himself in the labyrinth of the problem of the subjectivity and the
objectivity of first principles, we are tempted to pardon Reid for
having disdained this problem, for limiting himself to repeating that
the absolute truth of universal and necessary principles rests upon the
veracity of our faculties, and that upon the veracity of our faculties
we are compelled to accept their testimony. "To explain," says he, "why
we are convinced by our senses, by consciousness, by our faculties, is
an impossible thing; we say--this is so, it cannot be otherwise, and we
can go no farther. Is not this the expression of an irresistible belief,
of a belief which is the voice of nature, and against which we contend
in vain? Do we wish to penetrate farther, to demand of our faculties,
one by one, what are their titles to our confidence, and to refuse them
confidence until they have produced their claims? Then, I fear that this
extreme wisdom would conduct us to folly, and that, not having been
willing to submit to the common lot of humanity, we should be deprived
of the light of common sense."[41]
Let us support ourselves also by the following admirable passage of him
who is, for so many reasons, the venerated master of the French
philosophy of the nineteenth century. "Intellectual life," says M.
Royer-Collard, "is an uninterrupted succession, not only of ideas, but
of explicit or implicit beliefs. The beliefs of the mind are the powers
of the soul and the motives of the will. That which determines us to
belief we call evidence. Reason renders no account of evidence; to
condemn reason to account for evidence, is to annihilate it, for it
needs itself an evidence which is fitted for it. These are fundamental
laws of belief which constitute intelligence, and as they flow from the
same source they have the same authority; they judge by the same right;
there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of another. He who
revolts against a single one revolts against all, and abdicates his
whole nature."[42]
Let us deduce the consequences of the facts of which we have just given
an exposition.
1st. The argument of Kant, which is based upon the character of
necessity in principles in order to weaken their objective authority,
applies only to the form imposed by reflection on these principles, and
does not reach their spontaneous application, wherein the character of
necessity no longer appears.
2d. After all, to conclude with the human race from the necessity of
believing in the truth of what we believe, is not to conclude badly; for
it is reasoning from effect to cause, from the sign to the thing
signified.
3d. Moreover, the value of principles is above all demonstration.
Psychological analysis seizes, takes, as it were, by surprise, in the
fact of intuition, an affirmation that is absolute, that is inaccessible
to doubt; it establishes it; and this is equivalent to demonstration. To
demand any other demonstration than this, is to demand of reason an
impossibility, since absolute principles, being necessary to all
demonstration, could only be demonstrated by themselves.[43]
FOOTNOTES:
[37] On conceptualism, as well as on nominalism and realism, see the
_Introduction to the inedited works of Abelard_, and also 1st Series,
vol. iv., lecture 21, p. 457; 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 20, p. 215,
and the work already cited on the _Metaphysics of Aristotle_, p. 49:
"Nothing exists in this world which has not its law more general than
itself. There is no individual that is not related to a species; there
are no phenomena bound together that are not united to a plan. And it is
necessary there should really be in nature species and a plan, if every
thing has been made with weight and measure, _cum pondere et mensura_,
without which our very ideas of species and a plan would only be
chimeras, and human science a systematic illusion. If it is pretended
that there are individuals and no species, things in juxtaposition and
no plan; for example, human individuals more or less different, and no
human type, and a thousand other things of the same sort, well and good;
but in that case there is nothing general in the world, except in the
human understanding, that is to say, in other terms, the world and
nature are destitute of order and reason except in the head of man."
[38] See preceding lecture.
[39] On the just limits of the personality and the impersonality of
reason, see the following lecture, near the close.
[40] We have everywhere maintained, that consciousness is the condition,
or rather the necessary form of intelligence. Not to go beyond this
volume, see farther on, lecture 5.
[41] 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 22, p. 494.
[42] _Oeuvres de Reid_, vol. iii., p. 450.
[43] We have not thought it best to make this lecture lengthy by an
exposition and detailed refutation of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ and
its sad conclusion; the little that we say of it is sufficient for our
purpose, which is much less historical than dogmatical. We refer the
reader to a volume that we have devoted to the father of German
philosophy, 1st Series, vol. v., in which we have again taken up and
developed some of the arguments that are here used, in which we believe
that we have irresistibly exposed the capital defect of the
transcendental logic of Kant, and of the whole German school, that it
leads to skepticism, inasmuch as it raises superhuman, chimerical,
extravagant problems, and, when well understood, cannot solve them. See
especially lectures 6 and 8.
LECTURE IV.
GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES.
