looks. But till he has shown that the possession of language by their families has had no part in the invention of these signs, he can conclude nothing from them in favor of his hypothesis. All that he can conclude from his long and even wearisome discussions with regard to deaf mutes is, not that man can invent language, but that he can translate the language of the ear into the language of the eye, and that he does not need language to enable him to think in the intuitive order. Indeed, the learned author seems himself to be aware that he fails to prove his hypothesis, and very nearly admits that all he has done is to prove that the Traditionalists have not proved theirs. We are not insensible to the importance of asserting the possibility of the state of pure nature, and we are well aware that Calvinism and Jansenism originate in denying that God could, if he had chosen, have created man, seclusa ratione culpæ, as he is now born, whence they are led to assert that what man lost in the Fall was a part of his nature; but we see not how denying that man could have invented language, although conceded to be necessary to his social life, can by any possibility affect that question, any more than to deny that man could have invented air, fire, or water. Suppose it in some sense external, it amounts to nothing, for there are many things external, which, if God had not given them, man could never have obtained. Moreover, we must not forget to be on our guard against excessive rationalism. If we concede to the rationalists, that man, beginning without language, could by his own unaided powers have gradually invented a language so complicated and so perfect in its structure, so rich in its resources, and so beautiful in its expressions, as the Greek, for instance, we hardly know what degree of progress we could deny to our modern humanitarians. There is, we venture to say, no system of human thought, ancient or modern, that equals the perfection of any of our modern cultivated languages. English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, any of these languages contains in itself a truer and richer philosophy than is entertained by any of those who speak it. How could men invent a language without language, and embody in it a philosophy far superior to any they have ever been able to embody in their systems? Father Chastel recognizes the distinction we make be tween discovering truth and proving it. It will not do to build science on faith, or to maintain that the existence of God, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, and the difference between good and evil, regarded by our theologians as the preamble to faith, cannot be certainly proved by human reason. These, though originally communicated by revelation, must be naturally demonstrable, be truths of science, as well as of faith. Father Chastel, therefore, contends that man must have been able to discover them by his natural reason. In this, as against the Traditionalists, who appear to deny them to be truths of natural reason, and to contend that we can in no sense know them but as taught by a revelation from without, he is certainly right. But may not the Traditionalists also be right against him, when they contend that man was originally taught them by his Maker, and could never have discovered them, as truths in the reflective order, if he had not been so taught them? May not he and they find a point of agreement in distinguishing between discovering and demonstrating, and in saying that, although man could not have discovered them as objects of distinct reflection without being taught them, yet now they are represented to him in language he can by his natural reason demonstrate them? This would combine both the Traditional and the rational proof, leave man capable of real science, make a real distinction between science and faith, and avoid all confusion of the truths of the natural order and those of the supernatural order, as Father Chastel very properly wishes. Is it not possible that our author has dismissed this distinction a little too cavalierly, and that it deserves a little more attention than he seems to have paid it? He himself resorts to it when he wishes to prove that Bergier and others, claimed by the Traditionalists, were not of their school. The only argument he brings against it is, that language could not present these truths to the mind of the child ignorant of them. But this is not conclusive. That the words which represent them could not present, that is, express, them to the child that as yet has no intuition of them, we concede; but whence the necessity of supposing that the child is destitute of the intuition? The author has not disproved intelligible intuition, or proved that we apprehend the intelligible only in the sensible, and the general only in the particular. He does not pretend that Peripateticism is anything more than a probable hypothesis, and he is, therefore, not entitled to conclude from it as if it were certain and undeniable truth. The difficulty with both Father Chastel and the Traditionalists arises, we think, from their denying, overlooking, or not appreciating the fact that human reason has immediate intuition of the intelligible. The Traditionalists, not conceding this fact, are obliged to assume that the human mind is in no relation with the intelligible, as distinguished from the sensible, till instructed by society, which preserves the tradition of the revelation originally made to the first man. This necessarily denies all science, properly so called, or, what is the same thing, builds science on faith, making the act of faith precede the act of reason, which is impossible, since there can be no act of faith unless there has been previously an act of reason. Father Chastel sees this, and, fortified by the decisions of the Church, the teaching of doctors, and common sense, refutes it successfully; but denying, or at least not holding, intelligible intuition, he himself fails to give any satisfactory explanation of the real problem, or any clear and certain statement of the truth opposed to the