History of Modern Philosophy

Another royal friendship brought his career to an untimely end. Queen Christina of Sweden, the gifted and restless daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, heard of Descartes, and invited him to her Court. On his arrival she sent for the pilot who had brought the illustrious stranger to Stockholm and questioned him about his passenger. "Madame," he replied, "it is not a man whom I conducted to your Majesty, but a demi-god. He taught me more in three weeks of the science of seamanship and of winds and navigation than I had learned in the sixty years I had been at sea" (Miss E. S. Haldane's Life of René Descartes). The Queen fully came up to the expectations of her visitor, in whose eyes she had no fault but an unfortunate tendency to waste her time on learning Greek. Besides her other merits, she possessed "a sweetness and goodness which made men devoted to her service." It soon appeared that, as with others of the same rank, this was only the veneer of a heartless selfishness. Christina, who was an early riser, required his attendance in her library to give her lessons in philosophy at five o'clock in the morning. Descartes was by habit a very late riser. Besides, he had not even a lodging in the royal palace, but was staying at the French Embassy, and in going there "had to pass over a long bridge which was always bitterly cold." The cold killed him. He had arrived at Stockholm in October, and meant to leave in January; but remained at the urgent request of the Queen, who, however, made no change in the hour of their interviews, although that winter was one of the severest on record. At the beginning of February, 1650, he fell ill and died of inflammation of the lungs on the 11th, in the fifty-fourth year of his age.

Descartes had the physical courage which Hobbes lacked; but he seems, like Bacon, to have been a moral coward. The most striking instance of this is that, on hearing of Galileo's condemnation for teaching the heliocentric astronomy, he withheld from publication and had even thoughts of destroying a work of his own in which the same doctrine was maintained. This was at a time when he was living in a country where there could be no question of personal danger from the Inquisition. But something of the same weakness shows itself in his running away from France to escape those intrusions on his studious retirement which one would think might have been checked by letting it be known with sufficient firmness that his hours could not be wasted on idle conversation. And we have seen how at last his life was lost for no better reason than the dread of giving offence to Queen Christina.

It seems strange that a character so unheroic should figure among the great emancipators of human thought. In fact, Descartes's services to liberty have been much exaggerated. His intellectual fame rests on three foundations. Of these the most indubitable is the creation of analytical geometry, the starting-point of modern mathematics. The value of his contributions to physics has been much disputed; but, on the whole, expert opinion seems to have decided that what was new in them was not true, and what was true was not new. However, the place we must assign Descartes in the history of philosophy can only be determined by our opinion of his metaphysics.

As a philosopher Descartes has, to begin with, the merit of exemplary clearness. The fault is not with him if we cannot tell what he thought and how he came to think it. The classic Discourse on Method (1637) relates his mental history in a style of almost touching simplicity. It appears that from an early age truth had been his paramount object, not as with Bacon and Hobbes for its utility, but for its own sake. In search of this ideal he read widely, but without finding what he wanted. The great and famous works of literature might entertain or dazzle; they could not convince. The philosophers professed to teach truth; their endless disputes showed that they had not found it. Mathematics, on the other hand, presented a pleasing picture of demonstrated certainty, but a certainty that seemed to be prized only as a sure foundation for the mechanical arts. Wearily throwing his books aside, the young man then applied himself to the great book of life, mingling with all sorts and conditions of men to hear what they had to say about the prime interests of existence. But the same vanity and vexation of spirit followed him here. Men were no more agreed among themselves than were the authorities of his college days. The truths of religion seemed, indeed, to offer a safe refuge; but they were an exception that proved the rule; being, as Descartes observes, a supernatural revelation, not the natural knowledge that he wanted.

The conflict of authorities had at least one good result, which was to discredit the very notion of authority, thus throwing the inquirer back on his own reason as the sole remaining resource. And as mathematics seemed, so far, to be the only satisfactory science, the most reasonable course was to give a wider extension and application to the methods of algebra and geometry. Four fundamental rules were thus obtained: (1) To admit nothing as true that was not evidently so; (2) to analyse every problem into as many distinct questions as the nature of the subject required; (3) to ascend gradually from the simplest to the most complex subjects; and (4) to be sure that his enumerations and surveys were so exhaustive and complete as to let no essential element of the question escape.

