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Windelband - History of Philosophy
It was reserved for Augus tine to bring into full and conscious use, this, which had already become an accomplished fact in Origen and Plotinus.
'
1 It is unmistakable that Augustine himself in the course of his development transferred the emphasis of his personality more and more from the philosophi cal to the Church centre. This comes forward with especial distinctness in his backward look over his own literary activity, the Betractationes.
• Aug. De Ver. Bel. 39, 72. Noli foras ire ; in te ipsum redi : iw intgbiore iioMi. NK habitat Veritas.
Chat. 1, $ 22. ] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 277
This tendency toward inner experience even constitutes his pecu liar literary quality. Augustine is a virtuoso in self-observation and self-analysis ; he has a mastery in the portrayal of psychical states, which is as admirable as is his ability to analyse these in reflection and lay bare the deepest elements of feeling and impulse. Just for this reason it is from this source almost exclusively that he draws the views with which his metaphysics seeks to compre hend the universe. So there begins, as over against the Greek philosophy, a new course of development, which indeed, during the Middle Ages, made but little progress beyond what was achieved by Augustine in his first cast, and the full development of which is not to be found until the modern period.
1. This makes its appearance clearly already in Augustine's doctrine of the starting-point of philosophical knowledge. In cor respondence with the course of his personal development he seeks the way to certainty through doubt, and in this process, sceptical theories themselves must break the path. At first, to be sure, with the indomitable thirst of his ardent nature for happiness, he strikes down doubt by the Socratic postulate that the possession of truth (without the presupposition of which there is also no proba bility) is requisite for happiness, and therefore is to be regarded as attainable : but with greater emphasis he shows that even the sceptic who denies the external reality of the content of perception; or at least leaves it undecided, can yet not involve in doubt the internal existence of the sensation as such. But instead of con tenting himself with the relativistic or positivistic interpretations of this fact, Augustine presses forward just from this basis to victo rious certainty. He points out that together with the sensation there is given not only its content, which is liable to doubt in one direction or another, but also the reality of the perceiving subject, and this certainty which consciousness has in itself follows first of an from th** very act. of doubt. In that I doubt, or since I doubt, he says, I know that I, the doubter, am : and thus, just this doubt contains within itself the valuable truth of the reality of the con- rion* being. Even if I should err in all else, I cannot err in _this ; for in order to err I must exist. '
This fundamental certainty extends equally to all states of con
1 Augustine attributed fundamental importance to this line of argument, wMeb be frequently worked out (De Beat* \rita, 7; Sold II. 1 ff. ; De Ver. Btt. 72 f. ; De Trin. X. 14, etc. ). That it, however, was not completely unknown to Greek literature also is proved by the passage (III. fi f. ) of the compilation current under the name of " Metaphysics of Herennios. " The source of this passage has not ax yet been discovered, but is probably late Stoic. Ct on this E. Haiti: in SUt. -Ber. der Bert. Ak. d. IF. , 1889, pp. 1167 ft.
278 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III
sctowsness (cogitare), and Augustine sought to show that all the various kinds of these states are already included in the act of doubt. He who doubts knows not only that he lives, but also that he remembers, that he knows, and that he wills : for the grounds 6f his doubt rest upon his former ideas ; in estimating the momenta of the doubt are developed thought, knowledge, and judgment; and the motive of his doubt is only this, that heis striving after truth. Without particularly reflecting upon this, or tlrawin^ farther in clusions from Augustine proves in this example his deep insight infoTEe psychical life, since he does not regard the ditterent kinds of psychical activity as separate spheres, but as the aspects of one and th~e_same act, inseparably united with one another. The soul
for him — and by this he rises far above Aristotle, and also above t. he^Neo-Flatonists — *hA hvrng nrhnlA nf perxn^glity^ whr^e lite is~
-(jvja unity, and which, by its self-consciousrfess, certain of its own reality as the surest truth.
But from this first certainty Augustine's doctrine at once leads farther, and not only his religious conviction, but also deep epistemological reflection, that makes him regard the idea
of God as immediately involved in the certainty which the indi vidual consciousness has of itself. Here, too, the fundamental fact of doubt of authoritative importance in this case, also, already contains implicitly the full truth. How should we come to question and doubt the perceptions of the external world which force themselves upon us with such elementary power, asks Augus tine, we did not possess, besides these, and from other sources, criteria and standards of truths by which to measure and examine these perceptions? He who doubts must know the truth, for only for its sake does he doubt. 1 In reality, continues the philosopher, man possesses, besides sensation (sensus), the higher capacity of reason Xintellectus, ratio), i. e. of the immediate perception of incor- poTea1~~Eruths under the latter Augustine understands, notPonly the logical laWS, but also the norms of the good and the beautiful in" general, all those truths not to be attained by sensation,
which are requisite to elaborate and judge what given, — the principles
otjudging. '
De Ver. Bel. 39, 72
Aspectus animi, quo per se ipsum non per corpus verum intuetur De Trin. XII. 2. Cf. Contra Acad. III. 13, 29.
The apprehension of these intelligible truths by human consciousness was at the first designated by Augustine quite Platonically &v&nrri<rti. It was ortho dox scruples against the assumption of the pre-existence of the soul that led him to regard the reason as the intuitive faculty for the incorporeal world. CI. also J. Stortz, Die Philotophie des hi. Augustinus (Freiburg B. 1882).
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Chap. 1, § 22. ] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 279
Such norms of reason assert themselves as standards of judg ment in doubt as in all activities of consciousness ; but thev transcend, as something higher, the individual consciousness into which tney enter in the course of tune: they are the same tor all who think rationally, ana experience no alteration in this their worth. Thus the individual consciousness sees itself attached in its own function to something universally valid and far reaching. '
But 5 SIflBgg to the essence of truth that it is or exists. Augus tine also proceeds from this fundamental conception of the" ancient, as of every naive theory of knowledge. But the Being or existence of those universal truths, since they are absolutely incorporeal in their nature, can be thought only as that of the Ideas in God — after the Neo-Platonic mode ; they are the changeless Forms and norms of all reality (principales formal vel rationes rerum stabiles aique incommutabiles, quae in divino intellectu continental-), and the determinations of the content of the divine mind. In him they are all contained in highest union ; he is the absolute unity, the all- embracing truth ; he is the highest Being, the highest Good, perfect Beauty (unum, verum, bonum). All rational knowledge is ulti mately knowledge of God. Complete knowledge of God, indeed, even according to Augustine's admission, is denied to human insight in the earthly life. Perhaps only the negative element in our idea of him is completely certain ; and, in particular, we have no ade quate idea of the way in which the different elements of divine truth which the reason beholds are united in him to form the highest real unity. For his incorporeal and changeless essence
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(essentia) far transcends all forms of relation and association that belong to human thought ; even the category of substance appliesrx^ to him as little as do the rest. 1
3. Directly consistent as these thoughts are with Neo-Platonism,s
their Christian character is yet preserved in Augustine's presenta-
tion by the fact that the religious idea of the deity as absolute personality is inseparably fused with the philosophical conception ^p g^r ol tne deity as the sum and essence of all truth. But just for this ^^^" reason the whole Augustinian metaphysics is built up upon the V
« De Lib. Arb. II. 7 ff. ;"
* 'rt»;_gW'"'i'>1 "''"g this is the insight, that the categories acquired in
knowing Nature are inadequate for the peculiar nature of spiritual synthesis ( accxtrdiBl! Ut Wllll'li the diviim uiwonoo bIwwW -brTTioTIgtHT. I he new categories ufjnternality are, however, with Augustine only in the process of coming into -rniti>n"«> ; fti If'B following!
* In fact, Augustine seeks throughout to identify the nvt of Plotinus with the \iyox ol Origen ; but by dropping from the Neo-Platonic doctrine the emanistic derivation of the «5t and its acquirement of independent existence, he abrogates the physical schema of the world potencies in favour of the psychical.
. >
280 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [Part IIL
self-knowledge of the finite personality j. that upon fee fact of
inner experience. ' For so far as essence at all possible for man,
com prehension of the divine can be gained pnly after the This, however, shows the fol
analogy of human self-knowledge.
lowing fundamental composit"^" nf ^np innpr lifo the permanent
existence of spiritual Being given in the sum-total of its content of consciousness, or reproducible ideas; its movement and living activity consistsirTthe processes of uniting and separating these elements in judgments and the impelling force in this motion the will, directed toward the attainment of highest blessedness. Thus the three aspects of psychical reality are icfea Vorstellung), judgment, and will memoria, intellectus, voluntas,1 and Augustine expressly on his guard against conceiving of these modes of func tioning which are peculiar to personality, as the properties of bodies are conceived. Just as little do they mean different strata
unity the substance of the soul itself. In accordance with these relations
or spheres of its existence they form in their indissoluble
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The same triple division of the psychical activities found among the Stoics. Cf. p. 187.
thus recognised in man's mental life, Augustine then not only seeks to gain an analogical idea of the mystery of the Trinity, but recog nises, also, in the esse, nosse, and velle the fundamental determina
tions of all reality. Ttein^ knowing, ann* willing comprigp reality, and in omnipotp. np. p. , nmnisp. ipnp. p. , anil pprfep. t goodness, the deity encompasses the universe.
