[801] C. 9.

60. The sixth and last book announces a method of directing our pursuit of truth, by which we may avoid the many errors to which our understandings are liable. It promises to give them all the perfection of which our nature is capable, by prescribing the rules we should invariably observe. But it must, I think, be confessed that there is less originality in this method than we might expect. We find, however, many acute and useful, if not always novel, observations on the conduct of the understanding, and it may be reckoned among the books which would supply materials for what is still wanting to philosophical literature, an ample and useful logic. We are so frequently inattentive, he observes, especially to the pure ideas of the understanding, that all resources should be employed to fix our thoughts. And for this purpose we may make use of the passions, the senses, or the imagination, but the second with less danger than the first, and the third than the second. Geometrical figures he ranges under the aids supplied to the imagination rather than to the senses. He dwells much at length on the utility of geometry in fixing our attention, and of algebra in compressing and arranging our thoughts. All sciences, he well remarks, and I do not know that it had been said before, which treat of things distinguishable by more or less in quantity, and which consequently may be represented by extension, are capable of illustration by diagrams. But these, he conceives, are inapplicable to moral truths, though sure consequences may be derived from them. Algebra, however, is far more useful in improving the understanding than geometry, and is in fact, with its sister arithmetic, the best means that we possess.[802] But as men like better to exercise the imagination than the pure intellect, geometry is the more favourite study of the two.

[802] L. vi., c. 4. All conceptions of abstract ideas, he justly remarks in another place, are accompanied with some imagination, though we are often not aware of it; because these ideas have no natural images or traces associated with them, but such only as the will of man or chance has given. Thus, in analysis, however general the ideas, we use letters and signs, always associated with the ideas of the things, though they are not really related, and for this reason do not give us false and confused notions. Hence, he thinks, the ideas of things which can only be perceived by the understanding, may become associated with the traces on the brain, l. v., c. 2. This is evidently as applicable to language as it is to algebra.

Cudworth has a somewhat similar remark in his Immutable Morality, that the cogitations we have of corporeal things are usually, in his technical style, both noematical and phantasmatical together, the one being as it were the soul, and the other the body of them. “Whenever we think of a phantasmatical universal or universalised phantasm, or a thing which we have no clear intellection of (as for example of the nature of a rose in general), there is a complication of something noematical and something phantasmatical together; for phantasms themselves as well as sensations are always individual things.” P. 143.

Character of Malebranche. 61. Malebranche may perhaps be thought to have occupied too much of our attention at the expense of more popular writers. But for this very reason, that the Recherche de la Vérité is not at present much read, I have dwelt long on a treatise of so great celebrity in its own age, and which, even more perhaps than the metaphysical writings of Descartes, has influenced that department of philosophy. Malebranche never loses sight of the great principle of the soul’s immateriality, even in his long and rather hypothetical disquisitions on the instrumentality of the brain in acts of thought; and his language is far less objectionable on this subject than that of succeeding philosophers. He is always consistent and clear in distinguishing the soul itself from its modifications and properties. He knew well and had deeply considered the application of mathematical and physical science to the philosophy of the human mind. He is very copious and diligent in illustration, and very clear in definition. His principal errors, and the sources of them in his peculiar temperament, have appeared in the course of these pages. And to these we may add his maintaining some Cartesian paradoxes, such as the system of vortices, and the want of sensation in brutes. The latter he deduced from the immateriality of a thinking principle, supposing it incredible, though he owns it had been the tenet of Augustin, that there could be an immaterial spirit in the lower animals, and also from the incompatibility of any unmerited suffering with the justice of God.[803] Nor was Malebranche exempt from some prejudices of scholastic theology; and though he generally took care to avoid its technical language, is content to repel the objection to his denial of all secondary causation from its making God the sole author of sin, by saying that sin being a privation of righteousness, is negative, and consequently requires no cause.

[803] This he had borrowed from a maxim of Augustin: sub justo Deo quisquam nisi mereatur, miser esse non potest; whence, it seems that father had inferred the imputation of original sin to infants; a happy mode of escaping the difficulty.

Compared with Pascal. 62. Malebranche bears a striking resemblance to his great contemporary Pascal, though they were not, I believe, in any personal relation to each other, nor could either have availed himself of the other’s writings. Both of ardent minds, endowed with strong imagination and lively wit, sarcastic, severe, fearless, disdainful of popular opinion and accredited reputations; both imbued with the notion of a vast difference between the original and actual state of man, and thus solving many phenomena of his being; both, in different modes and degrees, sceptical, and rigorous in the exaction of proof; both undervaluing all human knowledge beyond the regions of mathematics; both of rigid strictness in morals, and a fervid enthusiastic piety. But in Malebranche there is a less overpowering sense of religion; his eye roams unblenched in the light, before which that of Pascal had been veiled in awe; he is sustained by a less timid desire of truth, by greater confidence in the inspirations that are breathed into his mind; he is more quick in adopting a novel opinion, but less apt to embrace a sophism in defence of an old one; he has less energy, but more copiousness and variety.

