[794] C. 12.

44. Sensation he defines to be “a modification of the soul in relation

to something which passes in the body to which she is united.” These

sensations we know by experience; it is idle to go about defining or

explaining them; this cannot be done by words. It is an error,

according to Malebranche, to believe that all men have like sensations

from the same objects. In this he goes farther than Pascal, who thinks

it probable that they have, while Malebranche holds it indubitable,

from the organs of men being constructed differently, that they do not

receive similar impressions; instancing music, some smells and

flavours, and many other things of the same kind. But it is obvious to

reply that he has argued from the exception to the rule; the great

majority of mankind agreeing as to musical sounds (which is the

strongest case that can be put against his paradox), and most other

sensations. That the sensations of different men, subject to such

exceptions, if not strictly alike, are, so to say, in a constant

ratio, seems as indisputable as any conclusion we can draw from their

testimony.

45. The second book of Malebranche’s treatise relates to the

imagination, and the errors connected with it. “The imagination

consists in the power of the mind to form images of objects by

producing a change in the fibres of that part of the brain, which may

be called principal because it corresponds with all parts of the body,

and is the place where the soul, if we may so speak, immediately

resides.” This he supposes to be where all the filaments of the brain

terminate; so difficult was it, especially in that age, for a

philosopher, who had the clearest perception of the soul’s

immateriality, to free himself from the analogies of extended presence

and material impulse. The imagination, he says, comprehends two

things; the action of the will and the obedience of the animal spirits

which trace images on the brain. The power of conception depends

partly upon the strength of those animal spirits, partly on the

qualities of the brain itself. For just as the size, the depth, and

the clearness of the lines in an engraving depend on the force with

which the graver acts, and on the obedience which the copper yields to

it, so the depth and clearness of the traces of the imagination depend

on the force of the animal spirits, and on the constitution of the

fibres of the brain; and it is the difference of these which occasions

almost the whole of that vast difference we find in the capacities of

men.

46. This arbitrary, though rather specious hypothesis, which, in the

present more advanced state of physiology, a philosopher might not in

all points reject, but would certainly not assume, is spread out by

Malebranche over a large part of his work, and especially the second

book. The delicacy of the fibres of the brain, he supposes, is one of

the chief causes of our not giving sufficient application to difficult

subjects. Women possess this delicacy, and hence have more

intelligence than men as to all sensible objects; but whatever is

abstract is to them incomprehensible. The fibres are soft in children,

and become stronger with age, the greatest perfection of the

understanding being between thirty and fifty; but with prejudiced men,

and especially when they are advanced in life, the hardness of the

cerebral fibre confirms them in error. For we can understand nothing

without attention, nor attend to it without having a strong image

in the brain, nor can that image be formed without a suppleness and

susceptibility of motion in the brain itself. It is, therefore, highly

useful to get the habit of thinking on all subjects, and thus to give

the brain a facility of motion analogous to that of the fingers in

playing on a musical instrument. And this habit is best acquired by

seeking truth in difficult things while we are young, because it is

then that the fibres are most easily bent in all directions.[795]

[795] L. ii., c. 1.

47. This hypothesis, carried so far as it has been by Malebranche,

goes very great lengths in asserting not merely a connection between

the cerebral motions and the operations of the mind, but something

like a subordination of the latter to a plastic power in the animal

spirits of the brain. For if the differences in the intellectual

powers of mankind, and also, as he afterwards maintains, in their

moral emotions, are to be accounted for by mere bodily configuration

as their regulating cause, little more than a naked individuality of

consciousness seems to be left to the immaterial principle. No one,

however, whether he were staggered by this difficulty or not, had a

more decided conviction of the essential distinction between mind and

matter than this disciple of Descartes. The soul, he says, does not

become body, nor the body soul, by their union. Each substance remains

as it is, the soul incapable of extension and motion, the body

incapable of thought and desire. All the alliance between soul and

body, which is known to us, consists in a natural and mutual

correspondence of the thoughts of the former with the traces on the

brain, and of its emotions with the traces of the animal spirits. As

soon as the soul receives new ideas, new traces are imprinted on the

brain; and as soon as external objects imprint new traces, the soul

receives new ideas. Not that it contemplates these traces, for it has

no knowledge of them; nor that the traces contain the ideas, since

they have no relation to them; nor that the soul receives her ideas

from the traces, for it is inconceivable that the soul should receive

anything from the body, and become more enlightened, as some

philosophers (meaning Gassendi) express it, by turning itself towards

the phantasms in the brain. Thus, also, when the soul wills that the

arm should move, the arm moves, though she does not even know what

else is necessary for its motion; and thus, when the animal spirits

are put into movement, the soul is disturbed, though she does not even

know that there are animal spirits in the body.

48. These remarks of Malebranche it is important to familiarise to our

minds; and those who reflect upon them will neither fall into the

gross materialism to which many physiologists appear prone, nor, on

the other hand, out of fear of allowing too much to the bodily organs,

reject any sufficient proof that may be adduced for the relation

between the cerebral system and the intellectual processes. These

opposite errors are by no means uncommon in the present age. But,

without expressing an opinion on that peculiar hypothesis which is

generally called phrenology, we might ask whether it is not quite as

conceivable that a certain state of portions of the brain may be the

antecedent condition of memory or imagination, as that a certain state

of nervous filaments may be, what we know it is, an invariable

antecedent of sensation. In neither instance can there be any

resemblance or proper representation of the organic motion transferred

to the soul; nor ought we to employ, even in metaphor, the analogies

of impulse or communication. But we have two phenomena, between which,

by the constitution of our human nature, and probably by that of the

very lowest animals, there is a perpetual harmony and concomitance; an

ultimate fact, according to the present state of our faculties, which

may, in some senses, be called mysterious, inasmuch as we can neither

fully apprehend its final causes, nor all the conditions of its

operation, but one which seems not to involve any appearance of

contradiction, and should therefore not lead us into the useless

perplexity of seeking a solution that is almost evidently beyond our

reach.

49. The association of ideas is far more extensively developed by

Malebranche in this second book than by any of the old writers, not

even, I think, with the exception of Hobbes; though he is too fond of

mixing the psychological facts which experience furnishes with his

precarious, however plausible, theory of cerebral traces. Many of his

remarks are acute and valuable. Thus, he observes that writers who

make use of many new terms in science, under the notion of being more

intelligible, are often not understood at all, whatever care they may

take to define their words. We grant in theory their right to do this;

but nature resists. The new words, having no ideas previously

associated with them, fall out of the reader’s mind, except in

mathematics, where they can be rendered evident by diagrams. In all

this part, Malebranche expatiates on the excessive deference shown to

authority, which, because it is great in religion, we suppose equally

conclusive in philosophy, and on the waste of time which mere reading

of many books entails; experience, he says, having always shown that

those who have studied most are the very persons who have led the

world into the greatest errors. The whole of the chapters on this

subject is worth perusal.

50. In another part of this second book, Malebranche has opened a new

and fertile vein, which he is far from having exhausted, on what he

calls the contagiousness of a powerful imagination. Minds of this

character, he observes, rule those which are feebler in conception:

they give them by degrees their own habit, they impress their own

type; and as men of strong imagination are themselves for the most

part very unreasonable, their brains being cut up, as it were, by deep

traces, which leave no room for anything else, no source of human

error is more dangerous than this contagiousness of their disorder.

This he explains, in his favourite physiology, by a certain natural

sympathy between the cerebral fibres of different men, which being

wanting in anyone with whom we converse, it is vain to expect that he

will enter into our views, and we must look for a more sympathetic

tissue elsewhere.

51. The moral observations of Malebranche are worth more than these

hypotheses with which they are mingled. Men of powerful imagination

express themselves with force and vivacity, though not always in the

most natural manner, and often with great animation of gesture; they

deal with subjects that excite sensible images, and from all this they

acquire a great power of persuasion. This is exercised especially over

persons in subordinate relations; and thus children, servants, or

courtiers adopt the opinions of their superiors. Even in religion,

nations have been found to take up the doctrines of their rulers, as

has been seen in England. In certain authors, who influence our minds

without any weight of argument, this despotism of a strong imagination

is exercised, which he particularly illustrates by the examples of

Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. The contagious power of imagination

is also manifest in the credulity of mankind as to apparitions and

witchcraft; and he observes that where witches are burned, there is

generally a great number of them, while, since some parliaments have

ceased to punish for sorcery, the offence has diminished within their

jurisdiction.

52. The application which these striking and original views will bear,

spreads far into the regions of moral philosophy, in the largest sense

of that word. It is needless to dwell upon, and idle to cavil at the

physiological theories to which Malebranche has had recourse. False

let them be, what is derived from the experience of human nature will

always be true. No one general phenomenon in the intercommunity of

mankind with each other is more worthy to be remembered, or more

evident to an observing eye, than this contagiousness, as Malebranche

phrases it, of a powerful imagination, especially when assisted by any

circumstances that secure and augment its influence. The history of

every popular delusion, and even the petty events of every day in

private life, are witnesses to its power.

53. The third book is entitled, Of the Understanding or Pure Spirit

(l’Esprit Pur). By the pure understanding he means the faculty of the

soul to know the reality of certain things without the aid of images

in the brain. And he warns the reader that the inquiry will be found

dry and obscure. The essence of the soul, he says, following his

Cartesian theory, consists in thinking, as that of matter does in

extension; will, imagination, memory, and the like, are modifications

of thought or forms of the soul, as water, wood, or fire are

modifications of matter. This sort of expression has been adopted by

our metaphysicians of the Scots school in preference to the ideas of

reflection, as these operations are called by Locke. But by the word

thought (pensée) he does not mean these modifications, but the soul or

thinking principle absolutely, capable of all these modifications, as

extension is neither round nor square, though capable of either form.

The power of volition, and, by parity of reasoning we may add, of

thinking, is inseparable from the soul, but not the acts of volition

or thinking themselves; as a body is always movable though it be not

always in motion.

54. In this book it does not seem that Malebranche has been very

successful in distinguishing the ideas of pure intellect from those

which the senses or imagination present to us; nor do we clearly see

what he means by the former, except those of existence and a few more.

But he now hastens to his peculiar hypothesis as to the mode of

perception. By ideas he understands the immediate object of the soul,

which all the world, he supposes, will agree not to be the same with

the external object of sense. Ideas are real existences; for they have

properties, and represent very different things; but nothing can have

no property. How then do they enter into the mind, or become present

to it? Is it, as the Aristotelians hold, by means of species

transmitted from the external objects? Or are they produced

instantaneously by some faculty of the soul? Or have they been created

and posited, as it were, in the soul, when it began to exist? Or does

God produce them in us whenever we think or perceive? Or does the soul

contain in herself in some transcendent manner whatever is in the

sensible world? These hypotheses of elder philosophers, some of which

are not quite intelligibly distinct from each other, Malebranche

having successively refuted, comes to what he considers the only

possible alternative--namely, that the soul is united to an

all-perfect Being, in whom all that belongs to his creatures is

contained. Besides the exclusion of every other supposition which, by

his sorites he conceives himself to have given, he subjoins several

direct arguments in favour of his own theory, but in general so

obscure and full of arbitrary assumption that they cannot be stated in

this brief sketch.[796]

[796] L. iii., c. 6.

55. The mysticism of this eminent man displays itself throughout this

part of his treatise, but rarely leading him into that figurative and

unmeaning language from which the inferior class of enthusiasts are

never free. His philosophy which has hitherto appeared so sceptical,

assumes now the character of intense irresistible conviction. The

scepticism of Malebranche is merely ancillary to his mysticism. His

philosophy, if we may use so quaint a description of it, is

subjectivity leading objectivity in chains. He seems to triumph in his

restoration of the inner man to his pristine greatness, by subduing

those false traitors and rebels, the nerves and brain, to whom, since

the great lapse of Adam, his posterity had been in thrall. It has been

justly remarked by Brown, that in the writings of Malebranche, as in

all theological metaphysicians of the catholic church, we perceive the

commanding influence of Augustin.[797] From him, rather than, in the

first instance, from Plato or Plotinus, it may be suspected that

Malebranche, who was not very learned in ancient philosophy, derived

the manifest tinge of Platonism that, mingling with his warm

admiration of Descartes, has rendered him a link between two famous

systems, not very harmonious in their spirit and turn of reasoning.

