Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/265

NORMAN SMITH, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy. 251 This dualism Descartes seeras to have accepted as self-evident, and as equally self-evident the theory of representative perception which is logically deducible from it. His assigning the cogito ergo sum as the ultimate element in his system would therefore be due to his overlooking the two more fundamental presupposi- tions on account of their self-evidence. Our author indeed insists that if we are to avoid an utter misrepresentation of the facts we must note that, so far as the internal dialectic of Descartes' thought is concerned the dualistic theory is the most fundamental basis of the Cartesian system, the theory of representative per- ception being a mere deduction from it, and the cogito ergo sum, a mere logical deduction from the theory of representative percep- tion. Though much stress is laid on the logical order here indicated, the evidence adduced in its support is not convincing (cf. p. 116 and note, and p. 249 and note). Moreover the analogy of Augustine's internal dialectic (cf. p. 6) distinctly points another way. Readers of Scottish Philosophy are further aware that it is at least as easy to deduce the theory of representative percep- tion from the cogito as it is to deduce the cogito from the theory of representative perception. The treatment of Descartes' Method in chapter ii. is excellent. It is shown that Descartes' insistence on Method is due to the fact that, as he interprets it, it expresses the innermost essence of mind and so that the problem of method is identical with the problem as to the nature and limits of knowledge. Descartes' Method is the intuitive-deductive method of mathematics. Intuition, which is 'not a fitting together of premisses but a dialectic,' 'a growing capacity of the mind for truth,' is the source of all our knowledge. Deduction is ' simply the process by which intuition extends itself so as to take in the complex, that at first appears to lie outside its sphere '. It is knowledge in the making. The limits of knowledge lie on the one side in the simple natures from which Intuition starts, on the other in the " possible fruitfulness " of these and in their " adequacy to the comprehension of the real ". In the criterion of truth which Descartes utilises in the em- ployment of his Method we have the first clear evidence of that rationalism which is one of the characteristic features of Carte- sianism. Misled by the scholastic doctrine of essence, he interpreted his criterion as meaning not only " that all that in thought is clearly and distinctly conceived to be necessarily connected must be likewise inseparable in existence," but that "in the case of ideas between which the mind can perceive no connexion, the existences corresponding to them must also be unconnected ". Now as the simple natures with which Descartes starts are one and all abstract general conceptions we are led by this criterion to "see the mirror of real existence in the rational, ordered concatena- tion of general conceptions. Nature reveals herself adequately and transparently in the rational framework of mechanical science.