CHAPTER VIII.

THE TRUE: THE FIRST ULTIMATE REALITY KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION: NORM OR STANDARD OF THINKING AND KNOWING.

32. The five ultimate realities known through rational Intuition.

IN rational intuition the mind comes in sight of reality of which neither reflective thought nor presentative intuition can of themselves give any knowledge. The ultimate genera of the realities thus given I call the Ultimate Realities known through Rational Intuition, and our ideas of them I call Ultimate Ideas of Reason. They are the Noumena in the true sense of the word. This word has, however, been so appropriated by false philosophy, that it is difficult to divest it of the erroneous meaning thus attached to it and I do not attempt to reclaim it.

The Ultimate Realities known in rational intuition, which I shall consider, are five:

The True, the contrary of which is the Absurd;

The Right, the contrary of which is the Wrong;

The Perfect, the contrary of which is the Imperfect;

The Good determined by the standard of Reason as having true worth or as worthy of the pursuit and enjoyment of a rational being, the contrary of which is the Unworthy, the Worthless, or the Evil.

The Absolute or Unconditioned, the contrary of which is the Finite or Conditioned.

The four first are the Norms or Standards of Reason and are classed together. They are the basis of Mathematics, of Logic, and of Speculative, Ethical, Æsthetic and Teleological Philosophy. The fifth as the Unconditioned and All-conditioning One stands by itself and is the basis of Theology.

The four first are norms or standards by which Reason estimates and judges beings in all their modes and actions. The True is the rational norm or standard of thinking and knowing; the Right is the norm of efficient action, personal or impersonal; the Perfect, of the creations of thought and their realization by action, the Good, of all

that is acquired, possessed and enjoyed. The third of Kant's three questions, "What can I know?" What shall I do? "What may I hope?" must be divided into two: "What may I become?” “ What may I acquire and enjoy?" The four norms correspond to these four questions; the True is the rational norm or standard of what a man may know, the Right, of what he may do, the Perfect, of what he may become, and the Good, of what he may acquire and enjoy.

We also apply these standards to nature. In so doing we assume that nature itself is the expression of Reason and therefore can be judged by the standards of Reason:-the True, the Right, the Perfect, and the Good. If Nature is not the expression of rational thought there is no propriety nor significance in judging it by the standards of rational thought. When we judge of nature by these norms or standards of Reason the questions are:-Does it express or reveal truth? Is it ordered under law? Does it realize or tend to realize ideals of perfection? Is it productive of good?

The ancient classification, the True, the Beautiful and the Good, is inadequate. I have substituted the Perfect instead of the Beautiful as a more correct designation of that idea and comprehending all that belongs under it, of which visible beauty is but a part. I have added The Right. Plato, to whom this classification of the True, the Beautiful and the Good is commonly ascribed, attempted to develop the idea of right from the good, and sometimes seems to resolve virtue into expediency. The idea of the right, however, appears sometimes instead of the true. Pythagoras is said to have discoursed of the just, (ôczátor) the beautiful and the good; and in Plato's Parmenides, Socrates and Parmenides converse of the just or right, (ôtxatov) the beautiful and the good. The idea of the right cannot be developed from the idea of the good and is certainly entitled, if any thing is, to a place among the fundamental realities known in rational intuition.

I call attention again to the fact that rational intuition does not give the knowledge of being, but only of the unchanging forms in which, because the universe is grounded in Reason, all beings exist, and in which therefore Reason, when they are brought under its knowledge, must know them as existing. When any object, thought as a being existing thus or thus, is brought to the notice of Reason, Reason must estimate it according to its unchanging rational forms, as true or absurd, as right or wrong, as perfect or imperfect, as good or evil, and as finite or absolute. The intuition that Absolute Being must exist presupposes the knowledge of beings. Beings are already known to exist; then Reason sees that a Being that is absolute and unconditioned must exist. And again I call attention to the error of abstract and scholastic thought, that because our knowledge of finite beings precedes

our knowledge of the Absolute Being, therefore finite beings must exist before the Absolute Being exists, that the Absolute Being is dependent on the finite, and man has created God. This error is possible only when the methods of concrete and scientific thinking are abandoned, and the notions and processeses of formal logic are mistaken for the beings and actions of the real world.

