completely explained away. The machine may be very complicated, but it is still, and can be nothing but, a machine. If we once admitted that matter could be anything but mechanical, we should be on the way to admit that matter could become mind. When a modern physical philosopher declares that everything, even life and thought, is ultimately reducible to matter, we cannot always be certain that he means what he seems to say. Not seldom the materialist soi-disant, when we hear his account of the properties of matter, turns out to be something like a spiritualist in disguise; but when Descartes asserted that everything but mind is material, and that the animals are automata, there is no such dubiety of interpretation. He said what he meant, and meant what he said, in the hardest sense his words can bear. His matter was not even gravitating, much less living; it had no property except that of retaining and transmitting the motion received from without by pressure and impact. And his animals were automata, not merely in the sense of being governed by sensation and instinct, but precisely in the sense that a watch is an automaton. Henry More cries out against the ruthless consequence with which he develops his principles to this result. “In this,” he says, “I do not so much admire the penetrative power of your genius as I tremble for the fate of the animals. What I recognize in you is not only subtlety of thought, but a hard and remorseless logic with which you arm yourself as with a sword of steel, to take away life and sensation with one blow, from almost the whole animal kingdom.” But Descartes was not the man to be turned from the legitimate result of his principles by a scream. “Nec moror astutias et sagacitates canum et vulpium, nec quaecunque alia propter cibum, venerem, aut metum a brutis fiunt. Profiteor enim me posse perfacile illa omnia ut a sola membrorum conformatione profecta explicare.”[1]
The difficulty reaches its height when Descartes attempts to explain the union of the body and spirit in man. Between two substances which, when clearly and distinctly conceived, do not imply each other, there can be none but an artificial unity,—a unity of composition that still leaves them external to each other. Even God cannot make them one in any Nature of sensation.higher sense.[2] And as it is impossible in the nature of mind to see any reason why it should be embodied, or in the nature of matter to see any reason why it should become the organ of mind, the union of the two must be taken as a mere empirical fact. When we put on the one side all that belongs to intelligence, and on the other all that belongs to matter, there is a residuum in our ideas which we cannot reduce to either head. This residuum consists of our appetites, our passions, and our sensations, including not only the feelings of pain and pleasure, but also the perceptions of colour, smell, taste, of hardness and softness, and all the other qualities apprehended by touch. These must be referred to the union of mind with body. They are subjective in the sense that they give us no information as to the nature either of things or of mind. Their function is only to indicate what things are useful or hurtful to our composite nature as such, or in other words what things tend to confirm or dissolve the unity of mind and body. They indicate that something is taking place in our body, or without it, and so stimulate us to some kind of action, but what it is that is taking place they do not tell us. There is no resemblance in the sensation of pain produced by great heat to the rending of the fibres of our body that causes it. But we do not need to know the real origin of our sensation to prevent us going too near the fire. Sensation leads us into error only when we are not conscious that its office is merely practical, and when we attempt to make objective judgments by means of its obscure and confused ideas, e.g. when we say that there is heat in our hands or in the fire. And the remedy for this error is to be found simply in the clear conviction of the subjectivity of sensation.
These views of the nature of sense, however, at once force us to ask how Descartes can consistently admit that a subjective result such as sensation, a result in mind, should be produced by matter, and on the other hand how an objective result, a result in matter, should be effected by mind. Descartes explains at great length, according to his modification of Theory of occasional causes.the physiology of the day, that the pineal gland, which is the immediate organ of the soul, is acted on by the nerves through the “animal spirits,” and again by reaction upon these spirits produces motions in the body. It is an obvious remark that this explanation either materializes mind, or else puts for the solution the very problem to be solved. It was therefore in the spirit of Descartes, it was only making explicit what is involved in many of his expressions, when Geulincx, one of his earliest followers, formulated the theory of occasional causes. The general approval of the Cartesian school proved that this was a legitimate development of doctrine. Yet it tore away the last veil from the absolute dualism of the system, which had so far stretched the antagonism of mind and matter that no mediation remained possible, or what is the same thing, remained possible only through an inexplicable will of God. The intrusion of such a Deus ex machinainto philosophy only showed that philosophy by its violent abstraction had destroyed the unity of the known and intelligible world, and was, therefore, forced to seek that unity in the region of the unknown and unintelligible. If our light be darkness, then in our darkness we must seek for light; if reason be contradictory in itself, truth must be found in unreason. The development of the Cartesian school was soon to show what is the necessary and inevitable end of such worship of the unknown.
