CRITIQUE OF HUME’S PHE�OME�ALISM

Paul Gerard Horrigan

2004

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CRITIQUE OF HUME’S PHE�OME�ALISM

Copyright © 2004 by Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

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CO�TE�TS

1. LIFE A�D WORK 5

2. CRITIQUE OF HUME’S SE�SIST IMMA�E�TISM A�D �OMI�ALISM 7

3. CRITIQUE OF HUME’S SKEPTICISM 19

4. CRITIQUE OF HUME’S DE�IAL OF SUBSTA�CE 22

5. CRITIQUE OF HUME’S ATTACK O� OBJECTIVE O�TOLOGICAL

CAUSALITY 27

6. CRITIQUE OF HUME’S PHILOSOPHICAL A�THROPOLOGY 35

7. CRITIQUE OF HUME’S AG�OSTICISM 54

CO�CLUSIO�: GE�ERAL CRITIQUE OF HUME’S PHE�OME�ALISM 67

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CHAPTER 1

LIFE A�D WORK

The Scottish empiricist David Hume1 (1711-1776) was born in Edinburgh on April

26th, 1711. Originally groomed for a legal career he instead pursued a literary and, above all, 1 Studies on Hume: C. W. HENDEL, Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1925 ; J. LAIRD, Hume’s Philosophy of Human �ature, Methuen, London, 1932 ; B. M. LAING, David Hume, Benn, London, 1932 ; R. W. CHURCH, Hume’s Theory of Understanding, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1935 ; H. H. PRICE, Hume’s Theory of the External World, Clarendon, Oxford, 1940 ; N. K. SMITH, The Philosophy of David Hume, Macmillan, London, 1941 ; R. M. KYDD, Reason and Conduct in

Hume’s Treatise, Oxford University Press, New York, 1946 ; A. B. GLATHE, Hume’s Theory of the Passions

and of Morals, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1950 ; D. G. MACNABB, David Hume: His Theory of

Knowledge and Morality, Hutchinson, London, 1951 ; T. BRUNIUS, David Hume on Criticism, Stockholm, 1951 ; J. A. PASSMORE, Hume’s Intentions, University Press, Cambridge, 1952 ; A. BASSON, David Hume, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1958 ; J. B. STEWART, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963 ; C. W. HENDEL, Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1963 ; R. M. KYDD, Reason and Conduct in Hume’s Treatise, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964 ; A. SABETTI, Hume filosofo della religione, Liguori, Naples, 1965 ; J. V. PRICE, The

Ironic Hume, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1965 ; L. L. BONGIE, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-

Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965 ; R. F. ANDERSON, Hume’s First Principles, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1966 ; D. G. C. MACNABB, David Hume: His Theory of Knowledge and Morality, Archon Books, Hamden, Conn., 1966 ; P. S. ÁRDAL, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1966 ; J. PASSMORE, Hume’s Intentions, Basic Books, New York, 1968 ; J. WILBANKS, Hume’s Theory of Imagination, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1968 ; D. BROILES, The Moral

Philosophy of David Hume, The Hague, 1969 ; A. SANTUCCI, Sistema e ricerca in D. Hume, Laterza, Bari, 1969 ; G. STERN, A Faculty Theory of Knowledge: The Aim and Scope of Hume’s First Enquiry, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, 1971 ; I. CAPPIELLO, La morale della simpatia di David Hume, Liguori, Naples, 1971 ; C. MAUND, Hume’s Theory of Knowledge: A Critical Examination, Macmillan, New York, 1972 ; G. CARABELLI, Hume e la retorica dell’ideologia, La Nuova Italia, Florence, 1972 ; D. C. STOVE, Probability

and Hume’s Inductive Scepticism, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973 ; M. DAL PRA, Hume e la scienza della

natura umana, Laterza, Bari, 1973 ; J. NOXON, Hume’s Philosophical Development, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973 ; N. CAPALDI, David Hume the �ewtonian Philosopher, Twayne, Boston, 1975 ; D. FORBES, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975 ; J. HARRISON, Hume’s Moral

Epistemology, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976 ; B. STROUD, Hume, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977 ; J. BRICKE, Hume’s Philosophy of Mind, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980 ; J. L. MACKIE, Hume’s Moral Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980 ; A. SANTUCCI, Introduzione a Hume, Laterza, Bari, 1981 ; J. HARRISON, Hume’s Theory of Justice, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981 ; D. MILLER, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981 ; T. L. BEAUCHAMP, A. ROSENBERG, Hume and the Problem of Causation, Oxford University Press, New York, 1981 ; A. SANTUCCI, Scienza e filosofia scozzese nell’età di Hume, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1983 ; D. W. LIVINGSTON, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 ; L. TURCO, Lo scetticismo morale di David Hume, Clueb, Bologna, 1984 ; D. F. NORTON, David Hume: Common-Sense

Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984 ; M. DAL PRA, David Hume: la

vita e l’opera, Laterza, Bari, 1984 ; G. PALOMBELLA, Diritto e artificio in David Hume, Giuffrè, Milan, 1984 ; R. J. FOGELIN, Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1985 ; F. G. WHELAN, Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985 ; J. V. PRICE, David Hume, Twayne, New York, 1986 ; F. RESTAINO, David Hume (1711-1776), Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1986 ; J. CHRISTENSEN, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary

Career, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1987 ; J. C. A. GASKIN, Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, Macmillan, New York, 1988 ; N. CAPALDI, Hume’s Place in Moral Philosophy, Peter Lang, New York, 1989 ; G. STRAWSON, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism and David Hume, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989 ; A. SCHWERIN, The Reluctant Revolutionary: An Essay on David Hume’s Account of �ecessary

Connection, Lang, New York, 1989 ; N. PHILLIPSON, Hume, Weidenfield & Nicolson, London, 1989 ; C. MONTELEONE, L’Io, la mente, la ragionevolezza: saggio su David Hume, Ed. Bollati-Boringhieri, Turin, 1989 ; D. PEARS, Hume’s System: An Examinaton of the First Book of His Treatise, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990 ; M. A. BOX, The Suasive Art of David Hume, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1990 ; J. W.

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philosophical path. He sojourned in France between the years 1734-1737, composing during this period his Treatise on Human �ature, a work that, to Hume’s great disappointment, failed miserably to attract attention in intellectual circles. In 1737 he returned to Scotland and a few years later published his Essays, Moral and Political (1741-1742), which proved to be a success. In 1748 he published Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, which was a revision of the first part of his earlier unsuccessful Treatise. A second edition of this work appeared in 1751, its final title being An Enquiry Concerning Human

Understanding. That same year saw the publication of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles

of Morals, a reworking of the third part of the earlier Treatise. A year later he published Political Discourses, which made him very famous. He became, also that year, librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. All throughout the 1750’s Hume laboured assiduously on his series of tomes on the history of England. In 1756 he published a history of Great Britain from the accession of James I to the death of Charles I, followed that same year by a history of Great Britain up to the revolution of 1688. In 1759 he published his History of England under the House of Tudor, and in 1761 his History of England from the

Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VIII. In 1762 Hume saw himself in Paris as secretary to the British Embassy in France. In 1766 he brought the famous, but difficult Jean-Jacques Rousseau back with him to England, but their friendship soon ended when the unstable and paranoid Rousseau accused Hume of having conspired with his enemies to destroy him. From 1767 to 1769 Hume was an Under-Secretary of State. He died in Edinburgh on August 25th, 1776. His controversial work, Dialogues Concerning �atural

Religion, written by him before 1752, was published posthumously in 1779.

DANFORD, David Hume and the Problem of Reason: Recovering the Human Sciences, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990 ; D. T. SIEBERT, The Moral Animus of David Hume, University of Delaware Press, Cranbury, 1990 ; E. LECALDANO, Hume e la nascita dell’etica contemporanea, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1990 ; R. GILARDI, Il giovane Hume: il ‘background’ religioso e culturale, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 1991 ; A. BAIER, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991 ; D. E. FLAGE, David Hume’s Theory of Mind, Routledge, New York, 1991 ; F. SNARE, Morals Motivation and

Convention: Hume’s Influential Doctrines, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991 ; T. PENELHUM, David Hume: An Introduction to His Philosophical System, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, IN, 1992 ; J. B. STEWART, Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992 ; D. F. NORTON (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993 ; D. GARRETT, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997 ; H. W. NOONAN, The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hume on Knowledge, Routledge, London, 1999 ; D. OWEN, Hume’s Reason, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999 ; C. HOWSON, Hume’s Problem:

Induction and the Justification of Belief, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000 ; L. E. LOEB, Stability and

Justification in Hume’s Treatise, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002 ; A. E. PITSON, Hume’s Philosophy of

the Self, Routledge, London, 2002 ; C. M. SCHMIDT, David Hume: Reason in History, Penn State University Press, University Park, PA, 2003 ; S. BOTROS, Hume, Reason and Morality: A Legacy of Contradiction, Routledge, London, 2006 ; S. TRAIGER (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise, Blackwell, Oxford, 2006 ; R. HARDIN, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007 ; K. R. MERRILL, Historical Dictionary of Hume’s Philosophy, The Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD, 2008.

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CHAPTER 2

CRITIQUE OF HUME’S SE�SIST IMMA�E�TISM A�D �OMI�ALISM

Hume’s Sensism. With Humean empiricist pan-phenomenalism we find human

knowledge restricted to the level of the senses. Gone is abstraction. Gone are universal concepts properly speaking, which are reduced to images. Gone is intellectual knowledge properly speaking.

For Hume, all man’s knowledge consists of perceptions, which can either be strong

(impressions) or weak (“ideas”).2 ‘Perception’ is the collective name he gives for the contents of consciousness in general. All these impressions and ideas have their origin in sense experience. Impressions, for him, are very vivid and immediate, the first products of the mind. Ideas, on the other hand, would be of a derivative and inferred character, mere reproductions or copies of those original impressions or elaborations of them, and can be manipulated and ordered among themselves by the imagination, according to the “law of association” (resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality). These laws of association of ideas are purely psychological laws.

‘Ideas’ would be the copies or faint images of impressions in thinking and reasoning.

If one looks at one’s room, what he receives is an impression of it. And “when I shut my eyes and think of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact representations of the impressions I felt; nor is there any circumstance of the one, which is not to be found in the other…Ideas and impressions appear always to correspond to each other.”3 It is clear from this passage that Hume reduces ideas to that of images.

Describing the difference between impressions and ideas in terms of vividness, Hume

writes in his Treatise: “The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind and make their way into our thoughts or consciousness. Those perceptions which enter with most force and violence we may name impressions; and, under this name, I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion.”4

Hume also distinguishes between simple and complex perceptions, a distinction which

he applies to both impressions and ideas. The perception of a red apple is a simple impression and the thought (or image) of the red apple is a simple idea. But if I am at the top of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral and, gazing out, survey the city of London, I receive a simple impression of the city, of the roofs, the chimneys, the various towers, the many streets, and the various persons hurrying by the sidewalks and inter-sections. And when I afterwards think of the city of London and recall this complex impression I have a complex idea. In this case the complex idea of the city of London corresponds to a certain degree to the complex impression of the city of London that I received gazing out of the dome of St. Paul’s

2 Cf. D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, Book I (Of the Understanding), Part I, Section I (Of the Origin of Our Ideas). 3 D. HUME, op. cit., Book I, Part I, Section I. 4 Ibid.

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Cathedral, but not so exactly and adequately. But Hume gives us another example: “I can imagine to myself a city as the New Jerusalem, whose pavement is gold, and walls are rubies, though I never saw any such.”5 In in this case one’s complex idea does not correspond to a complex impression.

Hume states that it is not true that to every idea there is an exactly corresponding

impression. But he observes that the complex idea of the New Jerusalem can be broken down into simple ideas. And to the question as to whether every simple idea has a corresponding simple impression and every simple impression a corresponding simple idea, Hume replies: “I venture to affirm that the rule here holds without any exception, and that every simple idea has a simple impression which resembles it, and every simple impression a correspondent idea.”6

Hume’s Laws of Association. Hume acknowledges three different forms of

association; he maintained that the contents of consciousness are connected together in accordance with the laws of resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. For him, the process involved in association is always purely mechanistic. In the law of similarity we know, for example, that a portrait painting naturally leads our thoughts to the original person represented by the painting. In the law of contiguity the mention, for example, of a specific hotel room in a hotel naturally introduces an inquiry or discourse concerning others. And in the law of causality, when we think of a bad wound on our knee, for example, we can scarcely refrain from reflecting on the pain which resulted from it.

In a subsequent development of his laws of association Hume reduces the idea of cause to that of an orderly succession of two happenings in time and place. Consequently, he retains only the first two laws of association (resemblance or similarity and contiguity in time and place). Of the two laws, the association of resembance or similarity would be limited in extent to a mental comparison of ideas, and therefore to the mathematico-geometrical sciences, while the sole law that would be applicable to the entire spectrum of the physical sciences would be the law of contiguity in time and space. The success of the law of contiguity is determined by our experience and habit. So for Hume, all order in the world and in science is reduced to this purely psychical element.

With regard to science, Hume distinguishes between ‘truths of reason’ and ‘truths of fact.’ ‘Truths of reason’ express the various relations of ideas and to this class belong the truths of geometry, algebra and arithmetic, in short, to every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. Truths of fact, in contrast, do not demand or contain the so-called logical necessity as to the truths of reason. Hume writes in section IV of his An

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “the contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction…That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, it will rise.”7

And what is experience for Hume? Nothing other than the association of ideas on the basis of a space-time contiguity. One specific event (e.g., the billiard cue stick hitting the billiard ball) is followed by another specific event (e.g., the billiard ball moving across the billiards table), and so both ideas are associated. If we see and hear the first event occur a 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV.

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second time, having acquired this experience previously, we would naturally wait for the second event to occur. Hume writes: “If a body of like color and consistency with that of bread of which we have formerly eaten be presented to us…we forsee with certainty like nourishment and support.”8 This experience, Hume holds, is nothing more than a custom or habit: according to him, experience does not deal with thought-acts or reasoning, or with other processes of the understanding, but rather with feeling, or habit, or familiarity which makes us expect and believe that something similar to what we experienced previously is happening and, therefore, that a second is about to follow the first.

Hume’s �ominalism. Hume was a thorough nominalist; he taught that there are no

universal concepts, only general ideas, “ideas” being simply blurred images expressing a resemblance common to a collection of particular sense perceptions. Therefore, all the contents of our experience must be particular and contingent, the consequences being that we would be unable to have a basis at all for any universal and necessary knowledge.

Hume’s Immanentism. The core of Humean empiricist epistemology is that what we know are our perceptions, not external, extra-mental reality. What the human mind knows is not something existing outside consciousness, but merely facts of consciousness. What is known are not real things but only our perceptions which are subjective modifications produced in us by sensible experience. “Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are derived from something antecedently present to the mind, it follows that it is impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of anything specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can we conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions which have appeared in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produced.”9

Critique of Hume’s Sensist Immanentism

The problem with Hume is that he is a gnoseological (epistemological) immanentist,

which logically leads to ontological immanentism (agnosticism or atheism). He is trapped within the prison of his mind, unable to access extra-mental reality. Being unable to access the extra-mental world of real things, of real beings endowed with their respective acts of being, he is unable to demonstrate the existence of God using objective causality. Now, the root cause of the theoretical agnostic and atheist world view lies in a particular type of epistemology called immanentism, which has as its founder the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes. When the immanentist position is adopted the obfuscation and eventual discarding of metaphysics (the science of being qua being, the most noble of the purely human sciences) becomes inevitable. Once metaphysics is eliminated, access to a rational effect to cause demonstration of God’s existence is impeded and one either falls into the various forms of agnosticism (Humean, Kantian, Neo-Positivist) or takes one step further and subscribes to the atheistic position that God is nothing but a projection of man himself (Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre), a mere idea that in no way corresponds to a real, extra-mental, extra-subjective, transcendent Supreme Being.

8 D. HUME, op. cit., Section V. 9 D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, I, 2, 6.

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A philosophical critique, which has become a classic in its field, documenting the genesis, rise and consolidation of the immanentist position throughout the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, is Cornelio Fabro’s monumental God in Exile: Modern

Atheism From Its Roots in the Cartesian Cogito to the Present Day,10 his magnum opus of more a thousand pages, which I warmly recommend for the serious intellectual. A number of thinkers believe that the rise of modern atheism is due primarily to affluence, to the consumerism of the “creature-comfort,” materialistic West, while others are of the opinion that the prevalence of naturalism is mainly to blame. Fabro, instead, holds that speculative or theoretical atheism’s roots lie in the epistemological revolution produced by the subjectivist Cartesian cogito, which has rendered man incapable of epistemological and ontological transcendence. While crass consumerism, horizontalist and monistic naturalism are all weighty factors that go into the making of the atheistic and nihilistic Zeitgeist that characterizes much of contemporary life, I believe that the predominance of the immanentist world view, in the first place among our intellectual elite who are its ideological purveyors and spiritual gurus, is the central factor, and that the solution for exiting from the mess that we find ourselves in lies in the refutation of the immanentist philosophical position by means of an authentic methodical, metaphysical realism open to real being (ens reale) and ultimately to the act of being (esse), act of acts and perfection of perfections.

The solution to the problem of immanentism lies in a vigorous and healthy

philosophical realism open to gnoseological and ontological transcendence. But what exactly is immanentism and what exactly do we mean by realism and transcendence? In philosophical usage, the term immanentism is derived from the concept immanence, which means to remain within oneself, which is opposed to transcendence, which means to go

beyond oneself. In immanentism, what man knows in the first instance is that which remains enclosed within the sphere of the self, such as ideas, sensations and impressions, and not the extra-mental real thing, which is either only mediately known (Descartes’ mediate “realism,” a pseudo-realism, unsuccessful in its attempts at reclaiming reality) or is simply unknowable (Humean and Kantian phenomenalism). Realism, on the other hand, retains that what is known in the first instance is the extra-subjective thing (also called the object) which really exists extra-mentally (e.g., that real pine tree to the right of me, or that particular brown cat in front of me).11 For the immanentist, who is incarcerated within the cell of his mind, unable to escape to a knowledge of noumenal reality, thought is prior to being. Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), that famous Cartesian dictum, is the name of the immanentist state penitentiary. Realism, instead, maintains that being is prior to thought. The actual dog that exists in reality is prior to the universal notion or concept “dog” that exists in the mind in an intentional manner. Dobermans and dachshunds are out there in reality and will continue to exist there whether we think of them or not. What is known in the first instance is the real dog and not the idea “dog.” Ideas are merely instruments by which we know things; they are that by which we know extra-mental objects existing in the world. For the immanentist, then, thought is the starting point of philosophical investigation, whereas for the realist it is being (ens), leading to the affirmation res sunt (things are). For immanentism, thought is prior to being, thought becomes the condition of being, and finally, as is the case with absolute idealism (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel) thought becomes identified with being, thought

10 C. FABRO, God in Exile: Modern Atheism From Its Roots in the Cartesian Cogito to the Present Day, Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, 1968. This is the English translation by Arthur Gibson from the original Italian entitled: Introduzione all’ateismo moderno, 2 vols., Studium, Rome, 1964. 11 Realism does maintain that our ideas can be known as objects in a second instance through reflection, but rejects the immanentist position that the object known by the mind in the first instance can only be that which remains within the subjective orbit of the mind.

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creates being. In Hegelian panlogicism, for example, all that is rational is real and all that is real is rational12 (the identification of logic and metaphysics, between the logical order and the real order).

Against immanentism, realism holds that all epistemology is founded upon the

metaphysics of being; being is prior to thought, and thought is dependent upon being. The act of being (esse) is the radical act of a being (ens); it is, in every being (ens), the internal principle of its reality and of its knowability, and therefore, the foundation of the act of knowing. Knowledge is indeed a way of being, but the act of being is not an element or a dimension of knowledge. When we know an extra-mental thing, taking in its form in an immaterial way, we leave out not only the matter of the thing in question but also its act of being.

In philosophical immanentism, transcendence (first gnoseological, then ontological) is

first emarginalized, then debilitated, and in the end, eliminated. In realism, on the other hand, both gnoseological and ontological transcendence is respected. There is a difference between gnoseological transcendence and ontological transcendence. The former regards the possibility of knowing reality distinct from consciousness and its representations; transcendence here is intended as extra-subjective. Ontological transcendence, on the other hand, regards the existence of realities that surpass the factual data of empirical experience, the most eminent of these realities being God, the absolutely transcendent Supreme Being. The history of modern philosophy, beginning with Cartesian rationalism, has shown that the refusal of a gnoseological transcendence (though not always in a direct and immediate way, as was precisely the case with the mediate “realism” of Descartes) impedes recognition of an authentic ontological transcendence.

The starting point of knowledge is not the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito,

ergo sum), but rather: “things are” (res sunt). That “I think, therefore I am” is surely evidence, but it is not the first evidence. It is not the point of departure of knowledge. “Things are” is the first in the order of all evidence. The first intellectual evidence that we experience through our senses is the fact that there are things in this world that we inhabit composed of an amazing variety of things which in some way form a totality. These “things” correspond to the classical metaphysical term “beings.” We perceive these beings around us which appear to our immediate experience as individual, concrete, definite and limited, making up part of a whole referred to as the world, the cosmos, the universe. “Realism accepts reality in toto and measures our knowledge by the rule of reality. Nothing that is validly known would be so if its object did not first exist…The first thing offered us is the concept of a being thought about by the intellect, and given us in a sensory intuition. If the being, in so far as it can be conceived, is the first object of the intellect, that is because it is directly perceived: res sunt,

ergo cogito (things are, therefore, I think). We start by perceiving an existence which is given us in itself and not first of all in relation to ourselves. Later, on inquiring into the conditions which make such a fact possible, we realize that the birth of the concept presupposes the fertilization of the intellect by the reality which it apprehends. Before truth comes the thing that is true; before judgment and reality are brought into accord, there is a living accord of the intellect with reality…”13

12 Cf. G. W. F. HEGEL, Philosophy of Right, Preface. 13 E. GILSON, Methodical Realism, Christendom Press, Front Royal, VA, 1990, pp. 120-121.

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The great twentieth century philosopher-historian Etienne Gilson defended the realist theory of knowledge against the immanentism underlying much of modern philosophy in many of his works, such as Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge

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Realism.15 In Methodical Realism he points out that it was in the thought of Descartes, and not Kant, where the “Copernican Revolution” took place for the first time: “Critical idealism was born the day Descartes decided that the mathematical method must henceforth be the method for metaphysics. Reversing the method of Aristotle and the medieval tradition, Descartes decided that it is valid to infer being from knowing, to which he added that this was indeed the only valid type of inference, so that in his philosophy, whatever can be clearly and distinctly attributed to the idea of the thing is true of the thing itself: when we say of anything

that it is contained in the nature or concept of a particular thing, it is the same as if we were

to say it is true of that thing, or could be affirmed of it…Indeed, all idealism derives from Descartes, or from Kant, or from both together, and whatever other distinguishing features a system may have, it is idealist to the extent that, either in itself, or as far as we are concerned, it makes knowing the condition of being…With Descartes the Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) turns into Cogito ergo res sunt (I think, therefore, things are)”16 Once trapped within the immanent sphere of one’s thoughts, initially doubting all reality perceived by the senses, and commencing from the cogito as the first certainty, we become unable to recuperate reality itself. All we will be able to do with the immanentist method is to conjure up a thought of reality, all the while remaining locked up within the prison of our minds. From mere mental representations we cannot reach the thing-in-itself which is doubted at the outset by the Cartesian universal doubt. If you have a hat stand painted on a wall, the only thing you will ever be able to hang on it is a hat likewise painted on a wall. Neither the principle of causality nor belief or assertion can get us out of the immanentist domain of the mind once we have initially doubted the existence of reality, and then commence from the cogito as the primal certitude.