Arnauld on true and false ideas. 63. Arnauld, who, though at first in personal friendship with Malebranche, held no friendship in a balance with his rigid love of truth, combated the chief points of the other’s theory in a treatise on true and false ideas. This work I have never had the good fortune to see; it appears to assail a leading principle of Malebranche, the separate existence of ideas, as objects in the mind independent and distinguishable from the sensation itself. Arnauld maintained, as Reid and others have since done, that we do not perceive or feel ideas, but real objects, and thus led the way to a school which has been called that of Scotland, and has had a great popularity among our later metaphysicians. It would require a critical examination of his work, which I have not been able to make, to determine precisely what were the opinions of this philosopher.[804]

[804] Brucker. Buhle. Reid’s Intellectual Powers.

64. The peculiar hypothesis of Malebranche, that we see all things in God, was examined by Locke in a short piece, contained in the collection of his works. It will readily be conceived that two philosophers, one eminently mystical and endeavouring upon this highly transcendental theme to grasp in his mind and express in his language something beyond the faculties of man, the other as characteristically averse to mystery, and slow to admit any thing without proof, would have hardly any common ground even to fight upon. Locke, therefore, does little else than complain that he cannot understand what Malebranche has advanced; and most of his readers will probably find themselves in the same position.

Norris. 65. He had, however, an English supporter of some celebrity in his own age, Norris; a disciple, and one of the latest we have had, of the Platonic school of Henry More. The principal metaphysical treatise of Norris, his Essay on the Ideal World, was published in two parts, 1701 and 1702. It does not therefore come within our limits. Norris is more thoroughly Platonic than Malebranche, to whom, however, he pays great deference, and adopts his fundamental hypothesis on seeing all things in God. He is a writer of fine genius, and a noble elevation of moral sentiments, such as predisposes men for the Platonic schemes of theosophy. He looked up to Augustin with as much veneration as to Plato, and respected more, perhaps, than Malebranche, certainly more than the generality of English writers, the theological metaphysicians of the schools. With these he mingled some visions of a later mysticism. But his reasonings will seldom bear a close scrutiny.

Pascal. 66. In the Thoughts of Pascal we find many striking remarks on the logic of that science with which he was peculiarly conversant, and upon the general foundations of certainty. He had reflected deeply upon the sceptical objections to all human reasoning, and, though sometimes out of a desire to elevate religious faith at its expense, he seems to consider them unanswerable, he was too clear-headed to believe them just. “Reason,” he says, “confounds the dogmatists, and nature the sceptics.”[805] “We have an incapacity of demonstration, which one cannot overcome; we have a conception of truth which the others cannot disturb.”[806] He throws out a notion of a more complete method of reasoning than that of geometry, wherein everything shall be demonstrated, which, however, he holds to be unattainable;[807] and perhaps on this account he might think the cavils of pyrrhonism invincible by pure reason. But as he afterwards admits that we may have a full certainty of propositions that cannot be demonstrated, such as the infinity of number and space, and that such incapability of direct proof is rather a perfection than a defect, this notion of a greater completeness in evidence seems neither clear nor consistent.[808]

[805] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 205. Il faut que chacun prenne parti, et se range nécessairement ou au dogmatisme, ou au pyrrhonisme; car qui penseroit demeurer neutre seroit pyrrhonien par excellence; cette neutralité est l’essence du pyrrhonisme, p. 204. I do not know that I understand this; is it not either a self-evident proposition or a sophism?

[806] P. 208.

[807] Pensées de Pascal, part i., art. 2.

[808] Comme la cause qui les rend incapables de démonstration n’est pas leur obscurité, mais au contraire leur extrême évidence, ce manque de preuve n’est pas un défaut, mais plutôt une perfection.

67. Geometry, Pascal observes, is almost the only subject, as to which we find truths wherein all men agree. And one cause of this is that geometers alone regard the true laws of demonstration. These as enumerated by him are eight in number. 1. To define nothing which cannot be expressed in clearer terms than those in which it is already expressed. 2. To leave no obscure or equivocal terms undefined. 3. To employ in the definition no terms not already known. 4. To omit nothing in the principles from which we argue unless we are sure it is granted. 5. To lay down no axiom which is not perfectly evident. 6. To demonstrate nothing which is as clear already as we can make it. 7. To prove everything in the least doubtful, by means of self-evident axioms, or of propositions already demonstrated. 8. To substitute mentally the definition instead of the thing defined. Of these rules, he says, the first, fourth, and sixth are not absolutely necessary in order to avoid error, but the other five are indispensable. Yet, though they may be found in books of logic, none but the geometers have paid any regard to them. The authors of these books seem not to have entered into the spirit of their own precepts. All other rules than those he has given are useless or mischievous; they contain, he says, the whole art of demonstration.[809]

[809] Œuvres de Pascal, i., 66.

