Metaphysics is a science when used in the singular. When used in the plural, metaphysics are the first principles of a science. Because Descartes’ errors are metaphysical errors in both senses, let’s go back over some basics.
Our intelligence acquires science from sensible images (for now, we will simply think of science as "knowledge" — it comes from the Latin scire — to know). Science is a combined effort of the senses and the intelligence. The senses gather data, and then the intelligence grasps being — as essence — from what it "supports" which we call accidents. i.e. the greenness of the grass which is the accident of the substance, grass.
It is apparent that the mind has this power — to grasp and apprehend being; that is, the simple, unadorned act of being in a state of existence it can also separate such qualities from anything it apprehends by a process called abstraction, and then signify a general type of thing (universalise) by using such an abstraction. Thus we can use the word dog to mean all dogs; which is to universalise, or we may employ an abstraction from a specific thing to use as a generality or universal; for example china for all cups and saucers etc. made of china clay.
The process of knowing percolates through our bodies and minds in a certain order:
What do you see about Descartes here? Well, he leapfrogs over the first four steps into the 5th, substituting his "clear and distinct ideas" for the first four steps.
Intellectual knowledge comes from the senses. We always start with our senses, but in the things perceived by the senses "the intelligence knows many things which the senses cannot perceive."
Note that dictum: the intelligence knows many things which the senses cannot perceive.
An example would be motion. If you have studied the history of philosophy, you know that because of the difficulty of understanding motion some of Parmenides’ followers tried very hard to prove that motion doesn’t exist! Such was the rocky beginning of metaphysics (for you also recall that Parmenides is usually considered the father of metaphysics).
The concept of motion and the measurement of motion are purely intelligible, not sensible.
Bear in mind that "sensible" means perceived through the senses — it is not being used as a synonym for "prudence".
The senses grasp things by their external accidents: colour, taste, motion, size, weight, smell. But the intelligence penetrates into the being of things, not only into the being of the substance, but also into the being of the accidents.(This is important to remember: Accidents do have being.)
When we say that the intelligence penetrates into the being we are speaking of being as essence. Essence is only intelligible, not sensible. The intelligence abstracts (draws away) the essence from the material of individual conditions of the thing.
Let me say that again. Things have individual conditions, natures. Out of the sense data of the individual conditions, the intelligence abstracts the essence of a thing. Take the concept "mammal." If you have such a concept, you have it because your intelligence formed the concept out of the sensible experience of having observed many individual dogs, cats, whales (most of us have to rely on reports of whales nursing their young — has anyone reading this actually seen that?).
Your intelligence, or the intelligence of someone before you who has passed the knowledge on to you, has gathered the observations all the things common to animals we know as mammals.
The intelligence then grasps the essence of the mammal and considers it in itself — distinct from the "individuating conditions" of mammal-ness such as your pet, the elephant at the zoo, or the whale. Note that nursing the young is an accident that belongs to the essence of the mammal.
It is a necessary accident; without it a mammal would not be a mammal. However, nursing the young is not "mammal" in substance.
The intelligence, again, penetrates through the external accidents and grasps what is essential in the thing, so that accidents do not conceal the substance but reveal it.
More on that later. Certainty: intellectual and sensible. Of what are we more certain — what we see through our senses or what we understand through our intelligence? For example "2+2=4" or "this desk is brown"? So by the light of the intelligence, we can acquire a certainty about things which cannot be proved through the senses although they can be proved. Our certainty, then, is not based on sensible evidence although though our knowledge does start there.
Our certainty is based on rational (reasoning) proof or demonstration. Note: not on a "clear and distinct idea of an individual, private "philosopher".
On the other hand, through our senses we do acquire a certainty which our senses can verify. "It’s cold outside," for example. When we make a statement which we cannot check with the senses, we must prove it with our reason. For example: "The human soul is immortal." This is not a statement that our senses can verify, but reason can.
The verification of these two examples: "It is cold outside" and "the human soul is immortal" give us two different types of certainty. That it is cold outside may be verified through the senses and we call our certainty there "experimental" certainty.
Metaphysics begins with the sensible world as we have seen, but it reaches intellectual certainty.
Certainty can be
Metaphysics, as we have said again and again, moves from its starting point, the sensible world, and rises to the level of intelligence.
For example, when metaphysics considered God or the human soul, these objects of knowledge are entirely beyond the sensible world, and so are realities like substance and accident in the visible world.
