History of Modern Philosophy / From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time

by Richard Falckenberg

CHAPTER XVI.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE THE DEATH OF HEGEL

1. From the Division of the Hegelian School to the Materialistic Controversy 2. New Systems: Trendelenburg, Fechner, Lotze, and Hartmann 3. From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time (a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena (b) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit (c) The Special Philosophical Sciences 4. Retrospect

INDEX

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INTRODUCTION.

In no other department is a thorough knowledge of history so important as in philosophy. Like historical science in general, philosophy is, on the one hand, in touch with exact inquiry, while, on the other, it has a certain relationship with art. With the former it has in common its methodical procedure and its cognitive aim; with the latter, its intuitive character and the endeavor to compass the whole of reality with a glance. Metaphysical principles are less easily verified from experience than physical hypotheses, but also less easily refuted. Systems of philosophy, therefore, are not so dependent on our progressive knowledge of facts as the theories of natural science, and change less quickly; notwithstanding their mutual conflicts, and in spite of the talk about discarded standpoints, they possess in a measure the permanence of classical works of art, they retain for all time a certain relative validity. The thought of Plato, of Aristotle, and of the heroes of modern philosophy is ever proving anew its fructifying power. Nowhere do we find such instructive errors as in the sphere of philosophy; nowhere is the new so essentially a completion and development of the old, even though it deem itself the whole and assume a hostile attitude toward its predecessors; nowhere is the inquiry so much more important than the final result; nowhere the categories "true and false" so inadequate. The spirit of the time and the spirit of the people, the individuality of the thinker, disposition, will, fancy—all these exert a far stronger influence on the development of philosophy, both by way of promotion and by way of hindrance, than in any other department of thought. If a system gives classical expression to the thought of an epoch, a nation, or a great personality; if it seeks to attack the world-riddle from a new direction, or brings us nearer its solution by important original conceptions, by a subtler or a simpler comprehension of the problem, by a wider outlook or a deeper insight; it has accomplished more than it could have done by bringing forward a number of indisputably correct principles. The variations in philosophy, which, on the assumption of the unity of truth, are a rock of offense to many minds, may be explained, on the one hand, by the combination of complex variety and limitation in the motives which govern philosophical thought,—for it is the whole man that philosophizes, not his understanding merely,—and, on the other, by the inexhaustible extent of the field of philosophy. Back of the logical labor of proof and inference stand, as inciting, guiding, and hindering agents, psychical and historical forces, which are themselves in large measure alogical, though stronger than all logic; while just before stretches away the immeasurable domain of reality, at once inviting and resisting conquest. The grave contradictions, so numerous in both the subjective and the objective fields, make unanimity impossible concerning ultimate problems; in fact, they render it difficult for the individual thinker to combine his convictions into a self-consistent system. Each philosopher sees limited sections of the world only, and these through his own eyes; every system is one-sided. Yet it is this multiplicity and variety of systems alone which makes the aim of philosophy practicable as it endeavors to give a complete picture of the soul and of the universe. The history of philosophy is the philosophy of humanity, that great individual, which, with more extended vision than the instruments through which it works, is able to entertain opposing principles, and which, reconciling old contradictions as it discovers new ones, approaches by a necessary and certain growth the knowledge of the one all-embracing truth, which is rich and varied beyond our conception. In order to energetic labor in the further progress of philosophy, it is necessary to imagine that the goddess of truth is about to lift the veil which has for centuries concealed her. The historian of philosophy, on the contrary, looks on each new system as a stone, which, when shaped and fitted into its place, will help to raise higher the pyramid of knowledge. Hegel's doctrine of the necessity and motive force of contradictories, of the relative justification of standpoints, and the systematic development of speculation, has great and permanent value as a general point of view. It needs only to be guarded from narrow scholastic application to become a safe canon for the historical treatment of philosophy.

In speaking above of the worth of the philosophical doctrines of the past as defying time, and as comparable to the standard character of finished works of art, the special reference was to those elements in speculation which proceed less from abstract thinking than from the fancy, the heart, and the character of the individual, and even more directly from the disposition of the people; and which to a certain degree may be divorced from logical reasoning and the scientific treatment of particular questions. These may be summed up under the phrase, views of the world. The necessity for constant reconsideration of them is from this standpoint at once evident. The Greek view of the world is as classic as the plastic art of Phidias and the epic of Homer; the Christian, as eternally valid as the architecture of the Middle Ages; the modern, as irrefutable as Goethe's poetry and the music of Beethoven. The views of the world which proceed from the spirits of different ages, as products of the general development of culture, are not so much thoughts as rhythms in thinking, not theories but modes of intuition saturated with feelings of worth. We may dispute about them, it is true; we may argue against them or in their defense; but they can neither be established nor overthrown by cogent proofs. It is not only optimism and pessimism, determinism and indeterminism, that have their ultimate roots in the affective side of our nature, but pantheism and individualism, also idealism and materialism, even rationalism and sensationalism. Even though they operate with the instruments of thought, they remain in the last analysis matters of faith, of feeling, and of resolution. The aesthetic view of the world held by the Greeks, the transcendental-religious view of Christianity, the intellectual view of Leibnitz and Hegel, the panthelistic views of Fichte I and Schopenhauer are vital forces, not doctrines, postulates, not results of thought. One view of the world is forced to yield its pre-eminence to another, which it has itself helped to produce by its own one-sidedness; only to reconquer its opponent later, when it has learned from her, when it has been purified, corrected, and deepened by the struggle. But the elder contestant is no more confuted by the younger than the drama of Sophocles by the drama of Shakespeare, than youth by age or spring by autumn.

If it is thus indubitable that the views of the world held in earlier times deserve to live on in the memory of man, and to live as something better than mere reminders of the past—the history of philosophy is not a cabinet of antiquities, but a museum of typical products of the mind—the value and interest of the historical study of the past in relation to the exact scientific side of philosophical inquiry is not less evident. In every science it is useful to trace the origin and growth of problems and theories, and doubly so in philosophy. With her it is by no means the universal rule that progress shows itself by the result; the statement of the question is often more important than the answer. The problem is more sharply defined in a given direction; or it becomes more comprehensive, is analyzed and refined; or if now it threatens to break up into subtle details, some genius appears to simplify it and force our thoughts back to the fundamental question. This advance in problems, which happily is everywhere manifested by unmistakable signs, is, in the case of many of the questions which irresistibly force themselves upon the human heart, the only certain gain from centuries of endeavor. The labor here is of more value than the result.

In treating the history of philosophy, two extremes must be avoided, lawless individualism and abstract logical formalism. The history of philosophy is neither a disconnected succession of arbitrary individual opinions and clever guesses, nor a mechanically developed series of typical standpoints and problems, which imply one another in just the form and order historically assumed. The former supposition does violence to the regularity of philosophical development, the latter to its vitality. In the one case, the connection is conceived too loosely, in the other, too rigidly and simply. One view underestimates the power of the logical Idea, the other overestimates it. It is not easy to support the principle that chance rules the destiny of philosophy, but it is more difficult to avoid the opposite conviction of the one-sidedness of formalistic construction, and to define the nature and limits of philosophical necessity. The development of philosophy is, perhaps, one chief aim of the world-process, but it is certainly not the only one; it is a part of the universal aim, and it is not surprising that the instruments of its realization do not work exclusively in its behalf, that their activity brings about results, which seem unessential for philosophical ends or obstacles in their way. Philosophical ideas do not think themselves, but are thought by living spirits, which are something other and better than mere thought machines—by spirits who live these thoughts, who fill them with personal warmth and passionately defend them. There is often reason, no doubt, for the complaint that the personality which has undertaken to develop some great idea is inadequate to the task, that it carries its subjective defects into the matter in hand, that it does too much or too little, or the right thing in the wrong way, so that the spirit of philosophy seems to have erred in the choice and the preparation of its instrument. But the reverse side of the picture must also be taken into account. The thinking spirit is more limited, it is true, than were desirable for the perfect execution of a definite logical task; but, on the other hand, it is far too rich as well. A soulless play of concepts would certainly not help the cause, and there is no disadvantage in the failure of the history of philosophy to proceed so directly and so scholastically, as, for instance, in the system of Hegel. A graded series of interconnected general forces mediate between the logical Idea and the individual thinker—the spirit of the people, of the age, of the thinker's vocation, of his time of life, which are felt by the individual as part of himself and whose impulses he unconsciously obeys. In this way the modifying, furthering, hindering correlation of higher and lower, of the ruler with his commands and the servant with his more or less willing obedience, is twice repeated, the situation being complicated further by the fact that the subject affected by these historical forces himself helps to make history. The most important factor in philosophical progress is, of course, the state of inquiry at the time, the achievements of the thinkers of the immediately preceding age; and in this relation of a philosopher to his predecessors, again, a distinction must be made between a logical and a psychological element. The successor often commences his support, his development, or his refutation at a point quite unwelcome to the constructive historian. At all events, if we may judge from the experience of the past, too much caution cannot be exercised in setting up formal laws for the development of thought. According to the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when, in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it turned out otherwise, and we must be content.

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The estimate of the value of the history of philosophy in general, given at the start, is the more true of the history of modern philosophy, since the movement introduced by the latter still goes on unfinished. We are still at work on the problems which were brought forward by Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz, and which Kant gathered up into the critical or transcendental question. The present continues to be governed by the ideal of culture which Bacon proposed and Fichte exalted to a higher level; we all live under the unweakened spell of that view of the world which was developed in hostile opposition to Scholasticism, and through the enduring influence of those mighty geographical and scientific discoveries and religious reforms which marked the entrance of the modern period. It is true, indeed, that the transition brought about by Kant's noëtical and ethical revolution was of great significance,—more significant even than the Socratic period, with which we are fond of comparing it; much that was new was woven on, much of the old, weakened, broken, destroyed. And yet, if we take into account the historical after-influence of Cartesianism, we shall find that the thread was only knotted and twisted by Kantianism, not cut through. The continued power of the pre-Kantian modes of thought is shown by the fact that Spinoza has been revived in Fichte and Schelling, Leibnitz in Herbart and Hegel, the sensationalism of the French Illuminati in Feuerbach; and that even materialism, which had been struck down by the criticism of the reason (one would have thought forever), has again raised its head. Even that most narrow tendency of the early philosophy of the modern period, the apotheosis of cognition is,—in spite of the moralistic counter-movement of Kant and Fichte,—the controlling motive in the last of the great idealistic systems, while it also continues to exercise a marvelously powerful influence on the convictions of our Hegel-weary age, alike within the sphere of philosophy and (still more) without it. In view of the intimate relations between contemporary inquiry and the progress of thought since the beginning of the modern period, acquaintance with the latter, which it is the aim of this History to facilitate, becomes a pressing duty. To study the history of philosophy since Descartes is to study the pre-conditions of contemporary philosophy.

We begin with an outline sketch of the general characteristics of modern philosophy. These may be most conveniently described by comparing them with the characteristics of ancient and of mediaeval philosophy. The character of ancient philosophy or Greek philosophy,—for they are practically the same,—is predominantly aesthetic. The Greek holds beauty and truth closely akin and inseparable; "cosmos" is his common expression for the world and for ornament. The universe is for him a harmony, an organism, a work of art, before which he stands in admiration and reverential awe. In quiet contemplation, as with the eye of a connoisseur, he looks upon the world or the individual object as a well-ordered whole, more disposed to enjoy the congruity of its parts than to study out its ultimate elements. He prefers contemplation to analysis, his thought is plastic, not anatomical. He finds the nature of the object in its form; and ends give him the key to the comprehension of events. Discovering human elements everywhere, he is always ready with judgments of worth—the stars move in circles because circular motion is the most perfect; the right is better than left, upper finer than lower, that which precedes more beautiful than that which follows. Thinkers in whom this aesthetic reverence is weaker than the analytic impulse—especially Democritus—seem half modern rather than Greek. By the side of the Greek philosophy, in its sacred festal garb, stands the modern in secular workday dress, in the laborer's blouse, with the merciless chisel of analysis in its hand. This does not seek beauty, but only the naked truth, no matter what it be. It holds it impossible to satisfy at once the understanding and taste; nay, nakedness, ugliness, and offensiveness seem to it to testify for, rather than against, the genuineness of truth. In its anxiety not to read human elements into nature, it goes so far as completely to read spirit out of nature. The world is not a living whole, but a machine; not a work of art which is to be viewed in its totality and enjoyed with reverence, but a clock-movement to be taken apart in order to be understood. Nowhere are there ends in the world, but everywhere mechanical causes. The character of modern thought would appear to a Greek returned to earth very sober, unsplendid, undevout, and intrusive. And, in fact, modern philosophy has a considerable amount of prose about it, is not easily impressed, accepts no limitations from feeling, and holds nothing too sacred to be attacked with the weapon of analytic thought. And yet it combines penetration with intrusiveness; acuteness, coolness, and logical courage with its soberness. Never before has the demand for unprejudiced thought and certain knowledge been made with equal earnestness. This interest in knowledge for its own sake developed so suddenly and with such strength that, in presumptuous gladness, men believed that no previous age had rightly understood what truth and love for truth are. The natural consequence was a general overestimation of cognition at the expense of all other mental activities. Even among the Greek thinkers, thought was held by the majority to be the noblest and most divine function. But their intellectualism was checked by the aesthetic and eudaemonistic element, and preserved from the one-sidedness which it manifests in the modern period, because of the lack of an effective counterpoise. However eloquently Bacon commends the advantages to be derived from the conquest of nature, he still understands inquiry for inquiry's sake, and honors it as supreme; even the ethelistic philosophers, Fichte and Schopenhauer, pay their tribute to the prejudice in favor of intellectualism. The fact that the modern period can show no one philosophic writer of the literary rank of Plato, even though it includes such masters of style as Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Lotze, not to speak of lesser names, is an external proof of how noticeably the aesthetic impulse has given way to one purely intellectual.

When we turn to the character of mediaeval thinking; we find, instead of the aesthetic views of antiquity and the purely scientific tendency of the modern era, a distinctively religious spirit. Faith prescribes the objects and the limitations of knowledge; everything is referred to the hereafter, thought becomes prayer. Men speculate concerning the attributes of God, on the number and rank of the angels, on the immortality of man—all purely transcendental subjects. Side by side with these, it is true, the world receives loving attention, but always as the lower story merely,[1] above which, with its own laws, rises the true fatherland, the kingdom of grace. The most subtle acuteness is employed in the service of dogma, with the task of fathoming the how and why of things whose existence is certified elsewhere. The result is a formalism in thought side by side with profound and fervent mysticism. Doubt and trust are strangely intermingled, and a feeling of expectation stirs all hearts. On the one side stands sinful, erring man, who, try as hard as he may, only half unravels the mysteries of revealed truth; on the other, the God of grace, who, after our death, will reveal himself to us as clearly as Adam knew him before the fall. God alone, however, can comprehend himself—for the finite spirit, even truth unveiled is mystery, and ecstasy, unresisting devotion to the incomprehensible, the culmination of knowledge. In mediaeval philosophy the subject looks longingly upward to the infinite object of his thought, expecting that the latter will bend down toward him or lift him upward toward itself; in Greek philosophy the spirit confronts its object, the world, on a footing of equality; in modern philosophy the speculative subject feels himself higher than the object, superior to nature. In the conception of the Middle Ages, truth and mystery are identical; to antiquity they appear reconcilable; modern thought holds them as mutually exclusively as light and darkness. The unknown is the enemy of knowledge, which must be chased out of its last hiding-place. It is, therefore, easy to understand that the modern period stands in far sharper antithesis to the mediaeval era than to the ancient, for the latter has furnished it many principles which can be used as weapons against the former. Grandparents and grandchildren make good friends.

[Footnote 1: On the separation and union of the three worlds, natura, gratia, gloria, in Thomas Aquinas, cf. Rudolph Eucken, Die Philosophie des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der Neuzeit, Halle. 1886.]

When a new movement is in preparation, but there is a lack of creative force to give it form, a period of tumultuous disaffection with existing principles ensues. What is wanted is not clearly perceived, but there is a lively sense of that which is not wanted. Dissatisfaction prepares a place for that which is to come by undermining the existent and making it ripe for its fall. The old, the outgrown, the doctrine which had become inadequate, was in this case Scholasticism; modern philosophy shows throughout—and most clearly at the start—an anti-Scholastic character. If up to this time Church dogma had ruled unchallenged in spiritual affairs, and the Aristotelian philosophy in things temporal, war is now declared against authority of every sort and freedom of thought is inscribed on the banner.[1] "Modern philosophy is Protestantism in the sphere of the thinking spirit" (Erdmann). Not that which has been considered true for centuries, not that which another says, though he be Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, not that which flatters the desires of the heart, is true, but that only which is demonstrated to my own understanding with convincing force. Philosophy is no longer willing to be the handmaid of theology, but must set up a house of her own. The watchword now becomes freedom and independent thought, deliverance from every form of constraint, alike from the bondage of ecclesiastical decrees and the inner servitude of prejudice and cherished inclinations. But the adoption of a purpose leads to the consideration of the means for attaining it. Thus the thirst for knowledge raises questions concerning the method, the instruments, and the limits of knowledge; the interest in noëtics and methodology vigorously develops, remains a constant factor in modern inquiry, and culminates in Kant, not again to die away.

[Footnote 1: The doctrine of twofold truth, under whose protecting cloak the new liberal movements had hitherto taken refuge, was now disdainfully repudiated. Cf. Freudenthal, Zur Beurtheilung der Scholastik, in vol. iii. of the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 1890. Also, H. Reuter, Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter 1875-77; and Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883.]

This negative aspect of modern tendencies needs, however, a positive supplement. The mediaeval mode of thought is discarded and the new one is not yet found. What can more fittingly furnish a support, a preliminary substitute, than antiquity? Thus philosophy, also, joins in that great stream of culture, the Renaissance and humanism, which, starting from Italy, poured forth over the whole civilized world. Plato and Neoplatonism, Epicurus and the Stoa are opposed to Scholasticism, the real Aristotle to the transformed Aristotle of the Church and the distorted Aristotle of the schools. Back to the sources, is the cry. With the revival of the ancient languages and ancient books, the spirit of antiquity is also revived. The dust of the schools and the tyranny of the Church are thrown off, and the classical ideal of a free and noble humanity gains enthusiastic adherents. The man is not to be forgotten in the Christian, nor art and science, the rights and the riches of individuality in the interest of piety; work for the future must not blind us to the demands of the present nor lead us to neglect the comprehensive cultivation of the natural capacities of the spirit. The world and man are no longer viewed through Christian eyes, the one as a realm of darkness and the other as a vessel of weakness and wrath, but nature and life gleam before the new generation in joyous, hopeful light. Humanism and optimism have always been allied.

This change in the spirit of thought is accompanied by a corresponding change in the object of thought: theology must yield its supremacy to the knowledge of nature. Weary of Christological and soteriological questions, weary of disputes concerning the angels, the thinking spirit longs to make himself at home in the world it has learned to love, demands real knowledge,—knowledge which is of practical utility,—and no longer seeks God outside the world, but in it and above it. Nature becomes the home, the body of God. Transcendence gives place to immanence, not only in theology, but elsewhere. Modern philosophy is naturalistic in spirit, not only because it takes nature for its favorite object, but also because it carries into other branches of knowledge the mathematical method so successful in natural science, because it considers everything sub ratione naturae and insists on the "natural" explanation of all phenomena, even those of ethics and politics.

In a word, the tendency of modern philosophy is anti-Scholastic, humanistic, and naturalistic. This summary must suffice for preliminary orientation, while the detailed division, particularization, modification, and limitation of these general points must be left for later treatment.

Two further facts, however, may receive preliminary notice. The indifference and hostility to the Church which have been cited among the prominent characteristics of modern philosophy, do not necessarily mean enmity to the Christian religion, much less to religion in general. In part, it is merely a change in the object of religious feeling, which blazes up especially strong and enthusiastic in the philosophy of the sixteenth century, as it transfers its worship from a transcendent deity to a universe indued with a soul; in part, the opposition is directed against the mediaeval, ecclesiastical form of Christianity, with its monastic abandonment of the world. It was often nothing but a very deep and strong religious feeling that led thinkers into the conflict with the hierarchy. Since the elements of permanent worth in the tendencies, doctrines, and institutions of the Middle Ages are thus culled out from that which is corrupt and effete, and preserved by incorporation into the new view of the world and the new science, and as fruitful elements from antiquity enter with them, the progress of philosophy shows a continuous enrichment in its ideas, intuitions, and spirit. The old is not simply discarded and destroyed, but purified, transformed, and assimilated. The same fact forces itself into notice if we consider the relations of nationality and philosophy in the three great eras. The Greek philosophy was entirely national in its origin and its public, it was rooted in the character of the people and addressed itself to fellow-countrymen; not until toward its decline, and not until influenced by Christianity, were its cosmopolitan inclinations aroused. The Middle Ages were indifferent to national distinctions, as to everything earthly, and naught was of value in comparison with man's transcendent destiny. Mediaeval philosophy is in its aims un-national, cosmopolitan, catholic; it uses the Latin of the schools, it seeks adherents in every land, it finds everywhere productive spirits whose labors in its service remain unaffected by their national peculiarities. The modern period returns to the nationalism of antiquity, but does not relinquish the advantage gained by the extension of mediaeval thought to the whole civilized world. The roots of modern philosophy are sunk deep in the fruitful soil of nationality, while the top of the tree spreads itself far beyond national limitations. It is national and cosmopolitan together; it is international as the common property of the various peoples, which exchange their philosophical gifts through an active commerce of ideas. Latin is often retained for use abroad, as the universal language of savants, but many a work is first published in the mother-tongue—and thought in it. Thus it becomes possible for the ideas of the wise to gain an entrance into the consciousness of the people, from whose spirit they have really sprung, and to become a power beyond the circle of the learned public. Philosophy as illumination, as a factor in general culture, is an exclusively modern phenomenon. In this speculative intercourse of nations, however, the French, the English, and the Germans are most involved, both as producers and consumers. France gives the initiative (in Descartes), then England assumes the leadership (in Locke), with Leibnitz and Kant the hegemony passes over to Germany. Besides these powers, Italy takes an eager part in the production of philosophical ideas in the period of ferment before Descartes. Each of these nations contributes elements to the total result which it alone is in a position to furnish, and each is rewarded by gifts in return which it would be incapable of producing out of its own store. This international exchange of ideas, in which each gives and each receives, and the fact that the chief modern thinkers, especially in the earlier half of the era, prior to Kant, are in great part not philosophers by profession but soldiers, statesmen, physicians, as well as natural scientists, historians, and priests, give modern philosophy an unprofessional, worldly appearance, in striking contrast to the clerical character of mediaeval, and the prophetic character of ancient thinking.

Germany, England, and France claim the honor of having produced the first modern philosopher, presenting Nicolas of Cusa, Bacon of Verulam, and René Descartes as their candidates, while Hobbes, Bruno, and Montaigne have received only scattered votes. The claim of England is the weakest of all, for, without intending to diminish Bacon's importance, it may be said that the programme which he develops—and in essence his philosophy is nothing more—was, in its leading principles, not first announced by him, and not carried out with sufficient consistency. The dispute between the two remaining contestants may be easily and equitably settled by making the simple distinction between forerunner and beginner, between path-breaker and founder. The entrance of a new historical era is not accompanied by an audible click, like the beginning of a new piece on a music-box, but is gradually effected. A considerable period may intervene between the point when the new movement flashes up, not understood and half unconscious of itself, and the time when it appears on the stage in full strength and maturity, recognizing itself as new and so acknowledged by others: the period of ferment between the Middle Ages and modern times lasted almost two centuries. It is in the end little more than logomachy to discuss whether this time of anticipation and desire, of endeavor and partial success, in which the new struggles with the old without conquering it, and the opposite tendencies in the conflicting views of the world interplay in a way at once obscure and wayward, is to be classed as the epilogue of the old era or the prologue of the new. The simple solution to take it as a transition period, no longer mediaeval but not yet modern, has met with fairly general acceptance. Nicolas of Cusa (1401-64) was the first to announce fundamental principles of modern philosophy—he is the leader in this intermediate preparatory period. Descartes (1596-1650) brought forward the first system—he is the father of modern philosophy.

A brief survey of the literature may be added in conclusion:

Heinrich Ritter's Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (vols. ix.-xii. of his Geschichte der Philosophie), 1850-53, to Wolff and Rousseau, has been superseded by more recent works, J.E. Erdmann's able Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der neueren Philosophie (6 vols., 1834-53) gives in appendices literal excerpts from non-German writers; the same author's Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (2 vols., 1869; 3d ed., 1878) contains at the end the first exposition of German Philosophy since the Death of Hegel [English translation in 3 vols., edited by W. S. Hough, 1890.—TR.]. Ueberweg's Grundriss (7th ed. by M. Heinze, 1888) is indispensable for reference on account of the completeness of its bibliographical notes, which, however, are confusing to the beginner [English translation by G.S. Morris, with additions by the translator, Noah Porter, and Vincenzo Botta, New York, 1872-74.—TR.]. The most detailed and brilliant exposition has been given by Kuno Fischer (1854 seq.; 3d ed., 1878 seq.; the same author's Baco und seine Nachfolger, 2d ed., 1875,—English translation, 1857, by Oxenford,—supplements the first two volumes of the Geschichte der neueren Philosophie). This work, which is important also as a literary achievement, is better fitted than any other to make the reader at home in the ideal world of the great philosophers, which it reconstructs from its central point, and to prepare him for the study (which, of course, even the best exposition cannot replace) of the works of the thinkers themselves. Its excessive simplification of problems is not of great moment in the first introduction to a system [English translation of vol. iii. book 2 (1st ed.), A Commentary on Kant's Critick of the Pure Reason, by J.P. Mahaffy, London, 1866; vol. i. part 1 and part 2, book 1, Descartes and his School, by J, P. Gordy, New York, 1887; of vol. v. chaps, i.-v., A Critique of Kant, by W.S. Hough, London, 1888.—TR.]. Wilhelm Windelband (Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 2 vols., 1878 and 1880, to Hegel and Herbart inclusive) accentuates the connection of philosophy with general culture and the particular sciences, and emphasizes philosophical method. This work is pleasant reading, yet, in the interest of clearness, we could wish that the author had given more of positive information concerning the content of the doctrines treated, instead of merely advancing reflections on them. A projected third volume is to trace the development of philosophy down to the present time. Windelband's compendium, Geschichte der Philosophie, 1890-91, is distinguished from other expositions by the fact that, for the most part, it confines itself to a history of problems. Baumann's Geschichte der Philosophie, 1890, aims to give a detailed account of those thinkers only who have advanced views individual either in their content or in their proof. Eduard Zeller has given his Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibniz (1873; 2d ed., 1875) the benefit of the same thorough and comprehensive knowledge and mature judgment which have made his Philosophie der Griechen a classic. [Bowen's Modern Philosophy, New York, 1857 (6th ed., 1891); Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 1892.—TR.]

Eugen Dühring's hypercritical Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie (1869; 3d ed., 1878) can hardly be recommended to students. Lewes (German translation, 1876) assumes a positivistic standpoint; Thilo (1874), a position exclusively Herbartian; A. Stoeckl (3d ed., 1889) writes from the standpoint of confessional Catholicism; Vincenz Knauer (2d ed., 1882) is a Güntherian. With the philosophico-historical work of Chr. W. Sigwart (1854), and one of the same date by Oischinger, we are not intimately acquainted.

Expositions of philosophy since Kant have been given by the Hegelian, C.L. Michelet (a larger one in 2 vols., 1837-38, and a smaller one, 1843); by Chalybaeus (1837; 5th ed., 1860, formerly very popular and worthy of it, English, 1854); by Fr. K. Biedermann (1842-43); by Carl Fortlage (1852, Kantio-Fichtean standpoint); and by Friedrich Harms (1876). The last of these writers unfortunately did not succeed in giving a sufficiently clear and precise, not to say tasteful, form to the valuable ideas and original conceptions in which his work is rich. The very popular exposition by an anonymous author of Hegelian tendencies, Deutschlands Denker seit Kant (Dessau, 1851), hardly deserves mention.

Further, we may mention some of the works which treat the historical development of particular subjects: On the history of the philosophy of religion, the first volume of Otto Pfleiderer's Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage (2d ed., 1883;—English translation by Alexander Stewart and Allan Menzies, 1886-88.—TR.), and the very trustworthy exposition by Bernhard Pünjer (2 vols., 1880, 1883; English translation by W. Hastie, vol. i., 1887.—TR.). On the history of practical philosophy, besides the first volume of I.H. Fichte's Ethik (1850), Franz Vorländer's Geschichte der philosophischen Moral, Rechts- und Staatslehre der Engländer und Franzosen (1855); Fr. Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik in der neueren Philosophie (2 vols., 1882, 1889), and Bluntschli, Geschichte der neueren Staatswissenschaft (3d ed., 1881); [Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, 3d ed., 1892, and Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, 3d ed., 1891.—TR.]. On the history of the philosophy of history: Rocholl, Die Philosophie der Geschichte, 1878; Richard Fester, Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie, 1890 [Flint, The Philosophy of History in Europe, vol. i., 1874, complete in 3 vols., 1893 seq.]. On the history of aesthetics, R. Zimmermann, 1858; H. Lotze, 1868; Max Schasler, 1871; Ed. von Hartmann (since Kant), 1886; Heinrich von Stein, Die Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik (1886); [Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, 1892.—TR.]. Further, Fr. Alb. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 1866; 4th ed., 1882; [English translation by E.C. Thomas, 3 vols., 1878-81.—TR.]; Jul. Baumann, Die Lehren von Raum, Zeit und Mathematik in der neueren Philosophie, 1868-69; Edm. König, Die Entwickelung des Causalproblems von Cartesius bis Kant, 1888, seit Kant, 1890; Kurd Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton, 2 vols., 1890; Ed. Grimm, Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems, von Bacon zu Hume, 1890. The following works are to be recommended on the period of transition: Moritz Carrière, Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit, 1847; 2d ed., 1887; and Jacob Burckhardt, Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 4th ed., 1886. Reference may also be made to A. Trendelenburg, Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie, 3 vols., 1846-67; Rudolph Eucken, Geschichte und Kritik der Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart, 1878; [English translation by M. Stuart Phelps, 1880.—TR.]; the same, Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie, 1879; the same, Beiträge zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 1886 (including a valuable paper on parties and party names in philosophy); the same, Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, 1890; Ludwig Noack, Philosophiegeschichtliches Lexicon, 1879; Ed. Zeller, Vorträge und Abhandlungen, three series, 1865-84; Chr. von Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, 2 vols., 1881; 2d ed., 1889. R. Seydel's Religion und Philosophie, 1887, contains papers on Luther, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Weisse, Fechner, Lotze, Hartmann, Darwinism, etc., which are well worth reading.

Among the smaller compends Schwegler's (1848; recent editions revised and supplemented by R. Koeber) remains still the least bad [English translations by Seelye and Smith, revised edition with additions, New York, 1880; and J.H. Stirling, with annotations, 7th ed., 1879.—TR.]. The meager sketches by Deter, Koeber, Kirchner, Kuhn, Rabus, Vogel, and others are useful for review at least. Fritz Schultze's Stammbaum der Philosophie, 1890, gives skillfully constructed tabular outlines, but, unfortunately, in a badly chosen form.

CHAPTER I.

THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION: FROM NICOLAS OF CUSA TO DESCARTES.

The essays at philosophy which made their appearance between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth, exhibit mediaeval and modern characteristics in such remarkable intermixture that they can be assigned exclusively to neither of these two periods. There are eager longings, lofty demands, magnificent plans, and promising outlooks in abundance, but a lack of power to endure, a lack of calmness and maturity; while the shackles against which the leading minds revolt still bind too firmly both the leaders and those to whom they speak. Only here and there are the fetters loosened and thrown off; if the hands are successfully freed, the clanking chains still hamper the feet. It is a time just suited for original thinkers, a remarkable number of whom in fact make their appearance, side by side or in close succession. Further, however little these are able to satisfy the demand for permanent results, they ever arouse our interest anew by the boldness and depth of their brilliant ideas, which alternate with quaint fancies or are pervaded by them; by the youthful courage with which they attacked great questions; and not least by the hard fate which rewarded their efforts with misinterpretation, persecution, and death at the stake. We must quickly pass over the broad threshold between modern philosophy and Scholastic philosophy, which is bounded by the year 1450, in which Nicolas of Cusa wrote his chief work, the Idiota, and 1644, when Descartes began the new era with his Principia Philosophiae; and can touch, in passing, only the most important factors. We shall begin our account of this transition period with Nicolas, and end it with the Englishmen, Bacon, Hobbes, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Between these we shall arrange the various figures of the Philosophical Renaissance (in the broad sense) in six groups: the Restorers of the Ancient Systems and their Opponents; the Italian Philosophers of Nature; the Political and Legal Philosophers; the Skeptics; the Mystics; the Founders of the Exact Investigation of Nature. In Italy the new spiritual birth shows an aesthetic, scientific, and humanistic tendency; in Germany it is pre-eminently religious emancipation—in the Reformation.

%1. Nicolas of Cusa.%

Nicolas[1] was born in 1401, at Cues (Cusa) on the Moselle near Treves. He early ran away from his stern father, a boatman and vine-dresser named Chrypps (or Krebs), and was brought up by the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer. In Padua he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy, but the loss of his first case at Mayence so disgusted him with his profession that he turned to theology, and became a distinguished preacher. He took part in the Council of Basle, was sent by Pope Eugen IV. as an ambassador to Constantinople and to the Reichstag at Frankfort; was made Cardinal in 1448, and Bishop of Brixen in 1450. His feudal lord, the Count of Tyrol, Archduke Sigismund, refused him recognition on account of certain quarrels in which they had become engaged, and for a time held him prisoner. Previous to this he had undertaken journeys to Germany and the Netherlands on missionary business. During a second sojourn in Italy death overtook him, in the year 1464, at Todi in Umbria. The first volume of the Paris edition of his collected works (1514) contains the most important of his philosophical writings; the second, among others, mathematical essays and ten books of selections from his sermons; the third, the extended work, De Concordantia Catholica, which he had completed at Basle. In 1440 (having already written on the Reform of the Calendar) he began his imposing series of philosophical writings with the De Docta Ignorantia, to which the De Conjecturis was added in the following year. These were succeeded by smaller treatises entitled De Quaerendo Deum, De Dato Patris Luminum, De Filiatione Dei, De Genesi, and a defense of the De Docta Ignorantia. His most important work is the third of the four dialogues of the Idiota ("On the Mind"), 1450. He clothes in continually changing forms the one supreme truth on which all depends, and which cannot be expressed in intelligible language but only comprehended by living intuition. In many different ways he endeavors to lead the reader on to a vision of the inexpressible, or to draw him up to it, and to develop fruitfully the principle of the coincidence of opposites, which had dawned upon him on his return journey from Constantinople (De Visione Dei, Dialogus de Possest, De Beryllo, De Ludo Globi, De Venatione Sapientiae, De Apice Theoriae, Compendium). Sometimes he uses dialectical reasoning; sometimes he soars in mystical exaltation; sometimes he writes with a simplicity level to the common mind, and in connection with that which lies at hand; sometimes, with the most comprehensive brevity. Besides these his philosophico-religious works are of great value, De Pace Fidei, De Cribratione Alchorani. Liberal Catholics reverence him as one of the deepest thinkers of the Church; but the fame of Giordano Bruno, a more brilliant but much less original figure, has hitherto stood in the way of the general recognition of his great importance for modern philosophy.

[Footnote 1: R. Zimmermann, Nikolaus Cusanus als Vorläufer Leibnizens, in vol. viii. of the Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 1852, p. 306 seq. R. Falckenberg, Grundzüge der Philosophie des Nikolaus Cusanus mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Lehre vom Erkennen, Breslau, 1880. R. Eucken, Beiträge zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Heidelberg, 1886, p. 6 seq.; Joh. Uebinger, Die Gotteslehre des Nikolaus Cusanus, Münster, 1888. Scharpff, Des Nikolaus von Cusa wichtigste Schriften in deutscher Uebersetzung, Freiburg i. Br., 1862.]

Human knowledge and the relation of God to the world are the two poles of the Cusan's system. He distinguishes four stages of knowledge. Lowest of all stands sense (together with imagination), which yields only confused images; next above, the understanding (ratio), whose functions comprise analysis, the positing of time and space, numerical operations, and denomination, and which keeps the opposites distinct under the law of contradiction; third, the speculative reason (intellectus), which finds the opposites reconcilable; and highest of all the mystical, supra-rational intuition (visio sine comprehensione, intuitio, unio, filiatio), for which the opposites coincide in the infinite unity. The intuitive culmination of knowledge, in which the soul is united with God,—since here even the antithesis of subject and object disappears,—is but seldom attained; and it is difficult to keep out the disturbing symbols and images of sense, which mingle themselves in the intuition. But it is just this insight into the incomprehensibility of the infinite which gives us a true knowledge of God; this is the meaning of the "learned ignorance," the docta ignorantia. The distinctions between these several stages of cognition are not, however, to be understood in any rigid sense, for each higher function comprehends the lower, and is active therein. The understanding can discriminate only when it is furnished by sensation with images of that which is to be discriminated, the reason can combine only when the understanding has supplied the results of analysis as material for combination; while, on the other hand, it is the understanding which is present in sense as consciousness, and the reason whose unity guides the understanding in its work of separation. Thus the several modes of cognition do not stand for independent fundamental faculties, but for connected modifications of one fundamental power which work together and mutually imply one another. The position that an intellectual function of attention and discrimination is active in sensuous perception, is a view entirely foreign to mediaeval modes of thought; for the Scholastics were accustomed to make sharp divisions between the cognitive faculties, on the principle that particulars are felt through sense and universals thought through the understanding. The idea on which Nicolas bases his argument for immortality has also an entirely modern sound: viz., that space and time are products of the understanding, and, therefore, can have no power over the spirit which produces them; for the author is higher and mightier than the product.

The confession that all our knowledge is conjecture does not simply mean that absolute and exact truth remains concealed from us; but is intended at the same time to encourage us to draw as near as possible to the eternal verity by ever truer conjectures. There are degrees of truth, and our surmises are neither absolutely true nor entirely false. Conjecture becomes error only when, forgetting the inadequacy of human knowledge, we rest content with it as a final solution; the Socratic maxim, "I know that I am ignorant," should not lead to despairing resignation but to courageous further inquiry. The duty of speculation is to penetrate deeper and deeper into the secrets of the divine, even though the ultimate revelation will not be given us until the hereafter. The fittest instrument of speculation is furnished by mathematics, in its conception of the infinite and the wonders of numerical relations: as on the infinite sphere center and circumference coincide, so God's essence is exalted above all opposites; and as the other numbers are unfolded from the unit, so the finite proceeds by explication from the infinite. A controlling significance in the serial construction of the world is ascribed to the ten, as the sum of the first four numbers—as reason, understanding, imagination, and sensibility are related in human cognition, so God, spirit, soul, and body, or infinity, thought, life, and being are related in the objective sphere; so, further, the absolute necessity of God, the concrete necessity of the universe, the actuality of individuals, and the possibility of matter. Beside the quaternary the tern also exercises its power—the world divides into the stages of eternity, imperishability, and the temporal world of sense, or truth, probability, and confusion. The divine trinity is reflected everywhere: in the world as creator, created, and love; in the mind as creative force, concept, and will. The triunity of God is very variously explained—as the subject, object, and act of cognition; as creative spirit, wisdom, and goodness; as being, power, and deed; and, preferably, as unity, equality, and the combination of the two.

God is related to the world as unity, identity, complicatio, to otherness, diversity, explicatio, as necessity to contingency, as completed actuality to mere possibility; yet, in such a way that the otherness participates in the unity, and receives its reality from this, and the unity does not have the otherness confronting it, outside it. God is triune only as the Creator of the world, and in relation to it; in himself he is absolute unity and infinity, to which nothing disparate stands opposed, which is just as much all things as not all things, and which, as the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable, the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum, the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum coincide. That which in the world exists as concretely determinate and particular, is in God in a simple and universal way; and that which here is present as incompleted striving, and as possibility realizing itself by gradual development, is in God completed activity. He is the realization of all possibility, the Can-be or Can-is (possest); and since this absolute actuality is the presupposition and cause of all finite ability and action, it may be unconditionally designated ability (posse ipsum), in antithesis to all determinate manifestations of force; namely, to all ability to be, live, feel, think, and will.

However much these definitions, conceived in harmony with the dualistic view of Christianity, accentuate the antithesis between God and the world, this is elsewhere much softened, nay directly denied, in favor of a pantheistic view which points forward to the modern period. Side by side with the assertion that there is no proportion whatever between the infinite and the finite, the following naïvely presents itself, in open contradiction to the former: God excels the reason just as much as the latter is superior to the understanding, and the understanding to sensibility, or he is related to thought as thought to life, and life to being. Nay, Nicolas makes even bolder statements than these, when he calls the universe a sensuous and mutable God, man a human God or a humanly contracted infinity, the creation a created God or a limited infinity; thus hinting that God and the world are at bottom essentially alike, differing only in the form of their existence, that it is one and the same being and action which manifests itself absolutely in God, relatively and in a limited way in the system of creation. It was chiefly three modern ideas which led the Cusan on from dualism to pantheism—the boundlessness of the universe, the connection of all being, and the all-comprehensive richness of individuality. Endlessness belongs to the universe as well as to God, only its endlessness is not an absolute one, beyond space and time, but weakened and concrete, namely unlimited extension in space and unending duration in time. Similarly, the universe is unity, yet not a unity absolutely above multiplicity and diversity, but one which is divided into many members and obscured thereby. Even the individual is infinite in a certain sense; for, in its own way, it bears in itself all that is, it mirrors the whole world from its limited point of view, is an abridged, compressed representation of the universe. As the members of the body, the eye, the arm, the foot, interact in the closest possible way, and no one of them can dispense with the rest, so each thing is connected with each, different from it and yet in harmony with it, so each contains all the others and is contained by them. All is in all, for all is in the universe and in God, as the universe and God in all. In a still higher degree man is a microcosm (parvus mundus), a mirror of the All, since he not merely, like other beings, actually has in himself all that exists, but also has a knowledge of this richness, is capable of developing it into conscious images of things. And it is just this which constitutes the perfection of the whole and of the parts, that the higher is in the lower, the cause in the effect, the genus in the individual, the soul in the body, reason in the senses, and conversely. To perfect, is simply to make active a potential possession, to unfold capacities and to elevate the unconscious into consciousness. Here we have the germ of the philosophy of Bruno and of Leibnitz.

As we have noticed a struggle between two opposite tendencies, one dualistic and Christian, one pantheistic and modern, in the theology of Nicolas, so at many other points a conflict between the mediaeval and the modern view of the world, of which our philosopher is himself unconscious, becomes evident to the student. It is impossible to follow out the details of this interesting opposition, so we shall only attempt to distinguish in a rough way the beginnings of the new from the remnants of the old. Modern is his interest in the ancient philosophers, of whom Pythagoras, Plato, and the Neoplatonists especially attract him; modern, again, his interest in natural science[1] (he teaches not only the boundlessness of the world, but also the motion of the earth); his high estimation of mathematics, although he often utilizes this merely in a fanciful symbolism of numbers; his optimism (the world an image of the divine, everything perfect of its kind, the bad simply a halt on the way to the good); his intellectualism (knowing the primal function and chief mission of the spirit; faith an undeveloped knowledge; volition and emotion, as is self-evident, incidental results of thought; knowledge a leading back of the creature to God as its source, hence the counterpart of creation); modern, finally, the form and application given to the Stoic-Neoplatonic concept of individuality, and the idealistic view which resolves the objects of thought into products thereof.[2] This last position, indeed, is limited by the lingering influence of nominalism, which holds the concepts of the mind to be merely abstract copies, and not archetypes of things. Moreover, explicatio, evolutio, unfolding, as yet does not always have the meaning of development to-day, of progressive advance. It denotes, quite neutrally, the production of a multiplicity from a unity, in which the former has lain confined, no matter whether this multiplicity and its procession signify enhancement or attenuation. For the most part, in fact, involution, complicatio (which, moreover, always means merely a primal, germinal condition, never, as in Leibnitz, the return thereto) represents the more perfect condition. The chief examples of the relation of involution and evolution are the principles in which science is involved and out of which it is unfolded; the unit, which is related to numbers in a similar way; the spirit and the cognitive operations; God and his creatures. However obscure and unskillful this application of the idea of development may appear, yet it is indisputable that a discovery of great promise has been made, accompanied by a joyful consciousness of its fruitfulness. Of the numberless features which point backward to the Middle Ages, only one need be mentioned, the large space taken up by speculations concerning the God-man (the whole third book of the De Docta Ignorantia), and by those concerning the angels. Yet even here a change is noticeable, for the earthly and the divine are brought into most intimate relation, while in Thomas Aquinas, for instance, they form two entirely separate worlds. In short, the new view of the world appears in Nicolas still bound on every hand by mediaeval conceptions. A century and a half passed before the fetters, grown rusty in the meanwhile, broke under the bolder touch of Giordano Bruno.

[Footnote 1: The attention of our philosopher was called to the natural sciences, and thus also to geography, which at this time was springing into new life, by his friend Paul Toscanelli, the Florentine. Nicolas was the first to have the map of Germany engraved (cf. S. Ruge in Globus, vol. lx., No. I, 1891), which, however, was not completed until long after his death, and issued in 1491.]

[Footnote 2: On the modern elements in his theory of the state and of right, cf. Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. iii. § II, 1881.]

%2. The Revival of Ancient Philosophy and the Opposition to it%.

Italy is the home of the Renaissance and the birthplace of important new ideas which give the intellectual life of the sixteenth century its character of brave endeavor after high and distant ends. The enthusiasm for ancient literature already aroused by the native poets, Dante (1300), Petrarch (1341), and Boccaccio (1350), was nourished by the influx of Greek scholars, part of whom came in pursuance of an invitation to the Council of Ferrara and Florence (1438) called in behalf of the union of the Churches (among these were Pletho and his pupil Bessarion; Nicolas Cusanus was one of the legates invited), while part were fugitives from Constantinople after its capture by the Turks in 1453. The Platonic Academy, whose most celebrated member, Marsilius Ficinus, translated Plato and the Neoplatonists into Latin, was founded in 1440 on the suggestion of Georgius Gemistus Pletho[1] under the patronage of Cosimo dei Medici. The writings of Pletho ("On the Distinction between Plato and Aristotle"), of Bessarion (Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis, 1469, in answer to the Comparatio Aristotelis et Platonis, 1464, an attack by the Aristotelian, George of Trebizond, on Pletho's work), and of Ficinus (Theologia Platonica, 1482), show that the Platonism which they favored was colored by religious, mystical, and Neoplatonic elements. If for Bessarion and Ficinus, just as for the Eclectics of the later Academy, there was scarcely any essential distinction between the teachings of Plato, of Aristotle, and of Christianity; this confusion of heterogeneous elements was soon carried much farther, when the two Picos (John Pico of Mirandola, died 1494, and his nephew Francis, died 1533) and Johann Reuchlin (De Verbo Mirifico, 1494; De Arte Cabbalistica, 1517), who had been influenced by the former, introduced the secret doctrines of the Jewish Cabala into the Platonic philosophy, and Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne (De Occulta Philosophia, 1510; cf. Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, vol. i. p. 1 seq.) made the mixture still worse by the addition of the magic art. The impulse of the modern spirit to subdue nature is here already apparent, only that it shows inexperience in the selection of its instruments; before long, however, nature will willingly unveil to observation and calm reflection the secrets which she does not yield to the compulsion of magic.

[Footnote 1: Pletho died at an advanced age in 1450. His chief work, the
[Greek: Nomoi], was given to the flames by his Aristotelian opponent,
Georgius Scholarius, surnamed Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople.
Portions of it only, which had previously become known, have been
preserved. On Pletho's life and teachings, cf. Fritz Schultze, G.G.
Plethon, Jena, 1874.]

A similar romantic figure was Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast Paracelsus[1] von Hohenheim (1493-1541), a traveled Swiss, who endeavored to reform medicine from the standpoint of chemistry. Philosophy for Paracelsus is knowledge of nature, in which observation and thought must co-operate; speculation apart from experience and worship of the paper-wisdom of the ancients lead to no result. The world is a living whole, which, like man, the microcosm, in whom the whole content of the macrocosm is concentrated as in an extract, runs its life course. Originally all things were promiscuously intermingled in a unity, the God-created prima materia, as though inclosed in a germ, whence the manifold, with its various forms and colors, proceeded by separation. The development then proceeds in such a way that in each genus that is perfected which is posited therein, and does not cease until, at the last day, all that is possible in nature and history shall have fulfilled itself. But the one indwelling life of nature lives in all the manifold forms; the same laws rule in the human body as in the universe; that which works secretly in the former lies open to the view in the latter, and the world gives the clew to the knowledge of man. Natural becoming is brought about by the chemical separation and coming together of substances; the ultimate constituents revealed by analysis are the three fundamental substances or primitive essences, quicksilver, sulphur, and salt, by which, however, something more principiant is understood than the empirical substances bearing these names: mercurius means that which makes bodies liquid, sulfur, that which makes them combustible, sal, that which makes them fixed and rigid. From these are compounded the four elements, each of which is ruled by elemental spirits—earth by gnomes or pygmies, water by undines or nymphs, air by sylphs, fire by salamanders (cf. with this, and with Paracelsus's theory of the world as a whole, Faust's two monologues in Goethe's drama); which are to be understood as forces or sublimated substances, not as personal, demoniacal beings. To each individual being there is ascribed a vital principle, the Archeus, an individualization of the general force of nature, Vulcanus; so also to men. Disease is a checking of this vital principle by contrary powers, which are partly of a terrestrial and partly of a sidereal nature; and the choice of medicines is to be determined by their ability to support the Archeus against its enemies. Man is, however, superior to nature—he is not merely the universal animal, inasmuch as he is completely that which other beings are only in a fragmentary way; but, as the image of God, he has also an eternal element in him, and is capable of attaining perfection through the exercise of his rational judgment. Paracelsus distinguishes three worlds: the elemental or terrestrial, the astral or celestial, and the spiritual or divine. To the three worlds, which stand in relations of sympathetic interaction, there correspond in man the body, which nourishes itself on the elements, the spirit, whose imagination receives its food, sense and thoughts, from the spirits of the stars, and, finally, the immortal soul, which finds its nourishment in faith in Christ. Hence natural philosophy, astronomy, and theology are the pillars of anthropology, and ultimately of medicine. This fantastic physic of Paracelsus found many adherents both in theory and in practice.[2] Among those who accepted and developed it may be named R. Fludd (died 1637), and the two Van Helmonts, father and son (died 1644 and 1699).

[Footnote 1: On Paracelsus cf. Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, vol. i. p. 25 seq.; Eucken, Beiträge zur Geschichteder neueren Philosophie, p. 32 seq.; Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik, vol. i. p. 294 seq.]

[Footnote 2: The influence of Paracelsus, as of Vives and Campanella, is evident in the great educator, Amos Comenius (Komensky, 1592-1670), whose pansophical treatises appeared in 1637-68. On Comenius cf. Pappenheim, Berlin, 1871; Kvacsala, Doctor's Dissertation, Leipsic, 1886; Walter Mueller, Dresden, 1887.]

Beside the Platonic philosophy, others of the ancient systems were also revived. Stoicism was commended by Justus Lipsius (died 1606) and Caspar Schoppe (Scioppius, born 1562); Epicureanism was revived by Gassendi (1647), and rhetorizing logicians went back to Cicero and Quintilian. Among the latter were Laurentius Valla (died 1457); R. Agricola (died 1485); the Spaniard, Ludovicus Vives (1531), who referred inquiry from the authority of Aristotle to the methodical utilization of experience; and Marius Nizolius (1553), whose Antibarbarus was reissued by Leibnitz in 1670.

