Chapter 1

The First Moral Law.

13. If we observe our acts of knowledge we see that the intellect, in contradistinction to feeling, perceives objectively, that is, focuses its attention on an object different from itself. In its very act of understanding, the intelligent spirit posits something different from itself, abandoning itself in order to concentrate on what is present to it. Indeed it is a condition of intellectual activity that the term of the operation is perceived as different from the one who perceives, or better, excludes the perceiver. The opposition between the person who perceives and what he perceives is such that one cannot simultaneously be the other, nor both be perceived by the same act. Hence in the very act of perception, the one who perceives is not at the same time what is perceived.
This difference or opposition that observation reveals between the perceiver, as perceiver, and what is perceived, as perceived, is real, not imaginary (1). There is a difference between being as perceived and the subject who perceives. We must therefore consider being in itself and in so far as it is employed by the intelligent subject who has the notion of it.

14. Although the perceiving subject differs from the perceived object by the very nature of intellective perception, there is a certain bond, in which understanding consists, between the perceiver and what is perceived. This bond is so intimate that a single individual is formed from the two principles without either absorbing the other. Thus we see that the light of reason (being) is united with the human subject and comes to form part of human nature in such a way that without it humanity would no longer exist (2).
Because the bond is so intimate, the twofold nature (so to speak) of the human subject, essentially intelligent and therefore essentially in possession of a universal object of his understanding, has often been overlooked. This oversight, which confuses the object essential to the intelligent subject with the subject itself, has caused many errors. What belongs only to the object is attributed to the subject, and viceversa what belongs to the object is attributed to the subject. This mistake has given rise to two erroneous systems of ethics, to which, it seems to me, all errors in moral teaching can ultimately be reduced.

15. The first erroneous system attributes to the subject what belongs to the object. I have indicated how the object (which, for me, is the supreme moral law) is endowed with divine characteristics such as immutability, eternity, universality, necessity. All these characteristics are mistakenly attributed to the human subject, who was thus divinised. Those who uphold this system speak enthusiastically of what is divine in the human being, and make the human creature a law unto himself. Kant named the system autonomy, that is, 'law unto oneself' (3).

16. The second erroneous system goes to the other extreme, attributing to the object, that is, to the moral law, what belongs to the subject. The human being is changeable, temporal, limited, contingent, and every effort is made to ascribe these characteristics to the moral law. Those who uphold this system would have us believe that the law is subject to continual change, just as climates, customs, education and races change. Such a system destroys all moral legislation, and has been confidently taught and diffused along with the sensist philosophy which gave it birth. It has always been rejected and opposed not only by the learned but also by the infallible instinct of christian peoples which enables them to reject every harmful teaching despite its illusory appeal and their own lack of sophistication.

There was a time, it seems, when all philosophy was dominated by these two excessive systems. Kant posited no new system when he spoke of heteronomy, that is, law received from outside ourselves, in opposition to his own system of autonomy. He was simply pointing to the system which maintains that even moral notions are generated in us by the use of our external senses.

17. Among moral systems, therefore, that make the moral law originate from a principle outside or different from us, we must carefully distinguish between that which makes morality arise from sensations, and that which posits in the human being a principle different from the human being but intimately united with him by a law of nature. Morality dependent on sensations is false, fruitless and destructive of internal morality. Morality dependent upon an object is true, and begins by observing the internal construction of our intellectual and moral nature from which it deduces the whole series of other moral laws connected with, and indicating, the marvellous, supreme principle which, shining in the soul, naturally enjoys an evident eternal stability and consistency. Against this principle no force, created or uncreated, can prevail; every finite intelligence must obey it; divinity itself, as Bossuet says, obeys it.

18. Careful consideration of the two systems we are examining shows their defective observation. Because both overlook and forget an element of human nature, their observation is necessarily imperfect. The first system, which divinises the human being, does not give enough attention to the nature of the spirit. As we have seen, the spirit is merely passive elative to the moral law; it receives the law, it does not form it. It is a subject who cannot refuse the law, not a lawgiver imposing the law (4). On the other hand the second system completely loses sight of the striking characteristics of the moral law which are not deduced by reasoning but observed directly as facts. That is why Locke and others who uphold this system deny the irresistible force of the law. But the law binds both the person who fulfils it and the person who violates it; with invincible authority, it is unchangingly present to all human beings.

19. Between these two systems, however, which fail because of deficient observation, there is a third, founded on complete, unbiased observation. This system does not confine itself arbitrarily to deducing everything from the subject, nor does it so concentrate on the excellence of the law that it forgets the properties of the spirit which perceives the law. It considers both subject and object and the wonderful way in which, because their properties remain separate and distinct, they form one thing without losing their identity. It affirms that, just as all obligatory force comes from the object, so feeling and awareness of feeling comes from the subject.

Notes

(1) Cf. Certainty, 1194-1208

(2) Those who claim that human beings are born without any notion deprive them in reality of intelligence. They then attempt to explain that animals become human beings by means of development and education, and that this immense leap is due to acquired sensations. But without an intellective seed from which to develop, there can be no development. These thinkers deny any such seed in human beings and are forced to posit something quite incomprehensible, such as an intellect created at some totally indeterminable point of life.

(3) Even St. Paul says that the Gentiles, deprived of written law, "are a law for themselves" (Rom 2. 14), meaning the natural law. The expression has its truth in the union by which the light of reason and the human being are one indivisible thing, and cannot be understood otherwise. It excludes the system we oppose which says that the subject (the human being) and the object (being) do not remain individuals in the union but become indistinguishably one.

(4) Neque enim creatura legem tribuit, sed accipit, et servat acceptam. Ambrose, Hexam. 1.