59. Of the splendid passages in the Novum Organum none are perhaps so

remarkable as his celebrated division of fallacies, not such as the

dialecticians had been accustomed to refute, depending upon equivocal

words, or faulty disposition of premises, but lying far deeper in the

natural or incidental prejudices of the mind itself. These are four in

number: _idola tribûs_, to which from certain common weaknesses of

human nature we are universally liable; _idola specûs_, which from

peculiar dispositions and circumstances of individuals mislead them in

different manners; _idola fori_, arising from the current usage of

words which represent things much otherwise than as they really are;

and _idola theatri_, which false systems of philosophy and erroneous

methods of reasoning have introduced. Hence, as the refracted ray

gives us a false notion as to the place of the object whose image it

transmits, so our own minds are a refracting medium to the objects of

their own contemplation, and require all the aid of a well-directed

philosophy either to rectify the perception, or to make allowances for

its errors.

|Confounded with idols.|

60. These idola, ειδωλα [eidôla], images, illusions, fallacies, or, as

Lord Bacon calls them in the Advancement of Learning, false

appearances, have been often named in English _idols_ of the tribe, of

the den, of the market place. But it seems better, unless we retain

the Latin name, to employ one of the synonymous terms given above. For

the use of idol in this sense is unwarranted by the practice of the

language, nor is it found in Bacon himself; but it has misled a host

of writers, whoever might be the first that applied it, even among

such as are conversant with the Novum Organum. “Bacon proceeds,” says

Playfair, “to enumerate the causes of error, the _idols_ as he calls

them, or false divinities to which the mind had so long been

accustomed to bow.” And with a similar misapprehension of the meaning

of the word, in speaking of the _idola specûs_, he says: “besides the

causes of error which are common to all mankind, each individual,

according to Bacon, has his own dark cavern or den, into which the

light is imperfectly admitted, and obscurity of which a tutelary idol

lurks, at whose shrine the truth is often sacrificed.”[202] Thus also

Dr. Thomas Brown; “in the inmost sanctuaries of the mind were all the

idols which he overthrew;” and a later author on the Novum Organum

fancies that Bacon “strikingly, though in his usual quaint style,

calls the prejudices that check the progress of the mind by the name

of idols, because mankind are apt to pay homage to these

instead of regarding truth.”[203] Thus too in the translation of the

Novum Organum, published in Mr. Basil Montagu’s edition, we find

_idola_ rendered by idols, without explanation. We may in fact say

that this meaning has been almost universally given by the later

writers. By whom it was introduced, I am not able to say. Cudworth, in

a passage where he glances at Bacon, has said, “it is no _idol of the

den_, to use that affected language.” But, in the pedantic style of

the seventeenth century, it is not impossible that idol may here have

been put as a mere translation of the Greek ειδωλον [eidôlon], and in

the same general sense of an idea or intellectual image.[204] Although

the popular sense would not be inapposite to the general purpose of

Bacon in this first part of the Novum Organum, it cannot be reckoned

so exact and philosophical an illustration of the sources of human

error as the unfaithful image, the shadow of reality, seen through a

refracting surface, or reflected from an unequal mirror, as in the

Platonic hypothesis of the cave, wherein we are placed with our backs

to the light, to which he seems to allude in his _idola specûs_.[205]

And as this is also plainly the true meaning, as a comparison with the

parallel passages in the Advancement of Learning demonstrates, there

can be no pretence for continuing to employ a word which has served to

mislead such men as Brown and Playfair.

[202] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.

[203] Introduction to the Novum Organum, published by the Society

for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Even Stewart seems to have

fallen into the same error. “While these idols of the den

maintain their authority, the cultivation of the philosophical

spirit is impossible; or rather it is in a renunciation of his

idolatry that the philosophical spirit essentially consists.”

Dissertation, &c.--The observation is equally true, whatever

sense we may give to _idol_.

[204] In Todd’s edition of Johnson’s Dictionary this sense is not

mentioned. But in that of the Encyclopædia Metropolitana we have

these words: “An _idol_ or image is also opposed to a reality:

thus Lord Bacon (see the quotation from him) speaks of idols or

false appearances.” The quotation is from the translation of one

of his short tracts, which is not made by himself. It is however

a proof that the word _idol_ was once at least used in this

sense.

[205] Quisque ex phantasiæ suæ cellulis, tanquam ex specu

Platonis, philosophatur; Historia Naturalis, in præfatione

Coleridge has some fine lines in allusion to this hypothesis in

that magnificent effusion of his genius, the introduction to the

second book of Joan of Arc, but withdrawn, after the first

edition, from that poem; where he describes us as “Placed with

our backs to bright reality.” I am not however certain that Bacon

meant this. See De Augmentis, lib. v. c. 4.

|Second book of Novum Organum.|

61. In the second book of the Novum Organum, we come at length to the

new logic, the interpretation of nature, as he calls it, or the rules

for conducting inquiries in natural philosophy according to his

inductive method. It is, as we have said, a fragment of his entire

system, and is chiefly confined to the “prerogative instances,”[206]

or phænomena which are to be selected, for various reasons, as most

likely to aid our investigations of nature. Fifteen of these are used

to guide the intellect, five to assist the senses, seven to correct

the practice. This second book is written with more than usual want of

perspicuity, and though it is intrinsically the Baconian philosophy in

a pre-eminent sense, I much doubt whether it is very extensively read,

though far more so than it was fifty years since. Playfair, however,

has given an excellent abstract of it in his Preliminary Dissertation

to the Encyclopædia Britannica, with abundant and judicious

illustrations from modern science. Sir John Herschel, in his admirable

Discourse on Natural Philosophy, has added a greater number from still

more recent discoveries, and has also furnished such a luminous

development of the difficulties of the Novum Organum, as had been

vainly hoped in former times. The commentator of Bacon should be

himself of an original genius in philosophy. These novel illustrations

are the more useful, because Bacon himself, from defective knowledge

of natural phænomena, and from what, though contrary to his precepts,

his ardent fancy could not avoid, a premature hastening to explain the

essences of things instead of their proximate causes, has frequently

given erroneous examples. It is to be observed on the other hand, that

he often anticipates with marvellous sagacity the discoveries of

posterity, and that his patient and acute analysis of the phænomena of

heat has been deemed a model of his own inductive reasoning. “No one,”

observes Playfair, “has done so much in such circumstances.” He was

even ignorant of some things that he might have known; he wanted every

branch of mathematics; and placed in this remote corner of

Europe, without many kindred minds to animate his zeal for physical

science, seems hardly to have believed the discoveries of Galileo.

[206] The allusion in “prærogativæ instantiarum” is not to the

English word prerogative, as Sir John Herschel seems to suppose

(Discourse on Natural Philosophy, p. 182), but to the prærogativa

centuria in the Roman comitia, which being first called, though

by lot, was generally found, by some prejudice or superstition,

to influence the rest, which seldom voted otherwise. It is rather

a forced analogy, which is not uncommon with Bacon.

|Confidence of Bacon.|

62. It has happened to Lord Bacon, as it has to many other writers,

that he has been extolled for qualities by no means characteristic of

his mind. The first aphorism of the Novum Organum, so frequently

quoted, “Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, performs and

understands so much as he has collected concerning the order of nature

by observation or reason, nor do his power or his knowledge extend

farther,” has seemed to bespeak an extreme sobriety of imagination, a

willingness to acquiesce in registering the phænomena of nature

without seeking a revelation of her secrets. And nothing is more true

than that such was the cautious and patient course of inquiry

prescribed by him to all the genuine disciples of his inductive

method. But he was far from being one of those humble philosophers who

would limit human science to the enumeration of particular facts. He

had, on the contrary, vast hopes of the human intellect under the

guidance of his new logic. The Latens Schematismus, or intrinsic

configuration of bodies, the Latens processus ad formam, or

transitional operation through which they pass from one form, or

condition of nature, to another, would one day, as he hoped, be

brought to light; and this not, of course, by simple observation of

the senses, nor even by assistance of instruments, concerning the

utility of which he was rather sceptical, but by a rigorous

application of exclusive and affirmative propositions to the actual

phænomena by the inductive method. “It appears,” says Playfair, “that

Bacon placed the ultimate object of philosophy too high, and too much

out of the reach of man, even when his exertions are most skilfully

conducted. He seems to have thought, that by giving a proper direction

to our researches, and carrying them on according to the inductive

method, we should arrive at the knowledge of the essences of the

powers and qualities residing in bodies; that we should, for instance,

become acquainted with the essence of heat, of cold, of colour, of

transparency. The fact however is that, in as far as science has yet

advanced, no one essence has been discovered, either as to matter in

general, or as to any of its more extensive modifications. We are yet

in doubt whether heat is a peculiar motion of the minute parts of

bodies, as Bacon himself conceived it to be, or something emitted or

radiated from their surfaces, or, lastly, the vibrations of an elastic

medium by which they are penetrated and surrounded.”

|Almost justified of late.|

63. It requires a very extensive survey of the actual dominion of

science, and a great sagacity to judge, even in the loosest manner,

what is beyond the possible limits of human knowledge. Certainly,

since the time when this passage was written by Playfair, more steps

have been made towards realising the sanguine anticipations of Bacon

than in the two centuries that had elapsed since the publication of

the Novum Organum. We do not yet _know_ the real nature of heat,

but few would pronounce it impossible or even unlikely that we may

know it, in the same sense that we know other physical realities not

immediately perceptible, before many years shall have expired. The

atomic theory of Dalton, the laws of crystalline substances discovered

by Häuy, the development of others still subtler by Mitscherlich,

instead of exhibiting, as the older philosophy had done, the idola

rerum, the sensible appearances of concrete substance, radiations from

the internal glory, admit us, as it were, to stand within the

vestibule of nature’s temple, and to gaze on the very curtain of the

shrine. If indeed we could know the internal structure of one primary

atom, and could tell, not of course by immediate testimony of sense,

but by legitimate inference from it, through what constant laws its

component molecules, the atoms of atoms, attract, retain, and repel

each other, we should have before our mental vision not only the

Latens Schematismus, the real configuration of substances, but their

_form_, or efficient nature, and could give as perfect a

definition of any one of them, of gold for example, as we can of a

cone or parallelogram. The recent discoveries of animal and vegetable

development, and especially the happy application of the microscope to

observing chemical and organic changes in their actual course, are

equally remarkable advances towards a knowledge of the Latens

processus ad formam, the corpuscular motions by which all change must

be accomplished, and are in fact a great deal more than Bacon himself

would have deemed possible.[207]

[207] By the Latens processus, he meant only what is the natural

operation by which one form or condition of being is induced upon

another. Thus, when the surface of iron becomes rusty, or when

water is converted into steam some change has taken place, a

_latent_ _progress_ from one form to another. This, in numberless

cases, we can now answer, at least to a very great extent, by the

science of chemistry.

|But should be kept within bounds.|

64. These astonishing revelations of natural mysteries, fresh tidings

of which crowd in upon us every day, may be likely to overwhelm all

sober hesitation as to the capacities of the human mind, and to bring

back that confidence which Bacon, in so much less favourable

circumstances, has ventured to feel. There seem, however, to be good

reasons for keeping within bounds this expectation of future

improvement, which, as it has sometimes been announced in unqualified

phrases, is hardly more philosophical than the vulgar supposition that

the capacities of mankind are almost stationary. The phænomena of

nature indeed, in all their possible combinations, are so infinite, in

a popular sense of the word, that during no period, to which the human

species can be conceived to reach, would they be entirely collected

and registered. The case is still stronger as to the secret agencies

and processes by means of which their phænomena are displayed. These

have as yet, in no one instance, so far as I know, been fully

ascertained. “Microscopes,” says Herschel, “have been constructed

which magnify more than one thousand times in linear dimension, so

that the smallest visible grain of sand may be enlarged to the

appearance of one million times more bulky; yet the only impression we

receive by viewing it through such a magnifier is that it reminds us

of some vast fragment of a rock; while the intimate structure on which

depends its colour, its hardness, and its chemical properties, remains

still concealed; we do not seem to have made even an approach to a

closer analysis of it by any such scrutiny.”[208]

[208] Discourse on Nat. Philos., p. 191.

|Limits to our knowledge by sense.|

65. The instance here chosen is not the most favourable for the

experimental philosopher. He might perhaps hope to gain more knowledge

by applying the best microscope to a regular crystal or to an

organised substance. And it is impossible not to regret that the great

discovery of the solar microscope has been either so imperfectly

turned to account by philosophers, or has disappointed their hopes of

exhibiting the mechanism of nature with the distinctness they require.

But there is evidently a fundamental limitation of physical science,

arising from those of the bodily senses and of muscular motions. The

nicest instruments must be constructed and directed by the human hand;

the range of the finest glasses must have a limit not only in their

own natural structure but in that of the human eye. But no theory in

science will be acknowledged to deserve any regard, except as it is

drawn immediately, and by an exclusive process, from the phænomena

which our senses report to us. Thus, the regular observation of

definite proportions in chemical combination has suggested the atomic

theory; and even this has been sceptically accepted by our cautious

school of philosophy. If we are ever to go farther into the molecular

analysis of substances, it must be through the means and upon the

authority of new discoveries exhibited to our senses in experiment.

