CHAPTER V

THE RATIONALISM OF THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD OF THE RENAISSANCE

=The Nature of Rationalism.= Although the new science grew apace,

it was not altogether a safe vocation. Natural science involves

metaphysical questions at every point. The scientist at this time,

therefore, found himself often in delicate relations with the jealous

church guardians. A scientific explanation of the universe might

antagonize the church dogma concerning God, creation, and the final

outcome of the world. The church doctrine concerning the soul, too,

its nature and its immortality, its relation to the body, might

be antagonized by physiological and psychological discussions. In

such dilemmas as these the natural scientist was not successful in

pretending to isolate himself entirely from theology and in assuming

an attitude of aloofness to it. Galileo might declare that, whatever

the results of his investigations in physics might be, they had nothing

to do with the Bible; but he sorrowfully found that the Inquisition

thought otherwise. Copernicus found that his astronomical theories

came into conflict with church dogma, and he was tormented by his

bishop. Kepler spent his later years in a deadly struggle with both

Protestantism and Catholicism. Bacon and Hobbes lived in a country

where their personal safety was fairly secure, nevertheless Bacon

disguised his position by using large words and Hobbes was untroubled

because he accepted the religion of his sovereign.

If the position of those was difficult who tried to keep themselves

strictly within the limits of science, how much more fraught with

personal danger was the position of those who openly constructed a

new metaphysics? It would mean that a challenge was issued to the old

Scholasticism by the same human reason that had already challenged

and overthrown the old science. The group of men who did this were

the Rationalists. The Rationalists were interested in science, but

they were more interested in the metaphysical problems that science

aroused. The human reason had been successful in the reconstruction

of physics by the use of mathematics. Why should it not also be able

to reconstruct metaphysics and set it, too, upon a mathematical basis?

The leaders of this school were Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and the

Occasionalists,――Malebranche and Geulincx. The Rationalists advanced

a new conception not only of nature, but of God; new theories not only

of the human body, but of the soul. Their task was the dangerous one of

bravely invading the hitherto impregnable realms of the spirit.

The task of the Rationalists was rendered the more difficult because,

for the first time in the history of European thought, the inner and

outer worlds had been completely sundered. For the first time do we

meet with a clear-cut and positive dualism. The history of the growth

of this dualism had been a long one, and to it the Greek Sophist,

the Stoic, and the Christian had each contributed his share. However,

Galileo and his fellow scientists in this period of the Renaissance

had so reconstructed the old “world of nature” that it had become

irreconcilable to the “world of grace.” These scientists believed that

nature must be made to explain itself; its events must be conceived as

necessitated; its processes as having the inevitableness of a machine.

From the revolutions of the planets to the circulation of the blood,

the movements of nature can be measured. The law of nature, that

is conceived to underlie all this science, is mechanical causation.

The researches of the scientists of the Renaissance had yielded a

rich world of brute, inevitable, and scientific facts, and these

stood in absolute fundamental contrast to the world of spiritual

facts which were embodied in the church dogma. Apparently the problem

of reconciling the “world of nature” and the “world of grace” had

been solved by St. Thomas Aquinas in mediæval times. Now, however,

the “world of nature” had been so reconstructed that the question

was re-opened. How is the new “world of nature” to be brought into

harmonious relation with that old, persistent, and settled dogma of the

church? How can the newly conceived mechanism of nature be harmonized

with the realm of free conscious spirits, without giving up the

conception of God as a rational being, and also without depriving the

soul of its power of initiation? The new science had therefore made it

especially difficult on the one hand to reconcile a mechanical universe

with an omnipotent God, and on the other to reconcile the mechanical

human body with the free soul.

The struggle of the Renaissance with the Middle Ages is therefore

concentrated in the development of the doctrine of this Rationalist

School. It is studied here even better than by reading the two periods

side by side. In Rationalism the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages and

the Science of the Renaissance meet. Rationalism was a new science, but

it was a new theology as well. It was a new scholastic philosophy; for,

while the Rationalists thought that they were giving the death blow to

mediæval philosophy, they were instead only replacing it with another

scholasticism. In their attempt, by means of the mechanical theory,

to get an absolute system of knowledge upon which thought can rest,

the Rationalists were acting in the spirit of the schoolmen. In fact,

no schoolman ever showed more vigor or more dogmatic confidence in

his philosophy. To the mathematical eye of the Rationalist there

was absolutely nothing mysterious in the physical universe or in the

spiritual realm. All things in heaven and earth could be made clear.

The declaration of the Rationalists was the call of freedom, but it

was as hazardous as it was ambitious; and the church with its assured

revelations always stood opposed to the realization of freedom. So we

shall find Descartes spending his whole life trying to trim his sails

that he may not offend the Inquisition; Spinoza saving himself from

both the Jews and the Christians by living in obscurity and publishing

nothing; Leibnitz constructing philosophy with the avowed purpose of

reconciling science and religion.

=The Mental Conflict in Descartes.= The strife between the spirit

of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance appears in Descartes

more strikingly than in any other thinker of this time. He shows,

on the one hand, all the conservatism of a churchman of mediæval time

in his respect for institutional authority; on the other hand, his

intellectual activity places him among the leading scientists of the

Renaissance. In no other thinker does the conflict between the Old

and the New appear so unsettling; in none does the antagonism between

the scholastic world of spiritual things and the mechanical world of

science appear so irreconcilable. He suffered a life-long mental strife,

for within himself mediævalism and science were engaged in an unending

dramatic struggle. The philosophy of Descartes was a compromise between

his traditions and his scientific genius; and his philosophy never

overcame his conflicting motives. The admirers of Descartes have

called him the father of modern thought, and this is partly true. The

father of the modern scientific method was Galileo. Descartes, on the

other hand, pointed out the incontestable principle from which modern

thought has proceeded; he won his place in the history of philosophy

by attempting to harmonize the old scholasticism with the new science

under this single principle.

=The Life and Philosophical Writings of Descartes= (1596–1650).[26]

(1) _As Child and Student_ (1596–1613).

At home until he was eight years old (1596– 1604).

At the Jesuit school at La Flèche until he was seventeen (1604–1613).

(2) _As Traveler_ (1613–1628). Descartes studies “the book of the

world.”

At Paris (1613–1617), in retirement and study.

In Holland (1617–1619), nominally attached to the army of Maurice.

First Journey (1619–1621), going through Bavaria, Austria, north to

the shores of the Baltic and back to Holland. The greater part of these

two years were spent in Bohemia, enrolled in the army of the Emperor.

He was on this journey when his mental crisis occurred,――at Neuberg,

in Austria, in 1619. It was then that he discovered either analytical

geometry or the fundamental principle of his philosophy.

In Paris again, 1623.

Second Journey (1623–1625), to Switzerland and Italy, making a

pilgrimage to the shrine of Loretto.

(3) _As Writer_ (1629–1650).

In Holland (1629–1649). For the sake of absolute seclusion from

inquisitive visitors, Descartes changed his residence in Holland

twenty-four times and lived in thirteen places. All his correspondence

passed through Mersenne. During these twenty years he made three

journeys to France. Thus this period of absolute retirement became his

period of literary production, chiefly between the years 1635 and 1644.

He wrote his

_Method_ (1635–1637).

_Meditations_ (1629–1641).

_Le Monde_ (1630–1632), published posthumously.

_Principles_ (1641–1644).

_Passions_ (1646–1649).

(4) _In Stockholm, Sweden_ (1649–1650). The romantic side of the life

of Descartes appears in his book on the _Passions_, which he wrote for

the Princess Elizabeth, and also in his acceptance of the invitation

of the Queen of Sweden to reside at her court and become her tutor. He

died there from the rigors of the climate after a residence of one year.

=The Two Conflicting Influences upon the Thought of Descartes.= On

the one hand, all the ties of inheritance, family influence, and

early education allied Descartes with the spirit of the Middle Ages.

A delicate constitution made him shrink from public controversy and

the public eye. He even made a half apology for his pursuit of science

by saying that he was seeking to reform his own life, and that it was

absurd for an individual to attempt to reform a state. His family on

both sides belonged to the landed gentry, and he was therefore bound

by caste to the support of institutional authority. He was educated

in the Jesuit school of La Flèche, and this most conservative of

ecclesiastical influences restrained him from following the logical

conclusions of his own thought. He was therefore both physically timid

and intellectually aloof. In 1632 he was about to publish _Le Monde_,

which was a scientific description of the origin and nature of the

universe, and agrees in part with the Copernican theory. It was a

treatise which would naturally conflict with the teaching of the

church. He learned of the trial of Galileo at Rome, and he never dared

to publish the book.

The rival spirit speaking in Descartes was the new scientific spirit

of the Renaissance. He had a genius for mathematics even when he was at

school at La Flèche. On his going to Paris he became the centre of the

most notable scientific circle in France――a circle composed of such men

as the Abbé Claude Picot, the physician Villebressieux, the optician

Ferrier, the mathematician Mersenne, and many other scientists and

theologians. But he became dissatisfied and made some long journeys in

order to study “the book of the world.” His discovery of his method and

his philosophical principle was the result. In mathematics he was the

discoverer of analytical geometry and was the first to represent powers

by exponents; in physics he stated the principle of the refraction of

light in trigonometrical form; he explained the rainbow; he weighed

the air. The same industrious application of the new scientific methods

that yielded great results in science, also resulted in his development

of his philosophy. Love for original discovery made Descartes

disdainful of all scientific authorities and even contemptuous of his

notable contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey. He mentions by name Plato,

Aristotle, Epicurus, Campanella, Telesio, and Bruno, but he claimed

that he learned nothing from any one except Kepler. He felt himself to

be above criticism, and in his self-arrogating dogmatism he is the type

of the modern practical individualist. He defined truth as candor to

one’s self, and both in his practical life and in his theoretical ideal

there is an entire absence of utilitarianism.

=The Method of Descartes.= Both science and scholasticism show

themselves in the method of Descartes. He attempted to construct

a philosophical method entirely in the scientific spirit of the

Renaissance, but in the application of it he showed his scholastic

training. Surfeited with inadequate and traditional methods he felt

the need of some single principle by which all knowledge might be

systematized, and he was sure that mathematics would furnish the

key. Rational science was to Descartes only mathematics. Truth is

to be found not in metaphysics, nor in empirical science. Descartes’

philosophical aim was to establish a universal mathematics. Descartes

was not entirely faithful to Galileo’s mathematical principle in his

employment of it, and his influence in metaphysics was thereby all the

greater; for in the development of his method he found assistance in

the traditional scholastic methods. Descartes was original in insisting

upon finding the existence of an absolute and undeniable principle

before any progress could be made. Such an absolute principle can be

obtained only by an _inductive sifting of all ideas_. From this all

further truths must be obtained by _deduction_. Every true philosophy

must therefore be an induction or analysis of ideas, and secondly,

a deduction or synthesis. _The great contribution of Descartes was

therefore this: to the inductive method of Bacon and the deductive

method of Galileo, he added an absolute principle which must be taken

as the basis of both induction and deduction._[27]

=Induction――Provisional Doubt――The Ultimate Certainty of Consciousness.=

The philosophical proclamation of Descartes was characteristically

French, for he demanded the same return to an uncorrupted nature for

the understanding that Rousseau many years later demanded for the heart.

