Chapter XX (4)

80. What has been the fame of Bacon, “the wisest, greatest, of mankind,” it is needless to say. What has been his real influence over mankind, how much of our enlarged and exact knowledge may be attributed to his inductive method, what of this again has been due to a thorough study of his writings, and what to an indirect and secondary acquaintance with them, are questions of another kind, and less easily solved. Stewart, the philosopher who has dwelt most on the praises of Bacon, while he conceives him to have exercised a considerable influence over the English men of science in the seventeenth century, supposes, on the authority of Montucla, that he did not “command the general admiration of Europe,” till the publication of the preliminary discourse to the French Encyclopædia by Diderot and D’Alembert. This, however, is by much too precipitate a conclusion. He became almost immediately known on the continent. Gassendi was one of his most ardent admirers. Descartes mentions him, I believe, once only, in a letter to Mersenne, in 1632;[217] but he was of all men the most unwilling to praise a contemporary. It may be said that these were philosophers, and that their testimony does not imply the admiration of mankind. But writers of a very different character mention him in a familiar manner. Richelieu is said to have highly esteemed Lord Bacon.[218] And it may in some measure be due to this, that in the Sentimens de l’Académie Français sur le Cid, he is alluded to, simply by the name Bacon, as one well known.[219] Voiture, in a letter to Costar, about the same time, bestows high eulogy on some passages of Bacon which his correspondent had sent to him, and observes that Horace would have been astonished to hear a barbarian Briton discourse in such a style. The treatise De Augmentis was republished in France in 1624, the year after its appearance in England. It was translated into French as early as 1632; no great proofs of neglect. Editions came out in Holland, 1645, 1652, and 1662.[220] Even the Novum Organum, which, as has been said, never became so popular as his other writings, was thrice printed in Holland, in 1645, 1650, and 1660.[221] Leibnitz and Puffendorf are loud in their expressions of admiration, the former ascribing to him the revival of true philosophy as fully as we can at present.[222] I should be more inclined to doubt whether he were adequately valued by his countrymen in his own time, or in the immediately subsequent period. Under the first Stuarts, there was little taste among studious men but for theology, and chiefly for a theology which, proceeding with an extreme deference to authority, could not but generate a disposition of mind, even upon other subjects, alien to the progressive and inquisitive spirit of the inductive philosophy.[223] The institution of the Royal Society, or rather the love of physical science out of which that institution arose, in the second part of the seventeenth century, made England resound with the name of her illustrious chancellor. Few now spoke of him without a kind of homage that only the greatest men receive. Yet still, it was by natural philosophers alone that the writings of Bacon were much studied. The editions of his works, except the Essays, were few; the Novum Organum never came separately from the English press.[224] They were not even much quoted; for I believe it will be found that the fashion of referring to the brilliant passages of the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum, at least in books designed for the general reader, is not much older than the close of the last century. Scotland has the merit of having led the way; Reid, Stewart, Robison, and Playfair turned that which had been a blind veneration into a rational worship; and I should suspect that more have read Lord Bacon within these thirty years than in the two preceding centuries. It may be an usual consequence of the enthusiastic panegyrics lately poured upon his name, that a more positive efficacy has sometimes been attributed to his philosophical writings than they really possessed, and it might be asked whether Italy, where he was probably not much known, were not the true school of experimental philosophy in Europe, whether his methods of investigation were not chiefly such as men of sagacity and lovers of truth might simultaneously have devised. But, whatever may have been the case with respect to actual discoveries in science, we must give to written wisdom its proper meed; no books prior to those of Lord Bacon carried mankind so far on the road to truth; none have obtained so thorough a triumph over arrogant usurpation without seeking to substitute another; and he may be compared with those liberators of nations, who have given them laws by which they might govern themselves, and retained no homage but their gratitude.[225]

[217] Vol. vi., p. 210, edit. Cousin.

[218] The only authority that I can now quote for this is not
very good, that of Aubery’s Manuscripts, which I find in Seward’s
Anecdotes, iv. 328. But it seems not improbable. The same book
quotes Balzac as saying: “Croyons donc, pour l’amour du
Chancelier Bacon, que toutes les folies des anciens sont sages;
et tous leurs songes mystères, et de celles-là qui sont estimées
pures fables, il n’y en a pas une, quelque bizarre et
extravagante qu’elle soit, qui n’ait son fondement dans
l’histoire, _si l’on en veut croire Bacon_, et qui n’ait été
déguisée de la sorte par les sages du vieux temps, pour la rendre
plus utile aux peuples.

[219] P. 44 (1633).

[220] J’ai trouvé parfaitement beau tout ce que vous me
mandez de Bacon. Mais ne vous semble t’il pas qu’Horace qui
disoit, Visam Britannos hospitibus feros, seroit bien étonné
d’entendre un barbare discourir comme cela? Costar is said by
Bayle to have borrowed much from Bacon. La Mothe le Vayer
mentions him in his Dialogues; in fact, instances are numerous.

[221] Montagu’s Life of Bacon, p. 407. He has not
mentioned an edition at Strasburg, 1635, which is in the British
Museum.

There is also an edition, without time or place, in the catalogue
of the British Museum.

[222] Brucker, v. 95. Stewart says that “Bayle does not
give above twelve lines to Bacon;” but he calls him one of the
greatest men of his age, and the length of an article in Bayle
was never designed to be a measure of the merit of its subject.

