These are a few notes of my saunterings. Each one of these holy places, as well as every church in those old lands, has its history which is interesting, and its legends that are poetical and full of meaning. They would fill volumes. Travelling is like eating; what gives pleasure to one only aggravates the bile of another. Some only find tyranny in the authority of the church, a love of pomp and display in her splendor, and superstition in her piety. Thoreau says, "Where an angel treads, it will be paradise all the way; but where Satan travels, it will be burning marl and cinders."
Professor Huxley, as we saw in a late number of this magazine, in the article onThe Physical Basis of Life, while rejecting spiritualism, gives his opinion that materialism is a philosophical error, on the ground of our ignorance of what matter is, or is not. There is some truth in the assertion of our ignorance of the essence or real nature of matter or material existence, though the professor had no logical right to assert it, after having adopted a materialistic terminology, and done his best to prove the material origin of life, thought, feeling, and the various mental phenomena. Yet we are far from regarding what is called materialism as the fundamental error of this age, nor do we believe that there is any necessary or irrepressible antagonism between spirit and matter, either intellectual or moral. In our belief, a profound philosophy, though it does not identify spirit and matter, shows their dialectic harmony, as revelation asserts it in asserting the resurrection of the flesh, and the indissoluble reunion of body and soul in the future life.
The fundamental error of this age is the denial of creation, and, theologically expressed, is, with the vulgar, atheism, and with the cultivated and refined, pantheism. Atheism is the denial of unity, and pantheism the denial of plurality or diversity, and both alike deny creation, and seek to explain the universe by the principle of self-generation or self-development. What is really denied is God THE CREATOR.
There are, no doubt, moral causes that have led in part to this denial, but with them we have at present nothing to do. The assertion of moral causes is more effective in preventing men from abandoning the truth and falling into error than in recovering and leading back to the truth those who have lost it, or know not where to find it. We lose our labor when we begin our efforts, as philosophers, to convert those who are in error by assuring them that they have erred only through moral perversity or hatred of the true and the good, the just and the holy, especially in an age when conscience is fast asleep. We aim at convincing, not at convicting, and therefore take up only the intellectual causes which lead to the denial of creation. Among these causes, we shall, no doubt, find materialism and a pseudo-spiritualism both playing their part; but the real causes, we apprehend, are in the fact that the philosophic tradition, which has come down to us from gentilism, has never been fully harmonized with the Christian tradition, which has come down to us through the church.
Gentilism had lost sight of God the Creator, and confounded creation with generation, emanation, or formation. Why the gentiles were led into this error would be an interesting chapter in the history of the wanderings of the human mind; but we have no space at present for the inquiry. It is enough, for our present purpose, to establish the fact that the gentiles did fall into it. The conception of creation is found in none of the heathen mythologies, learned or unlearned, of which we have any knowledge; and that they do not recognize a creative God, may be inferred from the fact that in them all, so far as known, was worshipped, under obscure symbols, the generative forces or functions of nature.In no gentile philosophy, not even in Plato or Aristotle, do you find any conception of God the Creator. Père Gratry, indeed, thinks he finds the fact of creation recognized by Plato, especially in theTimaeus; but though we have read time and again that most important of Plato's dialogues, we have never found the fact of creation in it; all we can find in it bearing on this point is what Plato, as we understand him, uniformly teaches, the identity of the idea with the essence orcausa essentialisof the thing. As, for instance, the idea of a man is the real, essential man himself; and is simply the idea in the divine mind, impressed on a preexisting matter, as the seal upon wax. God creates neither the idea nor the matter. The idea is himself; the matter is eternal. Aristotle does not essentially differ from Plato on this point. The individual existence, according to him, is composed of matter and form; the form alone is substantial, and matter is simply its passive recipient. The substantial forms are supplied, but not created by the divine intelligence. In no form of heathenism that existed before the Christian era have we found any conception of creation. The conception or tradition of creation was retained only by the patriarchs and the synagogue, and has been restored to the converted gentiles by the Christian church alone.
St. Augustine, and after him the great medieval doctors—especially the greatest of them all, the Angel of the schools—labored assiduously, and up to a certain point successfully, to amend the least debased gentile philosophy so as to make it harmonize with Christian theology and tradition. They took from gentile philosophy the elements it had retained from the ancient wisdom, supplied their defects with elements taken from the Christian tradition, and formed a really Christian philosophy, which still subsists in union with theology.
This work of harmonizing faith and philosophy, or, perhaps, more correctly, of constructing a philosophy in harmony with faith and theology, was nearly, if not quite completed by the great western scholastics or medieval doctors; but, unhappily, the East, separated from the centre of unity, or holding to it only loosely and by fits and starts, did not share in the great intellectual movement of the West. It made little or no progress in harmonizing gentile philosophy and Christian theology. It retained and studied the gentile philosophers, especially of the Platonic and Neoplatonic schools; and when the Greek scholars, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, in 1453, sought refuge in the West, they brought with them, not only their schism, but their unmitigated gentile philosophy, corrupted the western schools, and unsettled to a fearful extent the confidence of scholars in the scholastic philosophy. We owe the false systems of spiritualism and materialism, of atheism and pantheism, to what is called the Revival of Letters in the fifteenth century, or the Greek invasion of western Christendom.
