mind and matter. Malebranche gave all causation to God;
and the acosmist-as Hegel called him, in repudiation of Bayle's
nickname “atheist”—Spinoza, from the premises of Cartesianism,
and from other suggestions of the past,
developed that great system of determinist pantheism
which was a scandal and a terror to his generation. Really,
he urged, there could be only one substance-Descartes himself
had dropped a passing hint to that effect-and the bold deductive
reasoning of Spinoza's Ethics, in process if not in result,
betrays its kinship to the ontological argument, with its affirmation
of what must be. Thought and extension are peaceable
attributes in this one substance; there are infinitely many
other attributes, but these only are known to us.
In a different region, the tradition of Descartes passes on to G. W. Leibnitz. He accepts the ontological argument with a qualification—almost like his disciple Wolff, who tries to use it for defining the divine attributes. Leibnitz’s Monadology—which has little influence on his theism may be viewed as a strong recoil from Spinoza's all-swallowing substance. The more Spinozistic side of Leibnitz's thought-God as Monad of Monads—is a theistic postulate if hardly a theistic proof. The free will which Leibnitz teaches is not libertarian but determinist. Each monad works out necessary results, but these flow from its own nature; and so in a sense it is free. Reciprocal action is explained away into a “ reestablished harmony” between every monad and all others. In his Theodicy Leibnitz argues, like not a few predecessors, that this universe must be regarded as the best of all possible universes. Pain and sin must have been reduced to a minimum by God; though they are so ingrained in the finite that we have to make up our minds even to the endless sin and endless punishments of hell. It has been truly said that such optimism is a profound relative pessimism. The best? Yes, perhaps the best possible; in familiar speech, the best of a very bad business. But why must universes be so bad? Leibnitz's philosophy has no answer for us. In another direction, Leibnitz-and Wolff—give emphasis to the contrast between the necessary and the contingent; with important results for popular philosophy, and indirectly for theism. The disciple, Christian is one of the most typical figures in the history of theistic thought. He is a pure scholastic. The great thoughts of his master—or perhaps indeed rather Leibnitz's secondary thoughts—are dried and pressed by him, labelled and catalogued. Monadology drops out of WolH's teaching. Pre-established harmony drops out—except that it is used to explain the union of soul and body. Wolff tells us that six Latin works contain his system:—Ontology, General Cosmology, Empirical Psychology, Rational Psychology, Natural Theology, i.; Natural Theology, ii. In the volume on Empirical Psychology, Wolff discusses free will. He decides that human actions are caused or determined by the nature of the agent, but that, as man is not a necessary being, his actions are contingent. This view seems to preserve all that is questionable in Libertarianism, while omitting its moral meaning. The Rational Psychology formulates immortality on the ground that the immaterial soul has no parts to suffer decay- the argument which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason “ refutes ” with special reference to the statement of it by Moses Mendelssohn. The earlier of the two volumes on Natural Theology relies on the cosmological argument; the later—obviously an afterthought—tries to vindicate the ontological argument as an alternative basis for theism, but awkwardly and with manifest uneasiness. In the end, this volume diverges into the Attributes, construing God in the likeness of man via eminentiae.[1] No writer can be less intrinsically worthy of study than Wolff. But he is immortal as the inan against whom Kant directed his tremendous battery;[2] and he is also tolerably characteristic in outlook. He is no intuitionalist; but he is a drily common-sense mind, piling up in heaps the ruinous fragments of an idealist system.
In England, empiricist thought found a prophet in Bacon. He draws no inferences to theology or religion, whether friendly or hostile, from his new positions. He takes the line of separating the things of God from those of Caesar, and defends the traditional Protestant theology with obvious sincerity. Thomas Hobbes, a rough and anomalous but vigorous thinker, is the fountainhead of a more formidable empiricism. He is almost a materialist. In ethics, he is a hard determinist and hedonist, though not without qualifications (man's boundless desire for “gain and glory”) and peculiarities. He saves himself theologically by affirming that the good citizen will be of the same faith as the government—which had best be a monarchy. In that sense, living under a professedly Christian ruler, Hobbes himself is a Christian. John Locke, the real father of English philosophy, took the field against what he regarded as Descartes's impossible programme of “Innate Ideas.”[3] But Locke is a double-minded or half-hearted philosopher. He admits two sources of knowledge-sensation and reflexion; and God is to him the Great First Cause, especially of our own existence (or of the existence of jinite minds). This is a form of the cosmological argument, and ought to go with an intuitionalist not an empiricist doctrine of causality. On ethics, Locke says very little, although that little is hedonist and determinist. But once again in his political writings he breaks away from empiricism in appealing to natural law—an intuitionalist or conceivably an idealist tradition. Locke is thus a sensationalist and empiricist, but incompletely, and without perfect coherence. His suggestions led to different developments. In France, through Condillac, the inconsistencies were purged out, and materialism was ready for the next comer affirm—though it may be said with R. Flint that while materialism requires sensationalist psychology, yet the psychology in question allows no valid inference to matter, and therefore destroys materialism. Bishop George Berkeley, afraid of materialistic developments from a philosophy he was not prepared fully to recast, took refuge in immaterialism. Locke had treated ideas as testifying to the existence of matter. But can they? The inference seemed unwarrantable. Why should not God, a spirit like our own, though greater, speak to us in this language? In Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher Berkeley gives the fullest statement of this argument, while adding more commonplace attacks on the pettiness of religious scepticism. David Hume, following up Berkeley’s leading suggestion, pointed out that the inference to God is as precarious as the inference to matter, and that the assertion of a continuous or immaterial mind in man also goes beyond the immediate facts. The truth is, that all truth is uncertain! Scepticism, with which P. Bayle had played as a historian—he amused himself, too, with praising the Manichaean solution of the riddle of the universe—became a serious power in the history of philosophy with the advent of David Hume. Still, it may be doubted how far Hume was in earnest. Nay, it may be questioned how far it is either psychologically or logically possible to turn general scepticism into a coherent doctrine. The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion constitute Hume's formal profession of religious faith. The existence of God was no doubt probable; but what a number of difficulties there were! Still, one would not dispute whether God existed; but what he was-that was the hard question. This treatise must not be confused with the Natural History of Religion, in which Hume acts as a pioneer for comparative religion, with its study of facts. Even in that book Hume is able to play with sceptical solutions. Religion began in fear-as if it were no more than a lying superstition. Of course once more Hume saves himself by strong professions of admiration for rational or natural religion. It was not yet socially safe to be a confessed religious sceptic.
- ↑ Human attributes magnified, or their weak points thought away. The Schoolmen sought to establish other divine attributes by negation of human weaknesses and by finding in God the cause Of the varied phenomena of creation.
- ↑ On one side; another battery of Kant's was aimed against Hume.
- ↑ And against similar views in Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