33. The first Norm or Standard of reason: the true: The Norm or Standard of thinking and knowing.

I. The True is the name of the ultimate genus which includes all the universal truths or primitive principles known in rational intuition, the contraries of which are absurd; they are norms or standards regulative of all thinking and knowing. These truths must be distinguished from facts, which are enunciations of the knowledge of particular realities (facta). It must be remembered, however, that this distinction is not carefully made in the common use of language, scientific or popular. The enunciation of a thought which is the intellectual equivalent of reality, particular or universal, is a truth. We therefore have frequent occasion to distinguish them by a qualifying word or phrase, as universal truth or truth of reason as distinguished from a factual or empirical truth.

The word truth is also used to denote both the subjective knowledge and the objective reality of which the knowledge is the intellectual equivalent. The truths of reason are not merely subjective beliefs, but are objectively real in the sense that they regulate all thought and energy. The principle of causation is not merely a belief of my mind, it is a law of the universe. The correlation of truth and reality appears in the interchange of the words, true and real, as true gold, true piety, the true God.

The English word truth (trow, trowth), gives prominence to the subjective belief. The Greek aleta, the unconcealed, gives prominence to the objective reality.

II. The truths of Reason have to us objective reality as principles and laws of things, because they are, as already set forth, constituent elements of rationality eternal in the absolute and supreme Reason.

This accords with the Platonic philosophy, modified as it necessarily must be by Christian Theism. The ideas exist eternal and archetypal in God the supreme reason. The rational ideas of the True, the Right, the Perfect and the Good, and all forms and ideals compatible with them are eternal in the mind of God as an ideal universe before it exists as the universe which we perceive. By his power acting under the guidance of wisdom and love he gives expression to his archetypal

thoughts in space and time, and under the other limitations of finite things. He also gives existence to finite beings constituted rational like himself who, as in their normal development they come to know themselves, know the rational image of God. Here arises a moral system, in which God makes still higher and grander expression of his archetypal thoughts.

Plato sometimes attains this conception. He recognizes the principles of reason as the remembrance of what the soul saw in some former state of existence when in company with God, truths in which God is and in the knowledge of which he is God.* The soul knows God in these truths as the eye by a ray of light knows the Sun. Nor, argues Plato, would this be possible if the eye were not the one of the senses most like the sun.† This often quoted observation, that the eye's power of seeing depends on its likeness to the sun, is not understood in its full significance unless we remember that the ancients supposed that the eye when turned towards the sun was, as it were, kindled by it and emitted from itself the rays by which we see. So the rational spirit, because it is itself reason, sees the light of reason in God. Cicero also says that reason in man is "participata similitudo Rationis æternæ" and "vinculum Dei et hominis." Augustine teaches the same. "Being thus admonished to return to myself, I entered even into my inward self, Thou being my guide; and I was able to do so because Thou wast my helper. And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul, (such as it was,) even above my soul, above my mind, the Light unchangeable.

He who knows the truth, knows what that Light is." Says Thomas Aquinas: "When we say that we see all things in God and according to him judge of all things, we mean that we know and judge all things by participation in his light. For the natural light of reason is itself a certain participation of the divine light."§ The doctrine that we see all things in God, whatever mistiness and error accompany it as taught by Malebranche and other writers, has at least the significance given to it by Thomas; that man's reason sees the light of the universal reason; that what is the True, the Right, the Perfect, the Good which has true worth, to the reason of man, is the True, the Right, the Perfect, the Good which has true worth, to the universal reason of God; that we know truly even particular objects only as existing in a rational system, and we know them in a system as we know them ordered in unity in accordance with rational truths, laws, ideals and ends. This doctrine that man knows universal principles of reason which

* Phædrus, 249.

† Republic, B. VI. 508.

Confessions, B. VII. Chap. X. 16.

? Summa Theologiæ, Part I. Quæst. XII. Art. XI.

are eternal in God the Supreme Reason is not a flight of swarming enthusiasm, but is accordant with common sense, is the conclusion of the most profound thinkers in all ages, is the necessary inference from the most sober investigation of the rise and processes of knowledge and the laws of thought, and is itself the basis, whether recognized or not, of the possibility of science. They are the flighty and heedless thinkers who deny this. So in speaking of Anaxagoras, Aristotle said that, "the men who first announced that Reason (vou) was the cause of the world and of all orderly arrangement in nature no less than in living bodies, appeared like a man in his sober senses in comparison. with those who before had been speaking at random and in the dark."*

* Quoted by Prof. Robert Flint, History of the Philosophy of History in France and Germany, p. 90.