A BEGINNER’S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

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IMMANUEL KANT

(The Puttrich’sche Portrait of Kant was printed in the Kant-Studien in 1906 and is said by Professor Vaihinger to be one of the best likenesses of the Königsberg philosopher. The name of the artist was Puttrich, and the original painting goes back before 1798. It is interesting to note that this portrait of Kant was used by the sculptor, Rauch, as his model for the statue of Kant upon the memorial monument of Frederick the Great.)

A BEGINNER’S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

BY

HERBERT ERNEST CUSHMAN, LL.D., Ph.D.

Sometime Professor of Philosophy in Tufts College
Lecturer of Philosophy in Harvard College
Lecturer of Philosophy in Dartmouth College

VOL. II

MODERN PHILOSOPHY

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY HERBERT ERNEST CUSHMAN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

The pedagogical purpose of this history of philosophy is stated in the Preface to the first volume. It may be desirable in this place to restate what that purpose is.

This book is intended as a text-book for sketch-courses in the history of philosophy. It is written for the student rather than for the teacher. It is a history of philosophy upon the background of geography and of literary and political history. Since the book is intended for the student, it makes the teacher all the more necessary; for it puts into the hands of the student an outline of the history of philosophy and into the hands of the teacher the class-room time for inspiring the student with his own interpretations. In making use of geographical maps, contemporary literature, and political history, this book is merely employing for pedagogical reasons the stock of information with which the student is furnished, when he begins the history of philosophy. The summaries, tables, and other generalizations are employed, as in text-books in other subjects, as helps to the memory. Therefore the book has the single purpose of arranging and organizing the material of the history of philosophy for the beginner.

The student will be impressed with the short time-length of the modern period compared with the tremendously long stretches of the periods of antiquity. The modern period is only four hundred and fifty yearsin length, if we take the date 1453 as its beginning. Compared to the twenty-two hundred years of ancient and mediæval life, the period of modern life seems very short. Furthermore the student who has followed the philosophy of antiquity must have observed how often philosophy arose out of ethnic situations in which whole civilizations were involved. He will find that modern philosophy in this respect stands in contrast with the philosophy of ancient times. With the decentralizing of modern Europe, philosophy has also become decentralized. This does not mean that philosophical movements have included fewer people in their sweep, but that the movements have had shorter life, the transitions have been quicker, and the epochs have been briefer. Modern civilization is subjective; and its philosophy is thereby more technical, and more difficult to understand and to interpret than the philosophy of antiquity.

There are many helpful books in English on the history of modern philosophy, and the student should have them at hand. I call attention especially to Rand, Modern Classical Philosophers, for its judicious selection from the original sources; to Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, chapters iii to x; to Eucken, The Problem of Human Life, pp. 303 to 518; and to the Summaries in Windelband, History of Philosophy, Parts IV to VII. Besides these there are valuable histories of modern philosophy by Falckenberg, Höffding (2 vols.), Weber, Ueberweg (vol. ii), Calkins, Dewing, and Rogers.

To friends who have read parts of the manuscript, I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness for many wise criticisms and suggestions; especially to Professor W. A. Neilson, Professor R. B. Perry, Dr. B. A. G. Fuller,and Dr. J. H. Woods of Harvard University; to Professor Mary W. Calkins of Wellesley College; to Professor W. P. Montague of Columbia University; and to Professor S. P. Capen of Clark College.

Tufts College, December, 1910.

CONTENTS
VOLUME II. MODERN PHILOSOPHY
(1453 to the Present Time)

ILLUSTRATIONS

A BEGINNER’S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
VOLUME II

MODERN PHILOSOPHY (1453 TO THE PRESENT TIME)

CHAPTER I
THE CHARACTERISTICS AND DIVISIONS OF THE MODERN PERIOD

The Difficulty in the Study of Modern Philosophy. Beside the great spans of ancient and mediæval civilizations, the 450 years of the modern period seem brief. The road is indeed relatively short from mediæval times to the century in which we live, and yet it proves difficult to the student who travels it for the first time. Even for the modern mind the study of modern philosophy is inherently more difficult than that of the ancient and mediæval. The preceding periods present new points of view, but these, once attained, lead along comparatively easy ways. The chief difficulty of the preceding periods is overcome when their peculiar view of things is gained; but the student of modern philosophy is confronted with difficulties all along the way. In the first place, modern philosophy is very complex because it is a conflict of various aspirations. It has neither the objectivity of ancient thought nor the logical consistency of mediæval thought. It arises fromsubjective motives, whose shadings are difficult to trace. The task is rendered harder by the fact that intimations of the problems in the history of modern philosophy are on the whole present in the beginner’s mind; and yet at the same time his mind possesses, besides these, many mediæval notions as well. For the student to pass successfully through the entire length of modern thought from Cusanus to Spencer means, therefore, two things for him: (1) he must gain an insight into the depth and significance of his own half-formed ideas; (2) he must transcend or give up entirely his mediæval notions. If therefore philosophy represents the epoch that produces it,—either as the central principle or as the marginal and ulterior development of that epoch,—the modern can come to an understanding of the history of modern philosophy only by coming to an understanding of himself and his own inner reflections.

This will explain why the short period of modern thought is traditionally divided into comparatively many periods. These subordinate periods ring out the changes through which the modern man feels that he himself has blindly passed in his inner life. Modern philosophy is no more local and temporary than the ancient; it is no less a part of a social movement; but the modern man is more alive to the differentiations of modern thought than he is to those of antiquity.

The Periods of Modern Philosophy. The divisions of the history of modern philosophy are as follows:—

1. The Renaissance (1453–1690)—from the end of the Middle Ages to the publication of Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding.

2. The Enlightenment (1690–1781)—to the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

3. German Philosophy (1781–1831)—to the death of Hegel.

4. The Nineteenth Century Philosophy (1820–the present time).

The Renaissance, the first period, covers more than half of the length of modern times. It is sometimes called the springtime of modern history, although it is longer than all the other seasons together. It is to be noted that two epoch-making books form the dividing lines between the first three periods. The transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment is signalized by Locke’s great Essay on the Human Understanding, which expressed for one hundred years the political and philosophical opinions of western Europe. The transition from the Enlightenment to German Philosophy was in its turn signalized by the appearance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and this book may be said to have been fundamental to human thinking ever since. There is one point further to be noticed in these divisions, and that is the overlapping of the last two periods. German philosophy ends practically with the death of Hegel in 1831, and the modern Evolution movement began at least ten years before, about 1820. No great philosophical treatise marks the division here, for the Evolution movement had its beginnings in German philosophy and in the discoveries and practical inventions of natural science. Evolution, however, became a reaction upon the last phases of German philosophy, and then formed a distinct movement. The book that formulated the Evolution movement most fully appeared several years after the theory was under way. This was Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859. Locke’s Essay and Kant’s Critique are thereforethe most influential philosophical interpretations of the history of modern times since its early beginnings in the Renaissance.

The Causes of the Decay of the Civilization of the Middle Ages. The social structure of the mediæval time weakened and broke apart, in the first place because of certain inherent defects in its organism; in the second place because of some remarkable discoveries, inventions, and historical changes. We may call these (1) the internal causes and (2) the external causes of the fall of the civilization of the Middle Ages.

(a) The Internal Causes were inherent weaknesses in mediæval intellectual life, and alone would have been sufficient to bring mediæval society to an end.

(1) The intellectual methods of the Middle Ages were self-destructive methods. We may take scholasticism as the best expression of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, and scholasticism even in its ripest period used the method of deductive logic. Scholasticism did not employ induction from observation and experiment, but proceeded on the principle that the more universal logically a conception is, the more real it is. (See vol. i, p. 355.) On this principle scholasticism set as its only task to penetrate and clarify dogma. Its theism was a logical theism. Even Thomas Aquinas, the great classic schoolman, used formal logic (dialectics) as the method of obtaining the truth. After him in the latter part of the Middle Ages, logic instead of being a method became an end. It was studied for its own sake. This naturally degenerated into word-splitting and quibbling, into the commenting upon the texts of this master and that, into arid verbal discussions. The religious orders frittered away their time on verbal questions of triflingimportance. The lifetime of such intellectual employment is always a limited one.

(2) The standard of the truth of things in the Middle Ages became a double standard, and was therefore self-destructive. Ostensibly there was only one standard,—infallible dogma. Really there were two standards,—reason and dogma. The employment of logical methods implied the human reason as a valid standard. Logic is the method of human reasoning. To use logic to clarify dogma, to employ the philosophy of Aristotle to supplement the Bible, to defend faith by argument, amounted in effect to supporting revelation by reason. It was the same as defending the infallible and revealed by the fallible and secular. It was the erecting of a double standard. It called the infallible into question. It was the offering of excuses for what is supposedly beyond suspicion. The scholastic made faith the object of thought, and thereby encouraged the spirit of free inquiry.

(3) The development of Mysticism in the Middle Ages was a powerful factor that led to its dissolution. There is, of course, an element of mysticism in the doctrine of the church from St. Augustine onwards, and in the Early Period of the Middle Ages mysticism had no independence. But mysticism is essentially the direct communion with God on the part of the individual. The intermediary offices of the church are contradictory to the spirit of mysticism. It is not surprising, therefore, to find in the last period of scholasticism numerous independent mystics as representatives of the tendency of individualistic religion, which was to result in the Protestantism of the Renaissance.

(4) The doctrine of Nominalism was the fourthimportant element to be mentioned that led to the dissolution of the civilization of the Middle Ages. This was easily suppressed by the church authorities in the early mediæval centuries, when it was a purely logical doctrine and had no empirical scientific basis. In the later years, however, nominalism gained great strength with the acquisition of knowledge of the nature world. Nominalism turned man’s attention away from the affairs of the spirit. It incited him to modify the realism of dogma. It pointed out the importance of practical experience. It emphasized individual opinion, neglected tradition, and placed its hope in the possibilities of science rather than in the spiritual actualities of religion.

(b) The External Causes consisted of certain important events that brought the Middle Ages to a close and introduced the Renaissance. These events caused great social changes by demolishing the geographical and astronomical conceptions of mediæval time which had become a part of church tradition.

First to be mentioned are the inventions which belong to the Middle Ages, but which came into common use not before the beginning of the Renaissance. These played an important part in the total change of the society which followed. They were the magnetic needle, gunpowder, which was influential in destroying the feudal system, and printing, which would have failed in its effect had not at the same time the manufacture of paper been improved. Moreover at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century occurred the following events:—

1453. Constantinople fell and its Greek scholars migrated to Italy.

1492. Columbus discovered America, an achievementwhich was made possible by the use of the magnetic needle.

1498. Vasco da Gama discovered the all-sea route to India and thereby changed the course of the world’s commerce.

1518. The Protestant Reformation was begun by Luther.

1530. Copernicus wrote his De revolutionibus orbium, in which he maintained that the earth moved around the sun.

CHAPTER II
THE RENAISSANCE[1] (1453–1690)

The General Character of the Renaissance. The causes that led to the decline of the society of the Middle Ages were of course the same that ushered in the period of the Renaissance,—the first, the longest, and the most hopeful period of modern times. The general characterization of this period may be expressed in a single phrase,—a New Man in a New Universe. This, however, needs explanation.

(a) The New Man of the Renaissance was distinctly a man with a country. The fusion of the German and Roman peoples in the Dark Ages before Charlemagne (800) was now completed. The fusion did not result in a homogeneous whole, but in groups which formed the nations of Europe. The time when this grouping was practically finished is a difficult problem, into which we will not inquire. In a real sense it never was nor will be ended. We know that the nations began to form about the year 1000, and when we examine the history of the Renaissance we find Italians, Germans, French, Dutch, and English with distinctive national characteristics. We find the Renaissance first centralized among the Italians and Germans, and then later among the English, the people of the Low Countries, and the French. The Italian is a new Roman andthe German a new Teuton. The undefined nationalities of the Middle Ages now become clear-cut. Philosophy also becomes now more or less of a national concern.

(b) A New Universe is now opened to the “New Man” of the Renaissance. Not only in mental equipment, but in scope for his activity, does the European of the Renaissance differ from the mediæval man. The world is actually a new world—new in its geographical outlines and its astronomical relations; new in its intellectual stores from the past. The physical world that supported his body and the intellectual world that refreshed his mind were newly discovered by the man of the Renaissance. We must examine these two new worlds more in detail.

1. The physical universe had undergone a wonderful transformation for man. Our nineteenth century has often been looked upon as a period of extraordinary discoveries; but no discoveries have ever so revolutionized the human mind as those enumerated above as “the external causes of the fall of the society of the Middle Ages.” Think how new that old world must have seemed to the common people who had supposed it to be flat, as well as to the scientists who had hypothetically supposed it to be solid—how new it must have seemed when they found that it had been actually circumnavigated! How the horizon of men’s minds must have widened when new continents were discovered by sailors and new celestial worlds were found by the telescope of the astronomers! Discovery led to experiment, and the whole new physical world was transformed by the new physical science of Galileo into a mechanical order. It was a wonderful new material world that was discovered and scientifically reorganized at the beginningof the Renaissance. Whereas the common man in mediæval time had found little joy in living, the common man now looked upon the world as a magnificent opportunity. Whereas the mediæval man had turned from the disorders of this wicked world to contemplation of the blessedness of heaven, the man of the Renaissance came forth from the cloister and engaged in trade and adventure. The earth and the things therein had suddenly become objects of emotional interest.

2. Not only was a new geographical and physical world discovered at this time, but also the intellectual world of antiquity was restored. For more than a thousand years in western Europe the literature of the Greeks and Romans had been a thing of shreds and patches, and even then read only in Latin translations. Now the European had come into possession of a large part of it and was reading it in the original. He was aroused to the wonderful intellectual life of the Age of Pericles. The interest in ancient literature, which had been started by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, became an absorbing and controlling force at this time. The real interest began with the stimulus received by the coming of the Greek scholars to Italy from the East: first the ecclesiastical embassy in 1438, and afterward in 1453 the large number of refugees from Constantinople at the time of its capture by the Turks. Upon these refugees the patronage of the great Italian nobles—chiefly perhaps in Florence—was lavishly bestowed. The Platonic Academy was founded. Learned expounders of the new learning arose,—Pletho, the two Picos, Fincinus, Reuchlin. Of all the philosophies of antiquity Platonism was favored, and it was interpreted in a mystical manner. Aristotle and Christianitywere looked upon as mere interpretations of Plato. Nevertheless the Renaissance scholars were interested in all the new literary material from the East. They studied the Jewish Cabala and its mystic numbers. They revived Skepticism, Eclecticism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. Aristotle was represented by two antagonistic schools; and Taurellus opposed both and appealed to the scholarly world to return to Christianity.

The Significance of the Renaissance in History. We have above characterized the Renaissance as a time in which a “new man” found himself living in a “new universe.” But the old world of mediæval science, culture, and conventional manners had by no means been entirely outgrown and discarded. Periods of history do not “leave their low-vaulted past” as easily as a man may throw away his coat. Mediæval science and theology still remained, not only as a background but also as an aggressive social factor everywhere. Mediæval scholasticism was something with which the Renaissance had always to reckon. Scholasticism modified, frequently restricted, and even directed the thought of the Renaissance. Consequently when we form our final estimate of the place of the Renaissance in the modern movement, we must not overlook the conservative force of the mediæval institutions existing during the period. The “new man” lived in a “new universe”; and his problem was how to explain the relation of that “new universe” to himself so that his explanation would not antagonize the time-honored traditions of the church. This was the constructive problem that gave the Renaissance its place in history.

The first impression, however, of the Renaissance upon the reader is that it stands for no constructive problemwhatever. The changes that usher in the Renaissance seem to speak of an epoch that is entirely negative, destructive, and revolutionary. The period seems from one side to be a declaration against time-honored traditions. The “new man” had risen superior to dogma and to Aristotle. Intellectual fermentation had set in, and never had so many attempts at innovation been so strenuously sought. The love for novelty filled the human mind, and the imagination ran riot. The movement toward modern individualism appeared in the decentralization that at this time was everywhere taking place. Latin, for example, ceased to be the one language for educated men, and the modern languages came into use. Rome ceased to be the only religious centre, and Wittenberg, London, and Geneva became centres. There was no longer one church, but many sects. Scientific centres became numerous. Many of the universities had arisen independently, and now Oxford, Vienna, Heidelberg, Prague, and numerous universities in Italy and Germany afforded opportunities for study equal to those of Paris. To the man who looks upon the Classic Period of Scholasticism in the Middle Ages as the golden age of united faith,—to that man the Renaissance will appear only as the beginning of the disintegration and revolution that he sees in modern times.

MAP SHOWING THE DECENTRALIZATION OF EUROPE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

(Note that Rome, Wittenberg, London, and Geneva are the religious centres; that Paris, Oxford, Heidelberg, and Prague are the educational centres; and that Europe is divided into many nations)

But a deeper insight into the Renaissance shows that its revolutionary, negative, and spectacular aspect is not its whole significance. No doubt a strong, universal, and well-centralized government and a unity of faith are social ideals. The reverence in which the name of Rome was held long after the empire had been destroyed, and the reluctance with which the first Protestants separated themselves from the Catholic church, show that the lossof such a unity is a real loss. But the church of the Middle Ages was not the carrier of all the treasure of the past, nor could the church with its own inherent limitations stand as representative of modern times. The new problem which the Renaissance faced might be destructive of much of the traditional past, but it contained many new elements. The “new man” found himself in a “new universe.” He was obliged to undertake the solution of a far deeper problem than antiquity had ever attempted. He must orient himself in a larger world than the past had ever imagined. He must do this in the very presence of mediæval institutions, which had not lost their spiritual nor their temporal power. The constructive problem before the man of the Renaissance was therefore an exceedingly complex one. How should he explain his relation to the “new universe” in a way that would not antagonize tradition? It was a new problem, a real problem in which the traditional factor was always persistently present.

