stance, of subject, and of person. As we have already said, our theological thinking has not fully lifted us out of the first stage, still less transformed the second into the full notion of personality. Our Christian consciousness obliges us to esteem God a person, and in our practical bearing we are right. But in our philosophic thinking we are sadly hampered by a fall back into the stage of substantiality.

There is a sense in which the achievement of personality in ourselves is our own deed. The natural foundation for it is given us by the divine. In infancy we are animals, but with this marked difference, that we have the germ of personality. If we ever become proper persons it will be by a true selfassertion, by a distinction which is also a comprehension. This is what Fichte calls the Promethean deed. Is it, then, irrational to suppose that God makes himself a person, eternally grasping, in the focus of personality, his being, which is, in the last analysis, will?

Certainly we must admit that man is a creator in the moral world. His character is his own product, for he makes himself what he is, and freedom has its fullest play here. Ought we then to hesitate to say that the Divine Nature is self-constituted, is God's own deed, from all eternity? Do we not strike at the pure idea of the ethical in the Divine if we cling to the notion that any thing in the Divine Nature is to be considered as given him, as already found? Do we not thus strike at the very root of the absolute?

The fact is, our finite thinking hesitates to repose except in that which is given. We cannot reach the full thought of self-origination. In some way, deny it as we will, we ever fly back to the thought that God's nature is not self-originated, but comes to him ready made. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.

We come to the abyss of the causa sui, and start back affrighted. Our metaphysical notion of being, in general, keeps us back from thorough thinking here. Our philosophy is infected with the notion of a dead core of being, of substance and attributes, of thing and activities. The truth is, being is activity. We are what we do. The soul is activity, and this is its very substance. It is maintained by the divine, incessantly reproduced by him. He, the final source of all being, and all

life is the self-centered activity. We see for a moment the folly of asserting any dead core of being in him, and yet are ever smuggling in this supreme folly in asserting a nature, as it were, back of his activities. God is eternal activity, selforiginated activity, activity ever reproducing itself; and what, pray, is this but causa sui? The philosophers have done good service here in showing that cause and effect need not be separated in time; that in God they are cotemporaneous and coincident. With the well-considered words of Ulrici, on this subject, we will close this discussion. "For God," says he, in his "God and Nature," "being is not given, determined in itself. The Divine Being is creative thought, power, and selfactivity, productive and distinguishing. This being is not at first mere being (Stoff) and afterward distinguishing self-activity; but this self-activity is itself being or matter, (Stoff,) for in it consists the very being of God. Thus through his produc tive and distinguishing self-activity God makes himself the inaterial (Stoff) of his self-apprehension, for only in and with this original self-activity does being (Stoff) have and keep its definiteness."-P. 705.

5. Let us now consider Scotus' doctrine of man. He breaks essentially with the scholastic theory of perception. According to the scholastic theory, perception is effected by species or forms, derived from the external object, which take on more and more of a spiritual character, until in the nidus of the soul the idea is born. There is first the sensible species, then abstraction is made by the active intellect, then results the intelligible species, and finally, in the passive intellect arises the idea of the object. That is, the sensible species modified by abstraction becomes idea. Thus perception is effected by means of the fiction of the species. Again, the distinction had come from Aristotle of the active and the passive intellect.

Now, Scotus had caught a glimpse of the truth on this subject, by realizing in some measure the function of intuition, which would have led him to see that the object and the knowing soul give all the elements of the process. He had already made the distinction between intuitive and abstractive knowledge, in saying that our knowledge of God is of the latter kind, and not the former. He thus has a divination that species and phantasmata are unnecessary entities which FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXV.-2

Occam's razor soon cut off relentlessly. But here Scotus does not draw the immediate consequence. Again, Scotus, with a little irresolution, it is true, abolishes the distinction between the active and the passive intellect. Here was a fertile thought destructive to the scholastic system, but pushed to its consequences only by his successors. In this connection, again, the doctrine of the Formalities, so significant in Scotus, makes its appearance. The faculties of the soul, not to be distinguished in reality from the mind itself, are to be distinguished "formally and from the nature of the thing." Again, and here was a most important distinction, Scotus insisted upon the activity of the mind in perception. The passivity of the intellect in perception was the current thought before him, and he broke really with this view. In so far as he admitted a species at all, he held that this was not a purely passive product of the intellect. Knowledge, he expressly declared, is brought about by a concurrent activity of the understanding. As the father without the mother, he says, cannot generate, so cannot the understanding generate knowledge without the object. By far the greater significance, according to him, attaches to the intellectual activity. He almost makes the external object a mere occasion of spiritual activity.

