In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

220 BOOK REVIEWS of pantheism, is a clear nihilism with respect to creatures. On the other hand, the position that the esse causale is not " something " involves a total nihilism: without subsistent existence nihil habet esse. These are the inevitable results of the attempt to soften the denial that there are diverse acts of existence, the infinite and the finite. That this denial should have been considered at all is incomprehensible. For it is destructive of the very Thomistic existentialism that these scholars would proclaim. Most immediately it is such in its perversion of this doctrine into a hitherto inconceivable pluralistic monism, but in other respects as well it wreaks havoc. For example, in the order of existence God could not be held to exercise true efficient causality; he must be seen as simply imposing Himself upon the finite nature, rather than as communicating to it a distinct existential act. In addition, the analogy of being, which involves a proportion between each essence and its existence, no longer holds when infinite existence is said to be the one act of all things. The accepted understanding of the distinction between essence and existence must also be abandoned; within this scheme of things it is clearly a distinction between the divine and the created nature. Finally, despite innumerable assertions to the contrary, the existential act of the creature has been " essentialized," for it is identified with that existence which is also an essence. All this, however, would surely have been avoided had a more careful textual analysis been undertaken. The teaching of St. Thomas is stated with clarity in the very text from the Sentences upon which Fr. Phelan drew for his argument. Its wording is particularly relevant to Fr. Owens' formulation of their common position. It runs: Cum igitur modus cujuslibet rei creatae sit finitus, quaelibet res creata recipit esse finitum et inferius divino esse quod est perfectissimum. Ergo constat quod esse creaturae, quo est formaliter, non est divinum esse. 2244 North Kemore, Chicago, Illinois JoHN D. BEAcH Thought and Truth. A critique of philosophy: its source and meaning. By M. MAISELS. New York: Bookman Associates, 1956. Pp. 359 with index. $5.00. In his foreword to Thought and Truth Mr. Maisels makes an interesting remark: most of the work, he says, " was written during years of wandering , travail and seclusion which prevented normal exposure to the trends of thought prevalent then and now as well. Any similarity, therefore, between this work and that regnant thought is perforce incidental." And Mr. Maisels explains that he records this fact because it may be "of BOOK REVIEWS 221 some importance, ... for a meeting of minds, as it were, is perhaps valuable to the general appreciation of the thought of a given period and of the concepts which gained prominence in it." Mr. Maisels is quite right. Indeed, if one wanted to understand the meaning of contemporary philosophy , one could not do much better than to turn to Thought and Truth. For it presents, in isolation from the divisions of school and sect, a doctrine which distills what is essential to the philosophical spirit of the midcentury . That, as I see it, is the great value of this work. The very first observation which is the occasion of Mr. Maisels' reflexions and from which arises the fundamental problem of Thought and Truth is the observation of a phenomenon: it is the observation of that human experience which is philosophical activity itself; it is the fact that " man seeks to evolve a world-picture which transcends the bounds of palpable relationships and circumstances and to fix man's own place in that world." Now according to the author, what is distinctive of philosophy is that, unlike other human activities, such as art, and even unlike other intellectual activities, such as "[experimental] science," philosophy seeks "to obtain that which is beyond the reach of sense-experience "; that is why some distinction between appearance and reality is common to all philosophy . This is not true of "science." Indeed, Mr. Maisels shows in detail that there is no " relation of continuity between the two disciplines." And this distinction is important, because the contempt for metaphysics that follows upon...

pdf

Share