Moral System
93. This brief exposition will be divided into three sections: 1. an exposition of the system which I have made my own; 2. an exposition of the most noted systems, with a comparison between them and the system already explained; 3. some considerations on the natural relationships between morals and religion, and on the way in which religion brings morals to its fulfilment.
Section One
THE PRINCIPLE AND ESSENCE OF MORALITY
Section 1 - I.
The faculty of knowledge is partly necessitated and partly free
94. The moral system that I have proposed requires first of all the existence in the human being of a faculty of judgment which can be exercised freely.(75) Interior observation shows that such a faculty does indeed exist. Not all our acts of judgment are necessary, nor are they all determined by the irresistible light of truth. We often judge interiorly in a way contrary to the truth we do indeed see. The force of our free decision moves us in this direction by applying unjust, domineering pressure in favour of this judgment and contrary to the truth.
Thus we fall into error, a phenomenon otherwise inexplicable in a reasonable nature. Our error is the evil fruit of our will, not of our intellect.
95. Nevertheless, our free judgments do not impede the presence of other, necessary judgments. Not all human judgments are chosen by free decision; many are formed by our intelligent nature before free decision can operate. As intelligent beings, we apprehend things before our will can influence and act on our persuasion precisely because it is necessary for us to know before we can go on to want or reject what we have come to know. When we apprehend things, which are then loved or not loved, desired or abhorred by the will which judges them good or unsavoury, we perform an intellectual operation that precedes all voluntary and free judgments. There are, therefore, two ways of knowing in human beings: free knowledge and necessary knowledge.
96. Necessary knowledge precedes free knowledge; free knowledge is always produced by a judgment made about that which is necessarily known beforehand.
97. In forming a judgment, we can make decisions by considering under various aspects the things we know. For the moment, let us confine our attention to those judgments we make about the worth or degrees of goodness of what we know. We can judge that something known by us has a certain value or determined goodness only if, in contemplating the concept we have formed of that object, we find in it that worth or goodness which we attribute to it. But the concept or apprehension of this object appertains to our necessary way of knowing things, not to our free knowledge. As we said, our first apprehension of objects is not subject to the power of the will, but acts in us spontaneously, in virtue of the very laws that govern our understanding.
If therefore we cannot but discover in the apprehension of an object the degrees of goodness which we attribute to it, it must be the case that in our apprehension of the object, which is the first operation of our spirit, we already apprehend also all the goodness and all the worth that we then freely attribute to it. But precisely because this second operation of our spirit is free, and not necessary, it is able not only to conform to, but also dissent from, or stand contrary to the first operation, that is, to the apprehension. In this case, we attribute to objects degrees of goodness that are not present in the concepts we have of them, or we deny them the degrees of goodness that are contained in that concept.
This is the origin of truth and falsity in our judgment. Considered relatively to the free will that produces the judgment, this is also the origin of moral good or malice in that judgment. If our faculty of free judgment is upright, it will reaffirm what has been seen by the faculty of necessary apprehension; it will acknowledge the degree of goodness which it has apprehended in the objects, without making any effort to disturb or alter it.
98. If, on the other hand, our faculty of free judgment is distorted if , for example, it is misled and confused by passion we begin to lie to ourselves. Although we behold objects faithfully depicted before the mind on the canvas of the soul(76) as they actually are (this is the work of the faculty of apprehension), we do not want to acknowledge them in their legitimate, natural colours. It is as though we had something wrong with our eyes, and saw things mixed up and wrongly coloured. This consideration leads to an important truth: that is, there is always a foundation of truth in us, although sometimes error and perverted judgment prevail. We then see what we do not see, and feel what we do not feel. Our mind is lost in an inextricable labyrinth of sophisms, while our heart reproves our every step, telling us that we bear the manifest truth sculpted as it were within. Our eyes, constrained forever to see truth, can only avoid it if we constantly try to tear them away from it.