error of the Traditionalists. After all, it is more as a theologian than as a philosopher that he refutes them. The fact is, both he and they are virtually sensists, and hold the Peripatetic maxim, that nihil est in intellectu, quod prius non fuerit in sensu. They, starting from this maxim of Aristotle, maintain that the human intellect can have cognition only of sensibles, and can come into possession of intellectual ideas, as they call them, only by means of external instruction; he, recoiling from this, and not quite prepared to accept the doctrine of innate ideas, contends that we possess these ideas only by way of mental abstraction from sensible intuitions or phantasms. He sees clearly enough, that, admitting neither innate ideas nor intelligible intuition, the Traditionalists place the human mind out of the condition of being even the recipient of the instruction they suppose, for they leave nothing in it to correspond to the meaning of the words through which it must be communicated. There is no magic in language, in mere words, that can put the mind in possession of ideas of an order of which it knows nothing, and can of itself know nothing. We do not know a language by committing its words to memory, but by learning the meaning of the words themselves. In the case of a foreign language we learn it ordinarily by translating its words into the corresponding words of our own language. We know our own mother tongue only in so far as we know the things its signs stand for, and we may say it is only by the verba mentis that we can understand the verba vocis, or external speech. It would be impossible through external language to teach anything to a mind that was perfectly blank, for we can teach the unknown only by attaching it in some way to the known. It is only by virtue of a correspondence or analogy between the natural and the supernatural, that man is capable of receiving a supernatural revelation, or of finding in the mysteries of faith anything for his own understanding beyond empty words. The Traditionalists, by representing the mind as destitute of intellectual ideas, and as unable to behold the intelligible intuitively, really deny the possibility of such ideas, even in the natural order, and therefore really, though unintentionally, deny that man can even be the subject of a supernatural revelation. But while Father Chastel sees all this clearly enough, he does not see that, by assuming that the intelligible is apprehended not immediately in intuition, but only mediately in sensation, he has to encounter a strictly analogous difficulty, because the intelligible by no conceivable mental process whatever is attainable from sensations or purely sensible data, from the intuition of sensible things no more than from sensible signs. We readily concede that the intelligible is never intuitively apprehended by itself alone, and is always presented to us along with the sensible; but if it is not actually and immediately presented, actually and immediately apprehended, it cannot be obtained at all. The analysis of sensation can give only sensation, or the sensible object. To hold the intelligible, or to contemplate it by itself, we must undoubtedly separate it from the sensible phenomenon, as St. Thomas teaches. But if it was not originally distinct from the sensible element of the phenomenon, we could not separate or distinguish it, and all we should have for it would be a simple mental abstraction, formed by the mind, and without the least conceivable objective value. Our cognition would be restricted, objectively considered, to the sensible or nonintelligible world, and we should have no knowledge at all, properly so called, none at least above that which we detect in brutes. We should be compelled to reduce all our ideas, with Condillac, to "sensations transformed." The intelligible would be to us as if it were not, and we could never receive a revelation of the supernatural, because we should want the natural ideas by which its mysteries could be connected with our natural intelligence. The only way we can see of escaping this conclusion is to regard the sensible as naturally corresponding to the intelligible, which in a certain sense it does, since God is similitudo rerum omnium. But we must remember that it is nature that copies or imitates God, not God that copies or imitates nature; the sensible that imitates the intelligible, not the intelligible that imitates the sensible. We must know the original in order to detect the resemblance in the copy. So, unless we suppose intelligible intuition, which puts the mind in possession of the original, the idea exemplaris, the fact alleged can avail nothing. - The recognition of the fact of immediate intuition of the intelligible solves every difficulty in the case, and we confess that we do not understand the unwillingness of Father Chastel and the Traditionalists to accept it. Man is intellective as well as sensitive by nature; and if so, he must be as capable of intelligible as of sensible intuitions. Why, then, is there any more propriety in supposing the intelligible is obtained from the sensible, than in supposing the sensible is obtained from the intelligible? All Catholics must hold, that ratio Dei existentiam cum certitudine probare potest, reason can prove with certainty the existence of God, and therefore that the existence of God is a matter of science as well as of faith. But how can reason prove with certainty what it does not intuitively apprehend? Men certainly do and can know God, at least that he is, and is God, by the light of reason, but who will pretend that our cognitions can embrace matter not included in our intuitions? Why, then, since God is the intelligible, and, if we can know him, intelligible to us, hesitate to say that we have intuition of the intelligible? All knowledge is either intuitive or reflective. But as reflection is a return of the mind on its own past thoughts, reflective knowledge can never include any matter not included in our intuition. This is not a theory or an hypothesis in our understanding of the subject, but a |