68. The reverence of Pascal, like that of Malebranche, for what is established in religion does not extend to philosophy. We do not find in them, as we may sometimes perceive in the present day, all sorts of prejudices against the liberties of the human mind clustering together, like a herd of bats, by an instinctive association. He has the same idea as Bacon, that the ancients were properly the children among mankind. Not only each man, he says, advances daily in science, but all men collectively make a constant progress, so that all generations of mankind during so many ages may be considered as one man, always subsisting and always learning; and the old age of this universal man is not to be sought in the period next to his birth, but in that which is most removed from it. Those we call ancients were truly novices in all things; and we who have added to all they knew the experience of so many succeeding ages, have a better claim to that antiquity which we revere in them. In this, with much ingenuity and much truth, there is a certain mixture of fallacy, which I shall not wait to point out.

69. The genius of Pascal was admirably fitted for acute observation on the constitution of human nature, if he had not seen everything through a refracting medium of religious prejudice. When this does not interfere to bias his judgment, he abounds with fine remarks, though always a little tending towards severity. One of the most useful and original is the following: “When we would show anyone that he is mistaken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject, for his view of it is generally right on this side, and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case. For we are less ashamed of not having seen the whole, than of being deceived in what we do see; and this may perhaps arise from an impossibility of the understanding’s being deceived in what it does see, just as the perceptions of the senses, as such, must be always true.”[810]

[810] Id., p. 149. Though Pascal here says that the perceptions of the senses are always true, we find the contrary asserted in other passages; he is not uniformly consistent with himself.

Spinosa’s ethics. 70. The Cartesian philosophy has been supposed to have produced a metaphysician very divergent in most of his theory from that school, Benedict Spinosa. No treatise is written in a more rigidly geometrical method than his Ethics. It rests on definitions and axioms, from which the propositions are derived in close, brief, and usually perspicuous demonstrations. The few explanations he has thought necessary are contained in scholia. Thus a fabric is erected, astonishing and bewildering in its entire effect, yet so regularly constructed, that the reader must pause and return on his steps to discover an error in the workmanship, while he cannot also but acknowledge the good faith and intimate persuasion of having attained the truth, which the acute and deep-reflecting author everywhere displays.

Its general originality. 71. Spinosa was born in 1632; we find by his correspondence with Oldenburg, in 1661, that he had already developed his entire scheme, and in that with De Vries in 1663, the propositions of the Ethics are alluded to numerically, as we now read them.[811] It was therefore the fruit of early meditation, at its fearlessness, its general disregard of the slow process of observation, its unhesitating dogmatism, might lead us to expect. In what degree he had availed himself of prior writers is not evident; with Descartes and Lord Bacon he was familiar, and from the former he had derived some leading tenets; but he observes both in him and Bacon what he calls mistakes as to the first cause and origin of things, their ignorance of the real nature of the human mind, and of the true sources of error.[812] The pantheistic theory of Jordano Bruno is not very remote from that of Spinosa; but the rhapsodies of the Italian, who seldom aims at proof, can hardly have supplied much to the subtle mind of the Jew of Amsterdam. Buhle has given us an exposition of the Spinosistic theory.[813] But several propositions in this I do not find in the author, and Buhle has at least, without any necessity, entirely deviated from the arrangement he found in the Ethics. This seems as unreasonable in a work so rigorously systematic, as it would be in the elements of Euclid; and I believe the following pages will prove more faithful to the text. But it is no easy task to translate and abridge a writer of such extraordinary conciseness as well as subtlety; nor is it probable that my attempt will be intelligible to those who have not habituated themselves to metaphysical inquiry.

[811] Spinosæ Opera Posthuma, p. 398-460.

[812] Cartes et Bacon tam longè a cognitione primæ causæ et originis omnium rerum aberrarunt.... Veram naturam humanæ mentis non cognoverunt ... veram causam erroris nunquam operati sunt.

[813] Hist. de la Philosophie, vol. iii., p. 440.

View of his metaphysical theory. 72. The first book or part of the Ethics is entitled, Concerning God, and contains the entire theory of Spinosa. It may even be said that this is found in a few of the first propositions; which being granted, the rest could not easily be denied; presenting, as it does, little more than new aspects of the former, or evident deductions from them. Upon eight definitions and seven axioms reposes this philosophical superstructure. A substance, by the third definition, is that, the conception of which does not require the conception of anything else as antecedent to it.[814] The attribute of a substance is whatever the mind perceives to constitute its essence.[815] The mode of a substance is its accident or affection, by means of which it is conceived.[816] In the sixth definition he says: I understand by the name of God a being absolutely infinite; that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence. Whatever expresses an essence, and involves no contradiction, may be predicated of an absolutely infinite being.[817] The most important of the axioms are the following: From a given determinate cause the effect necessarily follows; but if there be no determinate cause, no effect can follow.—The knowledge of an effect depends upon the knowledge of the cause, and includes it.—Things that have nothing in common with each other cannot be understood by means of each other; that is, the conception of one does not include that of the other.—A true idea must agree with its object.[818]

[814] Per substantiam intelligo id quod in se est, et per se concipitur; hoc est, id cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat. The last words are omitted by Spinosa in a letter to De Vries (p. 463), where he repeats this definition.

