Cartesianism in the religious direction adopted by Pascal. His thought
is controlled by the endeavor to combine Cartesian metaphysics and
Augustinian Christianity, those two great forces which constituted the
double citadel of his order. His collected works appeared three years
before his death; and a new edition in four volumes, prepared by
J. Simon, in 1871. His chief work, _On the Search for Truth_ (new edition
by F. Bouillier, 1880), appeared in 1675, and was followed by the
_Treatise on Ethics_ (new edition by H. Joly, 1882) and the _Christian
and Metaphysical Meditations_ in 1684, the _Discussions on Metaphysics and
on Religion_ in 1688, and various polemic treatises. The best known among
the doctrines of Malebranche is the principle that _we see all things in
God (que nous voyons toutes choses en Dieu_.--
_Recherche_, iii. 2, 6). What
does this mean, and how is it established? It is intended as an answer to
the question, How is it possible for the mind to cognize the body if, as
Descartes has shown, mind and body are two fundamentally distinct and
reciprocally independent substances?
The seeker after truth must first understand the sources of error. Of these
there are two, or, more exactly, five--as many as there are faculties of
the soul. Error may spring from either the cognitive or the appetitive
faculty; in the first case, either from sense-perception, the imagination,
or the pure understanding, and, in the latter, from the inclinations or the
passions. The inclinations and the passions do not reveal the nature of
things, but only express how they affect us, of what value they are to
us. Further still, the senses and the imagination only reproduce the
impressions which things make on us as feeling subjects, express only what
they are for us, not what they are in themselves. The senses have been
given us simply for the preservation of our body, and so long as we expect
nothing further from them than practical information concerning the
(useful or hurtful) relation of things to our body, there is no reason for
mistrusting them,--here we are not deceived by sensation, but at most by
the overhasty judgment of the will. "Consider the senses as false witnesses
in regard to the truth, but as trustworthy counselors in relation to the
interests of life!"--Sensation and imagination belong to the soul in virtue
of its union with the body; apart from this it is pure spirit. The essence
of the soul is thought, for this function is the only one which cannot be
abstracted from it without destroying it. Hence there can be no moment in
the life of the soul when it ceases to think; it thinks always (_l'âme
pense toujours_), only it does not always remember the fact.
The kinds of knowledge differ with the classes of things cognized. God is
known immediately and intuitively. He is necessary and unlimited being,
the universal, infinite being, being absolutely; he only is known through
himself. The concept of the infinite is the presupposition of the concept
of the finite, and the former is earlier in us; we gain the conception of
a particular thing only when we omit something from the idea of "being in
general," or limit it. God is cogitative, like spirits, and extended, like
bodies, but in an entirely different manner from created things. We know
our own soul through consciousness or inner perception.
We know its
existence more certainly than that of bodies, but understand its nature
less perfectly than theirs. To know that it is capable of sensations of
pain, of heat, of light, we must have experienced them.
For knowledge
of the minds of others we are dependent upon conjecture, on analogical
inferences from ourselves.
But how is the unextended soul capable of cognizing extended body? Only
through the medium of _ideas_. The ideas occupy an intermediate position
between objects, whose archetypes they are, and representations in the
soul, whose causes they are. The ideas, after the pattern of which God
has created things, and the relations among them (necessary truths), are
eternal, hence uncaused; they constitute the wisdom of God and are not
dependent on his will. Things are in God in archetypal form, and are
cognized through these their archetypes in God. Ideas are not produced by
bodies, by the emission of sensuous images,[1] nor are they originated by
the soul, or possessed by it as an innate possession.
But God is the cause
of knowledge, although he neither imparts ideas to the soul in creation nor
produces them in it on every separate occasion. The ideas or perfections of
things are in God and are beheld by spirits, who likewise dwell in God as
the universal reason. As space is the place of bodies, so God is the
place of spirits. As bodies are modes of extension, so their ideas are
modifications of the idea of extension or of
"intelligible extension." The principle stated at the beginning, that things are perceived in God, is,
therefore, supported in the following way: we perceive bodies (through
ideas, which ideas, and we ourselves, are) in God.
