450 AMBROSE J. MCNICHOLL 



cepts must be resolved, being. Obsessed by his desire for what 

 is absolutely clear and evident, he ruled out sense-knowledge 

 as unworthy to form part of science, and the notion of being as 

 vague and empty. If the idea of being into which alone all 

 other ideas may be resolved, and from which they ultimately 

 derive their intelligibility, is discarded, the only unity possible 

 for human knowledge is that of method; and the method which 

 immediately presents itself, as eminently clear and certain, is 

 that of mathematics. Science must have a starting-point; and 

 if being is rejected, its place must be taken, not by one central 

 radiant source of light, but by several independent ultimate 

 units of intelligibility, regarded as clear and distinct in them- 

 selves, and objects of so many intuitions. Scientific thinking is 

 thus reduced to one of its modes, intuition, playing upon 

 " simple natures," such as thought and extension; and scientific 

 method is whittled down to a few simple rules which, in effect, 

 impose the mathematical type of procedure upon all the sci- 

 ences. Basically, this is the error of univocation; if the analogy 

 of being has not been grasped, neither can the analogy of 

 science. The vital unity of knowledge, growing out from the 

 basic intuition of being, gives way to a dead uniformity of iso- 

 lated compartments of thought, all upon the same level of 

 intelligibility, so that the richness and limitless variety of ex- 

 perience and reality are lost sight of, even the soul itself being 

 treated, in Gilbert Ryle's words, as the " ghost in the machine." ^ 

 M. Maritain has described this Cartesian revolution in terms 

 which I cannot hope to better: 



Unqualified in principle to comprehend the analogy of beings, and 

 so from the first closing to itself approach to divine things, the 

 Cartesian analysis, cutting up and levelling down, can only break 

 the internal unity of beings, destroy alike the originality and 

 diversity of natures, and violently bring everything back to the 

 univocal elements which it has been pleased to select as simple 

 principles. Henceforth, to understand is to separate; to be intelli- 

 gible is to be capable of mathematical reconstruction. To take a 

 machine to pieces and put it together again, that is the high work 



^ The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1951), pp. 15 and 16. 



