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In the first of these, being as such is distinguished from being as it is grasped by common sense, being as it is studied by, the Natural Sciences, and being as studied by Logic. In the second, being as such, the object of Metaphysics, is studied in itself, the parts played by rational analysis and intuitive perception are distinguished, and the glory of this intuition is majestically hymned. The third considers the Analogy of Being, Essence and Existence, the Trans- cendentals, Being as dynamic, Motion, and Visualisation. On Metaphysical truth and Metaphysical method these chapters are of quite capital importance. Let no one call himself a Maritalnian who has not carefully meditated them. Sketchy as is this analysis of the three chapters on Being as such, the space avail- able does not allow even so much for the final three chapters of the book, devoted to an analysis of four of the First Principles Identity, Sufficient Reason, Finality and Causality. Suffice it to say in conclusion that whether or not M. Maritain ever completes the book proper on Metaphysics, this present assembling of the materials must give a vast impulse to that contemporary. development of Thomism that hetappeal*. for so movingly. \ '^ PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY PURNELL AND SONS, LTD. PAULTON (SOMERSET) AND LONDON CONTENTS PAGE First Lecture INTRODUCTORY ...... i Second Lecture COUNTERFEIT METAPHYSICAL COIN . 17 Third Lecture THE TRUE SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICS . . 43 Fourth Lecture CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT BEING AS SUCH . . 62 Fifth Lecture THE PRINCIPLES OF IDENTITY, SUFFICIENT REASON AND FINALITY .... go Sixth Lecture THE PRINCIPLE OF FINALITY (SECOND ASPECT) 1 1 o Seventh Lecture THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY. CHANCE . 132 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS FIRST LECTURE INTRODUCTORY /. Living Thomism. i. Thomism is not a museum piece. No doubt, like other systems of medieval philosophy, indeed, philo- sophic systems of all ages, it must be studied historically. All the great philosophies whether of the Middle Ages or any other period have that in their substance which to an extent triumphs over time. But Thomism does so more completely than any other since it harmonises and exceeds them all, in a synthesis which transcends all its components. It is relevant to every epoch. It answers modern problems, both theoretical and practical. In face of contemporary aspirations and perplexities, it displays a power to fashion and emanci- pate the mind. We therefore look to Thomism at the present day to save, . in the speculative order, intellectual values, in the practical order, so far as they can be saved by philosophy, human values. In short, we are concerned not with an archaeological but with a living Thomism. It is our duty to grasp the reality and the requirements of such a philosophy. This duty gives rise to a double obligation. We must defend the traditional wisdom and the continuity of the Philosophia Perennis against the prejudices of modern individualism, in so far as it values, seeks and A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS delights in novelty for its own sake, and is interested in a system of thought only in so far as it is a creation, the creation of a novel conception of the world. But equally we must show that this wisdom is eternally young and always inventive, and involves a funda- mental need, inherent in its very being, to grow and renew itself. And so doing we must combat the pre- judices of those who would fix it at a particular stage of its development and fail to understand its essentially progressive nature. II. Metaphysics are of Necessity Traditional and Permanent. 2. We must recall the Thomist view of human teach- ing. We must remember that man is a social animal primarily because he is in need of teaching, and the teacher's art, like the doctor's, co-operates with nature, so that the Principal Agent in the art of instruction is not the teacher imparting knowledge to his pupil and producing it in his mind, but the understand- ing, the intellectual vitality of the pupil who receives, that is to say, assimilates the knowledge actively into his mind and so brings knowledge to birth there. But we must not forget that without the transmission of ideas elaborated by successive generations the in- dividual mind could make little progress in the re- search and discovery of truth. In view of this fact the need of a tradition is evident. Obviously to reject the continuity produced by the common labour of generations and the transmission of a doctrinal deposit above all in the very order of understanding and knowledge is to opt for darkness. But do not the facts give the lie to my thesis, however obvious it may seem? Revolutions of technique and in the natural sciences present us with the spectacle of progress by Substitution, FIRST LECTURE and this, moreover, as a general and seemingly universal phenomenon. The railway has replaced the stage-coach, electric light the oil lamp. Einstein's system has dethroned Newton's, as the Copernican had dethroned the Ptolemaic astronomy. We are strongly tempted to generalise, to believe that this type of progress should be extended to every domain of intellectual activity. Was not medieval philosophy replaced by the Cartesian? Did not Kant oust Descartes, to be ousted in turn by Bergson, and will not Bergson make way for some other philosopher, Whitehead perhaps or Heidegger? And while we still wait for the advent of an antideterminist variety of materialism, a revival of hylozoism is taking shape under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In view of all this we are shocked if we are told of a knowledge which applies to-day the same funda- mental concepts, the same principles as in the days of Sankhara, Aristotle or St. Thomas. 3. I have often answered this objection by pointing out that it is a gross blunder to confuse the art of the philosopher 'with the art of the tailor or milliner. I have shown also that truth cannot be subjected to a chronological test. Nevertheless the question must be examined more thoroughly. We shall then distin- guish two very different types of progress, proper, respectively to wisdom and the science of phenomena. "Mystey" and "Problem." 4. Making use of terminology borrowed from a contemporary French philosopher, M. Gabriel Marcel, 1 though I am employing it in a completely different 1 See Gabriel Marcel, Position et Approches du mysthc ontologiquc (Le Monde Cassd, Paris, Descl6e de Brouwer, 1933). A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS sense, we may say that every scientific question presents a double aspect, the one a Mystery, the other a Problem. It is a mystery and at the same time a problem, a mystery in regard to the thing, the object as it exists outside the mind, a problem in regard to our formulae. An intelligible mystery is not a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, it is the most exact description of reality. Mystery is not the implacable adversary of understanding. This unreal opposition was intro- duced by Descartes and his Cartesian reason, though it is indeed inevitable in an idealist system or an idealist atmosphere. The objectivity of the understanding is itself supremely mysterious and the object of know- ledge is "Mystery" reduced to a state of intelligibility in act and of intellection in act. In the act of understanding the intellect becomes what is other than itself, precisely as such. It introduces into itself an inexhaustible (transobjective) x reality vitally ap- prehended as its object. Its object is reality itself. Like the act of faith the act of understanding does not stop at the formula but attains the object, non terminatur ad enuntiabile, sed ad rem. 1 The " Mystery" is its food, the other which it assimilates. The proper object of understanding is being. And being is a mystery, either because it is too pregnant with intelligibility, too pure for our intellect which is the case with spiritual things, or because its nature presents a more or less impenetrable barrier to understanding, a barrier due to the element of non-being in it, which is the case with becoming, potency and above all matter. The mystery we conclude is a fullness of being with which the intellect enters into a vital union and 1 On this term see my Les Degrds du Savoir, Gh. Ill, p. 176 sqq 2 Sum Theol. II-II, i, 2 ad a. FIRST LECTURE into which it plunges without exhausting it. Could it do so it would be God, ipsum Esse subsistens and the author of being. The Supreme " mystery" is the supernatural mystery which is the object of faith and theology. It is concerned with the Godhead Itself, the interior life of God, to which our intellect cannot rise by its unaided natural powers. But philosophy and science also are concerned with mystery, another mystery, the mystery of nature and the mystery of being. A philosophy unaware of mystery would not be a philosophy. Where then shall we discover the pure type of what I call the "problem"? In a crossword puzzle, or an anagram. At this extreme there is no ontological content. There is an intellectual difficulty with no being behind it. There is a logical difficulty, a tangle of concepts, twisted by a mind which another mind seeks to unravel. When the tangle has been unravelled, the difficulty solved, there is nothing further, nothing more to be known. For the only thing to be discovered was how to disentangle the threads. When Oedipus has discovered the key to the riddle, he can proceed on his way leaving the Sphinx behind him. The "problem" may be described as a notional complex created by our intellect, which at first appears inex- tricable and which must be disentangled. I am speaking of the problem in its pure state. You will soon see that there are other cases in which the "problem" aspect reappears, but no longer isolated, in combination with the "mystery" aspect. 5. In fact every cognitive act, every form of know- ledge presents these two aspects. The mystery and the 5 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS problem are combined. The mystery is present because there is always some degree of being, and its depth and thickness must be penetrated. The problem also because our nature is such that we can pene- trate being only by our conceptual formulae, and the latter of their nature compose a problem to be solved. But according to the particular kind of knowledge one or the other aspect is predominant. The problem aspect naturally predominates where knowledge is least ontological, for example, when it is primarily concerned with mental constructions built up around a sensible datum as in empirical knowledge, and in the sciences of phenomena ; or again when its objects are entities constituted or reconstituted by the intellect, which though certainly based on reality, need not exist outside the mind but may equally well be purely ideal as in mathematics; or yet again when its object is mental constructions of the practical intellect as in craftsmanship and applied science. It is in fact, in this third category that the problem aspect is par- ticularly evident. In mathematics and the sciences of phenomena it is well to the fore and indeed predominates. But the mystery aspect is also very pronounced, especially when a discovery is made or when a science is revolutionised or passes through a crisis. The mystery aspect, as we should expect, pre- dominates where knowledge is most ontological, where it seeks to discover, either intuitively or by analogy, being in itself and the secrets of being; the secrets of being, of knowledge and of love, of purely spiritual realities, of the First Cause (above all of God's interior life). The mystery aspect is predominant in the 6 FIRST LECTURE philosophy of nature and still more in metaphysics. And, most of all in theology. Where the problem aspect prevails one solution follows another: where one ends, the other begins. There is a rectilinear progress of successive mental views or ideal perspectives, of different ways of con- ceptualising the object. And if one solution is in- complete, as is always the case, it is replaced by its successor. It is as when the landscape changes and scene succeeds to scene as the traveller proceeds on his way. Similarly the mind is on the move. Progress of this kind is progress by substitution. On the other hand where the mystery aspect pre- vails the intellect has to penetrate more and more deeply the same object. The mind is stationary turning around a fixed point. Or rather it pierces further and further into the same depth. This is progress in the same place, progress by deepening. Thus the intellect, as its habitus grows more intense, continues, as John of Saint Thomas puts it, to assault its object, the same object, with increasing force and penetration, vehementius etprofundius. Thus we can read and reread the same book, the Bible for example, and every time discover something new and more pro- found. Obviously under the conditions of human life, progress of this kind requires an intellectual tradition, the firm continuity of a system based on principles which do not change. Here knowledge is not exactly constituted by the addition of parts, still less by the substitution of one part for another. It is the whole itself that grows or rather is more deeply penetrated (every spatial meta- phor is inadequate) as an indivisible whole and in all its parts at once. A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS 6. At this point we must distinguish three kinds of intellectual thirst and three corresponding means of quenching them. In the first case, where the problem aspect pre- dominates I thirst to know the answer to my problem. And when I have obtained the answer I am satisfied: that particular thirst is quenched. But I thirst for some- thing else. And so interminably. This is the water of science, useful and bitter. In the second case where the mystery aspect pre- dominates I thirst to know reality, being under one or other of its modes, the ontological mystery. When I know it I drink my fill. But I still thirst and continue to thirst for the same thing, the same reality which at once satisfies and increases my desire. Thus I never cease quenching my thirst from the same spring of water which is ever fresh and yet I always thirst for it. This is the water of created wisdom. To this wisdom the text may be applied, "They who eat me hunger still and they who drink me still thirst." 1 In the third case the vision of God's Word face to face my thirst is again different. I thirst to see God and when I see Him my thirst will be completely quenched. I shall thirst no longer. And this is already in a measure true of the earthly commencement of bliss, the participation in time of eternal life. This is the water of uncreated wisdom of which it is written " Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water springing up unto everlasting life." 2 The climax of spiritual disorder is to confuse the third of these thirsts with the first, by treating the 1 Ecclesiasticus xxxiv. 20. a John iv. 13-14. 8 FIRST LECTURE things of eternal life, the vision of God, as an object of the first thirst that namely which belongs to the first case of which I was just speaking, the category of knowledge in which the problem predominates. For .this is to treat beatitude, not as a mystery, our mystery par excellence, but as a problem or series of problems, like the solution of a puzzle. As a result of this confusion Leibnitz can declare that beatitude is a moving from one pleasure to another, and Lessing that he prefers endless research to the possession of truth which would be monotonous, and Kant considers the boredom which it would seem God must experience in the everlasting contemplation of Himself. But it is also a radical disorder to confuse the second thirst with the first by treating philosophy, metaphysics, wisdom a category of knowledge in which reverence for the mystery of being is the highest factor as an object of the first thirst, pre-eminently a problem to answer, a puzzle to solve. Those who make this mistake attempt to make progress in wisdom by proceeding from puzzle to puzzle, replacing one problem by another, one Weltanschauung by its successor, as though in virtue of an irrefragable law. Progress by substitution is required by the sciences of phenomena, is their law, and the more perfectly they realise their type the more progress they make. But progress of this kind is not the law of wisdom. Its progress is progress by an adhesion of the mind to its object and a union with it increasingly profound, progress as it were by a growing intimacy. And it therefore requires as its indispensable prerequisite a stable body of doctrine and a continuous intellectual tradition. A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS 7. Two considerations may now be advanced which reinforce the proof that a philosophic tradition and a stable continuity are indispensable for wisdom. The first of these is provided by Christian thought and its force is therefore confined to Christians. It concerns the relation between philosophy and theology. Since it is founded on the words of God, indeed upon the Word of God, it is obvious that theology must be permanent. " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away/' The science, rooted in the faith, which develops and explains in terms of conceptual reasoning the meaning of these divine words the science we call theology cannot therefore be substantially changed in the course of time, cannot progress by successive substitutions. It does progress, but of all sciences built up by discursive reasoning, its progress is the most stable and, more perfectly than the progress of any other science, is a progress by entering ever more intimately. Theology, however, makes use of philosophy. Philosophy is the means and the instrument of its development. Philosophy, therefore, must be in its own fashion also permanent. That is why the Christian, we may remark, finds the notion of a permanent philosophic wisdom easier to accept. For superior to philosophy but connected with it he possesses a typical example of a science rooted in mystery. There is, however, a certain risk that we may con- fuse these two kinds of certainty and stability, those proper respectively to theology and philosophy, and ascribe to philosophy and its doctrinal continuity the stability of a higher order peculiar to theology. It is true that even the stability of theology is not 10 FIRST LECTURE absolute, for its continuity is not immutability but progress by penetration and admits therefore, of many discoveries, renewals and unexpected explanations. But even so theology is far more strictly and essentially traditional than philosophy. Its continuity is of another order and imitates more closely the immutability of uncreated Wisdom. 8. The second confirmation is the spectacle of modern man and the modern mind. It thus possesses special weight for us moderns. I have in mind what may be called the peculiar experience of the modern world, all the attempts it has made to alter the nature of wisdom. The experiment has certainly been carried out. After Descartes had denied the scientific value of theology, and Kant the scientific value of meta- physics, we have witnessed human reason gone astray and a captive to empiricism seeking wisdom more anxiously than ever before, yet failing to find it, because it has rejected the sense of mystery and has attempted to subject wisdom to the alien law of progress by substitution. It turns now towards the east, now towards the west. Will wisdom come from one quarter or the other? It does not even possess the criteria by which wisdom could be recognised and is blown about by every chance wind of desire. It is a remarkable fact that Thomas Aquinas did not impress the form of his wisdom on the final phase of medieval culture. From this point of view Thomism was not "a cultural success" on medieval soil. It has been, so to speak, laid up in the heaven of the Church. St. Thomas thus belongs to the Church's great 2fift of prophecy. He assumes the figure, if I may so put it, of a prophetic saint, a prophetic sage. He is a saint ii A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS reserved for the future. His reappearance in our time, as leader of a universal movement of philosophic enquiry, the advent of a period in the development of Thomism unlike any that went before it, assumes when viewed in this light a most striking significance. In the depths of the mind we hear the summons to fashion a universal Christian wisdom at the very moment when the progress of the sciences and of re- flexion enable us to give it its full scope and when the world, everywhere labouring under the same distresses and increasingly united in its culture and the problems with which it is faced, can or could be moulded into conformity with this wisdom. May we say that it still could be moulded or must we say that it could have been moulded if only the clerks, as M. Benda calls them, had but understood and willed accordingly, fashioned by this wisdom to receive from it a reasonable order? ///. Metaphysics is Necessarily Progressive and Inventive. 