Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/254

 CONDITION

212

CONDITION

fire will not burn wood unless applied to it. The application of the fire to the wood is said to be a con- dition sine qu6 non of the burning of the wood by the fire. A condition may further be considered in one of two different forms, either as preparing, disposing, or applying the causality of a cause towards its exer- cise in the production of an effect, or as removing some obstacle that hinders the action of the cause. This latter form of condition is sometimes known as the causa remuve.ns prohibens. The blinds of a room must be drawn up in order that the sunlight may enter and illuminate the objects in it. It is to be noted that tliis is really a condition, and not a cause, of the event considered. The illumination of the objects in the room is the effect of the simliglit enter- ing it. This same distinction appears in the "neces- sary", or "sufficient" conditions, much employed in mathematical science. A sufficient concUtion is one in which, when the antecedent is present, it is always followed by the consequent. A necessary condition is one in which the consequent never exists unless this particular antecedent be given.

Some modern systems of philosophy regard condi- tion in the sense of what in the Scholastic view would be called accidental mocUfication. Thus Kant up- holds the assertion that time and space contlition, or are the conditions of, our experience, as a priori forms. In tliis sense also, Hegel makes the conditioned entity equivalent to the finite entity; as it would indeed also be considered in Scholastic thought. That which has accidents, or is conditioned in the sense of limitations or definition, is necessarily, as contingent, in sharp distinction to the absolute. John Stuart Mill would have the framework, or complete setting in which anything exists accounted as its conditions; and all the necessary antecedents, or conditions, the cause of the thing. Thus it would be conditioned by its complex relationships — again an accidental modification in the Scholastic sense. We consequently find, in modern philosophical usage generally, and especially since Hamilton's theory of the Unconditioned was formu- lated, that the "conditioned" and the "uncondi- tioned" are used as equivalents of the "necessary" and "contingent" of the Schoolmen, in the sense that the "necessary" entity is conceived of as absolute of all determination other than its own aseity, while all "contingent" entity is defined and limited by a com- position in which one of the factors is potentiality. Hamilton's philosophy of the Unconditioned works out curiously in the department of ontology. His views were first given to the world in the form of an article in the Edinburgh Review (October, 1829), in which he criticized the philosophy of Cousin with regard to the knowledge of the Absolute. Victor Cousin maintained that we possess an immediate knowledge of the Unconditioned, Absolute, or Infinite in consciousness. According to Hamilton, the Un- conditioned is either the unconditionally limited or the unconditionally unlimited. In either case the Unconditioned is unthinkable. For all human knowl- edge is relative, in that, "of existence, absolutely and in itself, we know nothing" (Met., Lect. viii). As a consequence of this doctrine of the relativity of knowl- edge, it follows that we are incapable of knowing that which is unconditioned by relativity. "The mind can conceive, and consequently can know only the limited, and the conditionally limited". "Condi- tional limitation", he says again (Logic, Lect. v) "is the fundamental law of the possibility of thought." Hence, while the Unconditioned may exist, we cannot know it by experience, intuition, or reasoning. Ham- ilton undertakes to explain his doctrine by the illus- tration of the whole and the part. It is impossible to conceiv(! a whole to which addition may not be made, a part from which something may not he taken away. Hence the two extreme unconilitioiiates are Bucli, that neither can be conceived as possible, but

one of them must be admitted as necessary. Of this, the Unconditioned, we have no notion either negative or positive. It is not an object of thought. From such considerations it follows that we cannot conclude either as to the existence or non-existence of the Ab- solute. On the other hand, while our knowledge is of the limited, related, and finite, our beUef may go out to that which has none of these characteristics. Though we cannot know, we may believe — and, by reason of a supernatural revelation, if such be given, must believe — in the existence of the Unconditioned as above and beyond all that which is conceivable by us. Mill very carefully examines Hamilton's use of the word inconceivable, and finds that it is appUed in three senses, in one of which all that is inexplicable, including the first principles, is heki to be inconceiv- able. The same doctrine was advanced, in a sUghtly modified form, by Dean Mansel, in the Bampton Lec- ture of 1858. Whatever knowledge we are capable of acquiring of the L^nconditioned is negative. As we can rationally, therefore, form no positive notion or concept of God, our reason must be helped and sup- plemented by our faith in revelation. Both Mansel's and Hamilton's expositions of the doctrine of rela- tivity are in reality assertions of rational, or pliilo- sophical, agnosticism.

Thus, while professing to be theists, writers of this stamp are not properly to be accounted such in the strictly philosophical sense. The rational agnos- ticism that lies at the base of their theistic system, necessitating, as it does, an appeal to faith and rev- elation, \'itiates it as a philosophy. The thesis ad- vanced by them may, however, be criticized and amended in the following manner. It is true that the entire content of the L^niverse must be regarded, in comparison with its Creator, as limited or condi- tioned. It does not therefore follow that no rational inference can be drawn from the conditioned to the Absolute. On the contrary, the nerve of the theistic inference, tacitly, if not expressly, presupposed in all forms of the theistic argument, lies in the Thomistic distinction between the Necessary and the possible (or contingent). The existence of contingent beings, limited or conditioned things, postulates the exist- ence of the Necessary Being, the one Unlimited and Unconditioned Thing. The argument in its devel- oped form may be seen in the article Theism. But it may be here pointed out that the inference from the contingent to the Necessary — necessitated, as it is, by the normal psychological action of the dis- cursive reason — presupposes certain principles which are not always kept clearly in \'iew. The Scholastic synthesis recognizes the reality of the contingent. It a.sserts that the hvunan intelligence can rise above the phenomena of sense-perception to the actual sub- stance that prov-ides a basis and offers a rational ex- planation, at the same time psychological and onto- logical, of and for these. And it is in the changes and alterations of "substance" (see Hylomorphism) that it perceives the essential contingency of all created things. From this perception it rises, by a strictly arginnentative process, to the assertion of the Necessary or Unconditioned — and this with no appeal either to revelation or to faith. The knowledge of the Unconditioned thus reached is of two kinds: firstly, that the Unconditioned is, and that its existence is necessarily to be inferred from the existence of the possible or contingent (conditioned) ; secondly, that, as Unconditioned, or Necessary, the conceptions that we possess of it are to be found princiiially by the way of the negation of imperfections. Thus the Uncon- ditioned, with regard to time, is Eternal; with regard to space, I'nlimited, Infinite, Omnipresent; w^ith re- gard to power, Omnipotent; and so on through the categories, removing the imperfections anil asserting the jileiiitude of perfection. The argument may be found slated in the "Summa Theologica" of St.