27. belongs to zation, not must to the essence, of must being. These observations enable us to conclude that Quantity quantity is something belonging to the realization, the realiand not to the essence, of being. We further observe that it is to quantity we have recourse in order to explain the limitations, the different modes, grades, differences of being, number, etc., all of which belong, not to the essence of being, but to the laws of its realization. In these three sections the author takes up the question how pure simple being, the constitutive object of intelligence (see below, under §§ 35, 36), comes to be determined into real things. This, as we see at a glance, is the old and much-vexed problem of the One and the Many, which caused so much trouble to early Greek thinkers. The career of this problem is one of the most curious in the whole history of philosophy. As very often happens in such cases, it presented itself most clearly to the first person to whom it occurred, viz., Parmenides. The thinkers previous to him had found no difficulty in assuming a simple substance and making it determine itself. Even Herakleitos made his One, fire, enter into the process of its own determination, and thus arrived at his famous dictum: "All things pass and nothing remains (πávτα Xwpet kai ovdiv μéva)." He identified being with nothing, χωρεῖ μένει).” and made War the father of all things (πόλεμος πάντων Tarnр) (vid. Bywater, Heracliti Ephesii Fragmenta, p. 18, no. xliv.); but how this identity in diversity came about, or where the War came from, he did not stop to inquire. Parmenides, severely criticizing the followers of Herakleitos, whom he calls *See Schuster, Heraklit von Ephesus (Acta Soc. Philolog. Lipsiensis, vol. iii. pp. 1–398), pp. 36 sq., and compare my translation of the Fragments of Parmenides, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. iv. no. 1 (1870). "Deaf and dumb and blind and stupid unreasoning cattle," lays it down that being, pure and simple, alone is true, eternal, necessary, and unchangeable, whereas all its determinations are merely phenomenal (πpòç dóžav); in other words, that being is independent of any subject, whereas all determination is purely subjective. He, moreover, identifies thought with being (τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εiva). According to this theory the universe is self-thinking being, and all phenomena are subjective delusions. To get rid of this latter consequence, Plato, drawing partly upon Anaxagoras', doctrine of a world-ordering intelligence or vous, and partly upon Pythagoras' theory of numbers having a similar function, split up Parmenides' one being into a large number of parts, which he called ideas, and connected these with the phenomenal world by making the Divinity create or order the latter in accordance with them. Previous to the time of Sokrates and Plato, philosophical inquiry had been directed solely to the question how things are, not to the question how they are known. The literal acceptance by the sophists of Parmenides' doctrine, that all phenomenal knowledge is purely subjective, now, however, made the latter the burning question. Plato made an heroic effort to redeem human knowledge from mere subjectivity, by claiming for the soul a prenatal existence, in which it had had immediate knowledge of eternal ideas, whereof the things of the material world, into which by birth it had fallen, were only faint copies, hardly more than sufficient to recall the originals. By so doing he assumed two distinct phenomenal worlds (independent ideas, in order to be known, must become phenomenal even to disembodied spirits), connected by a deus ex machina, and rescued the objectivity of knowledge only at the expense of making man a fallen creature. Moreover, he did not succeed in accounting for either the unity of consciousness or the unity of the world. Aristotle got rid of a few of the more glaring of Plato's difficulties and paradoxes, by uniting the ideal with the real world as form with matter, and making the former synonymous with intelligence. According to this doctrine, ideas or forms (λóyou, edn) think themselves in two ways:first, with matter, in feeling and its correlated objects; second, without matter, in intelligence, which is one with its objects. Aristotle, indeed, plainly tells us that feelings. are ideas in matter,* that the intelligent soul is the place and form of forms,† and identical with its own objects.