THE METAPHYSICIANS
DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, SPINOZA, LEIBNIZ.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a Frenchman, born in Touraine, and belonging
by family to the inferior nobility. Educated at the Jesuit college of La
Fleche, he early acquired a distaste for the scholastic philosophy, or at
least for its details; the theology of scholasticism, as we shall see, left
a deep impression on him through life. On leaving college he took up
mathematics, varied by a short plunge into the dissipations of Paris. Some
years of military service as a volunteer with the Catholic armies at the
beginning of the Thirty Years' War enabled him to travel and see the world.
Returning to Paris, he resumed his studies, but found them seriously
interrupted by the tactless bores who, as we know from Moliere's amusing
comedy _Les Facheux,_ long continued to infest French society. To escape
their assiduities Descartes, who prized solitude before all things, fled
the country. The inheritance of an independent income enabled the
philosopher to live where he liked; and Holland became, with a few
interruptions, his chosen residence for the next twenty years (1629-49).
Even here frequent changes of residence and occasional concealment of his
address were necessary in order to elude the visits of importunate
admirers. With all his unsociability there seems to have {32} been
something singularly magnetic about the personality of Descartes; yet he
only fell in with one congenial spirit, the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of
the unfortunate Winter King and granddaughter of our James I. Possessing to
the fullest extent the intellectual brilliancy and the incomparable charm
of the Stuart family, this great lady impressed the lonely thinker as the
only person who ever understood his philosophy.
Another royal friendship brought his career to an untimely end. Queen
Christina of Sweden, the gifted and restless daughter of Gustavus Adolphus,
heard of Descartes, and invited him to her Court. On his arrival she sent
for the pilot who had brought the illustrious stranger to Stockholm and
questioned him about his passenger. "Madame," he replied, "it is not a man
whom I conducted to your Majesty, but a demi-god. He taught me more in
three weeks of the science of seamanship and of winds and navigation than I
had learned in the sixty years I had been at sea" (Miss E. S. Haldane's
_Life of Rene Descartes_). The Queen fully came up to the expectations of
her visitor, in whose eyes she had no fault but an unfortunate tendency to
waste her time on learning Greek. Besides her other merits, she possessed
"a sweetness and goodness which made men devoted to her service." It soon
appeared that, as with others of the same rank, this was only the veneer of
a heartless selfishness. Christina, who was an early riser, required his
attendance in her library to give her lessons in philosophy at five o'clock
in the morning. Descartes was by habit a very late riser. Besides, he had
not even a lodging in the royal palace, but was staying at the French
Embassy, and in going there "had to pass over a long bridge which was
always bitterly cold." The cold {33} killed him. He had arrived at
Stockholm in October, and meant to leave in January; but remained at the
urgent request of the Queen, who, however, made no change in the hour of
their interviews, although that winter was one of the severest on record.
At the beginning of February, 1650, he fell ill and died of inflammation of
the lungs on the 11th, in the fifty-fourth year of his age.
Descartes had the physical courage which Hobbes lacked; but he seems, like
Bacon, to have been a moral coward. The most striking instance of this is
that, on hearing of Galileo's condemnation for teaching the heliocentric
astronomy, he withheld from publication and had even thoughts of destroying
a work of his own in which the same doctrine was maintained. This was at a
time when he was living in a country where there could be no question of
personal danger from the Inquisition. But something of the same weakness
shows itself in his running away from France to escape those intrusions on
his studious retirement which one would think might have been checked by
letting it be known with sufficient firmness that his hours could not be
wasted on idle conversation. And we have seen how at last his life was lost
for no better reason than the dread of giving offence to Queen Christina.
It seems strange that a character so unheroic should figure among the great
emancipators of human thought. In fact, Descartes's services to liberty
have been much exaggerated. His intellectual fame rests on three
foundations. Of these the most indubitable is the creation of analytical
geometry, the starting-point of modern mathematics. The value of his
contributions to physics has been much disputed; but, on the whole, expert
opinion seems to have decided that what was new in them was not true, and
what was true was not new. However, the place we must assign Descartes in
the history of philosophy can only be determined by our opinion of his
metaphysics.
{34}
[Illustration: RENE DESCARTES.]
{35} As a philosopher Descartes has, to begin with, the merit of exemplary
clearness. The fault is not with him if we cannot tell what he thought and
how he came to think it. The classic _Discourse on Method_ (1637) relates
his mental history in a style of almost touching simplicity. It appears
that from an early age truth had been his paramount object, not as with
Bacon and Hobbes for its utility, but for its own sake. In search of this
ideal he read widely, but without finding what he wanted. The great and
famous works of literature might entertain or dazzle; they could not
convince. The philosophers professed to teach truth; their endless disputes
showed that they had not found it. Mathematics, on the other hand,
presented a pleasing picture of demonstrated certainty, but a certainty
that seemed to be prized only as a sure foundation for the mechanical arts.
Wearily throwing his books aside, the young man then applied himself to the
great book of life, mingling with all sorts and conditions of men to hear
what they had to say about the prime interests of existence. But the same
vanity and vexation of spirit followed him here. Men were no more agreed
among themselves than were the authorities of his college days. The truths
of religion seemed, indeed, to offer a safe refuge; but they were an
exception that proved the rule; being, as Descartes observes, a
supernatural revelation, not the natural knowledge that he wanted.
