necessarily reduces all our mental operations to cognitions and emotions. Man is, then, simply a being that knows and feels, and therefore differs only in degree from any of the animal tribes; for they all know and feel to some extent at least. But by what authority does the author exclude volitions? When one wills to do or not to do a thing, to resist or to follow inclination, to obey or to disobey God, is the mental fact simply an emotion or a cognition? A child knows better. The difference between cognition and emotion is not greater or more evident than the difference between either of them and volition, and the fact of volition is as certain as that we know or feel. The author, doubtless, fancies that he recognizes volitions, because he professes to recognize the will; but he does not recognize the will as a distinct faculty, or as the principle of a distinct class of mental facts. He resolves it, as we have seen, into the general activity of the soul, and gives it only the intellectual and the emotional modes of action. He must, then, either deny all voluntary activity, or else assert that all activity is voluntary. We have just shown that he cannot do the former; is he prepared to assert the latter, - that all our sensations, perceptions, intuitions, instincts, and animal passions are volitions, and therefore acts for which we are morally responsible, even though we have not deliberately excited or assented to them? This were, indeed, to go the full length of Calvinism. Calvinism, we are aware, confounds will with the simple power to act, and freedom with liberty a coactione. Hence it declares the simple motions of concupiscence to be sins, not only the effects of original sin, and inclining to sin, but sins themselves, for which we may be brought into judgment, even when actually resisted. It makes all instinctive and indeliberate actions, not proceeding from grace, mortal sins, and allows no distinction between what we do deliberately, and what we do indeliberately and unintentionally. This is the real doctrine of Jonathan Edwards's famous Treatise on the Affections, and it makes sanctity consist in having no internal struggles, and diminishes our merit just in proportion to the internal obstacles we have to overcome, or spiritual conflicts to maintain. But this is manifestly false as well as horrible. We are responsible only for what we do voluntarily; and only that act is voluntary which it depends on the will to do or not to do. Nothing is more absurd than to term an act which we cannot but do a voluntary act; and nothing is more certain than that our cognitions and emotions do not always depend on our will, -- are not always subject to our control. They not unfrequently come and go unbidden, in spite of our most strenuous efforts to the contrary. How often do we grieve at the intrusion of unwelcome thoughts, and at emotions which we would, but cannot, suppress? Who that knows any thing of the spiritual life, who that has attempted to live in thought, word, and deed a pure and holy life, needs to be told that not a few of his thoughts and emotions are indeliberate and involuntary, and occur in spite of his firmest resolutions, and most unremitting vigilance in guarding the avenues of his mind and heart? Who needs to be told that the Christian's life is an unceasing warfare? But our objections to Mr. Morell's psychology do not end here. Leaving by the way, for the moment, what he says of the emotional side of his table, we assure him that we cannot accept the intellectual side without important modifications. The mind, according to the author, begins in mere feeling, and passes successively through four degrees or stages of development; namely, the sensational, the perceptional, the logical, and the intuitional. In sensation, the sensitive subject and sensible object are confounded; the soul seizes, indeed, the sensible object, but does not distinguish itself from the object, or external cause of its sensitive affection. In perception, the soul apprehends the sensible object, and apprehends it as external and distinct from both the apprehension and the subject apprehending. In logic, or reflection, the soul generalizes, or applies its own abstract forms to the objects which it has perceived. That is, by perception we learn sensible objects, and by logic apply to them the abstract forms, or, as Kant would say, the categories, of the understanding. But our knowledge is not limited to our sensible intuitions and the subjective forms of the logical understanding. Above the logical understanding, which adds nothing to the matter or "content" of knowledge, is the intuitional consciousness, in which the soul apprehends another and a higher order of truth, - supersensible, necessary, and absolute truth,-pure Being, or God himself. This the author explains in the following passage. "The mathematical sciences, for example, have as their essential foundation the pure conceptions of space and number; or, if they be of the mechanical order, the conceptions of power and motion. Moral science, again, is based upon the fundamental notions of good and evil; æsthetical science upon that of beauty; theological science upon the conception of the absolute,- of God. Now, these primary elements of all the sciences can never be communi cated and never learned exegetically. Unless we have a direct consciousness of them, they must ever remain a deep mystery to us, just as no description could ever give to a blind man the notion of color, or to a man who has no organ of taste the idea of bitter or salt. We do not deny but that means may be employed to awaken the consciousness to these ideas, but still they can never be known by definition, never communicated by words to any man who has not already felt them in his own inward experience. Here, then, we have the actual material of all scientific truth, and that material, it is evident, must be presentative, coming to us by the immediate operation of our intuitional consciousness." - pp. 69, 70. There is little here, in the sense of the author, to which we do not object; but we restrict our comments to his doctrine of intuition. By the "intuitional consciousness" it is clear that he means the reason of Jacobi, Coleridge, and Gioberti, who very unreasonably distinguish reason as a faculty from understanding. It is the Vernunft distinguished from the Verstand and Empfindungs-vermögen of the Germans, and is held to be a power or faculty of the soul to apprehend immediately supersensible truth, in our terminology, the intelligible as distinguished from the sensible, the Idea, in the