[Footnote 1: Malebranche's refutation of the emanation hypothesis of the
Peripatetics is acute and still worthy of attention. If bodies transmitted
to the sense-organs forms like themselves, these copies, which would
evidently be corporeal, must, by their departure, diminish the mass of the
body from which they came away, and also, because of their impenetrability,
obstruct and interfere with one another, thus destroying the possibility of
clear impressions. A further point against the image theory is furnished by
the increase in the size of an object, when approached.
And, above all, it
can never be made conceivable how motion can be transformed into sensations
or ideas.]
As the knowledge of truth has been found to consist in seeing things as God
sees them, so morality consists in man's loving things as God loves them,
or, what amounts to the same thing, in loving them to that degree which
is their due in view of their greater or less perfection. If, in the last
analysis, all cognition is knowledge of God, so all volition is loving God;
there is implanted in every creature a direction toward the Creator. God is
not only the primordial, unlimited being, he is also the highest good,
the final end of all striving. As the ideas of things are imperfect
participations in, or determinations of universal being, the absolute
perfection of God, so the particular desires, directed toward individual
objects, are limitations of the universal will toward the good. How does
it happen that the human will, so variously mistaking its fundamental
direction toward God, attaches itself to perishable goods, and prefers
worthless objects to those which have value, and earthly to heavenly
pleasure? The soul is, on the one hand, united to God, on the other, united
to the body. The possibility of error and sin rests on its union with the
body, since with the ideas (as representations of the pure understanding)
are associated sensuous images, which mingle with and becloud them, and
passions with the inclinations (or the will of the soul, in so far as it is
pure spirit). This gives, however, merely the possibility of the immoral,
sensuous, God-estranged disposition, which becomes actual only through
man's free act, when he fails to stand the test. For sin does not consist
in having passions, but in consenting to them. The passion is not caused by
the corporeal movement of which it is the sequel, but only occasioned by
it; and the same is true of the movement of the limbs and the decision
of the will. The one true cause of all that happens is God. It is he who
produces affections in the soul, and motion in the material world. For the
body possesses only the capacity of being moved; and the soul cannot be the
cause of the movement, since it would then have to know how it produces
the latter. In fact those who lack a medical training have no idea of the
muscular and nervous processes involved. Without God we cannot even move
the tongue. It is he who raises our arm, even when we use it contrary to
his law.
Anxious to guard his pantheism from being identified with that of Spinoza,
Malebranche points out that, according to his views, the universe is in
God, not, as with Spinoza, that God is in the universe; that he teaches
creation, which Spinoza denies; that he distinguishes, which Spinoza had
not done, between the world in God (the ideas of things) and the world of
created things, and between intelligible and corporeal extension. It may
be added that he maintains the freedom of God and of man, which Spinoza
rejects, and that he conceives God, who brings everything to pass, not as
nature, but as omnipotent will. Nevertheless, as Kuno Fischer has shown,
he approaches the naturalism of Spinoza more nearly than he is himself
conscious, when he explains finite things as limitations (hence as modes)
of the divine existence, posits the will of God in dependence on his wisdom
(the uncreated world of ideas), thus limiting it in its omnipotence, and,
which is decisive, makes God the sole author of motion, _i.e._, a natural
cause. His attempt at a Christian pantheism was consequently unsuccessful.
But its failure has not shattered the well-grounded fame of its thoughtful
author as the second greatest metaphysician of France.
