its vital parts: through one organ or faculty it acts upon another, thus educing an actuality, a new perfection, in this other, and thus developing and perfecting its own being. But even considered as active it cannot be the adequate cause of the actuality acquired through the change. If this actuality is something really over and above the reality of its active and passive potential principles, then it remains true that change implies the influence of an actual being other than the subject changed: Quid quid movetur, ab alio movetur.

The question here arises, not only in reference to vital agents, but to all finite, created causes: Does the active cause of change (together with the passive potentiality of the subject of change, whether this subject be the agent itself as in immanent activity, or something other than the agent as in transitive activity),—does this active power account adequately for the new actuality educed in the change? It obviously does not; for the actuality acquired in the change is, as such, a new entity, a new perfection, in some degree positively surpassing the total reality of the combined active powers and passive potentialities which it replaces. In other words, if the actuality resulting from the change is not to be found in the immediate active and passive antecedents of the change, then we are inevitably referred, for an adequate explanation of this actuality, to some actual being above and beyond these antecedents. And to what sort of actual being are we referred? To a being in which the actuality of the effect resides only in the same way as it resides in the immediate active and passive antecedents of the change, that is potentially? No; for this would be useless, merely pushing the difficulty one step farther back. We are obliged rather to infer the existence of an Actual Being in whom the actuality of the said effect resides actually: not formally, of course, as it exists in itself when it is produced through the change; but eminently, eminenter, in such a way that its actualization outside Himself and under His influence does not involve in Him any loss of perfection, any increase of perfection, or any manner of change whatsoever. We are compelled in this way to infer, from the existence of change in the universe of our direct experience, the existence of a transcendent Immovable Prime Mover, a Primum Movens Immobile. All the active causes or principles of change which fall under our notice in the universe of direct experience are themselves subject to change. None of them causes change in any other thing without itself undergoing change. The active power of finite causes is [pg 066] itself finite. By educing the potentiality of other things into actuality they gradually use up their own energy; they diminish and lose their active power of producing effects: this belongs to the very nature of finite causes as such. Moreover, they are themselves passive as well as active; interaction is universal among the finite causes which constitute the universe of our direct experience: they all alike have passive potentiality and undergo change. Now, if any one finite cause in this system cannot adequately account for the new actuality evolved from the potential in any single process of change, neither can the whole system adequately account for it. What is true of them distributively is true of them taken all together when there is question of what belongs to their nature; and the fact that their active powers and passive potentialities fall short of the actuality of the effects we attribute to them is a fact that appertains to their very nature as finite things. The phenomenon of continuous change in the universe involves the continuous appearance of new actual being. To account for this constant stream of actuality we are of necessity carried beyond the system of finite, changing being itself; we are forced to infer the existence of a source and principle which must itself be purely actual and exempt from all change—a Being who can cause all the actuality that results from change without losing or gaining or changing in any way Himself, because He possesses all finite actuality in Himself in a supereminent manner which transcends all the efforts of finite human intelligence to comprehend or characterize in any adequate or positive manner. The scholastics expressed this in the simple aphorism: Omne novum ens est a Deo. And it is the realization of this profound truth that underlies their teaching on the necessity of the Divine Concursus, i.e. the influence of the Infinite First Cause or Prime Mover permeating the efficiency of all finite or created causes. Here, for example, is a brief recent statement of that doctrine:—

“If we must admit a causal influence of these things [of direct experience] on one another, then a closer examination will convince us that a finite thing can never be the adequate cause of any effect, but is always, metaphysically regarded, only a part-cause, ever needing to be completed by another cause. Every effect is—at least under one aspect, at least as an effect—something new, something that was not there before. Even were the effect contained, whether formally or virtually, in the cause, it is certainly not identical with this latter, for if it were there would be no causality, nothing would ‘happen’. In all causing and happening, something which was heretofore only possible, becomes real and actual. But things cannot determine themselves to influence others, or to receive the influence of others, since they are not dependent in their being on one another. Hence the necessary inference that all being, all happening, all change, requires the concurrence of an Absolute Principle of being. When two things act on each other the Absolute Being must work in and with them, the same Absolute Being in both—to relate them to each other, and supplement their natural insufficiency.”

“Such is the profound teaching about the Divine Concursus with every creature.... God works in all and with all. He permeates all reality, everywhere; there is no being beyond Him or independent of His conserving and concurring power. Just as creatures are brought into being only through God's omnipotence, and of themselves have no independent reality, so do [pg 067] they need the self-same ever-present, all-sustaining power to continue in this being and develop it by their activity. Every event in Nature is a transitory, passing phenomenon, so bound up with conditions and circumstances that it must disappear to give place to some other. How could a mode of being so incomplete discharge its function in existence without the concurrence of the First Cause?”[78]

We have seen now that in the real order the potential presupposes the actual; for the potential cannot actualize itself, but can be actualized only by the action of some already actual being. Nor can we avoid this consequence by supposing the potential being to have had no actual beginning in time, but to be eternally in process of actualization; for even so, it must be eternally actualized by some other actual being—a position which Aristotle and some scholastics admit to be possible. Whether, then, we conceive the actualization as beginning in time or as proceeding from all eternity, it is self-contradictory to suppose the potential as capable of actualizing itself.

It is likewise true that the actual precedes the possible in the order of our knowledge. The concept of a thing as possible presupposes the concept of that thing as actual; for the possible is understood to be possible only by its intelligible relation to actual existence. This is evidently true of extrinsic possibility; but our knowledge even of the intrinsic possibility of a thing cannot be the first knowledge we possess in the order of time. Our first knowledge is of the actual; for the mind's first cognitive act must have for object either itself or something not itself. But it knows itself as a consciously acting and therefore actual being. And it comes to know things other than itself only by the fact that such other things act upon it either immediately or mediately through sense-consciousness; so that in every hypothesis its first known object is something actual.[79]

The priority of the actual as compared with the potential in the real order, suggests a proof of the existence of God in the manner indicated above. It also affords a refutation of Hegelian monism. The conception of the world, including all the phenomena of mind and matter, as the gradual self-manifestation or evolution of a potential being eternally actualizing itself, is a self-contradictory conception. Scholastics rightly maintain that the realities from which we derive our first most abstract and transcendental notion of being in general, are actual realities. Hegelians seize on the object [pg 068] of this notion, identify it with pure thought, proclaim it the sole reality, and endow it with the power of becoming actually everything. It is manifest, therefore, that they endow purely potential being with the power of actualizing itself.

Nor can they fairly avoid this charge by pointing out that although their starting-point is not actual being (with which the scholastic philosophy of being commences), yet neither is it possible or potential being, but being which has neither of these determinations, being which abstracts from both, like the real being of the scholastics (7, 13). For though real being can be an object of abstract human thought without either of the predicates “existent” or “non-existent,” yet it cannot be anything in the real order without either of them. There it must be either actually existent or else merely potential. But Hegelians claim absolutely indeterminate being to be as such something in the real order; and though they try to distinguish it from potential being they nevertheless think of it as potential being, for they distinctly and repeatedly declare that it can become all things, and does become all things, and is constantly, eternally transforming itself by an internal dialectic process into the phenomena which constitute the worlds of mind and matter. Contrasting it with the abstract “inert” being which they conceive to be the object of the traditional metaphysics, they endow “indeterminate being” with the active power of producing, and the passive potentiality of becoming, actually everything. Thus, in order to show a priori how this indeterminate being must evolve itself by internal logical necessity into the world of our direct and immediate experience, they suppose it to be subject to change and to be at the same time self-actualizing, in direct opposition to the axiom that potential reality, reality which is subject to change, cannot actualize itself: Quidquid movetur ab alio moveatur oportet.

11. Kinds of Change.—Following Aristotle,[80] we may recognize a broad and clear distinction between four great classes of change (μεταβολή, mutatio) in the phenomena of our sense experience: local change (κίνησις κατὰ τόπον, φορά, latio); quantitative change (κατὰ τὸ πόσον, ἀύζησις ἤ φθίσις, augmentatio vel diminutio); qualitative change (κατὰ τὸ ποίον, ἀλλοίωσις, alteratio); and substantial change (κατ᾽ οὐσίαν, γένεσις ἤ φθορά). The three former are accidental, i.e. do not reach or affect the essence or substance of the thing that is changed; the fourth is substantial, a change of essence. Substantial change is regarded as taking place instantaneously, as soon as the condition brought about by the accidental changes leading up to it becomes naturally incompatible with the essence or nature of the subject. The accidental changes, on the other hand, are regarded as taking place gradually, as realizing and involving a succession of states or conditions in the subject. These changes, especially when they take place in corporeal things, are properly described as [pg 069] movement or motion (motus, motio). By movement or motion in the strict sense we therefore mean any change which takes place gradually or successively in a corporeal thing. It is only in a wider and improper sense that these terms are sometimes applied to activity of whatsoever kind, even of spiritual beings. In this sense we speak of thoughts, volitions, etc., as movements of the soul, motus animae; or of God as the Prime Mover ever in motion, the Primum Movens semper in motu.

With local change in material things, as also with quantitative change, growth and diminution of quantity (mass and volume), everyone is perfectly familiar. From the earliest times, moreover, we find both in science and philosophy the conception of matter as composed of, and divisible into, ultimate particles, themselves supposed to admit of no further real division, and hence called atoms (ἄ-τομος, τέμνω). From the days of Grecian atomism men have attempted to show that all change in the Universe is ultimately reducible to changes of place, order, spatial arrangement and collocation, of those hypothetical atomic factors. It has likewise been commonly assumed that change in mass is solely due to change in the number of those atoms, and change in volume (of the same mass) to the relative density or closeness with which the atoms aggregate together; though some have held—and it is certainly not inconceivable—that exactly the same material entity, an atom let us say, may be capable of real contraction and expansion, and so of real change of volume: as distinct from the apparent contraction and expansion of bodies, a change which is supposed to be due to change of density, i.e. to decrease or increase in the dimensions of the pores or interstices between the smaller constituent parts or molecules. However this may be, the attempts to reduce all change in physical nature to mere mechanical change i.e. to spatial motions of the masses (molar motions), the molecules (molecular motions), and the atoms or other ultimate components of matter (whether vibratory, undulatory, rotatory or translational motions), have never been satisfactory.

Qualitative change is wider than material change, for it includes changes in spiritual beings, i.e. in beings which are outside the category of quantity and have a mode of existence altogether different from the extensional, spatial existence which characterizes matter. When, for instance, the human mind acquires knowledge, it undergoes qualitative change. But matter, too, has qualities, [pg 070] and is subject to qualitative change. It is endowed with active qualities, i.e. with powers, forces, energies, whereby it can not merely perform mechanical work by producing local changes in the distribution of its mass throughout space, but also produce physical and chemical changes which seem at least to be different in their nature from mere mechanical changes. It is likewise endowed with passive qualities which appear to the senses to be of various kinds, differing from one another and from the mechanical or quantitative characteristics of size, shape, motion, rest, etc. While these latter are called “primary qualities” of bodies—because conceived to be more fundamental and more closely inherent in the real and objective nature of matter—or “common sensibles” (sensibilia communia), because perceptible by more than one of our external senses—the former are called “secondary qualities,” because conceived to be less characteristic of the real and objective nature of matter, and more largely subjective products of our own sentient cognitive activity—or “proper sensibles” (sensibilia propria), because each of them is apprehended by only one of our external senses: colour, sound, taste, odour, temperature, material state or texture (e.g. roughness, liquidity, softness, etc.). Now about all these perceived qualities and their changes the question has been raised: Are they, as such, i.e. as perceived by us, really in the material things or bodies which make up the physical universe, and really different in these bodies from the quantitative factors and motions of the latter? Or, as such, are they not rather partially or wholly subjective phenomena—products, at least in part, of our own sense perception, states of our own consciousness, having nothing really corresponding to them in the external matter of the universe beyond the quantitative, mechanical factors and motions whereby matter acts upon our faculties of sense cognition and produces these states of consciousness in us? This is a question of the first importance, the solution of which belongs to Epistemology. Aristotle would not allow that the objective material universe can be denuded, in the way just suggested, of qualities and qualitative change; and scholastic philosophers have always held the same general view. What we have to note here, however, in regard to the question is simply this, that even if the world of matter were thus simplified by transferring all qualitative change to the subjective domain of consciousness, the reality of qualitative change and all the problems arising from it would [pg 071] still persist. To transfer qualitative change from object to subject, from matter to mind, is certainly something very different from explaining it as reducible to quantitative or mechanical change. The simplification thus effected would be more apparent than real: it would be simplifying the world of matter by transferring its complexity to the world of mind. This consideration is one which is sometimes lost sight of by scientists who advance mechanical hypotheses as ultimate explanations of the nature and activities of the physical universe.

