CHAPTER VI.

GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND MODERN THOUGHT.

I.

Adequately to exhibit the relation of Greek philosophy to modern

thought would require a volume. The object of the present discussion

is merely to show in what ways that relation has been most clearly

manifested, and what assistance it may afford us in solving some

important problems connected with the development of metaphysical and

moral speculation.

Historians often speak as if philosophy took an entirely fresh start

at different epochs of its existence. One such break is variously

associated with Descartes, or Bacon, or some one of their Italian

predecessors. In like manner, the introduction of Christianity,

coupled with the closing of the Athenian schools by Justinian, is

considered, as once was the suppression of the West-Roman Caesarate

by Odoacer, to mark the beginning of a new régime. But there can be

no more a real break in the continuity of intellectual than in the

continuity of political history, beyond what sleep or inactivity may

simulate in the life of the organic aggregate no less than in the

life of the organic individual. In each instance, the thread is taken

up where it was dropped. If the rest of the world has been advancing

meanwhile, new tendencies will come into play, but only by first

attaching themselves to older lines of movement. Sometimes, again,

what seems to be a revolution is, in truth, the revival or liberation

of an earlier movement, through the decay or destruction of beliefs

which have hitherto checked its growth. Thus the systems of Plato and

Aristotle, after carrying all before them for a brief period, were

found unsuitable, from their vast comprehension and high spirituality,

to the undeveloped consciousness of their age, and were replaced by

popularised versions of the sceptical or naturalistic philosophies

which they had endeavoured to suppress. And when these were at length

left behind by the forward movement of the human mind, speculative

reformers spontaneously reverted to the two great Socratic thinkers

for a better solution of the problems in debate. After many abortive

efforts, a teacher appeared possessing sufficient genius to fuse their

principles into a seemingly coherent and comprehensive whole. By

combining the Platonic and Aristotelian spiritualism with a dynamic

element borrowed from Stoicism, Plotinus did for an age of intellectual

decadence what his models had done in vain for an age of intellectual

growth. The relation in which he stood to Stoicism, Epicureanism, and

Scepticism, reproduced the relation in which they stood to the various

physical and sophistic schools of their time; but the silent experience

of six centuries won for him a much more enduring success.

Neo-Platonism was the form under which Greek philosophy passed

into Christian teaching; and the transition was effected with less

difficulty because Christianity had already absorbed some of its most

essential elements from the original system of Plato himself. Meanwhile

the revival of spiritualism had given an immense impulse to the study

of the classic writings whence it was drawn; and the more they were

studied the more prominently did their antagonism on certain important

questions come into view. Hence, no sooner did the two systems between

which Plotinus had established a provisional compromise come out

victorious from their struggle with materialism, than they began to

separate and draw off into opposing camps. The principal subject of

dispute was the form under which ideas exist. The conflicting theories

of Realism and Nominalism are already set forth with perfect clearness

by Porphyry in his introduction to the _Organon_; and his statement

of the case, as Victor Cousin has pointed out, gave the signal for a

controversy forming the central interest of Scholasticism during the

entire period of its duration.

Now, it is a remarkable fact, and one as yet not sufficiently attended

to, that a metaphysical issue first raised between the Platonists

and Aristotle, and regarded, at least by the latter, as of supreme

importance for philosophy, should have been totally neglected at a time

when abundant documents on both sides were open to consultation, and

taken up with passionate eagerness at a time when not more than one or

two dialogues of Plato and two or three tracts of Aristotle continued

to be read in the western world. Various explanations of this singular

anomaly may be offered. It may be said, for instance, that after every

moral and religious question on which the schools of Athens were

divided had been closed by the authoritative ruling of Catholicism,

nothing remained to quarrel over but points too remote or too obscure

for the Church to interfere in their decision; and that these were

accordingly seized upon as the only field where human intelligence

could exercise itself with any approach to freedom. The truth, however,

seems to be that to take any interest in the controversy between

Realism and Nominalism, it was first necessary that European thought

as a whole should rise to a level with the common standpoint of their

first supporters. This revolution was effected by the general adoption

of a monotheistic faith.

Moreover, the Platonic ideas were something more than figments of an

imaginative dialectic. They were now beginning to appear in their

true light, and as what Plato had always understood them to be—no

mere abstractions from experience, but spiritual forces by which

sensuous reality was to be reconstituted and reformed. The Church

herself seemed something more than a collection of individuals holding

common convictions and obeying a common discipline; she was, like

Plato’s own Republic, the visible embodiment of an archetype laid up

in Heaven.[533] And the Church’s teaching seemed also to assume the

independent reality of abstract ideas. Does not the Trinity involve

belief in a God distinct from any of the Divine Persons taken alone?

Do not the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Atonement become more

intelligible if we imagine an ideal humanity sinning with the first

Adam and purified by becoming united with the second Adam? Such, at

least, seems to have been the dimly conceived metaphysics of St. Paul,

whatever may now be the official doctrine of Rome. It was, therefore,

in order that, during the first half of the Middle Ages, from

Charlemagne to the Crusades, Realism should have been the prevailing

doctrine; the more so because Plato’s _Timaeus_, which was studied in

the schools through that entire period, furnishes its readers with

a complete theory of the universe; while only the formal side of

Aristotle’s philosophy is represented by such of his logical treatises

as were then known to western Christendom.

Yet Realism concealed a danger to orthodoxy which was not long

in making itself felt. Just as the substantiality of individuals

disappeared in that of their containing species, so also did every

subordinate species tend to vanish in the _summum genus_ of absolute

Being. Now such a conclusion was nothing less than full-blown

pantheism; and pantheism was, in fact, the system of the first great

Schoolman, John Scotus Erigena; while other Realists were only

prevented from reaching the same goal by the restraint either of

Christian faith or of ecclesiastical authority. But if they failed to

draw the logical consequences of their premises, it was drawn for them

by others; and Abélard did not fail to twit his opponents with the

formidable heresy implied in their realistic principles.[534] As yet,

however, the weight of authority inclined towards Plato’s side; and the

persecution suffered by Abélard himself, as compared with the very mild

treatment accorded to his contemporary, Gilbert de la Porrée, when each

was arraigned on a charge of heresy, shows that while the Nominalism of

the one was an aggravation, the Realism of the other was an extenuation

of his offence.[535]

So matters stood when the introduction of Aristotle’s entire system

into western Europe brought about a revolution comparable to that

effected two centuries later by the complete recovery of ancient

literature. It was through Latin translations from the Arabic,

accompanied by Arabic commentaries, that the Peripatetic philosophy

was first revealed in its entirety; and even Albertus Magnus, living

in the thirteenth century, seems to have derived his knowledge of the

subject from these exclusively. But a few years after the capture

of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, the Greek manuscripts

of Aristotle were brought to Paris; and, towards the middle of the

century, a new Latin version was made from these under the supervision

of St. Thomas Aquinas.[536] The triumph of Aristotle was now, at least

for a time, secured. For, while in the first period of the Middle

Ages we find only a single great name, that of Abélard, among the

Nominalists, against a strong array of Realists, in the second period

the proportions are reversed, and Realism has only a single worthy

champion, Duns Scotus, to pit against Albertus, Aquinas, and William

of Ockham, each of them representing one of the principal European

nations.[537] The human intellect, hitherto confined within the narrow

bounds of logic, now ranged over physics, metaphysics, psychology,

and ethics; and although all these subjects were studied only at

second-hand, and with very limited opportunities for criticism, still

the benefit received must have been immense. The priceless service of

the later Schoolmen is to have appropriated and successfully upheld,

against Platonism on the one hand and theological mysticism on the

other, a philosophy which, however superficial, took in the whole range

of natural phenomena, derived all knowledge from external observation,

and set an example of admirable precision in the systematic exposition

of its results. If no positive addition was made to that vast

storehouse of facts and ideas, the blame does not lie with Aristotle’s

method, but with the forcible suppression of free mental activity by

the Church, or its diversion to more profitable fields by the study

of Roman jurisprudence. Even as it was, Aristotle contributed largely

to the downfall of ecclesiastical authority in two ways: directly by

accustoming men to use their reason, and indirectly by throwing back

mysticism on its proper office—the restoration of a purely personal

religion.

But before the dissolving action of Nominalism had become fully

manifest, its ascendency was once more challenged; and this time,

also, the philosophical impulse came from Constantinople. Greek

scholars, seeking help in the West, brought with them to Florence the

complete works of Plato; and these were shortly made accessible to a

wider public through the Latin translation of Ficino. Their influence

seems at first to have told in favour of mysticism, for this was the

contemporary tendency to which they could be most readily affiliated;

and, besides, in swinging back from Aristotle’s philosophy to the

rival form of spiritualism, men’s minds naturally reverted, in the

first instance, to what had once linked them together—the system of

Plotinus. Thus Platonism was studied through an Alexandrian medium,

and as the Alexandrians had looked at it, that is to say, chiefly

under its theological and metaphysical aspects. As such, it became

the accepted philosophy of the Renaissance; and much of what we

most admire in the literature—at least the English literature—of

that period, is directly traceable to Platonic influence. That the

_Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More was inspired by the _Republic_ and the

_Critias_ is, of course, obvious; and the great part played by the

ideal theory in Spenser’s _Faery Queen_, though less evident, is

still sufficiently clear. As Mr. Green observes in his _History of

the English People_ (II., p. 413), ‘Spenser borrows, in fact, the

delicate and refined forms of the Platonic philosophy to express his

own moral enthusiasm.... Justice, Temperance, Truth are no mere names

to him, but real existences to which his whole nature clings with a

rapturous affection.’ Now it deserves observation, as illustrating a

great revolution in European thought, that the relation of Plato to

the epic of the English Renaissance is precisely paralleled by the

relation of Aristotle to the epic of mediaeval Italy. Dante borrows

more than his cosmography from the Stagirite. The successive circles

of Hell, the spirals of Purgatory, and the spheres of Paradise, are a

framework in which the characters of the poem are exhibited, not as

individual actors whom we trace through a life’s history, but as types

of a class and representatives of a single mental quality, whether

vicious or virtuous. In other words, the historical arrangement of

all previous poems is abandoned in favour of a logical arrangement.

For the order of contiguity in time is substituted the order of

resemblance and difference in idea. How thoroughly Aristotelian,

indeed, were the lines within which mediaeval imagination moved is

proved by the possibility of tracing them in a work utterly different

from Dante’s—the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio. The tales constituting this

collection are so arranged that each day illustrates some one special

class of adventures; only, to make good Aristotle’s principle that

earthly affairs are not subject to invariable rules, a single departure

from the prescribed subject is allowed in each decade; while during

one entire day the story-tellers are left free to choose a subject at

their own discretion.

Now what distinguishes Spenser from Dante is that, while he also

disposes his inventions according to an extremely artificial and

abstract schematism, with him, as with Plato, abstractions acquire a

separate individual existence, being, in fact, embodied as so many

persons; while Dante, following Aristotle, never separates his from

the concrete data of experience. And it may be noted that, in this

respect at least, English literature has not deserted the philosophy

which presided over its second birth. It has ever since been more

prone to realise abstractions than any other literature, whether under

the form of allegories, parables, or mere casual illustrations drawn

from material objects. Even at this day, English writers crowd their

pages with dazzling metaphors, which to Continental readers must have

sometimes a rather barbaric effect.

Another and profounder characteristic of Plato, as distinguished from

Aristotle, is his thorough-going opposition of reality to appearance;

his distrust of sensuous perception, imagination, and opinion; his

continual appeal to a hidden world of absolute truth and justice. We

find this profounder principle also grasped and applied to poetical

purposes in our Elizabethan literature, not only by Spenser, but by

a still greater master—Shakespeare. It is by no means unlikely that

Shakespeare may have looked into a translation of the _Dialogues_; at

any rate, the intellectual atmosphere he breathed was so saturated

with their spirit that he could easily absorb enough of it to inspire

him with the theory of existence which alone gives consistency to his

dramatic work from first to last. For the essence of his comedies

is that they represent the ordinary world of sensible experience as

a scene of bewilderment and delusion, where there is nothing fixed,

nothing satisfying, nothing true; as something which, because of its

very unreality, is best represented by the drama, but a drama that is

not without mysterious intimations of a reality behind the veil. In

them we have the

Fallings from us, vanishings,

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realised;

while in his tragedies we have the realisation of those worlds—the

workings of an eternal justice which alone remains faithful to one

purpose through the infinite flux of passion and of sense.

