Descartes

Citation preview

1 HE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES , BY

A. BOYCE GIBSON M.A.(OxoN) c..

L EClURER I N PHILOSOPHY AT T H E UN IV ERS I TY OF B I RMINGHAM

NEW YORK / RUSSELL & RUSSELL

PREFACE THE object of this book is to present an account of the philosophy of Descartes, in itself and for itself. My excuse for publishing it, despite imperfections of which I am only too well aware, is that, in English, this has not yet been done. With the best will in the world-indeed, it is part of his special task -the general historian of philosophy tends to think in terms of periods or epochs of thought. In so doing, he comes to emphasize, in the work of any one philosopher, those pregnant anticipations of his successors which draw attention to the continuity of history, and thus to distort the stress of the philosopher himself. It is the special t ask of the historian of one man's philosophy to redress the balance; and that is what, in respect to Descartes, I have here attempted. It was my first intention to devote considerable space to the historical setting of Descartes's philosophy, and to eschew philosophical criticism. As I proceeded, I became more and more exciterl about the philosophical problems raised by Descartes, and my original aim receded into the background. I have tried, however, to conduct my discussion and criticism without introducing problems and terminologies belonging to more recent philosophies, and thus to retain the historical perspective. In one serious instance I am guilty of reading history backwards, and that is in my reference to the Kantian Criticism in Chapter V. My object here was to give greater precision to Descartes's own conceptions, and I can only hope that this betrayal of my principles has not been in vain. In a work written in the intervals of University lecturing, and over the space of several years, there is bound to be a certain degree of overlapping, and, what is worse, indications of divergent interpretations or points of view. I have done my best to remedy these defects, but it is too much to hope that none have escaped my notice. I have two outstanding personal obligations. The first is to M. Chevalier, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Grenoble, who was good enough, at the outset of my venture, \'ii

vm

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

to spare me time for valuable discussion on a subject on which he is well known as an authority, and to encourage me by approving of my outlines. The second is to Professor L. J. Russell, of the University of Birmingham, who read the whole work in manuscript, and by his kindly and judicious criticism, based on an expert knowledge of the seventeenth century, saved me from errors both of fact and of inference which, if undetected, would have made it more imperfect than it actually is. His constant advice, and his readiness to help in any possible way on any possible occasion, I can never hope to repay. I am greatly indebted to M. Gilson's magnificent commentary on the Discours de la M ethode, with its veritable mine of cross-references, and its penetrating insight into the mind of Descartes and of his times. I must further acknowledge the same author's La liberte chez Descartes et la thiologie, with its mass of historical information concerning the theological controversies which threw their shadow over the writings of Descartes. I also owe much valuable historical information, and many important references, especially in Chapter II, to M. Henri Gouhier's La pensie religieuse de Descartes. To all students of Descartes's relations with the personalities and movements of the period, and, above all, to all students of Descartes's day-to-day intentions and manceuvres, this work is indispensable. Chapter VIII, sect. 7, is based on a paper read before the Aristotelian Society, in November 1929, on 'The Eternal Verities and the Will of God'. I am grateful to the Society for the opportunity of submitting one of my main theses to discussion and criticism. I am greatly obliged to the Research Grants Committee of the University of Birmingham for making me a grant to cover the expenses of typing. Lastly, I am indebted to my wife, who has watched the progress of this work with fostering care, and has undertaken the tedious task of proof-reading. A. BOYCE GIBSON BIRMINGHAM

September 24, I93I

CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 PAGE

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

1

The historical approach to Descartes-The anti-historical outlook of his times-The Middle Ages and their interpretation of nature-The 'how?' and the 'why?'-Formal and final causes-Plato and the mathematical approach to nature -Scientific observation-The reign of natural law-Philosophical implications in the work of Galileo-The mediaeval view of the relations between religion and science-The Reformation and secular learning-The revolt against the philosopher's God-Its repercussions within the Catholic Church-Salvation or adoration the centre of personal religion ?-The Oratory, its regimen and philosophical t endencies-The new alliance of science and religionMersenne-Descartes and French Classicism.

CHAPTER

II

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES . Descartes's early education-His revolt against it-Cum plenus forem enthusiasmo-The first dedication of Descartes -The method of doubt-Scepticism and reconstruction-The ideal of the unity of knowledge-Berulie-The second dedication of Descartes-The retirement to HollandMetaphysician or scientist ?-Theocentrism and secular progress-Descartes's religious protestations-His 'prudence' -His sincerity-The student and his desire for peace-The party leader and his desire for propaganda-The Augustinians and the Jesuits-The Jansenists and the Jesuits-Descartes and the theological controversies of his time-Descartes and the Jesuits-Descartes and Dutch Calvinism-The failure of Descartes to convert the academic world-Convertam me ad gentes-Philosophy and practice-Princess Elisabeth and Queen Christina-The duality of Descartes's temperament, and its reflexion in his philosophy. ix

30

x

CONTENTS

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER III PAGE

COGITO, ERGO SUM

Xl

74

The two stages of the method of doubt-The deceptiveness of sense-perception-Its rejection as a guide to truth-Historical antecedents of this rejection-Scientific measurement as the proper corrective-The method of doubt extended to scienceThe wicked genius-The limits of scepticism-Cogilo, ergo sum-Not a syllogism-The nature of the metaphysical self-Does it include perception ?-Is it to be taken as a substance ?-The relation of soul and body-Is the self of the cogito instantaneous or continuous ?-The historical significance of the cogilo-Descartes and Idealism-Dubilo, ergo sum.

PAGE

THE OBJECTS OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

186

The unity of knowledge-Its mathematical foundationNumber and space-Intuition and perception in mathematics -The groundwork of mathematical physics-Is demonstration in physics possible ?-Extension and motion-Descartes's drift to Occasionalism-A scientific physiology-The problem of life-The 'animal-machine'-Its apologetic value-The denial of mind in animals-The assertion of their pure mechanism-Its metaphysical basis-Its practical difficulties.

CHAPTER

Vil

CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF PERCEPTION . THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

104

The progress from ideal to real-The proof of God from the idea of God in us-The distinction of fact and value-God as intellectual nature in general- God as transcendent-'The more cannot come from the less'-The assumption of the causal axiom-The importance of the first proof-The proof of God from our own existence-Its reciprocity with the previous proof- Efficient and final causes in metaphysicsThe doctrine of continuous creation-Efficient cause and temporal succession-Are God and the self separate entities? -The ontological proof-A petitio principii?-The criticism of Caterus-The ontological proof and religious experience.

The theory of representative perception-Its relation in Descartes to the theory of intuition-Perception, soul, and body-The intimate connexion of soul and body-The human substance-The theory of perception and the two-substance theory-Their inconsistency with one another-Resort to Occasionalism inevitable unless the two-substance theory is revised-The scope of Descartes's Occasionalism-Are all ideas innate ?-The pragmatic utility of sense-perceptionThe veracity of the senses and the veracity of God-The disjunction between life and knowledge.

CHAPTER Vlll CHAPTER V

THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE The scientific interpretation of nature guaranteed by the existence of a veracious God-'Clear and distinct ideas'The immediate character of intuition-'Simple natures'Deduction-The scaffolding of memory-The distinctness of simple natures-The simple nature discovered through a disjunctive judgment-The distinctness of spirit and extension -Distinctness and substantiality-Analytic and synthetic judgments-The theory of innate ideas-Second-hand things or first-hand principles ?-Descartes and Kant-Extension as a substance-Induction and experiment-Descartes and Bacon-The necessity of verification.

THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD 149

The attributes of God-Eternity-Its relation to durationlnfinity-Its relation to human finitude-Its relation to spatial limitation-The infinite and the indefinite-The infinite not a negation of the finite-'Amplitude'-CreationGod the cause of Himself-The creation of the self-Its community of nature with God, and its dis_parity of power-The doctrine of immortality-The creation of the physical world-The origin of extension-The marks of God in nature -Descartes and evolution-Descartes and pantheism-The eternal verities and the wil( of God-The nature of His supremacy over them-God and final causes in nature-Faith and reason.

'215

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

xii

CHAPTER IX PAGE

THE VINDICATION OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

293

The divine guarantee-The Cartesian circle-The guarantee and the cogito-The guarantee and Descartes's procedure in metaphysics-The logic of metaphysics and the logic of science-The guarantee of our knowledge of extension, and of its distinctness from spirit-The guarantee and scientific knowledge-Memory and the wicked genius-The order of approach and the order of reality-The alleged circularity of the argument from the self to God-The alleged circularity of the argument from the clearness and distinctness of our conception of God to His existence-The alleged circularity in the use of the causal axiom to prove the existence of GodPossible ways of escape from the circle-The problem of error.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER X

FREE-WILL AND THE MORAL LIFE Descartes and ethical theory-The will and the cogito--The constraint of the truth and the liberty of indifferenceDescartes and the theological problem of free-wii1-His apparent theological eclecticism based on his individual approach to the problem-The real requirements of his philosophy and their theological trappings-The psychology of passion-The control of passion-The defensive theory of morality-The provisional morality of the Discours-No final theory of morals-Descartes's exposition of SenecaMorality and our conceptions of the universe- Descartes and political theory-The impossibility of a final theory of morals -Omnis peccans est ignorans-Resignation and aggressionThe aggressive aspect of Descartes's theory of morals-The contribution of Descartes's theory of morals to his philosophy.

329

Disc. Med. Prine. Reg. R .V. Tr. Pass. I ae. Resp. Jae . Obj.

Discours de la mtfthode. M editationes de prima philosophia. P rincip ia philosophiae. Regulae de inquirenda veritate. Reclzerche de la vtfrittf. Traittf des passions. Primae Responsiones: and so with other replies to the objections to the Meditations. Primae Objectiones: and so with other objections to the Meditations .

INDEX

xiii

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES CHAPTER I THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

•

§r. PHILOSOPHY has been well described as the attempt we make to interpret the world about us. But the world about us changes. New elements come into our knowledge; we evolve new kinds of behaviour; and consequently we are confronted with new problems. It is these problems that the philosopher of every age tries to solve. He takes a synoptic view of his time, and the more he sees in it, the further he sees beyond it. But even if the final explanation is held to lie in the eternal, the eternal is not a datum, but a conclusion. Philosophy, we must remember, is the work of philosophers, and philosophers, however unwillingly, belong t o a given moment in history. Two influences, apart from his own reflective genius, are powerful in forming a philosopher's outlook. In the first place, there is a continuity of thought between different historical periods which puts the results of the earlier at the disposal of the later. As no intellectual revolution is ever universal, this inheritance is always a formative influence of the first importance. Often there is an unresolved disharmony in the inheritance, and the greatest work of many philosophers has been to discern the underlying unity. In the second place, in the actual facts of contemporary life, the philosopher will find a re-statement of the problems he is called upon to solve. He is therefore conditioned by history in two senses; he is both the child of a past age and an expositor of his own. To understand him we must study both the previous history of thought and the immediate developments of his own time. . This view is generally accepted ; but it is hard to practise. Our own problems distract us, and we are apt t o go to an earlier philosophy simply to get answers to them, or to explain how they arose. This procedure is of course useful and even 2

3

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

necessary to students of these problems, but it prejudices our understanding of the past. We must make a real imaginative effort to get behind our preoccupations; when we relax, we are in danger of falling into the abstract and interested criticism which is always the line of least resistance. But interested criticism in the long run must always fail to interest. It does not bring the author to life again; it merely arrays a corpse in new clothes, and the clothes alone are alive. It is not entirely unhistorical, for without history there can be no reference to the past at all. But history has been banished from its proper function, and has returned, as exiles do, illegally and subversively. The interested critic who does not trouble to read it forwards has no alternative, and probably no desire, but to read it backwards; and hence the 'rationalist' and 'Idealist' versions of Descartes in the respective mythologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Descartes has suffered more than most philosophers from the habit of treating one philosopher merely as a means to another. There are several reasons for this. One is the concentration of interest on modern German Idealism, the roots of which have been sedulously traced to Descartes. That they can be found there, no one doubts; but Descartes was far more than a mere precursor of Kant, and this is a fact which the direction-or misdirection-of our attention has helped to obscure. Another is the superstitious depreciation-at least in England-of mediaeval philosophy, which has tended to conceal Descartes's continuity with the past. A third, based in the long run on the other two, is the pedagogical necessity of beginning the study of modern philosophy somewhere, and if it has been decided to eliminate the Middle Ages and to concentrate on German Idealism, Descartes is a convenient springboard, however much he may suffer in the process. 1' fourth is the tendency of the professional philosophers towards a narrow craft-unionism, which ignores the debt of Descartes's philosophy to the Renaissance and the Reformation because the main inspiration of these movements was not strictly philosophical. There are, however, less discreditable arguments for the prevalent assumption that Descartes was simply a bolt from the blue. He was rather of that opinion himself. At least in the opening and closing phases of his career he mocked at accamulated learning, and he always held that method alone, ·a nd his method at that, was the one prerequisite for universal

knowledge. 'Book-knowledge,' he wrote, 'which has grown fat little by little through the composition of various pe?ple's trut~ as the plan:~ r~: opinions, is not nearly so close to flexions of a sensible man on the ob1ects which confront him._ In 1640, on his own confession, he h3:d not touched :;i. scholastic classic for twenty years, 2 and at no time wash~ .a wide or sympathetic reader. He seldom referred to authonhes, whether .to criticize or to borrow· his criticism of his great contemporaries was severe, and his 'appreciation niggardly. m~ saw, as .little reason for a gentleman to know Greek and Lahn as Swiss or Low-Breton'.3 He had apparently no interest in history, and certainly no respect for the past. Malebranc~e may n~t have been an orthodox disciple, but he was certainly speaking the mind of his master when he remarked that 'Adam in the earthly paradise knew no history', and quaintly inquired 'why we should aspire to know more'.4 . . . . But we cannot for this reason set history aside in our study of Descartes. No man can be a complete intellectual hermit; least of all the pupil of the Jesuits, the protege of the Oratory, the lay spiritual adviser of the Princess Elisabeth, and ~he intimate friend of that most indefatigable of learned gossips, the good Father Mersenne. Descartes, it is true, had no intention of synthesizing historical tendencies . He set out to search for truth in his own way from rock bottom. But the pro?le~s . of the age reappeared in him, as in a n;iicrocosm; . and _in his formulation of his own philosophy for his own satisfaction he found the solution which the age demanded. This is the true synthesis; not an adroit external manipulation of elements, but their embodiment in a living unity of concrete thought . In fact, though Descartes's antipathy to histo~y is .part. of his philosophy, his philosophy in its turn has its histoncal setting. The two principal preoccupations of Descartes w~re his mathematical method and his personal approach to philosophy. In both there lurks a hostility to the historical outlook. The necessary truths of mathematics are independent of

