PROLOGUE

The history of philosophy is often compared to a great cemetery in which tombstones succeed each other in awful continuity and, with their Hic jacet, write the many chapters of a sad encyclopedia—an encyclopedia of man’s repeated but always insufficient efforts to attain truth. Instead of this pessimistic simile, I prefer that of a maternity ward wherein the intellect, always in gestation, is periodically delivered of a theory which to all outer appearances is newborn, but whose internal structure reveals a heredity that makes it contemporaneous with the very origins of philosophical speculation. That is why the history of philosophy is much more a history of birth and rebirth than one of death-a genealogy more than a necrology. Our intellect needs time in which to progress, and time, bearer of old age and death to material life, becomes an agent of rejuvenation to the life of the mind.

The problem that we are now about to tackle is a brilliant confirmation of the thesis just stated. Officially, its birth is dated 1637, at the printing shop of Jean Maire in Leyden; its father is René Descartes, who gave it the name Discourse on Method and assigned it a very definite vocation-to teach man “to reason well and to seek for truth in the sciences.” Unofficially, our problem is much older than the published date of its birth would lead us to suspect, and the baptismal name given it by Descartes is only one of the many terms applied to it by thinkers of all ages. We might even say that its name is Legion and that the history of its pseudonyms would furnish material for a large volume. Not only is its name legion, but so are the guises under which it appears; its art of camouflage, of being visible or invisible, of revealing itself or escaping notice, would fill the wiliest chameleon with envy.

All these considerations should serve to fill us with the greatest circumspection about approaching this offspring of the human intellect, offspring that so clearly reveals its parent’s poverty, for it is truly poverty’s child and proof of our indigence. However, like Cinderella in the fairy story, this poor child, born of an intellect dependent upon the senses, can sometimes appear to us richly clad and ruling over all of the other offspring of our intellect, graciously granting or disdainfully refusing their claims to legitimacy on the pretext of its being officially commissioned to keep an eye on the intellect’s integrity and to make note of any infidelities of which she might be guilty in procreating her various types of knowledge.

To grasp the true nature of this bizarre and capricious character, therefore, we must never lose sight of it, must observe each of its successive births, must from the outset expose its high and mighty airs, in order for us not to be imposed upon by the increasingly dictatorial bearing that it assumes in the course of its evolution. Otherwise, we are in danger of confusing that which makes up the wealth of our intellectual life with the proofs of its poverty, and of deposing wisdom only to place epistemology upon the throne of truth.

Now, the only infallible way to remove every possibility of evasion and dissimulation from this subtle individual is to examine it as a problem before trying to find out what characterizes it as epistemological. For just as we cannot strictly define a being without previously having the notion of being as being, so the notion of this problem that is epistemology cannot truly be understood unless we first know what constitutes a problem as such.

The initial chapter of this first part will therefore be devoted to studying what a problem is as problem, the laws governing its birth in our mind, and the psychological reaction to which it inevitably gives rise. Once we know the characteristics common to every problem as such, we can then study one of its concretions, i.e., the characteristics peculiar to an epistemological problem. This will be the subject matter of the next three chapters. The second chapter will treat of the modern epistemological problem, since the modern age officially gave it birth. In the third chapter we shall consider that curious phenomenon, the Neo-Scholastic problem, which plunges roots deep into idealist methods, yet which finds its completion in the realistic metaphysics of St. Thomas.

Were we to fill in all the details of this outline, we could call the result “The History of Western Thought from the Fifth Century B.C. to 1950 A.D.” But despite its abridgment, so impoverishing to the life of ideas, this outline suffices to show t the genesis of a problem in any field whatsoever must entail a conflict within the human mind, a conflict that exists whenever the universe gives two seemingly irreconcilable accounts of itself, or, to say the same thing in another way, when our mind tells itself two stories pretending to apply to the same physical universe, but which are so divergent that the mind feels momentarily impotent to reconcile them or to judge their truth or falsity. Such, in very general terms, is the description of the laws governing the genesis of a problem as problem.

Section II: The Structure of Psychological Reactions

The first phase of our inquiry has shown us the objective factors that give rise to a problem in the soul. However, it has told us nothing about its psychological nature, because to note that the intellect cannot tolerate the coexistence within itself of two contradictory accounts tells us nothing about what happens in our mind, or the reason why we cannot abide contradictories. We must therefore pursue the analysis further and seek out the nature of the psychological reactions caused by the genesis of a problem; therein we shall discover its true nature. Two questions naturally occur to the mind once the general laws governing the genesis of a problem have been established. The first may be formulated as follows: What attitude does a man adopt when he is confronted with two contradictory narratives; what are his spontaneous psychological reactions? Once this question has been answered, a second necessarily arises: Why does man react in this way? What inner structural laws make contradiction intolerable to him and beget a whole train of steps to get rid of it? The answer to these two questions will reveal the true nature of a problem as such. Then we shall be able to apply this knowledge to the particular problem that gives rise to epistemology.

A. what psychological reactions are caused by contradictory stories?

The psychological reactions of a man confronted with two contradictory universes are comparable to the shock felt by the host who, having extended hospitality to two of his best friends, discovers that from the moment of their arrival his guests annoy each other, call each other liar and ignoramus, and bitterly reproach him for forcing them to eat the same foods when their tastes are different, to live under the same roof when they find the very sight of each other offensive and their stories mutually antinomic. Not expecting any such wrangling, their host can only be astounded and hurt by their attitude, and his first concern would be an attempt to pacify them; he would try to re-establish harmony between his two friends. Failing this, he would agree to the departure of one or the other of his guests, or to the departure of both if they prove unbearable. Now, that is exactly the soul’s situation in the presence of a problem, of contradiction between the accounts that reality gives of itself. Its first reaction is one of shocked surprise, and this shock produces an active effort to reconcile these divergent stories, if possible. Philosophers and scientists have given to this psychological shock the name wonder, and to the act of endeavoring to dispel this shock, the terms inquiry, research, investigation and other similar names. We shall now study the two aspects of this psychological reaction.

1. Shock or Wonder: First Psychological Reaction. Plato is the first to give a name to this human attitude when, in the Theaetetus, he states that “the feeling of wonder belongs peculiarly to philosophers; philosophy has no other source.” When Aristotle takes up his teacher’s theme and develops it, he assigns to it the value of a universal principle for explaining the origins of philosophical speculation and its progress through the ages: “It is wonder which attracted the first, as well as today’s, thinkers to philosophical speculation. At first, the most obvious difficulties aroused their wonder, but soon the difficulties became greater and so did their wonder... Now to see a difficulty and to wonder at it, is to admit one’s ignorance.” Similar statements are to be found in Christian thinkers, in the theologians of the Middle Ages, and especially St. Thomas. Modern thinkers, who agree so rarely with the ancients, do not hesitate to make wonder the “soul of philosophy,” as Descartes says,14 or the “most important factor in the progress of the sciences.”

Since, according to thinkers, wonder is so fruitful and describes the soul’s state in the presence of a real problem, it merits close examination; for it provides us with the first subjective or psychological characteristic of the reality we are investigating. Furthermore, because wonder seems to have affinities with doubt and thereby appears wholly modern, it should be examined all the more closely. Therefore, we shall study the word used by different philosophers to describe wonder, and the notions these words contain, in order to acquire a precise idea of the reality they express.

The word wonder and its Greek and Latin equivalents. Derived from auditory experience, from the frightening noise we call thunder (F. tonnerre), the French word for wonder (étonnement) is an exact translation of the Latin admiratio and the Greek thaumazein, and it has kept their general meaning of psychological tension in the face of the extraordinary, the prodigious, the unusual. It expresses an emotive reaction consequent upon an unusual or unaccustomed object of knowledge. Thus, it signifies that man is no longer listening to his familiar narrator, that another has replaced him, and that what he narrates is of the order of the marvelous.

The notion of wonder. By a simple definition of words, we have just seen that wonder, when analyzed, has a twofold aspect: the extraordinary or unusual character of the thing known, and man’s emotive reaction in his awareness of this object. In other words, there are the wonderful and wonder. How is the wonderful analyzed by philosophers?

The wonderful, admirabile, or mirum. The wonderful displays an interesting gnosiological duality: it is composed of knowledge and ignorance. Let us try to relive Parmenides’ state of mind when, in a flash of intuition, he perceived the absolute necessity of the unity of being. He already had in his mind the universe of his childhood, the everyday universe filled with movement, instability, and multiplicity that he experienced daily. But now, while this universe remained in his mind, there sprang up another, opposed in every way to the former. Thus, he had experimental knowledge of the coexistence of these two universes in his soul, but he did not know how or if they could be reconciled. Whence the many questions, he had to ask himself: Where does this duality come from? What is its source, myself or reality?

Similarly, when Augustine considers the Greek Neo-Platonic world that he has studied, whose harmony he has admired, and at the same time this same world that his Faith has told him is bruised by sin, plunged into the contingency of creation, but on the other hand is bound to God by His ineffable love, he can only ask himself: Whence comes this Greek universe discovered by human wisdom and so unlike the universe revealed by divine Wisdom? He knows that the world of faith is true, but he does not know whether this truth can be reconciled with the truth of the Greek world. And when the Christian Averroists of the thirteenth century, accustomed to the Neo-Platonic world Christianized by St. Augustine, were confronted with the Aristotelian universe of which God knows nothing and to which He is wholly indifferent, their knowledge of these two worlds and their ignorance of how to reconcile them led them to invent the famous theory of the double truth, the one fed by faith, the other nourished by reason. It is evident how, in these thinkers, wonder corresponds to a mixture of knowledge and ignorance.

When Descartes perceives that scientific truth is evident and that philosophical constructs are not, he wonders at this duality, because he does not know why there coexists in the soul this double image of reality, one aspect of which is true, the other false. The same is the case for Kant (as we shall see at length in the next chapter) and contemporary scientists.

The wonderful can therefore be defined or described as a dual image or idea of a reality that is given as one, and ignorance of the source of this duality. Thus, there is, in the wonderful, a marriage of intelligibility and unintelligibility, the intelligibility having to do with the existential opposition between two narratives and the evidence on which they rest, and the unintelligibility being concerned with the cause or reason of this opposition—which escapes us.

Wonder or admiratio. What is the nature of this psychological state? Does it belong to the order of knowledge or to the order of emotivity? We would be inclined to attribute it to knowledge, since it is by and in knowledge that it comes into being. But we must not forget that the emotive order depends upon cognitive experience, and that it is not contradictory that wonder belong to the emotive order even if it should enter through knowledge. St. Thomas and Descartes describe it as a passion. Now, even though the classical arrangement of the eleven passions divided into two groups (six concupiscible and five irascible) is no longer integrally accepted by modern psychology, yet the latter admits the existence of two complementary emotive aspects, love and aggressiveness, whose general characteristics are equivalent to the Scholastic division. In which division does wonder belong?

St. Thomas classifies it as irascible, for it is fear and therefore a psychological reaction of revulsion in the presence of evil, and an evil difficult to avoid. This evil that wonder fears can only be ignorance, which is one of the constitutive elements of the admirabile; it is the unintelligibility necessarily accompanying every contradiction that the mind cannot dispel either by excluding one of the divergent narratives or by discovering the reason why these accounts diverge.

Ignorance, the proper object of this fear that is wonder, is not nescientia, because nescience is unconscious, since it consists in a complete absence of knowledge and can consequently be neither experienced nor the cause of an emotive reaction. The ignorance connected with fear is partial-the intellect’s inability to see why two accounts are incompossible when each of them seems to be comprehensible and to contain elements of truth. The narrator familiar to Parmenides, describing a world given over to motion and multiplicity, told of a plausible universe; but, along with this plausible story, Parmenides could hear another, contradicting the first and offering as much or even more plausibility. Yet, he could not perceive any point of contact between these two accounts, or understand why they were opposed. He did not know, he feared this ignorance or absence of truth as one fears evil.

 2. Wonder, or Admiratio, as Principle of Research or Inquiry. Despair is a paralyzing and passive suffering, and the suffering entailed by anger is blind and vengeful, but fear is filled with the hope of ridding itself of the evil causing it to suffer in order to replace it by the good of which this evil is the privation. Since wonder is fear and suffers through the presence of ignorance, it immediately begets an effort to put an end to this evil, therefore to dispel ignorance. This is what Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and others mean when they describe wonder as a source of inquiry or investigation and the most effective factor for progress. This inquiry normally starts with the cause of wonder, that is, with the wonderful or admirabile, inasmuch as it is simultaneously made up of intelligibility and unintelligibility. What is the intellect’s attitude toward these two accounts?

Going back to our analogy of the host and his two quarreling guests, there are three possible solutions: i) If the host is really fond of both guests, he will first try to reconcile and pacify them: he will try to find some common ground for agreement; 2) If this first attempt fails, he can put out the guest who seems more particularly insolent and unjust; 3) If he can neither re-establish harmony nor discern which guest is right, the radical solution is to put them both out of the house. Very well, the history of philosophy shows us that these three alternatives have been successively experienced by humanity through the ages, and that wonder has always been the principle of quests for harmony, which, when successful, have endowed humanity with the admirable syntheses we call Platonism, Aristotelianism, Augustianism in its various forms, and Thomism. When no accord has been reached between the two contradictory narratives, thinkers have put one of them out, and we have the unilateral systems of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Euclid, the Megarics, Antisthenes, Descartes, Kant, and the most representative among our contemporaries, the panmathematicism of Léon Brunschvicg. Finally, if man can accept neither of the accounts as valid, he can remain in expectancy and wait for the light to dawn, and this is doubt. Or he can lose all hope of ever finding the reason for their opposition, and this is skepticism, which is nothing but intellectual despair in regard to the problem of truth.

Since there is a certain order in man’s attitude toward a problem, that is to say, in the fight against the ignorance that enters into wonder, since his first step is a conciliatory attempt to discover common ground or distinct, but non-contradictory, points of view, and since this step precedes all others that follow only if the first attempt fails, we should take a quick look at the way in which the quest for peace of mind is organized.

Inquiry’s point of departure is wonder, that is, the coexistence in the soul of two universes known to be opposed to each other, both of which claim to refer to the same reality. How is this inquiry possible? There is only one way to solve the difficulty, and that is to inquire into the structure of the two universes as known and into that of the real universe, in order to discover whether the first two can be correlated. It will be objected that the real universe escapes experience and can only enter by means of knowledge into the parallel to be set up, and that this constitutes a sort of vicious circle! There certainly is a circle here, but that it is vicious is a statement standing in need of proof, for a circle is vicious only if it results from an intellectual fraud, from a latent or overt sophism. Now, there is a world of difference between the universe as known and the real universe when known. In the first case the universe is considered with the characteristics it derives from the very fact that it exists in the soul, whereas in the second case the universe is considered with its own characteristics, which it possesses independently of knowledge, but which we became aware of in knowledge. Thus, a human being as known is universal; that is a characteristic acquired from the fact of his existence in the soul, whereas his existential characteristic is to be an individual. That 1 can perceive his individuality only in and by an act of knowledge is a truism known to all. What is not a truism, and what many thinkers do not see, is that the universe’s aspect as known and the characteristics belonging to this same universe as known in its real existence can be completely different.

Therefore, to resolve the wonderful, to discover the reason why the two universes as known are contradictory, we must examine the latter as such and compare them with the real universe of which they claim to be the exact reproduction. Now, if there are several ways of knowing, there may also be several universes as known; and if reality has several real aspects, it will be knowable in its very diversity and will justify the existence of a double synthesis in man. Thus,

this justification will be possible precisely insofar as there is a plurality of cognitive means and a plurality of realities to be known. As long as this plurality has not been established, there is no possibility of agreement. Let us try to illustrate these brief remarks by the inquiries consequent upon the four epistemological shocks already mentioned.

Parmenides was confronted with two known universes; he was aware of this duality and of the contradictory properties that these two universes possessed as known. He also knew that he had all he needed to explain their subjective existence, for at this point in the development of philosophical thought, the distinction between sensation and intellection had already been recognized . Therefore, he could account for the subjective duality of these two universes, but his analysis of reality was too primitive to enable him to see in each of them, as known, an aspect of reality that would verify and warrant their claim to represent that which is. Having perceived

only the unity of reality, he denied that sensation had any value for knowledge. Thus, he threw out the storyteller who told of multiplicity in the universe and entertained only the one whose geometric story seemed to him to explain what is. His solution was not sufficiently developed to satisfy the human mind.

The two centuries of speculation that follow witness a renewal of the problem by an analysis of reality. The theory of the atomists is a first attempt to conciliate the two quarreling guests of the human mind, by recognizing a certain multiplicity in the universe. Platonism has no aim other than to account for this dual human experience: the affirmation of eternal matter, which is the principle of becoming, corruption, and instability, explains the existence of sensation (without ascribing any truth to it, because truth implies stability); while the world of forms accounts for the universe to which the intellect attests. Aristotle takes up the same question and seeks to reconcile the two universes we are aware of. His solution differs from Plato’s, but it is nevertheless a solution to the very same problem that beset Parmenides: how to explain the coexistence of two universes in the soul. The method, too, is identical in each case, without its always attaining the same success: the analysis of the knower and the reality to be known, whose marriage, if real, authenticates the stories told by the soul and, if unreal, renders the intellect’s narratives illegitimate and illusory.

The constant use of this same “confronting” procedure could be traced right through the philosophical thought of the Middle Ages. However, let it suffice us to rediscover this procedure as the most characteristic factor in contemporary scientific methodology. We know that modern physics is dominated by mathematics, and we often hear the remark: “In Physics, God made the mathematics, and man made the rest.” The mathematician works with symbols; he stays in the realm of the possible, of that which implies no contradiction. He can give as many accounts of reality as he likes, provided they do not contravene the rules of the game. Nevertheless, if these accounts are to be taken seriously, they must be controlled by observation and experience; external reality must objectify the formal theory developed by the mathematician before any scientific problem can arise. Here is a typical case: Up to the end of the eighteenth century, all geometricians affirmed that the parallels of Euclid existed, because everyday experience had legitimized this notion both directly and indirectly. But about 1830 there appeared on the scene mathematicians who claimed that this mathematical truth was not demonstrated; they constructed all sorts of theories to explain how parallels could be replaced by the geodetical line or curved surface, whose properties were very similar to Euclidean parallels except that they could limit space. These statements were not taken seriously until 1866, when Beltrami discovered the pseudosphere and proved that the nonparallel line plays exactly the same role on unlimited surfaces that the Euclidean parallel does in limited space. Then the problem became: Why does the line that had universal value for Euclid seem to have concrete existence only within a curved surface? Research in this field led to the curious observation that “the essence of a mathematical idea is measured by the possible distortions which permit the extension of the application of this idea.” In other words, the truth of mathematical ideas must be modified in accordance with the objects known, which only experience and observation provide. Here again the comparison between the stories told by the mathematical intellect and by exterior reality is what produces harmony or discord. Thus, inquiry must deal with these two terms if the wonderful is truly to be the principle of progress, regardless of the field.

Confronting the immanent or known world with the exterior world is therefore the first law of any inquiry aiming either to pacify opponents or to exclude one in favor of the other. In the latter case, the first wonder may give way to a second, sometimes even more mysterious than the first. We have a typical case of such a succession in the modern epistemological problem, considered solely as a problem. By confronting the immanent universe with the physical universe, Descartes and Kant did not successfully explain the coexistence of the metaphysical universe of the ancients with the scientific universe. Therefore, they excluded the first and kept the second. However, a new problem then arose, and their wonder fell upon the mind’s capacity to recount contradictory stories when there seems to be nothing in reality capable of explaining this dual account. They placed the mirabile in the narrator’s own ability to tell a, story; and this second wonder, to which only the knowing subject contributed, was the source of those long and detailed investigations retold in the Discourse on Method and the Critique of Pure Reason.

Such is the nature of the psychological shock caused by the birth of a problem in the human soul, and of the inquiries it initiates. Descartes was right in saying that admiration, which we call wonder, is the very soul of philosophy, and Plato and Aristotle, too, were justified in attributing to it that power of progress and discovery which they identified with human knowledge wherever it is exercised. At the end of this second phase of our investigation we know the universal rule conditioning the birth of every problem, a rule that can be formulated in terms of awareness of an immanent and unintelligible dualism. We have also seen the spontaneous psychological reaction of the soul when confronted with this duality: a reaction of wonder or fear of ignorance, and an exertion of all the cognitive powers to dispel this ignorance and come to truth. Finally, we know the soul’s natural attitudes in its attempt to resolve the dualism immanent in every problem: an attempt to harmonize the duality by discovering a basis for agreement; exclusion of the duality by rejecting one of the accounts, when conciliation is impossible; doubt’s replacing discovery when neither of the first two attitudes is possible and the inquiry is completely unsuccessful; and doubt’s becoming a skepticism when doubt assumes permanency and falls upon the very power of the intellect to discover truth.

3. Wonder, Doubt, Skepticism. Before terminating this study of the psychological aspect of the problem as such, and before going on to the second question, concerning the why. of wonder and the inquiry that springs from it, we must study a historical aspect of wonder that relates it to doubt. The fact that this relationship already existed, at least lexicographically, in Aristotle and St. Thomas would be enough to oblige us to clarify the situation; but since Descartes assigned so much importance to doubt in his search for truth, and since Neo-Scholastics have used certain Aristotelian and Thomistic texts in such a way as to give them the meaning of Cartesian doubt, this question must necessarily be cleared up. Therefore, this third section will deal with the natural relations existing between wonder and doubt. A brief study of the vocabulary used by philosophers, and of the ideas expressed therein, will show us why a certain identification was made between the doubtful and the wonderful, but at the same time it will show us the absolute impossibility of considering the psychological attitude characterized by wonder as interchangeable with that characterizing doubt.

(a) Aporia-dubitabile or the doubtful. The Greek word aporia is a term composed of a privative particle, a-, and a substantive, poros, that means a way out, an opening. Therefore, the general sense of the recomposed word is: that which has no opening, provides no way out, an obstacle, a hindrance. Upon this etymological meaning Plato and Aristotle grafted a whole series of nuances all of which have the general sense of hindrance, obstacle, but depend for their exact meaning upon the application of the word to the various fields of human activity. In the context of social life aporia signifies difficulties caused by lack of wealth or by poverty. In the order of action it means indecision, hesitation resulting from perplexity in the choice of means toward some definite end. In the order of speculative or theoretical knowledge—the only order of direct interest to us here—aporia is synonymous with objective difficulties, with problems that may spring from reality itself, or from our lack of intellectual acuity, or, yet, from the competence of a specialist, when this competence destroys evidence that seems to be part of the common heritage. An example of these three sources of aporia will help us grasp exactly what it means. When Aristotle tells us that philosophers, in studying the heavenly bodies, considered as an aporia the curious behavior of the moon, which appears, disappears, or appears in whole or in part, this is an aporia with an objective source. In the matter of grasping the secret heart of things, when Aristotle compares our intellect with the eye of a night bird, he is pointing to the knowing subject itself as the source of the difficulty or aporia. Finally, when he states, as an aporia, the fact that his predecessors held a theory contrary to his own, their competence is the source of the difficulty. To this category would belong all the statements of modern science concerning the nonexistence of colors, sounds, of extensive quantity, etc. These are aporiai arising from the competence of scientists whose statements contradict what is universally held as evident. The whole third book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is filled with these three kinds of aporiai, which he proposes to solve in the succeeding books.

The Latin word dubitabile comes from dubius, the origin of our word doubt. Its root is duo, whose etymological meaning suggests that which is divided, which bifurcates, which lacks determination or unity. By means of a different imagery, the Latin dubitabile has exactly the same fundamental meaning as the Greek aporia. The latter, as we have seen, signifies the impossibility of proceeding because there is no way out; the former signifies the impossibility of proceeding because there are too many ways out, or, in other words, there are many ways, but we do not know which is the right one to take. To this primary sense the Latins also added various nuances according to the way the word is applied to the various fields of human activity. When something is to be done, some decision to be taken, the dubitabile is the reason for hesitation, indecision; in the order of knowledge, it means a problem, a question, a difficulty, that may have the same trinity of origin as has the aporia.

(b) Dubitabile and mirabile. It is a fact that Plato, Aristotle and St. Thomas seem to hold for a strict synonymity between the dubitabile and the mirabile, for they use them indiscriminately as the object of both wonder and doubt and attribute to them the same origin, ignorance. There is nothing abnormal in this synonymous use of dubitabile and admirabile, for both words have the same meaning: both refer to what modem terminology calls a problem. Now we have just seen that every problem is the very object of wonder, whence it springs, and that it is a mixture of intelligibility and unintelligibility, which is also the precise definition of the Aristotelian dubitabile or aporia when conceived as the principle of inquiry or the object of wonder:

The Stagirite declares that the aporia of the intellect points to a knot in the object (pragma). He seems to view the thing itself as somehow binding the intellect. The knot would seem to be something in the thing or arising from the thing. It binds the understanding until it is located and untied.... This state seems to coincide with the initial attitude of wonder described in Book A with the help of the aporia term. Being in a state of wonder and in a state of aporia were there regarded as synonymous. Aporia seems merely a more explicit notion of the initial wonder. [J. Owens, The doctrine of being, 115-116]

This objective sense of aporia is found again in the Thomist dubitabile, and we shall study it in more detail in the third chapter of this book. All we need note here is that the two words dubitabile and admirabile are used interchangeably by the ancient philosophers, for the simple reason that they refer to one and the same reality, a problem that besets the intellect.

We could easily justify this usage by the conventional character of language and simply say that the dubitabile is synonymous with the admirabile because thinkers have said so. This would be an easy solution, but it would not shed much light upon the relations between doubt and wonder. Let us therefore look at the case of mirabile and dubitabile from another angle. It may be a fact that these two words are used interchangeably, but it is not true of mirum and dubium, which, at first glance, would seem entitled to enjoy the same interchangeability. Why this difference? The reason lies in the very form of the words. Words ending in ibilis always refer to a potency, something that can be or not be, that can act or not act; while words ending in um indicate a state of fact, an actuality. Therefore, the dubitabile may become, but is not actually, a dubium; just as a mirabile may become, but is not necessarily a mirum.

Thus, a radio is an extraordinary thing, a mirum for anyone who knows nothing about modern physical science. Before being a mirum, it had the power to evoke admiration or wonder in the mind of anyone ignorant of electricity; it was a mirabile for the ignorant, but not for the scientist. Consequently, the mirabile and the dubitabile have a relative character: they can cause wonder or doubt but do not necessarily do so.

Now if we return to the notion of problem, which we have defined as the wonderful or the object of wonder, it is easy for us to explain this apparently untechnical use of such diverse terms. In effect, we have seen that from the beginning of the wonderful or the object of wonder, man was inquiring or investigating in order to solve the problem or the contradiction in the stories confronting him. This inquiry may end in the discovery of the cause of the opposition and its conciliation, or in the rejection of one of the stories, which puts an end to the problem, or in the impossibility of either discovering grounds for agreement or of rejecting one narrator in favor of the other. This latter hypothesis begets what we have called doubt or the intellect’s despair when it is faced with two equally valid possibilities and cannot choose between them. Considering the end or outcome of the inquiry in relation to its starting point, i.e., the wonderful or mirum, we must admit that the mirum can result in doubt if the inquiry it initiates comes to no decisive conclusion. Thus, the mirum a dubitabile, or a potential cause of doubt, at the same time that it is actually a mirum or wonderful.

Therefore, at the starting point of all reflection there is a problemwhose proper name is mirum when considered in its actual role vis-a-vis the human soul. But because this mirum can be extremely difficult and because the inquiry, whose starting point it is, is not infallibly successful, this mirum may be called mirabile insofar as the difficulty it brings up is insoluble, either absolutely or for the inquiring intellect. It is not by pure caprice, then, that philosophers have used mirabile and dubitabile indistinctly to refer to the problem from which philosophical or scientific reflection springs. On the contrary, this usage rests upon a very deep insight into the laws of the intellect, of its real incapacities and of the mystery in things, a mystery we cannot always penetrate.

Such, then, are the relations between the mirabile and the dubitabile: As a starting point for inquiry the two are identical, but they are completely different when this starting point is considered not in itself but in its possible repercussions upon the intellect at the term or outcome of its inquiry. If this outcome is positive, leading to the discovery of truth, the mirabile is positive, fruitful, and the source of hope. If this outcome is negative and fails, if the inquiry has led to doubt or intellectual despair, then the admirabile becomes the dubitabile, and the fear of ignorance becomes fear of an even greater evil, the fear of error or falsity.

(c) Doubt and wonder. What we have just seen about the definition of the dubitabile, and its comparison with the mirabile, indicates that wonder is not doubt. Let us pursue our investigation further and try to discover the deep reason for their difference.

