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.%