Besides the revival of Platonism, three causes had conspired to

overthrow the supremacy of Aristotle. The literary Renaissance with

its adoration for beauty of form was alienated by the barbarous

dialect of Scholasticism; the mystical theology of Luther saw in it

an ally both of ecclesiastical authority and of human reason; and the

new spirit of passionate revolt against all tradition attacked the

accepted philosophy in common with every other branch of the official

university curriculum. Before long, however, a reaction set in. The

innovators discredited themselves by an extravagance, an ignorance, a

credulity, and an intolerance worse than anything in the teaching which

they decried. No sooner was the Reformation organised as a positive

doctrine than it fell back for support on the only model of systematic

thinking at that time to be found. The Humanists were conciliated by

having the original text of Aristotle placed before them; and they

readily believed, what was not true, that it contained a wisdom which

had eluded mediaeval research. But the great scientific movement of the

sixteenth century contributed, more than any other impulse, to bring

about an Aristotelian reaction. After winning immortal triumphs in

every branch of art and literature, the Italian intellect threw itself

with equal vigour into the investigation of physical phenomena. Here

Plato could give little help, whereas Aristotle supplied a methodised

description of the whole field to be explored, and contributions of

extraordinary value towards the understanding of some, at least, among

its infinite details. And we may measure the renewed popularity of his

system not only by the fact that Cesalpino, the greatest naturalist of

the age, professed himself its adherent, but also by the bitterness of

the criticisms directed against it, and the involuntary homage offered

by rival systems which were little more than meagre excerpts from the

Peripatetic ontology and logic.

II.

Of all testimonies to the restored supremacy of Aristotelianism, there

is none so remarkable as that afforded by the thinker who, more than

any other, has enjoyed the credit of its overthrow. To call Francis

Bacon an Aristotelian will seem to most readers a paradox. Such an

appellation would, however, be much nearer the truth than were the

titles formerly bestowed on the author of the _Novum Organum_. The

notion, indeed, that he was in any sense the father of modern science

is rapidly disappearing from the creed of educated persons. Its long

continuance was due to a coalition of literary men who knew nothing

about physics and of physicists who knew nothing about philosophy

or its history. It is certain that the great discoveries made both

before and during Bacon’s lifetime were the starting-point of all

future progress in the same direction. It is equally certain that

Bacon himself had either not heard of those discoveries or that he

persistently rejected them. But it might still be contended that he

divined and formulated the only method by which these and all other

great additions to human knowledge have been made, had not the delusion

been dispelled by recent investigations, more especially those of his

own editors, Messrs. Ellis and Spedding. Mr. Spedding has shown that

Bacon’s method never was applied to physical science at all. Mr. Ellis

has shown that it was incapable of application, being founded on a

complete misconception of the problem to be solved. The facts could in

truth, hardly have been other than what they are. Had Bacon succeeded

in laying down the lines of future investigation, it would have been

a telling argument against his own implied belief that all knowledge

is derived from experience. For, granting the validity of that belief,

a true theory of discovery can only be reached by an induction from

the observed facts of scientific practice, and such facts did not,

at that time, exist in sufficient numbers to warrant an induction.

It would have been still more extraordinary had he furnished a clue

to the labyrinth of Nature without ever having explored its mazes on

his own account. Even as it is, from Bacon’s own point of view the

contradiction remains. If ever any system was constructed _à priori_

the _Instauratio Magna_ was. But there is really no such thing as _à

priori_ speculation. Apart from observation, the keenest and boldest

intellect can do no more than rearrange the materials supplied by

tradition, or give a higher generalisation to the principles of

other philosophers. This was precisely what Bacon did. The wealth of

aphoristic wisdom and ingenious illustration scattered through his

writings belongs entirely to himself; but his dream of using science as

an instrument for acquiring unlimited power over Nature is inherited

from the astrologers, alchemists, and magicians of the Middle Ages;

and his philosophical system, with which alone we are here concerned,

is partly a modification, partly an extension, of Aristotle’s. An

examination of its leading features will at once make this clear.

Bacon begins by demanding that throughout the whole range of experience

new facts should be collected on the largest scale, in order to supply

materials for scientific generalisation. There can be no doubt that he

is here guided by the example of Aristotle, and of Aristotle alone.

Such a storehouse of materials is still extant in the _History of

Animals_, which evidently suggested the use of the word ‘History’ in

this sense to Bacon, and which, by the way, is immensely superior

to anything that he ever attempted in the same line. The facts on

which Aristotle’s _Politics_ is based were contained in another

vast descriptive work of the same kind, now unhappily lost. Even

the Stagirite’s more systematic treatises comprise a multitude of

observations, catalogued according to a certain order, but not reduced

to scientific principles. What Bacon did was to carry out, or to bid

others carry out, the plan so suggested in every department of enquiry.

But if we ask by what method he was guided in his survey of the whole

field to be explored, how he came by a complete enumeration of the

sciences, arranged according to their logical order,—the answer is

still that he borrowed it from the Peripatetic encyclopaedia.

One need only compare the catalogue of particular histories subjoined

to the _Parasceve_,[538] with a table of Aristotle’s works, to

understand how closely Bacon follows in the footsteps of his

predecessor. We do, indeed, find sundry subjects enumerated on which

the elder student had not touched; but they are only such as would

naturally suggest themselves to a man of comprehensive intelligence,

coming nearly two thousand years after his original; while they are

mostly of no philosophical value whatever. Bacon’s merit was to bring

the distinction between the descriptive sciences and the theoretical

sciences into clearer consciousness, and to give a view of the former

corresponding in completeness to that already obtained of the latter.

The methodical distinction between the materials for generalisation and

generalisation itself, is derived from the metaphysical distinction

between Matter and Form in Nature.[539] This distinction is the

next great feature of Bacon’s philosophy, and it is taken, still

more obviously than the first, from Aristotle, the most manifest

blots of the original being faithfully reproduced in the copy. The

Forms of simple substances were, according to the Stagirite, their

sensible qualities. The Forms of aggregates were the whole complex

of their differential characteristics. And although the formal cause

or idea of a thing was carefully discriminated from its efficient

and final causes, it was found impossible, in practice, to keep the

three from running into one. Again, the distinction between single

concepts and the judgments created by putting two concepts together,

although clearly conveyed by the logical distinction between terms and

propositions, was no sooner perceived than lost sight of, thanks to

the unfortunate theory of essential predication. For it was thought

that the import of universal propositions consisted either in stating

the total concept to which a given mark belonged, or in annexing a

new mark to a given concept. Hence, in Aristotle’s system, the study

of natural law means nothing but the definition and classification

of natural types; and, in harmony with this idea, the whole universe

is conceived as an arrangement of concentric spheres, each receiving

its impulse from that immediately above it. Precisely the same

confusion of Form, Cause, and Law reigns throughout Bacon’s theory

of Nature. We do, indeed, find mention made of _axiomata_ or general

propositions to a greater extent than in the _Organon_, but they are

never clearly distinguished from Forms, nor Forms from functions.[540]

And although efficient and material causes are assigned to physics,

while formal and final causes are reserved for metaphysics—an apparent

recognition of the wide difference between the forces which bring a

thing into existence and the actual conditions of its stability,—this

arrangement is a departure from the letter rather than from the spirit

of Aristotle’s philosophy. For the efficient causes of the _De

Augmentis_ answer roughly to the various kinds of motion discussed in

the _Physics_ and in the treatise _On Generation and Corruption_; while

its Forms are, as we have seen, identified with natural causes or laws

in the most general sense.

According to Bacon, the object of science is to analyse the complex of

Forms making up an individual aggregate into its separate constituents;

the object of art, to superinduce one or more such Forms on a given

material. Hence his manner of regarding them differs in one important

respect from Aristotle’s. The Greek naturalist was, before all things,

a biologist. His interest lay with the distinguishing characteristics

of animal species. These are easily discovered by the unassisted

eye; but while they are comparatively superficial, they are also

comparatively unalterable. The English experimenter, being primarily

concerned with inorganic bodies, whose properties he desired to utilise

for industrial purposes, was led to consider the attributes of an

object as at once penetrating its inmost texture, and yet capable

of being separated from it, like heat and colour for instance. But,

like every other thinker of the age, if he escapes from the control

of Aristotle it is only to fall under the dominion of another Greek

master—in this instance, Democritus. Bacon had a great admiration for

the Atomists, and although his inveterate Peripatetic proclivities

prevented him from embracing their theory as a whole, he went along

with it so far as to admit the dependence of the secondary on the

primary qualities of matter; and on the strength of this he concluded

that the way to alter the properties of an object was to alter the

arrangement of its component particles.

The next step was to create a method for determining the particular

configuration on which any given property of matter depends. If such

a problem could be solved at all, it would be by some new system of

practical analysis. Bacon did not see this because he was a Schoolman,

emancipated, indeed, from ecclesiastical authority, but retaining a

blind faith in the power of logic. Aristotle’s _Organon_ had been the

great storehouse of aids to verbal disputation; it should now be turned

into an instrument for the more successful prosecution of physical

researches. What definitions were to the one, that Forms should be to

the other; and both were to be determined by much the same process.

Now Aristotle himself had emphatically declared that the concepts out

of which propositions are constructed were discoverable by induction

and by induction alone. With him, induction meant comparing a number

of instances, and abstracting the one circumstance, if any, in which

they agreed. When the object is to establish a proposition inductively,

he has recourse to a method of elimination, and bids us search for

instances which, differing in everything else, agree in the association

of two particular marks.[541] In the _Topics_ he goes still further

and supplies us with a variety of tests for ascertaining the relation

between a given predicate and a given subject. Among these, Mill’s

Methods of Difference, Residues, and Concomitant Variations are very

clearly stated.[542] But he does not call such modes of reasoning

Induction. So far as he has any general name for them at all, it is

Dialectic, that is, Syllogism of which the premises are not absolutely

certain; and, as a matter of nomenclature, he seems to be right. There

is, undoubtedly, a process by which we arrive at general conclusions

from the comparison of particular instances; but this process in its

purity is nothing more nor less than induction by simple enumeration.

All other reasoning requires the aid of universal propositions, and

is therefore, to that extent, deductive. The methods of elimination

or, as they are now called, of experiment, involve at every step

the assumption of general principles duly specified in the chapter

of Mill’s _Logic_ where they are analysed. And wherever we can rise

immediately from, a single instance to a general law, it is because the

examination of that single instance has been preceded by a chain of

deductive reasoning.

The confusion of Induction, properly so called, and Elimination under a

single name, is largely due to the bad example set by Bacon. He found

it stated in the _Analytics_ that all concepts and general propositions

are established either by syllogism or by induction; and he found some

very useful rules laid down in the _Topics_, not answering to what he

understood by the former method; he therefore summarily dubbed them

with the name of Induction, which they have kept ever since, to the

incalculable confusion of thought.

In working out his theory of logic, the point on which Bacon lays

most stress is the use of negative instances. He seems to think that

their application to reasoning is an original discovery of his own.

But, on examination, no more seems to be meant by it than that,

before accepting any particular theory, we should consider what

other explanations of the same fact might conceivably be offered. In

other words, we should follow the example already set by Aristotle

and nearly every other Greek philosopher after Socrates. But this is

not induction; it is reasoning down from a disjunctive proposition,

generally assumed without any close scrutiny, with the help of sundry

conditional propositions, until we reach our conclusion by a sort of

exhaustive process. Either this, that, or the other is the explanation

of something. But if it were either that or the other, so and so would

follow, which is impossible; therefore it must be this. No other

logic is possible in the infancy of enquiry; but one great advantage

of experiment and mathematical analysis is to relieve us from the

necessity of employing it.

The value of experimentation as such had, however, scarcely dawned on

Bacon. His famous Prerogative Instances are, in the main, a guide

to simple observation, supplemented rather than replaced by direct

interference with the phenomena under examination, comparable to that

moderate use of the rack which he would have countenanced in criminal

procedure. There was, perhaps, a deeper meaning in Harvey’s remark

that Bacon wrote about Nature like a Lord Chancellor than the great

physiologist himself suspected. To Bacon the statesman, science was

something to be largely endowed out of the public treasury in the sure

hope that it would far more than repay the expenditure incurred, by

inventions of priceless advantage to human life. To Bacon the lawyer,

Nature was a person in possession of important secrets to be wrested

from her by employing every artifice of the spy, the detective, the

cross-examiner, and the inquisitorial judge; to Bacon the courtier,

she was a sovereign whose policy might be discovered, and, if need be,

controlled, by paying judicious attention to her humours and caprices.