If all material things and processes could be ultimately analysed into configurations and local motions of space-occupying atoms, homogeneous in nature and differing only in size and shape, then each of these ultimate atomic factors would be itself exempt from intrinsic change as to its own essence and individuality. In this hypothesis there would be really no such thing as substantial change. The collection of atoms would form an immutable core of material reality, wholly simple and ever actual. Such an hypothesis, however, is utterly inadequate as an explanation of the facts of life and consciousness. And even as an account of the processes of the inorganic universe it encounters insuperable difficulties. The common belief of men has always been that even in this domain of reality there are fundamentally different kinds of matter, kinds which differ from one another not merely in the shape and size and configuration and arrangement of their ultimate actual constituents, but even in the very substance or nature of these constituents; and that there are some material changes which affect the actual substance itself of the matter which undergoes them. This belief scholastics, again following Aristotle, hold to be a correct belief, and one which is well grounded in reason. And this belief in turn involves the view that every type of actual material entity—whether merely inorganic, or endowed with life, or even allied with a higher, spiritual mode of being as in the case of man himself—is essentially composite, essentially a synthesis of potential and actual principles of being, and therefore capable of substantial change. The actually existing material being scholastics describe as materia secunda, the ὕλη ἐσχάτη of Aristotle; the purely potential factor, which is actualized in this or that particular kind of matter, they describe as materia prima, the ὕλη πρώτη of Aristotle; the actualizing, specifying, formative principle, they designate as forma substantialis (εἶδος). And since the purely potential principle [pg 072] cannot actually exist except as actualized by some formative principle, all substantial change or transition from one substantial type to another is necessarily both a corruptio and a generatio. That is, it involves the actual disappearance of one substantial form and the actual appearance of another. Hence the scholastic aphorism regarding substantial change: Corruptio unius est generatio alterius: the corruption or destruction of one kind of material thing involves the generation of another kind.

The concepts of materia prima and forma substantialis are concepts not of phenomenal entities directly accessible to the senses or the imagination, but of principles which can be reached only mediately and by intellect proper. They cannot be pictured in the imagination, which can only attain to the sensible. We may help ourselves to grasp them intellectually by the analogy of the shapeless block of marble and the figure educed therefrom by the sculptor, but this is only an analogy: just as the statue results from the union of an accidental form with an existing matter, so this matter itself, the substance marble, is composed of a substantial form and a primordial, potential matter. But there the analogy ceases.

Furthermore, when we consider that the proper and primary objects of the human intellect itself are corporeal things or bodies, and that these bodies actually exist in nature only as composite substances, subject to essential or substantial change, we shall realize why it is that the concept of materia prima especially, being a mediate and negative concept, is so difficult to grasp; for, as the scholastics describe it, translating Aristotle's formula, it is in itself neque quid, neque quantum, neque quale, neque aliquid eorum quibus ens determinatur.[81] But it is through intellectual concepts alone, and not through imagination images, that we may hope to analyse the nature and processes even of the world of corporeal reality; and, as St. Thomas well observes, it was because the ancient Greek atomists did not rise above the level of thinking in imagination images that they failed to recognize the existence, or explain the nature, of substantial change in the material universe[82]: an observation which applies with equal [pg 073] force to those scientists and philosophers of our own time who would fain reduce all physical processes to mere mechanical change.

Those, then, are the principal kinds of change, as analysed by Aristotle and the scholastics. We may note, finally, that the distinction between immanent and transitive activity is also applied to change—that is, to change considered as a process, not to the result of the change, to change in fieri, not in facto esse. Immanent movement or activity (motio, actio immanens) is that of which the term, the educed actuality, remains within the agent—which latter is therefore at once both agens and patiens. Vital action is of this kind. Transitive movement or activity, on the other hand (motio, actio transiens), is that of which the term is some actuality educed in a being other than the agent. The patiens is here really distinct from the agens; and it is in the former, not in the latter, that the change takes place: actio fit in passo. All change in the inorganic universe is of this sort ([101]).

Chapter III. Existence And Essence.

12. Existence.—In the preceding chapters we examined reality in itself and in its relation to change or becoming. We have now to examine it in relation to its actual existence and to its intrinsic possibility (7, a).

Existing or being (in the participial sense: esse, existere, τὸ εἶναι) is a simple, indefinable notion. A being is said to exist when it is not merely possible but actual, when it is not merely potential in its active and passive causes but has become actual through those causes (existere: ex-sisto: ex-stare: to stand forth, distinct from its causes); or, if it have no causes, when it simply is (esse),—in which sense God, the Necessary, purely Actual Being, simply is. Thus, existence implies the notion of actuality, and is conceived as that by which any thing or essence is, distinct from nothingness, in the actual order.[83] Or, again, it is the actuality of any thing or essence. About any conceivable being we may ask two distinct questions: (a) What is it? and (b) Does such a being actually exist? The answer to the former gives us the essence, what is presented to the mind through the concept; the answer to the latter informs us about the actual existence of the being or essence in question.

To the mind of any individual man the real existence (as also the real essence) of any being whatsoever, not excepting his own, can be known only through its ideal presence in his mind, through the concept or percept whereby it becomes for him a “known object,” an objectum cognitum. But this actual presence of known being to the knowing mind must not be confounded with the real existence of such being (4). Real being does not get its real existence in our minds or from our minds. Our cognition does not produce, but only discovers, actually existing reality. The latter, by acting on the mind, engenders therein the cognition [pg 075] of itself. Now all our knowledge comes through the senses; and sense cognition is excited in us by the direct action of material or phenomenal being on our sense faculties. But through sense cognition the mind is able to attain to a knowledge both of the possibility and of the actual existence of suprasensible or spiritual realities. Hence we cannot describe existence as the power which material realities have to excite in us a knowledge of themselves. Their existence is prior to this activity: prius est esse quam agere. Nor can we limit existence to material realities; for if there are spiritual realities these too have existence, though this existence can be discerned only by intellect, and not by sense.

13. Essence.—In any existing thing we can distinguish what the thing is, its essence, from its actual existence. If we abstract from the actual existence of a thing, not considering whether it actually exists or not, and fix our attention merely on what the thing is, we are thinking of its real essence. If we positively exclude the notion of actual existence from our concept of the essence, and think of the latter as not actually existing, we are considering it formally as a possible essence. There is no being, even the Necessary Being, whose essence we cannot think of in the former way, i.e. without including in our concept the notion of actual existence; but we cannot without error positively exclude the notion of actual existence from our concept of the Necessary Being, or think of the latter as a merely possible essence.

Taken in its widest sense, the essence of a thing (οὐσία, essentia, τὸ τί ἐστι, quod quid est, quidditas) means that by which a thing is what it is: id quo res est id quod est: that which gives us the answer to the question, What is this thing? Quid est haec res? τί ἐστι τόδε τι.[84] Now of course any individual thing is what it is just precisely by all the reality that is in it; but we have no direct or intuitive intellectual insight into this reality; we understand it only by degrees; we explore it from various [pg 076] points of view, abstracting and generalizing partial aspects of it as we compare it with other things and seek to classify and define it: ratio humana essentias rerum quasi venatur, as the scholastics say: the human mind hunts, as it were, after the essences or natures of things. Understanding the individual datum of sense experience (what Aristotle called τόδε τι, or οὐσία πρώτη, and the scholastics hoc aliquid, or substantia prima), e.g. this individual, Socrates, first under the vaguest concept of being, then gradually under the more and more determinate concepts of substance, corporeal, living, sentient, rational, it finally forms the complex concept of his species infima, expressed by his lowest class-name, “man,” and explicitly set forth in the definition of his specific nature as a “rational animal”. Nor does our reason fail to realize that by reaching this concept of the specific essence or nature of the individual, Socrates, it has not yet grasped all the reality whereby the individual is what he is. It has reached what he has in common with all other individuals of his class, what is essential to him as a man; it has distinguished this from the unanalysed something which makes him this particular individual of his class, and which makes his specific essence this individual essence (essentia “atoma,” or “individua”); and it has also distinguished his essence from those accidental and ever varying attributes which are not essential to him as a man, and from those which are not essential to him as Socrates. It is only the unfathomed individual essence, as existing hic et nunc, that is concrete. All the mind's generic and specific representations of it—e.g. of Socrates as a corporeal substance, a living being, a sentient being, a rational animal—are abstract, and all more or less inadequate, none of them exhausting its knowable reality. But it is only in so far as the mind is able to represent concrete individual things by such abstract concepts, that it can attain to intellectual knowledge of their nature or reality. Hence it is that by the term “essence,” simply and sine addito, we always mean the essence as grasped by abstract generic or specific concepts (ἔιδος, species), and as thus capable of definition (λόγος, ratio rei). “The essence,” says St. Thomas, “is that by which the thing is constituted in its proper genus or species, and which we signify by the definition which states what the thing is”.[85] Thus understood, the essence is abstract, and [pg 077] gives the specific or generic type to which the individual thing belongs; but we may also mean by essence, the concrete essence, the individual person or thing (persona, suppositum, res individua). The relations between the objects of those two concepts of essence will be examined later.

Since the specific essence is conceived as the most fundamental reality in the thing, and as the seat and source of all the properties and activities of the thing, it is sometimes defined or described, in accordance with this notion of it, as the primary constitutive of the thing and the source of all the properties of the thing. Conceived as the foundation of all the properties of the thing it is sometimes called substance (οὐσία, substantia). Regarded as the source of the thing's activities, and the principle of its growth or development, it is called the nature of the thing (φύσις, natura, from φύω, nascor).[86]

Since what makes a thing that which it is, by the same fact differentiates this thing from every other thing, the essence is rightly conceived as that which gives the thing its characteristic being, thereby marking it off from all other being. In reality, of course, each individual being is distinct by all that it is from every other. But since we get our intellectual knowledge of things by abstracting, comparing, generalizing, and classifying partial aspects of them, we apprehend part of the imperfectly grasped abstract essence of each individual as common to other classes (generic), and part as peculiar to that class itself (differential); and thus we differentiate classes of things by what is only part of their essence, by what we call the differentia of each class, distinguishing mentally between it and the generic element: which two are really one, really identical, in every individual of the species thus defined and classified.

But in the Aristotelian and scholastic view of the constitution of any corporeal thing, there is a danger of taking what is really only part of the essence of such a thing for the whole essence. According to this view all corporeal substance is essentially composite, constituted by two really distinct, substantial principles, primal matter (πρώτη ὕλη, materia prima) and substantial form (ἔιδος, μορφή) united substantially, as potential and actual principles, to form one composite nature or essence. Now the kind, or species, or specific type, to which a body belongs—e.g., a horse, an oak, gold, water, etc.—depends upon the substantial form which [pg 078] actualizes the matter or potential principle. In so far as the corporeal essence is known to us at all it is known through the form, which is the principle of all the characteristic properties and activities of that particular kind of body. Hence it is quite natural that the εἲδος, μόρφη, or forma substantialis of a body should often be referred to as the specific essence of the body, though of course the essence of the body really includes the material as well as the formal factor.

We may look at the essence of any being from two points of view. If we consider it as it is conceived actually to exist in the being, we call it the physical essence. If we consider it after the manner in which it is apprehended and defined by our intellects through generic and differentiating concepts, we call it the metaphysical essence. Thus, the essence of man conceived by the two defining concepts, “rational animal,” is the metaphysical essence; the essence of man as known to be composed of the two really distinct substantial principles, soul and body, is the physical essence. Understood in this way both are one and the same essence considered from different points of view—as existing in the actual order, and as conceived by the mind.[87]

The physical essence of any being, understood as the constitutive principle or principles from which all properties spring, is either simple or composite according as it is understood to consist of one such constitutive principle, or to result from the substantial union of two constitutive principles, a material and a formal. Thus, the essence of God, the essence of a purely spiritual being, the essence of the human soul, are physically simple; the essence of man, the essences of all corporeal beings, are physically composite.

According to our mode of conceiving, defining and classifying essences by means of the abstract generic and differential grades of being which we apprehend in them, all essences, even physically simple essences, are conceived as logically and metaphysically composite. Moreover we speak and think of their generic and differential [pg 079] factors as “material” and “formal” respectively, after the analogy of the composition of corporeal or physically composite essences from the union of two really distinct principles, matter and form; the analogy consisting in this, that as matter is the indeterminate principle which is determined and actuated by form, so the generic concept is the indeterminate concept which is made definite and specific by that of the differentia.[88] But when we think of the genus of any corporeal essence as “material,” and the differentia as “formal,” we must not consider these “metaphysical parts” as really distinct; whereas the “physical parts” of a corporeal substance (such as man) are really distinct. The genus (animal), although a metaphysical part, expresses the whole essence (man) in an indeterminate way; whereas the “matter” which is a physical part, does not express the whole essence of man, nor does the soul which is also a physical part, but only both together. Not a little error has resulted from the confusion of thought whereby genus and differentia have been regarded as material and formal constitutives in the literal sense of those expressions.

