"Miss Brandon," answered Mr. Stoffs in a formal way, and puffing out greater clouds of smoke than ever, "Miss Brandon was ill for some days, and they were afraid would never get over the shock; your fine ladies are so nervous!"
"Miss Brandon is not that kind," said Dick hastily, vexed by the contemptuous tone of his friend's remark. "And I don't believe fine ladies are any more—more—fussy than others."
"I suppose you know them well enough to be a certain judge," said Carl, who seemed in a very ugly humor.
"Of course I don't know one in the world," answered Dick, with considerable animation and a deeper color in his face. "But I can't see the good of always running down people, just because they happen to be richer than ourselves."
"Hush! now," interposed Mrs. Stoffs, as her husband was about answering, "or no dinner shall you have this day. I will not let you two quarrel."
"You were going to tell me about Mr. Brandon's difficulties," suggested Dick very gently, after both he and Mr. Stoffs had assured their peacemaker that they were never in better humor toward each other. "You were going to tell me about Mr. Brandon's difficulties."
"Yes. His wife she died, and it was found he had used all her money and had lost it, as he had his own; there was a failure and everything was sold out, and so—there's an end of him."
"Did he leave New-York?"
"I don't know. Who asks what has become of a one-time rich man after the bubble has burst?"
"I think I heard he wanted some situation to start life again," said Mrs. Stoffs. "Poor man!"
Mrs. Stoffs was right. Mr. Brandon had tried to start again; but he had been a hard man in his days of prosperity, and an unfaithful man, or he would not be as he was now; and so, many who heartily pitied him and his family for their fall, and who would willingly have given them assistance out of their own pockets, did not feel justified in giving him a position that could be better filled by some man in whom they could trust. Thus among all his rich friends, not one of whom felt unkindly toward him, there was none to push him a plank with which to save himself from drowning.
Dick had learned all that his hosts could tell, and knowing well how fearfully rapid is a man's fall when once he is over the precipice of failure, his heart was heavier than it had ever been for troubles of his own. He sought to sustain his part in the conversation, feeling that a silent guest seems selfish and ungrateful, and tried to laugh as heartily at his friend's jokes as ever; but it was not without an effort, and his friends were keen and saw that he was troubled.
"I do not like it," Carl grunted in his deepest tones, that Christmas night after Dick had gone and the children were asleep; "I do not like it."
"You must not think too hardly of him," answered Mrs. Stoffs, who, with that sort of perception women obtain when they become wives, knew her husband referred to Dick's troubled manner, the anxious way in which he had asked about Miss Brandon, and his hot resenting of Carl's careless words. "You are too hard on him," said Mrs. Stoffs, not because she did not equally dislike it all, but because there would be no conversation between them if old married folks were always to agree.
"Fine ladies, indeed!" muttered Mr. Stoffs, puffing away harder than ever. "Miss Brandon—what for should he care if Miss Brandon was hurt, more than for any other lady?"
"She is poor enough now," said Mrs. Stoffs musingly. "It would not be so strange now;" and under her breath she sighed, "Poor Rose!"
"Not that he has one thought of such a thing," Carl went on consistently; "you women always get such ideas into your heads."
Mrs. Stoffs, being an experienced wife, raised no question about the ownership of the "ideas," whatever they were, but sat looking into the fire for a long time before she spoke again, and then it was to say, "After all, I am glad we were too poor to have Rose come up for Christmas."
"If she would not be satisfied with what we had, so am I," grumbled Mr. Stoffs.
"I was not thinking of that," answered his wife mildly.
"I know Heremore's never such a fool as to be thinking of one so much above him as Miss Brandon," remarked Mr. Stoffs.
"She is not above him now that they are poor," answered his wife.
"It isn't the money that made the difference," said Carl rather impatiently, "it's the habits that money gives. That's what is the matter. Miss Brandon may not be half worthy of him, and yet he would be mad to think of her; it is misery when people marry out of their rank, misery to both."
"But if they love each other?" suggested his wife.
"That only makes the matter worse; he knows not her ways. She has a language that is not his; if they did not care, they could go their own ways, and seek their own. I think Heremore is a great fool; I do!"
"I don't believe he has a thought of such a thing," said Mrs. Stoffs; but there was a manifest question in her voice.
"If he has, he'll rue the day he thought of it first," said her husband emphatically; and there the conversation ended; but when Mrs. Stoffs wrote again to Mrs. Alaine, which she did not do for some time—for to write a letter was an event in the honest woman's life—she thought proper to give her sister a hint of that which they had observed; and Mrs. Alaine, in her turn, thought proper to convey the hint, in the form of information, to Rose, who, however, answered readily,
"Love Miss Brandon? Well, mamma, and why shouldn't he?"
"Because Miss Brandon is not in the same class of life that he is, dear."
"I am sure Mr. Heremore is better off than her father is now," urged Rose; "for he has a regular salary, and Mr. Brandon has nothing left, and nobody will give him any place."