The first step of Descartes was also French in its demand for absolute

clearness, which from his youth had shown him to be so passionately

fond of mathematics. The way to such clearness is through provisional

doubt. Let us purify the understanding by delivering it of the rubbish

of traditional opinions, taken upon the say-so of others. By this

negative induction of received knowledge, let us see if there is

anything positive and certain. In Descartes’s _Meditations_, in “a

dramatic dialogue with himself,” he portrays his own intellectual

struggle to gain uncontaminated truth. He makes an induction of all

kinds of knowledge and challenges each as it appears. Nothing is to

be accepted as true until it has proved itself true. All facts are

subjected to rigid scrutiny. Descartes doubts the testimony of the

senses, the existence of the material world, the existence of God. But

this induction is provisional, even if it is radical. While none of the

usually accepted truths are found by him to be undeniable and absolute,

yet Descartes has an ulterior purpose in challenging them. Greek

skepticism had no further end than doubt, while at the other extreme

Anselm and the orthodox scholastics had refused to doubt at all. The

method of Descartes is contrasted both with that of Anselm and with

that of the Skeptics, for he doubts in order that he may know. _Dubito

ut intelligam._ Doubt is necessary, but only as a means to an end; and

that end is knowledge. Descartes proclaimed for the modern individual

the privilege and the duty of rationalizing his own beliefs.

In such an inductive sifting of traditional beliefs, are there any

that can be called knowledge? Is there one whose reliability cannot

be successfully doubted? Not a single one, except the thinking process

itself. I am certain that I am conscious. Even when in my universal

doubt I say that nothing is certain, I am at least certain that I

doubt. I am, therefore, contradicting my universal skepticism. To doubt

is to think; in doubting, consciousness is asserting its existence.

Skepticism is self-contradictory. An induction of our ideas reveals

at least this one absolutely certain principle: I, as thinking,

am. _Cogito ergo sum._ My own existence is an intuitive truth that

accompanies every state of mind. This is the best known portion of

Descartes’s philosophy, and perhaps it is in part to the Latin formula

of it that it owes its widespread acceptance. It is criticised as

trifling, even if it be true; and as reasoning in a circle. Yet

it must be remembered that Descartes does not intend the _ergo sum_

(“therefore I am”) to be a conclusion of a syllogism of which _Cogito_

(“I think”) is the minor premise. This formula is not an inference, but

an intuition, which is revealed by induction as the certain background

of all knowledge.

Three things are to be learned from this fundamental principle, said

Descartes: (1) The first is that man has gained a criterion of truth.

The characteristic of this principle that makes it reliable and certain

is its clearness and distinctness. _Clearness and distinctness of ideas

is the proof of their truth._ All true ideas will therefore have the

mathematical and intuitive certainty that the idea of the existence

of the self has. (2) The second lesson from this fundamental principle

is that the existence of the soul is more certain than that of the

body. The soul is more important and independent than the body. This

is the subjective point of view of modern times. The modern man views

the world as the representation or the creation of his thinking soul.

(3) The third lesson from this principle concerns the nature of the

soul. How long do you exist? As long as you think. (_Sum cogitans._)

True existence is rational thinking, and God alone has it. Feelings and

passions are obscure ideas.

=Deduction――The Implications of Consciousness.= For Descartes reality

lies within the Self; and the next question before him is how to get

out of the Self. Knowledge that is confined to the Self and its states

is called, technically, solipsism. Such knowledge amounts to little;

indeed, it is not knowledge at all. Certainty of self-existence is the

minimum amount of knowledge――merely the starting point of knowledge.

Descartes proposes to escape from this solipsism by the use of logic.

His method from this point on is ostensibly deductive, although he

introduces by the side door other ideas than the idea of Self to make

his proof complete. Descartes maintains that any idea will be as true

as the consciousness that accompanies it, just as a proposition in

geometry partakes of the truth of the axioms from which it is derived.

Now my consciousness contains many ideas; some of them seem to be

the product of my imagination; some seem to be adventitious; some are

innate. It is upon the innate ideas that Descartes depends to get him

out of his solipsism, for they are not created by the Self and they

have the qualities of truth――a conscious clearness and distinctness.

Among these innate ideas is the idea of God as a perfect being.

=The Existence of God.[28]= As a deduction from consciousness, the idea

of God would prove to be a very useful one to Descartes, provided it

had reality. For it is evident that consciousness can testify only to

the existence of itself and its own states. How do I know the reality

of anything else? Am I confined within the circle of my own thinking?

Is all that I can say of this or that, “It is real to me”? Are all

things only the phantasmagoria of my own brain, testifying only to the

existence of myself? Descartes thought that the idea of God relieved

him of this solipsism. If he could demonstrate God’s existence,

he would then be able to demonstrate the existence of the material

universe. The problem was so highly important to Descartes that he

threw it into several different arguments. The complications with which

these arguments are filled must be passed over here, and the arguments

stated in their simplest forms.

(a) Two are ontological arguments, that is, arguments from the

character of the conception of God’s nature.

(1) _A Simple Deduction._ If I have in my consciousness any idea as

clear and distinct as my idea of Myself, it must have existence like

Myself. My idea of God has just that clearness and distinctness; and

therefore God exists.

(2) _The Geometrical Argument_, so called by Descartes. Some ideas have

properties so immutable that, when we think the ideas, we necessarily

think their properties. Such is the idea of a triangle; when I think

of a triangle, I must think of it as having its three angles equal to

two right angles. Such is also my idea of God; I must think of him as

perfect and existing. He would not be God, _i. e._ a perfect Being, if

He did not exist.

The reader will recognize this as a re-statement of the argument by

St. Anselm. As such it raised a tempest of controversy in Descartes’

time, and was attacked from all sides.

(b) Two are causal arguments, that is, based on the assumption of the

equality of cause and effect. Only one of these arguments will be cited

here. This is known as

_The Cartesian Argument._ I have an idea of a perfect Being. This idea

must have an adequate cause. Therefore God must exist, for only He, and

no imperfect being, can be the adequate cause of my idea of perfection.

The ontological arguments given by Descartes are evidently deductions

from the certainty of self-consciousness. The question which we

immediately raise concerning them is, Are they true? As to the causal

arguments, Descartes is breaking away from his original assumption,

viz., that self-consciousness is the only certainty, and is introducing

another assumption, viz., the certainty of the law of cause. The

question, then, that the thoughtful student asks, is, Does Descartes

really escape from his solipsism?

=The Reality of Matter.= It will be seen that Descartes is trying

to deduce from the certainty of the idea of self-consciousness the

certainty of other ideas, as propositions are deduced in geometry from

axioms. The existence of God is an implication of human consciousness.

Now Descartes points out that the existence of matter is implied in the

existence of God. Descartes is interested in material science, and it

is important for him to prove the reality of matter. Here again his

scholastic training comes into play. Since God has all the attributes

of a perfect being, He must be veracious. If there were no God, but

only a deceiving Devil, the external world might be only a fiction,

created to deceive us. But God exists, and we can trust that He would

not continually deceive men about the existence of nature. An atheist

could have no science, but to Descartes,

“God’s in His heaven――

All’s right with the world.”

Of course, man is constantly in error about the character of physical

things, but these errors arise from his misinterpretation of them.

Nature in some form lies before man, or else God in His truthfulness

does not exist. The essence of matter is extension (see below), and

whatever my interpretation of it, something extended lies before me

to be interpreted.

This is the skeleton upon which Descartes constructs his theory. Even

this cursory examination of it shows the obvious attempt to explain

“the world of grace” by the method of mathematics, and it is quite

consistent with the spirit of the Renaissance. The existence of God

and the existence of matter are deduced in turn from the axiom of all

thought, the Self; while matter is further described as the extended or

the measurable. Thus Descartes has tried to construct a bridge between

the scholastic concepts and the science of the Renaissance. The three

realities, the Self, God, and matter, which Descartes often speaks of

as intuitively certain, have obviously a differing cogency. The reality

of consciousness is the ground from which the other two are derived.

In asserting its primacy, he is voicing the spirit of the Renaissance

even more clearly than did Galileo and Bacon. For Descartes in this

has gone back of the objective facts to a single subjective principle;

whereas the deductive principles of Galileo were objective. In this

respect Descartes is the founder of the subjective method of modern

thought, and in identifying the Self as the reason he became the

founder of rationalism. In any case he established a background for

epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. But in his derivation of

the other two realities――God and matter――he shows how persistent was

the scholastic current in his thought. Although he declared them to

be intuitively known, they evidently are not so in the same sense

that self-consciousness is; and he felt obliged to support them by

traditional scholastic arguments.

=God and the World.= Leaving these fundamental principles of

Descartes, we now come to a consideration of a few of the details of

his philosophy. Descartes’ world is a dualism in which conscious being

stands in contrast with space objects. God is related to the world of

mind on the one hand and to the world of matter on the other. The order

in which Descartes came upon the three substances――the Self, God, and

matter――is, however, not the order of their reality. In reality God is

the _primary substance_, for He depends only upon Himself. Matter and

the Self are _relative or created substances_, for they depend upon

God. Matter and mind have different modes of appearing: the modes of

matter are form, size, position, and motion. The modes of mind are

ideas, judgments, and will. Thus mind is so essentially different from

matter, as can be seen in their respective modes, that God stands in a

different relation to each.

=The Relation of God to Matter.= Descartes here investigates the realm

in which he has the deepest interest; but he makes a concession at

the very beginning. He divests things of their qualities and finds the

essence of matter to be extension. Qualities are not resident in things,

but are the result of our sensations. Sense-perception is knowledge of

qualities, and therefore obscure knowledge; while clear or intellectual

knowledge is of quantities. But there is one quality common to

matter,――extension. Space, extension, and matter are the same. There

is no space that is empty, no matter that is not extended. An extended

or material body has, however, in itself no principle of motion. It

cannot move itself. It must be moved by an external cause, and the

whole universe must be a mechanism whose movements have their first

cause in God. Matter in its modes of motion and rest has God as its

first cause or unmoved mover; and under matter is included everything

extended,――inanimate objects, the lower animals, and the bodies of men.

To this world of matter God stands in the relation of an inventor to

his machine.

=The Relation of God to Minds.= The essential nature of minds

is thought. Mind is therefore different from matter because it is

unextended and free. The two relative substances have nothing in common

except that they are related to God. The relation of God to minds

is, however, very different from His relation to matter. God is not

the unmoved mover of minds, but He is the perfect and infinite mind

to which our finite minds turn as their ideal. God thinks and wills

perfectly what we think and will imperfectly. He is not the mechanical

but the teleological cause of minds, their _ens perfectissimum_, the

goal of all mental aspiration.

=The Relation of Mind and Body.= In proportion as Descartes clearly

defined mind and body, and referred each back to its own principle,

the impossibility of connecting the two became apparent. Descartes

intended that his theory should, above everything else, clear

philosophy of all obscurities. So he divided the world into two

relative substances,――mind and matter,――each operating in its own

realm, each exclusive of the other. The intention of Descartes is to

be a consistent dualist. But there was one point where, with one eye on

the church, he had to qualify for ethical considerations his scientific

principle of matter. That is the point where the human body acts upon

the soul and the soul acts upon the body.

There was little trouble for Descartes in conceiving the movements

of inanimate bodies, plants, and all the lower animals as purely

mechanical and automatic, with their first cause in God. From his own

investigations he felt obliged to regard many of the human functions

as automatic also. But his ethical and theological interests compelled

him to think of man as exalted above the rest of creation. Theology has

always been in a sense aristocratic, and has drawn a line between man

and other things. Man alone has a soul in his body. The soul of man

is immortal and free, and must therefore have control over the body;

nevertheless the soul of man must be conscious of the impressions

that come through the body. Here the science of the Renaissance and

the scholasticism of the Middle Ages refuse to be reconciled in the

philosophy of Descartes. When it became a question between Descartes’

scientific theory of matter operating itself mechanically and the

church doctrine of a spiritual will operating the matter of the human

body, the scientific theory had to yield. How does Descartes yield

gracefully to the theological requirements and bring together the two

unlike worlds of matter and mind in the human personality?