To the ethical aspect of his philosophy, Descartes, unlike Spinoza, only devoted a subordinate attention. In a short treatise, however, he discussed the relation of reason to the passions. After we have got over the initial difficulty, that matter should give rise to effects in mind, and mind in matter, and have admitted that in man the unity of mind and body turns what in the animals Ethics.is mere mechanical reception of stimulus from without and reaction upon it into an action and reaction mediated by sensation, emotion and passion, another question presents itself. How can the mere natural movement of passion, the nature of which is fixed by the original constitution of our body, and of the things that act upon it, be altered or modified by pure reason? For while it is obvious that morality consists in the determination of reason by itself, it is not easy to conceive how the same being who is determined by passion from without should also be determined by reason from within. How, in other words, can a spiritual being maintain its character as self-determined, or at least determined only by the clear and distinct ideas of the reason which are its innate forms, in the presence of this foreign element of passion that seems to make it the slave of external impressions? Is reason able to crush this intruder, or to turn it into a servant? Can the passions be annihilated, or can they be spiritualized? Descartes could not properly adopt either alternative; he could not adopt the ethics of asceticism, for the union of body and mind is, in his view, natural; and hence the passions which are the results of that union are in themselves good. They are provisions of nature for the protection of the unity of soul and body, and stimulate us to the acts necessary for that purpose. Yet, on the other hand, he could not admit that these passions are capable of being completely spiritualized; for so long as the unity of body and soul is regarded as merely external and accidental, it is impossible to think that the passions which arise out of this unity can be transformed into the embodiment and expression of reason.
Descartes, indeed, points out that every passion has a lower and a higher form, and while in its lower or primary form it is based on the obscure ideas produced by the motion of the animal spirits, in its higher form it is connected with the clear and distinct judgments of reason regarding good and evil. If, however, the unity of soul and body be a unity of composition, there is an element of obscurity in the judgments of passion which cannot be made clear, an element in desire that cannot be spiritualized. If the mind be external to the passions it can only impose upon them an external rule of moderation. On such a theory no ideal morality is possible to man in his present state; for, in order to the attainment of such an ideal morality, it would be necessary that the accidental element obtruded into his life as a spiritual being by his connexion with the body should be expelled. What can be attained under present conditions is only to abstract so far as is possible from external things, and those relations to external things into which passion brings us. Hence the great importance which Descartes attaches to the distinction between things in our power and things not in our power. What is not in our power includes all outward things, and therefore it is our highest wisdom to regard them as determined by an absolute fate, or the eternal decree of God. We cease to wish for the impossible; and therefore to subdue our passions we only need to convince ourselves that no effort of ours can enable us to secure their objects. On the other hand, that which is within our power, and which, therefore, we cannot desire too earnestly, is virtue. But virtue in this abstraction from all objects of desire is simply the harmony of reason with itself, the ἀταραξία of the Stoic under a slight change of aspect. Thus in ethics, as in metaphysics, Descartes ends not with a reconciliation of the opposed elements, but with a dualism, or at best, with a unity which is the result of abstraction.
The Philosophy of Malebranche.—Malebranche was prepared, by the ascetic training of the cloister and the teaching of Augustine, to bring to clear consciousness and expression many of the tendencies that were latent and undeveloped in the philosophy of Descartes. To use a chemical metaphor, the Christian Platonism of the church father was a medium in which Cartesianism could precipitate the product of its elements. Yet the medium was, as we shall see, not a perfect one, and hence the product was not quite pure. Without metaphor, Malebranche, by his previous habits of thought, was well fitted to detect and develop the pantheistic and ascetic elements of his master’s philosophy. But he was not well fitted to penetrate through the veil of popular language under which the discordance of that philosophy with orthodox Christianity was hidden. On the contrary, the whole training of the Catholic priest, and especially his practical spirit, with that tendency to compromise which a practical spirit always brings with it, enabled him to conceal from himself as well as from others the logical result of his principles. And we
