PART TWO

APPLICATION OF THE CRITERION TO DEMONSTRATE
THE TRUTH OF PURE KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER 4

Persuasion relative to the idea of being or truth,
and to the principles of reasoning

1143. Certainty is 'a firm and reasonable persuasion that conforms to the truth' (cf. 1044).
This definition contains two principal elements, 1. truth and 2. persuasion.
Until now I have spoken about truth; I shall now speak about persuasion.
Persuasion is not completely subject to the human will. A basic persuasion has been inserted in us by nature along with the act by which nature has infused being or truth and attached it to our souls [App., no. 6]. With this being or truth we judge things.

However, this persuasion of the first truth is neither imposed upon us nor extracted from us against our will. Nor is it blind persuasion. It arises from the presence of truth in all its clarity. Truth is so obvious that human beings, once they have seen it, know it of themselves as true. There can be nothing more true than truth. This follows from what we have said about the characteristic and proper nature of being in all its universality which demands nothing from us, but stands in its own right as a single, extremely simple fact.

1144. If we wish to find some proof that human beings are of their nature persuaded of the first principles of reasoning, we need look no further than the history of scepticism. As we have seen, any scepticism which truly denied the principles of reasoning would destroy the possibility of thought and of reasoning. But there has never been a sceptic really prepared to abandon reasoning for the sake of immersing himself in total mental and verbal silence. All sceptics have used reason to propagate their opinion. By this very fact they admit and use the first principles of reasoning without being conscious of what they are doing. Moreover, they do this naturally because the first principles cannot be denied. The very act of denial presupposes and requires them.

1145. Because every human being possesses the first principles of reasoning by nature and follows them, they are also called common conceptions. Note, however, that they are common because they possess an intrinsic power and force that renders them immediately known and immediately received by every individual of the human race. They do not possess their force of invincible persuasion from the fact that they are common, as one author seemed to maintain recently.(95)

1146. It is these principles, therefore, which form what is called common sense. This phrase includes all those consequences which, derivable from the principles, are so immediate and so plain that any person, however unlearned, could deduce them for himself. Because they are so easy and obvious, they are seen and granted by all human beings without exception.(96)
This definition enables us to see that common sense is only that reasoning which each person arrives at of himself. The word sense has no other meaning here.(97)

1147. Common sense should not be confused, therefore, with common beliefs, or with true and false traditions (error, too, has its traditions) which are passed on from generation to generation, and received according to the faith and authority of the ancestors who have transmitted them.

When we rebuke someone for 'having lost his common sense', therefore, we are certainly not rebuking him for 'not accepting common beliefs'. Anyone arguing against the affirmations of common sense is necessarily arguing badly, or rather has lost the use of reason. He does not see and does not know what can be seen and known with that thread of reason possessed by all human beings who have attained a sufficient stage of development. Hence, insanity consists in constantly deducing consequences opposed to those of human common sense.

This is not the case with those who oppose common beliefs. Their opposition does not normally lead to their being called insane. If the beliefs they reject have the weight of legitimate authority in their favour, such dissidents are said to be unreasonable; if the beliefs are holy and pious, such dissidents are said to be impious. On the other hand, those who oppose common, false or impious beliefs, such as idolatrous superstitions, are reasonably and laudably entitled to the description 'enemies of common prejudices'.

1148. One objection laid against the affirmation that human beings cannot disavow first principles by a law of nature is as follows: 'In some periods, especially in our own, people can be found who deny these principles. These persons must lack persuasion about them, therefore, and have no experience of the conviction you are describing.'

1149. I acknowledge the fact described. Moreover, I believe there are people who in some way are persuaded they have eliminated even the first principles of reasoning. I need to explain this fact; its explanation will in turn provide an answer to the consequence, wrongly drawn from the same fact, about the lack of universal persuasion concerning first principles.

We have to distinguish two kinds of knowledge in human beings, direct and reflective. This distinction is of the highest importance, and has been mentioned several times in volume 2 of this work.(98)

1150. Imagine that I am asked whether I know a given thing or accept a given principle. When replying I do not use direct but reflective knowledge. When I affirm or deny that I accept a given principle, I turn my gaze upon myself and examine the state of my understanding. I then acknowledge that the principle is approved or disapproved by my understanding. Let us suppose that I do approve some principle; this is direct knowledge. Examining myself and the state of my understanding, I find that my understanding approves the principle; this is reflective knowledge.

In affirming that I accept or do not accept a principle, I cannot possibly use the same knowledge with which my understanding accepts the validity of the principle. I must make use of the knowledge resulting from the examination of my state of understanding relative to the principle. By means of my scrutiny I acknowledge the state of my opinions and decide whether I approve or disapprove the principle. The knowledge resulting from my turning back on my understanding in order to know its state is reflective knowledge; the prior knowledge with which I intend simply to approve or disapprove of the principle is direct knowledge.