The adherents of Aristotle were divided into two parties, one of which relied on the naturalistic interpretation of the Greek exegete, Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 A.D.), the other on the pantheistic interpretation of the Arabian commentator, Averroës (died 1198). The conflict over the question of immortality, carried on especially in Padua, was the culmination of the battle. The Alexandrist asserted that, according to Aristotle, the soul was mortal, the Averroists, that the rational part which is common to all men was immortal; while to this were added the further questions, if and how the Aristotelian view could be reconciled with the Church doctrine, which demanded a continued personal existence. The most eminent Aristotelian of the Renaissance, Petrus Pomponatius (De Immortalite Animae, 1516; De Fato, Libero Arbitrio, Providentia et Praedestinatione), was on the side of the Alexandrists. Achillini and Niphus fought on the other side. Caesalpin (died 1603), Zabarella, and Cremonini assumed an intermediate, or, at least, a less decided position. Still others, as Faber Stapulensis in Paris (1500), and Desiderius Erasmus (1520), were more interested in securing a correct text of Aristotle's works than in his philosophical principles.

* * * * *

Among the Anti-Aristotelians only two famous names need be mentioned, that of the influential Frenchman, Petrus Ramus, and the German, Taurellus. Pierre de la Ramée (assassinated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 1572), attacked the (unnatural and useless) Aristotelian logic in his Aristotelicae Animadversiones, 1543, objecting, with the Ciceronians mentioned above, to the separation of logic and rhetoric; and attempted a new logic of his own, in his Institutiones Dialecticae, which, in spite of its formalism, gained acceptance, especially in Germany.[1] Nicolaus Oechslein, Latinized Taurellus (born in 1547 at Mömpelgard; at his death, in 1606, professor of medicine in the University of Altdorf), stood quite alone because of his independent position in reference to all philosophical and religious parties. His most important works were his Philosophiae Triumphus, 1573; Synopsis Aristotelis Metaphysicae, 1596; Alpes Caesae (against Caesalpin, and the title punning on his name), 1597; and De Rerum Aeternitate, 1604.[2] The thought of Taurellus inclines toward the ideal of a Christian philosophy; which, however, Scholasticism, in his view, did not attain, inasmuch as its thought was heathen in its blind reverence for Aristotle, even though its faith was Christian. In order to heal this breach between the head and the heart, it is necessary in religion to return from confessional distinctions to Christianity itself, and in philosophy, to abandon authority for the reason. We should not seek to be Lutherans or Calvinists, but simply Christians, and we should judge on rational grounds, instead of following Aristotle, Averroës, or Thomas Aquinas. Anyone who does not aim at the harmony of theology and philosophy, is neither a Christian nor a philosopher. One and the same God is the primal source of both rational and revealed truth. Philosophy is the basis of theology, theology the criterion and complement of philosophy. The one starts with effects evident to the senses and leads to the suprasensible, to the First Cause; the other follows the reverse course. To philosophy belongs all that Adam knew or could know before the fall; had there been no sin, there would have been no other than philosophical knowledge. But after the fall, the reason, which informs us, it is true, of the moral law, but not of the divine purpose of salvation, would have led us to despair, since neither punishment nor virtue could justify us, if revelation did not teach us the wonders of grace and redemption. Although Taurellus thus softens the opposition between theology and philosophy, which had been most sharply expressed in the doctrine of "twofold truth" (that which is true in philosophy may be false in theology, and conversely), and endeavors to bring the two into harmony, the antithesis between God and the world still remains for him immovably fixed. God is not things, though he is all. He is pure affirmation; all without him is composed, as it were, of being and nothing, and can neither be nor be known independently: negatio non nihil est, alias nec esset nec intelligeretur, sed limitatio est affirmationis. Simple being or simple affirmation is equivalent to infinity, eternity, unity, uniqueness,—properties which do not belong to the world. He who posits things as eternal, sublates God. God and the world are opposed to each other as infinite cause and finite effect. Moreover, as it is our spirit which philosophizes and not God's spirit in us, so the faith through which man appropriates Christ's merit is a free action of the human spirit, the capacity for which is inborn, not infused from above; in it, God acts merely as an auxiliary or remote cause, by removing the obstacles which hinder the operation of the power of faith. With this anti-pantheistic tendency he combines an anti-intellectualistic one—being and production precedes and stands higher than contemplation; God's activity does not consist in thought but in production, and human blessedness, not in the knowledge but the love of God, even though the latter presupposes the former. While man, as an end in himself, is immortal—and the whole man, not his soul merely—the world of sense, which has been created only for the conservation of man (his procreation and probation), must disappear; above this world, however, a higher rears its walls to subserve man's eternal happiness.

[Footnote 1: On Ramus cf. Waddington's treatises, one in Latin, Paris, 1849, the other in French, Paris, 1855.]

[Footnote 2: Schmid Schwarzenburg has written on Taurellus, 1860, 2d ed., 1864.]

The high regard which Leibnitz expressed for Taurellus may be in part explained by the many anticipations of his own thoughts to be found in the earlier writer. The intimate relation into which sensibility and understanding are brought is an instance of this from the theory of knowledge. Receptivity is not passivity, but activity arrested (through the body). All knowledge is inborn; all men are potential philosophers (and, so far as they are loyal to conscience, Christians); the spirit is a thinking and a thinkable universe. Taurellus's philosophy of nature, recognizing the relative truth of atomism, makes the world consist of manifold simple substances combined into formal unity: he calls it a well constructed system of wholes. A discussion of the origin of evil is also given, with a solution based on the existence and misuse of freedom. Finally, it is to be mentioned to the great credit of Taurellus, that, like his younger contemporaries, Galileo and Kepler, he vigorously opposed the Aristotelian and Scholastic animation of the material world and the anthropomorphic conception of its forces, thus preparing the way for the modern view of nature to be perfected by Newton.

%3. The Italian Philosophy of Nature%.

We turn now from the restorers of ancient doctrines and their opponents to the men who, continuing the opposition to the authority of Aristotle, point out new paths for the study of nature. The physician, Hieronymus Cardanus of Milan (1501-76), whose inclinations toward the fanciful were restrained, though not suppressed, by his mathematical training, may be considered the forerunner of the school. While the people should accept the dogmas of the Church with submissive faith, the thinker may and should subordinate all things to the truth. The wise man belongs to that rare class who neither deceive nor are deceived; others are either deceivers or deceived, or both. In his theory of nature, Cardanus advances two principles: one passive, matter (the three cold and moist elements), and an active, formative one, the world-soul, which, pervading the All and bringing it into unity, appears as warmth and light. The causes of motion are attraction and repulsion, which in higher beings become love and hate. Even superhuman spirits, the demons, are subject to the mechanical laws of nature.

The standard bearer of the Italian philosophy of nature was Bernardinus Telesius[1] of Cosenza (1508-88; De Rerum Natura juxta Propria Principia, 1565, enlarged 1586), the founder of a scientific society in Naples called the Telesian, or after the name of his birthplace, the Cosentian Academy. Telesius maintained that the Aristotelian doctrine must be replaced by an unprejudiced empiricism; that nature must be explained from itself, and by as few principles as possible. Beside inert matter, this requires only two active forces, on whose interaction all becoming and all life depend. These are warmth, which expands, and cold, which contracts; the former resides in the sun and thence proceeds, the latter is situated in the earth. Although Telesius acknowledges an immaterial, immortal soul, he puts the emphasis on sensuous experience, without which the understanding is incapable of attaining certain knowledge. He is a sensationalist both in the theory of knowledge and in ethics, holding the functions of judgment and thought deducible from the fundamental power of perception, and considering the virtues different manifestations of the instinct of self-preservation (which he ascribes to matter as well).

[Footnote 1: Cf. on Telesius, Florentine, 2 vols., Naples, 1872-74; K. Heiland, Erkenntnisslehre und Ethik des Telesius, Doctor's Dissertation at Leipsic, 1891. Further, Rixner and Siber, Leben und Lehrmeinungen berühmter Physiker am Ende des XVI. und am Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, Sulzbach (1819-26), 7 Hefte, 2d ed., 1829. Hefte 2-6 discuss Cardanus, Telesius, Patritius, Bruno, and Campanella; the first is devoted to Paracelsus, and the seventh to the older Van Helmont (Joh. Bapt.).]

With the name of Telesius we usually associate that of Franciscus Patritius (1529-97), professor of the Platonic philosophy in Ferrara and Rome (Discussiones Peripateticae, 1581; Nova de Universis Philosophia, 1591), who, combining Neoplatonic and Telesian principles, holds that the incorporeal or spiritual light emanates from the divine original light, in which all reality is seminally contained; the heavenly or ethereal light from the incorporeal; and the earthly or corporeal, from the heavenly—while the original light divides into three persons, the One and All (Unomnia), unity or life, and spirit.

The Italian philosophy of nature culminates in Bruno and Campanella, of whom the former, although he is the earlier, appears the more advanced because of his freer attitude toward the Church. Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 at Nola, and educated at Naples; abandoning his membership in the Dominican Order, he lived, with various changes of residence, in France, England, and Germany. Returning to his native land, he was arrested in Venice and imprisoned for seven years at Rome, where, on February 17, 1600, he suffered death at the stake, refusing to recant. (The same fate overtook his fellow-countryman, Vanini, in 1619, at Toulouse.) Besides three didactic poems in Latin (Frankfort, 1591), the Italian dialogues, Della Causa, Principio ed Uno, Venice, 1584 (German translation by Lasson, 1872), are of chief importance. The Italian treatises have been edited by Wagner, Leipsic, 1829, and by De Lagarde, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1888; the Latin appeared at Naples, in 3 vols., 1880, 1886, and 1891. Of a passionate and imaginative nature, Bruno was not an essentially creative thinker, but borrowed the ideas which he proclaimed with burning enthusiasm and lofty eloquence, and through which he has exercised great influence on later philosophy, from Telesius and Nicolas, complaining the while that the priestly garb of the latter sometimes hindered the free movement of his thought. Beside these thinkers he has a high regard for Pythagoras, Plato, Lucretius, Raymundus Lullus, and Copernicus (died 1543).[1] He forms the transition link between Nicolas of Cusa and Leibnitz, as also the link between Cardanus and Spinoza. To Spinoza Bruno offered the naturalistic conception of God (God is the "first cause" immanent in the universe, to which self-manifestation or self-revelation is essential; He is natura naturans, the numberless worlds are natura naturata); Leibnitz he anticipated by his doctrine of the "monads," the individual, imperishable elements of the existent, in which matter and form, incorrectly divorced by Aristotle as though two antithetical principles, constitute one unity. The characteristic traits of the philosophy of Bruno are the lack of differentiation between pantheistic and individualistic elements, the mediaeval animation and endlessness of the world, and, finally, the religious relation to the universe or the extravagant deification of nature (nature and the world are entirely synonymous, the All, the world-soul, and God nearly so, while even matter is called a divine being).[2]

[Footnote 1: Nicolaus Copernicus (Koppernik; 1473-1543) was born at Thorn; studied astronomy, law, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, and Padua; and died a Canon of Frauenberg. His treatise, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium, which was dedicated to Pope Paul III., appeared at Nuremberg in 1543, with a preface added to it by the preacher, Andreas Osiander, which calls the heliocentric system merely an hypothesis advanced as a basis for astronomical calculations. Copernicus reached his theory rather by speculation than by observation; its first suggestion came from the Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the earth. On Copernicus cf. Leop. Prowe, vol. i. Copernicus Leben, vol. ii. (Urkunden), Berlin, 1883-84; and K. Lohmeyer in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, vol. lvii., 1887.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Bruno, H. Brunnhofer (somewhat too enthusiastic),
Leipsic, 1882; also Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, vol. i. p. 49 seq.]

Bruno completes the Copernican picture of the world by doing away with the motionless circle of fixed stars with which Copernicus, and even Kepler, had thought our solar system surrounded, and by opening up the view into the immeasurability of the world. With this the Aristotelian antithesis of the terrestrial and the celestial is destroyed. The infinite space (filled with the aether) is traversed by numberless bodies, no one of which constitutes the center of the world. The fixed stars are suns, and, like our own, surrounded by planets. The stars are formed of the same materials as the earth, and are moved by their own souls or forms, each a living being, each also the residence of infinitely numerous living beings of various degrees of perfection, in whose ranks man by no means takes the first place. All organisms are composed of minute elements, called minima or monads; each monad is a mirror of the All; each at once corporeal and soul-like, matter and form, each eternal; their combinations alone being in constant change. The universe is boundless in time, as in space; development never ceases, for the fullness of forms which slumber in the womb of matter is inexhaustible. The Absolute is the primal unity, exalted above all antitheses, from which all created being is unfolded and in which it remains included. All is one, all is out of God and in God. In the living unity of the universe, also, the two sides, the spiritual (world-soul), and the corporeal (universal matter), are distinguishable, but not separate. The world-reason pervades in its omnipresence the greatest and the smallest, but in varying degrees. It weaves all into one great system, so that if we consider the whole, the conflicts and contradictions which rule in particulars disappear, resolved into the most perfect harmony. Whoever thus regards the world, becomes filled with reverence for the Infinite and bends his will to the divine law—from true science proceed true religion and true morality, those of the spiritual hero, of the heroic sage.

Thomas Campanella[1] (1568-1639) was no less dependent on Nicolas and Telesius than Bruno. A Calabrian by birth like Telesius, whose writings filled him with aversion to Aristotle, a Dominican like Bruno, he was deprived of his freedom on an unfounded suspicion of conspiracy against the Spanish rule, spent twenty-seven years in prison, and died in Paris after a short period of quiet. Renewing an old idea, Campanella directed attention from the written volume of Scripture to the living book of nature as being also a divine revelation. Theology rests on faith (in theology, Campanella, in accordance with the traditions of his order, follows Thomas Aquinas); philosophy is based on perception, which in its instrumental part comprises mathematics and logic, and in its real part, the doctrine of nature and of morals, while metaphysics treats of the highest presuppositions and the ultimate grounds,—the "pro-principles," Campanella starts, as Augustine before him and Descartes in later times, from the indisputable certitude of the spirit's own existence, from which he rises to the certitude of God's existence. On this first certain truth of my own existence there follow three others: my nature consists in the three functions of power, knowledge, and volition; I am finite and limited, might, wisdom, and love are in man constantly intermingled with their opposites, weakness, foolishness, and hate; my power, knowledge, and volition do not extend beyond the present. The being of God follows from the idea of God in us, which can have been derived from no other than an infinite source. It would be impossible for so small a part of the universe as man to produce from himself the idea of a being incomparably greater than the whole universe. I attain a knowledge of God's nature from my own by thinking away from the latter, in which, as in everything finite, being and non-being are intermingled, every limitation and negation, by raising to infinity my positive fundamental powers, posse, cognoscere, and velle, or potentia, sapientia, and amor, and by transferring them to him, who is pure affirmation, ens entirely without non-ens. Thus I reach as the three pro-principles or primalities of the existent or the Godhead, omnipotence, omniscience, and infinite love. But the infrahuman world may also be judged after the analogy of our fundamental faculties. The universe and all its parts possess souls; there is naught without sensation; consciousness, it is true, is lacking in the lower creatures, but they do not lack life, feeling, and desire, for it is impossible for the animate to come from the inanimate. Everything loves and hates, desires and avoids. Plants are motionless animals, and their roots, mouths. Corporeal motion springs from an obscure, unconscious impulse of self-preservation; the heavenly bodies circle about the sun as the center of sympathy; space itself seeks a content (horror vacui).

[Footnote 1: Campanella's works have been edited by Al. d'Ancona, Turin, 1854, Cf. Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, vol. i. p. 125 seq.]

The more imperfect a thing is, the more weakened is the divine being in it by non-being and contingency. The entrance of the naught into the divine reality takes place by degrees. First God projects from himself the ideal or archetypal world (mundus archetypus), i.e., the totality of the possible. From this ideal world proceeds the metaphysical world of eternal intelligences (mundus mentalis), including the angels, the world-soul, and human spirits. The third product is the mathematical world of space (mundus sempiternus), the object of geometry; the fourth, the temporal or corporeal world; the fifth, and last, the empirical world (mundus situalis), in which everything appears at a definite point in space and time. All things not only love themselves and seek the conservation of their own being, but strive back toward the original source of their being, to God; i.e., they possess religion. In man, natural and animal religion are completed by rational religion, the limitations of which render a revelation necessary. A religion can be considered divine only when it is adapted to all, when it gains acceptance through miracles and virtue, and when it contradicts neither natural ethics nor the reason. Religion is union with God through knowledge, purity of will, and love. It is inborn, a law of nature, not, as Machiavelli teaches, a political invention.

Campanella desired to see the unity in the divine government of the world embodied in a pyramid of states with the papacy at the apex: above the individual states was to come the province, then the kingdom, the empire, the (Spanish) world-monarchy, and, finally, the universal dominion of the Pope. The Church should be superior to the State, the vicegerent of God to temporal rulers and to councils.

%4. Philosophy of the State and of Law%.

The originality of the modern doctrines of natural law was formerly overestimated, as it was not known to how considerable an extent the way had been prepared for them by the mediaeval philosophy of the state and of law. It is evident from the equally rich and careful investigations of Otto Gierke[1] that in the political and legal theories of a Bodin, a Grotius, a Hobbes, a Rousseau, we have systematic developments of principles long extant, rather than new principles produced with entire spontaneity. Their merit consists in the principiant expression and accentuation and the systematic development of ideas which the Middle Ages had produced, and which in part belong to the common stock of Scholastic science, in part constitute the weapons of attack for bold innovators. Marsilius of Padua (Defensor Pacis, 1325), Occam (died 1347), Gerson (about 1400), and the Cusan[2] (Concordantia Catholica, 1433) especially, are now seen in a different light. "Under the husk of the mediaeval system there is revealed a continuously growing antique-modern kernel, which draws all the living constituents out of the husk, and finally bursts it" (Gierke, Deutsches Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. iii. p. 312). Without going beyond the boundaries of the theocratico-organic view of the state prevalent in the Middle Ages, most of the conceptions whose full development was accomplished by the natural law of modern times were already employed in the Scholastic period. Here we already find the idea of a transition on the part of man from a pre-political natural state of freedom and equality into the state of citizenship; the idea of the origin of the state by a contract (social and of submission); of the sovereignty of the ruler (rex major populo; plenitudo potestatis), and of popular sovereignty[3] (populus major principe); of the original and inalienable prerogatives of the generality, and the innate and indestructible right of the individual to freedom; the thought that the sovereign power is superior to positive law (princeps legibus solutus), but subordinate to natural law; even tendencies toward the division of powers (legislative and executive), and the representative system. These are germs which, at the fall of Scholasticism and the ecclesiastical reformation, gain light and air for free development.

[Footnote 1: Gierke, Johannes Althusius und die Entwickelung der
naturrechtlichen Staatstheorien, Breslau, 1880; the same, Deutsches
Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. iii. § II, Berlin, 1881. Cf. further, Sigm.
Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste, Leipsic, 1874; A.
Franck, Réformateurs et Publicistes de L'Europe, Paris, 1864.]

[Footnote 2: Nicolas' political ideas are discussed by T. Stumpf, Cologne, 1865.]

[Footnote 3: Cf. F. von Bezold, Die Lehre von der Volkssouveränität im
Mittelalter, (Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, vol. xxxvi., 1876).]

The modern theory of natural law, of which Grotius was the most influential representative, began with Bodin and Althusius. The former conceives the contract by which the state is founded as an act of unconditional submission on the part of the community to the ruler, the latter conceives it merely as the issue of a (revocable) commission: in the view of the one, the sovereignty of the people is entirely alienated, "transferred," in that of the other, administrative authority alone is granted, "conceded," while the sovereign prerogatives remain with the people. Bodin is the founder of the theory of absolutism, to which Grotius and the school of Pufendorf adhere, though in a more moderate form, and which Hobbes develops to the last extreme. Althusius, on the other hand, by his systematic development of the doctrine of social contract and the inalienable sovereignty of the people, became the forerunner of Locke[1] and Rousseau.

[Footnote 1: Ulrich Huber (1674) may be called the first representative of constitutionalism, and so the intermediate link between Althusius and Locke. Cf. Gierke, Althusius, p. 290.]

The first independent political philosopher of the modern period was Nicolo Machiavelli of Florence (1469-1527). Patriotism was the soul of his thinking, questions of practical politics its subject, and historical fact its basis.[1] He is entirely unscholastic and unecclesiastical. The power and independence of the nation are for him of supreme importance, and the greatness and unity of Italy, the goal of his political system. He opposes the Church, the ecclesiastical state, and the papacy as the chief hindrances to the attainment of these ends, and considers the means by which help may be given to the Fatherland. In normal circumstances a republican constitution, under which Sparta, Rome, and Venice have achieved greatness, would be the best. But amid the corruption of the times, the only hope of deliverance is from the absolute rule of a strong prince, one not to be frightened back from severity and force. Should the ruler endeavor to keep within the bounds of morality, he would inevitably be ruined amid the general wickedness. Let him make himself liked, especially make himself feared, by the people; let him be fox and lion together; let him take care, when he must have recourse to bad means for the sake of the Fatherland, that they are justified by the result, and still to preserve the appearance of loyalty and honor when he is forced to act in their despite—for the populace always judges by appearance and by results. The worst thing of all is half-way measures, courses intermediate between good and evil and vacillating between reason and force. Even Moses had to kill the envious refractories, while Savonarola, the unarmed prophet, was destroyed. God is the friend of the strong, energy the chief virtue; and it is well when, as was the case with the ancient Romans, religion is associated with it without paralyzing it. The current view of Christianity as a religion of humility and sloth, which preaches only the courage of endurance and makes its followers indifferent to worldly honor, is unfavorable to the development of political vigor. The Italians have been made irreligious by the Church and the priesthood; the nearer Rome, the less pious the people. When Machiavelli, in his proposals looking toward Lorenzo (II.) dei Medici (died 1519), approves any means for restoring order, it must be remembered that he has an exceptional case in mind, that he does not consider deceit and severity just, but only unavoidable amid the anarchy and corruption of the time. But neither the loftiness of the end by which he is inspired, nor the low condition of moral views in his time, justifies his treatment of the laws as mere means to political ends, and his unscrupulous subordination of morality to calculating prudence. Machiavelli's general view of the world and of life is by no means a comforting one. Men are simple, governed by their passions and by insatiable desires, dissatisfied with what they have, and inclined to evil. They do good only of necessity; it is hunger which makes them industrious and laws that render them good. Everything rapidly degenerates: power produces quiet, quiet, idleness, then disorder, and, finally, ruin, until men learn by misfortune, and so order and power again arise. History is a continual rising and falling, a circle of order and disorder. Governmental forms, even, enjoy no stability; monarchy, when it has run out into tyranny, is followed by aristocracy, which gradually passes over into oligarchy; this in turn is replaced by democracy, until, finally, anarchy becomes unendurable, and a prince again attains power. No state, however, is so powerful as to escape succumbing to a rival before it completes the circuit. Protection against the corruption of the state is possible only through the maintenance of its principles, and its restoration only by a return to the healthy source whence it originated. This is secured either by some external peril compelling to reflection, or internally, by wise thought, by good laws (framed in accordance with the general welfare, and not according to the ambition of a minority), and by the example of good men.

[Footnote 1: In his Essays on the First Decade of Livy (Discorsi), Machiavelli investigates the conditions and the laws of the maintenance of states; while in The Prince (II Principe, 1515), he gives the principles for the restoration of a ruined state. Besides these he wrote a history of Florence, and a work on the art of war, in which he recommended the establishment of national armies.]

In the interval between Machiavelli and the system of natural law of Grotius, the Netherlander (1625: De Jure Belli et Pacis), belong the socialistic ideal state of the Englishman, Thomas More (De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia, 1516), the political theory of the Frenchman, Jean Bodin (Six Livres de la République, 1577, Latin 1584; also a philosophico-historical treatise, Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem, and the Colloquium Heptaplomeres, edited by Noack, 1857), and the law of war of the Italian, Albericus Gentilis, at his death professor in Oxford (De Jure Belli, 1588). Common to these three was the advocacy of religious tolerance, from which atheists alone were to be excepted; common, also, their ethical standpoint in opposition to Machiavelli, while they are at one with him in regard to the liberation of political and legal science from theology and the Church. With Gentilis (1551-1611) this separation assigns the first five commandments to divine, and the remainder to human law, the latter being based on the laws of human nature (especially the social impulse). In place of this derivation of law and the state from the nature of man, Jean Bodin (1530-96) insists on an historical interpretation; endeavors, though not always with success, to give sharp definitions of political concepts;[1] rejects composite state forms, and among the three pure forms, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, rates (hereditary) monarchy the highest, in which the subjects obey the laws of the monarch, and the latter the laws of God or of nature by respecting the freedom and the property of the citizens. So far, no one has correctly distinguished between forms of the state and modes of administration. Even a democratic state may be governed in a monarchical or aristocratic way. So far, also, there has been a failure to take into account national peculiarities and differences of situation, conditions to which legislation must be adjusted. The people of the temperate zone are inferior to those of the North in physical power and inferior to those of the South in speculative ability, but superior to both in political gifts and in the sense of justice. The nations of the North are guided by force, those of the South by religion, those between the two by reason. Mountaineers love freedom. A fruitful soil enervates men, when less fertile, it renders them temperate and industrious.

[Footnote 1: What is the state? What is sovereignty? The former is defined as the rational and supremely empowered control over a number of families and of whatever is common to them; the latter is absolute and continuous authority over the state, with the right of imposing laws without being bound by them. The prince, to whom the sovereignty has been unconditionally relinquished by the people in the contract of submission, is accountable to God alone.]

Attention has only recently been called (by O. Gierke, in the work already mentioned, Heft vii. of his Untersuchungen zur deutschen Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte, Breslau, 1880) to the Westphalian, Johannes Althusius (Althusen or Althaus) as a legal philosopher worthy of notice. He was born, 1557, in the Grafschaft Witgenstein; was a teacher of law in Herborn and Siegen from 1586, and Syndic in Emden from 1604 to his death in 1638. His chief legal work was the Dicaeologica, 1617 (a recasting of a treatise on Roman law which appeared in 1586), and his chief political work the Politica, 1603 (altered and enlarged 1610, and reprinted, in addition, three times before his death and thrice subsequently). Down to the beginning of the eighteenth century he was esteemed or opposed as chief among the Monarchomachi, so called by the Scotchman, Barclay (De Regno et Regali Potestate, 1600); since that time he has fallen into undeserved oblivion. The sovereign power (majestas) of the people is untransferable and indivisible, the authority vested in the chosen wielder of the administrative power is revocable, and the king is merely the chief functionary; individuals are subjects, it is true, but the community retains its sovereignty and has its rights represented over against the chief magistrate by a college of ephors. If the prince violates the compact, the ephors are authorized and bound to depose the tyrant, and to banish or execute him. There is but one normal state-form; monarchy and polyarchy are mere differences in administrative forms. Mention should finally be made of his valuation of the social groups which mediate between the individual and the state: the body politic is based on the narrower associations of the family, the corporation, the commune, and the province.

While with Bodin the historical, and with Gentilis the a priori method of treatment predominates, Hugo Grotius[1] combines both standpoints. He bases his system on the traditional distinction of two kinds of law. The origin of positive law is historical, by voluntary enactment; natural law is rooted in the nature of man, is eternal, unchangeable, and everywhere the same. He begins by distinguishing with Gentilis the jus humanum from the jus divinum given in the Scriptures. The former determines, on the one hand, the legal relations of individuals, and, on the other, those of whole nations; it is jus personale and jus gentium.[2]

[Footnote 1: Hugo de Groot lived 1583-1645. He was born in Delft, became Fiscal of Holland in 1607, and Syndic of Rotterdam and member of the States General in 1613. A leader of the aristocratic party with Oldenbarneveld, he adhered to the Arminians or Remonstrants, was thrown into prison, freed in 1621 through the address of his wife, and fled to Paris, where he lived till 1631 as a private scholar, and, from 1635, as Swedish ambassador. Here he composed his epoch-making work, De Jure Belli et Pacis, 1625. Previous to this had appeared his treatise, De Veritate Religionis Christianae, 1619, and the Mare Liberum, 1609, the latter a chapter from his maiden work, De Jure Praedae, which was not printed until 1868.]

[Footnote 2: The meaning which Grotius here gives to jus gentium (=international law), departs from the customary usage of the Scholastics, with whom it denotes the law uniformly acknowledged among all nations. Thomas Aquinas understands by it, in distinction to jus naturale proper, the sum of the conclusions deduced from this as a result of the development of human culture and its departure from primitive purity. Cf. Gierke, Althusius, p. 273; Deutsches Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. iii. p. 612. On the meaning of natural law cf. Gierke's Inaugural Address as Rector at Breslau, Naturrecht und Deutsches Recht, Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1883.]

The distinction between natural and conventional law which has been already mentioned, finds place within both: the positive law of persons is called jus civile, and the positive law of nations, jus gentium voluntarium. Positive law has its origin in regard for utility, while unwritten law finds its source neither in this nor (directly) in the will of God,[1] but in the rational nature of man. Man is by nature social, and, as a rational being, possesses the impulse toward ordered association. Unlawful means whatever renders such association of rational beings impossible, as the violation of promises or the taking away and retention of the property of others. In the (pre-social) state of nature, all belonged to all, but through the act of taking possession (occupatio) property arises (sea and air are excluded from appropriation). In the state of nature everyone has the right to defend himself against attack and to revenge himself on the evil-doer; but in the political community, founded by contract, personal revenge is replaced by punishment decreed by the civil power. The aim of punishment is not retribution, but reformation and deterrence. It belongs to God alone to punish because of sin committed, the state can punish only to prevent it. (The antithesis quia peccatum est—ne peccetur comes from Seneca.)

[Footnote 1: Natural law would be valid even if there were no God. With these words the alliance between the modern and the mediaeval philosophy of law is severed.]

This energetic revival of the distinction already common in the Middle Ages between "positive and natural," which Lord Herbert of Cherbury brought forward at the same period (1624) in the philosophy of religion, gave the catchword for a movement in practical philosophy whose developments extend into the nineteenth century. Not only the illumination period, but all modern philosophy down to Kant and Fichte, is under the ban of the antithesis, natural and artificial. In all fields, in ethics as well as in noëtics, men return to the primitive or storm back to it, in the hope of finding there the source of all truth and the cure for all evils. Sometimes it is called nature, sometimes reason (natural law and rational law are synonymous, as also natural religion and the religion of the reason), by which is understood that which is permanent and everywhere the same in contrast to the temporary and the changeable, that which is innate in contrast to that which has been developed, in contrast, further, to that which has been revealed. Whatever passes as law in all places and at all times is natural law, says Grotius; that which all men believe forms the content of natural religion, says Lord Herbert. Before long it comes to be said: that alone is genuine, true, healthy, and valuable which has eternal and universal validity; all else is not only superfluous and valueless but of evil, for it must be unnatural and corrupt. This step is taken by Deism, with the principle that whatever is not natural or rational in the sense indicated is unnatural and irrational. Parallel phenomena are not wanting, further, in the philosophy of law (Gierke, Althusius). But these errors must not be too harshly judged. The confidence with which they were made sprang from the real and the historical force of their underlying idea.

As already stated, the "natural" forms the antithesis to the supernatural, on the one hand, and to the historical, on the other. This combination of the revealed and the historical will not appear strange, if we remember that the mediaeval view of the world under criticism was, as Christian, historico-religious, and, moreover, that for the philosophy of religion the two in fact coincide, inasmuch as revelation is conceived as an historical event, and the historical religions assume the character of revealed. The term arbitrary, applied to both in common, was questionable, however: as revelation is a divine decree, so historical institutions are the products of human enactment, the state, the result of a contract, dogmas, inventions of the priesthood, the results of development, artificial constructions! It took long ages for man to free himself from the idea of the artificial and conventional in his view of history. Hegel was the first to gather the fruit whose seeds had been sown by Leibnitz, Lessing, Herder, and the historical school of law. As often, however, as an attempt was made from this standpoint of origins to show laws in the course of history, only one could be reached, a law of necessary degeneration, interrupted at times by sudden restorations—thus the Deists, thus Machiavelli and Rousseau. Everything degenerates, science itself only contributes to the fall—therefore, back to the happy beginnings of things!

If, finally, we inquire into the position of the Church in regard to the questions of legal philosophy, we may say that, among the Protestants, Luther, appealing to the Scripture text, declares rulers ordained by God and sacred, though at the same time he considers law and politics but remotely related to the inner man; that Melancthon, in his Elements of Ethics (1538), as in all his philosophical text-books,[1] went back to Aristotle, but found the source of natural law in the Decalogue, being followed in this by Oldendorp (1539), Hemming (1562), and B. Winkler (1615).[2]

[Footnote 1: The edition of Melancthon's works by Bretschneider and Bindseil gives the ethical treatises in vol. xvi. and the other philosophical treatises in vol. xiii. (in part also in vols. xi. and xx.).]

[Footnote 2: Cf. C.v. Kaltenborn, Die Vorläufer des Hugo Grotius,
Leipsic, 1848.]

On the Catholic side, the Jesuits (the Order was founded in 1534, and confirmed in 1540), on the one hand, revived the Pelagian theory of freedom in opposition to the Luthero-Augustinian doctrine of the servitude of the will, and, on the other, defended the natural origin of the state in a (revocable) contract in opposition to its divine origin asserted by the Reformers, and the sovereignty of the people even to the sanctioning of tyrannicide. Bellarmin (1542-1621) taught that the prince derives his authority from the people, and as the latter have given him power, so they retain the natural right to take it back and bestow it elsewhere. The view of Juan Mariana (1537-1624; De Rege, 1599) is that, as the people in transferring rights to the prince retain still greater power themselves, they are entitled in given cases to call the king to account. If he corrupts the state by evil manners, and, degenerating into the tyrant, despises religion and the laws, he may, as a public enemy, be deprived by anyone of his authority and his life. It is lawful to arrest tyranny in any way, and those have always been highly esteemed who, from devotion to the public welfare, have sought to kill the tyrant.

%5. Skepticism in France.%

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, and in the very country which was to become the cradle of modern philosophy, there appeared, as a forerunner of the new thinking, a skepticism in which that was taken for complete and ultimate truth which with Descartes constitutes merely a moment or transition point in the inquiry. The earliest and the most ingenious among the representatives of this philosophy of doubt was Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), who in his Essays—which were the first of their kind and soon found an imitator in Bacon; they appeared in 1580 in two volumes, with an additional volume in 1588—combined delicate observation and keen thinking, boldness and prudence, elegance and solidity. The French honor him as one of their foremost writers. The most important among these treatises or essays is considered to be the "Apology for Raymond of Sabunde" (ii. 12) with valuable excursuses on faith and knowledge. Montaigne bases his doubt on the diversity of individual views, each man's opinion differing from his fellow's, while truth must be one. There exists no certain, no universally admitted knowledge. The human reason is feeble and blind in all things, knowledge is deceptive, especially the philosophy of the day, which clings to tradition, which fills the memory with learned note-stuff, but leaves the understanding void and, instead of things, interprets interpretations only. Both sensuous and rational knowledge are untrustworthy: the former, because it cannot be ascertained whether its deliverances conform to reality, and the latter, because its premises, in order to be valid, need others in turn for their own establishment, etc., ad infinitum. Every advance in inquiry makes our ignorance the more evident; the doubter alone is free. But though certainty is denied us in regard to truth, it is not withheld in regard to duty. In fact, a twofold rule of practical life is set up for us: nature, or life in accordance with nature and founded on self-knowledge, and supernatural revelation, the Gospel (to be understood only by the aid of divine grace). Submission to the divine ruler and benefactor is the first duty of the rational soul. From obedience proceeds every virtue, from over-subtlety and conceit, which is the product of fancied knowledge, comes every sin. Montaigne, like all who know men, has a sharp eye for human frailty. He depicts the universal weakness of human nature and the corruption of his time with great vivacity and not without a certain pleasure in the obscene; and besides folly and passion, complains above all of the fact that so few understand the art of enjoyment, of which he, a true man of the world, was master.

The skeptico-practical standpoint of Montaigne was developed into a system by the Paris preacher, Pierre Charron (1541-1603), in his three books On Wisdom (1601). Doubt has a double object: to keep alive the spirit of inquiry and to lead us on to faith. From the fact that reason and experience are liable to deception and that the mind has at its disposal no means of distinguishing truth from falsehood, it follows that we are born not to possess truth but to seek it. Truth dwells alone in the bosom of God; for us doubt and investigation are the only good amid all the error and tribulation which surround us. Life is all misery. Man is capable of mediocrity alone; he can neither be entirely good nor entirely evil; he is weak in virtue, weak in vice, and the best degenerates in his hands. Even religion suffers from the universal imperfection. It is dependent on nationality and country, and each religion is based on its predecessor; the supernatural origin of which all religions boast belongs in fact to Christianity alone, which is to be accepted with humility and with submission of the reason. Charron lays chief emphasis, however, on the practical side of Christianity, the fulfillment of duty; and the "wisdom" which forms the subject of his book is synonymous with uprightness (probité), the way to which is opened up by self-knowledge and whose reward is repose of spirit. And yet we are not to practice it for the sake of the reward, but because nature and reason, i.e., God, absolutely (entirely apart from the pleasurable results of virtue) require us to be good. True uprightness is more than mere legality, for even when outward action is blameless, the motives may be mixed. "I desire men to be upright without paradise and hell." Religion seeks to crown morality, not to generate it; virtue is earlier and more natural than piety. In his definition of the relation between religion and ethics, his delimitation of morality from legality, and his insistence on the purity of motives (do right, because the inner rational law commands it), an anticipation of Kantian principles may be recognized.

Under Francis Sanchez (died 1632; his chief work is entitled Quod Nihil Scitur), a Portuguese by birth, and professor of medicine in Montpellier and Toulouse, skepticism was transformed from melancholy contemplation into a fresh, vigorous search after new problems. In the place of book-learning, which disgusts him by its smell of the closet, its continued prating of Aristotle, and its self-exhaustion in useless verbalism, Sanchez desires to substitute a knowledge of things. Perfect knowledge, it is true, can be hoped for only when subject and object correspond to each other. But how is finite man to grasp the infinite universe? Experience, the basis of all knowledge, gropes about the outer surface of things and illumines particulars only, without the ability either to penetrate to their inner nature or to comprehend the whole. We know only what we produce. Thus God knows the world which he has made, but to us is vouchsafed merely an insight into mediate or second causes, causae secundae. Here, however, a rich field still lies open before philosophy—only let her attack her problem with observation and experiment rather than with words.

The French nation, predisposed to skepticism by its prevailing acuteness, has never lacked representatives of skeptical philosophy. The transition from the philosophers of doubt whom we have described to the great Bayle was formed by La Mothe le Vayer (died 1672; Five Dialogues, 1671), the tutor of Louis XIV., and P.D. Huet(ius), Bishop of Avranches (died 1721), who agreed in holding that a recognition of the weakness of the reason is the best preparation for faith.

6. %German Mysticism%.

In a period which has given birth to a skeptical philosophy, one never looks in vain for the complementary phenomenon of mysticism. The stone offered by doubt in place of bread is incapable of satisfying the impulse after knowledge, and when the intellect grows weary and despairing, the heart starts out in the quest after truth. Then its path leads inward, the mind turns in upon itself, seeks to learn the truth by inner experience and life, by inward feeling and possession, and waits in quietude for divine illumination. The German mysticism of Eckhart[1] (about 1300), which had been continued in Suso and Tauler and had received a practical direction in the Netherlands,—Ruysbroek (about 1350) to Thomas à Kempis (about 1450),—now puts forth new branches and blossoms at the turning point of the centuries.

[Footnote 1: Master Eckhart's Works have been edited by F. Pfeiffer, Leipsic, 1857. The following have written on him: Jos. Bach, Vienna, 1864; Ad. Lasson, Berlin, 1868; the same, in the second part of Ueberweg's Grundriss, last section; Denifle, in the Archiv für Litteratur und Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters. ii. 417 seq.; H. Siebeck, Der Begriff des Gemuts in der deutschen Mystik (Beiträge zur Entstehungsgeschichte der neueren Psychologie, i), Giessen Programme, 1891.]

Luther himself was originally a mystic, with a high appreciation of Tauler and Thomas à Kempis, and published in 1518 that attractive little book by an anonymous Frankfort author, the German Theology. When, later, he fell into literalism, it was the mysticism of German Protestantism which, in opposition to the new orthodoxy, held fast to the original principle of the Reformation, i.e., to the principle that faith is not assent to historical facts, not the acceptance of dogmas, but an inner experience, a renewal of the whole man. Religion and theology must not be confounded. Religion is not doctrine, but a new birth. With Schwenckfeld, and also with Franck, mysticism is still essentially pietism; with Weigel, and by the addition of ideas from Paracelsus, it is transformed into theosophy, and as such reaches its culmination in Böhme.

Caspar Schwenckfeld sought to spiritualize the Lutheran movement and protested against its being made into a pastors' religion. Though he had been aroused by Luther's pioneer feat, he soon saw that the latter had not gone far enough; and in his Letter on the Eucharist, 1527, he defined the points of difference between Luther's view of the Sacrament and his own. Luther, he maintained, had fallen back to an historical view of faith, whereas the faith which saves can never consist in the outward acceptance of an historical fact. He who makes salvation dependent on preaching and the Sacrament, confuses the invisible and the visible Church, Ecclesia interna and externa. The layman is his own priest.

According to Sebastian Franck (1500-45), there are in man, as in everything else, two principles, one divine and one selfish, Christ and Adam, an inner and an outer man; if he submits himself to the former (by a timeless choice), he is spiritual, if to the latter, carnal. God is not the cause of sin, but man, who turns the divine power to good or evil. He who denies himself to live God is a Christian, whether he knows and confesses the Gospel or not. Faith does not consist in assent, but in inner transformation. The historical element in Christianity and its ceremonial observances are only the external form and garb (its "figure"), have merely a symbolic significance as media of communication, as forms of revelation for the eternal truth, proclaimed but not founded by Christ; the Bible is merely the shadow of the living Word of God.

Valentin Weigel (born in 1533, pastor in Zschopau from 1567), whose works were not printed until after his death, combines his predecessors' doctrine of inner and eternal Christianity with the microcosmos-idea of Paracelsus. God, who lacks nothing, has not created the world in order to gain, but in order to give. Man not only bears the earthly world in his body, and the heavenly world of the angels in his reason (his spirit), but by virtue of his intellect (his immortal soul) participates in the divine world also. As he is thus a microcosm and, moreover, an image of God, all his knowledge becomes self-knowledge, both sensuous perception (which is not caused by the object, but only occasioned by it), and the knowledge of God. The literalist knows not God, but he alone who bears God in himself. Man is favored above other beings with the freedom to dwell in himself or in God. When man came out from God, he was his own tempter and made himself proud and selfish. Thus evil, which had before remained hidden, was revealed, and became sin. As the separation from God is an eternal act, so also redemption and resurrection form an inner event. Christ is born in everyone who gives up the I-ness (Ichheit); each regenerate man is a son of God. But no vicarious suffering can save him who does not put off the old Adam, no matter how much an atheology sunk in literalism may comfort itself with the hope that man can "drink at another's cost" (that the merit of another is imputed to him).[1]

[Footnote 1: Weigel is discussed by J.O. Opel, Leipsic, 1864.]

German mysticism reaches its culmination in the Görlitz cobbler, Jacob Böhme (1575-1624; Aurora, or the Rising Dawn; Mysterium Magnum, or on the First Book of Moses, etc. The works of Böhme, collected by his apostle, Gichtel, appeared in 1682 in ten volumes, and in 1730 in six volumes; a new edition was prepared by Schiebler in 1831-47, with a second edition in 1861 seq.). Böhme's doctrine[1] centers about the problem of the origin of evil. He transfers this to God himself and joins therewith the leading thought of Eckhart, that God goes through a process, that he proceeds from an unrevealed to a revealed condition. At the sight of a tin vessel glistening in the sun, he conceived, as by inspiration, the idea that as the sunlight reveals itself on the dark vessel so all light needs darkness and all good evil in order to appear and to become knowable. Everything becomes perceptible through its opposite alone: gentleness through sternness, love through anger, affirmation through negation. Without evil there would be no life, no movement, no distinctions, no revelation; all would be unqualified, uniform nothingness. And as in nature nothing exists in which good and evil do not reside, so in God, besides power or the good, a contrary exists, without which he would remain unknown to himself. The theogonic process is twofold: self-knowledge on the part of God, and his revelation outward, as eternal nature, in seven moments.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Windelband's fine exposition, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. i. §19. The following have written on Böhme: Fr. Baader (in vols. iii. and xiii. of his Werke); Hamberger, Munich, 1844: H. A. Fechner, Görlitz, 1857; A. v. Harless, Berlin, 1870, new edition, Leipsic, 1882.]

At the beginning of the first development God is will without object, eternal quietude and rest, unqualified groundlessness without determinate volition. But in this divine nothingness there soon awakes the hunger after the aught (somewhat, existence), the impulse to apprehend and manifest self, and as God looks into and forms an image of himself, he divides into Father and Son. The Son is the eye with which the Father intuits himself, and the procession of this vision from the groundless is the Holy Ghost. Thus far God, who is one in three, is only understanding or wisdom, wherein the images of all the possible are contained; to the intuition of self must be added divisibility; it is only through the antithesis of the revealed God and the unrevealed groundless that the former becomes an actual trinity (in which the persons stand related as essence, power, and activity), and the latter becomes desire or nature in God.

At the creation of the world seven equally eternal qualities, source-spirits or nature-forms, are distinguished in the divine nature. First comes desire as the contractile, tart quality or pain, from which proceed hardness and heat; next comes mobility as the expansive, sweet quality, as this shows itself in water. As the nature of the first was to bind and the second was fluid, so they both are combined in the bitter quality or the pain of anxiety, the principle of sensibility. (Contraction and expansion are the conditions of perceptibility.) From these three forms fright or lightning suddenly springs forth. This fourth quality is the turning-point at which light flames up from darkness and the love of God breaks forth from out his anger; as the first three, or four, forms constitute the kingdom of wrath, so the latter three constitute the kingdom of joy. The fifth quality is called light or the warm fire of love, and has for its functions external animation and communication; the sixth, report and sound, is the principle of inner animation and intelligence; the seventh, the formative quality, corporeality, comprehends all the preceding in itself as their dwelling.

The dark fire of anger (the hard, sweet, and bitter qualities) and the light fire of love (light, report, and corporeality), separated by the lightning-fire, in which God's wrath is transformed into mercy, stand related as evil and good. The evil in God is not sin, but simply the inciting sting, the principle of movement; which, moreover, is restrained, overcome, transfigured by gentleness. Sin arises only when the creature refuses to take part in the advance from darkness to light, and obstinately remains in the fire of anger instead of forcing his way through to the fire of love. Thus that which was one in God is divided. Lucifer becomes enamored of the tart quality (the centrum naturae or the matrix) and will not grow into the heart of God; and it is only after such lingering behind that the kingdom of wrath become a real hell. Heaven and hell are not future conditions, but are experienced here on earth; he who instead of subduing animality becomes enamored of it, stands under the wrath of God; whereas he who abjures self dwells in the joyous kingdom of mercy. He alone truly believes who himself becomes Christ, who repeats in himself what Christ suffered and attained.

The creation of the material world is a result of Lucifer's fall. Böhme's description of it, based on the Mosaic account of creation, may be passed without notice; similarly his view of cognition, familiar from the earlier mystics, that all knowledge is derived from self-knowledge, that our destination is to comprehend God from ourselves, and the world from God. Man, whose body, spirit, and soul hold in them the earthly, the sidereal, and the heavenly, is at once a microcosm and a "little God."

Under the intractable form of Böhme's speculations and amid their riotous fancy, no one will fail to recognize their true-hearted sensibility and an unusual depth and vigor of thought. They found acceptance in England and France, and have been revived in later times in the systems of Baader and Schelling.

%7. The Foundation of Modern Physics%.

In no field has the modern period so completely broken with tradition as in physics. The correctness of the Copernican theory is proved by Kepler's laws of planetary movement, and Galileo's telescopical observations; the scientific theory of motion is created by Galileo's laws of projectiles, falling bodies, and the pendulum; astronomy and mechanics form the entrance to exact physics—Descartes ventures an attempt at a comprehensive mechanical explanation of nature. And thus an entirely new movement is at hand. Forerunners, it is true, had not been lacking. Roger Bacon (1214-94) had already sought to obtain an empirical knowledge of nature based upon mathematics; and the great painter Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had discovered the principles of mechanics, though without gaining much influence over the work of his contemporaries. It was reserved for the triple star which has been mentioned to overthrow Scholasticism. The conceptions with which the Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy of nature sought to get at phenomena—substantial forms, properties, qualitative change—are thrown aside; their place is taken by matter, forces working under law, rearrangement of parts. The inquiry into final causes is rejected as an anthropomorphosis of natural events, and deduction from efficient causes is alone accepted as scientific explanation. Size, shape, number, motion, and law are the only and the sufficient principles of explanation. For magnitudes alone are knowable; wherever it is impossible to measure and count, to determine force mathematically, there rigorous, exact science ceases. Nature a system of regularly moved particles of mass; all that takes place mechanical movement, viz., the combination, separation, dislocation, oscillation of bodies and corpuscles; mathematics the organon of natural science! Into this circle of modern scientific categories are articulated, further, Galileo's new conception of motion and the conception of atoms, which, previously employed by physicists, as Daniel Sennert (1619) and others, is now brought into general acceptance by Gassendi, while the four elements are definitively discarded (Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik, 1890). Still another doctrine of Democritus is now revived; an evident symptom of the quantification and mechanical interpretation of natural phenomena being furnished by the doctrine of the subjectivity of sense qualities, in which, although on varying grounds, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes agree.[1] Descartes and Hobbes will be discussed later. Here we may give a few notes on their fellow laborers in the service of the mechanical science of nature.

[Footnote 1: Cf. chapter vi. in Natorp's work on Descartes'
Erkenntnisstheorie, Marburg, 1882, and the same author's Analekten zur
Geschichte der Philosophie, in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol.
xviii. 1882, p. 572 seq.]

We begin with John Kepler[1] (1571-1630; chief work, The New Astronomy or Celestial Physics, in Commentaries on the Motions of Mars, 1609). Kepler's merit as an astronomer has long obscured his philosophical importance, although his discovery of the laws of planetary motion was the outcome of endeavors to secure an exact foundation for his theory of the world. The latter is aesthetic in character, centers about the idea of a universal world-harmony, and employs mathematics as an instrument of confirmation. For the fact that this theory satisfies the mind, and, on the whole, corresponds to our empirical impression of the order of nature, is not enough in Kepler's view to guarantee its truth; by exact methods, by means of induction and experiment, a detailed proof from empirical facts must be found for the existence not only of a general harmony, but of definitely fixed proportions. Herewith the philosophical application of mathematics loses that obscure mystical character which had clung to it since the time of Pythagoras, and had strongly manifested itself as late as in Nicolas of Cusa. Mathematical relations constitute the deepest essence of the real and the object of science. Where matter is, there is geometry; the latter is older than the world and as eternal as the divine Spirit; magnitudes are the source of things. True knowledge exists only where quanta are known; the presupposition of the capacity for knowledge is the capacity to count; the spirit cognizes sensuous relations by means of the pure, archetypal, intellectual relations born in it, which, before the advent of sense-impressions, have lain concealed behind the veil of possibility; inclination and aversion between men, their delight in beauty, the pleasant impression of a view, depend upon an unconscious and instinctive perception of proportions. This quantitative view of the world, which, with a consciousness of its novelty as well as of its scope, is opposed to the qualitative view of Aristotle;[2] the opinion that the essence of the human spirit, as well as of the divine, nay, the essence of all things, consists in activity; that, consequently, the soul is always active, being conscious of its own harmony at least in a confused way, even when not conscious of external proportions; further, the doctrine that nature loves simplicity, avoids the superfluous, and is accustomed to accomplish large results with a few principles—these remind one of Leibnitz. At the same time, the law of parsimony and the methodological conclusions concerning true hypotheses and real causes (an hypothesis must not be an artificially constructed set of fictions, forcibly adjusted to reality, but is to trace back phenomena to their real grounds), obedience to which enabled him to deduce a priori from causes the conclusions which Copernicus by fortunate conjecture had gathered inductively from effects—these made our thinker a forerunner of Newton. The physical method of explanation must not be corrupted either by theological conceptions (comets are entirely natural phenomena!) or by anthropomorphic views, which endow nature with spiritual powers.

