ing to them? True, says Descartes, they might be wrought in us by the will of the Deity—nay, perhaps they are; but, at any rate, we are obliged to believe in the real objects, and to act every moment upon that belief. Such a system of deception we cannot rightly attribute to an all-perfect Creator; and, consequently, on the ground of his veracity, we must have confidence in the reality of the world around us. Here we have another of those fruitful germs of idealism, which afterwards sprang up and bore such a harvest of unwholesome speculation. Consciousness, it is true, appeals primarily to mental facts; but once get beyond the primary fact itself, and if our faculties are worth anything, they do assuredly testify as immediately to the reality of the finite as of the infinite. The whole procedure is, in fact, a vicious circle. The veracity of our faculties is first appealed to, in order to establish the being of a God; and then the authority of God is appealed to, in order to establish the veracity of the faculties. If those faculties, in their direct action, may deceive us at all, they may have deceived us in the first step; and there the whole edifice falls together.
The tendency which we have now pointed out in the Cartesian philosophy to make God the only direct source of action, and to reduce the universe more and more to the idea of a machine whose wheels are kept in motion simply and solely by the divine power, follows our author's speculations throughout all their subsequent details. Thus, in his philosophy of nature he makes everything in creation purely passive. Every single thing in the universe is brought into being by a direct exertion of the divine power and will; but this is not all. It would at any moment fall out of existence if not sustained by the same creative power. Thus the act of creation has to be every moment renewed, or, in other words, the whole universe is but an instrument, through which the Deity operates. As a result of this view, many remarkable conclusions follow. It follows that animals are mere automatons. They have no minds—no consciousness; they are simply machines moved by the divine power to perform a given destiny in the world. It follows, again, that the human body is equally automatic. All the sensations, the emotions, the passions—everything which falls below the direct control of the will, Descartes attributes to the flow of the animal spirits, and places them amongst the ordinary phenomena of nature.
But then, how is it that the mind and body are connected and work in harmony, if this be the case? This is explained by the well-known doctrine of occasional causes. The fact that any external object affects our bodily frame and puts the animal spirits in motion, is made the occasion on which the corresponding idea is presented, by an established law of the divine operation, to the consciousness. Thus nature, sense, and passion are all reduced to mechanical operations, under the control of Deity: add to this the doctrine of innate ideas as immediate emanations from the will of God, and we have the finite absolutely swallowed up in the infinite, and all the foundations laid on which a complete system of pantheism must inevitably be erected.
Whilst, however, we cannot but regard these conclusions as false and consequently injurious, yet they do not hinder us from bearing testimony to the vast services of Descartes as the great pioneer of all modern psychology. Bacon had grappled with the scholastic philosophy, and opposed it successfully with the method of analysis—that great engine of all modern science. This method, however, he had applied mainly, if not exclusively, to nature, and the present grandeur of physical science tells us with what results. Descartes was the first to enter the human mind with the torch of analysis in his hand, and though he fell into various errors, as perhaps it was inevitable that he should, yet we may regard the labours of Locke and his successors in England, of Leibnitz and his school in Germany, and of Condillac with all that belonged to his movement in France, as being the inheritance of that philosophic spirit and method which Descartes himself first evoked and founded. The followers of Descartes on the one hand exaggerated, and on the other corrected, his main principles. Thus Geulincx and Malebranche, on their side, completed the doctrine of occasional causes, and prepared the ground for Spinozism and all its results. Leibnitz, on the other side, corrected the doctrine of innate ideas, by substituting for it the far sounder theory of innate faculties; introduced into the notion of substance the element of power, thus bringing the theory of the universe from a mechanical into a dynamical form; and finally, by developing the doctrine of atoms, together with the accompanying admission of secondary causes, reared a barrier against those pantheistic results to which the other half of the Cartesian school was fast drifting. Descartes, as corrected by Leibnitz, may thus be viewed as the real basis on which the more moderate schools of modern psychology—those which stand alike far from the extremes of sensationalism and idealism—really take their stand.
Before we close this notice, it is necessary to allude briefly to the merits of Descartes in the region of mathematics and physics. The principal improvements which he introduced into mathematical science were—1. The use of indices to denote the powers of any given number; 2. The employment of the first letters of the alphabet to designate known, and the last ones to designate unknown, quantities; 3. The method of indeterminate coefficients; 4. The development of the theory of equations, particularly in relation to the possible number of positive and negative roots; and 5. The mode of applying algebra to geometry by means of co-ordinates. The latter point, especially, challenges for him one of the most distinguished places in the history of mathematics. In regard to physics he missed his road, mainly from allowing too great a play to metaphysical ideas, and too subordinate a place to fact and experiment. The famous doctrine, which regarded the heavens as one vast fluid mass revolving like a vortex round the sun, was not, perhaps, an unnatural supposition at that period, and certainly succeeded in explaining many of the most perplexing phenomena. Some of the modern French commentators on Descartes, indeed, claim for his physics a position in the history of science almost as high as the discoveries of Newton. This, of course, they cannot do on the ground of the relative importance of their respective conclusions, but because Descartes is supposed to have assisted Newton to the idea, that the planetary movements might be treated as an ordinary problem in mechanics. This idea is, however, after all, a very simple matter in comparison with its development and its proof; and it is hardly likely that any one but a Frenchman would have thought of drawing the comparison at all. Scherk, one of his best German commentators, says, that on these questions of physics his head swam round in one of his own vortices; and that had not his natural genius and powerful understanding hindered it, he would hardly have left behind him, as far as his physical theories went, a single idea that has retained any kind of credit to the present day. His merit here was in bringing all the reigning doctrines of physics into doubt, and demanding a mechanical interpretation of the laws of nature. What he demanded, however, it was Newton alone who found out how to supply.
The first complete edition of Descartes' works was published at Amsterdam, in quarto, between the years 1670 and 1683. An edition was published in 9 volumes in Paris in 1724. In 1825 M. Cousin edited the "Œuvres complètes de Descartes," in 11 vols., 8vo.; in addition to which, portions of his works, chiefly those on philosophy, have been published in French more recently, under the editorship of MM. Garnier and Jules Simon. A very good English translation of the "Meditations," together with selections from the "Principles of Philosophy," was published in 1853; Edinburgh, Sutherland & Knox.—J. D. M.
* DESCHAMPS, Antoine, brother of Emile, born in 1790, a poet of great feeling, grace, and tenderness. His works are not numerous, owing to cerebral attacks to which he is subject, and the approaches of which he is able to recognize and prepare against with a meek fortitude which is as admirable as it is touching. He has made an admirable translation of Dante.—J. F. C.
* DESCHAMPS, Emile, poet, was born at Bourges in 1791. The first publication of this author which attracted public attention was the fruit of a remarkable occasion. Prior to the revolution of 1830, Charles X. reviewed the national guards. On the appearance of his majesty the men expressed their dissatisfaction at the state of public affairs in cries for the removal of ministers, to which the ill-advised monarch replied by an ordinance dissolving the body. M. Deschamps, then a captain on the staff, in some vigorous lines prophesied fatal consequences to the throne, and the result justified the truth of the old saying that poet and prophet are the same. His greatest literary claim consists, however, in the distinguished part he took with an illustrious band of rising young poets in their efforts to introduce Shakspeare to their countrymen without departure from the