Descartes’ explanation of the relation of human mind and body reminds

us of the mythical explanations of Paracelsus. The soul is united to

all parts of the body, but its point of contact with the body is the

pineal gland, and this contact is made possible through the animal

spirits (_spiritus animales_) or the fire atoms in the blood, a revived

Greek conception. The pineal gland is a ganglion in the centre of the

brain, which biologists tell us is a defunct eye, but which Descartes

conceived to be the seat of the soul. Descartes maintained that

the animal spirits, having been distilled by the heart, ascend by

mechanical laws from the heart to the brain, and then descend to the

nerves and muscles. When they pass through the pineal gland, they come

in contact with the soul. The soul exercises influence on the body by

slightly moving the gland and diverting the animal spirits. In this way

the emotions and sensations are to be explained. The movement of the

pineal gland by the animal spirits causes sensations in the soul; the

movement of the gland by the soul changes the movement of the animal

spirits, and is an exhibition of free action. But this does not add to

or subtract from the energy. It merely changes the direction of energy.

=The Influence of Descartes.= Although the philosophy of Descartes

was forbidden in the University of Oxford, was proscribed by the

Calvinists in Holland, and his works were placed upon the Index by the

Catholics, it created a profound impression on the theology, science,

and literature of the seventeenth century. It spread over Europe in a

somewhat similar way to the Darwinian evolution theory in modern times.

Its success was immense, many standard men rallied to its support,

and everything before Descartes was considered to be antiquated. Among

philosophers his doctrine had an internal development in a natural

way along the lines of the problems which he had left unsolved. A

philosophical development, the source of which can be traced directly

back to Descartes, went on until Kant published his _Critique_ in

1781. This has later been called the School of Rationalism in Germany,

France, and Holland. The most important members of this school――the

Occasionalists, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Wolff――we shall consider in

their place. Descartes had an important immediate following in the

group, who go by the name of Occasionalists; but his most important

successor, who can hardly be called his disciple, was Spinoza.

Descartes’ method had a peculiar fate. His followers misunderstood

it, exactly reversed it, and obtained very fruitful results. Descartes

himself had hoped to see induction employed in most metaphysical

problems. He regarded deduction as of use only in proceeding from

one self-evident fact to another. But the following Rationalists used

the deductive method entirely and tried to systematize ethics after

the manner of Euclid. They deduced their systems from some assumed

principle. This tendency was first seen in the Port Royal logic, and

was completed by Spinoza.

=The Relation of the Occasionalists and Spinoza to Descartes.= The

development of the doctrines of the Occasionalists and Spinoza from

Descartes was an attempt to make clear the conception of _substance_.

Since substance was the most important scholastic category, it is easy

to see why Spinoza’s teaching became thoroughly scholastic. Descartes

had used the term “substance” in a very loose way to apply to God

as infinite, and to minds and bodies as finite. He speaks of God as

the only substance, and yet of consciousness and bodies as created

substances. Such ambiguity must be overcome, if a philosophy which

prided itself on making everything “clear and distinct” was to stand.

Descartes had fallen short of justifying his attempt to put metaphysics

completely upon a mathematical basis, although this had been his

original problem. The obscurity of the spiritual world still remained,

because Descartes had left the concept of the spiritual substance

undefined. The world of the spirit was still an unknown country. The

spiritual substance had not been made clear and distinct, and there

still remained the ontological problem of the relation between mind

and matter, and the psychological problem of the relation between the

individual soul and its body.

Descartes had, however, defined clearly the concept of the substance

of matter――the substance with which the natural scientist works. He had

accomplished this, to be sure, by destroying the essential distinctions

between material things. A “thing” is essentially a substance in

which many qualities inhere, _e. g._ a piece of sugar having whiteness,

sweetness, etc. Material substances were alike in that all were

essentially extension. All else besides extension in any particular

finite thing was a modification of extension. A lump of sugar was

essentially the same as a lump of salt in that both were extension; the

saltness, sweetness, etc., were secondary. Now this makes the nature

of bodies very clear; and Descartes proposed to reduce the substance

of the states of mind to the same clearness, but he did not do it.

He was interested in natural science and he developed his rationalism

only with reference to matter. Bodies are parts of space or corpuscles,

which are mathematically infinitely divisible, but perceptually are not

further divisible. As far as he went, Descartes was clear enough.

The Occasionalists and Spinoza represent the second stage in the

development of Rationalism. Both tried by making clear the meaning of

spiritual substance to define the relationship of God to the material

world. Both tried to state the problem in other words, to overcome the

dualism between mind and matter, and to reconstruct the old “world of

grace” so that it would be consistent with the new world of science.

The Occasionalists, whose chief exponents were Malebranche and Geulincx,

we shall dismiss with only a few words, while considerable attention

must be given to the teaching of Spinoza. Malebranche tried to do

for the mental world what Descartes had done for the world of matter.

Since no knowledge is possible except in God, he claimed that the

modes of finite minds――our ideas, judgments, imaginations――are alike

in essence in being modifications of the universal reason of God.

God is so far the “place of minds” as space is the place of bodies.

All our ideas participate in God’s reason, and all our volitions

are the modifications of the will of the Divine, just as bodies are

modifications of extension. What then is the relation, asked Geulincx,

between bodily movement and the states of consciousness? Why does my

arm move when I wish to move it? By the mediatory power of God. The

thought in my mind is the “occasional cause” of the movement of my

arm, while God is the true cause of the movement. The movement of the

human body is therefore, like the movement of all matter, a continuous

miracle caused by an ever watchful Deity, who keeps body and mind

in harmony. Spinoza completed his pantheism before Malebranche had

prepared the way. He formulated a complete doctrine of substance,

conceiving material bodies to be essentially the same in being modes of

extension, and mental phenomena to be essentially alike in being modes

of thought. But more important was his further teaching that on that

account the two series have no relation to each other. That is to say,

Spinoza reduced the whole difficulty to clearness and distinctness

by reducing the three substances of Descartes to one. For this reason

Spinoza was a more complete Rationalist than Descartes; and he was

assisted in this construction of a mathematical Rationalism by two

facts: he held himself strictly to the deductive method, and he

was free from social and ecclesiastical ties. Spinoza is the truest

utterance of his time in its effort to make all things clear; and this

is not contradicted by the fact that he had little influence in shaping

contemporary thought.

Illustration: BARUCH DE SPINOZA

(Pollock (_Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy_, p. xxvi) says

that only three of the portraits of Spinoza may reasonably be

considered authentic. One is a miniature of the philosopher

in the Summer Palace at the Hague; the second is a painting in

the Town Museum at the Hague; the third is the one given here,

which is an engraving found in copies of the original edition

of Spinoza’s Posthumous Works (1677). This portrait seems to be

somewhat idealized, but of the three it is the most artistic and

lifelike.)

=The Historical Place of Spinoza.=[29] Spinoza did not get full

standing nor was he widely read, until Lessing, one hundred years

later, resurrected his teaching and Goethe adopted it. He produced

what the Renaissance was striving for, but what the Renaissance

could not yet grasp,――the complete logical formulation of its deepest

thought. Spinoza produced the only great conception of the world during

this period, and it excited the hostility of contemporary Catholics,

Protestants, and free-thinkers alike. The product of his thinking

was a new systematic scholasticism, which, if the time had been ready

for it, would have entirely superseded the mediæval. He succeeded in

placing metaphysics upon a scientific and mathematical basis, for his

philosophy was not only logical in its content but mathematical in its

form. Spinoza’s philosophy is the Renaissance expression of mediæval

scholasticism,――the expression of that rationalism that underlies

both the thought of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is as if

Thomas Aquinas had been transported into the Renaissance, and finding

that science would not support and explain dogma, had conformed dogma

systematically to the new science. Mathematically science was the new

dogma. Spinoza is the last word of mediævalism, although his language

is the science of the Renaissance. The utterance of Spinoza sounds

strange because, while his thought is mediæval, his expression and form

are scientific.

Spinozism had a revival in the eighteenth century.[30] It formed the

background of the philosophy of Herder and that of the author of the

_♦Wolfenbüttel Fragments_. The connection of Lessing and Spinoza was

a matter of active controversy at that time. Spinoza was the great

influence upon Goethe. In the nineteenth century in England Coleridge

reproduced from Spinoza’s _Ethics_ the doctrine of an all-pervading

love and reason.

Spinoza strove before everything else for a unitary system, and yet

it is interesting to see how much he has been honored from different

quarters. Artists, religious devotees, poets, idealists, materialists,

and scientists have found in him their truest expression. This is

not only because each has found something different, but because his

philosophy had actually a many-sided character. His teaching had the

advantage of being thoroughly radical. Bad systems of philosophy are

impossible, because they are contradictory. While no one knows that any

system corresponds to fact, still it is possible that a radical system

may have such correspondence. Spinoza’s system is comprehensive, and

therefore has struck sympathetic chords in differing thinkers.

=The Influences upon Spinoza.= =1. His Jewish Training.= Spinoza

was born a Jew and remained a member of the Synagogue until he was

excommunicated at the age of twenty-four. Although he was the original

genius who transcends his limitations, his young mind was moulded after

the Jewish type. He received the strictly religious training of the

Jewish boy in the Jewish academy at Amsterdam, where he learned a trade

in connection with his studies. He studied the Talmud, mediæval Jewish

philosophy, especially the writings of Maimonides (twelfth century),

and the Cabalistic literature. In a Jewish curriculum the classical

languages had no place; and mathematics, except arithmetic, was

generally overlooked. His early instruction emphasized above everything

else the unity and the supremely transcendent, theistic character of

God.

However, his separation from the Synagogue at this early age could

not but modify his theology. It made him a free Jew. He was no

longer under the restraints of Jewish traditions. While he never

abandoned his belief in God as a unity, he gave up his belief in the

transcendent theistic God of the Hebrew prophets; and he differed from

the contemporary Jewish Cabalistic teaching of emanations from God. He

seems to have so modified the orthodox Hebrew conception of God that

it rather resembles that of the mediæval mystic Christian. Perhaps the

influence of Bruno upon his thought may account for its final shape.

=2. His Impulse from the New Science――Descartes’ Influence.= The “free

thinking” for which Spinoza was excommunicated by the Synagogue was

obtained first from his instruction in the school of Van der Ende,

a physician of daring naturalistic tendencies. This was when he was

eighteen. Spinoza had already learned Italian and French; Spanish,

Portuguese, Dutch, and Hebrew were his native tongues; Van der Ende

taught him German and Latin, and introduced him to the science of the

time. It was then that he read Descartes, whose philosophy he made the

basis of his own. Spinoza was not an inventive genius like Descartes

and Leibnitz, but he was more rigidly systematic than either. He was

by nature a thinker who was obliged to carry his thought through to

its logical conclusions. He had already, at this early age of eighteen,

begun to make independent theological excursions. Consequently the

mathematical methods of Descartes furnished him a method, and Van

der Ende gave him the encouragement for carrying out his independent

thinking unrelentingly to its logical end. To state his modified Jewish

conception of God in mathematical terms became his task, and his

success in thus stating it, with Descartes as a starting point, made

him the most complete representative of Rationalism.

=3. His Acquaintance with the Collegiants.= After his expulsion from

his kindred, he lived for seven years with a sect of Baptist Quakers

called Collegiants. This was a dissenting religious body without

priests or set forms of worship. The members were simple, pious

people, who regarded moral living as superior to creed; and Spinoza’s

life in their midst must have determined to some degree the lines

of his thought. To a man of Spinoza’s simplicity of mind and kindly

disposition, the Collegiants would prove to be not only congenial

companions in his hours of distress, but they would confirm his own

love for the ethical as an ideal. Spinoza says that the motive of his

philosophy is a practical one; that he is seeking that which would

“enable me to enjoy continuous and supreme and unending happiness.” He

is seeking a theory of life that would aid in allaying the unrest of

his time; and he is the only philosopher who has called his metaphysics

_Ethics_. The humaneness of his doctrine, the practical purpose of his

writings, and the ethical ideal that informed his whole life had at

least their reinforcement, and perhaps their origin, in his contact

with the Collegiants during this critical period. His life with this

sect influenced him in his refusal to accept the chair of philosophy at

the University of Heidelberg, and to remain content to be the obscure

grinder of optical lenses.