[Footnote 1: See Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, vol. i. p. 182 seq.; R.
Eucken, Beiträge zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, p. 54 seq.]

[Footnote 2: Aristotle erred when he considered qualitative distinctions (idem and aliud) ultimate. These are to be traced back to quantitative differences, and the aliud or diversum is to be replaced by plus et minus. There is nothing absolutely light, but only relatively. Since all things are distinguished only by "more or less," the possibility of mediating members or proportions between them is given.]

Intermediate between Bacon and Descartes, both in the order of time and in the order of fact, and a co-founder of modern philosophy, stands Galileo Galilei (1564-1641).[1] Galileo exhibits all the traits characteristic of modern thinking: the reference from words to things, from memory to perception and thought, from authority to self-ascertained principles, from chance opinion, arbitrary opinion, and the traditional doctrines of the schools, to "knowledge," that is, to one's own, well grounded, indisputable insight, from the study of human affairs to the study of nature. Study Aristotle, but do not become his slave; instead of yielding yourselves captive to his views, use your own eyes; do not believe that the mind remains unproductive unless it allies itself with the understanding of another; copy nature, not copies merely! He equals Bacon in his high estimation of sensuous experience in contrast to the often illusory conclusions of the reason, and of the value of induction; but he does not conceal from himself the fact that observation is merely the first step in the process of cognition, leaving the chief rôle for the understanding. This, supplementing the defect of experience—the impossibility of observing all cases—by its a priori concept of law and with its inferences overstepping the bounds of experience, first makes induction possible, brings the facts established into connection (their combination under laws is thought, not experience), reduces them to their primary, simple, unchangeable, and necessary causes by abstraction from contingent circumstances, regulates perception, corrects sense-illusions, i. e., the false judgments originating in experience, and decides concerning the reality or fallaciousness of phenomena. Demonstration based on experience, a close union of observation and thought, of fact and Idea (law)—these are the requirements made by Galileo and brilliantly fulfilled in his discoveries; this, the "inductive speculation," as Dühring terms it, which derives laws of far-reaching importance from inconspicuous facts; this, as Galileo himself recognizes, the distinctive gift of the investigator. Galileo anticipates Descartes in regard to the subjective character of sense qualities and their reduction to quantitative distinctions,[2] while he shares with him the belief in the typical character of mathematics and the mechanical theory of the world. The truth of geometrical propositions and demonstrations is as unconditionally certain for man as for God, only that man learns them by a discursive process, whereas God's intuitive understanding comprehends them with a glance and knows more of them than man. The book of the universe is written in mathematical characters; motion is the fundamental phenomenon in the world of matter; our knowledge reaches as far as phenomena are measurable; the qualitative nature of force, back of its quantitative determinations, remains unknown to us. When Galileo maintains that the Copernican theory is philosophically true and not merely astronomically useful, thus interpreting it as more than a hypothesis, he is guided by the conviction that the simplest explanation is the most probable one, that truth and beauty are one, as in general he concedes a guiding though not a controlling influence in scientific work to the aesthetic demand of the mind for order, harmony, and unity in nature, to correspond to the wisdom of the Creator.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Natorp's essay on Galileo, in vol. xviii. of the Philosophische Monatshefte, 1882.]

[Footnote 1: This doctrine is developed by Galileo in the controversial treatise against Padre Grassi, The Scales (Il Saggiatore, 1623, in the Florence edition of his collected works, 1842 seq., vol. iv. pp. 149-369; cf. Natorp, Descartes' Erkenntnisstheorie, 1882, chap. vi.). In substance, moreover, this doctrine is found, as Heussler remarks, Baco, p. 94, in Bacon himself, in Valerius Terminus (Works, Spedding, vol. iii. pp. 217-252.)]

One of the most noted and influential among the contemporaries, countrymen, and opponents of Descartes, was the priest and natural scientist, Petrus Gassendi,[1] from 1633 Provost of Digne, later for a short period professor of mathematics at Paris. His renewal of Epicureanism, to which he was impelled by temperament, by his reverence for Lucretius, and by the anti-Aristotelian tendency of his thinking, was of far more importance for modern thought than the attempts to revive the ancient systems which have been mentioned above (p. 29). Its superior influence depends on the fact that, in the conception of atoms, it offered exact inquiry a most useful point of attachment. The conflict between the Gassendists and the Cartesians, which at first was a bitter one, centered, as far as physics was concerned, around the value of the atomic hypothesis as contrasted with the corpuscular and vortex theory which Descartes had opposed to it. It soon became apparent, however, that these two thinkers followed along essentially the same lines in the philosophy of nature, sharply as they were opposed in their noëtical principles. Descartes' doctrine of body is conceived from an entirely materialistic standpoint, his anthropology, indeed, going further than the principles of his system would allow. Gassendi, on the other hand, recognizes an immaterial, immortal reason, traces the origin of the world, its marvelous arrangement, and the beginning of motion back to God, and, since the Bible so teaches, believes the earth to be at rest,—holding that, for this reason, the decision must be given in favor of Tycho Brahé and against Copernicus, although the hypothesis of the latter affords the simpler and, scientifically, the more probable explanation. Both thinkers rejoice in their agreement with the dogmas of the Church, only that with Descartes it came unsought in the natural progress of his thought, while Gassendi held to it in contradiction to his system. It is the more surprising that Gassendi's works escaped being put upon the Index, a fate which overtook those of Descartes in 1663.

[Footnote 2: Pierre Gassendi, 1592-1655: On the Life and Character of Epicurus, 1647; Notes on the Tenth Book of Diogenes Laërtius, with a Survey of the Doctrine of Epicurus, 1649. Works, Lyons, 1658, Florence, 1727. Cf. Lange, History of Materialism, book i. § 3, chap, 1; Natorp, Analekten, Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xviii. 1882, p. 572 seq.]

As modern thought derives its mechanical temper equally from both these sources, and the natural science of the day has appropriated the corpuscles of Descartes under the name of molecules, as well as the atoms of Gassendi, though not without considerable modification in both conceptions (Lange, vol. i. p. 269), so we find attempts at mediation at an early period. While Père Mersenne (1588-1648), who was well versed in physics, sought an indecisive middle course between these two philosophers, the English chemist, Robert Boyle, effected a successful synthesis of both. The son of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, he was born at Lismore in 1626, lived in literary retirement at Oxford from 1654, and later in Cambridge, and died, 1692, in London, president of the Royal Society. His principal work, The Sceptical Chemist (Works, vol. i. p. 290 seq.), appeared in 1661, the tract, De Ipsa Natura, in 1682.[1] By his introduction of the atomic conception he founded an epoch in chemistry, which, now for the first, was freed from bondage to the ideas of Aristotle and the alchemists. Atomism, however, was for Boyle merely an instrument of method and not a philosophical theory of the world. A sincerely religious man,[2] he regards with disfavor both the atheism of Epicurus and his complete rejection of teleology—the world-machine points to an intelligent Creator and a purpose in creation; motion, to a divine impulse. He defends, on the other hand, the right of free inquiry against the priesthood and the pedantry of the schools, holding that the supernatural must be sharply distinguished from the natural, and mere conjectures concerning insoluble problems from positions susceptible of experimental proof; while, in opposition to submission to authority, he remarks that the current coin of opinion must be estimated, not by the date when and the person by whom it was minted but by the value of the metal alone. Cartesian elements in Boyle are the start from doubt, the derivation of all motion from pressure and impact, and the extension of the mechanical explanation to the organic world. His inquiries relate exclusively to the world of matter so far as it was "completed on the last day but one of creation." He defends empty space against Descartes and Hobbes. He is the first to apply the mediaeval terms, primary and secondary qualities, to the antithesis between objective properties which really belong to things, and sensuous or subjective qualities present only in the feeling subject.[3]

[Footnote 1: Boyle's Works were published in Latin at Geneva, in 1660, in six volumes, and in 1714 in five; an edition by Birch appeared at London, 1744, in five volumes, second edition, 1772, in six. Cf. Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. i. chap. vii. pp. 265-268; Lange, History of Materialism, vol. i. pp. 298-306; vol. ii. p. 351 seq.; Georg Baku, Der Streit über den Naturbegriff, Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. xcviii., 1891, p. 162 seq.]

[Footnote 2: The foundation named after him had for its object to promote by means of lectures the investigation of nature on the basis of atomism, and, at the same time, to free it from the reproach of leading to atheism and to show its harmony with natural religion. Samuel Clarke's work on The Being and Attributes of God, 1705, originated in lectures delivered on this foundation.]

[Footnote 3: Eucken, Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie, pp. 94, 196.]

%8. Philosophy in England to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.%

%(a) Bacon's Predecessors.%—The darkness which lay over the beginnings of modern English philosophy has been but incompletely dispelled by the meritorious work of Ch. de Rémusat (Histoire de la Philosophie en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu'a Locke, 2 vols., 1878). The most recent investigations of J. Freudenthal (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Englischen Philosophie, in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. iv. and v., 1891) have brought assistance in a way deserving of thanks, since they lift at important points the veil which concealed Bacon's relations to his predecessors and contemporaries, by describing the scientific tendencies and achievements of Digby and Temple. The following may be taken from his results.

Everard Digby (died 1592; chief work, Theoria Analytica, 1579), instructor in logic in Cambridge from 1573, who was strongly influenced by Reuchlin and who favored an Aristotelian-Alexandrian-Cabalistic eclecticism, was the first to disseminate Neoplatonic ideas in England; and, in spite of the lack of originality in his systematic presentation of theoretical philosophy, aroused the study of this branch in England into new life. His opponent, Sir William Temple [1] (1553-1626), by his defense and exposition of the doctrine of Ramus (introduced into Great Britain by George Buchanan and his pupil, Andrew Melville), made Cambridge the chief center of Ramism. He was the first who openly opposed Aristotle.

[Footnote 1: Temple was secretary to Philip Sidney, William Davison, and the Earl of Essex, and, from 1619, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. His maiden work, De Unica P. Rami Methodo, which he published under the pseudonym, Mildapettus 1580, was aimed at Digby's De Duplici Methodo. His chief work, P. Rami Dialectics Libri Dua Scholiis, Illustrati, appeared in 1584.]

Bacon was undoubtedly acquainted with both these writers and took ideas from both. Digby represented the scholastic tendency, which Bacon vehemently opposed, yet without being able completely to break away from it. Temple was one of those who supplied him with weapons for this conflict. Finally, it must be mentioned that many of the English scientists of the time, especially William Gilbert (1540-1603; De Magnete, 1600), physician to Queen Elizabeth, used induction in their work before Bacon advanced his theory of method.

%(b) Bacon%.—The founder of the empirical philosophy of modern times was Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a contemporary of Shakespeare. Bacon began his political career by sitting in Parliament for many years under Queen Elizabeth, as whose counsel he was charged with the duty of engaging in the prosecution of his patron, the Earl of Essex, and at whose command he prepared a justification of the process. Under James I, he attained the highest offices and honors, being made Keeper of the Great Seal in 1617, Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam in 1618, and Viscount St. Albans in 1621. In this last year came his fall. He was charged with bribery, and condemned; the king remitted the imprisonment and fine, and for the remainder of his life Bacon devoted himself to science, rejecting every suggestion toward a renewal of his political activity. The moral laxity of the times throws a mitigating light over his fault; but he cannot be aquitted of self-seeking, love of money and of display, and excessive ambition. As Macaulay says in his famous essay, he was neither malignant nor tyrannical, but he lacked warmth of affection and elevation of sentiment; there were many things which he loved more than virtue, and many which he feared more than guilt. He first gained renown as an author by his ethical, economic, and political Essays, after the manner of Montaigne; of these the first ten appeared in 1597, in the third edition (1625) increased to fifty-eight; the Latin translation bears the title Sermones Fideles. His great plan for a "restoration of the sciences" was intended to be carried out in four, or rather, in six parts. But only the first two parts of the Instauratio Magna were developed: the encyclopaedia, or division of all sciences[1], a chart of the globus intellectualis, on which was depicted what each science had accomplished and what still remained for each to do; and the development of the new method. Bacon published his survey of the circle of the sciences in the English work, the Advancement of Learning, 1605, a much enlarged revision of which, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, appeared in Latin in 1623. In 1612 he printed as a contribution to methodology the draft, Cogitata et Visa (written 1607), later recast into the [first book of the] Novum Organum, 1620. This title, Novum Organum, of itself indicates opposition to Aristotle, whose logical treatises had for ages been collected under the title Organon. If in this work Bacon had given no connected exposition of his reforming principles, but merely a series of aphorisms, and this an incomplete one, the remaining parts are still more fragmentary, only prefaces and scattered contributions having been reduced to writing. The third part was to have been formed by a description of the world or natural history, Historia Naturalis, and the last,—introduced by a Scala Intellectus (ladder of knowledge, illustrations of the method by examples), and by Prodromi (preliminary results of his own inquiries),—by natural science, Philosophia Secunda. The best edition of Bacon's works is the London one of Spedding, Ellis & Heath, 1857 seq., 7 vols., 2d ed., 1870; with 7 volumes additional of The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, including His Occasional Works, and a Commentary, by J. Spedding, 1862-74. Spedding followed this further with a briefer Account of the Life and Times of Francis Bacon, 2 vols., 1878[2].

[Footnote 1: According to the faculties of the soul, memory, imagination, and understanding, three principal sciences are distinguished; history, poesy, and philosophy. Of the three objects of the latter, "nature strikes the mind with a direct ray, God with a refracted ray, and man himself with a reflected ray." Theology is natural or revealed. Speculative (theoretical) natural philosophy divides into physics, concerned with material and efficient causes, and metaphysics, whose mission, according to the traditional view, is to inquire into final causes, but in Bacon's own opinion, into formal causes; operative (technical) natural philosophy is mechanics and natural magic. The doctrine concerning man comprises anthropology (including logic and ethics) and politics. This division of Bacon was still retained by D'Alembert in his preliminary discourse to the Encyclopédie.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Bacon, K. Fischer, 2d ed., 1875; Chr. Sigwart, in the Preussische Jahrbücher, 1863 and 1864, and in vol. ii. of his Logik; H. Heussler, Baco und seine geschichtliche Stellung, Breslau, 1889. [Adamson, Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th. ed., vol. iii. pp. 200-222; Fowler, English Philosophers Series, 1881; Nichol, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 2 vols., 1888-89.—TR.] Bacon's merit was threefold: he felt more forcibly and more clearly than previous thinkers the need of a reform in science; he set up a new and grand ideal—unbiased and methodical investigation of nature in order to mastery over nature; and he gave information and directions as to the way in which this goal was to be attained, which, in spite of their incompleteness in detail, went deep into the heart of the subject and laid the foundation for the work of centuries.[1] His faith in the omnipotence of the new method was so strong, that he thought that science for the future could almost dispense with talent. He compares his method to a compass or a ruler, with which the unpractised man is able to draw circles and straight lines better than an expert without these instruments.

[Footnote 1: His detractors are unjust when they apply the criterion of the present method of investigation and find only imperfection in an imperfect beginning.]

All science hitherto, Bacon declares, has been uncertain and unfruitful, and does not advance a step, while the mechanic arts grow daily more perfect; without a firm basis, garrulous, contentious, and lacking in content, it is of no practical value. The seeker after certain knowledge must abandon words for things, and learn the art of forcing nature to answer his questions. The seeker after fruitful knowledge must increase the number of discoveries, and transform them from matters of chance into matters of design. For discovery conditions the power, greatness, and progress of mankind. Man's power is measured by his knowledge, knowledge is power, and nature is conquered by obedience—scientia est potentia; natura parendo vincitur.

Bacon declares three things indispensable for the attainment of this power-giving knowledge: the mind must understand the instruments of knowledge; it must turn to experience, deriving the materials of knowledge from perception; and it must not rise from particular principles to the higher axioms too rapidly, but steadily and gradually through middle axioms. The mind can accomplish nothing when left to itself; but undirected experience alone is also insufficient (experimentation without a plan is groping in the dark), and the senses, moreover, are deceptive and not acute enough for the subtlety of nature—therefore, methodical experimentation alone, not chance observation, is worthy of confidence. Instead of the customary divorce of experience and understanding, a firm alliance, a "lawful marriage," must be effected between them. The empiricists merely collect, like the ants; the dogmatic metaphysicians spin the web of their ideas out of themselves, like the spiders; but the true philosopher must be like the bee, which by its own power transforms and digests the gathered material.

As the mind, like a dull and uneven mirror, by its own nature distorts the rays of objects, it must first of all be cleaned and polished, that is, it must be freed from all prejudices and false notions, which, deep-rooted by habit, prevent the formation of a true picture of the world. It must root out its prejudices, or, where this is impossible, at least understand them. Doubt is the first step on the way to truth. Of these Phantoms or Idols to be discarded, Bacon distinguishes four classes: Idols of the Theater, of the Market Place, of the Den, and of the Tribe. The most dangerous are the idola theatri, which consist in the tendency to put more trust in authority and tradition than in independent reflection, to adopt current ideas simply because they find general acceptance. Bacon's injunction concerning these is not to be deceived by stage-plays (i.e., by the teachings of earlier thinkers which represent things other than they are); instead of believing others, observe for thyself! The idola fori, which arise from the use of language in public intercourse, depend upon the confusion of words, which are mere symbols with a conventional value and which are based on the carelessly constructed concepts of the vulgar, with things themselves. Here Bacon warns us to keep close to things. The idola specus are individual prepossessions which interfere with the apprehension of the true state of affairs, such as the excessive tendency of thought toward the resemblances or the differences of things, or the investigator's habit of transferring ideas current in his own department to subjects of a different kind. Such individual weaknesses are numberless, yet they may in part be corrected by comparison with the perceptions of others. The idola tribus, finally, are grounded in the nature of the human species. To this class belong, among others, illusions of the senses, which may in part be corrected by the use of instruments, with which we arm our organs; further, the tendency to hold fast to opinions acceptable to us in spite of contrary instances; similarly, the tendency to anthropomorphic views, including, as its most important special instance, the mistake of thinking that we perceive purposive relations everywhere and the working of final causes, after the analogy of human action, when in reality efficient causes alone are concerned. Here Bacon's injunction runs, not to interpret natural phenomena teleologically, but to explain them from mechanical causes; not to narrow the world down to the limits of the mind, but to extend the mind to the boundaries of the world, so that it shall understand it as it really is.

To these warnings there are added positive rules. When the investigator, after the removal of prejudices and habitual modes of thought, approaches experience with his senses unperverted and a purified mind, he is to advance from the phenomena given to their conditions. First of all, the facts must be established by observation and experiment, and systematically arranged,[1] then let him go on to causes and laws.[2] The true or scientific induction[3] thus inculcated is quite different from the credulous induction of common life or the unmethodical induction of Aristotle. Bacon emphasizes the fact that hitherto the importance of negative instances, which are to be employed as a kind of counter-proof, has been completely overlooked, and that a substitute for complete induction, which is never attainable, may be found, on the one hand, in the collection of as many cases as possible, and, on the other, by considering the more important or decisive cases, the "prerogative instances." Then the inductive ascent from experiment to axiom is to be followed by a deductive descent from axioms to new experiments and discoveries. Bacon rejects the syllogism on the ground that it fits one to overcome his opponent in disputation, but not to gain an active conquest over nature. In his own application of these principles of method, his procedure was that of a dilettante; the patient, assiduous labor demanded for the successful promotion of the mission of natural investigation was not his forte. His strength lay in the postulation of problems, the stimulation and direction of inquiry, the discovery of lacunae and the throwing out of suggestions; and many ideas incidentally thrown off by him surprise us by their ingenious anticipations of later discoveries. The greatest defect in his theory was his complete failure to recognize the services promised by mathematics to natural science. The charge of utilitarianism, which has been so broadly made, is, on the contrary, unjust. For no matter how strongly he emphasizes the practical value of knowledge, he is still in agreement with those who esteem the godlike condition of calm and cheerful acquaintance with truth more highly than the advantages to be expected from it; he desires science to be used, not as "a courtezan for pleasure," but "as a spouse for generation, fruit and comfort," and—leaving entirely out of view his isolated acknowledgments of the inherent value of knowledge—he conceives its utility wholly in the comprehensive and noble sense that the pursuit of science, from which as such all narrow-minded regard for direct practical application must keep aloof, is the most important lever for the advancement of human culture.

[Footnote 1: Bacon illustrates the method by the explanation of heat. The results of experimental observation are to be arranged in three tables. The table of presence contains many different cases in which heat occurs; the table of absence, those in which, under circumstances otherwise the same, it is wanting; the table of degrees or comparison enumerates phenomena whose increase and decrease accompany similar variations in the degree of heat. That which remains after the exclusion now to be undertaken (of that which cannot be the nature or cause of heat), yields as a preliminary result or commencement of interpretation (as a "first vintage"), the definition of heat: "a motion, expansive, restrained, and acting in its strife upon the smaller particles of bodies.">[

[Footnote 2: This goal of Baconian inquiry is by no means coincident with that of exact natural science. Law does not mean to him, as to the physical scientist of to-day, a mathematically formulated statement of the course of events, but the nature of the phenomenon, to be expressed in a definition (E. König, Entwickelung des Causalproblems bis Kant, 1883, pp. 154-156). Bacon combines in a peculiar manner ancient and modern, Platonic and corpuscular fundamental ideas. Rejecting final causes with the atomists, yet handing over material and efficient causes (the latter of which sink with him to the level of mere changing occasional causes) to empirical physics, he assigns to metaphysics, as the true science of nature, the search for the "forms" and properties of things. In this he is guided by the following metaphysical presupposition: Phenomena, however manifold they may be, are at bottom composed of a few elements, namely, permanent properties, the so-called "simple natures," which form, as it were, the alphabet of nature or the colors on her palette, by the combination of which she produces her varied pictures; e. g., the nature of heat and cold, of a red color, of gravity, and also of age, of death. Now the question to be investigated becomes, What, then, is heat, redness, etc.? The ground essence and law of the natures consist in certain forms, which Bacon conceives in a Platonic way as concepts and substances, but phenomenal ones, and, at the same time, with Democritus, as the grouping or motion of minute material particles. Thus the form of heat is a particular kind of motion, the form of whiteness a determinate arrangement of material particles. Cf. Natge, Ueber F. Bacons Formenlehre, Leipsic, 1891, in which Heussler's view is developed in more detail. [Cf. further, Fowler's Bacon, English Philosophers Series, 1881, chap. iv.—TR.]

[Footnote 3: The Baconian method is to be called induction, it is true, only in the broad sense. Even before Sigwart, Apelt, Theorie der Induction, 1854, pp. 151, 153, declared that the question it discussed was essentially a method of abstraction. This, however, does not detract from the fame of Bacon as the founder, of the theory of inductive investigation (in later times carefully elaborated by Mill).]

Bacon intended that his reforming principles should accrue to the benefit of practical philosophy also, but gave only aphoristic hints to this end. Everything is impelled by two appetites, of which the one aims at individual welfare, the other at the welfare of the whole of which the thing is a part (bonum suitatis—bonum communionis). The second is not only the nobler but also the stronger; this holds of the lower creatures as well as of man, who, when not degenerate, prefers the general welfare to his individual interests. Love is the highest of the virtues, and is never, as other human endowments, exposed to the danger of excess; therefore the life of action is of more worth than the life of contemplation. By this principle of morals Bacon marked out the way for the English ethics of later times.[1] He notes the lack of a science of character, for which more material is given in ordinary discourse, in the poets and the historians, than in the works of the philosophers; he explains the power of the affections over the reason by the fact that the idea of present good fills the imagination more forcibly than the idea of good to come, and summons persuasion, habit, and morals to the aid of the latter. We must endeavor so to govern the passions (each of which combines in itself a masculine impetuosity with a feminine weakness) that they shall take the part of the reason instead of attacking it. Elsewhere Bacon gives (not entirely unquestionable) directions concerning the art of making one's way. Acute observations and ingenious remarks everywhere abound. In order to inform one's self of a man's intentions and ends, it is necessary to "keep a good mediocrity in liberty of speech, which invites a similar liberty, and in secrecy, which induces trust." "In order to get on one must have a little of the fool and not too much of the honest." "As the baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue. It cannot be spared nor left behind, but it hindereth the march; yea, and the care of it sometimes loseth or disturbeth the victory" (impedimenta—baggage and hindrance). On envy and malevolence he says: "For men's minds will either feed upon their own good or upon others' evil; … and whoso is out of hope to attain another's virtue will seek to come at even hand by depressing another's fortune."

[Footnote 1: Cf. Vorlaender, p. 267 seq.]

In ethics, as in theoretical philosophy, Bacon demands the completion of natural knowledge by revelation. The light of nature (the reason and the conscience) is able only to convince us of sin and not to give us complete information concerning our duty,—e.g., the lofty moral principle, Love your enemies. Similarly, natural theology is quite sufficient to place the existence of God beyond doubt, by reasoning from the order in nature ("slight tastes of philosophy may perchance move one to atheism but fuller draughts lead back to religion"); but the doctrines of Christianity are matters of faith. Religion and science are separate fields, any confusion of which involves the danger of an heretical religion or a fabulous philosophy. The more a principle of faith contradicts the reason, the greater the obedience and the honor to God in accepting it.

%(c) Hobbes%.—Hobbes stands in sharp contrast to Bacon both in disposition and in doctrine. Bacon was a man of a wide outlook, a rich, stimulating, impulsive nature, filled with great plans, but too mobile and desultory to allow them to ripen to perfection; Hobbes is slow, tenacious, persistent, unyielding, his thought strenuous and narrow. To this corresponds a profound difference in their systems, which is by no means adequately characterized by saying that Hobbes brings into the foreground the mathematical element neglected by his predecessor, and turns his attention chiefly to politics. The dependence of Hobbes on Bacon is, in spite of their personal acquaintance, not so great as formerly was universally assumed. His guiding stars are rather the great mathematicians of the Continent, Kepler and Galileo, while Cartesian influences also are not to be denied. He finds his mission in the construction of a strictly mechanical view of the world. Mechanism applied to the world gives materialism; applied to knowledge, sensationalism of a mathematical type; applied to the will, determinism; to morality and the state, ethical and political naturalism. Nevertheless, the empirical tendency of his nation has a certain power over him; he holds fast to the position that all ideas ultimately spring from experience. With his energetic but short-breathed thinking, he did not succeed in fusing the rationalistic elements received from foreign sources with these native tendencies, so as to produce a unified system. As Grimm has correctly shown (Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems), there is an unreconciled contradiction between the dependence of thought on experience, which he does not give up, and the universal validity of the truths derived from pure reason, which he asserts on the basis of the mathematico-philosophical doctrines of the Continent. A similar unmediated dualism will meet us in Locke also.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was repelled while a student at Oxford by Scholastic methods in thought, with which he agreed only in their nominalistic results (there are no universals except names). During repeated sojourns in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Gassendi, Mersenne, and Descartes, he devoted himself to the study of mathematics, and was greatly influenced by the doctrines of Galileo; while the disorders of the English revolution led him to embrace an absolutist theory of the state. His chief works were his politics, under the title Leviathan, 1651, and his Elementa Philosophiae, in three parts (De Corpore, De Homine, De Cive), of which the third, De Cive, appeared first (in Latin; in briefer form and anonymously, 1642, enlarged 1647), the first, De Corpore, in 1655, and the second, De Homine, in 1658. These had been preceded by two books [1] written, like the two last parts of the Elements, in English: On Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, composed 1640, printed without the author's consent in 1650. Besides these he wrote two treatises Of Liberty and Necessity, 1646 and 1654, and prepared, 1668, a collected edition of his works (in Latin). In Molesworth's edition, 1839-45, the Latin works occupy five volumes and the English eleven.[2]

[Footnote 1: Or rather one; the treatise On Human Nature consists of the first thirteen chapters of the work, Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, and the De Corpore Politico of the remainder.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Hobbes, G.C. Robertson (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, vol. x.), 1886; Tönnies in the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, Jahrg. 3-5, 1879-81.]

Philosophy is formally defined by Hobbes as knowledge of effects from causes and causes from effects by means of legitimate rational inference. This implies the equal validity of the deductive and inductive methods,—while Bacon had proclaimed the latter the most important instrument of knowledge,—as well as the exclusion of theology based on revelation from the domain of science. Philosophy is objectively defined as the theory of body and motion: all that exists is body; all that occurs, motion. Everything real is corporeal; this holds of points, lines, and surfaces, which as the limits of body cannot be incorporeal, as well as of the mind and of God. The mind is merely a (for the senses too) refined body, or, as it is stated in another place, a movement in certain parts of the organic body. All events, even internal events, the feelings and passions, are movements of material parts. "Endeavor" is a diminutive motion, as the atom is the smallest of bodies; sensation and representation are changes in the perceiving body. Space is the idea of an existing thing as such, i. e., merely as existing outside the perceiving subject; time, the idea of motion. All phenomena are corporeal motions, which take place with mechanical necessity. Neither formal nor final causes exist, but only efficient causes. All that happens takes its origin in the activity of an external cause, and not in itself; a body at rest (or in motion) remains at rest (or in motion) forever, unless affected by another in a contrary sense. And as bodies and their changes constitute the only objects of philosophy, so the mathematical method is the only correct method.

There are two kinds of bodies: natural bodies, which man finds in nature, and artificial bodies, which he himself produces. By the latter Hobbes refers especially to the state as a human artefact. Man stands between the two as the most perfect natural body and an element in the political body. Philosophy, therefore, besides the introductory philosophia prima, which discusses the underlying concepts, consists of three parts: physics, anthropology, and politics. Even the theory of the state is capable of demonstrative treatment; moral phenomena are as subject to the law of mechanical causation as physical phenomena.

The first factor in the cognitive process is an impression on a sense-organ, which, occasioned by external motion, continues onward to the heart and from this center gives rise to a reaction. The perception or sensation which thus arises is entirely subjective, a function of the knower merely, and in no way a copy of the external movement. The properties light, color, and sound, which we believe to be without us, are merely internal phenomena dependent on outer and inner motions, but with no resemblance to them. Memory consists in the lingering effects or residuary traces of perception; it is a sense or consciousness of having felt before (sentire se sensisse meminisse est), and ideas are distinguished from sensations as the perfect from the present tense. Experience is the totality of perceptions retained in memory, together with a certain foresight of the future after the analogy of the past. These stages of cognition, which can yield prudence but not necessary and universal knowledge, are present in animals as well as men. The human capacity for science is dependent on the faculty of speech; words are conventional signs to facilitate the retention and communication of ideas. As the memory-images denoted by words are weaker, fainter, and less clearly discriminated than the original sensations, it comes to pass that a number of similar ideas of memory receive a common name. Thus abstract general ideas and generic concepts arise, to which nothing real corresponds, for in reality particulars alone exist. The universal is a human artefact. The combination of words into propositions, being an addition or subtraction of arbitrary symbols or marks, is called judgment; the combination of propositions into syllogisms, inference; the united body of true or demonstrated principles, science—hence mathematics is the type of all knowledge. In short, thought is nothing but calculation and the words with which we operate are mere counters; he who takes counters for coin is a fool. Animals lack reason, i.e., this power of combining artificial symbols.

Hobbes's theory of the will is characterized by the same! sensationalism and mechanism as his theory of knowledge. All spiritual events originate in impressions of sense. Man responds to the action of objects by a double reaction, adding to the theoretical reaction of sensation a practical one in the feeling of pleasure or pain (according as the impression furthers or hinders the vital function), whence desire and aversion follow in respect to future experience. Further developments from the feelings experienced at the signs of honor (the acknowledgment of superior power) and the contrary, are the affections of pride, courage, anger, of shame and repentance, of hope and love, of pity, etc. Deliberation is the alternation of different appetites; the final, victorious one which immediately precedes action is called will. Freedom cannot be predicated of the will, but only of the action, and even in this case it means simply the absence of external restraints, the procedure of the action from the will of the agent; while the action is necessary nevertheless. Every motion is the inevitable result of the sum of the preceding (including cerebral) motions.

Things which we desire are termed good, and those which we shun, evil. Nothing is good per se or absolutely, but only relatively, for a given person, place, time, or set of circumstances. Different things are good to different men, and there is no objective, universal rule of good and evil, so long as men are considered as individuals, apart from society. A definite criterion of the good is first reached in the state: that is right which the law permits, that wrong which it forbids; good means that which is conducive to the general welfare. In the state of nature nothing is forbidden; nature gives every man a right to everything, and right is coextensive with might. What, then, induces man to abandon the state of nature and enter the state of citizenship? The opinion of Aristotle and Grotius that the state originates in the social impulse is false; for man is essentially not social, but selfish, and nothing but regard for his own interests bids him seek the protection of the state; the civil commonwealth is an artificial product of fear and prudence. The highest good is self-preservation; all other goods, as friendship, riches, wisdom, knowledge, and, above all, power, are valuable only as instruments of the former. The precondition of well-being, for which each man strives by nature, is security for life and health. This is wanting in the state of nature, in which the passions govern; for the state of nature is a state of war of everyone against everyone (bellum omnium contra omnes). Each man strives for success and power, and, since he cannot trust his fellow, seeks to subdue, nay, to kill him; each looks upon his fellow as a wolf which he prefers to devour rather than submit himself to the like operation. Now, as no one is so weak as to be incapable of inflicting on his fellows that worst of evils, death, and thus the strongest is unsafe, reason, in the interest of everyone, enjoins a search after peace and the establishment of an ordered community. The conditions of peace are the "laws of nature," which relate both to politics and to morals but which do not attain their full binding authority until they become positive laws, injunctions of the sovereign power. Peace is attainable only when each man, in return for the protection vouchsafed to him, gives up his natural right to all. The compact by which each renounces his natural liberty to do what he pleases, provided all others are ready for the same renunciation,—to which are added, further, the laws of justice (sanctity of covenants), equity, gratitude, modesty, sociability, mercifulness, etc., whose opposites would bring back the state of nature,—this compact is secured against violation by the transfer of the general power and freedom to a single will (the will of an assembly or of an individual person), which then represents the general will. The civil contract includes, then, two moments: first, renunciation; second, irrevocable transference and (absolute) submission. The second unites the multitude into a civil personality, the most perfect unity being vouchsafed by absolute monarchy. The sovereign is the soul of the political body; the officials, its limbs; reward and punishment, its nerves; law and equity, its reason.

The social contract theory has often experienced democratic interpretation and application, both before and since Hobbes's time; and, in fact, it does not include per se the irrevocability of the transfer, the absoluteness of the sovereign power, and the monarchical head, which Hobbes considered indispensable in order to guard against the danger of anarchy. In every abridgment of the supreme power, whether by division or limitation, he sees a step toward the renewal of the state of nature; and he defends with iron rigor the omnipotence of the state and the complete lack of legal status on the part of all individuals in contrast with it. The citizen is not to obey his own conscience, which has simply the value of a private opinion, but the laws, as the public conscience; while the supreme ruler, on the contrary, is superior to the civil laws, for it is he that decrees, interprets, alters, and abrogates them. He is lord over the property, the life, and the death of the citizens, and can do no one wrong. For he alone has retained his original natural right to all, which the rest have entirely and forever renounced. He must have regard, indeed, to the welfare of the people, but he is accountable to God alone. The obligation of the subject to obey is extinguished in one case only,—when the civil power is incapable of providing him further with external and internal protection. For the rest, Hobbes declares the existing public order the lawful one, the evils of arbitrary rule much more tolerable than the universal hostility of the state of nature, and aversion to tyrants a disease inherited from the republicans of antiquity.

The sovereign, by the laws and by instruction, determines what is good and evil; he determines also what is to be believed. Religion unsanctioned by the state is superstition. The temporal ruler is also the spiritual ruler, the king, the chief pastor, and the clergy his servants. One and the same community is termed state in so far as it consists of men, and church in so far as it consists of Christian men (the ecclesiastical commonwealth). The dogmas which the law prescribes are to be received without investigation, to be swallowed like pills, without mastication.

The principle that every passion and every action is in its nature indifferent, that right and wrong exist only in the state, that the will of a despot is to determine what is moral and what immoral, has given just offense. Moreover, this was not, in fact, Hobbes's deepest conviction. Even without ascribing great importance to isolated statements,[1] it must be admitted that his doctrine was interpreted more narrowly than it was intended. He does not say that no moral distinctions whatever exist before the foundation of the state, but only that the state first supplies a fixed criterion of the good. Moral ideas have a certain currency before this, but they lack power to enforce themselves. Further, when he ascribes the origin of the state to self-interest, this does not mean that reason, conscience, generosity, and love for our fellows are entirely wanting in the state of nature, but only that they are not general enough, and, as against the passions, not strong enough to furnish a foundation for the edifice of the state. Not only exaggeration in statement but also uncouthness of thought may be forgiven the representative of a movement which is at once new and strengthened by the consciousness of agreement with a naturalistic theory of knowledge and physics; and the vigor of execution compels admiration, even though many obscurities remain to be deplored (e. g., the relation of the two moral standards, the standard of the reason or natural law and the standard of positive law). And recognition must be accorded to the significant kernel of doctrine formed, on the one hand, by the endeavor to separate ethics from theology, and on the other, by the thoughts—which, it is true, were not perfectly brought out—that the moral is not founded on a natural social impulse, but on a law of the reason, and first gains a definite criterion in society, and that the interests of the individual are inseparably connected with those of the community. In any case, the attempt to form a naturalistic theory of the state would be an undertaking deserving of thanks, even if the promulgation of this theory had done no further service than to challenge refutation.

[Footnote 1: God inscribed the divine or natural law (Do not that to another, etc.) on the heart of man, when he gave him the reason to rule his actions. The laws of nature are, it is true, not always legally binding (in foro externo), but always and everywhere binding on the conscience (in foro interno). Justice is the virtue which we can measure by civil laws; love, that which we measure by the law of nature merely. The ruler ought to govern in accordance with the law of nature.]

%(d) Lord Herbert of Cherbury.%—Between Bacon (1605, 1620) and Hobbes (1642, 1651) stands Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1648), who, by his work De Veritate (1624),[1] became the founder of deism, that theory of "natural religion," which, in opposition to the historical dogmatic faith of the Church theology, takes the reason, which is the same in all men, as its basis and morality for its content. Lord Herbert introduces his philosophy of religion by a theory of knowledge which makes universal consent the highest criterion of truth (summa veritatis norma consensus universalis), and bases knowledge on certain self-evident principles (principia), common to all men in virtue of a natural instinct, which gives safe guidance. These common notions (notitiae communes) precede all reflective inquiry, as well as all observation and experience, which would be impossible without them. The most important among them are the religious and ethical maxims of conscience.

[Footnote 1: Tractatus de Veritate prout distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a Possibile, et a False. Also, De Religione Gentilium, 1645, complete 1663.]

This natural instinct is both an impulse toward truth and a capacity for good or impulse to self-preservation. The latter extends not only to the individual but to all things with which the individual is connected, to the species, nay, to all the rest of the world, and its final goal is eternal happiness: all natural capacities are directed toward the highest good or toward God. The sense for the divine may indeed be lulled to sleep or led astray by our free will, but not eradicated. To be rational and to be religious are inseparable; it is religion that distinguishes man from the brute, and no people can be found in which it is lacking. If atheists really exist, they are to be classed with the irrational and the insane.

The content of natural religion may be summed up in the following five articles, which all nations confess: 1. That there is a Supreme Being (numen supremum). 2. That he ought to be worshiped. 3. That virtue and piety are the chief elements of worship. 4. That man ought to repent of his sins. 5. That there are rewards and punishments in a future life. Besides these general principles, on the discovery of which Lord Herbert greatly prides himself, the positive religions contain arbitrary additions, which distinguish them from one another and which owe their origin, for the most part, to priestly deception, although the rhapsodies of the poets and the inventions of the philosophers have contributed their share. The essential principles of natural religion (God, virtue, faith, hope, love, and repentance) come more clearly to light in Christianity than in the religions of heathendom, where they are overgrown with myths and ceremonies.

The Religio Medici (1642) of Sir Thomas Browne shows similar tendencies.

%9. Preliminary Survey.%

In the line of development from the speculations of Nicolas of Cusa to the establishment of the English philosophy of nature, of religion, and of the state by Bacon, Herbert, and Hobbes, and to the physics of Galileo, modern ideas have manifested themselves with increasing clearness and freedom. Hobbes himself shows thus early the influence of Descartes's decisive step, with which the twilight gives place to the brightness of the morning. In Descartes the empiricism and sensationalism of the English is confronted by rationalism, to which the great thinkers of the Continent continue loyal. In Britain, experience, on the Continent the reason is declared to be the source of cognition; in the former, the point of departure is found in particular impressions of sense, on the latter, in general concepts and principles of the understanding; there the method of observation is inculcated and followed, here, the method of deduction. This antithesis remained decisive in the development of philosophy down to Kant, so that it has long been customary to distinguish two lines or schools, the Empirical and the Rationalistic, whose parallelism may be exhibited in the following table (when only one date is given it indicates the appearance of the philosopher's chief work):

Empiricism. Rationalism.
Bacon, 1620. (Nicolas, 1450; Bruno, 1584).
Hobbes, 1651. Descartes, died 1650.
Locke, 1690 (1632-1704). Spinoza, (1632-) 1677.
Berkeley, 1710. Leibnitz, 1710.
Hume, 1748. Wolff, died 1754.

We must not forget, indeed, the lively interchange of ideas between the schools (especially the influence of Descartes on Hobbes, and of the latter on Spinoza; further, of Descartes on Locke, and of the latter on Leibnitz) which led to reciprocal approximation and enrichment. Berkeley and Leibnitz, from opposite presuppositions, arrive at the same idealistic conclusion—there is no real world of matter, but only spirits and ideas exist. Hume and Wolff conclude the two lines of development: under the former, empiricism disintegrates into skepticism; under the latter, rationalism stiffens into a scholastic dogmatism, soon to run out into a popular eclecticism of common sense.

If we compare the mental characteristics of the three great nations which, in the period between Descartes and Kant, participated most productively in the work of philosophy,—the Italians, with their receptive temperament and so active in many fields, exerted a decisive influence on its development and progress in the transition period alone,—it will be seen that the Frenchman tends chiefly to acuteness, the Englishman to clearness and simplicity, the German to profundity of thought. France is the land of mathematical, England of practical, Germany of speculative thinkers; the first is the home of the skeptics, though of the enthusiasts as well; the second, of the realists; the third, of the idealists.

The English philosopher resembles a geographer who, with conscientious care, outlines a map of the region through which he journeys; the Frenchman, an anatomist who, with steady stroke, lays bare the nerves and muscles of the organism; the German, a mountaineer who loses in clear vision of particular objects as much as he gains in loftiness of position and extent of view. The Englishman describes the given reality, the Frenchman analyses it, the German transfigures it.

The English thinker keeps as close as possible to phenomena, and the principles which he uses in the explanation of phenomena themselves lie in the realm of concrete experience. He explains one phenomenon by another; he classifies and arranges the given material without analyzing it; he keeps constantly in touch with the popular consciousness. His reverence for reality, as this presents itself to him, and his distrust of far-reaching abstraction, are so strong that it is enough for him to take his bearings from the real, and to give a true reproduction of it, while he willingly renounces the ambition to form it anew in concepts. With this respect for concrete reality he combines a similar reverence for ethical postulates. When the development of a given line of thought threatens to bring him into conflict with practical life, he is honest enough to draw the conclusions which follow from his premises and to give them expression, but he avoids the collision by a simple compromise, shutting up the refinements of philosophy in the study and yielding in practice to the guidance of natural instinct and conscience. His support, therefore, of theories which contradict current views in morals is free from the levity in which the Frenchman indulges. Life and thought are separate fields, contradictions between them are borne in patience, and if science draws its material from life it shows itself grateful for the favor by giving life the benefit of the useful outcome of its labors, and, at the same time, shielding it from the revolutionary or disintegrating effect of its doubtful paradoxes.

While the deliberate craft of English philosophy does not willingly lose sight of the shores of the concrete world, French thought sails boldly and confidently out into the open sea of abstraction. It is not strange that it finds the way to the principles more rapidly than the way back to phenomena. A free road, a fresh start, a straight course—such is the motto of French thinking. Whatever is inconsistent with rectilinearity is ignored, or opposed as unfitting. The line drawn by Descartes through the world between matter and spirit, and that by Rousseau between nature and culture, are distinctive of the philosophical character of their countrymen. Dualism is to them entirely congenial; it satisfies their need for clearness, and with this they are content. Antithesis is in the Frenchman's blood; he thinks in it and speaks in it, in the salon or on the platform, in witty jest or in scientific earnestness of thought. Either A or not-A, and there is no middle ground. This habit of precision and sharp analysis facilitates the formation of closed parties, whereas each individual German, in philosophy as in politics, forms a party of his own. The demand for the removal of the rubbish of existing systems and the sanguine return to the sources, give French philosophy an unhistorical, radical, and revolutionary character. Minds of the second order, who are incapable of taking by themselves the step from that which is given to the sources, prove their radicalism by following down to the roots that which others have begun (so Condillac and the sensationalism of Locke). Moreover, philosophical principles are to be translated into action; the thinker has shown himself the doctrinaire in his destructive analysis of that which is given, so, also, he hopes to play the dictator by overturning existing institutions and establishing a new order of things,—only his courageous endeavor flags as soon in the region of practice as in that of theory.

The German lacks the happy faculty, which distinguishes the two nations just discussed, of isolating a problem near at hand, and he is accustomed to begin his system with Leda's egg; but, by way of compensation, he combines the lofty flight of the French with the phlegmatic endurance of the English, i.e., he seeks his principles far above experience, but, instead of stopping with the establishment of points of view or when he has set the note, he carries his principles through in detail with loving industry and comprehensive architectonic skill. While common sense turns the scale with the English and analytical thought with the French, the German allows the fancy and the heart to take an important part in the discussion, though in such a way that the several faculties work together and in harmony. While in France rationalism, mysticism, and the philosophy of the heart were divided among different thinkers (Descartes, Malebranche and Pascal, Rousseau), there is in every German philosopher something of all three. The skeptical Kant provides a refuge for the postulates of thought in the sanctuary of faith; the earnest, energetic Fichte, toward the end of his life, takes his place among the mystics; Schelling thinks with the fancy and dreams with the understanding; and under the broad cloak of the Hegelian dialectic method, beside the reflection of the Critique of Reason and of the Science of Knowledge, the fancies of the Philosophy of Nature, the deep inwardness of Böhme, even the whole wealth of empirical fact, found a place. As synthesis is predominant in his view of things, so a harmonizing, conciliatory tendency asserts itself in his relations to his predecessors: the results of previous philosophers are neither discarded out of hand nor accepted in the mass, but all that appears in any way useful or akin to the new system is wrought in at its proper place, though often with considerable transformation. In this work of mediation there is considerable loss in definiteness, the just and comprehensive consideration of the most diverse interests not always making good the loss. And since such a philosophy, as we have already shown, engages the whole man, its disciple has neither impulse nor strength left for reforming labors; while, on the other hand, he perceives no external call to undertake them, since he views the world through the glasses of his system. Thus philosophy in Germany, pursued chiefly by specialists, remains a professional affair, and has not exercised a direct transforming influence on life (for Fichte, who helped to philosophize the French out of Germany, was an exception); but its influence has been the greater in the special sciences, which in Germany more than any other land are handled in a philosophic spirit.

The mental characteristics of these nations are reflected also in their methods of presentation. The style of the English philosopher is sober, comprehensible, diffuse, and slightly wearisome. The French use a fluent, elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought. The German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at once ponderous and not easily understood; each writer constructs his own terminology, with a liberal admixture of foreign expressions, and the length of his paragraphs is exceeded only by the thickness of his books. These national distinctions may be traced even in externals. The Englishman makes his divisions as they present themselves at first thought, and rather from a practical than from a logical point of view. The analytic Frenchman prefers dichotomy, while trichotomy corresponds to the synthetic, systematic character of German thinking; and Kant's naïve delight, because in each class the third category unites its two predecessors, has been often experienced by many of his countrymen at the sight of their own trichotomies.

The division of labor in the pre-Kantian philosophy among these three nationalities entirely agrees with the account given of the peculiarities of their philosophical endowment. The beginning falls to the share of France; Locke receives that tangled skein, the problem of knowledge, from the hand of Descartes, and passes it on to Leibnitz; and while the Illumination in all three countries is converting the gold inherited from Locke and Leibnitz into small coin, the solution of the riddle rings out from Königsberg.

PART I.

FROM DESCARTES TO KANT.

CHAPTER II.

DESCARTES.

The long conflict with Scholasticism, which had been carried on with ever increasing energy and ever sharper weapons, was brought by Descartes to a victorious close. The new movement, long desired, long sought, and prepared for from many directions, at length appears, ready and well-established. Descartes accomplishes everything needful with the sure simplicity of genius. He furnishes philosophy with a settled point of departure in self-consciousness, offers her a method sure to succeed in deduction from clear and distinct conceptions, and assigns her the mechanical explanation of nature as her most imperative and fruitful mission.

René Descartes was born at La Haye in Touraine, in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650. Of the studies taught in the Jesuit school at La Flèche, mathematics alone was able to satisfy his craving for clear and certain knowledge. The years 1613-17 he spent in Paris; then he enlisted in the military service of the Netherlands, and, in 1619, in that of Bavaria. While in winter quarters at Neuburg, he vowed a pilgrimage to Loretto if the Virgin would show him a way of escape from his tormenting doubts; and made the saving discovery of the "foundations of a wonderful science." At the end of four years this vow was fulfilled. On his return to Paris (1625), he was besought by his learned friends to give to the world his epoch-making ideas. Though, to escape the distractions of society, he kept his residence secret, as he had done during his first stay in Paris, and frequently changed it, he was still unable to secure the complete privacy and leisure for scientific work which he desired. Therefore he went to Holland in 1629, and spent twenty years of quiet productivity in Amsterdam, Franecker, Utrecht, Leeuwarden, Egmond, Harderwijk, Leyden, the palace of Endegeest, and five other places. His work here was interrupted only by a few journeys, but much disturbed in its later years by annoying controversies with the theologian Gisbert Voëtius of Utrecht, with Regius, a pupil who had deserted him, and with professors from Leyden. His correspondence with his French friends was conducted through Père Mersenne. In 1649 he yielded to pressing invitations from Queen Christina of Sweden and removed to Stockholm. There his weak constitution was not adequate to the severity of the climate, and death overtook him within a few months.

