PROPOSITION LXXVII.

Material Conceptual Truth is inseparable from the act of simple Apprehension; and its counterpart is to be found in all sensible perception. Both the one and the other, however, are really identical with the Transcendental, or ontological, Truth of the respective acts.

There are three Members in this Proposition; which we will consider separately.

I. In the FIRST MEMBER it is asserted that Material Conceptual Truth is inseparable from the act of simple Apprehension; or, in other words, that every simple Apprehension must necessarily be conceptually true. The assertion is thus proved. That intellectual act is materially true, which is conformable in its representation to the object that is to be represented. But every simple Apprehension, or Idea, is conformable, in its representation, to the object which is to be represented. Therefore, every simple Apprehension is materially true. There can be no doubt about the Major, because the Predicate is the definition of the Subject; the Proposition is, therefore, per se and primo, as Logicians say. The Minor is thus proved. That intellectual act, whose actually represented object is necessarily the object which is to be represented, is conformable in its representation to the object which is to be represented. But every simple Apprehension is of this nature. Therefore, it is always conformable to the object which is to be represented. The Minor of the proof needs declaration. The intellect, in its act of simple Apprehension, is purely passive as to its object. It is like a photographic Camera, producing an intellectual likeness of whatsoever chances to come within its field of view. Now, -- to pursue the metaphor, -- in its judicial act, the intellect pronounces that the photograph is the photograph of such a person, and that it is exactly like him. Here there is manifestly room for error; but not in the photograph itself. After the same sort, it is the office of the intellect, (using the term in its specific signification), to intue the Essences or Quiddities of things. It is its nature; and, as the faculty is not free, if it is in a normal condition and unimpeded; and if the object is duly set before it, it cannot help forming a similitude of that entity which is presented to it. Neither can the will or senses intervene to determine the object; for there is no room for either. The photograph is taken, and the object is that which is de facto apprehended. To repeat an instance already used in connection with this matter: -- an aluminium pencil-case is before me; and the sensile species or form is produced in my sensory, through the medium of the external senses. But that species is not the object of my intuition. It never could be; for it merely represents material conditions which could never become the object of the intellect. That species, as representative in its own imperfect way of the object, is the occasion of my thougbt; but my mind is in no way bound to represent that object, as determined by the sensile species. As a fact, I conceive a gold pencil-case. The similarity of the material conditions in the sensile species has given birth to the thought; but for all that I think a gold pencil-case; and a gold pencil-case is the one true object of my idea. The common sense of mankind confirms this doctrine; for who would ever dream of pronouncing such an idea, a gold pencil-case, false? And if I should give vocal expression to the simple Apprehension, is there any one would accuse me of error? If I were to say that this (pointing to the aluminium object before me) is a gold pencil-case; then my concept would be false. But why? Because my mind has intentionally determined the object to be represented. I am out of the range of simple Apprehensions, and am now pronouncing Judgment. There are other simple Apprehensions, however, where it would seem, at first sight, as though the doctrine here maintained could with difficulty be defended. These are of two classes. In the first class are included those ideas which are not repugnant in themselves, but have no corresponding reality outside the mind. Of such kind are the ideas of a golden mountain, for instance, or a Chimera, or the philosopher's stone. Now, in order to make the matter clearer, let it be borne in mind that a simple. Apprehension does not include existence in its representation. These entities are not conceived as existing; they are simply conceived. Accordingly, the only possible difficulty in the way of admitting that these ideas are materially true would be, that the object is self-contradictory, and will not endure as a term of thought. But no one would venture to affirm, that the existence of a golden mountain, of a Chimera, or even of the philosopher's stone, is metaphysically impossible, so that God could not create each or all of them, should it so please Him. But, if to any one such should appear to be the case in either of these instances, the example would then be transferred from the class under consideration to the one which now follows. There are, therefore, ideas whose object is an impossibility, because it involves a metaphysical contradiction; as, v.g. a round square, an insensile animal, a thinking stone. Of these Suarez appositely remarks, that they are not apprehensions of entity, but vocal Concepts, i.e. Concepts of words. Yet, so far as they are ideas, they are true. But they are absurd, say you. Certainly they are absurd; because the objects represented are absurdities; and the ideas must therefore be absurd, because they are in conformity with their object and, consequently, conceptually true.

II. In the SECOND MEMBER of this Proposition it is asserted, that the counterpart of Material Conceptual Truth is to be found in all sensile perception.