The outspoken opinion of the inadequacy of the physical (Aristotelian) categories reminds us only seemingly of Neo-Platonism, whose intelligible cate gories (cf. p. 245), as well as its entire metaphysical schema, are throughout physical. It is Augustine who first in earnest in the attempt to raise the peculiar forms of relation characteristic of the inner nature, to metaphysical principles. Aside irom""this. liTs cosmology runs oil in the track laid by Neo- PlaioiusnTwithout peouliarities worthy of mention. The doctrine ot the IW6 worlds, with its anthropological correlates, forms here the presupposition. The world of sense known through perceptions, the intelligible world through the reason, and these two given constituents of knowledge are brought into relation with each other by intellectual thought (ratiocinatio). For apprehend ing Nature, the teleology conditioned by the doctrine of Ideas presents itself. The corporeal world also created out of nothing by divine power, wisdom, and goodness, and bears in its beauty and perfection the sign of its origin. Evil (including moral evil, yet cf. below) here, too, nothing properly real
not thing, but an act; has no causa efflciens, but only causa deficiens; Its origin to be sought not in the positive Being (God), but in the lack of Being of finite natures for these latter, as having been created, possess only a weakened and therefore defective reality. . . Augustine's theodicy stands thus
essentially upon the ground of that of Origen and Plotinus.
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Chap. 1, § 28. ] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 281
the snJL. The leading motive in this is doubtless the man's own experience; himself a nature ardent and strong in will, as he exam ined and scrutinised his owu personality he came upon the will as ha inmost core. On this account the will is for him the essential element in all : omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt.
In his psychology and theory of knowledge this is shown especially in the fact that he seeks to set forth on all sides the controlling position of the will in the entire process of ideation and knowledge. 1 While with reference to sense perception the Neo-Platonists had distinguished between the state of corporeal stimulation and the becoming conscious of the same, Augustine demonstrates by an exact analysis of the act of seeing, that this becoming conscious is essentially an act of will (intentio animi). And as physical atten tion is accordingly a matter of the will, so too the activity of the inner sense (sensus interior) shows a quite analogous dependence upon the will. Whether we bring our own states and actions as such to our consciousness or not, depends as truly upon voluntary reflection as does the intentional consideration of something which belongs to our memory, and as does the activity of the combining fantasy when directed toward a definite goal. Finally, the thinking of the intellect (ratiocinatio), with its judging and reasoning, is formed completely under the direction of the purposes of the will ; for the will must determine the direction and the end according to which the data of outer or inner experience are to be brought under the general truths of rati onal insigEt
In the case of these cognitions of rational insight the relation assumes a somewhat more involved form, for in its relation to this higher divine truth the activity of the human mind cannot be given the same play as in the case of its intellectual relation to the outer world and to its own inner world. This is true even on philosophi cal grounds, for according to the fundamental metaphysical scheme the active part in the causal connection must belong to the more universal as the higher and more efficient Being (Sein). The rela tion of the human mind to this truth, which is metaphysically its superior, can in the main be only a passive one. The knowledge of the intelligible world is for Augustine also, essentially — illumination, revelation. Here, where the mind stands in the pe«»n>. i» "f its crea- tor, it lacks not only the creative, but even the receptive initiative. Augustine is tar from regarding the intuitive knowledge of the intelligible truths as possibly an independent production of the
* Cf. principally the eleventh book of the treatise De Trinitatt, and besides, especially W. Kahl, Die I*hrt vom Primal de* Willtnt bei Augusttnus, Duns
Sfottu mnd Descartes (Straasburg, 1880).
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revelation ; he teaches also that the appropriation of divine truth Is effectednot so much by insight, as through faith or belief. Faith or belief, however, as ideation plus assent, though without the act of conception, presupposes indeed the idea of its object, but contains in the factor of assent, which is determined by no intellectual com pulsion, an original volitional act of the affirming judgment. The
282 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part IIL
mind ontof its own nature ; indeed, he cannot even ascribe to it the same spontaneity of attention or of directing its consciousness
( »tfen(to) _that he agcrihps tin thp, empirical isognition. 8_of_puter and inner perception : he must, on the contrary, regard the illumination of the individual consciousness by the divine tfuflTas essentially an" act_of grace (cf. below), in the case of which the individual coh- sciousness-occupies an expectant and purely receptive attitude. These metaphysical considerations, which might also have been possible upon the basis of Neo-Platonism, experience in Augustine's case a powerful reinforcement by the emphasis which he laid in his theology upon the divine grace. Knowledge of the truths of reason is an element in blessedness, and blessedness man owes not to his own will, but to that of Ixod.
. Nevertheless Augustine here, too, sought to save a certain co operation for the will of the individual, at least at first. He not only emphasises that God bestows the revelation of his truths upon Kim only, who through good endeavour and good morals, i. e. through
jd**
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of this fact extends so far, in Augustine's opinion, that 1 not only in divine and eternal things, but also in the human and earthly and temporal things, this conviction produced immediately by the will yields the original elements of thought. The insight which conceives and comprehends grows out of these elements by
means of the combining reflective procedure of the understanding. Thus even in the most important things, i. e. in questions of salva tion, faith in the divine revelation and in its appearance in the tradi tion of the Church — faith dictated by the good will — must precede the knowledge which appropriates and comprehends it intellectually. Full rational insight is indeed first in dignity, hut fait^ in sesejatiaa is the first in timeT
5. In all these considerations of Augustine, the central point is the conception of the freedom of the mill, as a decision, choice, or assent of the will, independent of the functions of the understand ing, not conditioned by motives of cognition, but rather determining these motives without grounds in consciousness for its acts, and Augustine faithfully exerted himself to maintain this conception against various objections. In addition to the consciousness of
-jjmportance
Chap. 1, § 22. ] Metaphytict of Inner Experience : Auguitine. 283
ethical and religious responsibility, it is principally the cause of the divine justice that he here aims to defend : and, on the other hand, most of his difficulties arise from the attempt to unite un caused action whose opposite is alike possible and objectively think able, with the divine prescience. He helps himself here by appealing to the distinction between eternity (timelessness) and time. In an extremely acute investigation ' he maintains that time has real sig nificance only for the functions of inner experience as they measure and compare : its significance for outer experience also arises only in consequence of this. The so-called foreknowledge of the deity, which is in itself timeless, has as little causally determining power for future events as memory has for those of the past. In these connections, Aristotle is justly regarded as one of the most zealous and forcible defenders of the freedom of the will.
But in opposition to this view, championed essentially with the weapons of former philosophy, there now appears in Augustine's system another line of thought, increasing in force from work to work, which has its germ in the conception of the Church. and in the doctrine of its redeeming power. Here the principle of histor- ical universality encounters victoriously the principle of thf *! »«"- lule certainty of the individual mind. The idea of the Christian Church, of which Augustine was the most powerful champion, is rooted in the thought that the whole human race is in need of re demption. This latter idea, however, excludes the completely unde- termined freedom of the will in the individual man ; for it requires the postulate that every individual is necessarily sinful, and therefore in need of redemption. Under the overpowering pressure of this thought, Augustine set another theory by the side of his theory of_ freedom of the will which was so widely carried out in his philo sophical writings ; and this second theory runs counter to the first througho"uE
Augustine desires to solve the question as to the origin of evil. which is so important for him personally, and to solve__iL=Jn_
opposition to Manicmeism — by the conception of the freeilnm of_ the will, in order to maintain in this, human responsibility ami divine justice ; but in his theological system it seems to him ki_ht> sufficient to restrict this freedom of will to Adam, the first man. The idea of the substantial oneness of the human race — an idea which was a co-operating element in the faith in the redemption of all by the one Saviour — permitted likewise the doctrine that in
1 In the eleventh book of the Confettioru. Ci. C. Fortlage, A Dt Tempore Dvctrina (Heidelberg, 1830).
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regards the acts of the individual will as unalterably determined conse- quencesTeither of a general corruption or ot tne divine g"race.
Individualism and imiversalism in the conception of psychical reality
284 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III.
the one man Adam all humanity had sinned. By the abuse of this freedom of the will on the part of the first man, the whole human nature has been so corrupted that it cannot do otherwise than sin
(non posse non peccare) . This loss of freedom applies without ex ception, to the whole race arising from Adam. Every man brings with him into the world this corrupted nature which is no longer capable of good in its own strength or freedom, and this inlterited sin is the punishment for original sin. Just from this it follows that all men, without exception, are in need of redemption and of the Church's means of grace. One as little as another deserves to receive this grace : therefore, thinks Augustine, no injustice can be seen in the fact that God bestows this grace^ to which no one has any claim, not upon all, but only upon some ; and it is never known upon whom. But, on the other hand, the divine justice demands that, at least in the case of some men, the punishment for Adam's fall should be permanently maintained, that these men, therefore, should remain excluded from the working of grace and from redemption. Since, finally, in consequence of their corrupted nature, all are alike sinful and incapable of any improvement oi themselves, it follows that the choice of the favoured ones takes place not according to their worthiness (for there are none worthy before the working of grace), hut according to a" mMQMJhgMa decree of God. Upon him whom he will redeem he bestows his revelation with its irresistible power : he whom he does not choose, — he can in nowise be redeemed. Man in his own strength canuot make even a beginning toward the good i all good comes from God aTTd only from
UTthe doctrine ofpredestination, accordingly (and this is its philo sophical element), the absolute causality of God suppresses the free will of the individual. The latter is refused both metaphysical independence and also all spontaneity of action ; the individual is determined either by his nature to sin or by grace to the good. So in Augustine's system two powerful streams of thought come into violent opposition. It will always remain an astonishing fact that
/the same man who founded his philosophy upon the absolute and independent certainty of the individual conscious mind, who" th re w -the plummet of the most acute examination into the depths of inner experience and discovered in the will the vital ground of spiritual
Jpersonality, found himself forced by the interests of a theological
,or controversy to a theory of the doctrine of salvation which
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Chju». '1, § 22. ] Metdphyiics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 285
stand here in bald opposition, and their clashing contradiction is scarcely concealed by the ambiguity of the word " freedom," which, in the one line, is defended according to its psychological meaning, in the other, according to its ethico-religious meaning. The oppo sition, however, of the two motives of thought which here lie side by side so irreconcilable, had influence in the succeeding development of philosophy until long past the Middle Ages.
