Such is the modern “Acatalepsia,” which arises from denying the evidence of the senses, and from citing the transfigured realism of Spencer instead of the original realism of Aristotle, about whom Balfour speaks as follows: “It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to sum up our debts to Aristotle. But assuredly they do not include a tenable theory of the universe.”
4. The Past and Future of Metaphysics.—Aristotelian realism is the strong point of Roman Catholic philosophy. As interpreted by Thomas Aquinas, it is now in danger of becoming a dogma. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII. addressed to the bishops the Encyclica aeterni patris, which contained the words, “Sancti Thomae sapientiam restituatis et quam latissime propagetis.” From the Roman Catholic point of view this reaction to “Thomism” was a timely protest against modern metaphysics. It was founded upon a feeling of uneasiness at a growing tendency among Roman Catholic writers not only to treat theology freely, but to corrupt it by paradoxes. One cannot but feel regret at seeing the Reformed Churches blown about by every wind of doctrine, and catching at straws now from Kant, now from Hegel, and now from Lotze, or at home from Green, Caird, Martineau, Balfour and Ward in succession, without ever having considered the basis of their faith; while the Roman Catholics are making every effort to ground a Universal Church on a sane system of metaphysics. However this may be, the power of the movement is visible enough from the spread of Thomism over the civilized world, and in England from the difference between the freer treatment of metaphysics by some Roman Catholic writers and that which has arisen under the immediate influence of Thomism. J. H. Newman (1801–1890), maintaining the authority of conscience and the probabilism of the understanding, concluded to the necessity of a higher authority in the primitive church. W. G. Ward was a philosophical critic of Mill. St George Mivart, in The Ground-work of Science (1898), maintained the reality of an active causative power underlying Nature, and the dignity of human reason, from an independent point of view. On the other hand, more under the influence of the Thomist reaction, Thomas Harper published The Metaphysics of the School (1879, &c.), describing scholasticism, as it appears in the works of Aquinas; and The Manuals of Catholic Philosophy, edited by R. F. Clarke, include General Metaphysics (1890), by John Rickaby, who effectively criticizes Hegel by precise distinctions, which, though scholastic, did not deserve to be forgotten.
The Thomist reaction has had a good effect in the way of encouraging the study of Aristotelian philosophy in itself, and as modified by Aquinas. Nevertheless, the world cannot afford to surrender itself to Aristotle, or to Aquinas. Aristotle could not know enough, physically, about Nature to understand its matter, or its motions, or its forces; and consequently he fell into the error of supposing a primary matter with four contrary primary qualities, hot and cold, dry and moist, forming by their combinations four simple bodies, earth, water, air and fire, with natural rectilineal motions to or from the centre of the earth; to which he added a quintessence of ether composing the stars, with a natural circular motion round the earth. Metaphysically, he did not, indeed, as is often supposed, think the nature of substance to be matter and form, because in his view God is a substance, yet with no matter; but he did think that every natural substance or body is a concrete whole, composed of matter and form different from matter. He thought that besides proximate matter, or one body as matter of another, there is a primary formless matter beneath all bodies, capable of becoming all in turn, but itself potentially, not actually, substance. He thought not only that a form, or essence, is something different from, and at most conjoined with, matter in a concrete body, but also that in all the bodies of one kind, e.g. in all men, there is one undivided form or essence, e.g. rational animal, communicated from one member to another member of the kind, e.g. from father to son, by what we still call, though without any meaning, the propagation of the species. He thought, in consequence, that the principium individuationis, which differentiates two members of the kind, e.g. Socrates and Callias, is their one form or essence only as conjoined with different matters, e.g. different bones and flesh. He thought, moreover, that the one form of a kind is an original essence (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι), which is uncreate; and, in order to avoid the “separate forms” supposed by Plato, he concluded that the world of Nature must be eternal, in order that each original essence may from eternity always be in some individual or another of its kind. On this assumption of the eternity of the world, God could not be a Creator. Aristotle thought that God is only prime mover, and that too only as the good for the sake of which Nature moves; so that God moves as motive. Psychologically, Aristotle applied his dualism of matter and form to explain the antithesis of body and soul, so that the soul is the form, or entelechy, of an organic body, and he applied the same dualism to explain sensation, which he supposed to be reception of the sensible form or essence, without the matter, of a body, e.g. of the form of white, without the matter, of a white stone. He thought that in the soul there is a productive intellect and a passive intellect, and that, when we rise from sense by induction, the productive causes the passive intellect to receive the universal form or essence, e.g. of all white things; and he thought that this productive intellect is our immortal faculty. Lastly, he thought that, while other operations have, intellect (νοῦς) has not, a bodily organ; and hence he became responsible for the fancy that there is a break in bodily continuity between sense and will, while intellect is working out a purely immaterial operation of soul, resulting from the former and tending to the latter. It is evident that a philosophy containing so many questionable opinions is not fit to be made into an authoritative orthodoxy in metaphysics.
