THE CATHOLIC LIBRARY OF
RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE
To be completed in 100 Volumes

Translated from (he French
PRELIMINARY LIST

Baptism and Confirmation. Rev. A. D'Alès. S.J.
The Breviary. Its History and Contents. Doni Baudot, O.S.B.
The Church in Modern Times, 1447-1789. Canon Léman.
The Cradle of the Bible. Mgr. Legendre.
The Moral Law of the Family. P. Méline.
The Lust Things. Abbé A. Michel.
St. Paul. Abbé Tricot.
The Papacy. Abbé F. Mourret.
Holiness in the Church. R. Plus, S.J.
Greek Literature in the Early Church. Abbé G. Bardy.
The Christian Ixitin Literature of the First Six Centuries.
Abbé G. Bardy.
The Congregations of Priests, XVI-XVIli Century.
Canon Pisani.
The Church in the Early Centuries. Abbé Amann.
The Theology of the New Testament. R. P. Lemonnycr, O.P.
Pastors and People. Canon Magnin.
Mcdiccval Spirituality. Felix Vernet.
Ths Christian Life and the Spiritual Life. V. E. Masson, O.P.
Polytheism and Fetishism. M. Briault, C.S-SP.
Faith and its Rational Justification. Rev. G. Brunhes.
The Books of the Latin Liturgy. Rt. Rev. Abbot Cabrol, O.S.B.
Foundations of Thomistic Philosophy. A. D. Sertillangcs, O.P.

Catholic Eibrarp of Religious Knowledge
XX

FOUNDATIONS OF
THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
BY

A. D. SERTiLLANGES, O.P.
TRANSLATED BY

GODFREY ANSTRDTHER, O.P.

SANDS o’ CO.
15 King Street, Covcnt
Garden, London

B. HERDER BOOK CO.
15 O» 17 South Broadway
St. Louis, Mo.

Ribil Obstat

F. Edwin Essex, O.P.
F. Thomas Gilby, O.P., S.T.L., Ph.D.
Imprimatur

F. Bede Jarrett, Ο.Ρ.
Prior Prov. Angiitu.

Rlbil Obstat

F. Stanislaus W. Lamb, O.P., S.T.L.
imprimatur

^Andréas Joseph, O.S.B.,
Archùp. S. Andr. et Ed.

Edimdurûi,
die 27 Junii, 1931.

FKINTED IM ΰΚ3ΛΤ «IMTAIK BV
MOWTHVMBBltLAMb I XBSi UNITED,

tWCWTI.E-VPO*f-TV:«E

CONTENTS
MGB
.

Cn*F·
I. INTRODUCTORY

Π. BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
III. GOD

.

IV. CREATION

V.

PROVIDENCE

.10

·

·

-

·

·

·

*45

.

·

·

·

·

.

.

·

·

·

VI.

NATURE AND LIFE

....

VII.

THE HUMAN SOUL

.

VIII.

MORALITY

.

91
*35

T59
T99

233

FOUNDATIONS OF TIIOMISTIC

PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

THOSE who know St. Thomas well are at times
tempted to ask whether, in spite of his world­
wide reputation, he is really understood by many.
Indeed, we like to lose sight of his fame, and fondly
imagine that we are the first to discover his breadth
of outlook, and extraordinary subtlety.
People like to picture him as a good sort of man,
a simple, holy, uneccentric friar, quite ordinary, in
spite of his holiness. They hardly bother about his
mere mortal life, so much so that now it is impos­
sible to piece it together. This is a pity, and it is
a good sign that scholars are getting tired of mere
pamphlets and panegyrics. Yet this neglect is itself
instructive. St. Thomas’s life is so bound up with
his thought and ideas, that once you have grasped
them, you have understood the man. It is his
thought that matters. We need have no more
interest in his life than he had himself. Wc disI

Λ

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
cover him in his effects, as we find God in the
universe.
Catholics have a special reason for studying
St. Thomas; he is their own philosopher, and his
works are a family treasure: he is the “Catholic
Doctor ” par excellence. When many outside the
Church are taking an interest in him, it is surely
wrong for Catholics to neglect him. Leaders of
Catholic thought, and the whole Church through
them, owe much to him for their fundamental
principles, and Pius X has said that “ none can
depart from St. Thomas's teaching, especially in
metaphysics, without danger.”1
Every earnest, thinking man, who wishes to
know more about his religion—and every Catholic
implicitly professes to be such—must take at least
some sort of interest in this teaching. Not that he
is expected to study it deeply, for specialization in
this matter is the work of a few. All we mean is
that there is no excuse for ignorance, and in saying
this we put ourselves under an obligation of doing
our share to make this knowledge as accessible as
possible.

This is not a résumé : there are quite enough of
them already. They are not of the slightest use to
those who know the matter, and are ignored by the
beginner. Much less is this a learned treatise. We
have tried that elsewhere for scholars,2 and we arc
not doing it over again. But there is still another
way of treating a great philosophy. One can write
for a public consisting of just ordinary people—
neither advanced students nor wholly unlearned.
’ Encyclical Pascendi Gregis.
’ Saint Thomas d‘Aquin. Paris. Alcan.

2

INTRODUCTORY

Pascal wanted to forget that he was an author, and
in the same way we may write for the general run of
people, and not think of the reader as a student at
any particular stage.
As regards philosophy, the ordinary man is one
who, while not making it his special study, feels
that inevitable curiosity about it which we all have,
and which knowledge alone can satisfy. We are
not writing technicalities, as a teacher for students,
but merely putting the thinking man in direct contact
with reality and thought.
That is the simplicity we aim at. And Thomistic
philosophy is remarkably suited to such treatment,
for in St. Thomas, clearness and technical pre­
cision arc joined to the broad outlook, if I may use
the expression, of the intelligent man in the street.
Those who know already will easily see what lies
beneath our bare outlines: those who do not already
know must not expect to learn, as if they were back
at school, but I hope they will understand. What 1
mean is that they will not be in a position to teach
others, or to call themselves philosophers, but they
should have gained some real appreciation of this
veritable poem of St. Thomas.
I call it a poem, for it really is one, if read in the
right way. St. Thomas is, properly speaking, a
metaphysical poet, taking the word in its broadest
sense to signify one who interprets the universe;
a prophet of being—of God, humanity, nature.
Poet and philosopher here unite. He writes his
poem in abstract language, as Victor Hugo or
Pindar in image, Beethoven in sound, and Michael
Angelo in line and mass. Yet his poetry is nearer
reality, for he gives us, instead of an artistic inter­
pretation, which is arbitrary, a true account of
3

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
things. He analyses where others only depict : he
deduces where they introduce : he makes us under­
stand, where they make us sec: he reveals when
others sing. Yet always his theme is their theme.
He treats of the universe, of man, of divinity and
its attendant beings. He strives to create within us
a representation of all these things—a new world,
the double of this one, which will enable us, despite
our narrow limitations in time and space, to live in
the whole of it.
We want to reach the very soul of the poem of
ideas, to probe its spirit, to grasp its underlying
unity. This means that we shall dwell little on
detail and avoid discussion. If we can get at the
source, it will explain itself. Nor shall we trace the
historical growth of the doctrine, though quite
aware that it did not drop ready-made from heaven.
It simply is not necessary for our purpose.
A genius belongs to the ages preceding him before
he lives for the future. A work of genius is a
product of society, and the more it owes to society,
the more it has begged from men and things, the
greater it is. And it is precisely because it absorbs
everything and transforms everything into itself,
that it is always young and original. A genius is
full of life, and living consists in adapting and
assimilating, and thus recreating and manifesting
itself anew. He is more adapted than others to his
particular age, he is steeped in it and alive to its
wants, but nothing can satisfy him save the quest
of eternity, which is of every age, and that is what
makes him the concern of all.
Just as a genius can unite a variety of peoples
into one empire, so he can bind all ages together
into a permanent whole. He treads the same path
4

INTRODUCTORY

as his contemporaries, and it leads him towards the
eternal. He proclaims what his fellow men are
vaguely thinking about, and he is found to voice the
sentiments of all. Heedless of his own popularity,
he is self-sufficient and self-contained. He gathers
every ray of light he can find in his obscure
surroundings, and concentrates in himself their finest
qualities.
To profit by a time-honoured genius, then, we
have no need to go to history. All we need is to
be human beings. This is not to be taken as a slight
on the historical method, indispensable in many
ways, and extremely illuminative always. All we
say is that we can have the teaching without its
historical setting.
1 repeat that a Catholic work, because Catholic,
is universal in every way. It appeals independently
of any age to every age; there is something in it
like the liturgy or the Church. If we see that from
his friar’s cell, St. Thomas is in touch with every
age of Christianity, like a wireless operator at sea,
then are we ready to lend an car.
St. Thomas is profoundly original, for it is proper
to genius to make what it creates appear fresh and
verdant. It scatters seeds, which, though as old as
truth itself, seem capable of germinating for ever.
So fundamental are St. Thomas’s principles, that his
genius, like all genius, is its own and only explana­
tion.
But no one would dream of accusing him of that
pretentious originality which some people display in
order to achieve a reputation. He thought far too
intensely and disinterestedly; he was far too much
taken up with his object to care what others thought
of him. It is quite his own affair. Time is too
5

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
precious to waste in ostentation: he has quite
enough to do in tackling the difficulties of know­
ledge. He needs all his faculties to accomplish the
task of co-ordinating thought and being—a giant
undertaking, and an exceptionally impersonal one.
He was much too keen on reaching his end to strut
about on the way.
His very expressions are an indication. He
expounds and proves: he never "affirms” or
"declares.” He says: this is necessary; this is
impossible; or, it seems. All these express a
relation with things, not with the truth in his mind.
He knew none of those phrases so common with
us—“ one feels,” " one likes to think,’·’ “ one can’t
help thinking.” He had no use for personal ideas.
This is his strength, for impersonality is a
characteristic of truth, and a genius who stands for
truth is greater than one who stands only for
himself.
St. Thomas is sincere, and that is his most
effective weapon. For real intellectual work we
must get away from ourselves, into the realm of
ideas. It is reality that is intelligible, not the
Facts
subjective pretentiousness of a teacher.
speak: " Wisdom crieth out.” We can do without
any pedantic intermediary.
What St. Thomas says, properly understood,
seems evident to a right-minded man, precisely
because he puts forward the truth in the full light
of day, and does not treat is as a personal posses­
sion. He relies on you, not on himself. He draws
us out of ourselves, by deducing from principles
innate in us, something we had never realized before.
Hence the impression we get that his doctrine
satisfies some secret craving, answers some want
6

INTRODUCTORY

vaguely foreseen. Strictly speaking we learn only
what we have somehow possessed all along, without
being conscious oi it. We become convinced only
of what we implicitly held before. The more this
law is allowed its sway, the more is genius content
to put us in the presence of truth, the more fully
we grasp it.
There is another characteristic which naturally
follows from this. In steering clear of any sort
of personal vanity, St. Thomas avoids its usual
accompaniment. I refer to that exaggeration and
excluding of other points of view, so marked in
these days when every writer, piling Pelion on Ossa,
seems to push his books and himself. St. Thomas
was an impartial thinker; his judgment is never
warped; he never strains a point, nor has a bias.
He knows that one truth corresponds to another,
and that their nice juxtaposition and balance is the
only way of weighing them. Nature does not prefer
a mountain to a mole-hill, or make one out of the
other. It keeps its laws. All things are in propor­
tion; all things sincere and balanced. That is the
very essence of nature.
And St. Thomas was wise enough to follow
nature’s lead. He was determined that his idea
should correspond with reality in all its relations
and proportions. It must exactly reflect being;
otherwise his mind would be a distorted mirror.
There must be nothing misplaced, nothing due to
idle curiosity. The great, the small, the mediocre,
the sublime, must all be considered, and allotted
each its place and its degree of perfection.
It is a Thomistic principle that the proper object
of creation is not this or that creature in particular,
but the whole order of Being. In the same way,
7

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
the aim of Thomistic philosophy is not this or that
particular conclusion, but Truth.
We shall find St. Thomas just as interested in the
minutia as in the great questions, and he will show
us that these small details are not really small.
Smile if you like at the insect and his futile work;
yet the philosopher realizes that life is there, utilizing
the radiation and chemistry of the universe, part of
the equilibrium of cosmic forces, and that the breath
of the infinite stirs in these tiny bodies.
A philosopher’s business is to expound this
fullness in all things, and not to be too taken up
with just the large things. St. Thomas succeeded.
He stresses nothing unduly. He argues quite
simply, and betrays his interest quite naively; he
calmly applies far-reaching principles to small
nothings, till he persuades you that there are no
nothings, that everything is great and divine, and
reflects its Author.
St. Thomas is always calm, is never surprised.
His boldness is just as aggressive as Shakespeare’s
or Dante’s, who stop at nothing, but somehow his
does not seem like aggression. He dreams no
dreams like Dante: he secs. He is not disturbed
by his thoughts like Shakespeare: he judges calmly.
There is nothing of Hamlet about him.
Neither has he anything of Abelard or Kant, for,
besides being bold and calm, he is sure. In morals
and in metaphysics, where the need is more apparent,
he shows an extraordinary sense of value, which
has earned for him the title of the “ most prudent ”
(prudenfissimus). In practice as well as in theory,
in the appraisement of worth and just comparison
of values, his sense of proportion is manifest He
triumphs over confusion because he possesses order.
8

INTRODUCTORY
lie has a special gift for borrowing, arranging,
estimating and labelling, and then he takes the
chaotic elements of an obscure problem and welds
them into a harmonious whole.
We may perhaps derive some real benefit from
studying St. Thomas, even in an amateur way. Our
times are times of confused thought and topsy­
turvydom, despite the wealth of material. If anyone
find here a guide line, if ordinary people can find a
little light in these times of darkness, then will our
philosopher be greater by one more benefit con­
ferred.

9

CHAPTER II
BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

A. The Object of Human Knowledge

Philosophy confronted with things is thought con
fronted with chaos. To our minds things are in
chaos, for, though we notice that they are, super­
ficially, and, we presume, fundamentally in order,
still our minds are restless, because we cannot fully
comprehend this order. We may grasp its main
outlines, but we are at a loss when we come to
examine it more closely, and the farther we go into
it, the more we find ourselves faced by a mystery.
Yet, in spite of appearances, we all desire know­
ledge and want to satisfy this desire. Like
Mallarmé’s, our ideal should be to chant a “ hymn
of the relations of al! things.” We might well
emulate the ” esprit sphérique ” of Amiel, who saw
all and understood all, because he embraced all.
Though our task is apparently more modest, that is
what we are trying to do. and, of course, we can
hope for only a partial success. We wish to arrange
the parts of the world in perfect unity, estimate their
relative values and beauty, and unite them to their
God. This is the object of knowledge.
We shall specify this object, and sub-divide it as
10

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
we go along, but the main questions that will keep
coming up will be the following :
Of what stuff are all things made? Is it really
the same everywhere, or is reality composed of
disparate pieces? What principles of organization
does nature .obey? What ideas, and what leading
idea is found there? Whence comes the action
which operates there, and what are its forms? Is it
possible to account for this beautiful harmony by
some marvellous machinery? And lastly, according
to what plan does everything function, and what
task can be done by each part individually, and all
working together ?
These several questions present the problem of
causality, and they present it under four aspects,
just as we may ask about a statue: (i) What is it
made of? (2) What does it represent? (3) Who
made it? and (4) What is it made for? The whole
secret of the world lies in the answer to these
questions. When you have studied substance,
analysed its intricate composition, understood the
process pf its making, and found its maker, is
there anything more to be done?
Yes, there is one thing more, which we may best
explain by answering another question. Why ask
these questions, unless it is because wc already have
a certain knowledge of things? Then, should there
not be some correlation between the nature of things
and the knowledge wc have of them ? We surmise
that the process of discovery here corresponds to the
thing discovered itself, and we give as our reason
that knowledge is appropriation and adaptation, and
adaptation is always reciprocal.
We look at the world, but what do we mean
by “look”? We think about it; what does
it

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
“ thinking ” mean? And then comes the question,
what are we? What is this real thing which sees
and thinks precisely in so far as it sees and thinks?
What connection is there between the knower and
the thing known in the very act of knowing, and,
before this, in the capacity of knowing and being
known ?
This is an old problem. It was Plato’s startingpoint. Aristotle eagerly seized upon it, and while
he criticized his master, his own philosophy was
fundamentally a revised version of Platonism.
St. Thomas received the work, completed it, and put
it in a new form. Nobody has since surpassed these
united geniuses, and, unless we wish to go wrong,
we must confine our efforts to clearing up questions
of detail, which, in a matter like this, may be of
immense importance. But our great effort will be
to dig deeper and deeper for his meaning, which
can always be further penetrated; and, if possible,
to strengthen it.

B. The Nature of Knowledge

Here is a fact. I am myself, and nobody else.
I am conscious of my identity, of my unity, i.e.,
of my distinctiveness and difference from everything
else. Yet when I open my eyes, when I look, listen,
feel, smell, taste, or think, am I not in intimate
contact with something other than myself? I am
immediately conscious of this other than myself
which invades me. Something outside of me
becomes me; then I experience it; I live it, as a
secret joy or pain.
Still more, I do not even know that I exist except
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BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
by this invasion from without, which makes me
aware of myself by stimulating me to live the life
which it brings me. Should I know that 1 existed
if I did not think or feel? And should I think or
feel if I did not think or feel this or that? This
or that determines my action, and my action reveals
to me the subject of it. It is by being able to
appreciate things that I am able to appreciate my
own proper self. By determining me, the object
makes me visible to myself: its light illumines me,
and, in revealing itself to me, it shows me my own
mind. It is in this way that an appearance becomes
a self-appearance. Λ communication puts us on the
alert. Apart from that, we should be nothing but
darkness.
This is why scepticism and subjectivism, which
maintain that nothing is known or can be known
but self and modifications of self, are inimical to
life in all its phases, and undermine the very
foundations of knowledge. I should know nothing
of myself; I should not even know that I know;
I should be ignorant even of my very existence if
the evidence of something outside of me did not
arouse me to the consciousness of myself and my
actions. I exist in myself only after having existed
in something else. My thoughts return to me only
after going the round of the world. My conscious­
ness of myself is due to a certain external excitation,
and therefore evidence of some disparity between
myself and my object. I feel myself only by the
fact of becoming something else. I become myself
by becoming all things. Sleep, which partially cuts
me off from communication with the world, cuts me
off proportionally from communication with myself,
and T should be cut off from myself altogether were
13

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
it not for the part which, in sleep, I have taken
away from the world. Once the link with that which
is is recoupled, I regain myself in feeling myself he
who is.
None who reflects about this, seriously and
honestly, without sophistry or juggling of words,
will deny this first evidence. And a poet confesses
it. Shakespeare writes :
" For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath tra veil'd and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself.”*

This mirror is the object which we look at.
Knowledge has been defined as “ the reasoned
return of the intelligence upon the data of intuition."
What are these data of intuition? Is it ourself,
first of all? Is it not rather the external reality
that strikes us, both as child and grown-up? It is
the not-me, to use the jargon of philosophers, which
appears immediately to my consciousness; it is not
the internal conditions of its representation. The
thing known is the object; it is not the image or
the image-projector of the object. At the outset of
knowing I am relatively passive; I am acted upon
from without.
This, then, is a strange fact. Something outside
causes a disturbance within; a thing which is not
myself becomes, in some mysterious way, an
element of my very life. I look, I listen, I think,
which means, I live; and therefore that which
determines these acts determines my life. I must,
then, live that determinant, and so embrace other
things. I find myself actually something else,
without any change of nature taking place either
in me or in the other thing.
* Troilus and Cressida. III. 3.

M

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
What is this extraordinary phenomenon, to which
we get so used that we do not appreciate it? The
ordinary man sees nothing wonderful in the produc­
tion by a camera of innumerable replicas of those
who sit before it, and yet what a marvel it really is!
We ought to be just as surprised that beings, which
apparently have no connection with one another,
possess each a replica of the others and show a
capability of embracing everything, so as in some
way to become everything.
If only we could grasp the full meaning of the
Aristotelian phrase: To know, means, properly
speaking, to become! If I do not in some way
become what I know, I shall not know it. The
knowing is in me; it is me, it is my perfection, as
Being, as St. Thomas says, is a perfection of every­
thing which is. For the relation is the same between
my being and that which I am, and between my
knowledge and that which I become by my know­
ledge. Π I do not form, out of my own substance,
the stone, tree, or any object you like which becomes
me by being known, how can the consciousness of
that object result, as it needs must, from the
consciousness I have of myself? What can be
explained by the mere fact that the object lies
outside? And if it lay within, and did nothing but
lie there, and were not assimilated, I should be
ignorant of it. There must be a point of juncture
or suture. I have my allotted circle of existence,
out of which I cannot go ; the thing also is equally
limited, so that any sort of contact of consciousness
is impossible, unless there be sonie compénétration
of being.
St. Thomas insists that knowing, in its principle,
is being. The things we know truly mould some15

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
thing in us into a resemblance of themselves: they
communicate their form of being (species) to us, and,
because we are these things, and we operate
according to what we are, in performing an action
that is our very own, wc can conceive the object
such as it is in itself, according to its own proper
nature (quidditas, ratio).
Those who, like Duns Scotus, have combated
St. Thomas on this point, have not understood the
state of the question, and their explanations obscure
the issue. They are content to bring into contact
with the intellect an image of the object; they do
not speak of any assimilation; they attempt no sort
of synthesis. They repudiate the information and
identification of the knower and the known precisely
as such in the common act of knowledge. From this
it follows that they account only verbally for what
takes place. They are like a man who wants to fix
a negative without any knowledge of the chemistry
of photography. The activity which they attribute
to the mind is not to the point, for it is not a
question of the mind’s independent activity, but of
its activity in the other thing, and according to the
other thing. Nor is the “ contact ” these writers
speak of any more to the point, for we are not
concerned with the juxtaposition, like two doubles,
of object and intellect, but with how the object
affects the intellect, and how the intellect ideally
becomes it.
These lesser thinkers do not see that understand­
ing is a becoming, a modification of the subject in
conformity with the object. We must leave them
in their blindness, which promises no conquest
whatever to those who follow them. Being would
not be attained by knowing, if knowing did not
16

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

already belong to being. We hold, and find it
instructive, that there is a real compénétration
between the knower and the thing known; that
thought contains being in some way, and can there­
fore help us in defining it.
Is not this the reason for these fine thoughts of
St. Thomas : that the most perfect and intimate way
of possessing a thing is by knowing it; that the
contemplative life is the highest; that contemplation,
of itself, arrests other activities, admitting them only
in order to enable itself to continue and grow. In
fact, the “ possession ” of God will be in contempla­
tion, and it will be, none the less, completely all­
satisfying. Man’s noblest enjoyment, in this life
and the next, is to grasp by knowledge the creative
work, and the Creator Himself.
How does this compénétration come about, by
which knowledge and the fact of being known can
be conceived?
It might be best to approach a solution negatively,
by saying that he who becomes something else by
knowledge must not suffer any change of nature;
otherwise the process would be a metamorphosis,
and not knowledge at all. A body which is heated
participates in the surrounding heat, but it does not
know it. A chemical compound which undergoes
change becomes something else, but it knows
nothing about it. Yet is there any way of becom­
ing something else without renouncing oneself?
Can a being, while remaining wliat it is, be turned
into something else ? Can it put on something else
as a garment, or, better, as a new being? And has
this other thing any way of communicating itself
without losing anything?
We arc forced to suppose that there is something
17
b

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
on a common plane, above these two existences,
which can assemble them into a special, common
life. What is this something? What is it in the
thing understood, which, by coming into me,
becomes me, and represents it as a sort of substitute
or double, in such a way that I really know it,
though it be by a modification of myself?
St. Thomas replies: It is the real form of the
object known communicated to me, not as a natural
form embodied in matter, but intentionally, that is
to say, as an idea or intentio of nature. It is like
saying that when I look at a statue it comes into me
by its form, by which I mean, not the actual form
which gives the marble its figure—which cannot be
communicated—but the form which conveys to my
imagination a block of marble shaped to an expres­
sion of art.
Every object is a work of art, and this art has
an immanent principle, an infused idea, which can
be communicated to a subject, provided that he is
capable of receiving it.
This capacity implies that the subject must not be
so shut up within himself as not to be able to go
outside himself in any way. His own form of being
must not be entirely used up in determining his
matter, but must be free enough and independent
enough to live in a wider circle. In other words,
there must be certain forms of existence sufficiently
autonomous and plastic to be moulded into others,
and thus to communicate to the subject the thing
known according to some aspect or other.
Does this seem impossible? What is to prevent
a new idea determining a power which belongs to
a being already constituted, that is to say, already
making real one of nature’s ideas? Cannot one
18

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

idea be grafted on another, like an adjective on to
its noun? Nature's ideas determine matter, but
cannot a composite being, or even a simple one,
the subsisting idea, become matter as far as some
new determination is concerned?
Matter and form are relative terms. Quartz is
matter to granite, granite to a wall, the wall to a
house. Oxygen and hydrogen are matter to water,
water to flesh, flesh to man. Everything in nature
may become in turn die support and stay of
an ever increasingly complex whole. If we look
upon knowledge as an example of this, then, in
the act of knowing, the human soul, though
itself an intellectual form, becomes matter to an
intellectual form, namely, the form of the thing
known.
This intellectual engrafting is called by St. Thomas
intentional, by reason of its mode. While insisting
on this, we may call it objective, to denote that it
turns a thing into an object for us.
St. Thomas could sec only two extreme cases
where this further determination of a form might
he impossible. One was if the first constitution
of the being under consideration implied a total
absorption of its constitutive idea; that is to say,
if it was completely individualized and immersed in
its matter. The other was, on the contrary, a pure
idea, but one which contained all possible ideality,
and was in consequence incapable of receiving
anything. The latter case is that of God, Who
consequently really knows Himself, and all other
things in Himself. Under the first are included
all inorganic substances, which, having only the
minimum of immanent ideality which is totally used
up in determining them, cannot enjoy the luxury of
19

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

a participation in the ideality which surrounds them
“ To him that hath shall be given.”
We must bear in mind, when we talk like this,
that we arc dealing with the intangible. We cannot
hope to make things clear, for “ The principles of
things are hidden in an impenetrable secret,” and
we are here at the very heart of these principles.
The whole of philosophy is only an effort to push
back the obscurity of effects towards their causes,
without ever being able to dispel it. But know­
ledge is a (act : we do not hope to explain it,
conscious, as Goethe said to his friend Falk, that
“ there arc primitive phenomena whose divine
simplicity it is useless to wish to trouble or disturb.”
Nevertheless we may lay down the terms, mark out
the scope of inquiry, and conclude from *' this must
be ” to ** this is.”
Consequences
What follows from this as regards the constitution
of reality, and what can we gather, in the realm of
metaphysics, from this interpretation, to which there
is no alternative? It has been already made plain,
for the Thomistic doctrine has passed over little by
little from one of its correlative terms to the other,
from Being in us to Being in itself. It follows
from our analysis that reality, which is knowable,
since de facto it is known, must of necessity be
constituted at its foundation by that very element
which causes it to be known : in other words it is
itself an idea. Outside God and ourselves, an idea
is a thing, while a thing, in us and in God, is an
idea. At this stage, this will serve as a reasonably
accurate résumé of Thomism.
20

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
We have just said that the principle of knowing
and the principle of the thing known, in so far as it
is known, arc identical Wc know only by the idea,
taking the word in its broadest sense (species,
intentio). If, then, we really and truly know
things, it is because the idea is the basis of all
that is knowable, and consequently of all that is.
Nourishment cannot be something entirely differ­
ent in nature from that which it nourishes: there
must be something in common to bring them
together. Grass and the flesh of the grass-eating
animal contain the same elements. If reality, of
itself, nourishes thought, how can we avoid saying
that reality is thought; that reality is intelligibility
adapted to the intelligence; passive thought adapted
to active thought?
Our activity provides a test. We draw out ideas
from things, combine them and work them out
within ourselves, and re-embody them in action.
Does not the fact that the action succeeds, or
harmonizes with things, prove the objective validity
of the idea and of our judgments? If abstract
thought resolves concrete problems, how can we
fail to acknowledge its essential relation to the
concrete ?
By knowledge we obtain the subjective form of
an objective reality; it is, indeed, objective reality
itself, received into us, according to our nature and
its own. It is a synthesis of subject and object, a
common life of two realities, made for each other,
because they are kindred beings.
Aristotle says: the world is full of soul. The
world is imbued with spirituality and law; it is mind
and law, reason and art, the formed idea of an
intelligence, and we know this because the descend21

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
ing scale of intelligibility ascends again through us
to its source. Since we know by means of an idea,
since it is we who know, and reality that we know,
we perceive that everything participates in the same
essence.
The thing understood is adapted to him who
understands it, and when these two act on each
other in virtue of their capacity of understanding
and being understood, they coalesce. We under­
stand a thing by becoming it in its form of being:
the thing is understood by becoming our act of
understanding. The idea corresponds to the being:
the being is made for the idea, and the soul unites
the two. The unity is achieved in us because the
thing is made for us and depends on us. This is
a real unity, and manifests the fundamental unity
of the intelligible, of the intelligence, and of
being.
Being thinks, is thought, and outside that there
is nothing. In its fullness, in God, being is the
Thought of Thought, to use Aristotle’s sublime
expression. In all other intellectual beings it is
living thought, and in bodies it is lifeless thought,
but it is always and ultimately thought. Ravaisson
writes that the world is a non-thinking thought,
depending upon a self-thinking thought. “ The
world,” says Novalis, “ is a captive thought.”
God is a free thought.
We may say that since our souls exercise a
universal power over being, they are, in a certain
way, everything which they can become. The
profound nature of the soul is an anticipatory and
potential possession of everything that exists. The
soul is a latent world; its initial zero is only the sign
of a predestination to an infinite, which is expressed
22

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

in mathematics by double zero, joined together, oo.
The human soul, in its essence, is every idea and
every being. Soul, of its very emptiness, eagerly
summons idea and being to itself, to satisfy the
natural desire for its own completion. Its need to
know, to taste, to feel is only its need of self­
realization, of passing from potency to act, of
following its natural bent, and of finding itself.
Its need of God is only the need of achieving this
conquest of self and of all things, by going to the
very Source whence they flow, and where self and
everything else find their justification.
With what greatness does this truth endow us!
The depth of our mind is unfathomable, like the
world, and like God Himself. We are citizens of
the infinite: we are infinite, it is only gradually
that the knower realizes his universal power, though
he really possesses it from the first. He is at once
determined and undetermined; he is man, and he is
the world. As the object of thought, he is one
particular thing, but as the subject of thought he
is a universal thing : for we can only become some­
thing in so far as we are it already, and we
progressively become, or can possibly become, all
things.
Our extension in being is thus measured, not by
the narrow limits of our person, but by the vast
horizon which opens before us. Take away thought
and we are no more than the lowly beast, whose
domain is a den and an acre or so of forest. Take
away thought, and man is but a feeble nothing.
We alone, in nature, have the whole universe for
our world; other knowers have only certain districts,
while the non-knowers have no more than themselves
for world.
23

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
The intelligence itself is greater than anything
else that comes within its range. It is a star in
the heavens of nature, the harbinger of a new world.
Or better, it is the eye of nature, the eye that
nature lifts to heaven, the eye which has already
pierced the heavens, which belongs to heaven,
which is heaven, by its substance and power and
its content of celestial light, and is of the earth
earthy only by the organic means which it uses.
The intelligence reveals our affinity to all things;
it indicates the profound unity of being, to whose
hidden depths it opens the door.
We must there seek for an explanation, as well
as for an application, of this tendency of the mind
to unify whatever comes under its sway, and enclose
it in a more and more comprehensive framework,
in order the better to grasp it. If the mind is, by
its nature, adapted to its object, if there be a kin­
ship between itself and reality, we are led to conclude
that the tendency in us to unify things corresponds
to a unitive arrangement in nature. Inversely, if
there be a unity at the basts of everything, if every­
thing is idea, then the mind will find satisfaction in
bringing the phenomena of experience ever nearer
to ideas. And if, after this, we come across a real
idea, so rich that it comprises and explains every­
thing, we shall have found the perfection of know­
ledge, as well as the perfect being. We shall have
found the divine science, and God.
This in bare outline is the Thomistic structure,
and its foundation is here in the analysis of know­
ledge. The mind which tends towards unity as
towards an ideal, is forced in another way to tend
away from it. Its first step is to acknowledge
unity; then it makes an inventory of what it contains,
24

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

and finally it reintegrates the simplicity which it
lost by analysis.
We try only to unify the multiple, and we only
try, naturally and effectively, to unify that if it is
ultimately one. Hence, instead of groping its way,
our mind pierces to the very core, and unifies almost
unconsciously, just as we can remember what a face
looks like as a whole, without analysing its individual
traits. Once we have grasped this essential order
of unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity, we
need not search for the accidental connections which
follow from it. At least, perfect intuition would
have this result, otherwise the universe is an enigma.

The Moderate Idealism of Thomistic Doctrine
It will be seen that the conclusion drawn from
the interpretation of reality, as the object of know­
ledge, brings us to idealism. Things arc ideas.
Ihe world might be called objectively a real
appearance, just as subjectively it is a true
hallucination, it is an idea formed by Mind. But
Thomistic idealism carries with it none of the short­
comings that belong to the name : and also, because
it is idealism, it lacks all the shortcomings of
materialism.
It is proper to Thomistic teaching to envisage
things from such a height that it embraces in one
comprehensive synthesis the diverse positions which
customarily divide philosophies and men. Mind
and matter, body and soul, intelligence and will,
unity and multiplicity, movement and rest, deter­
minism and liberty, created and uncreated being,
which each in turn have become all-absorbing and
25

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
exclusive in other systems, arc here reconciled and
brought into harmony.
From the start this spirit of synthesis is shown
by the balance established between the consideration
of subject and object in knowledge, which enables
St. Thomas to escape both idealism and materialism,
by being, as it were, out of reach of both.
If we examine materialism from the point of view
of this initial problem, it is objectivism, that is to
say, an exclusive preoccupation with the object,
while idealism similarly considered is subjectivism,
an engrossment of all reality in the subject. The
subjectivist says: Everything is myself, since it is
I who think, and the object of my thought is only
what is within me. He ignores altogether the thing
thought of, or its resorbencc into himself. The
materialist says : Everything is matter, since I think
matter and find within me nothing but it. He
ignores the subject, as subject, which builds up
the idea from the matter outside of it.
The whole history of philosophy might be summed
up as an oscillation between these two extremes.
On one side, an entire confidence in the appearances
of external reality, and the monopoly of thought by
the study of objective relations. Such is naturalism,
and such was formerly the teaching of those whom
St. Thomas calls the ancient naturalists, Empedocles,
Heraclitus, Diogenes of Apollonia, Hippo, Critias,
and above all, Democritus. On the other hand,
the fanatical insistence on the subjective conditions
of knowledge, of the faculties and of self, and the
tendency to look upon reality only as a modification
of thought. This position is represented by Kantian­
ism, and among the Greeks by the schools of Elea
and Carneades.
26

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
Such a split into opposite camps is fatal, because
at the very outset it divides thought and things,
the knower and tiling known, as such. And that
is all that need be said. We are bound to acknow­
ledge the immediate evidence that we know, that
we know this, and this becomes us, and that neither
knower nor thing known loses its own nature. The
whole future study of knowledge is governed by
this elementary observation. It is the vertex of the
angle: produce the arms as far as you like, you
will but show' more and more its original correctness
or error.
Materialism begins in external observation. It
takes note of objects, among which are men, beings
capable of knowing. It analyses this object, man,
and imagines it has pieced together the objective
conditions in which he knows. It says: That is all
there is. Sensation is only a phenomenon like any
other, like heat or electricity: thought and will are
** secretions,” the soul a word born of ignorance.
I myself am a synthesis of states resulting from
the same objective conditions, which give rise to
thought and sensation. There is nothing else.
Yet even while the materialist is treating himself
as an object, he is still an observer, and therefore
a subject. He may like to overlook this fact, and
imagine himself a stranger to himself, but he cannot
help remaining a subject which observes.
How can this aberration come about? Because
at the very outset the obvious and unexceptional
opposition which exists in every fact of knowledge
is neglected, between that which knows, precisely
as knower, and that which is known, precisely as
known. Because the need is not recognized of
27

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
allowing a special place lor the subject precisely as
subject, the worker of an action which is sui generis
and irreducible to any other objective condition,
namely, knowledge.
Knowledge does not go on within me as a
phenomenon which comes from elsewhere and is
entirely conditioned before it comes to me : it is
also conditioned by my conceiving it, and it is 1
who manifest it under an entirely new form, a form
which escapes all observation except my own, which
is subjective and hence unyielding to any explanation
merely from outside.
Knowledge has objective antecedents, and is itself
objective, but it is equally subjective. By forget­
ting this, or not taking it sufficiently into account,
people come to deny thought, and even sensation
and life for what is peculiarly their own. They do
away with the soul, and finish with a radical falsifica­
tion of reality, the definition of which can be found
only at the very heart of being, and by contact with
its essential elements. “ There is no such thing as
brute matter,” wrote Emile Boutroux, “ and that
which makes being of matter communicates with
that which makes being of spirit.”
Now as regards idealism. It starts by supposing
that the first, if not the only object of philosophical
inquiry is the thinking subject, or, better, the
phenomena which we attribute to it, so much so
that nothing can be conceived or granted except by
or through this first object. This can go to great
lengths; in the first place we may conclude that
knowledge is in no way related to things, but only
to my own mental states. As the Platonists held:
knowledge is relative to ideas. With this difference
that, whereas, on the Platonic hypothesis, ideas exist
28

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

of themselves or, as some maintained, in God, here
they exist in us, and all human knowledge is thus
reduced, in a manner, to psychology.
Further, since reflection consists in placing an
interior object before one and thinking of one’s
thought as of a thing, if you say that the thing
is inaccessible, you must say that even our mental
states are inaccessible, and that true science, strictly
speaking, consists not in knowing exactly, but in
living. And so real knowledge becomes the un­
reflecting rhythm of the ego.
This leads to the ancient error that everything
which is seen is true, even contradictories. If each
one knows only his own mental states, he can judge
only of them, and only in so far as he is affected.
Every such judgment will therefore be immediate
and infallible. Hence all states of knowledge will
be valid, but we shall know nothing of their import.
It was sufficient for St. Thomas to have enunciated
these consequences to justify his going back to a
position which did away with them. But what can
this position be? It is simply this: Knowledge
implies immediate, objective data: not everything
is subject or modification of subject. Now since
from another point of view we are forced to hold
that these objective data can be known only by
becoming subjective, the only explanation is that
subject and object, in the act of knowing, form a
real synthesis. Tiicre is between them a constitutive
relationship, absolutely fundamental, a relationship
in being. This means that being is idea, as idea is
being; that the stuff is common to both, and hence
one can adapt itself to the other. The real can be
in us without ceasing to be in itself, because its
existence in itself implies an essence or form of
29

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
existence, which we can participate in, which we
live in common with the object, and which knits us
together.
It will be obvious that the problem of knowledge
plays a leading part in the Thomistic system, just
as it does in that of its antagonists. Everything,
explicitly or implicitly, comes back to this. We
often have the feeling of facing a closed system,
but there is a way in, as in a split-ring. To ask,
what is being, is to ask, what is this which appears
to us. And how can we answer without first saying
what we mean by appear, and what appearance gives
or does not give to reality; so that we can say:
This is the objective residue, and that belongs to
the subject, and that is their common property;
and such, finally, is being.