But the existing powers of exhibiting or compelling nature by

instruments, vast as they appear to us, and wonderful as has been

their efficacy in many respects, have done little for many years past

in diminishing the number of substances reputed to be simple; and with

strong reasons to suspect that some of these, at least, yield to the

crucible of nature, our electric batteries have up to this hour played

innocuously round their heads.

66. Bacon has thrown out, once or twice, a hint at a single principle,

a summary law of nature, as if all subordinate causes resolved

themselves into one great process, according to which God works his

will in the universe: Opus quod operatur Deus a principio usque ad

finem. The natural tendency towards simplification, and what we

consider as harmony, in our philosophical systems, which Lord Bacon

himself reckons among the _idola tribûs_, the fallacies incident

to the species, has led some to favour this unity of physical law.

Impact and gravity have each had their supporters. But we are as yet

at a great distance from establishing such a generalization, nor does

it appear by any means probable that it will ever assume any simple

form.

|Inductive logic; whether confined to physics.|

67. The close connexion of the inductive process recommended by Bacon

with natural philosophy in the common sense of that word, and the

general selection of his examples for illustration from that science,

have given rise to a question, whether he comprehended metaphysical

and moral philosophy within the scope of his inquiry.[209] That they

formed a part of the Instauration of Sciences, and therefore

of the Baconian philosophy in the fullest sense of the word, is

obvious from the fact that a large proportion of the treatise De

Augmentis Scientiarum is dedicated to those subjects; and it is not

less so that the _idola_ of the Novum Organum are at least as apt

to deceive us in moral as in physical argument. The question,

therefore, can only be raised as to the peculiar method of conducting

investigations, which is considered as his own. This would, however,

appear to have been decided by himself in very positive language. “It

may be doubted, rather than objected, by some, whether we look to the

perfection, by means of our method, of natural philosophy alone, or of

the other sciences also, of logic, of ethics, of politics. But we

certainly mean what has here been said, to be understood as to them

all; and as the ordinary logic, which proceeds by syllogism, does not

relate to physical only, but to every other science; so ours, which

proceeds by induction, comprizes them all. For we as much collect a

history and form tables concerning anger, fear, shame and the like,

and also concerning examples from civil life, and as much concerning

the intellectual operations of memory, combination and partition,

judgment and the others, as concerning heat and cold, or light, or

vegetation, or such things.”[210] But he proceeds to intimate, as far

as I understand the next sentence, that, although his method or logic,

strictly speaking, is applicable to other subjects, it is his

immediate object to inquire into the properties of natural things, or

what is generally meant by physics. To this indeed the second book of

the Novum Organum, and the portions that he completed of the remaining

parts of the Instauratio Magna bear witness.

[209] This question was discussed some years since by the late

editor of the Edinburgh Review on one side, and by Dugald Stewart

on the other. See Edinburgh Review, vol. iii., p. 273, and the

Preliminary Dissertation to Stewart’s Philosophical Essays.

[210] Etiam dubitabit quispiam potius quam objiciet, utrum nos de

naturali tantum philosophia, an etiam de scientiis reliquis,

logicis, ethicis, politicis, secundum viam nostram perficiendis

loquamur. At nos certè de universis hæc, quæ dictasunt,

intelligimus; atque quemadmodum vulgaris logica, quæ regit res

per syllogismum, non tantum ad naturales, sed ad omnes scientias

pertinet, ita et nostra, quæ procedit per inductionem, omnia

complectitur. Tam enim Historiam et Tabulas Inveniendi conficimus

de ira, metu et verecundia et similibus, ac etiam de exemplis

rerum civilium; nec minùs de motibus mentalibus memoriæ,

compositionis et divisionis, judicii et reliquorum, quam de

calido et frigido, aut luce, aut vegetatione aut similibus. Sed

tamen cum nostra ratio interpretandi, post historiam præparatam

et ordinatam, non mentis tantum motus et discursus, ut logica

vulgaris, sed et rerum naturam intueatur, ita mentem regimus ut

ad rerum naturam se aptis per omnia modis applicare possit. Atque

propterea multa et diversa in doctrina interpretationis

præcipimus. quæ ad subjecti, de quo inquirimus, qualitatem et

conditionem modum inveniendi nonnulla ex parte applicent. Nov.

Org. i. 127.

|Baconian philosophy built on observation and experiment.|

68. It by no means follows, because the leading principles of the

inductive philosophy are applicable to other topics of inquiry than

what is usually comprehended under the name of physics, that we can

employ all the prærogativæ instantiarum, and still less the peculiar

rules for conducting experiments which Bacon has given us, in moral,

or even psychological disquisitions. Many of them are plainly

referrible to particular manipulations, or at most to limited subjects

of chemical theory. And the frequent occurrence of passages which show

Lord Bacon’s fondness for experimental processes, seem to have led

some to consider his peculiar methods as more exclusively related to

such modes of inquiry than they really are. But when the Baconian

philosophy is said to be experimental, we are to remember that

experiment is only better than what we may call passive observation,

because it enlarges our capacity of observing with exactness and

expedition. The reasoning is grounded on observation in both cases. In

astronomy, where nature remarkably presents the objects of our

observation without liability to error or uncertain delay, we may

reason on the inductive principle as well as in sciences that require

tentative operations. The inference drawn from the difference of time

in the occultation of the satellites of Jupiter at different seasons,

in favour of the Copernican theory and against the instantaneous

motion of light, is an induction of the same kind with any that could

be derived from an _experimentum crucis_. It is an exclusion of

those hypotheses which might solve many phænomena, but fail to explain

those immediately observed.

|Advantages of the latter.|

69. But astronomy, from the comparative solitariness, if we may so

say, of all its phænomena, and the simplicity of their laws, has an

advantage that is rarely found in sciences of mere observation. Bacon

justly gave to experiment, or the interrogation of nature, compelling

her to give up her secrets, a decided preference whenever it can be

employed; and it is unquestionably true that the inductive method is

tedious, if not uncertain, when it cannot resort to so compendious a

process. One of the subjects selected by Bacon in the third part of

the Instauration as specimens of the method by which an inquiry into

nature should be conducted, the History of Winds, does not greatly

admit of experiments; and the very slow progress of meteorology, which

has yet hardly deserved the name of a science, when compared with that

of chemistry or optics, will illustrate the difficulties of employing

the inductive method without their aid. It is not, therefore, that

Lord Bacon’s method of philosophising is properly experimental, but

that by experiment it is most successfully displayed.

|Sometimes applicable to philosophy of human mind.|

|Less so to politics and morals.|

70. It will follow from hence that in proportion as, in any matter of

inquiry, we can separate, in what we examine, the determining

conditions, or law of form, from everything extraneous, we shall be

more able to use the Baconian method with advantage. In metaphysics,

or what Stewart would have called the philosophy of the human mind,

there seems much in its own nature capable of being subjected to the

inductive reasoning. Such are those facts which, by their intimate

connection with physiology, or the laws of the bodily frame, fall

properly within the province of the physician. In these, though exact

observation is chiefly required, it is often practicable to shorten

its process by experiment. And another important illustration may be

given from the education of children, considered as a science of rules

deduced from observation; wherein also we are frequently more able to

substitute experiment for mere experience, than with mankind in

general, whom we may observe at a distance, but cannot control. In

politics, as well as in moral prudence, we can seldom do more than

this. It seems however practicable to apply the close attention

enforced by Bacon, and the careful arrangement and comparison of

phænomena, which are the basis of his induction, to these subjects.

Thus, if the circumstances of all popular seditions recorded in

history were to be carefully collected with great regard to the

probability of evidence, and to any peculiarity that may have affected

the results, it might be easy to perceive such a connection of

antecedent and subsequent events in the great plurality of instances,

as would reasonably lead us to form probable inferences as to similar

tumults when they should occur. This has sometimes been done, with

less universality, and with much less accuracy than the Baconian

method requires, by such theoretical writers on politics as Machiavel

and Bodin. But it has been apt to degenerate into pedantry, and to

disappoint the practical statesman, who commonly rejects it with

scorn; partly because civil history is itself defective, seldom giving

a just view of events, and still less frequently of the motives of

those concerned in them; partly because the history of mankind is far

less copious than that of nature, and in much that relates to

politics, has not yet had time to furnish the groundwork of a

sufficient induction; but partly also from some distinctive

circumstances, which affect our reasonings in moral far more than in

physical science, and which deserve to be considered, so far at least

as to sketch the arguments that might be employed.

|Induction less conclusive in these subjects.|

71. The Baconian logic, as has been already said, deduces universal

principles from select observation, that is, from particular, and, in

some cases of experiment, from singular instances. It may easily

appear to one conversant with the syllogistic method less legitimate

than the old induction which proceeded by an exhaustive enumeration of

particulars, and at most warranting but a probable conclusion. The

answer to this objection can only be found in the acknowledged

uniformity of the laws of nature, so that whatever has once occurred

will, under absolutely similar circumstances, always occur again. This

may be called the suppressed premise of every Baconian enthymem, every

inference from observation of phænomena, which extends beyond the

particular case. When it is once ascertained that water is composed of

one proportion of oxygen to one of hydrogen, we never doubt but that

such are its invariable constituents. We may repeat the experiment to

secure ourselves against the risk of error in the operation or of some

unperceived condition that may have affected the result; but when a

sufficient number of trials has secured us against this, an invariable

law of nature is inferred from the particular instance; nobody

conceives that one pint of pure water _can_ be of a different

composition from another. All men, even the most rude, reason upon

this primary maxim; but they reason inconclusively from

misapprehending the true relations of cause and effect in the

phænomena to which they direct their attention. It is by the

sagacity and ingenuity with which Bacon has excluded the various

sources of error, and disengaged the true cause, that this method is

distinguished from that which the vulgar practise.

|Reasons for this difference.|

72. It is required, however, for the validity of this method, first

that there should be a strict uniformity in the general laws of

nature, from which we can infer that what has been will, in the same

conditions, be again; and secondly, that we shall be able to perceive

and estimate all the conditions with an entire and exclusive

knowledge. The first is granted in all physical phænomena; but in

those which we cannot submit to experiment, or investigate by some

such method as Bacon has pointed out, we often find our philosophy at

fault for want of the second. Such is at present the case with respect

to many parts of chemistry; for example, that of organic substances,

which we can analyse, but as yet can in very few instances recompose.

We do not know, and, if we did know, could not perhaps command, the

entire conditions of organic bodies (even structurally, not as

living), the _form_, as Bacon calls it, of blood, or milk, or oak

galls. But in attempting to subject the actions of men to this

inductive philosophy, we are arrested by the want of both the

necessary requisitions. Matter can only be diverted from its obedience

to unvarying laws by the control of mind; but we have to inquire

whether mind is equally the passive instrument of any law. We have to

open the great problem of human liberty, and must deny even a

disturbing force to the will before we can assume that all actions of

mankind must, under given conditions, preserve the same necessary

train of sequences as a molecule of matter. But if this be answered

affirmatively, we are still almost as far removed from a conclusive

result as before. We cannot without contradicting every day

experience, maintain that all men are determined alike by the same

exterior circumstances; we must have recourse to the differences of

temperament, of physical constitution, of casual or habitual

association. The former alone, however, are, at the best, subject to

our observation, either at the time, or, as is most common, through

testimony; of the latter, no being, which does not watch the movements

of the soul itself, can reach more than a probable conjecture. Sylla

resigned the dictatorship, therefore all men, in the circumstances of

Sylla, will do the same, is an argument false in one sense of the word

circumstances, and useless at least in any other. It is doubted by

many, whether meteorology will ever be well understood, on account of

the complexity of the forces concerned, and their remoteness from the

apprehension of the senses. Do not the same difficulties apply to

human affairs? And while we reflect on these difficulties, to which we

must add those which spring from the scantiness of our means of

observation, the defectiveness and falsehood of testimony, especially

what is called historical, and a thousand other errors to which the

various “idola of the world and the cave” expose us, we shall rather

be astonished that so many probable rules of civil prudence have been

treasured up and confirmed by experience than disposed to give them a

higher place in philosophy than they can claim.

