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intelligentia veritatis; Hæret enim veritati nulla interposita creatura.'*

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Notwithstanding some difficulties presented by the theory of St. Thomas, it will be impossible to see a doctrine different from St. Augustine's in these words: Omnia dicimur in Deo videre et secundum ipsum de omnibus judicare, in quantum per participationem sui luminis omnia cognoscimus et judicamus. Nam et ipsum lumen naturale rationis participatio quædam est divini luminis, sicut etiam omnia sensibilia dicimur videre et in sole, id est, per lumen solis. Unde dicit Augustinus, primo Soliloquiorum, disciplinarum spectamina videri non possunt nisi aliquo velut suo sole illustrentur, videlicet Deo.' When the sun enlightens us, it is immediately present to our eyes by its rays. The true Sun of our souls, God is as immediately present to our reason as the sun is to our bodily eyes. This, it seems, is the meaning of St. Thomas.

"Has not Bossuet also recognized this immediate and direct presence of God to natural reason? We have seen,' he the soul which seeks and finds the truth in God, turns herself says, that towards him to conceive it. towards God? Is it that the soul moves as a body, and changes What then is this turning herself her place? Certainly such movement has nothing in common with understanding. To begin to understand what is not understood is not to be transported from one place to another. It is not as a body the soul draws near to God who is always and every where invisibly present. The soul has him always present in herself, for it is by him that she subsists. But in order to see, it is not enough to have the light present; it is necessary to turn towards it, to open the eyes to it. The soul, also, has her manner of turning towards God, who is her light, because he is truth; and to turn herself to that light, that is to say, to the truth, is to will to understand.' It seems to me that it is impossible to express more explicitly the immediate and direct presence of God as truth in the soul it enlightens."-pp. 254-258.

We are not quite so certain of this in regard to Bossuet as is the learned Professor. Bossuet, indeed, asserts the immediate and direct presence of God in the soul, but not, what is equally important to M. Maret's purpose, that he affirms himself in direct and immediate intuition. He makes the actual perception of this presence depend on the act of the soul turning towards him, opening the eyes of the understanding to the light, which is to misconceive the in

* Lib. de divers. Quæst. lxxxiii. Quæst. 51.
+ Summa, pars prima, Quæst. xii. art. 11.
Connaissance de Dieu et de Soi-Même. Chap. x.

tuitive fact, and to confound intuition with conception. Intuition, according to Bossuet, and we fear according to our author himself, would be seeing by looking, whereas the intuition proper is seeing without looking, without any voluntary activity on our part, prior to the affirmation of the intelligible by itself. The seeing precedes the looking, and we look because we see, that we may see more clearly, more distinctly, or that we may understand what is presented in the intuition. Nevertheless, the passage from Bossuet undoubtedly implies the immediate and direct intuition of truth, though we confess it does not expressly assert it to our understanding. But the author continues:

"Fénelon is full of this same doctrine. He declares that 'the immediate object of all our universal cognitions is God himself." He terminates an admirable exposition of the idea of the infinite by the words, 'It is therefore necessary to conclude invincibly that it is Being infinitely perfect that presents itself to my mind when I conceive the infinite. O God, O only true Being, before whom I am as if I were not! Thou showest me thyself, and nothing of all that which thou art not can be like thee. I behold thee, thyself, and this ray that darts from thy countenance feasts my heart while I am waiting to behold thee in the noonday of truth.'*

"The most rigorous conclusions of logic are then borne out by the gravest authorities,-authorities equally dear to religion and to philosophy. Thus, gentlemen, in the natural order, in the intelligible and rational order, there is an immediate and direct presence of God, which itself implies a certain view of God, or rather, of the Divine truth he communicates to us.t

*Existence de Dieu, pp. 270-272.

Wherefore this qualification, since the Divine Truth communicated is God, and indistinguishable, in re, from him? Does not M. Maret know that God is ens simplicissimum, and that there is no distinction in him between him and his intelligence, between his intelligence and his essence, as there is none between his essence and his existence? When I see Divine truth, just so far as I see it, and in precisely the sense in which I see it, I see God, though I may not at all times be aware, nay, may not ordinarily be aware that it is God. This, if we understand him, is the doctrine the author is all along endeavoring to establish, and why, then, envelop it in a psychological mist, and lose the results of all his labor? Psychologically, or quoad nos, the distinction he makes is admissible, but not ontologically, not quoad Deum, not in the real order, and he professes to speak as an ontologist, not as a psychologist, and to present the real and not the conceptual order. Indeed, we are obliged throughout to complain of M. Maret, that while the doctrine he contends for is sound, is ontological, his language and exposition smack a little of psychologism, which

NEW YORK SERIES.-VOL. II. NO. I.

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"But here certain difficulties are raised against us, which it is necessary to discuss. The first comes from the Kantian school, and has been revived, in 1850, by M. Haureau in his De la Philosophie Scholastique. It is pretended that to refer the truth which enlightens us to God himself, to consider the absolute, necessary, and immutable truths of reason as thoughts or attributes of God, is to make God like man, and to fall into anthropomorphism. God, say the philosophers of this school, is the great Unknown, the Mystery of mysteries, and not without sacrilege can we raise the veil from the sanctuary in which he conceals himself from all mortal eyes. We know that he is, we know not what he is. We should be content to assert his existence, to adore his grandeur, without attributing to him modes of existence which must be wholly unworthy of him, without transferring to him the imperfections of our own ideas and cognitions