But his genius more clear, or at least disciplined in a more accurate

logic than that of Augustin, taught him to dissent from that father by

denying objective reality to eternal truths, such as that two and two

are equal to four; descending thus one step from unintelligible

mysticism.

[797] Philosophy of the Human Mind, Lecture xxx. Brown’s own

position, that “the idea _is_ the mind,” seems to me as

paradoxical, in expression at least, as anything in Malebranche.

56. “Let us repose,” he concludes, “in this tenet, that God is the

intelligible world, or the place of spirits, like as the material

world is the place of bodies; that it is from his power they receive

all their modifications; that it is in his wisdom they find all their

ideas; and that it is by his love they feel all their well-regulated

emotions. And since his power and his wisdom and his love are but

himself, let us believe with St. Paul, that he is not far from each of

us, and that in him we live and move, and have our being.” But

sometimes Malebranche does not content himself with these fine

effusions of piety. His theism, as has often been the case with

mystical writers, expands till it becomes as it were dark with

excessive light, and almost vanishes in his own effulgence. He has

passages that approach very closely to the pantheism of Jordano Bruno

and Spinosa; one especially, wherein he vindicates the Cartesian

argument for a being of necessary existence in a strain which perhaps

renders that argument less incomprehensible, but certainly cannot be

said, in any legitimate sense, to establish the existence of a

Deity.[798]

[798] L. iii. c. 8.

57. It is from the effect which the invention of so original and

striking an hypothesis, and one that raises such magnificent

conceptions of the union between the Deity and the human soul, would

produce on a man of an elevated and contemplative genius, that we must

account for Malebranche’s forgetfulness of much that he has

judiciously said in part of his treatise, on the limitation of our

faculties and the imperfect knowledge we can attain as to our

intellectual nature. For, if we should admit that ideas are

substances, and not accidents of the thinking spirit, it would

still be doubtful whether he has wholly enumerated, or conclusively

refuted, the possible hypotheses as to their existence in the mind.

And his more direct reasonings labour under the same difficulty from

the manifest incapacity of our understandings to do more than form

conjectures and dim notions of what we can so imperfectly bring before

them.

58. The fourth and fifth books of the Recherche de la Vérité treat of

the natural inclinations and passions, and of the errors which spring

from those sources. These books are various and discursive, and very

characteristic of the author’s mind; abounding with a mystical

theology, which extends to an absolute negation of secondary causes,

as well as with poignant satire on the follies of mankind. In every

part of his treatise, but especially in these books, Malebranche

pursues with unsparing ridicule two classes, the men of learning, and

the men of the world. With Aristotle and the whole school of his

disciples he has an inveterate quarrel, and omits no occasion of

holding them forth to contempt. This seems to have been in a great

measure warranted by their dogmatism, their bigotry, their

pertinacious resistance to modern science, especially to the Cartesian

philosophy, which Malebranche in general followed. “Let them,” he

exclaims, “prove, if they can, that Aristotle, or any of themselves,

has deduced one truth in physical philosophy from any principle

peculiar to himself, and we will promise never to speak of him but in

eulogy.”[799] But, until this gauntlet should be taken up, he thought

himself at liberty to use very different language. “The works of the

Stagyrite,” he observes, “are so obscure and full of indefinite words,

that we have a colour for ascribing to him the most opposite opinions.

In fact, we make him say what we please, because he says very little,

though with much parade; just as children fancy bells to say anything,

because they make a great noise, and in reality say nothing at all.”

[799] L. iv., c. 3.

59. But such philosophers are not the only class of the learned he

depreciates. Those who pass their time in gazing through telescopes,

and distribute provinces in the moon to their friends, those who pore

over worthless books, such as the Rabbinical and other Oriental

writers, or compose folio volumes on the animals mentioned in

Scripture, while they can hardly tell what are found in their own

province, those who accumulate quotations to inform us not of truth,

but of what other men have taken for truth, are exposed to his sharp,

but doubtless exaggerated and unreasonable ridicule. Malebranche, like

many men of genius, was much too intolerant of what might give

pleasure to other men, and too narrow in his measure of utility. He

seems to think little valuable in human learning but metaphysics and

algebra.[800] From the learned he passes to the great, and after

enumerating the circumstances which obstruct their perception of

truth, comes to the blunt conclusion that men “much raised above the

rest by rank, dignity, or wealth, or whose minds are occupied in

gaining these advantages, are remarkably subject to error, and hardly

capable of discerning any truths which lie a little out of the common

way.”[801]

[800] It is rather amusing to find that, while lamenting the want

of a review of books, he predicts that we shall never see one, on

account of the prejudice of mankind in favour of authors. The

prophecy was falsified almost at the time. On regarde

ordinairement les auteurs comme des hommes rares et

extraordinaires et beaucoup élevés au-dessus des autres; on les

révère donc au lieu de les mépriser et de les punir. Ainsi il n’y

a guères d’apparence que les hommes érigent jamais un tribunal

pour examiner et pour condamner tous les livres, qui ne font que

corrompre la raison, c. 8.

La plupart des livres de certains savans ne sont fabriqués qu’à

coups de dictionnaires, et ils n’ont guères lû que les tables des

livres qu’ils citent, ou quelques lieux communs, ramassés de

différens auteurs. On n’oseroit entrer d’avantage dans le détail

de ces choses, ni en donner des exemples, de peur de choquer des

personnes aussi fières et aussi bilieuses que sont ces faux

savans; car on ne prend pas plaisir à se faire injurier en Grec

et en Arabe.

[801] C. 9.

60. The sixth and last book announces a method of directing our

pursuit of truth, by which we may avoid the many errors to which our

understandings are liable. It promises to give them all the perfection

of which our nature is capable, by prescribing the rules we should

invariably observe. But it must, I think, be confessed that there is

less originality in this method than we might expect. We find,

however, many acute and useful, if not always novel, observations on

the conduct of the understanding, and it may be reckoned among the

books which would supply materials for what is still wanting to

philosophical literature, an ample and useful logic. We are so

frequently inattentive, he observes, especially to the pure ideas of

the understanding, that all resources should be employed to fix our

thoughts. And for this purpose we may make use of the passions, the

senses, or the imagination, but the second with less danger than the

first, and the third than the second. Geometrical figures he ranges

under the aids supplied to the imagination rather than to the senses.

He dwells much at length on the utility of geometry in fixing our

attention, and of algebra in compressing and arranging our thoughts.

All sciences, he well remarks, and I do not know that it had been said

before, which treat of things distinguishable by more or less in

quantity, and which consequently may be represented by extension, are

capable of illustration by diagrams. But these, he conceives, are

inapplicable to moral truths, though sure consequences may be derived

from them. Algebra, however, is far more useful in improving the

understanding than geometry, and is in fact, with its sister

arithmetic, the best means that we possess.[802] But as men like

better to exercise the imagination than the pure intellect, geometry

is the more favourite study of the two.

[802] L. vi., c. 4. All conceptions of abstract ideas, he justly

remarks in another place, are accompanied with some imagination,

though we are often not aware of it; because these ideas have no

natural images or traces associated with them, but such only as

the will of man or chance has given. Thus, in analysis, however

general the ideas, we use letters and signs, always associated

with the ideas of the things, though they are not really related,

and for this reason do not give us false and confused notions.

Hence, he thinks, the ideas of things which can only be perceived

by the understanding, may become associated with the traces on

the brain, l. v., c. 2. This is evidently as applicable to

language as it is to algebra.

Cudworth has a somewhat similar remark in his Immutable Morality,

that the cogitations we have of corporeal things are usually, in

his technical style, both noematical and phantasmatical together,

the one being as it were the soul, and the other the body of

them. “Whenever we think of a phantasmatical universal or

universalised phantasm, or a thing which we have no clear

intellection of (as for example of the nature of a rose in

general), there is a complication of something noematical and

something phantasmatical together; for phantasms themselves as

well as sensations are always individual things.” P. 143.

|Character of Malebranche.|

61. Malebranche may perhaps be thought to have occupied too much of

our attention at the expense of more popular writers. But for this

very reason, that the Recherche de la Vérité is not at present much

read, I have dwelt long on a treatise of so great celebrity in its own

age, and which, even more perhaps than the metaphysical writings of

Descartes, has influenced that department of philosophy. Malebranche

never loses sight of the great principle of the soul’s immateriality,

even in his long and rather hypothetical disquisitions on the

instrumentality of the brain in acts of thought; and his language is

far less objectionable on this subject than that of succeeding

philosophers. He is always consistent and clear in distinguishing the

soul itself from its modifications and properties. He knew well and

had deeply considered the application of mathematical and physical

science to the philosophy of the human mind. He is very copious and

diligent in illustration, and very clear in definition. His principal

errors, and the sources of them in his peculiar temperament, have

appeared in the course of these pages. And to these we may add his

maintaining some Cartesian paradoxes, such as the system of vortices,

and the want of sensation in brutes. The latter he deduced from the

immateriality of a thinking principle, supposing it incredible, though

he owns it had been the tenet of Augustin, that there could be an

immaterial spirit in the lower animals, and also from the

incompatibility of any unmerited suffering with the justice of

God.[803] Nor was Malebranche exempt from some prejudices of

scholastic theology; and though he generally took care to avoid its

technical language, is content to repel the objection to his denial of

all secondary causation from its making God the sole author of sin, by

saying that sin being a privation of righteousness, is negative, and

consequently requires no cause.

[803] This he had borrowed from a maxim of Augustin: sub justo

Deo quisquam nisi mereatur, miser esse non potest; whence, it

seems that father had inferred the imputation of original sin to

infants; a happy mode of escaping the difficulty.

|Compared with Pascal.|

62. Malebranche bears a striking resemblance to his great contemporary

Pascal, though they were not, I believe, in any personal relation to

each other, nor could either have availed himself of the other’s

writings. Both of ardent minds, endowed with strong imagination and

lively wit, sarcastic, severe, fearless, disdainful of popular opinion

and accredited reputations; both imbued with the notion of a vast

difference between the original and actual state of man, and thus

solving many phenomena of his being; both, in different modes and

degrees, sceptical, and rigorous in the exaction of proof; both

undervaluing all human knowledge beyond the regions of mathematics;

both of rigid strictness in morals, and a fervid enthusiastic piety.

But in Malebranche there is a less overpowering sense of religion; his

eye roams unblenched in the light, before which that of Pascal had

been veiled in awe; he is sustained by a less timid desire of truth,

by greater confidence in the inspirations that are breathed into his

mind; he is more quick in adopting a novel opinion, but less apt to

embrace a sophism in defence of an old one; he has less energy, but

more copiousness and variety.

|Arnauld on true and false ideas.|

63. Arnauld, who, though at first in personal friendship with

Malebranche, held no friendship in a balance with his rigid love of

truth, combated the chief points of the other’s theory in a treatise

on true and false ideas. This work I have never had the good fortune

to see; it appears to assail a leading principle of Malebranche, the

separate existence of ideas, as objects in the mind independent and

distinguishable from the sensation itself. Arnauld maintained, as Reid

and others have since done, that we do not perceive or feel ideas, but

real objects, and thus led the way to a school which has been called

that of Scotland, and has had a great popularity among our later

metaphysicians. It would require a critical examination of his work,

which I have not been able to make, to determine precisely what were

the opinions of this philosopher.[804]

[804] Brucker. Buhle. Reid’s Intellectual Powers.

