THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PROVINCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: Sheed and Ward, Inc., New York City VoL. VI OCTOBER, 19M3 No.3 PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD P EN and sword .used to mean two different things. This is no longer the case in the dominant thought of our times. Swords and pens, and the diversities of created perfections generally, have all been levelled off to one thing. That thing is a very indefinite one, but it does not permit of a plurality of being. The comparative, which of its nature implies at least two things, and which was employed so forcefully by Bulwer-Lytton in his aphorism, "The pen is mightier than the sword," has been suppressed so that only the element common to all things now remains. This sort of mutilation is being perpetrated consistently in every department of modern thought. Whether it be a question of the arts, such as music, painting, and literature; or of philosophy, as in psychology, mathematics, and metaphysics; or whether it be a question of theology and essential education, the results are ever the same, namely, a suppression of the diversity of created perfections with the consequent fusion of all things into one thing. It is neither necessary nor opportune within the limited scope of a single article to verify this assertion in all the afore-mentioned 286 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY departments of modern thought. We shall confine ourselves here to the realm of theology .1 We select theology on account of its peculiar adaptations for the designs and devices of the moderns. They see the thread of unity, namely, the unity of order to an ultimate in all created things, and in this they are entirely correct in their appraisal; but they close their eyes and minds to the multiplicity of created perfections upon which that order must necessarily be founded, and in this they are perniciously erroneous. For theology, as St. Thomas and the Fathers of the Church conceived it, is a science about God and all His creatures as ordered to Him under the supernatural viewpoint of faith. 2 It is the business of theology, therefore, not merely to penetrate the ultimate order of things which refers them all to the common source and end, namely, God, but also to show a scrupulously just regard for the essences of things in their created reality as generically, specifically, and individually distinct from each other. It is especially on account of theology's concern for this order in things that it lends itself so readily to the logical manipulations of the moderns. However, to. neglect either of the aforesaid phases of reality can lead only to a sterile and perverse theology. This is precisely what the modern despoilers of truth are doing with a diabolical cleverness inherited from the past four or five centuries of ruinous thought and rhetoric. They dwell upon the ultimate order of things, therefore they are theologians. 3 Theirs 1 The other extreme opposing this source of modern errors is to rest or linger unduly on the created essences of things, by emphasizing their special diversities to the neglect of their order to the Maximum, and thereby the true concept of analogy from the opposite angle in making all things, including God and creatures, univocal or else equivocal. This is a mistake which even those who profess themselves Thomists frequently fall into. To verify this tendency, however, among modern Thomists is outside the purpose of this particular article. • Sum. Theol., I, q. 1, a. 7. 8 " The new philosophy . . . , being evolved from the nature of religion, has in itself the true essence of religion,-is, in its very quality as a philosophy, a religion also." Ludwig Feuerbach, The Esse;nce of Christianity, translated from the 2nd German Edition by Marian Evans (George Eliot), New York, 1855. Preface to the Second Edition, p. 18. (All references to the are taken from this transla- PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 287 is, however, a perverse theology not only because their ultimate is a vague, indefinite something akin to prime matter, nature or their unqualified absolute and not the One True God, but also because they proceed to level off the diversity of created perfections in things and confuse them with their indeterminate ultimate. With such a simple device as this the moderns have carried forward a ceaseless campaign of exploitation of the truths of faith and reason. Their conspiracy has all of the plausibility of a church revival on account of its supporting element of truth, namely, the order that really exists in things, which they play up with a great sho.w of modesty only to dupe the unsuspecting reader or listener into their skeptical and ruinous frame of mind. The poisonous pen and the bloody sword on account of their potentiality for coordination have lost their peculiar identities in the single cause of the modern revolutionaries, which is avowedly or unavowedly none other than the ruin of Christianity. 4 With what measure of success they have accomplished this evil purpose is manifest on every front of modern life. In order that we may not be summarily accused of indulging in harmless generalities with our heads in the clouds, we shall take a concrete case typical of almost innumerable other possibilities with the purpose of verifying the above thesis. The case we propose for analysis is a book really existing and authentically traceable to an historical person who was undoubtedly a crusader in the cause of modernism. " There are certain books, now lost in the libraries, which three centuries ago caused the revolution which we now behold before our eyes." These words of Lacordaire could very well be applied to the book on which we have decided to base our discussion, even though it dates back only to the last century. We refer to the work of Ludwig Feuerbach entitled The Essence of Christion, because of the impossibility of procuring the German text. The references to the remainder of Feuerbach's work are taken from Daa W esen des Christentuma, contained in Siimmtliche W erke, 6 Rd., Stuhgart, 1908.) • " Certainly my work is negative, destructive, but, be it observed, only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human e!ements of religion." Fel,!e!,"bach,· o:p, cit., Preface, p. 7. fl88 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY tianity. 5 There are two points, then, to be made concerning this book of Feuerbach's which epitomizes so nicely his entire contribution to modern thought: 1) the method which he employed to accomplish the evil purpose already stated above as identical with the modernistic trend of thought; fl) the allocation and logical function of his work in reference to its bloodline descendants and forebears. These two points once properly evaluated will, we think, not only establish our thesis as enunciated above but will 1;1lso serve as standards of criticism for other departments of modern thought. I. THE METHOD OF FEUERBACH Feuerbach's method, in perfect conformity with the best traditions of the moderns, must be labelled as one of exploitation. In other words his major points all usually contain a modicum of truth, just enough, however, to render palatable the poisonous drug of error without impeding its deadly effects upon the uncritical mind. This charge can neither be ignored nor put down as a gratuitous statement. Note, for example, his point of departure. "My work," says Feuerbach modestly, " contains a faithful, correct translation of the Christian religion, out of the oriental language of imagery into plain speech. The general principles which I premise in thE: Introduction are no apriori, excogitated propositions, no products of speculation; they have arisen out of the analysis of gion. The ideas are only conclusions, consequences drawn from objective facts." 6 He repudiates with horror an absolute, immaterial speculation which is .sufficient unto itself. For his thoughts he demands the senses, especially sight. He draws the matter of his thought from the activity of the senses. He calls himself a natural philosopher in the domain of the mind. 7 6 Das Wesen des Christentums. First published in 1841. • Preface, p. S. 7 Preface, p. 4. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD " The present work," he says, " contains nothing else than the principle of a new philosophy which has been practically verified, i.e., in concreto, in application to a special object, . . . namely, to religion." 8 Thus he enlists the sympathy of the orthodox reader by pretending to ground himself upon fact, experience, and the veracity of the senses. The reader, however, who perseveres to the end of this book will meet more than enough evidence to convince him that Feuerbach's bold stand upon reality is only an attitude, a pretense. A case in point is his explanation or rather elimination of miracles. He· says: "I only show what a miracle is, . . . not apriori, but by examples of miracles narrated in the Bible as real events. In doing so, however, I answer or rather I preclude the question as to the possibility or reality or necessity of miracle." 9 The result of a miracle, for example, the wine at the marriage of Cana, is not miraculous; it is the procedure which is. "What suggests to man the notion that miracle is conceivable is that miracle is represented as an event perceptible by the sense, and hence man cheats his reason by material images which screen the contradiction." 10 The miracle of turning water into wine, for example, implies nothing else than that water is wine. (!) The transformation is only the visible appearance of this identity of two contradictions. This procedure also demands that one transgress specific differences. But this is impossible. (We shall presently see how, in spite of this apparent regard for specific differences, he succeeds in off the diversities of created perfections to one common denominator.) Therefore miracles are impossible. Therefore they are a product of the imagination. But a whole crowd of people have witnessed the same miracle. In that case there is a 8 Preface, p. 5. • The confident attitude which Feuerbach takes is visible in the lines preceding these words: " I do not inquire what the real, natural Christ was or may have been in distinction from what he has been made or has become in supernaturalism; on the contrary I accept the Christ of religion, but I show that this superhuman being is nothing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind." Preface, p. 13. 10 Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 156. (Italics ours.) 290 .L C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY general hallucination. " Miracle presents absolutely nothing else than the sorcery of the imagination which satisfies without contradiction aU the wishes of the heart." 11 Miracles, prayer, Providence-the conviction of man of the infinite value of his own existence, creation-the first and fundamental miracle, are nothing other than the supernatu.ralized freedom from Nat me, the dominion of self-will over law. This, to Feuerbach, is the essence of Christianity, namely, the exaltation of individuality, egoism, self-win into a God, as against the true divinity and infinity of the species of Nature. This supernatural principle is no other than the principle of subjectivity which in Christianity exalted itself to an unlimited universal monarchy. Such statements as these on miracles clearly discredit the veracity of the senses as well as Feuerbach' s alleged footing upon sensible reality. If a comparison of sense data observed by many individuals is not a secure corrective for the errors of hallucination, then there is no corrective and the reports of ou:r senses are nothing but phases of nature's general conspiracy to delude us in our efforts to penetrate reality. Moreover, a mirade, as we know from St. Thomas 12 and the Vatican Council 13 , is a phenomenon whose nature is not directly accessible to the investigation of natural reason. Certainly Feuerbach's attempt to prove the impossibility of miracles by his purely logical device, namely, the supposed impossibility of transgressing specific differences as he puts it, cannot be based upon sensible reality, because sense data cannot yield any such principle. No rational principle drawn from sense channels can establish the impossibility or repugnance of a miracle with respect to divine agency, its proper cause. Therefore this is only a ruse when Feuerloach says he bases himself upon the testimony of the senses. The sound Scholastic principle that all knowledge comes through the senses is, therefore, proposed by Feuerbach Ibid., pp. 161-162. Sum. Theol., I, q. 105, a. 7; q. 110, a. 4; De Potentia, q. 4, a. 2. 13 Concilium Vaticanum: "Miraculum est factum divinum luculenter Dei omni11 12 potentiam commonstrans." Denz., 1790. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD !WI not from a conviction of its security as a base of operation but for purposes of exploitation. 14 This ruse is all the better concealed by his apparent repudiation of other exploiters. He insists, for instance, that the primary postulate in his philosophy is not the Substance of Spinoza, not the Ego of Kant and Fichte, not the Absolute Identity of Schelling, not the Absolute Mind of Hegel; it is nothing abstract. It is the Ens realissimum-man; its principle is therefore in the highest degree positive and reaJ.l 5 We shall have ample occasion to test the sincerity of this testimonial of philosophic orthodoxy later. In his own words he places philosophy in the negation of philosophy. 16 Just what philosophy it is, the negation of which furnishes him with his original postulate, is not difficult to identify. It is not the philosophy of Kant or Hegel or any of the revolutionaries. It is Scholastic philosophy. This new philosophy built upon the negation of philosophy, he tells us, must no longer undergo the temptation of old Catholic Scholasticism or modern Protestant Scholasticism which consists in wishing to prove its agreement with religion by proving its agreement with Christian dogmas.U Here indeed is a manifestation of his propensity to deny the diversity in all things, namely, his agility in giving the impression that Catholicism and Protestantism are on an equal footing in their attitude toward dogmas and religion. This is a pretty bit of irony and subtle exploitation as well. He implies that Scholastic philosophy on account of its affinities with Christian dogmas has severed all moorings to the Ens realissimum and floats on the dreamy Sum. Theol., I, q. 84, a. 6, et passim. Preface, p. 6. 16 " This philosophy does not rest on an Understanding per se, on an absolute, nameless, understanding, belonging one knows not to whom, but on the understanding of man; ... though not, I grant, on that understanding of man enervated by speculation and dogma. Yes, both in substance and in speech it places philosophy in the negation of philosophy, i.e., it declares that alone to be true philosophy which is converted in succum et in sanguinem, which is incarnate in Man; and hence it finds its greatest triumph in the fault that to all dull and pedantic minds . . . it appears to be no philosophy at all." Preface, p. 5. 17 Preface, p. 18. 14 15 292 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY clouds of speculation, the very domain in which Feuerbach himself is most at home. These introductory notes upon his primary postulate and point of departure clearly forecast what is to follow in the detailed fabric of his new philosophy. Religion was assigned as the special object of his work, but this, too, turns out to be fertile soil for exploitation. In the first part of his book he sets out to show what there is of truth in religion: religion is the mirror of humanity. 18 Of course, no treatise on religion can with any show of ease and grace totally ignore Christianity and· its founder, Christ. So Feuerbach to make the travesty all the more devastating places the word Christianity in the very title of his book. " My analysis of Christianity is not simply historical," he tells us, " it is rather historico-philosophical." 19 By this he means that the rationalists felt it necessary to attack the historical person of Christ in their efforts to devitalize Christianity, whereas Feuerbach had no need of this expedient since he allows no distinction between the historical or human Christ and the divine Christ. 20 In other words he considers only the order which both the divine and human nature have to the single personality in Christ and levels off the difference between the human and divine natures in Him. The critics and the Christians, therefore, to his way of thinking are substantially in agreement since the human Christ and the divine Christ are entirely the same. Thus Feuerbach can judge all things without leaving his library and carry on his wprk of exploitation out of the reach of all criticism. In the second part of his book he continues the role of exploiter by professing to show what there is false in religion. 21 18 The work " is therefore divided into two parts. . . . The first exhibits religion in its essence, its truth, the second exhibits it in contradictions . ... That into which I resolve religion, ,which I prove to be its true object and substance, (is) namely man,-dnthropology ..• Preface, p. 8. 10 Preface, p. U. •• Cf. Note 9 above. n "In the first part I prove that the Son of God is in religion a real son, the son of God in the same sense in which man is the son of man, and I find therein the truth, the essence of religion, that it conceives a profoundly human relation as a divine relation, on the other hand in the second part I show that the Son of God- PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 293 Religion, he explains, attributes to a personal God what it should attribute to man himself. This is really a synthesis of Feuerbach's thought: the true sense of theology is anthropology. Thus his levelling device is applied indiscriminately to philosophy and theology, to God and man. On numerous pages of the book is displayed his motto: Homo homini Deus; Man is God to himsel£.22 By this time it has already become evident in spite of his claims to being a natural philosopher that he is a theologian, but a perverse one. There is, however, a shred of truth in all of this. It is true that religion taken materially and subjectively, that is, what has the appearance of being religion, sometimes attributes to God what should be attributed to man. It is not true that this should always be the case with religion considered objectively and formally, as Feuerbach in his mania for confusing the diversity of created perfections would have us believe. A demented or extremely ignorant person can order blasphemy to God under the influence of a subjective conviction that he is offering up a prayer, but everyone knows that objectively and formally this is not a prayer. It is also true that religion subjectively taken for human activity is a sort of mirror or reflection of human nature. Objectively, however, and from the viewpoint of its motive it is a standard of virtue according to which man's activity must be measured. Thus in his concept of theology Feuerbach has replaced the term analogy with the term anthropology. In his concessions to the not indeed in religion but in theology, which is the reflection of religion upon itselfis not a son in the natural, human sense, but in an entirely different manner, contradictory to nature and reason, and therefore absurd, and I· find in this negation of human sense and human understanding, the negation of religion." (Preface, p. 8.) " I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality." Preface, p. 10. ••" ... God, ... , the Trinity ... , the Word of God ... , are not that which the illusions of theology make them,-not foreign, but native mysteries, the mysteries of human nature." (Preface, p. 9.) " Das Bewusstsein Gottes ist das Selbstbewusstsein des Menschen, die Erkenntnis Gottes, die Selsterkenntnis des Menschen." (Das Wesen des Christentums, pp. 15 and 22.) "Homo homini Deus est-dies ist der oberste praktische Grundsatz,-dies der Wendepunkt der Weltgeschichte." (Ibid., pp. 826, 406, and elsewhere). 294 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY truth he always sees to it that error predominates and smothers the truth. A discussion on religion necessarily implies some idea of the nature of man. So Feuerbach in conformity with his principle makes man God in a few lines and then goes on to create the world. Here again we meet a major travesty on the truth which merits closer attention. must begin with the essential nature of man, he informs us correctly, since religion has its foundation in the essential difference between man and the brute, a difference which he will not fail to obliterate in the end. But what is this essential difference? It is the consciousness of self, not the consciousness of self as an individual, because animals have this. Consciousness of self, says Feuerbach, belongs strictly to a being to which its species, its essential nature, is the object of thought. Therefore man has a double life: he has the consciousness of himself as an individual-this is practical life; he has the consciousness of his nature, of his species-this is the life of the intellect. 