C. Particular Conclusions, giving the plan of
Thom is tic Tea ch i ng

This initial position leads to far-reaching conse­
quences. To bring them out one by one, as they
come within the scope of our experience, is to
establish in its true order the whole of philosophy.
St. Thomas has by no means done that, and even
a superficial knowledge of the universe shows it to
be so astonishingly complex that we should not
expect it of him.
St. Thomas’s teaching, taken in its entirety, is not
a philosophy but a theology, which uses philosophy
as its handmaid. St. Thomas never speaks of him­
self as a philosopher; the Philosophi, for him, were
a class apart : he is Doctor Catholicus or Theologus,
concerned with Sacra Doctrina. Theology avoids
3°

BEING AND KNOAVLEDGE

the critical point of view and its accompanying
analytical method. Its tenets are received, not
discovered, believed, not criticized. Its content
embraces the whole object of knowledge, but
views it from the particular angle of divine revela­
tion, from which angle it appears most untried and
co-ordinated, and at once rinds a proper place for
human nature in so far as it can know, since it is
properly classified in the order of being. We know
that the classification of things according to truth
is the same as according to being. If the order of
beings is known by divine faith, then our condition
as thinking beings, our capacity and our limitations
will be likewise known.
Further, even in philosophy, the state of these
problems in St. Thomas’s day did not require the
elaboration of a critical teaching, and he had no
temptation to follow this line of knowledge. There
existed in intellectual circles a unanimous acceptance
of the conditions of thought. It was better for
him to set to work to solve the problems of his
time. On occasion, when the need arose, St. Thomas
justifies his principles. He lays down the main lines
which subordinate knowledge as a whole, and its
characteristics, to the initial fact of the mode of
thinking, but, while doing so, he took things for
granted and used them. He did not mind antici­
pating. only he took care to advance nothing which
might later be contradicted; and he anticipated not
only himself, but the work of the future, being
aware of the solidarity of human thought and the
unity of knowledge.
In the chapters which follow, as we do not wish
to depart too widely from St. Thomas’s method of
procedure, and as it is not our design to present
31

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
his philosophy in its entirety, we may abandon the
genetic method sketched in this first chapter. We
have all the more reason for doing so, since we can
thus notice a few of the more salient characteristics,
which when brought together may furnish a scheme
of his teaching.
If knowledge may be called the return of being
upon itself, being that is intelligence on the one
hand and intelligibility on the other, then, the
greater the being or the perfection (which comes
to the same thing, since to perfect is to make to
be), the greater its intelligibility and intelligence.
And vice versa. Being and perfection, intelligence
and intelligibility, go together and are, so to speak,
only one thing. The more a thing is, the more it
can be known; and the more knowable it is, the
more it knows itself and all things. The all-being
is also the all-intelligent and all-intelligible. On
the other hand, as we recede towards non-being,
the ultimate state of which is pure potentiality, we
proportionally recede towards the unknowable. At
a certain point active knowledge ceases. Then there
is only an immanent idea called a form, or, from
another point of view, an end. In the extreme case
mentioned, there is not even that. There corres­
ponds to the quasi-nothing of pure potentiality,
beyond the nothing of active knowledge, the quasi­
nothing of cognoscibility.
It is precisely this which experience shows us.
St. Thomas explains that we understand by the
impression which things make upon us. This
impression gauges their intelligibility and our
intelligence. It is the subject or the object which
sets the limit as the case may be. The conditions
of knowledge make us realize that the objects of
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BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

experience are not entirely intelligible, and that we
ourselves are not pure intelligence. There is in
both a residue of the same nature, which conditions
knowledge, active and passive, and which character­
izes and limits it in all its branches. This is
matter.
Our minds grasp the abstract nature of each
individual thing which is represented to us. We do
not grasp its individuality, though it is identical
with the thing. The individual is for us " in­
effable,M since it implies an element which seems
a stranger to tliat by which we know, and which
represents a sort of degradation of it which we
cannot grasp. We notice a similar waste in our­
selves. We cannot completely understand ourselves
at all: there arc depths of unconsciousness in our
individuality which we can neither sound nor reach,
and uur mind is there entombed.
If we realize that the form of existence of things
by which wc understand them is endowed with a
sort of infinity, and that it represents, in its simple
definition, an infinite series of closely allied proposi­
tions, which particular things one after another bring
to reality but never exhaust, wc come to the un­
expected conclusion that the infinite is easier to
grasp by the mind than the finite, and that the
principle of the finite, matter (which, it is true, is
in another way infinite), is for us in this life the
chief barrier of knowledge.
What is this obscurity in us and things which
limits our knowledge to universals? And what
exactly is the place of an intelligent being in the
hierarchy of things?
The obvious answer is that the living spirit and
intelligible reality reach a stage beneath which they
33
c

TH0MIST1C PHILOSOPHY

live in a strange and inexpressible state of weakness.
The light of the understanding has its penumbra
in the senses and darkness in matter. Matter is a
residue of mind, and a degeneration of it. When
we seek to decipher nature, we find in everything,
including ourselves, this obscurity, belonging to
phenomena and to nature, in all its varied aspects.
Wc cannot grasp it, yet it underlies thought as it
underlies being.
The two aspects of nature, act and potency, are
thus brought out. The genesis of the idea and
the genesis of the thing show us these two sides
of being. We reach the individual by a power that
is half-blind and only semi-conscious, sensation. We
never master it : we attain to our individuality only
superficially, and by non-intellectual means.
This last fact is certainly the most striking, for
our individuality is within us, and ought not to need
pursuit. Yet we do pursue after it, and cannot
overtake or capture it. Were we able to discover
ourselves we should discover everything. To com­
prehend ourselves in our knowing states would be
to comprehend the world. But everything slips
away from us, ourselves included, because a vista,
in a way infinite, opens before us.
At the beginning of our existence as thinking
subjects we know nothing. We first house impres­
sions and vague sensations. Next we gradually
elaborate them, or rather we leave life to elaborate
them spontaneously for us, and form an experience.
The outside world dawns upon us, through the
animated body, which apportions its qualities and
rhythm by means of sensations. As the body is
joined to the world, as the matter of the world is
joined to its immanent idea, so the interior stock
34

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
of sense experiences, joined to our thinking soul,
excites, by abstraction, the general idea, which really
throws light on surrounding reality and its causes.
But even now, in order that the idea, already
received, may be used for actual knowledge, it must
still come into contact with the images, whence it
springs. It will be extinguished as soon as any
sort of trouble, momentary or lasting, overcasts or
effaces the imagination.
The only way of accounting for these facts is to
say that the intelligibility of one part, and the
intelligence of the other are not entirely un­
shackled, and are equally subject to restrictive con­
ditions. Such an intelligible form does not exist
of itself, as Plato believed. We must extract it.
The intelligence is not independent in its function­
ing: it emerges from an obscure zone, above which
it can raise itself only with difficulty, in constant
danger of falling. Ideas in nature are mixed with
certain tilings from which we must disengage them :
our ideas are shrouded with a mist which obscures
their light. Our conceptions are not intuitions and
never more than partial. By abstraction we parcel
out what is really one thing, fix what is really
successive, hold up time and cut up substance.
We make a heap of debris out of what was a living
nature.
Our mind has in consequence a painful journey,
groping from one glimmer to another, from one
point of view to another, but the attempts at com­
bining called judgments and reasoning, although
restricted, are pushing always towards the light.
Abstraction brings the whole richness of nature into
a restricted conformity with out imperfect selves.
We have an inkling of this underlying richness,
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

but we assert its presence rather than actually
attain it. Hence it might seem that we have been
over-enthusiastic about being. We must, however,
distinguish. Thought is sublime by reason of its
object and its possibilities; it is weak in its mode of
functioning and weak as regards what it grasps at.
This apparent paradox is due to the fact that we
and our immediate object are irreducibly composite,
and this composition limits knowledge. Where the
opaque element, matter, is removed, the object
becomes entirely intelligible, and the subject
entirely intelligent. The latter, being itself trans­
parent, will, as knower, become equal to its own
intelligibility, and will be able to grasp itself. It
will be able to exercise the same power outside
itself; and that without effort of discursive reason­
ing, or mixture of unknowable elements. Intellectual
intuition would be a living contact, just as abstrac­
tion is a dead one. De facto we have no such
intuition, and in the Thomistic system, wc derive
our certitude of the composition of things, and
of our own composition, from the principles of
knowledge and its modes, at the same time as the
certitude of the essential and universal ideality of
things.
This dualism is called hylomorphism, and taking
off from things compounded of matter and form,
the domain of our philosophy of being, stretches
both ways. Upwards towards ideas more and more
disengaged and pure, and downwards towards the
darkness of matter. The musical scale of creation
has matter for its bass, and God for its highest
note. In the realm of created things, the idea will
take us as far as the intellectual human soul in a
body, the disembodied soul, and the angel. To
36

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
matter belong extension, number, movement, and
time, which arc attributes of beings in motion.
This matter-idea dualism, fundamental to Thom*
ism, must stop at a point. If pushed too far it will
have dangerous consequences, and will contradict
its starting point, the supremacy of idea. What is
found at the origin of a system must find a place
also at the end, when the circle is completed. This
teaching therefore takes dualism only as far as it
should be taken, and we find out when to stop it
by again reflecting on the fact of knowledge. For
though matter resists intelligibility, it is no stranger
to it. Matter and form are intimately connected.
Our mind, conceiving the abstract through the
things of sense in which the individual lurks,
communicates with matter and unites it in the
general idea of being. When thought affirms a
thing to be, even though it affirms it to be unthink­
able for it, it none the less admits it to be thinkable
in itself. Mind and matter, viewed as being, differ
only in degree and perfection. Since being is the
object of our mind, and matter is a form of being,
we must, indirectly, understand matter. A pure
intelligence, an absolute mind could comprehend
a material thing. Matter and form are equally
transparent to it. Sicut tenebra ejus, ita et lumen
e/us. This is God’s way of knowing.
It is universally true that knowledge is the return
of being on itself, and the tendency to do away with
the duality of subject and object, which appears in
knowledge, is perfectly resolved in God, Who
understands all things, and is absolutely simple.
The human soul, as St. Thomas so often says,
is at the threshold of intellectuality. We have
noticed some of its limitations. Its knowledge of
37

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
the world must come through the body, and there­
fore the relations of things can only be made
manifest by the relations of the body. The series
of things, once outside and now within us, reflected
in the thought which abstracts them, reveals the
world to us, and it can do so only according to
the mode imposed on it. The measure of our
physical make-up, whether specific or individual,
measures our aptitude to experiment, and hence to
think, the marvellous whole, which comes to us
through our body, and of which the body is itself
a part. Our experience will depend on the facility
we have of bringing the images of things to us,
or preserving and combining them in us, so as to
form our inner world. Our experience is the flow
of the universe into us, unconsciousness the ebb.
The phenomena of the world are always affecting
our senses, while forms and the reasons of things
affect our minds. Nature caters for body and soul
by supplying mental, and not merely bodily, food.
It is our imperfection, not nature’s, that prevents
full assimilation.
But nevertheless, we arc spirits all the same; our
minds, in themselves, exclude matter; their action
transcends physical change; it is autonomous, and
belongs to the abstract. Let us keep on repeating
that we know this to be true, because the mind’s
object is universal, and because the object and
subject must correspond, since the object, in the
act of knowing, is a development in the subject
itself, and what our soul conceives is formed out
of our own substance.
Hence the incorruptibility and immortality of the
soul, which follow necessarily from its behaviour
in the act of knowing. It is a little lower than the
38

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
angels, as the Vulgate renders Psalm viii. It serves
therefore as a natural link between forms of exist­
ence, which are forms of matter (the soul is form
joined to matter), and forms without matter.
Under this last head come God, and below Him,
the *' vault ” of created being.
The passage from forms of existence in general
to the angels, forms which are self-subsistent,
neither material nor joined to matter, is explained
by St. Thomas as follows:
First, form, idea, is the basis of being, and
matter is only a sort of degeneration, a potency
corresponding to an act, a relatively non-being, a
prospective being, as opposed to a being really in
act, or a perfection. Therefore secondly, it is
form which gives being to the composite of matter
and form, just as in the universe, it is act which
explains potency, and is prior to it. It follows
thirdly, that matter cannot subsist alone, since it is
then without being, but form can subsist, the only
condition being that it must be sufficiently perfect;
for it is an imperfection in a form that makes it
need a support. A material form is the determina­
tion of the matter it informs, its act; by itself it
has no subsistence or proper perfection. The human
form is relatively, and eventually, self-subsistent; it
can subsist alone, though this is not natural to it.
It must have a body in order to show and develop
itself by action, and to make up the complete human
being. Above the human soul is pure form, totally
free from matter properly so called.
The consequences are obvious, for, since the
knower's clearness of vision and the clarity of the
thing known are both limited by matter, take away
matter, and they are on an equal footing, are like
39

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
each oilier, and combine. The angel is a real idea
present to itself, fully knowable to itself, and typify­
ing, in value and form, though in indefinitely varied
degrees, that intelligible knower, which is the ideal
being. In an angel, intellectuality is not a function
or a superimposed and partial activity; it is its very
nature. “ It has not intelligence,” says St. Thomas,
*' it is intelligence.” It follows that it must be
itself, and be entirely evident to itself. Again,
everything it knows must be equally evident and
quite transparent, seeing that the obscurity of being,
in subject or object, conies only from the obscurity
of matter. Instead of our clumsy groping after
truth, this doctrine finds room for an intellectuality
which is all light, where the idea is the whole being,
where the idea is the subject itself, and no longer
implies that unknowable element which bars our
entrance at the very threshold.
St. Thomas’s doctrine on the angels is based on
a comparative analysis of spirit, pure and simple,
and spirit joined to material conditions. By taking
away from the whole what is passive and material—
a loss which is really a gain—we reach pure spirit.
We complete the work by removing the limitations,
and this, done in detail, may rightly be called
building a world.
There is one last step to mount. This is not
really a step, it is true, because it is transcendent.
God is above intelligence and intelligibility, because,
as source of being, he is above being. But inas­
much as we take the word being to include its
source, and qualify it as self-subsistent being, we
may equally well use the terms subsistent intelligence
and subsistent intelligibility or truth.
The angels, though real ideas, have their sub40

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE

sistence, not in themselves, but from without. The
idea which they represent, which they arc, can be
thought of as existent or as only possible, and
must therefore come into being by the power of
something else. What has need of being made
real, does not make itself real. In this the angel,
though quite spiritual and immaterial, bears a like­
ness to matter. It is also potential as regards the
existence which it receives, as matter is potential as
regards the form which something in act gives to
it. But, if an angel receives its existence from
something outside, this something, if similarly
dependent, makes us seek higher still; and since
we cannot go on for ever in a series of causes, we
must come to a /iri/, where essence and existence,
idea and actual being, are absolutely identical.
And so wc reach the summit of a spiral composed
of three formations. These are intelligent beings,
intelligences, and, at the summit, intelligence itself.
Our doctrine impels us to this flight towards a
world above. But, while we acknowledge that it
is there, wc learn that it is closed to our intuition,
and that we cannot have any direct contact with it.
What is in itself the most knowable, is for us the
most unknowable, because its perfection blinds us.
We are as much dazzled by too much light as by
sudden darkness. We know spirits and God only
as postulates, which arc our sole means of naming
and qualifying them. This is what is meant by
Thomistic analogy, to which we must return in the
next chapter. This is important for all higher
philosophical thought.
This analysis of thought and being opens up all
the problems which thought will have hereafter to
resolve. There lies the whole of metaphysics, the
41

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

study of which consists in unravelling the conditions
of being, the object of consciousness, of being as
being, and which gives a complete answer to the
question: What must necessarily follow from that
which actually is. If that which is, precisely as the
object of consciousness, appears to us, in the very
act of knowing, as an idea made real, as an existing
essence, limited by its matter, then, by passing from
this first conception to the postulates it necessarily
implies, we shall be able to reconstruct all reality,
including the Supreme Reality.
Philosophy is the art of discovering the essential
links between things, and of joining them together
like a rosary with its Paters. The idea is a Paler.
The principal value of the idea here is not its
content, but its important position in relation to
primary causes. To study its nature, scope and
value, is to rise to the source of things, of which
it is the reflection.
If the soul did not thus reflect upon itself, what
would it think of, and how high could it rise?
Should it refuse to conquer itself, it would be power­
less to conquer anything at all that is above it. It
would be reduced to mediocrity. Then all man's
work would be for his belly, as the Bible puts it,
which is a summary way of saying his physical life
and the external actions which characterize it.
Considered uniquely as the instrument of the
rational animal, intelligence is the servant of
animality. It does nought but perfect and enlarge
the work of the senses: it is a universal hand, as
Aristotle calls it. The internal images, which the
soul uses, result from bodily actions, and idea is
only a superior means at the service of these actions.
If so, what becomes of our wonderful vocation and
42

BEING AND KNOWLEDGE
privilege, situated as we are, on the confines of two
worlds ? Aristotle has defined human intelligence
as a hand; he also says, thinking of our capacity
for the ideal, that man only makes full use of his
powers by going beyond himself, which implies first
overtaking himself. By reflecting on himself, as
knower, he finds his taking-off point, and is directed
towards invisible realities.
By this very fact, the theory of knowledge bears
also a moral character, partly, of course, because
ethics are based on knowledge, but also, and
primarily, because it leads us to the life of the
spirit, which in turn leads to God, and compels us
to contemplate our relations with Him.
" Ideas,” wrote Schopenhauer, in the margin of
a Plato, “ are realities which exist in God. The
world of bodies is like a concave glass which spreads
the rays emanating from the ideas. Human reason
is a convex glass which reunites them, and re­
establishes the original image, although it is dis­
torted by refraction.” St. Augustine says, with
more authority, thinking also of Plato: “The
doctrine of ideas is so rich that none can become
wise without understanding it.” St. Thomas quotes
this phrase with approval. For him ideas are almost
everything, since they are the source of the ideas
by which man understands, and at the same time the
source of being. In every created being, essence
comes first, and is the object of knowledge: then
comes existence. In this way everything has an
ideal beginning which gives it its status in being.
What we call beginning is really only a continuation,
because a being must be thought of before it can
exist. Its true beginning is in the mind. In the
beginning was the word. Hence every idea in a
43

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

created mind is a divine creation, and an indirect
communication from God. Our conception of things
follows their existence, which in turn follows their
conception by the divine mind.
Thus our ideas depend on God’s. If there were
not in God reasons for all things, there would be
neither object to embody ideas nor subject to
conceive them. God’s ideas found things, things
thought, and thought action. For, as Novalis
observes, “ incomplete theory wards off practice,
but complete theory brings it back.”

-M

CHAPTER III
GOD

In qualifying being, in the way he has done,
St. Thomas inevitably and by anticipation, has
qualified the Source of being. But a central problem
like this dominates the whole of science, theoretical
and practical, and must be treated apart. Indeed,
the entire Thomistic teaching is but a long treatise
on God, for we cannot study being, in its various
manifestations, without referring constantly to its
causes, and that brings us to the first Cause. The
doctrinal section called theodicy is therefore only a
framework. Everything else is really there and is
deduced from it, and everything comes back to it.
Il is most important to grasp its main lines, which
are the main lines of the whole of knowledge.
Seeing that we are presenting only the main theses
of Thomism, three principal questions here call for
our attention.
1. Is it possible and necessary to prove the exist­
ence of God ?
2. What can be known about God?
3. What value can we accord to this kind of
knowledge, as compared with our knowledge
and certitude of natural things, and what
value has it in relation to what God really is ?
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

I. Need

we

Posit, and can
Problem ?

we

Solve this

A. Can God's Existence be proved?

We have not to wait for Kant and modern
criticism to call in question the possibility of
proving the existence of God. The arguments
used, when they depend on a particular philosophy,
lead to a discussion of that philosophy, but if we
confine ourselves to the thesis itself, I believe we
shall find nothing stronger than, or indeed any­
thing really different from, the objections which
St. Thomas puts to himself in the Summa.1
He asks: How can you prove God’s existence,
or anything whatsoever, without starting with a
definition, without positing an essence which, it
will be proved, demands existence, without suppos­
ing a logical order, an order of necessity which
requires God, and which is therefore anterior to
God? Now God, if He exists, cannot be defined:
He is incomprehensible. If God is, His essence is
none other than His being; for every determined
essence implies limit or exclusion. If God exists,
He is not preceded by any necessity resulting from
the nature of things, since, if He is, then the entire
nature of things comes from Him. There is, con­
sequently, nothing upon which to build a demon­
stration of His existence. We do not know what
should be seen to exist in order that God may exist.
All that we could demand as necessary would not
be God, except in name. Where can the argument
start ?
1 la. q. 2. a. 2.

46

GOD
Secondly, to demonstrate one thing from anothei
is to establish a relation or proportion between them.
The earth is hot : I set out to prove that its heat
comes from the sun. I can do so because there is
a proportion between the heated body and the body
which supplies the heat, and therefore a possible
passage of heat from one to the other. But if 1
affirm the world is, and set out to prove that it
has an infinite being for its cause, i.e., a being out
of all proportion to it, how can the passage be
made? The argument leads us nowhere, since it
tends to the unknowable. We cannot compare what
is caused with what is the cause; that is to say, we
do not know whether there is causality, or whether
this definite relation, causality, is here applicable.
We know even that it certainly is not applicable,
for there cannot be a definite relation between two
terms of which one is infinite.
Thirdly, if there is a God, we must hold that He
exists of Himself, i.e., by His very nature. There­
fore His being and His nature are identical.
Therefore, to know the nature of God is the same
as to know His existence. Now we admit that
God's nature is inaccessible. Avicenna had said,
and St. Thomas repeats: “ The same reality answers
this double question: Is it? What is it? ” Under
these conditions is Pascal far wrong in saying: “ If
there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible,
and we cannot know what He is or whether He
is ”?
Lastly, the difficulty becomes still more striking
if we observe that every demonstration depends
ultimately on experience, seeing that the principles
employed can have no other origin. Those who
imagine that principles drop from heaven, under
47

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

the name of innate ideas, may believe that these
may help them to ascend thither, but if experience
is our starting-point, and our domain the world of
experience, our principles will not take us any
farther than their nature imports or their power
allows. To make them lead us to what is transcend­
ent is to violate them, and that is really to abandon
them and lay down an arbitrary conclusion. It is
a logical fault in every matter to prove something
about the object by principles which belong to
another kind of object, like using mathematical
arguments in morals. Here the mistake would
seem much graver. We claim to pass, by means
of experimental principles, to an object, which, by
its very nature, is outside experience. We use
principles of one genus to prove an object which
transcends all genera. We speak of causality,
finality, necessity, participation, etc. To apply
them to what is transcendent is a petitio principii,
or begging the question. It is a contradiction
even, for these relations can belong only to what is
relative, and God, if He exists, cannot be related
to anything, because He is infinite and therefore
absolutely outside the framework, with no definable
link with anything at all; outside the logical order
which claims to include Him, and dictate its laws
to Him.
To sum up, to deduce God's existence is to
deny Him : therefore we cannot have any real
demonstration of it.
These arguments, which in substance arc
St. Thomas’s, are surely disquieting, and not
without force. Kant succumbed to them, Pascal
half succumbed, and in contemporary thought
48

GOD

objections of this kind meet with ready credence.
Let us examine St. Thomas’s answer to the ages
which followed him, in quietly solving his own
objections.
Here again the gravity of the question justifies
our elaboration of St. Thomas’s replies; but if our
exposition seems full compared with the brief
answers given by St. Thomas, we feel, on the
contrary, bearing in mind all that follows from it,
and the difficulties of to-day, that we only feebly
sum up in this work of synthesis, where every
solution has far-reaching consequences.
The first objection is based on the impossibility
of defining God, and is, to that extent, unanswer­
able. St. Thomas, more than anybody, more than
certain deists would desire, insists on the unknow­
ableness of God. On this point he goes to the
extreme limit, and would applaud wholeheartedly
the pungent little dialogue of Leonardo da Vinci :
“ What is the undefinablc thing which would cease
to be if one could formulate it? The infinite, which
would be finite if one could define it.” But it
remains to be proved that every demonstration of
a thing depends on a definition of that thing, and
this cannot be proved. There are two kinds oi
demonstration, one which tries to establish a simple
judgment of existence, and another which attempts
to give the reason for that existence. An example
would be if I, not content with showing by experi­
ence or otherwise that man is mortal, undertake to
show the intrinsic reason, and natural necessity of
his immortality. In the latter case I must obviously
begin with a definition. What is man? The accurate
answer to this question puts me in a position to
49
d

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

decide whether death is just a frequent accident
or an unavoidable fatality. And in order to define
man, I must have recourse to notions anterior to
him, which include him—such notions as living,
natural body, four elements. I envisage “ man ”
as a logical network which itself corresponds to a
network of objective conditions, and which obliges
man, so to speak, to be mortal, by obliging him to
be what he is.
God’s existence certainly cannot be proved by this
form of argument, and, were there no other, the
objection would hold good. But the other kind of
demonstration offers a way out. To establish a
simple fact, a definition is not necessary, at least,
a definition of the thing; and that is what the
objection must needs suppose. Obviously we
should know what we are talking about, and, in
consequence, define our terms. We want to prove
the existence of God: then we must say what we
understand by *' God.” But this definition is not
necessarily a definition of His nature; it may be
nothing more than an expression of a function. I
call God the first cause, whatever that may be, of
the movement of beings, of their existence, of the
order they manifest, of the hierarchy of their values,
etc. That gives an object to the proof but it is
not a definition of God : it does not endow Him
with an essence that can be expressed in concepts;
a determinate being; much less a being resulting
from a necessity anterior to it, from an order of
things that include Him. Thus the whole objection
falls to the ground. It supposes an a priori, or
better, ex prioribus proof, while the proof of God’s
existence is a posteriori, a posterioribus : it starts
with effects, not with causes. I do not set out to
50

GOD

derive the necessity of God from a logical order
or a reality anterior to Him. 1 undertake to deduce
this necessity from what is, and from the logical
consequences of what is. That is quite a different
thing.
It is objected : you do not know what you must
know to exist in order to prove that God exists.
But I do. I must show that some sort of principle
exists of the unexplained being which I posit, under
all the forms in which this being is presented to my
observation, and in which it lacks a sufficient ex­
planation. Then again, it is quite beside the point
to tell me that everything I can demand as necessary
would be God only in name. I demand nothing
nominally in the sense in which you take the word.
In this sense God is not named, and we affirm it
with St. Thomas, even at the risk of shocking the
timid. St. Augustine said, long before you, speak­
ing of God: “ if you understand Him. it is not
He.” I demand something quite different. 1
demand a cause sufficient to explain obvious effects.
This cause can be anything you like so long as it
plays its proper part. Far from wanting to define
it, I undertake to prove that, if it is going to play
the part reality assigns to it, it must be incapable
of definition. How can I, then, characterize it, and
build up a purely natural theology? We shall see;
but at the moment 1 answer: Uniquely by its effects,
and in no sense by itself.
That seems to me enough for the present : it will
become clearer as we go on.
What about the second argument? It states
that the lack of proportion, of definite relation,
between God, if He exists, and what is said to
demand His existence, is an obstacle to any proof
5i

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

of His existence. Causality is a relation, and there
is no relation between the infinite and the finite.
I reply: It is perfectly true that God is not pro­
portioned to the creature, that there is no reciprocal
relation of God with the creature, any more in the
order of causality than in any other order. That
too we take upon ourselves to prove, so far are we
from denying it implicitly in our outline of proof.
We do not find it at all embarrassing. On the
contrary, we should like to retort, and ask whether
no contradiction appears in saying, on the one hand:
If God is, then He must be infinite, and on the
other: An infinite God cannot be demonstrated by
finite effects. How do you know that God, if He
is, must be infinite ? Renouvier would not grant it,
though we do. You and I know it, because we
know what conditions must belong to a principle of
the universe, if the universe needs a principle. If
you mean that the universe has no need of a
principle, the statement must be examined. But
what surprises me is that this infinity, which is
required, since it is postulated, seems an obstacle
to a demonstration when it supplies one of the
terms of a demonstration !
Moreover, this obstacle is illusory. We cannot
adequately know a cause by effects disproportionate
to it, and when it is a question of a transcendent,
infinite cause, we cannot claim to define it. But,
without knowing or defining it in this way, we can
prove the existence of the cause by the existence
and exigences of its effects. We can reach it and
characterize it precisely as the sufficient cause of
them, requiring such and such attributes in order to
be sufficient, the notion of which attributes being
borrowed from these effects. What will then be
52

GOD
defined will be its rôle, but it will not be God, whom
we affirm, on the contrary, to be unknowable in
Himself.
Il will be objected that it is a contradiction to
attribute to God certain well-defined rôles, and at
the same time declare that He is indefinable. This
would be true if we claimed to define these welldefined rôles from God’s point of view. The infinite
God cannot have in Himself any defined rôles— rôles
determinable by us as qualifications of His nature.
God has no nature, and no rôles : He is; He is
infinitely, and that is all, and that is enough. These
rôles we speak of are defined by us only from the
creature’s standpoint. We, being finite, must posit
them : they are differentiated only by our analysis,
and given their character by our way of conceiving
them. The divine Being absorbs them all in the
mystery of His unity.
We must understand that it is not God Who is
here to be defined and made intelligible: it is the
world. The problem of God is only the ultimate
basis of the problem of the world and of life. Take
away God, and life and the world arc left un­
finished, arc not defined, but offer only something
relative and insufficient, without ultimate reason for
existence : what may be called a system of nothings.
But, to manifest them, and make them thinkable
for us, it is sufficient to be able to think of, and
define God, and make Him apparent to us, precisely
as exercising a function. The problem of God
leads us to this: to comprehend the necessity of
the Incomprehensible, to know that there is an
Unknowable, to define the need of the Indefinable.
So true is this, that if we were able to understand
and define God, we would then be unable to account
53

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

for the world. I mean that if God were to enter
into the categories of thought, under any guise
whatever, He could no longer be that first thing
which the world requires in order to remain in what
Renouvier calls “ the limits of the possible intelli­
gence.” It is quite obvious, therefore, that there
is no contradiction of any sort. The defined and
the non-defined do not belong to the same object
or the same subject, and the objection falls to the
ground.
On the question of the identity of essence and
existence, of being, and that which is, in God, we
are in entire agreement. We admit the conse­
quences: we can no more attain to the being of
God than we can to His nature. But it is by no
means necessary to attain to God’s being in this
way in order to form a judgment of His existence.
To affirm that God is, is not to be in contact with
God's essence. Being may be taken in two ways.
First as signifying the very entity of a thing, in
which sense being is substance, quantity, quality
and the rest, because ** that only can be called being
which enters, in some way, into the general cate­
gories of being.”2 Secondly, as expressing the
truth of a proposition, by means of the connecting­
word is. In the first sense, the word being signifies
God in His reality, and therefore stands for some­
thing unknowable. In the second sense it signifies
nothing; it is only a predicate which can be applied
equally well to a thing without real existence, as
when we say: Thisness is, or nothing is inferior to
being. When we say : God is, we simply affirm the
reality, under whatever form it be, of the sufficient
and necessary principle of all things. We predicate
1 QuodJibet, IX, art. 3.

54

GOD

reality of the unknowable and unnamable principle,
without which nothing can be known or named.
It will now be apparent that the very being of
God, identical with His essence, has absolutely no
need to be attained by the mind, in order that the
proposition, God is, may be true and rigorously
demonstrated. We do not put God among existing
things in the sense that we attribute being to Him
as a quality which He possesses in common with
His creatures. In that sense God is not. If He
were, He could no longer be called the source of
being. That which causes being is above and out­
side the being which it causes. Since all causality
implies an ultimate principle, we postulate one, and
call it God. When we say God is, we consecrate
this postulate to Him alone, but we do not, properly
speaking, qualify its possessor. Our God is not
such a one; were He such, He would be limited,
and could no longer answer our requirements. The
phrase, God is, is positive only as an expression of
the insufficiency of the world and the correlative
necessity of an ultimate principle: as a value of
definition, in the proper sense of the word, it is
entirely negative.
After that it is useless to dwell on the last argu­
ment; it is already answered. Our principles are
derived from experience, and, it is objected, they
cannot take us out of the realm of experience.
Hence we cannot pass beyond that realm. I answer
that we pass beyond experience only in the sense
that we follow up our experiences to the source
which explains them. If we cannot close the circle,
if series of causes cannot give a reason for their
efficacy save by means of a first cause, at once
immanent and transcendent, then we must admit a
55

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
first cause. This first cause is immanent by its
action and life-giving presence, and, under this
aspect, it is knowable, as a necessity of experience
itself. As transcendent we declare it inaccessible
and unknowable; we do not put it in any ideo­
logical framework or category. The relations we
attribute to it arc only conveniences of thought; in
no sense are they realities. There are no real
relations of God to the creature : there are only
real relations of the creature to God, which we, by
an instinctive need of correlation, make reciprocal.
Whatever there is in the creature comes from God,
subsists by God, and tends towards God, but without
any change, or real qualification, or attachment,
or real relation on God’s side.
The inclusion of God in a logical order, on which
He is made to depend, is therefore only a way of
speaking. We really do not include God in any­
thing. The logical order is an emanation in our­
selves and a blurred image of His inaccessible truth,
which it does not comprehend. God is not reducible
to a system : He is limited by nothing, not even by
Being, if we mean by that, Being other than Him­
self. He is, and every necessity, logical or real,
comes from Him. The " system ” we invoke in
order to render God’s existence necessary, i.e.,
certain, is a system of things. It is the law of the
sufficient raison d'etre applied to facts, which,
without God, is broken off suddenly when its
application is most imperative. For at this point
the cycle of facts is about to close, the series of
causes about to find its starting-point and its end.
It may be objected, with Pascal: “ If there is a
God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, and we can
know neither what He is nor whether He is.” We
56

GOD

answer (perhaps in Pascal’s own sense) that we
cannot know what He is, i.e., in Himself, but only
what He is in relation to us, or more exactly, what
we are in relation to Him. Again we cannot know
whether He is, if by is is meant the being of His
essence. We even go so far as to say that in this
sense He is not, or, if you like, that His being is
His very nature, as His nature is Ilis being—feeble
words that do not pretend to define or qualify, in
the strict sense of these terms, what God really is.
Still, the affirmation, God is, is exact, as a postulate
of the real, in the sense explained above, and to be
further explained later on.
Thus Pascal’s proposition may be directed against
the misunderstanding of it. We might apply it to
the world, and argue: If there is a world, it is
infinitely incomprehensible without God. But there
is a world. Ergo. And we have a right to ask,
with Jacques Rivière: " Can we say that we do not
understand that, without which all the rest appears
to us incomprehensible? ”·’ There is no doubt that
we do not comprehend Him in Himself, but we
comprehend Him as an inevitable postulate, qualified
as such, and we reach the height of comprehension
in declaring Him, properly speaking, beyond our
comprehension. “ When a problem is insoluble,"
says Novalis, " we resolve it by proving that it is
insoluble."3
4* This is St. Thomas’s meaning, when
he says, speaking of God: "The supreme know­
ledge we can have of Him is to know that He is
above all our thoughts."8
These objections thus answered are seen to arise
3 A la trace de Dieu. p. 44.
* Franvtents
■ De Veritate, q. 2. art. I, ad. 2.

57

I
THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
from a false conception of the relations of God with
the world and with thought—a conception falsely
attributed to us and then used against us. The
replies do no more than re-establish the true con­
ception. It must be admitted that we often lend
colour to these false interpretations by language
and ideas which are more or less anthropomorphic.
As we shall see, St. Thomas, in his own quiet
way, boldly uses agnosticism. He was familiar
with the truth of Pascal’s maxim, which he ex­
pressed with reference to holy Scripture: “While
acknowledging one truth, we must always bear in
mind the truth of its antithesis.” When St. Thomas
speaks of making God known, he does not forget
that, on the other hand, God is unknowable, and
that our demonstrations do not reach His very
being. Therefore the opponent will apparently
have occasion to object to them, but he does so
only by disregarding Pascal’s maxim, by having a
one-sided, distorted view of truth.
B. h il Necessary to Demonstrate the Existence of
God? St. Anselm's “ Proof”

While some refuse to be convinced by arguments,
there are others who refuse even to consider the
question, for a quite opposite reason. God is not
demonstrable, some say. But others say: God is
evident, and therefore does not need to be demon­
strated. Still they argue a good deal in support of
this self-evidence, and subtly too. St. Anselm
argues in page after page of his Proslogion, and
his Book of Apologetics against Gaunilon, but his
method is defensible as an example of the Socratic
58

GOD

method, of bringing an opponent to agreement by
the investigation of his own principles.
St. Thomas is scarcely convinced by this attitude.
He finds it unscientific; he attributes it partly to
confusions in doctrine, and partly to those habits
of mind which in us have the force of evidence.
Accustomed from childhood to invoke God, religious
men cannot call in question a notion which seems
bound up with their very intelligence. They say :
It is evident, where they should say: I believe it,
or where it remains to say: I prove it. This is not
a reason for turning a deaf ear to them. They
incidentally say much that is true, and we must
show just where they are at fault.
There are, then, those who say: God cannot but
be evident to us, since He is in us far more intim­
ately than is our own soul. We might reply: You
are begging the question; you cannot know that
God is in us, except you arc first of all sure that
He exists. But granted we know His existence by
some other means, e.g., faith, even then your
statement that God is necessarily evident to us,
because He is in us, is not exact; for it docs not
follow that a thing is evident to us because it is in
us. It must be present to the mind as its proper
object, and this is not true of God. It is not even
true of our own soul, which is more than intimate
to us, being a very part of us. Our soul becomes
an object of our intelligence, only by recourse to
our senses, by intellectual abstraction and reflection.
With God for our object, we must pursue the same
process, and in addition to it, bring in the principle
of causality. Then we can attain to God, starting
with His effects in us, but in this case our method
is one of demonstration, not of immediate evidence.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
Others insist: How can He, by whom wc know
everything else, help but be evident? Is not God
“ the light which enlighteneth every man that cometh
into this world ” ? Is He not the source of all
understanding, as of all being? We answer.
Granting, without proof (as these opponents do),
that God exists, He is the principle of intelligibility,
of intelligence, and of intellection, but not in the
sense that nothing can be known without knowing
Him, or before knowing Him, as the knowledge of
conclusions depends on the knowledge of axioms.
God is the principle in this matter in so far as He
causes the light which the mind uses, just as He
supplies the light which is immanent in all things.
Therefore it is by using this causality that wc can
attain to God; therefore by demonstration, not by
evidence.
Others argue from objective truth; truth is, and
it is evident that it is ; even in denying it by saying :
There is no truth, we affirm a truth by that very
fact. And truth is eternal, for if we say that truth
once was not, even then it was true that it would
begin. But God is truth; therefore He exists
necessarily and from eternity. The flaw in this
argument rests in taking truth, eternal truth, as
if it were something subsisting in itself. Truth is
a truth of things; it is the relation of things to the
mind; it is founded on being. Now, it is quite
obvious that being is, but it is not so obvious that
it comes from a first Being, which is called from
this very fact the first Truth. Just what is to be
demonstrated is assumed, and the assumption is
quite arbitrary.
Or you may argue from Goodness. Every being
seeks after goodness, and goodness has its source
6o

GOD

in God; in fact it is God, and no intelligent being
can wholly aspire to God in this way without God
being self-evident. 1 reply : There is in us, by
reason of the Good to which we naturally tend, a
confused sentiment of God, and a correspondingly
confused knowledge of Him. But this is not really
knowing that God is, any more than you really
know that Peter is coming, if you merely know that
somebody is coming, who turns out to be Peter.
This is knowing an object hi confuso, whereas
proper evidence implies knowing it as such a thing.
In this case, what we have a definite sentiment and
certain knowledge of is beatitude. But we know
that people have imagined beatitude under all sorts
of forms, often, unfortunately, without introducing
God. Montaigne found two hundred and eighty
sovereign goods in the philosophers.
Lastly, St. Anselm sought—more philosophically
but still sophistically—to prove God's existence
evident by including it in the very notion of God.
His procedure was not lacking in force; for we
mean by " evident ” that which is known by the
sole consideration of the terms, so much so that
its denial implies a contradiction. Now, says
St. Anselm, having understood what the word
“ God ” means, we are immediately assured that
God is. The word “ God ” signifies a being, than
which nothing greater can be thought of. Now
what exists at the same time in the mind and in
reality is greater than what exists only in the mind.
Can we imagine a perfect thing without existence?
Therefore, to conceive the notion of God, and to affirm
that He does not exist, is to utter a contradiction.
If our idea of God has no real object answering to
it, the idea itself falls to pieces. But we do have
61

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
the idea. Therefore with it we have the certi­
tude of an existence which cannot be separated
from it. We can deny this existence in words,
and consider this denial in thought, but it is only
an apparent denial. The mind of necessity must
affirm it.
St. Thomas has examined this argument time and
again. At one time he simply refutes it; at another
he draws out of it a valuable truth, as is his wont.
Here is his position. God's attributes follow
necessarily from the notion of God. If He exists
merely in the mind, these attributes will be notional;
if He exists in reality they will be real. The first
of these attributes, in our eyes, is obviously self­
existence, for without that He would be nothing
and could not be the cause of being. Therefore if
God exists, in Himself, or in our minds, He must
exist there by reason of His own nature, and His
existence will be identical with Him, in such a way
that if we had intuitive evidence of His nature, His
existence would be incomparably more evident to
us than is the principle of contradiction. But we
have still to choose between the two ways of exist­
ing attributable to God, the one real, the other ideal.
We have no intuition of God, and consequently the
identity of subject and predicate in the sentence:
God is, is not immediately evident to us : we must’
get it by demonstration. Granted this demonstra­
tion we know that God, really existing, is also really
identical with His being, and that we cannot suppose
Him not existing without contradicting ourselves.
But, until wc have that demonstration, we have no
right to affirm that God exists, and the subtleties
of Anselm add nothing to our knowledge.
There is a double flaw in his argument. First,
62

GOD

when he tries to pass from the idea contained in
the word “ God,” as understood by everyone, to
the existence of God, he supposes that everyone
understands by the name “ God ” just what he
requires for his thesis, viz., that God is that, greater
than which nothing can be conceived. This is false,
since we find that many among the ancients make
God out to be a corporeal being, or have confounded
Him with the world, or talk of a finite God. Great
doctors like John Damascene enumerate the various
meanings of the word “ God ” without ever men­
tioning this one. Nowadays, ethnology applied to
the religious conceptions of primitive peoples has
taught us that such metaphysical notions arc foreign
to them.
But even granted that the word *' God ” can have
no other meaning than St. Anselm’s, you must still
bridge the gulf between the conception of such a
God—viz., the greatest conceivable thing, and
therefore self-existing—and the existence of this
God in reality. The objector can always say : I
conceive the greatest conceivable thing as really
existing, as existing of itself, as being unable not
to exist, but I have no business to conclude from
this that He exists in fact, and it is false to affirm
that existence in fact would add anything to my
notion of Him. There arc here two different orders.
Actual existence adds nothing to the perfection of
a concept; it belongs to another order. A concept
may or may not include the notions of existence,
self-subsistence or intrinsic evidence, but only in
the order of concepts, and the attribute affirmed
will still remain merely conceptual. As long as we
are in the world of ideas wc cannot conclude to
the existence of anything real. Wc need a bridge
63

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
to pass from this designation of ideas to positive
reality.
Further, on a point oi logic, there is an obvious
mistake. Anselm takes as equivalent the concep­
tion of a really existing thing, and the affirmation
that it exists. Now a conception cannot of itself
serve to justify an affirmation. There are two
mental operations, simple apprehension and judg­
ment, and the former does not include the latter.
To name God, He who is presumes nothing as to
the affirmation of His real existence. In spite of
the verbal paradox, He who is might perfectly well
not exist. If you affirm Him existing, this can only
be in virtue, either of an intuition—but that suggests
ontologism—or by a demonstration, which is refused.
Anselm’s activity leaves us with a deep sentiment
of God, an admirable analysis of the conditions of
the First Principle, a powerful psychological effort,
and a breath of religion which amply redeems the
logical weakness of the proof. It is not a proof,
but there is, as a kind of preamble or illustra­
tion, an imposing systematic construction of the
hypothesis, God.

