PART THREE

Chapter 1

THE FACT IN GENERAL

1158. I have already shown that the intuition of being is an undeniable fact, immune from every possibility of deception. It constitutes the faculty by which we know what is different from and independent of ourselves. (103) I also pointed out, however, that as long as we restrict the argument to possible being alone we do not affirm anything as subsistent. In such a case we grasp, through the idea of being, only the possibility of being. In other words, we have the universal concept of being. When presented with this concept we are simply given the possibility or faculty of knowing things in their mode of being independent of ourselves (cf. 1078 ss.). We still have to learn how the concept of subsistent beings, different from us in general, can lead us to affirm indivi-dual, subsistent beings. We need to know how we can pass from the simple faculty of knowledge, given to us by nature in the idea of being, to the possession of actual cognitions of real beings different from ourselves.

We have prepared the way for this discovery by establishing an unshakeable principle regarding the communication between things considered per se and the necessary judgment which we make upon their subsistence: (104) `The things we judge to subsist by a necessary deduction must subsist. If they did not subsist of themselves and in reality, our interior judgment would not be true and necessary. Consequently our intuition of being, which is true and necessary, would not be such’ (cf. 1137–1142). As we said, the internal necessity of being requires necessarily that external beings are as we judge them — in themselves, in a different way from us.

This principle, which constitutes the possible application of the idea of being to subsistent things considered in themselves, has its root, as we also affirmed, in that marvellous property of being, absolute objectivity. Indeed, the possible application of the idea of being is properly speaking only its objectivity exposed in its particular relationship with things that exist outside the mind. The objectivity of being — if we may repeat ourselves yet again, but in other words — consists in this: being which the mind sees is essentially different from the act of the mind with which it sees it. An accurate analysis of the primitive fact, the intuition of being, indicates the presence of two elements, the act of the intuiting or seeing subject, and being, which is seen or intuited. These two elements cannot be confused; the act of the mind is essentially different from being intuited by that act.

If, therefore, the( 364)( 365)( 366)( 367)( 368)( 369)( 370)( 371) of being is such that being is not presented to us as dependent on our mind, but rather totally independent from and foreign to it, we have to say that in this intuition (from which we must not exit) we possess from the very beginning two acts, that of the subject and that of being. This second act maintains being present to the subject, and forces the subject to intuit it. In this intuition, therefore, being informs, and the subject intuiting it is in its turn informed by being.(105)

Natural and logical necessity are present together gently and without any coercion in this presentation of being and its acceptance by the intuiting subject. Logical necessity, therefore, springs from something essentially different from the mind, although seen by the mind. This necessity refers to the object, not to the act of the mind. But we judge, with a necessary deduction, of the subsistence of an object different from the mind by means of logical necessity which is unique, and which we have described as totally present in universal being.

Our judgment tells us that if the external thing did not subsist as we judge it, being would not be. But being is, evidently and necessarily. The external object (the substance, the cause) must also subsist, therefore, because that internal necessity requires it as its condition; the sight of this relationship is in fact what causes us to pronounce our judgment. The principle of the possible application of the idea of being to subsistent things is therefore well established, and as certain as the idea of being itself.

1159. But this principle requires and supposes further data if it is to be used in a worthwhile and practical way. It supposes that our spirit sees that the intrinsic necessity possessed by being of itself is also possessed by the judgment with which we judge that a substance or cause subsists.
But how does our spirit conceive a strict, necessary union between subsistent things and the idea of being so that the subsistence of the former is proved by the necessity of the latter?

What are the conditions in which the spirit must be found if it is to see the necessity of pronouncing such a judgment upon the subsistence of something external to the mind and to ourselves? If the spirit remains with the idea of being alone, it has of course already gone out of itself because being is something other than the spirit. Nevertheless, it will not have gone beyond the possibility of things. Some change must take place in it, therefore, or some element at least must fall under its consideration which enables it to pass from the region of merely possible things to that of subsistent things. What is this change? What is this new element leading the spirit to move in such a way? What constitutes the link between this element, the idea of being, and subsistent things? What is the link, that is, enabling the spirit, prompted by the necessity originally lying in being, to judge that these things subsist? We still have to answer these questions.