23 Marx is going to eliminate this distinction between these two Jives by reducing man to the level of a beast and the beast to the level of absolute matter according to the Hegelian synthesis. For the moment, however, let us observe how Feuerbach makes error capitalize upon the morsel of truth he has just proposed about man. Religion, then, he continues, is identical with man's consciousness of his specific nature. However, since religion is nothing but the consciousness of the infinite, man also is infinite in nature. 24 A few lines previous, religion was merely founded "" " Die Religion beruht auf dem wesentlichen Unterschiede des Menschen von Thiere. . . . Bewusstsein im strengsten Sinne ist nur da, Wo einem Wesen seine Gattung, seine Wesenheit Gegenstand ist. Das Thier ist wohl sich als lndividuum-darum hat est Selbstgefiihl-aber nicht als Gattung Gegenstand. . . . Im Leben verkehren wir mit lndividuen, in der Wissenschaft mit Gattungen." Ibid., p. 1-2. •• " Das .Wesen des Menschen im Unterschied von Thiere ist nich nur der Grund, sondern auch der Gegenstand der Religion. Aber die Religion ist das Bewusstsein des Unendlichen; sie ist also und kann nichts Anderes sein als das Bewusstsein des Menshen von seinem und zwar nicht endlichen, beschriinkten, sondern unendlichen Wesen." Ibid., p. 2. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 295 on the difference between man and brute which consists in consciousness of specific nature on man's part; but now so soon religion becomes identical with this consciousness. From the premise, then, religion is consciousness of the infinite (which, incidentally, contains an element of truth, namely, from the viewpoint of ultimate term it is true), he proves the infinitude of man's nature. But what is this infinite nature of man? It is, we are told, Reason, Will, and Affection-in capital letters. 25 In one short sentence he erases all distinction of faculties among themselves and between faculties and the nature of man. Here he exploits to its very limits the truth which St. Thomas expresses so succinctly by saying that intellect and will are quasi-infinite, that is, on the part of their object. 26 Of course, Feuerbach under mines the foundation for that truth by denying the distinction between subject and object in this case. 25 "Die Vernunft, der Wille, das Herz. Der Mensch ist, urn zu erkennen, urn zu lieben, urn zu willen. Vernunft, Wille, Liebe oder Herzt sind kiene Krafte, welche der Mensch hat-denn er ist nicht ohne sie, er ist, was er ist, nur durch sie." Ibid., p. 5. 26 Sum. Theol., I, q. 86, a. 2, ad 4: " ... sicut intellectus noster est infinitus virtute, ita infinitum cognoscit. Est enim virtus ejus infinita, secundum quod non terminatur per materiam corporalem. Et est congoscitivus universalis, quod est abstractum a materia individuali, et per consequens non finitur ad aliquod individuum, se, quantum est de se, ad infinita individua se extendit." Cir. also I-II, q. 2, a. 8. In keeping with his practice of perverting truth to his own ends, Feuerbach himself quotes a similar passage in St. Thomas to prove by the Angelic Doctors own words that knowledge and consciousness of the infinite is none other than knowledge and consciousness of one's own infinite nature. Thus after having cited the following passage: " ... In habentibus autem cognitionem sic determinatur unumquodque ad proprius esses naturale per formam naturalem, quod tamen est receptivum specierum aliarum rerum; sicut sensus recipit species omnium aensibilium, et intellectus omnium intelligibilium. Et sic anima hominis fit omnia quodam modo sensum et secundum intellectum, in quo cognitionem habentia ad Dei similitudinem appropinquant ... " Sum. Theol., I, q. 80, a. l, c. (Italics ours), Feuer bach simply says that this psychological infinity is the ground of theological or metaphysical infinity. God's immensity and omnipresence are nothing but the objectivated immensity and omnipresence of the human imagination: "Die psychologische Unendlichkeit ist der Grunde der theologischen oder metaphysichen Unendlichkeit. Die Unermesslichkeit, die nicht auf Ort und Zeit eingeschrankte Existenz, die Allegegenwart Gottes ist die vergegenstandlichte Allegegenwart und Ermesslichkeit der menschlichen Verstellungs und Einbildungskraft." Ibid., p. 837-338. 296 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY He goes on to consider the end of man, but here again we are face to face with the most brazen exploitation. Reason, Will, and Affection are ends in themselves, he tells us. We think for the sake of thinking, we love for the sake of loving, we will for the sake of willing, that is, in order to be free. Man does not possess these powers. They possess him. They are divine, absolute. He cannot resist them. They are the elements of his nature. 27 Certainly, then, man is nothing without an end, without a goal. The great men of history are those who had a goal which was the object of all their activity. But this object is necessarily none other than the proper nature of the s"P-bject, which is at the same time an objective nature. 28 That is to say, it is the proper nature of the particular man, but it is at the same time the nature of the whole species. Feuerbach gives an example: the Sun is the common object of several planets: Mercury, Venus, the Earth, etc., but each planet has different relations to the Sun. It is, therefore, another Sun which illuminates Mercury than the Sun which illuminates the Earth. 29 But it may be well to pause here and search out from this heap of chaff blown over the nature of man, the grain of truth of which Feuerbach avails himself. St. Thomas justifies many distinct aspects in the ultimate end of man. Subjectively considered, man's ultimate end is a created reality existing in man himself; it is the highest activity of his highest faculty bent to its ultimate capacity upon the loftiest object. 30 Part of the truth in this pattern furnishes Feuerbach the necessary base for his campaign of destruction. Of course, he makes out the activities, faculties, and nature of man to be one and the same thing, but seems in his statements to be contacting the truth that man's end consists in his ultimate perfection. Objectively, however, man's end consists in •• Cf. Note above. ••" ... der Gegenstand, auf welchen sich ein Subject Wesent lich, notwendig bezieht, ist nicht Anderes, als das eigene aber gegenstiindliche Wesen dieses Subjects." Ibid., p. 5. •• "Jeder Planet hat seine eigene Sonne." Ibid., p. 15. 80 Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 8, a. c. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 297 no creature but only God. Although this would offer no difficulty for Feuerbach, since he has already identified God with man, still he does not seem anxious to exploit this aspect of the ultimate beyond the point of confusing the formal and material aspects of the ultimate end objectively accepted. 31 His exploitation of the difference and sameness of the individual and specific nature of man goes on, however, to further extremes. In knowing objects, says Feuerbach, man knows himself. 32 He does not mean that the common note of being is detected by comparison and predicated of object and self. That would contain too much truth for him. No, each object is a mirror of the subject after the manner of effect with respect to its cause. 33 Here, as in several instances above, he is applying the false principle that makes knowledge measure objects and not objects knowledge. This principle frequently operates instrumentally under the superior impetus of his more radical error of indiscriminately denying the diversity of created perfections, as will become evident from his further statements on the nature of man. Man, he states, perceives within himself reason and will as being infinite because the finite and nothingness are identical. 34 Certainly man is other than nothingness, so he is infinite; man's existence is infinite. Nevertheless, he feels himself limited. But it is precisely in this that the distinction between himself and the brute consists. The brute is limited and does not know it. Man, however, knows that he is limited, because he perceives his individual nature. Yet he is infinite, because he perceives within himself the perfection, the infinite perfection of his species, and this by his feeling as well as by his reason. 35 81 Ibid., I-II, q. l, a. 7. 82 " An dem Gegenstande wird daher der Mensch seiner selbst bewusst." Ibid., p. 6. Cf. Note 28 above. Endlichkeit namlich und nichtigkeit sind eins; Endlichkeit ist nur ein Euphemismus fiir Nichtigkeit." Ibid., p. 8. 86 " Wohl kann und soH selbst das menschlichle Individuum-hierin besteht sein Unterschied von dem thierischen-sich als beschrankt fiihlen und erkennen, aber 88 84 " 298 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY Each thing must conceive of itself as that which is best in it. Each thing has its God in itself. Man also has his God in himsel£:36 It is his infinite divine nature, a nature shared by all the species but which at the same time is his own. The human species has an infinite nature; each individual man, has an infinite nature. Is all of this a welter of contradiction? Feuerbach does not think so. Just as there is one Sun which becomes as many different Suns as there are planets according to its relations with E;ach planet while it still remains one Sun, so there is an infinite species which is united in all its fullness with each particular nature and which is by the consciousness which each pa:rticulall."nature has of it. So now there no longer remains any appreciable difference between individual and specific natureone can be many, being is non-being/' and the door :i.s wide open for the entrance of Ma:rx and EngeL Everything that man proclaims as great, as divine, is nothing other than an emanation of his own divine natu:re, of his nature projected outside of itself and becoming conscious of itself in contact with objectso38 "Take music, for example," says Feuerbach, if you have no feeling for music, you perceive nothing in the most beautiful music no more than in the wind which whistles by your ear or in the brook which babbles at your feet. What is it, then, that acts upon you when you are moved by a melody? What do you perceive? What else but your own heart? Feeling speaks only to feeling ... the object of feeling is none other than feeling. Likewise the object of the intellect is nothing other than the intellect objective to itselt Divine nature perceived by feeling ils nothing es kann wei! ihm die Vollkommenheit, die Unendlichkeit de!' GaUung Gegenstand ist." Ibid., p. 8. ••" Das absolute Wesen, der Gott des Menschen ist sem eigenes Wesen." (Ibid., p. 8) . " Im Bewusstsem des Unendlichen ist dem Bewusstsein die Unendlichkeit des eigenes Wesens Gegenstand, sei es mm als Gegenstand des Geflihls, oder des Gewissens.... " Ibid., p. 07 This is quite m keeping with Hegel's famous dictum: "lP'ure bemg (i.e. being without intermingled non-being) is nothing." •• Ibid., p. 10. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 299 other than feeling ravished, in ecstasy with itself, feeling drunk with joy, blessed in its own fullness. Such is man, divine man.39 From what has been seen, the thought of Feuerbach can be summed up in a few sentences. Man only knows himself. But he can know the infinite, in fact, he does know the infinite. Therefore he is himself infinite. It is evident that all depends upon the thesis that man knows himself only. Feuerbach does not prove this. To him it is evident. Kant had proved it. In view of this, one wonders what Feuerbach's comment would be upon the words of Pius XI: " ' Our intellect naturally knows being and those things that essentially belong to being, and upon this knowledge the knowledge of first principles is founded.' 40 This phase does away, root and branch, with the erroneous opinions of those modern philosophers who hold that, in the act of understanding, it is not being that is perceived, but a suggestion or impression of the percipient himself." 41 Feuerbach would probably pretend to agree with them and then begin to exploit them. Having thus reduced all intellectual experience, or rather all experience, to man in the act of becoming conscious of himself, there remains to be examined the notion of God, of a personal God, in human consciousness. One would naturally expect to find here another case of exploitation, the supreme travesty of all. He will not be disappointed. God is nothing other than the projection of man himself. Man alienates himself, makes God of his own divine nature. From the beginning of the world, men, even geniuses as great as Feuerbach, have believed in God. Yet it required our German philosopher to explain to them that they were only believing in themselves. No one before him had fully realized this, or if any suspected it, only Feuerbach has the courage to proclaim it loudly and boldly. It is at this stage that one begins to wonder whether Feuerbach got enough fresh air. Others have been •• Ibid., pp. 10-11. •• Summa contra Ge:nt,es, II, c. 88 . .. Studiorum Ducem, Pope Pius XI. 300 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY locked up for calling themselves Napoleon, but such was the fallen state of common sense around Feuerbach that for proclaiming man was God he was hailed as a genius. According to the system of Feuerbach we see without any difficulty that the consciousness of God is nothing other than consciousness of oneself. 42 It is only those who ignore this who adore a God other than themselves. The divine attributes are Eimply the attributes of human nature. "'You believe in love as a divine attribute," says Feuerbach, " because you love; you believe God as a being wise, benevolent, because you know of nothing better in yourself than wisdom and benevolence. You believe that God exists, that he is a subject--everything that exists is a subject, because you yourself exist, a:re a subject." 43 The attributes of God are anthropomorphisms, because they they are the product of man's thought. 44 But one does not immediately comprehend that this is also true of the existence of God, because this is something immediate which arises necessarily from one's own existence. But one must realize that the subject the predicate are identical, not only in God, everywhere. It follows that if the divine attributes are the product of human nature, necessarily the subject of these attributes must arise from human nature. 45 Thus Feuerbach proves logically that man is God. At this point Feuerbach draws attention to a remarkable phenomenon of religion. Since everything in God is human, the more the religious man reflects upon God, the more he wishes to glorify Him, the more he strips himself, the more he annihilates himself, the more he gives to God his own humanity. 46 42 " Das Bewusstsein Gottes ist das Selbstbewusstsein des Menschen, die Erkenntnis Gottes, die Selbsterkenntnis des Menschen." Ibid., pp. 15 and 22. 43 Ibid., p. 21. 44 Ibid., p. 22. 45 " Das Geheimnis der unerschoplflichen Fiille der gottlichen Bestimmungen ist daher nichts Anderes als das Geheimnis des menschlichens als eins 1.mendlich verschiedenartigen, unendlich bestimmbaren, aber eben deswegen sinnlichen Wesens." ibid., p. 28 . •• Ibid., p. 81. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 301 '\iVhat he renounces in himself, he enjoys in an infinitely greater measure in God. The more he renounces sensuality, the more his God is sensuaJ.47 Mysticism is nothing other than egotism. 48 What man denies in himself, he finds again in God, who is nothing other than himself conceived in a supremely egotistical way, needing nothing, no other creature, isolating himself from the species. Feuerbach does not combat God. He reduces him to the level of human nature, a degradation which is far more odious. At the same time he insults humanity by telling it that until his time it was ignorant of the true nature of God. In a single paragraph he reconciles Pelagianism and the doctrine of St. Augustine. 49 One exalted man, the other God. Without knowing it they were both exalting the same thing. Man-this is the mystery of religion, Feuerbach tells us-projects his being into objectivity. Then he makes himself an object before this projected image which he transforms into a subject. Thus, while man apparently humbles himself as low as possible before God, in reality he is exalting himself to the highest. 50 Never before Feuerbach did anyone have the slightest suspicion of the complicated procedure which a man must follow who believes in God. In order to accomplish this, Feuerbach does not baulk before the necessity of attributing a fundamental egotism to the whole human race except Feuerbach. But there is nothing shameful in this. Pascal had said: " The ego is hateful," but for a whole race of philosophers, the ego was to become the moral center of the universe. Feuerbach ends his Introduction by saying: "What yesterday was religion is no longer so today; and what is today atheism will be religion tomorrow." If one should pause here to try to sift the true from the false, he finds the following points verified beyond reasonable doubt. The parent error of this entire brood is Feuerbach's " Ibid., p. 32. •• " Gott die Selbstbefiedigung der eignenen, gegen alles Andere missgungstigen Selbstbesuch, Gott der Selbstgenuss des Egoismus." Ibid., p. 34. •• Ibid., p. 35. •• Ibid., p. 87. 2 802 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY proclivity to consider the ultimate order of things and totally ignore the things themselves on which this order is necessarily founded. The truth which he holds before us as bait is that borrowed from Christian doctrine to the effect that man is an image of God and the more he tends to God the more godlike he becomes, always, however, within the laws of analogical participation. Only Feuerbach with his purely logical device hurdles or rather levels off these barriers of analogy, entering in where the good angels fear to tread in order that he may reap the evil fruits of exploitation. Descending now to the more articulated dogmas of faith, he becomes if possible even more perverse. In the course of this examination he constantly cites the Doctors of the Church in his support and, even more frequently, Luther, as if all were of the same spiritual and doctrinal stature. 51 Whatever they say of God, he attributes to man. If St. Augustine says that God is closer to us than sensible, corporeal things, that proves that God is indeed the consciousness of onesel£.52 If God is infinite, necessary, that is because reason is infinite, necessary. 53 Reason is infinite because it measures all things. Reason is necessary because if there were no reason, there would be nothing. Without pausing for breath, he eliminates the necessity of a Creator. Why does anything exist? Why does the world exist? It is because " if something did not exist, nothing would exist." (Note here how cleverly a mere relative opposition is substituted for the opposition of contradictories which really exists between something and nothing.) But" if nothing existed, reason would not exist." But if reason did not exist, everything would be without reason, unreasonable, absurd. Thus, if the world did not exist, it would be absurd. In the absurdity 61 " For example, in considering the sacraments, I limit myself to two, for, in the strictest sense (see Luther, t. xvii, p. 558) there are no more." (!) Preface, p. 8. •• Daa Weaen dea Christentuma, p. 15. ••" Das reine, volkommene, mangellose gottliche Wesen ist das Selbstbewusstseins des Verstandes von seiner eigenen Volkommenheit," (Ibid., p. 42.) "In dem unbeschriinkten Wesen versinnlichst Du nur deinen unbeschriinkten Verstand." (Ibid., p. 48.) "Der Verstand oder die Vernuft ist endlich das nothwendige Wesen." (Ibid., pp. 52-58.) PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 808 of its non-existence is found the true reason of its existence. Existence is the absolute necessity; reason the profoundest and most essential necessity. 04 The doctrine of the creation of the world is thus explained: man feels himself limited by the world. In order to escape from this he makes of God a being completely superior to the world, who creates it from nothing. 55 But we know that the world came from itself. 56 Fundamentally God is none other than the expression of reason comprehending the world; he is the thinking world. 57 Thus all is in agreement. There is no need to explain whence things came, since nothing comes from nothing; everything must come from itself. Specific difference prevents one thing coming from another. 58 From these few examples may be seen whither a logic can lead that takes it upon itself to transform states of consciousness into universes. One may also see the lack of true knowledge of the Christian religion displayed by Feuerbach despite his parade of erudition fit to deceive those who do not know any more about it than he. 59 It is thus that reading Feuer bach becomes more and more monotonous, because he does not even have striking reasons for rejecting what he rejects. He drowns the difficulty under a flood of ambiguous words, or else he sets it aside as unworthy of attention. Feuerbach's powers, however, are not yet exhausted. He proves the necessity of the world in still another way. What is the cause of life? the need of life? Whence, tlren, came the world? The world is come from necessity, not from a necessity "'Ibid., p. 58. •• Ibid., p. 864 sq. •• Ibid., p. •• Ibid., p. 99. •• Ibid., p. 102. •• Other examples of Feuerbach's lack of uuderstauding of simple Christian doctrine are innumerable. For instauce, to him the doctrine of original sin is none other than the doctrine of the sinfulness of the act of generation: " The mystery of original sin is the mystery of sexual desire. . . . The act of generation is, insofar as it is pleasurable, sensual, a sinful act." (" Das Geheimnis der Erbsunde ist das Geheimnis der Geschlechtslust. . . . Der Zeugungsact ist, als ein genussreicher, sinnlicher, ein sundiger Act.") To prove this he quotes the Fathers, among them St. Bernard, who says: Homo natus de muliere et ob hoc cum reatu. (!) Ibid., p. 874. 