Kitabı oku: «Fundamental Philosophy, Vol. 2 (of 2)», sayfa 7

CHAPTER XX.
INTERMEDIATE REPRESENTATIONS BETWEEN SENSIBLE INTUITION AND THE INTELLECTUAL ACT

125. The question now occurs, whether the understanding, in order to perceive the geometrical relations offered in sensible intuition, does or does not need some intermediate representations which bring it into contact with the sensible order?¹⁰ Such a necessity would, at first sight, seem to exist, since, as the understanding is a non-sensible faculty, sensible elements cannot be its immediate object. But on maturer examination, it seems more probable that there is no necessity of any thing intermediate, except some sign to connect the sensible elements, and to show the point where they must unite, and the conditions to which they are subject. As this sign may, however, be a word, or something else, susceptible of a sensible representation, its mediation will not at all solve the difficulty; since the question will always recur: How is the understanding placed in communication with the sensible sign?

This difficulty arises from the faculty of the soul being considered, not only as distinct, but also, as separate, and as exercising each one of its faculties in its own peculiar and exclusive sphere, entirely isolated from that of all others. This mode of considering the faculties of the soul, though favorable to the classification of their operations, does not accord with the teachings of experience.

It cannot be denied that we observe within ourselves, affections and operations, very unlike each other, and arising from distinct objects, and producing very different results. This has led to a distinction of faculties, and in some degree, to a separation of their functions, so as to prevent them from mixing together and being confounded. But there can be no doubt that all the affections and operations of the soul are, as consciousness reveals, bound to a common centre. Whatever becomes of the distinction of the faculties among themselves, it is very certain, as consciousness tells us, that it is one and the same being that thinks, feels, desires, acts, or suffers: it is certain that this same consciousness reveals to us the intimate communication of all the operations of the soul. We instantaneously reflect upon the impression received; we instantaneously experience an agreeable or disagreeable sensation in consequence of a reflection which occurs to us: we reflect upon the will; we seek or repudiate the object of our thought; there is, so to speak, within us a boiling spring of phenomena of different kinds, all interlinked, modified, produced, reproduced, and mutually influenced by each other in their incessant communication. We are conscious of all these; we encounter them all in one common field, which is the subject that experiences them. What necessity, then, is there to imagine intermediate beings in order to bring the faculties of the soul into communication with each other? Why may it not with its activity, called understanding, occupy itself immediately with sensible representations and affections and with all that is in its consciousness? Supposing this consciousness in its indivisible unity to comprise all the variety of internal phenomena, it does not therefore follow that the intellectual activity of the soul cannot be referred to whatever it contains of active or receptive, without its being necessary to imagine species to serve as courtiers between the faculties, to announce to one what has taken place in the other.

126. The acting intellect of the Aristotelians, admissible in sound philosophy so far as it denotes an activity of the mind applied to sensible representations, does not seem alike admissible, if it be supposed to be the producer of new representations distinct from the intellectual act itself. The understanding is all activity; the receptivity of the soul has nothing to do with it, but to proportion its materials; and the conceptions elaborated in presence of these materials, seem to be nothing else than the exercise of this same activity, subject on the one hand to the conditions required by the thing understood, and subordinated on the other hand to the general conditions of every intelligence.

127. I do not mean to say that the intellectual act does not refer to any object. I replace the idea by other acts of the soul, or by affections or representations of some kind or other, whether active or passive. This being so, if I am asked, for example, what is the immediate object of the intellectual act perceiving of determinate sensible intuition, I reply that it is the intuition itself. If the difficulty of explaining the union of such different things be urged, I answer: first, that this union exists in the unity of consciousness, as the internal sense attests: second, that the same difficulty militates against those who pretend that the understanding elaborates an intelligible species, which it takes from the sensible intuition; and how, I may ask, does the understanding place itself in contact with this intuition when it would elaborate its intelligible species. If this immediate contact be impossible in the one case, it will be equally so in the other; and if they concede it to be possible in their own case, they cannot deny it to be possible in ours also.