II. What

can we know oe
“ Ways ”

God? The Five

We have already answered this question in a
negative way, in replying to those who deny the
possibility of proving God’s existence, and who
say: If there is a God, He is infinitely incom­
prehensible, and we can know neither what He
is, nor whether He is. We have rejected the latter
part of this sentence, but without giving any proof,
64

GOD
while we have conceded the former part, as to our
knowledge of what God is, but not in positive or
sufficiently precise terms. We have, then, to go
back on our reasoning as regards each of these
statements.
How do we set about proving God’s existence?
St. Thomas, in the Summa, has opened up five
ways. We have no intention of taking them one
by one here; that has been done many times.® Let
us here take them in globo. They may be syn­
thesized as follows:
Everything which we experience appears to belong
to a chain of existing things, implying and succeed­
ing one another; a chain of attributes which com­
municate with each other and interchange; a chain
of graduated values, of results, now partial, now
general, and growing more and more general till
they form a universe. It is so many ordered series
which cross and interlace, indefinitely sub-divided
into a number of combinations, but where every­
thing is linked up. One being comes from another,
which itself finds its raison d'etre in a third, and
this third in yet another. An effect comes from a
cause, which in turn implies a third. A change,
whether local, qualitative or quantitative, calls for a
source of change, which appears dependent on a
second, which issues from a third. A perfection is
of such a degree in one place; of some other degree
elsewhere, in conditions which reveal a common
origin. The same question arises if we compare
the perfection of this origin with its kindred per­
fections. Again, as regards the arrangement of
things, an element is aggregated to a compound.
* Scrtil’angca' Saint Thomas d'Aquin.
Dieu, son existence ei sa naturo.
65

Garrigou-Lagrango,
E

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

This in turn becomes elementary in relation to a
further compound, and so on in ever-increasing
complexity. Fresh perfections show themselves and
open out vistas of still greater ones. All that, to
use an abstract word, familiar to philosophers, may
be called an immense conditioning, by which being
and its perfections exist in different degrees, bearing
different mutual relationships, and under different
forms.
How can this series be accounted for, and what
does it presuppose? Can it be shown that all this
rhythm of nature betrays a divine influence?
Some say that it is subjective, i.e., it postulates
nothing but ourselves. VVe might smile and pass
on, but we remark that it does not alter the
question, except that it gives rise to further
problems. For these states of ours are conditioned
one by another, just as much as things are, and
in default of finding God at the apex of things, we
have simply to find Him in ourselves.
Others admit that it is real, but only as the
whole: its divisions are due to mental analysis:
it is thought which creates them by reason of its
very nature and needs. That does not alter the
question either, as we shall show presently. The
common consensus, and ultimately everybody, once
beyond the stage of quibbling, acknowledges the
world’s existence. It exists with this character of
a vast, multiform series, and here is the place to
ask, yet again, whither this series leads us.
In no order can anything give what it does not
possess. If it does not possess it of itself, it receives
it from something else. The fact that there are
interchanges and gradations proves that there are
sources. Some of these sources are evident to us,
66

GOD

and there is no lack of them in every natural species.
Only we must ask : Where are the primordial sources,
the first energies, beings, perfections, reasons, of
everything? For it is the first which supplies
everything in a series of causes. When a chandelier
is hung from the ceiling by a chain, the ring nearest
the light holds it up; this ring hangs upon another,
which in turn depends upon a third; but it is the
last ring which supports everything. Similarly,
when a thing is brought into being, its birth
supposes an immediate condition which is called a
generating condition. This condition is itself con­
ditioned by all sorts of facts which explain its
existence and action. Each of these facts has new
conditions, and so on, till we come to the very
springs of the cosmos.
Going forward, we find the same conditions are
required to account for any further generation.
And the question remains the same if, instead of
being, we lake a state, quality, arrangement, or
attribute of any sort. For, although being is multi­
form, its essential laws are the same, and we are
analysing one of the profoundest of them. Since
each thing gives only what it has received, it is
an intermediary, and, of itself, explains nothing: it
is a simple channel, not a source. Consequently,
in each series of causes, these channels or inter
mediaries cannot go on indefinitely. “ There cannot
be an infinite series of causes.” The reason is, not
only because an infinity of elements in the universe
seems an impossibility, but also because it. would
have no purpose, would account for nothing, and
leave the whole train of nature without a sufficient
cause.
Ever}· conditioning is composed essentially of
67

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

three terms: an origin, a communicating medium,
and an ultimate result: source, channels, effect. It
makes no difference whether the system of channels
is more or less developed, whether the medium is
simple or multiple, whether the number of inter­
mediaries is finite or infinite. Suppress the first
source; an infinite number of intermediaries will
not fill its place; the transmitting channels have no
longer anything to transmit, and offer only a useless
emptiness.
If you deny the reality of component parts, and
make them out to be the results of a purely mental
disintegration, you may be forced to conclude that
there are no causes or distinct effects, no parts of
a universal harmony, or co-ordinate movement, or
gradations, or interchanges, but you must still
acknowledge a fundamental unity, whence your
mind necessarily draws out all these divisions. And
this analysis must lead you to a less which pre­
supposes a greater, and that a greater still, until
you must eventually come to an integration, which
brings us back to our original conclusion.
It is said that the principle of causality funda­
mentally expresses only one thing, viz., that all
things form a whale; that their character and their
very reality depend upon, and in some cases consist
in, their being inserted in this whole. We agree,
with the proviso that not all phenomena are related
to the whole in an immediate and independent way:
there are interpositions and mediations; there are
series. To deny this would be to deprive know­
ledge of its object. We have still to determine the
character of this whole. If it appears divine, we
shall rest content, satisfied in having established
the transcendence of God in Himself.
68

GOD
To return to the point. When we follow up the
series of phenomena and beings to find their first
cause, we must bear in mind that it is not succession
in time, but dependence in nature that is important.
The causes of the world are not discovered by re­
gression in time. The past may be a condition of
the becoming of the present, but not of its actual
being. The past, no longer existing, cannot be the
cause of anything. It is not the past which causes
the present, which actually explains it, and supplies
the reason, immanent or external, proximate or
remote, of its existence. A father is the cause of
his son’s birth, by collaborating with the general
causes which concur in every generation, and are
the mainstay of all being. But after his son’s birth,
he explains nothing. Whether or no the father
continues to live makes no difference to his son’s
life. Thenceforth the son depends only upon the
activity of general causes, and the intrinsic consist­
ence of his own being. And so with everything.
Hence the regression which we are attempting is
not a regression in time or a search for temporal
origins. We reason about a series of causes as we
would about a row of skittles standing in a straight
line, nearly touching. Knock the first, and immedi­
ately you knock down the last. So the first cause
actually accounts for the very last effect.7
This observation is most important, for, if we
were to take a series of causes made up of beings
simply following one upon another, each causing
the next, but the action of the last not resulting,
properly speaking, from the whole, then there is no
reason why these ordinated, but not subordinated
■ Note.—Thi.= is only a comparison. In reality there is a
measurable time between the falling of the first and last skittle.

69

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

causes should not be infinite in number. St. Thomas
believes in the philosophical possibility of an eternal
world, in which there would be an infinite series of
generations. He calls this infinity accidental, i.e.,
having no essential relation with causality. But
within causality proper there cannot be an infinite
series, because there would then be nothing to
unite and integrate the conditions requisite for a
phenomenon; because there would be no original
term whence the phenomenon or the being would
be reputed to come.
This leads us to the first beginnings of being and
activity, of perfections of every form, degree and
order. That these sources exist cannot be gainsaid.
Reason demands them and science pursues them.
Science believes that it has detected them and is
constantly striving to trace them to deeper and
more certain origins. Suppose that we think we
have found, by science, the beginning of life, of
the stars, of the evolutions they command; the
beginning, proximate or remote, of all observed
movements, of all organizations and perfections
which arc found in the world. What ought we
to expect from these beginnings in order to accept
them as such; in order that they may be truly the
first? They must show such properties, that their
own existence, their own activity, their arrange­
ment, if any, their perfection, their all, find their
justification without recourse to anything else.
For, to explain a phenomenon means to think of
it in function of immediate antecedents, these ante­
cedents in function of others, and these in function
of others still, and lastly in function of everything,
as regards its primordial conditions and its first
roots. The real must therefore be intelligible:
70

GOD

only in so far as it is intelligible does it exist for
us intelligent beings. Unless human thought, in
its most essential action, be fallacious, these con­
ditions, these roots of universal being, must be able
to be thought of without reference to anything else.
That is what is meant by necessary : necessary not
merely in the sense that it must not be lacking,
must not perish, or fall to bits, or be other than
what it is, but in the sense that it cannot be thus
in any way at all. It carries its whole raison d’etre
in itself, so that its derivatives receive from it, but
without its receiving anything from anywhere,
whether as intelligible or as being.
It is this last effort of research which Plato, in
his Phaedo, reproaches Anaxagoras with not having
known how to accomplish. “ Anaxagoras," he
says, “saw only the cause of that which is: he
did not see that other cause, without which this
cause would not be a cause at all. There is matter
and instrument (or intermediary), but there is also
the Good, the divine, the immortal Principle, which
alone is capable of binding together and embracing
all things.”
As a matter of fact this necessary cause, which
we are seeking after, demands, when analysed, very
stringent conditions. By successive demonstrations,
it can be established that it is unique, and not
multiple, as one might be led to think it, in view
of the great diversity of scries used in our regres­
sion. It is a sort of centre of universal converg­
ence. For then it can be shown to be incorporeal,
for what is corporeal is, at least potentially, multiple,
as well as being potential in many other respects.
The necessary being is simple in every way, other­
wise it would be posterior to its component parts,
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

and would therefore pose the double problem of
their origin and their synthesis. It must needs be
perfect, in order to be the sufficient cause of all
being; it must possess all perfections, the fount
whence all perfections are derived. It must, then,
be the sovereign Good, the unique and eminently
simple source of all multiple goods. Therefore it
must be endowed with infinity, which is really the
same thing, since what is perfect excludes all
limitations. It is consequently everywhere, and
present in all things, since a thing is where it
operates, especially if it has to provide being and
all its attributes. It is unchangeable and unchang­
ing, as change would make it potential, and tending
towards its plenitude rather than actually possessing
it. It must be endowed with knowledge and not
be inert, for the plenitude of a being which is
present to itself, utterly without potentiality,
includes that perfect intimacy of knowing subject
and known object which is knowledge. It must,
then, know itself perfectly, by itself, and must know
all things through itself, since it is the source of
the entire being of each thing. It must have in
itself ideas of all things, actual or possible, which
is really only to know itself in so far as it is, or
can be, participated in. It is substantial Truth,
inasmuch as its being is the essence of that truth
which is found in things, and also of the truth
which is found in the mind, both of which are in
it identical. It is entirely living, or rather, it is
Life, and notably as to its sovereign intelligence
which is perpetually in act. It is endowed with a
will, and its will is eminently free, because will
follows on intelligence and is proportionate to
being, in such wise that a being which causes all
7*

GOD

things by its intelligence, necessarily rules them
all by its will. It loves and does everything by
love, since it gives being, with all that accompanies
it, only as an effect of its creative love. It is just
and merciful, giving each being what its nature
needs, and, by its plenitude, putting bounds to all
the misery of created being, according to its equit­
able wisdom. It is provident, because the order of
things is a part of the things themselves, and cannot
escape Him who gives all being. All things obey
its power, for this is identical with its being, which
is the cause of all being. Lastly, its highest activity
is the contemplation of its own perfection, which is
its happiness.
There we have reached God, for the word “ God,”
in its highest and most complete acceptation, means
all that. And the two questions: Is there a God?
and. Can we know Him? coincide. To be, for God,
is to be all that. We know that God is, because we
know that there must be a being answering to that
description. We know it because there must be
a necessary being, a first, essential, absolute, com­
pletely independent being. And we know that
there must be a necessary being in this sense,
because, like an axle which remains stationary
when the wheel revolves, it is the starting-point,
the foundation, the inevitable condition of whatso­
ever is.

Theodicy
Clearly, the philosopher who sets down all these
conclusions is in duty bound to establish them by
deduction. This is the function of natural theology.
Hence we may say that theodicy is only one long
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
proof of the existence of God. St. Thomas says so
incessantly, insisting that it does nothing but answer
the question whether God is (an sit). As for God’s
nature (quid sit), St. Thomas declares it to be in­
accessible, as we have already said. Just as the
visible rests on the invisible, so the thinkable has
its source in the divine unthinkable.
Somebody is sure to say that it is strange to give
a long list of God’s attributes, and end up by declar­
ing that God is unknowable. What do you mean
by “ know,” then? What is the good of these
deductions and attributions, these multiple and
marvellous “ names,” which you give to the first
Principle ?
There we have the main question. We have laid
down the terms, and indicated the solution, as far
as necessary for a preliminary question, but we must
persevere with it, for, of all St. Thomas’s teachings,
none does more honour to his genius and watchful
wisdom.

HI. What A^alue

has our Relative
of God?

Knowledge

How, asks St. Thomas, do we set about defining
our knowledge of a thing? We have only one
means: to distinguish this thing from others, and
mark its place in the framework of our thoughts.
We first determine the genus of objects to which
the thing to be defined belongs. Then we find
differences, by which the thing in question is more
and more characterized, and marked off from all
those other objects with which it has been associated
in our original, comprehensive notion.
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ÜÔD

Can we use this method to define God ? One
might imagine that we can, when we read in the
Catechism: “ God is a pure spirit, infinitely perfect,
knowing all things, seeing all things.’.’ And to read
the table of contents in the front of a manual of
theology would make one even more confident.
Common sense, whatever its ideas of God, docs
not feel obliged to express them under the form :
God is a being, which ... By expressions such as
these, as by the phrase " pure spirit ” or any
similar one, we appear to put God in a genus, and
then into a species by means of proper, constitutive
differences, which characterize Him completely.
But there is in fact no genus which can claim to
include or contain God, not even the so-called genus
of being, the notion of which is not homogeneous,
though in a way it binds all genera together. We
have already said that God is above being, and
consequently outside it, as its source. If God is
thus above being, He is a fortiori above the cate­
gories, which for us classify being, and supply us
with our genera, such as substance, quality, position,
duration, and so on. And « fortiori, He is still
more above and beyond the differences which the
mind uses to give precision to these notions, and
to apply them to beings: e.g., matter, spirit,
individual, person, intelligence, pozuer, goodness,
justice, and in general every substantial or acci­
dental attribute, every qualification borrowed from
the framework in which for us all being is inevitably
placed.
This means that God cannot be defined, wholly
or in part, by a positive definition. Any attempted
definition of God is partly erroneous. To think of
Him as definable is to deform Him, to lower Him,
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
in a word to deny Him. If we comprehend Him,
He is no longer true God but an idol. St. Thomas
lias much to say on this important point. We have
already seen how he does homage to God’s un­
knowableness, in making it, as far as wc creatures
are concerned, His highest and richest attribute.
“ God remains,” he says,· '* in a sort of night of
ignorance, and, in this life, it is by this ignorance
that we are most perfectly united to Him.” He
adopts St. John Damascene’s description of God
as an “ Ocean of substance, without determination,
without bounds.” The same saint says elsewhere:
“It is impossible to say what God is in Himself,
and it is more exact to speak of Him by excluding
everything. Indeed He is nothing of that which is.
Not in the sense that He is not, but in the sense
that He is above all that is, and above being itself.’’*
In other words, when we try to define God we
have to fall back on negative differences, which
describe God by what He is not, constituting Him
“ by exclusion,” by taking from Him whatever is
repugnant to the character of Super-Being. We
say, for example: (i) God is not a mere ideal; (2)
God is not a mere phenomenon; (3) God is not a
body; (4) God is not a being of sense; (5) God is
not an intelligence joined to a subject, or dependent
on an object, etc. We know Him properly, as far
as we can know Him, when we have distinguished
Him from all else: when we have denied Him every­
thing—and this has made sonic high mystics speak
of the nothingness of God—in order better to take
away the quasi-being of creatures from the Super­
Being, which alone completely is.
• In sent. I. dist. ΠΙ. art. I, ad. 4.
• De I’ide Orthod.. lib. I, cap. 4.

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GOD
But this is not the only possible point of view:
or rather, our ideas may bear some correspondence
with God, and this point of view may be made
clearer and more comprehensive without being
abandoned. Without attempting to define God, wc
may still speak of Him, and mean something by
our words. We can characterize Him indirectly by
His works; by referring to Him the notions that
have led us to postulate Him. It would surely be
contradictory to admit God's existence and then
refuse Him that without which He could not fulfil
His office; if we could not satisfy the conditions
which, in our eyes, His existence demands. We
have named God the cause of all things, because
being, in all its forms and manifestations, requires
this postulate; because a less supposes a greater,
and so on till we come to a reality which embraces
all things. Having done that, we cannot deny God
the plenitude of worth which this need demands.
Of what use would God be, if He did not possess
this eminently, under the form (or absence of form)
which belongs to the First Principle? God must
supply being; therefore He possesses it. He is
being per sc, source of all participated being, and
therefore we are bound to attribute to Him
everything in being that is really being; i.e., every
perfection which does not imply limitation or im­
perfection in its very notion. We rise to God,
starting from created things, using certain definite
relations between what is and what must cause it
to be: between the tree and its hidden root. It
is surely not arbitrary to name God after these
relations; to endow Him—with certain necessary
provisoes — with characteristics taken not from
what He is, which we do not know, but from
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

what we are, we creatures who owe our being to
Him.
God is a boundless plenitude, “ an infinite and
undetermined sea of substance,” devoid of any sort
of landmark to serve as the basis of our distinctions
or divisions. We can name and qualify Him only
by means of creation, which reflects its Creator, as
a tree witnesses to the existence of the hidden roots
whence it draws its life. Paul Valéry, in his
Aurore, expresses much the same thought when
he represents Ideas as saying:
Nous avons sur tes abîmes
Tendu nos fils primitifs;
Et pris ta nature nue
Dans une trame ténue
De tremblants préparatifs.111

If we consider the mode and the multiplicity of
our qualifications, we name God after the creature;
but if we consider the essential content of the terms
attributed to Him, then we name Him after Him­
self, since, as source, He contains, in His own
way, '* drowned in the infinite,” as Albert the Great
puts it, the foundation of all our qualifications.
This is generally known, in Thomistic theology,
as the analogical method, which we now proceed
to explain.
«° I nm indebted to Father John O’Connor for the following
translation :

O'er Thine unfathan»’d awe
Our gossamer we spin;
Round Thy sheer Godhead draw
Our cobweb-veiling thin
And gemm’d precariously
With dew-drops from Thy sea.

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GOD

Analogy
Analogy, in general, means likeness. There are
likenesses of various kinds, notably direct likenesses,
as that of father and son, king and minister, to
which we apply common qualifications, on account
of their mutual resemblances. There are also
indirect likenesses, founded solely on the similitude
of two relations, as when we say of a ship’s captain
that he is king on board, to express that the captain
is to his ship what the king is to his realm. In
the first sense, there is no analogy between God
and creatures, and the names, the qualifications
borrowed from creatures, the human words, such
as they are, cannot belong to the first Principle.
It is not true that God is good, wise, strong,
intelligent; it is not true that He is, or is being, if
we mean by these terms that there is in God and
in creatures, under the names of goodness, wisdom,
power, intelligence or being, something which the
creature holds in the same way with Him. Such a
communion, or participation in a notion, held in the
same way, appears to St. Thomas as not only wholly
erroneous, but also absurd." The reason is that
there are no qualities in God; there is no distinction
of subject and attribute, much less qualitative dis­
tinctions capable of being expressed by human
names. What we call wisdom in God is identical
with what we call goodness or power or being in
Him; identical with what we call God. In God
n De Veritate, q. 2, art. 1.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

there is only God, pure simplicity, since, being
essentially infinite, everything in Him is infinite,
and between infinite and infinite no distinction
whatever can be made.
It is not correct to say: God is wise, and man
is wise, but God’s wisdom is the maximum, and
man’s is less; in God it is infinite, and in man it is
finite. For to declare God’s wisdom infinite is to
identify it with all the other divine attributes, and
with the divine Being, and therefore to remove it
infinitely from our wisdom, which is limited to itself
and not identical with our nature. Therefore there
is no attribute really common; no notion in which
the divine Subject and created subjects hold in
common way. Creatures split up perfection and
arrange it under navies, but in God it is a nameless
synthesis. He has no distinct attributes, no definite
characteristics, no essence. It is false to speak of
His perfections in the plural, if we mean definite
perfections distinct from one another, though we
may speak of His perfection, which is the perfection
of being, beheld in its infinite source. None of
these attributes belong to God formally, unless we
add the word eminently, to signify that the attribute
in question is most certainly present, in an infinite
way, but, as it were, dissolved in the Super-Being,
and surpassing any name we can utter.
Indirect analogy is founded on a likeness, not
immediately between two things, but between two
proportions relative to them: not a definite relation
between the beings which are affirmed to participate
in a common notion, but this notion is attributed
to both of them because one bears a relation to a
third thing, similar to the relation which the other
bears to a fourth. To take an example. The
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GOD

number six is related to four in this sense that it
is twice three, while four is twice two. Therefore
we may give both of them, though they are quite
different, the common qualification of double. To
apply this to our names for God. We do not say
that there is any sort of definite relation between a
creature and God, or any mode of existence really
common to both, but there is a similitude between
the relation of God to God, on the one hand, and
creature to creature on the other. God is to God,
looked upon in the plenitude of his being and per­
fection, what man is to his intelligence, goodness,
power and other qualities, to himself and to others,
so long as no imperfection is implied. God is to
Himself alone, in His simplicity, what all these
terms express separately. As so distinct, these
terms relate only to man, but God is so perfect
that, in surpassing them, He absorbs them all, and
in the name “ God," all the perfections are included
which we claim when we ascribe these names to
ourselves. Therefore, while we acknowledge that
in God there is only God, we may think of Hirn,
as we think of a man, endowed with intelligence,
goodness and power. In other words, we must use
human language, and we may lawfully use it of
God, and say: God is intelligent, good, powerful,
and so on.
These expressions are lame and equivocal, since
they do not mean the same manner of existence
when applied to God and to man. But they are
not purely equivocal. They are true when viewed
from a particular angle, though, viewed otherwise,
they may be false. This point of view is legitimate,
for the creature demands God in the name of all
the perfections it contains, and because we cannot
81
F

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
alienate from God any perfection which is found in
creatures, no matter under what form, or absence
of form, He possesses it.
Obviously this is quite negative, and tells us
nothing about God considered intimately in Himself.
It simply denies that we can deny any perfection to
the first cause. It affirms, correctively, that He
must be accorded every perfection found in His
works, and it gives us a long list of names. Yet
we are fully aware that this litany of names is
defective. We know that the subsequent affirmation
adds nothing to the original negation. It is merely
positive in form, and the truth remains that “ we
do not know what God is : we know only what He
is not, and what relation everything else has with
Him.”12 We can do little more than give an answer
to the question: Is there a God?

Owing to this inevitable ambiguity in the names
of God, we may say that they arc not true, that
the attributes lent to God are not genuine, unless
they be safeguarded by a perpetual proviso. As
they stand, in their ordinary human meaning, they
are quite untrue; they are inadequate, false, even
ridiculous. Hence that bold statement of the
pseudo-Denis, quoted by St. Thomas, that every­
thing which is said, with truth, of God, may with
still more truth be denied of Him, because the
words that we utter are really only the language
of creatures, applicable to creatures, and necessarily
insufficient when applied to God. It is true to say
that God is good, because in His infinite perfection,
the meaning of good is to be found. It is true to
say that God is not good, for we have to remove
11 Cont. Gent., I. 30.

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GOD
from Him all distinct attributes or separate notions;
every positive statement which implies a correlative
negation, as happens with all human words. “ God,”
says St. Thomas's master, Albert the Great, ‘‘is at
once unnamable and all-namable, and * Unnamable ’ is the most beautiful of all His names, for it
raises Him at the outset above ever}' endeavour to
speak of Him.”13 “ These terms, Father, God,
Creator, Lord,” writes St. Justin, “ arc not divine
names: they are appellations derived from His
benefits and works.”14
The consequence is that God is not properly the
subject-matter of any science, not even of what is
called natural theology, which, for St. Thomas, is
only a chapter of general metaphysics, and bears a
metaphysical character. Every science, he says,
proceeds from principles anterior to its object {ex
prioribus), and there are no principles anterior to
God, Who is the cause of all things, including
principles. Therefore God can be the object of
intuition, but not of science. We can demonstrate
something about Him, namely that He is, and that
He is beyond the phenomena of experience. We
may further attribute to Him, by similitude or
analogy’, certain qualities, the notion of which is
derived from phenomena. In so doing we use
objects which, far from being principles with regard
to God. have Him for their Principle. And since
a science includes a study of a thing and its
principles, and since natural theology attains and
treats of God only in so far as He is the first
cause, its subject-matter is not God in Himself, but
Tkeol., Tr. III. q. 16, ad. I.
’* Apologia II, Pro Christianis, No. 6.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
universal being. In other words, there is no natural
theology outside general metaphysics.15

Well then, it will be objected, all terms applied to
God are only so many metaphors. God is intelligent,
as a pilot is king. We are landed in symbolism,
which is only a veil of pure agnosticism, and every­
one knows the outcome of that. Further, all these
terms are synonymous, not representing separate
ideas, but all meaning the same divine Being,
without partition or forms. Theodicy is, then,
only one long tautology.
The latter is easy to answer, but the former
requires a little care.
It is untrue that the terms employed to qualify
God are synonymous, precisely because they are
not, in themselves, divine qualifications, but only
human notions and human ways of speaking. They
answer directly to our own concepts, and are there­
fore diversified with our concepts. They are not
influenced by the fact that God is unique, since they
correspond to Him only indirectly. They keep their
distinct meanings and that is just the opposite of a
synonym. If we had direct intuition of God, and
tried to define Him in words, then, in virtue of His
perfect simplicity, we could give Him only one name:
or if we used several, they would be synonyms.
But our knowledge of God is not intuitive: we
attain to Him only through, and by means of,
creatures. Therefore we name and qualify Him
only by names and attributes of created things.
Doubtless these words certainly signify one
unique thing, divine simplicity, but they neverthe­
less, immediately and directly, stand for human
** Proem, in Comm, in Metaph.

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GOD

notions, imperfect mental concepts. “ As, there­
fore, to the different perfections of creatures there
corresponds one simple principle, represented by
different perfections of creatures in a various and
manifold manner, so also to the various and multi­
plied conceptions of our intellect there corresponds
one altogether simple principle, which is imper­
fectly understood according to these conceptions.
Therefore, although the names applied to God
signify one thing, still, because they signify that
thing under many and different aspects, they are
not synonymous.”16
This is a sufficient reply to the objection. Tau­
tology means repeated expression of one and the
same idea by different words. Here, it is not the
words only that are diverse, but the very ideas.
Only the thing expressed is one and the same. To
draw a multiplicity of ideas and words from one
and the same thing does not spell tautology but
rich variety. Tautology is useless and tedious, and
nobody would suggest that it is useless to express
God under all forms of life when this procedure is
the starting-point and sine qua non of any union of
our souls with the Supreme Life.
We grasp reality, whatever it be, only by thinking
it and expressing it to ourselves; we must do this
before wc can make any use of reality. Since we
have to use God as our guide through life, to satisfy
the movement of life, with its reverses, its yearnings
and its hopes, we must conceive God : we must know
His nature, under the form of attributes by which
the being of God is adapted to our minds and
given for our instruction. Those who, through
misguided piety, are chary of naming God, err in
l< Li, q. 13, art. 4, corp.

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
the other direction, as experience shows only too
clearly.

The other objection was that the doctrine of
analogy leads to a mere symbolism; that it builds
up a mere system of metaphors, not a system of
truths. This is equally fallacious, but not so easy
to answer, because we have to assign analogy its
exact place between two extreme errors concerning
our knowledge of God.
These two extremes are agnosticism and anthro­
pomorphism. Symbolism and analogy hold a position
midway between them, but, while symbolism is but
agnosticism in disguise, analogy keeps clear of
anthropomorphism. Agnosticism says that God is
in no way knowable; He is one great x, an unknown
quantity; all that is said of Him is empty and vain;
every symbol applied to Him is impertinent and use­
less. There is a basis to being, but religion consists
in respectfully acknowledging the impossibility of
ever knowing what that basis is.
The exponents of symbolism, on the contrary,
succumb in part to that irresistible tendency which
has given rise to purely natural religions. They
acknowledge these religions as so many purely
arbitrary systems adapted to various states of
civilization or of the individual. God remains in­
expressible, and the names which we give Him
arc not truths, but handy inventions, without
objective foundation, justified by their spiritual
results.
By condescending to man’s instinct in this way,
symbolism may possibly have some value, but.
owing to the equivocation it encourages, it is
possibly more dangerous than rank agnosticism.
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GOD

Otherwise, the two are fundamentally the same,
and in neither case is theodicy possible. God's
“ attributes " are valueless in philosophy, and the
only divine name is “ Unknowable." Everything
else is subjective cither to the individual or to
society: it is consequently arbitrary, and varies
according to the individual fluctuations of mind,
and progress of time and of civilization. The
religious consequences are obvious.
At idle other extreme is anthropomorphism, which
may be summed up in X’oltaire’s ironical epigram:
“ It is said that God created man to His own image :
man has retaliated." The ancient, pagan religions
were entirely anthropomorphic, although Goethe has
tried to see in them, not so much the humanizing
of God, as the deifying of man. The two are easily
reconcilable; they are correlative. Philosophers have
held the most extreme anthropomorphism. Sweden­
borg said: “ God is a Man
Renouvier: “ God is
a finite Person." As we know, even Christians and
Jews, while acknowledging the true God, often
instinctively entertained ideas of the same sort.
But that is beside the point. The point here is that
in philosophy, in the various scientific accounts of
God, we come, across an unconscious, thinly-veiled
anthropomorphism. Unless their words belie them,
philosophers of these schools hold that the divine
attributes are qualifications belonging to God in the
same way as they belong to us, only magnified and
adapted, so they say, by pushing them to their
utmost limit, without, however, changing them
essentially. The " infinite number " of Pascal is a
number; “ it is false that it is even: it is false that
it is odd." That shrouds it in a sort of mystery,
Lut it is a number for all that. In the same way,
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
the intelligence which we attribute to God is
intelligence and nothing more. The same applies
to goodness, power and the rest. God is put into
the categories’, He becomes definable, by depart­
ments, if I may say so. The first being becomes
qualified, complex, multiple, corporeal, outlined, in
lieu of being sublimely and necessarily simple. If
there were in God something which corresponded,
properly, directly, and word for word, with even
our most sublime ideas, something over and above
the “ ocean without dimensions or bounds ” of
St. John Damascene, then we should adore a false,
man-God, with no philosophical value whatever.
As we have seen, the problem of God’s existence
is the problem of the source of being, and whoever
places God in the categories of being implicitly
denies His existence.
Thomism does not do this. Analogy, as we
understand it, is not a simple magnifying of all
these names and ideas, which leaves them still with
their proper forms. It is a complete transposition,
putting one unique term in place of a multiplicity
of terms, yet one which corresponds to them all.
God’s wisdom is God. God’s goodness is God, and
is therefore the same thing as His wisdom, with
this sole difference that we signify it by a different
word, to indicate that the indivisible plenitude of
the first being comprehends the entire content of
all our words, without corresponding nominally
with any of them. That is why we say, with
Albert the Great, that God is unnamable.
On the other hand, God is described by a number
of names, and is even known as the “ All-namable.” Analogy supplies the necessary corrective.
It takes into account the limited range of human
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GOD

thought, our incapacity to think of the One other­
wise than as the multiple. We speak of God, while
our judgment simultaneously affirms Him ineffable;
we use a number of names to express Him,
while our judgment acknowledges His indivisible
unity.
When focused on God, thought can do no more
than make these desperate efforts to overstep its
natural limits. Still, we are not so hopeless as
defenders of symbolism, because our names of God
are not mere arbitrary, subjective figures of speech.
They have a real foundation, since they correspond
to a real relation, one term of which is quite defin­
able. It is also an essential relation, because it
follows upon the natures of the things related, even
though one of them is outside the categories of
being. For this relation is one between cause and
effect, and God is the cause of being. And when
attributes have a real foundation, we may apply
them to God, and our words will not be mere
symbols, but formal truths, though deplorably
inadequate. We have no difficulty in admitting
that, from another point of view, our words arc
false, or that their falsity outweighs, though does
not contradict, their truth. It simply manifests
our incapability.
In short, there is a middle terra between agnos­
ticism and anthropomorphism which steers clear of
both. Symbolism is nothing more than modified
agnosticism. The Thomistic doctrine of analogy is
quite independent. It is clear and accurate, though
justifiably subtle.
The following brief formula, rightly understood,
contains a complete explanation of how, and to
what extent, we can name God:
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

“ We do not know what God is, but only what
He is not, and what relation everything else has
with Him.”17 And this is the Thomistic doctrine
of our knowledge of God.
,T Cont. Gmt., I, 30.