The scholastics, especially St. Thomas, had transformed the peripatetic philosophy into a Christian philosophy; but the other Greek schools had remained pagan; and it was precisely these other schools, especially the Platonic, and Neoplatonic, or Alexandrian eclecticism, that now revived in their unchristianized form, and were opposed to the Aristotelian philosophy as modified by the schoolmen.Some of the early fathers were more inclined to Plato than to Aristotle, but none of these, not Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, or even St. Augustine, had harmonized throughout Plato's philosophy with Christianity, and we should greatly wrong St. Augustine, at least, if we called him a systematic Platonist.
With the study of Plato was revived in western Europe a false and exaggerated spiritualism, and a philosophy which denied creation as a truth of philosophy, and admitted it only as a doctrine of revelation. The authority of the scholastic philosophy was weakened, a decided tendency in pantheistic direction to thought was given, and the way was prepared for Giordano Bruno, as well as for the Protestant apostasy. We sayapostasy, because Luther's movement was really an apostasy, as its historical developments have amply proved. With Plato was revived the Academy with its scepticism, Sextus Empiricus, and after him Epicurus; and before the close of the sixteenth century, Europe was overrun with false mystics, sceptics, pantheists, and atheists, who abounded all through the seventeenth century, in spite of a very decided reaction in favor of faith and the church. What is worthy of special note is, that in all this period of two centuries and a half it was no uncommon thing to find men who, as philosophers, denied the immortality of the soul, which as believers they asserted; or combining a childlike faith with nearly universal scepticism, as we see in Montaigne.
Gradually, however, men began to see that, while they acknowledged a discrepancy between what they held as philosophy and the Christian faith, they could not retain both; that they must give up the one or the other. England, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, swarmed with free thinkers who denied all divine revelation; and France, in the eighteenth century, rejected the church, rejected the Bible, suppressed Christian worship, rebuilt the Pantheon, and voted death to be an eternal sleep. But the eighteenth century was born of the seventeenth, as the seventeenth was born of the sixteenth, as the sixteenth was born of the revival of Greek letters and philosophy, thoroughly impregnated with paganism, supposed by unthinking men to be the most glorious event in modern history, saving, always, Luther's Reformation.
In the seventeenth century, Descartes undertook to reform and reconstruct philosophy after a new method. He undertook to erect philosophy into a complete science in the rational order, independent of revelation. If he recognized the creative act of God, or God as creator, it was as a theologian, not as a philosopher; for certainly he does not start with the creative act as a first principle, nor does he, nor can he, arrive at it by his method. God as creator cannot be deduced fromcogito, ergo sum;for, without presupposing God as my creator, I cannot assert that I exist. Gentilism had so far revived that it was able to take possession of philosophy the moment it was detached from Christian theology and declared an independent science; and as that has no conception of creation, the tradition preserved by Jews and Christians was at once relegated from philosophy to theologian, from science to faith. Hence we fail to find creation recognized as a philosophical truth in the system of his disciple Malebranche, a profounder philosopher than Descartes himself. The prince of modern sophists, Spinoza, adopting as his starting point the definition of substance given by Descartes, demonstrates but too easily that there can be only one substance, and that there can be no creation, or that nothing does or can exist except the one substance and its attributes, modes, or affections. Calling the one substance God, he arrived at once at pantheism, now so prevalent.
That Descartes felt a difficulty in asserting creation in its proper sense, may be inferred from the fact that he always calls the soulla pensée, thought; never, if we recollect aright, a substance that thinks, which was itself a large stride toward pantheism, for pantheism consists precisely in denying all substantive existences except the one only substance, which is God. Spinoza developed his principles with a logic vastly superior to his own, and brought out errors which he probably did not foresee. Indeed, we do not pretend that Descartes intended to favor or had any suspicion that he was favoring pantheism; but he most certainly did not recognize any principle that would enable his disciples to oppose it, and in former days, before we knew the church, we ourselves found, or thought we found, pantheism flowing logically from his premises, and we escaped it only by rejecting the Cartesian philosophy.
Descartes revived in modern philosophy that antagonism between spirit and matter which was unknown to the scholastic philosophy, and which renders the mutual commerce of soul and body inexplicable. The scholastic doctors had recognized, indeed, matter and form; but with them matter was simply possibility, existing onlyin potentia ad formam, and was never supposed to be the basis or substratum of any existence whatever. The real existence was in the form, theformaor theidea. They distinguished, certainly, between corporeal and incorporeal existences; but not, as the moderns do, between spiritual and material existences, and the question between spiritualism and materialism, as we have it to-day, did not and could not come up with them. The distinction with them was between sensibles and intelligibles, the only distinction that philosophy by her own light knows.Spiritwas a term very nearly restricted to God, andspiritualmeant partaking of spirit, living according to the spirit; that is, living a godly life begotten by the Holy Spirit, as in the inspired writings of St. Paul.