9. I have spoken of the obligation imposed upon us by the continuity of wisdom. I have now to speak of another also of urgent necessity. We have not only to defend the value and necessity of a philosophic tradition against the prejudices of minds revolutionary on principle. We must also take due account of the constant novelty characteristic of philosophic wisdom, and defend the necessity of renovation and growth inherent in its nature, in this case against the prejudices of minds conservative on principle and hidebound. As we know, it was the task of St. Thomas to renovate the older scholasticism. It is a similar task which Thomists are called upon to perform to-day, a task 12 FIRST LECTURE whose novelty may well be greater than they them- selves realise. In this connection many questions require examination and a complete analysis needs to be undertaken. For this there is no time. It must suffice to point out the fact. But if you have understood what has just been explained you will understand that this work must be accomplished without detriment to the fixity of principles. Nor must it be accomplished by adding heterogeneous parts after the fashion in which those branches of knowledge progress in which the problem aspect, the puzzle, tends to become as important as the mystery aspect. For this reason I dislike the term "Neo-scholasticism" or "Neo-thomism." It involves the risk of pulling us down from the higher plane of wisdom to the lower plane of the problematic sciences and thereby leading us logically to demand for Thomism also a progress by substitution in which the Neo would devour the Thomism. This work must be accomplished by a vital assimila- tion and an immanent progress as it were, by the progressive autogenesis of the same intellectual organism, constantly building up and entering into itself, by a species of transfiguration of which the growth of corporeal organisms is a very imperfect image. Think of a baby and that baby grown to an adult. Its metaphysical personality has not changed, it remains entire. Nor have any heterogeneous parts been en- grafted from without. But everything in that human individual has been transfigured, has become more differentiated, stronger, better proportioned. At every decisive phase of growth the man has been more pro- foundly transfigured while remaining more profoundly himself and realising himself more perfectly. A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS 10. The part played in a progress of this kind by other philosophic systems is considerable. As I have pointed out elsewhere 1 a system with faulty foundations is a system adapted to the vision of one epoch and one epoch alone. For this very reason its less solid armour enables it to throw itself more quickly though only to perish upon the novel aspects of truth appearing above the contemporary horizon. All these systems which lack a sufficient foundation compose a merely potential philosophy, a philosophy in a state of flux, covering contradictory formulas and irreconcilable doctrines and upheld by whatever truth these may contain. If there exists on earth a philosophic system securely based on true principles, and such I believe Thomism to be, it will incorporate with more or less delay due to the intellectual laziness of Thomists and thus progressively realise in itself this potential philosophy which will thereby become to that extent visible and capable of formulation, formed and organically articulated. Thus, in my opinion, Thomism is destined to bear with it, in its own progress, the progress of philosophy. By assimilating whatever truth is contained in these partial systems it will expand its own substance and deduce from it more and more penetrating shafts of light which will reveal the forces concealed in its truths. The novelty which it thus displays, though not seeking it for its own sake, is above all a novel approach to the same shores of being, a new distribution of the same wealth, the pregnant mystery of things. New prospects are being constantly opened up of the same intelligible world, the same incorporeal landscape which seem to transform it before our eyes and make us enter more deeply into the secrets of its beauty. 1 Les Degns du Savoir, Preface. FIRST LECTURE ii. A particular question must be raised at this point, that of vocabulary. The fundamental concepts remain the same, they do not change. But we must reach them by new paths, so far at least as the method of treatment is concerned. The question arises whether the old names are still appropriate in all cases. In this connection we must bear in mind that the fashion in which the ancients formed their philo- sophical vocabulary was admirably spontaneous, supple and living, but also imperfect and almost excessively natural. They relied with a robust confidence upon common sense and upon the language which objects utter by their sensible appearances. For their intuitive intelligence was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently fresh to transcend these media. Thus it was that when they defined living being they thought primarily of that which changes its position, moves of itself. There is, in fact, no better definition. But it requires a prolonged critical examination and elaboration. The terminology of the ancients was apparently I mean in respect of the objects from which the metaphorical signification was derived more material than our own, not at all to the taste of our more refined contem- poraries. In reality that is, in respect of the meaning itself it was more spiritual and went straight to the heart of things. Because to-day we have become duller ourselves and more exacting, we require a vocabulary less charged with matter, less spontaneous, more remote from the senses, or rather renovated by a new contact more penetrating and more deliberate, like our art itself with sensible objects, by a new germination of the mental word in ourselves. In this respect philosophy is in the same case as poetry. Like poetic images 15 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS philosophic terms are blunted. The creation of a new vocabulary by depriving the understanding of the assistance provided by custom and by a social security already achieved compels it to pay exclusive attention to the vital process in which the idea is born of images and phantasms and the experience of life. Though these questions of vocabulary are not un- important, their importance is obviously secondary in comparison with doctrine. Nor must we forget that although these innovations of terminology are cal- culated to diminish certain obstacles produced in many modern minds by the influence, which is in truth below the level of philosophy, of associated ideas and by the reactions of sensibility, they will never make the voice of intelligible being audible to those who lack the ear for it or who close their ears to it. Nor will they suffice to create a vocabulary common to all philo- sophers. For terminology is essentially dependent upon doctrine, and a common vocabulary presupposes a common doctrine. "All life and joy is motion. That of time and vulgar souls is linear, and so not without change of place ; and good to them is known only in the coming and going. With souls of grace it is not so. They go about a centre, which planetary motion is their joy. They have also a self-revolving motion which is their peace. Their own regularity enables them to perceive the order of the universe. Their ears with inmost delectation catch the sound of the revolving spheres. They Kve in fruition of the eternal novelty." 1 1 Goventry Patmore, Aphorisms and Extracts. 16 SECOND LECTURE COUNTERFEIT METAPHYSICAL COIN /. The Object of these Three Lectures on Being. 1. In this and the two following lessons I want to invite your particular attention to the subject matter of metaphysics, being as such. I shall not adopt any formal academic procedure, but shall rather attempt to bring home to you certain preliminary truths on which too little stress is often laid at the outset, hough the mental attitude of modern philosophers educated in idealism makes it particularly necessary to do so. The most important texts dealing with the questions treated in this lecture and the next are Aristotle's Metaphysics and St. Thomas' Commentaries (St. Thomas' Br&mium, Book III (B), lecture 12, and above all Book IV, lectures i and 4; also Book VI, particularly the first two lectures). You may also consult the two works of Pere Garrigou-Lagrange on the Philosophy of Being and on God and Cajetan's Commentary on the De Ente et Essentia. Statement of the Problem. 2. As you know, it is a fundamental doctrine of scholastic philosophy that the formal object of the intellect is being. In the case of the human intellect 'there are two levels, two states or two quite distinct phases to be taken account of. A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS In the first place the Thomists, and in particular Cajetan, enquire what is the object first attained by the human intellect, an object therefore which every man attains the instant he begins to think as a rational being, an object presented from the outset to the human mind. They answer with Cajetan: it is being as enveloped or embodied in the sensible quiddity, being " clothed" in the diverse natures apprehended by the senses, ens concretum quidditati sensibili. It is something confiscally contained in this or that particular nature for example, in the dog, the horse, the pebble, something clothed in this or that object and diversified by it. It is not, therefore, the element common to all these things, disengaged from them, extricated in its purity. Nor yet is it diversity in its pure state, that is to say the manifold of diverse essences and diverse sensible quiddities. It is at the same time the particular quiddity and being in general. It is being as enveloped, embodied, in the manifold of natures or essences. This is what the Thomists teach us of the object attained primarily and in the first instance by the human intellect. But we must be quite clear that this is not the object of metaphysics. If it were, a child, as soon as he begins to perceive objects intellectually, would already be a metaphysician. For the object of which we are speaking is the object which the intellect attains primarily and in the first instance. The object of metaphysics and we now pass to an altogether different level, an entirely different phase in the process of human intellection is, according to the Thomists, being as such, ens in quantum ens, being not clothed or embodied in the sensible quiddity, the essence or nature of sensible things, but on the 18 SECOND LECTURE contrary abstraction, being disengaged and isolated, at least so far as being can be taken in abstraction from more particularized objects. It is being disengaged and isolated from the sensible quiddity, being viewed as such and set apart in its pure intelligible values. Metaphysics therefore at the summit of natural knowledge, where it becomes fully wisdom, brings to light in its pure values and uncovers what is enveloped and veiled in the most primitive intellectual knowledge. You can see how dangerous it would be to confuse these two phases, these two states and to imagine, that, as so many modern philosophers believe, that for the Thomist the metaphysical habitus is specified by being, as it is primarily attained by our intellect. 3. Observe that being presents two aspects. One of these is its aspect as essence which corresponds particularly to the first operation of the mind. For we form concepts primarily in order to apprehend, though in many cases blindly, essences which are positive capacities of existence. The other is the aspect existence, the esse in the strict sense, which is the end in which things attain their achievement, their act, their ''energy" par excellence, the supreme actuality of whatever is. Nor must we suppose that this second aspect, this aspect which crowns and perfects being, escapes the grasp of the intellect. The Platonists show a general tendency to confine the object of tlie human intellect to essences, whereas the profound tendency of St. Thomas's philosophy leads the intellect and therefore philosophy and metaphysics, not only to essences but to existence itself, the perfect and per- fecting goal, the ultimate fulfilment of being. '9 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS It is in the second operation of the mind, in the judgement, by composition and division, that the speculative intellect grasps being, not only from the standpoint of essence but from that of existence itself, actual or possible. Existence is here apprehended ut exercitdy that is as actualised by a subject: not merely as presented to the mind, as is the case with the simple concept of existence, but as possessed potentially or actually by a subject. Therefore Cajetan can say in a phrase full of meaning for the metaphysician that it is not contradictory to say existentia non existit, existence does not exist. For the term existentia, the concept and the term existence designates existence itself from the standpoint of essence, in as much as it is an intelligible concretion, a focus of intelligible determination, existentia ut significata, -as apprehended by a concept. On the other hand since existence when it is posited in the judgement and by the verb which expresses the judgement is attained ut exercita, as actualised or possessed, it would be an obvious contradiction to say "what exists does not exist", quod existit non existit. And it is the judgement that , completes and perfects knowledge. It is a radical error to restrict the object of the intellect to the object of the first operation of the mind. Unfortunately a number of popular expositions of scholasticism seem to represent the matter in this false light. They speak as though the object of the first operation constitutes the object of intellection as such. This is quite untrue. It is merely a preparation for the second, which achieves knowledge. When we affirm that the object of the intellect is being, an affirmation which displays the profound realism of Thomist philosophy, we do not stop short 20 SECOND LECTURE at essences. It is to existence itself that the intellect proceeds when it formulates within itself a judgement corresponding to what a thing is or is not outside the mind. From this point of view the intellect and the .will are on the same footing, though there is also a fundamental difference between the two cases. The goal of the will is existence precisely as outside the mind, as actualised or possessed by reality external to the mind, outside the spiritual act of the will. But the intellect and its act are fulfilled by existence affirmed or denied by a judgement, by existence attained as it is lived or possessed by a subject within the mind, within the mind's intellectual act itself. A Digression on Existence and Philosophy. 4. If the distinctive object of the intellect is being, not only "essential" or quidditative but existential, it is clear that philosophy must be orientated to being in the same way. It seeks existence itself, though not, as is the case with practical philosophy, to produce k, but to know it. Where actual existence is necessary and is thus able as such to perfect a knowledge which is thus rendered complete science in the strict sense philosophy proceeds to actual existence, something which actually exists. It is natural theology and tends to the Cause of being, God, Whose essence is His own eternally actual existence. Philosophy, because it is science in the strictest sense noblesse oblige must find its object in that which cannot be annulled, intelligible necessities. Therefore where existence is contingent, simply posited as a fact, as is the case with all created being, it must, 21 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS because of this defect in its object, be directly orien- tated only to possible existence. Which does not mean that it is restricted to a realm of pure essences. Its goal is still existence. It considers the essences as capable of actualisation, of being posited outside the mind. This is involved by the fact that the judgement is the per- fection of knowledge and of the act of intelligence. And this means that philosophy considers essences in so far as they require to issue forth and communicate themselves, to combine or separate in existence. In short, it considers them from the standpoint of the affluence and generosity of being. But this is not all. As the intellect "in a way leaving its proper sphere betakes itself by the instrumentality of the senses to corruptible things in which the universal is realised, 5 ' J so philosophy returns by the instrumentality of the senses to the actual existence of the object of thought which it contemplates. The philosophy of nature which verifies its con- clusions by sense data, refers to the corruptible existence which alone can be attained by sensation in order to establish scientifically what are the objects it studies not only to know their mode of existence but also to know their essence. Metaphysics, however, does not verify its conclusions in sense data, nor, like mathematics, in the imagina- tion. Nevertheless it too refers to the corruptible existence which can be attained by sensation. But it does so not to establish scientifically what are -the realities it studies those namely which constitute the subject matter of metaphysics, 2 the being " common to the ten predicaments, " created and material being 1 Cajetan, In Anal. Post, I, I *Cf. St. Thomas, In Metaph. Prasmium. 22 SECOND LECTURE taken as being nor in order to know their essence. It does so to know how they exist, for this, too, metaphysics should know, to attain their mode of existence, and then to conceive by analogy the exist- ence of that which exists immaterially, which is purely spiritual. The part played by the senses is you see, absolutely indispensable. Every judgement must in one way or another be finally resolved in them. In other words, the res sensibilis visibilis, the visible object of sense, is the touchstone of every judgement, ex qua debemus de aliis judicare, by which we must judge of everything else, because it is the touchstone of existence. 1 A metaphysician deprived of the senses or their use, a metaphysician asleep or dreaming, is for St. Thomas a sheer impossibility, a monster, an absurdity. And this not only because ideas are derived from the senses, but because the senses, which possess a specu- lative value, though it is obscure, are indispensable to science, and even to the supreme science, the science most disengaged from the material, if it is to reach the actual existence which it may neither ignore nor neglect. This is a corruptible existence which it attains only indirectly by leaving its proper sphere and through the instrumentality of the senses. From this you will understand what kind of man the Thomist metaphysician should be. He should possess a sensitive body, be like St. Thomas himself mollis came. Most certainly he must not be exclusively an intellect. His equipment of senses must be in good order. He must be keenly and profoundly aware of sensible objects. And he should be plunged into existence, steeped ever more deeply in it by a sensuous Cf. De Veritate, q. 12, a 12, ad. 3. Les Degrh du Savoir, p. 255. 23 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS and aesthetic perception as acute as possible, and by experiencing the suffering and struggles of real life, so that aloft in the third heaven of natural under- standing he may feed upon the intelligible substance of things. Is it necessary to add that the professor who is nothing but a professor, withdrawn from real life and rendered insensible at the third degree of abstraction is the diametrical opposite of the genuine metaphysician? The Thomist philosopher is dubbed scholastic, a name derived from his most painful affliction. Scholastic pedantry is his peculiar foe. He must constantly triumph over his domestic adversary, the Professor. The Thomist philosophy, therefore, is, in the sense just explained, an existential philosophy. The phrase may be understood in many different ways. I have just shown you in what sense it is applicable to the speculative philosophy of Saint Thomas, Thomism in the very order of speculation, particularly metaphysical speculation. In another sense the phrase is applicable to the practical philosophy of Saint Thomas. This tends to concrete acts which must be posited into existence. This time directly and in the distinctive sphere of its practicality and not only indirectly, leaving its own sphere of action by means of the senses the intellect, the practical intellect (voluntate conjuncta), tends to existence and lays hold of existence to regulate and determine it. In a third sense which, however, pertains no longer to the domain of the intellect but to that of the will thought may be termed existential, namely when it does not simply know the truth by yielding itself fully in accordance with the law of the mind to objective being, but when it, or rather the thinker, lives this truth, draws and assimilates it into his subjective 24 SECOND LECTURE being. It is in this third sense that many moderns, pre-eminently the Danish thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, understand the term existential. Too often they have made the tragic mistake of seeking the distinctive norm of philosophy, her law of knowledge in the existential thus understood, which confuses everything. Return to Our Problem. 