Chapter 9

SeeState-papers and Letters addressed to William Carstares, to which is prefixed a Life by M’Cormick (1774); Story’sCharacter and Career of William Carstares(1874); Andrew Lang’sHistory of Scotland(1907).

CARSTENS, ARMUS JACOB(1754-1798), German painter, was born in Schleswig, and in 1776 went to Copenhagen to study. In 1783 he went to Italy, where he was much impressed by the work of Giulio Romano. He then settled in Lübeck as a portrait painter, but was helped to visit Rome again in 1792, and gradually produced some fine subject and historical paintings,e.g.“Plato’s Symposium” and the “Battle of Rossbach”—which made him famous. He was appointed professor at Berlin, and in 1795 a great exhibition of his works was held in Rome, where he died in 1798. Carstens ranks as the founder of the later school of German historical painting.

CARSULAE,an ancient city of Umbria, on the Via Flaminia, 19 m. N. of Narnia (mod.Narni) and 24 m. S.S.W. of Mevania (mod.Bevagna). It is little mentioned in ancient literature. The town was amunicipium. The Via Flaminia is well preserved and enters the north gate of the town, the archway of which still stands. Remains of buildings may also be seen upon the site, and the outline of an amphitheatre is visible. The town of Cesi, 3 m. to the south-east, has polygonal walls, and may perhaps be regarded as an Umbrian city which was destroyed by the Romans, Carsulae being constructed in its stead. The medieval city, as so often happened in Italy, returned to the pre-Roman site.

See G. Gamurrini inNotizie degli Scavi(1884), 149; for the tombs, L. Lanzi, inNotizie degli Scavi(1902), 592.

CART(A.S.crœt, Gaeliccairt; connected with “car”), a general term for various kinds of vehicles (seeCarriage), in some cases for carrying people, but more particularly for transporting goods, for agricultural or postal purposes, &c., or for carriers. Though constructed in various ways, the simplest type for goods is two-wheeled, topless and springless; but as a general term “cart” is used in combination with some more specific qualification (dog-cart, donkey-cart, road-cart, polo-cart, &c.), when it is employed for pleasure purposes. The “dog-cart,” so called because originally used to convey sporting dogs, is a more or less elevated two-wheeled carriage, generally with scats back to back, in front and behind; the “governess-cart” (presumably so called from its use for children), a very low two-wheeled pony-carriage, has two side seats facing inwards; the “tax-cart,” a light two-wheeled farmer’s cart, was so called because formerly exempted from taxation as under the value of £21.

CARTAGENA,orCarthagena, a city, seaport, and the capital of the department of Bolívar, Colombia, South America, on the Caribbean coast, in 10° 25′ 48″ N., 75° 34′ W. Pop. (1905, official estimate) 14,000. The population of Cartagena is largely composed of blacks and mixed races, which form the predominant type on the lowland plains of northern Colombia. The well-to-do whites of Cartagena usually have country houses on the Turbaco hills, where the temperature is much lower than on the coast. The mean annual temperature in the city is 82°, and the port is classed as very unhealthful, especially for unacclimatized foreigners. The harbour, which is the best on the north coast of South America, is formed by an indentation of the coast-line shut in by two long islands lying parallel to the mainland. It covers an area of about 62.5 sq. m. and affords deep and secure anchorages and ample facilities for loading and unloading large vessels. The city itself has no modern quays, and large vessels do not approach within a mile of its landing-stages, but the railway pier (lengthened 120 ft. in 1898) on the mainland opposite permits the mooring of vessels alongside. There were formerly two entrances to the harbour—the Boca Grande (large mouth) between the low sandy island or peninsula on which the city stands and the island of Tierra Bomba, and the Boca Chica (small mouth) at the south end of the latter island. The Boca Grande was filled with stone after the city had been captured three times, because of the ease with which an enemy’s ships could pass through it at any time, and the narrow and moreeasily defended Boca Chica, 7 m. farther south, has since been used.

The city occupies a part of the upper island or peninsula facing the northern end of the harbour, and is separated from the mainland on the east by a shallow lagoon-like extension of the bay which is bridged by a causeway passing through the extramural suburb of Xiximani on another island. The old city, about ¾ m. long, north and south, and ½ m. wide, is enclosed by a heavy wall, in places 40 ft. thick, and is defended by several formidable-looking forts, which have long been dismantled, but are still in a good state of preservation. At the mainland end of the causeway leading from the city is the fort of San Felipe, about 100 ft. above sea-level, adapted as a distributing reservoir in the city’s waterworks; and behind it are verdure-covered hills rising to an elevation of 500 ft., forming a picturesque background to the grey walls and red-tiled roofs of the city. The streets are narrow, irregular and roughly paved, but are lighted by electricity; tramway lines run between the principal points of the city and suburbs. The houses are built with thick walls of stone and brick round open courts, in the Moorish style, and their iron-barred doors and windows give them the appearance of being a part of the fortifications. Among the numerous churches, the largest and most imposing is the Jesuit church of San Juan de Dios, with its double towers and celebrated marble pulpit; an old monastery adjoins. Cartagena is an episcopal see, and its cathedral dates from colonial times. The city was once the headquarters of the Inquisition in South America, and the edifice which it occupied, now private property, is an object of much interest. The water supply of the city was formerly obtained from rainwater tanks on the walls or by carriage from springs a few miles inland. But in 1906 an English company received a concession to bring water by pipes from springs on the Turbaco hills, 300 ft. above the sea.

The commercial importance of Cartagena declined greatly during the period of civil disorders which followed the war for independence, but in later years has revived. In the reign of Philip II. the Spaniards had opened a canal (“El Dique”) through some marshes and lagoons into a small western outlet of the Magdalena, which gave access to that river at Calamar, about 81 m. above the bar at its mouth; during Cartagena’s decline this was allowed to fill up; it was reopened in 1846 for a short time and then was obstructed again by river floods; but in 1881 it was reopened for steam navigation. Towards the end of the 19th century a railway, 65 m. long, was built between Cartagena and Calamar. Imports consist of cotton, linen and woollen fabrics, hardware, cutlery and machinery, kerosene, glass and earthenware; and the exports of cattle, sugar, tobacco, coffee, coco-nuts and fibre, dividivi and dye-woods, vegetable ivory, rubber, hides and skins, medicinal forest products, gold, silver and platinum. The aggregate value of the exports in 1906 was $3,788,094 U.S. gold.

Cartagena was founded in 1533 by Pedro de Heredia. In 1544 it was captured by pirates, who plundered the town; in 1585 by Sir Francis Drake, who exacted a large ransom; and in 1697 by the French, who obtained from it more than £1,000,000. In 1741 Admiral Vernon unsuccessfully besieged the town. It was taken by Bolívar in 1815, but was surrendered to the royalists in the same year. It was recaptured by the republicans on the 25th of September 1821, and thereafter remained in their possession. It figured prominently in the political agitations and revolutions which followed, and underwent a siege in the civil war of 1885. It was an important naval station under Spanish colonial rule, and is the principal naval station of Colombia.

CARTAGENA,orCarthagena, a seaport of south-eastern Spain, in the province of Murcia; in 37° 36′ N. and 0° 58′ W., at the terminus of a branch railway from the city of Murcia, and on the Mediterranean Sea. Pop. (1900) 99,871. Cartagena is fortified, and possesses an arsenal and naval dockyards. Together with Ferrol and San Fernando near Cadiz, the other great naval stations of Spain, it is governed by an admiral with the title of captain-general. It has also an episcopal see.

