Chapter 27

The cosmological law of motion

1507. In Fichte's sensism (his idealism is nothing more than sensism) the spirit posits itself together with the act with which it posits the world. At one and the same time, the spirit affirms MYSELF and NOT-MYSELF as co-relative and contrary elements, which limit and distinguish one another. According to me, the spirit is not constituted in this way, but works through the following acts:

1. It intuits the object, being in general, without affirming it, without affirming itself, without having any consciousness of itself or its act; it lives and is in being;

2. Contemporaneously, the spirit perceives a fundamental feeling and has, as a consequence, a fundamental perception which is apprehension without express affirmation. However, it neither perceives itself as perceiving, nor has consciousness of itself. Nevertheless it knows its own feeling, the term of its feeling and the principle of feeling without any act of the spirit dividing this principle from the term in which it lies.

Consciousness, and MYSELF, come much later, as I have explained.

The term of the fundamental feeling is not, therefore, perceived in the enunciation of a NOT-MYSELF, which is a relationship with and denial of MYSELF. It is perceived simply as something extended, without any comparison with MYSELF, which as yet is not even revealed. MYSELF, as we know, is not the sentient but the rational principle which, with conscious reflection, perceives the feeling it has acquired, that is, perceived. Nevertheless, there is in the feeling some duality, badly expressed indeed by Fichte with the words MYSELF and NOT-MYSELF. This duality should have been expressed with words signifying the correlative concepts of principle and term.

1508. But the change arising in feeling is the condition of the motion which the rational principle receives for its second acts. Because this change happens naturally through the action of the agents which compose the world, the spirit is said to be subject to this law of dependence on the world for its development (a cosmological law).
This law is reduced, therefore, to what I have already indicated: what is real is the term arousing attention, which is the radical force of subjective knowledge; what is real actuates and concentrates attention.(290) If what is real is removed from the soul, no cognitive act is possible except the soul's first act of intuition, without any subjective attention, without any concentration proper to subjective attention. It can be said, therefore, that in such a state the subject as subject has no actual cognition of its own.

1509. But two things have to be considered in this law:

1. The reason why the rational principle, overcoming its inertia, passes to its second acts: 'What is real, the term of the rational principle, is that which arouses attention and draws it to acts of subjective knowledge.'

2. The reason why these second acts of the rational principle are lively, enduring and satisfying: 'If acts of the rational principle find a real term, they are stable and lively. Otherwise, they are weak and tiring, and soon cease.'

Let us consider both parts of this law.

1510. This law is obvious from experience. The following comments on it will be of some assistance.

1. Not everything real stimulates the rational principle to the same degree of attention nor posits in it an equal quantity of action. Some real things attract attention exclusively to themselves. This attention comes to rest in perception. Other real things initiate reasoning.

1511. 2. Real things which, in addition to perception, initiate reasoning, are our needs. The rational principle instinctively endeavours to satisfy them in every way possible. One of these ways is the power of reasoning. Need, then, is not a simple feeling, but results from many simple feelings grouped together in a certain order. This, properly speaking, explains why motion also evolves in multiple acts.

1512. 3. Again, real things, when connected in virtue of animal laws and instincts, stimulate reasoning and an action which extends beyond perception. As a consequence, granted one image, more and more images are aroused; granted a feeling, other feelings are connected with it, according to the tenor of these laws.

1513. 4. When thought has conceived and proposed an end to the will, a free decision gives rise to thinking about means. Thus activity is extended, although this cognitive activity needs continual help from new, real things in order to follow through with thought and action.

1514. 5. Finally, not everything real which excites lively perception, is sufficient to produce consciousness, that is, to move us to reflect on ourselves. We are brought to this principally by social language and our needs. In fact, in society, names and personal pronouns stimulate reflection to consider person. The need to do this soon arises, as we see in the case of children. When some wrong has been done to a child, he begins to defend his own right and to judge between himself and the companion who has offended him. He begins to reflect on his own person and on the person of others.