5. This digression was not superfluous. We shall now return to our theme. Being is the formal object of the intellect. Therefore whatever it knows and every time it knows it attains being. But what are we to say of the various sciences inferior to meta- physics? In these being is particularised. Such a science deals with being of a particular kind. The specific object of metaphysics, on the other hand, is being regarded in itself and in accordance with its distinctive mysteries, ens secundum quod est ens, as St. Thomas says, translating Aristotle (Metaphysica, Book V, Lecture I, 530-533 in the Cathala edition). There are weighty and authoritative texts here which it is most important to bear in mind. 1 1 Met. 5 (IV), 1 1003, a, 21. "There is a science which investigates being as being, and the attributes which belong to it in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences; for none of these deals generally with being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attributes of this part this is what the mathematical sciences for instance do. Now since we are seeking the first principles and the highest causes, clearly there must be something to which these belong in virtue of its own nature. If, then, our predecessors who sought the elements of existing things were seeking these same principles, it is necessary that the elements must be elements of being not by accident but just because it is being. Therefore it is of being as being that we must also grasp the first causes." (Trans. W. D. Ross). St. Thomas's Commentary on this passage (IV Lecture I, Ed. Cathala, 530-533): "Dicit autem 'secundum quod est ens,' quia scicntiae aliae, quae sunt de entibus particularibus, considerant quidem de ente, cum omnia 25 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS There is a science which studies being, investigates being as such. This is its distinctive subject. And at the same time it studies the properties of being, the characteristics proper to being as such. The other sciences are concerned with particular kinds of being. Obviously they study being, for all the subjects of the sciences are beings. But they do not study being as such, but in so far as it is being of a particular kind, number for example, or geometrical figure or fire and so on. You must read that first lecture of St. Thomas, which is devoted to establishing this point, because it is of the utmost importance if we are to grasp the Thomist conception of metaphysics. Metaphysics subjecta scientiarum sint entia, non tamen considerant ens secundum quod ens, sed secundum quod est hujusmodi ens, scilicet vel numerus, vel linea, vel ignis, aut aliquid hujusmodi. "Dicit etiam 'et quae huic insunt per se' et non simpliciter quae huic insunt, ad significandum quod ad scientiam non pertinet con- siderare de his quae per accidens insunt subjecto suo, sed solum de his quae per se insunt. Geometra enim non considerat de triangulo utrum sit cupreus vel ligneus, sed solum considerat ipsum absolute secundum quod habet tres angulos aequales, etc. Sic igitur hujusmodi scientia, cujus est ens subjectum, non oportet quod consideret de omnibus quae insunt enti per accidens, quia sic consideraret accidentia quaesita in omnibus scientiis, cum omnia accidentia insint alicui enti, non tamen secundum quod est ens. Quae enim sunt per se accidentia inferioris, per accidens se habent ad superius, sicut per se accidentia hominis non sunt per se accidentia animalia. Necessitas autem hujus scientiae quae speculatur ens et per se accidentia entis, ex hoc apparet, quia hujusmodi non debent ignota remanere, cum ex eis aliorum dependeat cognitio; sicut ex cognitione communium dependet cognitio rerum propriarum. "Deinde cum dicit 'haec autem'. Hie ostendit, quod ista scientia non sit aliqua particularium scientiarum, (is not to be confused with any of the so-called special sciences) tali ratione. Nulla scientia parti- cularis considerat ens universale inquantum hujusmodi, sed solum aliquam partem entis divisam ab aliis; circa quam speculatur per se accidens, sicut scientaie mathematicae aliquod ens speculantur, scilicet ens quantum. Scientia autem communis considerat unhersale ens secundum quod ens: ergo ron est eadem alicui scientiarum par* ticularium." 26 SECOND LECTURE investigates the first principles of things and their highest causes. But these causes and principles are causes and, principles of a particular kind of intelligible mystery, the intelligible mystery which is being itself. This science therefore investigates the principles of being as such. This, then, is the subject matter of metaphysics which, because it embraces all the rest beneath its sway and dominates them is termed by Saint Thomas in the passage just quoted the "Universal science," scientia communis. The term, however, risks misinterpretation. We must beware of a fatal error, confusing metaphysics with logic. This mistake has, in fact, been made by the moderns, many of whom maintain that this being as such is a mere word, a linguistic residuum, or else that it is a universal frame whose value is purely logical, not ontological. According to them the metaphysician has fallen victim to human language whereas in fact he passes through and beyond language to attain its intellectual source, superior to any uttered word. We must, therefore, understand clearly that the meta- physical intuition of being is sui generis and of powerful efficacy and therefore distinguish carefully being which is the object of metaphysics from being as it is grasped by common sense and studied by the natural sciences and from being as studied by logic. Failure to observe these dis- tinctions has led many modern thinkers into very grave confusions. For when we speak to them of being as the object of metaphysics they assume, by a species of intellectual reflex, without even being conscious of the assumption, that we are speaking either of being as it is studied by logic or being as known by common Sense, being as it is understood by all who employ the verb to be. 27 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS II 6. At this point further distinctions are necessary . When we consider the object first attained by the human intellect of which we were speaking above, namely being embodied in sensible natures, we find that it can be envisaged from two different points of view, either as it is apprehended by knowledge of sensible nature and the divers experimental sciences, or as it is apprehended by common sense. Particularised Being. 7. We shall consider first the natural sciences. As St. Thomas has just reminded us, though these sciences certainly study being, it is a being presented to the mind as differentiated, or masked, by particular con- ditions and a particular "behaviour." Knowledge of nature considers sensible and mobile being, either as the object of the philosophy of nature which is intelli- gible being but considered with the particular qualifi- cation of mutability, that is, in so far as it is involved in the sensible and changing corporeal world or as in the empirical sciences being as the mere foundation of observable and measurable phenomena. We may designate as particularised being this being in so far as it is studied by the divers sciences of nature. The terminology I am suggesting is not the accepted terminology of the schools. It is simply a means of bringing home to you certain points of fundamental importance. Now observe: for the sciences thus specified and demarcated not by being but by being of a particular kind, the notion of being taken as such has and can 28 SECOND LECTURE have no meaning. If we speak to a scientist, of being as such, he can make nothing of it. For to the habitus which he represents it is nothing. By this I do not mean to say that the scientific-experimental habitus pronounces that it is nothing. For it would transgress its natural boundaries by pronouncing upon an object which is beyond its province, I say that the scientist as such can make no pronouncement on the subject. It is beyond his scope, and therefore he knows nothing of it. Vague Being. 8. If now we adopt the standpoint of common sense it is quite another matter. The perspective has entirely changed. For we are now confronted with an infra- scientific or pre-scientific knowledge, the term scientific being here understood in a universal sense as a perfect, and certain knowledge, knowledge in the strict sense, knowledge by causes whether it is afforded by the divers particular sciences, by the philosophy of nature, or by metaphysical wisdom. The knowledge of com- mon sense is a natural and spontaneous growth, the product so to speak of rational instincts and has not yet attained the level of science. It is an infra-scientific knowledge. Nevertheless this infra-scientific knowledge is more universal than that of the various particular sciences of which I have just spoken. It possesses a certain metaphysical value in as much as it attains the same objects as metaphysics attains in a different fashion. Common sense is therefore, as it were, a rough sketch of metaphysics, a vigorous and un- reflective sketch drawn by the natural motion and spontaneous instincts of reason. This is why common sense attains a certain though unscientific knowledge of God, human personality, free will and so on. 29 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS Here, indeed, is the being of the metaphysician. It has a meaning for common sense. It is the hidden sinew of all that common sense knows of the things of the spirit. But it is not known as such. Otherwise every man would be a metaphysician, and the meta-r physical habitus would not be, as it is, a sublime and exceedingly rare mental endowment. It would be simply common sense. In fact being as such is appre- hended blindly at this level, in a sign, an object of thought, which is, as it were, a surrogate and a mask of being as such, ens in quantum ens. To be more precise: Speak to common sense of "Being." Observe that common sense would not itself mention it. It reasons about particular objects basing itself implicitly on the being they possess. From the consideration of these particular objects it rises to their First Cause. And this ascent necessarily implies that means of proof which being is. For unless we consider the being in objects we could not rise to the First Cause of all being. But this operation of common sense is implicit, as is the support it finds in the object of thought, "being." By itself common sense cannot disengage this notion of being and envisage it in its distinctive mystery. Let the metaphysician, I say, talk to common sense and speak of " Being as such." Common sense will not explicitly conceive this being of which he speaks otherwise than as the object of what Thomists call abstractio totalis, an abstraction which is pre-scientific and infra-scientific. (On this see Cajetan Proemium to the De Ente et Essentia and John of Saint Thomas Logic, Secunda Pars, Q,27, Art. I.) What they term abstractio totalis we may call "Extensive" abstraction. 1 1 The term proposed by M. Yves Simon Jnlrod. d VOntologie du Con- nattre, p. 78. 30 SECOND LECTURE It is the mere disengagement of a universal from the many particulars it subsumes, the simple opera- tion by which, before enquiring whether in what I call man there exists an original focus of intelligibility .and what that focus is, I derive from Peter and Paul the object of thought "Man," then from Man in turn the object of thought "Animal," thus passing successively to increasingly general universals. The rich content of intelligible light remains implicit, as it were dormant. What appears explicitly is that on which the logical relations of greater or lesser general- ity are founded. This extensive abstraction is common to all knowledge, to pre-scientific knowledge as well as the scientific knowledge which presupposes the former. By hypothesis, on the level at which we are standing, we are envisaging objects from the point of view of common sense; consequently our knowledge of them is imperfect, not yet scientific. At this level no other hierarchy obtains between the concepts thus abstracted than that which arises from what the logician, as he reflects upon them, will term extensive relations. Thus, we perceive the notion of animal, for example, to be more extensive than that of man. But we have not yet explicitly disengaged what it is that distinguishes the former from the latter. For we are concerned with the confused and still imperfect notions of objects formed by common sense. Similarly we perceive the notion of being to be the most extensive, the -widest of all notions. But we have not yet dis- engaged the properties of being as the primordial source and focus of intelligible mystery, and have not yet seen its distinctive countenance. Observe that although what I am saying looks very simple, it is, in fact, very difficult : because we are trying 3 1 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS to grasp what takes place in us at two different phases of knowledge which are expressed by the same words, indeed by the same word, being. We may live in the company of a man, yet not know the colour of his eyes or the individual mystery of his soul. If we are asked who is he, we reply, my friend, the man who shares my amusements or my work. Yet we have not seen his unique psychological countenance. It is the same with this object of thought, this prim- ordial reality we call being. We have not looked it in the face. We think it something far simpler than it is. We have not yet troubled to unveil its true counten- ance. We do not suspect the peculiar mystery con- tained in the notion of it. For us, so far as our explicit knowledge is concerned, being is simply the most general and the most convenient of the classifications which we constantly employ and in which all the objects of our thought are arranged, the most compre- hensive of them. It is merely a class. This is true. But although common sense, when we mention being, explicitly thinks only of this most general class, nevertheless and this second feature is as typical and as important as the first it places in this class all the diverse objects of sense, all the varieties of being, a chaotic universe of innumerable forms, so that, if we may so put it, the comprehensive class together with the host of sensible objects which fill it, is, as it were, the practical equivalent and the surrogate of the being which is the metaphysician's concern. But it is not yet that being as the metaphysician is to see it and disengage it. Just now when I was speaking of the sciences inferior to metaphysics, I spoke of particularised being, masking and enveloping the metaphysical concept of being. In this case it is 32 SECOND LECTURE vague being that masks it. The metaphysical concept of being is present. But it is not disengaged but disguised, invisible. This vague being of common sense renders it possible to work upon what is really .(though the user does not know it) the metaphysical notion of being, and thus reach true pre-philosophic conclusions about certain fundamental problems which the metaphysician will settle scientifically and philo- sophically. That is to say, we are here confronted with an imperfect state of knowledge and at the same time with a species of philosophy corresponding with it, which is not yet philosophy, not yet perfect know- ledge, but the prefiguration and preliminary sketch of philosophy. Ill Being Divested of Reality. 10. Hitherto we have been concerned with two ways in which being confronts the mind or in which the term being can designate a particular object of thought, namely particularised being as it is studied by the different sciences and vague being envisaged by common sense. We have now to investigate what being is for the logician. It is no easy problem. As you know, the distinctive subject matter of logic according to St. Thomas is an ens rationis, a conceptual being, namely what is known, precisely as known. The objects which logic studies are not studied as they are in themselves but as they are involved in the process of reasoning, as they are within the mind, as it moves towards truth. This is the conceptual being which is the special concern of logic. Logic deals with everything with which other branches of philosophy or the par- 33 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS ticular sciences deal, though it studies them not as they really are but as involved in the process of reasoning. The logician will therefore, as he proceeds, encounter the notion of being, as he encounters all the rest, and, moreover, more than other notions since all other notions presuppose it. Being, we con- clude, is studied by the logician under the formal aspect characteristic of his science, the formal aspect of a conceptual being of the logical variety, sub ratione entis rationis logici, that is to say under the formal aspect of the conceptual order within the mind as it moves towards truth. Do not forget that logic is a reflex science in which the mind returns upon itself, upon the things it already knows to study them and enquire how it has known them and in what order they are present within itself. Therefore being has already been apprehended by ordinary intelligence, and may equally well have been apprehended as such, secundum quod ens, by the metaphysician. But this in- tuition, this perception, is presupposed by the logician. It is not his business. It has already taken place. He turns back upon it to study it from his own reflex and logical point of view. The logician returns reflexively to being as it plays a part in the order of thought proceeding towards truth, and in the vital relationships of concepts be- tween themselves. For example the notion of being is of the first importance in securing the coherence of thought, in as much as the whole of logic depends upon the principle of contradiction which is the logical form of the principle of identity: non est negare et qffirmare simul. We cannot affirm and deny the same thing from the same point of view. The notion of being also plays- a part in the theory of the verbal copula essential to 34 SECOND LECTURE the judgement. Finally and this is a most important consideration the logician studies from his reflex standpoint the transcendental and analogical charac- ter of being. He sees being as the most universal, the super-universal concept. He distinguishes reflexively and scientifically from the standpoint of his science the characteristic of maximal extension or supreme universality already discovered by vague being, that is by being as the object of a simple abstractio totalis. n. It is most important to understand that this being which is studied by the logician and is bound up with the other distinctive objects of logic and involved in them all, is not the metaphysician's being. It presupposes the latter. But in logic being is apprehended as an object of secondary mental vision, secunda intentio mentis. Reflex knowledge of the mind's own intellectual process and of objects as they are present in the mind is the objective light of logic. That which gives logic its specific character, the formal aspect under which it studies objects, is con- ceptual being, which cannot exist outside the mind. Being itself is envisaged by logic under this formal aspect of conceptual being. The logician, therefore, studies being under an aspect in which it can exist only in the mind, an aspect in which it cannot really exist. The logician's being differs in this from the meta- physician's that it is envisaged as present in the mind and can exist in the mind alone. In short all its real functions are presupposed but are not formally studied by the logician. What the logician formally disengages are the functions of being in and for knowledge which are functions of the conceptual order. Even if we have already looked being in the face, now in logic 35 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS we behold it only as reflected in our eyes, as it has entered into the process of our reasoning and know- ledge. The logician's being may thus be termed reflected being or being divested of reality. It is immediately obvious that if the logician's being is mistaken for the object of a science of reality, this science will necessarily be a science of the void, of vacuity itself. For by definition none of the real functions of being, but only its conceptual functions, are the proper and the direct object of logical study. There could be no more serious error than to suppose that the being of metaphysics is this being envisaged under the aspect of conceptual being, the being which belongs to the distinctive subject matter of logic and is apprehended by the objective light distinctive of logic. Pseudo-Being. 