The rules as they stand are ill-arranged, vague, and imperfect. The last should come first and the first last. The notions of simplicity, complexity, and truth are neither illustrated nor defined. And no pains are taken to discriminate judgments from concepts. It may be said that the method worked well; at least Descartes tells us that with the help of his rules he made rapid progress in the solution of mathematical problems. We may believe in his success without admitting that an inferior genius could have achieved the same results by the same means. The real point is to ascertain whether the method, whatever its utility in mathematics, could be advantageously applied to metaphysics. And the answer seems to be that as manipulated by its author the new system led to nothing but hopeless fallacies.

After reserving a provisional assent to the customs of the country where he happens to be residing and to the creed of the Roman Church, Descartes begins by calling in question the whole mass of beliefs he has hitherto accepted, including the reality of the external world. But the very act of doubt implies the existence of the doubter himself. I think, therefore I am. It has been supposed that the initial affirmation of this self-evident principle implies that Descartes identified Being with Thought. He did no such thing. No more is meant, to begin with, than that, whatever else is or is not, I the thinker certainly am. This is no great discovery; the interesting thing is to find out what it implies. A good deal according to Descartes. First he infers that, since the act of thinking assures him of his existence, therefore he is a substance the whole essence of which consists in thought, which is independent of place and of any material object – in short, an immaterial soul, entirely distinct from the body, easier to know, and capable of existing without it. Here the confusion of conception with judgment is apparent, and it leads to a confusion of our thoughts about reality with the realities themselves. And Descartes carries this loose reasoning a step further by going on to argue that, as the certainty of his own existence has no other guarantee than the clearness with which it is inferred from the fact of his thinking, it must therefore be a safe rule to conclude that whatever things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true.

In his other great philosophical work, the Meditations, Descartes sets out at greater length, but with less clearness, his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Here it is fully admitted that, besides thinking, self-consciousness covers the functions of perceiving, feeling, desiring, and willing; nor does it seem to be pretended that these experiences are reducible to forms of thought. But it is claimed that they depend on thought in the sense that without thought one would not be aware of their existence; whereas it can easily be conceived without them. A little more introspection would show that the second part of the assertion is not true; for there is no thought without words, and no words, however inaudibly articulated, without a number of tactual and muscular sensations, nor even without a series of distinct volitions.

Another noticeable point is that, so far from obeying the methodical rule to proceed from the simple to the complex, Descartes does just the contrary. Starting with the whole complex content of consciousness, he works down by a series of arbitrary rejections to what, according to him, is the simple fact of immaterial thought. Let us see how it fares with his attempt to reconstruct knowledge on that elementary basis.

Returning to his postulate of universal doubt, our philosopher argues from this to an imperfection in his nature, and thence to the idea of a perfect being. The reasoning is most slipshod; for, even admitting that knowledge is preferable to ignorance – which has not been proved – it does not follow that the dogmatist is more perfect than the doubter. Indeed, one might infer the contrary from Descartes's having passed with progressive reflection from the one stage to the other. Overlooking the paralogism, let us grant that he has the idea of a perfect being, and go on to the question of how he came to possess it. One might suggest that the consciousness of perfect self-knowledge, combined with the wish to know more of other subjects, would be sufficient to create an ideal of omniscience, and, proceeding in like manner from a comparison of wants with their satisfactions, to enlarge this ideal into the notion of infinite perfection all round. Descartes, however, is not really out for truth – at least, not in metaphysics; he is out for a justification of what the Jesuits had taught him at La Flèche, and no Jesuit casuistry could be more sophistical than the logic he finds good enough for the purpose. To argue, as he does, that the idea of a perfect being, in his mind, can be explained only by its proceeding from such a being as its creator is already sufficiently audacious. But this feat is far surpassed by his famous ontological proof of Theism. A triangle, he tells us, need not necessarily exist; but, assuming there to be one, its three angles must be equal to two right angles. With God, on the other hand, to be conceived is to be; for, existence being a perfection, it follows, from the idea of a perfect Being, that he must exist. The answer is more clear and distinct than any of Descartes's demonstrations. Perfection is affirmed of existing or of imaginary subjects, but existence is not a perfection in itself.