It is quite evident that, if the universal opinion, inseparably connecting Truth with the intellect, is to be accepted, the perceptions of the senses cannot be called, strictly speaking, true. Nevertheless, the Angelic Doctor, (who repeatedly declares in favour of that opinion), pronouncedly affirms, in more than one place, that these perceptions are true and, if one may judge from the collocation, apparently in the same sense in which he predicates Truth of simple Apprehension. Nay, he goes further; for he speaks of sensile Judgments, as though, in some sort of a way, attributing to the senses even formal Conceptual Truth. This needs some explanation; and necessarily involves a reference to questions which properly belong to Psychology. These, however, will be considered here, only so far as is absolutely required for the enucleation of the present subject; and the statements introduced will not be proved, but assumed, as Lemmata, from their own special science. The human soul, then, is a simple spiritual substance, possessed of various faculties; but all these faculties are in one simple substance. Whence it follows, that complete isolation, on the part of any one of them, is impossible. There is strict intercommunion, by virtue of their one common source. Of these faculties the principal are the intellect, the will, and the senses. The two former are spiritual; the last is common to man with other animals. As to the will, nothing need be said; it remains, therefore, to consider the intellect and senses, in connection with the present inquiry. To begin with the latter: There are the external, and there are the internal, senses. The former are organs of the body, and are subject to material modifications caused by the activity or, (if it pleases better), the active forces, of bodily accidents; by virtue of which modifications, sensile species or forms are impressed on the internal senses. And thus, these latter are evolved from their purely facultative state into act. We may at once dismiss the external senses, because they have no particular connection with the matter in hand; and limit our attention to the internal senses.

There are five internal, corresponding to the five external, senses. The object of each of these senses is threefold; to wit, its proper object, a common object, and that which is accidentally an object. The difference between them will be best understood by an example. A man is looking at a piece of lapis lazuli. Now, the colour of the stone is the proper object of sight; the form or shape is a common object, for it belongs as well to the sense of touch; the aluminous mineral itself is only accidentally an object, for no sense is cognizant of the inner substance, which it only recognizes through, or by, its accidental manifestations. Besides the five particular senses in the soul, there is a common or general sense, which contrasts, combines, reduces to unity of representation, the perceptions of the particular senses, -- which distinguishes, e.g. between sweet and hard, visible and sonorous, and represents as one the different sensile perceptions which are awakened by the presence of one body. Of these senses only two are, strictly speaking, representative; -- one, viz, sight, partially; the other, viz. touch, wholly. Besides these, there is sometimes to be found an additional faculty connected with sensation; about which it will be necessary, on account of its intrinsic importance, to enter into more detail.