Pierre Poiret[1] (1646-1719; for some years a preacher in Hamburg; lived
later in Rhynsburg near Leyden) was rendered hostile to Cartesianism
through the influence of mystical writings (among others those of
Antoinette Bourignon, which he published), and through the perception of
the results to which it had led in Spinoza. All cognition is taking up the
form of the object. The perfection of man is based more on his passive
capacities than on his active reason, which is concerned with mere ideas,
unreal shadows; the mathematical spirit leads to fatalism, to the denial of
freedom. The passive faculties, on the contrary, are in direct intercourse
with reality, the senses with external material objects, and the arcanum of
the mind, the basis of the soul, the intellect, with spiritual truths
and with God, whose existence is more certain than our own. Man is not
unconcerned in the development of the highest power of the mind, he must
offer himself to God in sincere humility. In subordination to the passive
intellect, the external faculty, the active reason, is also to be
cultivated; it deserves care, like the skin. Evil consists in the absurdity
that the creature, who apart from God is nothing, ascribes to himself an
independent existence.
[Footnote 1: Poiret: _Cogitationes Rationates de Deo, Anima, et Malo_,
1677, the later editions including a vehement attack on the atheism of
Spinoza: _L'Économie Divine_, 1682; _De Eruditione Solida, Superficiaria,
et Falsa_, 1692; _Fides et Ratio Collatae_, against Locke, 1707.]
Le Vayer and Huet, who have been already mentioned (pp.
50-51),
mediate between the founders of skepticism and Bayle, its most gifted
representative. The latter of these two wrote a _Criticism of the Cartesian
Philosophy_, 1689, besides a _Treatise on the Impotence of the Human Mind_,
which did not appear until after his death. He opposes, among other things,
the criterion of truth based on evidence, since there is an evidence of
the false not to be distinguished from that of the true, as well as the
position that God becomes a deceiver in the bestowal of a weak and blind
reason--for he gives us, at the same time, the power to know its deceptive
character.
As the last among those influenced by Descartes but who advanced beyond
him, may be mentioned the acute Pierre Bayle (1647-1706; professor in Sedan
and Rotterdam; _Works_, 1725-31[1]), who greatly excited the world of
letters by his occasional and polemic treatises, and still more by the
journal, _Nouvelles de la République des Lettres_ from 1684, and his
_Historical and Critical Dictionary_, in two volumes, 1695 and 1697.
Nowhere do the most opposite antitheses dwell in such close proximity as
in the mind of Bayle. Along with an ever watchful doubt he harbors a most
active zeal for knowledge, with a sincere spirit of belief (which has been
wrongly disputed by Lange, Zeller, and Pünjer) a demoniacal pleasure in
bringing to light absurdities in the doctrines of faith, with absolute
confidence in the infallibility of conscience an entirely pessimistic view
of human morality. His strength lies in criticism and polemics, his work in
the latter (aside from his hostility to fanaticism and the persecution of
those differing in faith) being directed chiefly against optimism and the
deistic religion of reason, which holds the Christian dogmas capable of
proof, or, at least, faith and knowledge capable of reconciliation. The
doctrines of faith are not only above reason, incomprehensible, but
contrary to reason; and it is just on this that our merit in accepting
them depends. The mysteries of the Gospel do not seek success before the
judgment seat of thought, they demand the blind submission of the reason;
nay, if they were objects of knowledge they would cease to be mysteries.
Thus we must choose between religion and philosophy, for they cannot be
combined. For one who is convinced of the untrustworthiness of the reason
and her lack of competence in things supernatural, it is in no wise
contradictory or impossible to receive as true things which she declares
to be false; he will thank God for the gift of a faith which is entirely
independent of the clearness of its objects and of its agreement with the
axioms of philosophy. Even, when in purely scientific questions he calls
attention to difficulties and shows contradictions on every hand, Bayle by
no means intends to hold up principles with contradictory implications as
false, but only as uncertain.[2] The reason, he says, generalizing from his
own case, is capable only of destruction, not of construction; of
discovering error, not of finding truth; of finding reasons and
counter-reasons, of exciting doubt and controversy, not of vouchsafing
certitude. So long as it contents itself with controverting that which is
false, it is potent and salutary; but when, despising divine assistance, it
advances beyond this, it becomes dangerous, like a caustic drug which
attacks the healthy flesh after it has consumed that which was diseased.