14. Characteristics of Abstract Essences.—When we consider the essences of things not as actually existing, but as intrinsically possible—the abstract, metaphysical essences, therefore—we find that when as objects of our thought they are analysed into their simplest constituents and compared or related with themselves and with one another they present themselves to our minds in these relations as endowed with certain more or less remarkable characteristics.

(a) In the first place, being abstract, they present themselves [pg 080] to the mind as being what they are independently of actual existence at any particular time or place. Their intelligibility is something apart from any relation to any actual time or place. Being intrinsically possible, they might exist at any time or place; but as possible, they are out of time and out of place—detemporalized and delocalized, if we may be permitted to use such expressions.[89]

(b) Furthermore, since the intellect forms its notions of them, through the aid of the senses and the imagination, from actual realizations of themselves or their constituent factors, and since it understands them to be intrinsically possible, or free from intrinsic incompatibility of their constituent factors, it conceives them to be capable of indefinitely repeated actualizations throughout time and space—unless it sees some special reason to the contrary, as it does in the case of the Necessary Being, and (according to some philosophers) in the case of purely immaterial beings or pure spirits. That is to say it universalizes them, and sees them to be capable of existing at any and every conceivable time and place. This relation of theirs to space is not likely to be confounded with the immensity or ubiquity of God. But their corresponding relation to time is sometimes described as eternity; and if it is so described it must be carefully distinguished from the positive eternity of God, the Immutable Being. To distinguish it from the latter it is usually described as negative eternity,—this indifference of the possible essence to actual existence at any particular point of time.

But apart from this relation which we conceive it as having to existence in the order of actual reality, can we, or do we, or must we conceive it as in itself an intrinsic possibility from all eternity, in the sense that it never began to be intrinsically possible, and will never cease to be so? Must we attribute to it a positive eternity, not of course of actuality or existence, but of ideal being, as an object of thought to an Eternally Existing Mind? What is this supposed eternal possibility of the possible essence? Is it nothing actual: the possible as such is nothing actual. But is it anything real? Has it only ideal being—esse ideale or intentionale? And has it this only in and from the human mind, or independently of the human mind? And also independently of the actual essences from which the human mind gets the data for its thought,—so that we must ascribe to it an eternal ideal being? To these questions we shall return presently.

(c) Thirdly, essences considered apart from their actual existence, and compared with their own constitutive factors or with one another, reveal to the mind relations which the mind sees to [pg 081] be necessary, and which it formulates for itself in necessary judgments,—judgments in materia necessaria. By virtue of the principle of identity an abstract essence is necessarily what it is, what the mind conceives it to be, what the mind conceives as its definition. Man, as an object of thought, is necessarily a rational animal, whether he actually exists or not. And if he is thought of as existing, he cannot at the same time be thought of as non-existing,—by the principle of contradiction. An existing man is necessarily an existing man,—by the principle of identity. These logical principles are rooted in the nature of reality, whether actual or possible, considered as an object of thought. There is thus a necessary relation between any complex object of thought and each of the constituent factors into which the mind can analyse it. And, similarly, there is a necessary negative relation—a relation of exclusion—between any object of thought and anything which the mind sees to be incompatible with that object as a whole, or with any of its constituent factors.

Again, the mind sees necessary relations between abstract essences compared with one another. Five and seven are necessarily twelve. Whatever begins to exist actually must have a cause. Contingent being, if such exists, is necessarily dependent for its existence on some other actually existing being. If potential being is actualized it must be actualized by actual being. The three interior angles of a triangle are necessarily equal to two right angles. And so on.

But is the abstract essence itself—apart from all mental analysis of it, apart from all comparison of it with its constituent factors or with other essences—in any sense necessary? There is no question of its actual existence, but only of itself as an object of thought. Now our thought does not seem to demand necessarily, or have a necessary connexion with, any particular object of which we do de facto think. What we do think of is determined by our experience of actual things. And the things which we conceive to be possible, by the exercise of our reason upon the data of our senses, memory and imagination, are determined as to their nature and number by our experience of actual things, even although they themselves can and do pass beyond the domain of actually experienced things. The only necessary object of thought is reality in general: for the exercise of the function of thought necessarily demands an object, and this object must be reality of some sort. Thought, as we saw, begins with actual [pg 082] reality. Working upon this, thought apprehends in it the foundations of those necessary relations and judgments already referred to. Considering, moreover, the actual data of experience, our thought can infer from these the actual existence of one Being Who must exist by a necessity of His Essence.

But, furthermore, must all the possible essences which the mind does or can actually think of, be conceived as necessarily possible in the same sense in which it is suggested that they must be conceived as eternally possible? To this question, too, we shall return presently.

(d) Finally, possible essences appear to the mind as immutable, and consequently indivisible. This means simply that the relations which we establish between them and their constitutive factors are not only necessary but immutable: that if any constitutive factor of an essence is conceived as removed from it, or any new factor as added, we have no longer the original essence but some other essence. If “animal” is a being essentially embodying the two objective concepts of “organism” and “sentient,” then on removing either we have no longer the essence “animal”. So, too, by adding to these some other element compatible with them, e.g. “rational,” we have no longer the essence “animal,” but the essence “man”. Hence possible essences have been likened to numbers, inasmuch as if we add anything to, or subtract anything from, any given number, we have now no longer the original number but another.[90] This, too, is only an expression of the laws of identity and contradiction.

We might ask, however, whether, apart from analysis and comparison of an abstract object of thought with its constitutive notes or factors, such a possible essence is in itself immutably possible. This is similar to the question whether we can or must conceive such a possible essence as eternally and necessarily possible.

15. Grounds of Those Characteristics.—In considering the grounds or reasons of the various characteristics just enumerated it may be well to reflect that when we speak of the intrinsic possibility of a possible essence we conceive the latter as something complex, which we mentally resolve into its constitutive notes or factors or principles, to see if these are compatible. If they are we pronounce the essence intrinsically possible, if not we pronounce it intrinsically impossible. For [pg 083] our minds, absence of internal incompatibility in the content of our concept of any object is the test of its intrinsic possibility. Whatever fulfils this test we consider capable of existing. But what about the possibility of the notes, or factors, or principles themselves, whereby we define those essences, and by the union of which we conceive those essences to be constituted? How do we know that those abstract principles or factors—no one of which can actually exist alone, since all are abstract—can in certain combinations form possible objects of thought? We can know this only because we have either experienced such objects as actual, or because we infer their possibility from objects actually experienced. And similarly our knowledge of what is impossible is based upon our experience of the actual. Since, moreover, our experience of the actual is finite and fallible, we may err in our judgments as to what essences are, and what are not, intrinsically possible.[91]

If now we ask ourselves what intelligible reason can we assign for the characteristics just indicated as belonging to possible essences, we must fix our attention first of all on the fundamental fact that the human intellect always apprehends its object in an abstract condition. It contemplates the essence apart from the existence in which the essence is subject to circumstances of time and place and change; it grasps the essence in a static condition as simply identical with itself and distinct from all else; it sees the essence as indifferent to existence at any place or time; reflecting then on the actualization of this essence in the existing order of things, it apprehends the essence as capable of indefinite actualizations (except in cases where it sees some reason to the contrary), i.e. it universalizes the essence; comparing it with its constituent notes or elements, and with those of other essences, it sees and affirms certain relations (of identity or diversity, compatibility or incompatibility, between those notes or elements) as holding good necessarily and immutably, and independently of the actual embodiment of those notes or elements in any object existing at any particular place or time. All these features of the relations between the constituents of abstract, possible essences, seem so far to be adequately accounted for by the fact [pg 084] that the intellect apprehends those essences in the abstract: the data in which it apprehends them being given to it through sense experience. What may be inferred from the fact that the human intellect has this power of abstract thought, is another question[92]. But granting that it does apprehend essences in this manner, we seem to have in this fact a sufficient explanation of the features just referred to.

We have, however, already suggested other questions about the reality of those possible essences. Is their possibility, so far as known to us, explained by our experience of actual things? Or must we think them as eternally, necessarily and immutably possible? From the manner in which we must apprehend them, can we infer anything about the reality of an Eternal, Immutable, Necessary Intelligence, in whose Thought and Essence alone those essences, as apprehended by our minds, can find their ultimate ground and explanation? These are the questions we must now endeavour to examine.

16. Possible Essences as such are Something Distinct from mere Logical Being, and from Nothingness.—There have been philosophers who have held that the actual alone is real, and only while it is actual; that a purely (intrinsically) possible essence as such is nothing real; that the actual alone is possible; that the purely possible as such is impossible. This view is based on the erroneous assumption that whatever is or becomes actual is so, or becomes so, by some sort of unintelligible fatalistic necessity. Apart from the fact that it is incompatible with certain truths of theism, such as the Divine Omnipotence and Freedom in creating, it also involves the denial of all real becoming or change, and the assertion that all [pg 085] actuality is eternal; for if anything becomes actual, it was previously either possible or impossible; if impossible, it could never become actual; if possible, then as possible it was something different from the impossible, or from absolute nothingness. Moreover, the intrinsically possible is capable of becoming actual, and may be actualized if there exists some actual being with power to actualize it; but absolute nothingness—or, in other words, the intrinsically impossible—cannot be actualized, even by Omnipotence; therefore the possible essence as such is something positive or real, as distinct from nothingness. Finally, intrinsically possible essences can be clearly distinguished from one another by the mind; but their negation which is pure non-entity or nothingness cannot be so distinguished. It is therefore clear that possible essences are in some true sense something positive or real. From which it follows that nothingness, in the strict sense, is not the mere absence or negation of actuality, but also the absence or negation of that positive or real something which is intrinsic possibility; in other words that nothingness in the strict sense means intrinsic impossibility.

Even those who hold the opinion just rejected—that the purely possible essence as such has no reality in any conceivable sense—would presumably admit that it is an object of human thought at all events; they would accord to it the being it has from the human mind which thinks it. It would therefore be an ens rationis according to this view, having only the ideal being which consists in its being constituted and contemplated by the human mind. That it has the ideal being, the esse ideale or esse intentionale, which consists in its being contemplated by the human mind as an object of thought, no one will deny. But a little reflection will show, firstly, that this ideal being is something more than the ideal being of an ens rationis, of a mere logical entity; and, secondly, that a possible essence must have some other ideal being than that which it has in the individual human mind.

The possible essence is not a mere logical entity; for the latter cannot be conceived as capable of existing apart from the human mind, in the world of actual existences (3), whereas the former can be, and is in fact, conceived as capable of such existence. Its ideal being in the human mind is, therefore, something other than that of a mere logical entity.

The ideal being which it has in the human mind as an object [pg 086] of thought is undoubtedly derived from the mind's knowledge of actual things. We think of the essences of actually experienced realities apart from their actual existence. Thus abstracted, we analyse them, compare them, reason from them. By these processes we can not merely attain to a knowledge of the actual existence of other realities above and beyond and outside of our own direct and immediate intuitional experience, but we can also form concepts of multitudes of realities or essences as intrinsically possible, thus giving these latter an ideal existence in our own minds. Here, then, the question arises: Is this the only ideal being that can be ascribed to such essences? In other words, are essences intrinsically possible because we think them as intrinsically possible? Or is it not rather the case that we think them to be intrinsically possible because they are intrinsically possible? Does our thought constitute, or does it not rather merely discover, their intrinsic possibility? Does the latter result from, or is it not rather presupposed by, our thought-activity? The second alternative suggested in each of these questions is the true one. As our thought is not the source of their actuality, neither is it the source of their intrinsic possibility. Solipsism is the reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy which would reduce all actuality experienced by the individual mind to phases, or phenomena, or self-manifestations, of the individual mind itself as the one and only actuality. And no less absurd is the philosophy which would accord to all intrinsically possible realities no being other than the ideal being which they have as the thought-objects of the individual human mind. The study of the actual world of direct experience leads the impartial and sincere inquirer to the conclusion that it is in some true sense a manifestation of mind or intelligence: not, however, of his own mind, which is itself only a very tiny item in the totality of the actual world, but of one Supreme Intelligence. And in this same Intelligence the world of possible essences too will be found to have its original and fundamental ideal being.

17. Possible Essences have, besides Ideal Being, no other sort of Being or Reality Proper and Intrinsic to Themselves.—Before inquiring further into the manner in which we attain to a knowledge of this Intelligence, and of the ideal being of possible essences in this Intelligence, we may ask whether, above and beyond such ideal being, possible essences have not perhaps from all eternity some being or reality proper [pg 087] and intrinsic to themselves; not indeed the actual being which they possess when actualized in time, but yet some kind of intrinsic reality as distinct from the extrinsic ideal being, or esse intentionale, which consists merely in this that they are objects of thought present as such to a Supreme Intelligence or Mind.