1151. The distinction between direct and reflective knowledge is now clear. We must add that the latter does not always harmonise with the former. It can in fact deceive us about the state of our direct knowledge. This happens when we turn back upon our mind and decide to examine its state relative to some principle, but then carry out the scrutiny inaccurately, or hurriedly, or perhaps allow our judgment to be formed by some hidden prejudice rather than by careful examination. In these cases I can deceive myself, and believe and affirm that my mind does not approve the principle even though it does approve it, and vice versa. Such limitation in our self-knowledge seems strange at first sight, but is nonetheless true: it is a fact.

1152. Granted this, the continual contradiction of the sceptics is easily explained. When they reason, they use and accept in the act of reasoning all the first principles of reason. But they do not realise they are doing this.(99) In fact, they think they are doing the opposite, and take the destruction of first principles as the basis of discussion and the aim of their arguments. At the same time, they assert their disbelief in these principles, whose defence and justification they reject. Throughout this whole process they show their open use and admission of such principles (which are necessary in all their reasoning - there could be no reasoning without them) in their direct knowledge.(100) In their reflective knowledge, however, they openly deny assent to the principles which they undertake to overthrow. But reflective knowledge, when contrary to direct knowledge, is inevitably false and deceptive.

1153. Those who assert that they are not persuaded of first principles, therefore, are either deceived or deceive. Others, however, may not suspect such wickedness or this extraordinary possibility of error about what we know. If this is the case, and there is no firm hold on the truths we have explained, some may be inclined too easily to believe these totally false affirmations of oversubtle sceptics, and be drawn, even by their own good nature, into a serious and certain danger of becoming unsuited to defend the cause of truth. Anyone who undertakes to believe that there could be people in the world who truly doubt about first principles, as though these principles were not firmly established and secured in our souls by the bountiful hand of nature, will inevitably come to a bad end.

Associating with sceptics, people like this will no longer find any fixed point of persuasion in human reason; the entire range of truth will be totally devoid, for them, of any undeniable element, and will remain entirely undefended against human rashness. They will find themselves capable of doubting their own existence, the existence of everything else, and the existence of God. God himself, wishing to reveal truths to the human heart, will be unable to provide it with a secure, infallible proof of the veracity of his own divine words. Any unconscious fellow-traveller with sceptics will constantly be subject to the fear of fatal illusion and false evidence, as it is called, because interiorly he bears no impression of any eternal rule and inextinguishable splendour, but only lights he himself can quench.

He may not be a sceptic himself. Indeed, he may wish to oppose scepticism. Nevertheless, having granted so much to sceptics, he will be forced to go a great deal further along their path, and seek the firm point he needs outside the territory of truth. He will seek something that satisfies him, as the sceptics do, something more absolute and more firm than truth itself, and he will place the supreme principle of certainty in blind instinct, or some irresistible urge to believe, or natural suggestion, or in mere authority which, unsupported, ceases to be authority. In a word, his search will take him anywhere, but always outside truth. In such a case, the new criterion is never justified because unenlightened by truth. A principle of this kind may indeed be able to produce in the human being a forced, unworthy assent, but never a reasonable assent, which is serenely produced and attained by the sole force of truth, never by any other element.(101)

1154. When a human being has arrived at such a pitch of self-deceit that he believes he does not give assent to first principles, but impugns them, his belief has to be shown false by his being drawn to consider the self-contradiction in which all his reasoning involves him.
His reflective knowledge will be rectified when he is brought to observe more accurately in himself the natural, direct knowledge to which reflective knowledge, an indication of direct knowledge, must conform.

1155. An appeal to the authority of others, by which we make use of the natural human inclination to believe others, is of great assistance in rectifying reflective knowledge.
Moreover, our human need to listen to others can be reinforced in various ways when two people are in disagreement about even the most obvious things. One can always say to the other: 'As human beings we are furnished with reason. This means that all our fellow human beings are furnished with reason just as we are. My reason, however, reaches a conclusion exactly opposite to yours. Could we not ask ourselves therefore what conclusion is reached by others? If one of us is wrong (and we cannot both be right), a comparison on the same point with the conclusion of many others will help us to discover who is mistaken.'

1156. If one person surrenders to the authority of others in this way, correction is at hand. However, the authority of others has not been the criterion of certainty in general, but simply the criterion of reflective knowledge. Although the first principles of reasoning have not been placed in us by the use of this criterion, the prejudice and bias preventing our acknowledging them has been removed. We are now able to see that which we have always possessed and accepted with our natural, direct knowledge, but rejected and opposed with our reflective knowledge.