|Considerations on the other side.|

73. It might be alleged in reply to these considerations, that

admitting the absence of a strictly scientific certainty in moral

reasoning, we have yet, as seems acknowledged on the other side, a

great body of probable inferences, in the extensive knowledge and

sagacious application of which most of human wisdom consists. And all

that is required of us in dealing either with moral evidence or with

the conclusions we draw from it, is to estimate the probability of

neither too high; an error from which the severe and patient

discipline of the inductive philosophy is most likely to secure us. It

would be added by some, that the theory of probabilities deduces a

wonderful degree of certainty from things very uncertain, when a

sufficient number of experiments can be made; and thus, that events

depending upon the will of mankind, even under circumstances the most

anomalous and apparently irreducible to principles, may be calculated

with a precision inexplicable to any one who has paid little attention

to the subject. This, perhaps, may appear rather a curious application

of mathematical science, than one from which our moral reasonings are

likely to derive much benefit, especially as the conditions under

which a very high probability can mathematically be obtained, involve

a greater number of trials than experience will generally furnish. It

is, nevertheless, a field that deserves to be more fully explored: the

success of those who have attempted to apply analytical processes to

moral probabilities has not hitherto been very encouraging, inasmuch

as they have often come to results falsified by experience; but a more

scrupulous regard to all the conditions of each problem may

perhaps obviate many sources of error.[211]

[211] A calculation was published not long since, said to be on

the authority of an eminent living philosopher, according to

which, granting a moderate probability that each of twelve jurors

would decide rightly, the chances in favour of the rectitude of

their unanimous verdict were made something extravagantly high, I

think about 8000 to 1. It is more easy to perceive the the

fallacies of this pretended demonstration, than to explain how a

man of great acuteness should have overlooked them. One among

many is that it assumes the giving a verdict at all to be

voluntary, whereas, in practice, the jury must decide one way or

the other. We must deduct, therefore, a fraction expressing the

probability that some of the twelve have wrongly conceded their

opinions to the rest. One danger of this rather favourite

application of mathematical principles to moral probabilities, as

indeed it is of statistical tables (a remark of far wider

extent), is that, by considering mankind merely as units, it

practically habituates the mind to a moral and social levelling,

as inconsistent with a just estimate of men as it is

characteristic of the present age.

|Result of the whole.|

74. It seems upon the whole that we should neither conceive the

inductive method to be useless in regard to any subject but physical

science, nor deny the peculiar advantages it possesses in those

inquiries rather than others. What must in all studies be important,

is the habit of turning round the subject of our investigation in

every light, the observation of everything that is peculiar, the

exclusion of all that we find on reflection to be extraneous. In

historical and antiquarian researches, in all critical examination

which turns upon facts, in the scrutiny of judicial evidence, a great

part of Lord Bacon’s method, not, of course, all the experimental

rules of the Novum Organum, has, as I conceive, a legitimate

application.[212] I would refer any one who may doubt this to his

History of Winds, as one sample of what we mean by the Baconian

method, and ask whether a kind of investigation, analogous to

what is therein pursued for the sake of eliciting physical truths,

might not be employed in any analytical process where general or even

particular facts are sought to be known. Or if an example is required

of such an investigation, let us look at the copious induction from

the past and actual history of mankind upon which Malthus established

his general theory of the causes which have retarded the natural

progress of population. Upon all these subjects before-mentioned,

there has been an astonishing improvement in the reasoning of the

learned, and perhaps of the world at large since the time of Bacon,

though much remains very defective. In what degree it may be owing to

the prevalence of a physical philosophy founded upon his inductive

logic, it might not be uninteresting to inquire.[213]

[212] The _principle_ of Bacon’s prerogative instances, and

perhaps in some cases a very analogous application of them,

appear to hold in our inquiries into historical evidence. The

fact sought to be ascertained in the one subject corresponds to

the physical law in the other. The testimonies, as we, though

rather laxly, call them, or passages in books from which we infer

the fact, correspond to the observations or experiments from

which we deduce the law. The necessity of a sufficient induction

by searching for all proof that may bear on the question, is as

manifest in one case as in the other. The exclusion of precarious

and inconclusive evidence is alike indispensable in both. The

selection of prerogative instances, or such as carry with them

satisfactory conviction, requires the same sort of inventive and

reasoning powers. It is easy to illustrate this by examples.

Thus, in the controversy concerning the Icon Basilike, the

admission of Gauden’s claim by Lord Clarendon is in the nature of

a _prerogative instance_; it renders the supposition of the

falsehood of that claim highly improbable. But the many second

hand and hearsay testimonies which may be alleged on the other

side, to prove that the book was written by King Charles, are not

prerogative instances, because their falsehood will be found to

involve very little improbability. So, in a different

controversy, the silence of some of the fathers as to the text,

commonly called, of the three heavenly witnesses, even while

expounding the context of the passage, is a _quasi-prerogative

instance_; a decisive proof that they did not know it, or did not

believe it genuine; because if they did, no motive can be

conceived for the omission. But the silence of Laurentius Valla

as to its absence from the manuscripts on which he commented, is

no prerogative instance to prove that it was contained in them;

because it is easy to perceive that he might have motives for

saying nothing; and, though the negative argument, as it is

called, or inference that a fact is not true, because such and

such persons have not mentioned it, is, taken generally, weaker

than positive testimony, it will frequently supply prerogative

instances where the latter does not. Launoy, in a little

treatise, De Auctoritate Negantis Argumenti, which displays more

plain sense than ingenuity or philosophy, lays it down that a

fact of a public nature, which is not mentioned by any writer

within 200 years of the time, supposing, of course, that there is

extant a competent number of writers who would naturally have

mentioned it, is not to be believed. The period seems rather

arbitrary, and was possibly so considered by himself; but the

general principle is of the highest importance in historical

criticism. Thus, in the once celebrated question of Pope Joan,

the silence of all writers near the time as to so wonderful a

fact, was justly deemed a kind of _prerogative_ argument, when

set in opposition to the many repetitions of the story in later

ages. But the silence of Gildas and Bede as to the victories of

Arthur is no such argument against their reality, because they

were not under an historical obligation, or any strong motive,

which would prevent their silence. Generally speaking, the more

anomalous and interesting an event is, the stronger is the

argument against its truth from the silence of contemporaries, on

account of the propensity of mankind to believe and recount the

marvellous; and the weaker is the argument from the testimony of

later times for the same reason. A similar analogy holds also in

jurisprudence. The principle of our law, rejecting hearsay and

secondary evidence, is founded on the Baconian rule. Fifty

persons may depose that they have heard of a fact or of its

circumstances; but the eye-witness is the prerogative instance.

It would carry us too far to develop this at length, even if I

were fully prepared to do so; but this much may lead us to think,

that whoever shall fill up that lamentable _desideratum_, the

logic of evidence, ought to have familiarised himself with the

Novum Organum.

[213] “The effects which Bacon’s writings have hitherto produced,

have indeed been far more conspicuous in physics than in the

science of mind. Even here, however, they have been great and

most important, as well as in some collateral branches of

knowledge, such as natural jurisprudence, political economy,

criticism and morals, which spring up from the same root, or

rather which are branches of that tree of which the science of

mind is the trunk.” Stewart’s Philosophical Essays, Prelim.

Dissertation. The principal advantage, perhaps, of those habits

of reasoning which the Baconian methods, whether learned directly

or through the many disciples of that school, have a tendency to

generate, is that they render men cautious and painstaking in the

pursuit of truth, and therefore restrain them from deciding too

soon. Nemo reperitur qui in rebus ipsis et experientia moram

fecerit legitimam. These words are more frequently true of moral

and political reasoners than of any others. Men apply historical

or personal experience, but they apply it hastily, and without

giving themselves time for either a copious or an exact

induction; the great majority being too much influenced by

passion, party-spirit, or vanity, or perhaps by affections

morally right, but not the less dangerous in reasoning, to

maintain the patient and dispassionate suspense of judgment

(ακαταληψια [akatalêpsia]), which ought to be the condition of

our enquiries.

|Bacon’s aptitude for moral subjects.|

75. It is probable that Lord Bacon never much followed up in his own

mind that application of his method to psychological, and still less

to moral and political subjects, which he has declared himself to

intend. The distribution of the Instauratio Magna, which he has

prefixed to it, relates wholly to physical science. He has in no one

instance given an example, in the Novum Organum, from moral

philosophy, and one only, that of artificial memory, from what he

would have called logic.[214] But we must constantly remember that the

philosophy of Bacon was left exceedingly incomplete. Many lives would

not have sufficed for what he had planned, and he gave only the

_horæ subsecivæ_ of his own. It is evident that he had turned his

thoughts to physical philosophy rather for an exercise of his

reasoning faculties, and out of his insatiable thirst for knowledge,

than from any peculiar aptitude for their subjects, much less any

advantage of opportunity for their cultivation. He was more eminently

the philosopher of human, than of general nature. Hence, he is exact

as well as profound in all his reflections on civil life and mankind,

while his conjectures in natural philosophy, though often very acute,

are apt to wander far from the truth in consequence of his defective

acquaintance with the phænomena of nature. His Centuries of Natural

History give abundant proof of this. He is, in all these inquiries,

like one doubtfully, and by degrees, making out a distant prospect,

but often deceived by the haze. But if we compare what may be found in

the sixth, seventh, and eighth books De Augmentis, in the Essays, the

History of Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in

his works, on moral and political wisdom, and on human nature, from

experience of which all such wisdom is drawn, with the Rhetoric,

Ethics, and Politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most

celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human

character, with Thucydides, Tacitus, Philip de Comines, Machiavel,

Davila, Hume, we shall, I think, find that one man may almost be

compared with all of these together. When Galileo is named as equal to

Bacon, it is to be remembered that Galileo was no moral or political

philosopher, and in this department Leibnitz certainly falls very

short of Bacon. Burke, perhaps, comes, of all modern writers, the

nearest to him; but though Bacon may not be more profound than Burke,

he is still more copious and comprehensive.

[214] Nov. Organ. ii. 26. It may however be observed, that we

find a few passages in the ethical part of De Augmentis, lib.

vii. cap. 3, which show that he had some notions of moral

induction germinating in his mind.

|Comparison of Bacon and Galileo.|

76. The comparison of Bacon and Galileo is naturally built upon the

influence which, in the same age they exerted in overthrowing the

philosophy of the schools, and in founding that new discipline

of real science which has rendered the last centuries glorious. Hume

has given the preference to the latter, who made accessions to the

domain of human knowledge so splendid, so inaccessible to cavil, so

unequivocal in their results, that the majority of mankind would

perhaps be carried along with this decision. There seems however to be

no doubt that the mind of Bacon was more comprehensive and profound.

But these comparisons are apt to involve _incommensurable_

relations. In their own intellectual characters, they bore no great

resemblance to each other. Bacon had scarce any knowledge of geometry,

and so far ranks much below not only Galileo, but Descartes, Newton,

and Leibnitz, all signalised by wonderful discoveries in the science

of quantity, or in that part of physics which employs it. He has, in

one of the profound aphorisms of the Novum Organum, distinguished the

two species of philosophical genius, one more apt to perceive the

differences of things, the other their analogies. In a mind of the

highest order neither of these powers will be really deficient, and

his own inductive method is at once the best exercise of both, and the

best safeguard against the excess of either. But upon the whole, it

may certainly be said, that the genius of Lord Bacon was naturally

more inclined to collect the resemblances of nature than to note her

differences. This is the case with men like him of sanguine temper,

warm fancy, and brilliant wit; but it is not the frame of mind which

is best suited to strict reasoning.

77. It is no proof of a solid acquaintance with Lord Bacon’s

philosophy, to deify his name as the ancient schools did those of

their founders, or even to exaggerate the powers of his genius. Powers

they were surprisingly great, yet limited in their range, and not in

all respects equal; nor could they overcome every impediment of

circumstance. Even of Bacon it may be said, that he attempted more

than he has achieved, and perhaps more than he clearly apprehended.

His objects appear sometimes indistinct, and I am not sure that they

are always consistent. In the Advancement of Learning, he aspired to

fill up, or at least to indicate, the deficiencies in every department

of knowledge, he gradually confined himself to philosophy, and at

length to physics. But few of his works can be deemed complete, not

even the treatise De Augmentis, which comes nearer to it than most of

the rest. Hence, the study of Lord Bacon is difficult and not, as I

conceive, very well adapted to those who have made no progress

whatever in the exact sciences, nor accustomed themselves to

independent thinking. They have never been made a textbook in our

universities; though after a judicious course of preparatory studies,

by which I mean a good foundation in geometry and the philosophical

principles of grammar, the first book of the Novum Organum might be

very advantageously combined with the instruction of an enlightened

lecturer.[215]

[215] It by no means is to be inferred, that because the actual

text of Bacon is not always such as can be well understood by

very young men, I object to their being led to the real

principles of inductive philosophy, which alone will teach them

to think, firmly but not presumptuously, for themselves. Few

defects, on the contrary, in our system of education are more

visible than the want of an adequate course of logic; and this is

not likely to be rectified so long as the Aristotelian methods

challenge that denomination exclusively of all other aids to the

reasoning faculties. The position that nothing else is to be

called logic, were it even agreeable to the derivation of the

word, which it is not, or to the usage of the ancients, which is

by no means uniformly the case, or to that of modern philosophy

and correct language, which is certainly not at all the case, is

no answer to the question, whether what we call logic does not

deserve to be taught at all.