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CHAPTER IV
CREATION

A. Creation and the “ Beginning

The problem of creation is no less difficult and
delicate than the problem of the existence of God.
At bottom it is the same. Creation is conceived
of as the frontier which thought encounters in its
flight to God, and in its return to created things.
To ask the meaning of creation is to ask how the
world holds together; how God arranges it; and
both questions include the nature of God, such as
we can know it, and its functioning in this world.
We cannot know what creation is, without knowing
what God’s action is, and God's action is God. We
cannot know what creation is without knowing what
is meant by beginning and non-beginning, by time
and eternity. And, since eternity is one of God’s
attributes, we are brought back to the question of
the validity of these attributes. In the light of the
exposition in the previous chapter, we must now
try to raise ourselves to the level of Thomistic
doctrine concerning creative action. St. Thomas
is again at his best, though not always understood.
Yet the false ideas rife to-day necessitate a clear
understanding of his thought.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
We admit at the outset that St. Thomas—despite
his clearness, if not because of it—is sometimes
liable to leave a false impression in the mind of
the beginner. Since he writes as a theologian, and
for simple folk, he makes great use of Scripture,
and language more or less anthropomorphic, which
gives him the appearance of forsaking his leading
principles. He is like an astronomer who in his
ordinary, everyday conversation, and even in his
serious writings, speaks of sunrise and sunset,
although he knows that these movements belong
to the earth, and not to the sun. There is nothing
wrong in this way of speaking, but we shall explain
the doctrine better if, as far as is possible, we avoid
expressions of this sort. We shall be safe in so
doing, and in no way contrary to St. Thomas's
mind.
In attacking the problem of creation, St. Thomas
is forced, by his principles, to choose between
Revelation and Aristotle, between the Apostles’
Creed and the Sayings of the Philosopher.
Aristotle believed in the eternity of the world:
faith affirmed its beginning. On this question of
fact no reconciliation of the two is possible, and
Aristotle must be abandoned. But was it a matter
of giving up any philosophical principles? Does
creation essentially imply beginning in time? Is
the philosophical conception of an eternal world
legitimate? If the answer to this last question is
affirmative, then Aristotle was wrong only as
regards a fact, inaccessible to human speculation,
the misconception of which could be no cause for
humiliation. That was St. Thomas's contention,
and he held it with a firm conviction, which makes
him appear rather tart in contrast with his usual
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suavity. The Opusculum De Ætemitate Mundi
contra Murmurantes bears traces of a certain im­
patience with the unphilosophical character of the
objections. But his insistence is only the result of
a deep realization of what was at stake in the debate,
viz., the real relation between God and the world,
which is intimately bound up with the very notion
of God.
Those who support at all costs the theory that
the world had a beginning in time, do so, usually,
simply because they have a confused idea of what
creation means. They imagine that it is, considered
actively, an intermediary between God and the world,
and passively an intermediary between nothing and
being; a succession or passage from nothing to
being. They picture the world as being brought
into reality at a given moment, before which only
God existed. They imagine that the act of creating
took place in time, when God, as it were, tired of
solitude, decided to make a world like unto Him­
self. The becoming of the world is deemed similar
to any other becoming, except that it began with
nothing, and presupposed only its divine cause.
This, taken literally, is absurd. I say “ taken
literally,” because it can be quite a legitimate
account if properly handled and corrected. Like
every writer, St. Thomas employs similar expres­
sions, as I have just said. But he is alive to the
fact that they are due to our way of understanding,
or rather imagining things. They are not literally
true, and to go by them would lead, not only to
absurd conclusions, but to grave doctrinal difficulties
as well.
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The Nature of Creation
Some people imagine creation to be an action
intermediate between God and the world; between
God, the cause of the world, and the world His
effect. But can there be an intermediary between
these two terms? What middle term can there be
between God and the creature, meaning by
“creature" the entire creation? It cannot be
something in God, because He is unchangeable
and gains no new quality in making the world.
Neither can it be something in the creature, for
the creature has still to be made, and if any part
of it is anticipated, this would need to be made by
a previous creation, which would require another
before it, and so on, giving us an indefinite series
of creations.
Secondly they imagine that creation, taken in a
passive sense, is an intermediary between nothing
and being; a passage from nothing to being. They
do not notice that by this conception “ nothing ’’ is
turned into something. How can you start from
nothing? How can you pass from nothing to
reality? How can you cross by a bridge that has
only one pier and no span? A passage implies
two terms, subject and object. In creation the
subject world, in order to effect its passage, must
already exist. In order to set out on its journey
towards existence, it must already be in existence.
And what are the two terms of the passage? The
second is apparent, namely, the world in the first
instant of its existence. But where is the first?
Is it also the world—the world not yet existing?
The “ world not yet existing " is nothing at all.
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Moreover, creation is imagined to take place at
a certain moment. What moment can possibly
precede the world's existence, to assist at its
creation? It is not a moment of time, because
time does not yet exist: time is an attribute of
successive realities, ” measured movement,” and it
cannot precede either movement or being. Nor is
it a moment of eternity, for eternity has no moments,
or. if you like, has but one, the eternal moment:
eternity is indivisible and unchanging. If the world
were created at this moment of eternity, it would
be eternal in the proper and divine sense of the
word, which is just the opposite of having a
beginning.
Were creation to be so imagined, we could not
claim for it the character of a total action which
supposes nothing pre-existing. For it would pre­
suppose duration and being, for these are both
necessary for any sort of becoming, or passage,
or change.
Creation is not a change; it is not a passage;
it is not a becoming. It is not a substitution of
being for nothing; a succession, effected by God,
from nothing to being. It is not an arrival at
being (accessus ad esse). There is no moment of
creation anterior to the world itself. In a word,
there is not, under the name of creative action, an
intermediary between God, Who creates, and the
world which is created. All that is pure fiction,
pure imagination. We cannot avoid it in our use
of words, since language is unable to express these
ideas properly, but we can avoid it in our judgments.
Creation is, if you will, an action, since there is
a cause and an effect. But the cause is the eternal
God, or God creating from eternity, and this is not
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an intermediary because God’s action is God. The
effect is the world in being, not in becoming, since
it does not become. It is the world in its entirety,
including its duration and its first instant, if there
was one. And it makes no difference here whether
or no it has a first instant: that is something quite
accessory, held by faith, and has nothing to do with
the essence of creation, considered philosophically.
St. Thomas remarks that philosophers like Avicenna,
who hold an eternal world, are just as insistent that
God created it. If you take away from the notion
of creation all idea of passage, movement and
becoming, it remains nothing but a pure relation,
and there is no reason why this relation should not
be eternal when its first term is the eternal God.
Now for a true idea of creation. It will be easy
once the ground is cleared.
We must not start with nothing at all and say:
(i) There is nothing; (2) God makes something.
That is the sort of explanation that does harm
and holds us up to the derision of philosophers like
M. Bergson, M. Edouard Leroy, and M. Paul
Valéry, who would soon show us that our original
so-called nothing is full of being, or else a mere
figment of the imagination, “ a comedy of silence
and perfect darkness,” an empty vessel, already
crammed full of what is going to be got out of it.
Pure nothing is not a reality, and cannot serve as
the beginning of any sort of action. To speak of
a moment when there was nothing is pure non­
sense, for there must already have been something,
in order to have a moment at all. A moment is
a position of time, and time is an attribute of
existing things. We cannot imagine anything
outside time. Even if we try to conjure up an
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image of the non-being which is supposed to
precede the world, we cannot help imagining it
in time. We thus make a sort of empty, infinite
time, with no differentiations, ready, at one of its
so-called instants, to receive the world with its
duration, and to be henceforth quite definite and
consistent. That is devoid of sense. There can be
no duration before the duration which measures
being. You might suggest the duration of God,
but that will not help us, as His duration is not
successive, since He has no extension and cannot
provide a definite moment of creation; in point of
fact, God's duration is simply God, thought of in
terms of time.
Let us gel rid of these chimeras once and for
all. Let us start with being, not with nothing.
What being? If we admit God’s existence, we may
start with His being. If, on the contrary, that is
not granted, we may start with the creature’s being,
which eventually leads us back to God’s.
Starting with God, we argue like this: God is,
and God is not alone. He has given a sort of
extension of His being, which we call the world.
Therefore the world depends on Him, bearing to
Him the relation of effect to cause, which is a
relation outside time, for time is just as much
created as anything else in the world, and equally
dependent on the Supreme Being.
Starting with the creature, we put it like this :
The world is, and is not independent, because not
self-sufficient. The assemblage of all its pheno­
mena and beings points to a first being, which is
the key to all of them, and, in this sense, their
origin, quite apart from the question of whether
or no they began in time. For whether duration is
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
finite or infinite it is equally subject to the con­
ditions of all dependent being, and therefore depends
on the first Principle.
This argument is like those which wc have
already used to prove the existence of God.
Indeed it is these proofs of the existence of God
which provide us with the genuine idea of creation.
And notice that we make no mention at all of the
notion of beginning; of a nothing preceding, or
underlying the world. It is simply a question of
a system of actual dependent beings, needing a
first term, and consequently a question of the
entire, actual dependence of everything in the world,
including duration, on the first Principle. Wc say
actual dependence to denote that this relation is co­
extensive with time, when viewed from the stand­
point of the creature; and we say including
duration to denote that, from God’s standpoint,
it is a relation outside time.
And it really is so. Creation, taken in an active
sense, is outside time. Time has its roots in the
eternity of God, and so has the world, in which
all succession is measured by time. “ Creation,”
says the Russian philosopher, Berdiacff, “ is not
metaphysically admissible unless it is accomplished
in eternity and not in time.” Quite so. Creation,
taken actively, is eternal, since it is God Himself.
God’s action is God, and His simplicity admits no
distinction of subject and action. As we have
already said, to represent creative action as an
intermediary between God and His work is a crude
figment of the imagination. Creation and Divinity
are thus one and the same thing.
Viewed from the creature’s standpoint, creation
is the creature itself, in so far as it is dependent.
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In other words, it is a relation of a derivative to its
cause. We imagine it as an action received, as if
the creature were first of all non-existent, and then
received being, but it is not so in reality. But we
must put out of our minds the idea of nothing, and
start with being. Creation is simply a pure relation.
As St. Thomas says: “ Take movement away from
action and passion, and nothing remains but rela­
tion.”1 Every created thing in the world must
bear this relation to God, not merely at the first
moment of its existence (if it has a first moment),
but continuously, through all its phases and states.
Therefore creation, which is nothing more than this
relation, must obviously be co-extensive with time.
If the world were eternal, i.e., if its duration were
infinite in every way, it would depend on God,
successively and continuously, and the act of
creating would be incessant. If it has a begin­
ning—as Christian Faith teaches—it began to
depend when it began to be. But began here
means that the beginning of the world was created
with the world; that the world's first instant is
itself a creature. Therefore creation, taken actively,
is always outside time, and, taken passively, co­
extensive with time.
ft would be more correct to say in the latter case,
that God created the world “ at the beginning of
time,” and that, since then, He keeps it in existence.
This is quite an accurate way of putting it, and the
most natural, on the supposition that the world had
a beginning. For, if it has a beginning, the first
instant of time is, as it were, privileged. It is
looked upon as new, though, of course, it is not
really so. since new literally connotes a temporal
1 la. q. XLV. art. 3. corp.

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order, which is here purely imaginary. Still, the
temptation to think of it like that is irresistible,
because we irresistibly think of creation as a
becoming, as being after non-being. Because of
this apparent newness, which really only brings out
the finite character of the world’s duration in the
past, we keep the word creation to signify the first
instant, and call what follows conservation, or
creation continued. But this first and following
dependence are identical in nature, and the use of
the two words creation and conservation is merely
a human way of emphasizing the contrast between
the eternal past and the world’s temporal duration
Creation, even when attached to the notion of
beginning, cannot be regarded as an historical
event. It is not an event at all, because there is
not a stage on which this so-called event could be
enacted; because nothing fakes place; no change is
produced. There was no reality before the first
instant of the world’s existence, though there are
subsequent realities and events. It was created out
of God, if you like, but only in the sense that it
was God’s handiwork. It is a relation, not an event.
The same safe-guarding distinction applies to what
follows creation, and is called conservation. In
reality there is no following, and hence no strict
conservation. St. Thomas explains at length that
these different words are due to our human way
of expressing ourselves. Creation could not be
renewed, or go on through the course of duration,
because, taken actively, it is outside time, and, taken
passively, co-extensive with time. Time is included
in the integral object of creative action. A con­
tinued relation, in this sense, is meaningless. It is
the world that continues, not creation, because the
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world is in time and creation is not. By creation
the world goes on, dependent on God for its dura­
tion just as much as for its extension and essence.
Therefore creation and conservation are one and
the same thing. They are distinguished only to
bring out the fact that in conservation the effect is
successive. The world exists; the world goes on;
the world, including its duration, depends on God,
by a relation outside time, and we call that relation
creation.
From this we see that it is wrong to argue : Once
the world is created, it has no need of being kept
in being. By the very fact that it is, it will go on
being, for everything keeps itself in being; nothing
in nature is ever annihilated, but only transformed
into something else. This is just as wrong as to
argue : The world has always existed, and therefore
never had need of being created. The only ground
for arguments like this is a complete misunder­
standing of what is meant by creation. Creation
is not something which took place once and is then
over and done with. Nor can it be dispensed with
by saying that its effects are eternal. Creation is
a first condition of finite being, precisely as being,
and of its qualifications as such. These include
duration, whether it be finite or infinite. Creation
is not an action taking place in time. Therefore
it cannot be limited to a first moment. For the
same reason, even if you suppose the world to be
eternal, you still cannot dispense with creation on
the grounds that you have dispensed with a first
moment. Creation is an action taking place outside
time, above and beyond time, and however long
the time (ad infinitum, if you will) it still depends
on creation. While a thing exists, it certainly lasts,
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
and this we grant; but to explain this we must be
able to find in it, at each moment, all the conditions
of its existence, and one of these is the first Cause.
Creation answers these requirements, and it is just
as necessary for existence ab aterno, as for yester­
day’s existence. It is simply a question of degree:
the need is the same.
There is another, and apparently paradoxical
consequence of this doctrine. Instead of creation
being an intermediary between God and His
creatures, as was imagined, it is posterior to the
creature, for a relation necessarily follows its
terms, an attribute, its subject. The created world
is first of all the world: it is consequently created.
I do not mean by consequently that it follows after
in time—obviously not—but that the world precedes
it in the order of thought and the nature of things.
St. Thomas admits, when treating of this point,
that creation holds “ a certain priority from the
fact that the object to which it is related is the
first Principle of creatures.”3 Quite so. From
God's standpoint creation is prior; but this only
means that God is prior to the world, since, taken
in an active sense, creation is God Himself. But
that is only a “ certain priority,” due to our way
of approaching the question, and to our imperfect
understanding. There are real relations of creature
to God, but not of God to creature. God has no
real relation to anything, being absolutely inde­
pendent, but everything is in relation to Him, since
it depends on Him for its very being. Therefore
creation, in God, is not a real relation, but only
a relation of reason. Creation is an attribute of
2 la, q. XLV. art. 3, ad. 3.
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created things and therefore logically posterior to
them. A logical treatment of creation must not
start with creation itself, for it would then have no
basis. It must not start with nothing, for that
cannot be a basis either. It must start with being.

tt. The Eternity or Non-Eternity of the World

With these principles, St. Thomas, as philosopher,
is not in the least embarrassed by the Aristotelian
theory of an eternal word, or rather of an infinite
regression in time. He is indifferent to it, and
serenely argues to prove: (i) That it is not con­
clusive in fact; (2) That it is philosophically possible
and contrary only to Revelation.
i. It is not. conclusive. The necessity of an effect
depends on the necessity of its cause. The cause
of the world is God, and God acts, not by necessity
of nature, but freely, being all-sufficient. Therefore
the world’s duration, like its nature, will be what
God decides it to be. Aristotle may have believed
the world eternal because his philosophy, void of
faith, had not a sufficiently exact idea of God’s
transcendence. In one way he separated Him too
much from the world, and in another way he made
Him depend on it. Christian faith alone has laid
down the true relations between God and the world.
Further, the idea of absolute beginning, which,
at first sight, seems quite simple, is really very
profound, and it is quite understandable that even
a deep thinker like Aristotle should find it more
natural to think of duration as an endless cycle of
beginnings. Aristotle gives his reasons for this
theory, but they are not so much positive teaching
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as answers to the false interpretations of begin­
ning, which he found prevalent. They are not
conclusive, as an examination of the principal
ones will show.
Aristotle states that the phenomena of nature
depend on an intrinsic necessity. Hosts of things
around us come into being and perish, while the
basis of nature remains unaltered. The framework
and springs of the world are necessary. But what
is necessary, always is, and can neither begin nor
end. It is obvious enough what this argument
proves, and what it does not prove. It proves
conclusively that the world, in its entirety, was not
brought into being in the same way as the particular
beings which it contains. What is necessary in it
has always been. That is quite true, but it pre­
supposes the world's existence. If the world did
not exist it would be neither contingent nor neces­
sary’: if it has not always existed, it has not always
been contingent or necessary. This attempted proof
of the world’s eternity begs the question, for we
must presuppose the world before we can qualify
it and draw conclusions as to its duration. The
natural order of ideas is: (i) The world exists;
(2) In it some things are contingent, and some
necessary; (3) What is contingent perishes, while
what is necessary endures for ever. But this for
ever expresses only the world’s extension in time
and has nothing to do with infinity. God creates
the world and gives it whatever length of duration
He thinks fit.
Among the necessary elements in the world,
matter, for the ancient philosophers, held the first
and foremost place. The eternity of uninformed
matter, prior to and underlying all phenomena
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seemed a necessary postulate. Many forerunners
of Aristotle maintained this theory, and attributed to
God the rôle of ordering or forming matter, which
till then was in a state of chaos. Aristotle himself
believed in the eternity of a world already formed,
and he apparently wished to prove his theory by the
eternity of matter. But his proof has much in
common with the last one. Matter, he argues,
cannot be engendered, since there is nothing prior
to it; no " contrary ” from which it can be brought
forth. That certainly demonstrates that the world
did not ** become,” but it proves nothing against its
being created, for creation docs not suppose any sort
of prior condition: it is not a becoming, and is
outside time. Matter will have a beginning, like
everything else, if God so wills. It will not be,
properly speaking, created, because, of itself alone,
it lias no being; it will be con-created, i.e., created in
the composite things which exist at the first instant
of the world.
The question of eternal matter has troubled many
minds. Even Fathers of the Church, like Tertullian
and Origen, influenced by Platonism, regarded
creation, as depicted in Genesis, as the ordering of
a chaos. St. Basil went so far as to postulate a sort
of spiritual matter out of which the angels were
created. But it must be carefully noted that these
Doctors did not therefore liberate matter from God’s
jurisdiction, or remove it from creation, properly
understood. They were simply thinking of how the
world began. But the truth remains, they did
apparently believe as a matter of opinion in eternal
matter.
Aristotle has another argument, which has been
resuscitated since his time. It is based on the fact
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that every new thing coming into the world pre­
supposes something before it : every movement and
every instant supposes an anterior one. Every begin­
ning is at the same time a continuation. An absolute
beginning, says Paul Valéry, like many earlier
philosophers, “ is necessarily a myth. A beginning
is coincidence. We must conceive of some unknown
sort of contact between everything and nothing, and,
in trying to do so, we find that every beginning is a
consequence : every beginning is the accomplishment
of something.” We would like a reason for this
statement. The concept is plausible and not antiphilosophical, but to make it a rigorous proof is to
push it too far. He is not sure that Aristotle would
have agreed with him. St. Thomas certainly would
not have thought so, though he seems to have forced
Aristotle's meaning somewhat when he quotes him.
Be that as it may. No proof is forthcoming that the
notion of beginning, which undoubtedly implies
something to follow, equally implies something
preceding. Why should it ?
In the rational order, it is easy to find examples of
followings which do not imply a series of previous
beginnings. Geometrical conclusions are deduced
from principles, but the principles are not deduced
from any previous ones; they are first beginnings
with respect to the conclusions. For, as St. Thomas
puts it: ” To conclude is to acts of the reason what
to move is to acts of nature.”3
Paul Valery says: “ In trying to think of it. we
find, etc.” It would be more exact to say : In trying
to imagine it. Our imagination is quite incapable of
picturing an absolute beginning, whether in time or
space, but that does not mean that wc have the right
* De Potentia, q. Ill, art. I, nd. 6.
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to judge, and judge with certainty, that the world is
really infinite cither in extent or in duration. To do
so is simply begging the question.
If the world is eternal, ever}' state and every move­
ment has one preceding it, and every instant is at
one and the same time a beginning and an end. But
logic does not permit us to take this consequence as
a fact, and then start with it to prove its own ante­
cedent. In order to hold an absolute beginning, it
is not necessary to conceive of “ some sort of
unknown contact between everything and nothing,”
unless conceive is here again taken as an act of the
imagination. We have already disposed of the
theory of a nothingness preceding the world, the idea
of the precession of some nature or absence of
nature. The only reality is the world itself, which
includes space and duration, since they arc qualifica­
tions of it. There is nothing anterior to time, taken
as a whole, any more than there is anything exterior
to the whole of space. St. Thomas finds many
points of resemblance between these two examples.
“ When we say that above heaven there is nothing,
the word above signifies only an imaginary place,
inasmuch as it is possible to imagine other dimen­
sions beyond those of the heavenly body.”* He says
much the same thing of a duration preceding the first
duration. Supposing the world to have gone on for
twenty milliard years: we may imagine it to have
gone on for thirty milliard, and this stretching of
time would be analagous to the stretching of space,
ly making the world out to be larger than it is. You
may represent this on a graph, by producing both
axes beyond their present extremities. All this is
pure imagination, due to our way of thinking, which
* la. q. 46, art. 1. ad. S.

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originates in sense experience, and is subject to
images of space. In reality everything would be
within this world increased in size or duration: the
world itself would have changed, and there would
still be nothing outside it. We have admitted that
those who believe in a beginning to the world, often
imagine it anthropomorphical!/, and thereby falsify
their idea of creation. But those who deny the
beginning may be equally the sport of similar fancies,
even while they pour derision on the first. They are
” clever,” says Pascal, ” but only up to a point.”

The following argument scarcely needs answering,
once the nature of creation is properly understood.
It runs: God is eternal; creative action is eternal.
How, then, can the created world be other than
eternal ? This conclusion does not follow. God is
eternal, not as an antecedent, with consequences
which follow automatically, like a tank, with the tap
always running, which must of necessity overflow.
God is a free cause. His effects are freely willed, and
His will gauges their duration, as well as their
extension and nature. God’s action is eternal, but
it takes on a kind of determination from the concep­
tion of the effect which it produces, and the effect
conforms, not to His action, as it really is in itself,
but to this determination of it. In describing it like
this, we must make allowances for our mode of
understanding. The objector apparently wishes to
conclude that the world ought to exist as soon as
God exists; as soon as God’s action is postulated.
This is unreasonable. Taken literally it puts God in
time, and gives Him a duration of the same kind as
ours, since it compares His with ours, and makes out
that the two coincide. This is a great mistake.
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God’s existence and action are not temporal pheno­
mena though infinitely distant. They exist at all
times and belong to no time. God’s existence is
God; God’s action is God. Therefore on no hypo­
thesis can God's duration be made to coincide with
the world’s. If the world were eternal, i.e., without
a term in the past, its duration would be none the
less absolutely different from God’s. I would even
say that it would be farther removed from the divine
eternity than on the supposition that it had a begin­
ning, for it would be less determined and less perfect,
having neither starting-point nor end. God's
eternity, on the contrary, is a sovereign perfection,
entirely centred in the “ Indivisible,” for it is nothing
else than God Himself, viewed under the relation of
time.
In short, there is no compelling proof of an eternal
world. Philosophy leaves it an open question:
Revelation alone can settle it. On the other hand,
apart from Revelation there is no conclusive argu­
ment to prove that the world began. Such is St.
Thomas’s thesis. It appears at first sight rather
bold, but it is really quite simple and serves as a
touch-stone for the mind. The imagination is balked
by it, but the metaphysical mind will delight in it.
This thesis may be proved a priori, as follows:
The “ newness ” of the world, or rather, the finite
character of its duration in the past, can be the object
of demonstration only in two ways : either by
starting with the nature of the world, and finding
out whether it has an intrinsic principle of endurance,
or else by considering the cause of the world, which
is God. There is no third way, since, apart from
the world and its cause, there is nothing. Now we
cannot deduce any conclusion as to the duration of
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the world from its nature, because a thing's nature
does not include its duration, and is consequently
compatible with duration of any sort. Excluding
other forces at work, what is to prevent a thing
which exists to-day from having existed yesterday
and the day before, and so on without end? If you
argue that it could not have existed at such a date
because its raison d’etre did not then exist, you
revert to its cause, and the only cause of the world,
taken as a whole, is God. If God had wished an
eternal world, then its raison d’etre would have
existed always, and the world too could have existed
always, being ready to receive existence at every
moment of the eternal duration. It is impossible to
imagine anything which could influence God one way
or the other. He acts as He wishes. He can do
anything that docs not involve a contradiction, and
it would be hard to prove that there is any con­
tradiction involved in the hypothesis of an eternal
world.
Yet any number of arguments of all kinds have
been used to prove the non-eternity of the world,
though they, none of them, have much weight for
St. Thomas, and he finds no difficulty in disposing of
them. We shall not go into details: that has been
already done elsewhere. The arguments imply one
or other of the following defects:
i. A confusion between a relative beginning in a
course of activity, such as we sec in nature, and
absolute beginning, and an attempt to apply the
rules of one to the other. An event in this world
always comes about at a given moment. Therefore
it is presumed that the creative event must needs
come about at a given moment also. We have
already pointed out the immaturity of this idea.
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Creation, even on the hypothesis of finite duration,
is no: an event : it does not take place ai a given
moment of an imaginary eternal duration. This is
pure fiction. To conclude that what happens in
relative things must happen in the absolute, is, says
St. Thomas, to be like the child referred to by
Maimonides. He is told that a man comes into
the world after nine months of gestation, and he
answers : That’s impossible; a man could not go nine
months without eating and drinking, since he cannot
do so for a single day.
2. A wrong meaning given to the phrase ad
infinitum. It is taken to represent a regression
towards (ad) a real term (infinitum), which our minds
can approach, even though it is declared in the same
breath to be immeasurably distant. And apart from
this supposition, what do the following objections
signify: An infinite past cannot be traversed; an
infinite number of days in the past makes a total
which cannot be actual, and, in any case, could not
be added to, etc. ? These arguments implicitly
suppose there must be a first day of the world, even
at infinity, and some means of covering the distance
from then till now, and constituting a whole. Now
this notion contradicts the very hypothesis. The
phrase ad infinitum cannot refer to a term. Nothing
could be ad infinitum in that sense. What it stands
for is the law of retrogression without end. It must
be taken as an adverbial phrase, meaning infinitely,
not as the preposition ad with a noun. We may go
backwards infinitely, but not to the infinite. There­
fore there is no first term to arrive at, nor distance
to cover, nor days to add up. On the hypothesis of
an eternal world, the past is not a whole thing, for,
as Aristotle shows, infinity and entirety are incomIII

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
patible ideas, like determined and undetermined,
actual and potential. The infinity of which wc speak
is not of number, and the objections of Cauchy and
others, who deny the possibility of an actually infinite
number are quite beside the point. Nor is it certain
that an actually infinite number is an impossibility.
Pascal and Leibniz believed that there could be one,
while St. Thomas declares4 that an actual infinite is
not repugnant to Aristotle’s principles. St. Thomas
himself rejects it in the Sunima, but takes the
opposite view in his Opusculum De Ætcrnitale
Mundi, and in his commentary on the Physics.
The past, whether finite or infinite, becomes a
composite whole only in our minds : in itself it has
never existed except successively, piece by piece,
instant by instant, in something which is not even a
part of itself, for an instant is not a part of time.
That is why St. Thomas says that time exists
formally only in our minds? Therefore it is fanciful
to represent the " entire ” extent of the infinite past
as a totality, complete in itself and comprehended by
the mind. Wc will not stop to ask whether the mind
really comprehends it or can add anything to it. It
is our imagination that leads us to speak of the
number of past days, and the aggregate of past
centuries. These aggregates only exist in so far as
our minds form them, and we, of course, always
form them finite. Therefore they do not help at all
in settling the question of the possibility or impossi­
bility of the infinite in reality.
The same applies to infinite distance from a
starting-point of things, a notion al least implicitly
underlying many arguments which are thought
4 Cont. Gent.. II. Si.
• Comm, «π Physic. A fist., lib. IV, feet. 23.
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convincing. Here again the imagination is at work
and needs to be counteracted. On the hypothesis
of an eternal world, the starting-point of things is
neither far removed nor near, since it does not
exist at all. The individual instants are parts of a
fictive “ whole.” In its progress, the world—by
which I mean the entire universe—gets no farther
from its starting-point than it gets nearer its end,
which nobody would hold to be a real thing. At
each moment, it advances with respect to some
definite, antecedent term, and it draws nearer to
some ulterior term, but the imagined “ aggregate ”
neither advances nor goes back. It is without
position, like a point in an infinite straight line.
We cannot say that, in ten thousand years’ time,
an eternal world will be farther from its beginning
or nearer its end. It will always have ahead of it,
and in its wake, an equally undetermined infinite,
and even while going on from one term to another,
from one definite epoch to the next, it remains, as
it were, eternally stationary with respect to its
infinite past and future. Even the actual present,
which is always fleeting, and following a deter­
mined course, never advances one step nearer its
end.
(3) A confusion between indeterminate and un­
real. It is objected that time ought to be something
real, since God created it, yet it is indeterminate,
?.nd therefore unreal. I reply: Time, taken as a
whole, is indeterminate, but, as we have said, we
must not take it as a whole. God created it as it
is, successive, becoming instant by instant in reality
and in our minds. “ Taken as a whole ” time was
not created by God but only by our minds. We
ex; lained above that primary matter is not created
113
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

in itself, but only in composite, material things,
precisely because, taken alone, it is indeterminate,
and has no proper existence. Similarly, duration,
as a whole, whether finite or infinite, has no proper
existence: it is formed only by the mind. Its only
reality is that of the world, considered in each of
its states. In this sense, then, is it created in itself,
and also in our minds as our ideas are created, and
as everything that exists is created.
We should not be surprised that the idea of
creation is difficult to grasp, for it is the bond which
unites the creature to God, and it participates in
His mysteriousness. Those who think they have a
clear idea of it are victims of their imagination.
Creation, like Providence, in one of its two aspects
is God Himself; in the other it is where the creature
joins God. It is thus steeped in divine mystery:
the ineffable welding of finite and infinite.

St. Thomas was obviously not in a position to
judge the so-called scientific proofs of the beginning
or end of the world, but there is no doubt that he
would have regarded them as very childish. We
know nothing of the world as a whole. Our
“ laws ” arc drawn from experiments of a very
restricted nature, and are only approximate. We
have no assurance that there are not, in particular
cases, much broader laws, ruling entireties unknown
to us. To claim to incorporate the two infinites of
Pascal into a thermo-dynamic formula, and use it
to predict the fate of the world, “ whose centre is
everywhere, and circumference nowhere,” would
show a lack of imagination almost amusing.
Aristotle would shrug his shoulders, as he did
at those who tried to prove, by the beginnings of
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Greek civilization, that the world itself had a
beginning.
For St. Thomas, the question of the eternity or
non-eremity of the world is a purely theological
one. In philosophy it is a problem, in the Aris­
totelian sense of the word. Yon may give argu­
ments for both sides, or support one of them, but
no necessary argument either way can be forth­
coming. God’s will alone can settle the debate,
and philosophy knows nothing of what God wills.
Ils supreme attainment is to prove God’s existence,
with all its implications. We Christians believe that
the world began, on the authority of Scripture,
taking as literal and conclusive the words of Genesis :
lit the beginning God made heaven and earth.
C. Does Creation Extend to the Universe as a
Whole* Matter. The Multiplicity and Variety
of Things

Having dealt with creation, and discussed the
eternity and non-eternity of the world, wc may
now go on to discover the extent of creation. Does
it include the entire universe, first, as regards its
matter, and then as regards the multiplicity and
variety of its forms and natures?
Wc have already mentioned, though from a
different standpoint, the ancient opinions about
matter. I say from a different standpoint, because
wc were then speaking of duration and not depend­
ence on a first Principle. But in point of fact, the
ancient philosophers who taught the eternity of
matter, taught also that it was independent of God.
Like certain Christian writers, they confused the
”5

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

problem of beginning with that of the first cause.
They made matter not only a principle co-eternal
with the first Principle, but independent of it, and
hence a co-operator in the production of the world.
God and matter, the Demi-urge and chaos (when
physical forces did not take the place of God),
accounted for the world, instead of everything,
including matter, being accounted for by God.
There seems to be a perpetual tendency to think
as they thought. As St. Thomas remarks, it is
not at all easy to take a comprehensive view of
the question, and find its only true answer in God.
Lower minds can see in nature only exterior and
superficial changes of one common substance, and
explain them by mere material causes. We have
to try to look more deeply into nature, to probe
the essences of things, to acknowledge that their
material properties are only so many symptoms or
consequences. Then the question of causality is
put on a higher plane: we must discover essences.
It was in searching for the origin of essences (as
well as for the origin of knowledge) that Plato
put forward his theory of ideas. In this Aristotle
refuses to follow him. Aristotle calls these ideas
forms, and makes them belong, not to the world
of causality, but to the physical substances, which
are its effects. This brings us back to the question
of cause, in so far as it concerns essences. Aristotle
solves it metaphysically by his system of living
worlds, and physically by the theory of the zodiac.
This theory taught that the varying positions of
solar rays, in the course of the year, were the
efficient cause, not only of heat and cold, but also,
by some hidden influence, of the birth and destruc­
tion of all things. This is like the modern theory
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ci radiations. The thought manifested by essences
came from the first heaven, which in turn derived
it from the contemplation of Pure Act.
These ideas seem strange to us to-day, but they
are an indication of the perpetual desire of dis­
covery. and it is better to be wrong as they were,
than to be wrong with some of the moderns. This
brings us to the problem of essences.
The ancients, in attacking this problem, neglect
the problem of the total substance. Matter remained
like a residue at the bottom of all their explanations.
Where does it come from ? Either they did not
ask the question, or they replied : It is eternal, the
material out of which God formed the world.
Matter and God are thus two co-existing principles,
one perfect act, the other pure potentiality, and so
they account for all reality.
St. Thomas, however, objects that this explains
only qualities and essences, not being in its entirety;
not being as being. It does not answer the ultimate
question of metaphysics, the question of being as
being. It explains how white becomes black, how
dense becomes rare, how cold becomes hot, or
vice versa : a considerat ion of material properties
is sufficient for that. It explains, too, how such
being becomes, by a substantial change, such other
being; but it does not take us out of the realm of
particular considerations. We are not concerned
with the question of such being, or of being affected
by such matter. Creation is concerned with being
as being, and that is precisely what is left unex­
plained. It is a question of the ultimate basis of
things in their entirety, for, when an element is
found to be based on being, it thereby comes under
creation. Is matter being f If it were not, it
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
would not be an element oi reality. It is not a
being, since it has no determination or unity of its
own, but it is oj being; it belongs to being in so
far as it is able to be. This is enough to enable
us to say, as we have done, that matter is not,
properly speaking, created, seeing it does not
subsist of itself alone, but concrcated. In brief,
matter enters into the object of creation, like
everything else, and this is the problem.
This problem would remain unanswered, no matter
how we conceived of matter, were it not for
St. Thomas’s high metaphysical principles. Whence
comes the stuff of which nature is made? Is it
a creation of God ? Is it independent, presupposing
nothing and itself presupposed in everything that
exists? That is the question.
In the Summa contra Gentiles,1 St. Thomas
attacks and explodes the theory of a matter in­
dependent of God. For what purpose is matter,
he asks, as regards an active cause ? Obviously,
to serve as a recipient of its action. Therefore its
action is not all-powerful. In one way it is a slave,
and, in consequence, the result is not entirely its
own. For, just as an action belongs to the doer,
in so far as it comes from him, so it belongs to
what suffers the action in so far as it resides there.
Can we say this of God? No. He is almighty,
and His action, identical with His being, is selfsufficient; it is all being, whether by reality in God
Himself, or by power, in the sense that all created
being comes from Him. Therefore there is no use
in postulating a matter co-eternal with God, which
He must act upon, as a sculptor makes things out
of marble. If an artist could create the material
’ll. 16.
ii8

CREATION
of his art, he would be the God of his production.
God, the sovereign Artist, supplies the material of
His art, as well as the forms. His power is not
restricted to the latter. He is the all-powerful
principle of being, and therefore supplies the whole
of being.
When a worker has need of material, it is
obviously material proportioned to his action, in
such a way that it can receive every form that he
can give it. Otherwise his power of making, which
can be exercised only in a material, would be
purposeless, as he would have no means of mani­
festing it. This supposition is particularly unten­
able when we are concerned with the foundations
of being. Nothing in nature is without a purpose.
Everything that an active cause can really do, can
always be really done. But it is obviously not true
that matter can receive everything that God can do.
God can make infinitely more things than matter
can receive. Matter is limited to physical creations,
of definite form, and in definite quantities. There
are many beings, especially possible ones, apart from
matter. God’s power is absolutely infinite, and
therefore could not be exercised as such if it were
conditioned by matter. And if it is not so con­
ditioned, why postulate matter as a co-eternal
principle that is pre-supposed in everything created
by God?
Further, in nature, when two realities are con­
nected so as to form a certain order, it is necessary
:hat one should proceed from the other, or both
from a third ; otherwise their order, their harmoni­
ous and productive intercourse, would be without
explanation. We should be compelled to put it
down to chance, and chance has no place in the
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

first constitution of things; it comes only from their
interactions, which are subsequent to their being.
Therefore, if there exists a co-etemal matter,
corresponding to the action of God, and in harmony
with it, then one of these two must proceed from
the other, or both from some third thing. But
God cannot proceed from matter, nor, moreover,
can He and matter proceed from some third thing.
These two solutions are excluded by the very notion
of God, for He is the first Cause, and would not
be at the summit of causality if a superior cause
could be attributed to Him, whether individually or
conjointly. Therefore matter must come from God;
i.e., God is the cause of matter.
Is God, equally and properly, the cause of the
multiplicity and variety of beings? Or is His
causality only general, concerned with the primary
elements of the world, and not with the particular
details of its constitution? This is a big question,
and the diverse answers given to it will be better
appreciated when we treat of Providence.
St. Thomas declares that God cannot be ignorant
of the results of His initial creation, or be interested
simply in primary beings. He says this would make
the world of experience a chance production. Wc
mean by a chance production the result obtained
when several distinct agents do each their own
work, without their actions being co-ordinated or
directed by some higher cause. If God were con­
cerned simply with the primary elements of the
world, and each of these acted independently,
without the guidance of a higher cause, the world
we experience would be a chance production. But
order is heaven’s first law, and order cannot be
attributed to chance. The greatest effect must be
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attributed to the greatest cause, God. We can
admit—indeed, we must admit—intermediate causes,
but it is inconceivable that God should be uncon­
cerned with what is most noble in the universe, and
that it should be left to chance. Creation would
be meaningless. The order of the universe is, as
it were, its ultimate form, which gives it its unity,
and its very being, as a whole. Granted that God
created the universe, you cannot say that what is
properly the universe, viz., the organic multiplicity
of things, with their distinctions and limits, escapes
His supreme causality.

The reason why certain philosophers held a world
due to chance, was because God is absolutely simple,
and can only will and produce what is simple. But
we have already seen that God’s simplicity is not
a simplicity of exclusion, but a simplicity of rich­
ness. We shall show that He even commands evil.
Therefore we must hold that His creative intention,
directly and in itself, implies multiplicity in its
effects. The reason is that, as every’ created thing
is necessarily imperfect in comparison with the first
being, the quota of perfection in the universe can­
not normally be concentrated in one sole nature.
Neither God nor the indefinite virtuality of matter
would be made manifest. Goodness is diffused and
gradated, and must descend from the Sovereign
Good, Who is a synthesis of all good, to a variety
of beings and perfections which, by their multiple
good, form an analysis of the good, and combine
to show forth the infinite riches of the Supreme
Good.
Creatures resemble God more by their diversity
and gradations than if they constituted one unique
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effect, for they can communicate their perfection, as
God communicates His, and this is only possible
where there is diversity. They also resemble God’s
thought. Just as wc use many words to express
one idea, so God creates many beings to express
Himself in the world.
From diversity naturally follows inequality, for
beings will vary in perfection according as they
approach or recede from the supreme perfection of
God. It is by successive negations that a scale of
values of being can be arranged under the perfect
being; just as, if we start with what is lowest in the
scale of creation, pure potentiality, wc gradate the
perfections of beings by successive additions. This
is true of all classification, e.g., vertebrate, inverte­
brate; rational animal, irrational animal. That is why
Aristotle compares the series of forms of being and
their definitions to numbers, which are changed
specifically by adding or subtracting a unit. He
thereby affirms implicitly that diversity implies
gradated perfections, at least as regards the domain
of essences.
Individuals, on the other hand, are differentiated
by matter, and since forms are manifested in matter,
the purpose of the many individuals of one species
is to show forth the potentialities of that species.
This material or individual multiplicity is thus
similar to specific multiplicity, and the same prin­
ciples may be applied to both. How to account
for the inequality of beings is therefore the same
problem as how to account for their diversity and
multiplicity; or, if you will, one explains the other.
Just as a participation in the supreme perfection
must be multiple, otherwise the universe would not
manifest that amount of goodness which it should,
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so also it must be gradated, and consequently
unequal.

Philosophers who believed that the inequalities in
nature and in human beings must be attributed
uniquely to particular causes, or to free will, instead
of seeing in them the divine necessity of order, are
obviously at fault. The Manicheans thought that a
perfect God could produce only the perfect, and
consequently they granted to Him only spiritual
and incorruptible beings, and abandoned corruptible
beings to an evil principle. Origen, in opposing
them, fell into a similar error. He granted that an
excellent and just God could be the cause only .of
what was excellent and just. From that he con­
cluded that only excellent creatures, rational
creatures, made to the likeness of God, were of
divine creation, and that they had all been formed
equal. What inequalities there were, were due to
the different use they made of their free will. Some
had been given the rank of pure intelligences, others
had been bound to bodies, and in these two ranks
the diversity of degrees was due to the diversity of
merits or the gravity of faults. St. Augustine wrote
of this:
“ What could be more nonsensical than to say
that God created the sun, which is unique in this
world, not out of a desire to enhance the beauty
of the universe, or preserve corporeal things, but
because one soul sinned in a way to deserve to be
imprisoned in such a body. Why! If not one, but
two, or a dozen, or a hundred souls had happened
to commit this same sin, then this world would have
a hundred suns!
* De Civ. Dei., XI. c. 23.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

Schopenhauer, Renouvier, and even Kant, have
elaborated similar theories from not very different
motives. Schopenhauer, judging the world to be
bad, interprets it as the fall of the will, into the
multiple and imperfect, from a state of perfect unity,
in which it could not maintain itself. Renouvier
attributes the fall of primitive man to a state of an
imperfect and progressive world, to a sort of
original sin, with orders to climb up, by the efforts
of civilization, towards the lost Eden. Kant,
without going that far, shows that he is infected by
the same spirit when he puts free will outside
phenomena, into some sort of state inaccessible to
experience, and attributes to this primordial responsi­
bility the characteristics of a phenomenal will, no
longer free. Lastly, in quite a number of con­
temporary poets, in Sully Prudhomme, and in Paul
Valéry, being itself is continually represented as a
fall and an error.
Soleil! soleil! faute éclatante!

