Theory on the Origin of Ideas

Objectum intellectus est ens vel verum commune.- St Thomas, ST I. lv. 1

 

385. So far, we have passed in review the principal systems on the Origin of Ideas, seeking for one which might give a satisfactory explanation of the matter, but in vain; for we have found some faulty be defect, i.e. because they assume to little (sec. III), and others by excess, i.e. because they assume a great deal too much (Sec IV), of the innate in the human mind. We must, therefore, try to go deeper into this thorny question, and see if we can hit upon the golden mean; admitting nothing innate of which the necessity is not proven, yet not allowing any prejudice against a harmless word to deter us from conceding that minimum of the innate which can be demonstratively shown to be an indispensable condition of the existence of our ideas (cf, 25–28).

 

But that we may know how much yet remains to be done, and in what way we must set about it, let us begin by taking a brief survey of the ground we have traversed.

 

I began, then, by pointing out as clearly and completely as I could where lay precisely the knot of the difficulty presented by this question, in the following words: “Those who say that all our ideas are acquired, must admit a certain order in the operations necessary for their formation. In this order, either judgments, precede ideas, or ideas precede judgments; here than can be not middle course. But both these alternatives are equally impossible; therefore it cannot be allowed that all our ideas are acquired” (cf, 41-45).

386. The Sensists and, in general, all those who pretend that all ideas without exception are of our own formation, have never perceived the true nature of this difficulty; and this is why they hold with such confidence to their opinion.

For just in proportion as the force of this difficulty is well seen and felt, are we compelled to give up the belief that all our ideas are acquired. The divergencies of philosophical schools as to the origin of human cognitions, arise solely from their not having seen, or not seen clearly, the said difficulty.

 

Yet even those who did not see the difficulty clearly and, so to say, full in the face, have at times caught glimpses of it, obscurely, and as it were sideways; or if they did not see it at all, those of their readers who have eyes to see, detect it none the less in their reasonings, and together with this, the fact that it is left there wholly unanswered.

 

Of this Locke is an instance. When describing the development of the sensitive faculty, he continually brings in judgments, unawares to himself, and therefore without thinking it at all necessary to explain whence they proceed, and how they are possible. So also in another place we find him laying it down that ideas are certainly anterior to judgments, without however examining or even suspecting the fact that the operation by which we from ideas is a judgment, and that this function of judgment must precede the ideas as cause goes before effect (cf, 68-69).

 

But if Locke shows plainly in these passages that he had not in the least perceived the difficulty; in other places a slight ray of light seems to have dawned upon him, as for instance where he observes that we can have no knowledge without a judgment (cf, 113-114); and still more where he comes upon the idea os substance, and finds it such a stumbling-block that he is forced to confess that in his system it is inexplicable. Nevertheless his imperfect and partial view of the difficulty prevents him from feeling its importance; so that after having said that all knowledge is preceded by a judgment, he does not draw out any consequences which flow from this; and as for the troublesome idea of substance, he gets rid of it by declaring that it has no existence (cf, 48-62).

 

387. Sometimes philosophers have noticed this difficulty (always under some particular form) in the reasonings of others, but not in their own. Condillac, for example, justly finds fault with Locke, because in explaining the operations of the sensitive faculty he introduces judgments without accounting for them (cf, 68,69).

But then Condillace himself, in order not to be harassed with this faculty of judgment, attributes it also to the senses; thus the monstrosity confounding together the principle that feels, with the principle that judges of the thing felt. (cf, 70, 71).

 

On the other hand, Condillac does not observe the other error into which Locke had fallen, by supposing that we form ideas in the first instance without judgments. He therefore begins also with ideas, not perceiving that he is introducing judgments into their formation. Nor does his system explain in any way the origin of the universality of ideas; although this is an essential property of all ideas, and it would be impossible, without it, to form any judgment whatever (cf, 86-96).

 

388. Reid saw further than Condillac. He saw quite plainly that Locke was maintaining an impossibility when declaring that ideas are formed first, and then, with their help, judgments; for we can form no idea without an act of judgment. He therefore laid it down that the first operation of our mind is, not an idea, but a judgment (cf, 115-117). But how is it conceivable that we can form judgments without having ideas? Reid answers that we make these judgments instinctively. But, in the first place, this is only an hypothesis, or rather a gratuitous assertion; and next, it in no way solves the difficulty. In fact, instinct cannot compel us to do the impossible, as it would be to form judgments while not having any ideas; for ideas are necessarily the means and elements of judgments. Instinct may explain well enough why I set myself to make use of my faculty of judgment, instead of allowing it to remain inoperative, but it can never explain the origin of the faculty itself. It cannot constitute in me this faculty; it can only set it in motion; and the faculty of judgment cannot be set in motion without something on which to exercise itself, and without a rule to go by, in other words, without ideas (cf, 121-129).

