scepticism. He has done much to break down the gross sensism and materialism of Locke and Condillac, and has latterly manifested, not in his philosophy, but in his personal dispositions, tendencies which we cannot deny ourselves the honor of applauding; but presenting the ideal element of thought as the constituent element of reason, not as an object apprehended by our noetic or intellective faculty, immediately presenting itself in intuition, he has no more than Kant, than Reid, than Sir William Hamilton, than Hume himself, been able to present a solid basis for science, for he has not been able to present the first principles of science as objectively evident, and a science based on principles not objectively evident is simply no science at all, and however irresistible it may be, it is only a subjective belief.

Rosmini, a really eminent as well as a truly pious man, one of the greatest recent glories of Italy, has made some earnest and laudable efforts to redeem philosophy from the charge of scepticism; but at bottom his system seems to us to coincide with those we have just dismissed. Like Sir William Hamilton, like Kant, like Cousin, the illustrious Italian recognizes, in words at least, a non-empirical element in our cognitions, which he calls the idea of being or existence, and which the mind applies to every fact or object of sensible experience. This idea is not, according to him, the intuition of real and necessary being, or of actual or concrete existence, but of being in general, existence indeterminate and abstract. Then it is not, as he supposes, prim; itive, for we must conceive the concrete before we can conceive the abstract, since the abstract without the concrete is a pure nullity. The abstract is a mental conception formed by the mind, operating upon the concrete intuitively apprehended. We cannot think or affirm existence without thinking or affirming the existent. Sir William Ham- · ilton says we cannot think without thinking the attribute of existence, as if existence, or being, which is the term he should have used, is an attribute. He who says being, says being is. Being is ultimate, and though it may have attributes, it is not and cannot itself be an attribute. We may distinguish between real and necessary being and contingent or created existences, but not in being itself between essentia, or substantia, and esse, or existere, for being which exists not, is not being. The primitive conception 59

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VOL. III. NO. IV.

of God is that of being; hence he names himself, I AM THAT AM, EGO SUM QUI SUM. Being in general, ens in genere, then, is inconceivable, and is not only an abstraction, but even an impossible abstraction. We have then, and can have, no idea of being which is not either real and necessary being, - ens necessarium et reale, the ens simpliciter of the Schoolmen, that is, God, or contingent existence, that is, creature, ens secundum quid.

But passing over this, Rosmini cannot, from the idea of being or the judgment, Being is, arrive at the judgment, Being is cause or creator. The first principles of philosophy, from which our whole intellectual life flows, are, according to Rosmini, the idea of being, and the sensible object. These are the primitive data. How from these two,. being and a sensible object, obtain the judgment of causality, or conclude the existence of a causal nexus between them, that being creates or places the sensible object? He must connect them in some way, or else deny the existence of the sensible object, and he can connect them only as being and phenomenon, which excludes the judgment of causality, and renders it impossible for us to refute the doctrine of the identity of substance and phenomenon of God and the universe, of God and man, which we have seen neither Cousin nor Sir William Hamilton escapes, or the nihilism of Hegel.

Schelling maintains the doctrine of the identity of subject and object, the contingent and necessary, the relative and absolute, and therefore cannot help us, though he asserts the absolute, the unconditioned. Hegel starts with the conception of pure being, das reine Syne, which in his view is identical with not-being, that is, with indeterminate, unreal, or mere possible being. But the possible cannot be prior to the real, for it is the power or ability of the real to place the contingent, and is intrinsic in the real and necessary. Hence Hegel, placing the possible before the real, begins and ends in nullity. The common error of the pseudo-ontologists is, that they start from the object, not as real being, objectively existing, and simply presented in intuition, but as a conception, and thus give us no real ontology, but a pure ideology. The being they assert is no real being. But even if it were, they could not assert the judgment of causality, because it is not contained in the judgment, Being is. Hence they fall inevitably into Pantheism.

The school which, among us, professes to follow St. Thomas, and which is the more prevalent as well as the sounder school we have, denies that it is a psychological school, and in its origin it certainly was not. It professes to proceed from notum, or something known, to the unknown, by the way of demonstration. But this is no more nor less than a Cartesian would say. It merely defines a method, not a philosophy; and though it proves that the school is faithful to the method, it by no means proves that it is faithful to the philosophy of St. Thomas. What is this notum? What is the principium of the school? The question of principles is prior to the question of method, and far otherwise important. Your method may be good, but if your principles are bad, you can never arrive at the truth but by an inconsequence, by a violation of good logic. The principium of this school is a sensible datum, that is, a contingent existence taken from sensible experience; from this it professes to proceed demonstratively, by the principle of contradiction, to the assertion of the necessary; that is, from the ens contingens sensibly apprehended to demonstrate the ens necessarium et reale, which is not apprehensible at all.

