Chapter XV — FINAL CAUSES; UNIVERSAL ORDER

106. TWO CONCEPTIONS OF EXPERIENCE, THE MECHANICAL AND THE TELEOLOGICAL.—We have seen that all change in the universe demands for its explanation certain real principles, viz. passive potentiality, actualization, and active power or efficiency; in other words that it points to material, formal and efficient causes. Do these principles suffice to explain the course of nature to the inquiring mind? Mechanists say, Yes; these principles explain it so far as it is capable of explanation. Teleologists say, No; these principles do not of themselves account for the universe of our experience: this universe reveals itself as a cosmos: hence it demands for its explanation real principles or causes of another sort, final causes, the existence of which implies purpose, plan or design, and therefore also intelligence.

The problem whether or not the universe manifests the existence and influence of final causes has been sometimes formulated in this striking fashion: Is it that birds have wings in order to fly, or is it merely that they fly because they have wings? Such a graphic statement of the problem is misleading, for it suggests that the alternatives are mutually exclusive, that we must vote either for final causes or for efficient causes. As a matter of fact we accept both. Efficient causes account for the course of nature; but they need to be determined by the influence of final causes. Moreover, the question how far this influence of final causes extends—finality (finalitas), as it is technically termed—is a secondary question; nor does the advocate of final causality in the universe undertake to decide its nature and scope in every instance and detail, any more than the physical scientist does to point out all the physical laws embodied in an individual natural event, or the biologist to say whether a doubtful specimen of matter is organic or inorganic, or whether a certain sort of living cell is animal or vegetable. The teleologist’s thesis, as against that of mechanism, is simply that there are final causes in the universe, that the universe does really manifest the presence and influence of final causes.(501)

There are two ways, however, of conceiving this influence as permeating the universe. The conception of final causality in general is, as we shall see, the conception of acting for an end, from a motive, with a purpose, plan or design for the attainment of something. It implies arrangement, ordination, adaptation of means to ends (55). Now at least there appears to be, pervading the universe everywhere and directing its activities, such an adaptation. The admirable equilibrium of forces which secures the regular motions of the heavenly bodies; the exact mixture of gases which makes our atmosphere suitable for organic life; the distance and relative positions of the sun and the earth, which secure conditions favourable to organic life; the chemical transformations whereby inorganic elements and compounds go to form the living substance of plants and are thus prepared for assimilation as food by animal organisms; the wonderfully graded hierarchy of living species in the animate world, and the mutual interdependence of plants and animals; the endless variety of instincts which secure the preservation and well-being of living individuals and species; most notably the adaptability and adaptation of other mundane creatures to human uses by man himself,—innumerable facts such as these convince us that the things of the universe are useful to one another, that they are constituted and disposed in relation to one another as if they had been deliberately chosen to suit one another, to fit in harmoniously together in mutual co-ordination and subordination so that by their interaction and interdependence they work out a plan or design and subserve as means to definite ends. This suitability of things relatively to one another, this harmony of the nature and activity of each with the nature and activity of every other, we may designate as extrinsic finality. The Creator has willed so to arrange and dispose all creatures in conditions of space and time that such harmonious but purely extrinsic relations of mutual adaptation do de facto obtain and continue to prevail between them under His guidance.

But are these creatures themselves, in their own individual natures, equally indifferent to any definite mode of action, so that the orderly concurrence of their activities is due to an initial collocation and impulse divinely impressed upon them from without, and not to any purposive principle intrinsic to themselves individually? Descartes, Leibniz and certain supporters of the theory of atomic dynamism regarding the constitution of matter, while recognizing a relative and extrinsic finality in the universe in the sense explained, seem to regard the individual agencies of the universe as mere efficient causes, not of themselves endowed with any immanent, intrinsic directive principle of their activities, and so contributing by mere extrinsic arrangement to the order of the universe. Scholastic philosophers, on the contrary, following the thought of Aristotle,(502) consider that every agency in the universe is endowed with an intrinsic principle of finality which constantly directs its activities towards the realization of a perfection which is proper to it and which constitutes its intrinsic end (45-46). And while each thus tends to its own proper perfection by the natural play of its activities, each is so related to all others that they simultaneously realize the extrinsic purpose which consists in the order and harmony of the whole universe. Thus the extrinsic and relative finality whereby all conspire to constitute the universe a cosmos is secondary and posterior and subordinate to the deeper, intrinsic, immanent and absolute finality whereby each individual created nature moves by a tendency or law of its being towards the realization of a good which perfects it as its natural end.

In order to understand the nature of this intrinsic and extrinsic finality in the universe, and to vindicate its existence against the philosophy of Mechanism, we must next analyse the concept, and investigate the influence, of what are called final causes.

107. THE CONCEPT OF FINAL CAUSE; ITS OBJECTIVE VALIDITY IN ALL NATURE. CLASSIFICATION OF FINAL CAUSES.—When we speak of the end of the year, or the end of a wall, we mean the extreme limit or ultimate point; and the term conveys no notion of a cause. Similarly, were a person to say “I have got to the end of my work,” we should understand him to mean simply that he had finished it. But when people act deliberately and as intelligent beings, they usually act for some conscious purpose, with some object in view, for the achievement or attainment of something; they continue to act until they have attained this object; when they have attained it they cease to act; its attainment synchronizes with the end of their action, taking this term in the sense just illustrated. Probably this is the reason why the term end has been extended from its original sense to signify the object for the attainment of which an intelligent agent acts. This object of conscious desire induces the agent to seek it; and because it thus influences the agent to act it verifies the notion of a cause: it is a final cause, an end in the causal sense. For instance, a young man wishes to become a medical doctor: the art of healing* is the *end he wishes to secure. For this purpose he pursues a course of studies and passes certain examinations; these acts whereby he qualifies himself by obtaining a certain fund of knowledge and skill are means to the end intended by him. He need not desire these preparatory labours for their own sake; but he does desire them as useful for his purpose*, as *means to his end: in so far as he wills them as means he wills them not for their own sake but because of the end, propter finem. He apprehends the end as a good; he intends its attainment; he elects or selects certain acts or lines of action as means suitable for this purpose. An end or final cause, therefore, may be defined as something apprehended as a good, and which, because desired as such, influences the will to choose some action or line of action judged necessary or useful for the attainment of this good. Hence Aristotle’s definition of end as τὸ οὖ ἕνεκα: id cujus gratia aliquid fit: that for the sake of which an agent acts.

The end understood in this sense is a motive of action; not only would the action not take place without the agent’s intending the end, showing the latter to be a conditio sine qua non; but, more than this, the end as a good, apprehended and willed, has a positive influence on the ultimate effect or issue, so that it is really a cause.

Man is conscious of this “finality,” or influence of final causes on his own deliberate actions. As an intelligent being he acts “for ends,” and orders or regulates his actions as means to those ends; so much so that when we see a man’s acts, his whole conduct, utterly unrelated to rational ends, wholly at variance and out of joint with the usual ends of intelligent human activity, we take it as an indication of loss of reason, insanity. Furthermore, man is free; he chooses the ends for which he acts; he acts electivé propter fines.

But in the domain of animal life and activity is there any evidence of the influence of final causes? Most undoubtedly. Watch the movements of animals seeking their prey; observe the wide domain of animal instincts; study the elaborate and intricate lines of action whereby they protect and foster and preserve their lives, and rear their young and propagate their species: could there be clearer or more abundant evidence that in all this conduct they are influenced by objects which they apprehend and seek as sensible goods? Not that they can conceive in the abstract the ratio bonitatis in these things, or freely choose them as good, for they are incapable of abstract thought and consequent free choice; but that these sensible objects, apprehended by them in the concrete, do really influence or move their sense appetites to desire and seek them; and the influence of an object on sense appetite springs from the goodness of this object (44, 45). They tend towards apprehended goods; they act apprehensivé propter fines.(503)

Finally, even in the domains of unconscious agencies, of plant life and inorganic nature, we have evidence of the influence of final causes. For here too we witness innumerable varied, complex, ever-renewed activities, constantly issuing in results useful to, and good for, the agents which elicit them: operations which contribute to the development and perfection of the natures of these agents (46). Now if similar effects demand similar causes how can we refuse to recognize even in these activities of physical nature the influence of final causes? Whenever and wherever we find a great and complex variety of active powers, forces, energies, issuing invariably in effects which suit and develop and perfect the agents in question,—in a word, which are good for these agents,—whether the latter be conscious or unconscious, does not reason itself dictate to us that all such domains of action must be subject to the influence of final causes? Of course it would be mere unreflecting anthropomorphism to attribute to unconscious agencies a conscious subjection to the attracting and directing influence of such causes. But the recognition of such influence in this domain implies no naïve supposition of that sort. It does, however, imply this very reasonable view: that there must be some reason or ground in the nature or constitution of even an inanimate agent for its acting always in a uniform manner, conducive to its own development and perfection; that there must be in the nature of each and every one of the vast multitude of such agents which make up the whole physical universe a reason or ground for each co-operating constantly and harmoniously with all the others to secure and preserve that general order and regularity which enables us to pronounce the universe not a chaos but a cosmos. Now that ground or reason in things, whereby they act in such a manner—not indifferently, chaotically, capriciously, aimlessly, unintelligibly, but definitely, regularly, reliably, purposively, intelligibly—is a real principle of their natures, impressing on their natures a definite tendency, directive of their activities towards results which, as being suited to these natures, bear to these latter the relation of final causes. A directive principle need not itself be conscious; the inner directive principle of inanimate agents towards what is good for them, what perfects them, what is therefore in a true and real sense their end (45, 46), is not conscious. But in virtue of it they act as if they were conscious, nay intelligent, i.e. they act executivé propter fines.

Of course the existence of this principle in inanimate agencies necessarily implies intelligence: this indeed is our very contention against the whole philosophy of mechanism, positivism and agnosticism. But is this intelligence really identical with the agencies of nature, so that all the phenomena of experience, which constitute the cosmos or universe, are but phases in the evolution of One Sole Reality which is continually manifesting itself under the distinct aspects of nature and mind? Or is this intelligence, though virtually immanent in the universe, really distinct from it—really transcendent,—a Supreme Intelligence which has created and continues to conserve this universe and govern all its activities? This is a distinct question: it is the question of Monism or Theism as an ultimate interpretation of human experience.

We conclude then that what we call finality, or the influence of final causes, pervades the whole universe; that in the domain of conscious agents it is conscious, instinctive when it solicits sense appetite, voluntary when it solicits intelligent will; that in the domain of unconscious agencies it is not conscious but “natural” or “physical” soliciting the “nature” or “appetitus naturalis” of these agencies.

Before inquiring into the nature of final causality we may indicate briefly the main divisions of final causes: some of these concern the domain of human activity and are of importance to Ethics rather than to Ontology.

(a) We have already distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic finality. An intrinsic final cause is an end or object which perfects the nature itself of the agent which tends towards it: nourishment, for instance, is an intrinsic end in relation to the living organism. An extrinsic final cause is not one towards which the nature of the agent immediately tends, but one which, intended by some other agent, is de facto realized by the tendency of the former towards its own intrinsic end. Thus, the general order of the universe is an extrinsic end in relation to each individual agency in the universe: it is an end intended by the Creator and de facto realized by each individual agency acting in accordance with its own particular nature.

(b) Very similar to this is the familiar distinction between the finis operis* and the *finis operantis. The former is the end necessarily and de facto realized by the act itself, by its very nature, independently of any other end the agent may have expressly intended to attain by means of it. The latter is the end expressly intended by the agent, and which may vary for one and the same kind of act. For instance, the finis operis of an act of almsgiving is the actual aiding of the mendicant; the finis operantis may be charity, or self-denial, or vanity, or whatever other motive influences the giver.

(c) Akin to those also is the distinction between an unconscious, or physical, or “natural” end, and a conscious, or mental, or “intentional” end. The former is that towards which the nature or “appetitus naturalis” of unconscious agencies tends; the latter is an end apprehended by a conscious agent.

(d) An end may be either ultimate or proximate or intermediate. An ultimate end is one which is sought for its own sake, as contrasted with an intermediate end which is willed rather as a means to the former, and with a proximate end which is intended last and sought first as a means to realizing the others. It should be noted that proximate and intermediate ends, in so far as they are sought for the sake of some ulterior end, are not ends at all but rather means; only in so far as they present some good desirable for its own sake, are they properly ends, or final causes. Furthermore, an ultimate end may be such absolutely or relatively: absolutely if it cannot possibly be subordinated or referred to any ulterior or higher good; relatively if, though ultimate in a particular order as compared with means leading up to it, it is nevertheless capable of being subordinated to a higher good, though not actually referred to this latter by any explicit volition of the agent that seeks it.

(e) We can regard the end for which an agent acts either objectively,—finis “objectivus,”—or formally,—finis “formalis”. The former is the objective good itself which the agent wishes to realize, possess or enjoy; the latter is the act whereby the agent formally secures, appropriates, unites himself with, this objective good. Thus, God Himself is the objective happiness (beatitudo objectiva) of man, while man’s actual possession of, or union with, God, by knowledge and love, is man’s formal happiness (beatitudo formalis).

(f) We may distinguish also between the real end (finis “qui” or “cujus”, and the personal end (finis “cui”). The former is the good which the agent desires, the good for the sake of which “cujus” gratia) he acts. The latter is the subject or person to whom he wishes this good, or for whom he wishes to procure it. Thus, a labourer may work to earn a sustenance for himself or also for his family. The real and the personal end are never willed separately, but always as one concrete good.

(g) The distinction between a principal end and an accessory end (motivum “impulsivum”) is obvious. The former can move to act of itself without the latter, but the latter strengthens the influence of the former. A really charitable person, while efficaciously moved to give alms by sympathy with the poor, may not be uninfluenced by vanity to let others know of his charity.

(h) Finally we may note the theological distinction between the natural end, and the supernatural end, of man as a rational and moral agent. The former is the end due to man’s nature, the latter is an end which is gratuitous and undue to his nature. God might not have created the world or man, and in this sense even the natural end of man is a gratuitous gift of God; but granted that God did decree to create the world and man, an end corresponding to man’s nature and powers was due to him: the knowledge, service and love of God as known to man by the light of natural reason. But as a matter of fact God, in His actual providence, has decreed for man an incomparably higher and purely gratuitous end, an end revealed to man by God Himself, an end entirely undue not only to man but to any and every possible creature: the Beatific Vision of the Divine Essence for ever in heaven.

108. CAUSALITY OF THE FINAL CAUSE; RELATION OF THE LATTER TO EFFICIENT, FORMAL, AND MATERIAL CAUSES.—We can best analyse the influence of the final cause by studying this influence as exerted on conscious and intelligent agents. The final cause has a positive influence of some sort on the production, happening, actualization of effects. What is the nature of this influence? The final cause exerts its influence by being *a *_ good_, an apprehended good; it exerts this influence on the appetite of the agent, soliciting the latter to perform certain acts for the realization, attainment, possession, or enjoyment of this good. But it must not be conceived as the efficient cause of this movement of the appetite, nor may its influence be conceived as action. An efficient cause must actually exist in order to act; but when the final cause, as an apprehended good, exerts its influence on the appetite it is not yet actual: not until the agent, by his action, has realized the end and actually attained it, does the end, as a good, actually exist. We must distinguish between the end as attained and the end as intended, between the finis in executione and the finis in intentione. It is not the end as attained that is a final cause; as attained it is an effect pure and simple. It is the end as intended that is a final cause; and as intended it does not yet actually exist: hence its influence cannot be by way of action. Perhaps it is the idea or cognition of the intended end that exerts the peculiar influence of final cause? No; the idea or cognition of the end actually exists, no doubt, in the conscious agent, but this is only a condition, a conditio sine qua non, for the apprehended good, the final cause, to exert its influence: nil volitum nisi praecognitum. It is not the cognition of the good, however, that moves the agent to act, it is not the idea of the good that the agent desires or strives for, but the good itself. It is the good itself, the known good, that exerts the influence, and this influence consists in the passive inclination or attraction or tendency of the appetite towards the good: a tendency which necessarily results from the very presence of the good (not really or physically of course, but representatively, mentally, “intentionally,” by “esse intentionale”; cf. 4) in the agent’s consciousness, and which is formally the actualization of the causal power or influence of the final cause. “Just as the efficient cause influences by acting,” says St. Thomas,(504) “so the final cause influences by being yearned for and desired”.

Looked at from the side of the agent that undergoes it, this influence is a passive yielding: this next becomes an active motion of appetite; and in the case of free will a deliberate act of intending the end, followed by acts of choosing means, and finally by acts commanding the executive faculties to employ these means.

Looked at from the side of the final cause, the influence consists in an attraction of appetite towards union with itself as a good. The matter cannot be analysed much further; nor will imagination images help us here any more than in the case of efficient causality. It must be noted, however, that the influence of the final cause is the influence not of a reality as actual, or in its esse actuale, but of a reality as present to a perceiving mind, or in its esse intentionale. At the same time it would be a mistake to infer from this that the influence of the final cause is not real. It is sometimes described as “intentional” causality, “causalitas intentionalis”; but this must not be taken to mean that it is not real: for it is not the “esse intentionale” of the good, i.e. the cognition of the good, its presence in the mind or consciousness of the agent, that moves the latter’s appetite: it is the apprehended good, apprehended as real, as possible of actual attainment, that moves the agent to act. The influence may not be physical in the sense of being productive of, or interchangeable with, or measurable by, corporeal energy, or in terms of mechanical work; nor is it; but it is none the less real.

But if the influence of a final cause really reaches to the effect of the agent’s actions only through the medium of the latter’s appetite, and therefore through a link of “intentional” causality, does it not at once follow that the attribution of final causality to the domain of unconscious and inorganic activities, can be at best merely metaphorical? The attribution to such agencies of an “appetitus naturalis” is intelligible indeed as a striking and perhaps not unpoetic metaphor. But to contend that it is anything more than a metaphor, to claim seriously that inanimate agencies are swayed and influenced by “ends,”—is not this really to substitute mysticism and mystery for rational speculation and analysis?

Mechanists are wont to dismiss the doctrine of final causes in the physical universe with offhand charges of this kind. They are but too ready to attribute it to a mystical attitude of mind. Final causes, they say, are not discovered in inanimate nature by the cold, calculating, unemotional analysis to which reason submits its activities, but are read into it by minds which allow themselves to be prompted by the imagination and emotions to personify and anthropomorphize inanimate agencies. The accusation is as plausible as it is unjust. It is plausible because the attribution of final causes to inanimate nature, and of an “appetitus naturalis” to its agencies, seems to imply the recognition of conscious, mental, “intentional” influence in this domain. But it really implies nothing of the sort; and hence the injustice of the charge. What it does imply is the existence of a genuine analogy between the nature and natural activities of physical agencies on the one hand and the appetite and appetitive activities of conscious agencies on the other. The existence of this analogy is absolutely undeniable. The orderly, invariable and uniformly suitable character of physical activities, simply forces our reason to recognize in physical agencies natures which tend towards their development, and which by their activities attain to what is good for them, to what perfects them. In other words we have to recognize that each by its natural line of activity attains to results that are good and useful to it just as if it apprehended them as such and consciously tended towards them. The analogy is there; and the recognition of it, so far from being a “mystic” interpretation of facts, is an elementary logical exercise of our reasoning faculty. The scholastics emphasized their recognition of the analogy by calling the nature of an unconscious agent,—the principle of its active tendencies towards the realization of its own perfection—an “appetitus naturalis”: an expression into which no one familiar with scholastic terminology would venture to read any element of mysticism.(505)

Every separate agency in nature has a uniform mode of activity; by following out this line of action each co-operates with all the others in maintaining the orderly course of nature. These are facts which call for explanation. They are not explained by the supposition of mechanists that these agencies are mere efficient causes: efficient causality does not account for order, it has got simply nothing to do with order or regularity. Consequently the last word of the mechanical philosophy on the fact of order in the universe is—Agnosticism. In opposition to this attitude we are far from contending that there is no mystery, or that all is clear either in regard to the fact of change or the fact of regularity. Just as we cannot explain everything in efficient causality, so neither can we explain everything in final causality. But we do contend that the element of order, development, evolution, even in the physical universe, can be partially explained by recognizing in its several agencies a nature, a principle of development, a passive inclination implanted in the very being of these agencies by the Intelligent Author of their being.

In conscious agencies this inclination or tendency to actions conformable or connatural to their being is not always in act; it is aroused by conscious cognition, perception, or imagination of a good, and operates intermittently. In unconscious agencies it is congenital and constantly in act, i.e. as a tendency, not as actually operative: for its actual development due conditions of environment are required: the seed will not grow without a suitable soil, temperature, moisture, etc. In conscious agencies the tendency, considered entitatively or as a reality in them, is an accidental form; in unconscious agencies it is their forma substantialis, the formative substantial principle, which determines the specific type to which their nature belongs.(506)

In all agencies the inclination or appetite or tendency to action arises from a form; an elicited appetite from an “intentional” form, a natural appetite from a “natural” form: Omnis inclinatio seu appetitus consequitur formam; appetitus elicitus formam intentionalem, appetitus naturalis formam naturalem. The scholastic view that final causality pervades all things is expressed in the aphorism, Omne agens agit propter finem: Every agency acts for an end.

From our analysis of final causality it will be seen that the “end” becomes a cause by exercising its influence on the agent or efficient cause, and thus initiating the action of the latter. We have seen already that material and formal causes exercise their causality dependently on the efficient cause of the change or effect produced by the latter. We now see that the final cause, the end as intended, determines the action of the efficient cause; hence its causality holds the primacy as compared with that of the other causes: it is in this sense the cause of causes, causa causarum.(507) But while the end as intended is the starting point of the whole process, the end as attained is the ultimate term of the latter. Hence the scholastic aphorism: Finis est primus in intentione et ultimus in executione. And this is true where the process involves a series of acts attaining to means subordinate to an end: this latter is the first thing intended and the last attained.

The final cause, the end as intended, is extrinsic to the effect. It is intrinsic to the efficient cause. It is a “forma” or determinative principle of the latter: a forma intentionalis in conscious agents, a forma naturalis in unconscious agents.

109. NATURE AND THE LAWS OF NATURE. CHARACTER AND GROUNDS OF THEIR NECESSITY AND UNIVERSALITY. SCIENTIFIC DETERMINISM AND PHILOSOPHIC FATALISM.—By the term nature we have seen that Aristotle and the scholastics meant the essence or substance of an agent regarded as inner principle of the latter’s normal activities, as determining the bent or inclination of these, and therefore as in a real sense their final cause. Hence Aristotle’s definition of nature as a certain principle or cause of the motion and rest of the thing in which that principle is rooted fundamentally and essentially and not merely accidentally.(508) The scholastics, recognizing that this intentio naturae, this subjection to finality, in unconscious agencies must be the work and the index of intelligence, in other words that this analogical finality in inanimate things must connote a proper finality, a properly purposive mode of action, in the author of these things, conceived this nature or intentio naturae as the impression of a divine art or plan upon the very being of all creatures by the Creator Himself. Hence St. Thomas’s profound and well-known description of nature as “the principle of a divine art impressed upon things, in virtue of which they move towards determinate ends*”. Defining art as *the just conception of external works to be accomplished,(509) he observes that nature is a sort of art: “as if a ship-builder were to endow his materials with the power of moving and adapting themselves so as to form or construct a ship”.(510) And elsewhere he remarks that nature differs from art only in this that the former is an intrinsic, the latter an extrinsic, principle of the work which is accomplished through its influence: so that if the art whereby a ship is constructed were intrinsic to the materials, the ship would be constructed by nature as it actually is by art.(511)

Such, then, is the teleological conception of the nature of each individual agency in the universe. When we speak of “universal nature,” “external nature,” “physical nature,” “the course of nature,” “the laws of nature,” etc. we are using the term in a collective sense to signify the sum-total of all the agencies which constitute the whole physical universe; and furthermore in all such contexts we usually understand by nature the world of corporeal things as distinct from the domain of mind or spirit.

The proof of this view,—that the agencies of the physical universe are not merely efficient causes, but that they act under the influence of ends; that they have definite lines of action which are natural to them, and whereby they realize their own individual development and the maintenance of the universe as a cosmos; that by doing so they reveal the influence of intelligent purpose,—the proof of this view lies, as we have seen, in the fact that their activities are regular, uniform, and mutually useful, or, in other words, that they are productive of order (110). Bearing this in mind let us inquire into the various meanings discernible in the very familiar expressions, “laws of nature,” “physical laws,” “natural laws”.(512)

We may understand firstly by a law of nature this innate tendency we have been describing as impressed upon the very being of all created things by the Creator. It is in this sense we speak of a thing acting “naturally,” or “according to the law of its nature,” or “according to its nature,” when we see it acting according to what we conceive to be the end intended for it, acting in a manner conducive to the development of its own individuality, the preservation of its specific type or kind, and the fulfilment of its rôle in the general scheme of things. What this “natural” mode of action is for this particular kind of thing, we gather from our experience of the regular or normal activity of things of its kind. Thus, we say it is a law of oxygen and hydrogen to combine in definite proportions, under suitable conditions, to form water; a law of all particles of matter in the universe to tend to move towards one another with a definite acceleration; a law of living organisms to reproduce their kind. This usage comes nearest to the original meaning of the term law: a precept or command imposed on intelligent agents by a superior. For we conceive this natural tendency impressed on physical agencies by the Creator after the analogy of a precept or command. And we have good reason to do so: because uniformity of conduct in intelligent agents is the normal result of their obedience to a law imposed upon them; and we see in the activities of the physical universe an all-pervading feature of regularity.

Secondly, we transfer the term law to this result itself of the natural tendency of the being, of the convergence of its activities towards its end. That is to say, we call the uniform mode of action of an agent a law of nature, a natural or physical law. This usage, which is common in the positive sciences, implies a less profound, a more superficial, but a perfectly legitimate mode of apprehending and studying the changes and phenomena of the physical universe.

Thirdly, since the several agencies of the universe co-exist in time and space, since they constantly interact on one another, since for the exercise of the natural activities of each certain extrinsic conditions of relationship with its environment must be fulfilled, an accurate knowledge and exact formulation of these relations are obviously requisite for a scientific and practical insight into the mode of activity of any natural agency. In fact the physical scientist may and does take for granted the natural tendency and the uniformity of action resulting therefrom, and confines himself to discovering and formulating the relations between any given kind of action and the extrinsic conditions requisite for its exercise. Such, for instance, would be any chemical “law” setting forth the measure, and the conditions of temperature, pressure, etc., in which certain chemical elements combine to form a certain chemical compound. To all such formulae scientists give the title of physical laws, or laws of physical nature. These formulae, descriptive of the manner in which a phenomenon takes place, setting forth with the greatest possible quantitative exactness the phenomenal factors(513) that enter into and precede and accompany it, are laws in a still more superficial and still less philosophical sense, but a sense which is most commonly—and justly—accepted in the positive or physical sciences.

