Initiation into Philosophy

by Émile Faguet

Secondly: even my own actual existence, my existence at this very moment, is it the result of my existence yesterday? Nothing proves it, and there is no necessity because I existed just now that I should exist at present. There must therefore be a cause at each moment and a continuous cause. That continuous cause is God, and the whole world is a creation perpetually continued, and is only comprehensible as continuous creation and is only explicable by a Creator.

THE WORLD.—Thus sure of himself, of God, and of the world, Descartes studies the world and himself. In the world he sees souls and matter; matter is substance in extensions, souls are substance not in extension, spiritual substance. The extended substance is endowed with impulse. Is the impulse self-generated, are the bodies self-impelled? No, they are moved. What is the primary motive force? It is God. Souls are substances without extension and motive forces. In this respect they are analogous to God. They are united to bodies and act on them. How? This is an impenetrable mystery, but they are closely and substantially united to the bodies, which is proved by physical pains depressing the soul and moral sufferings depressing the body; and they act on them, not by creating movements, for the quantity of movements is always the same, but by directing the movements after this fashion or that. Souls being spiritual, there is no reason for their disaggregation, that is, their demise, and in fact they do not die.

It is for this reason that Descartes lays such stress on animals not having souls. If they had souls, the souls would be spiritual, they would not be susceptible to disaggregation and would be immortal. "Save atheism, there is no doctrine more dangerous and detestable than that," but animals are soulless and purely mechanism; Descartes exerts himself to prove this in great detail, and he thus escapes avowing the immortality of the souls of animals, which is repugnant to him, or by allowing that they perish with the bodies to be exposed to the objection: "Will it not be the same with the souls of men?"

THE FREEDOM OF THE SOUL.—The human soul is endowed with freedom to do good or evil. What proof is there of this freedom? First, the inward feeling that we have. Every evident idea is true. Now, not only have we the idea of this freedom, but it would be impossible for us not to have it. Freedom "is known without proofs, merely by the experience we have of it." It is by the feeling of our freedom, of our free-will that we understand that we exist as a being, as a thing which is not merely a thing. The true ego is the will. Even more than an intelligent being, man is a free individual, and only feels himself to be a man when feeling himself free, so that he might not believe himself to be intelligent, nor think himself sensible, etc., but not to think himself free would for him be moral suicide; and in fact he actually never does anything which he does not believe himself to be free to do—that is, which he does not believe that he might avoid doing, if he so wished. Those who say, "It is simply the feeling that it is better for ourselves which tends to make us do this instead of doing that," are deeply in error. They forget that we often prefer the worst for ourselves in order to prove to ourselves that we are free and therefore have no other motive power than our own freedom. (And this is exactly what contemporaneous philosophy has thus formulated: "Will is neither determinate nor indeterminate, it is determinative.") "Even when a very obvious reason leads us to a thing, although morally speaking it is difficult for us to do the opposite, nevertheless, speaking absolutely, we can, for we are always free to prevent ourselves from pursuing a good thing clearly known ... provided only that we think it is beneficial thereby to give evidence of the truth of our free-will." It is the pure and simple wish to be free which creates an action; it is the all-powerful liberty.

As has been happily observed, in relation to the universe the philosophy of Descartes is a mechanical philosophy; in relation to man the philosophy of Descartes is a philosophy of will. As has also been remarked, there are very striking analogies between Corneille and Descartes from the point of view of the apotheosis of the will, and the Meditations having appeared after the great works of Corneille, it is not so much that Corneille was a Cartesian, as that Descartes was a follower of Corneille.

PSYCHOLOGY OF DESCARTES.—Descartes has almost written a psychology, what with his Treatise on the Passions and his letters and, besides, certain passages in his Meditations. The soul thinks and has passions. There are three kinds of ideas, the factitious, the adventitious, and the innate; the factitious ideas are those which the imagination forms; the adventitious ideas are those suggested by the external world through the intermediary of the senses; the innate ideas are those constituting the mind itself, the conditions under which it thinks and apart from which it cannot think: we cannot conceive an object not extended, nor an object apart from time, nor anything without a cause; the ideas of time, space, and cause are innate ideas; we cannot conceive ourselves as other than free; the idea of liberty is an innate idea.

The soul has passions; it is therein that, without dependence on the body, it has intimate relations with and is modified by it, not radically, but in its daily life. There are operations of the soul which cannot strictly be termed passions, and yet which are directed or at least influenced by the body. Memory is passive, and consequently memory is a species of passion. The lively sensations which the body transmits to the brain leave impressions (Malebranche would say "traces"), and according to these impressions the soul is moved a second or a third time, and that is what is called memory. "The impressions of the brain render it suitable to stir the soul in the same way as it has been stirred before, and also to make it recollect something, just as the folds in a piece of paper or linen make it more suitable to be folded anew as it was before than if it had never been thus folded." Similarly, the association of ideas is passive, and in consequence is a kind of passion. The association of ideas is the fact that thought passes along the same path it has already traversed, and follows in its labyrinth the thread which interlinks its thoughts, and this thread is the traces which thoughts have left in the brain. In abandoning ourselves to the association of ideas, we are passive and we yield ourselves freely to a passion. That is so true that current speech itself recognizes this: musing is a passion, it is possible to have a passion for musing, and musing is nothing else than the association of ideas in which the will does not intervene.

THE PASSIONS.—Coming to the passions strictly speaking, there are some which are of the soul and only of the soul; the passion for God is a passion of the soul, the passion for liberty is a passion of the soul; but there are many more which are the effects of the union of the soul with the body. These passions are excited in the soul by a state of the body or a movement of the body or of some part of the body; they are "emotions" of the soul corresponding to "movements" of the machine. All passions have relation to the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain, and according as they relate to the former or the latter are they expansive or oppressive. There are six principal passions, of which all the rest are only modifications: admiration, love, desire, joy, having relation to the appetite of happiness; hatred, sadness, having relation to the fear of pain. "All the passions are good and may become bad" (Descartes in this deviates emphatically from Stoicism for which the passions are simply maladies of the soul). All passions are good in themselves. They are destined (this is a remarkable theory) to cause the duration of thoughts which would otherwise pass and be rapidly effaced; by reason of this, they cause man to act; if he were only directed by his thoughts, unaccompanied by his passions, he would never act, and if it be recognized that man is born for action, it will at the same time be recognized that it is necessary he should have passions.

But, you will say, there can be good passions (of a nature to give force to just ideas) and evil passions.

No, they are all good, but all also have their bad side, their deviation, rather, which enables them to become bad. Therefore, in each passion no matter what it be, it is always possible to distinguish between the passion itself, which is always good, and the excess, the deviation, the degradation or corruption of this passion which constitutes, if it be desired to call it so, an evil passion, and this is what Descartes demonstrates, passion by passion, in the fullest detail, in his Treatise on the Passions.