Object of the lecture: What is the ultimate basis of absolute
truth?--Four hypotheses: Absolute truth may reside either in us,
in particular beings and the world, in itself, or in God. 1. We
perceive absolute truth, we do not constitute it. 2. Particular
beings participate in absolute truth, but do not explain it;
refutation of Aristotle. 3. Truth does not exist in itself;
defence of Plato. 4. Truth resides in God.--Plato; St.
Augustine; Descartes; Malebranche; Fenelon; Bossuet;
Leibnitz.--Truth the mediator between God and man.--Essential
distinctions.
We have justified the principles that govern our intelligence; we have
become confident that there is truth outside of us, that there are
verities worthy of that name, which we can perceive, which we do not
make, which are not solely conceptions of our mind, which would still
exist although our mind should not perceive them. Now this other problem
naturally presents itself: What, then, in themselves, are these
universal and necessary truths? where do they reside? whence do they
come? We do not raise this problem, and the problems that it embraces;
the human mind itself proposes them, and it is fully satisfied only when
it has resolved them, and when it has reached the extreme limit of
knowledge that it is within its power to attain.
It is certain that the principles which, in all the orders of knowledge,
discover to us absolute and necessary truths, constitute part of our
reason, which surely makes its dwelling in us, and is intimately
connected with personality in the depths of intellectual life. It
follows that the truth, which reason reveals to us, falls thereby into
close relation with the subject that perceives it, and seems only a
conception of our mind. Nevertheless, as we have proved, we perceive
truth, we are not the authors of it. If the person that I am, if the
individual _me_ does not, perhaps, explain the whole of reason, how
could it explain truth, and absolute truth? Man, limited and passing
away, perceives necessary, eternal, infinite truth; that is for him a
privilege sufficiently high; but he is neither the principle that
sustains truth, nor the principle that gives it being. Man may say, My
reason; but give him credit for never having dared to say, My truth.
If absolute truths are beyond man who perceives them, once more, where
are they, then? A peripatetic would respond--In nature. Is it, in fact,
necessary to seek for them any other subject than the beings themselves
which they govern? What are the laws of nature, except certain
properties which our mind disengages from the beings and phenomena in
which they are met, in order to consider them apart? Mathematical
principles are nothing more. For example, the axiom thus expressed--The
whole is greater than any of its parts, is true of any whole and part
whatever. The principle of contradiction, considered in its logical
title, as the condition of all our judgments, of all our reasonings,
constitutes a part of the essence of all being, and no being can exist
without containing it. The universal exists, says Aristotle, but it does
not exist apart from particular beings.[44]
This theory which considers universals as having their basis in things,
is a progress towards the pure conceptualism which we have in the
beginning indicated and shunned. Aristotle is much more of a realist
than Abelard and Kant. He is quite right in maintaining that universals
are in particular things, for particular things could not be without
universals; universals give to them their fixity, even for a day, and
their unity. But from the fact that universals are in particular beings,
is it necessary to conclude that they, wholly and exclusively, reside
there, and that they have no other reality than that of the objects to
which they are applied? It is the same with principles of which
universals are the constitutive elements. It is, it is true, in the
particular fact, of a particular cause producing a particular event,
that is given us the universal principle of causality; but this
principle is much more extensive than the facts, for it is applied, not
only to this fact, but to a thousand others. The particular fact
contains the principle, but it does not wholly contain it, and, far from
giving the basis of the principle, it is based upon it. As much may be
said of other principles.
Perhaps it will be replied that, if a principle is certainly more
extensive than such a fact, or such a being, it is not more extensive
than all facts and all beings, and that nature, considered as a whole,
can explain that which each particular being does not explain. But
nature, in its totality, is still only a finite and contingent thing,
whilst the principles to be explained have a necessary and infinite
bearing. The idea of the infinite can come neither from any particular
being, nor from the whole of beings. Entire nature will not furnish us
the idea of perfection, for all the beings of nature are imperfect.
Absolute principles govern, then, all facts and all beings, they do not
spring from them.
Will it be necessary to come to the opinion, then, that absolute truths,
being explicable neither by humanity nor by nature, subsist by
themselves, and are to themselves their own foundation and their own
subject?
But this opinion contains still more absurdities than the preceding;
for, I ask, what are truths, absolute or contingent, that exist by
themselves, out of things in which they are found, and out of the
intelligence that conceives them? Truth is, then, only a realized
abstraction. There are no quintessential metaphysics which can prevail
against good sense; and if such is the Platonic theory of ideas,
Aristotle is right in his opposition to it. But such a theory is only a
chimera that Aristotle created for the pleasure of combating it.