There is an initial opposition between doubt and wonder that results from their subjectum, or the part of the soul in which they are respectively rooted. Wonder, as we have seen, belongs to the affective part; it is a passion of the soul, a fear of the evil that is ignorance, an active fear that, to dispel this ignorance, sets into motion every human resource. Doubt, on the contrary, does not belong to affectivity but is a characteristic of the mind, a state of mind. In other words, just as we speak of non-volition to mean the attitude of the will that cannot do this or that, so doubt is a non-intellection, an inability to see that springs, not from a non-volition or a will not to see, but from a lack of luminosity on the part of things or a, lack of light on the part of our intellect.

Since difficulty also can be accounted for in two ways, its cause may exist not in the objects of our study but in ourselves: just as it is with bats’ eyes in respect of daylight, so it is with our mental intelligence in respect of those things which are by nature most obvious. [Metaph., a, 1; 993a-11]

When Aristotle wants to define aporia technically, not as a synonym of mirabile, but as a characteristic of the intellect during some of its activities, he defines it as a state of mind caused by the existence in the intellect of two contrary proofs enjoying equal evidence and therefore canceling each other out. In the same way, St. Thomas defines doubt as the impossibility of deciding upon one contradictory, as a mind vacillating between two alternatives, one of which destroys the other, and refusing its assent though fear of error.

While it is true that doubt and wonder differ because of the power of the soul in which they are found, the first belonging to our cognitive power, the second to the affective, they also differ in the ignorance from which they spring.The ignorance at the root of wonder is directly concerned with things; its object is the complex aspects of the same reality, a complexity that seems disordered and therefore unintelligible. The ignorance that is the wellspring of doubt is not concerned with things but bears directly upon the proofs of our causal knowledge of things. It has as its object the explanation or vindication of the truths we possess.

It is not every lack of knowledge that causes doubt; but that in which a person cannot see the reason for what he is investigating, and in which contrary reasons seem to apply... Doubt occurs as a result of a lack of a sufficient measure for the discovery of truth, and so it arises from a deficiency of knowledge. [In III Sent., 17, 4, sol., and ad 2. In III Sent., 26, 1, 3, sol.; 23, 2, 1, ad 6.]

Any ignorance can beget wonder, as is evinced by the infinite number of “why’s” asked by children, who wonder at everything because they know nothing, and also by the wonder besetting us throughout our lives whenever we embark upon a field of research new to us. But doubt is more exacting than wonder, for, unlike the latter, it is not an inevitable effect of the bonds existing between our powers of knowledge and those of appetite. It only concerns intellectual activity considered, not in its totality, but in the more specialized field of truth, of the one mediate and necessary truth. Doubt is not concerned with things, or with primary evidence, or with the immediate knowledge of contingent things, but solely with concluded truth whose cause is not evident when it should be. Strictly speaking, doubt is the contrary of science, when the latter is taken in the formal sense of a conclusion known through the causality of the premises. It lacks everything science has: that is, perception of the truth of what it knows, and indefectible assent to this truth or certitude. And since there is even a science concerning opposites, doubt can only be described in relation to the science of which it is the total absence; whereas wonder, the starting point of the inquiry that seeks science as its end, can be defined in relation to all kinds of ignorance or to a complete absence of knowledge, whatever its nature. The number of mira or objects of wonder is therefore equivalent to the infinite multiplicity of our ignorance, while the number of dubia or real doubts equals the number of our unsuccessful attempts to perceive the truth of our conclusions scientifically.

(d) Doubt and skepticism. Every skeptic is a doubter, but every doubter is not necessarily a skeptic. This statement is easily verified, for if doubt is synonymous with the absence of scientific truth, it can deal only with a certain field of human knowledge, namely that of truths begotten by immediate evidence. Thus, our doubts can be quite numerous without thereby begetting skepticism. The latter exists only in that precise case wherein man, disillusioned by the many errors he perceives and by the infinite multiplicity of contradictory explanations of our universe, definitely loses confidence in the intellect as a faculty capable of attaining truth and gives up further inquiry because it is foredoomed to failure. Skepticism is absolute intellectual pessimism, and the skeptic, despairing of knowledge, commits intellectual suicide, since he renounces intellectual life wherever it involves contemplation of the truth.

Doubt is an absence of certitude or assent as a defense against error, the foremost evil for the intellect. Thus, it betokens a sane mind, that is somehow vaccinated against the disease of error, a mind taking the hygienic measures necessary to every intellect that not possessing the ensemble of truths for which it is made, patiently and persistently seeks these truths until they come to enlighten and enrich it. Skepticism is a disease fatal to the mind, because, under the pretense of avoiding error, the skeptic condemns himself to death or to the total inactivity that is a sign of death. It is not only error but total error, since in advance it foregoes the contemplation of truth wherein lies man’s very beatitude. Consequently, when Descartes adopts doubt as a method of discovering truth, his doubt is not skepticism; it is not even a doubt but a dubitabile or an admirabile, a mirabile caused by an experimental establishment of the fact that error exists in man alongside truth, a mirabile from which proceeds a quest for a single cause to account for the presence of error in the human soul.

What we have inevitably seen about the relations between the wonderful and the doubtful, between wonder and doubt, between doubt and skepticism, has shown us that wonder is really the only psychological reaction that is both the principle of inquiry and the source of truth. And since every problem is the object of wonder, since it begets wonder and explains its nature, the definition of a problem involves two aspects; one relating to the object in which are wedded intelligibility and unintelligibility, the other dependent upon the subject wherein dwell both the fear of ignorance and a flight from this same evil, born of the desire to dispel ignorance and to replace it by true knowledge. Therefore, every problem is essentially constituted of two combined imperfections, one issuing from the defective luminosity of the real, the other from the knower’s deficient power of vision. Wherever one or the other of these conditions fails, wherever reality is perfectly luminous and the intellect’s vision is completely clear, the problem disappears to make way for integral perception of the totality of being and beings. Such, then, is a problem and the nature of the psychological reactions of which it is the immediate cause whenever it occurs in the human mind.

B. Primary source of man’s psychological reactions when faced with a problem

We have seen that the contradiction existing between the accounts given us by our storytellers begets in us, first of all, a reaction of fear whose name is wonder, and that this fear is induced by an evil called ignorance. We have also seen that the fear of this evil that is ignorance is the principle of a whole series of inquiries, of more or less difficult and complicated steps whose sole aim is to resolve the contradiction between these two accounts and thus suppress wonder or the fear of ignorance. When this suppression is impossible, wonder gives way to doubt, that state of mind which avoids decision through fear of an evil greater than ignorance, through fear of error or falsity. Thus, a last question besets the epistemologist: What is it, in man, that seems to force him to flee ignorance and error at any price? What inner power constantly constrains him to seek tirelessly and never to rest until he possess truth? How explain that this horror of ignorance and error are so great that the human mind deliberately accepts the death of the intellect, or skepticism, rather than be exposed to the danger of error, which seems to be a personal and deeply hated enemy, as St. Thomas so admirably expresses it: “Deception and error constitute a great part of unhappiness; in fact, that is what all men naturally avoid.”

The answer to this question will give us the secret to the existence of every problem and to its true nature, for it will help us to understand what a problem is, not only in its observed psychological effects, but in the primary cause that explains the laws of its birth, progress, and solution. It will thereby reveal to us the origins and fundamental laws governing the birth and nature of an epistemological problem, since this latter is only a particular problem in a precise subject-matter: namely, that which human knowledge presents to the mind that reflects upon its own most characteristic activity—its activity of knowing as such.

Why does man, from the moment he is aware of their presence, feel this constraint to avoid ignorance and error as though they were the greatest of evils? If we did not detest ignorance and error, the contradictory accounts given by our two storytellers would leave us completely indifferent. Their tales would interest us as curiosities, just as novels or detective stories amuse us; but no one takes the trouble to find out why two stories about the same crime disagree, or why two novelists describe imaginary facts in opposite ways! Why then is there this difference as soon as the universe we live in appears to be involved in contradiction? Why can we not remain neutral, why must we always take sides? Here is one scientist’s answer, which we quote because it is unaffected by either Thomistic or philosophical preconceptions.

The first question asked about scientific facts and theories such as we have been discussing in this book, is: “Are they true?” I would emphasise that even more significant than the scientific conclusions themselves is the fact that this question so urgently arises about them. The question “Is it true?” changes the complexion of the world of experience—not because it is asked about the world, but because it is asked in the world. When we go right back to the beginning, the first thing we must recognise in the world of experience is something intent on truth—something to which it matters intensely that beliefs should be true.... We are that which asks the question. Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility towards truth in one of its attributes. This side of our nature is aloof from the scrutiny of the physicist. [Eddington, New pathways, “Epilogue,” pp. 310-311]

This answer, which the physicist cannot give, must be found by the metaphysician, and its discovery gives us the sole fundamental and absolutely primary reason that is at the source of all human activities, regardless of the field. That problems or questions exist is a fact. Another fact is that these problems cause wonder and that ,wonder is the source of our inquiries. But the analysis of wonder reveals a fear of ignorance and an inquiry that seem to be a flight from this same ignorance. Now, this fear of ignorance and this flight explain nothing if they are but fear and flight. They must be exterior symptoms of a reality much more dynamic than the simple presence of evil, for evil has never produced anything. It is by nature an absence of act, an imperfection like the nothingness that in some manner it prefigures. We flee evil only with reference to a thing we love, desire, and whose possession gives us a certain happiness. The reality that positively animates our fear of ignorance and error is truth. To wonder or to flee ignorance, to doubt or to fear error, is to desire and seek truth. The inevitable character of wonder and doubt is only the negative aspect of the nature of our mind, which is made to know truth. To possess the world insofar as the latter is the sole source of the truths we can acquire, that is man’s end, that is the secret motive we find at the source of every problem as such. This secret motive explains the genesis of a problem, accounts for its psychological structure, is the true first cause explaining the success of our inquiries, the joy of discovery accompanying them when they succeed, and the sorrow resulting from our failures—a sorrow whose peak is found in the skeptical attitude wherein despair is so great that it causes suicide in the order of the knowledge of truth.

Made for truth, we find rest only when we are sated with it, and this satiation does not provoke disgust but constitutes our happiness. This is the meaning of a problem as such. Thus defined, it is independent of its subject-matter and also above the historical contingencies conditioning its birth or leading to its solution. Therefore, when in the course of this study we meet the epistemological problem clad in different formulae, dependent upon the particular turn of mind of the thinkers who pose it, or upon the epoch in which it appears or reappears, we must always remember that, beneath the diversity of formulae, the multiplicity of aspects, and the pressure of necessity, the epistemological problem is first and foremost a problem and obeys the universal laws that govern every problem as such:

1. It springs from contradictory evidence, the experience of which begets wonder or the fear of ignorance.
2. This fear of ignorance is the principle of inquiry or of the flight from ignorance.
3. This flight from ignorance is but the negative aspect of the pursuit of truth for which man is made and which he is incapable of not loving and desiring.

Our purpose in the first chapter was to define the nature of a problem as such, under the two complementary and chronologically distinct aspects that it presents to reflection: first, that of its genesis in the soul, a birth symbolized by the contradictory accounts of two storytellers, the familiar and the extraordinary; and second, that of its development through inquiry, whose immediate source is wonder or the fear of ignorance, and whose secret motive is that invincible love of truth which essentially characterizes the human intellect and governs all its activity. Now we are going to apply this natural methodology to the study of the epistemological problem, according to the various modes in which this problem has presented itself through the ages. Since the modern aspect is officially the first-born, we shall follow the official genealogy and begin with the modern epistemological problem.

In the philosophy of ideas, the modern epistemological problem has the appearance of a two-faced Janus; it has two faces that, externally, are totally dissimilar, but whose community of origin is such that they really constitute one single individual who unifies them without destroying their distinction. The first face has the features of the opposition between science and philosophy, or truth and error, a face created principally by Descartes and Kant. The second face of the modern epistemological problem, quite different from the first, no longer has the features of an opposition between science and philosophy, or truth and error, but has the aspect of a conflict between science and science, of contemporary physics dethroning classical physics and giving it an old-fashioned and antiquated look that forecasts its early demise. The mere formulation of these two aspects of the modern epistemological problem helps us to see the difference in their points of view. However, we must not dwell only upon their diversity, because they have this in common: Contemporary science is no more favorably disposed toward metaphysics than was its ancestor, and although Cartesianism and Kantianism are no longer gods to contemporary scientists, the latter’s science is nevertheless unintelligible without reference to the methods of Descartes and Kant.

This chapter will be divided according to these two aspects of the modern epistemological problem. The first section will study the Cartesian and Kantian problem, while the second section will deal with the contemporary problem.

Section I: The Cartesian and Kantian Problem

We already have the framework we shall use to study this aspect of the modern epistemological problem, for every problem must first be born in order to beget in the soul the psychological reactions that are at the root of its development. This section will therefore be divided into two subsections, the first of which will try to reconstruct the particular conditions attending the birth of the epistemological problem, first in the thought of Descartes and then in the thought of Kant. By a brief analysis of the works in which they set forth their respective points of view, the second section will examine the psychological reactions caused by this problem in the soul of each of these thinkers.

A. the birth of the modern problem

1. The Birth of the Cartesian Problem. Three factors contributed to the birth of the Cartesian epistemological problem. The first has a universal character and is identical with the deep instinct, that causes human nature to abhor ignorance and its acute form, skepticism, because it was made for truth. Descartes grew up in the moralizing and anti-intellectualist atmosphere of the Renaissance. He read those extremely subtle works extolling ignorance as the only way to happiness on earth, such as Petrarch’s De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia, Sanchez’ Quod nil scitur, and Montaigne, whose Essays vaunt the wisdom that has successfully freed itself of learning and its pretensions. Descartes was deeply influenced by these thinkers, who were the foremost writers of that day. He himself had an attack of skepticism, which he considered the worst illness that humanity could suffer. That is why he resolved to seek a serum with which to immunize humanity permanently against this cancer of the soul, skepticism. But hatred of skepticism and the desire to cure humanity of it are not enough; an infallible elixir must be found in order to immunize the intellect, and this elixir will be discovered only when the cause of doubt is known. Only this knowledge will infallibly effect the cure and prevent the disease. Such is the first factor in the Cartesian problem.

Besides this first universal factor, there is a second, more particular factor consequent upon Descartes’ historical milieu. Mathematical science had advanced considerably since Scholasticism had lost its hold upon scientists. The latter had shaken off its tyrannical protection and become masters of their own affairs. Descartes had personally experienced the liberty of mathematical knowledge; it had given him the opportunity to contribute to the progress of this science-and to bestow upon it a unity it had never known before. Now, the most striking feature of mathematical knowledge is its interior evidence and the absence of dissension between mathematicians, which proves its evidential character and therefore its truth. Therefore, if evident knowledge is necessarily true knowledge, true knowledge is necessarily evident: evidence and truth are interchangeable. Where there is no evidence, there is error. But Scholastic philosophy is filled with dissension; therefore, it lacks evidence and is erroneous—it feeds upon the probable. To identify the probable with the true is precisely to open the door to error and skepticism, since neither truth nor science can beget it. The second factor in the genesis of the Cartesian problem is thus the identification of probability with error, and of error with the source of doubt and skepticism.

The third and last factor of the Cartesian problem consists in identifying the nature of the philosophical knowledge of the ancients with that of popular or nonscientific knowledge, which in everyday language is called common sense. According to Descartes, these two types of knowledge are radically identical, and both are the result of educational prejudices. They are nourished by an illusion of truth, and through them doubt and skepticism come into the world.

Knowing these three factors helps us to understand the laws governing the birth of the Cartesian problem, because they introduce us to the two opposed storytellers we have found presiding at the birth of every problem. In Descartes’ soul we discover two universes; the first of which is that of Descartes, the child and pupil of the Jesuits. This universe is composed of substantial forms, sensible qualities, generations, corruptions, etc. In this universe, sensation perceives its intended objects, and the intellect discovers the intelligible, natures, and a whole hierarchy of beings. Such is the story told by the familiar narrator. But keeping him company for several years is the mathematician-narrator, and the story he tells wholly contradicts that told by the familiar storyteller. His universe contains neither substantial forms, colors, sounds, nor substantial transformations. It is a universe of pure forms, interconnected only by local motion. These two universes are obviously opposed, and, as we have seen, the evidence of this opposition constitutes the very existence of an intellectual problem.

Although this juxtaposition of universes may be sufficient to pose a problem, it does not suffice to constitute an epistemological problem, at least not for Descartes. The Cartesian problem is not the coexistence in the mind of two contradictory narratives told by two storytellers, but the fact that there are two tellers. For truth is one and must be one in the telling; reason, our only narrator is also one and is essentially made for truth, and therefore for unity. This is Descartes’ situation; he knows by mathematical experience that reason is one and infallible in its grasp of truth. He also knows that reason is made for truth, that therein lies its good and its end, the source of all its aspirations, all of which is proved by the way reason looks upon skepticism as the intellect’s most dangerous disease, because at the source it dries up all our desire for truth. His problem is this: How can reason, which by its very unity infallibly begets truth in science, infallibly generate error in philosophy? This is the initial contradiction seen by Descartes; this is his epistemological problem, his mirabile; and these are the factors that brought it into existence.

2. The Birth of the Kantian Problem. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Discourse on Method, whose author had proposed to discover the first cause of error and thus make skepticism impossible, a German philosopher gave us a picture of the intellectual status of the thinkers of his day. This description seems to be merely an intensified reproduction of the state of affairs in the time of Descartes.

Metaphysics has accordingly lapsed back into the ancient timeworn dogmatism, and so again suffers that depreciation from which it was to have been rescued. And now, after all methods, so it is believed, have been tried and found wanting, the prevailing mood is that of weariness and complete indifferentism, the mother, in all sciences, of chaos and night. [Critique of pure reason, “Preface to First Ed.”]

This state of affairs inspired him, too, with the desire once and for all, to cure humanity of its skepticism, for we are made to know truth: “But it is idle to feign indifference to such inquiries, the object of which can never be indifferent to human nature.” Here we see again the first factor in the birth of the Cartesian problem, the universal factor of the fear of ignorance and error, which is only the negative way of expressing man’s natural tendency toward truth. But to desire to heal is not in itself to cure; the cause of this disease must be found.

What then is the reason why, in this field, the sure road to science has not hitherto been found? Is it perhaps impossible of discovery...? Or if it be only that we have thus far failed to find the true path, are there any indications to justify the hope that by renewed efforts we may have better fortune than has fallen to our predecessors? [Ibid.]

The second element contributing to the genesis of the Kantian problem is also peculiar to it and dependent upon the historical circumstances that conditioned the development of the Königsberg philosopher’s thought. At this time the physical sciences, as well as the mathematical sciences, had progressed considerably and their success was the surest criterion of their truth: “Their success should incline us to imitate their procedure, at least by way of experiment.” The criterion of the truth of science springs from the unanimity of scientists, since truth is evident and can be but one.

Whether the treatment of such knowledge as lies within the province of reason does or does not follow the secure path of science, is easily to be determined from the outcome. For, if after elaborate preparations, frequently renewed, it is brought to a stop immediately it nears its goal; if often it is compelled to retrace its steps and strike into some new line of approach; or again, if the participants are unable to agree in any common plan of procedure, then we may rest assured that it is very far from having entered upon the secure path of science, and is indeed a merely random groping. [Ibid.]

Thus, the second factor is to be found in the identification of scientific evidence with evidence simpliciter and of scientific truth with the truth.

Finally, the third and last factor in the birth of the Kantian problem consists in the identification of metaphysics with common or popular knowledge.

For human reason, without being moved merely by the idle desire for extent and variety of knowledge, proceeds, impetuously, driven on by an inward need, to questions such as cannot be answered by any empirical employment of reason, or by principles thence derived. Thus in all men, as soon as their reason has become ripe for speculation, there has always existed and will always continue to exist some kind of metaphysics. [Critique of pure reason, “Introd. vi]

Now we can easily reconstruct the Kantian mirabile and define his epistemological problem. Like Descartes, Kant saw that in his mind there were two storytellers (although different from those of Descartes) telling him two totally dissimilar stories. The first narrator, innate to reason, shows him a universe of things in themselves, of physical and metaphysical causality, and leads him into the arcana of the soul and of God. The second narrator is infinitely more modest, for he is content to feed the reason with the essentially changing, the becoming of things, their mobility—change, mobility, and becoming that reason frames and mobilizes, but which are the only aspects of the universe that we know. For Kant, as for Descartes, the problem springs not so much from the contradiction between two accounts as from the fact that there can be only one narrator, the human reason. How can one single teller infallibly recount two contradictory stories? It is understandable that two narrators tell contradictory stories, but that one single narrator tell us, simultaneously, two entirely contradictory accounts, that is the Kantian mirabile. It may be formulated as follows: How is it possible that reason, which is one, be naturally the source of scientific truth and of metaphysical illusion?

3. Conclusion on the Birth of the Modern Epistemological Problem. The two preceding analyses have shown us that the characteristics of the modern epistemological problem do not spring from any difference of procedure in the birth of this problem. On the contrary, its birth follows the classical laws for the genesis of any problem, which laws we noted in our first chapter: namely, that there are two stories with contradiction between them. The characteristics peculiar to the modern problem, to its mirabile, result from its general context, which determines the very nature of the wonderful. Now this general context is a context of skepticism or error, and not a context of knowledge of the truth. What causes the wonder of Descartes and Kant is that error exists, although our mind is one. The second characteristic mark of the modern mirabile is its notion of truth and error: (a) That is true which is recognized as such by the universality of thinkers in a particular field of knowledge; (b) that is false which is incapable of unifying thinkers, of producing that harmony in methods and convergence of results which characterize successful knowledge; the pure sciences. Finally, a third distinctive mark of the modern mirabile is the importance assumed by the subject or Ego, even in its genesis. We have seen, in effect, that what causes Descartes and Kant to wonder is not directly the duality of accounts, or their contradictory aspect, but the fact that one narrator has the natural capacity to recount two irreconcilable stories, to be simultaneously the infallible source of truth and error.

These three marks truly characterize the modern problem; they stamp it with its own individuality and enable us to spot it wherever it is found, despite the diversity of the contexts and the variability of the formulae by which it reveals itself. In any given system, or in the elaboration of a theory, whenever the birth of particular problems gives priority to error over truth, to scientific truth over truth simpliciter, and gives primacy to the Ego over the object, we may be assured that the context of this system or theory is modern, and that it obeys the laws which Descartes and Kant invented and then imposed on their successors in every field of thought.

B. psychological structure of the modern problem

Every problem, we have seen, provokes various psychological reactions in the knower, the first of which is wonder or fear of ignorance, and the second, an inquiring effort directed toward the removal of that ignorance and to its replacement by truth. Hence, we are going to apply these distinctions to the two aspects of the modern problem, by making an analysis of the psychological reactions that have followed the birth of their moment of wonder, first, in the case of Descartes, and then in the case of Kant. Such is the plan of this subsection.

1. The Psychological Structure of the Cartesian Problem. Whenever he is faced with a problem, the first aspect of a man’s psychological reaction is wonder, whose nature is determined by the wonderful or mirable. Every mirabile is composed of two elements, one intelligible and understood, the other unintelligible and somewhat mysterious to the knowing mind. If it is granted that the Cartesian mirabile is composed of two distinctive elements—science or infallible truth as the intelligible and understood element, and error or popular knowledge and philosophy as its element of unintelligibility—its wonder will center upon the coexistence of these two elements, and the fear betokened by wonder will be the fear of error, or of popular and philosophical knowledge as conceived and constructed by the ancients.

Since all wonder is at the source of an inquiry aiming to dispel unintelligibility, Descartes’ efforts could have but one direction: to explain the error or the popular knowledge and philosophy of the ancients. There is no question here (as there was in the consideration of the problem as such) of attempting to reconcile science with popular and philosophical knowledge, since the latter is erroneous and must at all cost be expelled from the soul. In the face of such a mirabile, the only reasonable alternative is to safeguard the possession of truth and to immunize the mind against every possible inroad of error under its popular and philosophical form.

We have seen that the Cartesian mirabile did not center so much upon the duality of contradictory accounts as upon the mystery of mind, for the mind’s unity would seem to make it impossible that the mind could be the source of two divergent stories, one of which is infallibly true and the other quite as infallibly false. Since the mind is the sole narrator, it is the mind that we must examine to discover the causes of our errors, i.e., the source of popular knowledge and Scholastic philosophy. It was inevitable that Cartesian inquiry center upon the Ego, since the Ego is the teller of the two contradictory stories and, despite its unity, must contain the reason for its twofold capacity to create truth and error. Thus, the Cartesian method will primarily be a method of analyzing the subject or Ego in order to discover the latter’s nature and, once its nature is known, to discover the law of the Ego’s natural functioning, which will give us the key to its infallibility and enable us to discern the heterogeneous elements that might slip into the natural dynamism of our mind when we become unmindful of its true structure.

First of all, the Ego must be discovered. This quest would be extraordinarily difficult if it started from zero in knowledge or truth. But that is not the case with Descartes, for his mathematical experience gave him a definition of truth, namely, a clear and evident idea compelling the adherence of the will. To discover the nature of the mind or thought, then, we must arrive at such a truth about the mind that its clarity and evidence are absolute. But in pursuing this investigation, we are continually checkmated by childhood prejudices and the warping that results from a system of a education seemingly directed toward satisfying our need for dialectical debate rather than toward the possession of truth. Therefore, into our thought we must introduce a vaccine as powerful as our childhood and educational prejudices, and this radical vaccine, cathartic for the functioning of thought, is doubt, which, since Descartes, has been called universal or methodic doubt.

Armed with this twofold instrument—consisting of clear and evident ideas as criteria of truth and doubt as the scourge to purify the mind of its preconceptions—Descartes set to work. Doubt begins by expelling as non-evident, therefore false, all sensations and images, for they do not possess the clarity and evidence necessary for truth. Then it rejects all thoughts and even geometrical demonstrations as illusions and dreams caused by an evil genius. Having thus despoiled the mind of all objective content by means of doubt, Descartes finds himself face to face with the thinking, pure Ego, and we have the famous Cogito ergo sum, so evident that the most convinced skeptic cannot deny it. This is the first existential truth in Cartesianism, because it is the first truth discovered by Descartes that contains no other object than the subject itself: whence its simplicity and its absolute immediacy. In analyzing the cogito, we see that the mind producing this act of knowledge is none other than—

a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has no need of place, nor dependence upon any material thing. So that “I”, that is to say the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is. [Gilson, Discours de la méthode]

Since our soul is a thinking substance, entirely independent of the senses, it does not depend upon the body either to think or to acquire its ideas. Since it is a pure spirit, it is a light for the mind and completely intelligible, possessing from its inception the totality of ideas or truths it will think during its life. To attribute such a nature to the human soul is to attribute infallibility to it, so that the mind could never, by itself, explain the existence of error. Consequently, the source of popular knowledge and vulgar or Scholastic philosophy must be sought in the soul’s union to the body. Here is one of the most explicit texts on the subject:

Nor, indeed, have I asserted without reason that the human soul is always thinking, wherever it is, even in its mother’s womb: for what greater certainty or evidence could be desired for this proposition than what I have offered in proof of its nature consisting in this, that it thinks, just as the essence of the body consists in the fact that it is extended. And of course, it is impossible for anything ever to be deprived of its proper essence ... nothing is more reasonable than for us to think that the mind of an infant which has recently been united to its body is occupied with the confused perceiving or sensing of precisely those ideas of pain, tickling, heat, cold, and the like, which stems from this union and mixture, as it were. Nor is it any the less endowed with the ideas of God, of itself, and of all those truths which are called self-evident, which adult men have, even when they pay no attention to them; indeed, it does not acquire them later, as it grows older; nor do I doubt that, if it were freed from its bonds with the body, these ideas would still be found in it. [Lettre à X, août 1647]

If the mind is light and always present to itself, if it is, furthermore, the reservoir of all first and immutable truths, then it is the sole source of all the sciences, metaphysical as well as physical. The reason and source of the truths we possess must therefore be sought in the mind and not in things.

