After a reflection from a post-Kantian perspective on what the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition terms "the transcendental predicates of being"—unity, truth and goodness—with a side-glance at that most difficult predicate, beauty, I shall offer an opinion as to why such an all englobing set of"metaphysical" concepts remains, not just relevant for theory and valuable for therapy, but inevitable for thought and rational action. This will lead to a suggestion regarding one aspect of the notions’ usefulness: the therapeutic value of a proper understanding of the"transcendentals."

The position I shall explicate is neither the objectivist realism of classical Aristotelian-Thomistic ontology, nor the subjectivist idealism of Neokantianism. My position is that a balanced epistemology-ontology able to make sense of the interaction of transcending reality and poetic subject provides the sane context within which sound therapy can go forward. To make such a position clear, after a first, quick presentation of the notion of the transcendental predicates of being, I shall situate my position in relation to the Thomists and the Kantians.

I. The Inevitability and the"Objectivity" of the Transcendental Predicates of Being

Aristotle explains that one cannot demonstrate a first principle, for it is the expression of the fundament, and hence is derived from no higher known reality. A first principle is intuited in virtue of the mind’s most basic opening onto reality, its primordial grasp of being itself.

But that indemonstrability does not mean it is impossible to talk about principles, to draw attention to the shared experience which gives rise to the expression one calls"the principle," and thus to point out what renders them credible. (Note carefully for future reference the three levels of intentionality here evident: reality, experience of the reality, expression of the experience of the reality.)

The first principles of being are unique in being"transcendental" because, in their applicability, these predicates"go beyond" all things and the differences separating things to be said of all that is and can be. That is why, to justify the contention that the thought of being cannot be correctly separated from them, one can only point to the all pervasive experience of being, seeking to clarify through mustering attention to many aspects of experience what is meant when one speaks in these terms of being. In reflecting on these transcendental predicates, one is confronting, as metaphysics always tries, the ultimate context within which all other science and practice takes place and has its sense.

Allow me to assume a didactic pose for a moment to recall what the tradition understood by each of these"transcendental predicates of Being." I shall use the opportunity to clear up a problem which arises for us moderns who have been formed by the subjectivism of post Kantian thought.

The transcendental predicates"unity,""something," and"thing—unum, aliquid, and res, to employ St. Thomas’ terminology, are best understood together.

Aquinas points out that all that we perceive and understand presents itself to consciousness as something (aliquid): every perceived and understood thing is not just a unity, but a whole of a specific kind. The all englobing unity would be the totality of Being, God and cosmos comprehended as one all inclusive structure. While the human mind can conceive of such a totality—obviously I just did, or I would have been unable to express it—that is not how experience first proceeds. In everyday experience, to know something is to grasp it as standing out from the totality of reality, as having a certain consistency of its own identifiable sort, so that it appears to us not only as a thing, res, but always as some identifiable and comprehensible, in other words conceivable kind of thing, aliquid.

Right there, one can glimpse a possible Kantian way of interpreting the fact of this ‘thingly unity’: It is obviously, declares the Kantian, a creation of mind, responding to the need of our intelligence to introduce a manageable order into experience. Hence such unity reflects more how our mind works than how things really are independently of the conditions of human knowing."Transcendentality" is nothing but a reflection of the structures of mind, the conditions for the possibility of knowing. What is"all englobing" is not Being itself understood as reality independent of mind but finite mind itself.

With the Human and Kantian insight that this transcendentality might have something to do with the very way the human mind is fashioned came a peculiar twist to much of modern philosophy: if the human mind structures reality in a certain way, proportioned to its own needs and possibilities, then, assumed Kant and all those whom he impressed, it is not reality in itself we know but only the products of mind. We are reduced to interrogating these products of mind for hints and glimpses of what might lie beyond the humanly fashioned world of our perception, but we can have no objective, theoretical knowledge of reality that is not in some way shaped by the mind. The first level in our three tier intentional structure, the foundation, absorbed into the second, the experience, which has a structure of its own.

But, the realist replies, it in no way follows from the principle that phenomena are"products of mind" and subject to the conditions of human finitude that what is thus allowed to presence and, within the limits of human perception, reveal something of itself, is not part of reality, present to mind, as it exists independently of mind.