When the understanding refers to no determinate intuition, but only to sensible intuitions in general, its immediate object is their possibility also in general, subject to the conditions of the object considered in general, and to those of every intelligence; among which, the principle of contradiction holds a primary place.

CHAPTER XXI.
DETERMINATE AND INDETERMINATE IDEAS

128. We must, under pain of falling into sensism, by limiting the understanding to the perception and combination of objects presented by sensibility, admit other than intellectual acts referable to sensible objects in general. And what, in this case, is the object of the intellectual act, is a question as difficult as it is interesting.

129. The pure understanding can exercise its functions either upon determinate or indeterminate ideas; that is, upon ideas which contain something determinate, something realizable in a being, that is or may be offered to our perception, or upon ideas which represent general relations, without application to any object. Care should be taken not to confound general with indeterminate, or particular with determinate ideas. Every intermediate idea is a general idea, but not vice versa. The idea of being is general and indeterminate; that of intelligence is general but determinate. The particular idea refers to an individual; the determinate to a property, and it does not cease to be determinate although we abstract all relation in it to an existing individual. This distinction opens the way to considerations of the highest importance.

130. When the understanding proceeds by indeterminate conceptions, its principal object seems to be being in its greatest universality. This is the radical and fundamental idea, round which all other ideas are grouped. From the idea of being springs the principle of contradiction, with its infinite applications to every class of objects; from it also flow the ideas of substance and accidents, of cause and effect, of the necessary and the contingent, and every thing contained in the science of ontology, called for this very reason ontology, or the science of being.

131. There is nothing in those conceptions which express the general relations of all beings, to characterize them until they quit their purely metaphysical sphere and descend into the field of reality.

In order to be able to conceive of a real being, we require it to be presented to us with some property. Being and not-being, substance and accidents, cause and effect, are, when combined with something positive, highly fruitful ideas; but taken in general, with nothing determinate assigned to them, they do not offer us any existing, or even possible object.

132. The idea of being presents us that of a thing in the abstract; but if we would conceive of this as existing or as possible, we must imagine this thing to be something with characteristic properties. Whenever we hear an existing thing spoken of, we instinctively ask what it is, and what is its nature. God is essentially being, is infinite being; but nothing would be represented to our mind were we to conceive of him only as of being, and not also as intelligent, active, free being endowed with all the other perfections of his infinite essence.

133. The idea of substance offers us that of a permanent being, which does not, like a modification, inhere in another. This idea, taken in its generality without other determination than that added to the idea of being, by that of subsistence, offers us nothing real or realizable. Permanence in general, subsistence by itself, non-inherence in a subject, do not suffice to enable a substance to exist or to be possible; some characteristic mark, some attribute is also needed, as corporeal, intelligent, free, or any other you please, to determine the general idea of substance.

134. The same may be said of the idea of cause, or productive activity. An active thing, in general, offers us nothing either real or possible. In order to conceive an existing activity, we must refer to a determinate activity; the idea of acting, or of being able to act, in general, does not suffice; we must represent it to ourselves, as exercising itself in one way or another, referring to determinate objects, producing, not beings in general, but beings having their own characteristic attributes. True, we do not need to know what these attributes are; but we do need to know that they exist with their determinateness.

The most universal cause conceivable is God, the first and infinite cause; and although we do not conceive of him as of cause in the abstract, regarding the simple idea of productive activity, but we attach to the general idea of cause the ideas of free will and intelligence. When we say that God is omnipotent, we assign an infinite sphere to his power; we do not know the characteristic attributes of all the beings which can be created by this infinite activity; but we are certain that every existing or possible being must have a determinate nature; and we do not conceive it to be possible for a being to be produced, which, without any determination, would be nothing but being.

135. We do not meet this determination, indispensable as it is to us, if we would conceive of the existence or possibility of a being, in indeterminate ideas, but must take it from experience; wherefore, if our understanding were limited to the combination of those relations offered in indeterminate conceptions, it would be condemned to a perfectly sterile science. We have already seen (Chap. XIV.) that the absolute non-communication of the real with the ideal order is impossible if the intelligible order be not deprived of all consciousness of itself. It is not enough to know, that such a communication exists, but we must ascertain in what points it is verified, and how far it extends.