:2

t?e

1 Disc., Adam et Tannery, CEuvres de D escartes, VI. 12. All references to the text of Descartes are to this magnificent edition. The Roman numerals refer to the volume, and the Arabic numerals to the page. The care and erudition of the editors, t ogether with the beauty of the t ype and the noble t exture of the pages, makes it a joy to handle. z To Mersenne, III. 185. 3 R. V., X. 502-503. • Quoted by Maritain, Trois Rejormateurs: t>· 93, note .. I _hav~ ~ot succeeded in locating it, but it is too characteristic of the anb-h1stor_1c1sm of certain currents of thought in the seventeenth century to be omitted.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES 4 temporalchanges. They are always necessary. The order in which they happen is irrelevant to them ; their articulation is not that of events of time. On the other hand, the personal approach, placing as it does the whole onus of the search after truth on the individual, who must live through each turn of the argument he discovers, relieves him of the study of precedent and imposes simply the duty of reflecting methodically on the implications of his own experience. Both tendencies were at work in the central and primary conviction of Descartes, as he sat in the first rapture of dedication over his famous Bavarian stove, 'that works of art put together severally, by the hands of different masters, are less perfect than those that have been worked at by one man'.r But both these preoccupations Descartes shared with his age, and both trace their descent to that many-sided movement of the spirit conveniently described as the Renaissance, or re-birth of Europe. 'The Renaissance', says J. A. Symonds, at the opening of his great work, 'made two discoveries: the discovery of the world and the discovery of man.' The rise of mathematical physics and the revival of personal religion were the outstanding events in the history of thought since the Schoolmen of the thirteenth century elaborated their rich mosaic of Aristotelian Christianity. It is precisely these ele)ments which we find stressed in the work of Descartes; mere ·extension, mathematically expressible, on the one hand, and the human soul, dependent on an omnipotent God, on the other. And they are linked together in a single system according to mediaeval precedent. Descartes's conception of philosophy, as we shall see, is still that of Thomas Aquinas; and the role he planned for himself was that of a new Aristotle, who should found a new Scholasticism on the basis of recent scientific discovery. Thus, in his single system there is a gathering up of 'things both new and old'. He surveyed in his own mind, with a sublime unconsciousness, the great movements of the previous three hundred years, and found that they all worked together for good. And this, with the necessary distinctions of emphasis, was the experience of all the brilliant company of French Classicists in this 'century of genius' .i • Disc., VI. r I. •This tribute paid by Professor Whitehead (Science and the Modern W arid, ch. iii) t o the seventeenth century is no less than its due. There has never been a period of greater intellectual verve and audacity, or one which produced a larger number of outstanding minds.

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

5

Descartes had pitchforked history out of the stables; but she returned tenfold and rewarded him, in token of good for evil, with her special favour. §z. It is often said that it is the function of the school to teach people how to think, so that they will be able in after years to reflect methodically on the further knowledge they may acquire and the fresh experiences they may undergo. If this is so, the Middle Ages were the schooldays of modern Europe, and the great expositors of their outlook have been happily, though perhaps not intentionally, designated Schoolmen. They cultivated and developed for the extended vision of their successors both the spirit of universality, which is the driving force of philosophy, and the art of close and accurate thinking with the aid of which it makes its way through the multiplicity of facts. For patience and subtlety and tenacity, for clarity and conciseness of conception and expression, for meticulous attention to detail informed by an unerring mastery of the total theme, they have never yet been equalled. By the sheer prowess of their logic they were intellectually prepared for the birth of modern science. Their habits of rigorous exactitude were equal to any strain which might be put upon them. Nevertheless, it is by their failure to achieve any clear conception of science, as distinguished from philosophy, that the age they lived in is plainly marked off from our own. It would be an exaggeration to deny to the Middle Ages all interest in the facts of nature. To say nothing of the mystical sympathy of a St. Francis of Assisi with the humbler orders of creation, and of the gradual penetration by naturalism of mediaeval art, the intellect of the period was deeply concerned with the study of natural phenomena, which indeed it had inherited from the Greek tradition. It knew and studied the medicine of Galen and Hippocrates, and, above all, through its preoccupation with Aristotle was constantly confronted with 'the Philosopher's' scientific opinions. His physics and astronomy were part of the education of every man of culture, and loomed far larger in the university curriculum than those of their successors do to-day. It is true that habitual acceptance of authority inclined the learned of the times to the study of traditional views rather than to independent research, but they were perfectly prepared to accept a properly accredited new fact when it was brought to their notice, and to make the theoretical changes which its acceptance involved. The whole

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

fantastic array, as it seems to us, of 'epicycles' and 'eccentrics' was designed to bring the Aristotelian theory of the spheres into line with a growing knowledge of the complexity of the planetary paths, and even the Antipodes, belief in which had been formally declared heretical, were admitted, with as good a grace as possible, once they had had the temerity to be discovered. But there was no general expectation of discovery, and it was inconceivable that it should lead to anything more than some slight modification of detail. The general principles and forces of the physical world were settled for good and all; and if they were adequately followed out in particular instances there would be no need of discovery but only of verification. Thus it came about that the organized observation, or experiment, on which modern science relies for its data, played so small a part in the mediaeval study of nature. It was suspect as an empirical challenge to the supremacy of reason. Amusing instances of this attitude are furnished by the refusal of the professor of philosophy at Padua to look through Galileo's telescope, and by tpe stout determination of his o~posit; n17mber at Pisa to 'charm new planets out of the sky by logical argument'.1 If we can really learn all we want about the stars by 'logical argument' it is clear that we have no need of specially conditioned observation, and if we obstinately persist in such an unprofitable pursuit, we shall be suspected of some hidden motive, such as a clandestine bargain with the devil. Thus, too, it happened that such inventions as the age produced, as, for example, the optical lens and the mariner's compass, sit somewhat loosely to the general scheme. ~f . the scientific knowledge. They are the products of pure empmc1sm, neither issuing from nor leading up to the theory which their discovery implies. But a lack of interest in experiment, and an under-estimate of its importance, are not enough to characterize the mediaeval attitude to nature. Both are shared to some extent by the mathematical interpreters of nature in the seventeenth century, and not least by Descartes himself. It is not the emphasis on the a priori element, but a peculiar conception of it, which sharply divides the outlook of the Middle Ages from that which succeeded it. It is not mathematical but philosophical. Behind the perceived differences of quality, and the empirical classifications which grow out of them, they discerned, not the

measurable unitary basis of quantity, but a hierarchy of created orders, ascending from indeterminate matter to the pure form of God. They thus produced a philosophy of nature, an explanation of its meaning and purpose, which was not science, for it paid little heed to actual processes, but tended to usurp the place of science, as it was not so much in the processes as in their significance that the times were interested. The question 'Why?' had ousted the question 'How?'. Or, at any rate, whenever the question 'How?' was asked, the answer to the question 'Why?' insinuated itself into the reply. This is the reason why the efforts of the scientific innovators to answer the 'How?' unequivocally in its own language evoked such alarm in the traditionally minded. To them it carried a subord;_n ate connotation of 'Why?'. Physical law was to be the ground as well as the mechanical explanation.of n.atural even~s. An outstanding example of such apprehens10n is revealed m thP. observation of Pope Urban VIII on one of the main themes of Galileo's Dialogue on the T wo Chief Systems of the World, that 'the tides cannot be adduced as a necessary proof of the double motion of the earth without limiting God's omnip )tence'. 1 . This outlook on nature, which had the effect, throughout the Middle Ages, of excluding pure science in the name of a philosophy of nature, follows inevitably ~rom the prevailing Aristotelian modes of thought. The reduction of nature to an uniform system of quantitative relations is wholly opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine concerning Form and Matter, and to the cognate doctrine of the Four Causes. It was held that every creature, animate or inanimate, owes its existence to the actualization of less determinate matter by its supervening but inseparable form. The combination of form and matter is the condition of any specific existence, so that any separate consideration of the one or the other is philosophically inadmissible. Only in conjunction with its formal aspect can the material factor be understood. Hence arises the conception of an 'essence'; the underlying formal and generic character expressed in a multiplicity of particulars, and affording, in its formal capacity, an expla~a­ tion of their unity in difference. The essential nature of a thmg is part of its raison d'etre as a physical existence: it enters

6

Letter from Galileo to Kepler, quoted by Brett, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 67. 1

7

1 Quoted by Dr. Charles Singer, in his articl.e on 'The Historical Relations of Science and Religion', in the collection, Science, Religion, and Reality, p. 135.

8

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

not merely into its philosophical interpretation, but into its actual constitution. What makes it behave as it does is not an universal system of mechanical relations to which it belongs, but some occult quality, which it carries within itself, however freely it may share it with .other instances of the same cl~ss . This is its 'cause' quite as literally as the brute matter which it organizes \the material cause), ai;id the agency which bri17gs it immediately into being (the efficient cause). They are all mseparably and simultaneously the 'reason' why it exists. Indeed, if there is any one dominant explanation, it is the Form, for the material and the agent are, respectively, indeterminate and individual, and can be brought into the sphere of philosophy only by being taken in relation to the determining universal. Now if we apply this theory to the general structure of creation, we shall find a succession of orders, qualitatively distinguished by both the kind and the degree of the Form which they embody. The quantitative interpretation of matter threatens to reduce all the facts of nature to a dead level. Taken literally, it might be suspected of abolishing the distinct status of man, and thus of striking at the very root of religion . If, however, we make an arbitrary exception of the human soul, we still have to obliterate the qualitative differences between inanimate and animate, between vegetative and sentient, and thus to violate distinctions which are not only 'essential', but working factors in our everyday experience. These are difficulties which the mathematical theory of nature cannot avoid, so long as it claims to be a metaphysic of nature or even to possess an unqualified metaphysical sanction, and its presentation by Descartes is certainly not exempt from them.) Moreover, as applied to astronomy, while we may now recognize it as more unequivocally beneficial, it was likely to be none the less hostile to the Aristotelian tradition. The heavens, according to 'the Master', were of a different stuff from the earth. They are formed from a 'fifth body', to which belongs the essential quality of rotation denied to terrestrial bodies. And as circular motion carries with it the connotation of undeviating uniformity, the 'fifth body' is held to be uncompounded and immutable, and to stand to the terrestrial as more perfect to less perfect. For such a theory the mathematical interpretation of nature means extinction, for measurement is no respecter of celestial privilege, and is not daunted by the sensuous appearance of cosmic immensity. It may be said that it would have been possible to admit

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

9 mathematical science, with its quantitative systems of measurement, within the philosophy of nature, a~ a method of abstraction leading to merely abstract conclus10ns. Such a course, however, would have been contrary to the whole intellectual temper of the Middle Ages, and its adoption was never suggested even w?en the success. of the mathe!11atical met~od in the interpretation of nature raised the question of the philosophical status of that met~od in its. most acute form. More promising, because more akm. to mediaeval r:iodes of thought, was the mathematical concept10n of Form which was embedded in the recognized Platonic tradition . If the 'Why' of the universe is itself one with the principle of mathematical perfection, the interpretation of the physical world under mathematical formulae will itself be implicitly teleological. And, as t eleology will operate pervasively an~ internally, not o~st~uc­ tively and intrusively, it will be possible to conduct a distmct and disinterested investigation into the 'How?' without rejecting the final authority of the 'Why?'. As a matter of fact, as we shall see, it was under cover of a renascent Platonism that mathematical science eventually came to its own. But, t eleology or no teleology, the assumption of mathematical uniformity in nature is bound to flatten out the hierarchy of creation, to abolish celestial privilege, and to modify the theory of essences beyond recognition; and it could not but meet with uncompromising hostility from entrenched Aristotelianism, which therefore stood immovably in the way of scientific progress. In discussing the concurrence in the Platonic tradition of mathematics and teleology, we have insensibly passed from the theory of Forms to the theory of Ends. The Aristotelian tradition recognized nothing in nature without a purpose, whether it be attributed, as by Aristotle himself, to an unconscious immanent teleology, or, as by his Christian emendators, to the explicit will of a personal God. And as it is towards its formal perfection that every cre~ture aspires, th~ final caus~ is virtually the formal cause considered as an ob1ect of aspiration. To know what a thing is we must know what, in the natural course of its development, it is destined to become. Thus final cause enters as intimately into the explanation of motion as formal cause into the explanation of existence. Everything moves, when it . does move, t?wards. its p~oper place, as purposively determmed . Its end 1s to situate itself in a perfect organization, and it is the immanent pull of this

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

organization which is the true cause of motion. And, in the long run, everything moves towards the full perfection which has its source in the immutability of God. Now the application of mathematical formulae to nature involves not only uniformity of composition, but also uniformity of motion. But motion involves time, and also, it must be transmitted from one body to another. It must have been working in the first before it was passed over to the second· and it must have been passed over by direct physical contact'. Yet the effect of a final cause is produced by that which lies at the end of a series and is not effected by attraction and propulsion at all. Thus for this reason alone it would be out of the question for a consistent Aristotelian to recognize the exclusive domination of mechanical cause in nature. For the mathematical physicist, on the other hand, nothing less will serve. He may, if he is so inclined, acknowledge a meaning in nature as a whole, though, from his ovm point of view, he is under no obligation to do so; but he must not admit any factor, such as another and different order of detailed causation, which would detract from the rigour of his explanation. Here, then, is another respect in which the established Aristotelianism and the demands of mathematical science were irreconcilable. But it might appear as if there were a hope of reconciliation in the Christian doctrine of creation. After all, it is the very impersonality of Aristotle's God which diverts the attention from efficient to final cause. Once He is treated as a person, may He not be regarded as the First Mover in the strictly efficient sense; as imparting the first motion, not as the goal of creation, but as the original impact, which, at the moment of creating, sets the whole in motion for ever? The laws of nature could then be explained as the orderly continuation of God's original purpose. Now we shall notice some such theory in Descartes, and so vital would the notion of creation appear to be in Christian theology that, if there had been any desire to accommodate a mechanical theory of nature, we would have expected to find it in the Middle Ages also. But on this issue the dominant Aristotelian tradition was more audaciously Aristotelian than ever. Thomas Aquinas held that it could not be proved in philosophy that the world was not eternal, 1 and it is only creation in the efficient and temporal

sense ~hicn can ne1r- u::. out of our difficulty. In any other sense it represents God as a permanent and sustaining ground rather than as a decisive mechanical cause. To sum up: the mathematical interpretation of nature, expressed simply in terms of mechanical law, was alien to the whole temper of the Middle Ages; and even in conjunction with that of final cause, it was alien to the fashionable Aristotelianism of the period. Consequently what we would call natural science was never clearly distinguished from what we would call philosophy of nature; and no explanation of any natural phenomenon could be accepted which did not at least include the formal and the final causes. Such preconceptions were found to delay the growth of a mathematical conception of nature. Yet, on the whole, they were in harmony with the facts with which the age was acquainted and COD.cerned, and it was only towards its close that the natural philosophers of the Schools exchanged the attitude of intellectual candour for one of militant obstruction. The facts which demand the more rigorous sort of scientific explanation, and thereby compel its application to the affairs of everyday life, were not as yet clearly identified; and in their default it was no discredit to be overwhelmingly concerned with the simple experiences of human nature, and with the invisible bonds of disparity and aspiration which link the world with God.