And, for this very reason, he would feel drawn by a secret affinity

to the Aristotelian dialectic, derived as it was through Socrates and

Plato from the practice of the Athenian law-courts and the debates of

the Athenian assembly. No doubt the _Topics_ was intended primarily for

a manual of debate rather than of scientific enquiry; and the English

Chancellor showed true philosophic genius in his attempt to utilise it

for the latter purpose. Nevertheless the adaptation proved a mistake.

It was not without good grounds that the Socratic dialectic had been

reserved exclusively by its great founder, and almost exclusively

by his successors, for those human interests from the discussion of

which it was first derived. And the discoverers, who in Bacon’s own

lifetime were laying the foundations of physical science, employed a

method totally different from his, because they started with a totally

different conception of the universe. To them it was not a living

whole, a Form of Forms, but a sum of forces to be analysed, isolated,

and recombined, in fact or in idea, with a sublime disregard for the

conditions under which they were presented to ordinary experience. That

very extension of human power anticipated by Bacon came in a manner of

which he had never dreamed. It was gained by studying, not the Forms to

which he attached so much importance, but the modes of motion which he

had relegated to a subordinate place in his classification of natural

causes.[543]

It has been said that, whatever may be the value of his logic, Bacon

recalled men from the construction of baseless theories to the study

of facts. But, here also, he merely echoes Aristotle, who said the

same thing long before him, with much greater terseness, and with the

superior authority of one who teaches by example as well as by precept;

while the merit of reviving Aristotle’s advice when it had fallen into

oblivion belongs to another Bacon, the author of the _Opus Majus_; the

merit of acting on it, to the _savants_ of the Renaissance, to such men

as Vesalius, Cesalpino, and Tycho Brahe.

But, towards the close of the sixteenth century, the time for amassing

observations was past, no further progress being possible until the

observations already recorded were interpreted aright. The just

instinct of science perceived this; and for nearly a century after

Cesalpino no addition of any magnitude was made to what Bacon called

‘History,’ while men’s conceptions of natural law were undergoing a

radical transformation.[544] To choose such a time for developing the

Aristotelian philosophy was peculiarly unfortunate; for that philosophy

had become, both on its good and on its bad side, an obstacle to

progress, by encouraging studies which were not wanted, and by

fostering a spirit of opposition to the Copernican astronomy.

The mere fact that Aristotle himself had pronounced in favour of the

geocentric system did not count for much. The misfortune was that he

had constructed an entire physical philosophy in harmony with it; that

he had linked this to his metaphysics; and that the sensible experience

on whose authority he laid so much stress, seemed to testify in its

behalf. The consequence was that those thinkers who, without being

professed Aristotelian partisans, still remained profoundly affected

by the Peripatetic spirit, could not see their way to accepting a

theory with which all the hopes of intellectual progress were bound

up. These considerations will enable us to understand the attitude of

Bacon towards the new astronomy; while, conversely, his position in

this respect will serve to confirm the view of his character set forth

in the preceding pages. The theory, shared by him with Aristotle, that

Nature is throughout composed of Form and Matter reached its climax in

the supposition that the great elementary bodies are massed together in

a series of concentric spheres disposed according to some principle of

graduation, symmetry, or contrast; and this seemed incompatible with

any but a geocentric arrangement. It is true that Bacon quarrelled

with the particular system maintained by Aristotle, and, under the

guidance of Telesio, fell back on a much cruder form of cosmography;

but his mind still remained dominated by the fancied necessity of

conceiving the universe under the form of a stratified sphere; and

those who persist in looking on him as the apostle of experience will

be surprised to find that he treated the subject entirely from an _à

priori_ point of view. The truth is that Bacon exemplified, in his own

intellectual character, every one of the fundamental fallacies which he

has so picturesquely described. The unwillingness to analyse sensible

appearances into their ideal elements was his Idol of the Tribe; the

thirst for material utilities was his Idol of the Den: the uncritical

acceptance of Aristotle’s metaphysics, his Idol of the Theatre; and the

undefined notions associated with induction, his Idol of the Market.

III.

We may consider it a fortunate circumstance that the philosophy of

Form,—that is to say, of description, definition, classification,

and sensuous perception, as distinguished from mathematical analysis

and deductive reasoning,—was associated with a demonstrably false

cosmology, as it thus became much more thoroughly discredited than

would otherwise have been possible. At this juncture, the first to

perceive and point out how profoundly an acceptance of the Copernican

theory must affect men’s beliefs about Nature and the whole universe,

was Giordano Bruno; and this alone would entitle him to a great place

in the history of philosophy. The conception of a single finite world

surrounded by a series of eternal and unchangeable crystal spheres

must, he said, be exchanged for the conception of infinite worlds

dispersed through illimitable space. Once grant that the earth has a

double movement round its own axis and round the sun, and Aristotle’s

whole system of finite existence collapses at once, leaving the ground

clear for an entirely different order of ideas.[545] But, in this

respect, whatever was established by the new science had already been

divined by a still older philosophy than Aristotle’s, as Bruno himself

gladly acknowledged,[546] and the immediate effect of his reasoning was

to revive the Atomic theory. The assumption of infinite space, formerly

considered an insuperable objection to that theory, now became one of

its chief recommendations; the arguments of Lucretius regained their

full force, while his fallacies were let drop; Atomism seemed not only

possible but necessary; and the materialism once associated with it was

equally revived. But Aristotelianism, as we have seen, was not alone

in the field, and on the first symptoms of a successful revolt, its

old rival stood in readiness to seize the vacant throne. The question

was how far its claim would be supported, and how far disputed by

the new invaders. It might be supposed that the older forms of Greek

philosophy, thus restored to light after an eclipse of more than a

thousand years, would be no less hostile to the poetic Platonism than

to the scientific Aristotelianism of the Renaissance. Such, however,

was not the case; and we have to show how an alliance was established

between these apparently opposite lines of thought, eventually giving

birth to the highest speculation of the following century.

Bruno himself acted as a mediator between the two philosophies. His

sympathies with Platonism were strongly pronounced, he looked with

admiration on its mediaeval supporters, especially David of Dinan;

and regretted the time when Oxford was a focus of realistic teaching,

instead of being what he found her, devoted to the pedantic humanism

of the Renaissance.[547] He fully accepted the pantheistic conclusions

towards which Platonism always tended; but in proclaiming an absolute

principle whence all specific differences are evolved, he is careful to

show that, while it is neither Form nor Matter in the ordinary sense,

it may be called Matter in the more refined signification attached to

that term by Plotinus and, indeed, by Aristotle himself. There is a

common substance underlying all abstract essences, just as there is a

common substance left behind when the sensible qualities of different

bodies are stripped off; and both are, at bottom, the same. Thus monism

became the banner round which the older forms of Greek speculation

rallied in their assault on Aristotle’s philosophy, though what monism

implied was as yet very imperfectly understood.

Meanwhile a new and powerful agency was about to interpose with

decisive effect in the doubtful struggle. This was the study of

mathematics. Revived by the Arabians and never wholly neglected

during the Middle Ages, it had profited by the general movement of

the Renaissance, and was finally applied to the cosmical problem by

Galileo. In this connexion, two points of profound philosophical

interest must be noted. The first is that, even in its fall, the

Aristotelian influence survived, to some extent, both for good and

for evil. To Aristotle belongs the merit of having been the first

to base astronomy on physics. He maintains the earth’s immobility

on experimental no less than on speculative grounds. A stone thrown

straight up in the air returns to its starting-point instead of falling

to the west of it; and the absence of stellar parallax seems to show

that there is no change in our position relatively to the heavenly

bodies. After satisfying himself, on empirical considerations, that the

popular astronomy is true, he proceeds to show that it must be true,

by considerations on the nature of matter and motion, which, although

mistaken, are conceived in a genuinely scientific spirit. Now Galileo

saw that, to establish the Copernican system, he must first grapple

with the Peripatetic physics, and replace it by a new dynamical theory.

This, which he could hardly have effected by the ordinary mathematical

methods, he did by borrowing the analytical method of Atomism and

applying it to the measurement of motion. The law of falling bodies

was ascertained by resolving their descent into a series of moments,

and determining its rate of velocity at successive intervals; and

curvilinear motions were similarly resolved into the combination of an

impulsive with an accelerating force, a method diametrically opposed

to that of Bacon, who would not even accept the rough analysis of the

apparent celestial motions proposed by Greek astronomers.

It seems strange that Galileo, having gone so far, did not go a step

further, and perceive that the planetary orbits, being curvilinear,

must result from the combination of a centripetal with a tangential

force. But the truth is that he never seems to have grasped his own

law of inertia in its full generality. He understood that the planets

could not have been set in motion without a rectilinear impulse; but

his idea was that this impulse continued only so long as was necessary

in order to give them their present velocity, instead of acting on

them for ever as a tangential force. The explanation of this strange

inconsequence must be sought in a survival of Aristotelian conceptions,

in the persistent belief that rectilinear motion was necessarily

limited and temporary, while circular motion was natural, perfect, and

eternal.[548] Now such conceptions as Nature, perfection, and eternity

always rebel against an analysis of the phenomena wherein they are

supposed to reside. The same prejudice will explain why Galileo should

have so persistently ignored Kepler’s Laws, for we can hardly imagine

that they were not brought under his notice.

The philosophical affinities of the new science were not exhausted

by the atomistic analysis of Democritus and the regulative method of

Aristotle. Platonism could hardly fail to benefit by the great impulse

given to mathematical studies in the latter half of the sixteenth

century. The passionate love of its founder for geometry must have

recommended him as much to the most advanced minds of the period as

his religious mysticism had recommended him to the theologians of the

earlier Renaissance. And the increasing ascendency of the heliocentric

astronomy, with its splendid defiance of sense and opinion, was

indirectly a triumph for the philosophy which, more than any other, had

asserted the claims of pure reason against both. We see this distinctly

in Galileo. In express adhesion to Platonism, he throws his teaching

into a conversational form, endeavouring to extract the truth from his

opponents rather than convey it into their minds from without; and the

theory of reminiscence as the source of demonstrative knowledge seems

to meet with his approval.[549] He is always ready with proofs drawn

from observation and experiment; but nothing can be more in Plato’s

spirit, nothing more unlike Aristotle and Bacon, than his encomium on

the sublime genius of Aristarchus and Copernicus for having maintained

a rational hypothesis against what seemed to be the evidence of their

senses.[550] And he elsewhere observes how much less would have been

the glory of Copernicus had he known the experimental verification of

his theory.[551]

The Platonic influence told even more efficaciously on Galileo’s

still greater contemporary, Kepler. With him as with the author of

the _Republic_, mysticism took the direction of seeking everywhere

for evidence of mathematical proportions. With what brilliant success

the search was attended, it is needless to relate. What interests us

here is the fact, vouched for by Arago, that the German astronomer was

guided by an idea of Plato’s, that the world must have been created on

geometrical principles.[552] Had Bacon known anything about the work on

which his adventurous contemporary was engaged, we may be sure that it

would have afforded him another illustration for his Idôla, the only

difficulty being whether it should be referred to the illusions of the

Tribe, the Den, or the Theatre.

Meanwhile Atomism continued to exercise a powerful influence on the

method even more than on the doctrines of science. The analytical

mode of treatment, applied by Galileo to dynamics, was applied, with

equal success, by other mathematicians, to the study of discrete and

continuous quantity. It is to the division of numbers and figures into

infinitesimal parts—a direct contravention of Aristotle’s teaching—that

we owe logarithms, algebraic geometry, and the differential calculus.

Thus was established a connexion between spiritualism and materialism,

the philosophy of Plato and the philosophy of Democritus. Out of these

elements, together with what still survived of Aristotelianism, was

constructed the system of Descartes.

IV.