304 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY in a being other than itself (this would be a contradiction), but from its own necessity, which is not a contradiction. How is it from necessity? This is because if there were no world, there would be no necessity; if there were no necessity, there would be no reason, no understanding. Therefore the world comes from the necessity of necessity. It is true that, thus, negatively, as the speculative philos_ophersexpress themselves, nothing is the cause of the world . . . ! It is true that the world springs out of a want, out of privation, but it is false speculation to make this privation an ontological being. This want is simply the want which lies in the supposed non-existence of the world. But the necessity of the world is the necessity of reason. Reason is existence objective to itself as its own end. That which is an object to itself is the highest, the final being. That which has power over itself is almighty. 60 These convulsions of a reason running wild, these logical nightmares, seem, perhaps, puerile. Marx and Engels received them with tears of joy. Religion exalts divine love; Feuerbach praises it as human love. Love is the union between God and man, of spirit and nature, makes a man of God and God of man. Love is materialism, immaterial love is a chimera. Love makes the nightingale sing, gives the plant its corolla . . . a love which has flesh and blood, which vibrates as an almighty force through all the living. Only " The love which has flesh and blood ... can absolve from the sins which flesh and blood commit." Mercy is the justice of sensual life.61 It must be conceded that this is somewhat obscure, but it is pure Feuerbach. The mystery of the Incarnation gives Feuerbach the opportunity to perform several new feats. Here again the author uses the principle: Ex nihilo nihil fit. In order that God might become man, it was first necessary that man should be God. 62 60 Ibid., p. 53. This passage, while again demonstrating Feuerbach's ignorance of the Scholastic term ex nikilo, is a further example of Feuerbach's reconciliation of contradictories by turning contradictory opposition into purely relative opposition. 61 "Liebe ist Ma us, immaterielle Liebe ist ein Unding .... " Ibid., p. 59. " Die Barmherzigkeit ist das Rechtsgefiihl der Sinnlichkeit." Ibid., p. 60. 01 Ibid., p. 62. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 305 The exploitation is patent. The principle is universally true when qualified with the distinction: from nothing, i.e., nothing in the sense of an efficient cause, nothing is made, concede; from nothing, i.e., a material cause, subdistinguish; by a created agent, concede; by the Creator, deny. But Feuerbach suppresses this necessary qualification. It is subsequently said that God is love. A distinction is made here between the subject and the predicate. God is therefore other than love. There is a conflict between the two. But then it is said that God by love is become man, that is to say, love (i.e., projected human love) determined God to renounce his divinity (i.e., austere, abstract, moral rectitude) to become man. "Who then is our Savior and Redeemer? God or love? Love, for God as God has not saved us, but Love." 63 Therefore, since God has renounced Himself by love, we also should renounce God through love. Feuerbach confirms his conclusion by citing St. Bernard, who says: Amor triumphat de Deo. To reason run wild, all blasphemies are permitted in the name of truth. The Trinity must also be reduced to the level of an intellect wallowing in matter. Man's consciousness of himself in its totality is the consciousness of the Trinity. 64 The idea of a solitary God is repugnant to the need of love, of community, which human nature has. Religion must, therefore, divide God into two persons. 65 This idea of community is in turn represented by a third person. But Feuerbach eliminates the third person, because two persons are sufficient to the idea of love; among three love is dissipated. 66 The Father represents intellect, the Son, the heart, love. These are the two parts of man, the one specific, the other individual. Together they reflect the whole man, also the divinity of love and friendship. The Blessed Virgin is associated with the two first persons in place of the third in order to give the perfect idea of the family, 67 of the species, and also because maternal love is the greatest, the •• Ibid., p. 65. •• Ibid., p. 80. •• Ibid., p. 82. •• Ibid., p. 88. •• Ibid., p. 86. 806 .J. C. OSBOURN AND P][EBRE H. CONWAY first yearning of men toward women. 68 On this score Feue:rbach reproaches the Protestants with having neglected the Mother of God. Thus he reduces the most cherished realities of the Christian religion to mere symbols drained of aU truth except what man's puny mind deigns to impart. But the role of exploiter he refuses to drop for a single moment, and so he upbraids the Protestants in this matter only to win the sympathy of Christians to his perfidious cause. The Second Person of the Trinity is called the Word, because words are sacred, divine. They are the result of the imagination, a divine impulse, that of man's nature. 69 The ancients, because they were the children of the imagination, made of the Word a being. But the Word is divine, because it manifests human thought which is divine, aU-powerful. The word makes man free, because he who cannot express himself is a slave. (!) 70 In his last chapter, which follows six other chapters on the contradiction between alienated Christian dogma and the divine identity of man, Feuerbach demolishes the personal God and preaches his god, which is the human species. It is, above all, this positive part of his doctrine which attracted Marx and Engels. In it may be seen the more or less perceptible descent of man into matter. The great turning point in history-which coincides with Feuerbach-consists in the admission that the consciousness of God is none other than the consciousness of the species. 71 Man must rise above himself, but not apove the laws of the species. There is no other essence that man can think, dream, imagine, feel, believe, desire, love, and adore than that of human nature itsel£.72 Feuerbach says that only by uniting man with Nature can we combat the supernaturalistic •• Ibid., p. 87. Does Freud owe Feuerbach the "Oedipus complex?" •• Ibid., p. 96. •• Ibid., p. 97. 71 " Der uothwendige der Gescl:i.ichte ist daher dieses ofl'ene Be. kenntnis und Eingestandnis, dass das Bewusstsein Gottes nichts Anderes ist als das Bewusstsein der Gatt1mg." Ibid., p. 821ii. .. lbid., p. 826. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 307 egoism of Christianity. 73 The species comprises brute nature as being the essence of that nature-a distinction calculated to exclude pure materialism. At the same time nature belongs to the essence of man-a distinction calculated to exclude subjective idealism. These were vain precautions. Engels treats Feuerbach as an idealist and reduces him by contradiction to pure materialism. Feuerbach himself the excuse for this' in saying apropos of the Eucharist that eating and drinking were in themselves religious acts. He ends his book by saying: " Let bread be sacred to us, let wine be sacred, let water be sacred. Amen." As to the species, its individuals are to be united by love. The first law is the love of man for man which is ofitself religious. 74 is not divine because it is an attribute of God. On the contrary, it is an attribute of God because it is itself divine. Marriage is sacred in itself, not by any external restriction. 75 Man and woman complete each other; together they represent the species, the perfect man. The basis of morality is the distinction of the sexes. 76 The sins of the individuals are lost in the species. The sum of all the various individuals constitutes the species. The community alone constitutes humanity. God does not exist, because one has no corporal sensation of Him. But the species is not an abstraction, because it exists in feeling, in the moral sense, in the energy of love. Whence comes this feeling? Feeling comes from the participated sensation, from words, looks, sensible contacts. This is •• Ibid., p. Footnote. •• Ibid., p. •• Ibid., p. 76 " Die Basis der Sittlichkeit ist der Geschlechtunderschied." Ibid., p. 111. This mysterious statement is thus explained. Nature, as we have seen, i.e., the sensible world, is the very core of reality. Thinking man is nothing but conscious Nature, consciousness of oneself as an individual, of the species as infinite. Nature is the basis of personality (Ibid., p. 111). But Nature in tum is corporeal. Thus the body is the basis, the subject of personality, and the sexual impulse (Geschlechtsgetrieb) the strongest in Nature (Ibid., p. 109). Feuerbach concludes: " What is virtue, the excellence of man as man? Manhood. Of man as woman? Womanhood. . . . The basis of morality is the distinction of sex." 308 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY the last word of the man who :reproached religion with being lacking in culture, of knowing none of the joys of the thinker, seeker in nature, the artist. Religion remits that to the other world; Feuerbach wishes to give it to us in reality, and to this end he reduces man to the level of pure sensation. In other words, he :reduces man to matter, since the world is the sum of all reality and the cause of aU, including reason. Thus we see that the sum and substance of his book rests in the ruthless exploitation of the truths of faith and reason through the purely logical device of dropping diversity of created perfections while retaining their order to an ultimate, the Ens realissimum which he first proposed as man, but which, in due time, he levelled off to the ignoble condition of matter. n. THE PoSITION oF FEuERBAcH In examining more carefully the position of Feuerbach in modern thought, we are not, therefore, scattering. the ashes of the sacred dead; neither are we indulging the idle pastime of flogging a dead horse. We are not, because Feuerbach represents a stage in the march of Hegelian dialectics. This is a march which leaves behind it nothing but ruins, the ruin of Kant, the ruin of Hegel, the ruin of Feuerbach, which is not astounding since the march itself leads to ruin, the ruin of humanity, its swallowing up in prime maiter at the point farthest removed from God. Each stage represents the cutting of another li.nk between man and God. Feuerbach has had the unenviable distinction of cutting one of these most important links, the precise link between the divinity and man. In order to mount again towards God, man must reconstitute these links. We have exposed magic, the magic which Feuerbach used to rid himself of God. We have pointed out errors which the Hegelian man will be obliged to dissipate in order to know his Creator once again. In order to knit up the ravelled thread · reason again, we tried to lay our finger on the places where that thread has been broken. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 309 Ludwig Feuerbach is not an insignificant ruin along the Hegelian road. He is an imposing, grandiose ruin, one to rejoice the hearts of the destructive geniuses of humanity. Witness these words of Friedrich Engels at the time when the Hegelian creative struggle seemed upon the point of dying out: Then came Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. With one blow it pulverized the contradiction, in that without circumlocution it placed materialism on the throne again .... Nature exists independently of all philosophy; it is the basis upon which men, themselves products of nature, have grown up ... nothing exists outside of nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence .... The spell was broken ... , the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved .... Enthusiasm was general; we all became Feuerbachians on the spot. How enthusiastically Marx greeted this new conception and how much-despite all his critical considerations-he was influenced by him, can be read in The Holy Family." 77 Taken up by Engels and Marx, Feuerbach was associated with the genesis of Communism. Lenin himself sets Feuerbach down as one of the philosophical sources of Marxism when he describes this system, which he qualifies as the greatest accomplishment of scientific thought, as "the system of Hegel which, in turn, led to the materialism of Feuerbach. 78 It is clear that 77 " Da kam Feuerbachs 'Wesen des Christentums.' Mit einem Schlag zerstaubte es den Widerspruch in dem es den Materialismus ohne Umschweife wieder auf den Thron erhob .... Die Natur existirt unabhangig von aller Philosophie; sie ist der Grundlage, auf der wir Menschen, selbst Naturprodukte, erwachsen sind; ausser der Natur und den Menschen existirt nichts, und die hi:iheren Wesen, die unsere religiose Phantasie erschuf, sind nur die phantastiche Ruckspiegelung unsers eignen Wesens. Der Bann war gebrochen ... , der Widerspruch war, als nur in der Einbildung vorhanden, aufgeli:ist . . . Die Begeisterung war allgemein: wir waren Wie enthusiastich Marx die neue Auffassung aile momentan Feuerbachianer. begri.isste und wie sehr er-trotz aller kritischen Vorbehalte--von ihr beeinflusst wurde, kann man in der ' Heiligen Familie ' lesen." Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klaasischen deutschem Philosophie, Stuttgart, 1895. p. n. 78 " Marx did not stop at the materialism of the eightePr. century, but moved philosophy forward. He enriched it by the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially by Hegel's system, which in turn led to the materialism of J, C. OSBOURN AND PIEllmllli H, CONWAY the :revolution to which Feue:rbach helped to set the spark was not an ordinary revolution, Would Feuerbach himself even recognize it? It is, therefore, as an indispensable stage in the Hegelian march, as a saint in the Marxist heaven, that Feuerbach or rather the study of Feuerbach imposes itself. He had the talent not only of incarnating within himself the errors of the past: denial of the validity of the senses with the consequent arbitrary autonomy of reason working in a void, but also .of sowing in his work, so subtly calculated to overthrow Christianity, the germs of future chaos. Hence the enthusiasm of Engels: in a single man to have the synthesis of the past, the campaign plan of the future. In characterizing Feuerbach as a ruin, one does so in the proper sense of Hegelian dialectics, for Hegelian dialectics are a ruinous system, a system which lives on destruction, where each stage is brought forth by the destruction of the preceding one, just as the new single class is supposed to be brought forth by the destruction through class warfare of all the previously existing· classes. This procedure somewhat resembles a man going down a well on a ladder and taking care to destroy each rung after him, thus eliminating his only means of return, Kant cut the link between the external world and the mind, Hegel dissolved being and non-being in divine becoming, Feuerbach dissolved the divine into the human. His successors dissolved man into matter. For them it is not just the body which returns to dust; it is the whole man, But this philosophy bears_ within itself, so to speak, its own chastisement. Kant by opposing knowledge and reality turned the mind away from the external world, In revenge he lost the knowledge of the God in Whom he wished so much to believe. It is said that he invented the God of practical reason to conFeuerbach. Of these the main achievement is dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fuller, deeper form, free from one-sideness,-the doctrine also, of the relativity of human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter .... The historical materialism of Man: represented the greatest conquest of scientific thought. , .. V. I. Lenin, Marx, Engels Marxism. New York, 1!185, p, IH. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 811 sole his heartbroken servant. In the end Kant was to ask himself whether he was not himself God, a thought hardly calculated to rejoice the critical mind of the philosopher of Koenigsberg. Hegel resolved the contradictions of Kant by making contradiction the cause of becoming. He traced the evolution of this divine becoming down to the Prussian state, which recompensed him by making him its official philosopher and the most respected professor of the University of Berlin. But the disciples of Hegel reproached him with believing that the culminating and final point of this universal process coincided with his existence at Berlin, a halt which his own system forbade. Consequently his disciples of the left went over to revolutionary ideas, towards Russia, and Hegel was to complain before his death of having been understood by only one man, and he did not really understand him. The same fate was reserved for Feuerbach. He extolled the divine grandeur of man, but his disciples made a materialist of him and destroyed him in his own name. Thus Marx was to write: His [Feuerbach's] work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing his work, the chief thing still remains to be done. . . . Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be theoretically criticized and radically changed. 79 The internal coherence of his system had already pushed Feuerbach towards materialism. In a review of Moleshott's book, The Theory of Alimentation, he was to write: Food is transformed into blood, blood into the heart and the brain, into thoughts and feelings. Human alimentation is the basis of culture and human opinion. Do you want to reform the people? Give them, instead of declamation against sin, better food. Man is what he eats. 79 " Seine Arbeit besteht darin, die religiose Welt in ihre weltliche Grundlage aufzulosen. Er ubersieht, dass nach Vollbringung dieser Arbeit die Hauptsache noch zu thun bleibt. . . . Also z. B., nachdem die irdische Familie entdeckt ist, muss nun erstere selbst theoretisch kritisirt und praktisch umgewalzt werden." Friedrich Engels, Ibid., Anhang: Marx uber Feuerbach, N. 4. •• Ibid., p. 4. 812 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY To this end he recommends peas instead of potatoes. By freeing man from God he subjects him to vegetables. The theories of Feuerbach, which smoothed the Hegelian road for Engels and Marx and which contributed to the spirit of world revolution, were not spontaneous products but the fruit of several generations of warped thinking. The sors of Feuerbach, even Hegel, still had a God distinct from man to Whom they gave a name such as the Absolute or Mind. It remained to give some sort of form to this G-od. Feuerbach settled the problem very simply by making God identical with man. This was a perfect Hegelian synthesis. The philosophical ancestry of Feuerbach explains much. His onslaught upon Christianity, however, remains a personal triumph. He was born in the beginning of the nineteenth century, of a father who was a celebrated Bavarian jurist. He had several very gifted brothers. Ludwig Feuerbach began by studying theology at Heidelberg, where Hegel had been several years before as a professor of philosophy. It is a remarkable fact that so many anti-Christian geniuses have begun by studying theology. Hegel and Schelling studied theology together at Tubingen. Feuerbach soon went on to Berlin to study philosophy under Hegel, whom he was to call his second father. Schopenhauer was giving courses there at the same time, mostly to empty class rooms since he had rashly chosen the same hours as Hegel. Despite their diverging ideas, all these philosophers struggled in the same void in which Kant had enclosed them, that of knowledge which had no longer any direct connections with the outside world. They evaded one contradiction only to fall into another. It is, no doubt, thus that contradiction became at length a creative principle. Once he had made the thought of Hegel his own, Feuerbach withdrew to a factory in the country of which he owned a part by the dowry of his wife. Lacking facility in oral exposition, he restricted himself to writing and became known for his polemical style. Having withdrawn from the world,. he could overturn it at his ease without being annoyed by reality, like PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 313 Kant, who never left Koenigsberg, and who, during his daily walks-so regular that the neighbors could set their clocks by them-never spoke in winter for fear of having to breathe through the mouth instead of the nose; like Schopenhauer, who preached the tyrannical power of the will while living peacefully in a boarding house at Frankfort with his dog; like Nietzsche, who vaunted war and fainted at the sight of blood. It was from Feuerbach's retreat that there appeared in 1841 his mental masterpiece, The Essence of Christianity. In 1845, four years after its appearance, Marx jotted down some notes on Feuerbach's work while he was sojourning with Enge.ls at Brussels after having been expelled from Germany and then France. Of these notes Engels was to say that they were of fundamental value as the first document 'to contain the germs of the brilliant new view of the world-that of Marxism. Forty years later, in London, Engels wrote a long review of a book on Feuerbach, a review which contained a complete exposition of Marxism, in payment of the debt which dialectical materialism owed to Feuerbach. According to Engels in this review, the contribution of Feuerbach consisted in bringing Hegelian dialectics out of the impasse in which they were at the death of Hegel in 1831. Hegel saw in the world the work of a divine Idea which little by little had disentangled itself from matter into which it had somehow fallen and was taking up its abode with men. At his death it was identified with the Prussian state, and Hegel, the official philosopher of Prussia, did not see why it should go any farther. It was still a God, though a very indistinct one. But his own system called for perpetual becoming, constant progress emerging from the strife of contradiction. 