IO

' e.g. Summa contra Gentiles, II. 38, where he deprecates attempted proofs of the world's non-eternity, as tending by their vulnerability to weaken the authority of the Catholic faith.

II

§3. So far we have examined the specifically Aristotelian obstacles to the development of natural science on mechanistic lines. But in mediaeval thought these are only part of a wider system of objections based on Christian theology. The centre of concern in Christianity is the relation of God and man; and no theory of nature can enter into a Christian system of knowledge unless it is broadly consistent with this requirement. Now it is inevitable that mechanical physics should treat both man and his habitation as mere unprivileged incidents in the vast play of cosmic forces. The governing principles of this process in which he is submerged are indifferent to his welfare. No doubt we may save his soul alive by exalting it above the process, just as we may save God's good faith by insisting that He is not accountable to human expectations. But this is to inject into creation a duplicity of purpose which is contrary to all the principles of rational economy. God's handiwork is much more harmonious if each of its aspects reflects the needs of all the others. The most simple way of asserting the supremacy

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

of spiritual values over the material world is to suppose that the material world was created to serve the purposes of spirit. It is only at a higher level of subtlety that the triumph of spirit is felt to demand a certain recalcitrance of its raw material. Thus, to the Middle Ages, it seemed proper that God should have ordained nature to serve the ends of man. The rain falls to water our crops; the forests grow to supply us with timber; and, by the same token, horses exist simply to pull our carts. The earth in which we live is the pivot of the astronomical system. The outer spheres may accommodate beings purer and wiser than ourselves, but for all that those spheres are described with the earth as centre. All creation of set purpose ministers to God's crowning achievement, the human soul. Under the stem and comfortless rule of physical mechanism, this flattering pre-eminence will have to go. The human soul, if its claims are to be maintained at all, will have to make its own way in a world not primarily intended for it. It will have to surrender its heritage of homely, if patronizing, intercourse with nature, and adopt the gruff and hostile demeanour of the pioneer. It will have to choose between its abolition and its severance from the human body. In all its actions it will have to grope and jostle in the impenetrable confusion resulting from the mysterious and apparently fortuitous coincidence of two essentially distinct worlds. Its fate will no longer be the only concern of God; He will have others, for example the provision of His concourse to the laws of nature, which are in no way related to it. Its world will no longer be unique, but an undistinguished member of an innumerable company. It will lose not only its significance but its geographical status. With the passing of the concentric spheres, it will forfeit its consoling local proximity to the angelic host, which will be dispossessed of its starry home to find an uneasy refuge in the judicious agnosticism of theologians.I Deprived of the pictorial assistance of a localized heaven, it will embark on its last journey without the assurance of a definite itinerary. All of which is at its best discouraging, and at its worst damnable heresy. Now it may be possible to reconcile the two points of view by further reflexion on the nature of mind and on the condi-

tions under which science is possible, and so to refashion the unity of creation on idealist lines. But all such considerations were foreign both to the established philosophy and to the innovating science, and the adherents of the old regime may be pardoned for taking the conflict at its face value. The dismemberment of creation, the disruption of its orderly hierarchy, the flattening out of the plain man's familiar distinctions: this was the price that would have to be paid for the recognition of the reign of law. Only an intense pressure from the facts could justify it. And the facts, after all, were not really pressing. Closer observation might reveal the need for a new kind of explanation, based on the recognition of identity rather than on the accommodation of differences. Above all, a new spirit might arise to insist on analysing the facts before proceeding to construct an explanatory synthesis. But of the facts and views of the times the mediaeval philosophy of man is a satisfactory summation. Not only were the disadvantages of a change overwhelming, the call for it was faint and feeble . We have still to consider one final incompatibility between the dominant outlook of the Middle Ages and the scientific view of nature, and this concerns the status of sense-perception. On any theory whatever which thinks of the material world as adapted to the service of man, the evidence of the senses, through which we come by our knowledge of it, must be accepted as a true guide. But on the theory of human substance put forward by Thomas Aquinas it is, barring miraculous revelation, the only true guide.I He taught that man was a composite of formative intelligence and sub-intelligent matter, representing the last flicker of the divine intellect as it fades away into the merely animate, and is thus equipped, not for the direct vision of more exalted forms of being, but for the understanding, through the appropriate logical processes, of his own composite world. To grasp it, it is true, it is necessary to infer beyond it, but with what is beyond it there is no direct contact. Perception is thus the only pathway to knowledge. Not only that, but in the total structure of knowledge it is sustained without being co:-rected. Its judgments are the basis for classification, and classification for explanation. It is ultimately a reliance on its power of discrimination which accounts for the doctrine of essences. Of two stones, one feels light and

1 Descartes himself refuses to discuss the subj ect in answer to the inquiries of Henry More (V. 402), and to Burman (V. 157) he professes a complete agnosticism. 'Cognitio eorum nos fere latet.'

1 e.g. Summa Theologica , I. 89. 1: 'Sic ergo patet quod propter melius est animae ut corpori uniatur, et intelligat per conversionem ad phantasmata.'

12

13

rs

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

the other heavy, and the respective sensations are attributed without critical examination to the two qualities of lightness and heaviness. The views of Aquinas on sense-perception were not, of course, directed against the constructions of science. Their bearing was mainly theological, and concerned the claim of the plain man to experience a direct intuitive knowledge of God. Apart from the phenomena of mysticism, they did justice to the facts of contemporary knowledge. Men could appreciate revelation and philosophy on the one hand, and plain practical experience on the other. The theory of knowledge put before them appeared to effect a reconciliation between them, and there was nothing else to consider. But a theory of nature based on measurement is bound to dispute the evidence of sense-perception. Measurement and perspective are irreconcilable. Even if scientific knowledge is set in motion by perception, it is bound, sooner or later, to 'spurn the base degrees whereby it did ascend'. Of the same set of objects, the plain man and the physicist may take different and even contrary views. And it is clear that the plain man's criteria must give way to the superior objectivity of the physicist's. A new form of apprehension, neither common-sense nor philosophical, and latently hostile to both, has to be acknowledged, and its methods and results fitted into the wider outlines of universal knowledge. Its assurance of certainty is based neither on its data nor on their imolications, but on its standards or axioms. The exploration of nature passes for good and all into the hands of the expert. Whatever the function of sense-perception may be, it is not to reveal the real nature of the object; and the whole philosophical structure raised upon its pretended veracity crumbles.

favour of a hypothesis than its inconsistency with Aristotle's philosophy should count against it. The faith that reality is somehow built on the strictest principles of mathematical economy is an integral part of the Platonic tradition. But the expurgation from the mathematical conception of the world of its attendant finalism, which was the work of Galileo, depends on a thorough-going investigation of the facts. It was the detailed consideration of moving bodies which compelled men to think in terms of shock and propulsion: and it was this in turn which led them to find the true expression of applied mathematical relations not in the fulfilment of a purpose, but in an invariable mechanical sequence. These are the guiding principles of the dramatic rise of natural science in the seventeenth century. Once they were discovered, nothing could stop them, for such facts as were from time to time available fell ever and ever under the rubric of the mathematical interpretation, and the need for verifying the mathematical interpretation stimulated the search for new facts. One physical or astronomical phenomenon after another came under the sway of mechanical law. The simplicity and coherence of the new system of explanation inspired in its expositors an almost mystic admiration. It could not be challenged, save by prejudice, for it brought together facts that nothing else could bring together, and that with the minimum of supposition. Its immediate result was a series of epochmaking discoveries. In 1543, after years of delay inspired by apprehensions as to its reception, was published the learned and laborious treatise in which Copernicus maintained that the earth moves round the sun. From that date onward, with the increasing velocity of the falling bodies whose evidence proved so precious, instance after instance of mathematical uniformity in nature came to light. After a period of germination during which the adherents of Copernicus gathered strength in silence, Kepler, in 1597, first uttered his conviction of the geometrical configuration of the heavens which was to lead him to his great achievements. Working upon the mass of observations recorded by his predecessor Tycho Brahe, and striving to reduce them, without distortion or omission, to conformity with mathematical formulae, he demonstrated the elliptical motion of the planets (1609), and finally (1618) he came upon the law, for which he had long been searching, connecting the mean distances of planets from the sun with their periods of revolution; the squares of the latter are proportional to the

§4. Thus if ever a new science, based on the quantitative uniformity of nature, were to come to birth, it would certainly be opposed by a whole body of vigorous and none too plastic mediaeval prepossessions: and it is perhaps no coincidence that it had to wait till their imposing intellectual coherence began to be strained. Its rise may be traced, like that of the Renaissance in general, to two apparently opposed but really cognate factors: the rediscovery of antiquity and an increased vitality of observation. The mathematical element in the new outlook is Platonic. It was in the Platonic atmosphere of Medicean Florence that Copernicus gathered strength for his conviction that perfection of mathematical harmony should count more in

16

THE PHILOSOPHY OF. DESCARTES

cubes of the former. Meanwhile Stevinus, in ~6.05, had foun~ed the science of statics by defining the conditions of physical equilibrium, and Galileo, the greatest of all the ref?rmers (who, significantly enough, had in his student days at Pisa prefe~-red Plato to Aristotle), had privately adopted the .coperni~an hypothesis, and was already .beginning ~o ex~end its application from celestial to terrestrial mechanics .. His f~mo~s o~ul":f demonstration from the leaning tower of h1~ n~t1ve city md1cated, what his experiment with balls on an mclmed P!ane was subsequently to prove scientifica_lly, t~at the v~looty of. a falling body did not depend on i~s weight, ~mt increased m direct proportion to the time of its fall. ~1s new telescope which he had conveyed to him from Holland m 16ro, 1 not o~ly revealed whole catalogues of unchar~ed stars, b~t enabled hun to confirm the Copernican hypothesis by observing the phases of Venus, and to watch the entrance o~ the ~e~come.r, Serpentarius into the celestial company, which a divme edict had been held to have closed for ever. The result was the open profession of his scientific faith, and the open outbreak of ~os­ tilities between the old and the new order. .At the same. time, however Harvey was developing a mechanical explanation of the circ~lation of the blood, thus adding phy~iology. to the conquests of the new science. Finally.' a succession of i~nova­ tions was rapidly perfecting for readier u~e the s.ym~ohsm ~f algebra and thus simplifying the calculations which its application involved. There could be no doubt that the new procedure was brilliantly successful., a~d so?ner or. 1.ater the philosophers would have to inqmre mto its conditions and implications. k b G l'l Towards this investigation some steps were ta en ":( a .1 eo himself. In the first place, he understood t.hat th.e class~fications of sense-perception, so central in the Ansto~ehan philosophy, were confused and untrustworthy, at lea~t m so far as they araded as science. He admired the Copernican .astronomers for being 'able to prefer that which their reason dictated to the~, to that which sensible experiments represen~ed most m~m­ festly to the contrary'.2 The senses su~ply. us.with the ~a~en~, but not with the order which makes it significant . This 1s t. e result of mathematical demonstration. The senses advertise , Probably invented by Metius, of Alkmaar, in 1608. Cf. the testimony of Descartes in the Dioptrics, VI. 8 2 . S l b , Dialogue concerning the two great Systems ?f the World, a us ury translation (London, 1661): quoted Brett, op. cit., pp. 68-69.

