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BARBARA CELARENT

Dialectica est tentativa, quid tentart proprium est ex principiis extraneis procedere. Secundum quod est utens recedit a modo scientific* Oportet media multiplicari ad conclusionis mani- festationem, ut in syllogismis dialecticis accidit.

ST THOMAS AQUINAS

BARBARA CELARENT

A Description of Scholastic Dialectic

by

THOMAS GILBY O.P.

LONGMANS GREEN AND CO LONDON * NEW YORK * TORONTO

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To ELIZABETH GULLY

CONTENTS

Introduction

page

PART ONE LIMITATIONS i

I ORGANON 4

II LIMITED OBJECTIVE 13

III CORRECT AND TRUE 24

IV FORMAL AND MATERIAL 31 V FICTITIOUS BEING 36

PART TWO NOTIONS 47

VI SIGN AND SYMBOL 50

VII IMAGE AND MEANING 54

VIII SHAPE OF NOTIONS 63

IX COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY 7O

X ANALOGY 77

XI COMPLEX AND CONCRETE 96

XII NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE 103

XIII MUTUAL BEARING HO

PART THREE JUDGEMENTS 115

XIV METRONOME AND MELODY 117 XV QUALITY AND QUANTITY 124

XVI TYPES OF JUDGEMENT 129

XVII NECESSITY AND FACT 135

XVIII TREE OF PORPHYRY 145

XIX DEFINITION 152

XX DIVISION 171

viii CONTENTS

page

PART FOUR RATIOCINATIONS 179

XXI SENSE AND SENSIBILITY l8l

XXII REASONING BACK l86

XXIII PATTERN IN MOVEMENT IQO

XXIV PROOF AND EQUATION 196 XXV SYLLOGISM 203

XXVI RULES, FIGURES, AND

MOODS 207

XXVII DEDUCTION 217

XXVIII INDUCTION 225

XXIX METHOD OF THE SCIENCES 238

PART FIVE FALLACIES 251

XXX MISUSE OF TERMS 253

XXXI SOPHISMS AND DIALECTIC 259

PART six DISPUTATION 279

XXXII FORMAL DEBATE 282

XXXIII PARENTHESIS AND

INFORMAL OBJECTIONS 294

INDEX 297

INTRODUCTION

THESE pages were worked up in the Mediterranean between action stations in H.M.S. Renown, from rough notes all pulpy and partly indecipherable from the seas shipped when she was holed fighting but continuing to chase her two opposite numbers, Scharnhorst and GneisenaUj in the Arctic Circle. In attempting this picture of the thomist dialectic it was not altogether a disadvantage that there was nothing else but a miniature Summa Tbeologica to consult and no fair certainty of ever going to press. What is lacking in the ap- paratus may perhaps be made up in other ways, for while an elementary scholastic manual was not intended, neither was a scientific monograph on logical analysis, but rather a description of a habit of mind and method. Logic and dialectic are now over- lapping terms,* yet the original bent of the former is to pure form, while the latter mingles with the variety and sensibility of existing nature.1 I thought, too, that a swing and a breeze from outside might be welcome where the conventional demeanour is rather stiff and the atmosphere often close. Some of this ease may re- main despite the scholastic interpolations that have since been run in. Service language itself turns phrases with the ponderous- ness of the periwig period schoolmen, ordering the scheduled per- sonnel to remove their dentures before submersion, not divers to take out their false teeth before going under. Technicalities can scarcely be avoided, and

English cut on Creek and Latint Like Fustian heretofore on Sattin.

Even so, the final version is not for the advanced student but for the general reader who would like to wander along an old, and perhaps beaten, track, and is prepared to take some dull bits in his stride. These notes on the route, based on the geography of the logic but meditating on the conditions of the dialectic, are offered

1 Corresponding to the Aristotelean distinction between the apodictic logic of demonstration and the discourse on probabilities and suggestiveness. Cf. Commentary, VII Metaphysics, hct. 7. IV, lect. 4.

X INTRODUCTION

to those who can chuckle at the description of thomism in the Cow- cise Oxford Dictionary — 'theological doctrine of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) who maintained predestination and efficacious grace and denied the immaculate conception/ Some may be inclined to shape their thoughts to the classical discipline of the Christian West, and they may have an inkling that the doctrines are not con- fined to the Latin culture or the medieval centuries. They may already have caught a glimpse of a general design offering violence to none of the details of experience — nothing human strange to me, a claim that could not be urged without extravagance for some ideologies. Yet perhaps they have been baffled by the tangle of strange terms, and have felt like an explorer hacking his way through the Matto Grosso without chart, compass, or sight of the sky. These reflections, then, are for those who are discouraged by the entanglements of philosophy, but are suspicious of short cuts.

Tristram Shandy praised St Thomas for having so good a mechanical head, both for tying and untying the knots of school divinity; and so he had, yet with it a fundamental simplicity of thought. His sweep may engage the encyclopedist, his depth the mystic, his finesse the logical critic, nevertheless, as Mr Lewis Mumford observes, 'in no derogatory sense, one may call him a master of platitude, provided one adds that in medieval culture some of the platitudes of Greece and Rome came forth from their ancient graves as breathless discoveries.'1 His thought has not grown old; it is not, like the Palace of Versailles, a monument to an age that is past, for his project was never completed like a build- ing, but grows organically. It is not an accumulation of theorems nor an aggregation of parts.

Then as regards procedure, St Thomas himself compares wis- dom and play,2 and there is much to be said for philosophy being conducted like sport, and largely by amateurs. May they still thrive, 'the race of scholars who read Plato with their feet in the fender/ if only to bear witness to the union of science and letters. A smile is no enemy to truth; so are there sound reasons why a book on philosophy, which touches so many points of human in- terest and is implied in every adult experience and problem, should not be, to quote Doctor Johnson, 'a gay and vigorous dis-

Tbf Condition of Man. * Opusc IX, & Hfbdomadibus, Prologue.

INTRODUCTION XI

ser cation/ easier reading than the treatises on economics and psy- chology the week-end student is offered? The subject is neither so tricky as the policies of Queen Elizabeth nor so taxes the memory as learning a new language. The reader will judge for himself, though he is warned that his start is beset by the grey thickets of logic* Having passed through them, he will find himself in more open country, well-watered and fertile, commanding wide views with mountain ranges in the distance. Some equipment of techni- cal terms must be shouldered, nevertheless we are not out on an archaeological expedition. 'The less/ muses Night Thoughts, Ve copy the renowned Antients we shall ressemble them the more/

A pictorial guide cannot miss some of the subtlety of the analysis, though the enlargement of purely logical details will be omitted as far as possible. The dialectic of probabilities verges on rhetoric, and we will risk mixing our metaphors instead. But the temper is direct, the statements of ordinary careful speech are taken as signs of philosophical thought, and the advance is not committed to mathematical transport. The process is neither a programme of formal logic nor an organization of stylized rhe- toric. As one who begins with Xenophon may end with Plato, so a student of St Thomas, despite an early impression of burly and agile commonsense, soon discovers more than first meets the eye; many second thoughts to reflection; an ardour and refinement be- neath the apparent composure and simplicity; an invitation to the specialist; even a readiness to enter the labyrinth of sophistication; and certainly more echoes than this book will sound. Dick Swivel- ler asked the Marchioness if she had ever tasted beer, and when she replied that once she had had a sip remarked, 'She has never tasted it. It can't be tasted in a sip/

All the same, first reactions do fairly represent one side of a tradition of thought still alive, and even kicking, among people of no academic standing. St Thomas, however, remains a many- sided author, who cannot be known merely from consulting the indexes. To some scholars he is the last of the Fathers, to others the first of the moderns. He can work in a laboratory and yet re- new the open-air discussions of the Greeks. His elaborate abstrac- tions go with a decent respect for the common convictions of mankind* He can be imagined as one intent on far horizons, or, like a farmer, running soil through his fingers. Able to soar,

Xll INTRODUCTION

and yet willing to walk, he spoke with pure intelligence and still remained an impenitent materialist.

His philosophy is never meant to remain a professional occupa- tion. The Basques say that the devil devoted seven years trying to learn their language, and then gave it up as a bad job. How many have studied St Thomas for seven years, only for his philosophy at the end to be left in the class-room covered with chalk or treated as a kind of staff-college doctrine.1 An account of his topics may prove to be not merely of biographical interest to those outside his tradition. For while their chief fascination is for the Christian whose customs are defended and mysteries so daringly yet soberly made reasonable, we would avoid here Charles Lamb's encomium on the man 'who did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop/ Whatever the historical and psychological antecedents, his attempt to take reason to its farthest frontiers, is a free and untrammelled operation, substantially devoid of special pleading. The appeal to authority is relegated to the lowest rank2: there is no inclina- tion to adopt a deferential tone in any rationalist company.

This first volume is no more than a free commentary on the traditional logic according to terms, propositions, and arguments,

1 The standard course of studies in scholastic philosophy begins with /ogrV. Neglecting mathematics, the student then embarks on natural philosophy, which seeks to discover the general and enduring reasons at work in our physical en- vironment, reasons beyond the power of a particular or passing technique to un- cover. The first part of natural philosophy is often called cosmology and is con- cerned with the inanimate world; the second part, which considers animate things and chiefly human nature, is called psychology. Both these philosophical sciences differ from the experimental sciences of physics and psychology in that they do nor stop at the data of observation and experiment and their correlation in a mathematical scheme, but, while preserving sensible qualities, go on to in- terpret them by the common principles of thought, which are the special interest of the science of metaphysics. The effort here is to elucidate reality as such, in the most general and simplified way, abstracted from the changes and particular problems of the material world. In the first place the student enquires into the validity of knowledge in the science ofcpistemology, goes on to analyse the content, properties, and consequences of reality in the science of general metaphysicst and finally investigates the existence and nature of the first and the last cause of being in the science of natural theology. He then descends to apply his metaphysical conclusions to what he knows of the nature of man from psychology, and in moral philosophy studies human activity as a means to fulfilment.

2 Summa Theologica, la: I: 8, ad 2.

INTRODUCTION Xlll

which, in stressing the dialectical role of analogy, describes the temper of a method, and pauses at some of the positions. Follow- ing its hero's advice1 it will leave aside what is trifling, obscure, or highly technical in the teaching of the schoolmen, and will be directed to where, as Dante sings,2 there is good nourishment if there be no straying.

1 Summa Theologtca, Prologue. Footnote references are to the works of St Thomas unless otherwise stated. Though his logical works are the two great commentaries on Aristotle's de Interpretation (Penhermenias) and Analytica Pos- teriora — would that he had commented on the Topics -the majority are to the Summa Tbcologica, while probably the most important are to the fifth and sixth questions of his exposition on Bocthius, de Trinitate (Opusculum XKf). The num- bering of the optiscnla follows the order established by Pierre Mandonnet, Opuscula Omma 5". Thomae Aquinatis, Paris, 1927.

2 ParadisOj Canto 10.

PART ONE LIMITATIONS

FIRST catch your hare. Before dialectics can be described, a theory must be secured; what logic is and what not must be defined before its extension into ordinary discourse can be considered. This preamble, or section on proemial logic, will amount in effect to a self-denying ordinance. For contrary to a widespread opinion, logic does not flood the bed of dialectics; it is but one stream, or rather, one channel for the flow. People sometimes have mis- givings because unconsciously they exaggerate its force. The scholastics are supposed to have suflcred from an overwhelming logomachy; their masterpieces, however, display a method well under control.

It is, in fret, an instrument for a humane and critical spirit in- dispensable for civilized thought, but insufficient by itself. Re- flect 011 some examples: as a razor is used for shaving and a horse ior hunting, so logic is used for the processes of connected and communicable thought. You may, indeed you should, grow so accustomed that the instrument is taken for granted; a keen razor passes without advertence and a line rider is one with his mount; and so a practised thinker docs not trip over an over-conscious logic. A rattlesnake docs not listen for his own rattle. Training becomes second nature1 and operates almost unnoticed. By logic a man thinks swiftly and accurately without wary anxiety about his mental states; his thinking has style; and style is effortless and confident, as you find to admiration in gentlemanly Georgian buildings and the despatches of Nelson, in the well tempered clavicrchord and Frank Woollcy making a century for Kent.

One must allow for the danger that a primer on etiquette may produce intellectual stammerers, who, according to Hazlitt, are delivered of their good things with pain and effort; and conse- quently what costs them such evident uneasiness does not impart unmixed delight to the bystanders. This book, however, is rather a defence of the scientific status of alliterative thinking than an

1 Sutnma Theologica, ia-2ac: XLIX:

LIMITATIONS

exhortation to qualified and grudging speech; though even so, when logic luxuriates into dialectic, some limits should be set.1

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines; Curl me about, ye gadding vines; — But, lest your fetters prove too weak Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And courteous briars, nail me through.

When written up as a special study, logic may appear to be a nagging discipline, yet its purpose is to ease, not to cramp; to make for grace, not gawkiness. There is a proper way of thinking as there is a proper way of walking; you can shamble and still be able to move from place to place, just as you can have untidy thoughts and still be able to reach conclusions.

Our mental processes, then, need to be trained* Though dia- lectic will give the suppleness, nothing but logic will give the poise. The discipline can be learnt, for human minds are more apt to think logically than fingers are to play the pianoforte: the result is by practice out of nature. If our thoughts are to be read they must be legible; dialectics will illustrate them, but logic is required to set them in the appropriate severity of type. This is not for scholars alone but for the people: the need is past politeness; sur- vival is at stake, not merely elegance. We dare not give in to majority moods, nor fall for the catchwords and personalities and scoops, but must set ourselves to converse from a lively and humble sense of the facts we are certain of: there will be no rebuilding from the ruins around us unless we begin from the personal in- tegrity of exact thought: humanly speaking there is no other foundation for civilization, nor for religion. Unreason is more cruel than hate, for then law itself becomes the dictate of desire acting according to opportunity, not the measure of encourage- ment and restraint according to meaning,2 The universe yields a law and a logic. We do not make them up for ourselves, what we contribute is probably the dialectic and certainly the rhetoric. Now mor.il effort alone is unable to correct intellectual error; the

1 Summa Theologira, 2,i-2ae: CLXV1I: J.

2 Here, according to Hans Frank at the Nuremburg Trials, was Hitler's most serious shortcoming; 'every legal expert to him was a disturbing influence/ For reason in law, cf. Summa Tlcologica, ia-2ac: XVII: I. XC: I.

LIMITATIONS 3

cure begins in the will to think scientifically. This is not cold comfort, for of its nature the mind is the least lonely of powers,1 and reasoned meaning, more intimate than affection and more lasting than passion, is the condition of companionship*2

1 Summa Theologica, ia-2ac: ITI: 4.

s Logic is part of the courtesy of conversation, attaching to the virtues of friendliness (Swnma Theologira, za-2ae: CXIV: 2) and pleasantness (za-zac: CLXVTII: i, 2), which are bound up with truthfulness (2a~2ae: CIX: 3), for without ease, modesty, and exactness men cannot dwell together.

CHAPTER I ORGANON

LOGIC is no more a special doctrine than English grammar is a peculiar language; indeed it is to thought what grammar is to language. But while you can learn to write good idiomatic English without applying yourselves to grammar from a careful reading of English letters, as children can learn to feed themselves without a knowledge of dietetics, it is doubtful whether useful argument can be sustained without conscious reference to the rules. You can be understood even if you speak ungrammatically — like the little girl's reply, *er ain't a-calling we, us don't belong to she/ — but if you are illogical there are no secure communications. Logic amounts to a social duty, though the precept is probably affirma- tive, which means that the obligation, like that of honouring one's parents and unlike the negative precept of doing no murder, is not continuously binding. We are not always required to speak in a sober and severely rational spirit, and a humane logic of concepts will tolerate the dialectic of fantasy, for we are not in a world of types, but of things half-meaning, half-movement. What may be called logical spoonerisms sometimes strike a light; nonsense verse may be an escape for the univocally-minded scientist who has not yet discovered freedom under the law of analogy; inconsequence may be instructive as well as charming. Yet a temperate logic composes the standards of appreciation. Even madness, as in King Lear, must be set against a background of sanity. While admitting that the formal schemes of argument, as displayed in the old classical logic, may have to be stretched to accommodate the freest play of philosophical understanding, and that new modes of state- ment and inference have since been developed or explicitly recog- nized, nevertheless we cannot conclude that the ancient models are obsolete.

Aristotle is the father of the science of logic, the systematic re- flection on the purely mental patterns of thought; his work on the subject survived to exercise a profound influence on the West be- fore his other treatises were recovered. His texts formed what was

ORGANON 5

known as the Organon, the instrument or method; a means, there- fore, and not an end in itself. It is a servant, and not a master science; logical entities, says St Thomas, are not taken for their own sake but as props for other sciences, and he quotes Boethius with approval, logic is not so much a science as an engine of science.1

Perhaps too much was claimed in the later middle ages and afterwards, as too much was feared some centuries before when the Abbot of Cluny could write to Helo'ise; 'Well hast thou changed thy pursuits, and like a wise woman hast chosen the Gos- pel instead of Logic/ adding in the same vein, 'the Epistles in- stead of Physics, the Cloister instead of the Academy/ Logic indeed may be taken to comprise a collection of doctrines on all manner of subjects, from metaphysical criticism of knowledge and psychological enquiry into the conditions of consciousness, to purely mental analysis and linguistic discussions about the origin and application of words. In the strict sense it stands for the study of the figures of valid inference and scientific method, and as such need assume no attitude with regard to the nature of existing reality. Though the subject of this book is dialectic, looser, richer and more conversational, including the practice of myth, analogy, nnd the convergence of probabilities, we must still consider the central logical forms round which all dialectical processes revolve.2

Clearness is not enough. Logic itself does not compose the picture, it is not even the lens through which things are seen, but rather the appropriate aperture, focus, and exposure. For this reason one hesitates over classing it among the sciences, for scientia speculative an achievement of the theoretical reason, is the habit of seeing real and objective truths in their principles, of discovering conclusions about existents.3 The effort of constructing arguments in correct form is the work of the practical reason, intellectus prac- ticus or operatives,* a function of art rather than of science. There is, of course, a theory of purely mental form, apodictic logic,

1 Opusc. XVI, V de Trinitate, i, ad 2.

2 Commentary, VII Metaphysics, lect. 17. Summa Tleologica, 2a-2ae: XL VIII.

3 Summa Tbeologica, ia-2ae: LVII: 2.

4 Ibid., la: LXXIX: n. ia-2a: LVII: 3. Commentary, I Posterior Analytics, lect. I.

6 LIMITATIONS

logica demonstrativa or logica secundum quod est docens, concerned more with the coherence of concepts, and perhaps with their elegance, than with their correspondence to an existing environment; never- theless our main interest is in its application, secundum quod est utens, and this dialectica tentative as St Thomas notes, withdraws from the restraints of science.1

Can we conclude that logic unadorned is a tedious subject for special discussion, all manners and no substance, all plot and no passion, the study of possible shapes without heed to what is shaped, a piece of abstract art — almost a contradiction in terms; or shall we not recognize that it is an essential factor in human ex- pression and satisfaction? The system of thought should be treated as an internal skeleton, not a carapace; minds should be like bodies, bony not filleted, and the supple tissues of dialectic should clothe the pattern of logic. There are shapes in the movement of intel- ligent intercourse.

Logic is the art and science of thinking correctly, especially on subjects that admit of cogent demonstration,2 while dialectic is its companionable extension into matters where we must be content with descriptions and probable assents. We shall consider dialec- tic later; so far as logic is concerned, there are three terms to be seized on, namely art, science, correct.

Arts and sciences are settled mental qualities enabling us to grasp and direct the objects of experience and respond with ease to a given situation.3 By arithmetic we are ready to deal with figures, or by the art of small boat sailing we swiftly appreciate wind and tide and only less swiftly make the necessary muscular adjustments. But whereas a science is a theoretical cast of mind, a habit of drawing conclusions from premisses and assenting to their truth, an art is a practical bent, a rooted aptitude for effect- ing something useful or enjoyable. Science deduces but art pro- duces. Though art works through technical skill, the scholastics insist on the intellectualism of this ability; it is the recta ratio Jac- tibiliwn,* the right idea of things to be made, the effective plan of realizing a conception. Logic is the art of arts, liberal and not mechanical, directed to produce aright a quasi-externalized object,

1 Commentary, IV Metaphysics, Icct. 4. 3 Ibid., ia-2ae: XLIX: 4.

2 Snmma Tbeologica, 2a-2ae: XLVTI: 2, ad 3. 4 Ibid., ia-2ae: LVII: 3.

ORGANON 7

that artefact or opus aliquod which is the proper arrangement of reasoning, a job as enduring, though not so solid and visible, as anything in marble or bronze.1 The emphasis is on the thing to be done, not, as in the moral virtues, on our personal dispositions in doing it* Our expressed thoughts are the material of this art, and logic is no less practical than an escort vessel making order from a tangle and shepherding the merchantmen through the swept channel.2

Now the mind is single despite the diversity of its interests3; how we act is explained by how we think. A human operation is attempted according to a theoretical plan. The activity of art, un- like happy doodling, is controlled and presupposes forethought and speculation. Consequently there is a scientific side to logic, the study, detached and reflective, of the proper rules of thought and the analysis of their forms.4 And previous to the expectation of any practical advantage from its adoption, logic can share with mathematics and metaphysics the characteristics of pure under- standing, and, like all the sciences, be animated with a disin- terested curiosity that does not require that knowledge should be turned to profit.