Gilson describes for us the futility of those pseudo-realists who make their starting

point of knowledge the cogito and then attempt a recuperation of reality by means of the principle of causality: “he who begins as an idealist ends as an idealist; one cannot safely make a concession or two to idealism here and there. One might have suspected as much, since history is there to teach us on this point. Cogito ergo res sunt is pure Cartesianism; that is to say, the exact antithesis of what is thought of as scholastic realism and the cause of its ruin. Nobody has tried as hard as Descartes to build a bridge from thought to reality, by relying on the principle of causality. He was also the first to make the attempt, and he did so because he was forced to by having set the starting point for knowledge in the intuition of thought. It is, therefore, strictly true that every scholastic who thinks himself a realist, because he accepts this way of stating the problem, is in fact a Cartesian… If the being I grasp is only through and in my thought, how by this means shall I ever succeed in grasping a being which is anything other than that of thought? Descartes believed that it was possible, but even apart from a direct critique of the proof he attempted to give, history is there to show us that his attempt ends in failure. He who begins with Descartes, cannot avoid ending up with Berkeley or with Kant…It won’t do to stop at the man who took the first step on the road to idealism because we shall then be forced to go the whole of the rest of the road with his successors. The Cartesian experiment was an admirable metaphysical enterprise bearing the stamp of sheer genius. We owe it a great deal, even if it is only for having brilliantly proved that every undertaking of this kind is condemned in advance to fail. However, it is the 14 E. GILSON, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance, Vrin, Paris, 1939. 15 E. GILSON, Le réalisme méthodique, Téqui, Paris, 1935. 16 E. GILSON, op. cit., pp. 18-19.

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extreme of naïveté to begin it all over again in the hope of obtaining the opposite results to those which it has always given, because it is of its nature to give them.”17 “The absolute being that the Cogito immediately delivers to me can only be my own and no other. In consequence, whether the operation by which I apprehend the object as distinct from myself be a process of induction and therefore mediate, or an immediate grasp, the problem remains the same. If one’s starting point is a percipi, the only esse one will ever reach will be that of the percipi…‘Can we, or can we not arrive at things if we make our standpoint that of the Cogito?’ No, we can’t, and if the fate of realism depends on this question, its fate is settled; it is impossible to extract from any kind of Cogito whatsoever a justification for the realism of St. Thomas Aquinas.”18

The only way for us to get back to realism in philosophy (and in doing so be once

again in a position to validly demonstrate God’s existence, departing from the things that we see in the world) is to stop subordinating metaphysics to epistemology, or logic, or

psychology, or mathematics, or for that matter, any other human science,19 and let the former recover its pride of place as the queen of the human sciences, that is, of all the sciences discoverable by the lumen of natural reason alone. Metaphysics is first philosophy and any

science of thought must ultimately be founded upon the metaphysics of being. “What we must do first of all, therefore, is free ourselves from the obsession with epistemology as the necessary pre-condition for philosophy. The philosopher as such has only one duty: to put himself in accord with himself and other things. He has no reason whatever to assume a

priori that his thought is the condition of being, and, consequently, he has no a priori obligation to make what he has to say about being depend on what he knows about his own thought…I think therefore I am is a truth, but it is not a starting point…The Cogito is manifestly disastrous as a foundation for philosophy when one considers its terminal point. With a sure instinct as to what was the right way, the Greeks firmly entered on the realist path and the scholastics stayed on it because it led somewhere. Descartes tried the other path, and when he set out on it there was no obvious reason not to do so. But we realize today that it leads nowhere, and that is why it is our duty to abandon it. So there was nothing naïve about scholastic realism; it was the realism of the traveler with a destination in view who, seeing that he is approaching it, feels confident he is on the right road. And the realism we are proposing will be even less naïve since it is based on the same evidence as the old realism, and is further justified by the study of three centuries of idealism and the balance sheet of their results. The only alternatives I can see today are either renouncing metaphysics altogether or returning to a pre-critical realism. This does not at all mean that we have to do without a theory of knowledge. What is necessary is that epistemology, instead of being the pre-condition for ontology, should grow in it and with it, being at the same time a means and an object of explanation, helping to uphold, and itself upheld by, ontology, as the parts of any true philosophy mutually will sustain each other.”20

The �ominalism of Hume

For Hume there are no universal concepts, properly speaking. Ideas which are

universal are, for him, are nothing but a collection of singular percepts accompanied by a common name. All our general ideas, he writes, are really particular ones joined to a general term. In his Treatise of Human �ature, Hume writes: “A great philosopher (Berkeley) has

17 E. GILSON, op. cit., pp. 21-23. 18 E. GILSON, op. cit., pp. 27-28. 19 Sacred theology is not a human science but is rather the divine science. 20 E. GILSON, op. cit., pp. 34-35.

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asserted that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them. As I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries which has been made of late in the republic of letters I shall here endeavour to confirm it by some arguments, which I hope will put it beyond all doubt and controversy.”21

Hume also writes in his later work Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “There is no such thing as abstract or general ideas, properly speaking; but all general ideas are, in reality, particular ones, that resemble in certain circumstances the idea present to the mind.”22

For Hume it is an illusion that general names really represent universal concepts. The impression arises owing to the habitual association of images (theory of associationism), he says. Hume is a nominalist in the strict sense of the term since he does not allow there is in the mind any universal idea which corresponds to the ‘general’ term, but regards the ‘idea’ as singular, this ‘idea’ being the image or sense impression of a particular object imagined or sensed at the moment.

Giving a brief description of the nominalist position on the question of the universals, the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain writes: “For the nominalist school, universals have no existence except as names or ideas with which nothing in reality corresponds; for instance, there is nothing in the reality of human nature which is equally present in Peter, Paul, and

John. This position amounts to sheer negation of the possibility of intellectual knowledge, and reduces science to a figment of the mind. The most typical representatives of this school are, in antiquity the sophists and the skeptics, in modern times the leading English philosophers, William of Occam in the fourteenth century, Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth, Berkeley and Hume in the eighteenth, John Stuart Mill and Spencer in the nineteenth. It may be added that the majority of modern philosophers (that is to say, of those who ignore or oppose the scholastic tradition) are more or less deeply, and more or less consciously, imbued with nominalism.”23

Coffey gives us a description of modern sensist and empiricist nominalism (from

Hobbes to Hume to Taine) as follows: “While differing more or less on the contructive side

21 D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, Book I, Part I, Section VII. 22 D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XII, Note (P). 23 J. MARITAIN, An Introduction to Philosophy, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1956, pp. 119-120. Describing the position of nominalism, Juan Jose Sanguineti writes: “In its more common version, nominalism affirms that only the names or terms of things are universal; it is only the term ‘man,’ for example, that the multitude of men have in common. Universal concepts, in the strict sense, do not exist, but only schematic images which ‘sum up’ or ‘generalize’ the similar traits of different individuals. Nor are there such things as common essences: only individuals and individual properties exist, and these differ from the properties of other individuals. We employ common names to economize on mental effort, since it would be practically impossible to give a proper name to each thing. The function of common names is, therefore, to classify objects which are more or less similar. The similarities of these objects are of a very relative nature, and certainly not necessary; they merely point to a fact that has been repeated in the past, but do not guarantee its repetition in the future. “Nominalism usually goes hand in hand with a materialistic philosophy of man, in which human thought is reduced to a collection of signs whose purpose is to produce certain reactions in others. Nominalism links up in this way with behaviorism and pragmatism. There is no necessity in the world, no law that applies absolutely to individuals: everything is singular, different, unforeseeable. Language is only the means whereby man, who is regarded simply as a more developed animal, adapts himself to his biological needs”(J. J. SANGUINETI, Logic, Sinag-Tala, Manila, 1992, p. 42).

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of their theories of cognition, these philosophers all agree in denying to the human mind any cognitive power of a higher order than that of sense, or any apprehension of a mental object

that is properly speaking universal in its capacity of representing reality. They speak, of course, of ‘intellect,’ ‘conception,’ ‘concepts,’ ‘thought,’ ‘abstraction,’ ‘generalization,’ etc., but these they hold to differ not in kind, but only in degree, from organic sense perception, imagination, imagery, percepts, etc., – explaining the former rather as refinements or complex functions and products of the latter. Neither do they deny the existence of some sort or other of a mental correlate, some sort or other of a conscious, cognitive process and mental term, corresponding to the common name or general logical term of language. But inasmuch as they deny to this mental term or object of awareness all genuine universality, maintaining that there is in the mind or present to the mind no object which is ‘one-common-to-many,’ and thereby confine universality to the verbal sign or name, they are properly described as nominalists. Since, moreover, as we shall see in dealing with sense perception, these philosophers generally hold that knowledge does not and cannot extend beyond mental states, phenomena, or appearances, or reach to the extramental, they must be set down as denying the real objective validity of knowledge.”24

Critique of Hume’s �ominalism

Criticizing the nominalist position of Hume from the perspective of moderate realism,

R. P. Phillips writes: “Let us then first see what is to be said with regard to the nominalist view that we have no concepts which are, properly speaking, universal. When we reflect we see that we have in our minds some idea which corresponds to the common name we utter – such a name, for example, as man. Now reflection also shows us that this idea is not an individual sense impression, nor a collection of parts of similar sense impressions, but something which our mind grasps as being quite distinct from these impressions, though it is really in them and predicable of them. This universality is primarily in the mind, and not in the name. If I say ‘man,’ the idea in my mind is not that of an individual man, nor yet of a collection of individual men; but is a distinct mental concept, which is known to differ from that of any individual man with whom I am acquainted; but which, at the same time, is known to be applicable to them all, and so predicable of them; and not only of them, but of all similar beings. This is clear from the way in which we use these terms, for when we say ‘Peter is a man,’ we do not mean ‘Peter is a collection of men,’ nor do we mean that the name man is to be confined to Peter, so as to exclude Paul, John, etc., as we should if it signified a singular or individual concept. We make a distinction, too, between universal and collective terms, the latter class not being applicable to individuals: so I cannot say, e.g., Peter is an army.

“Further, the idea of the universal is itself a universal idea, being that of one concept which is capable of being predicated of many individuals. If then the Nominalist denies that we have any universal concepts he must also deny that he has the concept of the universal, and so is precluded from discussing this question, since it is useless to talk avout what is altogether unknown.

“The Nominalists themselves acknowledge that their theory destroys the possibility of

science, and so, like Hume, are skeptics; for if we can have no notion of anything which is common to several individuals, we can have none of any connection between them, or of the laws which govern them.

24 P. COFFEY, Epistemology, vol. 1, Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA, 1958, pp. 315-316.

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“Hume’s argument that when we use such a term as ‘horse,’ ‘we figure to ourselves’ a particular animal proves nothing more than that an image accompanies our conceiving a universal idea, if indeed this ‘figuring’ is to be granted to be a fact; which is highly doubtful. Huxley’s notion that the universal may be said to be of the same kind as a composite photograph is plainly inadmissible, for such a photograph gives us only an indistinct blur, unless the sitters are just alike, i.e. unless their features are the same. Actually we never get such identity of features, and if we did, a photograph of one of the sitters would serve as well as a photograph of a hundred, for we should be photographing the same thing in each case. So we should have in features what we are asserting we have in the case of universal natures, one thing which is common to many individuals.”25

Against the nominalism of Hume, we affirm that the concept is not the image; we have concepts and images. Giving various arguments against nominalism and in favor of moderate realism, the epistemologist Joseph Thomas Barron writes: “We have concepts in the strict sense of the term. We prove this by introspection which shows us that there is a difference between concepts and percepts, or images.

“First argument. (1) Concepts represent the nature or essence of whatness of a thing,

prescinding from all its individuating notes. The percept and the image do not represent the nature or essence, but only the external qualities of an object, such as its color and size. They represent an object more or less concrete, with certain individuating characteristics, in a definite situation etc.

“(2) The concept is universal, since it is capable of representing equally all members

of a class. This is because it represents the essential characteristics, and these alone, of all the members of a class. For example, the concept ‘horse’ is predicable of all horses, no matter what their size or kind of color may be. The image, whether it is distinct or obscure, is not universal; it can picture only one individual, of some particular kind and color. If we think ‘horse’ and note the accompanying imagery we see at once that the concept is not to be identified with the imagery since the concept can be applied to all horses indiscriminately, while the image can be attributed only to a horse which it resembles.

“(3) The concept is immutable and necessary; it cannot be otherwise than it is. If we

add to it, or subtract any note from it, it no longer represents its object. The image, on the other hand, is unstable, contingent, and fluctuating.

“This can be verified by introspection. My concept of a man has the two notes of

rationality and animality. If my concept is to be a concept of a man it must contain these two notes and these alone. If I add a new essential note, or if I take away either animality or rationality, I no longer have the concept of a man. In other words, my concept is unchangeable and fixed. But the same is not true of images. They change even in the same person as introspection shows. The same concept will be accompanied by varying imagery in the same person at different times.

“(4) Concepts may be perfectly clear but the concominant imagery may be extremely

hazy. My concept of a million-sided figure is clear – I know what such a figure is. The same is true of my concepts of minute things; my concept of a cell that is one one-thousandth of an

25 R. P. PHILLIPS, Modern Thomistic Philosophy, vol. 2 (Metaphysics), Newman, Wesminster, MD, 1935, pp. 98-100.

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inch in diameter is perfectly clear. But is the accompanying imagery as clearly defined? What is the verdict of introspection? If the concept is clear and the image is hazy they cannot be identified.

“Second argument. Appealing again to introspection I find that my concept is not a

sense datum, but that it is a thought-object apprehended apart from all sensory characteristics. Granting that I am conscious of an image when I think ‘horse,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘triangle,’ it is not about these sensuous images that I enunciate the judgments. ‘The horse is an animal,’ ‘Virtue is good,’ ‘A triangle is a figure.’ I certainly am not speaking of ‘the (pictured) horse,’ ‘the (pictured) virtue,’ or ‘the (pictured) triangle.’ In making these judgments I mean ‘all horses,’ ‘all virtue,’ and ‘all triangles.’ The image, to repeat, can only picture the individual, and if we had no concepts we could make no universal judgments.

“Third argument. Nominalists admit that the name or term is universal, but they hold

that there is no mental correlate which is really universal corresponding to it. But it would seem that the term can have no universal significance unless its mental correlate is universal, because language derives its significance from thojught – not thought from language. The term itself, whether written or oral, is concrete. It is general or universal because it is the expression of an idea that is universal. If there is no concept of which it is the expression it is a more concrete symbol of experience. Hence its universality is given to it by the concept for which it stands. The admission of nominalists that there are universal terms is thus an argument against their theory.

“Our position is strengthened by the results of psychological investigation.

Psychologists have established two facts concerning the relation between image and thought: (1) that different persons differ considerably as regards the images that accompany their thought on one and the same objects; (2) that images vary in the same person. Hardly anyone experiences the same images on successive occasions when thinking of the same thing.

“If our images were our concepts how could words be used as vehicles of thought? If

our universal terms stand for varying and unstable images how could the same words convey the same meaning to different people? For example, the term ‘animal’ may arouse fifty different images in fifty different people. Yet all understand the word in the same way – it has the same meaning for all fifty. It is clear that if the images were the thought there could not be this unanimity in understanding. As a matter of fact I know that when I make use of universal terms I do not manifest my images to others; I manifest my thoughts to them. I know this because they understand me.”26 26 J. T. BARRON, The Elements of Epistemology, Macmillan, New York, 1936, pp. 57-60. Coffey critiques nominalism as follows: “1. Introspection reveals the presence in consciousness of a mental correlate of the common name, a correlate of which the latter is the outward expression, and from which therefore the latter derives its function of standing for an indefinite multitude of individuals. This mental correlate introspection reveals to be not an individual sense datum, or a concrete portion isolated from each of a number of similar sense data, but to be a mental object apprehended apart from all the conditions of its actual existence in the similar sense data, but really in them and predicable of them: and it is because the common name connotes or implies this abstract and universal mental object that it can denote or stand for an indefinite multitude of the similar sense data. Therefore universality is not merely or primarily in the name; it is also and primarily in the mental term or object. And if some nominalists admit, as Sully seems to admit, that the mind can attain to the conscious possession of an object which expresses what is indefinitely realizable in individuals, and therefore stands for those in which it is de facto realized, – by this admission such writers really abandon the nominalist position. “2. The main contention of nominalism is that the verbal term or name alone is universal; and that the mental correlate, being itself sensuous and individual, derives the only universality we can ascribe to it from its uniform

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The Solution to the Problem of the Universals: Moderate Realism

The real solution to the problem of the universals, that which corresponds to reality,

lies in the position of moderate realism. Describing moderate realism, Maritain writes: “The moderate realist school, distinguishing between the thing itself and its mode of existence, the condition in which it is presented, teaches that a thing exists in the mind as a universal, in reality as an individual. Therefore that which we apprehend by our ideas as a universal does indeed really exist, but only in the objects themselves and therefore individuated – not as a universal. For example, the human nature found alike in Peter, Paul and John really exists,

but it has no existence outside the mind, except in these individual subjects and as identical

with them; it has no separate existence, does not exist in itself.”27

Sanguineti argues the case for moderate realism in two steps: “a) Firstly, we show that common names express universal concepts. Common names do not signify concrete images or concrete actions, but universal and intelligible essences. The signs with which animals communicate with one another always have a material and concrete content. They may sometimes give the impression of universality, but this is because some animals can associate images and other sensible signs with one another (when the dog hears a certain sound, it ‘knows’ it is going to eat). On the other hand, words are signs of an act of understanding; they transmit intelligible meaning. For example, when a man hears the term ‘relation,’ he does not understand a concrete relation, but the essence of relation as such. When he grasps the meaning of ‘circle,’ he is not thinking of the circle on the blackboard but of the nature of the circle as such. The concept of a circle is not material; it is not an image and it cannot be localized in a material place; and yet, it is not something vague: it has a very precise intelligible meaning that is applicable to every circle that we draw or imagine. Common names, therefore, express universal concepts.

“b) Secondly, we show that concepts signify a real nature. When we speak of a

‘parrot,’ a ‘chair,’ or an ‘oath,’ we are referring to a certain perfection or essence which is found in several individuals. These words do not signify something only in our mind; otherwise, there would be no such thing as extramental reality. All chairs have a common

structure or form which is materialized in every chair that exists. The mind understands this form by abstracting it from concrete chairs. What we understand by ‘chair’ is not something added to this particular chair: it is precisely what this object called chair is. When we point to an object and ask ‘What is it?’ our intention is not to find out ‘what it is called,’ though the reply to the former means giving the reply to the latter. If the names of things did not signify the being of things – what things are - , they would only point to what we think about things or what we do with them. Hence, concepts signify real natures.”28

alliance with the name. But the verbal term or name can have, of and in itself, no universal significance unless its mental correlate be itself a universal mental term or object: since language derives its significance from thought, and not vice versa. If, therefore, the human mind had no power of apprehending any mental term or object other than a concrete, individual datum, or individual collection or fusion of such data; if it had no power of apprehending an abstract and universal mental term or object, – then so far from the common name conferring universality on the former sort of mental term, the common name would be non-existent for us, it could could have no meaning for us: in a word, we should be, like the lower animals, destitute of language, because like them we should be incapable of thought as distinct from sensation”(P. COFFEY, op. cit., pp. 318-319). 27 J. MARITAIN, op. cit., p. 120. 28 J. J. SANGUINETI, op. cit., pp. 43-44.

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CHAPTER 3

CRITIQUE OF HUME’S SKEPTICISM Critique of Hume’s Skepticism with Regard to Extra-Mental Reality

Hume’s skepticism regarding extra-mental reality must also be addressed. Humean

philosophy cannot admit that there is anything real, anything objectively existing outside the states of human consciousness. The verdict of Hume’s radical empiricism is that the real existence of things can be but a hypothesis incapable of verification, a postulate that can neither be proved nor disproved. Now, contrary to Hume’s radical empiricism, the existence of things is not an hypothesis or a postulate, that is, something that we must assume since we cannot prove it, but, rather, an evident fact. An hypothesis or assumption is something that we cannot, at the moment, prove or disprove; for example, that the cure for cancer will be discovered in 2089. One can assume that the cure for cancer will be discovered at that point in time, but we simply cannot prove it. We can neither prove that it will not occur at that point in time. But if the cure for cancer is discovered in 2095, then we are no longer dealing with an assumption but with an accomplished fact. Now the existence of things in the world that we see around us is not an hypothesis but a fact. They are not assumed but given. Naturally, the existence of the things of the world cannot be proved because they need no proof; they are self-evident. We start with the things of the world; we say that these things are, for these things are there to begin with. They are thus judged to exist for they simply do exist.

General Critique of Skepticism

A skeptical philosophy professor can deny the self-evident certainty that reality exists,

but the minute he steps out of the classroom he acts like a realist (i.e., he holds as certain that the floor he is walking on really exists, that the car he is driving really exists, and that the fourteen-wheeler truck speeding towards him really exists, and so forth. If he denied these facts he would be dead). Therefore, skepticism is a practical impossibility (unworkable in action), as Bittle explains: “Skepticism is a practical impossibility. No sane human being can live without certitude of a practical kind. Even the most confirmed skeptic, no matter how many reasons of a theoretical and speculative nature he may have for doubting the possibility of genuine certitude, cannot lead a human life without denying his skeptical theory all day long in his conduct. His life shows that he is certain of very many things: the physical world, with its seasons and changes of weather, with its periods of day and night, with its differences of time and space relations; his own body, in all its concrete reality, in its conditions of health and sickness, in its physical needs of food, drink, and sleep; the existence and knowability of other people and other minds, some of whom agree with him while others disagree, and whom he communicates by means of conversation and writing, and whom he tries to convince of the truth of universal doubt. The story is told of Pyrrho the Skeptic that, when chased one day by a rabid dog, he ran for safety without allowing his skepticism to exercise its doubt about the existence and viciousness of the brute. When the bystanders laughed at him and ridiculed him for the inconsistency of his action, he is said to have made the sage remark (completely out of keeping with his theory): ‘It is difficult to get away entirely from human nature.’ After all, he could not doubt, in an untheoretical moment, that his body and the dog were real objects. This discrepancy between fact and theory, between life and philosophic system, between practical certitude and speculative doubt, is an incontrovertible

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proof that universal doubt is an impossibility except as a mere formulation of the mind. When facts and theories clash and contradict each other in such a transparent fashion, the sane man will not deny the facts and cling to his theories, but will realize that something is radically wrong with his views. Facts cannot be denied. To persist in universal skepticism in the face of a million contradicting facts of life bespeaks either insanity or stubbornness of mind. When the inconsistency between life and theory cannot be harmonized, it will not do to deny life, because that would be ridiculous; the theory must be abandoned as essentially faulty. Universal skepticism, therefore, must be rejected as a practical impossibility.”29

Skepticism is not only a practical impossibility but also a theoretical or speculative

absurdity. If our skeptical professor maintains that he cannot be certain about anything, the very judgment that he pronounces is already a certainty. He is certain that there cannot be any certainty about anything. Even though his certainty is erroneous, it, nevertheless, is a certainty. Bittle states: “One simply cannot doubt all things and principles, not even in a speculative way. The skeptics prove this by their own intellectual inconsistencies; and inconsistencies are the stigma of every false theory. Any normal person will realize the inherent contradiction of universal skepticism, if it is real and genuine, upon considering the following points:

“Skeptics contend that real certitude in knowledge is impossible, so that we must

always suspend our judgment because of a real doubt as to the truth of our judgment. This, in their view, is the only logical and rational thing to do. But then, they have at least arrived at this truth that we cannot be certain; and there is at least no doubt that we must doubt. Therefore, even skeptics possess certitude about something, and their fundamental tenet of universal doubt is involved in a contradiction.

“Skeptics claim we must suspend our judgment regarding any question, because we

might fall into error. But error is the opposite of truth. Consequently, they acknowledge that there is a difference between ‘truth’ and ‘error,’ and the two are not the same. Similarly, they must admit that ‘certitude’ and ‘doubt’ are not the same; otherwise, why should we doubt rather than be certain? Their very insistence on this difference shows plainly that they recognize the fact that something cannot be true and erroneous, certain and doubtful, at the same time. But thereby they surreptitiously admit the certainty of the truth of the principle of non-contradiction.

