In endeavouring to add a third step to the climax in question, Herr von Schelling has contributed a small afterpiece to these errors, into which two mighty intellects of the past had fallen owing to insufficient clearness in thinking. If Descartes met the demands of the inexorable law of causality, which reduced his God to the last straits, by substituting a reason instead of the cause required, in order thus to set the matter at rest; and if Spinoza made a real cause out of this reason, i.e., causa sui, his God thereby becoming the world itself: Schelling now made reason and consequent separate in God himself.[37] He thus gave the thing still greater consistency by elevating it to a real, substantial hypostasis of reason and consequent, and introducing us to something "in God, which is not himself, but his reason, as a primary reason, or rather reason beyond reason (abyss)." Hoc quidem vere palmarium est.—It is now known that Schelling had taken the whole fable from Jacob Böhme's "Full account of the terrestrial and celestial mystery;" but what appears to me to be less well known, is the source from which Jacob Böhme himself had taken it, and the real birth-place of this so-called abyss, wherefore I now take the liberty to mention it. It is the βυθός, i.e. abyssus, vorago, bottomless pit, reason beyond reason of the Valentinians (a heretical sect of the second century) which, in silence—co-essential with itself—engendered intelligence and the world, as Irenæus[38] relates in the following terms: λέγουσι γάρ τινα εἶναι ἐν ἀοράτοις, καὶ ἀκατονομάστοις ὑψώμασι τέλειον Αἰῶνα προόντα· τοῦτον δὲ καὶ προαρχήν, καὶ προπάτορα, καὶ βυθὸν καλοῦσιν.—Ὑπάρχοντα δὲ αὐτὸν ἀχώρητον καὶ ἀόρατον, ἀΐδιόν τε καὶ ἀγέννητον, ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ καὶ ἠρεμίᾳ πολλῇ γεγονέναι ἐν ἀπείροις αἰῶσι χρόνων. Συνυπάρχειν δὲ αὐτῷ καὶ Ἔννοιαν, ἣν δὲ καὶ Χάριν, καὶ Σιγὴν ὀνομάζουσι· καὶ ἐννοηθῆναί ποτε ἀφ' ἑαυτοῦ προβαλέσθαι τὸν βυθὸν τοῦτον ἀρχὴν τῶν πάντων, καὶ καθάπερ σπέρμα τὴν προβολὴν ταύτην (ἣν προβαλέσθαι ἐνενοήθη) καθέσθαι, ὡς ἐν μήτρᾳ, τῇ συνυπαρχούσῃ, ἑαυτῷ Σιγῇ. Ταύτην δὲ, ὑποδηξαμένην τὸ σπέρμα τοῦτο, καὶ ἐγκύμονα γενομένην, ἀποκυῆσαι Νοῦν, ὅμοιόν τε καὶ ἴσον τῷ προβαλόντι, καὶ μόνον χωροῦντα τὸ μέγεθος τοῦ Πατρός. Τὸν δὲ νοῦν τοῦτον καὶ μονογενῆ καλοῦσι, καὶ ἀρχὴν τῶν πάντων.[39] (Dicunt enim esse quendam in sublimitatibus illis, quæ nec oculis cerni, nec nominari possunt, perfectum Æonem præexistentem, quem et proarchen, et propatorem, et Bythum vocant. Eum autem, quum incomprehensibilis et invisibilis, sempiternus idem, et ingenitus esset, infinitis temporum seculis in summa quiete ac tranquillitate fuisse. Unâ etiam cum eo Cogitationem exstitisse, quam et Gratiam et Silentium (Sigen) nuncupant. Hunc porro Bythum in animum, aliquando induxisse, rerum omnium initium proferre, atque hanc, quam in animum induxerat, productionem, in Sigen (silentium) quæ unâ cum eo erat, non secus atque in vulvam demisisse. Hanc vero, suscepto hoc semine, prægnantem effectam peperisse Intellectum, parenti suo parem et æqualem, atque ita comparatum, ut solus paternæ magnitudinis capax esset. Atque hunc Intellectum et Monogenem et Patrem et principum omnium rerum appellant.)
Somehow or other this must have come to Jacob Böhme's hearing from the History of Heresy, and Herr von Schelling must have received it from him in all faith.
§ 9. Leibnitz.
