The Divine Lamp

Article 8
Judgment Must Not Be Confounded With Simple Attention.

81.   Let us continue:

“Where attention is twofold,” Writes our philosopher, “You have a comparison, because focusing attention on two ideas and comparing them is one and the same thing.”  (Extrait raisonne, p 14)

This reasoning is totally incorrect.  The proposition that giving attention to two ideas is the same as comparing them together, will not stand up to examination.  May I not, if I so choose, think in the first place of one idea alone, and then, of a second without instituting a comparison between them and noting their differences?

82.  But even if the attention given to two ideas necessarily implied their comparison and the knowledge of their points of difference, it would nevertheless be necessary to admit in this fact three distinct, although contemporaneous, intellectual operations-namely, 10 the attention given to one idea; 2) the attention given to the other idea, and 3) the attention given to the difference between the two; and it would still remain to be seen whether these three acts are of the same nature; for if they are not of the same nature, they cannot, their contemporaneousness notwithstanding, be attributed to one and the same faculty.

83.  Moreover, these three acts are not necessarily contemporaneous.  Surely I can bestow my attention on one idea and then another, without caring to think of their difference!

To see all this more clearly, it will be enough to glance at what takes place in regard to our ideas of numbers.

Suppose, then, that I have the ideas of number 35 and of number 49, am I obliged to institute a comparison between them and mark their difference?  Certainly not.  The knowledge of them is not the knowledge of that difference.  They are respectively 35 and 49, but the difference is 14-a third number which I produce to myself by performing on them an intellectual operation on a nature peculiar to itself.

Nay, I have the power not only to fix my attention on both those numbers, successively or contemporaneously, but furthermore to exercise my mind on them in sundry other ways, without being at all bound to make that intellectual operation which reveals to me their difference.

84.   Condillac’s belief that our attention could not be fixed on two things without at the same time perceiving  their differences, seems to have arisen from this, that he observed only what mostly takes place in those cases in which we think of things easy to compare together, and whose difference can be very readily seen.

85.   Is it not surprising, however, that so obvious a distinction as that between the act of simple attention first to one idea and then to another, and the act of comparing them together and of perceiving their difference, should have been overlooked by a philosopher?  Even admitting that we were always necessitated by a law of our nature to do these two acts simultaneously, we should still be obliged to say that they are essentially different from each other; and that the second is more than the first, and therefore deserving to be carefully analyzed apart, instead of being so lightly passed over.

When I simply fix my attention on two ideas, I do not produce a new object for it, but occupy it with two objects which are already in my mind.  When, on the contrary, I compare two ideas together and separate in them that which is proper to each from that which they have in common, I form to myself a new object of attention-i.e. their difference, of which, in so far as it is thus divided and distinguished from those ideas, I had no manner of thought before. -Excerpted from THE ORIGIN OF IDEAS, Vol 1,  by Blessed AntonioRosmini