64. The peculiar hypothesis of Malebranche, that we see all things in

God, was examined by Locke in a short piece, contained in the

collection of his works. It will readily be conceived that two

philosophers, one eminently mystical and endeavouring upon this highly

transcendental theme to grasp in his mind and express in his language

something beyond the faculties of man, the other as characteristically

averse to mystery, and slow to admit any thing without proof, would

have hardly any common ground even to fight upon. Locke, therefore,

does little else than complain that he cannot understand what

Malebranche has advanced; and most of his readers will probably find

themselves in the same position.

|Norris.|

65. He had, however, an English supporter of some celebrity in his own

age, Norris; a disciple, and one of the latest we have had, of the

Platonic school of Henry More. The principal metaphysical treatise of

Norris, his Essay on the Ideal World, was published in two parts, 1701

and 1702. It does not therefore come within our limits. Norris is more

thoroughly Platonic than Malebranche, to whom, however, he pays great

deference, and adopts his fundamental hypothesis on seeing all things

in God. He is a writer of fine genius, and a noble elevation of moral

sentiments, such as predisposes men for the Platonic schemes of

theosophy. He looked up to Augustin with as much veneration as to

Plato, and respected more, perhaps, than Malebranche, certainly more

than the generality of English writers, the theological metaphysicians

of the schools. With these he mingled some visions of a later

mysticism. But his reasonings will seldom bear a close scrutiny.

|Pascal.|

66. In the Thoughts of Pascal we find many striking remarks on the

logic of that science with which he was peculiarly conversant, and

upon the general foundations of certainty. He had reflected deeply

upon the sceptical objections to all human reasoning, and, though

sometimes out of a desire to elevate religious faith at its expense,

he seems to consider them unanswerable, he was too clear-headed to

believe them just. “Reason,” he says, “confounds the dogmatists, and

nature the sceptics.”[805] “We have an incapacity of demonstration,

which one cannot overcome; we have a conception of truth which the

others cannot disturb.”[806] He throws out a notion of a more complete

method of reasoning than that of geometry, wherein everything shall be

demonstrated, which, however, he holds to be unattainable;[807] and

perhaps on this account he might think the cavils of pyrrhonism

invincible by pure reason. But as he afterwards admits that we may

have a full certainty of propositions that cannot be demonstrated,

such as the infinity of number and space, and that such incapability

of direct proof is rather a perfection than a defect, this notion of a

greater completeness in evidence seems neither clear nor

consistent.[808]

[805] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 205. Il faut que chacun

prenne parti, et se range nécessairement ou au dogmatisme, ou au

pyrrhonisme; car qui penseroit demeurer neutre seroit pyrrhonien

par excellence; cette neutralité est l’essence du pyrrhonisme,

p. 204. I do not know that I understand this; is it not either a

self-evident proposition or a sophism?

[806] P. 208.

[807] Pensées de Pascal, part i., art. 2.

[808] Comme la cause qui les rend incapables de démonstration

n’est pas leur obscurité, mais au contraire leur extrême

évidence, ce manque de preuve n’est pas un défaut, mais plutôt

une perfection.

67. Geometry, Pascal observes, is almost the only subject, as

to which we find truths wherein all men agree. And one cause of this

is that geometers alone regard the true laws of demonstration. These

as enumerated by him are eight in number. 1. To define nothing which

cannot be expressed in clearer terms than those in which it is already

expressed. 2. To leave no obscure or equivocal terms undefined. 3. To

employ in the definition no terms not already known. 4. To omit

nothing in the principles from which we argue unless we are sure it is

granted. 5. To lay down no axiom which is not perfectly evident. 6. To

demonstrate nothing which is as clear already as we can make it. 7. To

prove everything in the least doubtful, by means of self-evident

axioms, or of propositions already demonstrated. 8. To substitute

mentally the definition instead of the thing defined. Of these rules,

he says, the first, fourth, and sixth are not absolutely necessary in

order to avoid error, but the other five are indispensable. Yet,

though they may be found in books of logic, none but the geometers

have paid any regard to them. The authors of these books seem not to

have entered into the spirit of their own precepts. All other rules

than those he has given are useless or mischievous; they contain, he

says, the whole art of demonstration.[809]

[809] Œuvres de Pascal, i., 66.

68. The reverence of Pascal, like that of Malebranche, for what is

established in religion does not extend to philosophy. We do not find

in them, as we may sometimes perceive in the present day, all sorts of

prejudices against the liberties of the human mind clustering

together, like a herd of bats, by an instinctive association. He has

the same idea as Bacon, that the ancients were properly the children

among mankind. Not only each man, he says, advances daily in science,

but all men collectively make a constant progress, so that all

generations of mankind during so many ages may be considered as one

man, always subsisting and always learning; and the old age of this

universal man is not to be sought in the period next to his birth, but

in that which is most removed from it. Those we call ancients were

truly novices in all things; and we who have added to all they knew

the experience of so many succeeding ages, have a better claim to that

antiquity which we revere in them. In this, with much ingenuity and

much truth, there is a certain mixture of fallacy, which I shall not

wait to point out.

69. The genius of Pascal was admirably fitted for acute observation on

the constitution of human nature, if he had not seen everything

through a refracting medium of religious prejudice. When this does not

interfere to bias his judgment, he abounds with fine remarks, though

always a little tending towards severity. One of the most useful and

original is the following: “When we would show anyone that he is

mistaken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the

subject, for his view of it is generally right on this side, and admit

to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this

acknowledgment that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only

inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case. For we are less

ashamed of not having seen the whole, than of being deceived in what

we do see; and this may perhaps arise from an impossibility of the

understanding’s being deceived in what it does see, just as the

perceptions of the senses, as such, must be always true.”[810]

[810] Id., p. 149. Though Pascal here says that the perceptions

of the senses are always true, we find the contrary asserted in

other passages; he is not uniformly consistent with himself.

|Spinosa’s ethics.|

70. The Cartesian philosophy has been supposed to have produced a

metaphysician very divergent in most of his theory from that school,

Benedict Spinosa. No treatise is written in a more rigidly geometrical

method than his Ethics. It rests on definitions and axioms, from which

the propositions are derived in close, brief, and usually perspicuous

demonstrations. The few explanations he has thought necessary are

contained in scholia. Thus a fabric is erected, astonishing and

bewildering in its entire effect, yet so regularly constructed, that

the reader must pause and return on his steps to discover an error in

the workmanship, while he cannot also but acknowledge the good faith

and intimate persuasion of having attained the truth, which the acute

and deep-reflecting author everywhere displays.

|Its general originality.|

71. Spinosa was born in 1632; we find by his correspondence with

Oldenburg, in 1661, that he had already developed his entire scheme,

and in that with De Vries in 1663, the propositions of the Ethics are

alluded to numerically, as we now read them.[811] It was therefore the

fruit of early meditation, at its fearlessness, its general disregard

of the slow process of observation, its unhesitating dogmatism, might

lead us to expect. In what degree he had availed himself of prior

writers is not evident; with Descartes and Lord Bacon he was familiar,

and from the former he had derived some leading tenets; but he

observes both in him and Bacon what he calls mistakes as to the first

cause and origin of things, their ignorance of the real nature of the

human mind, and of the true sources of error.[812] The pantheistic

theory of Jordano Bruno is not very remote from that of Spinosa; but

the rhapsodies of the Italian, who seldom aims at proof, can hardly

have supplied much to the subtle mind of the Jew of Amsterdam. Buhle

has given us an exposition of the Spinosistic theory.[813] But several

propositions in this I do not find in the author, and Buhle has at

least, without any necessity, entirely deviated from the arrangement

he found in the Ethics. This seems as unreasonable in a work so

rigorously systematic, as it would be in the elements of Euclid; and I

believe the following pages will prove more faithful to the text. But

it is no easy task to translate and abridge a writer of such

extraordinary conciseness as well as subtlety; nor is it probable that

my attempt will be intelligible to those who have not habituated

themselves to metaphysical inquiry.

[811] Spinosæ Opera Posthuma, p. 398-460.

[812] Cartes et Bacon tam longè a cognitione primæ causæ et

originis omnium rerum aberrarunt.... Veram naturam humanæ mentis

non cognoverunt ... veram causam erroris nunquam operati sunt.

[813] Hist. de la Philosophie, vol. iii., p. 440.

|View of his metaphysical theory.|

72. The first book or part of the Ethics is entitled, Concerning God,

and contains the entire theory of Spinosa. It may even be said that

this is found in a few of the first propositions; which being granted,

the rest could not easily be denied; presenting, as it does, little

more than new aspects of the former, or evident deductions from them.

Upon eight definitions and seven axioms reposes this philosophical

superstructure. A substance, by the third definition, is that, the

conception of which does not require the conception of anything else

as antecedent to it.[814] The attribute of a substance is whatever the

mind perceives to constitute its essence.[815] The mode of a substance

is its accident or affection, by means of which it is conceived.[816]

In the sixth definition he says: I understand by the name of God a

being absolutely infinite; that is, a substance consisting of infinite

attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence.

Whatever expresses an essence, and involves no contradiction, may be

predicated of an absolutely infinite being.[817] The most important of

the axioms are the following: From a given determinate cause the

effect necessarily follows; but if there be no determinate cause, no

effect can follow.--The knowledge of an effect depends upon the

knowledge of the cause, and includes it.--Things that have nothing in

common with each other cannot be understood by means of each other;

that is, the conception of one does not include that of the other.--A

true idea must agree with its object.[818]

[814] Per substantiam intelligo id quod in se est, et per se

concipitur; hoc est, id cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu

alterius rei, a quo formari debeat. The last words are omitted by

Spinosa in a letter to De Vries (p. 463), where he repeats this

definition.

[815] Per attributum intelligo id quod intellectus de substantia

percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens.

[816] Per modum intelligo substantiæ affectiones, sive id, quod

in alio est, per quod etiam concipitur.

[817] Per Deum intelligo Ens absolutè infinitum, hoc est,

substantiam constantem infinitis attributis, quorum unumquodque

æternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit. Dico absolutè infinitum,

non autem in suo genere; quicquid enim in suo genere tantum

infinitum est, infinita de eo attributa negare possumus; quod

autem absolutè infinitum est, ad ejus essentiam pertinet,

quicquid essentiam exprimit et negationem nullam involvit.

[818] Axiomata, iii., iv., v., and vi.

73. Spinosa proceeds to his demonstrations upon the basis of these

assumptions alone. Two substances, having different attributes, have

nothing in common with each other; and hence one cannot be the cause

of the other, since one may be conceived without involving the

conception of the other; but an effect cannot be conceived without

involving the knowledge of the cause.[819] It seems to be in this

fourth axiom, and in the proposition grounded upon it, that the

fundamental fallacy lurks. The relation between a cause and effect is

surely something different from our perfect comprehension of it, or

indeed from our having any knowledge of it at all; much less can the

contrary assertion be deemed axiomatic. But if we should concede this

postulate, it might perhaps be very difficult to resist the subsequent

proofs, so ingeniously and with such geometrical rigour are they

arranged.

[819] Prop. ii. and iii.

74. Two or more things cannot be distinguished, except by the

diversity of their attributes, or by that of their modes. For there is

nothing out of ourselves except substances and their modes. But there

cannot be two substances of the same attribute, since there would be

no means of distinguishing them except their modes or affections; and

every substance, being prior in order of time to its modes, may be

considered independently of them; hence, two such substances could not

be distinguished at all. One substance therefore cannot be the cause

of another; for they cannot have the same attribute, that is, anything

in common with one another.[820] Every substance therefore is

self-caused; that is, its essence implies its existence.[821] It is

also necessarily infinite, for it would otherwise be terminated by

some other of the same nature and necessarily existing; but two

substances cannot have the same attribute, and therefore cannot both

possess necessary existence.[822] The more reality or existence any

being possesses, the more attributes are to be ascribed to it. This he

says appears by the definition of an attribute.[823] The proof

however, is surely not manifest, nor do we clearly apprehend what he

meant by degrees of reality or existence. But of this theorem he was

very proud. I look upon the demonstration, he says in a letter, as

capital (palmariam) that the more attributes we ascribe to any being,

the more we are compelled to acknowledge its existence; that is, the

more we conceive it as true and not a mere chimera.[824] And from this

he derived the real existence of God, though the former proof seems

collateral to it. God, or a substance consisting of infinite

attributes, each expressing an eternal and infinite power, necessarily

exists.[825] For such an essence involves existence. And, besides

this, if anything does not exist, a cause must be given for its

non-existence, since this requires one as much as existence

itself.[826] The cause may be either in the nature of the thing, as,

e. gr. a square circle cannot exist by the circle’s nature, or in

something extrinsic. But neither of these can prevent the existence of

God. The later propositions in Spinosa are chiefly obvious corollaries

from the definitions and a few of the first propositions which contain

the whole theory, which he proceeds to expand.

[820] Prop. vi.

[821] Prop. vii.

[822] Prop. viii.

[823] Prop. ix.

[824] P. 463. This is in the letter to De Vries, above quoted.

[825] Prop. xi.

[826] If twenty men exist, neither more nor less, an extrinsic

reason must be given for this precise number, since the

definition of a man does not involve it. Prop. viii., Schol. ii.