Men caught a glimpse of the claims of truth beyond their immediate advantage when they left astrology for astronomy. Their impulse was to theorize, to know for the sake of knowing, to find out the answer regardless of safety and comfort. This trait still characterizes the scientist. Yet the early philosophers can scarcely be called unpractical dreamers: Thales, the first of them, was shrewd enough, it is reported, to make a corner in oil, though another legend recounts how he fell into a well; Aristotle, who closes the golden period, was statesman, doctor, dramatic critic, and field-naturalist into the bargain. The British philosophers, from Alcuin and Anselm, through Bacon, Herbert, Hobbes, Locke, to Haldane, Balfour, and Smuts, have played a notable

1 Commentary, I Posterior Analytics, left. i. Summa Theologica, ia-2ae: LVII: 3. V de Trinitate, V: i, ad. 3.

2 Dialectic deals rather with the strategy than with the tactical disposition of thought, or, to continue the comparison, it is the convoying of serviceable thoughts from one place to another. Cf. Aristotle, Topics, Bk. I, ch. 1-3.

3 Summa Theologica, la: LXXIX: 9, 10, n.

4 Ibid., la: XIV: 16.

8 LIMITATIONS

part in public affairs; even Berkeley's idealism went with a bishop- ric and preaching the panacea of tar-water. The medievals, too, sought restlessly for the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone, and, less ambitious, translated their theories into government and worked out a system of social and economic relationships that may still excite our envy. Albertus Magnus, the master of St Thomas, was a legendary magician, occupied with elaborate technical con- trivances well in advance of his time; St Thomas himself, at the time of his death, was composing a treatise on aqueducts and a commentary on the Song of Songs. Yet all of them took for granted that truth was its own reward, and theoretical, or as they would say, speculative, was for them a term of praise, not of reproach.1

Since then has grown the fashion of dealing with theories, and especially moral theories, as though they were Utopian. Hard- headed men of affairs are supposed to be deterred by no ideals from getting what they want. But on reflection it is seen that a successful Realpolitik starts from a clearly defined theory; an ex- ponent such as Bismarck had a strong ideal, not necessarily a good one, but so plain and paramount that all else was subservient. It is ideals that are persevering and ruthless, and opportunism that must give way or be content with the shifts of expediency. The peace- makers of Vienna appear to have had at once a clearer plan and a more temperate sense of practicality than those of Versailles, and their work in consequence was more lasting. There is a theory behind the traditional practice of British foreign diplomacy. Or again, think of Richelieu, then pass on to Metternich, Cavour, and Roosevelt, and the same lesson is brought home. While who ex- ceeds Lenin, that bommc tres thcorique, as a shaper of contemporary history?

The successful realists are the convinced idealists. Yet we tend to over-emphasize the division between theory and practice, for- getting that strong ideas bubble over into activity, and that unless backed and fed by centres of pure research the institutes of tech- nology would go no further than to refine the current appli- cations of physics. There is a similar need for higher studies in all departments, not least in theology. We think of idealism as noble enough but remote, while realism becomes expedience, a flexible

1 Summa Theologica, la: XIV: 16. XXIX: n. ia-2ae: III: 5. LVII: I, 2, 3.

ORGANON 9

accommodation to the turn of affairs. Yet our choices are chaotic unless directed by a principle* We recognize of course that theories are often prompted by practical needs, as in the case of the mathematical treatment of probability, which arose from the problem of how to divide the stakes in an unfinished game of chance. Part of the trouble is that contemplation no longer ap- pears to us, as it did to the Greeks and St Thomas, as the highest form of vitality; knowledge has become cerebral and opposed to strong and vivid action, reason has flown to our head. *No, Sir'; said Dr. Johnson, 'were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, "Follow me, and hear a lecture in philosophy"; and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, " Follow me, and dethrone the Czar"; a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the impression is universal; yet it is strange/

Behind the cunning of constructing cogent arguments, the art of logic, there lies the theoretical science, the elucidation of con- clusions demonstrated from their proper principles, in this case, the conditions, canons, and consequences of the correct orchestra- tion of thought. Both must be set in the wider plan of dialectic, and both, the craft and the theory, should go together, though sometimes they are found apart. French peasants may be practical logicians without being versed in the rules; learned men may be well informed about theories and yet jump their proofs. The art comes from practice, the science from examination of the modes of argument, and here correctness is called for, rather than truth.

There is a difference between the two, as between stage pro- perty food and real food. You can argue correctly from a false position to a false conclusion, you may start with a mistake and end with one, and yet not be logically awry. As a logical perform- ance the demonstration may be faultless, as when a thorough paced pantheist infers that individual responsibility is an illusion, or an old-fashioned marxist sets out to abolish organized religion.

Nearly every article in the Summa Theologica sets off with objec- tions against the position the author is going to establish; and usually the cutting edge of the logic is neither bent nor blunt. Take an objection almost at random against the simplicity of God: the best must be attributed to God, but rich diversity is nobler than simplicity, compounds are higher than their elements, and

10 LIMITATIONS

therefore we should not say that God is wholly simple.1 The reply must turn on the meaning of the term simplicity* Or take another example of an argument in which all the statements are doubtful, if not false, and which is yet free from logical flaw: I am told that people devoid of humour cannot appreciate Punch — moreover I believe that no Scotsman has a sense of humour — then I infer cor- rectly that no Scotsman appreciates Punch.2

When arguments can be strong and their conclusions inadmis- sible, the inadequacy of logic alone in the search for truth is re- vealed. Unlike the other sciences, it provides no food for thought, though it prepares the food. It works indifferently with true and false doctrines, with sobriety and whim. People who are men- tally ill sometimes argue without deviation to the most bizarre conclusions, there is a perseveration in their train of thought lack- ing in the healthy-minded; their sense of fact is at fault, not their logic. At a less morbid level we are rightly suspicious of doc- trinaires with little knowledge of history, familiarity with the lives of ordinary families, or respect for the inarticulate. To be de- finite, but not informed; to draw the uttermost conclusions from imperfectly established premisses; to be clever without a sense of proportion; to impose a simplified scheme without discrimination; to plan arguments untested by experience and hatch principles to suit already adopted conclusions; these are instances of logic running by itself without anything to bite on, with results similar to those of racing an engine in neutral gear.

The beautifully wrought constructions and the smooth and excellent finish Saint Saens applies to sound are not sufficient to arouse and prolong our interest; and so logic alone will not provide the sense of reality, nor even the zest for discovery. It has no special message in comparison with living literature, it is like the book of the film of the book. There are Christian thinkers who base their conviction of the existence and providence of God on mystical rather than on rational grounds, and who hold that Christianity is valid as a vehicle of experience, not for its mani- festation of intellectual evidence; they sometimes refer to the

1 Sutnma Theologica, la; III: 7, obj. 2.

2 Here, as frequently hereafter, we shall make use of what St Thomas calls exemplary arguments, adduced to illustrate a pattern, not to expound a thesis. Opusc. XLIII, On Fallacies, ch. i.

ORGANON II

classical theology of Catholicism as though it were a system of Hegelianism aiming to reach the truths of divinity by pure logic, whereas in point of fact logic is about as important to the Summa Theologica as die cage of masonry is to the architectural, social, and religious purposes of a contemporary Gothic cathedral.

A prime minister once warned the Commons to beware of needless innovations, 'especially when guided by logic'; he was warming to a truth, namely that logic is all very well, but there comes a stage when a man is not a logician, but just a crank, when he would construct schemes without reference to real conditions, and exact shapes from material that will not tolerate them. There are limits to what logic can do; it is but the mould of rational dis- course, empty of itself and needing to be filled from the other sciences. A man may train himself to logic and find himself in the fix of the visitor in Walden who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf sibyl, but when he came to be presented, and one end of the ear trumpet was put in his hand, then had nothing to say. To be in possession of the instrument, but of little else, will impart the unreality, but not always the felicity of Marjorie Fleming's lines to her pug:

I could not get a rhyme for Roman, So was obliged to call him woman.

The schoolmen of the decadence may have tried to torture the data of experience into their categories, but if they are accused of logic-chopping, we shall be more accurate if we mean that they chopped with, not at, logic. For their logic does not pretend to reflect on existents, but on mental modes and connections in our abstract consciousness. As somebody has said, somewhat un- kindly, it is the ability to rush round and round inside without getting dizzy. There was always a steady tradition of humanism among the scholastics, going back to the school of Chartres, and the awareness of the artificial quality of logic kept many of them from the chicanery of verbalisms and provoked their criticism of the nugiloqui vent ilatores, as John of Salisbury called them, the fans of futile phrases.

Yet logic will assist in the correct conduct of our approach to real objects of scientific enquiry; it sets the measure for all reasoned knowledge, and as such is the first part of scientific

12 LIMITATIONS

discipline*1 We shall be warned against mistaking ejaculations for explanations, particular instances for general rules, intuitions for demonstrations. Few interests need more to be supplemented by experience and resource, such as prompted the reply of the Duke of Wellington to Queen Victoria; incommoded by the nuisance committed by the sparrows in the glass palace of the Great Ex- hibition, she asked for a remedy, and had the reply, 'Sparrow- hawks, ma'am, sparrowhawks/ It cannot supply good sense and good feeling, nor, to take the widest view, can it work without the play of dialectic; nevertheless logic is indispensable if realistic thought is to be controlled and communicative; what has been said about its insufficiency applies in a less degree to all the sciences, which enclose but a part of reality. The business of living requires that we venture and sometimes jump beyond the demon- strated evidence; the management of everyday affairs cannot be exercised with scientific reticence; on many issues theoretical cer- titude cannot be sought and probability is enough for decision,2 Risks must sometimes be taken, and as both Horace and St Thomas have noticed in their different ways there are occasions when a sufficient motive for virtue is that it's foolish but it's fun.3

1 V df Trinitate, I, ad 3.

2 Swnma Tkeologica, 2a-2ae: LXX: 2.

3 Ibid., 2a-zae: CLXVII1: 4.

If correct logic docs not guarantee truth neither does incorrect logic neces- sarily spell falsehood. There arc bad arguments for the truth, even when all the statements taken by themselves may be true enough. Yet together they compose an ineffective proof. Frequently arguments are cast in this form: a is bt and c is bt and therefore c is a. For example: wishful thinking is a comfort, and religion is a comfort, and so religion is wishful thinking.

CHAPTER II LIMITED OBJECTIVE

THINKING goes through the successive stages of conceiving a thought, passing a verdict, drawing a conclusion. God — is our refuge — therefore we will not fear. There you see the three parts, the apprehending, the judging, the reasoning, or, in scholastic ter- minology, the simplex apprehensio, the juiiciwn, and the ratiocinium, which are, as it were, the logical chassis to which our thinking can be stripped, whether the style be ornate, or as economical as Jane Austen's opening: 'About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and a large income/ The treatises on the traditional logic are usually arranged according to this threefold division; they start by considering terms, pass on to the sense of propositions, and end with an examination of arguments.

As we have already noted logic is occupied, not with the al- leged correspondence of mental and verbal forms with reality, which is the burden of critical philosophy, nor with ideas and words as responses to environment, which is a subject for psycho- logy, but with their muster and arrangement. Though it will help to give the hang of a situation, the primary function of logic is to tidy whatsoever is presented without discriminating between the true and the false, the useful and the futile, the handsome and the drab. It can do this because like all specialized aptitudes it makes an abstraction1; indeed the abstraction in logic is more extreme than in the other sciences.

Abstraction and distraction may suggest the same mood of woolgathering, yet they are quite different, for one is a concentra- tion and steadiness, the other a dissipation and wandering away. Abstract is like extract; you draw off what is wanted, and leave the rest. One aspect is kept in view without reference to other sides

1 Summa Theologica, la: XL; 3. LXXXV: I.

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and accompaniments; the object is considered as a flat form, and not in the round.1 Thus at a show a judge first takes the points of a dog one by one before taking him as a whole. Notice that such an abstraction marks only a temporary period* For unless checked by a regard for the many-sidedness of things,2 and inspired by a desire to hold them complete and entire, the process may produce an attenuated object.8 Abstraction can go so far as to arrive at what is quite unreal, curvature without a line or chastity without emotion. Abstract can be piled on abstract, and never yield the concrete.4 To mistake an isolated form for the real thing is a false substitution,5 so also to treat the abstract form as the substantial form.6

Here we touch on the perennial opposition, implicit in schol- astic dialectic as in human experience, between types and things, between the contemplation of separate substances and the embrace of the living God, between the rational animal and historical man, and between a formal logic and a living dialogue. And yet by a paradox the greatest achievements seem to demand a certain fana- ticism and narrowness of mind. Though he was speaking in another connection Heraclitus may be recalled; the dry soul, he said, is the wisest and best. The human mind is, for the present, incurably formal7; there is an accent of abstraction in all our know-

1 We speak throughout of formal abstraction } the fixing of one form in a com- plex subject, as when we consider the hue of a rose without attending to its scent or shape; not of what is called total abstraction, the establishment of a simple idea that may include many things, as when we try to consider the essential meaning of humanity without reckoning with individuals; some such abstraction from mere individuality is the condition of all knowledge. Cf. V de Trinitate, 2, 3. Opusc. X, de Causis, lect. 10.

2 St Thomas recognizes that separation is too strong a term for abstraction, which, while understanding one note without another, implies that in reality they are compounded in the same reality; and so we do not speak of abstracting animal from stone when we conceive the two apart. Commentary, III de Anima, lect. 12. V de Trinitate, 3.

3 What is mingled, says St Thomas, charms more than what is uncom- pounded, as harmony more than a single bass or treble note. Commentary, III de Anima, lect. 2.

4 Sttmma Theologica, ia-2ae: LIX: 5.

5 Ibid., la: LXXXV: i, ad i.

6 V de Trinitatef 3.

7 Disputations, X de Veritate, 5.

LIMITED OBJECTIVE 15

ledge, even the freshest and most lyrical; in the rational examina- tion of any subject a selection must be made between foreground and background, between what is significant, special, and to the point, and what is supernumerary, general, and taken for granted. The old scholastic dualism of formal and material is present in all enquiry. All the activities of knowing would stammer together in one inarticulate experience but for this discrimination*

One science or art is discerned from another by the distinct- ness of its own special abstraction.1 The instructor in geometry draws triangles and circles on the blackboard heedless whether the chalk be yellow or white, for his science makes abstraction from colour. The engineer does not dwell on the beauty of the view from the top of the bridge he is designing, for his art is oblivious of the picturesque. The boundaries of the particular sciences must be accepted as conditions of their effectiveness and independence, inside which they have their proper field of freedom, and beyond which they are trespassers. How far they are subordinate to a general science, if such exists,2 is another question, and one of the purposes of dialectic will be to show how they are all penetrated and may be illustrated by communicating analogies. Yet without an initial limitation, our reasoned approach to the nature of our en- vironment will be as aimless and wasteful as loosing off ammuni- tion at random. Every discussion becomes muddled unless it starts with a definition: take, for instance, the subject of nation- ality; we have to decide whether we are treating it as a juridical concept, or a historical, or a psychological, or a biological, or what.

All rational science lays this formal emphasis. And one thing

1 V de Trinitate, I. Commentary, I Posterior Analytics, lect. 41.

2 In his original distinction of the sciences St Thomas adopts the three Aris- totelean degrees of abstraction. In the first degree the mind makes abstraction from individuating conditions and considers material things in general as subject to change, ens mobile-, this is the level of natural science and natural philosophy. In the second degree, a further abstraction is made to objects purely as quanti- fied, ens quantum, as when from the physical abstraction 'snub-nosed* you pro- ceed to consider 'curvature/ Beyond this, in the third degree, metaphysics begins; reality is freed from all material notes and considered simply as being, speculat ens in quantum ens. The division does not rule out free communication nor the existence of border sciences, such as mathematical physics, or symbolic logic, or metaphysical morals. C/« Commentary, I Physics, lect. i. II: lect. 3. VI Metaphysics, lect. I. V de Trinitate, I. VI: 2. Summa Theologica, la: XLIV: 2.

16 LIMITATIONS

at a time, the habit of sticking to the point, of keeping your eye on the ball, is no whit less necessary in the conduct of affairs as well, and marks the difference between the elder Moltke's cam- paign that led to Sadowa and the clumsy lungeings of Austrians and Russians in the autumn in 1914, Our world is not in such a flux, says St Thomas,1 that we can fasten on nothing; the blame for wavering knowledge lies on us, not on reality. We are prone to change the subject or shift the ground, perhaps more so with theoretical discussion than with practical decision. A dentist is not chosen because he is a good companion, but because he stops teeth or takes them out efficiently and painlessly. St Teresa of Avila applied the same rule when she bade her nuns seek the direc- tion of an expert theologian not conspicuous for his sanctity in preference to that of a devout ignoramus. The natural faculties have an inborn drive, the sight goes directly to colour and the hear- ing to sound; the acquired habits have to be disciplined to a similar concentration, otherwise there is dissipation in miscel- laneous activity: lacking a trained appreciation of relevant features, a power of keeping our head and dealing with the immediate object in an orderly manner, we go milling about, like the man St Paul speaks of, threshing the air.

The special target of a science or of any activity is called by the scholastics its formal object, objectum formal?.2 This is the business in hand, and everything else must be forgotten for the moment. Warmth and hues disappear in the polar light, and the various sciences are fixed in the nipping air of abstraction3: the traditional mathematician freezes everything to numbers, the logician every- thing to internal coherence and mental relevance; both are studiously remote from the juice and humours of life, yet both recognize, if they be wise and humane, that their self-denying ordinance is a temporary phase of asceticism and that they are in- sulated from anxiety and disturbing experiences like a man under vows. But lean and spare from economy, and even frugality, the mind practises self-denial and simplifies a complex reality only that a rounded reality may be born again; a dull calm precedes the many- twinkling smile of ocean. Mathematics leads to the discovery

1 Commentary, II Metaphysics, leet. I.

2 Summa Theologica, la: i: i, ad 2. ia-2ae: LX: 5. 2a-2ae: I: I. IX: 2, ad 3. a Ibid., la: LXXVII: 3. ia-2ae: XVIII: 2,

LIMITED OBJECTIVE YJ

of real patterns in nature, logic to the dialectic of conversa- tion. All special activities start by making a selection from what seems a welter, they take to pieces and single out, and then, in association with one another, rebuild the very thing from which they seemed to withdraw; once a puzzle, an incident of fragility and perhaps of pathos, whereas now become a meaning and a presage.

Poeta nasritur, non fit, is a tag not seldom abused; aesthetical philosophy and mystical theology alike bear witness that discipline is indispensable to achievement; apart from good fortune or ex- traordinary favour, there are no spoiled darlings, but only the in- vitation to drudgery and denial.1 The life of reason calls for soli- tude and poverty of spirit as much as does the life of perfection: indeed at their best are they different? Yet the detachment is but a method; the drive is to attachment, no longer furtive and fugi- tive, but open and enduring. The sciences make an enclosure, but true as they may be their abstract objects are not complete, they are rather means than ends; though mind holds the primacy in happiness,2 its final joy is not to be found in the thoughts of the speculative sciences.3 Towards the end of his life, St Thomas said that his theological writings were sicut palea, like chaff; logic is even dustier; yet both are necessary if ultimately we are to be caught up into the vision where nothing is wanting.4 In the mean- time logic should go into dialectic as theology goes into liturgy and mathematics into music. The course of studies at a medieval university may be recalled: the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, preparing for the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

In practice the separation of the sciences is sometimes diffi- cult to maintain; the medical psychologist is exercised to keep off morality and the spiritual director to decant sin from neurosis; while in theory there is a similar difficulty as well; organic chemistry shades off into physiology, physiology into psychology,

1 Commentary, VII Ethics, Itct. i. Ill Contra Gentes, 92.

2 Sumtna Thologica, ia-2ae: III: 4. Commentary, X Ethics, lect. n.

3 Ibid., la-zae; III: 6.

4 Ibid., la: XII: I, 2. ia-2ae: III: 8.

Nelson knew what he was doing at Copenhagen when he turned his blind eye to the admiral's signal. A special scientist must have a similar docta ignorantia.

l8 LIMITATIONS

psychology into ethics, and, in a sense, general philosophy covers them all. Moreover, the non-professional approach and the free play of dialectic offer advantages; guerilla warfare is not subject to the rule against crossing lines of communication which governs the movement of organized armies. Nevertheless the principle re- mains good that the world cannot be scientifically worked without specialization, and this spells the methodic exclusion of what is not relevant to the formal object.

Such are the demands of practical necessity and academic re- finement alike: oblivious of them, naval architects in the beginning of the century built the large and heavy cruisers that were to prove so useless and unfortunate. In the words of Brassey,1 'For if a cruiser is to be so powerfully built as to be capable of taking her place in a battleship action, it would surely be more sensible to go the whole hog and build her as a battleship; while if her true func- tion is to act as a scout, there would seem to be no need to place her in rivalry to the capital ship. Confusion of object was be- ginning to creep in/ Those were the days of John Fisher, but the Germans made a similar mistake in the design of their pocket battleships at the beginning of the war, when also confusion of object reigned over the design of British naval aircraft, which were crammed with apparatus for reconnaissance, fighting, bombing, and delivering torpedo attacks, with the result that they were effi- cient for none of these purposes. One specialized instrument must be limited to one job. General intelligence, it is true, has the quality of being an all-rounder, but this does not come from over- loading, but from a strong and flexible central control, the power of co-ordination and adaptation, of seeing the analogies linking apparently disparate things, of resolving the anagrams of reality, of taking logic into dialectic.

It is probable that we are witnessing a reaction against specia- lization, understandable when we reflect how dangerously the specialists can drive their processes when they have no regard for others on the road. But the reaction goes too far when it invites physicists to descant on religion, and divines to dogmatize on physical science. A man who is both physicist and theologian is to be envied, so long as he respects the integrity of his two distinct

Naval Annual, 1939.

