Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Carnegie Andrew" to "Casus Belli" / Volume 5, Slice 4

by Various

But even this denial is not the last word of pantheism. When the principle that the finite is known only in relation to the infinite, the individual only in relation to the universal, is interpreted as meaning that the infinite and universal is complete in itself without the finite and individual, when the finite and individual is treated as a mere accidental existence due to the “arbitrary will of God,” it ceases to be possible to conceive even God as a spirit. Did Malebranche realize what he was saying when he declared that God was “being in general,” but not any particular being? At any rate we can see that the same logic that leads him almost to deny the reality of finite beings, leads him also to seek the divine nature in something more abstract and general even than thought. If we must abstract from all relation to the finite in order to know God as he is, is it not necessary for us also to abstract from self-consciousness, for self-consciousness has a negative element in it that is something definite, and therefore limited? We do not wonder, therefore, when we find Malebranche saying that reason does not tell us that God is a spirit, but only that he is an infinitely perfect being, and that he must be conceived rather as a spirit than as a body simply because spirit is more perfect than body. “When we call God a spirit, it is not so much to show positively what he is, as to signify that he is not material.” But as we ought not to give him a bodily form like man’s, so we ought not to think of his spirit as similar to our own spirits, although we can conceive nothing more perfect. “It is necessary rather to believe that as he contains in himself the properties of matter without being material, so he comprehends in himself the perfections of created spirits without being a spirit as we alone can conceive spirits, and that his true name is ‘He who is,’ i.e. Being without restriction, Being infinite and universal.”[23] Thus the essentially self-revealing God of Christianity gives way to pure spirit, and pure spirit in its turn to the eternal and incomprehensible substance of which we can say nothing but that it is. The divine substance contains in it, indeed, everything that is in creation, but it contains them eminenter in some incomprehensible form that is reconcilable with its infinitude. But we have no adequate name by which to call it except Being. The curious metaphysic of theology by which, in his later writings, Malebranche tried to make room for the incarnation by supposing that the finite creation, which as finite is unworthy of God, was made worthy by union with Christ, the divine Word, shows that Malebranche had some indistinct sense of the necessity of reconciling his philosophy with his theology; but it shows also the necessarily artificial nature of the combination. The result of the union of such incongruous elements was something which the theologians at once recognised as heterodox and the philosophers as illogical.

There was another doctrine of Malebranche which brought him into trouble with the theologians, and which was the main subject of his long controversy with Arnauld. This was his denial of particular providence. As Leibnitz maintained that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that its evils are to be explained by the negative nature of the finite, so Malebranche, with a slight change of expression derived evil from the nature of particular or individual existence. It is not conformable to the nature of God to act by any but universal laws, and these universal laws necessarily involve particular evil consequences, though their ultimate result is the highest possible good. The question why there should be any particular existence, any existence but God, seeing such existence necessarily involves evil, remains insoluble so long as the purely pantheistic view of God is maintained; and it is this view which is really at the bottom of the assertion that he can have no particular volitions. To the coarse and anthropomorphic conception of particular providence Malebranche may be right in objecting, but on the other hand, it cannot be doubted that any theory in which the universal is absolutely opposed to the particular, the infinite to the finite, is unchristian as well as unphilosophical. For under this dualistic presupposition, there seem to be only two possible alternatives open to thought: either the particular and finite must be treated as something independent of the universal and infinite, which involves an obvious contradiction, or else it must be regarded as absolute nonentity. We find Malebranche doing the one or the other as occasion requires. Thus he vindicates the freedom of man’s will on the ground that the universal will of God does not completely determine the particular volitions of man; and then becoming conscious of the difficulty involved in this conception, he tries, like Descartes, to explain the particular will as something merely negative, a defect, and not a positive existence.