To understand Descartes aright, we must provisionally disregard the

account given in his work on Method of the process by which he arrived

at a new theory of the world; for, in truth, there was nothing new

about it except the proportion in which fragments taken from older

systems were selected and recombined. As we have already noticed,

there is no such thing as spinning philosophies out of one’s own head;

and, in the case of Descartes, even the belief that he was so doing

came to him from Plato; for, along with Aristotle’s dogmatic errors,

his sound teaching with regard to the derivation of knowledge had

fallen into oblivion. The initial doubt of the _Discourse on Method_

and the _Meditations_ is also Platonic; only it is manifested under

an individual and subjective, instead of a universal and objective

form. But to find the real starting-point of Descartes’ enquiries we

must look for it in his mathematical studies. A geometrician naturally

conceives the visible world under the aspect of figured extension; and

if he thinks the figures away, nothing will remain but extension as

the ultimate material out of which all determinate bodies are shaped.

Such was the result reached by Plato in his _Timaeus_. He identified

matter with space, viewing this as the receptacle for his eternal

and self-existent Ideas, or rather the plastic medium on which their

images are impressed. The simplest spatial elements are triangles;

accordingly it is with these that he constructs his solid bodies.

The theory of triangular elements was probably suggested by Atomism;

it is, in fact, a compromise between the purely mathematical and

the materialistic methods. Like all Plato’s fancies, this theory of

matter was attacked with such convincing arguments by Aristotle that,

so long as his physics remained in the ascendent, it did not find a

single supporter; although, as we saw in the last chapter, Plotinus

very nearly worked his way back to it from the Peripatetic definition.

Even now, at the moment of Aristotle’s fall, it might have failed to

attract attention, had not the conditions under which it first arose

been almost exactly repeated. Geometrical demonstration had again

become the type of all reasoning; there was again a sceptical spirit

abroad, forcing men to fall back on the most elementary and universal

conceptions; an atomistic materialism again threatened to claim at

least the whole field of physical enquiry for its own. That Descartes

followed the _Timaeus_ in identifying matter with extension cannot be

doubted; especially when we see that he adopts Plato’s analysis of

body into elementary triangles; but the theory agreed so well with his

intellectual predispositions that he may easily have imagined it to be

a necessary deduction from his own _à priori_ ideas. Moreover, after

the first two steps, he parts company with Plato, and gives himself

up, so far as his rejection of a vacuum will permit, to the mechanical

physics of Democritus. Much praise has recently been bestowed on his

attempt to interpret all physical phenomena in terms of matter and

motion, and to deduce them from the unaided operation of natural

causes; but this is no more than had been done by the early Greek

thinkers, from whom, we may observe, his hypothesis of an initial

vortex was also derived. His cosmogony is better than theirs, only in

so far as it is adapted to scientific discoveries in astronomy and

physiology not made by Descartes himself; for where his conjectures go

beyond these they are entirely at fault.

Descartes’ theory of the universe included, however, something more

than extension (or matter) and motion. This was Thought. If we ask

whence came the notion of Thought, our philosopher will answer that

it was obtained by looking into himself. It was, in reality, obtained

by looking into Aristotle, or into some text-book reproducing his

metaphysics. But the Platonic element in his system enabled Descartes

to isolate Thought much more completely than it had been isolated by

Aristotle. To understand this, we must turn once more to the _Timaeus_.

Plato made up his universe from space and Ideas. But the Ideas were too

vague or too unintelligible for scientific purposes. Even mediaeval

Realists were content to replace them by Aristotle’s much clearer

doctrine of Forms. On the other hand, Aristotle’s First Matter was

anything but a satisfactory conception. It was a mere abstraction;

the unknowable residuum left behind when bodies were stripped,

in imagination, of all their sensible and cogitable qualities. In

other words, there was no Matter actually existing without Form;

whereas Form was never so truly itself, never so absolutely existent,

as when completely separated from Matter: it then became simple

self-consciousness, as in God, or in the reasonable part of the human

soul. The revolution wrought by substituting space for Aristotle’s

First Matter will now become apparent. Corporeal substance could at

once be conceived as existing without the co-operation of Form; and

at the same stroke, Form, liberated from its material bonds, sprang

back into the subjective sphere, to live henceforward only as pure

self-conscious thought.

This absolute separation of Form and Matter, under their new names of

Thought and Extension, once grasped, various principles of Cartesianism

will follow from it by logical necessity. First comes the exclusion of

final causes from philosophy, or rather from Nature. There was not,

as with Epicurus, any anti-theological feeling concerned in their

rejection. With Aristotle, against whom Descartes is always protesting,

the final cause was not a mark of designing intelligence imposed on

Matter from without; it was only a particular aspect of Form, the

realisation of what Matter was always striving after by virtue of its

inherent potentiality. When Form was conceived only as pure thought,

there could be no question of such a process; the most highly organised

bodies being only modes of figured extension. The revival of Atomism

had, no doubt, a great deal to do with the preference for a mechanical

interpretation of life. Aristotle had himself shown with masterly

clearness the difference between his view of Nature and that taken

by Democritus; thus indicating beforehand the direction in which an

alternative to his own teaching might be sought; and Bacon had, in

fact, already referred with approval to the example set by Democritus

in dealing with teleological enquiries.

Nevertheless Bacon’s own attitude towards final causes differs

essentially from Descartes’. The French mathematician, had he

spoken his whole mind, would probably have denied their existence

altogether. The English reformer fully admits their reality, as, with

his Aristotelian theory of Forms, he could hardly avoid doing; and

we find that he actually associates the study of final with that of

formal causes, assigning both to metaphysics as its peculiar province.

This being so, his comparative neglect of the former is most easily

explained by the famous comparison of teleological enquiries to vestal

virgins, dedicated to the service of God and bearing no offspring; for

Mr. Ellis has made it perfectly clear that the barrenness alluded to is

not scientific but industrial. Our knowledge is extended when we trace

the workings of a divine purpose in Nature; but this is not a kind of

knowledge which bears fruit in useful mechanical inventions.[553] Bacon

probably felt that men would not be very forward to improve on Nature

if they believed in the perfection of her works and in their beneficent

adaptation to our wants. The teleological spirit was as strong with

him as with Aristotle, but it took a different direction. Instead of

studying the adaptation of means to ends where it already existed, he

wished men to create it for themselves. But the utilitarian tendency,

which predominated with Bacon, was quite exceptional with Descartes.

Speaking generally, he desired knowledge for its own sake, not as an

instrument for the gratification of other wants; and this intellectual

disinterestedness was, perhaps, another aspect of the severance

effected between thought and matter.

The celebrated Cartesian paradox, that animals are unconscious

automata, is another consequence of the same principle. In Aristotle’s

philosophy, the doctrine of potentiality developing itself into

act through a series of ascending manifestations, supplied a link

connecting the highest rational with the lowest vegetal life. The

identification of Form with pure thought put an end to the conception

of any such intermediate gradations. Brutes must either have a mind

like ours or none at all. The former alternative was not even taken

into consideration; probably, among other reasons, because it was not

easily reconcilable with Christianity; so that nothing remained but to

deny sensibility where thought was believed not to exist.

Finally, in man himself, thought is not distinguished from feeling;

it is, in fact, the essence of mind, just as extension is the essence

of body; and all spiritual phenomena are modes of thought in the

same sense that all physical phenomena are modes of space. It was,

then, rather a happy chance than genuine physiological insight which

led Descartes to make brain the organ of feeling no less than of

intellection; a view, as Prof. Huxley has observed, much in advance

of that held by Bichat a hundred and fifty years later. For whoever

deduced all the mental manifestations from a common essence was

bound in consistency to locate them in the same bodily organ; what

the metaphysician had joined the physiologist could not possibly put

asunder.

We are now in a position to understand the full force of Descartes’

_Cogito ergo sum_. It expresses the substantiality of self-conscious

Form, the equal claim of thought with extension to be recognised as an

element of the universe. This recognition of self-consciousness as the

surest reality was, indeed, far from being new. The Greek Sceptics had

never gone to the length of doubting their own personal existence. On

the contrary, they professed a sort of subjective idealism. Refusing

to go beyond their own consciousness, they found in its undisturbed

self-possession the only absolute satisfaction that life could afford.

But knowledge and reality had become so intimately associated with

something independent of mind, and mind itself with a mere reflection

of reality, that the denial of an external world seemed to the vulgar

a denial of existence itself. And although Aristotle had found the

highest, if not the sole absolute actuality in self-thinking thought,

he projected it to such a distance from human personality that its

bearing on the sceptical controversy had passed unperceived. Descartes

began his demonstration at the point where all the ancient systems had

converged, but failed to discover in what direction the conditions of

the problem required that they should be prolonged. No mistake can

be greater than to regard him as the precursor of German philosophy.

The latter originated quite independently of his teaching, though

not perhaps of his example, in the combination of a much profounder

scepticism with a much wider knowledge of dogmatic metaphysics. His

method is the very reverse of true idealism. The _Cogito ergo sum_ is

not a taking up of existence into thought, but rather a conversion of

thought into one particular type of existence. Now, as we have seen,

all other existence was conceived as extension, and however carefully

thought might be distinguished from this as absolutely indivisible,

it was speedily reduced to the same general pattern of inclusion,

limitation, and expansion. Whereas Kant, Fichte, and Hegel afterwards

dwelt on the form of thought, Descartes attended only to its content,

or to that in which it was contained. In other words, he began by

considering not _how_ he thought but _what_ he thought and _whence_

it came—his ideas and their supposed derivation from a higher sphere.

Take, for example, his two great methods for proving the existence

of God. We have in our minds the idea of a perfect being—at least

Descartes professed to have such an idea in his mind,—and we, as

imperfect beings, could not have originated it for ourselves. It must,

therefore, have been placed there by a perfect being acting on us from

without. It is here taken for granted that the mechanical equivalence

between material effects and their causes must obtain in a world where

spatial relations, and therefore measurement, are presumably unknown.

And, secondly, existence, as a perfection, is involved in the idea

of a perfect being; therefore such a being can only be conceived as

existing. Here there seems to be a confused notion that because the

properties of a geometrical figure can be deduced from its definition,

therefore the existence of something more than a simple idea can be

deduced from the definition of that idea itself. But besides the

mathematical influence, there was evidently a Platonic influence at

work; and one is reminded of Plato’s argument that the soul cannot

die because it participates in the idea of life. Such fallacies were

impossible so long as Aristotle’s logic continued to be carefully

studied, and they gradually disappeared with its revival. Meanwhile the

cat was away, and the mice used their opportunity.

That the absolute disjunction of thought from matter involved the

impossibility of their interaction, was a consequence not drawn by

Descartes himself, but by his immediate followers. Here also, Greek

philosophy played its part in hastening the development of modern

ideas. The fall of Aristotle had incidentally the effect of reviving

not only the systems which preceded, but also those which followed his.

Chief among these were Stoicism and Epicureanism. Differing widely in

most other respects, they agreed in teaching that body is acted on

by body alone. The Cartesians accepted this principle to the fullest

extent so far as human perceptions and volitions were concerned; and

to a great extent in dealing with the problems of physical science.

But instead of arguing from the laws of mechanical causation to the

materiality of mind, they argued from its immateriality to the total

absence of communication between consciousness and motion. There was,

however, one thinker of that age who went all lengths with the later

Greek materialists. This was Thomas Hobbes, the founder of modern

ethics, the first Englishman to grasp and develope still further

Galileo’s method of mathematical deduction and mechanical analysis.

V.

The author of the _Leviathan_ has sometimes been represented as one

who carried the Baconian method into politics, and prepared the way

for its more thorough application to psychology by Locke. But this

view, which regards the three great leaders of English philosophy in

the seventeenth century as successive links in a connected series, is

a misapprehension of history, which could only have arisen through

leaving out of account the contemporary development of Continental

speculation, and through the inveterate habit of looking on the modern

distinction between empiricism and transcendentalism as a fundamental

antithesis dividing the philosophers of every epoch into two opposing

schools. The truth is that, if the three writers just mentioned agree

in deriving knowledge solely from experience, they agree in nothing

else; and that their unanimity on this one point does not amount to

much, will be evident if we consider what each understood by the notion

in question.

With Bacon, experience was the negation of mere authority, whether

taking the form of natural prejudice, of individual prepossession,

of hollow phrases, or of established systems. The question how we

come by that knowledge which all agree to be the most certain, is

left untouched in his logic; either of the current answers would have

suited his system equally well; nor is there any reason for believing

that he would have sided with Mill rather than with Kant respecting

the origin of mathematical axioms. With Locke, experience meant the

analysis of notions and judgments into the simple data of sense and

self-consciousness; and the experientialists of the present day are

beyond all doubt his disciples; but the parentage of his philosophy,

so far as it is simply a denial of innate ideas, must be sought, not

in the _Novum Organum_, nor in any other modern work, but in the

old _Organon_ of Aristotle, or in the comments of the Schoolmen

who followed Aristotle in protesting against the Platonism of their

time, just as Locke protested against the Platonism of Descartes and

Malebranche.