[Footnote 1: Cf. on Bayle, L. Feuerbach. 1838, 2d ed., 1844; Eucken in the
_Allgemeine Zeitung_, supplement to Nos. 251, 252, October 27, 28, 1891.]
[Footnote 2: Thus, in regard to the problem of freedom, he finds it hard
to comprehend how the creatures, who are not the authors of their own
existence, can be the authors of their own actions, but, at the same time,
inadmissible to think of God as the cause of evil. He seeks only to show
the indemonstrability and incomprehensibility of freedom, not to reject it.
For he sees in it the condition of morality, and calls attention to
the fact that the difficulties in which those who deny freedom involve
themselves are far greater than those of their opponents. He shows himself
entirely averse to the determinism and pantheism of Spinoza.]
He who seeks to refute skepticism must produce a criterion of truth. If
such exists, it is certainly that advanced by Descartes, the evidence, the
evident clearness of a principle. Well, then, the following principles pass
for evident: That one, who does not exist, can have no responsibility for
an evil action; that two things, which are identical with the same thing,
are identical with each other; that I am the same man to-day that I was
yesterday. Now, the revealed doctrines of original sin and of the Trinity
show that the first and second of these axioms are false, and the Church
doctrine of the preservation of the world as a continuous creation, that
the last principle is uncertain. Thus if not even self-evidence furnishes
us a criterion of truth, we must conclude that none whatever exists.
Further, in regard to the origin of the world from a single principle, its
creation by God, we find this supported, no doubt, both by the conclusions
of the pure reason and by the consideration of nature, but controvened by
the fact of evil, by the misery and wickedness of man.
Is it conceivable
that a holy and benevolent God has created so unhappy and wicked a being?
Bayle's motives in defending faith against reason were, on the one hand,
his personal piety, on the other, his conviction of the unassailable purity
of Christian ethics. All the sects agree in regard to moral principles, and
it is this which assures us of the divinity of the Christian revelation.
Nevertheless, he does not conceal from himself the fact that possession of
the theoretical side of religion is far from being a guarantee of practice
in conformity with her precepts. It is neither true that faith alone leads
to morality nor that unbelief is the cause of immorality. A state composed
of atheists would be not at all impossible, if only strict punishments and
strict notions of honor were insisted upon.
The judgments of the natural reason in moral questions are as certain
and free from error as its capacity is shown to be weak and limited in
theoretical science. The idea of morality never deceives anyone; the moral
law is innate in every man. Although Christianity has given the best
development of our duties, yet the moral law can be understood and followed
by all men, even by heathen and atheists. We do not need to be Christians
in order to act virtuously; the knowledge given by conscience is not
dependent upon revelation. From the knowledge of the good to the practice
of it is, it is true, a long step; we may be convinced of moral truth
without loving it, and God's grace alone is able to strengthen us against
the power of the passions, by adding to the illumination of the mind an
inclination of the heart toward the good. Temperament, custom, self-love
move the soul more strongly than general truths. As in life pleasure is far
outbalanced by pain and vexation, so far more evil acts are done than good
ones: history is a collection of misdeeds, with scarcely one virtuous act
for a thousand crimes. It is not the external action that constitutes the
ethical character of a deed, but the motive or disposition; almsgiving from
motives of pride is a vice, and only when practiced out of love to one's
neighbors, a virtue. God looks only at the act of the will; our highest
duty, and one which admits of no exceptions, is never to act contrary to
conscience.
CHAPTER IV.
LOCKE.
After the Cartesian philosophy had given decisive expression to the
tendencies of modern thought, and had been developed through occasionalism
to its completion in the system of Spinoza, the line of further progress
consisted in two factors: Descartes's principles--one-sidedly rationalistic
and abstractly scientific, as they were--were, on the one hand, to be
supplemented by the addition of the empirical element which Descartes had
neglected, and, on the other, to be made available for general culture by
approximation to the interests of practical life.