136. Before passing to this investigation, we would observe, that the doctrine explained in this chapter is not to be confounded with that of the fourteenth chapter. There, it was shown that general ideas of themselves alone, have only a purely hypothetical value, and lead to nothing because they are not combined with any thing positive, furnished by experience; here, we have proved that indeterminate ideas of being, substance, and cause, do not of themselves alone suffice to enable us to conceive of any thing either existing or possible, if they be not accompanied by some determinate idea, which gives a character to the general ideas. There, a hypothetical value, with respect to their existence, was allotted to general ideas: here, we affirm it to be necessary for these ideas to be accompanied by some property that shall render them capable of constituting an essence, at least in the possible order. These are very different things, and must not be confounded; hence the importance of not forgetting the distinction between general and indeterminate, and between particular and determinate ideas.

CHAPTER XXII.
LIMITS OF OUR INTUITION

137. Could we assign limits to the field of experience, and determine exactly how much they inclose, we could also determine the characteristics by which a being may be presented to us as existing or as possible.

138. Passive sensibility, active sensibility, understanding, and will, are, if we be not mistaken, all that our understanding contains; and this is why we cannot conceive of any attribute characteristic of being, except these four. Let us examine these, each in its turn, and with the care required by the importance of the results which will follow this demarcation.

139. By passive sensibility we understand the form under which bodies are presented. As we have already explained it in several places, this form is reducible to figured or bounded extension.

It cannot be denied that this attribute contains a true determination, as there is nothing more determinate than objects presented to our senses, with extension, and figure, and other properties annexed to these fundamental attributes. Motion and impenetrability are determinations which accompany extension, or rather they are relations of extension. To us, motion is the change of the situations of a body in space, or the alteration in the positions of the extension of a body, with respect to the extension of space. Impenetrability is the reciprocal exclusion of two extensions. The idea of solid and liquid, of hard and soft, and other similar ideas, express relations of the extension of a body to their admission, with greater or less resistance, of the extension of another in one and the same place.

Questions upon the nature of extension have no place here. Extension is, so far as we are concerned, a determinate object, presented to us in the clearest intuition. The attribute of passive sensibility has ever been regarded as one of the most characteristic determinations; and this is why it has been made to enter as a fundamental classification in the scale of beings. The distinctions of corporeal and incorporeal, of material and immaterial, of sensible and insensible, are of as frequent use in ordinary language as in that of the schools; and it is obvious that the words, corporeal, material, and sensible, although not perfectly synonymous under some aspects, are usually taken to be such, in so far as they express a kind of beings, whose characteristic properties are those forms under which they are offered to our senses.

140. Active sensibility is the faculty of feeling; and is to us an object of immediate experience, since we have it within us. From the clear presence of sensitive acts, we may easily conceive what feeling is in other subjects than ourselves. We have no consciousness of what passes in another subject when it sees; but we know what it is to see; it is in others the same as in ourselves. In our own consciousness that of others is portrayed. We well know what is spoken of, when we hear a sensitive being mentioned; and this too by a perfectly determinate, not by a vague idea. If the question be raised, whether other senses are possible, the idea of a being endowed with them, loses a certain amount of its determinateness: our understanding has no intuition of what it would be; it discourses upon the reality or possibility by means of general conceptions.

141. Understanding, or the force of conceiving and combining, independently of the sensible order, is another of the data furnished by our own experience. As this is a fact of consciousness, we know it by intuition, not by abstract ideas; it is the exercise of an activity which we feel within ourselves; it is the me which we ourselves are. This activity, by reason of its very union, its identity with the subject perceiving it, is present to us in so intimate a manner that we find no difficulty in perceiving it.