75. There can be no substance but God. Whatever is, is in God, and

nothing can be conceived without God.[827] For he is the sole

substance, and modes cannot be conceived without a substance; but

besides substance and mode nothing exists. God is not corporeal, but

body is a mode of God, and therefore uncreated. God is the permanent,

but not the transient cause of all things.[828] He is the efficient

cause of their essence, as well as their existence, since otherwise

their essence might be conceived without God, which has been shown to

be absurd. Thus, particular things are but the affections of God’s

attributes, or modes in which they are determinately expressed.[829]

[827] Prop. xiv.

[828] Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, sed non transiens.

Prop. xviii.

[829] Prop. xxv. and Coroll.

76. This pantheistic scheme is the fruitful mother of many paradoxes,

upon which Spinosa proceeds to dwell. There is no contingency, but

everything is determined by the necessity of the divine nature, both

as to its existence and operation; nor could anything be produced by

God otherwise than as it is.[830] His power is the same as his

essence; for he is the necessary cause both of himself and of all

things, and it is as impossible for us to conceive him not to act as

not to exist.[831] God, considered in the attributes of his infinite

substance, is the same as nature, that is, _natura naturans_; but

nature, in another sense, or _natura naturata_, expresses but the

modes under which the divine attributes appear.[832] And intelligence,

considered in act, even though infinite, should be referred to

_natura naturata_; for intelligence, in this sense, is but a mode

of thinking, which can only be conceived by means of our conception of

thinking in the abstract, that is, by an attribute of God.[833] The

faculty of thinking, as distinguished from the act, as also those of

desiring, loving, and the rest, Spinosa explicitly denies to exist at

all.

[830] Prop. xxix.-xxxiii.

[831] Prop. xxxix. and part ii. prop. iii. Schol.

[832] Schol. in prop. xxix.

[833] Prop. xxxi. The atheism of Spinosa is manifest from this

single proposition.

77. In an appendix to the first chapter, De Deo, Spinosa controverts

what he calls the prejudice about final causes. Men are born

ignorant of causes, but merely conscious of their own appetites, by

which they desire their own good. Hence, they only care for the final

cause of their own actions or those of others, and inquire no farther

when they are satisfied about these. And finding many things in

themselves and in nature, serving as means to a certain good, which

things they know not to be provided by themselves, they have believed

that someone has provided them, arguing from the analogy of the means

they in other instances themselves employ. Hence, they have imagined

gods, and these gods they suppose to consult the good of men in order

to be worshipped by them, and have devised every mode of superstitious

devotion to ensure the favour of these divinities. And finding in the

midst of so many beneficial things in nature not a few of an opposite

effect, they have ascribed them to the anger of the gods, on account

of the neglect of men to worship them; nor has experience of

calamities, falling alike on the pious and impious, cured them of this

belief, choosing rather to acknowledge their ignorance of the reason

why good and evil are thus distributed, than to give up their theory.

Spinosa thinks the hypothesis of final causes refuted by his

proposition, that all things happen by eternal necessity. Moreover, if

God were to act for an end, he must desire something which he wants;

for it is acknowledged by theologians that he acts for his own sake,

and not for the sake of things created.

78. Men having satisfied themselves that all things were created for

them, have invented names to distinguish that as good which tends to

their benefit; and believing themselves free, have gotten the notions

of right and wrong, praise and dispraise. And when they can easily

apprehend and recollect the relations of things, they call them well

ordered, if not ill ordered; and then say that God created all things

in order, as if order were anything, except in regard to our

imagination of it; and thus they ascribe imagination to God himself,

unless they mean that he created things for the sake of imagining

them.

79. It has been sometimes doubted whether the Spinosistic philosophy

excludes altogether an infinite intelligence. That it rejected a moral

providence or creative mind is manifest in every proposition. His

Deity could at most be but a cold, passive intelligence, lost to our

understandings and feelings in its metaphysical infinity. It was not,

however, in fact, so much as this. It is true that in a few passages

we find what seems at first a dim recognition of the fundamental

principle of theism. In one of his letters to Oldenburg, he asserts an

infinite power of thinking, which, considered in its infinity,

embraces all nature as its object, and of which the thoughts proceed

according to the order of nature, being its correlative ideas.[834]

But afterwards he rejected the term, power of thinking, altogether.

The first proposition of the second part of the Ethics, or that

entitled, On the Mind, runs thus: Thought is an attribute of God, or,

God is a thinking being. Yet this, when we look at the demonstration,

vanishes in an abstraction destructive of personality.[835] And, in

fact, we cannot reflect at all on the propositions already laid down

by Spinosa, without perceiving that they annihilate every possible

hypothesis in which the being of a God can be intelligibly stated.

[834] Statuo dari in natura potentiam infinitam cogitandi quæ

quatenus infinita in se continet totam naturam objectivè, et

cujus cogitationes procedunt eodem modo ac natura, ejus nimirum

edictum, p. 441. In another place he says, perhaps at some

expense of his usual candour. Agnosco interim, id quod summam

mihi præbet satisfactionem et mentis tranquillitatem, cuncta

potentia Entis summè perfecti et ejus immutabili ita fieri

decreto, p. 498. What follows is in the same strain. But Spinosa

had wrought himself up, like Bruno, to a mystical personification

of his infinite unity.

[835] Singulares cogitationes, sive hæc et illa cogitatio, modi

sunt, qui Dei naturam certo et determinto modo exprimunt.

Competit ergo Dei attributum, cujus conceptum singulares omnes

cogitationes involvunt, per quod etiam concipiuntur. Est igitur

cogitatio unum ex infinitis Dei attributis quod Dei æternam et

infinitam essentiam exprimit, sive Deus est res cogitans.

80. The second book of the Ethics begins, like the first, with

definitions and axioms. Body he defines to be a certain and

determinate mode expressing the essence of God, considered as

extended. The essence of anything he defines to be that, according to

the affirmation or negation of which the thing exists or otherwise. An

idea is a conception which the mind forms as a thinking being. And he

prefers to say conception than perception, because the latter seems to

imply the presence of an object. In the third axiom he says: Modes of

thinking, such as love, desire, or whatever name we may give to the

affections of the mind, cannot exist without an idea of their object,

but an idea may exist with no other mode of thinking.[836] And

in the fifth: We perceive no singular things besides bodies and modes

of thinking; thus distinguishing, like Locke, between ideas of

sensation and of reflection.

[836] Modi cogitandi, ut amor, cupiditas, vel quocunque

nomine affectus animi insigniuntur, non dantur nisi in eodem

individuo detur idea rei amatæ, desideratæ, &c. At idea dari

potest, quamvis nullus alius detur cogitandi modus.

81. Extension, by the second proposition, is an attribute of God as

well as thought. As it follows from the infinite extension of God,

that all bodies are portions of his substance, inasmuch as they cannot

be conceived without it, so all particular acts of intelligence are

portions of God’s infinite intelligence, and thus all things are in

him. Man is not a substance, but something which is in God, and cannot

be conceived without him; that is, an affection or mode of the divine

substance expressing its nature in a determinate manner.[837] The

human mind is not a substance, but an idea constitutes its actual

being, and it must be the idea of an existing thing.[838] In this he

plainly loses sight of the percipient in the perception; but it was

the inevitable result of the fundamental sophisms of Spinosa to

annihilate personal consciousness. The human mind, he afterwards

asserts, is part of the infinite intellect of God; and when we say,

the mind perceives this or that, it is only that God, not as infinite,

but so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, has such

or such ideas.[839]

[837] Prop. x.

[838] Quod actuale mentis humanæ esse constituit, nihil aliud est

quam idea rei alicujus singularis actu existentis. This is an

anticipation of what we find in Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature,

the negation of a substance, or Ego, to which paradox no one can

come except a professed metaphysician.

[839] Prop. xi., coroll.

82. The object of the human mind is body actually existing.[840] He

proceeds to explain the connection of the human body with the mind,

and the association of ideas. But in all this advancing always

synthetically and by demonstration, he becomes frequently obscure if

not sophistical. The idea of the human mind is in God, and is united

to the mind itself in the same manner as the latter is to the

body.[841] The obscurity and subtlety of this proposition are not

relieved by the demonstration; but in some of these passages we may

observe a singular approximation to the theory of Malebranche. Both,

though with very different tenets on the highest subjects, had been

trained in the same school; and if Spinosa had brought himself to

acknowledge the personal distinctness of the Supreme Being from his

intelligent creation, he might have passed for one of those mystical

theosophists, who were not averse to an objective pantheism.

[840] Prop. xiii.

[841] Mentis humanæ datur etiam in Deo idea, sive cognitio, quæ

in Deo eodem modo sequitur, et ad Deum odem modo refertur, ac

idea sive cognitio corporis humani. Prop. xx. Hæc mentis idea

eodem modo unita est menti, ac ipsa mens unita est corpori.

83. The mind does not know itself, except so far as it receives ideas

of the affections of the body.[842] But these ideas of sensation do

not give an adequate knowledge of an external body, nor of the human

body itself.[843] The mind therefore has but an inadequate and

confused knowledge of anything, so long as it judges only by

fortuitous perceptions; but may attain one clear and distinct by

internal reflection and comparison.[844] No positive idea can be

called false; for there can be no such idea without God, and all ideas

in God are true, that is, correspond with their object.[845] Falsity

therefore consists in that privation of truth, which arises from

inadequate ideas. An adequate idea he has defined to be one which

contains no incompatibility, without regard to the reality of its

supposed correlative object.

[842] Prop. xxiii.

[843] Prop. xxv.

[844] Schol., Prop. xxix.

[845] Prop. xxxii., xxxiii., xxxv.

84. All bodies agree in some things, or have something in common: of

these all men have adequate ideas;[846] and this is the origin of what

are called common notions, which all men possess; as extension,

duration, number. But to explain the nature of universals, Spinosa

observes, that the human body can only form at the same time a certain

number of distinct images; if this number be exceeded, they become

confused; and as the mind perceives distinctly just so many images as

can be formed in the body, when these are confused, the mind will also

perceive them confusedly, and will comprehend them under one

attribute, as Man, Horse, Dog; the mind perceiving a number of such

images, but not their differences of stature, colours and the like.

And these notions will not be alike in all minds, varying according to

the frequency with which the parts of the complex image have occurred.

Thus those who have contemplated most frequently the erect figure of

man will think of him as a perpendicular animal, others as two-legged,

others as unfeathered, others as rational. Hence, so many disputes

among philosophers who have tried to explain natural things by mere

images.[847]

[846] Prop. viii.

[847] Schol., prop. xl.

85. Thus we form universal ideas; first, by singulars, represented by

the senses confusedly, imperfectly and disorderly; secondly, by signs,

that is, by associating the remembrance of things with words; both of

which he calls imagination, or primi generis cognitio; thirdly, by

what he calls reason, or secundi generis cognitio; and fourthly, by

intuitive knowledge, or tertii generis cognitio.[848] Knowledge of the

first kind is the only source of error; the second and third being

necessarily true.[849] These alone enable us to distinguish truth from

falsehood. Reason contemplates things not as contingent but necessary;

and whoever has a true idea, knows certainly that his idea is true.

Every idea of a singular existing thing involves the eternal and

infinite being of God. For nothing can be conceived without God, and

the ideas of all things, having God for their cause, considered under

the attribute of which they are modes, must involve the conception of

the attribute, that is, the being of God.[850]

[848] Schol. ii., prop. xl.

[849] Prop. xli., xlii, et sequent.

[850] Prop. xlv.

86. It is highly necessary to distinguish images, ideas, and words,

which many confound. Those who think ideas consists in images which

they perceive, fancy that ideas of which we can form no image are but

arbitrary figments. They look at ideas, as pictures on a tablet, and

hence do not understand that an idea, as such, involves an affirmation

or negation. And those who confound words with ideas, fancy they can

will something contrary to what they perceive, because they can affirm

or deny it in words. But these prejudices will be laid aside by him

who reflects that thought does not involve the conception of

extension; and therefore that an idea, being a mode of thought,

neither consists in images nor in words, the essence of which consists

in corporeal motions, not involving the conception of thought.[851]

[851] Schol., prop. xlix.

