CARTERET, SIR GEORGE (c. 1610-1680), English politician, was born between 1609 and 1617 on the island of Jersey, where his family had long been prominent landholders. He was the son of Helier de Carteret of St Ouen, and in his youth was trained to follow the sea. In 1639 he became comptroller of the English navy. During the Civil War he was active in behalf of the king. In 1643 he succeeded by reversion from his uncle, Sir Philip Carteret, to the post of bailiff of Jersey, and in the same year was appointed by the king lieutenant-governor of the island. After subduing the Parliamentary party in the island, he was commissioned (1644) a vice-admiral of Jersey and “the maritime parts adjacent,” and by virtue of that office he carried on from there an active privateering campaign in the Royalist cause. Parliament branded him as a pirate and excluded him specifically from future amnesty. His rule in Jersey was severe, but profitable to the island; he developed its resources and made it a refuge for Royalists, among whom in 1646 and again in 1649-1650 was Prince Charles, who created Carteret a knight and baronet. In 1650, in consideration of Carteret’s services, Charles granted to him “a certain island and adjacent islets near Virginia, in America,” which were to be called New Jersey; but no settlement upon this grant was made. In 1651 Carteret, after a seven weeks’ siege, was compelled to surrender Jersey to a Parliamentary force; he then joined the Royalist exiles in France, where for a time he held a command in the French navy. He returned to England at the Restoration, became a privy councillor, sat in parliament for Portsmouth, and also served as vice-chamberlain of the royal household, a position to which he had been appointed in 1647. From 1661 to 1667 he was treasurer of the navy. He rendered valuable service during the Dutch War, but his lax methods of keeping accounts led to his being censured by parliament. In 1667 he became a deputy treasurer of Ireland. He continued nevertheless in the royal favour, and subsequently was appointed one of the commissioners of the admiralty and a member of the board of trade and plantations. He belonged to that group of courtiers interested in the colonization of America, and was one of the eight to whom Charles II. granted the country of the Carolinas by the charters of 1663 and 1665. In 1664 James, duke of York, granted that part of his American territory between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to Sir George Carteret and John, Lord Berkeley, and in Carteret’s honour this tract received the name of New Jersey. Sir George’s relative, Philip Carteret (d. 1682), was sent over as governor in 1665, but was temporarily deposed in 1672 by the discontented colonists, who chose James Carteret (perhaps a natural son of Sir George) as “president.” Philip Carteret was restored to his office in 1674. In this year Lord Berkeley disposed of his share of the grant, which finally fell under the control of William Penn and his associates. With them Carteret agreed (1676) upon a boundary line which divided the colony into East and West Jersey. He died in January 1680, and two years later his heirs disposed of his New Jersey holdings to Penn and other Quakers.
CARTESIANISM,[1] the general name given to the philosophy developed principally in the works of Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza. It is impossible to exhibit the full meaning of these authors except in connexion, for they are all ruled by one and the same thought in different stages of its evolution. It may be true that Malebranche and Spinoza were prepared, the former by the study of Augustine, the latter by the study of Jewish philosophy, to draw from Cartesian principles consequences which Descartes never anticipated. But the foreign light did not alter the picture on which it was cast, but only let it be seen more clearly. The consequences were legitimately drawn. It may be shown that they lay in the system from the first, and that they were evolved by nothing but its own immanent dialectic. At the same time it is not likely that they would ever have been brought into such clear consciousness, or expressed with such consistency, except by a philosopher whose circumstances and character had completely detached him from all the convictions and prejudices of the age. In Malebranche, Cartesianism found an interpreter whose meditative spirit was fostered by the cloister, but whose speculative boldness was restrained by the traditions of the Catholic church. In Spinoza it found one who was in spirit and position more completely isolated than any monk, who was removed from the influence of the religious as well as the secular world of his time, and who in his solitude seemed scarcely ever to hear any voice but the voice of philosophy. It is because Cartesianism found such a pure organ of expression that its development is, in some sense, complete and typical. Its principles have been carried to their ultimate result, and we have before us all the data necessary to determine their value.