language of Plato, which, as we showed in our last Review, is identically God as Ens reale et necessarium. But to this we object, 1. That it supposes the order of truth intuitively revealed comes to the mind only in the fourth stage of its development, instead of the first; and 2. That it makes intuition a faculty of the soul, and asserts for man the natural subjective power to see God. * 1. The solidity of the first objection we established in our Review for last January, in the article just referred to, by showing that the order of knowledge must follow the order of being, since what is not can be no object of knowledge, and where there is no object there can be no fact of knowledge. That is to say, we cannot know without knowing somewhat, and cannot know somewhat unless somewhat is, no very startling proposition, we should suppose, and very much like a truism. The intuition of God, then, if the order of knowledge follows the order of being, must precede all knowledge of existences, because existences are from God, and subsequent to him, and because without him our existence is not, is nothing, and one term of a relation always connotes the other. To affirm ourselves as simple being, as ens reale, is to affirm a falsehood, for ens reale is God, and we are not God. To af * Quarterly Review, January, 1850, Art. I., pp. 24-26. firm ourselves as existence, taking the word, as we must if we distinguish it from real being, in its strict etymological sense, (from exstare,) is to affirm that we are from God, and are only as we are in him, by virtue of his creative act, and therefore is to distinguish ourselves from him, and to assert our dependence on him and relation to him as his creatures; which is impossible, unless we know that he is, and has created us. Perception, in Mr. Morell's sense, cannot precede intuition of the inintelligible, for it is only by virtue of intuition of the intelligible, that the sensible is perceptible, or any thing to us but a mere sensitive affection or mode of the soul itself. Nor can the logical operation described, but, by the way, inaccurately described, precede intuition; for logic cannot operate without data, and without the intuition of the intelligible it can have no data, that is, can have no principles, no premises; for no man a little versed in philosophy can seriously maintain that the categories are mere subjective forms of the understanding. The error of the author grows out of his confounding the order of intuition with the order of reflection. Intuition follows the order of being, and presents us the ontological order as it really is, independent of us, as it is revealed by God himself, and taught us in the Catechism, and therefore presents being before existence, the Creator before creatures, because such is the real order. Reflection, which is rethinking, reverses this order, begins where intuition leaves off, and leaves off where intuition begins. It takes the creature from intuition, and by analysis rises to the reflex cognition of God. It is the neglect to distinguish between these two orders of knowledge, and fixing attention mainly on the fact of reflection, undistinguished from intuition, that so wofully misleads our modern philosophers, and renders obscure and doubtful what in itself is clear and certain. 2. We ourselves, indeed, hold that God reveals himself intuitively to us, but we do not admit that intuition is a faculty, nor that we have the natural, inherent power to see God. The distinction between reason and understanding, contended for by Kant, Jacobi, Coleridge, Gioberti, and others, is imaginary; for to know is always one and the same fact, and demands, on the side of the subject, only one and the same faculty. To suppose that we must have one power by which to know sensible objects, and another by which to know God, is as superfluous as to suppose that we need one voice with which to sing the praises of our Redeemer, and another with which to sing the praises of a conquering hero. All the facts of knowledge have not, indeed, the same conditions, nor the same objects, but, as facts of knowledge, they all depend, by the very force. of the word, on the same cognitive principle. Can there be a cognition which is not cognition, which is more or less than cognition? or knowledge that is intellectual, but not rational, rational, but not intellectual? Can there be a man that understands but does not know, or knows but does not understand? There is, and can be, only one cognitive faculty. Intuition is simply a mental fact, not a mental faculty, or power of the soul. But we do not admit that we have the inherent power to behold God intuitively. In the first place, what is intuitively revealed to us of God is not his quidditas, is not what God is, but simply that he is; that is, he is made known to us simply as QUI EST, He who is, and who creates existences. In the second place, this cognition of God, although intuitive, is not by virtue of our own inherent intellectual force or created light; for till God is present to the mind as its intelligible object, it has no intellectual activity. Prior to the intuition of God, the intellect is not constituted, is not actual intellect, is at best only intellectus in potentia. It is only the moment when God presents himself as the creative intelligible object, that the intellect is objectively formed, is intellectus in actu. The power or activity that reveals and affirms God is his, not ours, and the revelation or affirmation of himself as intelligible object is only the completion of that creative act, which, from nothing, creates us, not only existences, but intellectual existences. As it is only by virtue of the intimate presence and immanence of God as ens reale, mediante his creative act, that we are existences, or continue to exist, so it is only by the intimate presence and immanence of God as the intelligible, mediante the same act, that we are and continue to be intellectual existences; for it is only in him that we live, move, and are, or are able to perform any function whatever. It is not, then, we who by our power behold God, but he who, by his own agency, makes himself known to us; and our intuitive apprehension of the fact that he is, is by virtue of an act as truly an act of divine revelation as is the revelation of the Christian mysteries themselves, differing from that only in the respect that it reveals what, when revealed, is evident per se, whereas that reveals what, when revealed, is evident only per alia. This distinction between the two revelations, we remark by the NEW SERIES.— VOL. IV. NO. II. 22 |