[223] It is not uncommon to meet with persons,
especially who are or have been engaged in teaching others
dogmatically what they have themselves received in the like
manner, to whom the inductive philosophy appears a mere school of
scepticism, or at best wholly inapplicable to any subjects which
require entire conviction. A certain deduction from certain
premises is the only reasoning they acknowledge. This is
peculiarly the case with theologians, but it is also extended to
everything which is taught in a synthetic manner. Lord Bacon has
a remarkable passage on this in the 9th book De Augmentis.
Postquam articuli et principia religionis jam in sedibus suis
fuerint locata, ita ut a rationis examine penitus eximantur, tum
demum conceditur ab illis illationes derivare ac deducere,
secundum analogiam ipsorum. In rebus quidem naturalibus hoc non
tenet. Nam et ipsa principia examini subjiciuntur; per
inductionem, inquam, licet minime per syllogismum. Atque eadem
illa nullam habent cum ratione repugnantiam, ut ab eodem fonte
cum primæ propositiones, tum mediæ, deducantur. Aliter fit in
religione; ubi et primæ propositiones authopystatæ sunt, atque
per se subsistentes; et rursus non reguntur ab illa ratione quæ
propositiones consequentes deducit. Neque tamen hoc fit in
religione sola, sed etiam in aliis scientiis, tam gravioribus,
quam levioribus, ubi scilicet propositiones humanæ placita sunt,
non posita; siquidem et in illis rationis usus absolutus esse non
potest. Videmus enim in ludis, puta schaccorum, aut similibus,
priores ludi normas et leges merè positivas esse, et ad placitum;
quas recipi, non in disputationem vocari, prorsus oporteat; ut
vero vincas, et peritè lusum instituas, id artificiosum est et
rationale. Eodem modo fit et in legibus humanis; in quibus haud
paucæ sunt maximæ, ut loquuntur, hoc est, placita mera juris, quæ
auctoritate magis quam ratione nituntur, neque in disceptationem
veniunt. Quid vero sit justissimum, non absolutè, sed relativè,
hoc est ex analogiâ illarum maximarum, id demum rationale est, et
latum disputationi campum præbet. This passage, well weighed, may
show us where, why, and by whom the synthetic and syllogistic
methods have been preferred to the inductive and analytical.

[224] The De Augmentis was only once published after the
first edition, in 1638. An indifferent translation, by Gilbert
Watts, came out in 1640. No edition of Bacon’s Works was
published in England before 1730; another appeared in 1740, and
there have been several since. But they had been printed at
Frankfort in 1665. It is unnecessary to observe, that many copies
of the foreign editions were brought to this country. This is
mostly taken from Mr. Montague’s account.

[225] I have met, since this passage was written, with
one in Stewart’s Life of Reid, which seems to state the
_effects_ of Bacon’s philosophy in a just and temperate
spirit, and which I rather quote, because this writer has, by his
eulogies on that philosophy, led some to an exaggerated notion.
“The influence of Bacon’s genius on the subsequent progress of
physical discovery has been seldom duly appreciated: by some
writers almost entirely overlooked, and by others considered as
the sole cause of the reformation in science which has since
taken place. Of these two extremes, the latter certainly is the
least wide of the truth: for in the whole history of letters no
other individual can be mentioned whose exertions have had so
indisputable an effect in forwarding the intellectual progress of
mankind. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that before
the era when Bacon appeared, various philosophers in different
parts of Europe had struck into the right path; and it may
perhaps be doubted, whether any one important rule with respect
to the true method of investigation be contained in his works, of
which no hint can be traced in those of his predecessors. His
great merit lay in concentrating their feeble and scattered
lights; fixing the attention of philosophers on the
distinguishing characteristics of true and of false science, by a
felicity of illustration peculiar to himself, seconded by the
commanding powers of a bold and figurative eloquence. The method
of investigation which he recommended had been previously
followed in every instance in which any solid discovery had been
made with respect to the laws of nature; but it had been followed
accidentally and without any regular preconceived design; and it
was reserved for him to reduce to rule and method what others had
effected, either fortuitously, or from some momentary glimpse of
the truth. These remarks are not intended to detract from the
just glory of Bacon; for they apply to all those, without
exception, who have systematised the principles of any of the
arts. Indeed, they apply less forcibly to him than to any other
philosopher whose studies have been directed to objects analogous
to his; inasmuch as we know of no art of which the rules have
been reduced successfully into a didactic form, when the art
itself was as much in infancy as experimental philosophy was when
Bacon wrote.” Account of Life and writings of Reid sect. 2.

SECT. III.

_On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Descartes._

|Early life of Descartes.|

81. René Descartes was born in 1596 of an ancient family in Touraine. An inquisitive curiosity into the nature and causes of all he saw is said to have distinguished his childhood, and this was certainly accompanied by an uncommon facility and clearness of apprehension. At a very early age he entered the college of the Jesuits at La Fleche, and passed through their entire course of literature and philosophy. It was now, at the age of sixteen, as he tells us, that he began to reflect, with little satisfaction, on his studies, finding his mind beset with error, and obliged to confess that he had learned nothing but the conviction of his ignorance. Yet he knew that he had been educated in a famous school, and that he was not deemed behind his contemporaries. The ethics, the logic, even the geometry of the ancients, did not fill his mind with that clear stream of truth, for which he was ever thirsting. On leaving La Fleche, the young Descartes mingled for some years in the world, and served as a volunteer both under Prince Maurice, and in the Imperial army. Yet during this period there were intervals when he withdrew himself wholly from society, and devoted his leisure to mathematical science. Some germs also of his peculiar philosophy were already ripening in his mind.

