In the middle ages 193

the codification of civil and canon law, the organi-

zation of crafts and guilds, the absolute and inter-

national hierarchy of the Church, the subordination

of states to the moral authority of the Pope, — all

of these were regarded by the intellectual classes as

the best means of establishing things in their proper

places. Order, said Thomas Aquinas, reveals in

every case the intervention of mind. ''Intellectus

solius est ordinareJ"^'^ Only the mind is able to set

things in order. Naturally, therefore, intellectual-

ism makes its appearance in everything.

16 /n Ethic, ad Nicomach., Lect. I, 7.

CHAPTER NINE

A Pluralistic Conception of the World

i. What metaphysics is. ii. Static aspects of reality, iii.

Dynamic aspects ; the central doctrine of act and potency,

iv. Application to substance and accident; to matter and form.

V. The problem of individuation. vi. Human personality,

vii. God: as pure existence.

To inquire into the conception of the world of-

fered by the scholastics is to enter into the realm

of their metaphysics. Real beings exist outside of

us. We know them first by means of sense-per-

ception. Then the intellect divests the realities of-

fered by sense-perception of their individualizing

and particular features, so that the object is laid

hold of as abstract and permits generalization.

Metaphysical inquiry is thus based upon abstract

knowledge both of what lies at the heart of cor-

poreal beings and of determinations wliich belong

to all being.

What is reality? To make clear the scholastic

answer to this question, 1 propose to consider re-

ality successively under two aspects: first, the static

aspect, or reality in tlie state of repose; second, the

^^ 194

In the middle ages 195

dynamic aspect, or reality in the state of change.

I use these technical expressions provisionally ; they

will become clearer as we proceed.

II

Let us suppose for the moment an impossibility;

namely, that the whirling universe in the midst of

which we live should stoj) suddenly, and that in this

state of universal repose we could take a snap-shot

of this static universe. In this state, of what would

the real world consist? Scholasticism would reply:

of a7i indefinite number of beings j. independent, in

their dHstence, each from the other. Each man,

each animal, each plant, each mono-cellular organ-

ism, each particle of matter exists by itself, in its

impenetrable individuality. The hidividual alone

eocists. Such is the fundamental doctrine of schol-

astic metaphysics and it was inherited from the

twelfth century. It belongs to natural science, and

not to philosophy, to tell us what that individual is.

Is it the atom, the ion, the electron? Scholastic

metaphysics would follow modern science to the

innermost division of reality. Whatever it maj^ be,

it is only the individual that exists.

Thus, scholasticism is a pluralistic philosophy,

and the sworn enemy of monism, which teaches the

fusion of all realities in one. Accordingly, Thomas

Aquinas speaks of the Fons Vitae of Avicebron, an

apologetic of Neo-Platonic and Arabian panthe-

196 PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION

ism, as being a poisoned well rather than a fountain

of life.

Let us consider more closely one of these myriad

individual realities, which surround us on all sides,

— for example, that oak-tree planted yonder. , The

individuality here presented includes many ele-

ments : it has a determinable thickness and height,

a cylindrical form of trunk, a 'roughness of bark,

a somber color of foliage, a place. which it occupies

in the forest, a certain action of its foliage upon

the ambient air, a specific subjection to influence as

it absorbs the nourishing sap from the ground.

These are all so many determinations of being or,

to use the scholastic language, so many classes,

categories, — categories of quantity, quality,, action,

passion, time, space and relation.

Now, all of these classes, or categories, presup-

pose a yet more fundamental one. ,Can you con-

ceive, asks Aristotle, the reality of walking with-

out some one who walks? Can you conceive quan-

tity, thickness, and the rest, without something, —

our oak-tree above — which possesses it? Neither

the action of walking nor the extension of quantity

can be conceived apart from a subject in which they

exist. And it is such a subject which Aristotle and

the scholastics call suhstavce, — the fundamental

category, as distinguished from the other classes,

which they call accidents (accidentia) .

Not only do we conceive corporeal realities in

terms of substance and accidents, — and no philos-