LIMITED OBJECTIVE 19

sciences, and, while trying to harmonize them, resists the tempta- tion of merging them. He will refuse alike to prove the existence of God in terms proper to physical science, or to grind empirical research with religious conviction.

In dealing later with analogy, which is the blood-stream of dialectic, we shall indicate how the different aspects of things may be seen together in one serene yet exciting vision,1 for there is a society in contrast,2 a variety to be resolved into unity, a motion into rest. Yet distinguish in order to unite; the parts must be taken separately for the whole to be possessed. Specialization, however, can be taken too far. 'If you know only medicine/ said an old Spanish physician, *you don't know that/' There is some excuse for the pell-mell of the sciences; all are functions of one and the same human nature, divergent and mixed in its elements, untidy and ambitious in its energies, more apt to jump and flounder than pick a dainty way.3 The organism is single yet compound, moods colour the motions of the will,4 sensibility enters under- standing, and the mind would play with a great variety of notes. Normally constituted people find it difficult to pursue one track of enquiry without gazing at the landscape or exploring other paths. Some degree of oscillation is a condition of mental health. Life thrusts us beyond our original premisses. What begins as mysticism ends as politics, moments of vision and decision de- velop into accommodations with convention, philosophy runs into the line of literature, biology into religion, psychology into ethics, mathematics descends to dealing with coupons.

Religious doctrine does not devour metaphysics, nor meta- physics and mathematics the natural sciences.5 With stronger reason must the special sciences be kept within their bounds, and even more the special techniques be prevented from invading what is not their field. Scientific gate-crashing can be detected with fair ease in many cases; but sometimes it may be covered with the prestige of powerful names. There have been insufferable attempts to explain the whole of life in terms of one half-educated

1 Summa Tkeologica, la: I: 3, ad 2.

2 Ibid., la: XIII: 4.

8 Ibid., ia-2ae: LXXII: I, 3. LXXV: 3.

4 Ibid., ia-2ae: X: 3.

5 V de Trinitate, it ad 6.

20 LIMITATIONS

way of knowledge. Sects have claimed the name of Catholic, but laboratory workers as well as church workers have been parochially minded; and if religious people have been accused of counting only those persons or things of value that could be set on the path of salvation painted in revivalist colours, a very narrow path with steep tumbling slopes to perdition on either side, the schools of science, notably of psychology, have like-minded votaries, with similar pretensions to conversion and exclusive righteousness. But it has been left for modern totalitarianism to produce a cramping political theory and a ruthless practice of government to which every human interest must be subservient. Galileo was not the last scientist to be subjected to an inquisition; the Planned State threatens to dictate in the name of tame comfort and efficiency all the public motions of the mind, and to condition its intimate convictions into the bargain. Nazi biology and Marxist history have been more of a menace to the expanse and freedom of science than bibliolatry ever was, though all three are inadmissible. The declaration of a Russian medical institute — 'we stand for the purity of Marxist-Leninist surgery* — is fallacious as well as intimi- dating. The notion of Catholic medicine is not free from the same confusion. Mother-love is just manganese, that is another example from the days of confident materialism of mixing the sciences; while earlier there was the substitution of piety for hygiene when cholera was treated with resignation to the wrath of God and left at that.

Yet all activities are at work on the same raw material, and all the sciences take their start, more or less directly, from the world we experience through the senses. This is the common stuff, worked up and elaborated in different fashions, called by the scholastics the material object, objectum materiale.1 Though they manufacture their own esoteric terms, 'uphill words/ as the canal boatmen would say, such as isotherms, enzymes, neutrons, mute of malice, hypostasis, syllogism, and so forth, all sciences have this same humble origin, which can be disavowed only at the peril of sterility. There is one common foundation for the whole of scientific enquiry; sciences so different as meteorology and mys- tical theology work at the same world; there is continuity from

1 Swnma Tleologica, la: I: 3.

LIMITED OBJECTIVE 21

London Clay to Longinus on the Sublime. To each science there is a proper formal object, yet each, if possible, should be set in the symmetry of the same general philosophy. There are special sub- jects, but also, in the analogy of being, the promise at least of a universal science, of a comprehensive education that marks one difference between a university and a polytechnic.

Even abrupt changes of metaphor and example, while they jerk the reader from situation to situation, may serve to show him one common philosophy beneath. St Thomas was a true aristotelean in basing his natural philosophy on the study of sensible objects and in applying an appropriate dialectic to match their movement and variety, a dialectic that is not just the uncoiling, link by link, of formal meaning; nevertheless he commanded a dispassionate, almost a mechanical style, seemingly indifferent to the excitement. He is neither high-flown nor allusive; yet his thoughts are not so case-hardened as his terms, they are susceptible to many influences and move easily and without offence from the highest subject to the lowest. Emotion becomes tranquil through intelligence. With no sense of shock he illustrates the natural law, the image of God, and the divine perfections from the humblest animal operations;1 a philosophy open to the revelation of God's mystery moves in the mustiest questions.

Like statesmen, scientists and philosophers have the great task of drawing the frontiers of the sciences, and while preserving the proper independence of each, breaking down the barriers and put- ting them in free and open communication. Scientific autarchy cannot stand; morals and economics and politics and psychology should comfort and borrow from one another; even theology, while it may run for a time as an impressive system of arbitrary law, stiffens into a conventional code unless nourished from humane biology, graced by literature, and tempered by a sense of history.2 The lover of wisdom, says St Thomas, is a lover of myths; indi- vidual substances, he also says, are truer than universals. De- ficiency diseases come from an unbalanced diet, mental illness from confinement; and so there is no science so exalted but is not better for being racy of the soil* Formal objects, therefore, must

1 Summa Thologica, la: i: 9, ad 3. XIII: 5. XCIII: 2. ia-2ae: XCIV: 2. ^a-2ae: LVII: 3.

2 Ibid. la: I: 3, ad 2.

22 LIMITATIONS

be grounded in the material object; and we have laboured the point because, whatever the austerity of logic, the role of dialectic is to work with analogies in the different orders of knowledge. Whatever else it may be the Summa Theologica is certainly not a complicated system of deductions from purely ideal principles.

Intelligence is the general ability of seeing connections every- where. Spinoza ground excellent lenses, Borodin was eminent in medicine, and it is well to go travelling in arts and sciences off one's professional route. One recommendation of the thomist philosophy is that nothing is too far-flung to engage its interest; there is a place for all the sciences; it offers an organization with- out friction under a law that is polite and not despotic, in a society rather than a community.1 As we shall see later, this generosity springs from the sense of analogy. The formal objects distinguishing the sciences are distinct abstractions, but all derive, and are known to derive, from one and the same material object. Sight perceives russet, taste enjoys the savour, through hearing and touch one shudders when the teeth skid at the first bite; all these are different forms, but there is only one thing, one apple.2 And so formal logical analysis itself must be set in a more spread- ing dialectic; between the significant forms arrested and ob- served the flow of events must not be forgotten; historical science in particular should not be restricted to the high-lights and cul- minations of affairs but must study diaries and convey the sense of how our ancestors lived and felt in the weeks and months between great events.

With this warning against over-simplification in mind, we must still say that each science must begin by minding its own business. It works from a special standpoint and aims at a limited

1 Summa Tkeologica, la: LXXXI: 3, ad 2. ia-2ae: LVI: 4, ad 3.

Note that some of the sciences start by being more closely related to one another than by helping in the management and investigation of the common material object of our environment. Their special interests may lie very close together. Agriculture is based on geology. The anatomist and physiologist take the human body, and so also, if they are wise, the psychologist and moralist in- clude the same object; but severally they study the human body under different aspects, as a structure of muscle, sinew, and bone; as a working, living organism; as the embodiment of consciousness and desire; as an essential part of a creature responsibly adapting means to the ultimate goal of human life.

2 Ibid., la: LXXXV: 2, ad z.

LIMITED OBJECTIVE 23

objective* It should not extrude the other sciences. Take heed from the economic interpretation of history, the explanation of all human events in terms of the development of the means of material production, which may be carried to such lengths as to abolish political, constitutional, social, even ecclesiastical history. Then history becomes unreal, a marginal illustration of economic laws, uninterested in Cleopatra's nose, except as an effect of diet and climate, and in all the human whims that have shaped the course of events, such as the refusal of the Comte de Chambord to give up the lilies for the tricolour in the very lifetime of Marx.

CHAPTER III CORRECT AND TRUE

ST THOMAS remarks that two matters cannot easily be coped with at once, there is the danger of falling between two stools, and consequently he deprecates investigating together the content and the method of the sciences; he suggests the logic should first be taken as yielding the common procedure.1 The separation of logic from the science of reality is, however, but a temporary and methodic phase, adopted, like the enclosed life, for the sake of society. More than the other sciences, and certainly more than dialectic, logic is aloof from the rough and tumble of events, and is therefore all the more likely to be dry and tedious. Thoughts will be tested according to their mental configuration rather than by the laws of evidence; with indifference alike to their sobriety or excitement, to their good sense or silliness. The eye is as frosty as the Iron Duke's reviewing troops, and not betraying whether he was thinking they were scum, or the steadiest fighters in Europe. Cordiality and colour must come from elsewhere, from philosophy and the play of dialectic and the arts.

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have, And practise rhetoric in your common talk; Music and poesy use to quicken you.

Even the strange processes of the madman may be logically impeccable. Stanhope relates how Wellington was at a loss to deal with Bliicher's fancies: 'When I went to take leave of him he posi- tively told me he was pregnant. And what do you think he was pregnant of? — an elephant! And who do you think he said had pro- duced it? — a French soldier! That is the human mind, added the Duke, He said, striking his side, Je sens un flippant Ul And what could you say to him. I could only say, Je vous assure que vous vous mlprene^ and that he would get better.' It is not the business of logic to decide whether final propositions are true or not, but

1 Commentary, II Metaphysics, led. 5. Opusc. X, de Causis, lect. I. Commen- tary, VI Ethics, lect. 7.

24

CORRECT AND TRUE 25

whether they are conclusions. Nor can it decide when fantasy is legitimate or not, though it may detect the purely formal flaws, as in the account of the laughing hyaena Peter Simple saw at Ports- down Fair, 'who cried like a human being in distress, and devours those who come to its assistance, a sad instance of the depravity of human nature, so the keeper observed/ Nor can it appreciate its expressiveness; we are a fast ship in a slow convoy, and a stoker has just gloomily observed that he reckons our fuel must be gaining on us.

Yet despite this concern for the patterning of thoughts, logic should not become an elegant trifling with no sense of intellectual responsibility. Its concepts derive from a living experience, and its purpose is to serve as an instrument for the scientific know- ledge of real things* Correctness is the form, but truth is the in- tention. All scientific systems must observe the connections which are its study. Once in possession of true facts or principles, any conclusion that follows logically from them must be true; if a false conclusion is arrived at, then bad logic is to blame; in other words, the rules of correct thinking guarantee profitable development given well-founded first positions.

That an initial truth can be expanded when treated according to certain mental laws assumes, of course, that the human reason is knit into the fabric of reality, and this can be proved, or rather defended, only by invoking a critical theory of knowledge. On this count logic cannot justify itself, but must borrow the force of its fundamental assumptions from elsewhere, and then proceed in the confidence that we can know real truth, not merely in flashes of intuition, but also by patient exploration and piecing together of the data of humdrum experience. It is engaged more with our reasonings than with out first convictions, it is more important for conclusion than for premisses; it is a frame to build round, rather than a foundation to build on; like British socialism, it is a pro- gramme rather than a doctrine.

When an argument proceeds from true principles to a false conclusion then the process itself will invariably be at fault. God is the cause of everything — we are not God — therefore we are the cause of nothing: something has gone wrong somewhere; the first two statements are true enough, moreover they are connected; yet the process of development is wrong, and the conclusion does not

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follow. Aristotle notes the constructive and destructive roles of logic.1 The former is to enlarge our field of knowledge by genuine arguments that are right in their design, whether they be as flat- bottomed and unhandy in appearance as a spritsail barge or as dainty as a naval gig; the latter, often more prominent, is to pull down bad arguments. The general reader may lack expert infor- mation about a subject, but he should be able to recognize logical consistency or the lack of it. This is his protection against the expert.

Cardinal Cajetan, perhaps the most famous commentator on St Thomas and a very close thinker in his own right, was dubious about the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews be- cause he thought the argument was too loose in places to be worthy of an apostle. But logic can be too exacting, when the occasion calls for tolerance and imagination. People may speak out of character, they sometimes think with their heads and sometimes with other parts, but are not thereby involved in crime against the reason. 4 Words/ said Lord Keynes, 'ought to be a little wild, for they are assaults of thought upon the unthinking/ It is here that logic becomes dialectic, lying easily with metaphorical and affective statement, pressing hard only against what purports to be scientific demonstration. Even there it must be prepared to follow the twists and turns of analogy, proper to the processes of philo- sophical thinking, which are not bound to the lines, fixed points, abrupt edges, and unyielding quantities of a mathematical method. The firmness of machinery is required without the stiffness; monumcntum acre ptrennius, yet springier than fine steel coil, suppler than muscle, ready to modulate itself to meaning even when couched in some such phrase as, 'the French General Staff always prepares for the last war, not the next/

Yet in pure logic the first and final distinction is between what is correct and what is incorrect. A correct argument may be true, or false, or nonsensical; an incorrect argument likewise may be of the same three kinds.2 Correct arguments of all three kinds are

1 Topics, Bk. V, ch. 2.

* Every argument conforms to one of these six fundamental types. A sound or correct argument may be well-founded, for example: the spring of bodiless activity cannot dry up — but the human soul is a spring of bodiless activity — and therefore can survive medical death. The first two statements are well-

CORRECT AND TRUE 27

admitted or rejected as the case may be, not by logic, which is equally complacent with them all, but by other habits of judge- ment. And so the side that scores the logical points in a debate is not necessarily in the right; facts are sometimes improbable, and not always bound up in what has gone before. Pure logic is not the criterion of evidence; but it does ensure that a conclusion has the force of its premisses; that and no more. While the distinction between correctness and truth must be made clear, too sharp a separation in practice may lead logic into discredit. The elaborate rules of thought have one purpose, and that is to serve singleness of mind and a happy end. To be absorbed in them to the ex- clusion of real dialectic is to be as set for failure as Philip II matching shadow with shadow in the Escorial.

Although the theory of pure logical form may well make us pause at internal coherence, we should allow ourselves to be carried on by its purpose, which is to shape judgements about reality. Accordingly St Thomas treats it as a method of science rather than a science itself,1 as an instrument to be directed at existents, and therefore adapted to work not merely with the ideal necessities of ontology, but also with first interpretations of the moving and

founded according to the philosophical psychology of St Thomas (Cf. Summa Theologtca, la: LXXV: 6. Disputations, de Anitna, 2, 14. II Contra Ccntes, 79). The same logical cogency is possessed by the following argument, which is nevertheless unfounded in both its premisses: a closed system docs not need God — but the human community is a closed system — therefore it does not need God (Cf. Swnma Thtologica, la: XCIII. za-zae: II: 3). Thirdly, there is the type of argument that concludes, 'for the bong was a boojum you see/ a coherence in absurdity that is the difficult art of the great drolls.

Unsound or incorrect arguments are likewise of three types. They may be composed of propositions true enough in themselves: British armies muddle through — Lord Raglan's army muddled through — and therefore his army was a British army. This fallacy often passes unnoticed when we are in sympathy with the drift of an argument; we are readier to pounce when we disagree or when we approach surrealism in a rationalist temper: Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton — and the Southern Railway will carry greyhounds — therefore the captain of the Mauritania reads Greek.

In scholastic disputation, one of the deadliest retorts is to accept the pre- misses of an opponent and show that they have nothing to do with the conclusion they are alleged to prove. Approximately one- third of the Summa Theologica com- prises objections against the position of the author; they are not always serious attacks, but they are mostly sound arguments, and treated as such.

1 V dt Trinitate, i, ad 2.

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sensible facts of experience. It begins already with physics, which cannot be wholly resolved into self-evident propositions. Even a metaphysic that claims to be related to facts cannot dispense with the dialectic of extrinsic and probable factors. Certainly flesh and blood problems cannot be settled by the logical application of naked reasons, as in the argument that parents should be loved before wives because we should love our neighbour more than our body.1

We distrust the fanaticism that would press the principle of nationality to its utmost conclusion in the delimitation of fron- tiers, and may suspect such simple solutions as that the British should clear out of Asiatic territory just because they are Europeans; the extremeness of the abstraction is more pronounced than the regard for the well-being of inarticulate millions. If we care to use logic like this we can spare ourselves much solicitude, not least in moral matters, where a rule accepted in the first place for good reasons, can suppress the workings of a robust and per- sonal conscience. But we shall not be dealing truthfully with the world of individual things. Prudence is necessary as a virtue because pure theory is not a sufficient a guide to action.2 The abstractions of the mind are related to our immediate environment through the activity of a ratio particular^; after somewhat the same fashion, pure logic continues into dialectic.4

One may stumble across the truth and this may happen more frequently than a devoted logician likes. In the end the cavalry doctrine of Edwardian Aldershot broke the Hindenburg Line. But we should remember that thoughts may be more logical than their utterance; an appreciation may be true at its source yet betrayed in formulation; perhaps some truths cannot be expressed except through the queerer lines of Christopher Smart. Then also we should allow for the influence of traditional lore; patterns of thought and action are inherited from the wisdom and prudence of our ancestors; there are racial myths behind our civilized history: a momentum from the past may continue to supply with decreas- ing force what is wanting in our own responsible enquiries; we spend a capital we have not earned, and use conclusions that are

1 Summa Theologica, 2a-zae: XXVI: n, sed contra.

2 Ibid., za-zae: XLVII: 3.

3 Ibid., la: LXXVIII: 4. LXXIX: 4.

4 Commentary, IV Metaphysics, hrt. 4.

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not strictly speaking our own. Yet to light on a truth as the result of an unsound argument is an accident, a fortunate chance, but still only a happening which belongs to the scientific way of thinking no more than to take off in a faulty aeroplane is part of the proper method of aviation. Scientific logic is not directly interested in singulars, still less in oddities or incidental con- junctions, but reserves its attention for the proper effects and necessary implications of an argument; it deals, in scholastic speech, with what is per se, not per accident.

Hence the qualities as well as the defects of strictly apodictic logic and the need of supplementing it by dialectic, just as justice must be supplemented by equity*1 I recall the eighteenth century Naval Order of Battle: Byng kept it, and was shot,Matthews broke ir, and was censured. Strict science establishes measure and con- trol, orders our thoughts into symmetry and makes a pattern of meanings; but always there is the inherent weakness because in- sistence on the rationally significant alone must neglect much else of what is presented; the world of fact is a great deal untidier than the world of thought, fugitive, recalcitrant, suddenly surrender- ing, full of surprises. The sciences work a sort of kaleidoscope, patterns of lucid meanings are displayed and objects thrown into various arrangements; a grid is projected on our environment, which else would appear swirling and blurred. There must be a relatively fixed frame of reference and this is partly supplied by formal logic. But natural science, says St Thomas, must keep the sensibility of motion, and a natural philosophy, or indeed any philosophy that is working with 'historical' reality cannot remain with the explication of essences, but must embark on mixed de- monstrations, that is combinations of necessary propositions and observations of fact, and cast about all round any subject it is con- sidering. Here dialectic will operate, to show the arrangement of a scheme of things, a design that, in a sense, is untidier than the internal connections exhibited by pure deduction. The difference between a sense of humour and wit may light up some of the difference; logic is laconic, but dialectic can be extravagant in its humour. Logic will sheer away from passages of sheer absurdity; 'You may well call Stratford Stony Stratford because I was never

1 Summa Thologica, 2a-2ae: CXX.

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so bitten by fleas in all my life/ Nevertheless nonsense has its standards, and there is a grotesque logic in the best shaggy-dog stories; 'Don't worry about me/ said the head in a bowler-hat bobbing in midstream to the worried man it had followed from Chelsea to the Victoria Embankment, 'don't worry about me, you see I'm riding a bicycle/

CHAPTER IV FORMAL AND MATERIAL

FORMAL logic turns on correctness, material logic on the content of thinking. The terms, formal and material, express their dif- ference, which also appears from the two main classes of fallacies, some of which belong to formal logic and consist in not observing the mental conditions of argument, while others come from an imperfect appreciation of its subject and belong to material logic. If I draw affirmative conclusions from negative principles my formal logic is at fault; but if I misapprehend a negative element as a positive and argue accordingly, as when from the evil at work in the world I infer the existence of a supreme principle of evil contesting dominion with the supreme principle of good,1 then my material logic is at fault. To decide whether the defect be formal or material is sometimes difficult, as in the case of a driver who accelerates when his petrol is running short in order to reach a filling station the more quickly. At other times both may go together, as when a complete determinist abuses his opponent.2

Taken in the widest sense material logic includes all the critical sciences of reality. It raises questions that are more absorbing than those of formal logic. They range from the trustworthiness of our senses to the place of general ideas in the real world, they open perplexing issues, the relationship of our mental categories to the non-mental world. From such heights it descends to the play of dialectic and the common or garden sense of fact and proportion,

1 Summa Theologica, la: XLIX: 3.

2 The logical works of Aristotle are divided by St Thomas as follows (Commentary, I Perihermenias, lect. I, Commentary, I Posterior Analytics, lect. l): —

I. Formal logic. The Categories or Predicaments treat of simple apprehension; the de Interpret atione or Perihermenias (first ten chapters commented on by St Thomas), of judgement; the Prior Analytics of reasoning.