There were two motifs which give to the problem of the Renaissance its constructive character. These were naturalism and subjectivism. In the first place, the Renaissance is the period when the naturalism of the Greeks was recovered. By naturalism is meant the love for earthly life. Of this the mediæval church and the mediæval time had little or nothing. The church had been born out of the revulsion from the earthly, and it rose on the aspiration for the supernatural. The Renaissance was, on the contrary, born out of a passionate joy in nature, which joy was intensified by the unexpected possession of the literature of the past and by the discovery of new lands beyond the seas. Man felt now the happiness and dignity of earthly living and theworth of the body as well as the soul. In the next place, the Renaissance is marked by the rise of subjectivism. At the beginning of our book we have already given the meaning of subjectivism (see vol. i, p. 2), and we have characterized modern civilization as subjective in distinction from the ancient as objective and the Middle Ages as traditional. We have also found, as we have gone on, the beginnings of subjectivism in the Sophists, Stoics, and Christians. But in the Renaissance for the first time does the individual as a rational self gain the central position. This is subjectivism: the individual is not only the interpreter of the universe, but also its mental creator. Of the subjective motif in modern times the Renaissance marks the inauguration, and German Idealism the culmination. While the world of the ancients was cosmo-centric and the mediæval world was theo-centric, the world of the modern man is ego-centric. The love of life, and the love of life because the individual feels his own capacity for life—this is the situation presented to the man of the Renaissance. Thus in the restoration of naturalism and in the construction of subjectivism did the Renaissance stand for positive upbuilding, in spite of the fact that in all this the period was constrained by the powerful tradition of the church.

The Two Periods of the Renaissance: The Humanistic (1453–1600); The Natural Science (1600–1690). The Renaissance is divided into two periods at the year 1600. The reason for taking this date as a division line will soon appear. The period before 1600 we call the Humanistic, or the period of the Humanities; the period after this date the Natural Science Period.

(a) The Similarities of the Two Periods. These two periods are alike in having the same motives. Both feel the same urgent need (1) for new knowledge, (2) for a new standard by which to measure their new knowledge, (3) for a new method of gaining knowledge. From the beginning to the end of the Renaissance the “new man” was feeling his way about, was trying to orient and readjust himself in his “new universe.” He was seeking new acquisitions to his rich stores of knowledge, to systematize his knowledge by some correct method, and to set up some standard by which his knowledge might be tested.

(b) The Differences of the Two Periods. There are, however, some marked differences in the carrying out of these motives by each period, and to these we must give our attention.

(1) The Countries which participate in the Renaissance differ in the Two Periods. In the Humanistic Period Italy and Germany were chiefly concerned. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, these countries had been engaged in commerce with the Orient, had become prosperous and more or less acquainted with the culture of the Orient. In the second place, Italy had been the refuge of the Greek scholars; when the colony of Greek refugees in Florence had died out in 1520, northerners like Erasmus, Agricola, Reuchlin, the Stephani, and Budæus had luckily already made themselves masters of the Greek language and literature, and had carried their learning into Germany.

In the Natural Science Period the Renaissance had practically become dead both in Germany and in Italy. The reason for this is not far to seek. In Italy, in 1563, the Council of Trent had fixed the dogma of the churchand had made it impossible for the church to assimilate anything more from antiquity. The so-called Counter-Reformation set in, and Italy became dumb under the persecutions of the Inquisition. Furthermore, the discovery of the sea-route to the East had turned commerce away from Italy. When we look to Germany, we find a similar situation. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had devastated the land and had made intellectual life wholly impossible.

On the other hand, England, France, and the Low Countries represent the Natural Science Period in the Renaissance. By the War of Liberation (1568–1648) Holland became the European country where the greatest freedom of thought was granted, and it proved itself an asylum for thinkers and scholars. France, through the influence of the University of Paris, was the centre of mathematical research. In England the brilliant Elizabethan era had already begun.

(2) The Intellectual Standards differ in the Two Periods. The Humanistic Period has been well characterized as the time of “the struggle of traditions.” Naturally enough, with the revival of Greek learning the thinkers of the first period of the Renaissance would try to solve the new problems by the standards which they found in antiquity. What did Aristotle, Plato, the Epicureans say in matters of science? What standards did they yield for solving the new problems of the “new universe”? The traditions of antiquity were therefore revived; and the contention was, Which should be taken as a standard? Among all the ancient systems neo-Platonism became the most prominent. It dominated the Humanistic Period because its æsthetic character and its mystical explanations appealed to thesusceptible mind of that time. Nevertheless, the sway of neo-Platonism was not absolute. The “struggle of traditions” continued throughout the period, as appears in the schisms of the church and in the literary and philosophical contentions.

The Natural Science Period, in its hope of finding a standard to explain the problems of the “new universe,” discovered a new standard within the “new universe” itself. No tradition of antiquity had proved itself adequate to the situation. Nothing could be found in Plato and Aristotle to give a theoretic standard for the new discoveries and inventions. Nature disclosed its own standard within itself. The Natural Science Period said nature facts must be explained by nature facts. But the question will naturally be asked, Why did the thinkers of this period, when the theories of antiquity were found to be inadequate, turn to nature rather than elsewhere for an explanation of nature? The answer to this is found in the great successes of the physical astronomers, who had started their investigations at the beginning of the Humanistic Period, and had reached the zenith of their glory at the beginning of the Natural Science Period. The discoveries of Galileo were especially important.

(3) The Scientific Methods in the Two Periods were Different. The method usually employed in the Humanistic Period was magic. This first period tried to explain nature facts of the “new universe” by referring them to agencies in the spiritual world. In their neo-Platonic nature-worship the scholars of this period imagined that the control of nature was to be obtained by a fanciful linking of the parts of nature to the spirits supposed to be in nature. The Bible is the product ofthe spiritual world, so why is not the “new nature-world” inspired from the same source? God is the first cause of all things; He is in all things and each finite thing mirrors Him. All things have souls. To gain control over nature, some all-controlling formula must be found which will reveal the secret of the control of spirits over nature; and to master the spirits that control nature is to control nature herself. Hence arose, as the methods of this first period, magic, trance-mediumship, necromancy, alchemy, conjurations, and astrology. Antiquity could offer (and especially is this true of Platonism) only spiritual causes for nature facts,—hence the search in this time for the philosopher’s stone. There was never a blinder groping after a method.

The scientific method used in the Natural Science Period was the mathematical. The world of experience was found to coincide with the number system, and therefore mathematics was used as the symbol to determine the form of nature events. Induction and deduction were used in different combinations. The period has been characterized as the time of “the strife of methods.” Induction and deduction became in fact the new methods of finding the truth about the “new world.” Whatever is clear and distinct, like the axioms, must be taken as true. All other knowledge must be deduced from these axiomatic certainties. In contrast with the magical methods of the Humanistic Period, which point beyond nature for an explanation of nature, here in the Natural Science Period mathematics need not lead the explanation farther than nature herself.

(4) The Attitude of the Church toward Science differs in the Two Periods. In the Humanistic Periodthe attitude of the church toward the new learning was not yet defined. This was because the bearing of the new learning upon dogma was not yet understood. On the one hand, on matters upon which the church had clearly declared itself, it was easily seen what could and what could not be believed. But, on the other hand, the significance of much of the wealth of the newly acquired learning could not at first be fully determined. The enthusiasm for science was so widespread, and the new discoveries were so many, that the church was unable to know what was consistent with dogma and what was not. At the outset the church was inclined to treat the new science with contemptuous toleration. Nevertheless, in spite of the new intellectual intoxication there was no real freedom of thought. The position of science was merely precarious, uncertain, and undefined.

In the Natural Science Period this uncertainty was dispelled because dogma came into violent conflict with science. It was soon found that questions in physics involved metaphysics, and that the new science touched the church doctrines at every point. In 1563 the church authorities at the Council of Trent settled dogma for all time. Great conflicts arose between the church and the secularizing spirit. The scientist became wary. He tried to avoid any intrusion upon the field of theology, and he insisted that his own field existed quite independent of theological dogma. But practically it was impossible for science not to take heretical positions, and this was especially true of the Rationalistic School, which tried to construct a new scholasticism. Safe independence of thought was not gained until the next period (the Enlightenment), and this was brought to pass by political changes.

A Brief Contrast of the Two Periods—A Summary of the Discussion above.

The Humanistic Period.

(1) The Time—1453–1600.

(2) The Countries Concerned—Italy and Germany.

(3) The Intellectual Standards—Neo-Platonism and other theories of antiquity.

(4) The Method—magic.

(5) The Relation of Science to the Church—precarious and uncertain.

The Natural Science Period.

(1) The Time—1600–1690.

(2) The Countries Concerned—England, France, and the Low Countries.

(3) The Intellectual Standard—the mechanism of nature facts.

(4) The Method—induction and mathematical deduction in various combinations.

(5) The Relation of Science to the Church—so definitely stated as to be placed in conflict with dogma.

CHAPTER III
THE HUMANISTIC PERIOD OF THE RENAISSANCE (1453–1600)

The Long List of Representatives of the Humanistic Period. There was a revival of scholasticism,—Paulus Barbus Socinas (d. 1494), Cajetan (d. 1534), Ferrariensis (d. 1528), Melchior Cano (d. 1560), Dominicus de Soto (d. 1560), Dominicus Banez (d. 1604), John of St. Thomas (d. 1644), Vasquez (d. 1604), Toletus (d. 1596), Fonseca (d. 1599), Suarez (d. 1617), John the Englishman (d. 1483), Johannes Magistri (d. 1482), Antonius Trombetta (d. 1518), Maurice the Irishman (d. 1513). Among the Humanists were Pletho, Bessarion (d. 1472), Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457), Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494), Francesco Pico della Mirandola (d. 1533), Theodore of Gaza (d. 1478), Agricola (d. 1485), George of Trebizond (d. 1484), Justus Lipsius (d. 1606), Schoppe (b. 1562), Paracelsus (d. 1541), Reuchlin (d. 1522), Fludd (d. 1637), Montaigne (d. 1592), Charron (d. 1603), Sanchez (d. 1632), Pomponatius (d. 1530), Achillini (d. 1518), Nifo (d. 1546), Petrus Ramus (d. 1572), Scaliger (d. 1558). The Italian nature philosophers were Cardano (d. 1576), Telesio (d. 1588), Patrizzi (d. 1597), Bruno (d. 1600), Campanella (d. 1639). The notable scientists were Cusanus (d. 1464), Copernicus (d. 1543), Tycho Brahe (d. 1601), Kepler (d. 1631).The Protestant Mystics were Luther (d. 1546), Zwingli (d. 1531), Franck (d. 1545), Weigel (d. 1588), Boehme (d. 1624). The political philosophers were Macchiavelli (d. 1527), Thomas More (d. 1535), Jean Bodin (d. 1597), Gentilis (d. 1611), Althusius (d. 1638), Hugo Grotius (d. 1645).

As examples of the first epoch of the Renaissance[2] we have selected Cusanus (1401–1464), Paracelsus (1493–1541), and Bruno (1548–1600). These three men will represent fairly well the wide interests of this epoch, and more especially its neo-Platonic spirit and its methods. The reader will see from their dates that the lives of these three philosophers nearly cover the Humanistic Period. Cusanus lived during the last half century of the Middle Ages and the first decade of the Humanistic Period; Paracelsus’s life covers the middle of the Humanistic Period; Bruno lived during the last part of the period, and his death (1600) coincides with the last year of the period. All three were neo-Platonists. They had been so impressed with the nature-world that had opened before them that they were mystic nature-worshipers—pantheists, to whom neo-Platonism became the truest philosophical standard. All three were scientists in different degrees. Yet Cusanus, the cardinal of the church, and Bruno, the speculative philosopher, contributed more to science than Paracelsus, who aspired to medical science. This seeming inconsistency in their lives is not difficult to explain. Paracelsus merely reflects the science of the time; while Cusanus and Bruno anticipate the Natural Science Period—the one by his empirical discoveries, theother by his mystic speculations which were almost prophecies.

Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464). Modern German scholars place Nicolas of Cusa (Nicolas Cusanus) with Bacon and Descartes, as the leaders of the modern philosophical movement. Nicolas lived two hundred years before Descartes and one hundred years before Bacon. The German estimate of him shows at least that he was modern in his thought, although he belongs in time to the Middle Ages for the most part. He lived when the Middle Ages were passing over into the Renaissance. His principal work, the Idiota, was published in 1450, when the Renaissance was on the threshold. He was certainly a forerunner of modern times. He was a German, a cardinal, and is now reverenced by liberal Catholics as one of their deepest thinkers.

Cusanus was a scientist of no small merit. He died before the great discoveries were made; but he anticipated Copernicus in his belief that the earth rotated on its axis; he anticipated Bruno in conceiving space to be boundless and time unending; he proposed a reform in the calendar; he was the first to have a map of Germany engraved. He condemned the prevalent superstitions of the church and the use of magic in explaining nature events. Thus he anticipated the science of the time of Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes, and transcended his own period.

In other respects Cusanus belongs in this period with Bruno and Paracelsus. He did not seek to discover a new method; but he turned back to the revived traditional Greek systems for an explanation of the “new world.” He found in the mystic numbers of Plato and the Pythagoreans the principle of all scientific investigation.The world of nature phenomena must be accounted for by the spiritual world. Cusanus uses almost the identical language of Bruno, when he says that the world is the mirror of God and that man is an epitome of the universe. In the neo-Platonic spirit of the Humanists, he regarded the world as a soul-possessing and articulate Oneness. Although a scientist, he conceived science to be only a conjecture, which in its unreality reveals the inner interconnections of the real world—the world of the spirit.

Paracelsus (1493–1541). Paracelsus did not transcend his time as did Cusanus. He merely expressed it. He was the exponent of its science as Bruno was the representative of its poetic speculation. Paracelsus was a much-traveled Swiss, who tried to reform the practice of medicine by a kind of magical chemistry. The poet Browning makes his adventures the basis of a poem. As a physician Paracelsus could employ the magic arts without much danger of the charge of heresy, for the practice of the magic art was theoretically justified by the neo-Platonism of the time. The Faust of Goethe is at first a Paracelsus. The universal spirit behind nature presents itself in an infinite number of spiritual individuals. Nature facts are to be understood and mastered by understanding the activities of these spiritual forces. In this way medicine became a brewing of tinctures, magical drinks, and secret remedies. It was an alchemy which grew to the proportions of a science. The alchemists of the time expected to discover a panacea against disease, which would give them the highest power. This is the meaning of the “philosopher’s stone,” which was to heal all diseases, transmute everything into gold, and bring all spirits into the powerof its possessor. Paracelsus thus turned back to Greek hylozoism for the truth about physiology and the cure of disease; and he met with some degree of personal success, for his physics had many adherents both in theory and in practice.[3]

In the neo-Platonic manner Paracelsus conceived the world as fundamentally a developing vital principle (Vulcanus). Man is this cosmic force individualized (Archæus). The laws that operate in the world are the same as in man, except that in man they are hidden. The study of nature’s laws, as they lie open, will reveal how those same laws operate in a human being. Now the vital principle in nature manifests itself in three realms: the terrestrial, the astral or celestial, and the spiritual or divine. The Archæus or vital principle in man must have the same realms of activity. There is man’s body, which gets its strength from the terrestrial realm of nature; man’s mind, which is nourished by the stars; man’s soul, that feeds on faith in Christ. Perfect health, therefore, consists in the sympathetic interaction of these three realms in man. A complete medicine consists of physics, astronomy, and theology.

But Paracelsus was a chemist, and the terrestrial nature of man was his peculiar interest. The theologian may prescribe for the human soul, and it is the duty of the astronomer to care for the human intellect; but the practical physician must understand the human body. Here is the Archæus imprisoned in the gross terrestrial body! It is in continual warfare with that body. What is the nature of that body which is so hostile to the human vital principle? Here Paracelsus introduces hisstrange chemical analysis which characterizes him as a Renaissance physician. Nature has three essences of which all bodies are composed: (1) mercury, that makes bodies liquid; (2) sulphur, that makes them combustible; (3) salt, that makes them rigid. These essences are compounded in such a way that from them the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire—are derived. Each one of these elements is controlled by elemental spirits. The earth is controlled by gnomes, the water by undines, the air by sylphs, and the fire by salamanders. Thus the chemical analysis of Paracelsus discovers four sets of spirits with which the physician is obliged to deal. Gnomes, sylphs, undines, and salamanders are in warfare with the human vital principle for control. When the Archæus is in any way checked by these, there is disease; when the Archæus has them under control, the man has health. The medicines that the physician administers are determined by their effectiveness in helping the Archæus in its battle against the hostile spirits. This makes medicine a field for the magician in the control of spirits.

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). The neo-Platonic spirit of the Humanistic Period reached its most complete development in the æsthetic philosophy of Giordano Bruno. He sang the world-joy of the æsthetic Renaissance. Italy ordained him priest, exiled him as heretic, and then burned him at the stake as recalcitrant. Italy has produced very few great speculators since his day. The Council of Trent met when he was fifteen years old; already the counter-Reformation had begun in Italy, and Italy was soon to become an intellectually arid waste. The influence of Bruno appears in Spinoza and perhaps in Leibnitz. His one contribution to modern science wasin his inspired conception that because God is infinite, the world is infinite in space and time. The philosophers who influenced his thought were Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, and Lucretius.

