Rediscovering Philosophy: Natural and Supernatural Principles
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Philosophy is the science of principles; not, as the superficial thinkers or unthinkers of our materialistic age would have us believe, of sensible or material facts, the proper object of the physical sciences, as astronomy, electricity, chemistry, mechanics, geology, hydraulics, etc. Principles precede facts, originate and govern them. Indeed we know not facts themselves, nor understand their significance or meaning, until we have referred them to their principles. What in the English-speaking world is in our days called philosophy is simply an induction from the observation of the facts of the physical order, and is confined by Sir William Hamilton to physics, psychology, and logic, and excludes not only the supernatural, but the supersensible or intelligible, though within the province of natural reason. But without meaning to disparage philosophy in this sense, or the physical sciences, the fruits of which are seen in the mechanical inventions and material progress of the age, we must maintain that it is infinitely below philosophy, properly so-called. It is, in a subordinate sense, scientia, but not sapientia, according to Aristotle, the science of principles which are supersensible and not obtained by way of induction from sensible facts, whether facts of external nature, or of the soul itself. All principles are supersensible and are objects of the intellect; in no case of the senses. Some of them are known or knowable by the light of nature; others only by the light of supernatural revelation. The science of the former is the philosophy of the natural; of the latter is the philosophy of the supernatural.
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These two philosophies are of principles equally certain; for the light of reason and the light of revelation are both emanations of the divine light or Logos, and each is infallible. We may err and take that to be reason which is not reason, or that to be revelation which is not revelation; but neither can itself err, for both rest on the veracity of God, who is Truth itself, and can neither deceive nor be deceived. The science of revealed principles is as truly science as is the science of principles known by the light of nature, and differs from it only as to its medium. We may then speak of the philosophy of the supernatural with as much propriety and confidence as of the philosophy of the natural.
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The philosophy of the supernatural follows the analogy of the natural. The philosophy of the natural presents the principles of the natural so far as they are cognizable by natural reason in their intelligible phase, their relation to one another, and the facts of the sensible order which they explain and govern. The philosophy of the supernatural presents the principles so far as revealed of the supernatural order, their mutual relation and reciprocal dependencies, and their relation to the natural order which they explain and complete, and which without them is not only incomplete, but absolutely without purpose or meaning.
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We do not pretend to enumerate and describe the principles of the supernatural philosophy, for we are neither philosopher nor theologian enough for that; we lack both the ability and the learning to do any thing of the sort. All we aim at here is to show that there is a philosophy of the supernatural as well as of the natural; and that we live in times when for the vindication of the faith against the various classes of its enemies, it is necessary to recognize and study it to a far greater extent than it is ordinarily studied in our seminaries. The age has no respect for authority, and though we prove conclusively that the Church is divinely commissioned and assisted to teach the faith, and is therefore infallible, we do not meet the real difficulties of the more cultivated classes of unbelievers, or prepare them to accept any article, dogma, or proposition of the faith for the reason that she teaches it. The world outside of the Church may be credulous and superstitious, able, as Clemens of Alexandria said to the Greeks, "to believe anything and everything except the Truth," but have undeniably lost all faith in the supernatural order, and really believe only in the natural, if indeed even so much as that. Our spiritists, who profess to have communications with the spirits of the departed, do not really admit a supernatural order. The real cause of this unbelief, so far as it is intellectual, not moral, is in the assumption that the natural and the supernatural are held by the Church as by the sects to be two separate, independent, and unrelated orders, indeed as two antagonistic orders. They take their views of Christian theology not from the teaching of the Church, but from such errorists as Calivinists and Jansenists, who in their theories demolish nature to make way for grace. The supernatural appears to them an anomaly in the Creator’s works; something arbitrary, illogical, without any reason in the nature of things, or the principles of the universe. No amount of evidence, they contend, can suffice to prove the reality of any order that is above nature or above the reach of natural reason. Hence they attempt to reduce miracles and all marvelous events, too well authenticated to be denied as facts, to the natural order, explicable by natural laws, though we may as yet be ignorant of these laws. Carlyle, one of the oldest of contemporary British thinkers and writers, in his "Sartor Resartus", has a chapter headed "natural-supernaturalism", in which he reduces the supernatural to the natural, and therefore really denies it while apparently asserting it. Natural supernaturalism is a contradiction in terms; and it is more manly to deny the supernatural outright than it is to attempt to explain it by the operation of natural laws.