The city stands on a hill separated by a little plain from the harbour; towards the north and east it communicates with a fertile valley; on the south and west it is hemmed in by high mountains. Its grey houses have a neglected, almost a dilapidated appearance, from the friable stone of which they are constructed; and there are no buildings of antiquarian interest or striking architectural beauty, except, perhaps, the ruined citadel and the remnants of the town walls. The wide streets are traversed by a system of tramways, which pass through modern suburbs to the mining district about two leagues inland, and on the west a canal enables small vessels to enter the town without using the port. The harbour, the largest in Spain after that of Vigo, and the finest on the east coast, is a spacious bay, deep, except near its centre, where there is a ledge of rock barely 5 ft. under water. It is dominated, on the seaward side, by four hills, and approached by a narrow entrance, with forts on either hand; a breakwater affords shelter on the east, and on the west is the Arsenal Basin, often regarded as the original harbour of the Carthaginians and Romans. The island called La Escombrera, the ancientScombraria(i.e.“mackerel fishery”), 2½ m. south, protects Cartagena from the violence of wind and waves. The mines near the city are very productive, and thousands of men and beasts are employed in transporting lead, iron, copper, zinc and sulphur to the coast. The industrial and commercial progress of Cartagena was much hindered, during the first half of the 19th century, by the prevalence of epidemic diseases, the abandonment of the arsenal, and rivalry with the neighbouring port of Alicante. Its sanitary condition, though still defective, was improved by the drainage of the adjacent Almajar Marsh; and after 1870, when the population had dwindled to about 26,000, Cartagena advanced rapidly in size and wealth. The opening of the railway enabled it to compete successfully with Alicante, and revived the mining and metallurgical industries, while considerable sums were expended on bringing the coast and land defences up to date, and adding new quays, docks and other harbour works. As a naval station, Cartagena suffered severely in 1898 from the maritime disasters of the Spanish-American War; and its commerce was much affected when, at the beginning of the same year, Porman, or Portman, a mining village on a well-sheltered bay about 11 m. east, was declared by royal order an independent port. Vessels go to Porman to land coke and coal, and to load iron ore and lead. From Cartagena the principal exports are metallic ores, esparto grass, wine, cereals and fruit. Esparto grass, which grows freely in the vicinity, is thespartum, or Spanish broom, which gave the town its Roman designation ofCarthago Spartaria. It is still used locally for making shoes, ships’ cables, mats and a kind of spun cloth. Timber is largely imported from the United States, Sweden and Russia; coal from Great Britain; dried codfish from Norway and Newfoundland. In 1904, exclusive of coasters and small craft trading with north-west Africa, 662 ships of 604,208 tons entered the port of Cartagena, 259 being British and 150 Spanish; while 90 vessels were accommodated at Porman.

Cartagena was founded about the year 243b.c.by the Carthaginian Hasdrubal, and was calledCarthago Novaor New Carthage, to distinguish it from the African city of Carthage. It was conveniently situated opposite to the Carthaginian territory in Africa, and was early noted for its harbour. Its silver and gold mines were the source of great wealth both to the Carthaginians and to the Romans. In 210b.c.this important place, the headquarters and treasure city of the Punic army, was stormed and taken with great slaughter by P. Scipio. The city continued to flourish under the Romans, who made it a colony, with the nameColonia Victrix Julia Nova Carthago. Ina.d.425 it was pillaged and nearly destroyed by the Goths. Cartagena was a bishopric from about 400 to 1289, when the see was removed to Murcia. Under the Moors it became an independent principality, which was destroyed by Ferdinand II. of Castile in 1243, restored by the Moors, and finally conquered by James I. of Aragon in 1276. It was rebuilt by Philip II. of Spain (1527-1598) for the sake of its harbour. In 1585 it was sacked by an English fleet under Sir Francis Drake. In 1706, in the War of the Spanish Succession, it was occupied by Sir John Leake; and in the nextyear it was retaken by the duke of Berwick. On the 5th of November 1823 it capitulated to the French. In consequence of the insurrection in Spain, Cartagena was in 1844 again the scene of warfare. On the 23rd of August 1873 it was bombarded by the Spanish fleet under Admiral Lobos; on the 11th of October a battle took place off the town, between the ships of the government and the rebels, and on the 12th of January 1874 Cartagena was occupied by the government troops.

SeeBiblioteca histórica de Cartagena, by G. Vicent y Portillo (Madrid, 1889, &c.);Fechos y fechas de Cartagena, by I. Martinez Rito (Cartagena, 1894); andSerie de los obispos de Cartagena, by P. Diaz Casson (Madrid, 1895).

CARTAGO,the capital of the province of Cartago, in Costa Rica, Central America; 13 m. E.S.E. of San José by the trans-continental railway. Pop. (1900) 4536. Cartago is built 4930 ft. above sea-level, on the fertile and beautiful plateau of San José, and at the southern base of the volcano Irazú (11,200 ft.). Some of its older buildings, especially the churches, are of considerable interest; but all bear marks of the volcanic disturbances from which the town has suffered on many occasions—notably in 1723, when it was nearly overwhelmed by the bursting of the flooded crater of Irazú, and in 1841, when it was shattered by an earthquake. There are hot mineral springs much frequented by invalids at Bella Vista, a suburb connected with the town by a tramway 3 m. long. The local trade is chiefly in coffee of fine quality, which is readily cultivated in the rich volcanic soil of the neighbourhood. Cartago is said to have been in existence as early as 1522; it was probably named in 1563 by the Spaniard Vazquez de Coronado, to whom its foundation is often ascribed. Though several times plundered by buccaneers, it retained its importance as the capital of Costa Rica until 1823, when it is said by tradition to have contained 30,000 inhabitants. Its prosperity rapidly diminished after the transference of the seat of government to San José, in 1823, but somewhat revived with the development of railways after 1871.

CARTE, THOMAS(1686-1754), English historian, was born at Dusmoon, near Clifton. He was educated at Oxford, and was first brought into notice by his controversy with Dr Henry Chandler regarding the Irish massacre, in which he defended Charles I. His attachment to the Stuarts also caused him to remain a non-juror, and on the discovery of the plot of Atterbury, whose secretary he was, he was forced to flee to France. There he collected materials for an English edition of De Thou and Rigault, which were purchased and published by Dr Mead. Being recalled to England through the influence of Queen Caroline, he published, in 1738,A General Account of the Necessary Materials for a History of England. The first volume of hisCentral History of England, which is only of value for its vast and careful collection of facts, was published in 1747. By the insertion in it of the statement that the king’s evil had been cured by the Pretender, Carte forfeited the favour of most of his patrons. He, however, continued to publish; and the 2nd volume appeared in 1750, the 3rd in 1752, the 4th in 1755. He published also aLife of James, duke of Ormond, containing a collection of letters, &c. (3 vols., 1735-1736; new ed., in 6 vols., Oxford, 1851), and aHistory of the Revolutions of Portugal, with letters of Sir R. Southwell during his embassy there (London, 1740). His papers became the property of the university of Oxford, and were deposited in the Bodleian library.

CARTER, ELIZABETH(1717-1806), English poet and translator, daughter of the Rev. Nicholas Carter, was born at Deal, in Kent, on the 16th of December 1717. Dr Carter educated his children, boys and girls, alike; but Elizabeth’s slowness tired his patience, and it was only by great perseverance that she conquered her natural incapacity for learning. She studied late at night and early in the morning, taking snuff and chewing green tea to keep herself awake; thus causing severe injury to her health. She learned Greek and Latin, and Dr Johnson said concerning a celebrated scholar that he “understood Greek better than any one whom he had ever known except Elizabeth Carter.” She learned also Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and lastly some Arabic. She studied astronomy, ancient geography, and ancient and modern history. Edward Cave was a friend of Dr Carter, and in 1734 some of Elizabeth’s verses, signed “Eliza,” appeared in theGentleman’s Magazine, to which she contributed for many years. In 1738 Cave published herPoems upon Particular Occasions; in 1739 she translated from the French an attack on Pope’sEssay on Manby J.P. de Crousaz; and in the same year appeared her translation from the Italian of Algarotti’sNewtonianismo per le Dame, under the title ofSir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy explained for the use of the Ladies, in six Dialogues on Light and Colour. Her translation of Epictetus (1758) was undertaken in 1749 to please her friends, Thomas Secker (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury) and his niece, Catherine Talbot, to whom the translation was sent, sheet by sheet, as it was done. In 1762 Miss Carter printed a second collection ofPoems on Several Occasions. Her letters to Miss Talbot contain an account of a tour on the continent undertaken in 1763 in company with Edward and Elizabeth Montagu and William Pulteney, 1st earl of Bath. Dr Carter, from 1762 to his death in 1774, lived with his daughter in a house at Deal, which she had purchased. An annuity was settled on her by Sir William Pulteney and his wife, who had inherited Lord Bath’s fortune; and she had another annuity from Mrs Montagu. Among Miss Carter’s friends and correspondents were Samuel Johnson, Bishop Butler, Richard Savage, Horace Walpole, Samuel Richardson, Edmund Burke, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Vesey, who was a leader of literary society. She died in Clarges Street, Piccadilly, on the 19th of February 1806.

HerMemoirswere published in 1807; her correspondence with Miss Talbot and Mrs Vesey in 1809; and her letters to Mrs Montagu in 1817. See alsoA Woman of Wit and Wisdom(1906), a biography by Alice C.C. Gaussen.