 

Reid and his disciple Dugald Stewart, pushed hard by the difficulty which they saw, however imperfectly, went still further. The instinctive judgments, with whatever virtue they may be credited, can never produce ideas truly universal. What did these philosophers therefore do? They took the short but desperate course of denying the existence of ideas altogether (cf, 104, 108, 160). This kind of Turkish justice inflicted on the unfortunate ideas, whose only guilt is that they did not reveal the secret of their origin, had been learned from Locke, who, as we have seen, had decreed that the idea of substance should no longer exist because it did not fit into his system.

 

None of these Ideologists, then, were so far shaken by the difficulty, as to persuade themselves that it was simply impossible to account for the production of all ideas through mere operations of our own mind; and the reason of this was because they either did not see the difficulty or saw it only partially and obscurely/

 

389. But there were others possessed of greater penetration, who clearly perceived that ideas could not be formed simply by sensation and reflection, or more generally, by the operations of our own mind; for they understood that these very operations could not be done without ideas. Amongst such we placed three rare and lofty intellects, Plato, Leibnitz, and Kant (cf, Sect IV).

 

All these great men were unanimous in holding “that unless the human soul be admitted to have, as congenite and connatural with it, some intellectual element distinct from a bare and simple faculty, it could never begin to think, nor, consequently, form ideas.” Here is an opinion constantly and most firmly held by the most learned and deepest thinkers known.

 

390. But if we find a perfect agreement amongst the most acute thinkers on the negative side of this question, that is to say, on the impossibility of all our ideas being entirely of our own forming, when we come to the positive side, namely, to defining what is this necessary element which, being joined with our soul by nature, makes it capable of intellectual operations, we see those thinkers much divided in opinion.

 

Theri differences arose from this, that some considered more of the innate element to be necessary than others. No doubt all those able men were well aware, that “In explaining the facts of the human soul one must not assume more than is necessary to account for them.” But the difficulty was, how to fine that minimum which, while on the one hand sufficient for explaining our ideas, had on the other nothing superfluous in it; and philosophy advanced towards the right solution of the problem in proportion as it came nearer and nearer to this discovery, according to the indubitable principle we have laid down, that “Of all complete explanations of the facts of the human soul, that which is simplest and requires fewest suppositions, is to be preferred (cf, 26-28).

 

In fact, among those philosophers who believed in the necessity of admitting an innate element in the soul in order to account for the formation of ideas, we noticed a progress; the latter ones seeking to remove the superfluous part allowed by their predecessors, and at the same time showing that, even with the “innate” so diminished, ideas could be produced (cf, 361, 362).

 

391. To come to particulars, Plato adopted the supposition that all ideas exist in us from the beginning, although in a dormant state, because he was unable to see any other way of explaining why a child, on being questioned, gives a true reply on many things which have never been taught him, and which he nevertheless seems to know quite well. That child (argued the great Athenian) must always have had those ideas in his mind; only he was not giving them his attention, and by the interrogations now put to him, without however telling him how matters are, he is stimulated to attend to those truths which he knows unawares to himself, and therefore finds them without having learned them from anyone.

 

392. But Leibnitz perceived that this was too large an admission, and considered that the gradual formation of our ideas could be sufficiently explained if, instead of supposing them to be in us entire from the first, one said that we carried with us some very faint traces of them; even as a block of marble might be said to contain a statue if it had in it colored veins in such a form as to exhibit, however slightly, the outlines of the statue (cf, 278, 279).

 

393. Kant, who came next, made a more accurate and searching analysis of our cognitions, and noticed that they are composed of two elements, the one supplied to us by means of the senses, and the other impossible to be so supplied. To the first he appropriately gave the name matter of cognition; to the second he gave the name of form. The first, he said, need not be supposed innate in us; but the second can only originate from within our own selves. Thus he did not make our ideas innate, either in themselves, as had been done by Plato, nor in their traces, as was done by Leibnitz. He only made one part of them innate, the formal part; so that according to him all our ideas are factitious, but not wholly so. This was a great step forward in philosophical science (cf, 324, 325).

394.  But the process of simplification required to be carried still further; it remained to reduce to the minimum possible this formal part of our cognitions, which, as had been long known, must come, not from ourselves, but from nature-must be the germ planted in our souls by the Creator, that from it should be developed the vast tree of human knowledge.

Now our fathers (in Italy) had seen that this element, essential to the existence of the intellective soul, could be but a very small thing, and they had said with as much elegance as truth of diction, that “God in the act of creating our souls allows them to have a fugitive glimpse, so to speak, of the immense treasure of His eternal Wisdom.”

395.  The problem of philosophy which still remains after the efforts made by Kant consists, therefore, “In determining the nature of that minimum of knowledge, or that light which renders the soul intelligent, and hence capable of intellectual operations.”  Truly, this minimum is so slight that we could hardly compare it even to a little spark stolen from the sun in the heavens, it is only so much of truth as can be snatched by means of, as it were, a furtive and instantaneous glance.

