other hand, in view of the essential contrariety of the two substances, is
it so intimate as to be more than a _unio compositionis_. Although the soul
is united to the whole body, an especially active intercourse between them
is developed at a single point, the pineal gland, which is distinguished by
its central, protected position, above all, by the fact that it is the only
cerebral organ that is not double. This gland, together with the animal
spirits passing to and from it, mediates between mind and body; and as the
point of union for the twofold impressions from the (right and left) eyes
and ears, without which objects would be perceived double instead of
single, is the seat of the soul. Here the soul exercises a direct influence
on the body and is directly affected by it; here it dwells, and at will
produces a slight, peculiar movement of the gland, through this a change
in the course of the animal spirits (for it is not capable of generating
motion, but only of changing its direction), and, finally, movements of the
members; just as, on the other hand, it remarks the slightest change in the
course of the _spiritus_ through a corresponding movement of the gland,
whose motions vary according to the sensuous properties of the object to be
perceived, and responds by sensations. Although Descartes thus limits the
direct interaction of soul and body to a small part of the organism, he
makes an exception in the case of _memoria_, which appears to him to be
more of a physical than a psychical function, and which he conjectures to
be diffused through the whole brain.
In spite of the comprehensive meaning which Descartes gives to the notion
_cogitatio_, it is yet too narrow to leave room for an _anima vegetativa_
and an _anima sensitiva_. Whoever makes mind and soul equivalent, holds
that their essence consists in conscious activity alone, and interprets
sensation as a mode of thought, cannot escape the paradox of denying to
animals the possession of a soul. Descartes does not shrink from such
a conclusion. Animals are mere machines; they are bodies animated, but
soulless; they lack conscious perception and appetition, though not the
appearance of them. When a clock strikes seven it knows nothing of the
fact; it does not regret that it is so late nor long soon to be able to
strike eight; it wills nothing, feels nothing, perceives nothing. The lot
of the brute is the same. It sees and hears nothing, it does not hunger or
thirst, it does not rejoice or fear, if by these anything more than mere
corporeal phenomena is to be meant; of all these it possesses merely the
unconscious material basis; it moves and motion goes on in it--that is all.
The psychology of Descartes, which has had important results,[1] divides
_cogitationes_ into two classes: _actiones_ and _passiones_. Action denotes
everything which takes its origin in, and is in the power of, the soul;
passion, everything which the soul receives from without, in which it can
make no change, which is impressed upon it. The further development of this
distinction is marred by the crossing of the most diverse lines of thought,
resulting in obscurities and contradictions. Descartes's simple, naïve
habits of thought and speech, which were those of a man of the world rather
than of a scholar, were quite incompatible with the adoption and consistent
use of a finely discriminated terminology; he is very free with _sive_, and
not very careful with the expressions _actio, passio, perceptio, affectio,
volitio_. First he equates activity and willing, for the will springs
exclusively from the soul--it is only in willing that the latter is
entirely independent; while, on the other hand, passivity is made
equivalent to representation and cognition, for the soul does not create
its ideas, but receives them,--sensuous impressions coming to her quite
evidently from the body. These equations, "_actio_--the practical, _passio_
= the theoretical function," are soon limited and modified, however. The
natural appetites and affections are forms of volition, it is true, but not
free products of the mind, for they take their origin in its connection
with the body. Further, not all perceptions have a sensuous origin; when
the soul makes free use of its ideas in imagination, especially when in
pure thought it dwells on itself, when without the interference of the
imagination it gazes on its rational nature, it is by no means passive
merely. Every act of the will, again, is accompanied by the consciousness
of volition. The _volitio_ is an activity, the _cogitatio volitionis_ a
passivity; the soul affects itself, is passively affected through its own
activity, is at the same instant both active and passive.
[Footnote 1: For details cf. the able monograph of Dr.
Anton Koch, 1881.]
Thus not every volition, _e.g._ sensuous desire, is action nor all
perception, _e.g._ that of the pure intellect, passion.
