tions cum fundamento in re, as we ourselves at one time tried to hold; but they are in the Divine mind, and are the real, necessary, eternal, and indestructible God himself. Idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam Dei essentia, says St. Thomas.* Therefore it is God, for no distinction secundum rem is admissible between God and his essence. "Sunt ideæ," says St. Augustine, "principales formæ quædam, vel rationes rerum stabiles atque incommutabiles, quæ ipsæ formatæ non sunt, ac per hoc æternæ ac semper eodem modo sese habentes, quæ in divina intelligentia continentur. Et cum ipsæ neque oriantur neque intereant; secundum eas tamen formari dicitur omne quod oriri et interire potest, et omne quod oritur et interit."† If contained in the Divine mind, if eternal and immutable, neither beginning nor passing away, but the forms of all things which may be or are originated, that may or do perish, they are unquestionably the necessary, eternal, immutable, and immovable God himself, in the infinite plenitude of his being; for certainly God is all that is uncreated, necessary, immutable, and eternal, as all theology and all philosophy never cease to assert. The necessary, immutable, and eternal, abstracted from reality, from real being, who is it, is necessary, immutable, and eternal nothing, and therefore absolutely unintelligible; for we never cease to repeat, that what is not is not intelligible. What is not is a pure negation, and negation is intelligible only in the intelligibleness of the affirmative, and hence God is said to know evil only by knowing its opposite, good. Necessary and eternal possibility is intelligible only as the necessary and eternal ability of God, that is, as his Divine omnipotence. We may consider the idea under the distinct aspect of possibility in the order of production, and then it is simply the power or ability of God; under that of exemplar or archetype, after which the Creator operates or may operate, and then it is the intelligence of God; under that of the end, the finis propter quem, of the Divine operations, and then it is the goodness, bonitas, of God; or, in fine, under that of the essence of things, the causa essentialis, the basis, so to speak, or foundation of existence, and then it is the being of God. But as power, intelligence, goodness, being, &c., are identical and indistinguishable in God, the idea, under whatever aspect it is revealed to us, or is contem

Summa, 1. Q. 15, a. 1 ad 3.

† Lib. de Diversis Quæstionibus LXXXIII. Quæst. 46.

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plated by us, is always and every where identically the one God, real, necessary, and eternal.

But if so, is not God all things, the universe itself? Mediante the creative act, yes, otherwise no; because, conceived simply as real, necessary, and eternal Being, Ens reale, et necessarium, he is not conceived as productive, and no universe is or can be asserted. The difference between philosophy and pantheism lies precisely in this creative act of God. Pantheism asserts, Real being is, Ens reale est, and there stops, and in doing so asserts God as real and necessary being, and nothing else. Philosophy goes a step farther, and asserts, Ens reale creator est, Real being is creator, and in doing so asserts the universe; for existences are nothing but the creative act of God in its terminus, as is asserted in asserting creation out of nothing. The difference between the two formulas, however slight at first view, is all the difference between act and no act, between existences and no existences, universe and no universe. To say that God non mediante the creative act is the universe, is not true, for then there is no universe; to say that God mediante the creative act is all things, is the universe, is true; for then the universe is not only asserted, but asserted in its true relation to God, as being only from him, by him, and in him, through the creative act bringing it, as our author would say, forth from potentiality into actuality. There is no possible bridge from God as real and necessary being to existences, or from existences to him, but his creative act, and therefore we must either rest in pantheism, or assert creation out of nothing.

But it follows from what we have said, that the formula, Real and necessary being is, Ens reale est, which is ontologically and psychologically primary, is not an adequate philosophical formula. We cannot attain to the conception of existences from the conception of being, or being is, any more than we can attain to the conception of God and the universe from the single conception of ourselves as simple entity. The simple formula, Ens reale est, Real entity is, is and must be unproductive, because from Real entity is, we can conclude only Real entity is. Being is intelligible of itself, and demands nothing in addition to itself to its intelligibility, as Hegel and others prove clearly enough. It does not depend on another to be, for if it did it would not be simple being, but an existence; it does not need to produce in order to be, for it already is. It is being free from the category of relation of every sort, and it

is only the category of relation of some sort that demands or connotes something beyond itself. It is what is called substance, and needs nothing beyond itself for its complete intelligibility, or, as Spinoza says, to be conceived. Unless, then, we can add to it the further conception of cause, of creator, it can be no more productive in the order of knowledge than in the order of being itself. Cousin has felt the difficulty, and has sought to escape it by resolving the category of being into that of cause, and the category of cause into that of being, and asserting that God is being only in that he is cause, thus making creation an intrinsic necessity, which, as it denies the free creative act, is pantheism. The Germans, falsely holding, that Being is, is an adequate philosophical formula, fail utterly, as all who are familiar with their theories well know, to attain to the real conception of existences, and revolve unceasingly in dead pantheism or nihilism. The error common to all is that of supposing that all conceptions are generable and generated from a single original conception. This is the grand error of modern philosophy itself, and that which has led it to attempt, first, with Descartes, that prince of psychologism and absurdity, to deduce geometrically all our conceptions from the single conception of our personal entity, and second, with Spinoza, Schelling, and Hegel, to do the same from the conception of what they call the Absolute, Absolute Being, that is, simple ens reale. Some few, like Cousin and our friend Channing, following the neoplatonists, and misapprehending the sacred mystery of the Trinity, introduce plurality and variety into their original conception of God, the first cause; but they obtain no relief, for they lose unity, dissolve the absolute, and assert the generative principle either of polytheism or of atheism.