CARTERET, SIR GEORGE(c. 1610-1680), English politician, was born between 1609 and 1617 on the island of Jersey, where his family had long been prominent landholders. He was the son of Helier de Carteret of St Ouen, and in his youth was trained to follow the sea. In 1639 he became comptroller of the English navy. During the Civil War he was active in behalf of the king. In 1643 he succeeded by reversion from his uncle, Sir Philip Carteret, to the post of bailiff of Jersey, and in the same year was appointed by the king lieutenant-governor of the island. After subduing the Parliamentary party in the island, he was commissioned (1644) a vice-admiral of Jersey and “the maritime parts adjacent,” and by virtue of that office he carried on from there an active privateering campaign in the Royalist cause. Parliament branded him as a pirate and excluded him specifically from future amnesty. His rule in Jersey was severe, but profitable to the island; he developed its resources and made it a refuge for Royalists, among whom in 1646 and again in 1649-1650 was Prince Charles, who created Carteret a knight and baronet. In 1650, in consideration of Carteret’s services, Charles granted to him “a certain island and adjacent islets near Virginia, in America,” which were to be called New Jersey; but no settlement upon this grant was made. In 1651 Carteret, after a seven weeks’ siege, was compelled to surrender Jersey to a Parliamentary force; he then joined the Royalist exiles in France, where for a time he held a command in the French navy. He returned to England at the Restoration, became a privy councillor, sat in parliament for Portsmouth, and also served as vice-chamberlain of the royal household, a position to which he had been appointed in 1647. From 1661 to 1667 he was treasurer of the navy. He rendered valuable service during the Dutch War, but his lax methods of keeping accounts led to his being censured by parliament. In 1667 he became a deputy treasurer of Ireland. He continued nevertheless in the royal favour, and subsequently was appointed one of the commissioners of the admiralty and a member of the board of trade and plantations. He belonged to that group of courtiers interested in the colonization of America, and was one of the eight to whom Charles II. granted the country of the Carolinas by the charters of 1663 and 1665. In 1664 James, duke of York, granted that part of his American territory between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to Sir George Carteretand John, Lord Berkeley, and in Carteret’s honour this tract received the name of New Jersey. Sir George’s relative, Philip Carteret (d. 1682), was sent over as governor in 1665, but was temporarily deposed in 1672 by the discontented colonists, who chose James Carteret (perhaps a natural son of Sir George) as “president.” Philip Carteret was restored to his office in 1674. In this year Lord Berkeley disposed of his share of the grant, which finally fell under the control of William Penn and his associates. With them Carteret agreed (1676) upon a boundary line which divided the colony into East and West Jersey. He died in January 1680, and two years later his heirs disposed of his New Jersey holdings to Penn and other Quakers.

CARTESIANISM,1the general name given to the philosophy developed principally in the works of Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza. It is impossible to exhibit the full meaning of these authors except in connexion, for they are all ruled by one and the same thought in different stages of its evolution. It may be true that Malebranche and Spinoza were prepared, the former by the study of Augustine, the latter by the study of Jewish philosophy, to draw from Cartesian principles consequences which Descartes never anticipated. But the foreign light did not alter the picture on which it was cast, but only let it be seen more clearly. The consequences were legitimately drawn. It may be shown that they lay in the system from the first, and that they were evolved by nothing but its own immanent dialectic. At the same time it is not likely that they would ever have been brought into such clear consciousness, or expressed with such consistency, except by a philosopher whose circumstances and character had completely detached him from all the convictions and prejudices of the age. In Malebranche, Cartesianism found an interpreter whose meditative spirit was fostered by the cloister, but whose speculative boldness was restrained by the traditions of the Catholic church. In Spinoza it found one who was in spirit and position more completely isolated than any monk, who was removed from the influence of the religious as well as the secular world of his time, and who in his solitude seemed scarcely ever to hear any voice but the voice of philosophy. It is because Cartesianism found such a pure organ of expression that its development is, in some sense, complete and typical. Its principles have been carried to their ultimate result, and we have before us all the data necessary to determine their value.

The Philosophy of Descartes.—Descartes was, in the full sense of the word, a partaker of the modern spirit. He was equally moved by the tendencies that produced the Reformation, and the tendencies that produced the revival of letters and science. Like Erasmus and Bacon, he sought to escape from a transcendent and unreal philosophy of the other world, to the knowledge of man and the world he lives in. But like Luther, he found within human experience, among the matters nearest to man, the consciousness of God, and therefore his renunciation of scholasticism did not end either in materialism or in that absolute distinction between faith and reason which inevitably leads to the downfall of faith. What was peculiar to Descartes, however, was the speculative interest which made it impossible for him to rest in mere experience, whether of things spiritual or of things secular, which made him search, both in our consciousness of God and our consciousness of the world, for the links by which they are bound to the consciousness of self. In bothPrinciple of doubt.cases it is his aim to go back to the beginning, to retrace the unconscious process by which the world of experience was built up, to discover the hidden logic that connects the different parts of the structure of belief, to substitute a reasoned system, all whose elements are interdependent, for an unreasoned congeries of opinions. Hence his first step involves reflection, doubt and abstraction. Turning the eye of reason upon itself, he tries to measure the value of that collection of beliefs of which he finds himself possessed; and the first thing that reflection seems to discover is its accidental and unconnected character. It is a mass of incongruous materials, accumulated without system and untested. Its elements have been put together under all kinds of influences, without any conscious intellectual process, and therefore we can have no assurance of them. In order that we may have such assurance we must unweave the web of experience and thought which we have woven in our sleep, that we may begin again at the beginning and weave it over again with “clear and distinct” consciousness of what we are doing.De omnibus dubitandum est.We must free ourselves by one decisive effort from the weight of custom, prejudice and tradition with which our consciousness of the world has been overlaid, that in that consciousness in its simplest and most elementary form we may find the true beginning of knowledge. The method of doubt is at the same time a method of abstraction, by which Descartes rises above the thought of the particular objects of knowledge, in order that he may find the primary truth in which lies the very definition of knowledge, of the reason why anything can be said to be true. First disappears the whole mass of dogmas and opinions as to God and man which are confessedly received on mere authority. Then the supposed evidence of sense is rejected, for external reality is not immediately given in sensation. It is acknowledged by all that the senses often mislead us as to the nature of things without us, and perhaps they may also mislead us as to there being anything without us at all. Nay, by an effort, we can even carry doubt beyond this point; we can doubt even mathematical truth. When, indeed, we have our thoughts directed to the geometrical demonstration, when the steps of the process are immediately before our minds, we cannot but assent to the proposition that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; but when we forget or turn away our thoughts from such demonstration, we can imagine that God or some powerful spirit is playing upon our minds to deceive them, also that even our most certain judgments may be illusory. In this naïve manner does Descartes express the idea that there are necessities of thought prior to, and presupposed in the truth of geometry. He is seeking to strip thought of all the “lendings” that seem to come to it from anything but itself, of all relation to being that can be supposed to be given to it from without, that he may discover the primary unity of thought and being on which allCertainty of the thinking self.knowledge depends. And this he finds in pure self-consciousness. Whatever I abstract from, I cannot abstract from self, from the “I think” that, as Kant puts it, accompanies all our ideas; for it was in fact the very independence of this universal element on the particulars that made all our previous abstraction possible. Even doubt rests on certitude; alone with self I cannot get rid of this self. By an effort of thought I separate my thinking self from all that I think, but the thinking self remains, and in thinking I am.Cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” The objective judgment of self-consciousness is bound up with or involved in the very faculty of judging, and therefore remains when we abstract from all other objective judgments. It is an assertion involved in the very process by which we dismiss all other assertions. Have we not then a right to regard it as a primitive unity of thought and being, in which is contained, or out of which may be developed, the very definition of truth?