81 Hegel was willing to stop, but his system would not allow it. To Feuerbach belongs the distinction of setting dialectics in movement 81 " In the course of progress all earlier reality becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality, peacable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death without a struggle, forcible when it strives against this necessity." Ibid., English translation, Chicago, 1903, p. 40. 814 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H. CONWAY again. He perceived the contradiction between the divine Idea and man, and he synthesized them by making man divine. He melted the divinity and nature together into a single world, a world of which man is the superior, reasoning side. Why did Marx and Engels receive this work with cries of joy as a deliverance? It was because, by a single stroke, Feuerbach had disposed forever of the idea of God, and with Him went the last remains of any spiritual principle. He had once again set materialism upon the throne. ;But this was not all; he had demolished the notion of the divine State in the sense of Hegel. He had opened the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite this accomplishment of Feuerbach, he fell into the same defect as Hegel. He thought that with him all had been said. He had transformed the religion of God into the religion of man and wished to remain there. But in the Hegelian meaning it was necessary that he, too, should be sublimated, liquidated for progress. The form of his philosophy was to be annihilated by criticism while its content would be maintained. Engels undertakes this criticism and he is very clairvoyant. The merit of Feuerbach for Engels consisted in this: he had proved that matter is not the product of the spirit, but rather that the spirit is only the highest product of matter. His defect consisted in not recognizing that he had proved materialism and in still wishing to remain an idealist. He did not see that matter regulated all things, even man. By playing the angel, he had played the beast and refused to see it, but Engels saw it very well. The misfortune of Feuerbach was that he was not practical. The ingratitude of men had pushed him into a little village where he was ignorant of the great discoveries on the creative power of matter as expounded in the Darwinian theories and where he was obliged to conceive of man in the abstract. 82 Still he did not dare to disengage himself completely from the idea of religion. Having noted that love between the sexes •• Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feu(fTback und dtn Ausgang dtn klassicken deutscken Pkilosopkie, p. 21-22. PEN AND SWORD VERSUS GOD 815 is a fundamental thing, for him the most fundamental thing, he made a religion out of it. 83 He does not see, says Engels, that this man who loves all other men, this love which governs the world, is an abstraction. In practice, and practice is the sole criterion of truth, it is the struggle between the classes, the struggle for economic power which governs the world, which rules men. 84 This struggle is none other than the manifestation of matter in evolution towards a proletarian equilibrium. All comes from matter. Feuerbach had proved it himself. Feuerbach, who wanted to make man God, sees himself accorded the sad glory of having reduced man to matter. He talked of love, but he lives only as the basis of a philosophy of world revolution. Truth has taken revenge upon him. Once rid of God as the supreme being, rid of man as God, reduced to matter as the sole reality, the mind still remains a faculty of order. It must put order into the world. It must make a system out of existence and hasten the coming of this order which is seen as the inevitable evolution of matter. Marx said that the philosophers had only interpreted the world, whereas the essential thing was to change it. In Lenin he found the man to put this changing to work. Since there no longer existed any God, or any rights of man derived from his spiritual nature, since there was only matter, one could cause blood to flow as one wished, and it was done. One could allow oneself all outrages, and they were allowed. As long as this philosophy exists, its logical consequences will always be_ in a position to reappear. The development of philosophy from Kant to Feuerbach is well expressed in the personage of Goethe's Faust. Goethe studied Kant and was a contemporary and friend of Hegel. Doctor Faustus expresses himself thus: "The great Spirit has repulsed me with disdain, nature has closed herself to me, the thread of my thought· has been broken, I am disgusted with all science." (This is Kant.) He finishes: " Open then the depths •• Ibid., p. 26. •• Ibid., pp. 84-85. 316 J. C. OSBOURN AND PIERRE H .. CONWAY of my sensuality and let the ardent passions which ferment there be sated." (This is unacademic Feuerbach.) 85 Like Kant, Doctor Faustus begins by saying: "It is ten years now that I have been leading my stupid students through an inexplicable labyrinth. I understand at last that we can know nothing." Like Feuerbach, he ends by crying to Marguerite: " Is not the bond which attaches us one to the other a mystery, eternal, invisible and visible? Give to this feeling whatever name you wish: name it felicity, heart, love, god .... Feeling is all; names are only noise, a vain mist obscuring the clarity of the heaven." 86 From this same angle of feeling the German philosophers rejoin Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Emile had given Kant the idea of a god felt rather than known. Feuerbach later on, like a good pedant, was to give a rational foundation for the primacy of feeling and blind force. Rousseau led to the French Revolution; Feuerbach 's revolution is not yet ended. For according to the Hegelian dialectic the conflict between the divine State and creative matter can just as easily be resolved in favor of the former. Whichever wins will be right since, according to Hegel, all that is real is also reasonable. Then, in the name of its divinity, the State may claim for itself all that matter claims, and it does so as we know well. Blood flows again and man is outraged once more. For those, therefore, who would stem the tide of this revolution it is no longer a question of choosing your weapons. The sword alone taken up in the cause of right is not sufficient. Sometimes it is not enough to die for a cause, but necessary also to live, think, and work for it. They who would defend the right must tear a page from the book of modern lore by coordinating both sword pen as one instrument in the defense of truth. His Holiness Pope Piux XI told us that it is in errors that lies the source of all the miseries of our time. n. The question now is whether all or only some human beings must be considered with regard to qualification for citizenship and public office; or, in other words, whether " the people " shall be co-extensive with " the population." The Republican answer may go further than the most extreme form of Greek democracy, for it may permit the naturalization of aliens, or it may deny that any man can be treated as property wholly or even in part, and yet it remains Republican if it keeps women in a condition of political inferiority, or if it allows ine'}uality in wealth to determine inequality in political status. On the other hand, the Democratic answer does not hold that every person who is biologically classified as hPman sho"ld be a citizen, for it may exclude the criminal, -G1e insane, and the feebleminded members of the 557 Women, children, and most of the slaves belonged to the domestic community; but all the resident aliens (i. f the metics) an.:l some slaves were attached to the political community, ·not as members, but .k> foreign bodies existing in a living organism, or as tools in its hands. THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 377 total population; and it need not go as far as Greek democracy in regarding all citizens as so equally eligible for office that appointment to office can be determined by lot rather than by election. By these criteria it is clear that all the Constitutional governments in the ancient world were Republican rather than Democratic, the Greek democracy ·as well as the polity and the oligarchy and, of course, the Roman Republic as well as the Greek city-states. But it is also clear that the Democratic constitution cannot be defined as one which gives "liberty and equality " to everyone in equal measure--certainly not in the egalitarian sense in which Greek democracy tried to give liberty and equality to all " the people," i. e., all the members of the political community. The words " some " and " all " will not enable us to define the distinction between Republican and Democratic constitutions unless we ask the right questions and understand the terms of the answers precisely. In the first place, we must always keep separate the problem of qualification for citizenship and the problem of qualification for governmental office. Though the one may be included in the other (i. e., no one but a citizen being eligible for office), we shall show that a just constitution can never identify the two; for that necessarily results either in too high a standard for citizenship or in too low or indiscriminate a standard for public office. Inequality in degree of competence cannot justly be made the basis for excluding some men from citizenship, any more than radical equality (i. e., possession of the same competence in some degree) can justly be made the basis for opening all offices to all men. Hence we see that a proper consideration of equality in relation to the justice of a constitution must (I) observe the distinction between political status (citizenship) and political office (governmental function) and must (2) make equal status available to all who are radically equal and respect inequality in degree in providing for appointments to office.558 ••• By this test, none of the Greek constitutions were free from injustice. Though better in certain respects than either oligarchy or democracy, the mixed constitution 878 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL Furthermore, the consideration of human equality should never be separated from the consideration of the inequalities among men. Undue or exclusive emphasis on one or the other was, according to Aristotle, the cause of injustice in oligarchies and democracies. us or polity nevertheless _retained some of the injustice peculiar to each. And all three were equally injust, as we shall presently show, in their treatment of women, slaves, metics. It must be remembered, of course, that we are here speaking in terms of _absolute justice. Whether or not the imperfect Republican constitution can ever be justified relative to inferior social and economic conditions is a question we shall postpone until Section 5 infra. We shall there consider it as we have previously considered the relative justification of the least perfect of all regimes--the absolute or non-constitutional (Royal) form of government. Vd. Part IV, Section 8, supra, in THE THOMIST, IV, 8, 505-20. Nor are we forgetting the qualification with which we concluded that discussion, taking account of the possibility that the conditions which could justify absolute government may never have existed, and so such government is always actually unjust. Vd. loc_ cit., pp. 520-22. For similar reasons all Republican constitutions may be actually unjust as well as absolutely imperfect. As we shall see, there have been modem Republican constitutions which, while remaining imperfect, are more just absolutely than any known to the ancient world. They tend to approach the perfection of the Democratic constitution as an ideal limit-albeit a practicable ideal and an attainable limit. The fact that there is something like a continuum, made by variation in degrees of justice among all the varieties of Republican constitution, does destroy the integral and essential character of the distinction between every Republican constitution-the best as well as the worst-and the Democratic constitution. Among political forms, as among natural species, the highest degree of the lower form tends to approximate the higher form in its lowest degree. We shall return to this point iater. •n Vd. Politics, III, 9, 1280"80. Though he himself does not apply it, Aristotle's point applies to every type of Republican constitution. Even constitutions which respect inequalities in the distribution of offices, and which grant to some who are equal equality of status, may refuse such equality of status to others whose equality deserves it. It is in this last respect that Aristotle's polity is as unjust as democracy, though it corrects. the democratic injustice of awarding offices by lot. In this last respect, moreover, Greek democracy was obviously more just than Greek oligarchy, because the latter, setting up a property qualification for citizenship, excluded from such status the poor who were equal in competence, if not equal in possessions, with the rich. It is unfortunately necessary to add that the state which Aristotle regarded as " ideal "--a thoroughly practicable ideal-was not as just in the constitution which Aristotle formulated for it, as either Greek democracy or the polity. Unlike the . democratic or the mixed constitution, the " ideal " constitution, according to Aristotle, is one which excludes from citizenship all the laboring classes--husbandmen and traders, mechanics and sailors, etc. Vd. Politics, VII, 8, 9. The Aristo- THE THEORY OF 379 In the second place, the notions of liberty and equality, so frequently evoked in discussions of democracy or of Democracy, have no political significance apart from the theory of justice. Men are by nature equal and unequal in many different respects. They are also equal or inequal as a result of social or economic accidents, or by the acquisition or loss of qualities and possessions through their own voluntary efforts. All of these equalities and inequalities (natural, accidental, or voluntary) are antecedent to political equality and inequality. Only the latter are caused by the form of government under which men live. Democracy cannot be judged the best constitelian prejudice against working men as members of the political community is confirmed by his praise for the oligarchical features of the Spartan, Cretan, and Carthaginian constitutions in Book II, -Chapter 9-11. An attempt may be made to defend Aristotle against this criticism by saying that his " ideal " constitution was aristocratic, not oligarchical-that it excluded the working classes from citizenship because the life of labor was incompatible with the life of virtue. This defense, however, merely reveals the source of the Aristotelian error at this point, namely, a false conception of the life of virtue, a conception of human happiness which makes it attainable only by the few. We shall return to this point later in our criticism of Aristotle's views on slavery. Our criticism, it will be seen, applies equally to the standard which he sets for citizenship in his " ideal " constitution. The principles of justice which Aristotle employs in Books III- VI to criticize democracy and oligarchy, and to show the superiority of the polity as a mixed constitution, he does not apply in Book II or Book VII. What he says about such actual states as Sparta and Crete in Book II and what he outlines as an " ideal " state in Book VII cannot be defended against the criticisms which he himself applies to constitutions in the basic middle books of the Politics. If the polity or mixed constitution is more just than the oligarchy, then it is. also more just than the actual constitution of Sparta or Crete, and more just than the " ideal " constitution Aristotle formulates in Book VII. In what sense, then, is Aristotle using the word " ideal " here--if it neither signifies the most just constitution that is practically attainable, nor an impracticable regime which is " ideal " only by reference to the Divine model? We are forced to one of two conclusions: either Aristotle is using the word " ideal " in Book VII in a manner that is like his use of the word" ideal" to refer to the absolute regime of the godlike man, namely, to describe a state in which only men of superior virtue are admitted to citizenship; or he is simply expressing his oligarchical prejudices against the laboring classes. The first explanation reduces to the second when one realizes that there is no intrinsic or essential connection (except in the mind of a Greek oligarch) between freedom from manual labor and the life of virtue. Though Aristotle's prejudices may be explicable and even somewhat excusable, the errors from which they arise, and the false judgments to which they lead, should not be tolerated. 380 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL tution, therefore, simply because it regards all men as politically equal; for if they were not antecedently equal in some respect which justly deserved equality in political status, the Democratic constitution would be unjust in its distribution of political equality. The problem is to determine the respects in which antecedent equalities and inequalities deserve consequent equality and inequality in political treatment. 560 When the respects are rightly determined, then the actual facts about the human beings living together in a given community must be observed, and a reasonable margin of error must be allowed in the making of such difficult observations about the equalities and inequalities among men. Only then can one judge what form of government is just for that conimunity. With respect to constitutions, therefore, it cannot be said that one is more just than another because there is more equality under one than the other. The amount of equality by itself is no criterion. Rather that constitution is more just which distributes political equality and inequality more nearly in accordance with the merits or just deserts of the community's members. If we say that the Democratic constitution is most just, we mean, then, that under it all who are in fact equal in respects which deserve political equality are so treated; and that such equality in political status does not prevent inequalities in other respects from receiving the political recognition which they merit. Similarly, the form of government or the type of constitution 56 ° Furthermore, it should be observed that some of these antecedent conditions of inequality are natural, whereas others are not natural, but caused by the operation of social and economic forces. Such social and economic inequalities may be contrary to the dispositions of nature. To the extent that these social and economic inequalities are themselves subject ' voluntary control, there may be a question of justice about the antecedent conditions of inequality from which political consequences flow. As an immoral act which is based on ignorance of relevant circumstances is excusable only if the ignorance itself is not voluntarily avoidable, so certain antecedent conditions of inequality can justify certain political apportionments only if these conditions are not themselves the result of voluntarily avoidable injustice. We shall return to this point subsequently. It is obviously relevant to the whole problem of the relative justification of the imperfect Republican constitution, which we shall discuss in Section 5 infra. THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 381 not make men free. The natural freedom which men have-the freedom of choice which they have through reason, or the autonomy which attaches to their personality-can neither be given nor taken away by government. It is only political liberty, or its lack, which men owe to the government under which they live. But the grant of political liberty, like the award of political equality, is a problem of justice which must be solved in the light of the facts. It is not true to say that that government is best which gives liberty to the most men or to all men, unless it is also true that most men or all men deserve it; for if there were, in fact, some men who are natural slaves, it would be unjust to rule them as if they were free men; and no one would say that criminals should be given the same liberties as law-abiding citizens. Nor is' it true to say that that government is best which gives the maximum liberty to men; for, in the first place, not all men may deserve the same degree of liberty; and, in the second place, if the " maximum degree of liberty " means " doing what one likes " it ceases to be political liberty and becomes anarchic freedom. This indicates that political liberty is always measured by justice; it is a condition of being ruled in a certain way, not the total absence of being ruled or governed. When Plato and Aristotle caricatured Greek democracy by attributing to its exponents the notion that democratic liberty consists in everyone doing what he likes, they described an impossible anarchy, not a form of government. 