A third argument for Theism remains to be considered. Descartes asks how he came to exist. Not by his own act; for on that hypothesis he would have given himself all the perfections that now he lacks; nor from any other imperfect cause, for that would be to repeat the difficulty, not to solve it. Besides, the simple continuance of his existence from moment to moment needs an explanation. For time consists of an infinity of parts, none depending in any way on the others; so that my having been a little while ago is no reason why I should be now, unless there is some power by which I am created anew. Here we must observe that Descartes is playing fast and loose with the law of causation. By what he calls the light of nature – in other words, the light of Greek philosophy – things can no more pass into nothing than they can come out of it. Moreover, the difficulty is the same for my supposed Creator as for myself. We are told that thought is a necessary perfection of the divine nature. But thinking implies time; therefore God also exists from moment to moment. How, then, can he recover his being any more than we can? The answer, of course, would be: because he is perfect, and perfection involves existence. Thus the argument from causation throws us back on the so-called ontological argument, whose futility has already been shown.

This very idea of perfection involves us in fresh difficulties with the law of causation. A perfect Being might be expected to make perfect creatures – which by hypothesis we are not. Descartes quite sees this, and only escapes by a verbal quibble. Our imperfections, he says, come from the share that Nothingness has in our nature. Once allow so much to the creative power of zero, and God seems to be a rather gratuitous postulate.

After proving to his own satisfaction the existence of the soul and of God, Descartes returns to the starting-point of his whole inquiry – that is, the reality of the material world and of its laws. And now his theology supplies him with a short and easy method for getting rid of the sceptical doubts that had troubled him at first. He has a clear and distinct idea of his own body and of other bodies surrounding it on all sides as extended substances communicating movements to one another. And he has a tendency to accept whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived by him as true. But to suppose that God created that tendency with the intention of deceiving him would argue a want of veracity in the divine nature incompatible with its perfection. Such reasoning obviously ignores the alternative that God might be deceiving us for our good. Or rather what we call truth might not be an insight into the nature of things in themselves, but a correct judgment of antecedents and consequents. Our consciousness would then be a vast sensori-motor machinery adjusted to secure the maintenance and perfection of life.

Descartes, as a mathematician, places the essence of Matter or Body in extension. Here he agrees with another mathematical philosopher, Plato, who says the same in his Timæus. So far the coincidence might be accidental; but when we find that the Frenchman, like the Greek, conceives his materialised space as being originally divided into triangular bodies, the evidence of unacknowledged borrowing seems irresistible – the more so that Huyghens mentions this as customary with Descartes.

The great author of the Method and the Meditations– for, after every critical deduction, his greatness as a thinker remains undoubted – contributed nothing to ethics. Here he is content to reaffirm the general conclusions of Greek philosophy, the necessary superiority of mind to matter, of the soul to the body, of spirit to sense. He accepts free-will from Aristotle without any attempt to reconcile it with the rigid determinism of his own mechanical naturalism. At the same time there is a remarkable anticipation of modern psychology in his doctrine of intellectual assent as an act of the will. When our judgments go beyond what is guaranteed by a clear and distinct perception of their truth there is a possibility of error, and then the error is our own fault, the precipitate conclusion having been a voluntary act. Thus human free-will intervenes to clear God of all responsibility for our delusions as well as for our crimes.

