ALL THAT IS NOT CONTRADICTORY IN INTUITIVE IDEAS IS AFFIRMED OF GOD.
130. We have seen that all that is positive in general and indeterminate conceptions is affirmed of God. Let us see if the same is true of intuitive ideas. These ideas, in all that touches our understanding, may be reduced to these four; passive sensibility, active sensibility, intelligence, and will.
131. Passive sensibility, or the form under which the objects of the external world are presented to our senses, cannot be attributed to the infinite being. This negative proposition, the infinite being is not passively sensible, is strictly true.
Does this proposition deny any thing positive of God? Let us examine it.
The form of passive sensibility is extension, which necessarily implies multiplicity. The extended is necessarily a collection of parts: to deny extension of God is to affirm his simplicity; to deny that he is a collection of beings, and to affirm the indivisible unity of his nature.
132. Besides extension, there is in the passive sensibility of objects only the relation of causes which produce in us the effects called sensations. This causality can and must be affirmed of God: for it is certain that the infinite cause is capable of producing in us all sensations without the intervention of any medium.
133. The negative proposition: the infinite being is not material, means nothing more than the other; the infinite being is not passively sensible. We do not know the intrinsic nature of matter: all we know is, that it is presented in intuition to our sensibility under the form of extension, as an essentially multiplex object. When we deny that God is material or corporeal, we deny that he is passively sensible, or that he is multiple under the form of extension.
134. The other properties of matter, such as mobility, impenetrability, and divisibility, relate to extension, or to a particular impression caused on our senses. The difficulties that may be raised on these points are solved by the preceding paragraphs.
Inertness, or indifference to rest or motion, is a purely negative property. It is the incapacity of all action, the absence of an internal principle productive of change, the purely passive disposition to receive all that is communicated to it.
135. It therefore remains demonstrated that to deny to God passive sensibility, or corporeal nature, is to affirm hisundivided nature, his productive activity, and the impossibility of his suffering any kind of change.
136. Active sensibility, or the faculty of perceiving, presents two characteristics which must be defined. There are in sensation two things: the affection caused in the sensitive being by the sensible object, and the internal representation of the sensible being. The first is purely passive, and supposes the possibility of being affected by an object, and, consequently, of being subject to change. This cannot be attributed to the infinite being: to deny it is to affirm immutability, or the necessity of remaining always in the same state. The second is a sort of inferior order of cognition, by which the sensitive being perceives the sensible object. The representation of all objects must necessarily be found in the infinite being, consequently all that is intuitively perceptive in the sensitive faculty must be contained in the perception of the infinite being; that is to say, all that sensibility presents to us of external objects, all that it transfers to our intuition of external existence, must be contained in the representation which the infinite intelligence has within itself. Man cannot know under what form objects are presented to the intuition of the infinite being; but it is certain that all thetruthcontained in sensitive representation is presented to this intuition.
137. Intelligence, or the perception of objects without the forms of sensibility, implies the perception of beings and of their relations, which is something positive. In us it is often accompanied by the negative circumstance, of the absence of determinate objects to which the general conception may be referred. The infinite being sees in a single intuition all that exists and all that can exist, and contains all that is positive in intelligence, without what is negative, which is an imperfection.
138. It is evident that will must be affirmed of God; forwe cannot deny the infinite being that internal, spontaneous activity which is calledto will, and the nature of which involves no imperfection.
139. The will of God, although one and most simple, is distinguished into free and necessary, according to the objects to which it is referred. This gives rise to various negative propositions, which it is well to examine.
We say: God cannot will moral evil; this proposition, apparently negative, is, logically considered, affirmative. God cannot will moral evil, because his will is invariably fixed on good, on that sublime type of all holiness which he contemplates in his infinite essence. The impotence of moral evil is in God an infinite perfection of his infinite holiness.
140. The divine will may be referred to external objects, which, being finite, can be combined in different manners, and the existence or non-existence of these combinations depends on the end proposed by the agent which produces or modifies them. The will of God exerted on these objects is free; and to say that he has no necessity of doing this or that is to deny nothing, but to affirm a perfection, namely, the faculty of willing or not willing, or willing in different manners, objects which, on account of their finite nature, cannot bind the infinite will.
141. Hence all the reality contained in general ideas, whether indeterminate or intuitive, that is not contradictory, is affirmed of the absolutely infinite being. As to individual realities, it is evident that those which are finite cannot be affirmed of the infinite being without contradiction. The proposition: the infinite being is the corporeal universe, is equivalent to this: the infinite being is an essentially finite being. The same contradiction will be met with in every proposition where the subject is the infinite being, and the predicate an individual reality distinct from the infinite being. This remark will suffice for the present: they will be more clearly understood when we come to treat of the multitude of substances, in refuting the error of pantheists.