point Kant has for ever settled, and it is really one of the most important steps made by modern philosophy.

Aristotle, and St. Thomas after him, concludes the existence of God from the necessity of a prime-mover or of the actual to reduce the potential to act. We accept the argument, providing you concede us intuition of the principle on which it rests, namely, the necessity alleged. This necessity is, in the argument, the universal, and must itself be intuitive, or nothing can be concluded from it. But this necessity itself, what is it? Does it exist only in the mind, or does it exist out of it? If only in the mind, it is subjective, and your conclusion contains no objective reality. If out of the mind, it must be being, real and necessary being, and intuition of it is intuition of that which is God, therefore, in reality, of God himself. Either then we have intuition of real and necessary being, which is God, or his existence cannot be proved by natural reason, since every conceivable argument for his existence demands that intuition as its principle. No doubt, the judgment, real and necessary being is, and the judgment, God is, or real and necessary being is God, are formally or subjectively distinguishable; and it is precisely on this fact that the conceptualists found their objections to the intuitionists. The judgment, real and necessary being is, is an intuitive judgment; the judgment, real and necessary being is God, or God is, is not an intuitive, but a reflective judgment. Hence as this formal judgment is obtained only by reflection, by reasoning, by argument, the conceptualists assert truly, from the psychological point of view, that the existence of God is not intuitively given. Not intuitively given as a conception, conceded, for no conception is intuitive; but not really given, or given intuitively as an objective reality we deny; for objectively, in the real order, the judgment, real and necessary being is, and the judgment God is, are one and the same, since all theologians agree that God is real and necessary being-ens necessarium et reale, or ens simpliciter, as distinguished from ens secundum quid, creature, or created existence; and this is all that the intuitionist ever dreams of asserting, when he asserts that God affirms himself to us in direct and immediate intuition. We never pretend that he affirms himself, conceptually as God, but really, as real and necessary being, as the Idea, or

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the Intelligible. The difficulty of the conceptualists or psychologists arises from the fact that they confound intuition with conception, and will not allow that any thing is given in the intuition, which is not formally embraced in the conception. In other words, they confound the intuitive order with the reflective, and the ontological with the psychological.

The conceptualists would be relieved of this and many other difficulties, if they could for once place themselves at the point of view of the intuitionists or ontologists, or if they would take the pains to understand before attempting to refute them. Ontologists profess to speak according to the order of things, not according to the order of conceptions. When Gioberti speaks of the ideal formula, defines it to be ens creat existentias, and calls it the primum philosophicum, he speaks of the real, intuitive formula, not of the conceptual. He presents this formula as the primum both of things and of science. Therefore concludes a psychological friend of ours, "When the baby tumbles over the leg of a table, the formula by which he expresses the fact is, ens creat existentiam, Being creates existence." This may pass as a witticism with the multitude, but as an argument or an illustration it is not remarkably clever. Our esteemed friend would find, perhaps, if he were to analyze the fact which he adduces, and reduce it to its elements, that it contains as its ideal element, the formula which appears to him so absurd. Yet what he should have noted is that the formula in question is asserted as the ideal or real formula, and the real not the conceptional principle, the non-empirical not the empirical element of all human thought. The formula is what Kant would call a synthetic judgment a priori, not an empirical judgment, but a judgment which precedes all experience, and is the necessary condition of all experience, or that which renders experience possible. It enters into all experience as its ideal principle and basis. It is at once the primum of things and the primum of science, the primum ontologicum and the primum psychologicum,-ontological in that it is real and necessary being affirming itself, and psychological in that it is real and necessary being affirming itself to our intellect, which it in affirming itself creates and constitutes. It is the permanent ideal element

of all our knowledge, but not therefore does it follow that every conception, every fact of experience, takes the form, Being creates existence, or existences. Perhaps the majority of men never in their whole lives conceive it distinctly, or distinguish it from the facts of experience. Our friend to whom we refer, notwithstanding all the pains we have taken with him, does not yet understand it, and we are afraid he never will. But that does not prevent him from saving his soul, or being in many departments of life a very useful man in his day and generation. All men have not the same gifts.

The ideal formula is intended, by those who defend it, to express the Intuitive principle of all our judgments, the Divine judgment which all our judgments copy or imitate. As the ideal, the intelligible, it is the basis of all our knowledge, and enters into all our judgments; but not therefore is it the empirical form of all our judgments, nor are all our judgments intuitive. It is not our judgment at all, but is precisely that in our judgments which is not ours. Our judgments demand it, presuppose it, but in so far as ours they are formed by reflection, by contemplation, by experience.