Before examining the feature and characteristic of necessity and universality which enters into all these various conceptions of a “physical law” we have here to observe that it would make for clearness, and for a better understanding between physics and metaphysics, between science and philosophy, between the investigator who seeks by observation and experiment for the proximate phenomenal conditions and “physical” causes of phenomena, and the investigator who seeks for the ultimate real ground and explanation of these latter by speculative analysis of them, and by reasoning from the scientist’s discoveries about them,—if it were understood and agreed that investigation into the scope and significance and ultimate ground of this feature of stability in the laws of physical nature belongs to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. We have already called attention to the fact that the propriety of such an obviously reasonable and intelligible division of labour is almost universally admitted in theory both by scientists and by philosophers; though, unfortunately, it is not always remembered in practice (100).

In theory the scientist assumes, and very properly assumes, that the agencies with which he deals are not capricious, unreliable, irregular, but stable, reliable, regular in their mode of action, that in similar sets of conditions and circumstances they will act uniformly. Without inquiring into the ultimate grounds of this assumption he premises that all his conclusions, all his inductive generalizations about the activity of these agencies, will hold good of these latter just in so far as they do act according to his general postulate as to their regularity. He then proceeds, by the inductive processes of hypothesis and experimental verification, to determine what agencies produce such or such an event, under what conditions they bring this about, what are all the phenomenal conditions, positive and negative, antecedent and concomitant, in the absence of any one of which this event will not happen, and in the presence of all of which it will happen. These are, in accordance with his assumption, determining causes of the event; the knowledge of them is from the speculative point of view extremely important, and from the practical standpoint of invention and applied science extremely useful. As a scientist he has no other knowledge in view: he aims at discovering the “how,” the quomodo, of natural phenomena,—how, for instance, under what conditions and in what measure, water is produced from oxygen and hydrogen. When he has discovered all these positive and negative conditions his scientific knowledge of the formation of water is complete.

But there are other questions in regard to natural phenomena to which the experimental methods of the positive sciences can offer no reply. They can tell us nothing about the wider “how” which resolves itself into a “why.” They can give no information about the ultimate causes, origins, reasons, or essences, of those phenomena. As Pasteur and other equally illustrious scientists have proclaimed, experimental science is essentially positive, i.e. confined to the proximate phenomenal conditions and causes of things; it has nothing to say, nor has it any need or any right to say anything, about the ultimate nature, or first origin, or final destiny, of the things and events of the universe.

Yet such questions arise, and clamour insistently for solution. How is it, or why is it, that natural phenomena are uniformly linked to certain other phenomenal antecedents or “physical” causes? Is it absolutely impossible, inconceivable, that this sequence should be found not to obtain in even a single individual instance? Why should there be such uniform “sequences” or “laws” at all? Are there exceptions, or can there be exceptions to these “laws of physical nature”? What is the character and what are the grounds of the necessity of these laws? Every living organism comes from a living cell—not from any living cell, but from some particular kind of living cell. But why are there such kinds of cells? Why are there living cells at all? Whence their first origin? Again, granted that there are different kinds or types of living cells, why should a particular kind of cell give rise, by division and evolution, to an organism of the same kind or type as the parent organisms? Why does it not always do so? Why are what biologists describe as “monsters” in the organic kingdom possible? And why, since they are possible, are they not as numerous as what are recognized as the normal types or kinds of living organisms?

Now these are questions in regard to which not only every professing physical scientist and every professing metaphysician, but every thinking man, must take up some attitude or other. A refusal to consider them, on the plea that they are insoluble, is just as definite an attitude as any other; nor by assuming this attitude does any man, even though he be a specialist in some department of the positive or physical sciences, escape being a “metaphysician” or a “philosopher,” however much he may deprecate such titles; for he is taking up a reasoned attitude—we presume it is such, and not the outcome of mere prejudice—on ultimate questions. And this is philosophy; this is metaphysics. When, therefore, a physical scientist either avows or insinuates that because the methods of physical science, which are suitable for the discovery of the proximate causes of phenomena, can tell him nothing about ultimate questions concerning these phenomena, therefore there is nothing to be known about these questions, he is not only committing himself, nolens volens, to definite philosophical views, but he is doing a serious disservice to physical science itself by misconceiving and mis-stating its rightful scope and limits. He has just an equal right with any other man to utilize the established truths of physical science to help him in answering ultimate questions. Nay, he may even use the unverified hypotheses and systematic conceptions(514) of physical science for what they are worth in helping him to determine his general world-view. But his competence as a specialist in physical science does not confer upon him any special qualification for estimating the value of these truths and hypotheses as evidence in the domain of ultimate problems. Nor can he, because he is a scientist, or even because he may go so far as to assert the right of speaking in the name of “science,” claim for his particular interpretation the privilege of exemption from criticism; and this is true no matter what his interpretation may be—whether it be agnosticism, mechanism, teleologism, monism, or theism. These observations may appear elementary and obvious; but the insinuation of positivism and phenomenism, that whatever is not itself phenomenal and verifiable by the experimental methods of the physical sciences is in no wise knowable, and the insinuation of mechanists that their world-view is the only one compatible with the truths of science and therefore the only “scientific” philosophy, justify us in reiterating and emphasizing even such obvious methodological considerations. Bearing them in mind, let us now examine the uniformity and necessity of the laws of physical nature.

Understanding by natural law the natural inclination or tendency of the creature to a definite line of activity, this law is of itself determining or necessitating. Moreover, it is absolutely inseparable from the essence of the creature. Granted that the creature exists, it has this tendency to exert and direct all its forces and energies in a definite, normal way, for the realization of its end. This nisus naturae is never absent; it is observable even where, as in the generation of “monsters” by living organisms, it partially fails to attain its end. A law of nature, taken in this sense, is absolutely necessary to, and inseparable from, the created agent; it admits of no exceptions; no agent can exist without it; for it is identical with the very being of the agent

But the uniformity of action resulting from this natural tendency, the uniform series of normal operations whereby it realizes its end, is not absolutely necessary, inviolable, unexceptional. In the first place the Author of Nature can, for a higher or moral purpose, prevent any created agency supernaturally, miraculously, from actually exercising its active powers in accordance with its nature for the prosecution of its natural end. But apart altogether from this, abstracting from all special interference of the First Cause, and confining our attention to the natural order itself, we have to consider that for any physical agency to act in its natural or normal manner certain extrinsic conditions are always requisite: oxygen and hydrogen, for instance, will combine to produce water, but only under certain conditions of contact, pressure, temperature, etc. This general requirement arises from the fact already mentioned, that physical agencies co-exist in time and space and are constantly interacting. These extrinsic conditions are, of course, not expressly stated in the formulation of those uniformities and quantitative descriptions called “laws of nature” in the second and third interpretations of this expression as explained above. It is taken as understood that the law applies only if and when and where all such conditions are verified. The law, therefore, as stated categorically, does not express an absolutely necessary, universal, and unexceptional truth. It may admit of exceptions.

In the next place, when we come to examine these exceptions to uniformity, these failures or frustrations of the normal or natural activities of physical agencies, we find it possible to distinguish roughly, with Aristotle, between two groups of such “uniformities” or “laws”. There are firstly those which, so far as our experience goes, seem to prevail always (ἀεὶ), unexceptionally; and secondly, those which seem to prevail generally, for the most part (ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ), though not unexceptionally. The former would be the outcome of active powers, energies, forces, de facto present and prevalent always and everywhere in all physical agencies, and of such a character that the conditions requisite for their actual operation would be always verified. Such, for instance, would be the force of gravity in all ponderable matter; and hence the law of gravitation is regarded as all-pervading, universal, unexceptional. But there are other natural or normal effects which are the outcome of powers, forces, energies, not all-pervading, but restricted to special groups of agencies, dependent for their actual production on the presence of a great and complex variety of extrinsic conditions, and liable therefore to be impeded by the interfering action of numerous other natural agencies. Such, for instance, would be the natural powers and processes whereby living organisms propagate their kind. The law, therefore, which states it to be a uniformity of nature that living organisms reproduce offspring similar to themselves in kind, is a general law, admitting exceptions.

Operations and effects which follow from the nature of their causes are called natural (καθ᾽ ἁυτό, καὶ μὴ κατὰ συμβεβηκός).(515) Some causes produce their natural effects always (τὰ ἐξ ἀνάνκης καὶ ἀεὶ γιγνομένα), others produce their natural effects usually, as a general rule (τὰ ὡς ἐπι πολὺ γιγνόμενα).(516) Operations and effects which are produced by the interfering influence of extrinsic agencies (τὸ βίαιον “violent,” as opposed to natural), and not in accordance with the nature of their principal cause, are called by Aristotle accidental (τὰ κατὰ συμβεβηκός, τὰ ἐνδεχόμενα γυγνέσθαι); and these, he remarks, people commonly describe as due to chance (καὶ ταῦτα πάντες φασὶν εἰναι ἀπο τύχης).(517)

All are familiar with events or happenings described as “fortuitous,” “accidental,” “exceptional,” “unexpected,” with things happening by “chance,” by (good or bad) “luck” or “fortune”.(518) There are terms in all languages expressive of this experience—casus, sors, fortuna, τύχη, etc. The notion underlying all of them is that of something occurring unintentionally, praeter intentionem agentis. Whether chance effects result from the action of intelligent agents or from the operation of physical causes they are not “intended,”—by the deliberate purpose of the intelligent agent in the one case, or by the natural tendency, the intentio naturae, of the mere physical agency in the other. Such an effect, therefore, has not a natural cause; hence it is considered exceptional, and is always more or less unexpected. Nature, as Aristotle rightly observes,(519) never produces a chance effect. His meaning is, that whenever such an effect occurs it is not brought about in accordance with the natural tendency of any physical agency. It results from a collision or coincidence of two or more such agencies, each acting according to its nature. The hunter’s act of firing at a wild fowl is an intentional act. The boy’s act of coming into the thicket to gather wild flowers is an intentional act. The accidental shooting of the boy is the result of a coincidence of the two intentional acts. Similarly, each of all the various agencies which bring about the development of an embryo in the maternal womb has its own immediate and particular natural effect, and only mediately contributes to the general effect of bringing the embryo to maturity. As a rule these particular effects are favourable to the general effect. But sometimes the immediate ends do not subserve this ulterior purpose. The result is accidental, exceptional, a deviation from the normal type, an anomaly, a “monster” in the domain of living organisms.

Aristotle’s analysis, correct so far, is incomplete. It assigns no ultimate explanation of the fact that there are such encounters of individual natural tendencies in the universe, such failures in the subordination of particular ends to wider ulterior ends. As a matter of fact these chance effects, although not “intended” by the natures of individual created agencies, are not wholly and entirely unintended. They are not wholly aimless. They enter into the general plan and scheme of things as known and willed by the Author of Nature. They are known to His Intelligence, and willed and ruled by His Providence. For Him there can be no such thing as chance. Effects that are accidental in relation to created causes, effects that run counter to the nature or intentio naturae of these, are foreseen and willed by Him and made to subserve that wider and more general end which is the universal order of the world that He has actually willed to create. It is only in relation to the natures of individual agencies, and to the limited horizon of our finite intelligences, that such phenomena can present the aspect of fortuitous or chance occurrences.

Before passing on to deal, in our concluding section, with the great fact of order, let us briefly compare with the foregoing explanation of nature and its laws the attempt of mechanists to explain these without recognizing in the physical universe any influence of final causes, or any indication of a purposive intelligence. We have ventured to describe their attitude as philosophic fatalism.(520) According to their view there is no ground for the distinction between phenomena that happen “naturally” and phenomena that happen “accidentally” or “by chance”. All alike happen by the same kind of general necessity: the generation of a “monster” is as “natural” as the generation of normal offspring; the former, when it occurs, is just as inevitably the outcome of the physical forces at work in the particular case as the latter is the outcome of the particular set of efficient causes which do actually produce the normal result: the only difference is that the former, occurring less frequently and as the result of a rarer and less known conjunction of “physical” causes than the latter, is not expected by us to occur, and is consequently regarded, when it does occur, as exceptional. Now it is quite true that what we call “chance” effects, or “exceptional” effects, result just as inevitably from the set of forces operative in their case, as normal effects result from the forces operative in theirs. But this leaves for explanation something which the mechanist cannot explain. He regards a physical law merely as a generalization, beyond experience, of some experienced uniformity; and he holds that all our physical laws are provisional in the sense that a wider and deeper knowledge of the actual conditions of interaction among the physical forces of the universe would enable us to eliminate exceptions—which are all apparent, not real—by restating our laws in such a comprehensive way as to include all such cases. We may, indeed, admit that our physical laws are open to revision and restatement in this sense, and are de facto often modified in this sense by the progress of science. But the important point is this, that the mechanist does not admit the existence, in physical agencies, of any law in the sense of a natural inclination towards an end, or in any sense in which it would imply intelligence, design, or purpose. On the contrary, claiming as he does that all physical phenomena are reducible to mechanical motions of inert masses, atoms, or particles of matter in space, he is obliged to regard all physical agencies as being, so far as their nature is concerned, wholly indifferent to any particular form of activity.(521) Committed to the indefensible view that all qualitative change is reducible to quantitative (11), and all material differences to differences in the location of material particles and in the velocity and direction of the spatial motion impressed upon each by others extrinsic to itself, he has left himself no factors wherewith to explain the actual order and course of the universe, other than the purely indifferent factors of essentially or naturally homogeneous particles of inert matter endowed with local motion. We emphasize this feature of indifference; for the conception of an inert particle of matter subject to mechanical motion impressed upon it from without, is the very type of an indifferent agency. What such an entity will do, whether or not it will move, with what velocity and in what direction it will move—in a word, its entire conduct, its rôle in the universe, the sum-total of its functions—nothing of all this is dependent on itself; everything depends on agencies extrinsic to it, and on its extrinsic time-and-space relations to these agencies; and these latter in turn are in the same condition as itself. Now is it conceivable that agencies of this kind, of themselves absolutely indifferent to any particular kind of effect, suitable or unsuitable, regular or irregular, orderly or disorderly, could actually produce and maintain the existing order of the universe? If they were themselves produced by an All-Wise and All-Powerful Being, and definitely arranged* in spatial relations to one another, and *initial mechanical motion in definite directions and velocities impressed on the different parts of the system, there is no denying that Infinite Wisdom and Power could, by Divine concurrence even with such indifferent agencies, realize and maintain a cosmos, or orderly universe. Such purely extrinsic finality (106) could, absolutely speaking, account for the existence of order, uniformity, regularity, system; though all the evidence furnished by the universe of our actual experience points to the existence of intrinsic finality also as understood by Aristotle and the scholastics. But the mechanist will not allow even extrinsic finality; he will not recognize in the actual universe of our experience any evidence of a Ruling Intelligence realizing a plan or design for an intelligent purpose; he denies the necessity of the inference from the data of human experience to the existence of a Guiding Intelligence. And what are his alternatives? He may choose one or other of two.

He may restate in the more scientific and imposing terminology of modern mechanics the crude conception of the ancient Greek atomists: that the actual order of the universe is the absolutely inevitable and fatal outcome of a certain collocation of the moving masses of the physical universe, a collocation favourable to order, a collocation which just happened to occur by some happy chance from the essentially aimless, purposeless, indifferent and chaotic motions of those material masses and particles. We say “chaotic,” for chaos is the absence of cosmos; and order is the fact that has got to be explained. In the concept of indifferent, inert atoms of matter moving through space there is emphatically no principle of order;(522) and hence the mechanist who will not admit the necessity of inferring an Intelligence to give these moving masses or atoms the collocation favourable to order is forced to “explain” this supposed collocation by attributing it to pure chance—the concursus fortuitus atomorum of the ancient Greeks. When, however, we reflect that the more numerous these atoms and the more varied and complex their motions, the smaller is the chance of a collocation favourable to order; that the atoms and motions are supposed actually to surpass any assignable number; that therefore the chance of any such favourable collocation occurring is indefinitely smaller than any measurable proportion,—we can draw our own conclusions about the value of such a speculation as a rational “explanation” of the existing cosmos. And this apart altogether from the consideration that the fact to be explained is not merely the momentary occurrence of an orderly collocation, but the maintenance of an orderly system of cosmic phenomena throughout the lapse of all time. No orderly finite system of mechanical motions arranged by human skill can preserve its orderly motions indefinitely without intelligent human supervision: the neglected machine will get out of order, run down, wear out, if left to itself; and we are asked to believe that the whole universe is one vast machine which not only goes on without intelligent supervision, but which actually made itself by chance!(523)

Naturally such an “explanation” of the universe does not commend itself to any man of serious thought, whatever his difficulties may be against the argument from the fact of order in the universe to the existence of an Intelligent Designer. Add to this the consideration that the mechanist theory does not even claim to account for the first origin of the universe: it postulates the existence of matter in motion. In regard to this supreme problem of the first origin of the universe the attitude of the mechanist is avowedly agnostic; and in view of what we have just remarked about the “chance” theory as an “explanation” of the existing order of the universe, it is no matter for surprise that most mechanists reject this theory and embrace the agnostic attitude in regard to this latter problem also. Whether the agnostic attitude they assume be negative or positive, i.e. whether they are content to say that they themselves at least fail to find any satisfactory rational explanation of the origin and nature of the cosmos, or contend further that no rational solution of these problems is within the reach of the human mind, their teaching is refuted in Natural Theology, where the theistic solution of these problems is set forth and vindicated.

110. THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE; A FACT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS.—The considerations so far submitted in this chapter, as pointing to the existence and influence of final causes in the universe, will be strengthened and completed by a brief analysis of order and its implications.

We have seen already (55) that the apprehension of order in things implies the recognition of some unifying principle in what is manifold. What, in general, is the nature of this principle? It is the point of view, the standpoint from which the unifying arrangement or disposition of the manifold is carried out; in other words it is the end, object, or purpose, of the orderly arrangement. The arrangement, and the order resulting from it, will vary according to the end in view—whether, for instance, it be an arrangement of books in a library, of pictures in a gallery, of materials in an edifice, of parts in a machine. Hence St. Thomas’s definition of order as the due adaptation of means to ends: recta ratio rerum ad finem. When this adaptation is the work of human intelligence the order realized is artificial, when it is the work of nature the order realized is natural. Art is an extrinsic principle of order, nature implies indeed also an intelligent extrinsic principle of order, but is itself an intrinsic principle of order: the works of nature and those of art have this feature in common, that they manifest adaptation of means to ends.(524)

The subordination of means to ends realizes an order which has for its unifying principle the influence of an end, a final cause. The group of dynamic relations thus revealed constitutes what is called teleological order, the order of purpose or finality. The realization or execution of such an order implies the simultaneous existence of co-ordinated parts or members in a system, a realized whole with complex, co-ordinated, orderly parts, the principle of unity in this system being the form of the whole. This realized, disposed, or constituted order, is called the esthetic order (55), the order of co-ordination, composition, constitution. In ultimate analysis, however, these two orders, the teleological and the esthetic, having as respective unifying principles the final cause and the formal cause, are not two really distinct orders, but rather two aspects of one and the same order: we have seen that in the things of nature the intrinsic end or final cause of each is identical with its forma substantialis or formal cause (108). But the final cause is naturally prior to the formal cause, and consequently the teleological order is more fundamental than the esthetic.

St. Augustine’s definition of order as “the arrangement of a multiplicity of things, similar and dissimilar, according its proper place to each,”(525) reveals the material cause of order in the multiplicity of varied elements, the formal cause of order in the group of relations resulting from the arrangement or dispositio, and the efficient cause of order in the agent that disposes or arranges them. The final cause, though not directly mentioned, is implied in the fact that the place of each factor in the system is necessarily determined by the function it has to fulfil, the part it is suited by its nature to play, in contributing to the realization of the end or purpose of the arrangement.

If, then, order is the right arrangement or disposition of things according to their destination, or in the mutual relations demanded by their ends*, it necessarily follows that the very existence of *natural order in the universe implies that this universe is not a work of chance but a purposive work, just as the existence of artificial order in products of human art implies that these products are not the result of chance but of activity influenced by final causes.(526)

It is in fact impossible to conceive order except as resulting from the influence of final causes. Right reason rejects as an utterly inadequate explanation of the natural order of the universe the fantastic and far-fetched supposition of a chance collocation of indifferent, undetermined and aimless physical agencies.(527) If we find in the actual physical universe difficulties against the view that this universe reveals the influence of final causes, such difficulties do not arise from the fact that there is order in the universe, but rather from the fact that with this order there seems to coexist some degree of disorder also. In so far forth as there is natural order there is cogent evidence of the influence of final causes. And so necessary is this inference that even one single authentic instance of natural order in an otherwise chaotic universe would oblige us to infer the existence and influence of a final cause to account for that solitary instance. We mean by an authentic instance one which evidences a real and sustained uniformity, regularity, mutual co-ordination and subordination of factors in the behaviour of any group of natural agencies; for we allow that transient momentary collocations and concurrences of indifferent agencies, acting aimlessly and without purpose as a matter of fact, might present to our minds, accustomed to seek for orderly and purposive phenomena, the deceptive appearance of order.

Order, then, we take it, necessarily implies the existence and influence of final causes. This in turn, as we have already observed, implies with equal necessity the existence of Intelligent Purpose. If, then, there is natural order in the universe, there must exist an Intelligent Will to account for this natural order.

Leaving the development of this line of argument to its proper place in Natural Theology, there remains the simple question of fact: Is the physical universe a cosmos? Does it reveal order—a natural order distinct from the artificial order realized by the human mind in the mechanical and fine arts, an order, therefore, realized not by the human mind but by some other mind, by the Divine Mind? The evidences of such order superabound. We have already referred to some of them (106), nor is there any need to labour the matter. Two points, however, in connexion with this universally recognized fact of order in the universe, call for a brief mention before we conclude. They are in the nature of difficulties against the ordinary, reasonable view of the matter, the view on which the theistic argument from order is based.

In accordance with the Kantian theory of knowledge it is objected that the order which we apprehend, or think we apprehend, in the universe, is not really in the universe of our experience, but is as it were projected into this universe by our own minds in the very process of cognition itself. It is therefore not real but only apparent, not noumenal but only phenomenal. It is simply a product of the categorizing, unifying, systematizing activity of our minds. It is a feature of the phenomenon or mental product, i.e. of the noumenal datum as invested with a category of thought. But whether or not it is a characteristic of the real universe itself man’s speculative reason is by its very constitution essentially incapable of ever discovering. The theory of knowledge on which this difficulty is based can be shown to be unsound and erroneous. For a criticism of the theory we must refer the reader to scholastic works on Epistemology. It may be observed, however, apart from the merits or demerits of the theory, that the experienced fact of order is by no means demolished or explained away by any questions that may be raised about the exact location of the fact, if we may so express it. Order is a fact, an undeniable, experienced fact; and it looms just as large, and cries out just as insistently for explanation, with whichever of the imposing adjectives “noumenal” or “phenomenal” a philosopher may choose to qualify it; nor do we diminish its reality by calling it phenomenal one whit more than we increase that reality by calling it noumenal.

The other difficulty arises from the existence of disorder in the universe. Pessimists of the type of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche concentrate their attention so exclusively on the evidences of disorder, the failures of adaptation of means to ends, the defects and excesses, the prodigality and penury, the pain and suffering, which abound in physical nature—not to speak of moral evil,—that they become blind to all evidences of order, and proclaim all belief in order an illusion.

The picture of

Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine(528)

is, however, the product of a morbid and distraught imagination rather than a sane view of the facts. The undeniable existence of disorder, of physical evils, defects, failures, frustrations of natural tendency in the universe, does not obscure or conceal from the normal, unbiassed mind the equally undeniable evidences of a great and wide and generally prevailing order. Nor does it conceal from such a mind the fact that the existence of order in any measure or degree implies of necessity the existence of plan or design, and therefore of intelligent purpose also. Inferring from this fact of order the existence of a Supreme Intelligence, and inferring by other lines of reasoning from the data of experience the dependence of the universe on this Intelligence as Creator, Conserver and Ruler, the theist is confronted with the reality of moral and physical evil (52), i.e. of disorder in the universe. But he does not see in this disorder anything essentially incompatible with his established conclusion that the universe is a finite creation of Infinite Wisdom, and a free manifestation of the latter to man. If the actual universe is imperfect, he knows that God created it freely and might have created a more perfect or a less perfect one. Knowing that God is All-Powerful as He is All-Wise, he knows that the actual universe, though imperfect absolutely, is perfect relatively, in that it infallibly reveals the Divine Wisdom and Goodness exactly in the measure in which God has willed to reveal Himself in His works. Conscious on the one hand that his finite mind cannot trace in detail all the purposes of God in nature, or assign to all individual events their divinely appointed ends, he is confident on the other hand that the whole universe is intelligible only as the working out of a Divine plan, and not otherwise. To his mind as a theist these lines are a clearer expression of rationally grounded optimism than they were perhaps even to the poet who penned them:—

I trust in nature for the stable laws Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant And Autumn garner to the end of time. I trust in God—the right shall be the right And other than the wrong, while He endures; I trust in my own soul, that can perceive The outward and the inward, Nature’s good And God’s.(529)

We have seen that the agencies which constitute the universal order have each its own inner principle of finality; that these agencies are not isolated but mutually related in such ways that the ends of each subserve an extrinsic and remoter end which is none other than this universal order whereby we recognize the world as a cosmos. The maintenance of this order is the intrinsic end of the universe as a whole: an end which is immanent in the universe, an end which is of course a good. But this universal order itself is for an end, an extrinsic, transcendent end, distinct from itself; and this end, too, must be a good. “The universe,” says St. Thomas,(530) “has the good of order and another distinct good.” The universal order, says Aristotle, has itself an end, a good, which is one, and to which all else is ordained: “πρὸς ἕν ἅπαντα συντέτακται”.(531) What can this Supreme Good be, this absolutely Ultimate End, this Transcendent Principle of all nature, and of all nature’s tendencies and activities? Whence comes this universal tendency of all nature, if not from the Being who is the One, Eternal, Immutable Prime Mover,(532) and whose moving influence is Love?(533) Such is the profound thought of Aristotle, a thought re-echoed so sublimely by the immortal poet of Christian philosophy in the closing line of the Paradiso:—

L’amor che muove il Sole e l’altre stelle.