6. In the light of the doctrine of predestination the grand picture of the historical development of humanity, which Augustine drew in the manner and spirit of the old patristic philosophy, takes on dark colours and peculiarly stiff, inflexible forms. For if not only the course of the history of salvation taken as a whole, but also, as in Augustine's system, the position which every individual is to occupy within has been previously fixed by diviue decree, one cannot rid one's self of the gloomy impression that all man's voli tional life in history, with all its thirst for salvation, sinks to
play of shadows and puppets, whose result infallibly fixed from
the beginning.
The spiritual wo throughout the whole course of history falls
apart, for Augustine, into two spheres, — the realm of God and the realm of the devil! To the former belong the angels that have not fallen, and the men whom God has chosen for his grace the other embraces, together with the evil demons, all those men who are not predestined to redemption, but are left by God in the state of sin and guilt the one the kingdom of heaven, the other that of the world. The two occupy in the course of history relation like that of two different races which are mingled only in outer action, while in ternally they are strictly separate. The community of the elect has no home on earth lives in the higher unity of divine grace. The r-omra unity of the condemned, however, divided within itself by discord fights in earthly kingdoms for the illusory worth of power and rule. Christian thought at this stage of development
so little able to master the reality presented by the world, that Augustine sees in the historical states only the provinces of com- munity of sinners hostility to uod, condemned to quarrel with
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so conceived that we find division entering between the two rralms, which becomes sharper and sharper in the course of history, tnd ultimately results in the complete and definitive separation of the same. In six periods, which correspond to the creative days of
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the Mosaic cosmogony and are attached to dates of Israelitic his tory, Augustine constructs his history of the world. In this process he combines a depreciatory estimate of the Roman world with slight understanding of the essential nature of the Grecian. The decisive point in this development is for him, also, the appearance of the Saviour, by which not only the redemption of those chosen by grace is brought to completion, but also their separation from the children of the world. With this begins the last world-period, whose end will be the Judgment : then after the stress of conflict shall enter the Sab bath, the peace of the Lord — but peace only for the elect ; for those not predestined to salvation will then be completely separated from the saints, and entirely given over to the pain of their unhappiness.
However spiritually sublime (though never without attendant physical imagery) the conception of happiness and pain here pre sented, — and this sublimity is especially noteworthy in the thought erfunhappiness as a weakening of Being, due to the lack of divioe causality, — the dualism of the Good and the Evil is yet unmistak ably, for Augustine, the final issue of the world's history. The man assailed by so many powerful motives of thought has not overcome the Manichwism of his youthful belief; he has taken it up into Christian doctrine. Among the Manichaeans the antithesis of good and evil is held to be original and indelible : with Augustine this antithesis is regarded as one that has come into being, and yet as one that is ineradicable. The omnipotent, omniscient, supremely benevolent God has created a world which is divided forever into his own realm and that of Satan.
7. Among the complicated problems and ideas of universal his torical importance which Augustinianism contains, there is still one to be brought forward. It lies in the conception of blessedness itself in which all motives of his thought cross. Egr^strongly as Augus tine recognised in the will the inmost motive energy of human nature, deeply as he penetrated the striving after happiness as the impelling motive of all psychical functions, he yet remained firmly convinced that the satisfaction of all this stress and urging is to he found only in beholding divine truth. Tiie highest good is God : but God is the truth, and one enjoys truth by beholding it and resting in its contemplation. All urging of the will is but the path to this peace in which it ceases! The last task of the will is to be silent in the gracious workingof divine revelation, — to remain quiet when the vision of truth, produced from above, comes over it.
Here are united in common opposition to individualism of will. the Christian idea of the absolute causality of God, and the contem- plative mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. . From both sides, the same
Cmap. 1, $ 23. ] Controversy over Universal*. 287
tendency is at work to briny about the conception of man's sanctifk cation as a working of God in him, as a becoming filled and illumined by the highest truth, as a will-less contemplation of the one, infinite^* Being. Augustine, indeed, worked out forcibly the practical conse quences which the working of grace should have in the earthly life, — purification of the disposition and strictness in the conduct of life, — and just in this is shown the comprehensive breadth of his personal nature and his spiritual vision. He develops the vigorous eneryv of his own combative nature into an ethical doctrine, which, for w>.
nf jife^sets man in the midst of the world-hatt. le, h«>tw(>p" (tq^d and Evil aa a brave fighter for the heavenly kingdom. But the highest
moved from the asceticism of . Neo-Platonism with its gflftpaaM
reirard which beckons this fighter for God is yet, for Augustine, not the restless activity of the will, but the rest of contemplation. For ike temporal uje, Augustine demands the full and never-resting exertion of the struggling and acting soul ; for eternity he offers the prospect of the peace of becoming absorbed in divine truth. He naflLed designates the state of the blessed as the highest of the virtue^, as love ' (charitas), but in the eternal blessedness where tha IBlUUtnce oi the world and of the sinful will is no longer to be over come, where love has no longer any want that must be satisfied. there this love is no longer anything other than a God-intoxicated contemplation.
In this duality, also, of the Augustinian ethics, old and new lie! r\
dose together. With the tense energy of will which is demanded 1 ! •** A*oaii for the earthly life, and with the transfer of the ethical judgment
so as to make it apply to the inner disposition, the modern man \I o^cu^Jt appears ; but in the conception of the highest goal of life the ancient <v^<\_>. ideal of intellectual contemplation retains the victory.
Here lies in Augustine's doctrine itself a contradiction with the individualism of the will, here at a decisive point an Aristotelian,
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anfolds itself in the formation of the problems of the Middle Ages.
element maintains itself, and this internal opposition
5 23. The Controversy over Universal*
Johannes Sareiberieniis, Mttalogicut, II. cap. 17 f.
J. H. Lowe, Dtr Kampf xieuchen Xominalitmut und Bealismui im Mittel- etttr. $tin Urtprung und Kin Verlauf (Prague, 1870).
The schooling in formal logic which the peoples that entered upon the scientific movement at the beginning of the Middle Ages
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288 Mediceoal Philosophy : First Period. [Part III
were obliged to undergo, developed in connection with the question as to the logical and metaphysical significance of genera and specie's (universalia) . But it would be a grave mistake to suppose that this
question had only the didactic value of serving as a subject for mental drill, in connection with which the rules of conceptional thought, division, judgment, and inference, were impressed for cen turies upon ever new and increasing throngs of scholars. On the contrary, the tenacity with which the science of the Middle Ages — and it is significant that this occurred independently in the Orient as well as in the Occident —. held fast to the elaboration of this problem in endless discussions, is rather in itselt a proof that in this question a very real and very difficult problem lies before us.
In tact, when Scholasticism, in its timorous beginnings, made the passage in Porphyry's Introduction ' to the Categories of Aristotle which formulated this problem, the starting-point of its own first attempts at thought, it hit with instinctive sagacity upon precisely the same problem which had formed the centre of interest during the great period of Greek philosophy. After Socrates had assigned to science the task of thinking the world in conceptions, the ques tion how the class-concepts, or generic concejrtions, are related jo~~ reality, became, for the first time, a chief motive of philosophy. It produced the Platonic doctrine 1)? Ideas and the Aristotelian logic ; and if the latter had as its essential content (cf. § 12) the doctrine of the forms in which the particular is dependent upon the uni versal, it is easy to understand that even from so scanty remains and fragments of this doctrine as were at the service of the earliest
Middle Ages, the same problem must arise with all its power for the new race also. And it is likewise easy to understand that the old enigmatic question worked upon the naive minds of the Middle Ages, untrained in thought, in a manner similar to that in which it worked upon the Greeks. In fact, the delight in logical dispute, as this developed after the eleventh century at the schools of Paris, finds its counterpart as a social phenomenon only in the debates of the philosophers at Athens, and in these latter, too, as numerous anecdotes prove, the question as to the reality of universals, which was connected with the doctrine of Ideas, played a leading part.
Nevertheless the problem was renewed under conditions that were essentially less favourable. When this question emerged for the Greeks, they possessed a wealth of proper scientific experience
". 1 The formulation of the problem in the translation of Bogthius is as follows : . . de generibus et speciebus — sive subsislant sive in svlis nudis intelleetibui pasita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia an incorporalia, et utrum separata a
sensibilibus an in sensibilibut posita et circa hax consistentia. . . . "
Chap. 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universals : Scotus Eriyena. 289
and a store of real information and knowledge, which, if not always, yet for the most part and on the whole, prevented them from mak ing their discussion solely a game with the abstractions of formal logic. But mediaeval science, especially in its beginnings, lacked just this counterpoise, and on this account was obliged to move so long in a circle with the attempt to construct its metaphysics out of purely logical considerations.
