History of Philosophy
by
Alfred Weberยง 54. The Cartesian School(1)
The philosophy of Descartes clearly and accurately expressed the ideals of its age: the downfall of traditional authorities in matters of knowledge, and the autonomy of reason. It met with immense success. Though accused of neologism and atheism by the Jesuits of France and the severe Calvinists of Holland, though attacked in the name of empiricism by Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi, and in the name of scepticism by Huet, Bishop of Avranches,(2) and Pierre Bayle,(3) it gathered around its standard men like Clerselier,(4) De La Forge,(5) Sylvain Regis,(6) Clauberg,(7) Arnauld,(8) Nicole,(9) Malebranche, Geulincx, Balthazar Bekker, and Spinoza. Even the leaders of militant Catholicism, Bossuet and Fenelon, felt its irresistible influence.(10)Two great problems dominate the speculations of the new school. What is the relation between soul and body, mind and matter? That is the ontological question, with which the question regarding the origin of ideas and the certainty of knowledge, or the critical problem, is closely allied. What is the relation between the soul and God, - between human liberty, on the one hand, and divine omnipotence, on the other? That is the moral question, which is closely connected with the preceding.
In order to solve the former, reasoning and experience must be reconciled. If we consult the facts only, sensation is evidently the body's action upon the soul, the action of matter on mind. And evidently, voluntary movement is the action of the mind on the body. We are acted upon by matter, and react upon it. Hence a relation, a very intimate relation, obtains between the two substances. But when they compare the results of observation with the dualistic metaphysics of the master, the Cartesians become involved in insoluble difficulties, and are confronted by mysteries on every side. The mind is a thinking substance and without extension; the body, an extended and unconscious substance. The mind is nothing but thought; matter, nothing but extension. Now, though we may conceive that an extended substance receives an impulse from another extended substance, and then communicates this to a third substance, likewise extended, the aforesaid extended substance cannot possibly be moved by something absolutely inextended; nor, conversely, can an absolutely inextended thing transmit any movement whatever to such an extended substance. We can conceive of mutual action between similar substances, but not between opposite substances. Hence we cannot assume that a real influence (influxus physicus) is exercised by the body upon the soul, or vice versa.
According to Arnold Geulinex(11) of Antwerp and Nicholas Malebranche,(12) a member of the Oratory of Jesus, the most illustrious representatives of the Cartesian school, the "apparent" action between soul and body can be explained only by the supernatural concourse of God. God intervenes on occasion of every volition, in order to excite in our bodies the movement which the soul cannot communicate to it of itself, and on occasion of each corporeal excitation, in order to produce the corresponding perception in the soul. Our volitions are the occasional causes, God the efficient cause of our movements; the sense-objects are the occasional causes, God the efficient cause of our perceptions.
Occasionalism concealed the boldest negations beneath its seeming naiveness. For, in the first place, if there is no direct influence between mind and body; if God, that is, infinite wisdom and goodness, is the necessary and only mediator between matter and soul, we must conclude, with the Dutch Cartesian Balthasar Bekker,(13) that sorcery, magic, or spiritism, in every shape or form, is a detestable and ridiculous superstition.
Nay, more. If God is the efficient author of all my perceptions and movements, I am nothing but a nominal, apparent, and fictitious subject, and God is the real subject of my actions and thoughts: it is he who acts in me; it is he who thinks in me. The former consequence of occasionalism (God acts in me) was drawn by Geulinex, the latter (God thinks in me), by Malebranche. According to Geulinex, we are not, strictly speaking, minds, but modes of mind. Take away the mode, and God alone remains.(14) According to Malebranche, God is the abode of spirits, as space is the abode of bodies. He is to the soul what light is to the eye. Just as this organ dwells in the light, so the mind is in God, thinks in God, sees in God.(15) We do not perceive the material things themselves, but the idea-types of the things, their ideal substance as it exists in God. Indeed, how could the eye of the mind see material things? To see an object means to assimilate it, to make it our own, does it not? And how can substances which exclude each other by their very essence, how can mind and matter, penetrate each other? How can the spiritual eye assimilate what is foreign to its nature? Mind can see nothing except mind.