"No doubt, my child; but it is not money that makes the difference. Miss Brandon has her ideas of life now just as she had them when she was rich; and Mr. Heremore is what he is, and would not be different if he were suddenly made a millionaire."
So Rose said no more.
While Mr. and Mrs. Stoffs were thus disturbed about him, Dick, unconscious of any cause he had given for their disquietude, was walking slowly and thoughtfully home. "Where was that little Mary with her fair hair and gentle smile this cold Christmas night?" was the question he kept putting to himself. It was a clear, bright night, with the moon shining on the pavements and the frozen earth, not at all such a night as that during which he had slept by her father's steps, and there was no fear that her fair head was shelterless; but still it was very sad to think of her, whose Christmas days had been such pleasant ones, in mourning for her mother, and perhaps in troubles such as those which men hear, but shudder to see, clouding the girlish youth that is so short, and should be so sunny.
"With God's help I'll find them out before to-morrow night if they are in this city," said Dick to himself, and then walked on more rapidly.
And he kept his word, though not without much trouble; and within twenty-four hours he stood in front of the wretched boarding-house to which poverty and sickness had already reduced the family that, a few months before, had never dreamed of the meaning of want.
But though he had found them out and stood before their door, Dick had done and could do nothing to lessen their trouble. Mr. Brandon had not seemed more unapproachable when, a rich man, he scowled and said hard words to the ill-dressed errand-boy—than he now did to the simple clerk, though Dick himself was richer now than was the once rich merchant. Miss Brandon was, in his eyes, now no less a lady, belonging to a sphere far above him, than she had been when, in all the glory of wealth, youth, and beauty, he had seen her ride down to the Stoffs's cottage to buy flowers for her hair. It seemed to him greater presumption for him to think of approaching her now than it would have been then, so he passed and repassed her door, grieved for her trouble, but more grieved, if possible, that he, with his youth and strength, should be powerless to give her one grain of comfort. How often and often, as he had watched her—she all unconscious of him and his grateful reverence—in her days of prosperity, had he dreamed of her as like some damsel of olden romance in sore distress, and thought that never had knight rushed more joyously or more potently to the rescue than he would to hers. Now his dream had come to pass—she was a damsel in sore distress; but where was his prancing steed, his burnished armor, his ready lance? Then, as he smiled in remembrance of his boyish fancy, he suddenly thought of Mr. Irving, the gentleman—just a boy's ideal of a gallant knight—whom he had seen so often with Miss Brandon in the country. He recollected well the manly bearing of that "perfect gentleman," whom he and Rose had looked upon as a veritable Sir Launcelot; he had seen many an act of "gentle courtesy" shown in a grave, tender way, to the fair lady by whose side he always rode; and where was he now that that fair lady needed her knight as never before?
There was nothing morbid or bitter about Dick. When he asked himself that question, it was with no thought of the common judgment pronounced upon "summer friends." He recognized Mr. Irving's right to aid and comfort the family of his former host. He knew that he had wealth, position, character, and, of course, ample influence, and not for an instant doubted that he would use every means in his power to befriend Mr. Brandon, if only for the sake of that beautiful daughter whom he so evidently admired. Where, then, was Mr. Irving? If he had been here, all this could not have happened. But as Dick asked himself this, it did not occur to him that Mary thought as he thought: if Mr. Irving had been here, all this would not have happened.
At last Dick, fully convinced that he would be guilty of no presumption in speaking his mind to Mr. Irving on this subject, cheerfully turned his steps homeward, and resolved that the first moment he had of his own should be spent in seeking Mr. Irving, and informing him of what he could not now be aware of, the downfall of the Brandons. For the fall of the Brandons, as he heard from one or two who knew, had been very great, very rapid, and, it was feared, was not yet completed. Mr. Brandon had never held his head up since his failure, but dragged around, shabbily dressed, querulous and half-sick, dejected and clearly miserable. His two sons had been given very poor situations, on very niggardly pay, by a relative in another city, who, having always been odiously cringing to Mr. Brandon when he had money, seemed to delight now in heaping humiliations upon his sons. So great a crime it was in his eyes to be better bred, better educated, and more kindly cared for than were his own rude, blustering, ignorant boys. If only Fred and Joe had been taught whence come adversity and prosperity, doubtless these humiliations would have been crowns of glory for them; but theirs had been only a vague, dreamy sort of faith, which they never suspected had any application to their real life. I dare say they were very idle, useless, self-conceited and aggravating boys; but I can't help feeling sorry for them in their troubles. Miss Brandon, Dick was told, had not recovered her strength since the accident, and however well she might have been, with all her accomplishments, could not have done more than she was now doing: giving music-lessons to a few persons residing near her new home.
But all hope of seeing Mr. Irving faded the first thing the next day; for Dick's questions brought the unwelcome information that he had left home in October for two years' travel in Europe, and Dick, of course, could not presume to write to him.
