269. Philosophy of Albert the Great. -- St. Thomas and Albert having a great many doctrines in common, the system of the disciple will throw considerable light on that of the master, and will at the same time give us an opportunity of noticing their chief points of difference. Moreover, the scholasticism of Albert is not so well known as that of St. Thomas.^{1} The connection between Albert's various works will show that he classified the philosophical sciences in the same way as his contemporaries. The following few leading notions will be here sufficient.

A supporter of the doctrine of matter and form, he gave a peripatetic meaning to this organic theory, but he did not carry it to its ultimate consequences. Without using the term materia, he admits that "separated" substances (the angels) are composed of substantial parts, that their form requires a fundamentum although this latter has no relation to quantity.^{2} The doctrine of Albert would thus be equivalent to that of St. Bonaventure, and would belong to the earlier scholasticism.^{3} On the other hand, Albert did not succeed in ridding his metaphysics of the theory of plurality of forms; and hence his teaching upon the unity of being has not the same significance as with Thomas of Aquin. It has been justly observed^{4} that the full and complete solution of the problem of the Universals was formulated by Albert, before St. Thomas of Aquin, and in the same sense (287).

The concept of infinity, perfecting the Aristotelian notion of pure actuality (45), is the soul of Albert's theodicy. The distinction between creature and Creator is boldly asserted, especially against Avicebron, whose doctrine of emanation Albert was the first to criticize.^{5} Like his predecessors, he combats the doctrine of the eternity of matter, and shows the impossibility of eternal creation (293).

His study of the motion and substantial change of bodies -- according to a rhythmic evolution directed by finality -- is imbued with the peripatetic spirit^{6} (294). But in two theories Albert subscribes to the earlier scholasticism: --

(1) He re-affirmed the doctrine of the rationes seminales thereby deviating from the peripatetic notion of primal matter, purely potential;

(2) His doctrine of the permanence of the elementary forms in the mixed body is a corollary from that of the plurality of forms.^{7} We shall see, moreover, that in the human organism the soul is not the forma corporeitatis: Albert was not so richly endowed with that deep insight, which is characteristic of genius, as was the distinguished disciple in whom he so much admired its highest manifestations. In the opinion of his latest historian,^{8} the coexistence of Augustinian and Arabian elements, badly combined with the fundamental ideas of peripateticism, deprives Albert's psychology of all organic unity: it is not unusual to find the philosopher defending opposite and incompatible theories in the course of the same work.^{9} The soul is the substantial form, that is to say, the first actuality (303), of the human body (Aristotle). There are not three souls in man, as the consistent pluralists maintained, but one vital principle only. Yet, with manifest inconsistency, Albert refuses to attribute the state of corporeity to the determining influence of the soul; although no mention of the forma corporeitatis^{10} is to be found in any of his treatises. The soul is substantial form by the totality of its being; and all its intellectual faculties are immanent (against Averroës). Albert subscribes alternately to two conflicting solutions^{11} on the question whether the union of the soul with the body is immediate, as peripateticism demands, or is rather effected by intermediaries (media), as certain Augustinians admitted.

Considered in itself, the soul is really distinct from its faculties. It is immaterial, and hence immortal, chiefly by reason of the independence it manifests, in its superior operations, in regard to matter (Aristotelian proof).

There are three groups of faculties, corresponding to the operations of the vegetative, the sensitive (knowledge and appetite), and the intellectual (knowledge and will) life. Vegetative life comprises the potentiae nutritiva, augmentativa, generativa, whose functions the learned Dominican studied at great length. In plants, the vegetative soul appears owing to the development of the ratio seminalis, and the same holds of the animal; but the human soul, which includes within it the perfections of the inferior vital principles, is created by God. Of the sense faculties some are external (Vires apprehensivae de foris), and amongst these Albert places the sensus communis; others internal (v. a. deintus, imaginatio, aestimatio, memoria, reminiscentia). He has long psycho-physiological dissertations on dreaming, sleeping and waking (proprietates animae sensibilis), and on the functions of the brain. On the intellectual faculties, the active intellect and the passive intellect, Albert takes the peripatetic view; and his ideology was taken up and perfected by his disciple.^{12} Arabian monopsychism, in its different forms, is the object of repeated refutations (300).

His doctrine on the appetitive faculties, and especially on the will, is rather wavering. Liberty is at one time represented as the fundamental prerogative of the intellectus adeptus (i.e., of the intelligence endowed with knowledge), at another as that of the libera voluntas. We have here the struggle of the intellectualist (Aristotle) with the voluntarist (Augustine) point of view: a problem that occasioned long controversies towards the middle of the thirteenth century upon the relative nobility of the psychical faculties.

{1} Cf. SCHNEIDER, op. cit., p. vii.

{2} "Ergo necesse est ponere substantiam communem quae sit in eis et haec meo judicio non dicetur materia, sed fundamentum" (In II. L. Sent., dist. 3, a. iv.).

{3} This is the opinion of the Quaracchi editors of St. Bonaventure, t. ii., pp. 93, 94.

{4} WILLMANN, Gesch. d. Idealismus, ii., p. 357.

{5} GUTTMANN, op. cit., p. 83.

{6} This doctrine of final causes, says Schneider, appears to have a Neo-Platonic turn in certain parts of the Ethics and Metaphysics. "All things tend towards the Divine, i.e., towards the Sovereign Good, which contains and sums up in itself supreme goodness. . . . This idea was developed by Albert in a Neo-Platonic sense, apparently without his being aware that he was deviating from Aristotle" (op. cit., p. 285). But even if the theory as such comes from the Neo-Platonists, it seems to us to have assumed a new and scholastic meaning with Albert, because it was stripped by him of all its original emanation elements.

{7} This theory is clearly explained in the De Coelo et Mundo, Lib. iii., tr. 2, c. I, to which we refer the student. There the author says: "Elementorum formae dupliciter sunt, scilicet primae et secundae. Primae quidem sunt a quibus est esse, elementis substantiale sine contrarietate, et secundae sunt a quibus est esse elementi et actio. Et quoad primas formas, salvantur meo judicio in composite . . . et quoad secundas formas sive quoad secundum esse non remanent in actu sed in potentia." Cf. De Generatione et Corrupt., Lib. i., tr. 6, c. 8. This is the theory of Avicenna.

{8} SCHNEIDER, op. cit., pp. 2 and foll.

{9} Op. cit., p. 8. Sources of the psychology of Albert: the Summa de Homine, a systematic account; and some passages of the Summa Theologica; to which must be added the Commentaries on Aristotle's psychological treatises.

{10} SCHNEIDER, op. cit., p. 27.

{11} Ibid., p. 36.

{12} Op. cit., p. 233.