The experience of Hobbes differs both in origin and application from

either of these. With him, sensible impressions are not a court of

appeal against traditional judgments, nor yet are they the ultimate

elements into which all ideas may be analysed; they are the channels

through which pulsating movements are conveyed into the mind; and

these movements, again, represent the action of mechanical forces

or the will of a paramount authority. And he holds this doctrine,

partly as a logical consequence of his materialism, partly as a

safeguard against the theological pretensions which, in his opinion,

are a constant threat to social order. The authority of the political

sovereign is menaced on the one hand by Papal infallibility, and on the

other by rebellious subjects putting forward a claim to supernatural

inspiration. To the Pope, Hobbes says: ‘You are violating the law of

Nature by professing to derive from God what is really given only by

the consent of men, and can only be given by them to their temporal

head,—the right to impose a particular religion.‘ To the Puritan, he

says: ‘Your inward illumination is a superstitious dream, and you have

no right to use it as a pretext for breaking the king’s peace. Religion

has really nothing to do with the supernatural; it is only a particular

way of inculcating obedience to the natural conditions of social union.’

Again, Hobbes differs wholly from Bacon in the deductive character of

his method. His logic is the old syllogistic system reorganised on

the model of mathematical analysis. Like all the great thinkers of

his time, he was a geometrician and a mechanical physicist, reasoning

from general to particular propositions and descending from causes to

effects.[554] His famous theory of a social contract is a rational

construction, not a historical narrative. But though a mathematician,

he shows no traces of Platonic influence. He is, therefore, all the

more governed by Atomist and Stoic modes of thought. He treats human

nature, single and associated, as Galileo and Descartes had treated

motion and space. Like them, too, he finds himself in constant

antagonism to Aristotle. The description of man as a social animal

is disdainfully rejected, and the political union resolved into an

equilibrium of many opposing wills maintained by violent pressure from

without. In ethics, no less than in physics, we find attractive forces

replaced by mechanical impacts.

While the analysis of Hobbes goes much deeper than Aristotle’s, the

grasp of his reconstructive synthesis is wider and stronger in at

least an equal proportion. Recognising the good of the whole as the

supreme rule of conduct,[555] he gives a new interpretation to the

particular virtues, and disposes of the theory which made them a mean

between two extremes no less effectually than his contemporaries had

disposed of the same theory in its application to the elementary

constitution of matter. And just as they were aided in their revolt

against Aristotle by the revival of other Greek systems, so also was

he. The identification of justice with public interest, though commonly

attributed to Epicurus alone, was, like materialism, an idea shared by

him with Stoicism, and was probably impressed on modern thought by the

weight of their united authority. And when we find the philosopher of

Malmesbury making public happiness consist in order and tranquillity,

we cannot but think that this was a generalisation from the Stoic and

Epicurean conceptions of individual happiness; for it reproduces, under

a social form, the same ideal of passionless repose.

On the other hand, this substitution of the social for the personal

integer involves a corresponding change in the valuation of individual

happiness. What the passions had been to later Greek philosophy,

that the individual soul became to Hobbes, something essentially

infinite and insatiable, whose desires grow as they are gratified,

whose happiness, if such it can be called, is not a condition of

stable repose but of perpetual movement and unrest.[556] Here, again,

the analogy between physics and ethics obtains. In both, there was

an original opposition between the idea of a limit and the idea

of infinite expansion. Just as, among the earlier Greek thinkers,

there was a physical philosophy of the infinite or, as its impugners

called it, the indefinite, so also there was, corresponding to it,

a philosophy of the infinite or indefinite in ethics, represented,

not indeed by professional moralists, but by rhetoricians and men of

the world. Their ideal was not the contented man, but the popular

orator or the despot who revels in the consciousness of power—the

ability to satisfy his desires, whatever they may be. And the extreme

consequence of this principle is drawn by Plato’s Callicles when he

declares that true happiness consists in nursing one’s desires up to

the highest point at which they can be freely indulged; while his ideal

of character is the superior individual who sets at naught whatever

restraints have been devised by a weak and timid majority to protect

themselves against him.

The Greek love of balanced antithesis and circumscribing form triumphed

over the infinite in both fields. While the two great masters of

idealism imprisoned the formless and turbulent terrestrial elements

within a uniform and eternal sphere of crystal, they imposed a similar

restraint on the desires and emotions, confining them within a barrier

of reason which, when once erected, could never be broken through. And

although the ground won in physics was lost again for a time through a

revival of old theories, this was because true Hellenism found its only

congenial sphere in ethics, and there the philosophy of the finite

continued to reign supreme. If the successors of Aristotle fell back on

cosmologies of ampler scope than his, they retained his limiting method

in their speculations on man.

With Christianity, there came a certain inversion of parts. The

external universe again became subjected to narrow limitations, and

the _flammantia moenia mundi_ beyond which Epicurus had dared to

penetrate, were raised up once more and guarded by new terrors as

an impassable barrier to thought. But infinity took refuge within

the soul; and, while in this life a sterner self-control than even

that of Stoicism was enjoined, perspectives of illimitable delight

in another life were disclosed. Finally, at the Renaissance, every

barrier was simultaneously overthrown, and the accumulated energies

of western civilisation expatiated over a field which, if it was vast

in reality, was absolutely unbounded in imagination. Great as were

the achievements of that age, its dreams were greater still; and what

most excites our wonder in the works of its heroes is but the fragment

of an unfinished whole. The ideal of life set up by Aristotle was,

like his conception of the world, contradicted in every particular;

and the relative positions assigned by him to act and power were

precisely reversed. It has been shown how Shakespeare reflected the

Platonism of his contemporaries: he reflected also the fierce outburst

of their ambition; and in describing what they would dare, to possess

solely sovereign sway and masterdom, or wear without corrival all

the dignities of honour, he borrowed almost the very words used by

Euripides to express the feelings encouraged by some teachers of his

time. The same spirit is exhibited a generation later in the dramas

of Calderon and Corneille, before their thoughts were forced into a

different channel by the stress of the Catholic reaction; while its

last and highest manifestation is the sentiment of Milton’s ruined

archangel, that to reign in hell is better than to serve in heaven.

Thus, when Hobbes reduces all the passions to modes of the fundamental

desire for power,[557] he does but give the scientific theory of that

which stands proclaimed in more thrilling accents by the noblest poetry

of his age.

Where no danger could deter from the pursuit of power, no balancing

of pain with pleasure availed to quench the ardour of desire. With

full knowledge that violent delights have violent ends and in their

triumph die, the fateful condition was accepted. Not only did Giordano

Bruno, in conscious parallelism with his theory of matter, declare that

without mutation, variety, and vicissitude nothing would be agreeable,

nothing good, nothing delightful, that enjoyment consists solely in

transition and movement, and that all pleasure lies midway between the

painful longing of fresh appetite and the sadness of its satiation and

extinction;[558] but the sedater wisdom of Bacon, in touching on the

controversy between Callicles and Socrates, seems to incline towards

the side of the former; and, in all cases, warns men not to make too

much of the inconveniences attendent on pleasure, but ‘so to procure

serenity as they destroy not magnanimity.’[559]

These, then, were the principal elements of the philosophical

Renaissance. First, there was a certain survival of Aristotelianism

as a method of comprehensive and logical arrangement. Then there

was the new Platonism, bringing along with it a revival of either

Alexandrian or mediaeval pantheism, and closely associated with

geometrical studies. Thirdly, there was the old Greek Atomism, as

originally set forth by Democritus or as re-edited by Epicurus,

traditionally unfavourable to theology, potent alike for decomposition

and reconstruction, confirmed by the new astronomy, and lending

its method to the reformation of mathematics; next the later Greek

ethical systems; and finally the formless idea of infinite power which

all Greek systems had, as such, conspired to suppress, but which,

nevertheless, had played a great part in the earlier stages of Greek

speculation both physical and moral.

On these foundations the lofty edifice of Spinozism was reared; out

of these materials its composite structure was built; and without a

previous study of them it cannot be understood.

VI.

Whether Spinoza ever read Plato is doubtful. One hardly sees why he

should have neglected a writer whose works were easily accessible,

and at that time very popular with thinking minds. But whether he was

acquainted with the _Dialogues_ at first hand or not, Plato will help

us to understand Spinoza, for it was through the door of geometry that

he entered philosophy, and under the guidance of one who was saturated

with the Platonic spirit; so far as Christianity influenced him, it

was through elements derived from Plato; and his metaphysical method

was one which, more than any other, would have been welcomed with

delight by the author of the _Meno_ and the _Republic_, as an attempt

to realise his own dialectical ideal. For Spinozism is, on the face

of it, an application of geometrical reasoning to philosophy, and

especially to ethics. It is also an attempt to prove transcendentally

what geometricians only assume—the necessity of space. Now, Plato

looked on geometrical demonstration as the great type of certainty, the

scientific completion of what Socrates had begun by his interrogative

method, the one means of carrying irrefragable conviction into every

department of knowledge, and more particularly into the study of our

highest good. On the other hand, he saw that geometricians assume

what itself requires to be demonstrated; and he confidently expected

that the deficiency would be supplied by his own projected method of

transcendent dialectics. Such at least seems to be the drift of the

following passage:

When I speak of the division of the intellectual, you will also

understand me to speak of that knowledge which reason herself

attains by the power of dialectic, using the hypotheses not as first

principles, but only as hypotheses—that is to say as steps and points

of departure into a region which is above hypotheses, in order that

she may soar beyond them to the first principle of the whole; and

clinging to this and then to that which depends on this, by successive

steps she descends again without the aid of any sensible object,

beginning and ending in ideas.[560]

The problem, then, which Spinoza set himself was, first, to account for

the fundamental assumptions of all science, and more particularly of

geometry, by deducing them from a single self-evident principle; and

then to use that principle for the solution of whatever problems seemed

to stand most in need of its application. And, as usually happens

in such adventurous enterprises, the supposed answer of pure reason

was obtained by combining or expanding conceptions borrowed without

criticism from pre-existing systems of philosophy.

Descartes had already accomplished a great simplification of the

speculative problem by summing up all existence under the two heads of

extension and thought. It remained to account for these, and to reduce

them to a single idea. As we have seen, they were derived from Greek

philosophy, and the bond which was to unite them must be sought for in

the same direction. It will be remembered that the systems of Plato

and Aristotle were bounded at either extremity by a determinate and

by an indeterminate principle. With the one, existence ranged between

the Idea of Good at the upper end of the scale and empty space at the

lower; with the other, between absolute Thought and First Matter.

It was by combining the two definite terms, space and thought, that

Descartes had constructed his system; and after subtracting these the

two indefinite terms remained. In one respect they were even more

opposed to each other than were the terms with which they had been

respectively associated. The Idea of Good represented unity, identity,

and constancy, as against plurality, difference, and change; while

Aristotle’s Matter was, by its very definition, multiform, fluctuating,

and indeterminate. Nevertheless, there were equally important analogies

traceable between them. No very clear account could be given of either,

and both were customarily described by negatives. If Matter fell short

of complete existence, the Good transcended all existence. If the one

was a universal capacity for assuming Forms, the other was the source

whence all Forms proceeded. When the distinctive characteristics of an

individual were thought away, the question might well be mooted into

which principle it would return. The ambiguous use of the word Power

contributed still further to their identification, for it was not less

applicable to the receptive than to the productive faculty. Now we have

just seen into what importance the idea of Power suddenly sprang at the

Renaissance: with Bruno it was the only abiding reality of Nature; with

Hobbes it was the only object of human desire.