“Skeptics either have valid reasons for their universal doubting, or they have no valid

reasons for it. If they have valid reasons, they surely know something that is valid, and they no longer are real skeptics. If they have no valid reasons, they have no reason to doubt. In the first case their position is inconsistent, and in the second case their position is irrational. Whichever way they turn, their position is untenable.

“Skeptics, in defending the necessity of universal doubt, must naturally be conscious

of their doubt and its necessity; for, if they were not conscious of this, they could neither be aware of their doubt nor speak of it. Consequently, they rely upon the testimony of their

consciousness as a source of valid knowledge. But that involves certitude regarding their own existence and person and regarding the trustworthiness of consciousness. They cannot, in consistency, cast a doubt upon the testimony of consciousness, because the argument of St. Augustine, in speaking to the skeptics, would apply to them: ‘If I err, I exist. For one, who

29 C. BITTLE, Reality and the Mind, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1959, pp. 45-47.

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does not exist, cannot err; and by the very fact that I err, I exist. Since, therefore, I exist, if I err, how can I err about my existence, when it is certain that I exist if I err?’30 That the skeptic must admit and acknowledge the certain existence of various states of his own consciousness, has been pointed out by St. Augustine in another passage, marked by a keen appreciation of the facts in the case: ‘If he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wants to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he must not give a hasty consent.’31 Notwithstanding their claim to universal doubt, therefore, the skeptics by their doubting actually, though inconsistently, express certitude concerning a great number of facts and principles. Universal skepticism collapses under the weight of its own folly. And thus we see that universal skepticism is a philosophic absurdity.”32

30 ST. AUGUSTINE, The City of God, II, 26. 31 Ibid. 32 C. BITTLE, op. cit., pp. 47-48.

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CHAPTER 4

CRITIQUE OF HUME’S DE�IAL OF SUBSTA�CE

Hume’s Denial of Substance

The radical sensist empiricism of David Hume led him to disregard substance

altogether; he claimed that there was no need for the idea of a real support of mental phenomena, i.e., of ideas or states of consciousness. “Substance,” whether material or spiritual, is merely a name (a term, a word) we give for a collection of actions without any subject of these actions. He writes in his A Treatise of Human �ature that “the idea (sense impression) of substance as well as that of a mode, is nothing but a collection of simple ideas (sense impressions) that are united by the imagination and have a peculiar name assigned to them by which we are able to recall either to ourselves, or to others, that collection.”33 Hume maintained that the idea of substance was nothing but a metaphysical fiction created by the imagination and ought really to be dismissed or abandoned.

Critique of Hume’s Denial of Substance

Against Hume we affirm the objective reality of substance. We initially arrive at a

knowledge of substance from the observation of accidental changes in nature. A father’s face, for example, gets red because his son bumped his favorite car. The passage from the father’s originally white face to a red face to a white face again does not obviously destroy the individual being that is the father. He doesn’t turn into a frog or into a chair. Therefore, this accidental modification that he undergoes without destroying his being an individual man reveals a substratum that remains in essence the same throughout the accidental changes. There is revealed, in the accidental alteration that we have observed, a stable, permanent substantial core, called the substance,34 and certain secondary changeable perfections, called the accidents.

33 D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, Section VI (Of Modes and Substances). 34 Studies on substance: R. JOLIVET, La notion de substance, (Essai historique et critique sur le développement des doctrines d’Aristote nos jours), Beauchesne, Paris, 1929 ; F. S. MOSELEY, The Restoration of the Concept

of Substance to Science, “The New Scholasticism,” 1936, pp. 1-17 ; R. MARKUS, Substance, Cause, and

Cognition in Thomist Thought, “The New Scholasticism,” 1947, pp. 438-448 ; A. FOREST, La structure

métaphysique du concret selon saint Thomas d’Aquin, Vrin, Paris, 1956 ; R. J. McCALL, The Reality of

Substance, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1956 ; T. E. EVERSON, Separability and

Substance in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Baltimore, MD, 1973 ; J. E. ROBERTSON, The Distinction Between

Substance and �on-Substance in Aristotle’s “Metaphysics,” Texas, 1975 ; A. GRAESER, Aristoteles und das

Problem von Substantialität und Sein, “Freiburger Zeitschr. Für Phil. u. Theol.,” 25 (1978), p. 120 s ; E. H. GRANGER, A Problem in Aristotle’s Ontology. Substance as Both Simple and Complex, Austin, Texas, 1977 ; C. SEAD, Divine Substance, Oxford, 1977 ; R. HEINAMAN, Substance and Knowledge of Substance in

Aristotle’s “Metaphysics,” Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1978 ; J. M. LOUX, Substance and

Attribute. A Study in Ontology, “Philosophical Studies,” Series in Philosophy 14, Dordrecht-Boston, London, 1978 ; D. A. MILLER, Aristotle on Sensible Substance, Rochester, 1979 ; L. DEWAN, Laurence Foss and the

Existence of Substances, “Laval théologique et philosophique,” 44 (1988), pp. 77-84 ; J. F. WIPPEL, Thomas

Aquinas on Substance as a Cause of Proper Accidents, in Philosophie Im Mittelalter: Entwicklungslinien und

Paradigmen (edited by J. Beckmann et al.), Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1987, pp. 201-212 ; J. F. WIPPEL, Thomas Aquinas on Substance as a Cause of Proper Accidents, in Philosophie Im Mittelalter:

Entwicklungslinien und Paradigmen (edited by J. Beckmann et al.), Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1987, pp. 201-212 ; J. F. WIPPEL, Substance in Aquinas’ Metaphysics, “Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association,” 61 (1987), pp. 2-16 ; R. MASIELLO, A �ote on Substance and Quod Quid Erat Esse According to St. Thomas, “Doctor Communis,” 40 (1987), pp. 285-288 ; M. L. GILL, Aristotle on

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Substance. Like being, substance cannot be strictly defined. But substance may be broadly defined as that reality to whose essence or nature it is proper to be by itself and not

in another subject. Now, since the substance is the core of a thing that weathers the various accidental modifications, it is the most important element in each thing. There are two basic aspects of substance: 1. The substance is the substratum, the subject, that supports the accidents; and 2. Substance is something subsistent. This means that it does not exist in something else but is by itself, not needing to inhere in another like the accidents do. A dog, for example, is a substance since it subsists, having its own being distinct from the being of anything else. The brownness of the dog, however, doesn’t subsist in itself but needs to inhere in a subject. We say “This brown dog.” The broad definition of substance is taken from this second fundamental aspect of substance. Psychologically, substance as the “substratum of the accidents” is prior to substance as “something whose nature or essence it is to be by itself and not in another subject.” That is, we initially arrive at a knowledge of the substance through its function of supporting the accidents. However, metaphysically or ontologically, that is, in the order of reality, substance as “something whose nature or essence it is to be by itself and not in another subject” is prior to substance as the “support of the accidents,” because in order for substance to act as the support of the accidents it must first of all “be by itself and not in another subject,” that is, it must be capable of supporting itself. If substance is capable of having an essence or nature to be by itself and not in another it will be capable of supporting the accidents. Being capable of supporting the accidents is a property of the substance whose real nature or essence is to be by itself and not in another subject. This is why the broad definition of substance is taken from the second of our aspects of substance.

Accidents. An accident is defined as that reality to whose essence it is proper to be in

something else, as in its subject. If what is most characteristic of the substance is to be by itself and not in another, that which is most characteristic of accidents is to be in another, that is, to be in the substance. Take for example a cat. The substance here would be the substance cat, while its accidents would be the various perfections inhering in the substance cat (a substance that, though modified by its accidents, nevertheless remains in essence or nature unchanged), accidents such as its shape, size, colour, fluffiness of its fur, etc.

It is to be observed that the definition of accident includes the subject. The nature of

the accident is to demand inherence in another. As the substance has a nature or essence to which subsistence is fitting, and which situates the subject within a determinate species, accidents also have their own essence by which they are differentiated from each other, and to which dependence on the being of their subjects is fitting. The essences of accidents are naturally imperfect for they demand the support of their subjects.35 Rather than simply being, an accident is said to be something belonging to being.36 Accidents cannot be said to “become” or be corrupted; rather it is the subject that becomes through the accidents.37 It is for this reason that an accident cannot be defined without the subject as a quasi-part of the definition.38 “No matter how we take an accident, its very notion implies dependence on a subject but in different ways. For if we take an accident in the abstract, it implies relation to a

Substance, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989 ; F. A. LEWIS, Substance and Predication in

Aristotle, Cambridge-New York, 1991 ; L. DEWAN, The Importance of Substance, Jacques Maritain Center: Thomistic Institute, Notre Dame, IN, 1997. 35 Cf. In I Sent., d. 8, q. 4, a. 3. 36 Cf. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 110, a. 2, ad 3. 37 Cf. Ibid. 38 Cf. De Ente et Essentia ch. 7.

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subject, which relation begins in the accident and terminates in the subject: for whiteness is that whereby a thing is white. Accordingly, in defining an accident in the abstract, we do not put the subject as though it were the first part of the definition, viz., the genus; but we give it the second place which is that of the difference: thus we say snubnosedness is a curvature of the nose. But if we take accidents in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates at the accident: for a white thing is something that has whiteness. Accordingly, in defining this kind of accident, we place the subject as the genus, which is the first part of the definition; for we say that a snubnose is a curved nose.”39

Threefold Relation Between Substance and Accidents. There is a three-fold relation between substance and accidents40: 1. The substance is the substratum or the subject of the accidents, the “subject” here the bearer and that which underlies, and it indicates the metaphysical dependence of all the accidents on the substance. The substance is also the substratum of the accidents inasmuch as it gives them the act of being (esse); 2. The substance is to accident what potency is to act, because the accidents perfect the substance. The substance has a potency or passive capacity to receive further perfections conferred to it by its accidents, called accidental forms. For example, the operations of acts of free will are accidents which are a kind of perfection to which a substance is in potency; and 3. The substance is related to the accident as cause is to effect. The substance is the cause of the accidents which arise from it and the accidents come into being because of the substance.

The Real Distinction Between Substance and Accidents. There is a real distinction between a substance and its accidents, as is seen when observing accidental changes. Observing such accidental changes in the substance, we find that certain secondary perfections disappear and give rise to new ones without a substantial change in the subject. And such accidental alterations can only be possible if these accidents are really distinct from the substance they affect. All the nine accidents are, by their very essences, distinct from their subject. The substance is really distinct from the accidents, being superior to them, for it is the substance that determines the very content of things, making them to be what they are, whereas the accidents must depend entirely upon the substance, their substratum, for their very being.

The Act of Being Properly Belongs to the Substance. The act of being (esse) properly belongs to the subject of the accidents which is the substance. Accidents also are, but are by reason of the act of being that belongs to the substance. It is only the substance that is in the proper sense of the term. To say that accidents have an act of being of their own, as Suarez did, would undermine the unity of the substance-accidents composite (that is one substance and one substance only having its own accidents). We should also be reminded that the substance is being (ens) in the strict sense. Accidents are only by reason of being supported by its substratum or support which is the substance. Thus, it is only the substance that should properly be called being; accidents instead are something belonging to a being (ens).

The Unity of the Substance-Accidents Composite. Accidents depend entirely on the

substance for their being, for they do not have esse of their own but are because of the act of being of the substance. The real distinction between substance and accidents and their inequality do not in any way undermine the radical unity of the substance-accident composite of being (ens). The real distinction cannot destroy the unity of ens for a substance and its

39

Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 53, a. 2, ad 3. 40 Cf. De virtutibus in communi, q. 1, a. 3.

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accidents are not many beings mixed up together to form a whole; rather, there is only one being in the strict sense, which is the substance, and all of the accidents of this particular substance “belong to it,” receiving their very being from the substance without which they would cease to exist. Accidents cannot be autonomous realities separated from substance; they are rather the determining aspects of a substance, perfecting and completing it.

Knowledge of Substance and Accidents. We arrive at a knowledge of the substance-accidents composite by means of our intellect, initially through the information provided it by our senses. Our senses are only able to directly grasp the accidents of things, and this data is passed over to the intellect which arrives at its source and basis, which is the substance, again by means of the accidents. It is only the intellect that is capable of grasping the nature of the thing, its essence. In the process of knowing a thing composed of substance and accidents we employ a constant going back and forth from accidents to substance and from substance back to the accidents: 1. In the beginning we have a vague knowledge of the composite of substance and accidents. When we are in the forest for example and see a large being approaching at a distance, its nature unknown to us, we know that the various qualities perceived by our senses, for example, the colour, size and shape, of the being, are not independent realities existing in themselves but rather belong to a single substance, the being approaching at a distance. Even at this initial stage of the knowledge process we already perceive that the various accidents are but secondary manifestations belonging to a single individual substance that subsists by itself, even though we are unable as yet to determine the exact nature or essence of this substance. It should be recalled that being (ens) is the first thing that is grasped by the intellect, and since substance is being in the strict sense, we cannot perceive accidents without at the same time perceiving the subject or substance in which these accidents inhere in; 2. From the perception of the accidents by the senses we move now to a knowledge of the nature of the substance. The accidents do not hide the substance; rather, they reveal it. The accidents of the bear approaching at a distance, reveal the nature or essence of the bear. Thus, through external manifestations we arrive at a knowledge of the substantial core of the subject in question; 3. Then, from the substance we go back to the accidents. Having arrived at a knowledge of the nature of the thing perceived, in this case, our approaching bear, this new knowledge gives us much more insight into the other accidents of the animal in question as well as their mutual relationships. Knowing the essence or nature of bears, man knows that bears can at times, when provoked, or when protecting their young in the vicinity, attack humans in a ferocious manner, and thus he adjusts his behaviour accordingly with the situation.

Concerning our knowledge of substance, Llano explains that “substance is being that

is by itself (per se): it is what is properly called being. Substance is what has the act of being and what subsists by its own act of being. Accidents, in contrast, are not beings in themselves, they are beings of a being (entis entia) or – as Aristotle says – ‘buds and concomitances of beings’41; they inhere in substance and participate in its act of being.

“In natural reality substance and accidents form a composite unity: the concrete and

singular being. Substance is never given without accidents, since it always subsists accidentally determined; and accidents are never given without substance since, of themselves, they do not have an act of being.

41 ARISTOTLE, �icomachean Ethics, I, 6, 1096a 22.

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“The dichotomies which the rationalist mode of thought leads to, tend to isolate substance from accidents. But it is an error to think that substance can only be known if it is separated from accidents: thus conceived substance immediately becomes unknowable, because such a separation can never occur. These rationalist oppositions lead to understanding accident as that which is known by the senses and substance as that which is known by thought.42

“What really happens is that the knowledge of the reality of substance is not separable

from the experience of the real whole, of being which is known by the senses and by the intellect, and which includes both substance and accidents, because it is an unum composed of both principles. The substance of material things is not directly knowable by the senses, but the intellect knows it immediately through the sense data in which substance appears. Substance – that which is by itself – cannot be reduced to that which is offered directly by sense experience, but it is discovered within the latter.

“The knowledge of substance begins with its accidents, which make it known because

they participate in the being (esse) of the substance. The accidents do not hide the substance, as if they were a sort of opaque crust covering it (this crude imaginative representation of the theory is at the root of not a few unjustified criticisms). The knowledge of the accidents, rather, entails a certain knowledge of the substance because any accident is known as an intrinsic reference to substance, which the intellect grasps confusedly but immediately in any accidental determination. For example, when I know the color white, what I grasp is not an isolated and subsisting ‘whiteness,’ but rather ‘this white thing,’ be it chalk, paper, light or whatever. Whence – as analytic philosophy has demonstrated – things cannot be counted numerically in adjectival terms, but only in terms of substances.43

“At first, substance is known above all as the substrate of the accidents, of the

properties and the changes in things. But this approach – as Aristotle has lucidly demonstrated44 – is insufficient. Subsequently, substance is known as the essence of the thing, as that which each being is in itself, as an act from which properties flow. Finally, the real constitutive factor of substance is attained: subsistence. Substance is what is determinate and separate,45 what has being (esse) in itself, the subject of the act of being.”46

42 In this line we find the absolute Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon (Kant carries out a logical-transcendental analysis of substance and accidents, limited to the knowledge of the phenomenal). In the Kantian theory of the object there is no place for the constitutive reference from what appears, to what is. There is an irreparable rupture between these two dimensions. But the truth is that being and phenomenon are fundamentally correlated; there is an essential homogeneity between that-which-manifests-itself and that-which-is-manifested. Being shows itself in the phenomenon, which is nothing other than ‘being-for-us.’ The phenomenon is a dimension of being, through which being becomes evident. The phenomenon is nothing other than the limited manifestation of being to a knowing subject (Cf. A. LLANO, Fenómeno y trascendencia en

Kant, EUNSA, Pamplona, 1973, pp. 274-275). 43 Cf. P. GEACH, Reference and Generality, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1962, pp. 38-40. 44 ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, VII, 3, 1029a 9-27. 45 ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, VII, 3, 1029a 28. 46 A. LLANO, op. cit., pp. 118-120.

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CHAPTER 5

CRITIQUE OF HUME’S ATTACK O� OBJECTIVE O�TOLOGICAL

CAUSALITY

Hume’s Denial of the Objective Validity of the Principle of Causality

Then comes the attack on the objective validity of the principle of causality47: Hume

denies the objective, universal and necessary validity of this principle. It is simply not objectively, universally, and necessarily true, he argues, that every effect has a cause, since in human perception cause and effect are in fact two phenomena with two separate existences, one following after the other. We cannot therefore conclude that the latter phenomena is due to the causality of the former just because it comes after it. The only conclusion that we can come up with is that, owing to the laws of the association of ideas,48 it is believed (felt) that a certain phenomenon is caused by another, because, by habit, we have grown accustomed to believe it. For him, causality does not truly occur in extra-mental reality but is rather a subjective phenomenal complex idea, a creation of the human mind. With this doctrine Hume dismisses the traditional a posteriori demonstrations of the existence of God as being devoid of demonstrative capacity.49

47 Hume repeatedly denies the objective, universal and necessary validity of the principle of causality in his An

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which is contained in his work Philosophical Essays Concerning

Human Understanding, first published in 1748. 48 “A prominent part of Hume’s philosophy is his theory of associationism. We speak, for example, of the principle of causality, and consider it to be a universally and necessarily valid axiom that ‘Every effect must have a cause.’ Hume claims that this axiom is derived from experience. What we perceive is an invariable

sequence of events: one thing invariably follows an antecedent event, and from this sequence we conclude that the antecedent event ‘causes’ the one that follows as an ‘effect.’ We do not perceive anything like the ‘production’ of one thing by another. From his phenomenalistic, sensationalistic standpoint, Hume could not admit real ‘causation.’ Whenever we observe one event to occur, we feel the mental compulsion to assert that the other will follow. But whence the mental compulsion to conjoin just these two events as ‘cause’ and ‘effect’? Hume gives as the reason that ‘the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant and to believe that it will exist.’ In other words, it is the association of ideas which compels us to formulate necessary and universal judgments, axioms, and principles. Such judgements, axioms, and principles have no objective value, but are mere associations of impressions derived from the succession of phenomena”(C. BITTLE, op. cit., p. 317). 49 “Having eliminated an objective origin for the idea of active power and the causal bond, Hume had to trace them to purely subjective conditions within the perceiver. The objects of perception are atomic, unconnected units which may, nevertheless, follow one another in a temporal sequence and pattern. Through repeated experience of such sequences, the imagination is gradually habituated to connect antecedent and consequent objects in a necessary way. The necessity does not arise from any productive force or dependence on the side of the objects so related but comes solely from the subjective laws of association operating upon the imagination to compel it to recall one member of the sequence when the other is presented. The causal bond consists entirely in our feeling of necessity in making the transition, in thought, from one object to the other. The philosophical inference from effect to cause is abstract and empty until it is strengthened by the natural relation set up by the workings of habit and association upon the imagination. Given this all-embracing psychological basis, however, causal inference can have nothing stronger than a probable import. Absolute certainty cannot be achieved, since the mind is not dealing with dependencies in being, on the side of the real things, but is confined phenomenalistically to its own perceptions and their relations. It is very likely that our habitual connection among ideas corresponds to some causal link among real things, but this can never be verified. Hence causal inference can yield only probability and belief, not certainty and strict knowledge. Hume rigidly applied this conclusion to the a posteriori argument for God’s existence, maintaining that it is, at the very most, a probable inference and nowise a demonstration”(J. COLLINS, God in Modern Philosophy, Regnery, Chicago, 1967, p. 117).

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Hume teaches that we do not have a perception of a cause; all that is perceived, experienced, are successive sensations. There is no intrinsic connection between these sensations nor any necessity for such a connection. So, what is this principle of causality that the scholastics boast about? Simply a subjective product of habit. We have gotten so used to seeing fire burn that, by habit, we say that fire causes the burning; but since Hume states that we cannot sense this causing, this causing can be but a subjective product of the imagination.

The common man in the street observes a ‘constant conjunction’ of A and B in

repeated instances, where A is contiguous with B and is prior to B, and so he calls A the cause and B the effect. Hume writes in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “When one particular species of events has always, in all instances, been conjoined with another, we make no longer any scruple of foretelling one upon the appearance of the other, and of employing that reasoning (casual inference) which can alone assure us of any matter of fact or existence. We then call the one object cause, the other effect.”50 “Suitably to this experience, therefore, we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where

all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.”51

For Hume, causation can be considered either as a philosophical relation or as a

natural relation. Considered as a philosophical relation, he defines cause as follows: “A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are placed in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter.”52 As a natural relation, Hume defines cause thus: “A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.”53 Hume observes that “though causation be a philosophical relation, as implying contiguity, succession and constant conjunction, yet it is only so far as it is a natural relation and produces a union among our ideas, that we are able to reason upon it or draw any inference from it.”54

It is thus that Hume gives an answer to his question “why we conclude that such

particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects, and why we form an inference from one to another.”55 Our pan-phenomenalist empiricist gives us a psychological reply, referring to the psychological effect of observation of instances of constant conjunction. This observation produces a custom or propensity in the mind, an associative link, whereby the mind passes in natural fashion from, for example, the idea of flame to the idea of heat or from an impression of flame to the lively idea of heat.

In keeping with his immanentist phenomenalism, Hume denied the objective

ontological validity of the principle of efficient causality, reducing the objective causality affirmed by methodical realism into nothing but a mere succession of phenomena put together by the associative force of habit, a mere product of our imagination. When we observe, for example, a lighted torch and then feel heat we are accustomed to conclude a causal bond. But in fact, Hume points out, it is the imagination, working by habit, that

50 D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, VII, 2, 59. 51 Ibid. 52 D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, I, 3, 14. 53 Ibid. 54 D. HUME, op. cit., I, 3, 6. 55 D. HUME, op. cit., I, 3, 3.