These theories all result from a misunderstanding
of the exigences of order: they sacrifice the first
Cause, and His unerring wisdom, for particular
causes. Can any person, asks St. Thomas, hold
that natures, the first basis of action, are them­
selves the result of action, and thus come about
accidentally? Why bring in questions of merit or
guilt? The very first constitution of natures is
clearly anterior to all questions of proportion or
right, which are measured by the mode of being of
its subject, i.e., by its nature; and all merit pre­
supposes this nature, since merit is based on action,
and action is posterior to being. Inequality comes
from God, as His direct effect, or at least as directly
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willed. It is a condition of universal perfection, of
liarmony, which is the highest expression of the
Good.
D. Creation and Evil

This is the place to consider evil, for the principal
errors connected with creation are based on it.
What is evil ? It is not something positive : it is
a lack, an imperfection and limitation of being,
which impedes its full realization. Looked at in
this light, there is no need to try to find a cause
for it. Evil has no cause of its own, since it is no
being, but a mere privation. Still, the fact of evil
is very positive. Evil is not, but there is evil : and
since this accident, this deficiency, is produced by
the very fact of a complexus of causes, this is the
place to treat of it, and discover why the first Cause
permits it. The solution is based on the principles
we have just put forward.
The universe is created, as we have said, by a
communication of the Sovereign Good, in which all
things participate in varying degrees. Each thing
expresses God in its own way, and is therefore
good, though necessarily deficient. There is only
one perfect being, God : all other things must be in
gradation, both as regards their being and their
perfection. The multiplicity of limited, and conse­
quently deficient natures, is compensated for by the
unity of order, and it is for the sake of this order
that evil is permitted. Without evil, or rather,
without the diversity of natures which permits it,
God would be less perfectly reflected in the world.
Every nature, as such, no matter how lowly, implies
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

a perfection of a special kind, which no other being
can replace, and which therefore has its due place
in the universe, being endowed with the degree of
goodness destined for it by the supreme wisdom.
Essences show forth being, and being would be the
poorer if robbed of any essence whatever. All
beings are deficient either in themselves, or (what
comes to the same thing) in their natural surround­
ings, which are, as it were, part of them, and lliat
without which they cannot be defined. Therefore
they necessarily fall short of perfection, in a greater
or lesser degree, and thereby give rise to evil. God
could prevent this failing, by a constant intervention
of His sovereign power, but it would be incompatible
with His wisdom. As we shall see later, Providence
leaves natures to themselves, and does not keep
interfering with their mode of acting, or with their
natural tendencies. There would be no purpose in
natures being deficient if endowed with the gift of
never failing. What can truly fail, will fail from
time to time, if left to itself.
Further, though evil in itself is non-being, it is
indirectly a condition of the interactions of being,
since it is a condition of all action. This argument
is equally cogent here, as when used of the inequality
of natures. There would be no such thing as
action if there were no contraries, for contraries
are the basis of all interchanges: the very weakness
of certain things, whether beings or phenomena, is
sacrificed for the birth or success of others. This is
just as true in the moral order as in the material.
There would be no life for the lion without death
for the sheep, nor martyr’s patience without the
malice of his persecutors. Good is more powerful
for good than evil is for evil. The good done more
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than compensates for the evil. The good resulting
from a well-built house is greater than the trouble
it is to build it well. Evil is evil, but it is good for
evil to be. This is true at the first foundation of
things and at their ultimate effects. These must be
waste, but it is not a meaningless waste, because it
shows forth God’s glory under some new form, and
that is its ultimate purpose. For example, in
material waste, God is manifested in the higher
cosmic laws; in moral lapses, by His justice, which
is the law of the moral order.
This does not mean that our created universe is
the best possible one. For St. Thomas, our
universe is the best that could possibly be made out
of the elements of which it is actually composed.
But to improve it, it would only be necessary to
increase the number of its elements, or enhance
their value, and thereby render their relations more
perfect. We have no right to expect this improve­
ment. God is under no obligation; He is absolutely
all-sufficient for Himself. A moment’s reflexion will
show that the best possible world is not possible,
for God could always improve on it. Whatever God
makes will necessarily be immeasurably deficient, in
comparison with the infinite possibilities He could
make, just as it is an unspeakable marvel, compared
with nothingness or the infinite decline open to it.
Our universe is between these extremes, and its
relative value is gauged by comparison with either
extreme. It is the best and the worst; it is nothing
and it is being. As Pascal says: “ An all in com­
parison with nothing, a nothing in comparison with
all.”
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
E. The Unity of Creation

Is the universe really and truly one, or are there
several worlds? We must carefully distinguish, for
there are several ways of looking at the problem.
We may look at it from the standpoint of astronomy,
or of cosmology, or of metaphysics; the last dealing
with the transcendent relations between the first
Cause and the world (or worlds). Or again we
may look at it from the standpoint of God’s absolute
power, or else from the standpoint of what is called
in theology His ordinary power.
When an astronomer speaks of a “ plurality of
worlds ” he does not mean it in the sense in which
we take it here. It is generally admitted that the
solar system, which is a universe, in a restricted
sense of the word, is only an element in the nebulæ
of the Milky Way, there being millions of them in
astronomical space. These groups are sufficiently
independent and isolated to be given each a collec­
tive name and to be distinguished one from another.
The astronomer would be the first to admit that the
word “ world,” in this context, has only a relative
sense, for no one believes that these groups are
really independent and isolated. They are observed
to be composed of similar materials, subject, broadly
speaking, to the same laws, and united one with
another by their mutual interactions. Worlds wholly
independent and isolated could not possibly be
known by us, for in order that they may be known,
light would have to come from them to us, and that
would make them subject to at least one common
law. the law of light, and thus not completely
isolated. The comparatively small universe known
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in St. Thomas’s time was held to form one sole
totality, well defined and perfectly linked up, with
actions and reactions going, without break, from the
periphery to the centre, and vice versa.
But is it possible that there are other worlds,
absolutely independent of us, cut off from us, and
having no connection with our universe? St.
Thomas says that it is logically impossible. He
says logically impossible, because, if you regard
only God’s power, then several worlds are just as
easy to create as one, since God can do anything He
wishes. He can do everything that does not involve
a contradiction, and there is no contradiction in the
existence of several worlds. But there is one sense
in which they would be connected. They might
conceivably have no external relations one with
another, but they must be assembled and unified
in the divine mind. In that sense they would be
connected, and we, though incapable of knowing
anything about them in this life, should sec them
some day, in seeing God. Therefore, absolutely
speaking, a plurality of entirely unconnected worlds
under one sole God is contradictory, since they must
at least be connected in the divine mind.
But could several worlds exist with no other
connection with one another than their unification
in the divine mind? Conceiving unity in a more
concrete sort of way, we must here distinguish the
absolute power of God, and His ordinary power, or
power governed by His wisdom. By His absolute
power, God could create several worlds without any
mutual relationships, other than their unification in
His mind. But His absolute power, i.e., His power,
singled out and considered apart from His other
attributes, is only a mental abstraction. We dis129

I

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

tinguish His wisdom and His power, and His other
attributes, as already explained, but they are really
identical. By His ordinary power, i.e., by His
power in consort with His wisdom, God could not
create such worlds. Here is St. Thomas’s reason
for saying so :
“ Λ11 things that come from God have a relation
one with another, and a relation with God,”’ because
God’s only possible motive in acting is to show forth
His goodness, and communicate His perfection.
Every other primary motive is excluded from Him
by His plenitude of being and absolute indepen­
dence. lie needs nothing, and can acquire nothing.
His only act is to give, and what He gives must in
some way be Himself, since there is nothing besides
Him. Thus creation is an emanation of the divine;
a participation in God. It is multiple because one
solitary being could not suffice to show forth the
riches of God, which is the ultimate purpose of all
things. Therefore it is impossible that they should
be entirely unconnected and unrelated. They must
have an order, for order is heaven’s first law. God
wills them, not for their individual worth, but for
their collective worth. The world essentially is
God’s work, and order is its form. God wills, first
and foremost, not this or that creature, but the order
which they proclaim. Just as an artist wills, not
this or that element of his production, but the whole
of it; just as a wise government wills, not the
success of individual enterprises, but the common
good of the whole nation, which comprehends and
surpasses the good of individuals; so God wills the
good of the universe, taken as a whole, and this
good surpasses the good of particular essences.
• la, q. XLVII, art. 3. corp.
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CREATION
Therefore the motive of God’s action is to diffuse
His goodness. Therefore His work must be
ordered : His creation must be one unique universe.
Democritus, who was a better cosmologist than
metaphysician, held a plurality of worlds, succeeding
one another, and subject only to Chance. St.
Thomas admits that there could be many independent
worlds if they were fortuitous, because Chance is
itself multiple, and could not unite them. Even in
the theory of Democritus, these worlds had a
minimum of unity, since they resulted from a
common law of atoms, but this unity is so restricted
that it is more exact to say, as did Democritus, that
there are many worlds made out of the same
matter, than that there is only one. There are
modern materialists whose philosophy is no more
advanced than that of these ancient ” naturalists.”
A correct view of the world’s origin is sufficient
to refute this theory. It is true that Chance of
itself causes the multiple, because it is an accidental
cause without unifying principle. On the contrary,
God is one, He acts by His intelligence, and intelli­
gence unifies its objects. God tends always to
unity: He assembles and unites, and makes all His
creatures common children of one Father. It is
inconceivable that His work should not be co­
ordinated.
St. Thomas gives the following dilemma,10 in
answer to an objection : Either these supposed
multiple worlds are identical, or they are without
purpose. Number is not willed for its own sake,
but only for the sake of the variety of conservation
of beings. Mere repetition is valueless : number is
simply the measure of material things. If creatures
*· la. q. 47. art. 3, ad. 2.
ISI

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
were multiplied merely for the sake of number,
there would be no reason why they should ever
cease being multiplied, but would go on ad infinitum.
If, on the other hand, they are multiple for some
other reason, they must needs form part of a plan.
They will be unified, not only in the divine mind, but
in being as well.
There is a side issue, which never occurred to
St. Thomas, but which is often discussed to-day,
namely, the question of a plurality of worlds in the
sense of Fontenelle, a plurality of inhabited worlds.
It is useless to ask what St. Thomas’s opinion would
have been. In the absence of any positive or
scientific data, he would probably have confessed
complete ignorance about it. Still, bad it occurred
to him, it is quite likely that his keen intelligence
would have sought a solution of the mystery.
There are Catholics who believe that it is contrary
to faith to hold a plurality of inhabited worlds, yet
Revelation, which concerns only our world, gives
us no hint one way or the other. There are others,
both Catholic and non-Catholic, scholars and popular
writers, who consider such a theory as arbitrary in
the extreme, and most improbable, because of the
stringent conditions required for life in this world,
which we find nowhere else, save possibly on Mars.
This is a curious outlook. Obviously, we have no
certitude, but surely the theory is quite reasonable.
Why should the planet Earth have a monopoly of
intelligent beings? Consider the myriads of suns,
that we know, and the myriads of others that we
suspect to be : they are similar in composition, and
it is probable that most of them have satellites as
our sun has. Is it unreasonable to maintain that
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CREATION
the stringent conditions required for life have
occurred, in the course of thousands of years, a
little oftcner than once? Is it unlikely that God,
Who has been so prodigal in creating worlds, should
single out our tiny earth, and give no intelligent
beings to the great worlds which will continue long
after ours has become as dead and uninhabitable as
the moon?
We cannot say for certain, but it is at least
within reason for those who believe in God, to
maintain that the whole creation was not made
merely to be contemplated by us insignificant beings,
who have never known its true dimensions, and
probably never shall. That seems hardly in keeping
with God’s wise adaptation of means to ends.
Of course it will be objected that “ it often takes
a big machine to make a small object : a huge
apparatus to produce a spark.” It is not a matter
of size, but of value. Agreed. Or again: “The
sublime results to which this discovery [immensity
of the universe] has led man must make him proud
of his rank here on earth, by showing him his own
grandeur in contrast with the extreme smallness
of the base whereby he measures the heavens.”11
Beautiful words and true, but hardly to the point,
for it is not easy to believe that the spiritual dignity
of lowly intelligences like ours requires quite such
profusion and disproportionate grandeur.
It seems almost to accuse God of a certain want
of skill. Creusot’s great steam-hammer can crack
a nut. Yes, but it was not made for that. It is not
skill, but want of it, which requires an enormous
machine to do a small job. If God thought fit to
give Himself innumerable chances of doing the work
” Laplace. Exposition du Système du Monde.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
He meditated, and then did it only once, would it
not resemble—though slightly, I admit—the Chance
of Democritus, which occasionally brought off a
success, because it had infinite numbers and time at
its disposal ?
But we are out of our depths, and had better
conclude, as we began, by saying that wc do not
know.

•34

CHAPTER V
PROVIDENCE

God creates, and having created, governs. Divine
governance and Providence are not exactly the same,
but, as one supposes the other, and as we commonly
call them by the same name, we may take them
together here.

I. The Meaning

of

Providence

God's Knowledge
God is provident because He gives things, not only
their being, but their order and destiny, for these arc
included in the object of God’s intelligence. It has
been proved in the second and third chapters that
God is intelligent, and we need not prove it again
here. We might say a good deal more about it, only
we must keep within bounds. We refer the reader
to the wonderful account of it given by St. Thomas
in the Summa.
The divine intelligence comprehends all things : it
does not remain shut up in itself, as Aristotle held.
Aristotle would argue that, because God knows only
Himself, He is ignorant of everything else. We
’35

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

argue that because God knows Himself, He conse­
quently knows everything else.
As already shown, to know means to become
ideally that which one knows. Obviously God can­
not become anything, ideally or otherwise. He
cannot be anything but Himself. Further, a
multiplicity of ideas in God is inconceivable, for
God is perfectly simple. Therefore what is created
cannot be in Him, as the details of a landscape are
reflected in a mirror. While human intelligence is
conditioned by its object, from which it receives, and
on which it depends, God’s intelligence can be condi
tioned by nothing, depends on nothing, and receives
from no created thing. God is absolutely intelligible
and absolute intelligence, and the cause of all that is
intelligible or intelligent. Therefore He must know
everything, in knowing Himself.
God knows all things, not only in general, but
through and through, down to the minutest details,
all of which are ruled by His providence. Things i»
general is not a reality : it has no being. God, the
cause of all being, knows all things in their reality,
each individually, and even their very possibilities.
We have already ruled out the sort of modified
creation which makes God responsible only for
primary elements. For the same reasons we here
rule out a modified form of knowledge, which would
confine the divine intelligence to universals, and deny
it that universality of knowledge which, as cause of
being, it demands. If an architect were the cause of
the house in all its details, including the materials
of which it was made, and its site, he would know it,
in knowing himself, in his own thought, and would
have no need to ask the builder for information.
God is the cause of all things and so has no need
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PROVIDENCE

to draw His knowledge of beings from the beings
themselves: He draws on Himself for it; He knows
them wholly, and nothing, for Him, is general or
particular.
His knowledge embraces everything ad infinitum,
for it comprises the real and the possible, the present
and the future, the actual and the potential—where
infinity lurks under so many forms. God's know­
ledge is God, and He can fail to know only by failing
to be. He comprehends infinitely. " He is,” says
St. Thomas, “ virtually all things.”

The Contingent Future
A special difficulty is raised in the schools over the
contingent future, i.e., the future not yet determined
in its causes. Its bearing on Providence is obvious,
for, if God is ignorant of the future of beings, of
their vagaries and actions, how can He rule them ?
'Phe difficulty is due to the fact that the future, as
such, does not exist, and therefore cannot be the
object of vision, while, as contingent, it has no being,
by anticipation, in its causes, and therefore cannot be
the object of prevision. How can even God know
what can be neither seen nor foreseen?
This difficulty originates in a false comparison of
God’s knowledge with ours. Our knowledge, like
its object, is in time. If subject and object, the mind
and the thing, do not in some way concur, they
cannot be united. I do not know what you will do
to-morrow, because my mind is working to-day, and
to-morrow and to-day are different times, uncon­
nected by any certain causality. But if my mind
were outside lime, T should see what you are going
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
to do to-morrow, just as well as I see what you are
doing to-day: there would be no difference. So it
is with God.
God, says St. Thomas, is like a spectator at the
top of a high tower, watching a procession go by.
Each individual in the procession sees those who are
ahead of him, but not those who follow. The
spectator sees the whole procession at once, because
he is not in it. So we who are in the procession of
time, measure our knowledge by time. The very
words which express it are of time, and the future,
as future, escapes us. But God looks on time as a
whole, by one simple glance. His word is unmodi­
fied by time; it expresses the whole of being without
division or succession of any sort, so much so that
God, in seeing Himself, sees all things present and
to come. Present and future are differences of His
own making, and in no way limit His knowledge
any more than the wall which is built day by day
limits the architect’s knowledge. Past, present, and
future are attributes which no more limit God’s
knowledge than red, white, blue, or round, square,
triangular. The last mark a spatial order, the first
a temporal order, but space and time are differences
of being within the categories, and God is above all
categories, and above created being as its principle.
Strictly speaking, God does not see into the future :
He sees the future in His eternal present.

Another characteristic of divine knowledge, already
touched upon, is its absolute independence of its
objects, and these objects’ absolute dependence on it.
“ God’s knowledge is the cause of things,” St.
Thomas says over and over again. It is the cause,
since it is to things what an artist’s knowledge is to
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PROVIDENCE
his works. The artist works in virtue of a form
which he conceives and wishes to impress on some
matter. God, author of the matter as well, works in
virtue of a more complete intellectual form; but
the relation is the same. God does not know the
creature by its being impressed on Him. On the
contrary, His knowledge creates it, though not
precisely as knowledge, for knowledge, as such, is
not a cause. You will never build a house by having
an idea of it : you must apply your idea to the
material, and that supposes in you an inclination or
bias, which leads you to express the idea in some
material. We call this inclination the will.

God's Will
God is will, in the same sense, and for the same
reason, as He is intelligence. He is will because He
is being, and because all being has this inclination or
impulse towards a good, which is suited to it. The
will may be regarded as the inclination of the intelli­
gence, or better, the inclination of the soul, which,
by becoming something else by knowledge, now
tends to a good other than itself. Will and intelli­
gence act in conjunction and cannot be found apart,
and therefore God must have will. But in God. will
and intelligence are identical with His nature.
Just as God primarily knows only Himself, and
even-thing else in Himself, so He can will only
Himself, and everything else by reason of Himself,
in so far as it participates in His goodness. There­
fore God’s will has no end outside God Himself.
His end is Himself, but Himself regarded as good­
ness which can be diffused. He can acquire nothing;
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
He can only communicate. His end is all goodness,
all generosity, and, whereas men, in giving, receive
something, God gives without recompense. Hence
St. Thomas says that He alone is, strictly speaking,
liberal.

God's Liberty
God knows and wills. But does He will freely, or
is He subject to a sort of fatality, whether in the
nature of things which compel Him, or in His own
perfection? Jupiter was subject to Fatum, and in
a number of philosophies, God is regarded as a
supreme necessity, or eternal axiom. This is con­
trary to our principles. God cannot be determined
by anything, since what determines a thing must
precede it, and nothing precedes God, the first cause
of all things.
God could not be determined by an effect, infinite
like Himself, because there would then be two Gods,
which is «absurd; nor by a finite effect, because this
would limit His action, and make Him a finite cause.
God has no limitations: He is being, pure and
simple. Therefore nothing can come from Hirn in
virtue of a sort of natural obligation.
Further, God is the Intelligible-Intelligent, the
Thought of Thought, as Aristotle puts it, and His
effects must proceed from Him in an intellectual way,
not by a fatality of nature. They must be the effects
of practical knowledge, of art. They cannot bind
Him, because He receives from nobody, and is the
Author of all the laws which govern them.
None the less, God’s will, in itself, is necessary,
because everything in God is necessary, since every­
thing in God is God. But it does not follow that the
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PROVIDENCE
effect is necessary, because God’s will transcends and
is entirely independent of its effects. That God can
du only what lie actually does, is true in the sense
that His will is unchangeable, but it does not mean
that 11 is effects have any right to existence, or
compel Him in any way. In that sense God can do
whatever He pleases. The contingency of the world
is due to the world, not to its cause. The world is
contingent because it has nothing in it to make it
necessary, even though it issues from a cause which
is itself necessary.
Ultimately, it all comes back to the proposition
that the world is not God nor equal to the active
power or motives of God. Our position contradicts
Pantheism, for Spinoza makes these following two
propositions equivalent : God acts necessarily, and :
The world is only a mode of God.

God's Omnipotence

In order to have a right idea of Providence, we
must know whether God’s will is always obeyed.
We give an affirmative answer to this question,
because God is the cause of universal being, and all
being must obey I Its law. A cause infallibly attains
its effect, unless impeded by something which is not
subject to it. Since God is the cause of all things,
nothing can escape His causality, and therefore
nothing can impede the complete realization of His
effects.
But omnipotence means a great deal more than
that, for obedience to God expresses a relation only
of actual being, whereas God’s power rules all being,
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Il

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
actual and possible. God can do all things, in the
sense that His power extends to everything that is
being in any way. Therefore God can do anything
that does not involve a contradiction.
Some have gone too far. attributing to God the
power of doing the impossible, as if it were a mark
of power to be able to do what cannot be done. In
his Opusculum De Æteniitate Mundi, St. Thomas,
while speaking kindlily of this opinion, out of respect
for the piety of its supporters, nevertheless firmly
rejects it as devoid of sense. His own conclusion
is, in the words of his master, Albert the Great, that
“ whoever speaks of realizing a contradiction is
postulating not power, but impotence.” The reason
is that God’s power is equal to His being, and cannot
escape, or go beyond being, without running counter
to His nature. It cannot overstep the limits of
thought, and thought implies a harmonizing of
elements into an ideal synthesis. Contradictions
cannot be reconciled, and thus they form a kind of
frontier to God’s knowledge : they are not really a
frontier, because a frontier is a division between two
things, and in the present case there is nothing the
other side.

Is God’s power faithful and just? Speaking
strictly, justice implies a debt, and God is not
indebted to any creature: He gives everything its
being, and any right belonging to a thing obviously
follows on its being. But precisely because things
have certain rights, God, in giving them their being,
gives also these rights. In so doing, He as it were
obeys an order, which is not imposed on Him from
without, but which is a necessary element of His
work. In this way He pays a debt to all things, in
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PROVIDENCE
giving each creature what fits it for its nature and
purpose.
Again, God’s omnipotent will is loving and merci­
ful : loving, in so far as it communicates good;
merciful, because it removes evil, as far as justice
allows.
God's Love

God must have love—not passionate or emotional,
but intellectual love. He wills good to His creatures
in willing their being and the consequent perfection
Which is their happiness. God’s love is creative,
i.e., it does not depend on the creatures’ merits or
goodness, but precedes them and is their first cause.
God docs not love His creatures because they are
good: they are good because He loves them. God
loves the Sovereign Good, and consequently He
loves all things, since all things participate in the
Sovereign Good, all communicate in being, of which
He is the source. But it follows also that He loves
them unequally. The difference is not in Him.
God’s love is God. The difference is due to the fact
that His love wills that there should be differences,
and that, from the creature’s standpoint, these differ­
ences allow the creative love to be qualified and
gradated.
God's Mercy

The same must be said of mercy. In God it is not
a passion, a loving sorrow, as it is in us, for a passion
supposes a body. We name it by its effects. The
effect of mercy is to help, to alleviate suffering, and
U3

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

remove misery, which God does in an eminent way,
as far as His wisdom and justice allow. Mercy and
justice must always be taken conjointly, though
mercy, in a way, excels and surpasses justice. As
St. James says: “ Mercy exalteth above judgment.”1

II. Definition of Providence

Wc are now in a position to define Providence.
St. Thomas borrows the following fine definition
from Boethius: “the divine reason itself, situate at
the summit of things, and disposing all things.”
Providence implies the disposition of things, but a
disposition in thought, preceding the things them­
selves, i.e., it is first and foremost a plan. But it is
a plan, not merely to be conceived by the intelligence,
but to be realized by the imperative judgments of its
Chief. Thus the event is fixed, and bound to its
temporal causes, even though it exist in the divine
mind. The realization of things, or their real follow­
ing on their cause, is not, properly speaking, an
effect of Providence, but of divine government, at
least in Thomistic language. Still, as we said,
language often confuses them.
God, then, is provident, in so far as He “ disposes
all things”; in other words, because the order of
things, just as their substances, proceeds from Him.
This order supposes, on the one hand, a directing of
each thing towards the particular end. which is suited
to it, or which it must serve, and, on the other, the
directing of all things towards the ultimate end,
which is the manifestation of the supreme Good.
» Ch. II. v. 13.

Γ44

PROX^IDENCE

Necessity, the Alternative to Providence

Those who deny Providence, or remove certain
things from its sway, do so either because of objec­
tions which they cannot answer, or because of
incidental error, or else because their philosophy
is defective in its very principles. Materialists like
Democritus attribute everything to material com­
binations, unaided by any superior cause, and
working without purpose : then chance takes the
place of Providence. idealists come to the same
conclusion in insisting on their so-called necessities,
which do away with the first necessity. It would
require an entire book to refute them, but we can
at least get rid of the chief objections and errors.
Both in modern thought and in antiquity there is
a constant error which secs an opposition between
necessity and Providence, neglecting the fact that
the necessary and the contingent are differences of
being, and forgetting that the problem of Provi­
dence, the problem of the divine ordering of being,
belongs to the highest level of thought.
When treating of God’s existence, we showed that
any necessary thing, other than God, must have a
reason for its necessity. For example, necessary
geometrical conclusions are based on antecedent
principles. Natural necessities are the executive
causes of Providence : they presuppose some real
antecedent to their action: they act on things
already in existence, according to some preestablished order. “ Pure determinism is non­
sense,” wrote Jules Tannery, “ it must presuppose
a thought, for things are determined for and by
MS
K

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

thought.” To say that things come about by
necessity is rather like saying that, because a bullet
leaves the gun and hits the target, it is impelled
uniquely by gunpowder, and does not require a
marksman.

Evil
Evil, physical and moral, is a disorder which has
led to a denial of Providence. But it may be
retorted that the fault is only in the order of things,
which are made for a determined end. You do not
complain of disorder in a sand-heap, but in a
machine or in an organism. You cannot blame an
architect or grammarian for not healing you: you
blame the doctor for that, and the grammarian for
grammatical mistakes. In the same way, you can­
not blame nature for its waywardness and its
monstrosities, or life for its unhappiness and its
faults. Nature and life follow an order, have a
final end, obey a thought, are ruled by a Providence.
But we may reasonably ask how it is that evils
and errors should find a place in this divine order.
That has been explained in the foregoing chapter,
by the inevitable imperfection of created being: we
may almost say, by its very perfection, in so far as
the manifestation of one being's perfection implies
imperfection in another. Granting this then, evil
comes from the infinite goodness of God, for
God's goodness envisages, before all else, the
good of the universe, which, far from excluding
evil, demands it, either as real or as possible, and
consequently produces it in a certain number of
cases.
It is sophistry to argue that only a perfect being
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PROVIDENCE
can come from what is perfect. On the contrary,
only an imperfect being can come from what is
perfect, for the perfect which would come from the
perfect would be the perfect itself. Beings which
come from the absolute being must be only relatively
perfect, multiple and varying in the degree of their
perfection. Thence come all the oppositions and
interferences which give rise to evil.
It may be objected that in relation to God, degrees
of perfection are purely arbitrary. If the world
were ten times more perfect than it is, we could
still postulate one twenty times as perfect. If it
were ten times less perfect, we should look upon
its actual state as an ideal. All we can say,
absolutely speaking, is that the world has some
degree of perfection : wc have no way of gauging
it by comparison with anything else. It is infinitely
perfect as God’s handiwork, and infinitely imperfect
in comparison with God. Many things in it seem
to us senseless or unjust, but to acknowledge
Providence, we have no need to understand all its
secrets: enough that we can catch a glimpse of its
work. Once acknowledged, Providence appears only
the more wonderful by its unaccountable way of
working. We bow down before a mystery, and
say with St. Augustine: “ God, Who is Sovereign
Good, would never have allowed evil in His works
if He were not so powerful and good that He could
bring good out of the evil.”3
2 Enchiridion, Ch. XI.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

Chance and Fortune. Free Will
Another objection is that, if Providence rules all
natural things, there is no room for chance, and if
it rules all moral things there is no room for free
will. But it is highly unphilosophical to deny
chance, and immoral to deny free-will, for that
would stifle morality in its very principle. There­
fore there is no such thing as Providence.
This is a good objection. St. Thomas reverts to
it again and again, and here is his solution of it.
First of all, we must rigidly maintain that all
things without exception are under Providence,
because nothing can act without at the same time
determining the end or result of its action. To
speak is to seek to be heard: to govern is to will
to be obeyed. Therefore the more powerful an
action, the more determined are its effects. If a
result escapes one agent, it is the independent work
of some other agent, which has intervened and
frustrated the first. I cock my gun and fire, and
the shot goes in a certain direction, determined by
my aim : if it deviates it is because of another
influence contrary to mine. Since nothing can be
contrary to, or impede God, His action always
attains its end. Everything He creates is according
to His pre-established plan, which includes even
contingencies and free acts.
Again, God's knowledge is the cause of things:
it owes nothing to them, but gives them their all.
God’s knowledge extends to all things, general and
particular, necessary and contingent or free. There­
fore all things, including free acts, are subject to
His pre-established order or Providence.
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PROVIDENCE
God is introduced into metaphysics as the neces­
sary principle of all things, and any qualification or
modification of His supremacy is equivalent to
denying His existence. Liberate mind or matter,
action or passion, or any other mode of being from
God's jurisdiction, and you set it up as a selfsufficient nature, a rival to God. “ God’s power
embraces all that is, under whatsoever form, or
in whatever matter it may be, since everything is
a participation in His being. Similarly, by His
intelligence He comprehends all knowledge and all
that is knowable. Further, His will and its object
comprise every desire and all that is desirable. So
that all that is knowable, as knowable, all that is
desirable, as desirable, falls under the sway of His
will, while all that is, as being, comes under His
active power.”3 ” There is nothing that escapes
His government, just as there is nothing that does
not come from His being.”4* It follows, then, that
” as God is perfect in being and in causing, so He
is perfect in ruling.”6
If free will or any other cause could act independ­
ently of God, it would follow that the universal
order would no longer have its full perfection in
God. It would gain or lose something from these
interferences, and its ultimate form would be deter­
mined, not by God, but by these secondary causes.
It is, however, blasphemous to suggest that a
creature can improve on God’s handiwork. The
definitive order is in God. in so far as He is its
cause: it is not established independently of Him
by the creature's co-operation or opposition.
3 Perihermenias, I, I. 14.
4 Cont. Gent., III. Ch. I.
• Ibid.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
St. Thomas is absolutely unshakable on this point;
he allows no reservations: it is not his way to dis­
pute the title of the first Cause to primacy, of the
Transcendent to independence, or of the universal
Being to communicate itself. Any dividing is an
offence in his eyes: he allows only subordination.
As we participate in the first being, so we have a
share in the sovereign action, but as this participa­
tion adds nothing to the first being, so to share in
the divine action is not to modify it in its results,
or to be, in any sense, a component part of it.
We have still to determine how far this mystery
is explicable, for, like creation, it is a mystery, and
cannot be fully explained. Indeed it is the same
mystery as creation, for creation means establishing
being with all its manifestations, and these include
created activity and its results. It is correct to say
that creation, properly speaking, has to do only
with subsisting things, but this exactitude does
not affect the problem. Non-subsisting things,
like action, are said to be “ concreated,” and
therefore created. The acting subject is just as
much created as acting, as it is as subject, and
therefore its action is as much created as its being :
it is a participation in the first Action, just as the
subject is a participation in the first Substance : the
two are identical. Hence we are again faced with
the mystery of the contact and reconciliation of
absolute Being with its derivatives, of the Infinite
with the finite.
Here is St. Thomas’s effort to reconcile them, as
far as is compatible with a mystery.

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PROVIDENCE
Attempt at Reconciliation

“ It must be understood that the divine will, of
which we speak, is outside being: that being is
penetrated by it entirely, and as regards all its
differences. Now the possible and the necessary
are differences of being, and therefore they have
their origin in the divine will.”6 “ It is necessary
that it should belong to him on whom the produc­
tion of any genus of realities depends, to produce
also the differences of this genus, just as he who
produces a triangle makes it equilateral or isosceles.
Now the necessary and the possible are the proper
differences of being. Whence it follows that it
belongs to God, Whose power is the proper cause
of being, to give to what He makes, by His provi­
dence, its necessity or possibility of existing.”7
“ Other causes do not make the law of necessity
or contingency, but merely use it when it has been
made by a higher cause. Hence a thing is subject
to the causality of any other cause, only in so far
as it is its effect. But that it should be necessary
or contingent depends on a higher cause, which is
the cause of being, as being, and from this cause
the order of necessity and contingency is derived.”8
These accurate statements contain the whole
doctrine. Wc have only to understand them, and
apply them to the two parallel cases which present
special difficulty, viz., chance and free-will.
There are numbers of people, Christians and
B Perih ermcnias, I. 14.
r Substantiis Separatis, Ch. XV.
* In VI Metaph,, lect. 3.
ISI

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

others, who are under the impression that it is
disrespectful to Providence to believe in chance.
They argue that what is subject to Providence
should not be fortuitous. Therefore, since all
things are subject to Providence, nothing will be
fortuitous, or a chance production. St. Thomas
makes an objection out of this, and answers it.
Far from eliminating chance, we make it one of the
elements of this world. It is not, properly speaking,
a cause, and Chance, with a capital C, means nothing.
But it is an accident of causes : it conies about by
the meeting of causal series, which are ordered in
themselves, but not co-ordinated. It is, according
to Aristotle’s classic example, as when two slaves,
each sent by his master, and on quite definite
errands, meet in the market-place without any
pre-arrangement. Or again, to borrow an example
from St. Thomas, it is as when one man buries a
treasure, and another happens to dig a grave there,
and finds it.
Chance is a natural fact which cannot be gainsaid.
Providence takes it into account and is in no way
opposed to it. Chance is subordinated to Provi­
dence, only the subordination is transcendent, i.e.,
chance is an element of something relative, Provi­
dence an aspect of the absolute, and the absolute,
far from hampering the relative or contradicting it,
constitutes it, corresponds to it point by point,
establishes it in its proper nature, sustains it at
each moment of its development, and makes, rather
than mars, its nature and characteristics. Providence
has willed that in this world there should be not only
effects, but above all an order, in which the relations
of causes with their effects form a principal element.
Therefore the creative action, far from suppressing
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PROVIDENCE

contingency, must guarantee its course. God is too
sovereign to interiere with the liberty of His works:
He is a head Who can give complete freedom to
His subordinates, because His government is such
that this very freedom is one of its elements. God
does not compel His works: He endows them.
It is only between them that there can be victor
and vanquished. Two created causes, coming into
contact, may agree or clash, but God’s action
neither agrees nor clashes with ours : it makes
all things and consequently manages all things.
Every effect of God, in so far as it comes from
Him, must be necessary; but it may be, in another
sense, contingent, if God so determines it.
The mistake is due to the fact that we regard
God as a cause like other causes, differing only in
power, a Demi-urge, Whose action co-ordinates the
actions of creatures, works over the same ground,
harmonizes with them, supports or runs counter
to their very order. So considered. God’s inter­
vention would overrule all secondary causes, and
thus deprive them of their natural action; hence
there would no longer be any contingency, chance
or freedom. Then only two logical positions remain.
Either you are a fatalist or a materialist. But God’s
action is not like the action of secondary causes.
He transcends causality, and it may even be said
that He is not a cause at all. God is a super-cause,
which means that He has the power of causing a
contingent being to be contingent, just as He causes
a necessary being to be necessary. Tt is quite true
that, in creating the contingent, God did determine
it, but only as regards its deepest being, not as
regards its lesser modes, and therefore He deter­
mined it to be contingent. He determined it to be
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

undetermined. God determines a being only in the
sense that He causes it to be what it is. He may
determine it to be undetermined, just as He may
determine it to be determined or necessary. He is
thus as much the cause of chance as of being.
The same applies to human liberty. We admit it
as a fact which necessarily follows on the gift of
intelligence. Consequently Providence does not
exclude, but, on the contrary, creates free will, even
while al! free acts, like everything else, have God for
their first cause. Such an expression as: “ God has
given man liberty, and man uses it,” shows a
fundamental misconception of what is meant by use,
or by freedom, or even by man. To be man is to
be, in a way determined by our human nature; to
be free is to be, in a more determined way, since it
adds liberty to the other human perfections; to use
is to be, in a still more determined way, since to use
is to put into act and render effective what was
hitherto only potential. Thus God, Who is the
source of being, is still more the source of free acts
than of the free will or of the man.
If you deny this you take from God what He
above all demands, what is most like Himself, who
is Pure Act. You make God only a partial cause,
a cause which owes something to its effects, an
ordainer who must wait to sec what his creature
will do. and modify his plan accordingly. That is
blasphemous. Man depends entirely on God. Tn
all the various phases of his life from his first
moments, in his faculties and in the exercise of them,
man is only a participation in being, a reflection of
the First Being, owing everything to God, without
Whom he has no substance, no potentiality, no act.
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PROVIDENCE

This does not detract from liberty, but, on the
contrary, constitutes it, by showing that its only
adequate explanation is to be found in God. Man
«·, because God created him: he uses his liberty,
and does so in this or that way, because God created
him with the exercise of liberty. It is a mistake to
confuse the conditions of psychological functioning
with the transcendent condition which creative inter­
vention implies. Psychologically, man would be free
even if God did not exist, or did not act. God’s
action is not an element in human action, or an
addition to it, or blended with it. Better, God has
no action, if you mean by action something other
than God; one of the forms under which we think
of being. God does not act in this sense: He does
not move or intervene. Intervene would then mean
that God’s influence was inserted into ours, and thus
modified it, thwarted it, abolished it, and hence
turned a free act into a necessary one. That is
nonsense. God creates, and all that creation postu­
lates is a pure relation. This transcendent relation,
which affects human action in all its phases, cannot
change the character or internal relations of human
action, and make a necessary effect issue from a
free power. It only makes the created to be
created and not uncreated : it only makes a derived
being not the first being: it only makes man not
God?
It is difficult to know how to put into words a
truth which is fundamentally so simple, yet so mis­
understood, and bring it home to Christians and
unbiased thinking men. If God were to act in us
as we ourselves act, or like the hundred and one
influences which surround us, that would be the end
of liberty. This infinite composer would alone direct
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
our actions and determine the results of our works.
Our acts would no longer be our own, but would
become divine acts. We would then have to say that
we were only the “ occasions ” of a divine action,
and man would be reduced to the status of a
phantom. But God’s motion, i.e., His creation, in
relation to voluntary acts, is of quite another order,
an order which transcends, and cannot be compared
with the action of the will on itself, or the action
upon us of some external, created influence. God’s
intervening does not modify our action, but, on the
contrary, confirms it, and gives it its entire raison
d'etre: it is the ultimate foundation of a free nature,
with a free functioning and a free act. A free act
means the work of a soul evolving of itself and
according to its own law.
God is not here a particular condition of willing,
but a general condition of being. If there is liberty,
it must be created by God : otherwise, how could it
exist? If there is any necessity, it must likewise
be created by God, Who is Himself the first
Necessary. But this does not do away with liberty
or necessity, nor does it confuse them. Or must
we say that God, Who creates them, destroys them
by the very same act? Are they less created,
because they are created such as they are, and not
as something quite different?
Let us try to put it in yet another way. God does
not modify: He actualises. He actualizes a free
being in its liberty, and a necessary being in its
necessity : He actualizes the man, the free man, and
the man acting freely, and thus lie actualizes the
free act itself. But no sort of modifying interven­
tion comes between these elements: the influence
underlies them, affects them all, actualizes all, withi5<5

PROVIDENCE

out changing their natures. Therefore God’s being
does not absorb ours or prevent its being autono­
mous. God’s action does not deprive our action of
its freedom, or render it necessary. God’s action is
identical with Ilis being, and the question of the
relation of our action to His, is identical with that
of the relation of our being with His. He does not,
in our manner of speaking, act: lie is, eminently,
and is therefore the source of all being and all
action.
Because derived being presupposes absolute being,
pantheists conclude that the former is only a mode
of the latter, and they make God absorb all things.
Because human action, like all action, presupposes
the action of the absolute, fatalists conclude that
everything is comprised in the great Necessity, and
that there can be neither liberty nor contingency.
The mistake is the same in each case. Absolute
being does not properly belong to being at all, nor
absolute action properly belong to action. By
making them homogeneous with their derivatives,
they cannot help entering into composition with their
derivatives, and thus make the absolute absorb all
things. But once admit that one transcends the
other, that they arc infinitely heterogeneous,
though bearing an analogy one with another as
explained in Chapter III, and you remove the
incompatability.
This does not mean that their comparability is
established. We cannot know positively how God’s
being is compatible with the being of creatures,
which “ adds nought to His,” or how God's action
is compatible with man’s free action, and does not
absorb it. The real relation between the divine
action and ours, between God’s being and our
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THOMIST1C PHILOSOPHY

being, necessarily escapes us, for, to understand
that, we. would have to penetrate God. Tt comes
back to what we have said of creation. One of the
terms of the reconciliation to be established, one of
the terms of the relation to be fixed, always escapes
our grasp. But. though we do not comprehend,
still, our notion of the divine transcendence shows
at least that the difficulties are without weight.
God’s very impenetrability is His best defence.

