The natural sciences depend on quantity, on an extensive accumulation of data by means of repeated experiments; the knowledge they procure covers its field in breadth. Philosophy, on the contrary, is not essentially dependent on the multitude of single observations, as it may in principle seize the essence of the object by means of one relevant example; nor is it intent on elaborating a knowledge in breadth.

The dimension in which it seeks to unfold is that of depth; moreover, it aims to comprehend the unity of the entire cosmos, and its crowning act is an advance to the ultimate principle of being: being infinite and absolutely simple, in which all abundance of being is contained per eminentiam.

Inner spiritual poverty is not true spiritual simplicity

Analogously to this cosmic hierarchy in reference to the inner plenitude of being, and according to the two opposite kinds of simplicity in general—the simplicity of primitivity and crudity on the one hand, the metaphysical simplicity of inward unity on the other—we also must distinguish between two extremely different types of human simplicity.

In describing people of primitive minds as simple, we refer to their inner poverty and their incapacity to respond to the depth and the qualitative manifoldness of the cosmos.

The attention of such people may be monopolized by elementary concerns, poor in meaning: for instance, the external necessities of life. Thus, a peasant’s thoughts and worries will sometimes be strictly confined to his chattel and his parcel of land. His life is deployed within the boundaries of a low sphere, impoverished in meaning and devoid of spirituality; in fact, a small section of that sphere, his household economy, may swallow up his life.

Moreover, that tiny microcosm itself may bear no interest for him except from certain pragmatically restricted points of view. He is hardly interested in a domestic animal as a living being, in the deep mystery embodied in a living organism as such. With all that he has no concern: he is absorbed by concerns of economic usefulness, The same applies to the objects of his agricultural activities.

Thus, his world is a shrunken one, both in depth and width, and his conception of the world is simple in the sense of lacking content and differentiation. It is uncomplicated; but that freedom from complication is obtained at the cost of a renunciation of metaphysical depth and abundance. Frequently, again, his inner life will reflect that conception of the world. In such a case, he will be simple in the sense of being coarse. A few primitive motifs, always the same, occupy his mental scene in a monotonous rhythm. This type of simplicity, no less than the aberration we have labeled complexity, forms an antithesis to the true Christian simplicity which is always joined to spirituality and depth of meaning.

Stupidity is not spiritual simplicity