That the Middle Ages," in their turn, engaged and persisted so pertinaciously in this controversy which had previously been waged principally between Plato and the Cynics, and afterward between the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa, was not due solely to the fact that in consequence of the defective character of their tradi tions the thinkers of the Middle Ages knew as good as nothing of those earlier debates ; it had yet a deeper ground. ,The feeling of the peculiar, intrinsic worth of personality, which had gained so powerful expression in Christianity and especially in the Augustin- lan doctrine, found the liveliest echo and the strongest sympathy among precisely those tribes which were called to become the new bearers of civilisation ; and in the hearts of these same peoples ■urged also the youthful delight in richly coloured reality, in the living, particular appearance. But with the Church doctrine they received a philosophy which, with the measured calm of Greek thought, conceived the essential nature of things to ^'p "' »"iver«al connections, a metaphysics which identified the stages of logical unTTBTgalHy with intensities of Being of varying worths. In this t*T an inconsistency which covertly asserted^ itself, even in A"ugus- tinianism, and became a constant stimulus for philosophical reflec-
1. The question as to the individual's ground of Being or exis tence, from which mediaeval thought never became free, was the more natural for it just at its beginning in proportion as the Neo- Platonic metaphysics still maintained itself under the veil of a Christian mysticism. Nothing could be more adapted to call out the contradiction of a natural individualism than the high degree of consistency with which scolus Eriyena carried through the funda mental thoughts of the Xeo- Platonic Realism. Perhaps no philoso pner has expressed more clearly and frankly than he the final consequences of the metaphysics which, from the standpoint of the Socratic-Platonic principle that the truth, and therefore also Being, is to b* sought in the universal, identifies the stages of universality with those of the intensity and priority of Being. The universal
(the class-concept or logical genus) appears here as the essential and original reality, which produces from itself and contains within UselJ
'290 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Pabt IIL
the particular (the species and ultimately the individual). The universals are, therefore, not only substances {res; hence the name " Realism"), but, as contrasted with the corporeal individual things, they are the more primitive, the producing and determining sub stances ; they are the more Real substances, and they are the more Real in proportion as they are the more universal. In tins conception,
'therefore, the logical relations of concepts immediately become metaphysical relations ; formal arrangement contains real signifi cance. Logical subordination becomes changed into a production and inclusion of the particular by the general ; logical partition and determination become transformed into a causal process by means of which the universal takes on form and unfolds itself in the particular.
The pyramid of concepts, thus raised to a metaphysical signifi cance, culminates in the concept of the deity as the most universal. But the last product of abstraction, the absolutely universal, is that wbich has no determinations (cf. p. 250). Hence this doctrine becomes identical with the old " negative theology," according to which we can predicate of God only what he is not ; ' and yet here, too, this highest Being is designated, quite in accord with the thought of Plotinus, as the "uncreated, but self-creating Nature. " For this most universal Being produces out of itself all things; these, therefore, contain nothing else than its manifestations, and are related to it as particular specimens or instances are to the class ; they are in it and exist only as its modes of appearance. The result of these presuppositions is thus a logical pantheism : all things of the world are " theophanies " ; the world is God developed into the particular, proceeding out of himself to take on a definite form (deus explicitus). (Jrid^arid th» world ai-p on^i The same_
". Nature" (<ftuo-tt) is, as creative unity, God, and as created plurality, the world.
The process of unfolding (egressus) proceeds in the graded scale of logical universality. Out of God comes at first the intelligible world as "the Nature which is created and itself creates," the realm of universals, of Ideas which (as vol in the sense of Plotinus) form the working forces in the sensuous world of phenomena. The Ideas are built up as a heavenly hierarchy according to their various grades of universality, and therefore also of intensity of Being, and in connection with this thought Christian Mysticism constructs a
1 In carrying out this Philonic thought (cf. p. 237) the Church Fathers had already . employed a course of thought which proceeds by successive abstraction to the concept of God as the undetermined. Cf. , e. g. , Clement Alex. Strom. V. 11(689).
Cmaf. 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universalt : Scotus Erigena. 291
doctrine of angels after a Neo-Platonic pattern. But in every case beneath the mythical covering the important thought is really mctive, that real dependence consists in logical dependence; the logical consequence, by which the particular follows from the general, is spuriously substituted for the causal relation.
Hence, then, even in the world of the senses, it is only the uni versal that is properly active and efficient : corporeal things, as a whole, form the " Nature which is created and does not itself create. " ' In this world the individual thing is not as such active ; it is rather active according to the proportion of universal attri butes which attain manifestation in it. The individual thing of sense, accordingly, possesses the least force of Being, the weakest and completely dependent species of reality: the Neo-Platonic Idealism is maintained by Scotus Erigena in full.
To the stages of unfolding corresponds in a reverse order the return of all things into God (regressus), the resolution of the world Of individual funus inlu the eternal primitive Being, the dei- •• B :. of flip wurTd So thought, as tin' tinal goul i all genera tion and change, as the extinction of all that is particular, God is designated as " the Nature which neither is created nor creates " : it is the ideal of motionless unity, of absolute rest at the end of the world-process. All theophanies are destined to return into the unity of the divine All-Being, — that unity which knows no dis tinctions. Thus, even in the final destiny of things, the superior reality of the universal, which swallows up all that is particular, preserves itself.
2. As in antiquity (cf. § 11, 5), so here, in consequence of the effort to assure truth and reality to universals, the peculiar thought of a graded scale of Being appears. Some things (universals), is the doctrine, are more than others (particulars). " Being" is looked upon as, like other qualities, capable of comparison, of increase and diminution ; it belongs to some things more than to others. So it became the custom to think that the concept of Being {esse, existere) has a relation to that which is (essentia), and a relation of different degrees of intensity, just as other marks and qualities are related to the objects in which they are formed. As a thing possesses more or less extension, force, permanence, so it has alan more nr Ipks " BBB5 " ; a"rf »« '* fan iwn! r» nr lrtaftgther qualities, SO it can receive or lose that of Being. This line of thought, peculiar to
Realism, must be kept in mind to understand a great number of the
1 It need only be briefly mentioned thmt this "division of Nature" obviously recall* the Aristotelian distinction of the unmoved mover, the moved mover, and that which neither moves nor is moved. Cf. f 18, 6.
<y
292 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III.
metaphysical theories of the Middle Ages. It explains, in the first place, the most important doctrine which Realism produced, the ontological argument for the existence of God which Anselm of Can terbury brought forward.
The more universality, the more Reality. From this it follows that if God is the most universal being, he is also the most Real ; if he is the absolutely universal being, he is also the absolutely Real being, ens realissimum. He has, therefore, according to the concep tion of him, not only the comparatively greatest Reality, but also absolute Reality ; that is, a Reality than which a greater and higher cannot be thought.
But through the whole development which this line of thought had already taken in antiquity, we find that the worth-predicate of
perfection was inseparably iused with the conception of Being. ThB~3egrees ot ±5emg are those ot perfection ; the more anything the more perfect and, vice versa, the more perfect anything
the more it. 1 The conception of the highest Being there fore, also that of an absolute perfection that of a perfection such that cannot be thought higher and greater: ens perfect issimum.
In accordance with these presuppositions, Anselm perfectly correct in his conclusion that, from the mere conception of God as most perfect and most real Being, must be possible to infer his existence. But to do this he attempts various modes of proof. In his Monologium he follows the old cosmological argument that because there Being at all, highest and absolute Being must be assumed from which all else that exists has its Being, and which itself exists only from itself, according to its own essential nature
Whereas every individual existent entity can be also thought as non-existent, and therefore owes the realitjr of its essence not to itself, but to another (the Absolute), the most perfect Being can be thought only as being or existent, and exists accordingly only by virtue of the necessity of its own nature. God's essence
(and only God's) involves his existence. The nerve of this argu ment thus ultimately the Eleatic basal thought, tortv tlvai, Being
and cannot be thought otherwise than as being or existing. Anselm, however, involved this same thought in peculiar com plication, while he intended to simplify and render independent in itself. In the Proslogium he entered upon the ontological argu
ment, properly so called, which maintains that without any reference to the Being of other things, the mere conception of the most per-
A principle which lies at the basis of Augustine's theodicy, in so far as with both the existent held to be to ipso good, and the evil, on the contrary, as not truly existent.
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Chat. 1, J 23. ] Controversy over Universalis : Anselm. 293
feet Being involves its Reality. Inasmuch as this conception is thought, it possesses psychical reality : the most perfect being is as a content in consciousness (esse in intellectu). But if it existed only as a content in consciousness, and not also in metaphysical reality (esse etiam in re), a still more perfect being could evidently be thought, which should possess not only psychical, but also meta physical reality ; and thus the former would not be the most perfect being possible. It belongs, accordingly, to the conception of the most perfect being (quo majus cogitari non potest) that it possesses not only reality in thought, but also absolute reality.
It is obvious that Anselm in this formulation was not fortunate in his shift, and that what hovered before him attained in this proof but a very awkward expression. For it takes little acuteness to see that Anselm proved only that if God is thought (as most perfect being), he must be thought also necessarily as being or existent, and cannot be thought as non-existent. But the ontologi- cal argument of the Proslogium did not show even in the remotest degree that God, i. e. that a most perfect being, must be thought. The necessity for this stood fast for Anselm personally, not only because of the conviction of his faith, but also by the cosmological argumentation of the Monoiogium. When he believed that he could dispense with this presupposition and with the help of the mere conception of God arrive at the proof of his existence, he exemplified in typical manner the fundamental idea of Realism, which ascribed to conceptions without any regard to their genesis and basis in the human mind, the character of truth, i. e. of Reality. It was on this ground alone that he could attempt to reason from the psychical to the metaphysical reality of the concep tion of God.
The polemic of Qaunilo, therefore, in a certain respect hit the vulnerable point. He argued that according to the methods of Anselm, in quite the same manner the reality of any idea whatever, e. g. that of an island, if the mark of perfection were only included within might be proved. For the most perfect island, were not really in existence, would evidently be surpassed in perfection by the real island, which should possess the same other marks the former would be inferior to the latter in the attribute of Being. But instead of showing in his rejoinder, as might have been ex pected, that the conception of perfect island completely unnec essary arbitrary fiction, or that this conception contains an inner contradiction, while the conception of the most real being neces- «ary and not contradictory, Anselm expatiates further upon his argument, that the most perfect being in the intellect, must
*■• also in re.
1 It is unmistakable that Augustine himself in the course of his development transferred the emphasis of his personality more and more from the philosophi cal to the Church centre. This comes forward with especial distinctness in his backward look over his own literary activity, the Betractationes.