|His beginning to philosophise.|

82. Descartes was twenty-three years old when, passing a solitary winter in his quarters at Neuburg on the Danube, he began to resolve in his mind the futility of all existing systems of philosophy, and the discrepancy of opinions among the generality of mankind, which rendered it probable that no one had yet found out the road to real science. He determined, therefore, to set about the investigation of truth for himself, erasing from his mind all preconceived judgments, as having been hastily and precariously taken up. He laid down for his guidance a few fundamental rules of logic, such as to admit nothing as true which he did not clearly perceive, and to proceed from the simpler notions to the more complex, taking the method of geometers, by which they had gone so much farther than others, for the true art of reasoning. Commencing, therefore, with the mathematical sciences, and observing that, however different in their subjects, they treat properly of nothing but the relations of quantity, he fell, almost accidentally, as his words seem to import, on the great discovery that geometrical curves may be expressed algebraically.[226] This gave him more hope of success in applying his method to other parts of philosophy.

[226] Œuvres de Descartes, par Cousin, Paris, 1824, vol. i.,
p. 143.

|He retires to Holland.|

83. Nine years more elapsed, during which Descartes, though he quitted military service, continued to observe mankind in various parts of Europe, still keeping his heart fixed on the great aim he had proposed to himself, but, as he confesses, without having framed the scheme of any philosophy beyond those of his contemporaries. He deemed his time of life immature for so stupendous a task. But at the age of thirty-three, with little notice to his friends, he quitted Paris, convinced that absolute retirement was indispensable for that rigorous investigation of first principles he now determined to institute, and retired into Holland. In this country he remained eight years so completely aloof from the distractions of the world, that he concealed his very place of residence, though preserving an intercourse of letters with many friends in France.

|His publications.|

84. In 1637 he broke upon the world with a volume containing the Discourse upon Method, the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry. It is only with the first that we are for the present concerned.[227] In this discourse, the most interesting perhaps of Descartes’ writings, on account of the picture of his life, and of the progress of his studies that it furnishes, we find the Cartesian metaphysics, which do not consist of many articles, almost as fully detailed as in any of his later works. In the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, published in Latin, 1641, these fundamental principles are laid down again more at length. He invited the criticism of philosophers on these famous Meditations. They did not refuse the challenge; and seven sets of objections, from as many different quarters, with seven replies from Descartes himself, are subjoined to the later editions of the Meditations. The Principles of Philosophy, published in Latin in 1644, contains what may be reckoned the final statement, which occupies most of the first book, written with uncommon conciseness and precision. The beauty of philosophical style which distinguished Descartes is never more seen than in this first book of the Principia, the translation of which was revised by Clerselier, an eminent friend of the author. It is a contrast at once to the elliptical brevity of Aristotle, who hints, or has been supposed to hint, the most important positions in a short clause, and to the verbose, figurative declamation of many modern metaphysicians. In this admirable perspicuity Descartes was imitated by his disciples Arnaud and Malebranche, especially the former. His unfinished posthumous treatise, the “Inquiry after Truth by Natural Reason,” is not carried farther than a partial development of the same leading principles of Cartesianism. There is consequently a great deal of apparent repetition in the works of Descartes, but such as on attentive consideration will show, not perhaps much real variance, but some new lights that had occurred to the author in the course of his reflections.[228]

[227] Id. p. 121-212.

[228] A work has lately been published, Essais Philosophiques,
suivis de la Métaphysique de Descartes resembleé et mise en
ordre, par L. A. Gruyer, 4 vols. Bruxelles, 1832. In the fourth
volume we find the metaphysical passages in the writings of
Descartes, including his correspondence, arranged methodically in
his own words, but with the omission of a large part of the
objections to the Meditations and of his replies. I did not,
however, see this work in time to make use of it.

|He begins by doubting all.|

85. In pursuing the examination of the first principles of knowledge, Descartes perceived not only that he had cause to doubt of the various opinions he had found current among men, from that very circumstance of their variety, but that the sources of all that he had received for truth themselves, namely, the senses, had afforded him no indisputable certainty. He began to recollect how often he had been misled by appearances, which had at first sight given no intimation of their fallacy, and asked himself in vain, by what infallible test he could discern the reality of external objects, or at least their conformity to his idea of them. The strong impressions made in sleep led him to inquire whether all he saw and felt might not be in a dream. It was true that there seemed to be some notions more elementary than the rest, such as extension, figure, duration, which could not be reckoned fallacious; nor could he avoid owning that, if there were not an existing triangle in the world, the angles of one conceived by the mind, though it were in sleep, must appear equal to two right angles. But even in this certitude of demonstration he soon found something deficient; to err in geometrical reasoning is not impossible: why might he not err in this; especially in a train of consequences, the particular terms of which are not at the same instant present to the mind. But above all, there might be a superior being, powerful enough and willing to deceive him. It was no kind of answer to treat this as improbable, or as an arbitrary hypothesis. He had laid down as a maxim that nothing could be received as truth which was not demonstrable, and in one place, rather hyperbolically, and indeed extravagantly in appearance, says that he made little difference between merely probable and false suppositions; meaning this, however, as we may presume, in the sense of geometers, who would say the same thing.

