REESE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFQRNI 
 
 
 MAR 23 1894 
 
 
 ts No 
 
 
GUIDE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 
 
GUIDE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 
 
 A 
 
 of t^e C^fef 
 
 BY A. GRATRY 
 ji 
 
 PROFESSOR OF MORAL THEOLOGY AT THE SORBONNE 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 ABBY LANGDON ALGER 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER 
 
 ( This Work was Crowned by the French Academy ) 
 
 f& * 
 
 i CNJ\ -K 
 
 BOSTOIT 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS 
 
 1892 
 
Copyright, 1892, 
 BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 ress: 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. PAOE 
 
 BY WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER . . 1-11 
 
 first 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EXPLANATORY. 
 
 A summary of the whole work. Why philosophy begins with a treatise 
 on the knowledge of God, with the knowledge whereby the mind of 
 man rises to God. I. Is it possible and necessary to prove the 
 existence of God? Are there atheists? II. General character of 
 the genuine proof of the existence of God. III. Precise nature of 
 that proof : it is the principal application of one of the two essential 
 processes of reason ; it is the act and fundamental process of the ra- 
 tional and moral life. The study of this proof is the study of phi- 
 losophy in its principle : studied historically, it is the basis of the 
 history of philosophy ; studied speculatively, it places the mind at 
 the point where the roots of ontology, psychology, logic, and morals 
 meet 13-25 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 PLATO'S THEODICY. 
 
 I. Why it belonged to the school of Socrates to give to the antique 
 world the laws of the chief process of reason, and to attain to the 
 true philosophical proof of the existence of God. II. Platonic dia- 
 lectic : the condition for its exercise ; its point of support, its move- 
 ment, its term. III. Discussion of texts from Plato concerning 
 the nature of the dialectic process. IV. Use which man should 
 
vi CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 make of this divine gift, to conquer the obstacle, develop the sense 
 of the immortal and the divine. V. Starting-point of the dialectic 
 process in the spectacle of visible objects. VI. full description of 
 the process. VII. Term of the process (re'Xos rijs nopeias). Two 
 degrees of the divine intelligible : shadows of that which is, or divine 
 phantasms : the Divine Being himself. VIII. The idea of the true 
 God as found in Plato. IX. Plato combats the false application 
 of the chief process of reason, sophistry. X. Summary of Plato's 
 Theodicy. XI. What Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
 Bossuet, and Thomassin think of the Platonic doctrine . . . 26-61 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 
 
 I. Relations between Plato and Aristotle. II. Proof of the existence 
 of God given by Aristotle and summed up by Saint Thomas Aquinas. 
 III. Discussion of that proof. Its logical value is doubtful in the 
 form in which it is given. IV. The result of Aristotle's Theodicy : 
 an immutable essence ; a principle whose essence is very act : God 
 pure act; how the motionless motor moves; attraction of the desir- 
 able and intelligible; God is an eternal and perfect living being, 
 Goodness, Thought, and Life. That which is in us is finite, in God 
 exists infinitely. V. Aristotle's error in regard to the eternity of 
 the universe. VI. God's relation to the world, according to Aris- 
 totle. VII. Summary of Aristotle's Theodicy. VIII. Distinction 
 between the two degrees of the divine intelligible. IX. Aristotle's 
 proof of the existence of God is at bottom precisely the same as that 
 of Descartes. Decision in regard to Aristotle 62-94 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 SAINT AUGDSTINE'S THEODICY. 
 
 I. Saint Augustine's opinion of philosophy. II. Analogy and differ- 
 ence between Plato and Saint Augustine : Quidqmd a Platone dicitur, 
 vivit in Augustino. III. What Saint Augustine sees in Plato ; 
 what he adds to him. IV. Theory of the method which lifts us to 
 God and the truth, according to Saint Augustine (gradus ad immor- 
 talia faciendux) . V. Elaboration of what precedes. Saint Augus- 
 tine more exact than Plato in regard to the theory of the philosophical 
 method which proves God. VI. Great superiority of Saint Au- 
 gustine over Plato concerning the theory of the divine sense, prin- 
 ciple of the moral and intellectual impulse towards God. VII. The 
 
CONTENTS. vii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 final term attained by reason, when God lifts it to himself (Ratio 
 perveniens ad Jinem suuni). VIII. Results of Saint Augustine's 
 philosophical method. Idea of the infinite ; doctrine of the creation. 
 IX. Journey of reason towards God, according to Saint Augus- 
 tine : two degrees of the divine intelligible. X. Conclusion : the 
 Temple ; two ways of regarding it 95-142 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 SAINT ANSELM'S THEODICY. 
 
 I. General sense of Saint Anselm's philosophical works. II. What 
 is Saint Anselm's argument ? III. Fuller analysis of that argu- 
 ment. IV. How far reason can go, according to Saint Anselm 143-157 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS* THEODICY. 
 
 I. Relations between Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine. 
 II. Literal translation of a Question by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which 
 is an abridged treatise on the existence of God : De Deo an Dem sit 
 (Sum. Theol. l a . q. 11). III. Discussion of this chapter from 
 Saint Thomas. IV. Theory of the method which lifts our mind to 
 God, according to Saint Thomas : 1. The starting-point in the spec- 
 tacle of created beings ; 2. The process, which takes three names : 
 via causalitatis, via eminently vel excellentice, via negationis vel re- 
 motionis ; 3. The moral obstacle : veritatem Dei in. injustitia detinent. 
 V. Distinction between the two degrees of the divine intelligible : 
 visio speculariSy visio per essentiam. Distinction in the higher of the 
 two degrees : light of grace, in via videntium ; light of glory, in pa- 
 tria mdentium. VI. Conclusion 158-184 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Philosophic character of the seventeenth century : unity of mind of its 
 great men ; unity of process. 
 
 DESCARTES. 
 
 I. His philosophical character. II. His starting-point to prove the 
 existence of God : unity of his two proofs. III. Double character 
 of the true proof, both rational and experimental. IV. Objective 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 reality of the idea of God, according to Descartes : this idea is a cer- 
 tain vision of God. This vision is indirect : I possess it by the same 
 faculty by which I know myself. It is the IMAGE of a genuine and 
 immutable nature. That image is only that which we see when the 
 mind conceives, judges, or reasons. V. How Descartes' two proofs 
 are inseparable and form but one. VI. The process of Descartes 
 does not differ from the dialectic of Plato. VII. Hiatus in the 
 ideas of Descartes, or at least in his work. Danger of Cartesianism 
 ill understood. Conclusion. To distinguish between, but not to 
 separate, the two orders of the divine intelligible. 
 
 PASCAL. 
 
 I. Part played by Pascal considered as a philosopher. II. His scep- 
 ticism is not genuine scepticism, any more than is Descartes' doubt. 
 He is especially averse to isolated reason. III. Pascal's doctrine 
 concerning the rational knowledge of God. Pascal's deficiency. 
 Conclusion. 2// 
 
 MALEBRANCHE. 
 
 I. Merit of Malebranche. Solid side of his doctrine. II. Male- 
 branche's practical and habitual method. III. How he proves the 
 existence of God. IV. Malebranche confounds the two orders of 
 the divine intelligible. This is his error. "*-*J 
 
 FENELON. 
 
 I. Fenelon's philosophical character. His superiority. II. Fenelon 
 corrects the exclusive points of view of Pascal and Malebranche. 
 His analysis of reason, the best that has been made, is at the same 
 time the most beautiful of the proofs of the existence of God. 
 III. Profound comparison by which Fenelon explains the nature of 
 ideas and reason : his superiority over Malebranche. IV. His the- 
 ory of the process by which our reason rises to God. Conclusion. 
 
 PETAU AND THOMASSIN. 
 
 I. Analysis of an important chapter by Petau, in which he explains 
 his method of demonstrative theology. II. Philosophical character 
 of Thomassin. III. Starting-point of the process which proves 
 God, according to Thomassin. IV. Profoundly original theory 
 given by Thomassin in regard to what has been called the innate 
 idea of God. V. Continuation of that theory. VI. Remarks on 
 the starting-point of the process which lifts our mind to God. 
 VII. Theory of that process. Thomassin's excess of tolerance in 
 regard to Neo-Platonism. VIII. Clear distinction between the 
 two regions of the divine intelligible. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 BOSSUET. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Bossuet's philosophical character. II. Relations between the 
 question of Quietism and the philosophic proof of the existence of 
 God. III. God proved by the spectacle of nature and by his op- 
 erations in us. IV. God proved by his idea taken in itself. 
 V. Description of the practical process which lifts us to God. THE 
 HIDDEN SPRING. The other light. jL7 L 
 
 LEIBNITZ. 
 
 I. Philosophical character of Leibnitz. His chief title to glory. 
 II. Did Leibnitz understand the relation between the infinitesimal 
 process and the corresponding logical process ? III. Leibnitz re- 
 gards as good almost all the means which have been employed to 
 prove the existence of God. He thinks he has reduced the proof of 
 the existence of God to mathematic precision. He remoulds Saint 
 Anselm's proof. IV. Summary of the Theodicy of Leibnitz. 
 V. Analogy between his Theodicy and his geometry. Conclusion 185-303 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 
 
 I. The true proof of the existence of God also gives us the attributes 
 of God. Deduction of all God's metaphysical attributes from any 
 one of those attributes. II. Intellectual and moral attributes. 
 III. Ipsum intelligere Dei est ejus substantia. The various ideas 
 in God. IV. God's providence. Creation. Death. V. To 
 what the triple distinction between the attributes of God 
 corresponds 304-326 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 
 
 I. How the proof of the existence of God is, as Descartes and Leib- 
 nitz assert, mathematically exact. It is the highest application of 
 the general infinitesimal method, of which the geometrical infini- 
 tesimal process is merely a special application. II. Why many 
 minds reverse the process which lifts our mind to God, and direct 
 it in a contrary course. The scientific process of modern atheism is 
 only the infinitesimal process inversely applied. Its result is an ex- 
 act proof, ad absurdum, of the existence of God. III. Conclusion 
 of first part of the Treatise on the Knowledge of God . . . 327-348 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 fart econti. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE TWO DEGREES OP THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 
 
 I. Three states of reason. II. Description of these different states of 
 reason. III. Causes of these different states. IV. Continuation. 
 How reason attains to its highest term : Ratio perveniens ad Jinem 
 suum . ...... . . 349-362 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 
 
 Distinction between the two degrees of the divine intelligible, that 
 to which reason attains, and that which, of itself, it cannot grasp, 
 according to Saint Thomas. II. Comparison between reason and 
 faith, according to Saint Thomas, Thomassin, and Saint Augustine. 
 III. Analogy to this distinction in Saint Paul. IV. What can 
 reason do without faith ? V. Parallel between the two forms of 
 wisdom, natural and supernatural, by Cornelius a Lapide. Reason 
 and faith compared by the Council of Trent. VI. Evident limits 
 of reason. VII. What is natural reason ? Analogy between the 
 evolution of reason and that of faith. VIII. What is sound reason 
 and what perverted reason? Reason conjoined to its principle; 
 reason doubting its principle 363-392 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH (Continued). 
 
 I. What is sound reason (continued) ? Natural faith. II. Natu- 
 ral faith, divine sense, according to the Holy Scripture. III. Natu- 
 ral faith according to Aristotle, the Alexandrians, and Kant. 
 IV. Natural faith, according to Thomassin. V. Reason supported 
 by its principle, by natural faith. VI. Is there, actually, no super- 
 natural gift mingled with sound natural reason 1 393-410 
 
CONTENTS. xi 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN KEASON AND FAITH (Continued). 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. What can sound reason do ? It may recognize its limitations, and 
 regret that which it lacks : this is its highest capability. II. Exact 
 precision of theological formulas on this subject. The perfection of 
 the rational creature depends upon a certain gift superior to the na- 
 ture of the created being. Geometrical analogy. III. Natural 
 desire to see God, according to Saint Thomas 411-431 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH (Continued). 
 
 I. Transition from reason to faith. II. Evening light and morning 
 light. III. Genesis of light according to the Gospel . . . 432-417 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH (Continued). 
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 I. Two degrees of light : Sound reason. Perverted reason. Slug- 
 gish reason. Comparison. II. Theological Summary. III. We 
 must advance, with the help of God, to the higher of the two degrees 
 of the divine intelligible 448-469 
 
UNJVEKblTY 
 
 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 BY WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER. 
 
 TN its original language the work here translated has 
 passed through many editions, and has attained the 
 rank of an authoritative classic. It is characterized by 
 such comprehensiveness of scope, such force and beauty of 
 style, such amplitude of learning, such ripeness and pre- 
 cision of thought, such depth of experience, and such catho- 
 licity of spirit that no one can fitly read it without being 
 instructed, stimulated, and edified. The author sweeps with 
 the ease of a consummate mastery through the wisdom of 
 twenty-five centuries, gathers up the chief treasures depos- 
 ited there by the kings of insight, and presents them con- 
 structed into one harmonious whole. The question with 
 which he grapples as strenuously as any one ever has done, 
 is whether the human mind is able to attain to a real 
 knowledge of God. To the examination of this sublime 
 theme he brings both an intense earnestness and an unfail- 
 ing sobriety; while adding to these high qualities all that 
 historic erudition and training can yield from without, or 
 personal acumen and consecration furnish from within. 
 The result, as embodied in the present volume, is one with 
 which, in point of attractiveness and solid value, no work 
 on the same subject within the entire compass of English 
 literature can for a moment stand a comparison. 
 
 Gratry answers the question, Can man know God ? in the 
 most effective way possible, by setting forth, in systematic 
 
 i 
 
2 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 outline and with appropriate detail, the experimental and 
 critical conclusions at which a large number of the most 
 illustrious thinkers of our race, from Plato and Aristotle 
 to Fe'nelon and Leibnitz, have actually arrived on that 
 subject. He lays bare the methods they employed, the dif- 
 ficulties they encountered, the arguments they constructed, 
 the aids they received, the results they conquered, and their 
 fundamental agreement through all. He does this with an 
 incisiveness of thought, a summarizing skill, a patience, an 
 impartiality, and a lucidity most admirable and most de- 
 lightful. It is true that as we pass on from name to name 
 there seems to be a good deal of repetition. But there is 
 ever a variety in the sameness, a progressive growth in the 
 exposition, a cumulative gain through the repeatals, which 
 fully reward the reader. As he goes over, in theodicy after 
 theodicy, what appear to be quite identical statements, he 
 will more and more find doubts dissolved, objections an- 
 swered, obscurities illuminated, peace bestowed, assurance 
 and satisfaction breaking in. There are very few, even 
 among professional students of philosophy, who will not 
 find themselves abundantly repaid for a patient perusal of 
 all the repetitions in these freighted pages, so momentous 
 are the themes treated, and so masterly is the treatment. 
 
 One of the central traits of this work is the appeal the 
 author makes for the action of human nature in its integ- 
 rity as regulated by the sovereign unity of the rational 
 principle. He protests against the division of the soul into 
 a collection of abstracting faculties which operate separ- 
 ately and breed all sorts of error, fiction, and confusion. 
 He quotes approvingly the bold remark of Fenelon, " Eeason 
 is even more wanting on earth than religion." Having also 
 cited the great saying of Saint Thomas, " In the moral order, 
 crimes against nature are worse than sacrilege," he adds, 
 " So in the intellectual order that crime against nature which 
 
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 3 
 
 attacks reason is worse than the sacrilege which attacks 
 faith ; for to ruin reason is to prostrate the religious edifice 
 by undermining the ground." 
 
 The vindication of the powers and rights of reason, so 
 nobly illustrated in the whole body of the work, has been 
 formally stated by Gratry in the following eloquent passage, 
 which is no less timely than it is just and weighty: 
 
 " What is the common and natural state of the reason among 
 men 3 We see it all about us. God is still unknown to the ma- 
 jority of men, and almost all are profoundly ignorant of their des- 
 tiny, their nature, and their duty. The majority still reject the 
 unmistakable light thrown upon human questions by universal 
 reason, aided by God, and they are unable to pass this first and 
 natural initiatory step, and far from attaining to the higher initi- 
 ation which God has prepared for all. Very few men even suc- 
 ceed in gaining complete mastery of their body ; nearly all live a 
 fortuitous and turbulent life, conducive to premature old age and 
 untimely death. 
 
 "How few reasonable beings there are who cultivate in them- 
 selves the sacred gift of reason ! The greater number cultivate 
 the earth ; others cultivate nothing. Throughout humanity, with 
 but rare exceptions, reason, that sacred talent intrusted by God to 
 every man on his entrance into this world, remains sterile or buried. 
 
 " Bossuet, speaking of reason hidden in the flesh, says : ' What 
 efforts must we not make to distinguish our soul from our body ! 
 How many of us there are who never attain to the knowledge or 
 slightest perception of this distinction ! ' ' How many are there 
 who rise somewhat above this mass of flesh, and clear their soul 
 from it?' 
 
 " Yes, there are but very few men in whom reason is distinct 
 from the mass of instincts, sensations, and wants, constituting a 
 free force and an independent power. With almost all it is a 
 sorely oppressed force, a power subordinated, not only to the im- 
 agination, the senses, interests, and desires, but also to the cur- 
 rent of the blood and the disposition, the influence of the matter 
 which feeds otir body, and the forces of physical nature. Reason, 
 the logical varnish of a purely animal life, the blind and trivial 
 
4 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 bond of our passions, desires, humors, and sensations, reason, 
 blended with the whole, and carried away by the general move- 
 ment, obeys slavishly, instead of ruling. 
 
 "There are, among God's creatures, animals belonging to the 
 lower grades of life. Their body is but a uniform mass, without 
 distinct organs. Each point represents as well as any other the 
 essential centres of life, and exercises all its functions vapidly and 
 indifferently. There is no distinct heart or brain ; all is con- 
 founded in the sum total of the mass. Well, just such is the in- 
 tellectual organization of the multitude at the present day. Reason 
 is in the germ, but not developed ; it is spread throughout the 
 mass, but is destitute of distinct central organ. It does not form, 
 let me repeat, a free force and an independent power. The minds 
 of such men may be compared to those inferior organizations in 
 the animal scale which have no distinct brain. 
 
 "And with those who have developed the germ of reason to 
 some slight degree, how is the development accomplished 1 ? 'We 
 seldom encounter anywhere other than warped intellects,' said 
 A*naud in the seventeenth century. What would he say now? 
 
 " What is a warped intellect 1 Bacon defines it very "happily : 
 ' It is a mirror without symmetry, irregular, in the beams of the 
 sun.' * Joubert uses the same figure in regard to one of our more 
 excessive thinkers : ' Thomas has a concave head ; it exaggerates 
 and enlarges everything which it reflects.' Now, just as crooked 
 mirrors deform every image, so a warped intellect distorts the data 
 which might raise it to the heights of truth. This one-sided in- 
 telligence falsifies the truth which strikes it; it is addressed in 
 words of truth, it hears falsehood ; beauty and sublimity are held 
 up before it, it sees only deformity. This may be accounted for. 
 Just as unsymmetrical surfaces are fantastic and distorted mirrors 
 which falsify by their unevenly developed dimensions, so a warped 
 intellect is a disproportionately developed intellect. For is not 
 our weak understanding usually employed in the exclusive direc- 
 tion of one ruling passion, one fixed idea or supreme prejudice'? 
 Who is there whose intellectual mirror is a regular surface in every 
 direction, spherical as the vault of heaven, or smooth as the mirror 
 of the waters? 
 
 "Certainly the majority of minds are strange and distorted 
 reflectors. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 5 
 
 " Being thus formed, they can derive only error from the spec- 
 tacle of visible things and of the inner actions of the soul, and 
 from that of human events. They gaze, and fancy that they see 
 everything ; they do see everything but the sum total and the pro- 
 portions. It is thus that we observe the world, that we write 
 history, and that we describe mankind. It is thus that, day by 
 day, we retrace present facts visible to every eye ; and the tale is 
 false. We do not deliberately lie, but we give everything facti- 
 tious dimensions, conformed to the desired effect. We enlarge 
 what pleases us, and render imperceptible whatever offends. We 
 are false, and we see things as we ourselves are. 
 
 " There is another natural infirmity of the reason, which is very 
 apparent at the present time. Even those who think somewhat 
 correctly, think but little and almost fruitlessly, because they are 
 isolated, because each mind sees by itself alone ; union and associa- 
 tion of intellectual forces are yet to come. The confusion of tongues, 
 the antagonism of sects, the subdivision of intellectual persons, and 
 above all, the secret question at the bottom of every heart, 'God or 
 no god,' the question which divides mankind into two camps, is 
 anything more than this needed to keep apart those who think 1 
 The sphere of the intellectual world is still inhabited on the exterior, 
 not at the centre, where all rays meet, but only on the surface, where 
 all are divided : so that there are, in the world of science and of 
 thought, regions divided by space, subject to different heavens, 
 speaking different languages, and much more foreign to one another 
 than the various races of the earth. Each science is surrounded 
 by a high wall, and so is every intellect. The unity of the human 
 mind is less attained than that of the globe. 
 
 "If we would save religion, society, and civilization, the first 
 work to undertake is the restoration of public reason. We must 
 re-establish in the minds of men a knowledge of and respect for 
 reason and its laws, and the practice of these laws, logic. It must 
 be known, for it has been forgotten, that there are both error and 
 truth in the world, and that the one may be distinguished from 
 the other; that there is a true method of human thinking, that 
 is to say, there are fixed principles and legitimate processes ; that 
 these principles and processes have been practised in all ages in- 
 stinctively by many persons, and might have been so in a certain 
 sense by all; that they were practised with some conscientious- 
 
6 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 ness and with admirable results by philosophical minds in every 
 century; but that they were ignored and violated by the blind 
 criticism and lawless practice of sophists in all ages ; that the true 
 philosophical method, without being yet very completely defined, 
 has nevertheless, in the course of ages, been determined and de- 
 veloped by the success of its applications and the even clearer 
 sense of those great intellects who made use of it ; but that there 
 exists a false method and a sophistical process, which has never 
 ceased to impede the advance of philosophy by its perturbing 
 action, and that this power of contradiction, ever increasing, seems 
 to borrow strength from the very progress of truth. 
 
 " This being thoroughly perceived, we must proceed to separate 
 these shadows and this light ; that is, we must at last learn to make 
 a scientific distinction between sophistry and philosophy. We must 
 give their true names, in history, to philosophers and sophists. 
 Moving in a direction contrary to contemporary eclecticism, philo- 
 sophy must at last proceed to the necessary excommunication of its 
 domestic foes, instead of greeting and embracing them. The errone- 
 ous method, and that whicli leads to truth, must be exactly defined j 
 we must recognize, what is manifest enough, that the sophistical 
 process is nothing but the philosophical method inverted. 
 
 ''The division once accomplished, and the sophists set apart, we 
 must restore the legitimate rule of reason and philosophy among 
 us by the study of genuine philosophers, by the practice and 
 knowledge of their method, as well as by a study of the sophists, 
 considered as a counter proof and demonstration through the 
 absurd. 
 
 "Philosophy, a universal science, must come forth from its isolation 
 and look face to face at the special branches of science which regard 
 philosophy with contempt. Philosophy, as a wise writer expresses 
 it, must cross the boundary-line, enter the domain of science, and 
 take possession of it. It is right that all these branches of science 
 which philosophy created should be subject to it ; or rather, it is 
 right that the human mind should cease to be divided into regions 
 unknown each to the other, and that the various sciences should 
 resume their natural relations in the unity of philosophy. 
 
 " Still more must be done, if we are to re-establish the serious 
 education of reason among us. 
 
 " It is not enough that science should exist, it must become a 
 
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 7 
 
 part of human intelligence ; and reason must be actually developed 
 in every man, or at least in the majority of those who desire to 
 think, and believe that they do so. 
 
 " Now, so long as we blindly refuse to recognize that the solid 
 and healthy growth of thought proceeds from the growth of the 
 entire soul and will, there can be no mental change. There can be 
 no advance of reason without a corresponding advance in moral 
 strength and freedom. Intellect and will, reason and freedom, are 
 the two wings of the soul, upon which it rises to its only object, 
 which is goodness, and at the same time truth. 
 
 " Farther yet, and this is the supreme question in the life of 
 the human mind and its history, a vital question for the human 
 intellect, is our reason conjoined to that of God, or is it wholly 
 separate ? Is reason destined to become holy, or to sink into 
 degradation? At which extreme is it to stop] For it will not 
 remain at this sterile and changeable intermediate, which is the 
 end of nothing; it must either fall or rise. 
 
 " Reason is a force that seeks for its beginning and end. Now, 
 the truth is, that the beginning and the end of reason is God. 
 The human heart seeks God no more unceasingly than reason does. 
 Only in this pursuit the mind, as well as the heart, is subject to 
 change. When the human heart changes, we have moral perversion. 
 \V hen the human mind changes, we have intellectual perversion, 
 the vice of sophists. ' Truth,' says Saint Augustine, ' lies in placing 
 in God these three things, the cause of the world, the supreme 
 good, the fulcrum of reason.' Nothing more profound could be said. 
 Very certainly the whole history of philosophy and sophistry is con- 
 tained in that sentence. Only Saint Augustine makes no mention 
 here of the final abyss irto which the sophist plunges when, setting 
 God apart from reason, he undermines the latter to discover its 
 origin. 
 
 " But what happens when, far from dividing it from God, we 
 conjoin the two, and reason follows its research to the end? 
 ' Reason/ says Saint Augustine, * reason, attaining its end, be- 
 comes virtue/ But what virtue? Let us see. 
 
 " There is a height, according to Saint Augustine, where reason 
 stops. This is its end. This is plain to every true philosopher. 
 ' The science of the human mind/ said Royer-Collard, ' will have 
 been carried to the highest degree of perfection which it can attain 
 when it can derive ignorance from its primary source.' 
 
8 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 " There is, therefore, let us say with Saint Augustine, a height 
 where reason stops : this is its end. But there it goes on in 
 something which is not itself; as one river flows into another, or 
 is borne to the ocean. This is the point where the mind of man is 
 continued in the mind of God himself, and is subject to it. This 
 subjection, or rather this high degree of elevation of the human 
 reason, subject to the mind of God, is faith. Faith, that is the 
 virtue to which reason soars when it attains its end. 'Faith is 
 indeed,' says Pascal, 'the last step of reason.' Only we must of 
 course agree as to this capital truth whose admission or rejection 
 decides the destinies of the world and the human mind. 
 
 " We affirm that this subjection of the human mind to the Spirit 
 of God is not the destruction of reason, but its final perfection. 
 Reason, said Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most exact of philosophers 
 as well as the greatest of theologians, reason is capable of a two- 
 fold perfection ; namely, its proper and natural perfection, resulting 
 from its own principles and its own powers, and the perfection 
 which it borrows from its union and subjection to the Spirit of God 
 himself, a principle higher and greater than it. This is its final 
 and supernatural perfection ; it is the human mind engrafted upon 
 the Divine mind, if we may so express it. Reason then bears 
 fruits which it could not bear; and as the poet says, repeating the 
 words of Nature herself, 
 
 " 'Admires those fruits which are not hers.' 
 
 " These fruits are those of the Spirit of God become the directly 
 fertilizing principle of human reason, which none the less retains 
 its individual principles. 
 
 "Far from diminishing reason, the introduction of the higher 
 principle lifts it to incomparable greatness, vivifies its powers, 
 and increases the fruitfulness of its natural principle. 
 
 " This alliance, in one sense, may be compared to the divine 
 alliance, to which Saint Thomas Aquinas alludes when he says, 
 ' Divine knowledge in the soul of Christ did not kill human knowl- 
 edge, but made it more luminous.' 
 
 " It is of this alliance that a holily far-sighted spirit said, early 
 in the seventeenth century : * There are three kinds of knowledge, 
 purely divine knowledge, the purely human knowledge, and knowl- 
 edge at once human and divine, which is indeed the true knowledge 
 of Christians. 9 
 
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 9 
 
 " It was this alliance which the genius of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, the parent of knowledge, actually sought. Instituted by those 
 great men who were all at once theologians, philosophers, and 
 scientists, from Kepler down to Leibnitz, passing by Pascal, 
 Descartes, Malebranche, Bossuet, and Fenelon, this sacred alli- 
 ance of all departments of intellect one with the other, and of the 
 human mind with the divine mind, was the cause of the greatness 
 and creative fertility of that period, the most luminous in history. 
 But since this tie was severed, we have only dimmed that match- 
 less light, and most of us can no longer even see it. 
 
 " So that when human reason is conjoined to God through 
 faith, history shows it, besides the new and sublime data 
 which result, its natural powers are increased, its individual prin- 
 ciples bear their rarest natural fruits, mingled with divine fruits. 
 When, on the contrary, reason breaks the alliance always offered 
 to every mind, in every age, this refusal, this reversion to its un- 
 aided self, this isolation and sacrilegious negation, weaken its 
 natural powers, and lead it, from negation to negation, to deny 
 itself, an intellectual suicide whose name is sophistry. 
 
 " Consider the great and wonderful symbolism, too little under- 
 stood and too little heeded, which the eighteenth century affords 
 us in that final scene when man strove to reject God and to wor- 
 ship himself and his own reason only ! 
 
 " What did man do when he attempted to place human reason 
 on the altar, to adore that alone ? 
 
 "Let history speak. He placed a naked prostitute upon the 
 altar. That is, he put upon the altar reason smeared with mud, 
 reason smothered in flesh and blood. 
 
 " And what was cast down from that altar to make way for this 
 infamous goddess '{ Heed the answer well ! Human reason was 
 cast down, but human reason allied with God. 
 
 "Men did not know, they do not yet know, that human reason 
 can find place upon a Catholic altar. 
 
 " What is there, then, on the Catholic altar if it be not Jesus 
 Christ 1 ? And what is Jesus Christ, if he be not God allied to man ? 
 ' The Divine Word,' says our dogma, ' took on, in its incarnation, 
 a human soul, a human soul gifted with reason. 9 
 
 "I give the exact statement, in the language of the Church : 
 * Verbura divinum aniniam humanam, eamque rationis participem, 
 assumpsit/ 
 
10 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 " Thus, according to our dogma, human reason, in actual pres- 
 ence, was upon the Catholic altar; it was there conjoined with God. 
 It was driven thence, to be replaced by human reason degraded and 
 dragged through the mud. The holy altar was stripped of the su- 
 preme reason, the reason of Jesus, the reason of the Man-God, and 
 replaced by the feeble reason of a lewd crew. Men were given 
 their choice of alliance, reason allied to filth, or reason conjoined 
 to God. They made their choice. 
 
 "We will not rest satisfied with this choice. We will reject 
 what we took, and take back what we rejected. Soon, I hope, the 
 majority of us will understand what was so happily and finely ex- 
 pressed in a now famous address : ' The great question, the supreme 
 question, which now absorbs all minds, is the question put by those 
 who recognize and those who do not recognize a supernatural, sure, 
 and supreme order of things. . . . For our present and future safety 
 alike, faith in the supernatural order, submission to the natural 
 order, must re-enter the world, and the human soul must be born 
 again in great minds as well as in simple ones, in the highest as 
 well as in the humblest regions.' 
 
 " Yes, our present and future safety demand faith in the super- 
 natural order. 
 
 " At this price reason may resume its sway over us ; the mind 
 may be lifted up and rescued. At this price we may yet see some- 
 thing of Leibnitz's great prediction accomplished: 'Let us hope 
 that a time may come when men will devote themselves to reason 
 more than they have hitherto done.' Upheld by God, and living 
 by faith, far more men will succeed in some degree in freeing their 
 soul and reason from this weight of flesh, and in living, throughout 
 an entire lifetime, by the love of justice and truth alone ; more men 
 will take up, conscientiously and vigorously, literature, science, and 
 philosophy, as sacred instruments to be used for the good of hu- 
 manity, for the increase of light, wisdom, and dignity among men, 
 for the progress of the world towards God." 
 
 Few works can compare with this one by Professor Gratry 
 as an exhibition of the compass of human reason and of what 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas calls " the much-misappreciated power 
 of reasoning." He clearly shows the truth of the assertion 
 
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 11 
 
 of Descartes and Leibnitz, repeated by Cardinal Gerdil, that 
 the existence of God and his infinite perfections may be as 
 rigorously proved as the solution of any mathematical prob- 
 lem. He shows this with the most brilliant originality, by 
 proving that the demonstration of the existence of God is the 
 supreme achievement of a general process of the reason, of 
 which the infinitesimal methods of geometry are but a special 
 application. The attention of the reader is particularly in- 
 vited to the exposition of this assertion where it occurs in 
 the following pages. It is no less fruitful and illuminating 
 in its consequences than it is startlingly original in itself. 
 
 The character and life of the illustrious author of this 
 work were in full keeping with his attainments and fame. 
 He was not merely a scholar and a philosopher, but likewise 
 a philanthropist and a saint, who thoroughly lived the doc- 
 trine he taught. In his spiritual will were found, after his 
 death, these touching words : " 1 leave to every human being 
 whom I have ever greeted or blessed, or to whom I have 
 ever spoken any word o'f esteem or affection, the assurance 
 that I love and bless him twice and thrice as much as I said. 
 I entreat all such to pray for me, that I may attain to the 
 kingdom of love, whither I will draw him too through the 
 infinite goodness of our Father." 
 
 In order to bring the two volumes of the original within 
 the compass of a single larger volume in the translation, the 
 superfluous appendices and some of the foot-notes contain- 
 ing the texts rendered by the author in the body of his work, 
 have been omitted. The prefaces to the first three editions, 
 abounding with personal and local references, as well as a 
 long and polemical Introduction, have likewise been left out. 
 
 The editor of this translation deems it his duty, in bring- 
 ing the work before the public in its English dress, to add a 
 word of protest against the view which Gratry gives of the 
 German school of philosophy as presented in the culminating 
 
12 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 exposition of Hegel. Ecclesiastical prejudice, national bias, 
 differences in points of view and in nomenclature, have pre- 
 vented many Catholic thinkers of the highest ability, includ- 
 ing even Eos mini, from seeing the real depth and the solid 
 result of the speculative movement begun by Kant, advanced 
 by Fichte, and carried through by Hegel. Because the dia- 
 lectic of the transcendental school is that of a negative unity, 
 its foes charge it with being exclusively negative, and ending 
 in nihilism. But Aristotle says, in the first chapter of the 
 last book of his Metaphysics, "All contraries inseparably 
 belong to a subject." Hegel was the first thinker syste- 
 matically to develop this statement through all its implica- 
 tions. He showed, as Fichte had partly done before, that 
 every lower set of contraries is reconciled in a higher cate- 
 gory, whose unity contains and mediates them, the highest 
 category being free self -consciousness. The negative dialectic 
 presupposes the affirmative, as the affirmative dialectic pre- 
 supposes the negative ; because both presuppose the absolute 
 dialectic, without which neither of these could be. Thus 
 the negative phase of the dialectic, when completed, is found 
 to carry also the opposite phase, and to coincide with the 
 whole sphere of a self-determining unity. Hegelianism ends 
 neither with atheism nor pantheism nor nihilism, but with a 
 solidly grounded vision of God, freedom, and immortality. 
 
 This does not affect the value of the present work in its 
 positive exposition, which unveils a mine of matchless 
 wealth, hidden, for the most part, from the Protestant world 
 by ignorance and prejudice. The central part of the divine 
 wisdom of the Catholic Church, the speculative insight cu- 
 mulatively developed in a broadening and brightening river 
 of tradition by its peerless thinkers and saints through so 
 many centuries, is here freely offered to all who are able to 
 understand it and willing to receive it. 
 
GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 EXPLANATOKY. 
 
 ," says Bossuet, "consists in knowing God 
 and knowing one's self." These words are, in 
 brief, a true definition of philosophy. 
 
 They mean, at the outset, that philosophy is the search 
 for wisdom; that is, the search, both theoretical and prac- 
 tical, for goodness and truth. They declare that philosophy 
 is not that abstract and purely speculative knowledge of 
 which Bossuet also says elsewhere, "Woe to that barren 
 knowledge which never turns to love, and is false to itself ! " 
 
 These words, moreover, limit the object of philosophy. 
 That object is God and man; it is man seeking through the 
 intellect and the will to find goodness and truth, which are 
 God. 
 
 On the other hand, this definition does not divide those 
 things which are incapable of division, and does not exclude 
 from philosophy a knowledge of bodies and of the visible 
 world. "For," says Bossuet, "to know man, we must know 
 that he is made up of two parts, which are the body and 
 the soul." Hence we see that philosophy also treats of 
 visible and material nature, especially in its relation to the 
 soul and to God. 
 
14 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 So that the various divisions of philosophy are 
 
 I. THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD (Theodicy). 
 
 II. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUL, considered in its re- 
 lations to God and the body (Psychology). 
 
 III. LOGIC, which is a further development of psychology, 
 and which studies the soul through its intelligence, and the 
 laws of that intelligence. 
 
 IV. MORALS, which is another outgrowth of psychology, 
 and which studies the soul through its will, and the laws 
 of that will. 
 
 We shall explain these different divisions of philosophy, 
 each in turn, beginning with the theodicy. 
 
 This order is that of Descartes, Fe'nelon, Malebranche, and 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas. Bossuet followed the inverse order. 
 But we prefer to begin with the theodicy, because in our 
 view it implies the whole of philosophy. It shows it to 
 us as a unity, a totality ; it contains all its roots. Every- 
 thing proceeds from it; it is therefore the starting-point. 
 
 Moreover, the theodicy, which is the loftiest, most pro- 
 found department of philosophy, is also the simplest. 
 Ideas of infinity and perfection, as Descartes, Bossuet, and 
 the majority of philosophers remark, are the first which 
 awakening reason reveals to us, which proves that reason 
 first impels us towards God. It is the cause of nature, at 
 the same time that it is the absolute order of truths taken 
 in themselves. 
 
 But by theodicy must not be understood only the knowl- 
 edge of God; it also means most particularly the knowledge 
 of the human mind aspiring towards God. 
 
 The theodicy is the knowledge of that wonderful process 
 of the reason which soars towards God and aspires to know 
 and prove his existence, nature, and attributes. 
 
 From this point of view we shall realize later how the 
 theodicy sums up all philosophy in a single question, 
 
EXPLANATORY. 15 
 
 namely, the proof of the existence of God and his attri- 
 butes, a question which the readers of this book will, I 
 hope, find neither barren nor commonplace, and upon which 
 we must at once enter. 
 
 Is it possible to prove the existence of God ? Is it essen- 
 tial ? Is not the truth of the existence of God self-evident 
 and indemonstrable as an axiom? Can there- be atheists? 
 
 It seems at first that this proposition, God is, is identical 
 with the similar proposition, Being is. And so it really is 
 to all who know the meaning of the word God, since that 
 word means " Him who is." This statement, therefore, is 
 one of those which are evident as soon as their terms are 
 known. Its terms imply its truth, for the subject and attri- 
 bute are identical ; and it bears its certainty on its face, as 
 does this, The whole is greater than a part. 
 
 But all men do not know the meaning of the word God, 
 all not understanding that God is none other than He who 
 is. The truth of God's existence is not clear to all, and it 
 requires to be proved from a basis of universal ideas. The 
 proposition which asserts it is identical, but its identity is 
 not apparent to all eyes. 
 
 And in fact there are atheists. Atheism, both theoretical 
 and practical, is a profound vice, or rather, the radical vice 
 of the heart and human mind. No age has been free from 
 it. Our own is more fully infected by it than we think. 
 Practical atheism is visible to every eye, and philosophical 
 atheism is revealed under the form of pantheism. More yet, 
 express, exact, avowed, and declared atheism has a school of 
 its own ; and this school of new atheism, more scientific 
 than the old atheism, is built upon a foundation which it 
 calls Modern Science. 
 
16 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 It is not difficult, in truth, to do justice to this would-be 
 modern science. We shall prove, in the proper place, that it 
 is nothing else than the radical vice of the human heart and 
 mind disguised as doctrine, and that its scientific semblance 
 conies from the fact that it applies, though in inverse order, 
 the true method and fundamental process of reason. 
 
 But first let us assert that the existence of God can be 
 strictly proved, and that no geometrical theorem is more 
 certain. This is, moreover, the opinion of Descartes, as well 
 as of Leibnitz ; the learned Cardinal Gerdil said the same. 
 
 We shall treat this point, which implies all metaphysics, 
 all morals, all logic, and all the theory of the method, with 
 the fulness which is deserved by this prime question of 
 philosophy, whose basis and summary it is. 
 
 II. 
 
 In the first place, if there are true proofs of the existence 
 of God, these proofs must be within the reach of all men ; 
 for the light of God shines, and should shine, upon every 
 man in this world. 
 
 Therefore, to find useful proofs of the existence of God, 
 we should seek his origin and reality in some ordinary and 
 daily act of the human mind ; and this sublime and simple 
 act being found, it will suffice to describe it, and translate it 
 into philosophical language. We shall then prove its scien- 
 tific value. 
 
 Now, this ordinary daily act of the human soul, mind, and 
 heart, intellect and will, is no other than the universal fact 
 of prayer ; and I mean, philosophically speaking, by prayer 
 what Descartes defines when he says, " I feel that I am a 
 finite being, unceasingly striving for and aspiring to some- 
 thing better and greater than I am." Prayer is the move- 
 ment of the soul from the finite towards the infinite. 
 
EXPLANATORY. 17 
 
 Scorn of present reality, so natural to man ; expectation of 
 an ideal future, so habitual to the soul ; instinctive sense 
 of the marvellous, and presentiment of infinity, are the 
 source of this sublime and simple act, which proves God. 
 
 Who does not know it? The soul of man, especially 
 when it is pure and lofty, in its vigor and youth, conceives 
 and desires without bounds all the beauties and virtues of 
 which it sees any trace. All boundaries, all limits, all im- 
 perfections, are destroyed. Being is conceived in all its 
 plenitude ; the mind conceives of eternal love, happiness 
 without change, truth without shadow, a will stronger than 
 any obstacle, strength and energy that play with time and 
 space, and of wonders, sudden creations realized by a word, 
 a gesture, or a wish. All these premonitions of the heart 
 of man, all these golden dreams of childhood, all these in- 
 toxications of ideal nectar, imply a true and strictly scien- 
 tific method. Analyzed by reason, this poetry, this faith, 
 contain the strict proof of the existence of God and his 
 attributes. 
 
 In fact, this is the poetic and ordinary process which, 
 with the help of education and tradition, lifts the majority of 
 men to the knowledge of God. The spectacle of the world, 
 the sense of life, the sight of finished beings and created 
 beauties, when the heart and imagination grasp them to 
 enlarge and urge them to infinity, by effacing evil, bounds, 
 and limits, that impulse of the soul towards infinity from 
 the finite, this it is that gives men an idea of God, a 
 natural knowledge and love of him. 
 
 And this intellectual and moral impulse, of which every 
 human soul is capable, is the act and the fundamental pro- 
 cess of the life of reason and the moral life. We say that 
 the act and fundamental process of a life of reason and a 
 moral life consist, as Bossuet expresses it, in passing without 
 any circuit of reasoning, although by a very justifiable impulse 
 
 2 
 
18 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 of the reason, from the finite to the infinite, from the genu- 
 ine finite being which we are, which we see, which we can ac- 
 tually touch, to the infinite Being, really and actually existing, 
 which the existence of the finite implies and supposes. 
 
 And while the simple, the ignorant, the humble, and the 
 young, by a wholly instinctive and poetic method, perform 
 this chief and necessary act of reason, this natural act of the 
 soul is the foundation of the most scientific of methods, and 
 all the demonstrations of the existence of God, given us by 
 true philosophers of all times, summed up and exactly de- 
 fined by the seventeenth century, are but the philosophical 
 translation of the ordinary process which all men employ. 
 
 This we shall show by enumerating and analyzing these 
 various demonstrations, the entire substance of which we 
 will afterwards sum up, and will prove their unerring 
 exactness. 
 
 III. 
 
 But before entering into details and studying these proofs 
 one by one, referring each to its author, we will set forth, 
 without going into particulars, the nature and conditions of 
 the complete essential proof, to which all others lead back 
 more or less directly, according as they are more or less 
 explicit, solid, and luminous. What we now simply state 
 will be developed and demonstrated later on. 
 
 We must know that there are two processes of reasoning, 
 the one as exact as the other, syllogism and induction. 
 Syllogism is tolerably familiar. But induction is not the 
 vague process which it is supposed to be, it is a precise 
 process ; it is the chief process of reasoning, and has been 
 practised in all ages by all great minds as well as by the 
 humblest, but it has never yet been sufficiently analyzed 
 by any one. We will attempt this analysis by means of 
 logic. 
 
EXPLANATORY. 19 
 
 These two processes may also be called the syllogistic 
 process and the dialectic process. They correspond to what 
 Leibnitz called the logic of deduction and the logic of inven- 
 tion, or the analytical part and the inventive part of logic. 
 They correspond to the two kinds of minds which we find 
 among men, and which we may represent by Aristotle and 
 Plato. Aristotle called them syllogism and induction ; Plato 
 calls them syllogism and dialectic. The seventeenth century 
 deserves the credit for establishing the truly mathematical 
 precision of the second process, by bringing it into practical 
 use, as Leibnitz says ; which was done by the works of 
 Descartes, Malebranche, and Fdnelon, and by the great dis- 
 covery of Leibnitz, the invention of the infinitesimal cal- 
 culus, a wonderful invention, which consists of actually 
 introducing into mathematics this chief process of reasoning. 
 
 This process, which in geometry is carried to mathemati- 
 cal infinity, is also carried, in metaphysics, to the infinite 
 Being, which is God. Exact as geometry, it is also much 
 the simpler and quicker of the two processes of reasoning. 
 Its very simplicity and rapidity have hitherto prevented any 
 complete analysis of it. 
 
 It consists, any degree of entity, beauty, or perfection being 
 given, which we always have so soon as we are, see, or think, 
 it consists, we say, in instantly destroying in thought the 
 limits of the finite being and the imperfect qualities which we 
 possess, or which we see, in order that we may affirm without 
 other intermediary the infinite existence of the one Being 
 and his perfections, corresponding to those we see. 
 
 Assuredly the process is a simple one ; any one may use 
 it, and the smallest minds, on certain points, employ it as 
 quickly as others : but it is precise. This is now proved 
 by the works of the seventeenth century, analyzed and 
 compared. 
 
 This process is not only applicable to the proof of the 
 
20 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 existence of God, but it leads up in everything to principles 
 and ideas ; and as several philosophers, who will be quoted 
 in due time, declare, it is a universal process of invention. 
 
 Absolutely distinct from syllogism, it is quite as exact ; it 
 alone gives the majors used by syllogism. 
 
 This process, like syllogism, may rest either upon an ab- 
 straction or a fact, an idea or a reality, upon a conception 
 which is a priori true or false, or upon an experience. 
 
 If the syllogism depend upon a simple possibility, which 
 does not exist, upon a chimera, or even on a contradiction, 
 which cannot be true, its deductions will be of the nature 
 of the primary cause : a series of non-existent possibilities, 
 or even a series of chimeras or a series of contradictions 
 is deduced, sooner or later ending in downright absurdity, 
 that is to say, in a conspicuous contradiction. But if 
 it rest upon a real postulate, derived from the nature of 
 things, as, for instance, Newton's law, all the deduc- 
 tions drawn from it will be true, genuine, and existent in 
 the nature of things. 
 
 Now, it is precisely the same with the other process. 
 Whether we take for our starting-point a pure possibility 
 which does not exist, or a contradictory statement, or even, 
 as Descartes says, a conception proceeding from nothing, 
 which does not and cannot exist, the assertion obtained by 
 the dialectic process will be a simple possibility, a chimera, 
 or a contradiction. But if it be based upon an experimental 
 postulate, a reality, or some actual and positive quality exist- 
 ing in things, then its results will be as real as the point of 
 departure, as real as those of the syllogism. If, for in- 
 stance, it depended, as in certain German theories, upon the 
 idea of non-being, it would affirm, as the Germans do, an 
 absolute non-being, and all the resultant absurdities ; it 
 would thus plainly obtain only a chimera and a monster. 
 But if it rest upon some conception of being, a conception 
 
EXPLANATORY. 21 
 
 which is clearly possible, it asserts the possibility of an 
 infinite Being ; if, moreover, it add to this the experience of 
 any real being whatsoever, actually existing, it concludes in 
 the infinite Being, no longer as merely possible, but as really 
 and actually existing. 
 
 And these assertions, which proceed from finite reality to 
 infinite reality, are always true ; since in metaphysics, as in 
 geometry, every positive finite has its corresponding infinite. 
 We can always go on asserting to infinity the existence of any 
 real and positive quality, finite though it be, which we see. 
 The assertion is always true, in God. This is because in 
 metaphysics, as in geometry, as Leibnitz observes, "Finite 
 laws always hold good of infinity, and vice versa" 
 
 But if the process de facto be true, de facto again, all do 
 not always carry it out. Just as every mind does not al- 
 ways infer the consequences of principles with which it is 
 familiar, so, too, every mind does not always move from every 
 finite to the corresponding infinite, or from every phenom- 
 enon to ideas, or from every creature to God. Just as there 
 are minds without any syllogistic impulse, so too there are 
 minds destitute of dialectic force. There are intellects which 
 possess neither the one nor the other, neither deduction 
 nor invention. All are necessarily deductive when they are 
 driven to it. There is a logical constraint which can force 
 any man to see a consequence in a principle ; but all, as a 
 matter of course, are not necessarily inventive ; all do not 
 possess the dialectic impulse, there is no intellectual con- 
 straint possible upon this point. The intellect may lose or 
 recover its strength of impulse towards the infinite. That 
 depends upon the energy, the elasticity, of the soul and 
 moral freedom, this impulse being alike and indissolubly 
 intellectual and moral ; and it cannot be other than a move- 
 ment of the human soul as a unity. The intellectual move- 
 ment towards infinity is always true, always possible, since 
 
22 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 man is endowed with reason ; but as a fact, it cannot take 
 place in the soul without the corresponding moral move- 
 ment. This is why diseased souls can never perform it, 
 even when the words of others assert it and execute it in 
 their presence. A deduction presented from without is not 
 always understood by a mind but slightly developed ; but a 
 moment more, a moment of careful attention, will make it 
 clear. The dialectic passage from the finite to the infinite 
 is still oftener overlooked by weak or diseased minds; a 
 moment of more active attention is not enough, a cure 
 and moral change are requisite. 
 
 This fact, but too little noted, is most important. It touches 
 on the bond and relation between logic and morals, intellect 
 and will, reason and liberty. There is a bond between rea- 
 son and liberty, this is unquestionable ; there are opinions 
 which are entirely free. Some schools of philosophy admit 
 that all opinions are free and unbiassed : this is evidently a 
 mistake ; for how can deduction be free ? A syllogistic con- 
 clusion is inevitable when the primary causes are given. 
 But still it is false to say that every true opinion is inevi- 
 table. Dialectic advance from the finite to the infinite, and 
 the opinion which results, is both true and free, yet although 
 always true, is never obtained save under conditions which 
 depend upon freedom. The first moral condition of the ex- 
 istence of these dialectic decisions which proceed from every 
 finite to the infinite, is what may be called the sense of in- 
 finity, that divine sense which is always given, which is 
 the omnipresent charm of the Sovereign Good for every soul. 
 Then, according to the free reciprocal adaptation of each 
 soul to this attraction of infinity, it pronounces, or does 
 not pronounce, the true opinion which leads from every 
 finite to infinity. It may even as the whole history of 
 philosophy, especially modern German philosophy, proves 
 pronounce that false opinion which leads from every 
 finite, in an opposite direction from infinity, to nothing. 
 
EXPLANATORY. 23 
 
 The proof of the existence of God therefore results from 
 one of the two processes essential to reason, but, as a fact, is 
 worked out freely, morally as well as rationally. 
 
 This, I admit, is quite contrary to our wretched logical 
 habits, which presuppose an absolute separation of logic 
 and morals. But this gratuitous supposition might even be 
 called strange, since it admits that intellect and will, two 
 faculties of a single soul, have no common root where they 
 touch ; this supposition, I say, is as false as it is strange. It 
 has been, it still is, one of the stumbling-blocks of philoso- 
 phy. It is unquestionable that, as a certain intellectual 
 condition, and not only a condition but an act, a voluntary 
 act, attention, is requisite to execute one of the movements 
 of reason, to form or to comprehend a syllogism ; so too we 
 also require a certain moral state, which we may call a 
 right sense, and a voluntary and moral act, to understand 
 and execute the other movement of reason. A right sense 
 which is moreover the same thing as the divine sense is 
 that hidden reason to 'which Pascal refers when he says, 
 " The heart has its reasons which the reason does not know." 
 It is this hidden reason which the fool lacks when he says 
 in his heart, " There is no God." 
 
 Such, then, is the nature, such are the conditions, of the 
 true proof of the existence of God. 
 
 In brief, the true proof of the existence of God is nothing 
 else but the use of one of the two processes of reasoning, 
 the chief one, that which gives the majors, and which consti- 
 tutes the logic of invention. 
 
 Every application of this process involves the proof of the 
 existence of God. 
 
 Let us repeat: this process consists, starting from every 
 finite being and every finite quality, in affirming, by the sup- 
 pression of finite limits, the infinite Being, or the infinite 
 perfections corresponding to the finite that we see. 
 
24 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 And this assertion is always true, according to the princi- 
 ple laid down by Leibnitz, that finite laws hold good of in- 
 finity, and vice versa ; in other words, that the finite is an 
 image of the infinite, which results, as Leibnitz also re- 
 marks, from the fact that everything is governed by God, 
 who governs all in conformity to himself. 
 
 This process is as sure as geometry, to which, moreover, 
 it is applied. This application is known as the infinitesimal 
 calculus. 
 
 On the other hand, this process is never de facto literally 
 carried out, and only reaches God by a simultaneous act 
 of intellect and will, reason and liberty. Its power in the 
 mind is the divine sense, the sense of infinity, or, if you 
 will, the inevitable attraction of the Sovereign Good for 
 every soul. But this power, given to all, acts or ceases to 
 act, or even changes its course, according to the moral state 
 of the soul. 
 
 We believe that we have proved all this in the totality 
 of the present work in such a manner that it will henceforth 
 be regarded as among the truths acquired by philosophy. 
 
 We may be opposed at first ; but as all opposition will be 
 vain, we hope our adversaries will soon have recourse to de- 
 claring that these things have been known in every age, 
 particularly in the seventeenth century, and that there is 
 nothing new in what we say. We shall hasten to agree to 
 this, merely reserving to ourselves the honor of having thrown 
 more vivid light upon this central point of philosophy, where 
 all rays meet. 
 
 This settled, let us turn to details, and proceed to the his- 
 toric study of the proofs of the existence of God. 
 
 We shall enter most minutely into this question, studying 
 in turn the theodicy of Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, 
 Saint Anselm, and Saint Thomas Aquinas ; then take up the 
 theodicy of the seventeenth century, treating of Descartes, 
 
EXPLANATORY. 25 
 
 Pascal, Malebranche, Fe'nelon, Bossuet, Leibnitz, and the 
 authors of two Latin Theodicies, unknown even to the 
 trained public, which are the two finest and most complete 
 ever written in any age. 
 
 We shall linger the more willingly upon this point, be- 
 cause it will at the same time afford us a study of the his- 
 tory of philosophy. 
 
 The history of the above-named philosophers is very nearly 
 the whole history of philosophy. Now, we know a philoso- 
 pher by his theodicy. The theodicy of a writer contains his 
 method, implies his logic and his ethics, is his system of 
 metaphysics and his theory of ideas also, therefore his psy- 
 chology. In this sense all philosophy may be found in the 
 theodicy. 
 
 In treating, therefore, of the theodicy of all the great minds, 
 each in its turn, we give at the same time a summary, and a 
 brief history, of philosophy. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 PLATO'S THEODICY. 
 
 PLATO comes first in chronological order; this is fortu- 
 nate. Of all men who discussed the subject of God 
 previous to the Christian era, he is the greatest. He has 
 been called the divine ; Bossuet so styles him, and this is his 
 distinguishing name among philosophers. Moreover, Plato 
 is the especial representative of one of the two processes of 
 human reason, the chief one, that which leads up to God. 1 
 If Aristotle was the immortal and perfect lawgiver for the 
 other process, Plato, without actually establishing the laws 
 of that which forms his glory, laws which could not be de- 
 fined exactly until the seventeenth century, Plato at least 
 indicated them, and gave us, besides, the finest example of 
 their use which human reason in the antique world produced. 
 
 The glory reverted to the school of Socrates. And why ? 
 Because the impulse of reason towards genuine infinity 
 an impulse which constitutes that chief process to which we 
 refer, and which gives us the proof of the existence of God 
 can only be carried out de facto, in consequence of a moral 
 state, under the impelling force of that "power" as Bossuet 
 says, which is the " divine sense ; " or, if you prefer, the 
 "attraction of the desirable and intelligible" as Aristotle 
 expresses it. 
 
 Now, the Socratic and Platonic school is of all ancient 
 schools the most moral, and the one which best knew, under- 
 
 1 Janet's admirable thesis on the "Dialectic of Plato" should be read on 
 this subject. This brilliant work, but too little known, should be one of the 
 first things read by all who desire to study Plato. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 27 
 
 stood, and described the real attraction of Supreme Good- 
 ness for the soul of man. 
 
 Socrates is, in fact, as modern sophists very aptly com- 
 plain, the founder of moral philosophy. His doctrine, as 
 has been well said, is little more than a theory of virtue ; 
 " and its only aim, according to the best judges," says 
 Thomassin, " is to purify our affections by means of moral- 
 ity." l Plato therefore claimed and this was the root of 
 his system to rely wholly upon that love of goodness and 
 that moral state without which reason does not apply the 
 dialectic process leading up to God. To him, the beginning 
 of all things was Goodness ; he knew that Goodness is the 
 father of light, that the action of the mind which rises to 
 God depends upon the forces of love, that this process, 
 which he so happily calls the " movement of the soul's 
 wings," implies a moral state, an outburst of love towards 
 God, and that the soul can only put out wings by dint of 
 virtue. 
 
 This is why Plato knew and practised more than any 
 other man in antiquity the chief process of reasoning. This 
 is why he knew and proved the existence of the true God. 
 
 Plato knew that there are two processes of reasoning, and 
 not merely one. He knew that the most potent of these 
 two processes, quite as exact as the other, is the scientific 
 truth of which poetry is merely the image. For this very 
 reason he was a poet in thought as well as by nature, like 
 all philosophers who have made especial use of the chief 
 process of reason. He understood that very beautiful meta- 
 phors are true, because they imply the truth of the dialectic 
 method, and that this chief form of philosophical thought is, 
 in its spirit, like poetry itself, simple, easy, and popular. 
 Plato knew above all he repeats it incessantly that 
 sensuality and passion are the obstacle to light in the soul, 
 
 1 Thomassin, Dogm. Theol., vol. ii. chap. x. p. 11. 
 
28 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 and that this obstacle must be overcome before we can rise 
 to truth through reason. He knew that there are two 
 courses open to the soul and its love, one of which leads the 
 mind to illusion and error, the other to truth ; that philoso- 
 phy is indivisibly a work of reason and freedom, of intellect 
 and will, far more, a work of sacrifice and virtue. It is 
 for this reason that he so constantly expounds the wonderful 
 Socratic saying : " To philosophize is to learn how to die." 
 
 And lastly, Plato knew that there are three soul-spheres, 
 three lives, in man ; and he states this as clearly as Pascal. 
 He describes the highest of the three as the contact of God 
 with the roots of the soul ; and this divinity l in the soul, 
 when the obstacle of vice is removed, is the power that lifts 
 the reason to eternal truths. We must acknowlege that true 
 philosophy is not, in Plato, unmixed with error, that is 
 only given to Christians ; but he possessed all philosophy, 
 all its essential features, all its fundamental elements. 
 
 Plato has all the characteristics of true philosophic ge- 
 nius ; he is the most brilliant instance in antiquity of 
 those perfect minds which, as has been well said, use alike 
 their reason and their heart, their learning and their poetry, 
 their feet and their wings, to attain to truth. It therefore 
 belonged to him to give in the ancient world the great proof 
 of the existence of God. Let us see if he succeeded. 
 
 II. 
 
 Let us first recall the nature of the process that gives the 
 true proof of the existence of God arid his attributes. 
 
 Those visible things being given which beget one another, 
 which are born and die, which change and which pass away, 
 which might not exist, which are limited and imperfect, 
 the mind should exceed these finite and visible beings, and 
 
 1 T6 6etoi>. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 29 
 
 rise through their images to the eternal, invisible, immu- 
 table ideas which correspond to the images. We should rise 
 from every finite object to the corresponding infinite. We 
 shall see later, through the aid of geometry itself, that this 
 is no vague mental action, but an exact process. This 
 process destroys in thought the limits of finite being, and 
 the imperfections of the qualities revealed to it by things, 
 and asserts that the idea formed in our mind by this sup- 
 pression of limits and defects, this idea of infinite being and 
 infinite perfection, corresponds to a reality truer, more ac- 
 tual, than the very object which we touch, and whence 
 dialectic reasoning starts. It asserts that all these supreme 
 realities are in God, and are God. Such is, at least, the duty 
 of the mind in the light of reason ; and, in fact, the mind 
 fulfils this duty whenever the moral obstacle that impedes 
 its progress is removed. 
 
 Did Plato fully understand this process ? Did he state lit- 
 erally, did he know that the sum total of immutable, eternal, 
 infinite ideas is in God, is the Word of God, which is God ? 
 Some deny this ; we believe that we should affirm it, with 
 Saint Augustine, Bossuet, Leibnitz, and Fe*nelon. 
 
 In any case, whether Plato himself knew or did not know 
 it, and I believe that he knew it, his dialectic process 
 actually ends in God, in the infinite. This is the nature and 
 the law of the process. Plato really made that supreme use 
 of reason which consists in passing by a simple impulse, 
 which is at the same time scholarly and systematic, from 
 everything to God ; from the finite, the variable, and the 
 uncertain to the infinite, immutable, and inevitable. 
 
 My readers may judge of this by the brief statement 
 which follows, and which will be verified later by quotations 
 from the text. 
 
 There is first in the soul a gift of God, which results from 
 contact with God, and which is that voice, that inner tute- 
 
30 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 lary spirit given by God to every soul. This divine element, 
 this sense of immortality and divinity, is the prime and 
 essential element, the principle and very root of the soul, in 
 its triple life. This is the power which proceeds from God 
 and leads us up to God. Now, man does not rise to God by 
 the mind alone, by the reason taken in that abstract sense 
 in which sophists understand it ; man rises to the knowledge 
 of God only through his whole soul; first by his will, by 
 doing good, which directs the eye where it should look, 
 then purifies it, makes it capable* of seeing. Knowledge of 
 God implies a free moral element. The part of the will con- 
 sists in conquering those moral obstacles which prevent us 
 from developing the divine sense within us, or which destroy 
 it. This divine sense is the condition, founded on expe- 
 rience, of a knowledge of God. Such is the moral part of 
 the process that leads us up to God. 
 
 The intellectual and logical part is properly the dialectic. 
 Dialectic is the process which advances, starting from this 
 visible world, to the idea of Being itself, Goodness itself, 
 absolute Being and Goodness. Thus dialectic, whose motive- 
 power, principle, and force lie in the divine sense set free 
 and made active by virtue, also relies in its action upon the 
 data of the visible world, which stimulate the mind, both by 
 likeness and contrast, to recall the supreme object, wholly 
 different from these as it is, of which they are but the 
 images. Dialectic progress consists in never pausing until 
 Being itself, the Supreme Good which is, is attained. Bea- 
 son starts from sensible things, as a conditional and essential 
 point of departure ; but it goes beyond and aside from these 
 sensible postulates, which stimulate it to recall intelligible 
 things, seeing their unlikeness to the intelligible. From 
 these postulates it passes to the essential ideas which our 
 reason implies, such as geometric truths, which are, as Plato 
 frequently repeats with a depth of meaning which is but too 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 31 
 
 seldom understood, shadows of the light of God. From 
 these shadows it learns to infer the existence of the sun. 
 Let us show all this by quotations. 
 
 III. 
 
 In the first place, the most important of philosophical 
 facts that central spring of the moral and rational life 
 which we call the divine sense, and which is the real source 
 of the proof of God's existence was so familiar to Socrates 
 and Plato, and was taught by them with such full con- 
 viction, in so concrete a form, that it was this very thing 
 which produced the misunderstanding relative to the daemon 
 of Socrates. Plato explains the meaning of this word in the 
 most philosophic manner when he shows that this daemon 
 was only the voice of conscience, the innate love of God. 
 
 In the Apology, Plato puts these words into the mouth of 
 Socrates : " The cause of all is merely what you have often 
 heard me say, ' There is a divine will which speaks to me ' ... 
 (Qeibv TI fcai ^aifioviov). I have heard this voice from my 
 youth up. . . ." This voice is that " of God, which orders rne 
 to live by seeking wisdom and a knowledge of myself. . . . 
 I ought then rather to obey God than you, Athenians ! " 
 It is clear that by daemon (Scupoviov) Socrates here under- 
 stands the voice of God. 
 
 Cicero understands it in the same way when he asserts 
 that "Socrates' daemon is that something divine which checked 
 him, and which he always obeyed." 
 
 The dying Socrates said : " Let us go whither God leads ; " 
 and he obeyed that divine voice even in death. Which 
 suggests to a learned author the following thoughts : " That 
 God was the voice which rang in his innermost soul, that 
 light which illumined his intellect and declared to him what 
 he was to do. It is what is commonly known as Socrates' 
 
32 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 daemon. . . . Socrates frequently refers to it as to a sort of 
 spiritual director, sometimes calling it daemon, and sometimes 
 God. He always seems to take it seriously, especially here, 
 where he relies upon it both for life and death. According 
 to some, Socrates understood by this the true God. Others 
 are of a different opinion." Saint Justin has no doubt about 
 it ; Saint Augustine hesitates. 
 
 Plato, moreover, in his Timseus, explains it in a way which, 
 as it seems to us, leaves no room for contradiction. We will 
 go into the details of this explanation, because it leads us 
 away from the incidental question of Socrates' da?mon, and 
 shows us what may be called the heart of dialectic, the 
 centre of Plato's philosophy, theology, and morals, the true 
 power upon which Platonism depends to prove the existence 
 of God, that motive power which we have called the divine 
 sense. 
 
 In his fine close to Timseus, Plato expresses himself as 
 follows : 
 
 " We have already said that the soul possesses a triple life, each 
 part of which has its place and its distinct action. . . . Now, you 
 must know touching the chief of these three lives, that it is the 
 dcemon which God has given to every man. That part of the soul 
 is that which occupies, as they say, the highest realm within us, 
 and which, through its celestial parentage, lifts us from the earth 
 and makes her the fruit of heaven rather than of earth, which is 
 profoundly true ; for at that point which is the very origin of our 
 soul, there the divine holds linked to it our root, our life principle, 
 and uplifts the whole man." a 
 
 Nothing can be plainer ; the word dcemon (Sai'fi&v) means 
 precisely the divine sense in the soul, that point at which 
 God touches us, the point which is our root, our origin, our 
 source (Trpeor?? <vo-t?, pia) ; that point, as Plato admirably 
 expresses it, whereby God holds us linked to him (TO Oelov 
 rrjv K(j)a\r)v /cat pi^av fjp&v avaKpepavvvv). 
 1 Timseus, 89, 90. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 33 
 
 It clearly results from these quotations that, according 
 to Plato, there are in man not three souls, as he is some- 
 times made to say, but there are in the soul three regions, 
 three parts, three lives, what matters the word, the 
 highest of which is at the very root of the soul ; that con- 
 tact with God which links us to him and lifts us to heaven, 
 and that it is the same thing which Socrates called his 
 divine voice and his daemon. 1 
 
 This triple life pointed out by Plato in the soul, corre- 
 sponds to the three worlds mentioned by Pascal, the ma- 
 terial world, the spiritual world, and the divine world, which 
 is God ; a triple life, which brings us into relation with nature 
 through sensation, with the soul through the inner sense, 
 with God through the divine sense ; the triple life known 
 and described by Christian mystics when they say, " Let us 
 turn from the outward inward, and from the inward let us 
 
 1 The misunderstanding in regard to the three souls must be made clear by 
 these quotations. We read in the passage quoted from Timseus, rpia fax?,* 
 etdvj, and not rpia fax&v etSrj. Farther on we read rofis rpets rbirovs rrjs faxw> 
 the three regions of the soul. Elsewhere Plato speaks of the parts of the soul, 
 two of which, particularly, are distinct, the one rational, \oyi<TTiK&v vovs, 
 which he also calls elsewhere, apxty fax?!* dBdvarov (Timseus) ; the other the 
 irrational, or fleshly, aXoyia-riK 'jv, or irit}v/j.'r]TiK6i>, which are united by the BV/J.OS 
 or Bv/jLoeidts (De Rep. IV.). This distinction doubtless refers to that one of the 
 three faculties, knowledge, will, and feeling, which he establishes in the same 
 book of the Republic. Plato had no more faith in three souls than Saint 
 Thomas, who nevertheless makes a distinction between the rational soul, the 
 sensitive soul, and the vegetative soul. 
 
 Moreover, in Plato, etSos is often used as a synonym for /ufyos ; we often 
 find eI5os Kai ^pos eidrj nal n^py. 
 
 Cicero did not believe that Plato spoke of several souls, but of several 
 spheres of the soul : Parfcs animi, secundnm Platonem. 
 
 As for Aristotle, in his " Book of the Virtues and Vices," in the beginning, 
 he says (Bekker's edition, page 1249): TpijuepoOs 5 rijs faxw XajM/UwopAnfi 
 KO.TO. IlXdrwra, TOV pfv XoyurriKOv dper^i tanv i) Qpbvyffis, TOV dt 0vfj.oiSovs ij 
 re TrppoTTjs /ecu ij dvSpcia, TOV 5t liri6vfjt.r}TiKov tf re GuQpofftivti Ka.1 i] y/cpareia, 
 6'\?7S 5 XT;? \f/vx?i* 7? TC 6i/cato<7i/j'?7. Aristotle therefore admits here, with Plato, 
 that there are these three parts of the soul, and names them as he does, and 
 in his book on the Soul he none the less maintains the unity of the soul 
 (P- 411). 
 
 3 
 
84 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 mount to higher things ; " the triple life which one of the 
 deepest thinkers of this century, Maine de Biran, rediscovered 
 in the soul by his persistent analysis, in spite of the prejudi- 
 ces of his starting-point, which admitted of but one. 
 
 And when Plato speaks of the highest of the three (fcvpiw- 
 rarov -^U^T)? eZSo?), that which he calls divine (TO delov), and 
 elsewhere the immortal principle of the soul (apxyv ^v^s 
 aOdvarov), when he assigns it an especial place and habita- 
 tion, at the very root (p%a) where God holds us linked to 
 himself (TO delov avaKpefiavvvv), whence the first genesis of 
 the soul proceeds (e/ceWev o6ev rj irpwrif] TT}? tyv%f)s <yeve<Ti<$ 
 e(f>v), Plato then speaks like Bossuet, who, pointing out 
 this particular region of the soul, this inner sanctuary, ex- 
 claims, " Hearken in thy innermost soul ; hearken in that 
 place where the truth makes itself heard, where pure and 
 simple ideas are found." And elsewhere, after saying, " The 
 soul therefore is made for God, it is to him that it should 
 ever be conjoined and as it were linked, through its knowl- 
 edge and affection," Bossuet speaks of " a spot in the soul so 
 deep and so retired that the senses do not suspect its ex- 
 istence, it is so remote from their domain ! " 
 
 Light is also thrown upon all this in the first Alcibiades, 
 when he is advised by the philosopher, if he would know his 
 soul, to look into that place in the soul where especially 
 resides the virtue of the soul, wisdom, that is to say, the 
 divine element of the soul ; then to consider the object itself, 
 of which this part of the soul is the image, in God. 1 For we 
 can never know ourselves if we look into that part of the 
 soul which is all shadow, and where God is not 2 (et? TO aOeov 
 KOI o-Koreivov). We must look into the divine part ; and 
 that part of the soul is to the soul what the pupil is to the 
 eye, the very centre, the primary sense, the channel itself 
 of vision. 3 And it is by looking into this place in the soul, 
 
 i Alcibiades, I. 133 C. 2 Ibid., 134 E. 8 Ibid., 133 B, 134 D. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 35 
 
 where light and divinity dwell (et? TO Oeiov /cal 
 ov) ; that the soul unfolds winged love within itself 
 
 Thus, finally, it is clear that, according to Plato, there is a 
 region in the soul, a central point of the soul, which he calls 
 its root, its primary cause, its origin, and that this point is 
 divine ; that is to say, it contains a gift which God has be- 
 stowed on every man, by touching him at that point, and 
 linking him to himself. 
 
 Whether we call this divine attribute divine spirit, or 
 divine sense, or the voice of conscience, or the attraction of 
 supreme goodness, attraction of the desirable and intelligible, 
 innate love of beatitude, innate idea of justice and injustice, 
 natural law written on the heart, whatever name we give to 
 this first, chief fact of all philosophy, which results 'from the 
 fact that the soul only is and exists because God is and touches 
 it, it will always be true that this divine attribute, peculiar 
 to all men, is the principle and power which give its im- 
 pulse to the mind as well as to the whole soul, in all its 
 aspirations towards God. 
 
 This Plato establishes in every possible way. 
 
 Let us now proceed to state the use which should be, in 
 his opinion, made of this attribute. 
 
 IV. 
 
 This divine attribute is the first cause of every movement 
 of the mind towards God. The secondary cause is man's 
 attempt to purify his soul, and thus remove the obstacle 
 which interferes with the action of that force which God 
 has given us. 
 
 " Knowledge," says Plato, " is not what some imagine when 
 they declare that they will give it to a mind which has it not, 
 
 * Alcibiades, I. 135 E. 
 
36 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 which would be like giving sight to a blind man. This is a great 
 mistake. There is within us a force, there is in every mind an 
 organ, by means of which every man may acquire knowledge. We 
 must treat this organ as we should the eye, were it impossible to 
 turn it away from darkness to the light, save by employing our 
 whole body, we must turn away our reason with our whole soul ; 
 we must turn it away from the things which pass, to the One 
 Being, and lift our spiritual vision to that radiant centre of Being 
 which we call Goodness. 1 Instruction can only teach us how to 
 direct the mind, and to turn its attention easily and effectually 
 towards the light; education does not give us sight, it merely 
 strives to direct in the right way the sight which already exists, 
 but which is turned in the wrong direction, and does not look 
 where it should look. 
 
 " There are, in the soul, qualities which may be acquired by 
 exercise and habit, as the body acquires certain powers and cer- 
 tain habits. But reason shows its divine origin, and proves that 
 it comes from something higher than ourselves, in that it never 
 loses its power, but becomes useful or injurious, according to the 
 way in which we use it. 2 Have you never noticed how quickly 
 and clearly the small soul of the wicked grasps the things upon 
 which it is bent, and what power it acquires in so doing 1 ? It sees 
 very plainly, only it chooses to. direct its vision to evil things. 
 But take those same souls in infancy, cut away and prune all the 
 growth of passions akin to the flesh ; set them free from those 
 heavy clods which cling to the pleasures of the table and similar 
 delights ; take away that weight which drags the mental vision 
 down to everything which is low. Instantly, in that same soul, 
 the eye, set free, turns towards realities, and sees them as clearly 
 as it now sees those things which absorb it." 3 
 
 We must therefore purify the whole soul, if we wish our 
 life and its attention to be turned and lifted towards its high- 
 est region, where the divine sense dwells. Those who do not 
 purify themselves, remain in the lowest of the three regions 
 of the soul, rise from there towards the middle realm, again 
 sink back into the lowest, and thus spend their lives in this 
 
 1 De Rep., 518 C. 2 Ibid., 518 E. 3 Ibid., 519 B. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY- 37 
 
 oscillation between the carnal and the passional, without 
 ever rising to that portion of the soul which God inhabits. 
 
 "The man without wisdom and without virtue, 1 constantly a 
 prey to and identified with all his fleshly appetites, necessarily 
 falls into the lower region, rises from that to the middle portion, 
 to wander thus his whole life long between the two ; but to pass 
 through both these realms, to rise, indeed, whether by the eye 
 alone or by his life, towards that which is truly high, is a thing 
 which he cannot do." 
 
 To attain, therefore, by the eye or by the life to that part 
 of the soul where the divine sense dwells, the source of our 
 knowledge of God, when we carry it out in our life and 
 pierce it with our eye, we must first overcome the moral 
 obstacle. 
 
 " He who surrenders himself to the double slavery of the world 
 and the flesh (eVe^v/xtas rj <iA.ovt/a'as, the carnal and the passional), 
 can never have other than mortal thoughts (Soy/xora 
 
 We must therefore overcome the moral obstacle by dint 
 of virtue, and yield to the action of the divine power which 
 directs our thoughts towards immortality and divinity. 
 
 Let us quote the whole of that magnificent passage in 
 which Plato teaches man how to cultivate in himself the 
 divine sense, that he may rise to immortality and God, alike 
 in thought and in life, things which Socrates and Plato 
 do not separate: 
 
 "He who, for love of the truth, strives to develop within him a 
 sense of the immortal and divine (yeyiyxi/aoTxeVu) <f>povtlv ptv aOdvara 
 Kat 0ia), that man must needs attain immortality, in so far as hu- 
 man nature is capable thereof; and since he has cultivated naught 
 save the divine (TO Otlov) within him, and has fed the Divine Spirit 
 in his soul (Scu/xoi/a), which dwells there, he must reach supreme 
 felicity. 
 
 1 De Rep., 586. 2 Timseus, 90. 
 
38 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 " Now, every life is nourished by its own proper food, and by 
 the movement which is adapted to it. But universal thoughts and 
 movements are the natural movements of the divine within us. 
 They are the thoughts and actions to which every man should con- 
 form ; all should labor to correct, by contemplation of the harmony 
 and the actions of the whole, those particular and irregular acts 
 which the flesh inspires in the centre of our soul, to the end that 
 the beholder, becoming like the object beheld, resumes his original 
 nature, becomes fit to possess at last the perfect life which God 
 offers to man both now and forever." 1 
 
 Thus Plato asserts that there is in every man's soul a di- 
 vine contact at that point where our soul is linked to God. 
 This point is the root, the primary cause, the origin of our 
 soul. Of the three lives which exist in our soul, that which 
 God himself maintains in this part of the soul is plainly the 
 chief, and should direct and lift the entire man towards di- 
 vinity, towards immortality, towards God, in both life and 
 thought. 
 
 But, moreover, Plato here establishes the fact, which, ap- 
 parent though it be, psychology, with us, so often refuses to 
 note, the fact of the native lawlessness to which we are born. 
 That is to say, that there is really an obstacle to the action 
 of that divine power which labors to lift us to God. 
 
 This obstacle is the double vice, which Plato calls the lust 
 of the flesh and anger, which is to say, pride and sensuality, 
 a double form of selfishness. 
 
 The condition upon which we may rise to God, in life or 
 in thought, is that we conquer this obstacle. 
 
 The obstacle conquered, it at once follows that man de- 
 velops within him the sense of immortality and divinity, and 
 attains to truth. 
 
 Truth leads bim to immortality and happiness. 
 
 We reach this end by struggling against the innate law- 
 lessness of our own thoughts and actions, by allying ourselves 
 
 1 Timseus, 90. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 39 
 
 to universal thought and action, by contemplating that uni- 
 versal which is God, by becoming like unto God, who gives 
 us immortality. 
 
 Thus, so far we clearly perceive the Platonic procedure ; 
 we have, first, a divine attribute within us, the primary cause 
 and motive spring of every impulse towards God. We have, 
 next, on the part of man, moral strength, which breaks, by 
 dint of virtue and sacrifice, the shackles that hinder that 
 impulse. This is the moral side of the dialectic process. 
 Let us now turn to its logical side. 
 
 V. 
 
 The mind has a starting-point for every inquiry. This 
 starting-point is not always a principle of deduction, far 
 from it. Where is the human mind first placed? Conse- 
 quently, whence does it ordinarily start ? The spectacle of 
 nature. It sees changes, birth and death. Assuredly it is 
 not from this starting-point, taken as a principle of deduc- 
 tion, that it will derive by syllogism the knowledge of God. 
 But by reason of these things it will think of God ; it emerges, 
 on the contrary, from these things to find God. 1 It certainly 
 starts from the spectacle of visible things. " It is with the 
 senses, not elsewhere, that we begin ; it is with sight, touch, 
 or some other sense; it cannot be otherwise." 2 But how can 
 all these transitory things lift us to God ? Certainly not by 
 their identity with God. Is it by their likeness to God ? Yes, 
 but it is quite as much by their difference and their contrast 
 with his eternal nature. " We see all these things striving to 
 resemble him, yet remaining ever remote from him." 3 And 
 these likenesses and contrasts alike remind us of him. You 
 behold one thing, and in it you comprehend another. Whether 
 this be due to likeness or to contrast, it is the object seen 
 
 1 Rep., vii. 525. 2 Phaedo, 75. 8 Ibid., 75. 
 
40 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 that calls up the memory. 1 If we see, if we hear, if we per- 
 ceive any object through any sense, and if, at the same time, 
 besides seeing that object, we conceive another, the idea of 
 which is not the same, but wholly different, should we not 
 say that the second object, to the idea of which we have at- 
 tained, is a memory suggested by the first? 2 A man and a 
 lyre are not the same thing. And yet those who love, recall 
 the loved object if they see the lyre which he has touched. 
 Such is reminiscence. 3 
 
 " There is an element in sense, impressions of which in no way 
 stimulate the intellect, because it stops at the senses which are 
 capable of judging it; and there is another element which does, 
 on the contrary, stimulate the intellect, the senses being unable 
 to deal with it." 4 
 
 " The sensations which stimulate the intellect are those which 
 imply both likeness and contrast; 5 as, for instance, when the 
 sight of a certain number of objects awakens in us the idea of 
 unity and that of infinite quantity." 6 
 
 "It is upon these attributes those which stimulate the intel- 
 lect that the process rests (/xa0>7/xa) which lifts us to the one 
 Being, and which almost no one uses properly '."* 
 
 VI. 
 
 Plato gives a full account of this process in the closing 
 pages of the sixth book of the Eepublic, which, I think, has 
 never been fully understood. 
 
 In this statement of logic as he understands it, Plato 
 defines exactly the two processes of reasoning, one of which 
 takes its starting-point (vTroOeo-is) 8 as its primary source 
 (ap%??), and deduces consequences from it ; the other ad- 
 vances from its point of departure to a universal principle 
 
 1 Phsdo, 74. * De Rep., 523 B. 7 Ibid., 522, 523. 
 
 2 Ibid., 73 C. 6 Ibid., 523. 8 Ibid., 510 et seq. 
 Ibid., 73 D. 6 ibid., 525. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 41 
 
 which is not contained in it (eV ap%r)v avwiroOerov ef VTTO- 
 Qeo-eax; lovcra). One is clearly the law of syllogism; he 
 calls the other the dialectic process (iropeia SiaXeKTi/crj). 
 The first process, he says, is that of geometry ; the second is 
 that of true philosophy. 1 
 
 Geometricians take their definitions as their starting-point 
 (Troirjo-d/jLevoi V7ro0e(reis avra). These points of departure 
 they take as principles, principles of deduction from which 
 they derive all the rest by means of inference and manifest 
 identity (eV TOVTWV 8' dp^o^evoL rd XOLTTO, ij&rj SiegLovres 
 
 T6\6VTO)(TiV 6yL60\070U/Z6Z/0?). 
 
 Yet again, this process, syllogistic deduction, does not go 
 back to the origin of things (OVK eV dp^hv lovcrav) ; evi- 
 dently it can never rise above its starting-point, since it 
 deduces by means of identity (eo? ov ^vva^vrjv TU>V viro- 
 Oea-ewv avwrepw eicftaiveiv). 
 
 The other, on the contrary, rises above its starting-point 
 (eV <ipx*) v avwiroOerov ef vTrodecrecos lovcra). It does not 
 take its starting-point as its primary source (ra? vTroQea-eis 
 TToiovfjievos OVK a/o^a?) ; it only takes it as a fulcrum and 
 to stimulate its flight (olov eV^acrei? re ical op/ia?). It 
 speeds from this to the universal principle absolutely out- 
 side and above the point of departure (^e-^pi rov dwiro- 
 Berov 7rl rrjv rov Trai^ro? dpx*) v M*v) 
 
 Afterwards only, it descends through inference to all 
 which that principle touches and includes, once it possesses 
 it (a\JrayLtez>o<? aur%, Trd\iv av e^6yLtez/09 TWV eiceivr}^ e^oyLteVwi/, 
 oi/rct)? eVt T\vrrjv KarafBaivrj). 
 
 Such are actually the two eternal processes of reasoning, 
 the two divisions of logic, one of which may be called the 
 logic of deduction, the other the logic of invention; or 
 again, the one immanent logic, and the other transcendent 
 logic. 
 
 1 Geometry had not then be^n developed through the infinitesimal process. 
 
42 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 But to what do these two processes lead, according to 
 Plato ? What are their different results ? 
 
 Those who use the dialectic attain to some perception of 
 being and of the intelligible (VTTO r% TOV SiaXeyeaOai, eiri- 
 arrj/jirjs TOV 6Vro? re ical VOTJTOV Oeaipov^evov). 
 
 Those who move by induction from their starting-point 
 (al? at inrodeaeis dp%ai), and do not go back to the primary 
 cause (&ia TO f^rj eV ap-^v dve\6ovTas), never really attain 
 to an intelligence of their object, which is, however, intelli- 
 gible if they know how to refer it to its primary cause (vovv 
 
 OVK, 1(T%IV 7Tpl aVTU, KaiTOl VQT]TtoV OVTtoV /Jb6Ta a/ 
 
 VII. 
 
 " But," says Plato, " here we have a far more difficult 
 point. ... I will deal with it to the best of niy ability : 
 God alone knows if it be so." 
 
 This point, -in our opinion, affords Plato opportunity to 
 settle, in an admirable manner, perhaps the most important 
 of all philosophical questions. 
 
 The point is to distinguish the degrees of knowledge, and 
 particularly of the knowledge of God. 
 
 Plato first distinguishes clearly two degrees of knowledge 
 in general, knowledge of sensible things (opaTOv), and 
 knowledge of intelligible things (vorjTov). 1 
 
 We shall speak of the intelligible only. 
 
 Within this degree Plato notes two others, one of which 
 corresponds to discursive thought (Sidvoia), the other to true 
 intellect (vorjcris). 
 
 The inferior degree, that of discursive thought, corre- 
 sponds to the syllogistic process which, by means of identity, 
 catches glimpses of essential and immutable truths, but 
 without understanding their relation to the principle of their 
 unity in God. 
 
 1 De Rep., 509. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 43 
 
 The superior degree, that of intellect, corresponds to the 
 dialectic process which rises to the principle of all truths. 
 
 In the superior degree, which is that of true science (eV*- 
 cmjiJLr)'), 1 superior to discursive notions (Sidvoia), the mind 
 contemplates that which Being and truth illuminate? 
 
 But is this superior degree itself, such as it has been 
 described, the final possibility of intellectual vision ? Or at 
 least, has it not its degrees ? Is there nothing beyond the 
 science that contemplates that which Being and truth illumi- 
 nate ? " We have," says Plato, " beyond science, Being 
 itself and truth itself (avro TO dXrjOes), which give to things 
 truth (a\rjdeta), and, to the mind, strength to know; and 
 there must be, beyond science, the very remote (reXeuraia), 
 very faint vision (/-toyt? opaaOai) 8 of that selfsame Being 
 which is supreme Goodness. For if science and truth are so 
 fair, their source is fairer yet." " We should be mistaken," 
 he says, " much mistaken, if we supposed that light and sight 
 are the sun ; they are images or reflections of the sun (rJXto- 
 ei&rj). So, too, we should mistake if we supposed science and 
 truth (a\rj0t,a) to be supreme Goodness itself ; they are the 
 images or reflections of supreme Goodness (ayadoe&rf)" 
 
 So that science (eVto-TiJ/^?;), even that acquired through 
 the dialectic, is, according to Plato, the vision of an image 
 (ayaOoeiSrj'). But then can we never succeed in seeing, not 
 merely the image (etV<5ya), but the truth itself (avro TO 
 a\r)0es) ? 4 Can we not, when we have acquired through 
 dialectic a perception OF DIVINE PHANTOMS AND SHADOWS 
 OF THAT WHICH IS (^>avTa(TfiaTa Oela KOI ovaa? TWV OVTWV), 
 judge that these shadows and these images are produced by 
 a sun which corresponds to them (ovaa? Si eTepov TOLOVTOV 
 <&>TO<?, &>? 7T/30? ri\ioVj Kplveiv cnTocrKLa^ofJieva^) 1 5 
 
 Yes, we can ; we may attain to a vision even of the 
 
 1 De Rep., 533. 3 Ibid., 517. 6 Ibid., 532. 
 
 2 Ibid., 508 D. 4 ibid., 532. 
 
44 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 essence of things (eV CLVTO o eariv e/cacrrov oppav). 1 We 
 may succeed in seeing the supreme Being of beings (TT/QO? 
 rrjv TOV apiffTOV ev rot? oven Oeav) ; we may reach that high- 
 est intellectual summit (eV avrw T&> TOV vorjrov reXet) ; we 
 may grasp the supreme essential Being himself, through the 
 mind itself (avro o eanv 'Aya6bv avrfj vorjaet, \dftrj) ; we 
 may gain sight of supreme Goodness (rrjv TOV 'AyaQov ISeav). 
 We see it dimly (poyis opdo-dai) ; but we may, we should, 
 see it. 
 
 We may do all this, says Plato, and we should do it. We 
 should persistently pursue this inquiry, and never pause 
 until we succeed in grasping, through the mind itself, the 
 supreme Goodness itself (ical fj,rj aTroa-rfj irplv av CLVTO o 
 (TTW 'Aya0bv avrfj vorjaei Xa/rty) ; 2 this is the final end of 
 the impulse of the mind, the term of the dialectic (re\o? 
 TT}? Trope/a?). 
 
 Thus, according to Plato, beyond even that grand knowledge 
 which the dialectic gives us, which is the vision of things illu- 
 mined by the light of supreme Goodness, by the light of Being 
 and of truth itself, beyond this knowledge and this truth re- 
 flected in things, if we may so express it, we have Truth it- 
 self, Being itself ; we have the idea and the sight of supreme 
 Goodness ; we have the principle of all things ; we have the 
 most perfect of beings and the height of the intelligible ; we 
 have the final end and aim of the process, which is the at- 
 tainment of supreme Goodness itself through the mind itself, 
 directly and immediately. But this end, he says elsewhere, 
 is not attained until after death. 
 
 Plato makes these degrees of knowledge and the course 
 of the process clear to us, by his famous description of the 
 cavern, and the story of the deliverance of the captives. 
 
 First we have captivity in the cave, and then liberty 
 in the sunshine: which corresponds to the vision of 
 
 1 De Kep., 532. 2 ibid., 532. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 45 
 
 the two worlds, the world of sense, and the world of 
 intellect. 
 
 In the cave there are shadows (ovaa?) and echoes. At first 
 they can only see by reflected rays, whether of light or of 
 voice. Then there conies a change. They turn away from 
 the shadows to objects and to the light (jMerao-rpo^rj atrb 
 rwv atciwv eVl ra ei$o\a /cal TO c^ft)?). 1 
 
 Outside the cave, in the real world, there are, Plato always 
 affirms, many degrees of vision. At first, the captives see 
 shadows (aicids} ; then (/iera TOVTO) we have another degree, 
 they see the images of objects in the water (eV rot? 
 vSacnv et'SwAa) ; then the objects themselves, men, and ani- 
 mals. Then they gaze up at the sky, at first by night, to 
 see the reflected light of the moon. " At last, after all this, 
 they look upon the sun, not indirectly now, apart from 
 itself, in its image reflected in the waters, but the sun itself, 
 by itself, in its proper place." 2 
 
 This admirable distinction between seeing shadows, reflec- 
 tions, phantoms, images, and the direct sight of light in its 
 course, this distinction, the vast results of which we shall 
 see later on, was afterwards even more fully established by 
 Saint Augustine when he speaks of reason attaining to its 
 final end (ratio perveniens ad finem suum) ; and by Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas, when he describes the two degrees of 
 the divine intelligible (duplici igitur veritate divinorum 
 intelligibilium existente). We beg the reader to keep this 
 point well fixed in his memory. He will understand the 
 bearing of it later. It is the most important point in all 
 philosophy. 
 
 For the rest, Plato seems to us to havo seen, or rather 
 expressed, this fundamental distinction in a slightly confused 
 way. This has given rise to discussions of his Theory of 
 Ideas, and of the question whether to him the Word is God 
 
 i De Rep., 532. 2 Ibid., 516 B. 
 
46 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 or is not God. But is it surprising that a truth which 
 escaped Malebranche, this is the omission in his system, 
 
 and over which Bossuet hesitates, should be expressed by 
 Plato with some ambiguity ? Moreover, to all who can see 
 clearly the great intellectual fact in dispute, it is evident 
 that Plato saw the truth, although he may waver in his 
 description. 
 
 What Plato saw is, that truth as man possesses it, or finds 
 it naturally, is only an image of God, but not the direct 
 sight of God. Pascal says, "The truth taken in this sense 
 
 is not God, but it is his image, and an idol which we 
 should not adore." The essential, eternal, immutable truths 
 of which reason gives us the certainty and the clear sight 
 are, as Plato expresses it, but divine phantoms or shadows 
 of what is, a magnificent expression, of the most fruitful 
 depth, which we cannot sufficiently admire. Even geome- 
 try, according to Plato, sees only shadows, the dream of 
 Being, not waking vision of Being } another statement of 
 deep meaning. But what man desires, and should desire, 
 according to Plato, is to pass from shadows, reflections, 
 echoes, and images. He desires to hurry on ; and he should 
 do so, never pausing until he has grasped very Being, 
 supreme Goodness itself, through his intelligence itself, 
 that is to say, until he has acquired direct and immediate 
 sight of God. 
 
 Plato, therefore, sees here what Saint Augustine expresses 
 so perfectly when he says, " God is intelligible ; these spec- 
 tacles of scientific truths are so likewise. But what a differ- 
 ence ! 2 The earth is visible, the light of the sun is visible ; 
 but the earth is visible only by the light of the sun. There 
 is all the difference of earth and sky between these phan- 
 toms of assured truths and the intelligible majesty of God/' 3 
 
 1 De Rep., 533 C. 8 Ibid., p. 686, 11 (v.). 
 
 2 Soliloq., lib. i. p. 608, 14 (vii.). 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 47 
 
 ; 8ft% 
 VIII. U> !TY 
 
 t 
 Thus, we see, Plato through his dialectic was able to rise 
 
 to the true God, to very Being, to the most perfect of 
 beings, to the beginnings of all things, to truth itself, to 
 supreme Goodness which is. But did he ever really attain 
 to the knowledge of the true God, to the genuine idea of 
 God and his attributes'? We unhesitatingly answer, Yes. 
 
 This is the opinion of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas, Bossuet, and also of Fe*nelon and Thomassin. We 
 shall quote these decisive authorities later. Let us first 
 show the fact. 
 
 In the tenth book of his Laws, Plato, striving to establish 
 that there is a Providence, rises through his dialectic to the 
 idea of God, as follows : " There are in us certain virtues : 
 therefore God possesses fully all virtue. 1 We can do some 
 things : God can at least do all that we can do. 2 In us 
 there may be both good and evil : in God, not." 3 
 
 Thus the resemblance and contrast between ourselves and 
 God lift Plato, according to his theory, to the reminiscence 
 of God. 
 
 These assertions, we see, are nothing but that common 
 and natural dialectic which, in the spectacle of visible things 
 and the sight of the human soul, effaces limits, omissions, and 
 evil, thus elevating goodness to the infinite and affirming it 
 to be of God. But Plato did this scientifically. 
 
 However this may be, we have already seen that Plato's 
 God is not an abstract God. Plato's God is the absolute Be- 
 ing, without faults ; supreme Goodness ; the Being possessed 
 of all virtue, wisdom, and providence; the sun of the intelligi- 
 ble world, of which the essential and universal truths which 
 we see are the shadow. This God, the author and Father of 
 
 i Leg., 900 D. 2 Ibid., 901 D. 8 Ibid., 900 D. 
 
48 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 intelligible light, is also the author and parent of the sun 
 and the visible world. He made the sun in his own image 
 to enlighten the world, as he himself enlightens the world of 
 intelligence. 1 He is that Goodness which we scarcely per- 
 ceive, in the centre of the world of intelligence, but which, 
 once seen, appears as the cause of all that is good and beau- 
 tiful. 2 It is towards him that the soul of the true philo- 
 sopher, which alone lias wings, strives to soar. 
 
 He who is absolutely (rw Traz^reXw? OVTI), who is a living 
 absolute (rw iravT^\el wo>), a perfect and living intelligible 
 (TO> reXewraTft) fcal VOTJTO) foow), the living one who is, in 
 whom the ideas are (evovaas tSea? TW o ecrn faW), the eter- 
 nal essence (diSios ovo-ia), of whom, properly speaking, we 
 cannot say that it has been, or will be, but only that it is 
 (TO eo-ri povov) : it is the God who is forever (6Wo? ael Qeov). 3 
 It is he who possesses motion in repose, who possesses au- 
 gust and sacred intelligence ; which the sophist denies. " In 
 God's name," exclaims Plato, " shall we be readily persuaded 
 that he who is absolutely, has neither motion, nor life, nor soul, 
 nor thought, that he is inert, that he is without august and 
 sacred intelligence 1 Shall we let men tell us that he has 
 intelligence, but has no life ? Shall we let them tell us that 
 he has both, but not personality ? 4 Shall we let them tell 
 us that he is personal, intelligent, living, but inert? All 
 this would be absurd." 5 
 
 Moreover, according to Plato, it is this God who made the 
 world. Everything was made by God (Kara ye Bebv avra 
 jijveo-Oat). The world does not proceed from a blind and 
 spontaneous cause producing without consciousness (a?r6 
 TWOS atr/a? avTOfjidrr)? real avev Siavoias (frvova-rjs), but it 
 proceeds from a God who creates with knowledge and with 
 
 * De Rep., 508 C. 2 Ibid., 517 C. 8 Tim., 30 et seq. 
 
 4 We cannot here translate otherwise the word ^i/x 7 ?- This is plainly 
 what Plato means. 
 6 Sophist.. 265 C. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 49 
 
 divine reason (/jLera \6yov re /cal eTricmjfjLTjs #e/a?, OLTTO Oeov). 
 The beings, which were not at first, afterwards became 
 through the God who made them (Oeov SrjpiovpyovvTos 
 vo-repov ytyveaOat, TTporepov ov/c ovra). 1 
 
 Such is the God given by the dialectic of Plato. This 
 God is; he is good; he is the absolute Being, Goodness 
 itself, intelligence and providence, author and Father of the 
 world. He is the true God. 
 
 But another decisive proof that Plato really knew the true 
 God and his attributes, and that he constantly alludes to 
 them, is that his entire doctrine may be called the doctrine 
 of ideas, and that, according to Plato, ideas exist in God, and 
 are God. 
 
 That such is the thought of Plato, seems to us well estab- 
 lished, in spite of all contradictions. Thomassin does not 
 hesitate to maintain this thesis ex professo : " Ideas were 
 placed in God by Plato ; that is the unanimous opinion of 
 the Fathers." 2 
 
 When Plato says, " Ideas are in the living one who is," it 
 seems to me that this sentence alone should suffice to settle 
 the question. 
 
 Plato everywhere affirms that the world and all that 
 therein is was made in the likeness of ideas. Now, in the 
 Timseus, he asserts that things were made as they are, "to 
 the end that the world might be as similar as possible to the 
 intelligible and perfect living one (iva roS' o>? o/jboiorarov y 
 Tc5 reXewrarw teal vorjTw fww)." 3 
 
 Thus, according to Plato, ideas are actually that intelli- 
 gible and perfect living one, i. e. God. He repeats the same 
 thing elsewhere. "To the end," he says, "that the world 
 may be like unto the living absolute (iva roBe . . . opoiov 
 
 1 Sophist., 265 C. 
 
 2 Thorn., Dog. Theol. This is the heading to chap. xii. lib. iii. 
 * Tim., 39. 
 
 4 
 
50 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 r) TO) 7ravTe\i &>&>)." l In the Timseus, Plato never ceases 
 to consider the eternal exemplar of ideas (d'&Lov TrapdSeiypa) 
 as being the living absolute, which includes all living intelli- 
 gibles, and which is the intelligible, supreme, and perfect 
 beauty of all points (ra yap Be vorjrd 000, Trdvra etcelvo Iv 
 eavTM 7rpi\a/3bv e^et . . . TO> TWV voovfjbevwv Ka\\icrrw KOI 
 Kara irdvra TeXea>)." 2 This is the assertion in exact words 
 that ideas, the eternal example for the world, are precisely 
 God. 
 
 When Plato speaks of God, who is always (6Wo9 del Oeov), 3 
 who created the world by gazing at that which is always (TO 
 bv del), that is to say, the eternal exemplar, ideas, does not 
 Plato clearly state that in gazing at that which is always, 
 ideas, he regards only himself, who always is ? 
 
 The texts in Plato which prove our thesis are superabun- 
 dant. It only remains for us to show the precise cause of 
 the misapprehension. If there be quotations which seem to 
 contradict each other upon this point, it is because Plato, 
 like ourselves, necessarily uses the word idea in two different 
 senses, sometimes to signify the truth as it is in itself (avro 
 TO dXrjOes), sometimes the truth as we see it in ourselves 
 (eTTio-TijfjLrj Kal d\ijOeia). In the first case, according to 
 Plato, ideas are in God and are God ; in the second, Being 
 itself, supreme Goodness, is as superior to them as the sun is 
 superior to the light reflected by the world, and to the vision 
 which we have of that light. 4 here are ideas in God and 
 ideas in us ; and between these two meanings of the word, 
 there is all the difference that Saint Augustine finds between 
 those two lights, of which one is the light that illumines (lu- 
 men illuminans) : this is God, the idea of God ; and of which 
 the other is only the light that is illuminated (lumen illu- 
 minatum) ; that is, we ourselves, the idea in us, created 
 intelligence. 
 
 1 Tim., 31. 2 Ibid., 3t). 8 Ibid., 34. 4 De Rep., 508. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 51 
 
 All the difficulties come from this. With this key we 
 can, I think, settle them. 1 Moreover, we should be well 
 aware that, for some time back, Plato, as well as Aristotle, 
 has been turned to account by Hegelian sophists, who strive 
 to take refuge beneath his wings, and shed their darkness 
 over his light. We will amply prove this in the proper 
 place. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Let us now turn from the result to the process. 
 
 We see, by the fact, that Plato was familiar with the 
 great and chief process of the reason, the only one which 
 rises to God. 
 