[Footnote 272]
[Footnote 272:The Human Intellect; with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Soul. By Noah Porter, D.D., Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics in Yale College. New-York: Scribner & Co. 1868. 8vo, pp. 673.]
This formidable volume is, unless we except Professor Hickok's work onRational Psychology, the most considerable attempt that has been made among us to construct a philosophy of the human understanding. Professor Porter is able, patient, industrious, and learned. He knows the literature of his subject, and has no little facility and fairness in seizing and setting forth the commanding points in the views and theories of others; but, while he shows great familiarity with metaphysical and psychological questions, and some justness and delicacy as an analyzer of facts, he seems to us to lack the true philosophical instinct, and that synthetic grasp of thought which seizes facts in their principles and genetic relations, and reduces them to a dialectic whole, without which one cannot be a philosopher.
The professor's book is a hard, book for us to read, and still harder for us to understand. Its mechanical aspect, with three or four different sizes of type on the same page, is repulsive to us, and prejudices us against it. It is not absolutely dull, but it is rather heavy, and it requires resolution to read it. It has nothing attractive or enlivening, and it deals so much with particulars and details that it is difficult for the reader to carry what he reads along in his memory. Even when we have in our minds what the author actually says, it is not easy to understand it, or determine which of several possible meanings he adopts. Not that his language, though seldom exact or precise, and disfigured occasionally by needless barbarisms, and a terminology which we hope is not yet in good usage, is not clear enough for any one accustomed to philosophical studies, nor is it that his sentences are involved and hard to be construed, or that his statements, taken as isolated statements, are not intelligible; but it is hard to determine their meaning and value from his point of view, and in relation to his system as a whole. His book is composed of particulars, of minute and not seldom commonplace observations, without any perceptible scientific reduction to the principle which generates, co-ordinates, and explains them.
It is but fair to the professor to say, in the outset, that his book belongs to a class of books which we seldom read and heartily detest. It is not a work of philosophy, or an attempt even to give us a science of things in their principles and causes, their progress and destiny, but merely aWissenschaftslehre, or science of knowing. Its problem is not what is or what exists; but what is knowing, how do I know, and how do I know that I know? With all deference to the Fichteans, we venture to assert that there is and can be no science of knowing separate from the science of things, distinct from and independent of the subject knowing. We know, says all that, we know that we know, says. He who knows, knows that he knows; and if one were to doubt that knowing is knowing, we must let him doubt, for we have only knowing with which to prove that knowing is knowing.
We can by no possible anatomical dissection of the eye, or physiological description of its functions, explain the secret of external vision. We are told that we see not external objects themselves, but their pictures painted by the light on the retina, and it is only by them that we apprehend visible objects. But suppose it so, it brings us no nearer to the secret of vision. How do we see the picture? How by means of the picture apprehend the external object? Yet the man who sees knows he sees, and all that can be said is, that to elicit the visual act there must be the visible subject, the visible object, and the light which mediates between them and illuminates them both. So is it with intellectual vision. We may ascertain some of the conditions under which we know, but the knowing itself is to us an inexplicable mystery. No dissection or possible inspection of the soul can explain it, or throw the least light on it. All that can be said is, that to the fact of knowledge, whatever its degree or its region, there must be the intellective subject, the intelligible object, and the intellectual light which places them in mutual relation and illumines alike both subject and object. Having said this, we have said all that can be said. Hence works intended to construct the science of science, or knowledge, are not only useless, but worse than useless; for, dealing with abstractions which have no existence in nature, and treating them as if real, they mislead and perplex the student, and render obscure and doubtful what without them is clear and certain.
Professor Porter is a psychologist, and places all the activity in the fact of knowledge on the side of the soul, even in the intuition of principles, without which the soul can neither exist, nor think, nor feel. His purpose in his Introduction is to establish the unity and immateriality—spirituality, he says, of the soul against the materialists—and to vindicate psychology not only as a science, but as an inductive science. With regard to the unity and immateriality of the soul, we hold with the professor, though they are not provable or demonstrable by his method; and we recognize great truth and force in his criticisms on materialism, of which we have to deplore in the scientific world, and even in popular literature, the recrudescence. That psychology is, in a secondary sense, a science, we do not deny; but we do deny that it is either "theprima philosophia" as the professor asserts, or an inductive science, as he endeavors to prove.
All the inductive sciences are secondary sciences, and presuppose a first science, which is strictly the science of the sciences. Induction, the professor himself maintains, has need of certain first principles, ora prioriassumptions, which precede and validate it. How can psychology be theprima philosophia, or first philosophy, when it can be constructed only by borrowing its principles from a higher or prior science? Or how can it be the first philosophy, when that would suppose that the principles which the inductive sciences demand to validate the inductive process are contained in and derived from the soul? Is the professor prepared to maintain that the soul is the first principle of all the sciences? That would imply that she is the first principle of things, of reality itself; for science is of the real, not of the unreal. But this were pure Fichteism, and would put the soul in the place of God. The professor would shrink from this. He, then, must have made the assertion that psychology is theprima philosophiasomewhat hastily, and without due reflection; unless indeed he distinguishes between the first principles of science and the first principles of things.
