Chapter XXIX (1)

HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1650 TO 1700.

_Aristotelians--Logicians--Cudworth--Sketch of the Philosophy of Gassendi--Cartesianism--Port-Royal Logic--Analysis of the Search for Truth of Malebranche, and of the Ethics of Spinosa--Glanvil--Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding._

|Aristotelian metaphysics.|

1. The Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics, though shaken on every side, and especially by the rapid progress of the Cartesian theories, had not lost their hold over the theologians of the Roman church, or even the protestant universities, at the beginning of this period, and hardly at its close. Brucker enumerates several writers of that class in Germany;[754] and we find, as late as 1693, a formal injunction by the Sorbonne, that none who taught philosophy in the colleges under its jurisdiction should introduce any novelties, or swerve from the Aristotelian doctrine.[755] The Jesuits, rather unfortunately for their credit, distinguished themselves as strenuous advocates of the old philosophy, and thus lost the advantage they had obtained in philology as enemies of barbarous prejudice, and encouragers of a progressive spirit in their disciples. Rapin, one of their most accomplished men, after speaking with little respect of the Novum Organum, extols the disputations of the schools as the best method in the education of young men, who, as he fancies, have too little experience to delight in physical science.[756]

[754] Vol. iv. See his long and laborious chapter on the
Aristotelian philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; no one else seems to have done more than copy Brucker.

[755] Cum relatum esset ad Societatem (Sorbonicam) nonnullos
philosophiæ, professores, ex iis etiam aliquando qui ad
Societatem anhelant, novas quasdam doctrinas in philosophicis
sectari, minusque Aristotelicæ doctrinæ studere, quam hactenus
usurpatum fuerit in Academiâ Parisiensi, censuit Societas
injungendum esse illis, imo et iis qui docent philosophiam in
collegiis suo regimini creditis, ne deinceps novitatibus
studeant, aut ab Aristotelica doctrina deffectant. 31 Dec. 1693.
Argentré, Collectio Judiciorum, iii., 150.

[756] Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 368. He admits, however,
that to introduce more experiment and observation would be an
improvement. Du reste il y a apparence que les loix, qui ne
souffrent point d’innovation dans l’usage des choses
universellement établies, n’autoriseront point d’autre méthode
que celle qui est aujourd’hui en usage dans les universités; afin
de ne pas donner trop de licence à la passion qu’on a
naturellement pour les nouvelles opinions, dont le cours est
d’une dangereuse conséquence dans un état bien réglé; vu
particulièrement que la philosophie est un des organes dont se
sert la religion pour s’expliquer dans ses décisions.

|Their decline. Thomas White.|

2. It is a difficult and dangerous choice, in a new state of public opinion (and we have to make it at present), between that which may itself pass away, and that which must efface what has gone before. Those who clung to the ancient philosophy believed that Bacon and Descartes were the idols of a transitory fashion, and that the wisdom of long ages would regain its ascendancy. They were deceived, and their own reputation has been swept off with the systems to which they adhered. Thomas White, an English catholic priest, whose Latin appellation is Albius, endeavoured to maintain the Aristotelian metaphysics and the scholastic terminology in several works, and especially in an attack upon Glanvil’s Vanity of Dogmatizing. This book, entitled Sciri, I know only through Glanvil’s reply in his second edition, by which White appears to be a mere Aristotelian. He was a friend of Sir Kenelm Digby, who was himself, though a man of considerable talents, incapable of disentangling his mind from the Peripatetic hypotheses. The power of words indeed is so great, the illusions of what is called realism, or of believing that general terms have an objective exterior being, are so natural, and especially so bound up both with our notions of essential, especially theological, truth, and with our popular language, that no man could in that age be much censured for not casting off his fetters, even when he had heard the call to liberty from some modern voices. We find that even after two centuries of a better method, many are always ready to fall back into a verbal process of theorising.

|Logic.|

3. Logic was taught in the Aristotelian method, or rather in one which, with some change for the worse, had been gradually founded upon it. Burgersdicius, in this and in other sciences, seems to have been in repute; Smiglecius also is mentioned with praise.[757] These lived both in the former part of the century. But they were superceded, at least in England, by Wallis, whose Institutio Logicæ ad Communes Usus Accommodata was published in 1687. He claims as an improvement upon the received system, the classifying singular propositions among universals.[758] Ramus had made a third class of them, and in this he seems to have been generally followed. Aristotle, though it does not appear that he is explicit on the subject, does not rank them as particular. That Wallis is right cannot be doubted by anyone who reflects at all; but his originality we must not assert. The same had been perceived by the authors of the Port-Royal Logic; a work to which he has made no allusion.[759] Wallis claims also as his own the method of reducing hypothetical to categorical syllogisms, and proves it elaborately in a separate dissertation. A smaller treatise, still much used at Oxford, by Aldrich, Compendium Artis Logicæ, 1691, is clear and concise, but seems to contain nothing very important; and he alludes to the Art de Penser in a tone of insolence, which must rouse indignation in those who are acquainted with that excellent work. Aldrich’s censures are, in many instances, mere cavil and misrepresentation; I do not know that they are right in any.[760] Of the Art de Penser itself we shall have something to say in the course of this chapter.

[757] La Logique de Smiglecius, says Rapin, est un bel ouvrage.
The same writer proceeds to observe that the Spaniards of the
preceding century had corrupted logic by their subtleties. En se
jettant dans des spéculations creuses qui n’avoient rien de réel,
leur philosophes trouvèrent l’art d’avoir de la raison malgré le
bon sens, et de donner de la couleur, et même je ne scai quoi de
specieuse, à ce qui étoit de plus déraisonnable, p. 382. But this
must have been rather the fault of their metaphysics than of what
is strictly called logic.