Suppose for a moment instead that the mind, arising from the very bosom of nature, has been fashioned through the evolutionary process to deal with reality on the scale of human existence determined by our bodies and required by the existential demands of human life. Why would not what we know in our way from a human point of view be able to reveal within those limits something of the perceived thing’s own reality, some of its ways of being organized in itself on a certain scale of coalescence and stability, which, while it may not be all there is to reality is nevertheless real as far as it goes? Kant, of course, admitted that in a way our sensible knowledge does reveal something of how things are, but, he warned, we must not extend our conclusions about things beyond what can be sensibly verified, because the generalizable aspects of the phenomena re the contribution of mind. And that would of course be true with a vengence when we declare metaphysically that the transcendental predicates apply to all being as such.

The realist contends that the world is able to reveal to mind the truth that the dynamic processes which make it up not only display sufficient consistency to base verifiable extrapolations, but for moments of vastly varying scale, coalesce and stabilize into recognizable things, which are classifiable by human minds according to their characteristic"whatnesses" because they really do manifest in the glimpse we have of them some inherent form or structure—they reveal themselves to be in themselves"aliquid," something. Those"whatnesses" are of infinite variety in scale, texture, degree of animation, etc., revealing"stuff" which is not projection of mind but received by mind. This is as true of the fleeting existence of a sub-atomic particle as it is of the long endurance of the earth. The possession of inherent structure is a characteristic of being itself which mind is fashioned, not to produce but to recognize.

When I see a tree for instance, it is because the light reflecting off a stable, structured, distinctive matter organized in the what characteristic of those large woody plants we have come to recognize and classify as"trees" is transmitted through the intervening atmosphere to my eyes and is there captured and transmitted as nerve impulses to the brain where, without my having to work at it explicitly, much relevant information about similar things is mustered to flesh out the present signals with interpretative context useful for knowing just this kind of thing, -- trees. All of this cerebral activity is focused around the continuing reception of the complexly structured light signals which contain much potential information about the tree, if I choose to attend to it and interrogate it in ways relevant to what it has to offer.

So is common sense so wrong in insisting that"there really is a tree out there in the garden"? Once again, the Kantian would say, no, that is quite natural, but what is revealed as"tree" or"grass" or"sky" is only phenomenal—it tells us nothing about"the thing in itself" from which, because it is"objective being" we can somehow generalize about all of being.

The realist begs to differ. When I spontaneously interpret the light signals as telling me that part of the impinging reality is structured as tree, another part as grass, another as sky, another as bushes, a certain ensemble as garden, I am responding to an actual state of affairs in which many of the impinging processes are objectively coalesced and stabilized in the things themselves by organizing principles which remain in part mysterious to us but which make those things into these distinctive entities of recognizable characteristic kinds, which distinctive"whatnesses" (aliquid) are signalled to us by the inherently structured sensed information. The intellect is able to intuit in the structured sense information gathered and transmitted to it by our structured sensorium aspects of the way these things are in themselves and is able from that to understand something of our relations to things and of the inherent reality of being itself. Unity is a transcendental predicate of being, not because everything is discovered only in mind, but because all things reveal themselves to mind as also structured in distinctive ways (alaiquid) in themselves, and as related to one another in larger systems and settings, -- larger unities—which themselves are knowable as they function in themselves. Kant’s assumption that partial excludes in itself (an sich) does not hold up to critical reflection. It was an arbitrary move (Descartes’ actually) to equate"in itself" with totality. Paradoxically, acceptance of the objectivity of metaphysical predication depends on restoring recognition to our always partial,"from a point of view" knowing of its ability to know some things about Being definitively even though no thing is known exhaustively.

I hear the Kantians still grumbling."If one were to grant this much to the realism of ordinary experience, is that justification enough for the leap to the transcendental claim that whatever is is as some kind of unity, stability, and potentially identifiable whatness? I might be willing to go so far as to admit that the things of our experience do manifest to use some inherent form or structure, some relatively stable objective relationships to one another. But that all being as such should exhibit something like thingness?"

If one interprets"thingness" (res = unum + aliquid) as it is manifest in the tree or the lawn, then clearly it would not apply to a reality such as a magnetic field. But a magnetic field is nonetheless itself recognizably a distinguishable stability-within-ongoing-change, an identifiable and measurable set of dynamic relationships not to be confused with a light beam or with acoustic waves passing through air. The unity and whatness of the earth’s atmosphere, taken as a whole, makes it distinguishable both from the atmosphere of Venus and from the part of the earth’s atmosphere one has just compressed into a tire. If certain information received by consciousness demands distinction of a sub-atomic particle of no extension, of a minuscule quantum of energy and a duration of 10 to the minus 8 seconds, then that"something" enjoys nothing like the mass and duration of the tree. Yet the information we extrapolate from our meter readings suggests something out there enjoys enough consistency, stakes out enough of a distinctive time-space for itself to merit our distinguishing and situating it in a larger setting of reality, of which it is a knowable part.