The conflict of authorities had at least one good result, which was to
discredit the very notion of {36} authority, thus throwing the inquirer
back on his own reason as the sole remaining resource. And as mathematics
seemed, so far, to be the only satisfactory science, the most reasonable
course was to give a wider extension and application to the methods of
algebra and geometry. Four fundamental rules were thus obtained: (1) To
admit nothing as true that was not evidently so; (2) to analyse every
problem into as many distinct questions as the nature of the subject
required; (3) to ascend gradually from the simplest to the most complex
subjects; and (4) to be sure that his enumerations and surveys were so
exhaustive and complete as to let no essential element of the question
escape.
The rules as they stand are ill-arranged, vague, and imperfect. The last
should come first and the first last. The notions of simplicity,
complexity, and truth are neither illustrated nor defined. And no pains are
taken to discriminate judgments from concepts. It may be said that the
method worked well; at least Descartes tells us that with the help of his
rules he made rapid progress in the solution of mathematical problems. We
may believe in his success without admitting that an inferior genius could
have achieved the same results by the same means. The real point is to
ascertain whether the method, whatever its utility in mathematics, could be
advantageously applied to metaphysics. And the answer seems to be that as
manipulated by its author the new system led to nothing but hopeless
fallacies.
After reserving a provisional assent to the customs of the country where he
happens to be residing and to the creed of the Roman Church, Descartes
begins by calling in question the whole mass of beliefs he has {37}
hitherto accepted, including the reality of the external world. But the
very act of doubt implies the existence of the doubter himself. I think,
therefore I am. It has been supposed that the initial affirmation of this
self-evident principle implies that Descartes identified Being with
Thought. He did no such thing. No more is meant, to begin with, than that,
whatever else is or is not, I the thinker certainly am. This is no great
discovery; the interesting thing is to find out what it implies. A good
deal according to Descartes. First he infers that, since the act of
thinking assures him of his existence, therefore he is a substance the
whole essence of which consists in thought, which is independent of place
and of any material object--in short, an immaterial soul, entirely distinct
from the body, easier to know, and capable of existing without it. Here the
confusion of conception with judgment is apparent, and it leads to a
confusion of our thoughts about reality with the realities themselves. And
Descartes carries this loose reasoning a step further by going on to argue
that, as the certainty of his own existence has no other guarantee than the
clearness with which it is inferred from the fact of his thinking, it must
therefore be a safe rule to conclude that whatever things we conceive very
clearly and distinctly are all true.
In his other great philosophical work, the _Meditations_, Descartes sets
out at greater length, but with less clearness, his arguments for the
immateriality of the soul. Here it is fully admitted that, besides
thinking, self-consciousness covers the functions of perceiving, feeling,
desiring, and willing; nor does it seem to be pretended that these
experiences are reducible to forms of thought. But it is claimed that they
depend on {38} thought in the sense that without thought one would not be
aware of their existence; whereas it can easily be conceived without them.
A little more introspection would show that the second part of the
assertion is not true; for there is no thought without words, and no words,
however inaudibly articulated, without a number of tactual and muscular
sensations, nor even without a series of distinct volitions.
Another noticeable point is that, so far from obeying the methodical rule
to proceed from the simple to the complex, Descartes does just the
contrary. Starting with the whole complex content of consciousness, he
works down by a series of arbitrary rejections to what, according to him,
is the simple fact of immaterial thought. Let us see how it fares with his
attempt to reconstruct knowledge on that elementary basis.
Returning to his postulate of universal doubt, our philosopher argues from
this to an imperfection in his nature, and thence to the idea of a perfect
being. The reasoning is most slipshod; for, even admitting that knowledge
is preferable to ignorance--which has not been proved--it does not follow
that the dogmatist is more perfect than the doubter. Indeed, one might
infer the contrary from Descartes's having passed with progressive
reflection from the one stage to the other. Overlooking the paralogism, let
us grant that he has the idea of a perfect being, and go on to the question
of how he came to possess it. One might suggest that the consciousness of
perfect self-knowledge, combined with the wish to know more of other
subjects, would be sufficient to create an ideal of omniscience, and,
proceeding in like manner from a comparison of wants with their
satisfactions, to enlarge this ideal into the {39} notion of infinite
perfection all round. Descartes, however, is not really out for truth--at
least, not in metaphysics; he is out for a justification of what the
Jesuits had taught him at La Fleche, and no Jesuit casuistry could be more
sophistical than the logic he finds good enough for the purpose. To argue,
as he does, that the idea of a perfect being, in his mind, can be explained
only by its proceeding from such a being as its creator is already
sufficiently audacious. But this feat is far surpassed by his famous
ontological proof of Theism. A triangle, he tells us, need not necessarily
exist; but, assuming there to be one, its three angles must be equal to two
right angles. With God, on the other hand, to be conceived is to be; for,
existence being a perfection, it follows, from the idea of a perfect Being,
that he must exist. The answer is more clear and distinct than any of
Descartes's demonstrations. Perfection is affirmed of existing or of
imaginary subjects, but existence is not a perfection in itself.
A third argument for Theism remains to be considered. Descartes asks how he
came to exist. Not by his own act; for on that hypothesis he would have
given himself all the perfections that now he lacks; nor from any other
imperfect cause, for that would be to repeat the difficulty, not to solve
it. Besides, the simple continuance of his existence from moment to moment
needs an explanation. For time consists of an infinity of parts, none
depending in any way on the others; so that my having been a little while
ago is no reason why I should be now, unless there is some power by which I
am created anew. Here we must observe that Descartes is playing fast and
loose with the law of causation. By what he calls the light of nature--in
other words, the light of Greek {40} philosophy--things can no more pass
into nothing than they can come out of it. Moreover, the difficulty is the
same for my supposed Creator as for myself. We are told that thought is a
necessary perfection of the divine nature. But thinking implies time;
therefore God also exists from moment to moment. How, then, can he recover
his being any more than we can? The answer, of course, would be: because he
is perfect, and perfection involves existence. Thus the argument from
causation throws us back on the so-called ontological argument, whose
futility has already been shown.