 But what is very remarkable, is that he also knew, de- 
 scribed, and combated its abuse. It seems as if he foresaw 
 the use which the Alexandrians would make of it, and 
 the still more absurd use which German sophists would 
 make of it in the nineteenth century. 
 
 Plato puts the question and settles it with the utmost 
 precision. It is strange that the importance of his solution 
 of the point is not appreciated ! Leibnitz was struck by it, 
 and quotes it as something of great value. We have, says 
 Plato, the philosopher and the sophist. The philosopher 
 and the sophist are exactly opposite in mind. The first 
 alone deals with the true dialectic, which rises to the splen- 
 dors of the one Being, the object of his inquiry and his con- 
 templation. But what is the sophist's course ? What does 
 he seek, and what does he see ? Hear Plato's answer : The 
 sophist moves towards mere nothingness. He seeks and 
 pursues non-being, and takes refuge in its shadows. 2 That 
 is his dwelling and the habit of his mind. Aristotle notes 
 
 1 See, on this point, book iii. de Deo, by Thomassin, and Nourisson's the- 
 sis, " Quid Plato senserit de Idceis," a substantial summary of a great work. 
 
 2 Sophist., 254. 
 
52 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 this opinion of Plato. " Plato," he says, " very fitly remarks 
 ' that sophism rests entirely upon non-being.' " 
 
 The reader will understand later, if he does not already 
 see, the depth of this observation. But this is not the place 
 to develop it. 
 
 We merely wish to show that Plato by his process, which 
 is the true one, could not obtain an idol, a false god, or 
 the empty and abstract unity of the Alexandrines, a 
 unity without being, goodness, or intelligence, and still 
 less that monster of contemporary pantheism, ontological 
 nonentity. Far from this, Plato declares this tendency to 
 be utterly contrary to philosophy, and uses the right phrase 
 in regard to those who meditate upon non-existence, or, 
 what is the same thing, the teachers of absolute identity. 
 He calls their doctrine monstrous. " If any one call like- 
 ness un likeness, and unlikeness likeness, it seems to me that 
 it would be monstrous" * And he adds an expression 
 which Malebranche seems to have translated when he lays 
 stress upon that kind of identical proposition which strikes 
 him as being fundamental : To perceive nothing, or not to 
 perceive anything, are one and the same thing. " He who 
 says nothing, necessarily, it seems, says nothing." We need 
 not even admit that he says anything ; he says nothing, 
 or rather, he does not speak, who undertakes to put into 
 articulate utterance that which has no existence. 2 
 
 In the face of so plain a statement, it is not admissible to 
 take an unfair advantage of certain passages in the Par- 
 menides or any other dialogue, to confound Plato with the 
 sophists, who do not even distinguish nothingness from 
 Being, and whose wholly perverted mind works the void and 
 produces the absurd. If obscure, vague, or even inexact 
 statements occasionally escape him in describing the process 
 which leads to the light of supreme Being and supreme 
 
 1 Parmetiid., 129. 2 Sophist., 237 E. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 53 
 
 Goodness ; if, especially in translations, Plato seems to 
 give a very strange idea of the infinite, we must first care- 
 fully consider all the texts, and see whether sometimes, 
 as certainly there are examples, we have not translated 
 the word which should mean undetermined, or at most 
 indefinite, as infinite, which would be the exact opposite 
 of the true meaning. Then, if we still find errors in Plato's 
 text itself, we should not be surprised. In regard to this 
 difficult and even yet most obscure point, no exact solution 
 was reached until since the seventeenth century, and that 
 solution itself is still but little known. The precise theory 
 of the infinite, before the new era, was scarcely possible; and 
 many Christian sages have themselves used expressions con- 
 cerning this subject which have only been noted and cor- 
 rected by the Catholic Church within the last two hundred 
 years. 
 
 X. 
 
 Let us sum up all that we have said. 
 
 Plato employs the true process of reasoning which leads 
 up to God, and he does indeed attain to the true God. He 
 takes created things as his starting-point, not as the prin- 
 ciple of deduction. He asserts that we should advance 
 from this starting-point, taken merely as a fulcrum for 
 our fliyht, to the universal primary cause which is outside 
 the starting-point ; that reason, by the true dialectic process, 
 rises to absolute Being, which is living, intelligent, personal, 
 and active, which is the cause of all beauty, all goodness, 
 which includes all perfection, with no trace of imperfection, 
 which is supreme Goodness itself, the Father of the world, 
 the creator of all things, who does not produce his work 
 spontaneously and blindly, but with knowledge and divine 
 reason, and creates the beings which are not at first, but 
 which become through him. 
 
54 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Plato shows that reason, by the other process, which is 
 syllogistic, does not reach this end, and can never rise above 
 its starting-point or depart from it, since it takes it as the 
 principle of deduction by means of identity. And, in fact, it 
 is used by the purified soul only to return to the first pro- 
 cess, wliich alone lias wings and is pre-eminently the philo- 
 sophical process ; intelligence does not spread its wings and 
 turn away from darkness to the light, except with the whole 
 soul ; we must cut and prune within the soul, and, as it 
 were, circumcise it; we must prune the natural instincts 
 of the animal part, which turn the gaze of the soul down- 
 ward ; then only can it change its direction and turn to the 
 truth. Then its gaze is bent upon that which is divine and 
 luminous, while the wicked and the impure have nought for 
 their eye to rest upon but the empty shadows of God. 
 
 This is precisely why the sophist, moving in the opposite 
 direction from the philosopher, takes not-being as the end 
 and object of his contemplation, and hides himself in the 
 gloom of nothingness. 
 
 And these two contrary directions of thought depend upon 
 the free use which every man makes of the gift of God ; that 
 is, of the contact of God with the root of the soul, at 
 that point where every soul is joined to God. 
 
 So Plato says. 
 
 It is certain that man's reason moves in this way, alike 
 in the humblest minds and in the profoundest philosophers. 
 
 Reason, moving according to its fundamental law, should 
 find the eternal, perfect, and infinite God, Father of men, 
 Creator of the world. God, as Saint Paul teaches, shows 
 himself sufficiently ; he is known through visible things, and 
 man is inexcusable if he does not recognize and glorify him : 
 this is the duty of reason. But there is a healthy reason 
 and a perverted reason. Healthy reason rules in the soul 
 which enjoys moral freedom, and perverted reason in the 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 55 
 
 soul which is enslaved. The one looks higher than man, 
 the other lower. 
 
 XL 
 
 It now remains for us to show that in our so favorable 
 opinion of the Platonic doctrine we have gone no farther 
 than Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Bossuet, nor 
 perhaps so far as Thomassin. We say what they say, and 
 that is enough. 
 
 Saint Augustine sees in antiquity one true doctrine and 
 two sects. The two sects are those of Epicurus and Zeno ; 
 the true doctrine is that of Plato. 
 
 We judge doctrine, according to Saint Augustine, by the 
 point where it places these three things : supreme Goodness 
 (faiem boni), the world-cause (causas rerum), the fulcrum 
 of reason (ratiocinandi fiduciam). 
 
 Now, Epicurus places these three things in the body and 
 the senses : his sect is impure. Zeno places them in man 
 himself : his sect is arrogant. Plato places them in the 
 true God; his philosophy is the true one. So says Saint 
 Augustine. 
 
 He asserts that the Platonists " place in the true God 
 the creative force of all things, the light of ideas, and the 
 good of practical life." 1 He asserts that, as Cicero abun- 
 dantly proves, " they place in an immutable, eternal, in no 
 way human, but properly divine wisdom, the original wis- 
 dom, stimulator of the other, these three things : supreme 
 Goodness, the world-cause, and the fulcrum of reason." 2 
 Saint Paul himself, he says elsewhere, does not accuse them 
 of ignorance of the true God. Elsewhere, again, he declares 
 " that Platonists place God far above the nature of every 
 created spirit. He having created not only visible nature 
 
 1 De Civit. Dei, lib. viii. cap. ix. t. vii. p. 320. 
 
 2 St. Aug., Epist., c. xviii. t. ii. p. 502. 
 
56 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 but the soul itself, he enlightens every rational nature, such 
 as the human soul is, and blesses it by admitting it to a 
 share in his immaterial and immutable light." 1 
 
 " Let all sects," he again says, " yield to the philosophers, 
 who say not that man's blessedness is in his body, or in 
 his soul, but in God alone : not as the mind enjoys the body 
 or itself, or as men find their happiness one in the other, but 
 indeed as the eye enjoys the light. . . . Plato places blessed- 
 ness in virtue, virtue in knowledge and imitation of God ; and 
 this itself is blessedness. He does not hesitate, he asserts 
 that to philosophize is to love God.-" 2 
 
 Such is Saint Augustine's opinion of Plato. 
 
 As for Saint Thomas Aquinas, he 3 defends Plato against 
 Aristotle in regard to a charge which strikes him as odious. 
 He says that it is absurd (videtur absurdum) to impute fol- 
 lies to such men as Socrates and Plato (talibus et tantis viris), 
 to men who were the most virtuous of philosophers (qui 
 fuerunt homines virtutibus dediti super omnes philosopher) ; 
 who established virtue as the chief good of humanity (solas 
 mrtutes bonum hominis ponebant), and all whose philosophy 
 tended to virtue (qui ad componendos mores corrigendosque 
 totam suam philosophiam effluerunt). 
 
 Thus, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, Plato is not 
 one of those philosophers whom Saint Paul stigmatizes, when 
 he says that having known God, they have glorified him not, 
 and on account of this have become vain in their imaginations 
 and given themselves up to uncleanness. 
 
 If the authenticity of the book De Regimine principum be 
 contested, here is another testimony, taken from the Summa, 
 the last work of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the summary of all 
 his teaching. He asserts that Plato established the idea of 
 
 1 St. Aug., De Cirit. Dei, lib. viii. cap. i. 
 
 2 Ibid., cap. viii. t. vii. p. 320. 
 
 3 De regimine principum, cap. iv. t. iv. p. 822. Paris edition. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 57 
 
 the true God. " He established," he says, " as a being apart, 
 the idea of Being, the idea of the One, which he calls Being 
 by itself, and Unity in itself ; being, unity, whence proceeds 
 by participation all that can be called being or unity. . . . 
 He also established that Being by itself, the One in itself, is 
 supreme Goodness; and as Goodness, Being, and Unity are 
 identical, he said that Goodness was God, in which all that 
 may be called good must share. And all this is true," says 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas ; " it is true that there is a first Being, 
 which is by its very essence, which is Goodness, which is he 
 whom we call God. Aristotle agrees on this point with 
 Plato." 1 
 
 Moreover, Saint Thomas Aquinas asserts, with Saint Justin, 
 that Plato knew the book of Genesis and followed it in cer- 
 tain points. We scarcely understand why this should be dis- 
 puted. Is it possible that Plato could be wholly ignorant of 
 Oriental traditions ? Could it be that among these traditions 
 he knew nothing of the Jews, whose zeal and activity bring 
 them to the front everywhere ? His utter ignorance on this 
 point would be very hard to explain. Plato elsewhere, like 
 Socrates, and this is to be carefully noted, everywhere 
 enters into tradition so far as he can. He uses with the 
 deepest respect, and accepts in his philosophy, all the sound 
 doctrines which he encounters, Plato, like every genuine 
 philosopher, sought after truth rather than after the mode of 
 finding it. He had no trace of that strange pedantry, that 
 barren mania known as rationalism, which consists in a de- 
 sire to find the truth in a certain manner and in no other, 
 and of one's self alone, through unaided human reason, without 
 any mixture of tradition, authority, or feeling, or any especial 
 help from God; like a man who plays at showing his strength, 
 and announces that he will lift an enormous weight without 
 a crowbar, with a single hand, and that the left. Does not a 
 
 1 Summte, I a , q. iv. a. 4. 
 
58 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 true workman use both hands, and all the crowbars that he 
 can find ? So, too, did Plato, who sought the truth with all 
 his mind and with all his heart and with his whole soul, as 
 he says we should do ; who studied all traditions, and trav- 
 elled far and wide to find every trace of such ; who con- 
 stantly invokes, as we see in his writings, the special and 
 present help of God to know the truth, help which, accord- 
 ing to Thomassin, was not refused him, and through which it 
 was given him to know the true philosophy, that of which a 
 Father of the Church said : " The Greeks found a law of right- 
 eousness in philosophy," 1 a statement which Saint Thomas- 
 quotes and confirms. 
 
 To know Bocsuet's opinion of Plato, we have only to quote 
 from that chapter of his " Logic " where he treats of eternal 
 essences, 2 and thus expresses himself: 
 
 "These eternal truths which our ideas present are the true ob- 
 ject of science, and therefore that we may become truly wise, Plato 
 incessantly reminds us of those ideas which present not that which 
 shapes itself, but that which is ; not that which engenders and suf- 
 fers corruption, which is seen and then passes away, which is made 
 and destroyed, but that which eternally subsists." 
 
 "This is that intellectual world which this divine philosopher 
 has put into the mind of God before the world was formed, and 
 which is the model for that sublime work." 
 
 "These are the simple, eternal, immutable, imperishable, and in- 
 corruptible ideas to which he refers us if we would comprehend the 
 truth." 
 
 "This is why he said that our ideas, the images of divine ideas, 
 were also directly derived from them, and did not come through 
 the senses, which do indeed serve, he said, to awaken them, but 
 not to form them in our mind." 
 
 Let us now come to the testimony of Thomassin, who goes 
 very far in regard to Plato, sometimes perhaps too far in 
 
 1 Clement of Alexandria, Strom., lib. i. no. 20. 
 
 2 Logic, liv. i. ch. xxxvii. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. 59 
 
 regard to the Platonists. Thomassin sees in the philosophy 
 of Plato what it itself asserts, a doctrine which is both 
 speculative arid moral, a struggle against the flesh and a 
 constant contemplation of death (perpetua mortis meditatio 
 et conflictatio cum corpore) ; l a doctrine which unfolds, by 
 means of reminiscence, the eternal reasons hidden in the soul 
 (latitantes in anima rationes per reminiscentiam exeitarej : a 
 doctrine which does not cast man upon externals, but leads 
 him back from external things to himself, and from himself 
 to that which is higher (nee in externa hominem refundere, 
 sed ab Us ad ipsum, ut ipsum summum contempletur) ; 2 a 
 doctrine which thus found truth, not by chance, but by its 
 very method, as Tertullian says (non tantum casu in verum 
 quandoque incurrisse)" 3 
 
 This doctrine, adds Thomassin, strives to purify the affec- 
 tions, to lift our mind to God ; and the very basis of Platon- 
 isrn, according to Saint Augustine, is the placing of ideas in 
 God : the Fathers agree on this point. The contrary error 
 comes from Aristotle tirst, then from the Gnostics and Arians. 
 Plato is the father of philosophy ; and he went to the verge 
 of philosophy, having more than any other philosopher 
 recognized and asserted the fact of the actual intervention 
 of God, by his help and his grace, in the contemplation of 
 immutable truths. 4 And this help was not denied him. 
 The Platonists, again says Thomassin, are praised by Saint 
 Augustine for attributing to divine light whatever was given 
 them in the order of that contemplation. 5 God, in fac^ 
 aided them ; and, moreover, they found help from the 
 Hebrews (Dei auxilio adjuti ; deinde Hebrceorum quandoque 
 contubernio). Thus we praise, we quote, this patrician race 
 
 1 Logic, lib. vi. cap. iii. n. i., 2. 2 Ibid., lib. i. cap. ii. n. 2. 
 
 3 Ibid., cap. xxiv. n. 1. 
 
 4 Dog. Theol., t. iii. lib. iv. cap. ii. n. 10. 
 
 5 Ibid., t. ii. lib. iii. cap. v. n. 15. 
 
60 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 of philosophers ; and to make their doctrine harmonize with 
 our dogmas is not a difficult work, still less is it a sterile 
 task, as Saint Bernard himself proved. 1 
 
 Finally, in the preface to his Theodicy, Thomassin thus 
 sums up his opinion of Plato: "That which precedes will 
 readily explain to you why, in the first part of this treatise, 
 I have mingled in proof Plato and his disciples with the 
 Fathers of the Church, Greek and Latin. For although for 
 the last five hundred years our most famous teachers have 
 gained their philosophic education in the school of Aristotle, 
 we must remember that all the Fathers acquired theirs in the 
 school of Plato. Baronius might truly say, ' The Academy 
 is the antechamber to the Church ; ' and the admirable Saint 
 Augustine, himself imbued with that patrician philosophy, 
 as Cicero calls it, declares that by changing a very few 
 words and thoughts, a Platonist becomes a Christian. To 
 this I have clung tenaciously (mordicus), showing in every- 
 thing the harmony of their thoughts and expressions with 
 our Scriptures and our holy Fathers, and pointing out the 
 differences where they exist." 2 
 
 In the face of these amazing testimonials from the Fathers 
 and from Catholic scholars, testimonials paid to the Pla- 
 tonic philosophy, and of this wonderful agreement between 
 philosophy and theology, this perfect union of philosophers 
 and theologians of the first order, we ask the meaning of 
 that war between religion and philosophy, reason and faith, 
 of which we have heard so much for a century past. For 
 myself, I see but one cause for this unhealthy division of the 
 universal light of the Word in human minds. That cause is 
 a decay of the human mind, and a simultaneous degeneration 
 of reason and faith. The light has grown dim in men's souls, 
 because they are less turned towards God. Winter reigns. 
 Faith, in those who still have it, has a lesser radiance ; 
 
 1 Dog. Theol., t. ii. lib. iii. cap. xxiii. n. 9. 2 Prsef., t. iii. n. 10. 
 
PLATO'S THEODICY. Cl 
 
 shrinking and repressed in the innermost heart, it no longer 
 sheds its divine dew upon the mind. Faith does not suffi- 
 ciently seek intelligence, as Saint Augustine urges it to do. 
 On the other hand, reason, in those who cultivate it, no longer 
 leads to any result, and misses the object of its career, as Plato 
 expresses it ; it does not search enough to find. Those who 
 rise highest, pause " at divine phantoms and the shadows of 
 what is," but they do not reach " the sun which casts these 
 shadows." Insufficiently upheld by God, whom it neither 
 seeks nor loves, reason completes its work in but very few 
 men. Its weak and fine-spun thoughts, its partial and 
 broken lights, have ceased to be more than the ruins and 
 fragments of integral philosophy. Better simple ignorance 
 than this ignorance which ignores itself ; better actual night 
 than a gloomy twilight which deems itself broad day, and 
 doubts not that the sun is shining. 
 
 At the present time, therefore, those souls in whom God 
 has placed through faith the source of light, are like a 
 clouded sky, in which the sun no longer beams ; and those 
 others, destitute of faith, but to whom God still sends a few 
 rays from without, are like the Earth when, in the first glim- 
 mer of dawn which puts out the stars without yet giving us 
 the sun, she no longer sees by any sign that her light cometh 
 to her from Heaven. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 
 
 LET us understand plainly that the question of the proofs 
 of the existence of God, which includes that of his at- 
 tributes, is not a question of any particular system of philos- 
 ophy, but is the question of philosophy in general. The effort 
 of the intelligence to show that there is a God, is the search 
 after truth, nothing less. In treating this general question, 
 we take up the Theodicy, consequently Metaphysics; we 
 take up Logic, because we are concerned with one of the two 
 processes of reasoning, and that the chief one. We must 
 evidently treat of Morals, since the condition without which 
 nothing can be proved, the existence of God, is a moral 
 question, a free act of our soul ; then we treat of Psy- 
 chology, since we are concerned with the principal acts of 
 both the intelligence and the will : we are at the point 
 where all branches of philosophy meet, at the centre, the 
 root, of philosophy. This is why we are forced first to 
 settle this supreme question. 
 
 Let us not fear, therefore, to dwell as long as may be 
 needful upon this central point, which includes everything, 
 even the history of philosophy. 
 
 I. 
 
 Aristotle arrives at the same results as Plato. For, as we 
 shall see in the course of this work, all geniuses of the first 
 order agree, often even when they seem or believe them- 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 63 
 
 selves to be in opposition. In reality, it is the sophists 
 who contradict one another and contradict the philosophers. 
 Cicero declares that the difference between the Academy and 
 the Portico is only a difference of words. 1 
 
 And yet it must be said that if, indeed, the great results 
 are the same, there is more than a difference of words, there 
 is a difference in the method, at least so far as regards 
 the statement. 
 
 There are two processes of reasoning, as we have already 
 said. Now, we may assert and distinctly settle this point : 
 Plato represents the one, and Aristotle the other. Plato is 
 above all else dialectic ; Aristotle is peculiarly syllogistic. 
 It is only unconsciously that he ever handles the dialectic 
 process, and he gives no complete analysis of it. 
 
 And yet Aristotle could not be ignorant of these two in- 
 tellectual processes, and he calls them syllogism and induc- 
 tion (eiraycoyr)). He says, what is true, that induction gives 
 us primary causes ; syllogism, consequences* He sees, what 
 we have already observed, that a knowledge of primary 
 causes considered, not as possible, but as actual and existing, 
 presupposes experience as the point of support of induction. 2 
 Thus Aristotle saw the facts. 
 
 But the great difference between Plato and Aristotle is 
 that the latter, in practice, strove to find everything, or at 
 least to prove everything, by syllogism ; and in theory he 
 knew neither all the conditions nor all the compass of the dia- 
 lectic process. He even denies, in Plato, its legitimacy ; and 
 if he himself makes use of it, it is often without knowing it, 
 and in an implied form. For twenty years the disciple of 
 Plato, he received the results of his work. He had in ad- 
 vance that supreme idea of God given us by the chief pro- 
 cess of reason, used by Plato, and above all brought to us 
 
 1 Academ., lib. i. cap. ix. 
 
 2 Analyt. prior., lib. i. cap. xxxi. 3. 
 
64 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 by tradition diffused throughout the world, and to which he 
 himself alludes. Aristotle retains all these data, but he en- 
 velops them in syllogisms, so that we lose sight of the way 
 in which the mind obtains them. 
 
 There occurs, upon this point, in the Theodicy, between 
 Plato and Aristotle, what occurred, at the close of the seven- 
 teenth century, in the domain of geometry, between Leibnitz, 
 the inventor of the Infinitesimal Calculus, and a famous alge- 
 braist, 1 who pretended to deny the discovery, attacked its prin- 
 ciples as inexact and productive of error, and then tried to 
 reproduce and demonstrate, by common algebra, the results 
 which Leibnitz^ obtained by his infinitesimal method. This 
 adversary of Leibnitz kept the Academy of Sciences in sus- 
 pense for several years, twenty years after the discovery. A 
 skilful algebraist, a bold calculator, but as a writer wrapped 
 in obscurity, as Montucla describes him, he reached, or 
 seemed to reach, by vast algebraic circumlocutions, and end- 
 less equations, the same results which Leibnitz found by 
 mere play, and proved with such marvellous simplicity. 
 Obscure and interminable equations enveloped what Leib- 
 nitz analyzed, explained, and made clear in brief and simple 
 formulas. That which Leibnitz found by the infinitesimal 
 method, his adversary could never have found by his alge- 
 braic method, deductive from identity to identity; but the 
 results being given, he sometimes reproduced them by dint of 
 hard work. Only, in his obstinate attempt to reproduce 
 them all, there were instances where he only succeeded by 
 the aid of false calculations and incorrect deductions, forcing 
 a way to attain the wished-for result. 
 
 And this is what must necessarily happen, in metaphysics, 
 to those who insist upon forcing their way by continuous 
 reasoning, syllogism, and thus reaching from creatures to 
 God, from finite to infinite. Sceptics stop them, and readily 
 
 1 See Montucla, Hist, of Mathematics, ii. 360. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 65 
 
 show them that the continuity of the deduction is only ap- 
 parent, and covers up voids and gulfs which only the other 
 process of reasoning can bridge over. 
 
 Our comparison between these philosophers and geometri- 
 cians is faulty, I believe, at but one point : that is, that there 
 was no equality between Leibnitz and his foe, while between 
 the genius of Plato and that of Aristotle, on the contrary, 
 there was parity. But we maintain that those who try to 
 establish by the logic of deduction the results produced by 
 the other process of reasoning, are like the mathematician 
 who denied the infinitesimal calculus, would use nothing 
 but common algebra, and used false figures in order to do 
 without the infinitesimal method. 
 
 Did Aristotle use false trains of reasoning to establish 
 the same results as Plato, though without succeeding at all 
 points ? We dare not affirm that he did ; we submit the 
 question to those who think themselves competent to answer 
 it. It would be a curious study in logic. But it is certain 
 that Plato is simple and luminous, and Aristotle is involved 
 and obscure ; that the Platonic dialectic is poetic and popu- 
 lar ; and that the Aristotelian syllogisms, on the question of 
 first principles, are so extremely difficult and subtle that 
 the best-equipped intellects would find it a long and difficult 
 task to decide whether the proofs be exact or not. Kant, 
 we are all aware, pronounced them false; only he treats all 
 the rest no better. But when h2 sets forth the type, which, 
 in his opinion, affords the true proof, that type is nothing 
 else, it seems, but the dialectic of Plato with its double logi- 
 cal and moral condition. 
 
 II. 
 
 Be this as it may, let us try to face the proofs of the exis- 
 tence of God as set forth by Aristotle. We will not at first 
 refer to the original. We will take Aristotle as explained 
 
66 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 by Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose genius is quite as power- 
 ful, but much more lucid than that of Aristotle. We are 
 fortunate to find such a guide. Saint Thomas Aquinas 
 takes his instances from Aristotle's collective works, he 
 having commented upon them all, and he sums them up 
 as follows in his Summa Contra Gentes. 1 
 We quote literally : 
 
 " Having proved that it is possible to demonstrate the exis- 
 tence of God, let us consider such proofs of it as have been given 
 to us." 
 
 " Here are those of Aristotle, who tries to prove the existence of 
 God in two ways, from the fact of motion." 
 
 "First proof. Everything which is in motion is moved by 
 something. Now, our senses show us that something moves, the 
 sun, for instance. Therefore it is moved by some other thing which 
 moves it. Moreover, either that other motor is a motion, or it is 
 motionless. If it be motionless, our assertion is proved, namely ; 
 that it is essential to establish a motionless motor, which is God. 
 If, on the contrary, it be in motion, it is moved by some other 
 motor. We must, therefore, either go on in this way forever, or 
 come at last to the motionless motor. But it is impossible to go 
 on thus forever. Accordingly, we must affirm the existence of a 
 primary motionless motor." 
 
 "But in this proof there are two propositions to be proved, 
 namely : That every moving thing in motion is moved by a 
 motor other than itself, and that we cannot admit of an infinite 
 series of motors." 
 
 " Aristotle proves the first proposition in three ways : 
 
 " 1st. If a motor be self-moving, it must contain in itself the 
 primary cause of its motion ; otherwise it is plain that it i& moved 
 by some other motor. It must also be moved by a primary move- 
 ment ; that is to say, by itself, and not by one of its parts, like an 
 animal borne along by the motion of its feet. For in this first 
 case the whole would not be moved by itself, but by its part, and 
 one part by the other. 2 This motor which moves must itself also 
 be divisible, have parts ; for everything that moves is divisible, as 
 
 1 Lib. i. cap. iii. 2 Physics, book vii., opening pages. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 67 
 
 is proved in the sixth book of the Physics. This settled, the phi- 
 losopher reasons thus : 
 
 " Everything which we suppose is self-moving is moved by a 
 primary motion. Therefore, inaction of one of its parts involves 
 the inaction of all. For if the inaction of one part leaves the other 
 part in motion, it ceases to be the whole itself which moves by a 
 primary motion ; it is that part alone, since it continues to move 
 while the other part is at rest. But nothing which stops as soon 
 as another thing stops is self-moving ; for that object whose cessa- 
 tion involves the cessation of the other, is also that whose motion 
 involves the motion of the other ; therefore that other is not self- 
 moving. Accordingly, that which we supposed to be self-moving 
 does not actually move of its own impulse. Accordingly, finally, 
 all which is in motion is necessarily moved by some motor other 
 than itself." 
 
 "We cannot destroy this reasoning by saying that what is 
 supposed to be self-moving can have no part of it in repose ; 
 and again, that the part can neither stop, nor move, save by 
 accident, as Avicenna so scandalously holds (ut Avicenna calum- 
 niatur). In reality, the whole force ot this reasoning lies in the 
 fact that if anything be self-moving by a primary movement, and 
 of itself, not by reason of its parts, it follows that its motion no 
 longer depends upon an outside motor. Now, the movement of 
 the divisible, as well as its being, depends on the being and move- 
 ment of its parts ; hence it cannot move of itself by a primary 
 motion. It is therefore not essential to the truth of the condi- 
 tional proposition inferred here, that we should admit as abso- 
 lutely true that the part moves in the inaction of the whole ; it is 
 enough that the sum-total of this conditional proposition is true ; 
 namely, That if the part be at rest, the whole will be at rest. 
 And it may be true even if the antecedent proposition were 
 impossible ; as in this instance : If a man were an ass, he would 
 be an irrational animal." 
 
 " 2d. Aristotle again proves the same proposition as follows : a 
 
 " Everything that moves by accident does not move of itself, 
 but is moved by the movement of some other thing ; this is evi- 
 dent ; neither that which moves naturally, by an inward motion, 
 
 1 Physics, text, comm., xxvii. ct infra. 
 
68 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 as the animal whose body is only moved by the soul ; nor that 
 which is moved by nature, by an outward motion, as heavy bodies ; 
 for everything of this kind moves only by the way of generation 
 or else by the removal of an obstacle. Now, all that is moved is 
 moved either by accident or by itself. If by itself, . . . etc." 
 
 Let us stop here. What will it profit us to prolong this 
 endless chain of propositions, each more obscure and more 
 incomprehensible than the other ? What reader would 
 follow us? Who now believes in this mode of reasoning? 
 The seventeenth century banished it under the name of 
 Aristotelianism. 
 
 What we have just quoted is but a fourth part of the 
 demonstration. We had yet to finish the second mode in 
 which Aristotle proves his major : All that is in motion is 
 moved by something other than itself. Then we should also 
 be forced to give the third mode of proving that same major. 
 After that there would still remain three other ways of prov- 
 ing the minor, namely : That there is not an infinite series of 
 motors. Then only would the syllogism be demonstrated. 
 
 Lastly, we should have to set forth the second syllogism, 
 which Aristotle also uses to prove, from motion, the existence 
 of God. We shall not undertake such a task, but shall con- 
 fine ourselves to a closer study of the basis of the line of rea- 
 soning which we have just shown. What we have thus far 
 quoted includes all its postulates. 
 
 III. 
 
 Aristotle takes the position, There is motion. 
 
 And from this he concludes : Therefore there is a first 
 motionless motor. We call this God. 
 
 Now, there are in this train of reasoning words which can 
 in no wise be filled by the syllogisms which we have just 
 repeated. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 69 
 
 What ! from seeing motion shall we infer the motionless, 
 by syllogism, by means of identity ? 
 
 That is to say that from the variable we infer immuta- 
 bility; from the imperfect, perfection; or from the finite, 
 infinity ! Let any one show us a genuine syllogism which 
 establishes such inference from the fact of motion presented 
 by the senses. 
 
 Where are the passage and the middle term between these 
 two worlds ? How can we derive immutability from motion 
 by means of deduction ? Clearly, it is impossible. 
 
 Most assuredly it was none of these arguments that led 
 Aristotle to assert immobility from seeing motion. 
 
 This conclusion involves a long story in the career of the 
 human mind. Heraclitus spent his life in saying, Every- 
 thing passes, everything slips away (TTCWTCL pee/) ; and amidst 
 these passing waves he never perceived the immutable. 
 This was the cause of his sorrow. And that sublime regret 
 a sense of the imperfection of this changing world, a long- 
 ing for immutability did not lead him up to the conclusion 
 that the immutable exists. He understood motion and its 
 strange significance, but nothing more. Plato also under- 
 stood motion, and he said : All that we see slips away ; 
 everything passes, is born, and dies ; and we behold nothing 
 that does not change. But having said this, Plato did 
 not confine himself to regret. The contrast between this 
 changing spectacle, this perishable nature, and an innate 
 longing for perfection, immutability, and immortality, awoke 
 in his soul that memory of the eternal, unchanging, and per- 
 fect Being which our soul also feels ; and he asserted the 
 existence of the immovable on the occasion of that which 
 passes. And this very point was the basis of his whole pro- 
 cess and his whole doctrine. 
 
 Aristotle, therefore, was furnished in the advance with this 
 result, which cannot be obtained otherwise. Aristotle pos- 
 
70 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 sesses the truth and strives to set it forth. To explain it 
 he wraps it in syllogisms. This seems clear to those who are 
 beginning to think; and Aristotle taught. These syllogisms, 
 with which it was impossible to find the truth, were no more 
 useful to prove it; they throw no light upon it, they veil it. 
 We can scarce recognize it under this disguise. We may 
 even question whether they do not destroy it, and whether 
 there are not gross faults of logic in this chain of reasoning. 
 Who will prove the contrary ? Who 'will sift all the mean- 
 ings of the words motion, immobility, immutability, and 
 inertia, to learn whether, in one of the links in his chain, 
 Aristotle does not confuse them ? 
 
 To Aristotle, the idea of motion is identical with that 'of 
 change. 1 He defines motion as the transition from poten- 
 tiality to act? 
 
 Plato made motion synonymous with life (KLV^CTLV teal 
 %wi]v\ and thence placed motion in the absolute, infinite 
 Being (KLVVJO-IV teal farjv . . . rc3 Traz/reXaK OVTL). Now, 
 Aristotle himself sometimes takes motion in the same sense 
 as Plato, as Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks. 
 
 Nevertheless, in the proof of the existence of God through 
 motion, it is clear that motion is understood in the sense of 
 change, or of the transition from potentiality to act. 
 
 This established, let us put Aristotle's reasoning into 
 exact form, and see if it be possible for us to judge from 
 it, to admit it or to deny it. 
 
 The entire chain of reasoning may be reduced to the two 
 following syllogisms : 
 
 FIRST SYLLOGISM. 
 
 Major. Everything in motion is moved by a motor other than 
 itself; in other words, nothing moves of itself. 
 
 Minor. Now, our eyes show us the fact of motion. 
 
 1 Metaph., xi. 11, 12. We quote from the Berlin edition. 
 
 2 Ibid., xi. 9. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 71 
 
 Conclusion. Therefore, there is something else which moves that 
 -which we see in motion. 
 
 SECOND SYLLOGISM. 
 
 Major. There cannot be an infinite series of motors ; in other 
 words, there can only be a finite series of motors ; in other words, 
 there is one first motor. 
 
 Minor. Now, this motor would not be the first if it were in 
 motion, since it would then be moved by some other thing (as 
 results from the first major). 
 
 Conclusion. Therefore, there is one first motionless motor. We 
 call this God. 
 
 These syllogisms are correct in form, but are they true as 
 facts ? 
 
 We see at the first glance that they are true if the majors 
 be true. But who will prove those majors ? There lie the 
 yawning voids. 
 
 For instance, how can we prove by syllogism, starting from 
 an obvious general proposition, that nothing moves of itself ? 
 Yet Aristotle tries to do so. It is in this way that he tries 
 to establish the existence of the one first motionless motor ; 
 that is, the existence of God. 
 
 He makes the attempt ; we have seen his efforts to prove 
 the first major, namely, " that everything in motion is moved 
 ~by a motor other than itself." But his arguments on this 
 point are so subtle and so doubtful that Avicenna claims 
 that the reasoning is false ; and Saint Thomas Aquinas, who 
 considers Avicenna's objection scandalous (ut Avicenna ca- 
 lumniatur), is still forced to confess that the argument rests 
 on a conditional proposition, whose condition may be impos- 
 sible or contradictory, as in this : If man be an ass, he is an 
 irrational animal (Si homo est asinus, est irrationalis). 
 
 Who shall be the judge ? Is the argument good ? I know 
 not, being unable to understand all parts of it. Is it false, 
 on account of the contradictory conditional ? I dare not say 
 
72 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 so, for even in algebra we introduce and calculate with imagi- 
 nary quantities, that is, impossibilities and contradictions. 
 What I assert is that these syllogisms are, to say the least, 
 not valid ; they do not discover the great truth which they 
 contain ; they do not make it manifest, and if, strictly speak- 
 ing, they demonstrate it, it is because they include the other 
 process of reasoning. 
 
 Moreover, Aristotle never puts his arguments into such 
 scholastic form as Saint Thomas has done here. But it is 
 certain that he generally tries to deduce everything by syllo- 
 gism from an evident fact or an abstract major. He seldom 
 advances in his statement by any other than the deductive 
 process of reasoning ; and this annoying habit often deprives 
 his reasoning I refer to the reasoning only of its clear- 
 ness, validity, utility, sometimes perhaps its solidity. 
 
 Does it follow from this that Aristotle's Theodicy contains 
 nothing new or valuable? Far from it; and we will now 
 attempt to show what he accomplished. 
 
 IV. 
 
 If Aristotle be syllogistic in his statement, proceeding by 
 abstract majors and deductions, we cannot conclude from this 
 that in his inner mental action he retained nothing of the 
 other process of reasoning. We have already said, and we 
 shall show when we come to logic, that he mentions and 
 clearly distinguishes between the two processes of reasoning, 
 attributing to the one the invention of majors, and to the 
 other deduction. In his profound meditations he made use 
 he could not but make use of the sublime process which 
 leads to God. But he generally managed to use it unawares, 
 like the majority of mankind, and concealed, through a trick 
 of style, his mode of discovery by a very different mode of 
 statement and proof. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 73 
 
 Be this as it may, not only did this powerful genius renew 
 in his thought the data of tradition in regard to God, and 
 the results of the Platonic method ; but we may also say 
 that on several points, not on all, he gave clearness and pre- 
 cision to Plato's theology. Had he added to the theodicy 
 nothing but the three words, God is pure act, a formula 
 which has been marvellously commented upon and used in 
 every way by Saint Thomas Aquinas, he would have given 
 the human mind an idea of capital significance. 
 
 To judge Aristotle, we should know the last chapters of 
 the twelfth book of his Metaphysics. 
 
 We will try to give an idea of these chapters by quotations 
 and brief commentaries. Our quotations will be given in 
 exactly the order in which they occur in the original. We 
 shall glean the truth from these chapters, setting aside the 
 often inexact reasoning which he brings to bear upon it, as 
 well as his errors in regard to the nature of the physical 
 heavens, the imperishable nature of the stars, and the eter- 
 nity of the world, errors to correspond with which there are 
 other metaphysical errors and inexplicable contradictions. 
 In spite of these exceptions, these chapters are still a truly 
 admirable summary of a theodicy. 
 
 " There are three essences, two of which are natural, and 
 one immutable. . . . For there must necessarily be one 
 eternal, unchanging essence." 1 
 
 Yes, there are two natural or created essences, mind and 
 matter ; one immutable or uncreated, which is God. Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas explains this as follows : " There are two 
 substances which are natural, because there is motion in 
 them ; besides these two substances, there is a third which 
 is immovable or immutable, and no longer natural." Nat- 
 
 1 Metaph., xii. 6. It is a mistake to translate this: "There are three es- 
 sences, two physical, the other immutable," for the word physical does not 
 mean natural, but corporeal. Saint Thomas Aquinas translates it with perfect 
 accuracy: ducB quidem naturales. 
 
74 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 ural, mobile, subject to change, are one and the same thing, 
 according to Aristotle ; as also, on the other hand, immobile, 
 immutable, eternal, and supernatural are terms each of which 
 includes the other. Pascal expresses the same truth in other 
 words : " There are three worlds, the world of bodies, 
 the world of mind, and the third, which is supernatural, 
 which is God." This had been established by Genesis long 
 before : " In the beginning God made heaven and earth ; " 
 where we must understand, with the Fourth Council of the 
 Lateran, that heaven and earth signify mind and matter, 
 natural things, which began, which were born. 
 
 " There must," adds Aristotle, " be a first cause such that 
 its essence is pure act." 1 
 
 Otherwise the world could not exist, as Aristotle says. 
 This the sophists ignore, who believe that Being began with 
 a mere potentiality or possibility, which is the same as 
 saying that effects can exist without a cause. 
 
 " A being which moves without being moved is eternal, is 
 pure essence, is pure act. " 2 
 
 The formula God is pure essence ; God is pure act is 
 immensely fruitful. Saint Thomas Aquinas, who develops it 
 by the light of his Christian genius, superior as such to that 
 of Aristotle, extracts genuine treasures from it, discovers 
 wonderful depths of meaning in it. We will only say here, 
 in a few words, that when we know that God is pure essence, 
 that is, that all is essential in God, we know that in him there 
 is no accident, no variable or secondary qualities. His being 
 is his essence, that is to say, it is necessary; his knowl- 
 edge is his essence, his will is his essence, his blessedness is 
 his essence. When we knqw that God is pure act, in other 
 words, that in him everything is act, we know that there 
 is not in him, as in us, virtual and actual, possible and real, 
 potentiality and act, but that with God all that is possible 
 
 i Metaph., xii. 6. 2 ibid., /. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 75 
 
 is actual ; that there is nothing in him to be developed or 
 completed ; that he is already perfect ; that he is not, like his 
 creatures, capable of indefinite development, but that he is 
 already now, if we may so express it, infinitely developed. 
 This establishes absolutely the distinction between the finite 
 and the infinite. To be pure essence and pure act is pre- 
 cisely the divine characteristic of infinity. At least, this 
 is what Saint Thomas Aquinas asserts in these formulas, 
 whether or no Aristotle ever perceived it. 
 
 What immediately follows in the original is both clear and 
 profound. It is the way in which the one first motionless 
 motor moves the other two essences. 
 
 " It moves thus. The desirable and the intelligible moves 
 without being moved. ... It moves as the object of love." l 
 
 " The supreme, desirable, and intelligible are one and the 
 same thing (TOVTWV TO, Trpwra ra avrd)" 
 
 This essence moves as the object of love; it attracts. 
 Here we have the universal charm or attraction of the 
 desirable and intelligible, which, according to Aristotle, at- 
 tracts everything, material and spiritual, each in its way, 
 and which causes, without exception, all motion, that uni- 
 versal attraction of which physics now knows something, 
 and with which psychology, let us hope, will some day be 
 familiar as the original source of all motion, all facts, the 
 entire history of the soul. And here Aristotle makes this 
 important remark by the way : " The object of desire is the 
 apparition of the Beautiful ; but the object of will is the 
 Beautiful itself." 2 
 
 Furthermore : " So soon as there is a being which moves, 
 although motionless, and which is motionless, although in 
 action, that being ceases to be subject to change." 
 
 " This motor, then, is a necessary being ; and in so far 
 as necessary, is the Good, and is the First Cause." 
 
 1 Metaph., xii. 7. 2 Ibid. 
 
76 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 " Such is the First Cause, upon which hang heaven and 
 earth." l 
 
 This reminds us of Plato's statement that " the divine is 
 bound to us by the very roots of our being ; " and that other 
 Platonic doctrine, that " the First Cause is the Good itself." 
 
 Here, now, is what the First Cause actually is : 
 
 " We taste fugitive happiness ; he possesses it forever." 
 " His happiness is his very act ; to be awake, to feel, to think, 
 is our good ; afterwards, memory and hope." 2 
 
 But what is his act or his happiness ? It is thought in itself. 
 
 "But thought in itself is the thought of the best in itself; and 
 the thought above all other thought is that of the Good above all 
 other good. Now, thought thinks itself by grasping the intelligible, 
 and it becomes intelligible by this contact and this thinking ; so 
 that the thought and its object are one and the same thing. To 
 grasp the intelligible, to grasp the essence, is thought : this very 
 possession is its act. And this act, which constitutes all thought, 
 has, it seems, a divine character ; so that contemplation is cer- 
 tainly happiness and perfection." 
 
 " But if God continually tastes this happiness, of which man 
 can only enjoy the fugitive taste, assuredly his bliss is wonderful ; 
 more wonderful still if this happiness is greater in him than it is 
 in us. Now, it is so. For this very thing, this happiness itself, 
 is his life ; the intelligible in act is life ; now, he is all act ; so 
 the act in itself is his life, eternal and supreme life. We call God 
 a perfect and eternal living being, because continual and eternal 
 life is in him; or rather, that life itself is God." 3 
 
 Certainly, this is a truly profound contribution to the The- 
 odicy, full of most fruitful and luminous points, although 
 they are but slightly developed, and thus very remote from 
 our habits of thought, which demand so many explanations. 
 It is plain that we have here a powerful implicit light, and 
 that it is not easy for human reason to go higher, or to 
 see farther. 
 
 i Metaph., xii. 7. 2 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 77 
 
 In this extract we have some faint vision of deep mys- 
 teries. When Leibnitz observes the amazing phenomenon 
 of the reflection of minds, which consists in the fact " that a 
 mind is itself its own immediate object and acts upon itself, 
 thinking of itself and of what it has done ; " 1 when he recog- 
 nizes " that this reduplication gives in a similar absolute sub- 
 stance an image of two respective substances, that which 
 understands and that which is understood," and when, more- 
 over, he considers that " that which is modal, accidental, 
 imperfect, and changeable in us, is real, essential, complete, 
 and immutable in God," Leibnitz sees in this reduplication, 
 as it were, a trace of the plurality of divine persons in the 
 Unity of God. It seems to us that this is exactly what 
 Aristotle, unconsciously, no doubt, catches a glimpse of here 
 both in the soul and in God. 
 
 He calls these three principles : 1. Good in itself (TO /ca0 y 
 avro apiorrov). 2. Thought in itself (vorjais 77 /caO' avrrjv). 
 3. Act or Life in itself (evepyeia Be 77 /caO' avrrjv e/ceivov 
 
 But thought in itself is thought of the Good in itself (r; Be 
 rj /ca6' avTrjv rov Kad' avro aplcrrov) ; and thought 
 and its object, the Good, are one and the same thing (wo-re 
 TCLVTOV vovs KOii vo^Tov). But this mutual possession of 
 thought and its object is its act (euepyel Se excov) ; this act 
 in itself is the life of God (Ixeivov fw??) ; and this excellent, 
 eternal life is God himself (TOVTO yap 6 eo<?). So that the 
 Good, thought, and life, which mutually possess one another, 
 are one and the same thing, and all this is God. 
 
 But what we should particularly note in this quotation is 
 the method manifestly implied in it. 
 
 This method is precisely that of the Platonic dialectic : it 
 is the only and the true method by which to lift one's self 
 to God; it is the chief process of reasoning, a process so 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 24, complete works. 
 
78 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 natural, simple, and direct, so native to reason, that all 
 men, even self-observant thinkers, employ it without knowing 
 it, a process, in fine, which consists, when God is its sub- 
 ject, in attributing to the infinite those finite qualities which 
 we find in ourselves. This is Leibnitz's remark : " God's per- 
 fections are those of our own souls, without the limits to be 
 found there." 
 
 " We taste a fugitive happiness," says Aristotle ; " he pos- 
 sesses it forever." 
 
 We find fugitive happiness within ourselves; the mind 
 grasps this idea of happiness, destroys limitations, does away 
 with time, the past, the future, all change, thus makes hap- 
 piness eternal, and attributes it to God. 
 
 This is not all. What is this happiness ? To be awake, 
 to think, to feel, to live, in brief, this is our good. All this 
 is ours partially ; all this, therefore, must be God's absolutely, 
 infinitely. 
 
 He is forever awake, since he is all act ; there is in him 
 nothing latent or dormant ; nothing which sleeps in the pos- 
 sible and awaits the future; no force which rests while pre- 
 paring its act : all is already act. 
 
 He thinks absolutely. His thought is thought in itself ; 
 it thinks the Good above all good ; and moreover it is that 
 which it thinks. We, when we think, try to touch and to see 
 the intelligible, which may be momentarily permitted to us ; 
 he not only sees and touches the intelligible, but he is him- 
 self that intelligible. His thought does not approach the 
 goal more or less closely, it is the goal. 
 
 He lives absolutely, infinitely, since his life is no other 
 than this act itself, this mutual penetration, and this iden- 
 tity of the intelligent and the intelligible, and since not 
 only he has this life, supreme and eternal, but what is the 
 crowning point, he is himself this life. He is eternal and 
 perfect life. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 79 
 
 So that plainly Aristotle rises here from what he sees in 
 us to God, and passes from the one to the other, positing the 
 infinite everywhere, urging everything towards the absolute, 
 by the suppression of all limitations. 
 
 The fundamental idea of pure act is especially worthy of 
 attention in this connection. We see in everything poten- 
 tiality and act, possible and actual; everything that lives, 
 becomes, grows, tends towards a superior limitation, which it 
 is as impossible to reach as it is by adding unities to unities 
 to reach infinity ; there will always be some possibility to be 
 developed in us, some future to be realized : this is the in- 
 superable and necessary gulf which divides the finite and the 
 infinite. Well ! there is a Being who does not become, who 
 is ; who is absolutely, who is that superior limitation towards 
 which everything moves and which nothing can ever reach, 
 because we do not become infinite; we are infinite. He 
 therefore is infinite; he is absolute development, complete 
 and unlimited life, and the infinity of potentialities already 
 realized. It was in this sense that Saint Thomas Aquinas 
 said, " God is the absolute actuality of all things " (Deus est 
 actualitas omnium rerum). This is what modern sophists 
 fail to understand. But this is surely the sovereign idea 
 which all reason seeks through every finite postulate; this 
 is surely the rational process above all processes: to rise 
 from finite to infinite, from all to God. 
 
 Furthermore : " That there is an eternal, immovable sub- 
 stance, distinct from sensible things, is plain from what we 
 have just said. It is also plain that this substance has no 
 particular size, but that it is without parts, that it is indi- 
 visible. It moves for an infinite time, and nothing finite has 
 an infinite force." 1 
 
 In all these statements there are exact mathematical 
 truths. We see here the origin of the strict idea of the infi- 
 1 Metaph., xii. 7. 
 
80 . GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 nite. Aristotle here catches a glimpse of that formula of 
 prime importance which was not expressed until the seven- 
 teenth century, and even then imperfectly and not by all : 
 that that which is infinite in one sense, is infinite in every 
 sense ; that that which is finite in a single sense is finite in 
 every sense; that the finite and the infinite are absolutely 
 incommunicable ; but that botli exist ; that there are two nat- 
 ural, finite substances, which we see ; that there is one eter- 
 nal, immovable, infinite (without special size), indivisible, and 
 absolutely continuous substance. Aristotle understood that 
 the infinite, the continuous, the indivisible, the eternal, and 
 the essential are one and the same. Elsewhere, however, he 
 wavers, and of the two natural and movable substances he 
 makes one, the heaven, eternal and movable during an in- 
 finite time. This is his mistake in regard to the eternity 
 of the world, a mistake which contradicts his own formu- 
 las. He ought to see that nothing eternal can be finite, or 
 that nothing finite can be of infinite duration; as he sees 
 that nothing finite can have infinite power. This is the 
 same thing. 
 
 V. 
 
 A question now remains to be solved, which we should 
 scarcely have expected to see Aristotle consider, it seems to 
 us so simple. 
 
 " Must this essence be regarded as unique ? or are there 
 several of them ? And if there are several, how many are 
 there ? " l 
 
 Now, here we find in the text an apparent contradiction 
 of so singular a nature that the author of the finest modern 
 work on Aristotle which we have, 2 does not fear to assert 
 that one of the terms of the contradiction is nothing else 
 than a thesis, which Aristotle first develops, that he may 
 
 1 Metaph., xii. 8. 2 M. Ravaisson. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 81 
 
 contest it later ; as, for instance, when Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas begins his theses by positing the antitheses. But 
 this explanation does not really agree with the text. 1 Aris- 
 totle admitted that the world was eternal : this was a source 
 of error to him. He is obliged to admit, as it were by 
 consequences, not only a first God, but other secondary 
 Gods, also eternal, immovable, and indivisible. But neither 
 the ancients nor Saint Thomas mention the smallest contra- 
 diction in this chapter. There is no contradiction, there are 
 errors. Aristotle begins by declaring that " the primary 
 cause of beings, the first being, is motionless, whether in 
 himself or accidentally, and that it is he who imparts to 
 everything the first, eternal, and simple motion. 2 But," he 
 adds, " besides the simple, universal motion, which we say is 
 produced by the essence of the prime immovable, we also 
 see in the world other eternal motions, those of the planets, 3 
 
 1 Besides, Aristotle proves in his Physics, to which he refers here, that 
 the motions of the planets are eternal, and that eternal motion can only be 
 produced by an eternal motor, and any motion whatsoever by a motionless 
 motor. Saint Thomas Aqninas refers us, for these proofs, to the book on 
 Physics and the one on the Heaven. 
 
 2 Metaph., xii. 8. 
 
 8 Aristotle here alludes at first to the diurnal motion which seems to carry 
 the whole celestial vault through a revolution of twenty-four hours' duration : 
 this is what he calls the simple, primary motion ; then he speaks of the 
 various movements of the planets, each of which seems to add a motion of its 
 own to this general and primary movement. Aristotle rests too much here 
 upon the postulates of experience as the senses have given them to him. 
 Plato also rested upon the experience of the senses, but he used his reason 
 more, was freer from the illusion of the senses, less directly ready to accept it 
 as the type of truth. In regard to the heaven and the stars, Plato probably 
 accepted Pythagorean ideas, and distrusted appearances. But Aristotle, lim- 
 iting knowledge on this point to what he saw, boldly asserts that there are 
 seven motionless, eternal motors, because there are seven planets ; and that 
 the eighth sphere, that of the fixed stars, is moved by the immovable, 
 eternal, and primary motor. Upon which Saint Thomas says (Paris edition, 
 vol. iv. p. 453, commmentary on book xii. chap. 8 of Aristotle's Metaphysics) 
 that in Aristotle's day astronomers had not yet observed, as the) r have since, 
 the proper movement of fixed stars ; but that thence Aristotle in every case, 
 in his system, asserts the existence of too few motors. 
 
 6 
 
82 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 for every spherical body is eternal, and cannot cease to be 
 in motion : we have proved this by physics. Each of these 
 movements, therefore, must be produced by an essence im- 
 movable in itself and eternal ; for the nature of the stars is 
 eternal in its essence. ... It is therefore evident that there 
 must necessarily be as many essences, eternal in their 
 nature, immovable in themselves, and indivisible." 1 This 
 established, Aristotle again returns to the one first motion- 
 less motor, the first essence. He says that it alone is im- 
 material, because it is all act ; that nothing of it is in a 
 potential state, and that it has its end in itself, as is expressed 
 by the Greek word entelechy 2 (eV, reXo?, e%&>z>), and he con- 
 cludes : " The first motionless motor is therefore a Unity 
 both as regards form and number." 3 
 
 But even after this he falls back into his error concerning 
 several secondary gods, and says that the fabulous mythology 
 of the ancients contains this basis of truth, "That the stars 
 are gods, and that the divine surrounds all nature (OTI 6eoi 
 re cl&iv ovrot KOI Tre/ote^et TO Oeiov rrjv o\r)v <uen,i>);" and 
 these secondary gods are distinguished by Aristotle from the 
 sovereign God, in that he alone is first, in that he alone is 
 immovable loth in himself and accidentally, he alone is all 
 act, has his end in himself, and is entelechy. The others 
 are not all act, they are immovable by themselves, but 
 movable accidentally. He alone, again, is the first desirable 
 and the first intelligible, and the sovereign Good. 
 
 VL 
 
 God's relations with the world, according to Aristotle, are 
 these : 
 
 "We must now consider 4 how universal nature includes the 
 Good, the sovereign Good. Is it as a separate being, existing in 
 i Metaph., xii. 8. * Ibid . 3 Ibid . 4 Ibid<> 10 . 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 83 
 
 itself, or rather as the cosmic order, or in both ways at once, as in 
 an army 1 For the good of an army is its order, and it is also, 
 its chief, particularly its chief: order does not constitute the 
 leader, it is the leader who gives order." 
 
 Aristotle admits both, and shows the absurdities which 
 flow from any other system. Those, for instance, who do 
 not accept the supreme Good as a separate principle existing 
 by itself, those who " derive beings from non-being, or, 
 to escape this necessity, reduce everything to absolute 
 unity." 1 
 
 Here Aristotle stigmatizes, as Plato does, the old absur- 
 dity of atheism which derives being from non-being, as well 
 as the old absurdity of pantheism, which refers everything 
 to absolute identity. He thus at once attacks the present 
 German sophists at both ends, those alike who admit non- 
 being and absolute identity, and who still fancy that in 
 Aristotle they have a powerful ally. Aristotle at the same 
 time refutes those who admit of two opposite principles, 
 as these sophists also do, and shows that they " are forced 
 to give an opposite to supreme knowledge and wisdom, 
 an excess which we avoid," 2 says Aristotle. " The first prin- 
 ciple has no opposite (ov yap larlv evavriov rw irpwrtd 
 oi)6ev). The first principle is unique. Those who take for 
 their principle number and an infinite series of essences, 
 each essence having its principle, make the universe a collec- 
 tion of episodes and a host of principles (eVe^ro&wS?; rrjv 
 rov Travrbs ovcriav iroiovcnv . . . KOI ap^a^ TroXXa?). But 
 beings do not wish to be ill-governed. Homer says, "A 
 multiplicity of leaders is of no avail. Let one alone 
 rule : 
 
 " OVK dyadov TroXvKoipavirj. Eis Koipavos eoro>." 8 
 
 Thus closes, with the twelfth book of Aristotle's Meta- 
 physics, this fine abstract of a Theodicy. 
 
 ""ORNIA. . 
 
 Metaph., xii. 10. 2 Ibid. II. ii. 204^ ' 
 
84 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 VII. 
 
 It was doubtless to his Metaphysics that Aristotle alluded, 
 when, on Alexander's reproaching him for having revealed 
 the sublimities of knowledge, he replied, " I have so revealed 
 them as not to reveal them." It is still true that these books, 
 more than any of his others, earned for Aristotle the title of 
 the Dark. 
 
 In his work on the World he is clearer. 1 After developing 
 his ideas in regard to the world, he adds, 
 
 " It remains for us to speak briefly of the cause which contains 
 and governs the whole. An old tradition, circulated among all 
 mankind by our fathers, tells us that everything comes from God 
 and through God, that no nature suffices unto itself (ovSe/xta Se 
 <f>vcris avTTj KaO 1 eavrrjv ecrnv aurapKrys), and exists only by his help. 
 . . . God is, in fact, the preserver and Father of all that is in the 
 world, and he acts in everything that acts, not as the workman 
 who labors and grows weary, but as an omnipotent virtue which 
 operates. . . . 2 
 
 "We must know of God that his might is irresistible, his beauty 
 complete, his life immortal, his virtue supreme, and that, invisible 
 to any mortal nature, he is visible in his works. And surely all 
 motions and all beings which are in the air, on the earth, or in the 
 waters, are really the works of God, who contains the universe. . . . 3 
 
 "God is an immutable law, a law which can be neither changed 
 nor corrected, a law holier and better than the laws written on our 
 tables. Governing all by incessant activity and infallible harmony, 
 he directs and orders the entire universe, heaven and earth, and 
 diffuses himself throughout all beings. . . . 4 
 
 " He is One, but he has several names, derived from his various 
 modes of action in the woild. Does it not seem that when we call 
 him both Zena, and Dia we mean Him ~by whom we live ? . . . 5 
 
 1 I know that the authenticity of this book is contested. But there is a 
 passion for disputing the authenticity of books to which we should only yield 
 on decisive proof. 
 
 2 De Mundo, vi. p. 397. 4 Ibid. p. 401. 
 8 Ibid., p. 399. . 6 ibid. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 85 
 
 "All these names stand for God alone, as the noble Plato re- 
 marks. God therefore, according to ancient tradition, is the be- 
 ginning, end, and middle of all that is, and traverses all nature in 
 a straight line (showing to all things his direct course), ever fol- 
 lowed by justice, the avenger of those who transgress upon this 
 divine line, justice which all should possess who desire to attain 
 in the future to a state of blessedness, and all who desire to be 
 happy in the present." 1 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Certainly all that precedes is grand and beautiful, but we 
 now come to a point where Aristotle's genius seems to us 
 amazing. 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas 2 asserts that Aristotle first called 
 attention to the great distinction between the two degrees of 
 the divine intelligible, which we have already encountered in 
 Plato. 
 
 Doubtless Aristotle is far from having seen the whole of 
 this vast question: that was impossible in his day. But 
 evidently he saw the truth, and grasped certain features of 
 it with admirable precision. 
 
 In the first place, he distinguishes in man, with perfect 
 distinctness, the two lights which Saint Augustine calls light 
 which illuminates and the light which is illuminated, and 
 which Fe'nelon describes as the reason which borrows and the 
 reason which gives. " Everywhere in nature," says Aristotle, 
 " we find the distinction between that which is only in the 
 potential state, and that which, being already actual, pro- 
 duces the passage from potentiality to act. This distinction 
 necessarily recurs in the soul. There is a passive intellect 
 capable of becoming anything, and there is an active intellect 
 capable of producing everything. The latter is like the light. 
 Light converts into actual fact colors which only exist in 
 potentiality. So, too, separable intellect (distinct from man), 
 
 1 De Mundo, close of the book. 2 Contra Gentes, cap. iii. 3. 
 
86 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 impassive and entirely pure, is act in essence. . . . That in- 
 tellect is Being itself, it alone is immortal, eternal, and with- 
 out it the passive intellect can do nothing." 1 
 
 Aristotle, therefore, perceived, in the analysis of reason, 
 that fundamental distinction which Fdnelon develops so 
 finely, between the reason which is within us, and the reason 
 which is God himself. 
 
 In all his works he recurs to this. He everywhere main- 
 tains that this principle, intelligent and intelligible, pure in- 
 tellect, is not the same thing as the soul, 2 and that neither 
 perception (alaOdvecrOcu), 3 memory, nor ordinary thought 
 (Sofae>), 4 nor reasoning (Xo7<r/zo<?), 5 nor any discursive in- 
 tellectual act (Sidvoia)? " are the functions of contemplative 
 intellect (vovs QewprjTiKos), 7 but rather the functions of man, 
 who gives life to that intellect." 8 
 
 This intellect is radically distinct from the soul, it is a 
 being and a substance apart which supervenes in man (6 Se 
 vovs eoitcev e<yylveo-0ai, oixria rt? ovcra) ; 9 which supervenes 
 from without (OvpaOev) ; 10 which is divine (Oelov elvai)\ 
 which is separable from the soul as the eternal from the 
 perishable (eVSe^erat ^(opl^aOai, KaOdirep TO dt'Siov rov 
 (f)0aprov') ; n which is in us as another kind of soul (eoi/cc tyv^s 
 7eVo<? erepov eivai) ; as a light which not only is not given 
 to animals, but which does not even seem to be granted to all 
 men (aXX' ovSe rot? dv6pu>irois vrao-t). 12 This latter assertion 
 would correspond with those solemn words of holy Scripture : 
 " The sun of intelligence has not risen upon them." 13 
 
 Aristotle, clearly, here refers to the final perfection of in- 
 
 1 De Anima, iii. 5. * Ibid. 7 Ibid. 
 
 2 Ibid., i. 2. 5 ibid., ii. 3. 8 Ibid., i. 4. 
 8 Ibid., 5. 6 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 
 
 10 De Generat. Amina, ii. 3, and ii. 6. n De Anima, ii. 2. 
 
 12 "Intelligence, in the sense in which we understand it, does not seem to 
 exist indifferently in all animals, or even in all men" (De Anima, i. 2). 
 
 1 3 Wisdom, v. 6. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 87 
 
 telligence, its end and last term, which Plato calls the term 
 of the intellectual procedure, and Saint Augustine, reason 
 attaining its end, a termination which consists, accord- 
 ing to Aristotle, in seeing the intelligible as he sees him- 
 self, in seeing him by touching him (Oiyydvcov /cal vowv), and 
 in becoming one with him (ware ravrbv vov$ /cal VOTJTOV) ; 
 which Saint Augustine also considers as the proper charac- 
 teristic of the vision of God. But this contemplation, says 
 Aristotle, which is happiness, and which, in God, is continu- 
 ous, is only granted to man at rare intervals. 1 
 
 Our mind is naturally in respect to this high degree of 
 light as the eye of the owl in respect to the sun. 2 God 
 always sees this pure intelligible light, it is himself : in God 
 intelligence and the intelligible are identical. 3 But with re- 
 gard to us, this divine light is supernatural ; and the soul, in 
 so far as we consider it as illuminated by this light, is not 
 purely natural* This light, according to Aristotle, does not 
 come by generation. The soul, in so far as vegetative, sensi- 
 tive, rational, that is to say, in so far as including life, ani- 
 mality, and humanity, the soul comes by generation, and 
 develops with the total germ. But this light of intelligence 
 alone comes to man otherwise, it only is divine. 5 
 
 This light is the end and object of man, and the sovereign 
 good consists in its contemplation. 
 
 So thinks and says Aristotle. We will consider these 
 extracts further elsewhere. Let the reader ponder well the 
 beautiful words which follow : 
 
 " If it be true that happiness is virtue in act, it is, above all, the 
 act of the highest virtue ; it is, above all, the act of that which is 
 best in man. Whether this best be the intellect, or any other 
 principle which, by nature, should prevail in man, and which pos- 
 
 1 Metaph., xii. 7. 4 Part. Anim., p. 641. 
 
 2 Ibid., ii. 1. 5 De Generat. Anim., ii. 2. 
 8 Ibid., xii. 7. 
 
88 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 sesses in itself the light of the divine and the good; whether this 
 test be the divine itself, or that which is most divine in man, in 
 any case it is the action of that principle, acting in harmony with 
 its own peculiar virtue, which must constitute perfect happiness. 
 We have already said that this action is contemplation. . . . But such 
 a life is superior to the life of man : it is not in that he is man that 
 he mill live thus, but in that a divine principle lives within him ; 1 
 and inasmuch as this principle differs from that compound which 
 is man, just so much will its action triumph over the action of 
 every other virtue. If the intellect be divine relatively to the 
 man, the life according to its action will be divine relatively to 
 human life. Man, therefore, according to the warning of the 
 wise, must learn to rise above the mere human, to lose all sense 
 of anything mortal, and to live immortally with the life of the 
 higher principle which lives within him." 
 
 Let the reader take heed lest he forget these fragments 
 from Aristotle. We shall make use of them again. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Let us close this study of Aristotle's theodicy with two re- 
 marks, one concerning the method, and the other the result. 
 
 As regards the method, it is plain that Aristotle used both 
 processes of reasoning. This we have seen. Nothing else 
 was possible ; but Aristotle did not always realize this with 
 sufficient distinctness. 
 
 Aristotle possessed that profound good sense peculiar to 
 the genius which seeks truth rather than the mere means of 
 finding it. He was particularly free from the unbearable 
 sophistical madness which demands absolute proof of every- 
 thing. " It is ridiculous " (<ye\oiov), he said, " to pretend to 
 prove that nature exists." " There are some," he says else- 
 where, "who admit of no other proofs than mathematical 
 ones ; others who only need to have examples ; others love to 
 
 1 Moral, ad Nicom., x. 7. 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 89 
 
 lean upon the authority of the poets. There are some who 
 demand that everything should be accurately proved, while 
 others find such accuracy unendurable. . . . And it must be 
 confessed that there is a certain futility beneath the pretence 
 of accuracy. . . . We should not exact mathematical accuracy 
 in everything, save in the case of abstract things." 
 
 Thus it was not a foregone conclusion with Aristotle to 
 apply syllogistic deduction to every question. He knew and 
 he maintained that majors were not to be found in this way, 
 but rather by the other process, induction (eirayoyytj). At 
 times he even calls this process Dialectic, with Plato . " This," 
 he said, " is the bent of dialectic : it is an investigator by 
 nature, and searches out the first principles in every branch 
 of learning." 1 This we shall discuss more fully in logic. 
 But we must confess that Aristotle errs in not recognizing 
 the Platonic dialectic as one of the two processes of reason- 
 ing, that which leads to God, that which he himself em- 
 ployed in his search for the first principle, for the Being all 
 act, the eternal and perfect living one. He often unwit- 
 tingly veils, disguises, and hinders this simple and powerful 
 process, by the syllogistic form. Hence those strange majors 
 which are the weak side of Aristotle, the point at which mod- 
 ern thinkers attack him. For instance, " Every spherical body 
 is eternal, and is eternally in motion." This is what revolted, 
 and justly so, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
 
 But what we also affirm is that these majors were often 
 the fruit of the profoundest thought, and the legitimate re- 
 sult of the process which reason possesses for the discovery 
 of majors. Such is, for instance, one which is fundamental 
 with Aristotle, and of which we have already spoken : " Every- 
 thing that moves is moved by some other thing, or, rather, 
 Nothing is self -moving!' Who would imagine that, in another 
 form, this major is the precise point from which Descartes 
 starts to find God ? This we shall show. 
 
 1 Top., i. 2. 
 
90 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 We have only to recall that movement, with Aristotle, means 
 the path from potentiality to act. Thus Aristotle's major 
 means : Everything that passes from potentiality to act, passes 
 thus only under the action of a cause already in act. Now, is 
 it not clear that Descartes sees the same truth and translates 
 Aristotle's algebra into ordinary speech, when he says : " I 
 know that I am an imperfect, incomplete thing, dependent 
 upon another, constantly tending and aspiring towards some- 
 thing better and greater than myself ; but I also know, at 
 the same time, that he upon whom I depend, possesses in 
 himself all those great things to which I aspire, . . . not 
 indefinitely and only IN POTENTIALITY, but that he en- 
 joys them indeed ACTUALLY and INFINITELY, and so he 
 is God." Descartes therefore saw, like Aristotle, the created 
 being passing from potentiality to act; now, he could not 
 thus pass into act and tend towards the best, save under the 
 influence of a cause which is not in potentiality, but in act : 
 and this cause which is ever in act is God. We see that this 
 is precisely Aristotle's major. It is also exactly the process 
 of Plato, who found the immutable in the variable, and the 
 infinite in the finite. And,- in fact, Plato says the selfsame 
 things in the Timaeus. He first asserts the absolute distinc- 
 tion between that which becomes and that which is abso- 
 lutely ; that is to say, of that which passes from potentiality 
 to act, and that which is already all act. " Let us first dis- 
 tinguish the being which is always and which has not to be- 
 come, from the being which becomes and never is entirely. 
 Now, all that which becomes, necessarily becomes under the 
 influence of a cause. For it is impossible for any being to 
 become without an author." In other words, there is no effect 
 without a cause. This is exactly Aristotle's major : Nothing 
 passes from potentiality to act, save through a cause already 
 in act. And it is in this truth that Plato, like Descartes, 
 sees the proof of the existence of God : " We have said that 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 91 
 
 all which becomes, must needs have an author who is the cause 
 of its becoming. But to find and know this author and this 
 father of all, is a grand work." l 
 
 Here then, in regard to this fundamental starting-point 
 and in regard to the process which leads to God, we trace 
 Descartes back to Plato, and, what we did not expect, to 
 Aristotle. This is because the human mind is one, and truth 
 is one. By God's goodness, man stands face to face with 
 truth, and the light shines for every man coming into this 
 world. All those who see, see the same things, and all that a 
 man has seen is true. So Saint Thomas and Saint Augustine 
 alike affirm. Thus, at bottom, all geniuses of the first order 
 agree ; and there is one human universal philosophy, which, 
 from this fact, has been accepted, elevated, consecrated and 
 crowned by Christian theology. There are none to contradict 
 this whole, divine and human, save the never-ending sect of 
 error, which, by a satanic method, succeeds in breaking away 
 from reason and turning away its head, that it may not see. 
 
 Our second remark in regard to Aristotle's Theodicy relates 
 to its result. 
 
 It is clear that this result is that of Plato, that of all wise 
 men, of all men subject to common-sense and followers 
 of reason. Aristotle we have cited all the texts ad- 
 mits of a God distinct from the world and present in the 
 world, all natures in which he pervades and penetrates, a 
 living, omnipotent God, the first cause, efficient cause, final 
 cause ; motionless motor, only being wholly in act, that is to 
 say the only being perfectly immutable, a perfect and eternal 
 living being ; a God who is sovereign goodness and supreme 
 good ; a God infinitely intelligent, since he is identical with 
 the intelligible itself, and since his act, his life, consists in 
 the very possession of that intelligible which is identical with 
 him ; a God invisible in himself, visible in his works ; a 
 
 1 Timaeus, p. 28. 
 
92 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 God governing all by his action and by his Providence, as a 
 leader governs an army ; a just God, who punishes free man, 
 the violator of his unchanging law, and rewards by happi- 
 ness, now and in the future, those who cling fast to justice. 
 
 We see that this is Plato, it is tradition, it is common- 
 sense, it is universal wisdom. 
 
 Aristotle here fully confirms Plato's saying: "All wise 
 men have but a single voice." 
 
 It is therefore certain, let us repeat it, and insist upon this 
 point, it is certain that there are universal truths in regard 
 to which all philosophers agree, if by philosophers we mean 
 sages, and not sophists. There is a universal philosophy, a 
 natural and common wisdom, which is the same in all men 
 amenable to the light of reason. All thinkers of the first 
 rank plainly come under this head. The sophists are outside 
 this guild. They are the heretics of reason, the sectarians of 
 humanity. As there are in the Catholic Church articles of 
 faith, there are in mankind articles of never-ending reason. 
 And this universal wisdom is only denied by the false and 
 vain minds whose pride prevents them from obeying the 
 dictates of common-sense, and whose intellectual weakness 
 at the same time forbids them from rising to the luminous 
 society of great minds, souls separated who do not live by 
 the heart, in the fruitful warmth of the common sun, and 
 who can no longer attain, in spirit, to the contemplation of 
 the light which would lead back their hearts to the true 
 source of life. These sad souls, doubly sectarian, doubly sep- 
 arated 1 from the universal faith and the common reason, 
 unfortunately exist in vast numbers in this age. And the 
 leaders of this perversion possess an audacity which the 
 sophists never had, they aspire to a radical change of the 
 human conscience and the human mind and the government 
 of the world. They undertake, and they avow it, to alter 
 
 1 Eradicate, bis mortuae (Epist. cath. B. Judse, 12). 
 
ARISTOTLE'S THEODICY. 93 
 
 universal logic and the meaning of human language. But 
 they will not succeed. They will, on the contrary, serve; and 
 we intend, for our part, to use them for this purpose : they 
 will serve clearly to separate the light from the darkness, by 
 themselves becoming darkness, and to make the truth more 
 apparent by proving it through their own absurdity. 
 
 If we divide into two classes the men who have thought 
 or pretended to think , if we call the one philosophers or 
 sages, the others sophists, Aristotle, as we see, has nothing 
 in common with the sophists of any age. He is a philoso- 
 pher properly so called, and one of the seven or eight ge- 
 niuses of the first order. Let us again remark that he has 
 nothing in common with that kind of mind now known as 
 rationalists, who are the minds hesitating between sophistry 
 and philosophy, always much nearer to the one than to 
 the other ; minds less keen for results than for mere proofs ; 
 bold and prejudiced minds, which create for themselves ex- 
 clusive methods, and reject all that does not come within the 
 compass of these methods ; who abuse individual reason by 
 excluding in advance all which it has not built up in each 
 of them ; who shut it out alike from all faith and all tradi- 
 tion and the thought of other minds, alike from feeling, 
 from the heart, and from knowledge of visible nature ; who, 
 besides, mutilate reason itself, and always take its clear 
 side and remove its warm side, the source of all light; 
 ignoring what Seneca said : " Reason is not made up of 
 evidence alone ; its best and greatest side is hidden and 
 obscure." 
 
 Aristotle, through his profound good sense, the precision 
 of his results, his respect for the thought of others and for 
 healthy antiquity, through his great knowledge of natural 
 facts, his intellectual universality, has nothing in common 
 with these unfortunate and sterile eccentrics. 
 
 The foregoing is enough, we hope, to justify the admira- 
 
94 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 tion of the great Catholic scholars of the Middle Ages for 
 Aristotle. Aristotle has too long been rejected by Bacon, 
 Descartes, and above all, by Protestantism. If classical stud- 
 ies ever revive among us, Aristotle will resume his proper 
 place. That vigorous genius may yet aid us to cast aside 
 those flabby and facile habits of thought which weaken the 
 mind, and to return to strong certainties, to recover that 
 strength of reason which now eludes us, and with humble 
 and firm penetration to subject this reason to the super- 
 natural light of divine contemplation, so that we may " rise 
 above man and his mortal feelings to live on a higher 
 plane than man, the life of the superior principle which 
 lives within us." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 
 
 Quidquid a flatone dicitur, vivit in Augustino. 
 
 TT7E now pass from the ancients to the moderns; from 
 Greek philosophers to Christian sages regarded as 
 philosophers ; from Aristotle and Plato to Saint Augustine^ 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas, and others. We shall see at the 
 first glance that Saint Augustine clings to the school of 
 Plato, and Saint Thomas to that of Aristotle. Neither of 
 them tries to disguise it. 
 
 I do not know why Christians are sometimes accused 
 of abjuring philosophy, of killing reason by faith. We 
 shall now find occasion to throw some light on this 
 point. 
 
 Thomassin states it is an historic fact that Christian 
 scholars, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century exclu- 
 sively, formed themselves, as philosophers, in the school of 
 Aristotle ; whereas the Fathers of the first centuries were 
 formed in Plato's school. 
 
 This being an undoubted fact, it follows that the Christian 
 doctors of no century ever abjured philosophy. 
 
 And in fact, all teach that philosophy and theology, prop- 
 erly so called, are two not separate, but distinct things, that 
 there is a divine knowledge and a human knowledge, which 
 are wholly distinct, and that true Christian knowledge lies 
 in the union of the two, without ever destroying the one by 
 the other. Saint Thomas asserts, and faith teaches us, "that 
 
96 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 in Jesus Christ divine knowledge does not destroy human 
 knowledge, but, on the contrary, renders it more luminous." 
 Such is also, in our opinion, the relation between these two 
 kinds of knowledge. 
 
 Human knowledge that is, philosophy from the ortho- 
 dox point of view, therefore, exists, and will always exist ; 
 just as there will always be a human mind different from 
 the mind of God. 
 
 This is why Christians, when the Gospel light illumined 
 the world, did not have to change the elements of genuine 
 philosophy then extant. They had merely to accept them, 
 just as they could not otherwise than admit geometry They 
 received Plato and Aristotle, in the bulk of their works, as 
 they accepted Euclid. 
 
 Certainly they developed philosophy, and will develop it 
 still farther : they have purged it of many errors, but they 
 have never changed its principles or its bases. We shall 
 invent no other rules for syllogism than those given us by 
 Aristotle ; and we shall discover no other process of rea- 
 soning than the two processes represented by Aristotle and 
 Plato. Thus there is a philosophy properly so called, dis- 
 tinct from revelation. 
 
 The prejudice prevailing among many men of the world, 
 I know, is that philosophy does not exist. This is an error 
 due to the same ignorance which leads so many others to 
 believe that divine revelation does not exist. There is a 
 philosophy. What is it? we are asked. We answer that 
 it is the philosophy of Socrates, of Plato, of Aristotle, cf 
 Saint Augustine, of Saint Thomas Aquinas, of Descartes, of 
 Bossuet, of Leibnitz, and of all geniuses of the first order, 
 without a single exception. 
 
 I do not say that philosophy has yet attained to its fullest 
 strength, or even that all its organs are perfectly developed ; 
 I do not say that it is yet at every point fully aware of its 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 97 
 
 method ; above all, I do not say that it has a very great 
 number of followers : but I say that it has existed in the 
 human race for long centuries back, and independently of 
 Christian revelation. 
 
 Hear Saint Augustine on this head. " As for what con- 
 cerns speculative philosophy," he says, "and moral philo- 
 sophy as well, there is no lack of keen and clever minds to 
 show us that Aristotle and Plato agree, although the inat- 
 tentive and incapable suppose them to be very wide apart ; 
 so that in my opinion, the struggle and strife of thought, 
 with the help of centuries, have at last produced a genuine 
 philosophy (una verissimcc philosophies disciplina)" Only, 
 as Saint Augustine instantly adds, this philosophy, even 
 begotten by human reason, could not become popular save 
 through the incarnate Word, which is profoundly true. 
 
 Saint Augustine believes so fully that philosophy exists 
 in the presence of revelation that he goes on to say : " And, 
 to tell you my entire thought, know that whatever may be 
 this human wisdom, I do not believe I yet possess it as an 
 entirety. I am now thirty-three years old ; but that is no 
 reason to despair of attaining it. I despise all else, all 
 that men deem advantages, and I devote my life to seek- 
 ing after it. ... I have, on the one hand, Christ's authority, 
 from which nothing shall part me ; . . . but for that which 
 the effort of my reason can attain, I am decided to possess 
 the truth, not only through faith, but also through intelli- 
 gence ; and in this connection I believe I find in Plato 
 doctrines which agree with our dogmas." So speaks the 
 humility of genius and sanctity. 
 
 And it is well to observe that these texts, according to 
 Thomassin, who quotes them, and according to the Bene- 
 dictines, are not those to which Augustine refers in his 
 Pietractations, when he believed that he had given too much 
 praise to Plato and the Platonists. 
 
 7 
 
98 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 These texts, therefore, are decisive. The saint in the 
 school of Christ reads Plato. And why ? To possess, if he 
 may, the human mind in its entirety, all reason, all hu- 
 man reason, to the end that he may bring back to God 
 the whole man, and subject all to Jesus Christ. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us now recall the way in which Plato distinguishes 
 two degrees in the advance of the human mind towards 
 intelligible light. 
 
 There are in the world of intelligence these two degrees, 
 vision of shadows, and vision of eternal realities ; in other 
 words, there is vision of God himself, God, who is the 
 sovereign Good, and vision of divine phantoms, shadows 
 of that which is. What are these divine phantoms, these 
 eternal shadows of that which is eternally ? They are the 
 essential truths, the laws and axioms, the unchanging rules 
 OJT definitions, of geometry, logic, and morals. This is the 
 .first degree of intellectual vision lifted above the senses ; 
 and from this vision of unchanging shadows, the soul infers 
 the existence of a sun capable of producing these shadows. 
 This is the work of Platonism, but nothing more. It has 
 recognized by a legitimate process the existence of the sun ; 
 it has surmised its beauty, its benefits. Has it seen the 
 sun itself? We say, No. 
 
 To see God ! This is the business of Christianity. " No 
 man has ever seen God," says the gospel. It is the incarnate 
 Word that brings to man the possibility of the vision of 
 God himself, the direct and immediate vision. Through 
 the incarnate Word we shall cease to guess at the sun from 
 the shadow, we shall see the sun itself. 
 
 In our present state, our physical eye is not framed to 
 look upon the visible sun, but only to behold the world in 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 99 
 
 the light of that sun. The eye is not made for the source 
 of light, but only for the objects which the rays from that 
 source strike. This fact is full of deep meaning. It is the 
 same with our soul. In the natural state of man, in that 
 state with which we are familiar, our soul is incapable of 
 seeing God himself ; but it is made for the light which he 
 diffuses, and which he sheds upon that soul and upon all 
 objects. To see God himself requires a modification of hu- 
 man nature, a conversion, a transformation ; or, rather, a 
 new birth, which man cannot by his own efforts attain, and 
 which God alone, who created him, can give him. After 
 this supernatural new birth, the soul can and should see 
 God. And its first look at God is faith, faith, which is 
 dim at first, like the first .inkling of a great light, but which 
 becomes clear vision in proportion to the growth of our 
 soul. "Faith, that attempt at vision," says Bossuet; "Faith, 
 that dawning vision," says Saint Thomas Aquinas. 
 
 This established, we can grasp the difference between 
 Plato and Saint Augustine, and understand why we took as 
 heading to this sketch, the words: "All that Plato says, lives 
 in Augustine." 
 
 The first difference between Plato and Augustine is, that 
 Augustine is, as it were, the type by which Plato is judged. 
 Every one judges in this way, theologians, philosophers, 
 Christians, and others. We prune away in Plato, as acci- 
 dental excrescences, all that does not fit this type; we 
 praise and admire all that reminds us of it. We strive to 
 discover, in the great philosopher, beams of that light which 
 bathes us in the great saint. The fact is that the Theodicy 
 of Christian philosophers, the fruit of human reason, sus- 
 tained and directed in its search after God by that great and 
 new divine postulate which is faith, is no longer, like the 
 ancient Theodicy, a dawn mingled with shadows and illu- 
 sions, seen by scarce one or two men who watch upon the 
 mountains ; it is broad day, visible to the whole world. 
 
100 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 We have p'ointed out the method and results of Plato's 
 Theodicy. Is it necessary to say that in Saint Augustine, 
 considered solely as a philosopher, the results as to God 
 are perfect, exact, absolute, uri mixed with error, doubt, or 
 hesitation ? 
 
 Why ? Because Saint Augustine did, as a moral and 
 intellectual means of rising to God, precisely what Plato 
 directs : he purified himself, kept himself holy, detached 
 himself from earth, wrested from his soul those nails to 
 which Plato refers, by which pleasure holds us -fast; he 
 despised honors, riches, sensual delights ; he turned his whole 
 soul to God, lived in his love and contemplation : antique 
 and simple truths which the light of reason teaches to those 
 who think, but between seeing and practising which there is 
 a gulf. It is easy for me to say that I ought to keep myself 
 holy; but it is less easy to do it, and to cross the gulf. Now, 
 the gulf was crossed by Plato and by Augustine. When we 
 measure the progress of "that universal man" of whom Pas- 
 cal speaks, the progress of the human mind compared in 
 these two brother geniuses, we seem to see but a single man, 
 first in his early and poetic youth, then in the strength of 
 maturity. In his youth, when he was Plato, he loved virtue 
 and truth ; he said to himself, " I will be good, and I will 
 possess knowledge ; I will know the mysteries of this beau- 
 tiful world ; I will become acquainted with him who is its 
 Father and author ; " and he foresaw and pursued this ideal 
 in his rich imagination : and now, after cruel struggles, after 
 a whole lifetime of labor and courage ; after many prayers, 
 tears, and victories ; after learning by experience the source of 
 strength ; after a new alliance with God, with God no longer 
 dreamed of as a poetic spectacle, but possessed as the sub- 
 stance of life, this man, at last triumphant, and upheld 
 by the Father in whom he trusted, this man knows the truth ; 
 he is good, and carries in his soul, matured by the sun of 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 101 
 
 God, the forces and virtues of the fruits whereof his youth 
 bore the flowers. 
 
 Such are Plato and Augustine, if we compare the results. 
 
 As for the theory of the method, the difference cannot be 
 the same. Plato is particularly interested in the method, 
 Augustine in the results. Nevertheless the general light 
 which the saint possesses in an incomparably greater degree 
 than the Greek philosopher, gives the saint a much clearer 
 knowledge of the soul, and one especially more experimental ; 
 whence necessarily result new and vivid lights upon the pro- 
 cedure of the soul in its flight towards God. 
 
 Thus, Plato affirms that the mainspring of the dialectic or 
 of the passage of the soul to God is love. Saint Augustine, 
 who possesses that love in the highest degree, knows this far 
 better than Plato, and expresses it better. Plato speaks of the 
 divine sense, or at least of that divine part of the soul where 
 God touches it, binds it to himself. Saint Augustine knows 
 this sense of God by experience ; in him the inner senses are 
 all developed; he knows that inward touch of God, those 
 inward perfumes, those savors of the soul, and those vis- 
 ions, those divine voices which spoke to him with far greater 
 clearness than to Socrates, and which did not merely bid him 
 abstain, but act, as when he heard the words, Tolle, legc. 
 
 Better than Plato he knew the vanity of all transitory 
 things, of all that is born and dies, and he is still less a prey 
 to them, whether in practice or in speculation. And yet he 
 is never excessive : he does not, like Plato, call them appear- 
 ances which do not exist ; he calls them ffie things which are 
 less, which, compared to God, do not exist, which is the most 
 exact and precise truth. He knows their use and their re- 
 lation to God better than Plato ; better than Plato he knows 
 how they proceed from God, how they belong to God, how 
 we may see God in them. 
 
 Better than Plato, he sees the emptiness of those eternal 
 
102 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 shadows, those divine phantoms, those cold, geometrical, log- 
 ical, or other truths, which we recognize in ourselves by the 
 light of God. Better than he, he understands that they are 
 not God, but his shadow seen in the mirror of the soul ; 
 more than he, he seeks and longs for the sun capable of 
 casting those shadows. 
 
 Another high advantage of Saint Augustine over Plato, 
 is that he clearly explains that the fulcrum of the process 
 which leads to God is not only the material world, but also 
 and more especially the inward world which is our soul ; he 
 is intimately acquainted with the soul, and knows better than 
 Plato how it differs from and how it resembles God. The 
 ancients, Plato himself, knew their souls but slightly, through 
 experience. Upon this head, Christians are incomparable ; 
 the saints and mystics are the only men who possess true 
 knowledge of the soul. 
 
 Lastly, it is very plain that Plato, who, according to our 
 views and those of most of the Fathers, does not posit ideas 
 elsewhere than in God, nevertheless failed to develop this 
 point in a thoroughly lucid way, or to assert this truth so 
 exactly and so often as Saint Augustine. It seems as if 
 Plato, too clear-sighted to posit his eternal ideas elsewhere 
 than in God, dared not explain that they are in God, and 
 how they are there. Augustine is exact and complete upon 
 this head. 
 
 Shall we say, on the other hand, that Saint Augustine has 
 borrowed much from Plato ? It is certain that he did : he 
 never denies the fact. Only, it is with Saint Augustine in 
 regard to Plato as it is with Descartes in regard to Saint Au- 
 gustine. Fenelon very fitly remarks that all of Descartes may 
 be found in Saint Augustine. Undoubtedly ; but Descartes, 
 when meditating, studied Saint Augustine little or not at 
 all: he studied reason. I certainly do not say that all Saint 
 Augustine is contained in Plato ; I say that Saint Augustine, 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 103 
 
 with greater knowledge of the past than Descartes, often saw 
 things both in Plato and in reason. We should merely con- 
 clude from these coincidences that these three master minds, 
 not to mention others, saw, each for himself, the same light, 
 and bore the same witness to it. 
 
 This settled, we will first follow, in Saint Augustine the 
 method in action. 
 
 III. 
 
 Of all that Plato says on this subject, Saint Augustine 
 possesses and gives us, if we may so express it, the experi- 
 mental intuition. Whatever is said by Plato, lives in 
 Augustine. 
 
 Now, what did Plato say ? Saint Augustine himself sums 
 it up as follows : 
 
 " If Plato lived, and if he condescended to answer my ques- 
 tions; if he taught me that it is not the physical eye, but the 
 pure mind that sees truth ; that every soul, which allies itself to 
 truth, becomes happy and perfect ; that the obstacle to this good 
 is a life subject to passions, the vision of the illusory images of 
 the world of sense, the source of so many errors and idle opinions ; 
 that the soul must be healed before it can learn to see the un- 
 changing form of things, and eternal beauty, always and at all 
 points the same ; that beauty which space does not disperse, 
 which time does not alter in its motionless unity, beauty whose 
 existence is unknown to men, while it exists supremely and all 
 else is born and dies, is fluid and slips away; if he told me that 
 all these things, in so far as they exist, are the works of the ever- 
 lasting God, effected in this truth : works amidst which the rational 
 soul can alone contemplate the eternity of God, be endowed and 
 imbued by it, and thus merit that eternity itself; that held back 
 by all which becomes and which passes, wounded by grief or by 
 love, given over to sensuality and the gross habits of this life, 
 lulled to sleep by its images and its dreams, that soul heeds not 
 when it is told that there exists a Being visible without the phys- 
 
104 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 ical eye, intelligible without images, and seen by the mind alone : 
 if Plato taught me these things." l 
 
 This is what Saint Augustine reads in Plato. 
 
 Now, while in regard to all these questions Plato gives an 
 outline of truth, Saint Augustine always shows it to us in 
 action ; he does not give a didactic description of his process, 
 he' relates his life. We see the living intelligence and light 
 in his ardent soul, and we cannot but apply to him his own 
 words when, speaking of this contemplation of the light, he 
 says : " These things have been foretold in the proper meas- 
 ure by those great and matchless souls who have seen them, 
 who, as we believe, still see them." 
 
 Thus Plato teaches us that to attain to the sight of God, 
 we must first heal our soul, purify it, free it from transitory 
 things ; that then it may soar to the contemplation of ever- 
 lasting beauty, that motionless unity which space does not 
 disperse or time alter. This implies the whole theoretical 
 and practical Theodicy. What will Saint Augustine tell us 
 of this whole ? 
 
 In the first place, in regard to the need for purifying and 
 healing the soul, while Plato, from this point of view, re- 
 bukes with the strongest irony the gross sensuality of men 
 plunged in foul pleasures, Saint Augustine does more : he 
 says little of the last degrees of the impure, he looks into 
 his own soul, and sees that soul, already luminous and living, 
 still covered with wounds, almost dying, exhausted, divided, 
 dispersed. In his actual, experimental intuition of the soul, 
 he sounds it and penetrates it in every part ; he sees in it all 
 that prevents it from being filled with God, from knowing 
 him, from being one with and absorbed in him ; and his 
 words upon this point have a tone of direct experience 
 which no art could ever imitate. 
 
 1 De vera Relig., chap. iii. 3. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 105 
 
 He sees in the soul what he calls the tumor of pride, 
 a tumor which puffs it up, which makes it empty, forces it 
 to a lesser being, diffuses it abroad, and, as it were, causes 
 it to cast outside itself its central life, which is God himself. 
 " The soul," he says, " does not exist of itself, since it is 
 changeable, and since there is in it a want of being; the 
 soul, therefore, is nothing in itself, but all of being which it 
 possesses is given it by God ; united to God through its de- 
 pendent state, the vital essence of its soul and conscience is 
 the very presence of God. This is its secret treasure. What, 
 then, does it mean in being puffed up with pride ? It means 
 to reach out after external things, to make the interior 
 empty and idle, to be ever less and less. But to reach after 
 external things is nothing else than casting forth its own 
 entrails, that is to say, removing God from itself, not by 
 space, but by mind and affection." l 
 
 Saint Augustine sees that the soul becomes inwardly ex- 
 hausted when it scatters its forces and wastes them upon 
 externals ; that it forsakes unity, stability, fulness of life ; 
 that it sinks into a state of dispersion, and into the flood of 
 created beings which pass away and flow towards death, and 
 which bear it away as they flow ; he sees that the soul should 
 struggle to recover, reascend, and return to life and rest: 
 what that power is which incessantly recalls it and can heal 
 it. Saint Augustine's vision of the soul, and its false life, 
 compared to true life, is a translucid intuition : his descrip- 
 tion of it is most striking. No man ever described as he has 
 done our failings and our fickleness, our longing for the im- 
 mutable and our need of healing. Here is a fine example of 
 this description: 
 
 " God of power, comfort us, show us thy face, and save us. 
 For, be the object what it may which turns my soul away from 
 thee, it is riveted to some sorrow ; it may cling to all beauties 
 
 1 De Musica, lib. vi. cap. xii. 40. 
 
106 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 outside itself, outside thee, beauties which yet cannot exist save 
 through thee. These beauties are born and die ; they begin, 
 they increase, they grow until they reach their highest point ; 
 that attained, they wither and fall. Everything tends downward 
 again, and decays. When they spring up, they strive to be ; 
 and the more they labor to be, the more they hasten not to be. 
 Such is their limitation. Thou hast given them these bounds, 
 
 Lord ; they are the successive phases of things which are never 
 complete in every part at any one time : but by their birth and 
 death they make up that universe of which they are the parts. 
 They are like the words of a speech, which is entire and finished 
 when each word, having uttered all its syllables, retires, that 
 another word may take its place. 
 
 " Let my soul therefore praise thee in these beauties, God, 
 Creator of all ; but let it never be fastened unto these things with 
 the glue of love and the senses of the body ! For they continue 
 to pass away, and cease to exist, and they rend my soul as they 
 go ; and as for my soul, it would fain exist, it would fain linger 
 with that which it loves. But how can we linger with that which 
 is not lasting, with that which is fugitive ; how can we follow these 
 things with the senses of the flesh ; how can we ever grasp them as 
 a whole when they pass away 1 The sense of the flesh is slow and 
 weak, and, in its turn, it has limits. It sufficeth unto its end, but 
 it sufficeth not to stay things running their course from their ap- 
 pointed starting-place to their end, to grasp at once the origin and 
 consummation. Thy divine Word alone, which creates them, saith 
 unto them, ' Depart and return/ Then be no longer foolish-, 
 my soul; permit not this tumult to close the ear of thine heart. 
 Hearken : the Word to thee also cries, Return to the place of ever- 
 lasting rest, where love is not forsaken, if itself forsaketh not. Do 
 
 1 ever depart 1 saith the Word of God. Fix thy dwelling in him, 
 my soul ! Wearied at last of illusions, restore to him what came 
 to thee from him. Restore to Truth what Truth hath given thee, 
 and thou shalt nevermore lose aught; what was decayed in thee 
 shall bloom again, what languished shall be healed, what was scat- 
 tered and dispersed shall be reformed and renewed. Things shall 
 no longer bear thee away in their course, hut shall stand fast with 
 thee in the steadfast and abiding God." 1 
 
 1 Confess., lib. iv. cap. x. 15. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 107 
 
 Here we have direct intuition to a degree never possessed 
 by Plato. It is thus that Saint Augustine saw the soul, its 
 wounds, its stigmas, its dispersedness, its illusions, its vain and 
 painful struggle to seize and fix that which is fugitive, its mis- 
 taken and impotent sensualities, its raptures over that which 
 vanishes; and yet in the midst, God, ever motionless and pres* 
 ent, who recalls it, who receives it, who heals it, who restores 
 all to it. It is thus that Saint Augustine sees arid touches 
 both the soul which would fain be purified, and the power 
 that purifies it. We feel that all this lives within him. 
 
 And if, again, he speaks of the efforts of the purified soul 
 to attain to the sight of God, it is still his own life that he 
 relates : 
 
 " I sought and I longed to know by what model we should 
 judge the beauty of bodies, terrestrial or celestial; by what light 
 we should judge this changing world, and say, This should be 
 thus, but that not ; and I found, above my soul and my 
 thoughts, themselves variable, an unchanging light and an eter- 
 nal truth. I ascended from my senses to the soul which per- 
 ceives through them; I went to that inward power to which the 
 senses refer things external, that point to which the faculties of 
 animals reach. I went still farther, and I came to reason, the judge 
 of what the senses give us. But my reason, seeing itself, beheld 
 itself variable, and seeing this, rose above itself and understood 
 itself; then, leaving behind it the torpor of habit and bewildering 
 phantasms, to find the light by which it was illumined, it cried 
 out without hesitation that the unchangeable was superior to the 
 changeable; and this itself was the beginning of knowledge of the 
 unchangeable. For if it had not known it, how should it have 
 preferred it to the changing world; how could it have left visible 
 certainties to attain the Being one of whose raj's we cannot see 
 without trembling ? Thus I understood and saw invisible things 
 through the things which God made; but I could not fix my gaze 
 thereon, and falling back upon my own weakness, restored to habit, 
 I retained of this momentary intercourse only a loving memory, a 
 regretful longing for the odors of the celestial food." * 
 1 Confess., lib. vii. cap. xvii. 23. 
 
108 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 When Plato says serenely, " The wise man considers the 
 eternal light," he says well ; he knows that which should be. 
 But when Saint Augustine speaks of that ray and the dark- 
 ness which followed it, and of that living memory, and of 
 the trace of those perfumes, it is evident that he is telling us 
 what has happened, and that he is recounting to us his own 
 life. 
 
 Yes, this indeed is the life, the deep and actual life of a 
 soul that seeks God and rises to God, which feels him, which 
 has seen him. 
 
 We must repeat it: what Plato hopes and conjectures, Saint 
 Augustine possesses and sees. What falls from the sublime 
 
 O JT 
 
 lips of the philosopher, exists and lives in the soul of the 
 saint, and bursts forth from his heart and his mouth, more 
 divine than that of Plato, with intonations, radiance, and 
 ardors' which the real presence of God alone can give. 
 
 IV. 
 
 We have now seen the method as a whole in action. Let 
 us look more in detail at the theory of the method, according 
 to Saint Augustine. 
 
 It is not to be expected that all readers will understand 
 Saint Augustine either in what follows or what precedes. 
 No one who does not live his life and undergo the same ex- 
 periences can understand his narratives and his descriptions 
 of life. " Give me," he says somewhere, " a man who loves, 
 and he will understand me." So that, unless you love as he 
 did, you cannot understand him. 
 
 Highly cultivated literary minds can but admire him; 
 they see that his style is always vivid and full of life ; they 
 therefore see that it possesses the characteristic of beauty. 
 But they do not sufficiently comprehend that this beauty is 
 only the splendor of truth, and they do not perceive the 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 109 
 
 strictly philosophic basis of those beauties. As almost no 
 one knows the chief process of reason, that by which the 
 creature mounts to God, which is at once poetic and logical, 
 they do not see the logical thread in all this sacred poetry, or 
 the stern reason beneath the raptures and the prayers of the 
 saintly soul. This we must now make clear by showing that 
 his sublime spirit was fully conscious of its acts, philosophi- 
 cally familiar with their nature, their range, and their abso- 
 lute certainty. 
 
 The chief difficulty in this explanation and this analysis 
 is the abundance of noble passages, among which the mind 
 hesitates. We will select, combining and supplementing 
 them one with the other, two or three connected passages, 
 in which Saint Augustine states theoretically the progress 
 of the mind towards God, as Plato tells the story of the 
 captives in the cave, who leave false lights behind them to 
 gain the sun of the true world. 
 
 After an ardent invocation to God, the Father of awaking 
 and light (pater emgilationis et illuminationis nostrce), and 
 before describing the process of reason which rises to God, he 
 speaks of reason itself, and says, 
 
 " My reason is a movement of my soul, a power which distin- 
 guishes and unites to know ; it is a guide which but too few of 
 us use to lead us to God, or even to the soul which is within us ; 
 . . . and this becanse, too deeply plunged in the details of sen- 
 sible phenomena, it is hard for us to return into ourselves. We 
 only apply our reason to illusory accidents ; we can neither know 
 it in itself, or in its laws." * 
 
 "Thus, the soul is diffused over that which is mortal: 
 this is the fall; to reascend is to bring reason back to it- 
 self." 2 Saint Augustine then describes the same progress of 
 reason which Plato calls dialectic, and to which he also gives 
 that name. 3 This progress does not consist in ceasing to see 
 
 i De Ordine, lib. ii. c. xi. 30. 2 Ibid., n. 31. 8 Ibid., xiii. 38. 
 