The sense in which Descartes understood his first principle becomes clearer when we look at his answers to the objections made against it. On the one hand it was challenged by those who asked, like Gassendi, why the argument should be based especiallyDifficulties of the “cogito, ergo sum.”on thought, and why we might not say with as good a right,ambulo, ergo sum: “I walk, therefore I am.” Descartes explains that it is only as referred to consciousness that walking is an evidence of my existence; but if I say, “I am conscious of walking, therefore I exist,” this is equivalent to saying, “I think in one particular way, therefore I exist.” But it is not thinking in a particular way, but thinking in general that is coextensive with my existence. I am not always conscious of walking or of any other special state or object, but I am always conscious, for except in consciousness there is no ego or self, and where there is consciousness there is always an ego. “Do I then always think, even in sleep?” asks the objector; and Descartes exposes himself to the criticisms of Locke, by maintaining that it is impossible that there should ever be an interval in the activity of consciousness, and by insisting that as man is essentially a thinking substance, the child thinks, or is self-conscious, even in its mother’s womb. The difficulty disappears when we observe that the question as to the conditions under which self-consciousness is developed inthe individual human subject does not affect the nature of self-consciousness in itself or in its relation to knowledge. The force of Descartes’s argument really lies in this, that the world as an intelligible world exists only for a conscious self, and that therefore the unity of thought and being in self-consciousness is presupposed in all knowledge. Of this self it is true to say that it exists only as it thinks, and that it thinks always.Cogito, ergo sumis, as Descartes points out, not a syllogism, but the expression of an identity which is discerned by the simple intuition of the mind.2If it were otherwise, the major “omne quod cogitat existit” would require to have been known before the minor “cogito”; whereas on the contrary it is from the immediate consciousness of being as contained in self-consciousness that that major can alone be derived. Again, when Hobbes and others argued that thinking is or may be a property of a material substance, Descartes answers that the question whether the material and the thinking substance are one does not meet us at the outset, but can only be solved after we have considered what is involved in the conception of these different substances respectively.3In other words, to begin by treating thinking as a quality of a material substance, is to go outside of the intelligible world for an explanation of the intelligible world. It is to ask for something prior to that which is first in thought. If it be true that the consciousness of self is that from which we cannot abstract, that which is involved in the knowledge of anything, then to go beyond it and seek for a reason or explanation of it in anything else is to go beyond the beginning of knowledge; it is to ask for a knowledge before knowledge.Descartes, however, is himself unfaithful to this point of view; for, strictly taken, it would involve the consequence, not only that there is nothing prior to the pure consciousness of self, but that there can be no object which is not in necessary relation to it. Hence there can be no absolute opposition between thought and anything else, no opposition which thought itself does not transcend. But Descartes commits the error of making thought the property of a substance, ares cogitans, which as such can immediately or directly apprehend nothing but thoughts or ideas; while, altogether outside of these thoughts and ideas, there is another substance characterized by the property of extension, and with which thought has nothing to do. Matter in space is thus changed, in Kantian language, into a “thing in itself,” an object out of all relation to the subject; and on the other hand, mind seems to be shut up in the magic circle of its own ideas, without any capacity of breaking through the circle or apprehending any reality but itself. Between thought and being, in spite of theirsubjectiveunity in self-consciousness, a great gulf seems still to be fixed, which cannot be crossed unless thought should become extended, or matter think. But to Descartes the dualism is absolute, because it is a presupposition with which he starts. Mind cannot go out of itself, cannot deal with anything but thought, without ceasing to be mind; and matter must cease to be matter ere it can lose its absolute externality, its nature as havingpartes extra partes, and acquire the unity of mind. They are opposed as the divisible and the indivisible, and there is no possible existence of matter in thought except a representative existence. The ideal (or, as Descartes calls it, objective) existence of matterinthought and the real (or, as Descartes calls it, formal) existence of matterout ofthought are absolutely different and independent things.

Descartes, however, is himself unfaithful to this point of view; for, strictly taken, it would involve the consequence, not only that there is nothing prior to the pure consciousness of self, but that there can be no object which is not in necessary relation to it. Hence there can be no absolute opposition between thought and anything else, no opposition which thought itself does not transcend. But Descartes commits the error of making thought the property of a substance, ares cogitans, which as such can immediately or directly apprehend nothing but thoughts or ideas; while, altogether outside of these thoughts and ideas, there is another substance characterized by the property of extension, and with which thought has nothing to do. Matter in space is thus changed, in Kantian language, into a “thing in itself,” an object out of all relation to the subject; and on the other hand, mind seems to be shut up in the magic circle of its own ideas, without any capacity of breaking through the circle or apprehending any reality but itself. Between thought and being, in spite of theirsubjectiveunity in self-consciousness, a great gulf seems still to be fixed, which cannot be crossed unless thought should become extended, or matter think. But to Descartes the dualism is absolute, because it is a presupposition with which he starts. Mind cannot go out of itself, cannot deal with anything but thought, without ceasing to be mind; and matter must cease to be matter ere it can lose its absolute externality, its nature as havingpartes extra partes, and acquire the unity of mind. They are opposed as the divisible and the indivisible, and there is no possible existence of matter in thought except a representative existence. The ideal (or, as Descartes calls it, objective) existence of matterinthought and the real (or, as Descartes calls it, formal) existence of matterout ofthought are absolutely different and independent things.

It was, however, impossible for Descartes to be content with a subjective idealism that confined all knowledge to the tautological expression of self-consciousness “I am I,” “What I perceive I perceive.” If the individual is toProof of existence of God.find in his self-consciousness the principle of all knowledge, there must be something in it which transcends the distinction of self and not self, which carries him beyond the limit of his own individuality. What then is the point where the subjective consciousness passes out into the objective, from which it seemed at first absolutely excluded? Descartes answers that it is through the connexion of the consciousness of self with the consciousness of God. It is because we find God in our minds that we find anything else. The proof of God’s existence is therefore the hinge on which the whole Cartesian philosophy turns, and it is necessary to examine the nature of it somewhat closely.

Descartes, in the first place, tries to extract a criterion of truth out of thecogito, ergo sum. Why am I assured of my own existence? It is because the conception of existence is at once and immediately involved in the consciousness of self. I can logically distinguish the two elements, but I cannot separate them; whenever I clearly and distinctly conceive the one, I am forced to think the other along with it. But this gives me a rule for all judgments whatever, a principle which is related to thecogito, ergo sumas the formal to the material principle of knowledge. Whatever we cannot separate from the clear and distinct conception of anything, necessarily belongs to it in reality; and on the other hand, whatever we can separate from the clear and distinct conception of anything, does not necessarily belong to it in reality. Let us therefore set an object clearly before us, let us sever it in thought so far as is possible from all other objects, and we shall at once be able to determine what properties and relations are essential and what are not essential to it. And if we find empirically that any object manifests a property or relation not involved in the clear and distinct conception of it, we can say with certainty that such property or relation does not belong to it except by arbitrary arrangement, or, in other words, by the external combination of things which in their own nature have no affinity or connexion.

Now, by the application of this principle, we might at once assure ourselves of many mathematical truths; but, as has been already shown, there is a point of view from which we may doubt even these, so long as the idea of a God that deceives us is not excluded. If it is not certain that there is a God that cannot lie, it is not certain that there is an objective matter in space to which mathematical truth applies. But the existence of God may be proved in two ways. In the first place, it may be proved through the principle of causality, which is a self-evident truth. We have in our mind many ideas, and according to the principle of causality, all these ideas must be derived from something that contains a “formal” reality which corresponds to their “objective” reality,i.e.which contains at least as much reality in its existence out of thought as they contain in their existence in thought. Now we might derive from ourselves not only the ideas of other minds like ourselves, but possibly also of material objects, since these are lower in the scale of existence than ourselves, and it is conceivable that the idea of them might be got by omitting some of the qualities which distinguish ourselves. But the idea of God, of a being who is eternal and immutable, all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good, cannot be derived from our own limited and imperfect existence. The origin, therefore, must be sought in a being who contains actually in himself all that is contained in our idea of him.