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

17

as all-important distinctions of quality which the scientific investigator may completely ignore. The real facts of nature are not presented to us, but laboriously attained. To the scientific mind, in fact, the senses are positively misleading, for they claim an accuracy which its criteria cannot sust ain. Hence Galileo set up a sharp distinction between appearance and reality, and assigned the unreality of appearance to its subj ectivity. When we are tickled by a feather, the tickling is not in the feather, but in us. In the same way, tastes, colours, and all other qualities which defy measurement, are not taken up from the facts before us, as the Middle Ages supposed, but are contributed to the experience from the recesses of our own nature. The true, substantial fact is the underlying measurable quantity which relates it to, and in which it is indeed one with, the whole mechanical system. The problem adumbrated by this treatment is the relation of the factor thus unceremoniously discarded to the alleged substratum of mathematically expressible fact, which it would appear both to postulate and to belie. Secondly, Galileo knew, as he could hardly help kn owing, that his scientific theory was bound in its victory to sweep away the claim of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature to substitute itself for science. In so far as that philosophy claimed to answer the question 'How?' it was entirely wrong, and though with the question 'Why?' Galileo, as a man of science, was not concerned, he could not avoid a philosophical dispute with those who urged on philosophical grounds that science had no function. In the Dialogue on the Two Systems of the World, which, perhaps by the causticity of its wit, brought about his condemnation by the Church, he introduces an archaic fossil of an Aristotelian, whose traditional defence of formal and final causes in nature is battered beyond repair by the two representatives of the Copernican system. The mathematical conception of nature is severed from the notion of purpose, and associated with a revived atomism. The problem raised by this attack concerns the whole relation of science and philosophy in the sphere of nature. Is it possible to maintain, concurrently, and consistently with the recognition of science, a revised philosophy of nature; t o admit the significance of natural phenomena in a larger order without denying the omnipotence of mechanical causation in their own order ? This raises the vital problem of the mutual adaptation, under the new system, of science and theology. The abolition of final causes might well seem to leave no room at all for God

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES r8

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

in nature. To this third and most delicate issue Galileo ~Hudes, though more cursorily. than a ~hilosopher woul? d~sire. He indicates the only possible solution; t~at of find1.ng m .God a first efficient cause, or supreme creative mech~rnc. ~h~s ~on­ ception, however, ignores what is fundamental m C~ris~ian~t}'.; the relation of God to man. Is man to be classed mdiscrirmnately with nature, and to be li~ked wit~ God merely un.der the aspect of creation? Su~h.a ~adical soluti?n was at that tim hardly conceivable. But if it is to be avo~ded, ho.w shall we bring together the differing, though not irreconcilable, conceptions admissible by science on the one hand, and demanded by religion on the other? . . . But, although Galileo was prep~r~d t o d~scus~ mc~dentally the philosophical implications of his innovations m sci~n.ce, he never claimed to be a philosopher, an~ had no ambition to construct a new scholasticism on the rum~ of th.e ol.d. It w~ his work in common with the other practical scientists of h era, to r~ise the new problems for a ne'V school Of philosophers to attack. §5. The mediaeval system, as re~resented by !horn, A uinas depended on the delicate ad]ustmen.t of Aristotle s p~ilosophy to the demands of Christian revelation. It assun:e that there could be no ultimate divergence, and reh~ on Aristotle's arguments to prov~ i~1depe~dently ~erta1 central articles of Christian faith, begmmng with the existenc of God. How would Christian truth fare when the support o Aristotle had been withdrawn? Inde~d .. was not the onslaugh on Aristotle itself damaging to Christ.ian truth? The appre hension of the theologians is well described ?Y Desc~rtes whe he complains, as late as 1629, that 'theol.ogy is.so enti.rely unde the power of Aristotle, that it is practically 1mpossi?le to ex pound another philosophy which does no~ at first sight s.ee to conflict with faith'.' It cannot be demed that many time honoured arguments were seriously threa~ened. For example it was no longer possible to prove the existence of God fro the working of an immanent purpose, or fr~m the appearanc of design in creation, or from the orde~·mg ?f nature fo divine or human ends. Moreover, the uniformity ?f nat~r law, and the exclusive confor~ity to it of matter m mot10n do not inevitably and uneqmvoca~ly. carry us ~eyond ~hef!l selves to a divine origin. They are, it 1s true, consistent with it, •To Mersenne, I. 85.

19

and its postulation does not threaten the mechanistic interpretation of nature, as does the notion of final cause. But the interpretation works none th e less adequately without it, and if there were no other reason for invoking it , there would, as Laplace was to urge later, be 'no need of such an hypothesis'. There remains, however, for the moment beyond the reach of science, because it possesses neither extension nor velocity, the human mind; and if in order to explain it we are compelled to believe in a God, it will then be possible to relate Him to nature in the one sense which science allows, namely, as its founder and creator both as fact and as law. The possibility of an understanding between science and religion will therefore depend on the stress laid by religious thinkers on the human soul, rather than the physical world, as the earthly tabernacle of God. If philosophy can consent to argue t o His existence from the facts and needs of personality and to avoid prejudicial assumptions concerning the workings of nature, it can count on the consent, if not on the enthusiasm, of science. And if religion is already, for its own reasons, anxious to dispense with its pseudo-scientific connexions, the philosopher who is trying to see the situation as a whole will have the basis of a rapprochement ready made for him. Yet, in the early years of the seventeenth century, this was exactly how things stood. The general tendency of the Renaissance was naturalistic. In its secular aspect it was covertly hostile to any religion except the religion of nature. The 'natural religi on' of Campanella, the flamboyant pantheism of Giordano Bruno, were its typical expressions in the sphere of religious feeling. But if the Renaissance be broadly conceived as the movement which asserted in all branches of life the claim to personal initiative, it may be said to have had a specifically religious aspect-the Reformation; and the Reformation was even more hostile to science than the Renaissance, in the limited sense, was hostile to religion. The explanation of this attitude lies in its passionate emphasis on personal religious experience. God is not to be found by demonstrations, but by the surrender of our wills, and their reconstitution as an organ of His purpose. The God of the philosophers, whether First Mover or Final Cause, does not as such invite this intimate communion; He attracts rather the lucid and equable contemplation of the self-reliant worldling. God, in short, is a term of religion and not of philosophy. The Middle Ages had not, of course, underrated the

20

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

importance of communion, but they had denied and censured as heretical the view that the existence of God is self-evident and demands no proof, they had thus restricted the personal conviction of God to saints and philosophers, and they did admit the claim of human reason, perhaps uninspired by the glow of authentic experience, to worm its unregenerate way into the citadel of faith. Such are the considerations which account for the intemperate rage of Luther at the mention of philosophy or philosophers. Aristotle, he exclaims, 'is to theology as the darkness to the light' ;1 a statement which unites him, if only by an identity of antipathies, to the scientific revolt. But Aristotle is only an instance of a whole execrable company. 'One should learn philosophy as one learns the black arts; simply in order to destroy it.' 2 'In the hearts of believers, reason should be dead and buried.'3 Calvin, cooler and more dialectical, admits the redemption of reason as a consequence of grace, but confines its recovered virtue to the examination of the vital issue of the religious life; man's relation to God. 'Our wisdom, in so far as it is true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts; the knowledge of God and of ourselves.' 4 But whether we concentrate on the religious life itself or on its interpretation, the whole province of nature is ignominiously excluded. In the minds of the Reformers, the centre of gravity in religious apologetics has shifted from the scheme of nature t o the heart of the believer. God is known to exist because He makes Himself felt in its quivering and incalculable recesses. His presence is directly experienced; if the 1 Ueberweg, Geschichte der Philosophie, III. 20. •Commentary on the Epistle to the R omans , fo l. 203 (b). J Erlangen, 44, 156-157. This a nd the above r eference are t aken from Maritain, Trois Reformateurs, pp. 45 and 48. T hey are, of course, extreme st at ements, typical Lutherian exaggerations, and are select ed by M. Maritain to prove a n extreme case. Luther actually agreed to the use of Aristotle for t eaching purposes (Ueberweg, op. cit., III. 19), and Melanchthon, his intellectu al a dv iser, was the founder of a Prot est ant Aristotelianism which was subsequently to establish itself in the Protestant universities of Germany. But it is the extreme stat ement of a doctrine, without reference t o practical compromise, which is historically m ost significant. •Institutes , I. I. l : the first senten ce. It is curious that D escartes should h ave proclaimed his own philosophical mission in almost identical terms. Cf. to Mersenne, I. 144, in the letter which a nnounces for the first time his attainment of a d efinite m etaphysical position: ' J'estime que tous ceu x a qui Dieu a donne l'usage de la raison sont obliges de !'employer principalement pour t acher a le conna itre et a se connaitre eux-memes.'

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

2I

Schoolman finds it necessary t o argue His existence it shows th~t t?e. Sch?olman has never really known Hirn. 'A sense of deity is mscnbed on every heart. '1 We are not here concerned directly with the theology of the lns_titutes: and still less with the Protestant scholasticism which~ with a perfe~t historical irony, persecuted Descartes fro_m its stronghold m the Dutch universities in the name of Anstotle; for Descartes was not a Protestant, and his furthest venture towards the reformed faith was to stand ambiguously at the c~ap_el do or for the duration of one Protestant sermon.2 But the ms1stence on personal religion, stressed in an exclusive sei;s~ by _the Protestant Reformation, pervaded the whole reh_g10us hf~ ~f the a15e. The Catholic counter-refo rmation, while repu?1atmg nothmg of the Church's heritage, none the less owed its la~ge measure of success t o its challenge to the reformers on their o~z: ~ound. In its own fastness, Spain, often su~i:ect to the lnqms1t10n, but in fact its greatest source of spmtual power, arose a fresh fervour of mysticism: Philip II and the Duke o_f ~va ~er~ the political spearheads of a movement whose rebg10us v1tahty was sustained by St. Teresa and St. J o?n of the C~oss. In France, the great figure of the Cathol~c reconstru_ct10n was St. Francis de Sales, who, though a J esmt, was of httle account as a scholastic theologian but s~ood out u?rivalled as a healer of souls. The problem of the s1.ck '.lnd sohta~y soul, which had tormented Luther and forced him mto re_bell10_n, was his special province, and his persuasiven~ss, especially m the conversion of Protestants, depended on a rival and subtler c~r~. ~ od, he urged, brings his advocacy to the rederni:t10n of man not an anmh1latmg omnipotence, but the co-operat.10n of man's own awakened nature, in which sin can never qmte destroy a native love of the divine. The 'constant peace of the soul' t o which he aspires does not proceed fro~ a sense of tot~l depravity, and pass through the wastes of anxiety and despair to an unheralded redemption. Rather, it pursu~s the stea_dy road. of _a constant trust, to which anxiety, m all its. forms, is t~ e pnnc1pal menace. His fine understanding and patient hurnamty were a haven of refuge for souls which had .been bu_ffeted by the splendid but unsparing logic of Calvm, and h_1s gen.tie in~istence ~n all forms of symbolism and ~eremony which ~mght aid devot10n was, like the Reformation _the religious life against its itself, 3: protest m th~ name truncat10n by theological defimhon. There is, of course no

o!

o!

'In stitutes, I. 3.

I.

•To Mersenne II 6, '

.

2 0.

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES 22

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

hint in his writings of disloyalty to the traditional cosmology, but his whole interest is elsewhere, and the centre, at any rate, of his practical theology, was the relation of God to the human soul. · h.m " th e f.rarr:ewor k Thus the emphasis on devotion, even wit of orthodox dogma, has the effect . of slu~rmg, w?il~ it outwardly respects, its more secular philos?p~ical affiliation~. ! he greater the emphasis, the greater t~e mdifferer_ice of rehg10~s minds to the impending cosmological revolution . . But while it shuts out the scholastic theologian's concern wit~ nature, the new movement actually augments hi~ concern with .man. The experimental sense of God's presence is an ev.ent, albe~t the supreme event of a soul's ~istory. If we. stress it e.xclusively, we shall worship God, not m His own nght, but simply as a power indispensable to man. . This is less a matter of metaphysics than of psychological emphasis, for it does not in the least prejudice the supremacy of God in relation to the soul; indeed, early P~otestant experimentalism consistently emphasized it. But i~ does lend t.o religious emotion a faint arriere pensee of self-mt~r~st; and it may direct att ention t o the state of the soul until i.t becomes 1 unhealthily absorbing. As M. l' Abbe Bremon~ has poi~t~d out, this outlook plays a large part i.n the confe~siona~ remimscences of Augustine, and even enters mto the lucid philosop~y of t~e Schoolmen. But as long as it ran in double harn~s~ with A:istotle's philosophy of nature, the excesses of rehg10us sub1ectivism were curbed. As this fell into the backg~ound throug~ the new interest in the psychology of redemption , the ommpotence of God tended m ore and more to revolve round ~uman experience. The centre of interest, though not necessarily the . met aphysical centre, was the human s~ul. Now a theory of this kin~ was u11:hkely t? combme spo~­ taneously with a system of science v.:hich had JUSt succeeded i_ dislodging man from his cosmic emm~nce. _If, however, a reh· gious attitude should arise which, while still concerned exclusively with God and the so~l, should de~nitely transfer th centre of gravity from salvation to adoration, not only woul 1 H istoire litteraire du sentiment relig_ieux en J'.rance, III. 25-26. The contrast between the two attitudes is not inevitable, and the ?es1; Christian thought, both Catholic and Prot~stant, h as al':"ay~ ~tnven: to overcome it . And even in the cases where it attracts.notice, it .is only a matter of degree, and often quite involuntary, the side on which tho emphasis is not laid being t aken for granted.

23

religion be rescued from its subjectivism, but the path would be prepared for an alliance with the new theory of nature. Such was the movement of sentiment and thought which developed in the precincts of the Oratory. The Oratory was a congregation of priests who came together in Paris in r6n under the guidance of Pierre de Berulle. The primary purpose of its foundation was the regeneration of the ordinary clergy by means of a systematic r egime of devotion. Devotion was, therefore, the first concern of the new order. But for Berulle the essence of devotion is forgetfulness of self. 'We must act', he writes, 'not out of regard or seeking for ourselves but out of pure regard for God.' 1 Very appositely he calls for a Copernican revolution in religious feeling: 'This new opinion, little followed in the science of the stars, is useful , and ought to be followed, in the science of salvation.'• In the one case, as in the other, man must shake off his incorrigible tendency to make himself the hub of the universe. We are for God, not God for us. This is the central t estimony of the Oratory. It is repeat ed by Charles de Condren, Berulle's immediate successor as Superior: 'Take no notice', he writes, 'of anything that happens inside yourself.' ... 'Do not seek out, by any internal experiment, the stirrings of grace in your souls.'3 And again by the lovable evangelist of the Order, Jean-Jacques Olier : 'The more we fuss about ourselves, the less progress we have made in the works of grace.'4 Now, as we have pointed out, the novelty here is not one of theology, for in theology the theocentric position was universally admitted. And, in any case, Berulle was no, dialectician, and disapproved of dialectic. But, like all religious attitudes, it only needed to impress an intellectualist t o undergo a theological translation. The man who e.ffected it was Gibieuf, an ex-Scholastic, whose submission t o the Oratory's scheme of devotion failed to extinguish his exuberant passion for argument, though it is only fair to record that it is with a denunciation of argument that much of his argumentativeness is concerned . He set out to disengage the conception of God, and of our knowledge of God, embedded in his master's practical directions; and his conclusions were published in 1632 , in a work entitled De L ibertate D ei et Creaturae. In the first place, he repudiates the syllogism. 'True and legitimate knowledge is to be found not in discourse, but in a 1

3

Op. cit., III. 29. Op. cit., III . 380.