12. At this point some further considerations arise. We must take note of a decadence which has occurred in the history of philosophy. I shall point out here its principal stages. Notice in the first place two errors concerned with logic itself. The first of these was to give ex- tension precedence over comprehension (intension) until the latter was at last completely forgotten and account taken only of the former. If however we neglect the characters which intrinsically constitute an object of thought and consider solely its greater or lesser extension, there is no longer any reason to distinguish being, as the ancients distinguished it, from conceptual objects of a purely generic nature. Being becomes a genus, a class, the widest of all. It is termed a genus, the supreme genus. In the eyes of 36 SECOND LECTURE the scholastic philosopher this is a serious heresy. Being is most certainly not a genus but a trans- cendental. Notice what follows. How shall we pro- ceed to reach this supreme genus? You may not introduce into the definition of the genus animal the characteristic notes of one of its species, man for example. To conceive animal you must make ab- straction of whatever belongs to man alone. That is to say to arrive at the genus you eliminate whatever is distinctive of the species. What, then, if being is simply a genus? To reach this supreme genus you will be obliged to eliminate all the varieties of being, all the determinations which particularise it. In short to arrive at the genus being you will be com- pelled to eliminate everything which is and you will thus reach a being indistinguishable from nothing. This was Hegel's procedure. Because he had forgotten that being is a transcendental, he was logically com- pelled to identify being with nonentity. The second error concerns the very nature of logic. Many moderns, particularly since Kant and Hamilton, call logic formal in a very different sense from that in which the ancients so termed it. For them it is a science of the laws and forms of a thought divorced from things and independent of them. In this con- ception of logic its object is no longer things them- selves, though as transported into the mind, but pure forms of thought, as though knowledge had a struc- ture* and forms independent of things and the logician studied these forms and this structure of thought. Thus the bridge is broken between thought and things, and the logician's being no longer presupposes real being. It is a pure form of thought. 13. A third error, this time a metaphysical error, 37 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS is to assign as the specific object of metaphysics essences as such, and not to require the intellect to proceed, as its nature craves, to existence, to esse, I mean esse ut exercitum, actual or possible, which, as I have shown above, implies that it returns through the instru- mentality of the senses to the actual existence of corruptible things. Thus the bridge is broken between metaphysics and existence. Metaphysics stops short at the description of essences. If it envisages esse and is orientated towards it, it is only to regard it as itself an essence, esse ut significatum. This error, which may be termed Platonic or Scotist, facilitates the confusion between the metaphysician's being and the logician's. 14. As a result of all these errors the being which is the distinctive object of metaphysics is confused not only with the genuine being of logic, that being we have termed being divested of reality, but with the being which is the object of a false logic, a decadent logic, with being as the supreme genus and a pure form of thought. And this being I call pseudo-being. Dialectics. 15. I will call your attention to an extremely sug- gestive fact. Read in the fourth lecture of St. Thomas's Commentary on Book IV of the Metaphysics what he tells us of dialectics in the old sense of the term. For by dialectics the ancients understood the science of probable conclusions. It was a portion of logic. 1 St. Thomas explains that, like the metaphysician,* the 1 In Met., IV, lee. 4, ed. Cathala 573 ff. Conveniunt autem in hoc (dialectica et philosophia), quod dialectic! est considerare de omnibus. Hoc autem esse non posset, nisi consideraret omnia secundum quod in aliquo uno conveniunt: quia unius scientiae unum subjectum est, et unius artis una est materia, circa quam operatur. Cum igitur omnes res non conveniant nisi in ente, manifestum est quod dialecticae 38 SECOND LECTURE dialectician studies all things, which he could not do unless they all possessed a character in common. For science has a single subject matter. Since being alone is common to all things, it is plain that being is materia est ens, et ea quae sunt entis, de quibus etiam philosophus considerat . . . "Diflferunt autem ab invicem. Philosophus quidem a dialectico secundum potestatem. Nam majoris virtutis est consideratio philosophi quam consideratio dialectici. Philosophus enim de praedictis com- munibus procedit demonstrative. Et ideo ejus est habere scientiam de praedictis, et est cognoscitivus eorum per certitudinem. Nam certa cognitio sive scientia est effectus demonstrationis. Dialecticus autem circa omnia praedicta procedit ex probabilibus ; unde non facit scientiam, sed quamdam opinionem. Et hoc ideo est, quia ens est duplex: ens scilicet rationis et ens naturae. Ens autem rationis dicitur proprie de illis intentionibus, quas ratio adinvenit in rebus consideratis ; sicut intentiones generis, speciei et similium, quae quidem non inveniun- tur in rerum natura, sed considerationem rationis consequuntur. Et hujusmodi, scilicet ens rationis, est proprie subjectum logicae. Hujus- modi autem intentiones intelligibiles, entibus naturae aequiparantur, eo quod omnia entia naturae sub consideratione rationis cadunt. Et ideo subjectum logicae ad omnia se extendit, de quibus ens naturae praedicatur. Unde concludit, quod subjectum logicae aequiparatur subjecto philosophiae, quod est ens naturae. Philosophus igitur ex principiis ipsius procedit ad probandum ea quae sunt consideranda circa hujusmodi communia accidentia entis. Dialecticus autem procedit ad ea consideranda ex intentionibus rationis, quae sunt extranea a natura rerum. Et ideo dicitur, quod dialectica est tentativa, quia ten tare proprium est ex principiis extraneis procedere . . . " Licet autem dicatur, quod Philosophia est scientia, non autem dialectica et sophistica, non tamen per hoc removetur quin dialectica et sophistica sint scientiae. Dialectica enim potest considerari secundum quod est docens, et secundum quod est utens. Secundum quidem quod est docens, habet considerationem de istis intentionibus, instituens modum, quo per eas procedi possit ad conclusiones in singulis scientiis probabiliter ostendendas : et hoc demonstrative facit, et secundum hoc est scientia. Utens vero est secundum quod modo adjunctivo utitur ad concludendum aliquid probabiliter in singulis scientiis; et sic recedit a modo scientiae . . . "Sed in parte logicae quae dicitur demons trativa, solum doctrina pertinet ad logicam, usus vero ad philosophiam et ad alias particulares scientias quae sunt de rebus naturae. Et hoc ideo, quia usus demon- strativae consistit in utendo principiis rerum, de quibus fit demon- stratio, quae ad scientias reales pertinet, non utendo intentionibus logicis. Et sic apparet, quod quaedam partes logicae habent ipsam scientiam et doctrinam et usum, sicut dialectica tentativa et sophistica; quaedam autem doctrinam et non usum, sicut demonstrativa." 39 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS the subject matter of dialectic, ens et quae sunt entis de quibus etiam philosophus considerat. Here St. Thomas states plainly what I have just been explaining: there is a being which is not the specific object of metaphysics, but the object or rather the subject matter of dialectic so that "The philosopher, the dialectician, and the sophist study" the same thing, namely being. Nevertheless they differ from each other. The philosopher differs from the dialectician in intellectual power, secundum potestatem. For his vision is keener and possesses greater force than the dialectician's. In respect indeed of all these objects enveloped in being the philosopher proceeds by demonstration and by ways capable in themselves of producing certainty. The dialectician, on the other hand, proceeds in respect of all these by probable arguments. That is why he never achieves science and must be content with opinion. St. Thomas gives us the clue to all this. "This we say is the case because being is twofold, conceptual being (ens rationis) and real being; and conceptual being, that is being which cannot exist outside the mind and must exist in it, is strictly the subject of logic." So the fold is as wide as the material. "The intelligible objects of the logician are co-extensive with real beings, since all real objects enter into the purview of reason. Hence the subject of logic extends to all things that possess reality." The subject matter of logic is co-extensive with the subject matter of philosophy, which is real being. But being is studied as transferred into the intellect and unable to exist outside it. And the procedure of the dialectician is to study objects not by real causes but by conceptual intentions, "that is conceptual beings of a logical nature which are extraneous to reality," extranea a natura rerum. 40 SECOND LECTURE St. Thomas goes on to explain that dialectic can be considered as it belongs to pure or to applied logic, logica docens or logica utens, as it is taught or employed. As taught it is a science, because it demonstrates to us the procedure by which we reach probability. On the contrary when it is employed, as an intellectual tool, it is the very intellectual procedure which studies objects from the standpoint not of real but of con- ceptual being, using probable arguments. It is then no longer a science because it produces only opinion. Hence the ancients divided logic into three parts, demonstra- tive, dialectic, and sophistic logic. Between these three parts the following difference obtains. In demonstrative logic the theory of demon- stration, pure logic, logica docens, pertains to logic. But the practice or employment of demonstration, applied logic, logica utens, is not the concern of the logician but of every man who studies reality. In the case of dialectical logic, and it is the same with sophistic, both employment and instruction, practice as well as theory are the logician's province. To know objects not in accordance with their real structure, but in accordance with the ideal structure of our conceptual beings and therefore in a fashion confined of its very nature to the probable is the logician's task, as it is also his task to construct the theory of probable reasoning. It is not the task of the natural philosopher or of the metaphysician. If you bear in mind St. Thomas's description of dialectic and the dialectician you will observe that the term dialectic as employed by modern philosophers has undoubtedly a different meaning. It now designates a procedure which passes from opposites to opposites to engender reality, starting from the most primitive 41 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS notion. But the very name is extraordinarily revealing. It informs us, reveals, admits that the philosophies in question are not the work of a genuine philosopher but of a logician, that is to say that their authors studied objects and attempted to explain them not by real causes but by conceptual beings, that is from the stand- point of the logical ens rationis. They sought a logical explanation of things, and in saying this I stress the term logic in as much as logic is the science of conceptual being and not a science of real being. The genuine philosopher, however, seeks an ontological (metalogical) explanation of things and is not content with a merely logical explanation. Here we must break off. You will notice that what we have first encountered on our way are forms of being which are not the being which is the subject matter of metaphysics but, in so far as they claim to be so, are but counterfeits of it, namely the particularised being of the sciences inferior to metaphysics, the vague being of common sense, the being divested of reality which is the subject of logic and the pseudo-being of a misconceived and decadent logic. In the next lecture I shall speak of the being which is the genuine subject matter of metaphysics. It will be easier to distinguish now that we have seen other meanings of the term being with which it might be confused. THIRD LECTURE THE TRUE SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICS I. The Intuition of Being as Such. i. IN my last lesson I began to deal with the subject matter of metaphysics namely being as such, ens secundum quod est ens. And the better to distinguish it and its distinctive characteristics I found it profitable to consider first a number of aspects under which being may be presented to our intellect but which are not the aspect we are looking for. So I pointed out cursorily four kinds of " Being'' which are not the genuine object of the metaphysician. I have now to deal with being insofar as being, ens in quantum ens. This is the ultimate object to be attained by the intellect, which it attains at the summit of its natural knowledge. It boxes the compass. For it sets out from being, but from being as it is immediately apprehended when the mind first awakes in the sensible world. That is its starting point. And at the end of its course it arrives at being, but being envisaged in itself, disengaged from its matrix, viewed in its own light and in accordance with its own type of intelligibility. The last lecture will have shown you that it is an intellectual disaster to confound this " Being" which is the subject matter of metaphysics with any one of those kinds of being I then pointed out to you. Otherwise we should find ourselves obliged particularly if we stopped short at the being D 43 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS which is the subject matter of logic or at what I termed pseudo-being and supposed that it is to this being, or pseudo-being, that the metaphysician ascribes real value to regard being as but a by-product of language, in which case the philosopher would indeed "vanish in his though ts." The being which is the subject matter of metaphysics, being as such, is neither the particularised being of the natural sciences, nor the being divested of reality of genuine logic nor yet the pseudo-being of false logic. It is real being in all the purity and fullness of its distinctive intelligibility or mystery. Objects, all objects, murmur this being; they utter it to the intellect, but not to all intellects, only to those capable of hearing. For here also it is true : He that hath ears to hear let him hear. Qui habet aures audiendi audiat. Being is then seen in its distinctive properties, as trans-objectively subsistent, autonomous and essen- tially diversified. For the intuition of being is also the intuition of its transcendental character and analogical value. It is not enough to employ the word being, to say "Being." We must have the in- tuition, the intt llectual perception of the inexhaustible and incomprehensible reality thus manifested as the object of this perception. It is this intuition that makes the metaphysician. 2. As you know, to each science there belongs a distinctive intellectual virtue. There is, therefore^ an intellectual virtue proper to the metaphysician. And this virtue, or habitus, corresponds to being as the object of the intuition just mentioned. We must therefore distinguish two "Lights" in scholastic par lance, one pertaining to the object, the other to the habitus, or intellectual virtue. The characteristic 44 THIRD LECTURE mode of intellectual apprehension or eidetic visu- alisation the degree of immateriality, of spirituality in the manner in which the mind grasps the object and conforms to it, demanded by the very nature of trans-objective reality as it presents to the mind as its object a particular intelligible facet constitutes what the ancients termed the ratio formalis sub qua, the objective light in which at a given degree of knowledge objects are knowable by the intellect. At the same time proportionate to this objective light there is a subjective light perfecting the subjective activity of the intellect, by which the intellect itself is proportioned to a given object, fitted to apprehend it. That is why Thomists say that the habitus is a lumen, a light, not in the objective but in the effective order. For it is concerned with the production or effectuation of the act of knowing. Hence the metaphysical habitus is requisite, if we are to have the intuition of being as such, ens in quantum ens. Yet on the other hand it is this intuition that effects, causes, the metaphysical habitus. This reciprocal causation simply means that the metaphysical habitus, the intellectual virtue of the metaphysician, comes to birth at the same time as its proper and specific object is disclosed to it. Nevertheless the object is prior, not in time but in ontological rank. In the order of nature the intuition of being as such takes precedence of the inner habitus of the metaphysician. It is this perception of being that determines the first moment at which the habitus comes to birth, and it is by the operation of this same habit thus developed that the being which is the metaphysician's distinctive object is more and more clearly perceived. 3. Enough of this digression. We are confronted 45 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS here with a genuine intuition, a perception direct and immediate, an intuition not in the technical sense which the ancients attached to the term, but in the sense we may accept from modern philosophy. It is a very simple sight, superior to any discursive reasoning or demonstration, because it is the source of demonstration. It is a sight whose content and implications no words of human speech can exhaust or adequately express and in which in a moment of decisive emotion, as it were, of spiritual conflagration, the soul is in contact, a living, penetrating and illumina- ting contact, with a reality which it touches and which takes hold of it. Now what I want to emphasise is that it is being more than anything else which produces such an intuition. The characteristics of intuition as I have just described them may seem at first sight those of M. Bergson's intuition. They seem so, in truth, but with the important difference that he denies that his intuition is intellectual. I, on the other hand, have just maintained that the object par excellence of intuition is being, but that that intuition is intellectual. This is remote indeed from the Bergsonian philosophy. Being does not produce the intuition such as I have described it, by means of that species of sympathy which demands a violent return of the will upon itself of which M. Bergson speaks, but evokes it from the in- tellect and by means of a concept, an idea. The concept, or notion, of being corresponds with this intuition. The term being is the correct term to express it, though obviously we cannot display by this poor word nor for that matter by the most skilful devices of language all the wealth contained in the intuition. It requires all the metaphysics hitherto elaborated or to be elaborated hereafter in its entire THIRD LECTURE future development to know all the riches implicit in the concept of being. It is by producing in con- junction with reality a mental word within itself that the intellect immediately attains being as such, the Subject-matter of metaphysics. Thus we are confronted with objects and as we con- front them, the diverse realities made known by our senses or by the several sciences, we receive at a given moment, as it were the revelation of an intelligible mystery concealed in them. Nor is this revelation, this species of intellectual shock, confined to metaphysicians. It is sometimes given to those who are not metaphysi- cians. There is a kind of sudden intuition which a soul may receive of her own existence, or of " being" embodied in all things whatsoever, however lowly. It may even happen that to a particular soul this in- tellectual perception presents the semblance of a mystical grace. I have quoted elsewhere (Degres du Savoir, p. 552) a personal experience communicated to me. "I have often experienced in a sudden intuition (he reality of my being, the profound first principle which makes me exist outside nonentity. It is a powerful intuition whose violence has sometimes frightened me and which first revealed to me a meta- physical absolute." A similar intuition is described in the autobiography of Jean-Paul Richter. "One morning when I was still a child, I was standing on the threshold of the house and looking to my left in the direction of the woodpile when suddenly there came to me from heaven like a lightning flash the thought: I am a self, a thought which has never since left me. I perceived my self for the first time and for good." 47 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS There are, therefore, metaphysical intuitions which are a natural revelation to the soul, invested with the decisive, imperious and dominant character, of a "Substantial word" uttered by reality. They reveal the intelligible treasure, the unforgettable trans- objective fact, which is either her own subsistence, the "Self" that she is, or being either her own or the being apprehended in objects. Evidently this intuition of which I am speaking does not necessarily present this appearance of a species of mystical grace. But it is always, so to speak, a gift bestowed upon the intellect, and beyond question it is in one form or another indispensable to every metaphysician. But we must also observe that although it is indispensable to the metaphysician, it is not given to everybody, nor to all those who engage in philosophy, nor even to all philosophers who desire to be or are believed to be metaphysicians. Kant never had it. What is the explanation of this? That it is difficult. It is not indeed difficult like an operation which it is hard to perform, whose successful performance demands expert skill. For there is nothing simpler. It was precisely because he sought it by a technique, an intellectual technique of extreme sublety, that Kant failed to attain it. Moreover, it is as true to say that this intuition pro- duces itself through the medium of the vital action of our intellect, I mean as vitally receptive and contemplative, as to say that we produce it. It is difficult, inasmuch as it is difficult to arrive at the degree of intellectual purification at which this act is produced in us, at which we become sufficiently disengaged, sufficiently empty to hear what all things whisper and to listen instead of composing answers. THIRD LECTURE We must attain a certain level of intellectual spirituality, such that the impact of reality upon the intellect or to use a less crude metaphor, the active attentive silence of the intellect, its meeting with the real gives the objects received through our senses (whose species impressa is buried in the depths of the intellect) a new kind of presence in us: they are present in a mental word, another life, a living con- tent which is a world of trans-objective presence and intelligibility. Then we are confronted within our- selves with the object of this intuition, as an object of knowledge, living with an immaterial life, with the burning translucence of intellectual nature in act. //. Concrete Approaches to this Intuition. 