Some few medieval scholastics[93] contended that possible essences have from all eternity not indeed the existence they may receive by creation or production in time, but an intrinsic essential being which, by creation or production, may be transferred to the order of actual existences, and which, when actual existence ceases (if they ever receive it), still continues immutable and incorruptible: what these writers called the esse essentiae, as distinct from the esse existentiae, conceiving it to be intermediate between the latter on the one hand and mere ideal or logical being on the other, and hence calling it esse diminutum or secundum quid. Examining the question from the standpoint of theism, these authors seem to have thought that since God understands these essences as possible from all eternity, and since this knowledge must have as its term or object something real and positive, these essences must have some real and proper intrinsic being from all eternity: otherwise they would be simply nothingness, and nothingness cannot be the term of the Divine Intelligence. But the obvious reply is that though possible essences as such are nothing actual they must be distinguished as realities, capable of actually existing, from absolute nothingness; and that as thus distinguished from absolute nothingness they are really and positively intelligible to the Divine Mind, as indeed they are even to the human mind. To be intelligible they need not have actual being. They must, no doubt, be capable of having actual being, in order to be understood as realities: it is precisely in this understood capability that their reality consists, for the real includes not only what actually exists but whatever is capable of actual existence. Whatever is opposed to absolute nothingness is real; and this manifestly includes not only the actual but whatever is intrinsically possible.

Realities or essences which have not actual being have only [pg 088] ideal being; and ideal being means simply presence in some mind as an object of thought. Scholastic philosophers generally[94] hold that possible essences as such have no other being than this; that before and until such essences actually exist they have of themselves and in themselves no being except the ideal being which they have as objects of the Divine Intelligence and the virtual being they have in the Divine Omnipotence which may at any time give them actual existence. One convincing reason for this view is the consideration that if possible essences as such had from all eternity any proper and intrinsic being in themselves, God could neither create nor annihilate. For in that hypothesis essences, on becoming actual, would not be produced ex nihilo, inasmuch as before becoming actual they would in themselves and from all eternity have had their own proper real being; and after ceasing to be actual they would still retain this. But creation is the production of the whole reality of actual being from nothingness; and is therefore impossible if the actual being is merely produced from an essence already real, i.e. having an eternal positive reality of its own. The same is true of annihilation. The theory of eternally existing uncreated matter is no less incompatible with the doctrine of creation than this theory of eternally real and uncreated forms or essences.

Again, what could this supposed positive and proper reality of the possible essence be? If it is anything distinct from the mere ideal being of such an essence, as it is assumed to be, it must after all be actual being of some sort, which would apparently have to be actualized again in order to have actual existence! Finally, this supposed eternal reality, proper to possible essences, cannot be anything uncreated. For whatever is uncreated is God; and since it is these supposed proper realities of possible essences that are made actual, and constitute the existing created universe, the latter would be in this view an actualization of the Divine Essence itself,—which is pantheism pure and simple. And neither can this supposed eternal reality, proper to possible essences, be anything created. For such creation would be eternal and necessary; whereas God's creative activity is admitted by all scholastics to be essentially free; and although they are not agreed as to whether “creation from all [pg 089] eternity” (“creatio ab aeterno”) is possible, they are agreed that it is not a fact.

Possible essences as such are therefore nothing actual. Furthermore, as such they have in themselves no positive being. But they are not therefore unreal. They are positively intelligible as capable of actual existence, and therefore as distinct from logical entities or entia rationis which are not capable of such existence. They are present as objects of thought to mind; and to some mind other than the individual human mind. About this ideal being which they have in this Mind we have now in the next place to inquire.

18. Inferences from our Knowledge of Possible Essences.—We have stated that an impartial study of the actual world will lead to the conclusion that it is dependent on a Supreme Intelligence; and we have suggested that in this Supreme Intelligence also possible essences as such have their primary ideal being ([16], [17]). When the existence of God has been established—as it may be established by various lines of argument—from actual things, we can clearly see, as will be pointed out presently, that in the Divine Essence all possible essences have the ultimate source of their possibility. But many scholastic philosophers contend that the nature and properties of possible essences, as apprehended by the human mind, furnish a distinct and conclusive argument for the existence of a Supreme Uncreated Intelligence.[95] Others deny the validity of such a line of reasoning, contending that it is based on misapprehension and misinterpretation of those characteristics.

All admit that it is not human thought that makes essences possible: they are intelligible to the human mind because they are possible, not vice versa.[96] For the human mind the immediate source and ground of their intrinsic possibility and characteristics is the fact that they are given to it in actual experience while it has the power of considering them apart from their actual existence.

But (1) are they not independent of experienced actuality, no less than of the human mind, so that we are forced to infer from them the reality of a Supreme Eternal Mind in which they have eternal ideal being?

(2) Is not any possible essence (e.g. “water,” or “a triangle”) so necessarily what it is that even if it never did and never will exist, nay even were there no human or other finite mind to conceive it, it would still be what it is (e.g. “a chemical compound of oxygen and hydrogen,” or “a plane rectilinear three-sided figure”)—so that there must be some Necessarily Existing Intelligence in and from which it has this necessary truth as a possible essence?[97] These essences, as known to us, are so far from being grounded in, [pg 091] or explained by, the things of our actual experience, that we rather regard the latter as grounded in the former. Do we not consider possible essences as the prototypes and exemplars to which actual things must conform in order to be actual, in order to exist at all?[98]

(3) Finally, the relations which we apprehend as obtaining between them, we see to be necessary and immutable relations. They embody necessary truths which are for our minds the standards of all truth. Such necessary truths cannot be grounded either in the contingent human mind, or in the contingent and mutable actuality of the things of our immediate experience. Therefore we can and must infer from them the reality of a Necessary, Immutable Being, of whose essence they must be imitations.

If, then, this ideal order of intrinsically possible essences is logically and ontologically prior to the contingent actualizations of any of them (even though it be posterior to them in the order of our knowledge, which is based on actual experience), there must be likewise ontologically prior to all contingent actualities (including our own minds) some Necessary Intelligence in which this order of possible essences has its ideal being.

19. Critical Analysis of Those Inferences.—The validity of the general line of argument indicated in the preceding paragraphs has been seriously questioned. Among other criticisms the following points have been urged[99]:—

(1) Actual things furnish the basis of irrefragable proofs of the existence of God—the Supreme, Necessary, Eternal, Omniscient, and Omnipotent Being. But we are here inquiring whether a mind which has not yet so [pg 092] analysed actual being as to see how it involves this conclusion, or a mind which abstracts altogether from the evidence furnished by actual things for this conclusion, can prove the existence of such a being from the separate consideration of possible essences, their attributes and relations. Now it is not evident that to such a mind possible essences reveal themselves as having eternal ideal being. Such a mind is, no doubt, conscious that it is not itself the cause of their possibility. But it sees that actual things plus the abstract character of its own thought account sufficiently for all their features as it knows them. To the question: Is not their ideal being eternal? it can only answer: That will depend on whether the world of actual things can be shown to involve the existence of an Eternal Intelligence. Until this is proved we cannot say whether possible essences have any ideal being other than that which they have in human minds.

(2) The actual things from which we get our concepts of possible essences do not exist necessarily. But, granted their existence, we know from them that certain essences are de facto possible. They are not necessarily given to us as possible, any more than actual things are necessarily given to us as actual. Of course, when they are thought of at all, they are, as objects of thought, necessarily and immutably identical with themselves, and related to one another as mutually compatible or incompatible, etc. But this necessity of relations, hypothetical as it is and contingent on the mental processes of analysis and comparison, involved as it is in the very nature of being and thought, and expressed as it is in the principles of identity and contradiction, is just as true of actual contingent essences as of possible essences;[100] and it is something very different from the sort of necessity claimed for possible essences by the contention that they must be conceived as having ideal being necessarily. The ideal being they have in the human mind is certainly not necessary: the human mind might never have conceived these possible essences.

But must the human mind conceive a possible essence as having some ideal being necessarily? No; unless that mind has already convinced itself, from a study of actual things, that an Eternal, Necessary, Omniscient Intelligence exists: to which, of course, such essences would be eternally and necessarily present as objects of thought. If the human mind had already reached this conviction it could then see that “even if there were no human intellect, things would still be true in relation to the Divine Intellect. But if both intellects were, per impossibile, conceived as non-existent truth would persist no longer.”[101] Suppose, therefore, that it has not yet reached this conviction, or abstracts altogether from the existence of God as known from actual things; and then, further, imagines the actual things of its experience and all human intellects and finite intellects of whatsoever kind as non-existent: must it still conceive possible things as possible? No; possibility and impossibility, [pg 093] truth and falsity will now have ceased to have any meaning. After such attempted abstraction the mind would have before it only what Balmes describes as “the abyss of nothing”. And Balmes is right in saying that the mind is unable “to abstract all existence”. But the reason of the inability is not, as Balmes contends, because when it has removed actual things and finite minds there still remains in spite of it a system or order of possible essences which forces it to infer and posit the existence of an Eternal, Necessary Mind as the source and ground of that order. The reason rather is because the mind sees that the known actual things, from which it got all its notions of possible essences, necessarily imply, as the only intelligible ground of their actuality, the existence of a Necessary Being, in whose Intelligence they must have been contained ideally, and in whose Omnipotence they must have been contained virtually, from all eternity. From contingent actuality, as known to it, the mind can argue to the eternal actuality of Necessary Being, and to the impossibility either of a state of absolute nothingness, or of an order of purely possible things apart from all actuality.

(3) Of course, whether the mind has thus thought out the ultimate implications of the actuality of experienced things or not, once it has thought and experienced those things it cannot by any effort banish the memory of them from its presence: they are there still as objects of its thought even when it abstracts from their actual existence. But if, while it has not yet seen that their actuality implies the existence of a Necessary, Omniscient and Omnipotent Being, it abstracts not only from their actual existence but from the existence of all finite minds (itself included), then in that state, so far as its knowledge goes, there would be neither actual nor ideal nor possible being. Nor can the fact that an ideal order of possible things still persists in its own thought mislead it into concluding that such an ideal order really persists in the hypothesis it has made. For it knows that this ideal order still persists for itself simply because it cannot “think itself away”. It sees all the time that if it could effectively think itself away, this ideal order would have to disappear with it, leaving nothing—so far as it knows—either actual or possible. Mercier has some apposite remarks on this very point. “From the fact,” he writes, “that those abstract essences, grasped by our abstractive thought from the dawn of our reason, have grown so familiar to us, we easily come to look upon them as pre-existing archetypes or models of our thoughts and of things; they form a fund of predicates by which we are in the habit of interpreting the data of our experience. So, too, the hypothetically necessary relations established by abstract thought between them we come to regard as a sort of eternal system of principles, endowed with a sort of legislative power, to which created things and intelligences must conform. But they have really no such pre-existence. The eternal pre-existence of those essence-types, which Plato called the ‘intelligible world,’ the τόπος νοητός, and the supposed eternal legislative power of their relations, are a sort of mental optical illusion. Those abstract essences, and the principles based upon them, are the products of our mental activity working on the data of our actual experience. When we enter on the domain of speculative reflection ... they are there before us; ... but we must not forget that reflection is consequent on the spontaneous thought-activity which—by working abstractively on the actual data of sensible, contingent, changeable, temporal realities—set them up there.... We know [pg 094] from psychology how those ideal, abstract essence-types are formed.... But because we have no actual memory of their formation, which is so rapid as practically to escape consciousness in spontaneous thought, we are naturally prone to imagine that they are not the product of our own mental action on the data of actual experience, but that they exist in us, or rather above us, and independently of us. We can therefore understand the psychological illusion under which Plato wrote such passages as the following: ‘But if anyone should tell me why anything is beautiful, either because it has a blooming, florid colour, or figure, or anything else of the kind, I dismiss all other reasons, for I am confounded by them all; but I simply, wholly, and perhaps naïvely, confine myself to this, that nothing else causes it to be beautiful, except either the presence or communication of that abstract beauty, by whatever means and in whatever way communicated; for I cannot yet affirm with certainty, but only that by means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful (τῷ καλῷ τὰ καλὰ γίγνεται καλά). For this appears to me the safest answer to give both to myself and others, and adhering to this I think that I shall never fall [into error].... And that by magnitude great things become great, and greater things greater; and by littleness less things become less.’[102] St. Augustine's doctrine on the invariable laws of numbers, on the immutable principles of wisdom, and on truth generally, draws its inspiration from this Platonic idealism.”[103]

But this Platonic doctrine, attributing to the abstract essences conceived by our thought a reality independent both of our thought and of the actual sense data from which directly or indirectly we derive our concepts of them, is rejected as unsound by scholastics generally. When we have proved from actual things that God exists, and is the Intelligent and Free Creator of the actual world of our direct experience, we can of course consider the Divine Intellect as contemplating from all eternity the Divine Essence, and as seeing therein the eternal archetypes or ideas of all actual and possible essences. We may thus regard the Divine Mind as the eternal τόπος νοητός, or mundus intelligibilis. This, of course, is not Plato's thought; it is what St. Augustine substituted for Platonism, and very properly. But we must not infer, from this truth, that when we contemplate possible essences, with all the characteristics we may detect in them, we are contemplating this mundus intelligibilis which is the Divine Mind. This was the error of the ontologists. They inferred that since possible essences, as known by the human mind, have ideal being independently of the latter and of all actual contingent reality, the human mind in contemplating them has really an intuition of them as they are seen by the Divine Intellect Itself in the Divine Essence; so that, in the words of Gioberti, the Primum Ontologicum, the Divine Being Himself, is also the primum logicum, or first reality apprehended by human thought.[104]

Now those authors who hold that the ideal order of possible essences contemplated by the human mind is seen by the latter, as so contemplated, to have some being, some ideal being, really independent of the human mind itself, and of the actual contingent things from which they admit that the human mind derives its knowledge of such essences,—these authors do not hold, but deny, that this independent ideal being, which they claim for these [pg 095] essences, is anything Divine, that it is the Divine Essence as seen by the Divine Intellect to be imitable ad extra.[105] Hence they cannot fairly be charged with the error of ontologism.