|His first step in knowledge.|

86. But, divesting himself thus of all belief in what the world deemed most unquestionable, plunged in an abyss, as it seemed for a time, he soon found his feet on a rock, from which he sprang upwards to an unclouded sun. Doubting all things, abandoning all things, he came to the question, what is it that doubts and denies? Something it must be; he might be deceived by a superior power, but it was he that was deceived. He felt his own existence; the proof of it was that he did feel it; that he had affirmed, that he now doubted, in a word, that he was a thinking substance. _Cogito: Ergo sum_--this famous enthymem of the Cartesian philosophy veiled in rather formal language, that which was to him, and must be to us all, the eternal basis of conviction, which no argument can strengthen, which no sophistry can impair, the consciousness of a self within, a percipient indivisible Ego.[229] The only proof of this is that it admits of no proof, that no man can pretend to doubt of his own existence with sincerity, or to express a doubt without absurd and inconsistent language.

[229] This word, introduced by the Germans, or originally perhaps
by the old Cartesians, is rather awkward, but far less so than
the English pronoun I, which is also equivocal in sound. Stewart
has adopted it as the lesser evil, and it seems reasonable not to
scruple a word so convenient, if not necessary, to express the
unity of the conscious principle. If it had been employed
earlier, I am apt to think that some great metaphysical
extravagances would have been avoided, and some fundamental
truths more clearly apprehended. Fichte is well known to have
made the grand division of _Ich_ and _Nicht Ich_, _Ego_ and _Non
Ego_, the basis of his philosophy; in other words, the difference
of subjective and objective reality.

|His mind.|

|Not sceptical.|

87. The scepticism of Descartes, it appears, which is merely provisional, is not at all similar to that of the Pyrrhonists, though some of his arguments may have been shafts from their quiver. Nor did he make use, which is somewhat remarkable, of the reasonings afterwards employed by Berkley against the material world, though no one more frequently distinguished than Descartes between the objective reality, as it was then supposed to be, of ideas in the mind, and the external or sensible reality of things. Scepticism, in fact, was so far from being characteristic of his disposition, that his errors sprang chiefly from the opposite source, little as he was aware of it, from an undue positiveness in theories which he could not demonstrate, or even render highly probable.[230]

[230] One of the rules Descartes lays down in his posthumous art
of logic, is that we ought never to busy ourselves except about
objects concerning which our understanding appears capable of
acquiring an unquestionable and certain knowledge, vol. xi., p.
204. This is at least too unlimited a proposition, and would
exclude, not indeed all probability, but all inquiries which must
by necessity end in nothing more than probability. Accordingly,
we find in the next pages, that he made little account of any
sciences but arithmetic and geometry, or such others as equal
them in certainty. “From all this,” he concludes, “we may infer,
not that arithmetic and geometry are the only sciences which we
must learn, but that he who seeks the road to truth should not
trouble himself with any object of which he cannot have as
certain a knowledge, as of arithmetical and geometrical
demonstrations.” It is unnecessary to observe what havoc this
would make with investigations, even in physics, of the highest
importance to mankind.

Beattie, in the essay on Truth, part ii. chap. 2, has made some
unfounded criticisms on the scepticism of Descartes, and
endeavours to turn into ridicule his, Cogito; ergo sum. Yet if
any one should deny his own, or our existence, I do not see how
we could refute him, were he worthy of refutation, but by some
such language; and, in fact, it is what Beattie himself says,
more paraphrastically, in answering Hume.

|He arrives at more certainty.|

88. The certainty of an existing Ego easily led him to that of the operations of the mind, called afterwards by Locke ideas of reflection, the believing, doubting, willing, loving, fearing, which he knew by consciousness, and indeed by means of which alone he knew that the Ego existed. He now proceeded a step farther; and reflecting on the simplest truths of arithmetic and geometry, saw that it was as impossible to doubt of them as of the acts of his mind. But as he had before tried to doubt even of these, on the hypothesis that he might be deceived by a superior intelligent power, he resolved to inquire whether such a power existed, and if it did, whether it could be a deceiver. The affirmative of the former, and the negative of the latter question Descartes established by that extremely subtle reasoning so much celebrated in the seventeenth century, but which has less frequently been deemed conclusive in later times. It is at least that which no man, not fitted by long practise for metaphysical researches, will pretend to embrace.

|His proof of a Deity.|

89. The substance of his argument was this. He found within himself the idea of a perfect Intelligence, eternal, infinite, necessary. This could not come from himself, nor from external things, because both were imperfect, and there could be no more in the effect than there is in the cause. And this idea requiring a cause, it could have none but an actual being, not a possible being, which is undistinguishable from mere non-entity. If, however, this should be denied, he inquires whether he, with this idea of God, could have existed by any other cause, if there were no God. Not, he argues, by himself; for, if he were the author of his own being, he would have given himself every perfection, in a word, would have been God. Not by his parents, for the same might be said of them, and so forth, if we remount to a series of productive beings. Besides this, as much power is required to preserve as to create, and the continuance of existence in the effect implies the continued operation of the cause.

