SCHOLASTICISM IN ENGLISH.*
RECENTLY there appeared an encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII., on the restoration of Christian philosophy in Catholic univer- sities, according to the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic, Doctor. This encyclical was translated into English and pub- lished, with a preface, by Cardinal Manning. The Scholastic philosophy was held forth both by Pope and Cardinal as the grand traditional inheritance of objective truth, which the Church guards and teaches in its philosophy. It is guarded and. taught by the authority of the Church, and its truth is, in the ultimate resort, guaranteed by the infallible authority of the Church. The Metaphysic of the School, of which the second volume is now before us, may fairly be considered in connection. with the encyclical of the Pope. It is an attempt to render into English, with such criticism of other systems as Mr. Harper could set forth, the great mediaeval system of philosophy. It is. a book full of courage and full of ability. But the ability is that of the advocate who reasons out a foregone conclusion. No one, however, will deny the courage of the man who in this. busy age seeks to revive the ponderous machinery of Mediaeval- ism, and who speaks not in Latin, but in English, of the, mysterious agents, distinct from matter, connected with matter, and hold to be indispensable for the explanation of its trans- formations. We had, in our reading in Latin, made the acquaintance of the vegetative soul, occult qualities, plastic. forces, specific virtues, affinities, energies, appetites, and many other mystic entities. Wo had got accustomed to them in their Latin form, and looked on them as rather ornamental and quite harmless. But Mr, Harper has brought them out into the clear light of day, and really recommends them as indispensable for the right understanding of ourselves and of the world. We give an example of how we are to think under the guidance of this infallible philosophy. Mr. Harper is speaking of the material cause,—" For convenience' sake, we will take the instance of an iron bar which is thrust into a furnace. The fire there introduces the accidental form of heat. Now, first of all, it is in the nature of accident that it should inhere in some subject which sustains it in its generation and in its complete act. But the heat expels the contrary form of cold. The latter also required a Subject of inhesion ; therefore, both accidents. must be in some subject, But why in one common subject, &c.?" It is unnecessary to continue the quotation. But it- was necessary to quote one illustration of the kind of' reasoning which abounds in this volume. The obvious criticism is, that to speak of heat as an accidental form inhering in a sub- ject adds nothing to our knowledge. On the contrary, it only serves to bewilder the mind, and to place a barrier between it. and the facts. What is the use of all this grotesque machinery, unless for the purpose of sending the intelligence to sleep P The infallible philosophy, like its counterpart in theology, is admir- ably fitted for this end. It gives the mind so much to do in the * The Metaphysic of the School. By Thomas Harper, H.J. Vol. II. Louden :.
Macmillan and Co. way of mastering all the intricacies of its network of divisions and subdivisions, and of becoming acquainted with the machinery generally, that when it arrives at the end for which these are supposed to exist, the mind has not strength left to care much about the matter. But the fatal objection to it all is this,—that it is really unnecessary, that the human mind can think to purpose when it discards these abstractions, and cannot think to much purpose when it uses them.
This volume, consisting of 757 closely-printed pages, is -de- voted to the setting forth of the Scholastic philosophy on the points of the "Principles of Being" and the " Causes of Being," The causes of being are discussed under the usual heads of material, formal, efficient, and final causes. But so protracted and intricate is the discussion, that though nearly 600 pages are occupied with the Scholastic doctrine of cause, only two of the classes into which it is divided are overtaken in this volume. Efficient cause is yet to follow, and will occupy the greater part of the next volume, and Mr. Harper promises in it to show the harmony which obtains between the metaphysics of the School and the latest physical discoveries. Meanwhile, we shall not enter on any criticism of that section of his book which treats of the causes of being. We should like to have the whole subject before us. Only this, we shall say, in a preliminary way. This scheme is based on the insufficient analysis made of Aristotle, who, for Scholasticism, is the philosopher. That the analysis made by Aristotle is insufficient and inadequate, is recognised by every one outside of Scholasticism. " Aristotle," says Professor Sayce, "makes no clear distinction between thought and language ; concept and word are with him interchangeable terms ; and his famous Ten Categories, into which all objects can be classed, are as much grammatical as logical, or, perhaps more rightly, a mixture of both. In his hands, the rhetorical gives way to the logical treatment of language, and the sentence is analysed in the interests of formal logic. The logical system of Aristotle is purely empirical ; it is based on the grammar of a single language, and is nothing but an analysis of the mode in which the framers of that language unconsciously thought." It is this empirical system, founded on the analysis of a single language, which has been raised by the metaphysic of the School into absolute universality, and in its hands has become
the infallible tradition of objective truth."