561 The tyrant who does not consider the com061 After describing democracy as "a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike," Plato caricatures the democratic citizen as "living from day to day, indulging the appetite of the hour. . . . His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom. . . . He is all liberty and equality.' (Republic, Book IX). Vd. POlitics, VI, !'l, 1817b1fl; and also V, 10, 1810'80-86, where Aristotle says: "Men think ... that freedom means doing what a man likes. In such democracies everyone lives as he pleases, or in the words of Euripides 'according to his fancy.' But this is all wrong. Men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for that is their salvation.'' Indeed, it is all wrong, but Pericles, the great Greek democrat, would have said it was all wrong, as readily as Aristotle and Plato. The Greek oligarchs are not 382 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL mon good or the good of others is a man who does what he likes. This false notion of " democratic liberty " would convert every man into a tyrant, and a " community " of tyrants would know no other law or peace than that of the jungle. Political liberty is the freedom which men have in relation to government, but it does not consist in freedom from government. It is, on the contrary, nothing more or less than the condition of those who are justly governed. Now government is just if it gives a man the status he deserves and safeguards all the rights and privileges attached thereto. Hence we see that political liberty, deriving as it does from just government, depends upon antecedent conditions of equality and inequality, for it is these which determine the justice of a regime or a constitution. The question whether all men should be given political liberty or whether all should be given the same degree of civil freedom is a question of justice which cannot be answered except in terms of the natures, powers, virtues, and perhaps even extrinsic accidents, of the men under consideration. In our earlier discussion of the distinction between the dominion of servitude and the dominion of freedom, 562 we made the only ones to know the folly of libertarianism. To charge the eighteenth-century exponents of political liberty and equality with the errors of libertarianism and egalitarianism is to perpetuate this unfair caricature. Locke and Montesquieu, for example, are as sound on the nature of political liberty and equality as are Suarez and Bellarmine, or St. Thomas. Vd. Second Essay Of Civil Government, Ch. IV, No. 21, where Locke says: " Freedom, then, is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us: ' A liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, .and not to be tied by any laws,' but freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to everyone of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it." Cf. ibid., Ch. VI, No. 57: " Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law.•.. For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? " And vd. Spirit of Laws, Book XI, Ch. 8, where Montesquieu writes: " Political liberty does not consist in an unlimited freedom. In government, that is, in societies directed by laws, liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will..•• Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would be no longer possessed of liberty, because all his fellow citizens would have the same power." With regard to the folly of egalitarianism, vd. Locke, op. cit., Ch. VI, No. 54; Montesquieu, op. cit., Book V, Ch. 5. Cf. fn. 688 and 645 infra. 660 Vd. Part IY, Section 2, supra, loc. cit., pp. 465-91. THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 888 clear that to be ruled as a slave is to be ruled as a means to the good of the ruler, and that to be ruled as a free man is to be ruled for one's own good.563 But nothing can be justly treated as a means to the good of another thing unless the greatest perfection which it can achieve is essentially different from and radically inferior to the perfection of the being which it serves as an end. This, in tum, depends upon the nature and consequent powers of the thing in question. Man is justified in using inanimate things, plants, and brute animals as means to his own end because these substances are inferior in essence and power, and their greatest perfection is clearly less than the human good which they serve when they are properly used. The difficult question of justice is whether the use of one man by another can ever be justified. In our subsequent discussion of the problem of slavery, natural or conventional, we hope to be able to show that the enslavement of men is never justified. Here we are only concerned to make the conception of political liberty precise by connecting it with the notions of equality and justice. The problem is complicated by the fact that there seem to be different and unequal degrees of political liberty. If the only element in the liberty of the governed were his status as an end (i. e., ruled for his own good, either immediately or through the mediation of the social common good) , then children would be as free under parental government as citizens are under constitutional government; and there would be no difference between the liberty of such citizens and the freedom of subjects under the absolute regime of a benevolent king. But we know that this is not so. Therefore, we must distinguish between perfect and imperfect liberty under government, (I) according as the ruled has or lacks legal right or juridical power to resist unjust commands,SM and according as the ruled does or does not exercise an effective voice in his own government. ••• If government is for the common good, it is also for the individual good of each member of the community thus governed; for the common good is itself a means to the happiness of each individual. ""We have seen that neither natural right nor natural power can be used as a 884 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL If these two elements are inseparable, then there are only two degrees of political liberty (the imperfect liberty of subjects, the perfect liberty of citizens), having one note in common, namely, that the governed be ruled as ends for their own good, and distinguished by the two elements which together may or may not be added. But if these two additional elements are themselves separable from one another, then there are three degrees of liberty, and we shall have to find a name for that which lies intermediate between the liberty of subjection and the liberty of citizenship. The intermediate status will be determined by the fact that, in addition to being ruled as an end, the governed has certain legal rights and juridical powers, but he does not have an effective voice in his own government. We shall, in the course of all our further discussions, use the word "suffrage" to signify having an effective voice in one's own government. We can, therefore, speak of citizenship without suffrage and citizenship with suffrage, and for brevity of reference we can call the latter " citizenship " simply or without qualification, and the former " second-class citizenship." The precise definition of suffrage as an element in complete citizenship will be one of our major undertakings, but for the present it is sufficient to point out that " an effective voice in one's own government" means at least a share in the constituent or amending power by which a constitution is made or changed, a direct or represented voice in the deliberations of government and, in the second alternative, a direct voice in the choice of one's representatives. Thus we see that suffrage does not consist simply in having a vote; nor does it, at the other extreme, consist in having a share in all the offices of government. 565 definitive element in P.olitical liberty. Vd. Part IV, Section supra, loc. cit., pp. 487-90, and especially fn. 565 In some of the Greek democracies, notably the Athenian, the principle of appointment to most of the major offices by lot was regarded as indispensable to democratic liberty, because the Greek democrats wrongly supposed that perfect freedom consisted in something more than suffrage, namely, in being able to participate in every aspect of government. Vd. W. R. Agard, What Democracy pp. "It is clear that the legislaMeant to the Greeks, Chapel Hill, THE THEORY OF 385 The general principle we have observed in the case of servitude and freedom applies to the several degrees of freedom s well. Since each degree of freedom is a different condition of being ruled, a different status of men under government, the problem of a just distribution of political liberty cannot be solved apart from the facts of equality and inequality, for it is these which determine what men deserve. It is necessary, therefore, to summarize here distinctions already made. 566 There are four possible relations of equality and inequality among men. (1) Equality in specific nature combined with inferiority in natural power, the defect in power making it impossible to form certain habits of mind or character. Let us call this" radical equality in nature " and "radical inequality in power." Radical equality in specific nature and in natural power combined with inferiority in the development of power (for whatever causes-whether immaturity or deprivation of opportunity and exercise) , the inferiority consisting in the lack of habits possessed by others. Let us call this " radical equality in power" (which, of course, implies radical equality in nature) and " radical inequality in habit." (3) Radical equality in specific nature, natural power, and habit combined with inferiority in the intensity or degree to which habits are developed in one individual as compared with another (again for whatever causes-whether due to natural tive, executive, and judicial functions of Athens were in the hands of all the citizens; there was representation in the executive and judicial bodies, to be sure, but on the extreme democratic principle of annual selection by lot. . . . There were no appointive offices, and only in the case of the Board of Generals did the people actually el<>ct their representatives rather than choose them by lot, the principle being that military and naval strategy was a highly technical job which could not be wisely entrusted to any person whose lot might be drawn. In practical terms this meant that every citizen of Athens during the course of his life had been engaged in public service. . . . It is obvious, therefore, that the ordinary citizen of Athens had an extraordinary opportunity for participating in political life; freedom to him meant, not so much the lack of restraint as the privilege of sharing in community enterprises." 566 Vd. fn. 309 and 387 supra. 886 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL and unalterable differences in degree of power, or to the degree to which natural powers are exercised) . Let us call this " radical equality in habit" (which implies both radical equality in nature and radical equality in power) and "inequality in degree of habit." It should be noted, furthermore, that inequality in degree of habit may or may not imply inequality in degree of power, and if not, the extent to which it is due to exercise may reflect either voluntary causes or external impediments or accidents. (4) Radical equality in specific nature, natural power, and habit combined with equality in the intensity or of habit. Let us call this simply" complete equality." We have enumerated four possibilities. The enumeration is intended to be analytically exhaustive, not to correspond simply with the actual facts. We know, for example, that all men are not completely equal. We know, therefore, that there must be some men in the third of the above classes, that is, men who are inferior to others in degree of habit. We know that children are radically inferior in habit, but there may be some question whether this second class is also occupied by some chronologically adult men and women. We know that the first class is occupied by subnormal or feeble-minded individuals, but whether any normal individuals can be so classified is another question, and upon the answer will depend the position we take concerning Aristotle's conception of the" natural slave." A just determination of the political status of women must also be made by approaching the problem of equality and inequality between the sexes in terms of these four basic categories. Controversy about diverse races of men, sometimes regarded as superior and inferior, must be similarly resolved. In short, every problem of justice concerning political equality and inequality, political liberty in its several degrees and political servitude, requires us to examine the antecedent facts about the natural or acquired equality and inequality among men. Now, furthermore, we can see the correlation between political equality and political liberty. The highest degree of politi- THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 887 cal liberty (the freedom of complete citizenship) should be enjoyed by those who, because of radical equality in habit with their rulers, deserve equality in status with them, even if residual inequalities in degree of habit do not entitle every citizen to participate directly in every function of government. The lowest degree of political liberty (the freedom of subjection) should be enjoyed by those who, because of radical equality in essence and power, must be ruled as ends rather than as means, even if radical inferiority in habit does not entitle the ruled to equality of status with their rulers. Equality of status between rulers and ruled is, therefore, not a necessary accompaniment of the freedom of the ruled under government, for imperfect freedom can be enjoyed without it, as in the case of the just Royal regime. Similarly, equality in function is not a necessary accompaniment of equality of status as between rulers and ruled, for perfect freedom can be enjoyed without it, as in the case of Constitutional government. But two questions remain. (1) What about the intermediate degree of liberty which attaches to the status we have called second-class citizenship, or citizenship without suffrage? Here there seems to be inequality of status and of freedom between different portions of the citizenry, for wherever there are second-class citizens, there must also be citizens with suffrage. 561 ••• Constitutional government cannot exist unless some men have suffrage. This is its minimal condition. Hence it is impossible for there to be only second-class citizens, though of course, the reverse is not impossible. There may be no secondclass citizens. All who are citizens may have suffrage. At the other extreme, it is impossible for all who live under some just form of civil government to be ruled as slaves. Hence we can enumerate all the possibilities with regard to divisions of a given population under civil government: (1) all are citizens with suffrage; all are citizens, some with and some without suffrage; (8) all are politically free, but some are citizens (with or without suffrage) and some are subjects; (4) some are politically free (either citizens or subjects) and some are politically enslaved; (5) some are politically free, but none are citizens, and some are politically enslaved; (6) all are politically free, but none are citizens. Now of these six possibilities the last two can occur only under a Royal regime; the first four can occur only under Constitutional government. Of these four, the first (with some qualifications to be added later) can occur only under a Democratic constitution; the remaining three exhaust the possible situations which can occur under a Republican constitution. 388 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL What antecedent condition of inequality can justify this inequality in political status and degree of'liberty? It would seem as if there had to be something between radical inferiority in habit (which justifies subjection and the lowest degree of freedom) and inferiority in degree of habit (which, since it implies radical equality in habit, can justify nothing less than citizenship). But there can be no such intermediate condition, for either men do not share the same habits, or if they do, they can differ only in the degree to which they possess them. Perhaps, then, it will be said that only those who possess a certain sufficiently high. degree of the habits common to all should be admitted to the privileges (i.e., suffrage) as well as the rights of citizenship. There are reasons for rejecting this suggestion also. This is one of the most difficult problems connected with the definition of Democratic justice. We shall, of course, deal with it subsequently, 568 and we hope to show that there are no conditions which can justify citizenship without suffrage, even if there are conditions which can justify subjection. (2) Is the status of subjection the same when it occurs under Royal and under Constitutional government? Ignoring the condition of slavery for the moment, essentially the same under any form of government which deprives some portion of the population of political liberty, we see that it may make a difference whether no men are citizens and all free men are subjects (as under Royal rule), or whether those who are subjects are deprived of the citizenship to which others in the same community are admitted (as under Constitutional rule). It may, for example, be the case under Constitutional rule that no man who is free (i.e., not enslaved) lacks all legal rights or juridical powers, yet some of these may be deprived of suffrage. The ground for such deprivation may be a supposed radical inferiority in habit. Were this to occur for this reason, then what we have called second-class citizenship would be identical with subjection under Constitutional government, and subjection under Constitutional government would differ from sub••• In Section 4 infra. THE THEORY OF 389 jection under Royal government in that, in the latter case, the ruled is also without legal rights or juridical powers. The point here being considered has an obvious bearing on the previous problem about citizenship without suffrage. It also has a bearing on another sort of subjection which can occur in relation to Constitutional government-the condition of a subject people living in a conquered province or in a dependent colony. Strictly speaking, such people are not living under a Constitutional regime, even though they are ruled by a state which is itself ConstitutionaL One need only consider the dependencies of Athens and Rome, or the condition of the English colonies in the New World before the American Revolution, to see that a Constitutional government may have subjects that do not differ in status from the subjects of a Royal regime. 569 We have raised this second problem, not to solve it here, but to suggest that the crucial words of this analysis, " slave," "subject," and "citizen," are unavoidably ambiguous. Not only may " subject" have a different meaning under Royal and Constitutional governments, as well as the same meaning under both; not only may there be variations in the meaning of " citizenship " which overlap variations in the meaning of " subjection"; but there may even be variations in the meaning of "slave" which permit us to distinguish between slaves who have some attenuated legal rights and slaves who are without any. The former is a condition of slavery which verges on the status of subjection, even as there is a condition of subjection which verges on the status of citizenship. To deny that such a continuum exists from the extreme of unmitigated slavery to the extreme of perfect and complete liberty would be to deny the unquestionable facts of political history. The existence of this continuum does not, however, prevent us from reaching dear definitions, even though we may have to use the same ••• Vd. Hobbes's observation that, though Rome was itself a republic, the people of Judea, or any other conquered province, did not enjoy republican government: Leviathan, Part II, Ch. 19. Cf. John Stuart Mill, Essay on Representative Government, Ch. XVIII, " Of the Government of Dependencies by a Free State," which considers the case of India under British domination. 