History of Modern Philosophy

Spinoza shared to the fullest extent, and even went beyond, Descartes's ambition to reconstruct philosophy on a mathematical basis. The idea may have come to him from the French thinker, but it is actually of much older origin, being derived from Plato, the leading spirit of the Renaissance, as Aristotle had been the oracle of the later Middle Ages. Now Plato's ideal had been to construct a philosophy transcending the assumptions – or, as he calls them, the hypotheses – of geometry as much as those assumptions transcend the demonstrations of geometry; and this also was the ideal of Spinoza. Descartes had been content to accept from tradition his ultimate realities, Thought, Extension, and God, without showing that they must necessarily exist; for his proof of God's existence starts from an idea in the human mind, while Thought and Extension are not deduced at all.

To appreciate the work of the Hebrew philosopher, of the lonely muser, bred in the religion of Jahveh – a name traditionally interpreted as the very expression of absolute self-existence – we must conceive him as starting with a question deeper even than the Cartesian doubt, asking not How can I know what is? but Why should there be anything whatever? And the answer, divested of scholastic terminology, is: Because it is inconceivable that there should be nothing, and if there is anything there must be everything. This universe of things, which must also be everlasting, Spinoza calls God.

The philosophy or religion – for it is both – which identifies God with the totality of existence was of long standing in Greece, and had been elaborated in systematic detail by the Stoics. It has been known for the last two centuries under the name of Pantheism, a word of Greek etymology, but not a creation of the Greeks themselves, and, indeed, of more modern date than Spinoza. Historians always speak of him as a Pantheist, and there is no reason to think that he would have objected to the designation had it been current during his lifetime. But there are important points of distinction between him and those who preceded or followed him in the same speculative direction. The Stoics differed from him in being materialists. To them reality and corporeality were convertible terms. It seems likely that Hobbes and his contemporary, the atomist Gassendi, were of the same opinion, although they did not say it in so many words. But Descartes was a strong spiritualist; and Spinoza followed the master's lead so far, at any rate, as to give Thought at least equal reality with matter, which he also identified with Extension. It has been seen what difficulties were created by the radical Cartesian antithesis between Thought and Extension, or – to call them by their more familiar names – mind and body, when taken together with the intimate association shown by experience to obtain between them; and also how Geulincx and Malebranche were led on by the very spirit of philosophy itself almost to submerge the two disparate substances in the all-absorbing agency of God. The obvious course, then, for Spinoza, being unfettered by the obligations of any Christian creed, was to take the last remaining step, to resolve the dualism of Thought and Extension into the unity of the divine substance.

In fact, the Hebrew philosopher does this, declaring boldly that Thought and Extension are one and the same thing – which thing is God, the only true reality of which they are merely appearances. And, so far, he has had many followers who strive to harmonise the opposition of what we now call subject and object in the synthesis of the All-One. But he goes beyond this, expanding the conception of God – or the Absolute – to a degree undreamed of by any religion or philosophy formulated before or after his time. God, Spinoza tells us, is "a Substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses his absolute and eternal essence." But of these attributes two alone, Thought and Extension, are known to us at present, so that our ignorance infinitely exceeds our knowledge of reality. His extant writings do not explain by what process he mounted to this, the most dizzy height of speculation ever attained by man; but, in the absence of definite information, some guiding considerations suggest themselves as probable.

Bruno, whom Spinoza is held, on strong grounds, to have read, identified God with the supreme unifying principle of a universe extending through infinite space. Descartes, on the other hand, conceived God as a thinking rather than as an extended substance. But his school tended, as we saw, to conceive God as mediating between mind and body in a way that suggested their real union through his power. Furthermore, the habit common to all Cartesians of regarding geometrical reasoning as the most perfect form of thought inevitably led to the conception of thought as accompanying space wherever it went – in fact, as stretching like it to infinity. Again, from the Cartesian point of view, that Extension which is the very essence of the material world, while it covers space, is more than mere space; it includes not only co-existence, but succession or time – that is, scientifically speaking, the eternal sequence of physical causes; or, theologically speaking, the creative activity of God. And reason or thought had also since Aristotle been more or less identified with the law of universal causation no less than with the laws of geometry.

