Chapter 19

The first psychological law: rational inertia

1447. The last proposition means that if the rational principle remains at rest, the only object moving it to action is what is ideal. Its only act is the intuitive act, which unites it to its term.

1448. In fact investigation of the subjective laws governing the action of the rational principle involves two questions:

First question : According to which laws is the principle moved to its second acts?

Second question : Granted that the principle is moved, which laws govern its movement?

1449. The answer to the first question is that the rational principle is moved to a second act only when given a new object, in addition to an ideal ens; it must be given something real.
A real ens however, as term of thought, can be finite or infinite, complete or incomplete. If it is infinite and complete, its essence is seen realised in what is ideal. In this case, real ens is per se object, and the infinite real ens, if communicated to the rational principle, would arouse in it truly ontological activity. This would allow us to investigate the nature of the ontological-subjective laws of the rational principle. Maximum, but extremely simply activity would be aroused in the rational principle and totally reduced to an act which would be at rest and find satisfaction in its term alone. With the completion of this act, the only other movement possible would be the passage from what is ideal to what is real, a pleasurable act caused by seeing that what is real completes all that is ideal, and what is ideal expresses and, as it were, illuminates all that is real. The rational principle could be moved to this incessant passage of attention and contemplation by what it would find to be identical and distinct in the ideal and the real.(241)

1450. But leaving aside the communication of infinite real ens, every communication of what is finitely real can arouse only a cosmological activity and be the source of solely cosmological, not ontological laws. Once this activity has been aroused, the way that the rational principle acts certainly originates from ideal ens and is thus ontological. Subjective-ontological laws are now possible, although the only act relative to purely ideal or infinite-real ens is that which terminates and rests in it.

1451. This need for new objects if the rational principle is to perform new acts I call the psychological law of inertia . According to this law the principle cannot move itself from rest to another act unless the object itself draws it and permits it to move. Once in motion, it can do different things in conformity with the other law of spontaneity.(242)

Notes

(241) Teodicea , 694-698. The objection that God, although not coming out of himself, performs distinct things, is not valid. The truth is that the Creator touches the creature with his creating act in so far as the creature is the term of creation. I am speaking about the hypothesis that the soul intuits God to the exclusion of all union and contact with creatures.

(242) In the Anthropology I discussed the two laws of inertia and spontaneity which govern an animal. The same laws can be seen in a rational being, to whom freedom is added.