It was Leibnitz who first formally stated the Principle of Sufficient Reason as a main principle of all knowledge and of all science. He proclaims it very pompously in various passages of his works, giving himself great airs, as though he had been the first to invent it; yet all he finds to say about it is, that everything must have a sufficient reason for being as it is, and not otherwise: and this the world had probably found out before him. True, he makes casual allusions to the distinction between its two chief significations, without, however, laying any particular stress upon it, or explaining it clearly anywhere else. The principal reference to it is in his "Principia Philosophiæ," § 32, and a little more satisfactorily in the French version, entitled "Monadologie": En vertu du principe de la raison suffisante, nous considérons qu'aucun fait ne sauroit se trouver vrai ou existant, aucune énonciation véritable, sans qu'il y ait une raison suffisante, pourquoi il en soit ainsi et non pas autrement.[40]
§ 10. Wolf.
The first writer who explicitly separated the two chief significations of our principle, and stated the difference between them in detail, was therefore Wolf. Wolf, however, does not place the principle of sufficient reason in Logic, as is now the custom, but in Ontology. True, in § 71 he urges the necessity of not confounding the principle of sufficient reason of knowing with that of cause and effect; still he does not clearly determine here wherein the difference consists. Indeed, he himself mistakes the one for the other; for he quotes instances of cause and effect in confirmation of the principium rationis sufficientis in this very chapter, de ratione sufficiente, §§ 70, 74, 75, 77, which, had he really wished to preserve that distinction, ought rather to have been quoted in the chapter de causis of the same work. In said chapter he again brings forward precisely similar instances, and once more enunciates the principium cognoscendi (§ 876), which does not certainly belong to it, having been already discussed, yet which serves to introduce the immediately following clear and definite distinction between this principle and the law of causality, §§ 881-884. Principium, he continues, dicitur id, quod in se continet rationem alterius; and he distinguishes three kinds: 1. Principium Fiendi (causa), which he defines as ratio actualitatis alterius, e.g., si lapis calescit, ignis aut radii solares sunt rationes, cur calor lapidi insit.—2. Principium Essendi, which he defines as ratio possibilitatis alterius; in eodem, exemplo, ratio possibilitatis, cur lapis calorem recipere possit, est in essentia seu modo compositionis lapidis. This last conception seems to me inadmissible. If it has any meaning at all, possibility means correspondence with the general conditions of experience known to us à priori, as Kant has sufficiently shown. From these conditions we know, with respect to Wolf's instance of the stone, that changes are possible as effects proceeding from causes: we know, that is, that one state can succeed another, if the former contains the conditions for the latter. In this case we find, as effect, the state of being warm in the stone; as cause, the preceding state of a limited capacity for warmth in the stone and its contact with free heat. Now, Wolf's naming the first mentioned property of this state principium essendi, and the second, principium fiendi, rests upon a delusion caused by the fact that, so far as the stone is concerned, the conditions are more lasting and can therefore wait longer for the others. That the stone should be as it is: that is, that it should be chemically so constituted as to bring with it a particular degree of specific heat, consequently a capacity for heat which stands in inverse proportion to its specific heat; that besides it should, on the other hand, come into contact with free heat, is the consequence of a whole chain of antecedent causes, all of them principia fiendi; but it is the coincidence of circumstances on both sides which primarily constitutes that condition, upon which, as cause, the becoming warm depends, as effect. All this leaves no room for Wolf's principium essendi, which I therefore do not admit, and concerning which I have here entered somewhat into detail, partly because I mean to use the word myself later on in a totally different sense; partly also, because this explanation contributes to facilitate the comprehension of the law of causality.—3. Wolf, as we have said, distinguishes a Principium Cognoscendi, and refers also under causa to a causa impulsiva, sive ratio voluntatem determinans.
§ 11. Philosophers between Wolf and Kant.
Baumgarten repeats the Wolfian distinctions in his "Metaphysica," §§ 20-24, and §§ 306-313.
Reimarus, in his "Vernunftlehre,"[41] § 81, distinguishes 1. Inward reason, of which his explanation agrees with Wolf's ratio essendi, and might even be applicable to the ratio cognoscendi, if he did not transfer to things what only applies to conceptions; 2. Outward reason, i.e. causa.—§ 120 et seqq., he rightly defines the ratio cognoscendi as a condition of the proposition; but in an example, § 125, he nevertheless confounds it with cause.
Lambert, in the new Organon, does not mention Wolf's distinctions; he shows, however, that he recognizes a difference between reason of knowledge and cause;[42] for he says that God is the principium essendi of truths, and that truths are the principia cognoscendi of God.