97. The Method of Philosophy. -- The same analytico-synthetic method rules in philosophical speculation.

As philosophy is the science of being in general -- of all being -- it embraces both the ideal and the empirical order. It passes through both analytically, in order thereafter to explain both synthetically. In this sense we define it, with Aristotle, as "the knowledge of things by their most profound reasons", or as "the profound knowledge of the universal order."

In each of its parts (physics, mathematics, metaphysics) philosophy uses the analytico-synthetic method.

(1) The physics of the ancients is nowadays divided into cosmology and psychology. By the aid of the physical, chemical, and mineralogical sciences, cosmology reaches the general inductive conclusions that corporeal substance is composed of matter and form, and exerts certain proper and characteristic activities. By means of these principles philosophy explains synthetically both the movement of corporeal nature, and the diversity, as well as the constancy of the laws which govern it.

In psychology, facts warrant the inductive conclusion that the first subject of human life is a material compound informed by an immaterial soul. This conclusion, the principle of synthetic psychology, enables us better to understand the proper object of human reason, the complexity of psychological life and the interdependence of its divers manifestations.

(2) The philosophy of mathematics is, in fact and of right, bound up with mathematical sciences. The mathematicians have never separated their theorems from the axioms whence they are deduced. Certain rudimentary observations suggest the axioms, the principles of the syntheses which form the sciences of number and of quantity, and lead on to the most abstract speculations of pure geometry.

(3) The various parts of the philosophical sciences lead to indefinable objects: physics, to substance composed of potentiality and act, of matter and form -- to movements produced in a passive subject by an efficient cause determined by an intrinsic end, mathematics, to the one, to the discreet, to addition, to numher, etc., or to continuous quantity, as the line, the surface, etc.; criteriology, to the true; ethics, to the moral end, to moral good; lastly, logic, to the being of reason, to the orderly arrangement of the objects of the reasoning faculty. The first philosophy, or metaphysics, takes for its object these indefinable entities and their relations, and these are the point of departure of the general synthesis which constitutes, in the formal and strict sense, rational wisdom, or philosophy.

The ideal of philosophy would be the power to explain the universe, its elements and its laws, judging it, as it were, from above, by means of a synthetic knowledge, as perfect as our nature can attain, of the First Cause Who has created the world by an act of His almighty power, and continually governs it by His providential wisdom: the "synthetic return," or study of the world in its First Cause is the summit of philosophy.^{1}

{1} Thus we see how the circular demonstration differs from the vicious circle.