The fundamental thought of the Humanistic Period was expressed by Bruno in his imaginative conception of the divine beauty of the living All. Poet as well as philosopher, he was consumed by a love for nature as a beautiful religious object. He revolted from all asceticism and scholasticism. The “new world” in which he found himself was to him the emblem of God. The thought of that chief of neo-Platonists, Plotinus, of the beauty of the universe had never been so sympathetically regarded as by the Renaissance; in the hands of Bruno this beauty became the manifestation of the divine Idea. Philosophy, æsthetics, and religion were identical to him. To express his thought he employed the usual neo-Platonic symbol of the all-forming and all-animating light. Bruno was no patient student of natural phenomena as such, but a lover of the great illumination of nature facts by the great soul behind them. He was not interested in any single group of phenomena, as was Paracelsus; but he loved them all as a religion. Not only externally but internally is the universe an eternal harmony. When one gazes upon it with the enthusiasm of a poet, its apparent defects will vanish in the harmony of the whole. Man needs no special theology, for the world is perfect because it is the life of God. Bruno is a universalistic optimist and a mystic poet. Before this cosmic harmony man should never utter complaint, but should bow in reverence. True science is religion and morality.

Since Bruno conceived no theodicy (proof of thegoodness and justice of God) to be necessary, he did not define in exact terms his conception of God. Nevertheless, to escape the charge of atheism, he distinguished between the universe and the world. For him God = the universe = nature = matter = the principle immanent in the world. The “world,” on the other hand, = the sum-total of nature phenomena. The “world” is the body of God, and God is the soul of the “world.” God is natura naturans; the world is natura naturata[4]. Just as the sum of the parts of man’s body does not equal the man himself, so to identify God with the totality of objects of nature is atheism in the true sense. It is to make God a finite being, although very big. In opposition to this, Bruno conceives God as the one substance manifesting himself through all things. This is to magnify God and to make him really omnipresent.

Nevertheless, Bruno is involved in all the inconsistencies of the Mystic. In a neo-Platonic fashion he frequently speaks of God as if he were a plural number of atoms. God is not only the world unity, but in every particle of the world is He writ small. The elements of the world are monads, and each is the mirror of the All. The Absolute is the primal unity; and yet in the paradoxical fashion in which the neo-Platonist is so successful, Bruno says that all creation is unfolded out of God and is included in him. The speculative poet is so in love with the world that he does not stop to make consistent the distinctions which he hasdrawn. The natura naturans and the natura naturata, the unity and plurality of the world, are the two aspects of the reality in his own life—and that reality is God.

MAP SHOWING THE BIRTHPLACES OF THE CHIEF PHILOSOPHERS OF THE RENAISSANCE

(The names of the philosophers are given in brackets beneath the towns in which they were born)

CHAPTER IV
THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD OF THE RENAISSANCE (1600–1690)[5]

The Philosophers of the Natural Science Period.

1. Galileo, 1564–1641, and the group of scientists.

2. Bacon, 1561–1626.

3. Hobbes, 1588–1679.

4. The Rationalists.

Descartes, 1596–1650.

Spinoza, 1632–1677.

Leibnitz, 1646–1716.

Countries other than Italy and Germany come upon the philosophic stage during the eighty-nine years of the period of teeming natural science. England is represented by Bacon and Hobbes, France by Descartes, Holland by the Jew, Spinoza, and, at the end of the period, Germany by Leibnitz. Still Italy yields the most influential thinker of them all,—Galileo, who is the most prominent of a long series of astronomers coming from many countries. The most completely representative is Descartes, who was the founder of the Rationalistic school; for he was not only interested in mathematics itself, but in the application of mathematics to metaphysical questions. Neither as influential as Galileo, nor as comprehensive as Descartes, the Englishmen, Bacon and Hobbes, were nevertheless important as the forerunners of the English empirical school. Spinoza is more of a “world’s philosopher” than any of the others, and he joins in his doctrine the scholasticismof the Middle Ages and the mathematics of the Renaissance; while Leibnitz occupies the position between the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.

The Mathematical Astronomers. After enthusiastically canvassing the traditional theories of antiquity, the Humanists had been unable to find one which would explain and organize the newly accumulated materials of their “new world.” But working in more or less narrow circles, natural science had already made a beginning in the midst of the Humanists. Beginning with Copernicus, an interest in physics and astronomy had been aroused, but in these early days it was more speculative than empirical. The speculations of the astronomers had but little influence upon their own time. However, when the ancient theories proved inadequate to explain the facts of the “new world,” and especially when the empirical researches of Galileo confirmed the speculations of his predecessors, the Renaissance turned away from antiquity to nature herself for an explanation. This was about the year 1600, the year of the beginning of the Natural Science period.

The most prominent of these astronomers were—

While the greatest of these scientists is Newton, who belongs to the next period, the most influential is Galileo. Modern methods in science began with Galileo. Of the four predecessors of Galileo three—Copernicus,Tycho Brahe, and Bruno—are in spirit Humanists; for their final explanation of nature is the world of spirits. Kepler belongs to both the Humanistic and Natural Science periods; for at first he constructed his natural science by an amalgamation of the doctrine of spirits and the Copernican theory; but in the latter part of his life he adopted completely the mechanical view of nature. The above scientists may be divided for convenience into two groups: (1) the speculative scientists before Galileo; (2) Galileo and the following empirical investigators.

For fourteen centuries the ancient Ptolemaic astronomy had been regarded by the learned as beyond question. Although complex and unwieldy, it explained all phenomena satisfactorily enough as they appeared to the senses; and it brought phenomena into a system. (The Ptolemaic system has been fully described in vol. i, pp. 322 ff.) To recapitulate it: the world-all was conceived as a hollow sphere with the earth as the centre and the fixed stars in the periphery, while the planets were supposed to move in epicycles. The universe was divided into the heavenly and terrestrial realms, which were occupied by various spirits. God resided outside this hollow sphere and held it, as it were, in his lap.

The history of the changes leading up to our modern astronomical conception makes a vivid chapter. How Copernicus contributed the idea of placing the sun at the centre of things, Kepler the idea of the orbits of the planets as ellipses, Bruno the idea of the boundlessness of space and time, and how Galileo, corroborating these theories by empirical investigations, was put under the ban of the church—all this shows what heroism must have been required to tear down a time-honoredand firmly intrenched traditional conception. Probably the speculative astronomers were not conscious that they were undermining the whole astronomical structure, and probably their sole motive was to simplify the Ptolemaic conception, not to destroy it. For Copernicus accepted the Ptolemaic system, except that he put the sun instead of the earth at the centre, and thereby simplified it by making many of the epicycles unnecessary; and Kepler simplified it further by supplanting the epicycles with ellipses. However, the result was inevitably an entirely new conception of the universe, and with it a new conception of the relation among particular material things. It was in this way that new scientific methods arose.

The universe now comes to be regarded as a mechanism, and what was formerly looked upon as the influence of spirits or as Providential guidance becomes an impersonal law of causal necessity. In the heavens above and the earth beneath there are no longer vital forces and supernatural influences. The universe becomes a homogeneous whole throughout, in which there is no difference between the fall of an apple and the revolution of the planets, no distinction between terrestrial and celestial spheres. The Christian heaven is nowhere in it; the Mediæval spirits are banished from it. The Greek gods have been pushed out, and the Christian God has been made to stand aside.

The demand that the new conception of the universe be verified in concrete experiments, if it were to replace the old Ptolemaic system, the revival of the study of Archimedes, the rivalry in trade and inventions among the Italian towns, were three causes for the demand for greater exactness. Investigation, experiment, and inventioncame into vogue. Magic, alchemy, astrology, and conjurations were no longer accepted as serious methods. In the Middle Ages deduction had been purely the logical employment of the syllogism in theological discussions, while induction, so far as it was used at all, had been the reference of nature phenomena to spiritual forces. Now deduction and induction[6] come to be used for other purposes, and mathematics is necessarily conjoined with both. The new Natural Science period is essentially a “strife of methods”; it is the period when the true plan of scientific procedure is being determined. It is here that the importance and influence of Galileo is seen upon modern science and philosophy.

The influence of mathematics in modern times grew up from these astronomical beginnings among the Humanists; and the Natural Science period with its contention as to methods was the immediate result. Bacon, for example, regarded final causes as one of the “idols.” Hobbes maintained that physics has only to do with efficient causes; Descartes held that it is audacious in man to think of reading the purposes of God in nature; while Spinoza thought it absurd to attribute divine purpose to nature. By degrees everything in nature came to be regarded as a mechanism, and there was no distinction between the animate and the inanimate. The discovery of the mechanical circulation of the blood by Harvey, in 1626, became a vigorous impulse toward the mechanical study of animal life. Descartes regarded animals as complex automata and on this line he published essays on dioptrics, musical law, and thefœtus. Hobbes applied mechanical law to psychological phenomena. The study of reflex action was carried on with great vigor in the Low Countries and France. The mechanical theory was rendered complete in this early time by the exclusion of the soul from the explanation of the body of man, just as God had been pushed into the background of the universe.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1641).[7] The dates of the life of Galileo show him to have been a younger contemporary of Bruno, and, like Bruno, to have been a victim of the ecclesiastical reaction that was sweeping away all scientific freedom in Italy. But while Bruno belonged both chronologically and in spirit to the first period of the Renaissance, Galileo is the true beginner of the second period. Bruno was a philosopher of nature, while Galileo was a true scientist. Galileo gave to all future thought a wisely formulated method of dealing with the new materials of the nature world. His laws of projectiles, falling bodies, and the pendulum created a new theory of motion. He set the hypothesis of Copernicus upon an experimental basis and made the future work of Newton possible. He was professor at the Universities of Padua and Pisa, and he was mathematician and philosopher at the court of Tuscany. That he perjured himself and thereby saved his life from the Inquisition, there is no doubt; but instead of death he had an old age of great bitterness. He gave open adherence to the Copernican system in 1610, when he constructed a telescope and discovered the satellites of Jupiter; and after this there followed discovery afterdiscovery, like the spots on the sun and the phases of Venus, which latter discovery confirmed the Copernican hypothesis. He invented the hydrostatic balance, the proportional compass, the thermoscope, microscope, and telescope. His two most noteworthy writings are The Dialogue concerning the Two Most Important World-Systems, and Investigations into Two New Sciences.

As to method, Galileo objected to formal logic, that it is not a means of discovering new truth, although valuable as a corrective of thought. New truth is discovered when we frame an hypothesis from certain experiences, and then infer the truth of other cases from that hypothesis. The hypothesis is first formed by induction from a few characteristic cases; the inference to other cases is made by deduction. He therefore linked induction and deduction closely together, and conceived them as necessarily complementary in scientific investigation. Either induction or deduction alone is absurd and impossible. By induction alone we should be obliged to examine all cases, an impossible undertaking. By deduction alone we should be in the same straits as the Scholastics, and never discover new laws. We must begin with our perceptual experiences and make an induction from them; then we must bring mathematics into use in constructing the hypothesis from which to deduce (calculate) new cases. This is the true, modern method and reveals the great genius of Galileo.

A mathematical law never exactly coincides with any particular concrete relations. A mathematical law is an hypothesis or ideal construction. What value, then, has a mathematical law for science? The orbits of planets[8]are described as ellipses, but no actual planet moves in a perfect ellipse. The ellipse is an hypothetical, mathematical orbit for a planet which has no disturbing influences upon it. We get at such a law by the method of concomitant variations;[9] and the value of it consists in the simplification and system that it gives the facts. For example, knowing that a planet would move in an ellipse if it suffered no perturbations, and then knowing the influences upon any particular planet, we can calculate its orbit. Mathematical law, although ideal, is the common rule under which all nature phenomena can be brought. However, only by measurements founded on the tests of observation and experiment can we know how far the claims of such deduction are supported. Measure everything measurable, and calculate the measurement of those things not directly measurable.

Nature, therefore, must be called upon to explain her own phenomena. Since the laws of nature are found by investigating nature phenomena as we experience them, the laws must be a part of nature and can be found nowhere else. To explain nature phenomena by referring them to spiritual influence is no real explanation. To say that God moves the planets is to involve the subject in mystery. Here is where Galileo shows that he does not belong to the Scholastics or the Mystics or the Humanists. He searched for some constant element, and not for a “vital force” behind nature phenomena. He declared this constant element to be motion—measurable motion. He is the author of the theory that mechanics is the mathematical theory of motion.Science was therefore taken by him out of the paralyzing grip of the theologian.

The Life of Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (1561–1626). Francis Bacon was a native of London and received his university education at Cambridge. He was in the English diplomatic service at an early age, but he later returned to London and took up the legal profession. At the age of thirty-two he entered Parliament and became immediately distinguished as a debater. At forty-three he became legal adviser of the crown, and when he was fifty-six he was made Lord Chancellor. After a brilliant career in public office he was accused and convicted of bribery and corruption, deposed from office, and heavily fined. His most notable writings are his Essays, two parts of his uncompleted Instauratio Magna, viz., De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum and Novum Organum, and his New Atlantis, a Utopian fragment.

The Position of Bacon in Philosophy. Tradition has frequently placed Bacon as the founder of modern philosophy. This estimate is due to a remark by Diderot, which was repeated by many French writers. The estimate, however, rests on a misapprehension of Bacon’s influence. Bacon was more of a Humanist than a technical philosopher, and in his constructive philosophy he seems not only to have had no influence upon his contemporaries, but also to have been uninfluenced by them. He was unconscious of the influence of Kepler and Galileo and their mighty scientific constructions. Bacon’s Novum Organum, which embodies his scientific methods, had no influence upon his own time, nor was it read in the seventeenth century. Its influence was first felt in the eighteenth century. However, all thismust be qualified in one respect. Bacon’s New Atlantis did have an immediate influence. The ideal of a college of science, which Bacon presented in his New Atlantis, was not only the cause of the work of Diderot in his Encyclopedia in the eighteenth century, but what is more important, it had effect in his own time. It led to the founding of the Royal Society, thirty-six years after Bacon’s death, and later to the founding of similar academies abroad. While the reader may be confused by the conflicting estimates of Bacon, the words of his own countryman, Sir David Brewster, may be accepted as embodying the truth: “Had Bacon never lived, the student of nature would have found in the works and writings of Galileo not only the principles of inductive philosophy, but also its practical application to the noblest efforts of invention and discovery.” So far from being the founder of modern science, Bacon developed only one side of it, the inductive side, and that without success. He identified deduction with the Aristotelian syllogism, and he was therefore unaware of the importance of the use of mathematics in the method of deduction. He did not seem to have the slightest idea that mathematics was going to be the scientific method; consequently science has gone much further than Bacon dreamed it would go. Bacon’s importance in the Renaissance does not consist in his contribution to the content of philosophy or to his successful formulation of the scientific method.

Wherein then lies the value of Bacon’s work as a philosopher?[10] Bacon was the first in England to collectthe fruits of the Renaissance and give them a secular character. Taking them out of the hands of the theologian, he, a lawyer, “gave them a legal existence by the most eloquent plea that has ever been made for them.” It was a time when philosophy and science were passing out of the hands of the theologian; and Bacon, feeling that science, including philosophy, should be secularized, drew a sharp line between the work of science and that of theology. Out of his great contempt for antiquity, Bacon voiced for England the contemporary reaction against the old scholastic methods. He set up the ideal and gave directions for following it. He issued the call to go from abstractions back to things. A man of worldly wisdom and pungency, his nature was buoyant in its belief in the coming age. He had confidence amounting to an optimism that final principles would be found to explain all the particulars of the “new world.” He was a prophet who outlined his prophecy. He felt that not only nature but all the activities of man would be reduced to some simple principles. He shared and expressed the confidence of his time that wonderful things were to be revealed; that nothing is impossible to man, provided man hits upon the right key to nature’s secrets. Just as every age, that feels itself upon the threshold of a new epoch, writes Utopias,[11] so Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, the Utopian fragment, for his age. This is the literary expression of his optimismabout the future of a distinctively secular science. The world of the New Atlantis is the world of new machines. Bacon’s most ambitious scientific contribution to the same end is his Instauratio Magna. Of this only two parts were completed: De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum and Novum Organum. Bacon is best known in philosophy by the second part, which was thus named to contrast it with the “old” Organum of Aristotle.

The high influence that Bacon gained later among philosophers may therefore be accounted for by the association of his eminent position and wonderful personality with his bold expression of this congenial utilitarianism. Even in that rich Elizabethan age of English literature, he was prominent as a writer and politician. He had occupied high political positions under James I; but his peculiar personality would in itself have attracted attention, for his genius was such that any of the products of that age—even the plays of Shakespeare—have seemed possible to him. Pope describes him as “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” Macaulay says in his essay, Bacon, that there were many things that he loved more than virtue and many that he feared more than guilt. His career shows that he loved himself, wealth, and learning. His unusual love for learning may be safely taken as his excuse for his unscrupulous lust for wealth. His great versatility prevented his success in any one direction, but he had the power of expressing the feeling of his impressive age and of becoming its personal representative.