[758] Atque hoc signanter notatum velim, quia novus forte hic
videar, et præter aliorum loquendi formulam hæc dicere. Nam
plerique logici propositionem quam vocant singularem, hoc est, de
subjecto individuo sive singulari, pro particulari habent, non
universali. Sed perperam hoc faciunt, et præter mentem
Aristotelis (qui, quantum memini, nunquam ejusmodi singularem,
την κατα μερος [tên kata meros] appellat aut pro tali habet) et
præter rei naturam: Non enim hic agitur de particularitate
subjecti (quod ατομον [atomon] vocat Aristotelis, non κατα μερος
[kata meros]) sed de partialitate prædicationis.... Neque ego
interim novator censendus sum qui hæc dixerim, sed illi potius
novatores qui ab Aristotelica doctrina recesserint; eoque multa
introduxerint incommoda de quibus suo loco dicetur, p. 125. He
has afterwards a separate dissertation or thesis to prove this
more at length. It seems that the Ramists held a third class of
propositions, neither universal nor particular, to which they
gave the name of _propria_, equivalent to singular.

[759] Art de Penser, part ii., chap. iii.

[760] One of Aldrich’s charges against the author of the Art de
Penser is, that he brings forward as a great discovery the
equality of the angles of a chiliagon to 1996 right angles; and
another is, that he gives as an example of a regular syllogism
one that has obviously five terms; thus expecting the Oxford
students, for whom he wrote, to believe, that Antony Arnauld
neither knew the first book of Euclid, nor the mere rudiments of
common logic.

|Stanley’s History of Philosophy.|

4. Before we proceed to those whose philosophy may be reckoned original or at least modern, a very few deserve mention who have endeavoured to maintain or restore that of antiquity. Stanley’s History of Philosophy, in 1655, is in great measure confined to biography, and comprehends no name later than Carneades. Most is derived from Diogenes Laertius; but an analysis of the Platonic philosophy is given from Alcinous, and the author has compiled one of the Peripatetic system from Aristotle himself. The doctrine of the Stoics is also elaborately deduced from various sources. Stanley on the whole brought a good deal from an almost untrodden field; but he is merely a historian, and never a critic of philosophy. He does not mention Epicurus at all, probably because Gassendi had so well written that philosopher’s life.

|Gale’s Court of Gentiles.|

5. Gale’s Court of the Gentiles, partly in 1669 and partly in later years, is incomparably a more learned work, than that of Stanley. Its aim is to prove that all heathen philosophy, whether barbaric or Greek, was borrowed from the Scriptures, or at least from the Jews. The first part is entitled Of Philology, which traces the same leading principle by means of language; the second, Of Philosophy: the third treats of the Vanity of Philosophy, and the fourth of Reformed Philosophy, “wherein Plato’s moral and metaphysic or prime philosophy is reduced to an useful form and method.” Gale has been reckoned among Platonic philosophers, and indeed he professes to find a great resemblance between the philosophy of Plato and his own. But he is a determined Calvinist in all respects, and scruples not to say, “Whatever God wills is just, because he wills it;” and again, “God willeth nothing without himself because it is just, but it is therefore just because he willeth it. The reasons of good and evil extrinsic to the divine essence are all dependent on the divine will, either decernent or legislative.”[761] It is not likely that Plato would have acknowledged such a disciple.

[761] Part iv., p. 339.

|Cudworth’s Intellectual System.|

6. A much more eminent and enlightened man than Gale, Ralph Cudworth, by his Intellectual System of the Universe, published in 1678, but written several years before, placed himself in a middle point between the declining and rising schools of philosophy; more independent of authority, and more close, perhaps, in argument than the former, but more prodigal of learning, more technical in language, and less conversant with analytical and inductive processes of reasoning than the latter. Upon the whole, however, he belongs to the school of antiquity, and probably his wish was to be classed with it. Cudworth was one of those whom Hobbes had roused by the atheistic and immoral theories of the Leviathan; nor did any antagonist perhaps of that philosopher bring a more vigorous understanding to the combat. This understanding was not so much obstructed in its own exercise by a vast erudition, as it was sometimes concealed by it from the reader. Cudworth has passed more for a recorder of ancient philosophy, than for one who might stand in a respectable class among philosophers; and his work, though long, being unfinished, as well as full of digression, its object has not been fully apprehended.

|Its object.|

7. This object was to establish the liberty of human actions against the fatalists. Of these he lays it down that there are three kinds, the first atheistic; the second admitting a Deity, but one acting necessarily and without moral perfections; the third granting the moral attributes of God, but asserting all human actions to be governed by necessary laws which he has ordained. The first book of the Intellectual System, which alone is extant, relates wholly to the proofs of the existence of a Deity against the atheistic fatalists, his moral nature being rarely or never touched; so that the greater and more interesting part of the work, for the sake of which the author projected it, was never written, unless we take for fragments of it some writings of the author preserved in the British Museum.

|Sketch of it.|

8. The first chapter contains an account of the ancient corpuscular philosophy, which, till corrupted by Leucippus and Democritus, Cudworth takes to have been not only theistic, but more consonant to theistic principles than any other. These two, however, brought in a fatalism grounded on their own atomic theory. In the second chapter he states very fully and fairly all their arguments, or rather all that have ever been adduced on the atheistic side. In the third he expatiates on the hylozoic atheism, as he calls it, of Strato, which accounts the world to be animated in all its parts but without a single controlling intelligence, and adverts to another hypothesis, which gives a vegetable but not sentient life to the world.

|His plastic nature.|

9. This leads Cudworth to his own famous theory of a plastic nature, a device to account for the operations of physical laws without the continued agency of the Deity. Of this plastic energy he speaks in rather a confused and indefinite manner giving it in one place a sort of sentient life, or what he calls “a drowsy unawakened cogitation,” and always treating it as an entity or real being. This language of Cudworth, and indeed the whole hypothesis of a plastic nature, was unable to stand the searching eye of Bayle, who, in an article of his dictionary, pointed out its unphilosophical and dangerous assumptions. Le Clerc endeavoured to support Cudworth against Bayle, but with little success.[762] It has had, however, some partizans, though rather among physiologists than metaphysicians. Grew adopted it to explain vegetation; and the plastic nature differs only, as I conceive, from what Hunter and Abernethy have called life in organised bodies by its more extensive agency; for if we are to believe that there is a vital power, not a mere name for the sequence of phenomena, which marshals the molecules of animal and vegetable substance, we can see no reason why a similar energy should not determine other molecules to assume geometrical figures in crystallization. The error or paradox consists in assigning a real unity of existence, and a real power of causation, to that which is unintelligent.

