A Champion of Reason
Bates, Ernest Sutherland
264 THE COMMONWEAL January 13, 1926 A CHAMPION OF REASON By ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES IMMANUEL KANT believed that his thought had effected "a Copernican revolution1' in philosophy. After...
...That much, Dr...
...They are not binding upon thought as thought—it is perfectly possible for an individual to contradict himself—they are only binding upon thought if it wishes to attain the truth...
...It is to the reassertion of the metaphysical standpoint of scholasticism that Dr...
...The scholastic proofs of the existence of God were discredited by Kant, and the idea of God was reduced to something half-way between an hypothesis and a useful fiction...
...Change, if it is to be explained, involves direction— a uterminus a quo" and a uterminus ad quod"—a something which changes, and a something which causes change...
...The external nature which Kant denied was a substantial nature moving according to objective intelligible laws—the external nature of modern philosophy is an insubstantial flux, whose essence is, for Bergson, pure "change...
...Man was enthroned in the center of an otherwise rather vacant universe...
...Movement involves a prime mover...
...Is this characterization of modern philosophy just...
...Sheen proves...
...It seems very much in accordance with the scholastic principle that things gradually attain their perfection...
...What is the conclusion...
...if He is the work of our conscience and we 'worship at the shrine our own hands have built;' if God is the sum of all consciousness and appears at the term of evolution and not at its beginning...
...There is nothing in evolution which shocks the scholastic...
...for James and Dewey, pure "experience...
...statement...
...Its concepts are said to substitute symbols for reality, to solidify what really is moving, to break up what really is continuous...
...Note that the objection is not to evolution as a biological theory but to evolution as a metaphysical principle...
...But for that very reason he held that the universe is not self-explanatory...
...Thus the Kantian philosophy would seem to have come full cycle...
...for Alexander, pure "space-time...
...January 13,1926 THE COMMONWEAL 265 century...
...For life is immanent activity—an activity whose goal is its own perfection—and such activity is best of all exemplified in intelligence whose goal is no extrinsic utility but the intrinsic goal of knowledge...
...Many of the modern philosophers seem desirous of identifying themselves with movement rather than of understanding it...
...Least of all are they synthetic creations of the mind, for they are known directly as forms of reality and only indirectly, by subsequent reflection, as involving psychic apprehension in the mind...
...if 'His nature is sustained by us;' if He is a mere president of a cosmic commonwealth—then all that common sense had regarded as holy and sacred is vain and foolish, and God, instead of being the Lord and Creator of the universe, the Supreme Goodness, Beauty and Truth, is merely the servant of man—and religion, whose real end is to express the dependence of man on God, now becomes the dependence of God on man—whether God be real or a mere creation of our conscience...
...his researches, have been carried into every branch of contemporary philosophy...
...But the God and nature from which it started are not the same as those with which it ends...
...So far from scholasticism having neglected the fact of movement in the universe, Saint Thomas, following Aristotle, recognized it as the chief characteristic of the universe...
...for Russell, pure "motion...
...Such force as the pragmatical objections really possess is directed solely against the reason, the faculty of discursive inference, not against the intelligence whose vision of essences is direct and immediate...
...for Whitehead, pure "events...
...In other words, scholasticism and neo-scholasticism appeal, as all philosophies must appeal, whether willingly or unwillingly, to the tests of inner consistency and harmony with facts...
...Sheen's refutation of the latter and his vindication of the rights of logic on the basis of Thomistic metaphysics have an interest as wide as philosophy itself...
...It is regarded as a product of evolution, an adaptation to biological conditions, an instrument for meeting practical needs...
...Common sense philosophy never has seen anything intrinsically impossible about it...
...As the nineteenth century proceeded on its way, the characteristic mark of its philosophy came to be its attack upon the intelligence...
...London: Longmans, Green and Company...
...still less are they mere dying sensations, for they become more, not less, perfect as they move away from the details of sensation...
...if God is a mere 'child of the imagining,' a creation of our desire, a being Who learns from us how to be 'more effectively faithful to His own greater tasks' and whose Very character depends on our acts,' a mere primus inter pares, without foresight of good and evil, facing 'the blackness of the unknown and the blind joys and confusions of life;' if God is merely the universe with a nisus toward deity...
...And a god who shall explain evolution cannot be an evolving god, a part of his own process...
...Intelligence, as a means of ascertaining reality, is deputed to be inferior to intuition, pure experience, immediate apprehension...
...Such is the characterization of modern philosophy set forth by Dr...
...Nothing is further from the truth than the words of a recent writer in the Hibbert Journal—'Scholastic logic has no use for the idea of evolution, and the idea of evolution has no use for scholastic logic' The long list of modern scholastics who have at their head such men as Wasmann and Mendel is sufficient answer to such a...
...The Critical Philosophy, which taught that the ultimate categories of relation and causality were not discovered but created by the mind of man, enabled the latter, in Kant's proud words, to ugive laws to nature...