Others' authority in primary matters, that is, in matters appertaining to common sense (cf. 1146, 1147) as we have described them above, is an excellent rule and a safe haven from error and danger in our first steps. For this reason nature itself, after giving us being, has not left us isolated on earth. We are born into the midst of society so that we may be helped and supported as we take our first steps in reasoning, as well as in those proper to our tiny bodies.

1157. But if the human evil of which we are speaking were disdain and rejection of all authority, our state would be perilous in the extreme. Some confirmation of what I have said can, however, be found in experience drawn from the care of insane people whose reasoning about the most obvious things in human life can only be described as weird. Considerable progress, which sometimes results in complete cure, is made when they are obliged by the presence of a force much greater than their own to conform to the regular habits and reasonings of other people.(102)

(95) Lammenais.

(96) Reid, the first proponent of the philosophy of common sense, defined it as 'the degree of judgment common to people with whom we can talk and conduct affairs' (Essay on the powers of the human mind, etc., vol. 2, p. 175). Shortly afterwards, he affirms: 'All cognition and knowledge must be built up on principles which are self-evident. Each person possessing common sense is a competent judge of such principles when he conceives them distinctly. Consequently arguments often conclude with an appeal to common sense' (ibid., p. 178). This appeal is also made for the sake of strengthening good faith in a hesitant adversary when he does not wish to yield to evidence. We use common sense to shame him, as it were, in his obstinacy, if he goes on resisting when everyone else has ceded to the clarity of obvious truth. In other words, this is an argument from shame. Considered like this, common sense is not even an authority. It is not used as an argument intended to convince the understanding, but as a penalty imposed upon human repugnance to profess the truth. Later on, we shall consider common sense under the aspect of authority. Here it is sufficient to note that making common sense consist in a judgment given by human beings on any argument whatsoever is a misapplication of language. In philosophical terms common sense can only be the judgment rendered by all, not by a great part of mankind, about the first principles and their immediate consequences. Other parts of human knowledge which are remote consequences of the first principles are altogether foreign to common sense. And what a disaster it would be if the only certain knowledge we had were solely of those things that everyone knows and knows with certainty!

(97) The understanding's direct intuition of truth is a spiritual sense (cf. vol. 2, 553 ss.). Hence the word sense is not used correctly in the expression common sense which refers only to truths seen directly or almost directly by the spirit. The general use of the expression, common sense, confirms our teaching on the sense which we admit in the spirit.

(98) Cf. especially vol. 2, 469 ss. and 547 ss. - St. Thomas notes explicitly: 'Every act of the understanding is unknown to itself', and affirms that no act of our understanding can be known without another act, an act of reflection upon the prior act of knowledge: Alius est actus quo intellectus intelligit lapidem, et alius est actus quo intelligit se intelligere lapidem [There is one act by which the intellect knows a stone, and another act by which it understands that it understands the stone] (cf. S.T., I, q. 87, art. 3).

(99) Kant, for example, after having denied the objective force of the principle of cause, uses it unbeknown to himself to establish the forms of the human spirit, as we have seen above.

(100) The solid tradition of antiquity has always taught that it is impossible for human beings to think that the first principles of reasoning are false. Ea quae naturaliter rationi sunt insita, verissima esse constat, in tantum ut nec ea esse falsa SIT POSSIBILE COGITARE [It is clear that the things naturally posited in reason are totally true in such a way that IT IS IMPOSSIBLE EVEN TO THINK they are false] (C. Gent., I, q. 7).

(101) This is Lammenais' case.

(102) What I have said presupposes that people have not reached such a disturbed state of reflection that they perjure themselves as a body by denying the first principles of reason. Such degradation of mankind is impossible in the particular, extraordinary conditions in which the human race presently finds itself; Christianity will always save mankind from universal scepticism. We must keep in mind that divine providence has taken mankind into its care, and in this sense it is true that the truth is always found in mankind as a whole. On the other hand, long, dispassionate meditation on the condition of individuals and of people taken as a whole will show that of themselves, without supernatural assistance, they are far more desolate and unhappy than is normally believed because we see humanity sustained by God in a most wonderful manner. For myself, long meditation has convinced me that humanity without revelation is devoid of sufficient moral force to preserve it from total lapse into the most abject idolatry. Humanity is subject to such mental debility that it finds scepticism impossible for one reason alone: the doctrine of scepticism is proper to a philosophical faction, and itself requires some use of reason. Humanity would not have time to surrender itself entirely to scepticism before giving in to self-annihilation and extinction at a level more wretched than that of brutes.