The immediate factors of the universal order of nature, themselves devoid of intelligence, must therefore be the work of Intelligent Will. To arrange these factors as parts of one harmonious whole, as members of one orderly system, Supreme Wisdom must have conceived the plan and chosen the means to realize it. The manifestation of God’s glory by the realization of this plan, such is the ultimate transcendent end of the whole created universe. “The whole order of the universe,” writes St. Thomas, developing the thought of Aristotle,(534) “is for the Prime Mover thereof; this order has for its purpose the working out in an orderly universe of the plan conceived and willed by the Prime Mover. And hence the Prime Mover is the principle of this universal order.”

The truths so briefly outlined in this closing chapter on the order and purpose of the universe have nowhere found more apt and lucid philosophical formulation than in the monumental writings of the Angel of the Christian Schools; nor perhaps have they ever elsewhere appeared in a more felicitous setting of poetic imagery than in these stanzas from the immortal epic of the Poet of the Christian Schools:—

... Le cose tutte quante Hann’ ordine tra lora; e questa è forma Che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante.

Qui veggion l’alte creature l’orma Dell’eterno Valore, il quale è fine Al quale è fatta la toccata norma.

Nell’ ordine ch’io dico sono accline Tutte nature per diverse sorti Più al Principio loro e men vicine;

Onde si muovono a diversi porti Per lo gran mar dell’essere, e ciascuna Con instinto a lei dato che la porti.

Questi ne porta il fuoco inver la Luna: Questi ne’ cuor mortali è permotore; Questi la terra in se stringe ed aduna.

Nè pur le creature, che son fuore D’intelligenza, quest’ arco saetta Ma quelle ch’ hanno intelletto ed amore.

La Providenza, che cotanto assetta, Del suo lume fa il ciel sempre quieto, Nel qual si volge quel ch’ha maggior fretta:

Ed ora li, com’ a sito decreto, Cen porta la virtù di quella corda, Che ciò che scocca drizzo in segno lieto.(535)

INDEX.

Absolute, the, 47 sq.; and relative, 332 sqq.

Actio et passio, v. causality, causes.

Actio intentionalis, 378.

Action, immanent and transitive, 73, 369, 391-2.

Actual and potential, 52 sqq. and passim.

Actuality, goodness and perfection, 173 sqq.

Aeveternitas, aevum, 230.

ANDRONICUS OF RHODES, 17.

Anthropology, 19.

Appetite, 167 sqq.

Atomism, v. Mechanism.

AVERROÏSM, 284.

BAUMGARTEN, 192 n.

Beauty, the Beautiful, 13, 14; analysis of, 192 sqq.; definitions of, 201 sqq.

Being, concept analysed, 32 sqq.; real being and logical being, 10, 42 sqq., 85, 140.

— fundamental distinction in, 46 sqq.

— metaphysical grades of, 123 sqq.

— potential and actual, 51 sqq.

Bilocation, 322.

BONAVENTURE, ST., on distinction of soul and faculties, 247-8.

BROWNING, 432.

BRUNETIÈRE, 196.

Categories, ultimate, analysis of, 208 sqq.; not adequately distinct as modes, 210-11, 350; but exhaustive, 211-12.

Causa exemplaris, 362.

Causalitas “intentionalis,” 413.

Causality, efficient, as index of real distinction, 148; classification of efficient causes, 372 sqq.; instrumental, 373-6; objective validity of concept, 382 sqq.; origin of concept, 385 sqq.; analysis of, 366 sqq., 388 sqq.; erroneous theories of, 392-6; and occasionalism, 396 sqq., 400 sqq.

— final (v. purpose), 361, 368; intrinsic and extrinsic finality, 404 sqq., 426; all-pervading influence of, 409; divisions of, 409 sqq.; analysis of, 411sqq.; as implying intelligence, 409, 414-15, 426.

CICERO, 1.

Cognitio “vulgaris,” 2.

Composition, logical and metaphysical, 34; essential and integral, 311, 314-16; as index of finiteness, 248.

Conceptualism, 24, 125.

Consciousness, and personality, 273, 277 sqq.; “subliminal,” 282 sqq.

Constitutive or constructive factors in thought, 45, 74, 340, 355-6.

Contingent and necessary Being, 47.

Co-operation, in philosophical studies, 30.

Correlatives, 388.

Corruptio et generatio, 71, 186.

Criteriology, v. Knowledge, theory of.

DAVID OF DINANT, 125 n.

Design, v. purpose and final cause.

Disposition, v. habit.

Dispositiones ad formam, 295 n.

Disorder, fact of, 431-2.

DOMET DE VORGES, 387 n.

“Double law” in man, 176.

“Double personality,” 282-4.

DUPASQUIER, 99 n.

Education, and habits, 298.

Efficiency, concept of, v. cause (efficient).

Ego, v. person.

Energies, equivalence of, 395.

Ens rationis, v. Being.

Entitative habit, 292 n.

Epistemology, v. Knowledge, theory of.

Essence, analysis of, 75 sqq.; and nature and substance, 79, 258.

Evil, analysis of, 182 sqq.

Extension, v. quantity.

Extrinsic denominations, 238, 239.

Faculties, 298 sqq.; and substance, 300 sqq.

Faith and reason, 5.

Figure, or form, as indicative of nature, 292-3.

Finis, finality, v. purpose and final causes.

Formae subsistentes, 129.

“Formal” unity, 156.

Formalitates, 154.

Formative principles, simplicity of, 317-18; plurality in the individual, 365 (n. 4).

FRANCIS OF VITTORIA, 113 n.

Free causes, 376-7; and occasionalism, 398.

Freedom of thought, 6.

Generatio, v. corruptio.

Genuensis, 98 n.

GEULINCX, 397.

GIOBERTI, 94.

Graceful, elegant, the, 199 n.

GREGORY OF VALENTIA, 110 n.

Habit, analysis of, 292 sqq.

Hypostasis, 265.

Hypostatic Union, 267-71.

Immaterial, positively and negatively, 16.

Immensity, Divine, 319.

Impenetrability, 309, 322.

Incommutabilia vera, 89 n.

Indiscernibles, identity of, 135.

Infinite and Finite, 47; and categories, 212.

Infinite regress in causation, 373.

Inherence, v. accident.

“Intentional” causality, 413.

JAMES, 30; on personal identity, 283-4.

JOSEPH, on meanings of “cause,” 379-80.

JOUFFROY, 275.

Knowledge, relativity of, 335 sqq.

—scientific, 2.

Lacensis, Philosophia, 21.

LACORDAIRE, 89 n.

LIBERATORE, 99 n.

Materia prima, Aristotle on, 71-2.

Mathematical unity, 116, 119.

Mathematics, philosophy of, 17, 25.

Matter, and evil, 190.

— divisibility of (v. individuation), 317; continuity of, 317-18.

Measurement, relativity of, 325-7.

Memory, and personality, 276-84.

MERCIER, on division of metaphysics, 21; on scholasticism, 26-7; on characteristics of essences, 83, 93-4; on analogical concept of God, 97; on distinction, 107; on phenomenism, 213, 224 n., 269 n.; on faculty and substance, 305 n.; on interaction, 391; on efficient cause, 393 n.; on occasionalism, 398 n.; on mechanism, 426 n., 429 n.

Metaphor, and analogy, 39.

Metaphysics, division of, 15 sqq.; etymology of, 17, 18; scope of, 24, 25, 27; and physics, v. physics.

Modal distinction, 150, 245 sqq.

Monadology, of Leibniz, 227.

Monophysites, 268.

Monopsychism, 284.

Morality and art, 205-6.

Motion (v. change), and efficient causality, 392-6.

Multitude, actually infinite, 321-2.

Nature and substance, 257 sqq.; and person, 261 sqq.; analysis of notion of, 461 sqq.

Necessary and Contingent Being, 47.

Necessity of essences, 81 sqq.

NEWMAN, on scope of philosophy, 22, 31; on causality, 377, 387.

NIETZSCHE, 431.

Nisus naturae, 421.

Nominalism, 125.

Notas individuantes, 124, 131.

Occasion, and cause, 359.

Panpsychism, 250.

Pantheism, v. monism.

Person, personality, 262 sqq.; definition of, 265, 270 n.; distinction from individual nature, 266 sqq.; false theories of, 276 sqq.; “subconscious,” 283-4.

Phenomenism, and substance, 213 sqq., 223; substantializes accidents, 215; substantializes consciousness, 281, 282-4; and causality, 382 sqq., 398, 421.

Philosophy, notion of, 2 sqq.; divisions of, 7 sqq.; and special sciences, 28-9.

Place, analysis of, 318 sqq.

Pleasure, sensible and esthetic, 196-7, 205-6.

Possible, the, 52 sqq., 82 sqq.; and intelligible, 97; and passive potentiality, 109.

Potentia obediantialis, 372.

Potential, v. actual.

Power, operative, 55; and passive potentiality, 298 sqq.; as index of perfection, 202 n.; classification of, 305.

Praescisio objectiva et formalis, 34, 146-7.

Prime mover, necessity of, 65-7.

Principle, notion of, 357-8.

Providence, and chance, 424.

PYTHAGORAS, 1.

QUALITY, analysis of, 286 sqq.; divisions of, 288 sqq.; characteristics of, 305 sqq.; grades of intensity in, 307.

Quantity, and individuation, 133; analysis of, 309 sqq.; and corporeal substance, 311 sqq.; internal and external, 309-10, 314.

REINSTADLER, 106 n.

RENOUVIER, 335.

SCHIFFINI, 99 n.

Scholasticism, 26, 30; on substance, 218 sqq.

SCHOPENHAUER, 431.

Science, v. knowledge.

Sciences, special, 16, 27; at Louvain and Maynooth, 29 n.

Self, consciousness of, 274 sqq. (v. person.)

Sensibilia propria et communia, objectivity of, 70; per se et per accidens, 218, 260.

Similarity, and identity, 137, 306; and distinction, 153.

Simplicity, and quantity, 307 n.

SOCRATES, 167.

Solipsism, 86.

Specialists, scientific, and metaphysics, 27-28.

Species expressa, 46; sensibilis, 313.

Spirits, individuation of, 129, 131.

STORCHENAU, 98 n.

Substance, category of, undeniable in thought, 209, 215, 220, 281, 282-4; reality of, 213 sqq.; cognoscibility of, 213 sqq., 219 sqq.; plurality of, 221; distinction from accidents, 224 sqq., 301-5; erroneous notions of, 225 sqq.; permanence of, 229, 277; divisions of, 252 sqq.; complete and incomplete, 254 sqq.; corporeal and spiritual, 253-4, 315-6; relation to space, 319.

Substantial change, 71.

SULLY-PRUDHOMME, 203 n.

Supernatural theology, 5, 12, 13.

Suppositum, suppositalitas, v. person, personality.

Taste, esthetic, 197.

Teleology, v. purpose and final cause.

Theodicy, 21.

Thought and imagery, 392-6.

Time, analysis of, 322 sqq.; problems on, 328.

Tradition, 31.

Transcendental and generic notions, 35; attributes of being, 114 sqq.; relations, 345.

Transubstantiation, 233.

Truth, ontological, 158 sqq.

Ubiquity, Divine, 319.

Uniformity of Nature, 377; and law, 418; and inductive science, 419; degrees of, 422 sqq.

Union, substantial and personal, 268.

Universal and individual (v. individuation), 252-3.

Univocal, v. analogical.

Vacuum, and motion, 321.

Variety, and beauty, 200.

Vital change, 64-5.

Voluntarism, 96-7.

Weltanschauung, World-view, 4, 29, 30.

WILLIAM OF OCKAM, 95.

FOOTNOTES

_ 2 Institutions Metaphysica, quas Roma, in Pontificia Universitate Gregoriana tradiderat_ P. JOANNES JOSEPHUS URRABURU, S.J. Volumen Secundum: Ontologia (Rome, 1891).

3 French version by SIERP, 4 vols. Paris, Gaume, 1868.

• 4 Ontologie, ou Métaphysique Générale*, par D. MERCIER. Louvain, 3me édit., 1902.

5 Τὴν ὀνομαζομένην σοφίαν περὶ τὰ πρῶτα αἴτια καὶ τὰς ὑπολαμβάνουσι πάντες.—ARISTOTLE, Metaph., I., 1. “Sapientia [philosophia] est scientia quae considerat primas et universales causas.”—ST. THOMAS, In Metaph., I., I. 2.

• 6 Cf.* DE WULF, Scholasticism Old and New, pp. 59-61, 191-4; History of Medieval Philosophy, pp. 311-13; also two articles in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record (March and May, 1906) on Thoughts on Philosophy and Religion*, and an article in the Irish Theological Quarterly (October, 1910) on *Philosophy and Sectarianism in Belfast University, by the present writer.

• 7 Cf.* Encyclical Aeterni Patris, on Philosophical Studies, by Pope Leo XIII., August 4,1880.

8 Introduction, § 1.

9 As a brief general statement of the matter this is sufficiently accurate and will not be misunderstood. Of course the general standpoint of ultimate causes and reasons admits within itself some variety of aspects. Thus Epistemology and Psychology deal with human thought, but under different aspects; Psychology and Ethics deal with human volition, but under different aspects, etc.

10 “Theoreticus sive speculativis intellectus, in hoc proprie ab operativo sive practico distinguitur, quod speculativus habet pro fine veritatem quam considerat, practicus autem veritatem consideratam ordinat in operationem tamquam in finem; et ideo differunt ab invicem fine; finis speculativae est veritas, finis operativae sive practicae actio.”—ST. THOMAS, In lib. Boetii de Trinitate.

11 Here is St. Thomas’ exposition and justification of the doctrine in the text: “Sapientis est ordinare. Cujus ratio est, quia sapientia est potissima perfectio rationis, cujus proprium est cognoscere ordinem.... Ordo autem quadrupliciter ad rationem comparatatur. Est enim quidam ordo quem ratio non facit, sed solum considerat, sicut est ordo rerum naturalium. Alius autem est ordo, quem ratio considerando facit in proprio actu, puta cum ordinat conceptus suos ad invicem, et signa conceptuum, quae sunt voces significativae. Tertius autem est quem ratio considerando facit in operationibus voluntatis. Quartus autem est ordo quem ratio considerando facit in exterioribus rebus, quarum ipsa est causa, sicut in arca et domo. Et quia consideratio rationis per habitum perficitur, secundum hos diversos ordines quos proprie ratio considerat, sunt diversae scientiae. Nam ad philosophiam naturalem pertinet considerare ordinem rerum quem ratio humana considerat sed non facit; ita quod sub naturali philosophia comprehendamus et metaphysicam. Ordo autem quem ratio considerando facit in proprio actu, pertinet ad rationalem philosophiam, cujus est considerare ordinem partium orationis ad invicem et ordinem principiorum ad invicem et ad conclusiones. Ordo autem actionum voluntariarum pertinet ad considerationem moralis philosophiae. Ordo autem quem ratio considerando facit in rebus exterioribus constitutis per rationem humanam, pertinet ad artes mechanicas.”—In X. Ethic. ad Nichom., i., lect. 1.

• 12 Cf.* Science of Logic, i., Introduction, ch. ii. and iii.

13 ARISTOTLE and the scholastics distinguished between the domain of the practical (πρᾶσσω, πρᾶξις, agere, agibilia) and the operative or productive (ποιεῖν, ποίησις, facere, factibilia).

15 “Quædam igitur sunt speculabilium quæ dependent a materia secundum esse, quia non nisi in materia esse possunt, et hæc distinguuntur quia dependent quædam a materia secundum esse et intellectum, sicut illa in quorum definitione ponitur materia sensibilis: unde sine materia sensibili intelligi non possunt; ut in definitione hominis oportet accipere carnem et ossa: et de his est physica sive scientia naturalis. Quædam vero sunt quæ, quamvis dependeant a materia sensibili secundum esse, non tamen secundum intellectum, quia in eorum definitionibus non ponitur materia sensibilis, ut linea et numerus: et de his est mathematica. Quædam vero sunt speculabilia quæ non dependent a materia secundum esse, quia sine materia esse possunt: sive nunquam sint in materia, sicut Deus et angelus, sive in quibusdam sint in materia et in quibusdam non, ut substantia, qualitas, potentia et actus, unum et multa, etc., de quibus omnibus est theologia, id est scientia divina, quia præcipuum cognitorum in ea est Deus. Alio nomine dicitur metaphysica, id est, transphysica, quia post physicam dicenda occurrit nobis, quibus ex sensibilibus competit in insensibilia devenire. Dicitur etiam philosophia prima, in quantum scientiae aliæ ab ea principia sua accipientes eam sequuntur.”—ST. THOMAS, In lib. Boetii de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1.

16 Ἐττιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἤ θεωοεῖ τὸ ὄν και τούτῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ᾽ ἁυτό.—Metaph. III., I (ed. Didot).

19 When the term “science” is used nowadays in contradistinction to “philosophy,” it usually signifies the knowledge embodied in what are called the special, or positive, or inductive sciences—a knowledge which Aristotle would not regard as strictly or fully scientific.

20 Aristotle’s conception of the close relation between Physics (or the Philosophy of Nature) and those analytic studies which we nowadays describe as the physical sciences, bears witness to the close alliance which he conceived to exist between sense observation on the one hand and rational speculation on the other. This sane view of the continuity of human knowledge, a view to which the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages were ever faithful, was supplanted at the dawn of modern philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the opposite view, which led to a divorce between physics and metaphysics, and to a series of misunderstandings which still prevail with equal detriment to science and philosophy alike.

• 21 Cf.* DE WULF, History of Medieval Philosophy, pp. 28-9, 66; MERCIER, Ontologie, Introd., p. v., n.

22 “Dicitur metaphysica [scientia] id est, transphysica, quia post physicam dicenda occurrit nobis, quibus ex sensibilibus competit in insensibilia devenire.”—ST. THOMAS, In Lib. Boetii de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1.

23 This is also the title of the social and ethnological study of the various races of men, their primitive habits, customs, institutions, etc.

24 Not entirely; for instance, what is perhaps the most comprehensive course of philosophy published in recent times, the Philosophia Lacensis (11 vols., Herder, 1888-1900) apparently follows the arrangement of metaphysics outlined above. The fundamental questions on knowing and being, which usually constitute distinct departments under the respective titles of Epistemology and Ontology, are here treated under the comprehensive title of Institutiones Logicales (3 vols.). However, they are really metaphysical problems, problems of speculative philosophy, wherever they be treated; and the fact that the questions usually treated in Ontology are here treated in a volume apart (vol. iii. of the Institutiones Logicales: under the peculiar title of Logica Realis), and not in the volumes assigned to general metaphysics, shows the necessity and convenience of the more modern arrangement. General metaphysics are dealt with in 2 vols. of Institutiones Philosophiae Naturalis* and 3 vols. of Institutiones Psychologicae; special metaphysics in the Institutiones Theodicœae (1 vol.); ethics in 2 vols. of *Institutiones Juris Naturae.

• 25 Cf.* TURNER, History of Philosophy, p. 525.

26 MERCIER, Logique, Introd., § 9.

30 CAJETAN, In 2 Post Anal., ch. xiii.

33 p. 18—in which context will be found a masterly analysis and criticism of current prejudices and objections against systematic metaphysics.

35 ROYCE, The Conception of God, p. 207.

37 Encyclical, Aeterni Patris, on philosophical studies.

• 39 Cf.* MERCIER, Origines de la psychologie contemporaine, ch. viii.; DE WULF, Scholasticism Old and New (passim).

41 EUCKEN, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Philosophie und Lebensanschauung, § 157 (Leipzig, 1903).

• 42 Cf.* art. Philosophy and the Sciences at Louvain, in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, May, 1905, reprinted as Appendix in DE WULF’S Scholasticism Old and New.

43 Hence the necessity of equipping the student of philosophy with a knowledge of the main conclusions and theories of the sciences that have an immediate bearing on philosophy: chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, mechanics, the axioms and postulates of pure and applied mathematics, cellular biology, embryology, the physiology of the nervous system, botany and zoology, political economy, sociology and ethnology. Nowhere is the system of combining the scientific with the philosophical formation of mind more thoroughly carried out at the present time than in the curriculum of the Philosophical Institute at the University of Louvain. In the College of Maynooth not only is the study of philosophy completed by a fuller course of Christian Theology,—both disciplines thus combining to give the student all the essential elements of a complete Philosophy of Life (ii.),—but it is preceded by an elementary training in the physical sciences and accompanied by courses on the history of scientific theories in chemistry, physics, physiology, and general biology.

44 “We may mention it in passing,” writes Mercier in his general introduction to philosophy (Logique, § 1, p. 6)—“it was this feeling of individual impotence in face of the task confronting the philosopher at the present day, that inspired the foundation of the Philosophical Institute at the University of Louvain”. He had previously outlined the project in his Rapport sur les études philosophiques at the Congress of Mechlin in 1891. Here are a few brief extracts from that memorable document: “Since individual effort feels itself well nigh powerless in the presence of the field of observation which goes on widening day by day, association must make up for the insufficiency of the isolated worker; men of analysis and men of synthesis must come together and form, by their daily intercourse and united action, an atmosphere suited to the harmonious development of science and philosophy alike....” “Man has multiplied his power of vision; he enters the world of the infinitely small; he fixes his scrutinizing gaze upon regions where our most powerful telescopes discern no limits. Physics and Chemistry progress with giant strides in the study of the properties of matter and of the combinations of its elements. Geology and Astronomy reconstruct the history of the origin and formation of our planet. Biology and the natural sciences study the minute structure of living organisms, their distribution in space and succession in time; and Embryology explores their origin. The archæological, philological and social sciences reconstruct the past ages of our history and civilizations. What an inexhaustible mine is here to exploit, what regions to explore and materials to analyse and interpret; finally what pioneers we must engage in the work if we are to have a share in garnering those treasures!”

46 Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum, et lumen semitis meis.—Ps. cxviii., 105.

47 TENNYSON, In Memoriam.

• 50 Cf.* SCOTUS, Summa Theologica, edit. by Montefortino (Rome, 1900), i., p. 106, Ad tertium.

53 Hence St. Thomas calls the things about which a generic or specific concept is predicated “analoga secundum esse et non secundum intentionem” (In 1 Sent., Dist. xix., q. 5, a. 2, ad a am): we bring them under the same notion or “intentio” (e.g. “living being”), but the content of this notion is realized in the various things (e.g. in Socrates, this horse, that rose-tree, etc.) in varying and unequal degrees of perfection. Hence, too, this univocal relation of the genus to its subordinate subjects is sometimes (improperly) called “analogy of inequality”.

56 This, of course, is the proper sort of analogical predication: the predication based upon similarity of proportions or relations. Etymologically, analogy means equality of proportions (Cf. Logic, ii., p. 160). On the whole subject the student may consult with profit Cajetan’s Opusculum de Nominum Analogia, published as an appendix to vol. iv. of St. Thomas’ Quæstiones Disputatæ in De Maria’s edition (1883).

• 64 Cf.* KLEUTGEN, La philosophie scolastique (“Die Philosophie der Vorzeit”). Fr. trans. by Sierp (Paris, 1868), vol. i., p. 66, § 35.

65 The logical copula, which expresses this relation and asserts the truth of the judgment, expresses, of course, a logical entity, an ens rationis. True judgments may be stated about logical entities as well as about realities. But since the former can be conceived only after the manner of the latter, the appropriateness of using the verb which expresses existence or reality, as the logical copula, will be at once apparent. Cf. Logic, i., p. 249, n. 1.

70 “Esse actum quondam nominat: non enim dicitur esse aliquid ex hoc, quod est in potentia, sed ex hoc, quod est in actu.”—ST. THOMAS, Contra Gent. i., c. xxii., 4.

71 Certain medieval philosophers had made the same mistake. St. Thomas points out their error frequently. Cf. Contra Gentes, i., c. xxvi: “Quia id, quod commune est, per additionem specificatur vel individuatur, æstimaverunt, divinum esse, cui nulla fit additio, non esse aliquid proprium, sed esse commune omnium: non considerantes, quod id, quod commune est, vel universale, sine additione esse non potest, sed sine additione consideratur. Non enim animal potest esse absque rationali vel irrationali differentia, quamvis sine his differentiis consideretur; licet enim cogitetur universale absque additione, non tamen absque receptibilitate additionis est. Nam si animali nulla differentia addi posset, genus non esset; et similiter est de omnibus aliis nominibus. Divinum autem esse est absque additione, non solum cogitatione, sed etiam in rerum natura; et non solum absque additione, sed absque receptibilitate additionis. Unde ex hoc ipso quod additionem non recipit, nec recipere potest, magis concludi potest quod Deus non sit esse commune, sed esse proprium. Etenim ex hoc ipso suum esse ab omnibus aliis distinguitur, quia nihil ei addi potest.”

• 75 Cf.* LAMINNE, Cause et Effet—Revue neo-scolastique, February, 1914, p. 38.

76 St. Thomas uses what is for him strong language when he describes such a view as ridiculous: “Ridiculum est dicere quod ideo corpus non agat, quia accidens non transit de subjecto in subjectum; non enim hoc modo dicitur corpus calidum calefacere, quod idem numero calor, qui est in calefaciente corpore, transeat ad corpus calefactum; sed quia virtute caloris, qui est in calefaciente corpore, alius calor numero fit actu in corpore calefacto, qui prior erat in eo in potentia. Agens enim naturale non est traducens propriam formam in alterum subjectum, sed reducens subjectum quod patitur de potentia in actum.”—Contra Gentes, L. III., c. lxix.

• 77 Cf.* ZIGLIARA, Ontologia (8), ix., Quintum. Cf. also ARISTOTLE, Metaph. v., ST. THOMAS, In Metaph., v., § 14, and Contra Gentes, i., c. xvi., where he emphasizes the truth that potential being presupposes actual being: “Quamvis id quod quandoque est in potentia, quandoque in actu, prius sit tempore in potentia quam in actu, tamen simpliciter actus est prior potentia; quia potentia non educit se in actum, sed opportet quod educatur in actum per aliquid quod sit in actu. Omne igitur quod est aliquo modo in potentia, habet aliquid prius se”.