[815] Per attributum intelligo id quod intellectus de substantia percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens.

[816] Per modum intelligo substantiæ affectiones, sive id, quod in alio est, per quod etiam concipitur.

[817] Per Deum intelligo Ens absolutè infinitum, hoc est, substantiam constantem infinitis attributis, quorum unumquodque æternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit. Dico absolutè infinitum, non autem in suo genere; quicquid enim in suo genere tantum infinitum est, infinita de eo attributa negare possumus; quod autem absolutè infinitum est, ad ejus essentiam pertinet, quicquid essentiam exprimit et negationem nullam involvit.

[818] Axiomata, iii., iv., v., and vi.

73. Spinosa proceeds to his demonstrations upon the basis of these assumptions alone. Two substances, having different attributes, have nothing in common with each other; and hence one cannot be the cause of the other, since one may be conceived without involving the conception of the other; but an effect cannot be conceived without involving the knowledge of the cause.[819] It seems to be in this fourth axiom, and in the proposition grounded upon it, that the fundamental fallacy lurks. The relation between a cause and effect is surely something different from our perfect comprehension of it, or indeed from our having any knowledge of it at all; much less can the contrary assertion be deemed axiomatic. But if we should concede this postulate, it might perhaps be very difficult to resist the subsequent proofs, so ingeniously and with such geometrical rigour are they arranged.

[819] Prop. ii. and iii.

74. Two or more things cannot be distinguished, except by the diversity of their attributes, or by that of their modes. For there is nothing out of ourselves except substances and their modes. But there cannot be two substances of the same attribute, since there would be no means of distinguishing them except their modes or affections; and every substance, being prior in order of time to its modes, may be considered independently of them; hence, two such substances could not be distinguished at all. One substance therefore cannot be the cause of another; for they cannot have the same attribute, that is, anything in common with one another.[820] Every substance therefore is self-caused; that is, its essence implies its existence.[821] It is also necessarily infinite, for it would otherwise be terminated by some other of the same nature and necessarily existing; but two substances cannot have the same attribute, and therefore cannot both possess necessary existence.[822] The more reality or existence any being possesses, the more attributes are to be ascribed to it. This he says appears by the definition of an attribute.[823] The proof however, is surely not manifest, nor do we clearly apprehend what he meant by degrees of reality or existence. But of this theorem he was very proud. I look upon the demonstration, he says in a letter, as capital (palmariam) that the more attributes we ascribe to any being, the more we are compelled to acknowledge its existence; that is, the more we conceive it as true and not a mere chimera.[824] And from this he derived the real existence of God, though the former proof seems collateral to it. God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each expressing an eternal and infinite power, necessarily exists.[825] For such an essence involves existence. And, besides this, if anything does not exist, a cause must be given for its non-existence, since this requires one as much as existence itself.[826] The cause may be either in the nature of the thing, as, e. gr. a square circle cannot exist by the circle’s nature, or in something extrinsic. But neither of these can prevent the existence of God. The later propositions in Spinosa are chiefly obvious corollaries from the definitions and a few of the first propositions which contain the whole theory, which he proceeds to expand.

[820] Prop. vi.

[821] Prop. vii.

[822] Prop. viii.

[823] Prop. ix.

[824] P. 463. This is in the letter to De Vries, above quoted.

[825] Prop. xi.

[826] If twenty men exist, neither more nor less, an extrinsic reason must be given for this precise number, since the definition of a man does not involve it. Prop. viii., Schol. ii.

75. There can be no substance but God. Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be conceived without God.[827] For he is the sole substance, and modes cannot be conceived without a substance; but besides substance and mode nothing exists. God is not corporeal, but body is a mode of God, and therefore uncreated. God is the permanent, but not the transient cause of all things.[828] He is the efficient cause of their essence, as well as their existence, since otherwise their essence might be conceived without God, which has been shown to be absurd. Thus, particular things are but the affections of God’s attributes, or modes in which they are determinately expressed.[829]

[827] Prop. xiv.

[828] Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, sed non transiens. Prop. xviii.

[829] Prop. xxv. and Coroll.

76. This pantheistic scheme is the fruitful mother of many paradoxes, upon which Spinosa proceeds to dwell. There is no contingency, but everything is determined by the necessity of the divine nature, both as to its existence and operation; nor could anything be produced by God otherwise than as it is.[830] His power is the same as his essence; for he is the necessary cause both of himself and of all things, and it is as impossible for us to conceive him not to act as not to exist.[831] God, considered in the attributes of his infinite substance, is the same as nature, that is, natura naturans; but nature, in another sense, or natura naturata, expresses but the modes under which the divine attributes appear.[832] And intelligence, considered in act, even though infinite, should be referred to natura naturata; for intelligence, in this sense, is but a mode of thinking, which can only be conceived by means of our conception of thinking in the abstract, that is, by an attribute of God.[833] The faculty of thinking, as distinguished from the act, as also those of desiring, loving, and the rest, Spinosa explicitly denies to exist at all.