390 M. J. ADLER Al\'D WALTER FARRELL words in several carefully distinguished senses; nor does it affect the principles of justice which must be applied in the classification and gradation of distinct forms of government. If, for example, slavery is always essentially unjust, the essential injustice is not removed by the mitigation or amelioration of the slave's condition in accidental respects. Similarly, if and when all normal men deserve to be citizens with suffrage, then their subjection is unjust despite the fact that, under Constitutional government, they may have some of the rights of citizenship. But it may be objected that if there is a continuum among the several dominions (i. e., the several conditions of being ruled) , there is also a continuum among the several regimes (i. e., the several modes of ruling) , in which case it may not be possible to separate two or three distinct forms of government. We have already faced this objection/ 70 but it is worth reiterating that an essential distinction of forms is quite compatible with an apparent continuum among the accidental varieties to which these forms give rise in their concrete embodiments. The continuum is only apparent, for every accidental variety of one form is distinguished from every accidental variety of another form by some definitive trait that is involved in the essential differentiation of the two forms. Thus, in the order of natural species, every brute lacks reason, no matter how high the degree of sensitive power and no matter how much an anthropoid ape may resemble the least intelligent man. Similarly, in the order of political forms, purely Constitutional government is marked by perfect popular sovereignty and perfect vicegerency, so that no matter how closely the intermediate regimen regale et politicum approaches Constitutional government we know that it is not a Republic (or purely Constitutional regime) by the fact that a king still retains some degree of personal sovereignty and that all the ruled are in some respects still in subjection. Unless every governmental function is discharged by a mere officeholder and unless some of the ruled are truly and completely no Vd. fn. 558 supra. THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 391 citizens, the minimum of purely Constitutional government (i.e., a Republic) does not exist. 571 Nevertheless, the objector may continue, the very nature of Constitutional government makes any further essential distinction impossible. There ·is an integral difference between absolute and limited government which no variations in degree can efface, but within the sphere of Constitutional regimes there is only a difference in the number of men who are admitted to citizenship with suffrage. Whether all, many, or only a few are, every essential characteristic of Constitutional government remains the same. Hence there can be no form of government which stands to the Republic as Constitutional government stands to the Royal regime-specifically distinct and hierarchically superior. The objection is overcome when two points are remembered. In the first place, in the order of political forms, as in the order of natural species, both of two superior forms can differ from one which is inferior to both by the same generic traits, and yet differ from each other specifically. The fact that men and brutes are both cognitive, and thus differ in the same way from plants, does not prevent brutes from lacking reason. So the fact that both the Republican and Democratic forms of government are Constitutional, and so differ generically in the same way from the Royal regime, does not prevent the Republic from having defects which specifically distinguish it from Democracy, even as defect of reason differentiates brute from man. In the second place, we must remember that the forms of government are in a moral, not a natural, hierarchy, and that the defect which differentiates one species of government from another must be a defect in justice. We have already explained how the Royal regime can be said to lack an element of justice when compared with Constitutional government. 572 It follows, Vd. Part IV, Section 4 supra, in THE THOMIST, IV, 4, pp. 711-18, Vd. Part IV, Section 6 supra in. THE THOMIST, VI, 2, pp. fl'. The comparison must, of course, be made absolutely, and not relatively to particular conditions. Only when they are n.bsolutely considered, can inferior forms of government be said to lack elements of justice actually present in tnore perfect regimes. Fur571 579 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL therefore, that if a constitution can be perfectly just, absolutely speaking, any defect of justice in a constitution will determine an inferior form of Constitutional government. Republican government is constitutional, but a constitution that is defective in justice. Democratic government is constitutional, but with a constitution that is perfect in justice. Whereas, in Part IV, our problem was to define the principle of constitutionality as a differentia, and to prove that Constitutional government was superior to Royal regime, in the absolute scale of justice, our problem here can be looked at in two ways: we can define the perfectly just constitution or we can define Democracy and show that it, and it alone, is the perfectly just constitution. Let us consider these alternatives. (1) Suppose we say that the perfectly just constitution is one which distributes freedom and equality to all members of the population according to their just deserts. Since this is a tautology, no further argument is needed. Any other constitution would be actually unjust in some respects. There is certainly no need to argue that one constitution is better than another if one is just in every respect and the other is unjust in some respects. Furthermore, to proceed in this way not only makes the identification of Democracy with the perfectly just constitution purely verbal, but violates our distinction between an absolute and a relative consideration of inferior regimes. If we were to identify the Republican with the non-Democratic constitution according to this definition, it would follow necessarily that every Republican government must be actually unjust. While may be the case in fact (if the hypothesis is false that inferior conditions exist which justify inferior regimes relatively), it should not be necessitated by purely formal or analytical considerations. We must, therefore, define the Democratic constitution and prove that it is perfectly just, rathe:r than define the just constitution and call it " Democratic." 573 thermore, defect of justice need not be the same as actual injustice relative to a particubr set of conditions. 573 We might similarly speak of brute and man as defective and perfect cognitive natures. In both cases. the defect and the perfection occur in the very trait THE THEORY OF 393 We propose to define the Democratic constitution as one under which all normal and mature human beings, regard-. less of sex, race, wealth, or other similar accidents, are admitted to the status of complete citizenship, and can enjoy its rights and privileges unless they forfeit their suffrage or their liberty by a crime of sufficient gravity to warrant such penalty. This means, negatively, that a Democratic constitution abolishes political slavery, and that it abolishes subjection for all except those whose unripe years or natural defects place them in the care of a home or an institution, or those whose anti-social behavior requires them to be taken into custody. This does not mean, positively, that citizenship by itself qualifies a man or woman for any public office, not even that of a juror, for additional qualifications may be needed for every governmental function, or special factors of disqualification may enter into the selection. We shall presently increase the precision of this definition, but it is clear at once that there is need to prove that the Democratic constitution, thus defined, is perfectly just. We must prove, for example, that there are no !latural slaves, that neither criminals nor prisoners of war can be justly treated as slaves, and that no man can be justly permitted to sell himself into slavery or purchase other men as slaves. We shall make this step of our proof in Section 3. We must prove also that all normal adults, of whatever sex or race or economic fortune, can and should become citizens exercising suffrage, and that the status of subjection (or second-class citizenship) must be restricted to minors, the incurably incompetent, and criminals. We shall undertake this step of our proof in Section 4. When these things have been demonstrated, we shall have shown that, taking man as he is or can become, anything less than the Democratic constitution is lacking in justice, even though it may not also be actua:lly unjust relative to social, economic or cultural conditions which prevent some men from being all they can become. In Section 5, we shall consider the relative justifi(cognition) by which the two forms are differentiated from what is inferior to them both. 394 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL cation of Republican government, and the various perversions to which Democracy is susceptible. And in Section 6, we shall expound the theory of political justice in terms of which all our comparisons of diverse regimes have so far been made. Let us complete this preliminary discussion by making certain that the definition is clear, and that its implications are precise. Unless such clarity and precision are attained, it will not be possible to judge whether the proposition to be provedthat Democracy is the most just form of government-has been demonstrated. In the first place, it is necessary to show why there cannot be more than three major forms of government, for if there were more than three, Democracy might be more just than the Republic and the Kingdom, and yet not be the most just regime. This can be shown as follows. The distinction between absolute and limited government is exhaustive. Even though the intermediate regimen regale et politicum reveals these terms not to be exclusive, it can be truly said that every form of government either is or is not purely ConstitutionaL Now this twofold division of aU regimes is capable of only one major subdivision. On the side of purely Royal government, there are only accidental subdivisions-such as the numerical distinction between absolute rule by one (called " monarchy ") and absolute rule by a few (called " aristocracy ") . No gradation in justice is here involved. But on the side of purely Constitutional government, there can be essential subdivisions according as the constitution is less or more jmrL We have already seen that, within the range of Greek constitutions, the polity can be said to be more just than democracy or oligarchy, and these three terms represent an essential subdivision of Constitutional government because principles of justice are involved. 514 It would, therefore, appear that the hierarchy of political forms contains more than three terms, for if Democracy is distinct from the three Greek constitutions, and is more just than any of these, as aU of these are more just than Royal "" Vd. IV, Section 5, supra, in THE THOMIST, VI, l, pp. 81-93. THE THEORY OF 895 government, then there are at least five terms in the hierarchy. But all the Greek constitutions, along with the constitution of the Roman republic and the constitutions of many modern governments, are alike in one essential respect. From the point of view of absolute justice, they are all imperfectly just. Even though they differ inter se in the degree of their imperfection or in the cause and locus of the particular defect of justice which they exhibit, they all agree in failing to extend citizenship and suffrage as far as it can be justly granted. The perfectly just constitution is, therefore, exhaustively divided against all these. Now since every form of government is either Constitutional or not, and since every constitution is either imperfectly or perfectly just, there cannot be more than three major terms in the hierarchy of political forms. This does not prevent us from recognizing that there can be more or less effective embodiments of the Democratic form. In fact, the Democratic form is an ideal which can be progressively approached by more and more adequate realizations of its principles in practice. This distinction between formal and real Democracy, previously acknowledged, does not alter our conclusion that Democracy is the most just form of government. 015 In the second place, we can now see how difficult it is to draw the line between and Democratic constitutions. In earlier discussions we have been content with imprecise formulations of this distinction. We have said that the mark of the Republican constitution is restricted suffrage, whereas the Democratic constitution is defined by universal suffrage. But this is neither adequate nor accurate. The opposition between giving political liberty and equality to some men and giving it to all conveys the spirit of the difference, but without further qualification the words " some " and "all" express only a rough approximation of the truth. The real trouble is with the word " all." Unqualified, it signifies children as well as Vd. p. 874, supra, where we pointed out that in this Part of our work we were going to consider Democracy formally, reserving for Part VI the discussion of the progressive steps by which this ideal or best form can be more and more adequately materialized in concrete historic embodiments. 396 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL adults, the feeble-minded and insane as well as the normal, the criminal as well as the law-abiding members of the population. Without here attempting to make precise the limits of immaturity, abnormality, and criminality, we can, nevertheless regard these three classes in any population as justly excluded from suffrage. Moreover, on this point there is no difference whatsoever between the Republican and the Democratic constitution: both agree that at least these three classes are justly disfranchised. With this point understood the word " all " can be used to signify the universality of suffrage which characterizes the Democratic constitution. In contrast, " some " expresses the restricted suffrage of the Republic. The line between the Republican and the Democratic constitution can, therefore, be drawn by regarding the disfranchisement of any members of the population, except the three classes indicated above, as the distinguishing mark. The Republic enslaves or subjects men who can and should be citizens. The existence of a slave class, countenanced by the constitution as a legitimate political category, is not indispensable to the definition of Republican government, for even with the abolition of slavery as a political category, human beings who are not in the three justly disfranchised classes may be excluded from suffrage for one of the following reasons: because they are females, because they are foreigners for whom naturalization is not made available; because they lack sufficient property; because they are illiterate as a result of insufficient education; because of color, creed, or previous condition of servitude. What is indispensable to the definition of the Republican constitution is that it does distinguish between subjects and citizens and places in subjection human beings who are not children, abnormal, or criminal. The Democratic constitution, on the other hand, gives the equality of complete citizenship and the perfection of political liberty to all except these. This distinction being clear, the problem of demonstrating its validity consists in proving that all except these justly deserve political equality and liberty of the sort which attaches to citizenship with suffrage. We must prove, in short, not only that THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 897 enslavement is unjust, but also that every disfranchisement which is based on sex, property, the accidents of birth, etc., is absolutely unjust. In the third place, it must be observed that the various criteria of disfranchisement which can be employed by a Republican constitution fall into two groups. They are either traits which are inseparable and unalterable accidents of human nature or they are purely extrinsic accidents capable of voluntary modification. Thus, for example, sex, race, or color, are inseparable and unalterable accidents of birth. In contrast, poverty and illiteracy are accidents due to causes which are within the voluntary control of the individual and of i:.he society in which he lives. Either a child is feeble-minded or normal. If incurably feeble-minded, then no voluntary efforts on the child's part or on the part of the community can cultivate the child's powers by education; but if not incurably feeble-minded, then either the abnormality, if one exists, can be remedied, or if the child is normal, he can be educated. His lack of education is a voluntarily avoidable deprivation, for which the home and the state can be held responsible. Hence the problem of whether illiteracy (or total lack of education) is just ground for disfranchisement must be viewed in two ways: (a) taking the population as it is, it may be just to disfranchise those adults who are illiterate or who lack a certain minimum of education; but (b) since the existence of such human beings in the population is the result of social, not natural, forces, and since these forces ai.:! themselves voluntarily controllable by the agency of government, it cannot be permanently just to disfranchise men who, but for causes beyond their own control and within the power of government to remedy, would not be disqualified for citizenship. By observing the difference between these two points of view, we can see how it may be possible to justify a Republican constitution relative to an existing state of affairs (in which, for example, some portion of the population is uneducated or illiterate), and yet at the same time to say that, absolutely speaking, illiteracy cannot be a just disqualification in the case 8 398 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL of normal men because government can, in the course of time, remedy the defect, and should make every effort to do so. "'\Vhether, at a given time, the government is fully responsible for the illiteracy that then exists, and so can be charged with actual injustice, is an extremely difficult question which must take into account a variety of social and economic causes. These may be so complex in their historic contingency that the deplorable situation to be remedied may not be sufficiently under the voluntary control of government to warrant the charge of injustice on the ground of malfeasance. We shaH return to this difficult problem in Section p when we consider the historic conditions relative to which the imperfect justice of Republican constitutions may be justified, that is, shown to be not actually unjust, though lacking in a point of justice that is ultimately attainable in the course of historic developments under the voluntary control of men and societies. We have said enough here about this one factor (illiteracy) to show how the general principle also applies to poverty and to foreign birth. The application must, of course, be made differently in each case. In the case of the resident alien, signifying a desire to become a citizen, the problem is one of providing just naturalization proceedings. In the case of the pauper, the problem is one of distinguishing between criminal indolence and incapacity for self-support, on the one hand, and lack of economic opportunity, on the other. And here the problem of justice requires us to define the minimum amount of property, or more generally, the economic condition of the person, which is relevant to a just distribution of suffrage. The amount must not be so large, or the condition so special, that it is impossible for all normal and willing persons to qualify, social and economic impediments being ultimately removable by the voluntary efforts of ju.st government. In contrast to these remediable disqualifications, such traits as sex and race present a different problem. Either the members of the female sex and the members of certain raCial groups are by nature inferior, so that their condition is beyond voluntary control, or no such natural inequalities exist in any way THE THEORY OF 399 that has political relevance. We shall try to prove that the second alternative is true, showing that the contrary supposition reduces to the absurdity of regarding women and certain racial groups as incurably subnormal. Nevertheless, it may be necessary to consider here whether social and economic impediments can cause a remediable inferiority which, so long as it exists and is not immediately alterable by governmental action, may justify the Republican constitution which disfranchises these human beings at a given time iri. history. In the fourth place, we must note that a just abridgement of political liberty is not equivalent to slavery. The insane who are taken into protective custody or otherwise confined in hospitals, the feeble-minded who are incarcerated in institutions as charges on the public care, are not free, but neither are they slaves, for they are being taken care of for their own good and the common good, not being used as means to the good of other individuals or of the state. They are not property (i.e., chattel) in any sense or respect. This holds true also for the just treatment of prisoners of war or enemy aliens who must be interned for the public safety. And it is equally true of the punitive justice which condemns criminals to death or to imprisonment, for life or for a term of years. In the latter case especially we see that the criminal has voluntarily forfeited his right to life, or to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The insane and the feeble-minded do not forfeit their rights, for theirs is not a loss of rights due to voluntary misconduct on their part; rather the rights which never cease to be potentially theirs, they cannot actually claim, because of natural impediment or defect. In a sense, these rights are always held in trust for them by society, as against the day when medical science may be able to restore them to normal manhood. 