The inductive sciences are constructed by induction from the observation and analysis of facts which the soul has the appropriate organs for observing. But psychology is the science of the soul, its nature, powers or faculties, and operations; and if an inductive science, it must be constructed by induction from psychical facts observed and analyzed in the soul by the soul herself. The theory is very simple. The soul, by the external senses, observes and analyzes the facts of the external world, and constructs by induction the physical sciences; by her internal sense, called consciousness, she observes and analyzes the world within herself, and by way of induction from the facts or phenomena she observes, constructs psychology, or the science of herself. Unhappily for the psychologue, things do not go so simply. To this theory there are two grave objections: First, the soul has no internal sense by which she can observe herself, her acts or states in herself; and second, there are no purely psychical facts to be observed.
The professor finds the soul's faculty of observing the facts of the internal world in consciousness, which he defines to be "the power by which the soul knows its own acts and states." But consciousness is not a power or faculty, but an act of knowing, and is simply the recognition of the soul by the soul herself as the subject acting. We perceive always, and all that is before us within the range of our percipient powers; but we do not always distinguish and note each object perceived, or recognize the fact that it is we who are the subject perceiving. The fact of consciousness is precisely in the simple perception being so intensified and prolonged that the soul not only apprehends the object, but recognizes itself as the subject apprehending it. It is not, as the professor maintains at great length in Part I., a presentative power; for it is always a reflex act, and demands something of memory. But the recognition by the soul in her acts as the subject acting is something very different from the soul observing and analyzing in herself her own powers and faculties.
The soul never knows herself in herself; she only recognizes herself under the relation of subject in her acts. Recognizing herself only as subject, she can never cognize herself as object, and stand, as it were, face to face with herself. She is never her own object in the act of knowing; for she is all on the side of the subject. She cannot be on one side subject, and on the other object. Only God can be his own object; and his contemplating of himself as object, theologians show us, is the Eternal Generation of the Son, or the Word. Man, St. Thomas tells us, is not intelligible in himself; for he is notintelligensin himself. If the soul could know herself in herself, she could be her own object; if her own object, she would suffice for herself; then she would be real, necessary, self-existent, independent being; that is to say, the soul would be God.
We deny not that the soul can know herself as manifested in her acts, but that she can know herself in herself, and be the object of her own thought. I can not look into my own eyes, yet I can see my face as reflected in the glass. So the soul knows herself, and her powers and faculties; but only as reflected from, or mirrored in, the objects in conjunction with which she acts. Hence the powers and faculties are not learned by any observation of the soul herself, but from the object. The soul is a unit, and acts always as a unit; but, though acting always in her unity, she can act in different directions, and in relation to different objects, and it is in this fact that originates the distinction of powers and faculties. The distinction is not in the soul herself, for she is a unit, but in the object, and hence the schoolmen teach us that it is the object that determines the faculty.
It is not the soul in herself that we must study in order to ascertain the faculties, but the soul in her operations, or the objects in relation with which she acts. We know the soul has the power to know, by knowing, to will, by willing, to feel, by feeling. While, then, the soul has power to know herself so far as mirrored by the objects, she has no power to observe and analyze herself in herself, and therefore no power of direct observation and analysis of the facts from which psychology, as an inductive science, must be constructed.
But there are no such facts as is assumed to be observed and analyzed. The author speaks of objects which are purely psychical, which have no existence out of the soul herself; but there are and can be no facts, or acts, produced by the soul's own energy alone. The soul, for the best of all possible reasons, never acts alone, for she does not exist alone."Thought," says Cousin, "is a fact that is composed of three simultaneous and indissoluble elements, the subject, the object, and the form. The subject is always the soul, [le Moi,] the object is something not the soul, [le non-Moi,] and the form is always the relation of the two." The object is inseparable from the subject as an element of the thought, but it exists distinct from and independent of the soul, and when it is not thought as well as when it is; otherwise it could not be object, since the soul is all on the side of the subject. The soul acts only in conjunction with the object, because she is not sufficient for herself, and therefore cannot suffice for her own activity. The object, if passive, is as if it were not, and can afford no aid to the fact of thought. It must, therefore, be active, and then the thought will be the joint product of the two activities. It is a grave mistake, then, to suppose that the activity in thought is all on the side of the soul. The soul cannot think without the concurrent activity of that which is not the soul. There is no product possible in any order without two factors placed in relation with each other. God, from the plenitude of his being, contains both factors in his own essence; but in creatures they are distinct from and independent of each other.
