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.