IN WHAT DOES UNIVERSAL REASON CONSIST?
156. What is universal reason? If we consider it as a simple idea, as
an abstraction from individual reason, as something separate from them,
but not real, we strike upon the very rock we try to shun. We endeavor
to assign a cause of the unity of human reason; and appeal to universal
reason; and then to explain in what universal reason consists, we recur
to an abstraction from individual reason. Evidently, this is a vicious
circle; we place the cause of a fact so fruitful in an abstraction, in
a generalization of the very thing we have to explain; we assign to a
great effect a cause totally insufficient, which has no existence out
of our understanding, and which only grows out of the very effect whose
origin we are investigating.
157. A real fact must have a real principle; a universal phenomenon
must have a universal cause; a phenomenon independent of all finite
intelligence must spring from some cause independent of all finite
intelligence. There is, then, a universal reason, the origin of all
finite reason, the source of all truth, the light of all intelligences,
the bond of all beings. There is, then, above all phenomena, above
all finite individuals, a being, in which is found the reason of all
beings, a great unity, in which is found the bond of all order, and of
all the community of other beings.
The unity, therefore, of all human reason affords a complete
demonstration of the existence of God. The universal reason is; but
universal reason is an unmeaning word, unless it denote an intelligent,
active being, a being by essence, the producer of all beings, of all
intelligences, the cause of all, and the light of all.
158. _Impersonal reason_, of which some philosophers speak, is an
unmeaning word. Either there exists a reason distinct from ours, or
there does not: if it does exist, it is not impersonal; if it does not
exist, it is impossible to explain the community of human reason: this
community would be to us a phenomenon, which we might call impersonal
reason, or any thing else we pleased, without it therefore being
possible for us to assign it any origin: it would be an effect without
a cause; a fact without a sufficient reason.
159. The understanding extends to a world of possibilities, and there
discovers a connection of necessary relations, some of dependence,
others of contradiction: but if there were no reality whereon to found
the possibility, this would be an absurdity; if nothing existed,
nothing would be possible.
Upon nothing, nothing can be founded; consequently, not even
possibility. The connection of necessary relations which we discover in
possible beings, must have a primitive type to which they refer: but in
nothing there are no types.
160. The assemblage of human understandings cannot establish
possibility. No one of them considered isolately is necessary to
general truth; and all together cannot have what no one of them has.
We conceive necessary truth, absolutely abstracted from the human
understanding: individual understandings appear and disappear, but work
no change in the relations of possible beings: on the contrary, the
understanding needs, in order to exercise its functions, a collection
of pre-existing truths, and without them it cannot work.
What any one individual understanding requires, all require. Their
union does not increase the strength of each one: since this
union is nothing more than an assemblage formed in our mind, and
may not correspond to any thing in reality except the individual
understandings, and their respective strength.
161. Necessary truths, therefore, exist before human reason; but their
pre-existence is an unmeaning word, if they be not referred to a being,
the origin of all reality, and the foundation of all possibility. There
is then no impersonal reason properly so called; there is a community
of reason in so far as one and the same light illumines all finite
intelligences; God the creator of them all.