87. The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and

infinite being of God. But men cannot imagine God as they can bodies,

and hence have not that clear perception of his being which they have

of that of bodies, and have also perplexed themselves by associating

the word God with sensible images, which it is hard to avoid. This is

the chief source of all error, that men do not apply names to things

rightly. For they do not err in their own minds, but in this

application; as men who cast up wrong see different numbers in their

mind from those in the true result.[852]

[852] Prop. xlvii. Atque hinc pleræque oriuntur controversiæ,

nempe, quia homines mentem suam non recte explicant, vel quia

alterius mentem male interpretantur.

88. The mind has no free will, but is determined by a cause, which

itself is determined by some other, and so for ever. For the mind is

but a mode of thinking and, therefore cannot be the free cause of its

own actions. Nor has it any absolute faculty of loving, desiring,

understanding; these being only metaphysical abstractions.[853] Will

and understanding are one and the same thing; and volitions are only

affirmations or negations, each of which belongs to the essence of the

idea affirmed or denied.[854] In this there seems to be not only an

extraordinary deviation from common language, but an absence of any

meaning which, to my apprehension at least, is capable of being given

to his words. Yet we have seen something of the same kind said by

Malebranche; and it will also be found in a recently published work of

Cudworth,[855] a writer certainly uninfluenced by either of these, so

that it may be suspected of having some older authority.

[853] Prop. xlviii.

[854] Prop. xlix.

[855] See Cudworth’s Treatise on Free will (1838), p. 20, where

the will and understanding are purposely, and, I think, very

erroneously confounded.

|Spinosa’s theory of action and passion.|

89. In the third part of this treatise, Spinosa comes to the

consideration of the passions. Most who have written on moral

subjects, he says, have rather treated man as something out of nature,

or as a kind of imperium in imperio, than as part of the general

order. They have conceived him to enjoy a power of disturbing that

order by his own determination, and ascribed his weakness and

inconstancy not to the necessary laws of the system, but to some

strange defect in himself, which they cease not to lament, deride, or

execrate. But the acts of mankind, and the passions from which they

proceed, are in reality but links in the series, and proceed in

harmony with the common laws of universal nature.

90. We are said to act when anything takes place within us, or

without us, for which we are an adequate cause; that is, when it may

be explained by means of our own nature alone. We are said to be acted

upon, when anything takes place within us which cannot wholly be

explained by our own nature. The affections of the body which increase

or diminish its power of action, and the ideas of those affections, he

denominates passions (affectus). Neither the body can determine the

mind to thinking, nor can the mind determine the body to motion or

rest. For all that takes place in body must be caused by God,

considered under his attribute of extension, and all that takes place

in mind must be caused by God under his attribute of thinking. The

mind and body are but one thing, considered under different

attributes; the order of action and passion in the body being the same

in nature with that of action and passion in the mind. But men, though

ignorant how far the natural powers of the body reach, ascribe its

operations to the determination of the mind, veiling their ignorance

in specious words. For if they alledge that the body cannot act

without the mind, it may be answered that the mind cannot think till

it is impelled by the body, nor are the volitions of the mind anything

else than its appetites, which are modified by the body.

91. All things endeavoured to continue in their actual being; this

endeavour being nothing else than their essence, which causes them to

be, until some exterior cause destroys their being. The mind is

conscious of its own endeavour to continue as it is, which is, in

other words, the appetite that seeks self-preservation; what the mind

is thus conscious of seeking, it judges to be good, and not inversely.

Many things increase or diminish the power of action in the body, and

all such things have a corresponding effect on the power of thinking

in the mind. Thus, it undergoes many changes, and passes through

different stages of more or less perfect power of thinking. Joy is the

name of a passion, in which the mind passes to a greater perfection or

power of thinking; grief, one in which it passes to a less. Spinosa,

in the rest of this book, deduces all the passions from these two and

from desire; but as the development of his theory is rather long, and

we have already seen that its basis is not quite intelligible, it will

be unnecessary to dwell longer upon the subject. His analysis of the

passions may be compared with that of Hobbes.

|Character of Spinosism.|

92. Such is the metaphysical theory of Spinosa, in as concise a form

as I found myself able to derive it from his Ethics. It is a

remarkable proof, and his moral system will furnish another, how an

undeviating adherence to strict reasoning may lead a man of great

acuteness and sincerity from the paths of truth. Spinosa was truly,

what Voltaire has with rather less justice called Clarke, a reasoning

machine. A few leading theorems, too hastily taken up as axiomatic,

were sufficient to make him sacrifice, with no compromise or

hesitation, not only every principle of religion and moral right, but

the clear intuitive notions of common sense. If there are two axioms

more indisputable than any others, they are that ourselves exist, and

that our existence is exclusive of any other being. Yet both these are

lost in the pantheism of Spinosa, as they had always been in that

delusive reverie of the imagination. In asserting that the being of

the human mind consists in the idea of an existing thing presented to

it, this subtle metaphysician fell into the error of the school which

he most disdained, as deriving all knowledge from perception, that of

the Aristotelians. And, extending this confusion of consciousness with

perception to the infinite substance, or substratum of particular

ideas, he was led to deny it the self, or conscious personality,

without which the name of Deity can only be given in a sense deceptive

of the careless reader, and inconsistent with the use of language. It

was an equally legitimate consequence of his original sophism to deny

all moral agency, in the sense usually received, to the human mind,

and even, as we have seen, to confound action and passion themselves,

in all but name, as mere phenomena in the eternal sequence of things.

93. It was one great error of Spinosa to entertain too arrogant a

notion of the human faculties, in which, by dint of his own subtle

demonstrations, he pretended to show a capacity of adequately

comprehending the nature of what he denominated God. And this was

accompanied by a rigid dogmatism, no one proposition being stated with

hesitation, by a disregard of experience, at least as the basis of

reasoning, and by an uniform preference of the synthetic method. Most

of those, he says, who have turned their minds to those subjects have

fallen into error, because they have not begun with the contemplation

of the divine nature, which both in itself and in order of knowledge

is first, but with sensible things, which ought to have been

last. Hence, he seems to have reckoned Bacon, and even Descartes,

mistaken in their methods.

94. All pantheism must have originated in overstraining the infinity

of the divine attributes till the moral part of religion was

annihilated in its metaphysics. It was the corruption, or rather, if

we may venture the phrase, the suicide of theism; nor could this

strange theory have arisen, except where we know it did arise, among

those who had elevated their conceptions above the vulgar polytheism

that surrounded them to a sense of the unity of the Divine nature.

95. Spinosa does not essentially differ from the pantheists of old. He

conceived, as they had done, that the infinity of God required the

exclusion of all other substance; that he was infinite _ab omni

parte_, and not only in certain senses. And probably the loose and

hyperbolical tenets of the schoolmen, derived from ancient philosophy,

ascribing, as a matter of course, a metaphysical infinity to all the

divine attributes, might appear to sanction those primary positions,

from which Spinosa, unfettered by religion, even in outward

profession, went on “sounding his dim and perilous track” to the

paradoxes that have thrown discredit on his name. He had certainly

built much on the notion that the essence or definition of the Deity

involved his actuality or existence, to which Descartes had given

vogue.

96. Notwithstanding the leading errors of this philosopher, his clear

and acute understanding perceived many things which baffle ordinary

minds. Thus, he well saw and well stated the immateriality of thought.

Oldenburg, in one of his letters, had demurred to this, and reminded

Spinosa that it was still controverted whether thought might not be a

bodily motion. “Be it so,” replied the other, “though I am far from

admitting it; but at least you must allow that extension, so far as

extension, is not the same as thought.”[856] It is from inattention to

this simple truth that all materialism, as it has been called, has

sprung. Its advocates confound the union between thinking and

extension or matter (be it, if they will, an indissoluble one) with

the identity of the two, which is absurd and inconceivable. “Body,”

says Spinosa in one of his definitions, “is not terminated by

thinking, nor thinking by body.”[857] This also does not ill express

the fundamental difference of matter and mind; there is an

incommensurability about them, which prevents one from bounding the

other, because they can never be placed in juxtaposition.

[856] At ais, forte cogitatio est actus corporeus. Sit, quamvis

nullus concedam; sed hoc unum non negabis, extensionem, quoad

extensionem, non esse cogitationem. Epist. iv.

[857] Corpus dicitur finitum, quia aliud semper majus concipimus.

Sic cogitatio alia cogitatione terminatur. At corpus non

terminatur cogitatione, nec cogitatio corpore.

|Glanvil’s Scepsis Scientifica.|

97. England, about the æra of the Restoration, began to make a

struggle against the metaphysical creed of the Aristotelians, as well

as against their natural philosophy. A remarkable work, but one so

scarce as to be hardly known at all, except by name, was published by

Glanvil in 1661, with the title, the Vanity of Dogmatizing. A second

edition, in 1663, considerably altered, is entitled Scepsis

Scientifica.[858] This edition has a dedication to the Royal Society,

which comes in place of a fanciful preface, wherein he had expatiated

on the bodily and mental perfections of his protoplast, the father of

mankind.[859] But in proportion to the extravagant language he employs

to extol Adam before his lapse, is the depreciation of his unfortunate

posterity, not, as common among theologians, with respect to their

moral nature, but to their reasoning faculties. The scheme of

Glanvil’s book is to display the ignorance of man, and especially to

censure the Peripatetic philosophy of the schools. It is, he says,

captious and verbal, and yet does not adhere itself to any constant

sense of words, but huddles together insignificant terms, and

unintelligible definitions; it deals with controversies, and

seeks for no new discovery or physical truth. Nothing, he says, can be

demonstrated but when the contrary is impossible, and of this there

are not many instances. He launches into a strain of what may be

called scepticism, but answered his purpose in combating the dogmatic

spirit still unconquered in our academical schools. Glanvil had

studied the new philosophy, and speaks with ardent eulogy of “that

miracle of men, the illustrious Descartes.” Many, if not most, of his

own speculations are tinged with a Cartesian colouring. He was however

far more sceptical than Descartes, or even than Malebranche. Some

passages from so rare and so acute a work may deserve to be chosen,

both for their own sakes, and in order to display the revolution which

was at work in speculative philosophy.

[858] This Book, I believe, especially in the second edition, is

exceedingly scarce. The editors, however, of the Biographia

Britannica art. Glanvil, had seen it, and also Dugald Stewart.

The first edition, or Vanity of Dogmatizing, is in the Bodleian

Catalogue, and both are in the British Museum.

[859] Thus, among other extravagances worthy of the Talmud, he

says, “Adam needed no spectacles. The acuteness of his natural

optics (if conjecture may have credit), showed him much of the

celestial magnificence and bravery without a Galileo’s tube; and

it is most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much

of this upper world as we with all the advantages of art. It may

be it was as absurd even in the judgment of his senses, that the

sun and stars should be so very much less than this globe, as the

contrary seems in ours; and it is not unlikely that he had as

clear a perception of the earth’s motion as we have of its

quiescence.” p. 5, edit. 1661. In the second edition, he still

adheres to the hypothesis of intellectual degeneracy, but states

it with less of rhapsody.

98. “In the unions which we understand the extremes are reconciled by

interceding participations of natures, which have somewhat of either.

But body and spirit stand at such a distance in their essential

compositions, that to suppose an uniter of a middle construction, that

should partake of some of the qualities of both, is unwarranted by any

of our faculties, yea, most absonous to our reasons; since there is

not any the least affinity betwixt length, breadth, and thickness, and

apprehension, judgment, and discourse; the former of which are the

most immediate results, if not essentials of matter, the latter of

spirit.”[860]

[860] Scepsis Scientifica, p. 16. We have just seen something

similar in Spinosa.

99. “How is it, and by what art does it (the soul), read that such an

image or stroke in matter (whether that of her vehicle or of the

brain, the case is the same), signifies such an object? Did we learn

an alphabet in our embryo state? And how comes it to pass that we are

not aware of any such congenite apprehensions? We know what we know;

but do we know any more? That by diversity of motions we should spell

out figures, distances, magnitudes, colours, things not resembled by

them, we must attribute to some secret deduction. But what this

deduction should be, or by what medium this knowledge is advanced, is

as dark as ignorance. One that hath not the knowledge of letters may

see the figures, but comprehends not the meaning included in them; an

infant may hear the sounds and see the motion of the lips, but hath no

conception conveyed by them, not knowing what they are intended to

signify. So our souls, though they might have perceived the motions

and images themselves by simple sense, yet, without some implicit

inference, it seems inconceivable how by that means they should

apprehend their anti-types. The striking of divers filaments of the

brain cannot well be supposed to represent distances, except some kind

of inference be allotted us in our faculties; the concession of which

will only stead us as a refuge for ignorance, when we shall meet what

we would seem to shun.”[861] Glanvil, in this forcible statement of

the heterogeneity of sensations, with the objects that suggest them,

has but trod in the steps of the whole Cartesian school, but he did

not mix this up with those crude notions that halt half way between

immaterialism and its opposite; and afterwards well exposes the

theories of accounting for the memory by means of images in the brain,

which, in various ways, Aristotle, Descartes, Digby, Gassendi, and

Hobbes had propounded, and which we have seen so favourite a

speculation of Malebranche.