For since the sciences taken all together are identical with human wisdom, which always remains one and the same, however applied to different subjects, and suffers no more differentiation proceeding from them than the light of the sun experiences from the variety of things which it illumines... [Regulae, I]

If the mind is light and the sole source of all infallible truth, it cannot be, as such, the source of error. The sole source of all erroneous knowledge, thus of common-sense knowledge and scholastic philosophy, must be sought in the union of soul to body and the importance of corporeal needs in childhood, which have accustomed our minds to project into reality the impressions we felt because of our union to the body. Here is the source of all our errors:

It is here that the first and principal of our errors is to be found. For in the first years of life the mind was so closely allied to body that it applied itself to nothing but those thoughts alone by which it was aware of the things which affected the body; nor were these as yet referred to anything existing outside itself, but the fact was merely that pain was felt when the body was hurt, or pleasure experienced when the body received some good, or else if the body was so (slightly) affected that no great good nor evil was experienced, such sensations were encountered as we call tastes, smells, sound, heat, cold light, colours, etc., which in truth represent nothing to us outside of our mind, but which vary in accordance with the diversities of the parts and modes in which the body is affected. The mind at the same time also perceived magnitudes, figures, movements and the like, which were exhibited to it not as sensations but as things or the modes of things existing, or at least capable of existing outside thought, although it did not yet observe this distinction between the two. And afterwards when the machine of the body which has been so constituted by nature that it can of its own inherent power turn here and there, by turning fortuitously this way and the other, followed after what was useful and avoided what was harmful, the mind which was closely allied to it, reflecting on the things which it followed after or avoided, remarked first of all that they existed outside itself, and attributed to them not alone magnitudes, figures, movements, and other such properties which it apprehended as things or modes of things, but also tastes, smells, and the like, the sensations of which it perceived that these things caused in it. And as all other things were only considered in as far as they served for the use of the body in which it was immersed, mind judged that there was more or less reality in each body, according as the impressions made on body were more or less strong.... And we have in this way been imbued with a thousand other such prejudices from infancy, which in later youth we quite forgot we had accepted without sufficient examination, admitting them as though they were of perfect truth and certainty, and as if they had been known by means of our senses or implanted in us by nature.”

Descartes therefore discovered the root of all possible and imaginable errors: it is sensation and its organization in sympathy with corporeal requirements. We objectify these sensations and needs in early childhood and, when we grow up, continue to consider them as having really external objects, because we forget their originally subjective character and attribute them to exterior nature when they are actually our creations. The union to the body, the pragmatic action, caused by our appetites, of the body upon the mind during childhood, the spontaneous forgetting of the distorting action of our body and our appetites, the exploitation of this forgetfulness and of our preconceptions by our teachers, such are the sole sources of error, doubt, and the skepticism that finally crowns so many errors and doubts.

With this conclusion, the Cartesian mirabile disappears, for having reached it, we know why man can create a system of infallible truths and another system of infallible errors. He creates a system of infallible truths as mind, and a system of errors insofar as this mind uses its body and organism as instruments of knowledge. Actually, we will recall that the Cartesian mirabile like every other mirabile, contains an intelligible element, the truth of the account narrated by mathematical science, and an unintelligible element, the erroneous account given by popular knowledge and vulgar or Scholastic philosophy. His mirabile centers upon the impossibility that one single narrator could simultaneously tell these two stories. But now we know that this narrator is not absolutely alone, for the mind is united to a body. Therefore, it is no wonder that this union of a pure spirit to a body could be the source of confusion, of approximations, of probabilities, whenever the mind does not distrust this proximity. Before Descartes, no one had discovered the secret of the mind in the infallibility of its nature, or that of its fallibility in its constant proximity to the body it inhabits. As long as this secret remained undiscovered, contradiction struck to the very heart of human knowledge. But now all that is over, the secret is out, and every man who wants “to conduct his reason rightly and seek truth in the sciences” has only to start with the soul as thinking substance, use the cathartic of doubt, follow the four precepts given in the Discourse, and the thing is done. No more error, no more skepticism, only infallible truth becomes inevitably the mind’s food, since the mind contains in itself the seeds of all truth.

Descartes could have ended his Discourse on Method with the discovery of the nature of the mind and the four precepts for rightly conducting the reason, because once the mirabile disappeared, the inquiry of which it was the starting point necessarily came to an end. What followed this discovery, that is, the metaphysics of God and the organization of a physics, adds nothing further to the solution of the problem; it merely confirms the efficiency and ease of the discovered method by applying it to metaphysical and physical problems. This part of the Discourse deals with applied method and nothing more. The true significance of the Discourse should not be sought in the application of the method Descartes discovered, but in the discovery of the method itself. Therefore, if we want to grasp the exact meaning of the Cartesian problem and the psychological reactions it causes, we shall have to concentrate our attention upon the method itself, that is, upon the parts where Descartes reveals to us the different factors that contributed to the birth of the problem and to its solution.

In the title of his work Descartes himself shows us the exact meaning of his problem and of the method he invented: Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting the reason and seeking truth in the sciences. “Rightly conducting the reason” and “seeking truth in the sciences,” that is what the Discourse aims to do. “Rightly conducting the reason” is an art everyone can learn, but it must be learned; and to be learned, it must exist. Therefore, Descartes proposes to create this art, to put it at everyone’s disposal. We have seen the essential elements of this art in the preceding pages. Now we should hear a word about the aim of this Cartesian art, “seeking truth in the sciences.” At first it would appear that this is a pleonasm, for Descartes’ definition of truth seems to be the same as his definition of scientific truth. But this is not quite true, for genuine Cartesian science is wisdom, the synthesis of all knowledge. Furthermore, science is, above all, the discovery of truth, and the discovery of truth starting from immediate evidence. Thus, scientific truth is not identical with truth simpliciter. There are two kinds of Cartesian truth: that seen by intuition, and that arrived at by deduction.

However, if science is perfectly science only when it is wisdom or the synthesis of all knowledge, then, evidently, only deduction can make this unity real, and scientific truth will be distinguished from intuited truth as the conclusion is distinguished from its principle.

Once this distinction between primary truth, or principle, and deduced truth is granted, it is true to say that Cartesian method is essentially oriented toward the possession of necessary or infallible truth and excludes, by definition, all knowledge not characterized by necessity and infallibility. This means that, for Descartes, only infallible truth exists, that there is identity between truth and infallible truth, and identity between knowledge and infallible knowledge of truth.

To reduce knowledge to knowledge of truth, and knowledge of truth to infallible knowledge, is to make an extraordinary simplification of the problem of human knowledge and to deal oneself an unbeatable hand. However, that is not all, because infallible truth could include totally different types of truth, which would somewhat complicate a method trying to teach man how to grasp different types of truth. But Descartes reduced all infallible truths to one single type—the only one that he, with his own preconceptions, had experienced-the infallibility of mathematical truth. This second simplification explains how in forty pages (the first four parts of the Discourse, the only ones important to his method) Descartes could give us his life’s history, describe the particular circumstances attendant upon his discoveries, and teach us the art of “rightly conducting the reason and seeking truth in the sciences.”

How can this rather extraordinary simplification of the problem of human knowledge be explained? A brief examination of the factors that begot the Cartesian mirabile will help us to understand why Descartes had to simplify the problems of knowledge in this way. This backward glance enables us to grasp the true meaning of the Cartesian problem and to conclude our study of its nature.

The starting point for the Cartesian mirabile is the existence of skepticism, considered as the mind’s worst disease, and the desire to cure the mind by discovering the cause of its illness, erroneous knowledge. This cause cannot be science, for science is certain, evident, and begets the union of minds, not skepticism. This cause must then be found in knowledge other than scientific; but there are only two other types: popular knowledge, and another type greatly resembling it, Scholastic philosophy. Thus, the error begetting skepticism must have its origin there; in fact, history proves that skepticism does result from the philosophers’ endless discussions concerning all problems, possible and impossible. This being so, we must conclude that, since popular knowledge and philosophic knowledge are lacking in evidence, they are also lacking in truth and therefore are false.

Having come to this conclusion, Descartes had to discover the cause of these errors by taking as criterion the only notion of infallible truth that he recognized, namely, mathematical truth, and he had to ask the Ego to account for the errors originating in it. Now, if we examine the Ego by taking mathematical evidence as criterion of truth, the only truths we will discover in it will be those whose evidence is of a mathematical type. That is just what Descartes did, and that is why his method is so simple, and why it simplifies human knowledge to such a degree that it is no longer human but becomes angelic. That, too, is the reason that Descartes’ discoveries in mathematics have endured and his physics and metaphysics have lasted exactly as long as the life of their inventor.

The Cartesian mirabile was born of an equivocation: identification of human knowledge and mathematical evidence, and the identification of error with everything that is not mathematically evident, or whose evidence is not mathematical in type. His method of inquiry was centered entirely upon the solution of this equivocal mirabile. It succeeded perfectly in resolving the mirabile, but it never touched the real epistemological problem, whose fundamental formulation must be made, not in terms of mathematical truth, but in these terms: What does it mean “to know?”

2. Psychological Structure of the Kantian Problem. We have already witnessed the birth of the Kantian problem under the pressure of three factors: the first being the desire to discover the cause of the skepticism from which man suffers; the second, the identification of the cause of skepticism with error or non-evident knowledge; the third, the identification of error or non-evident knowledge with metaphysical knowledge. Kant’s mirabile can be expressed as follows: How can reason, which is one, be simultaneously the cause of infallible truth and of metaphysical error? Since every problem begets wonder, and since wonder is the source of the inquiry that seeks to dispel it, we shall now study the psychological structure of Kantian wonder and of the Kantian inquiry into the epistemological problem thus conceived.

Kant’s wonder centers upon the fact that man has long since discovered the laws governing the acquisition of scientific truth, but is still groping and deceiving himself in the field of philosophical thought. What is the origin of this state of affairs?

What then is the reason why, in this field, the sure road to science has not hitherto been found? Is it perhaps impossible of discovery? Why in that case should nature have visited our reason with the restless endeavour whereby it is ever searching for such a path, as if this were one of its most important concerns? Nay, more, how little cause have we to place trust in our reason, if in one of the most important domains of which we would fain have knowledge, it does not merely fail us, but lures us on by deceitful promises, and in the end betrays us? [Critique of pure reason, Preface to second ed.]

Since Kantian wonder conceives reason, in its metaphysical aspirations, as a Circe who bewitches travelers and lures them to their destruction, the fear expressed by this wonder is the fear of reason as a natural source of error. The inquiry set in motion by this wonder will necessarily be directed toward knowing this natural cause of error, that is, to an analysis of reason or the thinking subject.

Kant does not open his investigation of reason or the Ego from zero-knowledge, or from complete ignorance of the mind and its activities, any more than did Descartes; for scientific knowledge exists and can teach us the methods used by reason to arrive at knowledge of truth.

The example of mathematics and natural science, which by a single and sudden revolution have become what they now are, seem to me sufficiently remarkable to suggest our considering what may have been the essential features in the changed point of view by which they have so greatly benefited. Their success should incline us, at least by way of experiment, to imitate their way of procedure, so far as the analogy which, as species of rational knowledge, they bear to metaphysics.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. [Ibid.]

The lesson Kant wants to learn from science is an experimental lesson in the procedures by which science becomes fruitful, since the success of science is the criterion of its truth. But science is fruitful when, instead of blindly following nature, it appoints reason to guide its knowledge of nature.

They [i.e. the scientists] learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining... Reason, holding in one hand its ‘equivalent to laws, and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in conformity with these principles, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated... It is thus that the study of nature has entered on the secure path of a science, after having for so many centuries been nothing but a process of merely random groping. [Ibid.]

This method that has succeeded so well in physics must be tried in metaphysics, which still is and has been for centuries at the groping stage where physics suffered so long. Since reason explains the success of the sciences, let us ask it to explain metaphysics’ lack of success. Let us start proceedings against reason, bring it into court.

It is a call to reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a tribunal which will grant to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws. This tribunal is no other than the Critique of pure reason. [Critique of pure reason, Preface to first Ed.]

This action can be brought against reason only if there is an innocent and a guilty party; i.e., if reason is both the source of truth (therein lies its innocence) and the source of error (wherein lies its guilt). Now, proceedings are always instituted by the innocent against the guilty. The Critique of pure reason, as tribunal, will therefore ask the reason that is innocent or capable of scientific truth to accuse the guilty reason of producing metaphysical error. Since metaphysical error is as old as humanity, Kant will indict all the metaphysics of which reason is guilty, including that of Descartes.

Obviously we cannot here follow every document adduced in proof at reason’s trial. We shall have to be content with considering the starting point, or the fact that scientific truth exists, the essential theme of innocence and guilt, or the subject-object relations, and the point of arrival, or metaphysics as a transcendental illusion. Under these three aspects, we shall try to grasp the essence of the Kantian inquiry, which sprang from his wonder at the epistemological mirabile. In this simplified study, we shall let Kant do the talking as often as possible, for he knows better than anyone else what he wants to say and how to say it.

(a) The inquiry’s starting point. The starting point in this inquiry is naturally the content of the Kantian mirabile in its paradoxical aspect of the coexistence of two systems of knowledge, one of which is true, the other false.

In the solution of the above problem, we are at the same time deciding as to the possibility of the employment of pure reason in establishing and developing all those sciences which contain theoretical a priori knowledge of objects, and have therefore to answer the questions:

      How is pure mathematics possible?
      How is pure science of nature possible?`

Since these sciences actually exist, it is quite proper to ask how they are possible; for that they must be possible is proved by the fact that they exist. But the poor progress which has hitherto been made in metaphysics and the fact that no system yet propounded can, in view of the essential purpose of metaphysics, be said really to exist, leaves everyone sufficient ground for doubting as to its possibility.

Yet, in a certain sense, this kind of knowledge is to be looked upon as given, that is to say, metaphysics actually exists, if not as science, yet still as a natural disposition.... And so we have the question:

How is metaphysics, as natural disposition, possible? that is, how from the nature of universal reason do those questions arise which pure reason propounds to itself, and which it is impelled by its own need to answer as best it can?

But... we cannot rest satisfied with the mere natural disposition to metaphysics... It must be possible for reason to attain to certainty whether we know or do not know the objects of metaphysics, that is to come to a decision either in regard to the objects of its inquiries or in regard to the capacity or incapacity of reason to pass any judgment upon them... This last question which arises out of the previous general problem, may, rightly stated, take the form:

      How is metaphysics, as science, possible?

It is interesting to note, first of all, that the Critique of Pure Reason does not propose the problem of the existence of truth as the point of departure for the Critique of knowledge; rather, since the fact of the existence of truth has been experienced, it asks the question: How is it possible? Comparing this starting point with that of Descartes, we find a striking difference: Descartes was seeking the existence of evident and indisputable truth, starting from doubt, whereas Kant starts from existing truths and looks for the conditions of their possibility. Doubt is not a component factor in Kantian method. Why? Because Kant could historically perceive the ravages that this method had wrought within philosophical thought and the woeful results to which it had led—the metaphysics and physics of Descartes. Furthermore, Kant admits the evidence of physical reality as initial datum; therefore, he had no need to seek in the Cogito the first certitude in the existential order. That the mathematical and physical sciences give us an account of our physical universe is a fact. What he asks of the mind is that it tell us why this is a fact.

The case of metaphysics is different, for its truth does not yet exist, which is a reason for doubting its possibility. On the other hand, this type of knowledge does exist as a natural disposition, and because of this fact, we can state the problem concerning the conditions, or the why, of this existence as a natural disposition. Here, again, the method goes from the quia est to the propter quid, to use Aristotelian and Scholastic terminology. But to give the why of metaphysics as a natural disposition does not explain its existence as science, which brings us to the third question: Does metaphysical truth exist? This is the only question concerned with the existence of truth, and it is restricted to metaphysical truth alone. In the latter case the problem is reversed, as we shall see, for Kant will prove that metaphysical truth does not exist, because the very nature of the mind makes it impossible.

Thus, there are two very different aspects to the starting point of the quest to solve the Kantian mirabile, because this mirabile includes two heterogeneous elements whose heterogeneity, strictly speaking, constitutes the problem of critique: Why does reason produce truth (science) and error (metaphysics)? The fact of truth must be explained; we must find the why of this truth. The fact of error, too, must be explained; we must also find its “why.” Now, the fact of error coincides with the fact of the existence of metaphysics as a natural disposition. To seek the why of error is equivalent to seeking the why of metaphysics as a natural disposition, but it is not equivalent to establishing the existence of metaphysics as a science, or the existence of metaphysical truth. Since this latter does not yet exist, we cannot start from the fact of its existence, of its quia est, to seek its propter quid. The only remaining alternative is to examine the mind to try to discover therein the conditions of the possibility or impossibility of metaphysical truth. From this angle, the quid sit of metaphysical truth is prior to its an sit. The Kantian mirabile thus contains three distinct aspects of the same problem, namely, the problem of truth and error. The first aspect concerns the why of the existence of scientific truth; the second deals with the why of the existence of error, or of metaphysics as a natural disposition; the third with the possibility or impossibility of the existence of metaphysical truth, considering the very nature of this truth. ,

(b) The essential theme of critique: subject versus object. Since the Critique is a tribunal before which the mind must appear to justify the truth it possesses and the error it begets, we must discover the reasons for its innocence and its guilt, for they cannot be identical. We must therefore start the inquiry by asking the mind by what means it knows.

By way of introduction or anticipation we need only say that there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root. Through the former, objects are given to us; through the latter, they are thought. [Critique of pure reason, Introd.]

The structure of the mind is thus characterized by a dualism whose source is unknown but whose existence is an undeniable fact. All human knowledge springs from this double origin. What is the specific contribution of each factor? Sensibility, says Kant, gives us the object, while understanding enables us to think these objects. Here is how he describes the operations belonging properly to each of these factors and their interdependence:

If the receptivity of our mind... is to be entitled sensibility, then the mind’s power of producing representations from itself, the spontaneity of knowledge, should be called the understanding. Our nature is so constituted that our intuition can never be other than sensible; that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. The faculty, on the other hand, which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding. To neither of these powers may a preference be given over the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is therefore just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is to add the object to them in intuition, as, to make our intuitions intelligible, that is to bring them under concepts. These two powers or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise. [Critique of pure reason, Transcendental Doctrine of Elements]

This description of human knowledge as the absolutely indissoluble marriage of the receptive part of our mind, whose name is sensibility, with the spontaneous part of this same mind, whose name is understanding, strikes a very anti-Cartesian and, on the contrary, a very Aristotelian note. That this definition of human knowledge is anti-Cartesian needs hardly to be said, since Kant never recognized either Descartes’ cogito or his notion of the Ego as a thinking substance possessing innate ideas and immediately evident truths from the first moment of its existence. But that this definition strikes an Aristotelian note cannot but be surprising, since the result of the Critique is the destruction of realist metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense of the word. Consequently, we must ask Kant to explain the proper role of sensibility in receiving objects, and that of the understanding as a spontaneous power capable of thinking these same objects. His explanation will give us the key both to his Critique and to the relations existing between subject and object, or between the a priori and the given; for the Kantian notion of object includes the subject, and the a priori includes the given.

The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance. [Critique of pure reason, Transendental dialectic, Bk 2, chs 1 & 3; Bk 1, ch 2]

In this statement we witness the first phase in the Kantian genesis of the object, which he calls phenomenon. The phenomenon comes into contact with the thinking subject through its causal action upon our sensibility, a causality that modifies the state of the subject itself. Grasping the subjective modifications caused by a phenomenon constitutes sensation. Sensation does not grasp the phenomenon as object but receives it passively. In and by sensation, empirical intuition (the act of sensibility) grasps the phenomenon, no longer as passively received by the subject, but as unified in space and time, that is, as exterior and immanent to the knower. Thus, the matter of phenomenon, pure becoming and multiplicity, is represented in the exterior unity that we term space and in the interior unity called time. This unification, accomplished by intuition according to the aforementioned modes, is the form of the phenomenon, because it allows its matter to be present to the mind as other than the subject and as its principle of objective determination. The phenomenon., as object is therefore made up of two elements. One, grasped by sensation, is essentially immersed in becoming and change, and the other, grasped by intuition, fixes this multiplicity in space and time. Are these two aspects of the phenomenon related, and what is their origin?

That in the appearance which corresponds to sensation I term its matter; but that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance... ; while the matter of all appearances is given to us a posteriori only, its form must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind. [Critique of pure reason, Transcendental aesthetic, Sect. 1, 2-3]

The matter of the phenomenon, or the a posteriori given, is therefore the element in the object which makes that object heterogeneous to the knowing subject, but this heterogeneity is not knowable or objective as long as it is not empirically intuited within the two a priori forms of sensibility, space and time. Only then does the phenomenon exist formally as phenomenon. In the last analysis, intuition of the given is possible only by means of the formal a priori conditions of space and time. The a priori enters into the constitution of the phenomenon, thus of the object undetermined as such.

What characterizes the a priori is that it is pure or purified of every sensory element and does not therefore belong to the given as such. It proceeds entirely from the nature of sensibility itself, which provides the given with whatever perceptibility it has. It is therefore the subject, in and by its a priori forms, that makes the given knowable and thus constitutes it formally as object of sensibility. The Kantian phenomenon as object cannot be conceived without the a priori forms of sensibility, or ever be considered as an exterior reality measuring a subject that passively submits to its causality. Contrary to the Thomistic explanation, Kantian reality supplies only the matter of the sensibly known object; the subject gives to this object its form, therefore, its perceptibility, by giving it a unity without which this absolute becoming would wholly escape knowledge.

This description of the material and formal components of the phenomenon is only the first step in the constitution of an object according to Kant, for we must make our intuitions intelligible, if human knowledge is truly to be exercised.

If I remove from empirical knowledge [intuition] all thought (through categories), no knowledge of any object remains. For through mere intuition nothing at all is thought, and the fact that this affection of sensibility is in me does not by itself amount to a relation of such representation to any object... [Critique of pure reason]

If each representation were completely foreign to every other, standing apart in isolation, no such thing as knowledge would ever arise. For knowledge is essentially a whole in which representations stand compared and connected. As sense contains a manifold in its intuition, I ascribe to it a synopsis. But to such synopsis a synthesis must always correspond; receptivity [i.e., sensibility] can make knowledge possible only when combined with spontaneity [i.e., understanding]. Now this spontaneity is the ground of a threefold synthesis which must necessarily be found in all knowledge; namely, the apprehension of representations as modifications of the mind in intuition, their reproduction in imagination, and their recognition in a concept.[Critique of pure reason, Transcendental deduction]

Nothing is knowable except it be unified. The multiplicity of sensory matter is informed by the formal unity of intuition, but intuitions themselves are multiple, as are the sensations they inform. Therefore, a unifying principle superior to sensibility must be found, and this principle is the transcendental unity of the thinking, subject expressed in “I think,” the necessary accompaniment of all possible and imaginable representations. Without “I think,” no activity of the understanding would be possible, because there would be no principle unifying all the representations of sensibility. This unity of apperception synthesizes the multiple data of empirical intuition, which would be impossible were it not for the categories whose precise function is to unify the multiplicity of a given intuition. Unless the a priori forms of the understanding (the concept or category) be joined to the a priori forms of sensibility, there can be no knowledge of the object or phenomenon.

To summarize what has just been said about the conditions necessary for the existence of an object as such, we must in every object as such distinguish the following:

1. The matter of the phenomenon or datum that causes sensation; it is heterogeneous to the subject.
2. The form of the phenomenon, or intuition of sensory matter by space and time, the two unifying modes of the given’s multiplicity. These are a priori forms and therefore distinct from the matter which they make knowable and thus make into an object or complete phenomenon. But since the a priori forms of sensibility give us a particular object or phenomenon, and phenomena are multiple, we need some other factor to make this particular object into this phenomenon, into an object in general, or an object as such. Whence the necessity for a third component to constitute the object.
3. The a priori forms of understanding, or the categories, which make this phenomenon or its intuition intelligible.

Thus, the Kantian object is not the exterior reality taken in its concrete existence, but rather the appearances or phenomena of external realities as informed by the a priori modes of sensibility and understanding. Objective knowledge does not receive exterior objects fully constituted; it contacts external reality, not in itself, but in its appearances (sensation) and gives to these appearances the forms of the cognitional powers themselves, the forms of sensibility and understanding. There is no objective knowledge unless there be a given, that is, unless a phenomenon act upon the knowing subject; but the datum cannot be an object or knowable without the subjects’s a priori forms. Therefore, the a priori forms of the subject formally constitute the object, while the given supplies only the material element. Without a given, knowledge has no objectivity, but without the a priori forms, there is no knowledge.

The essential theme of the Critique is therefore the notion of the object as such, for without it Critique is impossible, since there is no knowledge. On the other hand, the notion of the object is itself the judge in the tribunal of Critique, since the notion of the object reveals the contribution made by the subject in every act of knowledge, and the contribution made by reality in all objective knowledge. If the knower attributes to the given the properties that the subject itself contributes to knowledge, he is guilty of error; if, on the other hand, he does not make this misattribution, he is innocent, he possesses truth. Such are the essential notions in the Critique of Pure Reason. Equipped with this Kantian notion of the object, we can now consider the aim or term of Critique, or why metaphysics as a science is impossible.

(c) The aim of the Critique: metaphysics as a transcendental illusion. During the analysis of the Kantian object we have seen that the a priori or formal element, originating in the very nature of our knowing faculties, before any act of knowledge, is independent of the given. This a priori element, without which the given cannot be known, is knowable without the given. Thus, it is possible to know pure forms without matter (or the given) by sensible intuition as well as by the concept. That for Kant is what characterizes reason and is the great discovery made by the Critique. This knowledge of pure forms is, strictly speaking, transcendental knowledge and reveals the structure of the thinking subject as such; it constitutes the difference between “I think” and “I know.” It establishes the superiority of the Critique over the Discourse on Method, for Kant really analyzed the thinking subject, whereas Descartes went no further than the knowing subject.

While it is possible to think without knowing, it is impossible to know without thinking. Therefore, all the laws governing the sensible as well as the intelligible a priori forms are functions of knowledge and of empirical knowledge. This is the only kind of knowledge we can have, because thoughts without intuitions, thus without sensory data, are thoughts without content. They are not objective since one of the elements essential to objective knowledge, matter, is missing. If thought were also knowledge, we would have to have intellectual intuition, and reality in itself would have to be the object of this intuition. The noumenon would not only have to be, it would have to be knowable or intelligible for us; but this is not the case, for our power of intuition is not originarius but derivatus.

Consequently, the pure sciences are a utilization of the a priori of sensibility and understanding and their fullest completion by empirical knowledge. This completion is what gives to these sciences their truth and infallibility. Now, the objects of metaphysics, considered as a natural tendency, are all objects that elude sensible intuition, inasmuch as they are all necessary and universal, whereas empirical knowledge is concerned with the particular and contingent. Therefore, since the mind has no intellectual intuition, it cannot come into contact with necessary and universal datum, and when it does have such an object, it confuses the a priori modes of sensibility and understanding with the empirical datum measured by these modes. It creates a fictitious object; it lives in illusion. The history of metaphysics, past, present, and future, is the history of transcendentally illusory knowledge. Such is the verdict brought down at the tribunal of reason that is the Critique of Pure Reason.

Accordingly, fruitless as are all these endeavours of speculative reason, we have none the less found it necessary to follow them up to their primary sources. And since the dialectical illusion does not merely deceive us in our judgements, but also, because of the interest which we take in these judgements, has a certain natural attraction which it will always continue to possess, we have thought it advisable, with a view to the prevention of such errors in the future, to draw up in full detail what we may describe as being the records of this lawsuit and to deposit them in the archives of human reason.

This is the outcome of the Critique of Pure Reason, the goal of this long and painstaking inquiry that sprang from the Kantian mirabile. Having arrived at this term, this mirabile disappears, for we know now: (1) why truth is possible, (2) why error is possible, (3) why metaphysics is impossible. Reason has vindicated the paradoxical character of its narratives, both the infallibly true narrative and the infallibly false.

3. Conclusion on the Nature of the Modern Epistemological Problem. This study of the nature of the Cartesian and Kantian problem can be concluded by a comparison of the Cartesian mirabile with the Kantian and the consequences derived therefrom. This comparison can be outlined in four conclusions showing the diversity of the results obtained by the Discourse and the Critique:

First conclusion:

1. For Descartes, reason is infallible as soon as it quarantines sensation, eliminates the object of knowledge.
2. For Kant, reason is infallible insofar as it depends upon sensation, for the given is an essential component of the object.

Second conclusion:

1. For Descartes, infallible reason possesses, from the first moment of existence, the seed of all future truths about God, the Ego and physical nature.
2. For Kant, this infallible reason, in its relation to empirical intuition, possesses in its very structure every possibility of illusion or error about God, the self and the physical universe.

Third conclusion:

1. For Descartes, truth is always experienced through intellectual intuition or by deduction and analysis.
2. For Kant, truth is always dependent upon sensory intuition, since we have no intellectual intuition, and synthesis is the central factor in our experience of truth.

Fourth conclusion:

1. For Descartes, metaphysics is not only possible but upon its existence depends the basic foundation of all truth.
2. For Kant, metaphysics could never be anything but a transcendental illusion, and scientific truth is possible only insofar as reason realizes that it has this power of creating illusions.