II, Material logic. The Posterior Analytics (commented on by St Thomas) represent a logica judicativa devoted to the processes of demonstration; the Topics, a logica dialectica of sufficiently grounded arguments, to which are subordinated the Rhetoric and the Poetics.

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such as made the old architect remember that 'a good Parlour in Aegypt would make a good Cellar in England/

Formal logic on the other hand is concerned with the mode of predicating, not the act of existing.1 Without deep searchings of mind it proceeds briskly to the examination of terms, propositions, and arguments; conscientious, but not tortured, like Anthony Trollope sitting down to write a novel. It is like someone who is interested solely in the mechanics of music and who therefore accepts the Messiah and the Elijah in the same spirit. The absence of philosophical fret appeals to certain casts of mind: we read in Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, 'Some of the great metaphysical philo- sophers, both ancient and modern, were among the authors with whom Macaulay was most familiar; but he read them for the pleasure of admiring the ingenuity of their arguments or the elegance of their literary manner, and not from any sympathy with the subject-matter of their works/ But in fairness we should add that Macaulay also exclaimed: 'How oddly we are made! Some books which I should never dream of opening at dinner, please me at breakfast, and vice versa/

Even formal logic alone is not without reassurance* There are moods when the mind doubts whether it dwells in a dream world of unreality, or a fine-meshed system of mathematical cages, or the familiar scene of common-sense facts; what was fresh and friendly in the forenoon has become sullen and hostile by the afternoon; and still the mind can be imperturable about the laws of strict and consecutive thinking. Nor is it without a sense of sociability, for whatever our tenets, there can always be this minimum of agreement on the form and procedure of rational intercourse.2

Though formal logic can be discussed in an euclidean temper,3 its motions differ importantly from those of quantitative mathe- matics, for they are not confined to transactions conducted in mag- nitudes and numbers; they reach to identities not merely to equali- ties* When taken into material logic and a dialectic living in the vicissitudes of philosophical thinking, these identities are implicit in every communication of reason with reason, and in the shimmer

1 Commentary, VIII Metaphysics, lect. 17.

2 Opusc XI, He Rfgno, I, I.

8 Disputations, VI de Potentia, I, ad 12.

FORMAL AND MATERIAL 33

and glances of analogy. So logic must be seen, not just as the dilucidation of symbolic form, but as the shaping of natural signs and the mental modes of the passions of being, passiones entis. Like mathematics, logic is clear, but it has more of a sparkle. Yet logic is like soda-water, made to a formula; but dialectic is like cham- pagne, and cannot be resolved into its elements. It is not restricted to the motionless exactness of figures and diagrammatic patterns, nor to the relational bearing of numbers. On this account it may be doubted whether a mathematical training is altogether a help in the study of philosophy. A steady application to one line of thought is encouraged, but also an exclusive concentration on one type of certitude. Mathematical studies were not held in such importance in the middle ages as in later centuries, they were kept to functions of quantity, but this is not the main reason why the profound sympathies and differences engaged by the philosophy of St Thomas cannot be rendered into crystalline concepts, the id/es claires of Descartes. For a similar reason his moral theology cannot be exposed by purely legalistic casuistry. Despite the exhibition of logical form, the sympathies of dia- lectic in the lowest degrees of abstraction are with the motions and sensible qualities of physical nature, and in the highest degrees, with the simultaneous unities and multiplicities of being.

The logical fibre of a branch of science is shaped to every bend of exposition. To the extent that a quasi-geometrical morphology can be exposed a mathematical logic can also be exercised, but a humane discipline of experience also calls for a lively dialectic that will give grace and measure to liberal thought, not harsh and crabbed, but 'musical as is Apollo $ lute/ curling with the ebb and flow of intelligible being. In something of the same way biology must do more than match chromosome numbers in order to ap- preciate the propagation of life by the fusion of cells. We shall not, therefore, treat logic as the abstract composition of empty shapes, an elaboration such as a solitary might make for the sake of his own mental clearness, but as a discipline charged from the real sciences and habits of knowledge and governing the stresses of minds conversing with one another about a sensible and moving universe.

While logic may do for soliloquy, dialectic is certainly for

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dialogue. Therefore we must take for granted that language is e pressive of thought, that thinking itself is an admirable and pr Stable form of activity, that the purpose of thinking is to discov real meaning, that different minds can share in the same meanirj and that this meaning is not just a label we write out, but part the stuff of reality.

These rules of old discover'd, not deviz'd Are Nature still, but Nature methodized.

With such a conviction dialectic is committed to statemer that are part of general philosophy* For we are not engaged on t one hand with a close analysis of logical form, nor on the otli with the demonstration of the principles, but with a descriptio largely by a convergence of analogies, of how a rational spirit m cast about and accumulate knowledge about a world not who! reducible to severely logical structures,1 and that, like Rave Tombeau de Couperin, by offering a tribute rather than by attemj ing a close imitation. For one merit of the thomist philosophy its pervasive rationality, interpreting yet not reducing, ordering y respecting apparently recalcitrant elements. The cherished po: tions of common sense are adopted, yet there is a readiness to d fend them with uncommon sense; the multitude of things, for i stance, is not left as a statement of experience, but taken into t heart of its metaphysics. There are no untouchables in the hie archy of being. Plain yet recondite, all things to all men, phil sophy should be ambitious to explore doubt with the scepti penetrate to multiplicity with the monist, establish duty with t hedonist, and exceed a materialist in earthiness. And cons quently there is a co-operation between contrary forms, a syr pathy with the whole range of reality. Hence formal must war

1 Commentary, IV Metaphysics, lect. 4. I Posterior Analytics, I, lect. I. Co pendium Tkeologiac, ch. 102. When the logical form of the perennial philosop is examined we are looking, as it were, at the veneer, not the core; the ratioi finish, not the substance. Yet though we insist on the thomist dialectica. ute, the reader will not need to be reminded of the scholastic zeal for the analysis possible modes of propositions and argument. Purely logical controversies we rarely more dour than after the time of Ockham; the Logical Compendium fe pateticae of Javelli, who closes the period, adumbrates forms that were to be a proached three centuries later as though they were hitherto unknown.

FORMAL AND MATERIAL 35

to material logic. It is a control rather than an impulse1; a servant of real philosophy but, like Ariel, lacking the touch of feeling, needing to be kindled by dialectic at play in the world of sensi- bility, probability, and motion, and differing from rhetoric, not because it is cold, but because, instead of an audience, it has a friendly opponent.

1 V de Trinitate, I, ad z. Its action is that of a rudder, adminiculwn quoddamt ineffective unless you already have steerage way.

CHAPTER V FICTITIOUS BEING

THE business of logic is not with historical facts and real things but with the purely mental relations set up when they are syste- matically considered; the concepts thus fabricated should make no pretence to produce external existents, otherwise a realist might well ask, 'You use the snaffle and the bit all right, but where's the danged horse?' To rate its power, therefore, we must consider the value and bearing of abstract generalization, and so treat in paren- thesis of the scholastic doctrine of universal ideas. House is such an idea, applied to things so diverse as the birthplace of Burns and Blenheim Palace; thing is an idea even wider: and what is diverse and what is wider! Some generalizations are closer than others to indi- vidual objects, others are more remote and tenuous; some are the very stuff of the serviceable sciences, others, the purely mental compositions of reverie; but abstraction is present, at varying pitches, in every phrase of human conversation.

Now the forms in which logic is versed are not mental pro- cesses considered as exhibitions of the thinking subject, for these belong to the distinct discipline of psychology.1 Nor are they the patterns of natural realities, for these belong to dialectic. Logic takes mental processes neither as responses to one situation and as presages of another, nor yet as explorations into the working of things; but primarily as manifesting inner coherence.

I am with a friend on the cliff, watching terns through binocu- lars; I am more than a casual, if interested, observer; I am a bird- watcher, let us pretend, a keen naturalist who knows better than to call them sea-swallows. I recognize certain facts — the word is

1 Psychology includes in its field of study the workings of consciousness, an object as real, if not so easily measured, as that of any of the other sciences: states of consciousness are at least as positive as purely impersonal physical con- ditions, and much more urgent. In a sense, all scientific phenomena are psycho- logical data, else we would not notice them; and in consequence, psychology is as well-founded as any mechanical or purely objective science, such as ballistics or biology.

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FICTITIOUS BEING 37

used without prejudice — about terns; the red bill, the dusky distal third, the white shafted outer primary, and other notes of the scientific catalogue: I am more interested in the general marks of the species than in any one particular bird, yet while I do not com- pletely identify myself with the living fluttering object, for I am not enjoying a poetic experience, nevertheless let us admit that my mind is occupied with certain real characteristics.

Then laying down my glasses I cease thinking about birds and turn to myself; from watching terns I begin to reflect on myself watching terns. Why this interest of mine? Is it, I wonder, just an escape to the Orkneys from the noise of the town? I find my- self analysing my motives, and then presently considering the springs of human activity in general. I have left ornithology and am now engaged in the science of psychology. Its data are not entirely internal and subjective, for while I was watching the terns and then thinking about myself, my companion has been watching me, reading my thoughts and feelings, studying me as an outside fact in the same fashion that I was studying the terns: psychology can be pursued from without as well as from within.

So far the scientific musings of both of us have been keeping fairly close to the facts. I was intent on the special characteristics of terns, through the use of scientific apparatus, in this case my binoculars ; I may have missed the grace and vibrating poise of that slender body in the air above the isles, and when I turned to self- analysis my introspection may have deprived me of the most direct awareness of myself at that moment: such is the penalty of the scientific approach. But let us shift our knowledge away another remove from our primary perceptions. Suppose I cry, 'Look, there's a skua! A great skua!' and we both see that drifting flight and the sudden stoop. We go on to discuss the nature and habits of skuas, unpleasing piratical characters we agree, 'quite a different kind of bird from a tern,' I observe. There we pause, and ask our- selves, what do we mean by saying a different kind of thing! We are constantly classifying in that fashion, perhaps not always scien- tifically, but still with sufficient justification and approximate accuracy. We group different things under the same heading, and put this tern and that tern in the same kind or species; we also group different things under different headings, and put this tern and that skua in different species.

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There can be no systematic treatment of knowledge without the concept of formal object, of kind of thing; so much so, that in recent years, a new discipline, called Systematics, has been intro- duced to aid the science of general biology, by separating and de- fining species, and to ensure that the same name shall always have the same meaning, as nearly as possible, when applied to one organism or group of organisms*

Yet is a species as such a real entity? Is it a physical nature or is it a mental category contrived for our own convenience? Is it a thing or a thought? Out there is a thing we call a tern, now walk- ing awkwardly on the shore; also a thing we call a skua, poised against the clouds; also two things called men, I lying on the heather, my companion seated on a tussock. I strive to make the situation circumstantial and particular, yet watch how generaliza- tions throng — shore, clouds, heather, tussock, and so forth. But let us keep our attention on the tern, the skua, myself, and my companion* We agree that there are four diverse things here; we also agree that two of them, myself and my companion, are of the same kind, and that the other two are each of different kinds. Yet both are birds and therefore closer to one another than to the seals; and both belong to the same family of laridae} and therefore are closer than to the ducks and geese.1

But are species real? The natural scientist may well evade the question, and concentrate on deciding what are the special charac- teristics of select examples; he may continue his search for the classification of species without bothering overmuch about their final status in a general theory of reality. But if the question be faced, then the realm of material logic and critical metaphysics must be entered.

We have raised the major problem for the early scholastics, the problem of universals, over which we must skate lightly. The condition of logic is involved, also the exercise of dialectic. A uni- versal idea represents a nature communicable to many individuals;

1 In terms of the old natural philosophy, they are of different species, but of the same proximate genus. The traditional classification of objects, as will be seen in a later chapter, proceeds according to the distinction of genera and species; the nomenclature has been changed, so that now the naturalist speaks of orders, and families, and sub-species; but the ruling conceptions remain the same*

FICTITIOUS BEING 39

thus tern, skua, man. The problems are whether and how such a nature exists in reality, or whether no more than a mental concept or verbal label is affixed. One of the most vexed questions in philosophy is released, appearing at different times under different terms, and flashing in the debates of Abelard. In between the two extremes of ultra-realism and nominalism there are many shades of doctrine; fairly in the middle lies the position of Aristotle and St Thomas, the mean of temperate realism, realismus mitigatus.1

At one extreme are the ultra-realists, inspired by the elevated strains of platonic philosophy, more devoted to exemplars than to examples* Ideal types, they say, are of everything the most real and lasting* Purified by the asceticism of philosophy, the mind can contemplate with peace and security the pure forms of beauty and of justice, undistracted by the passing gleams of loveliness and by the shady and shifty claims to particular rights. Who can doubt the nature of triangle, what more certain and serene; but who can be sure that the figure he draws is truly a triangle and not an approximate sketch? What is more unconvincing and troubled than the intellectual attempt to demonstrate particular and material facts? Lift up your eyes to the calm and eternal hills from the turmoil of temporals down in the valley: universal ideas en- dure, but individual things no sooner are born than they begin to pass away: here below there is only opinion, if not downright de- lusion; there above in the heavenly places you will find certain truth; to seek it here is but 'to carve in snow, on waves to write/ We are invited to escape from the flux of history to the changeless world of ideas; no wonder that marxists have discovered Plato as their great enemy — yet is not their temper similar when they would have us substitute devotion to humanity, or near-humanity, for a tenderness towards individual human beings? Yet by a mys- terious compensation no philosophical tradition has sung this world more graciously and lyrically than platonism. Where are the poets from an aristoteleanism which intellectually holds it more dear?

At the other extreme are the nominalists, who would keep close to the physical world and refuse this flight to the ideas. An ounce

1 Commentary, VII Metaphysics, lect. 13. Summa Theokyca, u: LXXIX: 3. la; LXXXV: 2, ad 2. Opusc. VIII, de Ente ft Essentia, ch. 4.

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of fact is worth a ton of theory; our business is to deal with the things we experience here and now; we must get them into order without taking refuge in dreams. At least two currents converge on nominalism, one setting from empirical science, the other from poetic sensibility. Empirical science rightly resents any attempt to short-circuit its own patient examination and elaboration of facts by a swift reference to a supposedly ideal type; it cites the pseudo-scientific conclusions that have followed from the sedulous application of metaphysical concepts to the physical world un- checked by physical verification; and sets its face against the con- templations of metaphysical entities as a substitute for the effort of grouping and re-grouping in useful constellations the results of exact and prolonged observation and experiment* Indeed there are good grounds for suspecting any mysticism or philosophism that would deprive natural science of its dignity, or deny that the material world can furnish objects of real and certain knowledge.1 Scientists are joined by poets in resisting the overbearing reality claimed for general ideas, particularly by those with an immediate and sensuous appreciation of the spurts of individual life, an acute response to the moment that will never return, a sense of the frail and fugitive, expressed in the lament for mortality, which, to read between the lines and relate to his loving respect for creatureliness, St Thomas appropriates to the highest gift of science.2 Abstrac- tions appear but shrouds wherein to wrap dead thoughts. Behind the scientific and the poetic protest alike lurks the conviction that things are utterly individual and distinct; they must be grouped in classes, of course, for the sake of mental tidiness, but the general natures thereby formulated are little more than verbal or mental tags, names, n<mina, covering a collection of individuals. Better if we can see things just as things, and not as examples. A scientific theory, says a scientist, is not a dogma but a policy. Hang up philosophy, says a poet, unless philosophy can make a Juliet!

The material world is real and consists of particular and indi- vidual things, and these, though elusive to the purely rational sciences, are beings in the full metaphysical strength of the

1 V de Trinitate, 2.

2 Summa Theologica} 2a-2ae: IX: 2. On the sadness of science, and the promise in the second beatitude: Blessed are they that mourn } for they shall be comforted.

FICTITIOUS BEING 41

word, a set of stubborn facts that cannot be suppressed. A high- flying philosophy takes off from nowhere unless it starts from them. A logical theory is sterile unless it is joined to such exi- stents; the universal reason must work from the ratio particularity which means that logic must be united with a dialectic. Yet these particular things are embodiments of different natures; they exist in different types, few or many as the case may be. Such natures, expressed in our minds by universal ideas, are real, though they do not exist as universals outside the mind, but only as realized in physical individuals. Humanity as such is not real, but human beings are real; there is more there than an orator's gesture. Ac- cording to a scholastic adage, a universal idea exists formally in the mind, fundamentally in things, formaliter in mente, fundamentaliter in re; it is not an ultimate object of contemplation, but a means to particular knowledge.1 And therefore, as Gilbert should be sung to Sullivan, so logical theory should be taken to dialectic.

From this issues the aristotelean view of the world; a pattern of real kinds composed on a common ground and repeated and multiplied in many individuals; neither a series of disconnected incidents, nor yet a set of shadows cast from another world. There is here a true synthesis, for the facts of experience, cherished by the nominalist, are safeguarded; indeed they are lifted from the plane of appearances and become objects of metaphysical solici- tude; while the universal forms remain constant and certain, and are yet brought close to the world of physical science.

Most of us take for granted, often without reflection, that the world contains real types, besides much that is highly individual. I am watching birds, and recognize a tern and two skuas, then with my companion I consider the different foods of animals and what causes them to grow, etc., etc.; our thoughts abound with such general ideas, and there is not a word that could not be italicized; unreal or not they are certainly among the earliest data of our rational consciousness. Tell me, said Tertullian, how can you in- dict names? and logic, said Boethius, non de rebus sed de vocibus est: it is neutral in the issue whether deductive philosophy is an inference from language to non-linguistic facts.

The human mind works continually with general ideas, and we

1 V de Trinitate, 2, ad 4.

42 LIMITATIONS

shall assume that in the main they represent real kinds. The schol- astics call them first intentions, primae intentiones, for to them the reasoning reason first tends; they are its first readings of the sensible world*1 As we have seen, there is disagreement about their real status, but that begins to close when we push the abstraction to another remove from the individual objects of experience, and enquire: what do we imply mentally and what conditions are de- manded by the very laws of thought without overt reference to an outside reality when we group objects into the same species or divide them into different species? What is the meaning of such classification itself and what are the rules?2 What is meant by genus as such, not bird-genus nor mammal-genus; what is the result of a specific difference imposed on such general mental patterns; what do we signify by species as such, not tern species nor human species; what is the principle of discrimination between a proper characteristic and an incidental quality; what are the tests for such abstract notions as sequence, and connection, and sharing in common?

Now whatever the verdict about the first intentions of the mind, there can be little doubt that in the outside world there are no such things as genericity, specificness, differentiation, peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, all precisely as such. As the Dormouse said to Alice: 'You say things are much of a muchness — did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?' They are con- ceptions formulated by the mind and cannot exist outside the mind; their stuff is mental, and not real.3 They are described by the scholastics as second intentions, secundae intentiones, secondary thoughts and marginal readings. They enter into all thinking; there are few phrases, even of poetry, where words cannot be itali- cized which represent such fictitious entities, though they are not usually the subject of separate study. To treat them apart from their subject is like trying to draw without colour, yet pure logic must make the attempt, and address itself to thoughts about

1 There may be an experience of a concrete thing, some cognition on and just over the threshold of consciousness, before such a term of the first intention is articulated.

2 Disputations, I de Potentia, I, ad 10.

3 Summa Theologica, la: XXVIII: I.

FICTITIOUS BEING 43

thoughts, a procedure no closer to reality than is a course of in- structional technique to the actual business of teaching*1

A logical entity, or notional being, is termed an ens rationis. The term is not rarely misunderstood and taken to mean a fictional or imaginary being — such as one from the litany in King Goshawk and tie Birds, 'Mr. Pickwick and Don Juan, Rosalind and Lady Cicely Waynefleet, with the Chimaera and the HippogrifF, the Squirryphant and the Mock Turtle, Puss in Boots and the Whang- erdoodle, and the Dong with the Luminous Nose/ But none of these is a purely logical entity, for they could exist outside the mind; improbable they may be, yet they belong to the metaphysical order of possible being* They differ in degree and historical com- pleteness from Goliath the Philistine and Diogenes the Cynic, Julian the Apostate and the Man in the Iron Mask, the Merry Monarch and the Boy who stood on the Burning Deck, Anything that can exist, even if only on the most extravagant supposition, is not a creature of logic. But an ens rationis is a condition of mean- ing that can exist only in the human reason and nowhere else, a generality lacking the perfection of the real.2 It is mental through and through, though a remote foundation in reality must be al- lowed it, for the notes of nature are the ground bass on which logic is scored. Authentic examples are such notions as genus, species, sequence, syllogism, undistributed middle, and a host of others that will occur throughout these pages.3 They are but the ciphers of music, the other sciences must sound the notes, and dialectic must carry the undertones and overtones, the echoes of analogy.