Finally, certain
psychical phenomena fall indifferently under the head of perception or of
volition, _e.g._, pain, which is both an indistinct idea of something and
an impulse to shun it. In accordance with these emendations, and omitting
certain disturbing points of secondary importance, the matter may be thus
represented:
COGITATIO.
¦
¦
ACTIO ¦ PASSIO
¦
¦
¦
(Mens sola; clarae et distinctae ¦ (Mens unita cum corpore;
ideae.) ¦ confusae ideae.)
¦
VOLITIO: ¦
6. Voluntas. 3b. Commotiones ¦ 3a. Affectus. 2.
Appetitus naturales.
¦ intellectuales¦ ¦
¦
¦ ¦ \
/
¦ ¦ --------v---
----
Judicium. ¦ Sensus interni
---------------------------------+----------------------
-------------
¦
¦
PERCEPTIO: 4. Imaginatio
------^------
/ \
5. Intellectus 4b. Phantasia. ¦ 4a. Memoria. 1.
Sensus externi.
Accordingly six grades of mental function are to be distinguished: (1)
The external senses. (2) The natural appetites. (3) The passions (which,
together with the natural appetites, constitute the internal senses,
and from which the mental emotions produced by the intellect are quite
distinct). (4) The imagination with its two divisions, passive memory and
active phantasy. (5) The intellect or reason. (6) The will. These various
stages or faculties are, however, not distinct parts of the soul, as in the
old psychology, in opposition to which Descartes emphatically defends the
_unity of the soul_. It is one and the same psychical power that exercises
the higher and the lower, the rational and the sensuous, the practical and
the theoretical activities.
Of the mental functions, whether representative images, perceptions, or
volitions, a part are referred to body (to parts of our own body, often
also to external objects), and produced by the body (by the animal spirits
and, generally, by the nerves as well), while the rest find both object and
cause in the soul. Intermediate between the two classes stand those acts
of the will which are caused by the soul, but which relate to the body,
_e.g._, when I resolve to walk or leap; and, what is more important, the
_passions_, which relate to the soul itself, but which are called forth,
sustained, and intensified by certain motions of the animal spirits. Since
only those beings which consist of a body as well as a soul are capable of
the passions, these are specifically human phenomena.
These affections,
though very numerous, may be reduced to a few simple or primary ones,
of which the rest are mere specializations or combinations. Descartes
enumerates six primitive passions (which number Spinoza afterward reduced
one-half)--_admiratio, amor et odium, cupiditas (désir), gaudium et
tristitia_. The first and the fourth have no opposites, the former being
neither positive nor negative, and the latter both at once. Wonder, which
includes under it esteem and contempt, signifies interest in an object
which neither attracts us by its utility nor repels us by its hurtfulness,
and yet does not leave us indifferent. It is aroused by the powerful or
surprising impression made by the extraordinary, the rare, the unexpected.
Love seeks to appropriate that which is profitable; hate, to ward off that
which is harmful, to destroy that which is hostile.
Desire or longing looks
with hope or fear to the future. When that which is feared or hoped for
has come to pass, joy and grief come in, which relate to existing good and
evil, as desire relates to those to come.
The Cartesian theory of the passions forms the bridge over which its author
passes from psychology to ethics. No soul is so weak as to be incapable of
completely mastering its passions, and of so directing them that from them
all there will result that joyous temper advantageous to the reason. The
freedom of the will is unlimited. Although a direct influence on the
passions is denied it,--it can neither annul them merely at its bidding,
nor at once reduce them to silence, at least, not the more violent
ones,--it still has an indirect power over them in two ways. During the
continuance of the affection (e.g., fear) it is able to arrest the bodily
movements to which the affection tends (flight), though not the emotion
itself, and, in the intervals of quiet, it can take measures to render a
new attack of the passion less dangerous. Instead of enlisting one passion
against another, a plan which would mean only an appearance of freedom,
but in fact a continuance in bondage, the soul should fight with its own
weapons, with fixed maxims _(judicia)_, based on certain knowledge of good
and evil. The will conquers the emotions by means of principles, by clear
and distinct knowledge, which sees through and corrects the false values
ascribed to things by the excitement of the passions.
