Kitabı oku: «Fundamental Philosophy, Vol. 2 (of 2)», sayfa 35

CHAPTER XI.
FUNDAMENTAL EXPLANATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE OBSCURITY OF IDEAS IN WHAT RELATES TO CAUSALITY

116. It may be asked, of what nature is this connection of the terms of the series; how one communicates with another; what it is which is communicated; by virtue of what quality they are placed in relation. All these questions arise from a confusion of ideas which has been the occasion of interminable disputes. In order to avoid them we must remember the difference between intuitive and discursive knowledge, and between determinate and indeterminate, intuitive and not-intuitive ideas, as explained in its proper place.⁸²

117. I there said⁸³ that the pure intellect may exercise its functions by indeterminate ideas, or those representing general relations which are not applied to any real or possible object, until a determination furnished by experience is added to them.⁸⁴ The idea of cause is indeterminate;⁸⁵ and, consequently, taken in general, it cannot be presented to us without the relation of being and not-being, or of beings united among themselves by a certain necessity, but in an absolute indeterminate manner.⁸⁶ Therefore the idea of cause is not enough to determine the character of this activity and its means of communication; this idea by itself can tell us nothing of the particular; it can only teach us certain truths a priori; the application of these truths to beings rests on experience.

118. I said⁸⁷ that our intuition is confined to passive sensibility, active sensibility, intelligence, and will; whatever lies outside of this sphere we can know only by indeterminate conceptions, and, consequently, it is impossible for us to expose to the intuition of another that which we feel to be wanting to our own. We may develop this doctrine farther by applying it to the philosophical questions on causality.

119. There have been great disputes as to whether bodies exercise a true action on each other; and those who hold the negative are always asking, how one body can cause any thing in another? what that is which is transmitted, and what is the character of its active quality? Various replies have been made; but I greatly doubt if it is possible to make any which is satisfactory, without considering the doctrine which I have just explained, – what answer, then, can be made? It is this: we know nothing intuitively of bodies except passive sensibility, which, in the last result, is only extension with its various modifications.⁸⁸ Now these modifications are reduced to figure and motion; whatever would make us depart from these two intuitions, requiring an explanation with characteristic determinations, would ask for that which is beyond the power of man. The limits of our intuition on this point are confined to extension and motion, and their relations to our sensibility; we must, therefore, be contented with observing the phenomena of bodies, and subjecting them to calculation within the circle of this intuition: all beyond this is impossible. We know that the body A moves with a certain velocity, which we measure by the relation of space to time; when it arrives at the place where it meets B, B moves in a corresponding direction and with a corresponding velocity. Here there is a succession of phenomena in time and space; the phenomena are subject to constant laws, which are known by experience. Our intuitive cognitions go no farther; when we attempt to go beyond this we find the general relations of being and not-being, of being before and being after, of condition and conditioned, which present nothing determinate by which we can explain the true character of secondary causality.

120. Philosophy, when treating of bodies, is limited to what is strictly called physics; when it attempts to rise to the region of metaphysics bodies disappear, in so far as they are phenomena subject to sensible observation, and there remains only the general and indeterminate ideas of them.

121. As regards the sensitive faculty, we are in some sort passive, inasmuch as we receive the impressions which we call sensations. Whatever activity we possess in sensation does not depend on our free will, supposing that we are subject to the conditions of sensibility. If you put your hand in the fire it is impossible for you not to experience the sensation of heat. In what regards the causality which we have as to the reproduction of past sensations or the production of new sensible sensations, it is vain to ask us the manner in which we exercise this activity: its exercise is a part of consciousness; all we know about it is that it exists in such or such a manner in our consciousness.

122. The same may be said of the elaboration of ideas. None of the philosophers can explain the manner of this immanent production; ideological investigations go no farther than the characterizing and classifying these phenomena and showing the order of their succession; they can tell us nothing concerning the manner in which they are produced.

123. The exercise of the will presents to our intuition, or if you please, to our consciousness, another series of phenomena, of the manner of the production of which we know nothing. Consciousness testifies that the free principle which exercises this activity is within us: this is all that we know about it. These phenomena are found at times connected with motions of our bodies, which a constant experience presents as depending on our will, but how things so different are connected, we know not: philosophy will never know.

