Chapter 24

Corollary on the classification of human cognitions

1498. I must now deal with an important corollary resulting from what has been said.
The two activities of the rational principle, one aroused solely by the object and the other proper to the subject, result in two kinds of human cognition, objective and subjective .
Objective cognition, governed totally by the ontological laws I have described, corresponds to the first activity aroused by the object in the rational principle. Subjective cognition, originated by predication and governed by psychological laws, corresponds to the second activity proper to the subject.

1499. The term of the first kind of activity is the intuited object (that which is possible). An example is the proposition, 'Knowledge is about necessary things'.(288)
The term of the second kind is persuasion , or a certain state of the spirit relative to the object, by which the spirit, the subject, is united to the object in another way, and thus increases its cognition. The proposition 'Knowledge is about necessary things' cannot be included in it because subjective cognition can refer to contingent things. Anything real can be contingent; indeed every contingent thing is real, although not every real thing is contingent.

1500. The distinction is sufficient to destroy idealistic pantheism which, beginning from the false principle 'All knowledge is objective', induces that all knowledge concerns necessary things which in turn are reduced to God. It lays down that God is the universal, direct object of knowledge and, because every entity is an object of knowledge, soon concludes that every entity is God. The error in this reasoning lies in the principle. As I said, the statement that all knowledge is objective is false, just as it is false to say that all knowledge is 'about necessary things'. There is a mode of knowledge relative to contingent things, that is, a subjective knowledge obtained by predication.

1501. This distinction between knowledge through intuition and knowledge through affirmation gives a solid basis for philosophical method . It excludes the error of those who claim that 1. all human knowledge is reduced to facts , 2. human beings do not know the reasons for things, and consequently 3. only positive, not speculative sciences have real value.

The word 'facts' can of course be understood in many ways. In its most obvious sense, it means the term of knowledge acquired through affirmation . But this is not the only knowledge possessed by human beings. On the contrary, before we know through affirmation, we know through intuition, that is, through the ideal object. We can therefore refer the cognitions acquired by our affirmations (known facts) to cognitions acquired through intuition , and find the relationships between them. These relationships contain the reasons for the facts , and these reasons become a third genus of cognitions. Not even Scottish philosophy is immune from this error.(289)

If however we give a very extensive but inaccurate sense to the word 'fact', we must distinguish between 1. real facts, 2. ideal facts, and 3. the relationships between these two, that is, the reasons explaining real facts. Only in this inaccurate sense can we say that all human cognitions are reduced to having facts as their matter.

Notes

(288) The ancient dictum, 'All knowledge is through form' (St. Thomas, S.T. , I, q.12, art. 1, ad 2), pertains also to this knowledge. Consequently 'the infinite, considered through form relative to imperfect matter, is in itself unknown' (ibid .). However I say more generally that every subsistence (except the divine subsistence) is per se unknowable. Hence the idea (objective knowledge) must precede every cognition which predicates (subjective knowledge).

(289) Cf. Stewart, Éléments de Philosophie de l'Esprit humain , vol. 1, c. 1, sect. 2, where he describes Reid's system.