If a pig walks into your parlour, you may see it, touch it — and you could certainly smell it!
What does metaphysics say about the pig, its fatness, pinkness, curly tail and its odour? Metaphysics says "pig is a substance" but "the smell, colour, and texture" are accidents. Yet — and get this — neither the substance (pig) nor the accident (smell) are ‘sensible’ in themselves as substance or accident.
To come at this another way: What fits the human intelligence is neither the purely sensible nor the purely intelligible. What is purely sensible is very hard for man to understand as sensible.
You display the mental ability to develop from the sensible to the intelligible by your very use of words, of language.
For example, "What is this desk made of?" Of wood! When you say "wood" you have gone beyond the sensible qualities of wood (just as you went beyond the sensible qualities of the pig when you said ‘pig’ and beyond the sensible quality of smell when you said ‘smell’).
When you say "wood" or "skunk" or "smell" you are using a concept which is intelligible, and beyond the sensible qualities of what we consider. Take the wood for example. It is a combination of certain chemical substances, call them A, B, C etc. .The moment you want to understand what is sensible, you must introduce non sensible (that is intelligible) realities.
(This is where language fits in to the whole thing and indicates immediately why atheistic philosophical systems are led at once to attack this property of language, as in the linguistics schools).
We do understand sensible realities, but once they move inside our head, inside our intelligence, they are not sensible, but intelligible. The confusion of this simple reality is at the root of two destructive attitudes in the modern university.
One the one hand, the difference between sensible reality and intelligibility is ignored. The confusion that results is one of ignorance.
But there is a more destructive and wilful error common in universities today disseminated by academics who do understand the difference between sensible and intelligible certainty but who use that understanding deliberately to confuse students through fallacious "linguistic games."
If what is purely sensible is hard to understand, so is that which is purely intelligible. As long as we don’t think too hard about it, we are fairly comfortable with a sensible world understood intelligibly — it’s "where we live" as long as we are in this life, our natural environment.
This is due to our composition as men: our spiritual propensity is towards the intelligible (like God and the soul) and our material nature to the sensible.
However, man is neither purely material nor purely spiritual and so moving into the real of the purely intelligible is not comfortable; neither is moving into the purely sensible.
We are more comfortable in things that are sensible but understood (or conceptualised). That is to say, some things are below our understanding and others are above it. The purely sensible is below us, the purely intelligible (which is very close to the purely spiritual) is above us.
In looking at sensible things, the intelligence distinguishes between substance and accidents: these are purely intelligible concepts, impossible to sense or imagine, although they are very clear in our intelligence.
Take the mammal again. We cannot imagine a mammal as such, but we can easily imagine a particular mammal, such as a dog or a cat. Abstractions (such as mammal) can’t be imagined, but they can be conceived.
Think for a moment of other simple abstractions, like "weapon", "vehicle", "furniture", — we can conceive them but not imagine them (form an image of them apart from individual instances of them).
Concept is a produce of the intelligence, but image is a product of the sense.
INTELLIGENCE AND IMAGINATION
In metaphysics we try to make more precise the concepts of substance and accident and it is here that we feel the difficulty of doing without our imagination.
This is why we search for "concrete examples" — especially as we launch into the difficult sea of metaphysics. As Maritain warns, concrete examples actually may mislead us if they indulge the imagination rather than the intelligence.
Metaphysics is difficult precisely because it is the most abstract and least concrete of sciences. It is natural for us to think along the sensible level using concepts. Thus, we may confuse intelligence with imagination, and say we don’t understand something when in fact we cannot imagine it.
In metaphysical knowledge we don’t have sensible evidence — only intellectual evidence. That brings us back to substance.
Is substance something evident? Yes, Substance is evident but it is evident to the intelligence and not to the senses.
The fact that the imagination cannot reach substance does not mean that we cannot understand it, know it. This can make progress in metaphysics difficult — intellectual knowledge moves slowly for us because we must journey on without the aid of the imagination.
Progress in metaphysical knowledge requires patience and humility: being satisfied with the light that we can reach at any stage without expecting too much, and always hoping that we will see more light in the next step.
I would hazard the observation that the confusion in philosophy has resulted more from the spiritual problems of pride and impatience than any other thing — the mark of today’s "intelligentsia" is haste and arrogance.