• Aug. De Ver. Bel. 39, 72. Noli foras ire ; in te ipsum redi : iw intgbiore iioMi. NK habitat Veritas.
Chat. 1, $ 22. ] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 277
This tendency toward inner experience even constitutes his pecu liar literary quality. Augustine is a virtuoso in self-observation and self-analysis ; he has a mastery in the portrayal of psychical states, which is as admirable as is his ability to analyse these in reflection and lay bare the deepest elements of feeling and impulse. Just for this reason it is from this source almost exclusively that he draws the views with which his metaphysics seeks to compre hend the universe. So there begins, as over against the Greek philosophy, a new course of development, which indeed, during the Middle Ages, made but little progress beyond what was achieved by Augustine in his first cast, and the full development of which is not to be found until the modern period.
1. This makes its appearance clearly already in Augustine's doctrine of the starting-point of philosophical knowledge. In cor respondence with the course of his personal development he seeks the way to certainty through doubt, and in this process, sceptical theories themselves must break the path. At first, to be sure, with the indomitable thirst of his ardent nature for happiness, he strikes down doubt by the Socratic postulate that the possession of truth (without the presupposition of which there is also no proba bility) is requisite for happiness, and therefore is to be regarded as attainable : but with greater emphasis he shows that even the sceptic who denies the external reality of the content of perception; or at least leaves it undecided, can yet not involve in doubt the internal existence of the sensation as such. But instead of con tenting himself with the relativistic or positivistic interpretations of this fact, Augustine presses forward just from this basis to victo rious certainty. He points out that together with the sensation there is given not only its content, which is liable to doubt in one direction or another, but also the reality of the perceiving subject, and this certainty which consciousness has in itself follows first of an from th** very act. of doubt. In that I doubt, or since I doubt, he says, I know that I, the doubter, am : and thus, just this doubt contains within itself the valuable truth of the reality of the con- rion* being. Even if I should err in all else, I cannot err in _this ; for in order to err I must exist. '
This fundamental certainty extends equally to all states of con
1 Augustine attributed fundamental importance to this line of argument, wMeb be frequently worked out (De Beat* \rita, 7; Sold II. 1 ff. ; De Ver. Btt. 72 f. ; De Trin. X. 14, etc. ). That it, however, was not completely unknown to Greek literature also is proved by the passage (III. fi f. ) of the compilation current under the name of " Metaphysics of Herennios. " The source of this passage has not ax yet been discovered, but is probably late Stoic. Ct on this E. Haiti: in SUt. -Ber. der Bert. Ak. d. IF. , 1889, pp. 1167 ft.
278 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III
sctowsness (cogitare), and Augustine sought to show that all the various kinds of these states are already included in the act of doubt. He who doubts knows not only that he lives, but also that he remembers, that he knows, and that he wills : for the grounds 6f his doubt rest upon his former ideas ; in estimating the momenta of the doubt are developed thought, knowledge, and judgment; and the motive of his doubt is only this, that heis striving after truth. Without particularly reflecting upon this, or tlrawin^ farther in clusions from Augustine proves in this example his deep insight infoTEe psychical life, since he does not regard the ditterent kinds of psychical activity as separate spheres, but as the aspects of one and th~e_same act, inseparably united with one another. The soul
for him — and by this he rises far above Aristotle, and also above t. he^Neo-Flatonists — *hA hvrng nrhnlA nf perxn^glity^ whr^e lite is~
-(jvja unity, and which, by its self-consciousrfess, certain of its own reality as the surest truth.
But from this first certainty Augustine's doctrine at once leads farther, and not only his religious conviction, but also deep epistemological reflection, that makes him regard the idea
of God as immediately involved in the certainty which the indi vidual consciousness has of itself. Here, too, the fundamental fact of doubt of authoritative importance in this case, also, already contains implicitly the full truth. How should we come to question and doubt the perceptions of the external world which force themselves upon us with such elementary power, asks Augus tine, we did not possess, besides these, and from other sources, criteria and standards of truths by which to measure and examine these perceptions? He who doubts must know the truth, for only for its sake does he doubt. 1 In reality, continues the philosopher, man possesses, besides sensation (sensus), the higher capacity of reason Xintellectus, ratio), i. e. of the immediate perception of incor- poTea1~~Eruths under the latter Augustine understands, notPonly the logical laWS, but also the norms of the good and the beautiful in" general, all those truths not to be attained by sensation,
which are requisite to elaborate and judge what given, — the principles
otjudging. '
De Ver. Bel. 39, 72
Aspectus animi, quo per se ipsum non per corpus verum intuetur De Trin. XII. 2. Cf. Contra Acad. III. 13, 29.
The apprehension of these intelligible truths by human consciousness was at the first designated by Augustine quite Platonically &v&nrri<rti. It was ortho dox scruples against the assumption of the pre-existence of the soul that led him to regard the reason as the intuitive faculty for the incorporeal world. CI. also J. Stortz, Die Philotophie des hi. Augustinus (Freiburg B. 1882).
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Chap. 1, § 22. ] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 279
Such norms of reason assert themselves as standards of judg ment in doubt as in all activities of consciousness ; but thev transcend, as something higher, the individual consciousness into which tney enter in the course of tune: they are the same tor all who think rationally, ana experience no alteration in this their worth. Thus the individual consciousness sees itself attached in its own function to something universally valid and far reaching. '
But 5 SIflBgg to the essence of truth that it is or exists. Augus tine also proceeds from this fundamental conception of the" ancient, as of every naive theory of knowledge. But the Being or existence of those universal truths, since they are absolutely incorporeal in their nature, can be thought only as that of the Ideas in God — after the Neo-Platonic mode ; they are the changeless Forms and norms of all reality (principales formal vel rationes rerum stabiles aique incommutabiles, quae in divino intellectu continental-), and the determinations of the content of the divine mind. In him they are all contained in highest union ; he is the absolute unity, the all- embracing truth ; he is the highest Being, the highest Good, perfect Beauty (unum, verum, bonum). All rational knowledge is ulti mately knowledge of God. Complete knowledge of God, indeed, even according to Augustine's admission, is denied to human insight in the earthly life. Perhaps only the negative element in our idea of him is completely certain ; and, in particular, we have no ade quate idea of the way in which the different elements of divine truth which the reason beholds are united in him to form the highest real unity. For his incorporeal and changeless essence
^
C^_ <>
(essentia) far transcends all forms of relation and association that belong to human thought ; even the category of substance appliesrx^ to him as little as do the rest. 1
3. Directly consistent as these thoughts are with Neo-Platonism,s
their Christian character is yet preserved in Augustine's presenta-
tion by the fact that the religious idea of the deity as absolute personality is inseparably fused with the philosophical conception ^p g^r ol tne deity as the sum and essence of all truth. But just for this ^^^" reason the whole Augustinian metaphysics is built up upon the V
« De Lib. Arb. II. 7 ff. ;"
* 'rt»;_gW'"'i'>1 "''"g this is the insight, that the categories acquired in
knowing Nature are inadequate for the peculiar nature of spiritual synthesis ( accxtrdiBl! Ut Wllll'li the diviim uiwonoo bIwwW -brTTioTIgtHT. I he new categories ufjnternality are, however, with Augustine only in the process of coming into -rniti>n"«> ; fti If'B following!
* In fact, Augustine seeks throughout to identify the nvt of Plotinus with the \iyox ol Origen ; but by dropping from the Neo-Platonic doctrine the emanistic derivation of the «5t and its acquirement of independent existence, he abrogates the physical schema of the world potencies in favour of the psychical.
. >
280 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [Part IIL
self-knowledge of the finite personality j. that upon fee fact of
inner experience. ' For so far as essence at all possible for man,
com prehension of the divine can be gained pnly after the This, however, shows the fol
analogy of human self-knowledge.
lowing fundamental composit"^" nf ^np innpr lifo the permanent
existence of spiritual Being given in the sum-total of its content of consciousness, or reproducible ideas; its movement and living activity consistsirTthe processes of uniting and separating these elements in judgments and the impelling force in this motion the will, directed toward the attainment of highest blessedness. Thus the three aspects of psychical reality are icfea Vorstellung), judgment, and will memoria, intellectus, voluntas,1 and Augustine expressly on his guard against conceiving of these modes of func tioning which are peculiar to personality, as the properties of bodies are conceived. Just as little do they mean different strata
unity the substance of the soul itself. In accordance with these relations
or spheres of its existence they form in their indissoluble
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4. A farther and essential consequence of placing philosophy upon consciously anthropological basis in Augustine's case, the ce:ntral position which he assigned in his theory of the universe to
The same triple division of the psychical activities found among the Stoics. Cf. p. 187.
thus recognised in man's mental life, Augustine then not only seeks to gain an analogical idea of the mystery of the Trinity, but recog nises, also, in the esse, nosse, and velle the fundamental determina
tions of all reality. Ttein^ knowing, ann* willing comprigp reality, and in omnipotp. np. p. , nmnisp. ipnp. p. , anil pprfep. t goodness, the deity encompasses the universe.
The outspoken opinion of the inadequacy of the physical (Aristotelian) categories reminds us only seemingly of Neo-Platonism, whose intelligible cate gories (cf. p. 245), as well as its entire metaphysical schema, are throughout physical. It is Augustine who first in earnest in the attempt to raise the peculiar forms of relation characteristic of the inner nature, to metaphysical principles. Aside irom""this. liTs cosmology runs oil in the track laid by Neo- PlaioiusnTwithout peouliarities worthy of mention. The doctrine ot the IW6 worlds, with its anthropological correlates, forms here the presupposition. The world of sense known through perceptions, the intelligible world through the reason, and these two given constituents of knowledge are brought into relation with each other by intellectual thought (ratiocinatio). For apprehend ing Nature, the teleology conditioned by the doctrine of Ideas presents itself. The corporeal world also created out of nothing by divine power, wisdom, and goodness, and bears in its beauty and perfection the sign of its origin. Evil (including moral evil, yet cf. below) here, too, nothing properly real
not thing, but an act; has no causa efflciens, but only causa deficiens; Its origin to be sought not in the positive Being (God), but in the lack of Being of finite natures for these latter, as having been created, possess only a weakened and therefore defective reality. . . Augustine's theodicy stands thus
essentially upon the ground of that of Origen and Plotinus.