The idea of understanding is intuitive to us, not indeterminate, since it presents an object which is immediately given to our perception in our soul itself. When we speak of understanding, we fix our views upon what passes within ourselves, and we see greater or less perfection in the scale of intelligent beings portrayed in the gradation of the cognitions which we experience within ourselves; and when we would conceive of a far higher understanding, we enlarge and perfect the type we have discovered within ourselves; just as we represent to ourselves greater, more perfect, and more beautiful sensible objects, than those we see, without quitting the sphere of sensibility, but making use of the elements it furnishes to us, and enlarging and embellishing them so as to attain to that ideal type already conceived of in our imagination.

142. The will, although an inseparable companion of the understanding, and even necessary to its existence, is nevertheless a very different faculty from it; for the will offers to our intuition a series of phenomena very unlike the phenomena of the understanding. To understand is not to will; a thing may be known, and yet not willed. One and the same act of the understanding may unite at various times, or in diverse subjects, very different if not contradictory acts of the will; to will and to not will; or inclination and aversion.

The cognition of that series of phenomena called acts of the will, is not a general but a particular, not an abstract but an intuitive, cognition. What necessity is there of abstraction or discursion to ascertain what we will or do not will, what we love or what we abhor? This cognition is intuitive, so far as the acts of our own will are concerned; and although we have no immediate intuition of what the will of others is, we know perfectly well what passes in them, from seeing it in some degree manifested by what we ourselves experience. When we hear the acts of another's will spoken of, have we, by chance, any difficulty in conceiving the object in question? Are we obliged to proceed discursively by abstract ideas? Certainly not! The same occurs in others as in ourselves. When they will, or do not will, they experience just what we ourselves experience when we will or do not will. The consciousness of our will is the image of all others existing or possible. We conceive that will to be more or less perfect, which unites in a higher or lower degree the actual or possible perfections of our own: and if we would conceive a will of infinite perfection, we must elevate to an infinite degree the actual or possible perfection which we discover in the finite will.

143. When the Sacred Text tells us that man is created to the image and likeness of God, it teaches us a truth highly luminous, whether considered in a purely philosophical or in a supernatural aspect. We discover in our soul, in this image of infinite intelligence, not only a multitude of general ideas which carry us beyond the limits of sensibility, but also an admirable representation wherein we contemplate, as in a mirror, every thing that passes in that infinite sea which cannot be known by immediate intuition so long as we remain in this life. This representation is imperfect, is enigmatical; but it is a true representation: in its minutest particles, infinitely increased, we may contemplate the infinite; its feeblest brilliance reflects back to us the splendor of infinity. The slight spark struck from the flint may lead the imagination to that ocean of fire, discovered by astronomers in the orb of day.

CHAPTER XXIII.
OF THE NECESSITY INVOLVED IN IDEAS

144. In all ideas, even in those that relate to contingent facts, there is something of the necessary, something from which science may spring, but something which cannot emanate from experience, however multiplied we suppose it. Every induction resulting from experience is confined to a limited number of facts, – a number, which, even if augmented by all the experience of all men of all ages, would still remain infinitely below universality, which extends to all that is possible.

Moreover, however little we reflect upon the certainty of the truths intimately connected with experience, such as are arithmetical and geometrical truths, we cannot fail to perceive that the confidence with which we build upon them is not founded upon induction, but that we assent to them independently of any particular fact, and consider their truth as absolutely necessary, although we cannot verify it by the touchstone of experience.

145. The verification of ideas by facts is in many cases impossible, because the weakness of our perception and of our senses, and the coarseness of the instruments we use, fail to render us certain that the facts correspond exactly to the ideas. It is sometimes absolutely impossible to establish this proof, since geometrical truth supposes conditions such as cannot be realized in practice.

146. Let us apply these observations to the simplest truths of geometry. Certainly no one will doubt the solidity of the proof called superposition: that is to say, if one of two lines, or surfaces, be placed upon the other, and they exactly correspond, they will be equal. This truth cannot depend upon experience: first, because experience is limited to a certain number of cases, whereas the proposition is general. To say that one serves for all is to say that there is a general principal, independent of experience, since, without recognizing an intrinsic necessity in this truth, the universal could in no other way be deduced from the particular. Secondly, because even where experience avails, it is impossible for us to make it exact, since superposition made in the most delicate manner imaginable, can never attain to geometrical exactness, which repudiates the minutest difference in any point.

