The Innate Ideas of Descartes and Leibnitz, derived from Plato, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and the Chaldeans—the System of Mallebranche from the same Source, and St. Augustine.
The innate perception of first truths, maintained by Descartes and Leibnitz, which raised such warm and subtle disputes among metaphysicians, is a doctrine derived from Plato. That great philosopher, who acquired the surname of divine, by having written best on the subject of Deity, entertained a very peculiar sentiment respecting the origin of the soul. He calls it “an emanation of the divine essence, from whom it imbibed all its ideas; but that having sinned, it was degraded from its first estate, and condemned to a union with body, wherein it is confined as in a prison; that its forgetfulness of its former ideas was the necessary consequence of this penalty.” He adds, that “the benefit of philosophy consists in repairing this loss, by gradually leading back the soul to its first conceptions, accustoming it by degrees to recognise its own ideas, and by a full recollection of them to comprehend its own essence, and the true nature of things.” From that Platonic principle of the soul’s “divine emanation,” it naturally followed, that, having formerly had within itself the knowledge of every thing, it still retained the faculty of recalling to mind its immortal origin and primeval ideas. Descartes and Leibnitz reasoned in the very same manner, in admitting eternal and first truths to be imprinted on the soul:—they substitute indeed the creation and preexistence of souls, in place of the “divine emanation” of them taught by Plato; but they defend their system by the same sort of arguments.
Mallebranche entered the lists in defence of Descartes’s principles, and took upon him to support an opinion respecting the nature of ideas, which caused universal astonishment by its apparent singularity, and was treated as almost extravagant; although he advanced nothing but what might be defended by the authority of the finest geniuses of antiquity. After having defined ideas to be “the immediate, or nearest objects of the mind when it perceives any thing.” Mallebranche demonstrates the reality of their existence, by displaying their qualities, which never can belong to nothing, that have no properties. He then distinguishes between sentiments and ideas; considers the five different ways, whereby the mind comes at the view of external objects; shows the fallacy of four of them, and establishes the preeminence of the fifth, as being that alone which is conformable to reason, by saying, that it is absolutely necessary God should have in himself the ideas of all essences, otherwise he never could have given them existence. He undertakes to prove, that God, by his presence, is nearly united to our souls; insomuch, that he may be called the place of spirits, as space is of bodies; and thence he concludes, that the soul may discern in God whatever is representative of created things, if it be the will of God to communicate himself in that manner to it. He remarks, that God, or the universal intelligence, contains in himself those ideas which illuminate us; and that his works having been formed on the model of his ideas, we cannot better employ ourselves than in contemplating them, in order to discover the nature and properties of created things.
Mallebranche was treated as a visionary for having advanced these sentiments, although he accompanied them with the most solid and judicious proofs that metaphysics could afford; but he was never charged with plagiarism, though his system and manner of proof exist literally in ancient authors. After reciting passages from the “Oracula Chaldæorum,” which he reveres as a divine oracle, he says, “The gods here declare where the existence of ideas is to be found, even in God himself, who is their only source; they being the model according to which the world was formed, and the spring from which every thing arose. Others, by applying immediately to the divine ideas themselves, are enabled to discover sublime truths; but as for our part, we are content to be satisfied with what the gods themselves have declared in favour of Plato, in assigning the name of ideas to causes purely intellectual; and affirming, that they are the archetypes of the world, and the thoughts of the supreme father; that, in effect, they reside in the paternal intellect, and emanate from him to concur in the formation of the world.”
Pythagoras and his disciples understood almost the same thing by their numbers, that Plato did by his ideas. The Pythagorists expressed themselves with regard to numbers in the same terms as Plato uses, calling them “τα ὁντως ὁντα, real existences, the only things truly endowed with essence, eternally invariable.” They give them also the appellation of incorporeal entities, by means of which all other beings participate of existence.
Heraclitus adopted those first principles of the Pythagoreans, and expounded them in a very clear and systematic manner. “Nature,” says he, “being in a perpetual flow, there must belong to it some permanent entities, on the knowledge of which all science is founded, and which may serve as the rule of our judgment in fleeting and sensible objects.”
Democritus also taught, that the images of objects are emanations of the Deity, and are themselves divine; and that our very mental ideas are so too. Whether the doctrine be true or erroneous is not here a subject of inquiry: the present purpose being merely to show the analogy between the principles of Mallebranche and those of the ancients.
Plato, who, of all the ancient philosophers, deservedly ranks the highest, for the clearness and accuracy wherewith he hath explained and laid open this system, gives the appellation of “ideas” to those eternal intellectual substances, which were, with regard to God, the exemplary forms or types of all that he created; and are, with regard to men, the object of all science, and of their contemplation when they would attain to the knowledge of sensible things. “The world,” according to Plato, “always existed in God’s ideas; and when at length he determined to produce it into being, such as it is at present, he created it according to those eternal models, forming the sensible into the likeness of the intellectual world.” Admitting, with Heraclitus, the perpetual fluctuation of all sensible things, Plato perceived that there could be no foundation for science, unless there were things real and permanent to build it upon, which might be the fixed object of knowledge, to which the mind might have recourse, whenever it wanted to inform itself of sensible things. We clearly see that this was Plato’s apprehension of things; and we need only look at the passages quoted from him to be convinced, that whatever Mallebranche said on the subject, he derived from Plato.
Mallebranche would not have been railed against as impious, had his antagonists known to whom he was indebted for his opinions and reasonings; and that St. Augustine himself had said, “Ideas are eternal and immutable; the exemplars, or archetypes of all created things; and, in short, exist in God.” In this respect he differs somewhat from Plato, who separated them from the divine essence: but we may easily discern a perfect conformity between the father of the church and the modern philosopher.
Leibnitz was in some measure of the opinion of father Mallebranche; and it was natural that he should be, for he derived his principles from the same ancient sources. His “monads” were “entities truly existing; simple substances; the eternal images of universal nature.”