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Chap. 1, § 28. ] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 281
the snJL. The leading motive in this is doubtless the man's own experience; himself a nature ardent and strong in will, as he exam ined and scrutinised his owu personality he came upon the will as ha inmost core. On this account the will is for him the essential element in all : omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt.
In his psychology and theory of knowledge this is shown especially in the fact that he seeks to set forth on all sides the controlling position of the will in the entire process of ideation and knowledge. 1 While with reference to sense perception the Neo-Platonists had distinguished between the state of corporeal stimulation and the becoming conscious of the same, Augustine demonstrates by an exact analysis of the act of seeing, that this becoming conscious is essentially an act of will (intentio animi). And as physical atten tion is accordingly a matter of the will, so too the activity of the inner sense (sensus interior) shows a quite analogous dependence upon the will. Whether we bring our own states and actions as such to our consciousness or not, depends as truly upon voluntary reflection as does the intentional consideration of something which belongs to our memory, and as does the activity of the combining fantasy when directed toward a definite goal. Finally, the thinking of the intellect (ratiocinatio), with its judging and reasoning, is formed completely under the direction of the purposes of the will ; for the will must determine the direction and the end according to which the data of outer or inner experience are to be brought under the general truths of rati onal insigEt
In the case of these cognitions of rational insight the relation assumes a somewhat more involved form, for in its relation to this higher divine truth the activity of the human mind cannot be given the same play as in the case of its intellectual relation to the outer world and to its own inner world. This is true even on philosophi cal grounds, for according to the fundamental metaphysical scheme the active part in the causal connection must belong to the more universal as the higher and more efficient Being (Sein). The rela tion of the human mind to this truth, which is metaphysically its superior, can in the main be only a passive one. The knowledge of the intelligible world is for Augustine also, essentially — illumination, revelation. Here, where the mind stands in the pe«»n>. i» "f its crea- tor, it lacks not only the creative, but even the receptive initiative. Augustine is tar from regarding the intuitive knowledge of the intelligible truths as possibly an independent production of the
* Cf. principally the eleventh book of the treatise De Trinitatt, and besides, especially W. Kahl, Die I*hrt vom Primal de* Willtnt bei Augusttnus, Duns
Sfottu mnd Descartes (Straasburg, 1880).
v' 4*
revelation ; he teaches also that the appropriation of divine truth Is effectednot so much by insight, as through faith or belief. Faith or belief, however, as ideation plus assent, though without the act of conception, presupposes indeed the idea of its object, but contains in the factor of assent, which is determined by no intellectual com pulsion, an original volitional act of the affirming judgment. The
282 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part IIL
mind ontof its own nature ; indeed, he cannot even ascribe to it the same spontaneity of attention or of directing its consciousness
( »tfen(to) _that he agcrihps tin thp, empirical isognition. 8_of_puter and inner perception : he must, on the contrary, regard the illumination of the individual consciousness by the divine tfuflTas essentially an" act_of grace (cf. below), in the case of which the individual coh- sciousness-occupies an expectant and purely receptive attitude. These metaphysical considerations, which might also have been possible upon the basis of Neo-Platonism, experience in Augustine's case a powerful reinforcement by the emphasis which he laid in his theology upon the divine grace. Knowledge of the truths of reason is an element in blessedness, and blessedness man owes not to his own will, but to that of Ixod.
. Nevertheless Augustine here, too, sought to save a certain co operation for the will of the individual, at least at first. He not only emphasises that God bestows the revelation of his truths upon Kim only, who through good endeavour and good morals, i. e. through
jd**
7* ^"the qualities of his will, shows himself a worthy subject for this
of this fact extends so far, in Augustine's opinion, that 1 not only in divine and eternal things, but also in the human and earthly and temporal things, this conviction produced immediately by the will yields the original elements of thought. The insight which conceives and comprehends grows out of these elements by
means of the combining reflective procedure of the understanding. Thus even in the most important things, i. e. in questions of salva tion, faith in the divine revelation and in its appearance in the tradi tion of the Church — faith dictated by the good will — must precede the knowledge which appropriates and comprehends it intellectually. Full rational insight is indeed first in dignity, hut fait^ in sesejatiaa is the first in timeT
5. In all these considerations of Augustine, the central point is the conception of the freedom of the mill, as a decision, choice, or assent of the will, independent of the functions of the understand ing, not conditioned by motives of cognition, but rather determining these motives without grounds in consciousness for its acts, and Augustine faithfully exerted himself to maintain this conception against various objections. In addition to the consciousness of
-jjmportance
Chap. 1, § 22. ] Metaphytict of Inner Experience : Auguitine. 283
ethical and religious responsibility, it is principally the cause of the divine justice that he here aims to defend : and, on the other hand, most of his difficulties arise from the attempt to unite un caused action whose opposite is alike possible and objectively think able, with the divine prescience. He helps himself here by appealing to the distinction between eternity (timelessness) and time. In an extremely acute investigation ' he maintains that time has real sig nificance only for the functions of inner experience as they measure and compare : its significance for outer experience also arises only in consequence of this. The so-called foreknowledge of the deity, which is in itself timeless, has as little causally determining power for future events as memory has for those of the past. In these connections, Aristotle is justly regarded as one of the most zealous and forcible defenders of the freedom of the will.
But in opposition to this view, championed essentially with the weapons of former philosophy, there now appears in Augustine's system another line of thought, increasing in force from work to work, which has its germ in the conception of the Church. and in the doctrine of its redeeming power. Here the principle of histor- ical universality encounters victoriously the principle of thf *! »«"- lule certainty of the individual mind. The idea of the Christian Church, of which Augustine was the most powerful champion, is rooted in the thought that the whole human race is in need of re demption. This latter idea, however, excludes the completely unde- termined freedom of the will in the individual man ; for it requires the postulate that every individual is necessarily sinful, and therefore in need of redemption. Under the overpowering pressure of this thought, Augustine set another theory by the side of his theory of_ freedom of the will which was so widely carried out in his philo sophical writings ; and this second theory runs counter to the first througho"uE
Augustine desires to solve the question as to the origin of evil. which is so important for him personally, and to solve__iL=Jn_
opposition to Manicmeism — by the conception of the freeilnm of_ the will, in order to maintain in this, human responsibility ami divine justice ; but in his theological system it seems to him ki_ht> sufficient to restrict this freedom of will to Adam, the first man. The idea of the substantial oneness of the human race — an idea which was a co-operating element in the faith in the redemption of all by the one Saviour — permitted likewise the doctrine that in
1 In the eleventh book of the Confettioru. Ci. C. Fortlage, A Dt Tempore Dvctrina (Heidelberg, 1830).
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regards the acts of the individual will as unalterably determined conse- quencesTeither of a general corruption or ot tne divine g"race.
Individualism and imiversalism in the conception of psychical reality
284 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III.
the one man Adam all humanity had sinned. By the abuse of this freedom of the will on the part of the first man, the whole human nature has been so corrupted that it cannot do otherwise than sin
(non posse non peccare) . This loss of freedom applies without ex ception, to the whole race arising from Adam. Every man brings with him into the world this corrupted nature which is no longer capable of good in its own strength or freedom, and this inlterited sin is the punishment for original sin. Just from this it follows that all men, without exception, are in need of redemption and of the Church's means of grace. One as little as another deserves to receive this grace : therefore, thinks Augustine, no injustice can be seen in the fact that God bestows this grace^ to which no one has any claim, not upon all, but only upon some ; and it is never known upon whom. But, on the other hand, the divine justice demands that, at least in the case of some men, the punishment for Adam's fall should be permanently maintained, that these men, therefore, should remain excluded from the working of grace and from redemption. Since, finally, in consequence of their corrupted nature, all are alike sinful and incapable of any improvement oi themselves, it follows that the choice of the favoured ones takes place not according to their worthiness (for there are none worthy before the working of grace), hut according to a" mMQMJhgMa decree of God. Upon him whom he will redeem he bestows his revelation with its irresistible power : he whom he does not choose, — he can in nowise be redeemed. Man in his own strength canuot make even a beginning toward the good i all good comes from God aTTd only from
UTthe doctrine ofpredestination, accordingly (and this is its philo sophical element), the absolute causality of God suppresses the free will of the individual. The latter is refused both metaphysical independence and also all spontaneity of action ; the individual is determined either by his nature to sin or by grace to the good. So in Augustine's system two powerful streams of thought come into violent opposition. It will always remain an astonishing fact that
/the same man who founded his philosophy upon the absolute and independent certainty of the individual conscious mind, who" th re w -the plummet of the most acute examination into the depths of inner experience and discovered in the will the vital ground of spiritual
Jpersonality, found himself forced by the interests of a theological
,or controversy to a theory of the doctrine of salvation which
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Chju». '1, § 22. ] Metdphyiics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 285
stand here in bald opposition, and their clashing contradiction is scarcely concealed by the ambiguity of the word " freedom," which, in the one line, is defended according to its psychological meaning, in the other, according to its ethico-religious meaning. The oppo sition, however, of the two motives of thought which here lie side by side so irreconcilable, had influence in the succeeding development of philosophy until long past the Middle Ages.