110 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 this visible world, in suppressing it in thought ; we should, 
 on the contrary, first seek the traces of reason in the world 
 of sense. 1 We must learn to distinguish, in all that material 
 substances show us, the visible and the intelligible, the sign 
 and the significance. 2 
 
 When reason can distinguish the sign from the significance 
 in sensation, " when it has developed itself through language, 
 it takes itself as object, and, being itself reflected, it produces 
 the knowledge of knowledges, which we call dialectic. It is 
 this knowledge which teaches us to teach, and which teaches 
 us to learn ; in it reason shows itself and declares what it is, 
 what it can, and what it desires, to do. It is a knowledge 
 which knows itself, which can and will give knowledge." 3 
 
 "But reason desires to rise higher yet, and to pass from 
 study of itself to contemplation of divine things ! There, 
 that it may not fall into a vacuum, it seeks steps, and makes 
 itself a regular road through its previous acquisitions. It 
 desires to see that beauty which alone, and by a mere glance, 
 it can attain without the physical eye. But the senses hold 
 it back. What does it do ? It half turns its gaze towards 
 those same sensible objects which, crying to us that they are 
 the truth, importune us with their tumult when we would 
 fain rise higher." 4 
 
 Saint Augustine holds this to be an important point in the 
 theory of the method ; to him the visible world is a step, a 
 point of support, by which to rise higher. He often recurs 
 to this elsewhere: "I will mount higher than this very 
 power which is in me, and will regard it as a step to rise to 
 him who made me." 5 " Let us see how far reason can go 
 in its ascent from the visible to the invisible, from the transi- 
 tory to the eternal. I will not gaze in vain at all the beauty 
 of the sky, the regular course of the stars. ... I will not gaze 
 
 i De (Mine, lib. ii. c. xi. 33. 2 Ibid., 34. 3 Ibid., xiii. 38. 
 
 4 Ibid., xiv. n. 39. e Confess., lib. x. cap. viii. 12. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. Ill 
 
 at them in idle curiosity, but will make use of them as steps 
 to raise myself to the immutable and immortal." l 
 
 The way to rise to God, therefore, does not consist in de- 
 stroying in one's self the images of this world, but rather in 
 making of them steps (gradus ad immortalia faciendus) ; 
 we should not consider them exclusively, we should consider 
 them soberly (in eos ipsos paululum aciem torsit}. We 
 should consider them sufficiently to compare them, but not 
 so much as to lose sight of the other term of the comparison. 
 This feature of the method distinguishes healthy philosophy 
 from the mystic sophism which destroys images. 
 
 " But in its marvellous power of discernment, reason in- 
 stantly understands all the difference that lies between a 
 sensation itself and that which it signifies." 2 It speedily 
 recognizes that it is their laws which constitute the order, 
 value, light, and beauty of phenomena. But what are these 
 laws? 
 
 What are laws? Modern science knows. Saint Augus- 
 tine divined : these laws are geometrical forms, numbers. 
 " Reason," he says, " having reached this point, understands 
 that it is numbers that rule all the visible world." (Intel- 
 ligebat regnare numeros.) 3 
 
 And what are these forms and these numbers themselves ? 
 They are eternal, consequently divine, truths (reperiebat 
 divinos et sempiternos) ; 4 they are ideas perceived by reason. 
 Now, what reason sees always exists, and is immortal ; such 
 are numbers (Illud quod mens videt semper est prcesens et 
 immortale approbatur ; cujus generis numeri apparebant)? 
 Eeason here makes an essential distinction between the 
 numbers and the geometrical figures which the intelligence 
 includes, and those shown to it by the eyes. Hence it 
 
 1 De ver. Relig., xxix. 52. * Ibid., 41. 
 
 2 De Ordine, lib. ii. cap. xiv. 39. 6 Ibid., lib. iii. cap. xiv. 41. 
 
 3 I hid. 
 
112 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 creates geometry ; it applies geometry to the forms and 
 movements of the stars ; it creates astronomy, astronomy, 
 that grand and potent spectacle for religious souls, that pain- 
 ful labor for curious minds (magnum religiosis argumentum, 
 torrnentumque curiosis). * 
 
 Thus reason sees perfectly that these forms and these geo- 
 metric laws, such as it conceives them in itself, are abso- 
 lutely true ; but it recognizes at the same time that it 
 perceives in things only the shadow and vestige of truth. 2 
 
 To bear within one's self eternal ideas of which all this 
 visible world possesses merely the shadows, what a mar- 
 vel is this ! There is, then, within us something eternal ; 
 my mind, then, is immortal ! Here then, at least, I am very 
 close to what I sought. My reason, in which I perceived 
 these divine and eternal numbers, must itself be the same as 
 that which I see in it. Must it not itself be that primi- 
 tive number which reckons the others ? Whether it be so or 
 not, it is at least certain that it possesses in itself the object 
 of its search (aut si id non esset, ibi tamen eum esse quo per- 
 venire satageret). It therefore grasps at last that Proteus 
 who shall reveal to it the truth ; it grasps him in its hands, 
 and it holds him with all its might. 3 
 
 It is this primitive number which counts all the rest ; 
 this single number which we must capture and never again 
 let it escape us. 4 For we must know what unity is, and of 
 what it is capable. Add to this the dialectic, and we shall 
 quickly pass from the mathematic and abstract unity of sen- 
 sible postulates to the sovereign unity which exists in the uni- 
 verse. We pass from these abstract sciences to Philosophy, 
 and there too we find nought save unity; but a different 
 unity, deep and divine in a far different way ; and we learn at 
 last to distinguish the two worlds, and the Father of both. 
 
 1 De Ordine, lib. iii. cap. xiv. 41. 8 Ibul. 43. 
 
 2 Ibid. xv. 42. 4 Ibid. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 113 
 
 V. 
 
 Let us explain all this still further. 
 
 The soul which seeks wisdom, having reached that point, 
 after first examining and observing itself, arid having recog- 
 nized that reason is itself, or is its own (aut seipsum aut 
 suam esse rationem), that the numbers of reason are its 
 beauty and its power, and that reason is itself number, the 
 soul goes on and says : " By this movement and this inward 
 and secret power which is called reason, I distinguish and 
 reunite in order to know. But why distinguish ? To judge 
 of that which seems one, and yet is not, or at least, that 
 which is less of a unit than it seems. And why reunite, save 
 to recompose unity ? Thus, whether I divide or reunite, it 
 is unity which I love and desire. When I divide, it is that 
 I may have pure unity ; and when I reunite, it is to have 
 it total." 1 
 
 Everything tends towards unity, my reason, all nature, 
 society, love, and friendship. 2 
 
 What, then, is this unity ? What I seek, what I desire 
 to know, is God. Can this logical, mathematical unity, the 
 laws, forms, numbers, absolute, essential, eternal verities 
 that follow from it, be God? They give me a perfect 
 assurance : then must not knowledge of them be knowl- 
 edge of God ? 3 
 
 Let us now refer to Plato. These truths, he says, are not 
 God himself, nor the end of the process of reason (re'Xo? rr;? 
 Tropeia^, but they are divine phantoms, shadows of that 
 which is (<f>avTd<r/jLaTa Oela /cal <ncias rwv OVTCOV). 
 
 No, says Saint Augustine, this order of truths is neither 
 God nor knowledge of God ; " If they were knowledge of 
 
 1 De Ordine, lib. iii. cap. xv. 48. 8 Soliloq., lib. i. cap. v. 11. 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
114 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 God, in knowing them I should have the same rapture that I 
 should have in seeing God. 1 I am forced to confess that there 
 is all the difference of the heaven from the earth between 
 the intelligible majesty of God and the images otherwise true 
 and certain, which such knowledge gives us." 2 
 
 And in fact, " God is intelligible ; these logical spectacles 
 are also intelligible : but what a difference ! 3 The earth 
 also is visible, even as light is visible; but the earth, if 
 there were no light, could not be seen. Just as all these 
 scientific truths, which in the eyes of those who understand 
 them are absolutely certain, are only intelligible because 
 they too are illumined by another sun which .is theirs." 
 
 This is an important point, and it is clear. We have here 
 the fundamental distinction between the two degrees of the 
 intelligible world, a distinction which many modern think- 
 ers do not suspect, and whose absence casts them into the 
 strangest embarrassment. 
 
 " Now," adds Saint Augustine, " reason, which cries aloud 
 within thee, promises to show God to thy mind as the 
 sun shows itself to thine eyes. Our mind also has eyes, 
 and our soul has senses: and all assured truths may be 
 compared to earthly objects upon which the sun shines 
 and makes them visible, by shedding its light upon them : 
 but here, the sun is God: and I, reason, am to the mind 
 what sight itself is to the eyes." 4 
 
 Let us stop a moment, and note that thus far the theory 
 of the method of the progress of reason ascending to -God 
 is the same in Plato and in Saint Augustine. It is scarcely 
 possible that there are no direct reminiscences of Plato here ; 
 and yet it is evident that Saint Augustine is profoundly 
 original elsewhere ; it is the same truth, seen and described 
 by two minds of the first order, the second of which was 
 
 1 Soliloq., lib. i. cap. v. 1. 8 Ibid., viii. 15. 
 
 2 Ibid. 4 Ibid., vi. 12. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 115 
 
 necessarily familiar with the first. But they are really two 
 witnesses in favor of the true method. 
 
 Only, we think we may assert that Saint Augustine is 
 more exact and more precise than Plato. Plato is sometimes 
 vague in his description of the starting-point of dialectic 
 reason. What he calls the starting-point (i/7ro0eo-i?), or the 
 fulcrum of thought (fc7r/3acre9 ical op/Acts), by which it rises 
 to the principle which the starting-point does not include 
 (eV dpxvv avvir66erov e vTroOecrecos lovcra), is not always 
 clearly the visible world to him. Neither do we see that it 
 is the soul itself. Often, on the contrary, he seems to give 
 us to understand, he even states, that we should solely and 
 simply turn away from the earth to gaze only at the sun. 
 Saint Augustine, on the contrary, is entirely explicit and 
 exact in regard to this ; he says that reason, wishing to attain 
 to the contemplation of divine things, should, lest it fall into 
 a void (ne de alto caderef), have points of support, stepping- 
 stones (qucesivit gradus), an assured way through its pre- 
 vious acquisitions. And he declares that these points of 
 support are given us by our sight of the world ; and what 
 no one of whom I know, but Saint Augustine, has said fitly, 
 he asserts that we should consider them soberly, with a free 
 and impartial eye (aciem parce detorsif), so that we do not 
 linger over them, or see them only, but compare them with 
 the world after which they are patterned : that we may grasp 
 both their likeness and their difference in regard to the di- 
 vine world, of which the visible world is the image. 
 
 It is the very uncertainty of the Platonic method upon 
 this subject, which permits Aristotle to attack it as leading 
 to nothing real, and proceeding only to abstractions, to the 
 abstract unity of empty being, while our metaphysics, says 
 Aristotle, that is to say, our method, which starts from ma- 
 terial things to raise us to that which is above, gives us, out- 
 side and above nature, a real essence, neither abstract nor 
 
116 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 empty. In our opinion, Aristotle errs in condemning Plato 
 here ; but it is true that Plato was not sufficiently explicit 
 on this head. Saint Augustine explains it. 
 
 But this is just where Saint Augustine was incomparably 
 superior to Plato in analysis, precision, philosophic and sci- 
 entific development. It is a question of what Plato calls the 
 divine in the soul, the familiar spirit which God gives to each 
 of us, and which is the mainspring of the dialectic process. 
 
 We shall understand this superiority as we go on with the 
 guide-book of reason given us by Saint Augustine. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Let us suppose that the reason, starting with the visible 
 world, has reached that degree of the intelligible world where 
 we find the geometric, logical, essential, absolute, eternal 
 truths, which are not God, but which are intelligible only 
 through his light. Eeason understands it, understands that 
 these divine phantoms, these eternal shadows, are the shadow 
 of the divine sun : it longs to see this sun. 
 
 Now, what, in Plato's opinion, urges reason to seek this 
 sun ? It is the divine within us, it is that divine spirit, that 
 divine part of our soul, that point and very root of the soul 
 (pi&v), where God touches and holds us fast to him, a sa- 
 cred gift which some exercise and develop, and which leads 
 them to the contemplation of God, but which others stifle by 
 the lusts of the flesh and by pride. 
 
 Saint Augustine says the same things, but with what 
 wealth and with what clear-sighted precision ! 
 
 To him there is God, there is the soul. God is in the soul, 
 the soul feels him. 
 
 Such is the pure and simple truth which explains everything. 
 
 Saint Augustine sees not only, like Plato, the soul joined to 
 God ly its root, he sees a yet more intimate relation be- 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 117 
 
 tween God and the soul. God is at the centre of the heart 
 (intimus cordi) ; he is the secret good of the soul (hoc bonum 
 habet intimum)\ l God gives it life as if he were its vital 
 essence (ipsius Dei prcesentia veyetatur). 2 The rational soul 
 only lives, is enlightened and happy only through the very 
 substance of God (animam humanam et mentem rationalem 
 vegetari, non beatificari, non illuminari, nisi ab ipsa substan- 
 tia Dei)? The soul should be perpetually moulded and per- 
 fected by him, attaching itself to him (semper ab illo fieri 
 semper que per fid debemus inhcerentes ei)* For the soul to 
 withdraw from God, is like casting forth one's very entrails 
 (intima projicere id est longe a se facere Deum) ; 6 it is to 
 become empty and vain, and to be less and less (inanescere 
 minus minusque esse). Q 
 
 Such is the secret and necessary contact of God with the 
 soul. But is our soul conscious of it ? Does it feel and see 
 it ? In other words, has it the divine sense ? Yes ; although 
 withdrawn from God by the affections, it still feels the charm 
 of the supreme Good, by some hidden remembrance (per 
 quamdam occultam memoriam quce in longinqua progressam 
 non deseruit); 7 there is also a secret trace of the supreme 
 unity which exists within us and disturbs us (vestigium secre- 
 tissimce unitatis, ex qua eram, curce habebam). 8 Although 
 exiled, we are not cut off from the unchangeable source (nee 
 tamen inde prcecisi atque abrupti sumus). g This is why, al- 
 though in the midst of time, we do not cease to seek eternity 
 (ut non etiam in istis mutabilibus et temporalibus ceternita- 
 tern qucereremus). 10 Whence, unless we depended on heaven, 
 we should not here seek these things (unde nisi penderemus 
 Jiic ea non qucereremus). 11 All seek here below : all therefore 
 
 1 De Musica, lib. vi. cap. xiii. 40. 6 Ibid. 
 
 2 Ibid. 7 De Trinit, x. iii. 315. 
 
 3 In Joan. Tract., xxiii. 5. 8 Confess., lib. i. cap. xx. 31. 
 
 4 Ibid. 9 De Trinit., iv. i. 2. 
 
 5 De Musica, lib. vi. cap. xii. 40. Ibid. u Ibid. 
 
118 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 have this sort of knowledge and of reminiscence of God (nee 
 amarent nisi esset aliqua notitia ejus in memoria eorum). 1 
 It is a sort of idea of the Supreme God through impression 
 (impressa notio ipsius Boni] ; 2 it is a sort of inner sense (in- 
 terior nescio quoe conscientia)? 
 
 The soul exists, because God exists, has created it, preserves 
 and sustains it. Because God touches the soul and the 
 soul feels it, by this very thing the soul lives, it knows, and 
 it desires, and it, is perpetually disturbed by the attraction 
 of the sovereign Good and sovereign Truth. It bears with- 
 in it absolute Being, Truth itself, Good itself; and it 
 necessarily feels something of this. This is what Plato calls 
 reminiscence. Saint Augustine also uses this word, but 
 understands it differently ; to him this memory of God is a 
 sort of consciousness of God, a sense of God, which comes 
 from the presence of God. Saint Augustine thus unveils the 
 mpst sublime of truths, which even Plato dared not believe, 
 because it was as yet too great for his sublime mind. 
 
 The soul, therefore, feels God. It feels him when any 
 object whatsoever arouses it. For, everything being an 
 image of God, everything arouses some sense of the model. 
 But this awakened sense instantly shows us wherein every- 
 thing lacks, wherein it resembles, wherein it differs ; and the 
 soul judges of the infinite difference between the imperfect 
 and variable image and the immutable perfection of the 
 model. It judges created beings, "seeing in all visible 
 beauty wherein it copies from God, and wherein it cannot 
 copy him." 4 
 
 At least, such is the duty and the power of the soul. 
 Now, in reality, what does it do ? Do we all see God in his 
 creatures ? Assuredly not ; but why not ? 
 
 " Why does not this visible beauty speak alike to all ? " 5 
 
 1 Confess., x. 22. * De vera Relig., xxxii. 40. 
 
 2 De Trinit., vii. 6 ibid., xxxiv. 64. 
 8 Lib. de util. cred., cap. xvi. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 119 
 
 " Animals see it, but they cannot question it, because they 
 have no judgment : with them reason is not the judge of the 
 
 senses." 
 
 " But men can question it, to the end that they may see 
 and understand the invisible God through his visible work. 
 Instead of that, they are made subject to this world through 
 love of it; and having subjected themselves, they can no 
 longer question it. The world, answers only those who 
 judge it. It is understood only by those who compare its 
 voice, received from without, with the truth which they bear 
 within them." Such are the purified souls, which, never 
 having yielded to the visible world through love, regard it 
 with an impartial eye, master it, and judge it. 
 
 These souls, thus taking the earth as their footstool, rise 
 higher: again becoming free, they reascend to themselves, 
 they return towards reason (regressus in rationem}. Re- 
 stored to themselves, and free from the abuses of the out- 
 ward senses, they recover the inward sense, the divine sense 
 (sensus animce) ; they recognize their own imperfection and 
 variability more and more distinctly as the divine sense 
 grows in vigor. Without yet knowing God, they fully 
 understand that they perceive nothing, either world or soul, 
 which can be compared to him (qui nondum Deum nosti, 
 unde nosti niliil te nosse Deo simile). 2 
 
 Repossessed of its reason, the soul is not slow to judge 
 that the light which illumines that reason, and in which it 
 sees all that is within it, is not itself (spectamina ilia non 
 posse intelligi, nisi ab alio quasi suo sole illustrentur). 
 
 The soul therefore seeks the source of that light in which 
 it sees all these shadows. But here Plato and all philosophy 
 stop. Those of Plato's followers who, on reaching this point, 
 desire to go farther through philosophy, and to contem- 
 plate the source itself of light, these, according to Saint 
 
 1 Confess., i. 295. 2 Soliloq., lib. i. cap. ii. 7. 
 
120 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Augustine, have taken the wrong road ; they are following 
 a path which looks true, but is not so. 1 
 
 Beyond comes a wholly different order of things, another 
 life, another world. This is what Christianity calls the super- 
 natural world. We cannot penetrate it by the aid of philoso- 
 phy alone. 2 We can enter only through an actual new birth, 
 a radical cure, which allows the soul to return wholly and 
 entirely to the source of light, and no longer exclusively 
 attend to the objects which are revealed by that light. And 
 this is the new birth which follows that death of which 
 Socrates and Plato said : " To philosophize is to Jearn 
 to die." 
 
 Thus Plato dimly perceived these things, and he speaks of 
 them ; but Christianity alone effects them. Saint Augustine 
 explains this as follows. 
 
 VII. 
 
 God exists in us as force, as light, as love ; we feel him. 
 But this natural sense of the soul, given to all by the presence 
 of God, is at first only the vague and indeterminate attrac- 
 tion towards the desirable and the intelligible, to which the 
 soul has not yet responded. A few very imperfect responses 
 to this attraction raise it to the point which we have men- 
 tioned. There must be a decisive answer, which God inces- 
 santly provokes, which is God's work in us and with us, 
 which is the new birth, the new life. The soul which has 
 entered this other life believes in the Being, hopes for the 
 Truth, and desires the Good. Its three natural faculties are 
 actually exercised under the influence of their supreme ob- 
 ject and their supernatural life ; the implicit basis of our 
 being, which we ourselves do not know, clings to the eternal 
 Being through faith ; the intelligence clings to the light 
 of God through hope ; the will clings to the will of God 
 
 1 Epist. cxx., cap. i. 6. 2 Ibid. ,,4. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 121 
 
 through love. " Without these three things, no soul can be 
 healed in such a manner as to see God." (Sine tribus istis 
 anima nulla sanatur, ut possit Deum suum videre.) 1 
 
 Made whole, let it gaze ! That gaze is still reason, but 
 set free and made clear-sighted ; that straightforward look, 
 that perfect look, which actually follows vision, is a virtue ; 
 that look, that vision, attain to God himself. What a gaze ! 
 The gaze of " the soul is reason ; but every eye that gazes does 
 not yet see ; the true and straightforward gaze, that which 
 sees, is a virtue. Yes, true reason, upright reason, is a virtue. 
 The gaze of the purified soul, therefore, turns towards the 
 light, when these three things dwell within us, faith, which 
 believes that the object of the gaze constitutes happiness 
 when it is seen ; hope, which knows that the gaze shall see ; 
 love, which desires to see and love. Such is the gaze which 
 follows the vision of God himself, and this is the final end 
 of the gaze ; not because the eye then rests, but because it 
 has found the supreme object of its search. Yes, this itself 
 is virtue, reason attaining to its end ; it is supreme virtue 
 and bliss. As for vision itself, what is it but intelligence, 
 actual and present compounded of that which understands 
 and that which is understood, even as sight depends alike 
 on the eye and the light?" 2 
 
 These words are most profound and most exactly true. 
 They touch and solve the question of the relation between 
 .Philosophy and Eeligion, reason and faith. 
 
 But to continue. When reason reaches its end (ratio 
 perveniens ad finem suum; reXo? rijs Trope/a?), then truly 
 begins the living, real, and experimental knowledge of God, 
 that knowledge which Saint Augustine calls indeed " ex- 
 perimentalem Dei notitiam" a strong expression, quoted 
 and adopted by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Then only do the 
 inner senses of the soul develop for God ; we^become 
 
 i Soliloq., lib. i. cap. vi. 12. 2 Ibid., 1 
 
122 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 master of the other senses, because the divine sense tow- 
 ers above them ; this sense itself develops, because we are 
 master of the other senses. Then, too, " by continence, 
 verily, is the soul bound up and brought back into One, 
 whence it was dissipated into many (per continentiam 
 colligimur et redigimur in unum, a quo in multa defluxi- 
 mus')" 1 Saint Augustine has reached this point, and en- 
 tered into possession of the inner life of the soul, when 
 he exclaims : " My life at last shall wholly live, as wholly 
 full of thee (viva erit vita mea, totaque plena te\" 2 Then 
 he thus invokes the source of his life, that life which he 
 possesses and touches, which he sees, whose divine savor he 
 tastes, whose celestial perfumes he inhales : 
 
 " I have loved thee too late, thou Beauty, old and yet ever 
 new ! I have loved thee too late ! Thou wert within me ; I was 
 abroad. And I sought thee abroad, and flinging myself upon 
 those beauties created by thee, I lost my own fair form. They 
 held me far from thee, those beauties, which would never exist, 
 did they not exist in thee. Thou hast called me ; thou hast cried 
 aloud ; thou hast overcome my deafness. Thou hast shone, thou 
 hast sparkled, and thou hast triumphed over my blindness. Thy 
 perfumes made themselves manifest ; I breathed, and I breathe 
 for thee ; I have tasted thee, I hunger and thirst after thee. I 
 have touched thee, and my heart has ceased to long for aught 
 save the abiding peace which is in thee." 8 
 
 VIII. 
 
 We have seen the method in action, and then the theory 
 of the method. Let us now proceed to the results. 
 
 Let us repeat, the philosophic results acquired by Saint 
 Augustine in regard to the nature of God are complete, 
 exact, absolute, unmixed with error, equivocation, or un- 
 
 1 Confess., lib. x. cap. xxix. 40. 8 Ibid., cap. xxvii. 38. 
 
 2 Ibid., cap. xxviii. 39. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 123 
 
 certainty. This is the philosophy of Christians. This is 
 the wisdom mentioned by one of our most learned teach- 
 ers, " which is," he says, " both divine and human, and 
 which is therefore properly true Christian wisdom." We 
 mean that human wisdom, illumined by divine wisdom, 
 whose existence Saint Thomas Aquinas makes clear to us in 
 these words : " The divine wisdom of Christ did not dim his 
 human wisdom, but increased its clarity." 
 
 In considering, therefore, merely the advance of the rational 
 Theodicy, the purely human and non-theological side of wis- 
 dom, we must show not only the transition of knowledge 
 which is almost solely speculative into knowledge which is 
 at the same time experimental and speculative, but also 
 'observe greater scientific precision upon capital points, 
 which, moreover, all combine in a single one, the idea 
 of infinity. 
 
 The ancients had no clear idea of infinity ; the moderns 
 have that idea : the influence of Christianity has devel- 
 oped it. 
 
 Pythagoras so deceived himself upon this point that he 
 gives us the following qualities, quoted by Aristotle : on the 
 one hand, the finite, perfect, good, etc. ; on the other, the 
 infinite, imperfect, lad, etc. To him, finite meant finished, 
 and infinite meant indeterminate. He had no idea of the 
 determinate, finished, perfect infinite ; that is, in a word, of 
 the infinite, which he confounded with the indefinite. 
 
 Plato occasionally hesitates in regard to this matter. Still 
 he sees between God and his creatures such a difference 
 that he names as God " the One who exists absolutely " (ro5 
 7rai>TeXw<? oim), and calls the creatures " those who always 
 become and- never are " (/cal /JLTJ OVTO). This implies the 
 idea of the infinite. But there is an equivocation here. Do 
 God's creatures exist, or do they not exist ? Plato seems 
 rather to say that they do not exist; and he is forced to 
 
124 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 this conclusion for lack of a high enough idea of the infinite. 
 For, clearly feeling that the Being of God and the being of 
 his creatures are incomparable, to aggrandize God and show 
 that he is matchless, he says that his creatures do not exist. 
 
 Aristotle, by his idea of the motionless motor, and espe- 
 cially of the primary cause, which is pure act, implies the 
 idea of infinity : however, he does not yet fully comprehend 
 that infinite ; he does not know that God is everywhere 
 present as a whole ; he knows that God is in the world, 
 but he thinks that he occupies a central point, and that his 
 creatures receive the life which proceeds from him, with 
 more or less abundance, according to their physical distance 
 from that centre. Frequently, moreover, he gives us most 
 inexact notions of the metaphysical infinite. 
 
 But that which especially shows us how little idea of the 
 infinite the ancients had, is their incapability of conceiving 
 an infinite power, in other words, a power which can 
 create from nothing. Have we not seen that Aristotle, 
 while saying that this world is the work of God, supposes it 
 eternal, and that Plato also believes matter to be eternal '\ 
 Neither of them knew this exact principle, most unfamiliar 
 even in the present day : Infinite Being is infinite in every 
 sense ; finite being is finite in every sense. Whence it fol- 
 lows that finite being is finite in duration : therefore it did 
 not always exist, for it would have already actually infinite 
 duration. The ancients maintained that nothing can come 
 from nothing, which is truth itself, if there be not an 
 infinite power; but if there be an infinite power, the in- 
 finity in the power consists precisely in its creating, that 
 is to say, producing that which was not, or in producing 
 from nothing. 
 
 Now, all this has been known from the first ages of the 
 Christian Theodicy. Saint Augustine develops it, avoiding 
 all errors and equivocations. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 125 
 
 Far from confounding, as Pythagoras does, the infinite 
 with the imperfect, two things which are exactly opposite, 
 he says of the wisdom of God that it is infinite : "It is 
 manifest that the measure and form of everything arise 
 thence, and that it may be suitably called infinite, with 
 respect not to its extension in space, but to its power, 
 which transcends all the limits of human thought." l And 
 he adds this very profound remark : " Not that this wis- 
 dom is formless and indeterminate, like a body which has 
 no contour." 2 He declares in these words concerning that 
 which is still discussed in our day, that the infinite is in 
 110 wise the indeterminate. 
 
 In the same place, while stating that God is not infinite 
 in extent, he asserts that he is everywhere and wholly pres- 
 ent, which is, upon this point, the exact and absolute for- 
 mula : 3 "He is wholly present everywhere, like truth ; and 
 Truth is God himself." Saint Augustine points out the two 
 meanings of the word " infinite," one actually signifying 
 the infinite, while the other is very inaccurate, and signifies 
 the indefinite, increasing size whose limit is not known, all of 
 which is not visible. In the inaccurate sense it is applied to 
 physical size, and in the other to the spiritual greatness of 
 God : " In this sense it is applied to the incorporeal great- 
 ness which we call total, because no place can bound it, and 
 which may ~be called loth total and infinite : total, because 
 it lacks nothing; infinite, because it is not limited by any 
 circumscription." 4 
 
 As for the incomparable distance between God and his 
 creatures, the exact and explicit idea of the infinite allows 
 Saint Augustine to conceive of it without destroying the 
 creatures. Why ? Because infinite Being is such that finite 
 being, although really something, is nothing when compared 
 
 1 Epist, exviii. cap. iv. 24. 8 Ibid., 23. 
 
 2 Ibid. 4 Ibi(i . 
 
126 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 with the infinite, which is an exact principle now adopted 
 by science. Geometricians and algebraists assert and are 
 justified in asserting this formula : The addition to the infi- 
 nite of any quantity, however great, adds nothing ; l and this 
 other : However great a quantity may be, when compared to 
 the infinite it becomes nothing. This is expressed in the 
 Holy Scriptures by the text: "My being is as nothing be- 
 fore thee, my God ! " 2 And Saint Augustine says : " Why 
 compare with the infinite a finite thing, however great it 
 may be ? " 3 And elsewhere, commenting on the phrase : 
 "I am He who is," he says: 4 "God exists in such manner 
 that, compared to him, that which has been created does not 
 exist. Created beings, not compared to God, actually exist ; 
 for they exist through him ; but if they be compared to God, 
 they do not exist; for the true Being is the immutable Being, 
 and he alone is immutable." 
 
 Nothing can be more exact and precise than these words. 
 
 Finally, if we seek in Saint Augustine's works for his ideas 
 concerning the origin of things, the creation, the relation be- 
 tween God and his creatures, and between the creatures and 
 God, here above all we must admire the precise, explicit, and 
 exact knowledge of the great teacher, a truly mathematical 
 knowledge of the infinite, the finite, and their mutual relations. 
 Those absolute assertions, which the imagination does not 
 conceive, but which figures and geometry prove, exist already 
 in that powerful reason which aids the energy of faith to 
 surpass imagination. Saint Augustine says boldly, leaning 
 upon the Catholic faith, and also because reason requires it 
 and the idea of the infinite proves it, God made all from 
 nothing. It is clearly understood that Saint Augustine avoids 
 here the absurdity of those sophists in all ages who consider 
 
 1 Algebra gives us these formulae, which geometry confirms : oo 4- = oo, 
 and _ = 0. 
 
 oo 
 
 2 Ps. xxxviii. 6. 8 Enar. rat. in Psalt. xxxvi. 16. * Ibid., cxxxiv. ?. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 127 
 
 nothing as something. He goes on to explain : " The crea- 
 ture does not proceed from the divine nature, but from noth- 
 ing. 1 To be created out of nothing is the same thing as not 
 to be of the same nature with God. 2 When we say 'God 
 made all from nothing/ we say no more than this : ' He had 
 nothing outside himself with which to make his work, he 
 made it because he willed it.' " 3 This was expressed by the 
 Greek Fathers thus : " He made beings which were not." 4 
 
 God made all from nothing is one of those absolute propo- 
 sitions implying the infinite ; that is to say, incomprehensible, 
 which the imagination does not conceive , but in metaphysics 
 it is an exact truth, and we find very evident traces of it in 
 mathematics. When, for instance, algebraic formulae teach 
 us th&t finite greatness, however great, multiplying zero always 
 produces zero, it corresponds to the axiom Ex nihilo nihil, 
 Nothing from nothing. But if, instead of taking a finite 
 quantity as multiplier, we take the infinite, the statement 
 becomes : Zero multiplied by the infinite gives us all finite 
 greatness. 
 
 So, too, no finite force can create, can produce from noth- 
 ing ; but the omnipotent infinite can create or produce from 
 nothing. 
 
 We shall develop in its proper place a truly wonderful 
 theory of the creation, found in Saint Augustine at the close 
 of his book "De Musica." This amazing intuition of the 
 basis of things is, moreover, in perfect harmony with the 
 answer which science is now preparing to the great question, 
 What is matter ? 
 
 We do not dwell upon the sum total of the results con- 
 tained in Saint Augustine's works ; these results are truth 
 itself, as Christianity gives it to us, as human reason under- 
 stands it in that light, as the modern world knows it, as we 
 
 1 Contra Jul, lib. v. xxxi. * Ad Oros., iii. 
 
 2 Ibid., xlii. * T& uvra. tirolrifffv IK 
 
128 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 have taught it to our children ever since the first century of 
 the Christian era. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Let us sum up this doctrine. 
 
 How can we know God ? What is the course of reason, 
 from the blindness and ignorance in which we are born, up 
 to the time when we see God ? 
 
 The first step is a practical one. Few men use their reason 
 to rise to God. The soul must be purified. The soul is 
 given over to the senses. It must be brought back to reason 
 (regressus in rationem). Attached to earth, the soul is parted 
 from itself and from God : it knows neither God nor reason. 
 The soul requires a first purification, under the natural moral 
 law, which shall free it from animality and raise it to a ra- 
 tional state. Let it return to itself by a first effort to resist 
 the senses which divide it, and it will recover its reason, the 
 judge of its sens.es. But reason, beholding itself, sees that 
 it is imperfect and changeable (quce se quoque in me compe- 
 riens mutabilem). Now, to see change and mutability, is to 
 regret the immutable which it conceives by contrast (unde 
 nosset ipsum immutabile, quod nisi aliquo modo nosset, mdlo 
 modo illud mutabili prceponeret). Reason therefore, judging 
 itself, rises above itself and understands itself (erexit se ad in- 
 telligentiam suam). It sees that it is not light by itself, and 
 seeks to know what that light is by which it is enlightened 
 (ut inveniret quo lumine aspergeretur). Thus it understands 
 the invisible divine by the sight of that which is created 
 (tune invisibilia tua per ea qucefacta sunt intellecta conspexi). 
 
 But how can we conceive of the immutable by seeing that 
 which is mutable ? How are we to seek eternity thus in 
 time itself (in mutabilibus et temporalibus ceternitatem quce- 
 reremus) ? It is because we cling to God and are joined to 
 him (unde penderemus) ; because we only exist and live in 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 129 
 
 so far as we cling to him (semper ab illo fieri debemus inhce- 
 rentes ei) ; because, thenceforth, we are conscious of him by 
 a sort of occult memory (per quamdam occultam memoriam); 
 by a luminous impression of the Sovereign Good (impressa 
 notio ipsius Boni}\ by a sort of inner sense which urges us 
 to seek him always (interior nescio quce conscientia quceren- 
 dutn Deum). 
 
 This is the true inward principle, the power and mainspring 
 which lift us to reason and to God, starting from the senses 
 in which we were buried. 
 
 But it is not necessary, in order to return from the senses 
 to reason, and from reason to God, to suppress the use of the 
 senses. The use and acuteness of the senses is one thing ; 
 their abuse is another thing (aliud est utilitas, vivacitas sen- 
 tiendi ; aliud libido sentiendi). On the contrary, we must 
 make use of them to rise and make a stepping-stone of them. 
 It is in our sensations that we find the first vestiges of reason 
 (tenemus qucedam vestigia rationis in sensibus) ; the mind 
 finds these traces as soon as it discerns in the sensation the 
 sign and the significance (aliud sensus ; . . . aliud per sensuni ; 
 pulcher motus, et pulchra motus siguificatio). Keason also 
 takes sensible things as stepping-stones (qucesivit gradus), 
 stepping-s tones to rise to God himself (gradus ad immortalia 
 faciendus). The earth, says the Gospel, is the footstool of 
 God. Eeason contemplates sensible things that it may make 
 use of them, but contemplates them soberly (in eos ipsos pau- 
 lulum aciem detorsit), in order to seize the sensation less in 
 itself than for what it signifies (ratio vidit quid inter sonum, 
 et id cujus signum esset, distaret). This it does through its 
 great power of abstraction (ista potentissima secernendi). 
 And what does it find as the meaning of the visible symbol- 
 ism of nature ? It finds the geometric laws, forms, and num- 
 bers which govern phenomena (intelligent regnare numeros). 
 It at once understands that these laws are eternal and divine 
 
130 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 (reperiebat divinos et sempiternos). But these forms and 
 numbers, these laws, in brief, are only actually found in ma- 
 terial bodies in the state of shadows and vestiges (in his quce 
 sentiuntur umbras eorum potius atque vestigia). It is only 
 in reason itself that reason finds them absolute and true 
 (quas in seipsa cogitando intuebatur verissimas). 
 
 Here, then, I have something eternal and absolute. 
 Henceforth I no longer work at random to lift myself to 
 the divine (non temere jam qucerit ilia divina). 
 
 But is it God himself that I see when I see these true and 
 absolute principles, these numbers, laws, and axioms ? Far 
 from it, certainly. If it were God, the sight would over- 
 whelm me with joy (tantum gauderem quantum Deo cog- 
 nito). Between these truths and the holy majesty of God, 
 there is all the distance that there is between heaven and 
 earth, or the sun and the objects upon which it shines 
 (quantum in suo genere a ccelo terram, tantum ab intel- 
 liyibili Dei majestate spectamina ilia disciplina vera et 
 certa differre). These truths, such as we see them, are 
 not God ; they are sights lit up in us by the sun of God- 
 There is, therefore, one world, the world of sense ; another 
 world, the world of intelligence ; and above them both, 
 the Father of worlds (duos mundos, et ipsum parentem 
 universitatis). 
 
 Eeason advances from the world of sense to the world of 
 intelligence by the steps which we have just described. 
 But to see God himself, reason must be transformed and 
 become energy. It becomes energy by becoming pure and 
 perfect reason (est enim virtus vel recta vel perfecta ratio). 
 It becomes energy when it attains its supreme end (hcec est 
 vere perfecta virtus, ratio perveniens adfinem suum). What 
 is that end ? The very vision of God (ipsa visio Dei quce est 
 finis aspectus). This is supernatural, and comes through 
 the three virtues which God gives, Faith, Hope, and 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 131 
 
 Charity, three virtues without which no soul can be 
 healed in such manner as to see God (Fides, Spes, Caritas, 
 . . . sine tribus istis anima nulla sanatur, ut possit Deum 
 suum videre). To see God, this is the final aim of reason, in 
 the soul united to God : this vision is the union of the soul 
 which sees, with God himself, who is seen (intellectus ille 
 qui conficitur ex intelligente et eo quod intelligitur). 
 
 But all this course is the fruit of the successive purifica- 
 tion of the soul. It is clear that the soul which, turning away 
 from God, should seek its own light, to the exclusion of that 
 of God, would find only shadows (anima si ad lucem suam 
 attenderit tenebratur ; si ad lucem Dei, illuminatur). The 
 more the soul, turned away from the light of justice, strug- 
 gles, the farther it is removed from light, and the deeper 
 it is buried in the gulf of shadows (anima avertens se a luce 
 justitice, quanta magis qucerit tanto plus a luce repellitur, et 
 in tenebrosa repellitur). 
 
 Such is, according to Saint Augustine, the course of rea- 
 son towards God. 
 
 It is very plain that this course of reason implies all 
 philosophy, logic, morals, knowledge of the soul and of 
 God. 
 
 Thus we desire first to exhibit philosophy, in its broad out- 
 lines, to the attentive intelligences which may consent to 
 follow us. We try to put before them in living form the 
 actual thought of all wise men of the first order. Their ac- 
 cord gives us the teachings of a human authority without a 
 parallel. Intelligence and clear vision are requisite. I only 
 ask you to show respect and attention to these authorities. 
 Eespectful attention to the words and testimony of these 
 sublime geniuses or saints who, more than any others, have 
 sought and seen the truth, will soon direct your gaze to that 
 truth itself, which all have seen, which all describe with 
 one accord, each aiding the other by his splendid testimony. 
 
182 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Little by little, their words will lead you to see for your- 
 selves the intelligible object which they contemplated as 
 they spoke. Or rather, as Saint Augustine tells us, the 
 Master who enlightened them, the sole Master of all men, 
 who is in you as he was in them, will show you the 
 meaning of the words uttered by his most advanced dis- 
 ciples. You will see in the light itself the assurance, as 
 well as the omissions, in their teachings and in ours. 
 
 X. 
 
 We have now given a most imperfect account of Saint 
 Augustine's- Philosophy. We have been forced to select 
 from his vast store of riches, and perhaps have omitted the 
 best. We have grasped and separated from the living 
 current of his thought certain features which seem chilled 
 by isolation. We have done what may be worse yet, 
 we have repeated, out of place and out of connection, some 
 few of the deep accents of his soul and his love; and if 
 these accents fall upon the ear of one who does not love, 
 who does not believe or hope, they cannot be understood, 
 The inexperienced heart, which has never lived the life 
 of the most sublime and saintly love, cannot comprehend 
 Saint Augustine. How must it be with the empty, impure, 
 and perverse soul ? Destitute of the divine perceptions 
 developed in the soul of the saint, how should I understand 
 that which senses I do not possess permit him to see, smell, 
 taste, hear, and touch of God ? If he tells me of those 
 lights, those perfumes, and those voices, I am like a blind 
 man listening to an account of the sunrise : I hear the 
 words, I cannot see the things ; the words do not correspond 
 to the life I know, but to that which I do not know ; and 
 then how often I am tempted to say, These are words, and 
 nothing more ! 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 133 
 
 Bead Saint Augustine in the poetic period of early youth. 
 If your soul be beautiful, you will find a certain charm; 
 because there is nothing more complete than his genius, and 
 the sacred inspiration of the loftiest poetry pervades his 
 work. But you will not understand his knowledge, because 
 you have no knowledge of your own ; you will feel nothing 
 of his love, because you have as yet no love yourself, or the 
 love which you have is of another order. Take up Saint 
 Augustine twenty years later, when your soul has developed, 
 for if the light of your soul is dimmed, you will not take 
 up his work, re-read him after you have lived, sought, suf- 
 fered, and struggled for the truth ; then you will know that 
 mind and that soul which you did not know before: you 
 will be amazed that you could have read without under- 
 standing, and looked without seeing. You will see the life 
 under the words; and if you have yourself at times half 
 seen the light, if you have possessed wisdom but for an hour, 
 it is that wisdom and that light, all whose virtues, all whose 
 beams, you recover here. 
 
 From this point of view only can we judge the great sys- 
 tem of philosophy of the modern world, of which Saint 
 Augustine is the Plato ; we can understand the likeness and 
 all the difference between these two brother geniuses, born 
 under different skies ; and in this difference we seize upon 
 the chief feature in the history of the human mind, a 
 feature which, if it be understood, at last shows us what 
 Philosophy, the true, total, useful Philosophy, is. 
 
 Christian dogma teaches us that there is the same differ- 
 ence between the old Mosaic law and the new law of Jesus 
 that there is between the precept and the life, and the 
 same difference between these two states of religion in his- 
 tory that there is between the image and the reality. When 
 we are closely acquainted with Plato and Saint Augustine, 
 and have actually practised their teachings, we see that 
 
134 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 there is in several respects, between the two systems of 
 philosophy, the same difference as there is between the old 
 and the new law. 
 
 Several Fathers of the Church have compared Greek phi- 
 losophy to the old law ; they regard it as a sort of evangelical 
 preparation, and look upon true philosophers as prophets. 1 
 Now, as the Gospel tells us, when Christianity came, it came, 
 not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it; so too it does not 
 come to destroy the human fruit of philosophic thought, but 
 to ripen it. It effects in the human mind and its imperish- 
 able philosophy precisely the same revolution which it causes 
 in the eternal and universal religion of mankind. 
 
 We have seen that Plato desired, awaited, dimly foresaw 
 this divine revelation ; Saint Augustine declared it to be 
 accomplished; and the eye which can judge sees it indeed, 
 longed for in Plato, fulfilled in Saint Augustine. 
 
 I repeat it, the fundamental fact in the history of the hu- 
 man mind has been accomplished. Philosophy, properly so 
 called (I do not refer to Theology, which is distinct from it), 
 Philosophy, I say, has passed from infancy to manhood. 
 
 Of the two regions of the world of intelligence perceived 
 by all who foresaw the light, the human mind occupied one, 
 and, by a certain conjecture, regretted the other; now it 
 occupies both. 
 
 There are two regions in the world of intelligence, let us 
 again repeat with Plato : first that of God himself, and then 
 that of divine phantoms, shadows of that which is, essential 
 truths, eternal and absolute, but which are not God. Now, 
 Plato is, of all men of the old world, the one most familiar 
 with this distinction. Plato went as far as human reason 
 can go in its first estate. He saw all that exists in man ; he 
 reached the very apex of the soul ; he teaches, as Saint Au- 
 
 1 Saint Clement of Alexandria, Saint Justin. See Melchio Cano, lib. x. 
 cap. iv. and vi. 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY 135 
 
 gustine observes, that the sight of the essence of God is given 
 by a light absolutely distinct from man, absolutely divine ; 
 he knows that this light is God, that its source is the Sover- 
 eign Good ; he asserts that our soul is capable of attaining to 
 the direct and immediate vision of this source of light. And 
 yet Saint Augustine says of Plato : He saw only the image 
 of God ; he did not find the true way to attain to the sover- 
 eign Good ; he dealt with the eternal images of the True, not 
 with the True itself; he dealt with that truth which is not 
 God, but which is his image ; 1 that is to say, Plato did not 
 see the two regions, the difference between which he knew, 
 he saw the lower of the two, and conjectured the other. 
 
 "It is one thing to see our peaceful fatherland from the top of 
 a mountain and from the bosom of a wild forest, without the abil- 
 ity to find the road, and to seek a path of escape in vain amidst 
 enemies who surround and pursue us, ... it is quite another 
 thing actually to hasten over the road which leads us home." 2 
 
 "Platonists, therefore, know, after a certain fashion, invisible, 
 immutable, immaterial nature ; but the path that leads to this 
 supreme beatitude, namely, Jesus Christ crucified, seems to them 
 contemptible, they refuse to follow it, and thenceforth can never 
 reach the sanctuary which is its resting-place and end, although 
 the light that proceeds from it strikes their intelligence with a dis- 
 tant radiance." 3 
 
 It would take too long to explain here of what use the 
 Cross of Christ may be in philosophy. But the rest of this 
 book will, we hope, show it in a scientific way. There will 
 be found the deepest of philosophic truths, which was not 
 sufficiently well known. As it has been said that there are 
 two watersheds in history, one on this side the Cross, the 
 other on the other side, so too it must be said that the same 
 holds good of the human mind. These two watersheds are 
 
 1 Confess., lib. vii. cap. ix. 14. 8 Epist., cxx. cap. i. 4. 
 
 2 Ibid., lib. viii. cap. xxi. 27. 
 
136 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 just those two regions of the world of intelligence described 
 by Plato and all other philosophers after him. 
 
 Now, at that period of history at which we write, the 
 middle of the nineteenth century, the human mind is clearly 
 full of trouble, confusion, and contradiction. Minds delib- 
 erate, are excited, hesitate, repel, exclude, condemn, and at- 
 tack one another around a single point, Christianity. War 
 is waged around the Cross. Some desire to overthrow it 
 and return to the antique world behind the Cross ; others 
 strive to uphold it and advance into the new world beyond 
 it. Meantime, and while the battle rages, the mass of man- 
 kind dwell in an arid desert midway between the Promised 
 Land and Egypt, Egypt, to which they will not return, 
 and the Promised Land, which they will surely enter. But 
 those who refuse to go thither will die in the desert, and 
 will drag us down with them, until a new generation shall 
 arise, whom God may find resolved to follow him. 
 
 The sterilizers, the mortal foes of all progress of the hu- 
 man mind, are, in philosophy, those now called rationalists. 
 I call those rationalists who rely upon pure reason in such 
 a way as to exclude faith and all supernatural aid. We 
 defend the rights of human reason, they say. We reply, 
 By defending the rights of human reason as you do, do you 
 know the depths to which you have allowed Philosophy to 
 fall ? I do not say below the seventeenth century, below the 
 thirteenth century, below the time of the Fathers. I say below 
 Aristotle and Plato, far below that beautiful Greek philoso- 
 phy which we uphold and which you cannot uphold ; you 
 have taken it back and delivered it over to the sophists 
 before Socrates. Gorgias and Protagoras have returned : they 
 live, they teach, they speak and write. We hear nothing 
 else ; for as for you, you are no longer heard. You who 
 claim to uphold Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes, and who 
 reject the Cross of Christ as the guide of a fresh advance 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 137 
 
 in the world of intellect, what are you doing ? You deny 
 Plato's last and highest thought. He desired to turn 
 towards the sun which had not yet risen; and you require 
 us to turn away from the sun which is actually shining. I 
 call that the Judaism of philosophy ; and to this Judaism we 
 say, with Saint Paul : Hebrcei sunt, plus ego ! You are for 
 Aristotle and Plato, we are for them more than you; you 
 are for them, as the Jews were for Moses ; you reject him 
 whom they awaited. Is this supporting Plato ? It is de- 
 stroying him in his totality ; it is denying what Plato called 
 the goal of the onward march, the end of the process ; it is 
 taking for final realities those truths, absolute no doubt, 
 but empty, which he called shadows of the world of in- 
 telligence and divine phantoms ; it is taking Plato's dialec- 
 tic in exactly the wrong way on this point ; and I shall show 
 you that the only rationalistic philosophy, which moves and 
 stirs to-day, is nothing but an inversion of the Platonic 
 dialectic. 1 
 
 What is to be done ? We must grow and advance, as 
 Plato did in Saint Augustine. We must maintain the 
 distinction between the two regions of the world of intelli- 
 gence. A\ 7 e must learn that the first is merely shadows and 
 images, and is useful only as an image and prophecy of the 
 second. It is the second that we must enter, with our 
 whole soul, as Plato expresses it, that is, with heart, life, 
 and mind. There must be that total change of soul which 
 turns us away from the shadows seen on the walls of the 
 cave, towards the light and the objects which cast the 
 shadows. We must pass from that natural vision of God, 
 mediately and indirectly perceived in the essential truths of 
 reason, to that other vision of God, the direct and immediate, 
 which Christianity calls supernatural ; in short, we must 
 pass from the light of God, seen in ourselves, to the light of 
 1 See the Logic, Book II. 
 
138 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 God seen in God himself. We must advance from reason 
 to faith, the dim and imperfect beginning of that other light. 
 Does it follow from this that we forsake reason? No, 
 says Saint Augustine, we urge it to its last term, we make 
 of it a virtue, by rooting it in the faith which it preceded 
 and which it sought. For reason, as it is given to us, and as 
 it illumines us when we enter this world, teaches us to con- 
 clude the existence of the other light, which is the direct 
 vision of God in himself, a direct vision which the indirect 
 vision of God within ourselves leads us to suspect. And 
 the rough outline of this vision is faith, faith, that attempt 
 at vision, as Bossuet says ; faith, that eye of the heart, says 
 Saint Augustine ; faith, that incipient vision, says Saint 
 Thomas. Will that new vision destroy the other? Will 
 that divine knowledge overwhelm my human knowledge? 
 Will my acquaintance with God deprive me of my acquain- 
 tance with myself, and that of God which that acquaintance 
 implies ? Saint Augustine asserts that, even in the world to 
 come, the soul shall see God, both in himself and in itself, 
 which shows that our knowledge will remain eternally, both 
 human and divine, and that that wisdom, of which philoso- 
 phy is the beginning, shall endure. For if philosophy be 
 only God seen within us, the eternal vision is only God seen 
 in himself. 
 
 And when Saint Augustine says further : " There is within 
 my heart a depth which I do not know, and which thou 
 knowest, Lord ! a depth which is nought but shadows until 
 it becomes light beneath the splendor of thy face," Saint 
 Augustine, speaking thus, leads us to understand that he 
 perceives the two regions of the soul corresponding to the 
 two regions of the world of intelligence. 
 
 All philosophers have referred to this sanctuary of the 
 soul, where God is, and where he is necessarily, as the cause 
 of my being and my life. They have spoken of that point 
 
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 139 
 
 where God touches the soul to join it to himself, by which 
 he makes it living by holding it in his hand. Who does 
 not know that this is beyond all philosophy ? The world 
 touches us on the surface, God at the centre, and we are 
 between the two, and three worlds live in us, God, Nature, 
 and ourselves. Our soul is the temple, the place of contem- 
 plation. The centre, where God lives in us, is the sanctuary. 
 The circumference, where the world lives in us, is the outer 
 entrance. The intermediate enclosure is our proper abode ; 
 it is double, and is called intelligence and will, will is the 
 more central, intelligence more external. 
 
 Plato describes a cave, in illustration of the progress and 
 degrees of philosophy. We may be allowed to describe a 
 temple. 
 
 In childhood we play about the entrance ; if we attain to 
 manhood of mind, we enter the enclosure. The entrance is 
 illumined only by the light of the material sun ; the enclosure 
 is illumined only by the sacred flame which shines at the 
 centre. The splendid images of the enclosure, the forms 
 which cover it, are the divine phantoms of which Plato 
 speaks. We gaze at them ; Christ, on entering the temple, 
 himself gazed at the adornments ; he saw wherein the sacred 
 edifice conformed to the divine model. 
 
 But there is a difference between the temple of the soul 
 and those temples built by the hand of man : in these latter, 
 the lamp which lights the sanctuary is a pale image of the 
 sun ; in the temple of the soul, on the contrary, the sun is 
 but a pale image of the lamp. Now, there are some souls 
 which have attained to the inner degree of the intellectual 
 life, which move inwardly about the temple, but do not 
 approach the altar. To approach the altar, one must go 
 past the will ; reason must become energy. Such minds are 
 unwilling to look at anything but these images of God, and 
 they become adorers of those sacred forms which are within 
 
140 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 us, and are ourselves : as those who remain at the threshold 
 remain adorers of visible nature, which is less than we are. 
 These are the two philosopic sects which place either in 
 nature or in man " the sovereign Good, the cause of the 
 world, the fulcrum of reason." 
 
 Where does genuine philosophy begin and end ? - It be- 
 gins in the soul, which, having gazed at those divine phan- 
 toms illumined by the holy light proceeding from the 
 centre, perceives that as yet it has seen its surface only, 
 and not its depth ; that all the light of the enclosure comes 
 from the centre, and that in order to gaze at the sacred 
 images it has never ceased to turn its back upon the source 
 of light, the inner sanctuary, the central place, the abode of 
 God in us. This is the first step of true philosophy. Its 
 second step is to conclude that, if the images are so fair, the 
 model is far more beautiful, and that the term of contem- 
 plation and the purpose of the temple is the direct con- 
 templation of the Holy of Holies ; that this Holy of Holies 
 is in us, but is not us ; that we have seen its reflections 
 shining on the enclosure, on the inner surface of the soul, 
 and that we shall see its source in our centre. We under- 
 stand that there is within us a central enclosure to which 
 we have never penetrated, and that we must make our way 
 there at last by traversing the will. Plato goes thus far, but 
 Saint Augustine goes farther yet: he performs what Plato 
 thinks; he takes his eye from those arches and all their 
 splendor ; he ceases to move curiously about the temple ; 
 he turns towards the sanctuary, moves towards the altar, 
 ascends the steps ; he becomes a priest ; l he opens the 
 tabernacle to touch, see, and hear God, to taste him and 
 live by him. He turns back : the temple is no longer empty, 
 it is full of the stir of people ; gone are the images and 
 the statues; now, the images of God are men. 
 
 1 Gens sancta, regale sanctorum. 
 

 SAINT AUGUSTINE'S THEODICY. 141 
 
 It seems that the soul which has tasted God, God pres- 
 ent in its centre, that soul contains a thousand others : 
 those which, being with God, are with it. Abandoning 
 solitary and abstract reflection to seek God, it has found 
 him ; and in recovering God, has recovered mankind, its 
 life, its common-sense, its universal communion. 
 
 When the priestly soul turns towards the altar, towards 
 God, it sees its divine knowledge. When it turns towards 
 the vast enclosure, which is itself, arid towards the other 
 souls, which commune with it in God, it sees its human 
 knowledge. Both subsist in the holy sacrifice with its 
 eternal solemnity. 1 
 
 But there are necessary initiations before we can enter 
 the central enclosure ; there are conditions to be complied 
 with before we can become a priest: there is one which 
 includes them all. 
 
 This single condition consists in taking up the Cross of 
 Jesus Christ. This is what I have called the philosophic 
 use of the Saviour's cross. To take up the Cross of Christ is 
 to practise the Christian sacrifice ; it is to die to self in 
 order to live again ; it is to leave not only the outward life 
 of nature which we lived upon the threshold, but also the 
 inward life of solitary reflection, which contemplated the 
 images in the structure of the soul. Having quitted the life 
 of the world in us, to quit also our own life, to pass on to 
 the life of God himself, this is what Christianity calls 
 " taking up your cross and dying : " and it is of such death 
 that it is said : " If the grain of wheat die not, it remains 
 single ; if it die, it bears much fruit." Potent life, pro- 
 ceeding from the central point where God gives it, unfolds 
 
 1 This does not mean that the soul shall have only a supernatural knowl- 
 edge of God, and a natural knowledge of his creatures and itself. It will have 
 the natural knowledge of God and his creatures, when it looks at his crea- 
 tures and sees God in them ; it will have supernatural knowledge of God and 
 his creatures when it beholds God and sees his creatures in him. 
 
142 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 all the riches of the germ which desired to die in God, and, 
 at the tip of every twig or every ray of that life, the grain 
 which was dead and is born again bears fruit like unto 
 itself, an image of the soul turned towards God, developed 
 and become priestly, which, forasmuch as it liveth in God, 
 makes a world of souls live within it. 
 
 There is nothing superfluous in our description of the 
 temple. Search carefully, and you will find all this in the 
 history of philosophy, consummated and complete. 
 
CHAPTEK V. 
 
 THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 
 
 LIKE the two Sums of Saint Thomas, the two philosophic 
 works of Saint Anselm might be called "Intelligence 
 Seeking for Faith" " Faith seeking for Intelligence." l The 
 latter title was at first given by Saint Anselm himself to his 
 second work, the Proslogium. As for the first, the Mono- 
 logium, the saintly doctor tells us how he wrote the book for 
 his monks, who asked him for purely philosophic medita- 
 tions, in which absolutely nothing should rest upon the 
 authority of Scripture, but everything should depend upon 
 the evidence of truth and the necessary conclusions of rea- 
 son. 2 This is why, in the Monologium, he " supposes a man 
 seeking for truth by his unaided reason." 3 And, he says, "if 
 it be a question of most of the truths which we believe in 
 regard to God and the creation, I think that such a man, 
 who does not know them or does not believe them, may still, 
 if he be only of ordinary intellect, convince himself of them 
 by his unaided reason." * 
 
 Yet this book was at first entitled by Saint Anselm, 
 " Meditations on the Eeason of Faith" (Exemplum medi- 
 tandi de ratione Fidei). The saintly doctor does not merely 
 demonstrate the existence of God and his attributes in this 
 work, he goes farther. He proves the necessity of Faith, 
 and he goes so far as to meditate on the mystery of the Holy 
 Trinity. He claims that, this doctrine being given and 
 
 1 Intellectus quaerens Fidern. Fides quserens Intellectum. 
 
 z Monol., preface. 8 Ibid. 4 Ibid., chap. i. 
 
144 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 taught by revelation, the intelligence can find profound and 
 admirable reasons for the mystery. 
 
 Saint Anselm therefore wrote the first of his two works 
 for the same purpose that Saint Thomas wrote the Summa 
 PhilosopJiica ; that is, to bring natural reason to bear against 
 those who do not admit the authority of the Scriptures and 
 of revelation. 
 
 And like Saint Thomas, after proving the existence of 
 God, Saint Anselm too goes farther. He proves by reason 
 the necessity of another light. From the very fact that 
 reason on reaching a certain point fails, another light must 
 needs intervene. Like Saint Thomas again, Saint Anselm 
 gives his listeners a statement of that which the other light 
 reveals to us, and compels reason to see nothing therein which 
 is opposed to it, but, on the contrary, to discover rich stores of 
 truth. This, moreover, is the traditional course of all Catholic 
 schools of thought. All make a radical distinction between 
 Faith and Eeason; all maintain both; all affirm that un- 
 aided reason can accomplish certain things, that it has rights 
 and duties : but none stops at an isolated rational doctrine ; 
 all regard healthy reason, living reason, as a power which 
 lives and moves in the regret and desire for another power, 
 under the attraction of a higher truth : none supposes reason 
 apart from the superior attraction which seeks to elevate it. 
 All consider reason as correlative to faith, and always see, 
 either intelligence in search of faith, or else faith seeking for 
 intelligence. And we say, with full conviction, that this 
 point of view is not merely theological, but it is properly 
 and rigidly philosophical. To set it aside is to desert philo- 
 sophy and take up sophistry. Our future studies will show 
 this. 
 

 THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 145 
 
 II. 
 
 Now, how does Saint Anselm prove the existence of God ? 
 What is his argument ? Is that argument good or bad ? Is 
 it or is it not a sound chain of reasoning ? What is its place 
 in logic ? It is not for us to answer this question, lest we 
 should seem too fully to agree with our own selves : we will 
 rather leave it to the eminent writer who has so skilfully disr 
 cussed the philosophic work of Saint Anselm, and who was 
 first, so far as we know, to understand fully the nature- of 
 his famous argument. "! am convinced," says M. de Ke'mit- 
 sat, " that the foes of this argument will always have an easy 
 victory if we persist in turning it into a syllogism. The ma- 
 jor must always be such that it carries the decision of: the 
 question. . . . Therefore it is the major that we should con- 
 sider. It is the fundamental idea, not mere reasoning, tthat 
 we should bring to bear against our foes." l This is the truth 
 in regard to Saint Anselm's argument. In our opinion we 
 should undoubtedly bring both the fundamental idea and 
 the force of reasoning to bear against our foes ; but we must 
 first recognize that this reasoning is not a syllogism. What 
 then is it ? " It is an example of that boldness of induction 
 upon which ontology is based." 2 Yes, this reasoning, taken 
 with its true point of departure, is an induction, although, to 
 our thinking, there is no boldness about it. It is simply the 
 chief process of reason, that which finds the majors; that 
 which in our opinion logic does not bring sufficiently to the 
 front ; that which the best minds see dimly, which they even 
 describe, as our author does here, but which they dare not 
 frankly introduce into logic as an exact process, intimidated 
 
 1 Saint Anselm, p. 533. We are considering only the philosophical part 
 of M. de Remnsat's book. Were we considering the historic and religious 
 part, we should be compelled to make certain reserves. 
 
 2 Page 535. 
 
 10 
 
146 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 as they are, despite the authority of Aristotle and all great 
 philosophers, by the time-honored prejudice that reason has 
 but one process, the syllogistic. 1 
 
 Saint Ansel m's argument, taken as a whole, is, in our opin- 
 ion, a little masterpiece, containing in its simple form a great 
 wealth of ideas : it is the key to ontology, psychology, and 
 logic. Let us try to turn this key and see what it hides. 
 
 Let us see what occurs in the soul which attains to the 
 idea of God, that chief major of all philosophy. 
 
 In the first place, every soul always feels the attraction of 
 the Sovereign Good. Moreover, it sees all things, in a certain 
 degree, in the light of God. All desire for any finite Good 
 whatever implies some desire for the Sovereign Good. The 
 vision of any finite being whatsoever implies a certain degree 
 of vision of the infinite Being. The attraction of the desir- 
 able and the intelligible, the divine sense, this is always the 
 beginning. 
 
 But this sense and this vision of God which is given us, or 
 at least offered us by everything desired or known, is implicit. 
 The soul sees as if it did not see ; it feels as if it did not feel ; 
 it has eyes and sees not, senses and feels not. Why ? Be- 
 cause there is an obstacle, a double obstacle, the obstacle 
 which results from the necessary limitations of the finite, 
 
 1 Re-read from this point of view the last chapter of De Remusat's book. 
 In those remarkable pages, full of good sense, penetration, elevation, ingenious 
 and truthful insight, the writer seems to consider in turn, from without, all 
 the phases of a leading idea of which he never gives a complete description, 
 and which he develops with some hesitation. What would be the living bond, 
 the precise unity, the solid axis of all this chapter ? It would be this propo- 
 sition, understood as we understand and set it forth in this work: "There is 
 in the human mind, besides syllogism, another process quite as exact, which 
 leads up from effects to causes, and from the finite to the infinite." But what 
 is there to prove clearly that this process is an exact one ? This. This pro- 
 cess is applicable and applied to geometry, whose mainstay it is.. For several 
 years back this important observation has been made, both in France and Ger- 
 many. Little by little, those who devote themselves to philosophy will pay 
 heed to it. 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 147 
 
 and, besides, the sickly obstacle of a guilty and debased life. 
 " For the sense of my soul," says Saint Anselm, " has become 
 hardened, and, as it were, stupefied by the ancient languor of 
 sin." l In a sickly soul there must first be a certain moral 
 condition, a sacrifice of evil as an obstacle, and, moreover, 
 another sacrifice in humility, which is the sight of and regret 
 at the narrow confines of finite nature. There must be this 
 double sacrifice before the divine sense can become explicit 
 in us. But, moreover, we must have recourse to reason, to 
 make up for the degradation and obscurity of that inner 
 sense. Reason, or rather ratiocination, reproduces, with toil 
 and complication, what the divine sense, were it perfectly 
 active, would give us at once. 
 
 Reason, therefore, makes it clear to us that the desire for a 
 limited good is only the beginning of the desire for a sover- 
 eign good, and that the sight of finite beings is only the 
 beginning of the sight of the Being which is infinite. Why ? 
 Because my reason cannot conceive of a limited good with- 
 out conceiving a greater one, and a greater yet, and thus 
 it speeds until it reaches a term which it attains at a single 
 bound, and where it necessarily pauses ; namely, the idea of 
 a being such that none greater can be conceived? of a first, 
 supreme and absolute Being, upon whom all being neces- 
 sarily rests, as my thought rests and pauses in him alone. 
 But this simple ideal postulate once established, this sim- 
 ple name of a Being such that none greater can be con- 
 ceived, being merely mentally expressed, does not the mind 
 clearly recognize that which it saw implicitly, and does 
 not the inner sense of the soul support that light with all 
 the living force which is within it ? Does not the soul 
 
 1 Proslog., cap. xvii. 
 
 2 Id quo majus cogitari nequit (Contra insipientem, cap. viii.). 
 Invenisti eum esse quiddam summum omnium, quo nihil melius cogitari 
 
 potest (Prosl., cap. xiv.). 
 
148 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 instantly believe in the actual existence of the Being such 
 that none greater can be conceived ? 
 
 Here, then, are two moments, the one which, starting 
 with the desire or the sight of limited good, conceives the 
 name and formula of the Being such that none greater can 
 be conceived, that is to say, simply Being ; and the other 
 which instantly recognizes under this single name, actual 
 and real existence, as being necessarily contained therein, 
 since we cannot say : Being is not. 
 
 If we ask Saint Anselm how we arrive at this idea of the 
 Sovereign Good, he replies that we arrive at it by the sight of 
 limited good (de minoribus bonis ad major a conscendendo). 
 We pass from the idea of a Good such that a greater one can 
 be conceived (ex Us quibus majus cogitari valet, CONJICERE 
 id quo majus cogitari nequit), that is to say, from the idea 
 of finite good (quod initium et finem habet) we rise to the 
 idea of infinite good (quod nee finem habet nee initium). 
 All lower good, in so far as good, has some likeness to the 
 Sovereign Good (omne minus bonum intantum est simile 
 majori bono inquantum est bonum). There is, therefore, a 
 point of support to aid us in arriving at the idea of the infinite 
 (est igitur unde possit conjici quod majus cogitari nequeat). 
 Eeason reveals this to every rational mind (cuilibet rationali 
 menti). But if any Christian deny it, continues our holy 
 doctor, we must remind him of the words of Saint Paul : 
 " The invisible perfections of God are visible in the created 
 world." 1 
 
 This is the real basis of St. Anselm's argument, as the 
 eminent writer whom we have quoted, very truly remarks. 
 The argument is not an empty one, as is so constantly re- 
 peated, as Leibnitz and Kant believed, Leibnitz, who labors 
 to provide it with a point of support, and Kant, who strives 
 to destroy the whole argument. Would that they had un- 
 derstood Saint Anselm ! 
 
 1 Contra insipientem, cap. viil 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 149 
 
 In general, much trouble might be saved if, in studying 
 the human mind, great men were only considered in their 
 totality. By a comparative study of their various works, we 
 should arrive at the living idea which filled their mind, at 
 the object which they saw. Then, above all errors of tex*, 
 distractions of rnind, and padding between patches of light, 
 we should see clearly the general form of their thought, and 
 recover that phase of the immutable truth which their genius 
 perceived. Then we should comprehend the harmony of 
 great minds and how always excluding the sophists who 
 gaze into darkness, and the fools who speak without look- 
 ing all minds which see, supplement and sustain, instead 
 of contradicting, each the other. 
 
 III. 
 
 Thus, according to Saint Anselm, the sight of finite beings 
 and the desire for transient goods, leads us to the idea of 
 and desire for the Supreme Good and the infinite Being. 
 But, once more, how and why does this idea of the Supreme 
 Good and the infinite Being imply the actual and real exis- 
 tence of that Being whom the mind conceives ? This must 
 be fully understood, for this is the kernel of the argument. 
 Here is the plain and simple answer. It is because an idea, 
 an idea properly so called, is a particular view of the ob- 
 ject. Modern pantheists assert that the idea is the object. 
 Those who have no philosophy, on the contrary, believe that 
 an idea can have no object. The truth is midway. " We 
 do not perceive nothing," Malebranche constantly reiterates. 
 There can be no idea without an object ; but no idea in man 
 is his object. The idea is a particular view of the object. In 
 God alone is the idea identical with its object. But what is 
 the idea, properly so called? It is neither the sensation 
 nor the image of it which remains in the memory. The idea 
 
150 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 has reference only to the universal, the permanent, the true in 
 itself, the essential ; it is therefore a particular view of God. 
 But the sight of a thing implies its existence. It is thus, 
 Saint Ansel m says, I have the idea of a Being such that 
 none greater can be conceived, that is, of an infinite Being ; 
 therefore that infinite Being exists ; for you see him, in a 
 certain sense, so soon as you think of him. For if he did 
 not exist, he would not be such that none greater could be 
 conceived. Far from being infinite, he would be nought. 
 If you could conceive that being, such that none greater can 
 be conceived, does not exist, you would simultaneously con- 
 ceive the truth of two contradictory terms. 
 
 Now, there is a singular syllogistic form, which shows this 
 contradiction, and it is the argument of Saint Anselm. 
 
 I have the idea of a being such that none greater can be 
 conceived. 
 
 But if this being did not exist, he would not be greater 
 than any that can be conceived. 
 
 Therefore it is a contradiction to affirm that the Being 
 such that none greater can be conceived does not exist. 
 
 This singular argument proves the existence of God under 
 a mathematical form and with mathematical precision. 
 For it starts with a notion which exists in the mind, like 
 that of the triangle, and deduces from this notion that of 
 necessary existence, as from that of the triangle we deduce 
 the necessary properties of the triangle. And yet it does 
 not end in an ideal, abstract God, but in a real God. This 
 is due to the fact that the argument is at the same, time 
 a priori and a posteriori. It proves that God is because he 
 must be, and also because we see his existence. This argu- 
 ment holds good only of God, for the very reason that God 
 is the only necessary Being. Outside of God the ideal and 
 the real are separate. In him real and ideal are identical. 
 And this is what Aristotle seems to show us when, speaking 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 151 
 
 of the double series of the desirable and the intelligible, 
 he says that the first desirable and the first intelligible are 
 identical. 1 
 
 But let us see more explicitly by what process reason 
 rises from created things to God. 
 
 Since nothing exist's or subsists save through the presence 
 of the creative and preservative Being, 2 we can understand 
 how, in seeing the created world, we must, according to 
 Saint Paul, see something of the Creator. More yet, all 
 that we see, we see by the light of God (quidquid video, per 
 illam video). 3 Lastly, the soul is a mirror in which God is 
 seen. 4 
 
 But if I see in all things both the creature and the light 
 of God, if I see at once, in some measure, the absolute 
 perfection of God and the relative qualities of his creatures, 
 I must sepaiate, in all my thoughts and sensations, those 
 two things which are so absolutely different ; I must dis- 
 tinguish that which shows me God, and that which shows 
 me his creatures. What can I affirm of God ? Of all that 
 I can affirm of created things, what is there which befits 
 the wonderful nature of God ? 5 I am amazed if among the 
 words applicable to beings created out of nothing I find any 
 which can be worthily applied to the creative substance 
 of all. Let us see, however, what reason will tell us on 
 this point. 
 
 Here comes in the rational process to which we have 
 already referred, and to which we shall have frequent occa- 
 sion to refer : we must efface bounds and limits. We must 
 efface, as Descartes says, all that partakes of imperfection 
 and nothingness. As it is impossible to say that the su- 
 preme substance is something the non-existence of which 
 
 1 Metaph., lib. ii. cap. vii. * Monol., cap. Ixvii. 
 
 2 Monol., cap. xiii. 5 Ibid., xiii. 
 * Prosl., cap. xvi. 
 
152 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 would be, in any sense whatsoever, better than existence ; 
 so, too, it must necessarily be all whose existence is bet- 
 ter than non-existence : for it alone is the Sovereign 
 Good. We must therefore suppress every attribute of the 
 supreme essence which is less good than its negation, just 
 as we must affirm its every attribute which is better than 
 its negation. 1 Therefore we should affirm its life, wisdom, 
 beauty, goodness, omnipotence, beatitude, eternity, and every 
 other attribute which may be always and in every case 
 better than its negation. Now, this logical choice, almost 
 unintelligible in its theoretical statement, is practised spon- 
 taneously by every pure and religious soul, at every instant 
 of life. 
 
 It is accordingly by considering the works of God, but 
 above all by viewing itself, that the soul sees God, or at 
 least his image or reflection. 2 " For," says our Doctor, " it is 
 evident that we cannot see in ourselves that supreme nature, 
 but can only see it through an intermediary ; it is cer- 
 tain that that which can best raise us to a knowledge 
 thereof is the sight of the created being most like it. ... 
 So that the rational soul which, on the one hand, can alone 
 among created beings rise to the search after God, is also, on 
 the other hand, the very object in which it may find traces 
 of that which it seeks." 
 
 " We may therefore say of the soul, with perfect truth, 
 that it is to itself a mirror wherein it sees the image of him 
 whom it cannot behold face to face." 3 
 
 Keason, adds Saint Anselm, transfers to God the attri- 
 butes which it finds in the soul, but it does not transfer 
 them as they are. It speaks of them in the same terms, but 
 those terms have two meanings : one meaning relating to the 
 creature, another meaning relating to God ; and the meaning 
 relating to the creature, that petty meaning (tenuem signifi- 
 
 1 Monol., cap. xv. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., cap. Ixvii. 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 153 
 
 cationem), 1 is only the image, and, as it were the enigma, of 
 their meaning in God. 
 
 By summing up the foregoing, we see how complete Saint 
 Anselm's idea was. Nothing is wanting : the divine sense, 
 the attraction of the desirable and the intelligible ; the ob- 
 stacle to that attraction ; the state of degradation of the 
 divine sense in the soul ; the need for moral preparation, 
 for cure, in order that the divine sense, God's image in us, 
 which includes the memory of God, and which leads to the 
 knowledge and love of God, may be in some measure devel- 
 oped ; the effort of the thought and will to develop that 
 sense and derive light and love from it ; the external point 
 of departure of this task of reason, in the sight of finite 
 beings, limited goods ; the flight of reason from that which 
 is limited to the Being which is without limitations; the 
 crossing of the gulf between the world and God ; the scien- 
 tific operation which divides that which befits the Infinite 
 and that which could never befit him; the fundamental 
 process which finds the truth ; the syllogism which more 
 explicitly reveals the truth found, we encounter all this at 
 one and the same time in the thought of the holy Doctor. 
 
 IV. 
 
 It remains to determine what sort of knowledge Saint 
 Anselm believed he should acquire by this exercise of the 
 reason. He tells us, in the admirable summary which con- 
 cludes his philosophical work from which we quote, 
 
 " Hast thou found, my soul, all that thou hast sought 1 Thou 
 hast sought God. Thou hast found that God is the Being such 
 that none greater can be conceived : that he is life itself, light, 
 wisdom, goodness, everlasting beatitude, blessed eternity ; that he 
 is all this, everywhere and always. For if thou hast not found 
 
 1 Monol., cap. Ixv. 
 
154 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 God, how canst thou say that he is all which thou hast understood 
 with such complete certainty, such absolute truth 1 But if thou 
 hast found him, why doth not thy heart feel the great God whom 
 thou hast found ? Why, God, why doth my soul not feel thee, 
 if my soul possesseth thee ] Can it be that it hath not found 
 him whom it hath recognized as light and truth] How hath it 
 understood this, if it be not by seeing thy light and thy truth 1 
 Can it understand aught of thee, save through thy light and 
 truth 1 If it hath seen light and truth, it hath seen thee. If it 
 hath not seen thee, it hath not seen light and truth. But per- 
 haps what it hath seen is indeed light and truth, although it hath 
 not yet seen thee thyself. It hath seen thee in a certain fashion, 
 but it hath not seen thee as thou art (vidit te aliquatenus, sed non 
 vidit sicut es). 1 My God, my Creator, my Regenerator, tell my 
 soul, estranged from thee though it be, what thou art, above and 
 beyond what it hath seen, to the end that it may one day learn to 
 see thee purely. 
 
 " Verily, Lord, that light wherein thou dwellest is an inacces- 
 sible light, and nought can penetrate it, so far as to see thee thy- 
 self. I therefore do not see it, it is far beyond me ; there is no 
 proportion between it and me ; and yet by means of it I see all that 
 I see : even as my feeble sight sees by the light of the sun all that 
 it sees, although it cannot gaze at that light in the sun itself." 
 
 Thus this knowledge of God, acquired by reason, is a vision 
 which is still problematic, a vision in a mirror. Keason 
 entereth not into that inaccessible light which shows God 
 directly and immediately. But if that light be inaccessible 
 to the forces of nature, man may be raised to it by the favor 
 of God (quce inacessibilis est viribus nostris, sed acceditur 
 ad earn munembus divinis)? Saint Anselm, therefore, distin- 
 guishes, as do all the Fathers, between the two modes, natural 
 and supernatural, indirect and direct, in which the soul may 
 see the light of God. 
 
 It is thus that he distinguishes between knowledge which 
 is purely human and knowledge which is purely divine. But 
 
 1 Prosl., xiv. a Homil., iv. in Ev. sec. MattL 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 155 
 
 in practice he clings particularly to that knowledge, at once 
 human and divine, which is the fruit of reason working in 
 the light of revelation. This is expressed by those beautiful 
 words so often quoted, which are, as it were, the motto of all 
 Saint Anselm's works : 
 
 " I long to possess, in so far as possible, the intelligence of the 
 truth, my God, of that truth which my heart loves and believes. 
 I seek not intelligence to the end that I may believe, but I would 
 believe to the end that I may have intelligence. I believe things 
 which I could never comprehend if I did not first believe them. 1 . . . 
 Thanks to thee, my God, that which at first I believed by thy 
 grace I now see by thy light ; so that if I should cease to believe 
 that thou art, my God, I could not cease to know it." 2 
 
 So that, according to Saint Anslem, truths at first received 
 through faith become so luminous that we can no longer help 
 seeing them, even independently of faith. Faith, therefore, 
 is the root of knowledge. " But if the true order exacts that 
 Christian mysteries be received through faith, before reason 
 undertakes to discuss them, so too we should be, it seems to 
 me, guilty of negligence if, when we are established, we did 
 not seek eagerly for the intellectual possession of that which 
 we believe." 3 
 
 And, in our opinion, this is incomparably the best way to 
 arrive at philosophical discoveries. The example of Saint 
 Anselm himself is a proof of this. Saint Anselm, in fact, is 
 the stimulator of the great Scholastic movement, which is of 
 all historic movements that which has done most to develop 
 human reason. Moreover, Saint Anselm is perhaps the first 
 of all the philosophers to handle methodically the idea of the 
 infinite, that lever of science. If ideas required a genealogy, 
 and if every clear-sighted mind did not perceive them in 
 the light of God, there would be strong reasons for thinking 
 
 1 Prosl., cap. i. 8 Cur Deus homo., lib. i. cap. ii. 
 
 2 Ibid., cap. iv. 
 
156 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 that Saint Anslern's metaphysics form, in the development 
 of the human mind, the first perceptible germ from which 
 the invention of the infinitesimal calculus was afterwards to 
 be developed. Saint Anselm's great idea, the formula which 
 constantly recurs in his writings, is this : " The being such 
 that none greater can be conceived." Now, this formula is 
 not merely synonymous with the word infinite, it is a defini- 
 tion of it. The infinite is a word often used, which will often 
 be used again, in a vague or false way, t.o the point of con- 
 founding it, as did the ancients, with the indefinite. Now, 
 Saint Anselm's formula is the proper definition of the infinite, 
 such as our reason can conceive it. The indefinite, in fact, 
 is such that we can always conceive of something beyond it. 
 The infinite, on the contrary, the infinite alone, is such that 
 we can conceive of nothing beyond it. It is that absolute 
 limit of which Leibnitz speaks, which is above and outside 
 all size, which increasing size cannot attain, and which itself 
 cannot increase. Now, faith, completely reasoned out, become 
 evident, faith in the existence of the real and actual infi- 
 nite, is the highest of all ideas, and the strongest of all scien- 
 tific motives. It is, as it were, a type of truth, a general 
 method of discoveries. This idea teaches us, in all things, 
 to push reason to its farthest limit, to refer every contingent 
 notion to its eternal exemplar, to seek out what may be the 
 divine idea to which every object corresponds, as being its 
 transitory and partial image ; in fine, to study his creatures 
 in God, as when geometry searches in the infinite for the 
 laws and secret nature of finite forms. 
 
 The Church pays the following amazing testimony to Saint 
 Anselm's philosophic work : " His writings show plainly that 
 he derived from Heaven the form of doctrine by which he 
 defends our faith, and which has been followed since by all 
 theologians who apply the Scholastic method to sacred 
 
 things." 1 
 
 1 Brev. Rom., April 21, lect. vi. 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT ANSELM. 157 
 
 What is this form of doctrine ? It is plainly that great 
 Christian method, that complete process of thought which 
 seeks Faith through Intelligence, and Intelligence through 
 Faith. Saint Anselm, more exactly than the Fathers, gives 
 his law to the school, and founds the admirable theologic and 
 philosophic instruction in which the two principles of light, 
 reason and faith, always radically distinct, remain profoundly 
 united. And this is that which was derived from Heaven, 
 and which earth needs, as, I hope, may be understood in 
 proportion as philosophy revives. 
 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 
 I. 
 
 WE may say that Saint Thomas Aquinas is to Saint Au- 
 gustine what Aristotle is to Plato. We may also say 
 that Saint Thomas includes Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato. 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas, as a philosopher, includes all the 
 substance of his three great predecessors. But his mind is 
 that of Aristotle. There are two kinds of mind, correspond- 
 ing to the two processes of reasoning. Every mind employs 
 both processes ; but in almost all, one of the two prevails. 
 Some move particularly by means of syllogistic identity, oth- 
 ers by means of dialectic transcendence. Plato and Saint 
 Augustine proceed mainly by means of transcendence, Aris- 
 totle and Saint Thomas by means of identity. 
 
 It is clear that Saint Thomas Aquinas must have deduced 
 and wrought chiefly by syllogisms, since the majors were given 
 him. That which Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine found 
 in philosophy, he had not to search out. Certainly he veri- 
 fied their postulates with more scrupulousness, profundity, and 
 precision than any other man without exception, But still, 
 his work was chiefly one of deduction, and he had reached 
 that point of intellectual effort to which Plato alludes when, 
 after describing one of the two processes of reasoning, that 
 which, from the point of departure taken as primary cause, 
 deduces its consequences by syllogisms, he passes to the other 
 process, and says that reason, by its dialectic impulse, seizes 
 the primary cause, not contained in the point of departure, 
 then, thus possessing the idea and that which is dependent 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 159 
 
 upon it, it descends from idea to idea towards all the conse- 
 quences of the chief idea. Such is the most customary field 
 of Saint Thomas's syllogisms. It is not only syllogism ap- 
 plied to the postulates of the senses and to abstract notions, 
 but it is chiefly syllogism applied to ideas, which is Plato's 
 distinguishing feature. This has never been sufficiently 
 noticed. An eminent mind, a partisan of Plato and Saint 
 Augustine, who did not fear to call Saint Thomas Aquinas 
 a destroyer of Philosophy, was led to this error from lack of 
 grasping the above distinction. There is here, according to 
 Plato, all the difference that there is between the two regions 
 of the world of intelligence, and, according to Saint Augus- 
 tine, all the difference that there is between heaven and earth. 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas reasons in heaven, not on earth ; he 
 deduces, but he deduces from heaven, not from earth. 
 
 So much for the syllogistic side of the argument. But 
 every mind necessarily makes use of both processes of 
 reasoning. Aristotle practises, and, up to a certain point, 
 describes both. Now, we may assert that Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas uses, far more than Aristotle, the chief process of 
 Philosophy. Saint Thomas, moreover, did not misunder- 
 stand Saint Augustine, as Aristotle misunderstood Plato, by 
 rejecting his dialectic ; he set aside nothing in his glorious 
 predecessor ; and that process of rational ascent, advancing 
 from the sensation to God, so well described by Saint 
 Augustine, is practised, mentioned, and also described by 
 Saint Thomas. 1 
 
 There is in philosophy, in regard to the method, the same 
 difference between Aristotle and Plato that there is between 
 Lagrange and Leibnitz. Lagrange is blind and unjust in 
 respect to Leibnitz ; he does not admit his principles ; he is 
 
 1 Alia rationalis scientia dialedica quse ordinatur ad acquisitionem inven- 
 tivam, et alia scientia demonstrativa quse est veritatis deterrainativa. 2 a , 2" , q. 
 51, 2, ad 3 m . 
 
160 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 willing to retain merely the results, which he claims to reach 
 strictly by a better method. " He desires to base the entire 
 differential calculus upon simple algebraic identities," em- 
 ploying for this purpose " one of those metaphysical paralo- 
 gisms into which the greatest masters are liable to fall," l 
 and depending, to attain this end, upon a general principle, 
 which is false in certain cases. 2 Instead of this, there is, 
 between Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, only 
 the difference that there is between Newton and Leibnitz, 
 minus the dispute. Newton made the same discovery as 
 Leibnitz, but without expressing the idea of infinite small - 
 ness ; his idea is less distinct than that of Leibnitz, but it 
 is the same, and he recognized it. Now, if Saint Thomas, 
 upon this point, obscures Saint Augustine, it is in a yet more 
 transparent manner, as we shall see. 
 
 II. 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the question of the existence of 
 God and its proof, starts with a main idea from which he 
 never deviates ; it is that of Saint Paul : the invisible God 
 is seen in his visible effects. We see that this is the prin- 
 ciple of the proving of the infinite through the finite. 
 
 Henceforth, if any one object that the existence of God 
 cannot be proved, because the proposition God is, is an iden- 
 tical and self-evident proposition, Saint Thomas confesses 
 that it would be so to those who might know God in him- 
 self, but not to us, who only know him through his works. 
 
 If any one object that the existence of God is a truth 
 superior to reason, and that faith alone can attain to it, he 
 
 1 Cournot, Elementary Treatise on the Theory of Functions, vol. i. p. ix, 
 French edition. 
 
 2 This was proved by M. Lefebure de Fourcy in his lectures on the infini- 
 tesimal calculus. 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 161 
 
 denies it, and declares that reason is capable of perceiving 
 and proving God through his works. 
 
 These two objections removed, Saint Thomas proceeds to 
 prove the existence of God by his works. 
 
 We quote the whole of this argument. It is the second 
 question in the THEOLOGICAL SUM, which we translate lit- 
 erally, word for word. The reader will thus get an idea of 
 one chapter in that famous SUM, that abridgment of Theol- 
 ogy written for beginners, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says. 
 
 "QUESTION II. DOES GOD EXIST? 
 
 " This question includes three : 1. Is the existence of God self- 
 evident? 2. Is it capable of proof 1 ? 3. Does God exist? 
 
 "ART. I. Is the existence of God self-evident? 
 
 " Those who hold that it is, proceed thus : 
 
 " 1. It is self-evident that God exists. For we call self-evident 
 that which we know necessarily and naturally, like first principles. 
 But, as John of Damascus asserts, every mind knows naturally 
 that God exists. Therefore the existence of God is self-evident. 
 
 " 2. Moreover, all that is instantly certain, so soon as we know 
 the meaning of the terms, is self-evident : such is the evidence 
 which characterizes, according to Aristotle, the first principles of 
 proof. When you know what the whole is, and what the part is, 
 you at once know, by this very knowledge, that the whole is- 
 greater than the part. But so soon as we know the value of the 
 word God, we at once know that God is. For that name signifies, 
 * That which has nothing superior to it.' But that which is both 
 real and intelligible is superior to that which is merely intelligible. 
 Hence, God being intelligible, since you possess the idea, it fol- 
 lows that he is also real. Therefore the existence of God is self- 
 evident. [This is Saint Anselm's proof.] 
 
 " Moreover, it is self-evident that truth is ; for if you deny that 
 truth is, you grant that it is not ; but if truth is not, it is true 
 that it is not. Therefore there is something true. Therefore 
 truth is. Now, truth is God himself. ' I am the Way, the Truth, 
 and the Life,' says the Word. Therefore it is evident that God is. 
 
 " On the contrary, we grant that none can conceive the opposite 
 
 11 
 
162 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 of that which is self-evident, as Aristotle declares in regard to the 
 first principles of proof. Now, as a fact, we can think the oppo- 
 site of the proposition: 'God is,' as we see in the Scriptures; 
 'The fool saith in his heart, There is no God.' Therefore the 
 existence of God is not self-evident. 
 
 " I reply to all this that a truth is self-evident in two ways : 
 1 . In itself absolutely, and not relatively to us. 2. In itself, and 
 at the same time relatively to us. A proposition is self-evident 
 when the attribute is included in the definition of the subject, as 
 follows : ' Man is an animate being.' For the idea of ' animate 
 being ' is included in the definition of l man.' If, therefore, every 
 one knew both the attribute and the subject of a proposition, that 
 proposition would be self-evident to all. This is the case with 
 axioms whose terms are words familiar to all, such as ' being,' ' non- 
 being,' Hhe whole/ or 'the part.' But if any one is ignorant of either 
 subject or attribute, the proposition, evident in itself, is not so to 
 him. Thus it happens, says Boethius, that there are truths evident 
 in themselves to sages only, such as : * That mind is not subject 
 to space.' I say, therefore, that the proposition, ' God is,' taken 
 in itself, is evident, since the attribute and the subject are identi- 
 cal. For God is his very being, as we shall show. But because 
 we do not know what God is, the proposition is not for us directly 
 evident, but requires to be proved by intermediaries more familiar 
 to us, although in themselves less clear, I mean the sensible 
 effects of God's power. 
 
 "This established, we must reply to the first objection : that we 
 have, it is true, naturally within us, a sort of confused and general 
 knowledge of the existence of God, since, in fact, God is our sov- 
 ereign Good; since the desire for the sovereign Good is natural, and 
 what we desire naturally, we also know naturally. But this is not 
 exactly knowing the existence of God ; as, when I know that some 
 one is coming, I may not therefore know the man who is coming, 
 although I see him coming. And, indeed, all wish for perfect hap- 
 piness ; but some believe that perfect happiness lies in wealth, 
 others in pleasure, and so on. 
 
 " We reply to the second objection that those who hear the 
 word God, may not understand thereby the Being than whom 
 no higher can be conceived, since there are some who have 
 thought that God was a body. But admitting that all under- 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 163 
 
 stand by the word 'God ' the Being than whom no higher can be con- 
 ceived, it does not follow that we admit that such a Being, although 
 he be intelligible (he is this, since we think of him), therefore 
 exists in the nature of things. And we cannot maintain that he 
 is necessarily real, unless we grant that there is, in the nature of 
 things, a being such that no greater can be conceived. And this 
 is precisely what those who deny God do not grant. 
 
 "As for the third objection, it is plain, in general, that there 
 is something true ; but it is not evident, relatively to us, that 
 there exists a first truth. 
 
 "ART. II. Can we prove the Existence of God ? 
 
 " Those who deny it, proceed thus : 
 
 " 1. We cannot prove the existence of God, for it is an article 
 of faith. Now, faith is not capable of proof, for proof yields 
 knowledge ; but faith refers to things which are not seen, as the 
 Apostle says (Epistle to the Hebrews) : therefore, the existence 
 of God is not capable of proof. 
 
 " 2. Moreover, the middle term of a demonstration is the 
 essence of the subject. But we know of God, not what he is, but 
 only what he is not, as John of Damascus says. Therefore, we 
 cannot prove the existence of God. 
 
 " 3. Moreover, if we could prove God, it would only be through 
 his effects. But his effects bear no proportion to him, since he is 
 infinite and his effects finite, and there is no connection between 
 the finite and the infinite. A cause cannot be proved by an effect 
 disproportionate to that cause. Therefore we cannot prove the 
 existence of God. 
 
 " On the contrary, we cannot ignore what the Apostle says : 
 The invisible God is seen in his visible effects. This would be 
 false, if we could not by his effects prove that God is, for the first 
 thing to be perceived of a being is to perceive that it is. 
 
 " I reply that there are two kinds of proof , the one called proof 
 on account of which (propter quid), which starts from the cause, 
 from that which is intrinsically prior ; the other called proof 
 because (quia), which starts from the effect, and is prior only 
 relatively to us. 1 When a certain effect is clearer to us than 
 
 1 These are the two proofs mentioned by Plato, one of which starts from 
 the principle and deduces its consequences, while the other reaches the prin- 
 ciple by starting from a postulate which does not contain it. Repub., book 
 vi., close. 
 
 
164 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 its cause, we proceed to the knowledge of the cause by starting 
 from the effect. Now, every effect is sufficient proof that its 
 individual cause exists, when we are more familiar with these 
 effects than with their cause. The effect depending on the cause, 
 it is certain, if the effect exists, that the cause pre-exists. Thus 
 the existence of God, which to us is not self-evident, is proved by 
 its effects which we know. 
 
 " To the first objection it may be answered that the existence 
 of God, and other truths concerning God which may be known to 
 us through natural reason, as Saint Paul says in his Epistle to the 
 Romans, are not articles of faith, but preambles of faith. Faith 
 presupposes reason and natural knowledge, as grace presupposes 
 nature, and perfection presupposes the perfectible. Nevertheless, 
 nothing prevents the reception of that which is intrinsically capa- 
 ble of proof and naturally capable of being known as an article of 
 faith by those who do not understand the proof. 
 
 "We reply to the second objection that when we prove a cause 
 by its effects, we cannot start with a definition of the cause, but 
 must depend upon the effect ; and this is especially true in regard 
 to God ; because, to prove that a thing is, we must start with the 
 signification of its name, and not with its definition, the defini- 
 tion coming after the proof of existence. Now, as we shall see, 
 the names of God are borrowed from his effects ; when, therefore, 
 we prove God by his effects, we may take the meaning of one or 
 other of his names as our middle term. 
 
 "We reply to the third objection : From effects dispropor- 
 tionate to their cause we can gain no complete knowledge of that 
 cause, but every effect is sufficient to prove that its cause exists. 
 Therefore the effects of God's power can prove to us that God is, 
 although they cannot acquaint us with all that he is. 
 
 " ART. III. Is there a God ? 
 
 " Those who deny this, proceed thus : 
 
 " It seems that there is no God. If one of two opposites 
 be infinite, the other is not. But the word God means infinite 
 good. Therefore, if God were, there would be no evil. Now, 
 actually, there is evil. Therefore God is not. 
 
 " 2. Moreover, that which can be explained by a few principles, 
 does not depend on a greater number. Now, all that we see in 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 165 
 
 the world may be explained by two principles, on the supposition 
 that God is not. All material things may be referred to a single 
 principle, nature ; all spiritual things may be referred to an- 
 other principle, reason and will. It is unnecessary to suppose 
 another principle, God. 
 
 " On the other hand, it is written : ' I am that I am.' 
 
 " I reply that the existence of God may be proved in five ways. 
 
 " Motion is the first and most manifest. 
 
 " It is an assured fact, and we see, that there is motion in the 
 world. Now, every object in motion is moved by some other. 
 Nothing can be moved, if it be not in potentiality relatively to 
 the movement imparted to it ; and nothing could move save as 
 being in act, motion being only the passage from potentiality to 
 act. Clearly, nothing can be changed from potentiality to act, 
 save by that which is in act. Just as the fire, actually burning, 
 makes the wood, which was burning in potentiality, actually burn- 
 ing, and thereby moves and changes it. Now, it is impossible that 
 one and the same thing should be at once actual and potential in 
 one and the same respect, but only in different respects. That 
 which is hot in act is not hot in potentiality on the same point, 
 but upon that point cold in potentiality. It is therefore impossi- 
 ble that one and the same object, from one and the same point 
 of view, can be at once moved and motor, that is to say, that it 
 can move itself. Therefore, all that is in motion is moved by 
 some other thing. Therefore this motor, if it be itself in motion, 
 is in its turn moved by another, and that other by still another. 
 But there must be a pause ; we cannot go on thus to infinity, 
 for there would be no prime motor ; if there were no prime motor, 
 there would not be any motor, since secondary motors only move 
 by the prime motor, as a stick is only moved by the hand. There 
 must therefore be a primary motor which no other moves. Every 
 one understands that such a motor is God. 
 
 " The second proof is that of the efficient cause. 
 
 " We find in visible things a series of efficient causes, each of 
 which produces the other ; but we find nothing, and we can find 
 nothing, which is its own efficient cause, since such a cause would 
 be before being, which is impossible. Now, it is not possible to 
 reascend endlessly from cause to cause, for in the sum total of the 
 series of causes, the beginning is the cause of the middle, the mid- 
 
166 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 die of the end, whatever may be the number of terms. But if 
 we remove the cause, we remove the effect. Therefore if there 
 were no first efficient cause there would be no middle or end to 
 the series. But if there were an infinite series of efficient causes, 
 there would be no first one, and therefore there would be neither 
 a last effect, nor middle efficient causes, which is manifestly 
 false. Therefore, there must be a first efficient cause, which all 
 call God. 
 
 " The third proof is that of the possible and the necessary. 
 
 " We see beings who may be or not be, since there are corrup- 
 tions and generations. Now, it cannot be that that which is such 
 can endure forever, for that which may not be, in a certain space 
 of time ceases to exist. If, therefore, all might not be, it would 
 follow that there was a time when nothing was. But in that 
 case there would still be nothing now, for that which is not, does 
 not begin to be, save through that which is already. If, therefore, 
 nothing was, nothing can ever have begun to be ; therefore there 
 would be nothing, which is false. Therefore all beings are not 
 merely possible, and there is a necessary being. Now, that which 
 is necessary has in itself or outside itself the cause of its neces- 
 sity. But there cannot be an endless series of necessary beings, 
 external necessities, any more than there is an endless series of 
 efficient causes. We must therefore establish the fact that there 
 is something necessary itself, having no other cause for its neces- 
 sity, but being the cause of all which is necessary. Now, the 
 being necessary in itself is God. 
 
 " The fourth proof is that of the degrees of perfection. 
 
 " We find more or less, and degrees of goodness, truth, nobility, 
 and all other qualities of things. But the more and less can only be 
 applied to various beings variously approaching a sovereign type , 
 as, for example, warmth is that which partakes more or less of 
 absolute heat. There is therefore also a being who is supremely 
 good, supremely true, supremely noble, and who thence is the 
 Supreme Being. For, as Aristotle says, that which is supremely 
 true is supremely. Now that which is supremely endowed with 
 all perfection, of whatsoever kind it may be, is the cause of all 
 degrees of perfection of the same kind, as fire is the cause of all 
 heat. There is, therefore, a being who is the cause of the being, 
 of the goodness, of the perfection of all being, and that being is God. 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 167 
 
 " Lastly, the fifth proof is drawn from the government of the 
 world. 
 
 " We see certain intelligent beings, such as bodies, tend to an 
 end, since they do, usually or always, and in the same way, that 
 which leads them to a desired goal. Therefore it is not acciden- 
 tally, but rather in consequence of an intention, that they attain 
 that end. But having no knowledge, they have no individual 
 intention, and advance to their end only as directed by an intelli- 
 gence which possesses intention, as when the arrow is directed by 
 the hunter. There is therefore an intelligent being who orders 
 nature and guides it to its end. We call this God. 
 
 " Let us answer the first objection in Saint Augustine's words. 
 God, being supremely good, would by no means suffer the presence 
 of evil in his work, if he were not so all powerful and all good 
 that he can make good proceed from evil. The infinitude of 
 God's goodness endures if he permits evil only in order to produce 
 a greater good. 
 
 " To the second objection we reply that as nature, which acts 
 in that intention, advances towards its end only through the 
 manifest intention of a superior mind, we must refer to God, as 
 prime cause, all that nature effects. So, too, that which acts 
 through intention should also be referred to a higher cause than 
 human reason or will, because those two powers are variable and 
 defectible. Now, everything variable, everything defectible, pre- 
 supposes a first principle immutable and intrinsically essential, 
 as we have just shown." 
 
 III. 
 
 Throughout this little treatise by Saint Thomas Aquinas 
 upon the existence of God, in all his proofs and arguments 
 there is one leading idea, namely, the invisible God can be 
 proved through his works. Now, this is precisely the basis 
 of true demonstration, that which rises from the sight of 
 the finite to the infinite, the proof which is familiar to every 
 one, to Plato, Aristotle, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, all 
 thinkers, to poets and the people. 
 
 Moreover, St. Thomas Aquinas clearly distinguishes be- 
 
168 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 tween the proof which moves from cause to effect, which 
 deduces, which derives a consequence from a principle by 
 means of syllogism, and that which reascends from the 
 effect to the cause not contained in the effect, which advances 
 from finite effect to infinite cause. 
 
 He knows the objection to this point, and presents it 
 vigorously (Art. II., ad. 3 m ). " We can only," he objects, 
 " prove God through his works. Now, his works are wholly 
 disproportionate to himself, since he is infinite and his works 
 are finite, and there is no proportion between finite and in- 
 finite." He replies, " That an effect, disproportionate to its 
 cause, cannot reveal its entire cause, but can prove that it 
 exists." 
 
 He asserts, by the way, that those who say that there is 
 no God, do not accept actual infinity ; that is to say, the being 
 so great than none greater can be conceived (Art. L, ad. 2 m ). 
 