How could such different conclusions follow from a mirabile whose genesis and nature seem to be identical? The reason is that truth and falsity, the two components of their mirabile, are not defined in the same way by these two thinkers. Cartesian truth is defined by the being of things and falsity by their appearances, which are creations of the senses. Kantian truth is defined by the appearance of things, or phenomena, whereas falsity is caused by their being, or noumena, whose objectivity is the creation of speculative reason. Thus, when Descartes and Kant find it a source of wonder that the unity of reason could be the simultaneous source of truth and error and hold an inquest or trial of reason, they do not ask it to vindicate the same truth, or the same error. It is therefore not surprising that their answers are so different, for answers always depend upon the meaning of the questions asked.

What is the absolute truth value of these two answers? In the author’s opinion they contain this truth that should never be forgotten: Every epistemological problem stated in terms of the opposition between truth and error is badly stated and therefore insoluble. Every epistemological problem must first be stated in terms of knowledge and ignorance; this is its first instance or moment. Once this question has been answered, we can ask what truth our knowledge gives us. With this question answered, we can go on to a third: Is this truth infallible? Because Descartes and Kant started with the third question before asking the second and first, whose solutions are presupposed, they were never able satisfactorily and objectively to solve their own Droblem. This is the truth that may be gleaned from analysis of the Cartesian and Kantian problem, a truth which the contemporary or scientific aspect of the epistemological problem will only confirm.

Section II: The Contemporary Epistemological Problem

We have said that the modern problem is like a two-faced Janus, one of whose faces is represented by Descartes and Kant, the other by contemporary science. The study of this latter aspect of the modern epistemological problem is doubly interesting: initially, because of its dissimilarities that create a distinctive mirabile composed, not of the coexistence of truth and error, but of the coexistence of two scientific systems; then, because of certain characteristic attitudes that reveal its Cartesian and Kantian heredity, such as distrust of sensation and a pragmatic orientation toward knowledge. In this, as in the preceding section, we shall follow the natural approach we discovered when we considered the nature of every problem. There will be a first subsection in which we shall witness the birth of the contemporary problem, and a second wherein we shall study its particular nature and its relations to Cartesianism and Kantianism. We shall also follow the same procedure in stating the problem, letting the thinkers involved explain their own position in order to avoid any distortion of their thought.

A. The birth of the contemporary epistemological problem

For two hundred and fifty years, until the end of the nineteenth century, modern science was based upon the mathematical principles of Euclid and Pythagoras, applied by Newton to explain our universe. This universe has three dimensions, is measured by absolute space and time, and is composed of particles of matter at rest or in motion, while its whole dynamism is governed by the three mechanical laws of mass, force, and reaction. Scientific knowledge of this universe has an ideal of necessity and universality that make it almost divine. Here is a description of this scientific ideal.

We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence, who for a given instant should be acquainted with all the forces by which nature is animated and with the several positions of the entities composing it, if further his intellect were vast enough to submit those data to analysis, would include in one and the same formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain for him; the future, as well as the past, would be present to his eyes. The human mind, in the perfection it has been able to give to astronomy, affords a feeble outline of such an intelligence.... All its efforts in the search for truth tend to approximate without limit to the intelligence we have just imagined. [Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilités]

This harmonious, classical universe, in which chance and indeterminism have no place, and whose ideal of knowledge copies the divine in the way it joins past and future in the present—this universe has been superseded by another whose dimensions are vast enough to appear infinite, and whose interior structures are so incorporeal that they have no dimensions and are therefore unimaginable. In this universe, wherein the infinitely large jostles the infinitely small, there is no longer any absolute space and time, mass, or causal determinism. Groupings and fields of relation have become the essential factors to be explained. Principles of explanation no longer have the necessity, or the evidence of classical science but are indeterminate and relative, assigning a major role to chance. Knowledge by probabilities has succeeded classical science’s ideal of quasi-divine certitude; Euclidean geometry has given way to that of Riernarm and Einstein . Even Pythagorean number has been replaced by cosmic number.

This opposition between universes has all the elements of a mirabile, and the opposition between these explanatory theories has inevitably given rise to an epistemological mirabile. The consequences of this situation were quickly perceived, and since the beginning of the twentieth century, epistemological works have been produced in increasing acceleration, whereas the two preceding centuries were practically sterile in this field. This epistemological renascence in science has covered all the aspects of the contemporary problem: its source, mathematical knowledge; its methods, analysis, induction, deduction, logic, logistic; its objects; the macroscopic universe, this man-sized universe, and the microscopic universe; and finally the nature of actual physical knowledge; its truth, the degrees of certitude of this truth, its necessity, its hypothetical character, etc.

This wealth of works on scientific epistemology, once again, confirms the solidity of the universal law presiding over the birth of every problem, a law whose existence we noted in studying the problem as such. In order for a problem to exist, there must be two narrators telling divergent stories. For over two hundred years classical science was absolute mistress in its field. According to scientists, the Cartesian method and the Kantian Critique had definitely classed philosophical knowledge as pseudoscience, to which they no longer needed to pay any heed, and had bequeathed them a method and an ideal of knowledge that they had only to put into effect. Since conflicts between philosophy and science were done away with once and for all, since the methods and the ideal of science were one, there was no longer any possibility of duality in the stories or of any really important differences between the narrators. Descartes and Kant were the gods of the scientists, and the scientists were their prophets. The few isolated thinkers who dared stray from the beaten path were considered to be dreamers and were termed “philosophers,” with all the insulting insinuations of the word. However, advances in technical knowledge and the invention of increasingly accurate instruments of control brought the day when these instruments seemed to confirm the preposterous hypotheses of a few mathematical or physical geniuses, and a second storyteller has appeared whose account of the universe is to be taken seriously. Thus, the contemporary mirabile is born.

The original character and the epistemological value of the contemporary problem are that, hitherto, the mirabile always sprang from opposition between two different types of knowledge, either between popular knowledge and philosophical knowledge, or between the latter and science or theology. But in the twentieth century a mirabile has appeared whose two divergent factors are scientific: mathematical evidence opposes other mathematical evidence; controlled physical observations are opposed by other equally controlled experiments. How is it possible to explain that one science can be thus opposed to another science? Are they both true? Is their opposition owing to the mind or to things? Must one of them be rejected in favor of the other? Such is the contemporary mirabile, whose psychological structure we will now study briefly.

B. The psychological structure of the contemporary problem

Every problem or mirabile causes a shock or wonder in the soul, wonder that begets an inquiry aiming to dispel the ignorance at the source of this wonder. We have seen that this inquiry assumes very different forms, depending upon the psychological attitude of the inquirer toward the factors of his mirabile. If he considers one of these components radically true and the other synonymous with error, his inquiry will be a lawsuit brought against error in the name of truth. This is characteristic of modem methods. But if both components are given equal footing, if they are considered capable of being equally true, then the investigation will be made in a conciliatory spirit, by distinguishing the different objects or the points of view that may be had about reality, and the different aspects of this same reality. Contemporary epistemology has taken this direction, in the opinion of those who have dealt with the problem.

Elaborate studies made with instrumental aid have shown that the phenomena of the world of the electron do not in any way form a replica on a minute scale of the world of the nebulae. As we leave the man-sized world behind us, and proceed either towards the infinitely great in one direction or towards the infinitely small in the other, the laws of nature seems at first sight to change, not only in detail but in their whole essence. More careful scrutiny discloses that the apparent change is illusory; actually the same laws prevail throughout the range, but different features of these laws become of preponderating importance in different parts of the range... all objects are governed by the universal laws of physics, but one aspect of these laws is all-important for the electron, another for man-sized objects, and yet a third for the movements of the nebulae. [Jeans, Physics and philosophy]

The contemporary mirabile does not incline the epistemologist to put reason on trial in the name of a uniform and rigid criterion of truth, because reason confronts him with three universes, of which only one is true and the other two false. But it does urge him to find out what it is in man and the knowable universe that makes this trinity of knowledge possible. We have just seen that the first area of agreement is on the side of the object, since three different aspects of our physical universe are distinguishable: the infinitely large, the infinitely small, and the man-sized universe between them.

The definition of knowledge provides another basis for agreement. The principle governing contemporary epistemology is no longer the Cartesian and Kantian identification of knowledge with truth and of truth with infallible and absolutely certain truth; it is a much more flexible notion and more extensible to the different modes of human knowledge.

Some writers restrict the term knowledge to things we are quite certain of; others recognize knowledge of varying degrees of uncertainty... I prefer the broader meaning; and my own usage will recognize uncertain knowledge. Anything which would be knowledge if we were assured of its truth, is still counted as knowledge if we are not assured; ...usually a reasonable degree of certainty or probability is attributed to the knowledge we shall have occasion to discuss. But the assessment of certainty is to be regarded as separate from the nature of knowledge. [Ibid.]

Such a statement would make Descartes and Kant bristle with indignation, and here is another, even more revolutionary definition to terrify the inventors of the modern method, for it is directed against the distinction and separation of method from science:

Formally we may still recognize a distinction between science as treating the content of knowledge, and scientific epistemology as treating the nature of knowledge of the physical universe. But it is no longer a practical partition: and to conform to the present situation, scientific epistemology should be included in science. [Eddington, The philosophy of physical science]

Sir James Jeans is even more explicit about the inefficiency of any method that examines the mind in order to explain the truth of things, and that neglects things themselves as if they played no part in the explanation of truth! At the end of a chapter entitled, “How Do We Know?” in which he gives an historical account of idealist positions concerning the problem of knowledge, he concludes:

Our discussion seems to bring us back to the age-old conclusion that if we wish to discover truth about nature, the pattern of events in the universe we inhabit, the only sound method is to go out into the world and question nature directly, and this is the long-established and well tried method of science. Questioning our own mind is of no use. just as questioning nature can tell us truths only about nature, so questioning our own minds will tell us only truths about our own minds.

The general recognition of this has brought philosophy into closer relations with science and this approach has coincided with a change of view as to the proper aims of philosophy.... The tools of science are observation and experiment; the tools of philosophy are discussion and contemplation. It is still for science to try to discover the pattern of events and for philosophy to try to interpret it when found. [Jeans, Physics and philosophy]

This new orientation of epistemology, which takes it an integral part of the science whose method it is, obtains not only for physics but even for mathematics, which must have a certain realism in order truly to be a science.

To be too quick to condemn mathematical realism is to be seduced by the magnificent extension of formal epistemology; that is to say, by a sort of functioning in the void on the part of mathematical notions. But if no abstraction is made from the psychological approach of the mathematician, it does not take long to see that there is more to mathematical activity than a formal organization of diagrams, and that every pure idea has its counterpart in a psychological application, in an example which takes the place of reality. By meditating upon the work of the mathematician, we perceive that it always results from an extension of knowledge drawn from reality, and that even in mathematics, reality reveals itself in its essential function: i.e. to make us think.... There, as everywhere else, appears the dualism of the subjective and the objective. [Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique]

Contemporary epistemology has an increasing tendency to free itself from the tyrannical laws of the subjective method invented by Descartes and Kant, and to ask reality, and the object, to vindicate its explanation of scientific truth. Thus, wonder caused by the actual epistemological mirabile does not orient inquiry solely toward the Ego but toward the two elements essential to all truth: man and the universe he knows. Nor does this wonder look upon the opposition of scientific theories as a sign of falsity or error, but rather as a symptom of the complexity of our universe, the depths of whose unity are revealed in different ways, depending upon the more or less primitive, or more or less evolved, character of the matter being studied.

Such is the nature of the psychological reaction characterizing the contemporary mirabile. To go back to the comparison we used at the beginning of our first chapter, it resembles the host who tries to find grounds for agreement between his two quarreling guests in order that he may continue to extend them his hospitality and enjoy their presence. What will be the nature of the investigations and methods of inquiry destined to dispel the contemporary epistemological mirabile? We know that the starting point of an investigation governs it and organizes its procedure. We also know that the mirabile is the true starting point for inquiry, at the same time that it characterizes the inquiry, because it is the question that the inquiry seeks to answer. Now the question was this: Can two sciences dealing with the physical universe give different explanations of that universe and still be true? If the word truth has only one meaning and depends only upon the structure of the mind, this question must necessarily be answered in the negative. But if the word truth has several meanings, and the multiplicity of the aspects of the universe ,enters into its definition, then the question may be answered affirmatively. We shall perceive the nature of contemporary scientific truth, its criteria of existence and objectivity, by comparing it with the Cartesian and Kantian notion of the criteria for truth.

These criteria are three: (1) In order that knowledge be true, it must be evident or intuited; (2) It must be necessary and thus absolutely determined in its object, admitting of no exception; (3) It must be certain or infallible, never subject to change. Intuition, objective determination, certitude or subjective determination, these are the three characteristics of modem scientific truth. Let us see the characteristics of contemporary scientific truth.

All contemporary science is governed by three laws, which are the counterparts of the three characteristics of the Cartesian and Kantian scientific ideal:

1. The law of choice counters intuition.
2. The law of indeterminacy counters objective necessity.
3. The law of probability counters certitude or subjective necessity.

1. The Law of Choice. According to Descartes and Kant, where there is no intuition there is no truth, for otherwise there is no contact between the mind and reality. Practically all the realities that are the object of contemporary science fall outside Descartes’ category of clear ideas and escape the domination of the Kantian a priori forms, because these realities are measurable neither by Euclidean space nor by absolute time, which were necessary for the intuition of Descartes and Kant. Intuition has been replaced by the axiom of choice, whose various and somewhat capricious character is more suited to dealing with actual scientific realities. Here is an explanation of this axiom or law:

When two hypotheses are possible, we provisionally choose that which our minds adjudge to be the simpler, on the supposition that this is the more likely to lead in the direction of the truth. There can be, of course, no absolute criterion as to which of the two hypotheses is the simpler; in the last resort this must be a matter of private judgment. [Jeans, Physics and philosophy]

And here is a more detailed description of this law and its relation to intuition:

The new scientific spirit has turned the whole problem of intuition topsy-turvy. For this intuition can no longer be primary, it is preceded by a discursive study revealing a sort of fundamental duality. All basic notions can in some way be divided into two; they are all duplicated by complementary notions. Henceforward every intuition will proceed from a choice: there will be a kind of ambiguity basic to scientific description, affecting the immediate character of Cartesian intuition.... Nothing is more anti-Cartesian than the gradual modifications of the mind necessitated by the successive approximations reached by experimentation, especially when the farthest reaching of these experiments reveal previously-unknown organic wealth. Such is the case, we repeat, with the Einsteinian concept, whose richness and complex value suddenly reveal the poverty of the Newtonian concept. Such is the case, too, for the wave mechanics of Louis de Broglie which, in the full sense of the word, completes classical mechanics and even relativistic mechanics itself. [Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique]

The law of choice does not obtain only in physics; it plays an important role within mathematics. In a work on the nature of mathematical judgment, a philosopher, who is also a great mathematician, defends the legitimacy of this axiom against Léon Brunschvicg, who doubts its usefulness.

The axiom of choice is much more than a non-absurdity, a “pass” issued to the mind; its elegance speaks in its favor wherever hitherto unknown results are obtained by its means. The reason a better economy ensues upon its use is that it very probably penetrates deeply enough into the nature of things and expresses an aptitude thereof which is none the less real, although eluding explanation. It would be analogous in mathematics to a judgment of possibility, possibility meaning here a being in tendency that somehow escapes absolute necessity.... The fact remains that the axiom of choice and the judgments depending on it, more generally all those dealing with the transfinite, must be excluded from mathematics if the sole rule admitted is univocal necessity. This ostracism seems altogether illegitimate. [Guérard des Laureirs, L’activité du jugement, in RSPT 24 (1935), 423-424]

This first law is obviously diametrically opposite to the intuitive evidence that Descartes and Kant required in order to qualify a truth as such and to make it scientific. It is hard to see what role Cartesian innatism or the Kantian a priori would play with respect to such an axiom; as a matter of fact, they play no role whatsoever.

2. The Law or Principle of Indeterminacy. Cartesian innatism accounted for the necessary structure of things, and the Kantian a priori imposed upon phenomena the immutable and necessary forms of the mind. With such ideas and informing power, it was inevitable that the truths found in nature by the human mind enjoy an absolute objective necessity and that it be contradictory to think of a world other than that given by science. With the appearance of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity the causal links between things disappeared from science, because individual things gave way to groupings, to groups of relations or relative beings. Time and space having been replaced by their essentially correlative value, the knowledge we can have of the position of beings and of the bonds uniting them becomes extremely precarious, the more so because the speed at which they travel is unimaginable. Therefore, some principle had to be found to state intelligibly the lack of objective determination that characterizes reality with regard to its exact position and the speed at which it moves. Heisenberg discovered this principle, called the principle of uncertainty, which may be described as follows: an algebraic formula proposing to tell the future position of an object exactly, but in a formula of which precisely half the symbols represent knowable quantities and the other half unknowable quantities.

This principle of uncertainty rests entirely upon the character peculiar to the objectivity of scientific truth. This objectivity is essentially relative to an incalculable number of points or to a group of entities that are themselves mobile. The relation objectifying scientific knowledge must thus be of the same nature as the mobility of the beings constituting its object; it must therefore have indetermination identical with theirs if it is to be exact, that is to say, true. Therein lies the meaning of the principle of indeterminacy, which exactly measures the inexactitude or indetermination of the groups that are the object of scientific knowledge. When an object’s absolute has given way to its position in a group measured by correlative time and space, the absolute of the necessity of the truth must also give way to a certain indetermination, the exact knowing of which constitutes the very truth of knowledge.

 3. The Law of Probability. The certitude or necessity of Cartesian and Kantian truth springs from its immutable measure, which is either the idea or the a priori. Since modern science is measured by an essentially mutable reality, whose only stability proceeds from the constancy of the relations between beings, because of their prodigious multitude, the stability or certitude of scientific knowledge must follow the laws of its measurement. In other words, when the object is determined because it enters into an essentially determined physical causality, certitude is possible. But when causal determinism is replaced by an ensemble of relations whose relative values are essentially mobile, all we can ask of such knowledge is that it possess the relative stability of these objects and that, their stability be expressed in a law of probability defining scientific truth.

Whilst striving to perfect a system of law that would predict what certainly will happen, physicists also became interested in a system which predicts what probably will happen. Alongside the super-intelligence imagined by Laplace, for whom “nothing would be uncertain” was placed an intelligence for whom nothing would be certain but something would be exceedingly probable.... Generally speaking, his predictions never approach certainty unless they refer to an average of a very large number of individual entities. Thus the aim of science to approximate to this latter intelligence is by no means equivalent to Laplace’s aim. I shall call the aim defined by Laplace the primary aim, and the new aim introduced in the science of thermodynamics the secondary aim... Measured by advance towards Laplace’s aim its progress is just nil... The physicist might continue to profess allegiance to primary law but he has ceased to use it. Primary law was the gold stored in the vaults; secondary law was the paper currency actually used. But everyone still adhered to the traditional view that paper currency needs to be backed by gold... But I think it is clear that... present-day physics is off the gold standard. [Eddington, New pathways]

We have seen that efforts to discover the true nature of reality are necessarily doomed to failure, so that if we are to progress further it must be by taking some other objective and utilising some new philosophical principles of which we have not yet made use. Two such suggest themselves. The first is the principle of what Leibnitz described as probable reasoning. We must give up the quest for certain knowledge and concentrate on that one of the various alternatives before us which seems to be most probably true. [Jeans, Physics and philosophy]

The law of probability refers simultaneously to a property grafted on to realities because of their great number and to an attribute of our knowledge. Just as it designates a property of things that does not make them known in themselves but known by reason of their number and of the relations existing between the individuals of a group, so is our knowledge of them concerned with the number and relations of the individuals in a group. That is why it is opposed to causality or determinism in its objective sense and to the certitude or subjective necessity of knowledge. Sir James Jeans has admirably formulated this imperfect or non-certain character of probability in the following text:

The wave picture does not show the future as following inexorably from the present, but the imperfections of our future knowledge following inexorably from the imperfections of our present knowledge. [Ibid.]

 Conclusion on the Contemporary Epistemological Problem. We have seen that the contemporary mirabile consists in the coexistence of two sciences, one of which tells of a finite, perfectly ordered universe wherein events follow one another in exact order, while the other tells us of a confused universe, unimaginable and unobservable in itself, whose only unity consists in a system of relations between entities the number and mobility of which defy the imagination, but which are the object of mathematical calculations. Contemporary epistemology could have rejected the confused image and kept the clear and precise account, under the pretext that truth must be clear and precise. It did not do so because the two images correspond to facts. Therefore, it has organized its inquiry so as to explain both of these narratives; it has found a solution for their diversity. The clear image corresponds to the man-sized universe, to the universe corresponding to our lived and imagined experience; the other corresponds to the astronomical and microscopic universe. Each of these parts of the universe obeys its own aspect of the laws of nature and never becomes confused with the other. But these three universes are not separate. There is a harmony among the three aspects of a single universe. Hierarchy, not anarchy, exists among them, for the quantum theory and the theory of relativity exchange laws and explanatory procedures and govern the man-sized world without destroying its individuality.

However, to achieve this harmony between the two narrators, the unilateral meaning of the formulae in each narration had to be done, away with; that is, the realities expressed by the words truth, knowledge, science must be granted a diversity that Descartes and Kant, always refused them. By conceiving knowledge as something other than the infallible intuition of an absolute, contemporary scientists have resolved their mirabile and have added to classical science this marvelous instrument of discovery and utilization of the forces of nature that is science today. This way of conceiving and solving the mirabile is a sign of great wisdom, but it also indicates that the Discourse on Method and the Critique of Pure Reason are not infallible and immutable codes in which science must seek the principles of its investigations and the criteria of its discoveries. The “gold standard” of evidence and certitude, which they claim to have discovered in the name of the eternal structure of our reason, has been rejected by science as sterile and humanly useless to the explanation of the physical universe.

Van Riet’s history of the past one hundred years of “research into the problem of knowledge in the Thomistic school” reminds us of the nightmare of a realist who suddenly discovers in his dream that he has been stripped of the garment of truth by idealist critique and is exposed, in this state of nudity, to the ridicule of other thinkers. The sleeper’s first reaction is sane; he considers this nightmare a bad dream from which he will awake. But as the nightmare persists, he ends by taking it seriously; he feels immodest, indecent, and can no longer bear the shame of strolling around publicly in naturalibus. To cover his nakedness, he tries, furtively at first and then with an audacity to which shame lends guile, to dress himself in the only decent suits among the fashions exhibited in the philosophical market place, the idealist uniform. At first he feels a bit shy in this outfit, because it is not made to his order and must make him look odd. However, with the help of habit and the thought that it is better to be dressed in the truth of others than to be a nudist, he decrees that all philosophy not togged out in the same uniform that he is wearing will henceforth be considered naive or popular and will not truly deserve the name of philosophy. This realist’s dream has lasted more than one hundred years. During the first fifty years he accepted his nakedness; since then he has been making periodic visits to the idealist tailor. Every time he comes out he looks more and more like the original he is trying to copy.

We shall try to analyze this nightmare. The method we use will be familiar, for we shall witness its birth, and then watch its development under the pressure of the psychological reactions that the dream causes in the sleeper. We shall then try to discover its causes. Is it the product of an Oedipus complex, because metaphysics has become too attached to being, its father, at the expense of its mother, the intellect? Or is it simply the result of the tyranny of style, which strikes morbid fear to the heart of all weaklings and drives them to every sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of their being and truth, in order to be up-to-date and like others?

The plan of this chapter will follow the general rules for studying any epistemological problem: witness its birth, see it in action and developing. This is the only way to grasp its total nature. In the first section we will attend at the birth of the Neo-Scholastic problem; in the second we will follow the different psychological reactions occasioned by this birth among the Neo-Scholastics, and the results of these reactions.

Section 1 Birth of the Neo-Scholastic Problem

What factors contributed to the birth of this new problem? The first factor, chronologically, and the most important because it conditioned all the others, was the awareness on the part of Christian thinkers that their realist metaphysics had become a museum piece, dusty, mummified, interesting only to mental archaeologists and to some authors of textbooks; whereas idealism was having a golden age in the great systems of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Philosophical skepticism had replaced classical metaphysics by a vague appeal to belief in an exterior world under the impulse of common sense. Descartes had affirmed the non-existence of realist metaphysics because of its lack of evidence; Kant had decreed its character to be eternally illusory and false; the thinkers of the nineteenth century established experimentally that it no longer exists and is replaced by complete disorder in all fields of speculation except that of the experimental sciences dominated by mathematics. Add to this already black picture the progressive de-Christianization of all European thought, and you have every factor capable of shocking the Christian soul and waking it from its philosophical lethargy.

Balmès was the first to feel the shock of the non-existence of realist philosophy with sufficient violence to try to revive it. This he did in his Filosofia Fondamental, a work in four volumes, in which he takes up, successively, certitude, sensation, extension and space, ideas, being, unity and number, time, the infinite, substance, necessity, and causality. This first attempt at philosophical reconstruction was the wellspring of a multitude of other works, and the impulse it gave to Christian philosophy has lasted to our day. However, realist philosophy could not be reborn without meeting along its return route the idealist philosophy that had led it to the grave. One might even think that realist philosophy had been sufficiently impressed by the vigor of its executioner to believe it immortal; thus, upon waking from its lethargic sleep, its first battle was waged for immediate knowledge against the mediatism of Descartes. It did not realize that, as a philosophical doctrine, Cartesianism was dead, that the eternally true metaphysics, which Cartesian method claimed to have conceived, was stillborn. This illusion about the perennial value of Cartesianism exists only in the mind of Neo-Scholastics, for even science, in whose name Cartesian method was devised, has completely abandoned it, as we have seen. All the philosophers who have carried on Balmès’ work have continued to cherish this illusion that, complemented by a similar illusion about Kantianism, has given birth to the contemporary Neo-Scholastic problem.

This general factor, which we have just briefly described, conditions the birth of the Neo-Scholastic problem but does not constitute, it without the addition of other, more particular factors that are peculiarly characteristic of this problem. Once revived, realist metaphysics had to try to regain its place in the sun, to try once more to represent philosophy itself in Western thought. To do this, it had to have indisputable letters of credit; its foundations had to be beyond all doubt and discussion. Whence the metaphysical or epistemologic aspect of all Neo-Scholastic thought, whose avowed aim was to make nefarious undertakings, such as the Discourse on Method and Critique of Pure Reason, impossible in the future, and to make impregnable the metaphysical stronghold called “Thomistic Realism.”

The following statements clearly show that this is the distinctive character of the Neo-Scholastic problem: “The mediaeval mentality was fundamentally foreign to all the preoccupations of critique... It did not occur to them to be continually examining the foundations to see if the building was well grounded. Hence the complete contrast with the methodic approach whose essence was first grasped by Descartes, and of which we feel the need today [Léon Noël, Notes d’épistomologie thomiste]. Father Roland-Gosselin repeats the same theme in significant terms: “The confidence placed in the mind establishing science and metaphysics always leaves room... for anxiety which neither science nor metaphysics can allay. The Neo-Scholastics feel anxious about their realism; they feel the need to heed Kant’s and Descartes’ teaching that “there is no good metaphysics without critical prolegomena.

To formulate this anxiety, this need for critical prolegomena, in the terms we have been using to describe the genesis of an epistemological problem, to reduce it to the story told by Eddington, we may say that the Neo-Scholastic mind is confronted by two storytellers. One, the familiar narrator, is realist metaphysics telling of a universe of existents whose evidence is beyond doubt; the other narrator tells an entirely different story, the one we have met in studying the modern problem and which is completely contrary to that of the realist narrator—nothing in the exterior world is evident to the mind; it is for the mind to illumine the universe, not for the universe to illumine the mind. Here, in other words, is the dialogue in which the Neo-Scholastic philosopher takes part: Thomistic metaphysics says, “I exist and I know that my knowledge is true, because I have analyzed my object, being as being.” The idealist answers, “You do not exist, and you do not even know that you do not exist, because you have never analyzed or criticized the thinking subject as thinking subject.” Thus the Neo-Scholastic soul is faced with the problem of the existence of metaphysics. This is the true problem, and to place it elsewhere is to falsify it completely.

If we grant that this existence is the object of two divergent accounts—one of which would have this existence to be possible only after analysis of the subject, whereas the realist narrator asserts that it is possible upon analysis of the object—we are confronted with a genuine admirabile in the strict sense of the word, for the three factors we have discerned in every admirabile are present here:

1. There is a single theme under discussion: the existence of metaphysics.
2. There are two versions of the same theme: the idealist version and the realist.
3. These two accounts are divergent and known to be so by Neo-Scholasticism, which is caught in an impasse, for to admit the idealist narrator’s version is to deny the existence of Thomistic metaphysics, and to accept the realist account is to deny the claims of critique.

Now we have to study the psychological reactions of the Neo Scholastic thinkers faced with this problem, that is, the nature of the wonder which this problem begets and the direction of the inquiries of which it is the origin. This will be the subject of the second section of this chapter.