6. Finally feelings, granted they last for some time, help to maintain thought in act. This forms the second part of the law which I shall now explain.

1515. No one accustomed to observe human activity will deny this fact.
Here, however, an interesting investigation presents itself.
We have seen 1. that movement is not continuous, but comes about through instantaneous changes from state to state, each of which lasts for a brief period; 2. that certain extrasubjective movements in our fibre precede or correspond to stimulated feelings. However, feeling is one thing; the change from one feeling to another is something else. The latter can be done in an instant; the former must have some duration. Stimulated feeling, therefore, is always a more or less enduring state. But if stimulated feeling is an enduring state and stimulated along with non-lasting changes (movement of fibres), we must conclude that the instantaneous changes present in movement are not feelings and cannot be the full cause of feelings. The fullness of this cause must come from the enduring sentient principle.

1516. In the second place, and as confirmation, we have a non-stimulated feeling which has for its term not movement but what is extended, that is, several extended things which rub against one another.(291)

1517. In the third place, we notice that movements which arise in the extended element are not felt in their individual, instantaneous changes because 1. the change is instantaneous and feeling does not last longer than its term. Feeling, therefore, would be of zero duration if it had these changes as its terms. Consequently, it would not be feeling. 2. If this were how things happened, we would never have a constant feeling, but in every feeling would have to feel incessant change. Every feeling would be a complex of many successive feelings between which there would be intervals without feeling. This is totally opposed to what we know from experience. Nor could we object that such multiplicity and intervals could be present in every feeling without our adverting to them. If this were the case, we should notice far more easily the enduring intervals between one feeling and another than the non-lasting feelings.

All the feelings taken together would last less than a single interval, just as zero duration is less than any minimum duration, however small. Moreover, we do not advert to certain things which happen in us because we are occupied and distracted by other sensible things which attract and hold our rational attention. In our present case, we should be able to advert to the cessation of feeling that should last. Indeed, such feeling would be more apt to draw and hold our attention than feelings with zero duration. But we still have to establish that 'everything which we feel, and all passages from one feeling to another, are per se capable of being adverted to', and that lack of advertence is, for the reason given, only accidental. Finally, non-advertence to what is present is one thing; advertence to what is not present is another. The former may occur because we are subject to distraction, but this is obviously inapplicable to the latter. Advertence to the duration of our feelings is inexplicable if there is no duration. Indeed, we must say: 'We advert to this; everyone adverts to this: therefore, it is.' If it were not, we could not advert to it.

1518. We have to conclude, therefore, with the following beautiful and important proposition which throws great light on the nature of animal feeling: 'Sensations and other stimulated feelings do not have as their term movements of our fibre, that is, any change of place or state in the parts which make up the extended felt element. Their term is the extended felt element itself. The movement of the parts of the extended felt element, together with their reciprocal pressure and irritation, ensures that the extended element is felt in another way, and with greater liveliness.'(292)

1519. One thing, then, proves another. The fact of duration of stimulated feeling proves the impossibility of continuous movement as its term. Continuous movement, which has no lasting state or place, cannot be the term of feeling. We have to say, therefore, that the changes taking place in the movement of the fibres can (in their own way) excite feeling, but cannot of themselves alone be its term. We also have to say that stimulated feeling lasts, although the stimulus (the change in the fibre) which serves to excite, does not.

If the Creator had not arranged for sensations to have some prolonged duration, they would not have served their purpose, nor would the observations and experiments of natural scientists be possible.

1520. We now use the second part of the laws of motion to explain certain facts. There is no doubt that the rational principle, once drawn to its second acts, acquires free movement, that is, movement which can be directed according to the ends proposed by the will. Nevertheless, if this rational movement (moved originally by a real term, by a need, etc.) does not find a real term as its aim, it cannot form long-lasting, easy and lively acts.