 He refutes Saint Anselm's proof, regarded as purely syllo- 
 gistic and a priori, by the same remark that there may be 
 minds who deny actual infinity, and consequently do not 
 accept Saint Anselm's major. 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas therefore is perfectly aware that 
 this argument, to be complete, should be a proof at the same 
 time a priori and a posteriori, the proof of the existence of 
 God being the only one capable of combining these two ex- 
 tremes, because God is the only being at once ideal and real, 
 whose ideality is identical with reality, which Saint Thomas 
 expresses perfectly in that statement, whose importance is 
 not understood : His being is his essence (suum esse est sua 
 essentia) ; that is to say, his ideality and his reality are iden- 
 tical. Every other being has his idea in God, and his reality 
 is distinct from his idea, as the finite is from the infinite. 
 God, who alone is infinite, is identical with his ideal, which 
 is himself. Therefore the proof of the existence of God is 
 both rational and experimental. 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 169 
 
 To establish this proof, we must know a posteriori that 
 there is a Being such that none greater can be conceived. 
 How can we know this a posteriori ? By what effect, what 
 experience, are we to reach it ? By the path traced out by 
 Saint Anselm, as we have seen, and followed by Descartes 
 when he said, " I am an imperfect, incomplete being, depend- 
 ent upon others, ceaselessly tending and aspiring towards 
 something higher and better than I am;" and Descartes con- 
 cludes from this experimental postulate the existence of ac- 
 tual infinity. And this by an intellectual and moral impulse 
 which clings to the inner attraction of the sovereign Good. 
 Saint Thomas shows the existence of this attraction in the 
 soul (Art L, ad. l m ), when he explains the remark of John of 
 Damascus which is brought to bear against him, That all 
 men know God naturally. We have, he says, a confused 
 knowledge of him in our desire for happiness. Now, this 
 confused knowledge is the experimental basis of distinct 
 knowledge; it is the chief effect upon which reason relies 
 for rising to God. This desire for happiness, this attraction 
 of the sovereign Good, is the sense of infinity naturally ex- 
 isting in all men, if they do not destroy it by their own 
 perversity. 
 
 IV. 
 
 For a better knowledge of Saint Thomas's theory of the 
 method which rises to God, we should read his comments on 
 Saint Paul's great words : " The invisible God is seen in his 
 works." This divine text, as we have already seen, contains 
 all the ideas of Saint Thomas upon this subject. Saint 
 Thomas explains it thus. 
 
 Saint Paul is speaking of those men " who changed the 
 truth of God into a lie, and hid that which may be known 
 of God, which God had showed unto them. For the in- 
 visible things of him from the creation of the world are 
 
170 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, 
 even his eternal power and Godhead." 
 In fact, says Saint Thomas, 
 
 " Knowledge of the true God of itself leads us to the Good, but 
 it is captive and bound by wilful love of injustice." 
 
 " These men, therefore, possessed to a certain extent the true 
 knowledge of God ; for what we may know of God (quod notum est 
 Dei), that is, what man may know of him through reason, shone 
 within them, was showed unto them by some inner faculty, by 
 the intrinsic light of the soul." 
 
 " Not that, in one respect, God may not be unknown to man in 
 this life, according to the mysterious inscription found by Saint 
 Paul, Ignoto Deo. We do not know what God is. In fact, our 
 knowledge of God begins with the spectacle of the world in which 
 we live, with the sight of those sentient creatures whose limita- 
 tions can in no wise represent the divine essence. On the other 
 hand, however, the sight of his creatures leads us to know God in 
 three ways, as Dionysius shows in his book on the Divine Names. 
 
 "First, by causality (viam causalitatis) . For all creatures 
 being liable to change and imperfection, we must needs refer 
 them to a perfect and unchanging principle. And this teaches 
 us that God is." 
 
 "Secondly, by excellence (viam excellentice). For when we 
 refer all creatures to their beginning and cause, it is a beginning 
 which they do not contain, and a cause which absolutely trans- 
 cends them, and thence we know not only that God is, but that 
 he is above all." 
 
 " Thirdly, by negation (viam negationis). For this cause tran- 
 scends all its effects ; we must deny of it in a certain sense that 
 which we see in created beings ; and it is thus that we say of 
 God that he is infinite and immutable, his creatures being finite 
 and variable." 
 
 " God therefore, as Saint Paul says, made himself manifest." 
 
 " Now, God makes himself manifest in two ways : first, by 
 shedding inward light upon our soul, and then by showing us the 
 outward signs of his wisdom and power, created beings. God 
 thus made himself manifest to all men, both by this inward light 
 and by his creatures, in whom we may read, as in a book, the 
 knowledge of God." 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 171 
 
 " But, more exactly, what do we learn of God from these postu- 
 lates 1 The invisible perfections of God, says Saint Paul, that is, 
 his essence (per guce intelligitur Dei essentia) ; but not in his unity. 
 We find traces and images of him in his creatures, which show us 
 partially and by their multiplicity that which is one in God, and 
 through this our intelligence considers the essence of God under 
 the forms of a goodness, a wisdom, a power, which are not such in 
 God." 
 
 " Secondly, we know his creative power, that he is the begin- 
 ning of all things." 
 
 " Thirdly, we know his divinity ; we know that he is the end to 
 which all beings tend." 
 
 " The first knowledge, that of the essence, is acquired by nega- 
 tion ; the second, by causality ; the third, by excellence." 
 
 " What is the nature of this knowledge 1 The Apostle tells us : 
 we see these things by intellect (intellectu conspiciuntur) . In 
 fact, we know God by the intellect, not by the senses or imagina- 
 tion, which have not that power of transcendence which rises 
 above material things: and God is a spirit." 
 
 Such is the commentary on Saint Paul's words. It shows 
 us clearly the method of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Created 
 beings are the starting-point ; the active force is reason, the 
 light which God sheds within the soul, the process to 
 which he gives three names (causalitatis, excellentice, or 
 eminentice, negationis), and which leads us to perceive that 
 created beings, being subject to change and imperfection, 
 do not exist of themselves ; that is to say that God is, 
 and that God, existing of himself, is neither subject to 
 change or imperfection, this process consists in perceiving 
 perfection (excellentia) in imperfection, in denying (via ne- 
 gationis) the limits of the finite qualities which we see. 
 
 Saint Thomas very aptly observes that to do this we must 
 rise by means of intellect (transcendere) above that which 
 imagination and the senses can give us. This is precisely 
 the process of transcendence to which we have so often re- 
 ferred, and which is defined by the words : The way of excel- 
 
172 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 lence and of negation (mam excellentice et negationis), a 
 process which he calls elsewhere the way of eminence and 
 of elimination (via eminentice, via remotionis), and of which 
 he says: "These negations do not mean that he lacks that 
 which we deny of him, but that he possesses it in excess 
 (hcec non removentur ab eo propter ejus defectum, sed quia 
 super excedit)" 
 
 But Saint Thomas perfects this doctrine and touches its 
 depths, in his comments upon the rest of the same chapter 
 of Saint Paul's Epistle. 
 
 Saint Paul shows how the knowledge of God, which is 
 given us, is not accepted ; it is in us, but we smother it. 
 
 It is iniquity that smothers the knowledge of God within 
 us. Saint Paul has already declared this, it is his first re- 
 mark: "They held the truth in unrighteousness. . . . They 
 are without excuse ; they knew God, and they glorified him 
 not. . . . But they became vain in their imaginations, and 
 their foolish heart was darkened. . . . Professing themselves 
 to be wise, they became fools. . . . They changed the truth 
 of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature 
 and not the Creator." 
 
 " Glory" says Saint Thomas, " is nothing but the light it- 
 self of the divine nature." Men smother it within them, and 
 become vain in their imaginations. The human spirit es- 
 capes vanity only by resting upon God ; so soon as it ceases 
 to rely on God it is vain : the mind is empty and the heart 
 darkened; the light of the spirit no longer illumines the heart; 
 that heart becomes more and more foolish ; it has lost that 
 light of divine wisdom which alone can give us true knowl- 
 edge of God. The eye loses sight of objects when the rays of 
 the sun cease to give this to it ; so too he who turns away 
 from God, finding his support in himself, and not in God, loses 
 the light of the mind. What does the man who does not as- 
 cribe to God the glory of God, that is, the divine light which 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 173 
 
 falls upon him, do with that glory ? He ascribes it to created 
 beings ; he sees its cause in nature or in himself. He at- 
 tributes to the image that which only exists in the original, 
 reversing everything, and making that which is secondary first. 
 . . . The same reversal is immediately wrought in that soul 
 which puts God below the world, from opinion and affection : 
 its reason, which is divine, also places itself below the appe- 
 tites, and falls into that reprobate mind (sensum reprobum) 
 of which the Apostle speaks, which is the very opposite of 
 nature, as is proved by the strange and unnatural vices to 
 which it falls a prey. And all this because, having true 
 knowledge of God through the light of reason, together with 
 the sight of created beings, man does not accept it nor ex- 
 plain it, preferring to remain in vice. 
 
 Such is the commentary of Saint Thomas upon this grand 
 text of Saint Paul. 
 
 All this is clearly the very foundation of the truth in re- 
 gard to the question : Why not prove God explicitly ? The 
 elements of the knowledge of God are, everywhere and al- 
 ways, given to us, within us and outside us : within us, God 
 himself enlightens us ; outside us, he also enlightens us, by 
 giving us a book which is his work, the world. Why do not 
 men read this book ? Their vices prevent them ; this is the 
 real obstacle. Saint Thomas, as well as Saint Paul, analyzes 
 this mystery of iniquity ; he says : It is a reversal (converte- 
 runt primum in ultimum). Theoretically, man believes 
 himself to be the source of that light which God never ceases 
 to shed upon him, or else he believes the material world to 
 be its source, and that reason comes from the senses. This 
 is a reversal. Practically, he subjects his reason to the sen- 
 sual impulses which nature excites within him. Another 
 reversal. Sense is reversed. Man overturns and reverses 
 everything, in practice and speculatively. We shall see, in 
 the course of this work, whether the doctrine of scientific 
 
174 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, 
 
 atheism, as it is formulated to-day, be not the doctrine of re- 
 versal exactly and methodically applied to philosophy. This 
 curious intellectual and moral phenomenon should throw a 
 flood of light upon a multitude of moral, logical, and psycho- 
 logical questions. 
 
 Thus, in order to rise to God, we must first conquer the 
 obstacle, as all true philosophers say. Then only are we 
 able to take the spectacle of the world as our point of de- 
 parture from which to rise to God ; then reason displays its 
 powers, and the process which ascends to God is carried out. 
 Then only do we wake from that guilty folly to which Saint 
 Paul refers, and of which Saint Thomas says elsewhere : 
 "Such folly is sinful" (stultitia estpeccatum). 
 
 As for the process as a whole, we find in the writings of 
 Saint Thomas a multitude of passages which show us how 
 he understood it ; notably these statements : " God is all 
 things infinitely (Deus est omnia eminenter) ; God is in act 
 that which in things is only potential (Deus est actualitas 
 omnium rerum) ; All of being, goodness, and perfection to 
 be found in any creature whatsoever, exists pre-eminently in 
 God (Quidquid entitatis, bonitatis, perfectionis est in qua- 
 cumque creatura, totum est eminentius in Deo) ; " and through 
 his creatures we know God, by applying to the good quali- 
 ties which we see, a process of elimination which deprives 
 them of their limitations (ad cognoscendum Deum oportet 
 via remotionis.) 
 
 V. 
 
 Everything has not been said regarding the theory of 
 the knowledge of God as Saint Thomas Aquinas states it. 
 Hitherto we have shown him as speaking after Aristotle's 
 method and somewhat after Plato's fashion. He will now 
 speak wholly like Plato and like Saint Augustine. Saint 
 Thomas not only knew the first of those two regions of the 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 175 
 
 world of intelligibility distinguished by those sublime minds ; 
 as a Christian and a theologian, he must have known the 
 other. He did know it ; and we must own that he dis- 
 tinguishes both regions, and describes them with a precision 
 and exactness equalled by no other theologian or philosopher 
 whatever. Therefore the name of the Angel of the School, 
 applied to Saint Thomas, will endure. 
 
 The reader will recall what Saint Augustine says of 
 reason attaining to its end and becoming power (ratio 
 perveniens ad finem suum . . . virtus vocatur). This final 
 end of reason is the sight of God. Transcending the vision 
 of those absolute truths, which are but the eternal and cer- 
 tain shadow of the divine essence and the living truth, reason 
 finds, as Plato and Augustine say, truth itself, or the sun it- 
 self, which makes these other truths apparent. Saint Thomas 
 knows and discriminates so fully between these two degrees 
 of intelligibility that he usually makes separate questions 
 of them ; and the reader who does not effect a reconciliation, 
 sometimes takes Saint Thomas for a rationalist, that is, for 
 a mind arrested at natural philosophy, which does not go to 
 the end, nor even so far as Plato when he speaks of the term 
 of the dialectic (re'Xo? rr/? Tropeias}. Now, Saint Thomas goes 
 farther than Plato upon this point, as far as Saint Augus- 
 tine ; and he is more exact on this point than even Saint 
 Augustine, who is far more exact than Plato. 
 
 " There are," distinctly says Saint Thomas, " two degrees 
 of divine intelligibility (duplici igitur veritate divinorum 
 intelliyibilium existente). There are, relatively to us, two 
 modes of divine truth (duplex veritatis modus . . . duplicem 
 veritatem divinorurri)" 
 
 This is fundamental : THERE ARE TWO DEGREES OF DIVINE 
 
 INTELLIGIBILITY. 
 
 " Reason," he says elsewhere, " has a double term and two 
 degrees of perfection : a first degree, to which natural light 
 
176 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 leads us, and a second degree, to which the supernatural light 
 is our guide." The reader must not judge this latter state- 
 ment without fully comprehending it and knowing the idea 
 to which it corresponds in the thought of the theologians 
 who employ it. 
 
 Thus there are clearly two degrees of divine intelligibility 
 to which our intelligence may attain. But wherein does the 
 distinction lie ? 
 
 The distinction, according to Saint Thomas, is that which 
 Saint Paul makes : " For now we see through a glass darkly 
 (per speculum) ; but then face to face (tune autem facie ad 
 faciem)" 
 
 Saint Thomas comments on this text in the same strain 
 as all commentators who come after him. " Now," says an 
 esteemed author, " we see God, not in himself immediately, 
 but indirectly, by reflected rays ; . . . then we shall see him 
 directly, perfectly, in his divine essence. ... I shall see God 
 himself, as I am myself known of God." This is the thought 
 of Saint Thomas, whose admirable commentary upon Saint 
 Paul's grand expression we must quote entire. He says, 
 
 " What is this sight through a glass, and what is this sight 
 face to face?" 
 
 44 We may see," he replies, " either light itself (ipsa lux), which 
 strikes the eye itself (quce presens est oculo), or else its reflex 
 image, as when we perceive the white color of an object." 
 
 " Now, God sees himself in the first way. His essence is di- 
 rectly present to his intelligence, since his intelligence is his 
 essence (in Deo idem est sua essentia et suus intellectus, et ideo 
 sua essentia est prcesens suo intellect fit)." 
 
 " As for us, we know God in this life, by seeing his invisible 
 beauty in his creatures. The whole creation is like a mirror to 
 us. The order, beauty, and grandeur which God imparts to his 
 works teach us to know his wisdom, truth, and divine infinity. 
 This is the knowledge which has been called seeing through 
 a glass." 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 177 
 
 And now what is it to see him face to face ? 
 
 " When we look into a glass, we do not see the thing itself, 
 but its image; and when we look face to face, we see the thing 
 itself just as it is. When, therefore, the Apostle tells us that in 
 heaven we shall see God face to face, he means that we shall 
 see the essence of God." 
 
 "Even as God knows my essence, I too shall know God in 
 his essence." 
 
 " Those who say that we shall never see God, save by simili- 
 tude, say what is false and impossible. ... To say that God 
 can only be seen by the image and reflection of his light, is 
 to say that we cannot see the essence of God. But the soul: 
 itself is an image of God ; the sight of the soul, wherein migra- 
 tory man sees God, would therefore be no more enigmatic and 
 specular than that elear, direct vision promised to us in glory.. 
 . . . And then the natural desire of mankind to reach the First 
 Cause and behold his very self would be idle and vain." 
 
 Here certainly is light, full noonday, thrown upon what we 
 must call the central point of Philosophy. Eecall Plato's 
 distinction between the sight of divine phantasms, shadows 
 of that which is, and the sight through the intellect of the 
 Good itself such as it is. Kecall the same distinction as 
 made by Saint Augustine, almost in the same terms. 
 
 Saint Thomas quotes and comments on these passages 
 from Saint Augustine's works. In this specular sight, he 
 says, in this first degree of intelligibility, it is indeed eternal 
 truths that we see (rationes incorporates et sempiternas) ; 
 these truths are higher than the human soul, since they are 
 immutable (quoe nisi supra mentem essent, incommutaliles 
 profecto non essent) : Saint Augustine rightly speaks thus. 
 But these truths, as we see them, are not God himself. " We 
 see them in God, since they are eternal." Yes ; but only in 
 the sense that we see them in his light, that is, by the 
 natural light of reason, which is a participation in the divine 
 light, Saint Augustine, to whom some very inopportunely 
 
 12 
 
178 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 take exception here, expresses himself perfectly when he says : 
 " These intelligible spectacles only become visible to us as illu- 
 mined by their sun, which is God. Just as in order to see an 
 object with our eyes, it is not necessary to see the substance 
 and body of the sun, so, too, to see the intelligible of this 
 degree, it is not necessary to see the essence of God." 
 
 In this lower degree of the intelligible world, without 
 seeing the essence of God, we still know God through our 
 natural reason. When Saint Augustine says : " The eye of 
 the soul is diseased, and it cannot gaze unblenchingly at this 
 excellent light, except it be purified by the justice of faith;' 
 he refers to the sight of the essence of God. But when 
 Saint Paul says, "That which may be known of God is 
 manifest in them," he refers to that knowledge of God which 
 is given to us by reason, without faith. Assuredly that 
 reason rests upon sensible postulates which cannot show us 
 the divine essence, since these visible effects are in no wise 
 adequate to their cause, which is God. But yet, as these 
 effects would not exist unless their cause existed, they prove 
 to us that God is, and they teach us that he must be, as the 
 cause of all, superior to all. We know that he is nothing of 
 all that which he has created, but that all which we deny of 
 him must be denied, not because he lacks that which we 
 deny, but because he possesses it in excess. 
 
 Such is, according to Saint Thomas, the first of the two 
 degrees of the world of intelligibility. The second is proba- 
 bly distinct therefrom. 
 
 Saint Thomas speaks of this second degree particularly in 
 that question in the Sum : How may the human mind know 
 God ? (l a , q. xii.) We give the headings of the articles into 
 which he divides this question : 
 
 1. Can the created intellect see God in his essence ? Yes. 
 
 2. Does the created intellect which sees God's essence, 
 see it by any image or likeness ? No. 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 179 
 
 3. Can God's essence be seen by the material eye ? No. 
 
 4. Can created intellect see God's essence by the unaided 
 powers of its own nature (per sua naturalia) ? No. 
 
 5. Does created intellect require the intermediation of 
 any created light in order to see God's essence? No. 
 
 6. Can God's essence be seen more or less perfectly ? 
 Yes. 
 
 7. Is seeing God's essence the same thing as understand- 
 ing God ? No. 
 
 8. Does the soul which beholds God's essence see every- 
 thing in that essence ? No. 
 
 9. Does the soul see what it sees in God's essence, under 
 any figure ? No. 
 
 10. Does he who sees God's essence, see in God, at a 
 single glance, all that he sees therein ? Yes. 
 
 11. Is it possible, in this life, to see God's essence ? No, 
 save it be by a miracle. 
 
 12. Can we, in this life, know God by our natural reason? 
 Yes. 
 
 13. Can we have, in this life, a knowledge of God deeper 
 than that which our natural reason can give ? Yes. 
 
 Here we have this great distinction settled with a clear- 
 ness and vigor which the ancients could not apply to it. 
 There is the same difference between these two degrees of 
 divine intelligibility that there is between the heaven and 
 the earth. 
 
 But then and this seems to result from what has just 
 been established in regard to the question cited it would 
 follow that of the two degrees of divine intelligibility, one 
 would be only for this world and this life, and the other 
 for heaven and the life to come. Thus Plato and Aristotle 
 must have been under an entire illusion when they spoke 
 of the highest degree of divine intelligibility as capable of 
 being grasped in this life, although with great difficulty and 
 dimness. 
 
180 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Let us distinguish. Yes, according to Saint Thomas, as 
 well as according to Saint Paul and all Christian theology, 
 the clear vision of God's essence, save in certain rare and 
 miraculous cases, is reserved for the life to come, for the 
 heavenly home. 
 
 But it must be understood that in this higher of the two 
 degrees of divine intelligibility the one which gives us, 
 not shadows, images, phantasms, and likenesses of God, but 
 his essence there are also two degrees : one to which the 
 soul will only attain after its struggle, its labor, and its con- 
 summation, when it has reached its goal and gained the 
 peace and rest of the heavenly home (in patria videntium) ; 
 and the lower, which the soul attains during its progress 
 (in ma videntium). And these two degrees of the same 
 light may be distinguished by these terras : the light of grace 
 and the light of glory (lumen gratice, lumen glorice) ; or else, 
 the light of faith and the light of vision (lumen fidei et 
 lumen visionis), faith, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
 being but the beginning, still dim and unskilled, of the 
 direct vision of God and his essence. "Faith, as to the 
 assurance which it gives, is knowledge, and may be called 
 science and vision. Faith is an assured beginning of the 
 beatific vision of God. Faith belongs to the same order as 
 the vision of the heavenly country." 
 
 Saint Thomas invariably declares faith to be the beginning 
 of the intrinsic knowledge of God, as distinct from that 
 reflex and abstract knowledge given by the natural light 
 of reason. 
 
 While the natural light of reason is created truth (veritas 
 creata), that is to say, the divine light reflected by a created 
 object, or, if you prefer, an image of unrevealed truth 
 reflected in us (similitudo veritatis increatce in nobis resul- 
 tantis), the object of faith, on the contrary, is uncreated 
 truth, original truth (oljectum fidei, veritas prima, veritas 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 181 
 
 increata). " Faith, when it is virtue, raising human intelli- 
 gence above its proper light, unites it to truth itself as it 
 exists in the divine intelligence, truth which is the un- 
 created itself (ipsius rei increatce objectum)" Undoubtedly, 
 we must carefully distinguish between faith and supreme 
 vision ; but they both have the same object The object of 
 supreme vision is original truth, in so far as luminous ; the 
 object of faith is original truth in so far as obscure. It is 
 neither God's creatures, men or angels, whose testimony 
 leads us to believe, nor the images under which we believe, 
 that are the object of faith, it is God himself, with the 
 knowledge of whom the assent of faith brings us into unity. 
 Original truth is indeed, in itself and first of all, the object 
 of faith (veritas prima est primo et per se objectum fidei). 
 
 We quote a fine passage from Saint Thomas Aquinas upon 
 this subject ; it includes everything : 
 
 " Light, during our earthly pilgrimage, is given to us in two 
 ways : sometimes in a lesser degree, and as it were in faint rays. 
 This is the light of our native intelligence, which is a participation 
 in the eternal light, although remote, defective, comparable to 
 darkness mingled with a little light ; which gives man that reason, 
 the shadow of intelligence itself, whose feeble radiance gives birth 
 to a diversity of opinions to be destroyed by the direct radiation 
 of light. Sometimes light is given in a higher degree, in more 
 abundant clearness, and which brings us as it were face to face with 
 the sun. But there our sight is dazzled, because it beholds that 
 which is beyond us, beyond human understanding; and this is 
 the light of faith." 
 
 Such, therefore, is the beginning of the second degree of 
 divine intelligibility ; it is faith, the beginning of the knowl- 
 edge which we shall have in heaven (fides qucedam prceli- 
 batio brevis quam in futuro habebimus cognitionis). 
 
 We have here a fine distinction between the two degrees 
 of divine intelligibility, that one may be obtained by the 
 search of reason, and that the other transcends all efforts of 
 
182 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 human reason. It is this second degree which is the ob- 
 ject of faith, and " although reason by faith cannot wholly 
 grasp it, yet a high degree of perfection is given it, if it can 
 grasp it in any way, through faith." Profane philosophy 
 does not enter here, and it is of this that Saint Paul speaks 
 when he says : " God hath revealed unto us by his Spirit what 
 none of the princes of this world knew." " The princes of 
 this world," says Saint Thomas, "are the philosophers." 
 Philosophers suspect and know by conjecture and reasoning 
 the existence of this region, but they do not enter it ; and, as 
 Saint Thomas says, " Certain of them see the light, but are 
 not in the light." And he lays stress on Isaiah's vigorous 
 words: "Seeing many things, thou observest not." (Qui 
 multa vides, nonne custodies ?) (Is. xlii. 20.) 
 
 Thus, in brief, the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas is 
 this : God is light ; man may see the light which is God, 
 directly or indirectly. These are the two degrees of divine 
 intelligibility. Naturally he sees only the second degree ; 
 that is to say, the reflection or image of uncreated truth in 
 the mirror of created beings, or the mirror of the soul. This 
 is what is called the natural light of reason. But there is a 
 higher degree of light for which the human mind has some 
 natural desire. The human mind would fain see the First 
 Cause itself in itself. This sight is the sight of the essence 
 of God, the direct sight of the light which is God. This is 
 why this degree is called that of supernatural light, God 
 being above and beyond all nature. But there are two de- 
 grees of lucidity, in the supernatural degree itself ; there is 
 the confused, implicit, dazzled, and unpractised vision : this 
 is faith, the light of grace ; and there is clear vision, supreme 
 vision in the light of glory. The one is offered to man dur- 
 ing his journey through this life (in via videntium) ; and 
 the other awaits just men and saints at the end of their jour- 
 ney in the heavenly home (in p'atria videntium). 
 
THEODICY OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. 183 
 
 UNlT 
 VI. 
 
 Do not understand, I beg, all these terms, faith, grace, 
 glory, natural light, and supernatural light, as being more 
 than names applied to the intelligible objects described; 
 let us for a moment forget their theological meaning. We 
 say that at any rate we have here an exact description and a 
 complete guide to that world of intelligibility into which 
 Plato looked. Saint Thomas is as superior to Plato in exact 
 knowledge of the world of intelligibility as Kepler and New- 
 ton are to Pythagoras in astronomy. Pythagoras indeed 
 thought that the stars must form a heart, of which the sun, 
 the source of light, was lord and centre ; so he said. But 
 Kepler and Newton said: Yes, these worlds revolve about 
 the sun in curves whose geometric nature is as follows ; they 
 are attracted towards that centre by a force whose law is as 
 follows. Here, moreover, you have the speed and weight of 
 each of these worlds. 
 
 Such is the distance between the conjecture and instinct of 
 genius, on the one hand, and on the other revealed and ex- 
 act knowledge. I rank Plato very high, but I consider 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas as even more above Plato than our 
 knowledge of the physical world is above that of the Greeks. 
 Plato worked almost alone, amidst the gloom of the antique 
 world ; Saint Thomas worked beneath the sun of Christianity, 
 sustained by the labor, the experience, and the wisdom of 
 innumerable witnesses of the light, just as our modern sci- 
 ence, the fruit of a common industry, is enlightened by all 
 which is shown it by thousands of eyes, increased by all that 
 hundreds of thousands of hands can bring to it. 
 
 But Saint Thomas Aquinas is not understood ! There are 
 in him heights, depths, and precisions which contemporary 
 intellect is far from suspecting, and which may perhaps be 
 
184 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 understood several generations hence, if philosophy is re- 
 vived, if wisdom reappears among us. Aristotle says some- 
 where that probably the arts and philosophy have been 
 discovered and lost several times over ; that this is the cause 
 of those fragments of antique wisdom brought down to us by 
 tradition, I believe this also, but in a different sense. 
 Philosophy was discovered by Plato and Aristotle, by Saint 
 Augustine, by Saint Thomas Aquinas, by the seventeenth 
 century, but was lost in the intervals. To-day, among us, 
 it is evidently lost. We read ancient monuments without 
 understanding them ; we do not know the language in which 
 they are written ; we do not penetrate their meaning. 
 
 The centuries lose wisdom or find it again, just as a man 
 may lose or find the truth, at different periods of his life, 
 according as his soul is dissolved in sensual pleasure and 
 fallen into the night of the senses, or steeped in virtue and 
 lifted towards the intelligible. When a man renounces 
 wisdom, he does not therefore forget the discourse which 
 divine wisdom has held with his soul, the words which it 
 has graven on his memory : but those words have lost their 
 aureole, their life, their charm, their meaning ; they are 
 withered remnants, which thought, whose abode is elsewhere, 
 rolls along in its course because they are there ; but she no 
 longer uses them or believes in them. Such is the state of 
 contemporary thought in regard to the noble philosophy of 
 the past and the wisdom of the great ages ; it possesses all 
 their monuments, but has not their intelligence, and still less 
 their faith. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 
 PART FIRST. 
 
 FROM Saint Thomas Aquinas we pass to the seventeenth 
 century. In the interval, the human mind has ap- 
 parently undergone a great change: on all sides Aristotle 
 is rejected ; the Scholastic system and Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas himself are held in less esteem, and this among 
 the wisest and most learned. Clever intellects exclude and 
 despise the philosophy of the past. Men desire to see for 
 themselves ; they ardently search after truth, rather than 
 the mere tradition of truth. They have resolved to find 
 true knowledge; the mind takes a fresh flight, and, by a 
 generous effort, sheds upon this noble age the greatest flood 
 of human light ever known. We shall now see whether 
 this light be other than the light of the past. 
 
 The mind of man will doubtless extend itself to fresh 
 objects, and shine with more lustre in certain directions ; 
 but its laws will remain unchanged. Its former acquisitions 
 will become deeper ; it will complete and verify what it had 
 already found in past ages, and, according to an admirable 
 expression of the Holy Scripture, their knowledge shall le 
 renewed ; but we shall see that the light has not changed, 
 and that the renewed knowledge is, in fact, ever old and 
 ever new. 
 
 The seventeenth century should be treated as a single 
 man, or better, as a choir of voices. Never were the har- 
 
186 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 mony and unanimity of great minds more apparent, despite 
 certain easily corrected dissonances. True, these noble 
 geniuses count as nothing Spinoza, that questionable spirit, 
 and, with the exception of Leibnitz, who was far too amiable, 
 have nothing to say to Locke, an opaque intellect. The 
 seventeenth century did not take the absurd in earnest, but 
 set sophists on one side, and practised, in philosophy, the 
 great literary precept : Hoc amet, hoc spernat, " Know how 
 to love, and how to scorn," an important characteristic of 
 truly philosophic minds or ages, which, because they know 
 the true, also know the false, and because they are lumi- 
 nous, drive away darkness. Night alone is favorable to the 
 equality of systems and to a common respect for error and 
 truth. The seventeenth century, on the contrary, is exclu- 
 sive in the light, and firm in the unity of truth. From 
 this centre, it radiates light and strength and the wealth of 
 its harmonies. Would that I might reproduce something of 
 this in these pages ! My readers would then feel that if the 
 mind of man is destined to take another step forward, the 
 next great century, still more united in its view of the truth, 
 still more fully divided from the false, will witness the birth 
 of certainties of which we have lost sight, of unanimities for 
 which we have ceased to hope, and of some beginning of 
 that luminous peace which is to unite sciences and minds 
 in God. 
 
 All the philosophers of the great century sought God be- 
 fore anything else, knowing that he is the first truth and 
 the universal light. Certainly it was not to demonstrate the 
 existence of God that these men, full of practical sense as 
 they were, meditated their demonstrations. But they 
 knew that there would be found the centre of all phi- 
 losophy, the foundation of metaphysics, the vital question 
 of method, the science of the soul, the point of contact be- 
 tween logic and morals, the basis of physics, and the essen- 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 187 
 
 tial meaning, so long sought for, of geometry. Kepler, the 
 oldest of these pleiades, worked in science, discovered the 
 heavens, only that he might " frame a tabernacle for his God 
 therefrom." The others had the same purpose : Descartes, 
 Pascal, Malebranche, Fenelon and Bossuet, Leibnitz, Clarke 
 and Newton, Thomassin and Petau, the latter twain too little 
 known, because they wrote in Latin : all seek God in every 
 direction of thought ; and all these voices are truly united in 
 one and the same tone, one and the same song ; their subject 
 is Being and infinite perfection; and everything is com- 
 bined in this wondrous symphony, from Theology, with its 
 dogmatic decisions, to mathematics themselves, by the mar- 
 vellous invention of Leibnitz. 
 
 Let us cast a comprehensive glance at the proof of the 
 existence of God given by all these great minds. We will 
 listen to each of them in turn. 
 
 The mystics shall begin, I mean the true mystics, those 
 whom Bossuet calls, " Safe mystics." 1 
 
 All mysticism is contained in this motto: "Not only hear, 
 but feel and suffer, the divine." 2 It is of this degree of 
 inner contemplation that Saint Bonaventura says : " Not 
 only to see divine spectacles, but to taste divine savors." 3 
 The mystic school is a school of divine experiments. 
 
 I do not hesitate to affirm that the distaste for abstract 
 and isolated reasoning, and the need of experiment, which 
 characterizes the modern scientific movement, was first made 
 manifest among the mystics, and probably comes from them. 
 The " Imitation of Christ " popularized this feeling ; then 
 the ardent piety of the Jesuits and the saintly spirit of the 
 close of the seventeenth century rooted it in men's souls. 
 Saint Philip Neri, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Theresa, 
 
 1 Mystici in tuto. 
 
 2 Non solum discens, sed et patiens divina. 
 
 8 Non solum ad tuenda spectacula, sed etiam ad gustanda divina solatia. 
 
188 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Saint Francis de Sales, the pious school of Condren and Olier, 
 and a multitude of ascetic writers of that period, spread 
 abroad a feeling of contempt for abstract reasoning and " dry 
 light," as Bossuet expresses it, and they urged men's souls to 
 the direct perception of reality, to knowledge of life by per- 
 sonal experience. They apply this process of realism to the 
 knowledge of God and the soul ; others later on were to 
 apply it to the knowledge of nature. 
 
 Upon this basis of practical piety, the effort of genuine 
 thinkers stands out in bold relief : after the saints come the 
 sages. The latter develop the profound truth grasped by 
 the mystics ; they descend into their own souls, and seek 
 there for traces of God. Descartes, meditating on the soul, 
 marks the way by these words : " I am an imperfect, in- 
 complete thing, dependent upon another, ever tending and 
 aspiring towards something better and higher than I am ; 
 but the great things to which I aspire are actually and in- 
 finitely possessed by him on whom I depend." l 
 
 Here we have the finite and the infinite face to face. The 
 finite seen in ourselves as such by the direct experience of 
 life, and the infinite grasped in the finite by a contrast of ex- 
 perience, and by the impulse of reason, which, without devi- 
 ation or turn or discourse, conceives and declares the infinite. 
 
 Here we have the whole dialectic method. The entire, chief 
 process of reasoning is contained here : the soul, a bounded 
 thing, regarded as finite and imperfect, furnishes a starting- 
 point : desire for the perfection which we do not possess, but 
 would fain have, is the motive spring; hence results the 
 flight of reason towards its object, the absolute and ac- 
 tual infinite. 
 
 But Descartes and others bring out features which their 
 predecessors of the Middle Age merely indicated. This is 
 the advance in the proof of the existence of God. For 
 
 1 Third Meditation, close. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 189 
 
 instance, they explain two things which Saint Thomas 
 stated, but possibly without bringing them into sufficient 
 juxtaposition, and which include the whole process : 
 
 1. God is all things eminently (that is, infinitely). All 
 the being, goodness, perfection, found in any creature what- 
 soever, all this is in God in an infinite degree. 1 
 
 2. To know God, we must employ a process of elimination. 2 
 They all say with Leibnitz : " The perfections of God are 
 
 those of our souls, but raised to infinity." They all say 
 with Fdnelon : " Destroy limitations, and you will dwell in 
 the universality of Being." Take the finite, destroy its 
 limitations, and you have that which corresponds to it in the 
 infinite. And they determine this process to such a point 
 that they apply it to geometry, and renew the aspect of 
 mathematical science by the application. We shall now 
 endeavor to make this clear by details. 
 
 DESCARTES. 
 
 I. 
 
 I will not say, 
 
 11 At last Descartes comes, and, the first in France," 
 
 founds philosophy by restoring freedom to human reason. 
 I do not know who was the founder of philosophy, and 
 human reason had been free for many centuries : Jesus 
 Christ set it free, with the entire man. 
 
 But without exaggerating the influence of Descartes, it is 
 very evident that he imparted a great and fertile movement 
 to his century. 
 
 I must confess that I never greatly admired his Discourse 
 on Method. I see, moreover, as all admit, and as the Index 
 
 1 1. Deus est omnia eminenter. Quidquid entitatis, bonitatis, perfections 
 est in quacumque creatura, totum es eminentius in Deo. 
 
 2 2. Ad coguitionem Dei oportet uti via remotionis. 
 
190 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 has decided, that Descartes is open to correction. But it is 
 impossible to regard him as a sceptic and a wicked spirit. 
 Such a spirit is to be excluded, not corrected. Clearly, the 
 methodic doubt of Descartes is merely a vigorous defiance 
 of scepticism. " I am called a sceptic," he says somewhere, 
 " because I have fought sceptics. I am called an atheist, 
 because I have proved the existence of God." Descartes 
 claimed to sound the active powers of reason, and to reveal 
 its resources ; this certainly is one of the most useful tasks 
 which could be undertaken for the benefit of mankind. 
 Descartes understands what Fe*nelon says later : " There is 
 far greater lack of reason than of religion in this world." 
 He knew as we may also conclude from a passage in the 
 works of Saint Thomas Aquinas that attacks upon reason 
 are still more dangerous than attacks upon faith, because 
 they ruin both at the same time, that is to say, the sacred 
 edifice, and the ground on which it stands. He labored to 
 prepare the way for that future prophesied by Leibnitz : 
 "A time will come when men will devote themselves to 
 reason far more than hitherto." He showed in this work a 
 matchless energy, an' invincible determination, and a faith 
 which made him victorious. 
 
 To begin with, he proceeded at once to the heart of 
 philosophy, to the basis and origin of reasoning, which is 
 God ; and there he stood fast almost throughout his career. 
 Pascal was unjust when he reproached him with a wish to do 
 without God in his physical researches. Descartes was even 
 then pursuing in matter the laws, that is, the traces, of God. 
 He abstracted, but he did not deny. 
 
 Descartes took up again, stated precisely, and simplified 
 the proof of the existence of God, that living proof which 
 is, as we have already said, the act and fundamental process 
 of the rational life. If the way in which Aristotle set 
 forth his proofs made them dry and inapplicable in practice, 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 191 
 
 it is not so with the work of Descartes. Many minds have 
 been powerfully impressed and uplifted by the mighty im- 
 pulse of his vigorous reasoning ; and we might quote women, 
 even in this century, whom the reading of Descartes has led 
 to the most ardent piety, by the direct certainty and the 
 species of intellectual perception of God derived therefrom 
 by those who understand what they read. 
 
 II. 
 
 The true Cartesian proof of the existence of God rests 
 upon what we may call natural prayer. Natural prayer is 
 the impulse of the soul, which feels that it is limited and 
 imperfect, towards the infinite which it conceives and de- 
 sires. This prayer, or this impulse of the soul, which rises 
 to God through desire and thought, and which proves his 
 existence by thinking of and desiring him, is contained in 
 these words, which we quote in full : " Not only do I know 
 that I am an imperfect, incomplete thing, dependent on 
 another, ever tending and aspiring towards something greater 
 and better than I am, but I also know that he on whom I 
 depend possesses in himself all those great things towards 
 which I aspire, the ideas of which I find within myself," 
 and that he possesses them " not indefinitely and potentially 
 alone, but actually and infinitely, and thus that he is God." 1 
 
 These profound words contain the conditions of the true 
 proof in the most precise and explicit form : (1) the point of 
 support, which is the finite being whom we see and whom 
 we are ; (2) the moral condition, or the motive spring, 
 namely, the moral life, which consists, speaking exactly, 
 in constantly tending and aspiring towards something better 
 and greater ; that is, in yielding to the charm of the su- 
 preme Good ; (3) the process, that is, the advance of reason 
 from disdain of the imperfect to the idea of infinite perfection. 
 
 1 Descartes, Third Meditation, near close. 
 
192 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 " There are but two ways," says Descartes, " in which we 
 can prove that there is a God, namely, one by his works, 
 and the other by his essence." l That is to say, there is 
 the experimental proof and the rational proof, the proof 
 a posteriori, and the proof a priori. We have already ex- 
 plained that the two proofs combined form the unassailable 
 proof. 
 
 Now, in the words of Descartes already quoted, the two 
 proofs are in one. It should be so, because God is the 
 Being in whom ideality and reality are identical. 
 
 Descartes, it is true, afterwards elaborates them separately, 
 and sometimes, perhaps, seems to lose sight of their unity ; 
 nevertheless, he does not break the connecting link, they 
 are always united in his thought. 
 
 He states the first one thus : " The existence of God is 
 demonstrated by his works from the mere fact that his idea 
 is innate in us." 2 
 
 He states the second thus : " We may prove that there is 
 a God from the mere fact that the necessity of being or 
 existence is included in our notion of him." 3 
 
 Let us try to set forth the double rational and experimen- 
 tal proof contained in this double proof, to show the pro- 
 found unity of the two, and their absolute certainty when 
 we do not isolate them. 
 
 III. 
 
 We are not now demonstrating ; we are showing, we are 
 setting forth, we are striving to place these truths before 
 the eye of the mind, the mind which will see and com- 
 prehend them. 
 
 I think, I am. My thought is imperfect, because it hesi- 
 
 1 Reply to the First Objection, i. 395. 
 
 2 Medit., i. 293. Ibid., iii. 72. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 193 
 
 tates, doubts, and mistakes ; my being is imperfect, limited, 
 finite; I see it and I feel it. 
 
 What is it to see and feel that my being is finite ? It is 
 to see, in seeing the finite, the infinity by contrast. 
 
 My whole being tends and aspires towards something 
 greater and better than myself ; and not only does it now 
 aspire thus, but we see plainly that it will always thus 
 aspire, that is, it always aspires towards something greater 
 than any given greatness. But something greater than any 
 given or assignable greatness is infinity. Thus, my life is a 
 tendency towards the infinite. 
 
 It is evident that this is true of every upright mind and 
 healthy will. A perverse will, a corrupt mind, far from tend- 
 ing towards the infinite, tends towards lesser being, or noth- 
 ingness : all true philosophers have noted this. There i a 
 moral as well as an intellectual condition for this conception 
 of the mind and this tendency of life towards infinity. 
 
 But this condition presupposed, it being no other than a 
 healthy state of the moral and intellectual being, that moral 
 and intellectual being, finite and imperfect as it is, coneeives, 
 from the very perception of its own imperfection, perfection ; 
 and it is drawn towards the perfect being by the very centre 
 of its own being and the root of its life. Moreover, this 
 is only what Aristotle says when he speaks of the first 
 motionless motor which moves everything by its attraction, 
 the attraction of desirability and of intelligibility. 
 
 The attraction of the sovereign Good is felt by all men : 
 every philosopher, every theologian, every man who uses his 
 reason, sees this and says it. It is a truth at once rational 
 and experimental ; it is a moral law, as real and scientific as 
 that of the universal attraction of bodies. 
 
 God is at the same time desirable and intelligible, two 
 qualities which are but one in him : as desirable and as 
 intelligible, he attracts all souls; and this actual effect of 
 
 13 
 
194 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 God within us is called either the attraction of the sovereign 
 Good, the natural and universal desire for happiness, or the 
 natural knowledge of God, or else the innate idea of God, or 
 yet again, the divine sense. 
 
 The last expression is the simplest, most complete and 
 exact ; it includes and amends the others : the others are 
 somewhat exclusive, and refer either to the intelligible alone, 
 or to the desirable alone ; this, from its complex meaning, is 
 relative to both aspects. Like sensation itself, which is, as 
 has been remarked, both representative and affective, the 
 divine sense implies two elements, an element of knowl- 
 edge and an element of love ; the divine sense is both intel- 
 lectual and moral, its cause being both intelligible and 
 desirable, as we are both intelligence and will. Moreover, 
 the divine sense implies these elements, but does not explain 
 them ; it gives a vague attraction and a confused idea, as 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas observes ; it is, as Aristotle says, a 
 power close at hand, ready to burst forth, but only bursting 
 forth when the obstacle is removed. God, by his presence, 
 makes us this gift, which is innate, continual, universal. 
 The gift has been made : it is put into our hands ; it 
 remains for us to accept it with our reason and our free- 
 dom ; it remains for us to render explicit within us, by 
 reason, the confused idea of God, and by freedom, the vague 
 attraction towards God. The corrupt spirit, the perverted 
 intellect, changes the confused idea into a thousand mon- 
 strous errors, into general idolatry. A perverted will 
 changes the vague attraction into corrupting passions. We 
 have our choice ; there is the act, both rational and free, 
 which we must call the fundamental act of both intellectual 
 and moral life. From the finite being which he sees, which 
 he is, which exists up to a certain point, but not beyond it, 
 man may infer Being or nothing. Stimulated by the divine 
 sense, which urges him towards the Absolute from the one 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 195 
 
 side or the other, man decides the direction in which he will 
 be urged, and chooses his own conclusion. One man con- 
 cludes in infinite Being, another in non-being; one asserts 
 the existence of Good, the other, of evil ; one says God, the 
 other, nothing. This is what actually, historically, takes 
 place in the bottom of every man's heart. 
 
 In this inner history of the soul's relation to God we 
 should always read and study the proof of the existence of 
 God. There we find it at once and inseparably moral and 
 intellectual, rational and experimental, and conceive of God 
 felt through his effects in the living reality, and seen by the 
 essential idea which he puts within us. 
 
 It is therefore clear how the idea of infinite, necessary 
 Being is actually developed in the mind as soon as the will 
 yields to the moral attraction which implies it, and how this 
 idea comes, by virtue of that infinite, necessary Being which 
 shows itself as intelligible, after having made itself felt as 
 desirable. 
 
 -And here, as Descartes says, is the point "chiefly to be 
 considered, and upon which all the force and all the light, 
 or the intelligence, of this argument depend." 1 In fact, 
 God himself makes himself visible in his idea. In a certain 
 way it is God that we see. Henceforth we are sure that he 
 exists, since we see him. Herein lies the depth and solidity 
 of the proof. 
 
 Descartes and all the great school of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, in harmony, moreover, with the philosophy of the past, 
 maintain that, in the idea of God, it is God who shows him- 
 self, and that in a certain sense we see him. " The idea is 
 the thing itself conceived" 2 Descartes constantly says, 
 an excellent phrase, which implies this axiom, accepted by 
 Descartes, " All that is ideal is real, all that is real is ideal : " 
 a profound truth, but one which should be thoroughly un- 
 
 i Vol. i. p. 375. 2 Ibid., p. 370. 
 
196 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 derstood, for we may carry it to an absurd conclusion, as 
 the Germans do at the present day. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Descartes and the seventeenth century, we say, concede 
 that in the idea of God it is, in a fashion, God whom we 
 see. In what fashion ? This is the only question. Is God 
 seen directly in himself? Or is God seen indirectly in the 
 soul ? 
 
 Descartes grasps the truth in regard to this question. 
 Malebranche and others go too far. What is the idea of 
 God, according to Descartes ? Is it God ? Is it ourselves ? 
 It is both God and ourselves, seen at the same time ; or 
 rather, it is my soul, seen in the light of God: I see my soul 
 directly ; I see it in the light of God, without which every- 
 thing is invisible, and I see God, who is that light, but by 
 a reflected ray. 
 
 Descartes maintains that the idea is the thing itself con- 
 ceived} which he explains thus: 
 
 " The idea of God is God himself, existing in the understanding, 
 not, it is true, formally, as he is intrinsically, but objectively, 
 that is, in the way that objects usually exist in the understanding. 
 This existence in the understanding is not a mere nothing. 2 It is 
 not something feigned by the mind, not, as the saying is, an im- 
 aginary being ; it is something real which is distinctly conceived, 
 and which, certainly, requires some cause other than the under- 
 standing for its conception. Thus we must regard the objective 
 reality which exists in the idea of God ; its cause can only be an 
 actually existing God. Yes, for the very reason that we have 
 within us the idea of God, in which all conceivable perfection is 
 contained, we may very clearly infer thence that this idea depends 
 upon and proceeds from some cause which actually contains in it- 
 self all this perfection ; namely, an actually existing God." * 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 370. - Ibid., p. 371. 8 Ibid., pp. 373, 374. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 197 
 
 All this is true, unless it be that Descartes does not ex- 
 plain with sufficient distinctness that, in the idea of God, it 
 is the light itself of God which we see wholly in the soul, 
 or the soul which we see in the light of God. He comes 
 closer to it in what follows : " This idea is imprinted in a 
 similar fashion upon every human mind, . . . and therefore 
 we suppose that it belongs to the very nature of our mind, 
 and certainly not improperly ; but we forget one thing, which 
 we ought chiefly to consider, and on which all the force and 
 all the light or intelligence of this argument depends, which 
 is that this faculty of having in one's self the idea of God 
 could not le in us if our mind were only a finite thing, 
 as it actually is, and if it had not, as the cause of its being, 
 a cause which was God," l that is to say, infinite. This is of 
 the utmost importance. Thus we see something finite and 
 something infinite ; any perception which we have of the 
 infinite is an effect of which God is the cause, or rather it is 
 God himself, thought. 2 It is God indirectly perceived, God 
 seen, not in himself, but in the mirror of the mind. Des- 
 cartes explains his meaning still better : " And, in fact, it is 
 not strange that God, in creating me, should impress me with 
 this idea, to be as it were the Maker's mark stamped upon 
 his work ; and neither is it necessary that this mark should 
 be anything different from that work itself ; for the mere 
 reason that God created me it is very credible that he should 
 in some measure make me after his own image and likeness, 
 in which the idea of God is contained, and that I should 
 know him ly the same faculty ly which I know myself" 
 
 Descartes therefore plainly understands it thus : the idea 
 of God is God and myself, or rather it is my soul seen in 
 the light of God ; this idea implies a finite element, which is 
 my soul, and an infinite element, which is the light of God, 
 whom I see, and in which I at the same time see my soul by 
 the same faculty. 
 
 1 Vol. L p. 375. 2 Medit. III. (close). 
 
198 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Hence it is evident that "this idea is not something 
 feigned or invented, dependent only on my thought, but 
 that it is the image of a true and immutable nature." 1 
 
 And let no one say that Descartes here falls into a famil- 
 iar trap, and treats the idea of God degradingly, by calling it 
 an image. Descartes is as far from this as possible. Hear 
 what he says further : " Assuredly I do not think that this 
 idea is of the same nature as the images of material things 
 painted in phantasy ; but, on the contrary, I believe that it 
 can only be conceived by the understanding, and that, indeed, 
 it is only that very thing which we perceive through its means 
 (by means of the understanding), either when it conceives, or 
 when it judges, or when it reasons" 2 This is both exact and 
 true. The very light of thought I mean the light which 
 illumines my thought, and without which I cannot think 
 is God himself. Malebranche would be satisfied with this, 
 and we should not concede him an iota too much. 
 
 Descartes develops this still further elsewhere : " The 
 rule which I have established namely, that the things 
 which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all 
 true is only secure because God exists, and is a perfect 
 being, and all which is in us comes from him ; whence it 
 follows that our ideas or notions being real things, and pro- 
 ceeding from God, in all wherein they are clear and distinct 
 they can be no other than true." 
 
 Thus, according to Descartes, it is in our soul that we see 
 God : this vision of the soul, the image of God, actually en- 
 lightened by God, without which it would not be visible, is 
 the idea of God. Our idea of God, therefore, includes the 
 direct vision of our soul enlightened by God, and the indirect 
 vision of God who enlightens the soul. The idea of the per- 
 fect Being is placed in us by the perfect Being. The idea of 
 the perfect Being is an effect which transcends the power of 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 316. * ibid., p. 425. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 199 
 
 an imperfect being : I can conceive it, but only under the 
 influence of the perfect Being. I can see in a glass the sun 
 which is not actually there, but I could not see it if the sun 
 did not exist, and did not cast its image into the glass. The 
 idea of God is God seen in the mirror of the soul, a com- 
 parison so true, so profound, so exact, that none who do not 
 understand it can know what an idea is. 
 
 V. 
 
 Having said this, let us again take up Descartes' two 
 proofs, his proof a priori and his proof a posteriori. 
 
 1. I have the idea of a perfect Being, therefore he exists; 
 for this idea implies his existence. 
 
 2. I have the idea of a perfect Being, therefore he exists ; 
 for he only could have placed this idea in me. 
 
 In themselves, and properly, these two proofs are true, 
 and each sustains itself separately. In fact, relatively to 
 us, they form but one, and are mutually sustained. 
 
 The first, which is Saint Anselrn's proof, to which Descartes 
 with justice clings so closely, is true in itself ; for it is true 
 that God is the necessary Being. If he is the necessary Being, 
 that means that it is of his essence actually to exist; his 
 being and his essence are identical, as Saint Thomas Aquinas 
 shows ; in him real and ideal are identical ; his idea is his 
 being; whoever knows what God is, sees that he is by es- 
 sence ; whoever knows what every being, other than God, is, 
 sees that those beings do not exist by essence, that is to say, 
 are not necessary. The true idea of any being whatsoever, 
 except God, implies the possibility of that being; the true 
 idea of God implies, rigorously speaking, his necessary exist- 
 ence, his actual reality, as the idea of a triangle implies the 
 equality of the three angles to two right angles. 
 
 From the very idea of perfection and infinity, as Descartes 
 
200 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 constantly repeats, it follows that this perfect and infinite 
 Being exists : the idea of infinite Being implies that of neces- 
 sary existence. For what is the meaning of the words, " The 
 perfect and infinite Being?" They signify absolute Being, 
 that is, Being itself. For to speak of Being simply, is to 
 speak of Absolute Being, as Saint Augustine truly remarks. 
 Now, would it not be the most violent and absurd of all con- 
 tradictory propositions to say: Being is not? Therefore, 
 Being is, that is, the absolute, perfect, and infinite Being, 
 that is, God, is. 
 
 Descartes confesses, and we must admit, that at first sight 
 this argument, that the mere idea of the infinite and perfect 
 Being implies the idea of necessary existence, seems a soph- 
 ism to those who do not fathom it. The reason, *he says, is 
 this : " We are so accustomed in all other things to distin- 
 guish existence from essence that we do not consider how it 
 appertains to the essence of God rather than to that of other 
 things. . . . But we must make a distinction between possible 
 and necessary existence, and observe that possible existence 
 is included in the notion or idea of all things of which we 
 conceive clearly or distinctly, but that necessary existence is 
 included in the idea of God alone." a 
 
 Therefore the existence of God is at once an actual truth, 
 a reality; and a rational truth, a necessary idea a priori, 
 which is not true of any other existence. Not only does God 
 exist, but he must exist, which is not true of any other being. 
 It is as much a necessity, says Descartes, as the fact that the 
 three angles of a triangle equal two right angles. It is just 
 as necessary, and even clearer, says Descartes, and he says 
 truly ; for the proposition, Being is, is clearer than that the 
 three angles of a triangle equal two right angles. It is plain 
 that Being is ; and Being is God. 
 
 All this, therefore, is intrinsically true ; but is all this a 
 1 Vol. i. p. 390. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 201 
 
 proof relatively to us, to every mind, to man as he comes 
 into this world ? As Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks, if we 
 do not already know what God is, if we have not his true 
 idea, how can we know that his essence implies his existence, 
 as the idea of a triangle implies the equality of the three 
 angles to two right angles ? We must first have his idea, 
 true, real, and living, that is to say, enacted and caused in us 
 by him. He gives us that divine sense which implies the 
 true idea, divine sense, natural rational faith, or innate 
 idea, as so many gifted minds express it; confused knowl- 
 edge, as Saint Thomas says ; vague thought, as Leibnitz says : 
 this is the germ given by God. But how is this germ set 
 free ? Ordinarily, it is set free by the word of another : an- 
 other mind, by its word, is the father of mine, and sets in 
 action that divine sense which is the first potentiality of 
 the idea of God. This proximate potentiality passes into 
 act under the influence of speech, if my mind responds to it ; 
 that is to say, if my reason, by the power which is in it, rises 
 to the meaning of the word. And reason has this power 
 naturally, because it is the light which illumines every man 
 coming into the world, and because, starting from God, it 
 "seeks God. But the moral obstacle must not arrest it in this 
 spontaneous energy of its impulse towards the infinite. If, 
 therefore, the spirit, under the inner influence of the divine 
 sense and the outer influence of the word, responds, by an 
 act of moral and intellectual consent, to the light which God 
 shows it, and which is God, the mind then has the true idea 
 of God, in which it can clearly see, by a throng of reasons, 
 that existence is implied. 
 
 Thus it is that Descartes' two proofs are actually insep- 
 arable to us, and constitute but one. The proof of the exist- 
 ence of God, derived from the idea alone, is clear and proved 
 to us only when we have the idea of God. Now, the ob- 
 taining of this idea of God supposes an experimental pos- 
 
202 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 tulate, and also a moral condition, which is the starting- 
 point of the second proof. At the same time, the moral 
 and experimental condition does not suffice. It is essential 
 that the divine sense, or, if you prefer, the real attraction of 
 the desirable and intelligible, felt by the soul, should come into 
 the light ; our reason must take possession of it. Seeing this 
 faint light of the implicit idea of God, that is to say, see- 
 ing our soul, wherein God shines, reason must distinguish 
 the light from the glass, God from the soul, the infinite from 
 the finite, and the perfect from the imperfect; to the end 
 that it may assert the infinite at the same time that it sees 
 the finite. 
 
 Theoretically, the dim idea of infinity passes into light by 
 the following degrees. We feel at first, simultaneously and 
 obscurely, the finite and the infinite, God and the soul, life 
 itself being only the harmony of the two ; soon we see clearly 
 the finite, but not as such, not as imperfect ; then the dim 
 sense of the infinite, or perfection, leads us to see the finite, 
 or our soul, as imperfect; the sight of the finite as imper- 
 fect leads us to a clear conception, by contrast, of infinity 
 and perfection. And this knowledge of perfection, or 
 of God, bears in itself the double assurance of the exist- 
 ence of its object, first because it is experimental, then 
 because it is recognized, when once it is possessed, as being 
 necessarily rational, so that the opposite statement implies 
 contradiction. 
 
 Thus, to sum all this up once more, I see God in my soul 
 as in a glass ; this sight is experimental, like sensation ; this 
 sublime sense of God, to produce an actual emotion, requires 
 a moral condition ; this emotion, in order to pass into light, 
 supposes an act of reason. This act of reason divides the 
 infinite from the finite, and the light, which is God, from the 
 mirror wherein it appears, which is ourself. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 203 
 
 VI. 
 
 It remains for us to clear up a single point. Did Des- 
 cartes regard this act of reason as a simple, spontaneous act, 
 a sort of direct intuition of which nothing more can be said, 
 or is it performed by some process which may be described ? 
 According to Descartes, there is a process, although this pro- 
 cess is by no means complicated. This process is Plato's 
 dialectic ; it is that of which Saint Thomas says : " To know 
 God, we must employ a process of elimination." 
 
 Just as the will, under the charm of desirability, through 
 regret at its own imperfection, desires perfection, so too the 
 intellect, in the light of intelligibility, at the sight of the 
 finite, by the negation of limitations, raises itself to the idea 
 of the infinite. The assertion of all that is positive in the 
 finite, with the negation of its limitation, an assertion which 
 raises this negation to the infinite, such is the process. 
 
 Descartes aptly remarks that this process gives, at one 
 stroke, not only the existence of God, but moreover the 
 knowledge, in so far as we can obtain it, of what God is. 1 
 " We also acquire, through proving in this way the existence 
 of God, the advantage that we are made acquainted, by the 
 selfsame means, with what he is, in so far as the weakness of 
 our nature permits ; for in reflecting upon the idea which 
 we actually have of God, we see that he is eternal, omnis- 
 cient, omnipotent, the source of goodness and truth, the 
 creator of all things, and in fact that he possesses in him- 
 self all perfection, or the absence of all imperfection." 2 
 
 And this by the following process : " According to the 
 trains of reasoning just made, to know the nature of God, 
 in so far as my own is capable of so doing, I had but to con- 
 sider, concerning all the things any idea of which I found in 
 1 Principles, p. 235. 2 j^d., p . 239. 
 
204 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 me, whether it was or was not a perfection to possess them ; 
 and I was assured that none of them, possessed of any imper- 
 fection, was to be found in him, but that all the others 
 were." l He asserts all perfection and denies all imperfec- 
 tion. He denies of God all those negative ideas "which pro- 
 ceed from nothingness ; that is to say, which are in me only 
 because something is lacking in my nature, and it is not 
 wholly perfect." 2 I deny those negative ideas, which are 
 only in me "inasmuch as I have defects." 3 I affirm the 
 real and positive idea of God, or of a supremely perfect 
 Being. I deny the negative idea of nothingness, that is, 
 "of that which is infinitely removed from any kind of 
 perfection." 4 I efface all limitations in whatever I find in 
 me that is positive. I see my knowledge grow ; but it 
 will always be limited; I must destroy my limitations in 
 order to conceive of God's actual infinity. For " although 
 my knowledge may increase more and more, nevertheless 
 I know that it can never be actually infinite, since it will 
 never reach so high a degree of perfection as to be incapable 
 of greater increase. But I conceive of God as actually in- 
 finite to so high a degree that nothing can be added to the 
 sovereign perfection which he possesses." 5 
 
 We see, therefore, what there is in us that is positive, and 
 we raise it to the infinite. " Thus, the idea which we have, 
 for instance, of the divine understanding does not seem to 
 me to differ from that which we have of our own under- 
 standing, save only as the idea of infinite number differs 
 from the idea of binary or ternary number; and it is the 
 same with all the attributes of God, some vestiges of which 
 we recognize in ourselves. 6 . . . And we know that none of the 
 things which we conceive to be in God and in ourselves, 
 and which we consider separately in him as if they were 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 151. 3 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 283. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 278. * Ibid., p. 295. 6 Ibid., p. 422. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 205 
 
 distinct, because of the weakness of our understanding and 
 because we experience them so in ourselves, belong to God 
 and to us in the way which is called in the schools uni- 
 vocal" 1 That is, we must in some sort transpose them 
 from ourselves to God in conceiving their " immensity, sim- 
 plicity, and absolute unity." 2 " Unity and immensity we 
 conceive without ourselves possessing them, but God him- 
 self impresses them upon us, like the workman's mark 
 stamped upon his work." 3 Upon which Descartes very aptly 
 remarks that this process gives us a certain precise knowl- 
 edge of what God is. Doubtless, according to Descartes, I 
 do not comprehend the infinite, but I apprehend it. " For 
 to apprehend clearly and distinctly that a thing is such that 
 it is unlimited at every point, is clearly to apprehend that it 
 is infinite." 4 Now, thoroughly distinguishing between the 
 indefinite and the infinite, Descartes adds this most impor- 
 tant assertion : " And there is nothing which I can properly 
 call infinite, save that in which I can find no limits at any 
 point ; in which sense God alone is infinite." 5 
 
 Such is the description of the speculative process : in see- 
 ing the finite, to efface all limitations, and thus affirm to 
 infinity everything positive found there. 
 
 As for the practical and total process, Descartes himself 
 describes it thus: "I will now close my eyes, stop my ears, 
 I will efface from my very thoughts all images of material 
 things, or at least because this can hardly be done I will 
 esteem them false and empty, and thus communing with 
 myself alone, I will try to become better acquainted and 
 more intimate with myself." 
 
 "I am a thing that thinks, that doubts, that affirms, that 
 denies, that understands some few things, that is ignorant of 
 many, that loves, that hates, that desires, that desires not." 6 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 412. 8 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 
 
 2 Ibid. * Ibid., 385. 6 Ibid., p. 263. 
 
206 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 This is the beginning of the Third Meditation, wherein we 
 recognize exactly the process of the ascetics and con tern pla- 
 tors, who say, "Forsake the exterior; leave the world of 
 sense, enter into yourselves ; know yourselves ; know your 
 miseries; and from the knowledge of your miseries rise 
 higher: go to God." This is the course of prayer. 
 
 Thus Descartes saw plainly how the human mind ascends 
 to God. 
 
 VII. 
 
 We perceive but one break in all this. Descartes says 
 nothing of the great distinction between the two regions 
 of the world of intelligibility, nor of what Pascal, Plato, and 
 Saint Augustine call the last step of reason. This is because 
 Descartes had resolved, as he often says, riot to touch on 
 theology, but to keep to pure philosophy. 
 
 We all know the active faith and ardent piety of Descartes ; 
 and if Christina of Sweden, his pupil, could quit a throne to 
 return to the bosom of the Church, that rare strength of 
 conviction was in part derived from the lessons of the 
 philosopher and Christian whom she admired. Therefore 
 Descartes knew whither reason must lead us. But he had 
 his views. This energetic friend of truth wished to conse- 
 crate his life to reinforcing all truth, by essaying to educate 
 reason taken in itself. 
 
 Like his methodic doubt, this rigorous separation of the 
 purely rational order was on his part a manoauvre : in that 
 great contest which the spirit of truth wages with the ever- 
 recurring shadows of doubt, ignorance, and unbelief, he 
 tried to oppose reason alone to the enemy. At this period, 
 men were beginning to attack faith in the name of reason, 
 and reason in the name of faith. Protestants and Jansenists 
 had almost denied reason and the order of natural knowl- 
 edge. Others free thinkers, as they were called denied 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 207 
 
 faith. The structure of Scholasticism, that admirable com- 
 bination of divine and human light, was attacked on both 
 sides. Aristotle was pursued into the bosom of the theol- 
 ogy with which he had meddled, and even into reason 
 itself, reason and faith being frequently wounded, under 
 pretext of reaching Aristotle. 
 
 Very well ! said Descartes, destroy this temple, and it 
 will be rebuilt ; overthrow everything, and it shall be lifted 
 again. When everything is dashed to the ground, will it be 
 less true that we think and that we exist ? Now, with that 
 one truth, all others can be restored. The entire order of 
 rational truths will be re-established, reason will be restored, 
 and reason, again raised up, will soon recover the grand 
 foundations of faith, and accept the whole order of divine 
 truths. 
 
 So Descartes thought ; but it is not generally known that 
 at the same date many theologians, on their side, were effect- 
 ing the same movement. " Make a clean separation of the 
 two orders," was the cry ; " give up that lawless use of scholas- 
 tic theology which attempts to explain our mysteries to the 
 faithful. Our mysteries are inexplicable." We find a very 
 curious indication in this respect in Re*gis. 
 
 " This disorder," he says in his concordance of faith and of 
 reason, " this disorder, which proceeded rather from theo- 
 logians than from Theology, had prevailed in past centuries, 
 but it has at last been remedied in ours, where we see 
 theology more purified, and treated with greater dignity 
 than formerly. . . . Less heed is now paid to argument 
 than to authority. . . . The historic bases of Christianity 
 are proved, like truths of fact, and thereby those who have 
 admitted them are brought even to belief in the Trinity and 
 all the other mysteries. . . . Philosophic proofs are no 
 longer mingled with them. ... It is to this point," adds 
 Re*gis, " that the University of Paris [the Sorbonne] has 
 
208 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 reduced the chief part of its Theology. It is only to be 
 desired that it may keep on as it has begun ; for which 
 there is reason to hope." l 
 
 Without dwelling upon the astonishing fact of an opinion 
 which sees disorder, lawless use, and a lack of dignity in that 
 Theology of past ages which gave us Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
 the Angel of the School and the prince of Catholic theolo- 
 gians, let us confine ourselves to showing that the Cartesian 
 philosophy did on its side what the Sor bonne did on its own. 
 There was an effort to divide, more than had been done in 
 the past, the two orders of reason and faith, which, each 
 in its sphere, have in themselves their proper authority. 
 Philosophers and theologians agreed to free themselves mu- 
 tually, to maintain apart the two authorities and their 
 proper consistency : well knowing that the maintenance of 
 either of the two was enough to save the whole. Both, 
 besides, were equally anxious for the triumph of theology 
 and of philosophy : the Sorbonrie was as jealous of the 
 triumph of reason as Descartes, in his substantial piety, was 
 jealous of the triumph of faith. But men were very glad 
 to oppose unaided reason to the mystic evil scepticism of 
 Jansenism and Protestantism ; and to the free thinking of 
 paltry rationalists, faith alone with its divine authority. 
 
 And yet, what has happened ? These tactics, which were 
 well meant, but which, as Kegis aptly remarks, were novel, 
 being neither those of the Fathers rior of the Middle 
 Age, produced very different results from what were ex- 
 pected. Bossuet foresaw the mischief when he wrote to a 
 disciple of Descartes and Malebranche : " I see a great 
 contest making ready against the Church, under the name of 
 Cartesian philosophy. I see more than one heresy springing 
 from its bosom and its principles, which are, in my opinion, 
 misunderstood." More yet, Bossuet points out the mischief 
 
 1 Regis, Concordance of Faith and Reason, book iii. ch. xxviii. p. 370. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 209 
 
 as already accomplished : " From those same principles, mis- 
 understood as they are, another formidable evil is visibly 
 gaining ground ; for on the pretext that we should only 
 accept what we understand clearly, which, reduced to cer- 
 tain bounds, is very true, every man takes the liberty to 
 say, I understand this, and I do not understand that ; and 
 upon this basis alone, he approves or rejects whatever he 
 pleases, without thinking that besides our clear and dis- 
 tinct ideas, there are others, confused and general, which nev- 
 ertheless contain truths so essential that by denying them 
 we overthrow everything. Upon this pretext a freedom of 
 opinion is introduced which leads men to advance boldly 
 anything that they may think, without regard to tradition." l 
 
 Thus, upon the plea of Cartesianism, those who pique 
 themselves on their philosophy ensconce themselves in their 
 reason and their clear ideas, and from that shelter judge of 
 everything, authority, tradition, and faith. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the theologians forsaking proofs 
 and philosophical reasons, and "seizing the highest thing," 
 as Kegis says, theology became more and more obscure, par- 
 ticularly in the eyes of those who wished nothing but light. 
 Saint Augustine said, " I exhort your faith to the love of in- 
 telligence." The Middle Age took for its motto, "Faith 
 seeking intelligence." Saint Thomas Aquinas said, " The- 
 ology may receive from philosophy a grander manifestation 
 of her dogmas." A means of manifestation was therefore 
 lost, that is to say, a means of introducing into the mind 
 of men the revealed divine light. 
 
 So that these tactics produced but one result. They had, 
 in a certain sense, divided one from the other, faith and 
 reason, and had permitted the enemy to cut off the right and 
 left wings of truth, as has ingeniously been said. 2 The 
 
 1 To a Disciple of Malebranche. Letter to Father Lami. 
 
 2 Father Lacordaire. 
 
 14 
 
210 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 army of truth, thus reduced, must lose a battle. The 
 consequences have been before us for a century. The eigh- 
 teenth century, seeing faith and reason march separately, 
 flung itself between them, isolated them, and ruined faith in 
 the name of reason. This done, the enemy turned against 
 reason itself; and, as we know, philosophy was at once 
 ruined by the rebound, since it is plain that what is called 
 the philosophy of the eighteenth century is merely the ab- 
 sence and ignorance of all philosophy. And what shall we 
 say of the final consequences of this great rout ; namely, the 
 formal and radical negation of reason in all its postulates, 
 the premeditated and avowed destruction of logic in its ne- 
 cessary laws, a mystery of intellectual death and decomposi- 
 tion which has been preparing for fifty years, and which now 
 bursts upon us ! For, as we see, reason is attacked in all its 
 laws, as well as in all its postulates, as directly and as radi- 
 cally as faith was attacked ; the very foundations of logic 
 are denied, and the leader of this vast sophistic movement 
 exclaims : " The time has come to transform logic ; " and it is 
 indeed transformed, by destroying the antagonism of affirma- 
 tion and negation, whose identity is proclaimed, which 
 destroys logic itself, with every trace of theoretic and prac- 
 tical reason. 
 
 May this history be a lesson to our age ! Let us return to 
 the tactics of the Fathers and the Middle Age ; or rather, let 
 us have no tactics. Let us confine ourselves to not parting 
 that which God hath joined together. Certainly human 
 light, reason, is as different from divine light, faith, as man is 
 inferior to God, the creature lower than the Creator. The 
 advance of philosophy and theology in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and the decisions of the Church, have made a greater 
 distinction than ever between the two orders of the natural 
 and supernatural ; and nothing is more necessary, and at the 
 same time more fruitful, than an exact and precise knowl- 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 211 
 
 edge of this radical distinction : but this is precisely where 
 all Christianity rests upon the mystery of the two natures of 
 Christ, infinitely distinct, but closely united in the unity of 
 his person. So, too, as has been said, the true knowledge 
 of Christians should rest upon the union and mutual com- 
 munication of the two lights, otherwise radically distinct. 
 This union constitutes the great knowledge, " at once human 
 and divine," which all the Fathers and all the great theolo- 
 gians seek ; which Saint Gregory Nazianzen calls the highest 
 philosophy; and without which, says Origen in regard to 
 Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus, who approves of it, true 
 piety can never possess all its power. 
 
 PASCAL. 
 I. 
 
 In this admirable concert of illustrious voices which 
 teach us to seek God through reason, Pascal develops and 
 sustains an idea which is one of the most beautiful and most 
 essential to the truth of the whole. Not that by his melan- 
 choly and his moans he does not sometimes make a discord 
 with the others, but it is an indispensable discord, which 
 must be understood and brought into the general harmony. 
 
 Pascal insists upon the practical side of the rational search 
 for God ; he shows us particularly its real condition, which, 
 if it be fulfilled, suffices ; which, if it be wanting, renders 
 the rest impossible, and actually arrests all passage of the 
 mind towards God. 
 
 Pascal knows that the reasoning which rises to God re- 
 quires, as its motive-spring, a moral condition, and that the 
 point of support of the proof is not only the experimental 
 knowledge of our existence, but also that of our imperfec- 
 tion. He knows that the knowledge of our imperfection im- 
 plies some sense of perfection, and that this divine sense of 
 
212 GUIDE TO TEE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the perfect and the infinite is developed by moral rectitude, 
 and obliterated by depravity of will, as is proved by these 
 words of Scripture : " The fool saith in his heart, There is no 
 God." The fool, that is, the man deprived of the divine 
 sense by his folly, lacks any real starting-point for the proof 
 of God. He cannot understand that proof if it be offered to 
 him ; his mind neither receives it nor produces it. The side 
 of his reason which is capable of attaining the actual infi- 
 nite, does not work, for lack of a motive-spring ; the other 
 side is active and entire, but the former is paralyzed by an 
 obstacle, that obstacle which Aristotle saw in the sensu- 
 ality, intoxication, and blind torpor in which we live. 
 
 We see how important it was to develop vigorously this 
 part of the truth, amid those great minds who raised the 
 glory of human reason to such a height, by their doctrine 
 and their works. 
 
 Pascal, moreover, seems to counterbalance Descartes, who 
 devoted himself wholly to natural philosophy, and not to 
 Theology ; who sets faith apart, and makes so strong a dis- 
 tinction between " the two orders of divine intelligibility " as 
 to isolate them. Pascal incessantly urges the mind towards 
 the higher of the two orders, scorning the lesser. He rushes 
 with all his might towards the term of the process, as Plato 
 would say, and forgets the intermediaries. He knows that 
 the last step of reason is a surrender to faith, and he hastens 
 thither. He goes at once to the last depths, to the centre of 
 the soul, which he calls the heart, then directly from the 
 heart to God, to the God of Christians, to the supernatural 
 knowledge of God through Jesus Christ. 
 
 Thus, on the one hand, we have the moral condition indis- 
 pensable to the flight of the mind towards God ; on the other 
 hand, the necessity for attaining the supernatural goal ; the 
 vanity of purely natural knowledge of God: such are the 
 points to which the energetic eloquence of Pascal is devoted. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 213 
 
 II. 
 
 Pascal's scepticism, in reality and in its intention, is not 
 genuine scepticism : it is scarcely more than the sentiment 
 expressed by Bossuet : " 111 befall the barren knowledge which 
 does not turn to loving and betray itself ! " it is scarcely 
 more than the development of Bacon's words : " Human in- 
 telligence is not a dry light (Intellectus humanus luminis sicci 
 non est)" For if that light be dried up, by isolating it from 
 the heart, from feeling, from the divine sense, Pascal fails to 
 understand how it can reach to the knowledge of God. " The 
 heart," he says, " the heart has its reasons, which reason does 
 not know." 1 Now, in his eyes, " it is the heart that feels 
 God, not the reason. This is faith : God perceptible to the 
 heart, not to the reason." 2 Moreover, Pascal sees an element 
 of freedom in the use of this heart-sense, the beginning of 
 the knowledge of God. "I say that the heart loves the uni- 
 versal Being naturally and itself naturally, according as it 
 applies itself thereto ; and it hardens itself against one or the 
 other at its own choice. You reject one and retain the other : 
 is it reason that leads you to love ? " 3 This is indeed the 
 core of the question : the heart's free choice in regard to God's 
 natural attraction in the soul decides everything, and guides 
 our mind towards God or turns it from him. 
 
 But what does Pascal understand by the heart ? 
 
 We must know the original but deep significance which 
 he gives to the word. To him the heart is the chief of the 
 soul's faculties, implicating the roots of intelligence and will, 
 - that which, in the soul, adheres directly to the first prin- 
 ciples of the desirable and the intelligible, that is, the heart. 
 On the other hand, to Pascal, most frequently at least, reason 
 means ratiocination, and ratiocination means syllogism. 
 Hence we can understand what follows: 
 
 i Edit. Faug&re, ii. 172. 2 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 
 
214 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 "We know the truth, not only through the reason, but also 
 through the heart : it is the first principles of this latter sort that 
 we know, and it is in vain that ratiocination, which has no share 
 therein, strives to combat them. . . . The knowledge of the first 
 principles is as steadfast as any of those which our ratiocinations 
 give. And it is upon such knowledge of the heart and instinct 
 that reason should rest and should base all its discourse. Princi- 
 ples are felt, propositions are inferred ; and all this with equal cer- 
 titude, though by different ways. And it is as absurd for reason 
 to require of the heart proof of its first principles as a requisite 
 for consenting to them, as it would be absurd for the heart to de- 
 mand of reason a feeling for all the propositions that it proves, 
 before it will receive them. 771 
 
 We see that Pascal here describes inner facts which all 
 philosophers have seen, only he calls "heart and instinct" 
 what some call " direct perception of evidence ; " others, 
 " spontaneous knowledge;" others, "natural faith;" others, 
 "the sense of the desirable and the intelligible;" and we 
 understand how and in what sense he criticises reason : he 
 wishes, like all sceptics of a dogmatic bent, to humiliate, not 
 intrinsic reason, but reason isolated, mutilated, separated 
 from its source in the soul and from its source in God. 
 
 Besides, Pascal does not deny that there is a natural and 
 rational knowledge of God, independently of Christian faith ; 
 but he says that this knowledge is barren, barren of salvation. 
 "All those," he says, "who seek God without Jesus Christ, 
 can never find such light as will afford them true satisfaction 
 or genuine fruit. For either they do not advance so far as 
 to know that there is a God, or if they do. it is in vain." 2 He 
 therefore confesses that we can reach this natural knowledge ; 
 he points out three modes of knowing God, as a heathen, 
 as a Jew, and as a Christian. " The divinity of Christians 
 does not consist of a God who is merely the author of geo- 
 metric truths and the order of the elements ; that is the lot 
 
 1 Edit. Faugfcre, ii. 108. 2 Complete Works, ii. 307 (Lattaye). 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 215 
 
 of the heathen. It does not consist merely of a God who 
 exercises his providence over the life and welfare of men, to 
 give a happy length of years to those who adore him ; that 
 is the share of the Jews. But the God of Abraham and 
 Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and consola- 
 tion: he is a God who fills the soul and heart which he 
 possesses." l 
 
 Pascal, therefore, clearly distinguishes between natural and 
 supernatural knowledge of God. But he points out the dry- 
 ness and sterility of the natural knowledge. " If a man," he 
 says, " should be persuaded that the proportions of numbers 
 are immaterial and eternal truths dependent on a first truth in 
 which they subsist, and which is called God, I should not con- 
 sider that man had made great progress towards salvation." 2 
 
 Pascal does not deny the legitimacy of the metaphysical 
 proofs of God ; he only remarks, with the world in general, 
 upon their extreme difficulty, and their almost absolute in- 
 utility in practice, at least, when they are given under 
 certain forms. Who does not see the perfect justice of the 
 following observation ? " The metaphysical proofs of God 
 are so remote from human reasoning, and so complicated, 
 that they strike us but little ; and if they should serve some 
 persons, it could only be during the moment that they see 
 that demonstration ; but an hour later, they fear lest they 
 were deceived. Besides, this sort of proofs can only guide 
 us to a speculative knowledge of God." 3 
 
 It is plain enough that Pascal refers here to certain proofs 
 which he calls metaphysical, which are so remote from 
 human reasoning, and so complicated, which only guide us 
 to a speculative knowledge, which have nothing common, 
 popular, experimental, about them, nothing which rests 
 upon the divine sense and the moral side of the soul; 
 
 1 Complete Works, ii. 306. 8 ibid., p. 305. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 202. 
 
216 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 hence, what can be truer than this criticism ? Let us recall 
 Aristotle's proofs, as stated by Saint Thomas Aquinas. 
 
 Pascal wishes the knowledge of God always to rest both 
 upon the mind and upon the entire soul ; if it rests on the 
 mind alone, in his opinion it is only an idol. " Men make 
 an idol of truth itself ; for truth without charity is not 
 God, it is his image, and an idol which should neither be 
 loved nor worshipped," words of wonderful depth. 
 
 Lastly, it seems to me impossible to regard Pascal as a 
 genuine sceptic, if we weigh the following passages : " We 
 must learn to doubt where it is requisite, to assume where 
 it is requisite, to submit where it is requisite. He who fails 
 to do this does not understand the power of reason. 1 . . . 
 There are two excesses, to exclude reason, and to admit 
 nothing but reason. 2 ... It is your assent to yourself, and 
 the firm voice of your own reason, not that of others, which 
 should lead you to believe." 3 
 
 III. 
 
 From what precedes, it follows that in reality Pascal's 
 doctrine concerning the knowledge of God is this : 
 
 God is perceptible to the heart naturally, but the soul 
 destroys or increases this divine feeling, "according as it 
 applies itself, and of its own volition." When deprived of 
 this feeling, the soul has no power to rise to the idea of 
 God ; and the arguments which it then accumulates afford it 
 no useful light or assurance. On the contrary, with this 
 feeling, which is developed in the soul in proportion as it 
 becomes more familiar with its selfishness and poverty, the 
 least argument at once raises the mind to God. In this 
 case, " all our reasoning is reduced to yielding to emotion." 
 In the former case, " reason acts slowly, and with so many 
 
 1 Edit. Faugere, ii. 347. 2 Ibid., p. 348. 8 Ibid., p. 351. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 217 
 
 different views and principles which it must always consider, 
 that it continually grows drowsy, or goes astray for want of 
 seeing them all at once. It is not so with feeling ; it acts 
 in an instant, and yet is always ready to act." 1 Plainly, 
 Pascal has here in view the two processes of reason ; and he 
 shows the clumsiness, slowness, and complications of the 
 syllogistic process, when used to reproduce what the dia- 
 lectic process, although perfectly exact, seizes by a rapid, 
 almost simple impulse, comparable to a prayer or an 
 emotion. 
 
 Then, beyond all this, Pascal feels keenly that there is 
 another degree of the divine intelligibility, and that in 
 practice the true knowledge of God, serving for the salvation 
 of the world and of every soul, is that which faith in Christ 
 Jesus develops in us. 
 
 Such, I believe, is the solid basis of Pascal's philosophy. 
 But it must be confessed that it is not easy to grasp a sys- 
 tem among the scattered fragments which we know as his 
 works, since we find manifest contradictions in that maze, 
 where doubts and opinions, questions and assertions, ob- 
 jections and replies, are blended. 
 
 We see clearly that Pascal undertook to correct that 
 purely syllogistic semi-reason, paralyzed in its best part, set 
 apart from life, emotion, the heart, and all faith, whether 
 natural or supernatural, indifferent to all guidance, destitute 
 of rule or principles, limping, and blind to the infinite, even 
 in geometry, as it asserts. When, therefore, this puny 
 reason becomes arrogant, he humbles it, he overthrows it; 
 and that is only just. 
 
 But it is quite as plain that Pascal, being a Jansenist, was 
 liable to mistake, and was mistaken in regard to the rela- 
 tions between faith and reason. In the first place, he allows 
 natural reason but too little light, and the will but too little 
 
 1 Complete Works, vol. ii. p. 362. 
 
218 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 liberty. He knows no healthy and upright reason but that 
 which rests on emotion and affection ; and at the same time 
 he admits of no other love of God but that supernatural 
 love, the gift of grace, which is charity. Moreover, he not 
 only says that the supernatural light of faith is a gift of 
 God, snperadded to reason, he believes that this gift is 
 arbitrary on God's part; that nothing can prepare us for it ; 
 that no effort can avail, even indirectly, to make us less 
 incapable of it, and that God refuses it to souls which labor 
 with all their might, by reason and by freedom, to remove 
 the obstacle ! " We utterly fail to understand the works of 
 God," he says, " unless we accept it as a principle that God 
 blinds some, and enlightens others. 1 No man ever believes 
 with a true and saving faith, unless God inclines his heart ; 
 and no man, when God inclines his heart, can refrain from 
 thus believing. 1 " 2 He also allows himself elsewhere to be so 
 far carried away that he writes these almost blasphemous 
 words: "Neither discourses nor books, neither our sacred 
 Scriptures nor our Gospel, neither our most holy mysteries, 
 nor alms, nor fasts, nor mortifications of the flesh, nor mira- 
 cles, nor the use of sacraments, nor the sacrifice of our body, 
 nor all my efforts, nor those of the whole world combined, 
 can do anything at all to begin my conversion, if thou dost 
 not add to all these things the most extraordinary aid of thy 
 grace." 3 So that between the two worlds, between the two 
 degrees of the divine intelligibility, one of which, however, 
 supposes the other, according to Plato and Saint Thomas Aqui- 
 nas, there is no possible intermediary but an arbitrary decree 
 of God and a most extraordinary effort of his grace ; and 
 neither the proper use of reason and liberty, nor recourse to 
 the sacraments, nor reading of the gospel, nor all our efforts, 
 be they what they may, aided and preceded by that universal 
 
 1 Thoughts (Paris, 1714), p. 47. 8 Ibid., p. 303. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 177. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 219 
 
 grace which God sheds like his sun upon all men, absolutely 
 nothing can avail to begin the soul's return to eternal life. 
 And in speaking thus, Pascal imagines that he is following 
 Saint Augustine, while Saint Augustine teaches this : " Do 
 you think that man can believe if he desire it not, or that he 
 can abstain from believing if he desire to believe ? That would 
 be absurd. Therefore faith is in our power. . . . But, as the 
 Apostle says, all power comes from God. . . . God gives us 
 the power to believe, without imposing upon us the necessity. 
 . . . Faith, therefore, is in our power, since we believe if we 
 choose, and if we believe, it is because we choose." l 
 
 Such is sectarian blindness. A man may rely upon 
 Saint Augustine while he teaches the exact opposite of his 
 doctrines. In this respect, in what concerned sects and 
 their quarrels, no one was more sincerely blind and hasty 
 than Pascal. It was a matter of temperament and character 
 as much as of zeal and conviction. 
 
 Look at Pascal's portrait, sketched by Domat, in his 
 Corpus Juris, with such striking truth. Never did face 
 better express a whole history. At a single glance you 
 read in those features the courage, tenderness, terrors, and 
 tears of that generous heart ; the vigor and sombre enthusi- 
 asm of that splendid genius, as well as the strange error 
 which showed him an abyss ever yawning at his feet ; and 
 this other error, far worthier of pity, in which, without being 
 responsible for it, I hope, he slandered the purest of men. 
 
 MALEBRANCHE. 
 I. 
 
 "France is not sufficiently proud of her Malebranche," 
 said De Maistre. Others have called Malebranche the Chris- 
 tian Plato. And, indeed, if Plato brought all philosophy to 
 
 1 De Spirit, et Litter., pp. 54, 55. 
 
220 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the search and the vision of eternal ideas, which are God, 
 to what did Malebranche bring all philosophy, if not to see 
 everything in God? 
 
 What the Gospel says, " The Word is the light of men ; " 
 what Saint Augustine adds in his commentary on this pass- 
 age, " This light of men is reason ; " all Descartes' efforts 
 to show that the idea of God proceeds from God, is God con- 
 ceived, and even that every idea, every opinion, every act of 
 the understanding, is, or supposes, a certain perception of 
 the light which is God, is eagerly grasped by Malebranche, 
 developed with matchless fulness and untiring zeal, main- 
 tained with contagious conviction, penetrative lucidity of 
 reasoning and style. No man, so much as he, has shown 
 the presence of God in reason. 
 
 All the resources of his style, undulating with light, all 
 the power of the lofty poetry at his command, although a 
 systematic foe to imagination, all the rigor of his geometry, 
 all the perfection and the impetus of the most ardent faith, 
 and all the genuine warmth of a soul as loving as it was 
 clear-sighted, all these resources are used, not in abstract 
 demonstration of the existence of God, but in manifestation 
 of God as the Word present in the soul. And this Word 
 Malebranche calls sometimes " Eeason," and sometimes 
 "Jesus Christ." 
 
 Let us hear what he says. He begins his Christian 
 Meditations with this prayer: 
 
 " Eternal Wisdom ! I am not my light to myself, and the 
 bodies which surround me cannot enlighten me ; intelligences 
 themselves, not containing in their being the reason which ren- 
 ders them wise, cannot communicate that reason to my mind. 
 Thou art alone the light of angels and of men; thou art alone 
 the universal light of minds, wisdom, eternal, immutable, ne- 
 cessary. Oh, my true and sole Master \ show thyself to me ; 
 make me see light in thy light. I address myself to none save 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 221 
 
 thee ; I would consult only thee. Speak, Eternal Word, word of 
 the Father, word which has always been spoken, which is spoken 
 now, and which will be spoken forever. Speak, and speak loudly 
 enough to make thyself heard, despite the noisy confusion which 
 my senses and my passions make in my mind. 
 
 " But, Jesus ! I pray thee to speak in me only for thy 
 glory, and to make me know only thy greatness. . . . Make me 
 know, Jesus ! that which thou art, and how all things subsist 
 in thee. Pervade my mind with the splendor of thy light, con- 
 sume my heart with the ardor of thy love, and grant me in the 
 course of this work, which I write solely for thy glory, expressions 
 clear and true, vivid and breathing, worthy of thee, and such that 
 they may increase in me and in those who deign to meditate 
 with me the knowledge of thy greatness and the sense of thy 
 benefits ! " 
 
 II. 
 
 Let us try, then, to meditate a little while with Male- 
 branche. He listens, he questions, and the inward master 
 answers him. 
 
 Master. " Dost thou not feel that the light of reason is ever 
 present to thee, that it dwells within thee, and that when thou 
 retirest within thyself thou dost become completely illumined 
 therewith 1 Dost thou not hear that it answers thee when thou 
 dost question it, when thou canst question it by a serious atten- 
 tion, when thy passions and senses are reverent and silent? 
 
 " Retire into thyself, and hear me. . . . Thus doth truth speak 
 to all those who love her and who with ardent desire implore her 
 to feed them with her substance : 
 
 "I feed minds with my own self; ... I give myself wholly 
 to all and wholly to each. I have created them to make them 
 like unto myself, and to feed them with my substance ; and they 
 are the more rational the more perfectly they possess me." l 
 
 Soul. " What, my Jesus, is it thyself who dost speak to me in 
 my most secret reason 1 ? It is then thy voice I hear. Thou 
 comest to shed light in an instant through my soul ! What ! 
 
 1 Meditation II., Nos. 11, 12, 13. 
 
222 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 It is thou alone that enlightenest all men ! Alas, how dull was I 
 when I believed that thy creatures spoke to me, when thou didst 
 reply ! How vainglorious was I when I fancied that I was a light 
 unto myself, when thou didst enlighten me ! . . . Oh, my only 
 master, may men know that thou dost penetrate them in such 
 manner that when they believe they answer themselves and con- 
 verse with themselves, it is thou who dost speak with them and 
 hold converse with them ! Yes, light of the world, I understand 
 it now : it is thou who dost enlighten us, when we discover any 
 truth whatsoever ; it is thou who dost exhort us, when we see the 
 beauty of order ; it is thou who dost correct us, when we hear the 
 secret reproaches of reason ; it is thou who dost punish us or con- 
 sole us when we feel that deep remorse which rends our interiors, 
 or those words of peace which fill us with joy. 1 
 
 " May those who know thee as a God ever attent upon them, 
 acting in them, enlightening them, entreating them, correcting 
 them, consoling them, render perpetual thanks to thee for the 
 benefits they receive at thy hands, so that they may deserve fresh 
 favors, and that thou mayst at last make them worthy to possess 
 thee forever. May those who, unconscious of the secret opera- 
 tions by which thou actest in us, do not know the author of their 
 being, nor him who gives them every moment fresh motion and 
 life, seek their benefactor with all their strength, with love, eager- 
 ness, and persistence, and may they tend an altar to the unknoivn 
 God, until thou dost reveal thyself, to them. 2 
 
 " As for me, Lord, I implore thee to teach me that mode of 
 consulting thee which is ever rewarded by a clear and evident 
 knowledge of the truth." 
 
 Master. " Thou already knowest in part that which thou dost 
 ask. I have already told thee, but thou dost not reflect thereon. 
 Dost thou not remember that I have often answered thee as soon 
 as thou hast desired it? Thy wishes, therefore, suffice to force 
 me to answer thee. True, I desire to be entreated. But thy 
 desire is a natural prayer which my mind frames in thee. It is 
 the actual love of truth that prays, and that obtains the sight 
 of truth." 8 
 
 1 Meditation II., No. 15. 8 Meditation III, Nos. 9 and 10. 
 
 2 Ibid., No. 19. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 223 
 
 This is the beginning of these wonderful Meditations. 
 What follows, although placed in the middle of the work, 
 may be regarded as their conclusion. 
 
 " I confess it, my only Master, and I wish to consult thee 
 solely concerning the truths which are necessary to me to lead 
 me to the possession of true good. The time is short, death 
 draws near, and I must enter such an eternity as I shall have 
 deserved. The thought of death changes all my views and in- 
 terrupts all my plans. Everything vanishes or changes its as- 
 pect when I think of eternity. Abstract knowledge, brilliant 
 and sublime as you may be, you are but vanity, and I forsake 
 you. I will study religion and morals ; I will work to become 
 perfect and happy, and quit the weary task which God has given 
 to the children of men, all that empty knowledge of which it is 
 written, that those who acquire it, instead of becoming wise and 
 content, but add to their labors and their cares." T 
 
 We feel it to be our duty to give this quotation to show 
 the genius of Malebranche and the practical result which he 
 attained. In fact, Malebranche believed thoroughly in the 
 inward converse of the soul with the universal Word. He 
 did not merely state these things as speculative rules, he 
 practised them habitually. 
 
 He took literally and accepted, as a philosopher, Christ's 
 words in answer to those who asked him, " Who art thou ? " 
 "I am the beginning of all things, I who speak with you." 
 Malebranche considered that these words contained the very 
 principle of philosophy. The universal Word naturally speaks 
 always to all men. This inner appeal of God, and our 
 natural capacity for understanding its meaning, is reason. 
 According to Malebranche, he who does not know this, knows 
 nothing of philosophy. From this point of view any other 
 knowledge than that of the Word itself seemed to him fruit- 
 less. We see that, like Plato, he regarded the abstract sci- 
 
 1 End of Meditation IX. 
 
224 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 ences, brilliant and sublime as they might be, as merely the 
 shadows of that which is, and as divine phantasms. He 
 wishes to pass from the shadow to the reality, which gives 
 us the profoundly philosophic meaning of the beautiful and 
 devout words just quoted. 
 
 III. 
 
 As for the proof itself of the existence of God, as Male- 
 branche understands it, we find germs of it in the preceding 
 passages. But here it is in plain terms, 
 
 "God 1 is He Who is; that is to say, the Being which contains 
 in its esssence all the reality and perfection to be found in all 
 beings ; the Being infinite in every sense, in a word, Being. 
 
 " Our God is Being, without any restriction or limitation. He 
 includes in himself, in a manner incomprehensible to the finite 
 mind, all perfections, all true reality possessed by created and 
 potential beings. He includes in himself whatever there is of 
 reality or perfection in matter, the last and most imperfect of 
 beings, but without its imperfection, its limitation, its nothing- 
 ness ; for there is no nothingness in being, no limitation in the 
 infinite of every kind." 
 
 Thus, " our God is all that he is wherever he is present, 
 and he is omnipresent." Malebranche does not take the 
 pains to conclude otherwise, or to add: As God is Being, 
 and can be none other, and as Being necessarily exists, 
 therefore God exists. 
 
 This is Saint Anselm's proof, and Descartes' second proof, 
 that which he sums up thus: We have the idea of God, 
 therefore he exists, for that idea implies his existence. 
 
 But to this proof Malebranche instantly makes answer, 
 through the mouth of the adversary, with the objection which 
 
 1 Conversation between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher, 
 ii. 365 (Paris, 1837). 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 225 
 
 might be expected: We admit that the idea of infinity 
 includes the idea of Being; "but we deny that infinity 
 exists." 1 
 
 This is the same objection made by Saint Thomas to Saint 
 Anselm's proof : " The atheist," said he, " denies the very fact 
 that infinity exists." 
 
 Malebranche answers this objection with Descartes' first 
 proof: I have the idea of God, therefore he exists; for he 
 alone could inspire me with that idea. 
 
 " This," says Malebranche, " is a very simple and very natural 
 proof of God's existence, the most simple of all those which I 
 could give you. 
 
 " To think of nothing and not to think, to see nothing and not 
 to see anything, is the same thing. Therefore all that the mind 
 perceives directly and immediately, is or exists. ... All that the 
 mind perceives immediately, really . is. For if it were not, in 
 perceiving it I should perceive nothing, therefore I should not 
 perceive. 
 
 "Now, I think of the infinite: I perceive the infinite imme- 
 diately and directly. Therefore it exists." 2 
 
 To this the opponent answers, 
 
 " I admit that if the immediate object of your mind were the 
 infinite, when you think of it this would necessitate its existence ; 
 but then the immediate object of your mind is only your mind 
 itself. . . . Thus it does not follow that the infinite exists ab- 
 solutely and aside from us merely because we think of it." 
 
 Malebranche replies, 
 
 " That which does not exist cannot be perceived. To perceive 
 nothing and not to perceive anything, is the same thing. It is 
 therefore evident that, in a finite mind, we cannot find sufficient 
 
 1 Conversation between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher, 
 ii. 365. 
 
 2 Ibid., pp. 365, 366. 
 
 15 
 
226 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 reality to see the infinite in it. Heed this well. Is not your idea 
 of space alone infinite 1 Your idea of the heavens is very vast, but 
 do you not feel that your idea of space infinitely exceeds it ? 
 Does not this idea assure you that whatever impetus you may 
 give your mind to traverse it, you can never exhaust it, because 
 it has actually no bounds'? But if your mind, your own sub- 
 stance, does not contain sufficient reality to find out the infinite 
 in extent, this or that infinite, a particular infinite, how can you- 
 see in it the infinite in every kind of being, the infinitely perfect 
 Being, in a word, Being 1" 
 
 Thus, " nothing finite containing the infinite, the very fact 
 that we perceive the infinite, necessitates its existence. All 
 this is based on the simple, evident principle that nothing 
 cannot be directly perceived, and that to see nothing and not 
 to see nothing is the same thing." : 
 
 Malebranche, therefore, understands this proof thus : In 
 his opinion the idea of God is an immediate knowledge, an 
 experimental perception of God ; it is God himself who by 
 his presence gives us his idea, or rather, all ideas. "This," 
 he says, "is how I understand it. The infinitely perfect 
 being containing in himself all reality and perfection, he 
 can, by touching us with his efficacious realities, that is, by 
 his essence, reveal or represent to us all beings. I say, "by 
 touching us ; for although my mind be capable of thinking 
 or perceiving, it can only perceive that which touches or 
 modifies it, and such is its greatness that none save its Crea- 
 tor can act immediately in it. God is the life of intelli- 
 gences and the light which illumines them. ... He contains 
 in his essence the ideas or archetypes of all beings, and 
 reveals them to us. ... But gross and carnal men do not 
 comprehend this." 2 And, indeed, " the perception with 
 which the infinite touches us is so slight that you regard as 
 
 1 Conversation between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher, 
 ii. 366. 
 
 2 Ibid., ii. 37L 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 227 
 
 nothing that which touches you so slightly, . . . like chil- 
 dren who think that the air is nothing, because their percep- 
 tion of it is unconscious." l 
 
 These two demonstrations, the one through the idea itself 
 of the infinite, as involving the idea of necessary existence, 
 the other through the idea of the infinite considered as an 
 effect of God, as Descartes expresses it, and as a vision of 
 God present, these two demonstrations combined constitute 
 the entire Cartesian proof, both rational and experimental, 
 as we have stated it. Add to this the cosmologic proof, of 
 which we are about to speak, and we shall have the complete, 
 manifest, universal proof of God's existence such as man- 
 kind, wise or ignorant, philosophers or poets, have united in 
 seeing and describing. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In the same Dialogue, Malebranche thus presents the 
 cosmologic proof : " The proof which you have just given me 
 of God's existence," says the interlocutor, "is very simple, 
 but it is so abstract that it does not wholly convince me. 
 Have you none which is more concrete ? " "I will give you 
 as many as you please, for there is nothing visible in the 
 world which God has created whence we cannot rise to 
 the knowledge of the Creator, provided that we reason 
 correctly." 2 
 
 In fact (we here abridge Malebranche's long exposition), 
 any object whatsoever, seen by us, proves God, because no 
 object can be seen save through God and in God. 
 
 According to Malebranche, God brings about in us directly 
 and immediately all our ideas and sensations. He effects 
 
 1 Conversation between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher, 
 ii. 366, 367. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 368. 
 
228 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 them by his presence and his contact in the same way that 
 he effects in us his own idea, the idea of the infinite. 
 
 Here Malebranche confounds two truths. He believes 
 that our natural idea of God is the direct and immediate 
 vision of God himself. According to him, at least as he 
 develops it in his " Search After Truth," the sight of created 
 beings and the sight of our soul are but a sight of God ; 
 we therefore see only God, who effects within us, by the occa- 
 sional cause of our soul and the world, the impressions, the 
 sensations, the emotions which we attribute to the world 
 and our soul. Malebranche does not say, with Saint Paul, 
 " We see God through his creatures ; " he says the opposite, 
 "We see his creatures through God." He seems to forget 
 the passage from the Scriptures : " No man has ever seen God." 
 And, indeed, have we, such as we are and are born into 
 this world, a " direct and immediate " vision of God ? Who 
 can believe this ? But we understand Saint Paul ; we under- 
 stand that when we see nature and our soul and all creation, 
 we really gain a certain indirect and implicit view of God, 
 since he is the light which enlightens us, without which 
 nothing would be visible. 
 
