The bad deed, furthermore, is not the most considerable from the point of view of guilt; as merit or demerit the intention is worth as much as the deed and he is criminal who has had the intention to be so (which is clearly according to the Gospel).

HUGO DE SAINT-VICTOR; RICHARD.—Abelard possessed perhaps the broadest and greatest mind of the whole of the Middle Ages. After these famous names must be mentioned Hugo de Saint-Victor, a somewhat obscure mystic of German origin; and the not less mystical Richard, who, thoroughly persuaded that God is not attained by reason but by feeling, taught exaltation to Him by detachment from self and by six degrees: renunciation, elevation, impulsion, precipitation, ecstasy, and absorption.



CHAPTER II

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Influence of Aristotle His Adoption by the Church. Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

ARISTOTLE AND THE CHURCH.—From the thirteenth century, Aristotle, completely known and translated into Latin, was adopted by the Church and became in some sort its lay vicar. He was regarded, and I think rightly, as of all the Greek thinkers the least dangerous to her and as the one to whom could be left all the scientific instruction whilst she reserved to herself all the religious teaching. Aristotle, in fact, "defended her from Plato," in whom were always found some germs of adoration of this world, or some tendencies in this direction, in whom was also found a certain polytheism much disguised, or rather much purified, but actual and dangerous; therefore, from the moment when it became necessary to select, Aristotle was tolerated and finally invested with office.

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.—As Aristotelian theologians must be cited William of Auvergne, Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus; but the sovereign name of this period of the history of philosophy is St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote several small works but, surpassing them all, the Summa (encyclopaedia) which bears his name. In general philosophy St. Thomas Aquinas is an Aristotelian, bending but not distorting the ideas of Aristotle to Christian conceptions. Like Aristotle, he demonstrated God by the existence of motion and the necessity of a first motive power; he further demonstrated it by the contingent, relative, and imperfect character of all here below: "There is in things more or less goodness, more or less truth." But we only affirm the more or less of a thing by comparing it with something absolute and as it approaches more or less to this absolute; there is therefore an absolute being, namely God—and this argument appeared to him better than that of St. Anselm, which he refuted.

HIS CONCEPTION OF NATURE.—He showed the whole of nature as a great hierarchy, proceeding from the least perfect and the most shapeless to the most complete and determinate; from another aspect, as separated into two great kingdoms, that of necessity (mineral, vegetable, animal), and that of grace (humanity). He displayed it willed by God, projected by God, created by God; governed by God according to antecedent and consequent wills, that is, by general wills (God desires man to be saved) and by particular wills (God wishes the sinner to be punished), and the union of the general wills is the creation, and the result of all the particular wills is Providence. Nature and man with it are the work not only of the power but of the goodness of God, and it is by love that He created us and we must render Him love for love, which is involuntarily done by Nature herself in her obedience to His laws, and which we must do voluntarily by obedience to His commandments.

THE SOUL.—Our soul is immaterial and more complete than that of animals, for St. Thomas does not formally deny that animals have souls; the instinct of animals is the sensitive soul according to Aristotle, which is capable of four faculties: sensibility, imagination, memory, and estimation, that is elementary intelligence: "The bird picks up straw, not because it gratifies her feelings [not by a movement of sensibility], but because it serves to make her nest. It is therefore necessary that an animal should perceive those intuitions which do not come within the scope of the senses. It is by opinion or estimation that it perceives these intuitions, these distant ends." We, mankind, possess a soul which is sensibility, imagination, memory, and reason. Reason is the faculty not only of having ideas, but of establishing connections and chains of connection between the ideas and of conceiving general ideas. Reason pauses before reaching God because the idea of God precisely is the only one which cannot be brought to the mind by the interrelation of ideas, for God surpasses all ideas; the idea of God is given by faith, which can be subsequently helped by reason, for the latter can work to make faith perceptible to reason.

Our soul is full of passions, divisible into two great categories, the passions of desire and those of anger. The passions of desire are rapid or violent movements towards some object which seems to us a good; the passions of anger are movements of revolt against something which opposes our movement towards a good. The common root of all the passions is love, for it is obvious that from it are derived the passions of desire; and as for the passions of wrath they would not exist if we had no love of anything, in which case our desire not coming into collision would not turn into revolt against the obstacle. We are free to do good or evil, to master our evil passions and to follow those of which reason approves. Here reappears the objection of the knowledge God must have beforehand of our actions: if God foresees our actions we are not free; if free, we act contrary to his previsions, then He is not all-powerful. St. Thomas makes answer thus: "There is not prevision, there is vision, because we are in time whereas God is in eternity. He sees at one glance and instantaneously all the past, present, and future. Therefore, He does not foresee but see, and this vision does not hinder human freedom any more than being seen acting prevents one from acting. Because God knows our deeds after they are done, no one can plead that that prevents our full liberty to do them; if He knew them before it is the same as knowing them after, because for Him past, present, and future are all the same moment." This appears subtle but is not, for it only amounts to the statement that in speaking of God time must not be mentioned, for God is as much outside time as outside space.

THE MORAL SYSTEM OF ST. THOMAS.—The very detailed and circumstantial moral system of St. Thomas may thus be summarized: there is in conscience, first, an intellectual act which is the distinction between good and evil; secondly, an act of will which leads us to the good. This power for good urges the practice of virtue. There are human virtues, well known to the ancient philosophers, temperance, courage, wisdom, justice, which lead to happiness on earth; there are divine virtues, inspired in man by God, which are faith, hope, and charity, and they lead to eternal happiness. We practise the virtues, when we are well-disposed, because we are free; but our liberty and our will do not suffice; it is necessary for God to help us, and that is "grace."

FAITH AND REASON.—On the question of the relation of reason to faith, St. Thomas Aquinas recognizes, or rather proclaims, that reason will never demonstrate faith, that the revealed truths, the Trinity, original sin, grace, etc., are above reason and infinitely exceed it. How, then, can one believe? By will, aided by the grace of God. Then henceforth must no appeal be made to reason? Yes, indeed! Reason serves to refute the errors of the adversaries of the faith, and by this refutation to confirm itself in belief. The famous Credo ut intelligam—I believe in order to understand—is therefore true. Comprehension is only possible on condition of belief; but subsequently comprehension helps to believe, if not more, at least with a greater precision and in a more abundant light. St. Thomas Aquinas here is in exactly the position which Pascal seems to have taken up: Believe and you will understand; understand and you will believe more exactly. Therefore an act of will: "I wish to believe"—a grace of God fortifying this will: faith exists—studies and reasoning: faith is the clearer.

ST. BONAVENTURA; RAYMOND LULLE.—Beside these men of the highest brain-power there are found in the thirteenth century mystics, that is, poets and eccentrics, both by the way most interesting. It was St. Bonaventura who, being persuaded, almost like an Alexandrine, that one rises to God by synthetic feeling and not by series of arguments, and that one journeys towards Him by successive states of the soul each more pure and more passionate—wrote The Journey of the Soul to God, which is, so to speak, a manual of mysticism. Learned as he was, whilst pursuing his own purpose, he digressed in agreeable and instructive fashion into the realms of real knowledge.

Widely different from him, Raymond Lulle or de Lulle, an unbridled schoolman, in his Ars magna invented a reasoning machine, analogous to an arithmetical machine, in which ideas were automatically deduced from one another as the figures inscribe themselves on a counter. As often happens, the excess of the method was its own criticism, and an enemy of scholasticism could not have more ingeniously demonstrated that it was a kind of mechanism. Raymond de Lulle was at once a learned man and a well-informed and most enquiring naturalist for whom Arabian science held no secrets. With that he was poet, troubadour, orator, as well as very eccentric and attractive. He was beloved and persecuted in his lifetime, and long after his death still found enthusiastic disciples.