Another term occupying a very large place in Aristotle’s philosophy

was well adapted to mediate between and eventually to unite the two

speculative extremes. This was Substance; in logic the subject of

predication, in metaphysics the substratum of qualities, the οὐσία or

Being of the Ten Categories. Now First Matter might fairly claim the

position of a universal subject or substance, since it was invested

with every sensible quality in turn, and even, as the common element of

all Forms, with every thinkable quality as well. Aristotle himself had

finally pronounced for the individual compound of Form and Matter as

the true substance. Yet he also speaks as if the essential definition

of a thing constituted the thing itself; in which case Form alone could

be the true subject; and a similar claim might be put forward on behalf

of the Plotinian One.[561]

Such were the _à priori_ elements which a historical synthesis had

prepared to satisfy the want of a metaphysical Absolute. Let us now

see what result would follow when the newly-recovered idea of space

was subjected to a metaphysical analysis. Extension is both one and

infinite. No particular area can be conceived apart from the whole

which both contains and explains it. Again, extension is absolutely

homogeneous; to whatever distance we may travel in imagination there

will still be the same repetition of similar parts. But space, with the

Cartesians, meant more than a simple juxtaposition of parts; having

been made the essence of matter, it was invested with mechanical as

well as with geometrical properties. The bodies into which it resolved

itself were conceived as moving, and as communicating their movement

to one another through an unbroken chain of causation in which each

constituted a single link, determining and determined by the rest; so

that, here also, each part was explained by reference to an infinite

whole, reproducing its essence, while exempt from the condition of

circumscribed existence. We can understand, then, that when the

necessity of accounting for extension itself once became felt, the

natural solution would be to conceive it as holding the same relation

to some greater whole which its own subdivisions held to their sum

total; in other words it should be at once a part, an emanation, and

an image of the ultimate reality. This is, in fact, very nearly the

relation which Matter holds to the One in the Neo-Platonic system.

And we know that with Plotinus Matter is almost the same as infinite

Extension.

Corresponding to the universal space which contains all particular

spaces, there was, in the Neo-Platonic system, a universal Thought

which contained all particular thoughts,—the Nous about which we heard

so much in studying Plotinus. Such a conception is utterly strange

to the modern mind, but it was familiar enough to Spinoza; and we can

see how it would be suggested by the common forms of reasoning. The

tendency of syllogism is either to subsume lower under higher notions

until a _summum genus_ is reached, or to resolve all subjects into a

single predicate, or to connect all predicates with a single subject.

The analogies of space, too, would tell in the same direction, bringing

nearer the idea of a vast thought-sea in which all particular thoughts,

or what to a Cartesian meant the same thing, all particular minds, were

contained. And Neo-Platonism showed how this universal Mind or Thought

could, like the space which it so much resembled, be interpreted as

the product of a still higher principle. To complete the parallelism,

it remained to show that Thought, which before had seemed essentially

finite, is, on the contrary, co-infinite with Extension. How this was

done will appear a little further on.

Spinoza gathered up all the threads of speculation thus made ready for

his grasp, when he defined God as a substance consisting of infinite

attributes, each of which expresses his infinite and eternal essence;

subsequently adding that the essence here spoken of is Power, and that

two of the infinite attributes are Extension and Thought, whereof the

particular things known to us are modes. Platonism had decomposed the

world into two ideal principles, and had re-created it by combining

them over again in various proportions, but they were not entirely

reabsorbed and worked up into the concrete reality which resulted from

their union; they were, so to speak, knotted together, but the ends

continued to hang loose. Above and below the finite sphere of existence

there remained as an unemployed surplus the infinite causal energy

of the One and the infinite passive potentiality of Matter. Spinoza

combined and identified the two opposing elements in the notion of a

single substance as infinite in actuality as they had been in power. He

thus gave its highest metaphysical expression to that common tendency

which we traced through the prospects opened out by the Copernican

astronomy, the revival of Atomism, the dynamical psychology of Hobbes,

and the illimitable passion of the Renaissance, while, at the same

time, preserving the unity of Plato’s idealism, and even making it more

concentrated than before.

It has been shown how universal space and universal thought at once

contain and explain each particular space and each particular concept.

In like manner, the infinite substance contains and explains space and

thought themselves. Contains them, yes, as attributes; but explains

them, how? As two among an infinity of attributes. In other words,

if we ask why there should be such an existence as space, the answer

is because existence, being infinite, must necessarily include every

conceivable thing. The argument is strikingly like a principle of

the Epicurean philosophy, and may well have been suggested by it.

According to Lucretius, the appearance of design in our world need not

be attributed to creative intelligence, because infinite atoms moving

in infinite manners through infinite time, must at length arrive,

after a comprehensive series of experiments, at the present frame of

things;[562] and the same principle is invoked on a smaller scale to

account for the origin of organised beings, of memory, and of civil

society.[563] In both systems, infinite space is the root-conception;

but what Lucretius had legitimately used to explain becoming, Spinoza

illegitimately applies to the elucidation of being. At one stroke all

empirical knowledge is placed on an _à priori_ foundation. By assuming

unlimited credit at the bank of the universe we entitle ourselves to

draw a cheque for any particular amount. Thus the idea of infinite

attributes is no mere collateral speculation, but forms an essential

element of Spinozism. The known varieties of existence are, so to

speak, surrounded, supported, and fixed in their places by the endless

multitude of the unknown. And this conception of being as absolutely

infinite, is another proof of Spinoza’s Platonic tendencies, for it

involves the realisation of an abstract idea, that is to say, of Being,

which the philosopher treats as something more comprehensive than the

facts of consciousness whence it is derived.

Or, again, we may say that two principles,—the Nominalistic as well

as the Realistic,—are here at work. By virtue of the one, Spinoza

makes Being something beyond and above the facts of experience.

By virtue of the other he reinvests it with concrete reality, but

a reality altogether transcending our powers of imagination. Very

much, also, that Plotinus says about his One might be applied to

Spinoza’s Substance, but with a new and positive meaning. The First

Cause is above existence, but only existence as restricted within the

very narrow limits of our experience, and only as infinite reality

transcends the parts which it includes.

It is well known that Spinoza draws a sharp line of demarcation

between the two attributes of Extension and Thought, which, with him,

correspond to what are usually called body and mind. Neither attribute

can act on the other. Mind receives no impressions from body, nor

does body receive any impulses from mind. This proposition follows by

rigorous logical necessity from the Platonic principle that mind is

independent of body, combined with the Stoic principle that nothing

but body can act on body, generalised into the wider principle that

interaction implies homogeneity of nature. According to some critics,

Spinoza’s teaching on this point constitutes a fatal flaw in his

philosophy. How, it is asked, can we know that there is any such thing

as body (or extension) if body cannot be perceived,—for perceived it

certainly cannot be without acting on our minds? The idea of infinite

substance suggests a way out of the difficulty. ‘I find in myself,’

Spinoza might say, ‘the idea of extension. In fact, my mind _is_

nothing but the idea of extension, or the idea of that idea, and so

on through as many self-reflections as you please. At the same time,

mind, or thought, is not itself extended. Descartes and the Platonists

before him have proved thus much. Consequently I can conceive extension

as existing independently of myself, and, more generally, of all

thought. But how can I be sure that it actually does so exist? In this

wise. An examination of thought leads me to the notion of something in

which it resides—a substance whose attribute it is. But having once

conceived such a substance, I cannot limit it to a single attribute,

nor to two, nor to any finite number. Limitation implies a boundary,

and there can be no boundary assigned to existence, for existence

by its very definition includes everything that is. Accordingly,

whatever can be conceived, in other words whatever can be thought

without involving a contradiction,—an important reservation which I

beg you to observe,—must necessarily exist. Now extension involves

no contradiction, therefore it exists,—exists, that is to say, as an

attribute of the infinite substance. And, by parity of reasoning,

there must be an idea of extension; for this also can exist without

involving a contradiction, as the simplest introspection suffices to

show. You ask me why then I do not believe in gorgons and chimaeras. I

answer that since, in point of fact, they do not exist, I presume that

their notion involves a contradiction, although my knowledge of natural

law is not sufficiently extended to show me where the contradiction

lies. But perhaps science will some day be able to point out in every

instance of a non-existing thing, where the contradiction lies, no

less surely than it can now be pointed out in the case of impossible

geometrical figures.’ In short, while other people travel straight from

their sensations to an external world, Spinoza travels round to it by

the idea of an infinite substance.[564]

The relation of Spinoza’s Substance to its attributes is ambiguous. It

is at once their cause, their totality, and their unity. The highly

elastic and indefinite term Power helped these various aspects to play

into and replace one another according to the requirements of the

system. It is associated with the subjective possibility of multiplying

imaginary existences to any amount; with the causal energy in which

existence originates; and with the expansiveness characteristic alike

of Extension and of Thought. For the two known attributes of the

universal substance are not simply related to it as co-predicates of

a common subject; they severally express its essential Power, and

are, to that extent, identical with one another. But when we ask,

How do they express Power? the same ambiguity recurs. Substance is

revealed through its attributes, as a cause through its effects; as an

aggregate through its constituents; and as an abstract notion through

its concrete embodiments. Thus Extension and Thought are identical

through their very differences, since these illustrate the versatility

of their common source, and at the same time jointly contribute to the

realisation of its perfection. But, for all practical purposes, Spinoza

deals only with the parallelism and resemblance of the attributes. We

have to see how he establishes it, and how far he was helped in so

doing by the traditions of Greek philosophy.

VII.

It has been already shown how Extension, having become identified

with matter, took on its mechanical qualities, and was conceived as

a connected series of causes or modes of motion. The parallel found

by Spinoza for this series in Thought is the chain of reasons and

consequents forming a demonstrative argument; and here he is obviously

following Aristotle, who although ostensibly distinguishing between

formal and efficient causes, hopelessly confounds them in the second

book of his _Posterior Analytics_.[565] We are said to understand a

thing when we bring it under a general rule, and also when we discover

the mechanical agency which produces it. For instance, we may know

that a particular man will die, either from the fact that all men

are mortal, or from the fact that he has received a fatal wound. The

general rule, however, is not the cause of what will happen, but only

the cause of our knowing that it will happen; and knowledge of the rule

by no means carries with it a knowledge of the efficient cause; as we

see in the case of gravitation and other natural forces whose _modus

operandi_ is still a complete mystery. What deceived Aristotle was

partly his false analysis of the syllogism, which he interpreted as

the connexion of two terms by the interposition of a middle answering

to the causal nexus of two phenomena; and partly his conception of the

universe as a series of concentric spheres, through which movement is

transmitted from without, thus combining the two ideas of notional

comprehension and mechanical causation.

Be this as it may, Spinoza takes up the Aristotelian identification

of logical with dynamical connexion, and gives it the widest possible

development. For the Stagirite would not, at any rate, have dreamed of

attributing any but a subjective existence to the demonstrative series,

nor of extending it beyond the limits of our actual knowledge. Spinoza,

on the other hand, assumes that the whole infinite chain of material

causes is represented by a corresponding chain of eternal ideas; and

this chain he calls the infinite intellect of God.[566] Here, besides

the necessities of systematisation, the influence of mediaeval

realism is plainly evident. For, when the absolute self-existence

of Plato’s Ideas had been surrendered in deference to Aristotle’s

criticism, a home was still found for them by Plotinus in the eternal

Nous, and by the Christian Schoolmen in the mind of God; nor did such

a belief present any difficulties so long as the divine personality

was respected. The pantheism of Spinoza, however, was absolute, and

excluded the notion of any but a finite subjectivity. Thus the infinite

intellect of God is an unsupported chain of ideas recalling the theory

at one time imagined by Plato.[567] Or its existence may be merely what

Aristotle would have called potential; in other words, Spinoza may

mean that reasons will go on evolving themselves so long as we choose

to study the dialectic of existence, always in strict parallelism with

the natural series of material movements constituting the external

universe; and just as this is determined through all its parts by the

totality of extension, or of all matter (whether moving or motionless)

taken together, so also at the summit of the logical series stands the

idea of God, from whose definition the demonstration of every lesser

idea necessarily follows. It is true that in a chain of connected

energies the antecedent, as such, must be always precisely equal to the

consequent; but, apparently, this difficulty did not present itself to

Spinoza, nor need we be surprised at this; for Kant, coming a century

later, was still so imbued with Aristotelian traditions as, similarly,

to derive the category of Cause and Effect from the relation between

Reason and Consequent in hypothetical propositions.[568]

Meanwhile the parallelism between Thought and Extension was not

exhausted by the identification just analysed. Extension was not only a

series of movements; it still remained an expression for co-existence

and adjacency. Spinoza, therefore, felt himself obliged to supply

Thought with a correspondingly continuous quality. It is here that his

chief originality lies, here that he has been most closely followed

by the philosophy of our own time. Mind, he declares, is an attribute

everywhere accompanying matter, co-extensive and co-infinite with

space. Our own animation is the sum or the resultant of an animation

clinging to every particle that enters into the composition of our

bodies. When our thoughts are affected by an external impulse, to

suppose that this impulse proceeds from anything material is a

delusion; it is produced by the mind belonging to the body which acts

on our body; although in what sense this process is to be understood

remains a mystery. Spinoza has clearly explained the doctrine of

animal automatism, and shown it to be perfectly conceivable;[569] but

he has entirely omitted to explain how the parallel influence of one

thought (or feeling) on another is to be understood; for although this

too is spoken of as a causal relation, it seems to be quite different

from the logical concatenation described as the infinite intellect of

God; and to suppose that idea follows from idea like movement from

movement would amount to a complete materialisation of mind; while our

philosopher would certainly have repudiated Mr. Shadworth Hodgson’s

theory, that states of consciousness are only connected through their

extended substratum, as the segments of a mosaic picture are held

together by the underlying surface of masonry. Nor can we admit that

Spinoza entertained the theory, now so popular, according to which

extension and consciousness are merely different aspects of a single

reality. For this would imply that the substance which they manifest

had an existence of its own apart from its attributes; whereas Spinoza

makes it consist of the attributes, that is to say, identifies it with

their totality. We are forced, then, to conclude that the proposition

declaring thought and extension to be the same thing[570] has no other

meaning than that they are connected by the double analogy which we

have endeavoured to explain.