It was objected by some of the critics of Descartes that the idea of God as the infinite Being is merely negative, and that it is derived from the finite simply by abstracting from its conditions. Descartes answers that the case is just the reverse—theDescartes’s metaphysics.infinite is the positive idea, and the finite is the negative, and therefore the former is the presupposition of the latter. As Kant, at a later date, pointed out that space is not a general conception, abstracted from the ideas of particular spaces, and representing the common element in them, but that, on the contrary, the ideas of particular spaces are got by the limitation of the one infinite space that is prior to them, so Descartes maintains in general that the idea of the finite is had only by limitation of the infinite, and not the idea of the infinite by abstraction from the particular determinations of the finite. It is a necessary consequence of this that the self-consciousness of a finite being is bound up with the consciousness of the infinite. Hence the idea of God is not merely one among other ideas which we have, but it is the one idea that is necessary to our very existence as thinking beings, the idea through which alone we can think ourselves, or anything else. “I ought never to suppose,” says Descartes, “that my conception of the infinite is a negative idea, got by negation of the finite, just as I conceive repose to be merely negation of movement, and darkness merely the negation of light. On the contrary, I see manifestly that there is more reality in the infinite than in the finite substance, and that therefore I have in me the notion of the infinite,even in some sense prior to the notion of the finite, or, in other words, that the notion of myself in some sense presupposes the notion of God; for how could I doubt or desire, how could I be conscious of anything as a want, how could I know that I am not altogether perfect, if I had not in me the idea of a being more perfect than myself, by comparison with whom I recognize the defects of my own existence?”4Descartes then goes on in various ways to illustrate the thesis that the consciousness of a defective and growing nature cannot give rise to the idea of infinite perfection, but on the contrary presupposes it. We could not think of a series of approximations unless there were somehow present to us the idea of the completed infinite as the goal we aim at. If we had not the consciousness of ourselves as finitein relationto the infinite, either we should not be conscious ofourselves at all, or we should be conscious of ourselves as infinite. The image of God is so impressed by him upon us, that we “conceive that resemblance wherein the idea of God is contained by the same faculty whereby we are conscious of ourselves.” In other words, our consciousness of ourselves is at the same time consciousness of our finitude, and hence of our relation to a being who is infinite.The principle which underlies the reasoning of Descartes is that to be conscious of a limit, is to transcend it. We could not feel the limits either upon our thought or upon our existence, we could not doubt or desire, if we did not already apprehend something beyond these limits. Nay, we could not be conscious of our existence as individual selves if we were not conscious of that which is not ourselves, and of a unity in which both self and not-self are included. Our individual life is therefore to us as self-conscious beings a part of a wider universal life. Doubt and aspiration are but the manifestation of this essential division and contradiction of a nature which, as conscious of itself, is at the same time conscious of the whole in which it is a part. And as the existence of a self and its consciousness are one, so we may say that a thinking being is not only an individual, but always in some sense identified with that universal unity of being to which it is essentially related.If Descartes had followed out this line of thought, he would have been led at once to the pantheism of Spinoza, if not beyond it. As it is, he is on the verge of contradiction with himself when he speaks of the consciousness of God asin some senseprior to the consciousness of self. How can anything be prior to the first principle of knowledge? It is no answer to say that the consciousness of God is theprincipium essendi, while the consciousness of self is theprincipium cognoscendi. For, if the idea of God is prior to the idea of self, knowledge must begin where existence begins, with God. The words “in some sense,” with which Descartes qualifies his assertion of the priority of the idea of God, only betray his hesitation and his partial consciousness of the contradiction in which he is involved. Some of Descartes’s critics presented this difficulty to him in another form, and accused him of reasoning in a circle when he said that it is because God cannot lie that we are certain that our clear and distinct ideas do not deceive us. The very existence of the conscious self, thecogito, ergo sum, which is the first of all truths and therefore prior in certitude to the existence of God, is believed only because of the clearness and distinctness with which we apprehend it. How then, they argued, could God’s truthfulness be our security for a principle which we must use in order to prove the being of God? The answer of Descartes is somewhat lame. We cannot doubt any self-evident principle, or even any truth based on a self-evident principle, when we are directly contemplating it in all the necessity of its evidence; it is only when we forget or turn away from this evidence, and begin to think of the possibility of a deceitful God, that a doubt arises which cannot be removed except by the conviction that God is true.5It can scarcely be said that this is adignus vindice nodus, or that God can fitly appear as a kind of second-best resource to the forgetful spirit that has lost its direct hold on truth and its faith in itself. God, truth, and the human spirit are thus conceived as having merely external and accidental relations with each other. What Descartes, however, is really expressing in this exoteric way is simply that beneath and beyond all particular truths lies the great general truth of the unity of thought and existence. In contemplating particular truth, we may not consciously relate it to this unity, but when we have to defend ourselves against scepticism we are forced to realize this relation. The ultimate answer to any attack upon a special aspect or element of truth must be to show that the fate of truth itself, the very possibility of knowledge, is involved in the rejection of it, and that we cannot doubt it without doubting reason itself. But to doubt reason is, in the language of Descartes, to doubt the truthfulness of God, for, in his view, the idea of God is involved in the very constitution of reason. Taken in this way then, the import of Descartes’s answer is, that the consciousness of self, like every other particular truth, is not at first seen to rest on the consciousness of God, but that when we realize what it means we see that it does so rest. But if this be so, then in making the consciousness of self his first principle of knowledge, Descartes has stopped short of the truth. It can only be the first principle if it is understood, not as the consciousness of the individual self, but in a sense in which the consciousness of self is identical with the consciousness of God.Descartes, however, is far from a clear apprehension of the ultimate unity of thought and being, which nevertheless he strives to find in God. Beginning with an absolute separation of theres cogitansfrom theres extensa, he is continually falling back into dualism just when he seemed to have escaped from it. Even in God the absolute unity, idea and reality fall asunder; our idea of God is not God in us, it is only an idea of which God’s existence is the cause. But the category of causality, if it forms a bridge between different things, as here between knowing and being, at the same time repels them from each other. It is a category of external relation which may be adequate to express the relation of the finite to the finite, but not the relation of the finite to the infinite. We cannot conceive God as the cause of our idea of him, without making God a purely objective and therefore finite existence. Nor is the case better when we turn to the so-called ontological argument,—that existence is necessarily involved in the idea of God, just as the property of having its angles equal to two right angles is involved in the idea of a triangle. If indeed we understood this as meaning that thought transcends the distinction between itself and existence, and that therefore existence cannot be a thing in itself out of thought, but must be an intelligible world that exists as such only for the thinking being, there is some force in the argument. But this meaning we cannot find in Descartes, or to find it we must make him inconsistent with himself. He was so far from having quelled the phantom “thing in itself,” that he treated matter in space as such a thing, and thus confused externality of space with externality to the mind. On this dualistic basis, the ontological argument becomes a manifest paralogism, and lies open to all the objections that Kant brought against it. That the idea of God involves existence, proves only that God, if he exists at all, exists by the necessity of his being. But the link that shall bind thought to existence is still wanting, and, in consistency with the other presuppositions of Descartes, it cannot be supplied.But again, even if we allow to Descartes that God is the unity of thought and being, we must still ask what kind of unity? Is it a mere generic unity, reached by abstraction, and therefore leaving out all the distinguishing characteristics of the particulars under it? Or is it a concrete unity to which the particular elements are subordinated, but in which they are nevertheless included? To answer this question, we need only look at the relation of the finite to the infinite, as it is expressed in that passage already quoted, and in many others. Descartes always speaks of the infinite as a purely affirmative or positive existence, and of the finite in so far as it is distinguished from the infinite, as purely negative, or in other words as a nonentity. “I am,” he says, “a mean between God and nothing, between the Supreme Being and not-being. In so far as I am created by God, there is nothing in me that can deceive me or lead me into error. But on the other hand, if I consider myself as participating in nothingness or not-being, inasmuch as I am not myself the Supreme Being, but in many ways defective, I find myself exposed to an infinity of errors. Thus error as such is not something real that depends on God, but simply a defect; I do not need to explain it by means of any special faculty bestowed on me by God, but merely by the fact that the faculty for discerning truth from error with which he has endowed me, is not infinite.”6But if we follow out this principle to its logical result, we must say not only that error is a consequence of finitude, but also that the veryexistenceof the finite as such is an error or illusion. All finitude, all determination, according to the well-known Spinozistic aphorism, is negation, and negation cannot constitute reality. To know the reality of things, therefore, we have to abstract from their limits, or in other words, the only reality is the infinite. Finite being,quafinite, has no existence, and finite self-consciousness, consciousness of a self in opposition to or limited by a not-self, is an illusion. But Descartes does not thus reason. He does not see “anything in the nature of the infinite which should exclude the existence of finite things.” “What,” he asks, “would become of the power of that imaginary infinite if it could create nothing? Perceiving in ourselves the power of thinking, we can easily conceive that there should be a greater intelligence elsewhere. And even if we should suppose that intelligence increasedad infinitum, we need not fear that our own would be lessened. And the same is true of all other attributes which we ascribe to God, even of his power, provided only that we do not suppose that the power in us is not subjected to God’s will. In all points, therefore, he is infinite without any exclusion of created things.”7The truth of this view we need not dispute; the question is as to its consistency with Cartesian principles. It may be a higher idea of God to conceive him as revealing himself in and to finite creatures; but it is a different idea from that which is implied in Descartes’s explanations of error. It is an inconsistency that brings Descartes nearer to Christianity, and nearer, it may also be said, to a true metaphysic; but it is not the less an inconsistency with his fundamental principles, which necessarily disappears in their subsequent development. To conceive the finite as constituted not merely by the absence of some of the positive elements of the infinite, but as in necessary unity with the infinite; to conceive the infinite as not merely that which has no limits or determinations, but as that which is self-determined and self-manifesting, which through all finitude and manifestation returns upon itself, may not be erroneous. But it would not be difficult to show that the adoption of such a conception involves the rejection or modification of almost every doctrine of the Cartesian system.In connexion with this inconsistency we may notice the very different relations in which Descartes conceives mind on the one side and matter on the other, to stand towards God, who yet is the cause of both, and must therefore, by the principleMind and matter.of causality, contain in himself all that is in both. Matter and mind are to Descartes absolute opposites. Whatever can be asserted of mind can be denied of matter, whatever can be asserted of matter can be denied of mind. Matter is passive, mind is active; matter is extended, and therefore divisiblead infinitum;mind is an indivisible unity. In fact, though of this Descartes is not conscious, the determination of the one is mediated by its opposition to the other; the ideas of object and subject, the self and not-self, are terms of a relation distinguishable but inseparable. But in the idea of God we must find a unity which transcends this difference in one way or another, whether by combining the two under a higher notion, or, as it would be more natural to expect on Cartesian principles, by abstracting equally from the particular characteristics of both. Descartes really does neither, or rather he acts partly on the one principle and partly on the other. In his idea of God he abstracts from the properties of matter but not from those of mind. “God,” he says, “contains in himselfformaliterall that is in mind, but onlyeminenterall that is in matter”;8or, as he elsewhere expresses it more popularly, heismind, but he is only the creator of matter. And for this he gives as his reason, that matter as being divisible and passive is essentially imperfect.Ipsa natura corporis multas imperfectiones involvit, and, therefore, “there is more analogy between sounds and colours than there is between material things and God.” But the real imperfection here lies in the abstractness of the Cartesian conception of matter as merely extended, merely passive; and this is balanced by the equal abstractness of the conception of mind or self-consciousness as an absolutely simple activity, a pure intelligence without any object but itself. If matter as absolutely opposed to mind is imperfect, mind as absolutely opposed to matter is equally imperfect. In fact they are the elements or factors of a unity, and lose all meaning when severed from each other, and if we are to seek this unity by abstraction, we must equally abstract from both.The result of this one-sidedness is seen in the fact that Descartes, who begins by separating mind from matter, ends by finding the essence of mind in pure will,i.e.in pure formal self-determination. Hence God’s will is conceived as absolutelyReason and will.arbitrary, not determined by any end or law, for all laws, even the necessary truths that constitute reason, spring from God’s determination, and do not precede it. “He is the author of the essence of things no less than their existence,” and his will has no reason but his will. In man there is an intelligence with eternal laws or truths involved in its structure, which so far limits his will. “He finds the nature of good and truth already determined by God, and his will cannot be moved by anything else.” His highest freedom consists in having his will determined by a clear perception of the nature of good and truth, and “he is never indifferent except when he is ignorant of it, or at least does not see it so clearly as to be lifted above the possibility of doubt.”9Indifference of will is to him “the lowest grade of liberty,” yet, on the other hand, in nothing does the image of God in him show itself more clearly than in the fact that his will is not limited by his clear and distinct knowledge, but is “in a manner infinite.” For “there is no object of any will, even the infinite will of God, to which our will does not extend.”10Belief is a free act, for as we can yield our assent to the obscure conceptions presented by sense and the imagination, and thus allow ourselves to be led into error, so on the other hand we can refuse to give this assent, or allow ourselves to be determined by anything but the clear and distinct ideas of intelligence. That which makes it possible for us to err is that also in which the divine image in us is most clearly seen. We cannot have the freedom of God whose will creates the object of his knowledge; but in reserving our assent for the clear and distinct perceptions of intelligence, we, as it were, re-enact for ourselves the divine law, and repeat, so far as is possible to finite beings, the transcendent act of will in which truth and good had their origin.The inherent defect of this view is the divorce it makes between the form and the matter of intelligence. It implies that reason or self-consciousness is one thing, and that truth is another and quite different thing, which has been united to it by the arbitrary will of God. The same external conception of the relation of truth to the mind is involved in the doctrine of innate ideas. It is true that Descartes did not hold that doctrine in the coarse form in which it was attributed to him by Locke, but expressly declares that he has “never said or thought at any time that the mind required innate ideas which were separated from the faculty of thinking. He had simply used the word innate to distinguish those ideas which are derived from that faculty, and not from external objects or the determination of the will. Just as when we say generosity is innate in certain families, and in certain others diseases, like the gout or the stone, we do not mean to imply that infants in their mother’s womb are affected with these complaints.”11Yet Descartes, as we have seen, does not hold that these truths are involved in the very nature of intelligence as such, so that we cannot conceive a self-conscious being without them. On the contrary, we are to regard the divine intelligence as by arbitrary act determining that two and two should be four, or that envy should be a vice. We are “notto conceive eternal truth flowing from God as rays from the sun.”12In other words, we are not to conceive all particular truths as different aspects of one truth. It is part of the imperfection of man’s finite nature that he “finds truth and good determined for him.” It is something given,—given, indeed, along with his very faculty of thinking, but stillgivenas an external limit to it. It belongs not to his nature as spirit, but to his finitude as man.After what has been said, it is obvious that the transition from God to matter must be somewhat arbitrary and external. God’s truthfulness is pledged for the reality of that of which we haveclear and distinct ideas; and we have clear andTruth of external world.distinct ideas of the external world so long as we conceive it simply as extended matter, infinitely divisible, and moved entirely from without,—so long, in short, as we conceive it as the direct opposite of mind, and do not attribute to it any one of the properties of mind. “Omnes proprietates, quas in ea clare percipimus, ad hoc unum reducuntur, quod sit partibilis et mobilis, secundum partes.” We must, therefore, free ourselves from the obscure and confused modes of thought which arise whenever we attribute any of the secondary qualities, which exist merely in our sensations, to the objects that cause these sensations. The subjective character of such qualities is proved by the constant change which takes place in them, without any change of the object in which they are perceived. A piece of wax cannot lose its extension; but its colour, its hardness, and all the other qualities whereby it is presented to sense, may be easily altered. What is objective in all this is merely an extended substance, and the modes of motion or rest through which it is made to pass. In like manner we must separate from our notion of matter all ideas ofactio in distans—e.g.we must explain weight not as a tendency to the centre of the earth or an attraction of distant particles of matter, but as a consequence of the pressure of other bodies, immediately surrounding that which is felt to be heavy.13For the only conceivableactio in distansis that which is mediated by thought, and it is only in so far as we suppose matter to have in it a principle of activity like thought, that we can accept such explanations of its motion. Again, while we must thus keep our conception of matter clear of all elements that do not belong to it, we must also be careful not to take away from it those thatdobelong to it. It is a defect of distinctness in our ideas when we conceive an attribute as existing apart from its substance, or a substance without its attribute; for this is to treat elements that are only separated by a “distinction of reason,” as if they were distinct things. The conception of the possibility of a vacuum or empty space arises merely from our confusing the possible separation of any mode or form of matter from matter in general with the impossible separation of matter in general from its own essential attribute. Accordingly, in his physical philosophy, Descartes attempts to explain everything on mechanical principles, starting with the hypothesis that a certain quantity of motion has been impressed on the material universe by God at the first, a quantity which can never be lost or diminished, and that space is an absolute plenum in which motion propagates itself in circles.It is unnecessary to follow Descartes into the detail of the theory of vortices. It is more to the purpose to notice the nature of the reasons by which he is driven to regard such a mechanical explanation of the universe as necessary. A real or substantiveMaterial universe a mechanism.existence is, in his view, ares completa, a thing that can be conceived as a whole in itself without relations to any other thing. Now matter and mind are, he thinks, such complete existences, so long as we conceive them, as pure intelligence must conceive them, as abstract opposites of each other; and do not permit ourselves to be confused by those mixed modes of thought which are due to sense or imagination. Descartes does not see that in this very abstract opposition there is a bond of union between mind and matter, that they are correlative opposites, and therefore in their separationres incompletae. In other words, they are merely elements of reality substantiated by abstract thought into independent realities. He indeed partly retracts his assertion that mind and matter severed from each other areres completae, when he declares that neither can be conceived as existing apart from God, and that therefore, strictly speaking, God alone is a substance. But, as we have seen, he avoids the necessary inference that in God the opposition between mind and matter is reconciled or transcended, by conceiving God as abstract self-consciousness or will, and the material world not as his necessary manifestation, but simply as his creation,—as having its origin in an act of bare volition and that only. His God is the God of monotheism and not of Christianity, and therefore the world is to God always a foreign matter which he brings into being, and acts on from without, but in which he is not revealed.It is a natural consequence of this view that nature is essentiallydead matter, that beyond the motion it has received from God at the beginning, and which it transmits from part to part without increase or diminution, it has no principle ofAnimals automata.activity in it. Every trace of vitality in it must be explained away as a mere false reflection upon it of the nature of mind. The world is thus “cut in two with a hatchet,” and there is no attraction to overcome the mutual repulsion of its severed parts. Nothing can be admitted in the material half that savours of self-determination, all its energy must be communicated, not self-originated; there is no room for gravitation, still less for magnetism or chemical affinity, in this theory.A fortiori, animal life must becompletely 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 materialistsoi-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 everythingbutmind 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.Hismatter 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. Andhisanimals 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.”14The 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 artificialNature of sensation.unity,—a unity of composition that still leaves them external to each other. Even God cannot make them one in any higher sense.15And 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 thatsomethingis taking place in our body, or without it, and so stimulate us to some kind of action, butwhatit 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,Theory of occasional causes.a result in matter, should be effected by mind. Descartes explains at great length, according to his modification of 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 aDeus 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 shouldEthics.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 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 noidealmorality 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, theἀταραξίαof 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 principle which underlies the reasoning of Descartes is that to be conscious of a limit, is to transcend it. We could not feel the limits either upon our thought or upon our existence, we could not doubt or desire, if we did not already apprehend something beyond these limits. Nay, we could not be conscious of our existence as individual selves if we were not conscious of that which is not ourselves, and of a unity in which both self and not-self are included. Our individual life is therefore to us as self-conscious beings a part of a wider universal life. Doubt and aspiration are but the manifestation of this essential division and contradiction of a nature which, as conscious of itself, is at the same time conscious of the whole in which it is a part. And as the existence of a self and its consciousness are one, so we may say that a thinking being is not only an individual, but always in some sense identified with that universal unity of being to which it is essentially related.