The two decades of retirement in the Netherlands were Descartes's productive period. His motive in developing and writing out his thoughts was, essentially, the desire not to disappoint the widely spread belief that he was in possession of a philosophy more certain than the common one. The work entitled Le Monde, begun in 1630 and almost completed, remained unprinted, as the condemnation of Galileo (1632) frightened our philosopher from publication; fragments of it only, and a brief summary, appeared after the author's death. The chief works, the Discourse on Method, the Meditations on the First Philosophy, and the Principles of Philosophy appeared between 1637 and 1644,—the Discours de la Méthode in 1637, together with three dissertations (the "Dioptrics," the "Meteors," and the "Geometry"), under the common title, Essais Philosophiques. To the (six) Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, published in 1641, and dedicated to the Paris Sorbonne, are appended the objections of various savants to whom the work had been communicated in manuscript, together with Descartes's rejoinders. He himself considered the criticisms of Arnauld, printed fourth in order, as the most important. The Third Objections are from Hobbes, the Fifth from Gassendi, the First, which were also the first received, from the theologian Caterus of Antwerp, while the Second and Sixth, collected by Mersenne, are from various theologians and mathematicians. In the second edition there were added, further, the Seventh Objections, by the Jesuit Bourdin, and the Replies of the author thereto. The four books of the Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644 and dedicated to Elizabeth, Countess Palatine, give a systematic presentation of the new philosophy. The Discourse on Method appeared, 1644, in a Latin translation, the Meditations and the Principles in French, in 1647. The Treatise on the Passions was published in 1650; the Letters, 1657-67, in French, 1668, in Latin. The Opera Postuma, 1701, beside the Compendium of Music (written in 1618) and other portions of his posthumous writings, contain the "Rules for the Direction of the Mind," supposed to have been written in 1629, and the "Search for Truth by the Light of Nature." The complete works have been often published, both in Latin and in French. The eleven volume edition of Cousin appeared in 1824-26.[1]

[Footnote 1: Of the many treatises on the philosophy of Descartes those of C. Schaarschmidt (Descartes und Spinoza, 1850) and J.H. Löwe, 1855, may be mentioned. Further, M. Heinze has discussed Die Sittenlehre des Descartes, 1872; Ed. Grimm, Descartes' Lehre von den angeborenen Ideen, 1873; G. Glogau, Darlegung und Kritik des Grundgedankens der Cartesianisch. Metaphysik (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxiii. p. 209 seq.), 1878; Paul Natorp, Descartes' Erkenntnisstheorie, 1882; and Kas. Twardowski, Idee und Perception in Descartes, 1892. In French, Francisque Bouillier (Histoire de la Philosophie Cartésienne, 1854) and E. Saisset (Précurseurs et Disciples de Descartes, 1862) have written on Cartesianism. [The Method, Meditations, and Selections from the Principles have been translated into English by John Veitch, 5th ed., 1879, and others since; and H.A.P. Torrey has published The Philosophy of Descartes in Extracts from his Writings, 1892 (Sneath's Modern Philosophers). The English reader may be referred, also, to Mahaffy's Descartes, 1880, in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics; to the article "Cartesianism," Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. v., by Edward Caird; and, for a complete discussion, to the English translation of Fischer's Descartes and his School' by J.P. Gordy, 1887.—TR.]

We begin our discussion with Descartes's noëtical and metaphysical principles, and then take up in order his doctrine of nature and of man.

%1. The Principles%.

That which passes nowadays for science, and is taught as such in the schools, is nothing but a mass of disconnected, uncertain, and often contradictory opinions. A principle of unity and certainty is entirely lacking. If anything permanent and irrefutable is to be accomplished in science, everything hitherto considered true must be thoroughly demolished and built up anew. For we come into the world as children and we form judgments of things, or repeat them after others, before we have come into the full possession of our intellectual powers; so that it is no wonder that we are filled with a multitude of prejudices, from which we can thoroughly escape only by considering everything doubtful which shows the least sign of uncertainty. Let us renounce, therefore, all our old views, in order later to accept better ones in their stead; or, perchance, to take the former up again after they shall have stood the test of rational criticism. The recognized precaution, never to put complete confidence in that which has once deceived us, holds of our relation to the senses as elsewhere. It is certain that they sometimes deceive us—perhaps they do so always. Again, we dream every day of things which nowhere exist, and there is no certain criterion by which to distinguish our dreams from our waking moments,—what guarantee have we, then, that we are not always dreaming? Therefore, our doubt must first of all be directed to the existence of sense-objects. Nay, even mathematics must be suspected in spite of the apparent certainty of its axioms and demonstrations, since controversy and error are found in it also.

I doubt or deny, then, that the world is what it appears to be, that there is a God, that external objects exist, that I have a body, that twice two are four. One thing, however, it is impossible for me to bring into question, namely, that I myself, who exercise this doubting function, exist. There is one single point at which doubt is forced to halt—at the doubter, at the self-existence of the thinker. I can doubt everything except that I doubt, and that, in doubting, I am. Even if a superior being sought to deceive me in all my thinking, he could not succeed unless I existed, he could not cause me not to exist so long as I thought. To be deceived means to think falsely; but that something is thought, no matter what it be, is no deception. It might be true, indeed, that nothing at all existed; but then there would be no one to conceive this non-existence. Granted that everything may be a mistake; yet the being mistaken, the thinking is not a mistake. Everything is denied, but the denier remains. The whole content of consciousness is destroyed; consciousness itself, the doubting activity, the being of the thinker, is indestructible. Cogitatio sola a me divelli nequit. Thus the settled point of departure required for knowledge is found in the self-certitude of the thinking ego. From the fact that I doubt, i.e., think, it follows that I, the doubter, the thinker, am. Cogito, ergo sum is the first and most certain of all truths.

The principle, "I think, therefore I am," is not to be considered a deduction from the major premise, "Whatever thinks exists." It is rather true that this general proposition is derived from the particular and earlier one. I must first realize in my own experience that, as thinking, I exist, before I can reach the general conclusion that thought and existence are inseparable. This fundamental truth is thus not a syllogism, but a not further deducible, self-evident, immediate cognition, a pure intuition—sum cogitans. Now, if my existence is revealed by my activity of thought, if my thought is my being, and the converse, if in me thought and existence are identical, then I am a being whose essence consists in thinking. I am a spirit, an ego, a rational soul. My existence follows only from my thinking, not from any chance action. Ambulo ergo sum would not be valid, but mihi videor or puto me ambulare, ergo sum. If I believe I am walking, I may undoubtedly be deceived concerning the outward action (as, for instance, in dreams), but never concerning my inward belief. Cogitatio includes all the conscious activities of the mind, volition, emotion, and sensation, as well as representation and cognition; they are all modi cogitandi. The existence of the mind is therefore the most certain of all things. We know the soul better than the body. It is for the present the only certainty, and every other is dependent on this, the highest of all.

What, then, is the peculiarity of this first and most certain knowledge which renders it self-evident and independent of all proof, which makes us absolutely unable to doubt it? Its entire clearness and distinctness. Accordingly, I may conclude that everything which I perceive as clearly and distinctly as the cogito ergo sum is also true, and I reach this general rule, omne est verum, quod clare et distincte percipio. So far, then, we have gained three things: a challenge; to be inscribed over the portals of certified knowledge, de omnibus dubitandum; a basal truth, sum cogitans; a criterion of truth, clara et distinct a perceptio.

The doubt of Descartes is not the expression of a resigned spirit which renounces the unattainable; it is precept, not doctrine, the starting point of philosophy, not its conclusion, a methodological instrument in the hand of a strong and confident longing for truth, which makes use of doubt to find the indubitable. It is not aimed at the possibility of attaining knowledge, but at the opinion that it has already been attained, at the credulity of the age, at its excessive tendency toward historical and poly-historical study, which confuses the acquisition and handing down of information with knowledge of the truth. That knowledge alone is certain which is self-attained and self-tested—and this cannot be learned or handed down; it can only be rediscovered through examination and experience. Instead of taking one's own unsupported conjectures or the opinions of others as a guide, the secret of the search for truth is to become independent and of age, to think for one's self; and the only remedy against the dangers of self-deception and the ease of repetition is to be found in doubting everything hitherto considered true. This is the meaning of the Cartesian doubt, which is more comprehensive and more thorough than the Baconian. Descartes disputed only the certitude of the knowledge previously attained, not the possibility of knowledge—for of the latter no man is more firmly convinced than he. He is a rationalist, not a skeptic. The intellect is assured against error just as soon as, freed from hindrances, it remains true to itself, as it puts forth all its powers and lets nothing pass for truth which is not clearly and distinctly known. Descartes demands the same thing for the human understanding as Rousseau at a later period for the heart: a return to uncorrupted nature. This faith in the unartificial, the original, the natural, this radical and naturalistic tendency is characteristically French. The purification of the mind, its deliverance from the rubbish of scholastic learning, from the pressure of authority, and from inert acceptance of the thinking of others—this is all. Descartes finds the clearest proof of the mind's capacity for truth in mathematics, whose trustworthiness he never seriously questioned, but only hypothetically, in order to exhibit the still higher certainty of the "I think, therefore I am." He wants to give philosophy the stable character which had so impressed him in mathematics when he was a boy, and recommends her, therefore, not merely the evidence of mathematics as a general example, but the mathematical method for definite imitation. Metaphysics, like mathematics, must derive its conclusions by deduction from self-evident principles. Thus the geometrical method begins its rule in philosophy, a rule not always attended with beneficial results.

With this criterion of truth Descartes advances to the consideration of ideas. He distinguishes volition and judgment from ideas in the narrow sense (imagines), and divides the latter, according to their origin, into three classes: ideae innatae, adventitiae, a me ipso factae, considering the second class, the "adventitious" ideas, the most numerous, but the first, the "innate" ideas, the most important. No idea is higher or clearer than the idea of God or the most perfect being. Whence comes this idea? That every idea must have a cause, follows from the "clear and distinct" principle that nothing produces nothing. It follows from this same principle, ex nihilo nihil fit, however, that the cause must contain as much reality or perfection—realitas and perfectio are synonymous—as the effect, for otherwise the overplus would have come from nothing. So much ("objective," representative) reality contained in an idea, so much or more ("formal," actual) reality must be contained in its cause. The idea of God as infinite, independent, omnipotent, omniscient, and creative substance, has not come to me through the senses, nor have I formed it myself. The power to conceive a being more perfect than myself, can have only come from someone who is more perfect in reality than I. Since I know that the infinite contains more reality than the finite, I may conclude that the idea of the infinite has not been derived from the idea of the finite by abstraction and negation; it precedes the latter, and I become conscious of my defects and my finitude only by comparison with the absolute perfection of God. This idea, then, must have been implanted in me by God himself. The idea of God is an original endowment; it is as innate as the idea of myself. However incomplete it may be, it is still sufficient to give a knowledge of God's existence, although not a perfect comprehension of his being, just as a man may skirt a mountain without encircling it.

Descartes brings in the idea of God in order to escape solipsism. So long as the self-consciousness of the ego remained the only certainty, there was no conclusive basis for the assumption that anything exists beyond self, that the ideas which apparently come from without are really occasioned by external things and do not spring from the mind itself. For our natural instinct to refer them to objects without us might well be deceptive. It is only through the idea of God, and by help of the principle that the cause must contain at least as much reality as the effect, that I am taken beyond myself and assured that I am not the only thing in the world. For as this idea contains more of representative, than I of actual reality, I cannot have been its cause.

To this empirical argument, which derives God's existence from our idea of God (from the fact that we have an idea of him), Descartes joins the (modified) ontological argument of Anselm, which deduces the existence of God from the concept of God. While the ideas of all other things include only the possibility of existence, necessary existence is inseparable from the concept of the most perfect being. God cannot be thought apart from existence; he has the ground of his existence in himself; he is a se or causa sui. Finally, Descartes adds a third argument. The idea of perfections which I do not possess can only have been imparted to me by a more perfect being than I, which has bestowed on me all that I am and all that I am capable of becoming. If I had created myself, I would have bestowed upon myself these absent perfections also. And the existence of a plurality of causes is negatived by the supreme perfection which I conceive in the idea of God, the indivisible unity of his attributes. Among the attributes of God his veracity is of special importance. It is impossible that he should will to deceive us; that he should be the cause of our errors. God would be a deceiver, if he had endowed us with a reason to which error should appear true, even when it uses all its foresight in avoiding it and assents only to that which it clearly and distinctly perceives. Error is man's own fault; he falls into it only when he misuses the divine gift of knowledge, which includes its own standard. Thus Descartes finds new confirmation for his test of truth in the veracitas dei. Erdmann has given a better defense of Descartes than the philosopher himself against the charge that this is arguing in a circle, inasmuch as the existence of God is proved by the criterion of truth, and then the latter by the former: The criterion of certitude is the ratio cognoscendi of God's existence; God is the ratio essendi of the criterion of certitude. In the order of existence God is first, he creates the reason together with its criterion; in the order of knowledge the criterion precedes, and God's existence follows from it. Descartes himself endeavors to avoid the circle by making intuitive knowledge self-evident, and by not bringing in the appeal to God's veracity in demonstrative knowledge until, in reflective thought, we no longer have each separate link in the chain of proof present to our minds with full intuitive certainty, but only remember that we have previously understood the matter with clearness and distinctness.

Our ideas represent in part things, in part qualities. Substance is defined by the concept of independence as res quae ita existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum; a pregnant definition with which the concept of substance gains the leadership in metaphysics, which it held till the time of Hume and Kant, sharing it then with the conception of cause or, rather, relinquishing it to the latter. The Spinozistic conclusion that, according to the strict meaning of this definition, there is but one substance, God, who, as causa sui, has absolutely no need of any other thing in order to his existence, was announced by Descartes himself. If created substances are under discussion, the term does not apply to them in the same sense (not univoce) as when we speak of the infinite substance; created beings require a different explanation, they are things which need for their existence only the co-operation of God, and have no need of one another. Substance is cognized through its qualities, among which one is pre-eminent from the fact that it expresses the essence or nature of the thing, and that it is conceived through itself, without the aid of the others, while they presuppose it and cannot be thought without it. The former fundamental properties are termed attributes, and these secondary ones, modes or accidents. Position, figure, motion, are contingent properties of body; they presuppose that it is extended or spatial; they are modi extensionis, as feeling, volition, desire, representation, and judgment are possible only in a conscious being, and hence are merely modifications of thought. Extension is the essential or constitutive attribute of body, and thought of mind. Body is never without extension, and mind never without thought—mens semper cogitat. Guided by the self-evident principle that the non-existent has no properties, we argue from a perceived quality to a substance as its possessor or support. Substances are distinct from one another when we can clearly and distinctly cognize one without the other. Now, we can adequately conceive mind without a corporeal attribute and body without a spiritual one; the former has nothing of extension in it, the latter nothing of thought: hence thinking substance and extended substance are entirely distinct and have nothing in common. Matter and mind are distinct realiter, matter and extension idealiter merely. Thus we attain three clear and distinct ideas, three eternal verities: substantia infinita sive deus, substantia finita cogitans sive mens, substantia extensa sive corpus.

By this abrupt contraposition of body and mind as reciprocally independent substances, Descartes founded that dualism, as whose typical representative he is still honored or opposed. This dualism between the material and spiritual worlds belongs to those standpoints which are valid without being ultimate truth; on the pyramid of metaphysical knowledge it takes a high, but not the highest, place. We may not rest in it, yet it retains a permanent value in opposition to subordinate theories. It is in the right against a materialism which still lacks insight into the essential distinction between mind and matter, thought and extension, consciousness and motion; it loses its validity when, with a full consideration and conservation of the distinction between these two spheres, we succeed in bridging over the gulf between them, whether this is accomplished through a philosophy of identity, like that of Spinoza and Schelling, or by an idealism, like that of Leibnitz or Fichte. In any case philosophy retains as an inalienable possession the negative conclusion, that, in view of the heterogeneity of consciousness and motion, the inner life is not reducible to material phenomena. This clear and simple distinction, which sets bounds to every confusion of spiritual and material existence, was an act of emancipation; it worked on the sultry intellectual atmosphere of the time with the purifying and illuminating power of a lightning flash. We shall find the later development of philosophy starting from the Cartesian dualism.

Descartes himself looked upon the fundamental principles which have now been discussed as merely the foundation for his life work, as the entrance portal to his cosmology. Posterity has judged otherwise; it finds his chief work in that which he considered a mere preparation for it. The start from doubt, the self-certitude of the thinking ego, the rational criterion of certitude, the question of the origin of ideas, the concept of substance, the essential distinction between conscious activity and corporeal being, and, also, the principle of thoroughgoing mechanism in the material world (from his philosophy of nature)—these are the thoughts which assure his immortality. The vestibule has brought the builder more fame, and has proved more enduring, than the temple: of the latter only the ruins remain; the former has remained undestroyed through the centuries.

%2. Nature.%

What guarantee have we for the existence of material objects affecting our senses? That the ideas of sense do not come from ourselves, is shown by the fact that it is not in our power to determine the objects which we perceive, or the character of our perception of them. The supposition that God has caused our perceptions directly, or by means of something which has no resemblance whatever to an external object extended in three dimensions and movable, is excluded by the fact that God is not a deceiver. In reliance on God's veracity we may accept as true whatever the reason declares concerning body, though not all the reports of the senses, which so often deceive us. At the instance of the senses we clearly and distinctly perceive matter distinct from our mind and from God, extended in three dimensions, length, breadth, and depth, with variously formed and variously moving parts, which occasion in us sensations of many kinds. The belief that perception makes known things as they really are is a prejudice of sense to be discarded; on the contrary, it merely informs us concerning the utility or harmfulness of objects, concerning their relation to man as a being composed of soul and body. (The body is that material thing which is very intimately joined with the mind, and occasions in the latter certain feelings, e.g., pain, which as merely cogitative it would not have.) Sense qualities, as color, sound, odor, cannot constitute the essence of matter, for their variation or loss changes nothing in it; I can abstract from them without the material thing disappearing.[1] There is one property, however, extensive magnitude (quantitas), whose removal would imply the destruction of matter itself. Thus I perceive by pure thought that the essence of matter consists in extension, in that which constitutes the object of geometry, in that magnitude which is divisible, figurable, and movable. This thesis (corpus = extensio sive spatium) is next defended by Descartes against several objections. In reply to the objection drawn from the condensation and rarefaction of bodies, he urges that the apparent increase or decrease in extension is, in fact, a mere change of figure; that the rarefaction of a body depends on the increase in size of the intervals between its parts, and the entrance into them of foreign bodies, just as a sponge swells up when its pores become filled with water and, therefore, enlarged. The demand that the pores, and the bodies which force their way into them, should always be perceptible to the senses, is groundless. He meets the second point, that we call extension by itself space, and not body, by maintaining that the distinction between extension and corporeal substance is a distinction in thought, and not in reality; that attribute and substance, mathematical and physical bodies, are not distinct in fact but only in our thought of them. We apply the term space to extension in general, as an abstraction, and body to a given individual, determinate, limited extension. In reality, wherever extension is, there substance is also,—the non-existent has no extension,—and wherever space is, there matter is also. Empty space does not exist. When we say a vessel is empty, we mean that the bodies which fill it are imperceptible; if it were absolutely empty its sides would touch. Descartes argues against the atomic theory and against the finitude of the world, as he argues against empty space: matter, as well as space, has no smallest, indivisible parts, and the extension of the world has no end. In the identification of space and matter the former receives fullness from the latter, and the latter unlimitedness from the former, both internal unlimitedness (endless divisibility) and external (boundlessness). Hence there are not several matters but only one (homogeneous) matter, and only one (illimitable) world.

[Footnote 1: They are merely subjective states in the perceiver, and entirely unlike the motions which give rise to them, although there is a certain agreement, as the differences and variations in sensation are paralleled by those in the object.]

Matter is divisible, figurable, movable quantity. Natural science needs no other principles than these indisputably true conceptions, by which all natural phenomena may be explained, and must employ no others. The most important is motion, on which all the diversity of forms depends. Corporeal being has been shown to be extension; corporeal becoming is motion. Motion is defined as "the transporting of one part of matter, or of one body, from the vicinity of those bodies that are in immediate contact with it, or which we regard as at rest, to the vicinity of other bodies." This separation of bodies is reciprocal, hence it is a matter of choice which shall be considered at rest. Besides its own proper motion in reference to the bodies in its immediate vicinity, a body can participate in very many other motions: the traveler walking back and forth on the deck of a ship, for instance, in the motion of the vessel, of the waves, and of the earth. The common view of motion as an activity is erroneous; since it requires force not only to set in motion bodies which are at rest, but also to stop those which are in motion, it is clear that motion implies no more activity than rest. Both are simply different states of matter. Since there is no empty space, each motion spreads to a whole circle of bodies: A forces B out of its place, B drives out C, and so on, until Z takes up the position which A has left.

The ultimate cause of motion is God. He has created bodies with an original measure of motion and rest, and, in accordance with his immutable character, he preserves this quantity of motion unchanged: it remains constant in the world as a whole, though it varies in individual bodies. For with the power to create or destroy motion bodies lack, further, the power to alter their quantity of motion. By the side of God, the primary cause of motion, the laws of motion appear as secondary causes. The first of these is the one become familiar under the name, law of inertia: Everything continues of itself in the state (of motion or rest) in which it is, and changes its state only as a result of some extraneous cause. The second of these laws, which are so valuable in mechanics, runs: Every portion of matter tends to continue a motion which has been begun in the same direction, hence in a straight line, and changes its direction only under the influence of another body, as in the case of the circle above described. Descartes bases these laws on the unchangeableness of God and the simplicity of his world-conserving (i.e., constantly creative) activity. The third law relates to the communication of motion; but Descartes does not recognize the equality of action and reaction as universally as the fact demands. If a body in motion meets another body, and its power (to continue its motion in a straight line) is less than the resistance of the other on which it has impinged, it retains its motion, but in a different direction: it rebounds in the opposite direction. If, on the contrary, its force is greater, it carries the other body along with it, and loses so much of its own motion as it imparts to the latter. The seven further rules added to these contain much that is erroneous. As actio in distans is rejected, all the phenomena of motion are traced back to pressure and impulse. The distinction between fluid and solid bodies is based on the greater or less mobility of their parts.

The leading principle in the special part of the Cartesian physics,—we can only briefly sketch it,—which embraces, first, celestial, and, then, terrestial phenomena, is the axiom that we cannot estimate God's power and goodness too highly, nor ourselves too meanly. It is presumptuous to seek to comprehend the purposes of God in creation, to consider ourselves participants in his plans, to imagine that things exist simply for our sake—there are many things which no man sees and which are of advantage to none. Nothing is to be interpreted teleologically, but all must be interpreted from clearly known attributes, hence purely mechanically. After treating of the distances of the various heavenly bodies, of the independent light of the sun and the fixed stars and the reflected light of the planets, among which the earth belongs, Descartes discusses the motion of the heavenly bodies. In reference to the motion of the earth he seeks a middle course between the theories of Copernicus and Tycho Brahé. He agrees with Copernicus in the main point, but, in reliance on his definition of motion, maintains that the earth is at rest, viz., in respect to its immediate surroundings. It is clear that the harmony of his views with those of the Church (though it was only a verbal agreement) was not unwelcome to him. According to his hypothesis,—as he suggests, perhaps an erroneous hypothesis,—the fluid matter which fills the heavenly spaces, and which may be compared to a vortex or whirlpool, circles about the sun and carries the planets along with it. Thus the planets move in relation to the sun, but are at rest in relation to the adjacent portions of the matter of the heavens. In view of the biblical doctrine, according to which the world and all that therein is was created at a stroke, he apologetically describes his attempt to explain the origin of the world from chaos under the laws of motion as a scientific fiction, intended merely to make the process more comprehensible. It is more easily conceivable, if we think of the things in the world as though they had been gradually formed from elements, as the plant develops from the seed. We now pass to the Cartesian anthropology, with its three chief objects: the body, the soul, and the union of the two.

3. %Man.%

The human body, like all organic bodies, is a machine. Artificial automata and natural bodies are distinguished only in degree. Machines fashioned by the hand of man perform their functions by means of visible and tangible instruments, while natural bodies employ organs which, for the most part, are too minute to be perceived. As the clock-maker constructs a clock from wheels and weights so that it is able to go of itself, so God has made man's body out of dust, only, being a far superior artist, he produces a work of art which is better constructed and capable of far more wonderful movements. The cause of death is the destruction of some important part of the machine, which prevents it from running longer; a corpse is a broken clock, and the departure of the soul comes only as a result of death. The common opinion that the soul generates life in the body is erroneous. It is rather true that life must be present before the soul enters into union with the body, as it is also true that life must have ended before it dissolves the bond.

The sole principles of physiology are motion and heat. The heat (vital warmth, a fire without light), which God has put in the heart as the central organ of life, has for its function the promotion of the circulation of the blood, in the description of which Descartes mentions with praise the discoveries of Harvey (De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, 1628). From the blood are separated its finest, most fiery, and most mobile parts, called by Descartes "animal spirits" (spiritus animales sive corporales), and described as a "very subtle wind" or "pure and vivid flame," which ascend into the cavities of the brain, reach the pineal gland suspended in its center (conarion, glans pinealis, glandula), pass into the nerves, and, by their action on the muscles connected with the nerves, effect the motions of the limbs. These views refer to the body alone, and so are as true of animals as of men. If automata existed similar to animals in all respects, both external and internal, it would be absolutely impossible to distinguish them from real animals. If, however, they were made to resemble human bodies, two signs would indicate their unreality—we would find no communication of ideas by means of language, and also an absence of those bodily movements which take their origin in the reason (and not merely in the constitution of the body). The only thing which raises man above the brute is his rational soul, which we are on no account to consider a product of matter, but which is an express creation of God, superadded. The union of the soul or the mind (anima sive mens) with the body is, it is true, not so loose that the mind merely dwells in the body, like a pilot in a ship, nor, on the other hand, in view of the essential contrariety of the two substances, is it so intimate as to be more than a unio compositionis. Although the soul is united to the whole body, an especially active intercourse between them is developed at a single point, the pineal gland, which is distinguished by its central, protected position, above all, by the fact that it is the only cerebral organ that is not double. This gland, together with the animal spirits passing to and from it, mediates between mind and body; and as the point of union for the twofold impressions from the (right and left) eyes and ears, without which objects would be perceived double instead of single, is the seat of the soul. Here the soul exercises a direct influence on the body and is directly affected by it; here it dwells, and at will produces a slight, peculiar movement of the gland, through this a change in the course of the animal spirits (for it is not capable of generating motion, but only of changing its direction), and, finally, movements of the members; just as, on the other hand, it remarks the slightest change in the course of the spiritus through a corresponding movement of the gland, whose motions vary according to the sensuous properties of the object to be perceived, and responds by sensations. Although Descartes thus limits the direct interaction of soul and body to a small part of the organism, he makes an exception in the case of memoria, which appears to him to be more of a physical than a psychical function, and which he conjectures to be diffused through the whole brain.

In spite of the comprehensive meaning which Descartes gives to the notion cogitatio, it is yet too narrow to leave room for an anima vegetativa and an anima sensitiva. Whoever makes mind and soul equivalent, holds that their essence consists in conscious activity alone, and interprets sensation as a mode of thought, cannot escape the paradox of denying to animals the possession of a soul. Descartes does not shrink from such a conclusion. Animals are mere machines; they are bodies animated, but soulless; they lack conscious perception and appetition, though not the appearance of them. When a clock strikes seven it knows nothing of the fact; it does not regret that it is so late nor long soon to be able to strike eight; it wills nothing, feels nothing, perceives nothing. The lot of the brute is the same. It sees and hears nothing, it does not hunger or thirst, it does not rejoice or fear, if by these anything more than mere corporeal phenomena is to be meant; of all these it possesses merely the unconscious material basis; it moves and motion goes on in it—that is all. The psychology of Descartes, which has had important results,[1] divides cogitationes into two classes: actiones and passiones. Action denotes everything which takes its origin in, and is in the power of, the soul; passion, everything which the soul receives from without, in which it can make no change, which is impressed upon it. The further development of this distinction is marred by the crossing of the most diverse lines of thought, resulting in obscurities and contradictions. Descartes's simple, naïve habits of thought and speech, which were those of a man of the world rather than of a scholar, were quite incompatible with the adoption and consistent use of a finely discriminated terminology; he is very free with sive, and not very careful with the expressions actio, passio, perceptio, affectio, volitio. First he equates activity and willing, for the will springs exclusively from the soul—it is only in willing that the latter is entirely independent; while, on the other hand, passivity is made equivalent to representation and cognition, for the soul does not create its ideas, but receives them,—sensuous impressions coming to her quite evidently from the body. These equations, "actio—the practical, passio = the theoretical function," are soon limited and modified, however. The natural appetites and affections are forms of volition, it is true, but not free products of the mind, for they take their origin in its connection with the body. Further, not all perceptions have a sensuous origin; when the soul makes free use of its ideas in imagination, especially when in pure thought it dwells on itself, when without the interference of the imagination it gazes on its rational nature, it is by no means passive merely. Every act of the will, again, is accompanied by the consciousness of volition. The volitio is an activity, the cogitatio volitionis a passivity; the soul affects itself, is passively affected through its own activity, is at the same instant both active and passive.

[Footnote 1: For details cf. the able monograph of Dr. Anton Koch, 1881.]

Thus not every volition, e.g. sensuous desire, is action nor all perception, e.g. that of the pure intellect, passion. Finally, certain psychical phenomena fall indifferently under the head of perception or of volition, e.g., pain, which is both an indistinct idea of something and an impulse to shun it. In accordance with these emendations, and omitting certain disturbing points of secondary importance, the matter may be thus represented:

COGITATIO.
¦
¦
ACTIO ¦ PASSIO
¦
¦
¦
(Mens sola; clarae et distinctae ¦ (Mens unita cum corpore;
ideae.) ¦ confusae ideae.)
¦
VOLITIO: ¦
6. Voluntas. 3b. Commotiones ¦ 3a. Affectus. 2. Appetitus naturales.
¦ intellectuales¦ ¦ ¦
¦ ¦ \ /
¦ ¦ ————v———-
Judicium. ¦ Sensus interni
————————————————-+—————————————————-
¦
¦
PERCEPTIO: 4. Imaginatio
———^———
/ \
5. Intellectus 4b. Phantasia. ¦ 4a. Memoria. 1. Sensus externi.

Accordingly six grades of mental function are to be distinguished: (1) The external senses. (2) The natural appetites. (3) The passions (which, together with the natural appetites, constitute the internal senses, and from which the mental emotions produced by the intellect are quite distinct). (4) The imagination with its two divisions, passive memory and active phantasy. (5) The intellect or reason. (6) The will. These various stages or faculties are, however, not distinct parts of the soul, as in the old psychology, in opposition to which Descartes emphatically defends the unity of the soul. It is one and the same psychical power that exercises the higher and the lower, the rational and the sensuous, the practical and the theoretical activities.

Of the mental functions, whether representative images, perceptions, or volitions, a part are referred to body (to parts of our own body, often also to external objects), and produced by the body (by the animal spirits and, generally, by the nerves as well), while the rest find both object and cause in the soul. Intermediate between the two classes stand those acts of the will which are caused by the soul, but which relate to the body, e.g., when I resolve to walk or leap; and, what is more important, the passions, which relate to the soul itself, but which are called forth, sustained, and intensified by certain motions of the animal spirits. Since only those beings which consist of a body as well as a soul are capable of the passions, these are specifically human phenomena. These affections, though very numerous, may be reduced to a few simple or primary ones, of which the rest are mere specializations or combinations. Descartes enumerates six primitive passions (which number Spinoza afterward reduced one-half)—admiratio, amor et odium, cupiditas (désir), gaudium et tristitia. The first and the fourth have no opposites, the former being neither positive nor negative, and the latter both at once. Wonder, which includes under it esteem and contempt, signifies interest in an object which neither attracts us by its utility nor repels us by its hurtfulness, and yet does not leave us indifferent. It is aroused by the powerful or surprising impression made by the extraordinary, the rare, the unexpected. Love seeks to appropriate that which is profitable; hate, to ward off that which is harmful, to destroy that which is hostile. Desire or longing looks with hope or fear to the future. When that which is feared or hoped for has come to pass, joy and grief come in, which relate to existing good and evil, as desire relates to those to come.

The Cartesian theory of the passions forms the bridge over which its author passes from psychology to ethics. No soul is so weak as to be incapable of completely mastering its passions, and of so directing them that from them all there will result that joyous temper advantageous to the reason. The freedom of the will is unlimited. Although a direct influence on the passions is denied it,—it can neither annul them merely at its bidding, nor at once reduce them to silence, at least, not the more violent ones,—it still has an indirect power over them in two ways. During the continuance of the affection (e.g., fear) it is able to arrest the bodily movements to which the affection tends (flight), though not the emotion itself, and, in the intervals of quiet, it can take measures to render a new attack of the passion less dangerous. Instead of enlisting one passion against another, a plan which would mean only an appearance of freedom, but in fact a continuance in bondage, the soul should fight with its own weapons, with fixed maxims (judicia), based on certain knowledge of good and evil. The will conquers the emotions by means of principles, by clear and distinct knowledge, which sees through and corrects the false values ascribed to things by the excitement of the passions. Besides this negative requirement, "subjection of the passions," Descartes' contributions to ethics—in the letters to Princess Elizabeth on human happiness, and to Queen Christina on love and the highest good—were inconsiderable. Wisdom is the carrying out of that which has been seen to be best, virtue is steadfastness, sin inconstancy therein. The goal of human endeavor is peace of conscience, which is attained only through the determination to be virtuous, i.e., to live in harmony with self.

Besides its ethical mission, the will has allotted to it the theoretical function of affirmation and negation, i.e., of judgment. If God in his veracity and goodness has bestowed on man the power to know truth, how is misuse of this power, how is error possible? Single sensations and ideas cannot be false, but only judgments—the reference of ideas to objects. Judgment or assent is a matter of the will; so that when it makes erroneous affirmations or negations, when it prefers the false judgment to the true, it alone is guilty. Our understanding is limited, our will unlimited; the latter reaches further than the former, and can assent to a judgment even before its constituent parts have attained the requisite degree of clearness. False judgment is prejudgment, for which we can hold neither God nor our own nature responsible. The possibility of error, as well as the possibility of avoiding error, resides in the will. This has the power to postpone its assent or dissent, to hold back its decision until the ideas have become entirely clear and distinct. The supreme perfection is the libertas non errandi. Thus knowledge itself becomes a moral function; the true and the good are in the last analysis identical. The contradiction with which Descartes has been charged, that he makes volition and cognition reciprocally determinative, that he bases moral goodness on the clearness of ideas and vice versa, does not exist. We must distinguish between a theoretical and a practical stadium in the will; it is true of the latter that it depends on knowledge of the right, of the former that the knowledge of the right is dependent on it. In order to the possibility of moral action the will must conform to clear judgment; in order to the production of the latter the will must be moral. It is the unit-soul, which first, by freely avoiding overhasty judgment, cognizes the truth, to exemplify it later in moral conduct.

CHAPTER III.

THE DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION OF CARTESIANISM IN THE NETHERLANDS AND IN FRANCE.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cf. G. Monchamp, Histoire du Cartésianisme en Belgique,
Brussels, 1886.]

%1. Occasionalism: Geulincx.%

The propagation and defense of a system of thought soon give occasion to its adherents to purify, complete, and transform it. Obscurities and contradictions are discovered, which the master has overlooked or allowed to remain, and the disciple exerts himself to remove them, while retaining the fundamental doctrines. In the system of Descartes there were two closely connected points which demanded clarification and correction, viz., his double dualism (1) between extended substance and thinking substance, (2) between created substance and the divine substance. In contrast with each other matter and mind are substances or independent beings, for the clear conception of body contains naught of consciousness, thought, representation, and that of mind nothing of extension, matter, motion. In comparison with God they are not so; apart from the creator they can neither exist nor be conceived. In every case where the attempt is made to distinguish between intrinsic and general (as here, between substance in the stricter and wider senses), an indecision betrays itself which is not permanently endured.

The substantiality of the material and spiritual worlds maintained by Descartes finds an excellent counterpart in his (entirely modern) tendency to push the concursus dei as far as possible into the background, to limit it to the production of the original condition of things, to give over motion, once created, to its own laws, and ideas implanted in the mind to its own independent activity; but it is hard to reconcile with it the view, popular in the Middle Ages, that the preservation of the world is a perpetual creation. In the former case the relation of God to the world is made an external relation; in the latter, an internal one. In the one the world is thought of as a clock, which once wound up runs on mechanically, in the second it is likened to a piece of music which the composer himself recites. If God preserves created things by continually recreating them they are not substances at all; if they are substances, preservation becomes an empty word, which we repeat after the theologians without giving it any real meaning.

Matter and spirit stand related in our thought only by way of exclusion; is the same true of them in reality? They can be conceived and can exist without each other; can they, further, without each other effect all that we perceive them to accomplish? There are some motions in the material world which we refer to a voluntary decision of the soul, and some among our ideas (e.g., perceptions of the senses) which we refer to corporeal phenomena as their causes. If body and soul are substances, how can they be dependent on each other in certain of their activities, if they are of opposite natures, how can they affect each other? How can the incorporeal, unmoved spirit move the animal spirits and receive impulses from them? The substantiality (reciprocal independence) of body and mind, and their interaction (partial reciprocal dependence), are incompatible, one or the other is illusory and must be abandoned. The materialists (Hobbes) sacrifice the independence of mind, the idealists (Berkeley, Leibnitz), the independence of matter, the occasionalists, the interaction of the two. This forms the advance of the last beyond Descartes, who either naïvely maintains that, in spite of the contrariety of material and mental substances, an exchange of effects takes place between them as an empirical fact, or, when he realizes the difficulty of the anthropological problem,—how is the union of the two substances in man possible,—ascribes the interaction of body and mind, together with the union of the two, to the power of God, and by this abandonment of the attempt at a natural explanation, opens up the occasionalistic way of escape. Further, in his more detailed description of the intercourse between body and mind Descartes had been guilty of direct violations of his laws of natural philosophy. If the quantity of motion is declared to be invariable and a change in its direction is attributed to mechanical causes alone, we must not ascribe to the soul the power to move the pineal gland, even in the gentlest way, nor to control the direction of the animal spirits. These inconsistencies also are removed by the occasionalistic thesis.

The question concerning the substantiality of mind and matter in relation to God, is involved from the very beginning in this latter problem, "How is the appearance of interaction between the two to be explained without detriment to their substantiality in relation to each other?" The denial of the reciprocal dependence of matter and spirit leads to sharper accentuation of their common dependence upon God. Thus occasionalism forms the transition to the pantheism of Spinoza, Geulincx emphasizing the non-substantiality of spirits, and Malebranche the non-substantiality of bodies, while Spinoza combines and intensifies both. And yet history was not obliging enough to carry out this convenient and agreeable scheme of development with chronological accuracy, for she had Spinoza complete his pantheism before Malebranche had prepared the way. The relation which was noted in the case of Bruno and Campanella is here repeated: the earlier thinker assumes the more advanced position, while the later one seems backward in comparison; and that which, viewed from the standpoint of the question itself, may be considered a transition link, is historically to be taken as a reaction against the excessive prosecution of a line of thought which, up to a certain point, had been followed by the one who now shrinks back from its extreme consequences. The course of philosophy takes first a theological direction in the earlier occasionalists, then a metaphysical (naturalistic) trend in Spinoza, to renew finally, in Malebranche, the first of these movements in opposition to the second. The Cartesian school, as a whole, however, exhibits a tendency toward mysticism, which was concealed to a greater or less extent by the rationalistic need for clear concepts, but never entirely suppressed.

Although the real interaction of body and mind be denied, some explanation must, at least, be given for the appearance of interaction, i.e. for the actual correspondence of bodily and mental phenomena. Occasionalism denotes the theory of occasional causes. It is not the body that gives rise to perception, nor the mind that causes the motion of the limbs which it has determined upon—neither the one nor the other can receive influence from its fellow or exercise influence upon it; but it is God who, "on the occasion" of the physical motion (of the air and nerves); produces the sensation (of sound), and, "at the instance" of the determination of the will, produces the movement of the arms. The systematic development and marked influence of this theory, which had already been more or less clearly announced by the Cartesians Cordemoy and De la Forge,[1] was due to the talented Arnold Geulincx (1624-69), who was born at Antwerp, taught in Lyons (1646-58) and Leyden, and became a convert to Calvinism. It ultimately gained over the majority of the numerous adherents of the Cartesian philosophy in the Dutch universities,—Renery (died 1639) and Regius (van Roy; Fundamenta Physicae, 1646; Philosophia Naturalis, 1661) in Utrecht; further, Balthasar Bekker (1634-98; The World Bewitched, 1690), the brave opponent of the belief in angels and devils, of magic, and of prosecution for witchcraft,—in the clerical orders in France and, finally, in Germany.

[Footnote 1: Gerauld de Cordemoy, a Parisian advocate (died 1684, Dissertations Philosophiques, 1666), communicated his occasionalistic views orally to his friends as early as 1658 (cf. L. Stein in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. i., 1888, p. 56). Louis de la Forge, a physician of Saumur, Tractatus de Mente Humana, 1666, previously published in French; cf. Seyfarth, Gotha, 1887. But the logician, Johann Clauberg, professor in Duisburg (1622-65; Opera, edited by Schalbruch, 1691), is, according to the investigations of Herm. Müller (J. Clauberg und seine Stellung im Cartesianismus, Jena, 1891), to be stricken from the list of thinkers who prepared the way for occasionalism, since in his discussion of the anthropological problem (corporis et animae conjunctio) he merely develops the Cartesian position, and does not go beyond it. He employs the expression occasio, it is true, but not in the sense of the occasionalists. According to Clauberg the bodily phenomenon becomes the stimulus or "occasion" (not for God, but) for the soul to produce from itself the corresponding mental phenomenon.]

Geulincx himself, besides two inaugural addresses at Leyden (as Lector in 1662, Professor Extraordinary in 1665), published the following treatises: Quaestiones Quodlibeticae (in the second edition, 1665, entitled Saturnalia) with an important introductory discourse; Logica Fundamentis Suis Restituta, 1662; Methodus Inveniendi Argumenta (new edition by Bontekoe, 1675); and the first part of his Ethics—De Virtute et Primis ejus Proprietatibus, quae vulgo Virtutes Cardinales Vocantur, Tractatus Ethicus Primus, 1665. This chief work was issued complete in all six parts with the title, [Greek: Gnothi seauton] sive Ethica, 1675, by Bontekoe, under the pseudonym Philaretus. The Physics, 1688, the Metaphysics, 1691, and the Annotata Majora in Cartesii Principia Philosophiae, 1691, were also posthumous publications, from the notes of his pupils. In view of the rarity of these volumes, and the importance of the philosopher, it is welcome news that J.P.N. Land has undertaken an edition of the collected works, in three volumes, of which the first two have already appeared.[1] The Hague, 1891-92.[2]

[Footnote 1: On vol. i. cf. Eucken, Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xxviii., 1892, p,200 seq.]

[Footnote 2: On Geulincx see V. van der Haeghen, Geulincx, Étude sur sa
Vie, sa Philosophie, et ses Ouvrages, Ghent, 1886, including a complete
bibliography; and Land in vol. iv. of the Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie, 1890. [English translation, Mind, vol. xvi. p. 223 seq.]

Geulincx bases the occasionalistic position on the principle, quod nescis, quomodo fiat, id non facis. Unless I know how an event happens, I am not its cause. Since I have no consciousness how my decision to speak or to walk is followed by the movement of my tongue or limbs, I am not the one who effects these. Since I am just as ignorant how the sensation in my mind comes to pass as a sequel to the motion in the sense-organ; since, further, the body as an unconscious and non-rational being can effect nothing, it is neither I nor the body that causes the sensation. Both the bodily movement and the sense-impression are, rather, the effects of a higher power, of the infinite spirit. The act of my will and the sense-stimulus are only causae occasionales for the divine will, in an incomprehensible way, to effect, in the one case, the execution of the movement of the limbs resolved upon, and, in the other, the origin of the perception; they are (unsuitable) instruments, effective only in the hand of God; he brings it to pass that my will goes out beyond my soul, and that corporeal motion has results in it. The meaning of this doctrine is misapprehended when it is assumed,—an assumption to which the Leibnitzian account of occasionalism may mislead one,—that in it the continuity of events, alike in the material and the psychical world, is interrupted by frequent scattered interferences from without, and all becoming transformed into a series of disconnected miracles. An order of nature such as would be destroyed by God's action does not exist; God brings everything to pass; even the passage of motion from one body to another is his work. Further, Geulincx expressly says that God has imposed such laws on motion that it harmonizes with the soul's free volition, of which, however, it is entirely independent (similar statements occur also in De la Forge). And with this our thinker appears—as Pfleiderer[1] emphasizes—closely to approach the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz. The occasionalistic theory certainly constitutes the preliminary step to the Leibnitzian; but an essential difference separates the two. The advance does not consist in the substitution by Leibnitz of one single miracle at creation for a number of isolated and continually recurring ones, but (as Leibnitz himself remarks, in reply to the objection expressed by Father Lami, that a perpetual miracle is no miracle) in the exchange of the immediate causality of God for natural causation. With Geulincx mind and body act on each other, but not by their own power; with Leibnitz the monads do not act on one another, but they act by their own power.[2]—When Geulincx in the same connection advances to the statements that, in view of the limitedness and passivity of finite things, God is the only truly active, because the only independent, being in the world, that all activity is his activity, that the human (finite) spirit is related to the divine (infinite) spirit as the individual body to space in general, viz., as a section of it, so that, by thinking away all limitations from our mind, we find God in us and ourselves in him, it shows how nearly he verges on pantheism.

[Footnote 1: Edm. Pfleiderer, Geulincx, als Hauptvertreter der occasionalistischen Metaphysik und Ethik, Tübingen, 1882; the same, Leibniz und Geulincx mit besonderer Beziehung auf ihr Uhrengleichnis, Tübingen, 1884.]

[Footnote 2: See Ed. Zeller, Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1884, p. 673 seq.; Eucken, Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xix., 1893, p. 525 seq; vol. xxiii., 1887, p. 587 seq.]

Geulincx's services to noëtics have been duly recognized by Ed. Grimm (Jena, 1875), although with an excessive approximation to Kant. In this field he advances many acute and suggestive thoughts, as the deduction which reappears in Lotze, that the actually existent world of figure and motion cognized by thought, though the real world, is poorer than the wonderful world of motley sensuous appearance conjured forth in our minds on the occasion of the former, that the latter is the more beautiful and more worthy of a divine author. Further, the conviction, also held by Lotze, that the fundamental activities of the mind cannot be defined, but only known through inner experience or immediate consciousness (he who loves, knows what love is; it is a per conscientiam et intimam experientiam notissima res); the praiseworthy attempt to give a systematic arrangement, according to their derivation from one another, to the innate mathematical concepts, which Descartes had simply co-ordinated (the concept of surface is gained from the concept of body by abstracting from the third dimension, thickness—the act of thus abstracting from certain parts of the content of thought, Geulincx terms consideratio in contrast to cogitatio, which includes the whole content); and, finally, the still more important inquiry, whether it is possible for us to reach a knowledge of things independently of the forms of the understanding, as in pure thought we strip off the fetters of sense. The possibility of this is denied; there is no higher faculty of knowledge to act as judge over the understanding, as the latter over the sensibility, and even the wisest man cannot free himself from the forms of thought (categories, modi cogitandi). And yet the discussion of the question is not useless: the reason should examine into the unknowable as well as the knowable; it is only in this way that we learn that it is unknowable. As the highest forms of thought Geulincx names subject (the empty concept of an existent, ens or quod est) and predicate (modus entis), and derives them from two fundamental activities of the mind, a combining function (simulsumtio, totatio) and an abstracting function (one which removes the nota subjecti). Substance and accident, substantive and adjective, are expressions for subjective processes of thought and hence do not hold of things in themselves. With reference to the importance, nay, to the indispensability, of linguistic signs in the use of the understanding, the science of the forms of thought is briefly termed grammar.

The principle ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, forms the connection between the occasionalistic metaphysics and ethics, the latter deducing the practical consequences of the former. Where thou canst do nothing, there will nothing. Since we can effect nothing in the material world, to which we are related merely as spectators, we ought also not to seek in it the motives and objects of our actions. God, does not require works, but dispositions only, for the result of our volition is beyond our power. Our moral vocation, then, consists in renunciation of the world and retirement into ourselves, and in patient faithfulness at the post assigned to us. Virtue is amor dei ac rationis, self-renouncing, active, obedient love to God and to the reason as the image and law of God in us. The cardinal virtues are diligentia, sedulous listening for the commands of the reason; obedientia, the execution of these justitia, the conforming of the whole life to what is perceived to be right; finally, humilitas, the recognition of our impotency and self-renunciation (inspectio and despectio, or derelictio, neglectus, contemptus, incuria sui). The highest of these is humility, pious submission to the divine order of things; its condition, the self-knowledge commended in the title of the Ethics; the primal evil, self-love (Philautia—ipsissimum peccatum). Man is unhappy because he seeks happiness. Happiness is like our shadows; it shuns us when we pursue it, it follows us when we flee from it. The joys which spring from virtue are an adornment of it, not an enticement to it; they are its result, not its aim. The ethics of Geulincx, which we cannot further trace out here, surprises one by its approximation to the views of Spinoza and of Kant. With the former it has in common the principle of love toward God, as well as numerous details; with the latter, the absoluteness of the moral law (in rebus moralibus absolute praecipit ratio aut vetat, nulla interposita conditione); with both the depreciation of sympathy, on the ground that it is a concealed egoistic motive.

The denial of substantiality to individual things, brought in by the occasionalists, is completed by Spinoza, who boldly and logically proclaims pantheism on the basis of Cartesianism and gives to the divine All-one a naturalistic instead of a theological character.

%2. Spinoza.%

Benedictus (originally Baruch) de Spinoza sprang from a Jewish family of Portugal or Spain, which had fled to Holland to escape persecution at home. He was born in Amsterdam in 1632; taught by the Rabbin Morteira, and, in Latin, by Van den Ende, a free-thinking physician who had enjoyed a philological training; and expelled by anathema from the Jewish communion, 1656, on account of heretical views. During the next four years he found refuge at a friend's house in the country near Amsterdam, after which he lived in Rhynsburg, and from 1664 in Voorburg, moving thence, in 1669, to The Hague, where he died in 1677. Spinoza lived in retirement and had few wants; he supported himself by grinding optical glasses; and, in 1673, declined the professorship at Heidelberg offered him by Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine, because of his love of quiet, and on account of the uncertainty of the freedom of thought which the Elector had assured him. Spinoza himself made but two treatises public: his dictations on the first and second parts of Descartes's Principia Philosophiae, which had been composed for a private pupil, with an appendix, Cogitata Metaphysica, 1663, and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670, in defense of liberty of thought and the right to unprejudiced criticism of the biblical writings. The principles expressed in the latter work were condemned by all parties as sacrilegious and atheistic, and awakened concern even in the minds of his friends. When, in 1675, Spinoza journeyed to Amsterdam with the intention of giving his chief work, the Ethics, to the press, the clergy and the followers of Descartes applied to the government to forbid its issue. Soon after Spinoza's death it was published in the Opera Posthuma, 1677, which were issued under the care of Hermann Schuller,[1] with a preface by Spinoza's friend, the physician Ludwig Meyer, and which contained, besides the chief work, three incomplete treatises (Tractatus Politicus, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae) and a collection of Letters by and to Spinoza. The Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, in five parts, treats (1) of God, (2) of the nature and origin of the mind, (3) of the nature and origin of the emotions, (4) of human bondage or the strength of the passions, (5) of the power of the reason or human freedom. It has become known within recent times that Spinoza made a very early sketch of the system developed in the Ethics, the Tractatus Brevis de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate, of which a Dutch translation in two copies was discovered, though not the original Latin text. This treatise was published by Böhmer, 1852, in excerpts, and complete by Van Vloten, 1862, and by Schaarschmidt, 1869. It was not until our own century, and after Jacobi's Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Moses Mendelssohn (1785) had aroused the long slumbering interest in this much misunderstood philosopher, who has been oftener despised than studied, that complete editions of his works were prepared, by Paulus 1802-03; Gfrörer, 1830; Bruder, 1843-46; Ginsberg (in Kirchmann's Philosophische Bibliothek, 4 vols.), 1875-82; and Van Vloten and Land,[2] 2 vols., 1882-83. B. Auerbach has worked Spinoza's life into a romantic novel, Spinoza, ein Denkerleben, 1837; 2d ed., 1855 [English translation by C.T. Brooks, 1882.]

[Footnote 1: See L. Stein in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. i., 1888, p. 554 seq.]