Section II: The Nature of the Neo-Scholastic Problem

The contradiction found in the purport of these realist and ideal narratives concerning the very existence of metaphysics causes wonder, i.e., the fear of ignorance; for although the Neo-Scholastic perceives the opposition between the two accounts, be does not see how they can both be true at the same time. And since ignorance is an evil, the fear of this evil begets inquiry, which aims to discover truth by dispelling contradiction. This inquiry may have one of three positions as its starting point:

1. The acceptance of both narratives in the hope of their containing complementary fragments of truth, to be confirmed or denied by the inquiry.
2. The acceptance of one of the accounts as true and the rejection of the other as false, with the inquiry demonstrating the falsity of the rejected narrative.
3. The rejection of both accounts as non-evident or false, with the inquiry consisting in the discovery of another way of revealing the existence of metaphysics.

What direction will Neo-Scholastic philosophy take, which of the three alternatives will it adopt? This is the beginning of the nightmare, related in Van Riet’s book, whose plot was given at the beginning of this chapter. All Neo-Scholastics are realists, and realists in the Thomistic sense of the word. They all recognize the truth of St. Thomas’ metaphysics and, therefore, its existence as metaphysics. It would seem that the only possible attitude for a Neo-Scholastic would be the second alternative mentioned above, i.e., the rejection of the idealist position in favor of the realist position, followed by an inquiry showing the falsity of the idealist method, be it Cartesian or Kantian. The only contemporary philosophers to adopt this solution (the only logical one in view of the terms in which the neo-Thomist problem is stated) are Professors Maritain and Gilson and a historian of philosophy, Professor H. Gouhier. On the other hand, this logical position has been opposed by almost all Neo-Scholastic epistemologists who consider it a naive realism, hardly more vital than common-sense realism. This realism is on the same footing with that of the forerunners and initiators of Neo-Scholastic epistemology.

Consequently, Neo-Scholastic epistemology must be considered in relation to the two remaining alternatives: either acceptance of both narratives in the hope of seeing some complementary accord between them, or rejection of both narratives, in which case a third account begins to take shape, whose tenor will be completely distinct from the two conflicting stories themselves. Actually, the Neo-Scholastics chose the first attitude, conciliation, but it is by no means certain that their investigations and attempts to solve the conflict have not led them to a third account that is neither idealist nor Thomist. It is this that gives this chapter in metaphysical speculation its hallucinatory quality and calls forth the comparison with a nightmare.

Let us study the nature of the Neo-Scholastic problem as an inquiry aiming to conciliate two divergent stories about the existence of metaphysics, the idealist story and the Thomist. Of all the works on so-called Thomist epistemology, filling the 659 pages of Van Riet’s book—excluding the sections dealing with the position of Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain—only two attempts have really come to grips with the problem: those of Monsignor Noël and Father Maréchal. All the other works treat of one or another aspect of the epistemological problem—the problems of certitude, evidence, immediate realism, etc.—but they do not attempt to reconcile the Thomist and the idealist accounts. They adopt one point or other of the idealist story and show that it cannot destroy the realism of Thomistic metaphysics, which is quite another problem from that of reconciling the dialogue that goes on between Thomist metaphysics and idealism: “I exist and 1 know that I have truth because I have analyzed my object, being as being... You do not exist because you have not criticized the thinking subject as thinking subject.” This is the sole problem of neo-Thomist epistemology, and only Noël and Maréchal have tried to solve it. We shall briefly examine their efforts and the results to which they led.

A. Monsignor Noël: Cartesian method and Thomist metaphysics

Monsignor Noël was too good a philosopher and too good a Thomist. to cheat on the problem arising from the antithetically opposed statements just mentioned. He therefore adheres more particularly to the Cartesian approach of analyzing the subject as a preliminary condition for the existence of a realist metaphysics: “For a systematic philosophy, the mind is not simply one possible starting point among many others. It seems to me to be the only legitimate starting point.” Thus, he accepts the Cartesian method. But he also accepts the objective metaphysics of St. Thomas, although he knows he is altering it somewhat: “When St. Thomas invites us to reflect upon our intellectual experience and to realize that we have truth within us, he does not think that this reflection must necessarily precede all philosophical certitude. The question is whether it is opportune and whether it is possible... to transfer the reflection he recommends to the threshold of philosophy. The aim of this transposition of Thomistic reflection to the threshold of philosophy is to vindicate the universe of common sense.

The problem Monsignor Noël sets himself is very clear: to determine whether the elements of the Cartesian method cannot be found, at least implicitly, within the Thomistic method, which would make Thomistic metaphysics critical in the Cartesian sense of the word, since it would fulfill the requirements of Descartes’ method. The latter has two principle characteristics: methodic doubt and the cogito. By the first he excludes from knowledge everything that is not unquestionably evident in order to arrive at a truth principle so evident that no one can deny it; by the second he discovers all other truths of which philosophy is the synthesis. Therefore, it becomes a question of finding two factors in the Thomistic method to correspond, point by point, to these two characteristics of the Cartesian method. Monsignor Noël claims to have discovered them in the dubitatio universalis—found in St. Thomas’ commentaries on the Metaphysics of Aristotle and in the reflexio described in a personal work of the holy Doctor—by which the intellect “turns back upon itself and grasps its own act: this is indeed the cogito and the starting point of critique.” Since all epistemology can be constructed within the framework of this reflexio, of which the cogito is but a distant echo, Thomistic realism is a critical, not a naive, realism, depending implicitly but consciously upon an immediatist epistemology, and is therefore a justified realism.

Monsignor Noël’s purpose, continued by the school of Louvain, was essentially to effect the complete conciliation of the Neo-Scholastic mirabile by showing that actually the opposition formulated at the beginning of this chapter is only a verbal opposition, for Thomism, like idealism, bases its metaphysics upon a preliminary analysis of the thinking subject. The reason that everyone has been deceived upon this point is that this critique of the thinking subject is not explicitly brought out by St. Thomas, whereas Descartes pinpoints it and makes it the explicit starting point for all true metaphysics.

Since every inquiry is governed by the mirabile that is its starting point, and since the mirabile on which Monsignor Noël bases his inquiry centers upon the apparent opposition between the conditions necessary for the existence of metaphysics in Cartesianism and in Thomism, Monsignor Noël bends his whole effort to show that this opposition does not exist. He carries out this demonstration by a comparative analysis of the Cartesian dubitatio with the Thomistic dubitatio universalis and of the cogito with the reflexio. We shall examine each of these pairs of terms and the proofs he gives of their identity.

1. Cartesian Doubt versus Universal Doubt. To make sure that this comparison is both easily comprehensible and perfectly complete, we shall divide it under three headings, successively treating all the essential aspects of this psychology of the dubitatio. We shall examine (a) the origin of the dubitatio, (b) its object and context, and (c) its term.

(a) Origin of the dubitatio. Liberty is the primary source of the existence of Cartesian doubt, and that is why Descartes states that doubt is the pre-eminent type of free act. How, actually, could we push doubt far enough to suppose that the very Author of our nature deceives us, leads us into error, if we were not truly free? To ask Descartes why he attributes doubt to a free act, therefore to voluntary activity, is to bring his whole psychology of knowledge into play. What characterizes this psychology is that each and every judgment is a voluntary act and, as such, essentially free, except in the presence of a truth so clear that the will cannot refuse its assent, which happens only for the truth of the cogito and the truths derived from it. Since it is the will that assents to the act of understanding, it can refuse to do so every time this act lacks actual evidence: in which case the will’s assent would be precipitate and therefore wrong.

Thus, liberty makes possible the existence of doubt; but there must be a special, concrete reason to explain the use Descartes makes of this psychological liberty, and this is the origin of the dubitatio as philosophic method. This origin is twofold. It arises primarily from Cartesian pessimism about the relations of body and soul and the activities proceeding therefrom, the relations between sensation and intellection. According to Descartes, the body is an obstacle to knowledge, because sensations, originating in the body, are essentially organized in view of our needs and are fabricators; that is, they create objects that have no exterior existence and convince the intellect that they do exist extramentally. The second immediate source of the concrete use of doubt as a method is another pessimism, which Descartes professes about all men in their quest for truth: namely, that there are very few men who have sense enough to attain to truth, a fact attested by the innumerable errors with which popular knowledge and Scholastic philosophy abound. As a counterpart of this second pessimism, and basic to methodic doubt, is Descartes’ absolute confidence in his own intellect, a confidence that allowed him to throw out everything that had been said before him, being convinced of his ability to rediscover by himself, untaught by any other, the whole ensemble of truths to which the intellect can attain.

These are the origins of Cartesian doubt and the use Descartes made of it as method to discover the first principle of all metaphysics.

For St. Thomas, doubt is a state of mind and not an act of will ; unlike the will, the intellect is not free in face of evidence. Evidence forces the intellect’s assent, and assent is an activity proceeding solely from the intellect.

Being moved from outside is not contrary to the essential character of the intellect, as it is to the will ... instead, the working of the intellect can be against the inclination of man, which inclination is the will. For instance, some opinion may appeal to a person, yet he may be induced to assent to the contrary through his intellect. [Thomas, De veritate, 22, 5, ad 3]

The primary origin of doubt for St. Thomas is therefore not a decision made by the will but a lack of evidence in our knowledge of things. This lack of evidence serves only to reveal the structure of our intellect: made for truth and for all truths, the intellect cannot resist truth’s attraction, and that is why it is not free to refuse to see the truth or free to deny its assent to it. The mind is therefore not free to doubt. Lack of evidence and the nature of our intellect are the roots of the Thomistic dubitatio.

By examining the immediate origins of the use of dubitatio universalis as a philosophical method, we can see that none of the reasons that impelled Descartes to use his methodic doubt is applicable to dubitatio universalis as a philosophical method.

In the first place, St. Thomas is in no way pessimistic about the relations of body and soul; for without the body, the soul on earth is completely helpless, and would be just as helpless after death, if by substitution God did not provide what the soul would normally receive from the body. The body is entirely the soul’s instrument, an instrument it needs for all its operations, even those that are purely spiritual. This unpessimistic view of the peaceful and fruitful cohabitation of body and soul inevitably begets total optimism about the relations between sensation and intellection. Sensation is necessary not only as a starting point for all intellectual activity, but its presence is also necessary to explain the extent of its duration. There is no conflict between the sensible and the intelligible, but rather absolutely necessary harmony and cooperation. If pre-established harmony exists anywhere, it is certainly in the indissoluble marriage of sensibility and intelligibility, whose complementary character is essential to the very existence of human knowledge. And that is why, when St. Thomas makes use of dubitatio universalis as a principle of philosophical inquiry, he does not use it synonymously with Cartesian doubt, but as a synonym of the ignorance that begets admiratio, whose nature is entirely different from haesitatio, which is connected with voluntary activity and not with an act of vision.

There is no pessimism about the union of body and soul and the cooperation between sensation and intellection; neither is there pessimism about humanity as a whole in its quest for truth. Dubitatio universalis, far from being the result of Cartesian pessimism, springs from St. Thomas’ confidence in the intelligence of other men and in their competence to deal with subjects that they have long studied. As a counterpart to this social optimism, we find, not pessimism about individual intelligence, but a deep humility that leads St. Thomas to avow the poverty of the human intellect, a poverty preventing it from coming by itself to full bloom, to that euphoria, of sapience which is the fruit of intellectual riches accumulated and pooled through the ages. St. Thomas would have considered it a sin of presumption, the mother of error, to use dubitatio universalis as equivalent to Descartes’ methodic doubt.

Another benefit stems from revelation—the repression of presumption which is the mother of error. For there are people who presume so much on their own mental ability that they consider themselves capable of measuring the whole nature of things by their own intellects, being convinced that what appears so to them is entirely true, while what is not apparent to them is false. [C.G., I, 5]

Therefore, in the psychological origin of doubt and its use, we have found no reason to identify methodic doubt with dubitatio universalis. On the contrary, considering only the origin of these two doubts, we have found the nature and use of dubitatio universalis to have origins so completely different from those of Cartesian doubt that we must conclude that such an identification is impossible.

(b) Object and context of the dubitatio. Far from providing a possible basis for identification, the origins of methodic doubt and of dubitatio universalis show them to be irreconcilably opposed. Let us see whether their respective objects and contexts give more favorable grounds for establishing a similarity between them.

The first object of Cartesian doubt was the probable or conjectural, that is, everything depending upon dialectical and non-demonstrative arguments to which must be added all judgments concerned with sensible reality as such, since we can in no way trust the senses. But when Descartes decided to use doubt as the cathartic factor in his method, then the object of doubt came to be all existing human knowledge, even mathematical knowledge, since an evil genius or great deceiver could exist who might force us to err. Ultimately, therefore, doubt bears on the existence of all truth, since it applies to the very existence of things: “Here the chief concern is with the existing thing, does it exist?” Only one truth escapes doubt, the truth of the cogito, because to deny it would be to affirm it.

The context of such doubt is necessarily prescientific and pre-philosophic, since its aim is to discover the first principle of all philosophy and all science and since method must precede the science of which it is the method. The complete title of the Discourse clearly reveals the pre-scientific character of its method and, therefore, of the doubt that characterizes it: Discourse on Method in Order Rightly to Conduct the Reason and to Seek Truth in the Sciences.

It would take a sleight-of-hand artist to identify the object of dubitatio universalis with the object of Cartesian doubt. Here is the text used in support of this identification:

Other sciences consider truth in some particular way, hence it is their special function to exercise doubt on individual points; but this science [metaphysics] makes a universal study of truth, and so a universal doubt concerning truth pertains to it, hence it makes use of a doubt which is not particularized but universalized in all its aspects. [In III Metaph., lect. 1, nn. 343-344]

The difficulty in this passage centers upon the meaning of the word truth: Does it mean the truth of things, or of the mind? Is St. Thomas talking about the nature, or about the existence, of the truth of things or of the mind?

The truth which is the object of dubitatio universalis could not be the truth of the intellect, either in its existence or in its nature, for its existence is a per se notum that the mind cannot deny, and the nature of primary truth is such as to make discussion possible even with God. Furthermore, the nature of truth is the object of logic, whereas the truth discussed in this extract is the object of metaphysics.

Therefore, the truth that is the object of dubitatio universalis is the truth of things, which is proved by many other explicit statements made by St. Thomas in the very same place from which this passage is taken. Here are some of them:

First philosophy considers the universal truth of things [In II Metaph. l. 2, n. 274]... The word truth is not the exclusive characteristic of any species but is applicable in common to all beings... Hence, if we add to this deduction the fact that first philosophy considers causes, it follows, as we saw previously, that it considers the things that are most true. Hence it is in a special way the science of truth [In II Metaph. L. 2, n. 294]... And Aristotle first proceeds to show by way of disputation the points capable of being doubted concerning the truth of things... So he states initially that in the case of this science in which we seek first principles and the universal truth of things, we must first attack the matters to be doubted before truth may be determined.

If the truth discussed in the above text is the truth of things and not of the mind, the dubitatio in question is neither Cartesian doubt nor Thomistic doubt in the strict sense of the word; rather, it simply means the mirabile and should be translated by the words problem, question, aporia, inquiry, investigation. What this extract is discussing is the importance of asking the questions that should be asked when we are constructing a science, for the statement of the problems is central to the inquiry and even to the discovery of the mind’s truth.

If the object of methodic doubt cannot be identified with the object of dubitatio universalis, neither can their context, for the context of Cartesian doubt is pre-scientific and pre-philosophic, whereas the context of the Thomistic dubitatio is necessarily metaphysical. Let us go back to the text we quoted above. St. Thomas is contrasting the problems that any particular science sets itself with the questions metaphysics asks itself: the former are particular, whereas the latter are universal or common to all beings as such. The context is indeed metaphysical, not only because this text is from a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but because its very content requires a metaphysical context, for only metaphysics can consider being as being and resolve the problems or questions that an object sets before the mind.

There is in Thomism, as we shall see, an art of bene dubitare, an art of asking questions, of studying problems; for every problem is the object of a science, and problems vary according to the science. A science can ask questions only about the conclusions possible in this science and not about its principles, for each science receives its questions from metaphysics, whose function it is to determine which are the difficulties peculiar to each science: De illis enim a sapientibus determinandum est de quibus dubitatio est. Consequently, only metaphysics has the right to ask the most universal questions, that is, to inquire into the nature of being as being, to state all the difficulties that hinder the understanding of so difficult a truth. In this context the above quotation should be translated as follows: “It belongs to this science, which deals with all aspects of being as such, to consider the universal problems which such an object entails.” Such are the object and context of the Thomistic dubitatio universalis. They give us no reason to identify it with methodic doubt but again stress the diversity that we have already seen in studying the origin of these doubts.

(c) The aim or end of the dubitatio. For Descartes, doubt has a twofold purpose. First of all, it is a mental ascesis aiming to disincarnate the mind, to free it from sensory deceptions, and thus to display a radical sincerity in face of the problem of truth. But especially, it is a method to discover the first principle of philosophy, not a principle for distinguishing truth from error, but for discovering truth that is not yet known and substituting it for error. If this first principle is not discovered, no truth can ever exist, since truth and science are identical, and since all science depends upon the discovery of a first, unconditioned principle so unshakable that the wildest suppositions, even those of an evil genius or a deceiving God, could never impair it. What Cartesian doubt is seeking to establish as its end or aim is the very existence of truth and the possibility of the existence of all philosophy, for Cartesian science is linear and geometric. All its truths are homogeneous, and in order to exist, it must borrow evidence from the cogito, the sole source of evidence.

The end or aim of the Thomistic dubitatio universalis is neither a catharsis of the soul, for the soul must keep its sensory powers in order to know, nor the discovery of the first principle, for the first principle of human knowledge is not the object of inquiry or study but is immediately perceived as soon as being is present to the intellect. St. Thomas is not looking for a first principle in order to construct science or metaphysics, but, having seen it, he uses it to construct sciences and metaphysics. Were a skeptic or a Cartesian-type doubter to doubt the truth of this first principle, here is the answer St. Thomas would give him, after first remarking upon the doubter’s lack of knowledge and discipline.

Some people have said that it is possible for the same thing both to be and not be, in the same sense—and that it is possible to be convinced of this. Indeed this view is used by many natural philosophers, as will appear later. However, we now take as basic the truth of the principle which we have mentioned, namely that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be; in fact, from its truth we can show that it is most certain. [In IV Metaph., lect. 6, n. 607]

The end sought by dubitatio universalis is therefore in no way similar to the aim of methodic doubt. To discover its aim, we have to look on the side of the object and things, not on the side of the cogito.

The man who wishes to find a right answer must continue looking for a solution until there is no more room for doubt ... in all our efforts to solve difficulties, it seems to be customary to confine our inquiry to the refutation of opposing views rather than to the investigation of reality... But this is not enough. When a man wants to discover a true answer, he must not be satisfied with facing all available objections, he must diligently seek out the causes... This result is achieved when a man takes into consideration all the differences of things, on the basis of which the question may be answered. [In De caelo et mundo, lect. 22, n. 10]

Such is the radical sincerity required by the Thomistic dubitatio. This sincerity concerns things, because in Thomism it is things that bestow their truth upon man, and not man who endows things with truth. A Thomist’s first duty toward truth is to respect the nature of things and to extend them complete hospitality. When, by diligent inquiry, he has besought all the aspects of the nature of things to come into his soul, the Thomist possesses truth. This is the end of the dubitatio universalis: to ask questions about the nature of being ut sic in order to possess all truth about beings as being.

The conclusion of this study of the dubitatio is obvious. If Monsignor Noël hopes to solve his mirabile by reconciling two philosophic methods through the identification of methodic doubt with dubitatio universalis de veritate, this reconciliation is impossible. Not in their origins, their objects, their contexts, or their ends do Cartesian methodic doubt and Thomistic dubitatio universalis resemble one another. Far from resembling each other, they oppose and destroy each other.

2. Cartesian Cogito versus Thomistic Reflexio. The second factor that, according to Monsignor Noël, makes Thomistic realism a critical philosophy is the analytical function of the reflexio, which plays a role analogous to that of the Cartesian cogito:

There is a celebrated passage which, from the depth of the Middle Ages, seems to echo modern critique... Coming back upon its act, the mind in reflecting becomes aware of the proportion between its act and things. What else is this but the critical reflection we were speaking of a while ago? The intellect turns back upon itself, it grasps its own act; this is indeed the cogito and the starting point of critique. [Le réalisme immédiat]

To facilitate this comparison between the cogito and reflection, we shall study their respective functions in the construction of a philosophy and their nature, i.e., the object they treat.

(a) The function of the cogito and of the reflexio. The cogito has a very precise function in Cartesianism. It is the first principle of science and philosophy; it is the sole source of all our certitudes. Every truth that does not spring from the cogito and does not hark back to it is not truth but probability and conjecture. Thus, it is a principle both as starting point of philosophical knowledge and as generative source of all human truths that we can acquire, for it is the sole rule by which all must be measured.

Reflexio, Monsignor Noël tells us, can play the same role, for it is a judgment objectified by the esse of some reality, a judgment that can be used to define the formal conditions of truth at the same time that it reveals truth’s existence to us. This judgment is a natural certitude, the affirmation of an existence. It is a question of verifying this affirmation by an analysis that will discover in it both a self and a non-self and the law governing their relationship—the law by which the self tends toward the non-self, which is the very nature of truth. Reflexio gives us the definition of truth, and that is why it is the foundation of philosophy.

According to Monsignor Noël, this analysis of the reflexio should stand at the threshold of philosophy, since the latter presupposes it. It should normally be a part of logic, since logic precedes philosophy, of which it is the instrument, and defines the nature of truth and falsity. But logic is not the foundation of philosophy, and although it defines the nature of truth, it does not defend the nature of truth when attacked. The problem of critique is a problem of verification and of defending the very nature of truth; it is a matter of discovering the first principle of Thomistic philosophy and not of discussing the formal conditions of truth. Here is how St. Thomas solves such a problem:

The metaphysician ought to dispute against those who deny the principles of the special sciences, since all principles are founded on this principle: that affirmation and negation are not simultaneously true, and that there is no middle position between them... Now, the true and the false belong properly to the thinking of the logician... However, error concerning the true and the false is a consequence of error concerning being and non-being (circa esse et non esse): for the true and the false are defined in terms of to be and not to be.... Therefore, if we have destroyed the errors concerning to be and not to be, we have as a consequence destroyed those connected with the true and the false. [In IV Metaph. lect 17, n. 736]

If the reflexio of which Monsignor Noël speaks is a logical analysis whose function it is to reveal the nature of truth, and if the nature of truth is challenged by an adversary, it will not be up to logic to verify the truth, to vindicate it; this is uniquely the privilege of the metaphysician. In Thomism it is not the reflexio that lays the foundations of metaphysics and vindicates it; rather it is metaphysics that founds and vindicates reflexio. For St. Thomas, the realism of knowledge is neither established nor proved at the threshold of metaphysics; the office of doorkeeper given to reflexio is performed in his philosophical synthesis by the principle of contradiction.

To give to reflexio the importance the cogito has in Cartesianism, to make it play the role of first principle and sole source of human knowledge, is to transform this reflexio in such a way that it is no longer Thomistic but becomes the Cartesian cogito.

(b) The nature or object of the cogito and of reflection. The object of the Cartesian cogito is the self, and because it deals with the self, it has an existential truth value possessed by no other judgment: “Since I cannot think unless I exist, I cannot doubt unless I exist,” etc. The distinctive nature of the cogito’s truth is owing to thought’s not needing to go outside the thinking self in order to discover an existence. The fact of thought itself implies and makes evident the existence of the Ego, the only existence over which error has no hold.

Compare this object of the cogito with that of reflexio, or the term to which it leads. The other to which analysis of reflection leads is the first subject Aristotle speaks of in his Categories, and its independent presence dominates us. Now, supposing that analysis of reflexio, transformed into the cogito, really could lead us to the individual substance that confronts the knowing subject and is its object, could we say that this knowledge is only common-sense knowledge? In Thomism, it is not common-sense realism that forms the foundation of philosophical realism; rather, it is the latter that vindicates common-sense realism. Common-sense realism deals with being as sensible, therefore with a mode of being; whereas the object of metaphysics is being as being and thus includes all beings and all modes of being. And being as being is not vindicated by appealing to the existence of material substance, but by vertical ascent to the sole and necessary cause of all being, God as Creator.

Descartes can ascend to God by starting from the cogito, because in this cogito he finds existing an idea of perfection of which he himself could not be the cause. St. Thomas ascends to God by starting with an imperfect being, and metaphysics reveals to him the imperfection of being and the reason for this imperfection. To start from reflexio in order to arrive at the first subject mentioned by Aristotle, in his Categories, and to claim that metaphysics is based upon this primary knowledge, is to turn Thomism upside down.

41 Conclusion on Monsignor Noël’s Attempt. Monsignor Noël’s attempt to reconcile Cartesianism and Thomism did not meet with much success. Comparison upon two essential points, methodic doubt and the cogito, has shown them to be antinomic. The more they are studied, the more irreconcilable they are seen to be. Far from disappearing, the mirabile with which Monsignor Noël began his inquiry became progressively more dense as analysis of dubitatio universalis and reflexio revealed their contents and functions to be repugnant to the contents and functions of the methodic doubt and cogito of Descartes. Monsignor Noël has to give a tendentious interpretation of dubitatio universalis in order to make it play the role of doubt, and he is obliged to change the nature of the Cartesian cogito in order to compare it with the reflexio of St. Thomas. He has to use the cogito of the Meditations as point of comparison, not that of the Discourse, for the latter is closed, whereas the former is open; that is, besides the mind, there is the object, there is esse.

He also has to transfer to the threshold of philosophy a reflexio that, in Thomism, in no way smacks of an introduction to philosophy.

The pre-occupations of critique were fundamentally foreign to the mediaeval mind... When St. Thomas asks us to reflect upon our intellectual experience and to account for the truth that is in us, he is not thinking that this reflection must necessarily precede all philosophical certitude. So the question is... is it possible, without so distorting the Master’s teaching as to essentially falsify it, is it possible, I say, to transfer to the threshold of philosophy the reflection he prescribes? [Noël, Le réalisme immédiate]

Therefore, if the Thomistic dubitatio is in no way Cartesian, if the reflexio is not a philosophical threshold and can never become one without presupposing the philosophy whose threshold it is held to be, what do Cartesian critique and Thomistic realism have in common? Only the forced and untenable similarities that Monsignor Noël has traced between the two doctrines. This attempted reconciliation has had the concrete result of turning the Cartesian cogito into a cognosco which is anti-Cartesian, and of turning Thomism into pseudo-Cartesianism. A third account has replaced the other two without having the internal coherence of the narratives it has distorted in order to substitute itself for them.

B. Father Marechal: Thomistic critique and Kantian critique

We have seen that the attempt to reconcile the metaphysical position of St. Thomas with the Cartesian position came to naught. Instead of revealing their supposed identity of nature behind the diversity in their points of view, a comparison of components produced the opposite result. This second attempt is just as vigorous and honest as the first, and at an even more difficult level, because it involves the Critique of Pure Reason on the one hand and the whole of Thomistic metaphysics on the other. The works in which Father Maréchal’s thought is to be found are Le point de départ de la métaphysique (especially Cahier V, Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique) and three articles that appeared successively in the Revue néoscolastique de philosophie.

The following extract amply shows that Father Maréchal’s aim was to reconcile the two contrary positions concerning the existence of metaphysics and is therefore the first hypothesis described above.

Followed through, these two critical methods, which approach the same total object from complementary angles, come finally to identical conclusions; for the old critique starts off by postulating the ontological Object, which includes the transcendental Subject, and modern Critique posits the transcendental Subject whose postulate is the ontological Object. [Le point de départ de la métaphysique: abstraction ou intuition]

Like Monsignor Noël, Father Maréchal wanted to transfer to the threshold of metaphysics that which, in Thomism, is actually at its heart, or, again, to “transpose the Thomistic critique of knowledge to the transcendental mode.” To transpose an ontological mode to a transcendental mode and to harmonize them is a work requiring an inspired orchestrator, and Father Maréchal brought to the task all his talent as a philosopher and his profound knowledge of both the doctrines he was trying to reconcile.

Here, briefly, are the general outlines of this orchestration, which, being governed by the nature of the problem of critique itself, must have its starting point in analysis or reflection, a psychological attitude toward this starting point, and critique in the strict sense of the word, whose two essential phases are transcendental analysis and transcendental deduction. Agreement between the two critical methods must be established, therefore, upon the three following points:

1. The starting point of critique in experience of the object according to Kant and according to St. Thomas.
2. The attitude of Kant and of St. Thomas at the starting point.
3. Transcendental critique of the subject and of the object.