We do not forget theintellectus agensof St. Thomas, but it is not quite certain what he meant by it. The holy doctor does not assert it as a faculty of the soul, and represent its activity as purely psychical. Or if it be insisted that he does, he at least nowhere asserts, implies, or intimates that it is active without the concurrence of the object: for he even goes so far as to maintain that the lower acts only as put in motion by the higher, and the terrestrial by the celestial. Hence thepraemotio physicaof the Thomists, and the necessity in conversion of praevenient grace—gratia praeveniens.
But even granting that there is the class of facts alleged, and that we have the power to observe and analyze them, as, in the language of Cousin, "they pass over the field of consciousness," we cannot by induction attain to their principle and causes; for induction itself, without the first principles of all science, not supplied by it, can give us only a classification, generalization, an hypothesis, or an abstract theory, void of all reality. The universal cannot be concluded, by way of induction, from particulars, any more than particulars can be concluded, by way of deduction, from the universal. Till validated in theprima philosophia, or referred to the first principles, without which the soul can neither act nor exist, the classifications and generalizations attained to by induction are only facts, only particulars, from which no general conclusion can be drawn. Science is knowledge indeed; but the term is generally used in English to express the reduction of facts and particulars to their principles and causes. But in all the secondary sciences the principles and causes are themselves only facts, till carried up to the first principles and causes of all the real and all the knowable. Not without reason, then, has theology been called the queen of the sciences, nor without warrant that men, who do not hold that all change is progress, maintain that the displacement, in modern times, of this queen from her throne has had a deleterious effect on science, and tended to dissipate and enfeeble the human mind itself.We have no philosophers nowadays of the nerve of Plato and Aristotle, the great Christian fathers, or the mediaeval doctors, none of whom ever dreamed of separating theology and philosophy. Even the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a grasp of thought, a robust vigor of mind, and a philosophic insight into the truth of things and their higher relations that you look in vain for in the philosophers of the eighteenth century and of our own. But this by the way. When things are at the worst, they sometimes mend.
Psychology, not psychologism, is a science, though not an inductive science, nor a science that can be attained to by the study of the soul and her phenomena in the bosom of consciousness. The psychologists—those, we mean, who adopt the psychological method, a method seldom adopted before the famouscogito, ergo sumof Descartes—seem incapable of comprehending that only the real is cognizable, and that abstractions are not real but unreal; and therefore that the first principles of science must be real, not abstract, and the first principles of things. Thus Professor Porter appears to see no real connection between them. True, he says, (p. 64,) "Knowledge and being are correlatives. There must be being in order that there may be knowledge. There can be no knowledge which is not the knowledge of being. Subjectively viewed, to know implies certainty; objectively, it requires reality. An act of knowing in which there is no certainty in the agent, and no reality in the object, is impossible in conception and in fact." This would seem to assert that only being can be known, or that whatever is known is real being, which is going too far and falling into ontologism. Only being is intelligibleper se; but existences which are from being and participate of being, though not intelligible in or by themselves, since they do not exist in and by themselves, may yet be really known by the light of being which creates them. We knowbybeing, as well as being itself.
But be not alarmed. The professor's being, the only object of knowledge, his reality without which there is no cognizable object, is nothing very formidable; for he tells us, in smaller type, on the same page, that "we must distinguish different kinds of objects and different kinds of reality. They may beformed by the mind, and exist[only]for the mind that forms them, or they may exist in fact and space for all minds, and yet in each case they are equally objects. Their reality may be mental and internal, or material and external, but in each case it is equally a reality. The thought that darts into the fancy and is gone as soon, the illusion that crosses the brain of the lunatic, the vision that frightens the ghost-seer, the spectrum which the camera paints on the screen, the reddened landscape seen through a colored lens, the yellow objects which the jaundiced eye cannot avoid beholding,each as really existsas does the matter of the solid earth, or the eternal forces of the cosmical system." The "eternal forces" of the cosmical system can be only God, who only is eternal. So the illusions of fancy, the hallucinations of the lunatic, and the eternal, self-existent, necessary being whom we call God, and who names himself I AM THAT AM, SUM QUI SUM, are alike being, and equally real!
The learned author tells us elsewhere that we call by the name being beings of very different kinds and sorts, owing to the poverty of our language, which supplies but one name for them. He will permit us to say that we suspect the poverty is not in the language.We have in the language two words which serve us to mark the precise difference between that which is in, from, and by itself alone, and that which exists in, from, and by being. The first isbeing, the other isexistence. Being is properly applied only to God, who is, not Supreme Being, as is often said, but the one only being, the only one that can say, I AM THAT AM, or QUI EST; and it shows how strictly language represents the real order that in no tongue can we make an assertion without the verb TO BE, that is, only by being, that is, again, only by God himself. Existence explains itself. Existences are not being, but, as theeximplies, arefrombeing, that is, from him in whom is their being, as Saint Paul says, "For in him we live, and move, and are," "vivimus, et movemur, et sumus." Reality includes being and all that is from and by being, or simply being and existences. Nothing else is real or conceivable; for, apart from God and what he creates, or besides God and his creatures, there is nothing, and nothing is nothing, and nothing is not intelligible or cognizable.