[Footnote 2: For the literature on Spinoza the reader is referred to Ueberweg and to Van der Linde's B. Spinoza, Bibliografie, 1871; while among recent works we shall mention only Camerer's Die Lehre Spinozas, Stuttgart, 1877. An English translation of The Chief Works of Spinoza has been given by Elwes, 1883-84; a translation of the Ethics by White, 1883; and one of selections from the Ethics, with notes, by Fullerton in Sneath's Modern Philosophers, 1892. Among the various works on Spinoza, the reader may be referred to Pollock's Spinoza, His Life and Times, 1880 (with bibliography to same year); Martineau's Study of Spinoza, 1883; and J. Caird's Spinoza, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1888.—TR.]

We shall consider Spinoza's system as a completed whole as it is given in the Ethics; for although it is interesting for the investigator to trace out the development of his thinking by comparing this chief work with its forerunner (that Tractatus Brevis "concerning God, man, and the happiness of the latter," whose dialogistical portions we may surmise to have been the earliest sketch of the Spinozistic position, and which was followed by the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione) such a procedure is not equally valuable for the student. In regard to Spinoza's relations to other thinkers it cannot be doubted, since Freudenthal's[1] proof, that he was dependent to a large degree on the predominant philosophy of the schools, i.e. on the later Scholasticism (Suarez[2]), especially on its Protestant side (Jacob Martini, Combachius, Scheibler, Burgersdijck, Heereboord); Descartes, it is true, felt the same influence. Joël,[3]: Schaarschmidt, Sigwart,[4] R. Avenarius,[5] and Böhmer[6] = have advanced the view that the sources of Spinoza's philosophy are not to be sought exclusively in Cartesianism, but rather that essential elements were taken from the Cabala, from the Jewish Scholasticism (Maimonides, 1190; Gersonides, died 1344; Chasdai Crescas, 1410), and from Giordano Bruno. In opposition to this Kuno Fischer has defended, and in the main successfully, the proposition that Spinoza reached, and must have reached, his fundamental pantheism by his own reflection as a development of Descartes's principles. The traces of his early Talmudic education, which have been noticed in Spinoza's works, prove no dependence of his leading ideas on Jewish theology. His pantheism is distinguished from that of the Cabalists by its rejection of the doctrine of emanation, and from Bruno's, which nevertheless may have influenced him, by its anti-teleological character. When with Greek philosophers, Jewish theologians, and the Apostle Paul he teaches the immanence of God (Epist. 21), when with Maimonides and Crescas he teaches love to God as the principal of morality, and with the latter of these, determinism also, it is not a necessary consequence that he derived these theories from them. That which most of all separates him from the mediaeval scholastics of his own people, is his rationalistic conviction that God can be known. His agreement with them comes out most clearly in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. But even here it holds only in regard to undertaking a general criticism of the Scriptures and to their figurative interpretation, while, on the other hand, the demand for a special historical criticism, and the object which with Spinoza was the basis of the investigation as a whole, were foreign to mediaeval Judaism—in fact, entirely modern and original. This object was to make science independent of religion, whose records and doctrines are to edify the mind and to improve the character, not to instruct the understanding. "Spinoza could not have learned the complete separation of religion and science from Jewish literature; this was a tendency which sprang from the spirit of his own time" (Windelband, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. i. p. 194).

[Footnote 1: J. Freudenthal, Spinoza und die Scholastik in the
Philosophische Aufsätze, Zeller zum 50-Jährigen Doktorjubiläum gewidmet,
Leipsic, 1887, p. 85 seq. Freudenthal's proof covers the Cogitata
Metaphysica and many of the principal propositions of the Ethics.]

[Footnote 2: The Spanish Jesuit, Francis Suarez, lived 1548-1617. Works,
Venice, 1714 Cf. Karl Werner, Suarez und die Scholastik der letzten
Jahrhunderte, Regensburg, 1861.]

[Footnote 3: M. Joël, Don Chasdai Crescas' religions-philosophische Lehren in ihrem geschichtlichen Einfluss, 1866; Spinozas Theo.-pel. Traktat auf seine Quellen geprüft, 1870; Zur Genesis der Lehre Spinozas mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des kurzen Traktats, 1871.]

[Footnote 4: Spinozas neu entdeckter Traktat eläutert u. s. w., 1866; Spinozas kurzer Traktat übersetzt mit Einleitungen und Erläuterungen, 1870.]

[Footnote 5: Ueber die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozistischen
Pantheismus und das Verhältniss der zweiten zur dritten Phase, 1868.]

[Footnote 6: Spinozana in Fichte's Zeitschrift für Philosophie vols. xxxvi., xlii., lvii., 1860-70.]

The logical presuppositions of Spinoza's philosophy lie in the fundamental ideas of Descartes, which Spinoza accentuates, transforms, and adopts. Three pairs of thoughts captivate him and incite him to think them through: first, the rationalistic belief in the power of the human spirit to possess itself of the truth by pure thought, together with confidence in the omnipotence of the mathematical method; second, the concept of substance, together with the dualism of extension and thought; finally, the fundamental mechanical position, together with the impossibility of interaction between matter and spirit, held in common with the occasionalists, but reached independently of them. Whatever new elements are added (e. g., the transformation of the Deity from a mere aid to knowledge into its most important, nay, its only object; as, also, the enthusiastic, directly mystical devotion to the all-embracing world-ground) are of an essentially emotional nature, and to be referred less to historical influences than to the individuality of the thinker. The divergences from his predecessors, however, especially the extension of mechanism to mental phenomena and the denial of the freedom of the will, inseparable from this, result simply from the more consistent application of Cartesian principles. Spinoza is not an inventive, impulsive spirit, like Descartes and Leibnitz, but a systematic one; his strength does not lie in brilliant inspirations, but in the power of resolutely thinking a thing through; not in flashes of thought, but in strictly closed circles of thought. He develops, but with genius, and to the end. Nevertheless this consecutiveness of Spinoza, the praises of which have been unceasingly sung by generations since his day, has its limits. It holds for the unwavering development of certain principles derived from Descartes, but not with equal strictness for the inter-connection of the several lines of thought followed out separately. His very custom of developing a principle straight on to its ultimate consequences, without regard to the needs of the heart or to logical demands from other directions, make it impossible for the results of the various lines of thought to be themselves in harmony; his vertical consistency prevents horizontal consistency. If the original tendencies come into conflict (the consciously held theoretical principles into conflict with one another, or with hidden aesthetic or moral principles), either one gains the victory over the other or both insist on their claims; thus we have inconsistencies in the one case, and contradictions in the other (examples of which have been shown by Volkelt in his maiden work, Pantheismus und Individualismus im Systeme Spinozas, 1872). Science demands unified comprehension of the given, and seeks the smallest number of principles possible; but her concepts prove too narrow vessels for the rich plenitude of reality. He who asks from philosophy more than mere special inquiries finds himself confronted by two possibilities: first, starting from one standpoint, or a few such, he may follow a direct course without looking to right or left, at the risk that in his thought-calculus great spheres of life will be wholly left out of view, or, at least, will not receive due consideration; or, second, beginning from many points of departure and ascending along converging lines, he may seek a unifying conclusion. In Spinoza we possess the most brilliant example of the former one-sided, logically consecutive power of (also, no doubt, violence in) thought, while Leibnitz furnishes the type of the many-sided, harmonistic thinking. The fact that even the rigorous Spinoza is not infrequently forced out of the strict line of consistency, proves that the man was more many-sided than the thinker would have allowed himself to be.

To begin with the formal side of Spinozism: the rationalism of Descartes is heightened by Spinoza into the imposing confidence that absolutely everything is cognizable by the reason, that the intellect is able by its pure concepts and intuitions entirely to exhaust the multiform world of reality, to follow it with its light into its last refuge.[1] Spinoza is just as much in earnest in regard to the typical character of mathematics. Descartes (with the exception of an example asked for in the second of the Objections, and given as an appendix to the Meditations, in which he endeavors to demonstrate the existence of God and the distinction of body and spirit on the synthetic Euclidean method), had availed himself of the analytic form of presentation, on the ground that, though less cogent, it is more suited for instruction since it shows the way by which the matter has been discovered. Spinoza, on the other hand, rigorously carried out the geometrical method, even in externals. He begins with definitions, adds to these axioms (or postulates), follows with propositions or theorems as the chief thing, finally with demonstrations or proofs, which derive the later propositions from the earlier, and these in turn from the self-evident axioms. To these four principal parts are further added as less essential, deductions or corollaries immediately resulting from the theorems, and the more detailed expositions of the demonstrations or scholia. Besides these, some longer discussions are given in the form of remarks, introductions, and appendices.

[Footnote 1: Heussler's objections (Der Rationalismus des 17 Jahrhunderts, 1885, pp. 82-85) to this characterization of Kuno Fischer's are not convincing. The question is not so much about a principle demonstrable by definite citations as about an unconscious motive in Spinoza's thinking. Fischer's views on this point seem to us correct. Spinoza's mode of thinking is, in fact, saturated with this strong confidence in the omnipotence of the reason and the rational constitution of true reality.]

If everything is to be cognizable through mathematics, then everything must take place necessarily; even the thoughts, resolutions, and actions of man cannot be free in the sense that they might have happened otherwise. Thus there is an evident methodological motive at work for the extension of mechanism to all becoming, even spiritual becoming. But there are metaphysical reasons also. Descartes had naïvely solved the anthropological problem by the answer that the interaction of mind and body is incomprehensible but actual. The occasionalists had hesitatingly questioned these conclusions a little, the incomprehensibility as well as the actuality, only at last to leave them intact. For the explanation that there is a real influence of body on mind and vice versa, though not an immediate but an occasional one, one mediated by the divine will, is scarcely more than a confession that the matter is inexplicable. Spinoza, who admits neither the incognizability of anything real, nor any supernatural interferences, roundly denies both. There is no intercourse between body and soul; yet that which is erroneously considered such is both actually present and explicable. The assumed interaction is as unnecessary as it is impossible. Body and soul do not need to act on one another, because they are not two in kind at all, but constitute one being which may be looked at from two different sides. This is called body when considered under its attribute of extension, and spirit when considered under its attribute of thought. It is quite impossible for two substances to affect each other, because by their reciprocal influence, nay, by their very duality, they would lose their independence, and, with this, their substantiality. There is no plurality of substances, but only one, the infinite, the divine substance. Here we reach the center of the system. There is but one becoming and but one independent, substantial being. Material and spiritual becoming form merely the two sides of one and the same necessary world-process; particular extended beings and particular thinking beings are nothing but the changeable and transitory states (modi) of the enduring, eternal, unified world-ground. "Necessity in becoming and unity of being," mechanism and pantheism—these are the controlling conceptions in Spinoza's doctrine. Multiplicity, the self-dependence of particular things, free choice, ends, development, all this is illusion and error.

%(a) Substance, Attributes, and Modes%.—There is but one substance, and this is infinite (I. prop. 10, schol; prop. 14, cor. 1). Why, then, only one and why infinite? With Spinoza as with Descartes independence is the essence of substantiality. This is expressed in the third definition: "By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived by means of itself, i.e., that the conception of which can be formed without the aid of the conception of any other thing." 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. An absolutely self-dependent being can neither be limited (since, in respect to its limits, it would be dependent on the limiting being), nor occur more than once in the world. Infinity follows from its self-dependence, and its uniqueness from its infinity.

Substance is the being which is dependent on nothing and on which everything depends; which, itself uncaused, effects all else; which presupposes nothing, but itself constitutes the presupposition of all that is: it is pure being, primal being, the cause of itself and of all. Thus in Spinoza the being which is without presuppositions is brought into the most intimate relation with the fullness of multiform existence, not coldly and abstractly exalted above it, as by the ancient Eleatics. Substance is the being in (not above) things, that in them which constitutes their reality, which supports and produces them. As the cause of all things Spinoza calls it God, although he is conscious that he understands by the term something quite different from the Christians. God does not mean for him a transcendent, personal spirit, but only the ens absolute infinitum (def. sexta), the essential heart of things: Deus sive substantia.

How do things proceed from God? Neither by creation nor by emanation. He does not put them forth from himself, they do not tear themselves free from him, but they follow out of the necessary nature of God, as it follows from the nature of the triangle that the sum of its angles is equal to two right angles (I. prop. 17, schol.). They do not come out from him, but remain in him; just this fact that they are in another, in God, constitutes their lack of self-dependence (I. prop. 18, dem.: nulla res, quae extra Deum in se sit). God is their inner, indwelling cause (causa immanens, non vero transiens.—I. prop. 18), is not a transcendent creator, but natura naturans, over against the sum of finite beings, natura naturata (I. prop. 29, schol.): Deus sive natura.

Since nothing exists out of God, his actions do not follow from external necessity, are not constrained, but he is free cause, free in the sense that he does nothing except that toward which his own nature impels him, that he acts in accordance with the laws of his being (def. septima: ea res libera dicitur, quae ex sola suae naturae necessitate existit et a se sola ad agendum determinatur; Epist. 26). This inner necessitation is so little a defect that its direct opposite, undetermined choice and inconstancy, must rather be excluded from God as an imperfection. Freedom and (inner) necessity are identical; and antithetical, on the one side, to undetermined choice and, on the other, to (external) compulsion. Action in view of ends must also be denied of the infinite; to think of God as acting in order to the good is to make him dependent on something external to him (an aim) and lacking in that which is to be attained by the action. With God the ground of his action is the same as the ground of his existence; God's power and his essence coincide (I. prop. 34: Dei potentia est ipsa ipsius essentia). He is the cause of himself (def. prima: per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit existentiam, sive id, cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens); it would be a contradiction to hold that being was not, that God, or substance, did not exist; he cannot be thought otherwise than as existing; his concept includes his existence. To be self-caused means to exist necessarily (I. prop. 7). The same thing is denoted by the predicate eternal, which, according to the eighth definition, denotes "existence itself, in so far as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the mere definition of the eternal thing."

The infinite substance stands related to finite, individual things, not only as the independent to the dependent, as the cause to the caused, as the one to the many, and the whole to the parts, but also as the universal to the particular, the indeterminate to the determinate. From infinite being as pure affirmation (I. prop. 8, schol. I: absoluta affirmatio) everything which contains a limitation or negation, and this includes every particular determination, must be kept at a distance: determinatio negatio est (Epist. 50 and 41: a determination denotes nothing positive, but a deprivation, a lack of existence; relates not to the being but to the non-being of the thing). A determination states that which distinguishes one thing from another, hence what it is not, expresses a limitation of it. Consequently God, who is free from every negation and limitation, is to be conceived as the absolutely indeterminate. The results thus far reached run: Substantia una infinita—Deus sive natura—causa sui (aeterna) et rerum (immanens)—libera necessitas—non determinata. Or more briefly: Substance = God = nature. The equation of God and substance had been announced by Descartes, but not adhered to, while Bruno had approached the equation of God and nature—Spinoza decisively completes both and combines them.

A further remark may be added concerning the relation of God and the world. In calling the infinite at once the permanent essence of things and their producing cause, Spinoza raises a demand which it is not easy to fulfill, the demand to think the existence of things in substance as a following from substance, and their procession from God as a remaining in him. He refers us to mathematics: the things which make up the world are related to God as the properties of a geometrical figure to its concepts, as theorems to the axiom, as the deduction to the principle, which from eternity contains all that follows from it and retains this even while putting it forth. It cannot be doubted that such a view of causality contains error,—it has been characterized as a confusion of ratio and causa, of logical ground and real cause,—but it is just as certain that Spinoza committed it. He not only compares the dependence of the effect on its cause to the dependence of a derivative principle on that from which it is derived, but fully equates the two; he thinks that in logico-mathematical "consequences" he has grasped the essence of real "effects": for him the type of all legality, as also of real becoming, was the necessity which governs the sequence of mathematical truths, and which, on the one hand, is even and still, needing no special exertion of volitional energy, while, on the other, it is rigid and unyielding, exalted above all choice. Philosophy had sought the assistance of mathematics because of the clearness and certainty which distinguish the conclusions of the latter, and which she wished to obtain for her own. In excess of zeal she was not content with striving after this ideal of indefectible certitude, but, forgetting the diversity of the two fields, strove to imitate other qualities which are not transferable; instead of learning from mathematics she became subservient to it.

Substance does not affect us by its mere existence, but through an Attribute. By attribute is meant, according to the fourth definition, "that which the understanding perceives of substance as constituting the essence of it" (quod intellectus de substantia percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens). The more reality a substance contains, the more attributes it has; consequently infinite substance possesses an infinite number, each of which gives expression to its essence, but of which two only fall within our knowledge. Among the innumerable divine attributes the human mind knows those only which it finds in itself, thought and extension. Although man beholds God only as thinking and extended substance, he yet has a clear and complete; an adequate—idea of God. Since each of the two attributes is conceived without the other, hence in itself (per se), they are distinct from each other realiter, and independent. God is absolutely infinite, the attributes only in their kind (in suo genere).

How can the indeterminate possess properties? Are the attributes merely ascribed to substance by the understanding, or do they possess reality apart from the knowing subject? This question has given rise to much debate. According to Hegel and Ed. Erdmann the attributes are something external to substance, something brought into it by the understanding, forms of knowledge present in the beholder alone; substance itself is neither extended nor cogitative, but merely appears to the understanding under these determinations, without which the latter would be unable to cognize it. This "formalistic" interpretation, which, relying on a passage in a letter to De Vries (Epist. 27), explains the attributes as mere modes of intellectual apprehension, numbers Kuno Fischer among its opponents. As the one party holds to the first half of the definition, the other places the emphasis on the second half ("that which the understanding perceives—as constituting the essence of substance"). The attributes are more than mere modes of representation—they are real properties, which substance possesses even apart from an observer, nay, in which it consists; in Spinoza, moreover, "must be conceived" is the equivalent of "to be." Although this latter "realistic" party undoubtedly has the advantage over the former, which reads into Spinoza a subjectivism foreign to his system, they ought not to forget that the difference in interpretation has for its basis a conflict among the motives which control Spinoza's thinking. The reference of the attributes to the understanding, given in the definition, is not without significance. It sprang from the wish not to mar the indeterminateness of the absolute by the opposition of the attributes, while, on the other hand, an equally pressing need for the conservation of the immanence of substance forbade a bold transfer of the attributes to the observer. The real opinion of Spinoza is neither so clear and free from contradictions, nor so one-sided, as that which his interpreters ascribe to him. Fischer's further interpretation of the attributes of God as his "powers" is tenable, so long as by causa and potentia we understand nothing more than the irresistible, but non-kinetic, force with which an original truth establishes or effects those which follow from it.

As the dualism of extension and thought is reduced from a substantial to an attributive distinction, so individual bodies and minds, motions and thoughts, are degraded a stage further. Individual things lack independence of every sort. The individual is, as a determinate finite thing, burdened with negation and limitation, for every determination includes a negation; that which is truly real in the individual is God. Finite things are modi of the infinite substance, mere states, variable states, of God. By themselves they are nothing, since out of God nothing exists. They possess existence only in so far as they are conceived in their connection with the infinite, that is, as transitory forms of the unchangeable substance. They are not in themselves, but in another, in God, and are conceived only in God. They are mere affections of the divine attributes, and must be considered as such.

To the two attributes correspond two classes of modes. The most important modifications of extension are rest and motion. Among the modes of thought are understanding and will. These belong in the sphere of determinate and transitory being and do not hold of the natura naturans: God is exalted above all modality, above will and understanding, as above motion and rest. We must not assert of the natura naturata (the world as the sum of all modes), as of the natura naturans, that its essence involves existence (I. prop. 24): we can conceive finite things as non-existent, as well as existent (Epist. 29). This constitutes their "contingency," which must by no means be interpreted as lawlessness. On the contrary, all that takes place in the world is most rigorously determined; every individual, finite, determinate thing and event is determined to its existence and action by another similarly finite and determinate thing or event, and this cause is, in turn, determined in its existence and action by a further finite mode, and so on to infinity (I. prop. 28). Because of this endlessness in the series there is no first or ultimate cause in the phenomenal world; all finite causes are second causes; the primary cause lies within the sphere of the infinite and is God himself. The modes are all subject to the constraint of an unbroken and endless nexus of efficient causes, which leaves room neither for chance, nor choice, nor ends. Nothing can be or happen otherwise than as it is and happens (I. prop. 29, 33).

The causal chain appears in two forms: a mode of extension has its producing ground in a second mode of extension; a mode of thought can be caused only by another mode of thought—each individual thing is determined by one of its own kind. The two series proceed side by side, without a member of either ever being able to interfere in the other or to effect anything in it—a motion can never produce anything but other motions, an idea can result only in other ideas; the body can never determine the mind to an idea, nor the soul the body to a movement. Since, however, extension and thought are not two substances, but attributes of one substance, this apparently double causal nexus of two series proceeding in exact correspondence is, in reality, but a single one. (III. prop. 2, schol.) viewed from different sides. That which represents a chain of motions when seen from the side of extension, bears the aspect of a series of ideas from the side of thought. Modus extensionis et idea illius modi una cademque est res, sed duobus modis expressa (II. prop. 7, schol.; cf. III. prop. 2, schol.). The soul is nothing but the idea of an actual body, body or motion nothing but the object or event in the sphere of extended actuality corresponding to an idea. No idea exists without something corporeal corresponding to it, no body, without at the same time existing as idea, or being conceived; in other words, everything is both body and spirit, all things are animated (II. prop. 13, schol.). Thus the famous proposition results; Ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum (sive corporum; II. prop. 7), and in application to man, "the order of the actions and passions of our body is simultaneous in nature with the order of the actions and passions of the mind" (III. prop. 2, schol.).

The attempt to solve the problem of the relation between the material and the mental worlds by asserting their thoroughgoing correspondence and substantial identity, was philosophically justifiable and important, though many evident objections obtrude themselves upon us. The required assumption, that there is a mental event corresponding to every bodily one, and vice versa, meets with involuntary and easily supported opposition, which Spinoza did nothing to remove. Similarly he omitted to explain how body is related to motion, mind to ideas, and both to actuality. The ascription of a materialistic tendency to Spinoza is not without foundation. Corporeality and reality appear well-nigh identical for him,—the expressions corpora and res are used synonymously,—so that there remains for minds and ideas only an existence as reflections of the real in the sphere of [an] ideality (whose degree of actuality it is difficult to determine). Moreover, individualistic impulses have been pointed out, which, in part, conflict with the monism which he consciously follows, and, in part, subserve its interests. An example of this is given in the relation of mind and idea: Spinoza treats the soul as a sum of ideas, as consisting in them. An (at least apparently substantial) bond among ideas, an ego, which possesses them, does not exist for him: the Cartesian cogito has become an impersonal cogitatur or a Deus cogitat. In order to the unique substantiality of the infinite, the substantiality of individual spirits must disappear. That which argues for the latter is their I-ness (Ichheit), the unity of self-consciousness; it is destroyed, if the mind is a congeries of ideas, a composite of them. Thus in order to relieve itself from the self-dependence of the individual mind, monism allies itself with a spiritual atomism, the most extreme which can be conceived. The mind is resolved into a mass of individual ideas.

Mention may be made in passing, also, of a strange conception, which is somewhat out of harmony with the rest of the system, and of which, moreover, little use is made. This is the conception of infinite modes. As such are cited, facies totius mundi, motus et quies, intellectus absolute infinitus. Kuno Fischer's interpretation of this difficult conception may be accepted. It denotes, according to him, the connected sum of the modes, the itself non-finite sum total of the finite—the universe meaning the totality of individual things in general (without reference to their nature as extended or cogitative); rest and motion, the totality of material being; the absolutely infinite understanding, the totality of spiritual being or the ideas. Individual spirits together constitute, as it were, the infinite intellect; our mind is a part of the divine understanding, yet not in such a sense that the whole consists of the parts, but that the part exists only through the whole. When we say, the human mind perceives this or that, it is equivalent to saying that God—not in so far as he is infinite, but as he expresses himself in this human mind and constitutes its essence—has this or that idea (II. prop. II, coroll).

The discussion of these three fundamental concepts exhausts all the chief points in Spinoza's doctrine of God. Passing over his doctrine of body (II. between prop. 13 and prop. 14) we turn at once to his discussion of mind and man.

%(b) Anthropology: Cognition and the Passions.%—Each thing is at once mind and body, representation and that which is represented, idea and ideate (object). Body and soul are the same being, only considered under different attributes. The human mind is the idea of the human body; it cognizes itself in perceiving the affections of its body; it represents all that takes place in the body, though not all adequately. As man's body is composed of very many bodies, so his soul is composed of very many ideas. To judge of the relation of the human mind to the mind of lower beings, we must consider the superiority of man's body to other bodies; the more complex a body is, and the greater the variety of the affections of which it is capable, the better and more adapted for adequate cognition, the accompanying mind.—A result of the identity of soul and body is that the acts of our will are not free (Epist. 62): they are, in fact, determinations of our body, only considered under the attribute of thought, and no more free than this from the constraint of the causal law (III. prop. 2, schol.).—Since the mind does nothing without at the same time knowing that it does it—since, in other words, its activity is a conscious activity, it is not merely idea corporis humani, but also idea ideae corporis or idea mentis.

All adherents of the Eleatic separation of the one pure being from the manifold and changing world of appearance are compelled to make a like distinction between two kinds and two organs of knowledge. The representation of the empirical manifold of separately existing individual things, together with the organ thereof, Spinoza terms imaginatio; the faculty of cognizing the true reality, the one, all-embracing substance, he calls intellectus. Imaginatio (imagination, sensuous representation) is the faculty of inadequate, confused ideas, among which are included abstract conceptions, as well as sensations and memory-images. The objects of perception are the affections of our body; and our perceptions, therefore, are not clear and distinct, because we are not completely acquainted with their causes. In the merely perceptual stage, the mind gains only a confused and mutilated idea of external objects, of the body, and of itself; it is unable to separate that in the perception (e.g., heat) which is due to the external body from that which is due to its own body. An inadequate idea, however, is not in itself an error; it becomes such only when, unconscious of its defectiveness, we take it for complete and true. Prominent examples of erroneous ideas are furnished by general concepts, by the idea of ends, and the idea of the freedom of the will. The more general and abstract an idea, the more inadequate and indistinct it becomes; and this shows the lack of value in generic concepts, which are formed by the omission of differences. All cognition which is carried on by universals and their symbols, words, yields opinion and imagination merely instead of truth. Quite as valueless and harmful is the idea of ends, with its accompaniments. We think that nature has typical forms hovering before it, which it is seeking to actualize in things; when this intention is apparently fulfilled we speak of things as perfect and beautiful; when it fails, of imperfect and ugly things. Such concepts of value belong in the sphere of fictions. The same is true of the idea of the freedom of the will, which depends on our ignorance of that which constrains us. Apart from the consideration that "the will," the general conception of which comes under the rubric of unreal abstractions, is in fact merely the sum of the particular volitions, the illusion of freedom, e.g., that we will and act without a cause, arises from the fact that we are conscious of our action (and also of its proximate motives), but not of its (remoter) determining causes. Thus the thirsty child believes it desires its milk of its own free will, and the timid one, that it freely chooses to run away (Ethica, III. prop. 2, schol.; I. app.) If the falling stone were conscious, it would, likewise, consider itself free, and its fall the result of an undetermined decision.

Two degrees are to be distinguished in the true or adequate knowledge of the intellect: rational knowledge attained through inference, and intuitive, self-evident knowledge; the latter has principles for its object, the former that which follows from them. Instead of operating with abstract concepts the reason uses common notions, notiones communes. Genera do not exist, but, no doubt, something common to all things. All bodies agree in being extended; all minds and ideas in being modes of thought; all beings whatever in the fact that they are modes of the divine substance and its attributes; "that which is common to all things, and which is equally in the part and in the whole, cannot but be adequately conceived." The ideas of extension, of thought, and of the eternal and infinite essence of God are adequate ideas. The adequate idea of each individual actual object involves the idea of God, since it can neither exist nor be conceived apart from God, and "all ideas, in so far as they are referred to God, are true." The ideas of substance and of the attributes are conceived through themselves, or immediately (intuitively) cognized; they are underivative, original, self-evident ideas.

There are thus three kinds, degrees, or faculties of cognition—sensuous or imaginative representation, reason, and immediate intuition. Knowledge of the second and third degrees is necessarily true, and our only means of distinguishing the true from the false. As light reveals itself and darkness, so the truth is the criterion of itself and of error. Every truth is accompanied by certainty, and is its own witness (II. prop. 43, schol.).—Adequate knowledge does not consider things as individuals, but in their necessary connection and as eternal sequences from the world-ground. The reason perceives things under the form of eternity: sub specie aeternitatis (II. prop. 44, cor. 2).

In his theory of the emotions, Spinoza is more dependent on Descartes than anywhere else; but even here he is guided by a successful endeavor after greater rigor and simplicity. He holds his predecessor's false concept of freedom responsible for the failure of his very acute inquiry. All previous writers on the passions have either derided, or bewailed, or condemned them, instead of investigating their nature. Spinoza will neither denounce nor ridicule human actions and appetites, but endeavor to comprehend them on the basis of natural laws, and to consider them as though the question concerned lines, surfaces, and bodies. He aims not to look on hate, anger, and the rest as flaws, but as necessary, though troublesome, properties of human nature, for which, as really as for heat and cold, thunder and lightning, a causal explanation is requisite.—As a determinate, finite being the mind is dependent in its existence and its activity on other finite things, and is incomprehensible without them; from its involution in the general course of nature the inadequate ideas inevitably follow, and from these the passive states or emotions; the passions thus belong to human nature, as one subject to limitation and negation.—The destruction of contingent and perishable things is effected by external causes; no one is destroyed by itself; so far as in it lies everything strives to persist in its being (III. prop. 4 and 6). The fundamental endeavor after self-preservation constitutes the essence of each thing (III. prop. 7). This endeavor (conatus) is termed will (voluntas) or desire (cupiditas) when it is referred to the mind alone, and appetite (appetitus) when referred to the mind and body together; desire or volition is conscious appetite (III. prop. 9, schol.). We call a thing good because we desire it, not desire a thing because we hold it good (cf. Hobbes, p. 75). To desire two further fundamental forms of the emotions are added, pleasure and pain. If a thing increases the power of our body to act, the idea of it increases the power of our soul to think, and is gladly imagined by it. Pleasure (laetitia) is the transition of a man to a greater, and pain (tristitia) his transition to a lesser perfection.

All other emotions are modifications or combinations of the three original ones, to which Spinoza reduces the six of Descartes (cf. p. 105). In the deduction and description of them his procedure is sometimes aridly systematic, sometimes even forced and artificial, but for the most part ingenious, appropriate, and psychologically acute. Whatever gives us pleasure augments our being, and whatever pains us diminishes it; hence we seek to preserve the causes of pleasurable emotions, and love them, to do away with the causes of painful ones, and hate them. "Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause; hate is pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause." Since all that furthers or diminishes the being of (the cause of our pleasure) the object of our love, exercises at the same time a like influence on us, we love that which rejoices the object of our love and hate that which disturbs it; its happiness and suffering become ours also. The converse is true of the object of our hate: its good fortune provokes us and its ill fortune pleases us. If we are filled with no emotion toward things like ourselves, we sympathize in their sad or joyous feelings by involuntary imitation. Pity, from which we strive to free ourselves as from every painful affection, inclines us to benevolence or to assistance in the removal of the cause of the misery of others. Envy of those who are fortunate, and commiseration of those who are in trouble, are alike rooted in emulation. Man is by nature inclined to envy and malevolence. Hate easily leads to underestimation, love to overestimation, of the object, and self-love to pride or self-satisfaction, which are much more frequently met with than unfeigned humility. Immoderate desire for honor is termed ambition; if the desire to please others is kept within due bounds it is praised as unpretentiousness, courtesy, modesty (modestia). Ambition, luxury, drunkenness, avarice, and lust have no contraries, for temperance, sobriety, and chastity are not emotions (passive states), but denote the power of the soul by which the former are moderated, and which is discussed later under the name fortitudo. Self-abasement or humility is a feeling of pain arising from the consideration of our weakness and impotency; its opposite is self-complacency. Either of these may be accompanied by the (erroneous) belief that we have done the saddening or gladdening act of our own free will; in this case the former affection is termed repentance. Hope and fear are inconstant pleasure and pain, arising from the idea of something past or to come, concerning whose coming and whose issue we are still in doubt. There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear without hope; for he who still doubts imagines something which excludes the existence of that which is expected. If the cause of doubt is removed, hope is transformed into a feeling of confidence and fear into despair. There are as many kinds of emotions as there are classes among their objects or causes.

Besides the emotions to be termed "passions" in the strict sense, states of passivity, Spinoza recognizes others which relate to us as active. Only those which are of the nature of pleasure or desire belong to this class of active emotions; the painful affections are entirely excluded, since without exception they diminish or arrest the mind's power to think. The totality of these nobler impulses is called fortitudo (fortitude), and a distinction is made among them between animositas (vigor of soul) and generositas (magnanimity, noble-mindedness), according as rational desire is directed to the preservation of our own being or to aiding our fellow-men. Presence of mind and temperance are examples of the former, modesty and clemency of the latter. By this bridge, the idea of the active emotions, we may follow Spinoza into the field of ethics.

%(c) Practical Philosophy.%—Spinoza's theory of ethics is based on the equation of the three concepts, perfection, reality, activity (V. prop. 40, dem.). The more active a thing is, the more perfect it is and the more reality it possesses. It is active, however, when it is the complete or adequate cause of that which takes place within it or without it; passive when it is not at all the cause of this, or the cause only in part. A cause is termed adequate, when its effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived from it alone. The human mind, as a modus of thought, is active when it has adequate ideas; all its passion consists in confused ideas, among which belong the affections produced by external objects. The essence of the mind is thought; volition is not only dependent on cognition, but at bottom identical with it.

Descartes had already made the will the power of affirmation and negation. Spinoza advances a step further: the affirmation cannot be separated from the idea affirmed, it is impossible to conceive a truth without in the same act affirming it, the idea involves its own affirmation. "Will and understanding are one and the same" (II. prop. 49, cor.). For Spinoza moral activity is entirely resolved into cognitive activity. To the two stages of knowing, imaginatio and intellectus, correspond two stages of willing—desire, which is ruled by imagination, and volition, which is guided by reason. The passive emotions of sensuous desire are directed to perishable objects, the active, which spring from reason, have an eternal object—the knowledge of the truth, the intuition of God. For reason there are no distinctions of persons,—she brings men into concord and gives them a common end (IV. prop. 35-37,40),—and no distinctions of time (IV. prop. 62, 66), and in the active emotions, which are always good, no excess (IV. prop. 61). The passive emotions arise from confused ideas. They cease to be passions, when the confused ideas of the modifications of the body are transformed into clear ones; as soon as we have clear ideas, we become active and cease to be slaves of desire. We master the emotions by gaining a clear knowledge of them. Now, an idea is clear when we cognize its object not as an individual thing, but in its connection, as a link in the causal chain, as necessary, and as a mode of God. The more the mind conceives things in their necessity, and the emotions in their reference to God, the less it is passively subject to the emotions, the more power it attains over them: "Virtue is power" (IV. def. 8; prop. 20, dem.). It is true, indeed, that one emotion can be conquered only by another stronger one, a passive emotion only by an active one. The active emotion by which knowledge gains this victory over the passions is the joyous consciousness of our power (III. prop. 58, 59). Adequate ideas conceive their objects in union with God; thus the pleasure which proceeds from knowledge of, and victory over, the passions is accompanied by the idea of God, and, consequently (according to the definition of love), by love toward God (V. prop. 15, 32). The knowledge and love of God, together, "intellectual love toward God,"[1] is the highest good and the highest virtue (IV. prop. 28). Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. The intellectual love of man toward God, in which the highest peace of the soul, blessedness, and freedom consist, and in virtue of which (since it, like its object and cause, true knowledge, is eternal), the soul is not included in the destruction of the body (V. prop. 23, 33), is a part of the infinite love with which God loves himself, and is one and the same with the love of God to man. The eternal part of the soul is reason, through which it is active; the perishable part is imagination or sensuous representation, through which it is passively affected. We are immortal only in adequate cognition and in love to God; more of the wise man's soul is immortal than of the fool's.

[Footnote 1: The conception amor Dei intellectualis in Spinoza is discussed in a dissertation by C. Lülmann, Jena, 1884.]

Spinoza's ethics is intellectualistic—virtue is based on knowledge.[1] It is, moreover, naturalistic—morality is a necessary sequence from human nature; it is a physical product, not a product of freedom; for the acts of the will are determined by ideas, which in their turn are the effects of earlier causes. The foundation of virtue is the effort after self-preservation: How can a man desire to act rightly unless he desires to be (IV. prop. 21, 22)? Since reason never enjoins that which is contrary to nature, it of necessity requires every man to love himself, to seek that which is truly useful to him, and to desire all that makes him more perfect. According to the law of nature all that is useful is allowable. The useful is that which increases our power, activity, or perfection, or that which furthers knowledge, for the life of the soul consists in thought (IV. prop. 26; app. cap. 5). That alone is an evil which restrains man from perfecting the reason and leading a rational life. Virtuous action is equivalent to following the guidance of the reason in self-preservation (IV. prop. 24).—Nowhere in Spinoza are fallacies more frequent than in his moral philosophy; nowhere is there a clearer revelation of the insufficiency of his artificially constructed concepts, which, in their undeviating abstractness, are at no point congruent with reality. He is as little true to his purpose to exclude the imperative element, and to confine himself entirely to the explanation of human actions considered as facts, as any philosopher who has adopted a similar aim. He relieves the inconsistency by clothing his injunctions under the ancient ideal of the free wise man. This, in fact, is not the only thing in Spinoza which reminds one of the customs of the Greek moralists. He renews the Platonic idea of a philosophical virtue, and the opinion of Socrates, that right action will result of itself from true insight. Arguing from himself, from his own pure and strong desire for knowledge, to mankind in general, he makes reason the essence of the soul, thought the essence of reason, and holds the direction of the impulse of self-preservation to the perfection of knowledge, which is "the better part of us," to be the natural one.

[Footnote 1: That virtue which springs from knowledge is alone genuine. The painful, hence unactive, emotions of pity and repentance may impel to actions whose accomplishment is better than their omission. Emotion caused by sympathy for others and contrition for one's own guilt, both of which increase present evil by new ones, have only the value of evils of a lesser kind. They are salutary for the irrational man, in so far as the one spurs him on to acts of assistance and the other diminishes his pride. They are harmful to the wise man, or, at least, useless; he is in no need of irrational motives to rational action. Action from insight is alone true morality.]

All men endeavor after continuance of existence (III. prop. 6); why not all after virtue? If all endeavor after it, why do so few reach the goal? Whence the sadly large number of the irrational, the selfish, the vicious? Whence the evil in the world? Vice is as truly an outcome of "nature" as virtue. Virtue is power, vice is weakness; the former is knowledge, the latter ignorance. Whence the powerless natures? Whence defective knowledge? Whence imperfection in general?

The concept of imperfection expresses nothing positive, nothing actual, but merely a defect, an absence of reality. It is nothing but an idea in us, a fiction which arises through the comparison of one thing with another possessing greater reality, or with an abstract generic concept, a pattern, which it seems unable to attain. That concepts of value are not properties of things themselves, but denote only their pleasurable or painful effects on us, is evident from the fact that one and the same thing may be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent: the music which is good for the melancholy man may be bad for the mourner, and neither good nor bad for the deaf. Knowledge of the bad is an abstract, inadequate idea; in God there is no idea of evil. If imperfection and error were something real, it would have to be conceded that God is the author of evil and sin. In reality everything is that which it can be, hence without defect: everything actual is, in itself considered, perfect. Even the fool and the sinner cannot be otherwise than he is; he appears imperfect only when placed beside the wise and the virtuous. Sin is thus only a lesser reality than virtue, evil a lesser good; good and bad, activity and passivity, power and weakness are merely distinctions in degree. But why is not everything absolutely perfect? Why are there lesser degrees of reality? Two answers are given. The first is found only between the lines: the imperfections in the being and action of individual things are grounded in their finitude, particularly in their involution in the chain of causality, in virtue of which they are acted on from without, and are determined in their action not by their own nature only, but also by external causes. Man sins because he is open to impressions from external things, and only superior natures are strong enough to preserve their rational self-determination in spite of this. The other answer is expressly given at the end of the first part (with an appeal to the sixteenth proposition, that everything which the divine understanding conceives as creatable has actually come into existence). "To those who ask why God did not so create all men that they should be governed only by reason, I reply only: because matter was not lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature were so ample as so suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intellect." All possible degrees of perfection have come into being, including sin and error, which represent the lowest grade. The universe forms a chain of degrees of perfection, of which none must be wanting: particular cases of defect are justified by the perfection of the whole, which would be incomplete without the lowest degree of perfection, vice and wickedness. Here we see Spinoza following a path which Leibnitz was to broaden out into a highway in his Theodicy. Both favor the quantitative view of the world, which softens the antitheses, and reduces distinctions of kind to distinctions of degree. Not till Kant was the qualitative view of the world, which had been first brought into ethics by Christianity, restored to its rights. An ethics which denies freedom and evil is nothing but a physics of morals.

In his theory of the state Spinoza follows Hobbes pretty closely, but rejects absolutism, and declares democracy, in which each is obedient to self-imposed law, to be the form of government most in accordance with reason. (So in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, while in the later Tractatus Politicus he gives the preference to aristocracy.) In accordance with the supreme right of nature each man deems good, and seeks to gain, that which seems to him useful; all things belong to all, each may destroy the objects of his hate. Conflict and insecurity prevail in the state of nature as a result of the sensuous desires and emotions (homines ex natura hostes); and they can be done away with only through the establishment of a society, which by punitive laws compels everyone to do, and leave undone, that which the general welfare demands. Strife and breach of faith become sin only in the state; before its formation that alone was wrong which no one had the desire and power to do. Besides this mission, however, of protecting selfish interests by the prevention of aggression, the civil community has a higher one, to subserve the development of reason; it is only in the state that true morality and true freedom are possible, and the wise man will prefer to live in the state, because he finds more freedom there than in isolation. Thus the dislocation of concepts, which is perceptible in Spinoza's ethics, repeats itself in his politics. First, virtue is based on the impulse of self-preservation and the good is equated with that which is useful to the individual; then, with a transformation of mere utility into "true" utility, the rational moment is brought in (first as practical prudence, next as the impulse after knowledge, and then, with a gradual change of meaning, as moral wisdom), until, finally, in strange contrast to the naturalistic beginning, the Christian idea of virtue as purity, self-denial, love to our neighbors and love to God, is reached. In a similar way "Spinoza conceives the starting point of the state naturalistically, its culmination idealistically."[1]

[Footnote 1: C. Schindler in his dissertation Ueber den Begriff des Guten und Nützlichen bei Spinoza, Jena, 1885, p. 42, a work, however, which does not penetrate to the full depth of the matter. Cf. Eucken, Lebensanschauungen, p. 406.]

The fundamental ideas of the Spinozistic system, and those which render it important, are rationalism, pantheism, the essential identity of the material and spiritual worlds, and the uninterrupted mechanism of becoming. Besides the twisting of ethical concepts just mentioned, we may briefly note the most striking of the other difficulties and contradictions which Spinoza left unexplained. There is a break between his endeavor to exalt the absolute high above the phenomenal world of individual existence, and, at the same time, to bring the former into the closest possible conjunction with the latter, to make it dwell therein—a break between the transcendent and immanent conceptions of the idea of God. No light is vouchsafed on the relation between primary and secondary causes, between the immediate divine causality and the divine causality mediated through finite causes. The infinity of God is in conflict with his complete cognizability on the part of man; for how is a finite, transitory spirit able to conceive the Infinite and Eternal? How does the human intellect rise above modal limitations to become capable and worthy of the mystical union with God? Reference has been already made to the twofold nature of the attributes (as forms of intellectual apprehension and as real properties of substance) which invites contradictory interpretations.

3. %Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle.%

Returning from Holland to France, we find a combination of Cartesianism and mysticism similar to that which we have noticed in the former country. Under Geulincx these two forces had lived peacefully together; in Spinoza they had entered into the closest alliance; with Blaise Pascal (1623-62), the first to adopt a religious tendency, they came into a certain antithesis. Spinoza had taught: through the knowledge of God to the love of God; in Pascal the watchword becomes, God is not conceived through the reason, but felt with the heart. After attacking the Jesuits in his Provincial Letters, and unveiling the worthlessness of their casuistical morality, Pascal, constrained by a genuine piety, undertook to construct a philosophy of Christianity; but the attempt was ended by the early death of the author, who had always suffered under a weak constitution. Fragments of this work were published by his friends, the Jansenists, under the title, Thoughts on Religion, 1669, though not without mediating alterations. The Port-Royal Logic (The Art of Thinking, 1662), edited by Arnauld and Nicole, was based on a treatise of Pascal. His thought, which was not distinguished by clearness, but by depth and movement, and which, after the French fashion, delighted in antitheses, was influenced by Descartes, Montaigne, and Epictetus. He, too, finds in mathematics the example for all science, and holds that whatever transcends mathematics transcends the reason. By the application of mathematics to the study of nature we attain a mundane science, which is certain, no doubt, and which makes constant progress,[1] but which does not satisfy, since it reveals nothing of the infinite, of the whole, without which the parts remain unintelligible. Hence all natural philosophy together is not worth an hour's toil. Pascal consoles himself for our ignorance concerning external things by the stability of ethics.

[Footnote 1: It is this uninterrupted progress which raises the reason above the operations of nature and the instincts of animals. While the bees build their cells to-day just as they did a thousand years ago, science is continually developing. This guarantees to us our immortal destiny.]

The leading principles of his ethics are as follows: In sin the love to God created in us has left us and self-love has transgressed its limits; pride has delivered us over to selfishness and misery. Our nature is corrupted, but not beyond redemption. In his actions worthless and depraved, man is seen to be exalted and incomprehensible in his ends; in reality he is worthy of abhorrence, but great in his destination. No philosophy or religion has so taught us at once to know the greatness and the misery of man as Christianity: this bids him recognize his low condition, but at the same time to endeavor to become like God. We must humbly despise the world and renounce ourselves; in order to love God, we must hate ourselves. Moral reformation is an act of divine grace, and the merit of human volition consists only in not resisting this. God transforms the heart by a heavenly sweetness, grants it to know that spiritual pleasure is greater than bodily pleasure, and infuses into it a disgust at the allurements of sin. Virtue is finding one's greatest happiness in God or in the eternal good. As morality is a matter of feeling, not of thought, so God, so even the first principles on which the certitude of demonstration depends, are the object, not of reason, but of the heart. That which certifies to the highest indemonstrable principles is a feeling, a belief, an instinct of nature: les principes se sentent. As a defender of the needs and rights of the heart, Pascal is a forerunner of the great Rousseau. His depreciation of the reason to exalt faith establishes a certain relationship with the skeptics of his native land, among whom Cousin has unjustly classed him (Études sur Pascal, 5th ed., 1857).[1]

[Footnote 1: Of the works on Pascal we may mention that of H. Reuchlin, 1840: Havet's edition of the Pensées, with notes, Paris, 1866; and the Étude by Ed. Droz, Paris, 1886.]

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), a member of the Oratory of Jesus, in Paris, which was opposed by the Jesuits, completed the development of Cartesianism in the religious direction adopted by Pascal. His thought is controlled by the endeavor to combine Cartesian metaphysics and Augustinian Christianity, those two great forces which constituted the double citadel of his order. His collected works appeared three years before his death; and a new edition in four volumes, prepared by J. Simon, in 1871. His chief work, On the Search for Truth (new edition by F. Bouillier, 1880), appeared in 1675, and was followed by the Treatise on Ethics (new edition by H. Joly, 1882) and the Christian and Metaphysical Meditations in 1684, the Discussions on Metaphysics and on Religion in 1688, and various polemic treatises. The best known among the doctrines of Malebranche is the principle that we see all things in God (que nous voyons toutes choses en Dieu.—Recherche, iii. 2, 6). What does this mean, and how is it established? It is intended as an answer to the question, How is it possible for the mind to cognize the body if, as Descartes has shown, mind and body are two fundamentally distinct and reciprocally independent substances?

The seeker after truth must first understand the sources of error. Of these there are two, or, more exactly, five—as many as there are faculties of the soul. Error may spring from either the cognitive or the appetitive faculty; in the first case, either from sense-perception, the imagination, or the pure understanding, and, in the latter, from the inclinations or the passions. The inclinations and the passions do not reveal the nature of things, but only express how they affect us, of what value they are to us. Further still, the senses and the imagination only reproduce the impressions which things make on us as feeling subjects, express only what they are for us, not what they are in themselves. The senses have been given us simply for the preservation of our body, and so long as we expect nothing further from them than practical information concerning the (useful or hurtful) relation of things to our body, there is no reason for mistrusting them,—here we are not deceived by sensation, but at most by the overhasty judgment of the will. "Consider the senses as false witnesses in regard to the truth, but as trustworthy counselors in relation to the interests of life!"—Sensation and imagination belong to the soul in virtue of its union with the body; apart from this it is pure spirit. The essence of the soul is thought, for this function is the only one which cannot be abstracted from it without destroying it. Hence there can be no moment in the life of the soul when it ceases to think; it thinks always (l'âme pense toujours), only it does not always remember the fact.

The kinds of knowledge differ with the classes of things cognized. God is known immediately and intuitively. He is necessary and unlimited being, the universal, infinite being, being absolutely; he only is known through himself. The concept of the infinite is the presupposition of the concept of the finite, and the former is earlier in us; we gain the conception of a particular thing only when we omit something from the idea of "being in general," or limit it. God is cogitative, like spirits, and extended, like bodies, but in an entirely different manner from created things. We know our own soul through consciousness or inner perception. We know its existence more certainly than that of bodies, but understand its nature less perfectly than theirs. To know that it is capable of sensations of pain, of heat, of light, we must have experienced them. For knowledge of the minds of others we are dependent upon conjecture, on analogical inferences from ourselves.

But how is the unextended soul capable of cognizing extended body? Only through the medium of ideas. The ideas occupy an intermediate position between objects, whose archetypes they are, and representations in the soul, whose causes they are. The ideas, after the pattern of which God has created things, and the relations among them (necessary truths), are eternal, hence uncaused; they constitute the wisdom of God and are not dependent on his will. Things are in God in archetypal form, and are cognized through these their archetypes in God. Ideas are not produced by bodies, by the emission of sensuous images,[1] nor are they originated by the soul, or possessed by it as an innate possession. But God is the cause of knowledge, although he neither imparts ideas to the soul in creation nor produces them in it on every separate occasion. The ideas or perfections of things are in God and are beheld by spirits, who likewise dwell in God as the universal reason. As space is the place of bodies, so God is the place of spirits. As bodies are modes of extension, so their ideas are modifications of the idea of extension or of "intelligible extension." The principle stated at the beginning, that things are perceived in God, is, therefore, supported in the following way: we perceive bodies (through ideas, which ideas, and we ourselves, are) in God.

[Footnote 1: Malebranche's refutation of the emanation hypothesis of the Peripatetics is acute and still worthy of attention. If bodies transmitted to the sense-organs forms like themselves, these copies, which would evidently be corporeal, must, by their departure, diminish the mass of the body from which they came away, and also, because of their impenetrability, obstruct and interfere with one another, thus destroying the possibility of clear impressions. A further point against the image theory is furnished by the increase in the size of an object, when approached. And, above all, it can never be made conceivable how motion can be transformed into sensations or ideas.]

