be treated

in a supernatural Psychology and Anthropology.

human heart reveal to reason the supreme aim of humanity; on the other, reason itself sees humanity on this earth for ever weltering in ignorance, tossed hither and thither by passions and vices, everywhere corrupt, everywhere unhappy; life transient as a flash, ever uncertain, ever a struggle, ever a sacrifice, and the death of every man that is born close this great tragedy. At this spectacle reason itself staggers, thinks it is dreaming, loses confidence in itself. At last, rousing itself by one effort, it reinvigorates itself with the consoling hypothesis of a future life. But human reason is not forsaken by God in its dark surmisings. Behold! God reveals to man the secret of His creative goodness, assures him that the theory inspired by feeling and found by reason, through study and meditation, neither lies nor deceives. It shall be realized, and to it the facts will accurately correspond in a yet higher mode of the same theory. All that upon earth appears as an obstacle to, and contradiction of, reason, finds its explanation in the manifestation of the entire design of the Creator, and even becomes, in this design, a necessary means and a confirmation of what reason itself teaches. The hypothesis of another life is converted into a certainty by an infallible testimony. That other life, which has no end, in which man no more dies, has in it an abundance of weal and of woe that will atone for all the inequalities, and correct all the irregularities, of this temporal life. But in this life itself God has given us a faint

outline of that future and eternal order, has granted us excellent and purely divine means. whereby, if we will, we may rise to that sublime destiny which reason indicates darkly in the far distance. This part, therefore, of the destiny of the soul and of the entire man cannot be treated exhaustively in Natural Psychology or Anthropology, but in another Psychology and Anthropology which draw their doctrines from the mouth of God himself.

It does not enter into the scope of the present work to consider Rosmini's theological views; nevertheless, it may not be out of place here to state that, according to him, the light of grace alone can make us in any degree acquainted with the nature of God's reality. Human intelligence, with its infinite ideal term, is capable of reasoning with certainty to the fact of God's reality or subsistence; but only a direct presentation of that reality to feeling can in any way make us aware of its nature. Natural things are seen by natural light; supernatural things by supernatural light.

2. Cosmology.
152.

Cosmo

Cosmology is the science of the world. We What is have included it among the sciences of percep- logy? tion, because the objects of perception are the human soul and the bodies of which the world is made up. Of course, in the great system of creation there are other beings which do not fall under sensible experience, and are reached only through inductive reasoning. Such are the pure spirits, the angels.

Cosmology might be defined as the science of the extra-subjective, in contradistinction to Psychology, which is the science of the consubjective. The two, along with the inferential sciences of Ontology and Natural Theology, form the subdivisions of Metaphysics. Rosmini left no separate work on Cosmology, but the treatise on the Real, now printed as the fifth volume of the Theosophy, was intended to form part of such a work. According to the original design, the work on Cosmology was to be divided into the following chapters: (1) The Metaphysical World-Finite Objective Being; (2) The Conditions of Finite Being-The Finite One; (3) Finite Triple Being— Creation; (4) The Universe-The Principle, Being The Angels; (5) The First Created Intelligence; (6) The Soul of the World; (7) Man; (8) Time; (9) Space; (10) Matter; (11) Numbers; (12) Forms; (13) Laws, Final Grounds-Harmony-Beauty; (14) The End; (15) The Realization of the End.

This arrangement was subsequently modified somewhat. What was written is divided into two parts, the first of which treats of Essential Matter, the first element of Real Being; the second, of the Ontological Organism of Real Being.

How Cosmology considers the world.

153.

Cosmology considers the world (1) as a whole, (2) in its parts as related to the whole, and (3)

in its order.

In other words, the divisions of Cosmology are Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie), Natural Science, and Theology. Under the first will naturally fall the question respecting the origin of the world, whether it was created or existed from all eternity. This question can, of course, be answered only through the discovery of the true nature of the real as presented in the world, and its relation to the ideal, the only form in which we know the eternal. If

the real presents the same characteristics as the ideal, necessity, universality, eternity, etc., then it must have existed always; if, on the contrary, it is contingent, particular, temporal, it must have had a beginning. Under the second division will come all the experimental sciences, wherein, through the search for general laws, we try to reduce the phenomena of the world to a unity, and to show that they are due to a single principle. Under the third division will fall the question of the adaptation of means to ends. In whatever sense we use the term end, whether as conscious purpose or as actual result, it will always be true that the order and harmony of a natural organism will have a direct connection with that end, and will necessarily be expressed in terms of it. We cannot explain the construction and order of the eye without taking vision into account. As the Schoolmen said, Act follows being. Rosmini, of course, maintained the doctrine of final cause.

154.

of Cosmology.

Cosmology, as the doctrine of the whole, treats First part (1) of the nature of contingent real being, and (2) of its cause.

155.

of the

the world.

Contingent real being has not within itself the First proof ground of its own existence, and, therefore, re- creation of quires a cause. Since, moreover, no part of contingent being, whether substantial or accidental, contains the ground of its own existence, it requires a creative cause. Contingent being, therefore, is, every moment, drawn out of nothing.

Second proof.

Compare with this Rosmini's definition of life as given under § 124. We cannot here quote all that Rosmini advances on the subject of creation; but the following passage may suffice to show the tendency of his doctrine. Speaking of the exemplar of the world, he says, "This exemplar is the work of the creative liberty of God. Creative liberty is a virtue, a power belonging to absolute being in its subjective form. Absolute being in its subjective form infinitely loves itself as understood in its objective form. Being infinitely loves being. This love leads it to love being in all the modes in which it is lovable, in which it can be loved. In order to love it in all its modes, it loves it not only as absolute and infinite being, but also as relative and finite being. This love is the creative act. It, therefore, creates for itself, through the expansion of love, a lovable finite object, and this is the world. In order to create this world, it must, first, conceive it, both because this creative principle is intelligence and because that cannot be loved which is not known; second, it must realize it, because if it were not real in itself, the object of love would not exist, but would merely be possible, and what is loved, seen in its possibility, is desired to exist. Hence the two elements of essence and real, born at one birth, and forming mundane things" (Theosophy, vol. i. § 460).

156.

A second proof of the creation of the world is drawn from the analysis of perception. This analysis shows us that everything that comes under feeling, i.e. ourselves and the world, would necessarily remain unperceived, that is, would not be being, if the mind did not see it united to the essence of being. It is this essence, therefore, that imparts to all things the act of being, lends it to them, as it were, creates them.