cerebral substance! We need no further proof of this than the fact that light is perceived when the eye receives. a more or less powerful blow; the sensation is merely the effect of the excitement produced in the optic nerve. And what holds for light in general may be said of each particular color, which is but a modification of light. The senses therefore deceive us in so far as they make us be lieve that sound, light, and colors exist outside of us. The objectivity of the phenomenon is an illusion: The qualities of things are accidents of our own being, and there is noth ing objective except the motion of bodies, which arouses these accidents in us. Hobbes reasons as Berkeley afterwards reasoned; but the latter carries out his argument to the very end; proceeding from sensualistic premises, he finally denies the existence of bodies, and culminates in subjective idealism. Hobbes only goes half way: the reality of matter is, in his opinion, an unimpeachable dogma.2 Soul or spirit he defines sometimes as brain action, some-, times as nervous substance. By spirit, he says, I understand a physical body refined enough to escape the obser vation of the senses. An incorporeal spirit does not exist.3 The Bible itself make no mention of such a being. Animals and man differ in degree only; both being corporeal beings. We possess no real advantage over brutes except speech. We are no more endowed with free-will than the lower beings. Like them, we are governed by irresistible -appetites. Reason without passion, moral principles without a material attraction, exert no influence on the human will; it is impelled by the expectations of the imagination, the passions, and the emotions: love, hatred, fear, and hope. "A voluntary action is that which proceedeth from 1 Human Nature, p. 6: The image or colour is but an apparition unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration which the object works in the brain or spirits, or some internal substance of the head. 2 Id., pp. 9 f. • Id., pp. 71 f. the will;" but the volition itself is not voluntary; it is not our deed; we are not the masters of it. Every act has its sufficient reason. According to the indeterminists, a free or voluntary act is one which, though there be a sufficient reason for its performance, is not necessary. The absurdity of this definition is obvious. If an occurrence or an act does not happen, it is because there is no sufficient reason for its happening. Sufficient reason is synonymous with necessity. Man, like all creatures, is subject to the law of necessity, to fate, or, if we choose, to the will of God. Good and evil are relative ideas. The former is identical with the agreeable; the latter, with the disagree1 able. Interest is the supreme judge in morals as in everything else. Absolute good, absolute evil, absolute justice, absolute morality, are so many chimeras, gratuitous inventions of the theological mind and metaphysics.1 Hobbes's system of politics is consistent with these onto| logical premises. Liberty he considers as impossible in politics as in metaphysics and ethics. In the State as well as in nature might makes right. The natural state of man consists in the bellum omnium contra omnes. The State is the indispensable means of putting an end to this conflict. It protects the life and property of individuals at the cost of a passive and absolute obedience on their part. What it commands is good; what it prohibits is bad. Its will is the supreme law.2 We shall not dwell on this absolutistic theory, the logical consequence of materialism. Let us note in what two important respects Thomas Hobbes differs from Bacon. First, Hobbes teaches a system of metaphysics, the materialistic metaphysics; secondly, his definition of philosophy places a higher value on the syllogism than the author of the Novum organum sets upon it. The latter Treat. of Liberty and Necessity, London, 1656. 2 De cive, 6, 19; 12, 8; Leviathan, c. 17. had, in proclaiming induction as the universal method, overlooked (1) the part deduction plays in mathematics, and (2) the part played by the mathematical element and a priori speculation in the discoveries of the fifteenth century. Hence Hobbes occupies a position between pure empiricism and Cartesian rationalism. $53. Descartes RENÉ DES CARTES,1 born 1596 at La Haye in Touraine, and educated by the Jesuits of La Flèche, spent the greater part of his life abroad. In Germany he fought as a lieutenant in the Imperial army; in Holland he published his 1 Works [Latin ed., Amsterdam, 1650 ff; French, Paris, 1701]; French ed. by Victor Cousin, 11 vols., Paris, 1824-26; Philosophical. Works of Descartes, by Garnier, 4 vols., Paris, 1835, and by Jules Simon in the Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1 vol. 12mo, 1842; Moral and Philosophical Works of Descartes, by Amadée Prévost, Paris, 1855; Unpublished Works of Descartes, by Foucher de Careil, 1860; [Unpublished Letters, by E. de Budé, Paris, 1868; by P. Tannery, A. f. G. Ph, vols. IV. and V.; Engl. transl. of The Method, Meditations, and Selections from the Principles, by J. Veitch, 10th ed., Edinburgh and London, 1890; of the Meditations, by Lowndes, London, 1878; of Extracts from hi. Writings, by H. A. P. Torrey (Series of Modern Philosophers), New York, 1892. - TR.]