There is divergence, then, between a science of things and a science of notions,4 and yet they are related. Here another paren- thesis, on the main divisions of being according to the thomist philosophy, will be found helpful. Being is a grand and meta- physical word to be sure, putting us in contact with all existing things, referring to everything that is not nothing or nonentity,5 from the eternal supra-substance of God to the lemony tints in

1 Commentary, IV Metaphysics, bet. 4.

2 I Contra Gentes, 75.

3 VLdf Trinitate, I, first question. Summa Thologica, la: XIV: 9.

4 IV Contra, Gtntes, n.

6 Summa Theologicaf la; XIV: 9.

44 LIMITATIONS

Cotswold stone, from necessary forms to vagrant incidents, from real events to rational modes. Some are more real than others, for being can be differenced from within by its own intensity or relaxation*1

being

real logical

i I

actual non-actual

I

potential possible

Figure 1

A man walking and alive is a real and actual being. Is a corpse there? No, not actually, but potentially; it can, and will be there, unless high explosive does its work. Is a radiant winged creature there? No, not actually, not even potentially, for within a man are no real dispositions to such a transformation* But the prospect is not inconceivable, at any rate it is just possible, and to that ex- tent it does not speak nonentity.2 Reality stretches from the most solidly established substance down to the least likely possibility; wee has a sense in metaphysics; everything is included, from the one before the first comer to the one who never arrives. Once upon a time, a Christian believes, this world and everything in it was merely possible.3 Was it real then? Yes, in a manner of speaking, for possibility is a mode of reality, and is eternally in the divine mind and power.4

The difference between potential being and possible being lies in the existence of a real subject5: a potential being is already related to existence in a present and actual being, as was recognized by the old countryman to whom caterpillars were always butserflies-as-is- to-be; but a possible being is powerless to be born, there are no real grounds or material for its existence* There are shades of pos- sibility, from the nearly-might-have-been to the not-an-earthly,

1 Summa Thcologica, 2a-2ae: LII: I, 2. Cf. Figure i.

2 Disputations, I de Potentia, 3. Ill: 17, ad 10.

3 Summa Tbeologica, la: XLVI: 2.

4 Ibid., la: XLVI: I. ad i. la: XXV: 3.

5 Opusc. IV, de Aetcrnitate Mundi. Summa Theologica, la: IX: 2.

FICTITIOUS BEING 45

from what Christopher Marlowe might have written had he lived longer to a theologian with the body of a sea-lion; just as there are shades of impossibility, from the metaphysical impossibility of an uncaused composite substance, through the moral impossibility of a white lie and the mathematical impossibility of a square circle to the physical impossibility of powdered water. The world of pos- sibles opens out endlessly, for they are infinite in number, kind, and degree; we cannot imagine the creator using up all his re- serves, though there seems reason to believe that the world of actual and potential beings is limited.1

Now logical being does not even touch the fringe of reality proper to possible being, for omnipotence itself cannot make an ens rationis emerge outside the human mind. Yet it de- serves the title of being, as having a mental existence as a notion and conditioning our reasoning about real things. Though an abstraction from an abstraction, it is the special object of logical dis- cipline, without which knowledge does not begin to be systematic and classical. Here is no twilight or shadow world; the thoughts of logic are bright and clear. Hence the danger that a logician may be like a medical psychologist who remains interested in the diag- nosis and understanding of mental illness, though sceptical as to the value of treatment, or like a medieval jurist who forgets the law for the gloss. Yet given the humour for analogy, logic is the instrument for the liveliest and highest philosophy; given the realist and scientific impulse, it will help restore the nobility and good sense of the ancients, and recover what J. W. Mackail des- cribed as ' the Greek genius for asking the right question, and the Roman genius for finding the practical answer/

1 Summa Tbeologica, la: VII: 4. la: XXV: 3. la: XLVI: i, 2. Potentiality is sometimes called potentia subjectiva, that is a potential in a real subject; while possibility is potentia objectiva, that is as an object of consideration it is not a contradiction in terms. Commentary, IX Metaphysics, bet. i.

PART TWO NOTIONS

DEFINITION, enunciation, and argumentation,1 these are the three periods of our discourse. First, objects or notions; then their rela- tions by judgement; finally their generations by reasoning: subject, predicate, and conclusion: man, woman, and family* One mental process is no sooner completed than another begins anew; the teeming population of thoughts is always breeding. The first specimens, which we shall call notions for that denotes their mental form,2 though discernible in the complex data of con- sciousness, are caught with difficulty. Psychologists rightly hesitate before treating them as if they were like elements in chemistry from which compounds are built up; many postulate instead a single response to a situation more ample than can be re- presented by one meaning. We move all of a piece, and not in a series of connected jerks like a goods train starting with the coup- lings clanking as they take the strain. Logic, on the contrary, begins from units; it is like the shunter, and its concern is with the pieces, not the flow of life.

A notion is formed in an initial perception, simplex apprehensio, before any crisis of acceptance or rejection; the reaction is merely the registration of an object, the intelligentia indivisibilium, the glimpse of what has not yet been composed,3 the state of having a thought rather than of thinking. A notion is expressed as a term.4 One term may consist of a number of words, for instance, lust - considered - precisely - as - a - morally - neutral - motion - of- the - sensitive-appetite, or lust-considered-in-the-augustinian-sense-as- the-manifestation-of-depravity,5 Before examining such forms let us revert to the supposedly stilted figure cut by logic, as though it were a marionette, twitched this way and that by mechanical con- trivance, but not really alive.

1 Summa Theologica, la: XXXII: 2. ia-2ae: XC: i, ad 2.

2 Ibid., ia-2ae: XC: I, ad 2. Commentary, I Perihermenias lect. I*

3 Commentary, III He Anima, lect. n.

4 Summa Tkologica, la: XIII: i, 4.

5 Ibid., ia-2ae: XXIV: 2. ia~2ae: XXX: 3. ia-2ae: LXXXII: 3.

47

48 NOTIONS

From the psychological point of view the mind can scarcely be pinned down at the point of an initial simple perception, a per- ception, moreover, which is expected to contain one defined mean- ing; its attitude may be still perhaps for a moment, then it hurries to build up a response* When for example I exclaim, 'ah! the sea/ then at once I begin, if I do not anticipate, a judgement to the effect that the sea is in some way real, and already the notion and term are entering into complex relationships with other objects of my experience and setting off a series of meanings. Only in logic can the mind be arrested at the stage of the simple apprehension, and only there can we stop to consider terms as though they did not beckon further, but resembled the facade of an Italian church, unrelated to the interior or the building behind. Not merely an abstraction is produced, but also a fixation.1

Here, then, is the phase of set terms rather than of transitions and meanings in motion. Movement can be marked, or at least allowed for, indeed St Thomas requires an appreciation of ens mobile as a condition of the difference between physical and mathe- matical science, and dialectic must plunge into the flow, but so far as a severe logic is concerned the terms employed will be constants, like insoluble particles in a fluid. In accounting for change there is a sideways gesture towards the motion in between, then the gaze is steadied on the fixed points, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quern;2 the becoming is almost forgotten for the being that starts and the being that arrives. The manner of such logic is that of a stiffly formal dance, a succession of set attitudes not the billow and eddy; Lady Hamilton in her tableaux, not Emma in private. It gives the impression of working on a series of pauses, or states of being. This is inevitable but need not be regretted; no error results so long as dialectic makes the correction. Settled

1 Take the term cheese: in pure logic accepted as the point of departure for a process of straight or crooked thinking, not as the manifestation of a reality. By making an abstraction disregarding the probable nature of the external world suggested by the thought of cheese, and uninterested in the tastes and inclina- tions of those who conceive it, we can concentrate on the fitting shape of the notion for the purpose of argument. When we go on to reflect that 'Yorkshire- men like plumcake with cheese/ logic is content to rest on the purely notional shape of the thinking; for all it cares, we might as well have said, 'Bosnians like peaches with pork.'

2 Summa Thcologica, la: IX: i, 2. Commentary, III Physics, lect. i. V, hct. it 3.

NOTIONS 49

periods must be established even in a never-ending movement, as in Peter Simple's observations on the Royal Bengal Tiger, 'only three years old, what growed ten inches every year, and never arrived at its full growth/1

Scholastic science is alleged to deal with the position of objects rather than with their speed* Despite some flexibility and modu- lation, the elements of its processes are nouns, not adverbs,2 while to }>t and to have are the verbs.3 The effect is that of a man who has a firm command of Basic English. There is great clearness and firmness of outline about the argument, especially when conducted in the Latin language; the work may be fine and delicate, yet the result is like an etching without half-tones and tints. The thomist philosophy in general has been supposed to suffer from this stationary quality: various causes have been suggested; it is a statuesque achievement, say some; it has been adopted as an official doctrine, say others. Not seldom there is a failure to ap- preciate its intellectual humility and self-criticism, its vitalism, and the depth and range of the analogies in its reasoned dialectic.

1 The likelihood of an indefinite evolution must be left to natural philosophy, where the scholastics favour definite and achieved types, and a time when growth must stop. Summa Theologica, la: XL VI: I, 2.

2 Namely, categorematic terms, or terms standing by themselves, such as man, dog, cause, and congenial to the lapidary style of laborare est or Are and dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; not syncategorematic terms, or modifications of another term, for example humorously, faithful, effective, etc.

3 Usually cast in the present tense, when they are not made into nouns by the use of the infinitive.

CHAPTER VI SIGN AND SYMBOL

IT is commonly taken for granted that a simple conception in the mind somehow exists in the outside world as well; that cheese en- closed in our consciousness when we think of it can also be enclosed in a rind on the larder slab. Let us suppose that this indeed is the case; it is not a finding of logic alone, but requires a close analysis of sensation and a critical philosophy prepared to take the exami- nation of knowledge to its ultimate grounds.1 Do our thoughts correspond to things or not? Are there things, or are there merely thoughts? Or as some would say, are there not only things merely? Is being the same as being perceived? To such questions, in so far as he attends to them, St Thomas replies in no subjectivist strain, for he holds that the mind is a part of reality, that concepts are sympathies, passiones animae* that knower and known become one.3 He compares their union to the action and passion of male and female,4 and speaks gently of the early lonians — divining the truth, but from afar off5 — who described the situation as a physical assimilation. Let us admit for the present, that concep- tions involve a double existence, duplex esse* First, there is cheese really and physically existing, cheese in its natural being, in esse naturali, and secondly, there is cheese perceptually and mentally repeated in my consciousness, cheese in its significant being, in esse

1 Whether ideas be purely subjective or not is of little consequence to logic. For the sake of explaining the scholastic terminology we shall adopt what is called the position of commonsense. Incidentally this is not a term of praise in learned circles and some look down their noses at naive realism.

2 Commentary, I de Anirna, lect. 2. I Perihermenias, lect. 2.

3 Disputations, VIII de Veritate, 6, Exposition, and ad 3.

4 Opusc. XIII, Compendium Theologiac, ch. 38.

5 Commentary, I de Anima, lect. 12.

6 Note that in scholastic usage the term physical is not restricted to the merely bodily, but includes everything that is natural and real in the material universe. Thus the human soul, the substantial form of body, is a physical being and the object of that part of natural science and philosophy called psychology.

5°

SIGN AND SYMBOL 51

intentionali.1 The word comes from intendere, to stretch out, to direct towards, which indicates that the mental form or concept of cheese must be treated not as a thing and a final term of direct knowledge, but as an open relation and a medium.2 Through its passion or affection the mind conceives a similitude or likeness* The form is not opaque, but transparent; the mind does not stay there, but looks through it to the thing that is signified.

Let us shift from the senses to the presence of cheese in the mind as an intelligible nature, or in scholastic terminology as a species intelligibilis, a significant likeness of its nature, a form ren- dering cheese understandable*3 Such mental forms, though the stock-in-trade of logic, are no more than currency for other sciences, useful only for what they bring in. In themselves they are entirely secondary to and derivative from real things,4 Thinkers inevitably flounder in subjectivism when they treat these representations as terminal, not penultimate or mediate. They are like economists who make an idol of gold. But as money is important for food, clothing, shelter and the amenities, so these mental forms are important to the sciences, including psychology but excluding pure logic, only because they signify something beyond themselves and beyond a mental state.5 An idea consists in beckoning or pointing; in other words it is a sign; not a facsimile but a means to knowing another,6

Now there are two kinds of sign, natural and artificial. The force of the former does not depend on convention, arbitrary agree- ment, or previous instruction; instinctively and directly the atten- tion is transferred from the sign to the thing signified. Thus

1 Summa Theologica, I a: LXXXIV: 2. la: LXXVIII: 3. Disputations, XXII df Veritate, 12. The distinction is between the immutatio naturalis, the process of birth and decay, and the immutatio spiritualis, where, even in the lowest know- ledge, there is a becoming another without ceasing to be oneself.

2 Summa Theologica, la: LXXXV: 2. IV Contra Gentes, n.

3 Various terms are employed, enumerated here but not sorted: concept, idea, intelligible form, eidos, species, meaning, intentio, representation, ratio, mental word, logos, notion, likeness, abstract nature, concept. We use the word notion, for that, more than others, suggests a logical form. Summa Theologica, la: XV: I, 2, 3. I Contra Gentes, 53. IV: n. Disputations, III de Veritate, I, IX: 4, ad 3.

4 Disputations, XI de Veritate, i, ad 2.

5 Summa Theologica, la: LXXXV: 2,

6 Disputations, IX de Veritate, 4, ad 4.

52 NOTIONS

a skull-and-crossbones notice-board by the roadside warns the driver to take care; the footprint told Robinson Crusoe that he was not alone on the island; some tones of laughter manifest gaiety of heart, some cries suffering, some glances affection* If I point with my finger you will look along the required direction; though even here there are variations and degrees; we point with the first finger, but Red Indians with the second; we beckon with an up- ward curve, but they with a downward; dogs will look to where you are pointing, but cats merely glance at your finger tip.

With artificial signs, however, the pointed meaning is settled by agreement and custom; there is no intrinsic likeness between the symbol and the thing symbolized, and the relationship between them is conventional, ex institutiom. Thus, says St Thomas, a trumpet is a herald of war. Acltungl on a mountain road means little to the driver ignorant of German, though he may pause at the exclamation mark; in the nature of things there is no more reason why a red-white-and-blue pole should signify a barber and not a confectioner. The words of spoken and written language are the commonest examples of artificial signs; they refer to reality only through the concepts they are invented to repre- sent1 and, unless accompanied by appropriate natural signs, such as gestures and noises, or invested with a magical charm, they do not inevitably resemble what they describe. There are words, such as cuckoo, ping-pong, twang, and children's words especially, such as puff-puff, moo-cow, bow-wow, that shade into natural signs; onomatopoeia enhances the power of words and many lines of poetry surpass artificial significance; 'the curves of the purple hills of Tusculum.' Dialectic will seek to rouse this sympathy in rational philosophy; the evocation goes beyond the signification. By association words become charged with emotion: how much adolescent sentimentalism is psychologically conditioned by their look and sound, how much political thinking? Yet in general all symbolism requires an initiation into the meaning; for the true significance of an artificial sign may be at variance with the natural impact of the situation, as when a glamorous secret agent winks across the restaurant in morse code.

The question arises whether our ideas are in the category of

1 Disputations, II: I. XXII: 7, ad 5. Summa Thologica, la: XIII: I, 4, ad i. Commentary, I Perihermnias, lect. 2.

SIGN AND SYMBOL 53

real or artificial signs* Some hold that the mind throws its own light like a headlamp on the surrounding fog* They cannot admit that our ideas are natural likenesses of the world outside* Ideas may perhaps have a symbolic value and practical utility; but the existence of an objective natural world is doubted, or if granted, then any guarantee that we can know it is despaired of. Neverthe- less, they say, let us make do with what we have and arbitrarily agree to attach the same useful meaning to the same idea so that we can engage in harmonious transaction together* Ideas are like words, and we must use the same dictionary*1 A realist and vital philosophy, however, if it is a rationalism as well must claim more, it cannot be content with a let's pretend or with knowledge that has no roots in the physical world. Such a doctrine, doubtful of its contact with what is real, dries thoughts into artificial speci- mens and makes the communication of ideas just the exchange of convenient counters. By affirming that ideas are natural signs we break out of ourselves and find company*

1 Reference is here suggested to the psychological doctrine of Behaviorism, that ideas in fact are initial speech movements and the words themselves mechanical reflexes. Language is then not the vehicle of meaning, but rather, as it were, the noise of machinery.

CHAPTER VII IMAGE AND MEANING

Objects may be summoned up without being disclosed, for instance in the valediction to romantic philosophy in the music of Mahler. Many evocations are possible in a heightened sensibility; English nonsense-verse even has meanings where explanations cannot be attempted —

Far and few, far and few

Are the lands where the Jumblies live.

Here's richness indeed, and opportunity for a generous dialec- tic, but off the track of didactic logic, and so for the present we must neglect hint and keep to open avowal. At once a capital dis- tinction, between image and meaning confronts us.1

A natural sign of a sensible situation, called by St Thomas a vox, though more than an animal spasm, may not exceed an inter- jection; but human speech, locutio, sermo, or verbum, renders an intelligible situation,2 and that not merely by its arbitrary lin- guistic figure. That is to say a natural sign may point either to an occurrence or to a meaning or to both; we may catch the early morn- ing summer mists, the glintle of rain on leaves, the note dying on the wind, or we may possess the laws of vaporization, of the refrac- tion of fluids, or the theory of acoustics. In this contrast between fugitive perceptions and enduring generalizations, the former perhaps may be counted better worth the having, indeed there is some justice, the reverence we owe living substances, in our de- fiance of abstractions that stale as they last. Fortunately there are more humane durations.

Past ruin'd flion Helen lives,

Alcestis rises from the shades; Verse calls them forth; 'tis verse that gives

Immortal youth to mortal maids.

1 Commentary, III de Anima, lect. 4, 5, 6. Cf. Figure 2.

2 Summa Thologiea, la: XXXIV: I. Commentary, I Perihermcnias, I: lect, 2t 3, 4. I Politics, lect. I.

54

IMAGE AND MEANING

55

For verse substitute wisdom, or rather let it mean the know- ledge most closely sharing in the creative and sustaining mind of God, the knowledge which is the aspiration of philosophy and of which logic even at its severest is the preparation,

sign

artificial symbol

sensible image

natural likeness

intelligible idea

meaning and implication

I

11 dangerous bend,

change down to

low gear," or

" Allt y Dinistr.

7 o Droeon

Peryglus. Gyrrwch yn Araf Deg."

Figure 2

Corresponding to the contrast between an event in space and time and its lasting and universal meaning, there is a difference between a natural sign that is sensible and one that is intelligible.

56 NOTIONS

This is the difference between image and idea, the dual symbolism running throughout all human consciousness.1 To stop at the momentary responses of sense is difficult; the fleeting flash of king- fisher blue along the Regent's Park Canal, the first taste of Double Gloster, the first note of a hunting horn, the first sniff of estuary mud, the first feel of the fire. From their beginning they signify something outside, but until the mind takes over there is nothing lasting to express to ourselves or communicate, however imper- fectly, to others. 'Oh for a life of sensation and not of thought/ said Keats, and you may urge that there is no call either to heighten or to interpret the play of sensibility into a rational statement. That may be, but the point is that there is no enduring signific- ance until it is born again: sensations are strangled by space and time, they happen only once, and unless charged with reason they reflect merely an incident no sooner born than dying, and though we may avoid smugness our posture is less than human.

The reflection, or impression of phenomena, is called by the scholastics the sensible likeness, species sensiUlis. The term species, sight or appearance, would seem to denote a predominantly visual character, but this is mainly a convenience of speech, since most knowledge is most easily described in terms of the sense of sight, the nearest to reason.2 Lucidity must be banished from knowledge if this means distance, and made murkier if this means more warmth. Sense-images are not all visual but in different degrees according to the complexion of the individual have shape and texture and sound and savour. Coming from the external senses, they are worked up by the internal senses and received in the mind from the imagination, which presents them in the form of a composite image.3

It is also unfortunate that the term image suggests something rigid and statuesque, though every image as such is altogether

1 Illustrated by the narrative pictures of the English painters from Hogarth to the pre-Raphaelites. In addition to the representation of a scene there is a lesson or moral, as in the picture of Napoleon sailing to exile in Bdlerophon the grain of the planking is scrupulously drawn, every line of the rigging, the crease in the waistcoat, but the figure holding the centre conjures up the idea of genius in defeat.

2 Summa Thdogica, la: LXXVIII: 3.

3 Ibid., la: LXXVIII: 4. Exemplar is preferred to image. 3a:XXV: 3.

IMAGE AND MEANING 57

derivative and relative1 as such. Effigies, a term also used, has a similar disadvantage. The scholastic term phantasm, phantasma, is perhaps happier, so long as the sense of the weird and fanciful does not enter. We shall follow the usage and speak of images, always remembering they are, as the case may be, luminous, murky, blar- ing, whispery, fluent, jagged, gentle, sharp, bitter, sweet, scented, stinking, earthy, airy, and with other appropriate qualities of sensuousness.

Human consciousness is not entirely enmeshed in the flesh; prolonged and solitary sensations do not always relapse into day- dreaming. What starts in the senses is quickly infused with mean- ing, delicate or coarse, tenuous or harsh; musings are framed and related. Seeing a flash of blue we conceive — kingfisher! and im- mediately have a sign that does not uniquely point to the halcyon flight, but can send us to a bird-book to ponder over the same object in an entirely different context and in terms more general and lasting than the particular occasion by the Regent's Park Canal. So, too, from tasting the Double Gloster we may expatiate on the catalogue of cheeses and narrate encounters unlike the elevenses we had that morning at a Cotswold inn; the horn wakens echoes from history; the smells lead us to the science of soil; the fire kindles reflections on the future sources of industrial energy, and so on. We penetrate beyond sense images whenever we perceive a rational meaning and pass a judgement. The adult mind does not merely register a series of jottings, but is constantly deciphering and in its waking consciousness arranging experiences according to a system of intelligible relationships; organizing them in some sort of plan, though this may be incomplete, limited, expectant, or hopeless; for all logic can tell, merely perhaps the solution of a grammatical puzzle. A man of principle is he who upholds a meaning however distracting and various the circumstances: a liberal journalist, who believes in freedom and human dignity, will attack tyranny from the Left as from the Right and see the menace both of the boss and the bureaucrat, the magnate and the manager. The drama of human character lies in the conflict between the here and now on one side and the general plan on the other.