[762] Biblothèque Choisie, vol. v.

|His account of old philosophy.|

10. The fourth chapter of the Intellectual System, of vast length, and occupying half the entire work, launches into a sea of old philosophy, in order to show the unity of a supreme God to have been a general belief of antiquity. “In this fourth chapter,” he says “we were necessitated by the matter itself to run out into philology and antiquity, as also in the other parts of the book we do often give an account of the doctrine of the ancients; which, however, some over-severe philosophers may look upon fastidiously or undervalue and depreciate, yet as we conceived it often necessary, so possibly may the variety thereof not be ungrateful to others, and this mixture of philology throughout the whole sweeten and allay the severity of philosophy to them; the main thing which the book pretends to, in the meantime, being the philosophy of religion. But for our part, we neither call philology, nor yet philosophy, our mistress, but serve ourselves of either as occasion requireth.”[763]

[763] Preface, p. 37.

11. The whole fourth chapter may be reckoned one great episode, and as it contains a store of useful knowledge on ancient philosophy, it has not only been more read than the remaining part of the Intellectual System, but has been the cause, in more than one respect, that the work has been erroneously judged. Thus, Cudworth has been reckoned, by very respectable authorities, in the Platonic school of philosophers, and even in that of the later Platonists; for which I perceive little other reason than that he has gone diffusely into a supposed resemblance between the Platonic and Christian Trinity. Whether we agree with him in this or no, the subject is insulated, and belongs only to the history of theological opinion; in Cudworth’s own philosophy he appears to be an eclectic, not the vassal of Plato, Plotinus, or Aristotle, though deeply versed in them all.

|His arguments against atheism.|

12. In the fifth and last chapter of the first and only book of the Intellectual System, Cudworth, reverting to the various atheistical arguments which he had stated in the second chapter, answers them at great length, and though not without much erudition, perhaps more than was requisite, yet depending chiefly on his own stores of reasoning. And inasmuch as even a second-rate philosopher ranks higher in literary precedence than the most learned reporter of other men’s doctrine, it may be unfortunate for Cudworth’s reputation that he consumed so much time in the preceding chapter upon mere learning, even though that should be reckoned more useful and valuable than his own reasonings. These, however, are frequently valuable, and, as I have intimated above, he is partially tinctured by the philosophy of his own generation, while he endeavours to tread in the ancient paths. Yet he seems not aware of the place which Bacon, Descartes, and Gassendi were to hold; and not only names them sometimes with censure, hardly with praise, but most inexcusably throws out several intimations that they had designedly served the cause of atheism. The disposition of the two former to slight the argument from final causes, though it might justly be animadverted upon, could not warrant this most uncandid and untrue aspersion. But justice was even-handed; Cudworth himself did not escape the slander of bigots; it was idly said by Dryden, that he had put the arguments against a Deity so well, that some thought he had not answered them, and if Warburton may be believed, the remaining part of the Intellectual System was never published, on account of the world’s malignity in judging of the first.[764] Probably it was never written.

[764] Warburton’s preface to Divine Legation, vol. ii.

13. Cudworth is too credulous and uncritical about ancient writings, defending all as genuine, even where his own age had been sceptical. His terminology is stiff and pedantic, as is the case with all our older metaphysicians, abounding in words, which the English language has not recognised. He is full of the ancients, but rarely quotes the schoolmen. Hobbes is the adversary with whom he most grapples; the materialism, the resolving all ideas into sensation, the low morality of that writer, were obnoxious to the animadversion of so strenuous an advocate of a more elevated philosophy. In some respects, Cudworth has, as I conceive, much the advantage; in others, he will generally be thought by our metaphysicians to want precision and logical reasoning; and, upon the whole, we must rank him, in philosophical acumen, far below Hobbes, Malebranche, and Locke, but also far above any mere Aristotelians, or retailers of Scotus and Aquinas.

|More.|

14. Henry More, though by no means less eminent than Cudworth in his own age, ought not to be placed on the same level. More fell not only into the mystical notions of the later Platonists, but even of the Cabbalistic writers. His metaphysical philosophy was borrowed in great measure from them; and though he was in correspondence with Descartes, and enchanted with the new views that opened upon him, yet we find that he was reckoned much less of a Cartesian afterwards, and even wrote against parts of the theory.[765] The most peculiar tenet of More was the extension of spirit; acknowledging and even striving for the souls’ immateriality, he still could not conceive it to be unextended. Yet it seems evident that if we give extension as well as figure, which is implied in finite extension, to the single self-conscious monad, qualities as heterogeneous to thinking as material impenetrability itself, we shall find it in vain to deny the possibility at least of the latter. Some, indeed, might question whether what we call matter is any real being at all, except as extension under peculiar conditions. But this conjecture need not here be pressed.