BACON.—Contemporaneously lived the man whom it is generally the custom to regard as the distant precursor of experimental science, Roger Bacon (who must not be confused with Francis Bacon, another learned man who lived much nearer to our own time). Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar, occupied himself almost exclusively with physical and natural science. He passed the greater portion of his life in prison by reason of alleged sorcery and, more especially, perhaps, because he had denounced the evil lives of his brethren. He had at least a presentiment of almost all modern inventions: gunpowder, magnifying glass, telescope, air-pump; he was distinctly an inventor in optics. In philosophy, properly speaking, he denounced what was hollow and empty in scholasticism, detesting that preference should be given to "the straw of words rather than to the grain of fact," and proclaiming that reasoning "is good to conclude but not to establish." Without discovering the law of progress, as has too often been alleged, he arrived at the conclusion that antiquity being the youth of the world, the moderns are the adults, which only meant that it would be at our school that the ancients would learn were they to return to earth and that we ought not to believe blindly in the ancients; and this was an insurrection against the principle of authority and against the idolatry of Aristotle. He preached the direct study of nature, observation, and experiment with the subsequent application of deduction, and especially of mathematical deduction, to experiment and observation. With all that, he believed in astrology; for those who are in advance of their time none the less belong to it: but he was a very great man.



CHAPTER III

THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the Coming Era. Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery.

DECADENCE OF SCHOLASTICISM.—The fourteenth century dated the decadence of scholasticism, but saw little new. "Realism" was generally abandoned, and the field was swept by "nominalism," which was the theory that ideas only have existence in the brains which conceive them. Thus Durand de Saint-Pourcain remains famous for having said, "To exist is to be individually," which at that epoch was very audacious. William of Ockham repeated the phrase with emphasis; there is nothing real except the individual. That went so far as to cast suspicion on all metaphysics, and somewhat on theology. In fact, although a devout believer, Ockham rejected theology, implored the Church not to be learned, because her science proved nothing, and to content herself with faith: "Science belongs to God, faith to men." But, or rather in addition, if the ministers of God were no longer imposing because of their ambitious science, it was necessary for them to regain their sway over souls by other and better means. It was incumbent on them to be saintly, to revert to the purity, the simplicity, and the divine childishness of the primitive Church; and here he was virtually a forerunner of the Reformation.

Ockham was indeed one of the auxiliaries of Philip the Fair in his struggle with the Holy See, suffered excommunication, and sought refuge with the Duke of Bavaria, the foe of the Pope.

BURIDAN: THE LIBERTY OF INDIFFERENCE.—Realists and nominalists continued their mutual strife, sometimes physically even, until the middle of the fifteenth century. But nominalism always gained ground, having among other celebrated champions, Peter d'Ailly and Buridan; the one succeeded in becoming Chancellor of the University of Paris, the other in becoming its Rector. Buridan has remained famous through his death and his donkey, both alike legendary. According to a ballad by Villon, Buridan having been too tenderly loved by Joan of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, was by his order "thrown in a sack into the Seine." By comparison of dates, the fact seems impossible. According to tradition, either in order to show the freedom of indifference, or that animals are mere machines, Buridan declared that an ass with two baskets full of corn placed one on each side of him and at equal distance from him, would never decide from which he should feed and would die of starvation. Nothing of the kind is to be found in his works, but he may have said so in a lecture and his pupils remembering it have handed it down as a proverb.

PETER D'AILLY; GERSON.—Peter d'Ailly, a highly important ecclesiastic, head of the College of Navarre, chevalier of the University of Paris, Cardinal, a leader in the discussions at the Councils at Pisa and Constance, a drastic reformer of the morals and customs of the Church, did not evince any marked originality as a philosopher, but maintained the already known doctrines of nominalism with extraordinary dialectical skill.

Among his pupils he numbered Gerson, who was also Chancellor of the University of Paris, another highly zealous and energetic reformer, a more avowed enemy of scholasticism and mysticism, of exaggerated austerity and astrology, eminently modern in the best sense of the word, whose political and religious enemies are his title of respect. He was the author of many small books devoted to the popularization of science, religion, and morality. To him was long attributed the Imitation of Jesus Christ, which on the whole bears no resemblance to his writings, but which he might very well have written in old age in his retreat in the peaceful silence of the Celestines of Lyons.

THE KABBALA.—From the beginning of the fifteenth century the Renaissance was heralded by a revival of Platonism, both in philosophy and literature. But it was a Platonism strangely understood, a quaint medley of Pythagoreanism and Alexandrinism, the source of which is not very clear (the period not having been much studied). Then arose an incredible infatuation for the Kabbala—a doctrine which was for a long while the secret of the Jews, brooded over by them so to speak during the darkness of the Middle Ages, in which are to be found traces of the most sublime speculations and of the basest superstitions of antiquity. It contained a kind of pantheistic theology closely analogous to those of Porphyry and Iamblichus, as well as processes of magic mingled with astrology. The Kabbalists believe that the sage, who by his astrological knowledge is brought into relation with the celestial powers, can affect nature, alter the course of phenomena, and work miracles. The Kabbala forms part of the history of the marvelous and of occult science rather than of the history of philosophy. Nevertheless men of real learning were initiated and were infatuated, among them the marvelous Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, not less remarkable as humanist and Hebraist, who would have run grave risk at the hands of the Inquisition at Cologne if he had not been saved by Leo X. Cardan, a mathematician and physician, was one of the learned men of the day most impregnated with Kabbalism. He believed in a kind of infallibility of the inner sense, of the intuition, and regarded as futile all sciences that proceeded by slow rational operations. He believed himself a mage and magician. From vanity he spoke of himself in the highest terms and from cynicism in the lowest. Doubt has been cast on his sincerity and also on his sanity.

MAGIC.—There were also Paracelsus and Agrippa. Paracelsus, like Cardan, believed in an intense light infinitely superior to bestial reasoning and calls to mind certain philosophy of intuition of the present day. He too believed himself a magician and physician, and effected cures by the application of astrology to therapeutics. Agrippa did the same with yet stranger phantasies, passing from absolute scepticism through mysticism to magi and demonology; in his own time and in subsequent centuries enjoying the reputation of a devil incarnate as man.



CHAPTER IV

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

It Is Fairly Accurate to Consider that from the Point of View of Philosophy, the Middle Ages Lasted until Descartes.

Free-thinkers More or Less Disguised.

Partisans of Reason Apart from Faith, of Observation, and Of Experiment.

THE FREEDOM OF PHILOSOPHY: POMPONAZZO.—The freedom and even the audacity of philosophy rapidly increased. Learned and convinced Aristotelians were bent, either from sheer love of truth or from a more secret purpose, on demonstrating to what extent Aristotle, accurately read, was opposed to the teaching of the Church. For instance, Pomponazzo revealed that nothing could be drawn from Aristotle in favour of the immortality of the soul, in which he himself believed fervently, but in which Aristotle did not believe, hence it was necessary to choose between the Church and Aristotle; that without the immortality of the soul there could be no rewards beyond the grave, which was entirely his own opinion, but whoever should desire to offer excuses for Aristotle could say it was precisely the existence of punishments and rewards which deprived virtue of existence, which did away with virtue, since the good that is done for the sake of reward or from fear of punishment is no longer good; that, still according to Aristotle, there could never be miracles; that he, Pomponazzo, believed in all the miracles recorded in the Scriptures; but that Aristotle would not have believed in them, and could not have believed in them, a fact which demanded consideration, not assuredly in order to reject belief in miracles, but in order not to bestow on Aristotle that confidence which for so long had been too readily placed in him.

In the same way, he took up again the eternal question of the prescience of God and of human liberty, and showed that no matter what had been said it was necessary to choose: either we are free and God is not omnipotent, or God is omnipotent and we are not free. To regard as true this latter hypothesis, towards which the philosopher evidently leans, would cause God to be the author of evil and of sin. It would not be impossible for God to be the author of evil as an essential condition of good, for if evil were not to exist then there could not be good; nor would it be impossible that He should be the author, not of sin, but of the possibility of sin in order that virtue might be possible, there being no virtue where it is impossible to commit sin; but therein lies a mystery which faith alone can solve, and which Aristotle at any rate has not solved, therefore let us not place reliance on Aristotle.

This disguised freethinker, for he does not appear to me to be anything else, was one of the most original thinkers of the period intermediate between the Middle Ages and Descartes.

MICHAEL SERVETUS; VANINI.—Such instances of temerity were sometimes fatal to their authors. Michael Servetus, a very learned Spanish physician who perhaps discovered the circulation of the blood before Harvey, disbelieved in the Trinity and in the divinity of Jesus, and, as he was a Platonist, perceived no intermediaries between God and man save ideas. Persecuted by the Catholics, he sought refuge at Geneva, believing Calvin to be more merciful than the Inquisitors, and Calvin burned him alive.