The Philosophy of Descartes.—Descartes was, in the full sense of the word, a partaker of the modern spirit. He was equally moved by the tendencies that produced the Reformation, and the tendencies that produced the revival of letters and science. Like Erasmus and Bacon, he sought to escape from a transcendent and unreal philosophy of the other world, to the knowledge of man and the world he lives in. But like Luther, he found within human experience, among the matters nearest to man, the consciousness of God, and therefore his renunciation of scholasticism did not end either in materialism or in that absolute distinction between faith and reason which inevitably leads to the downfall of faith. What was peculiar to Descartes, however, was the speculative interest which made it impossible for him to rest in mere experience, whether of things spiritual or of things secular, which made him search, both in our consciousness of God and our consciousness of the world, for the links by which they are bound to the consciousness of self. In both Principle of doubt. cases it is his aim to go back to the beginning, to retrace the unconscious process by which the world of experience was built up, to discover the hidden logic that connects the different parts of the structure of belief, to substitute a reasoned system, all whose elements are interdependent, for an unreasoned congeries of opinions. Hence his first step involves reflection, doubt and abstraction. Turning the eye of reason upon itself, he tries to measure the value of that collection of beliefs of which he finds himself possessed; and the first thing that reflection seems to discover is its accidental and unconnected character. It is a mass of incongruous materials, accumulated without system and untested. Its elements have been put together under all kinds of influences, without any conscious intellectual process, and therefore we can have no assurance of them. In order that we may have such assurance we must unweave the web of experience and thought which we have woven in our sleep, that we may begin again at the beginning and weave it over again with “clear and distinct” consciousness of what we are doing. De omnibus dubitandum est. We must free ourselves by one decisive effort from the weight of custom, prejudice and tradition with which our consciousness of the world has been overlaid, that in that consciousness in its simplest and most elementary form we may find the true beginning of knowledge. The method of doubt is at the same time a method of abstraction, by which Descartes rises above the thought of the particular objects of knowledge, in order that he may find the primary truth in which lies the very definition of knowledge, of the reason why anything can be said to be true. First disappears the whole mass of dogmas and opinions as to God and man which are confessedly received on mere authority. Then the supposed evidence of sense is rejected, for external reality is not immediately given in sensation. It is acknowledged by all that the senses often mislead us as to the nature of things without us, and perhaps they may also mislead us as to there being anything without us at all. Nay, by an effort, we can even carry doubt beyond this point; we can doubt even mathematical truth. When, indeed, we have our thoughts directed to the geometrical demonstration, when the steps of the process are immediately before our minds, we cannot but assent to the proposition that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; but when we forget or turn away our thoughts from such demonstration, we can imagine that God or some powerful spirit is playing upon our minds to deceive them, also that even our most certain judgments may be illusory. In this naïve manner does Descartes express the idea that there are necessities of thought prior to, and presupposed in the truth of geometry. He is seeking to strip thought of all the “lendings” that seem to come to it from anything but itself, of all relation to being that can be supposed to be given to it from without, that he may discover the primary unity of thought and being on which all Certainty of the thinking self. knowledge depends. And this he finds in pure self-consciousness. Whatever I abstract from, I cannot abstract from self, from the “I think” that, as Kant puts it, accompanies all our ideas; for it was in fact the very independence of this universal element on the particulars that made all our previous abstraction possible. Even doubt rests on certitude; alone with self I cannot get rid of this self. By an effort of thought I separate my thinking self from all that I think, but the thinking self remains, and in thinking I am. Cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” The objective judgment of self-consciousness is bound up with or involved in the very faculty of judging, and therefore remains when we abstract from all other objective judgments. It is an assertion involved in the very process by which we dismiss all other assertions. Have we not then a right to regard it as a primitive unity of thought and being, in which is contained, or out of which may be developed, the very definition of truth?