78 KLIMKE, Der Monismus und seine philosophischen Grundlagen, p. 185. Cf. Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. vii. (April, 1912), p. 157 sqq., art. Reflections on Some Forms of Monism.

79 For relations of potentia and actus, cf. MERCIER, Ontologie, § 214.

81 Λεγώ δ᾽ ὕλην, ἢ καθ᾽ ἁυτὴν μήτε τὶ, μήτε ποσὸν, μήτε ποίον, μήτε ἄλλο μεδὲν λέγεται οἶς ὤρισται τὸ ὄν.—Metaph. vi., c. iii.

82 “Decepit antiquos philosophos hanc rationem inducentes, ignorantia formae substantialis. Non enim adhuc tantum profecerant ut intellectus eorum se elevaret ad aliquid quod est supra sensibilia: et ideo illas formas tantum consideraverunt, quæ sunt sensibilia propria vel communia. Hujusmodi autem manifestum est esse accidentia, ut album et nigrum, magnum et parvum, et hujusmodi. Forma autem substantialis non est sensibilis nisi per accidens, et ideo ad ejus cognitionem non bervenerunt, ut scirent ipsam materiam distinguere.”—In Metaph. vii., 2.

83 “Esse actum quemdam nominat: non enim dicitur esse aliquid, ex hoc quod est in potentia, sed ex hoc quod est in actu.”—ST. THOMAS, Contra Gentes, i., ch. xxii., 4.

84 The etymology of Aristotle’s description of the essence as τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι is not easy to explain. The expression τὸ εἶναι supposes a dative understood, e.g. τὸ ἀνθρώπῳ εἶναι, the being proper to man. To the question τὶ ἐστι τὸ ἀνθρώπῳ εἶναι; what is the being or essence proper to man? the answer is: that which gives the definition of man, that which explains what he is—τί ἦν. Is the imperfect, τὶ ἦν, an archaic form for the present, τὶ ἐστι; or is it a deliberate suggestion of the profound doctrine that the essence as ideal, or possible, is anterior to its actual, physical realization? Commentators are not agreed. Cf. MATTHIAS KAPPES, Aristoteles-Lexicon, p. 25 (Paderborn, 1894); MERCIER, Ontologie, p. 30 n.

85 Essentia est illud per quod res constituitur in proprio genere vel specie, et quod significamus per definitionem indicantem quid est res.—De Ente et Essentia, ch. i.

86 ARISTOTLE, Metaph., v., 4; ST. THOMAS, De Potentia Dei, q. ix., art. 1.

87 Sometimes, however, the expression “metaphysical essence” is used to signify those objective concepts, and those only, without which the thing cannot be conceived, (or sometimes, even the one which is considered most fundamental among these), and therefore as not explicitly involving the concepts of properties which follow necessarily from the former; while the “physical essence” is understood to signify all those real elements without which the thing cannot actually exist, including, therefore, all such necessary properties. Taken in this sense the physical essence of man would include not merely soul and body, but also such properties as the capacity of speech, of laughter, of using tools, of cooking food, etc.

88 Et ex hoc patet ratio, writes St. Thomas, quare genus et species et differentia se habeant proportionaliter ad materiam, formam et compositum in natura, quamvis non sint idem cum illis; quia neque genus est materia, sed sumitur a materia ut significans totum; nec differentia est forma, sed sumitur a forma ut significans totum. Unde dicimus hominem esse animal rationale, et non ex animali et rationali; sicut dicimus eum esse ex corpore et anima. Ex corpore enim et anima dicitur esse homo, sicut ex duabus rebus quædam tertia res constituta, quæ neutra illarum est: homo enim nec est anima neque corpus; sed si homo aliquo modo ex animali et rationali dicatur esse, non erit sicut res tertia ex duabus rebus sed sicut intellectus [conceptus] tertius ex duobus intellectibus. Intellectus enim animalis est sine determinatione formae specialis naturam exprimens rei, ex eo quod est materiale respectu ultimae perfectionis. Intellectus autem hujus differentiae, rationalis, consistit in determinatione formae specialis: ex quibus duobus intellectibus constituitur intellectus speciei vel definitionis. Et ideo sicut res constituta ex aliquibus non recipit prædicationem earum rerum ex quibus constituitur; ita nec intellectus recipit prædicationem eorum intellectuum ex quibus constituitur; non enim dicimus, quod definitio sit genus vel differentia.—De Ente et Essentia, cap. iii.

• 91 Cf.* MERCIER, Ontologie, pp. 42-3. How do we know that not only water (H2O) is a possible essence but also hydrogen di-oxide (H2O2)? Because the latter substance has been actually formed by chemists (Cf. ROSCOE, Elementary Chemistry, Lesson VI.). Is hydrogen tri-oxyde (H2O3) a possible substance? We may ask chemists,—and they may not be able to tell us with any certainty whether it is or not.

92 The actual existence of a thinking mind is of course a necessary condition, in the actual order, for the apprehension of objects in this abstract way. But such existence is no part of the apprehended object. That the human mind, which is itself finite, contingent, allied with matter, and dependent on the activity of corporeal sense organs for the objects of its knowledge, should nevertheless have the power to apprehend contingent realities apart from their contingent actual existence in time and space,—is a fact of the greatest significance as regards the nature of the mind itself. But if we try to prove the existence of God from a consideration of the nature and powers of the human mind, our argument proceeds from the actual, and is distinct from any argument based exclusively on the nature and properties of possible essences as such. St. Augustine’s argument assumes as a fact that the human mind represents to itself possible essences as having reality independently both of its own thought and of any actual existence of such essences (Cf. DE MUNNYNCK, Praelectiones de Dei Existentia, p. 23). But is this a fact? This is the really debatable point.

93 Among others Henry of GHENT († 1293; Cf. DE WULF, History of Medieval Philosophy*, pp. 364-6; KLEUTGEN, *Philosophie der Vorzeit, Dissert, vi., cap. ii., 2 §§ 581-5), Capreolus (1380-1444), certain Scotists, and certain theosophists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are credited with this peculiar view. For numerous references, Cf. URRABURU, Ontologia, Disp. iii., cap. ii., art. v. pp. 650-63.

95 Among others, BALMES (Fundamental Philosophy, bk. iv., ch. xxvi.), LEPIDI (Ontologia, quoted by DE MUNYNCK, Praelectiones de Dei Existentia*, Louvain, 1904, p. 19); DE MUNYNCK (*ibid., pp. 19-23, 46-7, 75); HICKEY (Theologia Naturalis, pp. 31-4); DRISCOLL (God, pp. 72 sqq.); LACORDAIRE (God, p. 21); KLEUTGEN, Philosophie der Vorzeit, Dissert. iv., § 476.

96 Truth is not the work of any human intelligence, says St. Augustine, nor can any one arrogate to himself the right to say “my truth,” or “thy truth,” but all must say simply “the truth”: “Quapropter, nullo modo negaveris esse incommutabilem veritatem, haec omnia, quae incommutabiliter vera sunt, continentem, quam non possis dicere vel tuam vel meam, vel cujuscumque hominis, sed omnibus incommutabilia vera cernentibus, tamquam miris modis secretum et publicum lumen, praesto esse ac se praebere communiter: omne autem quod communiter omnibus ratiocinantibus atque intelligentibus praesto est, ad ullius eorum proprie naturam pertinere quis dixerit?”—De Libero Arbitrio, lib. ii., ch. xii. Cf. his striking expression of the same thought in his Commentary, Super Genesim ad Litteram, lib. ii., cap. vii.: “We may conceive the heavens and the earth, that were created in six days, ceasing to exist; but can we conceive the number ‘six’ ceasing to be the sum of six units?”: “Facilius coelum et terra transire possunt, quae secundum numerum senarium fabricata sunt, quam effici possit ut senarius numerus suis partibus non compleatur” (apud MERCIER, Ontologie, pp. 35-6).

• 97 Cf.* BALMES (Fundamental Philosophy, bk. iv., ch. xxvi.), who, analysing the truth of the proposition “Two circles of equal diameters are equal,” as an example of the necessary, eternal, immutable characteristics of possible essences, goes so far as to write (italics ours): “What would happen, if, withdrawing all bodies, all sensible representations, and even all intelligences, we should imagine absolute and universal nothing? We see the truth of the proposition even on this supposition: for it is impossible for us to hold it to be false. On every supposition, our understanding sees a connection which it cannot destroy: the condition once established, the result will infallibly follow.

“An absolutely necessary connection, founded neither on us, nor on the external world, which exists before anything we can imagine, and subsists after we have annihilated all by an effort of our understanding, must be based upon something, it cannot have nothing for its origin: to say this would be to assert a necessary fact without a sufficient reason.

“It is true that in the proposition now before us nothing real is affirmed, but if we reflect carefully we find even here the greatest difficulty for those who deny a real foundation to pure possibility. What is remarkable in this phenomenon, is precisely this, that our understanding feels itself forced to give its assent to a proposition which affirms an absolutely necessary connection without any relation to an existing object. It is conceivable that an intelligence affected by other beings may know their nature and relations; but it is not so easy of comprehension how it can discover their nature and relations in an absolutely necessary manner, when it abstracts all existence, when the ground upon which the eyes of the understanding are fixed, is the abyss of nothing.

“We deceive ourselves when we imagine it possible to abstract all existence. Even when we suppose our mind to have lost sight of every thing, a very easy supposition, granting that we find in our consciousness the contingency of our being, the understanding still perceives a possible order, and imagines it to be all occupied with pure possibility, independent of a being upon which it is based. We repeat, that this is an illusion, which disappears so soon as we reflect upon it. In pure nothing, nothing is possible; there are no relations, no connections of any kind; in nothing there are no combinations, it is a ground upon which nothing can be pictured.

“The objectivity of our ideas and the perception of necessary relations in a possible order, reveal a communication of our understanding with a being on which is founded all possibility. This possibility can be explained on no supposition except that which makes the communication consist in the action of God giving to our mind faculties perceptive of the necessary relation of certain ideas, based upon necessary being, and representative of His infinite essence.”

Balmes, therefore, does not mean that we could continue to see essences as possible were we to imagine withdrawn not merely finite minds but even the Divine Mind. In such an absurd hypothesis, nothing would appear true or false, possible or impossible. But he contends that even when we try to think away all minds, even the Divine Mind, we still see possible essences to be possible. And from this he argues that, since we have successfully thought away finite minds and the actuality of essences, while the possibility of these latter still persists, these must be grounded in the Mind of God, the Actual, Eternal, Necessary Being, where they have eternal ideal being.

Cf. DE MUNNYNCK (op. cit., pp. 22-3): “Ponamus mundum non esse, nec supponamus Dei existentiam. In nihilo illo, omne ens actuale excludens, remanet intacta—hoc certissime scimus ex objectivo valore intellectus nostri—realitas aeterna, immutabilis, ordinis idealis. [Illa realitas essentiarum, he adds (ibid., n. 2), independens ab omni actuali existentia, atque ab omni actu intellectus, est fundamentum metaphysicum realismi platonici.—Habet praeterea mirum hoc systema, ut omnes sciunt, fundamentum criteriologicum.] Essentiae sunt, nec tamen existunt. Illa realitas, praeter mundum totum, praeter entia rationis, indestructibilis perseverat, nec tamen actualis est. Haec quomodo intelligi possit nescimus, nisi ponatur illam fundari in plenitudine aeterna, infinita, absoluta τοῦ Esse absoluti. Hoc ente supremo posito, omnia lucidissima se praebent intellectui; illo Deo optimo—quem non possumus, perspectis illis altissimis, non adorare—sublato, admittendae sunt essentiae rerum ab aeterno reales sine actuali existentia; atque proinde quid non-individuale est reale in se, quod tamen concipi non potest nisi objective in mente.”

• 98 Cf.* ST. AUGUSTINE, De Libero Arbitrio, lib. ii., ch. viii.

• 99 Cf.* especially MERCIER, Ontologie, pp. 40-49.

100 It is, for example, just as necessarily and immutably true of any actually existing man that he cannot be at the same time existing and not existing as it is that a man cannot be an irrational animal.

101 “Unde, etiamsi intellectus humanus non esset, adhuc res dicerentur verae in ordine ad intellectum divinum. Sed si uterque intellectus, quod est impossibile, intelligeretur auferri, nullo modo ratio veritatis remaneret.”—ST. THOMAS, De Veritate, q. i., art. ii.

107 “Quæ objecta non divina esse, luce clarius apparet. Attamen ilia ponderando, modumque inspiciendo quo representantur a mente humana, atque praesupponendo valorem objectivum intellectus, concludimus ex ideis ad realitates illas quæ in Esse divino fundantur ... ratione horum [objectorum scil. idearum nostrarum] percipimus, ope ratiocinii, illa positive aeterna et immutabilia, quæ reapse in Deitate fundantur, atque sunt ipse Deus quatenus imitabilis.”—ibid., pp. 24-5. Cf. extract quoted above, p. 91 n.

108 “Non ideo voluit Deus mundum creare in tempore, quia vidit melius sic fore, quam si creasset ab æterno; nec voluit tres angulos trianguli æquales esse duobus rectis, quia cognovit aliter fieri non posse. Sed contra, quia voluit creare mundum in tempore, ideo sic melius est, quam si creatus fuisset ab æterno, et quia voluit tres angulos trianguli necessario æquales esse duobus rectis, idcirco jam verum est, et aliter fieri non potest, atque ita de reliquis.”—DESCARTES, in Resp. ad Sext. Objectiones, ad 6um scrupulum.

110 URRABURU (op. cit. Disp. iii., cap. ii., § iii., p. 671) mentions Wolff, Leibniz, Genuensis and Storchenau as holding this view.

111 Among others, Liberatore, Lahousse, Pesch, Harper. Cf. URRABURU, op. cit., ibid.

112 Dupasquier, Mastrius and Rada, apud URRABURU, op. cit., ibid., pp. 679-81.

113 Urraburu, Schiffini, Mendive. Cf. URRABURU, op. cit., ibid., p. 671.

115 “Ex hoc ipso quod quidditati esse attribuitur, non solum esse, sed ipsa quidditas creari dicitur: quia antequam esse habeat, nihil est, nisi forte in intellectu creantis, ubi non est creatura, sed creatrix essentia.”—ST. THOMAS, De Potentia, q. iii., art. v., ad 2 um.

116 “Ipsum esse competit primo agenti secundum propriam naturam: esse enim Dei est ejus substantia, ut ostensum est (C. G., Lib. i., c. 22). Quod autem competit alicui secundum naturam suam, non convenit aliis nisi per modum participationis, sicut calor aliis corporibus ab igne [i.e. as caused or produced in them. Cf. Kleutgen, op. cit., Dissert., i., c. iii., § 61]. Ipsum igitur esse competit aliis omnibus a primo agente per participationem quamdam. Quod autem alicui competit per participationem, non est substantia ejus. Impossibile est igitur quod substantia alterius entis praeter agens primum sit ipsum esse. Hinc est quod Exod. iii., proprium nomen Dei ponitur esse qui est, quia ejus solius proprium est, quod sua substantia non sit aliud quam suum esse.”—ST. THOMAS, Contra Gentes, L. ii., cap. 52, n. 7.

“Quod inest alicui ab agente, oportet esse actum ejus; agentis enim est facere aliquid actu. Ostensum est autem supra, quod omnes aliae substantiæ habent esse a primo agente, et per hoc ipsæ substantiæ creatæ sunt, quod esse ab alio habent. Ipsum igitur esse inest substantiis creatis ut quidam actus earum. Id autem, cui actus inest, potentia est: nam actus in quantum hujusmodi ad potentiam refertur. In qualibet igitur substantia creata est potentia et actus.”—ibid., cap. 53, n. 2.

“Omne quod recipit aliquid ab alio, est in potentia respectu illius: et hoc quod receptum est in eo, est actus ejus; ergo oportet, quod ipsa forma vel quidditas, quæ est intelligentia [i.e. a pure spirit], sit in potentia respectu esse, quod a Deo recipit, et illud esse receptum est per modum actus, et ita invenitur actus et potentia in intelligentiis [i.e. pure spirits], non tamen forma et materia nisi aequivoce.”—De Ente et Essentia, cap. v. Cf. also Summa Theol., P. i., q. iii., art. 4; q. xiii., art. 11; q. lxxv., art. 5, ad 4 um. Quodlibeta, ii., art. 3; ix., art. 6. De Potentia*, q. vii., art. 2. *In Metaph., iii., Dist. vi., q. 2, art. 2. Contra Gentes, L. ii., cap. 54, 68. St. Thomas is usually interpreted as teaching that the distinction between essence and existence in created things is a real distinction. But there are some who have been unable to convince themselves that the Angelic Doctor has made his mind entirely clear on the subject. Kleutgen, for instance, writes (op. cit., Dissert. vi., c. ii., § 574, n. 2): “In the extracts quoted above St. Thomas clearly states that the distinction made by our thought is based on the nature of created things, but not that this distinction is that which exists between different parts, dependent on one another, each having its own proper being or reality.”

119 Zigliara (Ontologia (14), iii. iv.) gives the virtual distinction as a sub-class of the real distinction; adding, however (according to Goudin, Metaph., Disp. i., q. iii. art. ii., § i) that “this virtual distinction is not so much a [real] distinction as the basis of a [mental] distinction”.

121 These may be seen in abundance in the works of any of the scholastic writers, medieval or modern, who discuss the question. Cf., e.g. URRABURU, op. cit., §§ 251-4.

122 Besides St. Thomas (cf. supra, p. 102, n. 2), Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), Aegidius Romanus († circa 1300), Capreolus (1380-1444), Soncinas († 1494), Cajetan (1468-1534), Sylvester Ferrariensis (1474-1528), Dominicus Bañez (1528-1604), John of St. Thomas (1589-1644), Goudin (1639-95), are among the most noted scholastics to hold this view. It is supported by the members of the Dominican Order generally; and by not a few Jesuits among recent scholastic writers; also by MERCIER, op. cit., §§ 48-51.

126 “Esse rei quamvis sit aliud ab ejus essentia, non tamen est intelligendum, quod sit aliquod superadditum, ad modum accidentis, sed quasi constituitur per principia essentiae. Et ideo hoc nomen, quod imponitur ab esse (ens) significat idem cum nomine quod imponitur ab ipsa essentia.”—ST. THOMAS, In Metaph., L. iv., l. 2.

127 Among the advocates of this view are Alexander of Hales († 1245), Aureolus († 1322), Durandus († 1332), Gabriel Biel († 1495), Suarez (1548-1617), Toletus (1532-1596), Vasquez (1551-1604), Gregory of Valentia († circa 1600), and the Jesuits generally: some few regarding the distinction as purely logical, e.g. Franzelin (apud MERCIER, op. cit., § 47, p. 110, n. 2). For details and arguments on both sides, cf. URRABURU, op. cit., Disp. iv., cap. i., art. 2.

128 “Compositum ex esse et essentia dicitur de ratione entis creati secundum fundamentum, quod in ipso ente creato habet; hoc autem fundamentum non est aliud nisi quia creatura non habet ex se actu existere, sed tantum est ens potentiale, quod ab alio potest esse participare: nam hinc fit, ut essentia creaturae concipiatur a nobis ut potentiale quid, esse vero ut modus seu actus, quo talis essentia ens in actu constituitur.”—SUAREZ, Metaph., Disp. xxxi., § 13.

129 When we speak of an essence as receiving existence, we do not necessarily imply a real distinction between receiver and received: “Non est imaginandum quod una res sit, quae participat sicut essentia, et alia quae participatur sicut esse, sed quia una et eadem res est realitas modo participato et per vim alterius sicut per vim agentis: haec enim realitas de se non est nisi sub modo possibili; quod autem sit et vocari possit actus, hoc habet per vim agentis.”—ALEXANDER OF HALES, In Metaph., L. vii., text 22. “Non omne acceptum,” writes St. Thomas, “est receptum in aliquo subjecto; alioquin non posset dici quod tota substantia rei creatae sit accepta a Deo, cum totius substantiae non sit aliquod subjectum receptivum”—Summa Theol., I., q. xxvii., art. ii., ad. 3um.

• 130 Cf.* MERCIER, op. cit., § 49. Some of these doctrines we shall examine later, by way of illustration, in connexion with the Unity of being.

133 ARISTOTLE, Metaph., lib. 5, text ii., cap. 6; ST. THOMAS, in loc. et alibi.

134 “Si ... modus entis accipiatur ... secundum divisionem unius ab altero, ... hoc exprimit hoc nomen aliquid, dicitur enim aliquid quasi aliud quid. Unde sicut ens dicitur unum inquantum est indivisum in se, ita dicitur aliquid inquantum est ab aliis diversum*.”—ST. THOMAS, *De Veritate, q. 1, a. 1.

135 “Nam omne ens est aut simplex, aut compositum. Quod autem est simplex, est indivisum et actu et potentia. Quod autem est compositum, non habet esse, quamdiu partes ejus sint divisae, sed postquam constituunt et componunt ipsum compositum. Unde manifestum est quod esse cujuslibet rei consistit in indivisione; et inde est, quod unumquodque sicut custodit suum esse, ita custodit suam unitatem.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xi., a. 1.

136 “Unum vero quod est principium numeri, addit supra substantiam rationem mensurae, quae est propria passio quantitatis, et primo invenitur in unitate. Et dicitur per privationem vel negationem divisionis, quae est secundum quantitatem continuam. Nam numerus ex divisione continui causatur.*”—ST. THOMAS, *In Metaph., lib. 4, lect. 2, par. b.

137 Those who regard the distinction between the essence and the existence of an actually existing substance as real consider the latter as an ens unum per se. The existence of a real distinction between the essential constitutive factors of a composite substance is universally regarded by scholastics as compatible with essential unity—unitas per se—in the latter. Such factors are really distinct, and separable or divisible, but actually undivided. So also, the union of an individual nature and its subsistence (73) forms a unum per se (unum compositionis) in the view of those who place a real distinction between these factors.

138 Of course essential unity of composition is also “natural”. Cf. KLEUTGEN, op. cit., §§ 631-8.

139 “Unum quod convertitur cum ente ponit quidem ipsum ens, sed nihil superaddit, nisi negationem divisionis. Multitudo autem ei correspondens addit supra res, quæ dicuntur multæ, quod unaquæque earum sit una, et quod una earum non sit altera.... Et sic, cum unum addat supra ens unam negationem, secundum quod aliquid est indivisum in se, multitudo addit duas negationes, prout scilicet aliquid est in se indivisum, et prout est ab alio divisum, et unum eorum non esse alterum.”—ST. THOMAS, De Potent., q. 9, a. 7.

140 “Sic ergo primo in intellectu nostro cadit ens, et deinde divisio, et post hoc unum quod divisionem privat, et ultimo multitudo quæ ex unitatibus constituitur.”—ST. THOMAS, In Metaph.*, lib. 10, lect. 4, par. *c.

141 Omnis pluralitas consequitur aliquam divisionem. Est autem duplex divisio: una materialis quæ fit secundum divisionem continui, et hanc sequitur numerus, qui est species quantitatis. Unde talis numerus, non est nisi in rebus materialibus habentibus quantitatem. Alia est divisio formalis, quæ fit per oppositas vel diversas formas: et hanc divisionem sequitur multitudo quæ non est in aliquo genere, sed est de transcendentibus, secundum quod ens dividitur per unum et multa. Et talem multitudinem solam contingit esse in rebus immaterialibus.—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xxx., art. 3.

142 We may confine our attention here to substances, assuming for the present that accidents are individuated by the individual substances in which they inhere. We may note further that it is only corporeal individuals that fall directly within our experience. We can, of course, infer from the latter the actual existence of individual spiritual realities subsisting apart from matter, viz. human souls after death, and also the possibility of purely spiritual individual beings such as angels. But when we conceive these as individuals we must conceive them after the analogy of individuals in the domain of corporeal reality: it is only through concepts derived from this domain, and finding their proper application within it, that we can have any knowledge of suprasensible or spiritual realities, viz. by applying those concepts analogically to the latter.

143 The “formal-actual” distinction, which Scotists advocate between these grades of being, we shall examine later.

• 144 Cf.* URRABURU, op. cit., p. 280: “Principium ... intrinsicum vel formale est aliquid insitum rei, pertinensque ad intrinsecam et ultimam individui constitutionem, et fundans formalitatem illam, quae individitatio dicitur. Sicut enim materia est in homine, v.g. principium et fundamentum propter quod est, ac praedicatur materialis, et forma fundat in eodem praedicatum rationalis, totaque natura composita, humanitas, praedicatum hominis; ita quaerimus quid sit illud primum principium, unde existit in quovis individuo sua peculiaris ac propria individuatio.”

145 In ancient Greece the Eleatics argued against the possibility of real plurality somewhat in this wise: If there were really different beings any two of them would differ from each other only by some third reality, and this again from each of the former by a fourth and a fifth reality, and so on ad infinitum: which would involve the absurdities of infinite number and infinite regress. A similar argument was used by the medieval pantheist, David of Dinant, to identify God with the material principle of corporeal reality: God and primary matter exist and do not differ; therefore they are identical: for if they differed they should differ by something distinct from either, and this again should differ from both by something distinct from all three, and so on ad infinitum: which is absurd. Such sophisms arise from accepting the purely abstract view of reality as adequate. We have seen already, in dealing with the abstract notion of being, that from this point of view it must be recognized and admitted that the reality whereby things differ (viz. being) is also the reality wherein they agree (viz. being, also). The paradox is restated below in regard to individuation.

146 Materia ... dupliciter accipitur, scilicet, ut signata et non signata. Et dicitur signata, secundum quod consideratur cum determinatione dimensionum harum scilicet vel illarum; non signata autem, quæ sine determinatione dimensionum consideratur. Secundum hoc igitur est sciendum, quod materia signata est individuationis principium.—ST. THOMAS, De Veritate, q. ii., art. 6, ad. 7am.

148 These will easily be found in any of the fuller scholastic treatises. Cf. URRABURU, op. cit., Disp. ii., cap. 2, art. 4. Philosophia Lacencis, Logica, §§ 1282 sqq.; MERCIER, Ontologie, §§ 36-42; KLEUTGEN, Philosophie Scolastique, §§ 610 sqq.; BULLIAT, Thæsaurus Philosophiae Thomisticae (Nantes, 1899), pp. 171 sqq.—a useful book of reference for the teaching of St. Thomas.