Vanini, half a century later, that is at the commencement of the seventeenth, a restless, vain, and insolent man, after a life full of sudden changes of fortune, and yet distinguished, was burnt alive at Toulouse for certain passages in his De admirandis ... arcanis, and for having said that he would not express his opinion on the immortality of the soul until he was old, a Jew, and a German.

BRUNO; CAMPANELLA.—Giordano Bruno, an astronomer and one of the first to affirm that the sun was the centre of the world, professed, despite certain precautions, a doctrine which confused God with the world and denied or excluded creation. Giordano Bruno was arrested at Venice in 1593, kept seven years in prison, and finally burnt at Rome in 1600.

Campanella, likewise an Italian, who spent twenty-seven years in a dungeon for having conspired against the Spanish masters of his country, and who died in exile in Paris in 1639, was a sceptic in philosophy, or rather an anti-metaphysician, and, as would be said nowadays, a positivist. There are only two sources of knowledge, observation and reasoning. Observation makes us know things—is this true? May not the sensations of things which we have be a simple phantasmagoria? No; for we have an internal sense, a sense of our own, which cannot deceive us, which affirms our existence (here is the Cogito of Descartes anticipated) and which, at the same time, affirms that there are things which are not ourselves, so that coincidently the ego and the non-ego are established. Yes, but is this non-ego really what it seems? It is; granted; but what is it and can we know what it is? Not without doubt, and here scepticism is unshakable; but in that there is certitude of the existence of the non-ego, the presumption is that we can know it, partially, relatively, very relatively, while we remain infinitely distant from an absolute knowledge, which would be divine. Therefore let us observe and experiment; let us make the "history" of nature as historians make the history of the human race. And this is the simple and solid philosophy of experiment.

But Campanella, like so many more, was a metaphysician possessed by the devil of metaphysics, and after having imperiously recommended the writing of only the history of nature, he himself wrote its romance as well. Every being, he said (and the thought was a very fine one), exists on condition of being able to exist, and on condition that there be an idea of which it is the realization, and again on condition that nature is willing to create it. In other words, nature can, knows what she wishes, and wishes. Now all beings, in a greater or less degree according to their perfection or imperfection, feel this triple condition of being able, knowing, and wishing. Every being can, knows, and wishes, even inorganic matter (here already is the world as will and representation of Schopenhauer), and God is only absolute power, absolute knowledge, and absolute will. This is why all creative things gravitate to God and desire to return to Him as to their origin, and as the perfection of what they are: the universe has nostalgia for God.

Campanella was also, as we should say nowadays, a sociologist. He made his "Republic" as Plato had made his. The Republic of Campanella was called the City of the Sun. It was a community republic, leavened with aristocracy with "spiritual power" and "temporal power" somewhat after the manner of Auguste Comte. Campanella was a great sower of ideas.

FRANCIS BACON.—Francis Bacon, lawyer, member of Parliament, Lord Chancellor of England, personal friend of James I, friend, protector, and perhaps collaborator with Shakespeare, overthrown as the result of political animosity and relegated to private life, was a very learned man with a marvellous mind. Like his namesake, Roger Bacon, but in an age more favourable to intellectual reform, he attempted a sort of renewal of the human mind (Instauratio Magna) or at least a radical revolution in the methods and workings of the human mind. Although Francis Bacon professed admiration for many of the thinkers of antiquity, he urged that it was wrong to rely on them because they had not sufficiently observed; one must not, like the schoolmen, have ideas a priori, which are "idols," and there are idols of tribe, of party, of school, of eras; intentions must not be perceived everywhere in nature, and we must not, because the sun warms, believe it was created to warm, or because the earth yields nourishment believe her creation was for the purpose of feeding us, and that all things converge to man and are put at his service. It is necessary to proceed by observation, by experiment, and then by induction, but with prodigious mistrust of induction. Induction consists in drawing conclusions from the particular to the general, from a certain number of facts to a law. This is legitimate on condition that the conclusion is not drawn from a few facts to a law, which is precipitate induction, fruitful in errors; but from a very large number of facts to a law, which even then is considered as provisional. As for metaphysics, as for the investigation of universal law, that should be entirely separated from philosophy itself, from the "primary philosophy" which does not lead to it; it has its own field, which is that of faith: "Give to faith what belongeth to faith." In the main he is uninterested in metaphysics, believing them always to revolve in a circle and, I do not say, only believes in science and in method, but has hope only from knowledge and method, an enthusiast in this respect just as another might be about the super-sensible world or about ideas, saying human knowledge and human power are really coincident, and believing that knowledge will support humanity in all calamities, will prolong human life, will establish a new golden age, etc.

Moreover, let there be none of that eternal and unfounded fear that knowledge will cause the disappearance of the religious feeling. With profound conviction and judging by himself, Bacon said: "A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth a man's mind about to religion." Such is true philosophy, "subordinate to the object," attentive to the object, listening to the voices of the world and only anxious to translate them into human language: "that is true philosophy which renders the voices of the world the most accurately possible, like an echo, which writes as if at the dictation of the world itself, adding nothing of its own, only repeating and resounding."

And, as a man is always of his time, he believed in alchemy and in the possibility of transmuting base metals into gold. But note how he understood it: "To create a new nature in a given body or to produce new natures and to introduce them ... he who is acquainted with the forms and modes of super-inducing yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solution, and the rest, with their gradations and methods, will see and take care that these properties be united in some body, whence its transformation into gold may follow." Modern chemistry, with scientific methods highly analogous to those which Bacon indicated or foresaw, has not made gold, which is not a very useful thing to do, but has done better.

THOMAS HOBBES.—At the end of the sixteenth century, another Englishman, Thomas Hobbes, began to think. He was, above all else, a literary man and a sociologist; he translated Thucydides and Homer, he wrote Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, which is a manual of despotism, demonstrating that all men in a natural state were beasts of prey with regard to one another, but that they escaped this unpleasant fate by submission to a prince who has all rights because he is perpetually saving his subjects from death, and who can therefore impose on them whatever he pleases, even scientific dogma or religious beliefs. Merely regarded as a philosopher, properly so called, Hobbes has an important position in the history of ideas. Like Francis Bacon, but more rigorously and authoritatively, he began by separating metaphysics and theology from philosophy. Philosophy is the art of thinking. That which is not sensible—mind, soul, God—cannot be thought: can only be believed; philosophy does not deny all that; merely it does not concern itself therewith. Here is the whole of positivism established in principle. What we can think is what we feel. Things are known to us only through sensations; a thought is a sensation, the human mind is a compound of sensations.

No; for I can think of a thing without hearing, seeing, feeling it, etc.

This is because we have memory, which is itself a sensation; it is a sensation which prolongs itself; to remember is to feel that one has felt; it is to feel a former sensation which the brain is able to preserve. We think only by combining current sensations with other current sensations, or much more often indeed, thanks to memory, by combining current sensations with older ones, or former sensations with each other. This is but a fragile basis for knowledge and thought, for sensation is only a modification of ourselves caused by an external object, and consequently gives us nothing at all of the external object, and of itself the external world is eternally unknown to us; but we combine with each other the illusions that the external world deposits in us through the delusive or doubtful intermediary of our senses.

When the sensation thus combined with other sensations has become thought, then ideas begin to exist. They are products of sensation detached from sensation. They are interassociated by laws that are obscure, yet which can be vaguely perceived. They awake, so to speak, and call to one another; every time an idea previously acquired reappears, it is followed by the thought which accompanied it when it was acquired. In a conversation a traitor is spoken of. Someone asks what was the value of a piece of silver in ancient times. This appears incoherent; really it is a natural and simple association of ideas in which there are few intermediate steps. The person who listened as the traitor was mentioned thought of Judas, who was the first traitor of whom he had heard, and of the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the betrayal by Judas. The association of ideas is more or less close, more or less loose; it is disconnected in dreams, irregular in musing, close directly it is dominated and in consequence directed by an end pursued, by a goal sought; for then there is a desire to attain which associates nothing of itself, but which, eliminating all ideas that are not pertinent to the end pursued, permits only the association of those which have relation to it.