Let us hasten to remove absolute truths from this ambiguous and
equivocal state. And how? By applying to them a principle which should
now be familiar to you. Yes, truth necessarily appeals to something
beyond itself. As every phenomenon has its subject of inherence, as our
faculties, our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, exist only in a
being which is ourselves, so truth supposes a being in which it resides,
and absolute truths suppose a being absolute as themselves, wherein they
have their final foundation. We come thus to something absolute, which
is no longer suspended in the vagueness of abstraction, but is a being
substantially existing. This being, absolute and necessary, since it is
the subject of necessary and absolute truths, this being which is at the
foundation of truth as its very essence, in a single word, is called
_God_.[45]
This theory, which conducts from absolute truth to absolute being, is
not new in the history of philosophy: it goes back to Plato.
Plato,[46] in searching for the principles of knowledge clearly saw,
with Socrates his master, that the least definition, without which there
can be no precise knowledge, supposes something universal and one, which
does not come within the reach of the senses, which reason alone can
discover; this something universal and one he called _Idea_.
Ideas, which possess universality and unity, do not come from material,
changing, and mobile things, to which they are applied, and which render
them intelligible. On the other hand, it is not the human mind that
constitutes ideas; for man is not the measure of truth.
Plato calls Ideas veritable beings, [Greek: ta ontos onta], since they
alone communicate to sensible things and to human cognitions their truth
and their unity. But does it follow that Plato gives to Ideas a
substantial existence, that he makes of them beings properly so called?
It is important that no cloud should be left on this fundamental point
of the Platonic theory.
At first, if any one should pretend that in Plato Ideas are beings
subsisting by themselves, without interconnection and without relation
to a common centre, numerous passages of the _Timaeus_ might be objected
to him,[47] in which Plato speaks of Ideas as forming in their whole an
ideal unity, which is the reason of the unity of the visible world.[48]
Will it be said that this ideal world forms a distinct unity, a unity
separate from God? But, in order to sustain this assertion, it is
necessary to forget so many passages of the _Republic_, in which the
relations of truth and science with the Good, that is to say, with God,
are marked in brilliant characters.
Let not that magnificent comparison be forgotten, in which, after having
said that the sun produces in the physical world light and life,
Socrates adds: "So thou art able to say, intelligible beings not only
hold from the _Good_ that which renders them intelligible, but also
their being and their essence."[49] So, intelligible beings, that is to
say, Ideas, are not beings that exist by themselves.
Men go on repeating with assurance that the Good, in Plato, is only the
idea of the good, and that an idea is not God. I reply, that the Good is
in fact an idea, according to Plato, but that the idea here is not a
pure conception of the mind, an object of thought, as the peripatetic
school understood it; I add, that the Idea of the Good is in Plato the
first of Ideas, and that, for this reason, while remaining for us an
object of thought, it is confounded as to existence with God. If the
Idea of the Good is not God himself, how will the following passage,
also taken from the _Republic_, be explained? "At the extreme limits of
the intellectual world is the Idea of the Good, which is perceived with
difficulty, but, in fine, cannot be perceived without concluding that it
is the source of all that is beautiful and good; that in the visible
world it produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes,
that in the invisible world it directly produces truth and
intelligence."[50] Who can produce, on the one hand, the sun and light,
on the other, truth and intelligence, except a real being?
But all doubt disappears before the following passages from the
_Phaedrus_, neglected, as it would seem designedly, by the detractors of
Plato: "In this transition, (the soul) contemplates justice,
contemplates wisdom, contemplates science, not that wherein enters
change, nor that which shows itself different in the different objects
which we are pleased to call beings, but science as it exists in that
which is called being, _par excellence_...."[51]--"It belongs to the
soul to conceive the universal, that is to say, that which, in the
diversity of sensations, can be comprehended under a rational unity.
This is the remembrance of what the soul has seen during its journey _in
the train of Deity_, when, disdaining what we improperly call beings, it
looked upwards to the only true being. So it is just that the thought of
the philosopher should alone have wings; for its remembrance is always
as much as possible with _the things which make God a true God, inasmuch
as he is with them_."[52]
So the objects of the philosopher's contemplation, that is to say,
Ideas, are in God, and it is by these, by his essential union with
these, that God is the true God, the God who, as Plato admirably says in
the _Sophist_, participates in _august and holy intelligence_.[53]
It is therefore certain, that, in the true Platonic theory, Ideas are
not beings in the vulgar sense of the word, beings which would be
neither in the mind of man, nor in nature, nor in God, and would subsist
only by themselves. No, Plato considers Ideas as being at once the
principles of sensible things, of which they are the laws, and the
principles also of human knowledge, which owes to them its light, its
rule, and its end, and the essential attributes of God, that is to say,
God himself.