149 A kindred view to this is the view that subsistence (“subsistentia,” “suppositalitas”) or personality (“personalitas”) is the principle of individuation. We shall see later in what subsistence or personality is supposed to consist. Here it is sufficient to observe that the individual nature as such has not necessarily subsistence or personality; hence it cannot be individuated by this latter.

150 The consistent attitude for the Thomist here would, however, appear to be a denial that such a thing would be intrinsically possible.

151 Hujusmodi relatio non potest consistere nisi in quodam ordine, quem ratio adinvenit alicujus ad seipsum secundum aliquas ejus duas considerationes.—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xxviii., art. 3, ad. 2am.

153 It is only the concrete and individual that as such can exist actually; the abstract and universal as such cannot exist actually: abstractness and universality are mental modes—entia rationis—annexed by the mind to the real content of its concepts: considered as thought-objects they are themselves not real entities: they do not affect reality as given to us in our experience. But perhaps concreteness and individuality are also mere mental modes, affecting reality not as given to us in our experience but only as subjected to the process of intellectual conception, or at least as subjected to the process of sense perception? This would appear to be part of the general Kantian theory of knowledge: that we can apprehend reality as concrete and individual only because space and time, which characterize the concrete and individual mode of being, are mental modes which must be applied to reality as a prerequisite condition for rendering the latter capable of apprehension in our experience. This contention is examined in another context. Cf. infra, pp. 145, 147, 151.

154 Thus the recognition of a virtual distinction in a being is a sign of the relative perfection of the latter: the being involves in its higher sort of unity perfections elsewhere dispersed and separate. The being is of a higher order than if the principles of these perfections in it were really distinct from one another. But the virtual distinction also seems to imply a relative imperfection when it is found in creatures, inasmuch as here the thought-objects so distinguished are always principles of a plurality of really distinct accidental perfections: and real plurality in a being is less perfect than unity.—Cf. KLEUTGEN, op. cit., § 633.

155 “Omnis cognitio est a potentia et objecto, sive a cognoscente et cognito. Ratio a priori est, quia omnis cognitio saltem creata est expressio et imitatio atque imago vitalis objecti. Inquantum igitur est vitalis, procedit a cognoscente; implicat enim cognoscentem vivere per aliquid, quod ab ipso non est, sed pure illud recipit ab alio mere passive se habendo; inquantum vero cognitio est expressio, imitatio et imago objecti, procedit ab objecto”—SILVESTER MAURUS, Quaest. Philos., q. 2. This is the common scholastic distinction: cognition as a product representative or expressive of reality is a product determined by the influence of reality (as active) on the mind (as passive); cognition as a vital process is active, a reaction of mind to the influence of reality. It may be remarked, however, that the cognitive process, as vital, has always a positive term. Our cognitive processes are partly at least processes of abstracting, comparing, relating, universalizing: processes which produce “intentiones logicas” or “entia rationis,” such as the “intentio universalitatis” the relation of subject to predicate, and other logical relations and logical distinctions: and hence arises the difficulty, when we come to reflect on our cognitive experience, of discriminating between these “logical entities” and the reality which we interpret by means of them: of discriminating, in other words, between logical and real distinctions.

156 It is not necessary of course that this implicit embodiment of all the others, by any one of them, be seen to be mutual. It is sufficient, for instance, that of the concepts a, b, c and d, a be seen implicitly to involve b, b to involve c, etc., though not vice versa. However, it must be remarked that in the exercise of thought upon its abstract objects we feel something wanting to our intellectual insight as long as the relations we apprehend are not reciprocal. In the sciences of abstract quantity we approximate to the ideal of establishing reciprocal relations throughout the whole system of the concepts analysed. But abstract thought does not give us an adequate apprehension of the real: it represents reality only under the static aspect, and as abstract, i.e. apart from the individualizing conditions of time and space which affect its concrete, actual existence as revealed in sense experience. Were we to neglect the latter, and consider merely what abstract thought gives us, we should regard as really one what is one for thought*. But what is one for thought is *the universal; and the logical issue of holding the universal as such to be real is monism. Or again, to put the matter in another way, in so far as intellect sees the objects of its various abstract concepts to involve one another necessarily, it has no reason—as long as it ignores the verdict of sense experience on the real manifoldness of actually existing being—to abstain from attributing a real unity to the whole system of abstract thought-objects which it contemplates as reciprocally and necessarily interrelated. On the contrary, it should pronounce that whatever plurality can be unified by the dialectically necessary relations discovered by thought, is really one*, and must be regarded as *one reality: which, again, is monism. But a philosophy which thus ignores sense experience must be one-sided and misleading.

160 ST. THOMAS, De Ente et Essentia, cap. iv.: “Ideo, si quaeratur utrum ista natura possit dici una vel plures, neutrum concedendum est: quia utrumque est extra intellectum [conceptum] humanitatis, et utrumque potest sibi accidere. Si enim pluralitas esset de ratione ejus, nunquam posset esse una: cum tamen una sit secundum quod est in Sorte. Similiter si unitas esset de intellectu et ratione ejus, tunc esset una et eadem natura Sortis et Platonis, nec posset in pluribus plurificari.” Cf. ZIGLIARA, Summa Philos., Ontologia (1), iv., v.; (3) iv.

161 “Licet enim (natura) nunquam sit sine aliquo istorum, non tamen est de se aliquod istorum, ita etiam in rerum natura secundum illam entitatem habet verum ‘esse’ extra animam reale: et secundum illam entitatem habet unitatem sibi proportionabilem, quae est indifferens ad singularitatem, ita quod non, repugnat illi unitati de se, quod cum quacumque unitate singularitatis ponatur.”—SCOTUS, In L. Sent.*, 2, dist. iii., q. 7.—Cf. DE WULF, *History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 372.

• 162 Cf.* Science of Logic, ii., § 248. Moral truth or veracity—the conformity of language with thought—is treated in Ethics.

165 “Si omnis intellectus (quod est impossibile) intelligeretur auferri, nullo modo ratio veritatis remaneret.”—ST. THOMAS, De Veritate, q. i., art 1, 2 in fine.

169 “Si intellectus humanus non esset, adhuc res dicerentur veræ in ordine ad intellectum divinum. Sed si uterque intellectus, quod est impossibile, intelligeretur auferri, nullo modo ratio veritatis remaneret.”—ST. THOMAS, De Veritate, q. i., art. 2.

170 “Si ergo accipiatur veritas rei secundum ordinem ad intellectum divinum, tunc quidem mutatur veritas rei mutablis in aliam veritatem, non in falsitatem.”—ST. THOMAS, ibid. q. i., art. 6.

172 “Res per se non fallunt, sed per accidens. Dant enim occasionem falsitatis; eo quod similitudinem eorum gerunt quorum non habent existentiam.... Res notitiam sui facit in anima per ea quae de ipsa exterius apparent ... et ideo quando in aliqua re apparent sensibiles qualitates demonstrantes naturam quae eis non subest, dicitur res illa esse falsa.... Nec tamen res est hoc modo causa falsitatis in anima, quod necessario falsitatem causat.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 17, art. 1, ad. 2; De Veritate, q. i., art. 10, c.

173 Καλῶς ἀπεφήναντο τἀγαθὸν, οὖ πάντα ἐφίεται.—ARISTOTLE, Eth., i.

175 “Bonum autem, cum habeat notionem appetibilis, importat habitudinem causæ finalis.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 5, art. 2, ad. 1.

176 “Prima autem non possunt notificari per aliqua priora, sed notificantur per posteriora, sicut causæ per proprios effectus. Cum autem bonum proprie sit motivum appetitus, describitur bonum per motum appetitus, sicut solet manifestari vis motiva per motum. Et ideo dicit (Aristoteles) quod philosophi bene enunciaverunt bonum esse id quod omnia appetunt.”—ST. THOMAS, Comment. in Eth. Nich., i., lect. 1a.

177 The “end,” which is last in the order of actual attainment, is first as the ideal term of the aim or tendency of the nature: finis est ultimus in executione, sed primus in intentione: it is that for the sake of which, and with a view to which, the whole process of actualization or “perfecting” goes on. Cf. infra, § 108.

178 “Licet bonum et ens sint idem secundum rem; quia tamen differunt secundum rationem, non eodem modo dicitur aliquid ens simpliciter et bonum simpliciter. Nam, cum ens dicat aliquid esse in actu, actus autem proprie ordinem habeat ad potentiam, secundum hoc simpliciter aliquid dicitur esse ens secundum quod primo secernitur ab eo quod est in potentia tantum; hoc autem est esse substantiale rei uniuscujusque. Unde per suum esse substantiale dicitur unumquodque ens simpliciter; per actus autem superadditos dicitur aliquid esse secundum quid.... Sic ergo secundum primum esse, quod est substantiale, dicitur aliquid ens simpliciter et bonum secundum quid, id est, inquantum est ens; secundum vero ultimum actum dicitur aliquid ens secundum quid, et bonum simpliciter.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 5, art. 1, ad. 1.

179 “Respectus ... qui importatur nomine boni est habitudo perfectivi secundum quodaliquid natum est perficere non solum secundum rationem speciei [i.e. the abstract essence], sed secundum esse quod habet in rebus; hoc enim modo finis perficit ea quae sunt ad finem.”—ST. THOMAS, De Veritate, q. 26, art. 6.

• 180 Cf.* the familiar ethical distinction between objective, and formal or subjective happiness, beatitudo objectiva and beatitudo formalis seu subjectiva.

181 “In motu appetitus, id quod est appetibile terminans motum appetitus secundum quid, ut medium per quod tenditur in aliud, vocatur utile. Id autem quod appetitur ut ultimum terminans totaliter motum appetitus sicut quaedam res in quam per se appetitus tendit, vocatur honestum; quia honestum dicitur quod per se desideratur. Id autem quod terminat motum appetitus, ut quies in se desiderata, est delectabile.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 5, art. 3.

182 Excellentia hominis maxime consideratur secundum virtutem, quae est dis positio perfecti ad optimum, ut dicitur in 6 Physic. Et ideo, honestum, proprie loquendo, in idem refertur cum virtute.—ibid., 2a 2ae, q. 145, art. I, c.

183 “Eorum quae propter se apprehenduntur, quaedam apprehenduntur solum propter se, et nunquam propter aliud, sicut felicitas, quae est ultimus finis; quaedam vero apprehenduntur et propter se, in quantum habent in seipsis aliquam rationem bonitatis, etiamsi nihil aliud boni per ea nobis accideret, et tamen sunt appetibilia propter aliud, in quantum scilicet perducunt nos in aliquod bonum perfectius: et hoc modo virtutes sunt propter se apprehendendae.”—ibid., ad I.

185 “Omnia ... quae jam habent esse, illud esse suum naturaliter amant, et ipsam tota virtute conservant.... Ipsum igitur esse habet rationem boni. Unde sicut impossibile est quod sit aliquod ens quod non habeat esse, ita necesse est quod omne ens sit bonum ex hoc ipso quod habet esse.”—ST. THOMAS, De Veritate, q. 21, art. 2, c.

186 “Non-esse secundum se non est appetibile, sed per accidens, inquantum scilicet ablatio alicujus mali est appetibilis; quod malum quidem aufertur per non-esse; ablatio vero mali non est appetibilis, nisi inquantum per malum privatur quoddam esse. Illud igitur, quod per se est appetibile, est esse; non-esse vero, per accidens tantum, inquantum scilicet quoddam esse appetitur, quo homo non sustinet privari; et sic etiam per accidens non-esse dicitur bonum.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 5, art. 2, ad. 3.

187 “Malum est defectus boni quod natum est et debet haberi.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 49, art. 1, c.

189 “Causam formalem malum non habet, sed est magis privatio formae.”—St. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 49, art. 1, c.

190 “Nec causam finalem habet malum, sed magis est privatio ordinis ad debitum finem.”—ibid.

191 “Non est causa efficiens sed deficiens mali, quia malum non est effectio sed defectio.”—De Civ. Dei, xii., 7.

192 “O, altitudo divitiarum sapientiae, et scientiae Dei! Quam incomprehensibilia sunt judicia ejus, et investigabiles viae ejus!”—Rom. xi., 33.

193 Connected with the transcendental notion of unity is another concept, that of order, which will be more fully examined when we come to treat of causes.

194 BAUMGARTEN, a German philosopher of the eighteenth century, was the first to use the term Aesthetica in this sense.

195 “Dicendum est quod pulchrum est idem bono sola ratione differens. Cum enim bonum sit quod omnia appetunt, de ratione boni est, quod in eo quietetur appetitus; sed ad rationem pulchri attinet quod in ejus aspectu seu cognitione quietetur appetitus; unde et illi sensus præcipue respiciunt pulchrum, qui maxime cognoscitivi sunt, scilicet visus et auditus rationi deservientes; dicimus enim pulchra visibilia et pulchros sonos; in sensibilibus autem aliorum sensuum non utimur nomine pulchritudinis; non enim dicimus pulchros sapores, aut odores.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., ia. iiæ., q. 27, art. 1, ad. 3.

196 “Ad rationem pulchri pertinet, quod in ejus aspectu seu cognitione quietetur appetitus ... ita quod pulchrum dicatur id, cujus ipsa apprehensio placet.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., ia. iiæ., q. 27, art. 1, ad. 3. And the Angelic Doctor justifies the extended use of the term vision: “De aliquo nomine dupliciter convenit loqui, uno modo secundum ejus primam impositionem, alio modo secundum usum nominis, sicut patet in nomine visionis, quod primo impositum est ad significandum actum sensus visus; sed propter dignitatem et certitudinem hujus sensus extensum est hoc nomen, secundum usum loquentium, ad omnem cognitionem aliorum sensuum; dicimus enim: Vide quomodo sapit, vel quomodo redolet, vel quomodo est calidum; et ulterius etiam ad cognitionem intellectus, secundum illud Matt. v. 8: Beati mundi corde quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt.”—i., q. 67, art. 1, c.

197 “Pulchrum et bonum in subjecto quidem sunt idem, quia super eandem rem fundantur, scilicet super formam, et propter hoc bonum laudatur ut pulchrum: sed ratione differunt: nam bonum proprie respicit appetitum: ... et ideo habet rationem finis.... Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam: pulchra enim dicuntur quæ visa placent.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 5, art. 4, ad. 1.

• 198 Cf.* DE WULF, La Valeur esthétique de la moralité dans l’art, pp. 28-9.

• 200 De la connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même*, ch. i., § 8.

• 202 Cf.* POINCARÉ, Conférence sur les rapports de l’analyse et de la physique mathematique*.—apud MERCIER, *Ontologie, § 274, pp. 546-7 n.

203 When the object so excels in greatness or grandeur as to exceed more or less our capacity to realize it we speak of it as sublime. The sublime calls forth emotions of self-abasement, reverence, and even fear. If an object possessing the other requisites of beauty is wanting in due magnitude, we describe it as pretty or elegant. The terms grace, graceful, apply especially to gait, gesture, movement.

204 On this point all the great philosophers are unanimous. For Plato, beauty whether of soul or of body, whether of animate or of inanimate things, results not from chance, but from order, rectitude, art: οὐχ οὕτως εἰκῆ κάλλιστα παραγίγνεται ἀλλὰ τάξει και ὀρθότητι καὶ τέχνῃ, ἥτις ἑκάστῳ ἀποδέδοται αὐτῶν (Plato, Gorg. 506D). Aristotle places beauty in grandeur and order: Τὸ γὰρ καλὸν ἐν μεγέθει καὶ τάξει ἐστί (Poetics, ch. viii., n. 8). Τοῦ δὲ καλοῦ μέγιστα ἐίδη τάξις καὶ συμμετρία καὶ τὸ ὡρισμένον (Metaph., xii., ch. iii., n. 11). “Nihil,” writes St. Augustine, “est ordinatum quod non sit pulchrum.” “Pulchra,” says St. Thomas, “dicuntur quae visa placent; unde pulchrum in debita proportione consistit” (Summa Theol., i., q. 5, art. 4, ad. 1).

205 “Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur; primo quidem integritas sive perfectio; quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt; et debita proportio sive consonantia; et iterum claritas.”—Summa Theol., i., q. 39, art. 8, c. Elsewhere he omits integrity, supposing it implied in order: “ad rationem pulchri sive decori concurrit et claritas et debita proportio”. And elsewhere again he omits clarity, this being a necessary effect of order: “pulchrum in debita proportione consistit”.

206 By “natural perfection” is meant the perfection which a nature acquires by the realization of its end (5): Τέλειον δὲ τὸ ἔχον τέλος (Aristotle).

207 This definition coincides with that found in a medieval scholastic treatise De Pulchro et Bono, attributed to St. Thomas or Albertus Magnas: “Ratio pulchri in universali consistit in resplendentia formae super partes materiae proportionatas, vel super diversas vires vel actiones.” Cf. MERCIER, Ontologie, p. 554.

• 208 L’Idée du beau dans la philosophie de S. Thomas d’Aquin*, p. 2.

• 209 Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien*, viie leçon.

• 210 Kritik der Urtheilskraft*, Th. i., Abschn. 1, B. 1, passim.

211 “Omnis corporea creatura ... bonum est infimum, et in genere suo pulchrum* quoniam forma et specie continetur.”—ST. AUGUSTINE, *De Vera Relig., c. 20.

212 At the same time it must be borne in mind that many of the judgments by which things are pronounced “ugly” or “commonplace” are erroneous. This is partly because they are based on first and superficial sense impressions: beauty must be apprehended and judged by the intellect, and by the intellect “informed” with genuine knowledge; to the eye of enlightened intelligence there are beauties of structure and organization in the beetle or the tadpole as well as in the peacock or the spaniel. It is partly, too, because we unconsciously or semi-consciously apply standards of human beauty to beings that are merely animal: “To know really whether there are ugly monkeys we should have to consult a monkey; for the beauty we unconsciously look for, and certainly do not find, in the monkey, is the beauty of the human form; and when we declare the monkey ugly what we really mean is that it would be ugly if it were a human being; which is undeniable.”—SULLY-PRUDHOMME, L’Expression dans les beaux arts, p. 104.

• 216 Cf.* WINDELBAND, History of Philosophy (tr. Tufts), Introduction.

• 219 Cf.* ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 90, art. 2: “Illud proprie dicitur esse quod ipsum habet esse quasi in suo esse subsistens. Unde solæ substantiæ proprie et vere dicuntur entia; accidens vero non habet esse sed eo aliquid est, et hac ratione ens dicitur ... accidens dicitur magis entis quam ens.”

• 224 Cf.* ST. THOMAS, In Metaph., L. xi., lect. 9: “Sed sciendum est quod prædicamenta diversificantur secundum diversos modos prædicandi. Unde idem, secundum quod diversimode de diversis prædicatur, ad diversa prædicamenta pertinet.... Similiter motus secundum quod prædicatur de subjecto in quo est, constituit prædicamentum passionis. Secundum autem quod prædicatur de eo a quo est, constituit prædicamentum actionis.”

• 226 Cf.* Essay concerning Human Understanding, book iv., ch. vi., § 11: “Had we such ideas of substances, as to know what real constitutions produce those sensible qualities we find in them, and how these qualities flowed from thence, we could, by the specific ideas of their real essences in our own minds, more certainly find out their properties, and discover what properties they had or had not, than we can now by our senses: and to know the properties of gold, it would be no more necessary that gold should exist, than it is necessary for the knowing the properties of a triangle, that the triangle should exist in any matter; the idea in our minds would serve for the one as well as the other.”

227 “Sensation convinces us that there are solid, extended substances; and reflection, that there are thinking ones: experience assures us of the existence of such beings.”—ibid., book ii., ch. xxiii., § 29. Locke protested repeatedly against the charge that he denied the existence of substances.

228 The notion one has of pure substance is “only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities, which are capable of producing simple ideas in us; which qualities are commonly called accidents.... The idea then we have, to which we give the general name substance, being nothing but the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist, ‘sine re substante,’ without something to support them, we call that support substantia.”—book ii., ch. xxiii., § 2. In the following passage we may detect the idealistic insinuation that knowledge reaches only to “ideas” or mental states, not to the extramental reality, the “secret, abstract nature of substance”: “Whatever therefore be the secret abstract nature of substance in general, all the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of substances, are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself”. It belongs, of course, to the Theory of Knowledge, not to the Theory of Being, to show how groundless the idealistic assumption is.

229 Inquiring into the causes of our “impressions” and “ideas,” he admits the existence of “bodies” which cause them and “minds” which experience them: “We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body*? but ’tis vain to ask, *Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.”—A Treatise on Human Nature, Part iv., § ii.

230 Of the definition of a substance as something which may exist by itself, he says: “this definition agrees to everything that can possibly be conceiv’d; and will never serve to distinguish substance from accident, or the soul from its perceptions.... Since all our perceptions are different from each other, and from everything else in the universe, they are also distinct and separable, and may be consider’d as separately existent, and may exist separately, and have no need of anything else to support their existence. They are, therefore, substances, as far as this definition explains a substance.”—ibid., § v. “We have no perfect idea of substance, but ... taking it for something that can exist by itself, ’tis evident every perception is a substance, and every distinct part of a perception a distinct substance.”—ibid.

233 Assuming for the moment that we can know substance to be not one but manifold: that experience reveals to us a plurality of numerically or really, and even specifically and generically, distinct substances. Cf. infra, p. 221.

• 234 Cf.* HUXLEY, Hume, bk. ii., ch. ii. TAINE, De L’Intelligence, t. i., Preface, and passim.

236 Such terms as “corruptible,” “destructible,” etc., imply certain attributes of a thing which can be corrupted, destroyed. Conceiving this attribute in the abstract we form the terms “corruptibility,” “destructibility,” etc. So, too, the term “possibility” formed from the adjective “possible,” simply implies in the abstract what the latter implies in the concrete—an active or passive power of a thing to cause or to become something; or else the mind’s conception of the non-repugnance of this something. To substantialize a possibility, therefore, is sufficiently absurd; but to speak of a possibility as real and at the same time to deny the reality of any subject in which it would have its reality, is no less so.

237 except in the Blessed Eucharist: here we know from Divine Revelation that the accidents of bread and wine exist apart from their connatural substance. We cannot, by the light of reason, prove positively the possibility of such separate existence of accidents; at the most, men of the supreme genius of an Aristotle may have strongly suspected such possibility, and may have convinced themselves of the futility of all attempts to prove in any way the impossibility of such a condition of things. Nor can we, even with the light of Revelation, do any more than show the futility of such attempts, thus negatively defending the possibility of what we know from Revelation to be a fact.

• 239 Cf.* MAHER, Psychology, ch. xxii., for a full analysis and refutation of phenomenist theories that would deny the substantiality of the human person.

240 “Substantia est res, cujus naturae debetur esse non in alio; accidens vero est res, cujus naturae debetur esse in alio.”—Quodlib., ix., a. 5, ad. 2.

• 241 Cf.* DESCARTES, Oeuvres, edit. Cousin, tome ix., p. 166—apud MERCIER, Ontologie, p. 280.

242 PAULSEN, Einleitung in die Philosophie, Berlin, 1896, S. 135—apud MERCIER, loc. cit.

243 and also appetitive; as in mental life appetition is a natural consequent of perception. It is in accordance with this latter idea that Wundt conceives all reality as being in its ultimate nature appetitive activity: the Ego is a “volitional unit” and the universe a “collection of volitional units”.—Cf. WUNDT, System der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1889, S. 415-421.

245 But from Descartes’ doctrine of two passive substances so antithetically opposed to each other the transition to Spinozism was easy and obvious. If mind and matter are so absolutely opposed as thought and extension, how can they unite to form one human individual in man? If both are purely passive, and if God alone puts into them their conscious states and their mechanical movements respectively, what remains proper to each but a pure passivity that would really be common to both? Would it not be more consistent then to refer this thought-essence or receptivity of conscious activities, and this extension-essence or receptivity of mechanical movements, to God as their proper source, to regard them as two attributes of His unique and self-existent substance, and thus to regard God as substantially immanent in all phenomena, and these as only different expressions of His all-pervading essence? This is what Spinoza did; and his monism in one form or other is the last word of many contemporary philosophers on the nature of the universe which constitutes the totality of human experience.—Cf. HÖFFDING, Outlines of Psychology, ch. ii., and criticism of same apud MAHER, Psychology, ch. xxiii.

246 “Esse substantiæ non dependet ab esse alterius sicut ei inhærens, licet omnia dependeant a Deo sicut a causa prima.”—ST. THOMAS, De Causa Materiæ, cap. viii.

249 “Illud proprie dicitur esse, quod ipsum habet esse, quasi in suo esse subsistens. Unde solæ substantiæ proprie et vere dicuntur entia; accidens vero non habet esse, sed eo aliquid est, et hac ratione ens dicitur: sicut albedo dicitur ens quia ea aliquid est album. Et propter hoc dicitur in Metaph., l. 7 [al. 6], c. i. [Arist.], quod accidens dicitur magis entis quam ens.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i. q. 90, art. 2. “Illud cui advenit accidens, est ens in se completum consistens in suo esse, quod quidem esse naturaliter præcedit accidens, quod supervenit: et ideo accidens superveniens, ex conjunctione sui cum eo, cui supervenit, non causat illud esse in quo res subsistit per quod res est ens per se: sed causat quoddam esse secundum, sine quo res subsistens intelligi potest esse, sicut primum potest intelligi sine secundo, vel prædicatum sine subjecto. Unde ex accidente et subjecto non fit unum per se, sed unum per accidens, et ideo ex eorum conjunctione non resultat essentia quædam, sicut ex conjunctione formæ cum materia: propter quod accidens neque rationem completæ essentiæ habet, neque pars completæ essentiæ est, sed sicut est ens secundum quid, ita et essentiam secundum quid habet.”—De Ente et Essentia, ch. vii.

250 “Non est definitio substantiæ, ens per se sine subjecto, nec definitio accidentis, ens in subjecto; sed quidditati seu essentiæ substantiæ competit habere esse non in subjecto; quidditati autem sive essentiæ accidentis competit habere esse in subjecto.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., iii., q. 77, art. 1, ad. 2.

255 This logical usage is applied equally to attributes of a logical subject which is not itself a substance but an accident; it turns solely on the point whether the concept of the logical predicate of a judgment is or is not connected by an absolute logical connexion, a connexion of thought, with the concept of the logical subject.