'Look! a kingfisher.'— 'Where?'— -'There!' Consider that

Summa Theologica, la: XXXV: 1, ad I.

58 . NOTIONS

simple dialogue, which is not just exclamatory, but explanatory as well; and while pointing then and there to a particular fact, implies and uses knowledge previous to and not bound up with the im- mediate event; it presupposes that the speakers have a common and general idea of kingfisher, of location, and of relative direction from where they are standing. Such notions may be similarly operative in entirely different sense situations; for we may look up the term kingfisher in an ornithological dictionary: and what could be more unlike the green canyon than a column of print? Or the dialogue might run: 'Hark! a lark/— 'Where?'— 'There!' Or again: 'Ouch! hurts/ — 'Where?* — 'There!' In all these situations, and many others, so different sensuously and emotionally, there is a common meaning. We shall speak later of the grasp of analogy under various and complex circumstances which is the essential strength of intelligence: if we are inclined to dismiss this abstract and formal significance as pretty thin stuff, we must remind our- selves that on its web is stretched out the entire texture of human consciousness.

The pure logician is not perturbed by the supposed lack of richness and satisfaction. He is not out to be full-blooded but correct; his aim is not to work a confidence trick or to be persua- sive, but to be exact in his handling of the shapes of interlocking meaning; he is as indifferent to rhyme and enchantment as to ridi- cule, sarcasm, invective and the forms of satire. It is for a higher philosophy and dialectic to show that abstract truths are not like evaporated milk or denicotinized tobacco or non-alcoholic beer, a substitute and an occasion for wry reminiscence. We are not moved or drawn to universals: it is not humanity that is healed, as Aristotle says at the beginning of the Metaphysics, but this man or that man; St Thomas however notes in this connection that the universal is the ratio of things that move and must therefore be tracked down.1 Eventually, philosophy should sing, but our pre- sent demand is that it should sing in tune, and for that we must have a common pitch and key.

Take the sensations and emotions evoked by the term sea: how different they are, and how changing in one and the same indi- vidual. For the landsman it separates places, to the seaman it joins

1 V de Trinitate, 2, ad 5.

IMAGE AND MEANING 59

them; a menace to the conscript, an opportunity to the navigator, a holiday to the yachtsman, a field to the fisherman: yet all can take part in a common discussion of what is at stake in the com- mand of the sea. A meaning is fixed and enlarged amid the numerous images and emotions that are set loose by the sight or sound of the word* The idea of the thing must also be separated from the idea of the word, for words are bad travellers in geo- graphy and history: liberal is not the same in England and Quebec and Belgium; Falange is different in Chile and Spain; enthusiasm was deprecated in the eighteenth century, but admired in the nine- teenth; political whiggery has gone into abeyance, though for- tunately the spirit is not dead yet; charity has become patronage; and who likes now to be called respectable or amiable?

Now logic is exclusively concerned with signs that point to a rational meaning, species intelligibiles, the forms that express the en- during and general characteristics of the universe, not its passing and particular attractions. Furthermore these are subjected to a more refined abstraction, so that only their mental bearing re- mains. 'Ah! spider!' — you shudder, but I like spiders, and have cherished them as pets, steering bluebottles into their webs. Our images are different, our emotions are conflicting, yet the idea means to you what it means to me. And what is more, when we forget about the nature of spiders, and merely consider the notional quality of the concept, we can be more unanimous, as when you ask: 'What do you mean, a spider, or some spiders, or all spiders?' For all the world as if I had said, 'Ah! celery/ or 'Ah! topaz/ or 'Ah! kangaroo/

And there, like a dowager winning the hundred yards in a burst of speed, was old Ramillies coming up, pushing a white bol- ster beneath her bows, with a high plume of smoke from her funnel and her guns cocked up at maximum elevation — but the real reas- surance was that she was heavily armoured and could deliver a broadside of about eight tons, and that the Italians now had no stomach to interfere with the convoy. The adoption of the distinc- tion between image and idea is indispensable for scientific think- ing. For the imagination is always present, and however lively, fresh, and clean, its images are thick and solidified compared with the subtle and fluent reality of meaning.1 Until we can separate

! Summa Theologica, la: LXXXTV: 6.

60 NOTIONS

intelligible forms and partial but essential characteristics from the mixture we can scarcely be said to be engaged in rational reflection and discussion.

It is for philosophical psychology to elaborate on the difference between sensation and intelligence: how the former is individual and only approximately communicable; how the latter is universal and, when pains are taken, exactly communicable. I say cat; one sees tabby, another feels claws, another hears meowings, another remembers Lord Roberts, and so forth; but all can consider the same meaning, and the stronger our grasp on this the less we are at the mercy of stray sensations. Here is the clue to the old-fashioned catch, 'Yesterday I saw a cherry-coloured cat*; while we remain with sense-associations we smile at the absurdity, and not until we abstractedly think of black do we see the connection, why, black cherries, black cats. The distinction between imagination and meaning is at work even in trivialities.

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over. Ideas and meanings can be communicated; they can be tested and re- lated and examined and discussed and agreed over; they are social and civilized of their nature. But images and experiences are per- sonal and cannot properly enter into psychological commerce; they can be suggested but not explained; in a sense, they always remain solitary. It is true that masses of people can be moved by rhetoric, and that skilful declamation and repetition of an image can mes- merize a multitude into a course of action. Rabbles do not res- pond to ideas; we have witnessed this in our own time, and not only with the nazis. The look and sound of a word or phrase is often used as a substitute for its meaning — worker's revolution, schoolgirl complexion, social security, people's justice, equality of opportunity, civilization, barbarism, daring; then, to go back, mysticism, science, evolution, General Gordon, property, free Briton, the Bible and the Bible alone, divine right of kings, hell- fire: there are many instances where the strength of terms spoils their original sense. To pretend that we can live by reason alone or that logic requires no aid from rhetoric would be priggish; but it is well to insist that of all our faculties we are least lonely by the reason, even the loving will may only seek but never lay hold,1 and sensations and emotions are, as we have said, private and particular.

1 Summa Thcologica, ia-2ae: ift: 4.

IMAGE AND MEANING 6l

High happiness can be grasped by no other act than that of know- ledge: in the meantime there is no substitute for the reason if we would enter into pleasant intercourse with our fellows and deal sociably with them.

Words have to be looked at quietly and discussion has to begin with a definition. In theory at any rate one would expect ideas to be most surely communicated when they are purest and least mixed with sensation and passion. It is difficult to render them when charged with feeling. A. E. Housman said that this single line from Milton always moved him to tears:

Nymphs and shepherds dance no more.

I consult the first dictionary to hand, and translate: legendary lesser and mortal divinities imagined as beautiful young maidens, or rather, since the dictionary adds poetical, young and attractive women together with men employed in tending, feeding, and guarding sheep are no longer engaged in leaping and stepping with motions of the body adjusted to the measure of a tune. All that can be said is that something of the meaning remains. In imagi- native utterance you can scarcely alter a vowel sound without breaking the sense; so much so that, according to Cardinal New- man, the multiplication table is one of the few things that can be translated from one language to another without detriment to the original. There is here a pure rational meaning: nevertheless exact communication need not be limited to mathematics nor demand the pedantic awkwardness of our exegesis of Milton. There is a deft separation of sensible and intelligible signs in all the sciences, and it is peculiarly the doing of logic. Afterwards they may be re-united, and that largely is the doing of dialectical philosophy. For the security of communication creeds are best set in dead languages and recited in monotones. Consider the Catholic Church merely as a contemporary organization without ranging to periods that have passed and regions that have been lost: despite the great variety of religious experience, wealth of diverse cultures, gradation of moods and contrasts of individual types, even dif- ferences of theological accents, there is a unity in a common dog- matic and disciplinary idea. Sensation and emotions pass away, but thoughts and meaning endure with logic as their bone.

Bones, never vivid as blood, longer resist the sucking Of mould and worms.

62 NOTIONS

It is difficult to strip ideas from their sensible manifestations, how- ever meagre these may be: distracting emotions may be set up by initial letters, such as l.b.w., l.s.d., LST, or LMS. Yet a logical habit will seek to pierce beyond the appearance of words and images, and will unconsciously use what an American critic has named a fog-index to journalism.

Ideas cannot be assimilated until they have been made palat- able, and this is the work of rhetoric, which treats of the possible ways of persuading people on any given subject. The method of logic is proof, not persuasion; and here it differs from the art of swaying the imagination and the passions, and which may be em- ployed even to recommend logic by a display of allegory and alli- teration. But just as rhetoric may have the effect of exciting a strong emotion, often of reprobation, instead of an idea, of using words as nicknames, which, says Hazlitt, 'are the talismans and spells that collect and set in motion all the combustible part of men's passions and prejudices/ so logic may have the effect of chilling warmth with a platitude* Both effects however are abuses, particularly indefensible in the case of logic, for it is the servant of the human reason; every idea should be a biological act in the widest sense of the term and stir the appetite.

We speak of cold logic, and there is an austerity about the purely logical treatment of a subject; though the old physicians sought to cure excess by excess, the Summa Thologica is no cure for spiritual dryness. In a way, logic is a puritan among the sciences, killing colour, suspicious of the senses, even of the magic of such terms as Coromandel Coast, Aphrodite, debonair, threnody, the Downs and Christmas Eve. It would protect us from the racket of catch phrases and bogy words; it is disdainful of what are called loaded terms, and of verbal effects where the emotional fringe does duty for the meaning, such as retribution, communist, appease- ment, Jew, prelate, feudalism, fascist horde, sex, officer class, freedom, dogma, democracy, Poona, progress, high finance, Vati- can, and others that crop up in the high-brow periodicals, itself a term of the same sort. Yet though we are now going to consider the purely mental shapes and figures of ideas, we must not forget that our real interest is with the extension of logic into an exciting and untidy environment.

CHAPTER VIII SHAPE OF NOTIONS

'LOOK! a kingfisher'; before the phrase is finished, the speaker has surpassed sensation and touched an abstract nature. When he makes such a pronouncement as 'kingfishers swallow fish tail fore- most/ and asks himself, 'does that mean all or some? then interest is temporarily transferred from the real idea to its mental form and figure. The enquiry now is whether the idea is general or parti- cular, and the purely logical interest is the same as if the observa- tion had been to the effect that whales or razorbills or sea-lions or Andaman Islanders swallow fish tail foremost. In other words no attention is paid to the real significance nor to the psychological notes and echoes of our concepts; they are admitted solely as notions to be subjected to the tests for correct thinking. In con- sequence logic can appear intricate and contrived, not simple and direct; the bird is left for the notion; the electric blue, the swift low flight, the messy nest, all forgotten for a mental pattern.

Yet even those mainly interested in the bird may profit from this logical excursion; for say they are told that kingfishers frequent ponds, and this on the strength of two or three observations; then should they be on their guard against changes in the logical form of the idea which may start up together with illogical inference from the habits of few to the habits of all, as in the flat statement, kingfishers are pond birds. Few periodicals will not provide ex- amples of this jumping from few instances to a universal rule; from some religions to religion itself, from one swallow to the summer. One particular object is used to prove another; the features of Salazar are delineated from Hitler's. There are other logical fallacies to be treated later, of which one of the most fre- quent is to argue from association to identity — 'the philosophy of Aquinas is subsidiary to his theology, and therefore his proofs for the immortality of the soul are special pleading/ Often the reader is not in a position to check the conclusions from his own first-hand knowledge; but even when he is off his own beat, say on some such subject as the psychology of the Russians, the

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64 NOTIONS

politics of the Spanish clergy, or the beliefs of primitive races, he may yet detect a logical fallacy and treat the argument with appropriate reserve.1

Ideas and notions are qualities that can vary according to area and intensity, conditions of quantity applied by analogy to quality,2 Area is measured by the number of units comprised, thus we speak of acres more or less wide, of fleets more or less large, of ideas more or less embracing* Intensity is measured by the penetration effected, by the degree of possession or domination over the material, thus we speak of colours more or less bright, of sounds more or less loud, of ideas more or less exhaustive. Both measure- ments may be used when qualities are compared; we can say that there is more white in the cliffs of Dover than in this page, mean- ing that there is a greater extent of whiteness, but that this page is whiter, meaning that there is a greater intensity of whiteness: similarly as regards love, for benevolence may be judged both by its range and by its localization and force. So also knowledge may be rated according to span and to depth, by sweep and fullness, extent and penetration, or, to use scholastic terminology, by ex- tensio and comprehcnsio — in this context the latter term contracts a narrowing sense.

The area or extent of an idea is judged by the number of objects contained. Man covers millions of individuals, but animal is wider still, for to the multitude of human beings are added the innumerable members of other species, mosquitoes, golden plovers, limpets, giraffes, minnows and all. The three following progressions represent ever widening notions: Renown, battle- cruiser, man-of-war, ship; Thomas More, Londoner, Englishman, European; Sukie, cocker-spaniel, mammal, animal.

1 In some cases, of course, special knowledge is required; the following argu- ment can be met only by a practical acquaintanceship with the business of pub- lishing: if the expenses of an edition of a thousand copies will cost one hundred pounds, then I suppose an additional five hundred copies will cost fifty pounds more. Yet the field of purely logical criticisms remains large. We have been warned against identifying meanings because they conjure up much the same picture; a political Christian may be a man of the Right in some countries, a man of the Left in others. We should be warned against confusing ideas of dif- ferent shapes because their core of meaning is the same; one is not some, and some are not all; nor does a contingent connection establish an essential predicate.

2 Summa Theologica, ia-2ae: LII. ia-2a: III: I, ad I.

SHAPE OF NOTIONS 65

The intensity or penetration of an idea depends on its com- pleteness as the representation of an object, on its ability to ex- press the special characteristics as well as the general features. The idea of Renown t if narrower, is deeper and contains more notes than does the plain idea of ship; so also in this sense the idea of Thomas More is richer than the general idea of man, and the idea of Sukie more vivid than that of mammal. The sense of the special and peculiar is for the literary artist to cultivate, rather than for the philosopher; it must be confessed that scholasticism displays a preference for ideas that are wide and general. This is partly because its congenial method of deduction works from the cover- ing general idea to the particular case, partly because its bent is to systematize from broad principles, partly because a universal nature is more tractable than a many-sided individual to brief and convenient definition. The abstract is easier to deal with than the concrete, the act of existence more mysterious than any essence-

Unless an epigram succeeds in hitting them off —

Death the Skeleton, And Time the Shadow —

the description of features becomes prolix; logic is shy of such con- trasting wealth as in the old blazon of Mortalities Achievement: —

'He beareth for his coate Armour in a sable field, or land of Terroure and darknesse, dead bones in the midle layd crucifix, between a Skull and a crowne Imperiall, turned Topsy Turvy confusion-like proper, ensigned with Mortalitie on the Prince of Terrours head, environed with a wreath of snakes or poisonous wormes, crawling through the eye holes and out of the mouth; where there is fixed an houre glasse between a Turffe spade and shouell supported by Two Skallitons, or Images of death, one holding a dart the end reuersed, the other a syth, with top over his heade, Man tied with Oblivion Lined with Obscurity; standing Vpon the Brink of eternity, whereon is engraven this everlasting Motto by the hand of Truth, Triumpko: Omnia Mibi Nihil.'

Without prejudice to higher conditions of knowledge, at once more universal and more profound, it will be noticed that the ex- tent and fullness of rational ideas vary in inverse proportion. The wider-spread they are the thinner they are, like butter on toast. The more intense they are, the less they cover, all the butter is at

3

66 NOTIONS

one corner. The more diffused means the less intimate — tallying with the reproach, something about everything but everything about nothing. On the other hand, the more penetrating and total an idea with respect to one, the less applicable it is to others. Johnson said of Cowley that he pursued his thoughts to the last ramification, 'by which he loses the grandeur of generality.'

Merely to know ship conveys nothing of the lean strength and speed of Renown; while merely to know Renown tells you next to nothing about tunny boats or trows or stern-wheelers or luxury liners or junks.1 Man defines part of the Duke of Marlborough, but will not explain his charm and military genius; he provides few clues to the understanding of Beaudelaire, Isaac Watts, Kant, Fra Angelico, or Aristophanes. Or again, religion is a more extensive idea than Christianity, but not so intensive; and Christianity is wider than Catholicism, but not so deep; and so on down through Latin Catholicism to Dominicanism, and to Savonarola, Catharine of Siena, Lacordaire, and Lagrange. The more latitudinarian, the less comprehensive; it will be noticed that the usage of the word is different in logic and in broad-minded religion.

In life and learning there is a tension between the wide and the deep, the general and the particular, the common and the private. Logic notes the difference, but not the suffering. Philo- sophy is at odds with poetry. Everything goes flat when seen from above, the higher you are the less apparent the valleys and emi- nences. But this is to speak of the reasoning reason not of know- ledge itself, for the divine Logos embraces all things at once and enters the recesses of each particular.2 There not shallow the wide nor narrow the deep. But the double and contrasted measures of human ideas according to extension and comprehensiveness de- termine a notional figuration which is the particular concern of logic and which must now be examined.

'Caroline/ said Mr. Helstone smiting the mahogany, 'under- stand this: it is vulgar and puerile to confound generals with par- ticulars; in every case there is the rule and there are the exceptions/ The extension of a notion is here in question, its power to encom- pass many objects; ship and animal have been given as examples of

1 Summa Theologica, la: XIV: i, ad z. 7. n, ad I. la: LVIII: 2, 3, 4. Opusc. X, df Causis, lect. 10.

2 Summa Ikologica, la: XXXIV; 3.

SHAPE OF NOTIONS 6j

very extensive notions, but Renown and the Great Duke of Marl- borough, though comprehensive, are highly exclusive, they do not communicate with other things but keep to themselves.

A singular notion indicates an individual, one alone and no other1; it indicates, neither exposing nor explaining; for rational knowledge can make no more than a gesture towards such a one* The individual is but the occasion for formal abstraction which stays with types. Science, says Aristotle, does not treat of sin- gulars; a remark often quoted by St Thomas, from the opening of the Sumtna Theological where it is used as an objection against the scientific status of a theology engaged on working with historical fact, namely the Christian revelation, and often repeated, especially in the treatises on morality, where the impossibility of guiding conduct merely from scientific habits of mind is often affirmed* The reason is first concerned with general forms, and a set of them grouped as a pointer reading to a unique substance and associated with a particular image of that substance does not amount to a direct knowledge of its heart. Logic, less perhaps than other sciences, is occupied with individual events, save as they relate to the proper patterning of our thinking. Examples of singular notions are the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, Herne's Oak, Harriette Wilson, W. G. Grace, the Star of India diamond, Bucephalus, Immanuel Kant, the Summa Tbeologieat Tin tern Abbey, Crete, the opinion of Aristotle on a given point, and so forth. The sciences do not fasten on such singulars, except by way of example or citation of an authority; their movement is with general natures, with the proprieties rather than with the actual observance* To pin oneself to what Aristotle affirms and to fol- low faithfully what Boethius says in such or such a place is to be a commentator, a biographer rather than a philosopher.

Singular instances may serve as the beginning of an argument, but even then they are more an occasion than a cause. Logic watches lest they become illegitimately particular or general, and the discourse widen out into statements about women in general, cricketers, precious stones, gamblers, trees and so on. We cannot with safety argue from the behaviour of one individual to that of another, from Harriette Wilson to Harriet Martineau.8

1 Summa Theologka, la: I: 2, obj. 2. a Ibid., la: XIII: 9.

3 Ibid., la: LXXXVI: i.

68 NOTIONS

The position of singulars is uneasy in a philosophical assembly, though they don the uniform of general ideas — and wear them in a peculiar fashion. All the same, when ideas strive to express the singular they approach more nearly than do sweeping generali- zations to that intuition of whole existing substance without which knowledge is imperfect. Though the most problematic object of experience the singular is also the most intimate.1 Here in philosophy is found the story of Cinderella, with the same moral and ending.

In contrast to a singular notion stands a universal notion ex- pressing a meaning that can be repeated; a form that is, or can be, possessed by more than one thing, for example, woman, diamond, horse, gambler. Common signifies what can belong to many, thus common room, common land; but universal adds the sense of being multiplied and identified with its members.2 Such a universal notion is called a particular or disjunctive notion when restricted, and a general notion when unrestricted.

A particular notion is a universal limited to less than all; for example, one woman, two diamonds, three horses, most gamblers. It differs from a singular notion in that a communicable nature is expressed, whereas a singular notion is private and cannot be transferred from one object to another. There is but one Harriette Wilson, but the notion of a woman expresses a general nature not limited to one person, though a qualification is added which attaches it to one individual conceived in general terms, or to what the scholastics call the unattached individual, individuum vagum.* That most and many, as well as one, two, or some, are restrictions should be noticed.

For particular notions must be treated guardedly if they are not to set off a train of illogical thinking. What is true of some horses is not true of most; what applies to most gamblers does not apply to all. We shall return later to the use and abuse of par- ticular notions when we come to deal with the conduct of argu- ment; there we shall see that the inductive sciences work with the idea of the usual and the most, not with the idea of the necessary and the all, and that their generalizations are approximate and

1 Summa Theologica, la: XIV: n. 8 Ibid., w: XIII: 9. 3 M.9 ia: XXX: 4.

SHAPE OF NOTIONS 69

neither truly universal nor lit by insight into natures. There is no harm in this, but only benefit, so long as the restriction is recognized.