2

i

Op. cit., III. 24 . Op. cit., III. 138.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

kind of intuition of the truth.' This is a natural translation of his master's preference for devotion over dialectic; insight rather than argument is the proper approach to God. But the insight he interprets is that of the Oratory, which stresses adoration rather than peace of soul. Consequently we expect, and we get, a conception of God which stresses His absolute authority and creative power, denies his responsibility to human standards (thus setting him beyond criteria of truth), exalts Him above the pursuit of all special ends (thus excluding the study of final causes), proclaims His unrestricted freedom and indivisible unity, and resolutely rejects all systems of philosophy which start with human experience rather than with the 'amplitude' of the Divine. Now on every one of these points he departs, either in emphasis or (as is more often the case) in principle, from the traditional Thomist position. All his denials on this issue are disingenuous. More to the point is his recourse to ~he n.eoPlatonists Proclus, Iamblichus, and the pseudo-Dionysms. With these he has undoubted affinities, as he has also, like all Christian Platonists, with Augustine. Here he simply follows in his master's footsteps; for Berulle had spoken of Plato as 'the loftiest of the pagans', 2 thus placing him before Ari totle, and of Augustine as 'the most truly religious doctor of the Church',3 thereby exalting him above Aquinas. Logically, the Oratory should have disapproved of Augustine's introspectiveness, but, as Berulle points out, he adds the 'salt of wisdom'4 to the dry fare of mere learning. He makes philosophy subordinate to the religious life, and that is the first principle of all true philosophy. On the whole, therefore, it is fair to regard the outlook of the Oratory as an aspect of the Augustinian revival, and not least in that it proceeds to the conviction of God, not from the esoteric calculations of philosophers, but through the universal and unmediated dialectic of religious devotion.

exempt from the other's interference in its own specified area. No competent philosopher, reviewing the situation, could have been content merely to bisect experience into unrelated halves. If, however, a general collaboration of purpose could be discovered , in place of the un satisfactory collaboration in detail there was nothing to prevent a lasting reconciliation. ' Furthermore, in France at least , there was one excellent reason why science and religion were likely to go hand in hand. They both stood for a return t o positive conviction. This, it is true, is not so much a question of doctrine as of mental attitude, but it was a mental attitude, and not a doctrine, which was the main danger to the Church in France in the early years of ~~e sevent eenth century. As often happens, a long period of religious warfare had engendered a weary and disenchanted spirit of sceptical and secularist mockery. Much is heard under Louis XIII of the 'libertins', not so much declared enemies of religion as conventional conformists who lacked all interest in it. It was the day of Italian influence in high places; Marie de' Medici, the queen-mother, attracted to the French court swarms of her countrymen, whose social vivacity brought their ~gn.osticism int~ fashion . .o~tei:, it is true'. they were merely mdifferent, and 1t was their md1fference which was cont agious; but their loose practice was sometimes matched with a loose theory. The root, however, of their intellectual rebellion was not science, but philosophy. Giordano Bruno had popul arized the 'religion of nature', which was the expression in the sphere of religious feeling of his indiscriminate pantheism. Meanwhile, nearer home, Montaigne (the idol of the 'libertins') had attacked reason in the name of a sceptical sensationalism. So far from being scientific, these attitudes are inconsistent with any kind of. sci~nti&c ~nalysis. Neithe~ were thei~ exponents men of any scientific emmence. Bruno himself, at his worst, was something of an astrological pedlar, and his disciples in France, such as the entertaining impostor Vanini, were too busy 'living according to nature' to find out what nature was really like. Montaigne was a cultivated gentleman, striving by indifferen ce to maintain his culture in an age of civic turbulence; for the most pa~t una~quainted with science, and temperamentally hostile to its claims and methods. The great free-thinkers of the eighteenth century, inheritors of the rationalist side of the Cartesian tradition, were enthusiasts both for science and for new ways of life; and herein lay their power. But the appeal to nature fashionable in the smart set in Descartes's youth rested

24

1

~ 6. Thus the collaboration of science and theology in the m~diaeval philosophy had led in the end to the revolt of both the partners. It had become clear that if either were to develop the old deed of agreement would have to be destroyed. The question at issue was whether the partnership should be dissolved or renewed on freer terms. Neither to science nor to religion was its dissolution a necessity, provided each were

• La liberte chez D escartes et la theologie, p. 183. 3 Op. cit., p. 165.

' Op. cit., p . 172. • Op. cit., p. 166.

25

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES 26 on an unauthorized acceptance of her superficial aI_>pearances, and its predestined conclusion was a complete mtellectual see ticism and a complete bankruptcy of morn.ls: . . in any conflict of religion agamst scepticism, sCience is a va~:~ble ally, if only the t erms of the treat y car: be arranged. · the past had the Church been hostile t o science. Thomas N or , in ' · F .. t had Aquin as, in his t riumph over his ranciscan o.pponen s, left a precedent for welcoming the latest accredited cosmology t o the Church's bosom . But whether ha~dened by the. camaign against heresy, or overborn~ by scn ptural authm:ity , or ~ncumbered with · academic pre)udice, or bec~use it w~s honestly and r ationally satisfied by the ~tolemaic sy~t.e m , it · ed the discoveries of Copermcus with the suspic10n he receiv · f · B ' had feared. Its apprehensions were prophetic, or m runo s hands the Copernican h ypothesis was.used to demonstrat~ that the universe was unlimited, and this was held t o be mconsist ent with the existence of a transcendent ~od . H enceforth, the new theory was suspect on account of its. con~eq~ences, and the tension was increased by the dang~rous imphcat 10ns of Galileo's discoveries. The works of Copermc.us were put o.n .the Index in 1 6 1 6, donec corrigerentur, and 0ahleo was prohibite? from making any further public professions: Th~ story of his transgression, and his subsequent condemn ation , is wel~ known. But the dat es show that the Church had grasped the d.1ffere~~e between science and philosophy masqueradmg as sCience_, it t olerated Copernicus as science for seventy-three years, and interfered only when met aphysical consequences .were too fr eely drawn . And , further, it . was t~e. general policy of the Church t o allow the new scientific posit10ns t o be st at ed hyp~­ thetically, provided they were forr_n ally de.cl~red t o be co!1d~­ tional on the Church's interpret at10n of divme t:uth. This ~s the concession syst ematically made 1?Y? escartes m th.e pubhc exposition of his science in the P_rinciples,1 and ~alll~o was condemn ed mainly because the acid moc.kery ~f .h is dialog~e t oo obviously belied his for.mal declarat 10n. Ridicule ,?f this subt erfuge is misplaced , for 1t was re~lly a way of m~kmg the distinction between r elative and ultn~rnte ~ruth which most scientists are now prepared t o re~ogmze . Fmally, t~ere were other contribut ory circumst ances m. th~ case. of Galileo, s~ch as the professional jealousy of a J es mt nval. with an alt~rnative theory about sun-spots, and his condem!1at10n may easily have represented a local and t empor ary pamc rather than the con-

J

' e. g. P rine ., I V.

204.

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

27

sidered judgment of the Church universal. In France, at least, there was a st rong body of Catholic opinion which was openly favourable t o the new science, and it must be not ed that Descartes, who in 1633 suppressed his physics on account of the Copernican h ypothesis with which it was interwoven , nevertheless published them in 1644, under a mythological disguise which can hardly have deceived the trained censors of the Holy Office, and escaped even the bar est hint of official malediction . There was thus no unsurmountable antipathy between the Church and science, and fortunately for France both religion and r eason played their parts in the rest or ation of morale and conviction. It remained, however, t o formulate the t erm s of the compact . This was a task for a new philosophy, which it was left to Descartes t o work out. But a firm sense of the oneness of knowledge may precede its demonstration, and this we may discover in the work of Descartes's intimate correspondent, Mersenne. To Mersenne is due the credit for being the first out spoken advocate of the new science. Friendly t o the point of officiousness, open-minded to the point of credulity, he was none the less a born letter-writer, and fitt ed as were few other men t o fun ction as a depot of miscellaneous inform ation. His interest s were encyclopaedic, and he was probably too b usy putting people in touch with each other t o be a profoundly individual thinker ; but he had a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge and a genuine grasp of the new science, and his intimacy with Descartes was based on a fundament al unity of purpose. In the preface t o hi s Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1 623 ) he asserts boldly that the doct ors of the Church 'submit t o no authority when reason fails' ;1 they believe 'everything that God reveals to us either directly (i.e. through our r eason), or through His Church'. 2 They are willing to accept a whole list of scientific novelties (some of them, like the rational world-soul, are highly heretical), if they 'accord better with the truth of scripture' .3 This condition is not exacting, 'for t hey know that the various passages of Scripture have an infinite number of meanings, and they use very freely any meaning they please, provided it is not repugnant to the truth'. 4 In these passages, which, as M. Strowski p oints out, were neither withdrawn nor censured, there is an underlying conviction that truth is all one, and there is therefore no fear 1

l

St rowski , P ascal et son temps, I. Ibid .

2 2 2.

• I b id . 4 Op . cit., I.

22 3 .

28

THE HERITAGE OF DESCARTES

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

of a contradiction between one kind of _truth a~d ai:other. It is this noble faith which a clearer analysis must 1_ustify. It is one thing, however, to insist that truth is a wh?le, _an~ another to ignore the differences of aspect out of whi~h it is constructed. If religion and science cannot ~e ultimately divided, it is precisely because they be~ong to_ different layers of experience. Mersenne's hasty enthusiasm piles them amorphously together and leaps acrobati~ally from the one _to the other. His affinities are often fantastic; he proves the existence of God from the properties of the parallelogram, and returns ?n his tracks to deduce the theorem of Pythagoras from the existence of God. He even recommends his luckless fellow-preachers to take their texts from propositions of Euclid _or_ the_ laws of hydrostatics.r Such a temperament cannot distmgmsh we~ enough to combine. But even a cooler head on Mers~nr:e s shoulders might well have failed to balance the confhctmg claims. Mersenne was a loyal and progressiv_e _Cath~lic of the Renaissance; enlightened, humanist, and Mohmst. His was th_e happy piety which is unacquainted with the pa!1?s and_ auster:ties of a second birth. If he had had the reqmsite philosophic stability, he would doubtless have ~uilt ~ system round argument from design, lik~ Pal_ey _wi~~ his watch, or the 11:genious Dr. Derham with his 'Vindication of God by the In_stitution of Hills and Valleys' .1 The inevitabili~y of mec~amcal law would have seemed to him the sure refle~10n of_ the immutability which is God. But for the Reformat10n, this easy and popular solution might have been_ g~nerally accepted long before the eighteenth centur)'.'. But it _ig_nores the _cent~al fact that God is primarily the sub1ect of religious expenence, _a f~ct which no conspectus could omit without gravely mutilating the religious history of the preceding century. _The man \~horn philosophy required was one who could al;>preciate_ a devotional outlook like that of the Oratory, or bnng to his task some strong central experience of his own.

t?e

§7. The double revival of intellectual and religiou_s life, combined with the political unification and expansion of France under Richelieu and his successors, ~reated one of those periods of history when_, _for a short time _and under favouring circumstances, the spmt_of man ~~lances ma central harmony qualities usually found m opposition, and blossoms 1 Op. cit., I. 225-226. . . . . . 'Cf. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, P· 493·

29

into the rich and varied fructification which draws its vitality from the synthesis of contraries. This was the great classical perio~ ?f French culture. On the bracing tension of intersecting smcenties there often follows the philosophic vision, and it was in such a time of strenuous and conflicting spiritual aims that philosophy was reborn with Descartes. Its Catholicism, fervent but sober, was enriched by the intellectual absorption of its opponent~, ai:d not, as in some other countries, sterilized by their extinction. Its respect for authority was quickened by individual inspiration, and deepened by a personal sense of ~esponsibil~t)'.'. Rarel)'.' did its strength of conviction sharpen mto fanaticism, or its moral elevation darken into ascetic repression. _In _its ferven~y of feeling it preserved a purity of form, and m its perfection of form a sincerity of feeling. It un~t:d reverence with independence, scientific accuracy with religious ecstasy, the unruffled caution of the scholar with the gallant audacity of the cavalier. It revealed the full stature of the human mind; and for that very reason it grew to a deeper and steadier vision of God. It is as a leader of French classicism that literary history has always viewed Descartes; and it will help us to understand his philosophy also if we think of him, not merely as the distant descendant of Aquinas or the distant progenitor of Kant, but as the contemporary of Corneille and Pascal. In all of them we find the same broad fusion, despite a difference of emphasis, of ethical, religious, and intellectual endeavour. If we admire most in Corneille a titanic strength of moral purpose, we cannot ignore the brilliant agility of his psychological dialectic in Le Cid or the sense of religious mystery which pervades Polyeucte. If we think of Pascal mainly as the ascetic of PortRoyal, thrilled and tormented by the pitiless love of God, we shall do well to remember his epoch-making experiment on the Puy-de-Dome, and his indignant invective against the tepid and evasive morality sanctioned by the Society of Jesus. And, in the same way, it should not surprise us that Descartes, whose specific genius was intellectual, should fall into a mystical ecstasy over his stove, or cling, in entire honesty of conviction, to 'the religion of his King and his nurse', 1 and seek to discover, through the many ramifications of physical and metaphysical research, 'the .1ighest and most perfect ethic, which, pre-supposing a complete knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom'.• 1 This was his reply to the Protestant minister, Revius (Adam, Vie de Descartes, XII. 345, note). 'Prine., Preface, IX. 14.