1521. The facts explained by this law are principally the following. It explains

I. Why the mind cannot think subjectively without sensations or phantasms.(293)

1522. II. Why incorporeal substances cannot easily be conceived in their purity if nothing corporeal is mixed with them. The reason is this. In the order of nature, we perceive only our soul as an incorporeal substance and moreover perceive it through feeling which is in our soul as in its principle. But our very own feeling has as its term a purely extended element, or a corporeal extended element. It is true that the intuiting principle is the first act of feeling itself, but for this very reason it has no consciousness; although it is something real, it is not a real term (and only a real-term attracts attention). In the natural order, we have no other real term except our body. The attention of the rational principle is, therefore, drawn by corporeal feeling. Only later, by means of free reflection, does it consider the intuiting principle which it cannot know through any lively, concentrated conception because it does not find anything real in the intuiting principle to serve as a stimulating term. Because we have in us no perception of any incorporeal substance except our own, which is not suitable as a term for stimulating our attention except in so far as it is united with our body, we are inclined to conceive and imagine other substances as possessing the same nature as the term of our substance, that is, corporeal nature.

1523. III. Why abstractions need natural or artificial signs if we are to think them and reason about them.

1524. IV. Why spiritual substances and abstracts are always indicated in more ancient languages by words drawn from corporeal sources. Thus anima, animus (from (*) ), spiritus (*) are all words first signifying wind or corporeal air, and then taken to mean incorporeal substance. Again, abstract moral good did not have a word of its own but was called sometimes virtue, which means power,(294) sometimes honestas which means beauty, sometimes mos, which means custom. The word obligatio is also taken from a sensible bond and taken to mean 'force of law'.

1525. The same can be said about every spiritual substance and abstract except for the verb to be which was never expressed metaphorically. This fact alone is already an obvious witness furnished by common sense in favour of the philosophical system I have proposed. It shows that being cannot be confused with other abstractions because it is the immediate object always present to the mind.(295)

1526. V. Why languages are tools suitable for synthetical and analytical thought. Their synthetical quality is seen through the imposition of words in cases where a name is used to bind together a group of ideas or memories. When thought, which is bound through an ontological law to unity, has to retain several concepts or thoughts, it attempts to group them. One of the ways it uses to achieve this is to attach concepts to a single word. This is something real that serves to hold our attention and memory alert and alive - otherwise attention and memory would vanish; they would not exist without the presence of some real bond amid the plurality of things to join and unite these things. This explains our instinct for marking places where something has happened. We want to impress the matter in our memory through a word reminding us of it. The happening and the place have no natural, essential connection, and we find a single mark which commemorates both. Our rational instinct aims not only at passing on those memories to future generations, but of preserving their presence here and now.

This was very obvious amongst the first human beings whose language was still impoverished and who, as a result, had greater need to impose such names. Thus Agar called a well the 'well of the seer' because the angel of the Lord had appeared there.(296) In the same way, Abraham called the mountain of sacrifice 'the Lord sees';(297) Jacob called the place where he had the vision of the ladder Bethel, that is, 'house of God'(298) and gave the name Mahanaim to a place where he had experienced another vision of angels. The name was, as it were, a spontaneous expression of his feeling, shown by the instinctive way in which he pronounced it: 'These are the encampments of God'; mahanaim means 'encampment'.(299) The wells dug by the patriarchs were named according to the events occasioning the opening of the wells and according to the feeling which animated the patriarchs at that moment.(300) The fact of the imposition of names on places connected with very important events is very frequent throughout the whole of Genesis.