Even the ancients did not distinguish, in the modern sense, between spirit and matter. Their gods were corporeal, but ordinarily impassible. The spirit was not a distinct existence, but was the universal principle of life, thought, and action, and the spirit of man was an emanation from the universal spirit, which at death flowed back and was reabsorbed in the ocean from which it emanated. Their ghosts were not disembodied spirits, as ours are, were not departed spirits, but the umbra or shade—a thin, aerial apparition, bearing the exact resemblance of the body, and had formed during life, if I may so speak, its inner lining, or the immediate envelope of the spirit. It is the body that after death still invests the soul, according to Swedenborg, who denies the resurrection of the flesh. According to ancient Greek and Roman gentilism it was not spirit, nor body, but something between the two. It hovered over and around the dead body, and it was to allay it, and enable it to rest in peace that the funeral rites or obsequies of the dead were performed, and judged to be so indispensable. The Marquis de Mirville, in his work onThe Fluidity of Spirits, seems to think the umbra was not a pure imagination, and is inclined to assert it, and to make it the basis of the explanation of many of the so-called spirit-phenomena.He supposes it is capable of transporting the soul, or of being transported by the soul, out of the body, and to a great distance from it, and that the body itself will bear the marks of the wounds that may be given it. In this way he also explains the prodigies of bilocation.
But however this may be, the ghost of heathen superstition is never the spirit returned to earth, nor is it the spirit that is doomed to Tartarus, or that is received into the Elysian Fields, the heathen paradise. Hades, which includes both Tartarus and Elysium, is a land of shadows, inhabited by shades that are neither spirit nor body; for the heathen knew nothing, and believed nothing, of the resurrection of the flesh, and the reunion of soul and body in a future life. The spirit at death returns to its fountain, and the body, dissolved, loses itself in the several elements from which it was taken, and only the shade or shadow of the living man survives. Even in Elysium, the ghosts that sport on the flowery banks of the river, repose in the green bowers, or pursue in the fields the mimic games and pastimes that they loved, are pale, thin, and shadowy. The whole is a mimic scene, if we may trust either Homer or Virgil, and is far less real and less attractive than the happy hunting grounds of the red men of our continent, to which the good, that is, the brave Indian is transported when he dies. The only distinction we find, with the heathen, between spirit and matter, is, the distinction between the divine substance, or intelligence, and an eternally existing matter, as the stuff of which bodies or corporeal existences, the only existences recognized, are formed or generated.
But Descartes distinguished them so broadly that he seemed to make them each independent of the other. Why, then, was either necessary to the life and activity of the other? And we see in Descartes no use that the soul is or can be to the body, or the body to the soul. Hence, philosophy, starting from Descartes, branched out in two opposite directions, the one toward the denial of matter, and the other toward the denial of spirit; or, as more commonly expressed, into idealism and materialism, but as it would be more proper to say, into intellectism and sensism. The spiritualism of Descartes, so far as it had been known in the history of philosophy, was only the Neoplatonic mysticism, which substitutes the direct and immediate vision, so to speak, of the intelligible, for its apprehension through sensible symbols and the exercise of the reasoning faculty. From this it was an easy step to the denial of an external and material world, as was proved by Berkeley, who held the external world to consist simply of pictures painted on the retina of the eye by the creative act of God; and before him by Collier, who maintained that only mind exists. It was an equally short and easy step to take the other direction, assert the sufficiency of the corporeal or material, and deny the existence of spirit or the incorporeal, since the senses take cognizance of the corporeal and the corporeal only. Either step was favored by the ancient philosophy revived and set up against the scholastic philosophy. It was hardly possible to follow out the exaggerated and exclusive spiritualism of the one class without running into mystic pantheism, or the independence of the corporeal or material, without falling into material pantheism or atheism. These two errors, or rather these two phases of one and the same error, are the fundamental or mother error of this age—perhaps, in principle, of all ages—and is receiving an able refutation by one of our collaborateurs in the essay on Catholicity and Pantheism now in the course of publication in this magazine.
It is no part of our purpose now to refute this error; we have traced it from gentilism, shown that it is essentially pagan, and owes its prevalence in the modern world to the revival of Greek letters and philosophy in the fifteenth century, the discredit into which the study of Plato and the Neoplatonists threw the scholastic philosophy, and especially to the divorce of philosophy from theology, declared by Descartes in the seventeenth century. Yet we do not accept either exclusive materialism or exclusive spiritualism, and the question itself hardly has place in our philosophy, as it hardly had place in that of St. Thomas. It became a question only when philosophy was detached from theology, of which it forms the rational as distinguishable but not separable from the revealed element, and reduced to a mereWissenchaftslehre, or rather a simple methodology. True philosophy joined with theology is the response to the question, What is, or exists? What are the principles and causes of things? What are our relations to those principles and causes? What is the law under which we are placed? and what are the means and conditions within our reach, natural or gracious, of fulfilling our destiny, or of attaining to our supreme good? Not a response to the question, for the most part an idle question, How do we know, or how do we know that we know?
Many of the most difficult problems for philosophers, and which we confess our inability to solve, may be eluded by a flank movement, to use a military phrase. Such is the question of the origin of ideas, of certitude, and the passage from the subjective to the objective, and this very question of spiritualism and materialism. All these are problems which no philosopher yet has solved from the point of view of exclusive psychology, or of exclusive ontology, or of any philosophy that leaves them to be asked. But we are much mistaken if they do not cease to be problems at all, when one starts with the principles of things, or if they do not solve themselves. We do not find them, in the modern sense, raised by Plato or Aristotle, nor by St. Augustine or St. Thomas. When we have the right stand-point, if Mr. Richard Grant White will allow us the term, and see things from the point of view of the real order, these problems do not present themselves, and are wholly superseded. Professor Huxley is right enough when he tells us that we know the nature and essence neither of spirit nor of matter. I know from revelation that there is a spirit in man, and that the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding, but I know neither by revelation nor by reason what spirit is. God is a spirit; but if man is a spirit, it must be in a very different sense from that in which God is a spirit. Although the human spirit may have a certain likeness to the Divine spirit, it yet cannot be divine, for it is created; and they who call it divine, a spark of divinity, or a particle of God, either do not mean, or do notknowwhat they literally assert. They only repeat the old gentile doctrine of the substantial identity of the spirit with divinity, from whom it emanates, and to whom it returns, to be reabsorbed in him—a pantheistic conception. All we can say of spiritual existences is, that they are incorporeal intelligences; and all we can say of man is, that he has both a corporeal and an incorporeal nature; and perhaps without revelation we should be able to say not even so much.