[830] Prop. xxix.-xxxiii.

[831] Prop. xxxix. and part ii. prop. iii. Schol.

[832] Schol. in prop. xxix.

[833] Prop. xxxi. The atheism of Spinosa is manifest from this single proposition.

77. In an appendix to the first chapter, De Deo, Spinosa controverts what he calls the prejudice about final causes. Men are born ignorant of causes, but merely conscious of their own appetites, by which they desire their own good. Hence, they only care for the final cause of their own actions or those of others, and inquire no farther when they are satisfied about these. And finding many things in themselves and in nature, serving as means to a certain good, which things they know not to be provided by themselves, they have believed that someone has provided them, arguing from the analogy of the means they in other instances themselves employ. Hence, they have imagined gods, and these gods they suppose to consult the good of men in order to be worshipped by them, and have devised every mode of superstitious devotion to ensure the favour of these divinities. And finding in the midst of so many beneficial things in nature not a few of an opposite effect, they have ascribed them to the anger of the gods, on account of the neglect of men to worship them; nor has experience of calamities, falling alike on the pious and impious, cured them of this belief, choosing rather to acknowledge their ignorance of the reason why good and evil are thus distributed, than to give up their theory. Spinosa thinks the hypothesis of final causes refuted by his proposition, that all things happen by eternal necessity. Moreover, if God were to act for an end, he must desire something which he wants; for it is acknowledged by theologians that he acts for his own sake, and not for the sake of things created.

79. It has been sometimes doubted whether the Spinosistic philosophy excludes altogether an infinite intelligence. That it rejected a moral providence or creative mind is manifest in every proposition. His Deity could at most be but a cold, passive intelligence, lost to our understandings and feelings in its metaphysical infinity. It was not, however, in fact, so much as this. It is true that in a few passages we find what seems at first a dim recognition of the fundamental principle of theism. In one of his letters to Oldenburg, he asserts an infinite power of thinking, which, considered in its infinity, embraces all nature as its object, and of which the thoughts proceed according to the order of nature, being its correlative ideas.[834] But afterwards he rejected the term, power of thinking, altogether. The first proposition of the second part of the Ethics, or that entitled, On the Mind, runs thus: Thought is an attribute of God, or, God is a thinking being. Yet this, when we look at the demonstration, vanishes in an abstraction destructive of personality.[835] And, in fact, we cannot reflect at all on the propositions already laid down by Spinosa, without perceiving that they annihilate every possible hypothesis in which the being of a God can be intelligibly stated.

[834] Statuo dari in natura potentiam infinitam cogitandi quæ quatenus infinita in se continet totam naturam objectivè, et cujus cogitationes procedunt eodem modo ac natura, ejus nimirum edictum, p. 441. In another place he says, perhaps at some expense of his usual candour. Agnosco interim, id quod summam mihi præbet satisfactionem et mentis tranquillitatem, cuncta potentia Entis summè perfecti et ejus immutabili ita fieri decreto, p. 498. What follows is in the same strain. But Spinosa had wrought himself up, like Bruno, to a mystical personification of his infinite unity.

[835] Singulares cogitationes, sive hæc et illa cogitatio, modi sunt, qui Dei naturam certo et determinto modo exprimunt. Competit ergo Dei attributum, cujus conceptum singulares omnes cogitationes involvunt, per quod etiam concipiuntur. Est igitur cogitatio unum ex infinitis Dei attributis quod Dei æternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit, sive Deus est res cogitans.

80. The second book of the Ethics begins, like the first, with definitions and axioms. Body he defines to be a certain and determinate mode expressing the essence of God, considered as extended. The essence of anything he defines to be that, according to the affirmation or negation of which the thing exists or otherwise. An idea is a conception which the mind forms as a thinking being. And he prefers to say conception than perception, because the latter seems to imply the presence of an object. In the third axiom he says: Modes of thinking, such as love, desire, or whatever name we may give to the affections of the mind, cannot exist without an idea of their object, but an idea may exist with no other mode of thinking.[836] And in the fifth: We perceive no singular things besides bodies and modes of thinking; thus distinguishing, like Locke, between ideas of sensation and of reflection.

[836] Modi cogitandi, ut amor, cupiditas, vel quocunque nomine affectus animi insigniuntur, non dantur nisi in eodem individuo detur idea rei amatæ, desideratæ, &c. At idea dari potest, quamvis nullus alius detur cogitandi modus.