Cartesianism, though at first theistic, ultimately changed into a kind of pantheism in the systems of Geulinex and Malebranche, which naturally led to absolute determinism in ethics; for it made God the universal agent, so to speak. This element particularly impressed the Dutch Calvinists and the Catholics who accepted Jansen's and St. Angustine's teachings on predestination and prevenient grace (Arnauld, Nicole, Lancelot, etc.). These thinkers combined extreme rationalism with the mysticism of Pascal.(16) But the system had only to be divested of its theological shell to become Spinozistic naturalism.
1. F. Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophic cartesienne; Damiron, Histoire de la philosophie du dix-septieme siecle; E. Saisset, Precurseurs et disciples de Descartes, Paris, 1862; [G. Monchamp, Histoire du Cartesianisme en Belgique, Brussels, 1887].
2. 1630-1721. Censura philosophie cartesiane, Paris, 1669, etc. The sceptical freethinker Huet differs from Bayle, and resembles Pascal in that he teaches theological scepticism, i.e., a form of scepticism which serves as a stepping-stone for religious faith.
3. 1647-1706. Author of the celebrated Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 1697 ff.), and precursor of the religious criticists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [See L. Feuerbach, Pierre Bayle, etc., Leipsic, 1844.]
4. Died 1686. Publisher of Opera posthuma Descartis.
5. Tractatus de mente humana, ejus facultatibus et functionibus, Amsterdam, 1669.
6. 1632-1707. Cours entier de la philosophie, 3 vols., Paris, 1690; Amst. 1691.
7. 1625-1665. Initiatio philosophi s. dubitatio cartesiana, 1655; Logica vetus et nova; ontosophia; de cognitione Dei et nostri, Duisburg, 1656; Opera philosophica, Amst., 1691. [See H. Muller, J. Clauberg und seine Stellung im Cartesianismus, Jena, 1891.]
8. Died 1694. Works, Lausanne, 45 vols., 4to, 1775-1783; [philosophical works published by J. Simon and C. Jourdain, Paris, 1893. See F. R. Vicajee, Antoine Arnauld, Bombay, 1881].
9. Died 1695. Philosophical works published by Jourdain, 1845. [For the Port-Royalists Arnauld and Nicole see: H. Reuchlin, Geschichte von Port-Royal, Hamburg and Gotha, 1839-44; St. Beuve, Port-Royal, 3d ed., Paris, 1867].
10. The former, in his Traite de la connaisance de Dieu et de soi-meme; the latter, in his Traite de l'existence et des attributs de Dieu, and his Lettres sur la 'netaphysique.
11. 1625-1669. Arnoldi Geulinex, Logica fundamentis suis, a quibus hactenus collapsa fuerat, restituta, Leyden, 1662; Metaphysica vera et ad mentem peripatelicam, Amsterdam, 1691; sive Ethica, 2d ed., with notes, Leyden, 1675 ff.; Physica vera, 1688; etc. [Philosophical Works of Geulinex, ed. by J. P. N. Land, 3 vols, The Hague, 1891-93. On Geulinex see: E. Pfleiderer, Arnold Geulincx, etc., Tubingen, 1882; same author, Leibniz und Geulincx, ib., 1884; V. van der Haeghen, Geulincx, Etude sur sa vie, sa philosophie et ses ouvrages, Ghent, 1886; J. P. N. Land, A. G. u. seine Philosophie, The Hague, 1895. - TR.]
