now.

-

precursors of Lamarck and Darwin. According to Diderot, the entire universe is an endless fermentation, a ceaseless interchange of substances, a perpetual circulation of life. Nothing lasts, everything changes, species as well as individuals. Animals have not always been what they are In the animal and vegetable kingdoms, individuals arise, grow, decline, and die. Can we not say the same for entire species? Now, there is an affinity, and perhaps identity, between kingdoms, just as between species. Thus, who can ever exactly determine the boundaries between plants and animals? Plants and animals are defined in the same way. We speak of three kingdoms, but why should not one emanate from the other, and why should not the animal and vegetable kingdoms emanate from universal heterogeneous matter? The evolution is wholly mechanical. Nature, with its five or six essential properties, such as potential and active force, length, breadth, depth, impenetrability, and sensibility, which exists potentially in the inert molecule, and matter, suffices to explain the world. We should not search for designs (intentions) where there are only accidental facts. The spiritualists say: Look at man, that living proof of final causes! What do they mean? The real man or the ideal man? Surely not the real man, for there is not a perfectly constituted, perfectly sound man on the entire surface of the earth. The human species consists of an aggregation of more or less deformed and unhealthy individuals. Now, why should that make us sound the praises of the alleged creator? Praises, indeed! We have nothing but apologies to offer for him. And there is not a single animal, a single plant, a single mineral, of which we cannot say what has just been said of man. Of what use are the phalanges in the cloven foot of the hog? Of what use are the mammæ in males? The act ual world is as a day-fly to the millions of real or possible worlds of the past and future; it is what the insect of

Hypanis is to man, who sees it live and die in the passing of a day. The day of a world lasts a little longer, that is all.

These conceptions of the world and man are shared by HELVÉTIUS, who, like Thomas Hobbes and Mandeville,2 considers egoism and self-interest as the true and sole motive of our acts; by the mathematician D'ALEMBERT, whose philosophy reveals a delicate tinge of scepticism, which distinguishes it favorably from its environment, and brings it nearer to criticism; by the political economists TURGOT and CONDORCET,5 who construct a positive philosophy of history, based on the necessity of human actions and the law of continued progress; by the Baron d'HOL BACH, whose Système de la nature, published at London, 1770, under the pseudonym of Mirabaud, is a complete theory of ontological and psychological materialism. Matter and motion: these two words sum up everything. Matter and motion are eternal. The universe is neither governed by a God nor by chance, but by immutable and necessary laws. These laws do not depend on a personal power capable of modifying them; nor do they form a brutal necessity, a Fate hovering above things, a yoke imposed upon them

6

1 Claude Adrien, 1715-1771. De l'esprit, Paris, 1758 (anonymous); De l'homme, de ses facultés et de son éducation, London (Amsterdam), 1772 (anonymous); Les progrès de la raison dans la recherche de la vérité, London, 1775. Complete works, Amsterdam, 1776; Zweibrücken, 1784; Paris, 1794; 1796 (this last edition in 10 vols., 12°). 2 Bernard de Mandeville, 1670-1733. The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices made Public Benefits, London, 1714, 1719.

81717-1783. Author of the masterly Discours préliminaire of the Encyclopedia, which he helped to found. Mélanges de littérature, d'his

toire et de philosophie, 5 vols., Paris, 1752.

♦ Discours sur les progrès de l'esprit humain, etc. [Complete works by Dupont de Nemours, 4 vols., Paris, 1808-1811.]

Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (post humous work), 1794.

• 1723-1789.

from without: they are merely the properties of things, the expression of their innermost nature. The universe is neither an absolute monarchy à la Duns Scotus, nor a constitutional monarchy à la Leibniz, but a republic. Theism is the sworn enemy of science. Pantheism is merely a shamefaced theism, or atheism in disguise. The mechanical theory sufficiently explains all things. There is no finality in nature. Eyes were not made for seeing, nor feet for walking, but seeing and walking are the effects of a certain arrangement of atoms, which, if different, would produce different phenomena. There is no soul apart from nervous substance. Thought is a function of the brain. Matter alone is immortal; individuals are not. The freewill of the indeterminists is a denial of the universal order. There are not two separate realms and two series of laws,

physical laws and moral laws, - but one undivided and indivisible universe, subject, in all its parts and at all periods, to the same necessity.