=The Life and Philosophical Writings of Spinoza=[31] (1632–1677).

The history of philosophy presents in the person of Spinoza a lovable,

interesting, and striking character, as well as the author of one of

the profoundest of philosophical systems. His life was one of social

isolation and retirement rather than of solitude. The Jews to whom

he belonged lived a kind of double exile――they were exiled from their

home in Spain, and they lived by themselves apart from the people

of Amsterdam. When Spinoza was excommunicated by his brethren, he

suffered, therefore, a threefold exile. Moreover, Spinoza was not only

excommunicated by his people, but he was hated by the contemporary

Catholics, Protestants, and the prevailing Cartesian school. Even the

free-thinker, Hume, spoke of him as “the infamous Spinoza,” and another

philosopher described his philosophy as “the hideous hypothesis of

Spinoza.” But his isolation was far from solitude, and he had many

eminent and faithful friends and a notable correspondence. Of his short

life of forty-five years, he spent twenty-four, or more than half, as

a member of the Jewish synagogue. During the next seven years he found

refuge among the Collegiants. In the last fourteen years of his life he

became widely known, mainly through the _Theological-Political Tract_,

published in 1670, the only one of his writings which he himself

published. This brought him the call to the University of Heidelberg,

which he declined. His life may be conveniently divided into three

periods, as follows:――

1. _In Israel_ (1632–1656). Spinoza was educated at the Jewish academy

at Amsterdam, where he studied theology and learned a trade, according

to the Jewish custom. This trade was the grinding of optical lenses;

that is, he became an optician, and this required some knowledge of

mathematics and physics. During these years he got instruction from

Van der Ende in science and Latin. He also read Descartes and learned

many languages. He wrote a compendium of a Hebrew Grammar, of which

the date is doubtful. In 1656 he was excommunicated by the synagogue.

The charges brought against him were that: (1) he denied that the Old

Testament taught the doctrine of immortality; (2) he affirmed that

angels may be only phantoms or ideas in men’s minds; (3) he affirmed

that God may have a body.

2. _In Retirement_ (1656–1663). Spinoza spent this time with the

Collegiants, and this was his most fruitful intellectual period.

He brought his ontology, ethics, politics, and physics into a

unified system; and he formulated his theory of determinism and his

mathematical method. In 1658–1661 he was writing his so-called _Short

Treatise_, “concerning God, man and his well-being.” This was the first

draft of his _Ethics_. In 1656–1662 he was writing his _Improvement of

the Understanding_. In 1662–1663 he wrote a summary of the principles

of Descartes.

3. _In the Public Eye_ (1663–1677). During this period Spinoza

lived at or near the Hague, where he had many visitors and a large

correspondence.[32] He was an intimate friend of the brothers DeWitte,

who made so large a part of the political history of the country.

In 1662–1665 he was writing his _Ethics_, his monumental work. In

1663–1670 he wrote and published the _Theological-Political Treatise_,

the only work published during his life. Although received with horror,

it was widely read. It aimed to show that the _Bible_ is history. In

1673 he declined the call to the University of Heidelberg. Just before

his death, in 1677, he wrote the fragment of the _Political Treatise_.

=The Method of Spinoza.= The method which Spinoza employed in writing

his _Ethics_ must not be regarded by the reader as a fantastic dress

that he capriciously chose. It had for Spinoza a real and not merely

an external significance. On taking up the book, one finds philosophy

treated exactly as Euclid treated his geometry. Beginning with a

number of definitions and axioms, there are deduced, step by step,

propositions with appended scholia and corollaries. To Spinoza this was

not pressing philosophy into an artificial and rigid form, but was only

the natural mode of philosophical expression. For, in the first place,

if the new method of science had proved itself successful in treating

physical phenomena, why should not the same method have the same

success with problems of the world of the spirit――and in this way

bring the two worlds into harmony? By deduction one could then arrive

at absolute certainty and unassailable proof of the solutions of

metaphysical problems that had long vexed the Middle Ages. With the

perfect geometrical method all problems in heaven and earth could be

solved. In the second place, the religious conviction of Spinoza that

all things come from God required the deductive method to explain them.

The order in which we should study phenomena should correspond to the

real order in which they stand to God. God is the ground or reason of

things, and all are derived from Him as consequents. The deduction of

the relation of finite things to God will correspond to the real

relation in which God stands to them.

=The Fundamental Principle in Spinoza’s Philosophy.= The philosophy

of Spinoza seems to be Cartesian in every respect except one; and

that one difference was like the leaven in the lump――it transformed

his philosophy into a radically different one from that of Descartes.

Spinoza’s point of departure was the philosophy of Descartes, all

his presuppositions are the fundamental principles of Descartes, and

the structure of his system seems to be that of Descartes. He has the

same respect for the power of the reason to know all truth, the same

faith in the omnipotence of the mathematical method, the same general

conception of substance, the same idea of the qualitative difference

between the worlds of thought and extension, the same belief in the

mechanical structure of the world of nature. He made these his own

and accentuated them. But he added to these a new and transforming

principle: he conceived that the substance, God, is not merely one

object of knowledge, but _He is the only object of knowledge_. He is

the only substance, and finite things are only modifications of Him.

Finite things are alike at bottom, and to know them truly is to know

God.

This new principle transforms all the Cartesian elements in Spinoza’s

teaching. It changes the Cartesian theism into a pantheism; it

supplants Descartes’ theological orthodoxy with a naturalism and

Descartes’ doctrine of freedom with a determinism; and it turns the

cultured aloofness of Descartes into a benevolent mysticism. This

new principle becomes “the head of the corner.” The oneness and

universality of God is the single proposition from which Spinoza

deduced his whole philosophy. God is the ultimate ground whose

existence must be real, because it is conceived. The intrinsic

scholasticism of the philosophy of Spinoza appears in his definition

of substance, for it is only a condensed statement of St. Anselm’s

argument for the existence of God. Spinoza says, “By substance I mean

that which is in itself and conceived through itself alone.” There

are, therefore, two kinds of things: the thing that has existence in

itself and the things that have existence in something else. God stands

alone in the first class; all other things make up the second class.

Spinoza’s world is divided into two parts: God and the modes of God.

God is self-explanatory and self-existent, while everything else is

explained through Him. The only object of knowledge and the single

presupposition of existence is God. In a phrase that has become classic,

Novalis described Spinoza as a “God-intoxicated man.”

=Three Central Problems in Spinoza’s Teaching.= We have already noted

that Spinoza was the chief exponent of “clearness and distinctness”

in this epoch when all mysteries were to be revealed. He sought to

articulate a metaphysics that would spread out the plan of the world

like a demonstration in geometry. His definition of substance is

perfectly intelligible; he accepted the mathematical analysis of

the material world into a world of extension, and that of the world

of conscious states into one of thought――all this for the sake of

simplification and clearness. How simple such a philosophy at the first

blush appears――the world is God and his modifications. As a matter of

fact it is one of the many examples of the irony of history that the

philosophy of Spinoza is one of the most difficult to interpret. Its

difficulties do not arise from its having a novel point of view, for on

the contrary it is one that appeals strongly to the popular imagination.

Its difficulties arise from its very simplicity, for, after all, human

life is so rich and varied that a simple formula will hardly express

it. From beginning to end Spinoza’s thought has a vagueness for which

the beginner in vain strives to find the cause. The cause lies in the

seemingly simple principle that God is all that really exists, and yet

the world consists of God and other things.

From Spinoza’s effort to simplify matters emerged three central

problems: (1) The problem of the all-inclusiveness of God――the problem

of pantheism; (2) The problem of the unity of God――the problem of

mysticism; (3) The problem of the salvation of man――an ethical problem.

We shall now consider these problems in order.

=The Pantheism of Spinoza――The All-Inclusiveness of God.= That

Spinoza’s philosophy is a pantheism appears at the outset in his

conception of substance; for the substance is all that really is.

Descartes had conceived of three substances,――God as the absolute

substance, and mind and matter as the two relative substances. But to

Spinoza there can be only one substance; for if there were two or more,

no one would be substance, since each would be conceived through the

others. If we think at all, we must think of substance as all-inclusive.

One might suppose that this preliminary statement would be all that

Spinoza could say about life: all that really is, is substance; other

things do not exist. But that would be a misinterpretation of Spinoza.

He does not mean that finite things are mere nothings. They exist as

unrealities; they exist as negations of the substance. If you prick

into the finite world, it does not collapse, like a balloon. It still

exists as an unreality.

No person ever had the idea of infinity so profoundly as did Spinoza.

His idea of infinity is not merely that of the infinity of time

and space, which indeed affords a tremendous variety of possible

constructions, since space and time are each infinite. To Spinoza the

infinity of the substance is much more than these possible combinations

of time and space, for corresponding to the time and space series

is a series of mental states. Every event has a reason. Every one

of the infinity of events in the world of extension is paralleled

by some state of thought. But this is by no means the whole story

about Spinoza’s conception of infinity. Besides the infinite world of

time and space and the infinite world of corresponding thought, the

substance to Spinoza possesses an infinity of other attributes, each

of which is infinite. Spinoza piles up infinities upon infinities, and

thus conceives the substance as an infinity in an overwhelming sense.

Only two of the infinite modes appear to our limited human discernment:

the infinity of the mode of extension, and the infinity of the mode of

thought.

Spinoza begins at once to tell us about the forms in which the

all-inclusive God appears to us. First, the substance has two

attributes, thought and extension. An attribute is “that which the

intellect perceives as constituting the essence of the substance.” Each

attribute in its turn manifests itself in modes: thought appears in the

modes of intellect and will, extension in the modes of rest and motion.

Substance = God.

┌────────┴────────┐

Attributes = Thought Extension.

┌────┴────┐ ┌───┴───┐

Modes = Intellect Will Motion Rest.

This bare skeleton of our rich and varied world appears very much

the same as that which one might find beneath Descartes’ philosophy.

However, Spinoza’s conception of substance transforms it into a

framework of a very different kind of philosophy. Since God is the

inclusive reality of it all, we have here a pantheism instead of a

dualism. The antithesis which in Descartes’ philosophy was between

extension and thought, now in Spinoza’s teaching is between God and

other things.

What is the place of the attributes and modes in the all-embracing

and real substance? As to the attributes, Spinoza maintained that we,

as finite beings, do not know God in His character as substance, but

that He always appears to us through His attributes of thought and

extension. There are only these two attributes that the human mind

can know, although God as an infinite being must possess an infinite

number of such attributes. In our human world all things are either

thought-things or extension-things. Each of these two attributes is

infinite after its kind. Each fully expresses an aspect of God without

depreciating the value of the other. Each is fully adequate, just as a

table may be both white and hard without either quality infringing upon

the other. The attributes are the substance made more concrete. The

modes are in turn modifications of the attributes and more concrete

expressions of them and of the substance. Each mode is infinite after

its kind. Since God exists only in reality, He would not supposably

see from His point of view the world laid out in attributes and modes;

for these are only human ways of interpreting Him. While the critics

agree that the modes are human interpretations of the attributes and

therefore unreal, they disagree about the relation of the attributes

to God. Some maintain that the attributes are merely human ways of

seeing the substance, analogously to the modes――as if we saw God now as

thought and now as extension; others maintain that God is nothing other

than the sum of the attributes; of extension, thought, and the unknown,

infinite, other attributes. The difficulty lays bare the nerve of the

problem of pantheism, and probably Spinoza was not clear in his own

mind about the relation of the attributes to the substance.