A living writer of high reputation, who has at least fully

understood his own subject, and illustrated it better than his

predecessors from a more enlarged reading and thinking, wherein

his own acuteness has been improved by the writers of the

Baconian school, has been unfortunately instrumental, by the very

merits of his treatise on Logic, in keeping up the prejudices on

this subject, which have generally been deemed characteristic of

the university to which he belonged. All the reflection I have

been able to give to the subject has convinced me of the

inefficacy of the syllogistic art in enabling us to think rightly

for ourselves, or, which is part of thinking rightly, in

detecting those fallacies of others which might impose on our

understanding before we have acquired that art. It has been often

alleged, and, as far as I can judge, with perfect truth, that no

man, who can be worth answering, ever commits, except through

mere inadvertence, any paralogisms which the common logic serves

to point out. It is easy enough to construct syllogisms which sin

against its rules; but the question is, by whom they were

employed. It is not uncommon, as I am aware, to represent an

adversary as reasoning illogically; but this is generally

effected by putting his argument into our own words. The great

fault of all, over-induction, or the assertion of a general

premise upon an insufficient examination of particulars, cannot

be discovered or cured by any _logical_ skill; and this is

the error into which men really fall, not that of omitting to

_distribute the middle_ term, though it comes in effect, and

often in appearance, to the same thing. I do not contend that the

rules of syllogism, which are very short and simple, ought not to

be learned; or that there may not be some advantage in

occasionally stating our own argument, or calling on another to

state his, in a regular form (an advantage, however, rather

dialectical, which is, in other words, rhetorical, than one which

affects the reasoning faculties themselves): nor do I deny that

it is philosophically worth while to know that all _general

reasoning by words_ may be reduced into syllogism, as it is to

know that most of geometry may be resolved into the superposition

of equal triangles; but to represent this portion of logical

science as the whole, appears to me almost like teaching the

scholar Euclid’s axioms, and the axiomatic theorem to which I

have alluded, and calling this the science of geometry. The

following passage from the Port-Royal logic is very judicious and

candid, giving as much to the Aristotelian system as it deserves:

“Cette partie, que nous avons maintenant à traiter, qui comprend

les règles du raisonnement, est estimée la plus importante de la

logique, et c’est presque l’unique qu’on y traite avec quelque

soin; mais il y a sujet de douter si elle est aussi utile qu’on

se l’imagine. La plupart des erreurs des hommes, comme nous avons

déjà dit ailleurs, viennent bien plus de ce qu’ils raisonnent sur

de faux principes, que non pas de ce qu’ils raisonnent mal

suivant leurs principes. Il arrive rarement qu’on se laisse

tromper par des raisonnemens qui ne soient faux que parce que la

conséquence en est mal tirée; et ceux qui ne seroient pas

capables d’en reconnoître la fausseté par la seule lumière de la

raison, ne le seroient pas ordinairement d’entendre les règles

que l’on en donne, et encore moins de les appliquer. Néanmoins,

quand on ne considéreroit ces règles que comme des vérités

spéculatives, elles serviroient toujours à exercer l’esprit; et

de plus, on ne peut nier qu’elles n’aient quelque usage en

quelques rencontres, et à l’égard de quelques personnes, qui,

étant d’un naturel vif et pénétrant, ne se laissent quelquefois

tromper par des fausses conséquences, que faute d’attention, à

quoi la réflexion qu’ils feroient sur ces règles, seroit capable

de remédier.” Art de Penser, part iii. How different is this

sensible passage from one quoted from some anonymous writer in

Whateley’s Logic, p. 34. “A fallacy consists of an ingenious

mixture of truth and falsehood so entangled, so intimately

blended, that the fallacy is, in the chemical phrase, held in

solution _one drop of sound logic_ is that test which

immediately disunites them, makes the foreign substance visible,

and precipitates it to the bottom.” One fallacy, it might be

answered, as common as any, is the _false analogy_ the

misleading the mind by a comparison, where there is no real

proportion or resemblance. The chemist’s test is the

_necessary_ means of detecting the foreign substance; if the

“drop of sound logic” be such, it is strange that lawyers,

mathematicians, and mankind in general, should so sparingly

employ it; the fact being notorious, that those most eminent for

strong reasoning powers are rarely conversant with the

syllogistic method. It is also well known, that these “intimately

blended mixtures of truth and falsehood” deceive no man of plain

sense. So much for the _test_.

|His prejudice against mathematics.|

78. The ignorance of Bacon in mathematics, and, what was much worse,

his inadequate notions of their utility, must be reckoned among the

chief defects in his philosophical writings. In a remarkable passage

of the Advancement of Learning, he held mathematics to be a part of

metaphysics; but the place of this is altered in the Latin, and they

are treated as merely auxiliary or instrumental to physical inquiry.

He had some prejudice against pure mathematics, and thought they had

been unduly elevated in comparison with the realities of nature. “I

know not,” he says, “how it has arisen that mathematics and logic,

which ought to be the serving-maids of physical philosophy, yet

affecting to vaunt the certainty that belongs to them, presume to

exercise a dominion over her.” It is surely very erroneous to speak of

geometry, which relates to the objective realities of space, and to

natural objects so far as extended, as a mere handmaid of physical

philosophy, and not rather a part of it. Playfair has made some good

remarks on the advantages derived to experimental philosophy itself

from the mere application of geometry and algebra. And one of the

reflections which this ought to excite is, that we are not to

conceive, as some hastily do, that there can be no real utility to

mankind, even of that kind of utility which consists in multiplying

the conveniences and luxuries of life, springing from theoretical and

speculative inquiry. The history of algebra, so barren in the days of

Tartaglia and Vieta, so productive of _wealth_, when applied to

dynamical calculations in our own, may be a sufficient answer.

|Bacon’s excess of wit.|

79. One of the petty blemishes which, though lost in the splendour of

Lord Bacon’s excellencies, it is not unfair to mention, is connected

with the peculiar characteristics of his mind; he is sometimes too

metaphorical and witty. His remarkable talent for discovering

analogies seems to have inspired him with too much regard to them as

arguments, even when they must appear to any common reader

fanciful and far-fetched. His terminology, chiefly for the same

reason, is often a little affected, and, in Latin, rather barbarous.

The divisions of his prerogative instances in the Novum Organum are

not always founded upon intelligible distinctions. And the general

obscurity of the style, neither himself nor his assistants being good

masters of the Latin language, which at the best is never flexible or

copious enough for our philosophy, renders the perusal of both his

great works too laborious for the impatient reader. Brucker has well

observed that the Novum Organum has been neglected by the generality,

and proved of far less service than it would otherwise have been in

philosophy, in consequence of these very defects, as well as the real

depths of the author’s mind.[216]

[216] Legenda ipsa nobilissima tractatio ab illis est, qui in

rerum naturalium inquisitione feliciter progredi cupiunt. Quæ si

paulo plus luminis et perspicuitatis haberet, et novorum

terminorum et partitionum artificio lectorem non remoraretur,

longè plura, quam factum est, contulisset ad philosophiæ

emendationem. His enim obstantibus a plerisque hoc organum

neglectum est. Hist. Philos. v. 99.

|Fame of Bacon on the Continent.|

80. What has been the fame of Bacon, “the wisest, greatest, of

mankind,” it is needless to say. What has been his real influence over

mankind, how much of our enlarged and exact knowledge may be

attributed to his inductive method, what of this again has been due to

a thorough study of his writings, and what to an indirect and

secondary acquaintance with them, are questions of another kind, and

less easily solved. Stewart, the philosopher who has dwelt most on the

praises of Bacon, while he conceives him to have exercised a

considerable influence over the English men of science in the

seventeenth century, supposes, on the authority of Montucla, that he

did not “command the general admiration of Europe,” till the

publication of the preliminary discourse to the French Encyclopædia by

Diderot and D’Alembert. This, however, is by much too precipitate a

conclusion. He became almost immediately known on the continent.

Gassendi was one of his most ardent admirers. Descartes mentions him,

I believe, once only, in a letter to Mersenne, in 1632;[217] but he

was of all men the most unwilling to praise a contemporary. It may be

said that these were philosophers, and that their testimony does not

imply the admiration of mankind. But writers of a very different

character mention him in a familiar manner. Richelieu is said to have

highly esteemed Lord Bacon.[218] And it may in some measure be due to

this, that in the Sentimens de l’Académie Français sur le Cid, he is

alluded to, simply by the name Bacon, as one well known.[219] Voiture,

in a letter to Costar, about the same time, bestows high eulogy on

some passages of Bacon which his correspondent had sent to him, and

observes that Horace would have been astonished to hear a barbarian

Briton discourse in such a style. The treatise De Augmentis was

republished in France in 1624, the year after its appearance in

England. It was translated into French as early as 1632; no great

proofs of neglect. Editions came out in Holland, 1645, 1652, and

1662.[220] Even the Novum Organum, which, as has been said, never

became so popular as his other writings, was thrice printed in

Holland, in 1645, 1650, and 1660.[221] Leibnitz and Puffendorf are

loud in their expressions of admiration, the former ascribing to him

the revival of true philosophy as fully as we can at present.[222] I

should be more inclined to doubt whether he were adequately valued by

his countrymen in his own time, or in the immediately subsequent

period. Under the first Stuarts, there was little taste among studious

men but for theology, and chiefly for a theology which,

proceeding with an extreme deference to authority, could not but

generate a disposition of mind, even upon other subjects, alien to the

progressive and inquisitive spirit of the inductive philosophy.[223]

The institution of the Royal Society, or rather the love of physical

science out of which that institution arose, in the second part of the

seventeenth century, made England resound with the name of her

illustrious chancellor. Few now spoke of him without a kind of homage

that only the greatest men receive. Yet still, it was by natural

philosophers alone that the writings of Bacon were much studied. The

editions of his works, except the Essays, were few; the Novum Organum

never came separately from the English press.[224] They were not even

much quoted; for I believe it will be found that the fashion of

referring to the brilliant passages of the De Augmentis and the Novum

Organum, at least in books designed for the general reader, is not

much older than the close of the last century. Scotland has the merit

of having led the way; Reid, Stewart, Robison, and Playfair turned

that which had been a blind veneration into a rational worship; and I

should suspect that more have read Lord Bacon within these thirty

years than in the two preceding centuries. It may be an usual

consequence of the enthusiastic panegyrics lately poured upon his

name, that a more positive efficacy has sometimes been attributed to

his philosophical writings than they really possessed, and it might be

asked whether Italy, where he was probably not much known, were not

the true school of experimental philosophy in Europe, whether his

methods of investigation were not chiefly such as men of sagacity and

lovers of truth might simultaneously have devised. But, whatever may

have been the case with respect to actual discoveries in science, we

must give to written wisdom its proper meed; no books prior to those

of Lord Bacon carried mankind so far on the road to truth; none have

obtained so thorough a triumph over arrogant usurpation without

seeking to substitute another; and he may be compared with those

liberators of nations, who have given them laws by which they might

govern themselves, and retained no homage but their gratitude.[225]

[217] Vol. vi., p. 210, edit. Cousin.

[218] The only authority that I can now quote for this is not

very good, that of Aubery’s Manuscripts, which I find in Seward’s

Anecdotes, iv. 328. But it seems not improbable. The same book

quotes Balzac as saying: “Croyons donc, pour l’amour du

Chancelier Bacon, que toutes les folies des anciens sont sages;

et tous leurs songes mystères, et de celles-là qui sont estimées

pures fables, il n’y en a pas une, quelque bizarre et

extravagante qu’elle soit, qui n’ait son fondement dans

l’histoire, _si l’on en veut croire Bacon_, et qui n’ait été

déguisée de la sorte par les sages du vieux temps, pour la rendre

plus utile aux peuples.

[219] P. 44 (1633).

[220] J’ai trouvé parfaitement beau tout ce que vous me

mandez de Bacon. Mais ne vous semble t’il pas qu’Horace qui

disoit, Visam Britannos hospitibus feros, seroit bien étonné

d’entendre un barbare discourir comme cela? Costar is said by

Bayle to have borrowed much from Bacon. La Mothe le Vayer

mentions him in his Dialogues; in fact, instances are numerous.

[221] Montagu’s Life of Bacon, p. 407. He has not

mentioned an edition at Strasburg, 1635, which is in the British

Museum.

There is also an edition, without time or place, in the catalogue

of the British Museum.

[222] Brucker, v. 95. Stewart says that “Bayle does not

give above twelve lines to Bacon;” but he calls him one of the

greatest men of his age, and the length of an article in Bayle

was never designed to be a measure of the merit of its subject.

[223] It is not uncommon to meet with persons,

especially who are or have been engaged in teaching others

dogmatically what they have themselves received in the like

manner, to whom the inductive philosophy appears a mere school of

scepticism, or at best wholly inapplicable to any subjects which

require entire conviction. A certain deduction from certain

premises is the only reasoning they acknowledge. This is

peculiarly the case with theologians, but it is also extended to

everything which is taught in a synthetic manner. Lord Bacon has

a remarkable passage on this in the 9th book De Augmentis.