As the knowledge of truth has been found to consist in seeing things as God sees them, so morality consists in man's loving things as God loves them, or, what amounts to the same thing, in loving them to that degree which is their due in view of their greater or less perfection. If, in the last analysis, all cognition is knowledge of God, so all volition is loving God; there is implanted in every creature a direction toward the Creator. God is not only the primordial, unlimited being, he is also the highest good, the final end of all striving. As the ideas of things are imperfect participations in, or determinations of universal being, the absolute perfection of God, so the particular desires, directed toward individual objects, are limitations of the universal will toward the good. How does it happen that the human will, so variously mistaking its fundamental direction toward God, attaches itself to perishable goods, and prefers worthless objects to those which have value, and earthly to heavenly pleasure? The soul is, on the one hand, united to God, on the other, united to the body. The possibility of error and sin rests on its union with the body, since with the ideas (as representations of the pure understanding) are associated sensuous images, which mingle with and becloud them, and passions with the inclinations (or the will of the soul, in so far as it is pure spirit). This gives, however, merely the possibility of the immoral, sensuous, God-estranged disposition, which becomes actual only through man's free act, when he fails to stand the test. For sin does not consist in having passions, but in consenting to them. The passion is not caused by the corporeal movement of which it is the sequel, but only occasioned by it; and the same is true of the movement of the limbs and the decision of the will. The one true cause of all that happens is God. It is he who produces affections in the soul, and motion in the material world. For the body possesses only the capacity of being moved; and the soul cannot be the cause of the movement, since it would then have to know how it produces the latter. In fact those who lack a medical training have no idea of the muscular and nervous processes involved. Without God we cannot even move the tongue. It is he who raises our arm, even when we use it contrary to his law.

Anxious to guard his pantheism from being identified with that of Spinoza, Malebranche points out that, according to his views, the universe is in God, not, as with Spinoza, that God is in the universe; that he teaches creation, which Spinoza denies; that he distinguishes, which Spinoza had not done, between the world in God (the ideas of things) and the world of created things, and between intelligible and corporeal extension. It may be added that he maintains the freedom of God and of man, which Spinoza rejects, and that he conceives God, who brings everything to pass, not as nature, but as omnipotent will. Nevertheless, as Kuno Fischer has shown, he approaches the naturalism of Spinoza more nearly than he is himself conscious, when he explains finite things as limitations (hence as modes) of the divine existence, posits the will of God in dependence on his wisdom (the uncreated world of ideas), thus limiting it in its omnipotence, and, which is decisive, makes God the sole author of motion, i.e., a natural cause. His attempt at a Christian pantheism was consequently unsuccessful. But its failure has not shattered the well-grounded fame of its thoughtful author as the second greatest metaphysician of France.

Pierre Poiret[1] (1646-1719; for some years a preacher in Hamburg; lived later in Rhynsburg near Leyden) was rendered hostile to Cartesianism through the influence of mystical writings (among others those of Antoinette Bourignon, which he published), and through the perception of the results to which it had led in Spinoza. All cognition is taking up the form of the object. The perfection of man is based more on his passive capacities than on his active reason, which is concerned with mere ideas, unreal shadows; the mathematical spirit leads to fatalism, to the denial of freedom. The passive faculties, on the contrary, are in direct intercourse with reality, the senses with external material objects, and the arcanum of the mind, the basis of the soul, the intellect, with spiritual truths and with God, whose existence is more certain than our own. Man is not unconcerned in the development of the highest power of the mind, he must offer himself to God in sincere humility. In subordination to the passive intellect, the external faculty, the active reason, is also to be cultivated; it deserves care, like the skin. Evil consists in the absurdity that the creature, who apart from God is nothing, ascribes to himself an independent existence.

[Footnote 1: Poiret: Cogitationes Rationates de Deo, Anima, et Malo, 1677, the later editions including a vehement attack on the atheism of Spinoza: L'Économie Divine, 1682; De Eruditione Solida, Superficiaria, et Falsa, 1692; Fides et Ratio Collatae, against Locke, 1707.]

Le Vayer and Huet, who have been already mentioned (pp. 50-51), mediate between the founders of skepticism and Bayle, its most gifted representative. The latter of these two wrote a Criticism of the Cartesian Philosophy, 1689, besides a Treatise on the Impotence of the Human Mind, which did not appear until after his death. He opposes, among other things, the criterion of truth based on evidence, since there is an evidence of the false not to be distinguished from that of the true, as well as the position that God becomes a deceiver in the bestowal of a weak and blind reason—for he gives us, at the same time, the power to know its deceptive character.

As the last among those influenced by Descartes but who advanced beyond him, may be mentioned the acute Pierre Bayle (1647-1706; professor in Sedan and Rotterdam; Works, 1725-31[1]), who greatly excited the world of letters by his occasional and polemic treatises, and still more by the journal, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres from 1684, and his Historical and Critical Dictionary, in two volumes, 1695 and 1697. Nowhere do the most opposite antitheses dwell in such close proximity as in the mind of Bayle. Along with an ever watchful doubt he harbors a most active zeal for knowledge, with a sincere spirit of belief (which has been wrongly disputed by Lange, Zeller, and Pünjer) a demoniacal pleasure in bringing to light absurdities in the doctrines of faith, with absolute confidence in the infallibility of conscience an entirely pessimistic view of human morality. His strength lies in criticism and polemics, his work in the latter (aside from his hostility to fanaticism and the persecution of those differing in faith) being directed chiefly against optimism and the deistic religion of reason, which holds the Christian dogmas capable of proof, or, at least, faith and knowledge capable of reconciliation. The doctrines of faith are not only above reason, incomprehensible, but contrary to reason; and it is just on this that our merit in accepting them depends. The mysteries of the Gospel do not seek success before the judgment seat of thought, they demand the blind submission of the reason; nay, if they were objects of knowledge they would cease to be mysteries. Thus we must choose between religion and philosophy, for they cannot be combined. For one who is convinced of the untrustworthiness of the reason and her lack of competence in things supernatural, it is in no wise contradictory or impossible to receive as true things which she declares to be false; he will thank God for the gift of a faith which is entirely independent of the clearness of its objects and of its agreement with the axioms of philosophy. Even, when in purely scientific questions he calls attention to difficulties and shows contradictions on every hand, Bayle by no means intends to hold up principles with contradictory implications as false, but only as uncertain.[2] The reason, he says, generalizing from his own case, is capable only of destruction, not of construction; of discovering error, not of finding truth; of finding reasons and counter-reasons, of exciting doubt and controversy, not of vouchsafing certitude. So long as it contents itself with controverting that which is false, it is potent and salutary; but when, despising divine assistance, it advances beyond this, it becomes dangerous, like a caustic drug which attacks the healthy flesh after it has consumed that which was diseased.

[Footnote 1: Cf. on Bayle, L. Feuerbach. 1838, 2d ed., 1844; Eucken in the Allgemeine Zeitung, supplement to Nos. 251, 252, October 27, 28, 1891.]

[Footnote 2: Thus, in regard to the problem of freedom, he finds it hard to comprehend how the creatures, who are not the authors of their own existence, can be the authors of their own actions, but, at the same time, inadmissible to think of God as the cause of evil. He seeks only to show the indemonstrability and incomprehensibility of freedom, not to reject it. For he sees in it the condition of morality, and calls attention to the fact that the difficulties in which those who deny freedom involve themselves are far greater than those of their opponents. He shows himself entirely averse to the determinism and pantheism of Spinoza.]

He who seeks to refute skepticism must produce a criterion of truth. If such exists, it is certainly that advanced by Descartes, the evidence, the evident clearness of a principle. Well, then, the following principles pass for evident: That one, who does not exist, can have no responsibility for an evil action; that two things, which are identical with the same thing, are identical with each other; that I am the same man to-day that I was yesterday. Now, the revealed doctrines of original sin and of the Trinity show that the first and second of these axioms are false, and the Church doctrine of the preservation of the world as a continuous creation, that the last principle is uncertain. Thus if not even self-evidence furnishes us a criterion of truth, we must conclude that none whatever exists. Further, in regard to the origin of the world from a single principle, its creation by God, we find this supported, no doubt, both by the conclusions of the pure reason and by the consideration of nature, but controvened by the fact of evil, by the misery and wickedness of man. Is it conceivable that a holy and benevolent God has created so unhappy and wicked a being?

Bayle's motives in defending faith against reason were, on the one hand, his personal piety, on the other, his conviction of the unassailable purity of Christian ethics. All the sects agree in regard to moral principles, and it is this which assures us of the divinity of the Christian revelation. Nevertheless, he does not conceal from himself the fact that possession of the theoretical side of religion is far from being a guarantee of practice in conformity with her precepts. It is neither true that faith alone leads to morality nor that unbelief is the cause of immorality. A state composed of atheists would be not at all impossible, if only strict punishments and strict notions of honor were insisted upon.

The judgments of the natural reason in moral questions are as certain and free from error as its capacity is shown to be weak and limited in theoretical science. The idea of morality never deceives anyone; the moral law is innate in every man. Although Christianity has given the best development of our duties, yet the moral law can be understood and followed by all men, even by heathen and atheists. We do not need to be Christians in order to act virtuously; the knowledge given by conscience is not dependent upon revelation. From the knowledge of the good to the practice of it is, it is true, a long step; we may be convinced of moral truth without loving it, and God's grace alone is able to strengthen us against the power of the passions, by adding to the illumination of the mind an inclination of the heart toward the good. Temperament, custom, self-love move the soul more strongly than general truths. As in life pleasure is far outbalanced by pain and vexation, so far more evil acts are done than good ones: history is a collection of misdeeds, with scarcely one virtuous act for a thousand crimes. It is not the external action that constitutes the ethical character of a deed, but the motive or disposition; almsgiving from motives of pride is a vice, and only when practiced out of love to one's neighbors, a virtue. God looks only at the act of the will; our highest duty, and one which admits of no exceptions, is never to act contrary to conscience.

CHAPTER IV.

LOCKE.

After the Cartesian philosophy had given decisive expression to the tendencies of modern thought, and had been developed through occasionalism to its completion in the system of Spinoza, the line of further progress consisted in two factors: Descartes's principles—one-sidedly rationalistic and abstractly scientific, as they were—were, on the one hand, to be supplemented by the addition of the empirical element which Descartes had neglected, and, on the other, to be made available for general culture by approximation to the interests of practical life. England, with its freer and happier political conditions, was the best place for the accomplishment of both ends, and Locke, a typically healthy and sober English thinker, with a distaste for extreme views, the best adapted mind. Descartes, the rationalist, had despised experience, and Bacon, the empiricist, had despised mathematics; but Locke aims to show that while the reason is the instrument of science, demonstration its form, and the realm of knowledge wider than experience, yet this instrument and this form are dependent for their content on a supply of material from the senses. The emphasis, it is true, falls chiefly on the latter half of this programme, and posterity, especially, has almost exclusively attended to the empirical side of Locke's theory of knowledge in giving judgment concerning it.

John Locke was born at Wrington, not far from Bristol, in 1632. At Oxford he busied himself with philosophy, natural science, and medicine, being repelled by the Scholastic thinkers, but strongly attracted by the writings of Descartes. In 1665 he became secretary to the English ambassador to the Court of Brandenburg. Returning thence to Oxford he made the acquaintance of Lord Anthony Ashley (from 1672 Earl of Shaftesbury; died in Holland 1683), who received him into his own household as a friend, physician, and tutor to his son (the father of Shaftesbury, the moral philosopher), and with whose varying fortunes Locke's own were henceforth to be intimately connected. Twice he became secretary to his patron (once in 1667—with an official secretaryship in 1672, when Shaftesbury became Lord Chancellor—and again in 1679, when he became President of the Council), but both times he lost his post on his friend's fall. The years 1675-79 were spent in Montpellier and Paris. In 1683 he went into voluntary exile in Holland (where Shaftesbury had died in January of the same year), and remained there until 1689, when the ascension of the throne by William of Orange made it possible for him to return to England. Here he was made Commissioner of Appeals, and, subsequently, one of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations (till 1700). He died in 1704 at Gates, in Essex, at the house of Sir Francis Masham, whose wife was the daughter of Cudworth, the philosopher.

Locke's chief work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, which had been planned as early as 1670, was published in 1689-90, a short abstract of it having previously appeared in French in Le Clerc's Bibliothèque Universelle, 1688. His theoretical works include, further, the two posthumous treatises, On the Conduct of the Understanding (originally intended for incorporation in the fourth edition of the Essay, which, however, appeared in 1700 without this chapter, which probably had proved too extended) and the Elements of Natural Philosophy. To political and politico-economic questions Locke contributed the two Treatises on Government, 1690, and three essays on money and the coinage. In the year 1689 appeared the first of three Letters on Tolerance, followed, in 1693, by Some Thoughts on Education, and, in 1695, by The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures. The collected works appeared for the first time in 1714, and in nine volumes in 1853; the philosophical works (edited by St. John) are given in Bonn's Standard Library (1867-68).[1]

[Footnote 1: Lord King and Fox Bourne have written on Locke's life, 1829 and 1876. A comparison of Locke's theory of knowledge with Leibnitz's critique was published by Hartenstein in 1865, and one by Von Benoit (prize dissertation) in 1869, and an exposition of his theory of substance by De Fries in 1879. Victor Cousin's Philosophie de Locke has passed through six editions. [Among more recent English discussions reference may be made to Green's Introduction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, 1874 (new ed. 1890), which is a valuable critique of the line of development, Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Fowler's Locke, in the English Men of Letters, 1880; and Fraser's Locke, in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1890.—TR.]

%(a) Theory of Knowledge.%—Locke's theory of knowledge is controlled by two tendencies, one native, furnished by the Baconian empiricism, and the other Continental, supplied by the Cartesian question concerning the origin of ideas. Bacon had demanded the closest connection with experience as the condition of fruitful inquiry. Locke supports this commendation of experience by a detailed description of the services which it renders to cognition, namely, by showing that, in simple ideas, perception supplies the material for complex ideas, and for all the cognitive work of the understanding. Descartes had divided ideas, according to their origin, into three classes: those which are self-formed, those which come from without, and those which are innate (p. 79), and had called this third class the most valuable. Locke disputes the existence of ideas in the understanding from birth, and makes it receive the elements of knowledge from the senses, that is, from without. He is a representative of sensationalism,—not in the stricter sense, first put into the term by those who subsequently continued his endeavors, that thought arises from perception, that it is transformed sensation—but in the wider sense, that thought is (free) operation with ideas, which are neither created by it nor present in it from the first, but given to it by perception, that, consequently, the cognitive process begins with sensation and so its first attitude is a passive one. From the standpoint of the Cartesian problem, which he solves in a sense opposite to Descartes, Locke supplements the empiricism of Bacon by basing it on a psychologically developed theory of knowledge. That in the course of the inquiry he introduces a new principle, which causes him to diverge from the true empirical path, will appear in the sequel.

The question "How our ideas come into the mind" receives a negative answer (in the first book of the Essay): "There are no innate principles in the mind"[1] The doctrine of the innate character of certain principles is based on their universal acceptance. The asserted agreement of mankind in regard to the laws of thought, the principles of morality, the existence of God, etc., is neither cogent as an argument nor correct in fact. In the first place, even if there were any principles which everyone assented to, this would not prove that they had been created in the soul; the fact of general consent would admit of a different explanation. Granted that no atheists existed, yet it would not necessarily follow that the universal conviction of the existence of God is innate, for it might have been gradually reached in each case through the use of the reason—might have been inferred, for instance, from the perception of the purposive character of the world. Second, the fact to which this theory of innate ideas appeals is not true. No moral rule can be cited which is respected by all nations. The idea of identity is entirely unknown to idiots and to children. If the laws of identity and contradiction were innate they must appear in consciousness prior to all other truths; but long before a child is conscious of the proposition "It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be," it knows that sweet is not bitter, and that black is not white. The ideas first known are not general axioms and abstract concepts, but particular impressions of the senses. Would nature write so illegible a hand that the mind must wait a long time before becoming able to read what had been inscribed upon it? It is often said, however, that innate ideas and principles may be obscured and, finally, completely extinguished by habit, education, and other extrinsic circumstances. Then, if they gradually become corrupted and disappear, they must at least be discoverable in full purity where these disturbing influences have not yet acted; but it is especially vain to look for them in children and the ignorant. Perhaps, however, these possess such principles unconsciously; perhaps they are imprinted on the understanding, without being attended to? This would be a contradiction in terms. To be in the mind or the understanding simply means "to be understood" or to be known; no one can have an idea without being conscious of it. Finally, if the attempt be made to explain "originally in the mind" in so wide a sense that it would include all truths which man can ever attain or is capable of discovering by the right use of reason, this would make not only all mathematical principles, but all knowledge in general, all sciences, and all arts innate; there would be no ground even for the exclusion of wisdom and virtue. Therefore, either all ideas are innate or none are. This is an important alternative. While Locke decides for the second half of the proposition, Leibnitz defends the first by a delicate application of the concept of unconscious representation and of implicit knowledge, which his predecessor rejects out of hand.

[Footnote 1: According to Fox Bourne this first book was written after the others. Geil (Ueber die Abhängigkeit Lockes von Descartes, Strassburg, 1887, chap, iii.) has endeavored to prove that, since the arguments controverted are wanting in Descartes, the attack was not aimed at Descartes and his school, but at native defenders of innate ideas, as Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the English Platonists (Cudworth, More, Parker, Gale). That along with these the Cartesian doctrine was a second and chief object of attack is shown by Benno Erdmann in his discussion of the treatises by G. Geil and R. Sommer (Lockes Verhältnis zu Descartes, Berlin, 1887) in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, ii, pp. 99-121.]

Locke's positive answer to the question concerning the origin of ideas is given in his second book. Ideas are not present in the understanding from the beginning, nor are they originated by the understanding, but received through sensation. The understanding is like a piece of white paper on which perception inscribes its characters. All knowledge arises in experience. This is of two kinds, derived either from the external senses or the internal sense. The perception of external objects is termed Sensation, that of internal phenomena (of the states of the mind itself) Reflection. External and internal perception are the only windows through which the light of ideas penetrates into the dark chamber of the understanding. The two are not opened simultaneously, however, but one after the other; since the perceptions of the sensible qualities of bodies, unlike that of the operations of the mind itself, do not require an effort of attention, they are the earlier. The child receives ideas of sensation before those of reflection; internal perception presupposes external perception.

In this distinction between sensation and reflection, we may recognize an after-effect of the Cartesian dualism between matter and spirit. The antithesis of substances has become a duality in the faculties of perception. But while Descartes had so far forth ascribed precedence to the mind in that he held the self-certitude of the ego to be the highest and clearest of all truths and the soul to be better known than the body, in Locke the relation of the two was reversed, since he made the perception of self dependent on the precedent perception of external objects. This antithesis was made still sharper in later thinking, when Condillac made full use of the priority of sensation, which in Locke had remained without much effect; while Berkeley, on the other hand, reduced external perception to internal perception.

All original ideas are representations either of the external senses or of the internal sense, or of both. And since, in the case of ideas of sensation, there is a distinction between those which are perceived by a single one of the external senses and those which come from more than one, four classes of simple ideas result: (1) Those which come from one external sense, as colors, sounds, tastes, odors, heat, solidity, and the like. (2) Those which come from more than one external sense (sight and touch), as extension, figure, and motion. (3) Reflection on the operations of our minds yields ideas of perception or thinking (with its various modes, remembrance, judging, knowledge, faith, etc.), and of volition or willing. (4) From both external and internal perception there come into the mind the ideas of pleasure and pain, existence, power, unity, and succession. These are approximately our original ideas, which are related to knowledge as the letters to written discourse; as all Homer is composed out of only twenty-four letters, so these few simple ideas constitute all the material of knowledge. The mind can neither have more nor other simple ideas than those which are furnished to it by these two sources of experience.

Locke differs from Descartes again in regard to extension and thought. Extension does not constitute the essence of matter, nor thought the essence of mind. Extension and body are not the same; the former is presupposed by the latter as its necessary condition, but it is the former alone which yields mathematical matter. The essence of physical matter consists rather in solidity: where impenetrability is found there is body, and the converse; the two are absolutely inseparable. With space the case is different. I cannot conceive unextended matter, indeed, but I can easily conceive immaterial extension, an unfilled space Further, if the essence of the soul consisted in thought, it must be always thinking. As the Cartesians maintained, it must have ideas as soon as it begins to be, which is manifestly contrary to experience. Thinking is merely an activity of the mind, as motion is an activity of the body, and not its essential characteristic. The mind does not receive ideas until external objects occasion perception in it through impressions, which it is not able to avert. The understanding may be compared to a mirror, which, without independent activity and without being consulted, takes up the images of things. Some of the simple ideas which have been mentioned above represent the properties of things as they really are, others not. The former class includes all ideas of reflection (for we are ourselves the immediate object of the inner sense); but among the ideas of sensation those only which come from different senses, hence extension, motion and rest, number, figure, and, further, solidity, are to be accounted primary qualities, i. e., such as are actual copies of the properties of bodies. All other ideas, on the contrary, have no resemblance to properties of bodies; they represent merely the ways in which things act, and are not copies of things. The ideas of secondary or derivative qualities (hard and soft, warm and cold, colors and sounds, tastes and odors) are in the last analysis caused—as are the primary—by motion, but not perceived as such. Yellow and warm are merely sensations in us, which we erroneously ascribe to objects; with equal right we might ascribe to fire, as qualities inherent in it, the changes in form and color which it produces in wax and the pain which it causes in the finger brought into proximity with it. The warmth and the brightness of the blaze, the redness, the pleasant taste, and the aromatic odor of the strawberry, exist in these bodies merely as the power to produce such sensations in us by stimulation of the skin, the eye, the palate, and the nose. If we remove the perceptions of them, they disappear as such, and their causes alone remain—the bulk, figure, number, texture, and motion of the insensible particles. The ground of the illusion lies in the fact that such qualities as color, etc., bear no resemblance to their causes, in no wise point to these, and in themselves contain naught of bulk, density, figure, and motion, and that our senses are too weak to discover the material particles and their primary qualities.—The distinction between qualities of the first and second order—first advanced by the ancient atomists, revived by Galileo and Descartes on the threshold of the modern period, retained by Locke, and still customary in the natural science of the day—forms an important link in the transition from the popular view of all sense-qualities as properties of things in themselves to Kant's position, that spatial and temporal qualities also belong to phenomena alone, and are based merely on man's subjective mode of apprehension, while the real properties of things in themselves are unknowable.

Thus far the procedure of the understanding has been purely passive. But besides the capacity for passively receiving simple ideas, it possesses the further power of variously combining and extending these original ideas which have come into it from without, of working over the material given in sensation by the combination, relation, and separation of its various elements. In this it is active, but not creative. It is not able to form new simple ideas (and just as little to destroy such as already exist), but only freely to combine the elements furnished without its assistance by perception (or, following the figure mentioned above, to combine into syllables and words the separate letters of sensation). Complex ideas arise from simple ideas through voluntary combination of the latter.

Perception is the first step toward knowledge. After perception the most indispensable faculty is retention, the prolonged consciousness of present ideas and the revival of those which have disappeared, or, as it were, have been put aside. For an idea to be "in the memory" means that the mind has the capacity to reproduce it at will, whereupon it recognizes it as previously experienced. If our ideas are not freshened up from time to time by new impressions of the same sort they gradually fade out, until finally (as the idea of color in one become blind in early life) they completely disappear. Ideas impressed upon the mind by frequent repetition are rarely entirely lost. Memory is the basis for the intellectual functions of discernment and comparison, of composition, abstraction, and naming. Since, amid the innumerable multitude of ideas, it is not possible to assign to each one a definite sign, the indispensable condition of language is found in the power of abstraction, that is, in the power of generalizing ideas, of compounding many ideas into one, and of indicating by the names of the general ideas, or of the classes and species, the particular ideas also which are contained under these. Here is the great distinction between man and the brute. The brute lacks language because he lacks (not all understanding whatever, e.g., not a capacity, though an imperfect one, of comparison and composition, but) the faculty of abstraction and of forming general ideas. The object of language is simply the quick and easy communication of our thoughts to others, not to give expression to the real essence of objects. Words are not names for particular things, but signs of general ideas; and abstracta nothing more than an artifice for facilitating intellectual intercourse. This abbreviation, which aids in the exchange of ideas, involves the danger that the creations of the mind denoted by words will be taken for images of real general essences, of which, in fact, there are none in existence, but only particular things. In order to prevent anyone to whom I am speaking from understanding my words in a different sense from the one intended, it is necessary for me to define the complex ideas by analyzing them into their elements, and, on the other hand, to give examples in experience of the simple ideas, which do not admit of definition, or to explain them by synonyms. Thus much from Locke's philosophy of language, to which he devotes the third book of the Essay.

Complex ideas, which are very numerous, may be divided into three classes:
Modes, Substances, and Relations.

Modes (states, conditions) are such combinations of simple ideas which do not "contain in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as dependencies on, or affections of substances." They fall into two classes according as they are composed of the same simple ideas, or simple ideas of various kinds; the former are called simple, the latter mixed, modes. Under the former class belong, for example, a dozen or a score, the idea of which is composed of simple units; under the latter, running, fighting, obstinacy, printing, theft, parricide. The formation of mixed modes is greatly influenced by national customs. Very complicated transactions (sacrilege, triumph, ostracism), if often considered and discussed, receive for the sake of brevity comprehensive names, which cannot be rendered by a single expression in the language of other nations among whom the custom in question is not found. The elements most frequently employed in the formation of mixed modes are ideas of the two fundamental activities, thinking and motion, together with power, which is their source. Locke discusses simple modes in more detail, especially those derived from the ideas of space, time, unity, and power. Modifications of space are distance, figure, place, length; since any length or measure of space can be repeated to infinity, we reach the idea of immensity. As modes of time are enumerated succession (which we perceive and measure only by the flow of our ideas), duration, and lengths or measures of duration, the endless repetition of which yields the idea of eternity. From unity are developed the modes of numbers, and from the unlimitedness of these the idea of infinity. No idea, however, is richer in modes than the idea of power. A distinction must be made between active power and passive power, or mere receptivity. While bodies are not capable of originating motion, but only of communicating motion received, we notice in ourselves, as spiritual beings, the capacity of originating actions and motions. The body possesses only the passive power of being moved, the mind the active power of producing motion. This latter is termed "will." Here Locke discusses at length the freedom of the will, but not with entire clearness and freedom from contradictions (cf. below).

Modes are conditions which do not subsist of themselves, but have need of a basis or support; they are not conceivable apart from a thing whose properties or states they are. We notice that certain qualities always appear together, and habitually refer them to a substratum as the ground of their unity; in which they subsist or from which they proceed. Substance denotes this self-existent "we know not what," which has or bears the attributes in itself, and which arouses the ideas of them in us. It is the combination of a number of simple ideas which are presumed to belong to one thing. From the ideas of sensation the understanding composes the idea of body, and from the ideas of reflection that of mind. Each of these is just as clear and just as obscure as the other; of each we know only its effects and its sensuous properties; its essence is for us entirely unknowable. Instead of the customary names, material and immaterial substances, Locke recommends cogitative and incogitative substances, since it is not inconceivable that the Creator may have endowed some material beings with the capacity of thought. God,—the idea of whom is attained by uniting the ideas of existence, power, might, knowledge, and happiness with that of infinity,—is absolutely immaterial, because not passive, while finite spirits (which are both active and passive) are perhaps only bodies which possess the power of thinking.

While the ideas of substances are referred to a reality without the mind as their archetype, to which they are to conform and which they should image and represent, Relations (e.g., husband, greater) are free and immanent products of the understanding. They are not copies of real things, but represent themselves alone, are their own archetypes. We do not ask whether they agree with things, but, conversely, whether things agree with them (Book iv. 4.5). The mind reaches an idea of relation by placing two things side by side and comparing them. If it perceives that a thing, or a quality, or an idea begins to exist through the operation of some other thing, it derives from this the idea of the causal relation, which is the most comprehensive of all relations, since all that is actual or possible can be brought under it. Cause is that which makes another thing to begin to be; effect, that which had its beginning from some other thing. The production of a new quality is termed alteration; of artificial things, making; of a living being, generation; of a new particle of matter, creation. Next in importance is the relation of identity and diversity. Since it is impossible for a thing to be in two different places at the same time and for two things to be at the same time in the same place, everything that at a given instant is in a given place is identical with itself, and, on the other hand, distinct from everything else (no matter how great the resemblance between them) that at the same moment exists in another place. Space and time therefore form the principium individuationis. By what marks, however, may we recognize the identity of an individual at different times and in different places? The identity of inorganic matter depends on the continuity of the mass of atoms which compose it; that of living beings upon the permanent organization of their parts (different bodies are united into one animal by a common life); personal identity consists in the unity of self-consciousness, not in the continuity of bodily existence (which is at once excluded by the change of matter). The identity of the person or the ego must be carefully distinguished from that of substance and of man. It would not be impossible for the person to remain the same in a change of substances, in so far as the different beings (for instance, the souls of Epicurus and Gassendi) participated in the same self-consciousness; and, conversely, for a spirit to appear in two persons by losing the consciousness of its previous existence. Consciousness is the sole condition of the self, or personal identity.—The determinations of space and time are for the most part relations. Our answers to the questions "When?" "How long?" "How large?" denote the distance of one point of time from another (e.g., the birth of Christ), the relation of one duration to another (of a revolution of the sun), the relation of one extension to another well-known one taken as a standard. Many apparently positive ideas and words, as young and old, large and small, weak and strong, are in fact relative. They imply merely the relation of a given duration of life, of a given size and strength, to that which has been adopted as a standard for the class of things in question. A man of twenty is called young, but a horse of like age, old; and neither of these measures of time applies to stars or diamonds. Moral relations, which are based on a comparison of man's voluntary actions with one of the three moral laws, will be discussed below.

The inquiry now turns from the origin of ideas to their cognitive value or their validity, beginning (in the concluding chapters of the second book) with the accuracy of single ideas, and advancing (in Book iv., which is the most important in the whole work) to the truth of judgments. An idea is real when it conforms to its archetype, whether this is a thing, real or possible, or an idea of some other thing; it is adequate when the conformity is complete. The idea of a four-sided triangle or of brave cowardice is unreal or fantastical, since it is composed of incompatible elements, and the idea of a centaur, since it unites simple ideas in a way in which they do not occur in nature. The layman's ideas of law or of chemical substances are real, but inadequate, since they have a general resemblance to those of experts, and a basis in reality, but yet only imperfectly represent their archetypes. Nay, further, our ideas of substances are all inadequate, not only when they are taken for representations of the inner essences of things (since we do not know these essences), but also when they are considered merely as collections of qualities. The copy never includes all the qualities of the thing, the less so since the majority of these are powers, i.e., consist in relations to other objects, and since it is impossible, even in the case of a single body, to discover all the changes which it is fitted to impart to, or to receive from, other substances. Ideas of modes and relations are all adequate, for they are their own archetypes, are not intended to represent anything other than themselves, are images without originals. An idea of this kind, however, though perfect when originally formed, may become imperfect through the use of language, when it is unsuccessfully intended to agree with the idea of some other person and denominated by a current term. In the case of mixed modes and their names, therefore, the compatibility of their elements and the possible existence of their objects are not enough to secure their reality and their complete adequacy; in order to be adequate they must, further, exactly conform to the meaning connected with their names by their author, or in common use. Simple ideas are best off, according to Locke, in regard both to reality and to adequacy. For the most part, it is true, they are not accurate copies of the real qualities, of things, but only the regular effects of the powers of things. But although real qualities are thus only the causes and not the patterns of sensations, still simple ideas, by their constant correspondence with real qualities, sufficiently fulfill their divinely ordained end, to serve us as instruments of knowledge, i.e., in the discrimination of things.—An unreal and inadequate idea becomes false only when it is referred to an object, whether this be the existence of a thing, or its true essence, or an idea of other things. Truth and error belong always to affirmations or negations, that is, to (it may be, tacit) propositions. Ideas uncombined, unrelated, apart from judgments, ideas, that is, as mere phenomena in the mind, are neither true nor false.

Knowledge is defined as the "perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy" of two ideas; truth, as "the right joining or separating of signs, i.e., ideas or words." The object of knowledge is neither single ideas nor the relations of ideas to things, but the relations of ideas among themselves. This view was at once paradoxical and pregnant. If all cognition, as Locke suggests in objection to his own theory, consists in perceiving the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, are not the visions of the enthusiast and the reasonings of sober thinkers alike certain? are not the propositions, A fairy is not a centaur, and a centaur is a living being, just as true as that a circle is not a triangle, and that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles? The mind directly perceives nothing but its own ideas, but it seeks a knowledge of things! If this is possible it can only be indirect knowledge—the mind knows things through its ideas, and possesses criteria which show that its ideas agree with things.

Two cases must be clearly distinguished, for a considerable number of our ideas, viz., all complex ideas except those of substances, make no claim to represent things, and consequently cannot represent them falsely. For mathematical and moral ideas and principles, and the truth thereof, it is entirely immaterial whether things and conditions correspondent to them exist in nature or not. They are valid, even if nowhere actualized; they are "eternal truths," not in the sense that they are known from childhood, but in the sense that, as soon as known, they are immediately assented to.[1] The case is different, however, with simple ideas and the ideas of substances, which have their originals without the mind and which are to correspond with these. In regard to the former we may always be certain that they agree with real things, for since the mind can neither voluntarily originate them (e.g., cannot produce sensations of color in the dark) nor avoid having them at will, but only receive them from without, they are not creatures of the fancy, but the natural and regular productions of external things affecting us. In regard to the latter, the ideas of substances, we may be certain at least when the simple ideas which compose them have been found so connected in experience. Perception has an external cause, whose influence the mind is not able to withstand. The mutual corroboration furnished by the reports of the different senses, the painfulness of certain sensations, the clear distinction between ideas from actual perception and those from memory, the possibility of producing and predicting new sensations of an entirely definite nature in ourselves and in others, by means of changes which we effect in the external world (e.g. by writing down a word)—these give further justification for the trust which we put in the senses. No one will be so skeptical as to doubt in earnest the existence of the things which he sees and touches, and to declare his whole life to be a deceptive dream. The certitude which perception affords concerning the existence of external objects is indeed not an absolute one, but it is sufficient for the needs of life and the government of our actions; it is "as certain as our happiness or misery, beyond which we have no concernment, either of knowing or being." In regard to the past the testimony of the senses is supplemented by memory, in which certainty [in regard to the continued existence of things previously perceived] is transformed into high probability; while in regard to the existence of other finite spirits, numberless kinds of which may be conjectured to exist, though their existence is quite beyond our powers of perception, certitude sinks into mere (though well-grounded) faith.

[Footnote 1: Thus it results that knowledge, although dependent on experience for all its materials, extends beyond experience. The understanding is completely bound in the reception of simple ideas; less so in the combination of these into complex ideas; absolutely free in the act of comparison, which it can omit at will; finally, again, completely bound in its recognition of the relation in which the ideas it has chosen to compare stand to one another. There is room for choice only in the intermediate stage of the cognitive process; at the beginning (in the reception of the simple ideas of perception, a, b, c, d), and at the end (in judging how the concepts a b c and a b d stand related to each other), the understanding is completely determined.]

More certain than our sensitive knowledge of the existence of external objects, are our immediate or intuitive knowledge of our own existence and our mediate or demonstrative knowledge of the existence of God. Every idea that we have, every pain, every thought assures us of our own existence. The existence of God, however, as the infinite cause of all reality, endowed with intelligence, will, and supreme power, is inferred from the existence and constitution of the world and of ourselves. Reality exists; the real world is composed of matter in motion and thinking beings, and is harmoniously ordered. Since it is impossible for any real being to be produced by nothing, and since we obtain no satisfactory answer to the question of origin until we rise to something existent from all eternity, we must assume as the cause of that which exists an Eternal Being, which possesses in a higher degree all the perfections which it has bestowed upon the creatures. As the cause of matter and motion, and as the source of all power, this Being must be omnipotent; as the cause of beauty and order in the world, and, above all, as the creator of thinking beings, it must be omniscient. But these perfections are those which we combine in the idea of God.

Intuitive knowledge is the highest of the three degrees of knowledge. It is gained when the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas at first sight, without hesitation, and without the intervention of any third idea. This immediate knowledge is self-evident, irresistible, and exposed to no doubt. Knowledge is demonstrative when the mind perceives the agreement (or disagreement) of two ideas, not by placing them side by side and comparing them, but through the aid of other ideas. The intermediate links are called proofs; their discovery is the work of the reason, and quickness in finding them out is termed sagacity. The greater the number of the intermediate steps, the more the clearness and distinctness of the knowledge decreases, and the more the possibility of error increases. In order for an argument (e. g., that a = d) to be conclusive, every particular step in it (a = b, b = c, c = d) must possess intuitive certainty. Mathematics is not the only example of demonstrative knowledge, but the most perfect one, since in mathematics, by the aid of visible symbols, the full equality and the least differences among ideas may be exactly measured and sharply determined.

Besides real existence Locke, unsystematically enough, enumerates three other sorts of agreement between ideas,—in the perception of which he makes knowledge consist,—viz., identity or diversity (blue is not yellow), relation (when equals are added to equals the results are equal), and coexistence or necessary connexion (gold is fixed). We are best off in regard to the knowledge of the first of these, "identity or diversity," for here our intuition extends as far as our ideas, since we recognize every idea, as soon as it arises, as identical with itself and different from others. We are worst off in regard to "necessary connexion." We know something, indeed, concerning the incompatibility or coexistence of certain properties (e. g., that the same object cannot have two different sizes or colors at the same time; that figure cannot exist apart from extension): but it is only in regard to a few qualities and powers of bodies that we are able to discover dependence and necessary connexion by intuitive or demonstrative thought, while in most cases we are dependent on experience, which gives us information concerning particular cases only, and affords no guarantee that things are the same beyond the sphere of our observation and experiment. Since empirical inquiry furnishes no certain and universal knowledge, and since the assumption that like bodies will in the same circumstances have like effects is only a conjecture from analogy, natural science in the strict sense does not exist. Both mathematics and ethics, however, belong in the sphere of the demonstrative knowledge of relations. The principles of ethics are as capable of exact demonstration as those of arithmetic and geometry, although their underlying ideas are more complex, more involved, hence more exposed to misunderstanding, and lacking in visible symbols; though these defects can, and should, in part be made good by careful and strictly consistent definitions. Such moral principles as "where there is no property there is no injustice," or "no government allows absolute liberty," are as certain as any proposition in Euclid.

The advantage of the mathematical and moral sciences over the physical sciences consists in the fact that, in the former, the real and nominal essences of their objects coincide, while in the latter they do not; and, further, that the real essences of substances are beyond our knowledge. The true inner constitution of bodies, the root whence all their qualities, and the coexistence of these, necessarily proceed, is completely unknown to us; so that we are unable to deduce them from it. Mathematical and moral ideas, on the other hand, and their relations, are entirely accessible, for they are the products of our own voluntary operations. They are not copied from things, but are archetypal for reality and need no confirmation from experience. The connexion constituted by our understanding between the ideas crime and punishment (e. g., the proposition: crime deserves punishment) is valid, even though no crime had ever been committed, and none ever punished. Existence is not at all involved in universal propositions; "general knowledge lies only in our own thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of our own abstract ideas" and their relations. The truths of mathematics and ethics are both universal and certain, while in natural science single observations and experiments are certain, but not general, and general propositions are only more or less probable. Both the particular experiments and the general conclusions are of great value under certain circumstances, but they do not meet the requirements of comprehensive and certain knowledge.

The extent of our knowledge is very limited—much less, in fact, than that of our ignorance. For our knowledge reaches no further than our ideas, and the possibility of perceiving their agreements. Many things exist of which we have no ideas—chiefly because of the fewness of our senses and their lack of acuteness—and just as many of which our ideas are only imperfect. Moreover, we are often able neither to command the ideas which we really possess, or at least might attain, nor to perceive their connexions. The ideas which are lacking, those which are undiscoverable, those which are not combined, are the causes of the narrow limits of human knowledge.

There are two ways by which knowledge may be extended: by experience, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the elevation of our ideas to a state of clearness and distinctness, together with the discovery and systematic arrangement of those intermediate ideas which exhibit the relation of other ideas, in themselves not immediately comparable. The syllogism, as an artificial form, is of little value in the perception of the agreements between these intermediate and final terms, and of none whatever in the discovery of the former. Analytical and identical propositions which merely explicate the conception of the subject, but express nothing not already known, are, in spite of their indefeasible certitude, valueless for the extension of knowledge, and when taken for more than verbal explanations, mere absurdities. Even those most general propositions, those "principles" which are so much talked of in the schools, lack the utility which is so commonly ascribed to them. Maxims are, it is true, fit instruments for the communication of knowledge already acquired, and in learned disputations may perform indispensable service in silencing opponents, or in bringing the dispute to a conclusion; but they are of little or no use in the discovery of new truth. It is a mistake to believe that special cases (as 5 = 2 + 3, or 5 = 1 + 4) are dependent on the truth of the abstract rule (the whole is equal to the sum of its parts), that they are confirmed by it and must be derived from it. The particular and concrete is not only as clear and certain as the general maxim, but better known than this, as well as earlier and more easily perceived. Nay, further, in cases where ideas are confused and the meanings of words doubtful, the use of axioms is dangerous, since they may easily lend the appearance of proved truth to assertions which are really contradictory.

Between the clear daylight of certain knowledge and the dark night of absolute ignorance comes the twilight of probability. We find ourselves dependent on opinion and presumption, or judgment based upon probability, when experience and demonstration leave us in the lurch and we are, nevertheless, challenged to a decision by vital needs which brook no delay. The judge and the historian must convince themselves from the reports of witnesses concerning events which they have not themselves observed; and everyone is compelled by the interests of life, of duty, and of eternal salvation to form conclusions concerning things which lie beyond the limits of his own perception and reflective thought, nay, which transcend all human experience and rigorous demonstration whatever. To delay decision and action until absolute certainty had been attained, would scarcely allow us to lift a single finger. In cases concerning events in the past, the future, or at a distance, we rely on the testimony of others (testing their reports by considering their credibility as witnesses and the conformity of the evidence to general experience in like cases); in regard to questions concerning that which is absolutely beyond experience, e.g., higher orders of spirits, or the ultimate causes of natural phenomena, analogy is the only help we have. If the witnesses conflict among themselves, or with the usual course of nature, the grounds pro and con must be carefully balanced; frequently, however, the degree of probability attained is so great that our assent is almost equivalent to complete certainty. No one doubts,—although it is impossible for him to "know,"—that Caesar conquered Pompey, that gold is ductile in Australia as elsewhere, that iron will sink to-morrow as well as to-day. Thus opinion supplements the lack of certain knowledge, and serves as a guide for belief and action, wherever the general lot of mankind or individual circumstances prevent absolute certitude.

Although in this twilight region of opinion demonstrative proofs are replaced merely by an "occasion" for "taking" a given fact or idea "as true rather than false," yet assent is by no means an act of choice, as the Cartesians had erroneously maintained, for in knowledge it is determined by clearly discerned reasons, and in the sphere of opinion, by the balance of probability. The understanding is free only in combining ideas, not in its judgment concerning the agreement or the repugnancy of the ideas compared; it lies within its own power to decide whether it will judge at all, and what ideas it will compare, but it has no control over the result of the comparison; it is impossible for it to refuse its assent to a demonstrated truth or a preponderant probability.

In this recognition of objective and universally valid relations existing among ideas, which the thinking subject, through comparisons voluntarily instituted, discovers valid or finds given, but which it can neither alter nor demur to, Locke abandons empirical ground (cf. p. 155) and approaches the idealists of the Platonizing type. His inquiry divides into two very dissimilar parts (a psychological description of the origin of ideas and a logical determination of the possibility and the extent of knowledge), the latter of which is, in Locke's opinion, compatible with the former, but which could never have been developed from it. The rationalistic edifice contradicts the sensationalistic foundation. Locke had hoped to show the value and the limits of knowledge by an inquiry into the origin of ideas, but his estimate of this value and these limits cannot be proved from the a posteriori origin of ideas—it can only be maintained in despite of this, and stands in need of support from some (rationalistic) principle elsewhere obtained. Thinkers who trace back all simple ideas to outer and inner perception we expect to reject every attempt to extend knowledge beyond the sphere of experience, to declare the combinations of ideas which have their origin in sensation trustworthy, and those which are formed without regard to perception, illusory; or else, with Protagoras, to limit knowledge to the individual perceiving subject, with a consequent complete denial of its general validity. But exactly the opposite of all these is found in Locke. The remarkable spectacle is presented of a philosopher who admits no other sources of ideas than perception and the voluntary combination of perceptions, transcending the limits of experience with proofs of the divine existence, viewing with suspicion the ideas of substance formed at the instance of experience, and reducing natural science to the sphere of mere opinion; while, on the other hand, he ascribes reality and eternal validity to the combinations of ideas formed independently of perception, which are employed by mathematics and ethics, and completely abandons the individualistic position in his naïve faith in the impregnable validity of the relations of ideas, which is evident to all who turn their attention to them. The ground for the universal validity of the relations among ideas as well as of our knowledge of them, naturally lies not in their empirical origin (for my experience gives information to me alone, and that only concerning the particular case in question), but in the uniformity of man's rational constitution. If two men really have the same ideas—not merely think they have because they use similar language—it is impossible, according to Locke, that they should hold different opinions concerning the relation of their ideas. With this conviction, that the universal validity of knowledge is rooted in the uniformity of man's rational constitution, and the further one, that we attain certain knowledge only when things conform to our ideas, Locke closely approaches Kant; while his assumption of a fixed order of relations among ideas, which the individual understanding cannot refuse to recognize, and the typical character assigned to mathematics, associate him with Malebranche and Spinoza. In view of these points of contact with the rationalistic school and his manifold dependence on its founder, we may venture the paradox, that Locke may not only be termed a Baconian with Cartesian leanings, but (almost) a Cartesian influenced by Bacon. The possibility must not be forgotten, however, that rationalistic suggestions came to him also from Galileo, Hobbes, and Newton.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cf. the article by Benno Erdmann cited p. 156, note.]

Intermediate between knowledge and opinion stands faith as a form of assent which is based on testimony rather than on deductions of the reason, but whose certitude is not inferior to that of knowledge, since it is a communication from God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. Faith and the certainty thereof depend on reason, in so far as reason alone can determine whether a divine revelation has really been made and the meaning of the words in which the revelation has come down to us. In determining the boundaries of faith and reason Locke makes use of the distinction—which has become famous—between things above reason, according to reason, and contrary to reason. Our conviction that God exists is according to reason; the belief that there are more gods than one, or that a body can be in two different places at the same time, contrary to reason; the former is a truth which can be demonstrated on rational grounds, the latter an assumption incompatible with our clear and distinct ideas. In the one case revelation confirms a proposition of which we were already certain; in the other an alleged revelation is incapable of depriving our certain knowledge of its force. Above reason are those principles whose probability and truth cannot be shown by the natural use of our faculties, as that the dead shall rise again and the account of the fall of part of the angels. Among the things which are not contrary to reason belong miracles, for they contradict opinion based on the usual course of nature, it is true, but not our certain knowledge; in spite of their supernatural character they deserve willing acceptance, and receive it, when they are well attested, whereas principles contrary to reason must be unconditionally rejected as a revelation from God. Locke's demand for the subjection of faith to rational criticism assures him an honorable place in the history of English deism. He enriched the philosophy of religion by two treatises of his own: The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, and three Letters on Tolerance, 1689-1692. The former transfers the center of gravity of the Christian religion from history to the doctrine of redemption; the Letters demand religious freedom, mutual tolerance among the different sects, and the separation of Church and State. Those sects alone are to receive no tolerance which themselves exercise none, and which endanger the well-being of society; together with atheists, who are incapable of taking oaths. In other respects it is the duty of the state to protect all confessions and to favor none.

%(b) Practical Philosophy.%—Locke contributed to practical philosophy important suggestions concerning freedom, morality, politics, and education. Freedom is the "power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to" actions (thoughts and motions). It is not destroyed by the fact that the will is always moved by desire, more exactly, by uneasiness under present circumstances, and that the decision is determined by the judgment of the understanding. Although the result of examination is itself dependent on the unalterable relations of ideas, it is still in our power to decide whether we will consider at all, and what ideas we will take into consideration. Not the thought, not the determination of the will, is free, but the person, the mind; this has the power to suspend the prosecution of desire, and by its judgment to determine the will, even in opposition to inclination. Four stages must, consequently, be distinguished in the volitional process: desire or uneasiness; the deliberative combination of ideas; the judgment of the understanding; determination. Freedom has its place at the beginning of the second stage: it is open to me to decide whether to proceed at all to consideration and final judgment concerning a proposed action; thus to prevent desire from directly issuing in movements; and, according to the result of my examination, perhaps, to substitute for the act originally desired an opposite one. Without freedom, moral judgment and responsibility would be impossible. The above appears to us to represent the essence of Locke's often vacillating discussion of freedom (II. 21). Desire is directed to pleasure; the will obeys the understanding, which is exalted above motives of pleasure and the passions. Everything is physically good which occasions and increases pleasure in us, which removes or diminishes pain, or contributes to the attainment of some other good and the avoidance of some other evil. Actions, on the contrary, are morally good when they conform to a rule by which they are judged. Whoever earnestly meditates on his welfare will prefer moral or rational good to sensuous good, since the former alone vouchsafes true happiness. God has most intimately united virtue and general happiness, since he has made the preservation of human society dependent on the exercise of virtue.

The mark of a law for free beings is the fact that it apportions reward for obedience and punishment for disobedience. The laws to which an action must conform in order to deserve the predicate "good" are three in number (II. 28): by the divine law "men judge whether their actions are sins or duties"; by the civil law, "whether they be criminal or innocent" (deserving of punishment or not); by the law of opinion or reputation, "whether they be virtues or vices." The first of these laws threatens immorality with future misery; the second, with legal punishments; the third, with the disapproval of our fellow-men.

The third law, the law of opinion or reputation, called also philosophical, coincides on the whole, though not throughout, with the first, the divine law of nature, which is best expressed in Christianity, and which is the true touchstone of the moral character of actions. While Locke, in his polemic against innate ideas, had emphasized the diversity of moral judgments among individuals and nations (as a result of which an action is condemned in one place and praised as virtuous in another), he here gives prominence to the fact of general agreement in essentials, since it is only natural that each should encourage by praise and esteem that which is to his advantage, while virtue evidently conduces to the good of all who come into contact with the virtuous. Amid the greatest diversity of moral judgments virtue and praise, vice and blame, go together, while in general that is praised which is really praiseworthy—even the vicious man approves the right and condemns that which is faulty, at least in others. Locke was the first to call attention to general approval as an external mark of moral action, a hint which the Scottish moralists subsequently exploited. The objection that he reduced morality to the level of the conventional is unjust, for the law of opinion and reputation did not mean for him the true principle of morality, but only that which controls the majority of mankind—If anyone is inclined to doubt that commendation and disgrace are sufficient motives to action, he does not understand mankind; there is hardly one in ten thousand insensible enough to endure in quiet the constant disapproval of society. Even if the lawbreaker hopes to escape punishment at the hands of the state, and puts out of mind the thought of future retribution, he can never escape the disapproval of his misdeeds on the part of his fellows. In entire harmony with these views is Locke's advice to educators, that they should early cultivate the love of esteem in their pupils.

Of the four principles of morals which Locke employs side by side, and in alternation, without determining their exact relations—the reason, the will of God, the general good (and, deduced from this, the approval of our fellow-men), self-love—the latter two possess only an accessory significance, while the former two co-operate in such a way that the one determines the content of the good and the other confirms it and gives it binding authority. The Christian religion does the reason a threefold service—it gives her information concerning our duty, which she could have reached herself, indeed, without the help of revelation, but not with the same certitude and rapidity; it invests the good with the majesty of absolute obligation by proclaiming it as the command of God; it increases the motives to morality by its doctrines of immortality and future retribution. Although Locke thus intimately joins virtue with earthly joy and eternal happiness, and although he finds in the expectation of heaven or hell a welcome support for the will in its conflict with the passions, we must remember that he values this regard for the results and rewards of virtue only as a subsidiary motive, and does not esteem it as in itself ethical: eternal happiness forms, as it were, the "dowry" of virtue, which adds to its true value in the eyes of fools and the weak, though it constitutes neither its essence nor its basis. Virtue seems to the wise man beautiful and valuable enough even without this, and yet the commendations of philosophers gain for her but few wooers. The crowd is attracted to her only when it is made clear to it that virtue is the "best policy."

