The sentiments of Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche, concerning the
relation between liberty and necessity.
No one was ever more deeply implicated in the scheme of necessity than
Descartes. “Mere philosophy,” says he, “is enough to make us know that
there cannot enter the least thought into the mind of man, but God must
will and have willed from all eternity that it should enter there.” His
argument in proof of this position is short and intelligible. “God,” says
he, “could not be absolutely perfect if there could happen anything in
this world which did not spring entirely from him.” Hence it follows, that
it is inconsistent with the absolute perfections of God to suppose that a
being created by him could put forth a volition which does not spring
entirely from him, and not even in part from the creature.
Yet Descartes is a warm believer in the doctrine of free-will. On the
ground of reason, he believes in an absolute predestination of all things;
and yet he concludes from experience that man is free. If we ask how these
things can hang together, he replies, that we cannot tell; that a solution
of this difficulty lies beyond the reach of the human faculties. Now, it
is evident, that reason cannot “make us know” one thing, and experience
teach another, quite contrary to it; for no two truths can ever contradict
each other. Those who adopt this mode of viewing the subject, generally
remind us of the feebleness of human reason, and of the necessary limits
to all human speculation. Though, as disciples of Butler, we are deeply
impressed with these truths, yet, as disciples of Bacon, we do not intend
to despair until we can discover some good and sufficient reason for so
doing. It seems to us, that the reply of Leibnitz to Descartes, already
alluded to, is not without reason. “It might have been an evidence of
humility in Descartes,” says he, “if he had confessed his own inability to
solve the difficulty in question; but not satisfied with confessing for
himself, he does so for all intelligences and for all times.”
But, after all, Descartes has really endeavoured to solve the problem
which he declared insoluble; that is, to reconcile the infinite
perfections of God with the free-agency of man. He struggles to break
loose from this dark mystery; but, like the charmed bird, he struggles and
flutters in vain, and finally yields to its magical influence. In his
solution, this great luminary of science, like others before him, seems to
suffer a sad eclipse. “Before God sent us into the world,” says he, “he
knew exactly what all the inclinations of our wills would be; _it is he
that has implanted them in us_; it is he also that has disposed all
things, so that such or such objects should present themselves to us at
such or such times, by means of which he has known that our free-will
would determine us to such or such actions, _he has willed that it should
be so; but he has not willed to constrain us thereto_.” This is found in a
letter to the Princess Elizabeth, for whose benefit he endeavoured to
reconcile the liberty of man with the perfections of God. It brings us
back to the old distinction between necessity and co-action. God brings
our volitions to pass; he wills them; they “spring entirely from him;” but
we are nevertheless free, because he constrains not our external actions,
or compels us to do anything contrary to our wills! We cannot suppose,
however, that this solution of the problem made a very clear or deep
impression on the mind of Descartes himself, or he would not, on other
occasions, have pronounced every attempt at the solution of it vain and
hopeless.
In his attempt to reconcile the free-agency of man with the divine
perfections, Descartes deceives himself by a false analogy. Thus he
supposes that a monarch “_who has forbidden_ duelling, and who, certainly
knowing that two gentlemen will fight, if they should meet, _employs
infallible means to bring them together_. They meet, they fight each
other: their disobedience of the laws is an effect of their free-will;
they are punishable.” “What a king can do in such a case,” he adds, “God
who has an infinite power and prescience, infallibly does in relation to
all the actions of men.” But the king, in the supposed case, does not act
on the minds of the duellists; their disposition to disobey the laws does
not proceed from him; whereas, according to the theory of Descartes,
nothing enters into the mind of man which does not spring entirely from
God. If we suppose a king, who has direct access to the mind of his
subject, like God, and who employs his power to excite therein a murderous
intent or any other particular disposition to disobey the law, we shall
have a more apposite representation of the divine agency according to the
theory of Descartes. Has anything ever been ascribed to the agency of
Satan himself which could more clearly render him an accomplice in the
sins of men?
From the bosom of Cartesianism two systems arose, one in principle, but
widely different in their developments and ultimate results. We allude to
the celebrated schemes of Spinoza and Malebranche. Both set out with the
same exaggerated view of the sublime truth that God is all in all; and
each gave a diverse development to this fundamental position, to this
central idea, according as the logical faculty predominated over the
moral, or the moral faculty over the logical. Father Malebranche, by a
happy inconsistency, preserved the great moral interests of the world
against the invasion of a remorseless logic. Spinoza, on the contrary,
could follow out his first principle almost to its last consequence, even
to the entire extinction of the moral light of the universe, and the
enthronement of blind power, with as little concern, with as profound
composure, as if he were merely discussing a theorem in the mathematics.