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

CHAPTER II THE MISSION OF DESCARTES §r. THE broad historical tendencies of thought outlined in the last chapter, having outgrown the old 'philosophy, were boun.d sooner or later to create a new one. The man who formulated it was Descartes. It is our next object to trace the nature of his contacts with them; to estimate their relative importance in the formation of his outlook; to show, by an examination of his mental growth, how peculiarly well fitte~ he .was to undertake his historical task; and above all, to mqmre what he was trying to do in philosophy, and in what spirit he was trying to do it. In his inimitable log-book of spiritual discovery, the Discours de la M ethode, Descartes has left us a clear account of his development. It is obvious from every line of it that he regards his life as consecrated. Philosophy for him is not a pursuit but a passion. This simple fact explains all the comple.xities o.f his career. Though not without pride of race, he remamed celibate rather than sacrifice the least part of his independence. Despite his social capacities, and the tastes and .habits of .a fine .gei:tleman which he retained to the end, he hved a solitary hfe m a foreign country lest they should di~tract him from . his li~e's purpose. Further, as we shall see, his apparent terg1versahon and his much-discussed 'prudence' are traceable to the same source. They indicate not duplicity, but a tenacious sing~e­ mindedness, which looks like duplicity to men of less defim~e purpose. Any tactics likely .to dissei:ninate t~e ~rut~ will serve his tum. And, finally, his professional dedicat10n is not without its bearing on his metaphysical conclusions. Our point of departure, therefore, will be Descartes's sense of his. mission. The son of a provincial councillor of Brittany, who had little but satire for his ambition to 'get himself bound in calf', Descartes studied as a boy at la Fleche, the famous Jesuit college founded and protected by Henri IV, where his account of what he learned may be checked and amplified by reference

31 to the actual curriculum. 1 He depicts himself as a keen student, but he insists that from the first his interest was due to the belief that thus 'he might acquire a clear and certain knowledge of everything useful to life'.> This double emph,asis on the certainty and on the utility of knowledge was characteristic of Descartes throughout life; but for the moment he was doomed to disappointment. No sooner, he tells us, had he completed 'the whole course of study at the end of which it is usual to be received among the ranks of the learned', than he discovered that he had learnt nothing that he really cared about, and, like Socrates, was wiser than others merely in his recognition of his own ignorance.3 He believed, and he held to his conviction in later years, when his feelings towards the Jesuit order as a whole were none too friendly, that he had received the best education the age could give him;4 but it did not give him what he wanted. It accumulated authoritative learning, while he wanted to strike straight for the truth. He extols the value of what he has learnt with some sincerity and with much goodhumoured irony; and though by temperament a philosopher it is for philosophy that he reserves his peculiar pungency. 'It gives us the means to talk plausibly about everything and to get ourselves admired by those who are less learned.' 5 Even in the fragment of Le Monde, written between 1630 and 1633, 'philosopher' is a habitual term of abuse, and refers to the schoolman, with his hoary authorities, his piling of syllogism on syllogism, his expositions which pose as the discovery of new knowledge, and, in particular, his ignorance of contemporary science and mathematics, which always roused Descartes t o scorn. Even at school, it should be noticed, Descartes was especially fond of mathematics 'because of the certainty and evidence of their reasonings',6 but had not yet realized the world structure which might be built on their foundation. Moreover, he knew that all other sciences 'borrowed their principles from philosophy', 7 and as long as philosophy remained a medley of diverse opinions, there could be no further progress. But if his training had left him little that was positive it had 1 See Gilson, La liberti chez Descartes et la thiologie, pp. 6 ff., and especially his references to Rochemonteix, Le College Henri IV de la 2 D isc. , VI. 4. Fleche, Vol. IV (Le Mans, 1889). 3 Ibid . •To ***, II. 378: for Descartes's general sense of gratitude to his teachers, cf. to Noel, I. 383. s Disc., VI. 8. 6 Ibid., VI. 7. 1 Ibid., VI. 21-22.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

32

given him a sense of intellectual proportion which saved him from the lure of alchemy, astrology, and those other forms of primitive magic which, cloaked in the phr~ses _of s~ience, imposed, then as now, on the unwary or untramed mtelhgence. 'The Middle Ages', says Professor Whitehead, 'formed one long training of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense of order.' 1 Descartes's mediaeval schooling had done the same for him. He held firmly, against much of the tendency of his time, to the clean-cut distinction between spiritual and scientific values which, relative as it may be, is the condition of clear thinking about either. There was nothing spiritual to him in abnormal departures from natural law, in a mysterious interconnexion of souls and stars. The supernatural was the spirit of God, and not the disguised materialism of the magicians. It must be remembered in his favour that in the same century Louis XIII employed and honoured a court astrologer at the siege of La Rochelle; that Wallenstein, throughout his campaigns, allowed his real military genius to be clouded by the same form of superstition; that Mersenne pointed to monstrous births as a striking vindication of human genius ;2 that Kepler (Wallenstein's Bohemian compatriot) kept an astrological diary, and was sustained in his immense labours by a Pythagorean mysticism of numbers and harmonies; that Newton, much later, embarked on a mathematical exposition of the Apocalypse which he valued more highly than his discovery of gravitation. It is evident that the renewed interest in nature required the pruning-knife of a stern logic to cut away the hybrid growths of a mystical materialism. . . Saved by his sober critical sense from these absurdities, but unconvinced of any truth on which he could build, Descartes lost his respect for books altogether. The schoolboy who browsed indiscriminately in the libraries of la Fleche became as an adult an infrequent and negligent reader, who more often than

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

33

not did not finish the books he startedr and acknowledged no debt to any n:an, dead or Jiving. The acknowledged philosophies were contradictory and uncertain. Moreover, they were the work of pedants, who were not compelled to face the consequei:c~s of their own theories. From the beginning Descartes's ambition was _h'.'ofol?. 'I had always an extreme longing to learn how to drstmgmsh the true from the false in order to see clear in my actions and to walk in this life with' all assurancc.'z Philosophy t? h~m was no intellectual Chinese-puzzle, but the very stuff of life itself. To be of any value it must spring directly from life's problems. So Descartes set off on his travels as a soldier of fortune and learnt, to his lasting benefit, that national customs are not the d~cre:s of Provi?er_ice. But this increasing appreciation brought with rt no conv1ct1on of certainty, until it occurred to him to ~tudy the inward rather than the outward side of experience. One day', he says, 'I resolved to study within myself.'3 This was the day of destiny on which he withdrew from his campaigni'.1g into the sympathetic company of the now celebrated Bavanan s~ove .. The resolution was sufficiently momentous. At one stroke rt shifts the balance of philosophy as the Reformation had shifted the balance of theology, f~om the external "'.'orld to the i?dividual, and with consequences equally revolut10nary. The immediate result is the method of doubt which substitutes for the slow growth of philosophical tradition the systematic critical analysis of one man. But, besides this, it has a personal reference. Not all men, says Descartes elsewhere, are by nature fitt ed for the career of a philosopher. Together with the conviction that philosophy could and should be t otallv reconstructed there came upon Descartes the assurance that he was the man to do it. From this moment his vocation is fixed. The method recommends the man, and the man 1.he method. 1

S cience and the Modern World, p. 14. ' See Strowski, Pascal et son temps, I. 2 13, ::.nd his quotations. Descartes's general attitude is well summed up in the Discours, which our summary h ere follows. 'Pour les mauvaises doctrines, je pensais deja connaitre assez ce qu'elles valaient, pour n 'etre plus sujet .a etre trompe, ni par les promesses d'un alchimiste, ni par les pred1ct10ns d'un astrologue, ni par les impostures d'un magicien.' Cf. to Mersenne, III. 120 (on 'aerial salt'), and III. 15 (on the man who died on the date predicted by the astrologer-of fri ght, as Descartes is careful to observe. N.B.-In this passage , 'l' as trologie, la chiromancie, et autres telles niaiseries ') . 1

e.g ..Herbert of Cherbury, De Ver itate (to Mersenne, II. 596--599), and e~en G1b1euf, D e L ibe1·tate, which he warmly approved, but lent t o Rivet before he had finished it (to the same, I. 220). He seems t o have picked up books to ge t suggestions, and, whether he got them or not, he then dropped them. 'Disc., yr. 10. It i.s possible tha t Descartes is here reading his later experience mto his. boyhood, thou gh, as M. Gilson points out, there .is no ~eason why his t each ers should not have discoursed on the practical utility of a .modern education (Commentary, p. 102). Most teachers do. If they d1.d'. and Descartes took them seriously, it would make his subsequent d1s11lus10nment all the more intelligible l Disc., VI. IO. .

34

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

It is with the private dedication of Descartes to philosophy that we are here concerned. It is, indeed, clear enough in the sober pages of the Discours; but there is interesting corrobora-1 tive evidence in the Abbe Baillet's Vie de Monsieur D escartes, which t estifies to the high state of excitement through which Descartes was passing at this period, and compels us to modify the portrait of the 'cold rationalist' which later ages have fabricated in their own image. It appears that Descartes wrote a summary of his experiences in a booklet entitled Olympica, which is now lost, though the substance has been preserved by Baillet. 2 It is glossed by a marginal note, dated November IO, 1619, 'When I was full of inspiration, and was in the act of discovering the foundations of a wonderful knowl edge' 3 ( mirabilis scientiae), and gives an account of three remarkable dreams, to which Descartes himself attached a certain supernatural significance. The first, to which recent orthodox interpret ers of Descartes have paid perhaps too little attention, relates how a violent wind caught him up and pushed him towards the door of his college chapel. From the pain which he felt on awakening he felt that this was the work of some evil genius ; and he gave thanks to God, who had not allowed him 'to be carried away, even into a holy place, by a spirit which He had not sent'. The reference here is unmistakably t o the personal character of his service of God. He was t o justify His ways to man, but not as the schoolmen, and the t emptation t o accept the traditional account of His relation to man as His will is presented as direct blasphemy. The fact that this episode is recorded by Baillet, one of whose principal objects is to depict his subject as a pillar of the faith, is strong evidence of its importance to Descartes himself, and indicates, what Descartes's more cautious statement in the Discours does not, that his mind had been troubled during the day by conscientious scruples concerning his new attitude. The special features of his theory of Godmore especially the ontological proof-are not yet formulated, I. 50 . Baillet's life of Descartes dates from 1691, and thus represe nts 1 the considered v iew of a generation distant enough from the philosopher himself t o allow of a certa in historical perspec tive, and yet near enough t o retain the atmosphe re and t o take the evidence of th ose who had known him. The biographer's apologetic intentions lead him into a certa in one-sidedness, a nd he can sometimes be demonstrated t o have filled up gaps in his s ubj ect's life with his own conj ectures, but his ge nera l since rity is unimpeachable, and h e r em a ins th e fundam e ntal seco nd a ry a uth ority for the life of D e!>cartes. 'And is rep rinted in A.T., X. 179- 187. 3 Ibid., X . 179·

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

35

but the ii:timate con~exion between God and the thinking self, 3: connexion more direct than any mediate revelation which hes at the root of his later phil?sophy, is already manif~st. The second dream, from which he woke in terror amid the clatter of thunder a~d a blaze of lightning, contains nothing remarkable, but he interpreted his terror as remorse for sin a~d t~e ~hui:der as the descent upon him of the Holy Spirit'. His m~ssion ~s thus. definitely consecrated. In the third dream there is a ht~t of its method. M. Maritain has quoted with ~pprov~l a dictum reported by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, that th~ J?h1losophy of Descartes has cut the throat of poetry' .1 Th~s ts to take a narrow professional view of poetry. In the qmck flashes of creative intuition by which the mind passes from one pe~k of_ i:nathem_atical discovery to another, glows the true poetic_spm~: precisely what is lacking in the patient and_acu_te 1!1amp':la~1on ?f syllogisms. The discoverer proceeds by inspiration: his tmagmation must play upon his collection ?f facts before _he. can grasp, perhaps through a single crucial instance, the s~gm~cant beauty of their symmetrical arrangement. And so, ii: ~1s dream, Descartes was offered the choice of two b~o ks : a dictionary, which represented to him 'simply a ~at~ermg toge~h e.r of al~ th_e sciences', and a Corp1ts Poetarnm, which_ more, dtst_m ctly in~1cated the union of philosophy and true ~1sdom . This emphasis on poetic inspiration, in opposition to philosophy ~n_d erstoo d as th~ m~re aggregation of knowledge, Desc~r~es ,exphc1tly expresses m his Cogitationes. 'It may seem surpnsmg, he w~ote there, 'that the really important pronouncements are in ~he writings of poets rather than of philosophers. The r~ason. is t~at poets have written with the ecstasy and powe~ of 1magmat10n.' 2 Herein is heralded the attack on t~e s:yllogism, and the insistence that direct intellectual intuition is the _true way of knowledge ." Moreover, as the dream c.losed, he hghted ?n the passage of Ausonius, 'What way of life. shall I follow ? The way of knowledge was to be his way of hfe. . Thus began the mission of Descartes; and a proper appreciation o~ these. texts helps ':s to discard some venerable illusions. Combmed ~1t~ a ste_rlmg independence of judgment, it shows us a~ _unquestionmg piety which accepts the dreams literally as d1vme en~oi:ragement.; i~ sets the seal of religious enthusiasm on. t~e ~ms~10n of bmldmg a new scientific philosophy. After this, it. is difficult to argue that Descartes, when he urges, as 1

Trois Reformateurs, p.

1 27 .

1

X.

217.

36

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

he does again and again, that his theory of God lies at the root of all his science, is simply prevaricating in the interests of prudence. On the side of his own experience, ~e had felt that ~t was God's will that he should become a philosopher. Of this intimate inspiration the view that philosophy is grounded on the positive existence of God, is simply an i?tellectual t~ans~~­ tion. And this, we may add, was the foundat10n of the mirabilis scientia to which he refers. Included, it is true, are the detailed reflexions which he elaborated on the decisive day, and to these we shall return. But behind all these lies the conviction that philosophy, like art, is a personal matter: that each m~n who is temperamentally suited to the task must construct his own: that he himself is especially called upon to make the attempt: and that God has blessed it and made it possible. The close and complementary union of the two central certai.nties of the Cartesian system: ' I am', and 'God is', finds here its concrete historical origin, though the particular form of their relation to each other and to the system of philosophy as a whole dates from another phase of the mission of Descartes. 1

§z. The architect who is ordered to build a new city on the site of an old one has to begin by pulling the old one down. Descartes, with the growing animus against picturesque a.ntiquity which distinguished his century, declares fo~ straight lines and a single plan, and finds the ground occupied by an accumulated network of irregular alleys. Thus the first task of philosophy is a sort of slum clearance :2 in plain words, a wholesale scepticism. The town planner, however, even in his most ruthless moments differs from an anarchist with a bomb, because he is animated by the sentiment of reconstruction. It is this sentiment, directly inspired by his mission, which distinguish~s the scepticism of Descartes from the truculent and dogmatic scepticism which is simply negation in disguise, as also from the elegantly inconclusive scepticism of a languid and cultured indolence. The conditions of l}.is intellectual adventure are clearly defined at the outset. 'With regard t o all the opinions to which, up to this point, I had given credence, I persuaded myself that the best thing I could do would be, once and for all, to throw them off, so that I could replace them later on either by better ones, or by the same ones when I should have adjusted them to the level of reason.'3 Thus, he adds charac' See notes to § 6.