The Aim of Bacon. Bacon sought to secularize philosophy by making it the same as science. It was the age when Nature was conceived to be identical with theworld of the natural sciences. Bacon stood in this age as the formulator of the scientific usefulness of philosophy. Philosophy is to ameliorate social conditions and enrich human life by bringing nature under control. Ancient and mediæval times had not been occupied with the improvement of human society, but Bacon was inspired with the feeling of the modern statesman for such improvement. The true test of philosophy, according to Bacon, is what it will do. That philosophy is worth while which will effectively remove the weighing conditions upon human society, so that there are no longer two classes,—those that sacrifice and those that satisfy their ambitions. This dominant utilitarian motive in Bacon sets him in opposition to pure theoretical and contemplative knowledge, and makes him the father of utilitarianism and positivism[12] in England.[13] Knowledge is the only kind of permanent power, and man can master the world when he gives up verbal discussions and belief in magic. Man must gain a positive insight into nature. Science and philosophy must be separated from theology, and philosophy must be reduced to science. Thus while aiming to give a tangible form to the scholastic doctrine of the “twofold truth,” Bacon through his utilitarianism missed the goal reached by Galileo and Descartes.

The Method of Bacon. Bacon says that the method of the scientist should not be like that of the spiderthat spins a web out of himself, nor like that of the ant which merely collects material, but like that of the bee which collects, assimilates, and transforms. Bacon’s original inspiration had been his respect for method, and this grew more pronounced. Philosophy, i. e. science, is method. With Bacon we see the beginning of philosophy cut loose from personality and over-valued because it had mechanical accuracy. Nevertheless, the method of Bacon was very comprehensive. It included on the one hand a critical survey of the past, and on the other an anticipatory programme for the science of the future. Let us now turn to these two aspects of his method.

(a) Bacon’s criticism of the past was a trenchant criticism of prevailing philosophy, and amounted to a break with the past. Bacon felt that what passed for science in his day was but a pretence. In the presence of the facts of life traditional science was but empty words. The early thinkers are not the ancients. We are the ancients, for we embody in ourselves all the preceding centuries. Thus does Bacon swing from the mediæval blind acceptance of the past to an equally blind rejection of the past. But why did the ancient thinkers err? Not because they were not men of talent, nor because they lacked in intellectual opportunity; but because their method of procedure led them astray. The early thinkers followed wrong paths, and their results, which we now possess, are vain.

What must be our attitude in the presence of this traditional philosophy? We must dispossess ourselves of the prejudices that have misled the past, for they form the obstacles to our true knowledge of the world. The roots of the errors that have infected philosophyare “fantastic, contentious, and delicate learning.” We must not, indeed, trust to our every-day perceptions; for although science is based on our perceptions, our every-day perceptions are corrupted by our uncritical habits of thought. Thus there have arisen perversions and falsifications, of which we must first of all be rid. Bacon calls these Idols.[14] Idols are false images, that intervene between us and the truth and are mistaken for reality. Bacon makes four general classes of Idols:—

(1) The Idols of the Tribe, or the presuppositions common to the human race.

(2) The Idols of the Cave,[15] or individual prejudices due to natural individual disposition, situation in life, etc.

(3) The Idols of the Forum, or the traditional meanings of words, by which we substitute the word for the idea. These are the worst illusions.

(4) The Idols of the Theatre,[16] the theories or philosophic dogma, which command discipleship from groups of men and have not been subjected to our own criticism.

Bacon’s classification of our prejudices as Idols is a critical attempt to separate, in what passes for knowledge, the subjective, which has become traditional, from the real. Logic, religion, and poetry have had a bad effect on science, as is especially shown in the theatrical character of philosophy.

(b) Having dispossessed ourselves of our prejudices orIdols, we are ready to proceed to a positive construction of a scientific method of work. By what, in general, ought science to be guided? By induction and experience. Bacon suggests the following steps for the science of the future:—

(1) There must be an exhaustive collection of particular instances.

(2) There must then be an analysis and comparison of these instances, for to Bacon induction was not a mere enumeration of single instances. Negative instances, and instances of difference of degree, must be taken into account. Hasty generalizations must be avoided, and we must ascend gradually from the particular to the general.

(3) The simple “form” of the phenomenon must be discovered. Of the four causes of Aristotle, Bacon emphasizes the “formal.” By “form” Bacon means the nature that is always present when the phenomenon is present, absent when the phenomenon is absent, and increases or decreases with the phenomenon. The “form” is the abiding essence of the phenomenon.

The English Natural Science Movement. The natural science movement in England thus received at the start the impression of the sober Anglo-Saxon mind. Through its entire history English philosophy differed from that of the Continent. Here at the outset the Englishman is skeptical, not only of scholastic deductions from dogma, but also of deductions of all kinds.[17] He prefers the slow road of patient empirical discovery. Even pure contemplative knowledge and the deductions of mathematics have little charm for him. To be sure, induction even in the hands of an Englishman demandsby its nature the establishment of a general principle, but Bacon would have refused to use such a deduction to establish a new truth in the way that Galileo used his mathematical hypotheses. According to Bacon, an hypothesis is true only so far as it has already received the indispensable sanction of experience.

Thomas Hobbes[18] and his Contemporaries. During a certain period Bacon had under him a secretary by the name of Thomas Hobbes. Here was an obscure man turning to philosophy because of his interest in politics; whose point of attachment to philosophy was the mechanical theory of nature, so universally accepted by the scientists of that time. No contemporary of Hobbes—neither Bacon, Descartes, nor Galileo—had so systematic a philosophy. No other man succeeded better in expressing all that was in his mind. Hobbes was one of a large group of political theorists of the Renaissance. When the mediæval idea of the universal Christian state, such as was embodied in Augustine’s City of God, was no longer held, many of the Humanists tried to construct theoretical systems of political government that would meet the demands of the time. Macchiavelli, Thomas More, Bodin, Althusius, and Grotius[19] belong to this group. Hobbes is best known in modern times as a writer on this aspect of moralsand politics; but politics is only a part of his general mechanical system of the universe. He is the forerunner of modern materialism, and his peculiar theory of society is only an exemplification of this theory.

In passing from Bacon to Hobbes we come to a very different type of man. Bacon had risen to fame by his own genius, in spite of the hostility of his powerful relatives; Hobbes was a hard-headed man, with a narrow outlook, but with undoubted talents, which were fostered all his life under the patronage of the Devonshire family. Bacon was a practical politician; Hobbes was a doctrinaire and theoretical political writer. Of the voluminous literary remains of Bacon his philosophy forms but a small part; Hobbes had a general philosophical system, with which his classical and theological studies have connection.

In the succeeding chapter we shall review the philosophy of the rationalist, Descartes, who was a contemporary of Hobbes. We shall find that Descartes and Hobbes are alike in this: that both employed Galileo’s mathematical theory as authoritative. They differed, however, in the way in which they used Galileo’s theory. Descartes reduced mathematics to the rational, and conceived it to be the instrument of the reason; Hobbes reduced the rational to the mathematical, and conceived the reason as a form of mechanics. The starting-point of Descartes was the subjective, and he was held at a standstill until the relation of thought and mechanics was solved by him. The point of view of Hobbes was objective, and since all was mechanical, he discussed only incidentally the relation between thought and mechanical existence. Hobbes conceived the world in theterms of only one series, the mechanical. Descartes’ main motive was to preserve the rational; and, consequently, the world to him consisted of a double or dualistic series of terms. We therefore place Descartes, with Spinoza and Leibnitz, in a group called Rationalists. Hobbes was a materialist, and his greatness consisted in going the full length of materialism: he went beyond all the scientists of his time by extending the mechanical theory to the mental life.

The Life and Writings of Hobbes (1588–1679). The life of Hobbes falls into five natural periods. In his first and last periods he was the classical scholar. During his middle period of about thirteen years he was the philosopher. Furthermore, at one time he was absorbed in mathematics and at another in controversy. His period as mathematician was begun not until he was forty years old, and was preparatory to his creative philosophical period, which was begun when he was about fifty.

1. As a Classical Scholar (including his early years) (1588–1628)—the first forty years of his life. At Oxford (1603–1608); first journey abroad (1608–1612); beginning of his relations with the Devonshire family and also of his acquaintance with the “new science”; time of leisurely study (1612–1628) and acquaintance with Bacon, Herbert of Cherbury, and Ben Jonson; translation of Thucydides (1628).

2. As Mathematician (1628–1638). Second journey abroad (1629–1631) for eighteen months as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton; reads Euclid while abroad; third journey abroad (1634–1637), when he meets Galileo; begins to develop the conception of motion and sensation; by 1638 he is counted among thenotable philosophers and he meets the Parisian scientists, Mersenne and Gassendi.

3. As Philosopher (1638–1651). Plans his philosophy under title of Elements of Philosophy: De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive, which is interrupted by the English Revolution; Elements of Law (“little treatise”) written in 1640, read by a few in manuscript, published without his consent in 1650 in two parts: Human Nature and De Corpore Politico; flees to Paris (1640) and enters again the scientific circle at Paris; criticises Descartes’ Meditations; De Cive published (1642), which is De Corpore Politico enlarged; acts for a time as tutor to Charles II in Paris; engages upon his general philosophical theory (1642–1645); Liberty and Necessity, written (1646), published (1654); Leviathan published (1651).

4. As Controversialist (1651–1668). Flees back to London (1651); De Corpore, published (1655); Behemoth, written (1668), proscribed and not published until after his death; controversies with Bramhall, Ward, Wallis, and Boyle; De Homine, published (1658).

5. As Classical Scholar (1668–1679). Translation of Iliad and Odyssey (1675).

In Molesworth’s edition (1839–1845), Hobbes’ Latin works occupy five volumes, the English eleven. The Elements of Philosophy—the De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive—were not published in the sequence in which they were planned, but, on account of political exigencies, in the above order.

The Influences upon the Thought of Hobbes. 1. The premature birth of Hobbes had no inconsiderable influenceupon his life. When his mother was carrying him, she had suffered a great fright, at the announcement of the approach of the Spanish Armada. Was it in consequence of this that Hobbes’s life was a series of panics and controversies? He was extremely conservative in politics. He saw the new changes without sympathy with either party, and he had no political ideals—only fear. The time in which he lived reinforced this natural conservatism. When he was translating Thucydides, Buckingham was assassinated and the Petition of Rights was presented. Henry IV of France had been assassinated not many years before, and the Puritan element had become a disturbing factor in England. His study and his alliance with the Devonshire family confirmed him in his conservative position. All signs of the time pointed toward decentralization of government, toward war and rebellion. In fear he was “the first that fled” to France at the beginning of the troubles of Charles I; in fear he fled back to London eleven years later, lest the Roman Catholics, whom his Leviathan had offended, should murder him. Hobbes was again in great panic over the London fire and looked upon it as a divine penalty, on account of the impurity of the English court. Hobbes was always in fright lest he might not have peace.

2. The father of Hobbes was one of the unworthy clergymen of the English Established Church in the reign of Elizabeth. He was a dissolute man, and after many escapades he abandoned his family. In consequence of this Hobbes always had an antipathy toward the offices of the church and toward theology. Although he claimed to be a communicant, his allegiance was only nominal, as his theory will show.

3. Hobbes was very much influenced by the new mathematical science. His years at Oxford left little impression upon him, and he was but little interested in the scholasticism which was taught there. Yet his twenty years on the Continent brought him into the midst of the scientific circles of Italy and France. He was well along into maturity when he felt this influence. On his second journey, he read Euclid for the first time. He was then forty-three. On his third journey, he met Galileo and the French scientists, Mersenne and Gassendi, and it was then that he began his reflections concerning motion and sensation. The writings of Kepler, Descartes, and Galileo influenced him mightily. Although he acted as Bacon’s secretary after the latter’s fall, Bacon’s influence upon him was little and has been overestimated. The mental powers of Bacon and his secretary were different, and Bacon knew nothing of the mathematical method. Hobbes shows to some degree the empirical tendency of his nationality, and he believed that knowledge must spring from experience. Further than this, the method that Bacon pursued does not appear in him. The mission of Hobbes was to construct a mechanical view of the world.

Of the three influences upon Hobbes, his inherited timidity is seen in his conservative political theory; the influence of his father is seen in his theory of religion; the influence of the “new” mathematical science is seen in his whole philosophy, especially in his psychology.

The Fundamental Principle in the Teaching of Hobbes. The assumption from which Hobbes deduced his entire philosophy was the mechanical conception of the physical world,—the characteristic philosophicalassumption of his age. Hobbes’s contemporaries, both the natural scientists and the philosophers, had, however, on the whole, restricted the conception of mechanism to the physical world. Hobbes differed from them all in universalizing the conception. He extended its application from the physical over upon the mental realm, and thereby reduced the mental world to physics. He stated this mechanical principle in two parts: all that exists is body; all that occurs is motion. Hobbes applies this assumption to the physical world and it gives him materialism;[20] he applies it to knowledge and it gives him sensationalism;[21] he applies it to the will and it gives him determinism;[22] he applies it to morals and politics and it gives him naturalism.[23] Body is nature; body is everything. Body is the first term leading through man up to the State. With Hobbes, as with others of his time, the political field was the whole ground to be penetrated. The fundamental principle, by which Hobbes thought the whole field was to be explained, is body in motion. The mental world became drawn into the physical, and thereby his mechanical conception became the more natural.

There was one realm which Hobbes left untouched by his principle: the realm of the spirit, i. e. God, souls, angels. The science of bodies cannot deal withthe supernatural, for the supernatural does not consist of bodies in motion. Matter and mind are homogeneous; matter and spirit are not. The contrast in Hobbes is not between matter and mind, the material and the psychical, but between matter and spirit, the material and the supra-material.

The Method of Hobbes. Hobbes made the method of Galileo his own. He believed that all knowledge is rooted in mathematics. There is one true method of treating all subjects: the mathematical calculation of them as motions of bodies. Knowledge consists in using words as the signs of experience and in reckoning with them. Scientific thought is the combination of signs. It is the rationalizing of our experiences. Science has a truth in itself and stands as a rationally organized world, quite different from the world of experience which it has organized. The world of bodies in causally related motions is such an organized world, the most systematized and most simply constructed world that science can devise. But how does the scientist proceed? He begins with a phenomenon, which is a body in motion, and finds out the causes of the phenomenon, which causes are nothing more nor less than the elements of the phenomenon in question. Then the scientist proceeds from the causes to other phenomenal effects. These new effects are like the original phenomenon and its causes,—bodies in motion. Thus the world of the scientist is a world of causes and effects, for “the natural reason of man is busily flying up and down among the creatures, and bringing back a true report of their order, causes, and effects.” Thus we find Hobbes to be a nominalist (see vol. i, p. 358) who, nevertheless, used the deductive method—rathera strange combination. Like all his English successors, he employed induction and deduction, but the two processes never became fused.[24] Moreover for induction he has no method.

The order in which the writings of Hobbes appeared seems to have been the sport of outward events, for they were not written according to his original plan. On his return from his third journey to the Continent (1638), Hobbes, then fifty years old, had adopted the mechanical theory and had planned his philosophy. His comprehensive work was to be called the Elements of Philosophy, and was to be divided into three parts: De Corpore, treating physical bodies; De Homine, treating man as a psychological individual; De Cive, treating man as the citizen of a State. Hobbes’s philosophy was therefore to be a universal philosophy, and he intended to bring his works out in logical order—first, the science of physics, then of human nature, and last of society. However, the growing disturbances in the political world at that time moved him to publish several treatises on politics first, and his physics and psychology more than fifteen years later.

The Kinds of Bodies. There are two kinds of bodies, natural and artificial. Natural bodies are those belonging to the physical world. The artificial bodies are the institutions of society, of which the most important is the State. Man belongs to both classes of bodies—he has a physical nature and he is a member of the State. Man is the connecting link between natural and artificial bodies. Philosophy is therefore divided intothree parts: physics, which treats of purely natural bodies; psychology, which treats of man in his rôle as a natural individual; politics, which treats of man in social congregations with his fellows. Looking at the situation from the other end, political bodies are decomposable into men, men are in turn decomposable into physical bodies. Political bodies are dependent on the psychical nature of men, and the psychical nature of men is dependent on the nature of physical bodies, i. e. on bodies and their motions. Thus all bodies, natural and artificial, must be explained in terms of motion, if they are explained scientifically. Physical bodies are the first term leading up through man to the last term in the series, which is the State.

Hobbes’s Application of the Mathematical Theory to Psychology. Although the prime interest of Hobbes lay in the political life of man, he nevertheless made an original contribution to psychology. He snatched the science of mental phenomena from the hands of the scholastic theologian and made it for the first time an independent science. Psychology had been based upon the assumptions of the theologian; for these Hobbes substituted the assumptions of the mathematician. Consciousness became in his hands not a soul, but the motion of bodies. It is described by him as “the movement of certain parts of the organic body.” The states of consciousness, such as sensations, perceptions, etc., are brain movements or the refined movements of atoms in the nervous system. Memory and imagination are “decaying sensations”; thought is the sum of several sensations; experience is the totality of sensations bound together by the rigid laws of association. Hobbes was the father of what is known as the Associational Psychology,or the theory that consciousness is composed of mental atoms under fixed laws of association.