In a general notion there is a universal meaning applying without restriction to all members of a class; to all women with- out restriction, all trees, every cause, all copper, all water, all truthfulness as such, every top, every column — the pages of any book, even Bradshaw, will provide examples of notions used with- out limitation. As may be imagined, the finding of truly general ideas is the ambition of science, the search for the law without exception. This is most certainly the case with philosophical science and with logic. A good syllogism, the straightforward ex- pression of the logic of the schools, is based on the principle that whatever can be predicated of a general nature can be predicated also of each and every subject possessing that nature*

CHAPTER IX COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY

THE disposition of general notions under collective and distribu- tive headings, primarily the affair of logic, enters deeply into social philosophy. Contemporary totalitarianism, which omin- ously substitutes human masses for the individuals composing them, was prefigured by the giant effigy on the title page of the Leviathan, and preceded by a liberalism according to which the human group was just an aggregation of independent units or a collection of numbers enclosed in a bracket; an individualism, curiously reverent of the voice of the majority. The purely notional categories of collective and distributive wholes will be of assistance in framing such topics.

Nouns of multitude indicate collective notions; a flotilla of destroyers, a covey of partridges, a stack of hay. All the members of a group taken together in the lump are signified, but not each one of them taken singly. There is always something about the whole that does not belong to the parts; in the composition an- other entity is produced, over and above the components, of a character different, and sometimes less admirable: the voice of the mob, the yell of the crowd, and even public policy, these are less than human. When real and individual personality is merged into a pack, then take care. The group is sometimes termed with un- conscious irony a moral person 9 but moral is an ambiguous term and as a rule the actions of a group, even when composed of people individually estimable, tend to be irresponsible and defective by the standards private persons would set for themselves; this is borne out by the history of corporations and religious institutions. It has been said that the speed of a fleet is that of the slowest vessel; in fact it is slower.

But there is another type of generality set in sharp contrast, namely a distributive whole expressed by a distributive notion. Here all the members of a class are signified, and also each one of them taken singly. Man, cause, animal, quality, plant, these mean- ings are applied wholly and without diminution to each and every

70

COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY 71

example. Every particular is a microcosm of the general whole. Human nature — a distributive notion — is entire in one man: the human race — a collective notion — is not. Distributive universals are most useful in logical argument, for an easy passage can be made backwards and forwards between the general and the par- ticular. Collective notions are trickier though they are at a lower level of thought; you cannot identify a man with the bank to which he belongs, and it is difficult to pin down who is responsible for the acts of a nation. Of course distributive notions as well must be used with diffidence; it must not be thought that a genera- lization completely finishes off the particulars it includes; in the case of generalization according to genus and species there is much

collective notion

heap-of-stones

distributive notion

stone

Figure 3

left out of account, for no particular is merely a type; in the case of a generalization by analogy, the interior iridescence of the notion is recognized. 'Is not the name of Englishman a general term/ enquired Hazlitt, 'as well as that of man? How many variations does it not combine within it?'

The difference between collective and distributive is of capital importance: the former is gross and applies to all the parts, or most of them, when taken together in the lump, it may be large, but is not truly universal; whereas the latter can be multiplied and shared without loss, and be wholly applied to each and all its parts. A good huntsman not only knows his pack, but each and every hound by character and proper name. The difference is more than a matter of logic, its applications in the contrasts between

72 NOTIONS

community and society powerfully affect human relationships, A human community is composed of individuals, all of whom have some share, usually unequal, in the common property; this com- mon whole is greater than the parts and we conceive it existing as a kind of supervening entity1; the parts are entirely subordinate and, as it were, cede their own private inclinations in return for the benefit of belonging to the group. This kind of common good, lonum commune, is compared to a living organism, the well-being of which may sometimes require the amputation of a part.2 There is something godlike about the claims of the community; we have read about, and suffered from the extravagant exaltation of the nation-state, but long before Hegel, the scholastics were but fol- lowing Aristotle in repeating that the good of the whole is more divine, divinius, than the good of the part,3 and tolerates, and even exacts, the sacrifice of its members.4 St Thomas himself sterilizes this doctrine against totalitarianism by his principle of the im- mediate relationship of man to God in a society of persons.5

Now a society is different. Considered in its pure state and free from the demands of other types of communion, it is a companionship of equal persons, banded together in a friendship in which, as in the knowledge and love that is its life, there is no surrender,6 no incorporation in an organism or subordination of parts to a greater whole, as in community. Life is here at its highest; there is communication, and perhaps gain, but no expan- sion at another's expense. Friend finds friend without loss of him- self; the society exists only in and through them, there is no over- riding tertium quid, their association has created no superior power to which they are subject. Such an analysis of friendship

1 Commentary, I Ethics, lect. I. Cf. Figure 3,

2 Sutnma Theologica, 2a-zae: LXIV: 2. 2a-2ae: LXV: i.

8 Commentary, I Ethics, lect. 2. Summa Theologica, la: LVIII: 7, ad 2. la: XXII: 4. ia-2ae: XC: 2. 2a-2ae: LVIII: 5. Correct 2a-2ae: XXXI: 3, ad 2 by ia-2a: II: 8, ad 2.

4 Summa Theologica, la: XLIX: 2.

5 The tempering distinction is found in his defence of consecrated virginity against the biological urge of the group to breed. Summa Theologica, 2a-2ae: CLII: 4, ad 3: a characteristic example of how his thought is tucked away in unexpected places.

6 Disputations, II de Veritatet 2. Summa Theologica, la: LXXIX: 2. ia-2ae: XXVIII: 2, 5. I Contra Gcntes, 100.

COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY 73

in the strict sense1 engages the profound sexlessness of love — all are one, and there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female — and supports the saying that charity knows no law, for positive law is essentially a community affair.2 The contrast between collective and distributive notions applies to many problems of social morality, and touches off the con- troversy between communism and anarchism. A ruler, for ex- ample, is bound by decencies which do not derive from com- munity needs, and may be condemned as a criminal by private law when he outrages them. No alleged national interest can defend the surrender of personal honour or the direct destruction of innocent life.

The examination of the scholastic concept of the common good would take us too far afield, but this at least must be said, and not merely to make a logical point, that to discern when the context refers to a human group taken as a collectivity composed of member-units and when it refers to a society of persons is of great consequence. There is a difference between the good of the com- munity and the community of the good, though a state of pure society is perhaps but rarely and temporarily found in human con- junctions. At periods the relationship may be achieved, then it succumbs to a community base, the level of habit and common ground, of team-work and the claims of our animal nature, only to spring up again: the lapse is inevitable and merits no stricture; there is work to be done, the race and nation to be served, domestic economy established and property administered; perhaps only at moments are lovers actual, though their condition may be, and should be, habitual. Quiet friendship between men is possibly the most level and least taxing; but in present fact all association de- mands compromise and tends to produce the interim value of com- munity. The companionship of husband and wife should be a state of society; the onset of family responsibilities brings a state of community; through to some extent, as the purpose of juridical authority is to produce a communication within good beyond legislation, so the purpose of this community is to destroy itself and be transformed into a state of society again, by the education

1 Summa Thologica, 2a-2ae: XXIII: i. ia-2ae: XXVI: 4.

2 Ibid., ia-2ae: XCVI: I.

74 NOTIONS

of the baby into friendship with its parents, Happy the family whose members are bound not by ties of blood and property alone.

The doctrine that things may be entirely united without con- straint or fusion or any loss of identity has many ramifications in philosophy and theology, in the problem of how the One can create the Many and how the creature can live in the Creator and yet remain himself, as well as in the study of the implications of the Trinity; yet we must return to the logical treatment of collective and distributive ideas. At least the digression should aid us to ap- preciate the relevance of philosophy and its accompanying logic to the highest vital processes. There is a freedom about ideas that are whole and entire in each and in many, private yet communicable, distinct in substance yet identical in nature, non idem numero sd idem specie, real yet not the victims of physical change, generated without corruption. A thought dear to St Thomas lies behind his use of the term communication*, there is a confident generosity about such ideas like that of truth itself; they are shared without diminu- tion, given away but not spent, poured out without waste. They are neither statistical averages nor sums of amounts nor results of coalescence; lifted above the additions and subtractions of quanti- ties, they are essential to philosophical thinking.

Distributive ideas are so congenial to the human mind that there is a temptation to set them up in place of collective ideas, as when symbolic figures are used to personify collective groups, the Boche, Marianne, Uncle Sam, and then each individual member treated as an embodiment of the whole* A reverse sub- stitution was perpetrated by the Edwardian bishop who brought himself to bless the movement for women's higher education; ad- dressing Oxford women students he pointed out that they were 'all destined to become the wives of some good man/ He meant each. Special fallacies attend such thinking, namely the fallacies of composition and division.1

1 An example has been given in the matter of a publisher's costs. An illegitimate division may be made when an edition, a collective notion, is sorted into equal components; the publisher's costs of the first few books run off the press are far more than a few shillings, while of the last few they are far less. As an example of an illegitimate composition may be taken the argument that be- cause a cinematograph film consists of many 'stills' the perception of a moving picture on the screen is therefore an illusion: or that a society of penitents con- stitutes a penitentiary.

COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY 75

For this reason any human group, whether it be called the Class, or the Nation, or the Race, or the Social Collectivity, or the Dynasty, should very guardedly be allowed the attributes of human personality: and, in the reverse direction, rulers and sub- jects cannot shield themselves from blame behind the impersonal irresponsibility of their group. Mot, je suis I* /tat, was a juridical concept of French political theory and practice at the end of the seventeenth century, but Louis XIV was probably too well versed in logic, too little a neurotic, and too well monitored by Madame de Maintenon and his Jesuit confessor to carry the attribution to extravagance.

Mysticism, whether sacred or profane, may be allowed to tran- scend logic, but not to swamp it. By scrutinizing the nature and limits of a collective whole and contrasting it with a distributive whole, some of the excesses surrounding the social philosophy of totalitarianism may be exposed. In their public lives, still less in their private lives, men are not wholly members of a collective group, religious or civil1; nor is any man the head or servant of the whole so as to be empowered to sink his conscience in its irrespon- sibility: the Duke of Wellington spoke for an old tradition when he warned the Cabinet that if they wanted Napoleon put to death they must find someone else for the job. Justice, as Socrates said, should be written larger and be more discernible in the State than in the individual. Notwithstanding its discipline, medieval civilization recognized that some of the virtues were not to be

o

tested by their direct community value nor recluses to be treated as oddities; the temper of following ages has been perhaps more civic; the ideal of a state-servant stresses the less original qualities of human character.

No human person can avoid responsibility because the com- munity to which he belongs is credited with irresponsibility; the laws of logic and of morals alike should forbid him. The argu- ment:— the Party was composed of these individuals — the Party did not act with criminal deliberation, since it was running out of control — therefore, this individual member of the Party did not act with criminal deliberation, falls into the same fallacy as the fol- lowing:— this book is composed of these pages — this book is not

1 Summa Tkeologica, 2a-2ae: II: 3.

76 NOTIONS

about politics — therefore this page is not about politics. Great care is called for in any argument from a part to a collective group, from one page to a book, from one human person to his com- munity: and still greater care when the argument is in a reverse direction, above all in questions of social philosophy, lest the claims of corporations be used to suppress the obligations and privileges of human persons.

The situation with regard to distributive wholes is less subject to restriction; there is free and easy movement between them and the particular objects they include. More will be said about this distributive glide when we come to consider the logic of reasoning. Syllogisms themselves are less pieces of clockwork than a cyclic chorus, and their periods are not so mechanically punctual but they can tolerate the free play of meaning. In the meantime we may look at the division of distributive universals into two classes, univocal ideas that express a fixed nature and analogical ideas that express a more flexible and perhaps deeper reality.

CHAPTER X ANALOGY

A BRISK rationalist method may single out notes of reality without listening to their echoes and consonances. The particular sciences may play with a mute, but wisdom wants richer sounds. Unity in multitude is the signature of beauty; and how shall the simplicity in diversity, the communiones contrariorum and the incommixtioncf unitorwn,1 be declared except by abundance? The measure of philosophy becomes musical, the logic of forms a dialectic of dif- ference and likeness. There is no excellence that is not strange, no thing precious that is not also friendly. Even the Pickwickian sense has a place, for philosophy does not work only with standard fixtures. Neither extreme can be avoided,

Nor a tall Metaphor in the Bombast way, Nor the dry chips of short lung'd Seneca,

yet the movement does not oscillate between them, as though sometimes it were severely scientific and literal and at other times rhetorical and figurative, but combines them in the method of analogy. There is a literal sense even in metaphors.2 Anatomical diagrams cannot fairly display this circulatory system of the thomist philosophy; it functions in a living whole.

The account must start from what has been said about distri- butive ideas. They represent communicable forms. And here we note a major difference. Some may be applied in exactly the same and unvarying sense to the particulars they comprise, in which case they are called uni vocal or identical notions; whereas others may be applied according to some resemblance or association, more or less profound, in which case they are called analogical or analogous notions. The degree of the likeness will mark the difference between true and forced analogy.

1 Opusc. XIV: IV de Divinis Nominibus, lect. 6.

2 Summa Tbtologica, ia-2ae: CII: 2, ad 3. C/. Figure 4.

77

78 NOTIONS

A univocal notion, the same word and the same meaning, is attributed to many objects according to the same specific meaning* I am a man in the same sense that you are a man, we may differ by temperament, sex, physique, constitution, background, train- ing, character, social status, yet essential humanity is the same in both of us. In this respect, the notion of man is univocal, so also the notions copper sulphate, crimson rambler, golden Labrador, animal, and probably Old Etonian,1

distributive idea

e.g. triangle

is

univocal. analogical

with respect to

3 sided plane the Pyramids,

figures the Family, the Trinity,

the Archduke Trio, past-present-future,

perception-judgment-reasoning, triangle

drama, trinitro compounds, etc., etc.

and these may be the cues for such terms as :

threesquare, foundations of society,

eternity, compactness, achievement,

constant flow, fertility, first number

actually odd, common chord, explosive,

tricorne, Son Ho Hi//, magical triad, etc., etc.

Figure 4

A generic or specific nature is here indicated, which would be transformed into another kind were any intrinsic alteration suf- fered; the idea is so definite that it either is or is not, and there's an end on*t; shades of meaning do not enter. There is but one way of essentially being a man, and that is by being a body informed with a rational soul; there is but one way of being copper sulphate, crimson rambler, and so forth. But there are many ways of being

1 Summa Tleologica, la: XXIX; 4, ad 4.

ANALOGY 79

true or good or beautiful, ideas that cannot be enclosed in uni- vocal notions. Taken as a univocal idea, man applies equally to all men; no individual has more of the abstract substance of human nature than any other human individual, though as regards the accidents, which are much more prominent in social intercourse and morality, there is great variation.1

Egalitarianism therefore is justified in the logical realms of genus and species; by a similar abstraction the legal concept of the equality of all men before the law is established. But at once higher and lower than this exact scale is the inequality of being, to be engaged only by the use of analogy. There is a favouritism in creation — shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? — and God does not make all men equal except in the essential and abstract requirements of their nature; otherwise there would be one level of happiness, all would be equally virtuous or wicked,2 and, more bothering, we should be called upon to love all equally.3

Univocal forms are invariable in themselves, though they can be extinguished by mutations in their subjects4; that is to say, they are present in no intermediate or ambiguous sense. In this they promise well for research; they have a fixity of meaning which ensures neat exchange and a ready calculation; the security and convenience of a money standard, and also the limitations; the fool-proof framing of a questionnaire on a government form, and also the stringency of detail.

Specific natures, observes Aristotle and St Thomas often re- peats the comparison, are like numbers5; their differences are of kind, and not of degree. Nine, ten, and eleven are, as it were, specifically different, but arithmetically you cannot have one ten tcnnier than another: ten just men are no more ten than ten green bottles; the notion falls on both sets with exactly the same stress; which goes to show how limited is this mode of thought, but also how safe and secure. Rose is the same for all roses, dog for all dogs, man for all members of the human race; there are differences between Gloire de Dijon and Dorothy Perkins, between a Pome- ranian and a bull-mastiff, between a Bantu and an Eskimo, but

1 Opusc. XI, III de Regno, 9. 2 Summa Tkcologica, la: XX: 3, 4.

3 Ibid,, 2a-zae: XXVI: 6, 7. 4 Ibid., ia-2ae: LII: i.

5 Commentary, VIII Metaphysics, lect. 3.

8o NOTIONS

the differences are extrinsic to the central univocal idea; there is an identical core of meaning. From the point of view of scientific classification, no man is more human than another1 and though, according to morals, a good man is a better man than a bad one, the difference lies not in their radical nature, but in their habits and final end.

The clearness of univocal notions will be appreciated; they are definite and edged; they chart a fixed and rational clearing in a confusion of hints, but do not explore the recesses of reality.2 They suit those sciences that build up their effects in layers. High philosophy transcends them, nevertheless they remain the goal of the natural scientist and philosopher who sets out to classify and establish the formula which shall express with exclusive and un- varying meaning the nature of the wild convolvulus and the mountain goat and vitamin D; and then to relate the finding in a general system of knowledge. How far he can seize the heart of things is another matter, but at least he can affix a label sufficient for recognition. Perhaps, as in experimental biology, the concept of a species is scarcely more than a test applied to a group of indi- viduals that breed true within their own limits. The detection of species and the claims that are made by that token must be left to the naturalist who, with perseverance and modesty, may train himself to perceive essential identities and differences or their methodic equivalents, and may reach the quickness of an observer who can spot eight different varieties of bats on the wing. The logician as such is solely concerned with the mental rules of classi- fication and of predicating a general nature of a particular object: whether the concept represents a real specific nature or whether it is but a symbolic approximation does not worry him; what he insists on is that the term should bear the same sense whenever invoked and should be invariably treated as carrying a univocal notion.

Now we must broach the subject of employing meanings hard TO catch and conquer. As the personal character of St Thomas was made up of contrasts for comparison not for contradiction —

1 In philosophy, by the way, women count as men, though the scholastics, influenced by the aristotelean physics and the ethics of the stoics, are not whole- hearted in the admission.

2 I Contra Gentes, 32.

ANALOGY 8l

gentle yet drastic, self-effacing yet majestic in the vigour of his Norman and Hohenstaufen blood — so his philosophy cannot be appreciated without the dialectic of likeness in difference. For him analogy is not just a method of arguing by examples, but is a response to the interrelatedness of heterogeneous things and an exposition of their affinities; it has a metaphysical weight and ring. It may be mentioned in anticipation that the noblest ideas are analogical, beauty and justice, truth and love, comedy and tragedy, life itself,1 indeed all the perfections engaged by the fourth proof for the existence of God.2 'To understand a proverb, and the interpretation, the words of the wise, and their dark say- ings/ to describe a spirit, elusive and free and yet revealing, not confined to the track of univocal predication, a mixture of meta- phors must be risked. Philosophy and literature alike employ ambiguity, for the objects they engage cannot be answered with simple mental clicks but require variously echoing reactions. To strike the mathematical proportions is not enough, sensibility and motion have to be preserved, and yet taken beyond the stage of rhetoric; it is as though one were required to find a philosophy intervening between the Pythagorean mathematics and the Pythagorean mysteries.

Analogical ideas are not so crystalline as univocal ideas; there is more of a shimmer and a mist about them. They respond to beings which have an internal variety and degrees within them- selves; they express perfections that can be differently pitched. They are like shot silk compared with plain dull cloth. They start at the level of ordinary idiom, as when we say as right as rain and as fit as a fiddle, or speak of icebergs calving; they state a likeness in such pleasant lines as

Happy convents, bosomed deep in vines, Where slumber abbots, purple as their wines;

they lie at the heart of poetry, and what is more to the point, are engaged by the philosopher as soon as he gets past the quasi- mathematical categories of the natural sciences and touches the everlasting myths. They are deep and far-ranging, lively and

1 Summa Thcologicd, la: V: 6, ad 3. I Contra Gentcs, 97.

2 Summa Tbeologica, la: II: 3.

82 NOTIONS

venerable, promising and variable, beckoning to heaven and re- calling to earth. The dance is agiguetriste; the play a tragi-comedy. The thought of St Thomas is alive with these settled novelties and sudden antiquities, its movement is from an interaction of analo- gies and, despite the appearances, cannot be plotted on a figured screen. A philosopher, he says, must marvel and be a lover of myths and poetry.1 They are beyond calculation by tables, as in moral philosophy they are beyond the reach of legalism, for justice itelf is above the written code and finds fullness in the play of equity.2 Lacking them the scientific atmosphere grows intolerant and inhuman.

Analogical ideas are truly distributive, that is they apply to each of many objects, but, unlike univocal ideas, they do not bear a wholly identical sense throughout. They attempt to express the sliding rhythms beneath set terms. They are based on different strengths of being.3 Thus healthy, to take St Thomas' example of predilection, may be attributed to diet, or physical constitution, or complexion, or game, or habit of mind, or regular motions.4 And again, there is beauty in a North Atlantic gale and in the Vale of Pershore during May, in the Fens and in the Dolomites, in tor- toises and in hares, in perpendicular gothic and the broken curves of the baroque, in measured colonnades and Chinese pavilions, in Lully and in Berlioz; in each case different and in each case strangely kin. The analogy to an elephant's trunk is found in our hands and not our noses; feet to us are fins to fish, lungs to us are leaves to a tree.

One quality of the philosophy of St Thomas is to continue to be surprised while retaining a sense of order; not to poetry alone is this all-at-once freshness and familiarity dear, the novelty and the dlfi VK, the remote and the near, the discovery and the memory, the simultaneous sense of first welcome and that we have been here before:

curru nitido diem qui promts et celas aliusquc et idem nasceris.