But to understand fully Malebranche’s view of freedom and the ethical system connected with it, we must notice an important alteration which he makes in the Cartesian theory of the relation of will and intelligence. To Descartes, as we have Reason and will.seen, the ultimate essence of mind lay in pure abstract self-determination or will, and hence he based even moral and intellectual truth on the arbitrary decrees of God. With Malebranche, on the other hand, abstraction goes a step further; and the absolute is sought not in the subject as opposed to the object, not in pure formal self-determination as opposed to that which is determined, but in a unity that transcends this difference. With him, therefore, will ceases to be regarded as the essence of intelligence, and sinks into a property or separable attribute of it. As we can conceive an extended substance without actual movement, so, he says, we can conceive a thinking substance without actual volition. But “matter or extension without motion would be entirely useless and incapable of that variety of forms for which it is made; and we cannot, therefore, suppose, that an all-wise Being would create it in this way. In like manner, if a spiritual or thinking substance were without will, it is clear that it would be quite useless, for it would not be attracted towards the objects of its perception, and would not love the good for which it is made. We cannot therefore conceive an intelligent being so to fashion it.”[24] Now God need not be conceived as creating at all, for he is self-sufficient; but if he be a creator of spirits, he must create them for himself. “God cannot will that there should exist a spirit that does not love him, or that loves him less than any other good.”[25] The craving for good in general, for an absolute satisfaction, is a natural love of God that is common to all. “The just, the wicked, the blessed, and the damned all alike love God with this love.” Out of this love of God arises the love we have to ourselves and to others, which are the natural inclinations that belong to all created spirits. For these inclinations are but the elements of the love which is in God, and which therefore he inspires in all his creatures. “Il s’aime, il nous aime, il aime toutes ses créatures; il ne fait donc point d’esprits qu’il ne les porte à l’aimer, à s’aimer, et à aimer toutes les créatures.”[26] Stripping this thought of its theological vesture, what is expressed here is simply that as a spiritual being each man is conscious of his own limited and individual existence, as well as of the limited and individual existence of other beings like himself, only in relation to the whole in which they are parts, so he can find his own good only in the good of the whole, and he is in contradiction with himself so long as he rests in any good short of that. His love of happiness, his natural inclinations both selfish and social, may be therefore regarded as an undeveloped form of the love of God; and the ideal state of his inclinations is that in which the love of self and of others are explicitly referred to that higher affection, or in which his love does not proceed from a part to the whole, but from the whole to the parts.

The question of morals to Malebranche is the question how these natural inclinations are related to the particular passions. Sensation and passion arise out of the connexion of body and soul, and their use is only to urge us to attend to the wants of Ethics. the former. We can scarcely hear without a smile the simple monastic legend which Malebranche weaves together about the original nature of the passions and their alteration by the Fall. “It is visibly a disorder that a spirit capable of knowing and loving God should be obliged to occupy itself with the needs of the body.” “A being altogether occupied with what passes in his body and with the infinity of objects that surround it cannot be thinking on the things that are truly good.”[27] Hence the necessity of an immediate and instinctive warning from the senses in regard to the relations of things to our organism, and also of pains and pleasures which may induce us to attend to this warning. “Sensible pleasure is the mark that nature has attached to the use of certain things in order that without having the trouble of examining them by reason, we may employ them for the preservation of the body, but not in order that we may love them.”[28] Till the Fall the mind was merely united to the body, not subjected to it, and the influence of these pleasures and pains was only such as to make men attend to their bodily wants, but not to occupy the mind, or fill it with sensuous joys and sorrows, or trouble its contemplation of that which is really good. Our moral aim should therefore be to restore this state of things, to weaken our union with the body and strengthen our union with God. And to encourage us in pursuing this aim we have to remember that union with God is natural to the spirit, and that, while even the condition of union with the body is artificial, the condition of subjection to the body is wholly unnatural to it. Our primary tendency is towards the supreme good, and we only love the objects of our passions in so far as we “determine towards particular, and therefore false goods, the love that God gives us for himself.” The search for happiness is really the search for God in disguise, and even the levity and inconstancy with which men rush from one finite good to another, is a proof that they were made for the infinite. Furthermore, this natural love of God, or inclination for good in general, “gives us the power of suspending our consent in regard to those particular goods which do not satisfy it.”[29] If we refuse to be led by the obscure and confused voice of instinctive feeling, which arises from and always tends to confirm our union with the body, and wait for the light of reason which arises from and always tends to confirm our union with God, we have done all that is in our power, the rest is God’s work. “If we only judge precisely of that which we see clearly, we shall never be deceived. For then it will not be we that judge, but the universal reason that judges in us.”[30] And as our love, even of particular goods, is a confused love of the supreme good, so the clear vision of God inevitably brings with it the love of him. “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” When it is the divine reason that speaks in us it is the divine love that moves us, “the same love wherewith God loves himself and the things he has made.”[31]

The general result of the ethics of Malebranche is ascetic. The passions, like the senses, have no relation to the higher life of the soul; their value is only in relation to the union of soul and body, a union which is purely accidental or due to the arbitrary will of God. The more silently they discharge their provisional function, and the less they disturb or interfere with the pure activity of spirit, the more nearly they approach to the only perfection that is possible for them. Their ideal state is to remain or become again simple instincts that act mechanically like the circulation of the blood. Universal light of reason casts no ray into the obscurity of sense; its universal love cannot embrace any of the objects of particular passion. It is indeed recognized by Malebranche that sensation in man is mixed with thought, that the passions in him are forms of the love of good in general. But this union of the rational with the sensuous nature is regarded merely as a confusion which is to be cleared up, not in a higher unity of the two elements, but simply by the withdrawal of the spirit from contact with that which darkens and defiles it. Of a transformation of sense into thought, of passion into duty—an elevation of the life of sense till it becomes the embodiment and expression of the life of reason—Malebranche has no conception. Hence the life of reason turns with him to mysticism in theory and to asceticism in practice. His universal is abstract and opposed to the particular; instead of explaining it, it explains it away.