CHAPTER XII.
CAUSALITY OF PURE FORCE OF THE WILL

124. In what does creation consist? How can God produce things from nothing? Such a thing is incomprehensible. This is the language of many who do not reflect that the same incomprehensibility is found in the exercise of secondary causality, both in the corporeal and in the incorporeal world. If we knew God in the intuitive manner in which, according to the Catholic dogma, the blessed see him in the mansion of glory, we might know intuitively the manner of the creation. As it is, we say that in so far as we can form any idea of the action of the Creator, he produces all things from nothing by the force of his will; which besides according with the teachings of religion, is in harmony with what we experience in ourselves. God wills, and the universe springs up out of nothing: how can this be understood? To him who asks this, I say: man wills, and his arm rises; he wills, and his whole body is in motion. How can this be understood? Here is a small, weak, and incomplete, but true image of the Creator: an intelligent being which wills, and a fact which appears. Where is the connection? If you cannot explain it to us in so far as concerns finite beings, how can you ask us to explain it with respect to the infinite being? The incomprehensibility of the conception of the motion of the body with the force of the will does not authorize us to deny the connection; therefore the incomprehensibility of the connection of a being which appears for the first time with the force of the infinite will cannot authorize us to deny the truth of the creation: on the contrary, the finding a similar thing in ourselves greatly strengthens the ontological arguments which demonstrate its necessity. In the dogmas of the Christian religion, besides what they reveal that is supernatural, we find at every step philosophical truths as profound as they are important.

125. The causality which relates to purely possible effects can only be understood by placing it in an intelligence. The cause which does not produce an effect, but which may produce it, involves a relation of the existent to the non-existent; the cause exists, the effect does not exist; the cause does not produce it, but may produce it; what is the relation of that which exists to that which does not exist? is not a relation without a term to which it relates, a contradiction? It is certainly, if abstracted from the intelligence: the intelligence alone can relate to that which does not exist; for it can think the non-existent. A body can have no relation to a body which does not exist; but an intelligence may have a relation to that which does not exist, even knowing that it does not exist; we may ourselves wander at pleasure through the regions of pure possibility.

126. The will also participates of this character of the intellect. Desire relates to an enjoyment which is not, but which may be; we will and will not, we love and hate things that are often purely ideal, and whose identity we know perfectly well, still this does not prevent our willing them. Thus we desire things to happen which are not, and we may even desire things which we know to be impossible. We may wish to recover that which we know is lost forever; we may wish for the presence of a friend whom we know to be at so great a distance as to render his coming impossible; we may wish that time would stop or hurry on in conformity to our wants or our caprices.

127. Thus we find both the intellect and the will in relation to that which does not exist; – a relation which is not even conceivable in a being destitute of intellect. This leads to an important result. The absolute beginning of any thing is not possible unless we conceive causality as having its root in the intellect. That which begins passes from not-being to being, and how is it possible that a being has produced in another a transition from not-being to being, if the relation to the other before it existed was intrinsically impossible? An intelligent being may think another although the other does not exist; but for an unintelligent being if the other does not exist in reality it does not exist at all; consequently no relation to it is possible, any such relation that may be imagined is contradictory, and therefore it is absurd to suppose that which is not to begin to be.

128. This reasoning proves that in the origin of things there is an intelligent being, the cause of every thing, and that without this intelligence nothing could have begun. If something has begun, something must have existed from all eternity; and that which began was known by that which existed. Not admitting intelligence, beginning is absurd. Imagine in the origin of things a being without intelligence, its relations can only be to that which exists; it can have no relation to the non-existent; how then is it possible for the non-existent to begin to exist, through the action of the existent? In order that the non-existent may begin to be, some reason is necessary; for otherwise the beginning of one thing or of another, and even its beginning or not-beginning would be indifferent. Unless we suppose a being which knows that which does not exist, and may establish, so to speak, a communication with nothing, the being which does not exist can never exist.

CHAPTER XIII.
ACTIVITY

129. To understand more clearly the idea of causality, it will be useful to reflect on the ideas of activity and action, as also on those of inertness, or inactivity, and inaction.

130. An absolutely inactive being is a being without intelligence, without will, without sensibility, without any kind of consciousness, containing in itself nothing which can change its own state or that of any thing else.

Thus absolute inactivity or inertness requires the following conditions: I. The absolute denial of all principle, of intelligence, of will, of sensibility, and in general of every thing which is accompanied by consciousness. II. The absolute denial of all principle of change in itself. III. The absolute denial of all principle of change in others. The union of these three conditions forms the idea of absolute inactivity or inertness: the state of such a being is that of absolute inaction.