In politics Locke is an opponent of both forms of absolutism, the despotic absolutism of Hobbes and the patriarchal absolutism of Filmer (died 1647; his Patriarcha declared hereditary monarchy a divine institution), and a moderate exponent of the liberal tendencies of Milton (1608-74) and Algernon Sidney (died 1683; Discourses concerning Government). The two Treatises on Civil Government, 1690, develop, the first negatively, the second positively, the constitutional theory with direct reference to the political condition of England at the time. All men are born free and with like capacities and rights. Each is to preserve his own interests, without injuring those of others. The right to be treated by every man as a rational being holds even prior to the founding of the state; but then there is no authoritative power to decide conflicts. The state of nature is not in itself a state of war, but it would lead to this, if each man should himself attempt to exercise the right of self-protection against injury. In order to prevent acts of violence there is needed a civil community, based on a free contract, to which each individual member shall transfer his freedom and power. Submission to the authority of the state is a free act, and, by the contract made, natural rights are guarded, not destroyed; political freedom is obedience to self-imposed law, subordination to the common will expressing itself in the majority. The political power is neither tyrannical, for arbitrary rule is no better than the state of nature, nor paternal, for rulers and subjects are on an equality in the use of the reason, which is not the case with parents and children. The supreme power is the legislative, intrusted by the community to its chosen representatives—the laws should aim at the general good. Subordinate to the legislative power, and to be kept separate from it, come the two executing powers, which are best united in a single hand (the king), viz., the executive power (administrative and judicial), which carries the laws into effect, and the federative power, which defends the community against external foes. The ruler is subject to the law. If the government, through violation of the law, has become unworthy of the power intrusted to it, and has forfeited it, sovereign authority reverts to the source whence it was derived, that is, to the people. The people decides whether its representatives and the monarch have deserved the confidence placed in them, and has the right to depose them, if they exceed their authority. As the sworn obedience (of the subjects) is to the law alone, the ruler who acts contrary to law has lost the right to govern, has put himself in a state of hostility to the people, and revolution becomes merely necessary defense against aggression.

Montesquieu made these political ideas of Locke the common property of Europe.[1] Rousseau did a like service for Locke's pedagogical views, given in the modest but important Thoughts concerning Education, 1693. The aim of education should not be to instill anything into the pupil, but to develop everything from him; it should guide and not master him, should develop his capacities in a natural way, should rouse him to independence, not drill him into a scholar. In order to these ends thorough and affectionate consideration of his individuality is requisite, and private instruction is, therefore, to be preferred to public instruction. Since it is the business of education to make men useful members of society, it must not neglect their physical development. Learning through play and object teaching make the child's task a delight; modern languages are to be learned more by practice than by systematic study. The chief difference between Locke and Rousseau is that the former sets great value on arousing the sense of esteem, while the latter entirely rejects this as an educational instrument.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Theod. Pietsch, Ueber das Verhältniss der politischen Theorien Lockes zu Montesquieus Lehre von der Teilung der Gewalten Berlin dissertation, Breslau, 1887.]

CHAPTER V.

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Besides the theory of knowledge, which forms the central doctrine in his system, Locke had discussed the remaining branches of philosophy, though in less detail, and, by his many-sided stimulation, had posited problems for the Illumination movement in England and in France. Now the several disciplines take different courses, but the after-influence of his powerful mind is felt on every hand. The development of deism from Toland on is under the direct influence of his "rational Christianity"; the ethics of Shaftesbury stands in polemic relation to his denial of everything innate; and while Berkeley and Hume are deducing the consequences of his theory of knowledge, Hartley derives the impulse to a new form of psychology from his chapter on the association of ideas.

%1. Natural Philosophy and Psychology.%

In Locke's famous countryman, Isaac Newton (1642-1727),[1] the modern investigation of nature attains the level toward which it had striven, at first by wishes and demands, gradually, also, in knowledge and achievement, since the end of the mediaeval period. Mankind was not able to discard at a stroke its accustomed Aristotelian view of nature, which animated things with inner, spirit-like forces. A full century intervened between Telesius and Newton, the concept of natural law requiring so long a time to break out of its shell. A tremendous revolution in opinion had to be effected before Newton could calmly promulgate his great principle, "Abandon substantial forms and occult qualities and reduce natural phenomena to mathematical laws," before he could crown the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler with his own. For this successful union of Bacon's experimental induction with the mathematical deduction of Descartes, this combination of the analytic and the synthetic methods, which was shown in the demand for, and the establishment of, mathematically formulated natural laws, presupposes that nature is deprived of all inner life [2] and all qualitative distinctions, that all that exists is compounded of uniformly acting parts, and that all that takes place is conceived as motion. With this Hobbes's programme of a mechanical science of nature is fulfilled. The heavens and the earth are made subject to the same law of gravitation. How far Newton himself adhered to the narrow meaning of mechanism (motion from pressure and impulse), is evident from the fact that, though he is often honored as the creator of the dynamical view of nature, he rejected actio in distans as absurd, and deemed it indispensable to assume some "cause" of gravity (consisting, probably, in the impact of imponderable material particles). It was his disciples who first ventured to proclaim gravity as the universal force of matter, as the "primary quality of all bodies" (so Roger Cotes in the preface to the second edition of the Principia, 1713).

[Footnote 1: 1669-95 professor of mathematics in Cambridge, later resident in London; 1672, member, and, 1703, president of the Royal Society. Chief work, Philosophic Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687. Works, 1779 seq. On Newton cf. K. Snell, 1843; Durdik, Leibniz und Newton, 1869; Lange, History of Materialism, vol. i. p. 306 seq.]

[Footnote 2: That the mathematical view of nature, since it leaves room for quantitative distinctions alone, is equivalent to an examination of nature had been clearly recognized by Poiret. As he significantly remarked: The principles of the Cartesian physics relate merely to the "cadaver" of nature (Erud., p. 260).]

Newton resembles Boyle in uniting profound piety with the rigor of scientific thought. He finds the most certain proof for the existence of an intelligent creator in the wonderful arrangement of the world-machine, which does not need after-adjustment at the hands of its creator, and whose adaptation he praises as enthusiastically as he unconditionally rejects the mingling of teleological considerations in the explanation of physical phenomena. By this "physico-theological" argument he furnishes a welcome support to deism. While the finite mind perceives in the sensorium of the brain the images of objects which come to it from the senses, God has all things in himself, is immediately present in all, and cognizes them without sense-organs, the expanse of the universe forming his sensorium.

* * * * *

The transfer of mechanical views to psychical phenomena was also accompanied by the conviction that no danger to faith in God would result therefrom, but rather that it would aid in its support. The chief representatives of this movement, which followed the example of Gay, were the physician, David Hartley[1] (1704-57), and his pupil, Joseph Priestley,[2] a dissenting minister and natural scientist (born 1733, died in Philadelphia 1804; the discoverer of oxygen gas, 1774).

The fundamental position of these psychologists is expressed in two principles: (1) all cognitive and motive life is based on the mechanism of psychical elements, the highest and most complex inner phenomena (thoughts, feelings, volitions) are produced by the combination of simple ideas, that is, they arise through the "association of ideas "; (2) all inner phenomena, the complex as well as the simple, are accompanied by, or rather depend on, more or less complicated physical phenomena, viz., nervous processes and brain vibrations. Although Hartley and Priestley are agreed in their demand for an associational and physiological treatment of psychology, and in the attempt to give one, they differ in this, that Hartley cautiously speaks only of a parallelism, a correspondence between mental and cerebral processes, and rejects the materialistic interpretation of inner phenomena, pointing out that the heterogeneity of motion and ideas forbids the reduction of the latter to the former, and that psychological analysis never reaches corporeal but only psychical elements. Moreover, it is only with reluctance that, conscious of the critical character of the conclusion, he admits the dependence of brain vibrations on the mechanical laws of the material world and the thoroughgoing determinateness of the human will, consoling himself with the belief that moral responsibility nevertheless remains intact. Priestley, on the contrary, boldly avows the materialistic and deterministic consequences of his position, holds that psychical phenomena are not merely accompanied by material motions but consist in them (thought is a function of the brain), and makes psychology, as the physics of the nerves, a part of physiology. The denial of immortality and the divine origin of the world is, however, by no means to follow from materialism. Priestley not only combated the atheism of Holbach, but also entered the deistic ranks with works of his own on Natural Religion and the Corruptions of Christianity.

[Footnote 1: Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duties, his
Expectations. 1749.]

[Footnote 2: Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principles of the Association of Ideas, 1775; Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, 1777; The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 1777; Free Discussions of the Doctrines of Materialism, 1778 (against Richard Price's Letters on Materialism and Philosophical Necessity). Cf. on both Schoenlank's dissertation, Hartley und Priestley, die Begründer des Assoziationismus in England, 1882.]

As early as in Hartley[1] the principle, which is so important for ethics, appears that things and actions (e.g., promotion of the good of others) which at first are sought and done because they are means to our own enjoyment, in time come to have a direct worth of their own, apart from the original egoistic end. James Mill (1829) has repeated this thought in later times. As fame becomes an immediate object of desire to the ambitious man, and gold to the miser, so, through association, the impulse toward that which will secure approval may be transformed into the endeavor after that which deserves approval.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik, vol. i. p. 197 seq.]

Among later representatives of the Associational school we may mention
Erasmus Darwin (Zoönomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 1794-96).

%2. Deism%.

As Bacon and Descartes had freed natural science, Hobbes, the state, and Grotius, law from the authority of the Church and had placed them on an independent basis, i.e., the basis of nature and reason, so deism[1] seeks to free religion from Church dogma and blind historical faith, and to deduce it from natural knowledge. In so far as deism finds both the source and the test of true religion in reason, it is rationalism; in so far as it appeals from the supernatural light of revelation and inspiration to the natural light of reason, it is naturalism; in so far as revelation and its records are not only not allowed to restrict rational criticism, but are made the chief object of criticism, its adherents are freethinkers.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Lechler's Geschichte des Englischen Deismus, 1841, which is rigorously drawn from the sources. [Hunt, History of Religious Thought in England, 1871-73 [1884]; Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1876 [1880]; Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881.]

The general principles of deism may be compressed into a few theses. There is a natural religion, whose essential content is morality; this comprises not much more than the two maxims, Believe in God and Do your duty.

Positive religions are to be judged by this standard. The elements in them which are added to natural religion, or conflict with it, are superfluous and harmful additions, arbitrary decrees of men, the work of cunning rulers and deceitful priests. Christianity, which in its original form was the perfect expression of the true religion of reason, has experienced great corruptions in its ecclesiastical development, from which it must now be purified.

These principles are supported by the following arguments: Truth is one and there is but one true religion. If the happiness of men depends on the fulfilment of her commands, these must be comprehensible to every man and must have been communicated to him; and since a special revelation and legislation could not come to the knowledge of all, they can be no other than the laws of duty inscribed on the human heart. In order to salvation, then, we need only to know God as creator and judge, and to fulfill his commands, i.e.. to live a moral life. The one true religion has been communicated to man in two forms, through the inner natural revelation of reason, and the outer historical revelation of the Gospel. Since both have come from God they cannot be contradictory. Accordingly natural religion and the true one among the positive religions do not differ in their content, but only in the manner of their promulgation. Reason tries historical religion by the standard furnished by natural religion, and distinguishes actual from asserted revelation by the harmony of its contents with reason: the deist believes in the Bible because of the reasonableness of its teachings; he does not hold these teachings true because they are found in the Bible. If a positive religion contains less than natural religion it is incomplete; if it contains more it is tyrannical, since it imposes unnecessary requirements. The authority of reason to exercise the office of a judge in regard to the credibility of revelation is beyond doubt; indeed, apart from it there is no means of attaining truth, and the acceptance of an external revelation as genuine, and not merely as alleged to be such, is possible only for those who have already been convinced of God's existence by the inner light of reason.

To these logical considerations is added an historical position, which, though only cursorily indicated at the beginning, is evidenced in increasing detail as the deistic movement continues on its course. Natural religion is always and everywhere the same, is universal and necessary, is perfect, eternal, and original. As original, it is the earliest religion, and as old as the world; as perfect, it is not capable of improvement, but only of corruption and restoration. Twice it has existed in perfect purity, as the religion of the first men and as the religion of Christ. Twice it has been corrupted, in the pre-Christian period by idolatry, which proceeded from the Egyptian worship of the dead, in the period after Christ by the love of miracle and blind reverence for authority. In both cases the corruption has come from power-loving priests, who have sought to frighten and control the people by incomprehensible dogmas and ostentations, mysterious ceremonies, and found their advantage in the superstition of the multitude,—each new divinity, each new mystery meaning a gain for them. As they had corrupted the primitive religion into polytheism, so Christianity was corrupted by conforming it to the prejudices of those to be converted, in whose eyes the simplicity of the new doctrine would have been no recommendation for it. The Jew sought in it an echo of the Law, the heathen longed for his festivals and his occult philosophy; so it was burdened with unprofitable ceremonial observances and needless profundity, it was Judaized and heathenized. It was inevitable that the doctrines of original sin, of satisfaction and atonement should prove especially objectionable to the purely rational temper of the deists. Neither the guilt of others (the sin of our ancestors) nor the atonement of others (Christ's death on the cross) can be imputed to us; Christ can be called the Savior only by way of metaphor, only in so far as the example of his death leads us on to faith and obedience for ourselves. The name atheism, which, it is true, orthodoxy held ready for every belief incorrect according to its standard, was on the contrary undeserved. The deists did not attack Christian revelation, still less belief in God. They considered the atheist bereft of reason, and they by no means esteemed historical revelation superfluous. The end of the latter was to stir the mind to move men to reflection and conversion, to transform morals, and if anyone declared it unnecessary because it contains nothing but natural truths, he was referred to the works of Euclid, which certainly contain nothing which is not founded in the reason, but which no one but a fool will consider unnecessary in the study of mathematics.

That which we have here summarized as the general position of deism, gained gradual expression through the regular development and specialization of deistic ideas in individual representatives of the movement. The chief points and epochs were marked by Toland's Christianity not Mysterious, 1696; Collins's Discourse of Freethinking, 1713; Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730; and Chubb's True Gospel of Jesus Christ, 1738. The first of these demands a critique of revelation, the second defends the right of free investigation, the third declares the religion of Christ, which is merely a revived natural religion, to be the oldest religion, the fourth reduces it entirely to moral life.

The deistic movement was called into life by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (pp. 79-80) and continued by Locke, in so far as the latter had intrusted to reason the discrimination of true from false revelation, and had admitted in Christianity elements above reason, though not things contrary to reason. Following Locke, John Toland (1670-1722) goes a step further with the proof that the Gospel not only contains nothing contrary to reason, but also nothing above reason, and that no Christian doctrine is to be called mysterious. To the demand that we should worship what we do not comprehend, he answers that reason is the only basis of certitude, and alone decides on the divinity of the Scriptures, by a consideration of their contents. The motive which impels us to assent to a truth must lie in reason, not in revelation, which, like all authority and experience, is merely the way by which we attain the knowledge of the truth; it is a means of instruction, not a ground of conviction. All faith has knowledge and understanding for its conditions, and is rational conviction. Before we can put our trust in the Scriptures, we must be convinced that they were in fact written by the authors to whom they are ascribed, and must consider whether these men, their deeds, and their works, were worthy of God. The fact that God's inmost being is for us inscrutable does not make him a mystery, for even the common things of nature are known to us only by their properties. Miracles are also in themselves nothing incomprehensible; they are simply enhancements of natural laws beyond their ordinary operations, by supernatural assistance, which God vouchsafes but rarely and only for extraordinary ends. Toland explains the mysteries smuggled into the ethical religion of Christianity as due to the toleration of Jewish and heathen customs, to the entrance of learned speculation, and to the selfish inventions of the clergy and the rulers. The Reformation itself had not entirely restored the original purity and simplicity.

Thus far Toland the deist. In his later writings, the five Letters to Serena, 1704, addressed to the Prussian queen, Sophia Charlotte, and the Pantheisticon (Cosmopoli, 1720), he advances toward a hylozoistic pantheism.

The first of the Letters discusses the prejudices of mankind; the second, the heathen doctrine of immortality; the third, the origin of idolatry; while the fourth and fifth are devoted to Spinoza, the chief defect in whose philosophy is declared to be the absence of an explanation of motion. Motion belongs to the notion of matter as necessarily as extension and impenetrability. Matter is always in motion; rest is only the reciprocal interference of two moving forces. The differences of things depend on the various movements of the particles of matter, so that it is motion which individualizes matter in general into particular things. As the Letters ascribe the purposive construction of organic beings to a divine reason, so the Pantheisticon also stops short before it reaches the extreme of naked materialism. Everything is from the whole; the whole is infinite, one, eternal, all-rational. God is the force of the whole, the soul of the world, the law of nature. The treatise includes a liturgy of the pantheistic society with many quotations from the ancient poets.

Anthony Collins (1676-1729), in his Discourse of Free-thinking, shows the right of free thought (i. e., of judgment on rational grounds) in general, from the principle that no truth is forbidden to us, and that there is no other way by which we can attain truth and free ourselves from superstition, and the right to apply it to God and the Bible in particular, from the fact that the clergy differ concerning the most important matters. The fear that the differences of opinion which spring from freethinking may endanger the peace of society lacks foundation; on the contrary, it is only restriction of the freedom of thought which leads to disorders, by weakening moral zeal. The clergy are the only ones who condemn liberty of thought. It is sacrilege to hold that error can be beneficial and truth harmful. As a proof that freethinking by no means corrupts character, Collins gives in conclusion a list of noble freethinkers from Socrates down to Locke and Tillotson. Among the replies to the views of Collins we may mention the calmly objective Boyle Lectures by Ibbot, and the sharp and witty letter of Richard Bentley, the philologist. Neither of these attacks Collins's leading principle, both fully admitting the right to employ the reason, even in religious questions; but they dispute the implication that freethinking is equivalent to contentious opposition. On the one hand, they maintain that Collins's thinking is too free, that is, unbridled, hasty, presumptuous, and paradoxical; on the other, that it is not free enough (from prejudice).

After Shaftesbury had based morality on a natural instinct for the beautiful and had made it independent of religion, as well as served the cause of free thought by a keenly ironical campaign against enthusiasm and orthodoxy, and Clarke had furnished the representatives of natural religion a useful principle of morals in the objective rationality of things, the debate concerning prophecy and miracles[1] threatened to dissipate the deistic movement into scattered theological skirmishes. At this juncture Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) led it back to the main question. His Christianity as Old as the Creation is the doomsday book of deism. It contains all that has been given above as the core of this view of religion. Christ came not to bring in a new doctrine, but to exhort to repentance and atonement, and to restore the law of nature, which is as old as the creation, as universal as reason, and as unchangeable as God, human nature, and the relations of things, which we should respect in our actions. Religion is morality; more exactly, it is the free, constant disposition to do as much good as possible, and thereby to promote the glory of God and our own welfare. For the harmony of our conduct with the rules of reason constitutes our perfection, and on this depends our happiness. Since God is infinitely blessed and self-sufficient his purpose in the moral law is man's happiness alone. Whatever a positive religion contains beyond the moral law is superstition, which puts emphasis on worthless trivialities. The true religion occupies the happy mean between miserable unfaith, on the one hand, and timorous superstition, wild fanaticism, and pietistical zeal on the other. In proclaiming the sovereignty of reason in the sphere of religion as well as elsewhere, we are only openly demanding what our opponents have tacitly acknowledged in practice (e. g.> in allegorical interpretation) from time immemorial. God has endowed us with reason in order that we should by it distinguish truth from falsehood.

[Footnote 1: The chief combatant in the conflict over the argument from prophecy, which was called forth by Whiston's corruption hypothesis, was Collins (A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, 1724). Christianity is based on Judaism; its fundamental article is that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah of the Jews, its chief proof the argument from Old Testament prophecy, which, it is true, depends on the typical or allegorical interpretation of the passages in question. Whoever rejects this cuts away the ground from under the Christian revelation, which is only the allegorical import of the revelation of the Jews.—The second proof of revelation, the argument from miracles, was shaken by Thomas Woolston (Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour, 1727-30), by his extension of the allegorical interpretation to these also. He supported himself in this by the authority of the Church Fathers, and, above all, by the argument that the accounts of the miracles, if taken literally, contradict all sense and understanding. The unavoidable doubts which arise concerning the literal interpretation of the resurrection of the dead, the healing of the sick, the driving out of devils, and the other miracles, prove that these were intended only as symbolic representations of the mysterious and wonderful effects which Jesus was to accomplish. Thus Jairus's daughter means the Jewish Church, which is to be revived at the second coming of Christ; Lazarus typifies humanity, which will be raised again at the last day; the account of the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a symbol of his spiritual resurrection from his grave in the letter of Scripture. Sherlock, whose Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus was long considered a cogent answer to the attacks of Woolston, was opposed by Peter Annet, who, without leaving the refuge of figurative interpretation open, proceeded still more regardlessly in the discovery of contradictory and incredible elements in the Gospel reports, and declared all the scriptural writers together to be liars and falsifiers. If a man believes in miracles as supernatural interferences with the regular course of nature (and they must be so taken if they are to certify to the divine origin of the Scriptures), he makes God mutable, and natural laws imperfect arrangements which stand in need of correction. The truth of religion is independent of all history.]

Thomas Chubb (1679-1747), a man of the people (he was a glove maker and tallow-chandler), and from 1715 on a participant in deistic literature and concerned to adapt the new ideas to the men of his class, preached in The True Gospel of Jesus Christ an honorable working-man's Christianity., Faith means obedience to the law of reason inculcated by Christ, not the acceptance of the facts reported about him. The gospel of Christ was preached to the poor before his death and his asserted resurrection and ascension. It is probable that Christ really lived, because of the great effect of his message; but he was a man like other men. His gospel is his teaching, not his history, his own teaching, not that of his followers—the reflections of the apostles are private opinions. Christ's teaching amounts, in effect, to these three fundamental principles: (1) Conform to the rational law of love to God and one's neighbor; this is the only ground of divine acceptance. (2) After transgression of the law, repentance and reformation are the only grounds of divine grace and forgiveness. (3) At the last day every one will be rewarded according to his works. By proclaiming these doctrines, by carrying them out in his own pure life and typical death, and by founding religio-ethical associations on the principle of brotherly equality, Christ selected the means best fitted for the attainment of his purpose, the salvation of human souls. His aim was to assure men of future happiness (and of the earthly happiness connected therewith), and to make them worthy of it; and this happiness can only be attained when from free conviction we submit ourselves to the natural moral law, which is grounded on the moral fitness of things. Everything which leads to the illusion that the favor of God is attainable by any other means than by righteousness and repentance, is pernicious; as, also, the confusion of Christian societies with legal and civil societies, which pursue entirely different aims.

Thomas Morgan (The Moral Philosopher, a Dialogue between the Christian Deist, Philalethes, and the Christian Jew, Theophanes, 1737 seq.) stands on the same ground as his predecessors, by holding that the moral truth of things is the criterion of the divinity of a doctrine, that the Christian religion is merely a restoration of natural religion, and that the apostles were not infallible. Peculiar to him are the application of the first of these principles to the Mosaic law, with the conclusion that this was not a revelation; the complete separation of the New Testament from the Old (the Church of Christ and the expected kingdom of the Jewish Messiah are as opposed to each other as heaven and earth); and the endeavor to give a more exact explanation of the origin of superstition, the pre-Christian manifestations of which he traces back to the fall of the angels, and those since Christ to the intermixture of Jewish elements. He seeks to solve his problem by a detailed critique of Israelitish history, which is lacking in sympathy but not in spirit, and in which, introducing modern relations into the earliest times, he explains the Old Testament miracles in part as myths, in part as natural phenomena, and deprives the heroes of the Jews of their moral renown. The Jewish historians are ranked among the poets; the God of Israel is reduced to a subordinate, local tutelary divinity; the moral law of Moses is characterized as a civil code limited to external conduct, to national and mundane affairs, with merely temporal sanctions, and the ceremonial law as an act of worldly statecraft; David is declared a gifted poet, musician, hypocrite, and coward; the prophets are made professors of theology and moral philosophy; and Paul is praised as the greatest freethinker of his time, who defended reason against authority and rejected the Jewish ritual law as indifferent. Whatever is spurious in Christianity is a remnant of Judaism, all its mysteries are misunderstood and falsely (i.e. literally) applied allegories. Out of regard for Jewish prejudices Christ's death was figuratively described as sacrificial, as in earlier times Moses had been forced to yield to the Egyptian superstitions of his people. Morgan looks for the final victory of the rational morality of the pure, Pauline, or deistic Christianity over the Jewish Christianity of orthodoxy. Among the works of his opponents the following deserve mention: William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, and Samuel Chandler's Vindication of the History of the Old Testament.

It maybe doubted whether Bolingbroke (died 1751; cf. p. 203) is to be classed among the deists or among their opponents. On the one hand, he finds in monotheism the original true religion, which has degenerated into superstition through priestly cunning and fantastical philosophy; in primitive Christianity, the system of natural religion, which has been transformed into a complicated and contentious science by its weak, foolish, or deceitful adherents; in theology, the corruption of religion; in Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, types of untrammeled investigation. On the other hand, he seeks to protect revelation from the reason whose cultivation he has just commended, and to keep faith and knowledge distinct, while he demands that the Bible, with all the undemonstrable and absurd elements which it contains, be accepted on its own authority. Religion is an instrument indispensable to the government for keeping the people in subjection. Only the fear of a higher power, not the reason, holds the masses in check; and the freethinkers do wrong in taking a bit out of the mouth of the sensual multitude, when it were better to add to those already there.

As Hume, the skeptic, leads empiricism to its fall, so Hume, the philosopher of religion (see below), leads deism toward dissolution. Among those who defended revealed Christianity against the deistical attacks we may mention the names of Conybeare (1732) and Joseph Butler (1736). The former argues from the imperfection and mutability of our reason to like characteristics in natural religion. Butler (cf. p. 206) does not admit that natural and revealed religion are mutually exclusive. Christian revelation lends a higher authority to natural religion, in which she finds her foundation, and adapts it to the given relations and needs of mankind, adding, however, to the rational law of virtue new duties toward God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. It is evident that in order to be able to deal with their opponents, the apologetes are forced to accommodate themselves to the deistic principle of a rational criticism of revelation.

Notwithstanding the fear which this principle inspired in the men of the time, it soon penetrated the thought even of its opponents, and found its way into the popular mind through the channels of the Illumination.

Although it was often defended and applied with violence and with a superfluous hatred of the clergy, it forms the justifiable element in the endeavors of the deists. It is a commonplace to-day that everything which claims to be true and valid must justify itself before the criticism of reason; but then this principle, together with the distinction between natural and positive religion based upon it, exerted an enlightening and liberating influence. The real flaw in the deistical theory, which was scarcely felt as such, even by its opponents, was its lack of religious feeling and all historical sense, a lack which rendered the idea acceptable that religions could be "made," and priestly falsehoods become world-moving forces. Hume was the first to seek to rise above this unspeakable shallowness. There was a remarkable conflict between the ascription to man, on the one hand, of an assured treasure of religious knowledge in the reason, and the abandonment of him, on the other, to the juggling of cunning priests and despots. Thus the deists had no sense either for the peculiarities of an inward religious feeling, which, in happy prescience, rises above the earthly circle of moral duties to the world beyond, or for the involuntary, historically necessary origin and growth of the particular forms of religion. Here, again, we find that turning away from will and feeling to thought, from history to nature, from the oppressive complexity of that which has been developed to the simplicity of that which is original, which we have noted as one of the most prominent characteristics of the modern period.

%3. Moral Philosophy.%

The watchword of deism was "independence in religion"; that of modern ethical philosophy is "independence in morals." Hobbes had given this out in opposition to the mediaeval dependence of ethics on theology; now it was turned against himself, for he had delivered morality from ecclesiastical bondage only to subject it to the no less oppressive and unworthy yoke of the civil power. Selfish consideration, so he had taught, leads men to transfer by contract all power to the ruler. Right is that which the sovereign enjoins, wrong that which he forbids. Thus morality was conceived in a purely negative way as justice, and based on interest and agreement. Cumberland, recognizing the one-sidedness of the first of these positions, announces the principle of universal benevolence, at which Bacon had hinted before him, and in which he is followed by the school of Shaftesbury. Opposition to the foundation of ethics on self-love and convention, again, springs up in three forms, one idealistic, one logical, and one aesthetic. Ethical ideas have not arisen artificially through shrewd calculation and agreement, but have a natural origin. Cudworth, returning to Plato and Descartes, assumes an innate idea of the good. Clarke and Woolston base moral distinctions on the rational order of things, and characterize the ethically good action as a logical truth translated into practice. Shaftesbury derives ethical ideas and actions from a natural instinct for judging the good and the beautiful. Moreover, Hobbes's ethics of interest experiences, first, correction at the hands of Locke (who, along with a complete recognition of the "legal" character of the good, distinguishes the sphere of morality from that of mere law, and brings it under the law of "reputation," hence of a "tacit" agreement), and then a frivolous intensification under Mandeville and Bolingbroke. A preliminary conclusion is reached in the ethical labors of Hume and Smith.

Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae, 1672) turns to experience with the questions, In what does morality consist? Whence does it arise? and What is the nature of moral obligation? and finds these answers: Those actions are good, or in conformity to the moral law of nature, which promote the common good (commune bonum summa lex). Individual welfare must be subordinated to the good of all, of which it forms only a part. The psychological roots of virtuous action are the social and disinterested affections, which nature has implanted in all beings, especially in those endowed with reason. There is nothing in man more pleasing to God than love. We recognize our obligation to the virtue of benevolence, or that God commands it, from the rewards and punishments which we perceive to follow the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the law,—the subordination of individual to universal good is the only means of attaining true happiness and contentment. Men are dependent on mutual benevolence. He who labors for the good of the whole system of rational beings furthers thereby the welfare of the individual parts, among whom he himself is one; individual happiness cannot be separated from general happiness. All duties are implied in the supreme one: Give to others, and preserve thyself. This principle of benevolence, advanced by Cumberland with homely simplicity, received in the later development of English ethics, for which it pointed out the way, a more careful foundation.

The series of emancipations of morality begins with the Intellectual System of Ralph Cud worth (The Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678; A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 1731). Ethical ideas come neither from experience nor from civil legislation nor from the will of God, but are necessary ideas in the divine and the human reason. Because of their simplicity, universality, and immutability, it is impossible for them to arise from experience, which never yields anything but that which is particular and mutable. It is just as impossible that they should spring from political constitutions, which have a temporal origin, which are transitory, and which differ from one another. For if obedience to positive law is right and disobedience wrong, then moral distinctions must have existed before the law; if, on the other hand, obedience to the civil law is morally indifferent, then more than ever is it impossible that this should be the basis of the moral distinctions in question. A law can bind us only in virtue of that which is necessarily, absolutely, or per se right; therefore the good is independent, also, of the will of God. The absolutely good is an eternal truth which God does not create by an act of his will, but which he finds present in his reason, and which, like the other ideas, he impresses on created spirits. On the a priori ideas depends the possibility of science, for knowledge is the perception of necessary truth.

In agreement with Cudworth that the moral law is dependent neither on human compact nor on the divine will, Samuel Clarke (died 1729) finds the eternal principles of justice, goodness, and truth, which God observes in his government of the universe, and which should also be the guide of human action, embodied in the nature of things or in their properties, powers, and relations, in virtue of which certain things, relations, and modes of action are suited to one another, and others not. Morality is the subjective conformity of conduct to this objective fitness of things; the good is the fitting. Moral rules, to which we are bound by conscience and by rational insight, are valid independently of the command of God and of all hope or fear in reference to the life to come, although the principles of religion furnish them an effective support, and one which is almost indispensable in view of the weakness of human nature. They are not universally observed, indeed, but universally acknowledged; even the vicious man cannot refrain from praising virtue in others. He who is induced by the voice of passion to act contrary to the eternal relations or harmony of things, contradicts his own reason in thus undertaking to disturb the order of the universe; he commits the absurdity of willing that things should be that which they are not. Injustice is in practice that which falsity and contradiction are in theoretical affairs. In his well-known controversy with Leibnitz, Clarke defends the freedom of the will against the determinism of the German philosopher.

In William Wollaston (died 1724), with whom the logical point of view becomes still more apparent, Clarke found a thinker who shared his convictions that the subjective moral principle of interest was insufficient, and, hence, an objective principle to be sought; that morality consists in the suitableness of the action to the nature and destination of the object, and that, in the last analysis, it is coincident with truth. The highest destination of man is, on the one hand, to know the truth, and, on the other, to express it in actions. That act is good whose execution includes the affirmation (and its omission the negation) of a truth. According to the law of nature, a rational being ought so to conduct himself that he shall never contradict a truth by his actions, i. e., to treat each thing for what it is. Every immoral action is a false judgment; the violation of a contract is a practical denial of it. The man who is cruel to animals declares by his act that the creature maltreated is something which in fact it is not, a being devoid of feeling. The murderer acts as though he were able to restore life to his victim. He who, in disobedience toward God, deals with things in a way contrary to their nature, behaves as though he were mightier than the author of nature. To this equation of truth and morality happiness is added as a third identical member. The truer the pleasures of a being the happier it is; and a pleasure is untrue whenever more (of pain) is given for it than it is worth. A rational being contradicts itself when it pursues an irrational pleasure.—The course of moral philosophy has passed over the logical ethics of Clarke and Wollaston as an abstract and unfruitful idiosyncrasy, and it is certain that with both of these thinkers their plans were greater than their performances. But the search for an ethical norm which should be universally valid and superior to the individual will, did not lack justification in contrast to the subjectivism of the other two schools of the time—the school of interest and the school of benevolence, which made virtue a matter of calculation or of feeling.

* * * * *

The English ethics of the period culminates in Shaftesbury (1671-1713), who, reared on the principles of his grandfather's friend Locke, formed his artistic sense on the models of classical antiquity, to recall to the memory of his age the Greek ideal of a beautiful humanity. Philosophy, as the knowledge of ourselves and that which is truly good, a guide to morality and happiness; the world and virtue, a harmony; the good, the beautiful as well; the whole, a controlling force in the particular—these views, and his tasteful style of exposition, make Shaftesbury a modern Greek; it is only his bitterness against Christianity which betrays the son of the new era. Among the studies collected under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711, the most important are those on Enthusiasm, on Wit and Humor, on Virtue and Merit, and the Moralists.[1]

[Footnote 1: Georg v. Gizycki has written on Shaftesbury's philosophy, 1876. [Cf. Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutchison, English Philosophers Series, 1882.—TR.]

Shaftesbury's fundamental metaphysical concept is aesthetic: unity in variety is for him the all-pervasive law of the world. In every case where parts work in mutual dependence toward a common result, there rules a central unity, uniting and animating the members. The lowest of these substantial unities is the ego, the common source of our thoughts and feelings. But as the parts of the organism are governed and held together by the soul, so individuals are joined with one another into species and genera by higher unities. Each individual being is a member in a system of creatures, which a common nature binds together. Moreover, since order and harmony are spread throughout the world, and no one thing exists out of relation to all others and to the whole, the universe must be conceived as animated by a formative power which works purposively; this all-ruling unity is the soul of the world, the universal mind, the Deity. The finality and beauty of those parts of the world which we can know justifies the inference to a like constitution of those which are unapproachable, so that we may be certain that the numerous evils which we find in the details, work for the good of a system superior to them, and that all apparent imperfections contribute to the perfection of the whole. As our philosopher makes use of the idea of the world-harmony to support theism and the theodicy, so, further, he derives the content of morality from it, thus giving ethics a natural basis independent of self-interest and conventional fancies.

A being is good when its impulses toward the preservation and welfare of the species is strong, and those directed to its own good not too strong. The virtue of a rational being is distinguished from the goodness of a merely "sensible creature" by the fact that man not only possesses impulses, but reflects upon them, that he approves or disapproves his own conduct and that of others, and thus makes his affections the object of a higher, reflective, judging affection. This faculty of moral distinctions, the sense for right and wrong, or, which amounts to the same thing, for beauty and ugliness, is innate; we approve virtue and condemn vice by nature, not as the result of a compact, and from this natural feeling for good and evil exercise develops a cultivated moral taste or tact. And when, further, the reason, by means of this faculty of judgment, gains control over the passions, man becomes an ethical artist, a moral virtuoso.

Virtue pleases by its own worth and beauty, not because of any external advantage. We must not corrupt the love of the good for its own sake by mixing with it the hope of future reward, which at the best is admissible only as a counter-weight against evil passions. When Shaftesbury speaks of future bliss, his highest conception of the heavenly life is uninterrupted friendship, magnanimity, and nobility, as a continual rewarding of virtue by new virtue.

The good is the beautiful, and the beautiful is the harmonious, the symmetrical; hence the essence of virtue consists in the balance of the affections and passions. Of the three classes into which Shaftesbury divides the passions, one, including the "unnatural" or unsocial affections, as malevolence, envy, and cruelty, which aim neither at the good of the individual nor that of others, is always and entirely evil.

The two other classes, the social (or "natural") affections and the "self-affections," may be virtuous or vicious, according to their degree, i. e., according to the relation of their strength to that of the other affections. In itself a benevolent impulse is never too strong; it can become so only in comparison with self-love, or in respect to the constitution of the individual in question, and conversely. Commonly the social impulses do not attain the normal standard, while the selfish exceed it; but the opposite case also occurs. Excessive parental tenderness, the pity which enervates and makes useless for aid, religious zeal for making converts, passionate partisanship, are examples of too violent social affections which interfere with the activity of the other inclinations. Just as erroneous, on the other side, is the neglect of one's own good. For although the possession of selfish inclinations does not make a man virtuous, yet the lack of them is a moral defect, since they are indispensable to the general good. No one can be useful to others who does not keep himself in a condition for service. The impulse to care for private welfare is good and necessary in so far as it comports with the general welfare or contributes to this. The due proportion between the social passions, which constitute the direct source of good, and those of self-love, consists in subordinating the latter to the former. The kinship of this ethics of harmony with the ethical views of antiquity is evident. It is completed by the eudemonistic conclusion of the system.

As the harmony of impulses constitutes the essence of virtue, so also it is the way to true happiness. Experience shows that unsocial, unsympathetic, vicious men are miserable; that love to society is the richest source of happiness; that even pity for the suffering of others occasions more pleasure than pain. Virtue secures us the love and respect of others, secures us, above all, the approval of our own conscience, and true happiness consists in satisfaction with ourselves. The search after this pure, constant, spiritual pleasure in the good, which is never accompanied by satiety and disgust, should not be called self-seeking; he alone takes pleasure in the good who is already good himself.

Shaftesbury is not well disposed toward positive Christianity, holding that it has made virtue mercenary by its promises of heavenly rewards, removed moral questions entirely out of this world into the world to come, and taught men most piously to torment one another out of pure supernatural brotherly love. In opposition to such transcendental positions Shaftesbury, a priest of the modern view of the world, gives virtue a home on earth, seeks the hand of Providence in the present world, and teaches men to reach faith in God by inspiring contemplation of the well-ordered universe. Virtue without piety is possible, indeed, though not complete. But morality is first and fixed, hence it is the condition and the criterion of genuine religion. Revelation does not need to fear free rational criticism, for the Scriptures are accredited by their contents. Besides reason, banter is with Shaftesbury a second means for distinguishing the genuine from the spurious: ridicule is the test of truth, and wit and humor the only cure for enthusiasm. With these he scourges the over-pious as religious parasites, who for safety's sake prefer to believe too much rather than too little.

Before Shaftesbury's theory of the moral sense and the disinterested affections had gained adherents and developers, the danger, which indeed had not always been escaped, that man might content himself with the satisfaction of possessing noble impulses, without taking much care to realize them in useful actions, called forth by way of reaction, a paradoxical attempt at an apology for vice. Mandeville, a London physician of French extraction, and born in Holland, had aroused attention by his poem, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turned Honest, 1706, and in response to vehement attacks upon his work, had added a commentary to the second edition, The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices Public Benefits, 1714. The moral of the fable is that the welfare of a society depends on the industry of its members, and this, in turn, on their passions and vices. Greed, extravagance, envy, ambition, and rivalry are the roots of the acquisitive impulse, and contribute more to the public good than benevolence and the control of desire. Virtue is good for the individual, it is true, since it makes him contented with himself and acceptable to God and man, but great states require stronger motives to labor and industry in order to be prosperous. A people among whom frugality, self-denial, and quietness of spirit were the rule would remain poor and ignorant. Besides holding that virtue furthers the happiness of society, Shaftesbury makes a second mistake in assuming that human nature includes unselfish inclinations. It is not innate love and goodness that make us social, but our passions and weaknesses (above all, fear); man is by nature self-seeking. All actions, including the so-called virtues, spring from vanity and egoism; thus it has always been, thus it is in every grade of society. In social life, indeed, we dare not display all these desires openly, nor satisfy them at will. Shrewd lawgivers have taught men to conceal their natural passions and to limit them by artificial ones, persuading them that renunciation is true happiness, on the ground that through it we attain the supreme good—reputation among, and the esteem of our fellows. Since then honor and shame have become the strongest motives and have incited men to that which is called virtue, i.e., to actions which apparently imply the sacrifice of selfish inclinations for the good of society, while they are really done out of pride and self-love. By constantly feigning noble sentiments before others man comes, finally, to deceive himself, believing himself a being whose happiness consists in the renunciation of self and all that is earthly, and in the thought of his moral excellence.—The crass assumptions in Mandeville's reasoning are evident at a glance. After analyzing virtue into the suppression of desire, after labeling the impulse after moral approbation vanity, lawful self-love egoism, and rational acquisitiveness avarice, it was easy for him to prove that it is vice which makes the individual industrious and the state prosperous, that virtue is seldom found, and that if it were universal it would become injurious to society.

With different shading and with less one-sidedness, Bolingbroke (cf. p. 193) defended the standpoint of naturalism. God has created us for happiness in common; we are destined to assist one another. Happiness is attainable in society alone, and society cannot exist without justice and benevolence. He who exercises virtue, i.e., promotes the good of the species, promotes at the same time his own good. All actions spring from self-love, which, guided at first by an immediate instinct, and later, by reason developed through experience, extends itself over ever widening spheres. We love ourselves in our relatives, in our friends, further still, in our country, finally, in humanity, so that self-love and social love coincide, and we are impelled to virtue by the combined motives of interest and duty. This is an ethic of common sense from the standpoint of the cultured man of the world—which at the proper time has the right, no doubt, to gain itself a hearing.

Meanwhile Shaftesbury's ideas had impressed Hutcheson and Butler, according to the peculiarities of each. Both of these writers deem it necessary to explain and correct the distinction between the selfish and the benevolent affections by additions, which were of influence on the ethics of Hume; both devote their zeal to the new doctrine of feelings of reflection or moral taste, in which the former gives more prominence to the aesthetic, merely judging factor, the latter to the active or mandatory one.

Francis Hutcheson[1] (died 1747), professor at Glasgow, in his posthumous System of Moral Philosophy, 1755, which had been preceded by an Inquiry concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725, pursues the double aim of showing against Hobbes and Locke the originality and disinterestedness both of benevolence and of moral approval. Virtue is not exercised because it brings advantage to the agent, nor approved on account of advantage to the observer.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Fowler's treatise, cited above—TR.]

(1) The benevolent affections are entirely independent of self-love and regard for the rewards of God and of man, nay, independent even of the lofty satisfaction afforded by self-approbation. This last, indeed, is vouchsafed to us only when we seek the good of others without personal aims: the joy of inward approval is the result of virtue, not the motive to it. If love were in reality a concealed egoism, it would yield to control in cases where it promises advantage, which, as experience shows, is not the fact. Benevolence is entirely natural and as universal in the moral world as gravitation in the corporeal; and like gravitation further in that its intensity increases with propinquity—the nearer the persons, the greater the love. Benevolence is more widespread than malevolence; even the criminal does more innocent and kind acts in his life than criminal ones—the rarity of the latter is the reason why so much is said about them.

(2) Moral judgment is also entirely uninfluenced by consideration of the advantageous or disadvantageous results for the agent or the spectator. The beauty of a good deed arouses immediate satisfaction. Through the moral sense we feel pleasure at observing a virtuous action, and aversion when we perceive an ignoble one, feelings which are independent of all thought of the rewards and punishments promised by God, as well as of the utility or harm for ourselves. Hutcheson argues a complete distinction between moral approval and the perception of the agreeable and the useful, from the facts that we judge a benevolent action which is forced, or done from motives of personal advantage, quite differently from one inspired by love; that we pay esteem to high-minded characters whether their fortunes be good or ill; and that we are moved with equal force by fictitious actions, as, for instance, on the stage, and by those which really take place.

(3) A few further particulars may be emphasized from the comprehensive systematization which Hutcheson industriously and thoughtfully gave to Shaftesbury's ideas. Two points reveal the forerunner of Hume. First, the rôle assigned to the reason in moral affairs is merely subsidiary. Our motive to action is never the knowledge of a true proposition, but always simply a wish, affection, or impulse. Ultimate ends are given by the feelings alone; the reason can only discover the means thereto. Secondly, the turbulent, blind, rapidly passing passions are distinguished from the calm, permanent affections, which are mediated by cognition. The latter are the nobler; among them, in turn, the highest place is occupied by those conducive to the general good, whose worth is still further determined by the extent of their objects. From this is derived the law that a kind affection receives the more lively approval, the more calm and deliberate it is, the higher the degree of happiness experienced by the object of the action, and the greater the number of persons affected by it. Patriotism and love of mankind in general are higher virtues than affection for friends and children. As the goal of the self-regarding affections, perfection makes its appearance—for the first time in English ethics—by the side of happiness.

Joseph Butler[1] (1692-1752; Sermons on Human Nature, 1726; cf. p. 194) maintains still more strictly than Hutcheson the immediateness both of the affections and the moral estimation of them. He declares that even the self-regarding impulses as such are un-egoistic, and makes moral judgment leave out of view all consequences, either foreseen or present, whereas his predecessor had resolved the goodness of the action into its advantageous effects (not for the agent and the spectator, but for its object and) for society. The conscience—so Butler terms the moral sense—directly approves or disapproves characters and actions in themselves, no matter what good or ill they occasion in the world. We judge a mode of action good, not because it is useful to society, but because it corresponds to the demands of the conscience. This must be unconditionally obeyed, whatever be the issue. We must not act contrary to truth and justice, even if it should seem to bring about more happiness than misery.—Butler, too, furnishes material for the ethics of Hume, by his revival of the separation, previously defended by the Stoics, of desire and passion from self-love or interest. Self-love desires a thing because it expects pleasure from it, but the natural impulses impel us toward their objects immediately, i. e., without a representation of the pleasure to be gained; and repetition is necessary before the artificial motive of egoistic pleasure-seeking can be added to the natural motive of inborn desire. Self-love always presupposes original, immediate affections.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Collins's Butler, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics. 1881.—TR.]

The English moral science of the century is brought to a conclusion by Adam Smith[1] (1723-90), the celebrated founder of political economy.[2] Smith not only takes into consideration—like his greater friend, Hume—all the problems proposed by his predecessors, but, further (in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, published while he was professor at Glasgow), combines the various attempts at their solution, not by eclectic co-ordination but by working them over for himself, and arranges them on a uniform principle, thus accomplishing a work which has not yet received due recognition beyond the limits of his native land. He reached this comprehensive moral principle by recognizing the full bearing of a thought which Hume had incidentally expressed, that moral judgment depends on participation in the feelings of the agent, and by following out with fine psychological observation this sympathy of men into its first and last manifestations. In this way a twofold kind of morality was revealed to him: mere propriety of behavior and real merit in action. On the one hand, that is, the sympathy of the spectator—as Hume has one-sidedly emphasized—is directed to the utility of the consequences (or to the "merit") of the action, and, on the other, to the fitness of the motives (or their "propriety"). An action is proper when the impartial spectator is able to sympathize with its motive, and meritorious if he can sympathize also with its end or effect; i.e., if, in the first case, the feelings are suitable to their objects (neither too strong nor too weak), and, in the second case, the consequences of the act are advantageous to others. Merit = propriety + utility. The main conclusion is this: Sympathy is that by means of which virtue is recognized and approved, as well as that which is approved as virtue; it is ratio cognoscendi as well as ratio essendi, the criterion as well as the source of morality. Thus Smith endeavors to solve the two principal problems of English ethics—the criterion and the origin of virtue—with a common answer.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Farrer's Adam Smith, English Philosophers Series, 1880.—TR.]

[Footnote 2: The epoch-making work, with which he called economic science into existence, The Wealth of Nations\ appeared in 1776. Cf. Wilhelm Hassbach, Untersuchungen über Adam Smith, Leipsic, 1891.]

"Sympathy" denotes primarily nothing more than the innate and purely formal power of imitating to a certain degree the feelings of others. From this modest germ is developed by a progressive growth the wide-spreading tree of morality: moral judgment, the moral imperative with its religious sanction, and ethical character. Accordingly we may distinguish different stages in the development of sympathy—the psychological stage of mere fellow-feeling, the aesthetic stage of moral appreciation, the imperative stage of moral precepts, which further on are construed as commands of God (the famous Kantian definition of religion was announced in Glasgow a generation earlier than in Königsberg), finally, the concluding stage wherein these laws of duty are taken up into the disposition. Besides these, there results from the mechanism of the sympathetic feelings a series of phenomena, which, although they do not entirely conform to the ethical standard, yet exercise a salutary effect on the permanence of society; e.g., our exceptional judgment of the deeds of the great, the rich, and the fortunate, as also the higher worth ascribed to good (and, conversely, the greater guilt to bad) intentions when successfully carried out into action, in comparison with those which fall short of their result.

The first, the purely psychological stage, includes three cases. The spectator sympathizes (1) with the feelings of the agent; (2) with the gratitude or anger of the person affected by the action; (3) the person observed sympathizes in return with the imitative and judging feelings of the spectator.

The fundamental laws of sympathy are as follows: We are roused to imitate the feeling of another by the perception either of its signs (its natural consequences or its natural expression in visible and audible motions), or of its causes (the circumstances and experiences which occasion it), the latter exercising a more potent influence than the former. The wooden leg of the beggar is more effective in exciting our pity than his anxious air; the sight of dental instruments is more eloquent than the plaints of the sufferer from toothache. In order to be able to imitate vividly the feelings of a person, we must know the causes of them.—The feeling of the spectator is, on the average, less intense than that of the person observed, so long as the latter does not control and repress his emotions in view of the calmness of the former. The difference of intensity between the original and the sympathetic feelings differs widely with the various classes of emotions. It is difficult to take part in feelings which arise from bodily conditions, but easy to share those in the production of which the imagination is concerned—hence easier to share in hope and fear than in pleasure and pain.—We sympathize more readily with feelings which are agreeable to the observer, the observed, and other participants than with such as are not so; more willingly, therefore, with cheerfulness, love, benevolence than with grief, hatred, malevolence. This is not only true of temporary affections, but especially of those general dispositions which depend on a more or less happy situation in life; we sympathize more vividly with the fortunes of the rich and noble, because we consider them happier than the poor and lowly. Wealth and high rank are objects of general desire chiefly because their possessor enjoys the advantage of knowing that whatever gives him joy or sorrow always arouses similar feelings in countless other men. The root of all ambition is the wish to rule over the hearts of our fellows by compelling them to make our feelings their own; the central nerve of all happiness consists in seeing our own sensations shared by those about us and reflected back, as it were, from manifold mirrors. Small annoyances often have a diverting effect on the spectator; great success easily excites his envy; great sorrows and minor joys, on the contrary, are always sure of our sympathy. Hence the morose man, to whom everything is an occasion of ill-humor, is nowhere welcome, and the man of cheerful disposition, who rejoices in each little event and whose good spirits are contagious, everywhere.