Postquam articuli et principia religionis jam in sedibus suis

fuerint locata, ita ut a rationis examine penitus eximantur, tum

demum conceditur ab illis illationes derivare ac deducere,

secundum analogiam ipsorum. In rebus quidem naturalibus hoc non

tenet. Nam et ipsa principia examini subjiciuntur; per

inductionem, inquam, licet minime per syllogismum. Atque eadem

illa nullam habent cum ratione repugnantiam, ut ab eodem fonte

cum primæ propositiones, tum mediæ, deducantur. Aliter fit in

religione; ubi et primæ propositiones authopystatæ sunt, atque

per se subsistentes; et rursus non reguntur ab illa ratione quæ

propositiones consequentes deducit. Neque tamen hoc fit in

religione sola, sed etiam in aliis scientiis, tam gravioribus,

quam levioribus, ubi scilicet propositiones humanæ placita sunt,

non posita; siquidem et in illis rationis usus absolutus esse non

potest. Videmus enim in ludis, puta schaccorum, aut similibus,

priores ludi normas et leges merè positivas esse, et ad placitum;

quas recipi, non in disputationem vocari, prorsus oporteat; ut

vero vincas, et peritè lusum instituas, id artificiosum est et

rationale. Eodem modo fit et in legibus humanis; in quibus haud

paucæ sunt maximæ, ut loquuntur, hoc est, placita mera juris, quæ

auctoritate magis quam ratione nituntur, neque in disceptationem

veniunt. Quid vero sit justissimum, non absolutè, sed relativè,

hoc est ex analogiâ illarum maximarum, id demum rationale est, et

latum disputationi campum præbet. This passage, well weighed, may

show us where, why, and by whom the synthetic and syllogistic

methods have been preferred to the inductive and analytical.

[224] The De Augmentis was only once published after the

first edition, in 1638. An indifferent translation, by Gilbert

Watts, came out in 1640. No edition of Bacon’s Works was

published in England before 1730; another appeared in 1740, and

there have been several since. But they had been printed at

Frankfort in 1665. It is unnecessary to observe, that many copies

of the foreign editions were brought to this country. This is

mostly taken from Mr. Montague’s account.

[225] I have met, since this passage was written, with

one in Stewart’s Life of Reid, which seems to state the

_effects_ of Bacon’s philosophy in a just and temperate

spirit, and which I rather quote, because this writer has, by his

eulogies on that philosophy, led some to an exaggerated notion.

“The influence of Bacon’s genius on the subsequent progress of

physical discovery has been seldom duly appreciated: by some

writers almost entirely overlooked, and by others considered as

the sole cause of the reformation in science which has since

taken place. Of these two extremes, the latter certainly is the

least wide of the truth: for in the whole history of letters no

other individual can be mentioned whose exertions have had so

indisputable an effect in forwarding the intellectual progress of

mankind. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that before

the era when Bacon appeared, various philosophers in different

parts of Europe had struck into the right path; and it may

perhaps be doubted, whether any one important rule with respect

to the true method of investigation be contained in his works, of

which no hint can be traced in those of his predecessors. His

great merit lay in concentrating their feeble and scattered

lights; fixing the attention of philosophers on the

distinguishing characteristics of true and of false science, by a

felicity of illustration peculiar to himself, seconded by the

commanding powers of a bold and figurative eloquence. The method

of investigation which he recommended had been previously

followed in every instance in which any solid discovery had been

made with respect to the laws of nature; but it had been followed

accidentally and without any regular preconceived design; and it

was reserved for him to reduce to rule and method what others had

effected, either fortuitously, or from some momentary glimpse of

the truth. These remarks are not intended to detract from the

just glory of Bacon; for they apply to all those, without

exception, who have systematised the principles of any of the

arts. Indeed, they apply less forcibly to him than to any other

philosopher whose studies have been directed to objects analogous

to his; inasmuch as we know of no art of which the rules have

been reduced successfully into a didactic form, when the art

itself was as much in infancy as experimental philosophy was when

Bacon wrote.” Account of Life and writings of Reid sect. 2.

SECT. III.

_On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Descartes._

|Early life of Descartes.|

81. René Descartes was born in 1596 of an ancient family in Touraine.

An inquisitive curiosity into the nature and causes of all he saw is

said to have distinguished his childhood, and this was certainly

accompanied by an uncommon facility and clearness of apprehension. At

a very early age he entered the college of the Jesuits at La Fleche,

and passed through their entire course of literature and philosophy.

It was now, at the age of sixteen, as he tells us, that he began to

reflect, with little satisfaction, on his studies, finding his mind

beset with error, and obliged to confess that he had learned nothing

but the conviction of his ignorance. Yet he knew that he had been

educated in a famous school, and that he was not deemed behind his

contemporaries. The ethics, the logic, even the geometry of the

ancients, did not fill his mind with that clear stream of truth, for

which he was ever thirsting. On leaving La Fleche, the young Descartes

mingled for some years in the world, and served as a volunteer both

under Prince Maurice, and in the Imperial army. Yet during this period

there were intervals when he withdrew himself wholly from society, and

devoted his leisure to mathematical science. Some germs also of his

peculiar philosophy were already ripening in his mind.

|His beginning to philosophise.|

82. Descartes was twenty-three years old when, passing a solitary

winter in his quarters at Neuburg on the Danube, he began to resolve

in his mind the futility of all existing systems of philosophy, and

the discrepancy of opinions among the generality of mankind, which

rendered it probable that no one had yet found out the road to real

science. He determined, therefore, to set about the investigation of

truth for himself, erasing from his mind all preconceived judgments,

as having been hastily and precariously taken up. He laid down for his

guidance a few fundamental rules of logic, such as to admit nothing as

true which he did not clearly perceive, and to proceed from the

simpler notions to the more complex, taking the method of geometers,

by which they had gone so much farther than others, for the true art

of reasoning. Commencing, therefore, with the mathematical sciences,

and observing that, however different in their subjects, they treat

properly of nothing but the relations of quantity, he fell, almost

accidentally, as his words seem to import, on the great discovery that

geometrical curves may be expressed algebraically.[226] This gave him

more hope of success in applying his method to other parts of

philosophy.

[226] Œuvres de Descartes, par Cousin, Paris, 1824, vol. i.,

p. 143.

|He retires to Holland.|

83. Nine years more elapsed, during which Descartes, though he quitted

military service, continued to observe mankind in various parts of

Europe, still keeping his heart fixed on the great aim he had proposed

to himself, but, as he confesses, without having framed the scheme of

any philosophy beyond those of his contemporaries. He deemed his time

of life immature for so stupendous a task. But at the age of

thirty-three, with little notice to his friends, he quitted Paris,

convinced that absolute retirement was indispensable for that rigorous

investigation of first principles he now determined to institute, and

retired into Holland. In this country he remained eight years so

completely aloof from the distractions of the world, that he concealed

his very place of residence, though preserving an intercourse of

letters with many friends in France.

|His publications.|

84. In 1637 he broke upon the world with a volume containing the

Discourse upon Method, the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry.

It is only with the first that we are for the present concerned.[227]

In this discourse, the most interesting perhaps of Descartes’

writings, on account of the picture of his life, and of the progress

of his studies that it furnishes, we find the Cartesian metaphysics,

which do not consist of many articles, almost as fully detailed as in

any of his later works. In the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,

published in Latin, 1641, these fundamental principles are laid down

again more at length. He invited the criticism of philosophers on

these famous Meditations. They did not refuse the challenge; and seven

sets of objections, from as many different quarters, with seven

replies from Descartes himself, are subjoined to the later editions of

the Meditations. The Principles of Philosophy, published in Latin in

1644, contains what may be reckoned the final statement, which

occupies most of the first book, written with uncommon conciseness and

precision. The beauty of philosophical style which distinguished

Descartes is never more seen than in this first book of the Principia,

the translation of which was revised by Clerselier, an eminent friend

of the author. It is a contrast at once to the elliptical brevity of

Aristotle, who hints, or has been supposed to hint, the most important

positions in a short clause, and to the verbose, figurative

declamation of many modern metaphysicians. In this admirable

perspicuity Descartes was imitated by his disciples Arnaud and

Malebranche, especially the former. His unfinished posthumous

treatise, the “Inquiry after Truth by Natural Reason,” is not carried

farther than a partial development of the same leading principles of

Cartesianism. There is consequently a great deal of apparent

repetition in the works of Descartes, but such as on attentive

consideration will show, not perhaps much real variance, but some new

lights that had occurred to the author in the course of his

reflections.[228]

[227] Id. p. 121-212.

[228] A work has lately been published, Essais Philosophiques,

suivis de la Métaphysique de Descartes resembleé et mise en

ordre, par L. A. Gruyer, 4 vols. Bruxelles, 1832. In the fourth

volume we find the metaphysical passages in the writings of

Descartes, including his correspondence, arranged methodically in

his own words, but with the omission of a large part of the

objections to the Meditations and of his replies. I did not,

however, see this work in time to make use of it.

|He begins by doubting all.|

85. In pursuing the examination of the first principles of knowledge,

Descartes perceived not only that he had cause to doubt of the various

opinions he had found current among men, from that very circumstance

of their variety, but that the sources of all that he had received for

truth themselves, namely, the senses, had afforded him no indisputable

certainty. He began to recollect how often he had been misled by

appearances, which had at first sight given no intimation of their

fallacy, and asked himself in vain, by what infallible test he could

discern the reality of external objects, or at least their conformity

to his idea of them. The strong impressions made in sleep led him to

inquire whether all he saw and felt might not be in a dream. It was

true that there seemed to be some notions more elementary than the

rest, such as extension, figure, duration, which could not be reckoned

fallacious; nor could he avoid owning that, if there were not an

existing triangle in the world, the angles of one conceived by the

mind, though it were in sleep, must appear equal to two right angles.

But even in this certitude of demonstration he soon found something

deficient; to err in geometrical reasoning is not impossible: why

might he not err in this; especially in a train of consequences, the

particular terms of which are not at the same instant present to the

mind. But above all, there might be a superior being, powerful enough

and willing to deceive him. It was no kind of answer to treat this as

improbable, or as an arbitrary hypothesis. He had laid down as a maxim

that nothing could be received as truth which was not demonstrable,

and in one place, rather hyperbolically, and indeed extravagantly in

appearance, says that he made little difference between merely

probable and false suppositions; meaning this, however, as we may

presume, in the sense of geometers, who would say the same thing.

|His first step in knowledge.|

86. But, divesting himself thus of all belief in what the world deemed

most unquestionable, plunged in an abyss, as it seemed for a

time, he soon found his feet on a rock, from which he sprang upwards

to an unclouded sun. Doubting all things, abandoning all things, he

came to the question, what is it that doubts and denies? Something it

must be; he might be deceived by a superior power, but it was he that

was deceived. He felt his own existence; the proof of it was that he

did feel it; that he had affirmed, that he now doubted, in a word,

that he was a thinking substance. _Cogito: Ergo sum_--this famous

enthymem of the Cartesian philosophy veiled in rather formal language,

that which was to him, and must be to us all, the eternal basis of

conviction, which no argument can strengthen, which no sophistry can

impair, the consciousness of a self within, a percipient indivisible

Ego.[229] The only proof of this is that it admits of no proof, that

no man can pretend to doubt of his own existence with sincerity, or to

express a doubt without absurd and inconsistent language.

[229] This word, introduced by the Germans, or originally perhaps

by the old Cartesians, is rather awkward, but far less so than

the English pronoun I, which is also equivocal in sound. Stewart

has adopted it as the lesser evil, and it seems reasonable not to

scruple a word so convenient, if not necessary, to express the

unity of the conscious principle. If it had been employed

earlier, I am apt to think that some great metaphysical

extravagances would have been avoided, and some fundamental

truths more clearly apprehended. Fichte is well known to have

made the grand division of _Ich_ and _Nicht Ich_, _Ego_ and _Non

Ego_, the basis of his philosophy; in other words, the difference

of subjective and objective reality.

|His mind.|

|Not sceptical.|

87. The scepticism of Descartes, it appears, which is merely

provisional, is not at all similar to that of the Pyrrhonists, though

some of his arguments may have been shafts from their quiver. Nor did

he make use, which is somewhat remarkable, of the reasonings

afterwards employed by Berkley against the material world, though no

one more frequently distinguished than Descartes between the objective

reality, as it was then supposed to be, of ideas in the mind, and the

external or sensible reality of things. Scepticism, in fact, was so

far from being characteristic of his disposition, that his errors

sprang chiefly from the opposite source, little as he was aware of it,

from an undue positiveness in theories which he could not demonstrate,

or even render highly probable.[230]

[230] One of the rules Descartes lays down in his posthumous art

of logic, is that we ought never to busy ourselves except about

objects concerning which our understanding appears capable of

acquiring an unquestionable and certain knowledge, vol. xi., p.