258 St. Thomas, whose language is usually so moderate, thus expresses his view of the doctrine afterwards propounded by Descartes when the latter declared the essence of the soul to be thought: “Quidquid dicatur de potentiis animae, tamen nullus unquam opinatur, nisi insanus, quod habitus et actus animae sint ipsa ejus essentia.”—Quaest. Disp., De Spir. Creat., art. 11, ad 1. For a very convincing treatment of this question, cf. KLEUTGEN, op. cit., §§ 625-626.

262 Hence St. Thomas says, in regard to the Blessed Eucharist, that the accidents of bread and wine had not an existence of their own as long as the substance of bread and wine was there; that this is true of accidents generally; that it is not they that exist, but rather their subjects; that their function is to determine these subjects to exist as characterized in a certain way, as whiteness gives snow a white existence: “Dicendum quod accidentia panis et vini, manente substantia panis et vini non habebant ipsa esse sicut nec alia accidentia, sed subjecta eorum habebant hujusmodi esse per ea, sicut nix est alba per albedinem.”—Summa Theol., iii., q. 77, art. 1, ad. 4.

263 For the arguments on both sides cf. MERCIER, Ontologie, § 156 (pp. 308 sqq.). The indirect argument which the author derives from the fact that the Divine Concursus is necessary for the activity of creatures, while offering an intelligible explanation of this necessity on Thomistic principles, does not touch the probability of other explanations.

• 264 Cf.* URRABURU’S definition: “entitas vel realitas a subjecto realiter distincta, cujus totum esse consistit in ultima determinatione rei ad aliquod munus obeundum, vel ad aliquam realem denominationem actu habendam, sine qua, saltem in individuo sumpta, res eadem potest existere absolute”.—op. cit., § 120 (p. 380).

266 Whether immanent vital acts—especially of the spiritual faculties in man: thoughts, volitions, etc.—are mere modes, or whether they are absolute accidents, having their own proper and positive reality which perfects their subject by affecting it, is a disputed question. Habits, acquired by repetition of such acts, e.g. knowledge and virtue, belonging as they do to the category of quality, are more than mere modalities of the human subject: they have an absolute, positive entity, whereby they add to the total perfection of the latter.

268 The fact that Aristotle [Metaph., lib. vii. (al. vi.), ch. iii.] seems to have placed a real distinction between extension and corporeal substance, while he could not have suspected the absolute separability of the former from the latter, would go to show that he did not regard separability as the only test of a real distinction. Cf. KLEUTGEN, op. cit., ibid.

269 Obviously we are not concerned herewith all the attributes which by a necessity of thought we ascribe to an essence, e.g. the corruptibility of a corporeal substance, or the immortality of a spiritual substance. These are not entities really distinct from the substance, but only aspects which we recognize to be necessary corollaries of its nature. We are concerned only with properties which are real powers, faculties, forces, aptitudes of things.—Cf. KLEUTGEN, op. cit., § 627.

271 “Tertii sunt, qui dicunt, quod potentiae animae nec adeo sunt idem ipsi animae, sicut sunt ejus principia intrinsica et essentialia, nec adeo diversae, ut cedant in aliud genus, sicut accidentia; sed in genere substantiae sunt per reductionem ... et ideo quasi medium tenentes inter utramque opinionem dicunt, quasdam animae potentias sic differre ad invicem, ut nullo modo dici possint una potentia: non tamen concedunt, eas simpliciter diversificari secundum essentiam, ita ut dicantur diversae essentiae, sed differre essentialiter in genere potentiae, ita ut dicantur diversa instrumenta ejusdem substantiae.”—In lib. ii., dist. xxiv., p. 1, art. 2, q. 1.

In the same context he explains what we are to understand by referring anything to a certain category per reductionem: “Sunt enim quaedam, quae sunt in genere per se, aliqua per reductionem ad idem genus. Illa per se sunt in genere, quae participant essentiam completam generis, ut species et individua; illa vero per reductionem, quae nan dicunt completam essentiam.... Quaedam reducuntur sicut principia ... aut essentialia, sicut sunt materia et forma in genere substantiae; aut integrantia, sicut partes substantiae.... Quaedam reducuntur sicut viae ... aut sicut viae ad res, et sic motus et mutationes, ut generatio, reducuntur ad substantiam; aut sicut viae a rebus, et sic habent reduci potentiae ad genus substantiae. Prima enim agendi potentia, quae egressum dicitur habere ab ipsa substantia, ad idem genus reducitur, quae non adeo elongatur ab ipsa substantia, ut dicat aliam essentiam completam.”—ibid., ad. 8.

272 “Quoniam potentia creaturae arctata est, non potuit creatura habere posse perfectum, nisi esset in ea potentiarum multitudo, ex quarum collectione sive adunatione, una supplente defectum alterius, resultaret unum posse completum, sicut manifeste animadverti potest in organis humani corporis, quorum unumquodque indiget a virtute alterius adjuvari.”—In lib. ii., dist. xxiv., p. 1, art. 2, q. 8.

273 The student will find in MAHER’S Psychology (ch. iii.) a clear and well-reasoned exposition of the inconsistency and groundlessness of such attacks on the doctrine of faculties.

275 “Cum corpus hominis aut cujuslibet alterius animalis sit quoddam totum naturale, dicit unum ex eo quod unam formam habeat qua perficitur non solum secundum aggregationem aut compositionem, ut accidit in domo et in aliis hujusmodi. Unde opportet quod quaelibet pars hominis et animalis recipiat esse [i.e. sibi proprium] et speciem ab anima sicut a propria forma. Unde Philosophus dicit (l. ii. de anima, text. 9), quod recedente anima neque oculus neque caro neque aliqua pars manet nisi aequivoce.”—ST. THOMAS, Quaest. Disp. de anima*, art. 10—apud KLEUTGEN, *op. cit., § 632.

276 The most perfect real unity is of course that which includes all perfection in the simplicity of its actual essence, without any dispersion or plurality of its being, without any admixture of accident or potentiality. Such is the unity of the Infinite Being alone. No finite being possesses its actuality tota simul. And the creature falls short of perfect unity in proportion as it attains to this actuality only by a multiplicity of real changes, by a variety of really distinct principles and powers, essential and accidental, in its concrete mode of being. In proportion as created things are higher or lower in the scale of being (47), they realize a higher or a lower grade of unity in their mode of individual existence.

277 We are concerned here only with finite, created substances, as distinct from the Divine Uncreated Substance on whom these depend (64).

282 Sciendum est quod nomen naturae significat quodlibet principium intrinsicum motus; secundum quod Philosophus dicit quod natura est principium motus in eo in quo est per se, et non secundum accidens*.—ST. THOMAS, *Summa Theol., iii., q. 2, art. 1 in c.

283 And here we are reminded of the view of many medieval scholastics of high authority, that the same material entity can have at the same time a plurality of formative principles or substantial forms of different grades of perfection.

285 For want of a more appropriate rendering we translate the Latin term suppositum (Gr. ὑπόστασις) by the phrase “subsisting thing”; though the classical terms are really generic: suppositum being a genus of which there are two species, suppositum irrationale (“thing” or “subsisting thing”) and suppositum rationale (“person”).—Cf. infra, pp. 265-6.

286 Complete in every way: in substantial and in specific perfections. The separated soul, though it is an existing individual substance, retains its essential communicability to its connatural material principle, the body. Hence it has not “subsistence,” it is not a “person”.—Cf. infra, p. 264.

287 “Per se agere convenit per se existenti. Sed per se existens quandoque potest dici aliquid, si non sit inhærens ut accidens, vel ut forma materialis, etiamsi sit pars. Sed proprie et per se subsistens dicitur quod neque est praedicto modo inhærens neque est pars. Secundum quem modum oculus aut manus non potest dici per se subsistens, et per consequens nec per se operans. Unde et operationes partium attribuuntur toti per partes. Dicimus enim quod homo videt per oculum et palpat per manum.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 75, art. 2, ad. 2.

• 288 Cf.* preceding note. St. Thomas continues: “Potest igitur dici quod anima intelligit, sicut oculus videt, sed magis proprie dicitur quod homo intelligat per animam” (ibid.); and elsewhere he writes: “Dicendum quod anima est pars humanae speciei [i.e. naturae]. Et ideo, licet sit separata, quia tamen retinet naturam unibilitatis, non potest dici substantia individua quae est hypostasis vel substantia prima, sicut nec manus, nec quaecumque alia partium hominis; et sic non competit ei neque definitio personae, neque nomen.”—Summa Theol., i., q. 29, art. 1, ad. 5.

290 All created subsisting things and persons depend, of course, essentially on the Necessary Being for their existence and for their activity. This Necessary Being we know from Revelation to be Triune, Three in Persons, One in Nature. The subsistence of each Divine Person of the Blessed Trinity excludes all modes of dependence.

291 “Hoc ... quod est per se agere, excellentiori modo convenit substantiis rationalis naturae quam aliis. Nam solae substantiae rationales habent dominium sui actus, ita quod in eis est agere et non agere; aliae vero substantiae magis aguntur quam agunt. Et ideo conveniens fuit ut substantia individua rationalis naturae speciale nomen haberet.”—ST. THOMAS, Quaest. Disp. de Potentia, q. ix., art. 1, ad. 3.

• 293 Cf.* URRABURU, op. cit., § 291, for an exhaustive list of the authorities in favour of each of the various views propounded in this present context.

294 “Natura singularis et integra per se consituitur in sua independentia, non aliquo positivo addito ultra illam entitatem positivam, qua est haec natura.”—SCOTUS, iii., Dist. i. q. 1, n. 9 and n. 11, ad. 3. Cf. SUAREZ, Metaph., Disp. xxxiv. § 2; KLEUTGEN, op. cit., § 616; FRANZELIN, De verbo Incarnato, Th. xxix.

296 Neither is it a natural union in the sense of being due to the human nature; it is wholly undue to the latter, and is in this sense supernatural.

• 298 ibid.* Farther on (p. 863) he says it is certain that the Divine Nature of the Word is substantially united with humanity in a unity of person or subsistence: “certum est eamdem [naturam divinam] substantialiter uniri cum humanitate in unitate suppositi;” and for this he considers that the human nature must be incomplete “in ratione personae”. But this proves nothing; for of course the human nature must be wanting in personality. But it is complete as a nature. Nor does the aphorism he quotes—“Quidquid substantiae in sua specie completae accedit, accidens est,”—apply to subsistence or personality supervening on a complete substance.

299 “Humanitas illa [scil. Christi], quamvis completa in esse naturae, non tamen habet ultimum complementum in genere substantiae cum in se non subsistat.”—ibid., § 296 (p. 866).

302 Hence Urraburu gives this real definition of subsistence: ultimus naturae terminus in ordine substantiali sive in ratione existentis per se: the ultimate term (or determination) of a nature in the order of substantiality or of “existing by itself”—op. cit., § 296 (p. 866).

303 “Sicut enim modus accidentalis figurae terminat quantitatem, et modus ubicationis constituit rem hic et non alibi, ita modus substantialis personalitatis terminans naturam reddit illam incommunicabilem alieno supposito.”—URRABURU, op. cit., § 291 (p. 854).

304 The terms “Self,” “Ego,” and “Person” we take to be identical in reference to the human individual. The mind is not the Ego, self, or person, but only a part of it.—Cf. MAHER, Psychology, ch. vi., p. 104.

• 305 Cf.* MAHER, Psychology, ch. xvii.

• 308 Cf.* MAHER, Psychology, p. 365 (italics in last sentence ours).

311 There are cogent theological reasons also against the view that consciousness constitutes personality. For instance, the human nature of our Divine Lord has its own proper consciousness, which, nevertheless, does not constitute this nature a person.

• 312 Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, bk. ii., ch. xxvii.

313 “That being then one plant which has such an organization of parts in one coherent body partaking of one common life, it continues to be the same plant as long as it continues to partake of the same life, though that life be communicated to different particles of matter vitally united to the living plant, in a like continued organization conformable to that sort of plants....

“The case is not so much different in brutes, but that anyone may hence see what makes an animal and continues it the same....

“This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists: viz. in nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body.... For if the identity of soul alone makes the same man, and there be nothing in the nature of matter why the same individual spirit may be united [i.e. successively] to different bodies, it will be possible that ... men living in distant ages, and of different tempers, may have been the same man....”—Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. ii. ch. xxvii. § 4-6. Yet though “identity of soul” does not make “the same man,” Locke goes on immediately to assert that identity of consciousness, which is but a function of the soul, makes the same person.

• 314 Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, bk. ii., ch. xxvii., § 7. Names do not stand for ideas or concepts but for conceived realities; and the question here is: What is the conceived reality (in the existing human individual) for which the term “person” stands?

• 316 Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, bk. ii., ch. xxvii., §§ 13, 14.

• 317 Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, bk. ii., ch. xxvii., § 13.

318 For a searching criticism of such theories of the Ego or human person, cf. MAHER, Psychology, ch. xxii.

• 321 Cf.* MAHER’S criticism of Professor James’ theory on double personality (op. cit., ch. xxii., pp. 491-2): “Professor James devotes much space to these ’mutations’ of the Ego, yet overlooks the fact that they are peculiarly fatal, not to his adversaries, but to his own theory that ‘the present thought is the only thinker,’ and that seeming identity is sufficiently preserved by each thought ’appropriating’ and ‘inheriting’ the contents of its predecessor. The difficulties presented to this process of inheritance by such facts as sleep and swooning have been already dwelt upon [cf. ibid., p. 480 (c)]; but here they are if possible increased. The last conscious thought of, say, Felida 2 has to transmit its gathered experience not to its proximate conscious successor, which is Felida 1, but across seven months of vacuum until on the extinction of Felida 1 the next conscious thought which constitutes Felida 2 is born into existence. If the single personality is hard for Mr. James to explain, ‘double-personality’ at least doubles his difficulties.”

323 Ποιότητα δὲ λέγω, καθ᾽ ἤν ποιοί τινες εἰναι λέγονται.—Categ., ch. iv. Cf. ST. THOMAS: “Haec est ratio formalis qualitatis, per quam respondemus interroganti qualis res sit.”

324 The other accidents, e.g. actio and passio, in so far as they change the perfection of the substance, do so only by producing qualities in it. Quantity, which is the connatural accident of all corporeal substance, adds of itself no special complement or degree of accidental perfection to the latter, in the sense of disposing (or indisposing) the latter for the attainment of the full and final perfection due to its specific nature; but only in the sense that it supposes more or less of that kind of substance to exist, or in the sense in which it is understood to include the qualities of which it may be the immediate subject.—Cf. URRABURU, op. cit., § 326.

• 325 In Praedicamenta*, ch. i.

• 326 Cf.* MAHER, Psychology, ch. xii, xiii, xxiii, xxv. BERGSON rightly recognizes the irreducibility of quality to quantity (Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience, passim). But he wrongly infers from this “fundamental antinomy,” as he calls it, the existence, in each human individual, of a two-fold Ego, a deeper self where all is quality, and a superficial self which projects conscious states, in static and numerical isolation from one another, into a homogeneous space where all is quantitative, mathematical. The reasonable inference is merely that the human mind recognizes in the data of its experience a certain richness and variety of modes of real being.

• 327 Metaph.* V., ch. xiv., where the four groups are finally reduced to two.

329 To be distinguished from the passio which is correlative of actio and which consists in the actual undergoing of the latter, the actual reception of the accidental form which is the term of the latter.

330 “Inter omnes qualitates, figurae maxime sequuntur et demonstrant speciem rerum. Quod maxime in plantis et animalibus patet, in quibus nullo certiori indicio diversitas specierum dijudicari potest, quam diversitate figurae.”—ST. THOMAS, In VII. Physic, lect. 5.

331 Every natural habit, as we have just seen, has an essential relation to activity. Every such habit inheres immediately in some operative faculty, as science in the intellect, or justice in the will. All natural habits are operative. There is, however, as we know from Divine Revelation, an “entitative” habit, a habitus entitativus, which affects the substance itself of the human soul, ennobling its natural mode of being and so perfecting it as to raise it to a higher or supernatural plane of being, to an order of existence altogether undue to its nature: the supernaturally infused* habit of *sanctifying grace.

333 “Vires naturales non agunt operationes suas mediantibus aliquibus habitibus, quia secundum seipsas sunt determinatae ad unum.”—Summa Theol., ia iiæ, q. 49, art. 4, ad 2.

334 “Intellectus ... est subjectum habitus. Illi enim competit esse subjectum habitus quod est in potentia ad multa; et hoc maxime competit intellectui....”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., ia, iie, q. 50, art. 4, ad. 1. “Omnis potentia quae diversimode potest ordinari ad agendum, indiget habitu, quo bene disponatur ad suum actum. Voluntas autem cum sit potentia rationalis, diversimode potest ad agendum ordinari: et ideo oportet in voluntate aliquem habitum ponere, quo bene disponatur ad suum actum ...,”—ibid. art. 5, in c.

335 “Habitualis dispositio requiritur ubi subjectum est in potentia ad multa. Operationes vero quae sunt ab anima per corpus, principaliter quidem sunt ipsius animae, secundario vero ipsius corporis. Habitus autem proportionantur operationibus; unde ex similibus actibus similes habitus causantur, ut dicitur in 2 Ethic., cap. 1 et 2; in corpore vero possunt esse secundario, inquantum scilicet corpus disponitur et habilitatur ad prompte deserviendum operationibus animae.”—Summa Theol., ia iiæ, q. 49, art. 1, in c.

337 According to the scholastic theory of matter and form the matter must be predisposed by certain qualities for the reception of a given substantial form. The chemical elements which form a compound will not do so in any and every condition, but only when definitely disposed and brought together under favourable conditions. These elementary qualities, considered in themselves, are not habits or dispositions: “Unde qualitates simplices elementorum, quae secundum unum modum determinatum naturis elementorum conveniunt, non dicimus dispositiones vel habitus, sed simplices qualitates.”—ST. THOMAS, ibid., q. 49, art. 4, in C. They are natural qualities and not dispositions produced by disposing causes.

338 St. Thomas regards the distinction between habits and mere dispositions as a distinction not of degree but of kind: “Dispositio et habitus possunt distingui sicut diversae species unius generis subalterni, ut dicantur dispositiones illae qualitates primae speciei quibus convenit secundum propriam rationem ut de facili amittantur, quia habent causas mutabiles, ut aegritudo et sanitas; habitus vero dicantur illae qualitates quae secundum suam rationem habent quod non de facili transmutentur quia habent causas immobiles; sicut scientia et virtutes; et secundum hoc disposito non fit habitus.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., ia, iiæ, q. 49, art. 2, ad. 3.

339 “Vires sensitivae dupliciter possunt considerari: uno modo, secundum quod operanter ex instinctu naturae; alio modo, secundum quod operantur ex imperio rationis. Secundum igitur quod operantur ex instinctu naturae, sic ordinantur ad unum, sicut et natura; et ideo sicut in potentiis naturalibus non sunt aliqui habitus, ta etiam nec in potentiis sensitivis, secundum quod ex instinctu naturae operantur. Secundum vero quod operantur ex imperio rationis, sic ad diversa ordinari possunt: et sic possunt esse in eis aliqui habitus, quibus bene aut male ad aliquid disponuntur.”—ST. THOMAS, ibid., q. 50, art. 3, in c. In this context the angelic doctor, following Aristotle, places the virtues of temperance and fortitude in the sense appetite as controlled by the rational will. For the same reason he admits the possibility of habits in the faculties of internal sense perception, though not in the external senses (ibid., ad. 3).

340 “Quia bruta animalia a ratione hominis per quandam consuetudinem disponuntur ad aliquid operandum sic, vel aliter, hoc modo in brutis animalibus habitus quodammodo poni possunt.... Deficit tamen ratio habitus quantum ad usum voluntatis quia non habent dominium utendi vel non utendi, quod videtur ad rationem habitus pertinere; et ideo, proprie loquendo, in eis habitus esse non possunt.”—ibid., ad. 2.

341 It must not be forgotten that habit is an accident, an accidental perfection of the substance or nature of an individual agent; it immediately affects the operative power of the agent, which operative power is itself an accident of this agent’s nature (constituting the second sub-class of the accident, Quality). Habit is thus at once an actuality or actualization of the operative power and a potentiality of further and more perfect acts. It is intermediate between the operative power and the complete actualization which the power receives by the acts that spring from the latter as perfected by the habit. Faculty and habit form one complete proximate principle of those acts: a principle which is at once a partial actualization of the individual agent’s nature and a potentiality of further actualization of this nature.

342 “Si potentiae animae non sunt ipsa essentia animae, sequitur quod sint accidentia in aliquo novem generum contenta. Sunt enim in secunda specie qualitatis, quæ dicitur potentia vel impotentia naturalis.”—Q. Disp. de Spir. Creat., art. 11, in c.

• 343 Cf.* ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. 76, art. 1, in c.—“Cum potentia et actus dividant ens, et quodlibet genus entis, opportet quod ad idem genus referatur potentia et actus; et ideo si actus non est in genere substantiae, potentia, quæ dicitur ad illum actum, non potest esse in genere substantiae. Operatio autem animae non est in genere substantiae, sed in solo Deo, cujus operatio est ejus substantia.”—Cf. ZIGLIARA, Ontologia (9), xi.: “Actus et potentia essentialiter ad illum actum ordinata sunt in eodem genere supremo.”

344 “Nec in angelo, nec in aliqua creatura, virtus vel potentia operativa est idem quod sua essentia.... Actus ad quem comparatur potentia operativa est operatio. In angelo autem non est idem intelligere et esse; nec aliqua alia operatio, aut in ipso aut in quocunque alio creato, est idem quod ejus esse. Unde essentia angeli non est ejus potentia intellectiva, nec alicujus creati essentia est ejus operativa potentia.”—ibid., q. 54, art 3.

345 As we shall see later, action as such does not perfect or change the agens, unless when, as in immanent action, the agens is identical with the patiens. Action formally actualizes or perfects the patiens: actio fit in passo. But the exercise of any activity by an agent undoubtedly connotes or implies a perfection of this agent. It is not, however, that the actual operation as such (unless it is immanent) adds a new perfection to the agent. Rather the agent’s power of acting, revealed to us in its exercise, is for us a measure of the actual perfection of the agent. But the question remains: Is this power or perfection, so far as we know it, a substantial perfection? Is it the very perfection itself of the agent’s substance or nature as known to us? Or is it an accidental perfection which is for us an index of a corresponding degree of substantial perfection? In getting our knowledge of the nature of a substance from a consideration of its sensible accidents, its phenomena, its operations—according to the rule, Operari sequitur esse: qualis est operatio talis est natura—can we use a single inference, from action to nature, or must we use a double inference, from action to power, and from power to nature? But even if we have to make the double inference, this of itself does not prove any more than a conceptual distinction between power and nature.

349 Of course all accidents are “forms” in the sense of being determining principles of their subjects, these being considered as determinable or receptive principles. Even quantity is a form in this sense. But quantity itself does not appear to be a “simple” principle in the sense of being “indivisible”: its very function is to make the corporeal substance divisible into integral parts. What then of all those qualities which inhere immediately in the quantity of corporeal substances? They are determinations or affections of a composite, extended, divisible subject. Conceived in the abstract they have, of course, the attributes of indivisibility, immutability, etc., characteristic of all abstract essences (14). But in their physical actuality in what intelligible sense can they be said to be simple, indivisible entities?

• 350 Summa Theol., ia, iiae, q. 52, art. 2; iia, iiae, q. 24, art. 4, 5.—Q. Disp. de Virtutibus in communi, q. i, art. 11, in c.—I. _In Sentent., Dist., 17, q. 2, art. 2.—Cf. URRABURU, *op. cit._, §§ 329-332, for arguments and authorities. The author himself defends the former view, according to which alteration takes place by a real addition or substraction of grades of the same quality.

354 The scientific concept of “volume” is identical with the common and philosophical concept of “external, actual, local, or spatial extension”. The functions ascribed by physics and mechanics to the “mass” of a body have no other source, in the body, than what philosophers understand by the “internal extension” or “quantity” of the body.—Cf. Nys, Cosmologie (Louvain, 1903), §§ 192-203.

355 The terms quantity and extension are commonly taken as synonymous; but quantity is more properly applied to the internal plurality of integral parts of the substance itself, extension to the dispersion of these parts outside one another in space.

356 Hence Aristotle’s definition in Metaph., iv.: “Quantum dicitur, quod [est] in insita divisibile, quorum utrumque aut singula unum quid et hoc quid apta sunt esse”: a quantified substance is one which is divisible into parts that are really in it [i.e. partes integrantes], parts each of which is capable of becoming a distinct subsisting individual thing.—Cf. NYS, Cosmologie, § 154.

357 “Longitudo, latitudo et profunditas quantitates quaedam, sed non substantiae sunt. Quantitas enim non est substantia, sed magis cui haec ipsa primo insunt illud est substantia.”—Metaph., L. vii., ch. iii.

361 “Propria ... totalitas substantiae continetur indifferenter in parva vel magna quantitate; sicut ... tota natura hominis in magno, vel parvo homine.”—Summa Theol., iii., q. 76, art. 1, ad. 3.

362 No argument in favour of this view can be based on the use of the term species (“manentibus dumtaxat speciebus panis et vini”) by the Fathers of the Council of Trent. For them, as for all Catholic philosophers and theologians of the time, the scholastic term species, used in such a context, meant simply the objective, perceptible accidents of the substance. Cf. NYS, op. cit., § 175.

363 Hence the significance of the lines in ST. THOMAS’ hymn, Adoro Te devote:—

Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, Sed auditu solo tuto creditur.

364 and neither does Revelation. The Body of our Blessed Lord exists in the Eucharist without its connatural external extension and consequent impenetrability. But according to the common teaching of Catholic theologians it has its internal quantity, its distinct integral parts, organs and members—really distinct from one another, though interpenetrating and not spatially external to one another. Its mode of existence in the space occupied by the sacramental species is thus analogous to the mode in which the soul is in the body, or a pure spirit in space.

365 We know from Revelation that the Body of our Lord exists in this way in the Eucharist. We know, too, from Revelation that after the general resurrection the glorified bodies of the just will be real bodies, real corporeal substances, and nevertheless that they will be endowed with properties very different from those which they possess in the present state: that they will be immortal, incorruptible, impassible, “spiritual” (cf. 1 Cor. xv.). The Catholic philosopher who adds those scattered rays of revealed light to what his own rational analysis of experience tells him about matter and spirit, will understand the possibility of such a kinship between the latter as will make the fact of their union in his own nature and person not perhaps any less wonderful, but at any rate a little less surprising and inscrutable: and this without committing himself to the objective idealism whereby Berkeley, while endeavouring to show the utter unreality of matter, only succeeded in persuading himself that its reality was not independent of all mind.