If Descartes had followed out this line of thought, he would have been led at once to the pantheism of Spinoza, if not beyond it. As it is, he is on the verge of contradiction with himself when he speaks of the consciousness of God asin some senseprior to the consciousness of self. How can anything be prior to the first principle of knowledge? It is no answer to say that the consciousness of God is theprincipium essendi, while the consciousness of self is theprincipium cognoscendi. For, if the idea of God is prior to the idea of self, knowledge must begin where existence begins, with God. The words “in some sense,” with which Descartes qualifies his assertion of the priority of the idea of God, only betray his hesitation and his partial consciousness of the contradiction in which he is involved. Some of Descartes’s critics presented this difficulty to him in another form, and accused him of reasoning in a circle when he said that it is because God cannot lie that we are certain that our clear and distinct ideas do not deceive us. The very existence of the conscious self, thecogito, ergo sum, which is the first of all truths and therefore prior in certitude to the existence of God, is believed only because of the clearness and distinctness with which we apprehend it. How then, they argued, could God’s truthfulness be our security for a principle which we must use in order to prove the being of God? The answer of Descartes is somewhat lame. We cannot doubt any self-evident principle, or even any truth based on a self-evident principle, when we are directly contemplating it in all the necessity of its evidence; it is only when we forget or turn away from this evidence, and begin to think of the possibility of a deceitful God, that a doubt arises which cannot be removed except by the conviction that God is true.5It can scarcely be said that this is adignus vindice nodus, or that God can fitly appear as a kind of second-best resource to the forgetful spirit that has lost its direct hold on truth and its faith in itself. God, truth, and the human spirit are thus conceived as having merely external and accidental relations with each other. What Descartes, however, is really expressing in this exoteric way is simply that beneath and beyond all particular truths lies the great general truth of the unity of thought and existence. In contemplating particular truth, we may not consciously relate it to this unity, but when we have to defend ourselves against scepticism we are forced to realize this relation. The ultimate answer to any attack upon a special aspect or element of truth must be to show that the fate of truth itself, the very possibility of knowledge, is involved in the rejection of it, and that we cannot doubt it without doubting reason itself. But to doubt reason is, in the language of Descartes, to doubt the truthfulness of God, for, in his view, the idea of God is involved in the very constitution of reason. Taken in this way then, the import of Descartes’s answer is, that the consciousness of self, like every other particular truth, is not at first seen to rest on the consciousness of God, but that when we realize what it means we see that it does so rest. But if this be so, then in making the consciousness of self his first principle of knowledge, Descartes has stopped short of the truth. It can only be the first principle if it is understood, not as the consciousness of the individual self, but in a sense in which the consciousness of self is identical with the consciousness of God.

