New Essay
Volume 3
Appendix 3. (1087)
[Deduction of absolute certainty]
It is possible to attempt to deduce absolute certainty from three facts:
1. the matter of knowledge; 2. the knowing subject; and 3. the formal object, that is, the form of knowledge.
1. Some philosophers imagined they could draw certainty from the matter of knowledge, that is, from the senses. Their efforts gave rise to the sceptics of antiquity, the first to realise that the senses could not provide sources of apodictic certainty. Degerando. after describing the ten tropes or divisions used by the Pyrrhonists to encapsulate their exceptions to certainty, makes this acute observation: 'Note that the whole of this (sceptical) commentary is essentially an attack on the witness of the senses, and accepts as an agreed supposition that knowledge originates in exterior, sensible experience (Histoire comparée etc., 2nd edition, t. 2, pp. 477, 478). This is the Pyhrronism generated by sensists.
2. Other philosophers, who saw that knowledge could not have its source in the senses, imagined they could draw it from the depth of our spirit, and hence from ourselves and the laws of our intelligent nature. In a word, they deduced certainty from the subject. This was the origin of modern scepticism, which gave rise to the critical or transcendental philosophers. This is the Pyhrronism generated by Scottish philosphy, which gave rise to the absurdity of subjective truth, or truth that is not truth.
3. The third system finds the foundation and very essence of knowledge in the object, that is, in the first, indeterminate idea of being, which is 1. not matter, and hence cannot be altered or changed from its essential simplicity (cf. vol. 2, 426); 2. not a limited subject (hence not imposing partial forms on knowledge (cf. vol. 2, 417)), but an unlimited and indeterminate object which itself receives the forms and is, according to us, the unique, unchallengeable truth standing as the firm foundation on which certainty, entirely safe from human temerity, stands unshaken.
Early Christianity had already rejected and reproved the first two systems as causes of the two kinds of scepticism that have confused and disturbed recent generations. But early Christianity has in its turn been reproved by recent generations which, acting together like the blind leading the blind, fall into a tangled abyss of uncertainty and unrest where the end is indeed intellectual exhaustion and moral debility, but from which human nature will, we hope, hasten to emerge as it rebels against the annihilation and perdition awaiting it there.
Six centuries ago, one of the brightest stars in the Italian firmament rejected these two false systems, and taught that certainty could rest on neither the matter of knowledge (sensations) nor on the perceiving subject, but only on the unchangeable and eternal nature of the formal object, in other words, on IDEAS, all of which, as I have shown, are finally reduced to a single idea. His words need to be considered very carefully and I quote them in their original language: Illationis NECESSITAS (that is, certainty, which implies the concept of absolute necessity) non venit ab EXISTENTIA REI IN MATERIA* , quia est contingens (matter of knowledge); nec ab existentia rei IN ANIMA* (in the perceiving subject), quia tunc esset fictio, si non esset in re (the subjective or imagined truth of the transcendentalists). Venit igitur ab EXEMPLARITATE* in arte aeterna (the idea, the exemplar, the form of our knowledge), secundum quam res
abent aptitudinem et habitudinem ad invicem, ad illius aeternae artis repraesentationem ['The NECESSITY of deduction' (that is, certainty, which implies the concept of absolute necessity) 'does not arise from the EXISTENCE OF SOMETHING IN MATTER, because this is contingent' (matter of knowledge), 'nor from the existence of something in the soul' (in the perceiving subject) 'because it would then be false, as not in the thing' (the subjective or imagined truth of the transcendentalists). 'It comes, therefore, from exemplariness in eternal "praxis"' (the idea, the exemplar, the form of our knowledge) 'according to which things possess an habitual aptitude towards one another in their likeness to that eternal praxis.'
Those who date human wisdom from 1789, and hold in invincible repugnance knowledge which can be acquired from writers of previous centuries, should ask themselves what they make of the above words, which I am not inventing. They can read them in Itinerarium mentis in Deum, c. 3, and, provided they understand them, use them to push back by a few centuries the date of true knowledge.