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 IDEA

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IDEA

mind in mature life is in possession of such universal ideas, or concepts, the question arises: How have they been attained? Plato, as we have incidentally observed, conceives them to be an inheritance through reminiscence from a previous state of existence. Sundry Christian philosophers of ultra -spiritualist tendencies have described them as innate, planted in the soul at its creation liy God. On the other hand, Empiricists and Materialists have endeavoured to explain all our intellectual ideas as refined products of our sensuous faculties. For a fuller account and criticism of the various theories we must refer the reader to any of the Catholic textbooks on psychology. We can give here but the briefest outline of the doc- trine usually taught in the Catholic schools of phi- losophy. Man has a double set of cognitive faculties — sensuous and intellectual. All knowledge starts from sensuous experience. There are no innate ideas. External objects stimulate the senses and effect a modification of the sensuous faculties which results in a sensuous percipient act, a sensation or perception by which the mind becomes cognizant of the concrete individual object, e. g., some sensible quality of the thing acting on the sense. But, because sense and intellect are powers of the same soul, the latter is now wakened, as it were, into activity, and lays hold of its own proper object in the sensuous presentation. The object is the essence, or nature of the thing, omitting its individualizing conditions. The act by which the intellect thus apprehends the abstract essence, when viewed as a modification of the intellect, was called by the Schoolmen species intelligihilis; when viewed as the realization or utterance of the thought of the object to itself by the intellect, they termed it the verbum mentale. In tliis first stage it prescinds alike from universality and individuality. But the intellect does not stop there. It recognizes its object as ca- pable of indefinite multiplication. In other words it generalizes the abstract essence and thereby con- stitutes it a reflex or formally imiversal concept, or idea. By comparison, reflection, and generalization, the elaboration of the idea is continued until we attain to the distinct and precise concepts, or ideas, which accurate science demands.

Idea the Instrument, not the Object, of Cog- nition. — It is important to note that in the Schol- astic theory the immediate object of the intellectual act of perception is not the idea or concept. It is the external reality, the nature or essence of the thing apprehended. The idea, when considered as part of the process of direct perception, is itself the subjective act of cognition, not the thing cognized. It is a vital, immanent operation by which the mind is modified and determined directly to know the object per- ceived. The psychologist may subsequently re- flect upon this intellectual idea and make it the sub- ject of his consideration, or the ordinary man may recall it by memory for pxirposes of comparison, but in the original act of apprehension it is the means by which the mind knows, not the object which it knows — " est id quo res cognoscitur non id quod cognoscitur ". This constitutes a fundamental point of diiTerence between the Scholastic doctrine of perception and that held by Locke, Berkelej', Hume, and a very large proportion of modern philosophers. For Locke and Berkeley the object immediately perceived is the idea. The existence of material objects, if we be- lieve in them, can, in their view, only be justified as an inference from effect to cause. Berkeley and idealists generally deny the validity of that inference; and if the theory of immediate perception be altogether abandoned, it seems difficult to warrant the claim of the human mind to a genuine knowledge of external reality. In the Scholastic view knowledge is essen- tially of reality, and this reality is not dependent on the (finite) mind which knows it. The knower is something apart from his actualized knowing, and

the known object is something apart from its being actually known. The thing must be before it can be known ; the act of knowledge does not set up but presupposes the object. It is of the object that we are directly conscious, not of the idea. In popular lan- guage we sometimes call the object "an idea", but in such cases it is in a totally different .sense, and we recognize the term as signifying a purely mental creation.

V.\LiDiTY OP Ideas. — There remains the problem of the validity, the objective worth, of our ideas, though this question is already in great part answered by what has gone before. As all cognition is by ideas, taken in their widest signification, it is obvious that the question of the validity of our ideas in tliis broad sense is that of the truth of our knowledge as a whole. To dispute this is to take up the position of complete scepticism, and this, as has often Ijeen pointed out, means intellectual suicide. Any chain of reasoning by which it is attempted to demonstrate the falsity of our ideas has to employ ideas, and, in so far as it demands assent to the conclusion, implies belief in the validity of all the ideas employed in the premises. Again, assent to the fundamental mathematical and logical axioms, inchitling that of the principle of contra- diction, implies admission of the truth of the ideas expressed in these principles. With respect to the objective worth of ideas, as involved in perception gen- erally, the question raised is that of the existence of an independent material world com]5rising other human beings. The idealism of Hume and Mill, if consistently followed out, would lead logically to solipsism, or the denial of any other being save self. Finally, the main foundation of all idealism and .scepticism is the assump- tion, explicit or implicit, that the mind can never know what is outside of itself, that an idea as a cognition can never transcend itself, that we can never reach to and mentally lay hold of or apprehend anything save what is actually a present state of our own conscious- ness, or a subjective modification of our own mind. Now, first, this is an a priori assumption for which no real proof is or can be given; secondly, it is not only not self-evident, but directly contrary to what our mind affirms to be our direct intellectual experience. What it is possible for a human mind to apprehend cannot be laid down a priori. It must be ascertained by careful observation and study of the process of cognition. But that the mind cannot apprehend or cognize any reality existing outside of itself is not only not a self-evident proposition, it is directly contrary to what such observation and the testimony of man- kind affirm to be our actual intellectual experience. Further, Mill and most extreme idealists have to ad- mit the validity of memory and exijectation; but, in every act of memory or expectation which refers to any experience outside the present instant, our cog- nition is transcending the present modifications of the mind and judging about reality beyond and distinct from the present states of consciousness. Consider- ing the question as specially concerned with univer- sal concepts, only the theory of moderate realism adopted by Aristotle and St. Thomas can claim to guarantee objective value to oiu' itleas. According to the nominalist and conceptualist theories there is no true correlate in rerum naturd corresponding to the universal term. Were this the case there would be no valid ground for the general statements which constitute science. But mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the rest claim that their uni- versal propositions are true and deal with realities. It is involved in the very notion of science that the physical laws formulated by the mind do mirror the working of agents in the external universe. But unless the general terms of these sciences and the ideas which they signify have, corresponding to them, objective correlatives in the common natures and essences of the objects with which these sciences deal,