 Malebranche confounds the two degrees of the divine in- 
 telligibility : here lies all his error. He attributes to reason, 
 that is, to the natural vision of God in the mirror of the soul, 
 characteristics which only belong to the supernatural vision 
 of God in his essence. " The dogma of the beatific vision, 
 profoundly meditated," says Balmes, " sheds floods of light 
 upon philosophy. Malebranche's sublime dream may be only 
 a reminiscence of his theological studies." l It could not be 
 better expressed. Yes, the dogma of the supernatural vision 
 of God bathes philosophy in light, since it reveals the final 
 perfection of reason, and at the same time its limits ; its 
 natural range, its range : it is a certain perception of the 
 1 Files, fund., i. 27. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 229 
 
 Word ; its limits : it is only the indirect perception thereof ; 
 its final perfection: it may be called to see directly the 
 source of light, the essence of God. This is where Male- 
 branche becomes confused. He dreams in a sublime dream 
 that in his natural reason he already has the direct, immedi- 
 ate vision of God himself. Like Pascal, he goes at once to 
 the goal ; but while Pascal, in gazing at the supreme goal, 
 neglects and despises the intermediary, Malebranche does the 
 exact opposite, and fancies that the intermediary is the goal. 
 He confounds, let us once more repeat, the two degrees of the 
 divine intelligibility. 
 
 For if now, upon this plea, any one enter against this 
 great mind a charge of pantheism, I answer that in the 
 seventeenth century I recognize no pantheist but Spinoza, 
 
 Spinoza, whom Malebranche calls " that evil spirit, the 
 miserable Spinoza." Spinoza was a pantheist, consciously, 
 by choice. Spinoza loves the error ; Malebranche detests it. 
 Spinoza sets up falsehood and develops it ; Malebranche sees 
 and upholds truth, but in some details expresses himself un- 
 happily. This has occurred, on one point or another, to the 
 best and greatest intellects. The philosopher who strives 
 for truth and is accidentally mistaken, is radically different 
 from the sophist who strives for error and accidentally 
 speaks the truth. 
 
 Malebranche saw clearly and brought to light this truth, 
 
 that in every idea, every vision, every intellectual action, 
 there is the light of God, and that nothing is visible save in 
 the light of the divine sun. Have we not seen this doctrine 
 in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas ? It is a 
 supreme truth. But Malebranche does not fully grasp the 
 relation of the light to the soul and to objects, although he 
 distinguishes the three terms perfectly. 
 
 As for the proof of God's existence, Malebranche gives it 
 to us entire. 1, He takes his point of support in experience, 
 
230 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 in the vision of the soul and of the world ; 2, he sees and 
 describes admirably the divine impetus, the sense of the 
 infinite, the sense of God, of God who gives us his idea 
 by touching us ; 3, he sees the obstacle to the development 
 of this proximate power " in gross and carnal men who do 
 not comprehend it." He therefore knows the moral condition 
 of the proof ; in his Treatise on Morals, he develops it in all 
 forms, notably in chapter xi., to which he gives the title, 
 " In what Sort we must die to see God and be conjoined to Rea- 
 son" which recalls Socrates' profound words: "To philoso- 
 phize is to learn to die." "4, As for the process itself by 
 which we may rise to God, it is found in these words: There is 
 nothing visible in the world which God hath created, whence 
 we may not rise to the knowledge of the Creator, provided we 
 reason correctly ; . . . since he contains all true reality to be 
 found in all created and potential beings, even in matter, but 
 without their imperfection, limitation, and nothingness." 
 
 Let us repeat, in closing, that Malebranche, by his classic 
 style, which gains truth an entrance to the human mind, 
 rendered philosophy the immortal service of showing, better 
 than any other man before him, the presence of God in reason. 
 It was essential that in the seventeenth century this funda- 
 mental truth should be as loudly asserted as the impotence of 
 human thought when isolated from its source in God. Now, 
 these two truths, of which Pascal and Malebranche each 
 maintained one, sometimes even excessively and discor- 
 dantly, Fe*nelon was charged to maintain together, and 
 to bring the dissonance into a strong accord. 
 
 FtfNELOK 
 I. 
 
 We have already said, the best of all philosophers are 
 the theologians. Saint Augustine is deeper and more ex- 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 231 
 
 act than Descartes in matters of philosophy, because he is 
 more of a theologian. Fenelon and Bossuet are more exact 
 than Malebranche and Pascal, because the latter two are 
 no great theologians. As for Fenelon, let no one doubt that 
 he is an admirable theologian. In his dispute with Bossuet 
 on divine love and the soul's relations to God, he teaches 
 Bossuet more things than Bossuet teaches him, although 
 Bossuet was the victor. 1 As a philosopher, Fe'nelon is the 
 most exact of all the philosophers of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. The great philosophic idea of that century was the 
 idea of the infinite. Upon this point Fenelon is the most 
 complete, explicit, and sure of any. Strange to say, he 
 knew far more about the metaphysics of the infinite than 
 Leibnitz himself, the inventor of the infinitesimal calculus. 
 Moreover, he avoids all exaggerations, both that of Pascal 
 and that of Malebranche, the eccentricities of Leibnitz, and 
 many others beside. In every particular his genius is well 
 balanced, compounded as much of heart as of mind, of 
 reason as of religion, of impulse as of good sense ; in every- 
 thing he preserves a happy medium, and that completely cen- 
 tral human voice, of which it was so well said : " Fe*nelon's 
 voice is neither a man's voice nor a woman's voice, but, like 
 the voice of wisdom, it has no sex." 2 
 
 II. 
 
 In his Treatise on the Existence of God, Fe'nelon gives all 
 the proofs of the existence of God at length, consecutively, 
 and methodically. He develops in due order, 1, the proof 
 through the sight of the material world (cosmologic proof) ; 
 2, the proof from the sight of the soul (psychologic proof) ; 
 
 1 This is shown in the fine work by the learned M. Gosselin, entitled, "The 
 Literary History of Fenelon." 
 
 2 Joubert's Thoughts, ii. 108. 
 
232 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 3, the proof called metaphysical, based on the nature of 
 the idea of God. He demonstrates briefly the existence 
 of God from the spectacle of nature; then he states with 
 greater amplitude how reason and freedom, which exist in 
 us by the presence of God, prove God ; and how the idea 
 alone which we have of the infinite, gives us immedi- 
 ately, by way of direct consequence, the idea of neces- 
 sary existence. 
 
 In this treatise Fe*nelon corrects, particularizes, and 
 completes the exclusive points of view of Pascal and 
 Malebranche. 
 
 Pascal scourged reason, declaring it usually incapable of 
 advancing to God. Malebranche deified it, and said : Not 
 only does reason demonstrate God, but it is God himself 
 that we see directly and immediately when we reason; 
 reason shows God, because it is God. Fe'uelon develops 
 perfectly and simultaneously what Pascal and Malebranche 
 maintain, each for himself, far too exclusively. Let us see 
 how he combines them into a whole which is the truth. 
 
 In searching for the proof of God's existence in the spec- 
 tacle of our mind and the analysis of reason, he sees, first, 
 in the mind of man, that double character of pettiness 
 and grandeur clearly to be found there, and which strike us 
 at the first glance ; he sees the perfection and imperfection, 
 the constant disappointments and the infallible rule, the 
 evident limitations of the finite, the visible traces of the 
 infinite : he everywhere asserts that in reason we find both 
 God and ourselves. 
 
 We must quote these splendid passages, which should be 
 taken in their literal sense. 
 
 Having first described the weaknesses of our thought, he 
 shows the idea of the infinite therein, and exclaims, 
 
 " Oh, how great is the mind of man ! He bears within him 
 matter to amaze and infinitely to surpass himself, his ideas are 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 233 
 
 universal, eternal, and immutable. 1 Those unbounded ideas can 
 never be changed, altered, or effaced in us; they are the very 
 foundation of reason. 2 
 
 "Behold the mind of man, weak, uncertain, limited, full of 
 errors. Who hath put the idea of the infinite that is to say, of 
 perfection into a subject so limited and so full of imperfection ?" 
 Who hath placed in me that idea of the infinite which is " the 
 true infinite of which we have the thought 1 " 8 
 
 This idea is in me, but it is no part of me. Trr\, fixed 
 and immutable ideas, which are the basis of rr xocison, are 
 not a part of me. 
 
 " This fixed and immutable will is so inward and intimate that 
 I am tempted to take it for myself; but it is superior to me, since 
 it corrects me, sets me right, puts me on my guard against myself, 
 and warns me of my own impotency. It is something which 
 inspires me every hour, if I do but hearken to it ; and I am never 
 deceived save when I hearken not to it. 4 
 
 " This inward rule is what I call my reason, but I speak of my 
 reason without grasping the force of that expression. 5 
 
 " Truly, my reason is within me, for I must unceasingly return 
 into myself to find it ; but the superior reason which corrects me 
 in case of need, and which I consult, is not mine, and does not 
 form a part of myself. That rule is perfect and unchanging ; I 
 am changeable and imperfect. When I err, it preserves its recti- 
 tude ; when I am undeceived, it is not it that returns to the goal ; 
 without ever itself straying from the goal, it has authority to 
 recall me and compel me to return to it. It is an inward master 
 that commands me to be silent, to speak, to believe, to doubt, to 
 confess my errors or confirm my judgments; this master is omni- 
 present, and his voice is heard from one end of the universe to the 
 other, by all men as by me. 6 
 
 " Thus, what seems most our own and to be our very essence, 
 I mean our reason, is least peculiarly ours, is what we should 
 account most borrowed. We unceasingly and obviously receive a 
 
 1 First Part, chap. ii. No. 52. * Ibid., No. 54. 
 
 2 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 
 
 Ibid., No. 53. 6 ibid., No. 55. 
 
234 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 reason superior to ourselves, as we unceasingly breathe the air, 
 which is a foreign body, or as we unceasingly see all the objects 
 about us in the light of the sun, whose rays are bodies foreign to 
 our eyes. 1 
 
 " In all things we find, as it were, two principles within us : the 
 one gives, the other receives ; the one lacks, the other supplies ; 
 the one errs, the other corrects ; the one is prone to fall, the other 
 lifts it up. . . . Every man feels within him a limited and in- 
 ferior reason, which goes astray so soon as it escapes entire sub- 
 jection-, and which can only be rectified when it again submits to the 
 yoke of another superior, universal, and immutable reason. Thus, 
 everything in us bears the mark of an inferior, limited, shared, 
 and borrowed reason, which requires another to correct it at 
 every turn. 2 . . . 
 
 " Now, doubtless, the man who fears the correction of that 
 incorruptible reason, and who goes astray from not following 
 it, is not this perfect, universal, and unchanging reason which 
 corrects him in his own despite. 8 . . . 
 
 " There are then two reasons to be found within me, one of 
 which is myself, the other is superior to me. That which is my- 
 self is very imperfect, faulty, uncertain, prejudiced, headstrong, 
 subject to error, changing, hasty, ignorant, and limited ; in fact, it 
 possesses nothing that is not borrowed. The other is common to 
 all men and superior to them ; it is perfect, eternal, immutable, 
 ever ready of access and ready to rectify all minds that err, in 
 fine, incapable of ever being exhausted or divided, although it is 
 freely given to all those that desire it. Where is this perfect 
 reason which is so near me, and yet so different from me 1 ? 
 Where is it 1 It must be something real ; for nothing cannot be 
 perfect or render imperfect natures perfect. Where is this su- 
 preme reason-? Is it not the God whom I seek 1 " 4 
 
 Such is this superb analysis of reason, the best which has 
 been made; and at the same time the most certain, most 
 immediate, and most beautiful demonstration of the existence 
 of God. 
 
 1 First Part, chap. ii. No. 56. Ibid. 
 
 2 Ibid., No. 57. * Ibid., No. 60. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 285 
 
 Fe*nelon completes this point of view by analyzing the will 
 as he has before analyzed the intelligence. Just as he finds 
 in us an inferior and a superior reason, the double light which 
 Saint Augustine called "the illuminating and the illumi- 
 nated light," and between which Malebranche also makes a 
 distinction in more than one place ; so, too, he sees in our 
 will two faces : " On the one hand I am free, on the other I 
 am dependent. 1 I am dependent on a first Being even 
 in my own will, and nevertheless I am free. What is this 
 dependent liberty, this borrowed freedom?" 2 Dependence 
 reveals the nothingness from which I come, that is to say that 
 I am a secondary cause and a finite being; my freedom, 
 which I cannot doubt, is a greatness which comes from 
 the infinite. 3 
 
 Here we have everything in man clearly distinguished. 
 
 And here we have inferior reason scourged and contemned 
 when it sets itself apart, as Pascal contemned it ; we have 
 infallible and supreme reason deified as Malebranche deifies 
 it : both points of view are equally true ; but Fenelon com- 
 bines them without confusing anything, without exaggerating 
 anything. 
 
 III. 
 
 Fe*nelon understood what few fully understand even 
 now, namely, that the marvellous thing which we call 
 our reason, "without penetrating into the extent of this 
 word," is God and ourself ; or, more exactly speaking, it is a 
 relation of God to us, in which, on our side, we may be found 
 lacking, by turning away and isolating ourselves. Fe*nelon 
 knows that our ideas exist in God and in us, pertain to 
 God and to us. He knows the true theory of intellectual 
 vision, which Malebranche perceives but incompletely : it is 
 
 1 First Part, chap. ii. No. 63. 3 Ibid., No. 69. 
 
 2 Ibid., No. 69. 
 
236 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF G0l>. 
 
 that of Plato, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
 who (I will say it, however much metaphysicians may mis- 
 trust images) held fast to truth by an image, by depending 
 upon the poetry of God, and comparing intellectual vision to 
 physical vision, a comparison of which Kant took excel- 
 lent advantage on an important point, and of which philoso- 
 phers will yet make greater use when they have acquired 
 the true principle and practice of comparative science. 
 We quote this comparison, as used by F^nelon. 
 
 " There is a sun of spirits. ... As the natural sun lights all 
 bodies, so the sun of intelligence lights all minds. The substance 
 of a man's eye is not the light; on the contrary, the eye borrows, 
 every moment, the light from the rays of the sun. Just so, my 
 mind is not the primitive reason, the universal and immutable 
 truth, it is only the organ through which that original light 
 passes, and which is lighted by it. ... That universal light dis- 
 covers and represents all objects to our eyes; and we cannot 
 judge of anything save by it, even as we cannot discern any body 
 save by the rays of the sun." x 
 
 This is the precise truth that Malebranche describes im- 
 perfectly and inexactly. The soul, in its actual state, does 
 not see God directly, it sees itself, and it sees its ideas in 
 the light of God, as the eye sees objects in the light of day; 
 but to see daylight is not the same as to see the sun itself 
 directly, although the daylight proceeds from the sun; to 
 see the colors and forms of objects is not the same as seeing 
 the sun, although forms are only visible by means of the 
 sun, and colors are only the light itself of the sun, broken, 
 refracted, and partially reflected by objects. So, too, it is 
 impossible to say that every idea, all vision, all knowledge, 
 are immediately and directly the vision of God, although we 
 can have no idea without God, and all knowledge implies 
 
 * First Part, chap. ii. No. 58. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 237 
 
 God, as all vision through the eyes implies light, both the 
 source of light and its presence. 
 
 This Malebranche does not recognize. Malebranche's 
 lofty intelligence is dazzled by the most admirable of 
 truths, namely, " that if we do not see God in some man- 
 ner, we shall not see anything ; " l that we see everything, 
 without exception, in the light of God, and that in a certain 
 sense we see God in all vision, spiritual or corporeal. But 
 Malebranche believes that this necessary vision of God, 
 which all vision and all thought imply, " is the direct and 
 immediate vision of God ; " 2 that we see nothing, even ma- 
 terial bodies, save by seeing their ideas, which exist in God, 
 and which are' God. 3 So that it is no longer possible for 
 him to distinguish between the two degrees of the divine 
 intelligibility. This 1 distinction is the capital truth that he 
 lacks. He half perceives it when the objection is offered ; 
 but if he for a moment forsakes his error, it is only to 
 return to it speedily. " No," he says, " we cannot conclude 
 that spirits see God's essence, from the fact that they see all 
 things in God in this manner. . . . For we see not so much 
 the ideas of things, as the things themselves which the ideas 
 represent ; for instance, when we see a square, we do not say 
 that we see the idea of that square which is united to the 
 mind, but only the square which is on the exterior. . . . We 
 do not say that we see God by seeing truths, but by seeing 
 the ideas of those truths. ... To our thinking, we see God 
 when we see eternal truths ; not that these truths are God, 
 but because the ideas on which these truths depend exist 
 in God." 4 
 
 Malebranche here renounces his error, and teaches no 
 
 1 Search after Truth, book iii. part ii. chap. vL 
 
 2 Ibid., chap. vii. 
 Ibid., chap. ix. 
 
 * Ibid., book ii. chap. XL 
 
238 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 other than the theory of Plato, Saint Augustine, and Saint 
 Thomas, 1 which is the truth. But he does not stand fast ; 
 his dazzled condition carries him away, and in the selfsame 
 pages he maintains it is his ruling idea that " God 
 shows all things to spirits simply by desiring that they shall 
 see what is most central in themselves ; that is, that which 
 in him is in relation with those things and represents 
 them. 2 ... It is," he says, " only God that we see with 
 direct and immediate vision. It is only he who can en- 
 lighten the mind by his own substance. . . . We know 
 things by their ideas, that is, in God. ... It is in God 
 and by their ideas that we see bodies and their properties, 
 and therefore our knowledge of them is very perfect ; . . . 
 for when we see things as they are in God, we always see 
 them in a very perfect manner." 3 Saint Thomas says no 
 more than this of the beatific vision of the essence of God. 
 To see things in a very perfect manner, as they are in God, 
 in their very ideas, which are God, is the vision of 
 God's essence. Malebranche's error, therefore, plainly con- 
 sists, as Balme's has observed, in his failure to distinguish 
 the beatific vision from that natural and indirect vision of 
 God without which we can see nothing. As a theologian, 
 he can evade this objection only by contradicting himself 
 and momentarily deserting his system. He grants, in the 
 sixth chapter, that in natural knowledge what spirits " see 
 in God is very imperfect, and God is very perfect." Hav- 
 ing thus answered the objection, he asserts in chapter vii. 
 " that it is in God and by their ideas that we see bodies, 
 and that we have a very perfect knowledge of them." This 
 is what may be called in Malebranche a dazzled bewilder- 
 
 1 Omnis cognoscens, cognoscit implicite Deum in quolibet cognito. Ferit., 
 q. xxii. 2, l m . 
 
 2 Search after Truth, chap. vi. 
 8 Ibid. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 239 
 
 ment. But F^nelon here seems to us to see the whole truth, 
 without confusion or exaggeration. He asserts everywhere 
 that " it is the light of God that reveals objects to us, and 
 that we can judge of nothing save through it. This same 
 knowledge of individual things, where God is not the imme- 
 diate object of my thought, can only be acquired in so far 
 as God gives to the creature intelligibility, and to me actual 
 intelligence. It is therefore in the light of God that I 
 see all that can be seen." l F^nelon does not say, as 
 Malebranche does, that in everything we see God directly 
 and immediately, but only that we see everything in the 
 light of God. He does not speak of direct vision, and this 
 is the great point ; if he speaks of immediate vision, he 
 makes a distinction : " The immediate object of all my uni- 
 versal knowledge is God himself, and the single being or 
 created individual . . .is the immediate object of my sin- 
 gle knowledge." 2 But how is God himself the immediate 
 object of my general knowledge, for instance, of the idea 
 of the infinite ? " Who is it that put the idea of the infi- 
 nite in a subject so limited t . . . Let us suppose that the 
 mind of man is like a looking-glass. . . . What being was 
 able to imprint within us the image of the infinite, if the 
 infinite never existed ? . . . This image of the infinite is the 
 true infinite of which we have the thought. ... If it were 
 not, could it be engraved on the very essence of our 
 minds ? " 3 Accordingly, our idea of God is not the di- 
 rect vision of God, but it is an image of God, that is, a 
 vision reflected in the mirror of the soul. Here we again 
 meet with the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, natural 
 vision of the truth is, in the soul, the reflection (refulgentia) 
 of uncreated truth. For if Fdnelon goes so far as to say 
 
 1 Treatise on the Existence of God, part ii. ch. iv. No. 8. 
 
 2 Ibid., No. 60. 
 
 8 First part, chap. ii. No. 53. 
 
240 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 that, when we see the truth, "it is God himself, infinite 
 truth, that is revealed immediately to us, with the limita- 
 tions under which he may communicate his being," 1 he 
 understands it as he has just explained it: God graves his 
 image in our soul, he reflects himself in the mirror of the 
 soul. This is the very doctrine of Descartes. 
 
 So that, to sum up the whole, in Fdnelon's simile the idea 
 of God is the image of the sun in the mirror : all general 
 knowledge is the full rays of that image ; the light of God 
 reflected in the soul is then the immediate object of intellectual 
 vision. As for special knowledge, it is like the vision of bod- 
 ies by sunlight; I see bodies by their colors, partial, decom- 
 posed rays of the universal light that makes bodies visible. 
 But, in that very case, the eye sees something of the sun. 
 "Thus," says Fenelon, "our ideas are a constant mixture of the 
 infinite Being of God, who is our object, and of the limitations 
 which he always gives essentially to each of his creatures." 2 
 
 IV. 
 
 The reader will now better understand the admirable 
 demonstration of the existence of God derived from the 
 theory of reason. Fdnelon proves God from the spectacle 
 of the human mind as we prove the sun from light. He 
 sees, in our mind, the contrast between " a weakness which 
 strays and an infallibility which corrects, an insignificance 
 ignorant of its own thoughts, and an unlimited fund of ideas 
 which nothing can efface or alter." From the sight of this 
 weakness he learns that we are not the infallible ; from the 
 sight of this insignificance he learns that we are not the 
 infinite or the unlimited fund of ideas, but that all this is 
 God, or an effect of the presence of God. He concludes from 
 this that God exists. It is thus that the sight of darkness 
 
 1 Part ii. No. 53. 2 Ibid., chap. iv. No. 54. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 241 
 
 informs us in regard to light, tells us that it exists, in itself, 
 independently of objects, since they are only visible by it, 
 and are effaced when it ceases to lend its aid. 
 
 No one has known or developed better than Fe'nelon the 
 conditions of the true proof of the existence of God. The 
 point of support, in reality, takes up the whole of the first 
 part of his treatise. He does not drop it when he proceeds 
 to the metaphysical proof through the intrinsic idea of th& 
 infinite and necessary Being. As for that sense of the di- 
 vine and that divine impulse which raise us to God and 
 call us to the light, it is described in these charming 
 words : 
 
 " Where is that pure, sweet light, which not only enlightens the 
 eyes that are open, but which opens the eyes that are closed ; 
 which heals diseased eyes ; which gives eyes to those who have 
 none wherewith to see \ in brief, which inspires us with a desire 
 to be enlightened by it, and which makes itself loved even by 
 those who fear to see it 1 " l 
 
 Fe'nelon perceives the obstacle in these clouds of our pas- 
 sions on the divine sun ; he sees the diseased eyes closed to 
 the light ; he therefore knows the moral condition and the 
 proof of the existence of God. 
 
 As for the process by which our mind rises from the sight 
 of the finite to the knowledge of the infinite, Fe'nelon de- 
 scribes it perfectly. He says, 
 
 " God is veritably in himself all that there is real and positive 
 in the human mind, all that there is real and positive in material 
 bodies, all that there is real and positive in the essences of all 
 possible creatures, of which I have no distinct idea. He has all 
 the being of the body, without being limited to the body ; all the 
 being of the mind, without being limited to the mind ; and the 
 same of the other possible essences. He is all being in such a 
 manner that he has all the being of each of these creatures, but 
 
 1 Treatise on the Existence of God, part ii. chap. iv. No. 58. 
 16 
 
242 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 without the limitation that bounds it. Remove all bounds; re- 
 move all the difference which confines being to species : you 
 retain the universality of being, and, consequently, the infinite per- 
 fection of Being by itself. 1 
 
 " And when I conceive it thus in that kind which the School 
 calls transcendental, which no difference can ever cause to lose its 
 universal simplicity, I conceive that it can equally derive from its 
 simple and infinite being, minds, bodies, and all the other possi- 
 ble essences which correspond to these infinite degrees of beings." 2 
 
 In short, for what properly concerns the result of the pro- 
 cess, and the idea of the infinite which it should give, I find 
 it nowhere given with precision and completeness save in 
 Fe*nelon alone. Here is a passage in which he himself sums 
 it up: 
 
 " I could never conceive of more than a single infinite ; that is to 
 say, other than the being infinitely perfect, or infinite in every kind. 
 Any infinite which was infinite in but one kind would not be a 
 true infinite. To speak of a genus or species is plainly to speak of 
 limitation, and to exclude all ulterior reality, which establishes 
 the fact of a finite and limited being. To restrict the idea of the 
 infinite to the limits of a genus shows that we have not considered 
 it with sufficient simplicity. It is clear that it can only be found 
 in the universality of being, which is the being infinitely perfect 
 in every kind, and infinitely simple." 8 
 
 Nothing could be more important than these words. This 
 we shall see later. 
 
 In short, Fe*nelon corrects Pascal and Malebranche; and 
 he gives Descartes exactness and completion. 
 
 V. 
 
 Fe'nelon being our subject, we may be allowed to say a 
 few words more concerning him. 
 
 1 Treatise on the Existence of God, part ii. chap. v. No. 66. 
 
 2 Ibid., No. 67. 
 
 8 Letters on Metaphysics, letter iv. 3. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 243 
 
 Errors may be found in the writings of every man of the 
 seventeenth century. I ask if any be found in Fdnelon ? 
 
 Not that in asking this question I forget the matter of 
 Quietism, and the just condemnation which concluded it. I 
 have it in mind. But did Fenelon submit to that condem- 
 nation ? Did he burn his book ? Yes ; consequently he 
 yielded to the truth. If he yielded to the truth, he was not 
 mistaken. This we must admit, unless we mean to impute 
 to him the erasures in his manuscripts, and reproach him 
 with the pages which he flung into the fire. Let us learn at 
 least to appreciate the greatness of a mind capable of sacri- 
 ficing the first forms of its thought. Such a mind is great, 
 because it is greater than itself. The sacrificer of the false, 
 who immolates it in his own mind, is not a victim of error, 
 but a martyr to truth ; and he rises, by virtue of the sacri- 
 fice, above himself to the truth which is God. " Leave self, 
 to enter into the infinity of God!" exclaimed Fe*nelon. 
 Now that which he has said, that he has done. 
 
 Consider, amidst the great geniuses of the seventeenth 
 century, this admirable intellectual character, his perfect 
 proportions, his firm attitude in the truth. Fuller and 
 more luminous than Descartes in regard to the theory of 
 ideas and reason ; incomparably more exact that Leibnitz as 
 to the theory of the infinite ; avoiding the bitter melancholy 
 of Pascal, who seems to curse nature, as well as the brilliant 
 exaggeration of Malebranche, who believes that our natural 
 reason is the very vision of God ; more absolute, more clear- 
 sighted, than most in his opposition to pantheism and the 
 sophists ; firmer and more decided in regard to the error of 
 Jansenism than even Bossuet, who sometimes seems to wa- 
 ver ; truer than Bossuet, too, in regard to the theory of abil- 
 ity and liberty, and the great question of the relations of 
 Church and State ; holily animated with a pious and gen- 
 erous belief in the future and in the progress of the world, 
 
244 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 a faith very rare at that time, and perhaps as rare now ; 
 admirable for his mystic learning, which he taught to Bossuet 
 day by day, until he made an accomplished master of that 
 sublime pupil ; 1 more amiable, more attractive than all oth- 
 ers through the happy equilibrium of his courage, his intelli- 
 gence, and his goodness, the only man, in short, besides 
 Saint Vincent de Paul, whose aureole has remained visible 
 to all eyes through the lapse of two centuries : consider all 
 these features of perfect human beauty, and see if these 
 glorious pre-eminencies do not seem to realize in Fe'nelon 
 the words of Scripture : " He who humbles himself shall be 
 exalted." 
 
 When shall we learn what sacrifice is, in things of the 
 spirit, and what it can do ? "Our will is finite," says Bos- 
 suet ; " in so far as it restricts itself to itself it gives itself 
 limits. If you would be free, release yourself. Cut away, 
 retrench. Have no will but that of God." This is the 
 moral sacrifice. Now we may, by copying these words, say 
 also : " Our intellect is finite ; in so far as it restricts itself 
 to itself, it gives itself limits. If you would be free, release 
 yourself. Cut away, retrench. Have no thoughts but those 
 of God." Behold intellectual sacrifice ! 
 
 Fenelon cut away and retrenched. " If your right hand 
 offend you," says the Gospel, " cut it off and cast it from 
 you." Fe'nelon cast far from him thoughts full of error and 
 danger ; but the fund of truth which was in his soul, and 
 which those imperfect and faulty formulas curtailed and im- 
 paired, was set free by the action of the Church, to dif- 
 fuse itself into the human mind. True orthodox mysticism, 
 theologically perfected, dates from that period. That is to 
 say, before Fe'nelon' s effort to systematize mystic science the 
 writings of the most saintly authors contained inexacti- 
 tudes on this head, not of intention, but in expression ; so 
 
 1 See the " Literary History of Fenelon," by the Abbe Gosselin. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 245 
 
 that the chief point of mystic theology, the final word of 
 true wisdom, was then, and then only, defined and fixed. 
 We know that Fe*nelon's effort attracted the attention of 
 Bossuet, who was very justly moved ; Fe*nelon's vigorous 
 and luminous defence taught Bossuet the science ; Bossuet, 
 well armed by his opponent, urged on the contest. The con- 
 test was judged by the Church : the false side of Fe*nelon's 
 thought, or at least of his words, was corrected in the most 
 just and delicate way ; nothing that he had seen, felt, or 
 written of the truth, was touched, in short, Fenelon's sur- 
 render ended all in peace, in unity, and in truth. 
 
 Peace ! peace in unity and in truth ! when will these good 
 things be granted to us ? When shall we advance towards 
 this goal ? " Quarrelsome race of men ! " exclaims Saint 
 Chrysostom. Quarrelsome race indeed ! Yes, we are born 
 to quarrel, dissension, and division. Not only does human- 
 ity form two camps and two cities, for and against God, 
 for and against the truth, but, not to mention here the 
 sophists and the criminals, behold the history of the good 
 and of those who have pursued the truth with upright 
 spirit. Behold them all in presence of the sun : each is 
 bathed in its rays ; but each considers his soul and its 
 thought in that light, instead of considering the light itself 
 in the soul and the thought ; each limits, modifies, and di- 
 versifies the light, chooses the rays each according to its 
 proper color, and instead of understanding that all tints are 
 but the same light, suppose that the colors are contradictory, 
 as if the vivid purple of dawn should deem itself contra- 
 dicted by the dazzling whiteness of noon, or the dark violet 
 of the evening clouds. I am well aware that Plato divined 
 the necessary unanimity of the wise, and said, " All wise men 
 agree." Meantime, Plato and Aristotle are divided, Saint 
 Augustine and Saint Jerome do not always agree. Saint 
 Thomas and Saint Bonaventura give rise to two schools that 
 
246 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 contend for centuries. See Pascal opposed to Descartes 
 and the Jesuits, Descartes to Aristotle, Fe'nelon to Male- 
 branche, Newton to Leibnitz, and Bossuet to Fenelon; see 
 all these glorious couples struggling, often even in the sharp- 
 est anger! But in reality, as Saint Augustine affirms of 
 Aristotle and Plato, they differ owing to accidents which are 
 overcome by him who sees the true harmony of these 
 beauteous tints in the unity of light. Moreover, the separa- 
 tion between Plato and Aristotle is incomparably deeper 
 than that of the shades of philosophic doctrine in the Chris- 
 tian Fathers; when we weigh things well, we find that these 
 very shades are far less pronounced in the Middle Age 
 than in the Patristic age; and in the seventeenth century, 
 the sophists always excepted, the divisions are even less 
 marked. This is undoubtedly because the two Cities, among 
 men, are continually closing in and becoming stronger, each 
 in its own unity. 
 
 But under what influence and by what cause does the 
 unity of righteous hearts and docile minds thus increase, if 
 not because, since Plato and Aristotle, he who has been 
 called the Prince of Peace has arisen, and the Angel of 
 Peace has cast upon the earth the beginning of unity? 
 That part of humanity truly united to God has assumed a 
 visible centre, as astronomers say that they perceive in the 
 heavens, in the formation of worlds, a period when the 
 vague cloud, the raw material of the stars, assumes a centre 
 and labors to acquire regularity, roundness, and unity. God 
 then lays, as Genesis says, " a firmament in the midst of the 
 waters." l So too, a time has come in history when God is 
 placing, in the bosom of the ever-changing and scattered 
 mass of mankind, the centre of attraction which strives for 
 the increasing union of men in God. 
 
 Do we not see, in this supreme question of the soul's 
 
 1 Dixit quoque Deus, Fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum. Genesis i. 6. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 247 
 
 relations to God in love, that Bossuet and Fenelon, who, by 
 themselves, were forever divided, were only reunited by the 
 power and authority of that centre, and brought their diffi- 
 culties, unjust on both sides, to it, Bossuet sacrificing his 
 ignorances little by little, under the ascendency of Catholic 
 theology and the tradition of the saints which Fe*nelon op- 
 posed to him, and Fe*nelon yielding wholly by a single ef- 
 fort at the first warning of Unity, to the voice of the repre- 
 sentative of him of whom he himself had said, " It is in this 
 centre that all men meet, from one end of the world to 
 the other"? 
 
 Thus, there is in the world a uniting force and a visible 
 basis of unity. May peace then come in unity and in 
 truth ! 
 
 Deign, O God, ever to attract us more and more, both by 
 thy secret power and by the firm though gentle authority of 
 the visible centre of thy eternal unity ! Grant that by con- 
 sidering self less, we may see thee more, may lose sight 
 of our diversities, and contemplate thy unity. May we be 
 at length permitted to divide light less ; may the partial tint 
 of our souls impair less the whiteness of the ray ; may our 
 mind, despite its insignificance, and through the disinterest- 
 edness that comes from thee, love and seek the universality 
 and immensity of truth, and may our defects and our limits 
 at least never turn to negations and blindness. Give us, 
 with the charity of the heart, that of the mind. Grant that, 
 as Saint Ignatius says, a Christian may ever be more ready 
 to accept than to reject the word of his brother. Grant that 
 in spite of the difficulty of language and the imperfect form 
 of human thought, we may learn to reascend through the 
 word of another to the pure origin of the ray which has pro- 
 duced this word and this thought. Grant that by this char- 
 ity of mind we may learn to leave self behind and reach out 
 after the lights of others, and grasp in intellectual struggles 
 
248 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the aspect of truth which is opposed to us, and which we 
 lack. Grant, above all, that we may be docile to the intel- 
 lectual unanimity of our Fathers, and to the supreme author- 
 ity of the holy inspiration that directs thy Church ; to the 
 end that by docility, humility, and charity, men may attain 
 to some communion of minds on earth, and, being united, 
 understanding one another in God more and more, may ap- 
 proach that eternal goal of which Saint Augustine says: 
 "We shall then all see the thoughts of all; we shall see 
 God in our own intelligence; we shall see him in that of 
 
 others." l 
 
 1 De Civitate Dei, lib. xxii. cap. xxix. 6. 
 
CHAPTEK VII. 
 
 THE THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 
 PART SECOND. 
 
 PETAU AND THOMASSIK 
 
 T^VERY one knows that Leibnitz wrote a Theodicy, 
 " Fenelon the Treatise on the Existence of God, Bossuet 
 a book On the Knowledge of God and self ; that Descartes, 
 Malebranche, and others cleared, deepened, and developed 
 the proofs of God's existence, and the way that leads the 
 mind to the knowledge thereof ; but scarcely any one knows 
 that there also appeared in the seventeenth century two 
 Latin Theodicies, each of considerable length, equivalent 
 to eight or ten volumes like ours, and that these two 
 works are masterpieces of philosophic depth and learning. 
 
 Two great minds, scarcely inferior to the greatest, Petau 
 and Thomassin, brought together in these admirable works 
 all the substance of the fathers and the ancient philoso- 
 phers, in regard to the Theodicy ; then, with wondrous art, 
 they worked up and grouped the precious materials in the 
 light of their individual reflection. I know no books where 
 original thought is better blended with the thought of 
 others, where the intuition of genius is more perfectly sup- 
 ported by the power of tradition and the weight of author- 
 ity; and when Thomassin says, "Thus decree the patricians 
 of thought and the fathers of religion;" when he goes on 
 to proclaim these decrees, all luminous in the light of his 
 expositions, we see that he is himself one of those patri- 
 
250 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 cians, one of those fathers, voting with the rest, and utter- 
 ing his vote in a voice worthy to be heard with the most 
 illustrious. 
 
 Thomassin lived nearly fifty years after Petau, who died 
 about the same time as Descartes. His work is longer than 
 that of the famous Jesuit, more complete, perhaps still more 
 philosophic and more original. As it would be little else 
 than a repetition to speak in equal detail of two such similar 
 works, we will pay special attention to that of Thomassin. 
 We will merely give an analysis of one of Petau's chapters, 
 which will suffice to show the bearing of his mind. 
 
 We will take the chapter on Demonstrative Theology ; that 
 is to say, the process by which reason rises to God. 
 
 We give an abridged translation l : 
 
 " Demonstrative Theology treats of what are commonly known 
 as attributes; attributes which are divided into affirmative and 
 negative attributes. We shall deal with them in general in this 
 chapter, then in detail in the ensuing chapters. 
 
 "This division into positive and negative properties is usual 
 only with the ancient theologians : it is owing to the fact, as Saint 
 Cyril observes, that we know in two ways that which it is fit that 
 we should assert regarding the divine substance : we know God 
 from what he is, and from what he is not. Saint Dionysius, in his 
 Mystic Theology, has done more than any one else to point out this 
 twofold way : ' We must,' he says, ' posit in God all affirmations 
 which are true of all things, and they are true of him, because he 
 is the cause of all ; but then we must deny them, because he is 
 superior to all, and we should not suppose that these negations are 
 contrary to those affirmations ; and certainly the First Cause is 
 superior to these negations, being superior to all negation and even 
 all affirmation.' The same author remarks elsewhere that the 
 Scripture adopts sometimes one and sometimes the other of these 
 two modes : for it sometimes culls God Reason, Mind, Substance, 
 Light and Life ; sometimes designates him by very different terms, 
 as when it declares that he is invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible, 
 
 1 Theologicorum Dogmatum, lib. i. cap. v. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 251 
 
 and by other terms which express, not what he is, but, on the con- 
 trary, what he is not. 
 
 "This is elegantly summed up by Saint Gregory Nazianzen 
 in the words : * End of all, thou art one, thou art all that is, 
 being neither one nor all.' l 
 
 " Theology, therefore, seeks God by this twofold process of affir- 
 mation and negation ; but negation, according to Saint Dionysius 
 and other Fathers, is more potent here than even affirmation, which 
 he explains as follows in his celestial hierarchy. ' It is,' he says, 
 * because in denying his identity with the things we see, we speak 
 truly, and thus attain, although indirectly, his substance raised above 
 all other substance, and his infinity incomprehensible to the mind as to 
 all speech.' 
 
 " In fact, these negations, as Saint Dionysius says elsewhere, in 
 no way signify that there is in God any privation of that which they 
 deny, but, on the contrary, excess and plenitude. To say of God that 
 he is not substance, means that he is infinite substance; to say 
 that he is not life, means that he is supreme life ; to say that he 
 is not thought, means that he is sovereign thought. 2 This is sup- 
 ported by Saint Maximus when he remarks that negations are 
 more efficacious than assertions in God. 
 
 "Nevertheless, if negative statements are superior in exactness 
 to affirmative ones, still the latter should be maintained ; the two 
 should be combined and modified one by the other. These negi- 
 tions and affirmations are not contradictory, but, on the contrary, 
 they support and complete one another. And, as Theodore Abu- 
 cara says, positive properties should be attributed to God, as well 
 as negative ones, in such manner as to transfer to God all the per- 
 fections of our souls, taking away, by negation, all that proceeds from 
 accident or fault . 3 
 
 " This is very well shown by John Cyparissiotus when he de- 
 velops the thought that negation is far from refusing to God what 
 affirmation attributes to him. 
 
 "Very far from this, affirmative statements, positive notions, 
 are, by these negations, extended and made perfect : negation wipes 
 away and removes everything in the affirmation which is gross, nar- 
 
 1 Tu finis cunctorum, unus, simul omnia, nullus, 
 Non unus, non cuncta. 
 
 2 Dion., cap. iv. de Divin. non. 8 Theod. Abuc., opusc. tert. 
 
252 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 row, or borrowed from the creature whence it proceeds ; the idea 
 remains, purer, more transparent, worthier of God. As if marble, 
 says Saint Dionysius, contained innate statues : the hand of the 
 artist need only remove that which conceals them, and could un- 
 veil these hidden beauties by removing that which is not they. 
 This Maximus makes still clearer by his charming comments. He 
 says that there are two sorts of natural cameos, those which the 
 artist takes from the lump without adding anything, and which he 
 draws by removal ; and those which Euripides calls innate forms 
 (avrojjLopfoi) : as when Nature herself creates a design in a precious 
 stone. Such was that cameo of Pyrrhus mentioned by Pliny, 1 
 where the Nine Muses and Apollo with his lyre were engraved, not 
 by the hand or art of any man, but by Nature herself, which had 
 so disposed the forms and shades of the stone as to produce these 
 figures, and even to give each of the nine sisters all her attributes 
 in minute detail. In this case, the artist, without touching the 
 material itself, had only to remove the waste and smooth off the 
 roughness to reveal the innate masterpiece. This comparison ad- 
 mirably befits the notion of God shaped in us by the process of 
 theological elimination, a process which Plotirms believed to be 
 universal, because we know in general the nature of a being if we 
 take everything accidental from it. ' To know any nature,' he says, 
 * we must see it in its purity ; knowledge is prevented by accidental 
 additions to its essence. Therefore we should seek the essence by 
 eliminating the accidental.' 2 
 
 " All this agrees with the thought of Aristotle, who gives us his 
 first category, not by a positive, but by a negative definition. 
 Ammonias discusses and understands it in the same way. Alcinous 
 compares this process of rising to God by negation and elimina- 
 tion, to the geometric process which rises to the idea of a point by 
 eliminating the sensible forms of extension, passing from a solid 
 body to the surface, from the surface to the line, and from the line 
 to the point. 
 
 "In short, this process is peculiarly applicable to the idea of 
 God. For, as a Platonist, Herennius, observes in an unpublished 
 book, affirmations define, circumscribe; negations alone have an 
 infinite extent ; only negation has the power to rise, from beings 
 restricted in their limitations, to the illimitable Being whom noth- 
 ing can circumscribe." 
 
 1 Book xxxvii. chap. i. 2 Plot. Enn., i. 7, c. ix. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 253 
 
 Such is this chapter of Petau's Theodicy. 
 
 Assuredly the chief process of reason, which rises to the 
 infinity of God, which is, moreover, the universal process for 
 the knowledge of all intrinsic truth, was never described 
 better, never more completely or more profoundly analyzed, 
 than in this splendid chapter. 
 
 How is it that this fine work is unknown ; that it is not in 
 the hands of every one who makes a study of philosophy ; 
 that the Theodicy can be discussed without a knowledge 
 of it? 
 
 II. 
 
 Thomassin writes Latin as Malebranche does French, if 
 we make a slight reservation in regard to purity of classic 
 taste. Sometimes, in Thomassin's rapid composition, strange 
 excrescences of language and brilliant barbarisms slip in. 
 But the wealth, lucidity, and elevation of style are the same 
 in Thomassin and in Malebranche. As prodigiously learned 
 as Malebranche was not, he is no less original. In both, the 
 central idea, the philosophic cult, is the same : it is the wor- 
 ship of the Everlasting Word considered under both its 
 phases, both as the Universal Eeason which enlightens all 
 men, and as the Incarnate Word, the Saviour of mankind. 
 
 In both points of view Thomassin's motto is this : " Christ 
 comes at all times" (Christus venit semper^). As Reason, he 
 enlightens every man coming into this world ; as Saviour or 
 Incarnate Word, he also comes for all, and acts from the be- 
 ginning, according to the words of Scripture which speak 
 " of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." 
 
 Hence the vigorous eclecticism of Thomassin, which, in 
 the light of Catholic truth, and supported by the steadfast 
 basis of dogma, refers to Christianity, as its peculiar property, 
 all fragments and vestiges of truth which at any time and in 
 any place the Universal Word has sowed in the mind of 
 
254 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 men who have cultivated and followed their reason. Tho- 
 massin takes everything in good part, when it is not utterly 
 impossible; he rejects but little, accepts much. His broad 
 genius is generously hospitable ; he can always find room for 
 every man. He rejects none but the vicious and the impious ; 
 all who have been serious and sincere in their search for 
 truth are received. After Saint Augustine, Plato more than 
 any other, and all that relates to Plato, is dear to him. 1 The 
 whole train of Neo-Platonists is well received, and his good- 
 ness is not sufficiently on its guard againt Plotinus, who gener- 
 ally is half a sophist. He practises, even to excess, the words 
 of Saint Paul: "Charity believeth all things." Nor ever 
 does this abundant and perpetual hospitality inconvenience 
 him. He remains free in the midst of the multitude: he 
 contrives to live at once with all and with himself. He is 
 always conversing, but never stops meditating ; and while 
 entering into the thoughts of others, he never abandons his 
 own. By the pertinency of his questions, and the compari- 
 son which he constantly evokes between the universal and 
 the individual mind, he attributes to some, even often the 
 best, more intellect than they possess. He is well aware 
 that all the world has more intellect than any individual ; 
 therefore he brings all the world as near together as he can. 
 The mutual penetration of free thought and tradition, of 
 theology and philosophy, was never carried farther. No 
 man ever labored more for the reconciliation of all truths, 
 the reciprocal illumination of each order of things by all the 
 others. It was his aim to take up the sum total of human 
 
 1 We know that there are two ways of judging Plato : we may take him in 
 a good or in a bad sense. "We believe the former to be the truer way, and on 
 this subject we agree with the good Franciscan monk who printed at Bologna, 
 in 1627, a book entitled, " Christianse Theologicse cum Platonica comparatio, 
 atictore Livio Galante, sacri Seraphici ordinis Theologo." On the frontispiece, 
 the author engraved a rose. That rose is Plato. Upon the rose, to the right, 
 is a bee ; at the left, a spider. Above the bee are the words, hinc mel ; and 
 above the spider, hinc venenum. Now, Thomassin is a bee. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 255 
 
 intellect ; to survey and compare its entire sphere ; to recover, 
 by placing himself at the centre of that sphere, its lost unity 
 and forgotten harmonies ; to bring down from the central 
 point the universal light of the Word, or catholic truth, in all 
 the circles and upon all the points of the sphere ; to create the 
 true encyclopaedia, and apply it to the education of minds. 
 
 Besides his great theological work, which is really an 
 admirable comparison of theology and philosophy, he left 
 behind as monuments of his labor four fine works, even 
 less known than his Theological Dogmas, " Christian Meth- 
 ods of Studying and Teaching Philosophy;" "Grammar;" 
 "Historians;" "Poets." 
 
 Lastly, Thomassin elaborates his views in regard also to 
 " the mode of referring to God even physics and natural his- 
 tory, which is one of the finest parts of Philosophy, most 
 important, useful, and instructive." It is certainly high 
 time to follow these hints of genius given us by the seven- 
 teenth century, if we desire to renew science, letters, and 
 philosophy, to re-establish education and instruction, to re- 
 store public reason, and through reason, religion. 
 
 But let us return to our subject, which is Thomassin's 
 Theodicy. 
 
 III. 
 
 This work, which forms the first part of the Theological 
 Dogmas, is divided into ten books, each of which is about 
 the length of Fenelon's Treatise on the Existence of God, 
 and which bear the following titles : I. On the Existence of 
 God ; II. On the Unity of God and his Goodness ; III. On 
 God considered as Absolute Being, as Truth, Beauty, Love, 
 and Life (where Ideas are treated of) ; IV. On the Sim- 
 plicity of God; V. On the Immensity, Immutability, and 
 Eternity of God ; VI. On the Vision of God (how souls see 
 God) ; VII. On the Knowledge and Will of God. The last 
 three books are purely theological, and treat of predestination. 
 
256 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 This Theodicy, which is the work of the Fathers of the 
 Church summarized by a man of genius, is probably the 
 most complete, scholarly, and philosophic work regarding 
 God ever written. 1 
 
 We have now particularly to analyze the first book, which 
 treats of the existence of God. This book contains all the 
 profundities and all the aspects of the question, which is 
 amply discussed in its pages by the philosophers and the 
 Fathers. 
 
 All, according to Thomassin, who quotes them, recognize 
 first in the soul the innate idea, or at least the natural idea 
 of God, a sort of anticipated knowledge, or rather conscious- 
 ness, of God, impressed by God upon the new-born soul, or, 
 if you prefer, which the ever-present God never ceases to 
 offer it by revealing himself. 2 
 
 All see this innate germ of knowledge of God in the in- 
 nate desire for the sovereign Good. 3 
 
 They also see this implicit knowledge of God in that light 
 which distinguishes the just from the unjust, a natural law 
 written upon every heart. 4 
 
 They see it in reason itself, which cannot exist without an 
 actual relation of the soul to God ; which, first of all, repre- 
 sents God by his necessary forms, first principles, axioms, 
 the ideas of the infinite and of perfection ; and which also 
 sees God himself implicitly, by seeing what it sees, and 
 every time that it judges. There is the nature itself of the 
 rational soul which carries in its essence the idea of God 
 (divinam lucem animce inessentialem), 5 and there is the 
 actual and living relation of the soul to God, which shows it 
 God immediately (inmediatis cum Deo mentis congressibus)? 
 
 1 Tardy justice has at last been done to this almost unknown genius by 
 M. Lescoo3ur's fine work on Thomassin's Theodicy. 
 
 2 Dogm. Theol., de Deo, lib. i. cap. i. 1. 
 
 8 Ibid., cap. v. 6 Ibid., cap. viii. 1. 
 
 4 Ibid., cap. vi. and vii. 6 Ibid., cap. viii. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 257 
 
 Then, in the knowledge that our soul has of itself, knowl- 
 edge that implies other forms of knowledge not given by the 
 visible world, and, moreover, far clearer to us, 1 Thomassin 
 shows us a firmer and surer point of support, whence we 
 may rise to God, than the sight of the whole world could 
 afford. 2 
 
 Yet this rational knowledge of God, which we find natu- 
 rally in us, rather teaches us that God is, than shows us 
 what he is. 3 That is to say, it is indirect rather than 
 direct. 
 
 Moreover, the existence of God is also proved by all crea- 
 tion. It is demonstrated by that upward course of the mind 
 which advances from the things which are seen to thoss 
 which are not seen. 4 
 
 Necessary geometric ideas, taken in themselves, also 
 prove it. 5 
 
 Both the Fathers and the Philosophers agree in recogniz- 
 ing these three ways of proving the existence o God: 
 1. The gradation of beings (cosmological proof) ; 2. Intelli- 
 gence and the innate desire for the Good and the Beautiful 
 (psychological proof) ; 3. Necessary ideas taken in them- 
 selves (metaphysical proof). 6 
 
 We therefore find here once more, both in Thomassin 
 and in all those whom he consults, the two proofs a posteriori, 
 from the sight of our soul and that of nature, and the proof 
 a priori from ideas taken in themselves. 
 
 Thomassin considers the metaphysical proof a priori 
 good ; but he does not in any way separate it from the proof 
 a posteriori, and the basis of his thought is as follows : 
 
 That, in reality , the starting-point for all knowledge of 
 God, all efficacious and actual proof of his existence, is that 
 
 1 Dogm. Theol.,de Deo, title of cap. xvi * Ibid., cap. xxii. 
 
 2 Ibid., cap. xvii. 6 Cap. xxiii. and xxiv. 
 8 Ibid., cap. xviii. c a p. xxv. 
 
 17 
 
258 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 fact which is commonly known as the innate idea of God, 
 but that it is essential to search into it and to describe it in 
 a more philosophical manner. 
 
 \ 
 
 IV. 
 
 Now, we have here the profoundly original, and, to our 
 thinking, fundamental theory of what has been called the 
 innate idea of God. It is given by Thomassin in the title 
 of his nineteenth chapter, and elaborated throughout the 
 chapter : " Higher, more central than the intelligence, there 
 is a mysterious sense that touches God, rather than sees 
 or conceives him." (Supra vim intelligendi est sensus 
 quidem arcanus quo Deus tangitur, magis quam cernitur aut 
 intelligitur .) 
 
 In this chapter Thomassin posits and describes the most 
 profound of philosophic facts, which throws light on all 
 psychology, gives the Theodicy its true basis, and reveals 
 the true force of intelligence and will. It is what Aristotle, 
 without describing it, calls the attraction of the desirable 
 and the intelligible. 
 
 "We do not hesitate to say that this point, which is the 
 introduction in philosophy to true and necessary mysticism, 
 is the chief point which philosophy has pursued from the 
 beginning, without which it can never be completed, with- 
 out which it would lack all root, by which it will be per- 
 fected, transformed, and organized. This truth is perhaps 
 that perceived by the actual leader of German philosophy, 
 Schelling, 1 when he says that God can never again be only a 
 rational being to philosophy, but must also be an experimen- 
 tal being, and he sees a transformation of philosophy in this 
 new postulate. " It is in this direction," he says, " that phi- 
 losophy is on the eve of yet another great revolution, which, 
 
 1 When I wrote these lines Schelling was still living. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 259 
 
 BO far as the substance of things is concerned, will be 
 the last" 1 
 
 We believe these words well founded, and we say that 
 Thomassin handles and describes the fact to which they 
 relate better than any one. Moreover, Christians only will 
 fulfil this prophecy. 
 
 Thomassin therefore posits and asserts the existence of a 
 divine sense in the soul, a sense of divine contact, distinct 
 from the necessary ideas also existent in the soul, which are 
 a sort of vision of God. According to Thomassin, the soul is 
 conscious of material bodies, is conscious of itself, is con- 
 scious of God. Here we have the sum total of sensitivity, 
 which is thus divided into outward sense, inward sense, and 
 divine sense. 
 
 But the divine sense, note it well, can only give from this 
 contact with God an implicit knowledge and love of God, 
 a double element, which must be developed and directed 
 in us by reason and liberty. 
 
 Thenceforth we know God as we know the world. Sensa- 
 tion gives our knowledge of the world an experimental, but 
 confused and obscure basis : reason adds to this its lights ; so, 
 too, the divine sense gives an experimental basis for the 
 knowledge of God, obscure and confused though it be ; and 
 reason adds its lights. While we actually have this obscure 
 sense of the substance of God, we have, on the other hand, 
 a clear idea of the evident, necessary, absolute, and immuta- 
 ble truths which also proceed from God, which are a sort of 
 vision of God. Let us add these lights to the obscure sense ; 
 let the moral and affectional element implied in that sense be 
 the mainspring and give the impetus ; let reason proceed 
 according to its law, according to that simple and natural 
 process which seeks through all things nought save the uni- 
 
 1 System of Transcendental Idealism, appendix to Cousin's Philosophy, 
 p. 393. 
 
260 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 versal, the absolute, and the infinite affirmation, that is, 
 God ; then the genuine demonstration of the existence of 
 God, rational and experimental, ideal and real, a priori and 
 a posteriori, as certain as experience, as accurate as geometry, 
 as beautiful as poetry, as simple as intuition, as living as 
 prayer, is effected in the soul. 
 
 V. 
 
 But let us continue, with Thomassin, the analysis of the 
 innate idea of God, or rather the analysis of that fact which 
 has been called the innate idea of God and which Thomassin 
 sometimes calls the natural presentiment of God (naturalis 
 de Deo anticipatio), sometimes the anticipated consciousness 
 of God (anticipata Dei notitia), or innate knowledge of God 
 (innata Dei notitia), or natural knowledge of God imprinted 
 on the human mind (notitia Dei naturaliter mentibus infor- 
 mata)}- Thomassin makes a more profound and complete 
 analysis of this natural divine postulate than any other phi- 
 losopher has ever done. Malebranche and many others 
 regard it simply as a vision of God, and make a mistake in 
 their description and appreciation of this sort of vision ; the 
 mystics regard it merely as a secret sense by means of which 
 God inspires and touches us ; Descartes considers it " the 
 mark of the Maker stamped upon his work." Thomassin 
 combines these three points of view. According to him the 
 natural divine postulate is alike our own soul, the image of 
 God, and the image of all ; it is our own soul seeing God in 
 necessary and eternal ideas ; it is our own soul touching God 
 through that mysterious sense which is, as it were, its root. 
 We must quote his analysis : 
 
 The inward divine postulate consists "in those ideas which 
 our essence implies ;. in the very nature of our soul, which in 
 
 1 Cap. xx. and xxL 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, 261 
 
 a sense and in its measure is all things, and which, therefore, 
 as it develops, and, so to say, deploys its constituent fibres, 
 perceives all intelligibles." 1 It consists "in the commerce and 
 kinship of the soul with the intelligible, whose omnipresent 
 splendor shines upon it. Had the soul no ideas either acci- 
 dentally impressed upon it, or substantially implicated and 
 essentiated in it, nevertheless, as it is an intellectual eye, 
 it has only to open and look about to behold the omnipresent 
 and ever resplendent intelligibles." 2 It consists, lastly, " in 
 that secret, incorporeal contact wherein the soul, by its centre 
 and unity, touches God, and feels rather than sees him." 3 
 
 In the same place Thomassin also accepts Descartes' 
 phrase, " the Maker's mark stamped upon his work," and, he 
 adds, that he accepts all these elements of the natural divine 
 postulate provisionally in this form, until he can present the 
 subject more precisely, in the proper time and place. He does 
 this in the third book of the Theodicy, where he treats of God 
 considered as truth, as the substance of the eternal ideas, and 
 as love. It is there that he actually develops what was 
 merely suggested in the first book, when he treats of the 
 divine sense and expresses himself as follows: "Intelligence 
 and will in man correspond to God considered as Truth and 
 Love. But the unity itself of the soul, its deepest centre, 
 should correspond, in man, to the unity itself of God, 
 that principle which is conceived as in some sort anterior to 
 Truth and Love." 4 That is to say, in sum, that a triple pos- 
 tulate, which he calls the divine touch, the vision of intelli- 
 gibility, the love of the beautiful, corresponds in the soul to 
 God considered as Power, Truth, and Love. The whole third 
 book of the Theodicy is devoted to the development of the lat- 
 ter two elements of the divine postulate. Here, considering 
 God as very Being, very Truth, and very Love, he first shows 
 him, in so far as the source of ideas, manifest in the intelli- 
 
 1 Lib. i. cap. xx. i. 2 Ibid. 8 Ibid. * Ibid., cap. xix. v. 
 
262 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 gence. Here Thomassin speaks of God visible and present 
 in reason, in quite as explicit a way as Malebranche himself. 
 '' There is," he says, " naturally in all men some perception of 
 truth. We see the first principles and all the immutable rules 
 of reason in the light of eternal truth. Truth is sole mis- 
 tress of all minds that see it ; those that we call our masters 
 are only monitors. 1 It presides over the reason of every 
 man ; all consult it to know that which is, to dissipate 
 doubts, to correct the will, and to regulate life." We seern 
 to hear Fenelon saying almost the selfsame words twenty 
 years later. Thomassin continues : " Ideas shine forth in 
 the light of supreme truth, which is the Word of God. . . . 
 Ideas exist in the divine understanding, in God himself. 
 There we must posit them, and there Plato and the Pla- 
 tonists posited them ; the Fathers of the Church agree in 
 admitting this. . . . Ideas exist in God, they are the Word 
 itself, say the Fathers ; all wisdom, all theology, and all 
 philosophy depend upon their contemplation. . . . We see 
 ideas through the immediate and permanent presence of 
 truth in the mind." 2 We plainly hear Malebranche and 
 Fe'nelon in these words. Thomassin develops these things 
 throughout the larger part of his book with a power of 
 analysis and fulness of wealth which Malebranche had 
 merely to translate. But Malebranche did not translate, 
 he wrote the same things out of his own store; thus we 
 have two witnesses to the same truth. 
 
 Having considered God as Truth, Thomassin next con- 
 siders him as Love, and shows us the divine postulate in us 
 under the form of love : " Our innate knowledge, our innate 
 desire for the supreme beauty, is the origin of all love in 
 us. 3 God is love, and we possess God just as intimately, as 
 
 1 Lib. iii. cap. v. 
 
 2 Lib. iii., headings of several chapters. 
 8 Lib. iii. cap. xxii., heading to 5. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 263 
 
 constantly, as familiarly, as we have love for him and for our 
 brothers. Love in us, all true virtue in us, is the divine 
 form which stamps itself upon our soul, and stamps itself 
 there perpetually. God is the eternal law of love, by which 
 he himself lives, and by which he causes all intelligent 
 natures to live." l 
 
 Such is the genuine, complete, truly philosophical analysis 
 of the complex psychological fact which has been vaguely 
 called the innate idea of God. God exists, the soul exists : 
 the soul is conscious of all that exists ; it is conscious of the 
 existence of God through the mysterious basis of its exist- 
 ence ; endowed with intelligence, that is, intellectual 
 vision, it knows certain things to be absolutely and 
 eternally true, which is in a certain sense the vision or 
 perception of God ; endowed with will, it desires to love, it 
 seeks beauty, it seeks somewhat of the moral law of love, 
 which is in a certain sense the desire for God, who is 
 supreme beauty. 
 
 VI. 
 
 And here let us observe that this implicit divine postulate, 
 in which we have noted three elements, the touch, the 
 sight of, and the desire for God, considered as being, as 
 truth, and as love, is essentially one, like the soul, like 
 God himself. God may be known both by the clear surface 
 of thought, where evident principles and axioms are, and by 
 the hidden depth of feeling, if always those two extremes 
 are united by a living movement which shows their identity 
 and restores them to unity, a movement which is at the 
 same time instinctive, rational, and voluntary. This is the 
 foundation of what we are beginning to understand, that 
 the demonstration of the existence of God, starting from 
 necessary ideas taken in themselves, if it be isolated, is in 
 
 1 Lib. iii. cap. xxxiii., heading to 2. 
 
264 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 danger; but that it must rest upon that which rises to God 
 through his operations in the soul, in short, that a decisive 
 affirmation implies a voluntary element and an act of freedom. 
 The same holds good of the natural knowledge of God as of 
 the supernatural knowledge, to which Christ refers in the 
 Gospel when he says, " No man can come unto me except it 
 be given unto him of my Father" which signifies that 
 the Son, the eternal Word, the world of ideas, visible in the 
 flesh, appeals to man from without, and that the Father, the 
 principle of Being deep hidden in the secrecy of the soul, 
 attracts him inwardly : swayed by that attraction and that 
 light, the will which craves love, but is free to choose 
 between universal love and the other love, self-love, decides 
 and chooses either God or an idol. 
 
 Let us add two other remarks by Thomassin himself : 
 
 " I cannot," he says, " omit indicating here two points of the 
 utmost importance. 
 
 " In the first place, it is not particularly the germ of innate 
 knowledge, it is that of the innate love of the beautiful, which true 
 philosophers follow as a means for rising higher. The reason of 
 this may be that if our affections always rest upon some vague 
 knowledge of the object, still, all men are surer of their love than 
 of their knowledge, and are very conscious that they love beauty 
 and happiness without knowing what those things intrinsically are. 
 The knowledges natural to the soul are in some sort inert, are not 
 felt, and are found only by reflection. But our affections unfold 
 spontaneously, often tumultuously, and there is no mind so coarse, 
 so uncultured, as not to perceive them. 
 
 "Moreover, these philosophers have doubtless found it more 
 useful to begin by using our feelings and affections, and to lift our 
 heart gradually to the Eternal and Divine, than to attempt the 
 same transition by starting from the necessary ideas naturally given 
 to all. And this because love, in reality, guides and persuades 
 men better than thorny arguments. Moreover, it is far better 
 to attain an end by love than by speculation, since the touch 
 of the heart and its ardent embraces make us feel and enjoy God 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 265 
 
 far better than the intellect. All the more so because that same 
 love purifies the eye of the soul and gives it the power of divine 
 contemplation." 1 
 
 VII. 
 
 We have thus seen what, according to Thomassin, consti- 
 tutes the true substance and basis of the proof of the exist- 
 ence of God. Let us now look at the process which illustrates 
 that substance and all these implicit postulates. 
 
 I translate : 
 
 "Although it be given to us to conceive of God through our 
 natural and innate ideas of justice, truth, wisdom, goodness, su- 
 preme, eternal, immutable beatitude, yet these ideas are' but sym- 
 bols, attributes transferred from our soul to God. Our soul sees 
 all these things in itself, only finite and imperfect; wherefore when 
 it transfers them to God, it removes their defects and invests them 
 with immutability and infinity. We make use of these symbols 
 to describe God; and we are impelled to do this by that deep 
 sense in which Nature makes us feel that there is a God : that 
 is, a supreme, incomprehensible, ineffable being, nothing beyond 
 whom can be conceived, who can be equalled by nothing of which 
 we can conceive ; to whom, consequently, we must attribute 
 all conceivable perfections, perfections which, because of his 
 ineffable excellence, we must at once withdraw as unworthy and 
 insufficient." 2 
 
 Here Thomassin was defending himself against Plotinus 
 and the false Alexandrian mysticism, as well as certain of the 
 ancient Fathers, some of whose expressions contain traces of 
 Alexandrianism. Thomassin, as is his wont, carries tolerance 
 to excess ; he lets these authors say what they will ; then he 
 twists and turns their utterances and gives them a rational 
 meaning. He does not hesitate to quote those mystics who, 
 applying in a wrong sense that process of reason which rises 
 to the infinite by denying the limitations of the finite, sub- 
 
 * Lib. i. cap. xxv. 6 and 7. 2 Ibid., cap. xviii. 11. 
 
266 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 tilize and deny everything, and to form the idea of God, not 
 only wipe out limitations, imperfection, contingency, but 
 take to denying God even positive qualities, even beauty, 
 even being, even unity. Thomassin allows Pachymerus to 
 speak, and he exclaims : l " Well, if I may make so bold, God 
 is neither beautiful nor good." Then comes Victorinus Afer, 
 who declares that God is not even unity, and that he may be 
 said to be without existence, without substance, without in- 
 telligence, without life. 2 Still, Victorinus, as a Christian, 
 that is to say, preserved from absurdity by faith, cannot stop 
 there, and instantly adds: "We give him these privative 
 titles, not as terms of privation, but as terms of transcen- 
 dency ; for all which can be named by human speech is infe- 
 rior to him." 3 
 
 Thomassin resumes, and adds . 
 
 " Thus Victorinus strives to purify Platonic theology (Neo-Pla- 
 touic), and to adapt it to Christianity. He denies all the concrete 
 names which may be given to God, as all implying some limitation 
 or imperfection, even the words for existence, substance, life, and 
 unity, because God is far higher than the ideas conveyed in those 
 words ; but, to him, all these negations mean only one thing, the 
 transcendency, the ineffable excellence, of God and of his qualities. 4 
 Thus these negations are, after a fashion, nothing but affirmations 
 raised to the superlative degree. 
 
 " Moreover, these very words, the imperfection of which we re- 
 ject, signify him, praise him, admire him in his vestiges and effects^ 
 as Cause and Creator of being, mind, unity, and all things." 6 
 
 Nevertheless, we must confess that Thomassin sometimes 
 sins through excess of tolerance for the Alexandrians and 
 those Christian authors who have borrowed from them ; or 
 at least, in regard to the comparison or relation of the finite 
 and infinite, he is far less exact and explicit than Bossuet and 
 Fdnelon, who were both made exact by the great controversy, 
 
 1 Lib. ii. cap. vi. 4. 8 Loc. tit. 6 Loc. cit. 
 
 2 Ibid. , * Lib. ii. cap. vi. 5. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 267 
 
 whose result Thomassiii could not know, as he died before 
 that date. 1 
 
 Several conditions were requisite before philosophy could 
 attain precision on this chief point of metaphysics. Not only 
 was the wonderful controversy between Bossuet and Fe'nelon 
 requisite, the most admirable dispute recorded in history ; 
 not only was the decision of the Catholic Church as judge of 
 the contention requisite, - it was also requisite that Leibnitz 
 should apply these ideas to geometry ; it was requisite that 
 the truth in regard to this point should become geometrical ; 
 it was also requisite that the relation of all these things 
 should be understood, and that the same truth touching the 
 relation of the finite and the infinite should be encountered 
 alike in metaphysics, theology, and geometry. This is not 
 yet thoroughly understood, and it is what we are trying to 
 explain. If we succeed in doing so, it will be a decided phi- 
 losophical advance. 
 
 We shall deal with this point more at length in speaking 
 of Bossuet and Leibnitz. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 But first we must consider Thomassin from another point 
 of view. Did he, as well as Plato, Saint Augustine, and 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas, know the two regions of the world 
 of intelligibility ? What did he say of it ? 
 
 Thomassin was perfectly familiar with that fundamental 
 distinction, and devoted much thought to it. After Saint 
 Thomas, he perhaps wrote better of it than any other philo- 
 sopher. We must not forget that this distinction of the two 
 regions of the world of intelligibility corresponds to what the- 
 
 1 TLomassin died in 1695, and the condemnation of the "Maxims of the 
 Saints" did not take place till 1699. Moreover, his "Theological Dogmas" 
 appeared in 1680, 1684, and 1689. 
 
268 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 ologians and Christian philosophers call natural light and su- 
 pernatural light, or the light of reason and the light of grace. 
 
 Now, as we know, in the seventeenth and even from the 
 sixteenth century, the hottest of the philosophical combat 
 was waged in regard to nature and grace, reason and faith, 
 liberty and divine power. This was the contested question 
 between Catholics and Protestants ; the Protestants denied, 
 by the mouth of Luther and Calvin, reason and liberty, 
 
 that is to say, one of the two orders of things, the 
 Catholics maintaining both. It was also the question at 
 issue between Jansenists and Jesuits, between Fe'nelon and 
 Bossuet, the Jansenists almost annihilating reason and 
 liberty, and Fe'nelon, with the Quietists, expressing himself 
 inexactly and in the direction of the negation of the human 
 act, the natural side of life. Now, Thomassin stood in the 
 centre of the fight. A member of the Oratory, but free from 
 Jansenist passions, moreover one of the broadest and most 
 conciliatory of minds, he had profoundly studied the great 
 question of God's relations to the soul, of the natural to the 
 supernatural, the finite to the infinite ; and he must have 
 grasped this distinction of the two regions of intelligibility, 
 which is a particular case of the general question. A pro- 
 found psychologist, who seems to have sounded all the 
 spheres of the soul, even that spot so remote that the 
 senses do not suspect its existence, as Bossuet expresses it, 
 
 he must have seen in the soul that region of necessary 
 and immutable truths, the sight of which, however, is not 
 the actual sight of God. Indeed, he describes this degree of 
 the intelligible, which he distinguishes from the other, in 
 many places in his Theodicy ; and from this distinction he 
 derives consequences and applications of the greatest fer- 
 tility and of the utmost importance to the highest theology, 
 as we shall proceed to show briefly. 
 
 " Where do we see," he says, " the unchanging laws of 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 269 
 
 logic, geometry, numbers, and morals ? Most assuredly, in 
 eternal wisdom (in ceternce veritatis sinu) ; and yet it is not 
 outside of the soul (extra animam non esse). All the doc- 
 tors of the Church agree about these two things, which seem 
 to be opposites. But they reconcile them thus : the rational 
 soul is indeed enlightened by the simple truth of God, but it 
 receives that light tempered according to its proper form 
 and degree" (ita et circa intelligentiam et veritatem Dei 
 simplicissimam versatur anima rationalis ; sed ejus lumina 
 pro suo gradu et modo temper ata recipit). 1 
 
 The question is even better put elsewhere. 2 " How can these 
 truths, these laws, these first principles of dialectic, of arith- 
 metic, of music, of ethics and other sciences, be eternal and 
 immutable, if they are not of divine substance, since save 
 God it is very plain that there is nothing eternal or immu- 
 table ? But, on the other hand, how can it be God himself, 
 since we see that they are multiple, and not simple ? . . . 
 It is very probable that these truths are rays shed down 
 into us (condescensiones quasdam), and tempered for us from 
 the eternal and immutable light of the Word, which is low- 
 ered to rational natures, which suits itself to their capacity, 
 and allows the simple ray to be refracted in them." 3 Tho- 
 massin fully understands that this light, thus tempered and 
 lowered, " constitutes our reason." 4 
 
 Farther on, he expresses the distinction between the two 
 regions in a way which is as profound as it is simple : 
 " That incorruptible wisdom, that justice, that sanctity, 
 which shines over the soul, is a certain ray of God, who 
 reveals and stamps himself therein, not such as he himself 
 is. but such as they are, in such manner as they may convey 
 the divine ; he shows them that he is, not what he is." 6 
 
 1 Lib. i. cap. xxvi. 7. 4 Lib. iv. cap. xi. 11. 
 
 2 Vol. ii. p. 263. Ibid., cap. ii. 12. 
 * Tract, de Trinitate, cap. xxii. 7. 
 
270 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Nothing can be more profound than these words. The 
 light of the lower region of the world of intelligibility is 
 God, God revealing himself to human souls, not such as 
 he himself is, but such as they are. The other light, there- 
 fore, must be God revealing himself to human souls, not 
 such as they are, but such as he is himself. This is indeed 
 always the simple distinction between the two degrees of the 
 light, the light of God seen in us, the light of God seen 
 in God. 
 
 Thomassin sees perfectly that the first degree of the world 
 of intelligibility is that natural contemplation of which Saint 
 Gregory of Nyssa says : " That which thou canst see and 
 comprehend is the degree in which thou canst contemplate 
 God in thyself ! 1 These are truths essentiated, consubstan- 
 tiated, incarnated^ with thy soul." 2 They are copies, resem- 
 blances, images, of that which exists in God (simulacra, 
 similitudines, et quasi imitamenta), says Saint Gregory of 
 Nyssa ; and Thomassin dwells upon this, and calls this 
 region of intelligibility the simulachre of God and his bril- 
 liant imitation (Dei simulacrum et divinitatis fulgidissimum 
 imitamentum). We therefore indeed recover here " those 
 divine phantasms and those immutable shadows of him who 
 exists eternally." Thomassin quotes and repeats the very 
 words of Saint Augustine (spectamina ilia ceternarum ratio- 
 num), and thus sums up his description of the lower degree 
 of the intelligible. "We must," he says, "maintain tena- 
 ciously (mordicus) these two things ; namely, that those im- 
 mutable spectacles of eternal principles which never cease to 
 illumine the rational soul, and are naturally allied to it, that 
 all these incorruptible forms of wisdom, justice, and beauty 
 exist in God, live in God, radiate ideas and types from that 
 
 1 Lib. v. cap. ii. 18. 
 
 2 Naturae quasi inessentiaverit, sive consubstantiaverit et incorporaverit. 
 Ibid. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 271 
 
 source, and are engraved upon the rational soul, without 
 abiding there (non immigrando sed inscribendo) ; so that 
 when we are asked if we see immutable principles either in 
 God or in the soul, we must admit both at the same time, 
 in the sense that we are well aware that they can only ap- 
 pear in the soul if the eternal ideas that exist in God are 
 graven in the soul, and that we do not presume to see them 
 in God, unless it be at so incredible an interval that our 
 whole sight of them becomes enigmatic and symbolic." 1 
 
 In short, this degree, as we constantly repeat, with all 
 those who know anything of the interior of the soul, this 
 degree of the intelligible is a mirror in which we see God 
 by his rays (nimirum hcec specula sunt, in quce radios suos 
 Deus ejaculatur, in quibus videtur)? 
 
 But then, what is the other degree of the intellectual 
 world, that wherein we see, not merely that God is, but 
 what he is, where we see himself ; a knowledge which 
 the impious man cannot possess, while he is capable of the 
 other? This knowledge, says Thomassin, is supernatural; 
 the other, only natural. He quotes and approves of the 
 author quoted by Saint Bernard, who teaches "that the 
 knowledge of God by the immutable laws of wisdom and 
 truth is natural , but to know that which God actually is, is 
 a peculiar gift of divine grace ; that these two degrees are 
 distinct, and that in the lower we do not know what God 
 is in himself. 3 But to know what he who is, is in himself, 
 is impossible, unless we attain to it through the sense of 
 luminous love." 4 
 
 These are the same two regions pointed out by Plato, Saint 
 Augustine, and Saint Thomas, in one of which we see the 
 phantom or image of him who is, while in the other the 
 soul contemplates him who is. 
 
 1 Lib. iv. cap. xii. 9. 8 Ibid., cap. 11. 
 
 2 Ibid., cap. ii. 18. * Ibid. 
 
272 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 But we said that Thomassin makes a happy and fertile 
 application of this distinction to the highest theology. We 
 know no more admirable theologian in this respect. In his 
 eyes, one of the regions is that of the universal Word natu- 
 rally enlightening all men born into this world ; the other is 
 that of the incarnate Word, supernaturally giving itself for 
 the salvation of the world. The one is reason, the other is 
 Christ. Like Malebranche, he knows the relation of these 
 two names. He shows the identity of the two in their prin- 
 ciples, that is to say, in God himself; then he shows us 
 their relation, their necessary agreement, and above all the 
 means and condition of the passage of one to the other. 
 Of this we shall speak in its place. 
 
 BOSSUET. 
 L 
 
 Bossuet plainly played a greater part as theologian than 
 as philosopher in the grand movement of the human mind 
 which makes up the seventeenth century. Bossuet, like all 
 great minds, thought but little of what he called the purely 
 philosophical. No mind of the first order not Plato, Aris- 
 totle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Descartes, or Leibnitz 
 ever made any pretensions to pure philosophy. Pure phi- 
 losophy is an invention of professors and sophists. Truly 
 great and practical intellects simply love and seek the truth 
 in all directions and without abstraction. This is particularly 
 true of Bossuet. He sought the truth everywhere, in the- 
 ology, philosophy, history, and physiology. He had to a high 
 degree the instinct of comparative science and of the unity 
 of the human mind. He applies and compares theology to 
 everything, and all things to one another. His ideas are like 
 his style, which, says Joubert, makes use of all our idioms 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 273 
 
 as Homer does of all dialects. All ages and all doctrines 
 were ever present to him, as were all things and all words. 
 
 The human mind, says Pascal, is like the mind " of a uni- 
 versal man, in whom the effects of ratiocination are ever 
 increasing, because the whole race of men, throughout the 
 course of so many centuries, should be regarded as one man 
 who exists eternally and learns continually." 
 
 Now, such minds as Bossuet, Fe*nelon, Leibnitz, and a few 
 others, are the real links in this ideal unity; they, more- 
 than ordinary intellects, possess the life and unity of the 
 great human mind; they express and develop it, often 
 unconsciously. 
 
 This mind of the universal man pursues and maintains the 
 unity of its tasks even when the individuals themselves- are 
 ignorant of it, and is harmoniously and simultaneously dis- 
 played more frequently than we think. The gferious light 
 of the seventeenth century offers us the most? striking in- 
 stance of this. It is thus that Bossuet and Leibnitz revealed 
 and determined the general idea of the great century, each 
 by an unexpected application, whose relation to the whole 
 they perhaps did not see themselves. Bossuet applied the 
 general idea to theology, and Leibnitz to mathematics. 
 
 II. 
 
 Bossuet's work, a work truly immense in its depth and its 
 results, is the reciprocal application of philosophy and theol- 
 ogy. "Theology," says Saint Thomas Aquinas, "may re- 
 ceive 'somewhat from philosophy, 1 not as to its fundamental 
 truths, but in regard to the development and fuller manifes- 
 tation of its proper postulates." Moreover, what is all the- 
 ology but an application of philosophy to religion ? Has it 
 not been said and justly said of Saint Thomas Aquinas 
 
 1 I?q. 1, art. 5 ad 2">. 
 18 
 
274 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 that he merely translated the simplicity of the Gospel into 
 philosophy? 1 Theology is developed, as Saint Vincent de 
 Lerins says, from age to age and from century to century, 
 and the wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge of mankind and 
 of the Church itself become more and more exact and lumi- 
 nous ; the holy and sacred gift remains the same ; but the 
 idea which men form of it becomes broader, more analytical, 
 more scholarly. Now, Bossuet, by his labors, his struggle, 
 and his victory over Fdnelon, made clear an important point 
 in mystic theology which had never been determined, and 
 upon which the Church pronounced judgment by condemning 
 Fdnelon's book. And what is this point ? It is the great 
 and universal question of the relation of the finite to the 
 infinite, regarded from its most practical, most telling, and 
 most useful side for mankind. Instead of the infinite, let us 
 say God ; instead of the finite, the soul ; instead of relation, 
 love. How is the soul united to God through love ? This 
 is the question which Bossuet reduced to exact terms, and 
 whose solution he established by a decree of the Church. 
 
 Is not the connection of this question with that of the 
 proofs of God's existence clear ? How can the mind attain 
 to God through reason ? How does the will reach God 
 through freedom ? How is the soul united to God through 
 the divine love ? These three questions, although not iden- 
 tical, are analogous. It is possible that one and the same 
 universal idea may be applied to all, and that one and the 
 same general metaphysical formula includes them as special 
 cases. This is our belief. 
 
 In fact, what is the process by which reason proves and 
 knows God ? We have already said that this process con- 
 sists in asserting in the infinite, by the negation of limita- 
 tions, all the being, all the beauty, and all the positive 
 qualities of which we see any trace in the world, and of 
 
 1 Amelotte, Life of P. de Condren (preface). 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 275 
 
 which we find in ourselves any idea. And this is actually 
 the process employed by philosophy, by poetry, and by 
 common-sense to prove and to know God. 
 
 Now, even at the present day, in spite of the philosophy of 
 all ages, and, what is more, in spite of the common-sense of 
 the human race and the poetry of all souls, sophistry, ever 
 active, denies to reason the legitimacy of this process. You 
 see, says the sophist, limited being, that is, being and its 
 limitation ; why do you assert infinite Being, which destroys 
 limitation, and why, on the contrary, do you not assert that 
 the infinite has limitations, which would destroy Being? 
 Who tells you that this is not the absolute truth ? You 
 freely choose, between Being and nothing, but without rea- 
 son. Why this choice ? 
 
 This is the final question between sophistry and philosophy. 
 
 Now, in the seventeenth century, the false mystics put 
 the same question in theology. They put it so subtly that 
 Fe'nelon himself was wanting in precision, and did not see 
 the whole difficulty, nor all the vastness of the abyss dug by 
 false mysticism. The question was this : Must the soul an- 
 nihilate its own being in order to find God through love ? 
 Must it efface its ideas, destroy its powers, and suppress its 
 faculties ? or rather, should it be the reverse ? Should it 
 develop its powers, its faculties, its ideas ; should it unfold all 
 its being by annihilating and pushing back its limitations, to 
 its utmost ability ? 
 
 We see the relation, or rather the metaphysical identity, of 
 the two questions. 
 
 Bossuet, with steadfast firmness, with the ardor given by 
 the perception of truth, and the consciousness of a great 
 danger to be repelled, begins against false mysticism, against 
 what he calls wilful annihilation, that warfare which, de- 
 spite the passion that men may mingle with it, is his finest 
 title to glory, and the greatest service rendered in that cen- 
 tury to the human mind and the inner life of souls. 
 
276 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 What should be annihilated ? We should annihilate the 
 limit, the boundary, the obstacle, not the Being. Such is the 
 general law for the rational knowledge of God, as well as 
 for the moral growth of the soul in God, the supernatural 
 union of the soul with God in the Holy Ghost, and the 
 transition from the finite to the geometrical infinite. So 
 that mystic theology, through Bossuet's labor and the deci- 
 sion of the Church, was echoed even in speculative philoso- 
 phy, and confirmed its method. 
 
 All the war upon Quietism, the whole of the noble book 
 upon States of Prayer, the book entitled Mystici in tuto, and 
 the other, Schola in tuto, were intended to combat, as Bossuet 
 himself expresses it, " the pernicious meanings which some 
 persons give to the words nothing and annihilation ; " 1 to 
 confound those false mystics who annihilate man in order 
 to unite him to God, as Pantheism annihilates man before 
 God. 
 
 The repose of which the true mystics speak, says Bossuet, 
 " is an act ; it is the most perfect of acts, which, far from 
 being inaction, sets us wholly in action for God." 
 
 That death of which the true mystics speak, is not the 
 annihilation of our soul or its faculties, it is the annihila- 
 tion of the egotism which confines it within narrow limits. 
 
 That passive contemplation of which they speak, far from 
 excluding, as Molinos says, " Not only every image from the 
 memory, but also every idea from the mind," is, on the con- 
 trary, a powerful mental act, a simple thought wherein all 
 the infinite perfections of God are combined in one whole, 
 in so far as it is permitted to human weakness. 
 
 The generous indifference of the saints is not the annihila- 
 tion of liberty and will, " it is, on the contrary," says Bossuet, 
 " the expansion and dilatation of a heart which has no other 
 will but that of God. Our will, so long as it is confined to 
 1 Vol. viii. p. 3. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 277 
 
 itself, limits itself ; " let it aggrandize itself, set itself free, 
 and become free by willing like God ! 
 
 Bossuet had before him Molinos' theory of annihilation, 
 that theory which destroys man, in order that God may be 
 all, a theory which modern German pantheists continue. 
 Molinos said, 1 " Annihilation, to be perfect, is extended to 
 the judgment, actions, inclinations, desires, thoughts, and 
 the entire substance of life." Elsewhere : " The life, rest, and 
 joy of the soul lie in considering nothing, desiring nothing, 
 wishing nothing, making no effort." Elsewhere : " The soul 
 should be dead to its wishes, efforts, and perceptions, willing 
 as if it did not will, understanding as if it did not understand, 
 having no inclination even for nothingness." Elsewhere : 
 " An inner soul is lost when it turns towards reason. Its 
 only reason is to have no regard for it." 2 Elsewhere he 
 speaks of nothingness with even greater affection : " Array 
 yourself in this nothingness, make it your food and your 
 abode/' " Bury yourself in nothingness ; this God will be 
 your all." 
 
 But, what was far more dangerous, Bossuet had to combat 
 a multitude of inexact expressions, used by many orthodox 
 mystics, quoted, commented on, and collected by Fdnelon, to 
 such a point that the most enlightened minds might well 
 hesitate in regard to the precise doctrine of the relation of 
 the soul to God in prayer. Bossuet raised the entire ques- 
 tion, and obtained a decision which fixed this most important 
 point, and was given with that sort of mathematical exacti- 
 tude which marks all the pronouncements of the Church. 
 
 But here is not the place to develop this point. It is 
 enough to indicate it, and to show its relation to the Theodicy 
 and to the proof of the existence of God. Let us come to 
 the Theodicy itself. 
 
 1 Instruction in regard to States of Prayer, book iii. (beginning). 
 
 2 Molinos, Guide, liv. iii. ch. viii. 
 
278 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 III. 
 
 Bossuet's work on philosophy begins thus : " Wisdom con- 
 sists in the knowledge of God and self. Knowledge of self 
 should raise us to the knowledge of God." 
 
 In these first words Bossuet points out the course of his 
 proof of the existence of God. 
 
 He begins, like all men, with the spectacle of creation : 
 
 " All that shows order, accurate proportions, and means adapted 
 to produce certain ends, also shows an express purpose ; conse- 
 quently, a fixed intention, a regulated intelligence, and a perfect 
 art. 1 
 
 " If art be requisite to observe this harmony and accuracy, so 
 much the more is it necessary to establish them. 
 
 "Thus, by the term nature we understand a deep wisdom, 
 which develops in order and according to accurate laws all the 
 movements which we see. 
 
 " But of all the works of nature, man is undoubtedly the one 
 in which the design is most continuous." 
 
 Bossuet states this point at length, and from the light of a 
 deep knowledge of physiology he concludes, regarding the 
 life of the body, what Descartes, Malebranche, Fe'nelon, and 
 others say of the intellectual life, that that life implies God, 
 that God is present in it. 
 
 " It therefore appears," he says, in conclusion, " that this 
 body is an instrument formed and subjected to our will by a 
 power external to us ; and every time that we make use of 
 it, whether to speak, to breathe, or to move in whatsoever 
 fashion, we should always feel God present" 2 
 
 Thus the body and its life not only prove the existence of 
 God, they also imply his presence. Bossuet adds, 
 
 " But nothing so serves to raise the soul to its Author as the 
 knowledge it has of itself and of its sublime actions. 3 
 
 i Vol. x. p. 77. 2 Ibid., p. 81. 3 Ibid., p. 83. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 279 
 
 " We have already observed that eternal truths are the object 
 of the understanding. 
 
 " These eternal truths, which every understanding always per- 
 ceives the same, by which every understanding is regulated, are 
 something of God, or rather are God himself. 
 
 " We need, therefore, only reflect upon our own actions in order 
 to understand that we proceed from a higher principle. 1 
 
 " For from the fact that our soul feels itself capable of under- 
 standing, affirming, and denying, and that, moreover, it feels that 
 it is ignorant of many things, that it often errs, ... it sees, in 
 truth, that it has within it a good principle ; but it also sees that 
 it is imperfect, and that there is a higher wisdom to which it owes 
 its existence. 2 
 
 " In fact, perfection exists rather than imperfection, and imper- 
 fection presupposes it, as the lesser presupposes the greater of 
 which it is the diminution. . . . Thus it is natural that imperfec- 
 tion should presuppose perfection, from which it has, as it were, 
 degenerated ; and if an imperfect wisdom such as ours, which can 
 doubt, be ignorant, and err, still exists, so much the more 
 should we believe that perfect wisdom exists and subsists, and 
 that ours is but a faint spark thereof. 
 
 "We therefore know by ourselves and our own imperfection 
 that there is an infinite wisdom which never errs, which doubts 
 nothing, is ignorant of nothing, because it has full comprehen- 
 sion of the truth, or rather, because it is truth itself." 8 
 
 This is what we have called the act and fundamental 
 process of rational life, that is to say, the assertion in the 
 infinite, by the destruction of limitations, of every positive 
 quality or finite perfection shown to us by nature or our 
 soul. 
 
 And not only, according to Bossuet, does the sight of our 
 imperfection, joined to the possession of eternal ideas, prove 
 the existence of eternal truth, higher than we are, more 
 subsistent than we are, that is to say, the existence of 
 God, but, moreover, the sight itself of eternal ideas im- 
 plies the sight of God and reveals his presence. 
 
 i Vol. x. p. 83. 2 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 
 
280 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 The presence of God alone is the divine impulse that lifts 
 our mind to God ; Bossuet knows this, and asserts it amply. 
 For, he says, 
 
 " We see these truths in a light superior to ourselves. ... It 
 is in it, in a certain manner incomprehensible to me, it is in it, I 
 say, that I see these eternal truths ; and to see them is to turn to 
 him who is unchangeably all truth, and to receive his light. 1 
 
 " And when I actually receive that impression, when I actually 
 understand the truth which I was capable of understanding, what 
 befalls me, if not to be actually enlightened of God and rendered 
 like unto him 1 2 
 
 " We must therefore understand that the soul, made in the 
 image of God, capable of understanding the truth, which is 
 God himself, is actually turned towards its original, that is, 
 towards God, where the truth appears to it in so far as God is 
 pleased to make it apparent. 
 
 " It is an amazing thing that man should understand so many 
 truths, without at the same time understanding that all truth 
 proceeds from God, that it exists in God, and that it is God him- 
 self. But he is enchanted by his senses and his deceitful passions ; 
 and he is like one who, shut in his closet, where he is busied with 
 his affairs, uses light without heeding whence it comes." 8 
 
 Here, therefore, Bossuet points out the obstacle to the light 
 of God, and the need for the moral condition for the knowl- 
 edge of God and the proof of his existence. Then he 
 adds, 
 
 "We have seen that the soul, which seeks and finds in God 
 the truth, turns towards him to conceive of it. But what is it to 
 turn towards God ? . . . God is always and everywhere invisibly 
 present. The soul always possesses him inly, for it is through 
 him that it subsists. But to see, it is not enough that light 
 should be present, we must turn towards it, we must open our 
 eyes to it. The soul also has its way of turning towards God, 
 who is its light, because he is truth ; and to turn to that light 
 that is, to truth is, briefly, to desire to understand it. ... The 
 soul is upright through this desire." 
 
 i Vol. x. p. 82., 2 Ibid., p. 85. * Ibid. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 281 
 
 Bossuet understands that the soul begins to rise to God 
 through this desire, and he points out that divine sense 
 which is the simultaneous attraction of the desirable and 
 the intelligible. He sees that the first love and the first 
 knowledge of truth mutually imply each other; and that 
 this double natural postulate is increased by our concurrence 
 and our purity. He says, 
 
 " The love of truth supposes some knowledge of it. God, there- 
 fore, who has made us in his image, that is to say, who has 
 made us to understand and love the truth after his example, 
 begins by first giving us the general idea of it, by which he urges 
 us to seek for full possession of it, to which we advance in propor- 
 tion as love of truth is purified and kindled within us." 
 
 IV. 
 
 Behold, then, God demonstrated both by the spectacle of 
 nature and by his effects in us. But Bossuet also gives the 
 other demonstration, God demonstrated by his idea taken 
 in itself ; which is Saint Anselm's proof. Only he does not 
 separate this a priori proof from the other, which is a pos- 
 teriori ; he does not divide the purely rational proof from 
 that which is also experimental ; he blends them, one with 
 the other, he combines the two, as is proper. And it 
 seems to us that the argument is stated by Bossuet with 
 singular energy : 
 
 "And indeed, among those eternal truths that I know, one 
 of the most certain is this, that there is something in the 
 world which exists of itself, consequently which is eternal and 
 immutable. 
 
 " If there were a single moment when nothing was, then nothing 
 would eternally be. Thus nothingness would forever be all truth, 
 aid nothing would be true save nothingness, r an absurd and 
 contradictory thing. 
 
 " There is, therefore, necessarily something that exists before all 
 
282 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 times and from all eternity ; and it is in this eternal that these 
 eternal truths subsist." 
 
 It is plain that Bossuet does not rely here only on the 
 pure idea of the necessary Being, and that he blends with 
 that argument an experimental postulate, namely, that 
 something exists ; and Leibnitz also does the same, as we 
 shall see, when he reproduces this argument. Still, we must 
 note that Bossuet declares the hypothesis of nothingness to 
 be absurd and contradictory. Therefore his argument is 
 clearly a priori. 
 
 This argument is so much the stronger in our eyes because 
 we accept the principle, so fully established by Descartes 
 and Fdnelon, which necessarily results from the idea of the 
 infinite, that is, that there is but a single infinite ; that 
 that which is infinite in one sense is so in every sense ; and 
 that that infinite is God, aside from whom there can be 
 nothing infinite. 
 
 Now, it is certain that something exists from all eternity, 
 otherwise there would be nothing ; but that which exists 
 from all eternity is infinite in duration ; therefore it is so in 
 every sense ; therefore it is God. 
 
 If any one object that the world has existed thus eternally, 
 we reply that the world, being manifestly finite in several 
 senses, cannot be infinite in one sense, namely, in duration ; 
 for otherwise it would be infinite in every sense. 
 
 Moreover, in the Elevations on the Mysteries, Bossuet 
 develops his thought in regard to the necessity of Being, 
 that is to say, of eternal, infinite Being; and he seems to 
 foresee modern follies, and the silly bandying by sophists of 
 the words Being and Nothing. 
 
 " Whence comes it," he says, " that something exists, and that 
 it cannot be that nothing should exist, if not because Being is 
 better than nothing, and because nothing cannot prevail over 
 Being or prevent the being of Being 1 . . . God ! one loses 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 283 
 
 himself in such great blindness, the impious man loses himself 
 in the nothingness of God, which he prefers to the Being of 
 God!" 
 
 Here we clearly find the proof a priori and the proof 
 a posteriori at the same time distinguished and conjoined. 
 
 V. 
 
 We now come to a page by Bossuet, one of the finest that 
 he ever wrote, in which he sets forth the practical process 
 by which the soul rises to the knowledge of God. In it we 
 again encounter all our ideas regarding this chief process of 
 reason. 
 
 Considering our reason and its power, proved by the crea- 
 tion of the arts and sciences, he exclaims " That all this 
 would be impossible, that man could not rule the world, if he 
 were not bound to God, the creator of the world ; if he had 
 not in himself, in some part of his being, some art derived 
 from that first art, some fruitful ideas derived from those 
 original ideas, in short, some likeness, some tincture, some 
 portion of that working mind which made the world." 1 
 
 " Yes," he says, " there is a divine light within us : a ray 
 from thy countenance, Lord ! has been imprinted on our 
 souls. It is there, ... the first Reason who shows himself 
 to us by his image" 
 
 This could not be better expressed. Moreover, it is the 
 exact doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The reader 
 thoroughly understands, from what precedes, that our reason 
 is the first Reason revealed to us by his image ; that it is 
 God who enlightens us to make us visible to ourselves, we 
 who are his image. 
 
 But it is not enough for the soul to see itself and the 
 world in that light, it desires to know that light itself. 
 
 1 Sermon on Death, p. 210. 
 
284 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 " So," says Bossuet, " all this is nothing ; and here is the 
 most admirable feature of the divine likeness. God knows 
 and contemplates himself ; it is his life to know himself ; and 
 because man is his image, he wishes also that he should 
 know him." 
 
 That is to say that it is not enough for the soul to know 
 something, for instance, itself and the world, and that it 
 should be, through self-knowledge, a certain image of God 
 who knows all. To know the soul and the world, this is 
 nothing. Since God knows God, our soul also must know 
 God. We must make use of that light which renders us ra- 
 tional by impressing itself upon us, and which shows us, in 
 its radiance, all that the mind sees ; we must make use of 
 it to rise higher, to inquire after the light itself, and to know 
 what it is. 
 
 And how can we become acquainted with it, when we do 
 not perceive it directly ? How can we become acquainted 
 with it, it being eternal and infinite, while we are conscious 
 of nothing that is not limited, and see nothing that is not 
 subject to change ? Bossuet goes on as follows : 
 
 " Eternal, immense, infinite Being, exempt from all materiality, 
 free from all limitation, destitute of all imperfection ! What is 
 this miracle 1 We who are conscious of nothing that is not lim- 
 ited, see nothing that is not subject to change, where did we learn 
 to comprehend this eternity ? Where have we dreamed of this in- 
 finity ? Eternity ! Infinity ! says Saint Augustine, that our 
 senses do not even suspect, where didst thou find entrance to our 
 souls r' 
 
 How admirably the difficulty is here stated ! In what way 
 can the mind pass from that which is subject to change and 
 limitation, to the infinite, to the eternal ? Bossuet adds, 
 
 "So, too, if we are all body and all material, how can we 
 conceive of pure spirit? And how could we ever invent that 
 name 1 " 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 285 
 
 Without making any explicit distinction between these two 
 analogous questions, he answers that we conceive of pure 
 spirit, because we are ourselves a spirit, and are not all 
 body and all material; then we conceive of pure, eternal, 
 infinite spirit because, being allied to a principle higher than 
 man, the soul is conscious of a secret virtue in itself which 
 teaches it what the eternal spirit is, by means of nega- 
 tion, by saying to it of every imperfect conception : It is 
 not that. 
 
 According to Bossuet, we should not believe that, by 
 this indirect means, we know nothing of the pure, eter- 
 nal, infinite spirit of God. We know of it all that it is 
 not. He says, 
 
 " I know what may be said in this place, and justly, that when 
 we speak of these spirits, we do not fully understand what we say ; 
 our feeble imagination, unable to sustain so pure an idea, always 
 offers it some little body to clothe it. But after it has made its 
 final effort to render them very subtle and very delicate, do you 
 not feel at the same time that a celestial light issues from the 
 bottom of our soul, which dissipates all these phantasms, however 
 aerial and refined we have been able to figure them ? If you urge 
 it still further, and ask it what it is, a voice will rise from the centre 
 of the soul : ( I know not what it is, but nevertheless it is not 
 that.' " 
 
 Is not this the negative theology of the Alexandrian 
 Fathers, so well described by Petau and Thomassin ? 
 Bossuet finds it again here in the actual life of the soul. 
 He speaks of it elsewhere, like Thomassin ; like him, he sees 
 its source in the bottom of the soul, in the centre of the soul, 
 expressions full of meaning, which superficial psychology 
 understands not. 
 
 But what follows is admirable : 
 
 " What power, what energy, what secret virtue does that soul 
 feel within itself to correct and contradict itself and to dare to 
 reject all that it thinks ! " 
 
286 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 This is precisely what Thomassin says : 
 
 " There is a secret virtue, a secret sense (arcanus sensus), by 
 which the soul feels God when it has not yet seen him, and which 
 shows it that all which it sees is not he." 
 
 Bossuet adds, 
 
 " Who does not see that there is within it a hidden spring which 
 does not yet act with all its strength, and which, although it be 
 constrained, although it has not yet freedom of motion, plainly 
 shows, by a certain vigor, that it is not wholly bound to matter, 
 and that it is, as it were, attached by its extreme point to some higher 
 principle. . . ." 
 
 This hidden spring of which Bossuet speaks is an intu- 
 ition of genius. Whoever does not know this hidden spring, 
 is utterly ignorant of the human soul. The soul of man is 
 evidently bound to matter, which is beneath it and touches 
 it ; but it is not wholly bound to it, and it touches something 
 else than mere matter, it touches God. who is higher than 
 it ; it is joined to him by its extreme point, or, as Plato says, 
 it is suspended from him by its root ; and this necessary union 
 with God gives the soul a secret virtue and a hidden spring, 
 by means of which it rises to heights beyond itself, towards 
 the infinite and eternal, to conceive thereof, Plato also 
 speaks of these soarings and these wings of the soul. 
 
 But note this. This hidden spring does not yet act with 
 full force ; it is constrained, it has riot yet freedom of mo- 
 tion. And moreover, in our present and natural state, this 
 spring is soon relaxed, and the soul speedily returns to its 
 phantasms. " T confess it," adds Bossuet, " we do not long 
 maintain this noble ardor ; these fair ideas soon become 
 clouded, and the soul is quickly replunged in material 
 things. It has its weaknesses, its languors, and let me say 
 it, for I know not how to express myself it has incom- 
 prehensible grossnesses, which, if it ~be not otherwise enlight- 
 ened, almost force it to doubt what itself is." 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 287 
 
 These words complete the truth on this point. That is to 
 say, Bossuet points out here that distinction of the two re- 
 gions of the intelligible world which all minds of the first 
 order have perceived. 
 