Spinoza speaks more definitely upon this same problem of the relation

of the modes to God. Is God the sum-total of all existent things, or is

He the principle behind them? Spinoza says that God is both. God is the

cause of the world, not cause in the way that the term is commonly used

nor in the sense that Descartes used it. God is not to existent things

the first cause or the unmoved mover of matter, or the teleological

cause of thought, as in Descartes. He is cause in the sense that a

triangle is the cause of its own three sides. He is the rational ground

(_ratio essendi_) or the logical reason for the being of things. In

this sense God may be regarded as the cause _both_ in the sense that

He is the sum-total of existent things or modes (_natura naturata_),

and in the sense that He is the immanent and energizing principle of

existent things (_natura naturans_). These conceptions as well as their

phrases Spinoza probably got from Bruno.

The world is, therefore, related to God in that it follows directly

from the nature of God; God is related to the world in that He is

the logical ground of the world. Is God the creator of the world? No,

He is the world. Is God a person? Is He a self-conscious being like

ourselves,――an individual? No. The thought-aspect of God includes

our thought, but it is the very different infinite thought; the

extension-aspect of God includes our body, but it is the very different

infinite body. God has soul and body and an infinite number of

other aspects. _God is_――an unchanging, self-dependent being, whose

modifications are necessarily determined in their relation to Him and

to one another. Spinoza conceived the character of God exactly from

the nature of geometry. Just as all geometrical conclusions follow from

the nature of space and exist in determined and fixed relations to one

another, so everything finite follows from the nature of the Infinite,

and each finite thing is in a rigid chain of finite things of its own

kind――a chain without beginning or end. The necessity of the divine

nature appears in all, not as a series of emanations from God, but in

a series, each member of which is determined equally by Him.

=The Mysticism of Spinoza.= _From the point of view of man_, mysticism

in speculative or religious thought has reference to the immediate

apprehension of God. Mysticism frequently accompanies pantheism,

and _from the point of view of God_ refers to the oneness of His

all-inclusive nature. Spinoza’s pantheism is also a mysticism which

involves the immediate apprehension of the divine by the human;

it involves the oneness of God and man. More often than otherwise

mysticism is animated by a religious motive, and Spinoza’s philosophy

is profoundly religious. We have already seen similar mysticism in the

Orphic-Pythagorean sect which formed so great a peril to Greek culture

in the sixth century B. C., in the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists

at the beginning of this era, in many of the churchmen of the Middle

Ages, especially Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart. Bruno and many

of the Humanists were mystics, and if we should wish to go outside our

field, we should find mysticism to be the prevailing attitude of mind

of the great Oriental peoples. Mysticism frequently is accompanied by

belief in occult spiritual appearances, but that is not necessarily the

case; nor was it the case with Spinoza. Spinoza’s mysticism was purely

intellectual. Although a religious philosophy with an immediate ethical

bearing upon conduct, it was a scientific relationalism that could not

tolerate the miraculous and the abnormal psychological phenomena (such

as clairvoyance, hallucinations, etc.). Spinoza is, on the contrary,

distinguished as a mystic because he interpreted the universe in

entirely non-human terms. His great service to mysticism lies in

divesting the reality of life of every human attribution and laying

bare a mathematical skeleton. The desire of the period to find a

greater unity in life was responded to by him in a mathematical

mysticism. To him the universe is not only divided into parts, not

only is there no opposition between God and the world, but life is so

completely a rational thing that no exceptional phenomena can occur.

He believed that any description of God or of nature in anthropomorphic

terms disunites life. Spinoza dehumanized the universe, conceiving

matter to consist of elements, and conceiving spirit to consist of

simple ideas. He resolved the personality of man into parts for the

sake of the unity of the universe, and he obtained scientific clearness

at the expense of humanity. Thus, instead of being able to say with

Descartes, “I think and therefore I am,” Spinoza could say, and wished

only to say, “God thinks” (_Deus cogitat_).

Like the usual speculative mystic, Spinoza described his God in the

terms of formal deductive logic. God is the most real being, _ens

realissimum_. What is the most real being to a mystic? Would reality

contain any finite quality such as the world around us contains? Can

you say that God has this particular faculty, or is endowed with that

concrete attribute? Does God enjoy, love, hate; does He create and

destroy? But how can God be the real unity of the world unless He

contains in Himself everything in the finite world? We approach here

the threshold of _the problem of the concrete universal_, which has

engaged the attention of so much of modern philosophy. A concrete

universal is all-inclusive of finite existence, but at the same time is

a self-consistent unity. In contrast with the concrete universal is the

abstract universal, which is a unity, but outside of which all finite

existence falls. While it was undoubtedly the concrete universal that

Spinoza sought, his method could lead to nothing more concrete than

the abstract universals of Plato and the Schoolmen. The world of finite

things is included by Spinoza’s God in the same way that blocks are

included by a string which has been tied around them.

Spinoza’s God is the most abstract entity which it is possible to

conceive. All finite things fall outside Him. No quality can be

predicated of Him, for to define Him is to limit Him. After the manner

of the “negative theology” (see vol. i, p. 283), Spinoza refused to

ascribe any quality to God. He does not feel, think, or will as we do,

nor can extension be ascribed to Him in the sense of finite spaces.

We can say only that He is not this and not this. Spinoza’s conception

of God is reached by dropping off all determinate qualities, until the

most general and most abstract term is gained. The barrenness of this

logical conception, its absolute emptiness and abstractness, makes all

description of it impossible. God is a bloodless entity, an absolute

logical necessity and the most abstract universal. Outside of Him falls

all that we call life. If this is God’s character, is He everything

or nothing? If the process of abstraction rises so far above every

limitation to an _ens realissimum et generalissimum_,――to the most

real and most general entity,――if all content falls away from God,

what does such an empty form amount to? The paradox in Spinoza’s

philosophy appears here as in the case of all mysticism――for the mystic

revels in paradoxes. This empty generality is all that really is.

God is everything, and Spinoza points out empirical proof of this by

insisting that the transitory life of man has its only meaning in such

a substance. God is not this particular thing nor again that finite

determination, but He is all these. He is the timeless reality of

the temporal world, the infinity of finite things, the necessity of

contingent nature. When therefore Spinoza speaks of God as having an

intellectual love for Himself, and when he says that the attributes

of thought and extension constitute the essence of the substance, he

is not giving finite characteristics to God. He is struggling with

language to express the inherent paradox of his philosophy.

Moreover, the delineation of the finite world with God as a background,

as it appears from the point of view of a human being, is an inadequate

presentation of Spinoza’s profound conception of God. For the substance

is not merely a neutral point nor the central point of the universe.

The substance is all. All things have neither their explanation nor

their existence in themselves. God alone has an existence that explains

itself, and He is the reality and essence of all finite things. God

is immanent in the world. Just as the sides of a triangle get their

meaning from the triangle itself, so the significance of the attributes

and modes of the substance lies in the substance.

The unity of Spinoza’s God is further suggested by the relation of the

attributes of thought and extension, however separate they must appear

in their quality and causal dependence. Both are aspects of the same

substance, in the one case in the form of extension, and in the other

in the form of thought. In the all-inclusive nature of God, presumably

each moment has an infinite number of correlative moments corresponding

to the infinite number of the attributes of God. Since to human beings

only two of these worlds lie in sight, only two corresponding modes

appear, but always two. This correspondence of the physical and

psychical throughout nature is called in later times _panpsychism_;

in the relation of the body and mind of a human being it is called

_psycho-physical parallelism_. This correspondence helped Spinoza

to solve the apparent dualism of the two worlds. While ideas are

determined only by ideas, and motions by motions, both series point

below to the divine substance which is the significance of both. They

are like the top and bottom sides of a piece of paper, neither side

constituting the piece of paper, but both being necessary to it. The

substance is immanent in thought as well as in extension. Both thought

and extension are aspects of God. The relation of thought and extension

through the Deity discloses the monistic character of Spinoza’s

philosophy and seems to prove that he cannot be a materialist, although

some critics have said that he is. The same reality is seen, now as

consciousness and now as extension.

=Spinoza’s Doctrine of Salvation.= Spinoza divided his _Ethics_ into

five parts. The first is a treatment of the nature of God; the second,

of the nature and origin of the mind; the third, of the emotions;

the fourth, of human bondage; the fifth, of human freedom. This

most important writing of Spinoza, the only treatise on metaphysics

which has been called Ethics, is a practical philosophy of life and

redemption. The divisions of it, as they appear above, show that the

philosophy of life is looked at from two points of view: with reference

to the nature of God, and with reference to the nature of man. We

have above discussed the first point,――Spinoza’s conception of God,

whom he regards as pantheistic and mystic. But Spinoza’s conception of

the nature of the human being in relation to such a God is the other

pole of this subject. The problem of life from the human point of

view involves primarily the question of human freedom. Human freedom

and human bondage are conditions that depend upon the human as well

as the divine nature. By Spinoza’s eliminating the human element

from the nature of God, man himself has been reduced by Spinoza to an

insignificant detail in a machine-like universe. Yet for man in his

littleness Spinoza hews out a way to God in His greatness by his mystic

reconstruction of the universe. Existence in Spinoza’s pantheistic

mysticism is, after all, a sphere of wonderful grandeur for man,――more

wonderful and of wider utility than the existence which man is

ordinarily supposed to possess. Since God is the reality of everything,

man is deified; even the loss of man’s essential humanity is the

apotheosis of man.

Human salvation and freedom consist in being like God; bondage consists

in being unlike Him, in mistaking the unreality of life for His reality.

We are endowed with the ability of forming an adequate idea of God

by means of our reason, but we are also endowed with the faculties of

sensation, emotion, and imagination. The latter faculties make man a

passive creature, for they bring him into dependence upon the things

that act upon him and into bondage to them. We are passive when our

activities are limited by such limited objects. While a passion seems

to be the most active and turbulent of our faculties, if we look at

it more closely, we find that instead of being active ourselves during

a passion, we are being acted upon by an external object. Only as we

are purely rational,――only through the reason,――are we purely active.

It is then that we are like God, free like Him, and then do we rise

from insignificance to greatness. Then we transcend our false ideas of

freedom and become necessary beings, for in God freedom is necessity.

To be free from the passions and the finite things of the world we must

understand their nature; for to understand a thing is to be delivered

from it. An illusion is not an illusion when we know it to be such. To

see that all the passions, sensations, imaginations, and all the other

modes of thought are human limitations, is to dwell within the reason.

Spinoza’s freedom is not, as will be seen, freedom in the ordinary

psychological meaning of the term, but is the metaphysical freedom

of being identical with the deity and determined by no finite thing.

Freedom is rational knowledge. Nevertheless, freedom is ethical

also, for it consists in overcoming the passions by reason. Freedom,

therefore, has two sides: an escape from the emotions and an escape

from obscure ideas――the goal in both cases being the life of reason.

To attain freedom is to see the world as God sees it, which is the same

as the reason sees it. This is to see each finite thing as eternal.

Any concrete thing may be regarded by the human being as a finite and

isolated thing out of all relation to other objects; or the same thing

may be regarded as a detail of infinity. Looked at by itself, a thing

is seen partially and falsely, for no finite thing has its explanation

in itself. It is, however, seen truly when it is regarded, to use

Spinoza’s own celebrated phrase, “under a certain form of eternity”

(_sub specie aeternitatis_). This conception of eternity is one of the

most admirable in Spinoza’s teaching. When man rises through the reason

to the consciousness of the eternity of the truth of a thing, the thing

itself is transformed, and the man himself has gained salvation. Any

circle that I may draw is imperfect, every leaf upon the forest trees

is defective, all moral activities are wanting, if regarded in their

time-limitations. But below all the imperfections of the universe is

its absolute mathematical perfectness. There is nothing so abortive

and evil that it does not have its aspect of eternity. Side by side

with Spinoza’s conception of infinity is his conception of eternity.

Infinity is everlastingness, eternity is quality of being. Eternity

has no reference to time. One minute may be eternal. The infinity of

the substance is one aspect; the eternity of the substance is another.