The intellectual elite in the university, like Descartes, impatiently spin out their own foundations because it is quicker and easier than the kind of thing we are doing here.
That they presume to do this is a mark of arrogance at the beginning, I fear. Therefore, one of the first things the metaphysician must do is discipline the imagination.
He does not have to suppress it, but must control it and master it — and although metaphysics is not theology or religion, those who abandon religious faith inevitable abandon metaphysics also because when the supernatural life is abandoned, man gravitates toward the animal.
That is, he becomes more and more "sensual" not only in the way that we often use that word (i.e. pleasure seeking), but in that his thinking becomes more and more dependent on imagination.
Is it any wonder that most people in a declining culture prefer the television to a good book, especially if the book is difficult?
Drama is a good thing when properly used, just as a picture book for children is good if it is used to draw the children into the intellectual activity of reading.
However, if reading is abandoned in favour of, imagination is developed at the expense of intelligence. The ideal is to control the imagination with the understanding so that the imagination assists the understanding, but the effort is much more likely to be put forth by those who have a religious faith that there is something worth understanding — i.e. an ultimate cause.
This brings us back to metaphysics — the science of being as being.
As we all know by now, metaphysics is a science — it is the science of being as being.
Science is knowledge through causes — therefore knowledge that is certain, universal and necessary. It is a knowledge wherein we know the why because we have traced the cause — not random or chance cause but a necessary cause.
Because metaphysics is the science of being and science is knowledge through causes, we study in metaphysics the cause of being. More precisely, metaphysics is the science of the principles and causes of being as being.
Because the principles and causes of being must be the most universal of all principles and causes, we study the highest and ultimate and most universal principles or causes of everything.
The whole of reality falls under the scope of metaphysics. Is it any wonder than that this is tough? Should such a thing be easy? The difficulty of metaphysics comes not because it is complicated but because it is comprehensive and deep.
It is the science which comprehends everything that is.
THE OBJECT of METAPHYSICS
We can help matters by making a distinction between the material and the formal object of metaphysics. The material object is the subject matter — and we have just said that the subject matter is all things. It’s a big field of study.
The formal object of metaphysics, that is the aspect of the material object (all things), is distinct from the formal object of any other science. Metaphysics asks of being the questions: What is it? What is it made of? What is it for? What has made it come to be? These questions are asked in lesser sciences, also.
It is not that the questions are different, but that they are asked at the deepest possible level — the level of BEING, which all things have in common.
However, the difficulty of metaphysics can be lessened if we think of it as the natural science of man, the science most congenial to the intelligence. Think of children who come to the age of reason. The age of reason is marked by questions of being. Children ask, "What is this?" "What’s it for?" and of course their seemingly untiring questioning as to "Why?".
The difficulty of studying being is that being is applied to all realities but in different senses. The child is a being. The desk is a being. The dog is a being. God is a being. Does this mean that they are all the same?
If each is a being, then, and vastly different from one another, how are they alike? How is the being of a table different from the being of a good deed, or how is the being of a good deed different from the being of an evil deed?
Distinctions are made in being as a condition of existence, being described (substance), being from the standpoint of intelligibility (essence), and being as existence in action (act).
The supreme principle of metaphysics, as you may recall from our little historical sketch of the pre-socratics which ended with Parmenides, is the principle of non-contradiction.
Remember: It is impossible for something to be and not to be in the same sense and in the same subject. Let us put with that two operations of the intellect we have discussed here —
Metaphysics begins with the first glance at being, but it must go beyond the first glance and analyse it. Analysis by definition involves splitting a whole into parts. We can do this by the lowly means of grammar.
In terms of mere grammar, being can be a noun, a participle, or a gerund.
In Latin it is much clearer than in English: ens is the noun being, and esse is the verb to be . The starting point of metaphysics is the notion of ens — the noun. This first notion, however, is very general — it means the general or common aspect of everything.
From that first notion, we move on to other vague , yet progressively more differentiated notions.
We cross over from the vague notion into metaphysical science at the precise moment when the notion of being appears to us as a composite.
A composition, something put together. But for it to be put together, we have to see its parts — which we see by abstracting them.
What is the composition that we must see, and (that has been confused by Descartes et al)? We must see being as a composition of the subject of the act of being and in the act of being itself.
When this notion is clear, the progress can continue — being, existence, essence, substance, act and potential are terms that must be understood before progress can be made.