Thus, then, the ground was prepared for Spinoza, as a pantheistic monist, to conceive God under the two attributes of Extension and Thought, each in its own way disclosing his essence as no other than infinite Power. But why should God have, or consist of, two attributes and no more? There is a good reason why we should know only those two. It is that we are ourselves modes of Thought united to modes of Extension, of which our thoughts are the revealing ideas. But it would be gross anthropomorphism to impose the limitations of our knowledge on the infinite being of God, manifested through those very attributes as unlimited Power. The infinite of co-existence, which is space, the infinite of causal procession, which is time, suggest an infinity of unimaginable but not inconceivable attributes of which the one divine substance consists. And here at last we get the explanation of why there should be such things as Thought and Extension at all. They are there simply because everything is. If I grant anything – and I must, at least, grant myself – I grant existence, which, having nothing outside itself, must fill up all the possibilities of being which only exclude the self-contradictory from their domain. Thus, the philosophy of Spinoza neither obliges him to believe in the monsters of mythology nor in the miracles of Scripture, nor in the dogmas of Catholic theology, nor even in free-will; nor, again, would it oblige him to reject by anticipation the marvels of modern science. For, according to him, the impossibility of really incredible things could be deduced with the certainty of mathematical demonstration from the law of contradiction itself.

Hegel has given the name of acosmism, or negation of the world, to this form of pantheism, interpreting it as a doctrine that absorbs all concrete reality and individuality in the absolute unity of the divine essence. No misconception could be more complete. Differentiation is the very soul of Spinoza's system. It is, indeed, more open to the charge of excessive dispersion than of excessive centralisation. Power, which is God's essence, means no more than the realisation through all eternity of all possibilities of existence, with no end or aim but just the process of infinite production itself. There is, indeed, a nominal identification between the material processes of Extension and the ideal processes of Thought. But this amounts to no more than a re-statement in abstract terms of the empirical truth that there is a close connection between body and mind. Like the double-aspect theory, the parallelistic theory, the materialistic theory, the theory of interaction, and the theory of more or less complete reciprocal independence, it is a mere verbalism, telling us nothing that we did not know before. Or, if there is more, it consists of the very questionable assumption that body and mind must come in somewhere to fill up what would otherwise be blank possibilities of existence. And this, like other metaphysical assumptions, is an illegitimate generalisation from experience. The ideas of space and time as filled-up continua supply the model on which the whole universe must be constructed. Like them, it must be infinite and eternal, but, so to speak, at a higher power; as in them, every part must be determined by the position of all other parts, with the determination put at a logical instead of at a descriptive value; corresponding to their infinitely varied differentiation of position and quantity, there must be an infinite differentiation of concrete content; and, finally, the laws of the universe must be demonstrable by the same à priori mathematical method that has been so successfully applied to continuous quantity.

The geometrical form into which Spinoza has thrown his philosophy unfortunately restricts the number of readers – always rather small – that it might otherwise attract. People feel themselves mystified, wearied, and cheated by the appearance, without the reality, of logical demonstration; and the repulsion is aggravated by the barbarous scholasticism with which – unlike Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes – he peppers his pages. Yet, like the Greek philosophers, he is much more modern, more on the true line of developing thought than they are. But to get at the true kernel of his teaching we must, like Goethe, disregard the logical husks in which it is wrapped up. And, as it happens, Spinoza has greatly facilitated this operation by printing his most interesting and suggestive discussions in the form of Scholia, Explanations, and Appendices. Even these are not easy reading; but, to quote his own pathetic words, "If the way of salvation lay ready to hand, and could be found without great toil, would it be neglected by nearly everyone? But all glorious things are as difficult as they are rare."

Some of his expositors have called Spinoza a mystic; and his philosophy has been traced, in part at least, to the mystical pantheism of certain medieval Jews. In my opinion this is a mistake; and I will now proceed to show that the phrases on which it rests are open to an interpretation more consistent with the rational foundations of the whole system.

The things that have done most to fasten the character of a mystic on Spinoza are his identification of virtue with the knowledge and love of God, and his theory – so suggestive of Christian theology at its highest flight – that God loves himself with an infinite love. That, like Plato and Matthew Arnold, he should value religion as a means of popular moralisation might seem natural enough; but not, except from a mystical motive, that he should apparently value morality merely as a help to the religious life. On examination, however, it appears that the beatific vision of this pantheist offers no experience going beyond the limits of nature and reason. Since God and the universe are one, to know God is to know that we are, body and soul, necessary modes of the two attributes, Extension and Thought, by which the infinite Power which is the essence of the universe expresses itself for us. To love God is to recognise our own vitality as a portion of that power, welcoming it with grateful joy as a gift from the universe whence we come. And to say that God loves himself with an infinite love is merely to say that the attribute of Thought eternally divides itself among an infinity of thinking beings, through whose activity the universe keeps up a delighted consciousness of itself.