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CHAPTER VI
NATURE AND LIFE

We have viewed the universe as a system of inter­
changes of communications and mutual dependences,
in which the causal series, which have their ultimate
origin in the Sovereign Being, sustain the beauty
and usefulness of the cosmos.
But these actions and reactions and communica­
tions are not all of the same nature. The mind
frames ideas or expresses them : an animal is born
and dies : two chemical elements are combined or
separated: a body changes its position, grows hot,
expands, liquefies, is electrified. These phenomena
are quite different. The last three groups of
examples arc of changes belonging to matter, and
the sphere in which they are produced is nature
properly so called. The first belongs to an order,
which, in itself, is alien to and higher than the
material world, but which nevertheless is bound to
it, and the subject in which it is produced belongs
to two worlds. It is the human compositum, an
eminently Thomistic notion, which must be carefully
defined.
The phenomena known as material changes are
easily distinguished. The generation and dissolu­
tion of animals are the extreme events of what we
call life, and life is a particular case of natural
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

functioning, which calls for special treatment, and
which is so well treated by St. Thomas. St. Thomas
differs from many philosophers and scientists in
making the combinations and dissociations of
elements generations and destructions in the com­
plete sense of the words, viz., a summoning forth
from primary pure matter, which holds the lowest
place in the scale of being. Again, the superficial
changes in the last group—changes of place, size,
quality, and modifications of every sort—lead to the
general problem of movement, in the complete sense
of the word.
Nowadays, when we speak of movement, wc
mean exclusively a change of place, and we are
content to imagine, with Descarte, not only that
everything is made “ by figure and movement,” as
Pascal puts it, but that everything is figure and
movement and nothing else, in such a way that
quality becomes quantity modified and active. St.
Thomas rejects this impoverishment of being, and
this false simplification, which is due to a too
mathematical conception of reality. Natural qualities
presuppose, but are not the same thing as mechanical
movement. Therefore a qualitative change is a
movement sui generis, and cannot be reduced to the
other, any more than increase and diminution, which
are changes of substance. Here the mechanical
effect is only a means, occasion or result of an inner
metamorphosis, which is itself qualitative, formal,
in a word, of an ideal order. Emile Boutroux
endorses this when he says: 14 Matter in movement
seems to be, in bodies, only the vehicle of higher
properties, which are the physical properties properly
so called.”1
1 E Boutroux, La Contingence des Lois de la Nature, p. 64.
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NATURE AND LIFE

To sum up. AH this is a matter ior movable
being (ens mobile), as a Thomist would say. This
expressive phrase, taken in its most profound sense,
marks with a bold line the great division of being
into two zones, on the confines of which is the human
being.

I. Nature

A. Change
Let us study change in its simplest form, which
includes, under one name, local change or change of
position, increase and decrease, and alteration with
respect to any of the elementary qualities which we
call physical. How are wc to interpret this general
fact of nature, of which the stars and atoms offer us
the most striking instances? Movement cannot be
really defined, any more than other primary notions.
Pascal rightly says that the so-called definitions which
are given it would be better called propositions, and
are more obscure than the thing they set out to
explain. Still, a notion of movement which appears
the most fundamental at first impression, may not be
so when systematically studied, and it is legitimate to
investigate the more general headings under which
movement should be ranged.
It is evident that the end of movement is to acquire
something: to gain a certain place or position, to
reach a new level of growth, to become coloured, to
grow hot, to be electrified—that is its end and result.
Before this movement commences, its objective will
be a natural possibility: afterwards, it will be a fact.
And during? It is this during which is the move161
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
ment itself. It may sound strange, but this during
cannot be fully grasped, for at any given moment
we can only grasp a thing acquired or a thing to
be acquired, never the actual acquiring. If this
elusive thing exists, and it does exist, since some­
thing is done by it, in what compartment of being
should we put it? Not in actual being, which has
no more to acquire, nor in potential being, which
has not yet acquired anything. There must, then,
be some middle term. What is its nature with
regard to these primary notions, which have nothing
anterior to them ? Its nature must be somehow
actual, since movement is something real, some­
thing which actually takes place. It cannot be the
actuality of the thing acquired, nor, moreover,
the actuality with which we begin. Therefore the
only actuality that it can be is that of potency,
which is certainly something real, for there can
be no movement without it. Movement, then, is
the actuality of the potential, precisely as potential
(actus entis in potentia, prout in potentia). You
may think this childish, but further analysis will
show that it is, on the contrary, profound.
Movement is continuous; if it is broken up and
intermittent, it is then a series of movements, and
each is necessarily continuous. For we mean by
movement being continuous, that at any given
moment there is a transition from one term to
another, even while we affirm that there are only
two realities, viz., something acquired and some­
thing to be acquired. It seems at first sight
reasonable to suggest that movement is some sort
of intermediary between these two terms, since it
passes from one term to the other. But further
consideration will show that, however close two
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NATURE AND LIFE
moments may be, there is an infinity of possible
moments between them, and it is impossible to
locate the movement between any particular pair.
We can comprehend the starting-point, and the
stopping-point, but we cannot grasp the movement
which goes on between them. Its reality is ever
fleeting: what we apprehend is already something
else, its aftermath or foretaste.
If we say that movement is merely the movable
thing in each of its successive states, we make the
dynamic static. Granted no other alternative, we
are bound to admit that movement is something
that we cannot lay our finger on, since what we so
indicate has either finished or not yet started.
What is in a state of flux, cannot, as such, be
apprehended : it is becoming, and not being.
We do not go as far as M. Bergson, who defines
being itself by becoming. For us, being is idea; its
absolute is the first Idea, which is perfectly actual
and unchangeable. God cannot be becoming:
being, as such, is thinkable: the mind’s object
must be able to be designated, which cannot be said
of becoming. Consequently, in order to express
becoming in terms of being, by a convenient
definition, we must have recourse to something else
besides a natural positivity, for the state of the
movable thing in movement, viewed precisely as
such, expresses only being, and not the change of
being. Regarded as brought about by an anterior
evolution, this being in movement is an arrival;
regarded as having still to turn into something else,
it is a departure. But, regarded as, at the same
time, having anterior acquisitions, and acquisitions
yet to come—a double relation, given it by the mind
—it is movement.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

The mind divides up the movement of a thing, in
order to find something positive in it to grasp, but,
in so doing, it declares in the same breath that this
division is purely conceptual: we admit that the
task of grasping movement as such is beyond us.
Thomism thereby escapes the Bcrgsonian criticism
of maintaining that movement has divisions. We
are quite aware that what is continuous has no
actual divisions at all, but only potential ones, and
we hold that the mind, not the movable thing,
utilizes this potency. The movable thing is one
in itself, covers the undivided ground, and cannot
be intermittent, because there is no reason why
stoppages, once admitted, should not be infinite in
number, and thus render the whole passage
impossible.
Yet that was Zeno’s contention. He maintained
that an arrow in flight could never reach its mark,
nor Achilles catch up the tortoise, since there was
an infinity of positions between them. The answer
is that the verbal and conceptual divisions which we
employ to denote becoming, do not qualify the
movement in itself : they are an artifice of the mind,
not modalities of the thing known.

The Subjective Aspect of Change

What, then, according to us, is movement itself,
and in itself? We have already said that. We
have movement when, in one and the same concept,
the double relation of anteriority and posteriority is
attributed to one of the states of the movable thing:
when this state is considered at one and the same
time, as an arrival and a departure, without any
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NATURE AND LIFE

sort of discontinuity. Yet movement is not a mere
subjective notion, for there is something objective
and real in it, viz., the movable thing and the
diversity of its states. But it is quite true that this
something is not movement itself. Movement in
its perfect form, in its full entity, which answers
to its definition, is a subjective effect. It is the uel
of what is in potency, in so far as it is in potency,
the latter half of the definition obviously connoting
a mental operation. As an act, and consequently as
a definite reality, movement can exist only in the
mind: in itself, since it is the act of what is in
potency, in so far as it is in potency, since it is
therefore always in potency, it implies a kind of
non-entity, which only the mind which conceives it
can remedy.
Here arc St. Thomas’s own words:
“ The integral notion of movement is obtained,
not uniquely from movement as found in things,
but also as found in the mind. For there is nothing
of movement in things save an imperfect act, which
is a sort of beginning of a perfect act on the part
of the thing in movement, as when a thing is grow­
ing white, it is already imperfectly white. In order
that this imperfect act may be movement in the
complete sense of the word, it must be apprehended
by the mind as a mean between two terms, of which
the earlier is compared to it as potency to act
(hence movement is called act), while the later is
compared to it as perfect to imperfect, or as act
to potency. Hence movement is said to be the act
of a thing existing in potency.”2
Movement is therefore the order of priority and
’ In III Phys., c. I. lect. 5.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

posteriority in synthesis, and the work of the mind.
Without the mind there would be no movement, and
apart from the mind there is no movement, but
only successive, unconnected states, a multiplicity of
parts without unity. The determination of its parts
is due entirely to the divisions made by the mind.
This is the gist of the mystery, in which movable
being is shrouded. We regret that St. Thomas did
not dwell more upon it. In his day there were other
problems more pressing, while only in our own day
arc the far-reaching consequences of this theory
fully realized.
Movement is “ the very life of nature,” to use
St. Thomas’s own expression. We cannot know
time except by it, and even space is dependent on
it, if it is true that space is that which can be gone
through. By making movement depend on thought
for its very being, wc make it, to a great extent,
subjective. Or, if you like, subject and object are
here united : they arc not separate like two things.
Man is mixed up with nature: our thoughts, feel­
ings, memory are factors of the universe. And
granting the divine origin of the world, wc may
find some truth in this fragment of Novalis: " The
world is the result of an action and a reaction
between myself and God. Everything that is, and
everything that comes to be, is born of a contact
of minds.”3
That is as it should be, for, having defined being
by idea, it must seem quite natural to affirm a
synthesis of being and idea. St. Thomas’s much
remarked “ realism ” is also an idealism. It is
Plato’s doctrine completed and restated.
• Novalis, Fragments inédits.
166

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NATURE AND LIFE

/?. Substantial Becoming
Substantial becoming, a phenomenon of movable
being, is not, properly speaking, a movement. For
what comes into being, at the moment when it
really becomes being, is already in being. There
is no succession except in its preparation and pre­
liminaries. In itself, and strictly speaking, such a
becoming is an indivisible phenomenon, because
there are no stages in substantial being. A thing
is not more or less this or that. It is always what
it has to become. In nature the products repro­
duce what produces them. Generation gives birth
to what engendered it: systole and diastole, a sort
of elasticity of alternating rhythm, is one of nature’s
great laws. In treating of becoming, then, wc
must define its terms, lay down its principles, and
mark its place in this ever-changing world.
Contrary to the ancient Greek philosophers, and
to a fair number of modern philosophers, St. Thomas
considers the becoming of substance as a fact. For
him, man, dog, oak tree, water, etc., are not just
different modes of one unique substance, for then
they would not differ as beings, since substance is
being, and all real attributions arc added only to
determine it more exactly. St. Thomas did not
hold that there were only apparent generations in
nature. He based the work of nature on more
profound conditions: he believed, with Pascal, that
“ the principles of things are nearly allied to
nothing.” He makes movable being movable in
its very being: it is, as such, eternally in a state
of flux: it unmakes and remakes itself by genera­
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tion and destruction, as its modes are unmade and
remade by alteration, increase or local movement.
Subs tait liaI Form
We have already touched on the metaphysical
antecedents of this theory. Nature is embodied
ideas. This we may prove by the fact that know­
ledge consists in abstracting or disembodying the
idea, and, though the idea so obtained by the mind
does not adequately correspond to the idea em­
bodied in the. thing, nevertheless it is true as far
as it goes, and may be made more definite by
further analysis and synthesis. The only alternative
to this is Plato’s theory of separated ideas, accord­
ing to which natural realities arc only shadows of
self-subsisting ideas. It is not sufficient explanation
to say that these are divine ideas, for there are
no particular ideas in God, because everything in
God is wholly Himself, unparticularized perfection,
the source of all ideas as it is of being: He is
not a demi-urge who moulds matter according to
a plan. Hence the immediate raison d’etre of a
nature, which answers the question : What is it
that makes it what it is? is not God, but a par­
ticipation in God: something in the thing which we
can attain by knowledge. This is the substantial
form, which St. Thomas defines as " the very like­
ness of the sovereign Act, included in the matter.”4
* tn. Boel, de Trin., q. 4, art. 2.

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Primary Matter
But form cannot be the unique principle of mov­
able being, for two reasons. First of all, because
the individuals, which are multiple in one and the
same species, contain something more than the idea
by which we know them, and secondly, because one
form entirely supersedes another, and turns one
thing into another of an entirely different nature,
not by change of place or by successive alteration,
but in itself. Therefore there must be a subject
common to both forms, and that is matter.

Privation

There is yet a third principle. Before the subject
of a substantial becoming receives a certain form,
it possesses it in potency, for unless matter had this
potency it would serve no purpose. But matter can
pass under several forms in succession, and there­
fore must be in potency to all of them. Indeed,
matter is, by definition, pure potentiality and
nothing else. Therefore, when it appears under
one form, and is going to receive a different one,
it not merely does not possess the second, but is
deprived of it, for all forms are included in what
it has potentially, and each generation and change
in turn simply give this capacity a provisional
satisfaction. If matter were nothing more than
a subject, it would be fully actualized by the first
form which came to it, and no further substantial
change would be possible. Nature is ever evolving,
which means it is ever pursuing something, and
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the starting-point of this endless pursuit is what
we call privation, i.e., a capacity which everything
affects and nothing fully satisfies. That is why
nature shows no anxiety about any one of its works.
It is always striving to do something afresh, to
bring forms into being, incessantly, and at all
costs, and it is quite indifferent to the destruction,
suffering or death of its productions, so long as
its new productions prosper by it.

Character of Matter
In Thomistic philosophy, matter itself is void of
any kind of determination of an empiric order. It
is easy enough to laugh at the scholastic “ Nec
quid, nec quale, nec quantum," but not so easy to
suggest anything better. Since matter serves as
the support of substantial change, i.e., of the entire
becoming, as such, it obviously cannot be deter­
mined in any way, save in so far as it is a potency.
What is, docs not become: matter must lack what
it is to become. If it is to become purely and
simply, it must have no determination whatever:
it must be only a possibility of being. Pure matter
is pure of all definable actuality, of all that so
belongs to the categories of being. Hence it has
no qualifications, physical or chemical, spatial,
numerical or temporal, all of which are modes of
being. It is a noumenon, the basis of all pheno­
mena. It can be defined only negatively, or by
analogy with secondary matter, which we use in
what we make. Or it may be defined as a potential­
ity through its successive realizations, which shape
it as a mould shapes its cast. For, just as the soul
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is potentially all things, in so far as it is capable
of knowing them, so matter is all things in so far
as it is capable of becoming them. But in itself,
matter is unknowable, like its most distant opposite,
God.
Metaphysics and Physics

This metaphysical theory of nature, so often
misunderstood and confused with physical theories
of all kinds, is not to be identified with any of
them. It is, however, compatible with any purely
experimental theory. The Thomist may hold the
theory of atoms or aeons, and the stellar systems
of the infinitesimal, without departing from his
metaphysical principles. What the scientist calls
primary matter, the Thomist considers as so many
primary dispositions, which uniformly affect the
metaphysical matter underlying them all. The
Thomistic doctrine of mixture does no violence to
the fundamental laws of chemistry or physics. A
scholastic may believe in atoms or vary according
to the ever-changing theories of the day, and in
so doing he need make no modification in his
metaphysics. The interpretation or application of
metaphysics may depend on experimental sciences,
but, in themselves, metaphysics are quite independ­
ent, because their principles, their method and
proper object, belong to a higher order.
Active Cause

Matter must be acted upon in order to pass from
one form to another, since nothing can be actual­
ized save by some anterior act, which contains an
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

equivalent in power to what must ultimately result.
Nature is a system of interchanges, in each of which
there is a giver as well as a receiver. One receives
the effect, the giver is the active cause of it.
The question of what act is, in itself, and of how
to understand this communication which is said to
take place between the doer of an action and the
recipient, which is potential to the effect, is a much
debated one. This is what St. Thomas suggests:
Being, of itself, is productive of being: the good,
which is identical with it, diffuses itself. To do so
it has only to be in act. To be in potency, on the
other hand, is proper to what receives, for “ by
definition, what is in act moves, and what is in
potency is moved." But we must distinguish two
stages. There is the first actuality of the active
cause, which disposes it to activity in a permanent
way, and the second actuality, which determines it,
by giving it the ultimate dispositions required for
the kind of activity expected in such circumstances.
To take the example of an athlete’s muscle. By
its primary act it receives its being, and is made
contractible : by its secondary act it contracts when
put into action. Every particular act thus depends
on its first act, and ultimately on God.
Nature of Action

So much for the conditions of action, but we do
not yet know what action is. That by which an
active cause acts is its own self—regarded in its
ultimate determination—it is not the exercise of
its function. And yet there is no other positive
reality in the active cause at the moment when it
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NATURE AND LIFE
acts. The exercise of power is only the ultimate
static state, by which it is constituted an active
cause: it is not the action in actual movement;
the active action, so to speak. Therefore we are
obliged to look for the reality of the action outside
the active cause, in which we find its principle, but
to which it is not a superadded reality. Where is
it, then? It cannot be left hanging in the air. It
can only be found in the matter which receives the
action. St. Thomas says so in so many words :
“ Xdf'o est in fasso; the action is in the recipient.”
When he speaks on occasion of the action being
in the agent or active cause, and the receiving of
the action in the recipient, he must be understood
to mean that the action is in the agent as regards
its principle, and in this way an action belongs to
the agent which is its principle. But in itself it does
not belong or inhere. The agent, according to
St. Thomas, is called agent only in virtue of an
extrinsic denomination : by what takes place in the
recipient of the action. It is justifiable on the
grounds that the agent is responsible for what takes
place.
Action, as distinguished from becoming, is only
a pure relation. As was said of creation, take
away movement, and action connotes nothing but
a pure relation. But it does not follow that we
agree with Scotus, that action is a pure relation.
Action is what takes place, in so far as it is subject
to the active cause. Therefore it is movement itself,
in so far as it is related to the agent; it is not the
relation itself. In creation, action does become a
pure relation, but that is a unique instance in
created things. The only other instance is that of
the procession of the divine Persons in God.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
ft must be admitted that this rather goes against
our instincts. We cannot help thinking of activity
as a sort of effort or nervous release, but in reality
there is no effort: there are just beings in relation
one with another, which condition each other and are
subordinate. Being communicates itself, because
the good, which is identical with it, diffuses itself.
Being is, of itself, active and productive of being.
Perfection implies expansion, subject to circum­
stances, which are themselves the products of
being. The world is an order of regulated, “ con­
catenated ” phenomena. Particular laws indicate
the diverse natures of being. Laws become more
comprehensive as we rise higher in the scale of
being, till wc reach God, Who can diffuse His
being and goodness with absolute freedom. As
St. Thomas says: “ God’s will is the origin of all
movement in nature.”
Univocal and Non-univocal Active Causes

An important distinction must be made between
the univocal cause, i.e., the agent of the same
nature and species as its effect, and the nonunivocal cause, which differs specifically from its
effect. These definitions alone make it clear that
the non-univocal cause comes first and conditions
the univocal, for all particular species depend on
more general activities. Hence the classical saying,
so often referred to by St. Thomas, that “ man and
the sun generate man.”

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Spontaneous Generation
A much-debated question arising out of this is
whether the general activities are able to work in­
dependently of the particular species which they
condition. In other words, can the sun generate
man, of its own accord, without man? This, in
later times, and quite improperly, has been called
spontaneous generation. Nobody would dream of
upholding a spontaneous generation in the sense
that a being could emerge from its surroundings
without adequate preparatives. But spontaneous is
understood to exclude direct ancestors of the same
nature as the effect, and postulates only the action
of the general causes of the world. St. Thomas
would have been the last person to believe in a
generation without proper cause, general or par­
ticular, since he affirms the primacy of act over
potency, i.e., the necessity of a being in act for the
generation of what is up till then only in potency;
or, what comes to the same thing, the necessity of
the perfect as source of the imperfect. But the
question debated was, whether certain beings, even
living beings, could not be bom of matter by the
sole influence of general activities, without a semen,
representing the generative power or vitality of the
species. St. Thomas saw no doctrinal difficulty in
it, especially as he believed that the first mover
had a spiritual influence over the physical world,
even while he viewed Aristotle’s living heavenly
bodies with suspicion. Consequently the principle
that every living thing comes from a living thing
was not entirely set aside. Again, it seemed to
be borne out by experience. It was believed that
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
“ imperfect ” animals, i.e., animals with not very
complicated organisms, could be generated, in
properly disposed matter, by the sole power of
the stars; heat of fermentation was a sign of
this. The variety of species so brought into being
depended on the diversity of material conditions.
Certain Arabian philosophers extended this theory
to the generation of “ perfect ” animals. Avicenna
said : Whatever is generated by seed can be gener­
ated without seed, by simple mixture, under the
influence of higher causes. St. Thomas replies: It
does not seem possible that perfect animals can be
generated otherwise than by seed. Nature has
definite means of producing all its effects, and what
it does not do it presumably cannot do. We do
not find that the higher forms of animals arc
generated without seed, but only the inferior forms
which differ very little from plants.0
This way of putting it does not imply that St.
Thomas was absolutely opposed to the theory. It
is obviously a question of experience, not of
doctrine. There is no reason to suppose that St.
Thomas would have objected, for doctrinal reasons,
if, in a wider field of experience, biology and
palaeontology bore favourable witness to the hypo­
thesis that natural forms evolve from non-living to
living, or from one species of life to another. In
his eyes, minerals, animals and plants, higher and
lower animals, differ only by their organization, of
which the form or living soul is the act. Learning
by modern science that the various degrees of
organization are ranged not only in order of value
but also in order of time, there is no reason why we
should not adopt a larger interpretation of the
* Cf. Summa. Ia, q. LXXI, art. i, ad. t.
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NATURE AND LIFE
principle that what nature is not seen to do it
presumably cannot do; and there would be nothing
repugnant in the idea of a thing passing naturally
from one species to another. The unity of matter,
and the permanence of superior agents, lend colour
to this idea. To take the extreme case. God is
immanent in the world, and though He transcends
all things, He is the cause, nevertheless, of all acts,
primary and secondary, of created causes. As we
shall see, He intervenes in the generation of the
human being, though it is a perfectly natural genera­
tion. .Why, then, refuse a more comprehensive
interpretation of the Gospel words: The Father
worketh until now?
Further, the general activities of the world,
properly interpreted, form a likely instrument of
the divine operation. It is a question for general
cosmology to settle, and we shall be perfectly
ready to revise our cosmology, ancient or modern,
when experience makes it imperative, which it has
not done up till now. The theory of transformism,
considered as the general procedure of nature from
the appearance and distribution of life on the earth,
has still to be proved. Nobody has yet discovered
the missing links between various forms of life,
which is the only way, T think, of proving it. Still,
science has not spoken its last word. The Thomist
is not perturbed by the thought that in the end
transformism may win the day. His doctrine is
quite open to such an attractive hypothesis, because
it is so comprehensive. Surely we should adapt
our expression to modern chemistry, which has
passed beyond such old-fashioned axioms as fire
begets fire, and air. air. There is such a thing as
chemical transformism : the scientist can generate
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
new species before our eyes, and we ought to be
the last to say that a similar transformism is
impossible in regard to life. As a matter of fact,
the Thomist is a good deal more broad-minded than
some people arc led to think, and if we wish to
spread Thomism, it is quite useless to remain blind
to the discoveries of modern science.

C. Purpose in Nature
Substantial and accidental generation both imply
an ultimate principle, which is, in a sense, their first
principle. This we call the end. In active causes
endowed with knowledge, the end is an intrinsic
principle, while in non-intellcctual beings, the end
moves them in the sense that it determines the form
of their activity, by defining their being. A being
is defined by the particular purpose for which it
was made. This is only another way of stating
the law of determinism, and it is curious that
scientists and philosophers, who have a clear idea
of determinism, feel obliged to reject the idea of
end. An end is that which a being, properly
qualified, i.e., placed in suitable circumstances, is
determined to produce : it is that towards which it
tends, which characterizes it as dynamic, as its
definition characterizes it as static. A definite being
is the proof of a definite antecedent activity, and of
another definite activity to come, and this reveals
intention in nature. By intention I mean a
tendency, an immanent quest of an end. Hence we
can no more do away with ends in nature, than with
definite being, definite activities, the regular re­
currence of the same phenomena in the same
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circumstances; in short, with jiatural movement, in
its source and in all its forms. To put it another
way. There is no activity without direction, and
no direction without two terms, the second of
which, after the action, is called the result, and
before the action, the end. To say that there are
results but no ends, is like saying that a direction
can be determined by a term, which is still absolutely
non-existent. A result without an end is an effect
without a cause.
If there were not this inclination in general and
particular natural causes, they would produce
nothing, for to produce is to make something. A
fortiori nature would not produce regular effects
which recur and combine, and make a marvellous
harmony.
Nature and Providence
In nature there is intention only in the sense of
tendency: there is art, but it does not know itself.
But this natura naturata, as Spinoza would call it,
implies a natura naturans, with conscious intentions,
outside it.
Aristotle says: Order is the outcome of wisdom.
Since there is order in nature, there must be, some­
where, a reason for it, an idea which directs the
world, and that is God. This brings us back to
Providence.
Further, the idea, which forms every natural
thing, must also be the principle of matter, since
matter is a sort of degeneration of mind. For the
same reason it must be its end, and that helps us
to imagine the final transformation of the world as
depicted by St. Thomas. Begotten of mind, pene179

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

trated with mind, tending towards mind, the world
may one day become more or less mind. The
determinism of physical laws may be, to a great
extent, provisional. Even the physical world may
perhaps share, with the world of spirits, in the
“ liberty of the children of God.”

D. Determinism and Contingency
But this is not the place for dreams of the future.
The present provides a problem difficult enough, in
the reconciliation of natural ends with the immanent
necessities which lead to them. They are necessities,
because a natural end depends on an active deter­
mination, which in turn depends on an ontological
determination, or one arising from the very nature
of being. A thing can no more act otherwise than
it does, than it can be otherwise than it is, and
hence the whole of nature seems dominated by an
inexorable necessity.
This St. Thomas will not admit, but his own
position needs to be stated with care.
AVhen we see a cause regularly producing an
effect, we conclude that it is predisposed, and obeys
a law immanent in its being. When we sec several
causes regularly concurring to produce one and the
same effect, as in the generation of a living thing,
we conclude that there is a pre-established harmony
between them. They are directed by one immanent
idea, one common intention, which is as much a
natural factor as they are. This cannot reasonably
be denied. And here the scientific experience of a
Claude Bernard, and the realist and positive spirit
of a Pasteur agree with us.
If we observe a very general fact, like the. re180

NATURE AND LIFE

currence of the seasons, or the regular evolution
of species, or the formation of the stars, we get a
more comprehensive idea of causality than we do
from particular agents; we get the idea of a centre
of action, whence the series of causes cascade, each
cause depending on the next, and all together
producing a harmony.
It would seem, then, that all the general causes
in nature act of necessity, for what is most funda­
mental to, and even identical with being, must
surely be necessary. Can the same be said of
nature as a whole, in particular as well as in general,
in such a way that nothing can act otherwise than
necessarily? The Stoics believed so, and the same
opinion is frequently met with among modern
writers. At first sight there seems no answer to it.
Without going so far as to attribute a living soul
to the world, and thus make it a huge animal, with
us as its parasites, we certainly can imagine it as a
unique being, evolving according to some higher
law of organization and development, in such a
way that everything in it comes to pass as in a
regular crystallization, in the formation of a chemical
compound, or in the evolution of a living being.
It would be even more necessary than is the case
with the examples chosen, for there the matter
limits and to some extent frustrates the intentions
which direct them, whereas a universal intention
regulates matter as well, and renders chance
impossible. To St. Thomas this was clearer than
it was to Aristotle, against whom he objects." Still
he will not be led astray. It seemed evident to
him, as it did to Aristotle, that nature, which is
responsible for all definite effects, occasions also a
• Iu I Perihcrmcnias. lect. 14.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
host of others; that all relations of phenomena are
not equally natural, for all are not equally the object
of reason, and do not bear the character of one of
nature’s ideas. That is natural which tends to a
realization of an idea, to a form.
When he observed the birth of a normal living
being, i.e., one with the characteristics of its species,
St Thomas had no doubt that this was a natural
effect, and he acknowledged the determinism of the
subordinated causes which governed it. But if the
product were a monstrosity, he would call it an
accident: not that the chain of causes which had
led to this effect was not equally rigid, or that, from
this point of view, as Claude Bernard has remarked,
what happened was not equally natural, but that
we are used to the normal things that are ordinarily
produced, and do not think that a sheep with a fifth
leg, or one in the middle of its back, is a production
governed by an intention of nature, or that a definite
complexus of agents is naturally ordained to such
a result. Tn other words, there are results which
are not ends, because they have no immanent form
or proper goodness, and they can be caused only
by the irrationality of matter, intract ible to ideas.
To put it still another way. The world of effects
is too large for its laws : it overflows the series,
which laws govern, because there is not, in created
being, an all-embracing and supreme law, an
“ eternal axiom,” to rule the chance concurrence
of causes. The great series of phenomena which
interact are like two messengers who hurry past
without knowing each other. And when a thing
escapes the laws which should govern it. we say it
is accidental, a chance production, a thing removed
from all natural necessity.
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This is not a denial of determinism, in so iar as
it is a postulate of science. We maintain in general
terras that whatever goes on, must go on, granted
that suitable conditions are maintained; and this is
true, although in another fashion, even of free
actions. Otherwise we must postulate, with
Renouvier, absolute beginnings in the course of an
action, and effects without sufficient cause.
But we must take into account that one of the
conditions of reality is matter, and matter in itself
is undetermined : no form can be given it without
the possibility of its falling short of its end. Con­
sequently no assemblage of defined or definable
conditions can govern action in its entirety. Chance
appears marvellous to us, because it reveals to us,
in the plan of creation, the infinite ways in which
natural things can combine, and it leads us step
by step to the infinite Creator.
Those who maintain the possibility of a sort of
general formula of the world, which would account
for every single event, rationalize it out of
resemblance. They lose sight of the irrational,
albeit natural element called matter. They imagine
that the singular is made together with the universal,
and is only a sort of universal individualized by
being combined with other universals, whereas the
singular thing is “ ineffable,” inexpressible in
concepts, irrational in its basis of matter. Pascal’s
expression: “We do not know the whole of any­
thing,” is something more than an empirical
statement, since this is necessitated by the dualism
of matter idea, which is the basis of terrestrial being.
St. Thomas might almost have used the phrase of
Emile Meyerson : “ The mere fact that the world
exists is enough to prove that it is irrational.”
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
Wc liavc already seen, however, that matter,
though irreducible to idea, is not a complete stranger
to it, since matter is being, though of a very inferior
sort : it comes from God, as all other being. Hence,
for God, nothing is accidental, since everything is
subject to Him, even what appears to us to run
counter to Him. Necessary and contingent must
not be judged by this criterion. God transcends
the categories of being: He is the cause of the
very differences: He makes the necessary to be
necessary, and the contingent to be contingent.

II. Life
Wc came now to the question of life. Its essence
must be something quite simple, at least in its
notion, for it is found in such different beings as
lichen, protozoa, and man. ft cannot be activity in
its most general sense, for all being is active, but
not all being is living: but it is one of the very
earliest divisions of activity. There are, funda­
mentally, two kinds of activity, namely transitive
and immanent. Transitive actions are actions in
which the agent and the recipient are distinct
beings. Immanent actions are actions in which the
agent is also the recipient, though not precisely as
agent, for, strictly speaking, nothing can move
itself: nothing can give and receive, be active
and passive at the same time, and under the
same aspect. Rut certain beings are so constituted
that they can be agent and recipient of the action
under different aspects, and these are said to move
themselves, or to be living.
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NATURE AND LIFE
This appears at first sight very elementary, but
to understand it properly, it must be borne in mind
that movement, in the Aristotelian sense, does not
signify merely change of place : it includes as well
every kind of change that has to do with the
essence of things, and therefore, in a living thing,
it includes all that concerns its interior evolution,
and its relations with its surroundings : growth,
adaptation, defence. In all these cases, the living
thing finds in its own nature certain tendencies
relative to a plan of development, which it must
realize by its own proper means. It must, of its
own accord, apply these tendencies to the divers
circumstances of its life, co-ordinate them with the
world outside, utilize external stimuli, resist wouldbe aggressors, rather as a first principle of a
syllogism combines with minor propositions to
produce positive or negative conclusions.
Hegel said: “A tree grows by syllogism.”
Plant life assimilates from its surroundings, and
by this means evolves and realizes its natural plan,
the plant itself being the agent. The same applies
to animals, and even more so, for they have know­
ledge and more resources for the attainment of
their end. Lastly the rational animal, man, has in
addition the faculty of judging its ends, instead of
merely attaining them, in suitable circumstances,
by the impulsion of its nature. Man dominates
his objects, and. instead of simply working out
his destiny, like the plant, or being the unconscious
arbiter, like the brute, he has free will, i.e., he
obeys only his rational nature, and, up to a point,
can choose his destiny, instead of just submitting
to it.
This general theory of life has its opponents,
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

but it has nothing to fear from science. It agrees
with the scientific conclusions of men like Claude
Bernard and Wundt, who, with St. Thomas, make
a living being one “ which moves itself,” i.e.,
which has the property of going through a definite
series of changes, by means determined by its own
nature, and its relations with its surroundings. The
guiding idea of Claude Bernard is nothing else than
the form or immanent idea of St. Thomas. The
only difference is that in St. Thomas form accounts
for all things, and not merely living things. Every­
thing in this world happens according to a plan:
everything acts according to some immanent,
guiding idea. In living things, the form, having
a new part to play, takes a new name, and is called
the soul, but that does not alter the theory: it is
simply an application of the genera! philosophy of
forms. And it is worth noting how very striking,
in the light of modern science, is this unity of plan
in Thomistic philosophy. It explains those transi­
tions from the inanimate to the animate, those
likenesses between living things and so-called inert
bodies, which science more and more reveals.
AVhatever else it is, the soul is a form, a real
idea, whose object is the body: it is complex and
one, because the body is complex and one : or
rather, the body is one, because the soul is one;
composite, because the soul needs a harmony of
properties and organisms to manifest itself, just as
a composer needs an orchestra, or a thinker words
and phrases. “ The body,” says Paul Valéry, “ has
too many properties, resolves too many problems,
possesses too many functions and resources, to
correspond to anything but a transcendent need,
which is powerful enough to construct it, but not
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NATURE AND LIFE

powerful enough to do without it.”r There is, in
the transcendent world, i.e., in the metaphysical
order, the world of " Mother-Ideas ” as Goethe
would say, a need of bodies, which means that not
all forms of being are destined by God to be im­
material and subsistent, nor are they all capable of
it. Certain less perfect forms need a support for
their being, and an instrument for each of their
functions. The instrument is an organ; the support
for existence is the body. The human soul is of
the number. It requires the body for its own
manifestation and service. But, at the same time,
it is sufficiently powerful to form its own body,
just as a man who is a property owner and an
architect needs a house to live in, and can build it.
We shall see later that the soul cannot form its
body entirely of its own accord, but still, it is
responsible for it.
There are three classical problems : (i) How does
the soul form its body ? (2) How is the soul united
to the body? and (3) How does the soul move the
body?

I. How Does

the

Soul Form

its

Body?

It is not strictly exact to speak of the soul making
the body. The soul makes nothing, as it is of itself,
only an idea of making, an inherent form. There
certainly is an organizing principle in the seed, but
that is not the soul of the being which is engen­
dered. It is the power of the species, incarnate in
the elementary properties issuing from the principle
of generation. Soul is the starting-point of the
T Introduction Λ la méthode de Léonard de Vinci.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
movement, since it gives life to the parents, and
characterizes their operations: it is also the end,
since it is the principle element in the offspring.
But it is not the agent. The soul comes when a
living thing is constituted as an organized body,
capable of having a soul. As embers burst into
flame when fanned to intense heat, so the soul
comes to the body when the body reaches a suffi­
cient state of development to receive it. St. Thomas
defines the soul as “ the act of an organized body,
which possesses life potentially.” When this organ­
ized body, by the fact that it is organized, passes
into act, it becomes animated, and then, and not
before, it acquires a soul. “ It is the same thing
for matter to be united to form, as for matter to
be iu act.”5 The soul, then, does not precede the
body in order to constitute it: it follows it. What
does precede is the species and the biological—and
perhaps other—properties of the semen, which
represent the power of the species.

Nutrition and Growth

Nutrition and growth are simply forms of con­
tinued generation, and may be explained in the same
way. To be nourished is to be regenerated: to
grow is to be regenerated with additions, and in
each the action consists in assimilating what is
outside, under the form of food, air, or movement.
Things outside us nourish us and make us grow,
by being changed into us, and this is caused by a
power of the species, just as a generation is. This
power does not belong only to the soul, but to the
1 In Π De Anima, lect. I.

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compositum of soul and body. The soul, as form,
determines the species, and consequently its end,
while the body is responsible for the physical trans­
formation of external matter into itself. The body
does not grow, receive nourishment or recover from
illness by the distinct action of soul or body, but
by the united action of both. The animated body
is thus creative : it makes what was before alien to
be a part of itself. In the nutrition, growth and
recuperation of a living thing, the soul acts through
the body, and the body acts according to the soul.
II. How is the Soul United

to the

Body?

It is just as inaccurate, strictly speaking, to speak
of the “ union of soul and body ” as of the soul
making the body which it animates. I say animates
advisedly. In common parlance we speak of the
soul inhabiting the body, which shows a miscon­
ception of their true relations. We are led by it
to imagine the soul installed in the body, and
assuming direction, as an aviator climbs into his
machine and takes over the controls. The problem
of the union of soul and body then becomes
practically insoluble, because of the extreme dis­
parity between the two. Descartes found he could
not explain it on his principles, and had recourse
to a makeshift: he threw over the idea of union,
and invented a sort of mixture or quasi-mixture,
which served its purpose up to a point. But it
is not surprising that a problem should prove
insoluble when in reality it does not arise.
All union presupposes separation, at least in the
mind, and separation implies two distinct beings.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
Now neither the body nor the soul, taken alone, is
a being. The soul can no more be defined without
the body, than the body can without the soul, or
the thought behind a phrase without its expression.
It is quite philosophical to say that the soul, as
animating, is the body, that is to say, as regards
its proper form, or actuality. Under these conditions
the real being is the compound, and a compound
is a natural union under its various parts, without
any sort of problem arising. The body is only
properly a body, i.e., a body in act, because it is
animated : the soul is a soul only because it animates.
The union of soul and body is not, then, a problem
of union, but a problem of being, and one identical
with the general problem of matter and form, of
idea and the substratum of idea. We may analyse
this dualism, but not separate the parts, which con­
sequently cannot be united in any domain whatever,
living or non-living.
To try to unite soul and body, in the strict sense
of the word, is like trying to unite the circumference
to the circle, or heat to the flame. Heat is one of
the constituents of the flame, and the circumference
one of the constituents of the circle. They are not
united at all. In the same way. the soul is one of
the constituent parts of the animated body, and
therefore, like any other form, it is that by which
a thing is zvhat it is, not the thing itself. The soul
is that by which the animated body is what it is.
III. How Does the Soul Move the Body?