Besides this negative
requirement, "subjection of the passions," Descartes'
contributions to
ethics--in the letters to Princess Elizabeth on human happiness, and to
Queen Christina on love and the highest good--were inconsiderable. Wisdom
is the carrying out of that which has been seen to be best, virtue is
steadfastness, sin inconstancy therein. The goal of human endeavor is peace
of conscience, which is attained only through the determination to be
virtuous, i.e., to live in harmony with self.
Besides its ethical mission, the will has allotted to it the theoretical
function of affirmation and negation, i.e., of judgment.
If God in his
veracity and goodness has bestowed on man the power to know truth, how is
misuse of this power, how is error possible? Single sensations and ideas
cannot be false, but only judgments--the reference of ideas to objects.
Judgment or assent is a matter of the will; so that when it makes erroneous
affirmations or negations, when it prefers the false judgment to the true,
it alone is guilty. Our understanding is limited, our will unlimited; the
latter reaches further than the former, and can assent to a judgment
even before its constituent parts have attained the requisite degree of
clearness. False judgment is prejudgment, for which we can hold neither God
nor our own nature responsible. The possibility of error, as well as the
possibility of avoiding error, resides in the will. This has the power to
postpone its assent or dissent, to hold back its decision until the ideas
have become entirely clear and distinct. The supreme perfection is the
_libertas non errandi_. Thus knowledge itself becomes a moral function; the
true and the good are in the last analysis identical.
The contradiction
with which Descartes has been charged, that he makes volition and cognition
reciprocally determinative, that he bases moral goodness on the clearness
of ideas and _vice versa_, does not exist. We must distinguish between a
theoretical and a practical stadium in the will; it is true of the latter
that it depends on knowledge of the right, of the former that the knowledge
of the right is dependent on it. In order to the possibility of moral
_action_ the will must conform to clear judgment; in order to the
production of the latter the will must _be_ moral. It is the unit-soul,
which first, by freely avoiding overhasty judgment, cognizes the truth, to
exemplify it later in moral conduct.
CHAPTER III.
THE DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION OF CARTESIANISM IN
THE NETHERLANDS AND
IN FRANCE.[1]
[Footnote 1: Cf. G. Monchamp, _Histoire du Cartésianisme en Belgique_,
Brussels, 1886.]
%1. Occasionalism: Geulincx.%
The propagation and defense of a system of thought soon give occasion
to its adherents to purify, complete, and transform it.
Obscurities and
contradictions are discovered, which the master has overlooked or allowed
to remain, and the disciple exerts himself to remove them, while retaining
the fundamental doctrines. In the system of Descartes there were two
closely connected points which demanded clarification and correction, viz.,
his double dualism (1) between extended substance and thinking substance,
(2) between created substance and the divine substance.
In contrast with
each other matter and mind are substances or independent beings, for
the clear conception of body contains naught of consciousness, thought,
representation, and that of mind nothing of extension, matter, motion.
In comparison with God they are not so; apart from the creator they can
neither exist nor be conceived. In every case where the attempt is made to
distinguish between intrinsic and general (as here, between substance in
the stricter and wider senses), an indecision betrays itself which is not
permanently endured.
The substantiality of the material and spiritual worlds maintained by
Descartes finds an excellent counterpart in his (entirely modern) tendency
to push the _concursus dei_ as far as possible into the background, to
limit it to the production of the original condition of things, to give
over motion, once created, to its own laws, and ideas implanted in the mind
to its own independent activity; but it is hard to reconcile with it the
view, popular in the Middle Ages, that the preservation of the world is a
perpetual creation. In the former case the relation of God to the world is
made an external relation; in the latter, an internal one. In the one the
world is thought of as a clock, which once wound up runs on mechanically,
in the second it is likened to a piece of music which the composer himself
recites. If God preserves created things by continually recreating them
they are not substances at all; if they are substances, preservation
becomes an empty word, which we repeat after the theologians without giving
it any real meaning.
