Page:Immediate Experience and Mediation.djvu/18

 Descartes in his own reasoning support the theory of the Regulae. He claims, indeed, to have found a primary self-evident link of the chain of knowledge in the 'simple proposition' that my self-consciousness involves my existence. His next step is to establish the necessary being of God; and this too—the necessary implication of existence in the 'essential nature' of God is,—he maintains, a self-evident truth. But the welding together of these two self-evident links profoundly alters the meaning of the first. The 'necessary being of God; shows itself as involved in 'my being'; and as this implication emerges, 'my being' is revealed in a different light. For it now appears that God is presupposed as that without which neither I nor any other finite existent could be at all, so that it is only within, and by virtue of, God's creative and sustaining power that 'my self-consciousness involves my existence'. The supposed self-supporting and self-contained nexus, the supposed primary datum, is manifestly derivative and contingent; and my knowledge of it is mediated by my knowledge of God.

The analysis of mediation, thus advocated and abandoned by Aristotle and Descartes alike, treats Intelligence and the Intelligible as if they were mathematical unities or mechanical conjunctions. A chain and its links, a line and its contiguous minimal intervals—what possible analogy do these bear to a whole of demonstrated truth, to an inference or a system of