12. 1638-1715. De la recherche de la verite, ou l'on traite de la nature, de l'esprit de l'homme et de l'usage qu'il doit faire pour eviter l'erreur dans les sciences, Paris, 1675; 1712; [new ed., with an introduction by F. Bouillier, Paris, 1880; Engl. tr. by Taylor, London, 1700, 1720] ; Conversations metaphysiques et chretiennes, 1677; Traite de la nature et de la grace, Amsterdam, 1680, [Engl. tr., London, 1695]; Traite de morale, Rotterdam, 1684; [new ed. by H. Joly, Paris, 1882]; Meditations metaphysiques et chretiennes, 1684; Entretiens sur la metaphsique et sur la religion, 1688; Traite de l'amour de Dieu, 1697; etc. Euvres, Paris, 1712; Euvres, by Genoude, 2 vols., Paris, 1837; Euvres de Malebranche, published by Jules Simon, 4 vols., Paris, 1871. Blampignon, Etude sur Malebranche, d'apres des documents manuscrits, Paris, 1862; Leon Olle-Laprune, La philosophie de Malebranche, 2 vols., Paris, 1870-72; [Mario Novaro, Die Philosophie des Nicholas Malebranche, Berlin, 1893; Francois Pillon, L'evolution de l'idealisme en dixhuitieme siecle: Malebranche et ses critiques (L'Annee philosophique, IV., 1894); Spinozisme et Malebranchisme (Id. V., 1895). - TR.].
13. 1634-1698. De philosophia cart. admonitio candida et sincera, Wesel, 1668; De betoverde weereld (The World Bewitched), 4 vols., Leuwarden, 1690; Amsterdam, 1691 (a work occasioned by the appearance of the comet in 1680).
14. Metaphysica, p. 56: Sumus igitur modi mentis, si auferas modum remanet Deus. Cf. P. 146.
15. De la recherche de la verite, III., 2, 6.
16. 1623-1662. Euvres completes, 1779; published by Bossut, 1819. Pensees, fragments et lettres de Blaise Pascal, published by Faugere, 2 vols., 1844; Pensees publ. dans leurs textes authent. avec une introduction, des notes et des remarques, by M. E. Havet, 2d ed., 2 vols., Paris, 1866; [Engl. transl. of Pascal's Thoughts by C. Kegan Paul, London, 1885; of Provincial Letters, 1889]. V. Cousin, Etudes sur Pascal, 5th ed., Paris, 1857; Vinet, Eludes sur Blaise Pascal, Paris, 1848; 3d ed., 1876; Tissot, Pascal, reflexions sur les Pensees, Dijon and Paris, 1869; [Dreydorff's monographs, 1870, 1875; E. Droz, Etude sur le scepticisme de Pascal, etc., Paris, 1886. - TR.] As a physicist and mathematician, and especially as a writer, the author of the Pensees and Lettres provinciales ranks with Descartes. As a philosopher he was at first equally attracted by Cartesian dogmatism, which appealed to his "geometric mind," and the new Pyrrhonism of Montaigne. Then, owing to the influence of Port-Royal and the occurrence of an event which produced in him an entire change of heart, he became an enthusiastic adherent of Augustinian Christianity. His Pensses form the raw material, so to speak, of what he intended to be an apology of his new faith. Reason revealed itself to him in all its weakness, and made him a sceptic; nature appeared to him in all her ugliness, and made him pessimistic. It was the "heart" - we should say, the conscience - that revealed to him the real God, the living and personal God of the Gospel. For philosophy he henceforth had nothing but contempt. Among the modern writers who have made a study of Pascal, Vinet possesses the merit of having presented him in his true light, i. e., as the forerunner of Schopenhauer and Schleiermacber. Cousin saw in Pascal nothing but the sceptical and maniacal element. Though not ignoring the pathological element in his mysticism, we, for our part, discover three truths in his philosophy: first, reason and experience, without conscience, cannot yield us real truth; secondly, experience without conscience necessarily leads to pessimism; and finally, the will - for that is what Pascal means by the words heart (ceur) and feeling (sentiment) takes precedence of reason, and subjects it to its laws.