576 Their 676 Any child of human parentage must be presumed to have the potentialities of human nature, regardless of the pathological factors which operate against their development, and even tend to conceal their existence. It can never be presumed that these pathological factors are absolutely incurable, even though, in the present state of medical knowledge, successful therapy may be very unlikely. If the first presumption did not prevail, and if the second were not untenable, there would 400 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL political status, with its consequent liberty, is, therefore, in abeyance. It IS for the time being abridged, but it is not nulliwho suffers fied or permanently lost. Similarly, the incarceration for a term of years, rather than death or life imprisonment, also has his rights and liberties temporarily abridged. When he has paid hi« penalty, they may be restored to him upon his return to the community. But here distinction may be made among crimes, according to the gravity of the felony or misdemeanor and the moral turpitude it reflects, which defines certain crimes as just cause for the permanent forfeiture, not of all political rights, but of suffrage. Such disfranchisement is, of course, an irremediable loss of perfect liberty, but it is neither enslavement nor unjust subjection. On all these points, there is no necessary difference between Republican and Democratic justice, for either sort of constitution may make the same provisions for the insane and the feeble-minded and for enemies of the state, from within or without, during peace time or in war. But if, as many historic examples reveal, a Republican constitution treats any of these classes as slaves, converting them into the property of individuals or of the state, it is going beyond just disfranchisement and committing an actual injustice, an injustice which no conditions can excuse. We shall return to this point in Section 3 where we shall attempt to prove the actual injustice of slavery as a legal category. The theory of natural slavery is not the only error to be corrected. Nevertheless, it is important to observe here that such errors about justice are not essential to the defect of the Republican constitution, though they may be an additional blemish upon its character. Similarly, there is no necessary difference between Republican and Democratic principles of liberty, so far as these classes in the population are concerned. Despite their fundamental difference on the qualifications for suffrage, the Republic and the Democracy both understand constitutional liberty-the perbe no violation of natural law in killing off the unfit on the specious pretense of serving the common good by removing a burden from society. THE THEORY OF 401 feet liberty of complete citizenship-in the same way. For both, liberty is not an absolute right, but a privilege to which obligations are annexed, and which is limited by the ends that justify it. If constitutional liberty can be justly granted or justly withheld, abridged, or forfeited, then such liberty is itself the creature of justice. Divorced from considerations of justice, there is no such thing as political liberty, any more than there is political equality. There is only license and anarchy. The two ends which regulate the justice of liberty are the common good and happiness. No man deserves more liberty than is compatible with the common good, nor less than he needs to lead a good life. 571 Liberty is not an end, coordinate with happiness. It is rather linked with happiness as a condition indispensable to its pursuit. So far as liberty is thus justly conceived, there is no difference between freedom under Democratic and under Republican government. Being constitutional, both can be called " free governments " in contrast to absolute regimes which severely limit the freedom of the 577 John Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty is misread by those who charge him, as they charge Locke or Rousseau, with being a libertarian. Vd. fn. 561 supra. His theory of civil liberty can, in fact, be summarized by the italicized sentence in the text above. The end which justifies every degree of civil liberty is happiness; the end which limits civil liberty and draws the line between it and license is the common good; for, IJ.ccording to Mill, the prohibition of acts which injure o1hers · or transgress the common good in no way infringes on political freedom. The problem of civil liberty, he says in his opening sentences (op. cit.,) concerns "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." Mill's position throughout is like that of St. Thomas, who held that the positive law cannot command virtue or prohibit vice except in so far as the acts of virtue and vice affect the common good (general justice) or in so far as they injure other persons directly, and so are violations of particular justice. Cf. Utilitarianism, Ch. V, "On the Connection between Justice and Utility." Maritain identifies what he calls the freedom of autonomy with happiness. This is the terminal freedom toward which all other freedoms operate as means. The initial freedom is the natural freedom of man's free will. Intermediate between the natural freedom of free choice and the terminal freedom of autonomy is civil liberty, which is neither natural nor terminal. Civil liberty is the freedom of men under law or government to exercise their power of free choice in such a way that they not only work toward happiness or spiritual autonomy, but so that they also do not interfere with others in the same process. Cf. Maritain, The Problem of Freedom in the Modern World, pp. M, J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL ruled. 518 But though the quality of freedom (its intensity) is the same in a Republic and in a Democracy, differing in the same way from the quality of freedom under a Royal :regime, the quantity of freedom (L e., distributively) is greatly enlarged by the supe:rim.:justice of the Democratic constitution. These considerations about the relation of political liberty to justice will have a bearing on our subsequent demonstration of the injustice of any degree or kind of enslavement. Furthermore, the relation of perfect liberty (i. e., the dominion of citizenship) to the pursuit of happiness will enable us to prove, in the light of our conception of natural happiness, 579 why no normal adult should be subjected, much less enslaved. But it may be objected at once that we have omitted moral virtue in aU our enumerations of traits relevant to citizenship and suffrage; yet the moral virtues are indispensable to the pursuit of happiness and should, therefore, be made a condition of granting liberty to men as something which should be exercised for the common good and the life of virtue. Suffice it here to answer that the notion of moral virtue has been tacitly involved in our discussion of the habits relevant to political status, and that, moreover, it is obviously implied in the disfranchisement of children, the insane, the feeble-minded, and the criminal elements in the population. The :really difficult problem here is whether moral virtue can be made a positive condition (i. e., of enfranchisement) , as well as a negative condition (i.e., of disfranchisement). We know, for example, that children have unformed characters, or ••• If the word " freedom " is used to signify the dominion of imperfect freedom (subjection) as well as the dominion of perfect freedom (citizenship), then the Royali regime must be called "free." Only tyrannical government is enslaving government. Any regime which is just in its direction to the common good is " freeing." But as the word has come to be used, both in ancient and modern discussions of Constitutional government, emphasis· is placed on the perfection of political liberty which is inseparable from citizenship, and so only Constitutionall government is called "free," as only Constitutional government is called "popular."' Both appellations can be applied to the Republic, as well as to the Democracy, despite the essential difference between the imperfect distributive justice of the one, and the perfect distributive justice of the other. 519 Vd. Part III, Section 3, in THE THOMIST, IV, I, pp. 147-81. THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 408 that criminals are vicious and unjust men, for that is signified by the moral turpitude involved in serious injuries to other men or violations of the common good. So far we can go in using obvious lack of moral virtue, or obvious presence of vicious inclinations, negatively-as a condition of disfranchisement. But can we go further and demand evidence of a wellformed moral character as a positive condition of enfranchisement? The question is not whether such a criterion would be desirable or just. Certainly it would be. The question is a practical one, namely, whether such evidence is sufficiently available, or ascertainable with sufficient accuracy, to permit the practical employment of this criterion in the distribution of citizenship and suffrage. If not, it can have no place in the practical science of politics, or in the practical affairs of government. With all due respect for the " idealism " of ancient and mediaeval political theory in this respect, we must nevertheless insist that it is only capacity for the moral virtues and prudence and never the actual possession of them which can be made a positive qualification for citizenship and suffrage. No actual constitution has ever set up such a qualification (actual possession of virtue) because it is so obviously impracticable. The point can have no relevance to the distinction between Republican and Democratic government, though it inevitably arises in connection with the so-called " ideal " constitution that Aristotle proposed in Book VII of the Politics. It also has a bearing on his theory of natural sl;:wery and the disfranchisement of the laboring classes.580 We shall, therefore, return to a fuller consideration of it in Sections S and 4. 580 Vd. fn. 559 supra. According to the " ideal " constitution set forth in Book VII of the Politics, Aristotle saw nothing wrong with recommending that the laboring classes be-worse than disfranchised or refused citizenship-reduced to the condition of slaves of the state, comparable to the condition of slaves in the household. Vd. loc. cit., Ch. 9 and 10 "Husbandmen, craftsmen, and laborers of all kinds are necessary to the existence of the state, but the members of the state are the warriors and councillors " (1829"35) . The laboring classes are, in short, to be mere means. " But where there are two things of which one is a means and the other an end, they have nothing in common except that the one receives what the other produces. Such, for example, is the relation in which workmen and tools stand 404 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL In the fifth place, the essential distinction between the Republican and the Democratic constitution must not be confused by the addition to either of extraneous elements which have manifested themselves historically, but which do not belong to the essence of either constitution. We have in mind here two things especially, the one peculiarly characteristic of Greek democracy, the other a characteristic of· Greek oligarchy (or even the polity), of the Roman republic, and of many modern Constitutional regimes. The first is the principle of appointment to offices (some or all) by lottery. This can never be justified because it either requires too high a qualification for citizenship, thus unjustly disfranchising many, or if the standard is rightly set with to their work; the house and the builder bave nothing in common, but the art of the builder is for the sake of the house. And so states require property, but property, even though living beings are included in it, is no part of the state, for a state is not a community of living beings only, but a community of equals aiming at the best life possible " (Politics, VII, 8, 1828"27-88). With respect to the main point under consideration in the text (i.e., the inutility of virtue as a positive prerequisite for citizenship), two things should be noted. In the first place, even as in the administration of justice we presume the innocence of a man until he is proved guilty, so in the practical science of politics we must presume that a man has " civic virtue " until the contrary is evidenced by his conviction for violation of the law. We use the phrase "civic virtue" to signify virtue in relation to the common good. It is only such virtue which the positive law can command. Yd. Summa Theologica, I-II, 96, 2, 8. Hence a serious violation of the positive law marks a man as sufficiently lacking in civic virtue to be unfit for citizenship. In the second place, God, who can see into the hearts of men, is able to judge the goodness of a man absolutely-in regard to every virtue, and with respect to its interior as well as its exterior a.Cts. But one man cannot, and therefore should not presume to, judge the virtues of another man absolutely. Some judgment of a man's virtue is necessary, of course, as in the admmistration of law, but as we have seen, this goes no further than our knowledge of exterior acts, and only concerns acts which are affected with the public interest. The same limitations apply to the provisions of constitutional law: because men <'annot judge the virtue of their fellow men absolutely, human government cannot employ virtue as an absolute criterion in thll distribution of civic honors. A just constitution can go no further than to disfranchise criminals because they have by their act.i shown themselves to be vicious with respect to the common good. This does not mean, of course, that the rest of the n,on-criminal population are genuinely men of virtue, civic or otherwise. But who shall set himself up to judge the virtue of his fellow men, and what tests can be practically applied? Cf. Section 4 infra, where this problem is treated more fully. THE THEORY OF 405 respect to a just enfranchisement, then the principle works injustice by disregarding inequalities in degree of competence with respect to the hierarchy of governmental functions. Greek democracy (considering its various disfranchisements and its acceptance of slavery, etc.) neither has the justice of the Democratic constitution, nor does it represent a relatively just Republican constitution, because it involves an actual injustice which cannot be excused by reference to historic conditions. 581 The second is the principle that special political privileges belong to persons of noble birth or of more than average wealth. This principle may operate with respect to qualification for political office, or with respect to political powers granted a special class in the population, such as the Roman patricians, who had access to the legislative authority of the Senate from which the plebs were excluded, or the British peerage, which exercised an undue influence on legislation before the House of Lords was diminished to its present powers; or it may operate, as in the old Prussian constitution, by proportioning the number of votes to the amount of property held by an elector. This oligarchical principle-it should never be called "aristocratic" by anyone who has respect for that word-can be separated from Republican criteria for citizenship and suffrage. It is highly questionable whether it can ever be justified, as the 681 Confusion :results from supposing that Greek democracy is merely an incomplete achievement of true Democracy. Professor Agard, for example, knows that Democracy can recognize " no validity in the prejudices of class or race " and that the Democratic conception of equality is "that all men deserve equally to be respected as human beings and given a fair chance to· their ability " (What Democracy Meant to the Greeks, p. 7). But he is, nevertheless, willing to say, in answer to the question whether the Athenian constitution is genuinely Democratic, that "it is, in many respects" (ibid., p. 68; italics ours), even though "Athens denied political rights to important groups of residents" (p. 75). Cf. ibid., pp. 7982. Above all, he fails to note that the principle of appointment to office by lot is an actual injustice which cannot be condoned. To speak of Greek democracy as a limited or incomplete achievement of the ideal constitution is, therefore, both misleading and erroneous. It would be more accurate to sa.y that Greek democracy anticipates this ideal primarily, if not exclusively, in one respect-its overthrow of oligarchical privileges and oligarchical restrictions. 406 Mo J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL latter perhaps can, by :reference to special historic conditions. But whether or not it is always actually unjust, this oligarchical principle is separable from the essence of a Republican constitution, as the original constitution of the United States indicates, although we must recognize the historic fact that most Republican governments have been more or less flagrant in the embodiment of it. This enables us to see that one of the properties which flows from the essence of a Democratic constitution is the abolition of all politically privileged classes. The Democratic commonwealth is identical with the classless society-in the precise sense of no social or economic classes having special political rights or privileges, powers or immunities; but never in the sense of total egalitarianism which violates the hierarchy of governmental functions, for that is the (Greek) democratic fallacy which has no place in the truly just Democratic constitution. The Republican commonwealth, on the other hand, is always a society in which the classes are set against the masses; for even when certain social or economic classes do not have special powers or privileges, rights or immunities, over and above those granted to the ordinary citizen, the disfranchised masses under Republican government always belong to certain under-privileged social o:r economic groups. 582 The ideal of Democracy can, therefore, be defined as that of the free and politically classless society. 583 It repudiates the oligarchical ••• Vd. Politics, VII, 10: "It is no new or recent discovery of political philosophers that the state ought to be divided into classes, and that the warriors should be separated from the husbandmen" (l3ii!9b). Cf. Montesquieu, Spirit' of Laws, Book II, Ch. 2. 583 The Republican society, in contrast, is one in which freedom is hampered by the constitutional preservation of illegitimate class distinctions. Precisely because the Democratic constitution abolishes the political classes that the Republican constitution recognizes and retains, there can be no such thing as a mixeil Democratic constitution. The mixed constitution, properly understood, can occur only under Republican government, effecting some sort of compromise between the opposed social and economic classes which, if their desire for power is unchecked, naturally tend to the extremes of oligarchy or democracy. Cf. Part IV, Section 5, supra, loc. cit., and esp. fn. 500, 502, 508, 5U, 513. Cf. Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, pp.57-58: The idea! society "would THE THEORY OF 407 prejudice in favor of giving special privileges, or withholding basic privileges, according to the accidents of birth or wealth. The perfect justice of the Democratic constitution will be fully realized in the concrete only when all the counteractive oligarchical forces-whether social or economic-are extirpated from the body politic. WALTER FARRELL, 0. P. Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D. C. J. ADLER University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (To be continued.) in effect be a society sans classes, that is to say one in which the distinctions between classes which have been heretofore observed in our Western civilization would have disappeared, such distinctions having been founded in earlier times chiefly on the inheritance of blood, in modern times ou the inheritance of money. But a fresh differentiation would inevitably arise in a community of human beings all of whom were alike included in the category of workers, for there is no order without diversity and inequalities of rank; and in a world where social values would depend not on birth or on riches, but on work " . . . there would be " a true aristocracy of popular choice closely bound to the service of the community by the very object of their oflice." Cf. Jefferson's distinction between the tme and the false " aristocracies." V d. fn. 649 infra. In a recent article on the Jeffersonian tradition (entitled "Education for a Classless Society"), President Conant of Harvard described England as a free but socially stratified society, Russia as one not free but aiming to be classless, and the United States as approximating a classless and free society (The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 165, No. 5, pp. BOOK REVIEWS T. Lucreti Cari de Rerum Natura Libri Sex. Edited with Introduction and Commentary by WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD and STANLEY BARNEY SMITH. