it is a proof that we are pigmies. and shorten the

stature, their spears and swords too ponderous for our grasp, there were giants in those days and that We must needs sit down in all humility spear, and beat the sword thinner, and tailor the coat of mail as best we can. The substance will remain the same; the spear and the sword will be of the same steel that, in many a well-fought tilt of scholastic times, pierced through the brain of heresy and pinned it quivering to the earth.

A new formula is no proof of a new doctrine, any more than a new coat is a proof of a new man. The theory taught by Gioberti is his simply because he has formulized it. Scrutinize it fairly, without passion, without prejudice; examine it all the more closely because of Gioberti's theological and political errors; for error in one department of truth tends, as we have seen, to propagate itself in all others, and yet we think the theory will stand the test and be found the only golden mean between subjectism and objectism, between pantheism and nihilsm.

Every mind is stamped with individuality; every mind attaches different shades of meaning even to the commonest words. No two, out of an hundred disciples of the same master, will understand his doctrine in precisely the same way. The impress will be more or less different in all; the expression of the original doctrine will vary in proportion. A writer in the September number of the Rambler, in an article on Rosmini and Gioberti, thus explains his view of the Giobertian formula, Ens creat existentias. "When Gioberti asserts that the human mind is a spectator of the creative act, he does not mean that it sees the mysterious commencements of existences out of nothing. His copula creat is nothing more than a conception of the correlation of Absolute and Contingent, and which is given not in separate intuition, but in the intuition of the Absolute and Contingent themselves, in which such correlation is implied, as may be discovered by analysis. We shall see presently that there is nothing new in this doctrine. In the mean time, let me satisfy an objection which will readily occur to

the thoughtful reader. "It is true," some will urge, "that in the actual state of our knowledge, refined as it is by reflex processes, the notion of the Contingent involves the notion of the Absolute as cause; and, if Gioberti's copula means nothing more than the correlation of these terms, we cannot hesitate in accepting it. But why regard it as intuitive? Why not attribute it to the refinements of the reflective process itself? Because it is a law which has almost an axiomatic evidence, when properly understood, that nothing is given in reflection which is not given substantially in intuition; or, in other words, reflection, as its name implies, is not a faculty presentative but only re-presentative of truth, reflecting what has been substantially posited by the intuition. . . The human mind cannot create, and the representative faculty compounds or analyzes the simple materials which come by the presentative faculty."

This, as we understand it, is the doctrine accepted and defended in the pages of the Review. The writer in the Rambler touches, however, on one point which has not, perhaps, been brought as prominently forward as it deserves, against the opponents of Gioberti. They will persist in scaring at names, in shying off from the formula, Ens creat existentias, as if it were a deep, dark, magical phrase, a perfect bugbear of logical heresy. In reality, it is only another expression for the principle of causation-whatever exists must have a cause.

No philosopher worthy of the name, will refuse to grant us that the mind is furnished a priori with the principle of causation; that it is one of the necessary conditions of thought. The phenomena of sense contain only the relations of sequence, as Hume has conclusively shown. Are we at liberty to reason thus: hoc post hoc; ergo propter hoc? No: then the principle of causation is not derived from an analysis of the object of sense, it is not empirical. The mind gets it elsewhere, and by it, as its rule, judges of the phenomena of the external world. The principle of causation is a synthetic judgment, a judgment by which the mind views two things as connected by the relation of origin, one

producing and the other produced. This principle of causation is the major of the syllogism in the physical argument which makes evident to the reflective faculty the fact that God is. The ontological, moral, and physical arguments of natural theology have the same metaphysical basis, the fact that the mind intuitively possesses the principle of causation, and in it and by it, God and creatures and the relation between them. If, by the application of this principle, we can readily show, that the existence of the world presupposes that God is, then we must admit that it embraces every possible mode in which a cause can be connected with its effect, even that of creation, or production from nothing; otherwise, the three arguments are worth nothing, and we must say, either that there is no God, or that he is self-evident to the reflective faculty. Ens creat existentias is only another mode of enunciating the formula--whatever exists must have a cause.