366 “Ὥστε τὸ τοῦ περιέχοντος πέρας ἀκίνητον πρῶτον, τουτ᾽ ἔστιν ὁ τόπος.”—Physic, L. iv., ch. iv. (6).

367 The category Situs is commonly interpreted to signify the mutual spatial relations or dispositions of the various parts of a body in the place actually occupied by the latter.

368 A body deprived of its connatural extension exists in space in a manner analogous to that in which the soul is in the body. The Body of our Divine Lord is in the Eucharist in this manner—“sacramentaliter”.

372 “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.”—Confess. L. xi., ch. xiv.

373 “Cum enim intelligimus extrema diversa alicujus medii, et anima dicat, illa esse duo nunc, hoc prius, illud posterius quasi numerando prius et posterius in motu, tunc hoc dicimus esse tempus.”—ST. THOMAS, in Phys., L. iv. lect. 17a.

376 “The conception of variation united with sameness is not, however, the whole cognition of time. For this the mind must be able to combine in thought two different movements or pulsations of consciousness, so as to represent an interval between them. It must hold together two nows, conceiving them, in succession, yet uniting them through that intellectual synthetic activity by which we enumerate a collection of objects—a process or act which carries concomitantly the consciousness of its own continuous unity.”—MAHER, Psychology, ch. xvii.

377 That is, provided we abstract from all comparison of this internal time duration with that of any other current of conscious experiences in the estimating mind. As a matter of fact we always and necessarily compare the time duration of any particular experienced change with that of the remaining portion of the whole current of successive conscious states which make up our mental life. And thus we feel, not that the four-mile walk had a longer time duration than the three-mile walk, but rather that it took place at a quicker rate, more rapidly, than the latter. But if a mind which had no other consciousness of change whatsoever than, e.g. that of the two walks experienced successively, no other standard change with which to compare each of them as it occurred—if such a mind experienced each in this way, would it pronounce the four-mile walk to have occupied a longer time than the three-mile walk?—Cf. infra, p. 327.

378 This is true on the assumption that the intrinsic time-duration of a successive, continuous change, its divisibility into distinct “nows” related as “before” and “after,” is really identical with the continuous, successive states constituting the change itself, and is not a really distinct mode superadded to this change, a continuous series of “quandocationes,” distinct from the change, and giving the latter its temporal duration. But many philosophers hold that in all creatures duration is a mode of their existence really distinct from the creatures themselves that have this duration or continued existence.—Cf. infra, § 86.

383 The fact that we can perceive and estimate temporal duration only extrinsically, and in ultimate analysis by comparison with the flow of our own conscious states, and that therefore we can have no perception or conception of the intrinsic time duration of any change, seems to have been overlooked by DE SAN (Cosmologia, pp. 528-9) when he argues from our perception of different rates of motion, in favour of the view that time duration is not really identical with motion or change, but a superadded mode, really distinct from the latter.

• 385 Cf.* NYS, op. cit., pp. 120 sqq., for a defence of the view that an actually infinite multitude involves no contradiction.

389 “Est ergo dicendum, quod, cum aeternitas sit mensura esse permanentis secundum quod aliquid recedit a permanentia essendi, secundum hoc recedit ab aeternitate. Quaedam autem sic recedunt a permanentia essendi, quod esse eorum est subjectum transmutationis, vel in transmutatiose consistit; et hujusmodi mensurantur tempore, sicut omnis motus, et etiam esse omnium corruptibilium. Quaedam vero recedunt minus a permanentia essendi, quia esse eorum nec in transmutatione consistit nec est subjectum transmutationis; tamen habent transmutationem adjunctam vel in actu vel in potentia ... patet de angelis, quod scilicet habent esse intransmutabile cum transmutabilitate secundum electionem, quantum ad eorum naturam pertinet, et cum transmutabilitate intelligentiarum, et affectionum, et locorum suo modo. Et ideo hujusmodi mensurantur aevo, quod est medium inter aeternitatem et tempus. Esse autem quod mensurat aeternitas, nec est mutabile nec mutabilitati adjunctum. Sic ergo tempus habet prius et posterius, aevum non habet in se prius et posterius, sed ei conjungi possunt; aeternitas autem non habet prius neque posterius, neque ea compatitur.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. x., art. 5, in c.

_ 391 Invisibilia enim ipsius a creatura mundi, per ea quae facta sunt intellecta, conspiciuntur, sempiterna quoque ejus virtus et divinitas, ita ut [qui veritatem Dei in injustitia detinent] sint inexcusabiles._—Rom. ii. 20 .

393 For a clear and trenchant criticism of modern relativist theories, cf. VEITCH, Knowing and Being, especially ch. iv., “Relation,” pp. 129 sqq.

397 “We cannot of course perceive an unperceived world, nor can we conceive a world the conception of which is not in the mind; but there is no contradiction or absurdity in the proposition: ‘A material world of three dimensions has existed for a time unperceived and unthought of by any created being, and then revealed itself to human minds’.”—MAHER, Psychology, p. iii, n.

398 “I do not pretend to demonstrate anything, nor do I feel much concern, about any unknowable noumenon which never reveals itself in my consciousness. If there be in existence an inscrutable ‘transcendental Ego,’ eternally screened from my ken by this self-asserting ‘empirical Ego,’ I confess I feel very little interest in the nature or the welfare of the former. The only soul about which I care is that which immediately presents itself in its acts, which thinks, wills, remembers, believes, loves, repents, and hopes.*”—MAHER, op. cit., p. 475. Cf. MERCIER, *op. cit., § 180, pp. 363.

399 Πρός τι δὲ τὰ τοιαῦτα λέγεται, ὅσα αὐτά, ἄπερ ἐστὶν, ἑτέρων εἶναι λέγεται, ἢ ὁπωσοῦν ἄλλως πρὸς ἕτερον.—Categ. v. 1.

401 “Sicut realis relatio consistit in ordine rei ad rem, ita relatio rationis consistit in ordine intellectuum [ordination of concepts]; quod quidem dupliciter potest contingere. Uno modo secundum quod iste ordo est adinventus per intellectum, et attributus ei, quod relative dicitur; et hujusmodi sunt relationes quae attribuuntur ab intellectu rebus intellectis, prout sunt intellectae, sicut relatio generis et speciei; has enim relationes ratio adinvenit considerando ordinem ejus, quod est in intellectu ad res, quae sunt extra, vel etiam ordinem intellectuum ad invicem. Alio modo secundum quod hujusmodi relationes consequuntur modum intelligendi, videlicet quod intellectus intelligit aliquid in ordine ad aliud; licet illum ordinem intellectus non adinveniat, sed magis ex quadam necessitate consequatur modum intelligendi. Et hujusmodi relationes intellectus non attribuit ei, quod est in intellectu, sed ei, quod est in re. Et hoc quidem contingit secundum quod aliqua non habentia secundum se ordinem, ordinate intelliguntur; licet intellectus non intelligit ea habere ordinem, quia sic esset falsus. Ad hoc autem quod aliqua habeant ordinem, oportet quod utrumque sit ens, et utrumque ordinabile ad aliud. Quandoque autem intellectus accipit aliqua duo ut entia, quorum alterum tantum vel neutrum est ens; sicut cum accipit duo futura, vel unum praesens et aliud futurum, et intelligit unum cum ordine ad aliud, dicit alterum esse prius altero; unde istae relationes sunt rationis tantum, utpote modum intelligendi consequentes. Quandoque vero accipit unum ut duo, et intelligit ea cum quodam ordine; sicut cum dicitur aliquid esse idem sibi: et sic talis relatio est rationis tantum. Quandoque vero accipit aliqua duo ut ordinabilia ad invicem, inter quae non est ordo medius, immo alterum ipsorum essentialiter est ordo; sicut cum dicit relationem accidere subjecto; unde talis relatio relationis ad quodcumque aliud est rationis tantum. Quandoque vero accipit aliquid cum ordine ad aliud, inquantum est terminus ordinis alterius ad ipsum, licet ipsum non ordinetur ad aliud: sicut accipiendo scibile ut terminum ordinis scientiae ad ipsum.”—De Potentia, q. vii., art. 11; cf. ibid. art. 10.

“Cum relatio requirit duo extrema, tripliciter se habet ad hoc quod sit res naturae aut rationis. Quandoque enim ex utraque parte est res rationis tantum, quando scilicet ordo vel habitudo non potest esse inter aliqua nisi secundum apprehensionem intellectus tantum, utpote cum dicimus idem eidem idem. Nam secundum quod ratio apprehendit bis aliquod unum statuit illud ut duo; et sic apprehendit quandam habitudinem ipsius ad seipsum. Et similiter est de omnibus relationibus quae sunt inter ens et non ens, quas format ratio, inquantum apprehendit non ens ut quoddam extremum. Et idem est de omnibus relationibus quae consequuntur actum rationis, ut genus, species, et hujusmodi....”—Summa Theol., i., q. xiii., art. 7.

• 402 Summa Theol.*,1. q. xiii. art. 7. Elsewhere he points the distinction in these terms: “Respectus ad aliud aliquando est in ipsa natura rerum, utpote quando aliquae res secundum suam naturam ad invicem ordinatae sunt, et ad invicem inclinationem habent; et hujusmodi relationes oportet esse reales.... Aliquando vero respectus significatus per ea, quae dicuntur Ad aliquid, est tantum in ipsa apprehensione rationis conferentis unum alteri; et tunc est relatio rationis tantum, sicut cum comparat ratio hominem animali, ut speciem ad genus.”—ibid., q. xxviii., art. 1.

403 St. Thomas gives expression to it in these sentences: “Perfectio et bonum quae sunt in rebus extra animam, non solum attenduntur secundum aliquid absolute inhaerens rebus, sed etiam secundum ordinem unius rei ad aliam; sicut etiam in ordine partium exercitus, bonum exercitus consistit: huic enim ordini comparat Philosophus [Aristot., xii. (x.) Metaph., Comment. 52 sqq.] ordinem universi. Oportet, ergo in ipsis rebus ordinem quemdam esse; hic autem ordo relatio quaedam est.... Sic ergo oportet quod res habentes ordinem ad aliquid, realiter referantur ad ipsum, et quod in eis aliqua res sit relatio.”—QQ. Disp. De Potentia, q. vii., art. 9.

• 404 Kritik der reinen Vernunft*, bk. i., Hauptst. ii., Abschn. ii., § 26.

407 “Quaedam vero relationes sunt quantum ad utrumque extremum res naturae, quando scilicet est habitudo inter aliqua duo secundum aliquid realiter conveniens utrique; sicut patet de omnibus relationibus quae consequuntur quantitatem, ut magnum et parvum, duplum et dimidium, et hujusmodi; nam quantitas est in utroque extremorum: et simile est de relationibus quae consequuntur actionem et passionem, ut motivum et mobile, pater et filius, et similia.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xiii., art. 7.

408 “Quandoque vero relatio in uno extremorum est res naturae, et in altero est res rationis tantum: et hoc contingit quandocunque duo extrema non sunt unius ordinis; sicut sensus et scientia referuntur ad sensibile et scibile; quae quidem, inquantum sunt res quaedam in esse naturale existentes, sunt extra ordinem esse sensibilis et intelligibilis. Et ideo in scientia quidem et sensu est relatio realis, inquantum ordinantur ad sciendum vel sentiendum res; sed res ipsae in se consideratae sunt extra ordinem hujusmodi; unde in eis non est aliqua relatio realiter ad scientiam et sensum, sed secundum rationem tantum, inquantum intellectus apprehendit ea ut terminos relationum scientiae et sensus. Unde Philosophus dicit in 5 Metaph., text. 20, quod non dicuntur relative, eo quod ipsa referantur ad alia, sed quia alia referantur ad ipsa.”—ibid.

409 Being really and adequately identical with its foundation, which is the essence of its subject, this relation does not necessarily need the actual existence of its term. Thus actual knowledge or science, which is a habit of the mind, has a transcendental relation to its object even though this latter be not actual but only a pure possibility. Similarly the accident of quantity sustained without its connatural substance in the Eucharist, retains its transcendental relation to the latter.—Cf. URRABURU, op. cit., § 335 (p. 997).

• 411 Metaph.*, L. v., ch. xv. Cf. ST. THOMAS, in loc., lect. 17, where, approving of this triple division, he writes: “Cum enim relatio quae est in rebus, consistat in ordine unius rei ad aliam, oportet tot modis hujusmodi relationes esse, quot modis contingit unam rem ad aliam ordinari. Ordinatur autem una res ad aliam, vel secundum esse, prout esse unius rei dependet ab alia, et sic est tertius modus. Vel secundum virtutem activam et passivam, secundum quod una res ab alia recipit, vel alteri confert aliquid; et sic est secundus modus. Vel secundum quod quantitas unius rei potest mensurari per aliam; et sic est primus modus.”

• 413 Cf.* infra, p. 355. Some authors hold that the relation in question is predicamental. Cf. URRABURU, op. cit., p. 987. The nature or essence of any individual would seem to imply in its very concept a transcendental relation of specific identity with all other actual and possible individual embodiments of this essence. The point is one of secondary importance.

414 Even virtually, though not formally. The creative act is not formally transitive; it is virtually so: and in the creature it grounds the latter’s relation of real dependence on the Creator.

417 MERCIER, ibid.

418 “Cum igitur Deus sit extra totum ordinem creaturae, et omnes creaturae ordinentur ad ipsum et non e converso; manifestum est quod creaturae realiter, referuntur ad ipsum Deum; sed in Deo non est aliqua realis relatio ejus ad creaturas, sed secundum rationem tantum, inquantum creaturae referantur ad ipsum.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xiii., art. 7.

419 Among others Cajetan, Ferriariensis, Capreolus, Bañez, Joannes a St. Thoma. Cf. URRABURU, op. cit., § 338 (p. 994); MERCIER, op. cit., § 174. It would be interesting to know how precisely those authors conceived this “relative” entity, this “esse ad” as a reality independent of their own thought-activity. Cf. art. by the present writer in the Irish Theological Quarterly (vol. vii., April, 1912: “Reflections on some Forms of Monism,” pp. 167-8): “The whole universe of direct experience displays a unity of order or design which pervades it through and through; it is a revelation of intelligent purpose. Now a Cosmos, an orderly universe—which is intelligible only as the expression of intelligent purpose, and not otherwise—is a system of interrelated factors. But relating is unintelligible except as an expression of the activity of mind or spirit, that is, of something at least analogous to our mental activity of comparing and judging. Scholastic philosophers, as we know, discuss the question whether or how far the exact object of our ‘relation’ concept is real; that is, whether this object is, in itself and apart from the terms related [and the foundation], a mere ens rationis, a product of our thought, or whether it is in itself something more than this; and some of them hold that there are relations which, in themselves and formally as relations, are something more than mere products of our thought. Now if there be such relations, since they are not products of our thought, we may fairly ask: Must they be the product of some thought? And from our analysis of our very notion of what a relation is, it would seem that they must be in some sort or other a product or expression of some thought-activity: even relations between material things. It is in determining how precisely this is, or can be, that the theist and the monist differ. The theist regards all material things, with their real relations—and all our finite human minds, which apprehend the material world and its relations and themselves and one another—as being indeed in a true sense terms or objects of the Thought of God; not, however, as therefore identical or consubstantial with the Divine Spirit, but as distinct from It though dependent on It: inasmuch as he holds the Divine Thought to be creative, and regards all these things as its created terms. The kinship he detects between matter and spirit lies precisely in this, that matter is for him a created term of the Divine Thought. For him too, therefore, matter can have no existence except as a term of thought—the creative Thought of God.” Not that “the intelligible relations apprehended by us in matter are ... identical in reality with the thought-activity of the Divine Mind,” as Ontologists have taught [cf. supra, 14, 18, 19]; nor that we can directly infer the existence of a Supreme Spirit from the existence of matter, as Berkeley tried to do by erroneously regarding the latter merely as an essentially mind-dependent phenomenon; because “for the orthodox theist matter is in its own proper nature not spiritual, mental, psychical; not anything after the manner of a thought-process, or endowed with the spirit-mode of being”. If predicamental relations, such as quality or similarity of material things, are, as those medieval scholastics contended, real entities, “relative” in their nature, and really distinct from their extremes and foundations, did those scholastics conceive such “relative entities” as essentially mind-dependent entities? If they did they would probably have conceived them in the sense of Berkeley, as created terms of the Divine Thought, rather than in the Ontologist sense which would identify them with the Divine Thought itself. But it is not likely that they conceived such relative entities as essentially thought-dependent, any more than the absolute material realities related to one another by means of these relative entities. On the other hand it is not easy to see how such relative entities can be anything more than mere products of some thought-activity or other.

420 They rely especially on this text from the De Potentia (q. vii., art. 9): “Relatio est debilioris esse inter omnia praedicamenta; ideo putaverunt quidam eam esse ex secundis intellectibus. Secundum ergo hanc positionem sequeretur quod relatio non sit in rebus extra animam sed in solo intellectu, sicut intentio generis et speciei, et secundarum substantiarum. Hoc autem esse non potest. In nullo enim praedicamento ponitur aliquid nisi res praeter animam existens. Nam ens rationis dividitur contra ens divisum per decem praedicamenta.... Si autem relatio non est in rebus extra animam non poneretur ad aliquid unum genus praedicamenti.”

422 “Relatio habet quod sit res naturae ex sua causa per quam una res naturalem ordinem habet ad alteram.”—Quodl. 1, art. 2.

423 “In hoc differt Ad Aliquid [i.e. Relation] ab aliis generibus; quod alia genera ex propria sui ratione habent, quod aliquid sint, sicut quantitas ex hoc ipso quod est quantitas, aliquid ponit: et similiter est de aliis. Sed Ad Aliquid ex propria sui generis ratione non habet, quod ponat aliquid, sed ad aliquid.... Habet autem relatio quod sit aliquid reale ex eo, quod relationem causat.”—Quodl. 9, art. 4. Cf. De Potentia, q. ii., art. 5.

424 “Relatio est aliquid inhaerens licet non ex hoc ipso quod est relatio*.... Et ideo nihil prohibet, quod esse desinat hujusmodi accidens sine mutatione ejus in quo est.”—*De Potentia, q. vii., art. 9, ad. 7.

425 “Et utroque modo contingit in realibus relationibus destrui relationem: vel per destructionem quantitatis [or other foundation], unde ad hanc mutationem quantitatis sequitur per accidens mutatio relationis: vel etiam secundum quod cessat respectus ad alterum, remoto illo ad quod referebatur; et tunc relatio cessat, nulla mutatione facta in ipsa. Unde in illis in quibus non est relatio nisi secundum hunc respectum, veniunt et recedunt relationes sine aliqua mutatione ejus, quod refertur*.”—In i. *Sent., Dist. xxvi., q. ii., art. 1, ad. 3.

426 “Relationes differunt in hoc ab omnibus aliis rerum generibus, quia ea quae sunt aliorum generum, ex ipsa ratione sui generis habent, quod sint res naturae, sicut quantitates ex ratione quantitatis, et qualitates ex ratione qualitatis. Sed relationes non habent quod sint res naturae ex ratione respectus ad alterum.... Sed relatio habet quod sit res naturae ex sua causa, per quam una res naturalem ordinem habet ad alteram, qui quidem ordo naturalis et realis est ipsis ipsa relatio.”—Quodl., 1, art. 2.

• 427 Cf.* supra, p. 351, n. 1; in which context we may reasonably suppose him to be arguing that relation considered adequately is not a mere logical entity, “ex secundis intellectibus,” inasmuch as, having a real foundation in things outside the mind, it is in this respect real, independently of our thought.

• 431 Cf.* URRABURU, ibid., pp. 1006-7: “Deinde nullam relationem esse substantiam scripsit [S. Thomas] vel quia plerumque ratio fundandi non est substantia ... vel potius quia semper relatio, etiam cum in substantia fundatur, aliquid addit supra substantiam cujuslibet extremi relati singillatim sumpti, quia non identificatur cum fundamento prout se tenet ex parte solius subjecti, vel solius termini, sed prout se tenet ea parte utriusque. Quare relatio ... semper exprimit denominationem contingentem et accidentaliter supervenientem subjecto, utpote quae adesse vel abesse potest, prout adsit vel deficiat terminus.”

432 “Illi enim [the reference is to certain medieval idealists] quamvis agnoscerent duo alba existentia negabant dari actu in rebus formalem similaritatem [i.e. even after the comparative activity of thought], sed formalem similitudinem, et aliam quamvis relationem, reponebant in actu intellectus unum cum alio comparantis; nos vero ante actum intellectus agnoscimus in rebus, quidquid sufficit ad constituendam relationem similitudinis, diversitatis, paternitatis, etc., ita ut hujusmodi denominationes non verificentur de actu intellectus unum cum alio comparantis, sed plenam habeant in rebus ipsis verificationem.”—URRABURU, op. cit., p. 1010.

• 434 Cf.* Science of Logic, ii., § 218. For the concepts of “cause” and “causality” in the inductive sciences, as well as for much that cannot be repeated here, the student may consult with advantage vol. ii., p. iv., ch. iii., iv. and vi. of the work referred to.

435 “Id a quo aliquid procedit quocunque modo.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xxxiii., art. 1.

436 Hence Aristotle’s definition of principle, including both logical and real principles: Πασῶν μὲν οὖν κοινὸν τῶν ἀρχῶν τὸ πρῶτον εἶναι ὅθεν ἡ ἐστιν ἢ γίγνεται ἢ γιγνώσκεται.—Metaph. IV., ch. i.

437 A cause must be prior in nature to its effect, but not necessarily prior in time. In fact the action of the cause and the production of the effect must be simultaneous. Cf. Science of Logic, ii., § 220. Considered formally as correlatives they are simul natura. A principle must likewise be in some sense prior to what proceeds from it, not necessarily, however, by priority of time, nor by priority of nature involving real dependence. The Christian Revelation regarding the Blessed Trinity involves that the First Divine Person is the “principle” from which the Second proceeds, and the First and the Second the “principle” from which the Third proceeds; yet here there is no dependence or inequality, or any priority except the “relation of origin” be called priority.

• 442 i.e.* from the effect considered formally as a term of the activity; in the case of immanent activity, as, e.g. thought or volition, where the effect remains within the agent (as a verbum mentale or other mental term), uniting with the concrete reality of the latter, the effect is not adequately distinct from the agent as affected by this term or product.

• 443 Cf.* ST. THOMAS, In Physic., ii., lect. 10: “Necesse est quatuor esse causas: quia cum causa sit, ad quam sequitur esse alterius, esse ejus quod habet causam potest considerari dupliciter: uno modo absolute, et sic causa essendi est forma per quam aliquid est ens in actu; alio modo secundum quod de potentia ente fit actu ens: et quia omne quod est in potentia, reducitur ad actum per id quod est actu ens, ex hoc necesse est esse duas alias causas, scilicet materiam, et agentem quod reducit materiam de potentia in actum. Actio autem agentis ad aliquod determinatum tendit, sicut ab aliquo determinato principio procedit; nam omne agens agit quod est sibi conveniens. Id autem ad quod intendit actio agentis dicitur causa finalis. Sic igitur necesse est esse causas quatuor.”

445 Certain medieval scholastics, especially of the Franciscan School, regarded spiritual substances as having in their constitution a certain potential, determinable principle, which they called “materia”. St. Thomas, without objecting to the designation, insisted that such potential principle cannot be the same as the materia prima of corporeal substances (cf. De Substantis Separatis, ch. vii.).

• 446 Cf.* ST. THOMAS: “Actio est actus activi et passio est actus passivi*” (iii. Physic., l. 5); “Materia non fit *causa in actu nisi secundum quod alteratur et mutatur” (i. Contra Gentes, xvii.); “Materia est causa formae, inquantum forma non est nisi in materia” (De Princip. Naturae).

• 447 Cf.* ST. THOMAS, De Princip. Naturae, ibid.: “... et similiter forma est causa materiae, inquantum materia non habet esse in actu nisi per formam; materia enim et forma dicuntur relative ad invicem; dicuntur etiam relative ad compositum, sicut pars ad totum”.

448 “Materia cum sit infinitarum formarum determinatur per formam, et per eam consequitur aliquam speciem.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. vii., art. 1.

449 To Special Metaphysics also belongs the controverted question whether or not a plurality of really distinct substantial forms can enter into the constitution of an individual corporeal substance. When we classify corporeal things into genera and species according to their natural kinds (cf. Science of Logic, i., § 67), these latter are determined by the formae substantiales of the things classified, and are called infimæ species. Numerically distinct individuals which have (conceptually) the same forma substantialis*, fall into the same *infima species; while if such individuals have (conceptually and numerically) distinct formae substanialis* they fall into distinct *infimae species of some higher common genus. The wider the generic concept the larger the group of individuals which it unifies: it is a principle of conceptual unity, i.e. of universality. The objects of our generic, differential, and specific concepts, throughout this process of classification, are only virtually distinct metaphysical grades of being in the individuals. Now if the forma substantialis which yields the unifying concept of the species infima for the individuals, and the material principle which is the ground of the numerical distinction between these latter, were likewise regarded by the scholastics as being merely virtually distinct metaphysical grades of being, in each individual, then the question of a plurality of really distinct forms in one and the same individual would have no meaning: all “forms” in the latter would be only virtually distinct from one another and from the material principle. But the scholastics did not conceive that the real ground for grouping individuals into species infimae was the same as that for grouping these latter into wider genera. They regarded the relation between the forma substantialis and the materia prima in the individual as quite different from that between the generic and specific grades of being in the individual (cf. supra, § 38; Science of Logic, i., § 44; JOSEPH, Introduction to Logic, pp. 93-6). While they considered the latter a relation of virtual distinction they held the former to be one of real distinction. And while they recognized the concept of the species infima to be a principle of conceptual unity in grouping the individuals together mentally, St. Thomas emphasized especially the rôle of the forma substantialis (on which that concept was founded) as a principle of real unity in the individual: “Ab eodam habet res esse et unitatem. Manifestum est autem quod res habet esse per formam. Unde et per formam res habet unitatem” (Quodlib. i., art. 6). If we accept this doctrine of St. Thomas the arguments which he bases on it against the possibility of a plurality of distinct substantial forms in the same corporeal individual are unanswerable (Cf. MERCIER, Ontologie, § 215).