131. A being of this nature, regarded in general, presents only the idea of an existing thing: we may also consider it as a substance, supposing it not to inhere as a modification in another, or rather, supposing it as a substratum capable of receiving modifications by the action of other beings upon it.

The only means by which we can characterize to a certain extent this general idea, so that it may be presented to our intuition, is to add to it the idea of extension, by which we make in some manner the idea of inert matter.

132. After the ideas of inertness and inaction are explained, their opposites, the ideas of activity and action, are clearly understood.

When we conceive a being which has the reason of its changes within itself, we conceive an active being.

When we conceive a being which has within itself the reason of the changes of other beings, we conceive an active being.

When we conceive a being which knows, wills, perceives, or has consciousness in any way, we conceive an active being.

Hence activity may represent three things to us: the origin of its own changes; the origin of the changes of others; and consciousness.

133. The first kind of activity can belong only to changeable beings; the second also to immutable beings, which are causes; the third is an activity which belongs to mutable or immutable beings, abstracting absolutely the idea of causality.

134. The general relation of principle of its own or another's changes, is an indeterminate idea; consequently the only activity of which we can have an intuitive idea is that of intelligence, of will, and in general of whatever relates to the phenomena which require the perception called consciousness.

135. We must consider consciousness as an activity, and include in this order the idea of intelligence and will abstracted from all relation to their own or another's changes, unless we mean to say that God was from all eternity an inactive being, because he had no other action than the immanent acts of knowing and willing.

136. Therefore not all activity is transient, but there is a true immanent activity, of which we have an intuitive knowledge in the phenomena of our consciousness.

137. The activity which we can conceive in bodies is reduced to a principle of their own changes or those of some other being; it is therefore something of which we can have no intuitive knowledge. In fact, we are in relation with bodies only by means of the senses, which present but two orders of facts with respect to corporeal nature; subjective facts, or the impressions which we experience and call sensations, and which we believe to emanate from the action of bodies upon our organs; and objective facts, that is, extension motion, and the different modifications which the senses discover in extended things which move. Neither the first class of facts nor the second give us an intuitive idea of the activity of corporeal beings.

Subjective facts or sensations are immanent, that is, are in us, not in the things; and inasmuch as subjective tell us nothing of what is outside of us, but only what is within us. Even supposing sensations to be a true effect of the activity of bodies, this activity is not presented in the effect. When our hand is warmed by the fire we have the intuitive perception of the sensation of heat, inasmuch as it is in us; if we suppose that this sensation is really an effect of the activity of the fire, we know the relation of our sensation to this activity considered in general, and indeterminately as the origin of our sensation; but we do not know the activity intuitively in itself, because as such it is not represented in our sensation.

Neither do objective facts, that is, extension, motion, and whatever we conceive which is not in our sensation, but in the object itself, give us any intuitive idea of the activity of corporeal things. The modifications of extension, or figures, motion with all its accidents, and in general all that presents the corporeal world to our senses, are the changes themselves and their relations, but not the principle of these relations or of these changes. The body A, which is in motion, strikes upon the body B at rest; B after the impact begins to move: without considering whether the impact of A is the cause of the motion of B, that which we are certain of is, that we have no intuition of the activity producing the motion. What do the senses tell us of the body A? They only tell us that it has moved with a certain velocity towards the point M where the body B was situated. What do they tell us of the body B? Only that it began to move the instant the body A reached the point M: so far we have only the relations of space and time between the two extended objects A and B. Where is the intuition of the activity of A, and of its action on B? We see absolutely nothing of it. By reasoning, by analogy, by considerations of order, of agreement, and such like, we may prove with more or less evidence that in the body A there is an activity which causes the motion of the body B; but this gives us only an indeterminate idea, not an intuition of activity.

138. These considerations are conclusive as applied to all the phenomena of corporeal nature. Take any one you please, select that one which leads us most strongly to imagine a true activity; analyze it well, and you will find our intuition limited to relations of extension in space and in time.

That all bodies are heavy is a fact of experience; do we know intuitively the principle from which the phenomena of weight proceed? By no means. Let us examine it in the subjective order and in the objective. What does weight as perceived by us present to us? Only that affection which we call heaviness, that is, the pressure on the members of the body. What does it present objectively? Only the direction of bodies towards a centre with a certain velocity depending on circumstances. We find in all this only a purely internal fact, which is the unpleasant sensation of weight or heaviness, or the pure relations of extended objects in space and time.