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conjures up this causal bond from what is in fact a mere succession of phenomena: “We have no other notion of cause and effect but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoined together…We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing and always find that from the constant conjunction the objects acquire a union in the imagination.”56 Attacking the objective validity of the principle of efficient causality in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he states: “When we look towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connection; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequent of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole that appears to the outward senses. The mind feels no sentiment or inward impression from this succession of objects: consequently, there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connection.”57

Kreyche explains that “it is primarily by Hume that the major attack is launched upon

efficient causality. According to Hume, man knows only his ideas and images directly, and not the world of reality. Mind is, for him, simply a state of successive phenomenal impressions, and judgment is replaced by association. In asking whether causality can be justified, Hume requests that one show how its most important characteristic, necessary nexus, is grounded in experience. Not finding it rooted there, he concludes that the necessary connection between cause and effect is psychological, having its ground in custom and the association of ideas. Cause thereupon becomes a relationship among ideas, and no longer an influence of one thing upon the other in the real world…The principal shortcoming of Hume’s view stems from his empiricism and nominalism. He attemped to have the senses detect, in a formal way, causality and necessity per se – something that those powers are incapable of doing. Aquinas had himself observed that not even substance is sensible per se, but only per accidens. Since he did not admit abstraction of an intellectual nature, Hume was consistent within his own system in rejecting causality and substance. And, unable to justify causality ontologically, he did the next best thing in justifying it psychologically.”58

56 D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, I, 3, 6. 57 D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, VII, 1, 50. 58 G. F. KREYCHE, Causality, in �ew Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967, p. 346. Benignus’ Critique of Hume’s Rejection of Efficient Causality: “1. Sensism. Hume’s original error, which led to his rejection of substance and causality as valid philosophical concepts, was sensism. He considered experience as the sole ultimate source of valid human knowledge, which it is, but by experience he meant pure sensation, or at very best perception, and nothing more. Impressions of sense and their less vivid relics in the mind, namely, ideas, are the only data of knowledge for which experience vouches, according to Hume. We have no impression of causality or substance; therefore, he argues, these are not given in experience. “Hume mistakes an analysis of the factors in perception for an account of the perceptive act. The data of pure

sensation are, as he says, fragmentary and intermittent sense impressions. But the act which he is analyzing is not an act of pure sensation. What I perceive is not these fragmentary impressions, but the things of which they are accidents. It is doubtful that even animals perceive merely sensory qualities. Substances (i.e., particular, concrete) are the data of perception. They are incidental sensibles immediately perceived by means of internal sense co-operating within external sense. In his analysis Hume takes as the immediate datum of perception something which is actually known only as a result of a difficult abstraction, namely, the pure sensation. Then his problem is to discover how, starting from pure sensations, we come to believe in objective substances which exist unperceived and permanently. It is a false problem. “2. Human Experience Includes Understanding. Hume is right in saying that we never have a sensory impression of causality or substance. But he is wrong in saying that we never experience causes or substances. Efficient causes are immediately experienced every time we observe anything physically influencing anything else, every time, for example, we see a hammer driving a nail. But the cause qua cause is never sensed directly; cause, like substance, is only sensed per accidens. The cause as a sensible object, its movement, and the

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subsequent movement of the object acted upon are the immediate data of sense. But to limit experience to the sensible data perceived is to imply that man perceives without ever at the same time understanding what he perceives. When I perceive a hammer descending upon a nail and the nail moving further into the wood, I also understand that the hammer is something and is driving the nail into the wood. Both perception and understanding are equally parts of the experience. To exclude the understanding is to reduce all human experience to uncomprehending sense awareness. Not only is this not the only kind of human experience, but, at least in the case of adults, it never normally occurs at all. We simply do not perceive without some understanding of what we are perceiving; we do not perceive phenomena without perceiving them as the phenomena of something; nor do we perceive one thing acting upon another without at the same time understanding the former as a cause of the effect produced in the latter. “3. Understanding in Perception. There is surely a crystal-clear distinction between mere perceiving and understanding. The domestic animals of the battlelands of Europe are no more spared the bombing and the fire, the hunger and the cold, the noise and the stench, than are their human owners. But they have no understanding of what is going on; no reason for what is happening is known to them, and none is sought. Their minds do not grope for reasons the way their parched tongues crave for water. The darkness that their eyes suffer when they are driven in the midst of the night through strange lands is matched by no darkness of intellect seeking a reason which it cannot find – that awful darkness which is so often the lot of man. Failure to understand could no more be a privation and a suffering in man if his intellect were not made for grasping the reasons and causes of things, than blindness would be a suffering if sight never grasped the visible. A man who does not understand feels frustrated, because his mind is made for understanding; he suffers when he cannot grasp the reason, because he knows that there is a reason. Perception is not understanding; but normally some understanding occurs together with perception: we could not possibly have the experience of failing to understand what we perceive, if we did not have the prior experience of understanding what we perceive. “4. Cause is ‘Given’ to the Intellect. Cause is something that we grasp intellectually in the very act of experiencing action – whether our own action or another’s. We understand the cause as producing the effect: the hammer as driving the nail, the saw as cutting the wood, the flood as devastating the land, the drill as piercing the rock, the hand as molding the putty, ourselves as producing our own thoughts, words, and movements, our shoes as pinching our feet, a pin as piercing our finger, our fellow subway travelers as pressing our ribs together. We do not think that the nail will ever plunge into the wood without the hammer, the marble shape up as a statue without a sculptor, the baby begin to exist without a father, the acorn grow with no sunlight; if something ever seems to occur in this way, we do not believe it, or we call it a miracle (i.e., we attribute it to a higher, unseen cause). In a similar manner, substance is given directly to the intellect in the very act of perception; the substance is grasped as the reason for the sensible phenomena. “5. The Subjectivistic Postulate. The arguments of Hume are based on the subjectivistic postulate, namely, that we know nothing directly except our own ideas. From this starting point, certitude about real causality can never be reached. The only causality that could ever possibly be discovered if the primary objects of our knowledge were our own ideas would be the causal relations among the ideas themselves. No such relations are as a matter of fact found, since none exist and since the subjectivistic postulate is false to begin with. Causal relations exist between objects and the mind, and between the mind and its ideas, but not between ideas and ideas. Hume places causality in our mind, as a bond between ideas, when he accounts for our idea of causality by attributing it to mental custom. Whatever his intention, he actually presents similar successions of ideas as the cause of our ideas of causality and the principle of causality. As a matter of fact, such causality would not account for our belief in causality, because it would never be an idea, but only an unknown bond connecting ideas. It is only because Hume is already in possession of the concept of causality gained through external experience that he is able to formulate the theory that invariable succession of ideas produces mental custom, which in turn gives rise to the idea of cause. “6. Imagination and Causality. It is, perhaps, this locating of causality among our ideas that leads Hume to a very peculiar argument against the principle of causality: ‘We can never demonstrate the necessity of a cause to every new existence, or new modification of existence, without showing at the same time the impossibility there is that anything can ever begin to exist without some productive principle…Now that the latter is utterly incapable of a demonstrative proof, we may satisfy ourselves by considering, that as all distinct ideas are separable from each other, and as the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, it will be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent at this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle. The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible fot the imagination; and consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it implies no contradiction nor absurdity; and it is therefore incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas; without which it is impossible to demonstrate the necessity of a cause’(D. HUME, Treatise of Human �ature, I, 3, 3).

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Proof of the Objective Existence of Efficient Causality Against Hume

Contrary to the deniers of the objective existence of efficient causality like Hume,

Kant, and J. S. Mill, we instead maintain the objective validity of efficient causality based upon the data furnished by experience and demanded by reason as the only true explanation of the facts. A mere invariable sequence of antecedents and consequents is not sufficient to account for the concepts of ‘cause and effect’ and that there really exists an actual production of one thing or event by another thing or event.

Bittle explains: “In proving the existence of efficient causality among things, it will be

necessary first to show that the assumptions which underlie the position of the opponents are unwarranted; then it will be necessary to adduce the positive evidence which supports the view that efficient causality actually is present in nature.

“The opposition against the existence of efficient cause is based primarily on an

adverse theory of knowledge, and not on the facts themselves. As such, the denial is made primarily on epistemological grounds. Kant, since he maintained that we can have no knowledge of things-in-themselves, naturally had to deny any knowledge of efficient causality as existing among these things-in-themselves. It is the purpose of epistemology to vindicate the sources of our knowledge, among them being sense-perception, consciousness, and reason. In this connection we will restrict ourselves to one consideration. If Kant’s fundamental assumption were correct, we could know nothing of the existence and activity of other minds beside our own, because these ‘other minds’ are evidently things-in-themselves. But we have a knowledge of other minds. This is proved conclusively by the fact of language, whether spoken or written or printed. We do not use language to converse with ourselves;

“This argument, even if we overlook the flagrant petitio principii in the statement that ‘all distinct ideas are separable from each other,’ is no argument at all. What Hume says is nothing more than that he can imagine a thing beginning to exist without a cause, and that consequently no argument from mere ideas can ever prove the necessity of a cause. We can agree with him that no argument from mere ideas can ever prove real causality; but we will add that that is why Hume could never prove it – he started with mere ideas, or rather images. Aside from this, the argument is utterly unrelated to the subject of causality. Imagination has nothing to do with causes or with beginnings of existence. I never imagine anything as beginning to exist, or even as existing; I simply imagine the thing, and in my image there is no reference to existence. The thing which I imagine may as easily be a fire-breathing dragon as my own brother. The reference to existence lies in thought, not in imagination. The words of Hume, ‘The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination,’ have no real meaning, because the imagination never possesses the idea of a beginning of existence. Thought judges whether a thing conceived exists or not, and thought (even Hume’s ‘natural belief’) judges that nothing begins to exist without a cause. Surely, I can imagine a situation in which a certain thing is not an element and then a situation in which it is. To do this is not to conceive the thing as beginning to exist; it is merely to imagine it after not imagining it. Such imaginative play has no connection with causality, except in the obvious sense that I could not imagine anything, to say nothing of making imagination experiments, if I had not the power of producing, that is, causing images in my mind; and presumably that is not the sense in which Hume intended his illustration to the interpreted. “7. Loaded Dice. The subjectivistic postulate prejudices the whole issue as to the reality of causes before examination of the question even begins. If knowledge cannot attain to anything real and extramental, it cannot attain to real, extramental causes. The only causality it could possibly discover would be causal relation among images in the mind. If the object is read out of court by the postulate that we know only our ideas, objective causality is read out with it. It is not surprising that sensism and subjectivism should lead to the explicit denial of the principles of causality, sufficient reason, and substance, since they begin with their implicit denial. Sensations, impressions, images, separated from any being arousing them must be viewed by any intelligent mind as so many phenomena without any sufficient reason for existing. Normal men cannot abide sensory experiences without objective reasons. They regard a person who has such experiences as a psychopathic case; they say, ‘He imagines things,’ and suggests a psychiarist”(B. GERRITY, �ature, Knowledge, and God, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1947, pp. 337-341).

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conversation is essentially a dialogue between our mind and ‘other minds.’ Hence, we can and do acquire knowledge of things-in-themselves, as they exist in themselves, through the medium of language. Kant’s fundamental assumption is, therefore, incorrect. Consequently Kant is wrong, when he asserts that we could know nothing of efficient causality, if it existed among things. If we can show that efficient causality exists in ourselves, we prove that efficient causes exist in nature, because we ourselves are a part of nature.

“Hume, Mill, and others, denied efficient causality because of their phenomenalism.

According to their assumption, all we can perceive are the phenomena, and phenomena are revealed to us in our senses merely as events in ‘invariable sequence.’ Whenever, then, we perceive phenomena as invariably succeeding each other in place and time, we are prompted by habit and the association of ideas to imagine a causal connection to exist between them, so that the earlier event is the ‘cause’ and the later even the ‘effect.’ This is, in their view, the origin within our mind of the concept of efficient causality.

“This is a deplorable error. The fact is, we clearly distinguish between mere

‘invariable sequence’ and ‘real causality.’ We notice, for example, an invariable sequence between day and night every twenty-four hours, and we are convinced that this sequence has been maintained throughout the ages; at any rate, we have never experienced a single exception in this sequence. We also notice, when the day is hot and humid, and a sudden, decisive drop in temperature occurs, that a rainstorm develops; this sequence, however, is by far not as invariable as the sequence between day and night. No one, however, dreams of considering day and night as being in any causal connection, as if the day ‘produced’ or ‘caused’ the night. On the other hand, we certainly are convinced of the existence of a causal connection between the states of the weather, although the occurrence has by no means the invariability of the sequence we observe between day and night. Hence, the fundamental assumption of the phenomenalists, that our observation of ‘invariable sequence’ is the basis of our concept of ‘efficient causality’ is opposed to fact. In accordance with their principle, the phenomenalists must maintain a parity in all cases of invariable sequence. We, however, do not judge the cases to be the same. There must, then, be some other reason why we judge a causal connection to exist between phenomena, between things and events.

“Besides this, we clearly distinguish between conditions and causes, even if there be

an invariable succession between them. We know by experience that we are unable to see objects except in the presence of light. In the dark all objects are invisible; light must first be admitted before we can see. There is an invariable sequence between the presence of light and the seeing of objects. According to the phenomenalists’ principle, therefore, we should judge that light is the ‘cause’ of vision, because its presence invariably precedes vision. But we do not so judge. We consider light to be the condition, not the cause, of vision, although vision must always ‘follow after’ the admission of light in sound eyes. And so it is with all ‘conditions.’

“It is entirely untrue to assert that we obtain our concept of cause and effect from the

observation of the frequency of an occurrence through habit and the association of ideas. We judge of the presence of causality even in single cases. When the first steam engine, or the first telephone, or the first automobile, went into operation, no one waited for the hundredth or thousandth appearance or operation in order to apply the principle of causality; this was done immediately. Similarly, when an accident or disaster occurs, we do not wait until it occurs frequently before we think of cause and effect; we look for the causal connection as soon as it occurs. On the other hand, though we see a million automobiles follow each other

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down the highway, we never think of the one being the cause of the other, due to association of ideas or habit.

“Hence, mere sequence, no matter how frequent and invariable, is not the principle

which forces us to accept the concept of efficient cause and causal connection as valid in nature. The facts themselves compel our reason to judge that the relation of cause and effect exists between things.

“Our experience proves causality. Critical analysis of our internal states and of

external nature convinces us of its reality. Internal consciousness is an indubitable witness to the fact that our mental activities not only take place in us, but that they are also produced by us. Such are the activities of thinking, imagining, desiring, willing. They are clearly observed to be ‘produced’ by ourselves, and this production is observed to be due to our own action, so that their existence is intrinsically dependent on this productive action. Thus, we are conscious that we deliberately set about to solve a certain mental problem by combining ideas into judgments, judgments into inferences, and a whole chain of inferences into an extended argumentation. With the help of our imagination we work out poems, essays, melodies, pictorial scenes, machines, etc., before they ever appear outside the mind. We desire certain things and consciously will them; and we are fully aware that we are the responsible agents of these desires and acts of the will, because we produce them by direct action. No one can deny these facts; they are present for everyone to observe. But if the conscious knowledge of ourselves as the active agents in the production of these internal activities is unreliable and false, all our knowledge, of whatever character, must be adjudged an illusion, because knowledge rests ultimately on the testimony of consciousness. In that case, however, universal skepticism is the logical outcome, and that means the bankruptcy of all science and philosophy. Hence, our consciousness is a trustworthy witness to the fact of efficient causality within us.

“External experience proves the same. We speak. Language is an external expression

of our internal ideas. It is impossible for us to doubt that we actually produce the sounds of language which express our own thoughts. We intend to express these thoughts in conversation, and we actually do; and we are conscious of the fact that we are the agents in this process. If I am a painter, I set up my canvas, mix the paints, apply the colors, and with much effort project my mental images upon the canvas in form and color; I know that all this is not a mere ‘sequence of events,’ but a production of something in virtue of my own actions. So, too, if I take pen and ink and write something on paper, I not only perceive one word following the other, but I am also convinced beyond the possibility of any rational doubt that I am the ‘author’ of the words appearing on the paper. Neither Hume, nor Mill, nor any other phenomenalist, disclaimed the authorship of the books which appeared in their name, nor would they refuse to accept royalties from their publishers on the plea that they were not the efficient causes of these books.

“Again, we are convinced that many bodily actions are of a voluntary nature. I move

my hand, my arm, my head, and I know that these members move because I make them move. If I am set for a sprint, and the gun goes off, I jump into action. But I am conscious that there is not a mere sequence between the shot and my running; and I am also conscious that the shot does not make my limbs move so rapidly: it is I myself who decides to run and who deliberately produces this action of running. This is all the more obvious to me, when I compare this sort of action with the action of the heart or of the liver, etc., over which I have no control. I clearly distinguish between ‘sequence’ and ‘causality.’ Hume, as we have seen,

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claims that we cannot know of this causal connection between our will and our bodily movements, because we cannot ‘feel’ the energy involved in this operation. This merely proves that we do not observe the whole process. Of the fact of causation itself we are most assuredly aware, and we are also aware of the exertion and fatigue involved in producing these effects; but if we ‘produced’ nothing, of if there were no energy expended in the production (for instance, in walking, working, running, making a speech, etc.), why should we feel exertion and fatigue? And thus our external experience also testifies to the fact that we ourselves are efficient causes which produce definite effects.

“In order to disprove the opponents’ contention, no more is required than to prove a

single case of causality. We could, therefore, rest our case with the above argument taken from the internal and external experience of our own selves. However, we contend that the existence of other efficient causes in nature is also capable of proof.

“Reason demands efficient causality in nature. If reason demands that we admit the

existence of efficient causes acting in the universe, the philosopher cannot refuse to accept the verdict of reason, because science and philosophy are based on the operations of reason. Now, if I am convinced beyond doubt that I am the cause of the picture I paint, what am I to conclude, when I see someone else paint a picture? I must conclude that he is doing what I did, when I went through the same series of actions. Of course, all that my senses can observe is a ‘sequence’ of actions; my reason, however, demands that he, too, must be the ‘producer’ of his picture, just as I am of mine. This is common sense and sound logic. And the same principles applies to all actions performed by others, when I observe them doing the same things that I do or have done: if I am the efficient cause, they must be efficient causes for the same reason. There is a complete parity between my actions and their actions, and so I know, through a conclusion of reason, that real causality exists in nature in these and similar cases.

“It is only a short step from instances of such activities to productive activities in the

world at large. A farmer places seed into the soil. After a period of time it sprouts, grows, and eventually matures into an abundant harvest. Here something new has originated. And so with animals and men. We were not here a hundred years ago; but we are here now. We perceive new living beings coming into existence daily. They are new realities. But if they did not exist always and do exist now, they must have received existence. Their existence is a ‘produced’ existence, a ‘caused’ reality, because they were brought from non-existence to existence. That, however, which exerts a positive influence through its action in the production of another, is an efficient cause. Efficient causes, therefore, exist in nature. We must, then, reject phenomenalism as false and accept efficient causality as the only adequate interpretation of the facts as observed.”59

59 C. BITTLE, op. cit., pp. 343-349.

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CHAPTER 6

CRITIQUE OF HUME’S PHILOSOPHICAL A�THROPOLOGY

Hume’s Philosophical Anthropology

In keeping with his immanentist and sensist phenomenalism which negates substance,

Hume holds that the person is nothing but a “bundle of perceptions” put together by the memory and associative force of the imagination in order to form a stable whole. That the person seems to look like a stable and concrete subject, whose actions and activities belong to this subject, is a concoction due solely to the grouping of perceptions together by the imagination. What is the person, the I, for Hume? Mind reduced to its contents (the flowing phenomenal perceptions that is experienced). There is no Ego distinct from these perceptions. Hume “granted validity to phenomena alone, which he gathered together into collections or ‘bundles.’ For him, as a consequence, the soul is only a ‘bundle of perceptions,’ in constant flux and movement – it is from Hume consequently, that we trace the origin for all ‘psychologies without a soul.’ In addition, Hume regarded the causal bond uniting these ‘bundles of perceptions as nothing more than a subjective, psychological law required to make experience possible. In fact, it is this law which constitutes experience.”60

Hume argues substance (and consequently the substantial human soul) out of

existence, writing in his Treatise: “I would fain ask those philosophers, who found so much of their reasonings on the distinction of substance and accident, and imagine we have clear ideas of each, whether the idea of substance be derived from the impressions of sensations or reflection? If it be conveyed to us by our senses, I ask, which of them; and after what manner? If it be perceived by the eyes, it must be a color; if by the ears, a sound; if by the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses. But I believe none will assert, that substance is either a color, sound or taste. The idea of substance must therefore be derived from an impression of reflection, if it really exists. But the impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our passions and emotions; none of which can possibly represent a substance. We have therefore no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other meaning when we talk or reason concerning it.”61

So, for Hume, there is no substance, no substantial Ego, and no substantial (and

immortal) soul. All that is left are phenomena; all is reduced to internal mental states (pan-phenomenalism). We are unable to access extra-mental reality to the things themselves. Describing the pan-phenomenalism of Hume and its negative consequences for the personal Ego and substantial and immortal soul, Bittle writes: “Since for Hume there is no substantial reality underlying the transitory mental states, he contended that man is ‘but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.’62 We have then, Hume teaches, no personal mind

and Ego as the subject of mental phenomena. There are thoughts, but there is no thinker, who thinks the thoughts. We should not say ‘I think,’ but ‘It thinks.’ Here we have the psychology of the impersonal mind, and the ‘mind,’ if we are to speak of it at all, is not distinct from the passing internal states. It is like movement without anything that is moving.”63

60 J. HIRSCHBERGER, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 235. 61 D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, I, 1, 6. 62 D. HUME, op. cit., I, 4, 6. 63 C. BITTLE, The Whole Man, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1945, p. 541.

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Critique of Hume’s Philosophical Anthropology

An advocate of realism, James Collins describes and critiques Hume’s conception of

the personal self founded upon his sensist and pan-phenomenalist gnoseology, writing: “Hume agrees with his British predecessors that a theory of self must be constructed in conformity with one’s theory of mind, but he takes a more radically phenomenalistic view of mind than they do. Mind may be defined as ‘nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity…[It is] that connected mass of perceptions, which constitute a thinking being.’64 The substantiality of the mind is conspicuous by its absence from this definition. If by substance is meant something which may exist by itself, then (at least, as far as the free play of imagination is concerned) every distinct perception, being capable of separation and separate existence, is a genuine substance. But if substance is said to be entirely different from a perception, then we can have no idea of its nature and cannot raise questions about the immateriality and substantiality of the soul. Contrary to Locke’s and Berkeley’s contention, Hume states that perceptions are grasped as distinct objects, and hence never convey to the mind any evidence about their need for such inherence. Hence causal inference is not justified in arguing from a requirement that is lacking in empirical meaning. In this clash of opinion among the empiricists, Hume is relying once more upon a strictly phenomenalistic approach to perceptions and upon his logical doctrine about distinct perceptions. Perceptions are distinct not only from each other but also from any subject and, indeed, from any reference to a subject of inherence. This reification of perceptions is the extreme consequence of the analytic method and the notion of a percept-object.

“From the same standpoint, we are barred from attributing simplicity and identity to the mind. The idea of identity would have to rest upon some impression that remains invariant throughout a lifetime; the idea of simplicity would suppose that some impression reveals an indivisible center of union for the moments of experience. Neither of these conditions can be satisfied in terms of the Humean theory of knowledge. When I enter intimately into what I call myself, Hume says, I always stumble upon some particular perception. I never catch myself without some perception, and neither do I come upon myself as anything but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, each succeeding the other with inconceivable rapidity. In face of this situation, only one set of conclusions is possible for the Humean logic, based on the loosening of ideas. Since each perception is a distinct existent, no substance is needed; since the perceptions are all different and successive, there is no identity or invariant sameness of being; since the perceptions comprising the self are many, the self is not a simple thing.

“As usual, Hume employs this failure on the part of abstract reason as a recommendation that we seek a binding principle on the side of the ‘natural’ forces, operating through imagination. Thought is under some kind of constraint to pass from one given perception to the next, and thus to generate the self through this continuous transition. The personal self arises when, in reflecting upon a past series of perceptions, we feel that one perception naturally introduces the next. Personal identity is a powerful fiction, aroused by the circumstance that imagination is able to pass smoothly from one perceptual object to the next, and hence comes to regard the series as invariable and uninterrupted. The similarity in the mind’s act of apprehending the different perceptions instigates imagination to affirm a continuous identity of the self, on the side of the objects perceived. The easy transition is

64 D. HUME, A Treatise of Human �ature, I, 4, 1.

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made under the associative force of resemblance and the natural relation of cause-and-effect. Thus the self is ‘a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other.’65 Memory is the source of personal identity, insofar as it summons up images resembling past perceptions and grasps the causal succession of our perceptions, in the direction of the past. Passion and concern extend the same frame of causal reference forward as well as backward, strengthening the easy passage of thought and the reflective feeling that the perceptions belong to an identical, personal self.

