VALUE OF INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTIONS.--ABSTRACTION MADE FROM INTELLECTUAL
INTUITION.
89. Although we should admit that our mind can have no intuition but
the sensible, it could not thence be inferred that conceptions of the
purely intellectual order are empty forms, and in nowise conducive to
the knowledge of objects in themselves. It has always been understood
that general ideas are not intuitive, since by the very fact that they
are general they cannot be referred _immediately_ to a determinate
object; and yet no one ever doubted that they could serve to give us
true cognitions.
90. It is certain that general ideas, of themselves alone, do not lead
to any positive result; or, in other words, they do not make us know
existing beings; but if they be joined to other particular ones, a
reciprocal influence is established between them, from which cognition
results. When we make the general affirmation: "Every contingent being
requires a cause;" this proposition, although very true, means nothing
in the order of facts, if we abstract the existence of contingent
beings and causes of every kind. In such a case, the proposition will
express a relation of ideas, not of facts: the cognition which results
therefrom will be merely ideal, not positive.
91. This relation of ideas tacitly involves a condition, which gives
them, so far as facts are concerned, a hypothetical value; for, when
we affirm that every contingent being must have a cause, we are not to
be understood to affirm a relation of ideas destitute of all possible
application; but rather, on the contrary, to intend that if any
contingent being exists, it must have a cause.
92. In order that this hypothetical value of ideas may be converted
into a positive value, nothing is necessary but that the condition
involved in the general proposition: "Every contingent being must
have a cause," be verified. Of itself alone this teaches us nothing
concerning the real world; but from the moment that experience
shows us a single contingent being, the general proposition, before
sterile, becomes exceedingly fruitful. So soon as experience shows us
a contingent being, we know the necessity of its cause; we also infer
the necessity of the proportions, which the activity producing must
preserve with the thing produced; knowing the qualities of the latter,
we infer those which ought to be found in the former. In this manner,
resting upon two bases, one of which is ideal truth and the other real
truth, or data supplied by experience, we construct a true positive
science referred to determinate facts.
93. Since the being that thinks necessarily has consciousness of
itself, no thinking being can be limited to the cognition of purely
ideal truths. Even if we were to suppose it perfectly isolated from
all other beings, in absolute non-communication with every thing
not itself, so as neither to exert any influence upon them, nor to
be influenced by them, it could not be reduced to the cognition of a
purely ideal order; for, by the very fact that it is thinking, it is
conscious of itself, and consciousness is essentially a particular
fact, a cognition of a determinate being, since without it there could
be no consciousness.
94. This observation overturns to its very foundation the system which
pretends to bar all communication between the real and ideal orders.
It shows also that experience is not only possible, but absolutely
necessary to every thinking being, since consciousness is by its
very nature an experience, and the clearest and surest experience.
The truths of the ideal order are then necessarily interlinked with
those of the real order: to suppose all intercommunication between
them impossible, is to disown a fundamental fact of ideological and
psychological science, consciousness.
95. To render the truth and exactness of the preceding doctrine more
evident, let us suppose a man, or rather a human mind, absolutely
ignorant of the existence of an external world, of every body, and
even of every spirit; one that knows nothing concerning its own origin
or destiny, but one that would nevertheless at the same time exercise
its intellectual activity, without which it would be a lifeless thing,
and could offer no field to observation. Let us suppose him to have
general ideas, such as of being and of not-being, of substance and
accidents, of the absolute and the conditioned, of the necessary and
contingent. Manifestly he may combine them in various ways, and arrive
at the same purely ideal results to which we ourselves arrive. There
is no supposition more favorable to a series of abstract cognitions
independent of experience, and yet not even in this case would the
truths known be limited to the purely ideal order; it would even
here be impossible for them not to descend to the real order, if the
thinking being were not dispossessed of all consciousness of itself.
Indeed, by the very fact that a being is supposed capable of thinking,
it is supposed able to say to itself, _I think_. This act is eminently
experimental, and it needs only to be united with general truths in
a common consciousness, to enable the isolated being to rise above
itself, and create for itself a positive science, by which to pass from
the world of ideas to that of facts. The instability of its thoughts,
and the permanence of the being that experiences them, offer to it a
practical case in which the general ideas of substance and accident
are particularized. The successive appearance and disappearance of its
own conceptions will show to it the ideas of being and of not-being
realized; the recollection of the time when its own operations
commenced, beyond which the memory of its existence does not extend,
will enable it to know the contingency of his own being; and this
fact, combined with the general principles which express the relations
between contingent and necessary beings, will suggest to the thought
that there must be another that communicated to it its existence.