But this undertaking presupposes another. Our search reaches out for the principle justifying the judgment we make about the existence of things. But judgment on the subsistence of things presupposes the idea of things, or at least that the idea be co-existent with the judgment, as we have already shown to be the fact in perception (cf. OT, 405–407). This gives rise to another question, with which the application of being is really completed: `How do we acquire the ideas of things?’ This was the subject of the whole of The Origin of Thought, to which we refer the reader, but we still have to show the relationship of our present question with the three preceding queries by indicating the place it holds in the search for the criterion of certainty.

The three preceding questions were intended to illustrate how the mind can perceive things outside itself (supposing that ideas have been granted it). The fourth question asks how things outside the mind can be presented to the mind in such a way that it perceives them? The last question is concerned with the origin of acquired ideas; the first three constitute the search for the criterion of certainty.

1160. If we wish, we can express the first three questions in another way:

First question. `What is the principle by which the human spirit knows what is different from itself in general?’ As we have said, this principle is the idea of being in general because being (object) is that which constitutes what is different from the spirit (subject). That is to say, whatever is different is always included in being.

Second question. `What is the principle by which the human spirit knows with certainty what is different from itself and really subsisting?’ As we have said, this principle consists in the link or bond of identity between the real subsistence of things and ideal being so that the real subsistence shares in the necessity of ideal being. This happens in such a way that the necessity of being contains, supposes and requires the external reality which it judges to be present through a necessary deduction of identification.

Third question. `What is the principle by which the subsistence of real things is seen bound to the ideal necessity internal to ourselves?’ This is the question we intend to answer in our present chapter.

1161. It is clear that this third question presupposes as present in us, as we said, the idea of whatever it is we judge to be subsistent. In other words, it presupposes the solution to the question of the origin of ideas. We have to re-examine the origin of acquired ideas, therefore, and in this origin find the justification of the judgment made by our mind on the subsistence of things.
When we acquire a new idea, we always acquire at the same time a new, partial determination of being in general.(106) We have until now called such a partial determination of the idea of being in general the matter of our acts of knowledge. The first two questions, therefore, were concerned with only the form of knowledge; with the third, we descend to materiated knowledge whose legitimacy and validity we have to demonstrate in the present chapter.
All matter of knowledge, therefore, is either particular and determinate, or something contained in the particular and determinate. We shall include the matter of our knowledge under the general determination, fact.
Let us now proceed immediately to speak of the certainty of our knowledge of this fact, considered generally, that is, of all that is or happens. I begin as follows.

1162. It is clear that there can be no knowledge or certainty about a fact which is neither felt nor understood. We cannot ask, therefore, how we are certain of such a fact. To be certain of something, we must first know it. Nevertheless, a comment may be useful at this point.
When we know a fact, two elements are present in our knowledge: knowledge (the act of our knowledge), and the fact itself (the object of our knowledge).

By means of an abstraction we can separate the knowledge of the fact from the fact itself and so conceive that the fact exists in itself even when unknown. This shows that our notion of the act by which a being exists (a fact) presents this act as having a nature independent (relative to our mode of mental conception) of knowledge. Relative to us, therefore, knowing and existing are two separate and incommunicable elements; and such separation and incommunicability is a condition of our knowing. I mean that if knowing and existing were not two incommunicable elements, our knowing would be impossible. It is the analysis of our act of knowledge which provides us with the separation of these two elements: knowing cries out, as it were, that it is not being as known, and witnesses that it must stand apart.

1163. Consideration of this proposition allows us to understand 1. that the efforts of the German transcendental school to make knowing and being, the intellective act and the object of that act, (107) interpenetrate and identify are vain; 2. and that transcendental idealism is therefore absurd because it removes the one condition which makes knowledge possible, that is, the essential separation between knowledge and existence. It makes knowing impossible because it destroys being in itself, and consequently truth itself.