“For once, however, this counterprocess of binding together what empirical analysis

has loosened, fails to achieve the kind of unity to which our experience bears testimony. Hume observes that he cannot find a satisfactory explanation of the feeling of belongingness, on the basis of which imagination declares that all our perceptions belong to the same personal self: ‘In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz., that all our distinct perceptions are distinct

existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connection among them, there would be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of a skeptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding.’66 This is a disarmingly frank passage. Hume concedes that an adequate synthesis of empirical findings about the personal self requires a knowledge of substance and objective causal connections, in respect to man. But his own first principle about distinct perceptions, leading as it does to a divorce of abstract reason from experience, prevents him from admitting the reality of substance in man. His second principle about real connections leads to his skeptical theory of relations and rules out any objectively given causal principle, operative in mental life. Nevertheless, he cannot avoid using substantial and causal terms, when he describes the self as a bundle and as a self-perpetuating series of perceptions. Although he warns against the imagery, he finds it convenient to compare the mind both to a theater, upon whose (substantial) stage various appearances are presented, and to a republic that perpetuates itself (causally) through the successive generations of its members.

“The perceptions belonging to ‘our’ mind are not an indiscriminate heap but

constitute an ordered system. On the side of the cognitive acts themselves, these perceptions are already ordered by reference to ‘ourselves’ and ‘our’ imagination, even before Hume can apply his theory of how imagination produces the personal unity of the self. In order to give a plausible account of the association of perceptual objects, he covertly presupposes some

personal center of reference or intimate belongingness for the perceiving operations. His empirical explanation of the self implies the effective presence of certain substantial and causal factors, but his theory of knowledge prevents him from ever reconciling their reality with his own first principles.

“Hume’s passing remarks on immortality and freedom are consistent with his general

view of knowledge and causality. No demonstration of immortality is possible, both because there is no clear idea of an immaterial, simple substance and because such demonstration would suppose that the causal principle can extend to a state that is, by definition, beyond present human experience. Hume admits that reason places man above the brutes but not that it guarantees his survival beyond this life. It is likely that man, like other animals, will lose

65 D. HUME, op. cit., I, 4, 6. 66 D. HUME, op. cit., Appendix.

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consciousness and succumb to the universal frailty and dissolution of things. Neither immortality nor freedom has a bearing upon moral conduct, even if they could be established.”67

Contrary to Hume, the Metaphysical Ego of Man is Substantial

Man is not a “bundle of perceptions,” as Hume would say, or the “sum total of acts of

consciousness.” The Ego is not some mere construction of reflective acts of consciousness (Sartre), with no underlying substance to support the accidents of acts of thinking and willing. Rather, the metaphysical Ego of man is the individual substance of a rational nature (individua substantia rationalis naturae). It is the human person composed of body and soul (substantial form of the body). It is the rational subsistent that is man, endowed with a very high degree of act of being (esse). Bittle distinguishes between the empirical Ego, the historical Ego, and how they are ultimately referred to the metaphysical Ego, the most important of the three. He explains that the empirical Ego is none other than the self of Ego observable at any present instance, in a present experience. The historical Ego, on the other hand, is none other than the self or Ego of man as he perceives it through the memory of his life’s experiences from the present and going back into the past. The metaphysical Ego, instead, is the self or Ego considered in its constitution or nature, and is none other than the whole man, the human person, that rational subsistent that is an individual human being. Mind, soul, body, all bodily and mental states and activities are ultimately referred to the metaphysical Ego.

Regarding the empirical Ego, Bittle writes: “When we speak of the empirical Ego, we

mean the ‘Ego’ or ‘self’ as it is revealed to each individual in his own internal experience in the introspective act of self-consciousness. Usually the empirical Ego is observed by the individual in the performance of some action. It may be a bodily action, as when I pay attention to manipulating a tool, to humming a tune, to pronouncing words, etc.; or it may be a mental action, as when I consciously read a book, solve a problem in arithmetic, write an essay, etc. It is in this manner that I perceive my ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ concretely in action.

“In a similar way, I become conscious of my ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ in certain states which

affect me more or less passively. I am aware, for example, that something has struck me, that I feel the cold wind, that I have a pain or headache, etc. Here also it is through introspective self-reflection that I become conscious of my ‘Ego’ as the passive subject in which these states occur.

“Mainly, I become aware of my ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ when I consciously exert myself,

either physically or mentally, as when I push my physical powers to the limit of endurance or resist a pleasurable allurement for the sake of duty and conscience. This concomitant

awareness of my ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ in a personal action or affecting state is an immediate datum

of my internal experience. “I am not, however, aware of my ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ at all times, but only when my

attention is focused inwardly. When my attention is focused outwardly, as when I witness a stage play or an exciting game, I may be so absorbed in what is taking place before me as to forget my ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ for the time being. Attention to external happenings is inspection; attention to internal happenings is introspection.

67 J. COLLINS, op. cit., pp. 436-439.

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“The ‘empirical Ego,’ therefore, is the ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ as observed at any present

moment in a here-and-now-experience.”68 As regards the historical Ego, Bittle explains: “The historical Ego is the ‘Ego’ or

‘self’ of an individual as he perceives it through memory of his life’s experiences from the present down through the past. Every individual has a history of past experiences. The traces of these experiences are stored away in the mind and are, to a greater or lesser degree, capable of recall at the present moment. Since these experiences belonged to the ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ as to their subject, the part which the ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ played in these experiences is also capable of recall. Hence, the ‘Ego’ itself has a history, peculiar to each individual.

“The knowledge of my ‘historical Ego,’ since it is based on my memory of my past

experiences, is of necessity subject to all the vicissitudes and vagaries of my memory. While many events have been forgotten and are perhaps permanently beyond recall, I am usually able to remember the principal experiences of my childhood, youth and adulthood. All such experiences pertain to my ‘historical Ego.’

“Viewed in retrospect, the ‘historical Ego’ may undergo a considerable change in the

course of time, as the pattern of life changes. Success and failure, education and environment, influence a person in remarkable ways. We are sometimes compelled to confess: ‘I have changed greatly since the days of my youth.’ This change can also occur through a change in memory itself. Injury and illness may bring about a state of dissociation in the memory content. We then observe the mental phenomenon of a ‘changing personality.’

“The ‘historical Ego’ in each individual has its beginning with the first instance of the

knowledge of his own ‘self’ some time in childhood. The knowledge of the ‘self’ or ‘Ego’ is not innate; it is acquired. The prenatal life of the child is mainly vegetative. After birth, the child accumulates sense impressions and develops an acquaintance with his own body and with surrounding objects. After a few years, the child suddenly becomes aware of his own ‘self’ as a person set apart from other persons and things; he has reached selfhood. From that moment on he has a knowledge of his ‘empirical Ego,’ using the terms ‘I’ and ‘me’; that moment is also the starting point of his ‘historical Ego.’ From the data obtained in this manner man forms his abstract concept of the ‘self’ or ‘Ego.’

“It should be evident that the ‘empirical Ego’ is very meager in content and the

‘historical Ego’ very rich in content.”69 Bittle has this to say about the most important of the three, the metaphysical Ego (also

called simply the Ego), stating: “The Ego, considered in its constitution and nature, is termed the metaphysical Ego.”70 “Man becomes conscious of his Ego or self through a cognitive act of the mind…After he has learned to pay attention to the workings of his mind through introspection, he invariably refers the mind to his Ego or self, convinced that the mind

belongs to the Ego as a part of the whole. We thus say: ‘I have a mind.’ And we also say: ‘My sight; my imagination; my memory; my mind.’ Such phrases are universal, used by all persons and at all times. They plainly indicate that all mental states and the very mind itself belong to the Ego, so that the Ego or self is their subject and possessor. The Ego, therefore, is more basic and ultimate than the mind itself. 68 C. BITTLE, The Whole Man: Psychology, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1945, p. 530. 69 C. BITTLE, op. cit., pp. 531-532. 70 C. BITTLE, op. cit., p. 532.

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“We observe a similar relationship between the ‘soul’ and the ‘Ego.’ We frequently say, for instance: ‘I have a soul; my soul.’ Here, too, the soul is referred to the Ego as something more basic and ultimate than the soul itself. The soul, like the mind, belongs to the

Ego, and the Ego is considered as its subject and possessor. The Ego, therefore, is neither the mind nor the soul, but something deeper and more fundamental in man.

“The material, corporeal part of man’s being is also referred to the Ego. We say, for

instance: ‘I have hands and feet and a torso, I have a body; my nerves, my bones, my body.’ The body, therefore, and everything pertaining to it, belongs to the Ego as to its subject and possessor.

“Thus the material and mental, the physical and the psychical, body and mind, in a

word, man’s entire being, is conceived by us as belonging to the Ego or self as to its subject and possessor.”71

The Ego is the human person, the whole man, explains Bittle: “What is the human

Ego? Whatever in man is bodily and mental, physical and psychical, material and spiritual, is referred by the Ego to itself: I weigh one hundred fifty pounds, I see a house, I think, I will. The physical and the psychical represent ‘the whole man.’ The Ego, therefore, is the whole

man. Body and soul are integrated into one thing, the whole man, the Ego. The Ego, therefore, is not the body, not the soul, not the intellect, not the will, not consciousness, not life. All these things ‘belong’ to the Ego as constituting ‘the whole man.’

“The Ego is a substance. A ‘substance’ is an individual being whose nature it is to

exist in itself and not in another as in a subject. A being whose nature it is to exist, not in itself, but in another as in a subject, is called, in philosophical terminology, an ‘accident.’ Accidents are modifications and modes of substance. Shape, color, motion, thought, feelings, etc., are modifications of some ultimate reality; they do not exist in and for themselves, but exist in the substance which they modify. Man, considered as a totality, is a self-contained being with a naturally independent existence of its own; man, therefore, is a ‘substance.’ And since the Ego is the whole man, the ultimate reality which possesses everything pertaining to man’s being, it is evident that the Ego is substantial and not merely accidental.

“The Ego (man) is a person. The term ‘person’ is never applied to a chemical being,

to a plant, or to a brute animal; no one calls a piece of carbon, a tree, or a horse, a ‘person.’ Since man alone, among all material beings and organisms, is called a ‘person,’ what specifically constitutes man a ‘person?’ It is not ‘materiality,’ because chemicals, plants, and brutes are material. It is not ‘life,’ because plants and brutes are living. It is not ‘sentiency,’ because brutes are sentient. It must be that which distinguishes man from all these types of being, and that is ‘rationality,’ ‘intellectuality.’ Boethius has given us the following definition of a ‘person’: naturae rationalis individua substantia – an individual substance of a rational nature. A moment’s consideration will reveal the fact that the human Ego, or whole man, is indeed a substance which is individual and complete and subsistent and rational. Consequently, the human Ego or man in his totality, is a ‘person.’”72

71 C. BITTLE, op. cit., pp. 532-533. 72 C. BITTLE, op. cit., pp. 558-559.

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Contrary to Hume, the Human Soul Exists and Is Immortal

Knowledge of the Soul. We learn about the existence of the human soul by observing

its activities of intellection and willing that pertain to the human soul’s operative powers or faculties. Man has vital actions and therefore must have a first vital principle, which is the soul. Since he has the rational vital powers of intellect and will that transcend sense knowledge, since they pertain to the realm of the universal which is gotten through the intellectual activity of abstraction, man must not have merely a sensitive soul but rather a rational or intellectual soul. Since the activities of intellection and volition are immaterial, their operative powers of intellect and will must likewise be immaterial, and their first principle, the rational soul, must likewise be immaterial, for no effect can be greater than its cause. Something immaterial cannot originate from something material, which has a much lesser degree of act of being than immaterial realities which are so because of their particularly intense level of esse. The human soul is, therefore, the first principle of man’s rational life.

Rational Soul a Substance. The rational soul is a substance since the acts of understanding and volition are merely accidents that must inhere in something whose essence or nature it is proper to be by itself and not in another subject. Such accidents do not have act of being of their own but are by reason of their substance of which they are perfections of. Now, the immaterial acts of intellection and volition are acts of the rational soul alone, which has no matter in it; therefore, the soul is a substance.

Rational Soul is One Substance. The rational soul is one substance. One and the same

soul remains as a permanent principle throughout the succession of acts of understanding and willing. Reflection evidences the fact that we experience our acts of intellect and will as acts of the same I which remains throughout their succession.

Rational Soul is Simple. The rational soul is simple, meaning that its essence is not

composed of parts, viz., matter and form, which are constituent principles of a composite essence. We find that the rational soul is simple because it is the principle of operations that are intrinsically independent of matter. If the soul were composed of matter and form, its operation could not in any way be independent from matter, for action follows being (operari

sequitur esse). If the rational soul is essentially simple it follows that it is devoid of quantitative parts, for quantitative extension can only be found in something material. Renard explains: “The Soul is �ot a Body; It is the Act of the Body. A bodily nature is a composite of matter and form related as potency and act. Form specifies and matter individuates the bodily nature. The Angelic Doctor argues that the first principle of vital operation cannot be a body (a composite of matter and form) or a bodily organ, such as the heart or brain. For, if bodies were first principles of life by their very essence, that is, precisely as bodies, all bodies would be principles of life, of vital operation, and, consequently, all bodies would be living beings. The fact is that many of them are not living, for example, stones, the air, minerals. Therefore, the first principle of life, of vital operation, in man is not a body. ‘It is manifest that not every principle of vital operation is a soul, for then the eye would be a soul, since it is a principle of vision…But it is the first [essential] principle of life [vital operation] which we call the soul. Now, though a body may in a certain sense be a principle of life, as the heart is a principle of life in an animal, yet no body can be the first principle of life, for to be a living thing (vivens)

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does not belong to a body as a body; otherwise every body would be a living thing (vivens), or a principle of life.’73

“We may further conclude that if a body is a living being rather than non-living, this

is true not because it is a body, but because it is a definite or special type of bodily being. The fact that it is this definite type of body (a living body) must be due to something intrinsic to the bodily being, to a specifying principle, which we shall call the act (perfection) of the body. This act gives the body a perfection which the latter of itself – in so far as it is a body – does not possess. This act of the body we call the soul. ‘…It belongs to a body to be a living thing, or even a principle of life, inasmuch as it is such (tale) a body. Now that it is actually such a body it owes to some principle which is called its act. Therefore the soul, which is the first principle of life, is not a body but the act of a body…’74 ”75

“The Soul Has �o Essential Parts. That which is composed of essential parts (matter

and form) must be a body. But the soul of man is not a body, as has been explained in the preceding article. Therefore, the human soul is not composed of essential parts, but is essentially simple.

“St. Thomas proposes an argument based on the manner in which the intellectual soul

receives the forms of things in intellectual knowledge. We must bear in mind, in order to understand this proof, that knowledge in man presupposes that the knowing subject, while remaining itself, in some way ‘becomes’ the object, by receiving the perfection (the form) of the object known. Now whatever is received, is received according to the condition of the recipient. If the recipient is a composite of form and individuating matter, whatever it receives must be received as individuated by matter. If, on the other hand, the recipient is devoid of matter, it will receive forms without the individuating influence of matter, that is, absolutely, as universals. Now the intellectual soul receives the intelligible forms of things absolutely, that is, as freed from the individuating influence of matter. For man in his intellectual knowledge knows things according to their essences, and not according to their individual material conditions as do the senses. Consequently, the intellectual soul, since it receives these forms without the conditions of matter, must exist without matter in its

constitution; in other words, the human soul has no essential parts. “The Soul Has �o Quantitative Parts. By quantitative parts we mean extended parts,

occupying space in three dimensions so that one part is outside another. Now a being is extended and has quantitative parts by reason of matter. Moreover, that which has matter as a constituent principle of its essence is a body. But the soul, as we have shown, is not a body. Therefore, the soul does not have quantitative parts.”76

Rational Soul is Spiritual. The rational soul is spiritual since it exists independently of

matter. From the fact that the acts of intellection and willing are intrinsically independent of matter it follows that the soul, which is the principle of these actions, is likewise intrinsically independent of matter, for action follows being and no effect is greater than its cause, that is, in this case, something immaterial cannot be derived from something material, which has a much less intensity of participated act of being than something incorporeal. “There is one set of operations, the activities of understanding and willing, which do not basically depend upon

73 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75, a. 1, c. 74 Ibid. 75 H. RENARD, op. cit., pp. 29-30. 76 H. RENARD, op. cit., pp. 32-33.

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anything material. In the act of intellectual knowing, as we have seen, the forms of things exist in man as universal, and therefore as nonmaterial. This means that the intellect must be nonmaterial, for something material could not be the receptacle of the immaterial any more than a tin can could contain the idea of patriotism or any other abstract idea. If, in other words, there were matter in the intellect, the forms that are joined to it in the act of knowing could not be universal because where there is matter there is quantity, dimension, individuality. The intellectual activity of man, then, is intrinsically independent of matter, The act of the will is similarly independent of matter, for its object is always something known under the aspect of the universal good. Since the actions of knowing and willing are independent of matter, the principle or ground of these activities, the soul, must be independent of matter. If it is independent of matter for its activities, it must be equally independent of matter for its existence. Therefore we can call the soul of man a spirit as well as a soul, for this is what being a spirit means: to be independent of matter both as to its existence and operation.”77

Renard explains that “if the soul had matter in its make-up, or if it depended upon a

distinct material principle in order to undestand, it could never know the natures of all

corporeal beings. In such a supposition, the soul, at best, would be limited to the knowledge of one type of bodies, that is to say, it would know in accordance wih the determination resulting either from a constitutve formal element or from the material co-principle of knowledge. Now the soul of man is capable of knowing the natures of all bodies. Consequently: (1) the intellectual principle, the soul, cannot itself have any bodily form or nature; it must be incorporeal; (2) in this knowledge, the soul cannot depend on a bodily organ. The intellectual operation, therefore, is independent of matter. Since action is proportioned to existence, it follows that the human soul must exist independently of matter; it is a subsistent form. Since a subsistent form is spiritual, the human soul must be spiritual.”78

The Union of Soul and Body. The rational soul, though capable of subsistence after

the dissolution of the body, is an incomplete substance. Man is a composite substance of body and soul. Now a substantial union resulting in a sole substance can be possible only if the components are incomplete substances or substantial co-principles. Although the human soul is something subsistent, having the act of being (esse) of its own, it nevertheless is not a complete substance but rather an incomplete one. An incomplete substance is one whose nature demands that it be co-joined with another substantial co-principle, so as to be able to constitute a single complete substance. Matter taken by itself and form taken by itself are examples of incomplete substances. A human soul taken in itself is an incomplete substance, and a human body taken in itself is an incomplete substance. The human soul and the human body taken together constitute the single individual person, a complete substance, a person defined as an individual substance of a rational nature. A complete substance is one that does not need to be co-joined with the another substantial co-principle so as to constitute a single individual substance. It exists in such a manner that its nature does not demand a further union with a substantial co-principle. A dog, a rat, a horse, and an apple are all examples of complete substances.

The rational soul is really distinct from the body, which follows from the fact that the

intellectual soul is spiritual, while the human body is material.

77 D. SULLIVAN, An Introduction to Philosophy, Tan Books, Rockford, 1992, pp. 115-116. 78 H. RENARD, op. cit., p. 43.

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Man has his own rational soul. Reflection reveals to each of us that each man is an understanding and willing I, which is distinct from other understanding and willing I’s.

There can be only one soul in each man. Though he has vegetative, sensitive, and

rational powers, he doesn’t have three different souls (a vegetative soul, a sensitive soul, and a rational soul) but rather a single rational soul, it being the principle not only of the intellectual life of the human person, but also of his vegetative and sensitive life. “Each human being has his own soul and it constitutes him as an existing living substance of the human kind. And each man has only one soul. Although man has the three grades of life – vegetal, sentient or animal, and human – he is only one being, one substance. The human soul is, in itself or as such, a spiritual soul; this spiritual soul, inasmuch as, in the body, it can be the root-principle of bodily functions, is equivalently vegetal and sentient. We say, in technical words, the human soul is formally spiritual, and virtually vegetal and sentient.”79

The rational or intellectual soul virtually contains the lower forms: “Only One

Substantial Form. If the intellectual soul is united to the body as its substantial form, it is quite impossible for other substantial forms simutaneously to actuate matter. This truth appears evident if we recall the principles learned in the philosophy of being concerning matter and form. Accordingly, ‘the same essential form makes man an actual being, a body, a living being, an animal, and a man.’80 Three fundamental reasons may be offered to substantiate this assertion.

“In the first place, if this were not so, man would not be a perfect unit. The reason is

that ‘…nothing is absolutely one [a perfect unit] except by one form, by which a thing has ‘to be’; for a thing has both being and unity from the same source, and therefore things which are named according to various forms are not absolutely one, as, for instance, a white man. If, therefore, man were living by one form, the vegetative soul, and animal by another form, the sensitive soul, and man by another form, the intellectual soul, it would follow that man is not absolutely one…’81

“A second reason is taken from the mode of predication. For example, we directly and

essentially predicate both animal and man of the subject Peter. But if Peter were animal by one form and man by another, it would follow that only the first of these two perfections could be predicated directly (per se). We conclude, therefore, that Peter is animal and man by one and the same substantial form.

“A third reason is that the substantial form gives the first ‘to be’; it makes a thing to

be absolutely (simpliciter), whereas accidental forms make a thing to be such (tale). ‘Therefore, if besides the intellectual soul there pre-existed in matter another substantial form by which the subject of the soul were made an actual being, it would follow that the soul does not give the ‘to be’ absolutely and, consequently, that it is not the substantial form…’82

“Higher Form Virtually Contains Lower Forms. For the reasons given above, we

must conclude that there is no other substantial form in man besides the intellectual soul. It is the intellectual soul which makes a man to be, to be a body, a living being (vegetative), a sensitive being, and human. By virtue of one and the same substantial form (which is the

79 P. J. GLENN, A Tour of the Summa, Tan Books, Rockford, IL, 1978, p. 61. 80 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 76, a. 6, ad 1. 81 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 76, a. 3, c. 82 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 76, a. 4, c.

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intellectual principle) man is able to perform the operations of animals, plants, and chemicals. Accordingly, the forms of these lower beings are present in the intellectual soul in some way. This presence is not an actual presence, for man is not actually a brute, nor a plant, nor chemicals, although he obviously manifests the activity of all these forms. Nor is this presence merely potential, for it is in matter that these forms have potential presence. But since the intellectual form has the power or ‘virtue’ (virtus) of these lower forms, we say that the intellectual soul virtually contains them: the human soul is capable of the operations of the lower forms. The reason is that a higher act contains the perfection of lower acts, and since an agent operates in so far as it is in act, the more perfect agent can perform the operations of the less perfect. To exemplify this principle, we may use Aristotle’s example of the pentagon, which virtually contains a tetragon, or the example of a large denomination in currency which has the buying power, the ‘virtue,’ of many smaller denominations. ‘…There is no other substantial form in man besides the intellectual soul; and just as the soul contains virtually the sensitive and nutritive souls, so does it contain virtually (virtute) all inferior forms, and does alone whatever the imperfect forms do in other things. The same is to be said of the sensitive soul in brute animals, and of the nutritive soul in plants, and universally of all more perfect forms in relation to the imperfect.’83”84

The human soul is the substantial form of the body. The soul actualizes and animates

the body and is the substantial form which makes the living body the specific kind of living body it is: a human body. The human soul is a non-corporeal substance, an incomplete substance which together with the incomplete substance of the human body constitute the complete substance of the human person, man the hylemorphic composite of body and soul. The soul is an incomplete substance endowed with the operative faculties of intellect and will. In this life our soul has an extrinsic dependence on the body, not an intrinsic dependence. It is capable of existing and operating per se even if severed from its union with the body at death, since it has the act of being (esse) of its own which is communicated to the body. The human soul, then, is truly a subsistent substance, though, while it is a complete soul, it nevertheless is not a complete human being as Plato erroneously taught. Man, rather, is a compound of body and soul. The human soul is a spiritual substance, an element of the human composite or compound, but in itself is devoid of composition or compounding. There is no matter whatsoever in the soul, it being a substantial spiritual form, a spirit. Souls, being substantial and subsistent forms, having no material elements or parts to break up, cannot decay, disintegrate, or cease existence. They have no intrinsic dependence on matter for their existence and operations. Therefore, they are incorruptible substances which cannot perish or die. It is the spiritual soul which, substantially joined with matter, sets up and constitutes the one existing living human person. The human soul is joined with its human body in a substantial union, constituting one human substance. Each human person has his or her own soul and there are as many human souls as there are existing, individual human beings.