6. In the light of the doctrine of predestination the grand picture of the historical development of humanity, which Augustine drew in the manner and spirit of the old patristic philosophy, takes on dark colours and peculiarly stiff, inflexible forms. For if not only the course of the history of salvation taken as a whole, but also, as in Augustine's system, the position which every individual is to occupy within has been previously fixed by diviue decree, one cannot rid one's self of the gloomy impression that all man's voli tional life in history, with all its thirst for salvation, sinks to
play of shadows and puppets, whose result infallibly fixed from
the beginning.
The spiritual wo throughout the whole course of history falls
apart, for Augustine, into two spheres, — the realm of God and the realm of the devil! To the former belong the angels that have not fallen, and the men whom God has chosen for his grace the other embraces, together with the evil demons, all those men who are not predestined to redemption, but are left by God in the state of sin and guilt the one the kingdom of heaven, the other that of the world. The two occupy in the course of history relation like that of two different races which are mingled only in outer action, while in ternally they are strictly separate. The community of the elect has no home on earth lives in the higher unity of divine grace. The r-omra unity of the condemned, however, divided within itself by discord fights in earthly kingdoms for the illusory worth of power and rule. Christian thought at this stage of development
so little able to master the reality presented by the world, that Augustine sees in the historical states only the provinces of com- munity of sinners hostility to uod, condemned to quarrel with
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r*j* The course of the world's history under these presuppositions
so conceived that we find division entering between the two rralms, which becomes sharper and sharper in the course of history, tnd ultimately results in the complete and definitive separation of the same. In six periods, which correspond to the creative days of
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Medi&val Philosophy : Firtt Period. [Part in.
the Mosaic cosmogony and are attached to dates of Israelitic his tory, Augustine constructs his history of the world. In this process he combines a depreciatory estimate of the Roman world with slight understanding of the essential nature of the Grecian. The decisive point in this development is for him, also, the appearance of the Saviour, by which not only the redemption of those chosen by grace is brought to completion, but also their separation from the children of the world. With this begins the last world-period, whose end will be the Judgment : then after the stress of conflict shall enter the Sab bath, the peace of the Lord — but peace only for the elect ; for those not predestined to salvation will then be completely separated from the saints, and entirely given over to the pain of their unhappiness.
However spiritually sublime (though never without attendant physical imagery) the conception of happiness and pain here pre sented, — and this sublimity is especially noteworthy in the thought erfunhappiness as a weakening of Being, due to the lack of divioe causality, — the dualism of the Good and the Evil is yet unmistak ably, for Augustine, the final issue of the world's history. The man assailed by so many powerful motives of thought has not overcome the Manichwism of his youthful belief; he has taken it up into Christian doctrine. Among the Manichaeans the antithesis of good and evil is held to be original and indelible : with Augustine this antithesis is regarded as one that has come into being, and yet as one that is ineradicable. The omnipotent, omniscient, supremely benevolent God has created a world which is divided forever into his own realm and that of Satan.
7. Among the complicated problems and ideas of universal his torical importance which Augustinianism contains, there is still one to be brought forward. It lies in the conception of blessedness itself in which all motives of his thought cross. Egr^strongly as Augus tine recognised in the will the inmost motive energy of human nature, deeply as he penetrated the striving after happiness as the impelling motive of all psychical functions, he yet remained firmly convinced that the satisfaction of all this stress and urging is to he found only in beholding divine truth. Tiie highest good is God : but God is the truth, and one enjoys truth by beholding it and resting in its contemplation. All urging of the will is but the path to this peace in which it ceases! The last task of the will is to be silent in the gracious workingof divine revelation, — to remain quiet when the vision of truth, produced from above, comes over it.
Here are united in common opposition to individualism of will. the Christian idea of the absolute causality of God, and the contem- plative mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. . From both sides, the same
Cmap. 1, $ 23. ] Controversy over Universal*. 287
tendency is at work to briny about the conception of man's sanctifk cation as a working of God in him, as a becoming filled and illumined by the highest truth, as a will-less contemplation of the one, infinite^* Being. Augustine, indeed, worked out forcibly the practical conse quences which the working of grace should have in the earthly life, — purification of the disposition and strictness in the conduct of life, — and just in this is shown the comprehensive breadth of his personal nature and his spiritual vision. He develops the vigorous eneryv of his own combative nature into an ethical doctrine, which, for w>.
nf jife^sets man in the midst of the world-hatt. le, h«>tw(>p" (tq^d and Evil aa a brave fighter for the heavenly kingdom. But the highest
moved from the asceticism of . Neo-Platonism with its gflftpaaM
reirard which beckons this fighter for God is yet, for Augustine, not the restless activity of the will, but the rest of contemplation. For ike temporal uje, Augustine demands the full and never-resting exertion of the struggling and acting soul ; for eternity he offers the prospect of the peace of becoming absorbed in divine truth. He naflLed designates the state of the blessed as the highest of the virtue^, as love ' (charitas), but in the eternal blessedness where tha IBlUUtnce oi the world and of the sinful will is no longer to be over come, where love has no longer any want that must be satisfied. there this love is no longer anything other than a God-intoxicated contemplation.
In this duality, also, of the Augustinian ethics, old and new lie! r\
dose together. With the tense energy of will which is demanded 1 ! •** A*oaii for the earthly life, and with the transfer of the ethical judgment
so as to make it apply to the inner disposition, the modern man \I o^cu^Jt appears ; but in the conception of the highest goal of life the ancient <v^<\_>. ideal of intellectual contemplation retains the victory.
Here lies in Augustine's doctrine itself a contradiction with the individualism of the will, here at a decisive point an Aristotelian,
yeo-Platonlc
anfolds itself in the formation of the problems of the Middle Ages.
element maintains itself, and this internal opposition
5 23. The Controversy over Universal*
Johannes Sareiberieniis, Mttalogicut, II. cap. 17 f.
J. H. Lowe, Dtr Kampf xieuchen Xominalitmut und Bealismui im Mittel- etttr. $tin Urtprung und Kin Verlauf (Prague, 1870).
The schooling in formal logic which the peoples that entered upon the scientific movement at the beginning of the Middle Ages
' la hi» tyitem the three ChrUtian virtueg, faith, hope, and love, are placed
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aaofallEita* practical aud dianoiHk- virtues ul lireelc rtluc*'
288 Mediceoal Philosophy : First Period. [Part III
were obliged to undergo, developed in connection with the question as to the logical and metaphysical significance of genera and specie's (universalia) . But it would be a grave mistake to suppose that this
question had only the didactic value of serving as a subject for mental drill, in connection with which the rules of conceptional thought, division, judgment, and inference, were impressed for cen turies upon ever new and increasing throngs of scholars. On the contrary, the tenacity with which the science of the Middle Ages — and it is significant that this occurred independently in the Orient as well as in the Occident —. held fast to the elaboration of this problem in endless discussions, is rather in itselt a proof that in this question a very real and very difficult problem lies before us.
In tact, when Scholasticism, in its timorous beginnings, made the passage in Porphyry's Introduction ' to the Categories of Aristotle which formulated this problem, the starting-point of its own first attempts at thought, it hit with instinctive sagacity upon precisely the same problem which had formed the centre of interest during the great period of Greek philosophy. After Socrates had assigned to science the task of thinking the world in conceptions, the ques tion how the class-concepts, or generic concejrtions, are related jo~~ reality, became, for the first time, a chief motive of philosophy. It produced the Platonic doctrine 1)? Ideas and the Aristotelian logic ; and if the latter had as its essential content (cf. § 12) the doctrine of the forms in which the particular is dependent upon the uni versal, it is easy to understand that even from so scanty remains and fragments of this doctrine as were at the service of the earliest
Middle Ages, the same problem must arise with all its power for the new race also. And it is likewise easy to understand that the old enigmatic question worked upon the naive minds of the Middle Ages, untrained in thought, in a manner similar to that in which it worked upon the Greeks. In fact, the delight in logical dispute, as this developed after the eleventh century at the schools of Paris, finds its counterpart as a social phenomenon only in the debates of the philosophers at Athens, and in these latter, too, as numerous anecdotes prove, the question as to the reality of universals, which was connected with the doctrine of Ideas, played a leading part.
Nevertheless the problem was renewed under conditions that were essentially less favourable. When this question emerged for the Greeks, they possessed a wealth of proper scientific experience
". 1 The formulation of the problem in the translation of Bogthius is as follows : . . de generibus et speciebus — sive subsislant sive in svlis nudis intelleetibui pasita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia an incorporalia, et utrum separata a
sensibilibus an in sensibilibut posita et circa hax consistentia. . . . "
Chap. 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universals : Scotus Eriyena. 289
and a store of real information and knowledge, which, if not always, yet for the most part and on the whole, prevented them from mak ing their discussion solely a game with the abstractions of formal logic. But mediaeval science, especially in its beginnings, lacked just this counterpoise, and on this account was obliged to move so long in a circle with the attempt to construct its metaphysics out of purely logical considerations.