 In the lower, which is still sublime, the mind does not see 
 the eternal, the infinite, save through contrast and negation. 
 "I know not what it is," says reason, "but it is not that." At 
 the sight of all the phantasms, shadows of him who is, the 
 mind says, "It is not he," which it could not do, as 
 Bossuet, Thomassin, and the others understand, if it did not 
 already bear within it the celestial radiance at the bottom of 
 the soul, the voice at the centre, the hidden spring, the sense 
 of the infinite, the divine sense, which alone can lead it to 
 say, " That is not he." 
 
 But this degree is imperfect ; we see nothing in it save by 
 contrast, negatively and indirectly. We feel that the hid- 
 den spring is constrained, and has no freedom of motion ; it 
 falls back more easily than it darts upward ; and the soul is 
 quickly replunged in material things, if it be not otherwise 
 enlightened. 
 
 The soul requires the other light, the light of the other 
 region of the intelligible world, the direct light, no longer 
 seen by its shadow, but by itself. Those who are acquainted 
 with our soul are well aware that it can find rest only in 
 this direct vision. 
 
 Let no one say that all these expressions, such as " secret 
 virtue," " centre of the soul," " hidden spring," " bound by its 
 extreme point to some higher principle," are only images, 
 without philosophical precision. The meaning of all these 
 terms is clear enough, precise enough, luminous enough. 
 All this means that God and the soul exist ; that the soul, 
 which is conscious of itself and of the material bodies under 
 it, is also conscious of God, who is above it, and that the 
 divine sense leads it to know God, as the external senses 
 lead us to know bodies. 
 
288 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 In the first place, this divine sense, which in our present 
 and natural state is far from having all its strength, all its 
 movements, or all its perceptions, is yet sufficient to teach 
 us that which God is not, and to inform us by contrast, in 
 the presence of limited and transitory things, that he is 
 eternal and infinite. But this conclusion, though absolutely 
 sure, is abstract; it establishes the fact that God is 'eternal 
 and infinite, but it does not show us the eternal, infinite 
 essence. The divine sense then regrets that it does not see 
 this, and desires to see him whom our reason knows to be 
 eternal and infinite. For so much that degree of light and 
 that region of the intelligible world serve, wherein, Plato 
 says, the mind sees divine phantasms, the shadows of God, 
 but not God. This first region makes us desire the other, 
 that which reveals God himself; that where our soul 
 is otherwise enlightened, as Bossuet says ; and where, in 
 the potent and vivifying light, ardor is sustained, languor 
 is cured, incomprehensible grossnesses are overcome, and the 
 soul learns no longer to sink itself in material things. 
 
 LEIBNITZ. 
 I. 
 
 " The soul is the mirror of the universe," said Leibnitz ; and 
 perhaps no man has so well verified the profound thought as 
 its author himself. His genius is indeed a sort of universal 
 mirror, in which everything paints itself with the richest 
 profusion. 
 
 Only, it must be said that useless things were sometimes 
 mirrored in that fair glass, and that its surface was not 
 without flaw. Various irregularities at times impair the 
 truth of its images. But it is only necessary that the eye 
 should place itself in front of those singular points known 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 289 
 
 as the universal mathematical language and the pre-estab- 
 lished harmony, to enjoy the sight of the finest, greatest, 
 most brilliant reflector of light that ever existed. 
 
 Leibnitz, then, could not fail to bear within him the great 
 idea on which, throughout that century, the human mind 
 brooded, inspired by the mind of God, namely, the idea of 
 the infinite, the relation of infinite being to finite beings, and 
 the mode of transition from the one order to the other. Only, 
 while Bossuet, helped by Fe'nelon, saw these things in the 
 living relation of the soul to God, Leibnitz saw them in 
 geometry, and laid down the laws of the comparison and 
 the passage of the geometrical finite to the geometrical 
 infinite. 
 
 This does not mean that Leibnitz was the legislator of the 
 idea of the infinite in metaphysics, far from it ; this idea 
 bewilders him to such a degree that he sometimes (almost 
 incredible to relate) asserts the actual existence of the infi- 
 nite in nature and in matter ; and sometimes, alarmed by 
 the outcries of the geometricians of that day, he deserts, as 
 Fontenelle blames him for doing, the geometrical infinite it- 
 self, thus reversing the whole truth, saying yes where he 
 should say no, and vice versa. 
 
 And yet Leibnitz's chief title to glory an immortal 
 title, and one of the grandest ever won by the mind of any 
 man is the fragmentary chapter of a work which he medi- 
 tated, and which he called de Scientia infiniti. This chapter 
 contains the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus, the 
 most potent lever ever given to human thought with which 
 to uplift the world ; a discovery whence proceed the mar- 
 vels of our physical sciences, and whence other marvels 
 will yet proceed. Newton also discovered this lever, but 
 he gave it to us in an involved form which was both less 
 scientific and less practical. Leibnitz presents it to us in 
 .its true form, in its inmost nature, which is the cornpar- 
 
 19 
 
290 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 ison, the relation, the rational passage, of the finite to the 
 infinite. 
 
 Let us say at once that this process is merely a particular 
 case and a special application, to the geometrical infinite 
 and finite, of the universal process of reason in its passage 
 from the contingent to the necessary, from the particular to 
 the universal, from the world to God, and from the finite to 
 the infinite. This will be more fully developed in the 
 course of the present work. 
 
 II. 
 
 Did Leibnitz understand all the metaphysical significance 
 of his discovery ? Did he see its relation to the proof of the 
 existence of God ? Did he see its relation to the theological 
 question of the love of God, the true and false mysticism, 
 argued between Bossuet and Fe'nelon ? We think he did. 
 He says in his New Essays : l 
 
 " This is not the place to suggest the true means of extending the 
 art of demonstration beyond its ancient limits, which have hitherto 
 been essentially the same as those of the region of mathematics. 
 I hope, if God gives me the requisite time, to show some attempt at 
 this, by making effective use of these means, without confining myself 
 to precepts" 
 
 Elsewhere, in a letter to Wagner, on logic, he writes : 
 
 "By logic, I understand the art of using one's reason, and not 
 only of judging that which is established, but also of finding out 
 that which is hidden. . . . But I must confess that all systems of 
 logic known up to the present day are barely the shadow of that 
 which I desire, and which I see afar off. ... I hold it as certain 
 that it is possible to carry this art of using reason incomparably 
 higher, I seem to see it, I have a foretaste of it; but had it not 
 been for mathematics, I should have found it very hard to reach it. 
 I discovered some principles upon this subject while still a novice 
 
 1 New Essays, book iv. ch. iii. 19. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 291 
 
 in mathematics, and, towards my twentieth year, printed some- 
 what concerning it ; but now I see how obstructed the road is, 
 and how hard it would have been for me to force a passage, with- 
 out the help of the deepest part of mathematics." l 
 
 All this applies very well to the infinitesimal calculus, 
 which extends the art of demonstration far beyond its ancient 
 limits ; which is not confined to rules, but makes effective 
 use of itself in mathematics first, then in metaphysics, to which 
 it is also applied, as has never been sufficiently noted. And 
 it certainly appears as if it were to the infinitesimal analysis 
 that Leibnitz alludes here, for, three pages later, 2 it seems to 
 him that scientific knowledge will be carried much farther 
 than in the past ; " that considerable progress will be made 
 in time ; that we only lack the art of using our materials, 
 small beginnings of which I do not despair of seeing, since 
 infinitesimal analysis has given us the means of allying 
 geometry and physics." And if he here appears to speak only 
 of physical sciences, we must observe that shortly before he 
 remarks " that logic can demonstrate as well as geometry, 
 and that the logic of geometricians is an extension or partic- 
 ular promotion of general logic." 3 If, therefore, Leibnitz 
 understands, as we see, that the logic of geometricians is only 
 a particular extension of general logic, if he knows that the 
 art of demonstration in general has ordinarily had the same 
 limits as those of the mathematical region, if he can see that 
 the infinitesimal analysis has vastly extended the limits of 
 that region, how could he fail to conclude that this fresh ex- 
 tension of the logic of geometricians extends the power of 
 general logic in the same proportion ? And how can these 
 fail to be the true means of extending the art of demonstra- 
 tion, which he claimed to possess, and effective proof of 
 which he promised to give some day ? 
 
 1 Opera Philosophies, Erdraann's edition, p. 419. 
 
 2 New Essays, book iv. chap. iii. 24. 3 Ibid., chap. ii. 9. 
 
292 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 But let us not anticipate. The subject before us now 
 is the proof of God's existence as given in the Theodicy of 
 Leibnitz. 
 
 III. 
 
 In his Theodicy, Leibnitz, with that superabundant intel- 
 lectual variety which characterizes his genius, accepts all the 
 demonstrations of the existence of God. However, he re- 
 touches th'em all, not finding any of them completely enough 
 developed. " I hold," said he, that " the possibility and the 
 existence of God are demonstrated in more than one way. I 
 believe that nearly all the methods used to prove the exist- 
 ence of God are good, and would be of service, if perfected." 
 
 Leibnitz, therefore, accepts, with Aristotle, the proof of 
 God's existence derived from the fact of motion ; and he 
 works it over again, hoping that it is then raised to mathe- 
 matical precision. In the title of his curious dissertation on 
 the combinatory art, we find these words : Demonstration of 
 the existence of God, brought to mathematical precision. 1 
 This demonstration starts from the fact of motion (aliquod 
 corpus movetur), and claims to deduce from that fact, with 
 rigorous exactness, the existence of an incorporeal substance 
 of infinite virtue. 
 
 Elsewhere, 2 Leibnitz sees a demonstration of the existence 
 of God in Aristotle's assertion " That there is in us an agent 
 superior to our reason, and which is God." He only fears 
 that Aristotle by this understood that universal active -intel- 
 lect which would be one and the same in all men, and would 
 alone survive at death. But he sees, at any rate, in this 
 assertion a testimony to the universal light which enlightens 
 all men, which speaks to us when we have the certainty of 
 some immutable truth, and which is God. 
 
 1 Works of Leibnitz, Dutens' edition, vol. ii. p. 239. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 264. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 293 
 
 He also accepts as good, Saint Anselm's proof, reproduced 
 by Descartes, deduced a priori from the idea of necessary 
 being. He considers it " very beautiful and very ingenious," 
 but he sees in it " a void to be filled." " I hold the mid- 
 dle ground," 1 he says, " between those who take this reason- 
 ing for a sophism, and the opinion of Father Lamy, who 
 takes it for a complete demonstration." 
 
 "Saint Anselm," he says elsewhere, 2 "congratulates himself, 
 and not unjustly, upon having found a way to prove the exist- 
 ence of God a priori, from his own idea, without recourse to his 
 effects. And this is closely the form of his argument : God is 
 the greatest, or, as Descartes puts it, the most perfect of beings ; 
 or rather he is a being of a supreme grandeur and perfection 
 which contains all the degrees. This is the idea of God. Now, 
 see how existence follows from this notion. It is something 
 more to exist than not to exist, or rather existence adds a de- 
 gree to grandeur or perfection, and, as Descartes declares, ex- 
 istence is itself a perfection. Therefore that degree of grandeur 
 and perfection, or rather that perfection which consists of exist- 
 ence, exists in that supreme, all-great, all-perfect Being; for 
 otherwise he would lack some degree, contrary to his definition ; 
 and consequently that Supreme Being exists. The Scholastics, 
 not excepting their angelic doctor, scorned this argument, and 
 have passed it off as a paralogism, in which they were very 
 wrong, and Descartes was quite right to restore it. It is not a 
 paralogism, but it is an imperfect demonstration, which sup- 
 poses something which should also have been proved to make 
 it mathematically evident, that is, it is tacitly supposed that 
 this idea of the all-great or all-perfect Being is possible, and 
 does not imply a contradiction. And it is something gained 
 that by this remark we prove that supposing God were possible, 
 he exists, which is the privilege of the only divinity. But it is 
 to be desired that skilful persons might finish the demonstra- 
 tion with the exactness of mathematical evidence, and I believe 
 I have said somewhat elsewhere which may aid in the task." 
 
 1 Leibnitz's Works, vol. ii. p. 254. 
 
 2 New Essays, book iv. chap. ix. 7. 
 
294 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 These improvements on Saint Anselm's proof are indicated 
 by Leibnitz in an answer to the " Journal des Savants." l He 
 
 " In the first place, God should not be defined as the Supreme 
 Being, or the Perfect Being, but as Being in itself (Ens a se). 
 Hence, if such a being be possible, he exists. Those who would 
 deny this proposition would deny the possibility of being in itself. 
 But note well that this very expedient serves to show that they 
 are wrong, and fills the void in the demonstration. For if being in 
 itself be impossible, all beings through another are so also ; since 
 after all they only exist through the being in itself: thus nothing 
 could exist. This reasoning leads us to another modal proposition, 
 equivalent to the preceding one (if necessary being be possible, it 
 exists), and which, combined with it, completes the proof. We 
 might state it thus : If necessary being does not exist, there is no being 
 possible. It seems as if this demonstration had never before been 
 carried so far; and yet I have also labored elsewhere to prove that 
 the perfect being is possible." 
 
 We shall touch on this other work of Leibnitz later. But 
 let us first note that he recurs here to precisely the true point 
 of support for proving the existence of God ; he again and 
 inevitably bases what is called the rational proof a priori, 
 upon the ground of experience. For if, to finish the demon- 
 stration and to fill up the void, we must say that if the neces- 
 sary being does not exist, no being is possible, that means that 
 the necessary being exists, because there are possible beings 
 who actually exist under our eyes. This again helps to es- 
 tablish what we have called Descartes' second proof, the 
 proof of God from his idea taken in itself, upon the first, the 
 proof of God from his effects. Moreover, is not the idea it- 
 self, as all philosophers observe, the first and chief effect of 
 God in us ? And this is the place to observe that what is 
 usually called Saint Anselm's argument is only, as we have 
 
 1 Works, vol. ii. p. 254. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 295 
 
 seen, Saint Anselm's argument cut in halves. Men forget 
 that if, in the Proslogium, he deduces from the notion of God 
 his existence, he, in the Monologium, by induction gains the 
 notion of God from the sight of created beings. 
 
 Moreover, those are mistaken l who suppose that Leibnitz 
 claimed to put Saint Anselm's argument and the entire proof 
 of God's existence into a single formal syllogism. By this 
 syllogism Leibnitz plainly intends to prove but one of the 
 two modal propositions which should, he says, be added to 
 Saint Anselm's argument to fill the void in it. 
 
 Here is the syllogism : 
 
 " The being whose essence implies existence, exists if he be pos- 
 sible, that is to say, if he have an essence (this is an identical 
 axiom, which needs no proof). 
 
 " Now, God is the Being whose essence implies existence (this 
 is the definition). 
 
 " Therefore God, if he be possible, exists (necessary conclusion)." 2 
 
 Clearly this is not a demonstration of God's existence, since 
 the conclusion itself is not this, God exists, but this other, 
 God, if he be possible, exists. 
 
 To this proposition, God exists, if he be possible, which in 
 fact rigorously proves that syllogism, must be added, as Leib- 
 nitz says, the other proposition, If necessary being do not 
 exist, no being is possible. These two together, as Leibnitz 
 asserts, fill the void in the isolated ontological argument, and 
 complete the demonstration. 
 
 Thus Leibnitz, far from compromising by this alteration 
 what he believed to be Saint Anselm's proof, as is commonly 
 supposed, far from exaggerating its abstract character, has, 
 on the contrary, placed it on its true basis, by introducing 
 
 1 Cousin, in his sixth lesson on Kant, p. 238, and Saisset, in his "Manual 
 of Philosophy," p. 242,. both fall into this error. 
 
 2 Dutens, vol. v. p. 361. 
 
296 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 into it a concrete element, and resting it on the solid founda- 
 tion of reality. 1 
 
 IV. 
 
 We now come to the work undertaken by Leibnitz to prove 
 that perfect being is possible. We find in the summary of 
 his doctrine written out for Prince Eugene, 2 from 36 to 
 45,- 
 
 36. " But there must also be a sufficient reason for contingent 
 truths of fact ; that is, for the series of things diffused through the 
 world of creatures, where the resolution into particular reasons 
 might run into unlimited detail, on account of the immense variety 
 of natural objects and the infinite division of bodies. There is an 
 infinity of figures and of movements, present and past, which enter 
 into the efficient cause of my present writing, and there is an in- 
 finity of little inclinations and dispositions of my soul, past and 
 present, which enter into the final cause. 
 
 37. " And as all this detail only involves other anterior or more 
 detailed contingencies, each of which again requires a similar analy- 
 sis in order to account for it, we make no advance, and the suffi- 
 cient or final reason must be outside of the sequence or series of 
 the detail of contingencies, however infinite it may be. 
 
 38. "And thus it is that the final reason of things must be 
 found in a necessary substance, in which the detail of changes 
 exists eminently only, as in its source, and this is what we call 
 God. 
 
 39. "Now, this substance being a sufficient reason of all this 
 detail, which is everywhere connected, there is but one God, and 
 this God suffices. 
 
 40. "We may also judge that this supreme substance, which is 
 unique, universal, and necessary, having nothing outside of itself 
 which is independent of it, and being the simple continuity of pos- 
 
 1 Leibnitz has so little idea of giving a proof of the existence of God here, 
 that, on the contrary, he asserts, in this very same place, that there is another 
 part of the question to be demonstrated, namely, the possibility of the exist- 
 ence of God. See the Letter to Bierling, vol. v. p. 361. 
 
 2 Works, vol. ii. p. 25, from 36 to 45 inclusive. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 297 
 
 sible being, must be incapable of limitations, and contain all of 
 reality that is possible. 
 
 41. "Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect; perfec- 
 tion being nothing else than the greatest of positive reality taken 
 exactly, setting aside the limitations or bounds in that, which is 
 limited. And there where there are no bounds, that is, in God, 
 perfection is absolutely infinite." 
 
 42. " It also follows that creatures have their perfections from 
 the influence of God ; but they have their imperfections from their 
 own nature, incapable of existing without limits, for it is by this 
 that they are distinguished from God." 
 
 43. "It is also true that in God is the source, not only of ex- 
 istences, but also of essences, so far as they are real, or of that 
 which is real in the possible ; this is because the understanding 
 of God is the region of eternal truths, or of the ideas on which 
 they depend, and because without him there would be nothing 
 real in the possibilities, and not only nothing existing, but also 
 nothing possible." 
 
 44. " And yet if there be a reality in the essences or possibili- 
 ties, or, indeed, in the eternal truths, that reality must be based 
 upon something existing and actual, and consequently in the exist- 
 ence of the necessary being, in whom the essence includes existence, 
 or with whom it is enough to be possible in order to be actual." 
 
 45. " Thus God alone or the necessary being has this priv- 
 ilege, that he must exist if he be possible. And as nothing can 
 prevent the possibility of that which includes no bound, no nega- 
 tion, and consequently no contradiction, this also suffices to estab- 
 lish the existence of God a priori. We have also proved it by 
 the reality of the eternal truths. But we have just proved it a 
 posteriori, since contingent beings exist, which can only have their 
 final or sufficient reason in a necessary being who has the reason 
 of his existence in himself." 
 
 In these statements Leibnitz therefore claims, as he says, 
 to include three proofs of God's existence, 1, the proof 
 a posteriori, by the existence of contingent beings ( 36- 
 41) ; 2, the proof from the reality of eternal truths ( 43, 
 44); 3, the proof a priori t based on the fact that God is 
 
298 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 possible, and that he exists if he is possible ( 45). The 
 first is Descartes' first proof, God known by his acts; and 
 the other two belong to Descartes' second proof, God known 
 by his idea. And this second, we see clearly here, contin- 
 ually rests upon the first. 
 
 Leibnitz first asserts, in this remarkable summary, that it 
 is useless to analyze contingents, " we make no advance ; 
 and the sufficient or final reason must be outside of the 
 serial detail of contingencies." This is the substance of 
 any demonstration of God's existence, which, at bottom, 
 may be reduced to this simple argument : There are finite 
 beings, therefore there is an infinite being ; in other words, 
 there is something, therefore God exists, a train of reason- 
 ing which is in no way a syllogism, but which is the work 
 of the other process of reason; that which, far from ad- 
 vancing, like the first, from identity to identity, advances 
 from finite to infinite, and that without intermediary, since 
 there is none. 
 
 And it seems to me that here Leibnitz had an intuition 
 of the identity of the metaphysical process, which finds 
 necessary immutable being at the root of contingents, and 
 of his infinitesimal analysis, which finds at the bottom of 
 the variable increments of a geometrical postulate the fixed, 
 absolute, infinitesimal element that corresponds to it, and 
 that is its source, although it may be infinitely distinct from 
 it. Does he not immediately add that " the final reason of 
 things must exist in a necessary substance, in which the 
 detail of changes exists eminently only, as in its source " ? 
 I ask all geometricians, is it possible to give a better defini- 
 tion of the infinitesimal geometrical element, compared to 
 the variable increments of finite greatness which correspond 
 to it, than to call it the necessary element, in which the 
 detail of changes exists eminently only, as in its source ? 
 
 However this may be, we again encounter here, and with 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 299 
 
 much precision, all the details of the process which, at a 
 single stroke, demonstrates God and shows us his attributes, 
 to destroy limitations, remove bounds, assert all positive 
 perfection, "by setting aside limits and bounds, in order to 
 obtain absolute, infinite perfection, and the reality of all 
 potentiality, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says (Deus est actu- 
 alitas totius possibilitatis). 
 
 The famous editor of Leibnitz very aptly remarks, like 
 ourselves, that we have here an exact process, which has its 
 name and its. laws; he calls it via eminentice vel perfectionis, 
 and describes it as follows, 1 in a precise and perfect way : 
 
 " This process, which rises to the attributes of God, is called the 
 process of eminence, or perfection. It consists in removing the 
 limitations of the perfections seen in finite beings, and then attrib- 
 uting them to God, thus advancing in thought from the finite 
 perfections of created beings to the infinite perfections of God. 
 Only, we must be careful to grasp in our attributes that which is 
 actually there and is properly real ; otherwise we might attribute 
 imperfections to God. This process is distinct from the other, 
 called that of causality, which considers the effects of God's attri- 
 butes, and rises from these effects to their cause." 
 
 At bottom, these two processes, logically distinct, come to 
 the same thing, since every finite perfection of created beings 
 is at the same time the finite image and the finite effect of 
 the infinite perfections of God. 
 
 Leibnitz develops his thought still farther in the same 
 place, in these beautiful words : 
 
 " To love God, we need only behold his perfections, which is 
 easy, because we find their ideas within us. The perfections of God 
 are those of our souls, but he possesses them without bounds ; he is 
 an ocean of which we have received but a few drops ; there -is 
 within us some power, some knowledge, some goodness, but they are 
 all entire in God. Order, proportion, harmony, enchant us, paint- 
 
 1 See Bilfingeri Dilucid. Philosoph., sect. v. cap. iii. 418. Dutens, 
 Works of Leibnitz, vol. i. p. 38. 
 
300 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 ing and music are specimens. God is all order, he always observes 
 precise proportion, he makes universal harmony ; all beauty is an 
 effusion of his radiance." 
 
 Elsewhere, l 
 
 " We are instantly aware of substance and of spirit by becom- 
 ing aware of ourselves, and that the idea of God exists in ours 
 by the suppression of the limits of our perfections, as extension, 
 taken absolutely, is included in the idea of a globe." 
 
 Elsewhere, 2 
 
 " When we think of ourselves, we think of being, of substance, 
 simple and composite, of the immaterial and of God himself, 
 conceiving that what with us is limited exists in him without 
 limit." 
 
 We see that among the seventeenth-century philosophers, 
 Leibnitz stated mathematically the process by which our 
 mind rises from the finite to the infinite, from limited beings 
 to God; he applied it to geometry. Not Leibnitz, but 
 Fdnelon, gained the clearest and most complete idea of the 
 infinite. But Leibnitz gave its final precision to the process 
 which knows the infinite. 
 
 V. 
 
 As to formal proofs of the existence of God, Leibnitz, 
 truly, sometimes seems to offer them too exclusively as a 
 work of pure reason, isolated from all experience, and he 
 thus exposes them to the criticism of Kant. And yet, if 
 we penetrate to the root of his thought, and reunite the 
 various points of view upon this subject, scattered through- 
 out his writings, we see plainly that he knows the experi- 
 mental side of the proof, its moral condition, and the 
 existence of that divine sense, without which it could 
 never be effected in the mind. 
 
 1 Theodicy, 4. 2 Monadology, 30, p. 395. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 301 
 
 What is his grand and beautiful theory of innate ideas, 
 what his constant allusions to confined knowledge and indis- 
 tinct thought ? " What are these ideas which exist in us, 
 not always so that we perceive them, but always so that we 
 may draw them from our own store and make them percep- 
 tible ? " : Is it not precisely the same to have an innate 
 idea of God, as to have what we can and should call the 
 divine sense? 
 
 " There are," he says elsewhere, 2 " innate truths which we 
 find within us in two ways, by light and by instinct. . . . 
 There are in us instinctive truths which are innate princi- 
 ples, which we feel, and which we approve in spite of every- 
 thing. We have no proof of them, although we acquire it 
 when we yield to that instinct." This could not be better ex- 
 pressed ; those principles which we approve without having 
 a proof of them, recall Pascal's words : '" The heart has its 
 reasons, which reason does not know." Only Leibnitz adds 
 to this that reason may become acquainted with them later. 
 Leibnitz sees perfectly that the instinct which urges us to 
 happiness, which is only the attraction of the supreme Good, 
 or the divine sense, is an innate principle, which we do not 
 know in a luminous manner ; that, however, this principle 
 established, we may derive from it scientific consequences, 3 
 then founded on internal experience, or on confused 
 knowledges* 
 
 Leibnitz, like all philosophers, distinguishes between " cor- 
 rect and genuine reason, and a pretended reason corrupted 
 and abused by false appearances." 
 
 He knows, and calls attention to, that violation, or rather 
 that reversal, of the true powers of reason, which denies to 
 reason the power of giving any idea or definition of the attri- 
 butes of God. 5 He knows that abuse of the grand process oi 
 
 1 New Essays, book iv. chap. x. 7. 8 Ibid., 1 and 2. 
 
 2 Ibid., book i. chap. ii. 3. 4 Ibid. 
 
 6 Works, vol. i. p. 66: Disc, on the Conform, of Reason and Faith, No. 4. 
 
302 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 reason which, instead of annihilating all limits in the sight 
 of finite creatures, annihilates beings themselves and their 
 limited attributes, and is thus raised, not to being, but to 
 nothing. He sees the affinity between this strange dialectic, 
 the pantheism of Spinoza, and the errors of quietists and 
 false mystics. 1 He sees that the " deification of the mystics " 
 leads to Spinoza's doctrine, and starts from the false dialectic 
 which destroys the positive and not the negative. "The 
 destruction of that which peculiarly belongs to us," he says, 2 
 " carried so far by the quietists, may also be disguised im- 
 piety." He compares this quietism with the quietism of 
 Foe, " who, feeling death close at hand, declared to his dis- 
 ciples that he had hidden the truth from them under the 
 veil of metaphors, and that all might lie reduced to nothing, 
 which he considered the primary principle of all things" 
 
 It thus plainly appears that Leibnitz saw more or less 
 distinctly the affinity which exists between these questions : 
 the proof of the existence of God, discussions of Quietism, the 
 idea of the geometrical finite and infinite, and the advance 
 of the healthy reason, which, moreover, he by no means 
 separated from the heart, instinct, feeling, and morality. 
 
 It even appears that his philosophical motive, like that of 
 all true philosophers, is moral, and that historically his mind 
 advanced from the search for justice to the search for truth. 
 " I had," he says, " a greater leaning towards ethics . . . 
 than familiarity with speculative philosophers ; but I have 
 learned more and more how much ethics are strengthened 
 by the solid principles of true philosophy ; therefore I have 
 studied them ever since with more application, and have 
 entered upon rather novel meditations. ..." 
 
 We cannot better close this article than by a quotation 
 from the introduction to the New Essays. He says : 
 
 1 Disc, on the Conform, of Eeason and Faith, p. 71, No. 9. 
 
 2 Ibid., No. 10. 
 
THEODICY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 303 
 
 " Since then I seem to see a new aspect of the interior of 
 things. This system seems to unite Plato and Democritus, Aris- 
 totle and Descartes, the Scholastics with the moderns, theology and 
 morals with reason. It seems to take the best from every side, and 
 then afterwards to go farther than any one has yet gone. ... I find 
 in it an amazing uniformity and simplicity, so that it may be said 
 that it is everywhere and always the same thing, nearly in the 
 degrees of perfection. I see now what Plato meant when he took 
 matter for an imperfect and transitory entity ; what Aristotle meant 
 by his Entelechy; what the promise is that even Democritus, 
 like Pliny, made of another life ; just how far the sceptics were 
 right in inveighing against the senses ; how animals are automata, 
 according to Descartes, and yet how they have souls and feeling, 
 according to the opinion of the human race ; how we should ex- 
 plain rationally those who lodged life and perception in all things ; 
 . . . how the laws of nature (a good part of which were un- 
 known before this system) originate in principles superior to mat- 
 ter, although, nevertheless, everything takes place mechanically 
 in matter. ..." 
 
 This system is the system of universal harmony, the abuse 
 of which led to the singular idea of pre-established harmony, 
 but the truth of which is expressed in these profound words : 
 " We must know that harmony, metaphysics, ethics, and 
 geometry exist everywhere." We have just seen that the- 
 ology also exists everywhere, according to Leibnitz. So in 
 matter, in mind, finite beings, in God, infinite Being, it is the 
 same thing, nearly to the degrees of perfection, infinite per- 
 fection in God, and finite in his creatures ; but by virtue of 
 the universal harmony we can read in the lower order the 
 truths of the higher order, we can read God in nature, as 
 Saint Paul said, and as the human race has ever done. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 
 
 HERE we close the study of the theodicies of the philoso- 
 phers of the first order We have seen that all prove the 
 existence of God in the same way. All allude to the moral 
 obstacle which hides the light from the soul, and which must 
 first be removed ; all speak of that inward and divine sense, 
 that charm of the desirable and the intelligible, which, when 
 the obstacle is removed, becomes the mainspring of reason ; 
 all find the fulcrum of this impulse of reason in the spec- 
 tacle of created things, the world or the soul; all under- 
 stand that this starting-point is in no sense a principle from 
 which reason can deduce God, but merely a starting-point 
 from which reason rises to the principle of all things, which 
 contains no point of departure ; all understand or dimly per- 
 ceive that this process differs wholly from syllogism, and that 
 it is one of the two essential processes of reason, that which 
 finds the majors, and not that which draws the consequences ; 
 all describe this process as an act of reason, which, beholding 
 finite being, the world or the soul, sees, through contrast and 
 regret, even more than through resemblance, the necessary 
 existence of the infinite in this finite, and knows the infinite 
 through negation in denying the limits of all finite being and 
 all bounded perfection. 
 
 It is clear that, as Descartes says, this process gives us at 
 once the proof of the existence of God and the knowledge of 
 his attributes. For God cannot be proved save in so far as 
 he is proved as gifted with his essential attributes, without 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 305 
 
 which we should have proved the existence of something else, 
 but not of God. 
 
 We need not, therefore, in this Theodicy, undertake to 
 write a special treatise on the attributes of God. The de- 
 monstration of the existence of God .gives us all at the 
 same time. 
 
 And yet, before we close this study and finish the proof 
 of the existence of God, a proof in regard to which two 
 weighty considerations remain to be stated, we must first 
 show that reason may throw light upon and develop the 
 idea of God, and know his attributes, in two ways. It may 
 either acquire them all, starting from the spectacle of created 
 beings, by this principle : " The perfections of God are those 
 of his creatures, without their limitations ; " or else, a single 
 one of God's attributes being given, it may deduce all the 
 others from this by means of identity. We have hitherto 
 constantly referred to the former of these two methods ; we 
 must now briefly take up the second. 
 
 When Plato describes the dialectic process which, from 
 the sight of things, rises to grasp the principle above all 
 things, he adds that once in possession of the principle, 
 reason possesses all that touches that principle, and may ad- 
 vance from consequence to consequence, and from idea to 
 idea, without again relying upon the sight of sensible objects. 
 This is what we desire to say here. In possession of a single 
 one of God's attributes, reason possesses all the others, and 
 can deduce them from the first, by syllogism, as we deduce 
 from an algebraic figure, by means of identity, advancing 
 from equation to equation, all which the given formula im- 
 plies. It is undoubtedly to this that Aristotle alludes when 
 he asserts that the exact process of the geometricians applies 
 to intelligible things. 
 
 However this may be, that attribute of God which implies 
 all the others, is what scholastics call the metaphysical es- 
 
 20 
 
306 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 sence of God. Only it was usele.33, it seems, to disagree upon 
 the question as to which of God's attributes should be called 
 his metaphysical essence ; since clearly every attribute which 
 characterizes God is a formula whence we may deduce all the 
 rest. The teaching of theology on this point is evident, 
 namely : " That no real distinction can be admitted between 
 the attributes of God, nor between God and his attributes." 
 Therefore each attribute of God being, in essence, identical 
 with every other and with God, reason may derive all the 
 others from each one, and take each one among them as the 
 metaphysical essence of God. It is this principle of the ab- 
 solute identity of all that is in God, which the sophists so 
 abuse in their system of identity; instead of reserving this 
 principle for God, who alone is simple and absolutely iden- 
 tical in himself, they apply it to all, God and the world being 
 classed together. 
 
 Thus, every postulate that implies the infinite is the meta- 
 physical essence of God, and may serve reason as a principle 
 for the obtainment of God's attributes. One attribute of God 
 being given, to take it as a principle and deduce the other 
 attributes from it, by means of syllogistic consequence and 
 algebraic identity, is a task often essayed by Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas ; for instance, in the beginning of his Philosophic 
 Sum, and in the beginning of his Ninth Opuscule, which is 
 an abridged Theology. In both places he first proves the ex- 
 istence of God from the fact of motion. By applying to this 
 fact the dialectic or inductive process which gives the majors, 
 he infers the existence of immutable being. Then from im- 
 mutability, taken as the metaphysical essence of God, he 
 deduces all the divine attributes. 
 
 This deduction may be effected in several ways. We may 
 at the start establish a first attribute, be it what it may, from 
 this first deduce a second, from the second a third, and so on, as 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas does. Again, we may establish a first 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 307 
 
 attribute, and from it derive all the rest as rays around a 
 centre. We may combine these two methods and deduce each 
 attribute in succession either from that which was taken as 
 the principle, or from those already deduced. This exercise 
 should be given in logic several times to every student of 
 philosophy. It is the simplest and best exercise in pure ra- 
 tiocination which can possibly be proposed. There is a true 
 algebraic identity in the deduction, to those who can take the 
 words strictly and in their absolute simplicity. The thesis 
 of God's attributes is unique in this respect, from the very 
 fact that here every point leads to every other, and we know 
 in advance that there is identity everywhere. Only it is not 
 always easy to grasp, to see, and to express the identity 
 clearly. 
 
 Here is an instance of deduction, starting from the attri- 
 bute of God contained in the words of Scripture : " / am that 
 I am." From the idea of Being, or, if you prefer, from this 
 proposition, " Being is," we will first deduce what are called 
 the metaphysical attributes of God. 
 
 To do this we must take everything with mathematical 
 precision. We suppose it to be true purely, simply, and 
 absolutely true that Being is, a proposition, moreover, 
 which is the clearest of identical propositions, and, as it were, 
 the criterion of rational evidence. 
 
 Besides, it is plain enough that when we speak of Being, 
 simply and absolutely, we refer to absolute being, and not 
 to relative beings. This results from the very nature itself 
 of language. The pantheists abuse words, and found their 
 systems upon this abuse, when they at .the same time des- 
 ignate both absolute Being and relative beings by the word 
 Being. 
 
 1. This established, if Being is, simply and absolutely, it 
 is not a finite being, for finite being is up to a certain point, 
 and not beyond it. It is only within limits and under pe- 
 
308 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 culiar conditions ; it is not simply and absolutely. Therefore, 
 the Being which is is not finite therefore it is infinite. 
 
 2. Let us follow the deduction rigorously. Let us set 
 aside the hahit of seeing everything partially and relatively. 
 If Being is infinite, it is a strict identity to add that it is 
 infinite in every sense. It is well to add this, merely because 
 we have a weakness for falling back upon our limited, partial, 
 relative imaginations. Let us reject these customary distrac- 
 tions ; we are in algebra ; we must take things strictly and 
 simply. It is obvious, I say, that if Being is infinite, that 
 means identically that it is infinite in every sense, since if 
 it ceased to be infinite in one sense, it would be finite in 
 that sense, it would not be the infinite. Where there is a 
 limit in any sense whatever, in that point and in that sense 
 it would cease to Be ; therefore it would not be Being, as we 
 have stated. 
 
 Therefore, if Being is, it is infinite in every sense. 
 
 3. If Being is, it is all that is possible; otherwise it 
 would not be absolutely. It is all that is possible; it is 
 this infinitely ; since if it were not infinitely such possible 
 it would have, in that mode of being and in that sense, a 
 limit beyond which it would not be. If it is, it is infinitely 
 all that is possible. 
 
 4. If Being is, it is immense and eternal; this is the 
 same argument as for the infinity. If it were not eternal, 
 this would imply that there would be a time when it would 
 not be ; if it were not immense, this would imply that there 
 would be a place where it would not be. It would therefore 
 not le purely, simply, and absolutely. Moreover, we see 
 clearly that eternity and immensity are two attributes iden- 
 tical with infinity. 
 
 5. If Being is, it follows that it is necessary. The 
 question, Why is there anything? is irrational. From the 
 very fact that Being is, it follows that it cannot cease to 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 309 
 
 be. The question is, like this statement, fundamentally 
 absurd: "If God did not exist, we should have to invent 
 him." 
 
 Being is necessary because it is. 
 
 There was never a possibility of choice between Being and 
 nothing, from the very fact that Being is eternal. Therefore 
 there never was, and there never could be, any chance for the 
 non-existence of absolute Being. It could not be that Being 
 should not be ; as it could not be that nothing should be : 
 these two propositions are contradictory in terms. While 
 these two others: Being is, and Nothing is not, are two 
 identical propositions, expressing one and the same neces- 
 sary truth : Being is, it is necessarily. If you can conceive 
 a doubt as to the possibility of the non-existence of being, it 
 is because you have not the idea of Being, and do not know 
 the force of the word. 
 
 Whence it also follows that all which is not absolutely 
 Being, need not have existed: all which has not existed 
 from all eternity is capable of non-existence, and is only 
 contingent. 
 
 6. If Being is, it is by itself. For if it were not by 
 itself, it would not be absolutely, it would be relative be- 
 ing, and the Being by which it would be would be Being by 
 itself, that is to say, God. Moreover, if Being is neces- 
 sary, it follows that it is by itself; this is the same idea 
 under two forms. 
 
 7. A very important and absolutely exact, although truly 
 inconceivable deduction, as are, for instance, various alge- 
 braic deductions in their geometrical application, is that 
 Being, since it is eternal and immense, is really present at 
 all points of time and space. We conceive up to a certain 
 point its immensity, its omnipresence at all points of space ; 
 but we cannot conceive its omnipresence at all points of 
 time. And yet, if it is absolutely, it is equally at all times, 
 
310 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 in every plaee ; with God there is neither past nor future, 
 he sees and includes all in an eternal present. Past, present, 
 and future coexist in the infinite, as the two extreme points 
 and the centre of an infinitesimal element coexist in a single, 
 simple, and unextended point. 
 
 8. If God exists absolutely, he is simple. For if he were 
 not simple, he would be composite ; if he were composite, he 
 would have parts, physical or spiritual parts, no matter 
 which. If he had physical parts, one part would be in one 
 point, another elsewhere; he would not be entire in every 
 point ; he would not, therefore, be absolutely in one of the 
 points, nor absolutely in the other point, he would there- 
 fore not be absolutely. If they were spiritual, immaterial 
 parts, they would be distinct attributes, one of which would 
 not be the other, and would not be wholly he, which hence 
 would be limited the one by the other, and limited relatively 
 to him ; they would therefore be limited, and not infinite 
 attributes. Hence he would not exist, in the sense of these 
 limited attributes, save up to a certain point, not bey9nd it ; 
 he would not be absolutely. Therefore God, being unable 
 to be in any way composite, is absolutely simple ; therefore 
 his attributes are necessarily identical each with the other, 
 and with his essence. Therefore we can establish a strictly 
 exact equation between all the attributes of God himself and 
 his being and his essence, and we can say, with Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas : " God himself is his essence. 1 In God, being and 
 essence are identical. 2 God's intelligence is his essence. 3 
 His will is his essence. 4 God is his life ; 5 God is his 
 beatitude." 6 
 
 9. God, therefore, is absolutely simple and absolutely one. 
 He is unity itself. He alone is unity. No being has its 
 
 1 Contra Gent., book i. cap. xxi. 4 Summa contra Gentes. 
 
 2 Ibid., cap. xxii. 6 Ibid. 
 
 3 Ibid., xlv 6 Ibid. 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 311 
 
 unity save in him. The infinite alone is absolutely one, for 
 the infinite alone is total ; no created being is total, none is 
 absolutely complete. There is no concrete unity, save God, 
 which is absolute. Which ? a mass of matter ? Since 
 space is capable of infinite division, that quantity of matter 
 must be infinite to fill the volume, that is to say, to con- 
 tain an actually infinite number of points : which is impos- 
 sible, since created being is finite. All created unity is 
 approximate ; it is the image of unity, but not unity. An 
 atom is one only in its centre and by its centre, which is not 
 it. So with souls and ideas. Where is there an idea abso- 
 lutely one, total, and full ? Such an idea can only exist in 
 God; it is infinite, it is God. 
 
 Therefore absolute being is simple and a unit. 
 
 10. It is simple and a unit in itself ; but it is also one in 
 the sense that there is but one absolute being. To state the 
 distinction between two absolute beings would be to state the 
 distinction between two identicals or two indiscernibles, says 
 Leibnitz. It would be to state two infinites. It would be 
 to state this formula : the infinite plus the infinite, a 
 formula which has no meaning in algebra, and cannot be 
 stated ; or which would signify exactly the only infinite. 
 
 11, He who is, is immutable; for what is change? It is 
 to become that which you were not, or to cease being what 
 you were. But if the infinite becomes, if he gain anything 
 in any sense, then he was not in that sense, or from the 
 point where he begins to gain ; if he lose anything, he ceases 
 to be in that sense; he was not and is not absolutely. 
 Therefore, if he is he is immutable. Therefore he is actu- 
 ally all that he is. He is not in a state of growth, like us ; 
 he is not, like us, partly in act and partly in potentiality. 
 He is all act. He is pure act, as Aristotle and Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas so well express it, a formula which is one of the 
 simplest, most perfect, and most fecund to teach the knowl- 
 
312 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 edge of God. If he is all act, he is all his potentiality 
 deployed; he is all potentiality actually present, living. 
 
 12. Finally, unless we deny that there are finite and 
 relative beings aside from the absolute Being, it is true that 
 these finite beings, as incapable of becoming or of beginning 
 if nothing existed, could begin only through the Being which 
 already was. Therefore that Being had the power to produce 
 all that which is produced; but since those beings which 
 are were not, it follows that he produced, created, them out 
 of nothing ; but to produce that which was not is possible 
 only to an infinite power. No finite power could produce 
 anything out of nothing. Infinite power alone is capable 
 of producing out of nothing. This is what these algebraic 
 formulas symbolize : Zero multiplied ly any quantity what- 
 soever equals zero ; zero multiplied ly the infinite equals any 
 quantity whatsoever. 
 
 Therefore absolute Being is also omnipotent. 
 
 II. 
 
 Thus far we have deduced from the idea of Being what 
 may be called the metaphysical attributes of God, in- 
 finity, immensity, eternity, necessary existence, undivided- 
 ness, simplicity, unity, immutability, pure actuality, and 
 omnipotence. 
 
 But all the philosophers or theologians see at least two 
 distinct orders of attributes in God, metaphysical attributes 
 and moral attributes. 
 
 Those who distinguish three orders of attributes, meta- 
 physical, intellectual, and moral, those have still more 
 clearly seen that which was to be distinguished. 
 
 When Clarke, having developed the metaphysical attri- 
 butes, comes to the intellectual attributes, he begins in these 
 words : " The hottest dispute between the atheists and our- 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 313 
 
 selves rages about this proposition. And indeed, who does 
 not admit the existence of an eternal Being, infinite power 
 and origin of all things, whether this world be his work or 
 be himself ? " The spirit of atheism tolerates such a God, 
 a physical, geometrical, and mechanical God, who is infi- 
 nitely all that which we find in nature and its laws. Be- 
 tween such a God and infinite intelligence lies a great void ; 
 intelligence is quite another aspect, and like another dimen- 
 sion, of being. 
 
 But this is not the only void which reason encounters here. 
 Grant that the absolute, eternal, immense, immutable Being 
 possesses intelligence; add to infinite power infinite intelli- 
 gence, freedom, will, and goodness would still be lacking. 
 
 Is this being of infinite power and intelligence free ; does 
 he will, does he love ? This is again another order of things, 
 another face, and a new dimension of Being. 
 
 And, indeed, there are minds which stop at the first dimen- 
 sion of Being, and ignore the other two ; and there are those 
 who accept the first and second, like Spinoza, while they 
 reject the third, without which we have no more idea of 
 God than we have the idea of a body, without the idea of 
 the three dimensions. 
 
 In mathematics, unity, taken simply, geometrically repre- 
 sents linear unity, an abstract thing ; unity multiplied by 
 unity, which is still unity, represents unity of surface, an 
 abstract thing ; but unity thrice taken as factor, the product 
 still being unity, represents unity of bulk, a concrete thing. 
 Unity taken as factor a still greater number of times, repre- 
 sents nothing more. 
 
 Thus, unity thrice taken as factor, neither more nor less, 
 alone has a concrete geometrical meaning. 
 
 So, too, I say that the order of the metaphysical attributes, 
 taken quite alone, is an abstraction of the mind, a selection 
 from the complete, subsistent, and living being. 
 
314 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 So, too, with the first two orders taken together. We must 
 have all three. Being has its three necessary dimensions ; 
 and the formula of infinite being would be not only the 
 infinite, but the infinite multiplied ~by the infinite multiplied 
 by the infinite, which is still simple unity, just as, algebrai- 
 cally, unity multiplied by itself is always unity. 
 
 Having said this, we must inquire whether the intellectual 
 and moral attributes, as well as the metaphysical attributes, 
 are deduced from the idea of Being. 
 
 It is certain that Clarke does not perform this deduction 
 a priori. He again steeps himself in reality, returns to 
 earth, redescends into his own soul, sees there freedom and 
 intelligence, and thence, no longer by deduction, but by the 
 inverse process, he transfers these things to God, raised to 
 infinity. 
 
 In fact, it is thus that the mind usually proceeds, both for 
 the intellectual and the moral attributes. We see the three 
 worlds described by Pascal, the world of bodies, the world 
 of minds, and the world of love. We see the three rays 
 contained in the ray of physical life, the ray of force, the 
 ray of light, and the ray of heat. We see the three rays 
 contained in the ray of spiritual life, which not only is, but 
 which loves arid knows, and we transfer to God this neces- 
 sary triplicity of all totality. 
 
 Yet Saint Thomas Aquinas deduces everything from the 
 idea of immutable being, even intelligence, freedom, good- 
 ness, and will. He proceeds by a method which Clarke 
 regards as correct, but difficult, and of which he says : " I will 
 not employ, to prove it, the reason that that which exists by 
 itself must be invested with all possible perfections; the 
 thing in itself is very certain, but it is of such a nature that 
 it cannot readily be demonstrated a priori" 1 
 
 Saint Thomas takes this method, and having demonstrated 
 
 1 On the Existence of God, Clarke, chap. ix. prop. viii. 
 
0^ THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 315 
 
 that God is infinite, he deduces from this that in God we 
 must necessarily find all perfections which exist in all beings, 
 and find them superabundantly. If this be so, he says, God 
 must be intelligent. 1 
 
 Now, although in Clarke's eyes this process of Saint 
 Thomas differs from that which he himself employs, it is 
 plain enough that the two processes are but one, and that 
 Saint Thomas, as well as Clarke, in order to pass to the in- 
 tellectual and moral attributes, not only deduces the idea of 
 intelligence and goodness from the idea of immutable being 
 by the way of identity, but goes back to experience and 
 reality, to the human soul, and there again sees, as Saint 
 Paul says, the invisible perfections of God through the 
 spectacle of the creation. 
 
 The metaphysical that is, abstract attributes of physi- 
 cal things are, as their name shows, revealed by the sight of 
 material bodies in the light of reason ; the intellectual attri- 
 butes are revealed to the mind by the mind ; arid the moral 
 attributes by the heart, by the consciousness of freedom. 
 
 And yet, if we cannot rigorously deduce both his intelli- 
 gence and his freedom from the idea of God's being (which, 
 moreover, we do not hold to be impossible), this is due to the 
 limitations of our faculties or of our actual knowledge. For 
 it is certain, as Saint Thomas instantly adds, that God, being 
 absolutely simple, is his own intelligence as well as his 
 own being. In God, being and intelligence are identical; 
 in him will is identical with intelligence as well as with 
 being. Therefore, with sufficient penetration and sufficient 
 knowledge, we might advance, by means of identity, from 
 being to intelligence and freedom, or rather we should see 
 that Being is absolutely, necessarily, simply, all this together. 
 
 1 Opusc. ix. chap. xxi. and chap, xxviii. 
 
316 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 III. 
 
 Whether we follow out the idea of being, taken in itself, 
 or the knowledge of ourselves, transfigured by reason, we 
 say: Being is intelligent. 
 
 Then, we at once see that all the metaphysical attributes 
 of being are applicable to intelligence, which is identical 
 with being, since it has already been proved that being is 
 absolutely simple, and that all its attributes are identical. 
 Therefore the intelligence of Being is Being itself, or Being 
 itself is intelligence. Therefore, too, since Being is sim- 
 ple, infinite, eternal, immutable, wholly actual and omnip- 
 otent, its intelligence which is itself, has precisely these 
 characteristics. 
 
 It is simple, not discursive, not composite, like our own. 
 In it, everything is one in the distinction. It is infinite, and 
 it extends itself to infinite being, and to all relative, possible, 
 or actual being. It is eternal, that is, equally present at all 
 times, knowing all in an eternal present. It is immutable 
 and immovable, and can neither forget nor acquire. It is, 
 therefore, all act ; never passing, like our mind, from poten- 
 tiality to act, from darkness to light. It is not a faculty, a 
 power, a quality of being, it is Being itself, it is its 
 very essence. Far more, its present act of intelligence is its 
 very substance. 1 And, finally, it is its omnipotence. 2 God, 
 says Saint Augustine, repeated by Saint Thomas, does 
 not know things because they are, but they are because he 
 knows them. 3 
 
 What does he know ? In the first place, he knows himself 
 wholly. God is the identity of the intelligible and the in- 
 telligent, as Aristotle expresses it, and Saint Thomas develops 
 
 1 l a , l ae , q. xiv. a. 4. 2 Ibid., a. 8. 
 
 8 15 De Trint., cap. xiii. l a , l tte , q. xiv. a. 8. 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 317 
 
 it, 1 quoting, as applicable to God alone, these weighty words : 
 " The Being who knows his essence is identical with his 
 essence." 2 
 
 He not only knows himself, but he knows all which he 
 has created, since, indeed, his intelligence, joined with his 
 will, is the cause of creation. And there is in God not only 
 the unitary idea of himself, but also the multiple ideas of 
 divers things. 
 
 And what are these ideas in God ? No one has so well 
 expressed it as Saint Augustine, repeated by Saint Thomas : 
 " Ideas are the principles or formal reasons of things, reasons 
 stable, immutable, and independent of every principle other 
 than themselves; eternal, subsisting in the intelligence of 
 God. They are not born, and do not die ; and yet they are 
 the model of all which may be born and die, of all which is 
 born and dies." 3 They are in God, and they are God. God 
 sees them because he sees himself ; but if he is simple, how 
 can he see divers ideas in himself ? He can, says Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas; and thus: "He knows his essence, he knows it, 
 just so far as it is knowable. He can therefore know it 
 not only in accordance with what it is in itself, but also in 
 accordance with the partial resemblance which any one of 
 his creatures may bear to it. But that which constitutes 
 the species of a creature, is its degree of likeness to this 
 divine essence. Therefore, when God knows his essence 
 in so far as it is imitable by that creature, he knows it as 
 the reason or idea of that same creature. Thus God sees 
 in himself distinct ideas of things." 4 
 
 1 De Trinit., cap. xiii. l a , l ae , q. xir. 
 
 2 " Omnis sciens, qui scit suara essentiam, et rediens ad suam essentiara est 
 rediens ad suam essentiam reditione completa." 
 
 8 Lib. de divers Qusest., q. xlvi. I a q. xv. art. 2. 
 
 4 I a q. xv. art. 2. ff 
 
318 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Are there in God will, freedom, goodness, love? Does 
 God's providence pervade the world ? 
 
 I cannot help again asserting that the idea of being, fully 
 explained, if we can set aside the habit of limiting and ab- 
 stracting everything, of positing, even in being, the negation 
 only fitted for nonentity, and of never wholly daring to main- 
 tain universal affirmation, - the idea of being, I repeat, is iden- 
 tical with that of power, intelligence, will, freedom, and love. 
 Take away any of these things, and you destroy that which 
 is. Is not this clear ? Take away intelligence, take away 
 love, take away freedom, which takes away love, you blind 
 the sight, you tear out the heart of him who was, and you so 
 wholly deprive him of being that you then say : There is no 
 God. You say this, and justly. There is no longer a su- 
 perior Being above us ; there is only an inferior being. We 
 are superior to this shattered God, incomparably superior ; 
 since we know, will, love. There is no longer an absolute 
 being. 
 
 But independently of the possible deduction from being of 
 goodness and love, reason establishes the fact directly, by its 
 chief process, that God is infinitely good, free, and loving, 
 since there are in us traces of freedom, love, and goodness. 
 
 God is free, he is good, and he loves ; and all this, in refer- 
 ence to God's relation to the world, may be summed up in a 
 single word which also implies his wisdom and his power, 
 the word " Providence," or the paternal government of 
 the world. 
 
 I am well aware that the sophists of all ages regard these 
 words as devoid of meaning. But in our opinion these very 
 words are most full of meaning, while abstract words, even 
 when exact, are empty. 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 319 
 
 If the sophists, on this subject, as well as concerning the 
 words referring to it, see the opposite of what we see, this is 
 a necessity, and is explained by that strange fact but too 
 little known, namely, that, as Plato and Leibnitz say, 
 sophists are minds so perverted that they see everything 
 inversely. In fact,, they are minds which have by artificial 
 means learned to see, not things themselves, but only their 
 own abstract thought of them. These minds, therefore, are 
 like eyes which have succeeded, by an artifice, in changing 
 the nature of their vision, so that they no longer see objects 
 themselves, but the images of these things on the retina, 
 They would thus see all objects inverted, since the image on 
 the retina is always inverted. Thus, I say, the sophists see 
 invertedly. Hence, if we take the opposite of what they 
 assert, we have the truth. 
 
 I ask how it is possible not to see that God governs the 
 world by his providence. I ask to what degree of blindness 
 and intellectual inversion a man must attain to say, with 
 Lucretius, 
 
 "Do not think that eyes were given us that we might see 
 the world about us ; that our feet are flexible so that we may 
 walk ; that strong arms, that two hands, opposite and skilful, 
 were given us that we might use them. All that is thus inter- 
 preted, is interpreted quite wrongly ; it is all inverted. Nothing 
 was given us that we might make use of it ; that which exists, 
 that is what determines the use that is made of it." l 
 
 " Lumina ne facias oculorum clara creata 
 Prospicere ut possimus; et ut proferre viai 
 Proceros passus, ideo vestigia posse 
 Sura rum ac feminum pedibus fundata plicari ; 
 Brachia turn porro validis aptata lacertis 
 Esse, manusque datas utraque ex parte ministras 
 Ut jacere ad vitam possimus, quse foret usus. 
 Ccetera de genere hoc inter qusecumque pretantur, 
 Omnia perversa prcepostera sunt ratione ; 
 Nil ideo natum est a nostro corpore ut uti 
 Possimus, sed quod natum est id procreat usnm." 
 
320 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Is this credible ? Wherein does Lucretius differ here from 
 one who should say, " Men think that their feet are below, 
 and their head is above, but it is just the opposite " ? 
 
 We must say frankly that a man must have lost his 
 sense and forsworn his reason not to admit that our eyes were 
 given us to see, our limbs to walk and act; not to under- 
 stand that a deep knowledge and deep goodness, sustained 
 by an infinite power, framed our bodies and this world, and 
 left their mark and, as it were, their signature, upon the 
 whole and on every detail. Let us leave abstract arguments ; 
 here are palpable realities. 
 
 Yesterday, I held in my hand a fragment of flesh taken 
 by science from a corpse. It was a part of the aorta, taken 
 from the point where that arterial trunk arises from the 
 heart. I admired that door of the heart, whence life gushes 
 with the blood throughout the body, a door so constructed 
 that it is always both open and shut ; wide open and close 
 shut: open to life which rushes forth, and closed to life 
 /which might try to withdraw. I felt that tissue, frail as a 
 rose-leaf, but of matchless firmness ; fitted to vanish, as if it 
 did not exist, before the blood coming from the heart, and to 
 reappear, inflexible, so soon as the tide pauses and makes a 
 brief return towards the heart. The tiniest reflux itself 
 collects the three portions of the barrier, adapts them by its 
 motion, and closes them before it. But lest the slight web, 
 too firmly united to the arch of the canal, should some day 
 forget its task unseasonably, each fold of the valve is pro- 
 vided with a button which the reflux must needs grasp for 
 its own restraint; and this delicate action is performed in 
 my breast at every beat of my heart, quickening with emo- 
 tion, adapting its rhythm to my thought, my necessity, my 
 effort, the impulse of my soul; growing calmer when I 
 sleep, and resuming the mathematical regularity which rests 
 and renews me. And this goes on within me for half a 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 321 
 
 % 
 
 century, it may be a century, giving me fresh life with 
 every throb, and sweeping away death in the intervening 
 space. 
 
 Now, the whole life of my body and all the mechanism of 
 my life, as to-day known to science, is made up of a mil- 
 lion such details, all bearing the mark of the Maker, after 
 the same fashion ; moreover, all tend to the same purpose ; 
 moreover, all these details, adapted to each other in the 
 unity of my life, are in their turn adapted to the unity of 
 universal life, and to millions of other marvels in the midst 
 of which I live. 
 
 Whence does the heart, whose every fresh impulse gives 
 me new life, derive that life ? It comes to it from without, 
 a perpetual source, which comes to us without our aid ; 
 whose unfailing beneficence dwells in my own breast, affords 
 it its chief nourishment. Thousands of secondary forms of 
 nourishment are within my grasp ; there is another life than 
 mine, which produces them and gives them birth about me. 
 I am hungry, and there is bread ; and moreover, that bread 
 gives me life. And that hunger and that bread, and that 
 power given to the bread to support life, and the countless 
 means of attaining this end, all this is again made up 
 of thousands of details, each adapted to the other, each of 
 which, taken separately, is a miracle, and the sum total of 
 which, we may well say, is the very sight of God's hands 
 and God's labor to nourish me. 
 
 Before I existed, and before the first man existed, God 
 formed this globe out of a previous vapor. He made it into 
 a rock, welded it with fire; he cooled this burning lava, 
 clothed the rock with water, and brought it within reach of 
 the sun. He traced upon the ocean, which covered every- 
 thing, the plan for a palace and a garden, and caused palace 
 and garden to spring from the deep waters. Then, on the 
 arid soil of the garden he spread that fertile earth suited for 
 
 21 
 
322 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 plants, and he ordered it to bring forth plants. The dwell- 
 ing was magnificently adorned and richly provided with 
 fruit and food ; there were, moreover, deposited beneath the 
 ground instruments, and, in case of need, arms and treasures. 
 God then created another marvel, animated servitors, 
 docile powers, animals. 
 
 And the plan of all this abode, in the eyes of science able 
 to see, is clearly a plan traced by intelligent goodness for the 
 education of a race of men. 
 
 When all was ready, there was a day like our present clay, 
 and measured by the same sun, a day whose date is cer- 
 tain, although unknown ; there was a spot where man, who 
 an hour before did not exist upon the earth, was placed. 
 
 In the midst of this mute and unintelligent world sud- 
 denly appears a being who stands upright, who speaks 
 and thinks, and who, addressing the invisible, says : " My 
 Father ! " 
 
 All this is thus, and we see it with our own eyes. 
 
 But who was the nurse and the mother of that nascent 
 man ? Who taught the first man to walk and to talk ? 
 There is no choice in the matter, it was God. 
 
 God, like that poetic king of whom Virgil speaks, who 
 bore his child in his arms, 
 
 44 Ipse sinu prse se portans," 
 
 and who bound him to his lance when he crossed a torrent, 
 God, Creator and King of the world, at that transitional 
 moment also bore his child in his arms and bound him to 
 his sceptre. 
 
 Woe unto him who can think without emotion and admi- 
 ration of that unique and marvellous moment in history, 
 of that birthday of the human race ! 
 
 It is not a question of Providence here, a word too 
 abstract and too cold to express what I behold ! I see my 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 323 
 
 beloved father and mother ! I see the wisdom and the sup- 
 port of a father, the protecting love of a mother, an eternal 
 father and mother, who are God. 
 
 Shall I believe that this Father, who created me out of 
 nothing, who placed me on this earth, who supports my life, 
 who gives me intelligence and love, no longer watches over 
 me? No; I believe and I see that which, thank God, is 
 taught to the youngest child, and which the youngest child 
 believes and understands : I believe and I understand, and 
 cannot fail to understand, that his eye is ever upon me, 
 that he sees my most secret thoughts, knows every motion of 
 my heart ; that in every throb of that heart he incites me to 
 love him, and that, ever present and zealous, he labors at my 
 celestial education, even to the smallest details of the 
 minutest actions of my life. 
 
 I see, I understand, and cannot fail to understand, that 
 this is true of every man and of all mankind. When I 
 know the philosophy of history, as I believe I now know 
 that of my own life, I shall understand the providential 
 march of God in the history of humanity, as I see it now in 
 my own history ; arid if the history of the world be so slow, 
 it is due to the cause which makes my own progress slow. 
 Now, I know but too well what it is that has retarded my 
 advance. 
 
 I shall then know that God co-operates in events as he 
 co-operates in our thoughts and actions, and that he has a 
 purpose in tracing out the plan of history, quite as much as 
 in tracing out the course of the year. The purpose of the 
 visible plan of the year is the harvest : is not the purpose 
 of the history of the ages a harvest too ? 
 
 Why do the ages move, if it be not to ripen the harvest to 
 which the Gospel alludes, and to prepare the work of the 
 harvesters whom the Father of the family shall send ? 
 
 It seems to me that if we will leave abstractions, to look, 
 
324 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 in accord with the nature of human vision, at what is before 
 our eyes, we shall see, without any possibility of a question, 
 God's visible presence in the world. 
 
 Yet I confess that there is a shadow over the picture, and 
 a constant contradiction which leads many to doubt. This 
 shadow, this contradiction, is death. Death poisons and 
 destroys everything ; death holds all else in check, and 
 annihilates all God's gifts. Where, then, is Providence? 
 Where is the Father ? For death renders his work null. 
 
 Yes, if death be nothingness. But if it be immortality, 
 as the life within us affirms, which we should rather 
 believe than that unknown shadow which affrights us, 
 then, on the contrary, death is but a final feature added 
 to the perfection of the picture. It is the feature which 
 explains all and justifies all ; it becomes the light that trans- 
 figures the whole and gives it an eternal significance : for it 
 is to the work of God what that chief act of my reason and 
 my will is to the life of my heart and my intelligence, 
 which, as Fe'nelon says, breaks and sacrifices, by God's help, 
 the limitations of my intelligence and freedom, to enter into 
 the infinitude of God. 
 
 This will be explained more fully ^vhen we come to speak 
 of man's death and immortality, and also of the death of this 
 world and its reconstruction, of which Leibnitz says : " This 
 globe shall be destroyed and renewed whenever the govern- 
 ment of minds demands it." 
 
 V. 
 
 Before concluding this study of the attributes of God, we 
 must point out that to which we consider the philosophic 
 and true distinction of those attributes into metaphysical, 
 intellectual, and moral, corresponds in theology. This dis- 
 tinction corresponds to the dogma of the Trinity, if it be 
 
ON THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 325 
 
 true that, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, the distinction of 
 persons depends, in the holy Trinity, upon the procession of 
 the Word from the Principle which speaks it, and of Love 
 from both. (Beata Trinitas distinguitur secundum proces- 
 sionem Verbi a Dicente, et Amoris db utroque.) 
 
 Since non-Catholic writers abuse this divine mystery, 
 and pantheists found their entire system on the dogma, 
 as, for instance, Lamennais' entire book is but a false appli- 
 cation of it, and Hegel's whole system an absurd interpreta- 
 tion, I do not see why Christians should be forbidden to 
 consider in philosophy, together with Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
 Saint Augustine, and others, the philosophical side of this 
 dogma, and its possible applications to the knowledge of 
 man and the world. 
 
 Here we will say but a word regarding it. We will say 
 that if Christian philosophy be developed, that is, if the 
 only philosophy now possible and useful be called to bear 
 its fruits, the wise will at last learn that power, intelli- 
 gence, and love, those three radical distinctions, are to abso- 
 lute Being what the* three dimensions are to the body, and 
 that they constitute its unity, as the product of the three 
 unities of dimension constitute the unity of the solid body ; 
 that they no more destroy its simplicity than the simplicity 
 of the infinitesimal element of the solid body is destroyed 
 by the fact that we are bound to distinguish in it the 
 elements of the three dimensions ; that, lastly, if it be true 
 that in living organisms the highest perfection corresponds 
 to the maximum of individuality or unity combined with the 
 maximum of distinction in the organs, then in absolute 
 life perfection consists in absolute unity, combined with 
 absolute distinction. Now, absolute unity is simplicity, and 
 absolute distinction is the distinction of person from person. 
 If, therefore, the true philosophy be developed, we shall 
 understand what certain theologians have said, that the 
 
826 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 distinction of persons is, in God, the condition of simplicity, 
 far from being its negation. We shall understand the words 
 of Saint Thomas Aquinas : " Unity and transcendent plu- 
 rality are identical ; " and those of Saint Hilary of Poitiers : 
 " Our God is not solitary, although he is one." We shall 
 understand the truth of these comparisons and conceptions, 
 and above all, their insufficiency ; and we shall know the 
 incomprehensibility of the mystery. 
 
 And while still sounding the immeasurable depth of the 
 mystery by contemplation and study, we shall tend above 
 all to adore and worshipfully imitate it. We shall see in it 
 the source of all knowledge, of all virtue, life itself, and 
 immortality. We have weighed all these words thoroughly. 
 We shall see therein the heart of Christianity, the last 
 wish of Christ : " May they be one, my Father, even as 
 we are one." We shall see therein both the perfection of 
 every soul, and the organization of the world to come and 
 of the ideal society of heaven, which will be, according to 
 the Saviour's prayer, a plurality of persons in one. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE INFINITESIMAL PEOCESS. 
 I. 
 
 WE have completed the demonstration of the existence 
 of God, of God characterized by his attributes. But, 
 as we have already declared, two fundamental points still 
 await development, which will add singularly to the force 
 of this demonstration. 
 
 In the first place we shall show, as we have repeatedly 
 asserted in the foregoing pages, that the demonstration of 
 the existence of God, which is merely the application to its 
 proper object of one of the two essential processes of reason, 
 is as rigorous as a genuine mathematical demonstration, as 
 Descartes and Leibnitz also affirm ; and that it is thus rigor- 
 ous because it is nothing else than one of the two processes 
 of geometry which correspond to the two general processes 
 of reason. It is the infinitesimal process applied, not to the 
 abstract geometrical infinite, but to the substantial infinite, 
 which is God. 
 
 In the second place, we shall show that contemporary 
 atheism, which is very consistent and very learned, is a 
 demonstration ad absurdum of the existence of God, and 
 that it is merely the chief process of reason reversed, and the 
 infinitesimal geometrical process applied the wrong way. 
 
 And first, as for the primary point, Descartes lays great 
 stress upon the mathematical precision of the demonstration 
 of the existence of God. " When I think of it attentively," 
 he says, " I clearly find that God's existence can no more be 
 separated from his essence than the equality of its three 
 
328 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 angles to two right angles can be separated from the essence 
 of a right-angled triangle." Elsewhere he says : " It is 
 certain that I no less find in my consciousness the idea of 
 a supremely perfect being than that of any figure or number 
 whatsoever ; and I know no less plainly and distinctly that 
 an eternal and actual existence belongs to his nature than I 
 know that all which I can demonstrate of any figure or any 
 number veritably belongs to the nature of that figure or 
 number : and therefore . . . the existence of God must pass 
 in my mind as being a truth no less certain than I have 
 hitherto esteemed all mathematical truths to be." 
 
 Thus thought Descartes. Leibnitz, as we have seen, 
 thought the same. The two greatest mathematicians whom 
 the world has known assert that the proof of God's exist- 
 ence is as rigorous as any mathematical proof. 
 
 Now, not only is the truth of God's existence, regarded 
 from a particular point of view, of the same order as mathe- 
 matical truths, although it is also experimental at the same 
 time that it is ideal, it is, I say, of that order, in that it is 
 a necessary idea which cannot but be true, since God is the 
 Being whose essence implies existence, as the essence of the 
 triangle implies the equality of the three angles to two right 
 angles. Not only is this so, but we shall show besides, as we 
 have just declared, that the proof of God's existence, as men 
 practise it commonly, poetically, and as true philosophers have 
 developed it, is no other than a universal process, of which the 
 pre-eminent mathematical process the infinitesimal process 
 of Leibnitz is an individual case and a special application. 
 
 "Metaphysics, harmony, geometry, and morality," says 
 Leibnitz, " exist everywhere." Therefore, according to Leib- 
 nitz, there is geometry in metaphysics, or rather there is a 
 sort of universal mathematics, for which Descartes and Leib- 
 nitz sought, and the bases of which Leibnitz discovered. It 
 is undoubtedly this idea which he pursued in his treatise en- 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 329 
 
 titled, De Scientia infiniti. Moreover, the whole seventeenth 
 century is full of this idea of the infinite. Theology, meta- 
 physics, mathematics, even the ascetic treatises of that period 
 are full of it. All the thinkers of that time are in pursuit of 
 it. Pascal, Ferinat, Wallis, Descartes, dwell upon it. But 
 Leibnitz, more than the rest, applies it to mathematics by the 
 marvellous invention of the infinitesimal calculus, a discov- 
 ery which transfigures that science, and gives it the greatest 
 impulse it ever received or ever can receive. 
 
 Let us see what the infinitesimal process of Leibnitz is. 
 The idea is comprehensible without any special knowledge. 
 
 Mathematics treats of forms, motions, velocities, that is, 
 of the effects of force acting in space and time. 
 
 Now, the difficulty in mathematical research, " that is, in 
 research into forms and motions, comes," as Lacroix says, 
 " from the fact that there is continuity in lines and velocities." 
 
 And, in fact, how are we to reach continuity ? How can 
 we grasp, in forms or motions, the passage from one point to 
 the following one ? What is the point which follows another 
 point ? Is it the same point, or are there two points ? If it 
 be the same point, what can we say of the passage or relation 
 of the one to the other ? If it be another point divided by 
 space, however small the interval may be, it is not the fol- 
 lowing point ; for between any two points, divided by an in- 
 terval, there is always a space infinitely divisible, that is to 
 say, capable of containing as many geometrical points as we 
 like. This question is a labyrinth in which we are soon lost. 
 Hence that book, mentioned by Leibnitz, entitled, Labyrinthus 
 de compositione continui. And yet, in the analysis of forms 
 and motions, we must be familiar with the law of transition 
 from one point to the succeeding point, or else the continuity 
 escapes us. But two consecutive points coincide, otherwise 
 there would instantly be" an infinity between the two. We 
 must therefore analyze and find the relation between two 
 
330 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 contiguous points, distinct, although coincident, and grasp the 
 law of transition from one to the other. We must analyze 
 the indivisible, according to the expression of Leibnitz, who 
 called his calculus, " the analysis of indivisibles (analysis in- 
 divisibilium)" But this analysis evidently issued from the 
 analysis of finite quantities, and entered into infinity, into 
 the infinitely great and infinitely little, those two things which 
 Leibnitz calls " the two extremes of quantity considered aside 
 from quantity (extremitates quantitatis non inclusce sed se- 
 clusce)" One enters upon the indivisible or infinitely small 
 in finding the relation between two coincident points, and 
 enters alike upon the infinitely great and infinitely small 
 in considering curves as polygons with an infinite number 
 of infinitely small sides. Hence Leibnitz also calls his 
 analysis: "An analysis of indivisibles or infinites (Analy* 
 sis indivisibilium seu infinitorum)" It is essential, in a 
 word, to posit at the base of the calculus the idea of the 
 two actual infinites, the infinitely great and the infinitely 
 little, an idea without which, Pascal says, no one can be a 
 geometrician ; and this double geometrical infinite must be 
 considered as actually existing, if we would grasp the essence 
 of forms and motions. Hence Leibnitz really conceives of 
 continuity. He conceives of two contiguous points distinct 
 in their essence although coincident in space. 
 
 This is not all. How are we to grasp the relation of these 
 two points ? Thus. By starting from the relation of two 
 points considered as separated by a finite distance. By the 
 ordinary geometry of finite quantities, we find the relation 
 between two separate points ; we then assert that by annul- 
 ling the distance between the two points, that is, by passing 
 from the finite to the infinite by annihilating the interval, 
 the obstacle to continuity, the essence of the relation re- 
 mains, although it loses a variable part depending on the 
 greater or less distance between the points, when they were 
 separated by space. 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 331 
 
 Thus, while the ordinary analysis of finite quantities could 
 not attain continuity, or the essence of the relation between 
 the points, but merely attained, between two given points 
 divided by a definite interval, a particular relation constantly 
 differing according to the position and distance of the given 
 points, the infinitesimal analysis finds the relation between 
 any two contiguous points an invariable relation, always 
 identical for the infinite series of all points of the given curve 
 and for any curve of the same sort. This is what is called 
 the law of the increase of magnitudes, anterior to every quan- 
 tity of increase. It is the very law of the generation of 
 forms of a given kind. We advance, by the infinitesimal 
 process, from finite magnitude to infinite magnitude, that 
 is, to geometrical immensity in its infinite wealth and its 
 absolute continuity. We attain immensity itself, abstract 
 immensity, not vague and indeterminate immensity, but 
 intelligible immensity, full of its eternal laws, of the laws 
 and ideas of all forms. 
 
 The infinitesimal process destroys the finite magnitude of 
 forms, to obtain the laws and essences of forms realizable by 
 magnitude. It suppresses the variable quantity, but pre- 
 serves the immutable essence. Dimensions vanish, but the 
 relations of dimensions remain, relations which are invari- 
 able for every sort of conceivable forms. 
 
 To suppress the variable and retain the necessary in 
 forms ; to bring the multitude of points back to simplicity, 
 in order to destroy their accidental relations without destroy- 
 ing their essential relations; to return to the infinite by 
 gathering magnitude and dimension into a single point, 
 wherein subsists and wherein is discovered the law of gener- 
 ation for these multitudes, such is the infinitesimal calculus. 
 It is, briefly, if we may venture to say so, a re-ascent to the 
 mathematical laws and forms as they exist eternally in God, 
 independent of all size and all dimension. 
 
332 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Thus the infinitesimal mathematical process, like the 
 Platonic and Cartesian demonstration of the existence of 
 God, moves from finite to infinite, from contingent to neces- 
 sary, from variable to eternal, from the individual to the 
 universal; 1 and it proceeds in precisely the same manner, 
 effacing all the limits of contingence and variation, disengag- 
 ing the essence in particular realities, reducing accident to 
 zero, and raising the essential to infinity. 
 
 Therefore the infinitesimal process of mathematics is pre- 
 cisely an instance and particular application of a universal, 
 fundamental process, by which the human mind springs, 
 with an action as sublime and as certain as it is simple, from 
 any finite postulate to the infinite. 
 
 The same general process is applicable to the relation of 
 finite to infinite, whether in geometry or in metaphysics. 
 Now, applied to geometry, it produces marvels, and what it 
 gives us is infallibly sure : is it possible that when applied 
 to metaphysics it should produce only error? 
 
 I ask if it be rational to admit that a process innate in 
 the human mind, actually practised, implicitly or explicitly, 
 by all men; a process which is the foundation of poetry, 
 that flower of truth ; a process which all philosophers of the 
 first rank have perceived or described more or less clearly, 
 and which, lastly, by the progress of science, being also ap- 
 plied to geometry, 2 there reveals, by most amazing discove- 
 ries, the rigor of its certainty and the grandeur of its power, 
 I ask, I say, if it be permissible to admit that such a method 
 is true only in geometry, and has been wrongly applied, from 
 the beginning of the world, by common-sense, by poetry, by 
 
 1 It is plain that in mathematics the mind does not leave the abstract; it 
 moves from the abstract finite to the abstract infinite. 
 
 2 To tell the truth, the process has been applied to geometry since the 
 beginning of science, by the notion of limits and that of infinitely littles, but 
 it has only entered into it fully and methodically since the time of Leibnitz 
 and Newton. 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 333 
 
 philosophy, to the demonstration and study of the living 
 infinite ? This cannot be. There is necessarily solidarity 
 between the two applications of the process, and its geomet- 
 rical certainty confirms its metaphysical certainty. 
 
 The identity of the geometrical infinitesimal process with 
 the fundamental process of the rational life by which God is 
 demonstrated, has never been established. We state for the 
 first time explicitly and directly this identity, 1 to the study 
 of which we devote a part of our Treatise on Logic ; and we 
 there demonstrate what Descartes and Leibnitz assert with- 
 out proving it, namely, that the proof of God's existence 
 has a mathematical validity. At the same time we intro- 
 duce in theoretical logic the clearer knowledge of a truth 
 which is not sufficiently developed therein, namely, that 
 reason has two exact processes, and not one only ; that syllo- 
 gism is not the only form of reasoning ; that there is another 
 radically different from the first, but equally sure ; and that 
 these two logical processes correspond to the two methods of 
 geometry, the algebraic deductive method by means of iden- 
 tity, and the infinitesimal method, which gives the infinite by 
 starting from the finite. We believe that Leibnitz knew 
 this, but he neither said so clearly, nor demonstrated it. He 
 insinuated something of it, but he was not understood. Per- 
 haps this was what he was reserving for development in his 
 work on " The Science of the Infinite." 
 
 The geometrical infinitesimal process, discovered as a me- 
 thodical form of calculus by that seventeenth century which 
 
 1 Wallis, Newton, and above all, Leibnitz, have said what is equivalent to 
 this, but in terms which are not sufficiently explicit. I have answered the 
 objections made to me on this point, in an Introduction to my Logic, which 
 seems to me to close the discussion. Allow me to say that the objections were, 
 all and always, based upon the strangest of misunderstandings, misunder- 
 standings certainly not justified by the sum total of my statement, but to 
 which I necessarily gave occasion by some obscure detail or some ill-defined 
 word. In later editions, particularly in the latest one, I have tried to correct 
 these blemishes. 
 
334 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 was the father of sciences, transfigured mathematics, an infal- 
 lible science, and made it a power and a glory. This process 
 is verified by its geometrical and mechanical applications. It 
 attains laws and forms which the analysis of finite quantities 
 can in no way reach ; it solves with incomparable ease prob- 
 lems which the analysis of finite quantities solves with diffi- 
 culty; it is a new and transcendent method in all the 
 significance and truth of the word. 
 
 Whence we may conclude, it seems to me, that this same 
 process, when philosophy at last comprehends its universality, 
 reach, and precision, will transform philosophy as it has 
 transformed mathematics ; will answer questions which long 
 courses of deductive reasoning were unable to answer ; and 
 will make quick and easy, even for the simplest minds, the 
 solution of problems which the greatest geniuses have solved 
 with difficulty. 
 
 I allude to that fundamental operation of the rational life, 
 that act of sovereign reason, which from every finite postu- 
 late springs to the infinite as the actual source and eternal 
 model of the finite postulate that we see; which asserts 
 the actual, infinite existence of all being, all beauty, all 
 power, and all goodness of which we see any trace ; which 
 says, in its consciousness of being, of life, and of limitations : 
 Remove these limitations ; you have an infinite being, actually 
 and infinitely living ; which says : " I know something, 
 therefore an infinite intelligence exists ; I love, therefore infi- 
 nite love exists ; I see limited space, transitory time, therefore 
 infinite extension and eternity exist; there are traces of 
 beauty, therefore there is a supreme beauty ; there are traces 
 of happiness, therefore there is a complete happiness and a 
 felicity without bounds." Yes, these simple, common-place 
 arguments, implicitly employed by all good hearts and right 
 minds from the beginning of the world, make up a very sim- 
 ple, very potent and exact method, which scientists and 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 335 
 
 sages, although glimpsing at it, have not thus far ventured 
 to apply, for the very reason that it seemed to them at once 
 too potent and too simple, I repeat that this infinitesimal 
 method, identical with the corresponding mathematical pro- 
 cess which is but a special application of it, will renew 
 Philosophy whenever Philosophy at last chooses to take 
 possession of it and boldly apply it in its fulness. 
 
 II. 
 
 We said in the beginning of this Theodicy that if there 
 be a genuine proof of the existence of God, that proof must 
 correspond to some common, daily, essential, and funda- 
 mental process of human reason ; we have shown in the 
 soul and human mind a universal tendency, which, ever 
 desirous to enlarge, embellish, and raise to the infinite every 
 trace of being, beauty, and goodness presented by the world, 
 rises to God by this poetic process, which is but the impulse 
 of reason. Most minds, even the simplest, reach God by 
 this way. We have recognized that the proofs of God's ex- 
 istence given by true philosophers, from Plato to Descartes, 
 are nothing but this common method translated into philo- 
 sophic language. We have explained the essence of this 
 process ; we have asserted and shown, with Descartes and 
 Leibnitz, that this proof is as rigorous as any mathematical 
 proof ; and lastly, we have shown that this vital and funda- 
 mental process of the human mind is a universal process, 
 of which the infinitesimal mathematical process is merely 
 a special application. 
 
 It now remains for us to understand how, if it be true 
 that the demonstration of the existence of God be the sim- 
 plest and most spontaneous as well as the grandest and most 
 essential of the acts of reason ; if it be true that philosophy 
 has described, analyzed, and argued it with full details and pre- 
 
336 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 cision, and that this demonstration has now clearly acquired 
 mathematical certainty, it remains, we say, for us to under- 
 stand how there can still be atheists, how there always will 
 be, and how there is, at the present day, a school of atheism 
 which is far more scientific than the old-fashioned atheism. 
 
 In the first place, there are atheists because man is a free 
 agent, and because there are wicked men. 
 
 In fact, the proof of God's existence is not only the act 
 and fundamental process of the rational life, it is also the 
 act and fundamental process of the moral and practical life. 
 That is to say, the operation of the mind which proves God 
 answers to a moral act of the free will which loves and 
 adores God. These two acts answer to each other in such 
 fashion that the moral act is the source, the point of sup- 
 port, the cause, of the rational act. For if the will refuse 
 its action, reason cannot complete its own. The mind, when 
 the heart does not adore God, cannot alone effect the true 
 proof of the existence of God. It sees the reasons for it 
 if they be pointed out, but does not believe them. It can 
 repeat the lesson, if it choose to be a hypocrite, but it has 
 no faith in God ; and we find that the demonstration is only 
 an argument without a basis, which, to a dry, abstract spirit, 
 far removed from love and spontaneous worship, does not 
 imply the reality of God's existence, but only the abstract 
 idea of God. 
 
 So that, among men, those who reach God through love 
 may reach him through reason ; those who do not reach him 
 through love can only reach him through reason in seeming, 
 or actually turn their reason against him : I do not say that 
 they do not at the same time turn reason against itself, 
 but they turn their reason against God, and deny him in 
 their intelligence because they have denied him in their 
 affection. 
 
 Let us study more in detail the origin of atheism. 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 337 
 
 To do this, we must first recall the proof of the existence 
 of God. 
 
 We consider the beings who surround us, we contemplate 
 the world and our soul. We see therein being and life, 
 although limited; traces of beauty and goodness, mingled 
 with contrasts and changes. But the imperfect goodness 
 of this world leads us to comprehend infinite goodness ; its 
 borrowed beauty, absolute beauty. For this world speaks 
 and proclaims God. This is what the soul of every man 
 should comprehend in presence of this world, and such is 
 the duty of his reason. 
 
 The duty of reason is to conceive the infinite through 
 every trace of being, beauty, and goodness shown to us by 
 creatures ; and because they also everywhere show us limita- 
 tions, void, evil, and imperfection, it is the duty of reason, 
 as well as of will, to prevent us from pausing at knowledge' 
 or love in limited beings. To go beyond them, to seek the 
 infinitely perfect being, manifestly different from all crea- 
 tures, although evidently proclaimed by each, such is our 
 duty. 
 
 But it is here that men part, and either advance towards 
 God or hold aloof from him. 
 
 Who has not often hesitated before the complex vision 
 of things ? Now, the order and beauty of the world compel 
 the soul to admiration, praise, hope, and faith in that invisi- 
 ble being whom all things proclaim and reveal. Again, the 
 disorder and evil, the misery and brevity, of the present, 
 above all, death, trouble us, sadden us, drive us to distrust, 
 complaint, and despair. In this hesitation, in this trial of 
 reason and will, some, upheld by the legitimate instinct of 
 human nature, or, to speak better, by the contact of God 
 with the root of the soul, maintain within them their 
 ideal, faith in the infinite perfection, substantial, actual, and 
 living. Others, despite the horror felt by their soul and 
 
 22 
 
338 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the remorse of their reason, allow their ideal to be smothered 
 by the sight of chance, their faith by the sight of obstacle, 
 and, in answer to doubt, choose negation. These are the 
 two moral and intellectual races who divide the world. 
 There are minds and hearts which affirm, there are others 
 which deny. Herein lies the whole question : God or not ; 
 yes or no. 
 
 Consider well that the choice is free. We are, by choice 
 and freely, for God or against God. 
 
 The choice between these two paths is offered to every 
 man, not only in his youth, but at every point in life. Every 
 movement of our consciousness, every impression received 
 from our fellow-creatures, may and should re echo from our- 
 selves and our fellow-creatures back to God, if, repelling and 
 scorning the vanity, imperfection, and present misery of 
 things and of ourselves, a vigorous love of good that is, 
 virtue lifts our soul towards the sovereign Good, the 
 supreme perfection, transporting us from the finite to the 
 infinite, from the transitory to the eternal. This is what 
 Socrates meant by philosophizing, when he said : " To philo- 
 sophize is to learn to die ; " it is to learn to sacrifice acci- 
 dental and transitory impressions, limited sensations, finite 
 and transitory joys, to attain the substance itself of which 
 these are the shadows. This progress towards the infinite 
 by the sacrifice of the finite is the right path, the path 
 of goodness and truth. 
 
 But if all th3 moments of consciousness, if all the im- 
 pressions received from our fellow-creatures, far from re- 
 echoing to God in our intelligence and affection, wrap us in 
 selfishness and sensuality ; if every pleasure and every pain 
 nail us to use Plato's vigorous expression to the present 
 and accidental point of life ; if, far from raising us to the 
 infinite and the immense, the present instant fixes us upon 
 a point of the finite ; if it not only detach us from the con- 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 339 
 
 sciousness of God, but also from full consciousness of our- 
 selves, from entire possession of our soul which is greater 
 than the world, and reduce us to the proportions of a creature 
 which is but a mere detail in the world, this degradation, 
 which can only occur because we freely prefer the possession 
 of self to that of God, and the external possession of the senses 
 to the full and entire possession of self, sensuality to reason, 
 pleasure to virtue and freedom, this continuous descent 
 towards the lower, is clearly the false path, the path of 
 evil and of error. 
 
 We are not sufficiently alive to the fact that man ascends 
 or descends the ladder of life, as he may prefer, at every 
 point in life. He tends, by each of his unbiassed actions, 
 towards fulness of life or vacuity of life, that is, towards 
 an actual being more complete or more empty. We ap- 
 proach God, and we are more; we depart from him, and 
 we are less. And this is the whole mystery of life, to 
 advance towards God, or to depart from him. We know not 
 the perpetual and universal history of the world and of 
 every soul. Meantime, the tremendous drama does not 
 pause. We steadily advance either towards God or towards 
 nonentity. "The wicked man sinks towards nothingness," 
 says the holy Scripture. 
 
 This is why there are atheists. 1 
 
 Assuredly there are fearful moments for the soul, when, 
 having sunk in some sort to a lower state of being, that 
 is, to an enfeebled vitality, it is tempted to absolute 
 incredulity ; conscious of its degradation and decay, it is 
 tempted to say, There is nothing but an empty void ; there 
 is nothing, there is no God. Because it is moving towards 
 
 1 Yet, let us not forget, there are men who are mental, bnt not \vilful 
 atheists, as there are Christians who have faith, dead faith, but have no 
 love. So, too, it is very different to cherish a dead atheism, and to cherish 
 atheism as the actual principle of life. 
 
340 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 lesser being, it begins to believe in nonentity ; just as, in 
 the luminous moments of increasing life, the soul, conscious 
 of growth and progress, conceives of being more and more, 
 trembles with joy, and leaps by a mighty act of faith to the 
 immediate certainty and absolute assertion of Being, that 
 is, infinite Being. 
 
 So that, in reality, the mystery of good and evil, of truth 
 and error, consists in attaining, by free choice, to one of 
 these extremes, to one of these two prime decisions, implicit 
 universals, which are the foundation of every mind : Being 
 is, or else Being is not, a living, intimate, and incarnate 
 double proposition, which every soul asserts at will and 
 bears in its innermost core ; of which the one, produced by 
 free love of the supreme Good, is the very formula of evi- 
 dence, Being is ; the other, produced by that distaste for the 
 supreme Good and that habitual choice of the lesser, which 
 result from egoism, is the general formula of the absurd, 
 that is, the most concise and most absolute of all contradic- 
 tory propositions, Being is not. 
 
 Once more, we have the two human tendencies, good and 
 evil, truth and error ; there are minds which affirm, because 
 they love ; there are minds which deny, because they do not 
 love : absolute negation or absolute affirmation, Being or 
 non-Being, God or no God, all or nothing. 
 
 Hence the noble words of Plato, which Leibnitz holds to 
 be so true : " The philosopher and the sophist move in op- 
 posite directions : one advances towafds being, the other 
 towards nothing ; and while the philosopher is dazzled by 
 the too great clarity of his object, the sophist, on the con- 
 trary, is blinded by the darkness of his." 
 
 On this subject Leibnitz reports that the sophist Foe at 
 the close of his life said to his disciples : " This is the basis 
 of all things, there is nothing ; nonentity is the principle 
 of all things." We know that India is full of this insensate 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 341 
 
 nihilism. Greek sophists, Gorgias amcmg others, taught it ; 
 Plotinus renewed it ; and in our day a whole school of phi- 
 losophy teaches it. 
 
 Thus there are atheists ; there have been such in all ages ; 
 there will always be such, because evil plants radical incre- 
 dulity and absolute negation in perverse hearts. Atheism, 
 says Plato, is a disease of the soul before it is an error of 
 the mind. 
 
 This is why there is a modem school of atheism more 
 scientific than the ancient one. 
 
 It is because, as practical atheism is and can be nothing 
 but the will itself directed in a sense contrary to the moral 
 laws, so speculative atheism is only the reason directed in a 
 sense contrary to the laws of logic; whence results this 
 strange consequence, that in philosophy the theory of athe- 
 ism is nothing but the demonstration of the existence of God 
 taken inversely. The actual demonstration of the existence 
 of God being mathematically exact, and having clearly be- 
 come so by the labors of the seventeenth century, it follows 
 that the actual theory of atheism, which is that same demon- 
 stration reversed, is in a certain sense exact, and, I might 
 even say, true, true, in that it entails at the close of the 
 argument a manifest absurdity ; which must be so, since a 
 correct train of reasoning must reduce to an absurdity the 
 hypothesis that there is no God. 
 
 Contemporary atheism proceeds as follows. To the sight 
 of finite beings, who only exist up to a certain point, and not 
 beyond it, to the sight of created perfections and their limita- 
 tions, it applies in an inverse sense the process which rises to 
 God. Instead of destroying the limitation and raising the 
 perfections to the infinite, it destroys the perfections and 
 raises the limitation to the infinite ; and it thus succeeds in 
 asserting that absolute nonentity exists, and that there is 
 no other absolute being than this nothingness. 
 
342 GUIDE TO TEE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Whence it follows that " Being and Nothing are iden- 
 tical," or that " Being is Nothing." l These two propositions 
 exist textually in Hegel's works, and he constantly repeats 
 them. They are, as we see, the statement of absolute ab- 
 surdity. This is inevitable. The process which, applied 
 correctly, gives us truth itself, must produce pure absurdity 
 when applied in a contrary sense. 
 
 Thus we have in contemporary atheism a demonstration, 
 by means of the reductio ad absurdum, of the existence 
 of God. 
 
 But what is truly monstrous, and what is peculiar to the 
 present school of atheists, is that it clings with desperate 
 determination to this radical absurdity, and intrenches itself 
 in it. It asserts that the formula, " Being is nothing," is the 
 principle of philosophy, and that, starting from this prin- 
 ciple, logic must be transformed. " The time has come," 
 says Hegel, " to transform logic ; " and this transformation 
 consists chiefly in denying the principle of contradiction, 
 that is, in maintaining that in all things we can and ought 
 to assert at the same time for and against, in the same sense 
 and in the same connection. 
 
 So that a new system of Logic, absolutely contradicting 
 the old one, has been taught in Europe for the last forty 
 years, successfully, brilliantly, nay, more, with such raci- 
 ness of reasoning that Logic, reversed as it is by this school, 
 will come forth more fully developed than it was, because 
 several points hitherto unknown, or undemonstrated, will be 
 thus demonstrated to absurdity. This is an important fact, 
 a solemn and critical moment in the history of the human 
 mind. This fact, rich as it is in consequences and instruc- 
 tion, will be the object of minute study in our Treatise on 
 Logic. We shall then see how modern sophistry, which 
 has built up in the nineteenth century a powerful school 
 
 1 Sein und Nichts 1st dasselbe. Log., 88 (Encyclopaedia). 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 343 
 
 of atheism, is simply and precisely Descartes turned wrong 
 side out, Leibnitz reversed. 
 
 III. 
 
 Let us close this first part of the Treatise on the Knowledge 
 of God. 
 
 We have set forth the proofs of God's existence as they 
 have been given in all ages. 
 
 These proofs are distinguished as the cosmological, psycho- 
 logical, and ontological proofs, according as our reason rises 
 to God from the spectacle of nature, from the sight of our 
 own soul, or from the idea of God taken in itself. But the 
 first two form but one : it is God known through his acts ; 
 so that there are really, as Descartes says, but two proofs, 
 that which proves God through his acts, and that which 
 proves him through the mere idea which we have of him. 
 
 But it is clear that the idea of God is only obtained from his 
 acts, according to the sublime words of Saint Paul : " For the 
 invisible things of him from the creation of the world are 
 clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, 
 even his eternal power and godhead." Therefore, actually, 
 there is but one proof of the existence of God, which may be 
 thus defined : There is something, therefore God exists. 
 
 We have seen that if we truly possess the idea of God, 
 we possess the proof of his existence ; because then the propo- 
 sition, God is, is merely an identical proposition in our eyes, 
 as well as in itself. Everything, therefore, reverts to obtain- 
 ing the idea of God through his acts. 
 
 We have seen the process employed to this end by reason, 
 and we have also shown the moral requisite for the exercise 
 of the process. The whole process, permit us to summa- 
 rize once more, the entire proof, consists in rising from the 
 finite to the infinite by the negation of the limits of the 
 
344 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 finite, and in proceeding thus from everything to God, be- 
 cause, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, everything exists 
 in God infinitely, or God is everything eminently. We apply 
 to the finite this process of elimination, which gives us the 
 idea of the infinite ; that is, the idea of God, which, so soon as 
 it is obtained, of itself proves that God exists. 
 
 This process has the precision of geometrical processes, 
 since the infinitesimal process of geometry is itself but a 
 special application of it to the geometrical finite and infinite. 
 
 But as the exercise of this process also implies a moral 
 requisite, and the process, exact in itself, may be applied, if 
 desired, in a contrary way, it follows that there may be 
 atheists more logical and more consistent than ever before. 
 It is true that, by the very power of this admirable process, 
 the sophists, who apply it inversely, are led where they 
 should go, to a manifest absurdity ; that is to say, to the 
 contradictory proposition, which may be stated thus : Being 
 is not. They proceed thither, they cling to this statement: 
 they assert and write literally : " Being is nothing (Sein und 
 NiMs ist dasselbe)." So that modern atheism is nothing but 
 a demonstration ad dbsurdum of the existence of God, a 
 counter-proof of the direct demonstration. Either there 
 never was a demonstration ad absurdum, or this is the 
 strongest which has ever been given. 
 
 We have seen that this magnificent process not only 
 proves the existence of God, but at the same time gives us 
 his attributes ; and that if all these attributes may be de- 
 duced by way of identity from the idea of infinite Being, 
 each of them taken separately, they may also be obtained 
 directly and seen, as Saint Paul says, by the chief process of 
 reason, ill every trace of beauty or goodness found in 
 created beings. 
 
 We must have understood that this act of the human soul 
 which sees in nature, in the visible world, or in the soul, God 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 345 
 
 and his attributes, is the chief act, the fundamental process, 
 of the rational and moral life ; it is the pre-eminent act of 
 reason and liberty combined ; it is a joint act of intelligence 
 and will, a simultaneous work of discernment and morality ; 
 it is what should be called natural prayer, the impulse of the 
 soul which moves from everyching to God. 
 
 From this point of view, there is but a single proof of 
 God's existence. Everything is that proof. Every baing, be 
 it what it may ; eveiy action, be it what it may, is that 
 proof. 
 
 Why can I not make it perfectly clear ? How can any 
 man fail to see it for himself ? How can any one fail to see 
 that everything reveals God, that every thought leads to 
 him, every sensation conducts us to him ? Why must sen- 
 suality, which animalizes us and arrests in us, as in animals, 
 every sensation at its first effects, without permitting them 
 to be echoed back to the reason and heart ; why must im- 
 purity, which swallows up and profanes sensation, to enjoy 
 it ; the stupid habit of life which ceases to gaze and to ad- 
 mire ; that hateful education which withers and destroys our 
 faculties, instead of elevating and transfiguring them ; that 
 narrow, blind, abstract, and ignorant rationalism, which clips 
 the wings of the soul from earliest infancy, why must all 
 these causes destroy within us the divine sense of na- 
 ture and life, and the innate germs of the sacred poetry 
 which sees God in all things ? If souls were less dead, all 
 nature would lift us to the knowledge of God, to admiration, 
 adoration, love ! Every impression would be echoed back in 
 the mind to God. 
 
 Touch any material body, be it only a stone. I say that 
 this contact, in a pure and contemplative man, is echoed 
 back through the body, the senses, the mind and soul, to 
 God : the soul is conscious of Being, and, in Being, instantly 
 of the Infinite. Yes, at the touch of wood or stone, the soul 
 
346 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 should naturally exclaim: He, God! "Yes," says Bossuet, 
 "every time that we use our body to move in whatsoever 
 fashion, we should always feel God present." The soul 
 should thus mount, by wondrous undulations far swifter than 
 those of light, from world to world, from the world of the 
 body to that of the soul, and from that of the soul to God, 
 from the body, from this stone which it feels, which it 
 feels to be neither God nor a free or rational mind, to the 
 intelligent being which is itself, and from this free and intel- 
 ligent but still imperfect world to perfect and infinite being. 
 
 Such is the legitimate margin of a sensation, of any im- 
 pression whatsoever, outward or inward, in undegraded man. 
 "Who has not felt these things in some privileged moment ? 
 Who does not understand, when he reflects, that it must be 
 so ? The soundest and most incontestable philosophy, and the 
 most rigorous theology, teach that God is everywhere pres- 
 ent, that God is in all being, really and substantially. Then, 
 if God be in the stone, in touching it I implicitly touch him. 
 
 Not only is God in all being, but he operates in all action 
 and acts in all movement. " God operates in every operative 
 being," says Saint Thomas Aquinas (Deus operatur in omni 
 operante). This is true of all movements of bodies or of 
 minds. God is necessarily at the foundation of every act of 
 thought or will. Heat, light, attraction, sounds, savors, per- 
 fumes, all things which are forms of motion, are an effect of 
 God's presence, of God's contact with material bodies. The 
 light of the sun is the sun which God incites to shine. The 
 sun can no more shine without the impelling force of God, 
 than it can ejdst without his presence. In all being, in all 
 motion whatsoever, God is present as first cause, as motion- 
 less mover. To all who know the value of words, these are 
 identical propositions, which cannot but be true. 
 
 Thus when the soul, through the body, is conscious of any 
 being whatsoever, it receives a certain impression, of which, 
 
THE INFINITESIMAL PROCESS. 347 
 
 after all, the first cause is God ; and if our soul possessed all 
 its natural refinement, it is to be supposed that it would at 
 once, by that swift circulation of vague thoughts and ^ imper- 
 ceptible arguments, described by Leibnitz, conceive, in a more 
 or less explicit way, of the infinite and eternal power which 
 the finite and transitory being that it touches, implies from 
 the fact of its own creation. 
 
 Why can we not recall our earliest childhood, our first 
 vivid impressions, on beholding nature and life which have 
 but newly come to us ! There would be more philosophy in 
 that passive wisdom of little children than in the books of 
 philosophers. It may be in this sense that Christ says : 
 " Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast per- 
 fected praise." 
 
 I remember, in childhood, before I had attained what is 
 called the age of reason, once experiencing this sense of Being 
 in all its vividness. A great effort against something ex- 
 ternal, distinct from myself, whose unyielding resistance 
 amazed me, led me to pronounce the words : " I am ! " I 
 thought of it for the first time. Surprise grew into intense 
 amazement and into the most vivid admiration. I repeated, 
 with transport : " I am ! . . . being ! being ! " All the re- 
 ligious, poetic, and intelligent foundation of my soul was 
 stirred and awakened at that instant. A penetrating light, 
 which I seem still to see, enveloped me. I saw that Being 
 is, that Being is beautiful, blessed, lovely, full of mystery ' 
 
 I can still see, after the lapse of forty years, all these inner 
 facts, and the physical details which surrounded me. 
 