This very idea of perfection involves us in fresh difficulties with the law
of causation. A perfect Being might be expected to make perfect
creatures--which by hypothesis we are not. Descartes quite sees this, and
only escapes by a verbal quibble. Our imperfections, he says, come from the
share that Nothingness has in our nature. Once allow so much to the
creative power of zero, and God seems to be a rather gratuitous postulate.
After proving to his own satisfaction the existence of the soul and of God,
Descartes returns to the starting-point of his whole inquiry--that is, the
reality of the material world and of its laws. And now his theology
supplies him with a short and easy method for getting rid of the sceptical
doubts that had troubled him at first. He has a clear and distinct idea of
his own body and of other bodies surrounding it on all sides as extended
substances communicating movements to one another. And he has a tendency to
accept whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived by him as true. But to
suppose that God created that tendency with the intention of deceiving him
would argue a want of veracity in the divine nature incompatible with its
{41} perfection. Such reasoning obviously ignores the alternative that God
might be deceiving us for our good. Or rather what we call truth might not
be an insight into the nature of things in themselves, but a correct
judgment of antecedents and consequents. Our consciousness would then be a
vast sensori-motor machinery adjusted to secure the maintenance and
perfection of life.
Descartes, as a mathematician, places the essence of Matter or Body in
extension. Here he agrees with another mathematical philosopher, Plato, who
says the same in his _Timaeus_. So far the coincidence might be accidental;
but when we find that the Frenchman, like the Greek, conceives his
materialised space as being originally divided into triangular bodies, the
evidence of unacknowledged borrowing seems irresistible--the more so that
Huyghens mentions this as customary with Descartes.
The great author of the _Method_ and the _Meditations_--for, after
every critical deduction, his greatness as a thinker remains
undoubted--contributed nothing to ethics. Here he is content to reaffirm
the general conclusions of Greek philosophy, the necessary superiority of
mind to matter, of the soul to the body, of spirit to sense. He accepts
free-will from Aristotle without any attempt to reconcile it with the rigid
determinism of his own mechanical naturalism. At the same time there is a
remarkable anticipation of modern psychology in his doctrine of
intellectual assent as an act of the will. When our judgments go beyond
what is guaranteed by a clear and distinct perception of their truth there
is a possibility of error, and then the error is our own fault, the
precipitate conclusion having been a voluntary act. Thus human free-will
intervenes to clear God of all {42} responsibility for our delusions as
well as for our crimes.
MALEBRANCHE.
Pascal, we are told, could not forgive Descartes for limiting God's action
on the world to the "initial fillip" by which the process of evolution was
started. Nevertheless, Pascal's friends, the Jansenists, were content to
adopt Cartesianism as their religious philosophy, and his epigram certainly
does not apply to the next distinguished Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx
(1625-1669), a Fleming of Antwerp. Unfortunate in his life, this eminent
teacher has of all original thinkers received the least credit for his
services to metaphysics from posterity, being, outside a small circle of
students, still utterly unknown to fame. Geulincx is the author of a theory
called Occasionalism. Descartes had represented mind, which he identified
with Thought, and matter, which he identified with Extension, as two
antithetical substances with not a note in common. Nevertheless, he
supposed that communications between them took place through a part of the
brain called the pineal body. Geulincx cut through even this narrow
isthmus, denying the possibility of any machinery for transmitting sensible
images from the material world to our consciousness, or volitions from the
mind to the limbs. How, then, were the facts to be explained? According to
him, by the intervention of God. When the so-called organs of sense are
acted on by vibrations from the external world, or when a particular
movement is willed by the mind, the corresponding mental and material
modifications are miraculously produced by the exercise of his omnipotence;
and it is because these events occur _on occasion_ of signals of which they
{43} are not the effects but the consequents that the theory has received
the name of Occasionalism.
The theory, as Geulincx formulated it, seems at first sight simply
grotesque; and from a religious point of view it has the additional
drawback of making God the immediate executor of every crime committed by
man. Nevertheless, it is merely the logical application of a principle
subsequently admitted by profound thinkers of the most opposing
schools--namely, that consciousness cannot produce or transmit energy,
combined with the belief in a God who does not exist for nothing. Even past
the middle of the nineteenth century many English and French naturalists
were persuaded that animal species to the number of 300,000 represented as
many distinct creative acts; and at least one astronomer, who was also a
philosopher, declared that the ultimate atoms of matter, running up to an
immeasurably higher figure, "bore the stamp of the manufactured article."
The capture of Cartesianism by theology was completed by Nicolas
Malebranche (1638-1715). This accomplished writer and thinker, dedicated by
physical infirmity to a contemplative life, entered the Oratory at an early
age, and remained in it until his death. Coming across a copy of
Descartes's _Treatise on Man_ at twenty-six, he at once became a convert to
the new philosophy, and devoted the next ten years to its exclusive study.