Plato is truly the father of the doctrine which we have explained, and
the great philosophers who have attached themselves to his school have
always professed this same doctrine.
The founder of Christian metaphysics, St. Augustine, is a declared
disciple of Plato: everywhere he speaks, like Plato, of the relation of
human reason to the divine reason, and of truth to God. In the _City of
God_, book x., chap. ii., and in chap. ix. of book vii. of the
_Confessions_, he goes to the extent of comparing the Platonic doctrine
with that of St. John.
He adopts, without reserve, the theory of Ideas. _Book of Eighty-three
Questions_, question 46: "Ideas are the primordial forms, and, as it
were, the immutable reasons of things; they are not created, they are
eternal, and always the same: they are contained in the divine
intelligence; and without being subject to birth and death, they are the
types according to which is formed every thing that is born and
dies."[54]
"What man, pious, and penetrated with true religion, would dare to deny
that all things that exist, that is to say, all things that, each of its
kind, possess a determinate nature, have been created by God? This point
being once conceded, can it be said that God has created things without
reason? If it is impossible to say or think this, it follows that all
things have been created with reason. But the reason of the existence
of a man cannot be the same as the reason of the existence of a horse;
that is absurd; each thing has therefore been created by virtue of a
reason that is peculiar to it. Now, where can these reasons be, except
in the mind of the Creator? For he saw nothing out of himself, which he
could use as a model for creating what he created: such an opinion would
be sacrilege.[55]
"If the reasons of things to be created and things created are contained
in the divine intelligence, and if there is nothing in the divine
intelligence but the eternal and immutable, the reasons of things which
Plato calls Ideas, are the eternal and immutable truths, by the
participation in which every thing that is is such as it is."[56]
St. Thomas himself, who scarcely knew Plato, and who was often enough
held by Aristotle in a kind of empiricism, carried away by Christianity
and St. Augustine, let the sentiment escape him, "that our natural
reason is a sort of participation in the divine reason, that to this we
owe our knowledge and our judgments, that this is the reason why it is
said, that we see every thing in God."[57] There are in St. Thomas many
other similar passages, of perhaps an expressive Platonism, which is not
the Platonism of Plato, but of the Alexandrians.
The Cartesian philosophy, in spite of its profound originality, and its
wholly French character, is full of the Platonic spirit. Descartes has
no thought of Plato, whom apparently he has never read; in nothing does
he imitate or resemble him: nevertheless, from the first, he is met in
the same regions with Plato, whither he goes by a different route.
The notion of the infinite and the perfect is for Descartes what the
universal, the Idea, is for Plato. No sooner has Descartes found by
consciousness that he thinks, than he concludes from this that he
exists, then, in course, by consciousness still, he recognizes himself
as imperfect, full of defects, limitations, miseries, and, at the same
time, conceives something infinite and perfect. He possesses the idea of
the infinite and the perfect; but this idea is not his own work, for he
is imperfect; it must then have been put into him by another being
endowed with perfection, whom he conceives, whom he does not
possess:--that being is God. Such is the process by which Descartes,
setting out from his own thought, and his own being, elevated himself to
God. This process, so simple, which he so simply exposes in the
_Discours de la Methode_, he will put successively, in the
_Meditations_, in the _Responses aux Objections_, in the _Principes_,
under the most diverse forms, he will accommodate it, if it is
necessary, to the language of the schools, in order that it may
penetrate into them. After all, this process is compelled to conclude,
from the idea of the infinite and the perfect, in the existence of a
cause of this idea, adequate, at least, to the idea itself, that is to
say, infinite and perfect. One sees that the first difference between
Plato and Descartes is, that the ideas which in Plato are at once
conceptions of our mind, and the principles of things, are for
Descartes, as well as for all modern philosophy, only our conceptions,
amongst which that of the infinite and perfect occupies the first place;
the second difference is, that Plato goes from ideas to God by the
principle of substances, if we may be allowed to use this technical
language of modern philosophy; whilst Descartes employs rather the
principle of causality, and concludes--well understood without
syllogism--from the idea of the infinite and the perfect in a cause also
perfect and infinite.[58] But under these differences, and in spite of
many more, is a common basis, a genius the same, which at first elevates
us above the senses, and, by the intermediary of marvellous ideas that
are incontestably in us, bears us towards him who alone can be their
substance, who is the infinite and perfect author of our idea of
infinity and perfection. For this reason, Descartes belongs to the
family of Plato and Socrates.
The idea of the perfect and the finite being once introduced into the
philosophy of the seventeenth century, it becomes there for the
successors of Descartes what the theory of ideas became for the
successors of Plato.