Finally, on the eve of the Revolution, the physician CABANIS (1757-1808), in his Considérations générales sur l'étude de l'homme et sur les rapports de son organisation physique avec ses facultés intellectuelles et morales, formulated the principles of psychological materialism with such frankness. and vigor as have never been excelled. Body and mind are not only most intimately connected; they are one and the same thing. The soul is body endowed with feeling. The body or matter thinks, feels, and wills. Physiology and psychology are one and the same science. Man is simply a bundle of nerves. Thought is the function of the brain, as digestion is the function of the stomach, and the secretion of bile the function of the liver. The impressions reaching the brain cause it to act, just as the food introduced into the stomach sets that organ in motion. It is the business

1 In the Mémoires de l'Institut, years IV. and VI. (1796 and 1798); reprinted, Paris, 1802.

of the brain to produce an image of each particular impression, to arrange these images, and to compare them with each other for the sake of forming judgments and ideas, as it is the function of the stomach to react upon food in order to digest it. Intellectual and moral phenomena are, like ali others, necessary consequences of the properties of matter and the laws which govern beings.1

On this latter point, philosophers, be they conservative or radical, dogmatic or sceptical, jurists and littérateurs, naturalists and physicians, agree. By subjecting the Deity himself to laws, MONTESQUIEU Simply denies God as an absolute personal power. His God is the nature of things, in which are grounded the necessary relations which we call laws.2 VOLTAIRE is a deist, but he assumes, with Locke, that matter can think. J. J. ROUSSEAU is a spiritualist in his way, but nature, which we have abandoned and to which we must return, is his God also. The pioneers of German literature, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, combine with the highest idealism the same naturalistic and monistic, if not materialistic, tendency. What united these different thinkers was their outspoken or secret opposition to Cartesian dualism, which set up a separate order of things, called free spiritual substances, not subject to the laws of nature, a kind of caste or privileged aristocracy. Equality before the law

1 Closely related to the system of Cabanis is the intellectual or cerebral physiology (known by the name of phrenology) of Gall, Spurzheim and Broussais.

2 De l'esprit des lois. I., ch. I.: Les lois, dans la signification la plus étendue, sont les rapports nécessaires qui dérivent de la nature des choses: et, dans ce sens, tous les êtres ont leurs lois : la divinité a ses lois, etc.

3 See page 399, note 1.

4 1712-1778. Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalite parmi les hommes, Paris, 1753; Le contrat social, 1762; Émile ou de Véducation, 1762. [Œuvres, Paris, 1761; 1818-20; 1868. L. Moreau, J. J. Rousseau et le siècle philosophique, Paris, 1870; John Morley, Rousseau, 2 vols., London, 1873.- TR.]

of nature, and (in view of the failure of sense-perception and speculation to establish the freedom of indifference) determinism for all, without excepting even the Supreme Being: these were the watchwords of the philosophers until they became the watchwords of the Revolution in 1789.

§ 61. David Hume 1

"There are no bodies," the idealists dogmatically declared; "there is no spiritual substance," was the equally dogmatic assertion of the materialists. The Scotchman, DAVID HUME (1711-1776), an acute thinker and classi

1 [Treatise on Human Nature, 3 vols., London, 1739–1740; ed. by Selby-Bigge, Clarendon Press, 1888. Hume afterwards worked over the three books of the Treatise, and published them under the following titles: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1748; A Dissertation on the Passions; and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751. The first and last of these works, reprinted from the posthumous edition of 1777, have been edited, with introduction, etc., by J. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford, 1894. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 1741. The Natural History of Religion, 1755. All of the above-mentioned works, except the Treatise, were published under the title, Essays and Treatises on Sereral Subjects, London, 1770. The best edition of this collection (with introduction and notes), by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols., London, 1875, new ed., 1889. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion appeared after Hume's death. These, together with the Treatise, are published, with introduction and notes, by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols., London, 1874, new ed., 1889. The Autobiography was published by Adam Smith, London, 1777. The essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul appeared 1783. Selections from the Treatise (B. I.), by H. A. Aiken, in Series of Modern Philosophers, New York, 1893; from Hume's ethical writings, by J. H. Hyslop, in the Ethical Series, Boston, 1893. Works on Hume: F. Jodl, Leben und Philosophie David Hume's, Halle, 1872; E. Pfleiderer, Empirismus und Skepsis in D. H.'s Phil., Berlin, 1874; Meinong, Hume-Studien, 2 vols., Vienna, 1877, 1882; G. v. Gizycki, Die Ethik D. H.'s, Breslau, 1878: T. Huxley, Hume, London, 1879; W. Knight, Hume (Philosophical Classics), London, 1886; Introduction to ed. of Hume's works by T. H. Green. - TR.]