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Pp. ix + 886. $5.00. Lucretius is an author about whom opmrons have greatly differed and one whose study has fluctuated to a great extent during different periods. Some writers have assigned him the primacy among the poets of Rome. No less capable a Latin scholar than Denys Lambin wrote the following tribute to his use of language: non dubitanter affirmabo, nullum in tota lingua Latina scriptorem Lucretia latine melius esse locutum, non M. Tullii, non C. Caesaris orationem esse puriorem. Yet he never attained the prominent place in later Roman education that was justly granted to the bards of Mantua and Venusia. As a philosopher, Lucretius has failed to make a great mark. His hexameter poem De Rerum Natura is the best Latin exposition of Epi. cureanism; but his school lost the Roman field to Stoicism, which, for all its errors, appeared more worthy of acceptance to the minds of Romans. The middle ages looked upon him as a scientist more than as a philosopher; and even in science he was not held in the same esteem as Pliny or Seneca, to mention only the Latin authors. Modern philological study of Lucretius began with Lachmann in the last century. Munro in England, Brieger in Germany, and Giussani in Italy carried on further researches into the interpretation of his poem. In our own century, Ernout and Robin, Bailey, Merrill, Diels, and Martin have published useful editions and commentaries of De Rerum Natura. The present edition is a cooperative project, " the result of nearly lifelong interests of two scholars, which some fifteen years ago became merged in a cooperative enterprise." Professor Leonard has contributed the General Introduction. on" Lucretius: The Man, the Poet, and the Times"; Professor Smith has contributed the Latin text, the Commentary, and the Introduction to the Commentary, but "in a broader sense they are jointly responsible for the whole" (p. v) . Such a cooperative project has the obvious advantage of two heads instead of one, but in one instance at least it has led to overlapping. Witness the treatment by Leonard of Mss. (pp. 84-91) and the fuller treatment by Smith (p. 95 ff.), where there is necessarily some repetition. Usually, however, this overlapping is happily avoided. 408 BOOK REVIEWS 409 Leonard's introduction is pleasantly written and sufficiently informative. It shows first-hand acquaintance with the Latin writings of the contemporaries and predecessors of Lucretius. His years are given as 99-55 B. C. on the basis of St. Jerome's Chronicle. The question of his madness is discussed, and Leonard is unable to agree fully with Postgate and Conway who considered V. 1308-49 as a "madman's dream." The poem itself is used with advantage to obtain a view of the author's personality, but some of the conjectures are rather fine spun and unconvincing. The treatment of Epicurus, his influence on Lucretius, and the independence of the latter in certain instances, is excellent. Leonard deals roughly with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (p. ; especially with the last, whose scientific interests in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms receive scant mention. A student would get the erroneous idea that Aristotle was a mere deductive logician with a distaste for experiment. Again, Epicurus is mentioned as "perhaps the founder of inductive (as distinct from deductive) logic" (p. 47) , although Aristotle is more deserving of such a title from the viewpoint both of time and of merit. It is admitted (p. 48) that Epicurus and Lucretius " smuggled into " their system both reason and ethical judgments which are not accounted for by their· system of materialistic atomism. The strong influence of Empedocles in addition to (and sometimes even distinct from) that of Epicurus is rightly insisted on. The agreement between the philosophical atomism of Lucretius and the modern scientific atomic theory is greatly overstressed. Leonard has a prejudice against teleological thinking, upon which his information seems very limited (p. 60). He fails to appreciate the value of divine revelation as a guardian against error, and so naively speaks of " religious myth " as blocking free specu73). No mention is made of the inconlation on early man (cf. pp. sistency of Lucretius in rejecting the tales of gods as mere mythology, and then using that same mythology to point out, in the sacrifice of lphigenia, the evils that religion could produce. Professor Smith has a clear discussion of the Mss. all of which go back to an archetype of the fourth century. His treatment of" Textual Errors" is very helpful. He has a useful sketch of the diction and style of Lucretius which sums up neatly the results of several works: Ernout, Cartault, Deutsch, and Spangenberg. He falls into the old error about the shifting quantity of a vowel preceding a mute or liquid (pp. 160-1) . It is taught by philologists that the quantity of the syllable, not of the vowel, differs in such instances (cf. Kent, The Sounds of Latin, ed., p. The wrong date is assigned for the death of Isidore of Seville (p. 104). There are a few other minor errors, showing lack of acquaintance with modern views on quantities. But I have no desire to go into a list of errors. I feel justly grateful for the useful information assembled into this one volume. The commentary, 410 BOOK REVIEWS which is really helpful, shows that the authors have in mind the needs of our sad generation of college students who have little Latin and less than less Greek. Where Merrill cites the original Greek, this edition gives a good translation, often original. Much has been done since Merrill's edition in 1907, and this work offers a convenient If it does not displace Merrill in our American courses, it will at any rate be a welcome addition to his fine volume. The University of Wisconsin Press can well be proud of this finely printed and well-indexed book. JoHN J. GAVIGAN, 0. S. A. Villanova OoUege, Villanova, Pa. The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. By PAUL OsKAR KrusTELLER (Trans. by Virginia Conant). New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Pp. xiv + 441. $4.50. The philosophers of the Renaissance are little known. The textbooks usually pass over the two centuries which mark the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modem times with a few perfunctory remarks. The overthrow of the medieval system and the rise of the new science seem to them more important than the work done by thinkers who, after all, form the link between the past and the present. Thus, we welcome any study which makes us better acquainted with the personalities who fashioned thought in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among these thinkers, Marsilio Ficino (1438-1499) holds a prominent place. He was the founder and the head of the " Platonic Academy " at Florence and exercised a great influence on many people. Pico della Mirandola, for instance, was his pupil. Ficino, who was ordained a priest in 1473',attempted to work out a synthesis of Christian doctrine and Platonic, or rather NeoPlatonic, philosophy, although he took account, even to a large extent, of Aristotelian and Thomistic ideas. He was thoroughly opposed to Averroism which, at his time, dominated many of the philosophical schools. Ficino'a translations played an important role in the " humanistic " movement; the one he made of Plotinus is still highly regarded. Notwithstanding his dependence on ancient and medieval philosophy he was not without ideas of his own. His work is well worthy of consideration. Accordingly, one opens Dr. Kristeller's book with great expectations. That one is disappointed, in a measure, is the result of several defects, two of which are of a rather serioos nature. The many quotations from Ficino are mostly given in English lation only. This is in itself a drawback. It becomes the more so when the reader realizes that the translations are open to objections. Terms are BOOK REVIEWS 411 used for which it is difficult to imagine the original expression, e. g., "the peculiar end of a thing" (p. 143), "charm" (p. "model" (p. 95). Sometimes the translation is definitely mistaken: p. 37 where sufficientia 8Ubsistendi is rendered by "capacity for existence"; the phrase universi natura possibilius . . . (p. 72) is mistranslated; demens on p. 165 does not mean " mad " but "lacking mind," or " not mindlike "; secretio (p. is not " secretion " but rather separation, what Eckehardt called Abgeschiedenheit, nor does vacatio mean "vacation" but being free for, having a mind emptied of other things. It is hardly correct to translate affectio (of will) by disposition. On p. 39 decuit is rendered by "it was convenient," decet by " meet," although the use of the past and present tense is obviously significant. Princeps becomes "prince" on p. 80, and "head" on p. 83; neither of these words gives exactly the' sense. Act and action are not distinguished (pp. 77 and 236) . Twice one comes across mistakes which, perhaps are printing errors, p. 21 desiderant-denying, p. 296 laetus in praesens. The phrase" the angel has a number" (p. 88) is to say the least, clumsy and not to be understood by anyone not acquainted with Nco-Pythagorean speculation. Complexio is not a "sum" (p. but something like an integration, an organic togetherness, and must be read in the light of Cusanian philosophy. Ficino mentions Cusanus, the author tells us, only once, and the editors of the great edition of Cusanus' works refer to only one passage which might be, but :wobably is not, taken from the writings of the Cardinal. However, the absence of literal quotations and of the name does not constitute a sufficient proof for the absence of any influence. Complexio, for instance, is a Cusanian term. Also, Ficino speaks-the author does not mention this but it is reported by Fr. Olgiati--of docta religio, an expression sounding much like an intentional echo of docta ignorantia. There are other passages in which one is strongly reminded of Cusanus. These parallels ought to be investigated. They are, however, as little considered in this work as are many other obvious references, on Ficino's part, to his predecessors. To characterize the thought of any philosopher it is necessary to view him against his intellectual background. To have omitted this, constitutes the other serious defect of this work. Many ideas are presented as Ficino's own, perhaps even as original, which are simply repetitions of statements contained in various writings of the past. It is of a minor importance that the use of latitudo is, hypothetically, traced back to the Calculationes of Suiseth, though the Tractatus latitudinum formarum by Nicholas Oresme was printed in 1486 at Padua. The author rightly emphasizes the influence of St. Augustine--as well as of Plato and the Neo-Platonists; he also mentions occasionally St. Anselm. But there are many passages which obviously stem from Thomistic writers. Curiously, the only work of Aquinas ever 412 BOOK REVIEWS referred to is the Contra Gentes; one may, however, presume that Ficino the rest of Thomistic literature. He was a canon at was not ignorant the Cathedral of Florence; from 1446 to 1459 St. Antoninus, a Dominican, was Archbishop there; he is the author of a once famous Summa, written ad mentem doctoris. This book figures also among those contained in the library of Pico della Mirandola. It is highly- improbable that Ficino should not have been acquainted with this work and other Thomistic treatises. In fact, there are many passages in which notions occur which are well known to any student of Thomism: To mention only a few examples: pp. 44, 138, 176 the concepts of actus immanens and transiens, pp. 51 and of ontological truth, pp. 63 and 138 of bonum diffusivum sui, p. UO the principle anima quodammodo omnia, p. 166 the argumentum ex gradibus, and so on. No reference is found to St. Bonaventure, although his exemplarism apparently influenced Ficino. Nor is it mentioned that many of Ficino's principles are common to all his predecessors. The reader is led to overrate Ficino's originality. Dr. Kristeller only refers in a general manner to Ficino's indebtedness to his predecessors. It is, therefore, left to the reader to find out what are the truly characteristic contributions of the Florentine thinker. The author emphasizes mainly two notions which, if this reviewer understands correctly, he considers as Ficino's most personal ideas. One is the primum in aliquo genere, which is discussed pp. 146-170. The second is the notion of appetitus naturalis, pp. Concerning the first, the author correctly refers to similar notions, perfectum in aliquo genere, as found in St. Anselm, St. Thomas and others. One may consider also another writer who, at this time, was highly regarded: Thomas Bradwardine, doctor profundus, who in De causa Dei (1344) says quod nullus processus infinitus in entibus, sed est in quolibet genere unum principium. This primum is the perfect realization of the genus (which, it seems, should be considered, ontologically, as a species), and the other members are relatively imperfect and impure. The genus reproduces, as it were, within its structure the plan of Being as a whole, with its hierarchy; so also there exists a last and lowest member in every genus. The genera thus become definite spheres of reality, reproducing each the structure of the universe. The conception later developed in Leibniz' monadology, that each particular being mirrors the universe, can be traced back to Plato and the Stoics, and is found with various modifications in many writers (minor mundus); sometimes it is referred to man alone, sometimes generalized so as to apply to any being whatsoever. Here, again, the relation to Cusanus needs clarification. Ficino holds, with many of the medieval "Platonists," that the universe is an animated being, also that the celestial bodies have their own souls of BOOK REVIEWS 413 around which it is " natural " to them to revolve. It is furthermore in accordance with this tradition that man is considered as the very center, the point where the sensible and the intelligible world touch one another. It should be noted, incidentally, that this view has nothing of the often mentioned anthropocentrism " of the medieval system, nor is the idea that man is the " crown " of sensible creation .indicative of a lack of humility. Contrary to the ideas often expressed by the enthusiastic admirers of "modernity," it was the medieval mind which was humble, and it is the modern scientistic mind which is not. In his anthropology Ficino appears to be not quite consistent. On one hand he held that " man is the soul " (p. 3fl8) , a view reminiscent of older ideas, e. g., of Hugh of St. Victor; on the other hand he has an argument for the necessity of resurrection of the body gathered from the notion that sou'! and .body are ordained to one another. In his psychology one may note the notion of the formulae innataeadumbrating the idea of " inborn ideas "-which formulae seem to become actualized much in the same manner as is the case with the first principles in Aquinas. The intellectual substances are credited with a direct knowledge of the particulars, by an argument ex eminentia. The notion of symbolic cognition plays an important part. The image is related to the " idea " it represents as the thing directly pictured to the thing symbolized. We know things by the accidents and also symbolically; lower things are symbols of higher ones the nature of which becomes visible in the symbol (p. 95 ff.) . The nature of man and mind is conceived on the basis of the same ontological principles on which the whole order of being rests. These principles are, in the main, Neo-Platonic with, however, the difference that, contrary to Plotinus, it is not the higher emanation which brings forth the next one, but they all are created by God. Ficino apparently does not apply the notion of analogy to being, since he asserts that the One is above Being (p. 45) . The homogeneity of Being leads to the theory of the appetitus naturalis, which on the other hand is related to Ficino's conception of love and of human relations. Dr. Kristeller believes that Ficino took this term and idea from Epicurus, who elaborated the Aristotelian doctrine of orexis. However, it should be noted that term and notion belong to traditional teaching and that Ficino must have come across them elsewhere too. In fact, there seems to be little in Ficino's ideas which would go beyond the traditional views. Ficino seems to be the father of the notion of " Platonic love," although the author is obviously mistaken in his belief that medieval philosophers knew of love only as existing either between the sexes, or-as friendshipbetween individuals of the same sex. Even a superficial study of Aquinas' remarks on amor amicitiae might have shown the falsity of this interpretation. 9 414 BOOK REVIEWS Notwithstanding the many criticisms this work calls forth, we must gratefully acknowledge our debt to Dr. Kristeller for having made accessible the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. Our gratitude would be greater still if the author had found ways to add a chapter on the further influence of Ficino, beyond the circle of his immediate pupils and friends. If there are many conceptions in this philosophy which link it definitely to the past, there are others pointing to the future. The " ancestry " of what is called " modem " philosophy is still known but incompletely, and Ficino may well be an intermediary between medieval Scholasticism and more recent philosophies. To evaluate his influence would appear as an important and attractive task. RUDOLF ALLERS Catholic Universif;y of America, Washington, D. C. BOOKS RECEIVED Jaeger, Werner. Humanism and Theology. The Aquinas Lecture, 1943. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1948. Pp. 96, with notes. $1.50. Maritain, Jacques. The Rights of Man and Natural Law. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948. Pp. 118, with index. $1.50. Morris, Bertram. The Aesthetic Process. Evanston: Northwestern University, 1948. Pp. xiii + 189, with index. $!U5. Osbourn, James C., 0. P. The Morality of Imperfections. Thomistic Studies: No.1. Washington: Pontifical Faculty of Theology, Dominican House of Studies, 1948. Pp. xiii + 247, with index. $2.75. Shoemaker, Francis. Aesthetic Experience and the Humanities. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. Pp. xviii 389, with notes, bibliography and index. $3.50. + INDICES OF VOLUME VI (APRIL, JUNE, OCT., 1943) INDEX OF AUTHORS PAGE ADLER, M. J. AND FARRELL, W. The Theory of Democracy 49,251,367 ALLERS, R. Review of Schelling, The Age of the World, by F. Bolman 122 ---. Review of Philosophical Essays in Honor of E. A. Singer, Jr., by E. P. Clark and M. C. Nahm (ed.) 123 ---. Review of The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, by P. 0. Kristeller . 410 CHAPMAN, E. Review of Science, Philosophy and Religion: Second Symposium 126 CoNNELL, F. J. Review of A Companion to the Summa, by W. Farrell 119 CoNWAY, P. H. AND OsBOURN, J. C. Pen and Sword Versus God 285 DEKONINCK, C. D. The Wisdom That is Mary l FARRELL, W. AND ADLER, M. J. The Theory of Democracy 49,251,367 230 FoREST, I. The Meaning of Faith GAVIGAN, J. J. Review ofT. Lucreti Cari de Rerum Natura Libri Sex, 408 by W. E. Leonard and S. B. Smith LINTZ, E. J. The Unity of the Universe, According to A. N. Whitehead . 135,318 MURPHY, R. T. Review of Archaeology and the Religion oj Israel, by 278 W. F. Albright 285 OsBOURN, J. C., AND CoNWAY, P. H. Pen and Sword Versus God 180 OsTERLE, J. A. The Problem of Meaning 19 ScHWARTZ, H. T. A Reply: The Demonstration of God's Existence INDEX OF ARTICLES M. J. ADLER AND W. FARRELL 49,251,367 19 Demonstration of God's Existence; A Reply. H. T. ScHWARTZ 230 Faith, The Meaning of--. ILsE FoREST God's Existence, A Reply: The Demonstration of --. H. T. 19 ScHWARTZ Mary, The Wisdom That is--. C. D. DEKONINCK 1 180 Meaning, The Problem of--. J. A. OsTERLE . 285 Pen and Sword Versus God. J. C. OSBOURN AND P. H. CoNWAY Democracy, The Theory of--. 415 416 INDICES OF VOLUME VI (1943) PAGE Unity in the Universe, The--, According to A. N. Whitehead. E. J. LINTZ . I35, 3I8 Wisdom, The-- That is Mary. C. D. DEKONINCK . I INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS ALBRIGHT, W. F. Archaeology and the Relifion of Israel (Murphy) BoLMAN, F. Schelling, The·Age 'Of the World (Allers) CLARK, E. P. AND NAHM, M. C." (Editors). Philosophical Essays in Honor of E. A. Singer, Jr. (Allers) FARRELL, W. A Companion to the Summa, Vol. IV: The Way of Life (Connell) 119 KrusTELLER, P. 0. The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (Allers) 4IO LEONARD, W. E. AND SMITH, S. B. T. Lucreti Can de Rerum Natura Sex Libri (Gavigan) 408 NAHM, M. C. AND CLARK, E. P. (Editors). Philosophical Essays in Honor of E. A. Singer, Jr. (Allers) Science, Philosophy, and Religion: Second Symposium (Chapman) SMITH, S. B. AND LEONARD, W. E. T. Lucreti Cari de Rerum Natura Sex Libri (Gavigan) 408 END oF VoLUME VI