The analogy between Thought and Extension under the two aspects of

necessary connexion and mere contingent relation in co-existence or

succession, was, in truth, more interesting to its author as a basis

for his ethical than as a development of his metaphysical speculations.

The two orders of relations represent, in their distinction, the

opposition of science to opinion or imagination, the opposition of

dutiful conviction to blind or selfish impulse. Spinoza borrows from

the Stoics their identification of volition with belief; but in working

out the consequences of this principle it is of Plato rather than of

the Stoics that he reminds us. The passions are in his system what

sense, imagination, and opinion were in that of the Athenian idealist;

and his ethics may almost be called the metaphysics of the _Republic_

turned outside in. Joy, grief and desire are more or less imperfect

perceptions of reality—a reality not belonging to the external world

but to the conscious subject itself.[571] When Spinoza traces them to a

consciousness or expectation of raised or lowered power, we recognise

the influence of Hobbes; but when, here as elsewhere, he identifies

power with existence, we detect a return to Greek forms of thought. The

great conflict between illusion and reality is fought out once more;

only, this time, it is about our own essence that we are first deceived

and then enlightened. If the nature and origin of outward things are

half revealed, half concealed by sense and imagination, our emotions

are in like manner the obscuring and distorting medium through which

we apprehend our inmost selves, and whatever adds to or takes away

from the plenitude of our existence; and what science is to the one,

morality and religion are to the other.

It is remarkable that while Spinoza was giving a new application to

the Platonic method, another Cartesian, Malebranche, was working

it out more strictly on the old lines of speculative research. The

_Recherche de la Vérité_ of this unjustly neglected thinker is a

methodical account of the various subjective obstacles which impede

our apprehension of things as they really exist, and of the means by

which it may be facilitated. Here also, attention is concentrated on

the subjective side of philosophy; and if the mental processes selected

for study are of theoretical rather than practical interest, we may

probably attribute this to the circumstance that every ethical question

was already decided for Malebranche by the Church whose orders he had

assumed.

But it was not merely in the writings of professed philosophers that

the new aspect of Platonism found expression. All great art embodies

in one form or another the leading conceptions of its age; and the

latter half of the seventeenth century found such a manifestation

in the comedies of Molière. If these works stand at the head of

French literature, they owe their position not more to their author’s

brilliant wit than to his profound philosophy of life; or rather, we

should say that with him wit and philosophy are one. The comic power

of Shakespeare was shown by resolving the outward appearances of

this world into a series of dissolving illusions. Like Spinoza and

Malebranche, Molière turns the illusion in, showing what perverted

opinions men form of themselves and others, through misconceptions

and passions either of spontaneous growth or sedulously fostered by

designing hands. Society, with him, seems almost entirely made up of

pretenders and their dupes, both characters being not unfrequently

combined in the same person, who is made a victim through his desire

to pass for what he is not and cannot be. And this is what essentially

distinguishes the art of Molière from the New Comedy of Athens, which

he, like other moderns, had at first felt inclined to imitate until

the success of the _Précieuses Ridicules_ showed him where his true

opportunities lay. For the New Comedy was Aristotelian where it was

not simply humanist; that is to say, it was an exhibition of types

like those sketched by Aristotle’s disciple, Theophrastus, and already

prefigured in the master’s own _Ethics_. These were the perennial

forms in a world of infinite and perishing individual existences, not

concealed behind phenomena, but incorporated in them and constituting

their essential truth. The Old Comedy is something different again; it

is pre-philosophic, and may be characterised as an attempt to describe

great political interests and tendencies through the medium of myths

and fables and familiar domesticities, just as the old theories of

Nature, the old lessons of practical wisdom, and the first great

national chronicles had been thrown into the same homely form.[572]

The purely intellectual view of human nature, the definition of mind

in terms of cognition, is one more fallacy from which Aristotle’s

teaching, had it not fallen into neglect or contempt, might have

guarded Spinoza. Nevertheless, his parallelism between passion and

sensuous perception saves him from the worst extravagances of his Greek

predecessors. For the senses, however much they might be maligned,

never were nor could be altogether rejected; while the passions met

with little mercy from Plato and with none from the Stoics, who

considered them not only unnecessary but even unnatural. Spinoza

more wisely sees in them assertions, however obscure and confused,

of the will to be and grow which constitutes individual existence.

And he sees that they can no more be removed by pointing out their

evil consequences than sense-impressions can be abolished by proving

their fallaciousness. On the other hand, when Spinoza speaks as if

one emotion could only be conquered or expelled by another emotion,

we must not allow his peculiar phraseology to conceal from us the

purely intellectual character of his whole ethical system. What he

really holds is that emotion can be overcome by reason or better

knowledge, because it is itself an imperfect cognition. Point by point,

an analogy—or something more than an analogy—is made out between the

errors of sensuous perception joined to imagination, and the errors of

our spontaneous efforts after happiness or self-realisation. Both are

imposed on us from without, and neither can be got rid of by a simple

act of volition. Both are affected by illusions of perspective: the

nearer object of desire, like the nearer object of perception, assuming

a disproportionate place in the field of view. In both, accidental

contiguity is habitually confounded with causation; while in both the

assignment of causes to effects, instead of being traced back through

an infinite series of antecedents, stops short with the antecedent

nearest to ourselves. If objects are classified according to their

superficial resemblances or the usages of common language, so also

are the desires sustained and intensified by imitation and rivalry.

By parity of reasoning, moral education must be conducted on the same

lines as intellectual education. First, it is shown how our individual

existence, depending as it does on forces infinitely exceeding our

own, is to be maintained. This is chiefly done by cultivating friendly

relations with other men; probably, although Spinoza does not himself

make the comparison, on the same principle as that observed in the

mutual assistance and rectification of the senses, together with their

preservation by means of verbal signs. The misleading passions are to

be overcome by discovering their origin; by referring the pleasures and

pains which produce them to the right causes; by calling in thought to

redress the balance of imagination; by dividing the attention among

an infinite number of causes; finally, by demonstrating the absolute

necessity of whatever actions excite them, and classifying them

according to their relations, in the same way that the phenomena of the

material world are dealt with when subjected to scientific analysis.

So far Spinoza, following the example of Stoicism, has only studied

the means by which reason conquers passion. He now proceeds to show,

in the spirit of Plato or of Platonic Christianity, how immensely

superior to the pleasures of sense and opinion are those afforded by

true religion—by the love of God and the possession of eternal life.

But, here also, as in the Greek system, logic does duty for emotion.

The love of God means no more than viewing ourselves as filling a place

in the infinite framework of existence, and as determined to be what we

are by the totality of forces composing it. And eternal life is merely

the adjustment of our thoughts to the logical order by which all modes

of existence are deducible from the idea of infinite power.

Thus, while Spinoza draws to a head all the tendencies inherited

from Greek philosophy, borrowing from the early physicists their

necessarianism; from the Atomists, their exclusion of final causes,

their denial of the supernatural, and their infinite worlds; from the

Athenian school, their distinction between mind and body and between

reason and sense; from Aristotle, his parallelism between causation

and syllogism; from the Epicureans, their vindication of pleasure; and

from the Stoics, their identification of belief with action, their

conquest of passion and their devotion to humanity;—it is to the

dominant Platonism of the seventeenth century that his system owes its

foundation, its development, and its crown; for he begins by realising

the abstract conception of being, and infers its absolute infinity from

the misleading analogy of space, which is not an abstraction at all;

deduces his conclusions according to the geometrical method recommended

by Plato; and ends, like Plato, by translating dialectic formulas into

the emotional language of religious faith.[573]

VIII.

From this grand synthesis, however, a single element was omitted; and,

like the uninvited guest of fairy tradition, it proved strong enough

singly to destroy what had been constructed by the united efforts of

all the rest. This was the sceptical principle, the critical analysis

of ideas, first exercised by Protagoras, made a new starting-point by

Socrates, carried to perfection by Plato, supplementing experience with

Aristotle, and finally proclaimed in its purity as the sole function of

philosophy by an entire school of Greek thought.

Notwithstanding the sterility commonly associated with mere negation,

it was this which, of all the later Greek schools, possessed the

greatest powers of growth. Besides passing through more than one

stage of development on its own account, Scepticism imposed serious

modifications on Stoicism, gave birth to Eclecticism, and contributed

to the establishment of Neo-Platonism. The explanation is not far to

seek. The more highly organised a system is, the more resistance does

it offer to change, the more does its transmission tend to assume

a rigidly scholastic form. To such dogmatism the Sceptics were, on

principle, opposed; and by keeping the problems of philosophy open,

they facilitated the task of all who had a new solution to offer;

while mind and its activities being, to some extent, safe from

the universal doubt, the sceptical principle spontaneously threw

back thought on a subjective instead of an objective synthesis of

knowledge—in other words, on that psychological idealism the pregnancy

and comprehensiveness of which are every day becoming more clearly

recognised. And we shall now see how the same fertilising power of

criticism has been manifested in modern times as well.

The sceptical philosophy, already advocated in the Middle Ages by John

of Salisbury, was, like every other form of ancient thought, revived

at the Renaissance, but only under the very superficial form which

infers from the co-existence of many divergent opinions that none

of them can be true. Even so, however, it led Montaigne to sounder

notions of toleration and humanity than were entertained by any of his

contemporaries. With Bacon, and still more with Descartes, it also

appears as the necessary preparation for a remodelling of all belief;

but the great dogmatic systems still exercised such a potent influence

on both those thinkers that their professed demand for a new method

merely leads up to an altered statement of the old unproved assumptions.

Meanwhile the old principle of universal doubt could no longer be

maintained in presence of the certainties already won by modern

science. Man, in the time of Newton, had, as Pope tersely puts it,

‘too much knowledge for the sceptic side.’ The problem was not how to

establish the reality, but how to ascertain the origin and possible

extent of that knowledge. The first to perceive this, the first to

evolve criticism out of scepticism, and therefore the real founder

of modern philosophy, was Locke. Nevertheless, even with him, the

advantage of studying the more recent in close connexion with the

earlier developments of thought does not cease; it only enters on a new

phase. If he cannot, like his predecessors, be directly affiliated to

one or more of the Greek schools, his position can be illustrated by a

parallel derived from the history of those schools. What Arcesilaus and

Carneades had been to Socrates and his successors, that Locke was, in a

large measure, to Bacon and the Cartesians. He went back to the initial

doubt which with them had been overborne by the dogmatic reaction,

and insisted on making it a reality. The spirit of the _Apologia_ is

absent from Plato’s later dialogues, only to reappear with even more

than its original power in the teaching of the New Academy. And, in

like manner, Descartes’ introspective method, with its demand for

clear ideas, becomes, in the _Essay concerning Human Understanding_,

an irresistible solvent for the psychologyy and physics of its first

propounder. The doctrine of innate ideas, the doctrine that extension

is the essence of matter, the doctrine that thought is the essence of

mind, the more general doctrine, held also by Bacon, that things have

a discoverable essence whence all their properties may be deduced by a

process analogous to mathematical reasoning,—all collapsed when brought

to the test of definite and concrete experience.