Renouncing Plato's exaggerated realism, and holding that our knowledge of the ideal order of possible essences is derived by our mind from its consideration of actual things, they yet hold that this ideal order is seen to have some sort of being or reality independent both of the mind and of actual things.[106] This is not easy to understand. When we ask, Is this supposed independent being (or reality, or possibility) of possible essences the ideal being they have in the Divine mind?—we are told that it is not;[107] but that it is something from which we can infer, by reasoning, this eternal, necessary, and immutable ideal being of these same essences in the Divine Mind.

The considerations urged in the foregoing paragraphs will, however, have shown that the validity of this line of reasoning from possible essences to the reality of an Eternal, Divine, Immutable Intelligence is by no means evident or free from difficulties. Of course, when the existence of God has been proved from actual things, the conception of the Divine Intelligence and Essence as the ultimate source of all possible reality, no less than of all actual reality, will be found to shed a great deal of new light upon the intrinsic possibility of possible essences. Since, however, our knowledge of the Divine is merely analogical, and since God's intuition of possible essences, as imitations of His own Divine Essence, completely transcends our comprehension, and is totally different from our abstractive knowledge of such essences, our conception of the manner in which these essences are related to the Divine Nature and the Divine Attributes, must be determined after the analogy of the manner in which our own minds are related to these essences.

20. Essences are intrinsically Possible, not because God can make them exist actually; nor yet because He freely wills them to be possible; nor because He understands them as possible; but because they are modes in which the Divine Essence is Imitable ad extra.—(a) The ultimate source of the extrinsic possibility of all contingent realities is the Divine Omnipotence: just as the proximate source of the extrinsic possibility of a statue is the power of the sculptor to educe it from the block of wood or marble. But just as the power of the sculptor presupposes the intrinsic possibility of the statue, so does the Divine Omnipotence presuppose the intrinsic possibility of all possible things. It is not, as William of Ockam († 1347), a scholastic of the decadent period, erroneously thought, [pg 096] because God can create things that such things are intrinsically possible, but rather because they are intrinsically possible He can create them.

(b) Not less erroneous is the voluntarist theory of Descartes, according to which possible essences are intrinsically possible because God freely willed them to be possible.[108] The actuality of all created things depends, of course, on the free will of God to create them; but that possible essences are what they are, and are related to each other necessarily as they are, because God has willed them to be such, is absolutely incredible. Descartes seems to have been betrayed into this strange error by a false notion of what is requisite for the absolute freedom and independence of the Divine Will: as if this demanded that God should be free to will, e.g. that two plus two be five, or that the radii of a circle be unequal, or that creatures be independent of Himself, or that blasphemy be a virtuous act! The intrinsic possibility of essences is not dependent on the Free Will of God; the actualization of possible essences is; but God can will to actualize only such essences as He sees, from comprehending His own Divine Essence, to be intrinsically possible. But it derogates in no way from the supremacy of the Divine Will to conceive its free volition as thus consequent on, and illumined by, the Divine Knowledge; whereas it is incompatible with the wisdom and sanctity of God, as well as inconceivable to the human mind, that the necessary laws of thought and being—such as the principles of contradiction and identity, the principle of causality, the first principles of the moral order—should be what they are simply because God has freely willed them to be so, and might therefore have been otherwise.

From the fact that we have no direct intuition of the Divine Being, some philosophers have concluded that all speculation on the relation of God to the world of our direct experience is necessarily barren and fruitless. This is a phase of agnosticism; and, like all error, it is the exaggeration of a truth: the truth being that while we may reach real knowledge about the Divine Nature and attributes by such speculation, we can do so only on condition that we are guided by analogies drawn from God's creation, and remember that our concepts, as applied to God, are analogical (2).

“We can know God only by analogy with contingent and finite beings, and consequently the realities and laws of the contingent and finite world must necessarily serve as our term of comparison. But, among finite realities, we see an essential subordination of the extrinsically possible to the intelligible, of this to the intrinsically possible, and of this again to the essential type which is presupposed by our thought. Therefore, a pari, we must consider the omnipotent will of God, which is the first and universal cause of all [contingent] existences, as under the direction of the Divine Omniscience, and this in turn as having for its object the Divine Essence and in it the essential types whose intrinsic possibility is grounded on the necessary imitability of the Divine Being.

“When, therefore, in defence of his position, Descartes argues that ‘In God willing and knowing are one and the same; the reason why He knows anything is because He wills it, and for this reason only can it be true: Ex hoc ipso quod Deus aliquid velit, ideo cognoscit, et ideo tantum talis res est vera’—he is only confusing the issue. We might, indeed, retort the argument: ‘In God willing and knowing are one and the same; the reason why He wills anything is because He knows it, and for this reason only can it be good: Ex hoc ipso quod aliquid cognoscit, ideo vult, et ideo tantum talis res est bona,’ but both inferences are equally unwarranted. For, though willing and knowing are certainly one and the same in God, this one and the same thing is formally and for our minds neither will nor intellect, but a reality transcending will and intellect, a substance infinitely above any substances known to us: ὑπερούσια, supersubstantia, as the Fathers of the Church and the Doctors of the Schools call it. But of this transcendent substance we have no intuitive knowledge. We must therefore either abandon all attempts to find out anything about it, or else apprehend it and designate it after the analogy of what we know from direct experience about created life and mind. And as in creatures will is not identical with intellect, nor either of these with the nature of the being that possesses them; so what we conceive in God under the concept of will, we must not identify in thought with what we conceive in Him under the concept of intellect, nor may we with impunity confound either in our thought with the Nature or Essence of the Divine Being.”[109]

(c) Philosophers who deny the validity of all the arguments advanced by theists in proof of the existence of a transcendent Supreme Being, distinct from the world of direct human experience, endeavour to account in various ways for the intrinsic possibility of abstract essences. Agnostics either deny to these latter any reality whatsoever ([16]), or else declare the problem of their reality insoluble. Monists of the materialist type—who try to reduce all mind to matter and its mere mechanical energies ([11])—treat the question in a still more inadequate and unsatisfactory manner; while the advocates of idealistic monism, like Hegel and his followers, refer us to the supposed Immanent Mind [pg 098] of the universe for an ultimate explanation of all intrinsic possibility. Certainly this must have its ultimate source in some mind; and it is not in referring us to an Eternal Mind that these philosophers err, but in their conception of the relation of this mind to the world of direct actual experience. It is not, however, with such theories we are concerned just now, but only with theories put forward by theists. And among these latter it is surprising to find some few[110] who maintain that the intrinsic possibility of abstract essences depends ultimately and exclusively on these essences themselves, irrespective of things actually experienced by the human mind, irrespective of the human mind itself, and irrespective of the Divine Mind and the Divine Nature.

As to this view, we have already seen ([19]) that if we abstract from all human minds, and from all actual things that can be directly experienced by such minds, we are face to face either with the alternative of absolute nothingness wherein the true and the false, the possible and the impossible, cease to have any intelligible meaning, or else with the alternative of a Supreme, Eternal, Necessary, Omniscient and Omnipotent Being, whose actual existence has been, or can be, inferred from the actual data of human experience. Now the theist, who admits the existence of such a Being, cannot fail to see that possible essences must have their primary ideal being in the Divine Intellect, and the ultimate source of their intrinsic possibility in the Divine Essence Itself. For, knowing that God can actualize intrinsically possible essences by the creative act, which is intelligent and free, he will understand that these essences have their ideal being in the Divine Intellect; that the Divine Intellect sees their intrinsic possibility by contemplating the Divine Essence as the Uncreated Prototype and Exemplar of all intrinsically possible things; and that these latter are intrinsically possible precisely because they are possible adumbrations or imitations of the Divine Nature.

(d) But are we to conceive that essences are intrinsically possible precisely because the Divine Intellect, by understanding them, makes them intrinsically possible? Or should we rather conceive their intrinsic possibility as antecedent to this act by which the Divine Intellect understands them, and as dependent only on the Divine Essence Itself, so that essences would be [pg 099] intrinsically possible simply because the Divine Essence is what it is, and because they are possible imitations or expressions of it? Here scholastics are not agreed.

Some[111] hold that the intrinsic possibility of essences is formally constituted by the act whereby the Divine Intellect, contemplating the Divine Essence, understands the latter to be indefinitely imitable ad extra; so that as the actuality of things results from the Fiat of the Divine Will, and as their extrinsic possibility is grounded in the Divine Omnipotence, so their intrinsic possibility is grounded in the Divine Intellect. The latter, by understanding the Divine Essence, would not merely give an ideal being to the intrinsic possibility of essences, but would make those essences formally possible, they being only virtually possible in the Divine Essence considered antecedently to this act of the Divine Intellect. Or, rather, as some Scotists explain the matter,[112] this ideal being which possible essences have from the Divine Intellect is not as extrinsic to them as the ideal being they have from the human intellect, but is rather the very first being they can be said formally to have, and is somehow intrinsic to them after the analogy of the being which mere logical entities, entia rationis, derive from the human mind: which being is intrinsic to these entities and is in fact the only being they have or can have.

Others[113] hold that while, no doubt, possible essences have ideal being in the Divine Intellect from the fact that they are objects of the Divine Knowledge, yet we must not conceive these essences as deriving their intrinsic possibility from the Divine Intellect. For intellect as such presupposes its object. Just, therefore, as possible essences are not intrinsically possible because they are understood by, and have ideal being in, the human mind, so neither are they intrinsically possible because they are understood by, and have ideal being in, the Divine Mind. In order to be understood actually, in order to have ideal being, in order to be objects of thought, they must be intelligible; and in order to be intelligible they must be intrinsically possible. Therefore they are formally constituted as intrinsically possible essences, not by the fact that they are understood by the Divine Intellect, but by the fact that antecedently [pg 100] to this act (in our way of conceiving the matter: for there is really no priority of acts or attributes in God) they are already possible imitations of the Divine Essence Itself.

This view seems preferable as being more in accordance with the analogy of what takes place in the human mind. The speculative intellect in man does not constitute, but presupposes its object. Now, while actual things are the objects of God's practical science—the “scientia visionis,” which reaches what is freely decreed by the Divine Will,—possible things are the objects of God's speculative science—the “scientia simplicis intelligentiae,” which is not, like the former, productive of its object, but rather contemplative of objects presented to it by and in the Divine Essence.

Why, then, ultimately will the notions “square” and “circle” not coalesce so as to form one object of thought for the human mind, while the notions “equilateral” and “triangle” will so coalesce? Because the Essence of God, the Necessary Being, the First Reality, and the Source of all contingent reality, affords no basis for the former as a possible expression or imitation of Itself; in other words, because Being is not expressible by nothingness, and a “square circle” is nothingness: while the Divine Essence does afford a basis for the latter; because Necessary Being is in some intelligible way imitated, expressed, manifested, by whatever has any being to distinguish it from nothingness, and an “equilateral triangle” has such being and is not nothingness.

It is hardly necessary to add that when we conceive the Divine Essence, contemplated by the Divine Intellect, as containing in itself the exemplars or prototypes of all possible things, we are not to understand the Divine Essence as the formal exemplar of each, or, a fortiori, as a vast collection of such formally distinct exemplars; but only as virtually and equivalently the exemplar of each and all. We are not to conceive that possible essences are seen by the Divine Intellect imaged in the Divine Essence as in a mirror, but rather as in their supreme source and principle: so that they are faint and far off reflections of It, and, when actualized, become for us the only means we have, in this present state, for reaching any knowledge of the Deity: videmus nunc per speculum.[114]

21. Distinction Between Essence and Existence in Actually Existing Contingent or Created Beings.—Passing now from the consideration of possible essences as such, to the consideration of actually existing essences, we have to examine a question which has given rise to a great deal of controversy, partly on account of its inherent difficulty, and partly because of a multitude of ambiguities arising from confusion of thought: What is the nature of the distinction between essence and existence in the actually existing things of our experience?