The same rational instinct explains why people were moved to name stars in memory of heroes or events whose memory (when they ceased to be or act as something real) they wished to recall after their passing. By using the stars in this way, memory was bound to two real things: 1. to a star which was always vividly and visibly present above and could not be ruined by time, as earthly monuments were; 2. to a name, which was heard, and consigned to the society formed by succeeding generations. As Giuseppe Bianchi wrote so wisely:

1527. Every word we utter is, practically speaking, a synthesis; it is very rare for a word to stand for a single concept. We see this in synonyms which converge on a principal concept, but arouse so many others that it is very difficult, except for acute observers such as Tommaseo, to be mindful of them all. Nevertheless, people in general feel this effect and are unanimous in noticing the lack of propriety in the use of words, although they may not be able to express what is lacking and, in endeavouring to describe it, may sometimes err, just as they may not always write it correctly. Words, therefore, serve amongst other things to give unity to a certain plurality of concepts. This plurality is not something real; it needs a real sign if it is to be retained and designated.

1528. Everything which is not a real entity acting upon us needs real signs if we are to maintain and concentrate our attention upon it. Entities of this kind of real being are a) incorporeal substances, b) abstracts, c) multiples, d) real things which belong to the past (such as historical facts which no longer act upon us), e) real things which are absent and which, in the same way, do not act upon us, and so on.

1529. Proof of what we have said about real but absent things is found in our desire to possess portraits and souvenirs, which remind us vividly of beloved persons or things which cannot be continually present to us.

1530. Incorporeal substances can also be considered as absent in so far as they do not act immediately upon us as real things do. Hence our propensity and need for images and symbols which represent these substances for our veneration. This explains all external worship. Iconoclasts, therefore, acted contrary to the laws of human nature, despite the subtlety of their vain arguments.

1531. As every word is a synthesis, so every proposition and every discourse is an analysis. From what has been said (that is, plurality is not something real), we can see that for analysis and especially abstraction our thought needs signs and in particular words, which are the most suitable and natural signs. Analysis simply divides what is one into what is many. By the very fact of leading us to plurality, analysis needs signs to bind our attention to concentrate on the individual parts and, at the same time, embrace them without forgetting that they are parts of a single whole. Language which is, at one and the same time, a synthetical and analytical tool is of great assistance here.

1532. As a result of the discovery of language, therefore;

1. We satisfy a need proper to thought. We discover language not only to communicate our thoughts to others, but to determine, direct, retain and concentrate our own thought.

2. We satisfy also the need to communicate our thought to our fellows by furnishing them with the same easy means of thinking, that is, of directing and concentrating their own attention. In other words, we use the same means to help them as to help ourselves.

Here we have to admire the wisdom of the Creator who has not left this discovery of language to free, thought-out activity on the part of the human mind. He has put in us an instinct for language, as we shall show when we speak of the kind of psychological laws of thought which correspond to cosmological laws. Moreover, the Creator himself positively communicated the first elements of language to mankind.

1533. VI. The law also explains the laws of memory which provide certain facts that cannot be easily explained:

1. The first difficulty lies in explaining how thoughts are preserved in us without our thinking of them. - Does this happen simply because we no longer pay attention to them, just as we do not see a picture unless we turn to look at it, although it is always present? This does not explain the fact fully. If cognitions dormant within us could be explained solely by our lack of advertence to them, we could remember them whenever we wanted, just as we can look at a picture whenever we like. But we cannot remember many things which we have forgotten, or we remember them only with difficulty. We have to say rather that in this case attention is not activated and held by anything real, that is, by an image or other feeling.

Consequently, our attention does not know where to turn, where to fix itself, in order to find the information or cognition which it is searching for in the soul. When images and feelings, to which the desired information or cognition is bound, cease to exist, the information is immersed in uniform being in general where it remains hidden (the ancients called this 'potential' or 'virtual knowing'). It is not lost forever though, but emerges every time the force of attention succeeds in grasping an image or real feeling to which the information is joined in the instinct of attention itself. The information clothes itself, as it were, with this real thing or, more properly speaking, is indicated by it. The cognitions which are totally lost and of which there is no memory can be called unmarked cognitions. Consequently, they are not distinct in ideal being.