Here again, to ask how the soul moves the body
is. strictly speaking, to make a problem where none
exists. We use the expression in ordinary speech,
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and so did St. Thomas, but it is inaccurate. The
soul does not really move the body, since it is the
body’s form, and not properly distinct (aliud quid)
from it. It is, we repeat, a constituent, not a
mover. As such, it has no action of its own. If
it possesses one, as in man, it is because it is not
merely an animating principle, but self-subsisting
principle as well, and it is under this latter aspect
that it is the active cause of spiritual functions,
though it still needs the body’s collaboration. “ The
purpose of a form is to constitute its subject,”9
not to act.
When we say that the soul moves the body, we
must be understood to mean the incarnated soul,
or, what comes to the same thing, the animated
body, the organized body, with the soul as its act.
In other words, the soul is the principle whereby
the organized body moves itself according to its
own laws. The motive power is the “ disposition
itself of the movable thing,” i.e., its organization.
It is because its body is organized that the living
thing can move itself, and the more complicated its
organization, the more varied its movements.
The soul and its faculties of themselves are not
causes. Taken in this way, as immediate and
sufficient causes of psychological phenomena, they
are only, as Ribot has said, “ verbal entities.”
That which thinks, wills, consents, and moves
itself is a mixed substance, not a soul in a body.
In vital actions, taken in the concrete, we cannot
distinguish soul and body, and Claude Bernard was
quite justified in saying that in this matter,
“ spiritualism ” and “ materialism ” arc out of
date expressions.
• Q. II. de Veritate, art. 14, corp.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
Non-living things do not move themselves,
although they also have a kind of soul, viz., their
substantial form, which bears the same relation to
them as soul bears to living body. St. Thomas's
reason is that non-living things have no autonomous
movement whatever, because their organization is
too simple for one part of it to act as mover with
respect to another part. The internal mover of a
living thing is not the soul, but the whole thing,
its various parts being, under different aspects, mover
and moved, and acting one upon another. The soul
is mover only in the sense that it informs the com­
position, and possesses powers which pass into act
by means of the body’s organization. The soul thus
comes first and the rest is dependent on it, but it
is not thereby an autonomous cause, it is the source
of the effects only in so far as it is the principle of
the nature, which it has in common with all the
element assimilated after generation by nutritive
regeneration. There is, then, no need to pose the
question of how the soul moves the body, because
the body is not really another thing. The question
is, how the animated body moves itself, according
to its various parts, or how its diverse functions
coalesce. The scientific treatment of this question
belongs to psycho-physiology : its philosophical
explanation can be treated quite briefly.
It is only natural that in a being which is one,
though virtually multiple, a modification in one of
its parts should lead to a modification in other parts.
A heavy body falls without being pushed : it falls
because it is heavy. If we suppose that this is due
to some immanent law, quite apart from any
mechanical explanation, we may draw a com­
parison between it and the living being, which
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moves itself according to an internal law, and does
not require an extrinsic force. The difference
between the two cases is that the law by which
bodies fall is simple, whereas the law of a living
being is multiple: it not merely keeps it in being,
but directs its destiny. That is why living things
have complicated organisms, which need special
sciences like psychology and physiology to treat
of them, by which they are described in terms
either of simpler phenomena of the same order or
of lower phenomena of the inorganic order. And,
just as organic or inorganic substances become part
of the living thing by assimilation, and lose their
autonomous existence, so they cease to be subject
to their own laws, and are ruled by the more
comprehensive law of the soul.
There arc two main classes of organic life,
vegetable and animal. Plants owe their nature
and development to the mutual interactions of their
various parts, which stimulate each other, each
being mover and moved under different aspects.
The latter includes animals, which have sensation
and desire, and man, who has intelligence and free­
will as well. It is only to be expected that these
functions will make themselves felt in the actions
of the body. Knowledge and desire modify, and
arc modified by the body and its movements. There
is an internal correlation, a pre-established harmony
between soul and body. Our very inclinations make
us active forces. We have no need to postulate any
sort of demi-urge within us, and thus incur the
criticism expressed in Titchener’s ironical definition
of the soul as “ an invisible animal inside a visible
one.”
The soul’s action is immanent in the compositum,
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N

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

and therefore is not, strictly speaking, the action
of the soul, but the action of the whole compositum
moving itself. Actions belong to subsisting sub­
jects: actiones sunt suppositorum. I am one, and
I exercise power over my body, by my soul, because
I am my body, just as I exercise power over my
soul, by my body, because I am my soul. I rule
myself, by myself, and this reciprocal activity is my
proper evolution, as a mixed substance. There is
no need to introduce anything from outside to
explain this mutual influx, no need to look for the
door through which the soul’s activity can enter
the body. My soul moves me only in the sense
that it is the principle of my action on myself.

The Soul's Action and the Conservation of
Energy
This theory clears up a question which used to
be bitterly debated in the early days of the thermo­
dynamic theory, namely, how to reconcile the soul's
action in the body with the principle of the con­
servation of energy. Can it be supposed that the
soul really creates energy, and keeps on adding it
to the world? And if it does not create energy,
how can it move the body? You must have a
concurring principle of force to impel the various
organs, or even to direct their energies. But, to
St. Thomas, this question is absolutely meaningless.
The composite living being is one: the soul gives
it its law, which all the bodily energies obey. There
is no need of any force belonging properly to the
soul. The energy spent in a living being is not,
for St. Thomas, the energy of the soul, but solar
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energy, and a modem would explain that it is found
in the plants which animals feed on, and constitutes
what are called nutritive substances, the potential
energies of which become actual in us. The '* forces
of the soul ” are therefore forces of the organized
compositum, in which the soul is principal. The
soul is not a distinct thing, and has no need of
distinct energy. Whereas the soul can be independ­
ent of the body in some of its operations, such as
thinking, there is no way in which the body can
be independent of the soul, which gives the body
its being, defines it, and directs it towards its proper
ends. A thing acts according to what it is. There­
fore the body acts according to its form, which is
the soul. When the soul becomes something else
by knowledge, it modifies its own ends, and at the
same time modifies the bodily powers whose whole
purpose is to realize these ends. An auxiliary force
is needed only in a system governed by a law, which
needs to be modified or reversed by an outside force.
But the law of the body is the soul, and any modifica­
tion of the soul modifies its vital law, and, without
introducing any new energy, changes the whole
course of the bodily actions.
That being so, we do not have to postulate any
new creation of energy to explain the effects of
life and free will : it is explained by transformation.
The living thing is immersed in its environment:
the world outside influences it in a hundred and
one ways. Energy itself, properly so called, comes
from it. From a physical, chemical or mechanical
point of view, the organized body is only the point
of the concentration of energy : it is because of the
soul that it is able to transform it, and direct it to
the ends of life. This is the energy which supports
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life and develops it, without any creation of energy,
and also without any loss.
The soul is regarded as an internal art, as an
active idea, but it is not active of itself. To take
an example. Λ clock goes because its maker gives
it a certain form : he impresses his idea of what a
clock should be on suitable material. But that
does not of itself make the clock go. It goes by
means of wheels, weights, springs or pendulum.
In the same way, the soul acts by means of the
properties of the organism which it directs, and to
which it gives a purpose. The efficient movement
also comes from the soul, inasmuch as it is the
principle of activity. The soul is therefore behind
everything in a living being: it accounts for every­
thing, and in a certain way, does everything.

Importance of this Doctrine To-day
The importance of this doctrine can be realized
in an age when materialists on the one hand, and
Cartesians or neo-PIatonists on the other, prove
equally unable to co-ordinate the data of experi­
mental science with philosophy. It is generally
agreed to-day that a chemical compound is a unity
whose elements are now different from what they
were in a free state. Obviously, we can go farther.
An organism is a unity, a substance determined in
itself, not a colony of cells or atoms. No other
theory will explain how the living being can
assimilate its environment, first, for its develop­
ment, secondly to restore lost tissues and regenerate
itself according to an unchanging plan, and thirdly
to reproduce itself, with its specific characteristics.
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according to the laws of heredity. It is the form
or soul, or, as Goethe was fond of saying, the
entelechy, which explains the unity of the composiium, the unity of the living thing, the proper
character of organic development, of growth and
protection. Hence Goethe’s “ stubbornness of
individual characters," and " the aptitude of man
to repulse what is not in harmony with his being.”
This may explain the curious idea of Novalis, that
illness is, as it were, a “ bodily madness.” The
conduct of a living being should be in accordance
with its immanent idea, by which its species and its
ends are determined. Therefore any organic ill is
a sort of physical aberration, comparable with that
mental aberration which we call madness.
On the other hand, science reiterates and confirms
St. Thomas’s theory that these vital manifestations
are directed by a living form to prearranged ends;
and that these are realized by the collaboration of
elementary properties, with the active and passive
concurrence of environment as a condition. For
the Thomist, the body’s actions, regarded as purely
chemical, physical or mechanical, go on as if there
were no soul at all, but, regarded as vital, they
depend on it entirely. The form of a bed, says
Aristotle, cannot be attributed to the saw, but to
art, and yet the saw makes the bed. In the same
way, assimilation, which is the function of a living
being, is brought about by elementary qualities, but
it is not the less to be attributed to the soul. The
soul is the immanent art of the body: it is not the
engineer, as Plato held, or the pure spirit of
Descartes, united to the body by some unknown
means, and doing a work impossible to describe.
In this respect, St. Thomas’s philosophy is
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thoroughly up-to-date. Animistic, in the Aristo­
telian sense, it is at the same time idealistic, positive,
metaphysical, and open to all experiment. It well
deserves the praise of Wundt, who wrote: “The
result of my labours leads me neither to the
materialist’s hypothesis nor to the dualism of Plato
or Descartes. Aristotelian animism, which unites
psychology and biology, is the only likely meta­
physical conclusion of experimental psychology.”

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CHAPTER

VII

THE HUMAN SOUL

A. The Human Being's Place in Creation

By studying life in general, and its principle, the
soul, we have already indicated the place of the
human compositum in the scale of beings. Man is
"neither angel nor brute’’: neither an angel
incarnate nor a spiritualized brute, but a mixed,
composite nature, with its own mode of being, and
its own proper character as revealed by its functions.
The human soul must, then, have its place in the
graduated scale of being, must be an intermediary
between the spiritual and the corporeal world.
It is sufficiently perfect to subsist by itself, like
an angel, but not to provide its own individuality,
or to act without the body’s help. Corporeal things
act upon the soul through the body and vice versa.
It is only by the body that we know not merely
matter, but spirit as well, for every idea, even our
idea of God, has its first origin in the world out­
side of us, and comes to us through the senses
(omnis cognitio a sensu). Wc can observe what
goes on in the world outside us, and affirm the
truth of the invisible, only by the knowledge which
get through the modifications of our own body.
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Similarly, the soul cannot act directly on the exterior
world: it is much too diverse in character, albeit
the same at base. The living body serves as an
intermediary. The modifications of our body mark
the limits of our action on nature, and of nature
upon us. The soul’s force consists properly in
mastering its body, and by the body, the rest of its
environment. The more capable the soul is of
producing numerous effects in the body, the stronger
it is; and the less the body is affected by its environ­
ment, the stronger it is.
Moreover, the soul is at the frontier between our
physical being and the universe. It presides over
our unity and autonomy, and directs our selfdefence and our impressions. It distinguishes us
from the world, into which we revert when the soul
leaves the body. It is the guardian of our gates,
the “strong man” who secures our home; and it
is also the principle by which all things become us,
and we become all things.
We can form very little idea of the extent of the
soul’s power over this seemingly remote world of
nature and our fellow men. Our partial identifica­
tion with our environment does not exhaust it, for
our body is the only part of our environment which
has become identical with us. There is nothing to
show that this partial identification cannot be
extended, and the more it extends, the more shall
we be able to modify our environment by immanent
acts, conscious or unconscious, just as we modify
ourselves. This would include magic, charms,
telepathy, etc., all of them phenomena which St.
Thomas knew about or at least suspected, and not
always attributed by him to the devil.
But we belong to the spiritual world as well, and
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the soul has its own function, into which matter,
though a condition of it, does not formally enter.
This raises human nature and human destiny to a
much higher level.
Man is born of mind and matter. Their intimate
connection, and their proper characteristics as well,
are thereby manifested. Hence the many contrasts
which are in no sense contradictions. Sensation
and reason, brute desires and sublime aspirations—
these arc opposed, if you like, but only as light
and shade are opposed in a Rembrandt. Pascal
goes too far in attributing to the Fall particularities
which would have existed without it, though not in
so marked a degree. His “ monster ” can, to a
great extent, be explained naturally, and therefore
is no more a monster than is a protozoon or an
anthropoid. Our nature has a character of its own,
and its own kind of unity. Its very rank, on the
frontier between the spiritual and corporeal worlds,
makes it composite and diversified.
St. Thomas fully realized this. He understood
that it would be just as dangerous to oppose body
and soul as to confuse them, which is the initial
error of several philosophies which concentrate on
only one or other part of our being, and deny or
ignore the other. St. Thomas takes us as a whole.
He analyses the human being as a physical com­
pound, even while he is treating of man's spiritual
dignity. He is a follower of Plato and St.
Augustine as well as of Aristotle. And he is a
follower of Christ in that he introduces Christian
doctrine to complete man and his destiny, by link­
ing it up with the supernatural.
Tn going down the scale of gradated being, we
meet with man on the confines of mind and matter.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
In going up, we meet with man, his matter included,
as a creature directed by his whole being towards
mind, to such an extent that even his body partici­
pates in mind. An example of conjoint exaltation
and humility. But this is a matter for the moralist.
B. Intelligence

Our proper function is to understand, for only
by that can we be in contact with the other.
Knowledge is a becoming, and we are its subject.
This similarity between matter and mind enables us
to deduce the nature of knowledge from the very
nature of being, and, inversely, our definition of
knowledge leads to a clearer idea of being. This
needs treating more in detail.
The proper object of the intelligence is the nature
of things. Being is idea in the objects of our
experience; ideas which give form to being, whether
substantial or accidental, are, as it were, impover­
ished. They are individualised. They have lost
their universality, the infinity of their extension is
compressed in a particular case, and they have
become singular by their association with matter.
They necessitate other powers of knowing in us,
which are likewise associated with matter, and
subject to the limitations of time and space. These
arc the senses.
Since every subject operates at its own level, there
must be in the act of human knowledge a subject
at the beginning of the same order as the object to
which it corresponds, i.e., an object immersed in
matter. But this same principle implies that we
cannot grasp an idea itself, as idea, abstracted from
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its matter, except by means of a power which is
itself abstract, ideal, disembodied, and immaterial.
That power is the intelligence.
Intellectual knowledge consists in the appre­
hension of being, in a state prior to its becoming
individualized in things. We can apprehend being
in this state only by working backwards. We dis­
engage the idea of being from the thing which
embodies it: we go up from the idea made real to
the idea itself; from the house to the plan; from
the work of art which nature reveals, to the art, in
accordance with which nature makes or realizes it.
This distinction between intelligence and sensa­
tion is often denied on the grounds that the idea
is a sort of tracing, a vague generalization obtained
by the superposition of successive images on one
another, and that it does not transcend sense know­
ledge. It is quite true, as we shall see, that we
have a vague, general image of this sort, namely
the image in the imagination, which we can easily
observe. But we can discover something else.
The idea of a mathematical relation, of a definition,
of a property of being, or again the idea of a
negation or privation, which do not exist as such
in reality, or the idea of an idea, when thought
reflects upon itself—all these are, in themselves,
although the imagination plays a part, far removed
from images. We can see by the very use we
make of our ideas that they are really general, or
rather universal, and applicable to an infinity of
things, whereas what is concrete is necessarily
unique. The universal image is characterized by a
vague generality, but the universal idea by a distinct
and defined generality. The image is temporal,
moving, subject to time and space, and never for
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

two instants the same, whereas the idea is necessary
and outside time, even though its object be change­
able. The image is here a lower form of sensation,
expressing nothing in particular, whether concrete
or abstract, removed from the active intuition of
the senses without arriving at the level of the
intelligence.
If these statements are true, we are bound to
postulate an intelligence. Powers correspond to
acts, and acts are first specified by their objects.
Since intelligence finds in sense objects, the matter
of an intuition which surpasses them, viz., the
intuition of essences, we must suppose that, like
essence, it is on a level with the universal, outside
time, and necessary. We must, at least negatively,
abstract essence from its external or internal
environment, which is subject to movement, con­
tingency, and particularity of time and space. If
I become immaterial, I must be potentially
immaterial. “ By the fact,” says St. Thomas,
“ that the soul knows the universal natures of
things, it perceives that the form by which it knows
is immaterial: otherwise it would be individuated,
and thus would not lead to the knowledge of the
universal. Now, by the fact that the intelligible
form is immaterial, one understands that the
intellect is a something (res quaedam) independent
of matter.”1
To be quite clear, we must distinguish four terms
belonging to the same process : object, act, faculty,
and being. The becoming, which is knowledge,
unites all these terms, and therefore they must
belong to one and the same order. If the object is
immaterial, it can only be attained immaterially,
1 QQ. Disp. de Veritate, q. X. art. 8, corp.

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i.e., the act is immaterial. If the act is immaterial,
it can only issue from an immaterial power, which
is the faculty : and lastly, a faculty and its immedi­
ate subject must be of the same order. A purely
material being cannot possess a power which is
immaterial in itself or in its object. The intellect
may be material in certain respects, but it must be
immaterial as subject of this power, as doer of this
act, and as benefited by this object.
Hence this unique phenomenon of nature : a
power belonging to a soul, which is the act of a
body, without that power being itself the act of
the body. The soul, based on material conditions,
rises above them. Situated on the confines of two
worlds, it draws on both for its knowledge, as for
everything else.

The Soul Unknowable in Itself
We have noticed that St. Thomas uses a very
vague phrase to designate the soul : res quaedam,
a something. That is intentional. Our conclusions
regarding the nature of an intellectual soul are
purely negative. The intellect is outside and above
matter—that is all we can say. We know it only
through its acts : it remains in itself unknowable.
All we can demonstrate is that there are present
in us, call them ideas or concepts, certain objects
which, by the fact they arc in us, appear as natures,
stripped of the material and temporal conditions by
which natures are individualized. We must postulate
as the basis of their presence (which is the result of
a process) a subject of the same order, which
possesses ideas potentially, till the impress of the
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objects, coming through the senses, puts it in act.
We thus describe the phenomenon by an example
taken from the act of sensation, the only act which
gives us immediate intuitions. We compare the
act of understanding with sensation, whose con­
ditions wc know, just as we describe sensation
itself by comparing it with action and passion, as
when wc speak of objects moving our senses.
There is this difference, however, that the action
and passion implied in sensation are objects of
intuition: we feel that we feel; whereas intellectual
action and passion are judged only by analogy.
Normally wc have no intellectual intuitions. To
think our thought is not to make it our proper
object, but rather to analyse the necessary conditions
of thought, which, though undefinable in themselves,
are definable precisely as conditions. This recalls
what wc have said about our knowledge of God:
it is a sort of algebra, but in algebra there is truth.

Stages and Conditions of Intellectual Knowledge

Since the intelligence is a power belonging to a
soul which is the form of a body, the act of
intellection will be an act bound up with the act
of the body. In fact, it is in the midst of sense
phenomena, in continuity with them, and dependent
on them, that the intellectual act takes place. It
cannot be detached. St. Thomas thought that no
spiritual phenomenon could be produced in us
normally, otherwise than through the senses. If
any event in a man’s life is spiritual, I suppose a
conversion is. Yet St. Thomas goes so far as to
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THE HUMAN SOUL
say that “ the change from vice to virtue, or from
ignorance to enlightenment, which takes place,
attains to the spiritual part of the soul per accidens,
the transmutation taking place per se in the sensitive
part.”3
How do we set about convincing someone and
altering his outlook? By sounds coming from our
lips, which go to his ear, excite or awaken in him
mental images, and arc changed per accidens into
new ideas or resolutions. It is exactly the same
with the changes produced spontaneously in us :
they are fundamentally physical; they affect the body,
and we can bring them about only by modifying (by
means, however, which are beyond our ken) “ the
unconscious and generalizable organism which
harbours the idea.”3
People are often surprised to find Spinoza bring­
ing the body into the definition of apparently the
most spiritual things. St. Thomas does so just as
much, only it is not noticed. St. Thomas often
speaks of the soul when he means the soul as form,
as animating, and not as mind, and in this sense
the soul includes the body in its definition and in its
act: it is the body itself in act.
In these days of “ science ” it would be well to
pay more attention to this conclusion and to correct
our vocabulary accordingly. That is one of the
conditions of the Thomistic revival in psychology,
yet it is given little thought. We are here present­
ing the metaphysics of the soul in the language of
the ancients. To-day experimental psychology
derives its language from positivism or even
materialism. The task remains to piece together
’ <?Q· Disp. de Veritate. q. XXVI, art. 3, ad. 12.
1 Marcel Proust, Du côté do Guermantes.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
these fragments of knowledge and make a doctrine
of them.
“ The human soul,” wrote Spinoza, “ is adapted
to conceive a very great number of things, and the
more ways its body is disposed, the greater will
be its aptitude.”4 St. Thomas would thoroughly
agree. He says himself: ” The diverse dispositions
of men to works of the soul depend on the diverse
dispositions of their bodies.”3 *' The nobility of
the soul follows the good disposition of the body
. . . hence it follows that those with a delicate sense
of touch are more noble of soul and more clear­
sighted in mind.”4 The reason has been given
above. Wc are one part matter, and matter, in us
as in all things, is a falling off from intellectuality,
since it is a sort of degradation of being. Now, as
everything operates at its own level, our partial
identification with matter will lower our object.
Our object is not the purely spiritual world, but the
sensible world. In order to operate in a spiritual
way we must wait for nature to come to us and be
incorporated in us, and that is the purpose of the
senses. The senses inform us, and to do that they
must first inform themselves; by collecting their
material and moulding it in their own way, by
gathering pollen and making honey.

Elaboration of the Universal

The task of elaboration indicated in these words
is indispensable because of the conditions imposed
4 Spinoza, Ethica De An. Theor., 14.
• De Siem. et Rem., lect. I.
• De Anima, II. lect. 19.
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THE HUMAN SOUL
on ever}' natural becoming. Just as anything in
the physical order is potentially everything, by
reason of common matter, so the soul is potentially
all things, and all things are potentially the soul,
by reason of the divine intelligibility in which all
things participate. But in both cases there must
be intermediaries, and the greater the distance
between the elements employed and the result
aimed at, the more numerous the intermediaries,
and the more difficult the passage. “ Since the
distance between intelligent beings and exterior,
material beings is the greatest possible, the form
of a material thing is not received by the intellect
immediately, but reaches it through many inter­
mediaries.”7

The Senses
First of these intermediaries are the senses, i.e.,
that organic power, whose organ is to the body
what the sense itself is to the soul. As the body,
once affected, affects the soul, which is not really
a thing distinct from it, so the organ, affected by
the sensible thing, affects the sense, which similarly
is not a thing apart from it, but its ontological act.
But since the external, sensible thing can act on
the organ only in accordance with its nature, i.e.,
by its form, there will be in the sense, i.e., in one
of man’s powers, a true reflection of the object.
The form of the being, realized in this object, will
be lived by the subject : man will live the world,
which becomes partially identical with him, under
the form of an action exercised by him and received
into him. It is this double of the universe in us
7 QQ. Disp. de Anima, art. XX, c.

209

O

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
which St. Thomas designates by Aristotle’s word,
the phantasmata, i.e., the internal apparitions of
images or phantoms. It must not, however, be
supposed that these forms are therefore visible.
Material objects can be manifest in other ways
besides to sight. They are manifest by their sounds,
smells, movement, rhythm, and the organism which
creates the phantasma, can react to all these. More­
over, an object of sense does not merely affect a
man’s brain, but his whole body, especially his mien
and demeanour and his gestures. “ A man thinks
with his hands,” says Père Jousse, and the reason
is that a man most often thinks with a view to
acting, with the result that the phantasmata are to
a great extent the residues, plans, or symbols of
action.
Besides the external senses to which the word is
ordinarily applied, St. Thomas gives four internal
faculties of sense : the sensus communis, the
imagination, the vis æstimativa (in animals) or
vis cogitativa (in men), and the memory.
Sensus Communis

The sensus communis is the root of all the
sensibility which is diffused throughout a living
being, “ the centre whence flow the senses proper,
whither their impressions return, and where they
arc synthesized.”8
Imagination and Vis Cogitativa

The imagination is a power different from, but
connected with, the sensus communis. The partic* De Pot. Anima, c. 4.
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THE HUMAN SOUL

ular senses and the sensus communis gather the
impressions: the imagination stores them up and
puts them together. From this preliminary elabora­
tion there results a sort of judgment, still quite
instinctive, and determined by the laws of the species
and not by the subject’s own initiative. In animals
this instinct is free from all alloy and left to itself :
in man it is impregnated with reason, and thence
gets its name of particular, or cogitative reason. It
is called particular reason to indicate that it has
nothing to do with the universal yet to be elabor­
ated, and that the subject merely passes from one
particular case to a similar, or from several
particular cases to a new case of the same sort,
without evoking a principle.
This gives rise to the experience which “ consists
in the conscious collation of singular cases of the
same kind, which have been acquired by the
memory.” From this there results an empiric
rule of action, which is still neither science nor
art, but which, in man, foreshadows them. It
should be noted that this sort of experience is not
purely individual: it bears a social character. By
heredity, education, mutual influence, the child and
the adult manifest forms of experience much higher
than those acquired by an individual. Their share
in the experience of ages enables them to act
wisely without wisdom, cleverly without personal
ingenuity, artistically without art.

The Sensitive Memory

Fourthly and lastly is the faculty known as the
sensitive memory. The adjective is really super­
fluous because, strictly speaking, there is no such
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
thing as an intellectual memory. We remember
our ideas in the sense that we can call them up
again, but the feeling that we have had them before,
which is essential to memory, is due to their temporal
and therefore sensible connotations.
The memory is the treasury of sense apprecia­
tions, as the imagination is the treasury of images.
Memory is awakened over what was pleasant, harm­
ful, etc. Further, the appreciation of time is here
a condition of all the others: without it you may
have imagination, or return of imagination, sensa­
tion or return of sensation, but not remembrance.
Besides being a treasury of sense appreciations,
which lead to instinctive judgments, memory
extends to our acquisitions of every kind, though
it regards them all under the special relation of time.
It goes without saying that in St. Thomas this
analysis of functions in no sense obscures the im­
pression of the profound unity of the general
phenomena of sensitive life. Imagination, memory,
instinct, and the sensus communis, all depend on
a general power of sensation, which bears the same
relation to the manifestations of sense life as the
power of assimilation does to nutrition, growth, and
generation. On the other hand, St. Thomas would
be the first to agree that his classification, which
answers to the data of common sense, is cursory
and open to further research. But it does at least
show us how it is possible to rise above sense
knowledge and reach the universal.

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THE HUMAN SOUL

The Active Intellect (Intellectus Agens)
It is a fact that man rises from experience to
the idea, i.e., to a consideration which is applicable
to all cases of the same genus, and even, by analogy,
to certain cases beyond the genus, viz., to the transcendentals. For the Thomist here is the principle
of science and art : of art when the end in view is
something to be made; of science when it is a
question of being. But there must be a power in
the soul to make this transformation of experience
possible.
It might be suggested that this power is not in
the soul, but comes from a higher plane. In his
earlier works St. Thomas seems not averse to this
view. Certain Catholic Doctors, he says, affirm,
with a show of reason (satis probabiliter) that it
is God Himself Who plays the part of the active
intelligence in us, and they cite in support of their
opinion the words of St. John concerning the
Word: “ He was the light which cnlighteneth
every man coming into this world.” However,
he says farther on that it is hardly natural to
suppose that there is not in the soul itself an
immediate and sufficient principle of its own opera­
tions, as would be the case if the power of under­
standing, instead of belonging to each soul, were a
common reality, whether God, or, as some Arabian
philosophers held, an Intelligence. For this reason
St. Thomas definitely upheld the opposite opinion,
and he calls the power which enables us to trans­
form sensible experience into general ideas the
active intellect. We must assign its exact place in
his system.
2i 3

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

Ever}’ theory of knowledge supposes a previous
relationship between that which is to know and
what is to be known. The real thing, in order to
become an idea in us, must in some way be idea
already. How it is so is explained in Chapter II.
Reality is the descent of idea into matter. Since
it comes from idea and realizes it, it is full of idea,
and can therefore revive it in a subject that is suited
to receive it. Only, it does not do so of its own
accord, for ideality as existing in things has lost
the characteristics of universality and necessity,
which alone could make it the object of the
intelligence: it is subject to extension, number,
movement and contingency. In order that the real
may revive in the mind, with its proper character­
istics, it must in some way or other return to its
original, disembodied state and lose its individuality.
When a real thing is generated, its idea is, as it
were, attracted into matter: to be understood by
the mind, its idea must be extracted or abstracted,
and this operation requires a suitable power. Let
us repeat that this power need not be in the soul:
it could be a separated intelligence: it could be
God, and ultimately it must be God, inasmuch as
He is the source of intelligibility, as of everything
else. St. Thomas calls the active intellect a “ light
emanating from God,” and speaks of God as the
“ excelling cause of our knowledge.” But here it
is a question of the immediate principles of know­
ledge, and the view which puts them outside the
soul may be considered as arbitrary and we can here
neglect it.
Besides its passive capacity of adapting itself to
things, of receiving the soul of things into itself,
there is in the soul an active power of transforming,
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THE HUMAN SOUL

which completes in the intellect the process of dis­
embodying already begun in the senses, and which
renders possible this assimilation of form, in which
the act of intelligence consists. This is the active
intellect. The only alternative is to postulate innate
ideas, which render experience useless. But, granted
that our sole source of knowledge is external reality,
wherein the idea is manifested, but does not, strictly
speaking, exist (ipsa forma non est, sed compositum
per formam), we are bound to postulate some active
principle which procures its existence. And since
its subject must be the intellect, and its object must
be the thing itself, wc have to postulate a spiritual
activity presiding over the synthesis of subject and
object, which is the foundation of all knowledge.
There is here a threefold co-operation: of the
possible intellect, which receives the impression of
images representing external reality, the active
intellect, which draws from these the ideality
they embody, and thirdly the images themselves,
which, by being thus impressed on the intelligence,
bear witness to the objectivity of knowledge. The
three necessary conditions of knowledge are : an
active power of idealizing, a passive power of
receiving the ideas, and a specifying power, to which
the idea, given and received, gives form.
We must point out that these three elements
are not three subsisting things. They are things in
the broad sense of the word (res quaedam), but they
are not subjects. The words “ active intellect,”
” possible intellect,” “ images,” used as subjects of
our sentences are misleading, as is all language.
There are not two intellects, like two souls. The
images are only modifications of the subject which
receives them. But wc may distinguish the subject
2IS

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

precisely as endowed with understanding, and as
being modifiable into these images. There is a
similar distinction possible between the intellect
understanding potentially, and the intellect in act.
Put it this way. The intellectual soul has the
power of communicating something of its own
intelligibility to the sense images, and, because it
also enjoys a passive power, it is affected by the
images and conceives the objects which they
represent to it. It is this passive power of being
specified which gives rise to the term possible
intellect, and the active power of spiritualizing the
images which gives us the term active intellect.
The eye offers a similar example. It is not only
transparent and passive under the action of colours,
but at the same time it gives out light, so as to
manifest the colours and make them actually visible.
Hence there arc animals which arc said to see at
night, because their eyes have an illuminative power
capable of lighting up their objects."
In these explanations, intellectual knowledge is
seen to be really and truly a transformed sensation.
“ Sensualists ” agree with us on this point, the only
difference between us being that we hold a total
transformation. It is equally true to say that sensa­
tion is only a physiological alteration transformed.
But it is a total transformation. There arc diverse
orders, and there must be some elevating power in
order to pass from one to the other. In one case
it is the activity of sense, an animated power: in
the other, that of the intellect, a power of an order
higher than physical life.
• Cf. Coni. Gent., II, Ch. LXXVII.

2l6

THE HUMAN SOUL

Intellectual Memory
Are the ideas which are extracted from the images
of the imagination stored up in the intellect, or do
they merely reappear there when the conditions
which gave rise to them are reproduced in the
brain? St. Thomas considered this important,
because, if the ideas themselves are not preserved,
if there remains only the capacity of reviving them
by a renewal of the phantasmata, what becomes of
our thoughts, and the memory of our thoughts,
when the soul is separated from its body, and can
no longer use its brain, and therefore lacks all
experience ?
We shall see later that the soul then acquires a
new and higher form of experience, but this does
not entirely make up for the loss. If, on the other
hand, our thoughts remain, they must revive in
what will be practically a form strange to their
present one. Without an answer to this inevitable
question, the doctrine of the soul would not be
complete.
In his commentary on the Sentences,10 St.
Thomas is hesitant. Later on his thought grew
more definite, though certain expressions, and, it is
said, certain incidents in his life, reveal a persistence
of the doubt. His answer is in the affirmative, and
here is his reason:
If a spiritual power is capable of receiving a new
impression, it must be able to keep it, because it is
hardly likely (non videtur probabile) that the result
of a spiritual generation should be less stable than
’· Bk. IV, dist. 50, q. t, art. 3.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
precisely as endowed with understanding, and as
being modifiable into these images. There is a
similar distinction possible between the intellect
understanding potentially, and the intellect in act.
Put it this way. The intellectual soul has the
power of communicating something of its own
intelligibility to the sense images, and, because it
also enjoys a passive power, it is affected by the
images and conceives the objects which they
represent to it. It is this passive power of being
specified which gives rise to the term possible
intellect, and the active power of spiritualizing the
images which gives us the term active intellect.
The eye offers a similar example. It is not only
transparent and passive under the action of colours,
but at the same time it gives out light, so as to
manifest the colours and make them actually visible.
Hence there are animals which are said to see at
night, because their eyes have an illuminative power
capable of lighting up their objects.0
In these explanations, intellectual knowledge is
seen to be really and truly a transformed sensation.
“ Sensualists ” agree with us on this point, the only
difference between us being that we hold a total
transformation. It is equally true to say that sensa­
tion is only a physiological alteration transformed.
But it is a total transformation. There are diverse
orders, and there must be some elevating power in
order to pass from one to the other. In one case
it is the activity of sense, an animated power: in
the other, that of the intellect, a power of an order
higher than physical life.
• Cf. Coni. Gent.. II. Ch. LXXVII.

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THE HUMAN SOUL

Intellectual Memory
Are the ideas which are extracted from the images
of the imagination stored up in the intellect, or do
they merely reappear there when the conditions
which gave rise to them are reproduced in the
brain? St. Thomas considered this important,
because, if the ideas themselves are not preserved,
if there remains only the capacity of reviving them
by a renewal of the phantasmata, what becomes of
our thoughts, and the memory of our thoughts,
when the soul is separated from its body, and can
no longer use its brain, and therefore lacks all
experience ?
We shall see later that the soul then acquires a
new and higher form of experience, but this does
not entirely make up for the loss. If, on the other
hand, our thoughts remain, they must revive in
what will be practically a form strange to their
present one. Without an answer to this inevitable
question, the doctrine of the soul would not be
complete.
In his commentary on the Sentences,19 St.
Thomas is hesitant. Later on his thought grew
more definite, though certain expressions, and, it is
said, certain incidents in his life, reveal a persistence
of the doubt. His answer is in the affirmative, and
here is his reason:
If a spiritual power is capable of receiving a new
impression, it must be able to keep it, because it is
hardly likely (non videtur probabile) that the result
of a spiritual generation should be less stable than
” Bk. IV, dist. 50, q. i, art. 3.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
that of the sensitive memory, which preserves its
images, despite all kinds of fluctuations. There­
fore, a fortiori, a spiritual idea should be conserved
and not need to be re-acquired by a renewal of its
organic conditions.
We repeat that to know is to be, viz., to be some­
thing else, and to be something else is to have the
act of the thing known engrafted on the anterior
actuality of the subject. Now, between the mere
capacity of being something else and the actual
fulfilment of it, which is called its second act, there
is room for a first act, which is the idea, acquired,
but not yet lived : the state of a being formed uncon­
sciously on something else, and ready to awaken
to consciousness as soon as the conditions for
actual knowledge are realized. Therefore it seems
(videtur) that every acquired idea is preserved in
the soul, and indefinitely, since time has no influence
on immaterial things. Hence every acquired idea
persists in the life to come, though its use is only
relative.
But this is not memory properly so called.
Memory concerns the past as past. To think of a
thing, even repeatedly, without associating it with
time, is not to remember it. But time is the
measure of movement, which is a condition of
material things, while idea belongs only to the
universal, and therefore to the immaterial and
immobile, and has nothing temporal in it. Con­
sequently we can have an idea of a past event, but
not of a past event, precisely in its proper form, as
past. The past as past leaves its mark on some­
thing sensible, viz., the body. We find again what
once was, and how it affected us, by a process of
regression, called by St. Thomas reminiscence (act
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THE HUMAN SOUL

of rememorizing), which includes the notion of a
continuum, and consequently of matter.
The separated soul will be disposed by these ideas
(granted their survival) to orientate the new ideas
which it will receive from above. In that sense it
will re-think its former thoughts, and will be
conscious of so doing. This is a sort of remem­
brance, if you like, but it remains true that, strictly
speaking and in philosophical terminology, Aris­
totle is right when he says that the soul will not
remember when the body is no more. There is no
intellectual memory in the proper sense of the word.
C. Origin of the Human Soul

We have no intention of treating of the intellect’s
mode of functioning in the formation of the concept
and the judgment, in the elaboration of truth and
lapses into error, or in the process known as
demonstration which starts from principles. These
questions are outside the scope of this book. The
same applies to the will. But we must touch briefly
on certain consequences of what has been said,
viz., the origin and end of the intellectual soul.
Since being is the term of a becoming, which
must proceed according to a fixed plan, a thing’s
mode of becoming will depend on its mode of being.
If the soul were only an ordinary form, i.e., the act
of a body, if it had no other act but to inform the
body, then its existence would be co-terminous with
tliat of the composite body, and there would be no
reason to postulate a special mode of coming into
existence. It would be sufficiently accounted for
by the ordinary principles of material generation.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
But the soul has an act over and above the act of
informing the body, and to that extent must be
independent of matter. Therefore it cannot be
accounted for like a purely physical generation,
which consists in a change of form in a pre-existing
matter. Therefore the soul is not generated, and,
for the same reason, is indestructible.
And yet the soul has not always existed, for its
natural being is in the body, and the body has a
beginning. We cannot accept the Platonist, Manichæan or Averroist views on this matter without
accepting their whole philosophy. Therefore the
only alternative is to postulate an absolute beginning
to the soul, after not having been absolutely,
neither in itself nor in its specific causes. Therefore
the soul must have been immediately created by
God, Who alone is a sufficient cause to produce it.
We express this by a metaphor, and say that the
soul is infused into the body. It comes from with­
out, OupaOev, through the door, as Aristotle says.

The Soul and Generation
What follows will show how we must explain the
process of human generation. We know that it is
not the soul which operates in the semen or in the
ovum, but a formative power resulting from
material dispositions, which are instruments with
relation to the principles of generation. This
eliminates two errors. First, that the new soul
fabricates its own body from the start, and secondly
that the parent soul is responsible for the develop­
ment of the embryo.
To take the latter error first. The principle of
220

THE HUMAN SOUL
tile embryo’s development must be intrinsic to it
and not merely conjoint. The new being obviously
develops of its own accord, by its own laws, and
not by the laws of the parent being. Again, it soon
acquires sensation, an immanent operation which is
eminently subjective and cannot belong to two
subjects, of which one is the active cause and the
other the recipient.
The first error, though at first sight attractive,
is equally unacceptable. To say that the soul is in
the semen or in the ovum, or even in the embryo
not yet endowed with its essential organization, is
to lose sight of the fact that the human soul is not
primarily a spirit, but an act oj an organic body.
Its power surpasses the body, but it depends on the
body as on its natural support. It comes, so to
speak, when called for, to complete the process of
generation, although this completion depends on
other influences as well. The body needs the soul,
as every matter needs its form, in that upward
struggle of the whole creation, which " groaneth
and travaileth in pain.”11 Therefore the soul can
come to be naturally only when the body is
ultimately prepared for its act, i.e., possessing all the
essentials of a human organism. Before it has this
essential organism the body is not capable of having
a soul, because at the start it is not a body at all,
whilst at later stages it is not a body proportionate
to this soul, any more than a piece of wood is ready
to catch fire as soon as it is brought into contact
with the flame.
The animating soul is to the body what sight is
to the eye, and therefore it can no more exist before
the body than can the faculty of sight exist before
’* Rom. viii. 22.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
the eye. A properly human soul cannot exist before
a properly human body, i.e., a body so organized as
to lead a human life.
W/ten Docs Animation Take Place?

