The Divine Lamp

1. Philosophy is the science of ultimate grounds.

It will be seen, by reference to the tabular view of the sciences in the introduction, that Rosmini draws a clear distinction between the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘metaphysics’, employing the latter in the limited sense of Science of the Real, which according to him, includes Cosmology, Ontology, and Natural Theology. Thus the term ‘metaphysics’, while narrower that ‘philosophy’, is wider than ‘ontlogy’ (cf. Preface to Metaphysical Works, in Psychology, vol. 1. pp. 5-16, where these distinctions are treated at length).

The above definition of Philosophy does not differ materially from that of Leibniz, who calls it “the science of sufficient reasons”; or from that of Descarte, who makes it “the science of things evidently deduced from first principles” (cf. Hamilton’s Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. 1. pp. 48-53, where a list of the more famous definitions of philosophy, ancient and modern, are given). It approaches, perhaps, still more closely the definition which Aristotle gives of wisdom, “the science which considers first principles and causes”; and it coincides with the definition of first philosophy, which St Thomas in part borrows from Aristotle. “The philosopher,’ says he, meaning Aristotle, “determines it (i.e. first philosophy) to be the science of truth, not of truth in general, but of that truth which is the origin of all truth, that is, which relates to the first universal principle of being.” Rosmini condemns several other definitions of philosophy, especially those of Hobbes, Galluppi, Plato, and Wolf. Hobbes had defined philosophy as “a knowledge, acquired by correct reasoning, of effects or phenomena from their conceived causes or generations, and also of possible generations from known effects.” In regard to this Rosmini says, “Since from effects alone or from phenomena alone, without the aid of the ideal object, we can know only the proiximate causes, or, more properly speaking, the laws, according to which sensible things change, philosophy is destroyed by this definition, and there remain only physics and the natural sciences,usurping the title of philosophy.” Of Galluppi’s definition, which makes philosophy “the science of human thought,” he says, “But human thought is only the instrument wherewith philosophy finds and contemplates its objects, and these, among which the greatest is God, cannot in the smallest degree be reduced to thought..” In regard to the remark of Plato, that the philosopher “devotes himself always to the idea of being,” he says, “On the contrary, the idea of being must guide the human mind to discover the absolute and most real being, this being the end of all speculations-an end which it reaches, not through any idea, but through affirmation and intuition.” To Wolf’s definition of philosophy as “the science of things possible,” he objects: “Possibilities do not by any means constitute the grounds of things in their completeness, being but a single element of those grounds. Contingent things, for example, do not exist merely because they are possible, but because, being possible, a first cause has created them.” These objections help to make clear Rosmini’s view of the sphere and functions of philosophy, and the cardinal distinction which he makes between ideal being, which is in itself intelligible, and real being, which is intelligible only through the other. When he asserts that “the real, as merely real, signifies nothing, not going beyond itself or expressing anything but itself,” and that it “goes beyond the power of natural signs, altogether beyond the power of any spoken word, however eloquent, and of any writing, however learned, elegant, and sublime it may appear,” he comes very near drawing that distinction which, at first sight, seems to involve an absurd paradox, but which is, nevertheless, strictly true-the distinction, namely, between thought and knowledge. Thought being the mere instrument of knowledge (the quo cognoscimus, as the Scholastics say), and knowledge being that which thought accomplishes (quod cognoscimus), if follows that thought and knowledge are absolutely exclusive with respect to each other; that what is known cannot, as such, be thought; and that what is thought cannot, as such, be known. it is the failure to observe this distinction that has led Herbert Spencer and others into their strange muddle respecting the unknowable, by which they mean the unthinkable. Ideas are thinkable but absolutely unknowable; things are knowable but absolutely unthinkable.

In regard to Science, the genus of which philosophy is a species, Rosmini approves of the view expressed by Aristotle in the Later Analytics, where he says, “We think we know a thing absolutely, and not in the sophistical, accidental way, when we think we know the cause which produced it, know that that is the cause of that thing, and know that it must be the cause of that thing.” He, moreover, distinguishes between the subjective and the objective senses of the term. “The word science,” he says, “has a universal sense, equivalent to that of cognition; but it is also employed in a more restricted sense, to signify a particular mode of cognition. In this limited sense it may be regarded either subjectively, that is, as possessed by man, the knowing subject, or objectively, as knowable, as that which is intuited by a mind.” In the former view it is equivalent to philosophy; in the latter, it means “an entire system of demonstrated cognitions, depending upon a single principle.”

it is instructive to compare with these views respecting science and philosophy, the definitions of these terms given by Herbert Spencer. “Science,” says that writer, “is partially unified knowledge; Philosophy is completely unified knowledge.” it follows from this that we have not at present any philosophy, and indeed, that only omniscience is philosophy, and God the only philosopher.