|Another proof of it.|

90. With this argument, in itself sufficiently refined, Descartes blended another still more distant from common apprehension. Necessary existence is involved in the idea of God. All other beings are conceivable in their essence, as things possible; in God alone his essence and existence are inseparable. Existence is necessary to perfection; hence, a perfect being, or God, cannot be conceived without necessary existence. Though I do not know that I have misrepresented Descartes in this result of his very subtle argument, it is difficult not to treat it as a sophism. And it was always objected by his adversaries, that he inferred the necessity of the thing from the necessity of the idea, which was the very point in question. It seems impossible to vindicate many of his expressions, from which he never receded in the controversy to which his meditations gave rise. But the long habit of repeating in his mind the same series of reasonings gave Descartes, as it will always do, an inward assurance of their certainty, which could not be weakened by any objection. The former argument for the being of God, whether satisfactory or not, is to be distinguished from the present.[231]

[231] “From what is said already of the ignorance we are in of
the essence of mind, it is evident that we are not able to know
whether any mind be necessarily existent by a necessity à priori
founded in its essence, as we have showed time and space to be.
Some philosophers think that such a necessity may be demonstrated
of God from the nature of perfection. For God being infinitely,
that is, absolutely perfect, they say he must needs be
necessarily existent; because, say they, necessary existence is
one of the greatest of perfections. But I take this to be one of
those false and imaginary arguments, that are founded in the
abuse of certain terms; and of all others this word, perfection,
seems to have suffered most this way. I wish I could clearly
understand what these philosophers mean by the word perfection,
when they thus say, that necessity of existence is perfection.
Does perfection here signify the same thing that it does, when we
say that God is infinitely good, omnipotent, omniscient? Surely
perfections are properly asserted of the several powers that
attend the essences of things, and not of anything else, but in a
very unnatural and improper sense. Perfection is a term of
relation, and its sense implies a fitness or agreement to some
certain end, and most properly to some power in the thing that is
denominated perfect. The term, as the etymology of it shows, is
taken from the operation of artists. When an artist proposes to
himself to make anything that shall be serviceable to a certain
effect, his work is called more or less perfect, according as it
agrees more or less with the design of the artist. From arts, by
a similitude of sense, this word has been introduced into
morality, and signifies that quality of an agent by which it is
able to act agreeable to the end its actions tend to. The
metaphysicians who reduce everything to transcendental
considerations, have also translated this term into their
science, and use it to signify the agreement that anything has
with that idea, which it is required that thing should answer to.
This perfection, therefore, belongs to those attributes that
constitute the essence of a thing; and that being is properly
called the most perfect which has all, the best, and each the
completest in its kind of those attributes, which can be united
in one essence. Perfection, therefore, belongs to the essence of
things, and not properly to their existence; which is not a
perfection of anything, no attribute of it, but only the mere
constitution of it _in rerum natura_. Necessary existence,
therefore, which is a mode of existence, is not a perfection, it
being no attribute of the thing no more than existence is, which
is a mode of it. But it may be said, that though necessary
existence is not a perfection in itself, yet it is so in its
cause, upon account of that attribute of the entity from whence
it flows; that that attribute must of all others be the most
perfect and most excellent, which necessary existence flows from,
it being such as cannot be conceived otherwise than as existing.
But what excellency, what perfection is there in all this? Space
is necessarily existent on account of extension, which cannot be
conceived otherwise than as existing. But what perfection is
there in space upon this account, which can in no manner act on
anything, which is entirely devoid of all power, wherein I have
showed all perfections to consist? Therefore, necessary
existence, abstractedly considered, is no perfection; and,
therefore, the idea of infinite perfection does not include, and
consequently not prove, God to be necessarily existence [sic]. If
he be so, it is on account of those attributes of his essence
which we have no knowledge of.”

I have made this extract from a very short tract, called
Contemplatio Philosophica, by Brook Taylor, which I found in an
unpublished memoir of his life printed by the late Sir William
Young, in 1793. It bespeaks the clear and acute understanding of
this celebrated philosopher, and appears to me an entire
refutation of the scholastic argument of Descartes; one more fit
for the Anselms and such dealers in words, from whom it came,
than for himself.

|His deductions from this.|

91. From the idea of a perfect being, Descartes immediately deduced the truth of his belief in an external world, and in the inferences of his reason. For to deceive his creatures would be an imperfection in God; but God is perfect. Whatever, therefore, is clearly and distinctly apprehended by our reason, must be true. We have only to be on our guard against our own precipitancy and prejudice, or surrender of our reason to the authority of others. It is not by our understanding, such as God gave it to us, that we are deceived; but the exercise of our free will, a high prerogative of our nature, is often so incautious as to make us not discern truth from falsehood, and affirm or deny, by a voluntary act, that which we do not distinctly apprehend. The properties of quantity, founded on our ideas of extension and number, are distinctly perceived by our minds, and hence the sciences of arithmetic and geometry are certainly true. But when he turns his thoughts to the phenomena of external sensation, Descartes cannot wholly extricate himself from his original concession, the basis of his doubt, that the senses do sometimes deceive us. He endeavours to reconcile this with his own theory, which had built the certainty of all that we clearly hold certain on the perfect veracity of God.

|Primary and secondary qualities.|

92. It is in this inquiry that he reaches that important distinction between the primary and secondary properties of matter, the latter being modifications of the former, relative only to our apprehension, but not inherent in things, which, without being wholly new, contradicted the Aristotelian theories of the schools;[232] and he remarked that we are never, strictly speaking, deceived by our senses, but by the inferences which we draw from them.