That the Middle Ages," in their turn, engaged and persisted so pertinaciously in this controversy which had previously been waged principally between Plato and the Cynics, and afterward between the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa, was not due solely to the fact that in consequence of the defective character of their tradi tions the thinkers of the Middle Ages knew as good as nothing of those earlier debates ; it had yet a deeper ground. ,The feeling of the peculiar, intrinsic worth of personality, which had gained so powerful expression in Christianity and especially in the Augustin- lan doctrine, found the liveliest echo and the strongest sympathy among precisely those tribes which were called to become the new bearers of civilisation ; and in the hearts of these same peoples ■urged also the youthful delight in richly coloured reality, in the living, particular appearance. But with the Church doctrine they received a philosophy which, with the measured calm of Greek thought, conceived the essential nature of things to ^'p "' »"iver«al connections, a metaphysics which identified the stages of logical unTTBTgalHy with intensities of Being of varying worths. In this t*T an inconsistency which covertly asserted^ itself, even in A"ugus- tinianism, and became a constant stimulus for philosophical reflec-
1. The question as to the individual's ground of Being or exis tence, from which mediaeval thought never became free, was the more natural for it just at its beginning in proportion as the Neo- Platonic metaphysics still maintained itself under the veil of a Christian mysticism. Nothing could be more adapted to call out the contradiction of a natural individualism than the high degree of consistency with which scolus Eriyena carried through the funda mental thoughts of the Xeo- Platonic Realism. Perhaps no philoso pner has expressed more clearly and frankly than he the final consequences of the metaphysics which, from the standpoint of the Socratic-Platonic principle that the truth, and therefore also Being, is to b* sought in the universal, identifies the stages of universality with those of the intensity and priority of Being. The universal
(the class-concept or logical genus) appears here as the essential and original reality, which produces from itself and contains within UselJ
'290 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Pabt IIL
the particular (the species and ultimately the individual). The universals are, therefore, not only substances {res; hence the name " Realism"), but, as contrasted with the corporeal individual things, they are the more primitive, the producing and determining sub stances ; they are the more Real substances, and they are the more Real in proportion as they are the more universal. In tins conception,
'therefore, the logical relations of concepts immediately become metaphysical relations ; formal arrangement contains real signifi cance. Logical subordination becomes changed into a production and inclusion of the particular by the general ; logical partition and determination become transformed into a causal process by means of which the universal takes on form and unfolds itself in the particular.
The pyramid of concepts, thus raised to a metaphysical signifi cance, culminates in the concept of the deity as the most universal. But the last product of abstraction, the absolutely universal, is that wbich has no determinations (cf. p. 250). Hence this doctrine becomes identical with the old " negative theology," according to which we can predicate of God only what he is not ; ' and yet here, too, this highest Being is designated, quite in accord with the thought of Plotinus, as the "uncreated, but self-creating Nature. " For this most universal Being produces out of itself all things; these, therefore, contain nothing else than its manifestations, and are related to it as particular specimens or instances are to the class ; they are in it and exist only as its modes of appearance. The result of these presuppositions is thus a logical pantheism : all things of the world are " theophanies " ; the world is God developed into the particular, proceeding out of himself to take on a definite form (deus explicitus). (Jrid^arid th» world ai-p on^i The same_
". Nature" (<ftuo-tt) is, as creative unity, God, and as created plurality, the world.
The process of unfolding (egressus) proceeds in the graded scale of logical universality. Out of God comes at first the intelligible world as "the Nature which is created and itself creates," the realm of universals, of Ideas which (as vol in the sense of Plotinus) form the working forces in the sensuous world of phenomena. The Ideas are built up as a heavenly hierarchy according to their various grades of universality, and therefore also of intensity of Being, and in connection with this thought Christian Mysticism constructs a
1 In carrying out this Philonic thought (cf. p. 237) the Church Fathers had already . employed a course of thought which proceeds by successive abstraction to the concept of God as the undetermined. Cf. , e. g. , Clement Alex. Strom. V. 11(689).
Cmaf. 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universalt : Scotus Erigena. 291
doctrine of angels after a Neo-Platonic pattern. But in every case beneath the mythical covering the important thought is really mctive, that real dependence consists in logical dependence; the logical consequence, by which the particular follows from the general, is spuriously substituted for the causal relation.
Hence, then, even in the world of the senses, it is only the uni versal that is properly active and efficient : corporeal things, as a whole, form the " Nature which is created and does not itself create. " ' In this world the individual thing is not as such active ; it is rather active according to the proportion of universal attri butes which attain manifestation in it. The individual thing of sense, accordingly, possesses the least force of Being, the weakest and completely dependent species of reality: the Neo-Platonic Idealism is maintained by Scotus Erigena in full.
To the stages of unfolding corresponds in a reverse order the return of all things into God (regressus), the resolution of the world Of individual funus inlu the eternal primitive Being, the dei- •• B :. of flip wurTd So thought, as tin' tinal goul i all genera tion and change, as the extinction of all that is particular, God is designated as " the Nature which neither is created nor creates " : it is the ideal of motionless unity, of absolute rest at the end of the world-process. All theophanies are destined to return into the unity of the divine All-Being, — that unity which knows no dis tinctions. Thus, even in the final destiny of things, the superior reality of the universal, which swallows up all that is particular, preserves itself.
2. As in antiquity (cf. § 11, 5), so here, in consequence of the effort to assure truth and reality to universals, the peculiar thought of a graded scale of Being appears. Some things (universals), is the doctrine, are more than others (particulars). " Being" is looked upon as, like other qualities, capable of comparison, of increase and diminution ; it belongs to some things more than to others. So it became the custom to think that the concept of Being {esse, existere) has a relation to that which is (essentia), and a relation of different degrees of intensity, just as other marks and qualities are related to the objects in which they are formed. As a thing possesses more or less extension, force, permanence, so it has alan more nr Ipks " BBB5 " ; a"rf »« '* fan iwn! r» nr lrtaftgther qualities, SO it can receive or lose that of Being. This line of thought, peculiar to
Realism, must be kept in mind to understand a great number of the
1 It need only be briefly mentioned thmt this "division of Nature" obviously recall* the Aristotelian distinction of the unmoved mover, the moved mover, and that which neither moves nor is moved. Cf. f 18, 6.
<y
292 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III.
metaphysical theories of the Middle Ages. It explains, in the first place, the most important doctrine which Realism produced, the ontological argument for the existence of God which Anselm of Can terbury brought forward.
The more universality, the more Reality. From this it follows that if God is the most universal being, he is also the most Real ; if he is the absolutely universal being, he is also the absolutely Real being, ens realissimum. He has, therefore, according to the concep tion of him, not only the comparatively greatest Reality, but also absolute Reality ; that is, a Reality than which a greater and higher cannot be thought.
But through the whole development which this line of thought had already taken in antiquity, we find that the worth-predicate of
perfection was inseparably iused with the conception of Being. ThB~3egrees ot ±5emg are those ot perfection ; the more anything the more perfect and, vice versa, the more perfect anything
the more it. 1 The conception of the highest Being there fore, also that of an absolute perfection that of a perfection such that cannot be thought higher and greater: ens perfect issimum.
In accordance with these presuppositions, Anselm perfectly correct in his conclusion that, from the mere conception of God as most perfect and most real Being, must be possible to infer his existence. But to do this he attempts various modes of proof. In his Monologium he follows the old cosmological argument that because there Being at all, highest and absolute Being must be assumed from which all else that exists has its Being, and which itself exists only from itself, according to its own essential nature
Whereas every individual existent entity can be also thought as non-existent, and therefore owes the realitjr of its essence not to itself, but to another (the Absolute), the most perfect Being can be thought only as being or existent, and exists accordingly only by virtue of the necessity of its own nature. God's essence
(and only God's) involves his existence. The nerve of this argu ment thus ultimately the Eleatic basal thought, tortv tlvai, Being
and cannot be thought otherwise than as being or existing. Anselm, however, involved this same thought in peculiar com plication, while he intended to simplify and render independent in itself. In the Proslogium he entered upon the ontological argu
ment, properly so called, which maintains that without any reference to the Being of other things, the mere conception of the most per-
A principle which lies at the basis of Augustine's theodicy, in so far as with both the existent held to be to ipso good, and the evil, on the contrary, as not truly existent.
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Chat. 1, J 23. ] Controversy over Universalis : Anselm. 293
feet Being involves its Reality. Inasmuch as this conception is thought, it possesses psychical reality : the most perfect being is as a content in consciousness (esse in intellectu). But if it existed only as a content in consciousness, and not also in metaphysical reality (esse etiam in re), a still more perfect being could evidently be thought, which should possess not only psychical, but also meta physical reality ; and thus the former would not be the most perfect being possible. It belongs, accordingly, to the conception of the most perfect being (quo majus cogitari non potest) that it possesses not only reality in thought, but also absolute reality.
It is obvious that Anselm in this formulation was not fortunate in his shift, and that what hovered before him attained in this proof but a very awkward expression. For it takes little acuteness to see that Anselm proved only that if God is thought (as most perfect being), he must be thought also necessarily as being or existent, and cannot be thought as non-existent. But the ontologi- cal argument of the Proslogium did not show even in the remotest degree that God, i. e. that a most perfect being, must be thought. The necessity for this stood fast for Anselm personally, not only because of the conviction of his faith, but also by the cosmological argumentation of the Monoiogium. When he believed that he could dispense with this presupposition and with the help of the mere conception of God arrive at the proof of his existence, he exemplified in typical manner the fundamental idea of Realism, which ascribed to conceptions without any regard to their genesis and basis in the human mind, the character of truth, i. e. of Reality. It was on this ground alone that he could attempt to reason from the psychical to the metaphysical reality of the concep tion of God.
The polemic of Qaunilo, therefore, in a certain respect hit the vulnerable point. He argued that according to the methods of Anselm, in quite the same manner the reality of any idea whatever, e. g. that of an island, if the mark of perfection were only included within might be proved. For the most perfect island, were not really in existence, would evidently be surpassed in perfection by the real island, which should possess the same other marks the former would be inferior to the latter in the attribute of Being. But instead of showing in his rejoinder, as might have been ex pected, that the conception of perfect island completely unnec essary arbitrary fiction, or that this conception contains an inner contradiction, while the conception of the most real being neces- «ary and not contradictory, Anselm expatiates further upon his argument, that the most perfect being in the intellect, must
*■• also in re.