1534. 2. The second difficulty relative to facts about memory is that some cognition or information presents itself to the memory irrespective of or even against our will, and thus sometimes fuels what we call distractions, temptations, and so on. The explanation is the same as before: granted the principle that information and cognitions in us call and hold our attention whenever they are marked, that is, connected with something real such as images, feelings, external bodies, etc., and granted, on the other hand, that the real things to which they are connected present themselves to us irrespective or even against our will - for example, things which depend on the movement of animality and the animal potencies - it is clear that a great deal of obliterated information must return of its own accord to thought and attract our cogitative attention according to the laws of instinct and of habits. Sometimes this information even forces itself upon us when it has greater power to attract and hold our attention than our will has to keep it at bay. Daily experience shows the power and independence of our imagination and animal feelings. This is a great humiliation for us, whose dwelling place is the rational principle. This principle, which is ourselves, is often so unmanned that despite every reason urging it to precede and command, it follows instead like an enchained slave and obeys willy-nilly.

1535. 3. The third question is this: why is some information recalled easily and other information with difficulty? We have seen that the presence of real feelings, which characterise information, does not depend totally upon us. This will help us to overcome our present difficulty also. Our animal movements and feelings are neither entirely submissive to nor entirely exempt from the influence of the rational principle, which can to a great extent act upon our animal feelings, although not as much as it likes. Sometimes the rational principle has no difficulty in influencing the feelings it has; sometimes this is difficult and sometimes totally impossible.

1536. We could then ask about the law which increases or diminishes this ease or difficulty of action. If we restrict ourselves to what concerns memory alone, I say: 1. Anyone who thinks has always before him some real things (by 'real things' I mean images and feelings). 2. Real, present things are connected more or less, with real, absent things. 3. The bond is either a sign, or even an organic bond. Thus one sensible movement is the continuation or direct effect of other movements, or a bond which receives its relationship with feeling through instinct and habit, and so on. But if the rational principle is to be capable of arousing and reducing to act the feelings it seeks, these feelings must have 1. some connection with those actually present to the rational principle, 2. some more or less suitable connection, stimulating spontaneous passage, and enabling the rational principle to succeed more or less easily in restoring to their pristine state the animal movements and connected feelings which it searches for as signs of the information it needs to remember.

Notes

(290) This law, therefore, possesses a negative element which states: 'The rational principle is not moved to its second acts without some stimulus from what is real'. In this negative aspect, it is a psychological law corresponding to the ontological laws. It has also a positive element which states: 'What is real arouses attention, maintains it in act and focuses it.' In this respect, it is a cosmological law of the human spirit because it expresses the activity of the spirit corresponding to the real term, the world.

(291) AMS, 318-322.

(292) It may be objected that our argument runs as follows: 'The extrasubjective body is extended because the subjective term of feeling is extended (NE, vol. 2, 846-870). Why not argue in the same way, that because stimulated feeling is lasting, movement is continuous and hence lasting?' The two cases cannot in fact be compared. The second contains an absurdity not present in the first. Again, in the first argument we know the term of feeling and we argue from it to its proximate cause, that is, from the extension of the term to the extension of the proximate cause (although the remote cause, the corporeal principle, may be or rather must be simple). In the second argument, we argue from the duration of feeling to the duration of its term. Granted, therefore, that its term must endure, feeling cannot consist in instantaneous changes which have zero duration.

(293) St. Thomas acknowledged this law to such an extent that although he attributes a certain fullness of infused knowledge to the first human being, he nevertheless teaches that the first man needed phantasms in order to ponder .

(294) Cf. Storia comparativa de' sistemi morali , c. 5, art. 7.

(295) Cf. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain , bk 3, c. 1, §5.

(296) Gen 16: 14. - Agar also called 'the seer' the angel who had appeared to her, or rather God represented by the angel. She named him from his action , or manifestation.

(297) Gen 22: 14.

(298) Gen 28: 19.

(299) Gen 32: 1.

(300) Gen 26.

(301) Istoria Universale , Introd., c. 3.