4. It is worth remarking at this point that there are concrete approaches which prepare for this intuition and lead up to it. They are different paths which, however, it is important to observe, are radically insufficient if we stop short at them, but which may prove useful to particular individuals if they will transcend them, if they will go further. Here I will mention three of these. One is the Bergsonian experience of duration. Within limits it is a genuine experience. Duration is apprehended by an experience of motion in which, on a level deeper than that of consciousness, our psychic states fuse in a potential manifold which is, notwithstanding, a unity, and in which we are aware of advancing through time and enduring through change indivisibly, yet that we are growing richer in quality and triumphing over the inertia of matter. This is a psychological experience which is not yet the metaphysical intuition of being, but is capable of 49 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS leading us up to it. For involved in this psychological duration and implicitly given by it there is indeed existence, the irreducible value of being, esse. This intuition is therefore a path, an approach, to the perception of existence. The latter, however, is not yet nakedly displayed in its own intelligible form. 5. The German philosopher, Heidegger, assures us that no man can become a metaphysician who has not first experienced anguish, this anguish being un- derstood not only psychologically but also as meta- physically as possible. It is the feeling at once keen and lacerating of all that is precarious and imperilled in our existence, in human existence. As the effect of this feeling, of this anguish, our existence loses its commonplace and acquires a unique value, its unique value. It confronts us as something saved from nothingness, snatched from nonentity. Certainly such a dramatic experience of nothingness may serve as an introduction to the intuition of being, provided it is taken as no more than an introduction. 6. My third example is not a thesis fully worked out, but suggestions put forward in preliminary sketches or in the course of conversation. Therefore I must speak of it with all due reserve and without committing its author to my interpretation. It would seem that M. Gabriel Marcel is seeking a method of approach to metaphysical being by deepening the sense of certain moral facts, such as fidelity. As Heidegger attaches himself to a personal experience, a psychological experience such as anguish, while warning us that he is not concerned with psychology, so the notion of fidelity is here understood in a sense whicji does or should transcend ethics and conveys strictly metaphysical value and content. We may observe that 50 THIRD LECTURE the consistency, steadfastness, firmness and victory over disintegration and oblivion contained in this virtue and suggested by the word fidelity are strictly dependent upon a certain steadfastness in reality itself in virtue of which I dominate the flux of my own life and possess my metaphysical consistence. Therefore, if I rightly understand M. Marcel's thought, if we follow its direction we shall conclude that a philosophy of life which confuses my self with the flux of my life is incon- sistent with the experience of fidelity. The experience, the irreducible reality of what I experience and know as fidelity, is pregnant with an ontological realism. These Approaches are Useful only if we Take the Decisive Step. 7. In these three instances we are, you see, con- fronted with so many concrete approaches to being. The first of these experiences, that of duration, belongs to the speculative order, and is at once psychological and biological. The two others belong to the practical and moral order, the psychological factor being in- vested with the ethical. If we stop here, we have not, I maintain, crossed the threshold of metaphysics. These philosophic explorations are certainly not to be despised or refused. They can perform most valuable service by directing towards being many minds hide- bound by idealist prejudices or repelled by some textbook of so-called scholasticism. They can prepare them to recover the sense of being. But they can do this, only if we will travel further; cross the threshold, take the decisive step. Otherwise, whatever we do, we shall remain in psychology and ethics, which we shall then work up, swell out, enlarge or rarefy to make them mimic metaphysics. We shall then have, 5' A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS not genuine metaphysics, but a substitute which may certainly possess a very considerable philosophic interest, but is nothing but a substitute all the same. The utmost that can be achieved along these lines are solutions obtained by an indirect route which skirts the essential issue or by definitions based on external criteria, not the genuine solutions demanded by a science worthy of the name, by philosophic knowledge. Even if psychology and ethics enrich their own speech with metaphysical echoes or undertones, they will be but echoes. But the most serious danger which all these methods of approaching being involve is the danger of remain- ing imprisoned in one or other of the concrete analogues of being, whichever one has chosen as a path to it. The experience in question gives information only of itself. This is indeed the drawback of pure experience in philosophy and the pitfall of every metaphysical system which attempts to be empirical. The experi- ence, though valid for the domain covered by the particular intuition, cannot, save by an arbitrary procedure, be extended to a wider province of the intelligible world, and be employed to explain it. On the other hand, as I have just said, such experi- ences bring us to the threshold which it is then for us to cross by taking the decisive step. We do this by letting the veils too heavy with matter and too opaque of the concrete psychological or ethical fact fall away to discover in their purity the strictly metaphysical values which such experiences, concealed. There is then but one word by which we can express our discovery, namely being. Let us have the courage to require our intellect, acting as such, to look the reality signified by the term in the face. It is some- 52 THIRD LECTURE thing primordial, at once very simple and very rich and, if you will, inexpressible in the sense that it is that whose perception is the most difficult to describe, because it is the most immediate. Here we are at the root, at last laid bare, of our entire intellectual life. You may say, if you please, for I am here attempting to employ a purely descriptive terminology as a pre- liminary to the formation of a philosophic vocabulary, that what is now perceived is, as it were, a pure activity, a subsistence, but a subsistence which trans- cends the entire order of the imaginable, a living tenacity, at once precarious it is nothing for me to crush a fly and indomitable within and around me there is growth without ceasing. By this subsistence, this tenacity, objects come up against me, overcome possible disaster, endure and possess in themselves whatever is requisite for this. These are metaphors, lamentably inadequate, which attempt to express not so much what my intellect sees, which is super- empirical, as my experience of the vision, and do not themselves enter the domain of metaphysics but which may make us aware that to the word "being," when it expresses a genuine metaphysical intuition, there must correspond a primary and original datum, of its essence above the scope of observation. So true is it that the words "being," "existence," are pregnant with a metaphysical content which transcends observation, that, in order to free us from it, logical empiricists have proposed to abandon the term "existence." It is a bold though impossible solution, and moreover entirely consistent with the principles of empiricism, inasmuch as they demand the formation of a philosophic vocabulary completely divested of ontological reference. In the Revue de . 53 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS Metaphysique et de Morale (April-June, 1931) I read an article by Madame Christine Ladd-Frankliri, entitled La Non-Existence de VExistence, in which she proposes, in order to satisfy the demands of a scientific method devoid of ontology, in fact, of a purely em- pirical metaphysic, to substitute for the word "exist- ence" the phrase ''Event in such and such a province of thought." This metaphysical content, of which we are speak- ing, covers the entire domain of intelligibility and reality. It is a gift bestowed upon the intellect by an intuition which infinitely exceeds, I do not say in the intensity of its experience but in its intelligible value, the experiences which may have led up to it. ///. Confirmatory Rational Analysis. 8. I have spoken briefly of the intuition of being and of the paths which may lead to its threshold. I must add that it is both possible and necessary to show analytically that to arrive at this point is inevitable. We are now dealing with something totally different from those concrete approaches to being which I have just discussed. We are now concerned with a rational analysis establishing the necessity of being as such, ens in quantum ens, as the supreme object of our know- ledge. Such an analytic proof presupposes, as taken for granted by common sense or as scientifically confirmed by the criticism of knowledge, what in general terms we may call the objective or rather trans-objective validity of understanding and know- ledge, a non-idealist position. It is then easy to prove that it is only in appearance that we can dispense, as Madame Ladd-Franklin would have us do, with the notions of being and existence, even though we speak 54 THIRD LECTURE of " Event" and attempt to prove that we should substitute this choicer term for the word existence. The entire series of concepts employed to reach her conclusion witnesses at every turn to the primacy of the notion of being. It is argued, for example, that philosophers who employ the term existence are mistaken and that a sound scientific method requires the abandonment of ontological notions. But being is still there not always the word but the object which it signifies. And at every turn the critic makes use, unawares, of this intelligible value of being, which it is claimed has been got rid of. Every attempt to eliminate the notion of being refutes itself. In the second place it is easy to prove, as St. Thomas proves in the first article of his De Veritate that all our notions, all our concepts, are resolved in the concept of being. It is therefore the first of all our concepts, of which all the rest are determinations. Being is determined by the differences which arise within, not outside, itself. It is then to being that we inevitably reascend as to the fountain head. It is being which the intellect perceives first and before anything else. It is, therefore, being which the metaphysical intellect must disengage and know in its distinctive mystery. On this point consult the texts of the Metaphysics mentioned in my last lecture. 9. It is, however, important to observe that the intuition of which I was speaking just now and the analysis with which I am at present concerned should accompany each other. Were we content with the intuition without the rational analysis we should risk being landed with an intuition unconfirmed by reason, whose rational necessity therefore would not be manifest. Were we content with the analysis as we 55 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS are liable to be when we teach philosophy though the analysis would indeed prove that we must arrive at the intuition of being as the goal of a necessary regress, it would not of itself furnish the intuition. Thus the analysis is in the same case as the approaches of which I spoke earlier. The latter led up concretely, in via inventionis, to the metaphysical intuition of being. But it still remained to cross the threshold to which they had led us. It is the same with rational analysis. It leads us by logical necessity, and in via judicii, to the threshold which an intuitive perception alone enables us to cross, the perception of being as such. When the mind once has this intuition it has it for good. Observe what an unforgettable event in the history of philosophy was Parmenides' discovery, imperfect though it still was, of being as such. It was on that account that Plato called him the father of philosophy, and when obliged to criticise him accused himself of parricide. Parmenides was, it would seem, the first western philosopher to have the perception, though still very imperfect as I have said, of being as such. It was imperfect, for he does not seem to have dis- engaged it in its naked metaphysical value. He appears, as his theory of the sphere indicates, to have amalgamated the metaphysical intuition of being with a physical perception of sensible reality and to have misunderstood or misinterpreted his intuition of being, when the inevitable moment arrived for him to ex- plain it in terms of philosophic concepts, by under- standing it univocally and thus falling into monism. You will also see why the intuition of the principle of identity, every being is what it is, being is being, can possess such value for the metaphysician, can 56 THIRD LECTURE become the object of his enraptured contemplation. Common sense and therefore the man in the street makes use of the principle without scrutinising it. "A cat is a cat" says common sense what more could it say? so that, if the philosopher comes on the scene and enunciates the principle of identity in front of common sense, the latter will not see it, but will merely have the impression that an insignificant commonplace has been affirmed, in fact a tautology. The philosopher, on the other hand, when he enun- ciates the principle of identity enunciates it as an expression of the metaphysical intuition of being, and thus sees in it the first fundamental law of reality itself, a law which astounds him because it proclaims ex abrupto, the primal mystery of being, its combination of subsistence and abundance, a law which is ex- emplified by objects in an infinite number of different modes, and applied with an infinite variety. It is not as the result of a logistic process that the metaphysician perceives and employs the principle of identity, so that it compels him to reduce everything to *a pure identity, that is to say to obliterate all the diversities and varieties of being. For it is with its mode of analogical realisation that he apprehends the principle. When he apprehends being as such, being according to its pure intelligible nature, he apprehends the essentially analogous value of the concept of being which is implicitly manifold and is realised in diverse objects in such fashion as to admit differences of essence between them, complete and vast differences. The principle of identity secures the multiplicity and variety of objects. Far from reducing all things to identity, it is, as I have explained else- where, the guardian of universal multiplicity, the . 57 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS axiom of being's irreducible diversities. If each being is what it is, it is not what other beings are. The Intuition of Being as Such is an Eidetic Intuition. 10. It follows that the metaphysical intuition of being is an abstractive intuition. Abstraction, how- ever, is an antique term rendered suspect to modern ears by the distortion of long use and by errors and misconceptions of every sort. Therefore instead of abstraction I propose to speak of eidetic or ideating visualisation. I maintain then that the metaphysical intuition of being is an ideating intuition, that is an intuition producing an idea, and this in a pre-eminent degree. How could it be otherwise with the pure speculative operation of our human intellect? This intuition is at the summit of eidetic intellectuality. What do I mean by the phrase eidetic visualisation, abstractio ? I mean that the intellect by the very fact that it is spiritual proportions its objects to itself, by elevating them within itself to diverse degrees, in- creasingly pure, of spirituality and immateriality. It is within itself that it attains reality, stripped of its real existence outside the mind and disclosing, utter- ing in the mind a content, an interior, an intelligible sound or voice, which can possess only in the mind the conditions of its existence one and universal, an existence of intelligibility in act. If being were the object of a concrete intuition like that of an external sense or of introspection, of an intuition centred upon a reality grasped concretely in its singular existence, philosophy would be compelled to choose, as it gave this intuition an idealist or a realist value, between ja pure ontological monism and a pure phenomenalist pluralism. If, however, being is, as I have said, analogous 58 THIRD LECTURE and if the principle of identity is the axiom of reality's irreducible diversities, it is because extramental being is perceived in the mind under the conditions of the eidetic existence which it receives there, and the imperfect and relative unity it possesses in the mind must be broken up, as also must be the pure and unqualified unity of the objects of univocal con- cepts, when we pass from its existence in the concept to its real existence. The higher degree in which the intuition of being as such " ideates " is precisely the condition and guarantee of its correct metaphysical employment. At this point a gulf yawns between the scholastics and many modern philosophers of realist tendencies who attempt to construct an "Existential" philosophy and ontology. For many modern philosophers being is indeed the object of an intuition and a decisive encounter 1 but of an empirical intuition and a concrete 1 In the study to which I referred above M. Gabriel Marcel (page 8, note i) employs the term recollection and rejects the term intuition. An intuition of being, he writes, would be "incapable of taking its place in a collection, of being catalogued as an experience or Erlebnis of any kind. For such an experience is always, on the contrary, such that it can be at one instant integrated in its psychological matrix, at the next isolated and, as it were, exposed. Hence any attempt to recall the intuition, to describe it, shall I say, must be fruitless. Therefore to speak of an intuition of being is to invite us to play on a muted piano. This intuition cannot be brought into the light of day, for the simple reason that it is not, in fact, possessed." In my opinion this passage calls for the following comments: (1) The metaphysical intuition of being cannot take its place in a collection or repertory of experiences like any experience, or Erlebnis, you can think of because it is more fundamental and more immediate than all the rest and relates to a primary reality already present in our entire intellectual life. (2) Nevertheless it is an intuition. It is not indeed "just any in- tuition or Erlebnis" for it is super-empirical. It is a formal intuition, an intellectual perception, the intuition par excellence, of which the human intellect is capable only at the summit of its intellectuality. And for that very reason, because of this presence within itself which is distinctive of what is spiritual, the intellect is able to return upon this . 