Dr. Porter understands by reality or being only what is an object of knowledge, or of the mind in knowing, though it may have no existence out of the mind, or, as say the schoolmen,a parte rei. Hence, though the soul is certain that the object exists relatively to her act of knowing, she is not certain that it is something existing in nature. How, then, prove that there is anything to correspond to the mental object, idea, or conception? In his Second Part, which treats of the representative power, he tells us that the objects represented and cognized in the representation are purely psychical, and exist only in the soul and for the soul alone. These, then, do not exist in nature; they are, in the ordinary use of the term, unreal, illusory, and chimerical, as the author himself confesses. If the object of knowledge can be in any instance unreal, chimerical, illusory, or with no existence except in and for the soul itself, why may it not be so in every instance, and all our knowledge be an illusion? How prove that in any fact of knowledge there is cognition of an object that exists distinct from and independent of the subject? Here is thepons asinorumof exclusive psychologists. There is no crossing the bridge from the subjective to the objective, for there is no bridge there, and subject and object must both be given simultaneously in one and the same act, or neither is given.
Dr. Porter, indeed, gives the subjective and what he calls the objective, together, in one and the same thought; but he leaves the way open for the question, whether the object does or does not exist distinct from and independent of the subject. This is the difficulty one has with Locke'sEssay on the Understanding. Locke makes ideas the immediate object of the cognitive act; for he defines them to be "that with which the mind is immediately conversant." If the soul can elicit the cognitive act with these ideas, which it is not pretended are things, how prove that there is any real world beyond them? It has never been done, and never can be done; for we have only the soul, for whose activity theideaor concept suffices, with which to do it, and hence the importance to psychologists of the question, How do we know that we know? and which they can answer only by a paralogism, or assuming the reality of knowledge with which to prove knowledge real.
For the philosopher there is no such question, and nothing detracts so much from the philosophical genius of the illustrious Balmes as his assertion that all philosophy turns on the question of certainty.The philosopher, holding that to know is to know, has, after knowing, or having thought the object, no question of certainty to ask or to answer. The certainty that the object exists in nature is in the fact that the soul thinks it. The object is always a force or activity distinct from and independent of the subject, and since it is an activity it must be either real being or real existence.
The error of the author, as of all psychologers, is not in assuming that the soul cannot think without the concurrence of the object, or that the object is not really object in relation to the soul's cognitive power, but in supposing that the soul can find the object in that which has no real existence. He assumes that abstractions or mental conceptions, which have no real existence aside from the concrete or reality from which the mind forms them, may be real objects of the soul in the fact of knowledge. But no abstractions or conceptions exista parte rei. There are white things and round things, but no such existence as whiteness or roundness. These and other abstractions are formed by the mind operating on the concretes, and taking them under one aspect, or generalizing a quality they have in common with all concretes of their class, and paying no heed to anything else in the concrete object. But these abstractions or general conceptions are cognizable and apprehended by the mind only in the apprehension of their concretes, white or round things. They are, as abstracted from white things or round things, no more objects of thought or of thought-knowledge than of sensible perception. We speak of abstractions which are simply nullities, not of genera and species, or universals proper, which are not abstractions but real; yet even these do not exist apart from the individual. They and their individuals subsist always together in a synthetic relation, and though distinguishable are never separable. The species is not a mere name, a mere mental conception or generalization; it is real, but exists and is known only as individualized.
The unreal is unintelligible, and, like all negation, is intelligible only in the reality denied. The soul, then, can think or know only the real, only real being, or real existences by the light of real being. If the soul can know only the real, she can know things only in their real order, and consequently the order of the real and of the knowable is the same, and the principles of the real are the principles of science. The soul is an intelligent existence, and the principles, causes, and conditions of her existence are the principles, causes, and conditions of her intelligence, and therefore of her actual knowledge. We have, then, only to ascertain the principles of the real to determine the principles of science. The principles of the real are given us in the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," and in the first article of the Creed, "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible." Or, as stated in strictly scientific terms, as affirmed in intuition, Being creates existences. The real and necessary being given in the scientific formula or intuition is indeed God; but this is not intuitively known, and can be known only discursively or by contemplation and reflection. We must not, then, in stating the first principles of the real, and of knowledge as given in intuition, use the term God, but being. We know by intuition being, but do not by intuition know that being is God. Hence the mistake of those who say we have intuition of God, or know by intuition that God is.We have intuition of that which is God, but not that what is given is God. Ontology is a most essential part of philosophy; but exclusive ontologists are as much sophists as are exclusive psychologists.