The immediate successors of Duns drew the consequences which flow from his positions, and banished species and phantasms from the field of philosophy. Peter Aureolus, the Scotist, who died only thirteen years after his master, declares the species unnecessary for the explanation of knowledge. His neat statement is as follows: "That which we behold (intuemur) is not any form seen as it were in a mirror, (specularis,) but the thing itself, having phenomenal being, and this is the concept of the mind, or objective knowledge."

Durandus, who lived at the same time, and even belonged to the school of Thomas, reduced species to the physical impression of the external object. Besides, he makes a definite distinction between intuitive and abstractive knowledge, and abolishes that between the active and the passive intellect, though cutting off the active. Occam, who, doubtless, attended upon Scotus' lectures, most decidedly throws overboard all species whatever, and abolishes the distinction between the active and the passive intellect. A most important addition

to the doctrine of perception made by Occam, and emerging by a scratch of the nail from Scotus, is this. He asks the question, In what consists the likeness between thought and thing in knowledge? The answer is, Our conceptions stand related to things as mere signs. As smoke indicates fire and groaning pain, so without any absolute likeness our perceptions guarantee the external world. He goes deeper yet, and asks after the nature of thought, as subjective fact in the knowing subject. There are three positions, he says, which may be taken here. It may be an image of the external object, or a certain quality of the soul, or, lastly, the act of thought itself. He decides for the last on the principle of parsimony. Still, further, his doctrine of signs is a most valuable one, and leads to a true theory of perception. There are three kinds of termini, as he expresses it, the written sign, the verbal sign, and the conceptual sign. This last is the natural sign of the object, and cannot be changed. Thus thought, the intention, is the sign of the thing thought, not an arbitrary but a natural sign. The mind, then, is constructive in perception, and so Scotus' thought has led Occam almost to the phenomenalism of Lotze. Pierre D'Ailly declares God could annihilate all objects outside our minds, and still produce the representations of the same within us, and we should not note the loss of the objective world; a statement which anticipates Berkeley by more than three centuries. All that it is needful to suppose is the constant divine activity and the uniform course of nature.

We pass now to his notion of human freedom. In Scotus' system, freedom, as we have seen, plays the largest rôle. Spontaneity is his shibboleth every-where. Here he stands in diametrical opposition to St. Thomas. The latter is a Necessitarian, the former the most decided and uncompromising advocate of freedom. He asserts the power of alternativity, or contrary choice, saying explicitly, "The will, in so far as it is first actuality, is free to opposite acts. The will is the total cause of its activity." Again he says: "Nothing other than the will is total cause of volition in the will." The object may be the condition sine qua non, our knowledge of it may be indispensable, but the necessitation of the understanding, such as it is, can never be carried over to the will. It is only in the sense that we must know the object of desire that it can be called the

partial cause of the will. He stands squarely against the modern statement of the strongest motive as determining the will, or of the higher good as that which must be a compellant motive. It is here that Scotus takes his ground against all Determinists. Edwards tells us, following Locke, that "Freedom is the power that any one has to do as he pleases." True, but what if the choice is a necessitated one and wholly beyond the spontaneity of the individual? It has been often said that the position of Edwards involves the clock-hammer freedom to strike and no more. The arrow flying through the air, says Spinoza, if conscious, would say, "Behold how freely I move." Professor Fisher, in his article on "The Philosophy of Edwards," rehearses the same irrelevant matter as his master Edwards. Liberty, he tells us, relates to matters subsequent to volition, and this is the only proper use of the term freedom as applied to personal agents. The relevancy of dragging in Professor Fisher here is seen in the fact that he quotes St. Thomas to fortify Edwards. Aquinas says, "God, in moving the will, does not compel it, because he gives it its own inclination." Again he says, "to be moved from itself is not repugnant to this that it is moved by another." But this being moved by God, and this acting from a derived inclination, is the very thing which the advocates of freedom deny. Thus Scotus denies any such secret spring in the will, back of consciousness, whereby fata ducunt volentem. The statement of Scotus is: "Nothing else than the will is total cause of volition in the will." Spontaneity in the fullest sense, over against the divine action, is the solvent word. The Necessitarian assertion of freedom in the will, certainly as asserted by Edwards, is the boldest example of promise to the ear which is broken to the heart. Dr. A. A. Hodge, in a recent statement on the subject of the will, asserts that "Edwards' infinite series remains a triumphant refutation of the old doctrine of the liberty of indifference." The sole answer to this, forever exploding the infinite regress, may be given in the words of Scotus himself: "If we should ask, why the will wills this, there is no cause to be given, except that the will is will." The will itself can throw the sword of Brennus into the scale and decide from its own autonomic center. This decides the question, then, as to the comparative rank of the intellect and the will. Thomas