We know, again, just as little of matter. What is matter? Who can answer? Nay, what is body? Who can tell? Body, we are told, is composed of material elements. Be it so. What are those elements? Into what is matter resolvable in the last analysis? Into indestructible and indissoluble atoms, says Epicurus; into entelecheia, or self-acting forces, says Aristotle; into extension, says Descartes; into monads, each acting from its centre, and representing the entire universe from its own point of view, says Leibnitz; into centres of attraction and gravitation, says Father Boscovich; into pictures painted on the retina of the eye by the Creator, says Berkeley, the Protestant bishop of Cloyne, and so on. We may ask and ask, but can get no final answer.
Take, instead of matter, an organic body; who can tell us what it is? It is extended, occupies space, say the Cartesians. But is this certain? Leibnitz disputes it, and it is not easy to attach any precise meaning to the assertion "it occupies space," if we have any just notion of space and time, thepons asinorumof psychologists. What is called actual or real space is the relation of co-existence of creatures; and is simply nothing abstracted from the related. It would be a great convenience if philosophers would learn that nothing is nothing, and that only God can create something from nothing. Space being nothing but relation, to say of a thing that it occupies space, is only saying that it exists, and exists in a certain relation to other objects. This relation may be either sensible or intelligible; it is sensible, or what is called sensible space, when the objects related are sensible. Extension is neither the essence nor a property of matter, but the sensible relation of an object either to some other objects or to our sensible perception. It is, as Leibnitz very well shows, only the relation of continuity. Whirl a wheel with great force and rapidity, and you will be unable to distinguish its several spokes, and it will seem to be all of one continuous and solid piece. Intelligible space as distinguished from sensible space is the logical relation of things, or, as more commonly called, the relation of cause and effect. When we conform our notions of space to the real order, and understand that the sensible simply copies, imitates, or symbolizes the intelligible, we shall see that we have no authority for saying extension is even a property of body or of matter.
That extension is simply the sensible relation of body, not its essence, nor even a property of matter, is evident from what physiologists tell us of organic or living bodies. There can be no reasonable doubt that the body I now have is the same identical body with which I was born, and yet it contains, probably, not a single molecule or particle of sensible matter it originally had. As I am an old man, all the particles or molecules of my body have probably been changed some ten or twenty times over; yet my body remains unchanged. It is evident, then, since the molecular changes do not affect its identity, that those particles or molecules of matter which my body assimilates from the food I take to repair the waste that is constantly going on, or to supply the loss of those particles or molecules constantly exuded or thrown off, do not compose, make up, or constitute the real body. This fact is commended to the consideration of those learned men, like the late Professor George Bush, who deny the resurrection of the body, on the ground that these molecular changes which have been going on during life render it a physical impossibility. This fact also may have some bearing on the Catholic mystery of Transubstantiation.St. Augustine distinguishes between the visible body and the intelligible body—the body that is seen and the body that is understood—and tells us that it is the intelligible, or, as he sometimes says, the spiritual, not the visible or sensible, body of our Lord that is present in the Blessed Eucharist. In fact, there is no change in the sensible body of the bread and the wine, in Transubstantiation. The sensible body remains the same after consecration that it was before. The change is in the essence or substance, or the intelligible body, and hence the appropriateness of the termtransubstantiationto express the change which takes place at the words of consecration. Only the intelligible body, that is, what is non-sensible in the elements bread and wine, is transubstantiated, and yet their real body is changed, and the real body of our Lord takes its place. The nonsensible or invisible body, the intelligible body, is then, in either case, assumed by the sacred mystery to be the real body; and hence, supposing us right in our assumption that our body remains always the same in spite of the molecular changes—which was evidently the doctrine of St. Augustine—there is nothing in science or the profoundest philosophy to show that either transubstantiation or the resurrection of the flesh is impossible, or that God may not effect either consistently with his own immutable nature, if he sees proper to do it. Nothing aids the philosopher so much as the study of the great doctrines and mysteries of Christianity, as held and taught by the church.
The distinction between seeing and intellectually apprehending, and therefore between the visible body and the intelligible body, asserted and always carefully observed by St. Augustine when treating of the Blessed Eucharist, belongs to a profounder philosophy than is now generally cultivated. Our prevailing philosophy, especially outside of the church, recognizes no such distinction. It is true, we are told, that the senses perceive only the sensible properties or qualities of things; that they never perceive the essence or substance; but then the essence or substance is supposed to be a mere abstraction with no intelligible properties or qualities, or a mere substratum of sensible properties and qualities. The sensible exhausts it, and beyond what the senses proclaim the substance has no quality or property, and is and can be the subject of no predicate. This is a great mistake. The sensible properties and qualities are real, that is, are not false or illusory; but they are real only in the sensible order, or themimesis, as Gioberti, after Plato and some of the Greek fathers, calls it in his posthumous works. The intelligible substance is the thing itself, and has its own intelligible properties and qualities, which the sensible only copies, imitates, or mimics. All through nature there runs, above the sensible, the intelligible, in which is the highest created reality, with its own attributes and qualities, which must be known before we can claim to know anything as it really is or exists. We do not know this in the case of body or matter; we do not and cannot know what either really is, and can really know of either only its sensible properties.