That eternity gained through the reason is salvation and immortality.

God is reason, and by the act of the reason do we become one with Him.

Our knowledge is, therefore, the measure of our morality. Knowledge

and morality are the same; and whatever increases our understanding is

morally good; whatever diminishes our understanding is morally wrong.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of the philosopher, there is

nothing in the world that is morally good or bad,――nothing which merits

his hatred, love, fear, contempt, or pity,――since all that occurs

is necessary. The philosopher’s knowledge of the determinism of the

world lifts him above the usually conceived world of finite things to

this mystic world, reconstructed by his intellectual love of nature

or God. Love for God will give to everything its proper value. It

is the highest form of human activity. Love for God is an absolutely

disinterested feeling, and is not therefore like human love, which

is the passing from a less state to a greater. Love for God is peace,

resignation, and contentment, for it is oneness with God. In fact,

the love of man for God is the love of God for man; it is the love

of God for Himself, since man cannot love God without becoming God.

Thus man intellectually recognizes his oneness with God, and rejoices.

Immortality is absorption in the eternal and necessary substance of the

world. It is a common misconception that immortality is duration after

death; immortality consists in looking at things under the aspect of

eternity. The finite man perishes, but man’s real self, which is God,

survives.

=Summary of Spinoza’s Teaching.= The rationalism of Spinoza is the

final word of scholastic realism. It is a mathematical scholasticism

in which the attempt is to make clear by the method of deduction all

metaphysical problems. That the philosophical teaching of Spinoza is

inspiring and ennobling, no one will gainsay. That his philosophy is

not clear, is also true. In the beginning of his discussion, spirit is

subordinated to nature; at the end, nature is subordinated to spirit.

The result is that under the hands of Spinoza God has become a pure

abstraction and without content, the world is an illusion, dualism is

superseded by a monistic parallelism, individual activity gives way and

becomes a pantheistic determinism. Yet amid all this a reconstructed

world arises in which man is recompensed for all his losses by his

participation in _infinity_ and _eternity_.

=Leibnitz[33] as the Finisher of the Renaissance and the Forerunner

of the Enlightenment.= Leibnitz is the last of the remarkable group

of Rationalists of the Renaissance, who so fully represent the spirit

of its Natural Science epoch. But Leibnitz also carries us into

the next period of modern philosophy――the Enlightenment. He is the

transition philosopher. If the reader will examine the dates of his

life, he will observe that Leibnitz lived until twenty-five years

after the Enlightenment was ushered in by Locke’s _Essay on the Human

Understanding_ (1690). But as Leibnitz had already formed his own

philosophy by the year 1686, even so versatile a mind as his could

not then renounce the Rationalistic point of view for a new one. Some

of his writings, such as his _Correspondence with Clark and Bayle_,

his _Theodicy_, and his _New Essays_, show that he participated in the

new movement of the next period. Yet the majority of his philosophical

writings show him to be a Rationalist. Although he may be called

the “father of the Enlightenment,” the body of his thought belongs

to the Renaissance. His main motive was that which animated all

Rationalists――of stating theology in scientific terms. The immediate

occasion for his doing this was the political necessity of peace among

the religious bodies of Germany.

The effort of Leibnitz to restore the individual to his central place

in the universe was a _secondary motive_. It nevertheless makes him

the forerunner of the Enlightenment. Of the Rationalists, Leibnitz

speaks for the future, just as Spinoza for the past. Leibnitz unites

the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, just as Spinoza joins the

Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Spinoza is the Rationalist who

utters the final word of scholastic realism, while Leibnitz presages

the coming individualism. Spinoza’s philosophy is science buried in

traditionalism; Leibnitz’s is science breaking through traditionalism.

Spinoza harks back to universals and particulars, substance and forms;

Leibnitz points forward to vortex rings, energy, and dynamics. From

Leibnitz’s original purpose to rationalize theology, and to succeed

where Descartes and Spinoza had failed, there emerges a new motive. He

no longer lays the emphasis entirely upon the universal, but he shifts

it in part to the particular. The pantheism of Spinoza had systematized

the individual out of its reality. Leibnitz’s conception of the

individual as dynamic and his conception of the importance of the

infinitesimal redeem the individual and bring Leibnitz into more modern

times. To classify Leibnitz as a Rationalist is, therefore, not to

describe him fully.

=The Life and Writings of Leibnitz= (1646–1716). Compared with

Descartes and Spinoza, Leibnitz had a life that was long in time and

rich in experience. Descartes died at 54 and Spinoza at 45, while

Leibnitz lived to be 70. In striking contrast with Spinoza’s career,

there was no time in the life of Leibnitz after his graduation from the

university that he was not in public service. He held the offices that

would naturally go to the hanger-on of princes――some of them grandiose

ones. While theoretically the interests of the three Rationalists were

the same, Leibnitz differed from his predecessors in that his study

of philosophical problems always grew out of some practical problem

or political occasion. Leibnitz was not an academic thinker, and his

“writings were called forth to estimate some recent book, to outline

the system for the use of a friend, to meet some special difficulty,

or to answer some definite criticism.” Philosophy was only one

of the interests of Leibnitz. He was jurist, historian, diplomat,

mathematician, physical scientist, theologian, and philologist.

Leibnitz was as much at home with the theories of Plato and Aristotle

of ancient time, with those of St. Thomas and Duns Scotus of mediæval

time, as with the science of Descartes and Galileo. He was precocious,

had a prodigious memory and a reactive mind. In the wealth of his

information and the productiveness of his genius, he stands with

Aristotle as unequaled. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz belonged to

the inner circle of scholars of the time, but Leibnitz was also in

personal touch with political affairs and in intimate acquaintance with

many of the important rulers. He was in the service of the Elector of

Mainz and later of George I of England when George was only Elector of

Hanover. He was distinguished by Peter the Great of Russia and Ernst

August, Emperor of Germany. He corresponded with Eugene of Savoy and he

was ambassador to Louis XIV of France. Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, who

married the King of Prussia, was especially interested in him, and he

wrote for her his _Theodicy_. The three great Rationalists came from

different strata of society. Descartes was a nobleman’s son, and he

voluntarily relinquished the life that Leibnitz was ambitious to enjoy.

Spinoza came from the lower class. Leibnitz was the son of a college

professor and belonged to the upper middle class. The ambitions of

Leibnitz reached for large ends, as often happens among educated people

in the middle walks of life. Among other things, he tried to reconcile

the Catholics and Protestants, and he tried to universalize language by

getting universal characters for all languages.

The literary production of Leibnitz was enormous, consisting of

some lengthy works, but mainly of correspondence (at one time with

a thousand persons) and of dissertations to learned journals and

societies. No one book contains his philosophy――the _Monadology_ coming

the nearest to doing so. His most considerable work is his _Theodicy_.

He himself published in book form only two works: his university

dissertation on _Individuation_ and the _Theodicy_.[34]

In spite of his many successes, the life of Leibnitz was not happy.

From death or other causes his noble patrons changed, until he was

left without a patron. His life went from bad to worse, and his death

occurred almost unnoticed.

The seventy years of Leibnitz’s life fall into four periods. That

he passed through three of these periods by the time he was thirty

shows the voracity and versatility of his mental powers during their

formative and acquisitive state. It also reveals the unusual length

of his productive period,――from his thirtieth to his seventieth year.

Ten years after his productive period began, when he was forty, he had

completed his philosophical theory, so that the last thirty years of

his life were free for its elaboration and elucidation, and in part for

his departure from it. The details of Leibnitz’s life are as follows:――

1. _Leipsic and University Life_ (1646–1666).

Leibnitz was the son of a professor of the University of Leipsic. He

entered the University at the age of fifteen; received his bachelor’s

degree at seventeen, and his doctor’s degree at Altdorf at the age of

twenty. He was offered a professorship on account of his thesis, but

he declined. He published as his bachelor’s thesis, _The Principle of

Individuation_ (1663).

2. _Mainz and Diplomacy_ (1666–1672).

Meeting Baron John of Boineburg, who became his patron, Leibnitz went

with him to Mainz, and entered the service of the Elector of Mainz.

At this time Leibnitz wrote many pamphlets at the Elector’s request,

on the religious and political questions of the day. He wrote _A New

Physical Hypothesis_ in 1671.

3. _Paris and Science_ (1672–1676).

Leibnitz began this period with a diplomatic mission to the court of

Louis XIV in 1672; but during the year both Boineburg and the Elector

died, and Mainz was no longer his home nor diplomacy his interest.

He remained in Paris (and London) three years longer, and spent the

time in acquiring the “new science.” In Paris he met Arnauld the

Cartesian, Tschirnhausen the German mathematician, logician, and most

discriminating critic of Spinoza, and he studied with Huyghens the

Dutch mathematician. In London he met Boyle, the chemist, Oldenburg,

secretary of the Academy of Science, Collins, the mathematician, and he

corresponded with Newton. On his return to Hanover he called on Spinoza,

who showed him the manuscript of the _Ethics_.

4. _Hanover and Philosophy_ (1676–1716).

Leibnitz became court councilor and librarian to the Duke of Hanover

(Brunswick-Lüneburg). He was involved in a multitude of administrative,

historical, and political tasks, and he carried on an enormous

correspondence. Among other things he wrote the history of the reigning

family, which necessitated his going to Rome and Vienna. In 1684

he published his discovery of the differential calculus, over which

arose the celebrated controversy as to whether he or Newton made the

prior discovery. In 1686, in his fortieth year, he constructed his

philosophical system. However, he showed his affiliation to the coming

age by introducing into his system in 1697 the term “monad.” _Nearly

all his important works were produced in this period._ In 1700 he

founded the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He was instrumental in the

founding of an academy at St. Petersburg, and he planned academies at

Dresden and Vienna.

=The Three Influences upon the Thought of Leibnitz.=

(1) _His Early Classical Studies._ The father of Leibnitz, who was a

professor of moral philosophy at Leipsic, died when his son was young.

Left much to himself, the boy spent his time in his father’s library.

At eight years he had acquired Latin; at twelve he had read Seneca,

Pliny, Quintilian, Herodotus, Xenophon, Cicero, Plato, the Roman

historians, the Greek and Latin fathers. He became so absorbed in

scholastic studies that his friends feared that he would not leave

them, “not knowing that my mind could not be satisfied with only one

kind of thing.” There can be no question that this scholastic training

gave him a first hand and sympathetic appreciation of scholastic

philosophy. The Aristotelian conception of cosmic purpose, which he got

at this time, never left him. Among the writers of the Natural Science

Period he alone returned to Aristotle. He made Aristotle’s teleological

cause an integral part of his doctrine. His motto finally became, in

his _Theodicy_, “Everything is best in this best of possible worlds.”

While for a time he turned from Aristotle to Descartes, in his final

construction of his theory he borrowed more from Aristotle.

(2) _The New Science and His Own Discoveries._ Leibnitz was more

fortunate than many of his contemporaries in that his university had

already included in its curriculum the study of mathematics. At the

age of fifteen he was devoting himself to mathematics at Jena, and he

said that the study of Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes made him feel

as though “transported into a different world.” Later in life he said

of himself, that at fifteen he had decided to give up the scholastic

theory of Forms for the mathematical explanation of the world. He

became acquainted with the theories of Hobbes and Gassendi in 1670,

when he was at Mainz. In 1672, at the age of twenty-six, when he was

in Paris, he made himself possessor of all that the celebrated circle

of Parisian scientists had to teach. He had gone to Paris a dualist;

he returned to his native land with the Aristotelian teleology side

by side in his mind with the Spinozistic conception of identity and

necessity, the Spinozistic method, and the mathematical theory of

the significance of infinitely small particles. The next ten years

(1676–1686) were spent in overcoming his own dualism by systematizing

these new theories acquired from so many sources. In 1680 he had

universalized the concept of force so as to apply it to both souls

and bodies. In 1684 he published his discovery of the differential

calculus, in which he has had to share honors with Newton. In 1685 he

asserted that the centres of force have individuality. He was led to

this conclusion on account of the discovery of small organisms by the

microscopes of Swammerdam and ♦Leeuwenhoek. In 1686 he successfully

organized his collected material into his final system, although it

was not until eleven years later (1697) that he called these centres

“monads.” Probably he got the term “monad” not from Bruno, but from the

mystic chemist, Van Helmont.