The sense in which Descartes understood his first principle becomes clearer when we look at his answers to the objections made against it. On the one hand it was challenged by those who asked, like Gassendi, why the argument should be based especially Difficulties of the “cogito, ergo sum.” on thought, and why we might not say with as good a right, ambulo, ergo sum: “I walk, therefore I am.” Descartes explains that it is only as referred to consciousness that walking is an evidence of my existence; but if I say, “I am conscious of walking, therefore I exist,” this is equivalent to saying, “I think in one particular way, therefore I exist.” But it is not thinking in a particular way, but thinking in general that is coextensive with my existence. I am not always conscious of walking or of any other special state or object, but I am always conscious, for except in consciousness there is no ego or self, and where there is consciousness there is always an ego. “Do I then always think, even in sleep?” asks the objector; and Descartes exposes himself to the criticisms of Locke, by maintaining that it is impossible that there should ever be an interval in the activity of consciousness, and by insisting that as man is essentially a thinking substance, the child thinks, or is self-conscious, even in its mother’s womb. The difficulty disappears when we observe that the question as to the conditions under which self-consciousness is developed in the individual human subject does not affect the nature of self-consciousness in itself or in its relation to knowledge. The force of Descartes’s argument really lies in this, that the world as an intelligible world exists only for a conscious self, and that therefore the unity of thought and being in self-consciousness is presupposed in all knowledge. Of this self it is true to say that it exists only as it thinks, and that it thinks always. Cogito, ergo sum is, as Descartes points out, not a syllogism, but the expression of an identity which is discerned by the simple intuition of the mind.[2] If it were otherwise, the major “omne quod cogitat existit” would require to have been known before the minor “cogito”; whereas on the contrary it is from the immediate consciousness of being as contained in self-consciousness that that major can alone be derived. Again, when Hobbes and others argued that thinking is or may be a property of a material substance, Descartes answers that the question whether the material and the thinking substance are one does not meet us at the outset, but can only be solved after we have considered what is involved in the conception of these different substances respectively.[3] In other words, to begin by treating thinking as a quality of a material substance, is to go outside of the intelligible world for an explanation of the intelligible world. It is to ask for something prior to that which is first in thought. If it be true that the consciousness of self is that from which we cannot abstract, that which is involved in the knowledge of anything, then to go beyond it and seek for a reason or explanation of it in anything else is to go beyond the beginning of knowledge; it is to ask for a knowledge before knowledge.
Descartes, however, is himself unfaithful to this point of view; for, strictly taken, it would involve the consequence, not only that there is nothing prior to the pure consciousness of self, but that there can be no object which is not in necessary relation to it. Hence there can be no absolute opposition between thought and anything else, no opposition which thought itself does not transcend. But Descartes commits the error of making thought the property of a substance, a res cogitans, which as such can immediately or directly apprehend nothing but thoughts or ideas; while, altogether outside of these thoughts and ideas, there is another substance characterized by the property of extension, and with which thought has nothing to do. Matter in space is thus changed, in Kantian language, into a “thing in itself,” an object out of all relation to the subject; and on the other hand, mind seems to be shut up in the magic circle of its own ideas, without any capacity of breaking through the circle or apprehending any reality but itself. Between thought and being, in spite of their subjective unity in self-consciousness, a great gulf seems still to be fixed, which cannot be crossed unless thought should become extended, or matter think. But to Descartes the dualism is absolute, because it is a presupposition with which he starts. Mind cannot go out of itself, cannot deal with anything but thought, without ceasing to be mind; and matter must cease to be matter ere it can lose its absolute externality, its nature as having partes extra partes, and acquire the unity of mind. They are opposed as the divisible and the indivisible, and there is no possible existence of matter in thought except a representative existence. The ideal (or, as Descartes calls it, objective) existence of matter in thought and the real (or, as Descartes calls it, formal) existence of matter out of thought are absolutely different and independent things.
It was, however, impossible for Descartes to be content with a subjective idealism that confined all knowledge to the tautological expression of self-consciousness “I am I,” “What I perceive I perceive.” If the individual is to Proof of existence of God. find in his self-consciousness the principle of all knowledge, there must be something in it which transcends the distinction of self and not self, which carries him beyond the limit of his own individuality. What then is the point where the subjective consciousness passes out into the objective, from which it seemed at first absolutely excluded? Descartes answers that it is through the connexion of the consciousness of self with the consciousness of God. It is because we find God in our minds that we find anything else. The proof of God’s existence is therefore the hinge on which the whole Cartesian philosophy turns, and it is necessary to examine the nature of it somewhat closely.