Let us try to see, by comparing these three aspects of critique, how, according to Father Maréchal, the ontological Object includes the transcendental Subject, and the transcendental Subject postulates the ontological Object.

1. The Starting Point: Experience of the Object. That experience is the starting point for every critical analysis of knowledge presents no difficulty to the philosopher, for only that which consciously exists in the knower can be analyzed or criticized, and the object must necessarily be immanent to the analyst and critic. A few passages will show us how this position is common to both philosophers whose doctrines we are examining here.

There, can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses, partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and by combining or separating them, work up the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience. In the order of time therefore, we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins. [Critique of pure reason, Introd.]

That the object awakens our knowing powers and puts them into action is, we might say, the fundamental theme of all Thomist epistemology, for our powers exist, as knowing, only insofar as the object is present: “A potency must first be brought to bear on an object before it can be directed to its own act; indeed the act of a potency must be understood before one grasps its reflection on that act.”

But is Kantian experience the same as Thomistic experience? Thomistic experience depends entirely upon sensibility for its existence, both in its principle or starting point and in its term or point of arrival. Even when experience deals with non-sensible realities, there must be sensation, to prevent experience from staying at the image level, by negation of this image itself. In a certain sense Thomistic experience is always empirical, even experience of God: for it is always the result of the immediate presence of an existent, whether the existence is its own or that of another. Kantian experience, too, is always empirical, but it is not convertible with human knowledge, for some knowledge has nothing to do with experience. Experience is the source of a posteriori knowledge, but a priori knowledge is completely independent of experience, not only of actual experience of an exterior reality, but of every previous experience that could have produced in our mind a universal knowledge drawn from actual experience. Here are a few significant quotations from the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. “But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge supplies for itself” [Ibid.]. If this knowledge, purely the product of our intellectual faculty, exists, it is distinct from that knowledge we receive from sensible impressions. This latter is called “empirical, which has its sources a posteriori, that is in experience,” whereas the other type of knowledge, called a priori, is “not knowledge independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience [Ibid.].

What is the criterion for these two types of knowledge, one of which is empirical, or results from experience, and the other a priori, from which experience is completely excluded: “Experience teaches us that a thing is so and so, but not that it cannot be otherwise”[Ibid.] Thus, it lacks necessity and universality. Even if it can attain to a certain universality by induction, this universality always implies possible exceptions; whereas, “Necessity and strict universality are sure criteria of a priori knowledge, and are inseparable of one another” [Ibid.] Consequently, we can conclude that all knowledge characterized by strict universality and necessity does not come from experience, that it is therefore not empirical knowledge but purely a product of the mind—it is a priori knowledge. Notice that this purely mental product is not the result of abstraction from sensible impressions but is consequent upon the very nature of our understanding itself, a creative spontaneity that, upon the occasion of sensible impressions, produces a priori knowledge from itself.

Let us compare a typical case of this kind of knowledge in Kantianism and in Thomism. Our knowledge of the principle of contradiction is certainly characterized by strict universality and necessity, both for St. Thomas and for Kant. For St. Thomas it is the first principle par excellence, for Kant, “the highest principle of all analytic judgements. Without worrying, for the moment, about the function of the two principles in these two doctrines, let us examine only their origin. According to Kant, this principle cannot originate in sensation, since it is pre-eminently the analytical principle of all a priori knowledge. According to St. Thomas, its origin is in experience, for it can be drawn from no other source. The principle of contradiction is evidently not identical with sensation or with processes that go from sensation to principle by means of imagination and memory of experience. It surpasses sensation by the full height of the intellect, but it is not produced by a spontaneous intellective activity occasioned by sensation, for it is in and by sensation that it exists. And while it is the effect of an act of our intellective power, it is not purely a creation of this power, but the consequence of its working upon a sense datum.

It must therefore be concluded that although experience is necessarily the starting point for every critique of human knowledge, it is not identical for St. Thomas and for Kant. According to the latter, experience is only an occasional point of departure, whereas for the former it is the sole and total starting point of all human knowledge, be it singular or universal, contingent or necessary. The following passage, which is repeated many times by St. Thomas, is enough to establish the fundamental opposition between Thomism. and Kantianism: “It is impossible for a perfect judgment to be made concerning any item of knowledge without reducing it to the principle whence it sprang... But since every item of intellectual knowledge arises from sensation, there can be no right judgment without a reduction to sensation” [In IV Sent., 9, 1, 4, sol. 1]. This does not mean a corporeal dependence upon sensation, but a dependence upon it as upon a measure: “...intellectual judgment does not depend on sense because this act is performed through a sense organ; sensation is required as an ultimate limit to which a reduction can be made” [De veritate, 12, 3, ad 3].

Where do these diverse conceptions of experience come from? From their notion of the object. For Kant, the only objects are appearances or phenomenal objects, therefore, those which are given over to absolute becoming and can be present to us only under the forms of unstable, intemporal, and a-spatial impressions. But such an object cannot explain the stable and permanent element either in sensible intuition or in thought. Thus, when necessity and universality are found in our knowledge, this knowledge cannot be empirical, i.e., begotten by experience or sensation. It must come from elsewhere, and this elsewhere can only be the subject and its transcendental a priori laws. Thomistic experience of the object is the simultaneous experience of a noumenal and phenomenal object, whereas Kant’s experience of the object is, and can only be, phenomenal. Why does Kant exclude the noumenon from the objects of experience? Because he was awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, who ascribed to belief everything that depends upon substance and deemed only brute facts to be true knowledge. By this exclusion, Hume destroyed metaphysical truth as scientific truth, and this was the starting point for Kantian critique. The object of metaphysics does not exist because we do not know it; but we do believe it: “The holding of a thing to be true, or the subjective validity of the judgement... if it be only subjectively sufficient, and is at the same time taken as being objectively insufficient, we have what is termed believing; ...when the holding of a thing to be true is sufficient both objectively and subjectively, it is knowledge.

Can it be said that this starting point is the same for the two critiques in question? Yes, if the starting point is restricted to a cogito, i.e., to the experience of a phenomenon of knowledge without reference to its content. But neither Kant nor St. Thomas takes knowledge without content as a point of departure for his reflection; for on Father Maréchal’s own admission, Kantian experience has a phenomenal content, while Thomistic experience contains both phenomenon and noumenon. Consequently, we must conclude that the starting point differs for these two philosophers and that, in this respect at least, their critiques of knowledge cannot be reconciled.

2. The Kantian and Thomistic Psychological Attitude at the Starting Point of Critique. “A critique does not necessarily veto metaphysics; a critique does not prejudge the absolute value of its object” [Maréchal, Le point de départ]. What we have just seen concerning experience of the object in these two definitions of experience can but leave us skeptical about the possibility of the absolute neutrality of Kant and St. Thomas with respect to metaphysical truth. Let us see whether this neutrality exists on either side. What is the psychological attitude of Kant and of St. Thomas toward truth, since this is the matter in question?

Now the proper problem of pure reason is contained in the question: How are a priori synthetic judgements possible? ...In the solution of the problem, we are at the same time deciding as to the possibility of the employment of pure reason in establishing and developing all those sciences which contain a theoretical a priori knowledge of objects, and have therefore to answer the questions:

      How is pure mathematics possible?
      How is pure science of nature possible?

Since these sciences actually exist, it is quite proper to ask how they are possible; for that they must be possible is proved by the fact that they exist. But the poor progress which has hitherto been made in metaphysics, and the fact that no system yet propounded can, in view of the essential purpose of metaphysics, be said really to exist, leaves everyone sufficient ground for doubting as to its possibility. [Ibid.]

Therefore, Kantian critique does not start from zero; it does not start from universal doubt; nor does it question the existence of truth. Its distinctive problem is not, What is truth? Instead, since the existence of scientific truth is a fact, Kant asks: How is this possible? This question concerning the possibility of scientific truth is normally asked only about already existing truths: “Since these sciences [mathematics and physics] exist, it is quite proper to ask how are they possible.” But metaphysical truth does not exist. How then can it be the object of Critique? Solely because we have a natural disposition to ask questions that go beyond our experience, i.e., necessary and universal questions. What we should ask ourselves is: How is metaphysics as a natural disposition possible? But this natural disposition to ask questions that go beyond experience has, up to now, found no satisfaction, because all the solutions given are contradictory. Thus, we must find out scientifically, once and for all, whether this natural disposition corresponds to a real object and whether reason can or cannot grasp it. This in turn leads to critique’s ultimate question: How is metaphysics as a science possible?

Psychologically, Kant begins his inquiry into how scientific truth is possible certain that he will discover how mathematical science and pure physics are possible, certain, too, that he will discover how metaphysics is possible as a natural disposition, since it exists necessarily. But he also begins assured that the only metaphysical science we can have is a transcendental illusion, since he excludes from human experience the very object of metaphysics, the noumenon. Let us see whether, according to Father Maréchal, this attitude corresponds to the attitude St. Thomas would have had on the same subject.

It is rather surprising to find that Father Maréchal attributes to St. Thomas a psychological attitude very different from the one we have just noted in Kant’s own words. According to Father Maréchal, St. Thomas would have started his critique by decreeing that “at the risk of being incurably dogmatic, metaphysics must begin with a general critique of knowledge; that is, by deliberate and unprejudiced examination of the spontaneous movement that draws the mind towards what we call the true.” He would have adopted a negative and expectant attitude, a universal methodic doubt toward the existence of the true, in order to experiment with its logical possibility or impossibility. If it were supposed that St. Thomas’ attitude at the beginning of his metaphysics really was that of universal methodic doubt, his starting point would still be undeniably different from Kant’s, since the latter starts with the existence of scientific truth in order to ask himself how and not if it is possible. We must therefore conclude that, on this second aspect of critique, there is no agreement between these two thinkers.

3. Transcendental Analysis of the Subject and the Object. Kant insists rather curiously that his work is not a “system of pure reason, not a doctrine,” but a propaedeutic to a system or doctrine of pure reason, a propaedeutic whose name is “critique” and whose function “ought only to be negative, not to extend but only to clarify our reason and keep it free from errors.” The proper object of critique is therefore not the analysis of the object of knowledge but “the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.”This mode of knowledge is twofold: it is “pure intuition... contains only the form under which something is intuited; the pure concept is only the form of the thought of an object in general.” This analysis of the modes of our knowledge and not of its objects or content is accomplished by transcendental logic, which has nothing to do with empirical principles and borrows nothing from psychology. This transcendental logic is divided into two parts, of which the “Analytics” studies the concepts and principles of understanding insofar as they make possible scientific knowledge of phenomena, i.e., mathematics and physics. The “Dialectics” studies the concepts and principles of pure reason insofar as they are the known but inevitable source of metaphysical illusion.

In Thomism we are accustomed to hearing the words concept and principles, and to defining them in terms of object and objective knowledge. This is never the case with Kant, for a transcendental critique does not analyze the concept by dissecting its content in order to make it more clear, more distinct, etc., but consists in a “dissection of the faculty of understanding itself, in order to investigate the possibility of concepts a priori by looking for them in the understanding alone as their birth place, and by analyzing the pure use of this faculty... We shall therefore follow up the pure concepts to their first seeds and dispositions in the human understanding in which they lie prepared, until on the occasion of experience they are developed and by the same understanding are exhibited in their purity, freed from the empirical conditions attaching to them.

It is hard to imagine a Thomist whose analysis of concepts would be an analysis of pure form, even in formal logic. For, in Thomism, concepts, judgments, reasonings are all considered in their universality, particularity, or individuality, thus in their subjective condition, in the mode of existence they have as known, but with a reference, at least implicit, to reality considered in its concrete existence; otherwise, the words universality, particularity, individuality would have no meaning. Even in formal logic, forms, modi intelligendi, refer to experience, to empirical knowledge. Thomistic concepts may be transcendentally analyzed in the sense that they are in reference to an absolute of being, but this dynamic reference exists only because all these realities, despite their subjective or intentional existence, have an ontological content that explains their requirements as absolute or as being.

The Thomistic concept may indeed be considered as a pure possible; the noumenon or formal object of metaphysics may be considered to be “perfectly universal being and also, since the logical properties of universality and necessity are correlative, a being that is unconditionally necessary as being-in a word, the absolute of being.” This makes it adaptable, perhaps, to a metaphysics constructed upon a transcendental mode, but unfortunately it in no way corresponds to Thomistic being as being, or to the Thomistic concept of it. Furthermore, it does not turn it into a Kantian a priori concept.

The a priori may also be defined as the formal object of the ontological faculties and not only as a logical function, but to make this addition is completely to forsake the Kantian point of view for a realist point of view. And to identify the formal object with the faculty itself, with its first act, as if it were a hollow prefiguration of the general form of the object that will be its natural complement, is to transform into Kantian or subjective realities that which, for St. Thomas, characterizes exterior realities. Moreover, it is to transform these characteristics of the transcendental subject by giving them a window to the real, which Kant does not give them. For the opening of the Kantian a priori to an objective world of noumena is a glance at a world that is illusory by definition.

For here we have to do with a natural and inevitable illusion which, rests on subjective principles, and foists them upon us as objective... There exists, then, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason... one inseparable from human reason and which, even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will not cease to play tricks with reason and continually entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again calling for correction.

Conclusion to Chapter 3

We do not need to seek out the causes that led Father Maréchal to attempt a reconciliation of Kant’s transcendental critique with the ontological critique of St. Thomas. That would make a stimulating chapter in the history of epistemology, constituting a special mirabile whose solution would be highly interesting and full of surprises. But in our context, that is, in classifying Father Maréchal’s work as an attempt to conciliate the Kantian conceptions of the critique of knowledge with the Thomistic, we are obliged to conclude that his work, whose aim was to reveal the complementary aspects of the two epistemologies, ends in a complete rejection of both the Critique of Pure Reason and Thomistic metaphysics. The contents of Father Maréchal’s Cahier V, and of the articles cited, are neither Thomistic nor Kantian; the Neo-Scholastic philosopher is narrating a third story, a story that replaces the original dialogue between St. Thomas and Kant about metaphysical truth, and rejects them both. We are faced with a Maréchalist epistemology, as completely foreign to the Critique of Pure Reason as it is to a Thomistic position on the problem of human knowledge.

Being a Thomist and therefore a realist, this Neo-Scholastic philosopher realized that he was caught in a vicious circle. He had to renounce either the metaphysics he professed or the scientific character of this philosophy. Such, as we have seen, is the true epistemological problem facing contemporary Thomistic philosophers. We have seen the nightmare caused by this situation and the progressive feeling of guilt that developed among realist philosophers as they perceived their “critical” nudity. We have noted their numerous visits to that fashionable tailor, idealism. These prolonged fittings at the idealist clothier were supposed to put Thomists right in style, but they have emerged wearing Nessian tunics that have deprived them of all freedom of motion. This new uniform has become the Thomist’s prison, and every attempt to escape has accentuated his nudity the more, for he is now minus both Thomistic truth and the garment of idealism. Let us try to investigate the causes of this awful dream, whose incidents Van Riet has so scrupulously reported, and the frightful confusions they have sown in contemporary Thomistic philosophy.

A. The causes of Thomistic confusion

Descartes’ identification of Scholastic philosophy with popular knowledge, or so-called common sense, produced among Neo-Scholastic thinkers a sort of abscessed fixation, which they have been unable to heal. They fear this identification, but they accept it. How else explain the importance they attach to the realism of popular knowledge, whose vindication would make their philosophy critical in the Cartesian or Kantian sense of the word? To show that popular knowledge is realist is like breaking down a door already open, for neither Descartes, nor Kant, nor modern scientists deny it; it has even been established that all science has this realism as its starting point. But to admit the realism of popular knowledge is not to prove its scientific character. That is why everyone, beginning with Aristotle and St. Thomas, grants its realism and denies that it is scientific. To say that popular knowledge is scientific knowledge is to destroy the essential constituent of classical epistemology, namely, that to know scientifically is to know by causes. The fascination generated by the Cartesian identification of realist philosophy with popular knowledge must be shaken off, and our philosophy must be shown to be a wisdom. That is the aim of epistemology.

The second source of confusion among Neo-Scholastic epistemologists is that they have forgotten the very sources of idealism. Idealism sprang from the postulate that metaphysics does not exist because it has always begotten skepticism. A method starting from the nonexistence of metaphysical truth, by reason of this truth’s lack of unity, and seeking the causes of this nonexistence in the name of either a mathematical or physical criterion can only construct an epistemology that vindicates mathematics and physics and makes metaphysics impossible. For the possible applications of a method are exactly correlative to the evidence that is its starting point: everything that is unknowable by means of this evidential principle is unknowable by this method.

B. The consequences of this confusion

If “they shall sow wind, and reap a whirlwind,” he who sows confusion harvests even greater confusion. That is the verdict concluding Van Riet’s exhaustive investigations into our subject.

But there remains one discipline whose status has not yet been established... This is epistemology... Today we are still discussing its object and its method, the problems it entails and its place in a systematic philosophy: even its name is not universally accepted. [L’Epistémologie thomiste]

Here is a list of the different confusions existing among Neo-Scholastic epistemologists.

1. Confusion About the Name. This treatise is variously called: logica major, materialis, critica, epistemology, criteriology, gnosiology, theory of knowledge, immediate realism that is pre-critical, critical, methodic, philosophical, metaphysical, natural. Thirteen names for a single reality!

2. Confusion About the Place of this Treatise in Philosopby. It is a part of logic, of psychology, or is in the orbit of metaphysics, of which it is the threshold, the first, the second, or the last part. or else it is identical with metaphysics of which it is either the reverse side or the continual and perpetual verification. Eight different topographies for a single treatise!

3. Confusion About the Objects or Problems of Epistemology. These are: the certitude value and the reality value of all types of human knowledge, of human knowledge in general, of an act of human knowledge, of that of first principles; the reality value, but not the certitude, of human knowledge in general. Four objects for one same discipline!

4. Confusion About the Method. The method is apologetic, methodic or reflective, critical, transcendental.

Van Riet explains the chaotic state of Neo-Scholastic epistemology by its over-exclusive attachment to history:

From the very birth of the Neo-Scholastic movement, but especially today, the philosophical character of epistemology has been compromised by the ever increasing importance it assigns to history... On the one hand, epistemology tends to look for its problems in non-Thomist philosophies, as if its sole object were to refute them. But on the other hand, and for the same reason, it cannot be interested exclusively in the doctrine of St. Thomas.... Thomist epistemology can no more expect the texts of St. Thomas alone to supply it with questions, or to indicate the answers it must give, than it can seek the exclusive sources of its problems in non-Thomistic systems. A philosophical discipline, it must free itself of historical contingencies whatever they may be. [Ibid.]

This explanation seems to explain nothing. If the epistemology in question exists neither in the writings nor in the thought of St. Thomas, why call it Thomistic? If it is Thomistic, it will naturally look for its problems and answers where Thomism has the best chance of existing, that is, in the works of St. Thomas, and will naturally combat and refute the born enemies of this doctrine. It cannot be disinterested in history. With all due respect to Professor Van Riet, the incoherencies plaguing Neo-Scholastic epistemology have been produced, not by history, but by its own deficiencies in philosophy which should be pointed out in this conclusion.

By its history, epistemology is necessarily linked to the problem of infallible truth. The problem of truth is always complex, for to be intelligible, it requires a self, an interior non-self, and an exterior non-self. (This may be jargon, but it is the terminology preferred by the Neo-Scholastics.) The problem is always stated by the subject or the self, so the self always comes into the picture. Furthermore, the self can state a problem only by virtue of a certain duality in the self, therefore, by means of a duplication of self that exists simultaneously as experience and as object. This duality poses no problem, because it is the very evidence of the cogito, of ideas, i.e., of the real non-self. The problem concerns the non-self and can be stated in four ways:

1. How can we know that the non-self or the other-in-me really and actually corresponds to an exterior non-self? This question generates criteriologies or the quest for evidential criteria. A whole series of Neo-Scholastic epistemologies have asked this problem and have tried to solve it. It is, moreover, a genuine problem.
2. The second possible question is: In how many ways can the non-self exist in me? This real problem of the multiplicity of truths, of their evidence and certitude, has been the object of several epistemologists.
3. The third can be stated as follows: What is the relationship between the interior non-self and the exterior non-self? This again is a real problem, concerning not the evidence or certitude of truth, for they are properties of truth, but the very nature of truth, its quodquid est. This might be said to be the most important problem of epistemology, for the other two problems presuppose it to be solved, since the properties or qualities of a reality flow from this reality and presuppose it.
4. The fourth and last question: Is the self made for the non-self, or does truth exist? To ask this question is to cease philosophizing, for it indicates that by dint of disillusionment and many quests for truth that ended in error, one has become a skeptic. Skeptics have asked this question, as have several Neo-Scholastics, but it was never asked by Descartes or by Kant. Descartes started from an existing truth whose nature he used as criterion for discovering the first principles of metaphysics: he started from mathematical truth. Kant started from two existing truths to construct his critique: mathematical truth, and the truth of pure physics. When, by virtue of the principle of a radical pseudo-sincerity, St. Thomas is considered a universal, even a methodic, doubter, he is also considered an imbecile who disobeys his own first law concerning the questions the human intellect can and cannot ask. For what is unknown has never been a problem to anyone, and truth is knowable only insofar as it exists, for it exists only in the human soul. Knowing that certain truths exist, we can ask ourselves whether they are scientific, whether they are philosophical, whether they are popular, etc., but we cannot ask whether truth exists before we have experienced truth, that is, before it exists. Therefore, this is not a genuine question.

It is chiefly because it has asked itself this fourth question that Neo-Scholastic epistemology has descended into a chaos reminiscent of the one described in Genesis, but without the “Spirit of God moving over the waters.” Neither history, idealism, nor Thomism, has prevented this discipline from finding its place, its name, its object and method, but rather the fact that it starts by asking a question that makes no philosophical sense. It has been said that idealism has taught Thomism a great deal! One thing it has not taught many neo-Thomist epistemologists is how to ask a question. Let us see what Kant has to say about this, if what St. Thomas teaches us is not enough. The question is to be asked, not about the existence of truth, but about its nature:

The question, famed of old, by which logicians were supposed to be driven into a corner, obliged either to have recourse to a pitiful sophism, or to confess their ignorance and consequently the emptiness of their whole art, is the question: What is truth? ... To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath. [Critique of pure reason]

The spectacle of our contemporary philosophy is just as ridiculous as the incident Kant alludes to, for it will never be able to extract from idealism the milk of philosophical method, nor will its Thomism ever be able to hold a sieve to this method. Our nightmare has already lasted too long; it is time that we came out of it, unless we want to justify the idealists and skeptics of all times, for whom our metaphysics has always been a transcendental illusion. Let us ask St. Thomas, the angel of metaphysical genius, to show us the true philosophic method.

CHAPTER 4
THE ANGELIC DOCTOR’S METHOD

The rational principles of the syllogism and of definition play the same role in defining and syllogizing that the artistic standards to which the artist must look, do in the art process. Now the artist who makes a knife does not produce the standard which governs his work; rather, be examines whether the knife is well made in accord with the standard which he has in mind. [In II Post. Anal., lect. 5, n. 4]

Before attempting a study of the philosophic method used by St. Thomas in constructing his synthesis, we should briefly review what we have learned from the three preceding analyses, since each of these analyses deals with the nature of a problem and with the basic attitudes of the human mind in search of truth.

In the first chapter we learned three universal laws governing all our cognitive activities. The first is the incoercible desire for truth, a desire that haunts our soul and is expressed by our instinctive flight from ignorance and error the moment we become aware of their presence. The second law governs the activities consequent upon this desire for truth; it organizes the steps we take in discovering knowledge, steps that are normally a continual reflective interchange between the universe we know and the universe that is, in order to reconcile the different accounts reality gives of itself when we are its guests. The third law has to do with the results of our steps toward knowledge. If these results are positive—if man succeeds in resolving the contradiction between these accounts, dissolves their differences, and discovers a new truth, a truth more complete than those preceding it—then confidence in our intellectual powers increases, its methods of research improve, and there results one of those magnificent syntheses that have nourished the human mind for centuries.

If, however, his search for truth fails, if man cannot see where truth is to be found in the discordant stories he hears, then he doubts; that is, he refuses to take sides with either one or the other narrator in order to avoid error, which is a greater evil than the ignorance of which doubt is an admission. Therefore, doubt is not synonymous with error, but with a vaccine against error. If doubt accumulates, if man fails repeatedly in his search for truth, then he may become disillusioned, for his incoercible and seemingly unsatisfiable desire for truth becomes absurd to him. This disillusionment is called “skepticism,” which is a disease of the mind, and error par excellence, since it makes a man lose the taste for truth, in the same sense that we say a man loses the taste for food; he dies in the disinterested quest of that for which we are made.

The modern epistemological experiment teaches us a second lesson and shows us what not to do if we wish to discover philosophical truth; it gives us the rules for how not to philosophize. The first rule is as follows: To identify doubt with error is to identify the fear of error with error, the vaccine with the disease. The second rule flows from the first: To inoculate oneself with doubt is not to cure the disease but to contract it. Disease is an evil and not a cure; therefore, doubt as a method, instead of being an infallible cure for skepticism, only makes it worse, as the history of Cartesianism has decisively proved. The third rule: When doubt is identified with error, and when what is doubtful to me is considered equal to what is doubtful in itself, no criterion of truth and error remains but my mind, which thus becomes the rule of truth, and the cogito remains the only logical position from which to construct a philosophy. Fourth rule: If my mind is the only source of truth, it is also the only source of error. Consequently, it must be put on trial to defend itself, that is, to account for the existence of error. In such a context, every philosophic method becomes an analysis of our capacity to err and not an analysis of our power to attain to truth. The fifth rule deals with the results of the suit brought against the mind by method. The verdict may be not guilty, once the human soul is considered as a pure spirit, endowed with ideas and truths from the first moment of its existence: In this case, error is imputed to the body and education. The verdict may be guilty, when the soul is defined, not as a pure spirit filled with ideas, but as a Platonic Demiurgos whose creative power can draw from its spontaneity all ideas and forms, but not the matter these forms animate, which must be supplied by sensibility. This creator of a priori forms keeps on creating even in the absence of matter, and these creations are transcendental illusions: it creates errors. The life of a pure spirit entombed in a deceitful body, the life of a Demiurgos condemned to transcendental illusion, such is the life of a Cartesian and Kantian man, such is the philosophy born of their method.

The third and last lesson is drawn from the Neo-Scholastic experiment. Here are its essential points: Adherents of a philosophy that conceives man to be neither angel nor Demiurgos, a philosophy wherein what is doubtful to me is in no way synonymous with what is doubtful in itself, are supremely illogical in adopting a philosophic method consisting essentially in criticism of the angel or Demiurge for the constant disillusionment (skepticism) that it causes the human soul. For any such adherent, philosophic method should normally be conceived in relation to man proceeding toward truth. If there is a trial, it will be a trial of human truths, not of the disillusions caused by an angelic spirit or a demiurgic creator of a priori forms.

It is in the light of these lessons that we shall approach the study of the epistemological problem as St. Thomas saw and solved it. Our procedure in this chapter will be the same as that in the three preceding chapters. A first section will deal with the genesis of the problem caused by the opposition between the familiar account given by Augustinian theology and the surprising narrative told by Aristotelian cosmology; the second section will study the Thomistic mirabile and the methods of inquiry flowing from it.

Section I: Birth of the Thomistic Problem

A. The familiar storyteller

The ideological context in which the Thomistic synthesis was born and developed was a context of Christian faith immanent to a Neo-Platonic mode of thought. Faith taught St. Thomas that the universe is created, that he was himself a part of this universe, but it gave him a definition neither of creatures nor of man. The definitions that faith did not provide, Augustinian theology undertook to supply. We shall let the last and most perfect storyteller of the Augustinian medieval universe tell us this story of a universe-on-a-trip. Its itinerary is mapped out from all eternity, for the way it must follow is called the “Word of God.” Let us listen to St. Bonaventure describe the three steps in the itinerary that creation follows in coming forth from God, and that is its destiny to retrace.

First Stage: Creation or the Multiple Comes from the One. Multiplicity is an experienced fact; its divine origin is a revealed fact; its description fills the first pages of the Bible. Here is St. Bonaventure’s description of this coming forth. God, Who is Being, Essence, the Immutable, and infinitely rich, freely willed creation. Whatever is necessary for creating He possesses, for, being omnipotent and an artist of infinite resource, He is filled with ideas or imitabilities. Despite His simplicity, His artistic ingenuity succeeded in the feat of creating composite beings, for every creature, even the spiritual, is composed of matter and form. This composition starts from the depth of entis and esse to find completion in matter and form, to which are added genus and difference, substance and accidents. This is the first stage in the composition of creatures. With man is added the composition of spiritual and corporeal nature, as well as the composition belonging to every corporeal nature, that of homogeneous and heterogeneous parts.