But although Hobbes took psychology out of the hands of the theologian and made it a mechanical science, he did not identify it with physics. It is still psychology. The mental states are the physical motion of bodies, but they are not external motions, nor are they the copies of the external motions of bodies. Mental states are brain movements; they are the result of external motions. They come about in this way. A moving body in the outer world makes an impression on the sense organ, and this motion is transmitted by the nerves to the heart and brain. A reaction is effected in the brain, and this is a mental state. The brain transformations, and not the movement of the external object, is that of which we are conscious. The mental state is an “apparition” of the actual fact in the external world; it is an effect in a causal series. Our perception of light is, for example, a modification of the cerebral substance, and not of the external body itself. We deceive ourselves when we think that the sensations of light, sound, heat are outside us. These qualities of things are modifications of ourselves. There is nothing external to us, except the motions of bodies which are the causes of these modifications. The external world is no doubt real, but we have no knowledge of it—no knowledge of aught save the motions of bodies within ourselves. This is the point of view of all subsequent English philosophy: the substance of things is quite different from our knowledge of them. The substance of things is real; but is not the object of our knowledge. The object of our knowledge is a modification of ourselves.

The independence of knowledge with reference to theology on the one side, and to physical reality on the other, is well illustrated in Hobbes’s discussion of language. Speech consists of words, which are only the counters of things. Words are markers by which men may know a thing as “seamen mark a rock.” Science consists in their manipulation. Science combines them by addition and subtraction into judgments and syllogisms, and thereby constructs a body of demonstrated principles. Words are only counters, and he is a fool who mistakes the counter for the coin of reality. Words only represent reality, and the law of their use is mathematics. Truth and falsity are terms that are concerned with the correct or incorrect manipulation of these verbal counters and not with real things.

Hobbes’s Application of the Mathematical Theory to Politics. In the same way that material bodies in motion give rise to mental states, and mental states as bodies in motion give rise to the human consciousness, so men as individuals are the source of the artificial body,—the State. In every individual man the impulse to self-preservation is innate, and is, in fact, his absolute and universal characteristic. Just as the law of the mechanical association of ideas is the fundamental principle of the human mind, so the mechanical law of self-preservation is the principle of man’s ethical and political life. All our political institutions are the result of the striving of men for self-preservation. In his natural state—when, as Hobbes conceived, man lived without social organization—man had no other standard for conduct than his own self-interest; in the artificial political state, which man has constructed, self-interest is still his motive. Egoism is the sole workingprinciple of human beings both before and after they live in societies; but the political state is the most ingenious contrivance which egoism has hit upon for its own profit. Hobbes conceived that the original state of man, which under the name of “state of nature” was a common problem in the Renaissance, was a condition in which every man was making war against every other man. (Compare Locke and Rousseau.) But such a condition of things was obviously self-destructive. Consequently man arbitrarily and artificially formed the political State to avoid this self-destructive, internecine warfare. Under the circumstances it was the most effective way in which man could gain his personal ends, for the political State was the only possible means to peace. In the “state of nature” the right of every man to everything was the equivalent of the right of every man to nothing. So men made a compact with one another under which each relinquished a portion of his rights in order that each might have a portion of them secure. But what gives security to this compact? The sovereign to which the powers of the many have thus been delegated. What is the sovereign? It is the soul of the State, the general will,—represented by a single person in a monarchy, by an assembly in a republic. This sovereign, in whom the contract is vested, is absolute; for the sovereign was not a party to the original contract, since he did not then exist. The contract was made among the individuals, at that time in a “state of nature.” So long as the State preserves its power among the people, the people must render their obedience to the State,—to the sovereign in whom the contract was vested. The might of the political State makes right. Whatever the State commands is right;whatever is forbidden is wrong. There was no right and wrong in the “state of nature,” only the possible and the impossible. An act is a crime when it breaks the contract, and thus the ground of morality is political legislation. Even the religion of the people is determined by the State. Any political State is better than a revolution. Here was philosophical justification of Charles I. A reversion to war is a reversion to the “state of nature.”

When Hobbes was in France as a refugee he wrote the Leviathan, which contained this doctrine of political society. He presented a vellum-bound copy to Charles II, hoping to gain favor with that prince. However, the Leviathan, unfortunately for Hobbes’s purpose, contained two paragraphs that antagonized the royalists and the Catholics. One was, that when a commonwealth is unable to protect its citizens in peace, that commonwealth is dissolved and a new sovereign commonwealth is formed. The second was, that while the sovereign state shall decide what the religion of its people shall be, no religion is infallible—neither Anglican, Catholic, nor Puritan. The religion that the sovereign makes legal is only a temporary one; the true religion will come not until the Last Judgment. The church is subordinate to the State, like everything else, and it does not matter much what the State religion shall be, provided there be peace. Religion is only a superstition resting on a defective knowledge of nature, and it is of little consequence what particular religion the State makes binding.

It hardly need be said that the Leviathan pleased neither Charles II nor the Catholics. The sequel of its publication was that Hobbes fled back to England from fear of assassination.

The Renaissance in England after Hobbes. The philosophies of Bacon and Hobbes do not exhaust, but merely represent the philosophy of England during the Renaissance. Empiricism[25] had to wait for Locke in the next period before it became dominant. After Hobbes Scholasticism was narrowly confined to limited circles and appeared under the form of Skepticism or of Platonism, neo-Platonism, or Mysticism. The reaction toward Platonism was centred in a group of ethical scholars, called the Cambridge School. It included Culverwell, Cudworth, Henry More, and Cumberland. This Platonic movement was short-lived. The scientific spirit, represented in the Renaissance by Bacon and Hobbes, dominated the next period,—the Enlightenment,—and we shall find it spreading its influence over France and Germany in the form that Locke gave to it.

But the history of the philosophy of the Renaissance is not yet completed. Contemporary with Bacon and Hobbes, there was a movement on the Continent which was more characteristic of the Renaissance, and indeed more important to it than the movement in England. This was the school of Rationalists, to which we now turn.

CHAPTER V
THE RATIONALISM OF THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD OF THE RENAISSANCE

The Nature of Rationalism. Although the new science grew apace, it was not altogether a safe vocation. Natural science involves metaphysical questions at every point. The scientist at this time, therefore, found himself often in delicate relations with the jealous church guardians. A scientific explanation of the universe might antagonize the church dogma concerning God, creation, and the final outcome of the world. The church doctrine concerning the soul, too, its nature and its immortality, its relation to the body, might be antagonized by physiological and psychological discussions. In such dilemmas as these the natural scientist was not successful in pretending to isolate himself entirely from theology and in assuming an attitude of aloofness to it. Galileo might declare that, whatever the results of his investigations in physics might be, they had nothing to do with the Bible; but he sorrowfully found that the Inquisition thought otherwise. Copernicus found that his astronomical theories came into conflict with church dogma, and he was tormented by his bishop. Kepler spent his later years in a deadly struggle with both Protestantism and Catholicism. Bacon and Hobbes lived in a country where their personal safety was fairly secure, nevertheless Bacon disguised his position by using large words and Hobbes was untroubled because he accepted the religion of his sovereign.

If the position of those was difficult who tried to keep themselves strictly within the limits of science, how much more fraught with personal danger was the position of those who openly constructed a new metaphysics? It would mean that a challenge was issued to the old Scholasticism by the same human reason that had already challenged and overthrown the old science. The group of men who did this were the Rationalists. The Rationalists were interested in science, but they were more interested in the metaphysical problems that science aroused. The human reason had been successful in the reconstruction of physics by the use of mathematics. Why should it not also be able to reconstruct metaphysics and set it, too, upon a mathematical basis? The leaders of this school were Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and the Occasionalists,—Malebranche and Geulincx. The Rationalists advanced a new conception not only of nature, but of God; new theories not only of the human body, but of the soul. Their task was the dangerous one of bravely invading the hitherto impregnable realms of the spirit.

The task of the Rationalists was rendered the more difficult because, for the first time in the history of European thought, the inner and outer worlds had been completely sundered. For the first time do we meet with a clear-cut and positive dualism. The history of the growth of this dualism had been a long one, and to it the Greek Sophist, the Stoic, and the Christian had each contributed his share. However, Galileo and his fellow scientists in this period of the Renaissance had so reconstructed the old “world of nature” that it had become irreconcilable to the “world of grace.” These scientists believed that nature must be made to explain itself;its events must be conceived as necessitated; its processes as having the inevitableness of a machine. From the revolutions of the planets to the circulation of the blood, the movements of nature can be measured. The law of nature, that is conceived to underlie all this science, is mechanical causation. The researches of the scientists of the Renaissance had yielded a rich world of brute, inevitable, and scientific facts, and these stood in absolute fundamental contrast to the world of spiritual facts which were embodied in the church dogma. Apparently the problem of reconciling the “world of nature” and the “world of grace” had been solved by St. Thomas Aquinas in mediæval times. Now, however, the “world of nature” had been so reconstructed that the question was re-opened. How is the new “world of nature” to be brought into harmonious relation with that old, persistent, and settled dogma of the church? How can the newly conceived mechanism of nature be harmonized with the realm of free conscious spirits, without giving up the conception of God as a rational being, and also without depriving the soul of its power of initiation? The new science had therefore made it especially difficult on the one hand to reconcile a mechanical universe with an omnipotent God, and on the other to reconcile the mechanical human body with the free soul.

The struggle of the Renaissance with the Middle Ages is therefore concentrated in the development of the doctrine of this Rationalist School. It is studied here even better than by reading the two periods side by side. In Rationalism the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages and the Science of the Renaissance meet. Rationalism was a new science, but it was a new theology as well. It was a new scholastic philosophy; for, while the Rationaliststhought that they were giving the death blow to mediæval philosophy, they were instead only replacing it with another scholasticism. In their attempt, by means of the mechanical theory, to get an absolute system of knowledge upon which thought can rest, the Rationalists were acting in the spirit of the schoolmen. In fact, no schoolman ever showed more vigor or more dogmatic confidence in his philosophy. To the mathematical eye of the Rationalist there was absolutely nothing mysterious in the physical universe or in the spiritual realm. All things in heaven and earth could be made clear. The declaration of the Rationalists was the call of freedom, but it was as hazardous as it was ambitious; and the church with its assured revelations always stood opposed to the realization of freedom. So we shall find Descartes spending his whole life trying to trim his sails that he may not offend the Inquisition; Spinoza saving himself from both the Jews and the Christians by living in obscurity and publishing nothing; Leibnitz constructing philosophy with the avowed purpose of reconciling science and religion.

The Mental Conflict in Descartes. The strife between the spirit of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance appears in Descartes more strikingly than in any other thinker of this time. He shows, on the one hand, all the conservatism of a churchman of mediæval time in his respect for institutional authority; on the other hand, his intellectual activity places him among the leading scientists of the Renaissance. In no other thinker does the conflict between the Old and the New appear so unsettling; in none does the antagonism between the scholastic world of spiritual things and the mechanical world of science appear so irreconcilable.He suffered a life-long mental strife, for within himself mediævalism and science were engaged in an unending dramatic struggle. The philosophy of Descartes was a compromise between his traditions and his scientific genius; and his philosophy never overcame his conflicting motives. The admirers of Descartes have called him the father of modern thought, and this is partly true. The father of the modern scientific method was Galileo. Descartes, on the other hand, pointed out the incontestable principle from which modern thought has proceeded; he won his place in the history of philosophy by attempting to harmonize the old scholasticism with the new science under this single principle.

The Life and Philosophical Writings of Descartes (1596–1650).[26]

(1) As Child and Student (1596–1613).

At home until he was eight years old (1596–1604).

At the Jesuit school at La Flèche until he was seventeen (1604–1613).

(2) As Traveler (1613–1628). Descartes studies “the book of the world.”

At Paris (1613–1617), in retirement and study.

In Holland (1617–1619), nominally attached to the army of Maurice.

First Journey (1619–1621), going through Bavaria, Austria, north to the shores of the Baltic and back to Holland. The greater part of these two years were spent in Bohemia, enrolled in the army of the Emperor. He was on this journey when his mental crisis occurred,—at Neuberg, in Austria, in 1619. It was then that he discovered either analytical geometry or the fundamental principle of his philosophy.

In Paris again, 1623.

Second Journey (1623–1625), to Switzerland and Italy, making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Loretto.

(3) As Writer (1629–1650).

In Holland (1629–1649). For the sake of absolute seclusion from inquisitive visitors, Descartes changed his residence in Holland twenty-four times and lived in thirteen places. All his correspondence passed through Mersenne. During these twenty years he made three journeys to France. Thus this period of absolute retirement became his period of literary production, chiefly between the years 1635 and 1644. He wrote his

Method (1635–1637).

Meditations (1629–1641).

Le Monde (1630–1632), published posthumously.

Principles (1641–1644).

Passions (1646–1649).

(4) In Stockholm, Sweden (1649–1650). The romantic side of the life of Descartes appears in his book on the Passions, which he wrote for the Princess Elizabeth, and also in his acceptance of the invitation of the Queen of Sweden to reside at her court and become her tutor. He died there from the rigors of the climate after a residence of one year.

The Two Conflicting Influences upon the Thought of Descartes. On the one hand, all the ties of inheritance, family influence, and early education allied Descartes with the spirit of the Middle Ages. A delicate constitution made him shrink from public controversy and the public eye. He even made a half apology forhis pursuit of science by saying that he was seeking to reform his own life, and that it was absurd for an individual to attempt to reform a state. His family on both sides belonged to the landed gentry, and he was therefore bound by caste to the support of institutional authority. He was educated in the Jesuit school of La Flèche, and this most conservative of ecclesiastical influences restrained him from following the logical conclusions of his own thought. He was therefore both physically timid and intellectually aloof. In 1632 he was about to publish Le Monde, which was a scientific description of the origin and nature of the universe, and agrees in part with the Copernican theory. It was a treatise which would naturally conflict with the teaching of the church. He learned of the trial of Galileo at Rome, and he never dared to publish the book.

The rival spirit speaking in Descartes was the new scientific spirit of the Renaissance. He had a genius for mathematics even when he was at school at La Flèche. On his going to Paris he became the centre of the most notable scientific circle in France—a circle composed of such men as the Abbé Claude Picot, the physician Villebressieux, the optician Ferrier, the mathematician Mersenne, and many other scientists and theologians. But he became dissatisfied and made some long journeys in order to study “the book of the world.” His discovery of his method and his philosophical principle was the result. In mathematics he was the discoverer of analytical geometry and was the first to represent powers by exponents; in physics he stated the principle of the refraction of light in trigonometrical form; he explained the rainbow; he weighed the air. The same industrious application of the new scientificmethods that yielded great results in science, also resulted in his development of his philosophy. Love for original discovery made Descartes disdainful of all scientific authorities and even contemptuous of his notable contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey. He mentions by name Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Campanella, Telesio, and Bruno, but he claimed that he learned nothing from any one except Kepler. He felt himself to be above criticism, and in his self-arrogating dogmatism he is the type of the modern practical individualist. He defined truth as candor to one’s self, and both in his practical life and in his theoretical ideal there is an entire absence of utilitarianism.

The Method of Descartes. Both science and scholasticism show themselves in the method of Descartes. He attempted to construct a philosophical method entirely in the scientific spirit of the Renaissance, but in the application of it he showed his scholastic training. Surfeited with inadequate and traditional methods he felt the need of some single principle by which all knowledge might be systematized, and he was sure that mathematics would furnish the key. Rational science was to Descartes only mathematics. Truth is to be found not in metaphysics, nor in empirical science. Descartes’ philosophical aim was to establish a universal mathematics. Descartes was not entirely faithful to Galileo’s mathematical principle in his employment of it, and his influence in metaphysics was thereby all the greater; for in the development of his method he found assistance in the traditional scholastic methods. Descartes was original in insisting upon finding the existence of an absolute and undeniable principle before any progress could be made. Such an absoluteprinciple can be obtained only by an inductive sifting of all ideas. From this all further truths must be obtained by deduction. Every true philosophy must therefore be an induction or analysis of ideas, and secondly, a deduction or synthesis. The great contribution of Descartes was therefore this: to the inductive method of Bacon and the deductive method of Galileo, he added an absolute principle which must be taken as the basis of both induction and deduction.[27]

Induction—Provisional Doubt—The Ultimate Certainty of Consciousness. The philosophical proclamation of Descartes was characteristically French, for he demanded the same return to an uncorrupted nature for the understanding that Rousseau many years later demanded for the heart. The first step of Descartes was also French in its demand for absolute clearness, which from his youth had shown him to be so passionately fond of mathematics. The way to such clearness is through provisional doubt. Let us purify the understanding by delivering it of the rubbish of traditional opinions, taken upon the say-so of others. By this negative induction of received knowledge, let us see if there is anything positive and certain. In Descartes’s Meditations, in “a dramatic dialogue with himself,” he portrays his own intellectual struggle to gain uncontaminated truth.He makes an induction of all kinds of knowledge and challenges each as it appears. Nothing is to be accepted as true until it has proved itself true. All facts are subjected to rigid scrutiny. Descartes doubts the testimony of the senses, the existence of the material world, the existence of God. But this induction is provisional, even if it is radical. While none of the usually accepted truths are found by him to be undeniable and absolute, yet Descartes has an ulterior purpose in challenging them. Greek skepticism had no further end than doubt, while at the other extreme Anselm and the orthodox scholastics had refused to doubt at all. The method of Descartes is contrasted both with that of Anselm and with that of the Skeptics, for he doubts in order that he may know. Dubito ut intelligam. Doubt is necessary, but only as a means to an end; and that end is knowledge. Descartes proclaimed for the modern individual the privilege and the duty of rationalizing his own beliefs.