[861] P. 22, 23.

100. It would be easy to quote many paragraphs of uncommon vivacity

and acuteness from this forgotten treatise. The style is eminently

spirited and eloquent; a little too figurative, like that of Locke,

but less blameably, because Glanvil is rather destroying than building

up. Every bold and original thought of others finds a willing

reception in Glanvil’s mind, and his confident, impetuous style gives

them an air of novelty which makes them pass for his own. He stands

forward as a mutineer against authority, against educational

prejudice, against reverence for antiquity.[862] No one thinks more

intrepidly for himself; and it is probable that, even in what

seems mere superstition, he had been rather misled by some paradoxical

hypothesis of his own ardent genius, than by slavishly treading in the

steps of others.[863]

[862] “Now, if we inquire the reason why the mathematics and

mechanic arts have so much got the start in growth of other

sciences, we shall find it probably resolved into this as one

considerable cause, that their progress hath not been retarded by

that reverential awe of former discoveries, which hath been so

great a hindrance to theorical improvements. For, as the noble

Lord Verulam hath noted, we have a mistaken apprehension of

antiquity, calling that so which in truth is the world’s non-age.

Antiquitas sæculi est juventus mundi. ‘Twas this vain idolising

of authors which gave birth to that silly vanity of impertinent

citations, and inducing authority in things neither requiring nor

deserving it.--Methinks it is a pitiful piece of knowledge that

can be learned from an index, and a poor ambition to be rich in

the inventory of another’s treasure. To boast a memory, the most

that these pedants can aim at, is but a humble ostentation.”

P. 104.

[863] “That the fancy of one man should bind the thoughts of

another, and determine them to their particular objects, will be

thought impossible; which yet, if we look deeply into the matter,

wants not its probability.” P. 146. He dwells more on this, but

the passage is too long to extract. It is remarkable that he

supposes a subtle æther (like that of the modern Mesmerists), to

be the medium of communication in such cases; and had also a

notion of explaining these sympathies by help of the anima mundi,

or mundane spirit.

101. Glanvil sometimes quotes Lord Bacon, but he seems to have had the

ambition of contending with the Novum Organum in some of its brilliant

passages, and has really developed the doctrine of _idols_ with

uncommon penetration, as well as force of language. “Our initial age

is like the melted wax to the prepared seal, capable of any impression

from the documents of our teachers. The half-moon or cross are

indifferent to its reception; and we may with equal facility write on

this _rasa tabula_ Turk or Christian. To determine this indifferency

our first task is to learn the creed of our country, and our next to

maintain it. We seldom examine our receptions, more than children do

their catechisms, but by a careless greediness swallow all at a

venture. For implicit faith is a virtue, where orthodoxy is the

object. Some will not be at the trouble of a trial, others are scared

from attempting it. If we do, ’tis not by a sun-beam or ray of light,

but by a flame that is kindled by our affections, and fed by the fuel

of our anticipations. And thus, like the hermit, we think the sun

shines nowhere but in our cell, and all the world to be darkness but

ourselves. We judge truth to be circumscribed by the confines of our

belief and the doctrines we were brought up in.”[864] Few books, I

think, are more deserving of being reprinted than the Scepsis

Scientifica of Glanvil.

[864] P. 95.

|His Plus Ultra.|

102. Another bold and able attack was made on the ancient philosophy

by Glanvil in his “Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of

Knowledge since the days of Aristotle, 1668.” His tone is peremptory

and imposing, animated and intrepid, such as befits a warrior in

literature. Yet he was rather acute by nature, than deeply versed in

learning, and talks of Vieta and Descarte’s algebra so as to show he

had little knowledge of the science, or of what they had done for

it.[865] His animosity against Aristotle is unreasonable, and he was

plainly an incompetent judge of that philosopher’s general deserts. Of

Bacon and Boyle he speaks with just eulogy. Nothing can be more free

and bold than Glanvil’s assertion of the privilege of judging, for

himself in religion;[866] and he had doubtless a perfect right to

believe in witchcraft.

[865] Plus Ultra, p. 24 and 33.

[866] P. 142.

|Dalgarno.|

103. George Dalgarno, a native of Aberdeen, conceived, and, as it

seemed to him, carried into effect the idea of an universal language

and character. His Ara Signorum, vulgo Character Universalis et Lingua

Philosophica, Lond., 1661, is dedicated to Charles II. in this

philosophical character, which must have been as great a mystery to

the sovereign as to his subjects. This dedication is followed by a

royal proclamation in good English, inviting all to study this useful

art, which had been recommended by divers learned men, Wilkins,

Wallis, Ward, and others, “judging it to be of singular use for

facilitating the matter of communication and intercourse between

people of different languages.” The scheme of Dalgarno is

fundamentally bad, in that he assumes himself, or the authors he

follows, to have given a complete distribution of all things and

ideas; after which his language is only an artificial scheme of

symbols. It is evident that until objects are truly classified, a

representative method of signs can only rivet and perpetuate error. We

have but to look at his tabular synopsis to see that his ignorance of

physics, in the largest sense of the word, renders his scheme

deficient; and he has also committed the error of adopting the

combinations of the ordinary alphabet, with a little help from the

Greek, which, even with his slender knowledge of species, soon leave

him incapable of expressing them. But Dalgarno has several acute

remarks; and it deserves especially to be observed, that he

anticipated the famous discovery of the Dutch philologers, namely,

that all other parts of speech may be reduced to the noun,

dexterously, if not successfully, resolving the verb substantive into

an affirmative particle.[867]

[867] Tandem mihi affulsit clarior lux; accuratius enim

examinando omnium notionum analysin logicam, percepi nullam esse

particulam quæ non derivetur a nomine aliquo prædicamentali, et

omnes particulas esse vere casus seu modos notionum nominalium,

p. 120. He does not seem to have arrived at this conclusion by

etymological analysis, but by his own logical theories.

The verb-substantive, he says, is equivalent to _ita_. Thus,

Petrus est in domo, means, Petrus--ita--in domo. That is, it

expresses an idea of apposition or conformity between a subject

and predicate. This is a theory to which a man might be led by

the habit of considering propositions logically, and thus

reducing all verbs to the verb-substantive; and it is not

deficient, at least, in plausibility.

|Wilkins.|

104. Wilkins, bishop of Chester, one of the most ingenious men of his

age, published in 1668 his Essay towards a Philosophical Language,

which has this advantage over that of Dalgarno, that it abandons the

alphabet, and consequently admits of a greater variety of characters.

It is not a new language, but a more analytical scheme of characters

for English. Dalgarno seems to have known something of it, though he

was the first to publish, and glances at “a more difficult way of

writing English.” Wilkins also intimates that Dalgarno’s compendious

method would not succeed. His own has the same fault of a premature

classification of things; and it is very fortunate that neither of

these ingenious but presumptuous attempts to fasten down the

progressive powers of the human mind by the cramps of association had

the least success.[868]

[868] Dalgarno, many years afterwards, turned his attention to a

subject of no slight interest, even in mere philosophy, the

instruction of the deaf and dumb. His Didascalocophus is perhaps

the first attempt to found this on the analysis of language. But

it is not so philosophical as what has since been effected.

|Locke on human Understanding.|

|The merits.|

105. But from these partial and now very obscure endeavours of English

writers in metaphysical philosophy we come at length to the work that

has eclipsed every other, and given to such inquiries whatever

popularity they ever possessed, the Essay, of Locke on the human

Understanding. Neither the writings of Descartes, as I conceive, nor

perhaps those of Hobbes, so far as strictly metaphysical, had excited

much attention in England beyond the class of merely studious men. But

the Essay on Human Understanding was frequently reprinted within a few

years from its publication, and became the acknowledged code of

English philosophy.[869] The assaults it had to endure in the author’s

lifetime, being deemed to fail, were of service to its reputation; and

considerably more than half a century was afterwards to elapse before

any writer in our language (nor was the case very different in France,

after the patronage accorded to it by Voltaire) could with much chance

of success question any leading doctrine of its author. Several

circumstances no doubt conspired with its intrinsic excellence to

establish so paramount a rule in an age that boasted of peculiar

independence of thinking, and full of intelligent and inquisitive

spirits. The sympathy of an English public with Locke’s tenets as to

government and religion was among the chief of these; and the reaction

that took place in a large portion of the reading classes towards the

close of the eighteenth century turned in some measure the tide even

in metaphysical disquisition. It then became fashionable sometimes to

accuse Locke of preparing the way for scepticism; a charge which, if

it had been truly applicable to some of his opinions, ought rather to

have been made against the long line of earlier writers with whom he

held them in common; sometimes, with more pretence, to alledge that he

had conceded too much to materialism; sometimes to point out and

exaggerate other faults and errors of his Essay, till we have seemed

in danger of forgetting that it is perhaps the first, and still the

most complete chart of the human mind which has been laid down; the

most ample repertory of truths relating to our intellectual being; and

the one book which we are compelled to name as the first in

metaphysical science. Locke had not, it may be said, the luminous

perspicacity of language we find in Descartes, and, when he does not

soar too high, in Malebranche; but he had more judgment, more caution,

more patience, more freedom from paradox, and from the sources of

paradox, vanity and love of system, than either. We have no denial of

sensation to brutes, no reference of mathematical truths to the will

of God, no oscillation between the extremes of doubt and of

positiveness, no bewildering mysticism, no unintelligible

chaos of words. Certainly neither Gassendi nor even Hobbes could be

compared with him; and it might be asked of the admirers of later

philosophers, those of Berkeley, or Hume, or Hartley, or Reid, or

Stewart, or Brown, without naming any on the continent of Europe,

whether in the extent of their researches, or in the originality of

their discoveries, any of these names ought to stand on a level with

that of Locke. One of the greatest I have mentioned, and one, who

though candid towards Locke, had no prejudice whatever, in his favour,

has extolled the first two books of the Essay on Human Understanding,

which yet he deems in many respects inferior to the third and fourth,

as “a precious accession to the theory of the human mind; as the

richest contribution of well-observed and well-described facts which

was ever bequeathed by a single individual; and as the indisputable,

though not always acknowledged, source of some of the most refined

conclusions with respect to the intellectual phenomena, which have

been since brought to light by succeeding inquirers.”[870]

[869] It was abridged at Oxford, and used by some tutors as early

as 1695. But the heads of the university came afterwards to a

resolution to discourage the reading of it. Stillingfleet, among

many others, wrote against the Essay; and Locke, as is well

known, answered the bishop. I do not know that the latter makes

altogether so poor a figure as has been taken for granted; but

the defence of Locke will seem in most instances satisfactory.

Its success in public opinion contributed much to the renown of

his work; for Stillingfleet, though not at all conspicuous as a

philosopher, enjoyed a great deal of reputation, and the world

can seldom understand why a man who excels in one province of

literature should fail in another.

[870] Stewart’s Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia, part ii.

|Its defects.|

106. It would be an unnecessary prolixity to offer in this place an

analysis of so well-known a book as the Essay on the Human

Understanding. Few have turned their attention to metaphysical

inquiries without reading it. It has however no inconsiderable faults,

which, though much over-balanced, are not to be passed over in a

general eulogy. The style of Locke is wanting in philosophical

precision; it is a very fine model of English language; but too

idiomatic and colloquial, too indefinite and figurative, for the

abstruse subjects with which he has to deal. We miss in every page the

translucent simplicity of his great French predecessors. This seems to

have been owing, in a considerable degree, to an excessive desire of

popularising the subject, and shunning the technical pedantry which

had repelled the world from intellectual philosophy. Locke displays in

all his writings a respect which can hardly be too great, for men of

sound understanding unprejudiced by authority, mingled with a scorn,

perhaps a little exaggerated, of the gown-men or learned world; little

suspecting that the same appeal to the people, the same policy of

setting up equivocal words and loose notions, called the common sense

of mankind, to discomfit subtle reasoning, would afterwards be turned

against himself, as it was, very unfairly and unsparingly, by Reid and

Beattie. Hence he falls a little into a laxity of phrase, not unusual,

and not always important, in popular and practical discourse, but an

inevitable source of confusion in the very abstract speculations which

his Essay contains. And it may perhaps be suspected, without

disparagement to his great powers, that he did not always preserve the

utmost distinctness of conception, and was liable as almost every

other metaphysician has been, to be entangled in the ambiguities of

language.

|Origin of ideas, according to Locke.|

107. The leading doctrine of Locke, as is well known, is the

derivation of all our ideas from sensation and from reflection. The

former present no great difficulty; we know what is meant by the

expression; but he is not very clear or consistent about the latter.

