philosophy produced from Descartes to Hegel.* Most of its other products may be assigned to the storehouse of history, where the philosopher, in his proper capacity, may, without disadvantage, leave them undisturbed. "From Locke to Kant," says Rosmini, “ philosophy, in spite of all restraining efforts, went ever farther and farther astray, becoming ever more entangled, until, at last, men got weary of following, one after another, guides that led nowhere. Hence the schools of our time seem more inclined to narrate the adventures of philosophy, a long amusing story of the voyages and wanderings of the human mind, than to teach any philosophy. If philosophy is ever again to be restored to credit among men, I believe we must once more take up the opinions of the ancients, adapting them, as far as possible, to the method and easy style of the moderns, and giving them a fuller and closer bearing upon human life. Moreover, we must never forget that the Scholastics, now so deeply reviled, were, after all, the connecting link between ancient and modern philosophies. For although, toward the close of its history, Scholasticism became degraded, puerile, and ridiculous, yet it was not so in the works of its great writers, among whom it may suffice to mention Thomas Aquinas, the prince of Italian philosophers and the one in whose dear footsteps it always has been, and always shall be, our endeavour to follow." ↑

As a matter of fact, the starting-point and the central principle of Rosmini's philosophy was reached through the development of a thought which St. Thomas had expressed, but whose full bearings he had been prevented, by Aristotelian prejudices, from recognizing. We have seen that St. Thomas asserts the first object of intelligence and the ground of the principle of contradiction to be being, ens or

*He was always unwilling to acknowledge that he borrowed even this. See below, under § 122. + Theodicy, bk. i. cap. xxix.

ens commune. Pondering upon this thought, Rosmini suddenly came to see that being is the very essence and form of intelligence, as distinguished from sensation, and that this form is not subjective, but objective. In other words, he saw that it is the essence of intelligence to have an object, and that that object is being. In this manner he not only got rid of the identity-theory of cognition maintained by the ancients and the impression-theory held by the moderns, but he likewise did away with subjectivism, drew a clear line between intelligence and sensation, between the ideal and the real, and found the principle and criterion of truth in the essential unity of being as manifested under these two forms. In a word, he found in being. itself, in the very object without which we cannot cognize or even doubt anything, not only the true explanation of the mode of cognition, but also the indefeasible warrant of all truth. His whole system is merely a working out of the idea of being into all its ramifications and principles, necessary and contingent.

If Rosmini drew the bare notion of his first principle from the writings of St. Thomas, almost every other great system of philosophy was laid under contribution in order to determine it. Indeed, every other system was made to give up whatever it had of truth in order to arm the principle of the new doctrine. Rosmini agrees with Parmenides in holding that being, one, indeterminate, eternal, is the sole object of intelligence, the essence and form of truth; but refuses to conclude from this either that being is identical with knowing, or that the Many is unknowable. According to Rosmini, the Many is knowable as a series of objectified subjects. He agrees with Plato that the ideal is inconfusible with the real; but he denies that ideas subsist separate from the mind and things. According to him, ideas are determinations which the mind, through

subjective sensations derived from the real mode of being, makes in ideal being, which is its constitutive object. He agrees with Aristotle that ideas or forms exist in the mind and in things, and not in a state of separateness; but he denies that they exist in mind and in things in the same mode. In the former they are objective, ideal, and, therefore, universal; in the latter, they are subjective, real, and, therefore, particular. Moreover, the intellect and the intelligible (vouç kaì voŋrá) are so far from being identical, that they belong to two absolutely distinct modes of being. He makes the same concessions and objections to St. Thomas, but further agrees with him that the principle of contradiction rests on the intuition of being. He agrees with the school of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, that subjectivism and sensism cannot furnish a ground for truth, but denies that these are the sources from which truth ought to be expected, and affirms that it is the very form and essence of objectivism and intelligence. agrees with Kant that the form and matter of thought have to be distinguished; but he denies, first, that thought has a plurality of forms; second, that its form is subjective; and, third, that its matter is objective, before it is made so by thought itself. He maintains that the real, as purely such, is always subject (TOKEίμEVOV), while the ideal is always object (avTIKεíμevov) of intelligence. He agrees with Reid* that perception differs from sensation; but denies that the former is due to an inexplicable instinct in the mind. He holds that perception is due to the very nature of mind, whose term is necessarily an object. He agrees with Fichte that the Ego implies the non-Ego, but he utterly denics

He

* Rosmini has great respect for the sane, serious philosophy of Reid, and really owes it a great deal. Indeed, the Italians are almost the only philosophers that have done justice to Reid, whose very soberness and simplicity have exposed him to unmerited neglect in more romantic countries.

that the former creates either, and shows that the Ego is a compound, consisting of a subject and an act whereby that subject affirms itself as an object. He agrees with Schelling that there is something infinite in the mind, but denies that the mind is for that reason the Absolute. He maintains that the object of the mind is necessary, infinite, and eternal ; whereas the subject is contingent, finite, and, but for its union with the object, transient. He agrees, lastly, with Hegel, that the starting-point of philosophy is being; but he denies that the ideal being, with which such start is made, produces the real and moral forms of being, that is, develops into the universe and God. He, moreover, denies that being, though immediate, is an hypothesis, and shows that it is reached through a direct intuition, a form of cognition not liable to doubt or error, since for it phenomenon and noümenon are necessarily one.

Rosmini, having discovered the nature of ideal being and its necessary relation to intelligence, was thus able to collect, as determinations of it, all the truths of previous systems freed from their errors, and so, for the first time in the world's history, to lay a solid basis upon which true science might be built up and philosophy brought to stability and repose, after its twenty-five hundred years of weary circling, like that of the carnal spirits, driven by "the infernal hurricane, that never rests.” * Upon this basis he proceeded to build up three orders of science: first, sciences of intuition, or of the object; second, sciences of perception, or of sensible subjects; and, third, sciences of reflection, or of those subjects which, though beyond the reach of sense, may, through integration of the subjects of sense by means of the object of intelligence, be known in an idealnegative way, and in part made real by intelligence itself acting through volition. But, after all, when intelligence has *"La bufera infernal, che mai non resta" Dante, Inferno, v. 31).

exhausted its powers of intuition, perception, and reflection, there will still remain an infinitude of reality, of which it has only a negative knowledge, so long as this infinitude does not reveal itself, by imparting to it some new faculty, capable of feeling an infinite reality. When this takes place, intelligence will recognize that it has at last found the

necessary real subject of its necessary ideal object. This subject is God, whose reality, according to Rosmini, can be known only when He reveals Himself by imparting to the finite intelligence such an increase of objective light-the Light of Grace—as enables it to recognize, in a higher or lower degree, this infinite perfection. Thus Rosmini finds in the limitation of human intelligence a necessary place for revelation and the action of divine grace, and a formula for this revelation and action, such as is certainly not to be found in any other system of thought but his own. Whether or not we follow him in maintaining that Christianity is such a revelation of God, we must admit that he has, philosophically speaking, made a much better case for it than ever was made before. His system has, accordingly, made Christianity acceptable to many who otherwise would have rejected it. The table on the next page will show Rosmini's classification of the Sciences.

Of Rosmini's contributions to the different sciences, the most important are unquestionably those which he made to Ideology, a science toward which he stands in the same relation as Aristotle does to Formal Logic. His New Essay on the Origin of Ideas, by which he put an end to subjectivism and sensism, will take the place of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (by which, according to Hegel, an end was put to objective dogmatism, as he contemptuously calls truth *) as the second great philosophic work of the world,

Gesch. der Philosophie, vol. iii. p. 564 (edit. 1836).

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