139. The fire burns objects and reduces them to ashes; nothing could be better suited to give us the idea of activity. Still we cannot say that we know it intuitively. In the subjective order we have the painful sensation of burning, which thus far is a purely internal fact; in the objective order we have the disorganization of the bodies burnt, which presents to the senses only a change in the size, figure, color, and other qualities relative to our senses – all this may be the effect of the activity, but it is not the activity itself.

140. The light reflected from an object strikes our eyes, painting on the retina the object which reflects it. Have we in this case an intuition of the activity of light. Not at all. In the subjective order we find the sensation called seeing; in the objective order, we find the size, figure, and other qualities of the object in space. If we consider the light itself, we find a fluid whose rays have this or that direction in subjection to determinate laws, but we have no intuitive knowledge of its activity; and in order to persuade ourselves that the activity exists, we reason from principles which are not within the sphere of our intuition.

141. The four intuitions of passive sensibility, active sensibility, intelligence, and will, may be reduced to two:⁸⁹ extension and consciousness; including in extension all its modifications, and in consciousness all the internal phenomena of a sensitive or intellectual being; in so far as they have the common ground of consciousness. We therefore know intuitively two modes of being: consciousness and extension; consciousness is within us, it is a subjective fact; extension is external, its existence is revealed by sensations, particularly those of sight and touch.

142. The classification of these two intuitions is important beyond measure for the distinction of the active from the inert. In consciousness we find a type of true activity; in extension, as such, we have a type of true inertness. In thinking of consciousness, we think of something active without adding any other idea; when we think of extension, it presents to us the image of a thing susceptible of various modifications, the principle of none of which is contained in extension; in order to think of a corporeal activity we have to go out of the pure idea of extension, and consider a principle of change in general, which is not the object of the intuition of the extended.

143. Thus the only activity which we know intuitively is that of consciousness; for we have only indeterminate ideas of corporeal activity. The words action, reaction, force, resistance, impulse, express only indeterminate relations, and represent something fixed and determinate, only in their effects. Mechanists express forces by lines or numbers, that is, by results subject to calculation. Even Newton, in establishing his system of universal attraction, declares his ignorance of the immediate cause of the phenomenon, and confines himself to assigning the laws to which the motions of bodies are subjected.

144. Activity in changeable beings represents a principle of their own and others' changes, a sort of superabundance of being which constantly develops itself, and, in proportion as it is developed, perfects itself. We find an example of this development in our own mind. The child at its birth receives in a confused manner the impressions of all that surrounds it. By the repetition of these impressions its activity is developed; that which was obscure becomes clear, the confusion is put into order, that which was feeble becomes strong, thought arises, comparison begins, reflection is unfolded, and the being which was torpid and almost inert becomes perhaps a genius which astonishes the world. Materials have come to it from without, but of what use would they have been without that living fire of activity which transformed them and deduced from them new and valuable products? The same phenomena of nature are presented to the eyes of brute animals as to Kepler or Newton; but what for the first is only a sensible impression is for the latter a starting-point of sublime and wonderful theories.

145. The active being possesses virtually the perfections which it is to acquire; it may be compared to the acorn which contains the mighty oak, whose development depends on circumstances of soil and climate. On the other hand, the inactive being can give itself nothing; it has a state, and it preserves it till some other changes it; and it remains in this new state until another action from without takes it away and communicates another.

146. Activity is a principle of its own or another's changes; this activity may operate in two ways: with intelligence and without it. When the being is intelligent its inclination to that which is known is called will. The will is inclined to the object necessarily or not necessarily: in the first case, it is a necessary spontaneity; in the second, it is a free spontaneity. Liberty, then, does not consist solely in the absence of coaction; it requires the absence of all, even spontaneous, necessity; the will must be able to will or not will the object; if this condition is wanting there is no freewill.

147. It is worthy of remark that our intuition of the external relates only to the inactive, to extension; and that internal intuition relates principally to activity, to consciousness. By the first we know a substratum of changes, since all change seems to take place in extension; by the second we know no subject intuitively, but only the changes themselves. We prove the unity of their subject by reasoning, but we do not see it intuitively.⁹⁰ Extension, as such, is presented to us as simply passive: consciousness, as such, is always active; for, even in those cases in which it is most passive, as in sensations, in so far as there is consciousness, it implies activity; for by it the subject gives itself an account, explicitly or implicitly, of the affection experienced.