In such an inductive sifting of traditional beliefs, are there any that can be called knowledge? Is there one whose reliability cannot be successfully doubted? Not a single one, except the thinking process itself. I am certain that I am conscious. Even when in my universal doubt I say that nothing is certain, I am at least certain that I doubt. I am, therefore, contradicting my universal skepticism. To doubt is to think; in doubting, consciousness is asserting its existence. Skepticism is self-contradictory. An induction of our ideas reveals at least this one absolutely certain principle: I, as thinking, am. Cogito ergo sum. My own existence is an intuitive truth that accompanies every state of mind. This is the best known portion of Descartes’s philosophy,and perhaps it is in part to the Latin formula of it that it owes its widespread acceptance. It is criticised as trifling, even if it be true; and as reasoning in a circle. Yet it must be remembered that Descartes does not intend the ergo sum (“therefore I am”) to be a conclusion of a syllogism of which Cogito (“I think”) is the minor premise. This formula is not an inference, but an intuition, which is revealed by induction as the certain background of all knowledge.

Three things are to be learned from this fundamental principle, said Descartes: (1) The first is that man has gained a criterion of truth. The characteristic of this principle that makes it reliable and certain is its clearness and distinctness. Clearness and distinctness of ideas is the proof of their truth. All true ideas will therefore have the mathematical and intuitive certainty that the idea of the existence of the self has. (2) The second lesson from this fundamental principle is that the existence of the soul is more certain than that of the body. The soul is more important and independent than the body. This is the subjective point of view of modern times. The modern man views the world as the representation or the creation of his thinking soul. (3) The third lesson from this principle concerns the nature of the soul. How long do you exist? As long as you think. (Sum cogitans.) True existence is rational thinking, and God alone has it. Feelings and passions are obscure ideas.

Deduction—The Implications of Consciousness. For Descartes reality lies within the Self; and the next question before him is how to get out of the Self. Knowledge that is confined to the Self and its states is called, technically, solipsism. Such knowledge amountsto little; indeed, it is not knowledge at all. Certainty of self-existence is the minimum amount of knowledge—merely the starting point of knowledge. Descartes proposes to escape from this solipsism by the use of logic. His method from this point on is ostensibly deductive, although he introduces by the side door other ideas than the idea of Self to make his proof complete. Descartes maintains that any idea will be as true as the consciousness that accompanies it, just as a proposition in geometry partakes of the truth of the axioms from which it is derived. Now my consciousness contains many ideas; some of them seem to be the product of my imagination; some seem to be adventitious; some are innate. It is upon the innate ideas that Descartes depends to get him out of his solipsism, for they are not created by the Self and they have the qualities of truth—a conscious clearness and distinctness. Among these innate ideas is the idea of God as a perfect being.

The Existence of God.[28] As a deduction from consciousness, the idea of God would prove to be a very useful one to Descartes, provided it had reality. For it is evident that consciousness can testify only to the existence of itself and its own states. How do I know the reality of anything else? Am I confined within the circle of my own thinking? Is all that I can say of this or that, “It is real to me”? Are all things only the phantasmagoria of my own brain, testifying only to the existence of myself? Descartes thought that the ideaof God relieved him of this solipsism. If he could demonstrate God’s existence, he would then be able to demonstrate the existence of the material universe. The problem was so highly important to Descartes that he threw it into several different arguments. The complications with which these arguments are filled must be passed over here, and the arguments stated in their simplest forms.

(a) Two are ontological arguments, that is, arguments from the character of the conception of God’s nature.

(1) A Simple Deduction. If I have in my consciousness any idea as clear and distinct as my idea of Myself, it must have existence like Myself. My idea of God has just that clearness and distinctness; and therefore God exists.

(2) The Geometrical Argument, so called by Descartes. Some ideas have properties so immutable that, when we think the ideas, we necessarily think their properties. Such is the idea of a triangle; when I think of a triangle, I must think of it as having its three angles equal to two right angles. Such is also my idea of God; I must think of him as perfect and existing. He would not be God, i. e. a perfect Being, if He did not exist.

The reader will recognize this as a re-statement of the argument by St. Anselm. As such it raised a tempest of controversy in Descartes’ time, and was attacked from all sides.

(b) Two are causal arguments, that is, based on the assumption of the equality of cause and effect. Only one of these arguments will be cited here. This is known as

The Cartesian Argument. I have an idea of a perfectBeing. This idea must have an adequate cause. Therefore God must exist, for only He, and no imperfect being, can be the adequate cause of my idea of perfection.

The ontological arguments given by Descartes are evidently deductions from the certainty of self-consciousness. The question which we immediately raise concerning them is, Are they true? As to the causal arguments, Descartes is breaking away from his original assumption, viz., that self-consciousness is the only certainty, and is introducing another assumption, viz., the certainty of the law of cause. The question, then, that the thoughtful student asks, is, Does Descartes really escape from his solipsism?

The Reality of Matter. It will be seen that Descartes is trying to deduce from the certainty of the idea of self-consciousness the certainty of other ideas, as propositions are deduced in geometry from axioms. The existence of God is an implication of human consciousness. Now Descartes points out that the existence of matter is implied in the existence of God. Descartes is interested in material science, and it is important for him to prove the reality of matter. Here again his scholastic training comes into play. Since God has all the attributes of a perfect being, He must be veracious. If there were no God, but only a deceiving Devil, the external world might be only a fiction, created to deceive us. But God exists, and we can trust that He would not continually deceive men about the existence of nature. An atheist could have no science, but to Descartes,

“God’s in His heaven—

All’s right with the world.”

Of course, man is constantly in error about the character of physical things, but these errors arise from his misinterpretation of them. Nature in some form lies before man, or else God in His truthfulness does not exist. The essence of matter is extension (see below), and whatever my interpretation of it, something extended lies before me to be interpreted.

This is the skeleton upon which Descartes constructs his theory. Even this cursory examination of it shows the obvious attempt to explain “the world of grace” by the method of mathematics, and it is quite consistent with the spirit of the Renaissance. The existence of God and the existence of matter are deduced in turn from the axiom of all thought, the Self; while matter is further described as the extended or the measurable. Thus Descartes has tried to construct a bridge between the scholastic concepts and the science of the Renaissance. The three realities, the Self, God, and matter, which Descartes often speaks of as intuitively certain, have obviously a differing cogency. The reality of consciousness is the ground from which the other two are derived. In asserting its primacy, he is voicing the spirit of the Renaissance even more clearly than did Galileo and Bacon. For Descartes in this has gone back of the objective facts to a single subjective principle; whereas the deductive principles of Galileo were objective. In this respect Descartes is the founder of the subjective method of modern thought, and in identifying the Self as the reason he became the founder of rationalism. In any case he established a background for epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. But in his derivation of the other two realities—God and matter—he shows how persistent was the scholastic current in his thought.Although he declared them to be intuitively known, they evidently are not so in the same sense that self-consciousness is; and he felt obliged to support them by traditional scholastic arguments.

God and the World. Leaving these fundamental principles of Descartes, we now come to a consideration of a few of the details of his philosophy. Descartes’ world is a dualism in which conscious being stands in contrast with space objects. God is related to the world of mind on the one hand and to the world of matter on the other. The order in which Descartes came upon the three substances—the Self, God, and matter—is, however, not the order of their reality. In reality God is the primary substance, for He depends only upon Himself. Matter and the Self are relative or created substances, for they depend upon God. Matter and mind have different modes of appearing: the modes of matter are form, size, position, and motion. The modes of mind are ideas, judgments, and will. Thus mind is so essentially different from matter, as can be seen in their respective modes, that God stands in a different relation to each.

The Relation of God to Matter. Descartes here investigates the realm in which he has the deepest interest; but he makes a concession at the very beginning. He divests things of their qualities and finds the essence of matter to be extension. Qualities are not resident in things, but are the result of our sensations. Sense-perception is knowledge of qualities, and therefore obscure knowledge; while clear or intellectual knowledge is of quantities. But there is one quality common to matter,—extension. Space, extension, and matter are the same. There is no space that is empty, nomatter that is not extended. An extended or material body has, however, in itself no principle of motion. It cannot move itself. It must be moved by an external cause, and the whole universe must be a mechanism whose movements have their first cause in God. Matter in its modes of motion and rest has God as its first cause or unmoved mover; and under matter is included everything extended,—inanimate objects, the lower animals, and the bodies of men. To this world of matter God stands in the relation of an inventor to his machine.

The Relation of God to Minds. The essential nature of minds is thought. Mind is therefore different from matter because it is unextended and free. The two relative substances have nothing in common except that they are related to God. The relation of God to minds is, however, very different from His relation to matter. God is not the unmoved mover of minds, but He is the perfect and infinite mind to which our finite minds turn as their ideal. God thinks and wills perfectly what we think and will imperfectly. He is not the mechanical but the teleological cause of minds, their ens perfectissimum, the goal of all mental aspiration.

The Relation of Mind and Body. In proportion as Descartes clearly defined mind and body, and referred each back to its own principle, the impossibility of connecting the two became apparent. Descartes intended that his theory should, above everything else, clear philosophy of all obscurities. So he divided the world into two relative substances,—mind and matter,—each operating in its own realm, each exclusive of the other. The intention of Descartes is to be a consistent dualist. But there was one point where, with one eye on the church, he had to qualify for ethical considerations hisscientific principle of matter. That is the point where the human body acts upon the soul and the soul acts upon the body.

There was little trouble for Descartes in conceiving the movements of inanimate bodies, plants, and all the lower animals as purely mechanical and automatic, with their first cause in God. From his own investigations he felt obliged to regard many of the human functions as automatic also. But his ethical and theological interests compelled him to think of man as exalted above the rest of creation. Theology has always been in a sense aristocratic, and has drawn a line between man and other things. Man alone has a soul in his body. The soul of man is immortal and free, and must therefore have control over the body; nevertheless the soul of man must be conscious of the impressions that come through the body. Here the science of the Renaissance and the scholasticism of the Middle Ages refuse to be reconciled in the philosophy of Descartes. When it became a question between Descartes’ scientific theory of matter operating itself mechanically and the church doctrine of a spiritual will operating the matter of the human body, the scientific theory had to yield. How does Descartes yield gracefully to the theological requirements and bring together the two unlike worlds of matter and mind in the human personality?

Descartes’ explanation of the relation of human mind and body reminds us of the mythical explanations of Paracelsus. The soul is united to all parts of the body, but its point of contact with the body is the pineal gland, and this contact is made possible through the animal spirits (spiritus animales) or the fire atoms in the blood, a revived Greek conception. The pineal glandis a ganglion in the centre of the brain, which biologists tell us is a defunct eye, but which Descartes conceived to be the seat of the soul. Descartes maintained that the animal spirits, having been distilled by the heart, ascend by mechanical laws from the heart to the brain, and then descend to the nerves and muscles. When they pass through the pineal gland, they come in contact with the soul. The soul exercises influence on the body by slightly moving the gland and diverting the animal spirits. In this way the emotions and sensations are to be explained. The movement of the pineal gland by the animal spirits causes sensations in the soul; the movement of the gland by the soul changes the movement of the animal spirits, and is an exhibition of free action. But this does not add to or subtract from the energy. It merely changes the direction of energy.

The Influence of Descartes. Although the philosophy of Descartes was forbidden in the University of Oxford, was proscribed by the Calvinists in Holland, and his works were placed upon the Index by the Catholics, it created a profound impression on the theology, science, and literature of the seventeenth century. It spread over Europe in a somewhat similar way to the Darwinian evolution theory in modern times. Its success was immense, many standard men rallied to its support, and everything before Descartes was considered to be antiquated. Among philosophers his doctrine had an internal development in a natural way along the lines of the problems which he had left unsolved. A philosophical development, the source of which can be traced directly back to Descartes, went on until Kant published his Critique in 1781. This has later been called the School of Rationalism in Germany, France, and Holland. Themost important members of this school—the Occasionalists, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Wolff—we shall consider in their place. Descartes had an important immediate following in the group, who go by the name of Occasionalists; but his most important successor, who can hardly be called his disciple, was Spinoza.

Descartes’ method had a peculiar fate. His followers misunderstood it, exactly reversed it, and obtained very fruitful results. Descartes himself had hoped to see induction employed in most metaphysical problems. He regarded deduction as of use only in proceeding from one self-evident fact to another. But the following Rationalists used the deductive method entirely and tried to systematize ethics after the manner of Euclid. They deduced their systems from some assumed principle. This tendency was first seen in the Port Royal logic, and was completed by Spinoza.

The Relation of the Occasionalists and Spinoza to Descartes. The development of the doctrines of the Occasionalists and Spinoza from Descartes was an attempt to make clear the conception of substance. Since substance was the most important scholastic category, it is easy to see why Spinoza’s teaching became thoroughly scholastic. Descartes had used the term “substance” in a very loose way to apply to God as infinite, and to minds and bodies as finite. He speaks of God as the only substance, and yet of consciousness and bodies as created substances. Such ambiguity must be overcome, if a philosophy which prided itself on making everything “clear and distinct” was to stand. Descartes had fallen short of justifying his attempt to put metaphysics completely upon a mathematical basis, although this had been his original problem. The obscurity of the spiritualworld still remained, because Descartes had left the concept of the spiritual substance undefined. The world of the spirit was still an unknown country. The spiritual substance had not been made clear and distinct, and there still remained the ontological problem of the relation between mind and matter, and the psychological problem of the relation between the individual soul and its body.

Descartes had, however, defined clearly the concept of the substance of matter—the substance with which the natural scientist works. He had accomplished this, to be sure, by destroying the essential distinctions between material things. A “thing” is essentially a substance in which many qualities inhere, e. g. a piece of sugar having whiteness, sweetness, etc. Material substances were alike in that all were essentially extension. All else besides extension in any particular finite thing was a modification of extension. A lump of sugar was essentially the same as a lump of salt in that both were extension; the saltness, sweetness, etc., were secondary. Now this makes the nature of bodies very clear; and Descartes proposed to reduce the substance of the states of mind to the same clearness, but he did not do it. He was interested in natural science and he developed his rationalism only with reference to matter. Bodies are parts of space or corpuscles, which are mathematically infinitely divisible, but perceptually are not further divisible. As far as he went, Descartes was clear enough.

The Occasionalists and Spinoza represent the second stage in the development of Rationalism. Both tried by making clear the meaning of spiritual substance to define the relationship of God to the material world. Both tried to state the problem in other words, to overcomethe dualism between mind and matter, and to reconstruct the old “world of grace” so that it would be consistent with the new world of science. The Occasionalists, whose chief exponents were Malebranche and Geulincx, we shall dismiss with only a few words, while considerable attention must be given to the teaching of Spinoza. Malebranche tried to do for the mental world what Descartes had done for the world of matter. Since no knowledge is possible except in God, he claimed that the modes of finite minds—our ideas, judgments, imaginations—are alike in essence in being modifications of the universal reason of God. God is so far the “place of minds” as space is the place of bodies. All our ideas participate in God’s reason, and all our volitions are the modifications of the will of the Divine, just as bodies are modifications of extension. What then is the relation, asked Geulincx, between bodily movement and the states of consciousness? Why does my arm move when I wish to move it? By the mediatory power of God. The thought in my mind is the “occasional cause” of the movement of my arm, while God is the true cause of the movement. The movement of the human body is therefore, like the movement of all matter, a continuous miracle caused by an ever watchful Deity, who keeps body and mind in harmony. Spinoza completed his pantheism before Malebranche had prepared the way. He formulated a complete doctrine of substance, conceiving material bodies to be essentially the same in being modes of extension, and mental phenomena to be essentially alike in being modes of thought. But more important was his further teaching that on that account the two series have no relation to each other. That is to say, Spinoza reduced thewhole difficulty to clearness and distinctness by reducing the three substances of Descartes to one. For this reason Spinoza was a more complete Rationalist than Descartes; and he was assisted in this construction of a mathematical Rationalism by two facts: he held himself strictly to the deductive method, and he was free from social and ecclesiastical ties. Spinoza is the truest utterance of his time in its effort to make all things clear; and this is not contradicted by the fact that he had little influence in shaping contemporary thought.

BARUCH DE SPINOZA

(Pollock (Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy, p. xxvi) says that only three of the portraits of Spinoza may reasonably be considered authentic. One is a miniature of the philosopher in the Summer Palace at the Hague; the second is a painting in the Town Museum at the Hague; the third is the one given here, which is an engraving found in copies of the original edition of Spinoza’s Posthumous Works (1677). This portrait seems to be somewhat idealized, but of the three it is the most artistic and lifelike.)

The Historical Place of Spinoza.[29] Spinoza did not get full standing nor was he widely read, until Lessing, one hundred years later, resurrected his teaching and Goethe adopted it. He produced what the Renaissance was striving for, but what the Renaissance could not yet grasp,—the complete logical formulation of its deepest thought. Spinoza produced the only great conception of the world during this period, and it excited the hostility of contemporary Catholics, Protestants, and free-thinkers alike. The product of his thinking was a new systematic scholasticism, which, if the time had been ready for it, would have entirely superseded the mediæval. He succeeded in placing metaphysics upon a scientific and mathematical basis, for his philosophy was not only logical in its content but mathematical in its form. Spinoza’s philosophy is the Renaissance expression of mediæval scholasticism,—the expression of that rationalism that underlies both thethought of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is as if Thomas Aquinas had been transported into the Renaissance, and finding that science would not support and explain dogma, had conformed dogma systematically to the new science. Mathematically science was the new dogma. Spinoza is the last word of mediævalism, although his language is the science of the Renaissance. The utterance of Spinoza sounds strange because, while his thought is mediæval, his expression and form are scientific.

Spinozism had a revival in the eighteenth century.[30] It formed the background of the philosophy of Herder and that of the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. The connection of Lessing and Spinoza was a matter of active controversy at that time. Spinoza was the great influence upon Goethe. In the nineteenth century in England Coleridge reproduced from Spinoza’s Ethics the doctrine of an all-pervading love and reason.