Regarding the presence of the rational soul in the body, we state that the soul is

indeed in the body, that the whole soul is in the whole body, and that the whole soul is wholly or entirely in each part of the body. Glenn writes: “Man’s substantial form is whole in his living body and whole in every part of that unbroken living body. But the soul does not perform the same operations in every part of the body; there are different bodily parts or organs for different bodily operations. Hence we say: the human soul is present in its entirety of essence in the body and in every part of the body; but it is not thus wholly present in every

83 Ibid. 84 H. RENARD, op. cit., pp. 64-66.

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part as to specific operations. The soul is primarily related to the body; it is secondarily related to the various parts of the body considered severally.”85

Renard: “That the soul is in the whole body and in each single part of the body should

not seem strange. The same is true of every substantial form. For ‘…the substantial form is the perfection not only of the whole, but also of each part…For the act is in that of which it is the act, and, therefore, the whole soul must be in the whole body, and in each part of the body.’86

“But that the soul is entire, that is, wholly or totally present in each part of the body,

may at first not be clear. Obviously, we do not mean that the soul is present in every part of the body by totality of quantity, for quantity cannot be attributed to the soul either essentially or accidentally. The reason is that the soul is a simple form; it is not quantitative in itself, nor by reason of its subject.

“Nor is the soul present totally in each part of the body by totality of power; that is to

say, the soul, which is the principle of operation, cannot cause the same type of operation in every part of the body. ‘For it is not in each part of the body with regard to each of its powers; but with regard to the sight it is in the eye, and with regard to hearing it is in the ear…’87

“There is, however, a third kind of totality proper to forms. It is called by St. Thomas

totality of perfection and of essence, and signifies the presence of form in as much as it informs matter and gives the specific perfection to the composite essence. Since every part of the human body is human, we must assert that the whole soul of man is present in every part of the body by totality of essential perfection; for the soul is the substantial form of the body. ‘…It is enough to say that the whole soul is in each part of the body by totality of perfection and of essence, but not by totality of power,’88 and in no way by quantitative totality.”89

The Origin of the Human Soul. Where does the human soul come from? A man’s soul could not have come from the bodies of his parents, nor the composite of body and soul, nor from the souls of his parents. Only God can create a rational soul, infusing this soul into a body (making it human) which, together, forms the hylemorphic composite that is man. Parents cannot create the soul of their offspring for only God can create; only God has absolute control over the act of being of something, which he produces out of nothing. Human parents only have their acts of being from another, namely, God, so in no way can one’s human soul come from one’s parents. The parents, on the other hand, produce one component of their offspring’s hylemorphic composite, namely, the human body. Though one’s human soul is not produced by one’s parents, the union of soul with the body is brought about by the parents inasmuch as they produce a human body which necessarily needs to be animated by a human soul which is its act. Of course, the parents are not the creators of matter. Only God is the creator of matter. “God is the efficient cause of matter, whereas creatures only give rise to successive changes of the form. In the production of any new effect, creatures presuppose a prior subject, which in the case of generation is matter. Matter,

85 P. J. GLENN, op. cit., p. 62. 86 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 76, a. 8, c. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 H. RENARD, op. cit., p. 67.

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which is the ultimate substratum of all substantial changes, is the proper effect of of the causality of the supreme cause (God).”90

The human soul is created by God: “The question, ‘Whence the soul?’ is readily

answered once we have established that the human soul is a spiritual, subsisting form independent of matter for its existence (and consequently also for its coming into existence). Because the soul is not a material form, matter has no potency for it, and, consequently, no extrinsic agent however powerful could educe the soul from the potency of matter. Accordingly, since the human soul cannot be educed from matter as from a pre-existing subject, it has no strict becoming (fieri); its coming into existence is dependent upon an extrinsic cause alone. Such a coming into existence is to-be-created. Now God alone can create, for He alone is pure act in the existential order. Consequently, the human soul must be created immediately by Him…

“As a thing operates, so does it exist and come into existence. But the soul of man

operates and exists independently of matter. But such a mode of coming into existence is to-be-created. The human soul, therefore, is created.”91

The Immorality of the Human Soul. The human soul is immortal. Since man’s soul has

the act of being of its own, making it subsist even after the dissolution of the body at death, it is endowed with immortality, that is, it will continue to exist forever. The rational soul is not subject to direct corruption since it is a simple immaterial substance, not having material parts to break up or dissolve. Direct corruption refers to the decomposition of a whole into its parts. But the human soul is immaterial, not having matter (which is the principle of corruptibility) and thus cannot break up into parts. Neither is the human soul subject to indirect corruption for it is intrinsically independent of the human body both in its operations of intellection and volition and its very act of being (esse), having esse as its own possession. Thus, the rational soul cannot be corrupted by the corruption of its living human body.

Renard explains why the soul is not subject to direct or natural (per se) corruption or

to indirect or accidental (per accidens) corruption: “We distinguish between two types of corruption according to the diversity of its cause. The first is that which results from the inclination that a nature has to break up of itself (per se); the second is that which comes about accidentally (per accidens) on account of the corruption of another being or principle of being on which the nature depends for existence.

“�atural (Per Se) Corruption. Whenever a being is composed of act and potency in

the order of essence, that is, of matter and form, such a being will naturally corrupt, provided the requisite conditions and dispositions are present. The reason is simply this: matter, since it is of itself pure potency, can acquire any material form. Although actuated by a definite form, which places the resulting nature in a definite species, matter remains in potency to all other material forms. Consequently, all that is required for corruption of a being whose essence is a composite of matter and form is the action of an agent capable of producing the dispositions necessary for the eduction of a new form. The eduction of a new substantial form from the potency of matter is simultaneous with the reduction of the old form to potentiality; and, since along with the form there comes a proportionate ‘to be,’ a new being will exist at the

90 T. ALVIRA, L. CLAVELL, T. MELENDO, op. cit., p. 240. 91 H. RENARD, op. cit., pp. 51-52.

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term of the change. In other words, the corruption of one corporeal being is the generation of another (or others).

“Any being, therefore, whose essence (nature) is composed of matter and form is

naturally corruptible; it will corrupt when the conditions necessary for a substantial change are present. On the other hand, a being whose nature (essence) is simple is not naturally corruptible. Since the human soul is essentially simple, it is not naturally corruptible.

“Accidental (Per Accidens) Corruption. Whenever a form ceases to exist because of

the destruction of a being in which this form inheres and exists, we may say that this form is corrupted accidentally. Such is the case with accidental forms whose subject is being destroyed. Thus the whiteness of paper is corrupted when the paper is burned. In this instance, the accidental form, color, does not corrupt naturally of itself, but by reason of the corruption of the substance, the subject in which it inheres. Something similar is true of all material substantial forms, which are educed from the potency of matter, and depend upon matter for their ‘to be’ (as well as for their coming to be). Although such forms are simple, as for example the substantial form of a dog, they are not immortal, for they can be reduced to

the potency of matter. These forms are said to corrupt when the corporeal being of which they are the substantial form corrupts; thus these forms are corrupted accidentally. Here again our conclusion regarding the soul of man is evident: The soul of man cannot be corrupted

accidentally because it is subsistent. It cannot be reduced to the potency of matter because it is not a material form.

“Whatever cannot be corrupted of itself or by reason of another, upon which it

depends, is immortal. But the human soul cannot be corrupted either of itself (per se) or by reason of another (per accidens), on which it depends. Therefore, the human soul is immortal.

“The major premise is the definition of immortal being. The minor is easily

explained. The human soul is not corruptible of itself because it is a simple form and has no essential or quantitative parts. It is not corruptible because of another (the composite), for it is subsistent; it cannot be reduced to the potency of matter.

“‘To Be’ is Inseparable from Subsisting Form. In demonstrating that the human soul

is incorruptible per se, St. Thomas enunciates a principle which may prove difficult to understand: ‘That which belongs to a thing by virtue of itself is inseparable from that thing.’ He then applies this principle to the human soul: ‘…But the ‘to be’ [of a subsisting form] belongs by virtue of itself to the form and this form is an act.’ The conclusion follows with necessity: ‘The ‘to be’ of a subsisting form is inseparable from it; that is to say, the subsisting form must continue to exist; it cannot corrupt.

“The principle stated in the major premise has often been misunderstood. It becomes

clear, however, in the application made in the minor. The act of being, as regards the corporeal essence, man, whose form is subsistent, does not belong primarily to the composite. On the contrary, the ‘to be’ of man by virtue of itself belongs rather to the form. (This act of being, which is the ‘to be’ of the form, is communicated by the form to the matter). The form, therefore, is fully and directly actuated; for, since in itself the soul is an act (perfection), once actuated in the order of existence there remains in it no existential potency. Hence, no new ‘to be’ can be acquired. The subsisting form, therefore, is incorruptible.

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“On the other hand, the act of being of a composite whose form is not subsistent belongs by virtue of itself neither to the form nor to the matter. Rather, the existential act belongs primarily to the composite essence. Matter, however, which is the potential principle of that essence, is in potency to other forms and is not fully actuated; nor is the essence fully actuated by the ‘to be.’ Hence, when the matter acquires another form (and another existence), the first material form is reduced to the potency of matter – it ‘corrupts’ – and together with it the corporeal being is corrupted, as another corporeal being begins to exist. We see, therefore, that a non-subsistent form is ‘corruptible’ in the sense that it is reduceable to the potency of matter. Only a subsisting form, consequently, is truly incorruptible. It is not educed from the potency of matter; it exists independently of matter; consequently, it cannot be reduced to the potentiality of matter.”92

Contrary to Hume, Man is �ot a “Bundle of Perceptions”; Instead, the Human

Person is a Rational Supposit, An Individual Substance of a Rational �ature

Supposit: Being in the Fullest Sense. A consideration of the various constitutive

principles of being should naturally have as its goal being in the fullest sense, which is the supposit, our subsisting subject. The term subsisting subject refers to the particular being with all of its perfections. The supposit or subsisting subject is being in the full sense; it is being in

the most proper sense of the term, subsisting, existing in itself as something complete and finished, distinct from all other things. The supposit designates the particular being with all of its perfections. The supposit is defined as the individual whole, which subsists by virtue of a

single esse, and which consequently cannot be shared with another.

Characteristic Marks of the Supposit. The characteristic marks of the supposit are its individuality (only the singular exists in transsubjective reality while the universal exists in the mind; abstract essences cannot be suppositums for they do not have esse of its own), subsistence (we must add subsistence for not everything that can be called individual can subsist; accidents are individual but are not subsistent), and incommunicability or unsharedness (because of the preceding two characteristics, namely, individuality and subsistence, the suppositum cannot be shared by others. The suppositum cannot be participated in by various subjects for it exists as something unique and distinct from other subjects. A rock, for example, does not share its being with the book that is next to it).

Elements of the Supposit. What are the elements that make up the supposit? The subsisting subject (suppositum) is composed of act of being (esse, which renders subsistence to the subject, making it be), essence (essentia, which in corporeal beings are hylomorphically composed of prime matter and substantial form), and accidents (which are acts that perfect the receptive subject in potency to be perfected by them). The various names that have designated it throughout the history of philosophy include the whole, the concrete, the singular, the individual, the supposit or hypostasis, and the Aristotelian first substance (primary substance), that individual something which exists in reality with all of its perfections.

Supposit and �ature. There is a difference between supposit and nature. The supposit is really distinct from its nature in finite beings in the same way that a whole is different from one of its parts. There is a real distinction between supposit and nature in any being to which something can be added which does not belong to its very nature. In any finite being, at least

92 H. RENARD, op. cit., pp. 46-49.

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its act of being (esse) itself does not belong to its very nature. Thus, it follows that in every finite being there be a real distinction between supposit and nature. When we speak of real distinction here we don’t mean that the supposit is one thing and the nature another thing. The real distinction in question is not adequate but inadequate, inasmuch as the supposit includes the individual nature and adds a reality to it. St. Thomas writes: “In every thing to which can accede something which does not belong to the concept of its nature, the thing itself and its essence, i.e., the supposit and nature, are distinct. For, in the meaning of the nature is included only that which belongs to the essence of the species, whereas the supposit has not only what belongs to the essence of the species but also whatever else accedes to this essence. Hence, the supposit is signified by the whole, but the nature or quiddity [is signified only] as the formal part. Now, in God alone no accident can be found added to the essence because His act of being is His Essence, as has been said; hence in God supposit and nature are entirely the same. But in an angel [i.e., an unreceived subsistent form] the supposit is not entirely the same [as the nature] because something accedes to it which does not belong to the concept of its essence. For the act of being itself of an angel is in addition to the essence or nature; and other things [acts of intellect and will] accede to it, which belong to the supposit but not to the nature.”93

Alvira, Clavell and Melendo explain that the “essence, and more particularly the

form, gives the individual whole a way of being similar to that of other individuals, thus situating it in a given species. Due to a common essence or nature, men form part of the human race or species. As the intrinsic principle of similarity at the level of the species, the essence can be contrasted with the supposit or individual, which is an unshared reality (distinct and divided from all others). Consequently, the relation between supposit and its

nature is not that which exists between two principles of being; rather, it is one that entails a

real distinction; the supposit is distinct from its nature in the same way a whole is different

from one of its parts.94 The real distinction between nature and supposit can be seen in two ways: a) in every individual, there is a distinction between the individuated essence and the whole subsisting subject; b) every individual is distinct from the common specific nature (taken as a universal perfection which all individuals share, and which sets aside particular characteristics).”95

In this treatment of the distinction between supposit and nature, Renard explains that

“the supposit does add something not contained in the nature. It includes everything, says everything that can be predicated of a being. The nature on the contrary in creatures is distinct from and consequently does not contain its ‘to be’ (esse) and its accidents. ‘These words: person, hypostasis, and supposit designate an integral being.’96 A human supposit ‘is the entire being that is this man.’97 ‘The supposit implies that which is most complete.’98 Therefore, it takes in the accidents whereas the nature does not. Consequently, the nature is part of the supposit, a part which is designated as the formal part.99

93 Quodlibet. 2, a. 4. 94 The distinction between nature and suppositum is of paramount importance in theology. St. Thomas Aquinas made use of this doctrine to express with precision the mystery of the Incarnation: the human nature of Christ – despite its being singular and its full perfection as nature – cannot be a suppositum, for it does not include in itself the act of being. 95 T. ALVIRA, L. CLAVELL, T. MELENDO, op. cit., pp. 120-121. 96 Compendium Theologiae, ch. 211. 97 Ibid. 98 In III Sent., d. 5, q. 3, a. 3. 99 Cf. Quodlibet II, q. 2, a. 4 ; Summa Theologiae, III, q. 2, a. 2.

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“Moreover, since the ‘to be’ (esse) is the highest actuality in the order of being, and the supposit demands the most perfect completeness in that order, it follows that the substantial ‘to be’ (esse) by which a being subsists is of the very essence of the supposit. It is not the supposit itself, for the supposit includes the whole being; but we may say that it is its most important factor: for it is that because of which and by which a being attains its highest completion in the order of being, and by which it exists in its own right (it subsists). ‘The to

be (esse) is that in which the unity of the supposit is founded.’100 ‘The to be (esse) pertains to the very constitution of person.’101 ‘Person signifies that which is most perfect in the entire nature, namely, a being subsisting in a rational nature.’102 It must include, therefore, the ‘to be’ (esse) which is ‘the actuality of all acts, and the perfection of all perfections.’103 Indeed the most perfect completion consists precisely in this, that a being has its ‘to be’ (esse), which is an analogous participation in the divine ‘to be’ (Esse).’104

“To repeat then – the individual nature differs from the specific nature in that it adds

to the latter the individuating principles (in actu secundo); the supposit differs from the individual nature in that it adds the ‘to be’ (esse) and the necessary concomitant accidents.

“The Supposit Adds the Proper ‘To Be’ (Esse) to Individual �ature. It is, therefore,

this substantial ‘to be’ – the very act of esse (which ‘to be’ is proportioned and due to each individual nature) – that conjoins with the nature to establish the supposit and render it incommunicable in an absolute sense. Thus the supposit is established by the very act of coming into existence. Let us analyze this last statement. Since the supposit demands perfect completion, and since the highest completion in a being consists precisely in the actuation in the order of being by a ‘to be’ (esse) that is proportioned to its individual nature, that is to say, by a proper ‘to be’ (esse), it follows that an individual nature with its ‘to be’ will establish a supposit. In other words, the supposit adds to an individual nature its proper ‘to be’ (esse).”105

Act of Being as the Source of Unity of the Supposit. Alvira, Clavell and Melendo explain that the act of being (esse) belongs to the suppositum and that the source of the unity of the suppositum lies in its proper act of being (esse): “The constituent act which makes the suppositum real is esse. What is most proper to the individual is to subsist, and this is solely an effect of the act of being.106 Nevertheless, one cannot disregard the essence in explaining the subsistence of a subject, since a being receives esse if it has an essence capable of subsisting; that is, it must be a substantial essence, not a mere accidental one. For instance, as man is able to receive the act of being in himself and to be a suppositum because he possesses human nature, an essence meant to subsist in itself (and, thus, not to inhere in something else, as in the case of accidents).

100 Quodlibet IX, 3, ad 2m. 101 Summa Theologiae, III, q. 19, a. 1, ad 4m. 102 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 29, a. 3. 103 De Potentia Dei, q. 7, a. 2, ad 9. 104 Cf. Quodlibet, XII, q. 5, a. 5. 105 H. RENARD, op. cit., pp. 230-231. 106 St. Thomas Aquinas always maintained this doctrine, as can be verified from his early writings as well as the later ones (cf. In III Sent., d. 6, q. 2, a. 2 ; Quodlibet, IX, a. 3, and Summa Theologiae, III, q. 17, a. 3, c.). This was explicitly defended by Capreolus, one of the commentators of the Angelic Doctor (cf. Defensiones

Theologicae divi Thomae Aquinitatis, T. Pégues Ed., V, Tours, 1907, pp. 105-107). Later on, Suarez and Cajetan regarded the essence (and not esse) as the ontological basis of the subsisting subject.

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“However, the specific nature of a thing does not subsist unless it forms part of a subsisting subject (the individual). That is why it is not quite correct to say that the act of being belongs to the nature; it only belongs to the suppositum. However, since esse affects the whole by virtue of the essence, we can say that ‘esse’ belongs to the suppositum through

the nature or substantial essence. Nature gives the whole the capacity to subsist, although it is the whole which does in fact subsist through the act of being.

“Since esse is the ultimate act of a being, which gives actuality to each of its elements

(which are no more than potency with respect to esse), these parts are united to the extent that they are made actual by this constituent act, and referred to it. It is quite correct, therefore, to claim that ‘the act of being is the basis of the unity of the suppositum.’107 No part of the whole, taken separately, has esse of its own; it is, by virtue of the esse of the composite. To the very extent that the parts of the whole have esse, they must be a unity, since there is only a single act of being that actualizes them. Matter, for instance, does not subsist independently of the form; rather, both matter and form subsist by virtue of the act of being received in them. Operations are no more than an expression of the actuality which a being has because of its esse, and the same thing can be said of the other accidental modifications as well. In spite of the variety of accidents, the unity of the suppositum can easily be seen if we consider that no accident has an act of being of its own. All accidents share in the single act of being of the substance.”108

Perfections of a Particular Being to be Referred to the Supposit. Alvira, Clavell and Melendo also explain why all the perfections of a particular being must be referred to the suppositum: “We have seen that the entire actuality of a being has its ultimate basis in the perfection of its act of being. Since the suppositum is the natural seat of the act of being, all the perfections of the suppositum, of whatever type they might be, have to be attributed to the suppositum as their proper subject. Actions, in particular, have to be attributed to the subsisting subject. Thus, it cannot correctly be said that the hand writes, that the intellect knows, or that the will loves. In each case, it is the entire man who acts through his powers. Only that which subsists can act.

“It could be further stated that the manner in which an individual acts follows its

nature, which is what determines its manner of being. It can, therefore, be claimed that acting belongs to the subsisting hypostasis in accordance with the form and nature specifying the kind of operations it can carry out. Thus, only individuals act, since they alone exist. There is a certain similarity, however, among the activities of the members of a species, since all of them share in a common nature. Men think and laugh; dogs bark; each one of the elements of the periodic table behaves in a particular way. This also explains why no individual can act beyond the limits set by its own species.

“The recognition of the individual as a single subsisting whole provides the

metaphysical basis for avoiding any kind of dualism (between matter and spirit, between senses and intelligence) and any division of things into stagnant compartments in which the unity of the whole would be compromised.

“This doctrine equally denies the validity of philosophies which acknowledge the

universal as the primary reality (like in Hegelian historicism, socialism, and Marxism),

107 Quodlibet, IX, a. 3, ad 2. 108 T. ALVIRA, L. CLAVELL, T. MELENDO, op. cit., pp. 121-122.

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thereby absorbing the individual, robbing it of its metaphysical significance. The actus

essendi, as the single act of the suppositum, impedes any reduction of being to a mere relation or to a set of relations within the same class or category, as these philosophical systems purport to do.”109

Subsistence. Subsistence is the perfection by which the individual complete substance becomes a supposit. In the case of the rational supposit, the person, this perfection is called suppositality. This perfection makes the individual complete substance entirely incommunicable and intrinsically (not extrinsically) self-sufficient.110

Person. Man is a particular type of supposit, namely, a rational supposit. Rational

supposits are called persons. A human being, therefore, is a person. The sixth century A.D. Roman philosopher Severinus Boethius was the first thinker to formulate an adequate definition of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature (individua substantia

rationalis naturae). The most perfect beings that exist are persons, namely, God (who is Pure Act of Being), as well as angels (also called the separate substances) and men (both angels and men having particularly intense degrees of participation in esse). “Since all perfections stem from esse, the excellence of these substances (God, angels and men) is due either to the possession of the fullness of the act of being (God as Esse Subsistens), or to a high degree of participation in esse which angels and men have. In the final analysis, to be a person amounts

to possessing a likeness of the divine esse in a more sublime way, that is, by being spiritual; it means having a more intense act of being…ultimately, the entire dignity of the person, the

special greater perfection of his operations, is rooted in the richness of his act of being. The latter is what makes him a person and provides the basis of his psychological uniqueness (self-knowledge, spiritual love, etc.) and of his moral and social value. Consequently, neither consciousness nor free-will, neither responsibility nor inter-personal relations can constitute a person. All these perfections are merely accidents whose being is derived from the act of being, the only real core of personality.”111

109 T. ALVIRA, L. CLAVELL, T. MELENDO, op. cit., pp. 122-123. 110 “In the order of activity this self-sufficient being is also the ultimate principle which acts, and to which all actions are ultimately attributed. The nature is the ultimate principle through which or by which activity is exercised, but the supposit is the ultimate principle which exercises the activity. For instance, this person, Peter, is the ultimate principle which exercises through his rational nature the act of thinking; this supposit, Fido, is the ultimate principle which performs through its canine nature the act of barking. Hence the axiom: ‘Actions belong to the supposits.’ “Subsistence adds to individuality autonomy of independence. This autonomy of independence is an analogous concept and increases the higher we climb on the scale of beings. While on the lowest grade of being hardly any difference between the individual and the supposit is discernible, precisely because there is very little independence, this independence becomes more and more striking as we climb highwer on the scale of beings. Minerals, for example, can merely exist in themselves and act upon others in virtue of inherent powers; plants, in addition, have an intrinsic principle of growth and reproduction; to whatever self-sufficiency a plant has animals add the power of guiding themselves by means of sensation in their activity; man surpasses animals in autonomy because he has also the power to determine for himself for which purpose he is going to act. Thus subsistence adds to individuality an increasing degree of self-sufficiency”(H. J. KOREN, op. cit., pp. 201-202). 111 T. ALVIRA, L. CLAVELL, T. MELENDO, op. cit., pp. 123-124.