 Who has not, in his life, one of these transfigured memories 
 which time cannot impair ? We see it still; we shall always 
 see it ! We see, amidst the dimness of surrounding and for- 
 gotten years, days, and hours, a place, a scene, a landscape, 
 a feeling, a thought, or a word. Be the visible detail, the 
 common basis, of these immortal memories what it may, light 
 
348 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 envelops the scene. But study it with care, you will always 
 find in these luminous depths an emotion which echoes even 
 to God. That light, in fact, was God. It is God whom we 
 recall. God is the foundation of the remembrance. When 
 we have once dimly perceived him, he transfigures forever in 
 our mind the objects and the veils through which we saw 
 him. 
 
 This corresponds to that noble intellectual phenomenon, 
 familiar to meditative minds, which may be called the trans- 
 figuration of words. Sometimes a word opens, particularly 
 if it be a word used in the Gospel, and a flood of light pours 
 from it, which is a living idea, proceeding from the fountain- 
 head. At the heart of the idea there is a feeling, there is a 
 soul, and at the centre of that soul is God. " The more a 
 word resembles a thought, a thought a soul, a soul God," 
 some one has said, " the more beautiful it is." This admira- 
 ble remark aptly illustrates the relative passage from a word 
 to God. Our soul, touched by this word, stirred, that is to 
 say, moved, advances from the word to the idea, from the 
 idea to love, and from love to God, by that marvellous move- 
 ment of spiritual undulations of which the visible waves of 
 light are but a feeble image. Thus every sensation, in a soul 
 not degraded, should echo from the outward object to the 
 soul, from the soul to God. 
 
 And it is in this sense that we can say : Everything is a 
 proof of the existence of God. The Heavens, the Earth, Night, 
 Day, the smallest creature and the feeblest motion, display 
 God and celebrate his glory. 
 
CHAPTEE I. 
 
 TWO DEGREES OF THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 
 
 THE reader who has followed us thus far will surely be- 
 lieve that in this arduous task of presenting a summary 
 of Philosophy, our object is not merely to satisfy intellectual 
 curiosity. Our object is first and foremost practical and re- 
 ligious. We desire to do our part in arousing in select souls 
 the taste for wisdom, the passion for truth, and the effort for 
 morality. Active search after goodness, light, virtue, is 
 more than ever lacking in the souls of men. We do not 
 watch, we do not pray, as Christ requires us to do. We 
 sleep, as Saint Paul said (dormiunt multi). Life makes no 
 effort, consequently no progress, consequently loses its true 
 glory and fruitfulness. 
 
 Now, to our thinking, true philosophy is nothing but this 
 effort to gain wisdom. That is the very meaning of the 
 word ; and it is in this sense that Cicero understands it when 
 he says: "Philosophy, light of life!" Saint Gregory Nazi- 
 anzen also understands it thus when he speaks of the " very 
 lofty Philosophy." So also do Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus 
 and Origen, 1 when they assert that without philosophy there 
 is no true piety. So also Saint Augustine, when he says . 
 " I consecrate my life to philosophy." 2 Lastly, when Clement 
 
 1 Panegyric on Origen by Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus. 
 
 2 Huic investigamlie inservire proposui. Contra Academ., lib. iii. 43. 
 
350 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 of Alexandria asserts that before the coming of the Saviour 
 philosophy was requisite to lead man to justice, and that now 
 it leads him to piety, 1 it is plain that in speaking thus that 
 Father means by philosophy, as we do, the aspiration of the 
 soul towards wisdom, the labor of reason and of liberty, in 
 every man, to gain light and virtue. 
 
 It is therefore in behalf of philosophy, thus conceived, that 
 we labor. We desire to make it known, and to arouse it, if 
 may be, in every soul. We know no other genuine philoso- 
 phy than that philosophy true aspiration towards all wis- 
 dom which seeks religion when deprived of it, and glorifies 
 it when found. 
 
 Let us note, in the words of Saint Clement which we have 
 just quoted, the distinction which he makes between philoso- 
 phy before the coming of Christ and philosophy after Christ. 
 Here we again find the two watersheds in the history of the 
 human mind, before and beyond the Cross; and, which is 
 the same thing, the two states of human reason, according as 
 it is deprived of faith or illumined by it, which again re- 
 sponds to the great distinction between the two regions of 
 the world of intelligibility, which all real philosophers have 
 conjectured or known. 
 
 It is this supreme distinction which we desire, above all, 
 to establish in philosophy, and it is this that marks the dif- 
 ference between the two parts of this Treatise on the Knowl- 
 edge of God. " There are," says Saint Thomas Aquinas, " two 
 ways of knowing God ; there are two degrees of the divine 
 intelligible, and the wise man should seek to know God in 
 both these degrees." 
 
 Not that we intend to set forth, in this work, what Saint 
 Thomas calls the highest degree of the divine intelligible : that 
 would necessitate a statement of theology, the doctrine of 
 
 1 Atque erat quidem ante Domini adventum philosophia Graecis necessaria 
 ad justitiam; nunc autem est utilis ad pietatem. 
 
TWO DEGREES OF THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 351 
 
 faith; but we shall try, in this philosophical treatise, to 
 make known the foundation of this great distinction, and 
 the relation of reason to the two degrees of the divine 
 intelligible. 
 
 We must essentially distinguish three things when we 
 speak of philosophy, namely, the abuse of reason, whence 
 sophistry results ; the purely human use of reason, or philo- 
 sophy before faith, which is the duty of the mind destitute 
 of faith ; and lastly, the use of reason enlightened by faith, 
 philosophy both human and divine, which is peculiarly the 
 philosophy of Christians and total wisdom. 
 
 It is indispensable to know these three states of reason, 
 these three tendencies of the human mind, if we would 
 avoid the one which leads to yawning abysses, and would 
 not linger with the one which remains on the earth, which 
 becomes corrupt if it does not advance, but which, when it 
 advances, becomes, as De Maistre expresses it, the human 
 preface to the Gospel, or, according to Baronius, the vestibule 
 of the Church of Christ. 
 
 To speak precisely, there are actually but two tendencies 
 of the mind, the one towards God, the other away from 
 God. For when the middle tendency, which seeks God in 
 the limitations of human nature, is true to itself, aided by 
 God, it mounts higher. God, by a new principle which he 
 gives it, changes it into a divine virtue. But, on the con- 
 trary, when the purely human tendency is opposed to that 
 which is superior to it, through this very fact it changes its 
 own course ; it turns round, belies its nature, becomes a 
 sophistical and perverse tendency, and falls below the level 
 of man, towards those degrees of debased intelligence which 
 Saint James calls a carnal and diabolic wisdom. 
 
 The knowledge of these states of the human mind, of their 
 relations, and of the causes which lead a soul from one to 
 the other, which sometimes urge to its natural conclusion 
 
352 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the effort after wisdom, and then raise it higher than man, 
 and sometimes turn it back and convert it into a revolt 
 against all truth, this knowledge would surely suffice to 
 put an end to all the intellectual scandals of the present 
 day, both to those of lawless sophistry and those of the 
 apparent strife between reason and faith. These scandals 
 must be overcome if we desire to see humanity, held 
 back now for more than a century, resume its progressive 
 march. 
 
 Let us therefore try to make these three states of rea- 
 son known to all. 
 
 II. 
 
 First, let us descend into our own soul, and into the life 
 of our own mind, to seek the initial elements of this knowl- 
 edge. There is no one who has not hesitated between these 
 three states, who has not been inclined to each in turn, or 
 has not really passed from one to the other. 
 
 Unhappily, scarcely any one studies his own soul enough, 
 or exercises what true observers call the discernment of 
 minds. Still, as all these various movements constitute our 
 daily history, I hope that if we succeed in describing them 
 truthfully in these pages, they may be readily recognized 
 by all. 
 
 First comes what is certain, and what each of us sees in 
 himself. 
 
 There is something that speaks within us. Is it our- 
 self ? Is it something other than ourself ? " Is it I, or 
 another ? " said Saint Augustine ; " is it I and another at the 
 same time ? " This is not the question now. But what is 
 certain is, that there is in us an inner conversation, which is 
 not always made up of lucid discussion or finished speech 
 and luminous thoughts, but oftener of vague thoughts, im- 
 
TWO DEGREES OF THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 353 
 
 pressions, and sensations. There are clear and cold views; 
 there are ardent and impassioned movements ; there are 
 secret impressions, implicit desires, almost imperceptible 
 lights. 
 
 Now, amidst all these sensations, does your soul main- 
 tain a constant and habitual effort after wisdom, that is 
 to say, towards light and virtue ? Do you unceasingly tend 
 and aspire towards something better and greater than your- 
 self ? Or do you live in an habitual and secret state of despair 
 of attaining to truth and freedom ? Or again, formally con- 
 senting to this guilty despair, and turning it into a deliberate 
 maxim, do you deny in your heart virtue, truth, the future 
 of the soul, and do you turn all your efforts to the search 
 after present joys ? 
 
 These are the two tendencies, one towards God, and 
 the other away from God. But the tendency towards God, 
 the march towards wisdom, has two degrees. 
 
 Do you search anxiously ? Do you seek with doubt 
 which is ever renewed in regard to the sum total of truth, 
 although you may be certain in regard to some details, and 
 you have flickering lights, sometimes bright and sometimes 
 dim ? Have you no assurances save those which bestow no 
 peace, rational lights, as certain as geometry, but as cold 
 as it ; knowledges full of defects and regrets ; persuasions 
 ever seeking for more upon which to rest ? Do you feel a 
 state of mental exile ? Do you see all the truth which you 
 perceive, as being outside yourself, and remote, like a star 
 in some other world, which does indeed send us a few of 
 its rays, but does not warm us ? 
 
 If you seek thus, it is certain that you have reached the 
 first degree of the tendency towards wisdom. That wisdom 
 appeals to yon, since you seek it; it appeals to you con- 
 stantly, though indirectly, since it leaves you no peace, since 
 it never ceases to show you the vanity of what you possess, 
 
 23 
 
354 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the imperfection and defects of all your knowledge and all 
 your present virtue. You are like the Jews under the 
 law, which makes sin abound, says Saint Paul, because it 
 renders it visible ; but you are not yet subject to grace, 
 which will bring you light. But yet, if you persevere in 
 your attempt, if your effort is maintained, if your faith in 
 the light to come remains unshaken, you will have fulfilled 
 the duty of that degree of life ; you will have done what 
 was in you, and you have reason to hope that God will not 
 refuse to raise you to the higher degree. 
 
 That higher degree is known only to those souls whom 
 God himself raises to it. Its chief characteristic is peace. 
 When divine wisdom enters the soul, its first words are 
 those of Jesus Christ when he entered the room at the Last 
 Supper : " Peace be with you." It then seems to the soul 
 that it is no longer alone. It seems as if the Truth said to it, 
 " I, who spake to you from afar, am here with you (Ego ipse 
 qui loquebar, ecce adsum)" The soul feels that it is founded, 
 rooted, in a new principle, which it possesses, which exists 
 in it, in which it exists. It no longer hesitates or shifts in 
 regard to its principle, as in the foregoing degree, but it pos- 
 sesses it and is conjoined to it. It is no longer outside of 
 its centre, ever impelled to hasten in order to approach it, 
 but it is within that centre which attracted it. Its task and 
 its motion change their nature. It was, as Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas says, an oblique and discursive motion ; it is now 
 a sort of motionless motion, comparable to the motion of a 
 sphere which is at rest by its centre, and in motion by its 
 circumference. It was the course of a mind seeking its 
 point of departure and its principle ; it is now the expansion 
 of an intelligence unfolding in the light, because it contains 
 the principle of light. The love of wisdom no longer lies 
 for that soul in seeking unknown wisdom (Greed sapientiam 
 qucerunt), but in glorifying the wisdom it has found, which 
 
TWO DEGREES OF THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 355 
 
 is self-given and which dwells within us (nos autem prcedi- 
 camus . . . Dei sapientiam). Woe to them whose effort is 
 again relaxed, and who neglect the present wisdom, while 
 others still await the wisdom to come ! If they withdraw 
 now, they will quickly fall to the lowest degree of that outer 
 darkness where all those dwell who despair of virtue and 
 truth. 
 
 Thus the soul sometimes turns its effort in a contrary di- 
 rection, surrenders its will to evil, and its intelligence to error ; 
 again, it indeed pursues wisdom, but without possessing its 
 principle ; and yet again it possesses that principle, and labors 
 to display its light. 
 
 These three states of soul correspond to the states of phi- 
 losophy, of which we find one in the sophists of all ages ; 
 another in the great philosophers of antiquity, such as Plato 
 and Aristotle ; and the other in the great Christian philoso- 
 phers, such as Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. 
 Only as those who are capable of the most are capable of the 
 least, we see how Saint Thomas could write, besides his Theo- 
 logical Sum, his Sum addressed to the heathen, where he 
 starts with philosophy as it may be in the middle and purely 
 human degree. We see that, following his example and in 
 his footsteps, we should strive, in this work, to present phi- 
 losophy on its seizable side to those who, destitute of the 
 gift of faith, can as yet bring to it only the effort of healthy 
 reason. 
 
 III. 
 
 But what can the causes be which drag minds down from 
 the middle to the lower degree, or which hinder them from 
 rising to the higher degree, or which, finally, permit the eter- 
 nal wisdom to address to them the blessed invitation of the 
 Gospel : " Friend, go up higher." 
 
356 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Let us imagine a mind established in this middle degree, a 
 mind in which we find the beginning of philosophical life ; 
 by this I mean the effort after wisdom. What is the duty of 
 that soul ? What is its law ? Clearly this is its law , " Thou 
 shalt seek with all thy soul, with all thy heart, with all thy 
 mind, and with all thy strength." . But, I ask, who is there 
 that fulfils this law ? No man fulfils it, I might say with 
 Saint Paul. No man advances towards wisdom with all 
 his soul, all his heart, all his mind, and all his strength. 
 Men devote a part of their powers and faculties thereto, 
 but not all. 
 
 And, first, do you not find it easier to seek wisdom with 
 your whole mind than with your whole soul and heart ? Do 
 you not feel that we may indeed devote our whole intelli- 
 gence to the task, but not our whole will ? Is not this the 
 usual state of the soul? I speak of the best souls, those 
 whom the beauty of wisdom attracts. They regard it as a 
 bright ideal which they love to contemplate, but which they 
 will make a part of their life later ! We see the good, but 
 we follow after the bad. This is the history of humanity. 
 
 Thus, first, we may seek wisdom with our whole mind, 
 but not with our whole heart, nor consequently with all our 
 powers, since the heart is one of our powers, and indeed the 
 chief of them. But, moreover, is it indeed true that we de- 
 vote our whole mind to it ? Do you not observe that it is 
 very rare for our mind to spread its wings, and consequently 
 put forth all its powers ? By this I mean that it is very 
 rarely that our mind takes a flight and leaves the earth to 
 rise higher in search of the unknown. And this because the 
 human mind is naturally self-sufficient. Man scarcely be- 
 lieves that there is anything absolutely unknown to him. 
 Even minds whose evident poverty should most distress 
 them, even those minds most destitute of light, those minds 
 even above all find it hard to believe that there exists a 
 
TWO DEGREES OF THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 357 
 
 light greater than themselves ; they refuse to leave self be- 
 hind by some vigorous impulse; they do indeed try to de- 
 duce what they do not know from that which they know, but 
 they do not try to acquire those things of which they are 
 wholly ignorant, because a secret pride leads them to declare 
 that there is nothing of which they are absolutely ignorant. 
 The mind is indocile in proportion as it lacks light, and far- 
 ther removed from humility in proportion to its pettiness. 
 To leave self behind, as Fe'nelon says, that we may enter the 
 infinite of God, is a thing which minds without greatness 
 refuse more stubbornly than others. 
 
 What can we say, save that the mind itself, in this case, 
 does not seek wisdom with all its powers, and this secret 
 disposition which maintains it in its present light and in 
 the identity of its actual wisdom, deprives it of the chief of 
 the two movements of reason, that which soars upward, 
 leaving to it only that which deduces or infers. 
 
 All true progress is impossible to such a soul. Its will, its 
 practical life, almost estranged from search and effort, never 
 grows ; its mind never discovers ; it does not acquire any new 
 principle, any fresh revelation ; it amplifies what it possessed, 
 and deduces consequences therefrom, but does not gain what 
 it does not already possess, and does not arrive at any essen- 
 tial novelty. 
 
 In these inner facts of the soul you have the history of 
 that average philosophy, purely human, purely speculative, 
 and incomplete even in its speculation, which is locked up 
 in itself, and does not attain to real wisdom, to Christianity 
 and its supernatural faith, that new and divine principle. 
 
 Nor is this all. As some one has said, Life must live, 
 that is, must grow and develop. 
 
 And this law of progress is so far necessary that, sooner 
 than pause, life, when necessary, will move in an inverse 
 sense, and will progress backwards. 
 
358 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 So that, if the natural effort of the soul towards wisdom 
 be constantly arrested from above, because of the decided 
 refusal of the will to leave self behind and enter the infinite 
 of God, there will come a time when wisdom, tired of at- 
 tracting it in vain, will repel it. Or rather, a time will 
 come when the soul itself, tired of constant motion without 
 ever reaching the end, of constant search without ever find- 
 ing its object, and of constant oscillation, says Plato, between 
 the lower and the middle regions, without ever penetrating 
 the higher, the soul, I say, will turn entirely, and change 
 its course. As it demands, first and foremost, happiness 
 and novelty, it will try if, by letting itself fall, it may not 
 find the happiness and life which it did not gain by an 
 indolent effort to rise. " There is nothing above," it will say 
 to itself; "let us look below." 
 
 Such is sophistry, the carnal and diabolic wisdom of which 
 Saint James speaks. The soul then no longer merely stifles 
 the inspirations of God, it turns them round ; and the 
 hidden spring, which comes from God's immediate contact 
 with the root of the soul, according to Plato, Bossuet, and 
 others, being unable to raise it to God, hurls it downward. 
 
 We again encounter this latter feature in that purely 
 human philosophy, which, not seeking wisdom with all its 
 strength, and hence not attaining the end of reason, is at 
 last wearied, and often turns back, is transformed, and be- 
 comes the exact opposite of philosophy, the source of all 
 those monstrous errors which should be regarded, distinctly 
 says Saint Thomas Aquinas, as outside the pale of philoso- 
 phy (extraneas philosophice opiniones). 
 
 Close examination would show how this fall results in the 
 soul's failure to fulfil its law, that is, to seek with all its 
 heart, all its mind, and all its strength. 
 
 The soul begins by bringing its effort to bear upon the 
 mind alone, not sufficiently sustaining the mind by the 
 
TWO DEGREES OF THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 359 
 
 heart and practical will. Hence, in the vigorous and pro- 
 found words of the Gospel, "It doeth not the truth," it 
 merely looks at it. Hence comes all the mischief. The 
 soul, not working wisdom in itself, cannot grow in wisdom, 
 and limits itself to considering from the outside an abstract 
 ideal towards which it does not advance. At first it looks 
 and longs at the sight of this beauty, from which it is im- 
 measurably remote. Soon it ceases to long; the charm of 
 the ideal lessens in proportion as we gaze without approach- 
 ing and reflect without acting. Our knowledge is, after all, 
 but a reflection of our life. Knowledge is experimental in 
 its better half. If moral life grows less, how can intellec- 
 tual truth increase ? " For he that doeth truth, cometh to 
 the light," says the Gospel ; " and every one that doeth evil, 
 hateth the light, neither cometh to the light." But, in truth, 
 from the very fact that we do not seek wisdom with all our 
 strength, with heart and mind alike, but rather with the 
 mind alone ; from this very fact we no longer seek it with 
 our whole mind. The mind has its roots in the heart, and 
 necessarily clings to the will even in the unity of the soul. 
 There are sensations which the isolated mind cannot know ; 
 the mind can deduce by itself, but it cannot soar by itself. 
 We lessen the upward flight of the intelligence in proportion 
 as we isolate it and as the whole soul does not assist it with 
 all its powers. How, then, can we expect such a mind to 
 rise to the highest region of the intelligible, and reason, so 
 ill supported, to attain the goal ? 
 
 It can only vacillate between the lower and the middle 
 regions, become exhausted by this sterile toil, drop back, 
 invert its effort, and seek progress by its fall. 
 
360 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 IV. 
 
 We will now show how, on the contrary, it is granted to 
 the soul to rise from the medium and purely human state 
 which seeks wisdom, to the divine, supernatural state, which 
 possesses it. 
 
 To understand this, we must admit that wisdom seeks, to 
 bestow herself on all, and traverses the nations, as the holy 
 Scripture says, to form friends of God therein. We must ad- 
 mit that this wisdom is God, and that it continually solicits 
 every soul. " Eternal wisdom," says Saint Augustine, " never 
 ceaseth to address every soul, to the end that it may attract 
 and convert it." We must admit, what is plain, that the 
 majority of men oppose an obstacle thereto in the bottom of 
 their soul, and, what is no less plain, that the soul, in the 
 middle state where we have imagined it, should unceasingly 
 aspire and tend towards that wisdom which ceases not to 
 solicit it, that is, towards the attraction of the desirable 
 and intelligible. The soul should not cease to groan and 
 sigh, in view of the obstacle, the imperfection and vice which 
 dwejl within it, and which remove it from the light of God. 
 Let us, however, suppose that this aspiration, beneath the 
 attraction of God, by the good will of man, becomes ever 
 more and more vivid and sincere, and that the soul, in- 
 creasing its effort, more and more sets its heart upon it. 
 Then it will be granted to it, by the anticipative goodness of 
 God, to effect a first advance, that of understanding and 
 feeling, better than it could before it began to struggle, that 
 between it and wisdom lies the infinite, and that an effort 
 a thousand times greater would not bring it any closer, an 
 immense although a negative advance, without which wis- 
 dom is never to be given. But if the soul possessed the 
 secret of life, it would know that this deep and humil- 
 
TWO DEGREES OF THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE. 361 
 
 iating vision of its own insignificance is the sign of the ap- 
 proach of God. The soul has struggled, hoped, recognized 
 its impotence, seen its infinite distance from God, and yet it 
 still hopes ; it understands that God desires to give himself, 
 since he makes himself desired and sought ; it therefore does 
 that which is in it, it removes, in so far as in its power, 
 the obstacle to God's coming, which in fact forewarned it, 
 and without which it could never have desired or sought or 
 struggled or recognized its impotence, and far less hoped, 
 in spite of the vision of its own insignificance. God there- 
 fore, so soon as he will, and he will as soon as the obstacle 
 on man's side is removed, God bestows himself, and the 
 mystery of regeneration is fulfilled. God gives the mind 
 and soul a new life, which is the possession of the very 
 principle of wisdom, which is God. The soul passes from 
 alarm to peace, from search to possession. God establishes 
 it in a state which is the germ and the beginning of eternal 
 life. 
 
 We have spoken of purely human philosophy ; we have 
 explained what arrests it ; we also know what turns it aside 
 and hurls it headlong. We have pointed out what consti- 
 tutes its progress ; then what transforms it, raises it above 
 itself and above man. But this important point requires 
 ample study. Now, as the true progress of healthy reason 
 clearly is to attain its end, as Saint Augustine says (ratio 
 perveniens ad finem suum *), as that end is a new light other 
 than that which it at first possessed ; as that light is no 
 other than the supernatural light of faith, announced by 
 Christianity, it follows that we shall here enter upon a sort 
 
 1 Let us not forget that these words of Saint Augustine can be under- 
 stood only in the sense of Saint Thomas, when he speaks of reason which has 
 attained its highest degree of perfection through supernatural light (ratio 
 perfecta lumine supernaturali). Perfected reason, raised above itself, is rea- 
 son which has attained its supernatural end, very different from its natural 
 end. It is to the supernatural end that Saint Augustine alludes here. 
 
3C2 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 of Treatise as to the relations of reason and faith ; or, if you 
 prefer, the relations of reason to the highest degree of the 
 divine intelligible. 
 
 There is a void in almost every treatise on philosophy : 
 they lack a special chapter on the relations of reason and 
 faith. This void must be filled up in future. Already The- 
 ology, on its side, extending its hand to Philosophy, has in- 
 troduced, among its other divisions, a special treatise on the 
 relations of reason and faith. 1 Philosophy, in its turn, must 
 follow that example. 
 
 This is what we now undertake. 
 
 1 See Perrone's Theology: Tractatus de Analogia fidei et rationis. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 
 
 ^ I ^HE distinction between healthy, right, and useful hu- 
 man philosophy, and sterile and hide-bound or per- 
 verse and introverted philosophy, is that true philosophy, in its 
 full effort after total wisdom, may be called by the name given 
 it by the Middle Ages, " Intelligence in search of faith." This 
 work will reveal it more and more ; and, to our thinking, we 
 have already proved it by our studies of Plato, Aristotle, 
 Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the seventeenth 
 century. If it be true that all philosophers of the first rank 
 and notably Plato make a distinction between the two 
 regions of the intelligible world ; if this distinction has its 
 root in the very core of philosophy ; if it be certain, as phi- 
 losophers and theologians superabundantly declare, that one of 
 these two degrees is the perception of absolute and necessary 
 truths, as God impresses them upon our native reason, and 
 which constitute that reason, while the other is the direct, 
 immediate perception of the source which causes these truths 
 to shine within us, that is, of God, viewed, not in a mirror, 
 but in himself ; if it be true that faith is the attempt at or 
 beginning of that direct vision, as Saint Thomas Aquinas and 
 Bossuet say, and that hence it is distinguished from the 
 reason which, of itself, is incapable of this vision, and can 
 only grieve after it and conjecture it, if all this be true, it 
 results that the healthy and right reason is that which seeks 
 both regions of the intelligible, and pursues its double per- 
 
364 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 fection, natural and supernatural, as Saint Thomas expresses 
 it : it follows that the true philosophy is that which seeks, 
 regrets, desires, waits for faith when it is without it, and 
 which, when it finds it, takes firm root in it, develops it, 
 raises itself above itself by this supernatural support, and 
 bears, through this divine strength, fruits which it could not 
 otherwise bear. 
 
 Let us, therefore, enter with attention and respect upon 
 this study of the relations of faith and reason. What is rea- 
 son ? What is faith ? What relation unites them ? What 
 can reason do without faith ? What is its duty when faith 
 is given ? 
 
 It has not been sufficiently noted that Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas, the most vigorous metaphysical genius, perhaps, 
 who ever lived, the one of all writers in whom knowledge 
 and sanctity, reason and faith, were best combined, wrote 
 two principal works, the Theological Sum and the Philosophi- 
 cal Sum, and that these two works correspond exactly to 
 the two states of reason and philosophy, to the two regions 
 of the intelligible world. In the Theological Sum, the holy 
 doctor, as a learned oratorian 1 observes, " merely translates 
 the simplicity of the Gospel into philosophy ; " it is philosophy 
 after faith, or faith seeking for intelligence (fides qucerens 
 intellectual). In the Sum addressed to the Heathen, Saint 
 Thomas himself declares that it being clearly the duty of 
 the wise to traverse both regions of divine truths, that which 
 reason attains of itself, and that which transcends its effort, 
 he intends, in that book, to seek by the rational way all 
 that human reason can attain of God. This is philosophy 
 before faith; it is intelligence seeking faith (intellectus 
 queer ens fidem). 
 
 In the beginning of the Philosophic Sum, Saint Thomas 
 states in these terms the distinction between the two regions 
 
 1 Amelotte, Vie de Condren. 
 

 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 365 
 
 of the intelligible world, the two orders of divine truths, or 
 rather the two modes in which it may be given to man to 
 know God, a double knowledge, which he who seeks wisdom 
 should pursue impartially. He says, 
 
 " Since there are men who do not accept the authority of reve- 
 lation, we must have recourse to the use of the natural reason, 
 to which every man is forced to submit, but which, however, in 
 divine things has but a limited range. 
 
 " There is, in what touches God, a double mode of truth. There 
 are, in God, truths which all the powers of the human mind can- 
 not reach. . . . There are others which the natural reason can 
 reach, such as the existence and unity of God, and those of similar 
 nature, which philosophers, indeed, led by the natural light of 
 reason, have demonstrated. 1 
 
 " To scan the depths of the sovereign essence, and the trans- 
 cendant side of the divine intelligible, is clearly beyond the hu- 
 man reason ; and this Aristotle himself seems to have understood 
 when he asserts (Metaph. ii.) that in regard to the principle of 
 the Being which, from its nature, is light itself, our intelligence is 
 as the eye of the owl in presence of the sun." 2 
 
 Saint Thomas adds, 
 
 "There are, then, two degrees of truth in the divine intelligible: 
 one attainable by the search of reason, and the other, which trans- 
 cends its efforts." 3 
 
 The holy doctor concludes, 
 
 " It clearly results from what has just been said that the wise 
 man should devote himself to these two orders of divine truths, 
 one of which is accessible to the investigation of reason, the other 
 of which transcends all that its zeal can attain. It is understood 
 that when I distinguish two orders of truths in the divine intelli- 
 gible, I fully comprehend that it is not so in God, who is single 
 and simple truth ; this distinction relates only to the human 
 understanding, which has two modes of knowing God." 4 
 
 1 Contra Gentes, cap. iii. 8 Ibid. cap. iv. 
 
 2 Ibid., cap. iii. 3. 4 Ibid., cap. ix. 
 
366 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 What Saint Thomas says here is of the utmost impor- 
 tance. In these passages, the two degrees of the intelligible 
 are clearly distinguished one from the other. Man may 
 attain to one by natural reason, such as it is, and he can 
 only attain to the other through faith. This distinction 
 relates to man only, not to God. In him there is one only 
 truth, which is God. But man may know this truth in two 
 ways. The two lights of which theology treats, the natural 
 light and the supernatural light, are in God but one and the 
 same light, variously received by man. And Saint Thomas 
 asserts, as an evident fact, that the wise man should study 
 both. 
 
 This distinction being clearly established, with this im- 
 portant reserve, that it is not relative to God, but to man, that 
 is to say, it being fully understood that the same God is the 
 source of the light of reason as well as of the light of faith, 
 and that in him there is but one light, let us strive to know 
 fully wherein reason and faith consist, what they are in re- 
 gard one to the other. 
 
 II. 
 
 There is God, there is the soul. God is a light which en- 
 lightens the soul, and which the soul can conceive in two 
 ways. But what is the characteristic feature of these two 
 ways ? " The light of reason," says Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
 " by which we know the principles of truth, is a light which 
 God sheds within us ; it is an image of the uncreated truth 
 which is reflected in us." 1 
 
 This is what we have already frequently repeated, with 
 Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Thomassin : 
 reason is the light of God, seen in us, reflected in the mirror 
 of the soul, in the words of Saint Paul. " The assurance of 
 reason proceeds from a light which God gives us inwardly 
 
 1 Verit., qusest. ii. art. i. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 367 
 
 and by which he speaks in us. 1 ' God maketh the light of his 
 face to shine upon us,' says the Psalmist. This is the light 
 of natural reason, which is the image of God." 2 Saint 
 Thomas, following Saint Augustine in this (it is, moreover, 
 the constant doctrine of the Fathers, of the Theologians, and 
 of the Holy Scripture), always insists upon this lofty origin of 
 reason. To him, " reason is the impression made upon us by 
 divine light." 3 To him, " the natural light, thrown into the 
 soul, is the illumination of God." 4 To him, " the principles 
 of practical, as well as of speculative reason, are natural data 
 which exist in the soul." 5 But this vision in ourselves of 
 the light of God, Saint Thomas calls, with Saint Paul, seeing 
 in a glass; 6 it is absolutely distinct from the sight of the 
 light of God in God, which is no longer specular vision, but 
 rather vision through essence. 7 
 
 " Doubtless," says Saint Thomas Aquinas, " when we see, 
 by reason, certain immutable, eternal truths, which hence 
 are beyond us, we may see that we see them in God, since 
 we know nothing save through his light, and since reason is 
 a participation in that light ; for, says Saint Augustine, these 
 intelligible spectacles are only made visible to us as illumi- 
 nated by their sun, which is God. But even as in the world 
 of bodies, to see objects beneath the sun, it is not necessary 
 to see the substance and orb of the sun, so too with this 
 intellectual vision through the reason, it is not necessary to 
 see the essence of God." 8 
 
 In telling us what reason is, Saint Thomas begins to make 
 
 1 Verit., quaest. ii. art. 1. 
 
 - Comment, in Paul. 
 
 3 1. 2". q. xci. art. 2. 
 
 * 1". 2 e . q. ix. art. 1. 
 
 5 Naturaliter nobis esse indita sicut principia speculabilium ita et principia 
 operabilium. 
 
 6 Visio specularis. 
 
 7 Cognitio per esseutiam. 
 
 8 l a . q. xii. art. 11 ad 3". 
 
368 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 clear to us what faith is. Eeason is like seeing the world 
 beneath the sun, and faith, or at least that vision of which 
 faith is an essay, a foretaste, an imperfect participation, is 
 like seeing the sun itself. 1 
 
 This again rests upon the noble text already quoted in our 
 study of the Theodicy of Saint Thomas Aquinas : " Light, 
 during our earthly sojourn, is given to us in two ways. 
 Sometimes in a less degree, and, as it were, from a faint ray : 
 this is the light of our natural intelligence, which is a partici- 
 pation in the eternal light, but remote, defective, comparable 
 to a shadow mingled with a little light : which gives man 
 that reason, the shadow of intelligence, whose" feeble radi- 
 
 1 The word, faith, says Billuart, has several meanings. Sometimes, for in- 
 stance, it signifies consciousness (what we call natural faith, or divine sense) ; 
 sometimes it signifies the teaching of the faith, the object itself of faith ; some- 
 times, again, it signifies that divine virtue whose principle is grace, whose formal 
 object is God alone, whose formal motive is the wisdom and authority of God 
 alone, whose material object is all that God has revealed, and whose rule is the 
 Catholic Church alone. It is this virtue, taken in itself, considered as a 
 supernatural gift, in the supernatural light which constitutes it, that Saint 
 Thomas, transforming Saint Paul's phrase, defines as "A habit of the soul 
 with which eternal life begins in us, and by which the intelligence clings to di- 
 vine things which it sees not (Fides est habitus mentis quo inchoatur vita ceterna 
 in nobis, faciens inteUectum non apparentibus assentire)." Still, Saint Thomas 
 does not insist so strongly on the obscurity of faith that he does not also say : 
 "Faith is, in a certain sense, knowledge and vision (Fides etiam guodammodo 
 scientia et visio dicitur)." (Verit. xiv. art. 4.) And elsewhere: "Faith is 
 an imperfect beginning of future knowledge (Fides est qucedam prcelibatio brevis 
 cognitionis quam infuturo habemus)." (Verit., art. 2, ad 9 m .) Saint Thomas 
 also makes the word, faith synonymous with supernatural light, when he says : 
 " That light which is faith, is that which produces assent to divine truths ; 
 and it is hence that it is akin to perfection ; but we do not possess this light 
 perfectly, intellectual imperfection subsists with faith (Ex lumine simplici, 
 quod est fides, causatur id quod perfectionis est, assentire ; sed in quantum illud 
 lumen non perfecte parti cipatur, non totaliter tollitur imperfectio intellectus)." 
 (Verit. xiv. 2 ad 5 m . ) It is in this sense that several catechisms define faith : 
 "A gift of God and a supernatural light which makes us cling to the truths 
 revealed by God." It is of course understood that here we are speaking par- 
 ticularly of the intellectual element of faith. There is a voluntary element of 
 which we must never lose sight, and of which Saint Thomas says, In cogni- 
 tionefidei principalitatem habet voluntas (Contra Gentes, 1. in. c. xl.). 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 369 
 
 ance engenders diversity of opinions which the direct radi- 
 ation of light will destroy. Sometimes again we receive light 
 in a greater degree, in more abundance, and we are brought, 
 as it were, face to face with the sun. But then our eyes are 
 dazzled, because we contemplate that which transcends human 
 sense ; and this is the light of faith." 
 
 Whence it clearly results, as from our entire study of the 
 Theodicy of Saint Thomas, that, in the opinion of the Angelic 
 Doctor, there are two degrees of the divine intelligible, to 
 which reason and faith correspond; that light, in itself, is one, 
 but that the created spirit sees it in two ways, directly or 
 indirectly. Or rather, it sees the likeness of it in itself, 1 the 
 image and the reflection ; and this reflected light is the light 
 of reason. Or the created spirit may see light in God him- 
 self ; it may see, no longer in itself, but in God, its source 
 and its direct rays, as when an eye beholds the sun. And 
 this direct light is the supernatural light, which begins in 
 faith, although it only attains its consummation in the 
 beatific vision. 
 
 This distinction between reason and faith, between natural 
 and supernatural light, is that of all Christian theology. 
 Let us recall that which we saw in our study of Thomassin. 
 There we found precisely the same doctrine, and, as it were, 
 the* commentary of Saint Thomas. According to Thomassin, 
 reason doubtless sees the truth of God ; but it only receives 
 the light thereof in a tempered condition, according as it can 
 bear it in its present state. They are rays of the eternal light 
 of the AVord, but let down to us (condescensiones quasdam). 
 These same rays constitute reason (hoc sic inest rationi, ut 
 hoc ipsum ipsa ratio sit). It is God revealing himself to 
 souls, not such as he is, but such as they are (radius Deitatis 
 ostendentis se, non qualis ipsa est, sed quales ipsce sunt). 
 And, further says Thomassin, copying Saint Gregory of Nyssa, 
 
 1 Similitude veritatis increatse in nobis resultantis. 
 24 
 
370 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 who speaks as do Augustine and Plato, these rays are simu- 
 lacra, images and imitations of God (simulacra, similitudines 
 et quasi imit amenta). Yea, he says, this is a simulacrum, 
 and a very luminous image of divinity. The spectacle of 
 eternal principles, according to Saint Augustine (spectacula 
 ilia ceternarum rationum), is God when he sends us his 
 light, and impresses it upon us ; but it is not God himself 
 directly present (non immigrando, sed inscribendo) ; in a 
 word, says Thomassin, this degree of the divine intelligible, 
 according to Saint Thomas, is like unto a mirror in which 
 God shows himself by sending his rays into it (nimirum hcec 
 specula sunt in qiice radios suos Deus ejaculatur, in quibus 
 videtur). 
 
 In Thomassin's opinion, this doctrine in regard to the 
 nature of reason, namely, that it is only a certain aspect of 
 the Word, and that immutable, geometrical, logical, and 
 moral truths are seen in the light of the Word, this doc- 
 trine is not only that of the Fathers and Theologians, it is 
 plainly that of Christ and the Holy Gospel. 
 
 Having characterized reason, Thomassin describes the two 
 degrees of the intelligible with which we are striving to 
 become familiar. "The first degree of knowledge," he says, 
 "gives us certain necessary truths, which are eternal, immu- 
 table ; these are the eternal reasons, rays of the incorruptible 
 truth which is revealed always and everywhere to every 
 being endowed with reason. 
 
 " F>ut if a spirit love to follow this light, to linger and 
 purify itself in its rays, then it in its turn becomes light ; 
 it can receive true purity, and become the child of God, 
 worthy at last to see God." l 
 
 Thus, according to Thomassin, the first degree shows us 
 certain truths, immutable principles, which are the light of 
 the Word in the soul ; but the second shows us God him- 
 
 1 De Proleg. Theol., vol. iii. cap. ix. 1. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND^ FAITH. 371 
 
 self. Such are indeed the two degrees of the intelligible, of 
 which one is the natural sphere of reason, but the other is 
 supernatural, and is granted only to the regenerate, in that 
 light whose beginning is faith. In a word, the first degree 
 shows God in the mirror of the soul ; and the second, God 
 in himself. 
 
 Saint Augustine understands it no otherwise, as we have 
 already shown. But he expresses it in a particularly forci- 
 ble way when he calls the two lights " the illuminating light 
 and the illuminated light (lumen illuminans et lumen illumi- 
 natum)" Eeason perceives only the illuminated light. And 
 direct vision, of which faith is the attempt, has for object only 
 the illuminating light. This is what the great doctor teaches 
 when, speaking of his human knowledge before faith (cum 
 deformiter et sacrilega turpitudine in doctrina pietatis erro- 
 rem), 1 he compares himself to a man who turns his back to 
 the light, and his face to material objects. This comparison 
 is the exact truth upon this point. " I delighted in these 
 things," he says, "but knew not whence came all, what 
 therein was true or certain. For I had my lack to the light, 
 and my face to the things enlightened ; whence my face, 
 with which I discerned the things enlightened, itself was 
 not enlightened." 2 And it is not of sensible knowledge, 
 properly so called, that Saint Augustine speaks here, but 
 rather of rational knowledge ; he refers to abstract, geomet- 
 rical truths, immutable, necessary qualities, figures, and num- 
 bers (de dimentionibus figurarum et de musicis et de numeris). 
 The natural light of reason, according to Saint Augustine, 
 is therefore reflected light, while the other is direct. The 
 latter the eye receives itself, coming from its source, 
 and does not derive it from objects or abstract it from 
 creatures. 
 
 Now, these comparisons are the deepest and clearest ex- 
 
 1 Confess. I., lib. iv. cap. xiv. p. 31. 2 Ibid., p. 30. 
 
372 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 pressions of philosophy on this subject. Reason is a certain 
 vision of God, this is great and positive. But it is not the 
 direct, immediate view of the substance and essence of God. 
 It is a vision of God by means of reflection ; it is an image 
 of God which the soul perceives by seeing itself. 
 
 This is clear, simple, and certain, intelligible to all, useful, 
 fruitful, and the fiDal word uttered by philosophers of the 
 first order, and by theologians, in regard to the nature of 
 reason. 
 
 The importance and fertility of this theory of reason lies 
 especially in the fact that it also shows us that reason is 
 something correlative to faith ; so that when we know what 
 reason is, we also know, up to a certain point, what faith is. 
 If we comprehend that there are two modes of seeing God, 
 indirectly and in his image ; directly and in himself, we 
 comprehend that, if reason be the first of these two modes 
 in which man sees God, there remains the second. Every 
 philosopher will admit this, and the theologian may then 
 say, That second mode of seeing God is that which we call 
 supernatural. The philosopher, if he be a true philosopher, 
 will understand this. Moreover, we at once comprehend 
 that reason, having attained its natural end, and contem- 
 plating these intelligible spectacles, illuminated by that di- 
 vine sun which it does not see, may, as it did in Plato himself, 
 recognize that even these are but divine phantasms, conjec- 
 ture that the sun exists, and feel regret at not seeing it. 
 Now, the beginning, imperfect and obscure, of this super- 
 natural knowledge of God, is faith. 
 
 III. 
 
 This distinction is so fundamental and general that it 
 recurs, by analogy, throughout the history of the development 
 of man in relation to God. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 373 
 
 Saint Paul, establishing, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 the difference between the two Testaments, between the law 
 of Moses and Christian faith, had it in view. Ee-read that 
 Epistle. Throughout his constant comparison of the two 
 Testaments, of law and grace, 1 we find the analogy of reason 
 and faith. 
 
 In one, God spoke through the prophets (chap. i. 1); in the 
 other, he speaks to us directly through his Son, who is 
 God. One is the word of Moses, announcing God to us ; 
 the other is God himself (chap. iii. 3, 4). We must transcend 
 this first degree, which is weak, and does not move directly to 
 eternal salvation. The law did not give perfection. But we 
 have a better hope, that of union with God (chap. vii. 18, 19). 
 The priest of the law is only frail man ; but that which 
 comes after the law is the eternal and perfect Son (chap. viiL 
 28). In the Old Testament, God takes us by the hand; in 
 the New, God takes us by the heart (chap. viii. 9, 19). The 
 Old Testament is only the image and shadow of celestial 
 things (exemplari et umbrae ccelestium) ; the New gives us 
 celestial things themselves, heaven itself (ipsa ccelestia, ipsum 
 ccelum). (Chap. ix. 23, 24.) 
 
 There are two tabernacles, one of which is called the 
 worldly sanctuary (Sanctum sceculare), and the other the 
 Holy of Holies (Sanctum sanctorum), (chap. ix. 1, 3). The 
 latter was behind the veil. It is now revealed. Christ him- 
 self has become priest, to give us everlasting salvation by 
 this greater and more perfect tabernacle, which is not made 
 with hands ; that is to say, is not of this creation, but is 
 supernatural (chap. ix. 11, 12). 
 
 Yes, the law had but a shadow of good things to come 
 
 1 Not that we would maintain that there was no grace under the law and 
 in the law, a theory condemned by the Bull Auctorem Fidei. But this, far 
 from destroying our analogy, confirms it, for we also think, as will be shown 
 later, that, in real life, grace is continually blended with reason, even when 
 reason works in its own peculiar domain. 
 
374 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 (umbram enim habens lex futurorum bonorum) ; but the 
 just shall live by faith (Justus autem ex fide vivify. Faith is 
 the substance of things hoped for (est fides sperandarum 
 substantia rerum), (chap. x. 1 ; chap. xi. 1). Under the law 
 there was a voice which spake on earth, there is now a voice 
 which speaketh to us from heaven (chap. xii. 25, 27). And 
 that voice will change the earth, the transitory abode of man, 
 into the kingdom of God which cannot be moved. 
 
 IV. 
 
 This established, what can reason do without faith ? What 
 is its duty in advance of faith ? We have already stated 
 this at length in the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It 
 can attain to the first of the two orders of truths to be 
 distinguished in the divine intelligible. It can do this, it 
 should do this ; and, as an actual fact, according to the same 
 learned doctor, these truths, which are the existence of 
 God, his unity, and others of similar nature, have been 
 demonstrated by various philosophers, illumined by the 
 natural light of reason. 1 
 
 Natural reason may, without the aid of supernatural reve- 
 lation, know with certainty various truths, not only of the 
 geometric order, but also touching God, and we must accept 
 this theologic proposition : " Healthy reason, without the 
 aid of supernatural revelation, may know with certainty 
 various truths of the natural order, which we may call 
 preambles of faith." 2 We style an error of the super- 
 naturalists the error of those mentioned by Saint Thomas, 
 who hold " that the existence of God cannot be discovered 
 by reason, but must be received by the single means of 
 
 1 Contra Gentes, cap. iii. 
 
 2 Perrone, de Analogia rationis et fidei, prop. i. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 375 
 
 faith and revelation." l This is an error, he says, and he 
 refutes this error (hie error) at some length. 2 
 
 That fanatical tendency which would deny to natural rea- 
 son all power, whether to know God, or in general to 
 know anything with certainty, has often striven to spring 
 up in the Church, but has always been repelled, notably 
 in Luther, Calvin, Baius, Quesnel, and more recently in 
 Lamennais. 
 
 " Was it not Luther," says Erasmus, " who wrote that all 
 discipline, practical as well as speculative, is damnable ; 
 that all speculative sciences are sins and errors ? " 3 Luther 
 denied natural reason as well as free will. 
 
 According to Calvin, all the faculties of our soul are wholly 
 infected by evil. Moral freedom, of which man makes his 
 vain boast, is but a chimera. Man of himself can produce 
 nought save vicious acts and sins. Thus all our natural 
 faculties are accursed. 4 
 
 According to Baius, all the virtues of philosophers are 
 vices, and it is a Pelagian doctrine not to admit any natural 
 good, that is, any good produced by the unaided powers 
 of nature, and by the sole effort of philosophy. 5 
 
 Quesnel claimed that any knowledge of God, even natural, 
 even in heathen philosophy, can only proceed from God him- 
 self, and that, without grace, it produces only vanity, pre- 
 sumption, and opposition to God. 6 
 
 Lamennais not only denied that reason has the power to 
 know certain truths relative to God, he went so far as to 
 refuse reason the power of asserting with certainty our own 
 existence. " The rational certainty of our isolated existence," 
 he says, " would suppose as equally certain the certainty of 
 our reason and even its infallibility ; for to affirm that we 
 
 1 Contra Gentes, lib. i. cap. xii. * Institut., book iii. ch. ii. 
 
 2 Ibid., lib. i. cap. xii. 5 25-27, Baii. 
 8 Quoted by Perrone, vol. ii. p, 1393. 6 41, Quesnel. 
 
376 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 exist, is to express an opinion, and if it were possible to be 
 mistaken in saying / exist, we should not be rationally cer- 
 tain of our existence. To hold that every man possesses an 
 innate rational certainty of his existence, therefore, is to 
 declare that we accept the Cartesian philosophy, with all 
 its consequences. It is flinging ourselves into the midst of 
 the inconveniences, contradictions, and absurdities inherent 
 in that philosophy, which is as dangerous as it is stupid." 1 
 Surprising words, which fully justify Saint Augustine's 
 remark : " It is really to be feared that some may come to 
 distrust reason, or to detest it to the point of rejecting evi- 
 dence itself." 2 
 
 We know that this system has been completely refuted 
 by Father Eosaven, with irresistible logic arid great wealth 
 of learning. 3 
 
 Moreover, all these Lutheran, Calvinist, and Jansenist 
 errors, and all this pseudo-Catholic pyrrhonism, which sees 
 nothing but the wounds and sores of human nature, fails to 
 recognize its resources, refuses it all light and all power, and 
 deprives it of free will as well as reason, all these errors 
 have, in all times, been condemned by the Church. ,These 
 sombre doctrines, as has been observed, are allied to Mani- 
 cheism. Manicheism, that senseless flattery of the super- 
 natural order, taught that nature is the work of Satan, 
 that the order of grace alone is good, that the New Testa- 
 ment alone is true, and outside it and before it, all is false 
 and bad, even the Old Testament, even natural law, its 
 dogmas and precepts. 
 
 The least traces of these fundamental errors are subver- 
 sive, and it is not to be contested that the war upon reason 
 
 1 Defence of the Essay, p. 192. 
 
 2 De Magistro. 
 
 3 Review of a work entitled, " Philosophic Teachings in regard to Chris- 
 tianity, by J. L. Rosaven, S. J. Avignon, 1833." 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 377 
 
 is an insult to the Word of God, which is revealed as light 
 enlightening every man corning into the world. When the 
 Gospel speaks of the light of men, that light of men, say the 
 commentaries, which are accepted by Saint Thomas, is reason. 
 The Church, too, has never ceased to watch over this point, 
 and even recently (1849) one of the Provincial Councils of 
 France, revised and approved by the Holy See, pointed out 
 the error of writers who, " in order to aggrandize faith, de- 
 preciate reason excessively, thereby endangering the double 
 foundation of reason and faith, and threatening to over- 
 throw both." l This phenomenon is the opposite of that re- 
 vealed by the history of sophists, who, attacking faith in the 
 name of reason, end by denying reason. By dint of attack- 
 ing reason in the name of faith, faith too will be wrecked, 
 as the Council of Kennes declared. 
 
 From this point of view no one has ever fully noted and 
 praised the part played by the Jesuits in the history of Chris- 
 tian philosophy, and the way in which their imperturbable 
 good sense, in all ages, and in our own day, has always placed 
 them in the foremost rank of the defenders of reason and 
 human liberty. And, strange to say, if they have become 
 unpopular, it is particularly because they upheld, in the 
 seventeenth century, the cause of reason and liberty against 
 the popularity of the Jansenists. 2 
 
 V. 
 
 In general, what the Church reprobates is the negation of 
 any gift of God, natural or supernatural. 
 
 All orthodox theology on this head may be summed up 
 in a few words spoken by the pious and learned Cornelius 
 
 1 Council of Rennes, decree Ixiii. 
 
 2 See also the contemporary works of Fathers Chastel, Cahours, Daniel, etc. 
 
378 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 a Lapide, in his parallel of the two wisdoms, human 
 wisdom by reason, divine wisdom by grace and faith. 1 
 
 The judicious author begins by exalting the first, in order 
 to put the second higher yet. He considers sound reason 
 the guide of human life. 2 God, from the beginning, gave 
 man, proportioning it to his nature, a noble and divine law, 
 the expression of the eternal and living reasons which exist 
 in God. 3 Only, by sin this wisdom is dimmed, mingled 
 with errors and clouds, is deteriorated in many things (fu- 
 cata, nebulis errorum prcestrictct, sopita multis in rebus). 
 This is our reason, the source of natural wisdom. 
 
 But " if the profane wisdom of philosophers has been of so 
 much use and glory to the world, of how much greater use 
 and glory would that divine and sacred wisdom be, which 
 transcends that of philosophers as much as faith transcends 
 wisdom, grace nature, and heaven the earth ! " 4 This is 
 true ; the fruits of reason, even in antiquity, are good, but 
 those of grace and faith surpass them immeasurably. 
 
 " Wisdom's first title to glory is its origin. The origin of 
 natural wisdom is nature, that is, God, in so far as he is and 
 as he may be called creative nature, author and master of 
 nature. But the origin of supernatural and divine wisdom 
 is God, in so far as he is the author of grace and of all 
 supernatural goods." 5 Such is the orthodox point of view. 
 We have already proved it by Saint Thomas Aquinas. We 
 will now show it by an even greater theological authority. 
 
 The authority of Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose Theologic 
 Sum was placed in the Council of Trent face to face with 
 Holy Scripture, would be the highest of all authorities, did 
 there not exist a book, written by order of the Council of 
 Trent, to be distributed throughout the world as the com- 
 
 1 Heading of Commentary upon Ecclesiasticus, Antwerp, 1687. 
 
 2 Rectamrationem quasi datam sibi a Deo facem, sibique vise ac vitae ducem. 
 
 3 Commentary upon Ecclesiasticus. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 379 
 
 mon catechism of Catholicism. This book, written princi- 
 pally under the influence of Saint Charles Borromeo, and 
 published by Pius V., is called, in the preface to the work 
 itself, "the work of the Church Universal" (Universalis opus 
 Ecclesice). Now, this is the beginning of that (Ecumenical 
 Catechism : 
 
 " Such is the nature of the soul and of the human intelligence 
 that, although it may have discovered for itself, by diut of labor 
 and care, many truths in the order of divine things, yet the greater 
 part of those truths those which lead to eternal salvation, the 
 end for which God created man in his own image cannot be 
 seen by reason or known by natural light alone. 
 
 " The invisible perfections of God, as the Apostle teaches, his 
 eternal power and his divinity, are visible to the intelligence 
 through the spectacle of created things; but the hidden Mystery, 
 known neither to the ages nor the generations, so far transcends 
 human intelligence that had it not been manifested to the saints, 
 to whom God by the gift of faith has revealed the riches and 
 glory of his new alliance with men, no human effort could have 
 attained that mystery, that wisdom which is Jesus Christ." 
 
 This is the beginning of the Roman Catechism. Farther 
 on, in the body of the work, we find a complete parallel 
 established between reason and faith. We need only quote 
 it, reminding all Catholics that this is their catechism, as all 
 supreme Pontiffs for three centuries back have given it to 
 the entire Church. Here is the parallel : l 
 
 " The great difference between Christian philosophy and that 
 of the age lies in the fact that this latter, guided by natural light 
 alone, taking as its starting-point visible things and the opera- 
 tions of God, only rises to the comprehension of the invisible 
 perfections of God by slow degrees, with difficulty, after long 
 labor, and thus arrives at the knowledge that God exists, and 
 that he is the First Cause and Author of all things. But faith, 
 on the contrary, so elevates and strengthens the vision of the aoul 
 
 1 De Symbolo Fidei, cap. ii. 6, 7. 
 
380 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 that it enters heaven without effort, is there bathed in the light 
 of God, is able at first to contemplate the actual source of eternal 
 light, then all created things in that source ; so that the soul 
 knows by experience, as the prince of the Apostles says, that it is 
 called to the admirable light of God, and it shudders with bliss in 
 its faith. 
 
 "God inhabits, says the Apostle, inaccessible light, which no 
 man sees or can see. Our soul, to reach the sublimity of God, 
 must be freed from the senses. This is impossible in the present 
 life by the unaided forces of nature. 
 
 " Nevertheless, God has not at any time left man without tes- 
 timony of himself; he has filled the world with good things, says 
 the Apostle; he has given the heaven its dew, the earth its 
 fruitfulness, to all that lives its nourishment, to the heart of man 
 its joy. And this is what teaches philosophers to attribute noth- 
 ing low to the majesty of God ; to remove from his idea everything 
 material, all gross mixture ; to attribute to him all good and all 
 virtue, in a perfect degree ; to conceive him as the living and 
 inexhaustible source of all goodness, of all quality, whence all 
 perfection flows for his creatures ; to call him wise, the friend of 
 truth, the principle of virtue, and to give him other names which 
 presuppose supreme and absolute perfection ; finally, to call him 
 immense, infinite in his greatness, his power, and his action. 
 
 " Such are the great features of the knowledge of God, truly 
 conformed to the nature of God and to the authority of Holy 
 Scripture, which philosophy has discovered in the contemplation 
 of nature (investigatione cognoveruni) . And yet upon this same 
 point we recognize the necessity of divine instruction, if we 
 note that faith not only gives, as has been already stated, to the 
 simplest and most ignorant, instantly and clearly, knowledge 
 which sages only obtained with time and effort, but that it also 
 imprints upon the soul a purer and more certain knowledge than 
 if the intelligence had acquired it by the labor of human thought ; 
 moreover, that the light of faith opens to believers another order of 
 divine knowledge which the spectacle of nature could never give." 
 
 This then is the teaching of the universal catechism. The 
 whole question is here treated, regulated, and judged. 
 
 Our reason can by itself (ipsa per se) discover (investigare, 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 381 
 
 investigatione cognoscere) many truths touching the knowl- 
 edge of God, his existence, his perfections, and his infinity 
 (bonorum omnium perfectam vim . . . immensam et infinitam 
 virtutem). As for the other order of divine truths, those 
 which relate to eternal life, reason, by natural light alone, 
 can effect nothing. 
 
 Eeason in one sense sees God, it contemplates him (invisi- 
 bilia Dei contemplatur), but it is only through his acts 
 (ab effectibus) ; it sees him in the things created by him (ex 
 rerum effectarum investigatione). This is an indirect vision. 1 
 Christian wisdom, on the contrary (Christiana philosophia), 
 whose principle is faith, enters heaven and contemplates the 
 source itself of eternal light (ceternum ipsum luminisfontem) ; 
 our mind attains to God himself (ut mens nostra ad Deum 
 perveniat), which is impossible in this life by the mere 
 forces of nature (cujus rei facultatem in hac vita natu- 
 raliter non habemus). This therefore is the direct vision, 
 knowledge of the source. 
 
 Once again, such is the teaching of Catholic theology in 
 all ages upon this subject. 
 
 There is no motive for, arid there is no possibility of, 
 ranking reason either higher or lower, whether we rely upon 
 reason or upon faith. 
 
 VI. 
 
 We have just seen that, according to Saint Thomas Aqui- 
 nas and all orthodox theologians, and, finally, according to 
 the greatest of all theological authorities, the catechism of 
 the Council of Trent, natural reason, even in the individual, 
 has capabilities, possesses its own certainty, and, by its own 
 unaided effort, discovers and demonstrates truths known to 
 theologians as preambles of faith, which form one of the two 
 orders of the divine intelligibleness. 
 
 1 Billuart, Dissert., i. art. ii. Utrum sit Deus ? 
 
382 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 But there are limits set by theologians to the power of 
 reason even in the order of these natural truths which form 
 its proper domain. 
 
 Saint Thomas, who so vigorously upholds the natural 
 power of reason, nevertheless recognizes the evident limita- 
 tions and weaknesses of which we all give testimony. He 
 asserts that if men had no means save reason for attaining a 
 knowledge of God, even in that of the two intelligible orders 
 to which reason can attain, three things would result. 1 
 " First, few men would acquire a knowledge of God. Second, 
 this small number of privileged philosophers would attain 
 that knowledge only after much labor. Third, as error 
 most frequently slips into the researches of human reason, 
 truths, even rigorously demonstrated, would still leave doubts 
 in the mind, "because, we do not know the force of demonstra- 
 tion, and because we actually see so many various systems." 
 
 These statements of Saint Thomas Aquinas require no 
 proofs ; they are but the simple expression of what every 
 one knows and sees in himself, around him, and in the 
 history of the human mind. 
 
 Now, there is, in regard to what natural reason can and 
 cannot do, a very simple theological distinction, but whose 
 profundity, I hope, we shall understand. Human, natural 
 reason, without special help of grace, can do something, but 
 it cannot do everything, even in the natural order of truths. 
 This theology was formulated as follows : " Fallen man may, 
 without the special help of grace, know certain truths of the 
 natural order. The grace of God is essential to fallen man 
 for a complete knowledge of the truths of the natural order." 
 The first of these propositions is evident. The second is 
 what Bossuet expresses so well in this fine phrase : " Human 
 wisdom always falls short somewhere." Fenelon in his turn 
 elaborates it thus : " Men, as an author of our day has very 
 
 1 Contra Gentes, 1. i. c. iv. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 383 
 
 aptly observed, have not sufficient strength to follow out all 
 their reason. Thus I am fully persuaded that no man, with- 
 out grace, could have, of his own unaided natural powers, all 
 the constancy, all the regularity, all the moderation, all the 
 distrust of self, requisite for the discovery of those very 
 truths which do not call for the higher light of faith, in a 
 word, that natural philosophy which would move, without 
 prejudice, without impatience, without pride, to the final end 
 of human reason, is a romance of philosophy. I reckon upon 
 grace alone to guide reason, even in the narrow confines of 
 reason, to the discovery of true religion." This, therefore, 
 is clearly understood, and will be, moreover, developed 
 further on. 
 
 VII. 
 
 There is, therefore, a fixed and precise limit to the power 
 of purely natural reason. Reason, of itself, may do some- 
 thing, but it cannot do everything, even in the order of 
 natural truth. By the nature of things, the sum total of 
 truths escapes it. 
 
 But, yet once again, it may do something ; it has its own 
 certainty ; it discovers, it demonstrates, with certainty, and 
 knows, up to a certain point, several natural truths, such as 
 the existence of God, his attributes, the moral freedom and 
 spirituality of the soul. 
 
 Nevertheless, we must fully agree as to what natural rea- 
 son, sound reason is, if we would avoid falling into that 
 error which is known as rationalism. We must be on our 
 guard against the sophistic ignorance which regards reason 
 as independent of God and men, and as dependent on the 
 individual alone. 
 
 In the first place, nothing in man is independent. His 
 very being, his actual being, depends on God, as well as his 
 life, his reason, and all his faculties. This all true philoso- 
 
384 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 phers know; all, we have seen, agree with Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas, and declare that reason depends on the light of God. 
 "Eternal wisdom," says Saint Augustine, " ceaseth not for an 
 instant to speak to the rational creature ; " and this constant 
 and natural speech of God within us, is reason. The light 
 of men, as the Gospel calls the Word which enlightens every 
 man coming into the world, is the source of reason. Let 
 us not forget this point, for we shall see its consequences. 
 
 More yet. As an actual fact, how does reason wake in 
 every man ? The Word of God in the soul is the true 
 source of reason ; also, in reality, the potential reason in 
 every new-born man is roused by the speech of other men, 
 by the expression of their already formed reason. Man, 
 created rational, develops the germs of his reason, at first 
 because God speaks to him inwardly in the natural light 
 which he causes to shine upon his soul : this is the doctrine 
 of Saint Thomas ; and, furthermore, because the human 
 race, by articulate speech, warns him this is the expres- 
 *sion of Saint Augustine actually to hear the truth which 
 he is capable of hearing. 
 
 So that reason is developed, in every man, in the same 
 way as faith, according to what Catholic theology teaches in 
 regard to the development of faith. 
 
 Faith comes primarily from God, it is a gift of God (ex 
 interiore instinctu Dei) ; it is a supernatural light which 
 man refuses or accepts at will. Secondly, according to Saint 
 Paul, faith cometh by hearing (fides ex auditu). 
 
 " Faith," says Saint Thomas, " comes chiefly by this diffused 
 light (fides principaliter ex infusione) ; but as for its determina- 
 tion, it cometh by the hearing." * " Two things are needful for 
 faith, of which one is the inclination of the heart, which cometh 
 not by hearing, but by grace ; the other is the determination of 
 the articles of faith, which cometh by hearing." 2 
 
 i 4 d. q. 2, 2. 2 Epist ad Rom x lect 2> 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 385 
 
 Thus God inspires within, God's Church speaks without ; 
 and under this double influence free man accepts or rejects 
 this light, by a simultaneous act of intelligence and will. 
 
 So, too, with reason. It is, as it were, a luminous germ 
 which God implants in every man; but articulate speech, 
 supervening from without, develops the germ. 
 
 Only, it is very plain that in both cases the luminous 
 germ which God sows in the soul is the chief element. 
 Faith comes chiefly by the diffused light (fides principaliter 
 ex infusione*). This light of grace is properly the principle 
 of faith. And as for reason, Saint Augustine and Saint 
 Thomas point out in an admirable manner how adherence 
 to the truth, the very foundation of certainty, comes from 
 this inward light, by which God renders us rational. 
 
 " Go not without, enter into thine own self," says Saint Augus- 
 tine ; " it is in the inner man that truth dwells ! " * " In all that 
 the intelligence hears, what the mind consults is not the word 
 which echoes without, it is the truth which presides within ; the 
 word, perhaps, warns us to consult that truth which presides 
 within." 2 
 
 "The assurance of knowledge and intelligence," says Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas, " comes from the evidence itself of that which 
 is called certain." 8 " It is natural light that gives our soul the 
 assurance of that which it knows in that light, as, for example, 
 the first principles." 4 "The assurance of what we know, there- 
 fore, comes from the light of reason, inwardly given to man by 
 God, and by which God speaks in us ; it does not come from the 
 man who speaks to us from without, save in so far as instruction 
 refers conclusions to their principles, which, moreover, would 
 give us no certain knowledge, if we had not in advance the assur- 
 ance of those principles to which the conclusions are referred." 5 
 
 And this rational assurance, according to Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas, is entire. " There is," he says, " a certain basis of 
 
 1 De vera Relig., chap, xxxix. 4 Contra Gentes, book ii. chap. cliv. 
 
 2 De Magistro, chap. ii. 18. 5 De Verit., qusest. ii. art. i. 
 8 3 d. q. art. ii. q. 3. 
 
 25 
 
386 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 truth, with which no semblance of error can be mingled, 
 for instance, in first principles." l 
 
 Therefore, with reason as with faith, the chief part is 
 always the inward light given by God, supernatural and 
 natural alike. 
 
 Bossuet felicitously compares, upon this head, the genera- 
 tion of reason to that of faith. 
 
 " We must not imagine," he says, u that children, in whom 
 reason is beginning to appear, because they cannot arrange and 
 systematize their reasonings, are therefore incapable of feeling the 
 impressions of truth. We see them learn to talk at a still earlier 
 age ; how they learn this, how they distinguish between noun and 
 verb, substantive and adjective, they neither know, nor can we 
 who have methodically learned it clearly explain it, so deeply 
 hidden is it. We learn the language of the Church in much the 
 same way. A secret light leads us to it, in one estate as in the other, 
 there t in reason; here, in faith. Reason is developed little by 
 little, and faith infused by baptism does the same." 2 
 
 Thus in both cases there is a secret light at the bottom of 
 the soul, in the one case, in reason ; in the other, in faith. 
 This light, in both cases, is the chief element. Then the 
 language of mankind develops the germ of reason, and the 
 words of the Church develop the germ of faith. 
 
 Three things are essential for the development of reason. 
 We must have the soul, capable of knowing ; we must have 
 God, sole source of light, shedding his light upon the mirror 
 of the soul, which at first is incapable of seeing it, as the 
 eyes of the new-born child do not see the light of the sun ; 
 then mankind intervenes with speech, and the expression of 
 reason already formed, which stimulates the soul to see, and 
 develops, by a most mysterious generation, the obscure germ 
 of reason. 
 
 Thus reason is developed. Is it absolutely impossible for 
 
 l 2 d. 25, art. 20. 2 Conv. with Claude. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 387 
 
 it to be developed otherwise ? Cannot God arouse it by his 
 own unaided purpose, without the help of the words of ra- 
 tional and talking man ? It would be, to say the least, bold 
 to assert this ; or rather, it is plain that we cannot assert it, 
 since, as an actual fact, God alone developed reason in the 
 first man, even as, according to Saint Thomas and all theol- 
 ogy, God can, of himself alone, and without the word of the 
 Church, develop faith by revelation in an isolated man. 
 
 But let us confine ourselves to stating here that, save for 
 exceptions, such is the law. Individual reason is not in 
 man an absolute and independent power, invariable, immu- 
 table, self-subsisting, equal and identical in all ; it depends, 
 on the contrary, in its principle and in its development, in 
 its source and in its course, not only upon ourselves, but 
 upon God and the human race. Men impose upon us from 
 the beginning, by the communication of language, a sort of 
 ready made reason, more or less developed, more or less pure, 
 but which contains necessarily all the essential elements of 
 reason ; they form us from without, while God unceasingly 
 stimulates within us the living source of original, certain, 
 eternal, infallible reason ; and beneath these influences, the 
 free and rational soul, according to its ardor or its sluggish- 
 ness, its indifference or eagerness for light, its absorption or 
 its effusion, clings more or less closely either to this original 
 source, to this ready made reason, to its essential elements, 
 or to its bastard developments. 
 
 From this point of view we can readily define sound rea- 
 son, and perverse, corrupt reason, in other words, the true 
 philosophic tendency, and its opposite. We can take a new 
 and very important step in this study of reason compared 
 with faith, and in this analysis of the two degrees of the divine 
 intelligible we shall better understand the progress of the 
 mind towards both, and what we call the effort towards 
 total wisdom. 
 
388 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 VIIL 
 
 Man's law is this : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and 
 with all thy strength." This is the first commandment ; and 
 the second, which the Gospel says is like unto it, is this : 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
 
 I say that this double precept, which is the law for the 
 entire man, also contains the law of reason, and shows us 
 wherein it is sound and wherein it is corrupt. 
 
 In point of fact, rational and free man, placed between 
 God, the Father and Source of reason, and humanity, which 
 may perhaps be called the mother of reason, should fulfil 
 this law in order to maintain his reason sound and sane, 
 instead of perverting it. Is not this manifest ? So soon as 
 the individual learns to despise humanity, in so far as the 
 nurse and mother of his intelligence, to consider himself 
 greater than it and its tradition ; so soon as he ceases to love 
 with all his heart and with all his soul the charm of the 
 desirable and intelligible, the inner and enduring voice of 
 God, the source whence light comes to him, just so soon 
 that man begins to corrupt and pervert his reason. Whether, 
 intrenching himself more and more closely in moral and 
 intellectual egotism, that man thus renders himself ever 
 more and more incapable, I cannot affirm positively, but I 
 feel at least that the source of his reason is far above him, 
 and consequently that the mind should hearken and obey 
 humbly ; if he become accustomed to profane that source, as 
 being merely himself and dependent merely on himself ; if, 
 which is more serious, he defiantly enter that source which, 
 nevertheless, is still divine ; if he contend with light, and 
 seek malignly 1 for proofs of light and demonstration of evi- 
 
 1 Insidiose. Eccli. xxxii. 20. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 389 
 
 dence ; if he take upon himself the mission of constructing 
 evidence, of creating light by his own acts, instead of receiv- 
 ing it as the inspiration of his acts ; if he desire to make 
 himself in some sort the author of his own reason, by taking 
 up his position above first principles, instead of placing him- 
 self below them, if, I say, a man enter upon this path, he 
 has already acquired " that evil heart of unbelief " of which 
 Saint Paul speaks, 1 which departs from the "living God." 
 That soul, in the exercise of its reason, no longer depends 
 upon the divine source of reason; in it, fallible reason, 
 which receives and errs, as Fenelon says, has parted from 
 the immutable reason which gives, lifts up, and illumines ; 
 in brief, that mind has departed from the living God. 
 
 That soul, therefore, as Scripture says, is plucked up ly the 
 roots, twice dead. 2 Not only it has not advanced from reason 
 towards faith, not taken root in supernatural light, but it 
 has broken off, as far as in it lay, the natural root of the 
 light of God ; it has lost that faith, that innate faith, the 
 principle of reason, of which theology and philosophy speak. 
 And this very thing is the origin of the great sophistical ten- 
 dency whose excesses and follies, in all ages, 3 have soiled the 
 history of the human mind, and which is precisely reason re- 
 versed, philosophy inverted. And, indeed, the attempt to 
 reject God instead of seeking him, the attempt to conquer 
 light instead of yielding to it, the desire to prove evidence by 
 reasoning instead of throwing light on reasoning by evidence ; 
 
 1 Hebrews iii. 12. 
 
 2 Jude 12. 
 
 8 In all ages we encounter the efforts and eccentricities of perverse reason. 
 But it is remarkable that a complete development, theoretical and practical, of 
 sophistry, properly so called, forming a school, and taking the absurd as its 
 principle, has occurred only twice in the intellectual history of the western 
 world, first, in the time of Gorgias, and again in our own day, by the work 
 of Hegel. We see the remains of it in the wretched sect of atheists and soph- 
 ists, now (1864) the scorn of French literature, and whom I have made known 
 in a book entitled "Sophists and Criticism." 
 
390 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the habit of rendering unknown that which is known, instead 
 of moving from the vision of that which is known to that 
 which is unknown ; the incredible mania for aspiring to dig 
 under the roots to divide them from the earth, instead of 
 rising with them to their fruits, is not all this precisely 
 the opposite to the rational procedure ? Now, those who are 
 acquainted with the history of philosophy know that all this 
 is practised and has always been practised. And why ? Be- 
 cause some souls do not observe in the intellectual order the 
 law which obliges us to love God more than all things else, 
 and our neighbors as ourselves. The mind, with secret and 
 habitual pride, thoughtless though it often be, desires to rise 
 above humanity and above God. This is an overturning, an 
 inversion, of all things. It is an imitation of Satan's sin, and 
 it is the source of the devilish wisdom l of which Saint James 
 speaks, which is nothing but an effort in a direction contrary 
 to wisdom, a task undertaken in aversion from God. 
 
 Reason in a man, therefore, sometimes learns to doubt its 
 own origin ; and again it goes so far as to break, with its first 
 principle. 
 
 We find in a contemporary philosopher vigorous descrip- 
 tions of these two degrees of intellectual ruin. These quota- 
 tions will better explain to the reader the reality of this 
 frightful state. " We believe" says Jouffroy, " that is a fact ; 
 but have we any reason to believe what we believe ? Is that 
 which we regard as truth really truth? This universe which 
 surrounds us, these laws which seem to us to govern it, and 
 which we torture ourselves to discover, that powerful, wise, 
 and just Cause which, on the faith of our reason, we attribute 
 to it; those principles of good and ill which humanity re- 
 spects, and which seems to us the law of the moral world, 
 may not all this be an illusion, a consequent dream, and hu- 
 manity with all this, and we who dream that dream, like all 
 
 1 James iii. 17. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 391 
 
 the rest ? Fearful question, terrible doubt, which rises in the 
 loiiely thought of every man who reflects ! " l 
 
 Whence we see that he who describes this doubt, shared in 
 it himself, at least at times, since he elsewhere calls " a strange 
 illusion, that of modern philosophers who still persist in solv- 
 ing the impossible problem of absolute truth, and in dissipat- 
 ing by means of the human mind a doubt which, striking the 
 human mind itself, can never be destroyed." 2 
 
 But this is how the same thinker describes the intellectual 
 state which supervenes when we overcome that doubt by ne- 
 gation, by the supposition that no absolute truth exists. " If 
 our lips," he says, " can state this hypothesis, our intelligence 
 cannot comprehend it. For if certain things exist, they exist 
 in a certain manner, and there are certain relations between 
 them ; it is therefore absolutely true that they exist, that they 
 exist in such manner, and that there are such relations be- 
 tween them. If, on the contrary, nothing exists, it is abso- 
 lutely true that nothing exists. In order that absolute truth 
 should not exist, certain things therefore must both exist and 
 not exist at one and the same time ; they must have and not 
 have at one and the same time certain modes of existence ; 
 and there must be and not be at one and the same time certain 
 relations between them, which is a contradiction in terms. 
 If everything exists, there is absolute truth ; if nothing ex- 
 ists, there is still absolute truth. Whoever denies that there 
 is absolute truth, denies at once reality and nonentity, or 
 rather affirms the co-existence of these two things. The tongue 
 itself refuses to express such an absurdity ; it is forced to 
 make that which is the opposite of existence, nonentity, ex- 
 ist!" 3 Jouffroy did not suspect that, while he wrote thus, 
 all these absurdities, or rather these delirious ravings, were 
 
 1 Jouffroy, Philosopb. Miscell., 2d edit. p. 187. 
 
 2 Preface to Reid's Works, pp. 190-192. 
 
 8 Jouffroy, Philosoph. Miscell., 2d edit. p. 210. 
 
392 GUIDE TO TEE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 literally taught in Germany by Hegel, and that the most 
 learned of all nations accepted that teaching. 
 
 Eeason, therefore, may be corrupted among men in conse- 
 quence of that evil heart of unbelief which breaks with the 
 living God and with collective mankind, and which thus 
 parts the mind from its proper principle and its necessary 
 root. 
 
 This is corrupt reason. Then what is sound reason ? 
 
 Sound reason is that of the man who, receiving, like every 
 other mind, the light which enlightens all, practises the law 
 in regard to that reason-God, as Bossuet says ; in other words, 
 loves it, and seeks it with all his strength. Sound reason is 
 the reason of the man doing all that he can, in the mystery 
 of the soul and of conscience, to surrender self to divine rea- 
 son, its principle and source. 
 
 But wherein precisely does this surrender consist, which 
 conjoins us, in the natural order, to the living God ? 
 
 This must be studied in detail. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH (Continued). 
 
 WE must know that, even in the natural order, there 
 exists a sort of faith which, by its inward authority, 
 imposes assent upon our mind. There is an intellectual 
 conscience, as there is a moral conscience ; and just as the 
 voice of the moral conscience is that of God, the voice of this 
 intellectual conscience is also that of God. This point is 
 of such prime importance that we cannot dwell upon it 
 too long. 
 
 Let us see upon what theology, on the one hand, and phi- 
 losophy, on the other, support themselves in affirming the 
 existence of natural faith. 
 
 We read in the Scriptures these remarkable words : " In 
 every good work trust thy own soul with faith ; for this is 
 the keeping of the commandments. He that believeth in the 
 Lord taketh heed to the commandment." 1 
 
 Clearly this does not refer to the faith whose principle is 
 supernatural light, and whose rule is the Catholic Church ; 
 it refers to that faith whose primary cause is natural light, 
 which enlightens all men in their conscience and reason. 
 
 The sacred text, say the commentators, does not allude 
 here to theological faith, to Christian supernatural faith 
 (fides supernaturalis Christiana), but to that which is the 
 practical dictate of conscience (fides quce est practicum con- 
 scientice dictamen), which may also be called moral faith, 
 particular practical faith (fides moralis et particulars 
 1 Ecclesiasticus xxxii. 27, 28. 
 
394 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 practica), or the firm trust of the soul in God (certa animi 
 fiducia in Deo). As for theological faith, we cannot say of 
 it : " Follow with faith the movements of thy soul, trust iky 
 own soul with faith (crede ex fide animce tuce)." The object 
 of theological faith is very God and God alone, not the soul ; 
 while natural faith, the primary cause of reason, is addressed 
 to the soul enlightened of God. It is an indirect faith in 
 God. 
 
 Such is also the meaning of Saint Paul's words : " What- 
 soever is not of faith is sin (omne autem quod non estex fide 
 peccatum est)." The Church herself has decided this point, 
 for she condemned this proposition of Baius : "All the works 
 of the infidel [that is, of those who have not supernatural 
 Christian faith] are sins." 1 Saint Paul, as is also shown by 
 the context, does not, therefore, refer to supernatural Christian 
 faith when he says, " Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." 
 Accordingly, he evidently referred to that natural faith 
 whose primary cause is the voice of God in the conscience 
 and reason. 
 
 Theologians often speak of natural faith under other 
 names. When the Scriptures say, " The wise man belie veth 
 in the law of the Lord ; " and again, " The fool saith in his 
 heart/There is no God," it is clear that the words wise and 
 fool signify the soul which has or has not that faith. So 
 when Saint Augustine says : " We have in the inward man 
 another sense far more sublime than the outward sense, it 
 is that which teaches us to discern between the just and the 
 unjust;" it is plain that he alludes to what Perrone calls 
 " The faith which is the practical dictate of the conscience." 
 It is also clear that this latter theologian has in view the 
 same inward fact when, speaking of feeling in general, he 
 expresses himself thus: "We do not intend to refuse man 
 those feelings which the beneficent hand of the Creator has 
 
 1 Omnia opera infideliura sunt peccata. 35 Baii. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 395 
 
 placed in the heart of man to lead him more readily and 
 gently to truth, justice, and order. We admit a rational 
 sense (sensum rationalem), which impels the mind to truth 
 and enjoys it. We admit a moral sense, which, by its nature, 
 approves that which is just and virtuous in itself, takes pleas- 
 ure in it, condemns and detests evil. We admit a sense of the 
 beautiful, which teaches man to love and enjoy all order and 
 all beauty. He who would tear from the human heart this 
 triple sense which God himself has placed in it, and which is 
 born of that general and unconquerable charm of the desira- 
 able and intelligible which never quits the soul, that man 
 would mutilate human nature and deprive it of its most 
 essential element." 1 
 
 This sense which the charm of the desirable and intelli- 
 gible, identical with God, awakens in us, is assuredly the di- 
 vine sense ; and this sense, which leads us to distinguish at 
 once between good and evil, is that practical dictate of con- 
 science which our author calls faith. 
 
 It 
 
 But we find in the Scriptures a chapter which throws most 
 beautiful and brilliant light on this question. Consider 
 these divine texts with us for a moment : 
 
 " God created man from the earth, and made him in his 
 own image." Here we have the creation of man's body and 
 of his soul, in the image of God. 
 
 " Then God turned man anew into this image, and clothed 
 him with virtue like unto his own." 2 It is difficult not to 
 see, in this second verse, the elevation of man to the super- 
 natural life. The sacred author, having spoken of the crea- 
 tion, alludes directly after to this new creation, by which 
 
 1 Pen-one, Prelect, theol., vol. ii. p. 1330. 
 
 2 Eccli. xvii. 
 
396 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 God resumes his creature, converts him, brings him back to 
 himself, clothes him with virtue like unto his own ; that is 
 to say, endues him with his proper quality. 
 
 But soon the sacred text speaks of the knowledge and 
 sense which God gives to man ; and the distinction between 
 the two orders, natural and supernatural, becomes fully 
 evident. 
 
 " Counsel, and a tongue, and eyes, ears, and a heart, gave 
 he them to understand. Withal he filled them with the 
 knowledge of understanding, and showed them good and evil. 
 He set his eye upon their hearts, that he might show them 
 the greatness of his works. He gave them to glory in his 
 marvellous acts for ever, that they might declare his works 
 with understanding." 
 
 Evidently, the allusion here is to the natural light which 
 teaches us to know God through his works. The allusion is 
 to that knowledge which God gives the mind in creating it, 
 which is reason, and to that power of distinguishing between 
 good and evil, which is conscience. And, consequently, the 
 sense with which God fills the heart, when he sets his eye on 
 it, is that natural sense of which we speak, which makes man 
 feel the greatness of God in his work, and teaches him to rise 
 from created beauties to their Creator. 
 
 But what follows is manifestly of the supernatural order : 
 
 " Besides this, he gave them knowledge, and the law of 
 life for an heritage. He made an everlasting covenant 
 with them, and showed them his justice and his judgments. 
 Their eyes saw the majesty of his glory, and their ears heard 
 his glorious voice." 
 
 This added gift, this heritage of the law of life ; this ever- 
 lasting covenant, this justice of God ; this sight of the maj- 
 esty of God no longer in his works, but in his own glory 
 which they see with their eyes ; the power to hear his very 
 voice with their own ears, all this is supernatural. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 397 
 
 Thus, in these complete and connected texts we clearly 
 perceive the strong distinction between that which is natural 
 and that which is supernatural ; and it is plain that the sense 
 with which God fills our heart, when he sets his eye on it, 
 at the same time that he gives us knowledge, is of the purely 
 natural order, and that we must henceforth distinguish be- 
 tween a natural divine sense and a supernatural divine sense, 
 as we distinguish between a natural and a supernatural knowl- 
 edge of God, a natural and a supernatural love of God. 
 Whence it would follow that each of the three powers of the 
 soul may attain God in two modes, naturally and supernat- 
 urally, and that there is a complete parallelism between the 
 two orders. Saint John says : " The Son of God hath given us 
 a sense to know the true God." This supernatural divine sense, 
 which is faith or its principle, corresponds to an essential ele- 
 ment of human nature, to that natural divine sense to which 
 the sacred text refers, and through which we know God by 
 his works ; and this natural divine sense is the natural faith 
 of which Saint Paul speaks, the faith in which we must trust 
 our soul, say the Scriptures, the faith which theology calls 
 " the practical dictate of conscience." 
 
 Thus the word "faith" has, in theology, two meanings. 
 We distinguish between supernatural Christian faith, whose 
 principle is the light supernaturally given of God, and nat- 
 ural faith, whose principle is the light which, in his conscience 
 and reason, enlightens every man coming into this world, 
 " natural human faith which is in the individual as it were 
 the basis of human reason." 1 
 
 III. 
 
 And now what do philosophers think on this point ? 
 Philosophers use the word, in every instance, beginning 
 
 1 On Grace and Nature, by the Abbe Rohrbacher, p. 96. 
 
398 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 with Aristotle, to signify spontaneous, immediate adherence 
 to the primary, indemonstrable principles of reason, whether 
 speculative or practical. 
 
 The principle of demonstration, says Aristotle, is not dem- 
 onstration (a-TToSetf ea>5 apx*} OVK djroSeij; i?) , so too the princi- 
 ple of knowledge is not knowledge (ovft eV^rr?}/^? eTria-Trj/jirj). 
 All knowledge being discursive, there is no knowledge of 
 principles (TWV dpx<*> v eVtcrr 77/477 pev OVK av eirf). 1 Assured 
 and primary principles are those which create faith of them- 
 selves, without borrowing their certainty elsewhere (TO, py M 
 erepcov d\\a SI avrwv e%ovTa rrjv TTLCTTIV). When these 
 principles are referred to, we cannot ask the why and where- 
 fore (ov %el ev rat? eTria-TTj/jioviKals appals eTrifyrelo-Oai, TO &ia 
 T/). Each principle, taken in itself, inspires faith (aXV e/cd- 
 (TTTIV TWV dp%c*)v avrrjv /cad' eavrrjv elvai Trio-rrjv). We can- 
 not demonstrate them, we have no knowledge of them, and 
 it is impossible to say anything in regard to them (abvvarov 
 L7TLv TI 7Tpl avT&v), for the very reason that they are ante- 
 rior to everything. 2 How are these principles known 1 By 
 experience, which arouses in the soul what was latent there 
 (e/c & 6/i7TtyHa$ rj e/c Trai/ro? r^fjueprjcravTO^ rov KaOoKov ev rfj 
 tyvxf}). The mind attains these principles by an inductive 
 movement (ra TrpwTa eiraywyf) ^vwpi^eiv dvaytcaiov), by which 
 very thing sensation reveals the universal in the soul (ical jap 
 /cat alo~6r)o~is OVTQ) TO /ca06\ov e/iTrotet). 3 This inductive 
 movement, which awakens the universal in the soul, is, as 
 it were, an act of rational faith, which adheres to primary 
 principles. 
 
 And indeed this necessary adhesion, 4 in intelligible light, 
 to primary, indemonstrable principles, of which we have no 
 knowledge, concerning which we can say nothing, and which 
 sophists deny because they ask in vain for their demonstra- 
 
 1 Post Analyt, 19. 3 Post Analyt., 19. 
 
 2 Topiq., i. 1, 2. 4 Ibid. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 399 
 
 tion, this adhesion Aristotle calls faith (mams) wherever 
 he speaks of it. He uses the very word which has since been 
 elevated by the Fathers of the Church to mean Christian 
 faith. Not that he understands by that word a blind opinion ; 
 on the contrary, he regards it as an adhesion of the mind to 
 evidence, in intelligible light. But is it not thus that Saint 
 Thomas likewise understands it when he says, "Just as 
 man, by the natural light of intelligence, adheres to princi- 
 ples, so too by the light of faith, divinely diffused in the soul, 
 man adheres to the things of faith " ? l And Thomassin un- 
 derstands it as Saint Thomas does when he calls faith adhe- 
 sion to the evidence of primary principles. 
 
 The Alexandrine philosophers, urged on by the Christians, 
 went farther on this road, and developed the germs which 
 Aristotle and Plato contained upon this point. Proclus says 
 many beautiful things of them, which Thomassin quotes and 
 applauds. And Saint Athanasius, in his life of Saint An- 
 tony, aptly sets forth this doctrine. He relates that Saint 
 Antony, in a journey to Alexandria, desiring to convert cer- 
 tain philosophers to the Christian faith, began by talking to 
 them of philosophical natural faith, saying to them " That 
 this faith is, of all modes of knowledge, the most certain (17 
 Sia Tr/crrew? evepyeia . . . ravrrjv elvai rrjv dfcpiffri <yvw(riv)." 
 Then he formally put this question to them : " What is, in 
 all things, and especially if it relates to God, the most perfect 
 mode of knowledge 1 Is it by demonstration, or by the ac- 
 tion of faith in the soul ? And which is anterior to the 
 other, the action of faith, or rational demonstration ? " The 
 philosophers at once replied . " The action of faith." The 
 question was well put by Saint Antony, and the philosophers 
 answered very aptly according to Aristotle and Plato. 
 
 But on this point a strange work has been effected in 
 modern philosophy. 
 
 1 2 a . 2*. q. ii. art. 3. 
 
400 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Descartes said, " / believe in the existence of the world, be- 
 cause God is truthful, and cannot deceive me." He went too 
 far, and exceeded sound theology, as well as sound philoso- 
 phy. He employed a subterfuge, an argument, in order to 
 believe in the existence of the world ; while that natural, 
 rational faith referred to by Aristotle, and to which Descartes 
 meant to refer, is immediate, and clings to its object itself, 
 without any outside mixture of argument, its object being 
 precisely a primary, indemonstrable fact. But Descartes, 
 introducing argument between that faith and its object, gives 
 idealists and sceptics cause to deny the existence of bodies. 
 Kant, indignant at this exaggeration, strove to re-establish 
 the truth ; he undertook radically to ruin that scepticism 
 and idealism. To this end, he distinguishes abstract reason, 
 separated from that rational, natural faith which makes it 
 sound, solid, and straightforward ; he distinguishes it from 
 sound reason, from straightforward reason, which depends 
 " upon that rational faith," so called by him in exact terms 
 ( Vernunftglaube), " which alone," he says, " can give hu- 
 man reason its bearings." 1 
 
 But Kant, despite his mighty powers, is a clumsy, awk- 
 ward, and confused master, who becomes embarrassed in the 
 first half of his demonstration, loses his breath in the second, 
 and who, by this distinction carried to excess, opens the way 
 for all the series of sophists to which Germany has given 
 birth. They take possession of precisely this reason, artifi- 
 cially abstracted fron rational faith, as being reason itself, 
 true reason, total reason, and they make use of it to destroy 
 everything. And therein they justify Kant ; since, starting 
 with this reason out of its latitude, they actually end, as we 
 now see, in denying the first principles, certain and undemon- 
 strable though they be, whether of practical or of theoretical 
 reason, to the point of expressly contradicting the axiom 
 1 Was heisst sich im Denken orientiren. Opvas. vi. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 401 
 
 given by Aristotle as the last degree of evidence possible : 
 " That there is no medium between affirmation and negation, 
 and that it is impossible that one and the same thing should 
 at the same time exist and not exist." 
 
 Meantime, calmer minds try to maintain common-sense. 
 The Scotch patiently anlayze thought, and find indeed that 
 there is everywhere, in the beginning, in what relates to pri- 
 mary facts and principles, an element of immediate, sponta- 
 neous, unreasoned adhesion, which they call faith. This fact, 
 with its developments, is perhaps the only useful result of 
 Scotch philosophy. But it is important. It is an effort to 
 return to truth. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is by no means a discovery ; and our 
 theology, as we have seen, had long been familiar with it. 
 Even Aristotle had already comprehended it. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Here Thomassin is particularly to be admired. Whether 
 considered as theologian or as philosopher, he has said every- 
 thing that there is to be said on this capital point ; and, to 
 my knowledge, he is the only one. Let us recall his chapter 
 entitled, " Deeper than intelligence itself, there exists in the 
 soul a secret sense which touches God, rather than sees or 
 hears him." Thomassin often reproduces this idea, for he 
 prizes it, and justly. In his Treatise on God, he again 
 expresses himself thus : 
 
 " The soul, 1 by a sort of innate presage, so soon as it is freed 
 from the distractions and defilements of the senses, and, restored 
 to itself, has recovered its dignity, the sonl naturally suspects 
 and feels the sovereign principle, indescribable and ineffable. It 
 feels this by an intimate and secret contact, 2 which touches God, 
 ever present in the centre of the soul to protect its life. But 
 
 1 De Deo, lib. iv. cap. v. 7. 2 Ibid., 8. 
 
 26 
 
402 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 this immaterial and divine contact is the most mysterious point 
 of the education of minds; we know anything of it rather by 
 experience than by speech. Our soul proceeds, without any inter- 
 mediary, from the sovereign principle ; and it is the hand of God 
 whicli produces it, touches it, moulds it, and forms it ; and it, in 
 its turn, for all contact is mutual, feels God and touches him, 
 when it is not wrapped in the rough bark of low things, fastened 
 to it by the attraction of a gross love. 77 
 
 But what is the name of this divine touch, this divine 
 sense ? It is faith, according to Thomassin, natural faith, 
 as the Alexandrian philosophers understood it, to whom Saint 
 Anthony addressed himself; faith, as Plato understood it 
 in the book of the Laws, according to Proclus, quoted by 
 Thomassin. And here our author distinguishes several 
 meanings of the word faith. He says, 
 
 " There is that faith by which the loftiest souls, which have 
 attained the peace of the highest beatitude, possess God and en- 
 joy him, a very different faith from that wholly human faith 
 which binds us, through opinion, to unknown things ; different, 
 also, from that loftier faith through which our soul clings, without 
 reasoning or proof, to the evident light and immediate certainty 
 of first principles. That of which we speak here is anterior, supe- 
 rior, to the other two. Deeply hidden in the soul, it teaches 
 us thoroughly that which we could not otherwise have known, 
 because we could not have seen, and to accept what we cannot 
 understand." 1 
 
 " It is this faith which feels ineffable Being and sovereign Good 
 rather than understands them." 2 
 
 Thomassin quotes on this head very beautiful passages 
 from Proclus, notably this : " Faith is the ineffable bond be- 
 tween all souls, all minds, and God. Faith is anterior to 
 knowledge. Faith is that which leads souls into the hidden 
 nature of God." 3 
 
 i De Deo., book vi. chap. v. 11. 2 ibid. s ibid. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 403 
 
 That is, there is in the soul, in the opinion of philosophers 
 and theologians, whose views Thoinassin sums up, a natural 
 sense which feels God, a sense which some theologians and 
 philosophers call faith. And this faith, this divine sense, 
 is nothing hut the sovereign use of one of the three functions 
 of the soul, to feel, to know, to will. The soul feels every- 
 thing, God, itself, and the world. 
 
 From all which precedes, we see that in philosophy as 
 well as in theology we find allusions to a certain faith 
 which is not supernatural Christian faith, which is therefore 
 natural, whose principle is the voice of God in the con- 
 science and reason, a faith through which we must needs 
 cling to the theoretical and practical first principles of rea- 
 son ; a faith which, indeed, all minds do not possess, since 
 there are actually those who deny all logical and moral 
 laws, whether they deny them from explicit and avowed 
 doubt, or from some obscure but determinate system, as was 
 seen in Greece and is seen in Germany. 
 
 It is not an abuse of words to call faith, with Aristotle 
 and the Scotch philosophers, the adhesion of the mind to 
 the evidence of first principles, or to the evidence of primary 
 facts. To see and to believe are not opposite things. To 
 believe is not the opposite of to see, but to demonstrate and 
 understand thoroughly. For instance, man sees the world 
 without understanding it. Saint Augustine expresses him- 
 self very happily when he says, " He who has intelligence 
 has also faith ; but he who has faith has not always intelli- 
 gence." 1 Saint Augustine here points out this fundamental 
 fact, namely, that there is in all human light a root of 
 faith ; that for man, faith exists with intelligence, with 
 perception. Why ? Because man never possesses the prius 
 absolu of anything, being only secondary and not primary 
 intelligence. But when he sees and is bathed in light, he 
 i De Utilit. cred., cap. xi. 
 
404 GUIDE TO TEE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 does not see everything, and his gaze does not pierce any 
 being, any truth, through and through. Even when he 
 shall see God face to face, says theology, he will not under- 
 stand him. Faith, in one sense, says Saint Thomas, will en- 
 dure in that light ; it will disappear as an enigma, but 
 it will endure as knowledge. 1 Its substance will remain. 
 There will therefore still be faith in vision, as in the vision 
 of this world by our eyes there is faith, as in the evidence 
 of first principles there is faith, and this because we do 
 not see the whole of anything ; because we cannot see 
 God, or the world, or the principles of reason, to as great a 
 degree as God sees them. In all things we start from a 
 light greater than ourselves, and from data which transcend 
 us, and which always leave us with questions unsolved. 
 Faith is essential to the being who receives light ; faith is 
 the first acceptance of light, it is adherence to him who 
 gives it. Faith is that region of reason of which Bossuet 
 speaks, " that region unknown to man in his own actions 
 and in his own conduct, which is the secret region wherein 
 God acts, and the spring which he sets in motion." 2 
 
 In this sense, therefore, we may, with Aristotle, call faith 
 the adhesion of the mind to evidence and to indemonstrable 
 first principles. 
 
 V. 
 
 Having fully established these two meanings of the word 
 faith, natural faith and supernatural Christian faith, let us 
 return to the question with which we started: What is 
 sound reason ? 
 
 Sound reason is that which is not severed from rational 
 faith, its basis and its compass, without which, as some one 
 has aptly expressed it, it loses its bearings. " Faith," says 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas, " is, in the supernatural order, what 
 
 1 l a , 2 tte , q. 67, 5, c. 2 Vol. xxv . p . 394. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 405 
 
 the evidence of principles is in the natural order." l This is 
 admirable in its depth. 
 
 Thus sound reason is that which is not set apart from its 
 source in the root of the soul, which is not set apart from 
 that point of which Plato speaks, whence God suspends the 
 soul to himself, which he calls the root of the soul. 2 Sound 
 reason is that which clings to the charm of desirability and 
 intelligibility, so called by Aristotle ; to those simple oper,a- 
 tions of the soul into which error does not enter, says Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas ; 3 to that supreme, infallible reason which 
 supports and corrects, of which Fe*nelon speaks ; to that inner 
 sanctuary, that inmost core, that centre of which Bossuet 
 and all the mystics speak, where the truth makes itself heard, 
 where pure and simple ideas are collected and contemplated ; 
 to that hidden spring of which Bossuet also speaks, " Which 
 has not now all its pristine power, but clearly shows us, by 
 a certain vigor, that it is rooted in some higher principle." 
 
 Sound reason is that which does not break with the divine 
 sense, that divine touch, that secret sense, deeper than intel- 
 ligence, and by which God is touched rather than under- 
 stood or seen. 
 
 Sound reason, in fine, is that which, in every man, con- 
 joined at some point to that of God and to the common reason 
 of the human race, fulfils the law which consists in loving, 
 even in the intellectual order, God and man. 
 
 And perverse reason is that which breaks with that neces- 
 sary root of all its legitimate development, with that rational, 
 natural faith whose existence we have just established. 
 Corrupt reason is that which by some secret egoism confines 
 itself to the unduly narrow limits of individual thought, 
 makes of itself a cistern, instead of a channel of living water, 
 
 1 3 d. 26, q. 2, 2">, and 2 a , 2 ae . q. ii. art. 3. 
 
 2 In Joann. Tract, xxvi. 2. 
 
 3 Et in hue operatione animi non est error. 
 
406 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 and cuts itself off from its source in God and from its 
 human affluents. 
 
 Now, thanks to God, sound reason is that with which we 
 are born, the Word, on the one hand, enlightening all men 
 in this world ; and on the other hand, mankind imposing 
 upon us, by articulate speech, the outward forms of reason, 
 and giving us, in general, a practical example of its use ; and 
 hence theologians and philosophers agree in recognizing that 
 reason naturally leads us to what is true. 
 
 "Human reason," says Perron e, 1 "although limited, not 
 only by its nature tends to truth, but may also attain to it 
 with certainty. This common-sense recognizes, and this, in 
 all ages, has been professed by those who have philosophized 
 soundly. Christian and catholic religion admits and teaches 
 this, concerning the value of human reason." "When," 
 adds Per rone, " Luther denied free-will, in the sixteenth 
 century, he at the same time maintained that the intelligence, 
 wholly obscured, was incapable of knowing any truth without 
 the light of revealed faith ; mocking at the Scholastic doctors 
 (notably Saint Thomas Aquinas), insulting all philosophy as 
 hostile to Christianity, asserting that all the virtues of phi- 
 losophers are vices, and all their discoveries errors. Luther 
 was condemned by the Church on this point, as on all others. 
 The Jansenists, taking up this doctrine in part, were con- 
 demned in their turn, and Lamennais, although he mitigated 
 it somewhat, was also condemned." 2 
 
 Whence it follows that, according to Catholic teaching, as 
 in the eyes of good sense, we are born gifted with more or 
 less sound reason, feeble though it be, yet capable of develop- 
 ment and certainty. We are born into the human race 
 as into a sort of natural church, where the word of our 
 fathers, an authority worthy of respect, stimulates, regu- 
 lates, and develops the germs of reason. 
 
 1 Perrone, vol. ii. p. 1261. 2 Perrone, loc. cit. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 407 
 
 VI. 
 
 But we have not said everything on the subject of sound 
 reason. It still remains for us to consider the noble words 
 of F^nelon which have already been quoted : " I count on 
 grace alone to guide reason, even in the narrow limits of 
 reason. . . . Men have not sufficient strength to follow their 
 reason to the end. . . . That natural philosophy which could 
 advance without prejudice, without impatience, without pride, 
 to the end of purely human reason, is a philosophic romance." 
 
 We believe that it is strictly true to say that man cannot, 
 of himself, without grace, advance to the end of purely 
 human reason. This we shall show later. 
 