Spinoza strove before everything else for a unitary system, and yet it is interesting to see how much he has been honored from different quarters. Artists, religious devotees, poets, idealists, materialists, and scientists have found in him their truest expression. This is not only because each has found something different, but because his philosophy had actually a many-sided character. His teaching had the advantage of being thoroughly radical. Bad systems of philosophy are impossible, because they are contradictory. While no one knows that any system corresponds to fact, still it is possible that a radical system may have such correspondence.Spinoza’s system is comprehensive, and therefore has struck sympathetic chords in differing thinkers.

The Influences upon Spinoza. 1. His Jewish Training. Spinoza was born a Jew and remained a member of the Synagogue until he was excommunicated at the age of twenty-four. Although he was the original genius who transcends his limitations, his young mind was moulded after the Jewish type. He received the strictly religious training of the Jewish boy in the Jewish academy at Amsterdam, where he learned a trade in connection with his studies. He studied the Talmud, mediæval Jewish philosophy, especially the writings of Maimonides (twelfth century), and the Cabalistic literature. In a Jewish curriculum the classical languages had no place; and mathematics, except arithmetic, was generally overlooked. His early instruction emphasized above everything else the unity and the supremely transcendent, theistic character of God.

However, his separation from the Synagogue at this early age could not but modify his theology. It made him a free Jew. He was no longer under the restraints of Jewish traditions. While he never abandoned his belief in God as a unity, he gave up his belief in the transcendent theistic God of the Hebrew prophets; and he differed from the contemporary Jewish Cabalistic teaching of emanations from God. He seems to have so modified the orthodox Hebrew conception of God that it rather resembles that of the mediæval mystic Christian. Perhaps the influence of Bruno upon his thought may account for its final shape.

2. His Impulse from the New Science—Descartes’ Influence. The “free thinking” for which Spinoza was excommunicated by the Synagogue was obtained firstfrom his instruction in the school of Van der Ende, a physician of daring naturalistic tendencies. This was when he was eighteen. Spinoza had already learned Italian and French; Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hebrew were his native tongues; Van der Ende taught him German and Latin, and introduced him to the science of the time. It was then that he read Descartes, whose philosophy he made the basis of his own. Spinoza was not an inventive genius like Descartes and Leibnitz, but he was more rigidly systematic than either. He was by nature a thinker who was obliged to carry his thought through to its logical conclusions. He had already, at this early age of eighteen, begun to make independent theological excursions. Consequently the mathematical methods of Descartes furnished him a method, and Van der Ende gave him the encouragement for carrying out his independent thinking unrelentingly to its logical end. To state his modified Jewish conception of God in mathematical terms became his task, and his success in thus stating it, with Descartes as a starting point, made him the most complete representative of Rationalism.

3. His Acquaintance with the Collegiants. After his expulsion from his kindred, he lived for seven years with a sect of Baptist Quakers called Collegiants. This was a dissenting religious body without priests or set forms of worship. The members were simple, pious people, who regarded moral living as superior to creed; and Spinoza’s life in their midst must have determined to some degree the lines of his thought. To a man of Spinoza’s simplicity of mind and kindly disposition, the Collegiants would prove to be not only congenial companions in his hours of distress, but they would confirmhis own love for the ethical as an ideal. Spinoza says that the motive of his philosophy is a practical one; that he is seeking that which would “enable me to enjoy continuous and supreme and unending happiness.” He is seeking a theory of life that would aid in allaying the unrest of his time; and he is the only philosopher who has called his metaphysics Ethics. The humaneness of his doctrine, the practical purpose of his writings, and the ethical ideal that informed his whole life had at least their reinforcement, and perhaps their origin, in his contact with the Collegiants during this critical period. His life with this sect influenced him in his refusal to accept the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and to remain content to be the obscure grinder of optical lenses.

The Life and Philosophical Writings of Spinoza[31] (1632–1677). The history of philosophy presents in the person of Spinoza a lovable, interesting, and striking character, as well as the author of one of the profoundest of philosophical systems. His life was one of social isolation and retirement rather than of solitude. The Jews to whom he belonged lived a kind of double exile—they were exiled from their home in Spain, and they lived by themselves apart from the people of Amsterdam. When Spinoza was excommunicated by his brethren, he suffered, therefore, a threefold exile. Moreover, Spinoza was not only excommunicated by his people, but he was hated by the contemporary Catholics, Protestants, and the prevailing Cartesian school. Even the free-thinker, Hume, spoke of him as “the infamous Spinoza,” and another philosopher described his philosophy as “the hideous hypothesis of Spinoza.” But his isolation wasfar from solitude, and he had many eminent and faithful friends and a notable correspondence. Of his short life of forty-five years, he spent twenty-four, or more than half, as a member of the Jewish synagogue. During the next seven years he found refuge among the Collegiants. In the last fourteen years of his life he became widely known, mainly through the Theological-Political Tract, published in 1670, the only one of his writings which he himself published. This brought him the call to the University of Heidelberg, which he declined. His life may be conveniently divided into three periods, as follows:—

1. In Israel (1632–1656). Spinoza was educated at the Jewish academy at Amsterdam, where he studied theology and learned a trade, according to the Jewish custom. This trade was the grinding of optical lenses; that is, he became an optician, and this required some knowledge of mathematics and physics. During these years he got instruction from Van der Ende in science and Latin. He also read Descartes and learned many languages. He wrote a compendium of a Hebrew Grammar, of which the date is doubtful. In 1656 he was excommunicated by the synagogue. The charges brought against him were that: (1) he denied that the Old Testament taught the doctrine of immortality; (2) he affirmed that angels may be only phantoms or ideas in men’s minds; (3) he affirmed that God may have a body.

2. In Retirement (1656–1663). Spinoza spent this time with the Collegiants, and this was his most fruitful intellectual period. He brought his ontology, ethics, politics, and physics into a unified system; and he formulated his theory of determinism and his mathematicalmethod. In 1658–1661 he was writing his so-called Short Treatise, “concerning God, man and his well-being.” This was the first draft of his Ethics. In 1656–1662 he was writing his Improvement of the Understanding. In 1662–1663 he wrote a summary of the principles of Descartes.

3. In the Public Eye (1663–1677). During this period Spinoza lived at or near the Hague, where he had many visitors and a large correspondence.[32] He was an intimate friend of the brothers DeWitte, who made so large a part of the political history of the country. In 1662–1665 he was writing his Ethics, his monumental work. In 1663–1670 he wrote and published the Theological-Political Treatise, the only work published during his life. Although received with horror, it was widely read. It aimed to show that the Bible is history. In 1673 he declined the call to the University of Heidelberg. Just before his death, in 1677, he wrote the fragment of the Political Treatise.

The Method of Spinoza. The method which Spinoza employed in writing his Ethics must not be regarded by the reader as a fantastic dress that he capriciously chose. It had for Spinoza a real and not merely an external significance. On taking up the book, one finds philosophy treated exactly as Euclid treated his geometry. Beginning with a number of definitions and axioms, there are deduced, step by step, propositions with appended scholia and corollaries. To Spinoza this was not pressing philosophy into an artificial and rigid form, but was only the natural mode of philosophical expression. For, in the first place, if the new method of science had proveditself successful in treating physical phenomena, why should not the same method have the same success with problems of the world of the spirit—and in this way bring the two worlds into harmony? By deduction one could then arrive at absolute certainty and unassailable proof of the solutions of metaphysical problems that had long vexed the Middle Ages. With the perfect geometrical method all problems in heaven and earth could be solved. In the second place, the religious conviction of Spinoza that all things come from God required the deductive method to explain them. The order in which we should study phenomena should correspond to the real order in which they stand to God. God is the ground or reason of things, and all are derived from Him as consequents. The deduction of the relation of finite things to God will correspond to the real relation in which God stands to them.

The Fundamental Principle in Spinoza’s Philosophy. The philosophy of Spinoza seems to be Cartesian in every respect except one; and that one difference was like the leaven in the lump—it transformed his philosophy into a radically different one from that of Descartes. Spinoza’s point of departure was the philosophy of Descartes, all his presuppositions are the fundamental principles of Descartes, and the structure of his system seems to be that of Descartes. He has the same respect for the power of the reason to know all truth, the same faith in the omnipotence of the mathematical method, the same general conception of substance, the same idea of the qualitative difference between the worlds of thought and extension, the same belief in the mechanical structure of the world of nature. He made these his own and accentuated them. But headded to these a new and transforming principle: he conceived that the substance, God, is not merely one object of knowledge, but He is the only object of knowledge. He is the only substance, and finite things are only modifications of Him. Finite things are alike at bottom, and to know them truly is to know God.

This new principle transforms all the Cartesian elements in Spinoza’s teaching. It changes the Cartesian theism into a pantheism; it supplants Descartes’ theological orthodoxy with a naturalism and Descartes’ doctrine of freedom with a determinism; and it turns the cultured aloofness of Descartes into a benevolent mysticism. This new principle becomes “the head of the corner.” The oneness and universality of God is the single proposition from which Spinoza deduced his whole philosophy. God is the ultimate ground whose existence must be real, because it is conceived. The intrinsic scholasticism of the philosophy of Spinoza appears in his definition of substance, for it is only a condensed statement of St. Anselm’s argument for the existence of God. Spinoza says, “By substance I mean that which is in itself and conceived through itself alone.” There are, therefore, two kinds of things: the thing that has existence in itself and the things that have existence in something else. God stands alone in the first class; all other things make up the second class. Spinoza’s world is divided into two parts: God and the modes of God. God is self-explanatory and self-existent, while everything else is explained through Him. The only object of knowledge and the single presupposition of existence is God. In a phrase that has become classic, Novalis described Spinoza as a “God-intoxicated man.”

Three Central Problems in Spinoza’s Teaching. We have already noted that Spinoza was the chief exponent of “clearness and distinctness” in this epoch when all mysteries were to be revealed. He sought to articulate a metaphysics that would spread out the plan of the world like a demonstration in geometry. His definition of substance is perfectly intelligible; he accepted the mathematical analysis of the material world into a world of extension, and that of the world of conscious states into one of thought—all this for the sake of simplification and clearness. How simple such a philosophy at the first blush appears—the world is God and his modifications. As a matter of fact it is one of the many examples of the irony of history that the philosophy of Spinoza is one of the most difficult to interpret. Its difficulties do not arise from its having a novel point of view, for on the contrary it is one that appeals strongly to the popular imagination. Its difficulties arise from its very simplicity, for, after all, human life is so rich and varied that a simple formula will hardly express it. From beginning to end Spinoza’s thought has a vagueness for which the beginner in vain strives to find the cause. The cause lies in the seemingly simple principle that God is all that really exists, and yet the world consists of God and other things.

From Spinoza’s effort to simplify matters emerged three central problems: (1) The problem of the all-inclusiveness of God—the problem of pantheism; (2) The problem of the unity of God—the problem of mysticism; (3) The problem of the salvation of man—an ethical problem. We shall now consider these problems in order.

The Pantheism of Spinoza—The All-Inclusiveness of God. That Spinoza’s philosophy is a pantheism appears at the outset in his conception of substance; for the substance is all that really is. Descartes had conceived of three substances,—God as the absolute substance, and mind and matter as the two relative substances. But to Spinoza there can be only one substance; for if there were two or more, no one would be substance, since each would be conceived through the others. If we think at all, we must think of substance as all-inclusive. One might suppose that this preliminary statement would be all that Spinoza could say about life: all that really is, is substance; other things do not exist. But that would be a misinterpretation of Spinoza. He does not mean that finite things are mere nothings. They exist as unrealities; they exist as negations of the substance. If you prick into the finite world, it does not collapse, like a balloon. It still exists as an unreality.

No person ever had the idea of infinity so profoundly as did Spinoza. His idea of infinity is not merely that of the infinity of time and space, which indeed affords a tremendous variety of possible constructions, since space and time are each infinite. To Spinoza the infinity of the substance is much more than these possible combinations of time and space, for corresponding to the time and space series is a series of mental states. Every event has a reason. Every one of the infinity of events in the world of extension is paralleled by some state of thought. But this is by no means the whole story about Spinoza’s conception of infinity. Besides the infinite world of time and space and the infinite world of corresponding thought, the substance toSpinoza possesses an infinity of other attributes, each of which is infinite. Spinoza piles up infinities upon infinities, and thus conceives the substance as an infinity in an overwhelming sense. Only two of the infinite modes appear to our limited human discernment: the infinity of the mode of extension, and the infinity of the mode of thought.

Spinoza begins at once to tell us about the forms in which the all-inclusive God appears to us. First, the substance has two attributes, thought and extension. An attribute is “that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of the substance.” Each attribute in its turn manifests itself in modes: thought appears in the modes of intellect and will, extension in the modes of rest and motion.

Substance = God.

Attributes = Thought Extension.

Modes = Intellect Will Motion Rest.

This bare skeleton of our rich and varied world appears very much the same as that which one might find beneath Descartes’ philosophy. However, Spinoza’s conception of substance transforms it into a framework of a very different kind of philosophy. Since God is the inclusive reality of it all, we have here a pantheism instead of a dualism. The antithesis which in Descartes’ philosophy was between extension and thought, now in Spinoza’s teaching is between God and other things.

What is the place of the attributes and modes in the all-embracing and real substance? As to the attributes, Spinoza maintained that we, as finite beings, do notknow God in His character as substance, but that He always appears to us through His attributes of thought and extension. There are only these two attributes that the human mind can know, although God as an infinite being must possess an infinite number of such attributes. In our human world all things are either thought-things or extension-things. Each of these two attributes is infinite after its kind. Each fully expresses an aspect of God without depreciating the value of the other. Each is fully adequate, just as a table may be both white and hard without either quality infringing upon the other. The attributes are the substance made more concrete. The modes are in turn modifications of the attributes and more concrete expressions of them and of the substance. Each mode is infinite after its kind. Since God exists only in reality, He would not supposably see from His point of view the world laid out in attributes and modes; for these are only human ways of interpreting Him. While the critics agree that the modes are human interpretations of the attributes and therefore unreal, they disagree about the relation of the attributes to God. Some maintain that the attributes are merely human ways of seeing the substance, analogously to the modes—as if we saw God now as thought and now as extension; others maintain that God is nothing other than the sum of the attributes; of extension, thought, and the unknown, infinite, other attributes. The difficulty lays bare the nerve of the problem of pantheism, and probably Spinoza was not clear in his own mind about the relation of the attributes to the substance.

Spinoza speaks more definitely upon this same problem of the relation of the modes to God. Is God thesum-total of all existent things, or is He the principle behind them? Spinoza says that God is both. God is the cause of the world, not cause in the way that the term is commonly used nor in the sense that Descartes used it. God is not to existent things the first cause or the unmoved mover of matter, or the teleological cause of thought, as in Descartes. He is cause in the sense that a triangle is the cause of its own three sides. He is the rational ground (ratio essendi) or the logical reason for the being of things. In this sense God may be regarded as the cause both in the sense that He is the sum-total of existent things or modes (natura naturata), and in the sense that He is the immanent and energizing principle of existent things (natura naturans). These conceptions as well as their phrases Spinoza probably got from Bruno.

The world is, therefore, related to God in that it follows directly from the nature of God; God is related to the world in that He is the logical ground of the world. Is God the creator of the world? No, He is the world. Is God a person? Is He a self-conscious being like ourselves,—an individual? No. The thought-aspect of God includes our thought, but it is the very different infinite thought; the extension-aspect of God includes our body, but it is the very different infinite body. God has soul and body and an infinite number of other aspects. God is—an unchanging, self-dependent being, whose modifications are necessarily determined in their relation to Him and to one another. Spinoza conceived the character of God exactly from the nature of geometry. Just as all geometrical conclusions follow from the nature of space and exist in determined and fixed relations to one another, so everythingfinite follows from the nature of the Infinite, and each finite thing is in a rigid chain of finite things of its own kind—a chain without beginning or end. The necessity of the divine nature appears in all, not as a series of emanations from God, but in a series, each member of which is determined equally by Him.

The Mysticism of Spinoza. From the point of view of man, mysticism in speculative or religious thought has reference to the immediate apprehension of God. Mysticism frequently accompanies pantheism, and from the point of view of God refers to the oneness of His all-inclusive nature. Spinoza’s pantheism is also a mysticism which involves the immediate apprehension of the divine by the human; it involves the oneness of God and man. More often than otherwise mysticism is animated by a religious motive, and Spinoza’s philosophy is profoundly religious. We have already seen similar mysticism in the Orphic-Pythagorean sect which formed so great a peril to Greek culture in the sixth century B. C., in the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists at the beginning of this era, in many of the churchmen of the Middle Ages, especially Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart. Bruno and many of the Humanists were mystics, and if we should wish to go outside our field, we should find mysticism to be the prevailing attitude of mind of the great Oriental peoples. Mysticism frequently is accompanied by belief in occult spiritual appearances, but that is not necessarily the case; nor was it the case with Spinoza. Spinoza’s mysticism was purely intellectual. Although a religious philosophy with an immediate ethical bearing upon conduct, it was a scientific relationalism that could not tolerate the miraculous and the abnormal psychologicalphenomena (such as clairvoyance, hallucinations, etc.). Spinoza is, on the contrary, distinguished as a mystic because he interpreted the universe in entirely non-human terms. His great service to mysticism lies in divesting the reality of life of every human attribution and laying bare a mathematical skeleton. The desire of the period to find a greater unity in life was responded to by him in a mathematical mysticism. To him the universe is not only divided into parts, not only is there no opposition between God and the world, but life is so completely a rational thing that no exceptional phenomena can occur. He believed that any description of God or of nature in anthropomorphic terms disunites life. Spinoza dehumanized the universe, conceiving matter to consist of elements, and conceiving spirit to consist of simple ideas. He resolved the personality of man into parts for the sake of the unity of the universe, and he obtained scientific clearness at the expense of humanity. Thus, instead of being able to say with Descartes, “I think and therefore I am,” Spinoza could say, and wished only to say, “God thinks” (Deus cogitat).