Malebranche

Pascal, we are told, could not forgive Descartes for limiting God's action on the world to the "initial fillip" by which the process of evolution was started. Nevertheless, Pascal's friends, the Jansenists, were content to adopt Cartesianism as their religious philosophy, and his epigram certainly does not apply to the next distinguished Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx (1625-1669), a Fleming of Antwerp. Unfortunate in his life, this eminent teacher has of all original thinkers received the least credit for his services to metaphysics from posterity, being, outside a small circle of students, still utterly unknown to fame. Geulincx is the author of a theory called Occasionalism. Descartes had represented mind, which he identified with Thought, and matter, which he identified with Extension, as two antithetical substances with not a note in common. Nevertheless, he supposed that communications between them took place through a part of the brain called the pineal body. Geulincx cut through even this narrow isthmus, denying the possibility of any machinery for transmitting sensible images from the material world to our consciousness, or volitions from the mind to the limbs. How, then, were the facts to be explained? According to him, by the intervention of God. When the so-called organs of sense are acted on by vibrations from the external world, or when a particular movement is willed by the mind, the corresponding mental and material modifications are miraculously produced by the exercise of his omnipotence; and it is because these events occur on occasion of signals of which they are not the effects but the consequents that the theory has received the name of Occasionalism.

The theory, as Geulincx formulated it, seems at first sight simply grotesque; and from a religious point of view it has the additional drawback of making God the immediate executor of every crime committed by man. Nevertheless, it is merely the logical application of a principle subsequently admitted by profound thinkers of the most opposing schools – namely, that consciousness cannot produce or transmit energy, combined with the belief in a God who does not exist for nothing. Even past the middle of the nineteenth century many English and French naturalists were persuaded that animal species to the number of 300,000 represented as many distinct creative acts; and at least one astronomer, who was also a philosopher, declared that the ultimate atoms of matter, running up to an immeasurably higher figure, "bore the stamp of the manufactured article."

The capture of Cartesianism by theology was completed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). This accomplished writer and thinker, dedicated by physical infirmity to a contemplative life, entered the Oratory at an early age, and remained in it until his death. Coming across a copy of Descartes's Treatise on Man at twenty-six, he at once became a convert to the new philosophy, and devoted the next ten years to its exclusive study. At the end of that period he published his masterpiece, On the Investigation of Truth (De la Recherche de la Vérité, 1674), which at once won him an enormous reputation. It was followed by other works of less importance. The legend that Malebranche's end was hastened by an argument with Berkeley has been disproved.

Without acknowledging the obligation, Malebranche accepts the conclusions of Geulincx to the extent of denying the possibility of any communication between mind and matter. Indeed, he goes further, and denies that one portion of matter can act on another. But his real advance on Occasionalism lies in the question: How, then, can we know the laws of the material universe, or even that there is such a thing as matter at all? Once more God intervenes to solve the difficulty, but after a fashion much less crude than the miraculous apparatus of Geulincx. Introspection assures us that we are thinking things, and that our minds are stored with ideas, including the idea of God the all-perfect Being, and the idea of Extension with all the mathematical and physical truths logically deducible therefrom. We did not make this idea, therefore it comes from God, was in God's mind before it was in ours. Following Plotinus, Malebranche calls this idea intelligible Extension. It is the archetype of our material world. The same is true of all other clear and distinct ideas; they are, as Platonism teaches, of divine origin. But is it necessary to suppose that the ideal contents of each separate soul were placed in it at birth by the Creator? Surely the law of parsimony forbids. It is a simpler and easier explanation to suppose that the divine archetypal ideas alone exists, and that we apprehend them by a mystical communion with the divine consciousness; that, in short, we see all things in God. And in order to make this vision possible we must, as the Apostle says, live, move, and have our being in God. As a mathematician would say, God must be the locus, the place of souls.

There is unquestionably something grandiose about this theory, which, however, has the defect in orthodox opinion of logically leading to the Pantheism, held in abhorrence by Malebranche, of his greater contemporary Spinoza. And it is a suggestive circumstance that the very similar philosophy of the Eternal Consciousness held by our countryman T. H. Green has been shown by the criticism of Henry Sidgwick to exclude the personality of God.

