The Catholic World, Vol. 07, April 1868 to September, 1868Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 07, April 1868 to September, 1868
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
But what is this reason which operates in these two modes,
impersonal and spontaneous in the one, personal and reflective in
the other? As the distinction between the personal and impersonal
is, by Cousin's own avowal, a difference simply of modes or
degrees, there can be no entitative or substantial difference
between them. They are not two different or distinct reasons, but
one and the same reason, operating in two different modes or
degrees. Now, we demand, what is this one substantive reason
operating in these two different degrees or modes? It certainly
is not an abstraction, for abstractions are nullities and cannot
operate or act at all. What, then, is it? Is it God, or is it
man? If you say it is God, then you deny reason to man, make him
a brute, unless you identify man with God.
{100}
If you say it is man, that it is a faculty of the human soul, as
Cousin certainly does say--for he makes it our faculty and only
faculty of intelligence--then you make it subjective, since
nothing is more subjective than one's own faculties. They are the
subject itself. Consequently the impersonal reason belongs as
truly to man, the subject, as the personal reason, and therefore
is not objective, as we said, to the whole subject, but at best
only to the will and the personality--what Cousin calls _le
moi_. The most distinguished of the disciples of Cousin was
Theodore Jouffroy, who, in his confessions, nearly curses Cousin
for having seduced him from his Christian faith, whose loss he so
bitterly regretted on his dying-bed, and who was, in Cousin's
judgment, as expressed in a letter to the writer of this article,
"a true philosopher." This true philosopher and favorite disciple
of Cousin illustrates the difference between the impersonal
reason and the personal by the difference between _seeing_
and _looking_, _hearing_ and _listening_, which
corresponds precisely to the difference noted by Leibnitz between
what he calls simple _perception_ and _apperception_.
In both cases it is the man who sees, hears, or perceives; but in
the latter case, the will intervenes and we not only see, but
look, not only perceive, but apperceive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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