We have here, indeed, something comparable not only to the scepticism

of the New Academy, but also to the Aristotelian criticism of Plato’s

metaphysics; and, at first sight, it might seem as if the Peripatetic

philosophy was destined once more to regain the position taken from it

by the resuscitation of its ancient foe. But Locke was not inclined

to substitute one form of scholasticism for another. By applying the

analytical method of Atomism to knowledge itself, he created a weapon

equally fatal to the two competing systems. Under his dissection, the

concrete individual substance of the one vanished no less completely

than the universal ideas of the other. Nothing remained but a bundle of

qualities held together by a subjective bond.

Similarly, in political science, the analytical method of assuming

civil government to result from a concurrence of individual wills,

which with Hobbes had served only to destroy ecclesiastical authority,

while leaving intact and even strengthening the authority of secular

rulers, was reinterpreted by Locke as a negation of all absolutism

whatever.

It is interesting to observe how, here also, the positive science of

the age had a large share in determining its philosophic character.

Founded on the discovery of the earth’s true shape, Aristotle’s

metaphysics had been overthrown by the discovery of the earth’s

motion. And now the claims of Cartesianism to have furnished an exact

knowledge of matter and a definition of it whence all the facts of

observation could be deduced _à priori_, were summarily refuted by the

discovery of universal gravitation. The Cartesians complained that

Newton was bringing back the occult qualities of the Schoolmen; but

the tendency of bodies to move towards one another proved as certain

as it was inexplicably mysterious. For a time, the study of causes was

superseded by the study of laws; and the new method of physical science

moved in perfect harmony with the phenomenism of Locke. One most

important consequence of this revolution was to place the new Critical

philosophy on a footing quite different from that occupied by the

ancient sceptics. Both restricted certain knowledge to our own states

of consciousness; but it now appeared that this might be done without

impeaching the value of accepted scientific conclusions, which was

more than the Academic philosophy would have admitted. In other words,

granting that we were limited to phenomena, it was shown that science

consisted in ascertaining the relations of these phenomena to one

another, instead of to a problematic reality lying behind them; while,

that such relations existed and were, in fact, part of the phenomena

themselves, was what no sceptic could easily deny.

Nevertheless, in each case, subjective idealism had the effect of

concentrating speculation, properly so called, on ethical and practical

interests. Locke struck the keynote of eighteenth century philosophy

when he pronounced morality to be ‘the proper science and business

of mankind in general.’[574] And no sooner had morality come to the

front than the significance of ancient thought again made itself

apparent. Whether through conscious imitation, or because the same

causes brought about the same effects, ethical enquiries moved along

the lines originally laid down in the schools of Athens. When rules of

conduct were not directly referred to a divine revelation, they were

based either on a supposed law of Nature, or on the necessities of

human happiness, or on some combination of the two. Nothing is more

characteristic of the eighteenth century than its worship of Nature.

Even the theology of the age is deeply coloured by it; and with the

majority of those who rejected theology it became a new religion.

But this sentiment is demonstrably of Greek origin, and found its

most elaborate, though not its most absolute, expression in Stoicism.

The Stoics had inherited it from the Cynics, who held the faith in

greater purity; and these, again, so far as we can judge, from a

certain Sophistic school, some fragments of whose teaching have been

preserved by Xenophon and Plato; while the first who gave wide currency

to this famous abstraction was, in all probability, Heracleitus. To

the Stoics, however, is due that intimate association of naturalism

with teleology which meets us again in the philosophy of the last

century, and even now wherever the doctrine of evolution has not been

thoroughly accepted. It was assumed, in the teeth of all evidence, that

Nature bears the marks of a uniformly beneficent design, that evil is

exclusively of human origin, and that even human nature is essentially

good when unspoiled by artificial restrictions.

Yet if teleology was, in some respects, a falling-off from the rigid

mechanicism first taught by the pre-Socratic schools and then again by

the Cartesian school, in at least one respect it marked a comparative

progress. For the first attempts made both by ancient and modern

philosophy to explain vital phenomena on purely mechanical principles

were altogether premature; and the immense extension of biological

knowledge which took place subsequently to both, could not but bring

about an irresistible movement in the opposite direction. The first

to revive teleology was Leibniz, who furnished a transition from the

seventeenth to the eighteenth century by his monadology. In this,

Atomism is combined with Aristotelian ideas, just as it had previously

been combined with Platonic ideas by Descartes. The movement of the

atoms is explained by their aspiration after a more perfect state

instead of by mechanical pressure. But while Leibniz still relies on

the ontological argument of Descartes to prove the existence of God,

this was soon abandoned, along with the cosmological argument, for the

argument from design, which was also that used by the Stoics; while in

ethics the fitness of things was substituted for the more mechanical

law of self-preservation, as the rule of conduct; and the subjection of

all impulse to reason was replaced by the milder principle of a control

exercised by the benevolent over the malevolent instincts. This was a

very distinct departure from the Stoic method, yet those who made it

were more faithful to teleology than Stoicism had been; for to condemn

human feeling altogether was implicitly to condemn the work of Nature

or of God.

The other great ethical method of the eighteenth century, its hedonism,

was closely connected with the sceptical movement in speculative

philosophy, and, like that, received an entirely new significance by

becoming associated with the idea of law. Those who isolate man from

the universe are necessarily led to seek in his interests as such the

sole regulator of his actions, and their sole sanction in the opinion

of his fellows. Protagoras went already so far, notwithstanding his

unwillingness to recognise pleasure as the supreme end; and in the

system of his true successor, Aristippus, the most extreme hedonism

goes hand in hand with the most extreme idealism; while with Epicurus,

again, both are tempered by the influence of naturalism, imposing on

him its conceptions of objective law alike in science and in practice.

Still his system leaned heavily to the side of self-gratification

pure and simple; and it was reserved for modern thought to establish

a complete equilibrium between the two competing tendencies of Greek

ethics. This has been effected in Utilitarianism; and those critics

are entirely mistaken who, like M. Guyau, regard that system as a

mere reproduction of Epicureanism. It might with full as much reason

be called a modern version of Stoicism. The idea of humanity is

essentially Stoic; to work for the good of humanity was a Stoic

precept; and to sacrifice one’s own pleasure for that higher good is

a virtue which would have satisfied the most rigorous demands of a

Cleanthes, an Epictêtus, or an Aurelius.

Utilitarianism agrees with the ancient hedonism in holding pleasure to

be the sole good and pain the sole evil. Its adherents also, for the

most part, admit that the desire of the one and the dread of the other

are the sole motives to action; but, while making the end absolutely

universal and impersonal, they make the motive into a momentary

impulse, without any necessary relation to the future happiness of

the agent himself. The good man does his duty because doing it gives

him pleasure, or because the failure to do it would give him pain, at

the moment; although he knows that a contrary course would save him

from greater pain or win him greater pleasure hereafter. No accurate

thinker would call this acting from a selfish or interested motive; nor

does it agree with the teaching of Epicurus. Were all sensitive beings

to be united in a single organism, then, on utilitarian principles,

self-interest, interpreted in the sense of seeking its own preservation

and pleasure, would be the only law that the individualised aggregate

could rationally obey. But the good of each part would be rigorously

subordinated to the good of the whole; and utilitarian morality desires

that we should act as if this hypothesis were realised, at least in

reference to our own particular interests. Now, the idea of humanity

as forming such a consolidated whole is not Epicurean. It belongs to

the philosophy which always reprobated pleasure, precisely because its

pursuit is associated with the dereliction of public duty and with

bitter rivalry for the possession of what, by its very nature, exists

only in limited quantities, while the demand for it is unlimited or, at

any rate, far exceeds the supply. According to the Stoics, there was

only one way in which the individual could study his private interest

without abandoning his position as a social being, and this was to find

it exclusively in the practice of virtue.[575] But virtue and public

interest remained mere forms scantily supplemented by appeals to the

traditional morality, until the idea of generalised happiness, of

pleasure diffused through the whole community, came to fill them with

substance and life.

It has also to be observed that the idea of utility as a test of moral

goodness is quite distinct from hedonism. Plato proclaims, in the most

unequivocal terms, that actions must be estimated by their consequences

instead of by the feelings of sympathy or antipathy which they excite;

yet no one could object more strongly to making pleasure the end of

action. Thus, three distinct doctrines seem to converge in modern

English ethics, of which all are traceable to Greek philosophy, but

only one to Epicureanism in particular, and not ultimately to that but

to the older systems whence it sprang.

And here we unexpectedly find ourselves confronted by a new relation

between ancient and modern thought. Each acts as a powerful precipitant

on the other, dissolving what might otherwise have passed for

inseparable associations, and combining elements which a less complete

experience might have led us to regard as necessarily incompatible with

one another. The instance just analysed is highly significant; nor

does it stand alone. Modern spiritualists often talk as if morality

was impossible apart from their peculiar metaphysics. But the Stoics,

confessedly the purest moralists of antiquity, were uncompromising

materialists; while the spiritualist Aristotle taught what is not

easily distinguishable from a very refined sort of egoism. Again, the

doctrine of free-will is now commonly connected with a belief in the

separability of consciousness from matter, and, like that, is declared

to be an indispensable condition of morality. Among the Greeks,

however, it was held by the materialist Epicureans more distinctly

than by any other school; while the Stoics did not find necessarianism

inconsistent with self-sacrificing virtue. The partial derivation

of knowledge from an activity in our own minds is another supposed

concomitant of spiritualism; although Aristotle traces every idea to

an external source, while at the same time holding some cognitions to

be necessarily true—a theory repudiated by modern experientialists. To

Plato, the spirituality of the soul seemed to involve its pre-existence

no less than its immortality, a consequence not accepted by his modern

imitators. Teleology is now commonly opposed to pantheism; the two were

closely combined in Stoicism; while Aristotle, although he believed

in a personal God, attributed the marks of design in Nature to purely

unconscious agencies.

IX.

The naturalism and utilitarianism of the eighteenth century are the

last conceptions directly inherited from ancient philosophy by modern

thought. Henceforward, whatever light the study of the former can

throw on the vicissitudes of the latter is due either to their partial

parallelism, or to an influence becoming every day fainter and more

difficult to trace amid the multitude of factors involved. The progress

of analytical criticism was continually deflected or arrested by the

still powerful resistance of scholasticism, just as the sceptical

tendencies of the New Academy had been before, though happily with

less permanent success; and as, in antiquity, this had happened within

no less than without the critical school, so also do we find Locke

clinging to the theology of Descartes; Berkeley lapsing into Platonism;

Hume playing fast and loose with his own principles; and Kant leaving

it doubtful to which side he belongs, so evenly are the two opposing

tendencies balanced in his mind, so dexterously does he adapt the new

criticism to the framework of scholastic logic and metaphysics.

Meanwhile the strength of the analytical method was doubled by its

extension to the phenomena of growth and change; for, as applied to

these, it became the famous theory of Development or Evolution. No

idea belongs so completely to modern philosophy; for even the ancient

thinkers who threw their cosmology into a historical form had never

attempted to explain the present by the past. If anything, they

explained the past by the present, assuming a rough analogy to exist

between the formation of the universe as a whole and the genesis of

those natural or artificial bodies which were continually growing or

being built up before their eyes. Their cosmology was, in fact, nothing

but the old mythology stripped of its personal or conscious element;

and, like it, was a hypothesis unsupported by any external evidence;—a

criticism not inconsistent with the admission that to eliminate the

supernatural element from speculation was, even in the absence of any

solid addition to human knowledge, an achievement of inestimable value.

The evolutionary method is also an elimination of the supernatural, but

it is a great deal more. By tracing the history of compound structures

to their first origin, and noting the successive increments to which

their gradual growth is due, it reveals, as no statical analysis ever

could, the actual order of synthesis, and the meaning of the separate

constituents by whose joint action their movements are determined;

while, conversely, their dissolution supplies us with a number of

ready-made experiments in which the influence of each particular factor

in the sum total may be detected by watching the changes that ensue

on its removal. In a word, the method of evolution is the atomistic

method, extended from matter to motion, and viewed under the form of

succession instead of under the form of co-existence.