Seeing in the human soul only successive impulses arising from those first impulses which are the sensations, Hobbes does not believe we are free to do what we wish; we are carried away by the strongest impulse of our internal impulses, desire, fear, aversion, love, etc. Nevertheless we deliberate, we consider different courses to pursue and we decide on the one we desire to choose. No; we do not deliberate, we only imagine we deliberate. Deliberation is only a succession of different feelings, and to the one that gains the day we give the name of volition. "In the [so-called] deliberation, the final desire or the final fear is called will." Therefore liberty has no more existence among men than among animals; will and desire are only one and the same thing considered under different aspects.

UTILITARIAN MORALITY.—Henceforth there is no morality; without the power to will this and not to will that, there is no possible morality. Hobbes retorts with "utilitarian morality": What man should seek is pleasure, as Aristippus thought; but true pleasure—that which is permanent and that which is useful to him. Now it is useful to be a good citizen, a loyal subject, sociable, serviceable to others, careful to obtain their esteem by good conduct, etc. Morality is interest rightly understood, and interest rightly understood is absolutely blended with the morality of duty. The criminal is not a criminal but an idiot; the honest man is not an honest man but an intelligent one. Observe that a man is hardly convinced when preached to in the name of duty, but always convinced when addressed in the name of his own interest.

All this is fairly sensible; but from the time that freedom ceases there can be no morality, not even utilitarian; for it is useless even from the point of view of his own interests, to preach to a man who is only a machine moved by the strongest force; and, if he be only that, to lay down a moral code for him either from the point of view of his own interests, or from that of morality, or from that of the love of God are things which are the same and which are as absurd the one as the other. All philosophy, which does not believe in human liberty, yet which enunciates a system of morality, is in perpetual contradiction.



PART III

MODERN TIMES



CHAPTER I

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Descartes. Cartesianism.

DESCARTES.—The seventeenth century, which was the greatest philosophic century of modern times and perhaps of any time, began with Rene Descartes. Descartes, born at La Haye in Touraine in 1596, of noble family (his real name was des Quartes), was educated by the Jesuits of the college of La Fleche, followed the military profession for several years, then gave himself up to mathematics and became one of the greatest mathematicians of Europe, traveled all over Europe for his own amusement and instruction, wrote scientific and philosophical works, of which the most famous are the Discourse on METHOD, the Meditations, and the Rules for the Control of the Mind, resided sometimes in Paris, sometimes in Holland, and finally, at fifty-four years of age, unhappily attracted by the flattering invitations of Queen Christina of Sweden, proceeded to Stockholm, where he succumbed in four months to the severity of the climate. He died in February, 1650.

THE SYSTEM OF DESCARTES.—In the works of Descartes there are a general system of philosophy, a psychology, and a method. This order is here adopted because of the three, in Descartes; it is the third which is the most important, and which has left the most profound traces. The foundation of the system of Descartes is belief in God and in the goodness of God. I say the foundation and not the starting-point. The starting-point is another matter; but it will be clearly seen that the foundation is what has just been stated. The starting-point is this: I do not believe, provisionally, in anything, not wishing to take into account what I have been taught. I doubt everything. Is there anything I cannot doubt? It seems to me there is: I cannot doubt that I doubt. Now if I doubt, I think; if I think, I am. There is one certainty, I am.

And having arrived there, Descartes is at a dead stop, for from the certitude of one's own existence nothing can be deduced save the certitude of one's existence. For instance, shall I believe in the existence of everything that is not myself? There is no reason why I should believe in it. The world may be a dream. But if I believe in God and in a God of perfect goodness, I can then believe in something outside of myself, for God not being able to deceive Himself or me, if He permits me to see the external world, it is because this external world exists. There are already, therefore, three things in which I believe: my own existence, that of God, and that of the universe. Which of these beliefs is the fundamental one? Evidently, the one not demonstrated; the axiom is that upon which one rests to demonstrate everything except itself. Now of the three things in which Descartes believed, his own existence is demonstrated by the impossibility of thinking or feeling, without feeling his own existence; the other is demonstrated by the existence of a good God; the existence of a good God is demonstrated by nothing. It is believed. Hence belief in a good God is Descartes' foundation. This has not been introduced in order that he may escape from the I am at which he came to a stop; that belief certainly existed previously, and if he had recourse to it, it was because it existed first. Without that, he had too much intellectual honesty to invent it for a particular need. He had it, and he found it as it were in reserve when he asked himself if he could go beyond I am. Here was his foundation; all the rest would complete the proof.

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD.—Although Descartes rests on God as being his first principle, he does not fail to prove His existence, and that is begging the question, something proved by what has to be proved. For if Descartes believed only in something outside himself because of a good God, that Being outside himself, God, he can prove only because of the existence of a good God, who cannot deceive us, and thus is God proved by the belief in Him. That is begging the question. Descartes does not fail to prove the existence of God by superabundance as it were; and this, too, in itself indicates clearly that faith in God is the very foundation of the philosophy of Descartes. After having taken it as the basis of reasoning, he takes it as the goal of reasoning, which indicates that the idea of God, so to speak, encircled his mind and that he found it at every ultimate point of thought.

He proves it, therefore, first by an argument analogous to that of St. Anselm, which is this: we, imperfect and finite, have the idea of a perfect and infinite Being; we are not capable of this idea. Therefore it must have come to us from a Being really perfect and infinite, and hence this perfect Being exists.

Another proof, that of God regarded as cause. First: I exist. Who made me? Was it myself? No, if it had been myself I should have endowed myself with all the perfections of which I can conceive and in which I am singularly deficient. Therefore it must be some other being who created me. It was my parents. No doubt, but who created my parents and the parents of my parents? One cannot go back indefinitely from cause to cause, and there must have been a first one.

Secondly: even my own actual existence, my existence at this very moment, is it the result of my existence yesterday? Nothing proves it, and there is no necessity because I existed just now that I should exist at present. There must therefore be a cause at each moment and a continuous cause. That continuous cause is God, and the whole world is a creation perpetually continued, and is only comprehensible as continuous creation and is only explicable by a Creator.

THE WORLD.—Thus sure of himself, of God, and of the world, Descartes studies the world and himself. In the world he sees souls and matter; matter is substance in extensions, souls are substance not in extension, spiritual substance. The extended substance is endowed with impulse. Is the impulse self-generated, are the bodies self-impelled? No, they are moved. What is the primary motive force? It is God. Souls are substances without extension and motive forces. In this respect they are analogous to God. They are united to bodies and act on them. How? This is an impenetrable mystery, but they are closely and substantially united to the bodies, which is proved by physical pains depressing the soul and moral sufferings depressing the body; and they act on them, not by creating movements, for the quantity of movements is always the same, but by directing the movements after this fashion or that. Souls being spiritual, there is no reason for their disaggregation, that is, their demise, and in fact they do not die.

It is for this reason that Descartes lays such stress on animals not having souls. If they had souls, the souls would be spiritual, they would not be susceptible to disaggregation and would be immortal. "Save atheism, there is no doctrine more dangerous and detestable than that," but animals are soulless and purely mechanism; Descartes exerts himself to prove this in great detail, and he thus escapes avowing the immortality of the souls of animals, which is repugnant to him, or by allowing that they perish with the bodies to be exposed to the objection: "Will it not be the same with the souls of men?"

THE FREEDOM OF THE SOUL.—The human soul is endowed with freedom to do good or evil. What proof is there of this freedom? First, the inward feeling that we have. Every evident idea is true. Now, not only have we the idea of this freedom, but it would be impossible for us not to have it. Freedom "is known without proofs, merely by the experience we have of it." It is by the feeling of our freedom, of our free-will that we understand that we exist as a being, as a thing which is not merely a thing. The true ego is the will. Even more than an intelligent being, man is a free individual, and only feels himself to be a man when feeling himself free, so that he might not believe himself to be intelligent, nor think himself sensible, etc., but not to think himself free would for him be moral suicide; and in fact he actually never does anything which he does not believe himself to be free to do—that is, which he does not believe that he might avoid doing, if he so wished. Those who say, "It is simply the feeling that it is better for ourselves which tends to make us do this instead of doing that," are deeply in error. They forget that we often prefer the worst for ourselves in order to prove to ourselves that we are free and therefore have no other motive power than our own freedom. (And this is exactly what contemporaneous philosophy has thus formulated: "Will is neither determinate nor indeterminate, it is determinative.") "Even when a very obvious reason leads us to a thing, although morally speaking it is difficult for us to do the opposite, nevertheless, speaking absolutely, we can, for we are always free to prevent ourselves from pursuing a good thing clearly known ... provided only that we think it is beneficial thereby to give evidence of the truth of our free-will." It is the pure and simple wish to be free which creates an action; it is the all-powerful liberty.