. A. Baillet, La vie de Mr. des Cartes, Paris, 1691; Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, Paris, 1854, 3d ed., 1868 [a history of Cartesianism]; [C. Schaarschmidt, Descartes und Spinoza, Bonn, 1850]; J. Millet, Histoir de Descartes avant 1637 suivie de l'analyse du Discours de la méthode et des Essais de philosophie, Paris, 1867; Bertrand de SaintGermain, Descartes considéré comme physiologiste et comme médecin, Paris, 1870; [J. P. Mahaffy, Descartes (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), Edinburgh and Philadelphia, 1881. See also: M. Heinze, Die Sittenlehre des Descartes, Leipsic, 1872; Grimm, Descartes' Lehre von den angeborenen Ideen, Jena, 1873; G. Glogau, Darlegung u. Kritik des Grundgedankens der Cartesian. Metaphysik, Ztschr. f. Ph., vol. 73, 1878; A. Koch, Die Psychologie Descartes', Munich, 1881; Natorp, Descartes' Erkenntnisstheorie, Marburg, 1882; K. Twardowski, Idee und Perception bei Descartes, Vienna, 1892. — TR.]. Philosophical Essays, comprising the Discours de la méthode (1637), the Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), the Principia philosophiae (1644). His admirer Queen Christina invited him to Sweden, where he died 1650, the same year in which his Traité des passions de l'âme appeared at Amsterdam. Besides the above, we must mention the following characteristic works: Le monde ou traité de la lumière, and the Traité de l'homme ou de la formation du fœtus, which were published after the death of the author. In order to understand Descartes the philosopher, we must remember that he was an emulator of Gassendi, Galileo, Pascal, and Newton, the successor of Viète, and one of the founders of analytical geometry. Descartes was a mathematician above everything else; a geometrician with a taste for metaphysics rather than a philosopher with a leaning for geometry and algebra. Indeed, his philosophy simply aims to be a generalization of mathematics; it is his ambition to apply the geometric method to universal science, to make it the method of metaphysics. The Discourse on Method does not leave us in doubt on this point: “Above all," he says, "I was delighted with the mathematics on account of the certainty and evidence of their demonstrations, but I had not as yet found out their true use, and although I supposed that they were of service only in the mechanic arts, I was surprised that upon foundations so solid and stable no loftier structure had been raised." And again: "Those long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers are wont to employ in the accomplishment of their most difficult demonstrations, led me to think that everything which might fall under the cognizance of the human mind might be connected together in the same manner, and that, provided only one should take care not to receive anything as true which was not so, and if one were always careful to preserve the order neces 1 Discours de la méthode (Torrey's translation), Part I., § 10. sary for deducing one truth from another, there would be none so remote at which he might not at last arrive, nor so concealed which he might not discover.”1 These passages and many others make it quite plain that the Cartesian method consists in mathematical deduction generalized. How, then, did Descartes come to be called the inventor of inner observation or the psychological method? Descartes needed first principles from which to proceed in his deductions, and self-observation furnished him with such principles, from which he deduced all the rest more geometrico. Hence, those who regard Descartes as the author of the psychological method are right, in so far as observation is one of the phases and the preparatory stage, as it were, in the Cartesian method; but they err in so far as they regard it as more than an introduction, or kind of provisional scaffolding for deductive reasoning, which undoubtedly constitutes the soul of the Cartesianism of Descartes. Let us add that Descartes not only uses inner observation; he is a learned anatomist and physiolo gist (so far as that was possible in the seventeenth century), and as such appreciates the great value of experience. He loves to study the great book of the world; and for any one to oppose him to Bacon on this point is sheer ignorance. The most recent historians of Cartesianism justly insist that it is impossible to separate Descartes the philosopher from Descartes the scientist; and French positivism, too, is right in reckoning among its ancestors a man who tried to make philosophy an exact science. Descartes's failing, a failing which he shares with very many metaphysicians, and which is the result of his scholastic training, consists in his impatient desire to conclude and systematize; which hinders him from distinguishing sufficiently between the method of scientific investigation and the method of exposition. 1 Discours de la méthode (Torrey's translation), Part II., § 11. |