"I confess I very much mistrust that respect towards God which would render him wholly inaccessible, and deny every sort of relation or analogy between him and man. If we can form no con

ception of God, what reason can we have for asserting his existence? If this were so, skepticism as to his existence would be inevitable, and from skepticism to downright atheism there is but a step. As soon as we have the right to assert that God is, we have in us an idea of him, and this idea is necessarily a relation of our finite intelligence with infinite intelligence. We certainly know much more than that God is what is, although we never comprehend all that he is. But between this perfect comprehension and the absolute ignorance in which these philosophers would retain us, there is a distance. We see clearly that God must possess and does possess all the perfections diffused in creation; and without fearing to degrade him, we ascribe to him all those perfections in the infinite degree which comports with his nature. What, I find in my reason ideas, principles, a necessary, absolute, universal, eternal, and immutable truth, and yet I am not to refer this truth to a Being, necessary, absolute, eternal, and immutable like itself? Is it forbidden me to attribute the laws of reason, of conscience, and of nature to the Supreme Legislator? You might as well forbid me to attribute to God wisdom and goodness because I find proofs of wisdom and goodness in creation, and in free aud intelligent creatures! In refusing thus to go out of man, to transport out of him truth, wisdom, goodness, and to see in God their cause and substance, I degrade my own reason, and confine it within purely subjective limits, and inevitably doom myself to skepticism.

we are sure he holds in as much abhorrence as we do. He cannot, let hin do his best, exhibit the truth in the method of Descartes, nor properly express it in Cartesian language. We pray him to pardon us these criticisms, which touch the form but not the substance of his octrines.

"As I would escape skepticism, I refer to God without hesitation the necessary ideas and principles I find in my reason. I know that they are from God, are in God, and, in some sense, are God; I know that it is God who manifests them to me, who gives himself to me, and renders me thus a partaker of himself. But I conceive in myself that these ideas and principles are infinitely more perfect than I conceive them. I see clearly that God knows infinitely more and infinitely better than I, and between him and me I place the infinite. I attribute, then, to God all the perfections I conceive, all the truths I know, but in elevating them to infinity." -pp. 258-261.

We omit the rest of the learned Professor's answer to this objection of anthropomorphism. In substance the answer is conclusive, but its form is unsatisfactory, in consequence of the author's hesitating to say plainly, what he means, that necessary ideas and principles intuitively affirmed in our reason are God, identically God as the intelligible, or in his relation to our created intelligence. He forgets that intuition is the act of the object, even more than of the subject, since it is an act creative of the human intellect, and not an act initiated by it, as we have already explained. There is, then, no referring to necessary, eternal, and immutable being demanded in the case, for these perfections are it, and are intuitively presented as real and necessary being itself. The question is not of identifying them with being, but of identifying the being they are, and are intuitively known to be, with God. Even M. Maret finds it hard to get rid of prevailing psychologism, and to understand that the Idea, the Intelligible is being, and that it is only on that condition that it is idea or intelligible, or that it is intuitively apprehensible or apprehended. The author is mistaken in supposing the perfection of God is the perfection of creatures elevated to infinity, for that is precisely the objection of anthropomorphism brought against him. The perfections of creatures copy or imitate in an imperfect manner the perfections of God; but the perfections of God are distinct from them, and are apprehended not in them and generalized from them, but intuitively as the infinite ideas, types, or exemplars they in their manner copy or imitate.

After disposing of the objection of making God man, the author answers briefly a contrary objection, that of making man God, or of confounding the subject with the

object, as Cousin does by representing what he calls the impersonal reason as divine, and yet representing it as that within us which knows. We know by means of that reason, objectively present in the fact of knowledge. From this objection the author proceeds to objections of another order, urged by theologians. The first of these objections is that we see God only mediately through creation and creatures,-Invisibilia Dei per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta, conspiciuntur, as St. Paul says. This objection has been so often answered in these pages, that it may seem like a sheer waste of time and space to answer it again; but it may still be acceptable to our readers to see what so reserved and judicious an author as M. Maret replies to it. From the words of St. Paul, the theologians, he says,—

"Conclude that it is not by a direct light that we know God, or at least that his existence is not the first truth in the order of knowledge. Here important distinctions become necessary. We undoubtedly raise ourselves to God by the contemplation of nature and ourselves, and thus ascend, as it were, from effect to cause. This is a process of the human mind that gives admirable proofs of the existence of God. But in all these proofs, so beautiful and so certain, is not the idea of God presupposed? Is not the idea of God anterior to the reasonings by which we prove his existence? I have, in the first place, the idea of myself, of the world, of the finite, but at the same time I conceive myself, the world, the finite, I conceive the infinite. These two ideas are primitive, contemporaneous, simultaneous in my mind. I begin not by an abstract idea of being, which would give me only an abstract being. I pass not from the finite to the infinite, nor from the infinite to the finite, which would be a contradiction. With these two primitive ideas, which I find in my mind, the other ideas and principles are necesBut necessary ideas and principles, although they are the Divine Light, do not at first give us a reflective or reflex knowledge of the existence and perfections of God. We attain to that only by reasoning. For example, I have a certain view of necessary truth, and I see at the same time that it must be referred to (that it is) a necessary substance, and to a necessary intelligence, to which it belongs, and which manifests it. Then this intelligence, this substance exists, and therefore God is. From a certain view of God, implied in the intuition of necessary truth, I conclude his existence, as from the sense of myself I conclude my own personal existence. The existence of God is not then the first truth known by us; between our reason and the affirmation of his existence, there is an intermediary, and this intermediary is at once the Divine truth, the soul which it enlightens, and the world which reflects it." -pp. 264-266.

sary.

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