Now these, on the whole, are the very opinions of Aquinas, except so far as they were clearly inconsistent with the Christian faith. Aquinas thought, as an article of faith, that the world began, and that God is its Creator. This involved a change of detail in the theory of essences and of universals generally. Aquinas thought that before the creation the one eternal essence of any kind was an abstract form, an idea in the intellect of God, like the form of a house in the mind of a builder, ante rem; that after the creation of any kind it is in re, as Aristotle supposed; and that, as we men think of it, it is post rem, as Aristotle also supposed. Of this view the part which was not Aristotle’s, the state of “universalia ante rem,” was due to the Neoplatonists, who interpreted the “separate forms” of Plato to be ideas in intellect, and handed down their interpretation through St Augustine to the medieval Realists like Aquinas, who thus combined Neoplatonism with Aristotelianism. Hence too Aquinas opposed essence to existence much more than Aristotle did. Lastly, as a Christian, he supposed the whole soul to be immortal, and to form for itself a new body after death. But, with these modifications he accepted the general physics of Aristotle, the metaphysical dualism of matter and form, and the psychology founded upon it. The Thomism, therefore, of our day is wrong, from a metaphysical point of view, so far as it elevates Aristotelianism, as seriously modified but not fundamentally corrected by Aquinas, into an authoritative orthodoxy in metaphysics.
Centuries elapsed after Aquinas before Galileo and his successors reformed natural science, and before Bacon destroyed the metaphysical dualism of matter and form by showing that a form in Nature is only a law of the action of matter, and that, as the action of a body is as individual as the body, the form is eternal only in thought (ratione). The psychology of Aristotle and Aquinas thus became impossible; for, if the form of a body is only a mode of matter, to call one’s soul the form of one’s body is to reduce it to only a mode of matter, and fall into materialism. Hence Descartes began the reform of psychology not only by the appeal to consciousness, “I think,” but also by opposing body and soul, no longer as matter and form, but as different substances. These great improvements, due to the genius of Galileo, of Bacon, of Descartes, are the fresh beginnings of modern thought, from which we dare not turn back without falling into obscurantism. What, then, is the future of metaphysics? We must return not to the authority but to the study of Aristotle. The independence of metaphysics as the science of being, the principles of contradiction and excluded middle with their qualifications, the distinction without separation between substance and attributes, the definition of substance as a distinct individual thing, the discovery that the world consists of substances existing apart but related to one another, the distinction between material and efficient causes or matter and force, the recognition both of the natural and of the supernatural—all these and many other half-forgotten truths are the reasons why we must always begin with the study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. But their incompleteness shows that we must go forward from Aristotle to Bacon and modern science, and even pass through the anarchy of modern metaphysics, in the hope that in the future we may discover as complete an answer as possible to these two questions:—
- What is the world of things we know?
- How do we know it?
For authorities see the works quoted above, and the references in the articles on philosophers and philosophical subjects. (T. Ca.)