99. It must be granted therefore that we are not free to see or not see the truth presented to us by our faculty of apprehension which receives and holds within itself the objects offered to it; at the same time, it must also be granted that we are then free to acknowledge these objects, their dignity and their degree of excellence without altering or counterfeiting them. This is the work of the faculty which enables us to judge their worth, and it is this faculty which is subject to the violence of our passions. The eye of this faculty can be distorted, obscured and darkened by the murk diffused by the passions. But the simple faculty of direct, primitive knowledge preserves in us a profound cognition of truth in the midst of a thousand errors because it receives objects in itself as they are and as they act in the spirit. It is the faculty of reflective, subsequent knowledge which makes us meander through the ways of sophistry, error and illusion. inducing us to obstinately deny to ourselves what we actually see, hear and touch.
100. Once and for all, therefore, we have to distinguish knowledge from acknowledgement. When human beings perceive an object, they immediately know it for what it is; this is the act of simple knowledge. But when we turn our gaze to the object we have perceived and say to ourselves, `Yes, it is such, it does have this value, we acknowledge it and reaffirm it to ourselves; we reaffirm by means of an active, willed act what we already know by means of a necessary, passive act. This is our act of reflective cognition.
101. One of the principal distinctions between these two acts can be described as follows. The first, proper act of our faculty of knowledge consists simply in perceiving. More generally speaking we always apprehend(77) an object whole and entire. We take nothing from it, and indeed distinguish nothing within it. For us, it is one and simple; we notice it as it is. But when we come to the second act, we have the power to acknowledge the object wholly or in part. We can judge every individual quality of the object, and from a single point of view. In a word, with our first faculty we see the object in a unique, determinate mode; with the second we see it in different modes, either as a whole or in any one of its least elements, its most abstract qualities and its most distant relationships.
102. Moreover, with the first act of necessary knowledge we acquire the concepts of things and contemplate their essences.(78) We cannot err about these essences which as anticipations precede all the partial judgments that we form about things. Let us take as an example Carneades famous argument against the existence of justice.
This famous philosopher, the founder of the third Academy, certainly possessed the idea of justice, and would have been able to point to it in himself, describe it correctly and re-affirm it if he had succeeded in maintaining his reflection undisturbed. But he added an arbitrary quality to justice when he called it stupid. This abitrary affirmation, this calumny, destroyed justice. But Carneades was at war with himself. After having affirmed justice, he had to confess that he felt or knew it. If not, he could not even have spoken about it. In effect, he denied knowing justice by means of a judgment which depended upon the way in which he directed his reflections and his will.(79)
Notes
(75) Cf. PE.
(76) This metaphor is not out of place. We use it as a way of indicating the intellectual adherence of objects to the soul, nothing more.
(77) Apprehension is more general than perception. The latter requires that the object be a real being which exercises its action by making us feel some degree of its power which becomes the basis of perception itself. Apprehension on the other hand is carried out by the understanding apart from this action. It is sufficient that in some way or other we acquire the concept of a being even if this being does not really act upon us.
(78) The word essence should be taken in the sense attributed to it in OT 646, where it has been defined as `that which is contained in the idea of the thing'.
(79) `When he (Carneades) divided justice into two parts, one of which he called civil justice and the other natural justice, he destroyed both. According to him, civil wisdom exists, but is not justice; natural justice also exists, but is not wisdom' (Lactantius, bk. 5, c. 16). — Carneades possessed the notion of justice, but could deduce it only from utility. This was a fairly common opinion in weak, pagan philosophy because it seemed to be the only way of avoiding the description `stupid'. False judgments of this kind clearly indicate outrageous contradictions whose effect was to lead discouraged minds into scepticism. Lactantius is quite clear about this (c. 17): `Carneades realised what the nature of justice was and did not have to look far to see that it was not stupidity. I think I know where he made his mistake, however. He did not really think that just persons were stupid; he knew they were not, but did not understand why they were not. He wanted to show that the truth was hidden in order to defend what he asserted in his teaching, the height of which was to maintain that nothing can be perceived.'