New Essay Volume 3

17. (1330)

[The sensists' error]

An example of the kind of error that arises from exaggerated suspension of judgment and unwillingness to give assent would be the whole series of errors to which sensists are prone as a result of their inability to rest satisfied with their research into abstract problems. Sensists find great difficulty in admitting that their mind possesses universal concepts through which an entire species of possible things can be perceived with a single glance. The difficulty has become general in our day as a consequence of the general diffusion of sensism although it undoubtedly arises from the lack of internal observation proper to sensists who immerse themselves in external observation alone. Their difficulty originates when they try to fix their attention on a universal concept. They find it impossible to remain in this state for a long time without setting their imagination in motion. This potency, which is very active in everyone, is brought into action by sensists as if it were our only potency. It then arouses in them images derived from the bodily senses, which are the sole source of their philosophy. Moreover, the imagination presents and impresses images or phantasms of particular things. From that moment on, therefore, the universal which sensists have undertaken to contemplate is entirely lost to them.

Having experienced their incapacity for lengthy concentration on what is purely universal sensists go on to conclude that the universal does not exist. This occurs only because they insist on such lengthy attention to the universal, and demand the formation of an image which it cannot provide. They should have granted and admitted the universal as soon as they thought it, without wanting to apply to it the mode of conception proper only to corporeal particular things.

Moreover fixing our attention on the pure universal is more difficult in so far as the universal is more abstract. The concept of being in all its universality, that is, the concept of truth, which requires the greatest abstraction, also demands the greatest isolation from images and the most immediate assent to its light. I recognise, of course, that this is the greatest obstacle to the acceptance of my theory on the part of sensists and those who think like them. I would point out, however, that their observation about the difficulty of paying attention to abstracts was not unknown to philosophers who nevertheless admitted the presence of abstracts and universals in the mind. Men of this calibre, however, did not believe they had to reject the fact of universals simply because of the difficulty of concentrating on them, a difficulty which has its source in the mixed constitution of human beings.

St. Augustine was certainly one of these philosophers, and he speaks in the following terms of the immediate assent that should be given to truth without more ado:

St. Augustine noted, therefore, that we cannot concentrate for long on an abstract concept, that we naturally try to envelop this concept in corporeal forms, and that we have either to be satisfied with the most universal, final concept of truth as soon as we reach it or decide to fall once more from that height of thought to the level of the bodies we have already abandoned. But this observation was shared by all the best authors. I shall mention one only, the famous Scot, John Duns Scotus, who offered the following comment on our passage from St. Augustine:

When a universal is abstracted from a particular concept, the intellect's difficulty in concentrating on the concept is in proportion to its universality. This is the effect of our natural inclination to imagine something particular every time we grasp a universal. For the same reason, we can keep our attention fixed longer and more easily on a universal concept in so far as such a concept is similar to something particular and striking in the image. But the most universal concepts are those furthest from what is particular, and hence the most difficult of all from the point of view of prolonged, intellectual attention. Granted this, we ought not to ask what is truth (says St. Augustine) relative to the conception of God under the most universal concept of truth. In other words, we ought not to want to descend to some particular concept. If we do, we become embroiled in the light issuing from the fantasy of the imagination; we lose the tranquillity proper to truth, that is, the genuine truth in which God was perceived. As soon as we descend in this way, we come to perceive restricted truth, which is not fitting to God, to whom appertains truth conceived in all its generality, not restricted truth.