The question of the individual thing’s setting in a larger context of reality is no side issue. The unity in itself or any entity and the unity of all being have to be considered together—and considered in their objectivity—if either is to be properly understood. No entity exists in isolation, all exist in a setting, not just of consciousness (a subjective setting) but within a complexity of relationships to other entities, an objective setting. To be sure, each thing and every given setting reveals itself to consciousness within a given mental context. So philosophers must take care not to confuse these: objective setting and mental context are correlates, but they are strictly distinct. Every"objective" setting and every mental context is related through the entities contained within it and through its position in a stream of conscious life, to larger settings and more embracing contexts.

All of our experience points to the relatedness of all settings and all mental contexts: all open onto larger scenes, and all together onto a single englobing reality. Science presupposes a single cosmos. It is logically possible that other universes exist outside the finite, expanding time-space of our cosmos, but if somehow a relationship were to be established as existing between these universes, so that we came to know of the existence of one or many other universes, they would have to take their place within the englobing context of unified meaning which is the human conceptual"world."

That principle of meaningfulness cannot be"proven," but nothing in experience counts as evidence against it and everything in experience points towards its truth.

The relevance of the two kinds of unity—that of the particular entity of a given kind and that of all being as such, is the following: The meaning of the internally coherent form, or structure of any entity is fully grasped only when reference is made outward as well to its setting; and the unity of all being is not a formless All but a composition of many interacting entities within a complex web of identifiable relationships.

These considerations prepare us quite naturally to reflect on another transcendental predicate:

Everything that is, by virtue of its very being, is knowable. This is what the tradition meant by affirming the predicate verum to be transcendental.

Is this affirmation founded in anything more credible than an extrapolation of our experience—because everything we have ever encountered and then investigated has yielded intelligibility, we assume that everything must be inherently knowable? Or is it a sly importation from religious faith: Because God is all knowing and God has created all that exists outside Himself, God knows all, therefore everything is verum?

Something of both may indeed be at work in the tradition. (But remember that Aristotle, who first identified the transcendentals, had no notion of creation). There is however more support for this principle than the habits of common sense and the transcendental vision of religious faith: the principle can be defended, -- defended, not proven—in part by explaining what it means to claim that something is knowable, and then, secondly, by considering the absurdity of the contrary, the assertion that something may be which is per se unknowable.

Most fundamentally, what occurs when something is known? More is involved than a mere exchange of information contained in DNA. When a thing is related to consciousness, some kind of an insight is enjoyed into the distinctive"whatness" that makes the object distinguishable from its surroundings. The"seeing" of consciousness is able both to penetrate to something of the sense of the form or structure which makes up the thing and to gaze about and grasp its relations to its setting and to like and contrasting things.

We do not have time here to reflect on the wonders of mind as we experience it, its capacities, termed"spiritual" by the tradition, both to penetrate into and to plane above things, to decompose and recompose them imaginatively, to compare and contrast, abstract and classify. Our attention is rather ont he nature of things, that they allow of such operations because they present themselves as having distinctive forms and structures, distinguishable features, not reducible to the Kantian categories, observable and comprehensible, and because they relate causally and appear always in an objective setting. No matter how finely we probe into them, they reveal ever smaller structures within structures, ever different textures and clever tricks of organization, every surprising relationships which we do not invent imaginatively but, often to our greatest surprise, discover. With our investigations, mystery may compound, but always because fresh discoveries carry us forward to new frontiers of the unknown. That unknown however always yields to new penetration of mind.

Consider what it would mean to suggest that somewhere, somehow there existed something inherently unknowable. That would mean that it had no structure, no forum, no whatness, that it relates to nothing else in any definite or distinguishable way and therefore now sense can be made of it. In other words, it would mean literally nothing at all.

3. Good

Whereas"true" is predicated of everything because of a potential relationship to mind,"good" (bonum) is said of everything that is or can be because of a potential relation to will.

What did the tradition understand when it affirmed that the will embraces the goodness of something?

A center of conscious initiative affirms the being of something either by willing it into existence, as the Creator does absolutely or the artist partially, or by acknowledging and accepting the existence of something pre-existing its knowledge of it. Accepting means not just acknowledging the fact that it is, but willing its well-being (benevolentia).