59 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS encounter, which however profound, mysterious and secret it may be supposed to be, always remains of the same nature as those procured by psychological or moral experience. It discovers a singular reality or presence actually existing and acting in any case a reality which the intellect does not grasp by an eidetic visualisation in the transparence of an idea or concept. And it discovers it by a kind of affective and experienced connaturality. direct intuition, an immediate return or reapprehension which is totally different from a recollection or recreation of the past and by which this intuition is "possessed*' in its own spiritual light and "discovered" to consciousness which it fills with its music. In this sense to deny the metaphysical intuition of being precisely as an intuition is indeed to invite us to play, on a muted piano, the fundamental harmonies of metaphysics. (3) If a philosopher who is powerfully aware of the ontological mystery nevertheless is convinced that it cannot be an intuition, it is because idealistic prepossessions do not suffer him to address himself to his intellect as such, and trust to it to satisfy his search. We cannot but see in this attitude the effect of an unsurmounted prejudice against the objectivity of the intellect, which is conceived idealistically. In consequence of this prejudice he will seek to make contact with the ontological mystery so to speak by a circuitous route which leads through the subjective domain, therefore specifically by way of the obscure apprehension of love, and thus skirts the object we term being-. This object, however, is not a screen, it is being itself. Therefore love does not really skirt it but enters it after its fashion, as does intellect after its own. On the "other side" of it there is only nothingness. (4) Aristotle observed that metaphysics is too lofty for us to possess securely. It is only with a precarious grasp that the metaphysical intuition of being is "possessed" in that awareness of which I spoke just now. On the one hand its object is supremely inexhaustible, and is presented to us as such; on the other hand this intuition, with the awareness that reduplicates it, far from being always in act becomes habitual. We actualise it at will but in a fashion usually imperfect and without recapturing the original vividness, though it is also true that we can make it indefinitely deeper and more intense. I would add that " the assurance which underlies the entire process of thought, even discursive " of which M. Gabriel Marcel rightly speaks, belongs, in fact, to the obscure intuition of being possessed by common sense, the perception of what I have termed vague being. It is only when the metaphysical intuition of being has occurred that this assurance refers to it also. It is then confirmed, strengthened and made self- conscious. 60 THIRD LECTURE It is therefore an idealist prejudice which prevents these philosophers from making a frank and deliberate use of the eidetic intuition. They fail to see that they do employ it all the same but on its lowest level and mingled with sensible and emotional factors, the level, namely, of psychological experience or experiences even more enveloped by the opacity of the senses. Hence, although the various forms of experience of which I have been speaking, may serve as paths to the metaphysical perception of being, they cannot of themselves constitute it. This perception, this intuition is of a supremely eidetic order, is purely intelligible, not empirical. That is the reason why many who think themselves metaphysicians are in fact psycho- logists or moral philosophers and, though striving to reach metaphysics, mimic rather than attain the perception of which I am speaking. Thomism, as I have already observed, merits the appellation of an existential philosophy, and this already in the speculative order, in what concerns the speculative portion of philosophy. But though Thomist metaphysics is -an existential metaphysics, it is so by being and remaining metaphysics, a wisdom whose procedure is intellectual and in strict accordance with the demands of the intellect and its distinctive in- tuitiveness. 61 FOURTH LECTURE CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT BEING AS SUCH /. The Analogy of Being. i . I have spoken of the intuition of being precisely as the subject matter of metaphysics, of being as such, and of the concrete approaches to that intuition, also of the rational analysis which demands it by proving retrogressively that being is our first and indispensable object of thought. I have further observed that this intuition, taken as an experience lived by myself, that is from the side of the subject, is like every experience unutterable, or rather more so than any other experi- ence and therefore can be described or suggested only approximately. In this respect we can speak of an intelligible "revelation," and say that an intellectual perception invested with a more or less intense emotional atmosphere suddenly confronts us with this extraordinary and "unimaginable" reality which has risen up, as it were, for the first time before the eyes of the mind. As a result of this perception, it is evident that I myself and all things are subsistent and deter- minate, snatched from nonentity, loss, disaster, m^in- tained, and maintaining ourselves, outside it. The object, however, to which this intellectual intuition relates can perfectly well be named, is by no means unutterable. It is, on the contrary, the first- object to be conceived. I have in fact conceived it as embodied in sensible objects long before I conceived 62 FOURTH LECTURE it, as I now do, in itself. From childhood I have given it a name. It is perceived in a mental word which we express by the term being, and cannot express otherwise. Being, existence, I do not depart from it. If I am asked about this concept of being, called upon to explain it, I shall say and can only say and this is not a definition but a simple designa- tion that being is "that which exists or can exist." And this designation possesses meaning only because it thus refers to a primary intuition. 2. This, however, is not the primitive intuition of man as man, but the metaphysician's intuition in which being is beheld in itself and in its essential properties, secundum quod est ens. I see it as an intel- ligible reality which issues from the least thing and in diverse respects belongs to all things. It is as though on opening a bud there came out something bigger than the world, something that, with values and in ways essentially diverse, belongs to the bud in which I saw it first, to my self and to the very Cause of everything which exists. This being as such, the distinctive object of the metaphysician, is, how- ever, grasped by a pure and genuine intuition only when its polyvalence or analogy, its essentially analogous value, is grasped at the same time. It is a reality independent of myself, which con- stitutes, thus considered in itself, an entire universe of possible knowledge and intelligibility, of intelligible mystery, and which is not one thing, purely and simply one, but which is everywhere found in essen- tially different forms. We are thus in a sphere where no sensible image avails anything, neither that of a body which is one purely and simply, nor that of a manifold of visible objects, which are an aggregate 63 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS without unity. Its subsistence is purely intelligible and far from excluding, requires its multiplicity and diversification. We might speak of it as a liquid crystal which is the environment of the metaphysical intellect. Being presents me with an infinite intelligible variety which is the diversification of something which I can nevertheless call by one and the same name. It is something that I find everywhere and call by the same name, because it is in all cases made known to me by the similar relationship which the most diverse objects possess to a certain term essentially diverse, designated in each by our concept of being, as being present formally and intrinsically in it. And this analogical character, an example of what is called the analogy of strict proportionality, is inscribed in the very nature of the concept of being. It is analogous from the outset, not a univocal concept afterwards employed analogously. It is essentially analogous, polyvalent. In itself it is but a simple unity of pro- portionality, that is, it is purely and simply manifold and one in a particular respect. Essence and Existence. 3. I will attempt to bring out more clearly the intelligible subsistence contained in this the first object grasped by the metaphysician's intuition. We are immediately aware of this characteristic of it that when we consider different things there is in each alike a typical relationship between what is, that which philosophers term essence or nature, and its esse, or existence. That is to say this notion of being involves a species of polarity, essence-existence. A notion of being which completely abstracts from either of these two aspects is impossible. Surely this FOURTH LECTURE fact is worth our attention. The concept of being implicity involves in its analogous or polyvalent unity the division of being into created and uncreated, into substance and accident. For when I reflect upon being I see it divided into typical kinds of being which differ throughout, created and uncreated being, substantial and accidental being. But in virtue of its essential structure the concept of being also includes in itself indissolubly at every degree of its polyvalence, and whichever kind of being we are considering, throughout its entire extent, the boundless field which it can cover these two linked and associated members of the pair essence-existence, which the mind cannot isolate in separate concepts. Whatever being I may think of, its concept implies this double aspect. Meta- physics teaches us that in God the distinction between essence and existence is a distinctio rationis, a purely ideal distinction, but that in all created objects there is a real distinction between them. Thus the idea of being, however imperfect its unity may be, from the very fact of its higher degree of abstraction, possesses, like every idea, though its unity is imperfect and relative, more unity than the reality it signifies. Not only does this identical notion, when it signifies one analogous being, continue to be valid of another totally different. It also permanently unites in our mind, by its multiple and relative unity, realities -namely essence and existence which outside the mind are really distinct. To this same notion, to the imperfect unity of the concept of being a real diversity in things perman- ently corresponds, namely that between essence and existence in all creatures. This is the first observation we can formulate. A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS Being and the Transcendental. 4. When we consider the transcendentals we reach a second conclusion. There is a reality which I attain in the notion of being, in the intuition of being, and which I express by the term being; and it be- comes evident that this reality even as objectively manifested by and in the notion of being is richer and more pregnant with intelligible values than the idea of being by itself immediately reveals. By an intrinsic necessity it must in a sense overflow the very idea in which it is objectified. This is what I mean. You know that metaphysicians recognise a certain number of universal modes of being, as universal as being itself, which are termed transcendentals (passiones entis}. For example unity is being in as much as it is undivided. This is an aspect of being which rises before the mind namely its internal consistence. Certainly being can be divided. But in so far as it is, it ceases, renounces itself. To the extent to which anything is, it is one. Truth is being in as much as it confronts intellection, thought; and this is another aspect of being, thus revealed, a new note struck by it. It answers to the knowing mind, speaks to it, superabounds in utterance, ex- presses, manifests a subsistence for thought, a par- ticular intelligibility which is itself. An object is true that is to say conforms to what it thus says itself to thought, to the intelligibility it enunciates to the extent that it is. What is then manifest is of the nature of an obligation attached to being. An / ought to be consubstantial with / am. Every being ought to be and is, in so far as it is, in conformity with the expression of it which a perfect Knowledge would 66 FOURTH LECTURE produce. Then there is goodness, transcendental good. Good is being in as much as it confronts love, the will. This is another epiphany of being. I shall return to it later. Everything is good, metaphysically good. I am not speaking of moral goodness. Everything is good, that is to say, apt to be loved, to be an object of love, to the extent to which it is. Hence each of these transcendentals is being itself apprehended under a particular aspect. They add nothing real to it. How could they add anything to being? Outside being there is but nonentity. They are, so to speak, a reduplication of being for and in our mind. There is no real distinction between being and unity, between being and truth, between being and good. They are " convertible" notions. The distinction between these different intelligible infinities is merely conceptual, though based on reality, a virtual distinction. You see, then, that of a single reality, of something which is one and the same outside my mind, of some- thing which precisely as being is one, true and good, of this single and unique reality which exists or is capable of existing outside my mind I possess several ideas. The idea, the notion, the ratio, the concept of being qua idea, differs from the idea of unity, of truth, of goodness or good. I therefore possess many ideas which correspond to a single arid identical reality too rich, too fertile to enter my mind by the medium of a single idea, not even this primary idea, the idea of being. We may say that being compels the concept of being to multiply diverse concepts and exceed itself. A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS Being and Tendency. 5. A third consideration relates to the dynamic character of being, the fact that I cannot posit this reality, grasped by my primary intuition of being as such, without at the same time positing a certain tendency, a certain inclination. The Thomists repeat- ing St. Thomas's dictum "every form is accompanied by an inclination," hold that this is a truth self- evident to anyone who possesses the metaphysical intuition of being. 1 To affirm being is to affirm inclination or tendency. We are thus confronted with a kind of communicability or superabundance which is an inherent character of being itself, in as much as the notion of being, as I have just hinted, exceeds itself and passes over into the notion of goodness or good. In metaphysical good a new order is disclosed, a certain right to exist consubstantial with existence. For good is seen to be, as it were, a justification of being. It asserts a merit. Being is justified in itself justiftcatum in semetipso, because it is good. Good, I say, asserts a merit a glory also and a joy. By this I mean that good, as I indicated above, is essentially bound up with love. A good thing is worthy, metaphysically, though alas not always morally, to be loved, either in and for itself, as a perfection, with a direct affective love 2 this is good in the primary sense or as perfect- 1 Hate propositio t quod ad omnem formam sequitur inclinatio, per se nota est, John of St. Thomas, Curs. Phil. Vives, Vol. Ill, p. 523 Owm omne esse sequitur appetitus. An inclination follows every form, an appetite every being. Here we are dealing with a tendency or inclination of the agent itself as such, which follows upon being as act or form, the inclina- tion of being to superabound and to perfect, to communicate a surplus a determinate surplus, a determinate excess of being, without which it could communicate nothing. God needs nothing. In Him there is simply this generosity and superabundance 123 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS without the least connotation of receptivity or potency. His Being is love. If He refers all things to Himself, it is not for His own good. For He has no need of them. It is for their good and for their own ontological rectitude, without which, indeed, they could not exist. They could sooner lose their nature than their ordination to God. In God there is no shade of selfishness. Deus suam gloriam quaerit non propter se sed propter nos. God seeks His glory not for His own sake but for ours. 1 8. We now understand the true sense of St. Thomas's statement, frequently repeated of the principle of finality; omne agens agit propter finem, every agent acts in view of an end. You will find in St. Thomas himself, summed up in his distinctive fashion, that is with an admirable simplicity, all the points I have here at- tempted to make. The passage in question is in the Summa Theologica (I II, i, 2). Here it is. "Matter receives form only in so far as it is moved by an agent, for nothing reduces itself from potency to act. But the agent does not move without intending an end or as preordained to an end. Ex intentions finis" The formula is wholly general and universal. "For unless the agent were determined to a particular effect it would not do one thing rather than another. If, there- fore, it is to produce a determinate effect, it must be preordained to a particular thing which is its end. This preordination which in a rational nature is effected by the rational appetite we term the will, is effected in other natures by what is called the natural appetite." 2 *Sum. TheoL, II-II, 132, 1, ad I. */-//, i, 2. Materia non consequitur formam nisi secundum quod movctuf ab agente: nihil enim reducit se de potentia in actum. Agens autem non move 124 SIXTH LECTURE Moreover this formula, every agent acts in view of an end, is the pivot on which Pere Garrigou- Lagrange's magnificent book Le Realisme du Principe de Finalite turns. From all that has been said we can understand why the ancients also employed another formula of equiva- lent meaning: Omnis res est propter suam operationem, everything exists for its operation. This is what I have been pointing out. As Pere Garrigou-Lagrange observes the ancients saw a difficulty at this point. A thing is a substance, an operation is an accident. Can the substance exist for the accident? Cajetan's answer is profound. Omnis res est propter suam opsra- tionem, scilicet propter semetipsam operantem. Everything exists for itself in operation, for in as much as it is in operation, it attains its ultimate actuality. We are now in a position to criticise certain state- ments of the principle of finality, which are . merely approximate or actually erroneous. In his book on final causes Paul Janet proposed the following formula: " Everything is determined to an end." It is faulty in two respects. In the first place God is not deter- mined to an end. Though as I have pointed out He is the object and the end of His love. He does not exist for an end; and His being and will no more have final than they have efficient causes. And in the second place chance events, at least in respect of the entire order of created agents, have no end. That is why they are fortuitous. Therefore to defend the principle of nisi ex intentione finis. Si enim agens non esset determination ad aliquem effectum non magis ageret hoc quam illud: ad hoc ergo quod determinatum effectum producat, necesse est quod determinetur ad aliquid certum, quod habet wtionem finis. Haec autem determination sicut in rationali naiurafitper rational fm appetitum, qui dicitur voluntas ; ita in aliis fit per inclinationem naturalem t quae dicitur appetitus naturalis. 125 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS finality the philosopher need not be able to assign an end, for example, to the shape of clouds. The sole preordaining agent on which chance events depend is the First Cause. For the rest they depend on the mutual interference of secondary causes without any preordination in the created order. On the same ground I must criticise another suggested statement of the principle of finality: " whatever happens, happens in view of an end." That which happens by chance is precisely what happens with no end to determine it. Every agent indeed acts in view of an end, for an end. It is because the pursuit of their respective ends by different agents gives rise to a mutual interference of these lines of causation that an event occurs which is itself fortuitous. That is why St. Thomas, speaking formally, says that chance events have no cause determining their production, because they have no unity, but are merely the coincidence of a manifold, if we may so express it. The sole unity they can possess is in thought. 