We know that if matter exists at all, it must have an essence or substance; but what the substance really is human science has not learned and cannot learn. We really know, then, of matter in itself no more than we do of spirit, except that matter has its sensible copy, which spirit has not.Matter, as to its substance, is supersensible, and as to the essence or nature of its substance is superintelligible, as is spirit; and we only know that it has a substance; and of substance itself, we can only say, if it exists, it is avis activa, as opposed tonuda potentia, which is a mere possibility, and no existence at all. Such being the case, we agree with Professor Huxley, that neither spiritualism nor materialism is, in his sense, admissible, and that each is a philosophical error, or, at least, an unprovable hypothesis.
But here our agreement ends and our divergence begins. The Holy See has required the traditionalists to maintain that the existence of God, the immateriality of the soul, and the liberty of man can be proved with certainty by reason. We have always found the definitions of the church our best guide in the study of philosophy, and that we can never run athwart her teaching without finding ourselves at odds with reason and truth. We are always sure that when our theology is unsound our philosophy will be bad. There is a distinction already noted between spirit and matter, which is decisive of the whole question, as far as it is a question at all. Matter has, and spirit has not, sensible properties or qualities. These sensible properties or qualities do not constitute the essence or substance of matter, which we have seen is not sensible, but they distinguish it from spirit, which is non-sensible. This difference, in regard to sensible qualities and properties, proves that there must be a difference of substance, that the material substance and the immaterial substance are not, and cannot be one and the same substance, although we know not what is the essence or nature of either.
We take matter here in the sense of that which has properties or qualities perceptible by the senses, and spirit or spiritual substance as an existence that has no such properties or qualities. The Holy See says theimmateriality, notspirituality, of the soul, is to be proved by reason. The spirituality of the soul, except in the sense of immateriality, cannot be proved or known by philosophy, but is simply a doctrine of divine revelation, and is known only by that analogical knowledge called faith. All that we can prove or assert by natural reason, is, that the soul is immaterial, or not material in the sense that matter has for its sign the mimesis, or sensible properties or qualities. We repeat, the sensible is not the material substance, but is its natural sign. So that, where the sign is wanting, we know the substance is not present and active. On the other hand, where there is a force undeniably present and operating without the sign, we know at once that it is an immaterial force or substance.
That the soul is not material, therefore is an immaterial substance, we know; because it has none of the sensible signs or properties of matter. We cannot see, hear, touch, smell, nor taste it. The very facts materialists allege to prove it material, prove conclusively, that, if anything, it is immaterial. The soul has none of the attributes or qualities that are included, and has others which evidently are not included, in the definition of matter. Matter, as to its substance, is avis activa, for whatever exists at all is an active force; but it is not a force or substance that thinks, feels, wills, or reasons. It has no sensibility, no mind, no intelligence, no heart, no soul. But animals have sensibility and intelligence; have they immaterial souls? Why not? We have no serious difficulty in admitting that animals have souls, only not rational and immortal souls.Soul, in them, is not spirit, but it may be immaterial. Indeed, we can go further, and concede an immaterial soul, not only to animals but to plants, though, of course, not an intelligent or even a sensitive soul; for if plants, or at least some plants, are contractile and slightly mimic sensibility in animals, nothing proves that they are sensitive. We have no proof that any living organism, vegetable, animal, or human, is or can be a purely material product. Professor Huxley has completely failed, as we have shown, in his effort to sustain his theory of a physical or material basis of life, and physiologists profess to have demonstrated by their experiments and discoveries that no organism can originate in inorganic matter, or in any possible mechanical, chemical, or electrical arrangement of material atoms, and is and can be produced, unless by direct and immediate creation of God, only by generation from a preexisting male and female organism. This is true alike of plants, animals, and man. Nothing hinders you, then, from calling, if you so wish, the universal basis of lifeanimaor soul, and asserting, the psychical basis, in opposition to Professor Huxley's physical basis, of life; only you must take care and not assert that plants and animals have human souls, or that soul in them is the same that it is in man.
There are grave thinkers who are not satisfied with the doctrine that ascribes the apparent and even striking marks of mind in animals to instinct, a term which serves to cover our ignorance, but tells us nothing; still less are they satisfied with the Cartesian doctrine that the animal is simply a piece of mechanism moved or moving only by mechanical springs and wheels like a clock or watch. Theologians are reluctant chiefly, we suppose, to admit that animals have souls, because they are accustomed to regard all souls, as to their substance, the same, and because it has seemed to them that the admission would bring animals too near to men, and not preserve the essential difference between the animal nature and the human. But we see no difficulty in admitting as many different sorts or orders of souls as there are different orders, genera, and species of living organisms. God is spirit, and the angels are spirits; are the angels therefore identical in substance with God? The human soul is spiritual; is there no difference in substance between human souls and angels? We know that men sometimes speak of a departed wife, child, or friend as being now an angel in heaven; but they are not to be understand literally, any more than the young man in love with a charming young lady who does not absolutely refuse his addresses, when he calls her—a sinful mortal, not unlikely—an angel. In the resurrection men arelikethe angels of God, in the respect that they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but the spirits of the just made perfect, that stand before the throne, are not angels; they are still human in their nature. If, then, we may admit spirits of different nature and substance, why not souls, and, therefore, vegetable souls, animal souls, and human souls, agreeing only in the fact that they are immaterial, or not material substances or forces?