He seems in general to limit the word to the various operations of our

own minds in thinking, believing, willing, and so forth. This, as has

been shown formerly, is taken from, or at least coincident with, the

theory of Gassendi in his Syntagma Philosophicum. It is highly

probable that Locke was acquainted with that work; if not immediately,

yet through the account of the Philosophy of Gassendi, published in

English by Dr. Charleton, in 1663, which I have not seen, or through

the excellent and copious abridgment of the Syntagma by Bernier. But

he does not strictly confine his ideas of reflection to this class.

Duration is certainly no mode of thinking; yet the idea of duration is

reckoned by Locke among those with which we are furnished by

reflection. The same may perhaps be said, though I do not know that he

expresses himself with equal clearness, as to his account of several

other ideas, which cannot be deduced from external sensation, nor yet

can be reckoned modifications or operations of the soul itself; such

as number, power, existence.

|Vague use of the word idea.|

108. Stewart has been so much struck by this indefiniteness, with

which the phrase “ideas of reflection” has been used in the Essay on

the Human Understanding, that he “does not think, notwithstanding some

casual expressions which may seem to favour the contrary supposition,

that Locke would have hesitated for a moment to admit, with Cudworth

and Price, that the understanding is the source of new ideas.”[871]

And though some might object that this is too much in opposition, not

to casual expressions, but to the whole tenor of Locke’s Essay, his

language concerning substance almost bears it out. Most of the

perplexity which has arisen on this subject, the combats of some

metaphysicians with Locke, the portentous errors into which others

have been led by want of attention to his language, may be referred to

the equivocal meaning of the word idea. The Cartesians understood by

this whatever is the object of thought, including an intellection as

well as an imagination. By an intellection they meant that which the

mind conceives to exist, and to be the subject of knowledge, though it

may be unimaginable and incomprehensible. Gassendi and Locke limit the

word idea to something which the mind sees and grasps as immediately

present to it. “That,” as Locke not very well expresses it “which the

mind is applied about while thinking being the ideas that are there.”

Hence, he speaks with some ridicule of “men who persuade themselves

that they have clear comprehensive ideas of infinity.” Such men can

hardly have existed; but it is by annexing the epithets clear and

comprehensive, that he shows the dispute to be merely verbal. For that

we know the existence of infinities as objectively real, and can

reason upon them, Locke would not have denied: and it is this

knowledge to which others gave the name of idea.

[871] Prelim. Dissertation.

109. The different manner in which this all-important word was

understood by philosophers is strikingly shown when they make use of

the same illustration. Arnauld, if he is author of L’Art de Penser,

mentions the idea of a chiliagon, or figure of 1,000 sides, as an

instance of the distinction between that which we imagine, and that

which we conceive or understand. Locke has employed the same instance

to exemplify the difference between clear and obscure ideas. According

to the former, we do not imagine a figure with 1,000 sides at all;

according to the latter, we form a confused image of it. We have an

idea of such a figure, it is agreed by both; but in the sense of

Arnauld, it is an idea of the understanding alone; in the sense of

Locke, it is an idea of sensation, framed, like other complex ideas,

by putting together those we have formerly received, though we may

never have seen the precise figure. That the word suggests to the mind

an image of a polygon with many sides is indubitable; but it is urged

by the Cartesians, that as we are wholly incapable of distinguishing

the exact number, we cannot be said to have, in Locke’s sense of the

word, any idea, even an indistinct one of a figure with 1,000 sides;

since all we do imagine is a polygon. And it is evident that in

geometry we do not reason from the properties of the image, but from

those of a figure which the understanding apprehends. Locke, however,

who generally preferred a popular meaning to one more metaphysically

exact, thought it enough to call this a confused idea. He was not I

believe, conversant with any but elementary geometry. Had he reflected

upon that which in his age had made such a wonderful beginning, or

even upon the fundamental principles of it, which might be found in

Euclid, the theory of infinitesimal quantities, he must, one would

suppose, have been more puzzled to apply his narrow definition of an

idea. For what image can we form of a differential, which can pretend

to represent it in any other sense than as _d x_ represents it,

by suggestion, not by resemblance?

110. The case is, however, much worse when Locke deviates, as in the

third and fourth books he constantly does, from this sense that he has

put on the word idea, and takes it either in the Cartesian meaning or

in one still more general and popular. Thus, in the excellent chapter

on the abuse of words, he insists upon the advantage of using none

without clear and distinct ideas; he who does not this “only making a

noise without any sense or signification.” If we combine this position

with that in the second book, that we have no clear and distinct idea

of a figure with 1,000 sides, it follows, with all the force of

syllogism, that we should not argue about a figure of 1,000 sides at

all, nor, by parity of reason, about many other things of far higher

importance. It will be found, I incline to think, that the large use

of the word idea for that about which we have some knowledge, without

limiting it to what can be imagined, pervades the third and fourth

books. Stewart has ingeniously conjectured that they were written

before the second, and probably before the mind of Locke had been much

turned to the psychological analysis which that contains. It is

however certain that in the Treatise upon the Conduct of the

Understanding, which was not published till after the Essay, he uses

the word idea with full as much latitude as in the third and fourth

books of the latter. We cannot, upon the whole, help admitting that

the story of a lady who, after the perusal of the Essay on the Human

Understanding, laid it down with a remark, that the book would

be perfectly charming were it not for the frequent recurrence of one

very hard word, idea, though told, possibly, in ridicule of the fair

philosopher, pretty well represents the state of mind in which many at

first have found themselves.

|An error as to geometrical figure.|

111. Locke, as I have just intimated seems to have possessed but a

slight knowledge of geometry; a science which, both from the clearness

of the illustrations it affords, and from its admitted efficacy in

rendering the logical powers acute and cautious, may be reckoned,

without excepting physiology, the most valuable of all to the

metaphysician. But it did not require any geometrical knowledge,

strictly so called, to avoid one material error into which he has

fallen; and which I mention the rather, because even Descartes, in one

place, has said something of the same kind, and I have met with it not

only in Norris very distinctly and positively, but, more or less, in

many or most of those who have treated of the metaphysics or abstract

principles of geometry. “I doubt not,” says Locke,[872] “but it will

be easily granted that the knowledge we have of mathematical truths is

not only certain but real knowledge, and not the bare empty vision of

vain insignificant chimeras of the brain; and yet if we well consider,

we shall find, that it is only of our own ideas. The mathematician

considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or circle

only as they are in idea in his own mind; for it is possible he never

found either of them existing mathematically, that is, precisely true,

in his life.... All the discourses of the mathematicians about the

squaring of a circle, conic sections, or any other part of

mathematics, concern not the existence of any of those figures; but

their demonstrations, which depend on their ideas, are the same,

whether there be any square or circle in the world or no.” And the

inference he draws from this is, that moral as well as mathematical

ideas being archetypes themselves, and so adequate and complete ideas,

all the agreement or disagreement which he shall find in them will

produce real knowledge, as well as in mathematical figures.

[872] B. iv., c. 8.

112. It is not perhaps necessary to inquire how far, upon the

hypothesis of Berkeley, this notion of mathematical figures, as mere

creations of the mind, could be sustained. But on the supposition of

the objectivity of space, as truly existing without us, which Locke

undoubtedly believed, it is certain that the passage just quoted is

entirely erroneous, and that it involves a confusion between the

geometrical figure itself and its delineation to the eye. A

geometrical figure is a portion of space contained in boundaries

determined by given relations. It exists in the infinite round about

us, as the statue exists in the block.[873] No one can doubt, if he

turns his mind to the subject, that every point in space is

equidistant, in all directions, from certain other points. Draw a line

through all these, and you have the circumference of a circle; but the

circle itself and its circumference exist before the latter is

delineated. The orbit of a planet is not a regular geometrical figure,

because certain forces disturb it. But this disturbance means only a

deviation from a line which exists really in space, and which the

planet would actually describe, if there were nothing in the universe

but itself and the centre of attraction. The expression therefore of

Locke, “whether there be any square or circle existing in the world or

no,” is highly inaccurate, the latter alternative being an absurdity.

All possible figures, and that “in number numberless,” exist

everywhere; nor can we evade the perplexities into which the geometry

of infinities throws our imagination, by considering them as mere

beings of reason, the creatures of the geometer, which I believe some

are half disposed to do, nor by substituting the vague and

unphilosophical notion of indefinitude for a positive objective

infinity.

[873] Michael Angelo has well conveyed this idea in four lines,

which I quote from Corniani.

Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto,

Che un marmo solo in se non circonscriva

Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva

La mano che obbedisce all’intelletto.

The geometer uses not the same obedient hand, but he equally

feels and perceives the reality of that figure which the broad

infinite around him comprehends _con suo soverchio_.

113. This distinction between ideas of mere sensation and those of

intellection, between what the mind comprehends, and what it conceives

without comprehending, is the point of divergence between the two

sects of psychology which still exist in the world. Nothing is in the

intellect which has not before been in the sense, said the

Aristotelian schoolmen. Every idea has its original in the senses,

repeated the disciple of Epicurus, Gassendi. Locke indeed, as Gassendi

had done before him, assigned another origin to one class of

ideas; but these were few in number, and in the next century two

writers of considerable influence, Hartley and Condillac, attempted to

resolve them all into sensation. The Cartesian school, a name rather

used for brevity, as a short denomination of all who, like Cudworth,

held the same tenets as to the nature of ideas, lost ground both in

France and England; nor had Leibnitz who was deemed an enemy to some

of our great English names, sufficient weight to restore it. In the

hands of some who followed in both countries, the worst phrases of

Locke were preferred to the best; whatever could be turned to the

account of pyrrhonism, materialism, or atheism, made a figure in the

Epicurean system of a popular philosophy. The names alluded to will

suggest themselves to the reader. The German metaphysicians from the

time of Kant deserve at least the credit of having successfully

withstood this coarse sensualism, though they may have borrowed much

that their disciples take for original, and added much that is hardly

better than what they have overthrown. The opposite philosophy to that

which never rises above sensible images is exposed to a danger of its

own; it is one which the infirmity of the human faculties renders

perpetually at hand; few there are who in reasoning on subjects where

we cannot attain what Locke has called “positive comprehensive ideas”

are secure from falling into mere nonsense and repugnancy. In that

part of physics which is simply conversant with quantity, this danger

is probably not great, but in all such inquiries as are sometimes

called transcendental, it has perpetually shipwrecked the adventurous

navigator.

|His notions as to the soul.|

114. In the language and probably the notions of Locke as to the

nature of the soul there is an indistinctness more worthy of the

Aristotelian schoolmen than of one conversant with the Cartesian

philosophy. “Bodies,” he says, “manifestly produce ideas in us by

impulse, the only way which we can conceive bodies to operate in. If

then external objects be not united to our minds, when they produce

ideas in it, and yet we perceive these original qualities in such of

them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion

must be thence continued by our nerves, or animal spirits, by some

parts of our bodies to the brain, or the seat of sensation, there to

produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since

the extention, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable

bigness may be perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident

some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them to the eyes, and

thereby convey to the brain some motion which produces those ideas,

which we have of them, in us.” He so far retracts his first position

afterwards, as to admit, “in consequence of what Mr. Newton has shown

in the Principia on the gravitation of matter towards matter” that God

not only can put into bodies powers and ways of operation above what

can be explained from what we know of matter, but that he has actually

done so. And he promises to correct the former passage, which however

he has never performed. In fact, he seems, by the use of phrases which

recur too often to be thought merely figurative, to have supposed that

something in the brain comes into local contact with the mind. He was

here unable to divest himself, any more than the schoolmen had done,

of the notion that there is a proper action of the body on the soul in

perception. The Cartesians had brought in the theory of occasional

causes and other solutions of the phenomena, so as to avoid what seems

so irreconcilable with an immaterial principle. No one is so lavish of

a cerebral instrumentality in mental images as Malebranche; he seems

at every moment on the verge of materialism; he coquets, as it were,

with an Epicurean physiology; but if I may be allowed to continue the

metaphor, he perceives the moment where to stop, and retires, like a

dexterous fair one, with unsmirched honour to his immateriality.