But Hume has settled it for ever that the judgment of causality cannot be obtained from sensible experience, either intuitively or demonstratively; and without the judgment of causality we can never conclude real and necessary being from contingent existence, nor contingent existence from real and necessary being. If the professors of this school will examine it, they will find that this judgment is the very principle of their demonstration, for the principle of contradiction, without it, gives only the possible, not the real. They have, therefore, the judgment of causality prior to their demonstration, and do but apply it in their demonstrative process. How did they come by it? As they do not concede it to be an intuition, they can give only some one of the answers we have already found to be insufficient.

There has recently sprung up, principally in France, another school, called the Traditional School; but what are their precise doctrines is a matter of dispute between them and their opponents. But if they mean that tradition is necessary only in regard to the superintelligible, or that it is necessary only as an assistant in the order of the intelli

gible, they are so far unquestionably right; but if they mean that the first principles of science are known only as learned from a teacher, they apply in all its rigor to the natural order, in which St. Anselm did not apply it, the maxim, Crede ut intelligas, and thus found science on faith. Judging from M. Bonetty's criticisms on Gioberti, we should say this is their doctrine, and this is only a form of Jansenism. But judging from some of M. Bonetty's disclaimers, we might be inclined to think it is not. He says expressly, that he recognizes reason as a faculty of the soul, a natural power of knowing truth; but he denies that it is a power to invent-discover-truth. We suppose he means the first and necessary truths of morals and theology. But this is not decisive, for he leaves it in doubt whether he means morals and theology in the superintelligible order only, or in the intelligible order. If the former, all Christians agree with him, and he utters only a truism; if he means the latter, then he either means simply that, though man is able to know these first principles or necessary truths, the foundation of what is called natural theology and ethics, when supernaturally revealed, he could never have discovered them by his own unaided efforts; or he means to deny that we can either discover or know them by our natural reason. If the former of these subdistinctions, he coincides with Gioberti, and we see not why he should combat him; if the latter, which we suspect to be the case, when he is of his own opinion, he denies all science of principles or necessary truths, and really founds science on faith; which St. Anselm certainly never did, for St. Anselm professes to demonstrate the existence of God from the idea of the most perfect being, which the human mind has naturally. If this be the doctrine of the school, as their opponents allege, the Traditionalists are, in regard to human reason, like Pascal, Lamennais, Bayle, Kant, and Hume, really sceptics.

Now none of these philosophers and schools are practically sceptical, and we call them so only in regard to the tendency or result of their speculative systems. There is a common sense which directs, to a certain extent, all men in their practical judgments, and prevents them from running as wild in practice as in speculation. Amongst Catholics, speculation is held in check by theology, and philosophers are obliged to assert, whether legitimately or

not, a sound ontology; but for the most part, they borrow it from Catholic theology, instead of obtaining it from their philosophical speculation. "What is taught in our schools under the head of philosophy," said an eminent Catholic bishop to us one day, "is some fragments of Catholic theology, badly proved." But where there are no theological restraints, philosophy almost invariably runs into Pantheism, scepticism, and nihilism. Certainly none of the great philosophical schools of our day, none of the distinguished philosophers whom it is counted lawful to cite, have been able to solve Hume's problem in favor of science.

Yet let us not for this despair of human reason or of human philosophy. All the great men we have cited were much nearer the truth than at first sight would seem. They have all failed, and failed because misled by Des Cartes, who converted philosophy from a science of principles into a science of method, from the science of human and divine things in the natural and intelligible order, into what Fichte calls very happily Wissenschaftlehre, or science of science, that is, the science of knowing. They have been thus led to the investigation of conceptions instead of things, the object thought in the respect that it is the correlative of subject, instead of contemplating it in the respect that it is thing, and exists independent of the thinking subject. Modern philosophy, at least the philosophy in vogue, is nothing but a methodology, and very wretched at that. The investigation of principles should always precede the investigation of method, for it is the principles that determine the method, not the method that determines the principles.

Principles no doubt must be taken from thought, but from thought as objective, not as a fact of consciousness. Sir William Hamilton has well corrected the error of Reid, who made consciousness a special faculty distinguishable from our general cognitive faculty; but he has himself mistaken the true character of the fact of consciousness. He says consciousness is dual, and in thought we are alike conscious of both subject and object. This is not exact. Pierre Leroux says, more correctly, that consciousness is simply the recognition of ourselves in the act of thought as the subject thinking. We see, perceive, or apprehend the object, and are conscious that it is we who see, perceive, or apprehend it. The fact of conscious