9. We should further observe, as St. Thomas points out (De Potentia, q. 5 a. I) that since, as we have just seen, "the end is a cause, only in as much as it moves the agent to its operation, whether the agent be determined to it by its nature or by knowledge and will, it is not the first cause in being but only in intention. Where there is no action, there is no end, as we read in the third book of the Metaphysics." On this there are three observations to be made. The end is not first in being but only in intention, in as much as it signifies the agent's preordination to a particular action or effect. This purifies the principle of finality from a number of adventitious interpreta- 126 SIXTH LECTURE tions which more or less consciously confuse the end with the efficient cause. The end does not act by any entitative action or motion in the strict sense. Failure to grasp this vitiated the interpretations of the principle .of finality frequently proposed by the romantic philosophy of the nineteenth century. No clear distinction was made between the final cause in the strict sense and a sort of efficient causality supposed to be exercised by the end itself. Now for my second observation. The good acts as lovable or desirable. Its function as good is to attract love. We may therefore say that the good or end "acts" on the agent or "moves" him. This language is, however, as I have just indicated, metaphorical. What is not metaphorical is that the end in virtue of the love it evokes, is the ground of the agent's action. In strictest truth it determines the latter, and exercises a most genuine causality over it. How does it do this? The causality is the love itself in as much as it de- pends upon the good or end by which the agent tends towards that good or end. This love is some- times the agent's being itself, sometimes the "pro- duced" or elicited love which is evoked in the agent by the mere fact that the good in question is presented to him by knowledge. I said at the outset 1 that love of the end is the formal reason of the agent's action. This means that the true causality of the end or that in virtue of which it acts is this love which it evokes by the fact that it is known. 2 In the case of ' ' produced, ' ' or ""elicit," love this is obvious. In the case of "radical," or natural, love which is identical with the agent's 1 See above p. 113. a Cf. John of St. Thomas "Quae sit causalitas finis." Curs. Phil., Ed. Reiser, 2 pp., 276 et sqq. 127 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS being itself, with the very essence of the substance or faculty, the knowledge in question must be sought not in the agent itself, but in the thought which gives the agent being, the creative Thought. There is indeed no question here of a knowledge which evokes in God a love of the end. God is not subject to the causality of an end. He is Himself the End. As such He acts on all things, as supremely loved by them, not only as their efficient cause, and His creative knowledge orders all things to their end and good. My third observation is this. Where there is no action, there is no final cause. Because there is no action in mathematics there is no final cause in this sphere any more than there is any efficient cause. In mathe- matics there is but a formal cause. This what Aristotle meant by the very important remark on which the Thomists comment, that mathematics "are not good." Good, that is an end, has no place in mathematical explanation. You will understand from this that a philosopher such as Spinoza, who envisages the nature of metaphysics from the mathematical stand- point, must inevitably confuse the agent's relation to its action with that of the essence to its properties and thus reject finality. Finality is as impossible in Spinoza's world, as in the world of mathematics. Spinoza's God, a Deity very imperfectly immanent, is thought and extension, as we might conceive a subsistent Geometry. No more than the latter is He or can He be love. Nor can He be Himself the object and end of His love. Though we ought to love Him with an intellectual love, as we might love such a Geometry, both are equally incapable of returning our love or loving us first. Moreover, Spinoza's God causes things without ordaining them to any end. 128 SIXTH LECTURE We do not say that the essence of the triangle is made for its properties, which would be meaningless. Nor is this essence really distinct from its properties. This attempt to conceive the relation of the agent to its action on the model of the relation of the geometrical essence to its properties, though in fact it is impossible to eliminate completely the relation of agent to action, may help us to grasp Spinoza's conception of an im- manent cause, in which there is no real distinction between the cause and that which is caused by it. Why is this ? Because there is no real distinction between the essence of the triangle and its properties. Neverthe- less this Spinozist cause retains the term cause and the idea of a production, an emanation. For this immanent cause, conceived on the model of the relation of the geometrical essence to its properties retains something of the datum it is sought to reduce, namely the agent's relation to its action and effect. But in the latter case the cause is in fact distinct from the effect as it cannot be in Spinoza's immanent cause with which it is therefore incompatible. It is primarily because Spinoza failed to grasp the real distinction between the agent and its action that at the same time and with equal vehemence he denied the principle of finality and the possibility of miracles. Both alike are rejected, because you cannot deprive a triangle of its geometrical properties. If you conceive the agent's relation to its action in this geometrical fashion it becomes absurd to hold that an agent can be miraculously deprived of its operation, that the youths in the fiery furnace could fail to be burned by the fire. 10. One final observation about this principle of finality. Onme agens agit propter finem, every agent acts 120 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS in view of an end. Like the principle of sufficient reason this is an instance of the second mode of perseity, per se secundo modo. When the mind perceives these two notions into which being divides beneath its eye, the notions "Acting in view of an end" and "being that acts/' it sees at once that the former involves "Being that acts/' as its subject, not as part of its definition. I hope the exposition I have attempted has shown you how this principle, the third of the great first principles which possess the universal range of tran- scendental being, imposes itself upon the intellect without the least taint of anthropomorphism. I have dealt primarily with natural agents. And on the other hand I have strictly refrained from considering the case of a manifold which concurs to produce a certain unity, in which the principle of finality is exemplified in the second degree. It was simpler to leave this out of account and confine myself to the relation or ordination of an agent to its operation, whether a natural agent, or an intelligent and volun- tary agent. In the next lecture I shall say a few words about the principle of efficient causality. I shall thus abandon the higher ground of the absolute universality possessed by the transcendentals when taken in the pure state, for the lower ground where our prospect of being is more restricted. A species of trinity is constituted by the first princi- ples which cover the entire field of being in all its universality, namely the principles of identity, sufficient reason and finality. In the principle of identity we contemplate transcendental being itself, under two diverse aspects, in the principle of sufficient reason SIXTH LECTURE the mind contemplates transcendental being and transcendental truth. In the principle of finality it contemplates transcendental being and transcendental good. Below this level of absolute universality we can study contingent being. And when it contemplates contingent being, being which does not contain in itself the ground of its being, its sufficient reason, the mind catches sight of a fourth self-evident principle, the principle of efficient causality. SEVENTH LECTURE THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY. CHANCE I. The Principle of Causality. i . As I remarked at the close of my last lecture, to reach the principle of efficient causality we must cease to contemplate being in its entire analogical plenitude, as absolutely universal, comprising alike uncreated and created being. For the principle of causality obtains only in the latter, contingent being which is not a se, which does not contain in itself the entire ground of its existence. In fact the notion of being divides before the mind into self-existent or absolutely necessary being, and this moreover before the existence of a self-existent being has been proved, and being which is not self-existent but contingent. The same division may be expressed in other terms and more technically. We may say that being divides into being in pure act and composite being, into which in one way or another a factor of potency enters. It is the second member of this division, being which contains a potential factor, being therefore which is not a se, that we must now study. We are always brought back to the principle that being is richer than its objectivations, so that in the first intuitive judgements by which we apprehend it it divides into two distinct conceptual objects whose real identity we immediately recognise. Contingent being, being which is not self-existent, being which 132 SEVENTH LECTURE can be non-existent, this conceptual object divides before our mind's eye into two objects conceptually distinct. One of these is what I propose to term "contingent being posited in existence," the other what I shall term "caused," that is to say, "having a ground, a sufficient reason other than itself." When our mind contemplates these two notions we see that in being outside the mind they are necessarily identical. Accordingly we formulate the axiom : Every contingent being has a ground other than itself, exterior to itself, that is to say an efficient cause. It is a self-evident axiom and, like the principles we have already ex- amined, can be attached by a reductio ad absurdum to the principle of identity. For if we suppose a contingent being, a being which can be non-existent, that is to say which does not possess its entire ground in itself, which is not self- existent and at the same time imagine that this being which by definition does not possess its entire ground in itself has no ground outside itself, it constitutes as such a breach of the principle of sufficient reason. But a breach of the principle of sufficient reason is a breach of the principle of identity. This argument does not claim to demonstrate the principle of causality but to place those who deny it in an impasse. 2. You will observe that in all this I have not em- ployed any spatial division, such as those which M. Le Roy's philosophy attributes to conceptual thought and in particular to the principle of causality. Nor have I generalised a psychological experience, a pro- cedure which would have laid me open to a more or less plausible charge of anthropomorphism. I have not thought of a ball clashing with another ball, nor 133 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS of a muscular effort producing a particular effect and felt by us when we exert it. On the contrary, I have strictly adhered to the notion of ground or sufficient reason in its full abstract generality; That in virtue of which a thing is in the most general sense, that by which an object is determined in respect of intelligibility, that by which it can satisfy the intellect and give it rest. And it is simply this notion of sufficient reason which I have more fully determined by adding the note "other than the object of which it is the ground/ 7 a ground "exterior to the contingent being we have in view." So far, indeed, is the principle of causality from being derived from an empirical or psychological generalisation that it is difficult for it to make contact with experience. I mean that when we look for concrete examples of the principle of causality every one we find proves at some point defective. Take the instance of one body striking against another. We are indeed assured by long experience that the cause of the second body's motion is, in fact, con- cealed here, that the encounter of the two bodies is the cause of that motion. But we do not perceive in what this cause, this sufficient reason consists. It is ex- tremely mysterious. And for this reason our example is most unsatisfactory. Observe that one of the argu- ments employed by the empiricist school of philosophy, by David Hume for example, is the assumption that the rationality and self-evidence which belong to the principle of causality should, were that principle true, be transferable to the individual instances of causation) to which the principle is applied. They will therefore argue : in the fact that one ball strikes another, where do you perceive a priori the intelligible necessity of the second ball's motion? 134 SEVENTH LECTURE By simply inspecting the notions of which I have been speaking, to be contingent and to be caused, we see clearly that they are necessarily conjoined, and that the former demands the latter as that which accounts for its existence. But this does not mean that in every particular case we know in what this sufficient reason consists. I may remark, incidentally, that examples taken from psychology are preferable to others. Take the following example: I did this because I willed to do it, the instance of a rational and deliberate act of will. Here we see better how the effect, the act of choice, is attached to its cause, the deliberate will, as its sufficient reason. But even here a vast element of mystery remains, both in respect of the action of the cause, the free will itself, and of the fashion in which this decision is translated externally by a particular bodily movement. 3. Speaking generally it would seem that the mystery of being deepens when we come to the principle of causality. The reasons of this we may find in the facts that it is a principle primarily existential, that the bringing of anything into existence is always in- vested with a peculiar mystery, and that being is strictly the effect of the first cause. It is only in as much as second causes are themselves moved by God that they impart existence to their effect, are able to make anything exist. Therefore in the production of existence, the efficacious vocation to existence, there is some- thing which exceeds what a second cause could effect by itself, if it were not premoved by the First Cause, and which in some way depends upon the mystery of the creative act. If a being is contingent, there must, of necessity, 135 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS be something outside it which accounts for its coming into existence. Its own ontological sufficiency, if I may so put it, must be separate from it and bestowed upon it by another. This is certain, but how are we to under- stand it? In the first place we must not entertain the illusion that we have understood it by means of images which confine the mind to the empirical order and delude it with a false clarity an illusion which plays into the hands of the nominalists and the Kantians. If we remain within the intelligible order and respect its mystery, we shall find that it is possible to penetrate a little way into the intelligible mystery, by employing the keys forged by Aristotle, namely potency and act, and recognising the dynamic nature of being, the ontological root of the tendency, inclination and love on which I insisted so strongly in my last lecture. The principle of causality every contingent being has a cause may be expressed more philosophically in terms of potency and act. We shall affirm : That every being compounded of potency and act in as much as it is potential does not pass of itself to act. does not reduce itself to act. It passes to act by the operation of another being in act which causes the change. Nihil reducit se de potentia in actum. It is now clear that no being can be a cause save in so far as it is in act and (if a created cause) is con- fronted by a corresponding potency, a receptive factor. Being an agent is itself an inclination to communicate a good, so that philosophers who fail to recognise this dynamic aspect of being, and conceive being as an order of geometrical fixtures taken in the state of abstraction in which they exist in our mind, and sterilised of every tendency and consubstantial love 136 SEVENTH LECTURE must inevitably, with Malebranche, find causality a stumbling-block. It is clear that the communication of being and good implied by the relation of cause to effect is not the transmission of any imaginable entity, solid or liquid, passing from the former to the latter, but a community of actuation that is at once the final perfection of the transitive agent and that of the patient, both thus sharing in a single act and the agent's action being in the patient, actio in passo. (In the case of an immanent action virtually transitive, the action as such is wholly accomplished in the agent. But it evokes in the patient the actuality which perfects it and thereby renders the agent present in the patient, that is itself simply an ontological obedience to the action.) It is clear that since every created cause is as a cause more than the effect: and at the same time as created, less than itself and the effect together: in order to act it must be itself perfected, and brought into action by another. Nothing therefore, absolutely nothing, could be produced here below, not the slightest stir of a leaf, not the tiniest ripple on the surface of water, not the lightest movement of the emotions, not the most insignificant act of thought or will, if the created universe were not open to the action, virtually transitive, of the pure act, which, as Aristotle said, touches it without being touched by it, if a continual current of causal efficacy were not being poured without ceasing into creatures from the bosom of subsistent Intellect and subsistent Love. This is what is termed, in barbarous phraseology, physical premotion. 137 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS Supplementary Remarks. 4. The same observation must be made about the principle of causality as about the principles of sufficient reason and finality. It is a proposition intrinsically necessary, self-evident, but pertaining to the second mode of perseity. It is not in the notion which con- stitutes the subject that we perceive that of the attribute. The predicate is neither part of the definition of the subject nor the definition itself. It is the subject which is involved by the predicate as its specific subject. If we compare for even when it intuits the first principles of reason the mind actively compares these two notions, contingent being and caused being, that is being that has the ground of its existence in another, we see that the specific subject of that which has the ground of its existence in another is precisely contingent being. 5. I should like to put before you some further ob- servations on the principle of casuality. The first con- cerns its application to living beings. How does it apply to them? The classical definition of life appears to contradict the principle of casuality. For it defines a living being as a being that moves itself. But we have just said that nothing can reduce itself from potency to act, can cause itself. The contradiction is merely apparent. Living beings certainly move themselves. But they do not move in the same respect as that in which they are moved. This is obvious in the case of material organisms. One part moves another. Cer- tainly the organism does move itself. For the two parts are not two distinct substances, but two parts of a single substance. Nevertheless, one part moves another. 138 SEVENTH LECTURE In the case of an immaterial faculty such as the intelligence or the will, which has no parts, it is still untrue that it moves and is moved under the same aspect, in the same respect. The will, for example, reduces itself to act, moves itself in respect of the means in as much as it is already in act in respect of the end, that it wills that end in act, and it is because it wills the end in act that it is itself the cause of willing the means. Thus the principle of causality is always safeguarded. We must further add that in the case of all these living beings whose self-motion involves a passage from potency to act and which move themselves because they are in act in one respect, in potency in another, we must admit the action of a First Cause, a Prime Agent who moves them to move themselves. Only the absolute life, life as it is found in God, realises the notion of life so perfectly that it depends on no cause. All living beings other than God move them- selves, only because they are moved by another. There is another, namely, the First Cause of all being, that moves them or determines them to move them- selves, without thereby contradicting the notion of life or destroying their vital autonomy. 