"Being has been conceived heuristically as the objective of the detached and disinterested desire to know, and more precisely as what is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. This heuristic notion has been found to underlie all our knowing, to penetrate all conceptual contents, to go beyond them, to provide a core for all meaning. . . . For it is not only our notion of being that is heuristic, that heads for an objective that can be defined only in terms of the process knowing it, but also the reality of proportionate being itself exhibits a similar incompleteness and a similar dynamic orientation towards a completeness that becomes determinate only in the process of completion" (247). This seems it is not enough to know proportionate being.
There is a connection between the "dynamism of the mind and the dynamism of proportionate being. It affirms that the objective universe is not at rest, not static, not fixed in the present, but in process, in tension, fluid" (248). The universe is developing.
Lonergan will now look at the genetic method and the notion of development.
First, there is the "principle of emergence"(248). Second, there is the "principle of correspondence" (249). Third, there is the principle of "finality." "The underlying manifold is an upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism towards ever fuller realization of being" (249). Fourthly, there is the principle of "development itself". It is the "linked sequence of dynamic higher integrations" (250). Fifthly, the development "is marked by an increasing explanatory differentiation" (250). Sixthly, the development is "capable of a minor flexibility inasmuch it can pursue the same ultimate goal along different routes" (251). Seventhly, it is capable of major flexibility "that consists in a shift or modification of the ultimate objective" (251).
"Classical method is concerned to reduce regular events to laws. Genetic method is concerned with sequences in which correlations and regularities change. Accordingly, the principal object of genetic method is to master the sequence itself, to understand the development, and thereby to proceed from the correlations and regularities of one stage to those of the next" (252).
Human development is similar to organic and psychic development. First, then, "at any stage of his development a man is an individual existing unity differentiated by physical, chemical, organic, psychic, and intellectual conjugates" (254). Secondly, humans develop. The law of effect operates in human development. "Thus, unless one asks the further questions, one remains with the insights one has already, and so intelligence does not develop; inversely, because one wants to develop, one can frequent the lectures and read the books that put the further questions and help one to learn" (255). Thirdly, there is a "law of integration" (255). Different types of development needs to be integrated with the organic, psychic, intellectual. Fourthly, there is a "law of limitation and transcendence" (256). It is a law of "tension." "On the one hand, development is in the subject and of the subject; on the other hand, it is from the subject as he is and towards the subject as he is to be" (256). It is a tension between what we are now and what we can be in the future.
There is a tension in intellectual development. "Intellectual development rests upon the dominance of a detached and disinterested desire to know. It reveals to a man a universe of being ... It invites man to become intelligent and reasonable not only in his knowing but also in his living, to guide his actions by referring them, not as an animal to a habitat, but as an intelligent being to the intelligible context of some universal order that is or is to be" (257). This tension in the human consciousness is "the opposition between the world of sense of man the animal and, on the other hand, the universe of being to be known by intelligible grasp and reasonable affirmation" (257).
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