1164. The felt but not understood fact is either feeling, or the corporeal matter of feeling if the feeling is material (cf. OT, 1005 ss.). If we suppose this fact to be felt only and not understood, it is not yet the object of any act of knowledge. We cannot therefore ask: `How can we be certain of such a fact?’ because certainty is only an attribute of knowledge. If knowledge is absent, certainty is also absent.

As we have said so many times, feeling is unknown to itself. Only through abstraction, by which we separate all knowledge from feeling and consider it apart, in itself, do we come to know the existence of an unknown feeling. But considering the fact of feeling, in this way, we can reasonably conclude that feeling is an element separate from knowledge, as we said a short time ago about being. This separation between feeling and knowledge is another condition necessary for knowledge. Only knowledge renders feeling an object; it is not such per se. If the act of knowing and its object were not essentially distinct, knowing would be impossible because it is essential to knowing that the two things be separate. It is impossible, therefore, to identify knowing and feeling, or to make knowing emanate from feeling as though it were some development of feeling. The efforts of Schelling and the systematists have their origin solely in the lack of a careful examination of the fact of knowledge.

1165. We have to say, therefore, that our knowing can only subsist on condition that three distinct activities are posited: 1. the activity of being; 2. the activity of feeling; 3. the activity of knowing. But the way these three activities are united in a single being and bound together to form a single substance is a question altogether too profound for me to attempt to answer in this current work.

1166. Being has two modes, the ideal mode and the real mode. Ideal being is the form of knowledge; real being is the matter of knowledge. In this chapter we call the matter of knowledge fact.
We have seen that the fact which forms the matter of our act of knowledge is distinguished into two primary species. One consists in the activity of non-feeling being, the other in the activity of feeling. These can be called two species of real being.

The matter of knowledge, that is, non-feeling being and feeling cannot of themselves provide a basis for reasoning about their certainty as long as they remain unknown and have not been made objects of the third activity, knowing. Certainty is an attribute only of knowledge, which is not present in this case.
How, then, is the matter of knowledge (non-feeling being and feeling) presented to our intelligent spirit? How does it become the object of our knowledge?

1167. The matter of our knowledge is presented to our spirit by feeling itself. This arises from the identity between ourselves as feeling beings and ourselves as intelligent beings. By nature we are already furnished with 1. a fundamental feeling; 2. the vision of being in general. Nature itself, therefore, has presented us with the the form and first matter of our knowledge (cf. OT, 722). Our acquired matter is only a modification of the first, originating matter (of the fundamental feeling) (cf. OT, 705).

1168. It may be objected that although this serves to explain how the part of the matter of our acts of knowledge which consists in feeling is presented to our intelligent spirit, it does not explain the part of the matter that consists in the simple activity of a real being which lacks feeling. In other words, how do we form for ourselves the idea of inanimate beings?
This idea comes to us from the matter of feeling. The idea of inanimate beings is composed of 1. the matter of feeling; 2. those forces which, modifying the matter of this feeling, suppose no activity other than that which is found in the matter of feeling, according to the old tag: `Every agent acts according to its own likeness.’

1169. The universal principle governing every application of the form of reason to facts provided by feeling is the following: `The known fact must form an equation with the form of reason.’(108) But it is clear that if knowledge of a fact is equal to the form of knowledge, knowledge of a fact is equally justified and certain when the form of knowledge is justified. The principle, therefore, has to be verified but, before we can do that, relevant clarifications are called for.

1170. The equation which has to exist between the matter of knowledge (considered in knowledge itself) and the form of knowledge requires that everything explicitly and particularly comprised in materiated knowledge be already comprised implicitly and universally in the form.