As the mosquito presently coveting my blood exists, it is told. I acknowledge that it displays marvelous genetic ingenuity, and its ability to deploy its sniffer to sense the carbon dioxide of my breath and thus find my unsuspecting skin in such short order is admirable.

SWAT! So much for him, or rather her, as it is the female of that species who is blood thirsty!

So where is the love and affirmation in all that? What we have here obviously is a situational conflict of goods, with the higher consciousness—my own—having in this case the power and the right to adjudicate. My conform (assume for the sake of the example we are in a malaria and encephalitis is free zone!) against his very existence, just as my need for protein overrides the chicken’s joie de vivre. We do not know whether mosquitoes are"good for" anything. (The dragonflies find them, apparently, exquisite!) But that is not the point. The entomologist fascinated by his study of their astonishingly complex structure is closer to what is meant when it is said that all that is is good. But the analogous sense hidden in the unitility relationship of"good for..." must be brought together with the purely contemplative sense of"good" in a complete doctrine of this transcendental.

St. Thomas points out that every finite thing is not just good but also suffers from"metaphysical evil," and may from"moral evil.""Metaphysical evil" is a way of expressing the transcendental reality that to exist in a limited way entails coming up against the bounds of one’s being, if I may so put it, as every thing does in the struggle for existence and for life, in all the conflict of goods which mark so may collisions between things struggling to maintain themselves, to absorb others rather than to be absorbed, and which, on the level of entities enjoying any degree of consciousness, is the source of much suffering.

To declare of every coherence, every form, every thing, every distinguishable process that it is good is to go beyond affirmation of its intelligibility to affirmation of its appreciability, a recognition of its claim, however modest, to exist, of its inherent"dignity," we would say of beings which reach a certain level of nobility, but for the individual atom, the light beam, the single cell, what can we say? its"integrity?" its"reality"? its"beauty"?

Another reflection of this fundamental manifestation of being’s appreciability is found in the notion of physical evil: that to a given kind of organization is due of its nature a certain perfection, and when it is absent, we recognize a physical deficiency, for instance blindness in a human being, an impaired leg in a monkey, failure to bring forth fruit in a tree, cancerous multiplication of cells in any organism. The acknowledgement of deficiencies, disorders, struggles and conflicts is a recognition, not just of limits, but of the reality of order—relate successes of organization in the pursuit of goods necessary for the well being of given entities as well as of larger systems (perhaps of the cosmos as a whole?), and ultimately the recognition of a hierarchy of goods.

This last has never been claimed as a transcendental, although ordo seems, in all classical metaphysics, recognized as a fundamental characteristic of being taken as a whole. Sapientia est ordinare, declares St. Thomas. Moreover, there is no ordering of a vast complexity anywhere in our experience without a hierarchy of excellences. Again, is this a principle of Being as such? If so, it is one against which the instincts of egalitarians would seem to run counter. I shall have more to say about that in a moment.

In judging about goods and in ordering goods, -- good for whom and good for what? -- the knower must be careful to distinguish points of view, and he must strive to become ever more aware of the limits of his own wisdom, the all englobing understanding into which he integrates goods whenever he judges. Nevertheless, I shall contend, the ultimate standard for judging the adequacy of our wisdom remains objective: common cynically, we strive to measure it against the reality of the structures and processes of the"in itself" world which transcends me, the willful center of initiative. The all-Pervasiveness of the transcendental predicates of being founds this sense of potential consistency and meaning to the world.

4. Is"Beauty" a Transcendental?

Aristotle did not list beauty among the transcendentals. St. Thomas at one point suggest that pulchrum may be the resplendid shining forth of Being when all the transcendentals are considered together in their unity.

In a discourse that is already too long, even for a keynote address, I must avoid launching into a mini-treatise in aesthetics. Others in this conference will lead us to contemplate this most mysterious of all BEing’s dimensions. I want to make just one point essential to the whole reflection on the transcendentals: the distinction between aesthetic beauty—the incarnate human spirit’s encounter with sensual beauty—and the larger reality of beauty as a transcendental. This provides the occasion for considering the analogous character of the predication of all the transcendentals.