Not only the content, but the form of his philosophy was determined by

his mathematical studies. His philosophical diction is remarkably lucid.

Mathematics reinforced his early resolve “in words to attain clearness

and in matter usefulness.” His later discussions contain many terms

that he had borrowed directly from mathematics.

(3) _Political Pressure for Religious Reconciliation._ When Frederick

the Wise of Saxony in 1519 refused the crown of Emperor, Germany

was thrown into internal strife that in one hundred and thirty years

destroyed all its material wealth and depopulated the country. This

terminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the Peace of

Westphalia. Leibnitz was born two years before peace was declared. He

was the first German scientist in two hundred years. Both Catholics

and Protestants were weary of strife, and there was a general movement

toward religious reconciliation. Thus religious amity was the most

urgent public question.

Pietism had been one of the movements in Germany during the recovery

of the country from the Thirty Years’ War, and it represented the best

side of German civilization at that time. It was a reaction on the one

side against the mechanical theory of the scientists, and on the other

against the destructive strife of the old and new confessions. The

mother of Leibnitz was not only a Protestant, but also a Pietist, so

that the subject of religion early formed an important part of her

son’s training. When he entered the diplomatic service of the Elector

of Mainz the question of religious reconciliation took practical form

for him. No doubt his philosophy as a theory of reconciliation grew

out of such practical issues, as they were presented to him at Mainz.

Leibnitz had, therefore, a part in the religious reaction in Germany

in the last of the seventeenth century, which aimed to reconcile the

divergent interests of religion and science. He tried to effect this in

no external way, by patching together irreconcilable elements, but in

an internal way, by an examination of fundamental principles. With his

early training, his theological reading, and his wide public experience,

Leibnitz was fitted to take a prominent part in the movement for

reconciliation.

=The Method of Leibnitz.= Although the philosophers who immediately

followed Spinoza did not dare to accept his philosophical conclusions,

they adopted his method. They united it with the syllogistic processes

of formal logic for the deduction of all knowledge. This method became

very prevalent, as is seen in the practices of the German Cartesians

and in the preparation of academic text-books. Examples of this are

Jung, Weigel, who was Leibnitz’s teacher, and Puffendorf, who tried

to deduce by the geometrical method the entire system of natural right

from a single principle of human need. In the next century Wolff used

this method in writing his Latin text-books.

When this aspect of Spinoza’s teaching was gaining a foothold in

Germany, Leibnitz came into sympathy with it through his teacher,

Weigel, and at first was one of its most ardent supporters. In jest he

showed by this geometrical, syllogistic method in sixty propositions

that the Count Palatine of Neuberg _must_ be elected King of the Poles.

In seriousness he believed that all philosophical controversies would

cease when philosophy should be stated like a mathematical calculation.

Hobbes’s theory of words as counters to be used in conceptual reckoning,

the universal formulas of the Art of Lull and the pains which Bruno had

taken for its improvement, the Cartesian belief that the geometrical

method would prove to be an art of invention――all these were influences

upon Leibnitz, that committed him to the method of Spinoza and made him

pursue that method energetically. Leibnitz was part of the widespread

movement of the time to form a _Lingua Adamica_――a universal language,

which should discover fundamental philosophical conceptions and the

logical operations of their combinations. In brief, Leibnitz hoped to

form a philosophical calculus.

What, asked Leibnitz, are the highest truths which in their

combination yield all knowledge? What are the truths, so immediately

and intuitively certain, that they force themselves upon the mind

as self-evident and thereby form the ground for the deduction of all

knowledge? They are of two classes: (1) The universal truths of the

reason, and (2) The facts of experience. The truths of the reason are

forever true; the facts of experience have a truth for that single

instance. But both are true in themselves and not from deduction from

anything else. They are “first truths,” for a thing is true if it

can be deduced from the reason or tested as an experienced fact. The

two kinds of truth are the rational or _a priori_, and the empirical

or _a posteriori_. The difference between the starting point of the

Rationalism of Leibnitz and the Enlightenment of Locke appears here.

Locke said, “There is nothing in the mind that does not come from the

senses.” “Except the mind itself and its operations,” added Leibnitz in

comment.

But there is a difference between these two kinds of truth. The

truths of the reason are clear and distinct; the truths of experience

are clear but not distinct. Leibnitz is, be it observed, making

a distinction between the two terms of the pet phrase of the

Rationalists――“clear and distinct ideas.” He means that rational truth

is so transparent that it is impossible to conceive its opposite; that

empirical truth is only clear, and its opposite is thinkable. It is

impossible to think that the three angles of a triangle equal anything

but two right angles, but it is possible to think that its side, which

is now two inches, may be four inches. Thus emerge the two logical

principles upon which Leibnitz founded his philosophy: rational truths

depend upon the _Principle of Contradiction_; empirical truths depend

upon the _Principle of Sufficient Reason_. At first Leibnitz conceived

that this distinction between truths did not apply to God, but only to

man. Man must rejoice in the few rational truths in his possession and

be content with merely establishing the actuality of his experiences.

The divine reason can, however, see the impossibility of the opposite

both in rational and in empirical truth. Later on Leibnitz conceived

the distinction between the two kinds of truth to be absolute. That is,

in the nature of things the two truths differ. The rational truth has

no opposite, but is a _necessary_ truth; the empirical truth has an

opposite, and is a _contingent_ truth.

Leibnitz thus shows the fundamental principles upon which knowledge

is based, but what does he say about the logical method of their

combination? Nothing. No one would ever suspect from Leibnitz’s

philosophical remains that he had planned a system of philosophy

according to the method of Spinoza. The many pamphlets of Leibnitz on

many scattered subjects show how far short he fell of his ideal of a

universal philosophical calculus. He was too versatile, his interests

were too diversified, to carry through so slow and plodding a task.

He merely stated the principles upon which a systematic symbolic

philosophy might rest, without developing these principles in a logical

way. Like Bacon, Leibnitz conceived a method that was more of a hope

than an accomplishment.

=The Immediate Problem for Leibnitz.= Perhaps Leibnitz was called

away from this purely theoretical problem of method by the practical

problem of reconciling science and religion, which problem in his

day had become particularly acute. For science had made rapid strides

since the days of Descartes, had drawn very far away from religion,

and Leibnitz’s attempt to reconcile science and religion was much

more difficult than that of the preceding Rationalists. Leibnitz had

accepted the most radical results of science, but he saw that science

had yielded only a mechanical view of the world. Politics demanded in

the exigencies of that hour some principle of unity. He sought to find

some philosophical principle for the _living, religious character_

of the universe, and a principle that at the same time would preserve

the results of science. He therefore sought to leave the conception of

mechanical nature intact and go behind it for a teleological principle.

He examined the mechanical principles of the science of his day and

found them embedded in a deeper metaphysical principle.

=The Result of Leibnitz’s Examination of the Principles of

Science[35]――A Plurality of Metaphysical Substances.= What was the

developed scientific principle of Leibnitz’s time? And what was the

result of his analysis of it? The principle was the mathematical

principle of Galileo in more complex form, for there had been added

to it since Galileo’s day the concept of the atom. That is to say,

the fundamental scientific principle was that nature consists of the

measurable movements of atoms. From his analysis of this, Leibnitz

obtained as follows his conception of a plural number of substances,

which he called monads.

1. Leibnitz first scrutinized the scientific conception of motion.

His analysis of motion into infinitely small impulses by the method

employed by Galileo, Huyghens, and Newton had already led him to one

important discovery――the differential calculus. Now he scrutinizes it

further and discovers that the fundamental ground of motion is _force_.

While Leibnitz was in entire agreement with other scientists in their

effort to reduce all phenomena to motion, he insisted that motion

was not by any means the fundamental thing. He calls the Cartesian

conception of motion the antechamber of true philosophy. There is no

absolute motion nor absolute rest. Motion and rest are relative to

each other. Descartes’ theory that there is conservation of motion

is incorrect. Motion and rest are the phenomenal changes of force.

Force alone is constant and conserved. Physics points beneath itself

to metaphysics; motion points to force. Force is what is fundamental

in nature. Force is “that which in the present state of things brings

about a change in the future.” Therefore force as the substance of

nature is super-spatial and immaterial, and therefore the basis of

the new physics ought to be dynamic metaphysical substance.

2. Leibnitz next examined the scientific conception of the atom.

Gassendi, one of that celebrated group of Parisian scientists, had

been the author of the introduction of Greek atomism into modern

thought. It had been generally accepted by scientists and combined with

the mathematical hypothesis of Galileo. Leibnitz had known Gassendi

in Paris, and he took the hard, inelastic atoms of Gassendi under

examination. He agreed that the atomist was perfectly correct in saying

that material bodies consist of simple parts or atoms. But Leibnitz

insisted that the atomist erred in thinking such simple parts to be

physical. However simple the parts might physically appear to be,

they were not really simple. However small a bit of matter may be, it

may be divided again, and the dividing process may go on to infinity.

The atom is the extended, and the extended cannot be simple or real.

Substance must be unextended, and the materialists were wrong in

attributing substance to the extended. Is there anything simple that

has a qualitative character? Is there anything real below the physical

atoms? Yes, the metaphysical atoms. The indivisible, immaterial unit

lies beneath the physical atom, and in order to reach it we must

pass beneath the physical into the metaphysical. This immaterial

or metaphysical atom is called by Leibnitz the _monad_; and thus is

Leibnitz’s theory called _monadology_.

There are three kinds of points, or units, or “simples.” There is the

mathematical point, which is simple enough, but it is only imaginary.

There is the physical point, or atom, which is real but not simple.

There is, lastly, the metaphysical point, or monad, which is both real

and simple. The metaphysical point is the only true point. To call the

material atoms real, only shows “the feebleness of the imagination,

which is glad to rest, and is, therefore, in haste to make an end of

division and analysis.”

3. Leibnitz then identified force, as the substance of motion, with the

metaphysical atom, as the substance of the material atom. The result

was the monad, as he conceived it. The monads are the principles of

active working. They are the super-spatial and immaterial principles

in which the mechanical principles of the universe have their roots and

meaning. Nature is not dead; it is not merely extended. It is alive,

resistant, and reproductive. If, as Spinoza taught, there were only one

substance, nature would be non-resistant and passive. But as a matter

of fact there are many substances acting for themselves, many bodies

resisting other bodies. They are the centres of separate activity, and

there are as many forces as there are things. There is no body without

movement, no movement without force. Thus does Leibnitz reintroduce

vitalism in a maturer form than is seen in neo-Platonism. Life becomes

the principle of nature. Purpose is placed at the centre of things.

=The Double Nature of the Monads.= The student will find that the

philosophy of Leibnitz is spoken of as a pluralism, but the student

will also find that Leibnitz devoted nearly all his strength to prove

that the world is after all a unity. Leibnitz analyzed the world into

a plural number of parts, and the question then with him was, how to

put these parts together again in an organic unity. This accomplishment

would depend a good deal upon his conception of the nature of the parts.

The monads have a double character. Leibnitz conceived the monad (1) as

a force centre and (2) as an immaterial soul. This makes an equivalence

of psychical and physical attributes which reminds us of the Stoics’

“fiery reason” of God. The word “force,” as Leibnitz uses it, squints

both toward physics and toward psychology. But such ambiguity about the

monads, the cornerstones in Leibnitz’s philosophy, assists Leibnitz’s

reconciliation at the start. Here, in a miniature, the physical and

spiritual lie in unity. The monad is conceived as a _soul-atom_.