Descartes, however, is far from a clear apprehension of the ultimate unity of thought and being, which nevertheless he strives to find in God. Beginning with an absolute separation of theres cogitansfrom theres extensa, he is continually falling back into dualism just when he seemed to have escaped from it. Even in God the absolute unity, idea and reality fall asunder; our idea of God is not God in us, it is only an idea of which God’s existence is the cause. But the category of causality, if it forms a bridge between different things, as here between knowing and being, at the same time repels them from each other. It is a category of external relation which may be adequate to express the relation of the finite to the finite, but not the relation of the finite to the infinite. We cannot conceive God as the cause of our idea of him, without making God a purely objective and therefore finite existence. Nor is the case better when we turn to the so-called ontological argument,—that existence is necessarily involved in the idea of God, just as the property of having its angles equal to two right angles is involved in the idea of a triangle. If indeed we understood this as meaning that thought transcends the distinction between itself and existence, and that therefore existence cannot be a thing in itself out of thought, but must be an intelligible world that exists as such only for the thinking being, there is some force in the argument. But this meaning we cannot find in Descartes, or to find it we must make him inconsistent with himself. He was so far from having quelled the phantom “thing in itself,” that he treated matter in space as such a thing, and thus confused externality of space with externality to the mind. On this dualistic basis, the ontological argument becomes a manifest paralogism, and lies open to all the objections that Kant brought against it. That the idea of God involves existence, proves only that God, if he exists at all, exists by the necessity of his being. But the link that shall bind thought to existence is still wanting, and, in consistency with the other presuppositions of Descartes, it cannot be supplied.

But again, even if we allow to Descartes that God is the unity of thought and being, we must still ask what kind of unity? Is it a mere generic unity, reached by abstraction, and therefore leaving out all the distinguishing characteristics of the particulars under it? Or is it a concrete unity to which the particular elements are subordinated, but in which they are nevertheless included? To answer this question, we need only look at the relation of the finite to the infinite, as it is expressed in that passage already quoted, and in many others. Descartes always speaks of the infinite as a purely affirmative or positive existence, and of the finite in so far as it is distinguished from the infinite, as purely negative, or in other words as a nonentity. “I am,” he says, “a mean between God and nothing, between the Supreme Being and not-being. In so far as I am created by God, there is nothing in me that can deceive me or lead me into error. But on the other hand, if I consider myself as participating in nothingness or not-being, inasmuch as I am not myself the Supreme Being, but in many ways defective, I find myself exposed to an infinity of errors. Thus error as such is not something real that depends on God, but simply a defect; I do not need to explain it by means of any special faculty bestowed on me by God, but merely by the fact that the faculty for discerning truth from error with which he has endowed me, is not infinite.”6But if we follow out this principle to its logical result, we must say not only that error is a consequence of finitude, but also that the veryexistenceof the finite as such is an error or illusion. All finitude, all determination, according to the well-known Spinozistic aphorism, is negation, and negation cannot constitute reality. To know the reality of things, therefore, we have to abstract from their limits, or in other words, the only reality is the infinite. Finite being,quafinite, has no existence, and finite self-consciousness, consciousness of a self in opposition to or limited by a not-self, is an illusion. But Descartes does not thus reason. He does not see “anything in the nature of the infinite which should exclude the existence of finite things.” “What,” he asks, “would become of the power of that imaginary infinite if it could create nothing? Perceiving in ourselves the power of thinking, we can easily conceive that there should be a greater intelligence elsewhere. And even if we should suppose that intelligence increasedad infinitum, we need not fear that our own would be lessened. And the same is true of all other attributes which we ascribe to God, even of his power, provided only that we do not suppose that the power in us is not subjected to God’s will. In all points, therefore, he is infinite without any exclusion of created things.”7The truth of this view we need not dispute; the question is as to its consistency with Cartesian principles. It may be a higher idea of God to conceive him as revealing himself in and to finite creatures; but it is a different idea from that which is implied in Descartes’s explanations of error. It is an inconsistency that brings Descartes nearer to Christianity, and nearer, it may also be said, to a true metaphysic; but it is not the less an inconsistency with his fundamental principles, which necessarily disappears in their subsequent development. To conceive the finite as constituted not merely by the absence of some of the positive elements of the infinite, but as in necessary unity with the infinite; to conceive the infinite as not merely that which has no limits or determinations, but as that which is self-determined and self-manifesting, which through all finitude and manifestation returns upon itself, may not be erroneous. But it would not be difficult to show that the adoption of such a conception involves the rejection or modification of almost every doctrine of the Cartesian system.