At the end of that period he published his masterpiece, _On the
Investigation of Truth_ (_De la Recherche de la Verite, 1674_), which at
once won him an enormous reputation. It was followed by other works of less
importance. The legend that Malebranche's end was hastened by an argument
with Berkeley has been disproved. {44}
Without acknowledging the obligation, Malebranche accepts the conclusions
of Geulincx to the extent of denying the possibility of any communication
between mind and matter. Indeed, he goes further, and denies that one
portion of matter can act on another. But his real advance on Occasionalism
lies in the question: How, then, can we know the laws of the material
universe, or even that there is such a thing as matter at all? Once more
God intervenes to solve the difficulty, but after a fashion much less crude
than the miraculous apparatus of Geulincx. Introspection assures us that we
are thinking things, and that our minds are stored with ideas, including
the idea of God the all-perfect Being, and the idea of Extension with all
the mathematical and physical truths logically deducible therefrom. We did
not make this idea, therefore it comes from God, was in God's mind before
it was in ours. Following Plotinus, Malebranche calls this idea
intelligible Extension. It is the archetype of our material world. The same
is true of all other clear and distinct ideas; they are, as Platonism
teaches, of divine origin. But is it necessary to suppose that the ideal
contents of each separate soul were placed in it at birth by the Creator?
Surely the law of parsimony forbids. It is a simpler and easier explanation
to suppose that the divine archetypal ideas alone exists, and that we
apprehend them by a mystical communion with the divine consciousness; that,
in short, we see all things in God. And in order to make this vision
possible we must, as the Apostle says, live, move, and have our being in
God. As a mathematician would say, God must be the _locus_, the place of
souls.
There is unquestionably something grandiose about this theory, which,
however, has the defect in orthodox {45} opinion of logically leading to
the Pantheism, held in abhorrence by Malebranche, of his greater
contemporary Spinoza. And it is a suggestive circumstance that the very
similar philosophy of the Eternal Consciousness held by our countryman
T. H. Green has been shown by the criticism of Henry Sidgwick to exclude
the personality of God.
SPINOZA.
With the philosopher whom I have just named we come for the first time in
modern history to a figure recalling in its sustained equality of
intellectual and moral excellence the most heroic figures of Hellenic
thought. Giordano Bruno we may, indeed, pronounce, like Lucan or Cranmer,
"by his death approved," but his submission at Venice has to be set against
his martyrdom at Rome; and if there is nothing very censurable in his
career as a wandering teacher, there is also nothing worthy of any
particular respect. Differences of environment and heredity may no doubt be
invoked to account for the difference of character; and in the philosophy
about to be considered the determining influence of such causes for the
first time finds due recognition; but on the same principle our ethical
judgments also are determined by the very constitution of things.
Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), born at Amsterdam, belonged to a family of
Portuguese Jews, exiled on account of their Hebrew faith, in which also he
was brought up. Soon after reaching manhood he fell away from the
synagogue, preferring to share in the religious exercises of certain
latitudinarian Christian sects. Spies were set to report his conversation,
which soon supplied evidence of sufficiently heterodox opinions. {46} A
sentence of formal excommunication followed; but modern research has
discredited the story of an attempt to assassinate him made by an emissary
of the synagogue. After successfully resisting the claim of his sister and
his brother-in-law to shut out the apostate from his share of the paternal
inheritance, Spinoza surrendered the disputed property, but henceforth
broke off all communication with his family. Subsequently he refused an
offer of 2,000 florins, made by a wealthy friend and admirer, Simon de
Vries, as also a proposal from the same friend to leave him his whole
fortune, insisting that it should go to the legal heir, Simon's brother
Isaac. The latter, on succeeding, wished to settle an annual pension of 500
florins on Spinoza, but the philosopher would accept no more than 300.
Books were his only luxury, material wants being supplied by polishing
glass lenses, an art in which he attained considerable proficiency. But it
was an unhealthy occupation, and probably contributed to his death by
consumption.
Democracy was then and long afterwards associated with fanaticism and
intolerance rather than with free-thought in religion. The liberal party in
Dutch politics was the aristocratic party. Spinoza sympathised with its
leader, John de Witt; he wept bitter tears over the great statesman's
murder; and only the urgent remonstrances of his friends, who knew what
danger would be incurred by such a step, prevented him from placarding the
walls of the Hague, where he then resided, with an address reproaching the
infuriated people for their crime.
{47}
[Illustration: Reproduced (by permission) from _Spinoza's Short Treatise on
God, Man, and his Well-being_, by Professor A. Wolf (A. & C. Black).]
{48}
In 1673 the enlightened ruler of the Palatinate, a brother of Descartes's
Princess Elizabeth, offered Spinoza a professorship at Heidelberg, with
full liberty to teach his philosophy. But the pantheistic recluse wisely
refused it. Even at the present day such teaching as his would meet with
little mercy at Berlin, Cambridge, or Edinburgh. As it was, we have reason
to believe that even in free Holland only a premature death saved him from
a prosecution for blasphemy, and his great work the _Ethica_ could not with
safety be published during his lifetime. It appeared anonymously among his
posthumous works in November, 1677, without the name of the true place of
publication on the title-page.
Spinoza was for his time no less daring as a Biblical critic than as a
metaphysician. His celebrated _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ has for its
primary purpose to vindicate the freedom of scientific thought against
ecclesiastical interference. And this he does by drawing a trenchant line
of demarcation between the respective offices of religion and of
philosophy. The business of the one is to form the character and to purify
the heart, of the other to guide and inform the intellect. When religion
undertakes to teach scientific truth the very ends for which it exists are
defeated. When theological dogmatism gains control of the Churches the
worst passions are developed under its influence. Instead of becoming lowly
and charitable, men become disturbers of public order, grasping intriguers,
bitter and censorious persecutors. The claims of theology to dictate our
intellectual beliefs are not only mischievous, but totally invalid. They
rest on the authority of the Bible as a revelation of God's will. But no
such supernatural revelation ever was or could be given. Such violation of
the order of nature as the miracles recorded in Scripture history would be
impossible. And the narratives recording them are discredited by {49} the
criticism which shows that various books of the Old Testament were not
written by the men whose names they bear, but long after their time. As a
Hebrew scholar Spinoza discusses the Jewish Scriptures in some detail,
showing in particular that the Pentateuch is of a later date than Moses.