[765] Baillet, Vie de Descartes, liv. vii. It must be observed
that More never wholly agreed with Descartes. Thus they differed
about the omnipresence of the Deity; Descartes thought that he
was partout à raison de sa puissance, et qu’à raison de son
essence il n’a absolument aucune rélation au lieu. More, who may
be called a lover of extension, maintained a strictly local
presence. Œuvres de Descartes, vol. x., p. 239.

|Gassendi.|

|His Logic.|

15. Gassendi himself, by the extensiveness of his erudition, may be said to have united the two schools of speculative philosophy, the historical and the experimental, though the character of his mind determined him far more towards the latter. He belongs in point of time rather to the earlier period of the century; but his Syntagma Philosophicum having been published in 1658, we have deferred the review of it for this volume. This posthumous work, in two volumes folio, and nearly 1600 pages closely printed in double columns, is divided into three parts, the Logic, the Physics, and the Ethics; the second occupying more than five-sixths of the whole. The Logic is introduced by two proœmial books; one containing a history of the science from Zeno of Elea, the parent of systematic logic, to Bacon and Descartes;[766] the other, still more valuable, on the criteria of truth; shortly criticising also, in a chapter of this book, the several schemes of logic which he had merely described in the former. After stating very prolixly, as is usual with him, the arguments of the sceptics against the evidence of the senses, and those of the dogmatics, as he calls them, who refer the sole criterion of truth to the understanding, he propounds a sort of middle course. It is necessary, he observes, before we can infer truth, that there should be some sensible sign, αισθητον σημειον [aisthêton sêmeion]; for, since all the knowledge we possess is derived from the sense, the mind must first have some sensible image, by which it may be led to a knowledge of what is latent and not perceived by sense. Hence, we may distinguish in ourselves a double criterion; one by which we perceive the sign--namely, the senses; another, by which we understand through reasoning the latent thing--namely, the intellect or rational faculty.[767] This he illustrates by the pores of the skin, which we do not perceive, but infer their existence by observing the permeation of moisture.

[766] Prætereundum porro non est ob eam, quâ est, celebritatem
Organum, sive logica Francisci Baconis Verulamii. He extols Bacon
highly, but gives an analysis of the Novum Organum without much
criticism. De Logicæ Origine, c. x.

Logica Verulamii, Gassendi says in another place, tota ac per se
ad physicam, atque adeo ad veritatem notitiamve rerum germanam
habendam contendit. Præcipuè autem in eo est, ut bene imaginemur,
quatenus vult esse imprimis exuenda omnia præjudicia ac novas
deinde notiones ideasve ex novis debitèque factis experimentis
inducendas. Logica Cartesii rectè quidem Verulamii imitatione ab
eo exorditur, quod ad bene imaginandum prava prejudicia exuenda,
recta vero induenda vult, &c., p. 90.

[767] P. 81. If this passage be well attended to, it will show
how the philosophy of Gassendi has been misunderstood by those
who confound it with the merely sensual school of metaphysicians.
No one has more clearly, or more at length, distinguished the
αισθητον σημειον [aisthêton sêmeion], the sensible associated
sign, from the unimaginable objects of pure intellect, as we
shall soon see.

|His theory of ideas.|

16. In the first part of the treatise itself on Logic, to which these two books are introductory, Gassendi lays down again his favourite principle, that every idea in the mind is ultimately derived from the senses. But while what the senses transmit are only singular ideas, the mind has the faculty of making general ideas out of a number of these singular ones when they resemble each other.[768] In this part of his Logic he expresses himself clearly and unequivocally a conceptualist.

[768] P. 93.

17. The Physics were expanded with a prodigality of learning upon every province of nature. Gassendi is full of quotation, and his systematic method manifests the comprehensiveness of his researches. In the third book of the second part of the third section of the Physics, he treats of the immateriality, and, in the fourteenth, of the immortality of the soul, and maintains the affirmative of both propositions. This may not be what those who judge of Gassendi merely from his objections to the Meditations of Descartes have supposed. But a clearer insight into his metaphysical theory will be obtained from the ninth book of the same part of the Physics, entitled, De Intellectu, on the Human Understanding.

|And of the nature of the soul.|

18. In this book, after much display of erudition on the tenets of philosophers, he determines the soul to be an incorporeal substance, created by God, and infused into the body, so that it resides in it as an informing and not merely a present nature, forma informans, et non simpliciter assistens.[769] He next distinguishes intellection or understanding from imagination or perception; which is worthy of particular notice, because in his controversy with Descartes he had thrown out doubts as to any distinction between them. We have in ourselves a kind of faculty which enables us, by means of reasoning, to understand that which by no endeavours we can imagine or represent to the mind.[770] Of this the size of the sun, or innumerable other examples might be given; the mind having no idea suggested by the imagination of the sun’s magnitude, but knowing it by a peculiar process of reasoning. And hence we infer that the intellectual soul is immaterial, because it understands that which no material image presents to it, as we infer also that the imaginative faculty is material, because it employs the images supplied by sense. It is true that the intellect makes use of these sensible images, as steps towards its reasoning upon things which cannot be imagined; but the proof of its immateriality is given by this, that it passes beyond all material images, and attains a true knowledge of that whereof it has no image.

[769] P. 440.

[770] Itaque est in nobis intellectûs species, qua ratiocinando
eo provehimur, ut aliquid intelligamus, quod imaginari, vel cujus
habere obversantem imaginem, quantumcunque animi vires
contenderimus, non possimus.... After instancing the size of the
sun, possunt consimilia sexcenta afferri.... Verum quidem istud
sufficiat, ut constet quinpiam nos intelligere quod imaginari non
liceat, et intellectum ita esse distinctum a phantasia, ut cum
phantasia habeat materiales species, sub quibus res imaginatur,
non habeat tamen intellectus, sub quibus res intelligat: neque
enim ullam, v. g. habet illius magnitudinis quam in sole
intelligit; sed tantum vi propria, seu ratiocinando, eam esse in
sole magnitudinem comprehendit, ac pari modo cætera. Nempe ex hoc
efficitur, ut rem sine specie materiali intelligens, esse
immaterialis debeat; sicuti phantasia ex eo materialis arguitur,
quod materiali specie utatur. Ac utitur quidem etiam intellectus
speciebus phantasia perceptis, tanquam gradibus, ut ratiocinando
assequatur ea, quæ deinceps sine speciebus phantasmatisve
intelligit: sed hoc ipsum est quod illius immaterialitatem
arguit, quod ultra omnem speciem materialem se provehat,
quidpiamque cujus nullam habeat phantasma revera agnoscat.