As has been happily observed, in relation to the universe the philosophy of Descartes is a mechanical philosophy; in relation to man the philosophy of Descartes is a philosophy of will. As has also been remarked, there are very striking analogies between Corneille and Descartes from the point of view of the apotheosis of the will, and the Meditations having appeared after the great works of Corneille, it is not so much that Corneille was a Cartesian, as that Descartes was a follower of Corneille.

PSYCHOLOGY OF DESCARTES.—Descartes has almost written a psychology, what with his Treatise on the Passions and his letters and, besides, certain passages in his Meditations. The soul thinks and has passions. There are three kinds of ideas, the factitious, the adventitious, and the innate; the factitious ideas are those which the imagination forms; the adventitious ideas are those suggested by the external world through the intermediary of the senses; the innate ideas are those constituting the mind itself, the conditions under which it thinks and apart from which it cannot think: we cannot conceive an object not extended, nor an object apart from time, nor anything without a cause; the ideas of time, space, and cause are innate ideas; we cannot conceive ourselves as other than free; the idea of liberty is an innate idea.

The soul has passions; it is therein that, without dependence on the body, it has intimate relations with and is modified by it, not radically, but in its daily life. There are operations of the soul which cannot strictly be termed passions, and yet which are directed or at least influenced by the body. Memory is passive, and consequently memory is a species of passion. The lively sensations which the body transmits to the brain leave impressions (Malebranche would say "traces"), and according to these impressions the soul is moved a second or a third time, and that is what is called memory. "The impressions of the brain render it suitable to stir the soul in the same way as it has been stirred before, and also to make it recollect something, just as the folds in a piece of paper or linen make it more suitable to be folded anew as it was before than if it had never been thus folded." Similarly, the association of ideas is passive, and in consequence is a kind of passion. The association of ideas is the fact that thought passes along the same path it has already traversed, and follows in its labyrinth the thread which interlinks its thoughts, and this thread is the traces which thoughts have left in the brain. In abandoning ourselves to the association of ideas, we are passive and we yield ourselves freely to a passion. That is so true that current speech itself recognizes this: musing is a passion, it is possible to have a passion for musing, and musing is nothing else than the association of ideas in which the will does not intervene.

THE PASSIONS.—Coming to the passions strictly speaking, there are some which are of the soul and only of the soul; the passion for God is a passion of the soul, the passion for liberty is a passion of the soul; but there are many more which are the effects of the union of the soul with the body. These passions are excited in the soul by a state of the body or a movement of the body or of some part of the body; they are "emotions" of the soul corresponding to "movements" of the machine. All passions have relation to the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain, and according as they relate to the former or the latter are they expansive or oppressive. There are six principal passions, of which all the rest are only modifications: admiration, love, desire, joy, having relation to the appetite of happiness; hatred, sadness, having relation to the fear of pain. "All the passions are good and may become bad" (Descartes in this deviates emphatically from Stoicism for which the passions are simply maladies of the soul). All passions are good in themselves. They are destined (this is a remarkable theory) to cause the duration of thoughts which would otherwise pass and be rapidly effaced; by reason of this, they cause man to act; if he were only directed by his thoughts, unaccompanied by his passions, he would never act, and if it be recognized that man is born for action, it will at the same time be recognized that it is necessary he should have passions.

But, you will say, there can be good passions (of a nature to give force to just ideas) and evil passions.

No, they are all good, but all also have their bad side, their deviation, rather, which enables them to become bad. Therefore, in each passion no matter what it be, it is always possible to distinguish between the passion itself, which is always good, and the excess, the deviation, the degradation or corruption of this passion which constitutes, if it be desired to call it so, an evil passion, and this is what Descartes demonstrates, passion by passion, in the fullest detail, in his Treatise on the Passions.

THE PART OF THE SOUL.—If it is thus, what will be the part of the soul (the soul is the will)? It will be to abandon itself to good passions, or more accurately to the good that is in all passions, and to reduce the passions to be "nothing more than themselves." In courage, for example, there is courage and temerity. The action of the will, enlightened by the judgment, will consist in reducing courage to be nothing but courage. In fear, there is cowardice and there is the feeling of self-preservation which, according to Descartes, is the foundation of fear and which is a very good passion. The action of the soul is to reduce fear to simple prudence.

But how will the will effect these metamorphoses or at least these departures, these separations, these reductions to the due proportion? Directly it can effect nothing upon the passions; it cannot remove them; it cannot even remove the baser portions of them; but it can exercise influence over them by the intermediary of reasoning; it can lead them to the attentive consideration of the thought that they carry with them, and by this consideration modify them. For instance, if it is a question of fear, the soul forces fear to consider that the peril is much less than was imagined, and thus little by little brings it back to simple prudence.

Note that this method, although indirect, is very potent; for it ends by really transforming the passions into their opposites. Persuade fear that there is less peril in marching forward than in flight and that the most salutary flight is the flight forward and you have changed fear to courage.—But such an influence of the will over the passions is extraordinarily unlikely: it will never take place.—Yes, by habit! Habit too is a passion, or, if you will, a passive state, like that of memory or the association of ideas, and there are men possessed only of that passion. But the will, by the means which have been described, by imposing an act, a first act, creates a commencement of habit, by imposing a second confirms that habit, by imposing a third strengthens it, and so on. In plain words, the will, by reasoning with the passions and reasoning with them incessantly, brings them back to what is good in them and ends by bringing them back there permanently, so that it arrives at having only the passions it desires, or, if you prefer it, for it is the same thing, at having only the passion for good. Morality consists in loving noble passions, as was later observed by Vauvenargues, and that means to love all the passions, each for what is good in it, that is to reduce each passion to what real goodness is inherent in it, and that is to gather all the passions into one, which is the passion of duty.

THE METHOD OF DESCARTES.—As has been observed, not only had Descartes influence through all that he wrote, but it was by his method that he has exerted the greatest and most durable sway, and that is why we conclude with the examination of his method. It is all contained in this: to accept nothing as true except what is evident; to accept as true all that is evident. Descartes therefore made evidence the touchstone of certainty. But mark well the profound meaning of this method: what is it that gives me the assurance of the evidence of such or such an idea? How shall I know that such an idea is really evident to me? Because I see it in perfect clearness? No, that does not suffice: the evidence may be deceptive; there can be false evidence; all the wrong ideas of the philosophers of antiquity, save when they were sophists, had for them the character of being evident. Why? Why should error be presented to the mind as an evident truth? Because in truth, in profound truthfulness, it must be admitted that judgment does not depend upon the intelligence. And on what does it depend? On will, on free-will. This is how. No doubt, error depends on our judgment, but our judgment depends on our will in the sense that it depends on us whether we adhere to our judgment without it being sufficiently precise or do not adhere to it because it is not sufficiently precise: "If I abstain from giving my judgment on a subject when I do not conceive it with sufficient clearness and distinction, it is evident that I shall not be deceived." Evidence is therefore not only a matter of judgment, of understanding, of intelligence, it is a matter of energetic will and of freedom courageously acquired. We are confronted with evidence when, with a clear brain, we are capable, in order to accept or refuse what it lays before us, of acting "after such a fashion," of having put ourselves in such a state of the soul that we feel "that no external force can constrain us to think in such or such a way."

These external forces are authority, prejudices, personal interest, or that of party. The faculty of perceiving evidence is therefore the triumph both of sound judgment in itself and of a freedom of mind which, supposing probity, scrupulousness, and courage, and perhaps the most difficult of all courage, supposes a profound and vigorous morality. Evidence is given only to men who are first highly intelligent and next, or rather before all else, are profoundly honest. Evidence is not a consequence of morality; but morality is the condition of evidence.

There is the foundation of the method of Descartes; add to it his advice on the art of reasoning, which even in his time was not at all novel, but which with him is very precise; not to generalize too hastily, not to be put off with words, but to have a clear definition of every word, etc., and thus a sufficient idea of it will be obtained.