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The remedy is in supplying the defect in our formula, and rendering it productive. The productive formula must embrace the two conceptions entity and existence, connected by the creative act, the copula or medium between the two extremes. That is, the only adequate or productive formula is the synthesis or synthetic judgment, Ens reale creator est, or Being creates existences, because it is only mediante the creative act that real being is itself productive, and a formula cannot be productive in the order of knowledge unless it includes all the terms necessary to productiveness in the order of being, or ontological order. The error of modern philosophers does not lie in the denial of the necessity of having this

synthetic formula, so much as in attempting to obtain it by reflection, as if reflection could add something to intuition, or operate productively before having obtained a productive formula, in principle nothing less than supposing that the Creator creates his own creativeness, that is, creates himself. The synthesis must precede all our judgments a posteriori, because without it no judgment is possible, except the simple judgment Being is, which is not a posteriori, but a priori, for he who says Being says all he says who says Being is. It is possible, then, to obtain this synthesis, the adequate philosophical formula, only as it reveals and affirms itself a priori in direct and immediate intuition, in which we ourselves are but simple. spectators; and that it does so reveal and affirm itself is certain; for after the labors of Reid and the Scottish school, especially as that school has been developed by Sir William Hamilton, we are well permitted to assert, that we have direct intuition, not only of phenomena, but of existences themselves; and existences, as we have seen, are and can be nothing but the Divine creative act, which, as what is called conservation of existences is nothing but the very act, unsuspended, that originally created them out of nothing, is constantly before our eyes in the simple fact of existence itself. As this synthesis reveals and affirms itself a priori in immediate intuition, it is and cannot but be certain, both ontologically and psychologically, secundum rem and secundum nos. Here is the principle of the solution, which, for the want of space, we must leave to our readers to develop for themselves.*

* Consult on the philosophical formula, or "Ideal Formula," Gioberti, Introduzione allo Studio della Filosofia, Cap. IV. It is with some hesita tion that we refer our readers to this work, because its author is in bad odor, and also because, though we have commenced the examination of it, we have as yet proceeded but a little way, and are far from having mastered it. We certainly do not refer to him as in himself authority, although his ability is unquestionable, nor as to a writer whose works can be safely consulted without great caution; but on the point on which we refer to him, he is more full and satisfactory than any other writer, ancient or modern, of our acquaintance. We cannot say that we have been absolutely indebted to him for any of the views set forth in the text, for we had obtained them, substantially, before we had the least knowledge of his writings or of his doctrines; but it would be folly on our part, and injustice to him and the public, to attempt to dissemble that he has greatly aided us to clear up our previous views, and on several not unimportant points to extend them. In his hostility to the Jesuits, we have no occasion to inform the readers of this journal that we neither do nor are likely to share, and we rejoice to hear that his Gesuita Moderno has

Keeping in mind what we have established, that the idea, the ideal, in modern language, whether under the aspect of intelligibility, of wisdom, goodness, power, immutability, being, is God himself, the apparent limitation of the Divine freedom the author fancies he detects can present no difficulty. Grant that the idea is uncreated, necessary, eternal, -grant that God in producing existences operates, and can operate, so to speak, only after the idea, and must conform to its intrinsic nature, nothing is granted but that God, in creating, must create according to his own intrinsic nature, and can neither in creating nor in dealing with existences do violence to himself. That is, God is what he is, and cannot be any thing else, — is God and cannot cease to be God, — is, and cannot annihilate himself. As the only necessity supposed or supposable is his own most perfect nature, he is necessarily free to do whatever is not repugnant to that nature, that is, which would not imply his non-being; for since he is pure act, and most simple, any thing repugnant to his wisdom, intelligence, goodness, or any other attribute, would be repugnant to his very being, and imply his annihilation. But this is no restriction of his freedom, for freedom is in being, not in not being, and is restricted only by some defect in the being of whom it is predicated, never by that being's own perfection or plenitude. To say that God is free to do whatever he pleases, except annihilate himself, since the exception results from the perfection, not from the defect, of his nature, is to assert his absolute freedom; for freedom to do whatever does not imply the non-being of its possessor, and therefore the annihilation of itself, is the highest and most perfect freedom conceivable. The Arbitrium Liberum, as possessed by us, in the sense that it demands deliberation, is, of course, not predicable of God, for in that sense it implies defect; but in the sense in which it is a positive perfection, it is implied in been placed on the Index. In the work to which we refer, we find many things, not immediately connected with philosophy, things affecting him as a man, a statesman, and an Italian patriot, which commend themselves neither to our judgment nor to our taste. We by no means participate in his political passions or his national prejudices; we do not expect with him to see the Church Triumphant on earth, and we wholly dissent from his doctrine that the state, instead of the Church, is the proper schoolmaster. In a word, in those of his writings we have read, we find not a little extraneous matter that we do not like, and much, if not unsound, that is easily misapprehended, and not inapt to lead to dangerous errors; but we have, in what pertains exclusively to philosophy, found much that we most heartily approve, and which, in our age especially, needs to be profoundly meditated.