19. Buhle observes that in what Gassendi has said on the power of the mind to understand what it cannot conceive, there is a forgetfulness of his principle, that nothing is in the understanding which has not been in the sense. But, unless we impute repeated contradictions to this philosopher, he must have meant that axiom in a less extended sense than it has been taken by some who have since employed it. By that which is “in the understanding,” he could only intend definite images derived from sense, which must be present before the mind can exercise any faculty, or proceed to reason up to unimaginable things. The fallacy of the sensualist school, English and French, was to conclude that we can have no knowledge of that which is not “in the understanding;” an inference true in the popular sense of words, but false in the metaphysical.

|Distinguishes ideas of reflection.|

20. There is, moreover, Gassendi proceeds, a class of reflex operations, whereby the mind understands itself and its own faculties, and is conscious that it is exercising such acts. And this faculty is superior to any that a material substance possesses; for no body can act reflexly on itself, but must move from one place to another.[771] Our observation, therefore, of our own imaginings must be by a power superior to imagination itself; for imagination is employed on the image, not on the perception of the image, since there is no image of the act of perception.

[771] Alterum est genus reflexarum actionum, quibus intellectus
seipsum, suasque functioneo intelligit, ac speciatim se
intelligere animadvertit. Videlicet hoc munus est omni facultate
corporea superius; quoniam quicquid corporeum est, ita certo
loco, sive permanenter, sive succedenter alligatum est, ut non
versus se, sed solum versus aliud diversum a se procedere possit.

21. The intellect also not only forms universal ideas, but perceives the nature of universality. And this seems peculiar to mankind; for brutes do not show anything more than a power of association by resemblance. In our own conception of an universal, it may be urged, there is always some admixture of singularity, as of a particular form, magnitude, or colour; yet we are able, Gassendi thinks, to strip the image successively of all these particular adjuncts.[772] He seems, therefore, as has been remarked above, to have held the conceptualist theory in the strictest manner, admitting the reality of universal ideas even as images present to the mind.

[772] Et ne instes in nobis quoque, dum universale concipimus,
admisceri semper aliquid singularitatis, ut certæ magnitudinis,
certæ figuræ, certi coloris, &c., experimur tamen, nisi [sic]
simul, saltem successivè spoliari à nobis naturam qualibet
speciali magnitudine, qualibet speciali figura, quolibet speciali
colore; atque ita de cæteris.

|Also intellect from imagination.|

22. Intellection being the proper operation, of the soul, it is needless to inquire whether it does this by its own nature, or by a peculiar faculty called understanding, nor should we trouble ourselves about the Aristotelian distinction of the active and passive intellect.[773] We have only to distinguish this intellection from mere conception derived from the phantasy, which is necessarily associated with it. We cannot conceive God in this life, except under some image thus supplied; and it is the same with all other incorporeal things. Nor do we comprehend infinite quantities, but have a sort of confused image of indefinite extension. This is surely a right account of the matter; and if Stewart had paid any attention to these and several other passages, he could not have so much misconceived the philosophy of Gassendi.

[773] P. 446.

23. The mind, as long as it dwells in the body, seems to have no intelligible species, except phantasms derived from sense. These he takes for impressions on the brain, driven to and fro by the animal spirits till they reach the _phantasia_, or imaginative faculty, and cause it to imagine sensible things. The soul, in Gassendi’s theory, consists of an incorporeal part or intellect, and of a corporeal part, the phantasy or sensitive soul, which he conceives to be diffused throughout the body. The intellectual soul instantly perceives, by its union with the phantasy, the images impressed upon the latter, not by impulse of these sensible and material species, but by intuition of their images in the phantasy.[774] Thus, if I rightly apprehend his meaning, we are to distinguish, first, the species in the brain, derived from immediate sense or reminiscence; secondly, the image of these conceived by the phantasy; thirdly, the act of perception in the mind itself, by which it knows the phantasy to have imagined these species, and knows also the species themselves to have, or to have had, their external archetypes. This distinction of the _animus_, or reasonable, from the _anima_, or sensitive soul, he took, as he did a great part of his philosophy, from Epicurus.

[774] Eodem momento intellectus ob intimam sui præsentiam
cohærentiamque cum phantasia rem eandem contuetur, p. 450.

24. The phantasy and intellect proceed together, so that they might appear at first to be the same faculty. Not only, however, are they different in their operation even as to objects which fall under the senses, and are represented to the mind, but the intellect has certain operations peculiar to itself. Such is the apprehensions of things which cannot be perceived by sense, as the Deity, whom, though we can only imagine as corporeal, we apprehend or understand to be otherwise.[775] He repeats a good deal of what he had before said on the distinctive province of the understanding, by which we reason on things incapable of being imagined; drawing several instances from the geometry of infinites, as in asymptotes, wherein, he says, something is always inferred by reasoning which we presume to be true, and yet cannot reach by any effort of imagination.[776]

[775] Hoc est autem præter phantasiæ cancellos, intellectûsque
ipsius proprium, potestque adeo talis apprehensio non jam
imaginatio, sed intelligentia vel intellectio dici. Non quod
intellectus non accipiat ansam ab ipsa phantasia ratiocinandi
esse aliquid ultra id, quod specie imagineve repræsentatur, neque
non simul comitantem talem speciem vel imaginationem habeat; sed
quod apprehendat, intelligatve aliquid, ad quod apprehendendum
sive percipiendum assurgere phantasia non possit, ut quæ omnino
terminetur ad corporum speciem, seu imaginem, ex qua illius
operatio imaginatio appallatur. Ibid.