Spinoza

With the philosopher whom I have just named we come for the first time in modern history to a figure recalling in its sustained equality of intellectual and moral excellence the most heroic figures of Hellenic thought. Giordano Bruno we may, indeed, pronounce, like Lucan or Cranmer, "by his death approved," but his submission at Venice has to be set against his martyrdom at Rome; and if there is nothing very censurable in his career as a wandering teacher, there is also nothing worthy of any particular respect. Differences of environment and heredity may no doubt be invoked to account for the difference of character; and in the philosophy about to be considered the determining influence of such causes for the first time finds due recognition; but on the same principle our ethical judgments also are determined by the very constitution of things.

Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), born at Amsterdam, belonged to a family of Portuguese Jews, exiled on account of their Hebrew faith, in which also he was brought up. Soon after reaching manhood he fell away from the synagogue, preferring to share in the religious exercises of certain latitudinarian Christian sects. Spies were set to report his conversation, which soon supplied evidence of sufficiently heterodox opinions. A sentence of formal excommunication followed; but modern research has discredited the story of an attempt to assassinate him made by an emissary of the synagogue. After successfully resisting the claim of his sister and his brother-in-law to shut out the apostate from his share of the paternal inheritance, Spinoza surrendered the disputed property, but henceforth broke off all communication with his family. Subsequently he refused an offer of 2,000 florins, made by a wealthy friend and admirer, Simon de Vries, as also a proposal from the same friend to leave him his whole fortune, insisting that it should go to the legal heir, Simon's brother Isaac. The latter, on succeeding, wished to settle an annual pension of 500 florins on Spinoza, but the philosopher would accept no more than 300. Books were his only luxury, material wants being supplied by polishing glass lenses, an art in which he attained considerable proficiency. But it was an unhealthy occupation, and probably contributed to his death by consumption.

Democracy was then and long afterwards associated with fanaticism and intolerance rather than with free-thought in religion. The liberal party in Dutch politics was the aristocratic party. Spinoza sympathised with its leader, John de Witt; he wept bitter tears over the great statesman's murder; and only the urgent remonstrances of his friends, who knew what danger would be incurred by such a step, prevented him from placarding the walls of the Hague, where he then resided, with an address reproaching the infuriated people for their crime.

In 1673 the enlightened ruler of the Palatinate, a brother of Descartes's Princess Elizabeth, offered Spinoza a professorship at Heidelberg, with full liberty to teach his philosophy. But the pantheistic recluse wisely refused it. Even at the present day such teaching as his would meet with little mercy at Berlin, Cambridge, or Edinburgh. As it was, we have reason to believe that even in free Holland only a premature death saved him from a prosecution for blasphemy, and his great work the Ethica could not with safety be published during his lifetime. It appeared anonymously among his posthumous works in November, 1677, without the name of the true place of publication on the title-page.

Spinoza was for his time no less daring as a Biblical critic than as a metaphysician. His celebrated Tractatus Theologico-Politicus has for its primary purpose to vindicate the freedom of scientific thought against ecclesiastical interference. And this he does by drawing a trenchant line of demarcation between the respective offices of religion and of philosophy. The business of the one is to form the character and to purify the heart, of the other to guide and inform the intellect. When religion undertakes to teach scientific truth the very ends for which it exists are defeated. When theological dogmatism gains control of the Churches the worst passions are developed under its influence. Instead of becoming lowly and charitable, men become disturbers of public order, grasping intriguers, bitter and censorious persecutors. The claims of theology to dictate our intellectual beliefs are not only mischievous, but totally invalid. They rest on the authority of the Bible as a revelation of God's will. But no such supernatural revelation ever was or could be given. Such violation of the order of nature as the miracles recorded in Scripture history would be impossible. And the narratives recording them are discredited by the criticism which shows that various books of the Old Testament were not written by the men whose names they bear, but long after their time. As a Hebrew scholar Spinoza discusses the Jewish Scriptures in some detail, showing in particular that the Pentateuch is of a later date than Moses. His limited knowledge of Greek is offered as a reason for not handling the New Testament with equal freedom; but some contradictions are indicated as disallowing the infallibility claimed for it. At the same time the perfection of Christ's character is fully acknowledged and accepted as a moral revelation of God.