[232] See Stewart’s First Dissertation on the Progress of
Philosophy. This writer has justly observed, that many persons
conceive _colour_ to be inherent in the object, so that the
censure of Reid on Descartes and his followers, as having
pretended to discover what no one doubted, is at least
unreasonable in this respect. A late writer has gone so far as to
say: “Nothing at first can seem a more rational, obvious, and
incontrovertible conclusion, than that the colour of a body is an
inherent quality, like its weight, hardness, &c; and that to
_see_ the object, and to see it of _its own colour_, when nothing
intervenes between our eyes and it, are one and the same thing.
Yet this is only a prejudice.” &c. Herschel’s Discourse on Nat.
Philos., p. 82. I almost even suspect that the notion of sounds
and smells being secondary or merely sensible qualities, is not
distinct in all men’s minds. But after we are become familiar
with correct ideas, it is not easy to revive prejudices in our
imagination. In the same page of Stewart’s Dissertation, he has
been led, by dislike of the university of Oxford, to misconceive,
in an extraordinary manner, a passage of Addison in the Guardian,
which is evidently a sportive ridicule of the Cartesian theory,
and is absolutely inapplicable to the Aristotelian.

93. Such is nearly the substance, exclusive of a great variety of more or less episodical theories, of the three metaphysical works of Descartes, the history of the soul’s progress from opinion to doubt, and from doubt to certainty. Few would dispute, at the present day, that he has destroyed too much of his foundations to render his superstructure stable; and to readers averse from metaphysical reflection, he must seem little else than an idle theorist, weaving cobwebs for pastime which common sense sweeps away. It is fair, however, to observe, that no one was more careful than Descartes to guard against any practical scepticism in the affairs of life. He even goes so far as to maintain, that a man having adopted any practical opinion on such grounds as seem probable should pursue it with as much steadiness as if it were founded on demonstration; observing, however, as a general rule, to choose the most moderate opinions among those which he should find current in his own country.[233]

[233] Vol. i., p. 147. Vol. iii., p. 64.

|Objections made to his Meditations.|

94. The objections adduced against the Meditations are in a series of seven. The first are by a theologian named Caterus, the second by Mersenne, the third by Hobbes, the fourth by Arnauld, the fifth by Gassendi, the sixth by some anonymous writers, the seventh by a Jesuit of the name of Bourdin. To all of these Descartes replied with spirit and acuteness. By far the most important controversy was with Gassendi, whose objections were stated more briefly, and I think with less skill, by Hobbes. It was the first trumpet in the new philosophy of an ancient war between the sensual and ideal schools of psychology. Descartes had revived, and placed in a clearer light, the doctrine of mind, as not absolutely dependent upon the senses, nor of the same nature as their objects. Stewart does not acknowledge him as the first teacher of the soul’s immateriality. “That many of the schoolmen, and that the wisest of the ancient philosophers, when they described the mind as a spirit, or as a spark of celestial fire, employed these expressions, not with any intention to materialize its essence, but merely from want of more unexceptionable language, might be shown with demonstrative evidence, if this were the proper place for entering into the discussion.”[234] But though it cannot be said that Descartes was absolutely the first who maintained the strict immateriality of the soul, it is manifest to any one who has read his correspondence, that the tenet, instead of being general, as we are apt to presume, was by no means in accordance with the common opinion of his age. The fathers, with the exception, perhaps the single one, of Augustin, had taught the corporeity of the thinking substance. Arnauld seems to consider the doctrine of Descartes as almost a novelty in modern times. “What you have written concerning the distinction between the soul and body appears to me very clear, very evident, and quite divine; and as nothing is older than truth, I have had singular pleasure to see that almost the same things have formerly been very perspicuously and agreeably handled by St. Augustin in all his tenth book on the Trinity, but chiefly in the tenth chapter.”[235] But Arnauld himself, in his objections to the Meditations, had put it as at least questionable, whether that which thinks is not something extended, which, besides the usual properties of extended substances, such as mobility and figure, has also this particular virtue and power of thinking.[236] The reply of Descartes removed the difficulty of the illustrious Jansenist, who became an ardent and almost complete disciple of the new philosophy. In a placard against the Cartesian philosophy, printed in 1647, which seems to have come from Revius, professor of theology at Leyden, it is said: “As far as regards the nature of things, nothing seems to hinder but that the soul may be either a substance, or a mode of corporeal substance.”[237] And More, who had carried on a metaphysical correspondence with Descartes, whom he professed to admire, at least at that time, above all philosophers that had ever existed, without exception of his favourite Plato, extols him after his death in a letter to Clerselier, as having best established the foundations of religion. “For the peripatetics,” he says, “pretend that there are certain substantial forms emanating from matter, and so united to it that they cannot subsist without it, to which class these philosophers refer the souls of almost all living beings, even those to which they allow sensation and thought; while the Epicureans, on the other hand, who laugh at substantial forms, ascribe thought to matter itself, so that it is M. Descartes alone of all philosophers, who has at once banished from philosophy all these substantial forms or souls derived from matter, and absolutely divested matter itself of the faculty of feeling and thinking.”[238]

[234] Dissertation, ubi suprà.

[235] Descartes, x. 138.

[236] Id. ii 14.

[237] Vol. x., p. 73.