His limited knowledge of Greek is offered as a reason for not handling the
New Testament with equal freedom; but some contradictions are indicated as
disallowing the infallibility claimed for it. At the same time the
perfection of Christ's character is fully acknowledged and accepted as a
moral revelation of God.
Spinoza shared to the fullest extent, and even went beyond, Descartes's
ambition to reconstruct philosophy on a mathematical basis. The idea may
have come to him from the French thinker, but it is actually of much older
origin, being derived from Plato, the leading spirit of the Renaissance, as
Aristotle had been the oracle of the later Middle Ages. Now Plato's ideal
had been to construct a philosophy transcending the assumptions--or, as he
calls them, the hypotheses--of geometry as much as those assumptions
transcend the demonstrations of geometry; and this also was the ideal of
Spinoza. Descartes had been content to accept from tradition his ultimate
realities, Thought, Extension, and God, without showing that they must
necessarily exist; for his proof of God's existence starts from an idea in
the human mind, while Thought and Extension are not deduced at all.
To appreciate the work of the Hebrew philosopher, of the lonely muser, bred
in the religion of Jahveh--a name traditionally interpreted as the very
expression of absolute self-existence--we must conceive him as starting
with a question deeper even than the Cartesian {50} doubt, asking not How
can I know what is? but Why should there _be_ anything whatever? And the
answer, divested of scholastic terminology, is: Because it is inconceivable
that there should be nothing, and if there is anything there must be
everything. This universe of things, which must also be everlasting,
Spinoza calls God.
The philosophy or religion--for it is both--which identifies God with the
totality of existence was of long standing in Greece, and had been
elaborated in systematic detail by the Stoics. It has been known for the
last two centuries under the name of Pantheism, a word of Greek etymology,
but not a creation of the Greeks themselves, and, indeed, of more modern
date than Spinoza. Historians always speak of him as a Pantheist, and there
is no reason to think that he would have objected to the designation had it
been current during his lifetime. But there are important points of
distinction between him and those who preceded or followed him in the same
speculative direction. The Stoics differed from him in being materialists.
To them reality and corporeality were convertible terms. It seems likely
that Hobbes and his contemporary, the atomist Gassendi, were of the same
opinion, although they did not say it in so many words. But Descartes was a
strong spiritualist; and Spinoza followed the master's lead so far, at any
rate, as to give Thought at least equal reality with matter, which he also
identified with Extension. It has been seen what difficulties were created
by the radical Cartesian antithesis between Thought and Extension, or--to
call them by their more familiar names--mind and body, when taken together
with the intimate association shown by experience to obtain between them;
and also how {51} Geulincx and Malebranche were led on by the very spirit
of philosophy itself almost to submerge the two disparate substances in the
all-absorbing agency of God. The obvious course, then, for Spinoza, being
unfettered by the obligations of any Christian creed, was to take the last
remaining step, to resolve the dualism of Thought and Extension into the
unity of the divine substance.
In fact, the Hebrew philosopher does this, declaring boldly that Thought
and Extension are one and the same thing--which thing is God, the only true
reality of which they are merely appearances. And, so far, he has had many
followers who strive to harmonise the opposition of what we now call
subject and object in the synthesis of the All-One. But he goes beyond
this, expanding the conception of God--or the Absolute--to a degree
undreamed of by any religion or philosophy formulated before or after his
time. God, Spinoza tells us, is "a Substance consisting of infinite
attributes, each of which expresses his absolute and eternal essence." But
of these attributes two alone, Thought and Extension, are known to us at
present, so that our ignorance infinitely exceeds our knowledge of reality.
His extant writings do not explain by what process he mounted to this, the
most dizzy height of speculation ever attained by man; but, in the absence
of definite information, some guiding considerations suggest themselves as
probable.
Bruno, whom Spinoza is held, on strong grounds, to have read, identified
God with the supreme unifying principle of a universe extending through
infinite space. Descartes, on the other hand, conceived God as a thinking
rather than as an extended substance. But his school tended, as we saw, to
conceive God as mediating {52} between mind and body in a way that
suggested their real union through his power. Furthermore, the habit common
to all Cartesians of regarding geometrical reasoning as the most perfect
form of thought inevitably led to the conception of thought as accompanying
space wherever it went--in fact, as stretching like it to infinity. Again,
from the Cartesian point of view, that Extension which is the very essence
of the material world, while it covers space, is more than mere space; it
includes not only co-existence, but succession or time--that is,
scientifically speaking, the eternal sequence of physical causes; or,
theologically speaking, the creative activity of God. And reason or thought
had also since Aristotle been more or less identified with the law of
universal causation no less than with the laws of geometry.
