experience an agreeable or disagreeable sensation in consequence of a reflection which occurs to us: we reflect upon the will; we seek or repudiate the object of our thought; there is, so to speak, within us a boiling spring of phenomena of different kinds, all interlinked, modified, produced, reproduced, and mutually influenced by each other in their incessant communication. We are conscious of all these; we encounter them all in one common field, which is the subject that experiences them. What necessity, then, is there to imagine intermediate beings in order to bring the faculties of the soul into communication with each other? Why may it not with its activity, called understanding, occupy itself immediately with sensible representations and affections and with all that is in its consciousness? Supposing this consciousness in its indivisible unity to comprise all the variety of internal phenomena, it does not therefore follow that the intellectual activity of the soul cannot be referred to whatever it contains of active or receptive, without its being necessary to imagine species to serve as courtiers between the faculties, to announce to one what has taken place in the other.
126. The acting intellect of the Aristotelians, admissible in sound philosophy so far as it denotes an activity of the mind applied to sensible representations, does not seem alike admissible, if it be supposed to be the producer of new representations distinct from the intellectual act itself. The understanding is all activity; the receptivity of the soul has nothing to do with it, but to proportion its materials; and the conceptions elaborated in presence of these materials, seem to be nothing else than the exercise of this same activity, subject on the one hand to the conditions required by the thing understood, and subordinated on the other hand to the general conditions of every intelligence.
127. I do not mean to say that the intellectual act does not refer to any object. I replace the idea by other acts of the soul, or by affections or representations of some kind or other, whether active or passive. This being so, if I am asked, for example, what is the immediate object of the intellectual act perceiving of determinate sensible intuition, I reply that it is the intuition itself. If the difficulty of explaining the union of such different things be urged, I answer: first, that this union exists in the unity of consciousness, as the internal sense attests: second, that the same difficulty militates against those who pretend that the understanding elaborates an intelligible species, which it takes from the sensible intuition; and how, I may ask, does the understanding place itself in contact with this intuition when it would elaborate its intelligible species. If this immediate contact be impossible in the one case, it will be equally so in the other; and if they concede it to be possible in their own case, they cannot deny it to be possible in ours also.
When the understanding refers to no determinate intuition, but only to sensible intuitions in general, its immediate object is their possibility also in general, subject to the conditions of the object considered in general, and to those of every intelligence; among which, the principle of contradiction holds a primary place.
CHAPTER XXI.
DETERMINATE AND INDETERMINATE IDEAS
128. We must, under pain of falling into sensism, by limiting the understanding to the perception and combination of objects presented by sensibility, admit other than intellectual acts referable to sensible objects in general. And what, in this case, is the object of the intellectual act, is a question as difficult as it is interesting.
129. The pure understanding can exercise its functions either upon determinate or indeterminate ideas; that is, upon ideas which contain something determinate, something realizable in a being, that is or may be offered to our perception, or upon ideas which represent general relations, without application to any object. Care should be taken not to confound general with indeterminate, or particular with determinate ideas. Every intermediate idea is a general idea, but not vice versa. The idea of being is general and indeterminate; that of intelligence is general but determinate. The particular idea refers to an individual; the determinate to a property, and it does not cease to be determinate although we abstract all relation in it to an existing individual. This distinction opens the way to considerations of the highest importance.
130. When the understanding proceeds by indeterminate conceptions, its principal object seems to be being in its greatest universality. This is the radical and fundamental idea, round which all other ideas are grouped. From the idea of being springs the principle of contradiction, with its infinite applications to every class of objects; from it also flow the ideas of substance and accidents, of cause and effect, of the necessary and the contingent, and every thing contained in the science of ontology, called for this very reason ontology, or the science of being.
131. There is nothing in those conceptions which express the general relations of all beings, to characterize them until they quit their purely metaphysical sphere and descend into the field of reality.
In order to be able to conceive of a real being, we require it to be presented to us with some property. Being and not-being, substance and accidents, cause and effect, are, when combined with something positive, highly fruitful ideas; but taken in general, with nothing determinate assigned to them, they do not offer us any existing, or even possible object.
132. The idea of being presents us that of a thing in the abstract; but if we would conceive of this as existing or as possible, we must imagine this thing to be something with characteristic properties. Whenever we hear an existing thing spoken of, we instinctively ask what it is, and what is its nature. God is essentially being, is infinite being; but nothing would be represented to our mind were we to conceive of him only as of being, and not also as intelligent, active, free being endowed with all the other perfections of his infinite essence.
133. The idea of substance offers us that of a permanent being, which does not, like a modification, inhere in another. This idea, taken in its generality without other determination than that added to the idea of being, by that of subsistence, offers us nothing real or realizable. Permanence in general, subsistence by itself, non-inherence in a subject, do not suffice to enable a substance to exist or to be possible; some characteristic mark, some attribute is also needed, as corporeal, intelligent, free, or any other you please, to determine the general idea of substance.
134. The same may be said of the idea of cause, or productive activity. An active thing, in general, offers us nothing either real or possible. In order to conceive an existing activity, we must refer to a determinate activity; the idea of acting, or of being able to act, in general, does not suffice; we must represent it to ourselves, as exercising itself in one way or another, referring to determinate objects, producing, not beings in general, but beings having their own characteristic attributes. True, we do not need to know what these attributes are; but we do need to know that they exist with their determinateness.
The most universal cause conceivable is God, the first and infinite cause; and although we do not conceive of him as of cause in the abstract, regarding the simple idea of productive activity, but we attach to the general idea of cause the ideas of free will and intelligence. When we say that God is omnipotent, we assign an infinite sphere to his power; we do not know the characteristic attributes of all the beings which can be created by this infinite activity; but we are certain that every existing or possible being must have a determinate nature; and we do not conceive it to be possible for a being to be produced, which, without any determination, would be nothing but being.
135. We do not meet this determination, indispensable as it is to us, if we would conceive of the existence or possibility of a being, in indeterminate ideas, but must take it from experience; wherefore, if our understanding were limited to the combination of those relations offered in indeterminate conceptions, it would be condemned to a perfectly sterile science. We have already seen (Chap. XIV.) that the absolute non-communication of the real with the ideal order is impossible if the intelligible order be not deprived of all consciousness of itself. It is not enough to know, that such a communication exists, but we must ascertain in what points it is verified, and how far it extends.
136. Before