We have seen already that the concepts of essence and existence are distinct from each other ([12], [13]); in other words, that in all cases there is at least a logical distinction between the essence and the existence of any being. We must, however, distinguish between created or contingent beings and the Uncreated, Necessary, Self-Existent Being. The latter exists essentially, eternally, by His own Essence, so that in Him essence and existence are really identical. His essence is formally His Existence; and, therefore, in thinking of His Essence we cannot positively exclude the notion of existence or think of Him as non-existent. The distinction between essence and existence, which we find in our thoughts, is, therefore, when applied to God, a purely logical distinction, due solely to our finite human mode of thinking, and having no ground or basis or reason in the reality which is the object of our thought. On this there is complete unanimity among scholastic philosophers.

But while we conceive that God actually exists by that whereby He is God, by His Essence Itself, we do not conceive that any created or contingent being exists by that whereby it is what it is, by its essence. We do not, for example, regard the essence of Socrates, whether specific or individual (that whereby he is a man, or that whereby he is this man, Socrates), as that whereby he actually exists. In other words, the essence of the existing Socrates, being a contingent essence, does not necessarily demand or imply that it actually exist. Our concept of such an essence does not include the note of actual existence. Therefore if we find such an essence actually existing we consider this actually existing essence as caused or produced, and conserved in existence, by some other being, viz. by the Necessary Being: so that if it were not so created and conserved [pg 102] it would be a pure possibility and nothing actual.[115] The same difference between the Necessary Being and contingent beings will be seen from considering their existence. The abstract concept of existence is rendered definite and determinate by the essence which it actualizes. Now every finite essence is of some particular kind; and its existence is rendered determinate by the fact that it is the existence of a definite kind of essence. The existence of a contingent being we conceive as the actuality of its essence; and its essence as a definite potentiality of existence. Thus if we conceive existence as a perfection it is restricted by the finite nature of the potentiality which it actualizes. But the existence of the Necessary Being is the plenitude of actuality, an existence not restricted by being the existence of any essence that is determinate because finite, but of an essence that is determinate by being above all genera and species, by being infinite, by being Itself pure actuality, in no sense potential but perfectly and formally identical with actual existence. While, therefore, the essence of the Necessary Being is a necessarily existing essence, that of a contingent being is not necessarily existent, but is conceived as a potentiality which has been de facto actualized or made existent by the Necessary Being, and which may again cease to be actually existent.[116] On this too there is unanimity among scholastic philosophers.

We distinguish mentally or logically between the essence of an actually existing contingent being and its existence; considering the former as the potential principle, in relation to the latter as the actualizing principle, of the contingent existing reality. But is the distinction between such an essence and its existence something more than a logical distinction? Is it a real distinction? This is the question in dispute. And in order to avoid misunderstanding, we must be clear on these two points: firstly, of what essence and existence is there question? and secondly, what exactly are we to understand by a real distinction in this matter?

22. State of the Question.—In the first place, there is no question here of the relation of a possible essence as such to existence. The possible essence of a contingent being, as such, has no reality outside the Divine Essence, Intellect, Will, and Omnipotence. Before the world was created the possible essences of all the beings that constitute it were certainly really distinct from the actual existence of these beings which do constitute the created universe. On this point there can be no difference of opinion. To contend that it is on the eternal reality of the possible essence that actual existence supervenes, when a contingent being begins to exist, would be equivalent to contending that it is the Divine Essence that becomes actual in the phenomena of our experience: which is the error of Pantheism.

Again, before a contingent thing comes into actual existence it may be virtually and potentially in the active powers and passive potentialities of other actually existing contingent things: as the oak, for instance, is in the passive potentiality of the acorn and in the active powers of the natural agencies whereby it is evolved from the acorn; or the statue in the block of marble and in the mind and artistic power of the sculptor. But neither is there any question here of the relation of such potential being [pg 104] or essence as a thing has in its causes to the actual existence of this thing when actually produced. Whatever being or essence it has in its active and passive causes is certainly really distinct from the existence which the thing has when it has been actually produced. Nor is there any doubt or dispute about this point. At the same time much controversy is due to misunderstandings arising from a confusion of thought which fails to distinguish between the essence as purely possible, the essence as virtually or potentially in its causes, and the essence as actually existing. It is about the distinction between the latter and its existence that the whole question is raised. And it must be borne in mind that this essence, whether it is really distinct from its existence or not, is itself a positive reality from the moment it is created or produced. The question is whether the creative or productive act—whereby this essence is placed “outside its causes,” and is now no longer merely possible, or merely virtual or potential in its causes, but something real in itself—has for its term one reality, or two realities, viz. the essence as real subjective potentiality of existence, and the existential act or perfection whereby it is constituted actually existent.[117]

The question is exclusively concerned with the essence which began to exist when the contingent being came into actual existence, and which ceases to exist when, or if, this being again passes out of actual existence; and the question is whether this essence which actually exists is really distinct from the existence whereby it actually exists. Finally, the question concerns the essence and existence of any and every actual contingent reality, whether such reality be a substance or an accident. Of course it is primarily concerned with the essence and existence of substances; but it also applies to the essence and existence of accidents in so far as these latter will be found to be really distinct from the substances in which they inhere, and to have reality proper to themselves.

23. The Theory of Distinctions in its Application to the Question.—In the next place, what are we to understand by a real distinction in this matter? Ambiguity and obscurity of thought in regard to the theory of distinctions, and in regard to the application of the theory to the present question, has been probably the most fertile source of much tedious and fruitless controversy in this connexion.

Anticipating what will be considered more fully at a later stage ([30]), we must note here the two main classes of distinction which, by reflecting on our thought-processes, we discover between the objects of our thought. The real distinction is that which exists in things independently of the consideration of our minds; that which is discovered, but not made, by the mind; that which is given to us in and with the data of our experience. For example, the act of thinking is a reality other than, and therefore really distinct from, the mind that thinks; for the mind persists after the act of thinking has passed away.

Opposed to this is the mental or logical distinction, which is the distinction made by the mind itself between two different concepts of one and the same reality; which is not in the reality independently of our thought, but is introduced into it by our thought, regarding the same reality under different aspects or from different points of view. The mind never makes such a distinction without some ground or reason for doing so.

Sometimes, however, this reason will be found exclusively in the mind itself—in the limitations of its modes of thought—and not in the reality which is the matter or object of the thought. The distinction is then said to be purely logical or mental. Such distinctions are entia rationis, logical entities. An example would be the distinction between the concept “man” and the concept “rational animal,” or, in general, between any definable object of thought and its definition; the distinction, therefore, between the essence and the existence of the Necessary Being is a purely logical distinction, for in a definition it is the essence of the thing we define, and existence is of the essence or definition of the Necessary Being.

Sometimes, again, the reason for making a mental distinction will be found in the reality itself. What is one and the same reality presents different aspects to the mind and evokes different concepts of itself in the mind: though really one, it is virtually manifold; and the distinction between the concepts of these various aspects is commonly known as a virtual distinction. For example, when we think of any individual man as a “rational animal,” though our concept of “animal nature” is distinct from that of “rational nature,” we do not regard these in him as two realities co-existing or combining to form his human nature, but only as two distinct aspects under which we view the one reality which is his human nature. And we view it under [pg 106] these two aspects because we have actual experience of instances in which animal nature is really distinct and separated from rationality, e.g., in the brute beast. Or, again, since we can recognize three grades of life in man—vegetative, sentient, and rational—we conceive the one principle of life, his soul, as virtually three principles; and so we distinguish mentally or virtually between three souls in man, although in reality there is only one. Or, once more, when we think of the Wisdom, the Will, and the Omnipotence of God, we know that although these concepts represent different aspects of the Deity, these aspects are not distinct realities in Him; but that because of His infinite perfection and infinite simplicity they are all objectively one and the same self-identical reality.

A virtual distinction is said to be imperfect (thus approaching nearer to the nature of a purely logical distinction) when each of the concepts whereby we apprehend the same reality only prescinds explicitly from what is expressed by the other, although one of them is found on analysis to include implicitly what is expressed by the other. Such is the distinction between the being and the life of any living thing; or the distinction between the spirituality and the immortality of the human soul; or the distinction between Infinite Wisdom and Infinite Power: the distinction between the divine attributes in general. A virtual distinction is said to be perfect (thus approaching nearer to the nature of a real distinction) when neither of the concepts includes either explicitly or implicitly what is expressed by the other. Such, for instance, is the distinction between the principle of intellectual life and the principle of animal or sentient life in man; for not only can these exist separately (the former without the latter, e.g. in pure spirits, the latter without the former, e.g. in brute beasts), but also it will be found that by no analysis does either concept in any way involve the other.[118]

Our only object in setting down the various examples just given is to illustrate the general scholastic teaching on the doctrine of distinction. In themselves they are not beyond dispute, for the general doctrine of distinction is not easy of application in detail; but they will be sufficient for our present purpose. Probably the greatest difficulty in applying the general doctrine will be found to lie in discriminating between virtual distinctions—especially perfect virtual distinctions—and real [pg 107] distinctions.[119] And this difficulty will be appreciated still more when we learn that a real distinction does not necessarily involve separability of the objects so distinguished. In other words there may be, in a composite existing individual being, constitutive factors or principles, or integral parts, each of which is a positive real entity, really distinct from the others, and yet incapable of existing separately or in isolation from the others. “Separability,” says Mercier,[120] “is one of the signs of a real distinction; but it is neither essential to, nor a necessary property of the latter. Two separable things are of course really distinct from each other; but two entities may be really distinct from each other without being separable or capable of existing apart from each other. Thus we believe that the intellect and the will in man are really distinct from each other, and both alike from the substance of the human soul; yet they cannot exist isolated from the soul.” Therefore, even though the objects which we apprehend as distinct, by means of distinct concepts, be understood to be such that they cannot actually exist in isolation from each other, but only as united in a composite individual being, still if it can be shown that each of them has its own proper reality independently of our thought, so that the distinction between them is not the result of our thought, or introduced by our thought into the individual thing or being which we are considering, then the distinction must be regarded as real. If, on the other hand, it can be shown that the different aspects which we apprehend in any datum by means of distinct concepts have not, apart from the consideration of the mind, apart from the analytic activity of our own thought, each its own proper reality, but are only distinct mental views of what is objectively one and the same reality, then the distinction must be regarded as logical, not real,—and this even although there may be in the richness and fulness of that one reality comparatively to the limited capacity of our minds, as well as in the very constitution and modes of thought of our minds themselves, a reason or basis for, and an explanation of, the multiplicity of concepts whereby we attain to an understanding of some one reality.

24. Solutions of the Question.—Postponing further [pg 108] consideration of the serious problems on the validity of knowledge and its relation to reality, to which those reflections inevitably give rise, let us now return to the main question: the nature of the distinction between the essence and the existence of any actually existing contingent being. We need not be surprised to find that the greatest minds have been unable to reach the same solution of this question. For it is but a phase of the more general metaphysical problem—at once both ontological and epistemological—of the nature of reality and the relation of the human mind thereto. Nor will any serious modern philosopher who is at all mindful of the wealth of current controversial literature on this very problem, or of the endless variety of conflicting opinions among contemporary thinkers in regard to it, be disposed to ridicule the medieval controversies on the doctrine of distinction as applied to essence and existence. No doubt there has been a good deal of mere verbal, and perhaps trifling, argumentation on the matter: it lends itself to the dialectical skill of the controversialist who “takes sides,” as well as to the serious thought of the open-minded investigator. It is not, however, through drawing different conclusions from the same premisses that conflicting solutions of the question have been reached, but rather through fundamentally different attitudes in regard to the premisses themselves which different philosophers profess to find in the common data of their experience. When we have once grasped what philosophers mean by a logical or a real distinction as applied to the relation between essence and existence we shall not get any very material assistance towards the choice of a solution by considering at length the arguments adduced on either side.[121]

Those who believe there is a real distinction[122] between the essence and the existence of all actually existing contingent beings mean by this that the real essence which comes into [pg 109] actual existence by creation, or by the action of created causes, is a reality distinct from the existence whereby it actually exists. The actually existing essence is the total term of the creative or productive act; but what we apprehend in it under the concept of essence is really distinct from what we apprehend in it under the concept of existence: the existence being a real principle which actualizes the essence, and this latter being itself another real principle which is in itself a positive, subjective potentiality of existence.[123] Neither, of course, can actually exist without the other: no actual existence except that of a real essence; no existing essence except by reason of the existence which makes it actual. But these two real principles of existing contingent being, inseparable as they are and correlative, are nevertheless distinct realities—distinct in the objective order and independently of our thought,—and form by their union a really composite product: the existing thing.