Thus, then, the ground was prepared for Spinoza, as a pantheistic monist,
to conceive God under the two attributes of Extension and Thought, each in
its own way disclosing his essence as no other than infinite Power. But why
should God have, or consist of, two attributes and no more? There is a good
reason why _we_ should know only those two. It is that we are ourselves
modes of Thought united to modes of Extension, of which our thoughts are
the revealing ideas. But it would be gross anthropomorphism to impose the
limitations of our knowledge on the infinite being of God, manifested
through those very attributes as unlimited Power. The infinite of
co-existence, which is space, the infinite of causal procession, which is
time, suggest an infinity of unimaginable but not inconceivable attributes
of which the one divine substance consists. And here at last we get the
explanation of why there should be such things as Thought and Extension at
all. They are there simply because everything is. If I grant {53}
anything--and I must, at least, grant myself--I grant existence, which,
having nothing outside itself, must fill up all the possibilities of being
which only exclude the self-contradictory from their domain. Thus, the
philosophy of Spinoza neither obliges him to believe in the monsters of
mythology nor in the miracles of Scripture, nor in the dogmas of Catholic
theology, nor even in free-will; nor, again, would it oblige him to reject
by anticipation the marvels of modern science. For, according to him, the
impossibility of really incredible things could be deduced with the
certainty of mathematical demonstration from the law of contradiction
itself.
Hegel has given the name of acosmism, or negation of the world, to this
form of pantheism, interpreting it as a doctrine that absorbs all concrete
reality and individuality in the absolute unity of the divine essence. No
misconception could be more complete. Differentiation is the very soul of
Spinoza's system. It is, indeed, more open to the charge of excessive
dispersion than of excessive centralisation. Power, which is God's essence,
means no more than the realisation through all eternity of all
possibilities of existence, with no end or aim but just the process of
infinite production itself. There is, indeed, a nominal identification
between the material processes of Extension and the ideal processes of
Thought. But this amounts to no more than a re-statement in abstract terms
of the empirical truth that there is a close connection between body and
mind. Like the double-aspect theory, the parallelistic theory, the
materialistic theory, the theory of interaction, and the theory of more or
less complete reciprocal independence, it is a mere verbalism, telling us
nothing that we did not know before. Or, if there {54} is more, it consists
of the very questionable assumption that body and mind must come in
somewhere to fill up what would otherwise be blank possibilities of
existence. And this, like other metaphysical assumptions, is an
illegitimate generalisation from experience. The ideas of space and time as
filled-up _continua_ supply the model on which the whole universe must be
constructed. Like them, it must be infinite and eternal, but, so to speak,
at a higher power; as in them, every part must be determined by the
position of all other parts, with the determination put at a logical
instead of at a descriptive value; corresponding to their infinitely varied
differentiation of position and quantity, there must be an infinite
differentiation of concrete content; and, finally, the laws of the universe
must be demonstrable by the same _a priori_ mathematical method that has
been so successfully applied to continuous quantity.
The geometrical form into which Spinoza has thrown his philosophy
unfortunately restricts the number of readers--always rather small--that it
might otherwise attract. People feel themselves mystified, wearied, and
cheated by the appearance, without the reality, of logical demonstration;
and the repulsion is aggravated by the barbarous scholasticism with
which--unlike Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes--he peppers his pages. Yet, like
the Greek philosophers, he is much more modern, more on the true line of
developing thought than they are. But to get at the true kernel of his
teaching we must, like Goethe, disregard the logical husks in which it is
wrapped up. And, as it happens, Spinoza has greatly facilitated this
operation by printing his most interesting and suggestive discussions in
the form of Scholia, Explanations, and Appendices. Even {55} these are not
easy reading; but, to quote his own pathetic words, "If the way of
salvation lay ready to hand, and could be found without great toil, would
it be neglected by nearly everyone? But all glorious things are as
difficult as they are rare."
Some of his expositors have called Spinoza a mystic; and his philosophy has
been traced, in part at least, to the mystical pantheism of certain
medieval Jews. In my opinion this is a mistake; and I will now proceed to
show that the phrases on which it rests are open to an interpretation more
consistent with the rational foundations of the whole system.
The things that have done most to fasten the character of a mystic on
Spinoza are his identification of virtue with the knowledge and love of
God, and his theory--so suggestive of Christian theology at its highest
flight--that God loves himself with an infinite love. That, like Plato and
Matthew Arnold, he should value religion as a means of popular moralisation
might seem natural enough; but not, except from a mystical motive, that he
should apparently value morality merely as a help to the religious life. On
examination, however, it appears that the beatific vision of this pantheist
offers no experience going beyond the limits of nature and reason. Since
God and the universe are one, to know God is to know that we are, body and
soul, necessary modes of the two attributes, Extension and Thought, by
which the infinite Power which is the essence of the universe expresses
itself for us. To love God is to recognise our own vitality as a portion of
that power, welcoming it with grateful joy as a gift from the universe
whence we come. And to say that God loves himself with an infinite love is
merely to say that the attribute of Thought eternally divides itself among
an infinity of {56} thinking beings, through whose activity the universe
keeps up a delighted consciousness of itself.
Spinoza declares by the very name of his great work that for him the
philosophical problem is essentially a problem of ethics, being, indeed, no
other than the old question, first started by Plato, how to reconcile
disinterestedness with self-interest; and his metaphysical system is really
an elaborate mechanism for proving that, on the profoundest interpretation,
their claims coincide. His great contemporary, Hobbes, had taught that the
fundamental impulse of human nature is the will for power; and Spinoza
accepts this idea to the fullest extent in proclaiming Power to be the very
stuff of which we and all other things are made. But he parts company with
the English philosopher in his theory of what it means. On his view it is
an utter illusion to suppose that to gratify such passions as pride,
avarice, vanity, and lust is to acquire or exercise power. For strength
means freedom, self-determination; and no man can be free whose happiness
depends on a fortuitous combination of external circumstances, or on the
consent of other persons whose desires are such as to set up a conflict
between his gratification and theirs. Real power means self-realisation,
the exercise of that faculty which is most purely human--that is to say, of
Thought under the form of reason.
