Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 103
through the learning of general terms. Alice is enabled to think cat by being
taught the word ‘cat’ (or an equivalent). On this account, therefore, the
concept is not innate, the child had to be taught it; and nor is it abstracted,
she was not able to attend to cats as cats prior to being instructed in the use of
the concept.
Bringing Aquinas into the picture enables one to see how something of
this sort may not just be an alternative to innateness and abstractionism but
a via media. In order for something like the Wittgensteinian explanation to
work it has to be the case that the child has a prior predisposition or potentiality
to form concepts under appropriate influences; and it also has to be the
case that among these is one that is itself already possessed of the concept.
Alice will not pick up the meaning of the term ‘cat’ unless she has a relevant
potentiality, unless the structure of her receptivity is of the right sort. By the
same token, that potentiality will not be actualized except by an intellect that
is already active in using the concept, her older brother James, for example. This
vocabulary of ‘actuality’ and ‘potentiality’ is drawn from the Aristotelian–
Thomistic tradition, as is the less familiar terminology of the mind’s ‘receptivity’
and ‘activity’. Aquinas himself speaks of the active and passive intellects
as powers of one and the same thinker, which raises a question as to whether
he is over-individualistic in his conception of the mind. In any event, here
I am forging a link with Wittgenstein’s linguistic-communitarian account of
the origins of thinking in the individual, and that suggests dividing these
aspects of the intellect, at least in the first instance, between the teacher and
the taught. In these terms one may say that Alice’s intellect is receptive to, or
potentially informed by, the concept cat, while the mind or intellect of James
who has already mastered the use of the term is active with, or actually
informed by this concept. In teaching Alice the word, James imparts the
concept and thereby actualizes her potentiality. This picture grants something
both to innatism and to abstractionism. On the one hand, in order to explain
possession of concepts a native power has to be postulated; but on the other
it is allowed that, in a sense, concepts are acquired through experience.
Notice two features of this explanation. First it seems to give rise to a
regress, and second and relatedly it instantiates the structure of Aquinas’s
primary proof of the existence of God. He writes:
The first and most obvious way is based on change. For certainly some things
are changing: this we plainly see. Now anything changing is being changed by
something else. This is so because what makes things changeable is unrealized
potentiality, but what makes them cause change is their already realized state:
causing change brings into being what was previously only able to be, and can
only be done by something which already is. For example, the actual heat of fire
causes wood, able to be hot, to become actually hot, and so causes change in the