Descartes, in the first place, tries to extract a criterion of truth out of the cogito, ergo sum. Why am I assured of my own existence? It is because the conception of existence is at once and immediately involved in the consciousness of self. I can logically distinguish the two elements, but I cannot separate them; whenever I clearly and distinctly conceive the one, I am forced to think the other along with it. But this gives me a rule for all judgments whatever, a principle which is related to the cogito, ergo sum as the formal to the material principle of knowledge. Whatever we cannot separate from the clear and distinct conception of anything, necessarily belongs to it in reality; and on the other hand, whatever we can separate from the clear and distinct conception of anything, does not necessarily belong to it in reality. Let us therefore set an object clearly before us, let us sever it in thought so far as is possible from all other objects, and we shall at once be able to determine what properties and relations are essential and what are not essential to it. And if we find empirically that any object manifests a property or relation not involved in the clear and distinct conception of it, we can say with certainty that such property or relation does not belong to it except by arbitrary arrangement, or, in other words, by the external combination of things which in their own nature have no affinity or connexion.
Now, by the application of this principle, we might at once assure ourselves of many mathematical truths; but, as has been already shown, there is a point of view from which we may doubt even these, so long as the idea of a God that deceives us is not excluded. If it is not certain that there is a God that cannot lie, it is not certain that there is an objective matter in space to which mathematical truth applies. But the existence of God may be proved in two ways. In the first place, it may be proved through the principle of causality, which is a self-evident truth. We have in our mind many ideas, and according to the principle of causality, all these ideas must be derived from something that contains a “formal” reality which corresponds to their “objective” reality, i.e. which contains at least as much reality in its existence out of thought as they contain in their existence in thought. Now we might derive from ourselves not only the ideas of other minds like ourselves, but possibly also of material objects, since these are lower in the scale of existence than ourselves, and it is conceivable that the idea of them might be got by omitting some of the qualities which distinguish ourselves. But the idea of God, of a being who is eternal and immutable, all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good, cannot be derived from our own limited and imperfect existence. The origin, therefore, must be sought in a being who contains actually in himself all that is contained in our idea of him.
It was objected by some of the critics of Descartes that the idea of God as the infinite Being is merely negative, and that it is derived from the finite simply by abstracting from its conditions. Descartes answers that the case is just the reverse—the Descartes’s metaphysics. infinite is the positive idea, and the finite is the negative, and therefore the former is the presupposition of the latter. As Kant, at a later date, pointed out that space is not a general conception, abstracted from the ideas of particular spaces, and representing the common element in them, but that, on the contrary, the ideas of particular spaces are got by the limitation of the one infinite space that is prior to them, so Descartes maintains in general that the idea of the finite is had only by limitation of the infinite, and not the idea of the infinite by abstraction from the particular determinations of the finite. It is a necessary consequence of this that the self-consciousness of a finite being is bound up with the consciousness of the infinite. Hence the idea of God is not merely one among other ideas which we have, but it is the one idea that is necessary to our very existence as thinking beings, the idea through which alone we can think ourselves, or anything else. “I ought never to suppose,” says Descartes, “that my conception of the infinite is a negative idea, got by negation of the finite, just as I conceive repose to be merely negation of movement, and darkness merely the negation of light. On the contrary, I see manifestly that there is more reality in the infinite than in the finite substance, and that therefore I have in me the notion of the infinite, even in some sense prior to the notion of the finite, or, in other words, that the notion of myself in some sense presupposes the notion of God; for how could I doubt or desire, how could I be conscious of anything as a want, how could I know that I am not altogether perfect, if I had not in me the idea of a being more perfect than myself, by comparison with whom I recognize the defects of my own existence?”[4] Descartes then goes on in various ways to illustrate the thesis that the consciousness of a defective and growing nature cannot give rise to the idea of infinite perfection, but on the contrary presupposes it. We could not think of a series of approximations unless there were somehow present to us the idea of the completed infinite as the goal we aim at. If we had not the consciousness of ourselves as finite in relation to the infinite, either we should not be conscious of ourselves at all, or we should be conscious of ourselves as infinite. The image of God is so impressed by him upon us, that we “conceive that resemblance wherein the idea of God is contained by the same faculty whereby we are conscious of ourselves.” In other words, our consciousness of ourselves is at the same time consciousness of our finitude, and hence of our relation to a being who is infinite.