“All things,” says he, “determined to such and such actions, are
determined by God; and, if God determines not a thing to act, it cannot
determine itself.”(12) From this proposition he drew the inference, that
things which are produced by God, could not have existed in any other
manner, nor in any other order.(13) Thus, by the divine power, all things
in heaven and earth are bound together in the iron circle of necessity. It
required no great logical foresight to perceive that this doctrine shut
all real liberty out of the created universe; but it did require no little
moral firmness, or very great moral insensibility, to declare such a
consequence with the unflinching audacity which marks its enunciation by
Spinoza. He repeatedly declares, in various modes of expression, that “the
soul is a spiritual automaton,” and possesses no such liberty as is
usually ascribed to it. All is necessary, and the very notion of a
free-will is a vulgar prejudice. “All I have to say,” he coolly remarks,
“to those who believe that they can speak or keep silence—in one word, can
act—by virtue of a free decision of the soul, is, that they dream with
their eyes open.”(14) Though he thus boldly denies all free-will,
according to the common notion of mankind; yet, no less than Hobbes and
Collins, he allows that the soul possesses “a sort of liberty.” “It is
free,” says he, in the act of affirming that “two and two are equal to
four;” thus finding the freedom of the soul which he is pleased to allow
the world to possess in the most perfect type of necessity it is possible
to conceive.
But Spinoza does not employ this idea of liberty, nor any other, to show
that man is a responsible being. This is not at all strange; the wonder
is, that after having _demonstrated_ that “the prejudice of men concerning
_good_ and _evil_, merit and demerit, praise and blame, order and
confusion, beauty and deformity,” are nothing but dreams, he should have
felt bound to defend the position, that we may be justly punished for our
offences by the Supreme Ruler of the world. His defence of this doctrine
we shall lay before the reader without a word of comment. “Will you say,”
he replies to Oldenburg, “that God cannot be angry with the wicked, or
that all men are worthy of beatitude? In regard to the first point, I
perfectly agree that God cannot be angry at anything which happens
according to his decree, but I deny that it results that all men ought to
be happy; for men can be excusable, and at the same time be deprived of
beatification, and made to suffer a thousand ways. A horse is excusable
for being a horse, and not a man; but that prevents not that he ought to
be a horse, and not a man. He who is rendered mad by the bite of a dog, is
surely excusable, and yet we ought to constrain him. In like manner, the
man who cannot govern his passions, nor restrain them by the fear of the
laws, though excusable on account of the infirmity of his nature, can
nevertheless not enjoy peace, nor the knowledge and the love of God; and
it is necessary that he should perish.”(15)
It was as difficult for Father Malebranche to restrain his indignation at
the system of Spinoza, as it was for him to expose its fallacy, after
having admitted its great fundamental principle. This is well illustrated
by the facts stated by M. Saisset: “When Mairan,” says he, “still young,
and having a strong passion for the study of the ‘Ethique,’ requested
Malebranche to guide him in that perilous route; we know with what
urgency, bordering on importunity, he pressed the illustrious father to
show him the weak point of Spinozism, the precise place where the rigour
of the reasoning failed, the _paralogism_ contained in the demonstration.
Malebranche eluded the question, and could not assign the _paralogism_,
after which Mairan so earnestly sought: ‘It is not that the paralogism is
in such or such places of the _Ethique_, it is everywhere.’ ”(16) In this
impatient judgment, Father Malebranche uttered more truth than he could
very well perceive; the paralogism is truly everywhere, because this whole
edifice of words, “this frightful chimera,” is really assumed in the
arbitrary definition of the term substance. We might say with equal truth,
that the fallacy of Malebranche’s scheme is also everywhere; for although
it stops short of the consequences so sternly deduced by Spinoza, it sets
out from the same distorted view of the sovereignty and dominion of God,
from which those consequences necessarily flow.
Spinoza, who had but few followers during his lifetime, has been almost
idolized by the most celebrated savants of modern Germany. Whether this
will ultimately add to the glory of Spinoza, or detract from that of his
admirers, we shall leave the reader and posterity to determine. In the
mean time, we shall content ourselves with a statement of the fact, in the
language of M. Saisset: “Everything,” says he, “appears extraordinary in
Spinoza; his person, his style, his philosophy; but that which is more
strange still, is the destiny of that philosophy among men. Badly known,
despised by the most illustrious of his contemporaries, Spinoza died in
obscurity, and remained buried during a century. All at once his name
reappeared with an extraordinary eclat; his works were read with passion;
a new world was discovered in them, with a horizon unknown to our fathers;
and the god of Spinoza, which the seventeenth century had broken as an
idol, became the god of Lessing, of Goethe, of Novalis.”
“The solitary thinker whom Malebranche called a wretch, Schleiermacher
reveres and invokes as equal to a saint. That ‘systematic atheist,’ on
whom Bayle lavished outrage, has been for modern Germany the most
religious of men. ‘God-intoxicated,’ as Novalis said, ‘he has seen the
world through a thick cloud, and man has been to his troubled eyes only a
fugitive mode of Being in itself.’ In that system, in fine, so shocking
and so monstrous, that ‘hideous chimera,’ Jacobi sees the last word of
philosophy, Schelling the presentiment of the true philosophy.”