Activity enters more or less into the essence of every creature, because every creature is the effect of a cause who is one, necessary, eternal act. There can be no life, no existence without action. Spirits act by knowing and willing, the souls of brutes by mere feeling, matter by attraction and repulsion. No particle of matter is exempt from the law of gravitation; therefore, every particle of matter acts. Every substance is a vis activa; but substance, as such, is an abstraction; in the concrete order it must exist as a determinate substance with determinate modes. To separate modes from substance, or substance from modes, is to take both out of the order of reality, to make them mere entia rationis. Even God is, in one sense, modified; he has what metaphysicians call analogical and relative modes. The modification of substance is a concreting, so to speak, of the abstract vis activa. Every existing substance is not only an active force, but that force in exercise. Action implies two, an actor and an acted on; the action of spirit implies a thinker and a thing thought, a willer and a thing willed. Matter acts by attracting and repelling other matter, so that action is a relation of cause and effect between

two, and thus the universe, in the actions of its various parts, is a representation of God's creative act. To exist and to act are the same; then every existence acts at the moment of its creation, and acts conformably to its nature. The soul is a soul because it thinks and wills, and hence it thought and willed in the very act of its creation. But what did it think and will? One of three: itself, or God, or both so united as to be the inseparable objects of thought and volition.

To say that the soul thought and willed itself, is to make it self-active and self-existent. Its life is its action, and to suppose that it can be, by its own innate power, subject and object of its own action, is to make it the adequate principle of its own life; that is, to deify it. God only is, and can be, an object of activity unto himself. The Eternal Father, as the principle of origin for the other Divine Persons, knowing himself, generates in the same numerically Divine Nature, the Eternal Word; and the mutual will or love of the Father and the Son gives origin, by procession, to the Holy Ghost.

Is God the adequate object on which the soul acts at the moment of its creation? In the sense that it knows Him without knowing itself, we answer in the negative. If the primary intuition is simply of God as God, as the Absolute, or, what Rothenflue calls, rò esse simpliciter, without including the contingent and the relation of causation between the Absolute and Contingent, then the subject thinking is identified with God, the object thought, and we fall into Pantheism. Reflection can develope nothing from intuition but what is in it. If God only is intuitively apprehended, He only can be thought, in the order of reflection. Creation disappears, or becomes at best a pantheistic emanation, and we must say, with Schelling, that the foundation. of philosophy is the absolute indifference of all differences, the identification of the subject and the object.

Nothing remains but to admit that the soul has, by one and the same act, an intuition of God and of itself; that God and self-consciousness are respectively the objective

and subjective termini of the act which is the very life of the soul. God creates a spiritual activity, a soul or an angel. The created spirit instantly acts on its creator, or it is annihilated. It cannot, we have seen, be the object of its own activity, neither can another creature, independently and of itself, be its object. Put a simple case: God could, had he so chosen, have created but one spirit. Now, does the number of individuals in a species change the essence of that species? Is an angel or a soul more or less of an angel or a soul by having myriads of fellowcreatures, or by having none? One spirit is essentially the same as another. Suppose, then, but one created spirit in the world, what, but God, could be the object of its activity? Only he can be the principle of action who is the principle of life. If to act, by thinking and willing, is a spirit's essence, then the object must be presented to it at the moment of creation, for to suppose it destitute of an object, and to go out of itself in search of one, is to suppose it to act and not to act; to exist and not to exist. The unknown is for a spirit the same as the non-existing. The unknown object must disclose itself to the subject, and hence must be greater than it. The other hypothesis, that the union between the subject and object is effected by the subject, endows the mind with creative powers, and makes it God.

The Creator presents himself, in the act of creation, to the created spirit as the object of its activity. He flashes himself upon it and the soul by the splendor of the divine light,-knows him, and thereby knows itself. Consciousness is the rebound of the soul on itself from its bound to God. The Creator and the creature are presented together in intuition, joined by the nexus of causality. The soul, by the light of God, sees that he is absolute and itself contingent; he infinite, and itself finite; and that the finite and the infinite, the contingent and the absolute, cannot coexist but as effect and cause. Here, then, we have the principle of causation, or Ens creat existentias. The same divine act that created the soul preserves it; it depends as VOL. I.-No. I.

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