The chronological series of creatures started with the empyrean heaven, was continued by the angels, the matter of the elements, and the first measure of every creature, time. From three corporeal creatures flowed all the others, which are legion. The Bonaventurian universe is finally crowned by a last creature, wholly different from the rest—grace, a creature that permits sin and with it decreation. All these creatures are one, i.e., undivided in themselves and divided from all others. We are confronted with the most incredible multiplicity that could ever come from a single artist, God.

Second Stage: Unity Immanent in Multiplicity or Exemplarity. It might seem that the divine art hurled beings into time and space, that it dispersed them one by one without the slightest possibility of unity between creatures and themselves or the divine simplicity. However, this is not at all the case. The Divine Artist is present to each and every one of His works through His conserving activity and as their model, for they are but copies of divine ideas. This artistic aspect of things is not added to their nature; it constitutes it: “A creature is nothing but a copy of Wisdom.” “To be the image of God is not accidental to man, but rather substantial: just as to be a vestige is not accidental to any creature.”

Bound to the Divine Artist as copies, creatures are linked to each other by two ontological bonds, of which the first is prime matter, the universal appetite for forms, which supports the weakest as well as the most noble of these. The second ontological bond is the fellowship of forms, which, far from being mutually exclusive, band together and abide in the same thing. This second phase of the universe-on-a-trip consists in a pooling of the divine exemplarity that measures all created things and unifies them in their model, and a pooling of their poverty (prime matter) with their wealth (their substantial form). Thus unified, the universe is ready to embark upon the third and last stage of its journey, the return to God.

Third Stage: Return to God by Dynamism and Finality. This third stage is made up of two very distinct phases. First, the material universe progresses toward man, which is to say that everything active or passive in the material world is inclined toward formation by the highest of forms, the human soul. This inferior causality is not fortuitous or contingent, for God moves material things like puppets; all their movements, taken as a whole or singly, are ordered from all eternity by the providence of God. Furthermore, this causality does not consist in producing other beings, for this privilege is reserved to God alone. (By the production of being, Bonaventure understands the production of forms or essences both substantial and accidental. The causality of infra-human creatures is thus dispositive. It causes a being to pass from one mode of being to another (for example, it causes the bud to become a rose), but it can do no more than that, since God created everything from the principle of the seminal reasons that are contained in matter and that await the time foreseen for their blossoming.

So much for the return of the material universe to God through man. But once in man, what will man do with it? He will make it continue on the way to its final beatitude by means of knowledge and love, which constitute the causality proper to spiritual creatures. The second phase in the itinerary is a voyage whose medium is truth and love, for to know is to possess truth, and God alone is truth. He alone is truly undivided and indivisible, whereas all creatures, being composite, are divisible and therefore lack truth just as they lack being. But how can man cause truth, since truth and being are identical and only God can cause being?

In order to be equated with being by means of the intellect, which is the definition of truth, the two terms of the equation must be immutable; but neither created intellects nor created things are immutable. Therefore, to explain the production of truth, we must have recourse to divine causality, just as recourse to it was necessary to explain the appearance of new beings. Just as seminal reasons account for new beings (created causality influencing only appearances), so Augustinian memory contains eternal reasons, eternally deposited therein by divine illumination. To know truth is not really to produce it, but to reveal it where it already existed by means of illumination, the human intellect’s true motive power. The ratio movens that is illumination is active at every stage in the acquisition of truth: in the grasping of vestiges by sensation and the conservation of their image by sensible memory, in the grasping of natures by simple apprehension, of their truth by judgment, and of the necessary bonds between different truths by reasoning. Always more completely and intensely to actualize truths already existing in the soul, by means of the constant cooperation of illumination, until the very moment when, face to face with Truth, its journey will be over—such is the itinerary of the human soul and its proper role. This is the metaphysical explanation of the Bonaventurian universe.

The epistemology of St. Bonaventure, his “Discourse on Method,” is patterned exactly after the reality to be known and the nature of knowledge. Since the metaphysical structure of the universe belongs to the order of history, since it is a sort of theogonic drama whose impresario is God, truth consists in the ability to read this divine scenario, to follow the trilogy of efficiency, exemplarity, and finnality. The method of knowing it is a method of reading. Now faith has already given us another book, the Bible, and we know that the rules by which it should be read are four, according to the four meanings of the divine text. And the same is true of the divine book that is the universe: the only correct method of reading it is the exegetical method. This method consists in beginning with the literal meaning, then grasping the allegorical sense, to which is added the tropological meaning, which is crowned by the anagogical sense. Let us see how Bonaventure applies this exegetical method.

(a) The literal meaning. The universe is a book written by God, and this book obeys the general laws of writing: there are letters, the primary elements of which every creature is composed; there are syllables and words, the syntheses of these elements, constituting the natures of things; there are dynamic bonds between these natures that make up sentences and chapters. Speculative grammar, which discovers the laws of morphology and syntax of this book, is science, and Aristotle has excelled all others in studying the literal meaning of the book of the universe. But although grammar gives us the elements and laws for composing a book, it can tell us nothing of its meaning and truth. Aristotelian science alone does not therefore grasp the meaning of the book, and if it asserts that everything is found in grammar, it is false.

(b) The allegorical meaning. To understand the meaning of the signs studied through grammar is to grasp what really constitutes them; it is to grasp truth. To do this we must penetrate to the soul of the writer, discern his intentions and the ideas he used as models in composing his book. That was Plato’s work; his interest was not centered in the physical aspect of things, but in their character as copies or images of separated forms, the only realities that truly are and are really true. This kind of knowledge is called Wisdom, for it sees the whole lower world under the mark of the exemplarity and unity of its artist or author.

(c) The tropological meaning. Platonic wisdom rightly discerned the spiritual meaning of the universe and its participated character, but it never understood the meaning of this participation, because it never knew the locus of forms—the Word of God. Grace puts us into contact with the Holy Trinity, the true locus of forms, and theology explains the tropological meaning of the universe by showing us that it comes forth from God by creative activity and returns to Him through Christ and the Christological activity of the sacraments. Without this new knowledge, Platonic wisdom is false, for it does not truly explain the meaning of the universe, which must lead to the Trinity or be false.

(d) The anagogical meaning. Once we have understood that the universe is a copy made by an artist who is at first unkown (Platonic wisdom) and then known (Theology), we might think that truth has finally been won and that we have reached our goal. But we are still far from it, and woe to him who is satisfied with a reading of the book of creation that leaves us plunged in time and space, even though it be in the presence of the Trinity. We are not made to live in time but in eternity, not made to live in faith but in glory. A final meaning must be added to the first three. This is the anagogical sense given us by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the consciously savored presence of the Three Persons in the soul, a foretaste of the glorious vision of eternity. Mystical knowledge gives us this final way of reading the universe by which we may taste God and everything in God. It is truth in its totality, and, as far as Bonaventure is concerned, it characterizes the only genuine metaphysician. The successive stages in the acquisition of metaphysical, truth are given to us in a very enlightening passage: “Among philosophers, Plato was given wisdom, Aristotle science. The former looked most to the higher things, the latter to the lower. But through the Holy Spirit both wisdom and science were given to Augustine ... it was present in a more excellent way in Paul and Moses... in the most excellent manner in Christ.

There is the story told by Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas was perfectly familiar with it. In its broad outlines this narrative is to be found in St. Augustine, but Bonaventure embellished it with borrowings from Scotus Erigena, Gilbert de la Porrée, Avicenna, and William of Auvergne. Such an account of the universe could not but cause the Christian soul to rejoice, for the treasures of the interior life, whose importance is primary in Christianity, could only be increased and exalted by the place assigned to them in this doctrine. In fact, they had exclusive claim to truth, a sort of universal copyright on the ensemble of God’s works. In such a synthesis, reason is not the handmaiden of faith but its slave, and every attempt to be independent necessarily dooms reason to the depths of error and jeopardizes its chance to attain truth.

At the very same time that Bonaventure was telling this familiar story to the medieval soul, another story, which had already been circulating undercover for twenty years, began to be made public and provoked very violent reactions among theologians of that epoch. It was the story, so scandalous to the Neo-Platonic mind, told by the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle. Every story that scandalized the supporters of the Augustinian synthesis was bound to be scandalous to the Christian faith that had for eight centuries been theologically formulated in Augustinian terms. Thomas had already heard this narrative from his master, Albert. He had read it in the poor Latin translations of Arabic texts, and he was soon to read it again in a new translation made directly from the Greek text. How was this story opposed to the one we have just heard from Bonaventure?

B. The Aristotelian story

Aristotle did not come into conflict with the Augustinian universe by his notion of being, composed of potency and act, substance and accidents, because potency was necessary to the distinction between creature and creator, who alone was simple. The scandal began with the unicity of substantial form, with the introduction of real causality into the world of becoming and of a causality affecting forms. In the Aristotelian universe there were real generations and corruptions, and the cause of these generations and corruptions was not God acting through the mediation of seminal reasons primordially latent in prime matter, for prime matter was pure potency. It was the causality of creatures that accounted for forms, both substantial and accidental. For Bonaventure, the realm of forms was identical with that of being; it was taboo for created causality, which could at most work toward the flowering of a form, never toward its production.

The second scandalous feature in the Aristotelian story (it was in fact heretical) was the eternity and necessity of his physical universe: only individuals were born and died; structurally the universe had always been and would always be what it was. There was neither progress nor regress, only a fundamental identity underlying perpetual new beginnings in the eternal story of an eternal world.

Even more heretical, if possible, was the divinity that presided over these eternal changes and their order. Instead of one God, there were more than forty; instead of a providential God, these forty divinities presided imperturbably over earthly and celestial events that they did not even know about, since they did not produce them. Sources of universal motivity, they attracted this world of mobility and change by means of their very immobility, their impassibility which the physical universe tried to imitate by the eternity of species, which somewhat corrected the instability of individuals.

Into this world without a destiny, without progression or regression, governed by divinities who did not know what was going on in it and who would have been debased by taking an interest in it, Aristotle plunged the human soul, whose substance consisted in being the form of a body on which it depended for its subsistence and for all its activities. There was no Platonic reminiscence; much less was there Augustinian memory, where in advance eternal reason had inscribed all the truths of which the soul was capable. Neither was there divine illumination to establish contact between the being of God, source of all truth, and this human intellect “which is as a blank sheet of paper upon which nothing has been written.” There was a divine element, a theion ti, called the separate intellect, but it did not seem to belong to every man’s soul. The soul was really in a state of complete desolation; its only hope came from sensation, which was much better equipped to attain its object than was the intellect. A soul that was not immortal, that had no personal contact with a God who did not even know it existed, a soul whose whole beatitude lay in perceiving the imperfect order of a world without a destiny, and thus without divine significance—such was the final scandal in the Aristotelian narrative. If a totally pagan and a religious universe exists, it is certainly Aristotle’s, and we can easily imagine the instinctive repulsion that a Christian and mystically Christian soul would feel when confronted by such an account, which contradicts both Christian faith and the theology explaining and exploring the data of faith. This was the second narrative that Thomas could read in the philosopher’s text. The accompanying commentaries of Averroes, whose refined rationalism further emphasized these purely pagan constructs, only served to increase its scandalous character. Thus was born the Thomistic mirabile. Let us see what was the object of his wonder and the inquiries it initiated. In so doing we shall discover his method.

Section II: Nature of the Thomistic Problem

It is not enough to witness the birth of the Thomistic mirabile and the growing awareness of the basic conflict between medieval Augustinism as synthesized by Bonaventure and Aristotelianism. We must also determine the exact points upon which this opposition is based, for only the conflict whose cause is unknown gives rise to a problem. Among the antithetical statements in the Augustinian and Aristotelian syntheses, some can be explained by the presence of the Christian faith in Augustinianism and its absence in Aristotelianism. These points of conflict do not constitute a problem for St. Thomas, since he knows their cause: faith’s enabling man to perceive truths whose content wholly escapes the human reason, which is incapable of even suspecting their existence. As for that group of truths called revelabilia, which do not fall completely outside the range of reason, and knowledge of which is necessary for salvation, St. Thomas finds them in Aristotle, or at least interprets Aristotelian texts in accord with these truths. The real Thomistic mirabile is not to be found at the level of relations between faith and reason, but at the level of reason itself, in the contrary accounts that Augustinian Platonism and Aristotelianism give of the physical universe, its organization, its causality, and the relations that this universe and everything in it have with its first cause, God. The mirabile of St. Thomas must therefore be formulated in terms of Neo-platonism versus Aristotelianism. We shall try to describe this mirabile precisely, before considering the psychological reactions it brought about.

A. The nature of the Thomistic mirabile

Since the real source of dissension between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism does not lie in revealed or revealable truth, the basic elements of the Thomistic problem must be sought elsewhere. Stripped of its theological and theologal content, Augustinianism consists in a Neo-Platonic view of the universe. In that universe, the physical is not being, but only appearances, shadows of forms or essences whose origins and nature can easily be described in a mythology or a theology of the six days of creation, but which cannot be the object of a philosophical cosmology. Inasmuch as a universe so constituted cannot lead to a physica or philosophy of nature, we can know it only through a definition referring to the essence or exemplary cause of which it is the effect or sign. Actually, this is one of the characteristics of Augustinian thought, as we have seen in the mystical synthesis of Bonaventure, wherein science without wisdom is false knowledge. In Aristotelianism the procedure is just the opposite. The philosophy of nature necessarily precedes metaphysics, whose very name indicates that it comes after the physics which it presupposes and needs in order to exist, i.e., in order to discover its object, the intelligible or separabile and the separatum.

If the Thomistic mirabile is to be determined, this is the context in which it must be done, and in the following terms: Why is it that Platonism has only a mythical cosmology, whereas Aristotelianism gives us true knowledge of the physical universe and the beings in it? St. Thomas himself took pains to stress Aristotle’s originality in organizing philosophical knowledge upon a properly physical or sensible basis. One of the many passages pointing out this originality is to be found in the very same part of the commentary on the Metaphysics wherein he explains the method of first philosophy and speaks of the dubitatio universalis de veritate, so renowned among Neo-Scholastic epistemologists. In this text, St. Thomas, after commenting on Aristotle’s justification of his metaphysical method, adds a second reason to Aristotle’s. This second justification hits precisely upon the nature of the Thomistic mirabile:

He [i.e., Aristotle] does not proceed in the same way as other philosophers in seeking truth. For he starts from the sensible and appearances and proceeds to the separate, as may be seen below, in the seventh book. But the other philosophers wanted to apply the intelligible and the abstract to the sensible. [In III Metaph. lect. 1, n. 344]

What struck St. Thomas was the opposite character of the procedures by which Platonism and Aristotelianism seek truth: Non autem eodem ordine ipse procedit ad inquisitionem veritatis. In Platonism the intelligible is an a priori quoad se and quoad nos, and the sensible is an a posteriori, since we construct it, starting from the intelligible.

That the Thomistic mirabile is primarily concerned with the conflict between the Aristotelian and Platonic metbods is clearly attested by St. Thomas’ absolute liberty as regards the contents of the two philosophies and his fidelity to the Aristotelian method. We are sometimes surprised to see St. Thomas abandon some Platonic or Neo-Platonic tenets and substitute Aristotelian doctrines, or, on the contrary, reinforce the Aristotelian synthesis with Platonic or Neo-Platonic doctrines. Also, we are likely to conclude that his synthesis is only a syncretism or, again, a baptized Aristotelianism. However, neither of these suppositions is wholly true, although both of them contain elements of truth, for Thomism takes its truth where it finds it and integrates it within a completely original synthesis. But the philosophic method of St. Thomas is entirely borrowed from Aristotelianism, hence the Aristotelian characteristics of his doctrine even where Aristotelianism is excluded or entirely surpassed.

Having adopted the Aristotelian method, the Angelic Doctor was constrained to criticize Platonic and Neo-Platonic procedures or methods. This he does continually in dealing with the texts of Augustine, Boethius, and Dionysius, and in defining philosophic style as compared with the Platonic or Neo-Platonic style, which belongs properly to poetry and to the Bible, but is anti-philosophic because it lacks unity and conciseness.

It would be easy to give historical proof that St. Thomas completely accepted the Aristotelian philosophic method, simply by considering his continual quotations of the Stagirite’s methodological texts. An even more direct argument is to be found in his interest in Aristotle’s purely logical works and in the precision of his commentaries upon those parts of logic that deal explicitly with scientific or philosophic knowledge. We must never forget that St. Thomas professed but one vocation, that of a Christian doctor whose sole goal is to know God and make Him known. Now, Aristotelian texts speak little of God and center upon natural realities. How then explain that a Christian doctor devoted so many years of his short life to examining the teachings of a pagan entirely dedicated to the study of physical beings? St. Thomas himself has given us the reason for his interest in Aristotle’s works by establishing the necessary bonds that exist between knowledge of creatures and knowledge of the Creator, as well as the methodological difference between philosophical knowledge and theological knowledge. The description of the difference between philosophical method and theological method is a portrait of oppositions among Aristotelianism, Platonism, and all its medieval derivatives.

Moreover, St. Thomas accepts the methodological doctrine of Aristotle and the latter’s criticisms of Platonic separatism; he makes the conclusions of these criticisms his own. In short, if we observe that, in his commentaries on Aristotle, St. Thomas follows the literal formula and does not paraphrase him, that these analyses of Aristotle’s texts are models of their kind, and that they are continually strewn with value judgments about the force and fruitfulness of Aristotle’s arguments, we cannot but conclude that, for St. Thomas, Aristotelian method was philosophic method in all its purity. For him Aristotle personified natural wisdom, which he had so organized that it was absurd to pretend to find defects of method in it or errors in anything that touched upon the area of rational truth. From this conviction sprang the many battles he fought against Averroistic interpretations of Aristotelianism and the biting remarks, from such a peaceful man, that he levels at the Commentator “who was not so much a Peripatetic as a debaser” of peripatetic philosophy. This conviction is also the cause of his frequent recourse to the intentio auctoris to justify certain arguments, and the subtleties he attributes to the Philosopher when the latter’s proofs seem to him to be frivolous or sophistic.

It could be said that in these discussions the Philosopher uses not only probable but sophistical arguments, adducing reasons which he has borrowed from others. But it does not seem reasonable that in so important a matter, so great a philosopher would adduce so frivolous and trivial an argument. [In III Metaph., lect. 4, n. 371]

We could go on indefinitely, accumulating examples of this kind to show that, although Aquinas rejected some of Aristotle’s doctrines, he never criticized his method but, rather, defended it on every occasion and brought it to its highest possible fruition by transposing it to regions that the Stagirite would never have dreamed could be studied by means of the methodological instruments that he himself had perfected. But these general remarks suffice to conclude that the Thomistic mirabile is concerned much more with the conflict between Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic metbods than with the divergent contents of these two philosophies. What struck him was the fact that Aristotelianism takes all human experience as its starting point and, neglecting none of its aspects, tries to put hierarchy into its components rather than to mutilate it. By following a sure and irrefutable path, starting from the earth, Aristotelianism succeeds in discovering a God who is the Thought of thoughts; whereas Platonism despises everything in human experience that depends upon sensibility, mutilates man by transforming him into a spirit, mutilates reality by reconstructing it after the model of abstract ideas, and, with the help of examples and metaphors, ends up with a God who is beyond being and therefore absolutely unknowable.

The real Thomistic mirabile has as its starting point the fact that Aristotle constructed a cosmology and a cosmogony, a physics that permits of a metaphysics and is its substratum; whereas Platonism and all its Arabian and Christian offshoots were never really able to explain the physical character of the universe, except in terms of symbols. This mirabile may be formulated as follows: What is the principle whose presence enables Aristotelianism successfully to explain the universe and whose absence sterilizes Platonism and transforms it into a mythology of the physical universe? We know that this conflict springs from their respective methods, and we shall see St. Thomas ask Aristotle for the secret of this fruitfulness by a deep and painstaking study of that which constitutes Aristotle’s greatest originality; his philosophical method.

B. Analysis of the Aristotelian mirabile or method

We are now acquainted with the two storytellers to whom St. Thomas, as a young student, listened at length. We know the particular attention he gave to the divergence of these stories and especially to the conflict between their methods: the Platonic story always starting in heaven and ending on earth, with the Aristotelian accounts always departing from earthly things and rising gradually to contemplate heavenly realities. Now we must more closely examine the philosophical method adopted by St. Thomas and see how he used and deepened it in organizing his synthesis. As a Christian scholar, St. Thomas’ only concern was to enlist philosophy in the service of faith and thus to integrate the whole field of natural truth within revealed truth, so as to unify human knowledge and facilitate our understanding of supernatural mysteries. But the ancillary character of philosophy differs very greatly in Thomism and Augustinianism. Within the framework of Augustinian thought, which Bonaventure most faithfully and perfectly represents, philosophy is a servant-slave and theology a matriarch and despot; philosophy is allowed neither liberty nor autonomy; philosophy must believe in order truly to be philosophy, that is in order to be true knowledge. In Thomism, philosophy is queen in the realm of natural truth; it dons a servant’s uniform only when undertaking a task beyond its capacities, when it attempts to study the intimate mysteries of God and of deified man, for then it is blinded by that surpassing light and must be guided by faith.

Leaving aside the problem of the relationship of philosophy and theology, let us consider only the properly philosophic aspects of St. Thomas’ inquiry into the procedures by which reason, without the intervention of faith, grasps truths that are at its level. The inquiry deals necessarily with the two methods under discussion; it will terminate in the rejection of the Platonic a prioris and the acceptance of Aristotelian experimentalism. The spirit in which this criticism and rejection are made appears in the following text:

But because, in accepting or rejecting opinions, a man should not be affected by love or hate of those introducing the opinion, but rather by the certitude of truth, he says that we should love both those whose opinion we follow and those whose opinion we reject. For both were looking for truth and helped us, in so doing. Nevertheless we should follow the opinion of him who has more certainly arrived at truth. [In XII Metaph., lect. 9, n. 2566]

St. Thomas always rejects his adversaries gently, or, rather, he never wholly rejects their stories, only what is false in them, because he has but one criterion of choice, and this criterion is not based upon the thinkers, but upon the truth, of their thought, “for the study of philosophy is not intended to tell us what men have thought but what is really the truth in the matter.” Absalom of St. Victor said, “The spirit of Christ does not reign where rules the spirit of Aristotle.” St. Thomas maintains the opposite and proclaims that the spirit of Christ reigns wherever truth is found, for He is Truth. This is the sympathetic and understanding attitude with which he approaches the study and formulation of a philosophic method completely independent of the scriptural and theological method. In this, Aristotle is his only master.

Aristotle conceives the apprenticeship of philosophical knowledge as a constant and protracted dialogue between man and the universe, but, unlike Descartes, the apprentice philosopher is neither isolated from his milieu nor able to discover all truth by himself. His dialogue is made up of all previous inquiries, of all previously given answers. It is, by the mediation of one man, all humanity that carries on this dialogue with reality. Aristotle would certainly agree with Bernard of Chartres that “we see farther than did our ancestors; we are dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants.” This Aristotelian method (which accounts for the long historical introductions forming the first books of his major works) is commended by St. Thomas as an essential element in the virtue of prudence and, therefore, of the human activity that is the acquisition of knowledge.

As in the case of the other parts of prudence, docility indeed stems from natural aptitude; but human effort contributes a great deal to its development, provided man carefully, frequently and reverently applies his mind to the writings of his predecessors, neither neglecting them because of laziness, nor holding them in contempt because of pride.

Aristotelian and Thomistic inquiry into the problem of knowledge is utterly different from a Discourse on Method or a Critique of Pure Reason. There is none of the pride and intellectual presumption characteristic of the inventors of the modern method; instead, there are a humility and a social sense that explain the extraordinary results of these inquiries.

In order that this dialogue between humanity and the universe be fruitful, we must possess the science of asking questions, the technique of asking the questions the human mind must ask the universe if it would lay bare the latter’s secrets and discover its mysteries. Otherwise, there is the inevitable risk of asking ridiculous or disordered questions to which the interrogated universe would no longer know what to answer. Kant had true insight into the method of science when, in his preface to the second edition of the Critique, he compared this method with an interrogation of the universe by man. But his questioning is of the type to which a judge subjects a witness, whereas that of Aristotle and St. Thomas corresponds to the respectful but avid questions a pupil asks his teacher.

Aristotle invented the technique of questioning; he even invented two such techniques. One is for the purpose of discussing knowledge that is already possessed with other philosophers and with his own mind, in order to classify and set it in order, to defend it against opponents, to expose sophisms in argumentation, to dispose of adversaries whose contentions are irrational and contradictory. This first technique is called “dialectics” and is set forth in the Topics, as are its three functions concerning properly philosophical knowledge. The other technique is the very backbone of scientific and philosophical knowledge and consists in the direct interrogation of reality by the intellect, an interrogation made up of a precise number of questions to be answered by the universe under the threat of remaining obscured by a heavy veil, hiding it from the intellect and leaving visible only its outer contours. This questionnaire is fully set forth, along with its vindication, in the second book of the Analytics. St. Thomas clearly recognized the distinction between these two techniques, as well as the good or bad uses to which they might be put. The following text proves this:

The man who wishes to find a right answer must continue looking for a solution until there is no more room for doubt: and that is what these people fail to do. Including himself among those criticized, in order to avoid pride, Aristotle gives the reason for this defect: in all our efforts to solve difficulties, it seems to be customary to confine our inquiry to the refutation of opposing views rather than to the investigation of reality that is, not to go as far as the nature of the thing requires but only to the point at which the adversary offers no further opposition. He even remarks on this in his own case, when he is in doubt on some point he inquires within himself only until he finds that he has no further objections at hand. But this is not enough. When a man wants to discover a true answer, he must not be satisfied with facing all available objections, he must diligently seek out the causes. For this reason, as Aristotle adds, the successful investigator of truth must be ready to face both his own difficulties and those of other men, not sophistical objections but ones that are real and reasonably pertinent, that is to say, appropriate to the matter under investigation. This result is achieved when a man takes into consideration all the differences of things, on the basis of which the question may be answered. [In II De caelo, lect. 22, n. 10]

This art of philosophical dialogue, whose needs are imposed not by the arbitrariness of the mind or its belligerence, but rather by the profundity of the real itself. Quousque natura rei requirit, this art was studied subtly and at length by St. Thomas in his commentary upon those eleven pages of the Analytics in which Aristotle expounds his teaching on the acquisition of scientific truth by means of exact and exhaustive determination of the questions that the human intellect can present to reality, as well as the correct order of these questions. We shall limit ourselves, here, to analyzing the most important passages, but the reader is strongly advised to study this whole commentary, whose depth and literalness make it a model of its type.

C. Inquiry into the philosophical questionnaire

As soon as we begin to study the philosophical questionnaire, we are in familiar territory, for Aristotle and St. Thomas define the quaestio in the very terms that we used to describe the nature of a problem and its psychological effects: wonder and the desire for knowledge, of which wonder is the sign. We have seen that a problem and the wonder consequent upon it are the result of the marriage of knowledge and ignorance. Here is a description of a quaestio:

In every question there must be something known and something sought which we do not know. No question is asked concerning immediately evident matters—which though true involve no mediate knowledge; truths of this kind, since they are evident, do not submit to questioning. [In II Post Anal., lect 1, n. 6]

Since evidence excludes a quaestio or problem, and since in the latter there is a mixture of evidence and lack of evidence, the statement of every problem must begin with what is evident or known. There are two possible combinations of evidence and lack of evidence. In the first the nature of a being is known, but its actual existence is not, and, vice versa, the thing’s existence is known, but its nature is not. In this first combination there are two possible questions. If the nature is known, the question asked is, An est? If the existence is known, the question becomes, Quid est? In the second combination the question does not simply concern nature and existence, but substance and its accidents. In this case, the subject being known, we can ask whether this or that accident inheres in it; this question is, Quia? Or, on the contrary, the accident being known to inhere in a given subject, we can ask why it inheres, and this question becomes, Propter quid? Thus, four questions are possible, but, actually, only two of them can exist; for if the existence is known, only the quid est remains, and once the fact of inherence is established, the only remaining problem concerns the reason for this inherence.

We have said that this art of questioning belongs properly to philosophy or science in the ancient sense of this word. Here is how St. Thomas explains the nature of this interrogation and its relations with knowledge in the strict sense:

Aristotle states that there is an equal number of questions and of things that can be known demonstratively. The reason for this is that science is knowledge acquired through demonstration. Now, the things which have to be known by means of demonstration are those which were previously unknown. These are the things we ask questions about, for we do not know them. Consequently, the things that are questioned are equal in number to the things that are known demonstratively. Now there are four kinds of questions: is it a fact, for what reason, does it exist, and what is it (quia, propter quid, si est, et quid est). Whatever is capable of being asked or known may be reduced to these four queries.