81. Extension, by the second proposition, is an attribute of God as well as thought. As it follows from the infinite extension of God, that all bodies are portions of his substance, inasmuch as they cannot be conceived without it, so all particular acts of intelligence are portions of God’s infinite intelligence, and thus all things are in him. Man is not a substance, but something which is in God, and cannot be conceived without him; that is, an affection or mode of the divine substance expressing its nature in a determinate manner.[837] The human mind is not a substance, but an idea constitutes its actual being, and it must be the idea of an existing thing.[838] In this he plainly loses sight of the percipient in the perception; but it was the inevitable result of the fundamental sophisms of Spinosa to annihilate personal consciousness. The human mind, he afterwards asserts, is part of the infinite intellect of God; and when we say, the mind perceives this or that, it is only that God, not as infinite, but so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, has such or such ideas.[839]

[837] Prop. x.

[838] Quod actuale mentis humanæ esse constituit, nihil aliud est quam idea rei alicujus singularis actu existentis. This is an anticipation of what we find in Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, the negation of a substance, or Ego, to which paradox no one can come except a professed metaphysician.

[839] Prop. xi., coroll.

82. The object of the human mind is body actually existing.[840] He proceeds to explain the connection of the human body with the mind, and the association of ideas. But in all this advancing always synthetically and by demonstration, he becomes frequently obscure if not sophistical. The idea of the human mind is in God, and is united to the mind itself in the same manner as the latter is to the body.[841] The obscurity and subtlety of this proposition are not relieved by the demonstration; but in some of these passages we may observe a singular approximation to the theory of Malebranche. Both, though with very different tenets on the highest subjects, had been trained in the same school; and if Spinosa had brought himself to acknowledge the personal distinctness of the Supreme Being from his intelligent creation, he might have passed for one of those mystical theosophists, who were not averse to an objective pantheism.

[840] Prop. xiii.

[841] Mentis humanæ datur etiam in Deo idea, sive cognitio, quæ in Deo eodem modo sequitur, et ad Deum odem modo refertur, ac idea sive cognitio corporis humani. Prop. xx. Hæc mentis idea eodem modo unita est menti, ac ipsa mens unita est corpori.

83. The mind does not know itself, except so far as it receives ideas of the affections of the body.[842] But these ideas of sensation do not give an adequate knowledge of an external body, nor of the human body itself.[843] The mind therefore has but an inadequate and confused knowledge of anything, so long as it judges only by fortuitous perceptions; but may attain one clear and distinct by internal reflection and comparison.[844] No positive idea can be called false; for there can be no such idea without God, and all ideas in God are true, that is, correspond with their object.[845] Falsity therefore consists in that privation of truth, which arises from inadequate ideas. An adequate idea he has defined to be one which contains no incompatibility, without regard to the reality of its supposed correlative object.

[842] Prop. xxiii.

[843] Prop. xxv.

[844] Schol., Prop. xxix.

[845] Prop. xxxii., xxxiii., xxxv.

84. All bodies agree in some things, or have something in common: of these all men have adequate ideas;[846] and this is the origin of what are called common notions, which all men possess; as extension, duration, number. But to explain the nature of universals, Spinosa observes, that the human body can only form at the same time a certain number of distinct images; if this number be exceeded, they become confused; and as the mind perceives distinctly just so many images as can be formed in the body, when these are confused, the mind will also perceive them confusedly, and will comprehend them under one attribute, as Man, Horse, Dog; the mind perceiving a number of such images, but not their differences of stature, colours and the like. And these notions will not be alike in all minds, varying according to the frequency with which the parts of the complex image have occurred. Thus those who have contemplated most frequently the erect figure of man will think of him as a perpendicular animal, others as two-legged, others as unfeathered, others as rational. Hence, so many disputes among philosophers who have tried to explain natural things by mere images.[847]

[846] Prop. viii.

[847] Schol., prop. xl.

85. Thus we form universal ideas; first, by singulars, represented by the senses confusedly, imperfectly and disorderly; secondly, by signs, that is, by associating the remembrance of things with words; both of which he calls imagination, or primi generis cognitio; thirdly, by what he calls reason, or secundi generis cognitio; and fourthly, by intuitive knowledge, or tertii generis cognitio.[848] Knowledge of the first kind is the only source of error; the second and third being necessarily true.[849] These alone enable us to distinguish truth from falsehood. Reason contemplates things not as contingent but necessary; and whoever has a true idea, knows certainly that his idea is true. Every idea of a singular existing thing involves the eternal and infinite being of God. For nothing can be conceived without God, and the ideas of all things, having God for their cause, considered under the attribute of which they are modes, must involve the conception of the attribute, that is, the being of God.[850]

[848] Schol. ii., prop. xl.

[849] Prop. xli., xlii, et sequent.

[850] Prop. xlv.