Just as we are able to distinguish the sense in which something is good for the fulfillment of some goal I have set and the much larger sense in which each being can be said to be good in itself; and just as we can understand that my perception of the order of goods is limited by my perspective and is surely not the vision of the total order of things only God enjoys, so we can see that the kind of resonance set up in our bodies by the aesthetic appreciation of a well-ordered and clearly resplendent entity is only analogically related to the sense in which the mind finds a mathematical proof to be beautiful, or we talk of the life of Mother Theresa as that of a"beautiful person." One can quite see that the beauty of God is a reality exceeding the human sensorium or imagination. Already the beauty of the physical cosmos, which we glimpse in its galaxies and comets and radiations, is beyond our physical grasp, although the mind affirms its reality.

These kinds of adjustment of sense have to be made in every predication of the transcendentals, even on the humbler experiential levels. We can see that the unity of a worm is different from that of a gorilla, the latter having organs, a central nervous system, a high consciousness. A sonata is not beautiful in exactly the same way as a rose. The fact that the mind and the imagination can rise above the level of everyday perceptual experience with"material" things to predication about the operation of spirit and even God, raises enormous issues about the relations of mind to perceptual experience which existentialism, phenomenology, Neo-Thomism and even some forms of Neo-kantianism have been examining afresh, with much more openness to the fine points of experience than the anti-metaphysical program of Kant encouraged.

In acting, we cannot avoid judging relative goods; therefore by implication we integrate our appreciation of things into at least a rough and ready practical wisdom. This entails inevitably making sweeping implicit judgments about being. A relentless hedonist, for instance, says by his actions that the pleasure of the moment is the ruling good. (I am going here on the truth of the old adage:"Actions speak louder than words!")

Indeed, our acts"speak," that is manifest an implicit set of relationships with other things which imply something about their overall sense. The recognition of this is an acknowledgement of the intrinsic intentionality of human existence. All actions are pregnant with meaning for an observing consciousness, and not just reflective human acts. I believe I interpreted correctly the meaning of our cat’s being in the crab apple tree just now: she intended to grasp herself a bird for lunch. In judging what I see of her action, I bring my past knowledge of felines to the experience, providing some of the context needed to understand what is happening. A little sparrow’s gruesome death confirms just how right my judgment was.

Smokey’s crouch spoke eloquently of intentions. With human acts, we often read in gestures a sense quite different from stated intentions. Legitimately we insert our interpretation of a gesture into a context of on-going action and declarations in building up our understanding of a person’s life and character. We come to judge what it is they are really about, and what they really believe.

This is not to suggest that the average person’s practical wisdom is all of a piece, an eloquent implication of flawless order in the world. Human beings manifest a degree of inconsistency in their lives, a lack of integrity, pursuing inconsonant ends in ways that betray confusion in their beliefs about the significance of life and the meaning of reality, and we are all guilty of some degree of hypocrisy—our actions not living up to our noble declarations.

This kind of confusion, and lack of integrity in action when, for whatever reason, we seem to act against our stated convictions"out of weakness," brings untold misery in its wake. On the other hand, only fanatics and rare saints achieve great consistency. the difference between fanatic and saint lies in the truth of their respective ends and the degree of openness to all growth this brings with it.

It is necessary to human well-being to think about the longer range significance of what we are doing, where we are going, what we are making out of our lives, in the light of whatever it is we can discover about who we are, what human nature is all about, what kind of a cosmos this is in which we must make our way.

In asserting that it is better to think as explicitly and adequately as we can about"the sense of it all," I am doing nothing more than affirming the principle of reason, which follows from the transcendental intuition of being as truth. It is better to know than not to know, it is better to act in keeping with the way things are rather than substituting arbitrary fantasies, however difficult it may be in a given situation to discern the true nature of the relevant things and settings.

Little progress can be made in explicating the implicit metaphysics underlying our practical wisdom without some effort to formulate the fundamental principles of our beliefs about being and how it stands basically with the world.

Just last evening a 32 your old computer specialist was explaining to me what he means when he says he is an"old Tory." His sense of beholdness as a citizen to a civic order, he explained, is founded in the conviction that there is a human nature, that it is part of alrager order of nature, and that if we are to act rationally it must be by respecting that order, to the extent we can discover what it is. Part of it is the need for all to work together to create a just civic order. He went on to say that he does not see that recognition of such an order entails acknowledging a willful, knowing, providential Source of such an order, so he prefers to call himself an"atheist" rather than have himself saddled with the unthought-through demands of some traditional religion.

Wall-to-wall metaphysics, that. So may wide-sweeping arbitrary declarations which can neither be proven nor disproven? Mischievous in their pretentiousness?

