Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Grammar and Metaphysics - The Catholic Answer to Evolutionary Relativism


History proves that some things never change.  God gave language to Adam.  There are many evidences of this in the second Chapter of Genesis.  But, the most striking of these, is Adam’s naming of the animals. (Gen. 2: 19-20)

 

History has proven that the noun as a part of speech, exists in every language developed since Adam.  All the principles of Metaphysics are found realized in Grammar:  nouns, verbs and all their modifiers are but the names of the things that exist – that have essential natures, that move and that are known to us by their quantities, qualities, relations, time, place, clothing, posture, agency and receptivity.  It is by the nouns, verbs and their modifiers that we record, orally or in writing, the intelligibility of things, and it is by seeking out and describing their causes – Efficient, Final, Material and Formal that we analyze the reality that surrounds us.  Metaphysics is grammar in action.

 

But Logic is something else.  Logic is Reason on the Rational Reflective Mind of man, imposing its own innate or created Order upon the given language.  Not until Aristotle was there even such a thing as the “science”, or better, the art of right reasoning in language.  Aristotle’s” Organon” gave to the world the only true art of reasoning.  And notice that the subject and the verb correspond, not so much to the Metaphysical Substantial Form, but more properly to the subject of the logical proposition or sentence.  It is because Aristotle himself went on to develop the Science of First Principles or the Metaphysics that this latter science of Being, as such, escaped being overwhelmed by the Logic of Propositions or Right Reasoning in and by means of the grammatical, proportional sentence.  The fact remains, however, that the historical record of all languages however much the philologists and linguistic love to emphasize the changes – the historical record clearly demonstrates the absolute stability, the unchanging fact that nouns signify real things in the real world, (unless it is clearly indicated that the references are fictional), that verbs signify actions or motion, and that all modifiers correspond to the nine categories of Accidents, by which the mind knows the Substantial Form or the Genesis kind specified in Genesis One. 

 

All of Reality, in its diverse structures and forms, manifests this stability and immutability of certain forms, not only the bara min., created kinds of Genesis One, but certain natural laws, such as those inscribed in the human conscience and codified in the 10 Commandments;  but also those supernatural laws that are so marvelously spelled out in the Prophecies of the Old Testament. 

 

See The Preparation of the Incarnation by Henry James Coleridge – reprinted 2013 - originally published in 1885, and for the unmistakable distinctions of Grammar from both Logic and Metaphysics.  See Gwynne’s Grammar, by N.M. Gwynne Knopf. 2014

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