‡ How ideas or forms come to connect themselves with matter, or to assemble in one place, or to range themselves under one supreme form, he does not tell us, so that his doctrine is rather a clear statement of a difficulty than the solution of it. Indeed, that doctrine, if accepted as a solution, would do away with both subject and object, and leave "nothing but a bundle of ideas dancing through space to the tune of associations." The truth is that the ancient world furnished no solution of the problem of cognition. Indeed, it never even succeeded in stating it. Nor was the medieval world a whit more fortunate. The best of the Scholastics did nothing more than try to reconcile the theories of Plato and Aristotle and dispute over the locality of universals, as they termed ideas. Even St. Thomas, as we have already said, had no consistent theory of cognition. What with nominalism, realism, conceptualism, intelligible species, and the rest, the original form of the problem, as it presented itself to Parmenides, was utterly forgotten; so that, even when modern philosophy arose, that problem not only remained unsolved, but did not even seem to call for solution. Philosophy, from Descartes to Hume, remained essentially in the position in which Aristotle left it, failing utterly to account either for the unity of consciousness or the unity of the world. Indeed, Hume's result was precisely the same as Aristotle's, though reached by a different process, and much more clearly and consciously stated. Both abolished not *“Tà máôn xóyoi ěvuλoí eiσiv” (De Animâ, i. 1, 10; 403 a, 25). † “ Καὶ εὖ δὴ οἱ λέγοντες τὴν ψυχὴν εἶναι τόπον εἰδῶν, πλὴν ὅτι οὔτε ὅλη ἀλλ ̓ ἡ νοητική, οὔτε ἐντελεχείᾳ ἀλλὰ δυνάμει τὰ εἴδη” (De Anima, iii. 4, 4; 429 a, 27 sq.). “ Καὶ γὰρ ἡ χεὶρ ὄργανόν ἐστιν ὀργάνων, καὶ ὁ νοῦς εἶδος εἰδῶν” (Ibid., iii. 8, 2; 432 a, I sq.). 66 ‡ “Tavтòv voûs кal vonтóv” (Metaph., xi. 7; 1072 b, 20). only the objects, but even the subjects, of thought, and left nothing in the universe but associated ideas, each thinking itself. The bold statement of this doctrine brought Kant into the field, and with him a new epoch in philosophy. Kant's great merit lay in drawing a clear distinction between the matter and the form of thought. His error lay in substituting forms for the form, and making these attributes of the subject. His twelve categories have no essential connection with each other, and are not derived from an analysis of the primary act of cognition, but from that of the various forms of secondary judgments. Moreover, by making these categories or forms subjective, while sensation, the matter of cognition, is manifestly so, he rendered thought and cognition entirely subjective, and, as his successors abundantly showed, all objectivity purely problematical. Hegel carried the doctrines of Kant to their ultimate conclusions. Dropping the problematical objective, and stringing together Kant's categories by a coil of negations, he resuscitated, in a complicated form, the old doctrine of Herakleitos, against which Parmenides had, ages before, so vigorously protested. By making being identify itself with nothing, in order to impel it to start on a career of self-determination, he annihilates not only it, but likewise the possibility of anything, and arrives at pure nihilism. To be sure, by conjuring with the word identity, so as to make it mean negative correlation (full: not full), or more frequently contrary correlation (full: empty), and by abusively calling what all other men have hitherto understood by the term, viz. absolute sameness, "naughty identity" (schlechte Identität), he succeeds in creating a word-world, which he tries to pass off for real. But Hegel's wonderful structure has, in truth, no reality other than vocal, and no unity other than grammatical. Thus, when Rosmini appeared, philosophy had forgotten, amid a multitude of secondary questions, the original problem of Parmenides, and had wandered back to the doctrine of Herakleitos and nihilism. Rosmini resuscitated the Eleatic problem, brought it into connection with the Kantian distinction between the form and matter of thought, and so, by a careful analysis of the primary act of cognition, arrived at the conclusion that the One (being) is the form of cognition; the Many, its matter. He moreover showed, by a careful examination of Kant's categories, that while they were all subjective but one, that one, viz. being, was necessarily objective, and the very essence of objectivity. In this way he introduced a necessary, objective element into cognition, and so made true. cognition possible. Rosmini's solution of the problem, how being comes to be determined, lies in showing that being exists essentially in two forms-one ideal and undetermined, the other real and determined (see §§ 18, 21). As to determinations being, as such, non-beings, see Buroni, Dell' Essere e del Conoscere, pp. 95, sqq. 28. which known the of being. It may be said, If all things are known Ideas through the essence of being, how do we come to make know those negative properties of being which negation we spoke of above, and which are not in the essence of being? Are there not ideas of particular beings, of their differences, etc.? I reply that it is by means of the essence of being that we know all negations, since all that we know about them is that they are the contrary, the negation of being, and the negation of a thing is known as soon as we know the thing negated. Nevertheless, it is to be observed that language imposes a positive mark, a word, not only on being, but also on the negation of being, and we say nothing, limit, mode, as well as being. Hence it is that all these negations figure in our imaginations as if they were so many entities, although they are not. |