6. Another observation concerns the procession of immanent acts. How far can we speak of an efficient cause in their case? Consider, for example, an act of intelligence or will. Such acts, as I have already observed and I am not speaking of their product, the mental word, for instance, but of the act of intelligence (or will) are qualities which perfect the subject. We have already seen that the immanent act belongs to the predicament quality and in so far K 139 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS as it thus signifies a perfection, it does not require, in virtue of its purest notion, to be caused. That is why such acts are realised in uncaused Being, the pure Act. But wherever the act differs from the acting subject in so far as it is distinct from the faculty and the subject and therefore is produced a subject in another respect in act determines himself from potency to act and "produces" something which is not an object, but an action, the act itself of understanding or willing. He does not produce it by some other act. The act is itself at once a quality and an emanation. To that extent then a process of this kind comes under the principle and notion of causality, the act has a sufficient reason other than itself, that is a cause, which is above all the activity, the active power of the subject himself. Many other questions might be discussed concerning efficient causality. The fact should be emphasised that the notion of cause, like that of being, is essentially analogous. We should thus reach the conclusion that God is cause, indeed pre-eminently cause, that it is as the cause of being that reason is compelled to recognise His existence, though His causality is not like that of any cause we know. All this, however, must be reserved for treatment elsewhere, as also the examination of certain problems raised by con- temporary philosophers, for example by M. Bruns- chvicg, in his monograph on physical causality. 1 1 I regret that it was impossible to deal, in the earlier chapters of this work, with the views of M. Louis Lavelle and his book, La Dialectique de VEternel Present: de I' Eire (Alcan). But the discussion which this would have involved would have taken me outside the field of these lectures. I also regret that it was impossible to make use of A. Marc's important monograph : Uldte de VEtre chez St. Thomas et dans la scolastique posthicure, Archives de philosophic, volume X, cahier I, Beauchesne *933' The lectures were finished before it was published. 140 SEVENTH LECTURE I shall be content here with the very summary hints I have just thrown out which, however, will convey my meaning and which are strictly within the scope of my lectures. Chance 7. I must, however, speak about a problem bound up with that of causality, namely the problem of chance. Bear well in mind the philosophic and onto- logical character of the notion of efficient causation, such as I have attempted to elicit it. The efficient cause is an external ground which, to put it so, renders intelligible, I do not say to us, but in itself the existence of an object or event. This conception of a cause carries with it another conception, that of the communication of being. And the efficient cause is an agent predetermined to a particular effect as the tree is predetermined to its fruit, living energy to local motion, hydrogen and oxygen to produce water under given conditions. We must keep before our minds this philosophic and ontological conception of the efficient cause if we are to obtain an accurate notion of chance. It is because the essentially onto- logical character of the conception of cause is too often forgotten that the Aristotelian and Thomist theory of chance is no longer correctly understood. Chance, a fortuitous event, presupposes the mutual interference of independent lines of causation. Chance, and this is the basis of the ancients' notion of it, is the result of an irreducible pluralism, the plurality of the causal series which meet at a given moment. It is not the fact that it cannot be foreseen that con- stitutes chance. A fortuitous event can be foreseen, if its constituent factors are sufficiently simple. But it 141 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS is a fortuitous event notwithstanding, since it is a mere encounter. You may remember Aristotle's example. Is it true to say that a man is killed by brigands because he has eaten too salt viands? What is the link here between cause and effect? He has eaten too salt viands, becomes thirsty, and goes out to a spring. Behind the spring brigands are in hiding who profit by the opportunity to murder him. There is a chain of causes and effects. Is the entire chain necessary? To under- stand the conception of chance which is far more difficult than is often supposed, we shall examine this instance of it. There are here three series of causes. One extends from the salt food to the thirst. It is normal and in the natural order of things that salt food should cause thirst, the thirst excite the desire to drink, and the desire lead to the action. In another series there is a preliminary condition that there should be no water in the house. Moreover, there must be a spring near. And its existence in the vicinity must itself have a cause, namely the presence in a particular locality of underground water which in turn depends upon an entire series of geological facts. There is a third series of causes which accounts for the presence of the brigands at that particular place. Their presence there depends, for example, on their having hidden in the woods from the pursuit of the police, and this is itself the result of previous crimes they have com- mitted. Thus three independent causal chains meet, and the man's death is the result of their meeting. Each of the causes here operative continues or would have continued to act in its own line. The brigands would have continued their career of robbery, the spring its causal action, erosion of the earth's surface, 142 SEVENTH LECTURE evaporation, <2?c., and had the victim not met his death, the drink he had taken would have produced a particular physiological effect upon his organism. Every event in each series of causes has therefore its cause within the series. But the encounter between an event of one series, for example, the presence of the brigands and events of the other two, the existence of the spring and the desire to drink has not as such any cause in the entire universe. That is to say there is no nature, no natural agent predetermined by its structure to this encounter of the three events, nor any created intelligence that designed it. Geological facts ,. They continue their life of brigandage Underground water Spring The brigands are pursued by the police The water swallowed would blood A former crime Action of the spring on the earth, evaporation, etc. The illustrative diagram makes clear the irreducible multiplicity in which chance consists. Each of three causal lines diverges from the rest as we trace the series backwards, so that the farther back we go in each series, the more remote are we from the possibility of finding a cause pre-determined to the meeting of the three series and accounting for it. A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS That is to say the encounter of the three causal lines at a given moment is indeed a contingent fact but not a contingent being. This is the difficult and important point to grasp in the theory of chance. The encounter has no being, save in thought. Certainly it exists. But it is not an essence. It is a pure coincidence, and possesses no ontological unity requiring to render its existence intelligible an active structure preordained to it. It is neither a genuine being, nor a genuine unity and therefore does not possess a genuine cause, in the ontological sense which I have explained. 8. You will find these notions explained by St. Thomas in what is, in my opinion, his deepest treatment of the Fortuitous, in the Prima Pars of his Summa 115, 6. He is enquiring whether the heavenly bodies necessitate all events. In reality he treats here in another language the entire problem of mechanism. His answer might seem at first sight paradoxical. "Arguing," he says, "from the propositions that everything has a cause and on the other hand that when the cause is present the effect necessarily follows (are not these two propositions evident?) some have drawn the conclusion that all things happen of necessity. Their opinion is refuted by Aristotle in the sixth book of the Metaphysics. And his refutation deals precisely with the two propositions to which these men appeal. In the first place, he says, it is not true that if any cause whatever is present the effect necessarily follows. For there are some causes which do not produce their effects necessarily, but only in the majority of cases, and such causes sometimes fail to produce the effect only in a very small number of instances." (It suffices that the cause predetermined 144 SEVENTH LECTURE of itself to a particular effect, for example a medicine preordained to heal the organism, is prevented from producing its effect.) "But," St. Thomas proceeds, " since these causes fail in a particular instance only because another cause intervenes to prevent their normal effect, would it not seem that our opponents are after all right? For this hindrance itself has a cause and therefore happens of necessity. It must, therefore, be said in the second place that everything which is of itself, omne quod est per se, everything that constitutes an essence in the strict sense, is in the strict sense a being, has a cause. That, however, which is by accident, has no cause, quia non est vere ens cum non sit vere unum, for it is not genuine being, because it is not truly one." It is important to remember this last statement. Since for lack of ontological unity there is no genuine being, there is, therefore, no need of a cause of which the event in question is the effect, a cause in the nature of which the effect is predetermined. "But it is clear that when one cause prevents the action of another, the preventing cause interferes with the former per accident, accidentally. Wherefore, such an encounter of causes has no cause, inasmuch as it happens accidentally. Therefore what follows upon such an encounter cannot be reduced to a particular pre- existent cause from which it follows of necessity. Thus, when a fiery meteor is formed in a particular region of the air, the cause of the event is to be found in the power of the heavenly bodies. " (The cause which determines it is the constitution of the universe, whose essential structure requires this effect.) "Similarly that on a particular spot on the earth's surface there should be certain combustible materials 145 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS can also be reduced to causes dependent upon the heavenly bodies. But that the fire when it falls should encounter those materials and burn them and the. two series of causes should thus intersect, is not caused by any heavenly body" (that is to say there is no agent, no essential structure which of its nature requires it) . ' 'Non habet causam aliquod coeleste corpus, sed estper accident. It is not caused by any heavenly body, but happens accidentally." Chance is thus reduced to the plurality of which I was speaking just now. Consult also St. Thomas's last lecture, Lecture 14, on the first book of the Perihermeneias. In each of the independent causal series there studied there is a chain of causes and effects. But the encounter between them does not depend upon any cause determined by its nature to produce it and requiring its occurrence. The fire caused by the thunderbolt is an event which replaces that which would naturally have followed in the causal series. Take, for example, the accumulation of dried vegetable matter in the soil of a particular place. The next event in the same causal chain might have been* that these dried vegetables would have helped to manure the ground. The series would thus have continued in the same line. This event, however, to which of itself the preceding event would have led did not take place. For the series was interrupted by its encounter with another series of causes belonging to the meteorological order. 9. To obtain a complete idea of the theory we must add St. Thomas's explanations in the following article (q. 1 1 6, a. I). He there points out that that which is accidental may be unified by a mind. In that case 146 SEVENTH LECTURE the encounter, the intersection of causes which con- stitutes chance and does not constitute a being with .a unity of its own outside the mind, but is the pure coincidence of many factors, possesses a unity in the mind that knows it, and above all in the Mind that is the cause of nature. And this encounter as it is known by that Mind, can also be caused by It, can depend upon Its providence which disposes all things and has disposed this entire manifold, this infinite multitude of individual causes and their interferences. From this it is evident that we must improve our statement of the principle of causality. Everything we said which exists or happens contingently or mingled with potency has a cause. Now we must add : in accordance with the requirements of its being or unity. If what exists or happens contingently is not vere ens, genuine being, not ens per se, being by itself, but ens per accidens, accidental being, possesses only a conceptual being and unity as the mutual interference of a manifold, its sole cause can be a thought on which the causal series which thus meet depend. That is to say in the case of fortuitous events conditioned neither by a human nor by an angelic intelligence, their cause, the cause which aims at such an effect can be only the Mind, the Intelligence that knows all things. This fact invests fortuitous events with a peculiar interest. For they clearly depend, if we may so put it, more immediately, in respect of their predetermina- tion upon the First Cause, than do other events. On the other hand we understand what the ancients meant when they called chance an accidental cause, causa per accidens, or natura agens praeter intentionem, a natural agent acting outside its determination to an end. Why does it so act? Because it has encountered 147 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS another causal series. See further on this topic the important explanations by Aristotle and St. Thomas. 1 All this amounts to saying that the simple inter- section of different causal chains is not in itself more intelligible than the event which results from it. The explanation of the fortuitous fact or event must be sought in the causes active in each of these causal chains. But none of these causes is predetermined to produce it and this multiplicity of causes explains the chance event only on the supposition that these chains meet at a particular point of intersection. And there is nothing in the world which requires this, save the actual manifold of existents posited at the outset. There is no agent whose nature is such that it must overflow in this particular effect and is fore- ordained to produce it. We say: "This chance event occurs because a particular event has occurred before it, because these two causal series have crossed." That is to say we unite this manifold in our mind. But there is no being whose structure and essential preordination postulate of themselves this encounter. It is equally clear that chance cannot possibly be the origin of things. For it presupposes an encounter of causal series, and further that each of these series exists only because the causes it contains are determined to a particular end. Chance, that is to say, necessarily implies preordination. To hold that the universe can be explained by a primordial chance is self-contradictory. 10. This theory of chance is as philosophical, as ontological in its character and statement, employs 1 Book II, of the Physics with St. Thomas's lectures 7 to 10, and Book XI of the Metaphysics with St. Thomas's lecture and Book XII with his third lecture. 148 SEVENTH LECTURE notions as strictly metaphysical, as the preceding theory of causation. If your conception of cause is purely empirical or empiriological, if you empty it of all philosophic or ontological content and with the empiricists make it consist solely in the observed fact of a constant precedence, you will be unable to distinguish between what is necessary and what is fortuitous. It is thus only what we should have expected that as positive science has replaced cause by a purely empirical substitute, it has tended in the same measure to adopt a statistical theory of causation, a statistical determinism, of recent years statistical indeterminism intended to replace genuine causal determinism. We may further observe, and still with the same considerations in view, that a difficulty may be raised about the application of the principle of finality to ordered manifold. Take the case not of an agent predetermined to its distinctive effect, but of a united plurality, a manifold united like that of an orchestra, in short a case of order. For order is essentially a manifold reduced to unity. It is usually said and with perfect truth, it is indeed an expression of finality, that order presupposes someone who produces it having himself the intention to impose this unity on the manifold. And there is a fundamental reason for affirming this to which St. Thomas frequently appeals : A manifold cannot possibly by itself account for its unity. Multa per se intendunt ad multa, unus vero ad unum. If this be granted, we may ask whether the principle is universally applicable. Are there not instances in which we believe that a manifold has been intention- ally ordered, when in reality this is not the case? Can we not see shapes in the clouds or on old walls, such as Leonardo da Vinci liked to trace? Can we not 149 A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS form a word by chance when we combine the letters of the alphabet at random? They may be selected at random and nevertheless form an intelligible word, at any rate a very short one. We may then imagine that the word has been intentionally formed and written. What answer shall we return to this difficulty which is a serious one. For by applying mathematics to any particular instance of order we may enquire what is the probability of its chance realisation. What, for example, is the mathematical probability that by combining all the letters of the alphabet an enormous number of times a poem such as the Iliad might be composed? The mathematician will ask this question. He will answer it by calculating the improbability which will indeed be enormous. But his calculation itself implies that however enor- mous the improbability it is not an impossibility. To answer this problem we must, I believe, maintain that if a unity is genuine, and consequently the order in question is real, our principle admits no exception. The order depends on one who has ordered it, a cause of unity whose intelligence has in view the unity of this manifold. Therefore everything depends on the question whether the unity is real or merely apparent. For since, as St. Thomas pointed out, what is not of itself one may be united in the mind, there may be a conceptual or apparent without a real unity. The entire problem, therefore, reduces itself to this: To find a criterion whereby we can distinguish a real unity existing outside the mind from a purely con- ceptual unity. The mathematician leaves this problem out of account. For him the distinction between real and conceptual existence has no interest. He will therefore submit to the calculus of probabilities, 150 SEVENTH LECTURE things, cases, problems which in reality are not amenable to this treatment. If, for example, a poem possesses a real unity, not merely the semblance of unity, really expresses an intelligible organism I am not speaking of surrealist poems, though even in their case random thinking presupposes thought if the universe in the same way possesses a real unity verifiable by the con- stancy of particular actions and laws which subserve the conservation of the whole, it is metaphysically impossible, not merely improbable but impossible, that this order should be produced without someone to produce it. The mathematician, however, remains free to make his calculation of probabilities, because as such he does not enquire whether he is working with real or conceptual beings. Ill ii. In these lectures I have dealt only with the first four principles of speculative reason. But they are very far from exhausting the number of self- evident principles. A fifth concerns formal causation. It may be stated as follows: "Everything which exists is formed and determined," or in other terms, "Every determination is a perfection in so far as it is due to form, a limitation in so far as it depends upon matter. " A sixth concerns material causation. It runs: "Every change presupposes a subject." A seventh declares: "Operatic sequitur esse. Operation follows being." There are also principles which are corollaries of these great primary axioms. For example the principle of sufficient reason, and the principle of causality involve the four following subordinate principles. Propter quod unumquodque et illud magis, aut saltern non A PREFACE TO METAPHYSICS minus that in virtue of which anything is must be greater or at least not less than it. Id propter quod aliquid est, oportet melius esse that in virtue of which anything is must be better than it. Quod est per se (per suam essentiam) prius est eo quod non est per se that which is by itself (by its essence) is prior to that which is not by itself. Omne quod habet aliquid per participationem reducitur ad id quod habet illud per essentiam sicut in principium et causam whatsoever possesses any- thing by participation is reducible to that which possesses it by its essence as its principle and cause. 1 You will find in St. Thomas's Compendium Theologiae a veritable treasury of such metaphysical axioms. It w r ould be of great interest to draw up a methodical list of them. And we should do well to build up metaphysical Axiomatics in the same spirit. 1 See on these points my Antimoderne , pp. 179 sqq. 152