Not less admirable than the fine gift of observation which guides Smith in his discovery of the primary manifestations and the laws of sympathy is the skill with which he deduces moral phenomena, from the simplest to the most complex—moral judgment, the moral law, its application to one's own conduct, the conscience—from the interchange of sympathetic feelings. From involuntary comparison of the representative feeling of the spectator with its original in the person observed arises an agreeable or disagreeable feeling of judgment, a judgment of value, approbating or rejecting the latter. This is approving when the intensity of the original harmonizes with that of the copy, disapproving when the former exceeds or fails to attain the latter. In the one case the emotion is judged suitable to the object which causes it; in the other, too violent or too weak. It is always a certain mean of passion which, as "proper," receives approval (esteem, love, or admiration). In the case of the social passions excess is more readily condoned, in the case of the unsocial and selfish ones, defect; hence we judge the over-sensitive more leniently than the over-vengeful. Anger must be well-grounded and must express itself with great moderation to arouse in the spectator a like degree of sympathetic resentment. For here the sympathy of the spectator is divided between two parties, and fellow-feeling with the angry one is weakened by fear for the person menaced by him, whereas, in the case of kind affections, sympathy is increased by doubling. While our judgment of propriety or decorum rests on simple participation in the sentiments of the agent, our judgment of merit and demerit is based, in addition, on sympathy with the feelings of gratitude or resentment experienced by the person on whom the action terminates. An act is meritorious if it appears to us to deserve thanks and reward, ill-deserving if it seems to merit resentment and punishment. Nature has inscribed on the heart, apart from all reflection on the utility of punishment, an independent, immediate, and instinctive approbation of the sacred law of retribution. This is the point at which a hitherto purely contemplative sympathy passes over into an active impulse, which prepares us to support the victim of attack and insult in his defense and revenge.

This participation in the circumstances and feelings of others is a reciprocal phenomenon. The spectator takes pains to share the sentiments of the person observed; and the latter, on his part, endeavors to reduce the emotions which move him to a degree which will render participation in them possible for the former. In these reciprocal efforts we have the beginnings of the two classes of virtues—the gentle, amiable virtues of sympathy and sensibility, and the exalted, estimable virtues of self-denial and self-command. Both of these conditions of mind, however, are considered virtues only when they are manifested in unusual intensity: humanity is a remarkably delicate fellow-feeling, greatness of soul a rare degree of self-command. (The consideration for those about one which is ethically demanded is given, moreover, to a certain extent involuntarily. The man in trouble and the merry man alike restrain themselves in the company of persons who are indifferent, or in an opposite mood, while they give rein to their emotions when with those similarly affected. Joy is enhanced by sympathy, and grief mitigated.) Thus the perfection of human nature and the divinely willed harmony among the feelings of men are dependent on every man feeling little for himself and much for others; on his holding his selfish inclinations in check and giving free course to his benevolent ones. This is the injunction of Christianity as well as of nature. And as, on the one hand, the content of the moral law is thus deduced from sympathy, so, on the other, this yields the formal criterion of good: Look upon thy sentiments and actions in the light in which the impartial spectator would see them. Conscience is the spectator taken up into our own breast. It remains to consider the origin of this third, imperative stage.

From daily experience of the fact that we judge the conduct of others, and they ours, and from the wish to gain their approval, arises the habit of subjecting our own actions to criticism. We learn to look at ourselves through the eyes of others, we assign the spectator and judge a place in our own heart, we make his calm objective judgment our own, and hear the man within calling to us: Thou art responsible for thy acts and intentions. In this way we are placed in a position to overcome two great delusions, one of passion, which overestimates the present at the expense of the future, and one of self-love, which overestimates the individual at the expense of other men; delusions from which the impartial spectator is free, for the pleasure of the moment seems to him no more desirable than pleasure to come, and one person is just the same to him as another. Through comparison of like cases in the exercise of self-examination certain rules or principles are formed concerning what is right and good. Reverence for these general rules of living is called the sense of duty. The last step in the process consists in our enhancement of the binding authority of moral rules by looking on them as commands of God. Here Smith adds subtle discussions of the question, in what cases actions ought to be done simply out of regard for these abstract maxims, and in what others we welcome the co-operation of a natural impulse or passion. We ought to be angry and to punish with reluctance, merely because reason enjoins it, but, on the other hand, we should be benevolent and grateful from affection; she is not a model wife who performs her duties merely from a sense of duty, and not from inclination also. Further, in all cases where the rules cannot be formulated with perfect exactness and definiteness (as they can in the case of justice), and are not absolutely valid without exception, reverence for them must be assisted by a natural taste for modifying and supplementing the general maxims to suit particular instances.

In this sketch of the course of Smith's moral philosophy much that is fine and much that is of importance has of necessity been passed over—his excellent analysis of the relations of benevolence and justice, and numerous descriptions of traits of character, e. g., his ingenious parallel between pride and vanity. We may briefly mention, in conclusion, his observations on the irregularities of moral judgment. Prosperity and success exert an influence on this, which, though hurtful to its purity, must, on the whole, be considered advantageous to mankind. Our lenience toward the defects of princes, the great, and the rich, and our over-praise for their excellent qualities are, from the moral standpoint, an injustice, but one which has this advantage, that it encourages ambition and industry, and maintains social distinctions intact, which without loyalty and respect toward superiors would be broken down. For most men the road to fortune coincides with the path to virtue. Again, it is a beneficent provision of nature that we put a higher estimate on a successfully executed act of benevolence, and reward it more, than a kind intention which fails of execution; that we judge and punish the purposed crime which is not carried out more leniently than the one which is completed; that we even ascribe a certain degree of accountability to an unintentional act of good or evil—although in these cases the moralist is compelled to see an ethically unjustifiable corruption of the judgment by external success or failure beyond the control of the agent. The first of these irregularities does not allow the man of good intentions to content himself with noble desires merely, but spurs him on to greater endeavors to carry them out—man is created for action; the second protects us from the inquisitorial questioning of motives, for it is easy for the most innocent to fall under grave suspicion. To this inconsistency of feeling we owe the necessary legal principle that deeds only, not intentions, are punishable. God has reserved for himself judgment concerning dispositions. The third irregularity, that he who inflicts unintentional injury is not guilty, even in his own eyes, but yet seems bound to make atonement and reparation, is useful in so far as it warns everyone to be prudent, while the corresponding illusion, in virtue of which we are grateful to an involuntary benefactor—for instance, the bearer of good tidings—and reward him, is at least not harmful, for any reason appears sufficient for the bestowal of kind intentions and actions.

It is impossible to explain in brief the relation of Smith's ethical theory to his political economy. His merit in the former consists in his comprehensive and characteristic combination of the results reached by his predecessors, and in his preparation for Kantian views, so far as this was possible from the empirical standpoint of the English. His impartial spectator was the forerunner of the categorical imperative.

English ethics after Smith may, almost without exception, be termed eclecticism. This is true of Ferguson (Institutes of Moral Philosophy, 1769); of Paley (1785); of the Scottish School (Dugald Stewart, 1793). Bentham's utilitarianism was the first to bring in a new phase.

%4. Theory of Knowledge.%

(a) %Berkeley%.—George Berkeley, a native of Ireland, Bishop of Cloyne (1685-1753; An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision, 1709; A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710; Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713; Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 1732, against the freethinkers; Works, 1784. Fraser's edition of the Collected Works appeared in 1871, in four volumes),[1] is related to Locke as Spinoza to Descartes. He notices blemishes and contradictions allowed by his predecessor to remain, and, recognizing that the difficulty is not to be remedied by minor corrections and artificial hypotheses, goes back to the fundamental principles, takes these more earnestly than their author, and, by carrying them out more strictly, arrives at a new view of the world. The points in Locke's doctrines which invited a further advance were the following: Locke proclaims that our knowledge extends no further than our ideas, and that truth consists in the agreement of ideas among themselves, not in the agreement of ideas with things. But this principle had scarcely been announced before it was violated. In spite of his limitation of knowledge to ideas, Locke maintains that we know (if not the inner constitution, yet) the qualities and powers of things without us, and have a "sensitive" certainty of their existence. Against this, it is to be said that there are no primary qualities, that is, qualities which exist without as well as within us. Extension, motion, solidity, which are cited as such, are just as purely subjective states in us as color, heat, and sweetness. Impenetrability is nothing more than the feeling of resistance, an idea, therefore, which self-evidently can be nowhere else than in the mind experiencing it. Extension, size, distance, and motion are not even sensations (we see colors only, not quantitative determinations), but relations which we in thinking add to the sense-qualities (secondary qualities), and which we are not able to represent apart from them; their relativity alone would forbid us to consider them objective. And material substances, the "support" of qualities invented by the philosophers, are not only unknown, but entirely non-existent. Abstract matter is a phrase without meaning, and individual things are collections of ideas in us, nothing more. If we take away all sense-qualities from a thing, absolutely nothing remains. Our ideas are not merely the only; objects of knowledge, but also the only existing things—nothing exists except minds and their ideas. Spirits alone are active beings, they only are indivisible substances, and have real existence, while the being of bodies (as dependent, inert, variable beings, which are in a constant process of becoming) consists alone in their appearance to spirits and their being perceived by them. Incogitative, hence passive, beings are neither substances, nor capable of producing ideas in us. Those ideas which we do not ourselves produce are the effects of a spirit which is mightier than we. With this a second inconsistency was removed which had been overlooked by Locke, who had ascribed active power to spirits alone and denied it to matter, but at the same time had made the former affected by the latter. If external sense is to mean the capacity for having ideas occasioned by the action of external material things, then there is no external sense. A third point wherein Locke had not gone far enough for his successor, concerned the favorite English doctrine of nominalism. Locke, with his predecessors, had maintained that all reality is individual, and that universals exist only in the abstracting understanding. From this point Berkeley advances a step further, the last, indeed, which was possible in this direction, by bringing into question the possibility even of abstract ideas. As all beings are particular things, so all ideas are particular ideas.

[Footnote 1: Cf. also Fraser's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philosophical
Classics) 1881; Eraser's Selections from Berkeley, 4th ed., 1891; and
Krauth's edition of the Principles, 1874, with notes from several
sources, especially those translated from Ueberweg.—TR.]

Berkeley looks on the refutation of these two fundamental mistakes—the assumption of general ideas in the mind, and the belief in the existence of a material world outside it—as his life work, holding them the chief sources of atheism, doubt, and philosophical discord. The first of these errors arises from the use of language. Because we employ words which denote more than one object, we have believed ourselves warranted in concluding that we have ideas which correspond to the extension of the words in question, and which contain only those characteristics which are uniformly found in all objects so named. This, however, is not the case.[1] We speak of many things which we cannot represent: names do not always stand for ideas. The definition of the word triangle as a three-sided figure bounded by straight lines, makes demands upon us which our faculties of imagination are never fully able to meet; for the triangle that we represent to ourselves is always either right-angled or oblique-angled, and not—as we must demand from the abstract conception of the figure—both and neither at once. The name "man" includes men and women, children and the aged, but we are never able to represent a man except as an individual of a definite age and sex. Nevertheless we are in a position to make a safe use of these non-presentative but useful abbreviations, and by means of a particular idea to develop truths of wider application. This takes place when, in the demonstration, those qualities are not considered which distinguish the idea from others with a like name. In this case the given idea stands for all others which are known by the same name; the representative idea is not universal, but serves as such. Thus when I have demonstrated the proposition, the sum of all the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, for a given triangle, I do not need to prove it for every triangle thereafter. For not only the color and size of the triangle are indifferent, but its other peculiarities as well; the question whether it is right-angled or obtuse-angled, whether it has equal sides, whether it has equal or unequal angles, is not mentioned in the demonstration, and has no influence upon it. Abstracta exist only in this sense. In considering the individual Paul I can attend exclusively to those characteristics which he has in common with all men or with all living beings, but it is impossible for me to represent this complex of common qualities apart from his individual peculiarities. Self-observation shows that we have no general concepts; reason, that we can have none, for the combination of opposite elements in one idea would be a contradiction in terms. Motion in general, neither swift nor slow, extension in general, at once great and small, abstract matter without sensuous determinations—these can neither exist nor be perceived.

[Footnote 1: Against the Berkeleyan denial of abstract notions the popular philosopher, Joh. Jak. Engel, directed an essay, Ueber die Realität allgemeiner Begriffe (Engel's Schriften, vol. x.), to which attention has been called by O. Liebmann, Analysis tier Wirklichkeit, 2d ed., p. 473.]

The "materialistic" hypothesis—so Berkeley terms the assumption that a material world exists apart from perceiving mind, and independently of being perceived—is, first, unnecessary, for the facts which it is to explain can be explained as well, or even better, without it; and, second, false, since it is a contradiction to suppose that an object can exist unperceived, and that a sensation or idea is the copy of anything itself not a sensation or idea. Ideas are the only objects of the understanding. Sensible qualities (white, sweet) are subjective states of the soul; sense objects (sugar), sensation-complexes. If sensations need a substantial support, this is the soul which perceives them, not an external thing which can neither perceive nor be perceived. Single ideas, and those combined into objects, can exist nowhere else than in the mind; the being of sense objects consists in their being perceived (esse est percipi). I see light and feel heat, and combine these sensations of sight and touch into the substance fire, because I know from experience that they constantly accompany and suggest each other.[1] The assumption of an "object" apart from the idea is as useless as its existence would be. Why should God create a world of real things without the mind, when these can neither enter into the mind, nor (because unperceived) be copied by its ideas, nor (because they themselves lack perception and power) produce ideas in it? Ideas signify nothing but themselves, i. e., affections of the subject.

[Footnote 1: The fire that I see is not the cause of the pain which I experience in approaching it, but the visual image of the flame is only a sign which warns me not to go too near. If I look through a microscope I see a different object from the one perceived with the naked eye. Two persons never see the same object, they merely have like sensations.]

The further question arises, What is the origin of ideas? Men have been led into this erroneous belief in the reality of the material world by the fact that certain ideas are not subject to our will, while others are. Sensations are distinguished from the ideas of imagination, which we can excite and alter at pleasure, by their greater strength, liveliness, and distinctness, by their steadiness, regular order, and coherence, and by the fact that they arise without our aid and whether we will or no. Unless these ideas are self-originated they must have an external cause. This, however, can be nothing else than a willing, thinking Being; for without will it could not be active and act upon me, and without ideas of its own it could not communicate ideas to me. Because of the manifoldness and regularity of our sensations the Being which produces them must, further, possess infinite power and intelligence. The ideas of imagination are produced by ourselves, real perceptions are produced by God. The connected whole of divinely produced ideas we call nature, and the constant regularity in their succession, the laws of nature. The invariableness of the divine working and the purposive harmony of creation reveal the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty more clearly than "astonishing and exceptional events." When we hear a man speak we reason from this activity to his existence. How much less are we entitled to doubt the existence of God, who speaks to us in the thousandfold works of nature.

The natural or created ideas which God impresses on us are copies of the eternal ideas which he himself perceives, not, indeed, by passive sensation, but through his creative reason. Accordingly when it was maintained that things do not exist independently of perception, the reference was not to the individual spirit, but to all spirits. When I turn my eyes away from an object it continues to exist, indeed, after my perception has ended—in the minds of other men and in that of the Omnipresent One. The pantheistic conclusion of these principles, in the sense of Geulincx and Malebranche,[1] which one expects, was really suggested by Berkeley. Everything exists only in virtue of its participation in the one, permanent, all-comprehensive spirit; individual spirits are of the same nature with the universal reason, only they are less perfect, limited, and not pure activity, while God is passionless intelligence. But if, in the last analysis, God is the cause of all, this does not hold of the free actions of men, least of all of wicked ones. The freedom of the will must not be rejected because of the contradictions which its acceptance involves; motion, also, and mathematical infinity imply incomprehensible elements. In the philosophy of nature Berkeley prefers the teleological to the mechanical view, since the latter is able to discover the laws of phenomena only, but not their efficient and final causes. Sense and experience acquaint us merely with the course of phenomenal effects; the reason, which opens up to us the realm of causation, of the spiritual, is the only sure guide to science and truth. The understanding does not feel, the senses do not know. We have no (sensuous) idea of other spirits, but only a notion of them; instead of themselves we perceive their activities merely, from which we argue to souls like ourselves, while we know our own mind by immediate self-consciousness.[2]

[Footnote 1: The example of Arthur Collier shows that the same results which Berkeley reaches empirically can be obtained from the standpoint of rationalism. Following Malebranche, and developing further the idealistic tendencies of the latter, Collier had, independently of Berkeley, conceived the doctrine of the "non-existence or impossibility of an external world "; but had not worked it out in his Clavis Universalis, 1713, until after the appearance of Berkeley's chief work, and not without consideration of this. The general point of view and the arguments are the same: Existence is equivalent to being perceived by God; the creation of a real world of matter apart from the ideal world in God and from sensuous perceptions in us would have been a superfluous device, etc.]

[Footnote 2: It should be remembered, however, that this immediate knowledge of ourselves is also "not after the manner of an idea or sensation." Our knowledge of spirits is always mediated by "notions" not by "ideas" in the strict sense, that is, not by "images." Cf. Principles, §§ 27, 135 seq., especially in the second edition.—TR.]

In contrast to the fearlessness with which Berkeley propounds his spiritualism, his anxious endeavors to take away the appearance of paradox from his immaterialistic doctrine, and to show its complete agreement with common sense, excite surprise. Even the common man, he argues, desires nothing more than that his perceptions be real; the distinction between idea and object is an invention of philosophers. Here Berkeley cannot be acquitted of a certain sophistical play upon the term "idea," which, in fact, is ambiguous. He understands by it that which the soul perceives (its immediate, inner object), but the popular mind, that through which the soul perceives an object. The reality of an idea in us is different from the idea of a real thing, or from the reality of that which is perceived without us by means of the idea, and it is just this last meaning which common sense affirms and Berkeley denies. In any case it was a work of great merit to have transferred the existence of objects beyond our ideas, of things-in-themselves, out of the region of the self-evident into the region of the problematical. We never get beyond the circle of our ideas, and if we posit a thing-in-itself as the ground and object of the idea, this also is simply a thought, an idea. For us there is no being except that of the perceiver and the perceived. Later we shall meet two other forms of idealism, in Leibnitz and Fichte. Both of these agree with Berkeley that spiritual beings alone are active, and active beings alone real, and that the being of the inactive consists in their being perceived. But while in Berkeley the objective ideas are impressed upon finite spirits by the Infinite Spirit from without and singly, with Leibnitz they appear as a fullness of germs, which God implanted together in the monads at the beginning, and which the individual develops into consciousness, and with Fichte they become the unconscious productions of the Absolute Ego acting in the individual egos. For the two former as many worlds exist as there are individual spirits, their harmony being guaranteed, in the one case, by the consistency of God's working, and, in the other, by his foresight. For Fichte, on the other hand, there is but one world, for the absolute is not outside the individual spirits, but the uniformly working force within them.

(b) Hume.—David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, and died in the same city, 1776. His position as librarian, which he held in the place of his birth, 1752-57, gave the opportunity for his History of England( 1754-62). His chief work, the Treatise on Human Nature, which, however, found few readers, was composed during his first residence in France in 1734-37. Later he worked over the first book of this work into his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748); the second book into A Dissertation on the Passions; and the third into An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. These, and others of his essays, found so much favor that, during his second sojourn in France, as secretary to Lord Hertford, in 1763-66, he was already honored as a philosopher of world-wide renown. Then, after serving for some time as Under-Secretary of State, he retired to private life at home (1769).

The three books of the Treatise on Human Nature, which appeared in 1739-40, are entitled Of the Understanding, Of the Passions, Of Morals. Of the five volumes of the Essays, the first contains the Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 1741-42; the second, the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1748; the third, the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751; the fourth, the Political Discourses, 1752; the fifth, 1757, the Four Dissertations, including that On the Passions and the Natural History of Religion. After Hume's death appeared the Autobiography, 1777; the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 1779; and the two small essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, 1783.[1] The Philosophical Works were published in 1827, and frequently afterward.[2]

[Footnote 1: Or 1777, cf. Green and Grose's edition, vol. iii. p. 67 seq.—Tr.]

[Footnote 2: Among the works on Hume we may mention Jodl's prize treatise, 1872, and Huxley's Hume (English Men of Letters), 1879. [The reader may be referred also to Knight's Hume (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), 1886; to T.H. Green's "Introductions" in Green and Grose's edition of the collected works in four volumes, 1874 (new ed. 1889-90), which is now standard; and to Selby-Bigge's reprint of the original edition of the Treatise, I vol., 1888, with a valuable Analytical Index.]

Hume's object, like that of Berkeley, is the improvement of Locke's doctrine of knowledge. In several respects he does not go so far as Berkeley, in others very much farther. In agreement with Berkeley's ultra-nominalism, which combats even the possibility of abstract ideas, he yet does not follow him to the extent of denying external reality. On the other hand, he carries out more consistently Berkeley's hint that immediate sensation includes less than is ascribed to it (e.g., that by vision we perceive colors only, and not distance, etc.), as well as his principle—destructive to the certainty of our knowledge of nature—that there is no causality among phenomena; and brings the question of substance to, the negative conclusion, that there is no need whatever for a support for groups of qualities, and, therefore, that substantiality is to be denied to immaterial as well as to material beings. The points in Locke's philosophy which seemed to Hume to need completion were different from those at which Berkeley had struck in. The antithesis of rational and empirical knowledge is more sharply conceived; the combination of ideas is not left to the choice of the understanding but placed under the dominion of psychological laws; and to the distinction between outer and inner experience (to the former of which priority is conceded, on the ground that we must have had an external sensation before we can, through reflection, be conscious of it as an internal phenomenon), there is added a second, as important as the other and crossing it, between impressions and ideas, of which the former are likewise made prior to the latter.

Everyone will acknowledge the considerable difference between a sensation actually present (of heat, for instance) and the mere idea of one previously experienced, or shortly to come. This consists in the greater force, liveliness, and vividness of the former. Although these two classes of states (the idea of a landscape described by a poet and the perception of a real one, anger and the thought of anger) are only quantitatively distinct, they are scarcely ever in danger of being confused—the most lively idea is always less so than the weakest perception. The actual, outer or inner, sensations may be termed impressions; the weaker images of memory or imagination, which they leave behind them, ideas. Since nothing can gain entrance to the soul except through the two portals of outer and inner experience, there is no idea which has not arisen from an impression or several such; every idea is the image and copy of an impression. But as the understanding and imagination variously combine, separate, and transpose the elements furnished by the senses and lingering in memory, the possibility of error arises. A hidden, and, therefore more dangerous source of error consists in the reference of an idea to a different impression than the one of which it is the copy. The concepts substance and causality are examples of such false reference.

The combination of ideas takes place without freedom, in a purely mechanical, way according to fixed rules, which in the last analysis reduce to three fundamental laws of association: Ideas are associated (1) according to their resemblance and contrast; (2) according to their contiguity in space and time; (3) according to their causal connection. Mathematics is based on the operation of the first of these laws, on the immediate or mediate knowledge of the resemblance, contrariety, and quantitative relations of ideas; the descriptive and experimental part of the sciences of nature and of man on the second; religion, metaphysics, and that part of physical and moral science which goes beyond mere observation on the third. The theory of knowledge has to determine the boundaries of human understanding and the degree of credibility to which these sciences are entitled.

The objects of human thought and inquiry are either relations of ideas or matters of fact. To the former class belong the objects of mathematics, the truths of which, since they are analytic (i. e., merely explicate in the predicate the characteristics already contained in the subject, and add nothing new to this), and since they concern possible relations only, not reality, possess intuitive or demonstrative certainty. It is only propositions concerning quantity and number that are discoverable a priori by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on real existence, and that can be proved from the impossibility of their opposites—mathematics is the only demonstrative science.

We reach certainty in matters of fact by direct perception, or by inferences from other facts, when they transcend the testimony of our senses and memory. These arguments from experience are of an entirely different sort from the rational demonstrations of mathematics; as the contrary of a fact is always thinkable (the proposition that the sun will not rise to-morrow implies no logical contradiction), they yield, strictly speaking, probability only, no matter how strong our conviction of their accuracy may be. Nevertheless it is advisable to separate this species of inferences from experience—whose certainty is not doubted except by the philosophers—from uncertain probabilities, as a class intermediate between the latter and demonstrative truth (demonstrations—proofs—probabilities). All reasonings concerning matters of fact are based on the relation of cause and effect. Whence, then, do we obtain the knowledge of cause and effect? Not by a priori thought. Pure reason is able only to analyze concepts into their elements, not to connect new predicates with them. All its judgments are analytic, while synthetic judgments rest on experience. Judgments concerning causation belong in this latter class, for effects are entirely distinct from causes; the effect is not contained in the cause, nor the latter in the former. In the case of a phenomenon previously unknown we cannot tell from what causes it has proceeded, nor what its effect will be. We argue that fire will warm us, and bread afford nourishment, because we have often perceived these causal pairs closely connected in space and time. But even experience does not vouchsafe all that we desire. It shows nothing more than the coexistence and succession of phenomena and events; while the judgment itself, e. g., that the motion of one body stands in causal connection with that of another, asserts more than mere contiguity in space and time, it affirms not merely that the one precedes the other, but that it produces it—not merely that the second follows the first, but that it results from it. The bond which connects the two events, the force that puts forth the second from the first, the necessary connection between the two is not perceived, but added to perception by thought, construed into it.[1] What, then, is the occasion and what the warrant for transforming perceived succession in time into causal succession, for substituting must for is, for interpreting the observed connection of fact into a necessary connection which always eludes observation?

[Footnote 1: The weakness of the concept of cause had been recognized before Hume by the skeptic, J. Glanvil (1636-80). Causality itself cannot be perceived; we infer it from the constant succession of two phenomena, without being able to show warrant for the transformation of thereafter into thereby.]

We do not causally connect every chance pair of successive events, but those only which have been repeatedly observed together. The wonder is, then, that through oft-repeated observation of certain objects we come to believe that we know something about the behavior of other like objects, and the further behavior of these same ones. From the fact that I have seen a given apple fall ten times to the ground, I infer that all the apples in the world do the same when loosened, instead of flying upward, which, in itself, is quite as thinkable; I infer further that this has always been the case, and will continue to be so to all eternity. Where is the intermediate link between the proposition, "I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect," and this other, "I foresee that other objects which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects"? This postulate, that the future will be like the past, and that like causes will have like effects, rests on a purely psychological basis. In virtue of the laws of association the sight of an object or event vividly recalls the image of a second, often observed in connection with the former, and leads us involuntarily to expect its appearance anew. The idea of causal connection is based on feeling (the feeling of inner determination to pass from one idea to a second), not upon insight; it is a product of the imagination, not of the understanding. From the habitual perception of two events in connection (sunshine and heat) arises the mental determination to think of the second when we perceive the first, and, anticipating the senses, to count on its appearance. It is now possible to state of what impression the idea of the causal nexus is the copy: the impression on which it is based is the habitual transition from the idea of a thing to its customary attendant. Hence the idea of causality has a purely subjective significance, not the objective one which we ascribe to it. It is impossible to determine whether there is a real necessity of becoming corresponding to the felt necessity of thought. In life we never doubt the fact, but for science our conviction of the uniformity of nature remains a merely probable (though a very highly probable) conviction. Complete certainty is vouchsafed only by rational demonstration and immediate experience. The necessary bond which we postulate between cause and effect can neither be demonstrated nor felt.

If all experiential reasonings depend on the idea of causality, and this has no other support than subjective mental habit, it follows that all knowledge of nature which goes beyond mere observed fact is not knowledge (neither demonstrative knowledge nor knowledge of fact), but belief.[1] The probability of our belief in the regularity of natural phenomena increases, indeed, with every new verification of the assumptions based thereon; but, as has been shown, it never rises to absolute certainty. Nevertheless inferences from experience are trustworthy and entirely sufficient for practical life, and the aim of the above skeptical deliverances was not to shake belief—only a fool or a lunatic can doubt in earnest the immutability of nature—but only to make it clear that it is mere belief, and not, as hitherto held, demonstrative or factual knowledge. Our doubt is intended to define the boundary between knowledge and belief, and to destroy that absolute confidence which is a hindrance rather than a help to investigation. We should recognize it as a wise provision of nature that the regulation of our thoughts and the belief in the objective validity of our anticipation of future events have not been confided to the weak, inconstant, inert, and fallacious reason, but to a powerful instinct. In life and action we are governed by this natural impulse, in spite of all the scruples of the skeptical reason.

[Footnote 1: Hume distinguishes belief as a form of knowledge from religious faith, both in fact and in name. In the Treatise—the passage is wanting in the Enquiry—our conviction of the external existence of the objects of perception is also ascribed to the former, which later formed Jacobi's point of departure. Religious faith is referred to revelation.]

In Hume's earlier work his destructive critique of the idea of cause is accompanied by a deliverance in a similar strain on the concept of substance, which is not included in the shorter revision. Substances are not perceived through impressions, but only qualities and powers. The unknown something which is supposed to have qualities, or in which these are supposed to inhere, is an unnecessary fiction of the imagination. A permanent similarity of attributes by no means requires a self-identical support for these. A thing is nothing more than a collection of qualities, to which we give a special name because they are always found together. The idea of substance, like the idea of cause, is founded in a subjective habit which we erroneously objectify. The impression from which it has arisen is our inner perception that our thought remains constant in the repeated experience of the same group of qualities (whenever I see sugar, I do the same thing, that is, I combine the qualities white color, sweet taste, hardness, etc., with one another), or the impression of a uniform combination of ideas. The idea of substance becomes erroneous through the fact that we refer it not to the inner activity of representation, to which it rightly belongs, but to the external group of qualities, and make it a real, permanent substratum for the latter. Mental substances disappear along with material substances. The soul or mind is, in reality, nothing more than the sum of our inner states, a collection of ideas which flow on in a continuous and regular stream; it is like a stage, across which feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and volitions are passing while it does not itself come into sight. A permanent self or ego, as a substratum of ideas, is not perceived; there is no invariable, permanent impression. That which leads to the assumption of personal identity is only the frequent repetition of similar trains of ideas, and the gradual succession of our ideas, which is easily confused with constancy. Thus robbed of its substantiality, the soul has no further claims to immateriality and immortality, and suicide ceases to be a crime.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cf. the essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, 1783, whose authorship by Hume, however, is not absolutely established [of. Green and Grose, as above, p. 221, note first.—TR.]

Is Hume roundly to be called a skeptic? [1] He never impugned the validity of mathematical reasonings, nor experimental truths concerning matters of fact; in regard to the former his thought is rationalistic, in regard to the latter it is empirical or, more accurately, sensationalistic. His attitude toward the empirical sciences of nature and of mind is that of a semi-skeptic or probabilist, in so far as they go beyond the establishment of facts to the proof of connections under law and to inferences concerning the future. Habit is for him a safe guide for life, although it does not go beyond probabilities; absolute knowledge is unattainable for us, but not indispensable. Toward metaphysics, as an alleged science of the suprasensible, he takes up an entirely negative attitude. If an argument from experience is to be assured of merely that degree of probability which is sufficient for belief, it must not only have a well-established fact (an impression or memory-image) for its starting point, but, together with its conclusion, it must keep within the limits of possible experience. The limits of possible experience are also the limits of the knowable; inferences to the continued existence of the soul after death and to the being of God are vain sophistry and illusion. According to the famous conclusion of the Essay, all volumes which contain anything other than "abstract reasonings concerning quantity or number" or "experimental reasonings concerning matter of fact and existence" deserve to be committed to the flames. In view of this limitation of knowledge to that which is capable of exact measurement and that which is present in experience, as well of the principle that the elements added by thought are to be sharply distinguished from the positively given (the immediate facts of perception), we must agree with those who call Hume the father of modern positivism.[2]

[Footnote 1: In the Essay, Hume describes his own standpoint as mitigated or academical skepticism in antithesis to the Cartesian, which from doubt and through doubt hopes to reach the indubitable, and to the excessive skepticism of Pyrrhonism, which cripples the impulse to inquiry. This moderate skepticism asks us only, after resisting the tendency to unreflecting conclusions, to make a duty of deliberation and caution in judging, and to restrain inquiry within those fields which are accessible to our knowledge, i.e., the fields of mathematics and empirical fact. In the Treatise Hume had favored a sharper skepticism and extended his doubt more widely, e.g., even to the trustworthiness of geometry. Cf. on this point Ed. Grimm, Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems, 1890, p, 559 seq.]

[Footnote 2: So Volkelt, Erfahrung und Denken, 1886, p. 105.]

* * * * *

As a philosopher of religion Hume is the finisher and destroyer of deism. Of the three principles of the deists—religion, its origin and its truth are objects of scientific investigation; religion has its origin in the reason and the consciousness of duty; natural religion is the oldest, the positive religions are degenerate or revived forms of natural religion—he accepts the first, while rejecting the other two. Religion may correspond to reason or contradict it, but not proceed from it. Religion has its basis in human nature, yet not in its rational but its sensuous side; not in the speculative desire for knowledge, but in practical needs; not in the contemplation of nature, but in looking forward with fear or joy to the changing events of human life. Anxiety and hope concerning future events lead us to posit unseen powers as directing our destiny, and to seek their favor. The capriciousness of fortune points to a plurality of gods; the tendency to conceive all things like ourselves gives them human characteristics; the powerful impression made by all that comes within the sphere of the senses incites us to connect the divine power with visible objects; the allegorical laudation and deification of eminent men leads to a completed polytheism. That this and not (mono-) theism was the original form of religion, Hume assumes to be a fact for historical times, and a well-founded conjecture for prehistoric ages. Those who hold that humanity began with a perfect religion find it difficult to explain the obscuration of the truth, endow immature ages with a developed use of the reason which they can scarcely have possessed, make error grow worse with increasing culture, and contradict the historical progress upward which is everywhere else observed. The philosophical knowledge of God is a very late product of mature reflection; even monotheism, as a popular religion, did not arise from rational reflection, although its chief principle is in agreement with the results of philosophy, but from the same irrational motives as polytheism. Its origin from polytheism is accomplished by the transformation of the leading god (the king of the gods or the tutelary deity of the nation) through the fear and emulous flattery of his votaries into the one, infinite, spiritual ruler of the world. Amid the folly of the superstitious herd, however, this refined idea is not long preserved in its purity; the more exalted the conception entertained of the supreme deity, the more imperatively the need makes itself felt for the interpolation between this being and mankind of mediators and demi-gods, partaking more of the human nature of the worshipers and more familiar to them. Later a new purification takes place, so that the history of religion shows a continuous alternation of the lower and higher forms.

After depriving theism of its prerogative of originality, Hume further takes away from it its fame as in every respect the best religion. It is disadvantageously distinguished from polytheism by the fact that it is more intolerant, makes its followers pusillanimous, and, by its incomprehensible dogmas, puts their faith to severer tests; while it is on a level with polytheism in that most of its adherents exalt belief in foolish mysteries, fanaticism, and the observance of useless customs above the practice of virtue.

The Natural History of Religion, which far outbids the conclusions of the deists by its endeavors to explain religion, not on rational, but on historical and psychological grounds, and to separate it entirely from knowledge by relegating it to the sphere of practice, leaves the possibility of a philosophical knowledge of God an open question. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion greatly diminish this hope. The most cogent argument for the intelligence of the world-ground, the teleological argument, is a hypothesis which has grave weaknesses, and one to which many other equally probable hypotheses may be opposed. The finite world, with its defects and abounding misery amid all its order and adaptation, can never yield an inference to an infinite, perfect unit-cause, to an all-powerful, all-wise, and benevolent deity. To this the eleventh section of the Enquiry adds the argument, that it is inadmissible to ascribe to the inferred cause other properties than those which are necessary to explain the observed effect. The tenth section of the same Essay argues that there is no miracle supported by a sufficient number of witnesses credible because of their intelligence and honesty, and free from a preponderance of contradictory experiences and testimony of greater probability. In short, the reason is neither capable of reaching the existence of God by well-grounded inference nor of comprehending the truth of the Christian religion with its accompanying miracles. That which transcends experience cannot be proven and known, but only believed in. Whoever is moved by faith to give assent to things which contradict all custom and experience, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person.

Hume never denied the existence of God, never directly impugned revelation. His final word is doubt and uncertainty. It is certain that his counsel not to follow the leadership of the reason in religious matters, but to submit ourselves to the power of instinct and common opinion, was less earnest and less in harmony with the nature of the philosopher than his other advice, to take refuge from the strife of the various forms of superstition in the more quiet, though dimmer regions of—naturally, the skeptical—philosophy. Hume's originality and greatness in this field consist in his genetic view of the historical religions. They are for him errors, but natural ones, grounded in the nature of man, "sick men's dreams," whose origin and course he searches out with frightful cold-bloodedness, with the dispassionate interest of the dissector.

* * * * *

In his moral philosophy[1] Hume shows himself the empiricist only, not the skeptic. The laws of human nature are capable of just as exact empirical investigation as those of external nature; observation and analysis promise even more brilliant success in this most important, and yet hitherto so badly neglected, branch of science than in physics. As knowledge and opinion have been found reducible to the associative play of ideas, and the store of ideas, again, to original impressions and shown derivable from these; so man's volition and action present themselves as results of the mechanical working of the passions, which, in turn, point further back to more primitive principles. The ultimate motives of all action are pleasure and pain, to which we owe our ideas of good and evil. The direct passions, desire and aversion, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, are the immediate effects of these original elements. From the direct arise in certain circumstances the indirect passions, pride and humility, love and hatred (together with respect and contempt); the first two, if the objects which excite feeling are immediately connected with ourselves, the latter, when pleasure and pain are aroused by the accomplishments or the defects of others. While love and hate are always conjoined with a readiness for action, with benevolence or anger, pride and humility are pure, self-centered, inactive emotions.

[Footnote 1: Cf. G. von Gizycki, Die Ethik David Humes, 1878.]

All moral phenomena, will, moral judgment, conscience, virtue, are not simple and original data, but of a composite or derivative nature. They are without exception products of the regular interaction of the passions. With such views there can be, of course, no question of a freedom of the will. If anyone objects to determinism, that virtues and vices, if they are involuntary and necessary, are not praise-or blame-worthy, he is to be referred to the applause paid to beauty and talent, which are considered meritorious, although they are not dependent upon our choice. The legal attitude of theology and law first caused all desert to be based upon freedom, whereas the ancient philosophers spoke unhesitatingly of intellectual virtues.

Hume does not, like nearly all his predecessors and contemporaries, find the determining grounds of volition in ideas, but in the feelings. After curtailing the rights of the reason in the theoretical field in favor of custom and instinct, he dispossesses her also in the sphere of practice. Impassive reason, judging only of truth and falsehood, is an inactive faculty, which of itself can never inspire us with inclination and desire toward an object, can never itself become a motive. It is only capable of influencing the will indirectly, through the aid of some affection. Abstract relations of ideas, and facts as well, leave us entirely indifferent so long as they fail to acquire an emotional value through their relation to our state of mind. When we speak of a victory of reason over passion it is nothing but a conquest of one passion by another, i. e., of a violent passion by a calm one. That which is commonly called reason here is nothing but one of those general and calm affections (e. g., the love of life) which direct the will to a distant good, without exciting any sensible emotion in the mind; by passion we commonly understand the violent passions only, which engender a marked disturbance in the soul and the production of which requires a certain propinquity of the object. A man is said to be industrious "from reason," when a calm desire for money makes him laborious. It is a mistake to consider all violent passions powerful, and all calm ones weak. The prevalence of calm affections constitutes the essence of strength of mind.

As reason is thus degraded from a governor of the will to a "slave of the passions," so, further, judgment concerning right and wrong is taken away from her. Moral distinctions are determined by our sense of the agreeable and the disagreeable. We pass an immediate judgment of taste on the actions of our fellow-men; the good pleases, evil displeases. The sight of virtue gives us satisfaction; that of vice repels us. Accordingly an action or trait of mind is virtuous when it calls forth in the observer an agreeable, disinterested sentiment of approbation.

What, then, are the actions which receive such general approval, and how is the praise to be explained which the spectator bestows on them? We approve such traits of character as are immediately agreeable or useful, either to the person himself or to others. This yields four classes of praiseworthy qualities. The first class, those which are agreeable to the possessor (quite apart from any utility to himself or to others), includes cheerfulness, greatness of mind, courage, tranquillity, and benevolence; the second, those immediately agreeable to others, modesty, good manners, politeness, and wit; the third, those useful to ourselves, strength of will, industry, frugality, strength of body, intelligence and other mental gifts. The fourth class comprises the highest virtues, the qualities useful to others, benevolence and justice. Pleasure and utility are in all cases the criterion of merit. The monkish virtues of humility and mortification of the flesh, which bring no pleasure or advantage either to their possessor or to society, are considered meritorious by no one who understands the subject.

If the moral value of actions is thus made to depend on their effects, we cannot dispense with the assistance of reason in judging moral questions, since it alone can inform us concerning these results of action. Reason, however, is not sufficient to determine us to praise or blame. Nothing but a sentiment can induce us to give the preference to beneficial and useful tendencies over pernicious ones. This feeling is evidently no other than satisfaction in the happiness of men and uneasiness in view of their misery—in short, it is sympathy. By means of the imagination we enter into the experiences of others and participate in their joy and sorrow. Whatever depresses or rejoices them, whatever inspires them with pride, fills us with similar emotions. From the habit of sympathetically passing moral judgment on the actions of others, and of seeing our own judged by them, is developed the further one of keeping a constant watch over ourselves and of considering our dispositions and deeds from the standpoint of the good of others. This custom is called conscience. Allied to this is the love of reputation, which continually leads us to ask, How will our behavior appear in the eyes of those with whom we associate?

Within the fourth and most important class, the social virtues, Hume distinguishes between the natural virtues of humanity and benevolence and the artificial virtues of justice and fidelity. The former proceed from our inborn sympathy with the good of others, while the latter, on the other hand, are not to be derived from a natural passion, an instinctive love of humanity, but are the product of reflection and art, and take their origin in a social convention.

In order that an action may gain the approval of the spectator two other things are required besides its salutary effects: it must be a mark of character, of a permanent disposition, and it must proceed from disinterested motives. Hume is obliged by this latter position to show that disinterested benevolence actually exists, that the unselfish affections do not secretly spring from self-love. To cite only one of the thousand examples of benevolence in which no discernible interest is concerned, we desire happiness for our friends even when we have no expectation of participating in it. The accounts of human selfishness are greatly overdrawn, and those who deduce all actions from it make the mistake of taking the inevitable consequences of virtue—the pleasure of self-approval and of being esteemed by others—for the only motives to virtue. Because virtue, in the outcome, produces inner satisfaction and is praised by others, it does not follow that it is practiced merely for the sake of these agreeable consequences. Self-love is a secondary impulse, whose appearance at all presupposes primary impulses. Only after we have experienced the pleasure which comes from the satisfaction of such an original impulse (e. g., ambition), can this become the object of a conscious reflective search after pleasure, or of egoism. Power brings no enjoyment to the man by nature devoid of ambition, and he who is naturally ambitious does not desire fame because it affords him pleasure, but conversely, fame affords him pleasure because he desires it. The natural propensity which terminates directly on the object, without knowledge or foresight of the pleasurable results, comes first, and egoistic reflection directed toward the hoped-for enjoyment can develop only after this has been satisfied. The case is the same with benevolence as with the love of fame. It is implanted in the constitution of our minds as an original impulse immediately directed toward the happiness of other men. After it has been exercised and its exercise rewarded by self-satisfaction, admiration, thanks, and reciprocation, it is indeed possible for the expectation of such agreeable consequences to lead us to the repetition of beneficent acts. But the original motive is not an egoistic, regard for useful consequences. If, from the force of the passion alone, vengeance may be so eagerly pursued that every consideration of personal quiet and security is silenced, it may also be conceded that humanity causes us to forget our own interests. Nay, further, the social affections, as Shaftesbury has proven, are the strongest of all, and the man will rarely be found in whom the sum of the benevolent impulses will not outweigh that of the selfish ones.

In the section on justice Hume attacks the contract theory. Law, property, and the sacredness of contracts exist first in society, but not first in the state. The obligation to observe contracts is, indeed, made stronger by the civil law and civil authority, but not created by them. Law arises from convention, i. e., not from a formal contract, but a tacit agreement, a sense of common interest, and this agreement, in turn, proceeds from an original propensity to enter into social relations. The unsocial and lawless state of nature is a philosophical fiction which has never existed; men have always been social. They have all at least been born into the society of the family, and they know no-more terrible punishment than isolation. States are not created, however, by a voluntary act, but have their roots in history. The question at issue between Hobbes and Hume was thus adjusted at a later period by Kant: the state, it is true, has not historically arisen from a contract, yet it is allowable and useful to consider it under the aspect of a contract as a regulative idea.

Only once since David Hume, in Herbert Spencer, has the English nation produced a mind of like comprehensive power. Hume and Locke form the culminating points of English thought. They are national types, in that in them the two fundamental tendencies of English thinking, clearness of understanding and practical sense, were manifested in equal force. In Locke these worked together in harmonious co-operation. In Hume the friendly alliance is broken, the common labor ceases; each of the two demands its full rights; a painful breach opens up between science and life. Reason leads inevitably to doubt, to insight into its own weakness, while life demands conviction. The doubter cannot act, the agent cannot know. It is true that a substitute is found for defective knowledge in belief based upon instinct and custom; but this is a makeshift, not a solution of the problem, an acknowledgment of the evil, not a cure for it. Further, Hume's greatness does not consist in the fact that he preached modesty to the contending parties, that he banished the doubting reason into the study and restricted life to belief in probabilities, but in the mental strength which enabled him to endure sharp contradictions, and, instead of an overhasty and easy reconciliation, to suspend the one impulse until the other had made its demands thoroughly, completely, and regardlessly heard. Though he is distinguished from other skeptics by the fact that he not only shows the fundamental conceptions of our knowledge of nature and the principles of religion uncertain and erroneous, but finds necessary errors in them and acutely uncovers their origin in the lawful workings of our inner life, yet his historical influence essentially rests on his skepticism. In his own country it roused in the "Scottish School" the reaction of common sense, while in Germany it helped to wake a kindred but greater spirit from the bonds of his dogmatic slumbers, and to fortify him for his critical achievements.

(c) %The Scottish School%.—Priestley's associational psychology, Berkeley's idealism, and Hume's skepticism are legitimate deductions from Locke's assumption that the immediate objects of thought are not things but ideas, and that judgment or knowledge arises from the combination of ideas originally separate. The absurdity of the consequences shows the falsity of the premises. The true philosophy must not contradict common sense. It is not correct to look upon the mind as a sheet of white paper on which experience inscribes single characters, and then to make the understanding combine these originally disconnected elements into judgments by means of comparison, and the belief in the existence of the object come in as a later result added to the ideas by reflection. It is rather true that the elements discovered by the analysis of the cognitive processes are far from being the originals from which these arise. It is not isolated ideas that come first, but judgments, self-evident axioms of the understanding, which form part of the mental constitution with which God has endowed us; and sensation is accompanied by an immediate belief in the reality of the object. Sensation guarantees the presence of an external thing possessing a certain character, although it is not an image of this property, but merely a sign for something in no wise resembling itself.

This is the standpoint of the founder[1] of the Scottish School, Thomas Reid (1710-96, professor in Aberdeen and Glasgow; An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 1764; Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 1785, Essays on the Active Powers, 1788, together under the title, Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind. Collected Works, 1804, and often since, especially the edition by Hamilton, with valuable notes and dissertations, 7th ed., 2 vols., 1872). We may recognize in it a revival of the common notions of Herbert, as well as a transfer of the innate faculty of judgment inculcated by the ethical and aesthetic writers from the practical to the theoretical field; the "common sense" of Reid is an original sense for truth, as the "taste" of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson was a natural sense for the good and the beautiful. Like Jacobi at a later period, Reid points out that mediate, reasoned knowledge presupposes a knowledge which is immediate, and all inference and demonstration, fixed, undemonstrable, immediately certain fundamental truths. The fundamental judgments or principles of common sense, which are true for us, even if [possibly] not true in themselves, are discoverable by observation (empirical rationalism). In the enumeration of them two dangers are to be avoided: we must neither raise contingent principles to the position of axioms, nor, from an exaggerated endeavor after unity, underestimate the number of these self-evident principles. Reid himself is always more sparing with them than his disciples. He distinguishes two classes: first principles of necessary truth, and first principles of contingent truth or truth of fact. As first principles of necessary truth he cites, besides the axioms of logic and mathematics, grammatical, aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical principles (among the last belong the principles: "That the qualities which we perceive by our senses must have a subject, which we call body, and that the thoughts we are conscious of must have a subject, which we call mind"; "that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause which produced it"). He lays down twelve principles as the basis of our knowledge of matters of fact, in which his reference to the doubt of Berkeley and Hume is evident. The most important of these are: "The existence of everything of which I am conscious"; "that the thoughts of which I am conscious, are the thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person"; "our own personal identity and continued existence, as far back as we remember anything distinctly"; "that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be"; "that we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will"; "that there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men"; "that there is a certain regard due… to human authority in matters of opinion"; "that, in the phenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like what has been in similar circumstances."

[Footnote 1: In the sense of "chief founder"; cf. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875, pp. 36, 68 seq., which is the standard authority on the school as a whole.—TR.]

The widespread and lasting favor experienced by this theory, with its invitation to forget all earnest work in the problems of philosophy by taking refuge in common sense, shows that a general relaxation had succeeded the energetic endeavors which Hume had demanded of himself and of his readers. With this declaration of the infallibility of common consciousness, the theory of knowledge, which had been so successfully begun, was incontinently thrust aside, although, indeed, empirical psychology gained by the industrious investigation of the inner life by means of self-observation. James Beattie continued the attack on Hume in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism, 1770, on the principle that wisdom must never contradict nature, and that whatever our nature compels us to believe, hence whatever all agree in, is true. In his briefer dissertations Beattie discussed Memory and Imagination, Fable and Romance, the Effects of

Poetry and Music, Laughter, the Sublime, etc. While Beattie had given the preference to psychological and aesthetic questions, James Oswald (1772) appealed to common sense in matters of religion, describing it as an instinctive faculty of judgment concerning truth and falsehood. The most eminent among the followers of Reid was Dugald Stewart (professor in Edinburgh; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1792-1827; Collected Works, edited by Hamilton, 1854-58), who developed the doctrines of the master and in some points modified them. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), who is highly esteemed by Mill, Spencer, and Bain, approximated the teachings of Reid and Stewart to those of Hume. The philosophy of the Scottish School was long in favor both in England and in France, where it was employed as a weapon against materialism.

By way of appendix we may mention the beginnings of a psychological aesthetics in Henry Home (Lord Kames, 1696-1782), and Edmund Burke (1728-97).[1] Home, in ethics a follower of Hutcheson, is fond of supporting his aesthetic views by examples from Shakespeare. Beauty (chap. iii.) appears to belong to the object itself, but in reality it is only an effect, a "secondary quality," of the object; like color, it is nothing but an idea in the mind, "for an object is said to be beautiful for no other reason but that it appears so to the spectator." It arises from regularity, proportion, order, simplicity—properties which belong to sublimity as well (chap, iv.), but to which they are by no means so essential, since it is satisfied with a less degree of them. While the beautiful excites emotions of sweetness and gayety, the sublime rouses feelings which are agreeable, it is true, but which are not sweet and gay, but strong and more serious. Burke's explanation goes deeper. He derives the antithesis of the sublime and the beautiful from the two fundamental impulses of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation and the social impulse. Whatever is contrary to the former makes a strong and terrible impression on the soul; whatever favors the latter makes a weak but agreeable one. The terrible delights us (first depressing and then exalting us), when we merely contemplate it, without being ourselves affected by the danger or the pain—this is the sublime. On the other hand, that is beautiful which inspires us with tenderness and affection without our desiring to possess it. Sublimity implies a certain greatness, beauty, a certain smallness. Delight in both is based on bodily phenomena. Terror moderated exercises a beneficent influence on the nerves by stimulating them and giving them tension; the gentle impression of beauty exerts a quieting effect upon them. The disturbances caused by the former, and the recovery induced by the latter, are both conducive to health, and hence, experienced as pleasures.

[Footnote 1: Home, Elements of Criticism, 1762. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry info the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1756.]