The first principles of reality are being, existence, and the creative act of being, whence the ideal formula or judgment, Being creates existences. This is theprimumin the real order. All that is real and not necessary and self-sufficing being must be from being; for without real uncreated being there can be nothing, and existences are something only in so far as they participate of being. Things can exist from being, or hold from it, only by virtue of its creative act, which produces them by its own energy from nothing, and sustains them as existent. There is only the creative act by which existences can proceed from being. Emanation, generation, evolution, which have been asserted as the mode of procession of existences, give nothing really or substantially distinguishable from being. Existences, then, can really proceed from being only by the creative act, and, indeed, only by the free creative act of being; for necessary creation is no creation at all, and can be only a development or evolution of being itself. In theological language, then, God and creation include all the real; what is not God is creature or existence, and what is not creature or existence is God. There is no reality which is neither God nor creature, notertium quidbetween being and existence, or between existence and nothing. Theprimumof the real is, then, the ideal formula or divine judgment,Ens creat existentias, for it affirms in their principle and their real relation all that is and all that exists. This formula is a proper judgment, for it has all the terms and relations of a judgment, subject, predicate, and copula. Being is the subject, existences is the predicate, and the creative act the copula, which at once unites the predicate to the subject and distinguishes it from it. It is divine, because it isa priori, theprimumof the real; and as only the real is intelligible or knowable, it must precede as its principle, type, and condition, every judgment that can be formed by an existence or creature, and therefore can be only the judgment of God affirming his own being and creating the universe and all things, visible and invisible, therein.
Now, as the soul can only know the real, this divine judgment must be not only theprimumof the real, but of the knowable; and since the soul can know only as she exists, in the real relations in which she stands, and knows only by the aid of the object on which she depends for her existence and activity, it follows that this judgment is theprimum scientificum, or the principle of all real or possible science.
Is it asked, How is this known or proved, if not by psychological observation and analysis? The answer is, by the analysis of thought, which discloses the divine judgment as its idea, or necessary and apodictic element. This is not psychologism nor the adoption of the psychological method. Psychologism starts from the assumption that thought, as to the activity that produces it, whatever may or may not be its object, is purely psychical, and that the ontological, if obtainable at all, is so by an induction from psychological facts. The first assumption is disproved by the fact just shown, that thought is not produced or producible by the psychical activity alone, but by the joint action of the two factors subject and object, in which both are affirmed.The other assumption is disposed of by the fact that what is found in the analysis of thought is not particular facts or phenomena from which the first principles are concluded by way of induction, which could give us only a generalization or abstraction, but the first principles themselves intuitively given.
Philosophers generally assert that certain conditions precedent, or certain ideasa priori, are necessary to every fact of experience or actual cognition. Kant, in his masterlyCritik der reinen Vernunft, calls them sometimes cognitions, sometimes synthetic judgments,a priori, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and holds them to be necessary forms of the subject. Cousin asserts them and calls them necessary and absolute ideas, but fails to identify them with the real, and even denies that they can be so identified. Reid recognized them, and called them the first principles of human belief, sometimes the principles of common sense, after Father Bouffier, which all our actual knowledge presupposes and must take for granted. Professor Porter also recognizes them, holds them to be intuitively given, calls them certain necessary assumptions, first truths or principles without which no science is possible, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and seems to regard them as abstract principles or ideas, as if abstractions could subsist without their concretes, or principles ever be abstract. We deny that they are abstract ideas, necessary assumptions, or necessary forms of the understanding or cognitive faculty, and hold them to be the principles of things, alike of the real and the knowable, without which no fact exists and no act of knowledge is possible. They cannot be created by the mind, nor formed by the mind operating on the concrete objects of existence, nor in any manner obtained by our own mental activity; for without them there is no mind, no mental activity, no experience. Dr. Porter, after Reid, Kant, Cousin, and others, has clearly seen this, and conclusively proved it—no philosopher more conclusively—and it is one of the merits of his book. He therefore justly calls them intuitions, or principles intuitively given; yet either we do not understand him, or he regards them as abstract truths or abstract principles. But truths and principles are never abstract, and only the concrete or real can be intuitively given. Those intuitions, then, must be either real being or contingent existences; not the latter, for they all bear the marks of necessity and universality; then they must be the real and necessary being, and therefore the principles of things, and not simply principles of science. Dr. Porter makes them real principles in relation to the mental act; but we do not find that he identifies them with the principles of the real. He doubtless holds that they represent independent truths, and truths which are the principles of things; but that he holds them, as present to the mind, to be the principles themselves, we do not find.
Dr. Porter's error in his Part IV., in which he discusses and defines intuitions, and which must be interpreted by the foregoing parts of his work, appears to us to be precisely in his taking principle to mean the starting-point of the soul in the fact of knowledge, and distinguishing it from the principle of the real order. He distinguishes between the objectin menteand the objectin re, and holds that the former is by no means identical with the latter. He thus supposes a difference between the scientific order and the real, and therefore that the principle of the one is not necessarily the principle of the other.This is to leave the question still open, whether there is any real order to respond to the scientific order, and to cast a doubt on the objective validity of all our knowledge. The divine judgment, or ideal formula, we have shown, is alike theprimum raaleand theprimum scientificum, and therefore asserts that the principles of the two orders are identical, and that the scientific must follow the real, for only the real is knowable. Hence science is and must be objectively certain.