204. This is at least too unlimited a proposition, and would

exclude, not indeed all probability, but all inquiries which must

by necessity end in nothing more than probability. Accordingly,

we find in the next pages, that he made little account of any

sciences but arithmetic and geometry, or such others as equal

them in certainty. “From all this,” he concludes, “we may infer,

not that arithmetic and geometry are the only sciences which we

must learn, but that he who seeks the road to truth should not

trouble himself with any object of which he cannot have as

certain a knowledge, as of arithmetical and geometrical

demonstrations.” It is unnecessary to observe what havoc this

would make with investigations, even in physics, of the highest

importance to mankind.

Beattie, in the essay on Truth, part ii. chap. 2, has made some

unfounded criticisms on the scepticism of Descartes, and

endeavours to turn into ridicule his, Cogito; ergo sum. Yet if

any one should deny his own, or our existence, I do not see how

we could refute him, were he worthy of refutation, but by some

such language; and, in fact, it is what Beattie himself says,

more paraphrastically, in answering Hume.

|He arrives at more certainty.|

88. The certainty of an existing Ego easily led him to that of the

operations of the mind, called afterwards by Locke ideas of

reflection, the believing, doubting, willing, loving, fearing, which

he knew by consciousness, and indeed by means of which alone he knew

that the Ego existed. He now proceeded a step farther; and reflecting

on the simplest truths of arithmetic and geometry, saw that it was as

impossible to doubt of them as of the acts of his mind. But as he had

before tried to doubt even of these, on the hypothesis that he might

be deceived by a superior intelligent power, he resolved to inquire

whether such a power existed, and if it did, whether it could be a

deceiver. The affirmative of the former, and the negative of the

latter question Descartes established by that extremely subtle

reasoning so much celebrated in the seventeenth century, but which has

less frequently been deemed conclusive in later times. It is at least

that which no man, not fitted by long practise for metaphysical

researches, will pretend to embrace.

|His proof of a Deity.|

89. The substance of his argument was this. He found within himself

the idea of a perfect Intelligence, eternal, infinite, necessary. This

could not come from himself, nor from external things, because both

were imperfect, and there could be no more in the effect than there is

in the cause. And this idea requiring a cause, it could have

none but an actual being, not a possible being, which is

undistinguishable from mere non-entity. If, however, this should be

denied, he inquires whether he, with this idea of God, could have

existed by any other cause, if there were no God. Not, he argues, by

himself; for, if he were the author of his own being, he would have

given himself every perfection, in a word, would have been God. Not by

his parents, for the same might be said of them, and so forth, if we

remount to a series of productive beings. Besides this, as much power

is required to preserve as to create, and the continuance of existence

in the effect implies the continued operation of the cause.

|Another proof of it.|

90. With this argument, in itself sufficiently refined, Descartes

blended another still more distant from common apprehension. Necessary

existence is involved in the idea of God. All other beings are

conceivable in their essence, as things possible; in God alone his

essence and existence are inseparable. Existence is necessary to

perfection; hence, a perfect being, or God, cannot be conceived

without necessary existence. Though I do not know that I have

misrepresented Descartes in this result of his very subtle argument,

it is difficult not to treat it as a sophism. And it was always

objected by his adversaries, that he inferred the necessity of the

thing from the necessity of the idea, which was the very point in

question. It seems impossible to vindicate many of his expressions,

from which he never receded in the controversy to which his

meditations gave rise. But the long habit of repeating in his mind the

same series of reasonings gave Descartes, as it will always do, an

inward assurance of their certainty, which could not be weakened by

any objection. The former argument for the being of God, whether

satisfactory or not, is to be distinguished from the present.[231]

[231] “From what is said already of the ignorance we are in of

the essence of mind, it is evident that we are not able to know

whether any mind be necessarily existent by a necessity à priori

founded in its essence, as we have showed time and space to be.

Some philosophers think that such a necessity may be demonstrated

of God from the nature of perfection. For God being infinitely,

that is, absolutely perfect, they say he must needs be

necessarily existent; because, say they, necessary existence is

one of the greatest of perfections. But I take this to be one of

those false and imaginary arguments, that are founded in the

abuse of certain terms; and of all others this word, perfection,

seems to have suffered most this way. I wish I could clearly

understand what these philosophers mean by the word perfection,

when they thus say, that necessity of existence is perfection.

Does perfection here signify the same thing that it does, when we

say that God is infinitely good, omnipotent, omniscient? Surely

perfections are properly asserted of the several powers that

attend the essences of things, and not of anything else, but in a

very unnatural and improper sense. Perfection is a term of

relation, and its sense implies a fitness or agreement to some

certain end, and most properly to some power in the thing that is

denominated perfect. The term, as the etymology of it shows, is

taken from the operation of artists. When an artist proposes to

himself to make anything that shall be serviceable to a certain

effect, his work is called more or less perfect, according as it

agrees more or less with the design of the artist. From arts, by

a similitude of sense, this word has been introduced into

morality, and signifies that quality of an agent by which it is

able to act agreeable to the end its actions tend to. The

metaphysicians who reduce everything to transcendental

considerations, have also translated this term into their

science, and use it to signify the agreement that anything has

with that idea, which it is required that thing should answer to.

This perfection, therefore, belongs to those attributes that

constitute the essence of a thing; and that being is properly

called the most perfect which has all, the best, and each the

completest in its kind of those attributes, which can be united

in one essence. Perfection, therefore, belongs to the essence of

things, and not properly to their existence; which is not a

perfection of anything, no attribute of it, but only the mere

constitution of it _in rerum natura_. Necessary existence,

therefore, which is a mode of existence, is not a perfection, it

being no attribute of the thing no more than existence is, which

is a mode of it. But it may be said, that though necessary

existence is not a perfection in itself, yet it is so in its

cause, upon account of that attribute of the entity from whence

it flows; that that attribute must of all others be the most

perfect and most excellent, which necessary existence flows from,

it being such as cannot be conceived otherwise than as existing.

But what excellency, what perfection is there in all this? Space

is necessarily existent on account of extension, which cannot be

conceived otherwise than as existing. But what perfection is

there in space upon this account, which can in no manner act on

anything, which is entirely devoid of all power, wherein I have

showed all perfections to consist? Therefore, necessary

existence, abstractedly considered, is no perfection; and,

therefore, the idea of infinite perfection does not include, and

consequently not prove, God to be necessarily existence [sic]. If

he be so, it is on account of those attributes of his essence

which we have no knowledge of.”

I have made this extract from a very short tract, called

Contemplatio Philosophica, by Brook Taylor, which I found in an

unpublished memoir of his life printed by the late Sir William

Young, in 1793. It bespeaks the clear and acute understanding of

this celebrated philosopher, and appears to me an entire

refutation of the scholastic argument of Descartes; one more fit

for the Anselms and such dealers in words, from whom it came,

than for himself.

|His deductions from this.|

91. From the idea of a perfect being, Descartes immediately deduced

the truth of his belief in an external world, and in the inferences of

his reason. For to deceive his creatures would be an imperfection in

God; but God is perfect. Whatever, therefore, is clearly and

distinctly apprehended by our reason, must be true. We have only to be

on our guard against our own precipitancy and prejudice, or surrender

of our reason to the authority of others. It is not by our

understanding, such as God gave it to us, that we are deceived; but

the exercise of our free will, a high prerogative of our nature, is

often so incautious as to make us not discern truth from falsehood,

and affirm or deny, by a voluntary act, that which we do not

distinctly apprehend. The properties of quantity, founded on our ideas

of extension and number, are distinctly perceived by our minds, and

hence the sciences of arithmetic and geometry are certainly true. But

when he turns his thoughts to the phenomena of external sensation,

Descartes cannot wholly extricate himself from his original

concession, the basis of his doubt, that the senses do sometimes

deceive us. He endeavours to reconcile this with his own theory, which

had built the certainty of all that we clearly hold certain on the

perfect veracity of God.

|Primary and secondary qualities.|

92. It is in this inquiry that he reaches that important distinction

between the primary and secondary properties of matter, the latter

being modifications of the former, relative only to our apprehension,

but not inherent in things, which, without being wholly new,

contradicted the Aristotelian theories of the schools;[232] and he

remarked that we are never, strictly speaking, deceived by our senses,

but by the inferences which we draw from them.

[232] See Stewart’s First Dissertation on the Progress of

Philosophy. This writer has justly observed, that many persons

conceive _colour_ to be inherent in the object, so that the

censure of Reid on Descartes and his followers, as having

pretended to discover what no one doubted, is at least

unreasonable in this respect. A late writer has gone so far as to

say: “Nothing at first can seem a more rational, obvious, and

incontrovertible conclusion, than that the colour of a body is an

inherent quality, like its weight, hardness, &c; and that to

_see_ the object, and to see it of _its own colour_, when nothing

intervenes between our eyes and it, are one and the same thing.

Yet this is only a prejudice.” &c. Herschel’s Discourse on Nat.

Philos., p. 82. I almost even suspect that the notion of sounds

and smells being secondary or merely sensible qualities, is not

distinct in all men’s minds. But after we are become familiar

with correct ideas, it is not easy to revive prejudices in our

imagination. In the same page of Stewart’s Dissertation, he has

been led, by dislike of the university of Oxford, to misconceive,

in an extraordinary manner, a passage of Addison in the Guardian,

which is evidently a sportive ridicule of the Cartesian theory,

and is absolutely inapplicable to the Aristotelian.

93. Such is nearly the substance, exclusive of a great variety of more

or less episodical theories, of the three metaphysical works of

Descartes, the history of the soul’s progress from opinion to doubt,

and from doubt to certainty. Few would dispute, at the present day,

that he has destroyed too much of his foundations to render his

superstructure stable; and to readers averse from metaphysical

reflection, he must seem little else than an idle theorist, weaving

cobwebs for pastime which common sense sweeps away. It is fair,

however, to observe, that no one was more careful than Descartes to

guard against any practical scepticism in the affairs of life. He even

goes so far as to maintain, that a man having adopted any practical

opinion on such grounds as seem probable should pursue it with as much

steadiness as if it were founded on demonstration; observing, however,

as a general rule, to choose the most moderate opinions among those

which he should find current in his own country.[233]

[233] Vol. i., p. 147. Vol. iii., p. 64.

|Objections made to his Meditations.|

94. The objections adduced against the Meditations are in a series of

seven. The first are by a theologian named Caterus, the second by

Mersenne, the third by Hobbes, the fourth by Arnauld, the fifth by

Gassendi, the sixth by some anonymous writers, the seventh by a Jesuit

of the name of Bourdin. To all of these Descartes replied with spirit

and acuteness. By far the most important controversy was with

Gassendi, whose objections were stated more briefly, and I think with

less skill, by Hobbes. It was the first trumpet in the new philosophy

of an ancient war between the sensual and ideal schools of psychology.

Descartes had revived, and placed in a clearer light, the doctrine of

mind, as not absolutely dependent upon the senses, nor of the same

nature as their objects. Stewart does not acknowledge him as

the first teacher of the soul’s immateriality. “That many of the

schoolmen, and that the wisest of the ancient philosophers, when they

described the mind as a spirit, or as a spark of celestial fire,

employed these expressions, not with any intention to materialize its

essence, but merely from want of more unexceptionable language, might

be shown with demonstrative evidence, if this were the proper place

for entering into the discussion.”[234] But though it cannot be said

that Descartes was absolutely the first who maintained the strict

immateriality of the soul, it is manifest to any one who has read his

correspondence, that the tenet, instead of being general, as we are

apt to presume, was by no means in accordance with the common opinion

of his age. The fathers, with the exception, perhaps the single one,

of Augustin, had taught the corporeity of the thinking substance.

Arnauld seems to consider the doctrine of Descartes as almost a

novelty in modern times. “What you have written concerning the

distinction between the soul and body appears to me very clear, very

evident, and quite divine; and as nothing is older than truth, I have

had singular pleasure to see that almost the same things have formerly

been very perspicuously and agreeably handled by St. Augustin in all

his tenth book on the Trinity, but chiefly in the tenth chapter.”[235]

But Arnauld himself, in his objections to the Meditations, had put it

as at least questionable, whether that which thinks is not something

extended, which, besides the usual properties of extended substances,

such as mobility and figure, has also this particular virtue and power

of thinking.[236] The reply of Descartes removed the difficulty of the

illustrious Jansenist, who became an ardent and almost complete

disciple of the new philosophy. In a placard against the Cartesian

philosophy, printed in 1647, which seems to have come from Revius,

professor of theology at Leyden, it is said: “As far as regards the

nature of things, nothing seems to hinder but that the soul may be

either a substance, or a mode of corporeal substance.”[237] And More,

who had carried on a metaphysical correspondence with Descartes, whom

he professed to admire, at least at that time, above all philosophers

that had ever existed, without exception of his favourite Plato,

extols him after his death in a letter to Clerselier, as having best

established the foundations of religion. “For the peripatetics,” he

says, “pretend that there are certain substantial forms emanating from

matter, and so united to it that they cannot subsist without it, to

which class these philosophers refer the souls of almost all living

beings, even those to which they allow sensation and thought; while

the Epicureans, on the other hand, who laugh at substantial forms,

ascribe thought to matter itself, so that it is M. Descartes alone of

all philosophers, who has at once banished from philosophy all these

substantial forms or souls derived from matter, and absolutely

divested matter itself of the faculty of feeling and thinking.”[238]

[234] Dissertation, ubi suprà.