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CHAPTER 7

CRITIQUE OF HUME’S AG�OSTICISM

Definition of Agnosticism

Agnosticism,112 a term first proposed in its modern sense by Thomas H. Huxley

(1825-1895) in 1869, is etymologically derived from the Greek word agnostikos which means not knowing, ignorant. It is the philosophical doctrine which professes that the human mind is incapable of reaching a knowledge of anything immaterial (in particular, any knowledge regarding the existence, nature and attributes of God). Agnosticism is different from atheism. The agnostic does not explicitly negate the existence of God, as does the atheist. The agnostic position is that the human mind, restricted to the level of sensible phenomena, simply cannot rationally demonstrate the existence of God by means of speculative reason.

Hume’s Agnosticism

An evident conclusion that one can gather from Humean skeptical empiricism is that

it is impossible to prove the existence of God for it is impossible to prove the existence of anything. There is nothing we can know beyond our sense perceptions, whether noumena in the world or God. All we can do is believe as our imagination fancies. We are unable to prove the existence of God by means of the metaphysical principle of causality for causality has no objective value. With the empiricist doctrine of the inability of the mind to ascend from the level of experience to the establishment of the existence of a cause that exists and operates on a level of reality above the level of the senses, Hume has wiped out (from his own skeptical mind) metaphysics and, with it, philosophy of God, the highest branch of metaphysics. For Hume, one cannot rationally demonstrate the existence of God for there is no power of insight and understanding in man different in kind from the bodily senses. Such is Humean skeptical empiricist agnosticism.

How then does he explain the fact that so many people have a notion of a Supreme Being, whom they do not hesitate to call God? His answer: that too is a product of the imagination, something concocted out of many varied sense impressions. He does not deny its psychological value and use, as does the psychological utility of many of our other

112 For a general description of agnosticism and its principal tenets, see: R. GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, God:

His Existence and �ature, vol. 1, chapter 1 and section 2 of chapter 2, B. Herder, St. Louis, 1949, pp. 3-60, 84-109 ; C. FABRO, L’uomo e il rischio di Dio, chapter 2 (L’agnosticismo), Studium, Rome, 1967, pp. 97-131. For a description of Anglo-American agnostic doctrines during the first quarter of the twentieth century, see: F. J. SHEEN, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, Longmans, Green, and Co., New York, 1925. For a brief description of the agnosticism of neo-positivism and analytical philosophy, see: B. MONDIN, Dio: chi è?, Massimo, Milan, 1990, pp. 261-270. For a treatment of agnosticism and atheism’s foundations in the principle of immanence, see: C. FABRO, God in Exile: Modern Atheism, Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, 1968, pp. 1061-1085, 1144-1153. Studies on agnosticism: R. FLINT, Agnosticism, W. Blackwood, Edinburgh and London, 1903 ; G. MICHELET, Dieu et l’agnosticisme contemporain, V. Lecoffre, Paris, 1912 ; C. JOURNET, The Dark

Knowledge of God, Sheed and Ward, London, 1948 ; B. MINOZZI, Per una critica dell’agnosticismo della

contemporanea scienza della religione, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1968 ; B. LIGHTMAN, The Origins of

Agnosticism. Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1987.

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products of the imagination. But the simple fact is that the real existence or non-existence of God is outside the mind’s power to know.

Hume did not want to be branded an atheist and took pains to distinguish between the atheist’s denial of God’s existence and the agnostic’s suspension of judgment concerning His real existence or non-existence. But he certainly did not believe in Christian Revelation, describing supernatural Christian religion as nothing but the creation of man’s fertile imagination. He also maintained that that even a deistic “illuminist” religion founded on the rational metaphysical principles of philosophy of God (natural theology) had no experiential or rational foundation. All the major religions, Hume held, all lack empirical basis. Religious beliefs and their habits of association are explained through instinct and in the habits of association which arise from it. A religion may be tolerated if it has practical utility: as a source of consolation, altruism, fraternity, etc. Naturally, the tolerated religions should be devoid of all unreasonable fictions of the imagination, such as belief in mysteries and miracles; the only useful religion, according to Hume, would be a purely natural religion devoid of mysteries and miracles whatsoever.113

Critique of Hume’s Agnosticism: We Are Able to Demonstrate the Existence of

God Using Causality

Demonstration. A demonstration cannot simply be equated with a proof for a proof may be compelling, convincing, or merely persuading, whereas a demonstration is always compelling. When a history professor says to his students that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, a skeptical student who raises his hand may be satisfied by the historical proofs from an abundance of books and specialized historical periodicals on Ancient Rome handed to him by his professor. However, there isn’t a simple demonstration of the truth in question. That Julius Caesar did indeed cross the Rubicon is, of its nature, an historical fact that relies on various statements, historical documents, and written testimonies. But it isn’t something that, given all the objective information to examine, a person will affirm as being inevitable as for example, a person sees as inevitable the fact that five plus five equals ten. On the other hand, a math teacher has no need of various historical documents, testimonies and statements to convince a skeptical student that the angles of a triangle come to a hundred and eighty degrees, for it is a truth that can be reasoned out in such a complete and thorough way that the doubting student who understands every single step of the process is compelled to recognize it. And only to such a compelling proof can we give the name of demonstration.

Now there are two types of demonstration114: the quia demonstration (which goes

from the effects to the causes) and the propter quid demonstration (which goes from causes

113 Cf. D. HUME, Dialogues Concerning �atural Religion (written before 1752 and published posthumously in 1779). 114 Studies on demonstration in Aristotle: O. BENNETT, The �ature of Demonstrative Proof According to the

Principles of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Catholic University Press, Washington, D.C., 1943 ; Y. R. SIMON and K. MENGER, Aristotelian Demonstration and Postulational Method, “The Modern Schoolman,” 25 (1947-48), pp. 183-192 ; E. SIMMONS, Demonstration and Self-Evidence, “The Thomist,” 24 (1961), pp. 139-162 ; J. BARNES, Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration, “Phronesis,” 14 (1969), pp. 123-152 ; B. T. WILKINS, Aristotle on Scientific Explanation, “Dialogue,” 9 (1970), pp. 337-355 ; B. A. BRODY, Towards an

Aristotelian Theory of Scientific Explanation, “Philosophy of Science,” 39 (1972), pp. 20-31 ; J. JOPE, Subordinate Demonstrative Science in the Sixth Book of Aristotle’s Physics, “Classical Quarterly,” 22 (1972), pp. 279-292 ; D. J. HADGOPOULOS, Demonstration and the Second Figure in Aristotle, “The New Scholasticism,” 49 (1975), pp. 62-75 ; H. S. THAYER, Aristotle on the Meaning of Science, “Philosophical Inquiry,” 1 (1979), pp. 87-104 ; T. V. UPTON, Imperishable Being and the Role of Technical Hypotheses in

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to effects).115 St. Thomas explains these two types of demonstration for us in his Summa

Theologiae, and then affirms the possibility of an a posteriori demonstration of God’s existence116: “Demonstration can be made in two ways. One is through the cause, and is called propter quid, and this is to argue from what is prior absolutely. The other is through the effect, and is called a demonstration quia. This is to argue from what is prior relatively only to us. When an effect is better known to us than its cause, from the effect we proceed to the knowledge of the cause. And from every effect the existence of its proper cause can be demonstrated, so long as its effects are better known to us, because since every effect depends upon its cause, if the effect exists, the cause must pre-exist. Hence the existence of God, in so far as it is not self-evident to us, can be demonstrated from those of His effects which are known to us.”117

The demonstration propter quid (a priori) consists in demonstrating the effects and

properties of something on the basis of the cause or nature, which is more known to us.118 In the a priori demonstration (also called deduction), the process of demonstration starts from what is prior in essendo and also in cognoscendo, to what is posterior by nature. The instrument of demonstration is a cause, a definition, or a general principle. Mathematics is essentially a deductive science for its demonstrations are basically propter quid (a priori). In certain instances what is better known to us is also more knowable by nature and in itself. Such is the case with the science of mathematics; by reason of its abstraction from matter, it carries out its demonstrations only on the basis of formal principles. Hence, mathematical demonstrations begin with what is more knowable in itself.119

On the other hand, the demonstration quia (a posteriori) demonstrates the existence of

a cause by using its effects, which are more known to us, as the point of departure. Such a demonstration begins with what is posterior in essendo and ends with what is anterior in

essendo, as what is posterior by nature comes first in cognoscendo. This “effect-to-cause” demonstration is called quia because what the conclusion does is to affirm the existence of the cause because (quia) of the existence of the effect. The quia demonstration is also called a posteriori for it begins with what is posterior in the ontological order (the order of being or reality). In itself, a cause is prior to its effect, but in a demonstration we must start with whatever is prior as far as concerns us. Thus, when the effects are more evident to us than the cause, we proceed from knowledge of the effects to knowledge of the cause. It is possible to demonstrate the existence of a cause starting from its effects for since every effect depends upon its cause, every effect must presuppose the existence of its cause. Therefore, the

Aristotelian Demonstration, “Nature and System,” 2 (1980), pp. 91-99 ; J. HINTIKKA, Aristotelian Induction, “Revue Internationale de Philosophie,” 34 (1980), pp. 422-439 ; J. BARNES, Proof and the Syllogism, in Aristotle on Science: The “Posterior Analytics”, Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium Aristotelicum, Padua, 1981, pp. 1-59 ; M. T. FREEJOHN, Definition and the Two Stages of Aristotelian Demonstration, “Review of Metaphysics,” 36 (1982), pp. 375-395 ; A. CASSINI, La función de la teoria de la demonstración scientifica en

Aristoteles, “Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia,” 14 (1988), pp. 165-177. 115 Cf. D. MERCIER, Manual of Modern Thomistic Philosophy, volume 2, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, 1938, p. 184. 116 Studies on demonstration in St. Thomas: O. BENNETT, St. Thomas’ Theory of the Demonstrative Proof, “Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association,” 16 (1941), pp. 76-88 ; J. F. ANDERSON, On Demonstration in Thomistic Metaphysics, “The New Scholasticism,” 32 (1958), pp. 476-494. 117

Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 2, c. 118 For an in-depth study of this demonstration, see: E. CHAVARRI, �aturaleza de la demostración ‘propter

quid’ en los Analiticos Posteriores, “Estudios Filosoficos,” 20 (1971), pp. 39-90; 21 (1972), pp. 3-58, 283-338, 559-585. 119 Cf. In I Anal. Post., lect. 14.

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existence of God (not self-evident with regard to ourselves), can be demonstrated through His effects, which are evident to us.

It is through a causal induction that we demonstrate the existence of God, on the basis

of the limited perfections that we observe in things. Causal induction, based upon the principle of causality, seeks to discover the universal link between a series of events and its cause. In the philosophical realm this link operates on the metaphysical level. Our quia demonstration of the existence of God utilizes induction with a foundation in the principle of causality, operating on the metaphysical or ontological level. Though our demonstration of the existence of God involves a causal induction (for scientific investigation begins with a phenomenon whose cause still has to be discovered before the major premise of the demonstration quia can be formulated), the structure of the demonstration quia (the demonstration from effect to cause) generally has the structure of a categorical syllogism, which is a deductive process. The major premise would enunciate that a particular event signifies the presence of a cause. The demonstration quia can also be formulated as a conditional syllogism (the “if” conditional hypothetical syllogism, which contains a conditional proposition as the major premise), wherein the presence of the cause will be inferred from its effect according as the causality involved is sufficient, necessary, or both simultaneously. How can we reconcile inductive inference with deductive inference, both being involved in our quia demonstration of the existence of God?

It should not be thought that deduction and induction are processes totally

independent from one another. On the contrary, the inductive and deductive processes are complementary for the prerequisite of deduction are premises arrived at by induction. The principle of the syllogism, or deductive reasoning, is a universal attained by induction. Aristotle states that “induction is the starting-point which knowledge even of the universal presupposes, while the syllogism proceeds from universals. There are therefore starting-points from which the syllogism proceeds, which are not reached by the syllogism; it is therefore by induction that they are acquired.”120 Induction is introduced in order to know some principle and some universal at which we arrive through experience of singulars. But from the universal principles known previously in the aforesaid manner proceeds the syllogism. There are certain principles from which the syllogism proceeds, which are not certified by the syllogism, otherwise one would proceed to infinity in the principles of the syllogism, which is not possible.121 Thus the principle of the syllogism is induction. But it should be said that not any syllogism is causative of scientific knowledge, but solely the demonstrative syllogism, which concludes necessary things from necessary.122

It was mentioned that the demonstration quia, which makes use of a causal induction,

is based on the principle of causality. But what exactly is this principle? The principle of

causality is the cause-effect dependence between things expressed in a universal manner. We are here referring solely to that most commonly known type of causality, that is, to efficient or agent causality, the efficient or agent cause being that primary principle or origin of any 120 ARISTOTLE, �icomachean Ethics, VI, 1139b 25. 121 See: ARISTOTLE, Posterior Analytics, I. 122 Studies on induction in the Stagirite and the Angelic Doctor: P. H. CONWAY, Induction in Aristotle and St.

Thomas, “The Thomist”, 22 (1959), pp. 336-365 ; G. BUCHDAHL, Induction and �ecessity in the Philosophy

of Aristotle, Aquinas Paper (40), Aquinas Society of London, London, 1963. See also: P. SIWEK, La structure

logique de l’induction, “Gregorianum”, 17 (1936), pp. 224-253; M. C. GUÉRARD DES LAURIERS, L’induction, “Les sciences phil. et théol.” (1941-42), pp. 5-27; W. BAUMGAERTNER, The �ature of

Induction, “Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association”, 25 (1951), pp. 130-136; W. BUCHEL, Zum Problem des Induktionsschlusses, “Scholastik”, 34 (1959), pp. 34-53.

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act which makes a thing to be, or to be in a certain way.123 Efficient causality is of capital importance in our demonstration of God’s existence, for the efficient or agent cause always transcends the effect.

There are various formulations of the principle of causality, all of which express the

basic condition that every effect is in need of a causal basis. Such formulas include: 1. Anything which moves is moved by something else, or whatever is in motion is put

in motion by another (quid quid movetur ab alio movetur)124 This formulation of the principle of causality was first developed by the Stagirite, who used it to arrive at the First Mover, Pure Act, the First Cause of movement in things. Aquinas uses this formulation of the principle in his prima via, the demonstration from motion in things. In a general sense, the motion mentioned here is that transition from being in potentiality to being in actuality,125 or from a certain non-being to being. The demonstrative power of this formulation of the principle of causality lies in the absolute irreducibility of act to potency, as well as the impossibility that anything potential can ever confer actuality upon itself. Nothing can be reduced from potency to act except by a being in act.126

2. Everything which begins or comes “to be” has a cause.127 This is a more precise

formulation of the principle of causality than the popular formula “every effect has a cause,” This principle, that anything which begins “to be” necessarily demands a cause, is applicable to any perfection of things having a beginning in time. A thing which does not have a certain 123 Cf. O. J. LA PLANTE, The Traditional View of Efficient Causality, “Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association”, 14 (1938), p. 2. 124 ARISTOTLE, Physics, VII, ch. 1, 241b 24; Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3. 125 Studies on act and potency: A. FARGES, Theorie fondamentale de l’acte et de la puissance du moteur et du

mobile, Paris, 1893 ; A. BAUDIN, L’acte et la puissance dans Aristote, “Revue Thomiste,” 7 (1899), pp. 39-62, 153-172, 274-296, 584-608 ; G. MATTIUSSI, Le XXIV tesi della filosofia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, Gregorian University, Rome, 1925 ; G. MANSER, Das Wesen des Thomismus. Die Lehre von Akt und Potenz als tiefste

Grundlage der thomistischen Synthese, Paulus Verlag, Fribourg, 1935 ; P. DESCOQS, Sur la division de l’être

en acte et puissance d’après Saint Thomas, “Revue de Philosophie,” 38 (1938), pp. 410-430 ; V. A. BERTO, Sur la composition d’acte et de puissance dans les créatures, “Revue de Philosophie,” 39 (1939), pp. 106-121 ; P. DESCOQS, Sur la division de lêtre en acte et puissance d’après Saint Thomas. �ouvelles precisions, “Revue de Philosophie,” 39 (1939), pp. 233-252, 361-70 ; C. FABRO, Circa la divisione dell’essere in atto e potenza

secondo S. Tommaso, “Divus Thomas,” 42 (1939), pp. 529-552 ; A. SANDOZ, Sur la division de lêtre en acte

et puissance d’après Saint Thomas, “Revue de Philosophie,” 40 (1940), pp. 53-76 ; VAN ROO, W. A., Act and

Potency, “The Modern Schoolman”, 18 (1940), pp. 1-4 ; C. GIACON, Atto e potenza, La Scuola, Brescia, 1947 ; J. D. ROBERT, Le principe: ‘Actus non limitatur nisi per potentiam subjectivam realiter distinctam,’ “Revue philosophique de Louvain,” 47 (1949), pp. 44-70 ; W. NORRIS CLARK, The Limitation of Act by Potency:

Aristotelianism or �eoplatonism?, “The New Scholasticism,” 26 (1952), pp. 167-194 ; E. BERTI, Genesi e

sviluppo della dottrina della potenza e dell’atto in Aristotele, “Studia Patavina,” 5 (1958), pp. 477-505 ; C. FABRO, La determinazione dell’atto nella metafisica tomistica, in Esegesi tomistica, Pontificia Università Lateranense, Rome, 1969, pp. 329-350 ; H. P. KAINZ, Active and Passive Potency in Thomistic Angelology, M. Nijhoff, The Hague, 1972 ; C. A. FREELAND, Aristotle’s Theory of Actuality and Potentiality, Pittsburgh, 1979 ; F. KOVACH, St. Thomas Aquinas: Limitation of Potency by Act. A Textual and Doctrinal Analysis, in Atti del VIII Congresso Internazionale dell’Accademia Pontificia di San Tommaso d’Aquino (V), Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City, 1982, pp. 387-411 ; G. VERBEKE, The Meaning of Potency in Aristotle, in Graceful Reason. Essays in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Presented to Joseph Owens CssR, edited by L. P. Gerson, Toronto, 1983, pp. 55-74 ; J. F. WIPPEL, Thomas Aquinas and the Axiom ‘What is Received is

Received according to the Mode of the Receiver, in A Straight Path: Essays Offered to Arthur Hyman, edited by Ruth Link Salinger, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D. C., 1988, pp. 279-289 ; J. F. WIPPEL, Thomas Aquinas and the Axiom that Unreceived Act is Unlimited, “The Review of Metaphysics,” 51 (1998), pp. 533-564. 126 Cf. Compendium Theologiae, ch. 7. 127 Cf. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 75, a. 1.

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act cannot confer that act upon itself, but must receive the influence of something else which does have that act. Our second formulation of the principle of causality has an even more far-reaching application in the case of anything which begins or comes “to be” in the absolute sense, that is, as substantia.

3. Every contingent being requires a cause. The Angelic Doctor applies this

formulation of the principle of causality to his tertia via demonstration of the existence of God in order to arrive at the Necessary Being. As regards being, anything which in itself has a potentiality for ceasing “to be” is contingent. We limit ourselves naturally to corporeal beings, which are corruptible because of their composition of matter and form. A thing contingent in itself can either “be” or “not be.” If in fact it is, there must subsequently be a cause of its being actual. And if that cause be something likewise contingent, we must look to a further cause, inquiring further until we attain an absolutely necessary being, that is, a being which cannot “not be.”

4. If a particular being possesses a perfection not derived from its essence, that

perfection must come from an external cause. This last formulation is a causal process that operates in Aquinas’ quarta via. When applied to the act of being (esse), the formulation can be considered as the most perfect and universal formulation of the principle of causality. The act of being (esse) as a perfection does not pertain necessarily to an essence. Thus, it must originate from an extrinsic cause which is really distinct from the essence. The act of being (esse) does not come from the essence for the essence (essentia) is the principle of specification and differentiation among individual things; it makes a thing to be what it is and different from other things. The act of being, on the other hand, is the principle of unity and similarity among all things because all things have it. The common possession of all things, all creatures participate in the act of being, whatever determinate essence each being (ens) may have. Therefore, we must conclude that the act of being (esse) of a thing must come from a cause, and it is distinct from the essentia of the same thing. We also see that esse is possessed by things in various degrees, which gives rise to a metaphysical or ontological hierarchy of being. The multiplicity and finitude of things reveal that no individual thing can possess the act of being in all its fullness, in its full intensity. Rather, finite things possess esse only in part, by participation.128 Now, if esse is possessed only in a partial manner by 128 Studies on Thomistic participation metaphysics: C. A. HART, Participation and the Thomistic Five Ways, “The New Scholasticism,” 26 (1952), pp. 267-282 ; W. NORRIS CLARKE, The Meaning of Participation in St.

Thomas Aquinas, “Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association,” 26 (1952), pp. 147-157 ; L. B. GEIGER, La participation dans la philosophie de St. Thomas d’Aquin, Paris, 1953; G. LINDBECK, Participation and Existence in the Interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas, “Franciscan Studies,” 17 (1957), pp. 1-22, 107-125 ; C. FABRO, Partecipazione e causalità, S.E.I., Turin, 1961 ; C. FABRO, La nozione metafisica

di partecipazione, 3rd ed., S.E.I. Turin, 1963; C. FABRO, Elementi per una dottrina tomistica della

partecipazione, “Divinitas,” 2 (1967), pp. 559-586 ; C. FABRO, The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic

Philosophy: The �otion of Participation, “The Review of Metaphysics,” 27 (1974), pp. 449-491 ; Partecipazione agostiniana e partecipazione tomistica, “Doctor Communis,” 39 (1986), pp. 282-291 ; H. J. JOHN, Participation Revisited, “The Modern Schoolman,” 39 (1962), pp. 154-165 ; J. ARTOLA, Creación y

participación, Publicaciones de la Institución Aquinas, Madrid, 1963 ; P. C. COURTÈS, Participation et

contingence selon Saint Thomas d’ Aquin, “Revue Thomiste,” 77 (1969), pp. 201-235; J. CHIU YUEN HO, La

doctrine de la participatión dans le Commentaire de Saint Thomas sur le “Liber de Causis”, “Revue philosophique de Louvain,” 27 (1972), pp. 360-383 ; T. FAY, Participation: The Transformation of Platonic

and �eoplatonic Thought in the Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, “Divus Thomas,” 76 (1973), pp. 50-64 ; O. N. DERISI, Participación, acto y potencia y analogia en Santo Tomás, “Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica,” 65 (1974), pp. 415-435 ; O. N. DERISI, La existencia o esse imparticipado divino, causa de todo ser participado, “Sapientia,” 31 (1976), pp. 109-120 ; O. N. DERISI, El fundamento de la metafisica tomista: El Esse e

Intelligere Divino, fundamento y causa de todo ser y entender participados, “Sapientia,” 35 (1980), pp. 9-26; Del ente participado al Ser imparticipado, “Doctor Communis”, 35 (1982), pp. 26-38; La participación del ser,

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things, by participation, it must be present in a being that possesses it in all its fullness, in all its intensity. This being is none other than God.

As was mentioned, the demonstration quia is based on the principle of causality. The

means of proof used by this demonstration is a fact of experience which, through induction, we know to be essentially linked to some cause. The universal premise of this demonstration is none other than a particular formulation of the principle of causality (e.g., that everything that begins or comes to be has a cause, either present or past).

We start with a consideration of things given in sensible experience, and infer from

their existence, the existence of a Being not given in sense experience. Starting from an effect whose existence is given in sense experience, it will be possible to infer the existence of a cause that really exists and is the true cause of this effect.

For a demonstration to be valid its conclusion must not be present explicitly in the

premises but only implicitly or potentially. We would be begging the question if the conclusion were explicitly present in the premises, for the premises are supposed to prove the conclusion, and the latter was already contained in the former. On the other hand, if the conclusion is only potentially present in the premises, then such premises possess the power to produce, that is, to cause in us, the knowledge of the conclusion. In such a case, the demonstration would be authentic and valid.