Now first, to this method Descartes was unfaithful, as always happens, and often accepted the suggestions of his magnificent imagination as the evidences of his reason; secondly, the touchstone of evidence is certainly the best, but is far from being infallible (and Vico has ridiculed it with as much sense as wit) and the freest mind can still find false things evident; yet, thirdly, favouring freedom of research self-controlled, individual and scornful of all authority, the method of Descartes has become a banner, a motto, and a flag for all modern philosophy.

DESCARTES THE FATHER OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.—And from all that the result has been that all modern philosophy, with few exceptions, has recognised Descartes as its parent—that individual evidence, if it may be thus expressed, favouring temerity and each believing himself closer to the truth the more he differed from others, and consequently was unable to suspect himself of being subject to influences, individual evidence has provided a fresh opportunity for self-deception; finally, that Descartes, by a not uncommon metamorphosis, by means of his system which he did not follow, has become the head or the venerated ancestor of doctrines which he would have detested and which he already did detest more than all others. Because he said that evidence alone and the free investigation of evidence led to truth, he has become the ancestor of the sceptics who are persuaded that surrender must be made only to evidence and that evidence cannot be found; and he has become the ancestor of the positivists who believe that evidence certainly exists somewhere, but not in metaphysics or in theodicy, or in knowledge of the soul, of immortality, and of God, branches of knowledge which surpass our means of knowing, which are in fact outside knowledge. So that this man who conceived more than any man, this man who so often constructed without a sure foundation, and this man, yet again, as has been aptly said, who always thought by innate ideas, by his formula has become the master and above all the guarantor of those who are the most reserved and most distrustful as to philosophic construction, innate ideas, and imagination. This does not in the least diminish his brilliant merit; it is only one of those changes of direction in which the history of ideas abounds.



CHAPTER II

CARTESIANS

All the Seventeenth Century was under the Influence of Descartes. Port-Royal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz.

CARTESIAN INFLUENCE.—Nearly all the seventeenth century was Cartesian, and in the general sense of the word, not only as supporters of the method of evidence, but as adherents of the general philosophy of Descartes. Gassendi (a Provencal, and not an Italian), professor of philosophy at Aix, subsequently in Paris, was not precisely a faithful disciple of Descartes, and he opposed him several times; he had leanings towards Epicurus and the doctrine of atoms; he drew towards Hobbes, but he was also a fervent admirer of Bacon, and so approached Descartes, who thought very highly of him, though impatiently galled by his criticisms. After the example of Epicurus he was the most sober and austere of men, and of the two it was Descartes rather than he who was Epicurean in the common use of the word. According to a tradition, which to my mind rests on insufficient proof, he was an instructor of Moliere.

All the thinkers of the seventeenth century came more or less profoundly under the Cartesian influence: Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Arnauld, and all Port-Royal. This influence was to diminish only in the eighteenth century, though kept up by the impenitent Fontenelle, but outweighed by that of Locke, to reappear very vigorously in the nineteenth century in France in the school of Maine de Biran and of Cousin.

MALEBRANCHE.—A separate niche must be made for the Cartesians, almost as great as Descartes, who filled the seventeenth century with their renown,—the Frenchman Malebranche, the Dutchman Spinoza, and the German Leibnitz. Pushing the theories of Descartes further than Descartes would himself in all probability have desired to, from what Descartes had said that it was only through God that we perceived accurately, Malebranche declared that it was only in God that we perceived accurately, and fundamentally this is the same idea; it can only be deemed that Malebranche is the more precise: "God alone is known by Himself [is believed in without uncertainty]; there is only He that we can see in immediate and direct perspective." All the rest we see in Him, in His light, in the light He creates in our minds. When we see, it is that we are in Him. Evidence is divine light. He is the link of ideas. (And thus Malebranche brought Plato near to Descartes and showed that, without the latter being aware of it, they both said the same thing.) God is always the cause and as He is the cause of all real things, He is cause also of all truths, and as He is everywhere in real objects, He is also everywhere in the true ideas which we can have, or rather in which we can participate. When we seek a truth we pray without thinking we do so; attention is a prayer.

In the same way, from the saying of Descartes that the universe is a continuous creation, Malebranche deduced or rather concluded that our thoughts and actions are acts of God. There can be no action of the body on the soul to produce ideas; that would be inconceivable; but on the occasion, for instance, of our eyes resting on an object, God gives us an idea of that object, whether in conformity or not we cannot tell; but at any rate He gives us that idea of the object which He wishes us to have.

There is no action of our soul on our body; that would be inconceivable. But God to our will adds a force having a tendency towards goodness as a rule, and to each of our volitions adds a force tending to its execution and capable of executing it.

Then, when our will is evil and we execute it, does God sin in our name?

Certainly not; because sin is not an act; it consists in doing nothing; it consists precisely in the soul not acting on the body; therefore it is not a force but a weakness. Sin is that God has withdrawn Himself from us. The sinner is only a being who is without strength because he is lacking in grace.

The principle of morality is the respect for order and the love of order. That makes two degrees, the first of which is regularity and the second virtue. To conform to order is highly rational but without merit (e.g., to give money to the poor from habit or possibly from vanity). To love order and to desire that it should be greater, more complete, and nearer to the will of God, is to adhere to God, to live in God, just as to see rightly is to see in God. All morality, into the details of which we will not enter, evolves from the love of order. The universe is a vast mechanism, as was stated by Descartes, set in motion and directed by God—that is to say, by the laws established by God; for God acts only by general dispositions (which are laws) and not by particular dispositions. In other words, there exists a will, but there are no volitions.

MIRACLES.—But then you will say there are no miracles; for miracle is precisely a particular will traversing and interrupting the general will.

To begin with, there are very few miracles, which therefore permits order to subsist; it would be only if there were incessant miracles that order would be non-existent. Next, a miracle is a warning God gives to men because of their weakness, to remind them that behind the laws there is a Lawgiver, behind the general dispositions a Being who disposes. Because of their intellectual weakness, if they never saw any derogation from the general laws they would take them to be fatalities. A miracle is a grace intervening in things, just as grace properly so-called intervenes in human actions. And it is not contradictory to the general design of God, since by bringing human minds back to the truth that there is a Being who wills, it accustoms them to consider all general laws as permanent acts, but also as the acts of the Being who wills. The miracle has the virtue of making everything in the world miraculous, which is true. Hence the miracle confirms the idea of order. Therein, perhaps alone, the exception proves the rule.

SPINOZA.—Spinoza, who during his life was a pure Stoic and the purest of Stoics, polishing the lenses of astronomical telescopes in order to gain his living, refusing all pensions and all the professorial positions offered to him, and living well-nigh on nothing, had read Descartes and, to conform to the principle of evidence, had begun by renouncing his religion, which was that of the Jews. His general outlook on the world was this: There is only one God. God is all. Only He has His attributes—that is to say, His manners of being and His modes, that is His modifications, as the sun (merely a comparison) has as its manners of being, its roundness, colour, and heat, as modifications its rays, terrestrial heat, direct and diffused light, etc. Now God has two attributes, thought and extension, as had already been observed by Descartes; and for modifications He has exactly all we can see, touch, or feel, etc. The human soul is an attribute of God, as is everything else; it is an attribute of God in His power. It is not free, for all that comes from God, all that is of God, is a regular and necessary development of God Himself. "There is nothing contingent" [nothing which may either happen or not happen]. All things are determined, by the necessity of the divine nature, to exist and to act in a given manner. There is therefore no free-will in the soul, the soul is determined to will this or that by a cause which is itself determined by another and that by another, and so on to infinity.

Nevertheless we believe ourselves to be free and according to the principle of evidence we are; for nothing is more evident to us than our liberty. We are as intimately convinced of our liberty as of our existence and we all affirm, I am free,—with the same emphasis that Descartes affirms: I am. I am and I am free are the two things it is impossible for man to doubt, no matter what effort he makes.

No doubt, but it is an illusion. It is the illusion of a being who feels himself as cause, but does not feel himself as effect. Try to imagine a billiard ball which feels it moves others, but which does not feel that it is moved. What we call decision is an idea which decides us because it exercises more power over us than the others do; what we term deliberation is a hesitancy between two or three ideas which at the moment have equal force; what we name volition is an idea, and what we call will is our understanding applied to facts. We do not want to fight; we conceive the idea of fighting and the idea carries us away; we do not want to hang ourselves; we have the obsessing idea of hanging ourselves and this thought runs away with us.