1

Disc., VI.

l l,

13.

3

Ibid., VI. 13.

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

37 teristi~ally, he will succeed in conducting his lifo much better. Th~re, is here no tra~e of luxuri.ating in doubt, no sinking back o? .1t as on a. s?ft pillow .1 It is the whole object of his prov1s10nal sceptic~sm to discover 'rock or. clay' beneath 'moving earth and sand .2 So far from overturnmg foundations, he sets out to make them ~m.shakable. This would be entirely evident ?ut for the dramatic mterest of Descartes's resolve, which lends it a false ap_pearance of revolutionary novelty. As a matter of f~ct, scepticism of a sort was the fashion in the 'advanced' circles of the day. If Descartes had been an ordinary sceptic, any contemporary would have passed him over as being just one more of those too clever young people. What really was remarkable. was the use of sc~pticisn: to refute :he sceptics. He had railed at the dogmatism which declined his ordeal· bu~ he is prep3:red to adopt with enthusiasm the dogmatis~ which can pass it. It_is here, then, that Descartes is most original, and it is here precisely that .he owes most to his mission. For his divergence from the sceptical tradition is not simply or even fundamentally a m~t~er of argu~ent. Beneath the mockery of the sceptic was a spmt of despair. It was because he had lost faith in reascn that he reined in before the first fence and declared he could go no further. It was because he was lost in the wilderness that he had t o cover his .dignity with the fiction that truly wise people i:ever find their way. Descartes, because of his mission was an mdomitable optimist. Sustained by his faith in reason' he allowed hims.elf .t~ stray from the beaten track, as they did'. but he was not mh1b1ted from recognizing a path when he saw one. The prospect of reducing man's noblest endowment to an absur?ity awakened in him no perverted pleasure; but he knew that it could come to its full stature only when it should be allow~d to stand and face the problems of life alone. It is .often. ass~rted that scepticism, so qualified, is really dogrn.atism d.1sg~11s.ed. But, paradoxical as it may sound, the sceptic who is limited by a fundamental belief in reason has far more scope for open-minded reconstruction than one who is not . In particular, ~e is not ~ommitted ~o .a. rejection of the past. There al~ays remams for him the poss1b1hty that his questions and de1:11als may restore the old truths. There is a tendency ~m?ng mnova~ors to suppose that no thinking can be unpre1ud1ced unless it produces novelty. As our quotation shows, the 1

' The phrase is Pascal's: quoted Chevalier, Descartes, p . 2 o . 5 ' Disc., VI. 29.

38

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

direction of Descartes's scepticism saved him from this form of superstition; he knew that the plausibility of passion is no less hollow than the plausibility of convention. He will think away all preconceptions, it is true; but thereafter he will follow where reason leads, even though it should conduct him back t o the old paths, which the prejudice and vanity of the ordinary sceptic compel him to abjure in advance and without examination. There are other conditions to Descartes's experiment, which also are best understood in the light of the mission. Not everyone, he says in effect, is qualified for a course of methodical scepticism. 1 Quick and unstable intellects, once committed to doubt, will lack the humility and the ballast to recover from it; while honest humdrum intellects, aware of their own limitations, will realize that they were not intended to be r eason's pioneers, and should not be pushed or taunted into it. Only those whom a wide variety of experience, such as his own, has already disabused, and those who have a gift for intellectual construction, together with some premonition of a constructive method, should be allowed to go forward. And even they must forswear the temptation of reforming the minds of others, and devote their whole attention t o the improvement of their own. Finally, Descartes sets above all manner of doubt certain provisional maxims of conduct. While we doubt, we must live, and we cannot simply live anyhow. We must adopt some regular system, and seeing that we have as yet no rational moral standard, we may as well conform, for the time, to. the ordinary usages of reasonable people. H ence Descartes's literal acceptance, for practical purposes, of the faith, manners, and morals of his country, and in particular of loyalty, consistency, and contentment with one's lot, as personally binding. So far from effecting a separation between intellect and action, as might superficially appear, this procedure links them inseparably on each of two different planes. In the first place, a life of research must be protected from external diversions, which always dog the careless liver, and from the disturbances of the soul which they habitually induce. For philosophy, as well as for mystic meditation, some orderly preparations and precautions are indispensable. But, secondly, Descartes accepts the conventions in practice only because he questions them in theory. ' I would not have thought it my duty to content myself with the opinions of others for a single moment, if I had not proposed to use my own judgment to examine them when I should have time.' 1 A

provi~ional m~rality for the explorer: a rational morality for ~he discoverer . for each the form of obser vance suited to his ~ntellectual st at us. And, above all, no bawling for moral reform m advance of rational inquiry. In. eve:y .aspect, .then, Descartes's scepticism is subordinate to. h~s m1ss10n. It is a means to the reconstruction wh ich the m1ss10~ To Charlet, IV. 157-158.

68

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

It was in this accommodating, but hardly dishonest, spirit that he produced the Principles in 1644. 1

with pleasure on the cautious scientific modernism of the Jesuit Noel; 1 and notes in a letter t o t he Princess Elisabeth some scatt ered compliments 'even from the J esuit Fathers' .1 But as a propagandist he has failed, and all his concessions have gone for nothing. H~ .has st~ll. ho~ever, to face the full consequences of publicity. Arist otle is as strongly entrenched in H olland as in France, and the Calvinist scholastic Voetius 'the world's most d~wnri~h~ pedant,'3 opens a campaign agai~st him, which results m political complications and the personal intervention of the French ambassador. His chosen sanctum of solitude has been invaded. Pursued by one authority after another, denounced by the powerful Calvinist ministry, he begins to regret that. he ever emerged from his retirement. His foremost disciple, Regms, professor of physics at Utrecht, distorts his metaphysics, preaches heresy, invites disturbances by his t actlessness, and asserts his right t o individual interpretation of the Cartesian canon. '~e loves .novelty more than truth,'4 says the mast er, and fulminates his excommunication. But what is the use of making converts if even they cannot understand? Amid the controversial clamour Descartes hides his head. He is once more .the indifferent amateur, though coat ed with cynicism by ~xpenence. 'I am so disgusted with the trade of writing that it troubles me merely to think of it. '5 'I meddle with no science except for my own private instruction.'6 People do not want to understand him, and he will expose himself to calumny no longer. And then, suddenly, he turns to the Gentiles. .He has not .made enemies without making friends; a nd these friends are without exception men and women of the world. Of these the most important was the Princess Elisabeth (niece of Charles I of England), whose comprehension and sympathy he greatly valued; but he has also attracted the notice of Queen Christina of Sweden, and among his converts are Chanut ?f the dipl~matic. service, who, as ambassador t o Sweden, super~ intended his affairs after his death; Clerselier, the lawyer, who collected and edited his letters; the Due de Luynes, who translated. the Medi~ations into French; and, by correspondence, the English Marqms of Newcastle. His appeal t o such an audience is explained by the Princess Elisabeth herself when she t ells

§8. Descartes has now reached the limit of concession . He has allowed recollections of his boyhood, the friendliness of individual J esuits such as Charlet, and his correspondents Mesland and Grandamy, the crying need of his philosophy for publicity, a nd perhaps also the feeling that in breaking with the order over Bourdin's criticism he had acted t oo hastily, to hold up his project of exposing scholasticism. Further, in meeting scholastic objections, he has become something of a scholastic himself. He has read up Thomas Aquinas, Eust ache de Saint-Paul, and the lat est t ext-book by Fabri: he has stuffed in the chinks of his own syst em with scholastic borrowings (noticeably in his account of the relation of soul and body, where they make confusion worse confounded) : he employs scholastic t erminology, t akes an interest in scholastic problems and writes in the scholastic language, Latin. He is far from the contempt of learning with which he st arted. Doubtless the controversialist and diplomat in him enj oyed the new experience, but it was interfering both with his scientific research and with his repose of spirit. For the success of his mission he was sacrificing much. And by the end of 1645 it was evident that the Principles had failed of their purpose. If Descartes had been less nai'vely certain of the sovereignty of reason, he would have expected nothing else. The J esuits were not going t o reverse their whole curriculum in a single year, at the bidding of one man who had only just stopped calling them names. But Descartes is disquieted : he has heard from Mersenne that Fabri has been preferred to himself, 2 and that his drea m of succeeding Arist otle is as far away as ever. On the one hand, he t oys with the notion of putting into operation his original threat of annotating a scholastic t ext ;3 on the other h e remarks ' It is easy t o exaggerat e the ex t ent of Descart es's concessions in the Principles . lt is tru e th a t h e slu rs over his distinctive theory of freedom, th at he co nceals his v iew concerning God and the et ern a l verities, that h e is profuse with sen ti ments of loyalty t o the Church. But wh a t he conceals is the possible implications of his philo3ophy rather th an its essenti a ls. On the othe r side we must a llow a n unu sual daring in his st a t em en t of th e m ethod of doubt (nowh ere else does h e a llow himself in so m a ny words t o doubt the existence of God), a nd remember th a t h e introduces fo r the first time his theor y of the earth 's m ovem ent, qualified as it may be by the theory of vortices. 3 To Huygens, IV. 225. • To Mersenne, IV. 498.

'To Noel, IV. 58 4 . To Mer senne, III. 23 1. ' fo Mersenne, I V. 396.

3

' T o the Princess E lisabeth , IV. 591. 4 Notae in Programma, VIII. 364. 6 Ibid., IV. 527; cf. 536.

69

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

him that she appreciates his philosophy 'not because his way of reasoning is more unusual, but because it is the most natural that she has met '. 1 'Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world,' 2 and Descartes's syst em, which starts afresh, unencumbered with learned allusion and reference, requires nothing but good sense to underst and i~ . -i:o the lay intelligence, therefore, he turns away from the preiudice of the scholar: for he cannot rest from propagating the Cartesian gospel. A new audience involves a new approach to philosophy. The men of the world are interested in specifically human problems -medicine, morals, and psychology. Descartes is thus brought back to the point from which he has somewhat digressed in his controversies: the importance of philosophy as a guide to life. Once again, in the preface to the French translation of the Principles, in which he t ook special interest and which was evidently intended as an appeal from the scholar to the layman, 'philosophy means the study of ~is do:n ' (sagesse). 'and by wisdom is understood not only foresight m the affairs of life but a perfect acquaintance with all the things that man cad know, both for the conduct of his life, the preservatio~ of his health, and the discovery of all the arts'.3 For the practical man the practical appeal. But in this new propaganda De cartes reall~ recovers part of himself. There is an affinity between the preface to the Principles and the Inquiry after the Truth on the one hand, and the Discours on the other. In both there is the ~ame respect for the vigorous and unspoiled intellect, the same contempt for professional knowledge, the same radical cleavage with scholastic t erms and methods, the same appeal from me:e antiq~it y to ~e~son . The fragmenta.ry Inqui~y is particularly mstruch ve. It i~ m the form of ~ ~ialog~e, m which the scholastic pedant Ep1st emon and the on gmal thmker Eudoxus contend for the allegiance of Polyander, the plain man. The mere names are significant; the 'knowing' are not the 'right-thinking'. Experience of profess.ors has made Descar~es pungent. The need for a thorough purgat10n from early t eachmg is referred not only to the senses or even to tradition, but

pointedly and directly to the t eacher himself. The scholar of the piece is also its butt, and is hopelessly outwitted by the common sense of the innovat or. Many of Descartes's personal enemies have doubtless gone t o his creation. Books and booklearning come in for specially hard handling. 'There is no more obligation on a decent man t o know Greek or Latin than Swiss or Low Breton, nor the history of the Empire than that of the meanest state in Europe. ' 1 Even if books were any goodwhich they are not- it would t ake more than a life-time to read them, and it would be quite superfluous, because every man 'can find in himself all the knowledge which he needs for the conduct of life'. 2 Such an attitude carries with it a renewed antipathy to scholastic philosophy. In his· famous interview with Burman in r648 he said of it that 'before all else it must be ext erminated '.3 And with it goes the whole edifice of theological detail. 'The simplest theology is also the best. '4 God is unsearchable: let us cling to His historic and personal revelation, and forbear to analyse where analysis is powerless. Thus, at long last, Descartes asserts his own conception of God against all philosophical authority. In pursuance of his new policy, he works vigorously at medical research, composes fo r Queen Christina a treatise on The Passions of the SLul, and maintains a long correspondence with the Princess E lisabeth on problems of ethics. Meanwhile there grows upon him a passion for personal contact with sympathetic minds. All his life Descartes has been worried by the difficulty of imparting his convictions t o others.s It is a vision as well as a syst em which he has t o communicate: the disciple must not only learn but experience. The impersonal methods proper t o an impersonal syst em have failed him. Writing is useless : the reader is concerned less t o place himself at the angle of the author than to align him with his own preconceived idea. The academic follower is useless: he cannot escape from the old otiose problems, and gives the pure word a twist which changes its meaning. He falls back more and more on correspondence, to which he commits hisp10st important thoughts for the last five years of his life. The exercise of personal influence becomes an essential feature of his mission. His impatience, as a matter of fact, did his contemporaries

70

The P rincess Elisabeth t o Descartes , I V. 269. ' Disc., VI. I. Prine., Preface, I X. 2. Descart es's conception of 'sagesse' undoubtedly includes a moral element . It is the kind of wisdom which mere intellect can never attain. It involves an a uthority of character which cannot be reached without knowled ge, but is not simply knowledge. And, as God is the source and centre of 'all the things that man can know', it implies a personal a ttitude t owards God, as well as the conviction of His existence. 1

1

7r

1

1 X . 503. I accept the arguments of M. Gouhier (La pensee relig{l'Mse de Descartes, pp. 155-156 and 31 9-320) for the late composition of this dialogue. ' X. 496. l Interview, V. 176. 4 Ibid. • e.g. to Mersenne, I. 182.