[776] In quibus semper aliquid argumentando colligitur, quod et
verum esse intelligimus et imaginando non assequimur tamen.

|His philosophy misunderstood by Stewart.|

25. I have given a few extracts from Gassendi, in order to confirm what has been said, his writings being little read in England, and his philosophy not having been always represented in the same manner. De Gérando has claimed, on two occasions, the priority for Gassendi in that theory of the generation of ideas which has usually been ascribed to Locke.[777] But Stewart protests against this alledged similarity in the tenets of the French and English philosophers. “The remark,” he says, “is certainly just, if restrained to Locke’s doctrine as interpreted by the greater part of philosophers on the continent; but it is very wide of the truth, if applied to it as now explained and modified by the most intelligent of his disciples in this country. The main scope, indeed, of Gassendi’s argument against Descartes is to materialise that class of our ideas which the Lockists, as well as the Cartesians, consider as the exclusive objects of the power of _reflection_, and to show that these ideas are all ultimately resolvable into images or conceptions borrowed from things external. It is not, therefore, what is sound and valuable in this part of Locke’s system, but the errors grafted on it in the comments of some of his followers, that can justly be said to have been borrowed from Gassendi. Nor has Gassendi the merit of originality even in these errors; for scarcely a remark on the subject occurs in his works, but what is copied from the accounts transmitted to us of the Epicurean metaphysics.”[778]

[777] Histoire comparée des Systèmes (1804), vol. i., p. 301, and
Biogr. Universelle, art. Gassendi. Yet in neither of these does
M. de Gérando advert expressly to the peculiar resemblance
between the system of Gassendi and Locke, in the account they
give of ideas of reflection. He refers, however, to a more
particular essay of his own, on the Gassendian philosophy, which
I have not seen. As to Locke’s positive obligations to his
predecessor, I should be, perhaps, inclined to doubt whether he,
who was no great lover of large books, had read so unwieldy a
work as the Syntagma Philosophicum; but the abridgment of Bernier
would have sufficed.

[778] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.

26. It will probably appear to those who consider what I have quoted from Gassendi, that in his latest writings he did not differ so much from Locke, and lead the way so much to the school of the French metaphysicians of the eighteenth century as Stewart has supposed. The resemblance to the Essay on the Human Understanding, in several points, especially in the important distinction of what Locke has called ideas of reflection from those of sense, is too evident to be denied. I am at the same time unable to account in a satisfactory manner for the apparent discrepancy between the language of Gassendi in the Syntagma Philosophicum, and that which we find in his objections to the Meditations of Descartes. No great interval of time had intervened between the two works; for the correspondence with Descartes bears date in 1641, and it appears by that with Louis, Count of Angoulême, in the succeeding year, that he was already employed on the first part of the Syntagma Philosophicum.[779] Whether he urged some of his objections against the Cartesian metaphysics with a regard to victory rather than truth, or, as would be the more candid, and perhaps more reasonable hypothesis, he was induced by the acuteness of his great antagonist, to review and reform his own opinions, I must leave to the philosophical reader.[780]

[779] Gassendi Opera, vol. i., p. 130. These letters are
interesting to those who would study the philosophy of Gassendi.

[780] Baillet, in his Life of Descartes, would lead us to think
that Gassendi was too much influenced by personal motives in
writing against Descartes, who had mentioned the phenomena of
parhelia, without alluding to a dissertation of Gassendi on the
subject. The latter, it seems, owns in a letter to Rivet that he
should not have examined so closely the metaphysics of Descartes,
if he had been treated by him with as much politeness as he had
expected. Vie de Descartes, liv. vi. The retort of Descartes, O
caro! (see chap. xx. of this work, p. 497) offended Gassendi, and
caused a coldness; which, according to Baillet, Sorbière
aggravated acting a treacherous part in exasperating the mind of
Gassendi.

|Bernier’s epitome of Gassendi.|

27. Stewart had evidently little or no knowledge of the Syntagma Philosophicum. But he had seen an Abridgment of the Philosophy of Gassendi by Bernier, published at Lyons in 1678, and finding in this the doctrine of Locke on ideas of reflection, conceived that it did not faithfully represent its own original. But this was hardly a very plausible conjecture; Bernier being a man of considerable ability, an intimate friend of Gassendi, and his epitome being so far from concise that it extends to eight small volumes. Having not indeed collated the two books, but read them within a short interval of time, I can say that Bernier has given a faithful account of the philosophy of Gassendi, as it is contained in the Syntagma Philosophicum, for he takes notice of no other work; nor has he here added anything of his own. But in 1682 he published another little book, entitled, Doutes de M. Bernier sur quelques uns des principaux Chapitres de son Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi. One of these doubts relates to the existence of space; and in another place he denies the reality of eternity or abstract duration. Bernier observes, as Descartes had done, that it is vain and even dangerous to attempt a definition of evident things, such as motion, because we are apt to mistake a definition of the word for one of the thing; and philosophers seem to conceive that motion is a real being, when they talk of a billiard-ball communicating or losing it.[781]

[781] Even Gassendi has defined duration “an incorporeal flowing
extension,” which is a good instance of the success that can
attend such definitions of simple ideas.