We come to the shorter section, entitled, "Principles of Being." In this part, there is a critical examination of the syn- thetical, a priori, judgments of Kant. , In order that the reader may understand his polemic, our author leads up to it by a review of Descartes, and a more lengthened examination of Hume. We acknowledge that he has done his work in no perfunctory manner. He evidently knows the authors he criticises at first hand, and specially to Hume and Kant he has given no ordinary share of attention. At the same time, we do not think he has mastered the problem of philosophy as it presented itself to these great thinkers. It is scarcely possible that he could do so. For to him, the movement of the human mind in philosophy, ever since it broke the fetters of the Scholastic method, is an irrelevancy and an aberration. From the time of Descartes downwards, the modern mind, according to Mr. Harper, has drifted in helpless hopelessness, at the mercy of every shifting wind, since it abandoned the safe anchorage of infallible objective truth. Still, objective, infallible truth, in the person of this author, condescends to reason and to argue, and we can try the cogency of his reasoning by the rules of ordinary logic. The great aim of his criticism of Kant is to prove that synthetic judgments a priori are impossible. We do not wonder that the author puts forth all his strength, and exerts to the uttermost his dialectic skill in this effort. For the issue is vital. If synthetic judgments a priori are possible, Scholas- ticism vanishes like a had dream. Both its method and its principle are overthrown.
At the outset, we would concede to the author his proposition, that immediate analytical judgments are in themselves uni- versal. Analysis merely unfolds what is contained in the sub- ject. Under guidance of the principle of contradiction, it merely makes explicit what from the first was involved and implied in the subject. There is no need, in propositions which are truly analytic, to go beyond the simple operation of our minds, or to make any appeal to experience in order to ascer- tain its truth. An idea, proposition, or judgment must not contradict itself. Operations like these are clearly a priori, and proceed under the leading of the principle of contradiction. It is not to our present purpose to inquire into the value of such knowledge, or how far it can lead us, or to inquire how far it is based on a previous synthesis of experience. Clearly, whether the result of such process be valuable or not, such an analytical method is competent. The question, however, which Hume asked, leads us quite outside of the sphere and scope of analytical judgment. He found that iu mere matters of fact there were also principles which seemed universal and necessary. When one ball hits another, why do I expect the second to move P When the sun shines on a stone, why do I expect the stone to grow warm P There are a number of events which have been habitually conjoined in all my experience, and yet I never think of the one as cause of the othor. It is a sufficient explanation of such conjunction, to say that it is the result of habit and of custom. But to make the principle of causality itself one of custom, as Hume did, is clearly to mistake a subjective bond of habitual association in me, for one which is objective and true in itself, valid for every one, as it is valid for me. Hume could find no other ex- planation of the principle of causality—every change must have a cause—than that it was the result of habit, or of in- separable association. But this is manifestly inadequate. Here Kant takes up the problem, and transposes it from the particular of Hume into the universal problem of the possibility of syn- thetic judgment a priori. It is not necessary nor possible for us to enter into the Kantiau solution. In the present reference, the issue between Mr. Harper and Kant lies not in the question is the principle of causality universal and necessary, for both of them affirm its universality and necessity, but is it analytic or synthetic P Mr. Harper enunciates his thesis thus :— " The principle of Causality (which may be thus enunciated : inceptive or contingent being necessarily supposes its efficient cause) is analytical. Hence, the concept of an efficient cause is essentially contained in the idea of change, or the possible." In our opinion, Mr. Harper has utterly failed, in the demonstration of this proposition, a proposition absolutely essential to his system. In no possible way, by no means of analysis, can we out of the notion of change obtain the idea of cause. For change is an empirical fact, wholly contingent, and experience declares only what a thing is, not what it must be. But under the notion of cause, we have not the empirical or the contingent, but what is universal and necessary. So keenly is this felt, that the whole tribe of the successors of Hume in this country have striven to eliminate the element of necessity out of the idea of cause, and prove it to consist only in ante- cedent and consequent. Could this by any possibility have happened, if the conception of cause was contained in the idea of change, as Mr. Harper would have it P But we must account philosophically for the conviction which is in every human mind that every change has a cause, and for other similar pro- positions. The only philosophical explanation yet given is that of Kant, and the attempt of Mr. Harper to damage its validity• has, in our opinion, failed. Of the fact that synthetic judg- ments a priori are possible, we can have no doubt, and if the Scholastic would descend from the lofty tableland of being in general, and would condescend to inquire into the actual experience of men, he would find that the problem transforms itself, and becomes one which inquires into the way how the synthesis of experience is possible. Scholasticism has no answer to this question. It assumes all hum an knowledge as given already in human language, and by mere analysis of human language it conceives it possible to arrive at the knowledge of ourselves, and of all else, But human language is itself the product of human experience, and changes, enlarges, and is modified with the widening experience of man. An analysis of the contents of our notions as given in human language can only give us what was put into language in its formative period ; and this is all that, at its best, we can expect from the Scholastic philosophy.
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