We might attempt to illustrate this by the analogy of a body and its shape or colour. The body itself is really distinct from its actual shape and colour: it may lose them, and yet remain the same body; and it may acquire other shapes and colours. At any time the body has actually some particular shape and colour; but that by which it is formally so shaped and coloured is something really different from the body itself. Furthermore, before the body actually possessed this particular shape and colour, these were in it potentially: that is to say, there were then in the body the real, passive, subjective potentialities of this particular shape and colour. So too that by which a real (contingent) essence actually exists (i.e. the existential act, existence) is really distinct from that which actually exists (i.e. the essence, the potentiality of that existential act). The analogy is, however, at best only a halting one. For while it is comparatively easy to understand how the passive, subjective potentiality of a shape or colour can be something real in the already actually existing body, it is not so easy to understand how the potentiality of existence, i.e. the real essence, can be anything that is itself real and really distinct from the existence.[124] The oak is really in the acorn, for the passive, subjective potentiality of the oak is in the actual acorn; but is this potentiality anything really distinct from the acorn? or should we not rather say that the actual acorn is potentially the oak, or is the potentiality of the oak? At all events even if it is really distinct from the actual acorn, it is in the actual acorn. But is it possible to conceive a real, subjective potentiality which does not reside in anything actual?[125] Now if the real essence is really distinct from its existence it must be conceived as a real, subjective potentiality of existence. Yet it cannot be conceived as a potentiality in anything actual: except indeed in the actually existing essence which is the composite result of its union with the existential act. It is not a [pg 110] real, subjective potentiality antecedently to the existential act, and on which the latter is, as it were, superimposed:[126] in itself, it is, in fact, nothing real except as actualized by the latter; but, as we have already observed, the process of actualization, whether by direct creation or by the action of created causes, must be conceived as having for its total term or effect a composite reality resulting from what we can at best imperfectly describe as the union of two correlative, con-created, or co-produced principles of being, a potential and an actual, really distinct from each other: that whereby the thing can exist, the potentiality of existence, the essence; and that whereby the thing does exist, the actuality of essence, the existence. The description is imperfect because these principles are not con-created or co-produced separately; but, rather, the creation or production of an existing essence, the efficiency by which it is “placed outside its causes,” has one single, though composite, term: the actually existing thing.

This view, thus advocating a real distinction between essence and existence, may obviously be regarded as an emphatic expression of the objective validity of intellectual knowledge. It might be regarded as an application of the more general view that the objective concepts between which the intellect distinguishes in its interpretation of reality should be regarded as representing distinct realities, except when the distinction is seen to arise not from the nature of the object but from the nature of the subject, from the limitations and imperfections of our own modes of thought. But in the case of any particular (disputed) distinction, the onus probandi should lie rather on the side of those who contend that such distinction is logical, and not real. On the other hand, many philosophers who are no less firmly convinced of the objective validity of intellectual knowledge observe that it is possible to push this principle too far, or rather to err by excess in its application. Instead of placing the burden of proof solely on the side of the logical distinction, they would place it rather more on the side of the real distinction—in conformity with the maxim of method, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. And they think that it is an error by excess to hold the distinction between essence and existence to be real. This brings us to the second alternative opinion: that the distinction in question is not real, but only virtual.[127]

According to this view, the essence and the existence of any existing contingent being are one and the same reality. There is, however, in this reality a basis for the two distinct objective concepts—of essence and of existence—whereby we apprehend it. For the contingent being does not exist necessarily: we see such beings coming into existence and ceasing to exist: we can therefore think of what they are without thinking of them as actually existent: in other words, we can think of them as possible, and of their existence as that by which they become actual. This is a sufficient reason for distinguishing mentally, in the existing being, the essence which exists and the existence by which it exists.[128] But when we think of the essence of an actually existing being as objectively possible, or as potential in its causes, we are no longer thinking of it as anything real in itself, but only of its ideal being as an object of thought in our minds, or of the ideal being it has in the Divine Mind, or of the potential being it has in created causes, or of the virtual being it has in the Divine Omnipotence, or of the ultimate basis of its possibility in the Divine Essence. But all these modes of “being” we know to be really distinct from the real, contingent essence itself which begins to exist actually in time, and may cease once more to exist in time when and if its own nature demands, and God wills, such cessation. But that the real, contingent essence itself which so exists, is something really distinct from the existence whereby it exists; that it forms with the latter a really composite being; that it is in itself a real, subjective potentiality, receptive of existence as another and actualizing reality, really distinct from it, so that the creation or production of any single actually existing contingent being would have for its term two really distinct principles of being, a potential and an actual, essence and existence, created or produced per modum unius, so to speak: for asserting all this it is contended by supporters of [pg 112] the virtual distinction that we have no sufficient justifying reason.[129] Hence they conclude that a real distinction must be denied: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Though each of these opinions has been defended with a great deal of ability, and an exhaustive array of arguments, a mere rehearsal of these latter would not give much material assistance towards a solution of the question. We therefore abstain from repeating them here. There are only a few points in connexion with them to which attention may be directed.

In the first place, some defenders of the real distinction urge that were the distinction not real, things would exist essentially, i.e. necessarily; and thus the most fundamental ground of distinction between God and creatures, between the Necessary Being and contingent beings, would be destroyed: creatures would be no longer in their very constitution composite, mixtures of potentiality and actuality, but would be purely actual, absolutely simple and, in a word, identical with the Infinite Being Himself. Supporters of the virtual distinction deny that those very serious consequences follow from their view. They point out that though the existence of the creature is really identical with its essence, the essence does not exist necessarily or a se; the whole existing essence is ab alio, is caused, contingent; and the fundamental distinction between such a being and the Self-Existing Being is in this view perfectly clear. Nor is the creature, they contend, purely actual and absolutely simple; it need not have existed, and it may cease to exist; it has, therefore, a potentiality of non-existence, which is inconceivable in the case of the Necessary and purely Actual Being; it is, therefore, mutable as regards existence; besides which the essences even of the most simple created beings, namely pure spirits are composite in the sense that they have faculties and operations really distinct from their substance.

Secondly, it is alleged by some defenders of the real distinction that this latter view of the nature of existing contingent reality is a cardinal doctrine in the whole philosophical system of St. Thomas, and of scholastics generally: so fundamental, in fact, that many important doctrines, unanimously held to be true by all scholastics, cannot be successfully vindicated apart from it.[130] To which it is replied that there are no important truths of scholastic philosophy which cannot be defended quite adequately apart altogether from the view one may hold on the present question; and that, this being the case, it is unwise to endeavour to base admittedly true doctrines, which [pg 113] can be better defended otherwise, upon an opinion which can at best claim only the amount of probability it can derive from the intrinsic merits of the arguments by which it is itself supported.[131]

Before passing from this whole question we must note the existence of a third school of thought, identified mainly with the followers of Duns Scotus.[132] These authors contend that the distinction between essence and existence is not a real distinction, nor yet, on the other hand, is it merely a virtual distinction, but one which they call formalis, actualis ex natura rei, that between a reality and its intrinsic modes. It is better known as the “Scotistic” distinction. We shall see the nature of it when dealing ex professo with the general doctrine of distinctions.

The multiplicity of these views, and the unavoidable difficulty experienced in grasping and setting forth their meaning with any tolerable degree of clearness, would suggest the reflection that in those controversies the medieval scholastics were perhaps endeavouring to think and to express what reality is, apart from thought and “independently of the consideration of the mind”—a task which, conceived in these terms, must appear fruitless; and one which, anyhow, involves in its very nature the closest scrutiny of the epistemological problem of the power of the human mind to get at least a true and valid, if not adequate and comprehensive, insight into the nature of reality.

[pg 114]

Chapter IV. Reality As One And Manifold.

25. The Transcendental Attributes or Properties of Being: Unity, Truth, and Goodness.—So far, we have analysed the notions of Real Being, of Becoming or Change, of Being as Possible and as Actual, of Essence and Existence. Before approaching a study of the Categories or Suprema Genera Entis, the highest and widest modes in which reality manifests itself, we have next to consider certain attributes or properties of being which reveal themselves as co-extensive with reality itself. Taking human experience in its widest sense, as embracing all modes that are cognitive or allied with consciousness, as including intellect, memory, imagination, sense perception, will and appetite, as speculative, ethical or moral, and esthetic or artistic,—we find that the reality which makes up this complex human experience of ours is universally and necessarily characterized by certain features which we call the transcendental attributes or properties of being, inasmuch as they transcend all specific and generic modes of being, pervade all its categories equally, and are inseparable from any datum of experience. We shall see that they are not really distinct from the reality which they characterize, but only logically distinct from it, being aspects under which we apprehend it, negations or other logical relations which we necessarily annex to it by the mental processes whereby we seek to render it actually intelligible to our minds.

The first in order of these ontological attributes is unity: the concept of that whereby reality considered in itself becomes a definite object of thought. The second in order is truth: which is the conception of reality considered in its relation to cognitive experience, to intellect. The third is goodness: the aspect under which reality is related as an object to appetitive experience, to will.

Now when we predicate of any reality under our consideration that it is “one,” or “good,” or “true”—in the ontological [pg 115] sense to be explained,—that which we predicate is not a mere ens rationis, but something real, something which is really identical with the subject, and which is distinguished from the latter in our judgment only by a logical distinction. The attribution of any of these properties to the subject does not, however, add anything real to the latter: it adds merely some logical aspect involved in, or supposed by, the attribution. At the same time, this logical aspect gives us real information by making explicit some real feature of being not explicitly revealed in the concept of being itself, although involved in, and following as a property from, the latter.

There do not seem to be any other transcendental properties of being besides the three enumerated. The terms “reality,” “thing,” “something,” are synonymous expressions of the concept of being itself, rather than of properties of being. “Existence” is not a transcendental attribute of being, for it is not co-extensive with reality or real being. And although reality must be “either possible or actual,” “either necessary or contingent,” “either infinite or finite,” etc., this necessity of verifying in itself one or other member of any such alternatives is not a property of being, but rather something essentially rooted in the very concept of reality itself. Some would regard as a distinct transcendental attribute of being the conception of the latter as an object of esthetic contemplation, as manifesting order and harmony, as beautiful. This conception of being will be found, however, to flow from the more fundamental aspects of reality considered as true and as good, rather than directly from the concept of being itself.

26. Transcendental Unity.—When we think of anything as one we think of it as undivided in itself. The unity or oneness of being is the undividedness of being: Unum est id quod est indivisum in se: Universaliter quaecunque non habent divisionem, inquantum non habent, sic unum dicuntur.[133] When, therefore, we conceive being as undivided into constitutive parts, and unmultiplied into repetitions of itself, we conceive it as a being, as one. For the concept of being, formally as one, it does not seem necessary that we conceive being as divided or distinct from all other being. This second negation, of identity with other being, rather follows the conception of being as one: being is distinct from other being because it is already itself one: it is [pg 116] a prior negation that formally constitutes its unity, namely, the negation of internal division or multiplication of itself: God was truly one from all eternity, before there was any other being, any created being, distinct from Him. The division or distinction of an object of thought from whatever is not itself is what constitutes the notion of otherness.[134]

It is manifest that being and unity are really identical, that when we think of being we think of what is really undivided in itself, that once we introduce dividedness into the object of our concept we are no longer thinking of being but of beings, i.e. of a multitude or plurality each member of which is a being and one. For being, as an object of thought, is either simple or composite. If simple, it is not only undivided but indivisible. If composite, we cannot think of it as a being, capable of existing, so long as we think its parts as separate or divided: only when we think of them as actually united and undivided have we the concept of a being: and eo ipso we have the concept of being as one, as a unity.[135]

Hence the scholastic formulæ: Ens et unum convertuntur, and Omne ens est unum. The truth embodied in these is so self-evident that the expression of it may seem superfluous; but they are not mere tautologies, and in the interests of clear and consistent thinking our attention may be profitably directed to them. The same remark applies to much in the present and subsequent chapters on the transcendental attributes of being.

27. Kinds of Unity.—(a) The unity we have been describing has been called transcendental, to distinguish it from predicamental unity—the unity which is proper to a special category of being, namely, quantity, and which, accordingly, is also called quantitative or mathematical unity. While the former is common to all being, with which it is really identical, and to which it adds nothing real, the latter belongs and is applicable, properly speaking, only to the mode of being which is corporeal, [pg 117] which exists only as affected by quantity, as occupying space, as capable of measurement; and therefore, also, this latter unity adds something real to the being which it affects, namely, the attribute of quantity, of which unity is the measure and the generating principle.[136] For quantity, as we shall see, is a mode of being really distinct from the corporeal substance which it affects. The quantity has its own transcendental unity; so has the substance which it quantifies; so has the composite whole, the quantified body, but this latter transcendental unity, like the composite being with which it is identical, is not a unum per se but only a unum per accidens (cf. b, infra).

We derive our notion of quantitative or mathematical unity, which is the principle of counting and the standard of measuring, from dividing mentally the continuous quantity or magnitude which is one of the immediate data of sense experience. Now the distinction between this unit and transcendental unity supposes not merely that quantity is really distinct from the corporeal substance, but also that the human mind is capable of conceiving as real certain modes of being other than the corporeal, modes to which quantitative concepts and processes, such as counting and measuring, are not properly applicable, as they are to corporeal reality, but only in an analogical or transferred sense ([2]). The notion of transcendental unity, therefore, bears the same relation to that of quantitative unity, as the notion of being in general bears to that of quantified or corporeal being.

