From Cath. Encyc DIALECTIC

But if we get all our universal notions, necessary judgments, and intuitions of immutable

truth through the ever-changing, individual data of sense, how are we to account for the

timeless, spaceless, changeless, necessary character of the relations we establish between

these objects of abstract, intellectual thought: relations such as "Two and two are four",

"Whatever happens has a cause", "Vice is blameworthy"? Not because our own or our

ancestors' perceptive faculties have been so accustomed to associate certain elements of

consciousness that we are unable to dissociate them (as materialist and evolutionist

philosophers would say); nor yet, on the other hand, because in apprehending these

necessary relations we have a direct and immediate intuition of the necessary,

self-existent, Divine Being (as the Ontologists have said, and as some interpret Plato to

have meant); but simply because we are endowed with an intellectual faculty which can

apprehend the data of sense in a static condition and establish relations between them

abstracting from all change.

By means of such necessary, self-evident truths, applied to the data of sense-knowledge,

we can infer that our own minds are beings of a higher (spiritual) order than material

things and that the beings of the whole visible universe--ourselves included--are

contingent, i. e. essentially and entirely dependent on a necessary, all-perfect Being, who

created and conserves them in existence. In opposition to this creationist philosophy of

Theism, which arrives at an ultimate plurality of being, may be set down all forms of

Monism or Pantheism, the philosophy which terminates in the denial of any real distinction

between mind and matter, thought and thing, subject and object of knowledge, and the

assertion of the ultimate unity of being.