Matter and spirit stand related in our thought only by way of exclusion;
is the same true of them in reality? They can be conceived and can exist
without each other; can they, further, without each other effect all that
we perceive them to accomplish? There are some motions in the material
world which we refer to a voluntary decision of the soul, and some among
our ideas (_e.g._, perceptions of the senses) which we refer to corporeal
phenomena as their causes. If body and soul are substances, how can they
be dependent on each other in certain of their activities, if they are of
opposite natures, how can they affect each other? How can the incorporeal,
unmoved spirit move the animal spirits and receive impulses from them?
The substantiality (reciprocal independence) of body and mind, and their
interaction (partial reciprocal dependence), are incompatible, one or
the other is illusory and must be abandoned. The materialists (Hobbes)
sacrifice the independence of mind, the idealists (Berkeley, Leibnitz), the
independence of matter, the occasionalists, the interaction of the two.
This forms the advance of the last beyond Descartes, who either naïvely
maintains that, in spite of the contrariety of material and mental
substances, an exchange of effects takes place between them as an
empirical fact, or, when he realizes the difficulty of the anthropological
problem,--how is the union of the two substances in man possible,--ascribes
the interaction of body and mind, together with the union of the two, to
the power of God, and by this abandonment of the attempt at a natural
explanation, opens up the occasionalistic way of escape.
Further, in
his more detailed description of the intercourse between body and mind
Descartes had been guilty of direct violations of his laws of natural
philosophy. If the quantity of motion is declared to be invariable and a
change in its direction is attributed to mechanical causes alone, we must
not ascribe to the soul the power to move the pineal gland, even in the
gentlest way, nor to control the direction of the animal spirits. These
inconsistencies also are removed by the occasionalistic thesis.
The question concerning the substantiality of mind and matter in relation
to God, is involved from the very beginning in this latter problem, "How
is the appearance of interaction between the two to be explained without
detriment to their substantiality in relation to each other?" The denial
of the reciprocal dependence of matter and spirit leads to sharper
accentuation of their common dependence upon God. Thus occasionalism forms
the transition to the pantheism of Spinoza, Geulincx emphasizing the
non-substantiality of spirits, and Malebranche the non-substantiality of
bodies, while Spinoza combines and intensifies both. And yet history was
not obliging enough to carry out this convenient and agreeable scheme of
development with chronological accuracy, for she had Spinoza complete his
pantheism _before_ Malebranche had prepared the way. The relation which was
noted in the case of Bruno and Campanella is here repeated: the earlier
thinker assumes the more advanced position, while the later one seems
backward in comparison; and that which, viewed from the standpoint of the
question itself, may be considered a transition link, is historically to be
taken as a reaction against the excessive prosecution of a line of thought
which, up to a certain point, had been followed by the one who now shrinks
back from its extreme consequences. The course of philosophy takes first a
theological direction in the earlier occasionalists, then a metaphysical
(naturalistic) trend in Spinoza, to renew finally, in Malebranche, the
first of these movements in opposition to the second.
The Cartesian school,
as a whole, however, exhibits a tendency toward mysticism, which was
concealed to a greater or less extent by the rationalistic need for clear
concepts, but never entirely suppressed.
Although the real interaction of body and mind be denied, some explanation
must, at least, be given for the appearance of interaction, _i.e._ for the
actual correspondence of bodily and mental phenomena.