This is a matter for positive science, and science
is not very advanced on this point. It is generally
agreed that it is from the sixth month onwards
that the cerebral cortex, the organ of the higher
bodily functions in man, takes on its definite
structure, and it is then possible to distinguish the
five fundamental layers which are found in the adult,
viz., molecular layer, exterior layer, or layer of
small pyramidal cells, middle layer of large pyramidal
cells, interior layer of polymorphous cells, the whole
resting on a white mass of fibres, and on the
epithelium (the ependyma). The central nervous
system is composed of higher psychic centres, centres
of movement and sensation, and reflex centres. It
is these last which appear first: they are common
to all animals, and their development is seen to be
constant. The motive and sensitive centres come
next, both in order of differentiation and of develop­
ment. Lastly, the higher psychism proper to man,
which takes longer to come: it gains complete
control over the ccrebal fibres only about the age
of seven or eight years. But the essential fibres are
already apparent after six months, and quite clear
after eight.
Here again there is a great lack of certitude, which
justifies the Church’s practice in the matter of
baptism, where the safest course is always adopted.
But philosophically, for St. Thomas, to put a soul in
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THE HUMAN SOUL

a still unformed embryo, much less in the semen, is
a manifest metaphysical mistake. “ We do not put
the art of building in flutes.”
Successive Souls

It must be granted that the formative power
contained in the semen, in the initial embryo, is the
power of a human soul, in this sense that it is the
effect and instrument of human parents, operating
according to the laws of their species, which is
determined by their soul. It is the power of a
human soul also in the sense that it of its nature
tends to the production of a soul, although it cannot
do this of itself and by itself. But objectively,
actually, there is no human soul there. It comes by
stages, and in the evolution of the embryo we find
the whole kingdom and plan of nature. It is first
of all vegetal and leads the life of a plant, growing
and being nourished like one. St, Thomas adopts
Aristotle’s view12 on this point, but obviously the
plant which he speaks of is a human plant: it is
vegetal life directed towards the full life of man,
with its own characteristics, as may he proved by
the facts of heredity. As it develops the embryo
acquires sensitive life, which opens the way to
intellection. When the proper principle of the latter
arrives, it finds a matter adapted and proportionate
to its powers. But these diverse stages are all
immanent, and therefore require each a functional,
and consequently an ontological principle propor­
tionate to it. Therefore there must be, first a
vegetal soul, then a higher soul, at once vegetal
»a Cf. De Gen. Anim., II, III.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

and sensitive, and finally, the perfect essential
development, a soul at once vegetal, sensitive, and
rational.
We must add, however, that this conclusion of
St. Thomas would have to be modified if we accepted
the hypothesis of transformation, but we need facts a
good deal more certain than those which are forth­
coming, to convince us. We repeat that St. Thomas's
philosophy is in no sense opposed to it. To admit
evolution, especially that of slow modifications,
which gradually change the specific type until it
appears as a new being, is to do away, in the
analysis of generation, with the distinction between
accidental disposing forms which are continually
evolving, and the substantial form which succeeds
them. In this case, there would be a continuous
evolution, a continual change of form, bringing
about vegetal life at one period, then sensation,
which leads to intellection (though it does not
produce it of itself), instead of a succession of
provisional souls, each prepared by some anterior
evolution, and brought about instantaneously. It is
like saying that to go from one to three you must go
through a double scale of fractions, and that two
is on the way.
This might easily be. As St. Thomas explains:
“ forms are said to be unchangeable because they
themselves cannot be subjects of change: they are
nevertheless subject to change, in so far as their
subjects are changeable as regards them. Hence it
is clear that they may vary inasmuch as they exist,
for they are called beings, not as subjects of being,
but because by them something exists.”13
Thus the subject, in our case the human embryo,
»· Ia. q. IX, art. 2, ad. 3.
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THE HUMAN SOUL

evolves continually, and we may say that it continu­
ally takes on a new form, is endowed with a new
soul. But, since this soul is only provisional, it is
not the guiding idea of man : it participates in it, as
a thought behind a work of invention participates in
its successive, preliminary stages.
In any case the last soul, the definite, rational soul
which has powers over and above the power of
animating, of being the act or form of the body,
cannot just follow on automatically at the end of
a work of·material organization. Some exterior
influence must be brought to bear, some action must
come from the world of intelligence, whose power
transcends that of matter.
Yet there is nothing miraculous about it. God is
involved in His works,” says St. Augustine.
What He docs ordinarily, in conformity with the
plan realized in nature, is not a miracle. But it is a
creation, in so far as it is a participation in the First
Being, brought about by an absolute beginning,
without causal continuity, other than preparatory,
with preceding material conditions.

The Soul and the Evolutionist Theory
It is worth pointing out that if the theory of
evolution were proved by experimental science, and
if it managed to explain, experimentally of course,
man's arrival on earth in the course of geological
ages, St. Thomas’s philosophy could easily be
accommodated to it. Once admitting the doubtful,
though attractive, theory that the phases of the
embryo are a miniature of the phases of the life in
general. St. Thomas would apply what has been said
of the human soul to the formation of humanity in
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p

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

our first parents. Adam’s organism would then be
the work of centuries of life slowly developing on
the earth. The rational soul would be brought in
at its proper time, invisibly, without any observable
intervention; naturally, but meaning by that, nature
as a whole which includes God, to Whom alone the
production of soul can be attributed. This would
still not be a miracle, but it mould be a creation,
and the Bible narratives would lose nothing of their
value, philosophical or religious.
>1 . ·

D. The Survival oj the Soul

There remains the problem of the survival of the
soul, which must be treated rather carefully, once
you admit with St. Thomas, and against all forms
of Platonism, the doctrine of the human compotitwn.
We cannot utterly perish. We possess ideas,
which are an earnest of immortality. The soul is
immaterial and cannot be divided, broken up into its
elements and destroyed as the body can. How can
we perish, then, when wc possess immortality?
But this is just what is called in question. That
we possess immortality merely proves that not
everything in us will perish, but it does not prove
that we ourselves shall not. Man is made up of
body and soul, and when the body is destroyed the
man is no more; not even his name belongs to him,
as St. Thomas says unexpectedly: To affirm that
the man survives is to return to Plato, who taught
that man was only an intellectual soul, and that his
body was not an essential part of him.
Faith answers this difficulty by the doctrine of the
resurrection of the body, which is quite natural,
granted that the natural state of the soul is to be in
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THE HUMAN SOUL
the body. But philosophy has no recourse to faith :
it observes that the man dies, and it cannot affirm
that he comes to life again. It must be content with
affirming that not everything in man dies. It might
add that because the soul is the principal part, and
it is customary to name things by their principal
parts, it is, broadly speaking, true to say that we are
immortal. This is not Platonism. Plato held that
the soul was united only accidentally to its matter,
and literally meant that it is synonymous to say that
the soul is immortal and man is immortal.
But there is a still graver difficulty. If the soul
preserves its nature and yet loses its functions, of
what use is its nature after death? No function at
all seems possible without a body, or rather without
a properly disposed body. Illness affects the
intelligence, and can even suspend its working, by
doing away with the organic conditions, on which
the senses, imagination and memory depend.
The answer is rather complicated, as it must needs
be, and it gave St. Thomas’s opponents an oppor­
tunity of censuring his Aristotelianism. If the think­
ing individual is only actually thinking when in
possession of interior images, and if these images
suppose an organism, and the organism supposes a
cosmic environment, how can the soul operate or even
be conscious of itself, when the organism and the
environment are no longer there? “To exist is to
feel one’s body,” wrote Maine de Biran. If the
soul no longer feels its body, it no longer knows
that it exists. Will death be only a dreamless sleep ?
But apart from this awful supposition, how can we
imagine this unconscious and inert survival in the
plan of nature. To be neither for oneself nor for
another, is hardly to be at all.
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

From this it is only a step to the view that the
intellect, separated from matter, is not entirely
personal, even in this life, but a sort of common
influence, a light that shines for a time in each one
of us, and later leaves us mere particles of humanity
to die like day-flies in the night. That was the view
of Averroes, and he claims the authority of Aristotle.
Who knows? Though we still have St. Thomas's
commentary on the De Anima, and his brilliant study
on the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists,
they scarcely clear up the positive difficulty of affirm­
ing a survival which turns out to be totally
indescribable, with only the data of natural psycho­
logy to go upon.
Still, it is not as desperate as all that. The actual
purpose of the passive intellect, namely to receive
ideas from the sensible world, does not exhaust its
powers. It is a receptacle of ideas. That these
ideas come from sensible objects is beside the point.
That is its actual condition, not its necessary one.
Its separate nature, i.e., independent of matter,
renders it impervious to death, and its unlimited
receptive nature, which makes its information or
cognitive determination possible in other conditions,
provide the basis of its conscious and active
immortality.
Moreover the soul is itself intelligible. It lacks
intuition of itself in this life because its union with
the body turns and limits its attention to bodily
objects. When it is separated from the body and
left to itself, why should it not act as an intelligent
intelligible and understand itself? Why should not
its knowledge extend to all that its nature implies
concerning being and the causes of being? That
would take it a long way without any external
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THE HUMAN SOUL
influence. But further, it could receive from above
what it no longer receives from below: from spirit
instead of from matter. Psychologically it could,
and if morally it should, then there is no difficulty.
Man with his longings, the moralist preoccupied
with his principles, the Christian with his faith, all
can be accommodated.
Here is St. Thomas’s reply: The functions which
depend on the body perish, i.e., the senses, imagina­
tion, sensible experience, memory proper, and the
passions; but the rational functions do not perish,
but are simply re-orientated. “ Everything acts
according to its being. Although the being of the
human soul while united to the body is absolute and
independent of the body, nevertheless the body is a
sort of covering subject which receives it. Con­
sequently the proper operation of the soul, namely
to understand, though not depending on the body, in
the sense of being exercised through a bodily organ,
has nevertheless its object in the body, namely the
phantasms. Hence, as long as the soul is in the
body it cannot understand without phantasms, nor
remember except by the cogitative and meinorative
powers which prepare them. Therefore this mode
of understanding is destroyed with the memory when
the body is destroyed. But the being of a separated
soul belongs to it alone, without the body, and hence
its operation, which is to understand, is not wholly
expended on objects existing, like phantasms, in
bodily organs. It understands of itself, in the
manner of substances which are totally separate from
bodies in their being, and it can be influenced by
these separated substances, as by its betters, to
understand more perfectly.”14
u Cont. Gent., II. Sx.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
It will be noticed in this quotation that St. Thomas
refers to a faculty of intuition which the soul even
now possesses, but which is kept under restraint by
its association with the body. Lachelier compares
this faculty to “ our respiratory power during the
life in the womb.” When the immortal life begins,
this power shows itself, as a new-born baby breathes
in its first cry.
But this brings us to another difficulty. If the soul
can function like that, of itself, without the body,
why has it been joined to a body? Is it “ for its
own good,” as St. Thomas says in contrast with
Origen and the Manichees, who regarded it as a
fall and a punishment? St. Thomas answers that
the soul can function without the body, but that does
not make the body useless to it. Placed on the
lowest rung of intelligence, it could learn only a
very little of truth if left to itself. The body is one
of its sources of information, looking out as it does
on the world. When the body perishes, the soul
returns to itself, and of itself would acquire little.
But the world above, which we on earth see only
in reflection, is opened to it, and it now receives from
above what before came to it from below. Direct
rays replace the laborious filtering of abstraction.
“ The human soul is on the confines of two worlds,
on the horizon of time and eternity. As it recedes
from the lower it draws nearer to the higher, and
when absolutely separated from the body it will be
just like separated substances in their manner of
knowing, and will receive their influence in greater
abundance.”111
In a word, at the moment of its birth in the body,
the soul is reduced to the lowest rank of spirit: aftei
» Ibid.
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THE HUMAN SOUL
its separation by death it advances to a higher
environment, and is brought under the influence of
nobler beings. Our body gives us the rights and
advantages of a spectator of the world, and makes
us active citizens of nature. In leaving the body we
leave school to return to our real home. The body
nourishes the mind, but rather as a warder feeds his
prisoner. Material things develop the soul, but
they also envelop it; they enliven it while they
imprison it. True progress is to be found only in
closer union with God and His Kingdom, in com­
parison with which this world is only a shadow.
That, to St. Thomas, is how knowledge in us is
apportioned to the various domains we successively
inhabit. On earth we get everything from experi­
ence, i.e., from the world entering into us, the in­
vasion of embodied forms which are disembodied by
abstraction. But even while so operating we are
already in communication with the world of spirit.
The source of light is above, the form is ** divine
throughout nature we unconsciously commune with
God. The “ vision of God ” is, in that sense, a
natural truth. All truth comes from God. In one
way or another God must be involved in our every
thought, with our science and art, with everything,
in fact, that implies intelligibility. Our ideas come
from above, even though we get them from below,
as the reflection of the sun in the sea. Our thought
is an ideal reflection, just as being is a real reflection
of the divine source which is both ideal and real.
In other conditions, when we have broken the
barriers of this world, God and divine things can be
reflected in us without the mediation of the reality
which envelops us. The intelligible world to which
the liberated soul belongs, will nourish thought and
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

restore to it, full measure and overflowing·, what it
seemed to have lost. Instead of contemplating ideas
in reflection, we shall receive them straight from
their source, and contemplate with ourselves. God,
the angels and ourselves will be transparent to us,
but God in everything and in all.

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CHAPTER Vil I
MORALITY

A. Foundations of the Doctrine
Our Catholic theories of morality are often accused
of being a priori, of wearing an abstract air, of
being based on arbitrary commandment without
positive justification, of deriving conclusions from
Revelation, instead of establishing them by reason;
in short, of lacking the scientific character which is
expected nowadays in all branches of knowledge.
It is not our purpose to defend other authors, but
only St. Thomas, and we affirm that his principles
of morality are scientific. They are joined to his
metaphysics, and so they should be, since their
object, man, is a being, and his law must come
under the general laws of being.
St. Thomas begins with what is. Human life is
engaged amid an ensemble of things from which
man, by likenesses and differences, gets his own
character: he is part of a great movement, of which
the origin, the end and the means determine his
destiny, as they determine the destiny of all things.
There we must look for the principles of his actions.
Something within him speaks to him: his con­
science, i.e., the sum total of impulses subjected
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

to his rational nature; dictates which his intelligence
perceives and to which his conduct must confoim.
It is all a question of finality, but of free finality,
for man differs from other beings in that he moves
himself towards his end. when reason has once
recognized it. Hence his responsibility and also
his danger. The tragedy of destiny consists in the
fact that a man is daily and continually the arbiter
of his own fate. At each moment of his conscious
life, and indirectly of his unconscious life, he does
an act which saves him or damns him.
The good man cannot wander or lose his way
unless he turns from the divine course which directs
being and brings everything in creation to its proper
end. As long as he tends towards his end he is
saving his own soul and fulfilling part of nature’s
universal plan. He must complete his life, as his
share in the completion of nature. This is no
mystery, but a positive fact.
To complete his life means that a man must
recognize the true nature of his life and act
accordingly. Morality is simply the art of direct­
ing man’s free activity so as to realize his end and
his place in God’s handiwork, as his own instincts,
properly studied, prompt him. Or, if you like,
morality is the science of what a man ought to be
by reason of what he is.
In this epitome of Thomistic morality, certain
principal notions stand out and need explanation.
The first of these is the notion of the last end or
beatitude.

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MORALITY
B. Beatitude

Everything acts for an end : all activity is a search
for something. If there were no term assigned to
an action, implied in the action itself, then a result
would not follow from one rather than from
another. Natural determinism would be no longer
explicable, an absolute chance would prevail, and
science would be rendered impossible. But though
everything acts for an end, not everything knows
its end, and even when it knows it as object, it may
not know it as end, i.e., precisely as the result to
be obtained by appropriate means. Reason alone
can carry out this task, and therefore only the
rational being can direct himself to his end.
What is that end ? Every being tends, consciously
or otherwise, to its own realization, preservation,
expansion, and, where possible, complete develop­
ment. Man is no exception to the rule. His
nature, at once multiple and one, seeks to unfold
and develop all its faculties in perfect harmony.
That, at least, is what his reason wishes when true
to itself.
Now harmony consists in the subordination of
functions to a principal function; completion consists
in full expansion of all in the measure permitted by
what is essential. What is essential is the higher
life of the soul, by which we are defined, and
distinguished from other animals. Therefore our
beatitude, in this life and in the next, consists in
directing all our faculties to the life of the
intelligence.
This, however, does not tell us what the object
is. Beatitude, so envisaged, is a form of activity,
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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

and we have still to determine its substance. What
objects can make us happy? To what do we turn
if we would live well? To answer this question in
detail would be to write a whole treatise on the
nature of man, for man ought to be what he ought
to be, by reason of what he is. But we can give
a metaphysical answer, as far as concerns the
essentials.
Man is essentially an intelligent being. There­
fore the essential object of his beatitude, his
supreme ideal, must be an object of his intelligence.
And granted that beatitude must be perfect in its
own order, we are led to the conclusion that his
object must be the most perfect object among in­
telligible beings, and this is God. Therefore human
beatitude consists essentially in the contemplation
of God.
St. Thomas thus combines Revelation, which
defines beatitude as a vision of God, with the
authentic teaching of Aristotle.1

Thomism and Arisioteleanism
It is strange at first sight to find St. Thomas
relying so much on a pagan philosophy in moral
matters, but he regarded it just as one more case
of a more general agreement, of which wc have
already noticed the happy success. Again, a closer
examination will show that there are great differ­
ences between them. It is quite true that the
essence of human beatitude is the contemplation of
God, but Aristotle’s explanation is set out in a
manner calculated to confuse us. Aristotle was
1 Cf. Ethics,
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MORALITY
concerned only with this life, and his so-called
happiness is restricted to a privileged few, for
brief periods and in precarious circumstances. In
a world dominated by material things, by rank and
birth, only a small minority can lead the higher
intellectual life. How can we indulge in it when
we arc almost entirely engrossed in finding the
necessities of life, with little time for contemplation.
But St. Thomas, while realizing the shortcomings
of such a theory, did not for that reason abandon
the principles. He had wherewith to supplement
them and justify their ambition. There is another
life. We may not be able to describe what is in
store for us, but we believe and hope, and what
was for Aristotle an unwarranted optimism, is for
us a reality.
Moreover, St. Thomas does not rely only on
rational research, he does not construct a merely
philosophical heaven, but makes use of the only
heaven which is revealed to us, to give definite
character to beatitude, and to the moral means
which lead up to it. In the intuitive contemplation
of God all our desires will be satisfied, because God
is the source of everything good. Whatever we
derive from the life of the senses, from intellectual,
family, or social life, and every other form of
temporal happiness, must find its counterpart in
God. Above all, faith assures us, by the resurrec­
tion of the body, by the new heaven and new earth,
an “ accidental ” prolongation of the primary and
essential beatitude, by which it will be adapted to
our standing and to all our needs. It remains to
consider how this end can be reached.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

C. Human Acts as Means to Beatitude

Since beatitude is the goal of our activity, it
must be obtained by suitable acts, i.e., by acts which
directly or indirectly lead to it. Since man is rational
be will advance towards his beatitude when he acts
in conformity with his reason, by obeying the law
within him, which is derived from the Supreme Law.
The end of a thing is its perfection, and a being
is perfected by reaching the end of its proper
activity. Therefore our perfection must be attained
by the perfection of our rational being. Therefore
moral activity and rational activity exactly coincide.
To be moral is to act in conformity with reason.
Another Contact with Aristoteleanism

Tn this matter we again find that Christian
thought goes hand in hand with Aristotle. But
we find the same lack of completeness on the part
of the latter. Aristotle agrees with St. Thomas
that an act is moral when it is reasonable, and
reasonable when it is of a nature to achieve the
end which reason seeks, viz., beatitude. But when
it comes to ascertaining whether there is a regular
correspondence or link between the end and the
act, between moral perfection and morality, Aris­
totle is silent. His philosophy is nobly but too
exclusively rationalistic for him to be able to
guarantee any such connection. Man’s life is far
too complicated; nature, society, even our own
internal affairs are far too much given over to
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MORALITY
chance to guarantee the end aimed at, however
faithful and courageous our efforts.
Things never go smoothly, and our efforts are
often frustrated. Not that we expect a reward.
But still, virtue is its own reward, only provided it
reaches its aim. It is a question of the efficacious­
ness, and consequently of the justification, of our
actions. It is really no more than a paradox to
say: “Hope is not necessary for perseverance.”
Can men launch out on an undertaking with no
hope of accomplishing it? Must not an order of
facts correspond to the order of our actions ?
What Kant calls the reign of ends, i.e., the con­
sistent fulfilment of our virtuous actions, needs to
be guaranteed. Otherwise we have only a chance
morality, and all idea of obligation is excluded. As
a matter of fact, obligation is so loose in Aristotle
that its very existence has been denied.
St. Thomas points out this defect, and supple­
ments it as follows: ” Whenever there is any due
order to some end, it is necessary that it should
lead to the end, and that deviation from it exclude
the end. For the things which derive from the end,
derive a necessity from the end, in this sense, that
they are necessary if the end is to be reached, and
they reach the end unless impeded.”2
A pagan naturalist could not feel the same assur­
ance. We do not see this order, as St. Thomas
explains it, realized before our eyes. Nobody
would dream of maintaining that visible happiness
regularly follows each virtuous act, or that certain
happiness follows a virtuous life as a whole. There
are too many impediments, too many chance inter­
ventions between the quest and the goal. Betwixt
8 Cont. Gent.. HI. 140.
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TH0MIST1C PHILOSOPHY

the cup and the lip. . . . Fortunes of birth and
environment, inner struggles and miseries, conspire
to mar the harmony between our acts and their
natural ends. The triumph of ungodliness and the
oppression of justice have been stumbling-blocks to
centuries of inquirers.
But this is an incomplete picture of destiny.
Pagan philosophers held to it, and defended it or
opposed it as they thought fit. Even Aristotle was
aware of it, and discreetly withdrew. He admitted
that accidental causes upset the splendid order of
his ethics. This order was an ideal, by which men
might benefit “ as far as it belongs to men.” It
was a clever subterfuge, but a subterfuge all the
same, and we are faced with an antinomy.
On the one hand we are attracted towards
beatitude, i.e., towards the harmonious perfection
of our whole being, in the contemplation of God.
It is a wonderful ideal, and our instincts and nature
bear witness that we are made for it. We are told
that virtue, or, what is the same thing, rational
conduct, is the means to this end. On the other
hand we have grave doubts as to whether this
means is apt to procure the happiness aimed at.
Experience shows that happiness and virtue often
lie along different routes. Happiness depends on a
host of conditions foreign to virtue, or even opposed
to it. Virtue depends only on itself, namely, on
its form, which is the moral intention or will to
obey reason; but its matter, the object of its effort,
can be lost. It is not effective by itself. It does
not necessarily reach its end; its object, happiness,
may be had almost without wishing it, and it may
be wished for in vain. That is the contradiction.
We may avoid it by ignoring man’s nature and
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MORALITY

contradicting his instincts. We may say with the
stoics : There is no true happiness save moral good
itself, considered in its pure form. Happiness is
exclusively the will to do good, and, since that
depends on ourselves, it is within our grasp. Kant
also, before he attempted the re-establishment of
the postulates of the practical reason, thought that
morality was a pure form, a “ form without matter,”
an intention independent of all realization, and which
would be spoiled by preoccupation with practical
results. Hence the happiness of virtue, or the
satisfaction arising from duty performed, which
Kant admitted, has nothing to do with the
happiness of man, as man.
Aristotle’s doctrine was too positive, and St.
Thomas is too insistent on the doctrine of matter
and form, potency and act, to lose himself in a
philosophy which runs counter to man’s very nature.
Yet Aristotle could not solve the difficulty. He took
it for granted that the will to do good was the only
sufficient cause of happiness, the only cause that
could make our destiny truly our own. And when
he finds his theory contradicted by actual facts he
says it is an accident, though its prevalence should
make it seem rather the rule. But there is no place
for accidents in the realm of absolute values, and
the moral order, which gives us absolute standards
of conduct, must be absolute in itself, and therefore
in its sanctions.
St. Thomas had not Aristotle’s excuse for ignor­
ing this. He had a remedy: here, as everywhere,
he corrects Aristotle's doctrine by perfecting it,
which is the best form of correction.
He shows that the purpose of morality is not to
satisfy a sort of empty formalism or abstract
241
Q

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY

dragooning. Its purpose is to constitute man, to
preserve him from influences which upset and
degrade him, in a word to perfect him. Virtue is a
prolongation of instincts, provided that these arc
true to man’s nature.
Nor is he surprised that the accident should nullify
and frustrate the results. He takes a larger view of
it : the doctrine of immortality answers the difficulty.
Although virtuous acts do not immediately produce
happiness, they are its seeds. They are valuable for
it: they merit it, and lead to it in due time. They
already contain it in a mysterious way, under the
form of grace, but that is a question of theology'.
It is merit that joins virtue to happiness. “ Merit
is, as it were, the road that leads from virtue to the
happy end.”3 The world does not, of itself, obey
the moral law, although it is closely allied to it.
God brings them together: virtue becomes the law
of the world and sanctions its activities. Providence
unites in one far-reaching plan what appeared dis­
parate and divergent. Our works “ follow us,” and
finally determine our fate. They may not be
rewarded en route, but they are at the terminus.
Reality is not moral by itself, but it is moral if taken
in its entirety, because it then includes God. The
world is a moral harmony in God, and our moral
life is thereby established in security, both as regards
its effects and its principles. God's providence is in
man and in the world, in all groups and in all
surroundings. God must be in agreement with Him­
self. He attracts us to happiness; our effort, united
to his, must be invincible. With Him we succeed,
without Him we fail. The moral order may be an
order delayed in its full perfection, yet it is an order
* Sent. II, dist. 35, q. x, art. 3.

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MORALITY
aH the same, and a well-established one. A good
conscience is the highest force in the world. This
theory neither does away with morality nor makes
it so autonomous and detached as to be beyond our
reach.
This is what the Gospels call the “ Kingdom of
God,” and what the philosopher calls the absolute
of the moral order. The kingdom of God is within
us, as we are in God and God in us. It is in us by
hope and by merit.

From this doctrine St. Thomas draws a conclusion
of paramount importance, which was quite unknown
to Aristotle. Our moral efforts are directed partly
to realize temporal good, but above all, supra­
temporal, even supernatural good, i.e., good above
the level of our natural actions. And since the
events of this life “ are not worthy to be compared
with the glory to come that shall be revealed in us,”*
our efforts to secure temporal happiness are of little
importance compared with our efforts to merit eternal
life.
But this is not to discourage purely natural actions.
We merit, it is true, by actions which lead to our
ultimate end, but they are actions performed in this
life. That we promise them a greater reward does
not mean that we condemn their purely natural
compensation, since beatitude is promised to those
who use this world rightly. Eternity is rooted in
time, not opposed to it. And history shows that the
greatest saints were the best citizens.
4 Rom. viii. 18.

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THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
D. Pleasure and Goodness

So far we have treated beatitude as man’s
perfection, as a realization of his specific form, by
the accomplishment of his final end. This is its
essential character, because it answers to the primary
and principal definition of his being. But there is
another aspect. We have experience of an accessory
reality which also belongs to being, and which to
some seems the first element of beatitude, namely
pleasure. What is it? What is its relation to
human acts, to morality, and to our final happiness?
Pleasure is a Good

According to St. Thomas, pleasure is a secondary
function dependent on the others. It is the
perfection of a vital action, but not part of its
essence, since the action may be defined without it.
We can define sight without mentioning the pleasures
of vision. Pleasure is a complement of our acts, a
sort of psychological reflection, echo, epiphenomenon,
or quality, and it results from their perfection, whole
or in part. St. Thomas would have agreed with
Spinoza’s definition of joy as the “ passing from a
lesser to a greater perfection,” and of sorrow as
the '* passing from a greater perfection to a lesser.”5
Everyone yearns for what is pleasant to him.
Everyone desires to live, and to live as full a life as
possible. Aristotle left unanswered the question as
to whether pleasure is made for life, or life for
pleasure, whereas St. Thomas steadfastly rejects the
* Ethics, lib. IU. c. XI. Scholion.
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latter hypothesis. Life is not made for pleasure :
in God’s plan, pleasure is the repose of the appetite
in the pleasurable thing, which it therefore pre­
supposes. The essential thing is the fitness of the
object, as judged by the reason, and the fitness of
the pleasure is a result of this, and dependent upon
it. Pleasure is always a good in itself, if not of itself.
It moreover leads to good, in so far as it stimulates
us to do virtuous actions. We understand better
when we have a liking for study; we travel better
over pleasant country; we enjoy music more when
we appreciate the harmony; we do virtuous acts of
all sorts better when we act with pleasure. The only
action that pleasure impedes is one which is alien or
contrary to it, when it is a distraction or a preventive.
But pleasure which properly belongs to an action
stimulates our faculties, concentrates our attention,
welds together the soul and its object, and increases
our vitality.
We must never condemn or banish pleasure as
wrong in itself. On the contrary, we maintain that it
is an essential perfection, valuable and extremely
good. The joy of God is God. It can rise to a
high degree of excellence and stability. Even though
our pleasures pass away, pleasure itself is not a
change as Plato held. Our pleasures are transitory,
but pleasure itself is not fragile of itself : it is related
to goodness, which by its nature has no limit of
value or boundary of time. In this life our pleasures
vanish when their object vanishes, and are limited
like it. But if some day we find a good which
completely satisfies us and which does not fade, then
the pleasure which it gives us will be itself lasting and
perfect. That is eternal joy.
Consequently Thomism is opposed to every form of
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rigorism, Stoicism, Kantianism, or false mysticism,
which inveigh against even the moderate enjoyment
of pleasant things. Indeed, the refusal to enjoy what
is good is a vice—St. Thomas calls it insensibility,
i.e., a deforming or excluding of sensible enjoyment.
It is an offence against reason and against God,
because it is a rejection of His order and wise
disposition of things. A child who is unwilling to
enjoy his father’s company can hardly be said to fulfil
all his duties. He is wanting in gratitude and love.
Pleasure is not the First Good

But this doctrine, though true and important,
needs to be balanced by a complementary doctrine.
Pleasure is a good, but it is not a good on its own
account, and therefore it cannot be the first good.
Pleasure assists life, but it is not the whole of life,
nor even its principal part; it presupposes first of all
a happy activity, and by happy I mean answering
to what we are, to what our reason and conscience
tell us we are.
This is contrary to the partisans of the Moral of
Pleasure, the hedonists, immoral moralists, re­
presented in antiquity by Eudoxus and Epicurus.
Aristotle remarks, and St. Thomas seconds him, that
they contradict the general sentiment of mankind.
Men love pleasure, it is true, but they require to
judge of the object wherein the pleasure is found.
“ Content to be at ease ” is an invidious phrase, yet
docs it not exactly express the hedonist? A well
balanced man is content to have realized or to possess
something good.
Nobody wishes to feel the pride and dignity of
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royalty after the fashion of the lunatic who thinks
he is a king. Nobody wishes never to grow up, so
as to perpetuate his childish pleasures. The criminal
does not wish to live for ever in crime. To be men,
to enjoy our reason, our human dignity, our entire
humanity seems to us preferable to all the joys of an
abnormal life. Sight, hearing, memory, knowledge,
and love, bring us countless pleasures, but even if wc
had to abandon all these in order to have pleasure, we
would prefer to sacrifice the pleasure.
Nature has attached pleasure to our acts because it
obviously desires them, and the more important the
act the greater the pleasure. For example, in bodily
actions more pleasure follows from acts which
concern the species than from those which concern
the individual. This is nature’s way of showing that
the good of pleasure, in God’s plan, and consequently
according to right reason, is only an added
encouragement and help to virtue. To attribute to
it an independent or primary value is to abuse it.
There is a limit beyond which any pleasure becomes
unreasonable and unjustifiable in moral law. It is
good to enjoy truth, but only because truth itself
is first of all good. On a lower plane, it is good to
enjoy food in moderation, because food is good for
the body, which is both valuable in itself and even
more so as the instrument of the soul.
Conclusions Regarding Pleasure

Broadly speaking, we may say with St. Thomas
that pleasure is worth what its action is worth, and
its action is worth what its object is worth. If
the object is good the action is happy—happy in
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the eyes of reason, happy on the whole, all things
considered. Then the pleasure also is good. And
vice versa.
This means that the pleasure must be in propor­
tion to the being and to the action. Any dispro­
portion means a more or less bad action. To crave
for enjoyment for its own sake is wrong, because
it is unreasonable, and therefore immoral and
against the order established by Providence. The
gravity of the sin will depend on the gravity of
the object. Excessive enjoyment of the little things
of everyday life will be a light fault, while, when
pleasure is contrary to life itself, when it upsets
vital actions, harms the individual or the community,
the gravity is obviously greater.
E. Obligation and Sanction

Here we might end this chapter, as we have
touched on the essentials of Thomistic morals.
Still, we have hardly so much as mentioned the
words obligation and sanction, which occur so
frequently in manuals. The reason is that in
Thomism, morals, strictly speaking, have no obliga­
tion or sanction. Let us not be misunderstood.
We mean that the good is not imposed on the
human act from without, like a decree which
deprives a man of his own spontaneity of action,
or of choosing from the objects which surround
him. We mean also that the reward is not from
without, by a sort of intervention of something
between the act and its natural result. This follows
logically from what has been said above.
According to St. Thomas, morality is the art of
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attaining our end. There is hardly need to point
out now that this end is an objective, ontological
good, the full perfection of our being, and the
perfect realization of our human nature. Moral
good is therefore the attainment of this end by a
judicious choice and use of means to it. Virtue is
only another name for fulfilling the law of activity,
which governs us, as men. Happiness or misery
will follow according as we gain or lose the good
sought after. But let us go more closely into the
question of moral law and sanction.

The Nature of the Moral Law
For a proper understanding of law as taught by
St. Thomas, we must pass from the moral order,
which is governed by reason, to the natural order,
in which reason is immanent. Both the reason of
man and the reason in things are, of course,
derived from God.
Law in general is defined as the “ rule or measure
of action, by which one is led to act or deterred
from acting.”6 Laws may differ according to the
character of the active cause and of the action, but
they will always answer to this common definition :
they will always be a sort of framework into which
actions arc fitted, natural actions naturally, human
actions freely. This is the meaning of the Thomistic
definition, and is quite distinct from the modern idea
of law, as a mere systematic expression of facts, a
scheme established past factum, with no objective
norm.
The world is governed by an intelligent finality:
a la, llae, q. go, art. i.
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even what is inanimate is ideal, in the sense that
it has a form, which is a sort of soul. Therefore
all action is directed by an intrinsic or immanent
law.
The clearest example is that of the living being.
No one will deny that there is there an organic plan.
Now an organic plan has the character of a law,
“of a preconceived and active idea,” as Claude
Bernard has said, a command of nature. It has
the makings of a right, of which the right, properly
so called, is only a new application, called for by
new conditions.
Coming to man, wc find that in certain respects
he agrees with lower living beings, and indeed with
all natural beings. The forms of his activity are
the results of the ideality immanent in him. But
he differs in an all-important respect. The form
or immanent end which determines his activity is
not entirely given. He himself is partially respon­
sible for it : he can react on nature and form a
practical judgment, i.e., a judgment which guides
him by his own initiative, and which consists
properly in arbitrating on his own particular case.
Hence its name of liberum arbitrium, free will.
This is a passage from law in the physical or
metaphysical sense to law in the moral sense, like
the passage from ontological good to moral good.
Ontological good is that which everything desires:
it is the realization or means to realization of every
being. Moral good is this same good freely em­
braced under the guidance of reason. In the same
way, law, in the physical or metaphysical sense, is
that which every being tends to do by reason of its
nature and circumstances. Moral law is that which
a rational being, as such, i.e., as freely acting,
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tends to do by reason of its nature and circum­
stances. The difference is that a physical law
belongs to irrational things, which are moved, and
is imposed, whereas a moral law belongs to rational
beings, which move themselves and is proposed.
We enjoy something of God's liberty in creating
and disposing of things: we form the ideas by which
we act, and we move ourselves.
But this power obviously needs a law. There is
a rule in every system governed by purpose. Just
as God governs natural things through the laws of
nature, so He governs rational beings through the
moral law. Man is ruled by nature and by reason,
but in different ways. I have the power to disobey
the moral law, but not the laws of nature. This
makes me responsible for my rational acts, and
liable to reward or punishment, because I obey or
disobey by my own free will, and not by some
intransigent fatality. In that sense only am I
obliged by the moral law.
This is the philosophical and scientific meaning
of obligation. *’ Scientific ’’ is not too strong a
word, for our argument is based on the law of
development, which is an object of science, and wc
have merely adapted it to the special needs of a
self-moving subject.
Autonomy

As regards obligation. St. Thomas’s morality is
not a legalism like that of Kant, and of some
Catholic philosophers. For Kant, the good is
obligatory because we so conceive it, and impose
it upon ourselves as obligatory, by an autonomous
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will, i.e., a will which does not depend on anything
above or below it, and which has no natural or
supernatural justification. For certain teachers,
including Duns Scottis, the good is obligatory
because God has so willed. For St. Thomas the
good is obligatory because reason judges it to be
the means whereby man may be truly man, and
may reach his end. Man's end, though freely
sought after, is just as imperative to him as
fatality is to other beings.
According to this teaching, God’s will does not,
as Scotus made out, turn what would be otherwise
indifferent into something obligatory, but it makes
things to be obligatory in themselves; by the very
nature of things. God here acts more as creator
than as legislator, or, if you prefer, He is Legis­
lator, because, and in so far as, He is creator, since
for God to impose a law is simply to impose the
ideal or end, and to impose the end is simply to
impose the nature, in other words, to create.
The autonomy of our reason is left intact, because,
in creating, God entrusts each being to itself, and
does not absorb it. Law and being both depend
on Him, but law only as a consequence of
being. What comes from God cannot run counter
to Him or be independent of Him, and therefore
moral law depends on the eternal law. But once
we have acknowledged the true relations between
divine and human reason, and the transcendence of
the former, which rules out all real comparison in
our sense of the word, for there is no common
measure, it is correct to speak of the autonomy of
reason with respect to the moral law. In this sense
we may speak of a morality without obligation, i.e.,
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tion. Morality is not an order coming from with­
out, not even from heaven : it is the voice of reason,
recognized as the voice of God. St. Thomas regards
the natural law, which is the very foundation of
the moral law, not as an extrinsic regulation, like the
command of a superior, but as a participation in the
eternal law, as an immanent law, and, in consequence,
as capable of making the reason autonomous.7
This power is not embanked by having a source,
especially as its source is divine. We may apply
what we said of Providence and free will. Just as
man is as free under the almighty action of God
as if there were no God, so, in moral matter, he is
as autonomous as if there were no eternal law. The
eternal law is within him, in so far as he really
participates in it, and he is thereby responsible for
his actions. The presence of God is the hermit’s
justification.
Nature of Moral Sanction

The same applies to moral sanction. The moment
you admit that the moral law is not an order coming
from without, but an internal law of action imposed
on man by his nature, then you make its sanction
the result of autonomous actions. It will be a happy
outcome if the rational actions have been good, and
vice versa.
There is no adequate equivalent in St. Thomas to
the word sanction. He usually speaks of recom­
pense or punishment, but he explains that to be
recompensed is simply to reach one’s end, and to
be punished is to miss it.
r Cf. la. Ilae. q. 91. art. 2.
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Disinterestedness
Once we grant that virtue is the rational means
to happiness, and vice the irrational rejection of this
means, we are bound to conclude that virtue
produces happiness and vice unhappiness. Those
who deny sanctions either have a different idea of
morality, and then wc must argue with them on
more fundamental points, or else they imagine that
the means and the end are not interdependent—that
you can arrive in London when travelling towards
Berlin, and that the right road leads nowhere.
What people like to call disinterestedness is really
only a refusal to attribute to virtue its justification,
and to law its dependence on being.
Natural and Other Worldly Sanctions

There are people who declare that the earthly
results, interior or exterior, of virtue and vice are
sufficient to satisfy us. We reply that they are not
sufficient, because they are precarious, and because
moral laxity co-exists with moral effort, although
wc like their realist and objective point of view.
Virtue is made to serve; it is a means, not an end.
We respect life because of its value, we guard health
because we value it, we study because we value
knowledge, we are just because we value peace.
Similarly we act virtuously because we value
happiness.
The outcome of our actions in this world, the
arrival of means at their end, is too limited and
precarious to satisfy our moral conscience or our
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idea of order. We have rejected Aristotle’s
optimism and substituted a Christian optimism that
is thoroughly philosophical, since it is based on
truths such as the existence of God, Providence and
eternal life, which may be proved independently of
Revelation. The fact that there is a providential
God is a divine guarantee that virtue will be
rewarded, while the existence of a future life makes
possible that ultimate and perfect happiness which
the world cannot give.
These are the principles of the Thomistic doctrine
of sanctions, a doctrine too complicated to be treated
here in full. Its fundamental notion rules out all
recompense which is extrinsic to the effort, and it
identifies it with the normal result, the natural out-'
come or end of our actions.
Just as in a true sense Thomistic morality is a
morality without obligation, so, in the same sense,
it is a morality without sanction. It repudiates the
legalism of Kant or Scotus. and takes its stand
on the philosophy of dependent beings. It makes
sanction not an extrinsic recompense, but the effect
of our normal intrinsic action, under the protecting
guidance of God.

THE END