A certain tender beauty as of twilight is spread over the world as we view it through the eyes of this cloistered philosopher, and we do not at first see that the softness and ideality of the picture is due to the gathering darkness. Abstraction seems only to be purifying, and not destroying, till it has done its perfect work. Malebranche conceived himself to be presenting to the world only the purest and most refined expression of Christian ethics and theology. But if we obey his own continual advice to think clearly and distinctly, if we divest his system of all the sensuous and imaginative forms in which he has clothed it, and reduce it to the naked simplicity of its central thought, what we find is not a God that reveals himself in the finite, and to the finite, but the absolute substance which has no revelation, and whose existence is the negation of all but itself. Thus to tear away the veil, however, there was needed a stronger, simpler, and freer spirit—a spirit less influenced by opinion, less inclined to practical compromise, and gifted with a stronger “faith in the whispers of the lonely muse” of speculation than Malebranche.

The Philosophy of Spinoza.—It is a remark of Hegel’s that Spinoza, as a Jew, first brought into European thought the idea of an absolute unity in which the difference of finite and infinite is lost. Some later writers have gone further, and attempted to show that the main doctrines by which his philosophy is distinguished from that of Descartes were due to the direct influences of Jewish writers like Maimonides, Gersonides, and Hasdai Crescas, rather than to the necessary development of Cartesian ideas. And it is undoubtedly true that many points of similarity with such writers, reaching down even to verbal coincidence, may be detected in the works of Spinoza, although it is not so easy to determine how much he owed to their teaching. His own view of his obligations is sufficiently indicated by the fact, that while in his ethics he carries on a continual polemic against Descartes, and strives at every point to show that his own doctrines are legitimately derived from Cartesian principles, he only once refers to Jewish philosophy as containing an obscure and unreasoned anticipation of these doctrines. “Quod quidam Hebraeorum quasi per nebulam vidisse videntur qui scilicet statuunt Deum Dei intellectum resque ab ipso intellectas unum et idem esse.”[32] It may be that the undeveloped pantheism and rationalism of the Jewish philosophers had a deeper influence than he himself was aware of, in emancipating him from the traditions of the synagogue, and giving to his mind its first philosophical bias. In his earlier work there are Neoplatonic ideas and expressions which in the Ethics are rejected or remoulded into a form more suitable to the spirit of Cartesianism. But the question, after all, has little more than a biographical interest. In the Spinozistic philosophy there are few differences from Descartes which cannot be traced to the necessary development of Cartesian principles; and the comparison of Malebranche shows that a similar development might take place under the most diverse intellectual conditions. What is most remarkable in Spinoza is just the freedom and security with which these principles are followed out to their last result. His Jewish origin and his breach with Judaism completely isolated him from every influence but that of the thought that possesses him. And no scruple or hesitation, no respect for the institutions or feelings of his time interferes with his speculative consequence. He exhibits to us the almost perfect type of a mind without superstitions, which has freed itself from all but reasoned and intelligent convictions, or, in the Cartesian phrase, “clear and distinct ideas”; and when he fails, it is not by any inconsistency, or arbitrary stopping short of the necessary conclusions of his logic, but by the essential defect of his principles.

Spinoza takes his idea of method from mathematics, and after the manner of Euclid, places at the head of each book of his Ethics a certain number of definitions, axioms, and postulates which are supposed to be intuitively certain, and to form Geometrical method applied to metaphysics. a sufficient basis for all that follows. Altogether there are twenty-seven definitions, twenty axioms, and eight postulates. If Spinoza is regarded as the most consequent of philosophers it cannot be because he has based his system upon so many fragmentary views of truth; it must be because a deeper unity has been discerned in the system than is visible on the first aspect of it. We must, therefore, to a certain extent distinguish between the form and the matter of his thought, though it is also true that the defective form itself involves a defect in the matter.