[238] Vol. x., p. 386. Even More seems to have been perplexed at
one time by the difficulty of accounting for the knowledge and
sentiment of disembodied souls, and almost inclined to admit
their corporeity. “J’aimerois mieux dire avec les Platoniciens,
les anciens pères, et presque tous les philosophes, que les âmes
humaines, tous les génies tant bons que mauvais, sont corporels,
et que par consequent ils ont un sentiment réel, c’est à dire,
qui leur vient du corps dont ils sont revêtus.” This is in a
letter to Descartes, in 1649, which I have not read in Latin
(vol. x., p. 249). I do not quite understand whether he meant
only that the soul, when separated from the gross body, is
invested with a substantial clothing, or that there is what we
may call an interior body, a supposed monad, to which the
thinking principle is indissolubly united. This is what all
materialists mean, who have any clear notions whatever; it is a
possible, perhaps a plausible, perhaps even a highly probable,
hypothesis, but one which will not prove their theory. The former
seems almost an indispensable supposition, if we admit
sensibility to phenomena at all in the soul after death; but it
is rather, perhaps, a theological than a metaphysical speculation.

|Theory of memory and imagination.|

95. It must be owned that the firm belief of Descartes in the immateriality of the Ego or thinking principle, was accompanied with what in later times would have been deemed rather too great concessions to the materialists. He held the imagination and the memory to be portions of the brain, wherein the images of our sensations are bodily preserved; and even assigned such a motive force to the imagination, as to produce those involuntary actions which we often perform, and all the movements of brutes. “This explains how all the motions of all animals arise, though we grant them no knowledge of things, but only an imagination entirely corporeal, and how all those operations which do not require the concurrence of reason are produced in us.” But the whole of his notions as to the connexion of the soul and body, and indeed all his physiological theories, of which he was most enamoured, do little credit to the Cartesian philosophy. They are among those portions of his creed which have lain most open to ridicule, and which it would be useless for us to detail. He seems to have expected more advantage to psychology from anatomical researches than in that state of the science, or even probably in any future state of it, anatomy could afford. When asked once where was his library, he replied, showing a calf he was dissecting, This is my library.[239] His treatise on the passions, a subject so important in the philosophy of the human mind, is made up of crude hypotheses, or at best irrelevant observations, on their physical causes and concomitants.

[239] Descartes was very fond of dissection: C’est un exercise où
je me suis souvent occupé depuis onze ans, et je crois qu’il n’y
a guère de médecins qui y ait regardé de si près que moi. Vol.
viii., p. 100., also p. 174 and 180.

|Seat of soul in pineal gland.|

96. It may be considered as a part of this syncretism, as we may call it, of the material and immaterial hypothesis, that Descartes fixed the seat of the soul in the conarion, or pineal gland, which he selected as the only part of the brain which is not double. By some mutual communication which he did not profess to explain, though later metaphysicians have attempted to do so, the unextended intelligence, thus confined to a certain spot, receives the sensations which are immediately produced through impressions on the substance of the brain. If he did not solve the problem, be it remembered that the problem has never since been solved. It was objected by a nameless correspondent, who signs himself Hyperaspistes, that the soul being incorporeal could not leave by its operations a trace on the brain, which his theory seemed to imply. Descartes answered, in rather a remarkable passage, that as to things purely intellectual, we do not, properly speaking, remember them at all, as they are equally original thoughts every time they present themselves to the mind, except that they are habitually joined as it were, and associated with certain names, which being bodily, make us remember them.[240]

[240] This passage I must give in French, finding it very
obscure, and having translated more according to what I guess
than literally. Mais pour ce qui est des choses purement
intellectuelles, à proprement parler on n’en aucun ressouvenir;
et la première fois qu’elles se présentent à l’esprit, on les
pense aussi bien que la seconde, si ce n’est peut-être qu’elles
ont coûtume d’être jointes et comme attachées a certains noms
qui, étant corporels, font que nous nous ressouvenons aussi
d’elles. Vol. viii., p. 271.

|Gassendi’s attacks on the Meditations.|

97. If the orthodox of the age were not yet prepared for a doctrine which seemed so favourable at least to natural religion as the immateriality of the soul, it may be readily supposed, that Gassendi, like Hobbes, had imbibed too much of the Epicurean theory to acquiesce in the spiritualising principles of his adversary. In a sportive style, he addresses him, _O anima!_ and Descartes, replying more angrily, retorts upon him the name _O caro!_ which he frequently repeats. Though we may lament such unhappy efforts at wit in these great men, the names do not ill represent the spiritual and carnal philosophies; the school that produced Leibnitz, Kant, and Stewart, contrasted with that of Hobbes, Condillac, and Cabanis.

|Superiority of Descartes.|

98. It was a matter of course that the vulnerable passages of the six Meditations would not escape the spear of so skilful an antagonist as Gassendi. But many of his objections appear to be little more than cavils; and upon the whole, Descartes leaves me with the impression of his great superiority in metaphysical acuteness. It was indeed impossible that men should agree, who persisted in using a different definition of the important word, _idea_; and the same source of interminable controversy has flowed ever since for their disciples. Gassendi adopting the scholastic maxim, “Nothing is in the understanding, which has not been in the sense,” carried it so much farther than those from whom it came that he denied anything to be an idea but what was imagined by the mind. Descartes repeatedly desired both him and Hobbes, whose philosophy was built on the same notion, to remark that he meant by idea, whatever can be conceived by the understanding, though not capable of being represented by the imagination.[241] Thus we imagine a triangle, but we can only conceive a figure of a thousand sides; we know its existence, and can reason about its properties, but we have no image whatever in the mind, by which we can distinguish such a polygon from one of a smaller or greater number of sides. Hobbes, in answer to this, threw out a paradox which he has not, at least in so unlimited a manner, repeated, that by reason, that is, by the process of reasoning, we can infer nothing as to the nature of things, but only as to their names.[242] It is singular that a man conversant at least with the elements of geometry should have fallen into this error. For it does not appear that he meant to speak only of natural substances, as to which his language might seem to be a bad expression of what was afterwards clearly shown by Locke. That the understanding can conceive and reason upon that which the imagination cannot delineate, is evident not only from Descartes’ instance of a polygon, but more strikingly by the whole theory of infinites, which are certainly somewhat more than bare words, whatever assistance words may give us in explaining them to others or to ourselves.[243]