Leibnitz came to philosophy with a mind saturated with the mathematical

ideas of the continuous, the infinitesimal, and the possible. He

thought of the monads as potentialities or possibilities. He looked

upon the world as essentially a developing world. Behind the facts

that seem to us inflexible, lies the great world of generating force.

Explanation of the actual can be made only in view of what the actual

may be and has been. Let us enlarge the scope of man by so widening his

conception of the actual that it will include the possible. Leibnitz

also spoke of the monads as infinitesimal. He thereby lifted the

conception of the infinitesimal from the realm of mathematics into

that of metaphysics, just as Hobbes universalized the conception of

mechanics by lifting it to metaphysics. Leibnitz, therefore, did not

regard the limits of perception as the limits of nature: the reality

of a nature object must be too small to be the object of perception. In

the same way he made use of his mathematical conception of continuity.

Leibnitz’s conception of nature-continuity is one of his contributions

to philosophy. Within itself the world of nature consists of a

continuous gradation from the lower to the higher forms; and also the

world of nature is continuous with the world of the spirit. There are

no leaps in the series from matter to God. Seeming differences in kind

are only differences in degree; for example, evil is only the absence

of good; matter is only an obscure idea of spirit.

But this Leibnitzian atomism consists of soul-atoms. These monads,

these force-centres are souls, and the mathematical qualities have a

place in Leibnitz’s description of the psychical powers of the monad.

The monad is a soul, for soul is the only substance in the universe

that may pass through many changes and it, itself, not change. The self

is the only subject of which many predicates may be asserted, while

it, itself, may not be the predicate of any other subject. The idea

of myself underlies all my mental states. The monad is an entelechy,

or an entity having its purpose within itself. All its attributes are

contained within itself, and it is, therefore, by nature, sufficient

unto itself. It is an individual which passes from one state to another,

moved by its “constitutional appetition.”

Among the psychical powers none is more important in Leibnitz’s

description of the monad than its power of representation.

Representation is the general function of the monad――from the lowest

to the highest monad. This means that each monad is the world force,

yet in a particular form,――a world substance, but in some peculiar

aspect. Every monad is a microcosm. Each represents the world so

far as it is conscious of its own activity. But it is evident that

all things in the universe are not conscious, and therefore all

soul-monads are not conscious. In souls there are, therefore, more

than conscious thoughts――there are thoughts that are unconscious.

Among the Rationalists Leibnitz is the first to give significance to

the so-called unconscious states that form so important a place in

modern psychology. (But see Plotinus.) As a wave is composed of small

particles of water, so the mind is made up of a myriad of unconscious

states. The conscious state is the general effect of the whole. A

soul-monad contains in itself at all times representations of the whole

world, some obscure, some clear. This power of universal representation

makes the monad a microcosm. What we call knowledge of the external

world is our representation of it within ourselves. This representation

is possible to us because we reproduce it in miniature. Since the monad

directly perceives only itself and its own states, it follows that

the more clearly and distinctly it is conscious of its own activities,

the more adequately does it represent the cosmos. The converse is also

true――that the more a monad represents the cosmos, the more truly does

it represent itself.

In his development of his description of the monad, Leibnitz hits upon

two catch-phrases, one of which presents his doctrine of the physical

isolation of the monad, the other presents the doctrine of its ideal

psychical unity. These phrases are: “the monads are windowless” and

“the monads mirror the universe.” By “windowless” Leibnitz means that

each monad is “like a separate world, self-sufficient, independent

of every other creature.” “Having no windows by which anything can

enter or depart,” the monad can perceive only its own states. Whatever

happens to it comes from itself alone as a purely internal principle.

The monad’s development is self-development and not the result of

external changes. Nevertheless the monad is a “mirror of the universe.”

In this psychical qualification of the nature of the monad, its

physical isolation vanishes and the way is open for a unity of monads,

which would have otherwise seemed to be physically hopelessly sundered.

How is it possible for each of the numberless monads, all so different,

to “mirror the universe”? The answer is found in their psychical power

of representation.

=The Two Forms of Leibnitz’s Conception of the Unity of the

Substances.= The principle of unity among the monads is called by

Leibnitz a _preëstablished harmony_. He presented this principle

of harmony in two ways. In part the harmony comes out of their

constitution, as he conceived it to be. In part Leibnitz artificially

superimposed it upon the monads for theological reasons. In either case

it is preëstablished.

=The Intrinsic Unity of the Monads――The Philosophical Unity.= There

is a family resemblance among the monads. The lowest reproduces the

universe in obscure and elementary representations. Minerals and

plants are sleeping monads with entirely unconscious ideas. Animals

are dreaming monads. Man is a waking monad. The highest monad is God,

who reproduces the universe in clear and distinct ideas. Between God

and matter there is a series of monads, graded as to the clearness

of their ideas. All contain the universe by representation. All are

bound together according to the principle of continuity; plants are

lower animals and animals are less perfect men. Man is a monad whose

conscious activity has risen to the height of self-consciousness, with

the cognate power of reason. There is no inert matter; no soul-less

bodies nor body-less souls. The smallest portion of dust is the

habiliment of animalculæ. Nothing is dead, and nature is a gradation

of monads in differing degrees of activity.

Metaphysically the monads are isolated, yet in nature as we see them,

they live in groups, and compose the things which we call plants,

animals, and men. An organic thing is a combination of monads with a

central ruling monad. This central monad is the soul of the group; the

subordinate ones form the body of the organism. The influence of the

soul or ruling monad upon the body-monads is purely ideal. They all

strive for the same end, which the soul represents more clearly. The

group acts spontaneously and together, not from any outside influence.

An inanimate object differs from such a living organism, inasmuch as

it is a group of monads without a soul or a ruling, central monad;

and therefore such a monad is both soul and body. There is therefore

no dualism between soul and body in any creatures, for body is only

obscure or unconscious activity. The body consists of monads having a

confused sense of their activity.

This continuity and unity within the world, as Leibnitz sees it, is

only the logical development of the unity with which he originally

endowed his monads. Although he starts the monads as “windowless,” he

also says that “they mirror the universe.” They are so conceived as

to be originally physically separated, but psychologically and ideally

united. “Their natural harmony resides in an ideal of perfect activity,

while in actual existence they are independent.” The ideal which unites

them is God, the last term in the graded series of the monads. He is

the monad of monads, because He is perfect, conscious activity. Just

as the various groups of monads are ruled by a central soul-monad, so

the world of these groups is an hierarchy, which derives its unitary

and harmonious character from this dominating monad. The world may

be likened to a pyramid with God at the apex. The world is like a

machine which differs from other machines, in that its parts are little

machines. Although the parts seem to operate separately, they are under

the dominating control of God. God is their intrinsic unity and the

universe is a preëstablished harmony.

A comparison with Spinoza’s conception of the world of nature brings

out Leibnitz’s meaning effectively. Both philosophers conceive nature

phenomena to be under the law of mechanical causation. To Spinoza,

however, all phenomena are qualitatively alike; there are no grades or

distinctions of value between them. All are modes of substance and all

illusions in the sight of God. To Spinoza phenomena are homogeneous.

Leibnitz’s estimate of the world of nature is quite different, and for

him nature has a far richer endowment. The phenomena of nature are not

homogeneous. Their difference does not consist in their content, but

in the degree in which they represent the universe. The law of nature

is a unifying principle that gives unitary individuality to the members

under the law. The individuality of the terms of the nature-series

is implied in the very nature of the law of necessity, and on the

other hand, the individual terms, for their part, transform the law of

necessity into a principle of unity that is higher than bare necessity.

In a necessitated series, Leibnitz points out, each term is determined

by the preceding, and in turn each term determines the events that

follow. Thus, while nature phenomena are a series and a necessitated

series, it is a series whose existence depends upon each event having

not only its place, but its unique place. No other event can fill that

place, and the conditions that give the event its place constitute its

individuality. Every finite event has, so to speak, its formula, and

this gives individuality to each term of the series, which appeared

to Spinoza only as a homogeneous, mathematical, and characterless

mode. Life is meaningful to Leibnitz, because each member of the

necessitated series of events has its unique part to play. The changes

of life are to Spinoza void of meaning, because he conceives them

to be undifferentiated. The law of mechanical necessity became under

Leibnitz’s hands a principle of harmony, a teleological principle. Even

in the necessitated mathematical series, such as Spinoza conceived the

world to be, Leibnitz believed that necessity implies individuality and

individuality implies purpose.

How vital, therefore, does life now appear, with its mechanical members

transformed into living units! Universal striving or force fills nature,

and the surging of individual forces gives a new meaning to the unity

of the whole. The mechanical series――the physiological changes of our

bodies and the efficient causes in nature――are only the expression

of the inner teleological development. Leibnitz points out several

pregnant principles that are aspects of this preëstablished but

intrinsic harmony. In the first place, nature has no breaks and abhors

a vacuum; and the series is a continuous one,――_the law of continuity_.

Member follows member in continuous and graded order. Their qualitative

differences are differences of quality of activity. Rest and motion,

good and evil, are differences of degree. In the second place, there

is nothing superfluous; no two things in nature are alike. If they

were alike, they would be identical――_the law of the identity of

indiscernibles_. Although there is no absolute antithesis or contrast

between things, there is no absolute likeness. Every monad must be

differentiated from every other intrinsically, _i. e._ according to

its perfected activity. Therefore, in the third place, every member

has an excuse for being――_the law of sufficient reason_. Every member

has its part to perform and no other can act as an understudy for it.

However insignificant any member may appear to be, it is as unique as

its bigger neighbor.

=The Superimposed Unity of the Monads――The Theological Unity.= The

intrinsic unity of the monads is derived naturally from the monads

themselves, but it is an unattained ideal for which they strive. When

Leibnitz turns his philosophy into a theodicy, or justification of the

nature of God, this unity of the world takes on a different form and

assumes a theological importance. The unity is no longer an intrinsic

unity, with no actual but only ideal existence depending upon the

highest monad in the series, but is an actual personality who exists

apart from the world. The world is his eternal purpose. Probably this

conception was always in the background of Leibnitz’s thought, but it

cannot be deduced from his philosophy. It is a conception afterwards

superimposed upon his philosophy. Leibnitz now conceives God not as an

ideal goal, but as a perfect and actual person, whose reason impelled

Him to construct the best possible world. The world in which we live

is the world He chose. It is perfectly conceivable that the world could

be different. Why, among all the possible worlds, did God choose to

construct this world? There is no reason in logic, but in fact. There

was no necessity for its construction. The fact is the excellence of

the world. Spinoza said that all possible worlds exist. Leibnitz said

this best possible world exists. Look about you; is it not so?

The best possible world is a world of free agents, whose acts are

rewarded or punished according to their deserts. If we discover what

seems to be inexplicable evil, we must regard it as an incident in the

harmony of the whole. The world would be less good without evil. There

is no more evil than there ought to be. The world which God conceived

to be the best possible――this world――is a world of lights and shades.

Evil comes from the free agency of man, and God is not responsible

for it. It is better to have evil and free agency than no evil and no

free agency. Evil after all is not positive, and is only due to the

indistinct ideas of man. It is the absence of good, as cold is the

absence of heat.

Thus a preëstablished harmony was constructed by Leibnitz that does

not come out of his original philosophical premises. Leibnitz used his

celebrated figure of the two clocks to illustrate the harmony of the

monads. Two clocks keep the same time, not because they influence one

another (interaction), nor because the maker moves the hands of one

(Occasionalism), but because they have been thus constructed by an

intelligent Creator. Thus the harmony of the world implies a personal

God. Leibnitz’s philosophical Rationalism here passed into theology,

and his metaphysics became an ethics. Leibnitz began with a monadology,

and by means of the conception of harmony passed to an optimism.