I would say rather an honest expression of my friend Bruce’s global experience of the world as he lives it, the starting point of further reflection, by him alone and with friends, who can better challenge the implications of what he says, and muster experience of their own to raise questions about the adequacies of his formulations to embrace everything they have experienced to exist. One’s metaphysics, understood as the ruling principles of a wisdom, both illumine, as part of the all-englobing horizons of interpretation of the world, every experience, as we seek to make sense of it, and at the same time should be open to deepening and enrichening under the impact of every kind of experience. How this dialectic ruling principle and experience proceeds concretely, that is how truth on this metaphysical scale is pursued, is the subject of my major research, which has thus far produced a rather overwhelming four volumes of manuscript, bearing the over-all title, Truth and Tradition.

In the remaining time, I would like to offer an oblique kind of evidence of the worth of metaphysical reflection by suggesting how an explicit understanding of the transcendental predicates of being can have a therapeutic value.

My basic contention here is that possession of a nonfanatic sense of orientation is necessary to mental well being. This can be enhanced if a person has a lively sense that the world coheres, that it is in itself intelligible, and that it is, overall, good. St. Thomas suggests these correlative aspects of being are sometimes glimpsed together in the experience of beauty and of order. The experience of love introduces us into the very heart of such an understanding of being.

But is this vision of being not simply a projection of romantic wishful thinking about a sensible, even lovey-dovey world, an Eden of order and fulfillment we would all consent to live in, were it only real? What justification is there for believing such a thing? What about the terrible reality of conflict, dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest, Yuppie agressivity, senseless suffering, flight into obsession and addiction, and all these other"good things"?

We brushed past the problem of evil and disorder as we sought to understand what the tradition means in affirming bonum as a transcendental predicate of being. We saw that the predicate of metaphysical evil also applied to all finite entities and that may suffer as well from physical evil. That all being, in so far as it exists, is good does not exclude the pain of concrete non-being in the form of limits and collisions between limited beings, and imperfections in the forms of things.

We did not at that point go into the further issue of moral evil arising from abuse of the most creative of finite being possibilities, human freedom. Leaving open the question of the degrees and kinds of involuntariness mixed into unhealthy fantasies and destructive acts, clearly much pathology and much sinfulness consists in unwillingness to respect reality, or in trying to change it in ways that are either impossible or needlessly destructive of good possibilities.

The effective center of human freedom is closely bound to our ability to move about our attention, to focus on what we want to see, to suppress what we want to ignore, and to conjure up possibilities in fantasy. Attention is not all, of course: there is also the need actually to act when we know we should, with cowardice restraining us when we know we should move ahead.

"Weakness of will" and abuse of freedom, using our powers to ignore, distort or destroy the goodness of reality meaninglessly is the profoundest mystery in human experience. It is not extravagant to suggest that much of Judaeo-Christian revelation and subsequent theology is intended to give meaning to suffering, especially that caused by human perversity. After all, the central Christian symbol is an atrocious instrument of execution for the worst criminals, used to murder the Most Just One.

Can we stare in the face evil, especially the worst depravities brought on by moral abuse, and still believe we can derive genuine therapeutic benefit from reflecting on the transcendental predicates of being? Does metaphysical reflection on these analogous generalities yield to reason, and can reason get carried into action without the graciously given light of faith, a healing consolation?

It seems to me the history of thought shows the ability of human reason to embrace a wide sweep of reality outside the order of revelation. neither Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle or the great Stoics knew the revelation of Sinai or Isaiah or in Jesus Christ.

If the principles of being we have enunciated and then commented on so briefly here reflect being as it is, then reason must have access of its very nature to the vision of a cosmos that reassures by its order, its goodness and its beauty despite all its imperfections, the destructive aspects of which seem in no way destined to overwhelm the constructive impulse of beings’ unfolding. The fundamental experience of being, on this view, would seem to encourage a kind of metaphysical confidence that our search for truth and sense is rewarded by ever new discovery and successful personal and societal development—that being manifests itself as a way that is a life, that the cosmos itself is fruitful.

It is pointless to try to hide that my own appreciation of this metaphysical vision is influenced by Christian faith. But in proposing its reasonableness to an ecumenical audience I refer again to the express metaphysics of the greatest Greek thinkers and to echoes of the same intuitions in thinkers of the East before Christianity penetrated those regions, and I would point to people I know who would acknowledge much of what was said in Part I without sharing a belief in Providence. This is important because, if the fundamental metaphysics of being entailed by the transcendental predicates is true and it is implicit in reason itself, it provides the one, true and good framework within which therapeutic reorientation of clouded lives can successfully take place.

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