1 Commentary , I Metapkysifs, lect. 3.

2 Summa Tkologica, 2a-2ae: CXX: 2.

3 M., ia: XIII: 5. * Ibid., ia: XIII: 5.

ANALOGY 83

A great novel does not stand alone in combining a universal theme and an intensely felt local setting. Creation compounded with eternity, the exciting manifold with quiet changelessness, 'full of tumultuous life and great repose/ that is the philosophical mystery of God, the problem of the Many and the One. The simultaneous continuity and discontinuity of all things in the universe including the creator, who yet dwells beyond our categories,1 that is the guiding principle of natural theology,2 Variety is more than the spice of life, it is the condition of inter- course within the union of minds and hearts3 — two distincts, division none. One could continue in this vein; how meta- physics is at once both airy and ponderous, nimble and stately by the adoption, critical yet not grudging, of analogy; but our present interest is the method or dialectic of philosophy and not the after-effects.

If logic is to serve and be present in every play of spirit, guiding every adventure, keeping neither to the rails of univocation nor losing itself in the labyrinth of words, then must it possess a theory and a practice of analogy. This would be an impossible de- mand were logic but a branch of mathematical science albeit clad in verbiage, for mathematics is strictly univocal. That St Thomas adopts analogy in those very parts of his system exacting the hardest thought should dispose of the prejudice that science can work pro- fitably only with ideas that are plain and fixed, for there it is re- quired to follow every angularity and curve in its examination of the waywardness at the heart of being.4 Being is not an undifferen- tiated genus, but enters into every particularity; consequently a humane metaphysics responds to different intensities within its object.5 It will admit that one and the same idea can exist at different strengths; that some things possess more being than others, Suffolk Punches more than mangel wurzels, and Suffolk

1 Swnma Tleologica, la: III: 5.

2 Ibid., la: IV: 3. I Contra Gentes, 29.

3 Summa Theologiea, la-zae: XXVIII: I, 2, 5.

4 As will be seen later, any differences that confront the attempt to classify things univocally by genus and species can always be treated as coming from outside the common stock, vertebrate is additional to animal, and mammal is additional to vertebrate, and rational is additional to animal; but there is nothing additional to or outside being, no difference from without.

5 Commentary, I Metaphysics, lect. 9.

84 NOTIONS

farmers and their wives more than their horses; yet all belong to reality and all are related1 It will recognize that truth also is various; mathematics is truer than experimental psychology and philosophy truer than either; and so with all the variegated ways of knowing, for they do not deal with lonely truths that never meet. The purpose of analogy is to emphasize the likeness while pointing the difference; the shock of surprise lingers after the inevitability has been established: this runs from top to bottom, from the statement that all loving reaches out, confidently or otherwise, for God, to the figure of speech, the rats were that hungry they even ate the anchors.

The first quality to be noticed about analogical notions is that they rejoice in interior contrasts. These differences of degree are in- accurately pictured as differences of size.2 By resorting to them the philosopher learns to be cautious with his either-ors in argu- ment, for while you can be downright with univocal ideas, as with pounds-shillings-and-pence, analogical ideas are not so readily fixed, and since they express what is deepest and best in reality, he does well, certainly in the domain of highest philosophy, who dis- trusts the easy opposition, the slapdash alternative, the heaven or hell of contrasted attitudes. And here it may be remarked that moral theory is partly a metaphysical science.

One idea is enriched and strengthened when correlated with others. In a world where all things are kin, it is the genius of analogy to throw light on the unknown and still mysterious from what is known and evident, to find familiarity even in what is strange. The pathetic fallacy of reading our own affections into the world must be avoided; but that is not an example of analogy, but rather of working according to univocal ideas: through the French windows we survey the garden scene, the moss on the dial, the thrushes on the lawn, and call it kindly; yet is it also cruel, though in no moral sense of the term. Sensibility apart, the whole of creation is all of a piece, shot through with likenesses in difference; and a world-dialectic must wield the delicate and powerful

1 Summa Tkeologica, la; XVI: 7. I Contra Gentts, 54.

2 As in the case of mortal and venial sin: the difference is not between big and little, though it must be rendered so in the junior stages of the catechism, but between denying an end and misusing the means. Summa Tkeologica, ia-2ae: LXXXVIII: i. 2.

ANALOGY 85

weapon of analogy. As will be recognized, this means more than drawing inferences by taking samples. It is the analogia enti$t running from high to low, that gives range and penetration to philosophy, or to speak of more personal qualities, aspiration and modesty. To sink to bathos may be a crime in poetry, but not so in philosophy: St Thomas cites the power of rhubarb to illustrate causality,1 does not hesitate to draw on the impolitest ideas in meditating on the nature of God,2 and in his lines the drop of the conjuration in the couplet may not seldom be recaptured:

By princely Bourbon's late recovered Crown And by Miss Fanny's safe return from town.

or the mock solemnity of

There thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.

But there is a rise as well as a fall: if he appears profane on sacred subjects, he will also set the humblest function in theology. Few thinkers are so continuist in joining everything to everything else; and the feat is all the more impressive because nothing is excluded from his range of interest; moreover the harmony does not stop at purely rational thought but reaches also to the revealed mysteries of the Christian religion.3

Though it may frequent the laboratories, metaphysical science should be careful not to stay there. A humane tradition associ- ates philosophy and letters, and it is worth remembering that the artistae sive philosophi of the University of Paris mourned St Thomas when he died more than did the students of divinity, medicine, and law. Complication and obscurity must be risked if the intention is not to write an elementary text-book; better to suffer from a confusion of images than to limit a meaning to one

1 Opusc. I, de Operationibus Occultis Naturae, written for a soldier.

2 Summa Thfologica, la: I: 9, ad 3.

8 For this reason St Thomas requires to be read right through. His doctrine cannot really be selected from under the appropriate section headings. The psy- chologist must consult the treatise on the Trinity (Summa Tkeologica, la: XXVII- XLIII), the metaphysician must add to that the treatise on the Angels (la: L-LXTV), the social philosopher must go to the treatise on the Mosaic Law (ia-2ae: XCVHI-CIV).

86 NOTIONS

clear sense-experience; philosophers and mystics meet the same problem from very reverence for their subject. The existential value and force of analogy is a matter for a treatise of metaphysics; though prescribing some rules, logic remains on the fringes, for its interest in analogy is almost, but not quite, confined to the validity of reasoning by example or paradigm. Its office is to safeguard the correct and communicable forms of thought; if more critical, its action is also more negative and, in a sense, more unsympathetic than that of dialectic. Yet it will respect the idioms of ordinary speech, neither seeking to impose an unadorned style nor to be apathetic before flights of fancy; after all, the literal sense of a figurative statement is its plain and proper meaning1: sitteth at the right hand of God signifies honour, not bodily location: moreover it will entertain analogies when in company with thoughts that are glancing and lissom and agile,2 too quicksilvery to be ex- changed as fixed counters: content to welcome what it cannot dis- prove and to keep the controls that will prevent analogy landing the mind in ambiguity and equivocation. Greatness, says Lon- ginus, needs the spur often, it also needs the bit. Nevertheless rationalism will be advised to entertain distributive ideas that exhibit such simultaneous identity and diversity of meaning with- in themselves, and in respecting their general attributions never to treat them with the inflexibility appropriate to uni vocal forms. The Sutnma Tleologica is one prolonged argument by analogy. Take one bald case. The good is what all desire — but, God is the Good — therefore, God is what all desire.3 Forget the apparent thinness of the syllogism — in fact it is rich beyond the dreams of commentary — and concentrate on the idea of the good. What differences are included, lying a-bed with the morning's Times > bathing while the mist still lies on the water, the taste of marzipan and of horseradish sauce, Saturday night and Sunday morning, to name but humble events: but of all these, and of many more, nobler and more enduring, we say that they are good. The word does not convey all that we mean, for that cannot be said, yet it is not just a conventional tag; despite all the differences between the events enumerated, a profound likeness is also claimed, closer than that, say, between Marlowe and Gounod because both have

1 Summa Tkologica, la: i, 10. 2 Ibid., 2a-2ae: CLXXX: 6.

3 &id., ia-2ae: II: 6, 7, 8. la: VI: 4.

ANALOGY 87

written on the subject of Faust* The likeness is not purely verbal, as would be the case in equivocation, but answers to a real relationship.

In the broadest sense, all use of one term to stand for different things is equivocation, but a distinction must be drawn between benign equivocation which is justified because of some real like- ness between them and pure equivocation where the resemblance stops at the sound or spelling of the word. Vice may signify de- pravity or the instrument on the woodworker's bench, and there are many examples — adder, bank, cock, date and so on — of other words having more than one utterly different meaning; they are what the scholastics call the equivocal by chance, aequivocum a casu, where to argue from one meaning to another would be an obvious fallacy. But there are ambiguities more lurking; commonsense may mean the practical agreement of most men or the internal power which is the clearing house within the organism for the other senses1; democracy may mean anything from the enlightened ex- tension of popular control to the seizure of power by a gang of thugs; political clericalism may cover a programme of advanced social reform as well as the last ditch stand of the black aristocracy. Because the word happens to be the same, it is supposed that the ideas for which they stand are identical, and the result is a sus- tained begging of the question and other fallacious forms of argu- ment which will be examined later. The ethical treatment of politics, the release of moral indignation, is especially prone to make this mistake, be its cause the defence of or attack on the traditional order of society; there is a kind of uplift writing on international affairs more irresponsibly dangerous than Macchia- velli. The impression of the word is substituted for the idea of the thing, and by repetition becomes a sort of incantation. Words of course play a great part in conditioning our thought, especially in an environment where much of our experiences comes through the printed page, more of our information depends on hearsay, and thought moves in a murmur of ideological chit-chat. Here comes the overworked term of anti-fascist: whom did it not signify in reality? — liberals, freemasons, competitive capitalists, members of the ancient nobility, communists, clerics, socialists, quakers,

1 Stitnma Tlcologica, la: LXXVIII: 4.

88 NOTIONS

anarchists. When such a galley of types can be covered, a word ceases to be useful in argument.

Purely verbal equivocation serves no purpose. As St Thomas notes, the choice of words is largely a matter of agreement, and there is nothing to prevent others terming stone what we term Go^.1 Ideas or things cannot be equivocal, for though an idea may refer to two different things, this is only on condition that they have something in common. If there be a real resemblance, either strict or metaphorical, then it will be found that the same word has been deliberately selected to stand for both, an instance of what the scholastics sometimes refer to as designed ambiguity, aequivocum a consilio, and, more frequently and less misleadingly, as the analogical.2

Symbolism and metaphor come lowest in the scale of analogy to the metaphysician, certainly during his strictly scientific periods, yet teaching and exposition will draw on them; the philosopher, says St Thomas, should cherish poetic fables.8 Scholastic theo- logy should be nourished from the Bible and Babylon, and schol- astic philosophy, because of its logical polish and complacence, needs to draw on living experience lest it become a pharasaism of forms. Plato recognised the value of myth. The Bonny Grey Eyi Morn supplements the knowledge to be had through meteorology. No gleam, however fitful, should pass unnoticed, nor any spark of contact, nor the strange shadows of primitive myths; but analogies are most philosophically tractable when they express the inner pro- portions of things. Acquainted with the psychology of art we can begin to know an attribute intrinsic to God when we strike the proportion that as an artist is to his work so God is to his creation.4 Metaphor is usually not so strict5 yet together with simile,

1 Opusc. XIII, Compendium Tbeologiagj ch. 15.

2 Summa Theologica, la: XIII: 5. I Contra Gentes, 33, 34. It is important to note these two senses of the term equivocal, the distinction between acquivocum a casu and aequivoeum a consilio. For instance, a cause of a higher nature than its effect is called an equivocal cause, which may appear misleading since every full-blown cause is of this class. The context will decide the sense: the chance equivocal is either just an identity of terms or the occasion of fallacy: the designed equivocal refers to a real likeness.

3 Commentary, I Metaphysics, lert. 3.

4 Summa Theologica, la: XIV: 8.

6 Aid., la: i: 9. ia-2ae: LXXXVIII: i.

ANALOGY 89

allegory, and parable,1 it is grouped under the heading locutio tncta- plorica, and belongs to analogy. Although philosophical dialectic will not eschew the picturesque or neglect anything that will pro- vide a glimpse of reality, and theology will speak of sensuality as the tinder of sin2 and penance as a plank after ship wreck,8 yet the analogical ideas most proper to formal and rational enquiry are those that signify the firmest and most abstract proportions and meanings. The thomist system is closer to Dante than to Milton. The whole body of the organic thought of St Thomas is built round the principle of the analogy of being. Behind the variety we experience, there is not one exclusive, complete, and monotonous reality, but a richness of perfection to which the mind can respond with many and different notes. Nor is there a diversity of funda- mentally different and independent units, for the universe is a planned order, composed of multiple systems all closely inter- meshed, and none of them closed. Tapeworms illustrate the doc- trine of the image of God4 and even illusory desire is warmed by divine happiness.5 There is unity as well as difference; things are not completely irreducible, a multitude of windowless monads; nor are they aspects of one unique thing* Pantheism is to be avoided on one hand, polytheism on the other. There is a God whose infinity does not abolish finiteness, whose glory does not extinguish lesser glows.6 This is not the place to examine the foundation of such pluralism, the distinction within being of

1 Various definitions have been attempted of these figures of speech; but for the sake of understanding the scholastic principles of literary criticism, and notably as regards scriptural interpretation, where a strict aristotelean logic meets a rich oriental imagination, it is well to note that an allegory lends itself to more detailed analysis than does a parable. For in an allegory all the parts of the story have their counterparts in the lesson that is intended, an allegory is, as it were, an extended simile: the state is like a ship, the prime minister is like the helmsman, the chancellor of the exchequer like the purser, the rocks to port are communism and to starboard are vested capitalism, or what you will. But a parable tells a story that must be taken all in one piece, without scrutinizing the parts to see if they correspond to parts of the moral: God is like an unjust judge who grants the request of an importunate woman; the point is the need of perseverance in prayer, the supineness of the Lord is not implied: a parable is, as it were, an extended metaphor.

2 Summa Thologica, ja: XV: 2.

8 Ibid., 33: LXXXIV: 6. 4 Ibid., la: XCIII: 2.

5 Ibid., la: XXVI: 4. 6 Ibid., la: VI: 4. la: VII: 2.

go NOTIONS

essence and existence*1 Nevertheless at this height, the mind, and logic with it, must find a way; a foothold here, the weight taken there; it is all as delicately poised and severe in its discipline as mountaineering.

Nor is this the place to pursue the metaphysical idea of analogy, and its division into two classes, namely the analogy of attribution, or immediate proportion or relation, analogia attrilutionis, which attributes to a principle or cause whatsoever is found in its con- sequences or effects, and the analogy of proper proportionality, the

analog/

I

figurative or philosophical

metaphorical

" The Lord is my shepherd " " A Is for arch "

of attribution of proportionality

" The Prince of Peace " " What man is there of you, whom if his

' A is like a, only s°n ask ubread' wil!

more so." he give him a stone ?

41 A Is to o, * os 6 is to b."

(Terms italicized represent what is already known to the enquirer.-) Figure 5

proportion of proportions or relation of relations, analogia propor- tionalitatis, which is more subtle and profound and from a familiar relationship projects another to a term hitherto unknown.2 The reader need not strain to grasp the difference, still a matter of con- troversy among professional scholastics, but he will not go far wrong if he takes it along the lines of the following example. Let us imagine someone who is familiar with the works of Mozart, but

1 Summa Tbcologiea, la: III: 4.

2 Disputations, II de Vtritatc, n. Disputations, VII fa Potentia, 7. Summa Tbeologica, la: XIII: 5. I Contra Gentcs, 34. I fa Trinitatf z, ad 3. C/. Figure 5.

ANALOGY 91

has never heard Haydn: he asks for information; and you reply that Haydn was Mozart's master and that the younger man was an authentic but adventurous disciple; you are then using the analogy of attribution, and the questioner is left with some know- ledge of Haydn, But if you reply that Haydn is to Mozart what bread-and-cheese is to biscuits-and-cheese, then you are drawing a parallel, or using the likeness of proportions, which despite the possible cheapness of the example, taken here not for its justice but as the illustration of a method, is calculated to take the questioner rather further into the musical character of Haydn. An example of the two types of analogy and their comparison may be taken from Canning's squibs. He described Addington as 'happy Britain's guardian gander/ an analogy of attribution; but a deeper and wider historical appreciation is obtained through the analogy of proportion contained in his famous couplet; 'Pitt is to Addington, as London is to Paddington.'

Such attributions and proportions underlie the phrases of everyday speech; the metaphysician simply lifts them to a more abstract plane, while the logician registers their mental form and keeps their development within the limits of meaning. Faces smile, but the term is transferred to landscapes, seas, orchards, and prospects. Wines are called generous, or wise, or discreet. Blood is thicker than water. Beauty shall glide along. We speak of a yellow streak, a bouncing manner, a fruity voice, a wag, a bear with a sore head, a cat on hot bricks. Examples can range from the bizarre to the sober, from the racy to the academic, from the poetical to the scientific. They are drawn upon and worked throughout the Summa Theologica; one, already given, is the com- parison of the creator to an artist1; another, the parallel between mind and will, as mind is to conclusions so will is to objects of choice2; a third, the likeness between a criminal and a diseased member of the body.3

If logic is to be a fit companion for a lively philosophy then it must welcome, if sometimes hard put to, the habit of ranging abroad and finding familiarity among things at first sight so different. An analysis according to mathematical symbols will not meet the case. There is here a profound steadiness and simplicity

1 Summa Tkologica, la: XIV: 8. 2 IbiL, la: LXXXII: 2.

3 Ibid., 2a-2ae: LXIV: 2.

92 NOTIONS

when the mind does not run wild with complexity nor allow itself to be bemused with the embarrassment of its riches.1 'If Alci- biades was proud/ says Aristotle, 'or Achilles and Ajax were proud, we should find on enquiring what they all had in common, that it was intolerance of insult,1 but he also notes that 'it was this which drove Alcibiades to war, Achilles to wrath, and Ajax to suicide/2 In fact, according to psychologists, this power of co-ordination is the very mark of intelligence, found alike in the sympathetic dis- cernment of the kinship between people so dissimilar as St Teresa of Avila and St The*rese of Lisieux, in the ability to trans- late one language into another and to sort out anagrams and read 'Barchester' from 'there's crab/ in the understanding of the praise from a negro, 'his skin may be white, but his heart is black/ and in the recognition that God is most just because he is merciful,8 Perhaps this is part of the reason why people with quick and voluble perceptions are apt to mix their metaphors. At any rate, to see a fundamental likeness of meaning is to rise above the level of sensation.

'We become oblivious of the difference between a horse, a steam-engine, and a waterfall/ says Bain,4 'when our minds are engrossed with the one circumstance of moving power. The diversity of these had no doubt, for a long time, the effect of keeping back their first identification; and to obtuse intellects, this identification might have been for ever impossible/ It is by the grasp of analogies that our actions are different from those of animals. Their instinct, for instance, will drive them to catch fish in one determinate way, by diving or wading as the case may be; but we can employ all manner of different motions with the same meaning and purpose, we can trawl, cast, spear, depth-charge, or tickle* From this sense of analogy follows the power of adaptation which works from the speculations of high philosophy to such crafts as jungle fighting, where, as military experts have noted, civilized peoples, though they start at a disadvantage, can be trained to be more efficient than primitive peoples because of their aptitude for mastering a subject.

1 Opusc. X, de Causis, lect. 9, 10.

2 Posterior Analytics, II, 13, g?b. Transl. G. R. G. Mure. 8 Summa Tbeologica, la: XXI: 3, 4.

4 Th Senses and tk Intellect.

ANALOGY 93

In this conception of all-round ability, or general intelligence as it is sometimes called, the word general is beginning to recover some of the strength that was apparently denied it with reference to the thinness and flatness of extensive notions; for to be universal reveals a powerful central energy, available for use in diverse de- partments, an integrating wisdom working throughout profusion. To recur to a point raised in regretting the rupture between theory and practice, eminence in one field of human interest may not leave much time for the cultivation of another, yet the capability is there. Verdi was a proficient farmer and St Thomas himself was an acceptable preacher in the Neapolitan vernacular,1 an acute observer of human character,2 and was frequently consulted on administrative problems.3 Yet his latent allusions make him a difficult author for those who would extract his doctrine by consulting the appropriate headings in the index; he is not really a manualist for he supposes a general background and is often most informative in his asides, his best sayings on a topic not seldom are to be found in unlikely places. A single theme runs throughout the versatility, the passage from one aspect to another is not abrupt, there are no splits in his personality.

We may conclude with an outline of the workings of uni vocal, equivocal, and analogical terms in a cardinal treatise of the Summa Theologica, the problem of the nature of God. The pre- liminary positions of theism having been granted, the schools of theology fall into three main groups, though there are many shades of detail; there are two extreme positions corresponding to the op- posite boundaries of univocal and equivocal terms, and a midway position, modus medius says St Thomas, corresponding to the mean

1 Opuscula XXXIII-XXXVT. Most of these sermons are published in English, The Three Great Prayers, Burns Gates, 1937.

2 The detailed analysis of the emotions. Summa Theologica, ia-2ae: XXII- XLVIII; and of good and bad human habits, 2a-zae: XLVII-CLXX.

3 Cf. Opusculum XI, de Regno, On Sovereignty, to the King of Cyprus; Opusculum XII, de Regimine Judaeorum, On the Jewish Problem, to the Duchess of Brabant; Opusculum XX, On the Deferred Meeting of Commercial Bills. What was expected