Though, in nature, the orders of Being are clearly defined, being separated from each other by notes essentially distinct; yet there is generally a sort of no man's land between two orders, within which the lines of demarcation have so melted into each other, as to puzzle, not unfrequently, the most acute and scientific observers. To take an example: The animal, is commonly understood to be separated from the vegetable order, by at least two very broad distinctions. The one is given by Aristotle, and has again found acceptance in our own day; viz, that in the plant the stomach is outside, in the animal it is inside. A plant may almost be said to resemble an animal turned inside out; for even its lungs are spread out upon its leaves. The other difference is to be found in the process of nutritive assimilation peculiar to each. For, in the plant it is synthetical; in the animal it is analytical. Yet there have been discovered several so-called carnivorous plants, as for instance the fly-trap, whose process of assimilation is partially analytical; while they extemporize an external stomach, by contracting their leaf round the animal object, and, from certain cells in the leaf functionally analogous to the gastric cells of the animal stomach, give forth the fluid by which the digestive process is accomplished. So, on the other hand, there are animals which are hardly distinguishable from plants; since they have no organs of sense, save the sense of touch; and this last only in a rudimentary form, little, if at all, superior to that of a sensitive plant. In addition, they have no ganglionic centres of nervous action; yet they have the two animal characteristics just mentioned. Such are Zoophytes; and among them one is inclined to select the sea-anemone, so called from its close resemblance to a flower. Yet the author has seen it feeding on mussels, rejecting the shell; while, by means of its serried tentacula, it drew within its body, and digested, the fish. Of course, the same may be said of that lowest sub-kingdom of animalcules, known by the name of the Protozoa. As, then, animal life ascends towards its higher grades of development and reaches nearer that boundary line which divides it off from man, its sensile faculties become more perfect; and there appears a sort of distant obumbration of those intellectual faculties, which, in reality, belong exclusively to man, by reason of his spiritual nature. It may well be, that these points of contact, above and below, between the respective orders of nature, were intended to be signified to us by the evenings and the mornings in those probably aeonic days of the Mosaic Cosmogony.^{1} St. Thomas, then, calls attention to the fact that, in the higher classes of animals, there is a faculty called by him the vis aestimativa^{2} or estimative faculty, by means of which the beast is enabled instinctively to form a sort of sensile Universal, and a spontaneous, Judgment, (using the word analogically). Thus, -- to take his own example, -- a sheep does not flee from this individual wolf with its proper notes of colour, size, and the rest; but it exhibits a distaste for the wolf in general. In like manner, a cat has a propensity for pouncing upon mice in general, not upon this mouse in particular; so much so, that if one imitates, in a very generic sort of way, the peculiar movements or noise of a mouse, its activity is at once aroused. This faculty also exists in man, but after a nobler sort; because it becomes now the appanage of an intellectual, or spiritual, Being. Hence, in him it is named by the Angelic Doctor vis cogitativa,^{3} or the cogitative faculty; probably because of its in some way blending with the intellect in act, or of its being modified and ennobled by it. This faculty St. Thomas declares to be the highest of the sensile faculties,^{4} -- ascribes to it the apprehension of that which is fitting and of that which is hurtful,^{5} -- asserts that in man it is on the boundary of thought^{6} and that, under that ennobling modification, as vis cogitativa, it is peculiar to man;^{7} -- while he adds, that its organ is in the central cellule of the brain.^{8} There is, however, this marked distinction between the said faculty and the intellect. The former terminates with the individual, though under a more or less universal form, while the intellect properly intues the universal nature; and, moreover, the former apprehends the individuality of the Essence or Quiddity, while the latter conceives the Essence or Quiddity of the individual. There is the further distinction, that the potentia cogitativa only has material particular entity for its formal object; whereas the intellect only represents material or singular Being by accident, since its proper object is the immaterial and universal.

After this brief exposition touching the nature of the senses, let us consider bow these lower psychical faculties differ from the higher or intellectual faculty. The principal points of difference are four. First of all, the internal senses can only act in, and through, the proper bodily organ. Hence, in a disembodied spirit, they would be purely facultative, and could never naturally be reduced to act; while, on the contrary, the intellectual faculty would become better fitted for action. Again: the senses are restrained to the representation of the material, singular, present. On the other hand, the intellect has for its proper object, as has been said before, the immaterial and universal; and does not require the actual presence of the reality which it thinks of. There is, it is true, a faculty in the lower part (so to speak) of the soul, which has the power of again evoking sensile Phantasmata, in the absence of the object. But this faculty is Imagination, which is distinct from the internal senses. Nothing further need be said about it, as it does not affect the present question. Once more: the senses represent only the accidents, or material conditions, of substance, though virtually or implicitly they also represent, in conjunction with the common sense, substance likewise; but it is substance qua substance, i.e. simply as the unifying subjacence or substratum of the accidents, not the Quiddity of substance. The same may be said of the estimative faculty, which represents indeed the individual Quiddity, as consisting of a substratum of such and such accidents, but does not represent the essential nature belonging to the individual. Lastly, the internal senses have no reflex action. They cannot return upon themselves. For they can only act through a bodily organ; so that there could be no distinct act of reflection. They cannot turn their eye back concomitantly on what they are about; because this vital self-consciousness and self-reflection are only possible to a spiritual nature. There is one further observation to be made, before proceeding to a declaration of this second Member of the Proposition. Though the sensile perceptions are objectively material representations, i.e. representations of material conditions, they are not material subjectively, i.e. in their own nature; for this simple reason, that they are acts of the human Soul. For the same reason they may truly be called spiritual in their root. Thus it may safely be affirmed of them, that they are material in representation, immaterial in their vital act, spiritual in their source.