Like the usual speculative mystic, Spinoza described his God in the terms of formal deductive logic. God is the most real being, ens realissimum. What is the most real being to a mystic? Would reality contain any finite quality such as the world around us contains? Can you say that God has this particular faculty, or is endowed with that concrete attribute? Does God enjoy, love, hate; does He create and destroy? But how can God be the real unity of the world unless He contains in Himself everything in the finite world? We approach here the threshold of the problem of the concrete universal,which has engaged the attention of so much of modern philosophy. A concrete universal is all-inclusive of finite existence, but at the same time is a self-consistent unity. In contrast with the concrete universal is the abstract universal, which is a unity, but outside of which all finite existence falls. While it was undoubtedly the concrete universal that Spinoza sought, his method could lead to nothing more concrete than the abstract universals of Plato and the Schoolmen. The world of finite things is included by Spinoza’s God in the same way that blocks are included by a string which has been tied around them.

Spinoza’s God is the most abstract entity which it is possible to conceive. All finite things fall outside Him. No quality can be predicated of Him, for to define Him is to limit Him. After the manner of the “negative theology” (see vol. i, p. 283), Spinoza refused to ascribe any quality to God. He does not feel, think, or will as we do, nor can extension be ascribed to Him in the sense of finite spaces. We can say only that He is not this and not this. Spinoza’s conception of God is reached by dropping off all determinate qualities, until the most general and most abstract term is gained. The barrenness of this logical conception, its absolute emptiness and abstractness, makes all description of it impossible. God is a bloodless entity, an absolute logical necessity and the most abstract universal. Outside of Him falls all that we call life. If this is God’s character, is He everything or nothing? If the process of abstraction rises so far above every limitation to an ens realissimum et generalissimum,—to the most real and most general entity,—if all content falls away from God, what does such an empty form amount to? The paradox inSpinoza’s philosophy appears here as in the case of all mysticism—for the mystic revels in paradoxes. This empty generality is all that really is. God is everything, and Spinoza points out empirical proof of this by insisting that the transitory life of man has its only meaning in such a substance. God is not this particular thing nor again that finite determination, but He is all these. He is the timeless reality of the temporal world, the infinity of finite things, the necessity of contingent nature. When therefore Spinoza speaks of God as having an intellectual love for Himself, and when he says that the attributes of thought and extension constitute the essence of the substance, he is not giving finite characteristics to God. He is struggling with language to express the inherent paradox of his philosophy.

Moreover, the delineation of the finite world with God as a background, as it appears from the point of view of a human being, is an inadequate presentation of Spinoza’s profound conception of God. For the substance is not merely a neutral point nor the central point of the universe. The substance is all. All things have neither their explanation nor their existence in themselves. God alone has an existence that explains itself, and He is the reality and essence of all finite things. God is immanent in the world. Just as the sides of a triangle get their meaning from the triangle itself, so the significance of the attributes and modes of the substance lies in the substance.

The unity of Spinoza’s God is further suggested by the relation of the attributes of thought and extension, however separate they must appear in their quality and causal dependence. Both are aspects of the same substance, in the one case in the form of extension, andin the other in the form of thought. In the all-inclusive nature of God, presumably each moment has an infinite number of correlative moments corresponding to the infinite number of the attributes of God. Since to human beings only two of these worlds lie in sight, only two corresponding modes appear, but always two. This correspondence of the physical and psychical throughout nature is called in later times panpsychism; in the relation of the body and mind of a human being it is called psycho-physical parallelism. This correspondence helped Spinoza to solve the apparent dualism of the two worlds. While ideas are determined only by ideas, and motions by motions, both series point below to the divine substance which is the significance of both. They are like the top and bottom sides of a piece of paper, neither side constituting the piece of paper, but both being necessary to it. The substance is immanent in thought as well as in extension. Both thought and extension are aspects of God. The relation of thought and extension through the Deity discloses the monistic character of Spinoza’s philosophy and seems to prove that he cannot be a materialist, although some critics have said that he is. The same reality is seen, now as consciousness and now as extension.

Spinoza’s Doctrine of Salvation. Spinoza divided his Ethics into five parts. The first is a treatment of the nature of God; the second, of the nature and origin of the mind; the third, of the emotions; the fourth, of human bondage; the fifth, of human freedom. This most important writing of Spinoza, the only treatise on metaphysics which has been called Ethics, is a practical philosophy of life and redemption. The divisions of it, as they appear above, show that the philosophy of lifeis looked at from two points of view: with reference to the nature of God, and with reference to the nature of man. We have above discussed the first point,—Spinoza’s conception of God, whom he regards as pantheistic and mystic. But Spinoza’s conception of the nature of the human being in relation to such a God is the other pole of this subject. The problem of life from the human point of view involves primarily the question of human freedom. Human freedom and human bondage are conditions that depend upon the human as well as the divine nature. By Spinoza’s eliminating the human element from the nature of God, man himself has been reduced by Spinoza to an insignificant detail in a machine-like universe. Yet for man in his littleness Spinoza hews out a way to God in His greatness by his mystic reconstruction of the universe. Existence in Spinoza’s pantheistic mysticism is, after all, a sphere of wonderful grandeur for man,—more wonderful and of wider utility than the existence which man is ordinarily supposed to possess. Since God is the reality of everything, man is deified; even the loss of man’s essential humanity is the apotheosis of man.

Human salvation and freedom consist in being like God; bondage consists in being unlike Him, in mistaking the unreality of life for His reality. We are endowed with the ability of forming an adequate idea of God by means of our reason, but we are also endowed with the faculties of sensation, emotion, and imagination. The latter faculties make man a passive creature, for they bring him into dependence upon the things that act upon him and into bondage to them. We are passive when our activities are limited by such limited objects. While a passion seems to be the most active and turbulentof our faculties, if we look at it more closely, we find that instead of being active ourselves during a passion, we are being acted upon by an external object. Only as we are purely rational,—only through the reason,—are we purely active. It is then that we are like God, free like Him, and then do we rise from insignificance to greatness. Then we transcend our false ideas of freedom and become necessary beings, for in God freedom is necessity.

To be free from the passions and the finite things of the world we must understand their nature; for to understand a thing is to be delivered from it. An illusion is not an illusion when we know it to be such. To see that all the passions, sensations, imaginations, and all the other modes of thought are human limitations, is to dwell within the reason. Spinoza’s freedom is not, as will be seen, freedom in the ordinary psychological meaning of the term, but is the metaphysical freedom of being identical with the deity and determined by no finite thing. Freedom is rational knowledge. Nevertheless, freedom is ethical also, for it consists in overcoming the passions by reason. Freedom, therefore, has two sides: an escape from the emotions and an escape from obscure ideas—the goal in both cases being the life of reason. To attain freedom is to see the world as God sees it, which is the same as the reason sees it. This is to see each finite thing as eternal. Any concrete thing may be regarded by the human being as a finite and isolated thing out of all relation to other objects; or the same thing may be regarded as a detail of infinity. Looked at by itself, a thing is seen partially and falsely, for no finite thing has its explanation in itself. It is, however, seen truly when it is regarded, touse Spinoza’s own celebrated phrase, “under a certain form of eternity” (sub specie aeternitatis). This conception of eternity is one of the most admirable in Spinoza’s teaching. When man rises through the reason to the consciousness of the eternity of the truth of a thing, the thing itself is transformed, and the man himself has gained salvation. Any circle that I may draw is imperfect, every leaf upon the forest trees is defective, all moral activities are wanting, if regarded in their time-limitations. But below all the imperfections of the universe is its absolute mathematical perfectness. There is nothing so abortive and evil that it does not have its aspect of eternity. Side by side with Spinoza’s conception of infinity is his conception of eternity. Infinity is everlastingness, eternity is quality of being. Eternity has no reference to time. One minute may be eternal. The infinity of the substance is one aspect; the eternity of the substance is another. That eternity gained through the reason is salvation and immortality. God is reason, and by the act of the reason do we become one with Him. Our knowledge is, therefore, the measure of our morality. Knowledge and morality are the same; and whatever increases our understanding is morally good; whatever diminishes our understanding is morally wrong.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of the philosopher, there is nothing in the world that is morally good or bad,—nothing which merits his hatred, love, fear, contempt, or pity,—since all that occurs is necessary. The philosopher’s knowledge of the determinism of the world lifts him above the usually conceived world of finite things to this mystic world, reconstructed by his intellectual love of nature or God. Love for God willgive to everything its proper value. It is the highest form of human activity. Love for God is an absolutely disinterested feeling, and is not therefore like human love, which is the passing from a less state to a greater. Love for God is peace, resignation, and contentment, for it is oneness with God. In fact, the love of man for God is the love of God for man; it is the love of God for Himself, since man cannot love God without becoming God. Thus man intellectually recognizes his oneness with God, and rejoices. Immortality is absorption in the eternal and necessary substance of the world. It is a common misconception that immortality is duration after death; immortality consists in looking at things under the aspect of eternity. The finite man perishes, but man’s real self, which is God, survives.

Summary of Spinoza’s Teaching. The rationalism of Spinoza is the final word of scholastic realism. It is a mathematical scholasticism in which the attempt is to make clear by the method of deduction all metaphysical problems. That the philosophical teaching of Spinoza is inspiring and ennobling, no one will gainsay. That his philosophy is not clear, is also true. In the beginning of his discussion, spirit is subordinated to nature; at the end, nature is subordinated to spirit. The result is that under the hands of Spinoza God has become a pure abstraction and without content, the world is an illusion, dualism is superseded by a monistic parallelism, individual activity gives way and becomes a pantheistic determinism. Yet amid all this a reconstructed world arises in which man is recompensed for all his losses by his participation in infinity and eternity.

Leibnitz[33] as the Finisher of the Renaissance and the Forerunner of the Enlightenment. Leibnitz is the last of the remarkable group of Rationalists of the Renaissance, who so fully represent the spirit of its Natural Science epoch. But Leibnitz also carries us into the next period of modern philosophy—the Enlightenment. He is the transition philosopher. If the reader will examine the dates of his life, he will observe that Leibnitz lived until twenty-five years after the Enlightenment was ushered in by Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding (1690). But as Leibnitz had already formed his own philosophy by the year 1686, even so versatile a mind as his could not then renounce the Rationalistic point of view for a new one. Some of his writings, such as his Correspondence with Clark and Bayle, his Theodicy, and his New Essays, show that he participated in the new movement of the next period. Yet the majority of his philosophical writings show him to be a Rationalist. Although he may be called the “father of the Enlightenment,” the body of his thought belongs to the Renaissance. His main motive was that which animated all Rationalists—of stating theology in scientific terms. The immediate occasion for his doing this was the political necessity of peace among the religious bodies of Germany.

The effort of Leibnitz to restore the individual to his central place in the universe was a secondary motive. It nevertheless makes him the forerunner of the Enlightenment. Of the Rationalists, Leibnitz speaks forthe future, just as Spinoza for the past. Leibnitz unites the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, just as Spinoza joins the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Spinoza is the Rationalist who utters the final word of scholastic realism, while Leibnitz presages the coming individualism. Spinoza’s philosophy is science buried in traditionalism; Leibnitz’s is science breaking through traditionalism. Spinoza harks back to universals and particulars, substance and forms; Leibnitz points forward to vortex rings, energy, and dynamics. From Leibnitz’s original purpose to rationalize theology, and to succeed where Descartes and Spinoza had failed, there emerges a new motive. He no longer lays the emphasis entirely upon the universal, but he shifts it in part to the particular. The pantheism of Spinoza had systematized the individual out of its reality. Leibnitz’s conception of the individual as dynamic and his conception of the importance of the infinitesimal redeem the individual and bring Leibnitz into more modern times. To classify Leibnitz as a Rationalist is, therefore, not to describe him fully.

The Life and Writings of Leibnitz (1646–1716). Compared with Descartes and Spinoza, Leibnitz had a life that was long in time and rich in experience. Descartes died at 54 and Spinoza at 45, while Leibnitz lived to be 70. In striking contrast with Spinoza’s career, there was no time in the life of Leibnitz after his graduation from the university that he was not in public service. He held the offices that would naturally go to the hanger-on of princes—some of them grandiose ones. While theoretically the interests of the three Rationalists were the same, Leibnitz differed from his predecessors in that his study of philosophical problems alwaysgrew out of some practical problem or political occasion. Leibnitz was not an academic thinker, and his “writings were called forth to estimate some recent book, to outline the system for the use of a friend, to meet some special difficulty, or to answer some definite criticism.” Philosophy was only one of the interests of Leibnitz. He was jurist, historian, diplomat, mathematician, physical scientist, theologian, and philologist. Leibnitz was as much at home with the theories of Plato and Aristotle of ancient time, with those of St. Thomas and Duns Scotus of mediæval time, as with the science of Descartes and Galileo. He was precocious, had a prodigious memory and a reactive mind. In the wealth of his information and the productiveness of his genius, he stands with Aristotle as unequaled. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz belonged to the inner circle of scholars of the time, but Leibnitz was also in personal touch with political affairs and in intimate acquaintance with many of the important rulers. He was in the service of the Elector of Mainz and later of George I of England when George was only Elector of Hanover. He was distinguished by Peter the Great of Russia and Ernst August, Emperor of Germany. He corresponded with Eugene of Savoy and he was ambassador to Louis XIV of France. Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, who married the King of Prussia, was especially interested in him, and he wrote for her his Theodicy. The three great Rationalists came from different strata of society. Descartes was a nobleman’s son, and he voluntarily relinquished the life that Leibnitz was ambitious to enjoy. Spinoza came from the lower class. Leibnitz was the son of a college professor and belonged to the upper middle class. The ambitionsof Leibnitz reached for large ends, as often happens among educated people in the middle walks of life. Among other things, he tried to reconcile the Catholics and Protestants, and he tried to universalize language by getting universal characters for all languages.

The literary production of Leibnitz was enormous, consisting of some lengthy works, but mainly of correspondence (at one time with a thousand persons) and of dissertations to learned journals and societies. No one book contains his philosophy—the Monadology coming the nearest to doing so. His most considerable work is his Theodicy. He himself published in book form only two works: his university dissertation on Individuation and the Theodicy.[34]

In spite of his many successes, the life of Leibnitz was not happy. From death or other causes his noble patrons changed, until he was left without a patron. His life went from bad to worse, and his death occurred almost unnoticed.

The seventy years of Leibnitz’s life fall into four periods. That he passed through three of these periods by the time he was thirty shows the voracity and versatility of his mental powers during their formative and acquisitive state. It also reveals the unusual length of his productive period,—from his thirtieth to his seventieth year. Ten years after his productive period began, when he was forty, he had completed his philosophicaltheory, so that the last thirty years of his life were free for its elaboration and elucidation, and in part for his departure from it. The details of Leibnitz’s life are as follows:—

1. Leipsic and University Life (1646–1666).

Leibnitz was the son of a professor of the University of Leipsic. He entered the University at the age of fifteen; received his bachelor’s degree at seventeen, and his doctor’s degree at Altdorf at the age of twenty. He was offered a professorship on account of his thesis, but he declined. He published as his bachelor’s thesis, The Principle of Individuation (1663).

2. Mainz and Diplomacy (1666–1672).

Meeting Baron John of Boineburg, who became his patron, Leibnitz went with him to Mainz, and entered the service of the Elector of Mainz. At this time Leibnitz wrote many pamphlets at the Elector’s request, on the religious and political questions of the day. He wrote A New Physical Hypothesis in 1671.

3. Paris and Science (1672–1676).

Leibnitz began this period with a diplomatic mission to the court of Louis XIV in 1672; but during the year both Boineburg and the Elector died, and Mainz was no longer his home nor diplomacy his interest.

He remained in Paris (and London) three years longer, and spent the time in acquiring the “new science.” In Paris he met Arnauld the Cartesian, Tschirnhausen the German mathematician, logician, and most discriminating critic of Spinoza, and he studied with Huyghens the Dutch mathematician. In London he met Boyle, the chemist, Oldenburg, secretary of the Academy of Science, Collins, the mathematician, and he corresponded with Newton. On his return to Hanoverhe called on Spinoza, who showed him the manuscript of the Ethics.

4. Hanover and Philosophy (1676–1716).

Leibnitz became court councilor and librarian to the Duke of Hanover (Brunswick-Lüneburg). He was involved in a multitude of administrative, historical, and political tasks, and he carried on an enormous correspondence. Among other things he wrote the history of the reigning family, which necessitated his going to Rome and Vienna. In 1684 he published his discovery of the differential calculus, over which arose the celebrated controversy as to whether he or Newton made the prior discovery. In 1686, in his fortieth year, he constructed his philosophical system. However, he showed his affiliation to the coming age by introducing into his system in 1697 the term “monad.” Nearly all his important works were produced in this period. In 1700 he founded the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He was instrumental in the founding of an academy at St. Petersburg, and he planned academies at Dresden and Vienna.

The Three Influences upon the Thought of Leibnitz.