[241] Par le nom d’idée, il veut seulement qu’on entende ici les
images des choses matérielles dépeintes en la fantaisie
corporelle; et cela étant supposé, il lui est aisé de montrer
qu’on ne peut avoir propre et véritable idée de Dieu ni d’un
ange; mais j’ai souvent averti, et principalement en celui là
même, que je prends le nom d’idée pour tout ce qui est conçu
immédiatement par l’esprit; en sorte que, lorsque je veux et que
je crains, parce que je conçois en même temps que je veux et que
je crains, ce vouloir et cette crainte sont mis par moi en nombre
des idées; et je me suis servi de ce mot, parce qu’il étoit déjà
communément reçu par les philosophes pour signifier les formes
des conceptions. de l’entendement divin, encore que nous ne
reconnoissions en Dieu aucune fantaisie ou imagination
corporelle, et je n’en savois point de plus propre. Et je pense
avoir assez expliqué l’idée de Dieu pour ceux qui veulent
concevoir les sens que je donne à mes paroles; mais pour ceux qui
s’attachent à les entendre autrement que je ne fais, je ne le
pourrais jamais assez. Vol. i., p. 404. This is in answer to
Hobbes; the objections of Hobbes, and Descartes’ replies, turn
very much on this primary difference between ideas and images,
which alone our countrymen could understand, and ideas as
intellections, conceptions, νοουμενα [nooumena], incapable of
being imagined, but not less certainly known and reasoned upon.
The French is a translation, but made by Clerselier under the eye
of Descartes, so that it may be quoted as an original.

[242] Que dirons nous maintenant si peut-être le raisonnement
n’est rien autre chose qu’un assemblage et un enchaînement de
noms par ce mot est? D’ou il s’ensuivroit que par la raison nous
ne concluons rien de tout touchant la nature des choses, mais
seulement touchant leurs appellations, c’est à dire que par elle
nous voyons simplement si nous assemblons bien ou mal les noms
des choses, selon les conventions que nous avons faites à notre
fantaisie touchant leurs significations, p. 476. Descartes merely
answered:--L’assemblage qui se fait dans le raisonnement n’est
pas celui des noms, mais bien celui des choses signifiées par les
noms; et je m’étonne que le contraire puisse venir en l’esprit de
personne. Descartes treated Hobbes, whom he did not esteem, with
less attention than his other correspondents. Hobbes could not
understand what have been called ideas of reflection, such as
fear, and thought it was nothing more than the idea of the object
feared. “For what else is the fear of a lion,” he says, “than the
idea of this lion, and the effect which it produces in the heart,
which leads us to run away? But this running is not a thought; so
that nothing of thought exists in fear but the idea of the
object.” Descartes only replied, “it is self-evident that it is
not the same thing to see a lion and fear him, that it is to see
him only,” p. 483.

[243] I suspect, from what I have since read, that Hobbes had a
different, and what seems to me a very erroneous view of
infinite, or infinitesimal quantities in geometry. For he answers
the old sophism of Zeno, Quicquid dividi potest in partes
infinitas est infinitum, in a manner which does not meet the real
truth of the case: Dividi posse in partes infinitas nihil aliud
est quam dividi posse in partes _quotcunque quis velit_. Logica
sive Computatio, c. 5., p. 38 (edit. 1667).

|Stewart’s remarks on Descartes.|

99. Dugald Stewart has justly dwelt on the signal service rendered by Descartes to psychological philosophy, by turning the mental vision inward upon itself, and accustoming us to watch the operations of our intellect, which, though employed upon ideas obtained through the senses, are as distinguishable from them as the workman from his work. He has given indeed to Descartes a very proud title, Father of the experimental philosophy of the human mind, as if he were to man what Bacon was to nature.[244] By patient observation of what passed within him, by holding his soul as it were an object in a microscope, which is the only process of a good metaphysician, he became habituated to throw away those integuments of sense which hide us from ourselves. Stewart has censured him for the paradox, as he calls it, that the _essence_ of mind consists in thinking, and that of matter in extension. That the act of thinking is as inseparable from the mind as extension is from matter, cannot indeed be proved; since, as our thoughts are successive, it is not inconceivable that there may be intervals of duration between them; but it can hardly be reckoned a paradox. But whoever should be led by the word essence to suppose that Descartes confounded the percipient thinking substance, the Ego, upon whose bosom, like that of the ocean, the waves of perception are raised by every breeze of sense, with the perception itself, or even, what is scarcely more tenable, with the reflective action, or thought; that he anticipated this strange paradox of Hume in his earliest work, from which he silently withdrew in his Essays, would not only do great injustice to one of the acutest understandings that ever came to the subject, but overlook several clear assertions of the distinction, especially in his answer to Hobbes. “The thought,” he says, “differs from that which thinks, as the mode from the substance.”[245] And Stewart has in his earliest work justly corrected Reid in this point as to the Cartesian doctrine.[246]