It is an elementary theorem, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. This truth does not rest upon experience: first, because the universal cannot be deduced from the particular; secondly, because, however delicate be the instruments for measuring angles, they cannot measure them with geometrical exactness; thirdly, because geometry supposes conditions which we cannot realize in practice; lines have no thickness, and the vertices of angles are indivisible points.

147. If general principles depended upon experience they would cease to be general, and would be limited to a certain number of cases. Neither would their enunciation be absolute, even for the cases already observed; for it would of necessity be reduced to what had been observed, that is to say, to a little more or less, but never be perfect exactness. Consequently we could not assert that the three angles of every triangle are equal to two right angles; all that we could say would be, that so far as our experience goes, we have observed that in all triangles the three angles are very nearly equal to two right angles.

This would obviously destroy all necessary truths; and even mathematical truths would be no more certain than the reports of adepts in any profession who recount to us their observations concerning their respective objects.

148. There can be no science without necessary truths; and even the cognition of contingent truths would become exceedingly difficult without them. How do we collect the facts furnished by observation, and adjust them? Is it not by applying certain general truths to them, as, for example, those of numeration? Otherwise we could have no perfect confidence in them, nor in the results of observation.

149. Human reason cannot live, if it abandon this treasure of necessary truths which constitute its common patrimony. Individual reason could take no more than a few short steps, overwhelmed as it constantly would be with the mass of observations; distracted unceasingly by the verifications to which it would always have to recur; in want of some light to serve for all objects; and prohibited ever from simplifying, by uniting the rays of science in a common centre.

General reason would also cease to be, and men would no longer understand each other: every one would be confined to his own experience: and since there would be in the experiences of all men, nothing necessary, nothing to connect them, there would be no unity in them all together: all the sciences would be a field of confusion, to which all restoration of order would be utterly impossible. No language could have been formed; or even if formed could be preserved. We meet in the simplest enunciations of language, as well as in the complication of a long discourse, an abundance of general and necessary truths, which serve as the woof for the weaving-in of contingent truths.

150. To inquire, therefore, if there are necessary truths, is to inquire, if individual, if general reason exists; if what we call reason, and discover in all men, really exists, or is but a fantastical illusion. This reason does exist: to deny it is to deny ourselves: not to wish to admit it, is to reject the testimony of our consciousness, which assures us that it is in the depth of our soul; it is to make impotent efforts to destroy a conviction irresistibly imposed by nature.

151. And here I would remark that this community of reason among all men of all ages and of all climes; this admirable unity, discoverable in the midst of so much variety; this fundamental accord which neither the diversity nor the contradiction of views can destroy, evidently proves that all human souls have one common origin; that thought is not a work of chance; that, besides human intelligences, there is another which serves as their support, illuminates them, and has, from the first moment of their existence, endowed them with all the faculties needed to perceive, and to know what they perceived. The admirable order which reigns throughout the material world, the concert, the unity of plan discoverable in it, are not a more conclusive proof of the existence of God, than are the order, the concert, the unity, offered by reason in its assent to necessary truths.

For our own part, we ingenuously confess, that we can discover no more solid, more conclusive, or more clear proof of the existence of God, than that deduced from the world of intelligences. Beyond this it has another advantage, which is, that it takes for its point of departure the act most immediate to us, the consciousness of our own acts. It is true, the proof best adapted to the capacity of ordinary men, is the one founded on the admirable order reigning over the corporeal world: but this is because they are unaccustomed to meditate upon insensible objects, upon what passes within themselves; wherefore it is that they abound more in direct cognitions than in power of reflection.

The atheist asks how we can be certain of the existence of God, and demands an apparition of the divinity: very well, this apparition exists, not without, but within us: and although it may be pardonable for men of little reflection not to perceive it, most certainly it is not pardonable for those who pretend to be adepts in metaphysical science, not even to endeavor to discover it. The system of Malebranche, which makes men see every thing in God, cannot be sustained, but it shows a very profound thinker.