...Causation, on pain of becoming an infinite regress, involves a first cause—not necessarily, as so many modern attacks on scholasticism assume, a temporal first cause, but a logical first cause...
...Neo-scholasticism can assimilate evolutionary biology easily enough—what it cannot assimilate is evolutionary philosophy...
...Of them all, it was Schopenhauer who stood nearest to later developments of thought...
...This degradation of the intelligence is held to be favorable to religion...
...Sheen devotes the remainder of his book...
...if finite selves are eternal, and have a being independent of God...
...He is thoroughly familiar with the field of which 'he treats...
...its so-called truth is nothing but utility...
...Sheen allows modern philosophers to speak for themselves, either through direct quotation or close paraphrase...
...In fact, many of the early fathers saw in it something very beautiful, as may be found in Saint Augustine and the Alexandrine school, with their doctrine of the rationes seminales...
...if He is so weak that He 'draws strength and increase of being from us,' and 'owes His being to the preexisting finites;' if we must change our idea of God with every new scientific advance and change of government...
...Universals are not abstractions derived by a comparison of particulars, for without the previous existence of the concept, comparison would be impossible...
...In the philosophy of Saint Thomas, he asserts, are to be found specific answers to the two chief problems that have perplexed modern philosophers—the problem of knowledge and the problem of change...
...There are, to be sure, certain faults of emphasis—he overstates the importance of M. Bergson (incidentally, his frequent comparison of M, Bergson to Heraclitus is unfair to the Greek thinker, who, it should be remembered, recognized not only the flux but an abiding Logos) and he does not give due credit to the contemporary realistic defense of the intelligence against the attacks of the pragmatists...
...for, although modern philosophy regards the existence of God as unprovable, it regards itself as highly religious...
...If God is mere appearance in the absolute and eventually will be lost in it...
...God, it holds, can be approached non-rationally through individual experience, intuition, faith, hypothesis...
...Sheen's general characterization remains quite correct...
...The God from Whom Kant departed was a timeless God, the Creator and Preserver of the world, Whose essence was perfect intelligence of which man's is an imperfect image...
...The god of modern philosophy is an "elan vital," a "nisus toward deity," a "child of the divine imagining," a "president of the cosmic commonwealth," a "great toiler," an "idealized common will," a god of becoming, organic with the universe, evolving with it toward something which piously may be hoped to approximate perfection as a limit...
...After nearly a hundred and fifty years, we are now in a position to estimate some of the effects of that revolution...
...Nevertheless, since contemporary idealists, realists, and pragmatists alike, with few exceptions, have striven for an evolutionary interpretation of reality and have substituted biology for metaphysics, Dr...
...Kant's idealistic followers, while they saw the necessity of an Absolute by which man himself could be measured, interpreted this Absolute in capricious human terms—Fichte as moral striving, Schelling as aesthetic sensibility, Hegel as discursive thought, Schopenhauer as blind impulse dignified under the name of Will...
...Fulton J. Sheen, of the University of Lou vain, in his God and Intelligence,* which may safely be called one of the most important contributions to philosophy which has appeared in the present *God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy—A Critical Study in the Light of the Philosophy of Saint ThomaSj by Fulton J. Sheen...
...It hardly can be otherwise in the main, since for over sixty pages, Dr...
...The application of the scholastic doctrine of intelligence to the problem of change is direct...
...they are ways in which reality impresses itself upon the mind, not ways in which the mind impresses itself upon reality...
...Intelligence, so far from being as the Bergsonians believe, opposed to life, is the highest form of life...
...There can be no charges of intentional unfairness or ignorance brought against him...
...Beginning with the denial of God and external nature in favor of man's intelligence, it has ended by denying man's intelligence in favor of external nature and God...
...finally, Bergson and the pragmatists, armed with evolutionary biology, led a frontal attack all along the line...
...Similarly, the first principles of logic—the principle of being and the principle of contradiction—are no mere laws of thought but laws of reality...
...And here, in view of the oft-repeated assertion that scholasticism is merely an authoritarian religious philosophy, it may be well to quote in conclusion one more statement—"Our basic principles are extracted from the doctrines of Aristotle and Saint Thomas—principles whose sole claim to be accepted are their accord with common sense, and not their authority...
...Sheen makes this quite clear—uWe may take occasion here to correct a false impression about the attitude of neo-scholasticism toward modern evolution...
...Such individual experience of God, even though it results in as many gods as there are philosophers, should take precedence of all intellectual doubts...
...The empiricists in England undermined it in behalf of the senses, Nietzsche conducted sporadic forays against it in the name of the will...
...his quotations come from more than a hundred sources...
...Judging by these tests, the present nonCatholic writer at least would affirm that they fare far better than any of their contemporary idealistic or pragmatic rivals...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 10