[235] Descartes, x. 138.

[236] Id. ii 14.

[237] Vol. x., p. 73.

[238] Vol. x., p. 386. Even More seems to have been perplexed at

one time by the difficulty of accounting for the knowledge and

sentiment of disembodied souls, and almost inclined to admit

their corporeity. “J’aimerois mieux dire avec les Platoniciens,

les anciens pères, et presque tous les philosophes, que les âmes

humaines, tous les génies tant bons que mauvais, sont corporels,

et que par consequent ils ont un sentiment réel, c’est à dire,

qui leur vient du corps dont ils sont revêtus.” This is in a

letter to Descartes, in 1649, which I have not read in Latin

(vol. x., p. 249). I do not quite understand whether he meant

only that the soul, when separated from the gross body, is

invested with a substantial clothing, or that there is what we

may call an interior body, a supposed monad, to which the

thinking principle is indissolubly united. This is what all

materialists mean, who have any clear notions whatever; it is a

possible, perhaps a plausible, perhaps even a highly probable,

hypothesis, but one which will not prove their theory. The former

seems almost an indispensable supposition, if we admit

sensibility to phenomena at all in the soul after death; but it

is rather, perhaps, a theological than a metaphysical speculation.

|Theory of memory and imagination.|

95. It must be owned that the firm belief of Descartes in the

immateriality of the Ego or thinking principle, was accompanied with

what in later times would have been deemed rather too great

concessions to the materialists. He held the imagination and the

memory to be portions of the brain, wherein the images of our

sensations are bodily preserved; and even assigned such a motive force

to the imagination, as to produce those involuntary actions which we

often perform, and all the movements of brutes. “This explains how all

the motions of all animals arise, though we grant them no knowledge of

things, but only an imagination entirely corporeal, and how all those

operations which do not require the concurrence of reason are produced

in us.” But the whole of his notions as to the connexion of

the soul and body, and indeed all his physiological theories, of which

he was most enamoured, do little credit to the Cartesian philosophy.

They are among those portions of his creed which have lain most open

to ridicule, and which it would be useless for us to detail. He seems

to have expected more advantage to psychology from anatomical

researches than in that state of the science, or even probably in any

future state of it, anatomy could afford. When asked once where was

his library, he replied, showing a calf he was dissecting, This is my

library.[239] His treatise on the passions, a subject so important in

the philosophy of the human mind, is made up of crude hypotheses, or

at best irrelevant observations, on their physical causes and

concomitants.

[239] Descartes was very fond of dissection: C’est un exercise où

je me suis souvent occupé depuis onze ans, et je crois qu’il n’y

a guère de médecins qui y ait regardé de si près que moi. Vol.

viii., p. 100., also p. 174 and 180.

|Seat of soul in pineal gland.|

96. It may be considered as a part of this syncretism, as we may call

it, of the material and immaterial hypothesis, that Descartes fixed

the seat of the soul in the conarion, or pineal gland, which he

selected as the only part of the brain which is not double. By some

mutual communication which he did not profess to explain, though later

metaphysicians have attempted to do so, the unextended intelligence,

thus confined to a certain spot, receives the sensations which are

immediately produced through impressions on the substance of the

brain. If he did not solve the problem, be it remembered that the

problem has never since been solved. It was objected by a nameless

correspondent, who signs himself Hyperaspistes, that the soul being

incorporeal could not leave by its operations a trace on the brain,

which his theory seemed to imply. Descartes answered, in rather a

remarkable passage, that as to things purely intellectual, we do not,

properly speaking, remember them at all, as they are equally original

thoughts every time they present themselves to the mind, except that

they are habitually joined as it were, and associated with certain

names, which being bodily, make us remember them.[240]

[240] This passage I must give in French, finding it very

obscure, and having translated more according to what I guess

than literally. Mais pour ce qui est des choses purement

intellectuelles, à proprement parler on n’en aucun ressouvenir;

et la première fois qu’elles se présentent à l’esprit, on les

pense aussi bien que la seconde, si ce n’est peut-être qu’elles

ont coûtume d’être jointes et comme attachées a certains noms

qui, étant corporels, font que nous nous ressouvenons aussi

d’elles. Vol. viii., p. 271.

|Gassendi’s attacks on the Meditations.|

97. If the orthodox of the age were not yet prepared for a doctrine

which seemed so favourable at least to natural religion as the

immateriality of the soul, it may be readily supposed, that Gassendi,

like Hobbes, had imbibed too much of the Epicurean theory to acquiesce

in the spiritualising principles of his adversary. In a sportive

style, he addresses him, _O anima!_ and Descartes, replying more

angrily, retorts upon him the name _O caro!_ which he frequently

repeats. Though we may lament such unhappy efforts at wit in these

great men, the names do not ill represent the spiritual and carnal

philosophies; the school that produced Leibnitz, Kant, and Stewart,

contrasted with that of Hobbes, Condillac, and Cabanis.

|Superiority of Descartes.|

98. It was a matter of course that the vulnerable passages of the six

Meditations would not escape the spear of so skilful an antagonist as

Gassendi. But many of his objections appear to be little more than

cavils; and upon the whole, Descartes leaves me with the impression of

his great superiority in metaphysical acuteness. It was indeed

impossible that men should agree, who persisted in using a different

definition of the important word, _idea_; and the same source of

interminable controversy has flowed ever since for their disciples.

Gassendi adopting the scholastic maxim, “Nothing is in the

understanding, which has not been in the sense,” carried it so much

farther than those from whom it came that he denied anything to be an

idea but what was imagined by the mind. Descartes repeatedly desired

both him and Hobbes, whose philosophy was built on the same notion, to

remark that he meant by idea, whatever can be conceived by the

understanding, though not capable of being represented by the

imagination.[241] Thus we imagine a triangle, but we can only

conceive a figure of a thousand sides; we know its existence, and can

reason about its properties, but we have no image whatever in the

mind, by which we can distinguish such a polygon from one of a smaller

or greater number of sides. Hobbes, in answer to this, threw out a

paradox which he has not, at least in so unlimited a manner, repeated,

that by reason, that is, by the process of reasoning, we can infer

nothing as to the nature of things, but only as to their names.[242]

It is singular that a man conversant at least with the elements of

geometry should have fallen into this error. For it does not appear

that he meant to speak only of natural substances, as to which his

language might seem to be a bad expression of what was afterwards

clearly shown by Locke. That the understanding can conceive and reason

upon that which the imagination cannot delineate, is evident not only

from Descartes’ instance of a polygon, but more strikingly by the

whole theory of infinites, which are certainly somewhat more than bare

words, whatever assistance words may give us in explaining them to

others or to ourselves.[243]

[241] Par le nom d’idée, il veut seulement qu’on entende ici les

images des choses matérielles dépeintes en la fantaisie

corporelle; et cela étant supposé, il lui est aisé de montrer

qu’on ne peut avoir propre et véritable idée de Dieu ni d’un

ange; mais j’ai souvent averti, et principalement en celui là

même, que je prends le nom d’idée pour tout ce qui est conçu

immédiatement par l’esprit; en sorte que, lorsque je veux et que

je crains, parce que je conçois en même temps que je veux et que

je crains, ce vouloir et cette crainte sont mis par moi en nombre

des idées; et je me suis servi de ce mot, parce qu’il étoit déjà

communément reçu par les philosophes pour signifier les formes

des conceptions. de l’entendement divin, encore que nous ne

reconnoissions en Dieu aucune fantaisie ou imagination

corporelle, et je n’en savois point de plus propre. Et je pense

avoir assez expliqué l’idée de Dieu pour ceux qui veulent

concevoir les sens que je donne à mes paroles; mais pour ceux qui

s’attachent à les entendre autrement que je ne fais, je ne le

pourrais jamais assez. Vol. i., p. 404. This is in answer to

Hobbes; the objections of Hobbes, and Descartes’ replies, turn

very much on this primary difference between ideas and images,

which alone our countrymen could understand, and ideas as

intellections, conceptions, νοουμενα [nooumena], incapable of

being imagined, but not less certainly known and reasoned upon.

The French is a translation, but made by Clerselier under the eye

of Descartes, so that it may be quoted as an original.

[242] Que dirons nous maintenant si peut-être le raisonnement

n’est rien autre chose qu’un assemblage et un enchaînement de

noms par ce mot est? D’ou il s’ensuivroit que par la raison nous

ne concluons rien de tout touchant la nature des choses, mais

seulement touchant leurs appellations, c’est à dire que par elle

nous voyons simplement si nous assemblons bien ou mal les noms

des choses, selon les conventions que nous avons faites à notre

fantaisie touchant leurs significations, p. 476. Descartes merely

answered:--L’assemblage qui se fait dans le raisonnement n’est

pas celui des noms, mais bien celui des choses signifiées par les

noms; et je m’étonne que le contraire puisse venir en l’esprit de

personne. Descartes treated Hobbes, whom he did not esteem, with

less attention than his other correspondents. Hobbes could not

understand what have been called ideas of reflection, such as

fear, and thought it was nothing more than the idea of the object

feared. “For what else is the fear of a lion,” he says, “than the

idea of this lion, and the effect which it produces in the heart,

which leads us to run away? But this running is not a thought; so

that nothing of thought exists in fear but the idea of the

object.” Descartes only replied, “it is self-evident that it is

not the same thing to see a lion and fear him, that it is to see

him only,” p. 483.

[243] I suspect, from what I have since read, that Hobbes had a

different, and what seems to me a very erroneous view of

infinite, or infinitesimal quantities in geometry. For he answers

the old sophism of Zeno, Quicquid dividi potest in partes

infinitas est infinitum, in a manner which does not meet the real

truth of the case: Dividi posse in partes infinitas nihil aliud

est quam dividi posse in partes _quotcunque quis velit_. Logica

sive Computatio, c. 5., p. 38 (edit. 1667).

|Stewart’s remarks on Descartes.|

99. Dugald Stewart has justly dwelt on the signal service rendered by

Descartes to psychological philosophy, by turning the mental vision

inward upon itself, and accustoming us to watch the operations of our

intellect, which, though employed upon ideas obtained through the

senses, are as distinguishable from them as the workman from his work.

He has given indeed to Descartes a very proud title, Father of the

experimental philosophy of the human mind, as if he were to man what

Bacon was to nature.[244] By patient observation of what

passed within him, by holding his soul as it were an object in a

microscope, which is the only process of a good metaphysician, he

became habituated to throw away those integuments of sense which hide

us from ourselves. Stewart has censured him for the paradox, as he

calls it, that the _essence_ of mind consists in thinking, and

that of matter in extension. That the act of thinking is as

inseparable from the mind as extension is from matter, cannot indeed

be proved; since, as our thoughts are successive, it is not

inconceivable that there may be intervals of duration between them;

but it can hardly be reckoned a paradox. But whoever should be led by

the word essence to suppose that Descartes confounded the percipient

thinking substance, the Ego, upon whose bosom, like that of the ocean,

the waves of perception are raised by every breeze of sense, with the

perception itself, or even, what is scarcely more tenable, with the

reflective action, or thought; that he anticipated this strange

paradox of Hume in his earliest work, from which he silently withdrew

in his Essays, would not only do great injustice to one of the acutest

understandings that ever came to the subject, but overlook several

clear assertions of the distinction, especially in his answer to

Hobbes. “The thought,” he says, “differs from that which thinks, as

the mode from the substance.”[245] And Stewart has in his earliest

work justly corrected Reid in this point as to the Cartesian

doctrine.[246]

[244] Dissertation on Progress of Philosophy. The word experiment

must be taken in the sense of observation. Stewart very early

took up his admiration for Descartes. “He was the first

philosopher who stated in a clear and satisfactory manner the

distinction between mind and matter, and who pointed out the

proper plan for studying the intellectual philosophy. It is

chiefly in consequence of his precise ideas with respect to this

distinction, that we may remark in all his metaphysical writings,

a perspicuity which is not observable in those of any of his

predecessors.” Elem. of Philos. of Human Mind, vol. i. (published

in 1792) note A. “When Descartes,” he says in the dissertation

before quoted, “established it as a general principle that

_nothing conceivable by the power of imagination could throw any

light on the operations of thought_, a principle which I consider

as exclusively his own, he laid the foundations of the

experimental philosophy of the human mind. That the same truth

had been previously perceived more or less distinctly by Bacon

and others, appears probable from the general complexion of their

speculations; but which of them has expressed it with equal

precision, or laid it down as a fundamental maxim in their

logic?” The words which I have put in italics seem too vaguely

and not very clearly expressed, nor am I aware that they are

borne out in their literal sense, by any position of Descartes;

nor do I apprehend the allusion to Bacon. But it is certain that

Descartes, and still more his disciples Arnauld and Malebranche,

take better care to distinguish what can be imagined from what

can be conceived or understood, than any of the school of

Gassendi in this or other countries. One of the great merits of

Descartes as a metaphysical writer, not unconnected with this, is

that he is generally careful to avoid figurative language in

speaking of mental operations, wherein he has much the advantage

over Locke.