The intuitive affirmation of the formula, being creates existences, creates, places the soul, and constitutes her intelligent existence. The author rightly says every thought is a judgment. There is no judgment without the copula, and the only real copula is the copula of the divine judgment or intuition, that is, the creative act of being. Being creating the soul is the principle of her existence; and as we have shown that she can act only as she exists, the principle of her existence is the principle of her acts, and therefore of her knowing, or the fact of knowledge. There is, then, no thought or judgment without the creative act for its copula. The two orders, then, are united and made identical in principle by the creative act of being. The creative act unites the acts of the soul, as the soul itself, to being.
The difficulty some minds feel in accepting this conclusion grows out of a misapprehension of the creative act, which they look upon as a past instead of a present act. The author holds that what is past has ceased to exist, and that the objects we recall in memory are "created a second time." He evidently misapprehends the real character of space and time. These are not existences, entities, as say the scholastics, but simple relations, with no existence, no reality, apart from therelata, or the related. Things do not exist in space and time; for space and time simply mark their relation to one another of coexistence and succession. Past and future are relations that subsist in or among creatures, and have their origin in the fact that creatures as second causes and in relation to their own acts are progressive. On the side of God, there is no past, no future; for his act has no progression, and is never inpotentia ad actum. It is a complete act, and in it all creatures are completed, consummated, in their beginning, and hence the past and the future are as really existent as what we call the present. The Creator is not acausa transiens, that creates the effect and leaves it standing alone, but acausa manens, ever present in the effect and creating it.
Creation is not in space and time, but originates the relations so-called. The creative act, therefore, can never be a past or a future act, an act that has produced or that will produce the effect, but an act that produces it always here and now. The act of conservation, as theologians teach, is identically the act of creation. God preserves or upholds us in existence by creating us at each instant of our lives. The universe, with all it contains, is a present creation. In relation to our acts as our acts or our progressiveness toward our final cause or last end, the universewascreated and will remain as long as the Creator wills; but in relation to God it is created here and now, and as newly created at this moment as when the sons of the morning sang together over its production, by the divine energy alone, from nothing; and the song ceases not; they are now singing it.There is nothing but this present creative act that stands between existences and nothing. The continuity of our existence is in the fact that God creates and does not cease to create us.
We have only to eliminate from our minds the conceptions that transport the relations of space and time to the Creator, or represent them as relations between Creator and creature, where the only relation is that of cause and effect, and to regard the creative act as having no relations of space and time, to be able to understand how the divine judgment, intuitively affirmed, is at once the principle of the real and of the scientific, and the creative act, the copula of being and existence, is the copula of every judgment or thought, as is proved by the fact already noted, that in no language can an assertion be made without the verbto be, that is, without God.
Dr. Porter, engaged in constructing not the science of things, but a science of knowing—aWissenschaftslehre—has apparently been content with the intuitions as principles or laws of science, without seeking to identify them with the real. He is a doctor of divinity, and cannot intend to deny, with Sir William Hamilton and the Positivists, that ontology can be any part of human science. The Positivists, with whom, in this respect, Sir William Hamilton, who has finished the Scottish school, fully agrees, assert that the whole field of science is restricted to positive facts and the induction of their laws, and that their principles and causes, the ontological truths, if such there be, belong to the unknowable, thus reducing, with Sir William Hamilton, science to nescience. But though Dr. Porter probably holds that there is an ontological reality, and knows perfectly well that it cannot be concluded from psychical phenomena, either by way of induction or of deduction, he yet seems unable or unwilling to say that the mind has in intuition direct and immediate apprehension of it. The first and necessary truths, or the necessary assumptions, as he calls them, which the mind is compelled to make in knowing particulars, such as "what is, is," "the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time," "whatever begins to exist must have a cause," etc., are, in his doctrine, abstract ideas, which, though they may represent a reality beyond themselves—and he tries to prove that they do—are yet not that reality itself. These ideas he states, indeed, in an abstract form, in which they are not real; but they are all identified in the ideal formula, or divine judgment, which is not an abstract but a real, concrete judgment. He holds them to be intuitions, indeed; but intuition, in his view, simply stands opposed to discursion, and he makes it an act of the soul immediately affirming the object, not the act of the object immediately affirming itself by its own creative act. Till being, in its creative act, affirms itself, the soul does not exist; and the intuitive act is that which creates it, and creates it intelligent. The intuition cannot, then, be the act of the soul, unless you suppose the soul can act without existing, or know without intelligence. If we make intuition the act of the soul, and suppose the necessary truths intuitively given are abstractions or representative ideas, how can we know that there is any reality represented by them? The old question again: How pass from the subjective to the objective?—from the scientific to the real?