This authentic and valid type of demonstration is true as regards the a posteriori quia

demonstration of God’s existence starting from the existence of corporeal, sensible beings. For such sensible beings are not considered at first as explicit and actual effects but are considered as particular beings which, when analyzed, manifest certain characteristics such as mutability, contingency, limitation, imperfection, etc. And from this point of departure one can conclude that such certain characteristics of sensible beings must have a necessary relation or connection with some other being upon which they must simultaneously here and now depend for their actual act of being.

In the a posteriori demonstration of the existence of God the knowledge of the

conclusion comes after the knowledge of the premises. As the order of knowing is the reverse of the order of being, there is nothing stopping created beings from being posterior to the Supreme Being, even though our knowledge of created beings precedes our knowledge of God. What man first knows is the being of sensible, material things. It is only after this knowledge that he can then arrive at a knowledge of the existence of God, who is beyond man’s sensible experience. This is the order of our knowing process. On the other hand, in

“Sapientia,” 37 (1982), pp. 5-10, 83-86, 243-248 ; La participación de la esencia, in Cinquant’anni di

Magistero Teologico. Scritti in onore di Mons. Antonio Piolanti, “Studi tomistici” (26), Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City, 1985, pp. 173-184 ; P. LAZZARO, La dialettica della partecipazione nella Summa contra Gentiles di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, Parallelo, Regio Calabria, 1976 ; K. REISENHUBER, Participation

as a Structuring Principle in Thomas Aquinas’ Teaching on Divine �ames, “Studies in Medieval Thought,” 20 (1978), pp. 240-242 ; A. BASAVE, La doctrina metafisica de la participación en santo Tomás de Aquino, “Giornale di Metafisica,” 30 (1979), pp. 257-266 ; A. L. GONZÁLEZ, Ser y participación, EUNSA, Pamplona, 1979 ; P. MAZZARELLA, Creazione, partecipazione, e tempo secondo san Tommaso d’Aquino, “Studia Patavina,” (1982), pp. 308-335 ; J. F. WIPPEL, Thomas Aquinas and Participation, in Studies in Medieval

Philosophy, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1987, pp. 117-158 ; C. P. BIGGER, St.

Thomas on Essence and Participation, “The New Scholasticism,” 62 (1988), pp. 319-348 ; T. TYN, Metafisica

della sostanza. Partecipazione e analogia entis, Edizioni Studio Domenicano, Bologna, 1991, pp. 18-20, 523-583, 813-933 ; R. A. TE VELDE, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas, Brill, Leiden, 1995.

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the ontological order, that is, the real order of being, it is God’s existence that comes first, and then the existence of sensible, material beings, which are dependent upon the First Cause for their very act of being.

In the a posteriori demonstration of the existence of God we find that the conclusion

follows with necessity from the premises as such a proof necessarily concludes to a Necessary Being. This is the case even though the demonstration proceeds from the contingent existence of a particular sensible and material being. Because of such a contingency the particular sensible and corporeal being must necessarily be connected in its existence to a non-contingent, that is, Necessary Being. Therefore we must conclude that there exists a Necessary Being, that is, God.

The A Posteriori Demonstration of the Existence of God. Essential Points to

Remember for Any “A Posteriori Quia” Demonstration of God’s Existence. The a posteriori demonstrations of the existence of God are not simple demonstrations that any ordinary person on the street can perform; rather, the five ways require an adequate understanding of the fundamental points of realist metaphysics, such as the transcendental structure of being, the doctrine of transcendental metaphysical participation, intrinsic and extrinsic predicamental causality and their ultimate ontological foundation in transcendental metaphysical causality.129 These quia demonstrations of God’s existence are not mathematical deductions nor are they demonstrations from physics; they are, instead, metaphysical demonstrations that regard created beings in as much as they are caused effects that require an uncaused proper, immediate and necessary cause. They are demonstrations rooted in the centrality of esse (as act of acts and perfection of perfections) and in transcendental metaphysical causality. The core metaphysical point of the quia demonstrations lies in the fact that the real composite structure of beings (entia), composed of essence and act of being, requires a reason why those beings in fact are. And this reason cannot be found in the order of predicamental causality (which explains only the becoming of the effect but not its act of being), but rather in the order of transcendental metaphysical causality wherein we find that the being by essence is the immediate and necessary proper cause of all finite beings. Such a causality is metaphysical and not physical or a causality of phenomena.

The Constitutive Elements of the “A Posteriori” Demonstration of God’s Existence. There are four constitutive elements in the a posteriori quia demonstration of the existence of God: 1. the point of departure (or starting point); 2. the application of causality to the point of departure; 3. the impossibility of proceeding to infinity in the series of causes (just what type of series of causes will be explained shortly); and 4. the conclusion of the necessity of God’s existence. This four stage structure is summarized by Battista Mondin as follows: “1. The attention is drawn to a certain phenomenon (change, secondary causality, possibility, the grades of perfection, finality); 2. The relative, dependent and caused character (that is, the contingency) of the phenomenon is evidenced. Whatever changes is moved by another; second causes are in turn, caused; the possible receives its being from others; the grades of perfection receive perfection from the highest perfection; finality always requires intelligence, while natural things in themselves do not have intelligence; 3. It is demonstrated that the effective and actual reality of a contingent phenomenon cannot be explained by postulating the intervention of an infinite series of contingent causes; and 4. It is concluded 129 The Summa Theologiae was written for theology students who had already completed extensive studies in philosophy. St. Thomas presumed that they already had an adequate knowledge of the fundamentals of metaphysics.

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that the only valid explanation of the contingent is God. He is the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, necessary being, the most perfect being, and the supreme ordering intelligence.”130

1. The Point of Departure of the “A Posteriori” Demonstration of the Existence of

God. The a posteriori quia demonstration of the existence of God is entirely a metaphysical demonstration. We are not doing physics, a scientific experiment, nor are we working out a mathematical problem. We are doing metaphysics, which operates at the third degree of abstraction. But the sensible and the physical is the obligatory passage that one must undergo to pass on to the metaphysical level, since all our knowledge begins from that which is grasped by the senses.131 In the point of departure (or starting point) of the demonstration of God’s existence, we perceive the world of real beings, of physical reality, that is immediately evident to our observation and experience, but nevertheless must now be endowed with a metaphysical formality. The demonstration starts from empirical or observable facts, that is, from things or events in the world that we can directly experience. The primary condition for a valid proof of God’s existence is a basis in data evident to human sensible-intellectual experience. It should, however, be made clear that though our starting point is something known empirically, such a fact of experience must be considered metaphysically. It must not be considered in as much as it is initially presented in an empirically experiential way, but rather according to a metaphysical perspective (which goes beyond the sensible experience of the visible world). Our attention is given to determinate contingent phenomena: change, secondary or instrumental causality, possibility, grades of perfection and order. From the knowledge of things that move we have the experience of movement. From the knowledge of the actions of creatures we have the experience of efficient causality. From the knowledge that things are not necessary of themselves we have the experience of the diverse grades of non-necessity. From the sensible-intellectual knowledge of things that are more or less perfect we have the experience of grades of perfection. And from the knowledge that non-thinking beings are finalized we have the experience of the order of the universe.

2. The Application of Causality to the Point of Departure. A cause is defined as that

which really and positively influences a particular being (ens) or thing, making this particular being (ens) or thing be dependent upon it in a certain way. Causality132 is the aspect of a thing

130 B. MONDIN, A History of Mediaeval Philosophy, Urbaniana University Press, Rome, 1991, p. 320. 131 Cf. V. J. BOURKE, Experience of Extra-Mental Reality as a Starting Point of St. Thomas’ Metaphysics, “Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association”, 14 (1938), pp. 134-144. 132 Studies on causality: G. BALLERINI, Il principio di causalità e l’esistenza di Dio, Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, Florence, 1904 ; A. BERSANI, Principium causalitatis et existentia Dei, “Divus Thomas,” 2 (1925), pp. 14-35 ; P. E. NOLAN, Causality and the Existence of God, “The Modern Schoolman,” 14 (1936), pp. 16-18 ; C. FABRO, La difesa critica del principio di causa, “Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica,” 27 (1936), pp. 102-141 ; D. HAWKINGS, Causality and Implication, Sheed and Ward, London, 1937 ; F. X. MEEHAN, Efficient Causality in Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1940 ; E. R. KILZER, Efficient Causality in the Philosophy of �ature, “Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association,” 17 (1941), pp. 142-150 ; G. KLUBERTANZ, Causality in the Philosophy

of �ature, “The Modern Schoolman,” 19 (1942), pp. 29-31 ; J. S. ALBERTSON, Instrumental Causality in St.

Thomas, “The New Scholasticism,” 28 (1954), pp. 409-435 ; F. GIARDINI, Gradi di causalità e di similitudine, “Angelicum,” 36 (1959), pp. 26-50 ; C. FABRO, Partecipazione e causalità, S.E.I., Turin, 1961 ; W. H. KANE, Existence and Causality, “The Thomist,” 28 (1964), pp. 76-92 ; C. GIACON, La causalità del Motore

Immobile, Editrice Antenore, Padua, 1969 ; G. BLANDINO, Discussione sulla causalità I, “Aquinas,” 23 (1980), pp. 93-113 ; T. M. OLSHEWSKY, Thomas’ Conception of Causation, “Nature and System,” 2 (1980), pp. 101-122 ; G. BLANDINO, Discussione sulla causalità II, “Aquinas,” 25 (1982), pp. 515-552 ; M. PANGALLO, Il principio di causalità nella metafisica di san Tommaso, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City, 1991.

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insofar as it influences the being of something else. It is that which exercises a positive influence upon the “to be” of something else133 (we are, of course, speaking here of efficient or agent causality, which is what is meant by a cause in common parlance). It is truly the dynamic aspect of being which, through the act of being (esse), is capable of communicating its various perfections as well as to produce new things. We experience causality in our everyday lives. For example, we know that the cause of Jimmy’s black eye was Victor who gave him a punch in the schoolyard after class the other day. Or the fact that the cause of The

Messiah was George Frideric Handel who composed it. Or, going to St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, we know that the cause of the Pietà was Michelangelo who sculpted it. We also have the internal experience that we are the cause of our own actions, such as the moving of our arms, of our walking to the supermarket, etc. We also have a concurrent internal and external experience of causality, that is, we are conscious of our causal actions on the extra-mental, extra-subjective beings around us, as well as the influence that these particular beings have on us. The existence of causality in our world is an evident truth which requires no demonstration (only something that is not immediately evident requires demonstration). What is necessary, though, is an inquiry into its basis. Such a basis is provided by being (ens), which can exercise causality because of its esse.

The most characteristic observations that are affirmable after a basic consideration of

the notions of cause and effect are: 1. That the effect’s very dependence on its cause with regard to esse is the counterpart of the real influence of the said cause on the effect. A cause is said to be a cause precisely to the extent that the effect cannot come to be or exist without it. For example, Michelangelo’s Mausoleum of Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains) in Rome, which contains the famous sculpture of Moses, would not exist without the materials of which it is made and without the proper arrangement of these elements. Neither would this sculpture work exist without the genius of Michelangelo, even though his master hand more directly influenced the coming into being of the sculpture series than its actual being. This two-fold way of influencing the effect enables us to define a cause as anything by which something depends with regard to its being or to its coming into being ; 2. That there is a real distinction between the cause and the effect since the real dependence of one thing upon another would necessarily demand that they be really distinct from one another ; 3. Lastly, the cause is prior to the effect. The cause comes before the effect as the perfection which the cause confers upon or produces in the effect must first exist in the cause in some manner. The fact that the cause is prior to the effect entails, in many instances, a precedence in time. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Mozart preceded their son Wolfgang Amadeus, Leonardo preceded the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo preceded the Last Judgment, and Beethoven preceded the �inth Symphony. But as far as the causal action is concerned, effect and its cause are simultaneous and correlative as the cause is a cause when it causes and an effect is an effect at the very moment it is being caused. If Michelangelo stopped painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel the coming into being of that particular work of art would immediately cease. If Leo Tolstoy stopped thinking during the writing of War and Peace, the coming into being of War and Peace would immediately stop.

133 Cf. H. J. KOREN, Introduction to the Science of Metaphysics, B. Herder Book Company, St. Louis, 1965, pp. 228-232. After having distinguished cause from principle, condition, occasion, and sufficient reason of being, Koren defines cause as “an ontological principle which exercises a positive influence upon the ‘to be’ of something else” (H. J. KOREN, op. cit., p. 232). According to Phillips, a cause is “a principle on which something else depends for existence” (R. P. PHILLIPS, Modern Thomistic Philosophy, vol. 2, Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, London, 1934, p. 236). Celestine Bittle defines cause as “that which in any way whatever exerts a positive influence in the production of a thing” (C. BITTLE, The Domain of Being, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1938, p. 321).

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A proper efficient cause is an agent that exercises its influence over the being of some other being (which is here called the effect), by means of an activity that is properly its own, that is, by means of an activity that flows from its own nature, its own form, an activity which is proportioned to the very nature of the agent cause. For example, in the painting of The

Transfiguration, many causes have exercised their activity, but working together as a causal unit. We have the intelligence of Raphael, his various motor faculties or nerves, his fingers, the moved movement of his various paintbrushes, and so forth. And the complexity of this causal activity is beautifully mirrored in the complexity of the effect produced: The

Transfiguration, which carries profound meaning. The various elements that constitute the unity of the effect, a profound painted masterpiece, are proportioned to what in the agent has properly produced them. For example, the shapes, colors, shades, and textures of the painting are properly proportioned to the oilpaints and brushes utilized, whereas the meaning or intelligibility that these shapes, forms, and colors carry is properly proportioned to the intelligence of the artist. Hence, the proper cause of the meaning of the painting has not been the oilpaints, paintbrushes, and canvas, which have no intelligence, but rather the artist who has utilized these artistic tools. Therefore, this is the first characteristic of a proper cause, that is, it produces the effect by an activity that is proportioned to its own nature or being. Now regarding the argument from the existence of an effect to the existence of God, it will be proper to argue for the existence of God as the proper cause of the very being of the effect.

One can also observe how one particular set of causes may have been needed to bring

about a certain effect into being, and another set needed to sustain the effect in being. Let us take as an example the painting of Leonardo, the famous Mona Lisa. Once the work of art had been painted it is no longer the effect of the painter, the paint brushes and the oil paints. Rather, it was their effect. It was painted. But it is to be observed that the painting, the Mona

Lisa, is not here and now being caused by Leonardo and his painting instruments. And yet, the Mona Lisa remains in existence. It exists to be enjoyed by art lovers all over the world. It keeps on keeping the being it has received, and thus, it keeps on depending on a series of causes that preserves it in being. The existence of the canvas conserves the existence of the oil paint and the oil paint conserves the existence of the meaning intended by Leonardo. And all these must exist simultaneously. This aspect of the simultaneous existence of cause and effect, as far as causal action is concerned, is of crucial interest in the demonstration of the existence of God, for once it is seen that God is needed as the sole possible proper cause of the act of being of any being, it will also be seen that God must simultaneously be if anything is to be at all.

As regards the various starting points for the existence of God mentioned above, one

can find causality manifested. From the experience of movement we find that that which is moved is moved by another. From the experience of efficient causality we find that every subordinate cause is caused by another, that is, it is impossible that something be the efficient cause of itself. From the experience of the diverse grades of necessity we find that contingent being is caused by a necessary being. From the experience of various grades of transcendental perfections we find that the perfections that are given in various degrees are participated, and therefore caused. And lastly, from the experience of the order of the universe we find that order towards an end is caused. Our starting point, which is limited, imperfect, changeable and contingent being, is now manifested to be an effect, and as all effects depend upon their causes, once we have proven that such changeable, imperfect, limited, and contingent beings are in fact effects, it is subsequently necessary that a cause pre-exist. From every proper effect it is possible to demonstrate the existence of the proper

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cause of its being. There are no absolute and totally independent effects for every effect presupposes a proper cause upon which its being depends upon.

Causality has a metaphysical value as it is not perceived by the senses but rather by

the intellect. One can, with one’s intelligence, grasp that a cause is that which gives being and all that which begins to be has need of an efficient cause. Every effect does not have in itself the very reason of its being. The reason of its very being lies in its proper cause which gives being to it. In causality the notions of cause and effect are understood together, as being inseparably linked. Each and every being which causes is a cause of something and a given effect necessarily demands a causal origin.

3. The Impossibility of Proceeding to Infinity in the Series of Causes. This third

constitutive element of the a posteriori demonstration of the existence of God is utilized by the quia demonstrations whose points of departure are the experience of motion, secondary causality, and contingency in the beings of this visible world (the first, second, and third ways of St. Thomas). The a posteriori demonstration from grades of transcendental perfections (the fourth way), as well as the quia demonstration from finalization of non-intelligent beings (the fifth way), do not require this third element, though they can be included without compromising the structure of the proofs.

The quia demonstrations treat of the impossibility of a process to infinity by causes

essentially subordinated in the present and not of causes accidentally subordinated in the past. Causes accidentally subordinated in the past have the character of particular causes or autonomous causes, and can therefore be infinite: “In efficient causes it is impossible to proceed to infinity per se – thus, there cannot be an infinite number of causes that are per se required for a certain effect; for instance, that a stone be moved by a stick, the stick by the hand, and so on to infinity. But it is not impossible to proceed to infinity accidentally as regards efficient causes; for instance, if all the causes thus infinitely multiplied should have the order of only one cause, their multiplication being accidental; as an artificer acts by means of many hammers accidentally, because one after the other is broken. It is accidental, therefore, that one particular hammer acts after the action of another…”134

Causes accidentally subordinated in the past only give the reason of the becoming of

the effect, but what must be discovered here is the very cause of being, which can be found through the inquiry into the causes essentially subordinated in the present. The former regards predicamental causality while the latter attains the causality of esse, which is transcendental causality.

The infinity which is treated here is not a mathematical infinity, which has a simply

logical and formal value, nor a mere physical infinity, in which the causes are univocal and only explain the becoming of the effect. Rather, as regards our third constitutive element of the a posteriori demonstration of the existence of God, we are speaking of metaphysical

infinity, which treats of the series of causes of metaphysically considered real effects.135 A text of the Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas is relevant here, as it shows that, if one

134 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 46, a. 2, ad 7. 135 Cf. J. OWENS, Aquinas on Infinite Regress, “Mind”, 71 (1962), pp. 244-246 ; P. BROWN, Infinite Causal

Regression, “Philosophical Review”, 75 (1966), pp. 510-525 ; F. VAN STEENBERGHEN, Le ‘Processus in

Infinitum” dans les trois premieres ‘voies’ de s. Thomas, “Rassegna di Scienze Filosofiche”, 30 (1974), pp. 127-134 ; T. J. DAY, Aquinas on Infinite Regresses, “International Journal for Philosophy of Religion”, 22 (1987), pp. 151-164.

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were to proceed to infinity in the series of efficient causes, essentially subordinated in the present, in the order towards the production of an effect, there would not be a first cause, and if there be no first cause neither can there be any intermediate causes nor even an effect: “In all ordered efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, whether one or many, and this is the cause of the last cause. But, when you suppress a cause, you suppress its effect. Therefore, if you suppress the first cause, the intermediate cause cannot be a cause. Now, if there were an infinite regress among efficient causes, no cause would be first. Therefore, all the other causes, which are intermediate, will be suppressed. But this is manifestly false.”136 For more on the impossibility of an infinite regress in a per se essentially ordered series of efficient causes, see its use in the second way (secunda via) below.

4. The Conclusion of the “A Posteriori” Demonstration: The �ecessity of God’s

Existence. The Thomistic five way a posteriori quia demonstrations of the existence of God conclude with their respective affirmations of His existence as First Unmoved Mover, Uncaused First Efficient Cause, Necessary Being, Supremely Perfect Being by Essence, and First Supreme Ordering Intelligence.

136 Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 13.

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CO�CLUSIO�

GE�ERAL CRITIQUE OF HUME’S PHE�OME�ALISM

Hume’s main errors lie in his epistemological and ontological immanentism, as well

as in his reduction of human knowledge to the level of the senses (sensism or sensationalism), thus denying that man has the power of abstraction and the ability to form universal concepts. For Hume, sense experience was the ultimate source of valid human knowledge and in the final analysis, all that we could ever hope to know are phenomena, our own internal mental states and not extra-mental reality itself (pan-phenomenalist immanentism). Thus, thrown out together with metaphysics are substance, the substantial metaphysical Ego, the substantial and immortal soul, as well as objective ontological causality. Having done this he remained agnostic concerning God’s existence, a natural consequence of his immanentist, pan-phenomenalist sensism.

Criticizing Hume’s radical empiricism, Celestine Bittle notes a number of things:

“First, Hume’s explanation of ideas as faint images of sense-impressions is totally inadequate. Since both are of a sensory character, they are concrete and individualized. Our ideas, however, are abstract and universal. There is, as we have shown, a radical difference between ‘sensations’ and ‘images’ on the one hand and ‘intellectual ideas’ on the other. To ignore or deny these differences is a serious error. Second, Hume’s explanation of universal

ideas is totally inadequate.137 The process of forming universal ideas is not at all the way Hume pictures it. We acquire them by a process of abstraction, taking the objective features common to a number of individuals and then generalizing the resultant idea so that it applies to the whole class and to every member of the class. It is not a question of merely labeling objects with a common name. Intellectual insight into the nature of these objective features, not ‘custom’ or habit, enables us to group them together into a class. Third, Hume’s explanation of the origin and nature of the necessarily and universally true axioms and principles, such as the principle of causality and the principle of non-contradiction, is totally inadequate. He explains their necessity and universality through association. Now, the laws of association are purely subjective laws with a purely subjective result. Consequently, the ‘necessity’ which we experience relative to the logical connection between subject and predicate in these principles would not be due to anything coming from the reality represented in these judgments, but solely to the associative force existing in the mind. It is a subjective and psychological, not an objective and ontological, necessity. The mind does not judge these principles to be true because it sees they cannot be otherwise; it cannot see them to be otherwise because the mind in its present constitution must judge them to be true. So far as objective reality is concerned, 2 + 2 might equal 3 or 5 or any other number; and there might be a cause without an effect, or an effect without a cause. If Hume’s contention were correct, that our observation of ‘invariable sequence’ is the reason for assuming an antecedent event to be the ‘cause’ of the subsequent event, then we should perforce experience the same psychological necessity of judgment in all cases where we notice an invariable sequence in successive events. Experience, however, contradicts this view. For instance, day follows night in an invariable sequence; but nobody would dream of asserting that the night is the ‘cause’ of the day. In an automobile factory one car follows the other on the belt line in

137 Describing Hume’s nominalism, Bittle writes: “Relative to universal ideas, Hume maintains that we find a resemblance between objects and apply the same name to them; then, after a ‘custom’ of this kind has been estblished, the name revives the ‘idea,’ and the imagination conceives the object represented by the ‘idea’(C. BITTLE, op. cit., p. 317).

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invariable sequence; but this association does not compel us to think that the preceding car is the ‘cause’ of the one following. Reversely, when an explosion occurs but once in our experience, we search for the ‘cause’ of this ‘effect’ and are convinced there must be a cause present; here, however, there can be no question of an ‘invariable sequence’ of events. Fourth, Hume’s theory, if accepted as true, must destroy all scientific knowledge. The very foundation of science lies in the principles of non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and causality. If these principles are valid only for our mind and do not apply with inviolable necessity to physical objects in nature, the scientist has no means of knowing whether his conclusions are objectively valid. His knowledge is nothing but a purely mental construction

which may or may not agree with extra-mental reality. But science treats of physical systems and their operations, not of mental constructions. Since, according to Hume, we can know nothing but our internal states of consciousness, we could never discover whether the external world and other minds exist at all; driven to its logical conclusions, such a theory can end only in solipsism or in skepticism.”138

138 C. BITTLE, op. cit., pp. 317-319.