86. It is highly necessary to distinguish images, ideas, and words, which many confound. Those who think ideas consists in images which they perceive, fancy that ideas of which we can form no image are but arbitrary figments. They look at ideas, as pictures on a tablet, and hence do not understand that an idea, as such, involves an affirmation or negation. And those who confound words with ideas, fancy they can will something contrary to what they perceive, because they can affirm or deny it in words. But these prejudices will be laid aside by him who reflects that thought does not involve the conception of extension; and therefore that an idea, being a mode of thought, neither consists in images nor in words, the essence of which consists in corporeal motions, not involving the conception of thought.[851]

[851] Schol., prop. xlix.

87. The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite being of God. But men cannot imagine God as they can bodies, and hence have not that clear perception of his being which they have of that of bodies, and have also perplexed themselves by associating the word God with sensible images, which it is hard to avoid. This is the chief source of all error, that men do not apply names to things rightly. For they do not err in their own minds, but in this application; as men who cast up wrong see different numbers in their mind from those in the true result.[852]

[852] Prop. xlvii. Atque hinc pleræque oriuntur controversiæ, nempe, quia homines mentem suam non recte explicant, vel quia alterius mentem male interpretantur.

88. The mind has no free will, but is determined by a cause, which itself is determined by some other, and so for ever. For the mind is but a mode of thinking and, therefore cannot be the free cause of its own actions. Nor has it any absolute faculty of loving, desiring, understanding; these being only metaphysical abstractions.[853] Will and understanding are one and the same thing; and volitions are only affirmations or negations, each of which belongs to the essence of the idea affirmed or denied.[854] In this there seems to be not only an extraordinary deviation from common language, but an absence of any meaning which, to my apprehension at least, is capable of being given to his words. Yet we have seen something of the same kind said by Malebranche; and it will also be found in a recently published work of Cudworth,[855] a writer certainly uninfluenced by either of these, so that it may be suspected of having some older authority.

[853] Prop. xlviii.

[854] Prop. xlix.

[855] See Cudworth’s Treatise on Free will (1838), p. 20, where the will and understanding are purposely, and, I think, very erroneously confounded.

Spinosa’s theory of action and passion. 89. In the third part of this treatise, Spinosa comes to the consideration of the passions. Most who have written on moral subjects, he says, have rather treated man as something out of nature, or as a kind of imperium in imperio, than as part of the general order. They have conceived him to enjoy a power of disturbing that order by his own determination, and ascribed his weakness and inconstancy not to the necessary laws of the system, but to some strange defect in himself, which they cease not to lament, deride, or execrate. But the acts of mankind, and the passions from which they proceed, are in reality but links in the series, and proceed in harmony with the common laws of universal nature.

90. We are said to act when anything takes place within us, or without us, for which we are an adequate cause; that is, when it may be explained by means of our own nature alone. We are said to be acted upon, when anything takes place within us which cannot wholly be explained by our own nature. The affections of the body which increase or diminish its power of action, and the ideas of those affections, he denominates passions (affectus). Neither the body can determine the mind to thinking, nor can the mind determine the body to motion or rest. For all that takes place in body must be caused by God, considered under his attribute of extension, and all that takes place in mind must be caused by God under his attribute of thinking. The mind and body are but one thing, considered under different attributes; the order of action and passion in the body being the same in nature with that of action and passion in the mind. But men, though ignorant how far the natural powers of the body reach, ascribe its operations to the determination of the mind, veiling their ignorance in specious words. For if they alledge that the body cannot act without the mind, it may be answered that the mind cannot think till it is impelled by the body, nor are the volitions of the mind anything else than its appetites, which are modified by the body.

93. It was one great error of Spinosa to entertain too arrogant a notion of the human faculties, in which, by dint of his own subtle demonstrations, he pretended to show a capacity of adequately comprehending the nature of what he denominated God. And this was accompanied by a rigid dogmatism, no one proposition being stated with hesitation, by a disregard of experience, at least as the basis of reasoning, and by an uniform preference of the synthetic method. Most of those, he says, who have turned their minds to those subjects have fallen into error, because they have not begun with the contemplation of the divine nature, which both in itself and in order of knowledge is first, but with sensible things, which ought to have been last. Hence, he seems to have reckoned Bacon, and even Descartes, mistaken in their methods.

96. Notwithstanding the leading errors of this philosopher, his clear and acute understanding perceived many things which baffle ordinary minds. Thus, he well saw and well stated the immateriality of thought. Oldenburg, in one of his letters, had demurred to this, and reminded Spinosa that it was still controverted whether thought might not be a bodily motion. “Be it so,” replied the other, “though I am far from admitting it; but at least you must allow that extension, so far as extension, is not the same as thought.”[856] It is from inattention to this simple truth that all materialism, as it has been called, has sprung. Its advocates confound the union between thinking and extension or matter (be it, if they will, an indissoluble one) with the identity of the two, which is absurd and inconceivable. “Body,” says Spinosa in one of his definitions, “is not terminated by thinking, nor thinking by body.”[857] This also does not ill express the fundamental difference of matter and mind; there is an incommensurability about them, which prevents one from bounding the other, because they can never be placed in juxtaposition.