(b) Transcendental unity may be either essential (or substantial, “unum per se,” “unum simpliciter”), or accidental (“unum per accidens,” “unum secundum quid”). The former characterizes a being which has nothing in it beyond what is essential to it as such, e.g. the unity of any substance: and this unity is twofold—(1) unity of simplicity and (2) unity of composition—according as the substance is essentially simple (such as the human soul or a pure spirit) or essentially composite (such as man, or any corporeal substance: since every such substance is composed essentially of a formative and an indeterminate principle).[137]

Accidental unity is the unity of a being whose constituent factors or contents are not really united in such a way as to form one essence, whether simple or composite. It is threefold: (1) collective unity, or unity of aggregation, as of a heap of stones or a crowd of men; (2) artificial unity, as of a house or a picture; and (3) natural or physical unity, as of any existing substance with its connatural accidents, e.g. a living organism with its size, shape, qualities, etc., or the human soul with its faculties.[138]

(c) Transcendental unity may be either individual (singular, numerical, concrete, real) or universal (specific, generic, abstract, logical). The former is that which characterizes being or reality considered as actually existing or as proximately capable of existing: the unity of an individual nature or essence: the unity whereby a being is not merely undivided in itself but incapable of repetition or multiplication of itself. It is only the individual as such that can actually exist: the abstract and universal is incapable of actually existing as such. We shall examine presently what it is that individuates reality, and what it is that renders it capable of existing actually in the form of “things” or of “persons”—the forms in which it actually presents itself in our experience.

Abstract or universal unity is the unity which characterizes a reality conceived as an abstract, universal object by the human intellect. The object of a specific or generic concept, “man” or “animal,” for example, is one in this sense, undivided in itself, but capable of indefinite multiplication or repetition in the only mode in which it can actually exist—the individual mode. The universal is unum aptum inesse pluribus.

Finally, we can conceive any nature or essence without considering it in either of its alternative states—either as individual or as universal. Thus conceived it is characterized by a unity which has been commonly designated as abstract, or (by Scotists) as formal unity.

28. Multitude and Number.—The one has for its correlative [pg 119] the manifold. Units, one of which is not the other, constitute multitude or plurality. If unity is the negation of actual division in being, multitude results from a second negation, that, namely, by which the undivided being or unit is marked off or divided from other units.[139] We have defined unity by the negation of actual intrinsic dividedness; and we have seen it to be compatible with extrinsic dividedness, or otherness. Thus the vague notion of dividedness is anterior to that of unity. Now multitude involves dividedness; but it also involves and presupposes the intrinsic undividedness or unity of each constituent of the manifold. In the real order of things the one is prior to all dividedness; but on account of the sensuous origin of our concepts we can define the former only by exclusion of the latter. The order in which we obtain these ideas seems, therefore, to be as follows: “first being, then dividedness, next unity which excludes dividedness, and finally multitude which consists of units”.[140]

The relation of the one to the manifold is that of undivided being to divided being. The same reality cannot be one and manifold under the same aspect; though obviously a being may be actually one and potentially manifold or vice versa, or one under a certain aspect and manifold under another aspect.

From the transcendental plurality or multitude which we have just described we can distinguish predicamental or quantitative plurality: a distinction which is to be understood in the same way as when applied to unity. Quantitative multitude is the actually separated or divided condition of quantified being. Number is a multitude measured or counted by unity: it is a counted, and, therefore, necessarily a definite and finite multitude. Now it is mathematical unity that is, properly, the principle of number and the standard or measure of all counting; and therefore it is only to realities which fall within the category of quantity—in other words, to material being—that the concept of number is properly applicable. No doubt we can and do [pg 120] conceive transcendental unity after the analogy of the quantitative unity which is the principle of counting and measuring; and no doubt we can use the transcendental concept of “actually undivided being” as a principle of enumeration, and so “count” or “enumerate” spiritual beings; but this counting is only analogical; and many philosophers, following Aristotle and St. Thomas, hold that the concepts of numerical multiplicity and numerical distinction are not properly applicable to immaterial beings, that these latter differ individually from one another not numerically, but each by its whole nature or essence, that is, formally.[141]

29. The Individual and the Universal.—We have distinguished transcendental unity into individual and universal ([27, c]). Reality as endowed with universal unity is reality as apprehended by abstract thought to be capable of indefinite repetition or multiplication of itself in actual existence. Reality as endowed with individual unity is reality apprehended as actually existing, or as proximately capable of actually existing, and as therefore incapable of any repetition or multiplication of itself, of any division of itself into other “selves” or communication of itself to other “selves”. While, therefore, the universal has its reality only in the individuals to which it communicates itself, and which thus embody it, the individual has its reality in itself and of its own right, so to speak: when it actually exists it is “sui juris,” and as such incommunicable, “incommunicabilis”. The actually existing individual is called in Latin a “suppositum”—a term which we shall render by the English “thing” or “individual thing”. It was called by Aristotle the οὐσία πρωτή, substantia prima, “first substance,” or “first essence,” to distinguish it from the substance or essence conceived by abstract thought as universal; the latter being designated as οὐσία δέυτερα, substantia secunda, “second substance” or “second essence”.

Now it is a fundamental assumption in Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy that whatever actually exists, or whatever [pg 121] is real in the sense that as such it is proximately capable of actual existence, is and must be individual: that the universal as such is not real, i.e. as such cannot actually exist. And the manifest reason for this assumption is that whatever actually exists must be, with entire definiteness and determinateness, its own self and nothing else: it cannot be capable of division or repetition of itself, of that which it really is, into “other” realities which would still be “that individual thing”. But reality considered as universal is capable of such repetition of itself indefinitely. Therefore reality cannot actually exist as universal, but only as individual.

This is merely plain common sense; nor does the idealistic monism which appears to attribute reality to the universal as such, and which interprets reality exclusively according to the forms in which it presents itself to abstract thought, really run counter to this consideration; for what it really holds is not that universals as such are real, but that they are phases of the all-one reality which is itself one individual being.

But many modern philosophers hold that individuality, no less than universality, is a form of thought. No doubt “individuality” in the abstract is, no less than universality, an object abstracted from the data of experience by the mind's analysis of the latter. But this is not what those philosophers mean. They mean that the individual as such is not a real datum of experience. From the Kantian view that individuality is a purely mental form with which the mind invests the datum, they draw the subjectivist conclusion that the world, thus interpreted as consisting of “individuals,” is a phenomenal or mental product for the objective validity of which there can be to man's speculative reason no sufficient guarantee.

To this theory we oppose that of Aristotle and the scholastics, not merely that the individual alone is actually existent, but that as actually existent and as individual it is actually given to us and apprehended by us in internal and external sense experience; and that although in the inorganic world, and to some extent in the lower forms of life, we may not be able to determine for certain what portions of this experience are distinct individuals, still in the world of living things generally, and especially of the animal kingdom, there can be no difficulty in determining this, for the simple reason that here reality is given to us in sense experience as consisting of distinct individuals.

At the same time it is true that we can understand these individual realities, interpret them, read the meaning of them, only by the intellectual function of judgment, i.e. by the analytic and synthetic activity whereby we abstract and universalize certain aspects of them, and use these aspects as predicates of the individuals. Now, seeing that intellectual thought, as distinct from sense experience, apprehends its objects only as abstract and potentially universal, only as static, self-identical, [pg 122] possible essences, and nevertheless predicates these of the concrete, individual, contingent, actually existing “things” of sense experience, identifying them with the latter in affirmative judgments; seeing moreover, that—since the intellectual knowledge we thus acquire about the data of sense experience is genuine and not chimerical—those “objects” of abstract thought must be likewise real, and must be really in those individual sense data (according to the theory of knowledge which finds its expression in Moderate Realism),—there arises immediately the problem, or rather the group of problems, regarding the relations between reality as revealed to intellect, i.e. as abstract and universal, and reality as revealed to sense, i.e. as concrete and individual. In other words, we have to inquire how we are to interpret intellectually the fact that reality, which as a possible essence is universal for abstract thought, is nevertheless, as actually existing, individualized for sense—and consequently for intellect reflecting on the data of sense.[142]

30. The “Metaphysical Grades of Being” in the Individual.—What, then is the relation between all that intellect can apprehend in the individual, viz. its lowest class essence or specific nature, and its whole nature as an individual, its essentia atoma or individual nature? We can best approach this problem by considering first these various abstract thought-objects which intellect can apprehend in the individual.

What are called the metaphysical grades of being, those positive moments of perfection or reality which the mind detects in the individual, as, for instance, substantiality, materiality, organic life, animality, rationality, individuality, in the individual man—whether we describe them as “phases” or “aspects” or “formalities” of being—are undoubtedly distinct objects for abstract thought. Why does it thus distinguish between them, and express them by distinct concepts, even when it finds them [pg 123] embodied in a single individual? Because, reflecting on the manner in which reality presents itself, through sense experience, as actually existing, it finds resemblances and differences between individually distinct data. It finds in some of them grades of reality which it does not find in others, individual, specific, and generic grades; and some—transcendental—grades common to all. Now between these various grades of being as found in one and the same individual it cannot be denied that there exists a logical distinction with a foundation or ground for it in the individual reality; because the latter, being more or less similar to other individual realities, causes the mind to apprehend it by a number of distinct concepts: the individuality whereby it differs really from all other individuals of the same species; the specific, differential and generic grades of being whereby it is conceptually identified with wider and wider classes of things; and the transcendental grades whereby it is conceptually identified with all others. The similarity of really distinct individuals, which is the conceptual identity of their qualities, is the ground on which we conceptually identify their essences. Now is there any reason for thinking that these grounds of similarity, as found in the individual, are really distinct from one another in the latter? They are certainly conceptually distinct expressions—each less inadequate than the wider ones—of what is really one individual essence. But we must take them to be all really identical in and with this individual essence, unless we are prepared to hold conceptual plurality as such to be real plurality; in which case we should also hold conceptual unity as such to be real unity. But this latter view is precisely the error of extreme realism, of reifying abstract concepts and holding the “universale a parte rei”: a theory which leads logically to monism.[143]

31. Individuality.—The distinction, therefore, between these grades of being in the individual, is a virtual distinction, i.e. a logical distinction with a ground for it in the reality. This is the sort of distinction which exists between the specific nature of the individual, i.e. what is contained in the definition of the lowest class to which it belongs, and its individuality, i.e. what constitutes its nature or essence as an individual. No doubt the concrete existing individual contains, besides its individual nature or essence, a variety of accidental characteristics which serve as [pg 124] marks or signs whereby its individuality is revealed to us. These are called “individualizing characteristics,” “notae individuantes,” the familiar scholastic list of them being “forma, figura, locus, tempus, stirps, patria, nomen,” with manifest reference to the individual “man”. But though these characteristics enable us to mark off the individual in space and time from other individuals of the same class, thus revealing individuality to us in the concrete, it cannot be held that they constitute the individuality of the nature or substance in each case. If the human substance, essence, or nature, as found in Socrates, were held to differ from the human substance, essence, or nature, as found in Plato, only by the fact that in each it is affected by a different set of accidents, i.e. of modes accidental to the substance as found in each, then it would follow that this substance is not merely conceptually identical in both, but that it is really identical in both; which is the error of extreme realism. As a matter of fact it is the converse that is true: the sets of accidents are distinct because they affect individual substances already really and individually distinct.

It is manifest that the accidents which are separable from the individual substance, e.g. name, shape, size, appearance, location, etc., cannot constitute its individuality. There are, however, other characteristics which are inseparable from the individual substance, or which are properties of the latter, e.g. the fact that an individual man was born of certain parents. Perhaps it is such characteristics that give its individuality to the individual substance?[144] To think so would be to misunderstand the question under discussion. We are not now inquiring into the extrinsic causes whereby actually existing reality is individuated, into the efficient principles of its individuation, but into the formal and intrinsic principle of the latter. There must obviously be something intrinsic to the individual reality itself whereby it is individuated. And it is about this intrinsic something we are inquiring. The individual man is this individual, human nature is thus individuated in him, by something that is essential to human [pg 125] nature as found in him. This something has been called—after the analogy of the differentia specifica which differentiates species within a genus—the differentia individua of the individual. It has also been called by some the differentia numerica, and by Scotists the haecceitas. However we are to conceive this something, it is certain at all events that, considered as it is really found in the individual, it cannot be anything really distinct from the specific nature of the latter. No doubt, the differentia specifica, considered in the abstract, it is not essential and intrinsic to the natura generica considered in the abstract: it is extrinsic and accidental to the abstract content of the latter notion; but this is because we are conceiving these grades of being in the abstract. The same is true of the differentia individua as compared with the natura specifica in the abstract. But we are now considering these grades of reality as they are actually in the concrete individual being: and as they are found here, we have seen that a real distinction between them is inadmissible.