IMMANENCE
682
IMMANENCE
vents in Great Britain and Ireland, to all of which
and to five boarding-schools elementary schools are
attached. About 230 sisters teach in these convents.
The English Novitiate is at Rock Ferry, Cheshire.
The other English houses are at Great Prescot Street,
London, E. ; Leeds; Sicklinghall, Yorkshire; Stock-
port; Macclesfield; Stalybridge; Woodford, Essex;
Ramsgate; Liscard, Cheshire; Birkenhead; Wrexham,
Wales; Leith, Scotland. Attached to the Leeds con-
vent is a juniorate for testing vocations. The habit in
England only is blue with a white girdle and a black
veil. In Ireland they have one house in the Archdiocese
of Armagh at Magherafelt, and another in Kildare, to
both of which schools are attached. The institute
has novitiate houses at Bordeaux. France; Bas-Oha,
Lifege, Belgium; Hortaleza, Madrid, Spain; Bellair,
Natal, South Africa; Montreal, Canada; and two in
Asia. Besides the novitiates there are juniorates
attached to some of the convents. There is one at
Lozere, Mende, France, one at Liege, Belgium, and
one at Fromista, Spain.
Steele, Comments of Great Britain; The Holy Family, a pamphlet; article in The Irish Catholic on The Holy Family.
Francesca M. Steele.
Immanence (Lat. in manere, to remain in) is the quality of any action which begins and ends within the agent. Thus, vital action, as well in the physio- logical as in the intellectual and moral order, is called immanent, because it proceeds from that spontaneity which is essential to the living subject and has for its term the unfolding of the subject's constituent ener- gies. It is initiated and is consummated in the inte- rior of the same being, which may be considered as a closed system. But is this system so shut in as to be self-sufficient and incapable of receiving anything from without? — or can it enrich itself l:)y taking up elements which its environment offers and which are at times even neces.sary, as nourishment is to the immanent activity of the body? This is the problem which the philasophies of immanence propose and attempt to solve, not only in respect to man consid- ered as a particular being, but also in respect to the universe considered as a whole. It is, indeed, with reference to this latter aspect that the controversy arose in ancient times.
Historical Sketch. — The doctrine of immanence came into existence simultaneously with philosoph- ical speculation. This was inevitable, since man first conceived all things after his own likeness. He re- garded the universe, then, as a living thing, endowed with immanent activity, and working for the full unfolding of its being. Under the veil of poetic fictions, we find this view among the Hindus, and again among the sages of Greece. The latter hold a somewhat confu.sed Hylozoisra: as they see it, the cosmos results from the evolution of a single principle (water, air, fire, imity), which develops like an animal organism. But Socrates, coming back to the study "of things human", refuses to look upon himself as merely part and parcel of the Great All. He asserts his independence and declares himself distinct from the universe; and thus he shifts the pivotal problem of philosophy. What he professes is, indeed, the imma- nence of the subject, but that immanence he does not conceive as absolute, for he recognizes the fact that man is subject to external influences. Thenceforward, these two conceptions of immanence are to alternate in ascendancy and decline. After Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, absolute immanence regains its sway through Zeno of Cittium, who gives it its clearest expression. In turn it falls back before the preaching of Christianity, which sets forth clearly the person- ality of man and the distinction between God and the world. The Alexandrians, in the wake of Philo, im- part a new lustre to the doctrine of absolute imma- nence; but St. Augustine, borrowing from Plotinus
the Stoic notion of "seminal principles", contends for
relative immanence which in the Middle Ages tri-
umphs with St. Thomas. With the Renaissance
comes a renewal of life for the theory of absolute
immanence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, on the contrary, Descartes and Kant maintain
the transcendency of God, though recognizing the
relative immanence of man. But their disciples ex-
aggerate this latter fact and thus fall into subjective
monism: the ego is shut up in its absolute immanence;
it posits the non-ego. After Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel, the same path is taken by Cousin, Vacherot,
Bergson, and many others. The principle of absolute
immanence becomes a dogma which they seek to im-
pose upon contemporary philosophy. It confronts
revealed religion, and appears as one of the sources
of modernism, which it thus brings into close prox-
imity with liberal Protestantism. The notion of im-
manence is at the present day one of the centres
around which the battle is being fought between the
Catholic religion and monism.
Before passing on to larger developments, we note that (1) under its various aspects, the conception of immanence is the interpretation and extension of a fact observed in the living subject ; (2) in every age it takes on two parallel and opposite forms, which the Encyclical "Pascendi gregis" defines in an eminently philosophical way, as follows: "Etcnim hoc quser- imus; an ejusmodi 'immanentia' Deum ab homine distinguat necne? Si distinguit, quid tum a catholica doctrina differt aut doctrinam de revelatione cur rejicit? Si non distinguit, panthcisnmm habemus. Atqui immanentia haec modernistarum vult atc|ue admittit omne conscientia; phenomenon ab homine, ut homo est, proficisci" (For, we a.sk, does this "imma- nence " make God and man distinct or not? If it does, then in what does it differ from the Catholic doctrine? or why does it reject what is taught in regard to revelation? If it does not make God and man dis- tinct, it is Pantheism. But this immanence of the Modernists would claim that every phenomenon of con.sciousness proceeds from man as man).
Division. — From this general consideration of the subject the following division arises. A. The doctrine of immanence, (I) absolute, (2) relative. And, as this doctrine has of late years given birth to a new method in apologetics, we shall next consider: B. The em- ployment of the method of immanence, (1) absolute, (2) relative.
A. The Doctrine of Immanence. (1) Absolute Im- manence, (a) Its Historical Evolution. — At its outset the doctrine of immanence, properly so called, was con- cerned with solving the problem of the world's origin and organization: the universe was the resultant of an absolutely necessary, immanent evolution of one only principle. The Stoics, who gave it its first exact formula, virtually revived the pre-Socratic cosmog- onies. But they shut up in matter first the "Demi- urgic Word ", in which Plato saw the efficient cause of the cosmos; and, then, the transcendent ly lovable and desirable "Supreme Intelligence", postulated by Aristotle iis the final cause of universal activity. There existed, then, but one principle under a seem- ing duality; it was corporeal, though it expressed it- self sometimes in terms of passivity, when it was called matter, and sometimes in terms of activity, when it was called /orce, or cause. It was the technic fire presiding over the genesis of the world; it was the Divine seminal principle from which all things were born (ttCp rex """5. Aivos anep^LaTiKis). This princi- ple, which is the first to move, is also the first to be moved, since nothing is outside of it ; all beings find in it their origin and their end, they are but successive moments in its evolution, they are born and they die through its perpetual becoming. The fiery spirit seems to move the chaotic mass as the soul moves the body, and this is why it is called the "soul of the