1171. Let us set this out syllogistically. `Every human being possesses reason; Andrew is a human being; therefore Andrew possesses reason.’ The major of these three propositions, `Every human being possesses reason’, refers to the possible world and tells us, in a general and implicit way, that the particular human being, Andrew, possesses reason. If all human beings possess reason, each one must possess reason, whatever his name. The third proposition, therefore, is comprised implicitly and generally in the first. It is in this sense that I affirm an equation between the third and first propositions, in so far as that which is asserted in the third is already asserted in the first. No new assertion is made; the particular proposition is identified with the general.

1172. Let me explain more clearly. In the first proposition, `All human beings possess reason,’ something general is affirmed. In this general proposition are comprised a quantity of particular propositions which, however, are not distinguished individually in our minds. Because they are not distinguished, and because we do not know the subjects to which they refer, we say that we know them only implicitly. But when feeling presents their particular subjects, these particular propositions are completed and rendered clear and distinct. We now know them in a particular way with the same light with which we formerly knew them in a universal way. In other words, a proposition, when materiated and complete, makes a perfect equation not with the universal proposition, but with the particular proposition which, although present in the universal, remained there unseen and confused. We could not distinguish it from ourselves because we did not know the subject of which it was predicated.

In the syllogism used in our example, we know implicitly, as a result of the first proposition, `Every human being possesses reason,’ that an individual human being called Andrew possesses reason. But how can our knowledge that Andrew possesses reason be in us if we do not know Andrew? It is a blind, indistinct proposition, enveloped in the general proposition and there absorbed, but with a virtual, not an actual existence. It is in this sense that the universal proposition forms a perfect equation with the particular proposition. As soon as we have a perception of Andrew, and come to know the particular proposition, or rather in knowing it, we also know that it was already present (without our knowing this) in the universal.

The universal proposition, therefore, is capable, by means of its virtuality, of forming simultaneously as many equations as there are particular propositions. In other words, the general proposition takes on in each equation the special relationship it holds towards the particular proposition with which it is compared.

1173. Everything is reduced, therefore, to perception, as we said. Given perception, we know the individual subject and hence possess the particular proposition which forms an equation with the general proposition. Perception, however, has already been justified by us. We also showed that while all this is accomplished within us, the nature of experience also shows that not everything within us appertains to us. It is possible for an element essentially foreign to us to be in us, and this is precisely what occurs in perception. In the fact of intuition there is no contradiction present in our knowing something different from us (that which is ideal). Equally in the fact of perception there is no contradiction in our knowing something different from us (that which is real).

1174. But at this point we are faced with an extremely difficult question: `How can the matter of knowledge be identified with the form? And if the matter is not identified with the form, how can it be said to be contained in the form and make with it a perfect equation?’

I answer that the matter, considered in itself, is never identified with the form of knowledge.(109) On the contrary, we have already shown that the matter in itself (the fact, feeling, and being considered simply) is an activity different from knowing, and even more different from the form of knowledge (cf. 1164 ss.). We also said that the matter of knowledge, when separate from knowledge itself, remains unknown and outside the question of certainty, which is only an attribute of knowledge. It is the matter of knowledge as known which is identified with the form of know-ledge. In this fact, the spirit simply considers the matter relatively to being, and sees it contained in being as an actuation and term of being itself.

There is no identification before the matter is united with being. The matter is such that nothing can be said about it before we know it. But when it has been united with being and thus objectivised and become known to us, it has acquired through our act of know-ledge a relationship, form and predicate that it previously lacked. In this predicate consists its identification with being. Being is predicated of it, and our act of knowledge consists in this predication.
When we go on to consider the matter as already known, we imagine that it has in itself something totally common to all things. This most common quality, as common, is however acquired for it by the mind and received by the mind. It is a relationship it has with the act of the mind; it is not something real in the matter, but real only in the mind itself.