|Process of Cartesian philosophy.|

28. The Cartesian philosophy, which its adversaries had expected to expire with its founder, spread more and more after his death, nor had it ever depended on any personal favour or popularity of Descartes, since he did not possess such except with a few friends. The churches and schools of Holland were full of Cartesians. The old scholastic philosophy became ridiculous, its distinctions, its maxims were laughed at, as its adherents complain; and probably a more fatal blow was given to the Aristotelian system by Descartes than even by Bacon. The Cartesian theories were obnoxious to the rigid class of theologians; but two parties of considerable importance in Holland, the Arminians and the Coccejans, generally espoused the new philosophy. Many speculations in theology were immediately connected with it, and it acted on the free and scrutinising spirit which began to sap the bulwarks of established orthodoxy. The Cartesians were denounced in ecclesiastical synods, and were hardly admitted to any office in the church. They were condemned by several universities, and especially by that of Leyden, in 1678, for the position that the truth of scripture must be proved by reason.[782] Nor were they less exposed to persecution in France.[783]

[782] Leyden had condemned the whole Cartesian system as early as
1651, on the ground that it was an innovation on the Aristotelian
philosophy so long received; and ordained, ut in Academia intra
Aristotelicæ philosophiæ limites, quæ hic hactenus recepta fuit,
nos contineamus, utque in posterum nec philosophiæ, neque nominis
Cartesiani in disputationibus lectionibus aut publicis aliis
exercitiis, nec pro nec contra mentio fiat. Utrecht, in 1644, had
gone farther, and her decree is couched in terms which might have
been used by anyone who wished to ridicule university prejudice
by a forgery. Rejicere novam istam philosophiam, primo quia
veteri philosophiæ, quam Academiæ toto orbi terrarum hactenus
optimo consilio docuere, adversatur, ejusque fundamenta
subvertit; deinde quia juventutem a veteri et sana philosophia
avertit, impeditque quo minus ad _culmen eruditionis provehatur_;
eo quod istius præsumptæ philosophiæ adminiculo et _technologemata
in auctorum libris professorumque lectionibus et disputationibus
usitata, percipere, nequit_; postremo quod ex eadem variæ falsæ
et absurdæ opiniones partim consignantur, partim ab improvida
juventute deduci possint pugnantes cum cæteris disciplinis et
facultatibus, atque imprimis cum orthodoxa theologia; censere
igitur et statuere omnes philosophiam in hac academia docentes
imposterum a tali instituto et incepto abstinere debere,
contentos _modica libertate dissentiendi_ in singularibus
nonnullis opinionibus ad aliarum celebrium Academiarum exemplum
hic usitata, ita ut veteris et receptæ philosophiæ fundamenta non
labefactent. Tepel. Hist. Philos. Cartesianæ, p. 75.

[783] An account of the manner in which the Cartesians were
harassed through the Jesuits is given by M. Cousin, in the
Journal des Sçavans, March, 1838.

29. The Cartesian philosophy, in one sense, carried in itself the seeds of its own decline; it was the Scylla of many dogs; it taught men to think for themselves, and to think often better than Descartes had done. A new eclectic philosophy, or rather the genuine spirit of free inquiry, made Cartesianism cease as a sect, though it left much that had been introduced by it. We owe thanks to these Cartesians of the seventeenth century for their strenuous assertion of reason against prescriptive authority: the latter part of this age was signalised by the overthrow of a despotism which had fought every inch in its retreat, and it was manifestly after a struggle, on the continent, with this new philosophy, that it was ultimately vanquished.[784]

[784] For the fate of the Cartesian philosophy in the life of its
founder, see the life of Descartes by Baillet, 2 vols., in
quarto, which he afterwards abridged in 12mo. After the death of
Descartes, it may be best traced by means of Brucker. Buhle, as
usual, is a mere copyist of his predecessor. He has, however,
given a fuller account of Regis. A contemporary History of
Cartesian Philosophy by Tepel contains rather a neatly written
summary of the controversies it excited both in the lifetime of
Descartes and for a few years afterwards.

|La Forge. Regis.|

30. The Cartesian writers of France, the Low Countries, and Germany, were numerous and respectable. La Forge of Saumur first developed the theory of occasional causes to explain the union of soul and body, wherein he was followed by Geulinx, Regis, Wittich, and Malebranche.[785] But this and other innovations displeased the stricter Cartesians who did not find them in their master. Clauberg in Germany, Clerselier in France, Le Grand in the Low Countries, should be mentioned among the leaders of the school. But no one has left so comprehensive a statement and defence of Cartesianism, as Jean Silvain Regis, whose système de la Philosophie, in three quarto volumes, appeared at Paris in 1690. It is divided into four parts, on Logic, Metaphysics, Physics, and Ethics. In the three latter, Regis claims nothing as his own except some explanations, “All that I have said, being due to M. Descartes, whose method and principles I have followed, even in explanations that are different from his own.” And in his Logic he professes to have gone little beyond the author of the Art de Penser.[786] Notwithstanding this rare modesty, Regis is not a writer unworthy of being consulted by the studious of philosophy, nor deficient in clearer and fuller statements than will always be found in Descartes. It might even be said that he has many things which would be sought in vain through his master’s writings, though I am unable to prove that they might not be traced in those of the intermediate Cartesians. Though our limits will not permit any further account of Regis, I will give a few passages in a note.[787]

[785] Tennemann (Manuel de la Philosophie, ii., 99.) ascribes
this theory to Geulinx. See also Brucker, v. 704.

[786] It is remarkable that Regis says nothing about figures and
modes of syllogism: Nous ne dirons rien des figures ne des
syllogismes en général; car bien que tout cela puisse servir de
quelque chose pour la spéculation de la logique, il n’est au
moins d’aucun usage pour la pratique, laquelle est l’unique but
que nous nous sommes proposés dans ce traité, p. 37.