It cannot be said that Locke is equally successful.

|And its immateriality.|

115. In another and a well-known passage, he has thrown out a doubt

whether God might not superadd the faculty of thinking to matter; and

though he thinks it probable that this has not been the case, leaves

it at last a debatable question, wherein nothing else than

presumptions are to be had. Yet he has strongly argued against the

possibility of a material Deity upon reasons derived from the nature

of matter. Locke almost appears to have taken the union of a thinking

being with matter for the thinking of matter itself. What is there,

Stillingfleet well asks, like self-consciousness in matter? “Nothing

at all,” Locke replies, “in matter as matter. But that God cannot

bestow on some parcels of matter a power of thinking, and with it

self-consciousness, will never be proved by asking how it is possible

to apprehend that mere body should perceive that it doth perceive.”

But if that we call mind, and of which we are self-conscious, were

thus superadded to matter, would it the less be something real? In

what sense can it be compared to an accident or quality? It has been

justly observed that we are much more certain of the independent

existence of mind than of that of matter. But that, by the

constitution of our nature, a definite organization, or what will be

generally thought the preferable hypothesis, an organic molecule,

should be a necessary concomitant of this immaterial principle, does

not involve any absurdity at all, whatever want of evidence may be

objected to it.

116. It is remarkable that in the controversy with Stillingfleet on

this passage, Locke seems to take for granted that there is no

immaterial principle in brutes; and as he had too much plain sense to

adopt the Cartesian theory of their insensibility, he draws the most

plausible argument for the possibility of thought in matter by the

admitted fact of sensation and voluntary motion in these animal

organizations. “It is not doubted but that the properties of a rose, a

peach, or an elephant superadded to matter change not the properties

of matter, but matter is in these things matter still.” Few perhaps at

present who believe in the immateriality of the human soul, would deny

the same to an elephant; but it must be owned that the discoveries of

zoology have pushed this to consequences which some might not readily

adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a little our

prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit this, or

be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary fibre. Brutes

have been as slowly emancipated in philosophy as some classes of

mankind have been in civil polity; their souls we see, were almost

universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century,

even by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery.

Even within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any

kind of reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions

by the vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better

of our humble companions; and as usual in similar cases, the

predominant bias seems rather too much of a levelling character.

|His love of truth and originality.|

117. No quality more remarkably distinguishes Locke than his love of

truth. He is of no sect or party, has no oblique design, such as we so

frequently perceive, of sustaining some tenet which he suppresses, no

submissiveness to the opinions of others, nor what very few lay aside,

to his own. Without having adopted certain dominant ideas, like

Descartes and Malebranche, he follows with inflexible impartiality and

unwearied patience the long process of analysis to which he has

subjected the human mind. No great writer has been more exempt from

vanity, in which he is very advantageously contrasted with Bacon and

Descartes; but he is sometimes a little sharp and contemptuous of his

predecessors. The originality of Locke is real and unaffected; not

that he has derived nothing from others, which would be a great

reproach to himself or to them, but in whatever he has in common with

other philosophers, there is always a tinge of his own thoughts, a

modification of the particular tenet, or at least a peculiarity of

language which renders it not very easy of detection. “It was not to

be expected,” says Stewart, “that in a work so composed by snatches,

to borrow a phrase of the author, he should be able accurately to draw

the line between his own ideas and the hints for which he was indebted

to others. To those who are well acquainted with his speculations it

must appear evident that he had studied diligently the metaphysical

writings both of Hobbes and Gassendi, and that he was no stranger to

the Essays of Montaigne, to the philosophical works of Bacon, and to

Malebranche’s Inquiry after Truth. That he was familiarly conversant

with the Cartesian system may be presumed from what we are told by his

biographer, that it was this which first inspired him with a disgust

at the jargon of the schools, and led him into that train of thinking

which he afterwards prosecuted so successfully. I do not however

recollect that he has anywhere in his Essay mentioned the name of any

one of those authors. It is probable that when he sat down to write,

he found the result of his youthful reading so completely identified

with the fruits of his subsequent reflections, that it was impossible

for him to attempt a separation of the one from the other, and that he

was thus occasionally led to mistake the treasures of memory for those

of invention. That this was really the case may be further presumed

from the peculiar and original cast of his phraseology, which though

in general careless and unpolished, has always the merit of that

characteristical unity and raciness of style, which demonstrate that

while he was writing he conceived himself to be drawing only

from his own resources.”[874]

[874] Preliminary Dissertation.

|Defended in two cases.|

118. The writer however whom we have just quoted has not quite done

justice to the originality of Locke in more than one instance. Thus,

on this very passage we find a note in these words: “Mr. Addison has

remarked that Malebranche had the start of Locke by several years in

his notions on the subject of duration. Some other coincidences not

less remarkable might be easily pointed out in the opinions of the

English and of the French philosopher.” I am not prepared to dispute,

nor do I doubt, the truth of the latter sentence. But with respect to

the notions of Malebranche and Locke on duration, it must be said,

that they are neither the same nor has Addison asserted them to be

so.[875] The one threw out an hypothesis with no attempt at proof; the

other offered an explanation of the phenomena. What Locke has advanced

as to our getting the idea of duration by reflecting on the succession

of our ideas seems to be truly his own. Whether it be entirely the

right explanation, is another question. It rather appears to me that

the internal sense, as we may not improperly call it, of duration

belongs separately to each idea, and is rather lost than suggested by

their succession. Duration is best perceived when we are able to

detain an idea for some time without change, as in watching the motion

of a pendulum. And though it is impossible for the mind to continue in

this state of immobility more perhaps than about a second or two, this

is sufficient to give us an idea of duration as the necessary

condition of existence. Whether this be an objective or merely a

subjective necessity, is an abstruse question, which our sensations do

not decide. But Locke appears to have looked rather at the measure of

duration, by which we divide it into portions, than at the mere

simplicity of the idea itself. Such a measure, it is certain, can only

be obtained through the medium of a succession in our ideas.

[875] Spectator, No. 94.

119. It has been also remarked by Stewart, that Locke claims a

discovery rather due to Descartes--namely, the impossibility of

defining simple ideas. Descartes, however, as well as the authors of

the Port-Royal Logic, merely says that words already as clear as we

can make them do not require, or even admit, of definition. But I do

not perceive that he has made the distinction we find in the Essay on

the Human Understanding, that the names of simple ideas are not

capable of any definition, while the names of all complex ideas are

so. “It has not, that I know,” Locke says, “been observed by any body

what words are and what are not capable of being defined.” The passage

I have quoted in another place (chap. xx., p. 500), from Descartes’

posthumous dialogue, even if it went to this length, was unknown to

Locke; yet he might have acknowledged that he had been in some measure

anticipated in other observations by that philosopher.

|His view of innate ideas.|

120. The first book of the Essay on the Human Understanding is

directed, as is well known, against the doctrine of innate ideas, or

innate principles in the mind. This has been often censured, as

combating in some places a tenet which no one would support, and as,

in other passages, breaking in upon moral distinctions themselves, by

disputing the universality of their acknowledgment. With respect to

the former charge, it is not perhaps easy for us to determine what

might be the crude and confused notions, or at least language, of many

who held the theory of innate ideas. It is by no means evident that

Locke had Descartes chiefly, or even at all, in his view. Lord

Herbert, whom he distinctly answers, and many others, especially the

Platonists, had dwelt upon innate ideas in far stronger terms than the

great French metaphysician, if indeed he can be said to have

maintained them at all. The latter and more important accusation rests

upon no other pretext, than that Locke must be reckoned among those

who have not admitted a moral faculty of discovering right from wrong

to be a part of our constitution. But that there is a law of nature

imposed by the Supreme Being, and consequently universal, has been so

repeatedly asserted in his writings, that it would imply great

inattention to question it. Stewart has justly vindicated Locke in

this respect from some hasty and indefinite charges of Beattie; but I

must venture to think that he goes much too far when he attempts to

identify the doctrines of the Essay with those of Shaftesbury. These

two philosophers were in opposite schools as to the test of moral

sentiments. Locke seems always to adopt what is called the selfish

system in morals, resolving all morality into religion, and all

religion into a regard to our own interest. And he seems to have paid

less attention to the emotions than to the intellectual powers

of the soul.

|General praise.|

121. It would by no means be difficult to controvert other tenets of

this great man. But the obligations we owe to him for the Essay on the

Human Understanding are never to be forgotten. It is truly the first

real chart of the coasts; wherein some may be laid down incorrectly,

but the general relations of all are perceived. And we who find some

things to censure in Locke have perhaps learned how to censure them

from himself; we have thrown off so many false notions and films of

prejudice by his help that we are become capable of judging our

master. This is what has been the fate of all who have pushed onward

the landmarks of science; they have made that easy for inferior men

which was painfully laboured through by themselves. Among many

excellent things in the Essay on Human Understanding none are more

admirable than the whole third book on the nature of words, especially

the three chapters on their imperfection and abuse. In earlier

treatises of logic, at least in that of Port-Royal, some of this might

be found; but nowhere are verbal fallacies, and, above all, the

sources from which they spring so fully and conclusively exposed.

|Locke’s Conduct of Understanding.|

122. The same praiseworthy diligence in hunting error to its

lurking-places distinguishes the short treatise on the Conduct of the

Understanding; which, having been originally designed as an additional

chapter to the Essay,[876] is as it were the ethical application of

its theory, and ought always to be read with it, if, indeed, for the

sake of its practical utility, it should not come sooner into the

course of education. Aristotle himself, and the whole of his

dialectical school, had pointed out many of the sophisms against which

we should guard our reasoning faculties; but these are chiefly such as

others attempt to put upon us in dispute. There are more dangerous

fallacies by which we cheat ourselves; prejudice, partiality,

self-interest, vanity, inattention and indifference to truth. Locke,

who was as exempt from these as almost any man who has turned his mind

to so many subjects where their influence is to be suspected, has

dwelled on the moral discipline of the intellect in this treatise

better, as I conceive, than any of his predecessors, though we have

already seen, and it might appear far more at length to those who

should have recourse to the books, that Arnauld and Malebranche,

besides other French philosophers of the age, had not been remiss in

this indispensable part of logic.

[876] See a letter to Molyneux, dated April, 1697. Locke’s Works

(fol. 1759), vol. iii., p. 539.

123. Locke, throughout this treatise, labours to secure the honest

inquirer from that previous persuasion of his own opinion, which

generally renders all his pretended investigations of its truth little

more than illusive and nugatory. But the indifferency he recommends to

everything except truth itself, so that we should not even wish

anything to be true before we have examined whether it be so, seems to

involve the impossible hypothesis that man is but a purely reasoning

being. It is vain to press the recommendation of freedom from

prejudice so far; since we cannot but conceive some propositions to be

more connected with our welfare than others, and consequently to

desire their truth. These exaggerations lay a fundamental condition of

honest inquiry open to the sneers of its adversaries; and it is

sufficient, because nothing more is really attainable, first to

dispossess ourselves of the notion that our interests are concerned

where they are not, and next, even when we cannot but wish one result

of our inquiries rather than another, to be the more unremitting in

our endeavours to exclude this bias from our reasoning.

124. I cannot think any parent or instructor justified in neglecting

to put this little treatise in the hands of a boy about the time when

the reasoning faculties become developed. It will give him a sober and

serious, not flippant or self-conceited, independency of thinking; and

while it teaches how to distrust ourselves, and to watch those

prejudices which necessarily grow up from one cause or another, will

inspire a reasonable confidence in what he has well considered, by

taking off a little of that deference to authority, which is the more

to be regretted in its excess, that, like its cousin-german

party-spirit, it is frequently united to loyalty of heart, and the

generous enthusiasm of youth.

CHAPTER XXX.

HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE,

FROM 1650 TO 1700.