[856] At ais, forte cogitatio est actus corporeus. Sit, quamvis nullus concedam; sed hoc unum non negabis, extensionem, quoad extensionem, non esse cogitationem. Epist. iv.

[857] Corpus dicitur finitum, quia aliud semper majus concipimus. Sic cogitatio alia cogitatione terminatur. At corpus non terminatur cogitatione, nec cogitatio corpore.

Glanvil’s Scepsis Scientifica. 97. England, about the æra of the Restoration, began to make a struggle against the metaphysical creed of the Aristotelians, as well as against their natural philosophy. A remarkable work, but one so scarce as to be hardly known at all, except by name, was published by Glanvil in 1661, with the title, the Vanity of Dogmatizing. A second edition, in 1663, considerably altered, is entitled Scepsis Scientifica.[858] This edition has a dedication to the Royal Society, which comes in place of a fanciful preface, wherein he had expatiated on the bodily and mental perfections of his protoplast, the father of mankind.[859] But in proportion to the extravagant language he employs to extol Adam before his lapse, is the depreciation of his unfortunate posterity, not, as common among theologians, with respect to their moral nature, but to their reasoning faculties. The scheme of Glanvil’s book is to display the ignorance of man, and especially to censure the Peripatetic philosophy of the schools. It is, he says, captious and verbal, and yet does not adhere itself to any constant sense of words, but huddles together insignificant terms, and unintelligible definitions; it deals with controversies, and seeks for no new discovery or physical truth. Nothing, he says, can be demonstrated but when the contrary is impossible, and of this there are not many instances. He launches into a strain of what may be called scepticism, but answered his purpose in combating the dogmatic spirit still unconquered in our academical schools. Glanvil had studied the new philosophy, and speaks with ardent eulogy of “that miracle of men, the illustrious Descartes.” Many, if not most, of his own speculations are tinged with a Cartesian colouring. He was however far more sceptical than Descartes, or even than Malebranche. Some passages from so rare and so acute a work may deserve to be chosen, both for their own sakes, and in order to display the revolution which was at work in speculative philosophy.

[858] This Book, I believe, especially in the second edition, is exceedingly scarce. The editors, however, of the Biographia Britannica art. Glanvil, had seen it, and also Dugald Stewart. The first edition, or Vanity of Dogmatizing, is in the Bodleian Catalogue, and both are in the British Museum.

[859] Thus, among other extravagances worthy of the Talmud, he says, “Adam needed no spectacles. The acuteness of his natural optics (if conjecture may have credit), showed him much of the celestial magnificence and bravery without a Galileo’s tube; and it is most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of this upper world as we with all the advantages of art. It may be it was as absurd even in the judgment of his senses, that the sun and stars should be so very much less than this globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and it is not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earth’s motion as we have of its quiescence.” p. 5, edit. 1661. In the second edition, he still adheres to the hypothesis of intellectual degeneracy, but states it with less of rhapsody.

98. “In the unions which we understand the extremes are reconciled by interceding participations of natures, which have somewhat of either. But body and spirit stand at such a distance in their essential compositions, that to suppose an uniter of a middle construction, that should partake of some of the qualities of both, is unwarranted by any of our faculties, yea, most absonous to our reasons; since there is not any the least affinity betwixt length, breadth, and thickness, and apprehension, judgment, and discourse; the former of which are the most immediate results, if not essentials of matter, the latter of spirit.”[860]

[860] Scepsis Scientifica, p. 16. We have just seen something similar in Spinosa.

99. “How is it, and by what art does it (the soul), read that such an image or stroke in matter (whether that of her vehicle or of the brain, the case is the same), signifies such an object? Did we learn an alphabet in our embryo state? And how comes it to pass that we are not aware of any such congenite apprehensions? We know what we know; but do we know any more? That by diversity of motions we should spell out figures, distances, magnitudes, colours, things not resembled by them, we must attribute to some secret deduction. But what this deduction should be, or by what medium this knowledge is advanced, is as dark as ignorance. One that hath not the knowledge of letters may see the figures, but comprehends not the meaning included in them; an infant may hear the sounds and see the motion of the lips, but hath no conception conveyed by them, not knowing what they are intended to signify. So our souls, though they might have perceived the motions and images themselves by simple sense, yet, without some implicit inference, it seems inconceivable how by that means they should apprehend their anti-types. The striking of divers filaments of the brain cannot well be supposed to represent distances, except some kind of inference be allotted us in our faculties; the concession of which will only stead us as a refuge for ignorance, when we shall meet what we would seem to shun.”[861] Glanvil, in this forcible statement of the heterogeneity of sensations, with the objects that suggest them, has but trod in the steps of the whole Cartesian school, but he did not mix this up with those crude notions that halt half way between immaterialism and its opposite; and afterwards well exposes the theories of accounting for the memory by means of images in the brain, which, in various ways, Aristotle, Descartes, Digby, Gassendi, and Hobbes had propounded, and which we have seen so favourite a speculation of Malebranche.