It perhaps may be thought that to admit different orders of souls to correspond to the different orders, genera, and species of organisms, would imply that the human soul is generated with the body; contrary to the general doctrine of theologians, that the soul is created immediatelyad hoc.The Holy See censured Professor Frohshamer's doctrine on the subject; but the point condemned was, as we understand it, that the professor claimedcreativepower for man. But it is not necessary to suppose, even if plants and animals have souls, that the human soul is generated with the body, in any sense inconsistent with faith. The church has defined that "anima est forma corporis," that is, as we understand it, the soul is the vital or informing principle, the life of the body, without which the body is dead matter. The organism generated is a living not a dead organism, and therefore if the soul is directly and immediately createdad hoc, the creative act must be consentaneous with the act of generation, a fact which demands a serious modification of the medical jurisprudence now taught in our medical schools. Some have asserted for man alone a vegetable soul, an animal soul, and a spiritual soul, but this is inadmissible; man has simply a human soul, though capable of yielding to the grovelling demands of the flesh as well as to the higher promptings of the spirit.
But we have suffered ourselves to be drawn nearer to the borders of the land of impenetrable mysteries than we intended, and we retrace our steps as hastily as possible. Our readers will understand that what we have said of the souls of plants and animals is said only as a possible concession, but not set forth as a doctrine we do or design to maintain; for it lies too near the province of revelation to be settled by philosophy. All we mean is that we see on the part of reason no serious objection to it. Perhaps it may be thought that we lose, by the concession, the argument for the immortality of the soul drawn from its simplicity; but, even if so, we are not deprived of other, and to our mind, much stronger arguments. But it may be said all our talk about souls is wide of the mark, for we have not yet proved that man is or has a soul distinguishable from the body, and which does or can survive its dissolution, and that our argument only proves that, if a man has a soul, it is immaterial. The materialist denies that there is any soul in man distinct from the body, and maintains that the mental phenomena, which we ascribe to an immaterial soul, are the effects of material organization. But that is for him to prove, not for us to disprove. Organization can give to matter no new properties or qualities, as aggregation can give only the sum of the individuals aggregated. Matter we have taken all along, as all the world takes it, as a substance that has properties and qualities perceptible by the senses, and it has no meaning except so far as so perceptible. Any active force that has no mimesis or sensible qualities, properties, or attributes, is an immaterial, not a material substance. That man is or has an active force that feels, thinks, reasons, wills, we know as well as we know anything; indeed, better than we know anything else. These acts or operations are not operations of a material substance. We know that they are not, from the fact that they are not sensible properties or qualities, and therefore there must be in man an active force or substance that is not material, but immaterial. Material substance is, we grant, avis activa; but if it has properties or qualities, it has no faculties. It acts, but it acts onlyad finem, or to an end, neverpropter finem, or for an end foreseen and deliberately willed or chosen. But the force that man has or is, has faculties, not simply properties or qualities, and can and does act deliberately, with foresight and choice, for an end. Hence, it is not and cannot be a substance included in the definition of matter.
That this immaterial soul, now united to body and active only in union with matter, survives the dissolution of the body and is immortal, is another question, and is not proved, in our judgment, by proving its immateriality. There is an important text in Ecclesiastes, 3:21, which would seem to have some bearing on the assumption that the immortality of the soul is really a truth of philosophy as well as of revelation.
"Who knoweth if the spirit of the children of Adam ascendupward, and if the spirit of the beasts descend downward?"
"Who knoweth if the spirit of the children of Adam ascendupward, and if the spirit of the beasts descend downward?"
The doubt is not as to the immortality of the soul, but as to the ability of reason without revelation to demonstrate it. Certainly, reason can demonstrate its possibility, and that nothing warrants its denial. The doctrine, in some form, has always been believed by the human race, whether savage or civilized, barbarous or refined, and has been denied only by exceptional individuals in exceptional epochs. This proves either that it is a dictate of universal reason, or a doctrine of a revelation made to man in the beginning, before the dispersion of the human race commenced. In either case the reason for believing the doctrine would be sufficient; but we are disposed to take the latter alternative, and to hold that the belief in the immortality of the soul, or of an existence after death, originated in revelation made to our first parents, and has been perpetuated and diffused by tradition, pure and integral with the patriarchs, the synagogue, and the church; but mutilated, corrupted, and travestied with the cultivated as well as with the uncultivated heathen. With the heathen Satan played his pranks with the tradition, as he is doing with it with the spiritists in our own times.