[787] Regis, in imitation of his master, and perhaps with more
clearness, observes that our knowledge of our own existence is
not derived from reasoning, mais par une connoissance simple et
intérieure, qui précède toutes les connoissances acquisés, et qui
j’appelle _conscience_. En effet, quand je dis que je connais ou
que je crois connoître, ce _je_ presuppose lui-même mon
existence, étant impossible que je connoisse, ou seulement que je
croye connoître et que je ne sois pas quelque chose d’existant,
p. 68. The Cartesian paradox, as it has been deemed, that
thinking is the essence of the soul, Regis has explained away.
After coming to the conclusion, Je suis donc une pensée, he
immediately corrects himself: Cependant je crains encore de me
définir mal, quand je dis que je suis une pensée, qui a la
propriété de douter et d’avoir de la certitude; car quelle
apparence y a t’il que ma nature, qui doit être une chose fixe et
permanente, consiste dans la pensée, puisque je sais par
expérience que mes pensées sont dans un flux continuel, et que je
ne pense jamais à la même chose deux momens de suite? mais quand
je considère la difficulté de plus près, je conçois aisément
qu’elle vient de ce que le mot de _pensée_ est équivoque, et que
je m’en sers indifféremment pour signifier la pensée qui
constitue ma nature, et pour designer les différentes manières
d’être de cette pensée; ce qui est une erreur extrême, car il y a
cette différence entre la pensée qui constitue ma nature, et les
pensées, qui n’en sont que les manières d’être, que la première
est une pensée fixe et permanente, et que les autres sont des
pensées changeantes et passagères. C’est pourquoi, afin de donner
une idée exacte de ma nature, je dirai que je suis une pensée qui
existe en elle-même, et qui est le sujet de toutes mes manières
de penser. Je dis que je suis une pensée pour marquer ce que la
pensée qui constitute ma nature à de commun avec la pensée en
général qui comprend sous soi toutes les manières particulières
de penser: et j’ajoute, qui existe en elle-même, et qui est le
sujet de différentes manières de penser, pour designer ce que
cette pensée a de particulier que la distingue de la pensée en
général, vu qu’elle n’existe que dans l’entendement de celui qui
la conçoit, ainsi que toutes les autres natures universelles,
p. 70.

Every mode supposes a substance wherein it exists. From this
axiom Regis deduces the objective being of space, because we have
the ideas of length, breadth, and depth, which cannot belong to
ourselves, our souls having none of these properties; nor could
the idea be suggested by a superior being, if space did not
exist, because they would be the representations of non entity,
which is impossible. But this transcendental proof is too subtle
for the world.

It is an axiom of Regis that we only know things without us by
means of ideas, and that things of which we have no ideas, are in
regard to us as if they did not exist at all. Another axiom is
that all ideas, considered in respect to their representative
property, depend on objects as their types, or _causes
exemplaires_. And a third, that the “cause exemplaire” of ideas
must contain all the properties which the ideas represent. These
axioms, according to him, are the bases of all certainty in
physical truth. From the second axiom he deduces the objectivity
or “cause exemplaire” of his idea of a perfect being; and his
proof seems at least more clearly put than by Descartes. Every
idea implies an objective reality; for otherwise there would be
an effect without a cause. In this we have the sophisms and
begging of questions of which we may see many instances in
Spinosa.

In the second part of the first book of his metaphysics, Regis
treats of the union of soul and body, and concludes that the
motions of the body only act on the soul by a special will of
God, who has determined to produce certain thoughts
simultaneously with certain bodily motions, p. 124. God is the
efficient first cause of all effects, his creatures are but
secondarily efficient. But as they act immediately, we may
ascribe all model beings to the efficiency of second causes. And
he prefers this expression to that of occasional causes, usual
among the Cartesians, because he fancies the latter rather
derogatory to the fixed will of God.

|Huet’s Censure of Cartesianism.|

31. Huet, bishop of Avranches, a man of more general erudition than philosophical acuteness, yet not quite without this, arraigned the whole theory in his Censura Philosophiæ Cartesianæ. He had been for many years, as he tells us, a favourer of Cartesianism, but his retractation is very complete. It cannot be denied that Huet strikes well at the vulnerable parts of the Cartesian metaphysics, and exposes their alternate scepticism and dogmatism with some justice. In other respects he displays an inferior knowledge of the human mind and of the principles of reasoning to Descartes. He repeats Gassendi’s cavil that, Cogito, ergo sum, involves the truth of Quod cogitat, est. The Cartesians, Huet observes, assert the major, or universal, to be deduced from the minor; which, though true in things known by induction, is not so in propositions necessarily known, or as the schools say, à priori, as that the whole is greater than its part. It is not, however, probable that Descartes would have extended his reply to Gassendi’s criticism so far as this; some have referred our knowledge of geometrical axioms to experience, but this seems not agreeable to the Cartesian theory.

|Port-Royal Logic.|

32. The influence of the Cartesian philosophy was displayed in a treatise of deserved reputation, L’Art de Penser, often called the Port-Royal Logic. It was the work of Antony Arnauld, with some assistance, perhaps, by Nicole. Arnauld was not an entire Cartesian; he had himself been engaged in controversy with Descartes; but his understanding was clear and calm, his love of truth sincere, and he could not avoid recognising the vast superiority of the new philosophy to that received in the schools. This logic accordingly is perhaps the first regular treatise on that science that contained a protestation, though in very moderate language, against the Aristotelian method. The author tells us that after some doubt he had resolved to insert a few things rather troublesome and of little value, such as the rules of conversion and the demonstration of the syllogistic figures, chiefly as exercises of the understanding, for which difficulties are not without utility. The method of syllogism itself he deems little serviceable in the discovery of truth; while many things dwelt upon in books of logic, such as the ten categories, rather injure than improve the reasoning faculties, because they accustom men to satisfy themselves with words, and to mistake a long catalogue of arbitrary definitions for real knowledge. Of Aristotle he speaks in more honourable terms than Bacon had done before, or than Malebranche did afterwards; acknowledging the extraordinary merit of some of his writings, but pointing out with an independent spirit his failings as a master in the art of reasoning.