450 “Idem actus secundum rem est duorum secundum diversam rationem: agentis quidem, secundum quod est ab eo, patientis autem, secundum quod est in ipso.... Ex eo quod actio et passio sunt unus motus non sequitur quod actio et passio, vel doctio et doctrina, sint idem; sed quod motus cui inest utrumque eorum, sit idem. Qui quidem motus secundum unam rationem est actio, et secundum aliam rationem est passio; alterum enim est secundum rationem esse actus hujus, ut in hoc*, et esse actus hujus, ut *ab hoc; motus autem dicitur actio secundum quod est actus agentis ut ab hoc; dicitur autem passio secundum quod est actus patientis ut in hoc. Et sic patet quod licet motus sit idem moventis et moti, propter hoc quod abstrahit ab utraque ratione: tamen actio et passio differunt propter hoc quod diversas rationes in sua significatione habent.”—ST. THOMAS, In Phys., iii. 1. 5.

451 “Solet dubium esse apud quosdam, utrum motus sit in movente, aut in mobili.... Sed manifestum est quod actus cujuslibet est in eo cujus est actus; actus autem motus est in mobili, cum sit actus mobilis, causatus tamen in eo a movente ... cum motus sit actus existentis in potentia, sequitur quod motus non sit actus alicujus inquantum est movens, sed inquantum est mobile.”—ibid., 1. 4.

452 Some languages mark the distinction between these two kinds of action: “Differt autem facere et agere: quia factio est actio transiens in exteriorem materiam, sicut aedificare, secare et hujusmodi; agere autem est actio permanenslin ipso agente sicut videre, velle et hujusmodi.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol. iae iia, q. lxvii., art. 4, c.

453 Hume went even farther, at least in language; for he alleged (whether he really believed is another question) that he could overcome the supposed merely psychological difficulty, that he could easily—and, presumably, without doing violence to his rational nature—conceive a non-existent thing as coming into existence without a cause! He proclaimed that he could achieve the feat of thinking what the universal voice of mankind has declared to be unthinkable: an absolute beginning of being from nothingness. “The knowledge of this relation (causality) is not,” he writes, “in any instance attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined* with each other ”(*Works, ed. Green and Grose, iv., 24). “All distinct ideas are separable from each other, and, as the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, ’twill be easy for us (!) to conceive any object as nonexistent this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or producing principle” (Treatise on Human Nature, p. 381). On this argument (?) even such an ardent admirer of the pan-phenomenist as Huxley was, is forced to remark that “it is of the circular sort, for the major premise, that all distinct ideas are separable in thought, assumes the question at issue” (HUXLEY’S Hume, p. 122).

454 Thus, for instance, man, elevated by sanctifying grace, can perform acts which merit the supernatural reward of the Beatific Vision.

• 457 Cf.* URRABURU, op. cit., § 392 (p. 1123): “Unde adaequata virtus instrumentalis videtur conflari ex naturali instrumenti virtute vel efficacitate et ex virtute causae principalis sibi transeunter addita, docente S. Thoma: Instrumentum virtutem instrumentalem acquirit dupliciter scilicet quando accipit formam instrumenti et quando movetur a principali agente ad effectum* (*Summa Theol., iii., q. xix., art. 3, ad. 2).”

458 “Ad aliquem effectum aliquid operatur dupliciter. Uno modo sicut per se agens; et dicitur per se agere quod agit per aliquam formam sibi inhaerentem per modum naturae completae, sive habeat illam formam a se, sive ab alio.... Alio modo aliquid operatur ad effectum aliquem instrumentaliter, quod quidem non operatur ad effectum per formam sibi inhaerentem, sed solum inquantum est motum a per se agente. Haec est ratio instrumenti, inquantum est instrumentum, ut moveat motum; unde sicut se habet forma completa ad per se agentem, ita se habet motus, quo movetur a principale agente, ad instrumentum, sicut serra operatur ad scamnum. Quamvis enim serra habeat aliquam actionem quae sibi competit secundum propriam formam, ut dividere; tamen aliquem effectum habet qui sibi non competit, nisi inquantum est mota ab artifice, scilicet facere rectam incisionem, et convenientem formae artis: et sic instrumentum habet duas operationes; unam quae competit ei secundam rationem propriam; aliam quae competit ei secundam quod est motum a per se agente, quae transcendit virtutem propriae formae.”—De Veritate, q. xxvii., art. 4. It is not clear, however, that St. Thomas regarded these two “operationes” of the instrumental cause as really distinct, for he says that it acts as an instrument (i.e. modifies the efficiency of the principal cause) only by exercising its own proper function: “Omne agens instrumentale exsequitur actionem principalis agentis per aliquam operationem propriam, et connaturalem sibi, sicut calor naturalis generat carnem dissolvendo et digerendo, et serra operatur ad factionem scamni secando” (Contra Gentes, ii., ch. xxi.): from which he goes on to argue that no creature can act even as an instrumental cause in creating.—Cf. iv. Sent., Dist. i., q. i., art. 4, sol. 2.—De Potentia, q. iii., art. 7.—Summa Theol., iii., q. lxii., art. 1, ad. 2.

459 St. Thomas, proving the necessity of the Divine concursus for all created causes, illustrates the general distinction between a principal and an instrumental cause: “Virtus naturalis quae est rebus naturalibus in sua institutione collata, inest eis ut quaedem forma habens esse ratum et firmum in natura. Sed id quod a Deo fit in re naturali, quo actualiter agat, est ut intentio sola, habens esse quoddam incompletum, per modum quo ... virtus artis [est] in instrumento artificis. Sicut ergo securi per artem dari potuit acumen, ut esset forma in ea permanens, non autem dari ei potuit quod vis artis esset in ea quasi quaedam forma permanens, nisi haberet intellectum; ita rei naturali potuit conferri virtus propria, ut forma in ipsa permanens, non autem vis qua agit ad esse* ut instrumentum primae causae, *nisi daretur ei quod esset universale essendi principium; nec iterum virtuti naturali conferri potuit ut moveret seipsam, nec ut conservaret se in esse: unde sicut patet quod instrumento artificis conferri non oportuit quod operaretur absque motu artis; ita rei naturali conferri non potuit quod operaretur absque operatione divina.”—QQ. DD. De. Pot., q. iii., art. 7.

• 460 Cf.* MAHER, Psychology, ch. xix.—MERCIER, Psychologie, ii., ch. i. § 2.

461 For a fuller treatment of this whole subject, cf. Science of Logic, ii., Part iv., chs. iii., iv.; Part v., ch. i.—MAHER, Psychology, ch. xix., pp. 423-4.

• 467 Cf.* what was said above (32) about the causal or extrinsic, as distinct from the intrinsic, principle of individuation.

468 “Whenever science tries to find the cause not of a particular event, such as the French Revolution (whose cause must be as unique as that event itself is), but of an event of a kind, such as consumption, or commercial crises, it looks in the last resort for a commensurate cause. What is that exact state or condition of the body, given which it must and without which it cannot be in consumption? What are those conditions in a commercial community, given which there must and without which there cannot be a commercial crisis?”—JOSEPH, op. cit., p. 65. Cf. Science of Logic, ii., § 221.

470 For instance: (a) The “ontological” or “true” cause, which “actually produces” the effect, need not necessarily be the “ultimate” cause of the latter. (b) A “physical fact” can be the cause of another in the sense of being the invariable antecedent (or physical cause) of the latter, but not “in that sense alone”; it may also be an efficient cause of the latter by exerting an active influence on the happening of this latter. (c) Whether or not efficiency is “a mysterious and most powerful tie,” at any rate it does exist between “physical facts” in the universe. (d) Its analysis reveals not a “supposed necessity of ascending ... to ... the true cause, ... which ... produces the effect,” as if the proximate causes did not also truly produce the latter; but a real necessity of ascending to a First Cause as the source and support and complement of the real efficiency of these proximate causes. (e) A merely logical theory of Induction does not indeed demand any inquiry either into the efficiency of natural agencies, or into the nature and grounds of the “invariability” or “necessity” or “law” whereby these are connected with their effects. But a philosophical theory of Induction does imply such inquiries. And here phenomenist writers like Mill have laid themselves open to two accusations. For while professing merely to abstract from the problem of efficiency they have tried equivalently to deny its existence by proclaiming it superfluous and insoluble, besides consciously or unconsciously misrepresenting it. And similarly, in dealing with the invariability of causal sequences in the universe, with the necessary character of its physical laws, they have misconceived this necessity as being mechanical, fatal, absolutely inviolable; and have wrongly proclaimed its ultimate grounds to be unknowable (Agnosticism). Cf. infra, § 104; Science of Logic, ii., Part IV., chs. iii., iv., and v.; Part V., ch. i. Thus, while eschewing the genuine Metaphysics, which seeks the real nature and causes of the world of our experience, as superfluous and futile, they have substituted for it a masked and spurious metaphysics which they have wrongly fathered on Physical Science: a mass of more or less superficial speculations which have not even the merit of consistency. No philosopher, starting with their views on the nature of the human mind, can consistently claim for the latter any really valid or reliable knowledge of laws, any more than of causes. For the knowledge of a law, even as a generalized fact, is a knowledge that claims to pass beyond the limits of the individual’s present and remembered experiences. But there can be no rational justification, whether psychological or ontological, for the certain reliability of such a step, in the philosophy which logically reduces all certain knowledge to the mere awareness of a flow of successive sensations supposed to constitute the total content of the individual consciousness and the total reality of human experience.

472 “When an effort of attention combines two ideas, when one billiard ball moves another, when a steam hammer flattens out a lump of solid iron, when a blow on the head knocks a man down, in all these cases there is something more than, and essentially different from, the mere sequence of two phenomena: there is effective force—causal action* of an agent endowed with real energy.”—MAHER, *op. cit., ibid., p. 370.

• 474 Cf.* DOMET DE VORGES, Cause efficiente et cause finale, p. 39. Volitional activity is no doubt the most prominent type of efficient causality in our mental life. But it is not the only type; we have direct conscious experience of intellectual effort, of the work of the imagination, of the exercise of organic and muscular energy. There is no warrant therefore for conceiving all efficient power or energy, after the model of will-power, as Newman among others appears to have done when he wrote in these terms: “Starting, then, from experience, I consider a cause to be an effective will: and by the doctrine of causation, I mean the notion, or first principle, that all things come of effective will” (ibid., p. 68). No doubt, all things do come ultimately from the effective will of God. This, however, is not a first principle, but a remote philosophical conclusion.

477 “Nulla res per seipsam movet vel agit, nisi sit movens non motum.... Et quia natura inferior agens non agit nisi mota ... et hoc non cessat quousque perveniatur ad Deum, sequitur de necessitate quod Deus sit causa actionis cujuslibet rei naturalis, ut movens et applicans virtutem ad agendum.”—ST. THOMAS, De Potentia Dei, q. iii., art. 7.

478 This is the principle repeatedly expressed by ST. THOMAS: “Unde quarto modo unum est causa alterius, sicut principale agens est causa actionis instrumenti: et hoc modo etiam oportet dicere, quod Deus est causa omnis actionis rei naturalis. Quanto enim aliqua causa est altior, tanto est communior et efficacior, tanto profundius ingreditur in effectum, et de remotiori potentia ipsum reducit in actum. In qualibet autem re naturali invenimus quod est ens et quod est res naturalis, et quod est talis vel talis naturae. Quorum primum est commune omnibus entibus; secundum omnibus rebus naturalibus; tertium in una specie; et quartum, si addamus accidentia, est proprium huic individuo. Hoc ergo individuum agendo non potest constituere aliud in simili specie, nisi prout est instrumentum illius causae quae respicit totam speciem et ulterius totum esse naturae inferioris. Et propter hoc nihil agit in speciem in istis inferioribus ... nec aliquid agit ad esse nisi per virtutem Dei. Ipsum enim esse est communissimus effectus, primus et intimior omnibus aliis effectibus; et ideo soli Deo competit secundum virtutem propriam talis effectus: unde etiam, ut dicitur in Lib. de Causis (prop. 9), intelligentia non dat esse, nisi prout est in ea virtus divina. Sic ergo Deus est causa omnis actionis prout quodlibet agens est instrumentum divinae virtutis operantis.”—ST. THOMAS, De Potentia Dei, q. iii. art 7.—Cf. supra, 99 (c), p. 375, n. 2.

479 Why, then, is a finite cause not capable of acting uninterruptedly? why are its powers, forces, energies, fatigued, lessened, exhausted by exercise? Simply because its action is proportionate to its powers, and these to its finite nature.

480 “Creatio non est mutatio nisi secundum modum intelligendi tantum. Nam de ratione mutationis est quod aliquid idem se habeat aliter nunc et prius.... Sed in creatione, per quam producitur tota substantia rei, non potest accipi aliquid idem aliter se habens nunc et prius, nisi secundum intellectum tantum; sicut si intelligatur aliqua res prius non fuisse totaliter, et postea esse. Sed cum actio et passio conveniant in una substantia motus, et differant solum secundum habitudines diveras ... oportet quod subtracto motu, non remaneant nisi diversae habitudines in creante et creato. Sed quia modus significandi sequitur modum intelligendi ... creatio significatur per modum mutationis; et propter hoc dicitur quod creare est ex nihilo aliquid facere; quamvis facere et fieri magis in hoc conveniant quam mutare et mutari; quia facere et fieri important habitudinem causae ad effectum et effectus ad causam, sed mutationem ex consequenti.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xlv., art. 2, ad. 2.

481 “Remoto motu, actio nihil aliud importat quam ordinem originis [effectus] secundum quod [effectus] a causa aliqua procedit.”—op. cit., i. q. xli., art. 1, ad 2.

482 The act of the will is, of course, virtually transitive when it wills or determines bodily movements.—Cf. MAHER, Psychology, chs. x., xxiii. (pp. 517-24).

483 At the same time it must be noted that organic vital activity is transitive in the sense that no part or member of the organism acts upon itself, but only on other parts, in the production of the local, quantitative and qualitative changes involved in nutrition. It is subject to the inductively established law which seems to regulate all corporeal action: that all such action involves reaction of the patiens on the agens. Mental activity is outside this law. Cognitive and appetitive faculties do not react on the objects which reduce these faculties to act, thus arousing their immanent activity.—Cf. MERCIER, op. cit., § 227.

• 485 Cf.* MAHER, Psychology, chs. xiii. and xiv.

• 486 Cf.* URRABURU: “Vel, si mavis, dic causam efficientem esse causam, a qua fit aliquid, vel a quo proprie oritur actio, intelligendo per actionem emanationem et fluxum ac dependentiam effectus a causa.”—op. cit., § 389 (p. 1112).

• 487 Cf.* MERCIER, op. cit., § 229: “L’action, l’efficience, qu’est elle, en quoi consiste-t-elle? Est-ce une sorte d’écoulement de la cause dans l’effet? Évidemment non. Lorsque nous voulons nous élever à une conception métaphysique, nous nous raccrochons à une image sensible, et nous nous persuadons volontiers, que la netteté de la première répond à la facilité avec laquelle nous nous figurons la seconde. Il faut se défier de cette illusion. Puisque l’action, même corporelle, ne modifie point l’agent, la causalité efficiente ne peut consister dans un influx physique, qui passerait de la cause dans l’effet.”

489 We might add this other fact: that all kinds of corporeal activity and change (11) seem to involve motion or local change. This does not prove that they all are motion or local change. The significance of the fact lies probably in this, that local motion is necessary for procuring and continuing physical contact between the interacting physical agencies.—Cf. NYS, Cosmologie, §§ 227-9.

491 “Une cause véritable est une cause, entre laquelle et son effet l’esprit aperçoit une liaison nécessaire: c’est ainsi que je l’entendes. [This is ambiguous.] Or il n’y a que l’être infiniment parfait entre la volonté duquel et les effets l’esprit aperçoive une liaison nécessaire. Il n’y a donc que Dieu qui soit véritable cause, et il semble même qu’il y ait contradiction à dire que les hommes puissent l’être”—De la récherche de la vérité, Liv. 6me, 2e partie, ch. iii.

492 “Si l’on vient à considérer attentivement l’idée que l’on a de cause ou de puissance d’agir, on ne peut en douter que cette idée ne présente quelque chose de divin.”—ibid.

493 “Il n’y a point d’homme qui sache seulement ce qu’il faut faire pour remuer un de ses doigts par le moyen des esprits animaux.”—ibid.

494 “J’ai toujours soutenue que l’âme était l’unique cause de ses actes, c’est à dire de ses déterminations libres ou de ses actes bons ou mauvais.... J’ai toujours soutenu que l’âme était active, mais que ses actes ne produisaient rien de physique.”—Réflexions sur la prémotion physique*. “Je crois que la volonté est une *puissance active, qu’elle a un véritable pouvoir de se déterminer; mais son action est immanente; c’est une action qui ne produit rien par son efficace propre, pas même le mouvement de son bras.”—Réponse à la 3me* lettre d’Arnauld*.

496 We may reasonably ask the occasionalist to suppose for the moment that we are efficient causes of our mental processes and to tell us what better proof of it could he demand, or what better proof could be forthcoming, than this proof from consciousness.

498 Should anyone doubt that consciousness does testify to this fact, we may prove it inductively from the constant correlation between the mental state and the bodily movement: “I will to move my arm, it moves; I will that it remain at rest, it does not move; I will that its movement be more or less strong and rapid, the strength and rapidity vary with the determination of my will. What more complete inductive proof can we have of the efficiency of our will-action on the external world?”—MERCIER, op. cit., § 231.

499 “Si effectus non producuntur ex actione rerum creatarum, sed solum ex actione Dei, impossibile est quod per effectus manifestetur virtus alicujus causae creatae: non enim effectus ostendit virtutem causae nisi ratione actionis, quae a virtute procedens ad effectum terminatur. Natura autem causae non cognoscitur per effectum, nisi inquantum per ipsum cognoscitur virtus, quae naturam consequitur. Si igitur res creatae non habent actiones ad producendum effectum, sequitur, quod nunquam naturam alicujus rei creatae poterit cognosci per effectum; et sic subtrahitur nobis omnis cognitio scientiae naturalis, in qua praecipuae demonstrationes per effectum sequuntur.”—ST. THOMAS, Contra Gentes, L. iii., cap. 69.

500 “Je demeure d’accord que la foi oblige à croire qu’il y a des corps; mais, pour l’évidence, il me semble qu’elle n’est point entière, et que nous ne sommes point invinciblement portés à croire qu’il y ait quelqu’autre chose que Dieu et notre esprit.”—Récherche de la vérite, 6me éclaircissement.

503 “Quaedam vero ad bonum inclinantur cum aliqua cognitione; non quidem sic quod cognoscant ipsam rationem boni, sed cognoscunt aliquod bonum particulare.... Inclinatio autem hanc cognitionem sequens dicitur appetitus sensitivus. Quaedam vero inclinantur ad bonum cum cognitione qua cognoscant ipsam boni rationem; et haec inclinatio dicitur voluntas.”—ST. THOMAS, Summa Theol., i., q. xlix., art. 1.

504 “Sicut influere causae efficientis est agere, ita influere causae finalis est appeti et desiderari.”—De Veritate, q. xxii., art. 2.

505 In its modern usage the term “intention” is inseparable from the notion of conscious direction. The scholastics used the term “intentio” in a wider and deeper sense to connote the natural tendency of all created agencies towards their natural activities and lines of development. And in unconscious agencies they did not hesitate to refer to it as “intentio naturae” or “appetitus naturalis”.

506 “Res naturalis per formam qua perficitur in sua specie, habet inclinationem in proprias operationes et proprium finem, quem per operationes consequitur; quale enim unumquodque est, talia operatur, et in sibi convenientia tendit.”—ST. THOMAS, Contra Gentes, iv., 19.

“Omnia suo modo per appetitum inclinantur in bonum, sed diversimode. Quaedam enim inclinantur in bonum per solam naturalem habitudinem absque cognitione, sicut plantae et corpora inanimata; et talis inclinatio ad bonum vocatur appetitus naturalis.”—Summa Theol., i., q. xlix., art. 1.

507 “Causa efficiens et finis sibi correspondent invicem, quia efficiens est principium motus, finis autem terminus. Et similiter materia et forma: nam forma dat esse, materia autem recipit. Est igitur efficiens causa finis, finis autem causa efficientis. Efficiens est causa finis quantum ad esse, quidem, quia movendo perducit efficiens ad hoc, quod sit finis. Finis autem est causa efficientis non quantum ad esse sed quantum ad rationem causalitatis. Nam efficiens est causa in quantum agit; non autem agit nisi causa [gratia] finis. Unde ex fine habet suam causalitatem efficiens.”—ST. THOMAS, In Metaph., v., 2.

“Sciendum quod licet finis sit ultimus in esse in quibusdam, in causalitate tamen est prior semper, unde dicitur causa causarum, quia est causa causalitatis in omnibus causis. Est enim causa causalitatis efficientis, ut jam dictum est. Efficiens autem est causa causalitatis et materiae et formae.”—ibid., lect. 3.

508 Φύσις ἐστιν ἀρχὴ τὶς καὶ αἰτία του κινεῖσθαι καὶ ἠρεμεῖν ἐν ῷ ὑπάχει πρώτως καθ᾽ αὑτο, καὶ μὴ κατὰ συμβεβηκός. Natura est principium quoddam et causa cur id moveatur et quiescat, in quo inest primum, per se et non secundum accidens.—Physic., L. ii., cap. 1.

509 “Ars nihil aliud est quam recta ratio aliquorum operum faciendorum.”—Summa Theol. ia iiae, q. lvii., art. 3.—Cf. In Post. Anal., l. 1.

510 “Natura nihil aliud est quam ratio cujusdam artis, scilicet divinae, indita rebus qua ipsae res moventur ad finem determinatum; sicut si artifex factor navis posset lignis tribuere quod ex seipsis moverentur ad navis formam inducendam.”—In II Phys., lect. 14.

“Omnia naturalia, in ea quae eis conveniunt, sunt inclinata, habentia in seipsis aliquod inclinationis principium, ratione cujus eorum inclinatio naturalis est, ita ut quodammodo ipsa vadant, et non solum ducantur in fines debitos*.”—*De Veritate, q. xxii., art. 7.

511 “In nullo enim alio natura ab arte videtur differre, nisi quia natura est principium intrinsecum, et ars est principium extrinsicum. Si enim ars factiva navis esset intrinseca ligno, facta fuisset navis a natura, sicut modo fit ab arte.”—In II. Phys., lect. 13.

520 Fatalism is the view that all things happen by a blind, inevitable, eternally foredoomed and unintelligible necessity. Thus SENECA (Nat. Quaest., L. III., cap. 36) describes fatum as necessitas omnium rerum actionumque, quam nulla vis rumpat*. This *necessitas ineluctabilis is totally different from the conditional physical necessity of the course of Nature dependently on the Fiat of a Supreme Free Will guided by Supreme Intelligence (Cf. Science of Logic, §§ 224, 249, 253, 257). If the necessity of actual occurrences is not ultimately traceable to the Fiat of an Intelligent Will—and mechanists deny that it can be so traced—it is rightly described as fatalistic, blind, purposeless, unintelligible.

522 “Expliquer par une rencontre fortuite, la convergence d’éléments, dont chacun a sa poussée propre, c’est rendre raison de la convergence par des principes de divergence.... Il est donc contradictoire d’attribuer au hasard la raison explicative de l’ordre.”—MERCIER, op. cit., § 260.

524 “Similiter ex prioribus pervenitur ad posteriora in arte et in natura: unde si artificialia, ut domus, fierent a natura, hoc ordine fierent, quo nunc fiunt per artem: scilicet prius institueretur fundamentum, et postea erigerentur parietes, et ultimo supponeretur tectum.... Et similiter si ea quae fiunt a natura fierent ab arte, hoc modo fierent sicut apta nata sunt fieri a natura; ut patet in sanitate, quam contigit fieri, et ab arte et a natura.... Unde manifestum est quod in natura est alterum propter alterum, scilicet priora propter posteriora, sicut et in arte.”—ST. THOMAS, In II. Phys.*, lect. 13.—Cf. *supra, p. 417, n. 3.

525 “Ordo est parium dispariumque rerum sua cuique loca tribuens dispositio.”—De Civ. Dei, xix., 13.

527 “La convergence de causes indifférentes qui réalisent d’une manière harmonieuse et persistante un même objet ordonné, ne s’explique point par des coincidences fortuites; elle réclame un principe interne de convergence.*”—*Ibid., § 260.

528 TENNYSON, In Memoriam, lvi.

529 BROWNING, A Soul’s Tragedy, Act. 1.

530 “Universum habet bonum ordinis et bonum separatum.”—In Metaph., xii., l. 12.

531 ARISTOTLE, Metaph., xi., 10. Does Aristotle teach that God moves the universe only as its Final Cause, as the Supreme Good towards which it tends, or also as Efficient Cause? His thought is here obscure, and has given rise to much controversy among his interpreters.

532 Ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ πρῶτον τῶν ὄντων ἀκίνητον καὶ καθ᾽ ἁυτὸ καὶ κατὰ συμβεβηκός, κινοῦν δὲ τὴν πρώτην ἀΐδιον καὶ μίαν κίνησιν.—Ibid., xi., 8.

533 Κινεῖ δὲ (οὐ ἕνεκα) ὡς ἐρώμενον, κινούμενον δὲ τᾶλλα κινει.—ibid., 7.

534 “Totus ordo universi est propter primum moventem, ut scilicet explicetur in universo ordinato id quod est in intellectu et voluntate primi moventis. Et sic oportet quod a primo movente sit tota ordinatio universi.”—Ibid., xii., l. 12.

535 ... Among themselves all things Have order; and from hence the form, which makes The universe resemble God. In this The higher creatures see the printed steps Of that eternal worth, which is the end Whither the line is drawn. All natures lean In this their order, diversely, some more, Some less approaching to their primal source. Thus they to different havens are moved on Through the vast sea of being, and each one With instinct giv’n, that bears it in its course; This to the lunar sphere directs the fire, This prompts the hearts of mortal animals, This the brute earth together knits and binds. Nor only creatures, void of intellect, Are aim’d at by this bow; but even those That have intelligence and love, are pierced. That Providence, who so well orders all, With her own light makes ever calm the heaven, In which the substance that hath greatest speed Is turned: and thither now, as to our seat Predestin’d, we are carried by the force Of that strong cord, that never looses dart, But at fair aim and glad ...

—DANTE, Paradiso, Cant. i. (tr. by CARY).