In connexion with this inconsistency we may notice the very different relations in which Descartes conceives mind on the one side and matter on the other, to stand towards God, who yet is the cause of both, and must therefore, by the principleMind and matter.of causality, contain in himself all that is in both. Matter and mind are to Descartes absolute opposites. Whatever can be asserted of mind can be denied of matter, whatever can be asserted of matter can be denied of mind. Matter is passive, mind is active; matter is extended, and therefore divisiblead infinitum;mind is an indivisible unity. In fact, though of this Descartes is not conscious, the determination of the one is mediated by its opposition to the other; the ideas of object and subject, the self and not-self, are terms of a relation distinguishable but inseparable. But in the idea of God we must find a unity which transcends this difference in one way or another, whether by combining the two under a higher notion, or, as it would be more natural to expect on Cartesian principles, by abstracting equally from the particular characteristics of both. Descartes really does neither, or rather he acts partly on the one principle and partly on the other. In his idea of God he abstracts from the properties of matter but not from those of mind. “God,” he says, “contains in himselfformaliterall that is in mind, but onlyeminenterall that is in matter”;8or, as he elsewhere expresses it more popularly, heismind, but he is only the creator of matter. And for this he gives as his reason, that matter as being divisible and passive is essentially imperfect.Ipsa natura corporis multas imperfectiones involvit, and, therefore, “there is more analogy between sounds and colours than there is between material things and God.” But the real imperfection here lies in the abstractness of the Cartesian conception of matter as merely extended, merely passive; and this is balanced by the equal abstractness of the conception of mind or self-consciousness as an absolutely simple activity, a pure intelligence without any object but itself. If matter as absolutely opposed to mind is imperfect, mind as absolutely opposed to matter is equally imperfect. In fact they are the elements or factors of a unity, and lose all meaning when severed from each other, and if we are to seek this unity by abstraction, we must equally abstract from both.

The result of this one-sidedness is seen in the fact that Descartes, who begins by separating mind from matter, ends by finding the essence of mind in pure will,i.e.in pure formal self-determination. Hence God’s will is conceived as absolutelyReason and will.arbitrary, not determined by any end or law, for all laws, even the necessary truths that constitute reason, spring from God’s determination, and do not precede it. “He is the author of the essence of things no less than their existence,” and his will has no reason but his will. In man there is an intelligence with eternal laws or truths involved in its structure, which so far limits his will. “He finds the nature of good and truth already determined by God, and his will cannot be moved by anything else.” His highest freedom consists in having his will determined by a clear perception of the nature of good and truth, and “he is never indifferent except when he is ignorant of it, or at least does not see it so clearly as to be lifted above the possibility of doubt.”9Indifference of will is to him “the lowest grade of liberty,” yet, on the other hand, in nothing does the image of God in him show itself more clearly than in the fact that his will is not limited by his clear and distinct knowledge, but is “in a manner infinite.” For “there is no object of any will, even the infinite will of God, to which our will does not extend.”10Belief is a free act, for as we can yield our assent to the obscure conceptions presented by sense and the imagination, and thus allow ourselves to be led into error, so on the other hand we can refuse to give this assent, or allow ourselves to be determined by anything but the clear and distinct ideas of intelligence. That which makes it possible for us to err is that also in which the divine image in us is most clearly seen. We cannot have the freedom of God whose will creates the object of his knowledge; but in reserving our assent for the clear and distinct perceptions of intelligence, we, as it were, re-enact for ourselves the divine law, and repeat, so far as is possible to finite beings, the transcendent act of will in which truth and good had their origin.

The inherent defect of this view is the divorce it makes between the form and the matter of intelligence. It implies that reason or self-consciousness is one thing, and that truth is another and quite different thing, which has been united to it by the arbitrary will of God. The same external conception of the relation of truth to the mind is involved in the doctrine of innate ideas. It is true that Descartes did not hold that doctrine in the coarse form in which it was attributed to him by Locke, but expressly declares that he has “never said or thought at any time that the mind required innate ideas which were separated from the faculty of thinking. He had simply used the word innate to distinguish those ideas which are derived from that faculty, and not from external objects or the determination of the will. Just as when we say generosity is innate in certain families, and in certain others diseases, like the gout or the stone, we do not mean to imply that infants in their mother’s womb are affected with these complaints.”11Yet Descartes, as we have seen, does not hold that these truths are involved in the very nature of intelligence as such, so that we cannot conceive a self-conscious being without them. On the contrary, we are to regard the divine intelligence as by arbitrary act determining that two and two should be four, or that envy should be a vice. We are “notto conceive eternal truth flowing from God as rays from the sun.”12In other words, we are not to conceive all particular truths as different aspects of one truth. It is part of the imperfection of man’s finite nature that he “finds truth and good determined for him.” It is something given,—given, indeed, along with his very faculty of thinking, but stillgivenas an external limit to it. It belongs not to his nature as spirit, but to his finitude as man.

After what has been said, it is obvious that the transition from God to matter must be somewhat arbitrary and external. God’s truthfulness is pledged for the reality of that of which we haveclear and distinct ideas; and we have clear andTruth of external world.distinct ideas of the external world so long as we conceive it simply as extended matter, infinitely divisible, and moved entirely from without,—so long, in short, as we conceive it as the direct opposite of mind, and do not attribute to it any one of the properties of mind. “Omnes proprietates, quas in ea clare percipimus, ad hoc unum reducuntur, quod sit partibilis et mobilis, secundum partes.” We must, therefore, free ourselves from the obscure and confused modes of thought which arise whenever we attribute any of the secondary qualities, which exist merely in our sensations, to the objects that cause these sensations. The subjective character of such qualities is proved by the constant change which takes place in them, without any change of the object in which they are perceived. A piece of wax cannot lose its extension; but its colour, its hardness, and all the other qualities whereby it is presented to sense, may be easily altered. What is objective in all this is merely an extended substance, and the modes of motion or rest through which it is made to pass. In like manner we must separate from our notion of matter all ideas ofactio in distans—e.g.we must explain weight not as a tendency to the centre of the earth or an attraction of distant particles of matter, but as a consequence of the pressure of other bodies, immediately surrounding that which is felt to be heavy.13For the only conceivableactio in distansis that which is mediated by thought, and it is only in so far as we suppose matter to have in it a principle of activity like thought, that we can accept such explanations of its motion. Again, while we must thus keep our conception of matter clear of all elements that do not belong to it, we must also be careful not to take away from it those thatdobelong to it. It is a defect of distinctness in our ideas when we conceive an attribute as existing apart from its substance, or a substance without its attribute; for this is to treat elements that are only separated by a “distinction of reason,” as if they were distinct things. The conception of the possibility of a vacuum or empty space arises merely from our confusing the possible separation of any mode or form of matter from matter in general with the impossible separation of matter in general from its own essential attribute. Accordingly, in his physical philosophy, Descartes attempts to explain everything on mechanical principles, starting with the hypothesis that a certain quantity of motion has been impressed on the material universe by God at the first, a quantity which can never be lost or diminished, and that space is an absolute plenum in which motion propagates itself in circles.

It is unnecessary to follow Descartes into the detail of the theory of vortices. It is more to the purpose to notice the nature of the reasons by which he is driven to regard such a mechanical explanation of the universe as necessary. A real or substantiveMaterial universe a mechanism.existence is, in his view, ares completa, a thing that can be conceived as a whole in itself without relations to any other thing. Now matter and mind are, he thinks, such complete existences, so long as we conceive them, as pure intelligence must conceive them, as abstract opposites of each other; and do not permit ourselves to be confused by those mixed modes of thought which are due to sense or imagination. Descartes does not see that in this very abstract opposition there is a bond of union between mind and matter, that they are correlative opposites, and therefore in their separationres incompletae. In other words, they are merely elements of reality substantiated by abstract thought into independent realities. He indeed partly retracts his assertion that mind and matter severed from each other areres completae, when he declares that neither can be conceived as existing apart from God, and that therefore, strictly speaking, God alone is a substance. But, as we have seen, he avoids the necessary inference that in God the opposition between mind and matter is reconciled or transcended, by conceiving God as abstract self-consciousness or will, and the material world not as his necessary manifestation, but simply as his creation,—as having its origin in an act of bare volition and that only. His God is the God of monotheism and not of Christianity, and therefore the world is to God always a foreign matter which he brings into being, and acts on from without, but in which he is not revealed.

It is a natural consequence of this view that nature is essentiallydead matter, that beyond the motion it has received from God at the beginning, and which it transmits from part to part without increase or diminution, it has no principle ofAnimals automata.activity in it. Every trace of vitality in it must be explained away as a mere false reflection upon it of the nature of mind. The world is thus “cut in two with a hatchet,” and there is no attraction to overcome the mutual repulsion of its severed parts. Nothing can be admitted in the material half that savours of self-determination, all its energy must be communicated, not self-originated; there is no room for gravitation, still less for magnetism or chemical affinity, in this theory.A fortiori, animal life must becompletely 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 materialistsoi-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 everythingbutmind 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.Hismatter 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. Andhisanimals 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.”14

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 artificialNature of sensation.unity,—a unity of composition that still leaves them external to each other. Even God cannot make them one in any higher sense.15And 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 thatsomethingis taking place in our body, or without it, and so stimulate us to some kind of action, butwhatit 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,Theory of occasional causes.a result in matter, should be effected by mind. Descartes explains at great length, according to his modification of 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 aDeus 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 shouldEthics.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 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 noidealmorality 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, theἀταραξίαof 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 wedo not wonder even when we find him treating as a “miserable” the philosopher who tore away the veil.

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