England, with its freer
and happier political conditions, was the best place for the accomplishment
of both ends, and Locke, a typically healthy and sober English thinker,
with a distaste for extreme views, the best adapted mind. Descartes, the
rationalist, had despised experience, and Bacon, the empiricist, had
despised mathematics; but Locke aims to show that while the reason is the
instrument of science, demonstration its form, and the realm of knowledge
wider than experience, yet this instrument and this form are dependent for
their content on a supply of material from the senses.
The emphasis, it is
true, falls chiefly on the latter half of this programme, and posterity,
especially, has almost exclusively attended to the empirical side of
Locke's theory of knowledge in giving judgment concerning it.
John Locke was born at Wrington, not far from Bristol, in 1632. At Oxford
he busied himself with philosophy, natural science, and medicine, being
repelled by the Scholastic thinkers, but strongly attracted by the writings
of Descartes. In 1665 he became secretary to the English ambassador to the
Court of Brandenburg. Returning thence to Oxford he made the acquaintance
of Lord Anthony Ashley (from 1672 Earl of Shaftesbury; died in Holland
1683), who received him into his own household as a friend, physician, and
tutor to his son (the father of Shaftesbury, the moral philosopher), and
with whose varying fortunes Locke's own were henceforth to be intimately
connected. Twice he became secretary to his patron (once in 1667--with
an official secretaryship in 1672, when Shaftesbury became Lord
Chancellor--and again in 1679, when he became President of the Council),
but both times he lost his post on his friend's fall.
The years 1675-79
were spent in Montpellier and Paris. In 1683 he went into voluntary exile
in Holland (where Shaftesbury had died in January of the same year), and
remained there until 1689, when the ascension of the throne by William of
Orange made it possible for him to return to England.
Here he was made
Commissioner of Appeals, and, subsequently, one of the Commissioners of
Trade and Plantations (till 1700). He died in 1704 at Gates, in Essex, at
the house of Sir Francis Masham, whose wife was the daughter of Cudworth,
the philosopher.
Locke's chief work, _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_, which had
been planned as early as 1670, was published in 1689-90, a short abstract
of it having previously appeared in French in Le Clerc's _Bibliothèque
Universelle_, 1688. His theoretical works include, further, the two
posthumous treatises, _On the Conduct of the Understanding_ (originally
intended for incorporation in the fourth edition of the _Essay_, which,
however, appeared in 1700 without this chapter, which probably had proved
too extended) and the _Elements of Natural Philosophy_.
To political
and politico-economic questions Locke contributed the two _Treatises on
Government_, 1690, and three essays on money and the coinage. In the year
1689 appeared the first of three _Letters on Tolerance_, followed, in 1693,
by _Some Thoughts on Education_, and, in 1695, by _The Reasonableness of
Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures_. The collected works appeared
for the first time in 1714, and in nine volumes in 1853; the philosophical
works (edited by St. John) are given in Bonn's Standard Library
(1867-68).[1]
[Footnote 1: Lord King and Fox Bourne have written on Locke's life, 1829
and 1876. A comparison of Locke's theory of knowledge with Leibnitz's
critique was published by Hartenstein in 1865, and one by Von Benoit (prize
dissertation) in 1869, and an exposition of his theory of substance by De
Fries in 1879. Victor Cousin's _Philosophie de Locke_
has passed through
six editions. [Among more recent English discussions reference may be made
to Green's Introduction to Hume's _Treatise on Human Nature_, 1874 (new ed.
1890), which is a valuable critique of the line of development, Locke,
Berkeley, Hume; Fowler's _Locke_, in the English Men of Letters, 1880; and
Fraser's _Locke_, in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1890.--TR.]]
%(a) Theory of Knowledge.%--Locke's theory of knowledge is controlled by
two tendencies, one native, furnished by the Baconian empiricism, and the