In pleading for the subordination of the self-seeking desires to reason
Spinoza repeats the lessons of moral philosophy in all ages and countries
since its first independent constitution. In connecting the interests of
morality with the interests of science as such, he follows the tradition of
Athenian thought. In interpreting pantheism as an ethical enthusiasm of the
universe he returns to the creed of Stoicism, and {57} strikes the keynote
of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry. In fixing each man's place in nature as
one among the infinite individuations of divine power he repeats another
Stoic idea--with this difference, however, that among the Stoics it was
intimately associated with their teleology, with the doctrine that
everything in nature has a function without whose performance the universe
would not be complete; whereas Spinoza, following Bacon and Descartes,
utterly abjures final causes as an anthropomorphism, an intrusion of human
interests into a universe whose sole perfection is to exhaust the
possibilities of existence. And herein lies his justification of evil which
the Stoics could only defend on aesthetic grounds as enhancing the beauty
of moral heroism by contrast and conflict. "If I am asked," he says, "why
God did not create all men of such a character as to be guided by reason
alone, my answer is because he had materials enough to create all things
from the highest to the lowest degree of perfection." Perfection with him
meaning reality, this account of evil--and of error also--points to the
theory of degrees of reality, revived and elaborated in our own time by Mr.
F. H. Bradley, involving a correlative theory of illusion. Now, the idea of
illusion, although older than Plato, was first applied on a great scale in
Plato's philosophy, of whose influence on seventeenth-century thought this
is not the only example. We shall find it to some extent countervailed by a
revived Aristotelian current in the work of the metaphysician who now
remains to be considered.
LEIBNIZ.
G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716), son of a professor at the University of Leipzig,
is marked by some of the distinguishing intellectual characters of the
German genius. {58} Far more truly than Francis Bacon, this man took all
knowledge for his province. At once a mathematician, a physicist, a
historian, a metaphysician, and a diplomatist, he went to the bottom of
whatever subject he touched, and enriched all his multifarious studies with
new views or with new facts. And as with other great countrymen of his, the
final end of all this curiosity and interest was to combine and reconcile.
One of his ambitions was to create a universal language of philosophy, by
whose means its problems were to be made a matter of mathematical
demonstration; another to harmonise ancient with modern speculation; a
third--the most chimerical of all--to compose the differences between Rome
and Protestantism; a fourth--partly realised long after his time--to unite
the German Calvinists with the Lutherans. In politics he tried, with equal
unsuccess, to build up a Confederation of the Rhine as a barrier against
Louis XIV., and to divert the ambition of Louis himself from encroachments
on his neighbours to the conquest of Egypt.
It seems probable that no intellect of equal power was ever applied in
modern times to the service of philosophy. And this power is demonstrated,
not, as with other metaphysicians, by constructions of more or less
contestable value, however dazzling the ingenuity they may display, but by
contributions of the first order to positive science. It is now agreed that
Leibniz discovered the differential calculus independently of Newton; and,
what is more, that the formulation by which alone it has been made
available for fruitful application was his exclusive invention. In physics
he is a pioneer of the conservation of energy. In geology he starts the
theory that our planet began as a glowing molten mass derived from the sun;
and the modern {59} theory of evolution is a special application of his
theory of development.
Intellect alone, however, does not make a great philosopher; character also
is required; and Leibniz's character was quite unworthy of his genius.
Ambitious and avaricious, a courtier and a time-server, he neither made
truth for its own sake a paramount object, nor would he keep on terms with
those who cherished a nobler ideal. After cultivating Spinoza's
acquaintance, he joined in the cry of obloquy raised after his death, and
was mean enough to stir up religious prejudice against Newton's theory of
gravitation. Of the calamity that embittered his closing days we may say
with confidence that it could not possibly have befallen Spinoza. On the
accession of the Elector of Hanover to the English crown as George I.,
Leibniz sought for an invitation to the Court of St. James. Apparently the
prince had not found him very satisfactory as a State official, and had
reason to believe that Leibniz would have liked to exchange his office of
historiographer at Hanover for a better appointment at Vienna. Greatness in
other departments could not recommend one whom he knew only as a negligent
and perhaps unfaithful servant to the favour of such an illiterate master.
Anyhow, the English appointment was withheld, and the worn-out
encyclopaedist succumbed to disease and vexation combined. The only mourner
at his funeral was his secretary, Eckhardt, who hastened to solicit the
reversion of the offices left vacant by his chief's decease.
A single theory of Leibniz has attained more celebrity than any one
utterance of any other philosopher; but that fame is due to the undying
fire in which it has been enveloped by the mocking irony of Voltaire. {60}
Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Such is the
famous text as a satire on which _Candide_ was composed. Yet whatever value
Voltaire's objections to optimism may possess tells nearly as much against
Voltaire himself as against his unfortunate butt. For, after all, believing
as he did in a God who combined omnipotence with perfect goodness he could
not any more than Leibniz evade the obligation of reconciling the divine
character with the divine work. On _a priori_ grounds the German
philosopher seems to have an incontrovertible case. A perfect Being must
have made the best possible world. The only question is what we mean by
goodness and by possibility. Spinoza had solved the problem by identifying
goodness with existence. It is enough that the things we call evil are
possible; the infinite Power of nature would be a self-contradiction were
they not realised. Leibniz rejects the pantheistic position in terms, but
nearly admits it in practice. Evil for him means imperfection, and if God
made a world at all it was bound to be imperfect. The next step was to call
pain an imperfection, which suggests a serious logical deficiency in the
optimist; for, although in certain circumstances the production of pain
argues imperfection in the operator, we are not entitled to argue that
wherever there is pain there must be imperfection. Another plea is the
necessity of pain as a punishment for crime, or, more generally, as a
result of moral freedom. Such an argument is only open to the believers in
free-will. A world of free and responsible agents, they urge, is infinitely
more valuable than a world of automata; and it is not too dearly purchased
even at the cost of such suffering as we witness. The argument is not very
convincing; for liberty of choice {61} in a painless world is quite
conceivable. But, be it a good or bad argument, although it might appeal to
Voltaire, who believed in free-will, it could not decently be used by
Leibniz, who was a determinist of the strictest type. To make this clear we
must now turn to his metaphysical system.
Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza, disagreeing widely on other subjects, were
agreed in discountenancing the study of final causes: Bacon, apparently,
from dislike of the idea that the perfect adaptation of all things to the
service of man rendered superfluous any efforts to make them more
serviceable still; Descartes from his devotion to the mathematical method
which was more applicable to a system of mechanical causation; Spinoza for
the same reason, and also from his disbelief in a personal God. Leibniz, on
the contrary, felt deeply impressed by a famous passage in Plato's
_Phaedo,_ where Socrates, opposing the philosophy of teleology to the
philosophy of mechanism, desiderates an explanation of nature as designed
with a view to the highest good. But Leibniz did not go so far as Plato.
Mediating between the two methods, he taught that all is done for the best,
but also that all is done through an unbroken series of efficient causes.
At the same time, these causes are only material in appearance; in reality
they are spiritual beings. There is no such thing as dead matter; the
universe consists of living forces all through. The general idea of force
probably came from that infinite Power of which, according to Spinoza, the
whole universe is at once the product and the expression; or it may have
been suggested by Plato's incidental identification of Being with Action.
But Leibniz found his type of force in human personality, which, following
the lead of Aristotle {62} rather than of Plato, he conceived as an
Entelechy, or realised Actuality, and a First Substance. After years of
anxious reflection he chose the far happier name of Monad, a term
originally coined by Bruno, but not, as would appear, directly borrowed
from him by the German metaphysician.
According to Leibniz, the monads or ultimate elements of existence are
constituted by the two essential properties of psychic life, perception and
appetency. In this connection two points have to be made clear. What he
calls bare monads--_i.e._, the components of what is known as inorganic
matter--although percipient, are not conscious of their perceptions; in his
language they do not _apperceive_. And he endeavours to prove that such a
mentality is possible by a reference to our own experience. We hear the
roaring of waves on the seashore, but we do not hear the sound made by the
falling of each particle of water. And yet we certainly must perceive it in
some way or other, since the total volume of sound is made up of those
inaudible impacts. He overlooks the conceivable alternative that the
immediate antecedent of our auditory sensations is a cerebral disturbance,
and that this must attain a certain volume in order to produce an effect on
our consciousness. The other point is that the appetency of a monad does
not mean an active impulse, but a search for more and more perceptions, a
continuous widening of its cognitive range. In short, each monad is a
little Leibniz for ever increasing the sum of its knowledge.
At no stage does that knowledge come from experience. The monad has no
windows, no communication of any kind with the external world. But each
reflects the whole universe, knowing what it knows by {63} mere
introspection. And each reflects all the others at a different angle, the
angles varying from one another by infinitesimal degrees, so that in their
totality they form a continuous series of differentiated individuals. And
the same law of infinitesimal differentiation is observed by the series of
progressive changes through which the monads are ever passing, so that they
keep exact step, the continuity of existence being unbroken in the order of
succession as in the order of co-existence. Evidently there is no place for
free-will in such a system; and that Leibniz, with his relentless fatalism,
should not only admit the eternal punishment of predestined sinners, but
even defend it as morally appropriate, obliges us to condemn his theology
as utterly irrational or utterly insincere.
In this system animal and human souls are conceived as monads of superior
rank occupying a central and commanding position among a multitude of
inferior monads constituting what we call their bodies, and changing _pari
passu_ with them, the correspondence of their respective states being,
according to Leibniz, of such a peculiarly intimate character that the
phenomena of sensation and volition seem to result from a causal reaction
instead of from a mechanical adjustment such as we can imagine to exist
between two clocks so constructed and set as to strike the same hour at the
same time. This theory of the relations between body and soul is known to
philosophy as the system of pre-established harmony.
It may be asked how every monad can possibly reflect every other monad when
we do not know what is passing in our own bodies, still less what is
passing all over the universe. The answer consists in a convenient
distinction between clear and confused {64} perceptions, the one
constituting our actual and the other our potential knowledge. A more
difficult problem is to explain how any particular monad--Leibniz or
another--can consistently be a monadologist rather than a solipsist
believing only in its own existence. Here, as usual, the _Deus ex Machina_
comes in. Following Descartes, I think of God as a perfect Being whose idea
involves his existence, with, of course, the power, will, and wisdom to
create the best possible world--a universe of monads--which, again, by its
perfect mutual adjustments, proves that there is a God. A more serious, and
indeed absolutely insuperable, objection arises from the definition of the
monads as nothing but mutually reflecting entities. For even an infinity of
little mirrors with nothing but each other to reflect must at once collapse
into absolute vacuity. And with their disappearance their creator also
disappears. God, the supreme monad, we are told, has only clear
perceptions; but the clearness is of no avail when he has nothing to
perceive but an absolute blank. Leibniz rejected the objectivity of time
and space; yet the hollow infinity of those blank forms seems, in his
philosophy, to have reached the consciousness of itself.
* * * * *
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