The conceptualists find it difficult to understand the intuitive method because they do not regard ideas as objective, or if they do, they fail to perceive their identity with the Divine Intelligence, and therefore with God himself. They regard them as affections or products of our intellect, or it may be, as something distinct from God which he implants in our minds, and therefore termed innate. The psychological friend already cited, thinks that he sufficiently explains the matter by saying that they are furnished by the intellectus agens, or active intellect, asserted by the Peripatetics. But what is this intellectus agens itself? Is it our intellect, the noetic faculty of the human soul? Then the ideas, the intelligibles, the necessary truths it furnishes, are products of the subject, the mind's own products or affections, not objects apprehended by it, and therefore introduce us to no objective reality at all. Is the intellectus agens the Divine Intellect, presenting us the necessary ideas in presenting itself? Then you must accept the intuitive method, and the very ideal formula you seek to cover with ridicule. You assert the very

doctrine you labor to refute. Is it neither one nor the other, the ens in genere of Rosmini, the impersonal reason of Cousin, which is Divine and yet not God? But what is neither God nor creature is not at all. Between God and creature there is and can be no middle existence, and no middle term but the creative act of God. What is not God is creature, and what is not creature is God. There is no mundus logicus between them. The possible world exists only in God, and what exists in God is God himself. The world of abstractions which is sometimes talked about as if it were neither God nor creature, but something independent of both, and even governing both, is, in so far as neither one nor the other, nothing. There are no abstractions in nature, and abstractions are simply the conceptions of our own minds operating on intuition. The scholastics, though not careful always to note this fact, do not maintain any thing to the contrary, and usually take it for granted. St. Thomas, if we understand him, does not regard the intellectus agens as a created intellect, but as our participation of the Divine, uncreated Intellect, that is to say, God himself in his relation to our intellect, or as we say, God as the Intelligible. It is not every man who calls himself a Thomist that understands St. Thomas.

But our psychologists proceed on the supposition that in the facts of knowledge, man, supposing him to be sustained in existence, suffices for himself, and they never understand that the Divine concurrence as the Intelligible is as necessary in order to enable him to know, as is the Divine concurrence as Being in order to enable him to exist. As profoundly as many of them have investigated the conditions of knowledge on the side of the subject, they have forgotten generally to investigate them on the side of the object. They make all facts of knowledge purely human, and leave God out of the account, and they, furthermore, make them all purely psychological, and recognize no activity in their production, but the activity of the soul itself. Here is their capital mistake,-a mistake as capital as would be that of regarding the soul as an independent existence. There can no more be a fact of knowledge without an objective activity, than there can be without a subjective activity. This is recognized by

Cousin, and has been proved, although abused, by Pierre Leroux, and in proving it, he has made a contribution to modern philosophy that his wildness and extravagance inregard to other matters have prevented from being generally appreciated according to its merits. In consequence of overlooking the activity of the Intelligible in the fact of intuition, and placing all the activity on the side of the subject in intuition as well as in conception, the psychologists nave failed to recognize the objectivity of ideas, which Plato had long ago clearly established, and which Aristotle really accepts, though he rejects the term idea, and substitutes that of principle.

We are not writing for tyros in philosophy, and therefore do not deem it necessary to enumerate the ideas and principles which compose the ideal or intelligible world. Every body likely to read our philosophical articles knows that there is in some form and in some manner present to our minds a non-sensible world, a world of necessary ideas, or eternal truths, which enters into all our intellectual operations, and is the principle and basis of all our sciences, physical, metaphysical, and ethical. We cannot speak of an effect without thinking cause, of a particular cause without thinking a universal cause; of the contingent without thinking the necessary; of the finite without thinking the infinite; of beautiful things without thinking beauty, that by which all beautiful things are beautiful-the beautiful in itself; of good actions without thinking goodness, that by which all good actions are good, the good in itself, and so in many other instances, which will readily occur to the reader. The question to be settled is, what are these absolute, these necessary ideas? Are they objects of the human mind, realities existing independent of it? Or, are they the necessary forms or conceptions of our understanding? The psychologists or conceptualists hold the latter, and this we regard as their fundamental error, an error held by Abelard, and opposed by Guillaume de Champeaux and the old Realists. Plato held them to be objects of the noetic faculty of the soul, really existing independently of the human mind. This was the doctrine of St. Augustine, of St. Anselm, and in reality of St. Thomas, although St. Thomas seems at times to regard them as