To understand this point, we ought to consider the fact that, since there can only be scientific knowledge of the true, and since the true is expressed only in the enunciation, of necessity it is the enunciation alone that is knowable and consequently subject to questioning. Now, as is stated in the second book On Interpretation, the enunciation is formed in two ways. One way combines a noun and a verb, for instance in the statement, man is; the second way involves a third item which is attributed, as in the statement, man is white. Thus, a question may be formed so as to refer either to the first mode of enunciation, and in this case it will be a somewhat simple question—or, to refer to the second mode, and in this case it will be a rather complex question... for, it will be asked about the composition of two items.

Concerning this kind of complex enunciation, two questions can be asked. One is whether this statement is true... for example, we may ask whether the sun wanes as a result of an eclipse, or not, and whether man is an animal, or not. In such cases, we are said to ask: is it a fact? The question is not whether I express the question with a certain word (quia) or in a certain form of interrogation, but rather we ask the question in order to ascertain, is it so.

After we know that it is so, we ask, for what reason is it so. For example, when we know that the sun disappears as a result of an eclipse, and that the earth is moved during an earthquake, we then ask for the reason why the sun wanes, or why the earth is so moved.

Next Aristotle indicates two other questions which do not figure in the original enumeration, though they are simple. He says that we ask some questions in a different way from the previous questions, that is to say, apart from the original four questions. For example, we may ask whether a centaur exists or not. Here, we are simply asking about the centaur, does it exist—the question is not whether the centaur is this individual, say this white thing, or not. And in the case where we know that this thing is of a certain kind, we have asked the question, why is it? so also, when we know about a thing that it is simply so, we then ask, what is this thing?—for example, what is God, or what is a man. And so, these are as many questions as we can ask; when we find their answers, we are said to know. [In II Post. Anal., lect. 1, nn. 2-4]

Since the analysis of philosophical questioning interests us here only insofar as it will help us state the epistemological problem, we shall study its essential structure briefly, in order to observe the method that St. Thomas borrowed from Aristotle and used constantly in his works. The progressive steps of this philosophical methodolgy are as follows:

1. Formulation and Number of Questions. First of all, we are dealing with scientific or philosophical knowledge, therefore, with knowledge by causes. Knowledge by causes can be of two types, because there are two modes of causality, intrinsic and extrinsic. The intrinsic mode is subdivided into matter and form in material things considered in the abstract, and into potency and act when these same things are considered as being. The extrinsic mode is subdivided into efficiency and finality. Knowledge that grasps reality in its intrinsic causes is knowledge by apprehension; whereas the grasp of extrinsic causes depends upon reasoning, a complex act whose object includes the complexity of relations between cause and effect.

Second, every quaestio is conceived by an act of judgment and formulated in an enunciation:

1. Simple or existential enunciation has only two terms: the subject and the verb, or predicate, as when we say, “Socrates exists,” “God exists.”
2. Complex enunciation has three terms: the subject, the predicate, and the sign of their composition, the verb, as when we affirm, “God is eternal ... Socrates is white.”

Third, since every enunciation is made up of several terms, the quaestio may deal with the subject, the predicate, or the bond uniting predicate to subject. Whence are derived four questions:

1. Two are for simple or existential enunciation:
   • One deals with the predicate of the act of existing: “Does God exist?” (An sit?)
   • The other deals with the nature of the subject: “Who is God?” (Quid sit?)
2. Two are for complex enunciation:
   • One deals with the existence of an accident in a substance or subject: “Is God eternal?” (Quia est?)
   • The other is concerned with the bond between accident and substance: “Why is God eternal?” (Propter quid?)

2. The Object of Each of These Four Questions. The first of the four questions, An sit?, can only be asked when the existence of the thing escapes our immediate powers of perception, that is, either our external senses or our intellect. Thus, only the causes and effects of immediately sensible and immediately intelligible things are the object of the question, An sit? Consequently, everything studied by macroscopic and microscopic physics (which deals with sensibly perceived movements) can be the object of the question, An sit?, as well as God, spiritual realities other than the soul, and the causes of the immanent acts of the soul:

Likewise, our intellect knows whether a thing is, in three ways. We know in one way, because the answer falls within the range of sensation. In a second way, we know from the cause-effect relationship of things within the range of sensation, as in the case of knowing fire as result of the perception of smoke. Thirdly, we know that a thing is in itself, as a result of a tendency that it has toward certain acts, and we know this inclination from reflection on our own actions, being aware that they are going on. [In III Sent., 23, 1, 2, sol.]

But for everything that is the immediate object of sensible or intellectual perception, the question of existence cannot be asked except dialectically, and that no longer falls within the properly philosophical questionnaire. Furthermore, the question of existence presupposes an at least nominal knowledge of the thing about which the question is asked.

The second question, Quid sit?, is the most important of all, since it corresponds to the natural object of the human intellect made to apprehend natures. But it is also the most difficult question to answer, because we grasp natures only by means of their accidents, and accidents do not, strictly speaking, have a nature. Thus, the proper objects of this second question are substances or natures, and every time its object is an accident, it is so by reference to the substance whose accident it is. The reason substance has such exclusive right over definition, in the proper sense, is that the definition, as its name indicates, implies strict unity (i.e., indivision in itself and division from everything else), and only substance has a sufficiently rich mode of being to possess the unity that makes it intelligible. When the question Quid? is asked about non-substantial beings, it assumes a derivative and relative meaning, which must be clearly recognized if we would avoid impasses or pseudo-problems. We shall see this when we take up the subject of human knowledge. Here is a text summing up Thomistic doctrine on the knowledge of natures:

What a thing is, may be known when its quiddity is comp rehended. Now sense does not grasp this quiddity, but only sensible accidents; nor does imagination, but only the images of bodies; instead, it is the proper object of the intellect... Our intellect comprehends the essence of a thing, in three ways. First of all, it comprehends the essences of things falling within the range of sensation, by abstracting from all the individuating characteristics which accompany these essences in sensation and imagination, for the resultant will be the pure essence of the thing, for instance of man, which consists of those factors belonging to man as man. Secondly, we know the essences of things which we do not see, through their causes or proportionate effects which are sensible. Of course, if the effects are not in due proportion with their cause, they will not enable us to know what the cause is but only that it is, as is clear in the case of God. Thirdly, we know the essences of artificial objects that have never been seen, by investigating the requisites of such an artifact in terms of its proportioned relation to its end. [In III Sent. 23, 1, 2, sol.]

Such is the object of the second question and the procedures used by the intellect to answer the question asked. It is important to note that everything relating to knowledge as an immanent activity enters into the third category of things, which can he defined only in the third way mentioned in the text above, since we are dealing here with realities essentially ordered to the grasping of exterior sensible things and spiritual realities within our range.

In the third question, Quia ita est?, we are again dealing with a problem of existence, but accidental existence or nonexistence of a form or accident in a substance or subsisting nature, as in the examples: Is Socrates white? Is Socrates an animal? But here we are no longer concerned with the substantial actuality of the subject of the enunciation, but with the actuality of the forms constituting the subject or added to its substantial actuality. The object of this question is therefore the properties of subsisting beings, and this object is as vast as the field of predication, both universal and analogical. In this third question, as in the first, the knowledge of nonexistence is either attained by sensible or intellectual intuition (in which case this knowledge is immediate and poses no problem), or else the nonexistence eludes sensible and intellectual perception, whereupon the question Quia ita est? is asked. This question could be formulated as follows: Is this so?; or by concrete problems; Is the soul immortal, is being one or multiple, is knowledge true or false, is Descartes an idealist?

The fourth and last question in the philosophical questionnaire, Propter quid ita sit?, is the most important question in the order of demonstrative knowledge, because it is the very soul of demonstration. Once accidents or multiple forms are known to inhere in a substance, we ask what bond exists between the subject and the accidents inhering in it: Is it a necessary bond? Is it contingent? To answer this question it is not enough to say that this bond is necessary (or contingent) because this accident of this form always accompanies this substance; we must also know the cause of this inherence, for it is only upon this condition that the necessity (or contingence) of the bond will truly be known, because we know the propter quid. The propter quid that is the object of this last question is nothing but the quid of the second question, not in that it constitutes the nature of the thing, but that it causes this nature’s properties, as efficient cause, final cause, or, again, as material cause in qua. A perfect example of this search for the propter quid is provided by the demonstration of the attributes of God.

St. Thomas constructs this demonstration by starting from the existence of these attributes as described in Scripture and links them all to the quid of God known negatively, i.e., to the pure act of existing, which constitutes the intimate nature of divinity, to the Ego sum Qui sum. Thus, starting with the quid, he eliminates from the Divine Nature all predicates implying the slightest imperfection, because they go against the nature of the Ipsum esse subsistens.

The unity of the propter quid determines the unity of the properties or propriae passiones. This unity can be either absolute or relative, and consequently so can the propriae passiones. Thus, when the propter quid of the unity, multiplicity, truth, and goodness of beings is discovered in the constitution of being as being, since this latter is only a unity of order, the transcendental properties flowing from it will also be one with a unity of order. This means that each being is one, true, and good in its own way because it is a being in its own way.

There is one last remark to be made; the question Propter quid? is never asked about substances as such. The objects of this question are the accidents of substances or substantial realities as effects of higher causes. We must never ask why man is man, why nature is nature, why a brute animal is a brute animal, but why man is quantified, qualified, living, intelligent, etc. We can therefore say that the first two questions account for the absolute unity of a being considered as an existing nature, whereas the last two questions explain the multiplicity existing either in a being (substance and accidents) or in the universe, the diversity of whose beings is explicable by the unity of a sole first cause’s making intelligible this ensemble of beings and their activities.

 3. The Order of These Four Questions. We have seen the number of questions that man must ask the universe; taken together, the answers to these questions make up philosophical knowledge. But since the latter is knowledge of order, the philosophical questionnaire must proceed according to an ordinata interrogatio, which is to say that it must conform to the needs of both being and the human intellect, and not to the caprices of the questioner. The following text explains the necessary order existing among these questions:

Sometimes (i) we know that a thing is so (quia), and we still may ask why it is (propter quid); at other times (2) the answers to both questions are at once apparent to us; but (3) the third variation is impossible, namely that one should know why a thing is before he knows that it is.

The same is true of knowing the quiddity (quod quid erat esse): (1) for sometimes we know that a thing is but do not know perfectly what it is; (2) sometimes we know both; (3) but the third variation is impossible, that is, for us to know what it is, when we are ignorant as to whether it is. [In II Post. Anal., lect. 7, n.5]

The first paragraph of this passage tells us three things about the third and fourth question. first, that there is no question if the existence of the effect and the nature of the cause are known; second, that there can be no question about the nature of the cause as long as the existence of the effect is unknown; and, finally, that when the existence of an effect is known, the only question that can be asked is Propter quid? The second paragraph follows the same order concerning the first two questions: As long as the existence of a being is not known (An sit?), the problem of its nature (Quid sit?) is unintelligible; when the existence and the nature of a being are known simultaneously, there is no question. Finally, the question Quid est? presupposes that the existence of this being is known.

Therefore, the normal and complete order of the four questions is as follows: The existence of a thing must be evident before we can ask questions about its nature; then, we must have evidence of the existence of accidents or effects in order to ask questions about the cause of these effects. The immediate conclusion to be drawn from these statements is that, chronologically speaking, the first object of the philosophical questionnaire is a being whose existence is immediately known by the human intellect, i.e., material things in their concrete and physical existence. If this existential starting point is not accepted, there can be no philosophy, since the questions Quid? and Propter quid? can never be asked.

To conclude this overly brief study of the philosophical questionnaire, we must note St. Thomas’ insistent warnings against identifying problems or questions with the reality that is their object. Thus, the quid, or definition, is not the thing’s nature, but the intelligible and intellected sign expressing that nature. Also, the propter quid or the medium of demonstration is not the cause of effects, but is the known sign, the intelligible expression of this cause whose existence and nature have been intellectually apprehended. The same is true of the an sit and of the quia ita est designating the esse of the enunciation, which signifies the existence of things but is not that existence. We must not ask knowledge to provide replicas or material images of the things we know. It is enough for our knowledge to signify these realities adequately, for it to make these realities present to our soul, in order that questions and answers about them become legitimate. It is because we know the existence and natures of things that we ask these questions and arrive at these answers. The philosophical questionnaire is not merely a grammar of discourse, as Léon Brunschvicg would have it, but is the grammar of cognitive being itself, since it is a book whose printer, reality, makes a microcosm of our soul.

Such is the philosophical questionnaire that Aristotle invented and St. Thomas adopted, not because of its Aristotelian origin, but because it expresses the twofold law of being and knowledge of which being is the measure. We must now consider the dialogue between the intellect and things as it applies to the problem of knowledge, so as to bring into this problem the order without which knowledge remains an insoluble puzzle for philosophical reflection.

D. Application of the questionnaire to the epistemological problem

Now that we know the philosophical method which St. Thomas borrowed from Aristotle and used constantly in his works, let us see how it applies to the epistemological problem. Can we and should we ask, about knowledge the four questions circumscribing and explaining a reality under all the aspects from which it can be grasped by our mind? If so, our questionnaire will be as follows:

1. Does knowledge exist (An sit)?
2. What is knowledge (Quid sit)?
3. What are its properties (Quia ita est)?
4. Why does it have these properties or characteristics (Proper quid)?

Of these four questions, the first is impossible, for the existence of knowledge is immediate evidence which serves as starting point for all the problems arising about knowledge but which cannot itself be questioned. Thus, three problems remain. The first concerns the nature of knowledge, the second, its accidents or properties, and the third, the reason why these properties seem to characterize the existence of knowledge. Let us briefly examine the meaning of these three questions and the order existing among them.

Starting from common experience, which is nothing but interior evidence of the existence of knowledge, we must first ask what the nature of this mysterious phenomenon is. This is the problem of its definition, i.e., its intelligible unification. But to define knowledge, we must know whether it is a substance or an accident, for the processes of unifying or defining differ greatly according to whether the thing to be defined is substantial or accidental. If the thing is a substance, it must be conceived as an absolute, a thing-in-itself, an indivisum in se et divisum ab aliis; if it is an accident, it must be defined in relation to the subject in which it inheres. Experience shows us knowledge as an indefinite variety of human activities that have no existence other than that given them by man. Consequently, man is included in the definition of knowledge as the subject of this accident, as its efficient principle, and, in a certain respect, as its end. It is therefore impossible to conceive the nature of knowledge without an immediate reference to man, its source. But, what characterizes the particular accident that is knowledge and makes it heterogeneous to all other accidents of man is that we are aware of it as being the presence of another; we are aware that we are ourselves plus something other than ourselves. Thus, it is impossible to define knowledge without constant reference, first, to man, its cause, and then to the object characterizing it.

Once knowledge has been defined by its twofold reference to the knower and the reality, we must ask what its characteristics are; and then we shall discover that it is necessarily either true or false. Therefore, we must study truth and falsity as a double existential property of human knowledge, a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde who never meet but are nevertheless the two faces with which one and the same human knowledge exists and presents itself to reflection.

Finally, these characteristics of truth or falsity necessarily accompanying human knowledge also have properties or characteristics, for the truth and falsity of our knowledge are marked by either necessity or contingence, characteristics usually translated by the words certitudo and probabilitas. We must ask why truths have this certitude and probability, and with this last question, the cycle of the epistemological problem is complete.

Let us look at these three epistemological questions and try to see how they give birth to one another, the first conditioning the existence of the second, the second conditioning the third. This order and conditioning will be more evident if we reverse our questionnaire and start with the third question: Why is truth necessarily certain or probable? To account for the certitude or probability of truth we must know what truth is, for the properties of truth are explained by the nature of truth (the nature of truth explains the properties flowing from it). The second question therefore has priority over the third, which is unintelligible without it. But this second question itself, What is truth?, remains impossible to answer as long as we do not know what knowledge is, since truth is an accident of human knowledge and flows from its nature. Thus, the first question conditions the second, as the second does the third; and this conditioning is such that the intelligibility of these questions depends upon it.

Now it is easy to understand the defects in the modern way of stating the epistemological problem. Descartes and Kant asked the third question without having previously asked the second and first. They asked: “Why is our reason the source of infallible truth and error?” To state the problem in this way is to identify the nature of knowledge with the nature of truth, and the nature of truth with that of certitude or infallibility. But this identification is impossible, for knowledge is to truth as cause is to effect, truth is to certitude as cause is to effect, and a cause cannot be identified with its effect since, by definition, they are opposites. It is therefore not surprising that, starting from such an identification, neither the Discourse on Method nor the Critique of Pure Reason could truly state and solve the problem of knowledge. Descartes and Kant made the same mistake in epistemology as was made in metaphysics by Parmenides, who, having identified being with one of its properties, immutability, was constrained to refuse the name of being to everything that was not genuinely immutable. Similarly, the inventors of the critique identified knowledge with one of its properties, infallibility, and were thus obliged to refuse the name of knowledge to everything that did not present this identification card to the intellect. Not knowing how to ask questions, they could not answer them, and for three hundred years we have been suffering from the disorder they introduced into this philosophical problem, which epistemology must solve.

In order to impress our minds deeply with the different aspects of the epistemological problem, let us repeat again that, to solve this problem, we must ask three questions, which must follow a rigid order for the following reasons: In order to answer the question, What is knowledge?, we must know that knowledge is an accident of man which begets a duality in him, and that consequently it must be defined in relation to both man and the duality it introduces, i.e., the object. To answer the question, What is truth?, we must know that truth is an accident of knowledge, that it must be defined in terms of the constituents of knowledge, the subject and the object. Finally, to answer the question, What is infallible or certain truth? (or its contrary, probable or fallible truth), we must know that infallibility is an accident of truth, and that truth must be included in its definition, as it must be in the definition of its contrary, probability. It is impossible to define infallibility without having previously defined truth, since the latter is the former’s propter quid. It is impossible to grasp the nature of truth without first having defined knowledge, since knowledge is the propter quid of truth. Finally, it is impossible to define knowledge without referring to the nature of man and the object, since these are the propter quid of knowledge.

With these three questions and the order obtaining among them, we are far removed from the epistemological exegesis that characterized medieval thought before St. Thomas. The exegete has ceded to the philosopher, the symbol has been replaced by things having ontological value. Secondary causality takes its true place within the universe and, under the constant efficacy of primary causality, fulfills its vocation as creature and part of a perfectly harmonized whole.

E. Thomistic context of the epistemological problem

What we have just seen about the number and order of the questions that must be asked if we would find an adequate answer to the epistemological problem enables us to determine the philosophical context in which St. Thomas situated this problem and organized its solution. Since knowledge is an accident and must be defined in relation to that whose accident it is, the being of man is necessarily the center from which must start and toward which must converge all the different aspects of the problem under study. Sören Kierkegaard forcefully expressed the necessity of this human context when he said: “Supposing that we knew what a man is. Then we would have the criterion of truth which was sought, doubted, postulated or fruitfully exploited by all Greek philosophy.” But the Angelic Doctor did not have to suppose that he knew what a man is; his faith and his metaphysical inquiries had given him the answer for all time. To be a man is primarily to be a creature, therefore a beggar for existence. Because he is but one being, man is perfectly imperfect, since the very fact of his oneness excludes all other beings outside him and therefore the perfection that these beings represent. But a creature, despite its radical imperfection, tends toward the perfection of the principle whose image it is, which obliges the creature constantly to imitate divinity. To be correctly understood, the problem of knowledge in Thomism must be situated in this context of imitation on the side of the creature and exemplarity on the side of God. Exactly what does this imitation consist in, when we use our cognitive powers? St. Thomas has told us in an admirable text that can serve as prologue to the whole of his epistemology:

A thing is found perfect in two ways: the first is in terms of the perfection of its act of being (esse) which belongs to it in virtue of its proper species. But since the specific esse of one thing is distinct from the specific esse of another, therefore every created thing, in terms of the perfection possessed by any type of thing, lacks precisely that amount of perfection which is more perfectly present in other species. Thus the perfection of any given thing, considered in itself, is imperfect—for it is but a part of the perfection of the whole universe which results from the combination of the perfections of singular things. Hence, in order that there might be a remedy for this imperfection, we find a second type of perfection among created things, inasmuch as the perfection appropriate to one thing may be found in another. Now, this is the perfection characteristic of the knower as knower... And thus it is said that the human soul is, in a way, all things, for it is naturally able to know all things. So, this is the ultimate perfection achievable by the soul, according to the philosophers—the order of the entire universe and of its causes may be inscribed within it. [De veritate, II, 2, c.]

This passage expresses the true nature of created being, which is to be perfect inasmuch as it is, but radically imperfect too, since it is only itself. At the same time, it expresses the true nature of created knowledge. It is a remedy for the radical imperfection flowing from the limitation of esse by a particular nature and from the exclusion of every other esse but its own, since every nature is closed in upon itself; it is an aliquid. There is but one possible way to overcome these ontological limitations without violating the creature’s structure, and that is to be able to be everything in a way different from that in which one is one’s self. The philosopher’s stone that changes a limited creature, locked within his own being, into a library of the universe, that turns a creature, unable ever to be more than a pale reflection of divinity, into all creation, since in him the whole of God’s work may be reconstructed “so that in him may be found the order of the whole universe and its causes,” that which makes possible this miracle is knowledge.

This passage makes the doctrinal situation of Thomist epistemology perfectly clear. It is an epistemology of creatures; it rests upon the very nature of created being as such; but, at the same time, what a horizon it opens to man! He is no longer the prisoner of his own nature, or, rather, this nature holds within its limitations the key to his prison. This nature can come out at any time, or, more precisely, it can open the door to its prison and invite in the totality of creatures and God, their cause. Every creature can come and write the secret of its being upon the soul, and not only its own secret, but those of all other creatures to which it is related. When each and every being has thus revealed its mystery, the human soul will be like to God, t o His infinity, because that which His creative power has produced, our receptive power will have assimilated.

This first kind of imitation, characterizing the doctrinal context in which Thomistic epistemology is situated, springs from a metaphysical axiom underlying the whole doctrine of created activity. operatio sequitur esse. For just as “everything is by virtue of its act of existing,” and as the esse of a creature likens it to God, so also are the activities following upon this esse all assimilations of creative causality. But the activity of knowing is the most perfect of assimilative activities, and by it, especially, are all creatures arranged in relation to God. To be a creature is to possess a certain perfection, but this perfection falls short of each and every perfection existing outside it; thus, every creature is perfectly imperfect. There is but one remedy for having being and not being being, and that is to become what we are not. Knowledge is the art by which our soul can capitalize upon all the reflections of the infinite perfection of God.

To know what man is as a creature gives Thomistic epistemology its metaphysical context; but this context is not sufficient, for man is a particular creature and his imitation of God depends upon his own nature, since nature determines esse. But our nature is hylemorphic. Therefore, when we say operatio sequitur esse, the esse we are talking about belongs to a creature that is nature in the Aristotelian sense of the word. The immediate context of Thomist epistemology is thus a philosophy of nature. Every nature is a complex but unified reality, at the same time that it is predestined or predetermined to an end. Man answers to this definition, since he is essentially complex and his imitation as a creature orients him toward God. To actualize his predestination to his end, man, like every nature, needs a natural motion, an activity that is simultaneously a march toward and a taking possession of the end that is his. This natural movement will have the same complexity and enjoy the same unity as the being to which it belongs: operatio sequitur esse. Since our nature is not composed of two natures, one of which would be body and the other soul, but of a hierarchy of two principles, one of which is matter and the other form, so also will our natural motion, i.e., human knowledge, not consist of two processes, one of which would be sensation and the other intellection, but of a sort of epistemological hylemorphism wherein sensation plays the role of matter and intellection that of form.

In such a context, the Cartesian hypothesis of sensibility antagonistic to intellect is absurd, and a cathartic ascesis purporting to purify knowledge of the deceptive elements surreptitiously introduced into it by sensibility is an impossibility that contradicts Divine Wisdom itself, for proprie loquendo, actiones naturales sunt Dei instituentis naturam. Sensation and intellection are two principles of knowledge conditioning each other, just as body and soul are two principles of being that condition each other, and cannot exist without one another. As soon as man knows as man, as soon as he is in possession of all his natural means for attaining the divine imitation that is the very end of his knowledge, neither pure sensation nor pure intellection exists within him. The body is not human except in union with the soul, and the soul is human only in its relation to the body. Also, sensation cannot be the human principle of knowledge except in union with intellection, and intellection is human only in and by its necessary union with sensation.

A knower who is not God but creature receives both his being and his knowledge; a creature that is neither Demiurgos nor pure spirit, but the spiritual form of corporeal matter, receives its knowledge and being according to the twofold spiritual and material law of its being. Superior in nature to all other beings in the physical universe, man seeks God in a way superior to all other physical beings’ but this way imitates the physical nature of which it is a part. The physical universe is characterized by motion, through a continual reciprocation between diverse realities by means of mutual exchanges and aids. The same is true of human knowledge, which is enriched by a certain metaphysical motion leading it to the very threshold of immobile Divine Perfection by means of the wisdom that is its crown. To forget this context of the philosophy of nature in stating the problem of human knowledge is to make it impossible even to state this problem; it also renders unintelligible numerous passages in St. Thomas’ works, because it cuts them off from the only doctrinal context that saw them take life and gives them their full significance.

CONCLUSION OF PART ONE

This first part of our study has had but one purpose: to prepare us to grasp the Thomistic statement of the epistemological problem so that, in the three parts to follow, we may freely devote our minds to understanding the solution to this problem without continual interference from the critical positions and solutions of the moderns. We undertook this thankless task, not for the pleasure of criticizing thinkers whom we respect, whose works we admire, and to whom we are obliged for a keener awareness of the difficulties involved in the problem of knowledge, but because we think that their positions are, in themselves, erroneous and likely to beget endless confusion in the formulation of a truly philosophical epistemology. We have tried, in all sincerity, to bring out the source of their errors, which a concatenation of historical circumstances seems to have made inevitable.

In order to achieve this end, we have adopted a method that seems to us to be the simplest and least likely to create constant misunderstandings. Our first chapter analyzed the nature of a problem as such, the laws governing its birth, progress, and solution, the objective and psychological factors it necessarily involves, independently of the epochs in which it appeared and the matter of which it treats. More than any other, this starting point seemed to us sufficiently universal and impersonal to guarantee impartiality and realism. With the help of this impersonal criterion, we studied the epistemological problem as stated by Descartes, Kant, contemporary scientists, and the Neo-Scholastics, in order to determine to what degree they fulfill the conditions characteristic of every problem that is not a pseudo-problem, or badly stated and therefore insoluble. In our imperfect but objective sketch we presented the epistemological problems of the last three centuries and their fundamental and characteristic defects.

We then tried to locate the epistemological problem exactly as St. Thomas saw it, seeking to learn from him the secret of his philosophical method, which we applied to the epistemological problem in the Thomistic framework and according to the spirit of the Thomistic questionnaire and the Thomistic synthesis. A survey of the philosophical questionnaire, although too brief, gave us a glance at the diverse aspects presented by the problem of human knowledge, its doctrinal context, and the hierarchical order of its different parts. From man to knowledge, from knowledge to its property, truth, from truth to its characteristics of certitude and probability—this is the inevitable procedure in a Thomistic epistemology.

Now we shall see this method of the dialogue between man and his knowledge in action; we shall watch St. Thomas build the noetic synthesis that his genius constructed and that our neglect has left dormant in his writings. The Angelic Doctor himself will show us the nature of human knowledge, its accompanying truth, and the conditions necessary for the infallibility or probability of this truth. My role here is perfectly described in a sentence from a modem poet: “If this indeed be the Hour in which I lift up my lantern, it is not my flame that shall burn therein.” The light and flame of Thomistic doctrine will lead us to the heart of the mystery of knowledge, without reducing it to those impoverishing outlines in which our reason tends to substitute its own light and arrogant power for the omnipotence of Him who simultaneously created both being and knowledge. With St. Thomas as our guide, we shall penetrate deep into the realm of epistemology, in order to examine its wealth and its poverty. We shall enter by stages, as befits the poor travelers we are. There will, in fact, be three stages. The first will lead us into the holy of holies of human knowledge, where the latter appears as an accident of man and things. The second will answer the question: What is knowledge? In this second stage we shall see an immanent universe live with the intellect’s own life, through the intellect’s dynamic spontaneities that bring a beginning of unity and beauty into a discontinuous and bondless immanent world. Our third part will answer the question: What does it mean to know truth? This third and final stage will present us with a completely unified universe, whose order and harmony reflect the art of its Creator and Exemplary Cause. Then shall we come to the very throne of God by means of philosophical wisdom, the last and most perfect of citizens in the kingdom of knowledge. The fourth part will answer the question: What does it mean to know infallible truth? Such will be our plan in the pages to follow.