This was insufficiently considered by Aristotle and others like him, and led to their thinking that the mind could obtain for itself the idea of being by abstracting what was most common in things. But it is the mind itself which places this most common quality in things, and in retrieving the quality only takes back what is its own. As I have said, that which is common in things is only the result of the relationship that they have with the intelligent mind.(110)

1175. It should be noted that when we established, on the basis of the equation between them, the principle that the certainty of a particular proposition (which refers to what is real) is the same as the certainty of the general proposition (which refers to what is possible), we were speaking of propositions equally composed of matter and form. We were not speaking of an equation between matter separated from form and form itself.
If this is true, the matter of knowledge, the fact, may of itself prove to be something highly mysterious and covert. I would not disagree with this in any way, but add that this mysterious, covert activity included in the fact is the root of knowledge itself. This activity itself is in the last analysis a fact owing its origin to the supreme necessity springing up in the highest of all natures, before whom the philosopher must bow his head in humble adoration.

Notes

(103) Cf. 1065–1111. — Our knowledge is made up of: 1. being, which we conceive mentally in all our acts of knowledge (this is the formal part of knowledge); 2. determinations of being (this is the material part). As I have indicated on several occasions, I restrict myself to saying that our knowledge is perfectly objective in its formal part, without extending the same assertion to the material part.

(104) I do not say between things and ideas. Ideas alone do not include the subsistence of things, but only their possibility. I say between subsistent things and the judgment about their subsistence.

(105) Hence we affirmed that the faculty of intuiting being is a spiritual sense. Sense perceives by suffering, as it were, that is, by receiving.

(106) If we possessed a positive idea of God (which is naturally impossible for us here on earth), we would not have acquired any materiated knowledge, but increased our formal or objective knowledge. All that we know positively about God is form and pure object of our mind and knowledge. The same is true of heavenly beings which possess the vision of God. This explains St. Thomas' beautiful phrase: `When any created intellect sees God in his essence, the very essence of God becomes the intelligible form of the intellect'.

(107) The intellective act (intuition), the idea (the ideal, possible object), the sensitive act (sensation, sense-perception), the term of the sensitive act (matter), the rational act (intellective perception) and real being (the real object to which the idea refers) are six different things and every care must be taken to avoid confusing them.

(108) We have already indicated this (cf. 1160 ss.). Here we are dealing more fully with the second of the three questions indicated in those numbers. Aquinas caught sight of this when he wrote: `Being, which is FIRST because of its commonality, is never disproportionate because it is the SAME IN ESSENCE FOR ANYTHING WHATSOEVER' (this is the equation). `It is known, therefore, when we know anything whatsoever' (De Ver., q. 10, art. 11).

(109) We can apply here the ancient adage: `Contingent things are not; God alone is.'

(110) Certain passages in St. Thomas show, I think, that this great man had seen these two important things: 1. that universality is not drawn out of things, but placed in them by the mind; 2. that the essence of knowing consists in the mind's adding universality to felt things. This teaching seems clearly expressed by the Saint in the following passage: `When we speak about the abstract universal, we understand two things, namely, the nature of the thing, and abstraction or UNIVERSALITY' (abstraction for Aquinas is, therefore, the same as the universality of something). `The nature of the thing which happens to be understood or abstracted, or the underlying universality' (note how three synonyms are used: being understood, being abstracted, and the universality of the thing) `is not present in individual things. BEING UNDERSTOOD, OR BEING ABSTRACTED, OR THE UNDERLYING UNIVERSALITY, IS IN THE INTELLECT' (S.T., I, q. 85, art. 2). There is, however, one reasonable difficulty which will occur to those who remember the distinction St. Thomas makes between the two operations he assigns to the intellect and which he sometimes calls 1. illuminating the phantasms and 2. abstracting the phantasms, and which I have explained in NS. 495 ftn. But in the passage quoted above, St. Thomas uses the phrase `to abstract' to indicate the action which elsewhere he calls `illuminating the phantasms'. He does in fact distinguish two kinds of abstraction, the first of which he describes with the phrase `done simply', a perfect synonym for `illuminating the phantasms' which is the meaning given to `abstract'. The second kind of abstraction he describes as `done by composition or division'. This is abstraction properly speaking, which is contrasted in other places with illuminating.