Occasionalism denotes
the theory of occasional causes. It is not the body that gives rise to
perception, nor the mind that causes the motion of the limbs which it has
determined upon--neither the one nor the other can receive influence from
its fellow or exercise influence upon it; but it is God who, "on the
occasion" of the physical motion (of the air and nerves); produces the
sensation (of sound), and, "at the instance" of the determination of the
will, produces the movement of the arms. The systematic development and
marked influence of this theory, which had already been more or less
clearly announced by the Cartesians Cordemoy and De la Forge,[1] was due to
the talented Arnold Geulincx (1624-69), who was born at Antwerp, taught
in Lyons (1646-58) and Leyden, and became a convert to Calvinism. It
ultimately gained over the majority of the numerous adherents of the
Cartesian philosophy in the Dutch universities,--Renery (died 1639) and
Regius (van Roy; _Fundamenta Physicae_, 1646; _Philosophia Naturalis_,
1661) in Utrecht; further, Balthasar Bekker (1634-98; _The World
Bewitched_, 1690), the brave opponent of the belief in angels and devils,
of magic, and of prosecution for witchcraft,--in the clerical orders in
France and, finally, in Germany.
[Footnote 1: Gerauld de Cordemoy, a Parisian advocate (died 1684,
_Dissertations Philosophiques_, 1666), communicated his occasionalistic
views orally to his friends as early as 1658 (cf. L.
Stein in the _Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie_, vol. i., 1888, p. 56).
Louis de la Forge,
a physician of Saumur, _Tractatus de Mente Humana_, 1666, previously
published in French; cf. Seyfarth, Gotha, 1887. But the logician, Johann
Clauberg, professor in Duisburg (1622-65; _Opera_, edited by Schalbruch,
1691), is, according to the investigations of Herm.
Müller _(J. Clauberg
und seine Stellung im Cartesianismus_, Jena, 1891), to be stricken from
the list of thinkers who prepared the way for occasionalism, since in his
discussion of the anthropological problem (_corporis et animae conjunctio_)
he merely develops the Cartesian position, and does not go beyond it. He
employs the expression _occasio_, it is true, but not in the sense of the
occasionalists. According to Clauberg the bodily phenomenon becomes the
stimulus or "occasion" (not for God, but) for the soul to produce from
itself the corresponding mental phenomenon.]
Geulincx himself, besides two inaugural addresses at Leyden (as Lector in
1662, Professor Extraordinary in 1665), published the following treatises:
_Quaestiones Quodlibeticae_ (in the second edition, 1665, entitled
_Saturnalia_) with an important introductory discourse; _Logica Fundamentis
Suis Restituta_, 1662; _Methodus Inveniendi Argumenta_
(new edition by
Bontekoe, 1675); and the first part of his Ethics--_De Virtute et Primis
ejus Proprietatibus, quae vulgo Virtutes Cardinales Vocantur, Tractatus
Ethicus Primus_, 1665. This chief work was issued complete in all six parts
with the title, _[Greek: Gnothi seauton] sive Ethica_, 1675, by Bontekoe,
under the pseudonym Philaretus. The _Physics_, 1688, the _Metaphysics_,
1691, and the _Annotata Majora in Cartesii Principia Philosophiae_, 1691,
were also posthumous publications, from the notes of his pupils. In view of
the rarity of these volumes, and the importance of the philosopher, it is
welcome news that J.P.N. Land has undertaken an edition of the collected
works, in three volumes, of which the first two have already appeared.[1]
The Hague, 1891-92.[2]
[Footnote 1: On vol. i. cf. Eucken, _Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol.
xxviii., 1892, p,200 _seq_.]
[Footnote 2: On Geulincx see V. van der Haeghen, _Geulincx, Étude sur sa
Vie, sa Philosophie, et ses Ouvrages_, Ghent, 1886, including a complete
bibliography; and Land in vol. iv. of the _Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie_, 1890. [English translation, _Mind_, vol.
xvi. p. 223 _seq_.]]
Geulincx bases the _occasionalistic_ position on the principle, _quod
nescis, quomodo fiat, id non facis_. Unless I know how a