Kant missed this minimum altogether.  He made the formal part of our cognitions much more than it really is.  Instead of starting from a principle perfectly one and simple, he tore up the formal part into many independent forms, two of which he gave, as we have seen, to the internal and the external sense, four (each of them subdivided into three modes) to the understanding, and three to the reason (cf, 357, 358).   He did not perceive that the sense, as such, has in it nothing appertaining to formal knowledge, and that all the forms attributed by him to the understanding and reason are reducible to the most simple form of possibility, or (which is the same thing) of ideality, and that from this, as from a little seed, all the others easily germinate, so that anything more would be superfluous.  For, given this one form, it readily produces the rest, not indeed equal, but posterior and subordinate to it (cf, 363-380).

From not having seen his way to this great simplification, the philosopher of Konigsburg suffered most greviously, for he was thereby disabled from understanding the nature of the one true form which is objective, transcendently high, independent of the soul itself, exempt from all modes, and therefore from all danger of being counterfeited; since that which is not susceptible of a variety of modes cannot be counterfeited.  Hence Kant was unable to give a solid basis to science, to truth, and to human certainty (cf, 327-329, 379).

396.  This I believe I have demonstrated.  And it was my duty to do so; for, having engaged to take up the work of previous philosophers from where they had left it, I was bound in the first place to make the two truths established by them my own, viz,:

    1st.  That the formal part of our cognitions must be distinguished from the material part.

    2nd.  That it is the formal part only that is given us by nature.

With this valuable inheritance in my possession, the next thing I had to do was, to inquire diligently into the nature of this second part (the formal) which they had not succeeded in discovering-so that I might determine it, and this so accurately that nothing belonging to the first part (the material) should be left mixed up with it; and, moreover, in such a manner that it should be made to stand out in its simplest and primal character, and not in any of those modes which it assumes through its various applications.  This inquiry I have endeavored to make, and as a result I have found that the formal part of our cognitions, in its primal and original state, consists in one thing only, that is, in a natural and abiding intuition of possible being (cf, 363-380, 52-54, 115-120).

397.  Such then is the task which I have attempted in the first volume of this work.  I have now to indicate briefly the object of the present volume:-

I propose to draw out in regular order that which I believe to be the true theory on the origin of ideas, beginning with the examination of the intuition of possible being.  From what I have said, this intuition appears to be the most necessary, as well as the most important of all ideas, nay the only one deserving the name idea; and in it centers at last the whole difficulty which I have set before the reader.

None of the philosophers of the Sense School have ever been able to explain satisfactorily the origin of this idea.  It has always been the unlucky rock on which they foundered; for all our intellectual operations (by which these philosophers pretend that all ideas without exception are produced) require this idea as a sine qua non, while on the other hand, given this idea, the mind can start on its work and prosecute it without impediment.

I could not therefore, begin otherwise than by this singular idea.  For so long as it remains unexplained, the others cannot be explained.  Some intellectual act is necessary for their formation; and every intellectual act supposes, as I have said, this very idea, and puts it continually in requisition.

If, then, I can succeed in giving a proper account of this idea, I shall have shown, as a matter of course, where we must look for the origin of all the principles of human cognitions, and of all the other ideas or rather concepts, for by means of it they are all easily generated.

I shall therefore, in the first place, demonstrate that being is the light shining to our mind by nature: then I shall trace out the first principles of reasoning, which, as a diligent analysis will show, are only so many modes of applying the self-same idea of being, which immovably adheres to us.  I shall thus have explained how it is that we are able to reason; for the principle of cognition, the principle of contradiction, and the other first principles, are the instruments without which our mind cannot make a single step forward.

Having seen what it is that makes us intelligent and reasoning beings, it will not be difficult to show how we become the authors of our many conceptions, since these may readily be formed by the use of reasoning.

Amongst these, however, there are some which stand nearest to the fountain-head, namely the pure conceptions, which contain nothing whatever of the sensible element, but flow direct from the primal and innate idea alone; and they will come first.

Next I shall proceed to deduce the non-pure or mixed conceptions, which take more or less of material element from the senses.  Here I shall show in the first place, how the concepts of the two species of substance-the corporeal and the spiritual-are formed.

I shall then have occasion to unfold the origin of the concept of body: and as this presents itself to us in two modes, i.e. as body animated by our own soul and a inanimate body, so I shall begin  by analysing the concept of our own body; nor will it be possible to go onto the concept of body as external to ours, without stopping a little on the way to investigate the difficult concepts of time,l motion, and space, which are necessary in order to formulate completely the concept of this kind of body, the analysis of which therefore will come in the last place.  Thus the whole of the present section will be divided as follows:

Part 1. Origin of the idea of being.

Part 2.  Origin of all conceptions generally by means of the idea of being.

Part 3.  Origin of the first principles of reasoning.

Part 4.  Origin of pure conceptions-i.e. of those which contain nothing of the sensible element.

Part 5.  Origin of the non-pure or mixed conceptions-i.e. of those which require for their formation something supplied by the sense.

Conclusion.