But if the belief originated in revelation and is a doctrine of faith rather than of science, yet is it not repugnant to science, and reason has much to urge in its support. The immateriality of the soul implies its unity and simplicity, and therefore it can not undergo dissolution, which is the death of the body. Its dissolution is impossible, because it is a monad, having attributes and qualities, but not made up by the combination of parts. It is the form of the body, that is, it vivifies the organic or central cell, and gives to the organism its life, instead of drawing its own life from it. Science, then, has nothing from which to infer that it ceases to exist when the body dies. The death of the body does not necessarily imply its destruction. True, we have here only negative proofs, but negative proofs are all that is needed, in the case of a doctrine of tradition, to satisfy the most exacting reason. The soul may be extinguished with the body, but we cannot say that it is without proof. Left to our unassisted reason, we could not say that the soul of the animal expires with its body. Indeed, the Indian does not believe it, and therefore buries with the hunter his favorite dog, to accompany him in the happy hunting grounds.
The real matter to be proved is not that the soul can or does survive the body, but that it dies with the body. We have seen that it is distinguishable from the body, does not draw its life from the body, but imparts life to it; how then conclude that it dies with it? We have not a particle of proof, and not a single fact from which we can logically infer that it does so die. What right then has any one to say that it does? The laboring oar is in the hands of those who assert that the soul dies with the body, and it is for them to prove what they assert, not for us to disprove it.The real affirmative in the case is not made by those who assert the immortality of the soul, but by those who assert its mortality. The very termimmortalis negative, and simply denies mortality. Life is always presumptive of the continuance of life, and the continuance of the life of the soul must be presumed in the absence of all proofs of its death.
We have seen that the immateriality, unity, and simplicity of the soul prove that it does not necessarily die with the body, but that itmaysurvive it. The fact that God has written his promise of a future life in the very nature and destiny of the soul, is for us a sufficient proof that the soul does not die with the body. That God is, and is the first and final cause of all existences, is a truth of science as well as of revelation. He has created all things by himself, and for himself. He then must be their last end, and therefore their supreme good, according to their several natures. He has created man with a nature that nothing short of the possession of himself as his supreme good can satisfy. In so creating man, he promises him in his nature the realization of this good, that is, the possession of himself as final cause, unless forfeited and rendered impossible by man's own fault. To return to God as his supreme good without being absorbed in him, is man's destiny promised in his very constitution. But this destiny is not realized nor realizable in this life, and therefore there must be another life to fulfil what he promises, for no promise of God, however made, can fail. This argument we regard as conclusive.
The resurrection of the flesh, the reunion of the soul and body, future happiness as a reward of virtue, and the misery of those who through their own fault fail of their destiny, as a punishment for sin, etc., are matters of revelation or theology as distinguished from philosophy, and do not require to be treated here, any further than to say, if reason has little to say for them, it has nothing to say against them. They belong to the mysteries of faith which, though never contrary to reason, are above it, in an order transcending its domain.
We have thus far treated spiritualism and materialism from the point of view of philosophy, not from that of psychology, or of our faculties. The two doctrines, as they prevail to-day, are simply psychological doctrines. The partisans of the one say that the soul has no faculty of knowing any but material objects, and therefore assert materialism; the partisans of the other say that the soul has a faculty by which she apprehends immediately immaterial or spiritual objects or truths, and hence they assert what goes by the name of spiritualism, which may or may not deny the existence of matter. Descartes and Cousin assert the cognition of both spirit and matter, but as independent each of the other; Collier and Berkeley deny that we have any cognition of matter, and therefore deny its existence, save in the mind. The truth, we hold, lies with neither. The soul has no direct intuition of the immaterial or intelligible. We useintuitionhere in the ordinary sense, as an act of the soul—knowing by looking on, or immediately beholding; that is, in the sense of intelligible as distinguished from sensible perceptions—intellection, as some say, as distinguished from sensation. This empirical intuition, as we call it, is very distinct from that intuitiona prioriby which the ideal formula is affirmed, for that is the act of the divine Being himself, creating the mind, and becoming himself the light thereof.But that constitutes the mind, and is its object, not its act. No doubt, the intellectual principles of all reality and of all science are affirmed in that intuitiona priori, and hence these principles are ever present to the soul as the basis of all intelligible as well as of all sensible experience. Yet they are asserted by the mind's own act only as sensibly represented, according to the peripatetic maxim, "Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu." The mind has three faculties, sensibility, intellect, and will, but it is itself one, a singlevisor force, and never acts with one faculty alone, whether it feels, thinks, or wills; and, united as it is in this life with the body, it never acts as body alone or as spirit alone. There are then no intellections without sensation, nor sensations without intellection; purely noetic truth, therefore, can never be grasped save through a sensible medium.
We have already explained this with regard to material objects, in which the substance, though supersensible, has its sensible sign, through which the mind reaches it. But immaterial or ideal objects are, as we have seen, precisely those which have no sensible sign of their own—properties or qualities perceptible by the senses. For this order of truth the only sensible representation is language, which is the sensible sign or symbol of immaterial or ideal truth. We arrive at this order of reality or truth only through the medium of language which embodies it; that is to say, only through the medium of tradition, or of a teacher. So far we accord with the traditionalists. We do not believe that, if God had left men in the beginning without any instruction or language in which the ideas are embodied, they would ever have been able to assert the existence of God, the immateriality of the soul, and the liberty or free will of man—the three great ideal truths which the Holy See requires us to maintain can beprovedwith certainty by reason; and we do not hold that, like the revealed mysteries, they are suprarational truth, and to be taken only on the authority of a supernatural revelation. If God had not infused the knowledge of them into the first of the race along with language, which he also infused into Adam, we should never by our reason and instincts alone have found them out, or distinctly apprehended them; but being taught them, or finding them expressed in language, we are able to verify or prove them with certainty by our natural reason, in which respect we accord with those whom the traditionalists call rationalists.