[245] Vol. i., p. 470. Arnauld objected, in a letter to

Descartes, Comment se peut il faire que la pensée constitue

l’essence de l’esprit, puisque l’esprit est une substance, et que

la pensée semble n’en être qu’un mode? Descartes replied that

thought in general, la pensée, ou la nature que pense, in which

he placed the essence of the soul, was very different from such

or such particular acts of thinking, vol. vi., p. 153-160.

[246] Philosophy of Human Mind, vol. i., note A. See the

Principia, § 63.

|Paradoxes of Descartes.|

100. Several singular positions which have led to an undue

depreciation of Descartes in general as a philosopher, occur in his

metaphysical writings. Such was his denial of thought, and, as is

commonly said, sensation to brutes, which he seems to have founded on

the mechanism of the bodily organs, a cause sufficient, in his

opinion, to explain all the phænomena of the motions of animals, and

to obviate the difficulty of assigning to them immaterial souls;[247]

his rejection of final causes in the explanation of nature, as

far above our comprehension, and unnecessary to those who had the

internal proof of God’s existence; his still more paradoxical tenet

that the truth of geometrical theorems, and every other axiom of

intuitive certainty, depended upon the will of God; a notion that

seems to be a relic of his original scepticism, but which he

pertinaciously defends throughout his letters.[248] From remarkable

errors, men of original and independent genius are rarely exempt;

Descartes had pulled down an edifice constructed by the labours of

near two thousand years, with great reason in many respects, yet

perhaps with too unlimited a disregard of his predecessors; it was his

destiny, as it had been theirs, to be sometimes refuted and

depreciated in his turn. But the single fact of his having first

established, both in philosophical and popular belief, the

immateriality of the soul, were we even to forget the other great

accessions which he made to psychology, would declare the influence he

has had on human opinion. From this immateriality, however, he did not

derive the tenet of its immortality. He was justly contented to say

that from the intrinsic difference between mind and body, the

dissolution of the one could not necessarily take away the existence

of the other, but that it was for God to determine whether it should

continue to exist; and this determination, as he thought, could only

be learned from his revealed will. The more powerful arguments,

according to general apprehension, which reason affords for the

sentient being of the soul after death, did not belong to the

metaphysical philosophy of Descartes, and would never have been very

satisfactory to his mind. He says, in one of his letters, that “laying

aside what faith assures us of, he owns that it is more easy to make

conjectures for our own advantage and entertain promising hopes, than

to feel any confidence in their accomplishment.”[249]

[247] It is a common opinion that Descartes denied all life and

sensibility to brutes. But this seems not so clear. Il faut

remarquer, he says in a letter to More, where he has been arguing

against the existence in brutes of any thinking principle, que je

parle de la pensée, non de la vie, ou du sentiment; car je n’ôte

la vie à aucun animal, ne la faisant consister que dans la seule

chaleur du cœur. Je ne leur refuse pas même le sentiment autant

qu’il dépend des organes du corps, vol. x., p. 208. In a longer

passage, if he does not express himself very clearly, he admits

passions in brutes, and it seems impossible that he could have

ascribed passions to what has no sensation. Much of what he here

says is very good. Bien que Montaigne et Charron aient dit, qu’il

y a plus de différence d’homme à homme que d’homme à bête, il

n’est toutefois jamais trouvé aucune bête si parfaite, qu’elle

ait usé de quelque signe pour faire entendre à d’autres animaux

quelque chose que n’eût point de rapport à ses passions; et il

n’y a point d’homme si imparfait qu’il n’en use; en sorte que

ceux qui sont sourds et muets inventent des signes particuliers

par lesquels ils expriment leur pensées; ce qui me semble un très

fort argument pour prouver que ce qui fait que les bêtes ne

parlent point comme nous, est qu’elles n’ont aucune pensée, et

non point que les organes leur manquent. Et on ne peut dire

qu’elles parlent entre elles, mais que nous ne les entendons pas;

car _comme les chiens et quelques autres animaux nous expriment

leurs passions_, ils nous exprimeroient aussi bien leurs pensées

s’ils en avoient. Je sais bien que les bêtes font beaucoup de

choses mieux que nous, mais je ne m’en étonne pas; car cela même

sert à prouver qu’elles agissent naturellement, et par ressorts,

ainsi qu’un horloge; laquelle montre bien mieux l’heure qu’il

est, que notre jugement nous l’enseigne.... On peut seulement

dire que, bien que les bêtes ne fassent aucune action qui nous

assure qu’elles pensent, toutefois, à cause que les organes de

leurs corps ne sont pas fort differens des nôtres, on peut

conjecturer qu’il y a quelque pensée jointe à ces organes, ainsi

que nous experimentons en nous, bien que la leur soit beaucoup

moins parfaite; à quoi je n’ai rien à répondre, si non que si

elles pensoient aussi que nous, elles auroient une ame immortelle

aussi bien que nous; ce qui n’est pas vraisemblable, à cause

qu’il n’y a point de raison pour le croire de quelques animaux,

sans le croire de tous, et qu’il y en a plusieurs trop imparfaits

pour pouvoir croire cela d’eux, comme sont les huitres, les

éponges, &c. Vol. ix., p. 425. I do not see the meaning of une

ame immortelle in the last sentence; if the words had been une

ame immatérielle, it would be to the purpose. More, in a letter

to which this is a reply, had argued as if Descartes took brutes

for insensible machines, and combats the paradox with the

arguments which common sense furnishes. He would even have

preferred ascribing immortality to them, as many ancient

philosophers did. But surely Descartes, who did not acknowledge

any proofs of the immortality of the human soul to be valid,

except those founded on revelation, needed not to trouble himself

much about this difficulty.

[248] C’est en effet parler de Dieu comme d’un Jupiter ou d’un

Saturne, et l’assujettir au Styx et aux destinées, que de dire

que ces vérités sont indépendantes de lui. Ne craignez point, je

vous prie, d’assurer et de publier partout que c’est Dieu qui a

établi ces lois en la nature, ainsi qu’un roi établit les lois en

son royaume. Vol. vi., p. 109. He argues as strenuously the same

point in p. 132 and p. 307.

[249] Vol. ix., p. 369.

|His just notion of definitions.|

101. Descartes was perhaps the first who saw that definitions of

words, already as clear as they can be made, are nugatory or

impenetrable. This alone would distinguish his philosophy from that of

the Aristotelians, who had wearied and confused themselves for twenty

centuries with unintelligible endeavours to grasp by definition what

refuses to be defined. “Mr Locke,” says Stewart, “claims this

improvement as entirely his own, but the merit of it unquestionably

belongs to Descartes, although it must be owned that he has not always

sufficiently attended to it in his researches.”[250] A still more

decisive passage to this effect, than that referred to by Stewart in

the Principia will be found in the posthumous dialogue on the Search

after Truth. It is objected by one of the interlocutors, as it had

actually been by Gassendi, that, to prove his existence by the act of

thinking, he should first know what existence and what thought is. “I

agree with you,” the representative of Descartes replies, “that it is

necessary to know what doubt is, and what thought is, before we can be

fully persuaded of this reasoning; I doubt, therefore I am, or what is

the same, I think, therefore I am. But do not imagine that for this

purpose you must torture your mind to find out the next genus, or the

essential differences, as the logicians talk, and so compose a regular

definition. Leave this to such as teach or dispute in the schools. But

whoever will examine things by himself, and judge of them according to

his understanding, cannot be so senseless as not to see clearly, when

he pays attention, what doubting, thinking, being, are, and as to have

any need to learn their distinctions. Besides, there are things which

we render more obscure, in attempting to define them, because, as they

are very simple and very clear, we cannot know and comprehend them

better than by themselves. And it should be reckoned among the

chief errors that can be committed in science for men to fancy that

they can define that which they can only conceive, and distinguish

what is clear in it from what is obscure, while they do not see the

difference between that which must be defined before it is understood

and that which can be fully known by itself. Now, among things which

can thus be clearly known by themselves, we must put doubting,

thinking, being. For I do not believe any one ever existed so stupid

as to need to know what being is before he could affirm that he is;

and it is the same of thought and doubt. Nor can he learn these things

except by himself, nor be convinced of them but by his own experience,

and by that consciousness and inward witness which every man finds in

himself when he examines the subject. And as we should define

whiteness in vain to a man who can see nothing, while one can open his

eyes and see a white object requires no more, so to know what doubting

is, and what thinking is, it is only necessary to doubt and to

think.”[251] Nothing could more tend to cut short the verbal cavils of

the schoolmen, than this limitation of their favourite exercise,

definition. It is due, therefore, to Descartes, so often accused of

appropriating the discoveries of others, that we should establish his

right to one of the most important that the new logic has to boast.

[250] Dissertation, ubi, suprá, Stewart, in his Philosophical

Essays, note A, had censured Reid for assigning this remark to

Descartes and Locke, but without giving any better reason than

that it is found in a work written by Lord Stair; earlier,

certainly, than Locke, but not before Descartes. It may be

doubtful, as we shall see hereafter, whether Locke has not gone

beyond Descartes, or at least distinguished undefinable words

more strictly.

[251] Vol. xi., p. 369.

|His notion of substances.|

102. He seems, at one moment, to have been on the point of taking

another step very far in advance of his age. “Let us take,” he says,

“a piece of wax from the honey-comb; it retains some taste and smell,

it is hard, it is cold, it has a very marked colour, form, and size.

Approach it to the fire; it becomes liquid, warm, inodorous,

tasteless; its form and colour are changed, its size is increased.

Does the same wax remain after these changes? It must be allowed that

it does; no one doubts it, no one thinks otherwise. What was it then

that we so distinctly knew to exist in this piece of wax? Nothing

certainly that we observed by the senses, since all that the taste,

the smell, the sight, the touch reported to us has disappeared, and

still the same wax remains.” This something which endures under every

change of sensible qualities cannot be imagined; for the imagination

must represent some of these qualities, and none of them are essential

to the thing; it can only be conceived by the understanding.[252]

[252] Méditation Seconde, i. 256.

|Not quite correct.|

103. It may seem almost surprising to us, after the writings of Locke

and his followers on the one hand, and the chemist with his crucible

on the other, have chased these abstract substances of material

objects from their sanctuaries, that a man of such prodigious

acuteness and intense reflection as Descartes should not have remarked

that the identity of wax after its liquefaction is merely nominal, and

depending on arbitrary language, which in many cases gives new

appellations to the same aggregation of particles after a change of

their sensible qualities; and that all we call substances are but

aggregates of resisting moveable corpuscles, which by the laws of

nature are capable of affecting our senses differently, according to

the combinations they may enter into, and the changes they may

successively undergo. But if he had distinctly seen this, which I do

not apprehend that he did, it is not likely that he would have

divulged the discovery. He had already given alarm to the jealous

spirit of orthodoxy by what now appears to many so self-evident, that

they have treated the supposed paradox as a trifling with words, the

doctrine that colour, heat, smell, and other secondary qualities, or

accidents of bodies, do not exist in them, but in our own minds, and

are the effects of their intrinsic or primary qualities. It was the

the tenet of the schools that these were sensible realities, inherent

in bodies; and the church held as an article of faith, that the

substance of bread being withdrawn from the consecrated wafer, the

accidents of that substance remained as before, but independent, and

not inherent in any other. Arnauld raised this objection, which

Descartes endeavoured to repel by a new theory of transubstantiation;

but it always left a shade of suspicion, in the Catholic church of

Rome, on the orthodoxy of Cartesianism.

|His notions of intuitive truth.|

104. “The paramount and indisputable authority which, in all our

reasonings concerning the human mind, he ascribes to the evidence of

consciousness” is reckoned by Stewart among the great merits of

Descartes. It is certain that there are truths which we know, as it is

called, intuitively, that is, by the mind’s immediate inward glance.

And reasoning would be interminable, if it did not find its ultimate

limit in truths which it cannot prove. Gassendi imputed to Descartes,

that, in his fundamental enthymem, Cogito, ergo sum, he supposed a

knowledge of the major premise, Quod cogitat, est. But Descartes

replied that it was a great error to believe that our knowledge of

particular propositions must always be deduced from universals,

according to the rules of logic; whereas, on the contrary, it is by

means of our knowledge of particulars that we ascend to generals,

though it is true that we descend again from them to infer other

particular propositions.[253] It is probable that Gassendi did not

make this objection very seriously.

[253] Vol. ii., p. 305. See too the passage, quoted above, in his

posthumous dialogue.