Spinoza declares by the very name of his great work that for him the philosophical problem is essentially a problem of ethics, being, indeed, no other than the old question, first started by Plato, how to reconcile disinterestedness with self-interest; and his metaphysical system is really an elaborate mechanism for proving that, on the profoundest interpretation, their claims coincide. His great contemporary, Hobbes, had taught that the fundamental impulse of human nature is the will for power; and Spinoza accepts this idea to the fullest extent in proclaiming Power to be the very stuff of which we and all other things are made. But he parts company with the English philosopher in his theory of what it means. On his view it is an utter illusion to suppose that to gratify such passions as pride, avarice, vanity, and lust is to acquire or exercise power. For strength means freedom, self-determination; and no man can be free whose happiness depends on a fortuitous combination of external circumstances, or on the consent of other persons whose desires are such as to set up a conflict between his gratification and theirs. Real power means self-realisation, the exercise of that faculty which is most purely human – that is to say, of Thought under the form of reason.

In pleading for the subordination of the self-seeking desires to reason Spinoza repeats the lessons of moral philosophy in all ages and countries since its first independent constitution. In connecting the interests of morality with the interests of science as such, he follows the tradition of Athenian thought. In interpreting pantheism as an ethical enthusiasm of the universe he returns to the creed of Stoicism, and strikes the keynote of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry. In fixing each man's place in nature as one among the infinite individuations of divine power he repeats another Stoic idea – with this difference, however, that among the Stoics it was intimately associated with their teleology, with the doctrine that everything in nature has a function without whose performance the universe would not be complete; whereas Spinoza, following Bacon and Descartes, utterly abjures final causes as an anthropomorphism, an intrusion of human interests into a universe whose sole perfection is to exhaust the possibilities of existence. And herein lies his justification of evil which the Stoics could only defend on aesthetic grounds as enhancing the beauty of moral heroism by contrast and conflict. "If I am asked," he says, "why God did not create all men of such a character as to be guided by reason alone, my answer is because he had materials enough to create all things from the highest to the lowest degree of perfection." Perfection with him meaning reality, this account of evil – and of error also – points to the theory of degrees of reality, revived and elaborated in our own time by Mr. F. H. Bradley, involving a correlative theory of illusion. Now, the idea of illusion, although older than Plato, was first applied on a great scale in Plato's philosophy, of whose influence on seventeenth-century thought this is not the only example. We shall find it to some extent countervailed by a revived Aristotelian current in the work of the metaphysician who now remains to be considered.

Leibniz

G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716), son of a professor at the University of Leipzig, is marked by some of the distinguishing intellectual characters of the German genius. Far more truly than Francis Bacon, this man took all knowledge for his province. At once a mathematician, a physicist, a historian, a metaphysician, and a diplomatist, he went to the bottom of whatever subject he touched, and enriched all his multifarious studies with new views or with new facts. And as with other great countrymen of his, the final end of all this curiosity and interest was to combine and reconcile. One of his ambitions was to create a universal language of philosophy, by whose means its problems were to be made a matter of mathematical demonstration; another to harmonise ancient with modern speculation; a third – the most chimerical of all – to compose the differences between Rome and Protestantism; a fourth – partly realised long after his time – to unite the German Calvinists with the Lutherans. In politics he tried, with equal unsuccess, to build up a Confederation of the Rhine as a barrier against Louis XIV., and to divert the ambition of Louis himself from encroachments on his neighbours to the conquest of Egypt.

It seems probable that no intellect of equal power was ever applied in modern times to the service of philosophy. And this power is demonstrated, not, as with other metaphysicians, by constructions of more or less contestable value, however dazzling the ingenuity they may display, but by contributions of the first order to positive science. It is now agreed that Leibniz discovered the differential calculus independently of Newton; and, what is more, that the formulation by which alone it has been made available for fruitful application was his exclusive invention. In physics he is a pioneer of the conservation of energy. In geology he starts the theory that our planet began as a glowing molten mass derived from the sun; and the modern theory of evolution is a special application of his theory of development.

Intellect alone, however, does not make a great philosopher; character also is required; and Leibniz's character was quite unworthy of his genius. Ambitious and avaricious, a courtier and a time-server, he neither made truth for its own sake a paramount object, nor would he keep on terms with those who cherished a nobler ideal. After cultivating Spinoza's acquaintance, he joined in the cry of obloquy raised after his death, and was mean enough to stir up religious prejudice against Newton's theory of gravitation. Of the calamity that embittered his closing days we may say with confidence that it could not possibly have befallen Spinoza. On the accession of the Elector of Hanover to the English crown as George I., Leibniz sought for an invitation to the Court of St. James. Apparently the prince had not found him very satisfactory as a State official, and had reason to believe that Leibniz would have liked to exchange his office of historiographer at Hanover for a better appointment at Vienna. Greatness in other departments could not recommend one whom he knew only as a negligent and perhaps unfaithful servant to the favour of such an illiterate master. Anyhow, the English appointment was withheld, and the worn-out encyclopædist succumbed to disease and vexation combined. The only mourner at his funeral was his secretary, Eckhardt, who hastened to solicit the reversion of the offices left vacant by his chief's decease.