We have studiously avoided, as far as possible, the metaphysics of the subject we have been considering, and perhaps have, in consequence, kept too near its surface; but we think we have established our main point, that neither spiritualism nor materialism, taken exclusively, is philosophically defensible. We are able to distinguish between spirit and matter, but we can deny the existence or the activity, according to its own nature, of neither. We know matter by its sensible properties or qualities, We know spirit only as sensibly represented by language. Let language be corrupted, and our knowledge of ideal or non-sensible truth, or philosophy, will also be corrupted, mutilated, or perverted. This will be still more the case with the superintelligible truth supernaturally revealed, which is apprehensible only through the medium of language. Hence, St. Paul is careful to admonish St. Timothy to hold fast "the form of sound words," and hence, too, the necessity, if God makes us a revelation of spiritual things, that he should provide an infallible living teacher to preserve the infallibility of the language in which it is made.We may see here, too, the reason why the infallible church is hardly less necessary to the philosopher than to the theologian. Where faith and theology are preserved in their purity and integrity, philosophy will not be able to stray far from the truth, and where philosophy is sound, the sciences will not long be unsound. The aberrations of philosophy are due almost solely to the neglect of philosophers to study it in its relation with the dogmatic teaching of the church.
Some of our dear and revered friends in France and elsewhere are seeking, as the cure for the materialism which is now so prevalent, to revive the spiritualism of the seventeenth century. But the materialism they combat is only the reaction of the mind against that exaggerated spiritualism which they would revive. Where there are two real forces, each equally evident and equally indestructible, you can only alternate between them, till you find the term of their synthesis, and are able to reconcile and harmonize them. The spiritualism defended by Cousin in France has resulted only in the recrudescence of materialism. The trouble now is, that matter and spirit are presented in our modern systems as antagonistic and naturally irreconcilable forces. The duty of philosophers is not to labor to pit one against the other, or to give the one the victory over the other; but to save both, and to find out the middle term which unites them. We know there must be somewhere that middle term; for both extremes are creations of God, who makes all things by number, weight, and measure, and creates always after the logic of his own essential nature. All his works, then, must be logical and dialectically harmonious.
Whether we have indicated this middle term or not, we have clearly shown, we think, that it is a mistake to suppose the two terms are not in reality mutually irreconcilable. Nothing proves that, as creatures of God, each in its own order and place is not as sacred and necessary as the other. We do not know the nature or essence of either, nor can we say in what, as to this nature and essence, the precise difference between them consists; but we know that in our present life both are united, and that neither acts without the other. All true philosophy must then present them not as opposing, but as harmonious and concurring forces.
We do not for ourselves ever apply the term spiritualism to a purely intellectual philosophy. We do not regard the words spirit and soul as precisely synonymous. St. Paul, Heb. iv. 12, says, "The word of God is living and effectual, … reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit," or, as the Protestant version has it, "quick and powerful, … piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit." There is evidently, then, however closely related they may be, a distinction between the soul and the spirit. Hence there may be soul that is not spirit, which was generally held by the ancients. The Greeks had their[Greek text], and the Latins theiranimaandspiritus. The term spirit, when applied to man, seems to us to designate the moral powers rather than the intellectual, and the moral powers or faculties are those which specially distinguish man from animals. St. Paul applies the term spiritual uniformly in a moral sense, and usually, if not always, to men born again of the Holy Ghost, or the regenerated, and to the influences and gifts of the Holy Spirit; that is, to designate the supernatural character, gifts, graces, and virtues of those who have been translated into the kingdom of God and are fellow-citizens of the commonwealth of Christ, or the Christian republic.Hence, we shrink from calling any intellectual philosophy spiritualism. If it touches philosophy, as it undoubtedly does—since grace supposes nature, and a man must be born into the natural order before he can be born again into the supernatural order, or regenerated by the Spirit—it rises into the region of supernatural sanctity, into which no man by his natural powers can enter; for it is a sanctity that places one on the plane of a supernatural destiny.
But even taken in this higher sense, there is no antagonism between spirit and matter. There is certainly a struggle, a warfare that remains through life; but the struggle is not between the soul and the body; it is, as is said, between the higher and inferior powers of the soul, between the spirit and concupiscence, between the law of the mind, which bids us labor for spiritual good which will last for ever, and the law in the members, which looks only to the good of the body, in its earthly relations. The saints, who chastise, mortify, macerate the body by their fastings, vigils, and scourgings, do not do it on the principle that the body is evil, or that matter is the source of evil. There is a total difference in principle between Christian asceticism and that of the Platonists, who hold that evil originates in the intractableness of matter, that holds the soul imprisoned as in a dungeon, and from which it sighs and struggles for deliverance. The Christian knows that our Lord himself assumed flesh and retains for ever his glorified body. He believes in the resurrection of the body and its future everlasting reunion with the soul. Christ, dying in a material body, has redeemed both matter and spirit. Hence we venerate the relics of our Lord and his saints, and believe matter may be hallowed. In our Lord all opposites are reconciled, and universal peace is established.