What in the first instance recommends the geometrical method to Spinoza is, not only its apparent exactness and the necessity of its sequence, but, so to speak, its disinterestedness. Confusion of thought arises from the fact that we put ourselves, our desires and feelings and interests, into our view of things; that we do not regard them as they are in themselves, in their essential nature, but look for some final cause, that is, some relation to ourselves by which they may be explained. For this reason, he says, “the truth might for ever have remained hid from the human race, if mathematics, which looks not to the final cause of figures, but to their essential nature and the properties involved in it, had not set another type of knowledge before them.” To understand things is to see how all that is true of them flows from the clear and distinct idea expressed in their definition, and ultimately, it is to see how all truth flows from the essentia Dei as all geometrical truth flows from the idea of quantity. To take a mathematical view of the universe, therefore, is to raise ourselves above all consideration of the end or tendency of things, above the fears and hopes of mortality into the region of truth and necessity. “When I turned my mind to this subject,” he says in the beginning of his treatise on politics, “I did not propose to myself any novel or strange aim, but simply to demonstrate by certain and indubitable reason those things which agree best with practice. And in order that I might inquire into the matters of this science with the same freedom of mind with which we are wont to treat lines and surfaces in mathematics, I determined not to laugh or to weep over the actions of men, but simply to understand them; and to contemplate their affections and passions, such as love, hate, anger, envy, arrogance, pity and all other disturbances of soul not as vices of human nature, but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder pertain to the nature of the atmosphere. For these, though troublesome, are yet necessary, and have certain causes through which we may come to understand them, and thus, by contemplating them in their truth, gain for our minds as much joy as by the knowledge of things that are pleasing to the senses.” All our errors as to the nature of things arise from our judging them from the point of view of the part and not of the whole, from appoint of view determined by their relation to our own individual being, and not from a point of view determined by the nature of the things themselves; or, to put the same thing in another way, from the point of view of sense and imagination, and not from the point of view of intelligence. Mathematics shows us the inadequacy of such knowledge when it takes us out of ourselves into things, and when it presents these things to us as objects of universal intelligence apart from all special relation to our individual feelings. And Spinoza only wishes that the same universality and freedom of thought which belongs to mathematics, because its objects do not interest the passions, should be extended to those objects that do interest them. Purity from interest is the first condition of the philosopher’s being; he must get beyond the illusion of sense and passion that makes our own lives so supremely important and interesting to us simply because they are our own. He must look at the present as it were through an inverted telescope of reason, that will reduce it to its due proportion and place in the sum of things. To the heat of passion and the higher heat of imagination, Spinoza has only one advice—“Acquaint yourself with God and be at peace.” Look not to the particular but to the universal, view things not under the form of the finite and temporal, but sub quadam specie aeternitatis.

The illusion of the finite—the illusion of sense, imagination and passion, which, in Bacon’s language, tends to make men judge of things ex analogia hominis and not ex analogia universi, which raises the individual life, and even the present Sense the source of error. moment of the individual life, with its passing feelings, into the standard for measuring the universe—this, in the eyes of Spinoza, is the source of all error and evil to man. On the other hand, his highest good is to live the universal life of reason, or what is the same thing, to view all things from their centre in God, and to be moved only by the passion for good in general, “the intellectual love of God.” In the treatise De Emendatione Intellectus, Spinoza takes up this contrast in the first instance from its moral side. “All our felicity or infelicity is founded on the nature of the object to which we are joined by love.” To love the things that perish is to be in continual trouble and disturbance of passion; it is to be full of envy and hatred towards others who possess them; it is to be ever striving after that which, when we attain it, does not satisfy us; or lamenting over the loss of that which inevitably passes away from us; only “love to an object that is infinite and eternal feeds the soul with a changeless and unmingled joy.” But again our love rests upon our knowledge; if we saw things as they really are we should love only the highest object. It is because sense and imagination give to the finite an independence and substantiality that do not belong to it, that we waste our love upon it as if it were infinite. And as the first step towards truth is to understand our error, so Spinoza proceeds to explain the defects of common sense, or in other words, of that first and unreflected view of the world which he, like Plato, calls opinion. Opinion is a kind of knowledge derived partly from hearsay, and partly from experientia vaga. It consists of vague and general conceptions of things, got either from the report of others or from an experience which has not received any special direction from intelligence. The mind that has not got beyond the stage of opinion takes things as they present themselves in its individual experience; and its beliefs grow up by association of whatever happens to have been found together in that experience. And as the combining principle of the elements of opinion is individual and not universal, so its conception of the world is at once fragmentary and accidental. It does not see things in their connexion with the unity of the whole, and hence it cannot see them in their true relation to each other. “I assert expressly,” says Spinoza, “that the mind has no adequate conception either of itself or of external things, but only a confused knowledge of them, so long as it perceives them only in the common order of nature, i.e. so long as it is externally determined to contemplate this or that object by the accidental concourse of things, and so long as it is not internally determined by the unity of thought in which it considers a number of things to understand their agreements, differences and contradictions.”[33]