HIS MORAL SYSTEM.—Spinoza wrote a system of morality. Is it not radically impossible to write a system of morality when the author does not believe in free-will? The admirable originality of Spinoza, even though his idea can be contested, is precisely that morality depends on belief in the necessity of all things—that is, the more one is convinced of this necessity so much the more does one attain high morality—that is, the more one believes oneself free the more one is immoral. The man who believes himself free claims to run counter to the universal order, and morality precisely is adherence to it; the man who believes himself free seeks for an individual good just as if there could be an individual good, just as if the best for each one were not to submit to the necessary laws of everything, laws which constitute what is good; the man who thinks himself free sets himself against God, believes himself God since he believes himself to be creator of what he does, and since he believes himself capable of deranging something in the mechanism and of introducing a certain amount of movement. As a matter of fact, he does nothing of the kind; but he believes that he does it, and this mere thought, false and low as it is, keeps him in the most miserable condition of life; to sum up, a man who believes himself free may not perhaps be an atheist, but he is ungodly.

On the contrary, the man who does not believe himself free believes he is in the hands of God, and that is the beginning of wisdom and the beginning of virtue. We are in the hands of God as the clay is in those of the potter; the mad vase would be the one which reproached the potter for having made it small instead of big, common instead of decorative. It is the beginning of wisdom to believe oneself in the hands of God; to see Him, to see Him the least indistinctly that we can, therein lies the highest wisdom; we must see His designs, or at least His great design and associate ourselves with it, thus becoming not only part of Him, which we always are, but a conscient part of Him.

This is the love of God, and the love of God is virtue itself. We ought to love God without consideration of the good He can do us and of the penalties He can inflict upon us; for to love God from love of a beneficent God or from fear of a punitive God is not to love God but to love oneself.

THE PASSIONS.—We have our passions as enemies and as obstacles to our elevation to this semi-perfection. It is they which cause us to do immoral acts. "Immoral," has that a meaning from the moment that we do nothing which we are not obliged to do? Yes, just as when led by our deceitful mind we have arrived necessarily at a false idea, the fact of this thought being necessary does not prevent it from being false; we may have been led by necessity to commit a villainous action, but that does not prevent its being immoral. The passions are our imperfections, omissions, gaps in a soul which is not full of the idea of God and of universal order and the love of God and of universal order, and which, in consequence, lives individually—that is, separated from the universe.

The passions are infinite in number and Spinoza, in a bulky volume, furnished a minute and singularly profound description of the principal ones alone, into the details of which we regret that we cannot enter. The Ethics of Spinoza is an incomparable masterpiece.

The study of the passions is very salutary, because in studying them one gets so detached from them that one can perceive their emptiness, their meanness, and their puerile, nay, even bestial character. It might even be added that the mere thought of studying them is already an act of detachment in reference to them. "Thou wouldst not seek Me, hadst thou not already found Me," said God to Pascal. "Thou wouldst not make investigations about us, hadst thou not already quitted us," the passions might say to the philosopher.

SANCTIONS OF MORALITY.—What are the sanctions of morality? They are necessary sanctions; just as everything is necessary and may even be said to be mechanical. There is neither merit nor demerit and the criminal is not culpable; only he is outside order, and everything must be in order. "He who is maddened by the bite of a mad dog is certainly innocent; yet anyone has the right to suffocate him. In the same way, the man who cannot govern his passions by fear of the law is a very excusable invalid; yet he cannot enjoy peace of mind, or the knowledge of God, or even the love of God, and it is necessary that he perish." Through death he has re-entered within order.

But does the sanction of beyond-the-grave exist, and is the soul immortal, and are we to be rewarded therein in another life? The conclusion of Spinoza on this matter is hesitating, but at the risk of misrepresenting it, which I fear to do, it seems to me that it can be thus summed up—The soul makes itself immortal, in proportion as by the knowledge and love of God it participates more in God. In proportion it makes itself divine; and approaching perfection, by the same progress it also approaches immortality. It is conceivable that by error and sin it kills itself, and by virtue renders itself imperishable. This immortality is not or does not seem to be personal, it is literally a definite re-entry into the bosom of God; Spinozian immortality would therefore be a prolongation of the same effort which we make in this life to adhere to universal order; the recompense for having adhered to it here below is to be absorbed in it there, and in that lies true beatitude. Here below we ought to see everything from the point of view of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis), and this is a way of being eternal; elsewhere we shall be in eternity itself.

LEIBNITZ.—Leibnitz possessed a universal mind, being historian, naturalist, politician, diplomatist, scholar, theologian, mathematician; here we will regard him only as philosopher. For Leibnitz the basis, the substance of all beings is not either thought or extension as with Descartes, but is force, productive of action. "What does not act does not exist." Everything that exists is a force, either action or tendency to action. And force, all force has two characteristics: it desires to do, it wishes to think. The world is the graduated compound of all these forces. Above all there is the supreme force, God, who is infinite force, infinite thought; by successive descents those base and obscure forces are reached which seem to have neither power nor thought, and yet have a minimum of power and even of thought, so to speak, latent. God thinks and acts infinitely; man thinks and acts powerfully, thanks to reason, which distinguishes him from the rest of creation; the animal acts and thinks dimly, but it does act and think, for it has a soul composed of memory and of the results and consequences of memory, and by parenthesis "three-fourths of our own actions are governed by memory, and most frequently we act like animals"; plants act, and if they do not think, at least feel (which is still thought), though more dimly than animals; and finally in the mineral kingdom the power of action and thought slumber, but are not non-existent since they can be transformed into plants, animals, and men, into living matter which feels and thinks.

Therefore, as was later on to be maintained by Schopenhauer, everything is full of souls, and of souls which are forces as well as intelligences. The human soul is a force too, like the body. Between these two forces, which seem to act on one another and which certainly act in concert in such fashion that the movement desired by the soul is executed by the body or that the soul obviously assents to a movement desired by the body, what can be the affinity and the relation, in what consists their concurrence and concord? Leibnitz (and there was already something of the same nature suggested by Descartes) believes that all the forces of the world act, each spontaneously; but that among all the actions they perform there exists an agreement imposed by God, a concord establishing universal order, a "preestablished harmony" causing them all to co-operate in the same design. Well, then, between the soul, this force, and the body, this force also, this harmony reigns as between any force whatever in nature and one and all of the others; and that is the explanation of the union and concord between the soul and the body. Imagine two well-constructed clocks wound up by the same maker; they indicate the same hour, and it might appear that this one directs the other, or that the other directs the first. All the forces of the world are clocks which agree with each other, because they have been regulated in advance by the divine clockmaker, and they all indicate the eternal hour.

THE RADICAL OPTIMISM OF LEIBNITZ.—From all these general views on matter, on mind and on the mind, Leibnitz arrived at a radical optimism which is the thing for which he has since been most ridiculed, and by which, at any rate, he has remained famous. He believes that all is good, despite the evil of which no one can dispute the existence; and he believes that all is the best possible in the best of possible worlds. In fact, God is supreme wisdom and supreme goodness; that was quite evident to Descartes, who in the matter of evidence was not easily satisfied. This perfect wisdom and perfect goodness could choose only what is best.—But yet evil exists! Diminish it as much as you choose, it still exists.—It exists by a necessity inherent in what is created. Everything created is imperfect. God alone is perfect; what is imperfect is by its definition evil mingled with good. Evil is only the boundary of good, where God was compelled to stop in creating beings and things other than Himself, and if He had created only according to absolute goodness, He could have created only Himself. And that is the precise meaning of this phrase "the best of possible worlds"; the world is perfect so far as that which is created, and therefore imperfect, can be perfect; so far as what is not God can be divine; the world is God Himself as far as He can remain Himself whilst being anything else than Himself. THE THREE EVILS.—Let us distinguish in order to comprehend better. There are three evils: the metaphysical, the physical, and the moral. Metaphysical evil is this very fact of not being perfection; it is natural enough that what emanates only from perfection should not be perfection. Physical evil is suffering; God cannot will suffering, desire it, or cherish it; but He can permit it as a means of good, as a condition of good; for there would be no moral good if there were not occasion for struggle, and there would be no occasion for struggling if physical evil did not exist; imagine a paradise; all the inhabitants merely exist and never have cause to show the slightest endurance, the least courage, the smallest virtue. And finally, as to moral evil, which is sin, God can even less desire that it should exist, but He can admit its existence, allow it to be, to afford men occasion for merit or demerit. Nothing is more easy than to criticize God whilst considering only a portion of His work and not considering it as a whole. He must have created it to be a whole and it is as a whole that it must be judged. And precisely because the whole cannot be comprehended by anyone, "hold thy peace, foolish reason," as Pascal said, and judge not or judge a priori, since here it is not possible to judge by experience; and declare that the Perfect can have willed only the most perfect that is possible.

THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE.—There still remains the fundamental objection: to reduce God to the conditions of the possible is to limit Him, and it is useless to say that God is justified if He has done all the good possible. He is not; the words "possible" and "impossible" having no meaning to Him who is omnipotent, and by definition infinite power could effect the impossible.

Yes, Leibnitz replies, there is a metaphysical impossibility, there is an impossibility in the infinite; this impossibility is absurdity, is contradiction. Could God make the whole smaller than the part or any line shorter than a straight one? Reason replies in the negative. Is God therefore limited? He is limited by the absurd and that means He is unlimited; for the absurd is a falling away. It is therefore credible that the mixture of evil and good is a metaphysical necessity to which I will not say God submits, but in which He acts naturally, and that the absence of evil is a metaphysical contradiction, an absurdity in itself, which God cannot commit precisely because He is perfect; and no doubt, instead of drawing this conclusion, we should actually see it, were the totality of things, of their relations, of their concordance, and of their harmony known to us.

The optimism of Leibnitz was ridiculed specially in the Candide of Voltaire, ingeniously defended by Rousseau, magnificently defended by Victor Hugo in the following verses, well worthy of Leibnitz:

"Oui peut-etre au dela de la sphere des nues, Au sein de cet azur immobile et dormant, Peut-etre faites-vous des choses inconnues Ou la douleur de l'homme entre comme element."



CHAPTER III

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, General Politics, and Religious Politics.

LOCKE.—Locke, very learned in various sciences—physics, chemistry, medicine, often associated with politics, receiving enlightenment from life, from frequent travels, from friendships with interesting and illustrious men, always studying and reflecting until an advanced old age, wrote only carefully premeditated works: his Treatise of Government and Essay on the Human Understanding.

Locke appears to have written on the understanding only in order to refute the "innate ideas" of Descartes. For Locke innate ideas have no existence. The mind before it comes into contact with the external world is a blank sheet, and there is nothing in the mind which has not first come through the senses. What, then, are ideas? They are sensations registered by the brain, and they are also sensations elaborated and modified by reflection. These ideas then commingle in such a manner as to form an enormous mass of combinations. They are commingled either in a natural or an artificial manner. In a natural manner, that is in a way conforming to the great primary ideas given us by reflection, the idea of cause, the idea of end, the idea of means to an end, the idea of order, etc., and it is the harmony of these ideas which is commonly termed reason; they become associated by accident, by the effects of emotion, by the effect of custom, etc., and then they give birth to prejudices, errors, and superstitions. The passions of the soul are aspects of pleasure and pain. The idea of a possible pleasure gives birth in us to a desire which is called ambition, love, covetousness, gluttony; the idea of a possible pain gives birth in us to fear and horror, and this fear and horror is called hatred, jealousy, rage, aversion, disgust, scorn. At bottom we have only two passions, the desire of enjoyment, and the fear of suffering.

THE FREEDOM OF MAN.—Is man free? Appealing to experience and making use only of it and not of intimate feeling, Locke declares in the negative. A will always seems to him determined by another will, and this other by another to infinity, or by a motive, a weight, a motive power which causes a leaning to right or left. Will certainly exists—that is to say, an exact and lively desire to perform an action, or to continue an action, or to interrupt an action, but this will is not free, for to represent it as free is to represent it as capable of wishing what it does not wish. The will is an anxiety to act in such or such a fashion, and this anxiety, on account of its character of anxiety, of strong emotion, of tension of the soul, appears to us free, appears to us an internal force which is self-governed and independent; we feel consciousness of will in the effort. This tension must not be denied, but it must be recognised as the effect of a potent desire which the obstacle excites; this tension, therefore, is an indication of nothing except the potency of the desire and the existence of an obstacle. Now this desire, so potent that it is irritated by the obstacle, and, so to speak, unites us against it, is a passion dominating and filling our being; so that we are never more swayed by passion than when we believe ourselves to be exercising our will, and in consequence the more we desire the less are we free.

It is not essential formally and absolutely to confound will with desire. Overpowered by heat, we desire to drink cold water, and because we know that that would do us harm we have the will not to drink; but although this is an important distinction it is not a fundamental one; what incites us to drink is a passion, what prevents us is another passion, one more general and stronger, the desire not to die, and because this passion by meeting with and fighting another produces in all our being a powerful tension, it is none the less a passion, even if we ought not to say that it is a still more impassioned passion.

LOCKE'S THEORY OF POLITICS.—In politics Locke was the adversary of Hobbes, whose theories of absolutism have already been noticed. He did not believe that the natural state was the war of all against all. He believed men formed societies not to escape cannibalism, but more easily to guarantee and protect their natural rights: ownership, personal liberty, legitimate defence. Society exists only to protect these rights, and the reason of its existence lies in this duty to defend them. The sovereign therefore is not the saviour of the nation, he is its law-maker and magistrate. If he violates the rights of man, he acts so directly contrary to his mission and his mandate that insurrection against him is legitimate. The "wise Locke," as Voltaire always called him, was the inventor of the Rights of Man.

In religious politics he was equally liberal and advocated the separation of Church and State; the State, according to him, should not have any religion of its own, its province being only to protect equally the liberty of all denominations. Locke was discussed minutely by Leibnitz, who, without accepting the innate ideas of Descartes, did not accept the ideas through sensation of Locke, and said: "There is nothing in the intelligence which has not first been in the senses," granted ... "except the intelligence itself." The intelligence has not innate ideas born ready made; but it possesses forms of its own in which the ideas arrange themselves and take shape, and this is the due province of the intelligence. And it was these forms which later on Kant was to call the categories of the intellect, and at bottom Descartes meant nothing else by his innate ideas. Locke exerted a prodigious and even imperious influence over the French philosophers of the eighteenth century.



CHAPTER IV

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Berkeley: Highly Idealist Philosophy which Regarded Matter as Non-existent.

David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy.

The Scottish School: Common Sense Philosophy.

BERKELEY.—To the "sensualist" Locke succeeded Berkeley, the unrestrained "idealist," like him an Englishman. He began to write when very young, continued to write until he was sixty, and died at sixty-eight. He believed neither in matter nor in the external world. There was the whole of his philosophy. Why did he not believe in them? Because all thinkers are agreed that we cannot know whether we see the external world as it is. Then, if we do not know it, why do we affirm that it exists? We know nothing about it. Now we ought to build up the world only with what we know of it, and to do otherwise is not philosophy but yielding to imagination. What is it that we know of the world? Our ideas, and nothing but our ideas. Very well then, let us say: there are only ideas. But whence do these ideas come to us? To explain them as coming from the external world which we have never seen is to explain obscurity by denser darkness. They are spiritual, they come to us without doubt from a spirit, from God. This is possible, it is not illogical, and Berkeley believes it.

This doctrine regarded by the eyes of common sense may appear a mere phantasy; but Berkeley saw in it many things of high importance and great use. If you believe in matter, you can believe in matter only, and that is materialism with its moral consequences, which are immoral; if you believe in matter and in God, you are so hampered by this dualism that you do not know how to separate nature from God, and it therefore comes to pass that you see God in matter, which is called pantheism. In a word, between us and God Berkeley has suppressed matter in order that we should come, as it were, into direct contact with God. He derives much from Malebranche, and it may be said he only pushes his theories to their extreme. Although a bishop, he was not checked, like Descartes, by the idea of God not being able to deceive us, and he answered that God does not deceive us, that He gives us ideas and that it is we who deceive ourselves by attributing them to any other origin than to Him; nor was he checked, like Malebranche, by the authority of Scripture, which in Genesis portrays God creating matter. He saw there, no doubt, only a symbolical sense, a simple way of speaking according to the comprehension of the multitude.