 But here, let us first note, with Thomassin, that, in natural 
 sound reason, there is, besides reason itself, whose light is a 
 ray from the face of God shining into the soul, says Saint 
 Thomas, there is, moreover, a constant aid from God, which 
 incites, moves, urges to action and development the germ of 
 reason. 1 Not only does this light come from God and belong 
 to God, but also God actually continues to diffuse it, to in- 
 cite and direct its radiance. As when a star shines in 
 heaven, and besides its ordinary lustre and its peaceful light 
 it sends out flashes and scintillations to provoke attention, 
 and to show that what the spectator sees is not a dead lu- 
 minary, but a luminary which lives and acts : so, too, in the 
 light of the human soul, besides the gift itself of reason 
 which man possesses once for all, there are flashes, movements, 
 and renewals which come from God, and which are aids, 
 benefits, and stimulants from God in the natural order. 
 
 There is more yet. As an actual fact, historically, no man 
 is given over to natural reason alone, and to the natural aids 
 alone of God. When we are told that the Word is the light 
 
 1 De Gratia, tract, iii. cap. iii. 
 
408 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 that enlightens every man coming into this world, this refers 
 to both supernatural and natural light. God, desiring to 
 raise all men to the supernatural order, calls them all thither 
 by his grace, by his supernatural stimulations. " God," says 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas, " as incessantly effects the justifica- 
 tion of man (the appeal to supernatural justice) as the sun 
 incessantly effects the illumination of the air." 1 Again, 
 elsewhere, Saint Thomas utters these important words : " God 
 desires to raise man to the supernatural state ; and the effect 
 of that desire is the order itself of nature, so disposed as to 
 lead to eternal life ; it is the supernatural and natural stim- 
 ulations, ever offered to all, which lead to that end." 2 The 
 reason, like the will, is therefore perpetually, and in all 
 ways, assisted by God, who unceasingly urges every soul to 
 its double natural and supernatural perfection. 
 
 When Fenelon says, " I count on grace alone to guide 
 reason," he at once adds, 
 
 " But I believe, with Saint Augustine, that God gives to every 
 man a first germ of intimate and secret grace, which is impercep- 
 tibly blended with reason, and which prepares man to pass gradu- 
 ally from reason to faith. This is what Saint Augustine calls the 
 germ of faith, like a germ conceived in the breast of a mother 
 (inchoationes fidei^ conceptionibus similes). It is a very remote be- 
 ginning of a nearer and nearer approach to faith, as a very form- 
 less germ is the beginning of the child to be born long after. 
 God blends the beginning of the supernatural gift with the rem- 
 nants of our depraved nature so that the man who possesses them 
 united together in his own heart cannot part them, and bears 
 within him a mystery of grace of which he is profoundly ignorant. 
 This is what Saint Augustine means by these kindly words : 
 ' Little by little, Lord, with thy gentle and merciful hand, thou 
 dost caress and reform my heart. 7 Man already possesses the 
 sublimest wisdom, but it is still milk to feed babes (ut infantice 
 nostrce lactesceret sapientia tua). The germ of faith must begin to 
 bloom before it can be distinguished from reason. 
 
 1 Contra Gentes, book iii. cap. clix. 2 Sent., book i. dist. 46, q. i. art. i. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 409 
 
 " This secret and shapeless germ is the beginning of the new 
 man (conceplionibus similes) it is not reason alone, or nature left 
 to herself, it is nascent grace hiding beneath nature to correct it 
 gradually." 
 
 Admirable words ! Yet we must beware of these com- 
 parisons. Yes, God mingles a secret germ of grace with the 
 natural sound reason, but it is a germ not yet fertilized, 
 not permanent in the soul; these are impulses of actual 
 grace, but not of habitual grace, for that would be faith 
 itself, it would be intelligence raised above itself into a 
 supernatural state. 
 
 But, in this sense, all theologians agree that, historically, 
 sound reason is always sustained by generous aid from God, 
 natural and supernatural. 
 
 What sound reason is, and what it can do unaided, is 
 therefore, in theology, a purely theoretical question. All 
 theologians, even those who grant the most to the natural 
 powers of reason, such, for instance, as Perrone, admit 
 that in fact and in history, reason, of itself alone, has not only 
 never discovered the sum total of truths of the natural order, 
 but it has not even found that portion of natural truth which, 
 logically, it was possible for it to discover; that, for instance, 
 philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle received supernat- 
 ural aid from God for the discovery of various great natural 
 truths ; moreover, that they evidently made use of the data 
 of tradition, deposited in language, where many traces of 
 primitive lights may be found, given by God to the first 
 man. 
 
 Thus, in short, sound natural reason is always sustained 
 by God, who desires to elevate it (ipse ordo naturce infinem 
 salutis). God sustains it, stimulates and guides it by his 
 supernatural and natural aid ; that is to say, God not 
 only co-operates in every movement of thought, as in every 
 other movement of his creatures, but he also co-operates in 
 
410 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 those movements by upholding and directing them, as Fe'nelon 
 so admirably explains when he speaks of the two reasons 
 within us, one which is prone to err, and the other which 
 corrects the first. Moreover, God, desiring to raise all men 
 to the supernatural order, unites the germ of grace with 
 the natural germ of reason, and strives to fertilize that germ 
 by his incitements ; and we may say of natural reason what 
 Saint Thomas says of the whole order of nature, that that 
 order, by God's desire to save all men, moves towards the 
 supernatural goal, and that every intelligence unceasingly 
 receives both natural and supernatural impulses which urge 
 it towards this end. 1 
 
 1 We find, in a lecture by Lacordaire, thoughts exactly agreeing with our 
 own in regard to natural faith and the relation of the two orders of the divine 
 intelligible. " Even in axioms," says the eloquent and learned Dominican, 
 " I have made clear to you an obscure element, and consequently an element 
 of faith ; not that axioms are not final evidence, but that evidence does not 
 prevent us from seeking something beyond them, the substantial axiom 
 instead of the logical axiom, eternal light instead of communicated light, 
 intrinsic truth instead of truth descended on a mind which may lose it. ... 
 Which leads y6u to see that the natural world is joined to a higher world, 
 to the divine world ; natural knowledge to divine knowledge, natural faith to 
 divine faith." 1836, Lecture xii. 
 
CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 THE RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH (Continued). 
 
 FEQM what precedes, we have learned what sound reason 
 is. It is reason such as it is when it is maintained in 
 its natural relations ; it is reason not artificially mutilated, 
 not sophistically separated from the will first, and then from, 
 its true root in the centre of the soul, which is the divine 
 sense, natural faith in God ; it is reason not in revolt against 
 the common reason of mankind, not insensible of the gen- 
 erous aids which God gives to every soul. "We must," 
 says a refined thinker, " avoid, in our intellectual operations, 
 all that parts the mind from the soul." Nothing could be 
 better expressed. We must not set the mind apart. We 
 must leave to thought its life in the entire soul and in the 
 nourishment which the soul receives from God and from 
 humanity. Whoever proceeds otherwise, maims and muti- 
 lates himself, forces his mind to retreat, loses his reason, and 
 descends to sophistry, even to the formal negation of the 
 essential principles of reason, even to the negation of evi- 
 dence and axioms. In short, sound reason, as an actual fact, 
 is always sustained by the grace of God, which mingles with 
 it to lead man to the supernatural order. 
 
 This established, we shall necessarily agree when we come 
 to investigate what reason may and may not do ; and noth- 
 ing, I believe, should any longer prevent our recognition of 
 what must be called the highest power and the highest 
 achievement of reason. 
 
412 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 This final achievement of reason is expressed by Perrone 
 in the proposition : " Individual reason may by itself with 
 certainty recognize and demonstrate the possibility, utility, 
 and necessity of divine revelation." l 
 
 This theological theorem seems to us to be of prime im- 
 portance and beauty. If we succeed in fully establishing its 
 truth, it will be of immense consequence; the bond be- 
 tween Eeligion and Philosophy will then be found. 
 
 The question, it seems to us, may be reduced to knowing 
 whether Descartes and Saint Augustine were right in utter- 
 ing these great and fundamental words : " I am, and I feel 
 that I am, an imperfect thing, incomplete, dependent on an- 
 other, unceasingly tending and aspiring towards something 
 better and greater than myself." 
 
 It is enough, I say, to prove this theological theorem, if we 
 know whether human reason is or is not an imperfect thing, 
 incomplete and dependent, incessantly tending and aspiring 
 towards something better and greater than itself. 
 
 If it be true, as Scripture tells us, that the light which is in 
 us is only darkness, that is, that our reason, compared to the 
 supernatural light, is but the shadow of the light of God ; if 
 we may say of reason what the poet says of the sun, 
 
 " Sun, shadow of his light ! " 
 
 if this be that which Plato perceived when, in the lower de- 
 gree of the intelligible, he saw nought but " divine phantasms 
 and shadows of that which is ; " if Aristotle understood the 
 same thing when he distinguished between knowledge coming 
 from above, and that which comes from below, between that 
 which is borrowed from visible things, and that which is pure 
 intellect, and when he showed us above our reason another 
 light which is, which lives, which is self-thinking, which is 
 eternal, immutable, which is not ours, which is not essential 
 
 1 Perrone, ii. 1638. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 413 
 
 to the soul, from which the soul may be separated without 
 impairing the reason; if the certain and actual objects per- 
 ceived by reason, according to Saint Augustine, are clearly 
 not God, but demonstrate him ; if, as Saint Bernard says (in 
 which he is followed by Saint Thomas and Thomassin), natu- 
 ral light be a reflection of God in the mirror of the soul, so 
 that the soul sees merely the reflection of God, not God him- 
 self, and only sees that reflection in that it sees itself, which 
 Descartes also says ; if it be true that hence this knowledge 
 of God, such as it is, as Saint Thomas everywhere declares, 
 in which he is confirmed by the Koman Catechism and all 
 theology, is always a thing apart from the creature, never 
 direct and immediate, for that would be to see God, a thing 
 impossible naturally, if all this be true, if such be the na- 
 ture of reason, do you believe that reason knows nought 
 of it? 
 
 How did Aristotle and Plato and so many others know it, 
 if reason is incapable of knowing it ? Are Descartes' lucid 
 words false ? Is not the reason of every man, as well as his 
 will, conscious of its own imperfection and incompleteness ? 
 Is it not conscious of its dependence on a higher being ? Does 
 it not incessantly tend and aspire to something better and 
 greater than itself? 
 
 Yes, reason, every one may recognize for himself, as we 
 see in history, seeks a light, not only brighter than its pres- 
 ent light, but also a very different light, both of a different 
 nature and better and greater than itself. 
 
 Men far advanced in the works of the mind know this : 
 we need a better light ; that which we have neither nourishes 
 nor gives life. Shadows, phantasms, axioms, reflections, and 
 abstractions do not satisfy our desire for knowledge, admira- 
 tion, and love. 
 
 What soul is there, still living beneath the weight of years 
 and of the most vast and dearly bought human knowledge, 
 
414 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 which does not sometimes compare these views of abstract 
 thought with the living reality, with the vision of the 
 earth, fertile, blooming, radiant in sunshine, with the pene- 
 trating and mysterious odors of nature, the savor of plants 
 and their generous products, with the vigor of the vital air 
 and the stimulating fluids which penetrate, revive, and elec- 
 trify us, with the sight of men who seek and hope, with the 
 spectacle of whatever remains to us of nobility and human 
 beauty, with the commerce of souls, with love ! What soul 
 is there, I say, yet living, who, when this contrast is made 
 clear, does not feel it and say : " My head is filled with shad- 
 ows, genuine shadows, undoubted shadows, but still shadows ! 
 I have spent my life in discovering the world, in studying its 
 motive springs ; I have not solved the enigma ; I have suc- 
 ceeded in grasping only certain portions, and the little that I 
 retain is but a dead copy of life." 
 
 Eead again Goethe's inexhaustible sarcasms in regard to 
 what he calls " a foolish fellow who speculates ! " l Above 
 all, re-read the grander and more sublime cry which disgust 
 for worldly wisdom wrings from Solomon : 
 
 " Vanity of vanities ! all is vanity ! I gave my heart to seek 
 and search out by wisdom all things that are done under the sun ; 
 and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. I said in mine 
 heart, Go to, now, I will prove thee with mirth. There is nothing 
 better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that he 
 should make his soul enjoy good in his labor. There is no good, 
 but for a man to rejoice in his life." 
 
 What does this prove ? That our senses show us realities, 
 and our reason, in so far as it dwells in the natural light 
 alone, phantasms. Do not misunderstand me ; I say divine, 
 certain, axiomatic, absolute, eternal, evident phantasms, but 
 still phantasms. 
 
 Well ! shall I therefore relapse from reason into the senses, 
 
 1 Ein Kerl der speculiert. Faust. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 415 
 
 like Goethe's hero, like Solomon himself ? Or rather, quite 
 the contrary, shall I not do better to say : " Let us rise higher. 
 Let us see if that reflection does not proclaim a Sun, and if 
 there be not a Being, a life corresponding to those ideas of 
 eternity, immensity, perfection, and infinity, which are per- 
 haps in my mind the cold, dry copy of eternal life ? May 
 we, by some wondrous revelation, behold the Being to whom 
 these traits answer? May we touch, feel and love him? 
 May we, by some great and holy initiation, hold commerce 
 with him and live his life, as we live in nature and humanity ? " 
 
 That such a Being exists, says reason, I know. It is God. 
 Everything proves it. Now, what motive have I to deny 
 that I can see him, and that this great revelation is possible ? 
 I indeed see material bodies and the earth, which are unlike 
 myself ; I see myself and am conscious of myself ; I see the 
 mind and soul of other men in their words and looks; I see 
 immutable truths, as empty as they are assured, which only 
 stimulate my glance to seek fuller light: then why should 
 I not see God ? Cannot God, in whose light I see and know 
 everything, make himself known and seen, as a rnind makes 
 itself known to my mind, as my soul is revealed to itself ? 
 
 I defy all the knowledge in the world to find any trace 
 whatsoever of impossibility here ; or rather, I affirm this pos- 
 sibility simply because I conceive this new relation of the 
 soul to God, and seek for him. 
 
 I assert the possibility of this revelation, because I see that 
 it is useful and necessary. 
 
 It is necessary : l for if there be no living intelligible object 
 which I can see as I see the outward world, if all intelligi- 
 bility be abstract, as atheists say, is intelligibility worth one 
 hour's toil ? Intelligibility then ceases to be a future, a hope, 
 
 1 Necessary in the sense in which the Treatises on the True Religion have 
 proved the necessity of revelation, and not in the sense that Baius maintained, 
 that the supernatural light is due to nature. 
 
416 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 a felicity. The intelligible is no longer heaven, or rather it 
 is the pagan heaven, the kingdom of shades, wherein the 
 loftiest souls must needs exclaim, with Achilles : " Why am 
 I not again upon the earth ! Why am I not the slave of the 
 poorest laborer ! Better that than to reign over all these 
 shadows." No one indeed cares to reign over shadows. Bet- 
 ter be the living slave of a real and living being. 
 
 If there be not, beyond the cold light of my reason, the 
 holy light, the purifying light, the vivifying light, the loving 
 light, a flood of ecstatic delights as well as a flood of 
 radiance, then my reason has deceived me. I should have 
 done better to till the ground and rest satisfied with its 
 gifts. I should do better even now to give up the vain labor 
 of thought, to return to living reality, and descend from that 
 chill height which it was idle to climb. 
 
 And indeed, this temptation assails, at the pinnacle of life, 
 most minds which have sought light by the labor of thought. 
 When man has passed his highest point, and begins to go 
 down into the valley of old age, he hesitates. Then comes 
 a critical period, when the soul returns to earth, when the 
 senses revive and put forth all their most dangerous refine- 
 ments. Medical science recognizes and teaches this. 1 
 
 This is a lesson which nature gives us. When man has 
 risen to his highest point, has attained his natural eminence, 
 and has climbed as far as human strength can go, he should 
 mount higher yet, he should rise to the divine ; if not, he 
 will sink to the animal. 
 
 Yes, if the man who has gained the summit of life, after 
 spending so much time in the ascent, does not desire to 
 descend rapidly into the valley of his tomb ; if, while he is 
 yet full of unrealized hopes, unemployed powers, and pos- 
 sible progress, both conceived and hoped for, if he do not 
 desire to see all his powers, all his perfections, his clear 
 
 1 Burdach, Physiology, v. 127. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH, 417 
 
 judgment, his penetration, his enthusiasm, his courage, his 
 nobility, his very heart, decay with inconceivable rapidity ; 
 if he do not desire to return to matter, to return to earth, 
 and to degenerate into all the indolence, the grossness, and 
 blindness of the flesh ; if he do not desire to see that flesh, at 
 the same time that it loses its beauty, resume its tyranny 
 over the soul, to restore it more quickly to the dust, if man 
 desire not this sad end, he must accept and traverse from 
 above, and by an heroic effort, the great crisis of middle life. 
 He must repeat the prayer of the prophet : " Lord, 1 am thy 
 work ! In the midst of my days, give me fresh life ; in the 
 midst of my life, show me thy light!" He must at last 
 decide to cease being a son of earth, and become a child of 
 heaven ; to pass, still living, by the sacrifice and rupture of 
 all earthly ties, into the higher sphere of existence; to 
 enter wholly into supernatural reality. He must pass from 
 nature to God, leave self behind, and enter the infinity of 
 God, ascend to heaven, in a word, like Elijah in the 
 chariot of fire. 
 
 If he dare not do this ; if he cannot give up earth and 
 all its vanities ; if his search after wisdom was mixed with 
 stratagems and sensuality ; if he shrink from indispensable 
 and entire sacrifice, he relapses into animalism ; and the 
 life of insight will soon seem to him moro empty and idle 
 than the games of childhood and the illusions of youth. 
 
 Now, it is impossible that a vain effort, followed by a fall 
 and a return to the senses, should be the whole destiny of 
 reason ; it is impossible that the effort, be it what it may, 
 after wisdom and truth, should be mere vanity, Therefore 
 we must believe in the chariot of fire and in the other light. 
 
 Therefore there is, or there may be, says reason, some 
 divine revelation which gives perfect wisdom ; and that 
 revelation I must await and seek. 
 
 For if, in this belief, a man take up the Gospel and read 
 
 27 
 
 
418 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 these words : " Whosoever believeth in him shall have eter- 
 nal life ; " and these : " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
 shall see God ; " if he remember that all Christianity lies in 
 offering to mankind means for attaining to the vision of very 
 God, and his possession ; that the great news which he bears 
 is the existence of another light, greater, better, than that 
 of reason, a light which vivifies and beautifies ; if we hear 
 Saint Paul call faith the beginning of that light, and define 
 it as the substance of Good to come ; if we understand Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas when he declares that this light " is called 
 substantial because it differs from ordinary knowledge, which 
 sees its object from without only, in that divine Faith im- 
 parts to the soul the very substance and peculiar beginning of 
 the good things for which we hope," then reason no longer 
 understands merely the possibility and utility of revelation, 
 but. as another theoretical axiom expresses it, " Man's reason 
 may attain the certainty of the existence of divine revelation," 
 and reason may say, " The revelation which I knew to be 
 possible, useful, and necessary, exists ; I behold it, it is 
 the Gospel." 
 
 II. 
 
 But this point of the question is one of such radical im- 
 portance that we must needs dwell upon it, and, if possible, 
 attain exact results in regard to our subject. Now, it 
 seems to me that there are, indeed, at the heart of the 
 question, results so precise that I may venture to call them 
 geometrical. 
 
 The point at issue is the necessity, for every man, of the 
 supernatural gift in order to attain his full perfection. 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas is here again our point of support 
 and our theological authority. Let us quote him first, then 
 we shall see how this point may be like a question in geom- 
 etry. He says, 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 419 
 
 " Throughout the hierarchy of subordinate natures we find that, 
 for the perfection of every lower term, two things are needed, 
 the one depending on its individual life, the other adding to it the 
 life of the higher term. Now, the created rational nature alone has 
 for its higher and immediate term God himself; the other creatures 
 do not touch the universal. 
 
 " The rational nature alone is immediately subordinated to the 
 First Principle, to the Universal Being. 
 
 "Thus the perfection of rational nature consists, not only in that 
 which constitutes its individual nature, but also in some supple- 
 ment which is added to it by a certain supernatural participation, 
 in the goodness of God. And it is for this very reason that we 
 have already said that the final beatitude of man consists of the 
 supernatural vision of God." * 
 
 To our thinking, there is a sort of geometrical preci- 
 sion in the theological formulas of Saint Thomas Aquinas. 
 " Harmony," says Leibnitz, " geometry, metaphysics, and 
 morals are everywhere existent." This, I say, seems to hold 
 good of the theology and metaphysics of Saint Thomas, 
 which, moreover, is only Christian science in all its sub- 
 limity and precision. 
 
 This, then, is what strikes us as geometrical in the propo- 
 sition that intelligent being, alone immediately subordinated 
 to the universal and the infinite, attains final perfection 
 only by a supernatural participation in the life of God 
 himself. 
 
 Man is not and cannot be, of himself, absolutely perfect 
 in anything. Neither in his being, his knowledge, his will, 
 nor his love can he be, by himself, complete, entire, and 
 finished. God alone is a unit, total, perfect in his nature. 
 Man is necessarily partial, mutable, finite, and incomplete 
 in all, for the very reason that he is created, and lives within 
 the limits of time. 
 
 This is true of man, as of every creature. But there is 
 
 1 2 a , 2 ae , q. ii. art. 3. 
 
420 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 this difference between man and all the other inhabitants of 
 our earth, that man alone, says Saint Thomas Aquinas, is 
 immediately subordinated to the universal or the infinite. 
 
 This means, if I do not err, that, every created being having 
 its number, its weight, and its measure, a fixed number 
 and determinate measure, man alone, here below, has, for 
 his number and measure, an indefinite number, an increas- 
 ing measure, with no other higher limit but the infinite 
 itself. 
 
 He alone, in so far as a rational and free soul, in that 
 which constitutes human nature, is indefinitely perfectible. 
 He alone can develop more and more, without fixed limit, 
 the idea of God to which he corresponds. He increases in 
 intelligence, in love; and there is no finite, fixed limit to 
 this growth. But can he ever develop all ? No, for then 
 he would cease to be a man or a created being ; he would 
 be all act, like God. God alone is all actual. Man by his 
 very nature is always partly potential and partly actual. 
 If there were but one finite development to be enacted, he 
 would enact it ; but he would then be mere matter, he would 
 be irrational, and hence he would not be immediately subor- 
 dinated to the infinite. But as he possesses a possible de- 
 velopment which is endless, he cannot complete it, since he 
 cannot become God. God alone is all actual at the same 
 time that he is infinite. 
 
 Let us clearly understand how the rational, free, and loving 
 soul, having its relation to the- universal, can never develop 
 everything, and always remains indefinitely developable. 
 
 What, then, is the rational and loving being ? How do 
 we acquire love and reason ? By direct illumination from 
 him who is the Light of men. What is reason ? It is a 
 light derived from the Word, that is, from an infinite 
 source. So, too, with our love. Thus man, both in his rea- 
 son and in his love, in that which constitutes his individual 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 421 
 
 nature, is capable of indefinite development ; but he will 
 never attain the limit of development. 
 
 It is here that man and his entire rational and volitional 
 life, both in his growth and in his effort to reach his limit and 
 his perfection, are comparable to those marvellous geometrical 
 quantities known as convergent series developed regularly. 
 
 Do not be alarmed by this comparison; any one can 
 understand it. 
 
 Is it not true that the following series of terms, 
 
 that is, one half plus one quarter, plus one eighth, plus one 
 sixteenth, plus one thirty-second, and so on indefinitely, is 
 it not true that all these terms, each of which is always a 
 half of that which precedes it, form, if added together, an 
 increasing quantity which tends to become equal to one ? 
 This is self-evident. 
 
 Is it not true that if you add to the series one term 
 more, still the half of the preceding one, that is, the essen- 
 tial law of the series, you will approach nearer and nearer 
 to unity? This is clear. 
 
 For instance, the terms written above, taken together, 
 form a sum equal to unity minus one thirty-second. But 
 add the next term, which would be one sixty-fourth, the 
 sum total will then equal unity minus one sixty-fourth. 
 Thus you see that you steadily approach unity in propor- 
 tion as you develop your series. 
 
 But do you not also see that, for some reason, you will 
 never attain unity itself ? Is it not possible to go on for- 
 ever, endlessly, adding one term more ? Undoubtedly, since 
 to add a term we have only to take half of the preceding 
 term ; and that preceding term, small as it may be, being 
 something, the half of something is necessarily something, 
 never zero. You can thus always add one term more. 
 
422 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 However far you may develop your series, there will 
 always remain a genuinely infinite series of possible terms 
 to be developed, while you will have obtained nothing but a 
 finite number of terms. 
 
 The perfect image of free and rational being which is de- 
 veloped in time, under an increasing number and a growing 
 measure, which always remains actually finite, that is the 
 necessary nature of created things; but which is always 
 capable of potential increase, that is the peculiar nature 
 of man. The perfect image, we say, of a being which can 
 never carry all its potentiality into act, since it would then 
 be limited like matter, or infinite like God ; which tends 
 and converges constantly towards that limit, towards that 
 universal and that infinite, to which it is directly relative, 
 but yet which it can never attain, whatever be the dura- 
 tion and rapidity of its development. 
 
 But there is another point of view. How do geometricians 
 say, and how can they say with all truth, that the series just 
 quoted, taken with all its possible terms, is mathemati- 
 cally, precisely, equal to one ? How can they posit as true, 
 with the utmost precision, this equation, 
 
 that is to say, one half plus one quarter, plus one eighth, 
 plus one sixteenth, plus all the rest, equals ONE ?. 
 
 It is because they suppose, as we said, that the series is 
 taken with all its possible terms, not only with all the 
 terms actually developed, but with all its possible developable 
 terms and all its terms in potentiality. But there is an 
 infinite number of these possible terms, as we have seen. 
 There is an infinite number, in the exact sense of the word, 
 since we can never, absolutely never, reach the last. We 
 can never develop more than a finite number of them, and 
 there always remains an infinite number of possible ones to 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 423 
 
 be developed. The number of possible terms, therefore, is 
 really infinite. 
 
 Here, then, the infinite intervenes ; and we must indeed 
 suppose that the infinite has actually entered into the series, 
 and has completed the terms developed by its developable 
 infinity, in order for it to become a unit. The infinite must 
 intervene before this increasing quantity can have its integ- 
 rity, attain its' plenitude, its perfection, its absolute totality. 
 This is plain. 
 
 Well, what does theology teach us ? It tells us that, by 
 his own unaided nature alone, man cannot attain the perfec- 
 tion of his life, of his knowledge, of his will, of his wisdom, of 
 his love, or of his beatitude. All is always necessarily partial 
 and incomplete in man ; nothing absolutely one, perfect, total, 
 integral, belongs to him by nature. But God, who is the 
 Infinite, may, by superadding to the created being a new 
 gift, which is himself, give that integrity and perfection to 
 the rational creature. 
 
 Here, then, we have a very precise comparison, on this 
 point, of geometry and theology , and we see that our reason 
 cannot acquire its final perfection until God himself shall 
 descend into it. 
 
 And all this is further elucidated by theological formulas, 
 and also aids us to understand them. 
 
 For instance, nothing could seem stranger, at first sight, 
 than the condemnation of this proposition of Bams : " The 
 integrity of first creation is not a gratuitous final touch of 
 perfection superadded to human nature, it is its natural con- 
 dition." l The condemned proposition, for those who do not 
 know the language of theology, at first seems evident in its 
 terms. How can the integrity of nature be a gratuitous gift 
 superadded to nature ? How can the integrity of nature be 
 other than natural ? Could God create a maimed and muti- 
 lated being, a ruin like the actual humanity ? 
 
 1 26 Bail. 
 
424 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 From our point of view, we understand the condemnation ; 
 we see the proposition of Baius to be utterly false. Man, by 
 his individual nature, no more possesses his integrity and 
 perfection, even natural, than the series in process of develop- 
 ment can attain its unity and totality without the hypo- 
 thesis of the infinite, a hypothesis so perfectly outside of 
 the law of the development of the series that, by that law, 
 it is, on the contrary, apparent that the limits and unity 
 cannot be attained. 
 
 From this point of view also we understand this other 
 theological theorem already quoted: "The grace of God is 
 requisite to fallen man, for a knowledge of all the truths of 
 the natural order." 
 
 I am well aware that, far from any intention to allude 
 here to absolute necessity, there is no question, in the sense 
 in which this proposition was framed, of any but a moral 
 necessity. That is to say that, strictly speaking, man, even 
 fallen, if he made perfect use of all the natural aids from 
 God, all his time, all his life, might, perhaps, without special 
 grace, know the sum total of those truths. 
 
 But what truths ? The principal moral truths, the pre- 
 ambles of faith, the dogmas of natural religion essential to 
 man, and not all the truths of the natural order; and he 
 would not know them with that entire knowledge, carried to 
 its end, such as the first man possessed. Doubtless again, 
 as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, in the primitive state, nature 
 attained, without supernatural grace from God, to all that 
 knowledge; but how did man attain that state of perfect 
 nature ? In consequence of a supernatural gift from God. 
 Therefore, strictly speaking, and in no case, have human in- 
 telligence, human love, or anything human, their full per- 
 fection, even natural, as Saint Thomas teaches, without a 
 supernatural gift from the goodness and infinite power of 
 God. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 425 
 
 And our geometrical formula remains visible under the 
 transparent veil of these dogmas. 
 
 We understand that the integrity of human nature is not 
 the natural condition of man, but a perfecting of nature by 
 the infinite power of God. We understand furthermore that, 
 by this gift, man obtained the perfection of his nature ; but 
 it did not necessarily follow from that perfection, given 
 within the limits of nature by a supernatural principle, 
 that man was to be raised to participation in the divine 
 nature. 
 
 And we see that we cannot say, with Bai'us, " That the 
 elevation of human nature to participation in the divine na- 
 ture was due to the integrity of the first creation, and should 
 be called natural, and not supernatural." 1 
 
 The gift of God might stop there, and give man only com-; 
 plete natural knowledge, complete empire over his passions,^ 
 and immortality in his body. Only, as Saint Thomas d 
 onstrates, man would not then have been raised to his fina 
 perfection ; that is, to his supernatural end, which consists 
 in seeing the essence of God and possessing it ; and integral 
 nature, even more than fallen nature, would have retained 
 the natural desire to see the essence of God and to possess it. 
 
 Man would then have been merely in that state which 
 may be called supernatural as to its origin, and not in that 
 which must be called supernatural as to its sanctifying 
 effects. 2 
 
 The supernatural gift in its origin would have as its only 
 and complete end, natural perfection, and not that commu- 
 nication from the divine nature known as sanctification. 
 
 But this is only a purely hypothetical state, as is the state 
 
 1 21 Baii. 
 
 2 There is the supernatural as to its origin (entative, KO.T ovalav), the su- 
 pernatural as to its sanctifying effects (icad' ayuurfjibv, or a0' 
 
 ), as Father Passaglia so ably treats them in his note-books. 
 
426 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 of pure nature. These two states never existed. The first 
 man was created in a state cf justice and supernatural sanc- 
 tity, at the same time as in that state of complete natural 
 perfection which excludes ignorance, lust, sorrow, and death, 
 and which implies a supernatural gift. 
 
 However this may be, what we desire to assert is that, in 
 any case, the perfection of man is possible only by a super- 
 natural gift from the bounty and infinite power of God. 
 
 It would then remain for us to understand how man may, 
 through God, do what he cannot do of himself ; how, in the 
 intellectual order, man may know, through God, every truth 
 ,of the natural order, all the first region of the intelligible, 
 and enter the second, which is, in itself, supernatural. This 
 is the mystery of divine love, the mystery of union. 
 
 We see, indeed, in the material world, the wonders of 
 grafting, that is, a root which bears, by a superadded germ, 
 fruits not its own, and of a nature superior to its own. 
 
 We see, as Leibnitz observes, in speaking of that which 
 revelation adds to knowledge, we see the human eye, the 
 instrument of vision, acquire, by the power which other in- 
 struments superadd to it, a vision many thousand times 
 stronger than its natural vision. 
 
 In geometry we see that convergent series by which we 
 can prove that it cannot, by development, attain its integ- 
 rity ; and yet, if the hypothesis of the infinite be introduced 
 into it, that which was impossible becomes possible. 
 
 To attain to the highest degree of the divine intelligible, 
 let us note in passing, to the supernatural degree, is, as 
 theology teaches, to share in the knowledge of God himself. 
 This knowledge, by its nature, transcends all created intelli- 
 gence, and belongs only to God. But God, who possesses it, 
 enables us to attain it through him. How ? By union 
 with him, by love. We can say no more. "What we can 
 do through those we love," says Saint Thomas Aquinas on 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 427 
 
 this head, " we can, in a certain sense, do of ourselves." 
 What I can do through my well-beloved, says love, I can do 
 by myself. I know because you know, and I see because 
 you see. These enthusiasms, these ecstasies of passion, are 
 realized and made true by omnipotent God, for the souls 
 which are united to him. 
 
 But this is not properly the question here. What we 
 wish to demonstrate, is the geometrical precision of this prop- 
 osition of Saint Thomas Aquinas: that the perfection of 'a 
 rational creature depends not alone upon that which his in- 
 dividual nature implies, but also on a certain supernatural 
 participation in the bounty of God. 
 
 III. 
 
 We think that we have now proved this assertion, but 
 without as yet making clear its whole range. 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas not only affirms that the perfection 
 of the rational creature depends upon a supernatural gift 
 (/car ovo-iav), which gives it the perfection of its peculiar 
 nature ; he also affirms and proves that the rational creature 
 attains its final perfection only through that other supernat- 
 ural gift (KO,& dyiaaiJLov), which raises human nature above 
 itself to participate in the divine nature, by the vision of 
 God's essence. We quote his wonderful words : : 
 
 " The final and perfect beatitude of man consists in the vision 
 of the very essence of God. This is made clear by two considera- 
 tions. In the first place, man is never perfectly happy while 
 there yet remains anything for him to desire and to seek. In the 
 second place, the perfection of each of our powers depends upon 
 its relation to its object. 
 
 " Now, the object of the intelligence is that which is, it is the 
 very essence of things, says Aristotle. Whence it follows that in- 
 
 1 1* 2", q. iii. art. 8. 
 
428 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 tellectual progress consists in seeing the essence of things. If, 
 therefore, the mind know the essence of any effect which does not 
 reveal to it its essence, but only the existence of its cause, we can- 
 not say that that mind has attained this cause, although it knows 
 that it exists ; therefore, when man is acquainted with an effect 
 and knows that it has a cause, his natural desire is to know also 
 what this cause is : and this desire, mixed with admiration, urges 
 him on in his search, and this search ceases only at the sight of 
 the essence. If, therefore, the human mind knows the essence of 
 any created effect, and knows nothing of God, save that he is, we 
 cannot say that the mind has grasped the First Cause, but it 
 still has the natural desire to seek it, and it has as yet neither 
 its perfection nor its beatitude. Therefore, for man's perfect 
 beatitude, his intellect must attain the very essence of the First 
 Cause, and that intellect can only have its perfection in a union 
 with God. its supreme object, and the supreme beatitude of man." 
 
 Saint Thomas everywhere insists upon this point ; J in the 
 Philosophic Sum he devotes long chapters to establishing 2 
 
 " That the natural knowledge of God does not satisfy the 
 natural desire of men's souls, but that, on the contrary, this knowl- 
 edge incites them to desire a sight of God's substance. To know 
 thoroughly, says Saint Thomas, is to know of a thing that which 
 it is. Our natural desire to know is therefore not satisfied when 
 we only know that God is. In vain we know that he is, our de- 
 sire does not stop there, but we also wish to know God through 
 his essence. Every intelligence naturally desires the vision of the 
 divine substance. Now, it is impossible that this natural desire 
 should be an idle one. Therefore every created intelligence may 
 attain to the sight of the essence itself. Only no created being 
 can, through his natural powers, attain to this vision of God." 
 
 Which is to say that man sees with his eyes, directly 
 before him, the world, creation. He desires to see, in the 
 same manner, God himself, God's being, God's essence. Now 
 he knows that God is ; he knows it with certainty ; but he 
 
 1 Notably 1* q. xii. cap. i.; 3 a q. ix. cap. ii. et ad 3 m . 
 
 2 Title of chap. 1., chap. Ivii. Title of chap. lii. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH 429 
 
 wishes to see him whose existence he knows. To know that 
 God is because the world is, is the first degree of intelligible 
 light, it is the sight of natural light reflected by creation. 
 When man shall see the source itself of that light, God him- 
 self, that will be the second degree, that of supernatural vision. 
 
 This is what man desires and seeks. For without this 
 he cannot be supremely happy. Thus, according to Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas, natural reason is a power which, through 
 regret and privation, seeks the supernatural light, although 
 it cannot conceive of it. The first degree of the divine intel- 
 ligible leads to the other. Keason, by natural light, proves 
 that it requires another and a different light : reason leads to 
 revelation , intelligence seeks faith. 
 
 I am well aware that elsewhere Saint Thomas seems to 
 say quite the contrary. In his Treatise on Truth he ex- 
 presses himself thus : 
 
 " Man's supreme good, that good which moves his will as the 
 final goal, is double. There is the good which is proportioned to 
 human nature, and which the forces of nature suffice to obtain. 
 This is the felicity, whether contemplative or active, which lies in 
 the exercise of human wisdom and the practice of the moral vir- 
 tues described by the philosophers. But there is, for man, another 
 good which transcends all the proportions of human nature, and 
 which the natural powers do not suffice to obtain, or even to con- 
 ceive or desire. And this good is eternal life." l 
 
 Thus in the Theological Sum and in the Philosophical 
 Sum, Saint Thomas speaks of man's natural desire (naturale 
 desiderium) to see the essence of God, which is man's su- 
 preme good ; and, in this Opuscule, he denies that the soul, 
 by its natural powers, can conceive and desire the supreme 
 good. 
 
 But the contradiction is only seeming, and these two points 
 of view of Saint Thomas explain the theological discussion 
 
 1 Verit. xiv. art. 21. 
 
430 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 which has arisen upon this subject, and which the Bull 
 Auctorem fidei decides. This double point of view answers 
 to this clear distinction which Saint Thomas continually 
 repeats : Natural reason may know of God that he is, not 
 what he is. 
 
 Natural reason may say : I know that he is, without know- 
 ing what he is. I do not know his essence. I do not see it. 
 I lack that vision. I conceive that it may be obtained. I 
 would that I might obtain it. Here we have that natural 
 desire to which Saint Thomas refers in the Sum, a desire 
 which is not only inefficacious, as Billuard has observed, but 
 which we also declare to be indirect, negative, and without 
 substantial relation to its object. As for the other kind of 
 desire, which conceives the object, which is created in the 
 soul by the real attraction of the desirable and the super- 
 natural intelligible, this desire clearly transcends the powers 
 of nature. Between these two kinds of desire, of which one 
 is desire through privation, and the other desire through a 
 beginning of possession, there is all the difference that there 
 is between reality and shadow, between fulness and empti- 
 ness, between positive and negative. 
 
 Between these two degrees of desire there are the differ- 
 ences expressed by the Psalmist in these words : " I have 
 desired the true desire of justice (concupivit anima mea 
 desiderare justificationes tuas) " : it is nature desiring with 
 natural desire, the supernatural desire of grace, as Saint 
 Ambrose says. 1 
 
 This distinction seems to us clearly established by the 
 Bull Auctorem fidei. The Jansenist Council at Pistoia had 
 established that man, given over to his own light (relic- 
 tus propriis luminibus), might be capable of moving and 
 rising so far as to desire light (moveret se ad desiderandum 
 
 1 Ps. cxviii. v. 20 : Concnpiscimus desiderare, quod non sit potestatis nostrse 
 desiderium, sed gratise Dei. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 431 
 
 auxilium superioris luminis). The Bull decides that this 
 doctrine, understood in the sense of a desire which should 
 tend to eternal salvation (intellecta de desiderio adjutorii 
 superioris luminis in ordine ad salutem promissam per 
 Christum), is suspicious, and favorable to semi-Pelagian 
 heresy. Nothing can be plainer. Desire tending to eternal 
 salvation that is to say, salutary, efficacious, supernatural 
 desire for eternal life is out of all proportion to all 
 natural lights and powers. It is in this sense, which is 
 that of the Council of Pistoia, that the Bull condemns the 
 statement ; but it formally declares that the doctrine is con- 
 demned only in this sense (intellecta de . . . ). It thus 
 reserves another sense ; and that sense can only be that of 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas in his two Sums, which assuredly 
 were not condemned on any point by the Bull Auctorem 
 fidei. 
 
 Whence it results that if it be certain, if it be taught by 
 faith, that the vision of God is purely supernatural, and 
 that we can neither attain to it, nor desire it aright, effica- 
 ciously, save by a supernatural gift, we may yet maintain, 
 with the Angelic Doctor, that the rational creature, created 
 for the vision of God, has a natural desire for it, such as we 
 have defined. Yes, the intelligence of man longs to see 
 God, not only as in a glass, but face to face and directly ; our 
 nature desires the two degrees of the divine intelligible, and 
 we may say of sound reason that it is a power which seeks 
 faith. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN EEASON AND FAITH (Continued). 
 
 I. 
 
 WE have seen what sound reason is, and what it 
 can do. 
 
 It can find and prove the existence of God. Then it can 
 show the possibility, the necessity, of a revealed light, 
 that is, the necessity for seeing God, God's essence, in 
 order to attain final perfection, supreme beatitude. 
 
 But how does the soul pass from one to the other ? 
 How. does the intellect, established in sound reason and 
 in natural light, acquire faith, acquire the supernatural 
 light ? 
 
 We explained this in part when we quoted the admirable 
 passage in which Fe'nelon speaks of the means of passing 
 gradually from reason to faith. But we must now develop 
 it still further. 
 
 When Fe'nelon tells us, " God mingles the beginning of 
 the supernatural gift with the remains of kindly nature," 
 and this germ is developed gradually, if our spirit respond 
 faithfully to the help which it receives, in these words 
 there is an image, borrowed, it is true, from the Gospel, 
 which compares the kingdom of God to the leaven mixed 
 with the whole lump ; but this image requires to be trans- 
 lated here into philosophical language. 
 
 Saint Thomas and Saint Augustine combined seem to give 
 us this translation. Saint Thomas calls the light of reason 
 " a light inwardly given by God, in which God speaks to 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 433 
 
 us ;' M1 and Saint Augustine says, "That eternal wisdom, the 
 primary cause of the rational creature, never ceases in any 
 sort to speak with him, to the end that it may convert him." 2 
 A comparison of these two texts? will explain Fe'nelon's en- 
 tire thought. 
 
 The two doctors, taken together, affirm that God never 
 ceases to address the rational creature, as well by the nat- 
 ural, as by the supernatural light; and they show what 
 results from this continual appeal of the Word to the 
 soul. 
 
 God never ceases to address the rational creature : this is 
 the source of reason. But why does God speak ? To the 
 end that the rational creature may be converted to him who 
 is. This intention to bring back his creature to him is grace, 
 which tries to incite the conversion of the soul,. that is, 
 its passage from natural life to eternal, supernatural life. 
 
 While reason speaks, and the natural light properly so 
 called is made manifest, grace speaks at the same time, 
 the supernatural light is already there,, like God. himself, 
 with God himself, who offers it. This is the double speech, 
 natural and supernatural, which the Eternal Wisdom never 
 ceases to address to the rational creature. The Word of 
 God is always speaking, to give the one and the other light. 
 The' one is necessarily received so soon as we are rational, 
 but the other is freely received when the soul ceases to 
 oppose any obstacle. Suarez says, 
 
 " We have proved that the stimulating grace necessary to sal- 
 vation is by a general law promised to all, offered to all, by Jesus 
 Christ, not absolutely, but upon one condition, which depends 
 upon man. This condition is neither a merit on our part, nor a 
 tendency in any way proportioned to the gift of supernatural 
 grace. It can therefore only be the single condition of offering no 
 obstacle ; we cannot conceive of any other. For if, ordinarily, 
 
 1 Verit., q. ii. art. 1. * Ibid., iii. 106, c. 
 
434 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the moral act be necessary, that moral act, having no proportion 
 to grace, could only be necessary to remove the obstacle of sin ; 
 it is useful to destroy the vicious tastes which make man more 
 incapable of receiving grace. We readily understand this doc- 
 trine. Imagine .an adult man absolutely lacking in this inward 
 stimulating grace ; this lack cannot come originally from God, 
 who desires supremely to give grace to all. The cause, therefore, 
 is in the man. But what is it ? Is it that the man does not 
 merit grace, or has not prepared the way for it by works? No, 
 since there are no preparatory merits or acts proportionate to 
 grace, save after a first grace. There is thus but one possible 
 cause for the lack of all grace, and that is, that man opposes some 
 obstacle to the grace which is given. The condition of God's 
 grace, therefore, is this, not to oppose any obstacle to it." 2 
 
 Thus grace is present like God, who is present to all, and 
 who desires supremely to give his grace to all. God never 
 ceases to address the rational creature: this is the natural 
 gift always received. He addresses him, to the end that he 
 may ~be converted ; this is the supernatural divine intention, 
 it is the grace which is offered. Is it received ? Is it in 
 us ? Is it not ? It is received, it is in us so soon as we re- 
 move the obstacle. What is the obstacle, ? It is vice ; it is 
 that depravity which, understanding the natural speech of 
 the Word in conscience and reason, does not obey it in prac- 
 tice and life. God would pour into the soul the supernat- 
 ural gift which is always offered, if the soul would obey him 
 and heed it in the natural order. 
 
 The single and perfect God, the absolute, supreme Good, 
 is present. He speaks continually to the soul, which gives 
 it life in the natural order, and would give it life in the 
 supernatural order, if the soul would become converted. This 
 conversion is continually suggested by God, who never ceases 
 to speak through nature and grace. The same perfect God, 
 who is the life of the soul in the natural order, becomes its 
 
 1 Tract, de divin. Grat., pars ii. lib. iv. cap. xv. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 425 
 
 supernatural life so soon as it ceases to oppose an obstacle 
 to the constant inspiration which labors to convert it. 
 
 The soul, in its natural state, beholds itself, and sees the 
 light of God in the mirror which is itself, and that light is 
 its reason. If it turns, beneath the watchful grace of God, 
 if it turns from itself to God, these same rays which it saw 
 reflected and oblique in the mirror, it sees in the direction 
 whence they came, and its gaze follows them to their source ; 
 and that gaze is the vision of God, when the eye is capable 
 of seeing, which can only be after our earthly journey is 
 over ; it is faith, as obscure as you like, while the eye of the 
 soul is not yet fashioned to the supernatural light and thinks 
 itself blinded by it. 
 
 This does not mean that God sheds his light and his gifts 
 continuously and uniformly, like the sun, and that every 
 man does with them simply what he will. The comparison 
 would be unworthy of God. If God were only an impassive 
 sun, he would be merely an element, and not the free and 
 omnipotent Master of all creatures, the Father of men, full 
 of wisdom and full of love. 
 
 The eternal sun of justice is not an impassive sun. Have 
 we not said above, regarding this comparison, that even the 
 star scintillates, and the sidereal light has its motions and its 
 pulses ? Now, the wisdom of God, his goodness, his love, 
 have infinitely more elements, more approximations towards 
 the soul to save it and elevate it, than the starry sky has to 
 provoke and lift our glance. The light of God, which we 
 perceive directly or indirectly, as it is supernatural or nat- 
 ural, is continually scintillating, veiling itself, revealing itself, 
 increasing, vanishing, again increasing, and this in accord 
 with the infinite calculations of an infinite love and infinite 
 wisdom, diversely applied to each soul and to each moment 
 of each soul, to save all. 
 
 God shows his natural light in the mirror of the soul only 
 
436 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 to engage the soul to turn and behold himself, who is su- 
 pernatural ; and this intention itself is grace. This is the 
 meaning of Saint Augustine's words, which I cannot too 
 often repeat : " The eternal Wisdom incessantly addresses 
 the rational creature, to the end that it may be converted 
 to him who is." 
 
 II 
 
 Saint Augustine elsewhere develops wonderfully the dif- 
 ference between the two lights, as well as the relation and 
 the passage of one to the other, when he speaks of the 
 double gaze which man fixes on himself or on God ; when 
 he compares to the twilight of evening the gaze which man 
 fixes on himself, and to morning that other gaze which 
 he fixes directly on God. "After the darkness," he says, 
 " comes the morning ; after the view which man has taken 
 of his own nature, which is not God, he goes on to praise 
 the light which is God, contemplation of whom reveals it." l 
 "When the book of Genesis tells us of the evening and 
 the morning which follow after each other, the evening is 
 the knowledge which man gains of self, and through which 
 he sees that he is not God ; but the morning, which succeeds 
 that evening, and which begins the ensuing day, is the con- 
 version in which man refers his creation to the Creator's 
 power. Twilight returns when the mind beholds the crea- 
 tion, no longer as before in the Word, but actually in the 
 creation itself ; then the morning, when the mind again 
 turns to praising God, and to seeking fresh knowledge in the 
 Word itself. " Yes," continues Saint Augustine, " there is 
 an essential difference between the knowledge of a being in 
 the Word of God, and the knowledge of that being in its own 
 nature ; the first is truly day, and the other twilight. Com- 
 pared to that bright light which we may see in the Word 
 
 1 De Genesi ad litteram, lib. iv. cap. xxii. et xxiii. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 437 
 
 itself, all knowledge by which we see a creature alone, 
 may really be called night ; although that night itself, com- 
 pared to the darkness and utter ignorance of those who 
 know not even the creature, may, in its turn, be called light. 
 It is thus that the life of the soul with faith, although still 
 in the world and the flesh, compared to the life without 
 faith and without piety, may justly be called light and day ; 
 in the words of the Apostle : You were darkness at first, and 
 now you are light in God." 
 
 And here Saint Augustine displays the depths of his 
 genius, when he shows that in the everlasting home both 
 lights will endure. 1 To see immutably the eternal reasons 
 of men in the immutable light of the Word, and men in 
 themselves ; then to refer to the glory of God this knowledge 
 of the creation, is not this morning, evening, broad day ? 
 In this sense, who would venture to say that the celestial city 
 either does not contemplate the eternity of the Creator, or 
 else is ignorant of this mutable creation, knows not how to 
 praise the Creator in this secondary knowledge ? Day, twi- 
 light, morning, all exist there simultaneously. Yes, in that 
 land of spirits there is always and at the same time the light 
 of day, endless day, in the contemplation of immutable truth ; 
 the light of evening in the sight of the creation itself ; and 
 the light of morning, and a perpetual morning, in the return 
 of that inferior knowledge to God to praise him. 
 
 Here, then, we have the whole theory of light, or, if you 
 prefer, of the two lights and of their relation. The mind, if 
 it behold itself or creation, only sees the light mixed with 
 shadows, the evening light, the light of reason, purely natural. 
 If it behold God in himself, it is the perfect day ; and if on 
 beholding the creation it raise its eye at once to God to thank 
 him for his work, it is the morning which begins the day ; 
 it is reason seeking another and better light than itself ; it is 
 
 1 De Genesi ad litteram, lib. iv. cap. xxix. et xxx. 
 
438 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 reason receiving, through God's grace, faith, the initial attempt 
 of vision to attain full vision. 
 
 I cannot conceive that an attentive mind, face to face with 
 these data of the highest reason and of the great and holy 
 Catholic tradition, a mind familiar with the history of the 
 struggles, the mistakes, or the glories, the strange and con- 
 tinued movements of human thought, and acquainted above 
 all with its *own individual history and those of its very 
 variable, very uncertain thoughts, which faint and fall, 
 which rise again, which never cease to seek the perfect day, 
 which often think that they have reached the dawn, but 
 merely possess a waning, paling light, soon vanishing into 
 night, I cannot conceive, I say,' that such a mind, meditat- 
 ing on these data, as philosophic as they are Christian, 
 should fail at last to discover therein its law, its rule, and the 
 true theory of light as Christ has made it known to us. 
 
 Will men never observe their souls, and will they never 
 understand the practical conditions of light ? Will they 
 never see in themselves that struggle between darkness and 
 light of which they are really the umpires ? Will they 
 never see why these "beginnings of morning light do not at- 
 tain to the full light of day, but soon turn to evening, and 
 why the evening shades so soon change to darkness ? Why 
 these long slumbers of the soul during which there is no 
 longer any suspicion of daylight ? Why, at long intervals, 
 these attempts and allurements of lights which penetrate us 
 without our aid ? Is it so hard to conclude from these facts 
 that there is a light which is not we, and that if it appear to 
 us veiled, mutable, intermittent in regard to us, it is because 
 we are ourselves variable, mutable, and veiled in its presence : 
 as we now know that it is not the sun which revolves, 
 but the earth which moves and passes, is veiled and turns 
 away, while the sun remains always motionless and radiant ? 
 
 Let no one consider these as empty phrases, but rather as 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 439 
 
 very practical conclusions. And may the healthy soul which 
 reads these pages find therein, as it meditates on the holy 
 doctors whom we quote, efficacious lights and assured prin- 
 ciples to guide its advance in one or the other of these two 
 ways, or successively in both: intelligence seeking faith, 
 faith seeking intelligence ! 
 
 Let us repeat what has just been said, in order to with- 
 draw into ourselves, to descend into the soul in presence of 
 these truths, to the end that we may judge of our intellec- 
 tual life and regulate its course for the future. 
 
 I am not the source of the light which is within me : that 
 source is he who is luminous of himself ; but the cause of 
 vicissitudes, intermittences, diminutions, and obscurities, is 
 myself. 
 
 There is therefore an obstacle in me ; there is therefore a 
 struggle to be made : for I am made for the light, I must 
 reach it, and I desire to do so. 
 
 But the first obstacle, clearly, is that I do not desire it 
 with sufficient ardor. I do indeed feel some attraction 
 towards it ; but this is its constant attraction, which proceeds 
 from it, and not from me. I myself seek that attraction but 
 little ; I do not add all my powers to it, and it is, as it were, 
 inactive on my side. 
 
 Such is the inevitable confession of every sincere soul. 
 
 Well, active response to the attraction, that is, prayer to 
 him who attracts us, this is the starting-point for a more 
 luminous life. The possibility of prayer, the grace of prayer, 
 is always offered to us ; and this attracting grace is as con- 
 tinuous as physical attraction among the stars. 
 
 To unite our strength to this divine attraction is the first 
 endeavor after wisdom. 
 
 But why is all light, in the habitual state of my soul, as in 
 the state of most souls, even when I have prayed, evening 
 light, that is to say, fading and turning to night ? 
 
440 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Because you look, as Saint Augustine says, only into crea- 
 tures, or into yourself ; inclination towards self, inclination 
 towards inferior creatures, keeps your gaze downward. Every 
 luminous datum of the ray, which returns at intervals, as the 
 mystics express it, being applied by you only to creatures 
 and yourself, soon becomes exhausted there, and is changed 
 to darkness. 
 
 Do you know what that luminous datum would be if we 
 could succeed in seeing it without this tendency of limited 
 love for created beings and self ? It would be matinal and 
 increasing. 
 
 Thus the obstacle to be overcome is the tendency towards 
 created beings. It must be conquered, so that God shall no 
 longer be prevented from turning you towards him, him 
 who never ceases to address you to effect this divine return. 
 
 Aided by God, who forewarns us by the inspirations of 
 conscience, and moreover by the increase which his bounty 
 occasionally lends to the light of reason to rouse us ; urged 
 on moreover by the perpetual offer of grace, which is the 
 presence of God himself striving to convert us ; borne along 
 by so many forces, we needs must act, needs must destroy 
 the obstacle. God will then convert us, and we shall move 
 from natural to supernatural light. 
 
 When a soul, by the grace of God, reaches this point, it 
 indeed turns to God. A deep horror of the past, a birth- 
 pang, a great hope in the divine future, take possession of 
 the heart; the supernatural love of God fills it, and the 
 transformation is effected. A new series of works, of sacri- 
 fices, of labors, and of endeavors which lead to God, raise the 
 soul from radiance to radiance in increasing light. Then the 
 luminous data, the increments of the divine ray, become 
 morning light, and change to day. 
 
 But I have not made myself clear. I must find other 
 words and newer semblances for these ancient data of wis- 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 441 
 
 dom ; I must invent forms to captivate the attention which 
 glides over all familiar words and purposes. 
 
 Do you believe in the mutual penetration of minds ? Do 
 you believe that, independent of word and voice, indepen- 
 dent of distance, from one end of the world to the other, 
 minds can influence and penetrate one another ? l Do you 
 believe, as Fenelon says, that in God all men meet? Do 
 you believe that a thought, a movement, a love, an impulse, 
 can reach you by the secret influence of the heart and mind 
 of another? Or rather do you not know that every soul 
 continually lives by the movement of other souls, resists, 
 yields to, agrees perpetually with them ? Do you not know 
 that a soul can feel within it another soul which touches it ? 
 If you do not know this, you do not know the every-day 
 things of earth ; how then can you comprehend the things 
 of heaven ? If you do know it, if you believe in this com- 
 munication of influences between souls and between created 
 minds, so much the more should you believe in God within 
 you. Yes, there is near you, within you, deeper far than 
 any created mind can reach, or than you yourself can reach, 
 God, his influence and his presence, pervading your soul to 
 its very root, and lower yet, to the very bottom of all its 
 powers, and farther yet. And it is not only a divine and im- 
 mense force, in the bosom of which you are plunged, it is a 
 mind which enlightens your mind, a heart which bears up 
 your heart. 
 
 Yes, there is within you some one besides yourself. You 
 are not alone. Is it he, or is it I that speaks within me ? 
 said Saint Augustine. There is, I say, some one within you, 
 at this moment, who looks upon you and loves you. You 
 are scarcely conscious of it, scarcely credit it, because your 
 soul is elsewhere, absorbed and carried away by other joys, 
 other thoughts, other avidities, other affections. Silence 
 
 1 Catech. Trident., pars ii a , de Pcenitent., xi. 
 
442 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 these, and you will soon feel the presence and attraction of 
 him who has long addressed you, looked upon you, and 
 loved you. You will then feel and see clearly within you 
 the two directions of life, and you can choose between them ; 
 you can turn your whole soul towards him who was first to 
 love you, and whose infinite power can produce the marvel 
 of a change of soul, and make of a soul a new soul, by giving 
 it the divine power to be born again in the likeness of the 
 Well-Beloved who penetrates and inspires it. 
 
 Understand, therefore, in what sense Jesus Christ said, " I 
 am the beginning of all things, I who speak in you ; " and 
 Saint John the Baptist said, " He stands in the midst of you, 
 him whom you know not." And understand that admirable 
 commentary by Thomassin which shows us the transition 
 from one of the two lights to the other, and from reason to 
 faith, by him who is the primary cause of reason and faith : 
 
 " ' He is in the midst of you, him whom you know not,' says 
 the Gospel. Thus no soul is born without Jesus Christ. Thus 
 Christ is revealed within us, rather within us than to us, since it 
 is he whose germ nature deposits within us when she sows in our 
 soul the seeds of the eternal law. It is thus that he occupies 
 the middle and centre of every soul, to the end that he may en- 
 lighten all. So that even those whom the Gospel and preachers 
 can only touch externally, are stimulated and solicited by Christ 
 inwardly, by Christ, that is to say, by reason* itself, the eternal 
 law, the innate germ of virtue. Let those, therefore, cultivate 
 that germ, let them conquer vice and all its guilty loves, and 
 Christ, growing ever more and more within their breast, shall 
 reveal himself there in all the fulness of religion and faith." ] 
 
 Do you understand now the transition from reason to 
 faith ? 
 
 1 De Incarnat. , 1. i. cap. ix. This admirable passage, with those which 
 follow, requires to be thoroughly understood, not to be interpreted in a different 
 sense from that which Thomassin certainly attached to it. To say that " na- 
 ture begins to bring forth Christ within us," is an expression which, taken liter- 
 ally, would be false. It is not nature which brings forth Christ within us, 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 443 
 
 Thomassin constantly recurs to these capital truths. He 
 
 says, 
 
 " Christ is Virtue itself humanly developed. No man is born 
 without Christ, because no man is born without the germ of vir- 
 tues. Thus the knowledge of Jesus Christ is as it were inoculated 
 into all men, because nature labors to make every mind know 
 and love good and the eternal law. To believe in Christ we 
 must not go outside of self, but withdraw into self, to seek God 
 and find Christ already present in our heart and in the very 
 breath of our life. Whoever, therefore, practises a virtue as 
 being virtue, the divine spark, an emanation from the eternal law, 
 and not as a vain flower of human glory, that man practises 
 Christ, that man is a Christian. 1 
 
 " Hence, to become a Christian we need not travel afar, but retire 
 into our own self : the kingdom of God is within us, says Jesus 
 Christ ; and when any man finds his reason, submits it to the eter- 
 nal reason, and submits his body to both, that man becomes a par- 
 ticipant in Christ. This is why Saint Paul says that it is not 
 needful to seek Christ afar off, to bring him down from above, 
 since he is in the heart, in the soul, and in the mouth of every 
 man. It is not needful to traverse the earth, or to traverse the 
 seas, to find Jesus Christ, who is in the centre of every soul ; 
 for he is only the perfect and Sovereign reason descended into 
 humanity." 2 
 
 III. 
 
 After such words, so profound and so inspired, it only 
 remains for us to hear, upon this great subject, Jesus 
 himself revealing to us, from his visible mouth and in 
 
 but grace. But if it be certain that God mingles the germ of grace, the begin- 
 ning of the supernatural gift, with the remants of kindly nature, as Fenelon 
 puts it ; if it be true, on the other hand, that the same Word is at once the 
 principle of both natural and supernatural light; and if it incessantly offer 
 both to the soul, we understand that nature, forewarned and aided by grace, 
 prepares the soul for the birth of the new man ; or rather that the Word itself, 
 the principle of nature and of grace, prepares its ways in the soul by grace and 
 by nature, and is developed there when the soul opposes no obstacles. 
 
 1 De Incarnat., lib. i. cap. ix. 2 Ibid. 
 
444 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 articulate words, the laws of eternal life and the genesis 
 of light. 
 
 A learned man sought Jesus Christ by night. This man had 
 reached that degree of human wisdom which seeks and longs 
 for the wisdom of God and desires to see God. He questioned 
 the Saviour, who replied : " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, 
 Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of 
 God." 1 
 
 Such is the truth. Man must be born again, to enter into 
 the second degree of the intelligible, and to see the actual 
 light of God. 
 
 But, said the wise man, " How can a man be born when 
 he is old ? Can he enter the second time into the womb of 
 his mother, and be born ? Jesus answered, Marvel not that I 
 said unto thee y Ye must be born again. . . . Art thou a mas- 
 ter of Israel, and Jcnowest not these things ? " ' 2 The Saviour 
 is amazed that the doctors, whose duty it is to lead men 
 to God, do not know that a man must be born again to see 
 God. And he at once explains his reproach by words which 
 reveal the innermost depths of the history of the human 
 mind : " If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, 
 hou* shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things?"' 6 
 
 In other words : If I, who am a light to all men coming 
 into this world, cannot convince you when I speak to you 
 through reason, if you do not heed your reason, the light 
 which should guide you on earth, how will you heed me 
 and understand me when, in the very light of God, I strive 
 to show you heaven ? 
 
 How could the human mind attain total wisdom and the 
 last degree of the divine intelligible, which is the sight of 
 heaven, wherein it does not dwell, in the light of God, which 
 it does not possess, if it cannot even see correctly the earth 
 wherein it dwells, in human light which is its proper light ? 
 1 John iii. 3. 2 Ibid., 4, 7, 10. Ibid., 12. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 445 
 
 But, as Christ teaches, it is not by our own powers that 
 we are asked to rise towards this faith in higher things and 
 towards the sight of heaven. " No man hath ascended up 
 to heaven but he who came down from heaven, even the Son 
 of man who is in heaven." l This text includes all Chris- 
 tianity. Man cannot ascend to heaven by his own unaided 
 powers ; reason, by its unaided powers, cannot attain the celes- 
 tial degree of the divine light. Man, of himself, cannot make 
 himself divine, or enter into participation of the divine nature, 
 any more than the finite can rise to the infinite. We do not 
 become infinite. For that we must have already been in 
 heaven ; we must have come down from heaven to ascend 
 up into it. The Son of man who ascends up into heaven is 
 he who, being one with God himself, is already in heaven, 
 this Son of man, who by a whole lifetime of suffering, sorrow, 
 and sacrifice, and by his cross, shall raise himself to the throne 
 of God for the salvation of all ; for, he adds, "As Moses lifted 
 up the serpent of bronze in the wilderness [to heal the people], 
 even so must the Son of man be lifted up from the earth : that 
 whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal 
 life." 2 And elsewhere he says : " And I, if I be lifted up 
 from the earth, will draw all mtn unto me." 3 
 
 So, to pass from earthly things to heavenly things we 
 must be born again. To pass from the lower degree of the 
 divine intelligible to the higher, that is to say, to see 
 God, we must have a new life. We must have the life 
 of faith, of that faith which believes the eternal Wisdom 
 when it tells us of heavenly things, as in order to be in 
 reason, in the first degree of the divine intelligible, we must 
 have faith in Wisdom when it tells us of earthly things, 
 and teaches us that the earth should bear witness to God 
 and show reflections from heaven. To possess total wis- 
 dom, we must believe in the Word of God, according to 
 
 i John iii. 13. 2 Il>i<l., 14, 15. 8 Ibid., xii. 32. 
 
446 GUIDE TO TEE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 these two lights, natural and supernatural, which he sheds 
 within us. 
 
 But how can we he born again ? How can we pass from 
 the first region of light into the second, where the inacces- 
 sible majesty of God dwells ? How can we rise from earth 
 to heaven ? This is the business of God himself ; it is the 
 work of the incarnate Word, of him who came down from 
 heaven to our own nature, to the end that he might raise us 
 up with him. Put your whole faith in him, and he will lift 
 you up to see God. 
 
 But how are we to believe ? And how are we to cling to 
 him? Thus. Hear the Saviour uttering the simplest and 
 the grandest words ever uttered in this world in regard 
 to the search after wisdom and the obstacle to wisdom. It is 
 the history of free choice between darkness and light. It is 
 the practical genesis of light : " He that lelieveth on the Son 
 of God is not condemned : but he that believeth not, is con- 
 demned already. This is the condemnation. Light is come 
 into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, 
 because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil 
 hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds 
 should le revealed. But he that DOETH TRUTH cometh to the 
 light, that his deeds may le made manifest, that they are 
 wrought in God." l 
 
 The divine simplicity of these words of the Master admits 
 of no commentary, and their supernatural power seems fitted 
 to seize and lead captive every soul which ever loved truth 
 but for a single day. 
 
 Is there, or is there not, a manifest and direct certitude 
 that these words are the infallible truth ? 
 
 Can you hope to make any advance whatsoever towards 
 wisdom and light, without a corresponding moral effort ? 
 
 Do you understand that there is no other salutary philoso- 
 
 1 John iii. 18-21. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 447 
 
 phy save that which is an effort towards total wisdom, a 
 pursuit of light in both degrees of the divine intelligible ? 
 
 Do you understand that if you seek the truth without 
 seeking virtue, the primary practical wisdom, you are not 
 really seeking for truth, you are only feigning to do so, and 
 you are but a pharisee, a scribe, like those who rejected 
 Christ ? And if, by some amazing preoccupation, you are 
 content with such light as mere reason can give you, with- 
 out the grace of God, without divine faith, you are already 
 judged, you dwell in the region of shadows, and in that 
 degree of light which the Gospel calls Darkness. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. RESUME* AND 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 I. 
 
 n^O sum up. 
 
 There is God. There is the soul. God, the eternal 
 wisdom, never ceases to address the rational creature, to 
 the end that it may be converted unto him. God never 
 ceases to solicit the soul by his twofold assistance, by his 
 twofold natural and supernatural light. 
 
 God alone is light. God alone is the Father of all light, 
 both natural and supernatural. 
 
 Natural light is the light of God reflected in our soul or in 
 the mirror of created beings ; and supernatural light is the 
 light of God seen in its source, directly and immediately. 
 
 Natural light constitutes human reason properly so called, 
 and is its source. " The light of reason'' says Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas, " is the image of the uncreated truth reflected in our 
 soul" These are the most important and profound words 
 ever uttered in regard to the nature of reason. 
 
 Supernatural light is the source of divine faith. Faith is 
 the attempt at, the faint and feeble beginning of, the vision 
 of God himself, in his essence and in the source of his light. 
 
 There are two degrees of the divine intelligible, that 
 which reason may attain, and that which can be attained 
 only by faith and revelation. Reason has its own sphere 
 and its relative perfection, in the first degree of the intelli- 
 gible. But it cannot find there, of its own unaided powers, 
 its entire natural development. It only reaches its final 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 449 
 
 perfection, in the second degree of the intelligible, when 
 aided and raised above itself by the supernatural light. 
 
 Sound reason is that which is not parted from its source 
 in the soul and in God. The source of reason is the light 
 itself which God gives. The origin in the soul of this gift 
 is variously called divine sense, natural faith, the attraction 
 of the desirable and the intelligible, the hidden spring. The 
 actual moment, or, if you prefer, the point, at which the nat- 
 ural light of God touches and solicits the soul, that point, 
 that moment, that root, that gift, as you may choose to call it, 
 is the source of reason. Sound reason is that which is not 
 parted from this source in the centre of the soul, and which 
 finds in this faith its orientation, in this hidden spring its 
 impulse towards truth, and in this divine sense or contact its 
 assurance. 
 
 Perverted reason is that which breaks, in so far as it 
 may, with this source, with this heart, as Pascal says, with 
 this divine sense, with this faith, with the attraction of the 
 desirable and the intelligible. But as absolute rupture with 
 God. is impossible for any being or any power, perverted 
 reason is that which unceasingly labors to cut itself off from 
 its source, its pursuing source. Whence follows one thing 
 only, an advance in a direction contrary to that of correct 
 reason, and, as history proves, an advance towards the noth- 
 ingness of thought, instead of an advance towards the vision 
 of being ; a logical advance backwards, which, instead of dis- 
 playing the consequences of first principles, actually denies 
 first principles themselves, both speculative and practical. 
 It is in some sort reprobate reason, which God urges to 
 absurdity, that is, to an indirect demonstration of the 
 truth. 
 
 Between these two contrary courses, between these two 
 mental states, of which one elevates and the other degrades, 
 between sound reason and perverse reason, there is the 
 
 29 
 
450 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 sluggish reason, which does not advance, which does not 
 ascend, but which does not yet decidedly descend; which 
 does not gravitate towards Being, but which does not, as yet, 
 rush towards nothingness; which does not deny the first 
 principles, but yet is unable to derive anything from them, 
 
 which, according to Plato, fluctuates towards the middle 
 region, without ever rising to the highest. 
 
 Let me represent these different mental states by a 
 comparison. 
 
 The rational soul was created to see God, very God, in 
 his essence, as the eagle, we are told, to look the sun in 
 the face. 
 
 Imagine an eagle on the shore of a lake in which the im- 
 age of the sun shines : the eagle may be content with looking 
 at the image, without lifting his gaze to the object itself. 
 
 It may, but eagles never do; then why should men? 
 
 it may take its flight towards the image, and fling itself 
 into the lake, where it at once ceases to see, and at the same 
 time loses both the image and the object. 
 
 Again, it may, excited by the image, lift its gaze, unfold 
 its wings, and direct its course straight towards the sun 
 itself, as if attracted by the rays which its eyes drink in. 
 This is what eagles do ; and it is this sublime action, 
 this flight towards the source of light, which charms man- 
 kind, and has gained the king of air the glory of being the 
 poetic symbol of the sublimities of the mind. 
 
 Thus with the gaze of the soul. 
 
 Our soul is both eagle and lake. 
 
 Sometimes we gaze stupidly at the lake, without distin- 
 guishing the water itself from the rays of light which it 
 reflects, without distinguishing the mobile surface from 
 the fixed image whose spherical form rests beneath the 
 ripples. This is the sluggish reason and the sterile philoso- 
 phy of the learned men who have not wisdom. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 451 
 
 Sometimes these contrasts warn us, and we begin to un- 
 derstand that the light is not ourselves, that there is only 
 an image there, a reflected light, the source of which is not 
 within us, and that this passive water is of itself cold and 
 dark. We understand that there is outside us an object 
 whence the light comes to us and which the image pre- 
 supposes. Sound reason advances thus towards the truth. 
 
 But instinct spares the eagle, and a diviner instinct, if 
 we had not first stifled it in our soul, would also spare us, the 
 vertigo with which we are sometimes seized, the strange 
 vertigo of a being who has wings and uses them to hurl 
 himself into an abyss that he may seek the Sun there ! 
 Yes, we hurl ourselves into the abyss, where we cease to see, 
 where we lose both image and object. This catastrophe is 
 that of perverse reason, and history shows that many minds 
 have chosen and yielded to it, seeking the source itself of 
 light in their own innermost depths, digging out the image 
 below the image, below the surface of the lake, to dis- 
 cover its luminous and burning roots in the water. It is 
 thus that some have sought, in reason itself, the objective and 
 first principle of reason, and that thought has plunged to the 
 bottom of the shadowy abyss which exists in the soul, below 
 the luminous point which God lights up from above. 
 
 Lastly, the soul, stimulated by the splendor of the reflec- 
 tion, and by the contrast between the dark, moving lake, 
 and the glittering and motionless image, may conclude that 
 the lake is not the object, but the mirror; it may seek 
 the object, it may raise its eyes and seize the direct ray in- 
 stead of the reflected ray ; and, as it has wings far more 
 powerful than those of the eagle, it may take its flight, soar 
 towards the divine Sun, not in sport like the eagle, but 
 with a genuine impulse which ends in and is united with 
 the principle of life. "For the eagle," says Saint Fran- 
 cis de Sales, " has greater powers of vision than of flight ; " 
 
452 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 but the soul, aided by God, bas equal power of flight and 
 of vision. 
 
 Let us carry this comparison a little farther, to show what 
 reason is capable of doing by its own movements alone, and 
 what it is incapable of doing unaided by the supernatural 
 light. 
 
 The eye is the reason, the reflected ray is the natural light, 
 and the direct ray is the supernatural light. 
 
 What can the eye do by the aid of each light ? 
 
 The eye by the reflected ray alone sees the image of the 
 sun, not the sun : that is absolutely impossible ; it would be 
 a contradiction in terms. When we see the sun itself, it is 
 necessarily by its direct rays. 
 
 The eye, by contrasting the mutability of the mirror and 
 the immutability of the image, distinguishes between the two, 
 and concludes that the image comes from some object other 
 than the mirror. The eye refers the traces of the image to 
 a real being which it does not see. Such is the knowledge 
 of God and his attributes, separated from created beings and 
 viewed in the necessary and immutable ideas which the soul 
 finds in itself. 
 
 But does the eye know the entire image as it is ? No, 
 certainly not ; for instance, it sees it as a disk, when it is 
 really a sphere. 
 
 Again, it errs in referring the image to the under part of the 
 mirror, instead of referring it to the surface ; and it imagines 
 that it sees direct rays, while it really sees reflected rays. 
 Thus it will never know the image completely until it 
 knows the object, its true situation, its relation to the sur- 
 face, and the mystery of reflected rays and direct rays. 
 Nevertheless, so soon as the eye recognizes that the image is 
 not the sun, the eye may be strained to see the sun, to regret 
 that it does not see it, and to seek to see it ; but evidently 
 it will riot see anything unless the direct rays strike it. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 453 
 
 Leaving these comparisons, we will now say that reason 
 may, of itself (ipsa per se), by natural light alone, know vari- 
 ous truths which constitute the first degree of the divine 
 intelligible, and which have been called preambles of faith. 
 
 Reason cannot, without the aid of supernatural light, 
 Jmow all the truth of this first degree. 
 
 This insufficiency of reason, even in the natural order, 
 that is, in the first degree of the divine intelligible, reason 
 may and does recognize, and it proves the necessity of divine 
 revelation, even in this order of truths. 
 
 Eeason may, moreover, and this is its highest effort, 
 recognize that it is not itself its own absolute or first princi- 
 ple, that its natural light is only the image of that principle, 
 and as it were the shadow of its light ; that this image corre- 
 sponds to an object which does not exist in the image, which 
 it does not see, and which it must be possible to see directly ; 
 it comprehends that we must see the source of light, the 
 essence of that divine object, and that this sight is necessary 
 to its supreme felicity and its final perfection. 
 
 It is of course understood that this natural desire for su- 
 preme felicity, that is, this natural desire to see the essence 
 of God, is radically different from that other positive desire 
 which is a beginning of the conception and possession of the 
 supernatural light. But it is equally, of course, understood 
 that these two sorts of desire for the sovereign Good, in fact 
 and in the actual life of the soul, are perpetually blended, 
 and perhaps, by the watchful goodness of God, succeed and 
 correspond each to the other, like the two motions of the 
 heart. 
 
 But this scientific analysis, by which we strive to dis- 
 tinguish exactly between the two orders of the divine intel- 
 ligible, the natural and the supernatural, this analysis, which 
 is essential in metaphysics, has little value in practice ; for no 
 soul is surrendered to itself without supernatural aid from 
 
454 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 God. God blends, says Fe"nelon, the beginning of the super- 
 natural gift with the remains of kindly nature, and man 
 bears within him a mystery of grace of which he is pro- 
 foundly ignorant. There are germs of faith in the soul, and 
 no soul is deprived of Christ, says Saint Jerome, whose words 
 are repeated and commented on by Thomassin. In fact, 
 natural reason is developed, is sound, advances towards its 
 goal under the influence of God's grace and the natural and 
 supernatural incitements of God. I reckon upon grace alone, 
 says Fenelon, to guide my reason within the limits of reason ; 
 and Perrone, the most decided defender of the rights of 
 reason, recognizes that, in our present state, the germ of rea- 
 son is developed by the influence of grace. 
 
 So much for practice. But for the theory all the analytic 
 labor which precedes was necessary, and God grant that 
 it has been given us to maintain precision ; for this question 
 is assuredly the pivot of the human mind, the centre of phi- 
 losophy ; it is, if we may so express ourselves, the point 
 where the mind of man and the mind of God meet : there 
 we find the relation, the means of transition, from one to 
 the other. If we, Catholic theologians, in possession of the 
 truth, succeed in throwing light on this point we shall have 
 done philosophy the greatest service ever done it. We shall 
 have made a decisive effort towards the pacification of the 
 mind, the regeneration of knowledge, and the salvation of 
 man. . 
 
 Why is it not given to us to teach men to discern in the 
 centre of their soul this point, this root of life, this hidden 
 spring where God touches them, this double point, this 
 double root, which, if I may venture to say so, is at the same 
 time God and ourself ; this point, I say, where God touches 
 us, where his light comes to us, reflects itself in the soul, 
 and forms, after the reflection of the divine light, our 
 natural life, before that reflection, the supernatural life ; so 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 455 
 
 that, although there is an infinite difference between the two, 
 in practice they are hardly to be distinguished, since one and 
 the same point, in some sort, contains both the natural and 
 the supernatural ray. 
 
 This point of contact and this divine touch, in so far as the 
 soul reacts thereon, are the divine sense, natural divine 
 sense when beneath this contact the soul feels itself ex- 
 plicitly and God implicitly ; supernatural divine sense when 
 beneath this contact the soul is explicitly conscious of God 
 himself, and is only implicitly conscious of self in God, 
 a twofold meaning, which is, perhaps, mingled, and varies in 
 the soul, let us say, like the two beats of the heart ; God, 
 according to our dogma, being ever present to the soul, with 
 his double natural and supernatural aid, and varying his 
 gifts according to his free bounty, and according to the free 
 response of the soul. 
 
 Why do we not at once see the intellect, made for the two 
 degrees of the divine intelligible, capable, by its impulses 
 and its freedom of choice, beneath the twofold divine gift, of 
 rising now to the one and now to the other, according as it 
 rests upon one or the other side of the hidden spring, upon 
 the natural divine sense, or upon the supernatural divine 
 sense, rising, in the first case, to the immutable shadows 
 of the infinite, the eternal; in the second, to the infinite, 
 the eternal itself ! 
 
 So that the life of the mind, like that of the will, like that 
 of the soul, is everywhere twofold, at the point of departure, 
 which is the divine sense, either natural or supernatural ; in 
 the impulse, which varies with the point of departure ; and 
 in the goal, which depends upon the point of departure and 
 on the nature of the impulse, and which is the twofold region 
 of the divine intelligible. 
 
 And the better to understand this marvellous duality, 
 comparable remotely and in a certain sense to the duality of 
 
456 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 the two natures of Christ, we should know that the natural 
 man and the supernatural man resemble each other, that 
 the natural man is, as it were, the rough draught of the su- 
 pernatural man, and that to every trait in the one, some trait 
 in the other corresponds. 
 
 The natural man is the image of God, and the supernatural 
 man is man united to God, it is God entering into his image ; 
 God himself living in his substantial reality in every feature 
 of the image, bringing by his approach the supernatural di- 
 vine sense into the natural divine sense, the supernatural 
 divine impulse into the natural impulse of the reason towards 
 the immutable and the infinite, and placing the infinite itself 
 in the ideas of the infinite. 
 
 We cannot better depict all this, and better represent the 
 mystery of this double life, than by venturing to compare 
 God, when he animates man for eternal life, to the prophet 
 Elisha when he restored the child to life : " The prophet," 
 says the Holy Scripture, " went up and lay upon the child ; 
 he put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his 
 eyes, and his hands upon his hands ; and he stretched him- 
 self upon the child ; and the flesh of the child waxed warm." l 
 So, too, God stoops down and overspreads man ; he puts his 
 mouth upon our mouth, his love and the breath of his Holy 
 Spirit upon our love ; he puts his eyes upon our eyes, his 
 intelligence upon ours, and the child of God is born to new 
 life, which is God in him and upon him; he is born to eter- 
 nal life, that is to say, to the life which God himself 
 lives for him. 
 
 II. 
 
 Let us now sum up our thought from the theological point 
 of view, properly so called. 
 
 The light of reason is a natural gift of God, by which man 
 
 1 2 Kings iv. 34. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 457 
 
 is man. The light of faith is another gift, free> supernatural, 
 radically distinct from the first, by which God's goodness 
 raises man above his own nature. 
 
 In the beginning, God might have left man to his own 
 nature, without raising him, by a higher gift, to participation 
 in the divine nature, to intuitive vision and possession of 
 eternal life. 
 
 But, as a fact, God chose to raise man to this supernatural 
 state ; he created man to this end ; he created him to raise 
 him to intuitive vision. From this voluntary and wholly 
 gratuitous will of God, there results for man the necessity 
 that he shall attain to intuitive vision, if he is to reach his 
 final perfection, and the end for which he was created. 
 
 God, according to our dogma, desires to lead all men to 
 this end, and gives his grace to all, in order to lead them 
 thither. " The effects of this will," says Saint Thomas, " are 
 the order itself of nature directed towards this end, and all 
 the impulses, whether natural or supernatural, which inces- 
 santly urge us thither." " God," as Saint Augustine teaches, 
 "never ceases to address the rational creature, to the end 
 that it may attain this goal." And therefore Fenelon is jus- 
 tified in saying : " I hold, with Saint Augustine, that God 
 gives to every creature a first germ of secret grace, which is 
 imperceptibly blended with reason, and which prepares man 
 to pass gradually from reason to faith." But although this 
 germ of grace, which prepares the way for faith, if we offer 
 no obstacle to it, may be blended with reason, it remains 
 radically distinct, as the diamond, set in gold, remains dis- 
 tinct from the metal which holds it, or as a seed, sowed in 
 the earth, is not the earth. 
 
 There is in reason a natural and continual aid from God, 
 which is, as it were, the primary cause of reason ; and there 
 is, mingled with reason, a principle radically distinct from 
 reason, a germ of grace, which, on the one hand, favors its 
 
458 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 natural growth, and which, on the other, gradually prepares 
 it to rise, beyond itself, to faith. But the mind can no more 
 pass from reason to faith, by a natural growth, than the 
 finite, by increasing, can become infinite. There is always 
 the whole gulf of the infinite between finite and infinite. So, 
 too, there is always the infinity of God between reason and 
 faith. God alone can fill up this gulf by imparting his own 
 light, which is himself, which is the only principle and the 
 only formal motive of faith. 
 
 Now, God desires to fill up this gulf. He labors to do so 
 by his grace, by his sun which he causes to shine upon the 
 wicked as well as upon the good. But the depraved man 
 opposes an obstacle. He refuses the benefit which is offered 
 to him ; often even, by his own fault, far from allowing him- 
 self to be raised higher than man, in the supernatural light, 
 he does not even stretch his intellect to the natural truths 
 which it should grasp. He sometimes rejects the natural 
 help of God, which stimulates and sustains his reason in its 
 proper sphere, as he also rejects the higher help which opens 
 a new world to his intelligence. He rejects reason as he 
 rejected faith, and he applies his inverted mind to the mon- 
 strous negation of the very principles of reason. 
 
 Doubtless there is a medium between scepticism and 
 faith, between the supernatural life and the animal life. 
 And yet the minds which seek or think they seek the truth, 
 and which reject the supernatural truth offered by grace 
 and revelation, usually abandon at last the worship of all 
 truth, the effort towards wisdom, to plunge again in the 
 senses, and attach themselves to earth. 
 
 It is a deep fault in reason to reject the supernatural 
 light of faith. It is contrary to the duty of reason. Does 
 not reason, by its own natural lights, see its limitations and 
 its imperfection ? Is it not forced to admit that it does not 
 see the essence and substance of the True ? Does it not 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 459 
 
 demonstrate that the substantial truth is God himself? Can 
 it maintain that, when it conceives of the absolute truths 
 which form its domain, it sees very God in himself, and 
 that it has an intuitive vision of God? By what right, then, 
 should it deny that there may be another light superior to 
 its own light ? How should it maintain that God cannot 
 raise the created intellect to the vision of the substance and 
 essence of the True, to the intuitive vision of God ? 
 
 More yet. Created intellect has, in fact, a desire for the in- 
 tuitive vision of God. So soon as a mind knows that God is, it 
 desires to see God, as Saint Thomas constantly affirms. This 
 desire belongs to the very nature of the rational creature, also 
 says Saint Thomas ; followed by almost all theology. Now, 
 this desire, this negative desire, I grant you, a desire caused 
 by privation and regret, however indirect, blind, and ineffi- 
 cacious it may be in itself, is yet sufficient to prove that our 
 intelligence, since it has this regret, will never find its per- 
 fect rest and its full perfection save in the higher light 
 which will give it the sight of God. But whether this 
 desire be, in man, essentially natural, or only innate, 
 whether it result necessarily from the peculiar nature of 
 the rational intelligence, as almost all Scholastics maintain, 
 or whether it be merely an impulse superadded by God; 
 whether it be contained in the fact of creation, or be derived 
 from God's wish to raise every intelligence to intuitive 
 vision, and thus be what Saint Thomas calls " the natural 
 order directed towards the supernatural end," whether 
 this superadded impulse should be, in its turn, called natural 
 or supernatural, matters little. As in any case this impulse 
 from God is mingled with the reason, it always results that 
 reason, sound reason, can demonstrate the possibility of the 
 supernatural light, the intuitive vision, and prove its neces- 
 sity, if the mind is to attain its final perfection and reach 
 its rest. 
 
460 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Lastly, in our present state, where our reason is wounded, 
 as well as our will, our reason itself thoroughly understands 
 and demonstrates its own weaknesses. Tt demonstrates its 
 impotence to conquer its entire domain, and, weak as it is, to 
 stretch forth and grasp the very truths which, were it stronger, 
 it might discover. It reveals, moreover, its aberrations and 
 its constant errors. It thus proves the necessity of a superior 
 help, and it confirms the words of Fdnelon: "I reckon upon 
 grace alone to guide my reason within the limits of reason." 
 It therefore requires the other light, not only to be raised 
 to its highest perfection, but even to be healed and attain 
 its proper and natural perfection. 
 
 And this necessity for supernatural light to give the 
 rational creature his final or his relative perfection, comes 
 not only from the wounds and weaknesses of reason in our 
 present state, it also comes from the nature of created rea- 
 son. The finite mind naturally sees only in part ; the 
 sum total escapes it ; it knows the whole of nothing ; it 
 could no more attain to the whole of its intelligibles, or to the 
 absolute totality of a single idea, than a convergent mathe- 
 matical series can, by development, attain its limit. Before 
 such a series can be complete, we must add the infinite to 
 it by hypothesis. So, too, before the finite mind can attain 
 to all the truth of its degree, it must be united to the infinite 
 mind. 
 
 But let us go back from theology to philosophy. 
 
 III. 
 
 Either philosophy demonstrates nothing, or else all that 
 precedes proves that there are, for man, two regions in the 
 world of intelligibility, as Plato expresses it ; that there are 
 for our intelligence two degrees of the divine intelligible, as 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas says. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 461 
 
 All philosophers of the first order teach this ; all Catholic 
 theology professes it; all Christian dogma presupposes it; 
 all men feel it and can see it in themselves ; the whole his- 
 tory of the human mind explains it, and rests upon that 
 basis. 
 
 This, I say, is proved, because all those familiar with the 
 human mind have seen it, and because you see it yourself, 
 if you have understood what goes before. 
 
 There are two degrees of total wisdom. Plato calls them 
 the two regions of the intelligible world, one of which is 
 that of divine phantasms, shadows of that which is ; the 
 other is the intelligible itself in its divine essence, the 
 Sun, whence shadows and images come, and which is 
 the supreme Good viewed in itself. 
 
 Plato speaks of it again when he speaks of those truths, 
 the most important of all, which it is impossible or very 
 difficult to know in this life, yet which it is possible to 
 know if some one teaches them, but which none can teach 
 unless he be sent by God himself. 
 
 Aristotle distinguishes these two degrees when he says 
 that there is in man, besides the life of feeling, the rational 
 life ; and besides the rational life, the contemplative life of 
 pure intellect, which is like another soul superadded to 
 the soul ; which is not essential to the soul, which may be 
 separated from it, which comes to us from without, which 
 is supernatural rather than human, divine, which is very 
 God. Aristole's marvellous texts on this head may be 
 recalled. 
 
 Saint Augustine declares that there is between rational, 
 certain, and absolute truths, and the intelligible majesty 
 of God, the same distance that there is between heaven 
 and earth, between darkness and light. He repeats the 
 very words of Plato, but develops and deepens their mean- 
 ing. Of the two lights, the two forms of vision, he calls 
 
462 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 one outward (extraria), the other inward (intraria) ; of 
 the two knowledges, he calls one evening light (vesper- 
 tina), and the other morning light (matutina). All vision 
 possessed by created beings, the vision which our soul has of 
 itself, beneath the light of God, is this light akin to shadow ; 
 and only the vision of God himself is the light of day. 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas names them THE Two ORDERS OF 
 THE DIVINE INTELLIGIBLE (duplici veritate divinorum intel- 
 ligibilium), and his two Sums, or Summaries, are these two 
 orders of the divine intelligible treated separately. 
 
 He asserts that reason has two terms and two spheres of 
 action, one which displays to it the natural light, and the 
 other which opens to it the gift of supernatural light. He 
 also calls the lower region the region of shadows (natura in- 
 tellectualis adumbrata) ; the one is, he says, a specular vision 
 (specularis), the other is direct vision of the essence (visio 
 per essentiam). 
 
 There are therefore these two degrees of the intelligible, 
 corresponding to what Christian theology calls the natural 
 order and the supernatural order, the order of reason and 
 the order of faith. 
 
 Now, is it certain, from the experience of each of us, as 
 well as from the whole history of the human mind, that the 
 first of these two degrees seeks, regrets, and desires the other, 
 and that, the higher a mind rises in this first region, de- 
 velops its reason and lifts its vision, the better it under- 
 stands that its vision is partial, and that what it sees is only 
 the shadow, but not the essence and the substance of truth ? 
 Is it certain that the natural light of reason, in proportion as 
 it grows, produces a more and more ardent thirst ? But 
 thirst for what, if not for the truth itself, essential and total, 
 substantial and living, whose likeness, ever more distinct, 
 whose rays, ever more numerous in the mirror of the soul, 
 kindle there a desire for the reality, the totality ? 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 463 
 
 This is the legitimate conclusion of sound reason, of in- 
 creasing reason, the sourse of true philosophy. Sluggish, 
 arrested reason knows it not, and gives birth to that lan- 
 guishing, sterile, and changeable philosophy which revolves 
 upon its own axis without advancing. Depraved reason 
 denies it and utterly rejects it ; but instantly reverses itself, 
 turns against itself, denies and destroys itself; and its name 
 is sophistry, the suicide of reason. 
 
 Are these, or are they not, the fundamental features of the 
 history of the human mind, and of the classes into which 
 minds may be divided ? 
 
 This settled, Christians are those who believe that the 
 second region of the intelligible world will be given, and 
 that it is indeed given even now, in principle, by faith in 
 Christ, divine faith which implants within us, as Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas says, following Saint Paul, the essence and 
 substance of the truth, in its supernatural germ, developable 
 in eternity. 1 
 
 As for true philosophers who are not Christians, I do 
 not refer to the sophists, nor to the learned who devote them- 
 selves to idle philosophy, theirs are necessarily minds 
 which wait, seek, desire, and regret ; which suspect and con- 
 jecture the Sun whose shadows they see, the images and 
 abstract lineaments of whose essence they perceive. 
 
 For if it be so, this is what we feel it our duty to offer all 
 those, Christians or not, who have within them the philo- 
 sophic germ, I mean by this the effort towards total 
 wisdom. 
 
 We would offer them, above all, in the practical order, as 
 the daily law of their life, these words of Christ : " Every 
 one that doeth evil hateth the light ; he that doeth truth, 
 cometh to the light ; " and these others : " Pray without 
 ceasing, and weary not in so doing ; " that is to say, we 
 
 1 2 a 2 ae , q. iv. 1. 
 
464 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 should always unite our free force and an active co-opera- 
 tion to the permanent attraction of the desirable and the 
 intelligible. 
 
 It is most evident that this continued inward effort and 
 this persevering prayer, combined with a struggle against all 
 evil and an attempt at all good, is the practical method to 
 attain the truth. 
 
 But, moreover, in the speculative order, we would give 
 this counsel : it is a new way to study the formulas of 
 Christian faith. 
 
 Usually men study them controversially, from without, 
 and from the circumference, in certain details, never as a 
 whole; and attention is fixed far less on the dogma itself 
 and its simple statement, than on certain human and very 
 imperfect and incomplete considerations of it given by some 
 preacher or writer. 
 
 Is this the way to acquire, I do not say faith, but merely 
 a knowledge of faith and an understanding of its authentic 
 statements ? 
 
 Behold, now, the inverse process, from which we believe we 
 may expect much fruit for many souls. 
 
 Take the formulas of the faith as they are presented by 
 the Church. Add certain of the words of Christ upon which 
 these formulas rest. 
 
 If you are a Christian, you believe that these are principles 
 of divine truth, capable of development in the divine light. 
 
 If you are not a Christian, you may doubt this, but you 
 have no reason to deny it. 
 
 Now, what would you do if, holding in my hand a few 
 grains of dust, I said to you : " Here are germs. They 
 imply plants and contain fruits." 
 
 If you doubted it, there would clearly be no way to get 
 at the truth but to intrust those germs to the earth, and to 
 summon that dust to germinate, and to show to all eyes that 
 which previously they could not see. 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 465 
 
 Do the same. Root these little grains, these formulas of 
 faith, firmly, immovably in your memory. " Do not despise 
 memory, it is the treasury of gifts," says Bossuet; it is a 
 soil which not only preserves, but which develops. Root, I 
 say, all these germs in the depths of your mind ; then dwell 
 with them. Let the changes of life, its seasons, its droughts, 
 its trials, its griefs, its weaknesses, its hopes, its joys, and its 
 sun, act upon those seeds. Keep that attempt at a harvest 
 alive by the ferment of your mind, by the vital fluid which: 
 nourishes it, by the light in which it unfolds. Compare all 
 these affirmations with its wants, its regrets, its doubts, its 
 questions, its expectations, and its conjectures. 
 
 Let these germs be cherished by those hidden forces which 
 make everything grow which lives in man, and which are 
 born, like a sort of electricity, of the free movement of: the 
 soul towards the universal attraction of God ; in other words, 
 pray without ceasing, and weary not in so doing. 
 
 Let not heart and will become paralyzed, but act faithfully 
 under the influence of this holy and infallible law : " Every 
 one that doeth evil, hateth the light ; he that doeth, truth, 
 cometh to the light." 
 
 Do this, and you yourself shall see the gerrns swell, and 
 whether Jesus was wrong in saying : " The word of God is a 
 seed ; if it falls into good ground, it bringeth forth some an 
 hundred-fold, some sixty, some thirty." 
 
 Whether you be a Christian or not, this experiment should 
 be made. If you are not a Christian, you will have a chance 
 to find that other sphere of intelligence, that heaven of truth, 
 which your mind longs for and pursues, and that total phi- 
 losophy which you know that you do not possess. 
 
 If you are a Christian, you believe that these are germs of 
 eternal light, and the highest principles of real philosophy 
 and complete wisdom. 
 
 Try it, therefore. 
 
 30 
 
466 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 This experiment, made under the requisite conditions, may, 
 by God's grace, give philosophy to souls which have only 
 faith ; faith to those who have only philosophy. 
 
 It is the first labor to be undertaken by the faith which 
 seeks understanding, and by the understanding which seeks 
 faith. 
 
 Let the minds which, having reached the term of human 
 light, find it pale, partial, expiring, greatly blended with 
 shadows ; who recognize that the flying object of their pur- 
 suit is but the light of evening, which grows dim and van- 
 ishes, and the substance of which is only darkness, let 
 these, I say, add to their mind the principles of what Saint 
 Augustine calls morning light. 
 
 I am well aware that at first these principles will strike 
 them as even more obscure than that very daylight which is 
 insufficient for them, and that, accustomed to what Descartes, 
 I think, somewhere calls the rude evidence of geometry, they 
 will see nought but thick night in these germs of celestial 
 light. But let them fully understand this, and meditate on 
 this comparison. 
 
 We, too, call the absence of our sun night. But what does 
 the sun show us ? It shows us the earth and itself. When 
 it has vanished, what do we see ? At first we no longer see 
 earth, or sun, or anything. But patience ; let night advance, 
 and behold ! The stars appear one by one ; the entire vault 
 is peopled -, the sky is filled with rays, movements, and scin- 
 tillations, as it were with eyes waking and imploring our 
 gaze. We see the heaven which the sun concealed. So 
 that, to any one who wished to see the whole heaven, it was 
 well that the sun went away. 
 
 But, I confess, all these stars still seem to you mere drops 
 of lustre upon the night. All together do not equal one sun- 
 beam. And yet what have we before our eyes ? We have 
 before us the immense universe of suns, in which our own 
 
RELATIONS BETWEEN REASON AND FAITH. 467 
 
 sun is but a point, a point in which the earth is but a 
 fraction. Every imperceptible point of that luminous dust 
 is a sun like ours, surrounded by a hundred living earths, as 
 great or greater than our own. Day, therefore, showed us a 
 point ; night shows us immensity. 
 
 May I venture to say that this is one of the divine reasons 
 for the setting of the sun ? If the sun reigns and then dis- 
 appears by turns, it is because God desires that besides the 
 earth, man should also see the heaven. 
 
 It is precisely the same with the obscurities of faith, rela- 
 tively to the daylight of reason. 
 
 This is why our dogma teaches that reason, like the sun, 
 should rule and should surrender by turns : should rule over 
 all the earth, and surrender in the sight of heaven. Its reign 
 gives it a world ; its surrender gives it immensity, in which 
 the world is but a point. 
 
 Let no one therefore be alarmed at the obscurities of faith 
 or the surrenders of the mind. 
 
 As for Christians, they must allow me, after the example 
 of Saint Augustine, to exhort them eagerly to seek light and 
 love understanding. 1 
 
 Learn to see in the light of intelligibility what you possess 
 firmly through faith. 2 In this time of great decay and lan- 
 guor of reason and faith, you who have the assured principles 
 of universal light, why do you bury them, and not display, 
 by culture and effort, by constant labor of intellect and soul, 
 its rays, its colors, its perfumes, its beauties, and its fruits ? 
 You who believe beforehand that every one of those drops of 
 light is a sun, an animating principle of worlds ; you who 
 bear within you that starry heaven of faith ; you are a 
 heaven greater than the visible heaven, why do you not 
 seek to become more distinctly luminous, for the glory of God 
 and the salvation of your brothers ? 
 
 1 Ut fidem tuam ad amorem intelligentice cohorter. 
 
 2 Ut quod fidei fivmitate jam tenes, etiam rationis luce conspicias. 
 
468 GUIDE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 What can excuse you and dispense you from an effort to 
 attain perfect day and increasing light ? Is it age or sex ? 
 Hear Saint Augustine, addressing his mother, when, leaning 
 by her side from that window which we may still see at 
 Ostia, gazing at the immense ocean and the starry heaven, 
 and comparing them to the heaven of the soul, he said to 
 that beloved mother : " Mother, I implore you, do not be 
 terrified, or arrested in your task, by the wilderness of knowl- 
 edges which seem requisite. One may choose, from all these, 
 the true points, few but fruitful ; difficult, doubtless, to many 
 minds, but to you, mother, whose mind seems new to me 
 every day, and whose soul, whether from the advance of 
 years, or whether from its wondrous temperance, wholly 
 freed from the deceptions of the world and from the hard 
 servitude of the senses, has power to grow and rise mightily 
 within itself, to you, beloved mother, these things will be 
 as easy as they would be hard to the sluggish understanding 
 of all those souls who live so miserably." 
 
 It was therefore to the weakness of sex and the decline 
 of life that the great doctor addressed this testimony and 
 this exhortation. 
 
 We venture, therefore, to transmit to the readers of these 
 pages, be they who they may, that same exhortation. 
 
 But where now among us are the Christian souls whose 
 converse is thus in heaven, that is, in the search after wisdom 
 and truth ? Where are the souls whose pleasures, wholly 
 intellectual and cordial in their nature, lie in pursuing and 
 gathering up the traces of God, as Saint Augustine did, in 
 the inner history of the soul, in that of the world and of 
 empires, in the spectacle of nature, in the history of the hu- 
 man mind, in the confessions of his life, in music and in let- 
 ters, in numbers and in astronomy, to the end that he might 
 refer all these things to the eternal model, and confront every 
 thought with the word of God, with the definite dogma 
 
DELATIONS BETWEEN UK AS ON AND FAITH. 469 
 
 borne in his memory, with God carried in his heart and 
 his faith ? Where are the stern abstinences of Saint Monica 
 in regard to the sorceries of the earth ? Who suspects the 
 ecstasies of which our intemperances deprive us? Where 
 are the souls ever new, and growing, through their search 
 after wisdom, from childhood unto death ? And who sus- 
 pects the floods of light and true love which would burst 
 forth from Christian souls for the salvation and happiness of 
 mankind, at the cost of a little effort ? 
 
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