A single theory of Leibniz has attained more celebrity than any one utterance of any other philosopher; but that fame is due to the undying fire in which it has been enveloped by the mocking irony of Voltaire. Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Such is the famous text as a satire on which Candide was composed. Yet whatever value Voltaire's objections to optimism may possess tells nearly as much against Voltaire himself as against his unfortunate butt. For, after all, believing as he did in a God who combined omnipotence with perfect goodness he could not any more than Leibniz evade the obligation of reconciling the divine character with the divine work. On à priori grounds the German philosopher seems to have an incontrovertible case. A perfect Being must have made the best possible world. The only question is what we mean by goodness and by possibility. Spinoza had solved the problem by identifying goodness with existence. It is enough that the things we call evil are possible; the infinite Power of nature would be a self-contradiction were they not realised. Leibniz rejects the pantheistic position in terms, but nearly admits it in practice. Evil for him means imperfection, and if God made a world at all it was bound to be imperfect. The next step was to call pain an imperfection, which suggests a serious logical deficiency in the optimist; for, although in certain circumstances the production of pain argues imperfection in the operator, we are not entitled to argue that wherever there is pain there must be imperfection. Another plea is the necessity of pain as a punishment for crime, or, more generally, as a result of moral freedom. Such an argument is only open to the believers in free-will. A world of free and responsible agents, they urge, is infinitely more valuable than a world of automata; and it is not too dearly purchased even at the cost of such suffering as we witness. The argument is not very convincing; for liberty of choice in a painless world is quite conceivable. But, be it a good or bad argument, although it might appeal to Voltaire, who believed in free-will, it could not decently be used by Leibniz, who was a determinist of the strictest type. To make this clear we must now turn to his metaphysical system.

Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza, disagreeing widely on other subjects, were agreed in discountenancing the study of final causes: Bacon, apparently, from dislike of the idea that the perfect adaptation of all things to the service of man rendered superfluous any efforts to make them more serviceable still; Descartes from his devotion to the mathematical method which was more applicable to a system of mechanical causation; Spinoza for the same reason, and also from his disbelief in a personal God. Leibniz, on the contrary, felt deeply impressed by a famous passage in Plato's Phædo, where Socrates, opposing the philosophy of teleology to the philosophy of mechanism, desiderates an explanation of nature as designed with a view to the highest good. But Leibniz did not go so far as Plato. Mediating between the two methods, he taught that all is done for the best, but also that all is done through an unbroken series of efficient causes. At the same time, these causes are only material in appearance; in reality they are spiritual beings. There is no such thing as dead matter; the universe consists of living forces all through. The general idea of force probably came from that infinite Power of which, according to Spinoza, the whole universe is at once the product and the expression; or it may have been suggested by Plato's incidental identification of Being with Action. But Leibniz found his type of force in human personality, which, following the lead of Aristotle rather than of Plato, he conceived as an Entelechy, or realised Actuality, and a First Substance. After years of anxious reflection he chose the far happier name of Monad, a term originally coined by Bruno, but not, as would appear, directly borrowed from him by the German metaphysician.

According to Leibniz, the monads or ultimate elements of existence are constituted by the two essential properties of psychic life, perception and appetency. In this connection two points have to be made clear. What he calls bare monads —i. e., the components of what is known as inorganic matter – although percipient, are not conscious of their perceptions; in his language they do not apperceive. And he endeavours to prove that such a mentality is possible by a reference to our own experience. We hear the roaring of waves on the seashore, but we do not hear the sound made by the falling of each particle of water. And yet we certainly must perceive it in some way or other, since the total volume of sound is made up of those inaudible impacts. He overlooks the conceivable alternative that the immediate antecedent of our auditory sensations is a cerebral disturbance, and that this must attain a certain volume in order to produce an effect on our consciousness. The other point is that the appetency of a monad does not mean an active impulse, but a search for more and more perceptions, a continuous widening of its cognitive range. In short, each monad is a little Leibniz for ever increasing the sum of its knowledge.

At no stage does that knowledge come from experience. The monad has no windows, no communication of any kind with the external world. But each reflects the whole universe, knowing what it knows by mere introspection. And each reflects all the others at a different angle, the angles varying from one another by infinitesimal degrees, so that in their totality they form a continuous series of differentiated individuals. And the same law of infinitesimal differentiation is observed by the series of progressive changes through which the monads are ever passing, so that they keep exact step, the continuity of existence being unbroken in the order of succession as in the order of co-existence. Evidently there is no place for free-will in such a system; and that Leibniz, with his relentless fatalism, should not only admit the eternal punishment of predestined sinners, but even defend it as morally appropriate, obliges us to condemn his theology as utterly irrational or utterly insincere.