This ideal intuition is not immediate and direct intuition of God, as the pseudo-ontologists contend, and which the church has condemned; but is intuition under the form of necessary, universal, eternal, and immutable ideas--of that which the mind, by reasoning, reflection, and contemplation, proves really is God. What misleads the author and so many others who use the argument he uses, is that the intuition of real and necessary being, and the intuition of contingencies, are given both in the same thought, the one along with the other, and most minds fail to distinguish them--which is done, according to St. Thomas, by the _intellectus agens_, in distinction from the passive or receptive intellect--and hence they suppose that they conclude the ideal intuition from the empirical intuition. This is decidedly the case with Dr. McCosh. The learned doctor admits intuitions, but only intuitions of individual existences--what we call empirical intuitions--whether causes or effects, not intuition of 8 the ideal; and hence his argument for the existence of God proves nothing, for the universal is not derivable from the particular, the necessary from the contingent, nor being from existences. Had he recognized that along with, as its necessary condition, the intuition of the particular there always is the intuition of the universal, etc., he would have placed theology against positivism on an impregnable foundation. The necessary ideas, the universal, the eternal, the immutable, the necessary, connoted in all our thoughts, cannot be simply abstractions, for abstractions have no existence _a parte rei_, and are formed by the mind operating on the concrete object of empirical intuition. As these ideas are objects of intuition, they are real; and if real, they are either being or existences. But no existences are or can be necessary, universal, eternal, immutable, for they depend to be on another, as is implied in the very word existence, from _ex-stare_. Then they must be being, and identifiable in the one universal, eternal, real, and necessary being, and distinguishable from existences or things, as the creator from his creatures, the actor from the act.
We have said that the ideal intuition is not intuition of God, but of that which is God; we say now that the ideal intuition is not formally intuition of _ens_ or being, as erroneously supposed by some to be maintained by Gioberti and Dr. Brownson, but of that which is _ens_. The process of demonstrating that God is consists in identifying, by reflection and reasoning, the necessary ideas or ideal intuition with real, necessary, universal, eternal, and immutable being, and real and necessary being in which they are all identified with God. This process is demonstration, not intuition. When I say, in the syllogism, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises, I have intuition of the necessary, else I could not say it; but I have not intuition of the fact that the necessary is being, far less that it is God. This is known only by reflection and reasoning, disengaging the ideal from the empirical. The idea must be real, or there could be no intuition of it, but if real, it must be being; if being, it must be real and necessary being; and real and necessary being is God. So of all the other necessary ideas. As the intuition is of both the ideal or necessary and the contingent in its principle, and in their real relation, it gives the principles of a complete demonstration of the being of God as creator, and of the universe as the effect of his creative act, and therefore of the complete refutation of pantheism. The vice of Dr. McCosh’s argument is that it proceeds on the denial of ideal intuition, and the assumption that being, God, is obtainable by generalization and abstraction from the individual things given in empirical intuition. It is not obtained by reflection from them, but from the ideal intuition, never separable from the empirical.