In what sense, then, can Truth be predicated of sensile perception? and to what extent can the senses be said to form a Judgment?

i. To begin with the first question: -- if Truth is conceived in a vague, generic, way, as the correspondence of a psychical representation of whatever kind with the object which it represents; in such sense, and in such sense only, can Material Truth be predicated of sensible perception, as of the simple Apprehension. Accordingly, St. Thomas strings them together in this way, remarking that 'The intellect is not deceived in its cognition of Essence; as neither are the senses deceived in the sensile perception common to them.'^{9} Supposed in both cases a normal condition of the faculty and a due presentation of the object according to the nature of each, the sensile representations of the latter are as infallible as the intellectual representations of the former. The representations of the senses are thus denominated true, in much the same way as we predicate truth of a photograph. Again: sensile perceptions may be called true causatively, inasmuch as they are naturally adapted for causing a true cognition in the intellect. In this sense, the term would be used analogically according to analogy of proportion in the first class, in which the form is intrinsic only in the principal analogate, and applied, by extrinsic denomination derived from the first, to the secondary analogates; whereas, according to the first meaning, the term would be used, -- to say the most, -- according to analogy of proportion. In a word, truth of representation can never be predicated univocally of sensile perception and of simple Apprehension. It is for this reason that, in the enunciation of the Thesis, the word, counterpart, has been selected.

ii. And now for the second question, touching the extent to which the senses may be considered capable of forming a Judgment. In the first place, this may be said generally, that the senses, as such, including the common sense, cannot of themselves form a Judgment in the strict meaning of the word. The obvious reason is, that they are, one and all, incapable of reflex action, i.e. of a return upon themselves. But, (a) the five internal senses may be pronounced capable of forming a Judgment, according to a distant analogy of proportion; inasmuch as there is a consciousness of the perception, and an instinctive practical conviction of the reality of its presentation, (using the term in its widest sense, as including representative presentation and causal, i.e. the representation of a cause by its effect, as in the instance of colour). In like manner and with greater reason, the common sense may also analogically be pronounced capable of forming a Judgment; inasmuch as it unites in one Subject, and compares, the perceptions of the particular senses. Yet nearer is the approach of the vis aestimativa, in the higher order of brute animals, to this capacity for forming a Judgment; since, in the act of that faculty, there is the obumbration of a universal, and much more of comparison and composition. Hence, St. Thomas places it on the boundary line which divides the intellectual, from the sensile, faculties. In man, the approach is yet nearer, because of the intimate conjunction of these two orders of faculties. Hence, according to St. Thomas, the vis cogitativa, or as he otherwise calls it, the ratio particularis, (which is proper to man, and corresponds with the vis aestimativa of brutes), is of a much higher and nobler nature than this latter; and, in so far forth as it has some participation of reason, may be able to elicit a Judgment, properly so called. Finally, in the case of man, a sensile judgment is sometimes intended to mean a Judgment of the intellect on the object of sensile representation; and then, of course, it is a true and proper Judgment.

III. In the THIRD MEMBER of the Proposition it is asserted, that this Truth, (as analogically predicated of sensile perception and the simple Apprehension of the intellect), is really identical with the Transcendental, or ontological, Truth of the respective acts. This is the meaning of St. Thomas, in the second of the two passages quoted above in the seventy-second Proposition, where he asserts that 'Truth can exist in the senses or in the intellectual simple Apprehension of Essence as in a certain true entity, but not as something cognized by the cognizing, which is what' (formal Conceptual) 'Truth means.' It is, of course, difficult to make a declaration of this part of the Thesis, which will be intelligible to the reader, till we have considered what Transcendental, or ontological, Truth is. It will suffice here to say briefly, that ontological Truth is the Truth of Being, as the name implies; and that it is the Being itself, considered as naturally fitted to cause in whatsoever intellect a true estimate of itself. Now it is of the essence alike of a simple Apprehension of the intellect and of sensile perception, to be a representative act, i.e. a true and faithful representation, according to their respective capacities, of the object represented. As, then, their entity is representation, the Truth of their representation is the Truth of their entity.

{1} May not such an interpretation explain the repeated phrase 'And the evening and the morning' were the first day? In order of evolution, the evening of one order would be, as it were, coincident with the morning of the higher.

{2} 1ae lxxviii, 4, 0.

{3} 1ae lxxxi. 3, c.

{4} De Verit. Q. xxv, a. 2, c. v. ft.; in 3 d. xxvi, Q. I, a. 2, c; et d, xxxv, Q. I, a. 2, q. 2, ad 1m.

{5} In d. xvii, Q. unica, a. I, q. 2, ad 2m.

{6} 1-2ae lxxiv, 3, ad 1m; in d. xxiii, Q. 2, a. 2, q. I, ad 3m.

{7} Ibidem.

{8} Ie lxxviii, 4, c; c. Gent. L. II, c. 60, in init.; et alibi.

{9} 'Intellectus non decipitur in cognoscendo quod quid est, sicut nec sensus in proprio seusibili.' c. Gentes, L. I, c. 61, 2o.