72

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

less than justice. His fame in France was growing. In March 1648 he received the offer of a royal pension, and when he paid a short visit to Paris in May of that year, his arrival, despite the distracting disturbances of the Fronde, created no small stir. He refused private offers of assi$tance, remarking, with his old hauteur, that 'it was for the public to pay for what he did for the public'. 1 We may gather that he hoped to see an Academy of Sciences, like the Academy of Letters founded not long before by Richelieu, in the organization of which he himself would play a prominent part. At any rate, by 1649 he had determined to return to Paris 'as soon as the city should be quiet'.• Meanwhile he returned to Holland, and finally accepted an invitation t o the Court of Sweden. He would follow the advice of his friend the Abbe Picot, and bring his gospel 'to the notice of those to whom God has given the power of commanding the peoples of the earth'. 3 Perhaps he dreamed of playing Aristotle to Christina's Alexander: there must have been some strong motive t o induce him to leave his solitude to act the courtier and write an opera-ballet, to say nothing of attending his royal pupil at five in the morning in the depths of a Swedish winter. There is evidence that he was dis atisfied, for in one of his latest letters he announces his intention of returning within the year.4 The drama was t o be played out in France. But the secret of his campaign died with him in February 1650. §g. To the end he was divided against himself. In the thick of his plans and plots, he dreamed of another retirement, and it lent him independence and dignity. If his sentiments are too frank to please the Queen, he writes from Stockholm to the Princess Elisabeth, 'It will give me an opportunity of returning all the sooner to my solitude, away from which it is difficult for me to make any progress in my search after truth: and it is in this that the chief good of my life consists'.5 There is the Descartes who shuns company and family life, who shrinks from all bustle and anxiety, who cultivates above all things a perfect tranquillity of mind, who works for himself alone, content to be engrossed in research and reflexion; and there is the other Descartes, greedy of experience and travel, eager to 2 Baillet, II. 434. Quoted by Adam, XII. 649. Introduction to the Traite des passions, written for Descartes by Picot. 4 To the Princess Elisabeth, V. 43r. s Ibid., 430. 1

3

THE MISSION OF DESCARTES

73 spread his ~nowledge for the world's good, filled with the zest of e?'plan.at10n and controversy, who is to lead Ari totle captive behmd his chariot, and to turn the hearts of kings and princes It was t~e mission of Descartes, and the bent of his nature. both t~ discover truth and to proclaim it. It was his misfortun~ that cir.cumstances often set his two ambitions in mutual ant~g?msm. But ~ach in it elf was strong and genuine, and the:r mner. connex10n atones for their conflict in the sphere of policy. Neither can fairly be regarded merely as a cloak for the other. And between them they account entirely for the plet~or~ of precaut~ons which seems to us so exceedingly s oph1stica~ed. Both his love of quiet and his longing for converts affe_cte~ his modes of s~atement. He.certainly lacked the prickly fire e~tmg ~onesty which prefers disaster to discretion· but in all his ev~ 10n and reticence it was the truth, and the truth alone, which he had at heart. In a philosophy as ;person~! as that of Descartes, it is only to be looked. for that this duality of attitude should be reflected We find, m fact, a contemplative mysticism, as far as possibl; deta.che~ .from all moral and practical interests, absorbed in the mtmt10n of God and the truth, together with a pragmatic zeal for humanity, working. through the scientific conquest of nature. In · any system whICh depends on the balance of its parts, a ~ocal exaggeration of stress p~oduces a complete change of meamng, and that of Descartes is no exception. He looks backwa~ds t? th~ steady glow of celestial stability, forwards t~ the flICkenng hght of human progress; and it is easy to allow h:s. response to the one to divert our attention from his recogmt10n of the other. But each in its place he knew and valued· a~d the s~rength of. hi~ ;practical preoccupations is itself th~ highest tribute to his vis10n of an encircling eternity.

COGITO, ERGO SUM

CHAPTER III COGITO, ERGO SUM

§r. THE whole philosophy of Descartes is ~ominat~d .by ~ls pursuit of ·certainty. It mus~ there~ore begm by dissipatmg specious probabilities. Anythmg whic~ c~n be ? oubted mu.st be doubted. Until we have found a cnten on which cannot he, even moral certainties must be treated as t ot ally .f~lse . There are, however, two stages of the sc~pbc s progr~ss. The first consist s in throwing off our preconceptions and openmg our minds t o the clear intuitions of science. I~ the ~econd the challenge is directed against the veracity of sc_ien~e itself. The first dat es back t o Descartes's original insp1ra~10n of ~~19, and is r ecorded in the first rule of method, w~ich, explicitly 1 denounces 'precipitancy and prematu_re ~ssumptH.~n . ~ut the clearest intuition has in itself no ob1 ective sanction; it ~':st 'borrow its principles from philosophy'. ~t thus becomes m its turn the victim of methodical doubt; which ends, howev:er , by discovering a met aphysical certai~ty pote~t enough , .m ~he long run , t o secure its r elative validity. This final apphcati?n of the method dates from the birth of Descartes's metaphys~cs in 1 62 nearer t o affirming their truth. In the case of the t ower, perception can correct its own error , but only because the near , view can be rationally approved by a standard measurement , ..\ Me d. , I, VII . 18. >I bid ., VI , VII. 76-77. Ibid., III , VII. 38-39. H ere D escartes strikes d eliberat ely at the loose n a turalis m of the 'li bertins' . The sceptical t enden cy t o d iscredit knowled ge, beginning with the ' Que sais-je ?'of Montaigne, ended often enough by making inclination the only st andard of b elief or condu ct . There is no ' n ature', says Montaigne : there is only the n ature of each person. It is easy t o see how the growing spirit of psychological realism wou ld conclude that 'nature' is simply the sum of one's own habits and inst inct s, and therefore affords a sanction for everything we choose t o do. This is one of the many cases in which an understanding of the times imparts a new interest t o Descartes's attacks on anony m ous abuses. 4 I b id., III, VII. 37 ; cf. Ibid., II, VII. 29 ; Ibid., III, VII. 35. s Ibid., 38. 1

3

76

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

COGITO, ERGO SUM

77

by which, and not by any kind of perception, its accuracy is established. In a case like that of our view of the sun perception, taken alone, can never escape from delusion, and must appeal to the stabler and more objective judgment of science. Thus the first stage in the method of doubt is to learn to distrust our senses. As yet, our whole attitude is provisional; it may still be possible to discover their proper function in the light of fuller knowledge. But this we can never attain till we have silenced the importunity of inadequate criteria. It is, however, no easy task which lies before us. Our perceptions are naturally linked t o our desires, and have been fortified by the growth of habits which assume them. From childhood upwards we have been accustomed to rely on them, and have allowed them to form our decisions for us. Consequently there is a constant risk of relapse; to stand on the high ground of pure reason requires continuous effort. 1 Only those who can achieve it are fit to dabble in philosophy at all; and even those who are naturally called to it may take months to fall into the proper frame of mind. 2 (Hence the form and title of the M editations .) By these means we may end by banishing the most stubborn of all our illusions, the belief that we are the centre of the cosmos. This is founded on our central position in the world of our own sense-experience, and is strengthened by the recollections of a long childhood, in the course of which our desires have been carried out by others.3 The caution entered by Descartes against the senses includes all personal, interested, and irrelevant motives. In the same way it is directed against all rough empirical generalizations, and all systems of knowledge built on the observations of the senses : 'the multitude's multitudinous formulae' of Plato's Republic. No matter how far they soar in their later development, they have started wrong, and are thus doomed to collapse. This is a direct attack on Thomas Aquinas, and its daring is only concealed by Descartes's cust omary avoidance of names. For Aquinas 'the beginning of our knowledge is in sense'.4 The human soul, being united to

the bod Y, 'understa~ds ~y turni~g to· images'. ' It represents the ~owest leyel of mtelhg~mce; it participates imperfectly in the mcreate h~ht of God'_s mtellect, which contains the eternal ess ~nces, and !s appropn:=i-tely matched with material things, which, on their fo~mal s.1de, participate imperfectly in those essenc~s . In matenal ~h1~gs we may trace inferentially the operat10n ?f e~e~nal prmc1ples, but in this sphere direct knowledge, or mtmhon, is denied to man, and restrict ed t o the angels and to God Himself. We cannot know the eternal e.ssences, however well we may know sensible obj ects in the hght of et ern al essences. Plainly, on Descartes's theory any such system of knowledge is built on sand. ' Th~ source ?f the difference lies in Descartes's pursuit of cert amty. He is. convinced that behind the clumsy apparatus of ~he senses hes the clear intuition of perfect knowledge. Aqumas would. have admitted that our knowledge of the sen~uous world is not complete knowledge, but he would have denied ~he assumption that things are better known to us in proport10n t o thei~ intrinsic intelligibility. H e would have wa~ned the human mtellect of its limitations, and rejected its ~lau~ ~o ~ny sort ~f direct vision. Descartes's use of the word .mt_u1h?n to d~scnbe h1:1man insight might itself be taken as md1c3:hon of his temen~y, for in mediaeval philosophy the t erm is reserve~ f.or the immediate inspection of God and the angels. M. Mantam has therefore plausibly accused Descartes of le pechi de l'_ang.ilisme :1 'the sin of pretending to be an angel'. To him the re1ect10n of the senses is an impious revolt against the human status. Unfortunately Descartes had to account someh?w for the newly recognized fact of mathematical necessity, and as its origin was clearly not empirical it had to be. attnbuted to a strictly non-sensuous order. As we have pomted out, .the new fact s would not fit in the old framework. Whatever m!ght be said of ordinary people, the mathematical expert ha~ m fact been. ~ranslate~ to the angelic condition, and , sustamed ~y t~e pu~ions of his a priori knowledge, was prepared to mamtam it mdefinitely. It is not, however, the

M ed., I, VII. 23 . 'IIae. Resp ., VII . 130-131. T o • • •, II. 37: 'Nous nous sommes faits obeir par nos nourrices .' The psychologist may trace the imperious impatience, which D escartes displayed in his own life and took such special pains to avoid in his philosophy, to t he complaisance of a good-natured nurse in the face of this importunate infan t . 4 'Principium n os trae cognitionis est a sensu': quoted as a summary of Aquinas's doctrine in Gilson, Le Thomisme, p. 175, and alluded to by

Des~_artes in the J?isc ., VI. ,37= ,'Ce que Jes philosophes tienn ent p our m ax1~e dans l; s. ecoles, qu 11 n y a rien dans l'entendement qui n 'ait prem_1 erement ete d ans le sens, ou t out efois il est certain que Jes idees de D1eu et de l'ame n 'ont jamais ete.' 1 Summa Theologica, I. 89. 1, ad Resp. ' See the brilliant essay on 'Descartes, ou l'incaq1ation de J' a nge • in Trois Riformateurs. '

1

3

COGITO, ERGO SUM

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES whole truth wh;ch thus lle£ open to the human gaze. Between man and God due order and proportion are still observed, for the existence of God remains a matter of inference, and the full nature of His being is veiled in mystery. It is evident from what we have said that one at least of the factors in Descartes's outlook which led to this striking change was his conception of the needs ?f t~e ~ew . ~cier:ce. Sense perception is condemned because. scientific mtmt10n is there to take its place. But the deceptiveness of . the senses was_ a commonplace of earlier Christian thought, it had been heavily stressed by Plato, and from the t~o sourc_es. co~bined it ~on­ verged and expanded in Augustine. C~r~s.tia~ mtrospec~ion, t ogether with the immanent collapse of civihzat10n, had ~hifted the balance of spiritual endeavour from nature and socie~y to the inwardness of the soul. The progress of the soul to virtue and salvation depended on the detection of the false suggestions of sense. 'The delusive representations of images or phantasi;ns' 1 befog the mind which is striving towards the _tr1:1th ?fall thi~gs -./..... in the 'eternal essences' , i.e. the Ideas as e~~sting: m the mmd of God. Descartes, it is true, is not over-familiar with the works of Augustine but the curriculum of la Fleche shows that he must have k~own some of them at school, and he had lived in Paris in constant contact with Augustinian sentiments. His own view of philosophy as a discipline of. the s?ul, requiring the co-operation of the will to avert the irruptions of sense, would find in such an atmosphere response and support, and it is probable that Descartes's own convictions and his Augustinian borrowings, on this point at least, enhanced and strengthened each other. . The rejection of the evidence of the senses is thus demanded by both of the main fact ors in Descart e~'s m~n~a.l growth. Their conj unction , however, is concentrated_ m. the~r Jom t theory of representative perception . The sharp d1s~i~chon s~t up Galileo between primary and secondary quahhes combines with a metaphysic of transcendent Forms t? reduce the percept. to the condition of a bearer of false witness about something more real than itself; in the one case the world of physical investigation, in the other th~ world of ' e~ er_nal essences'. The mediaeval theory of perception was r ealistic; the senses are the open gates thronged by the 'species' which emanate by effluence from the actual object, and passing into the mind

?Y

De Civitate Dei, XI. 26: quot ed by Norman Smith, Studies in thl Cartesian Philosophy, p. 6. 1

79

~evertheless r~m ain what they were outside it. But if perception

is representative, the external world, on its entrance to the ~ind, P.asses, as it were, through a toll-gate of unreality, and

its bewildered ghost wanders about its new home, for ever d.oubtful of its own identity. It is the old story; the representative :annot repr~sent. Once admit that the percept is a proxy, ai:d its credei:tials becor:ie dubious. Indeed, 'the theory of misrepresentahve percept10n' would be the more accurat e title. The rejection of the senses is the first indication of the coal~tion of ~he new. scientific and religious influences against the sc~olashc te~chmg. It is certainly indispensable t o the new sCience, but it does not follow that it is merely a reflexion of the needs of that science. It is part of the coincidence for which Descartes is so devoutly grateful. Thus if it be asked whether his scepticism of the senses is not simply a methodical dodge for assertin g his certainty of science, the answer is, Yes and No. Descartes is certain all the time, at the back of his) ~ind, that the criteria of science are sound, an d this certainty ~s one of ~he re~sons which leads him t o assert that appearances mcompatible with the verdict of science are untrue. But there is also the testimony of personal experience which not only corroborates the scientific, but delivers Descartes from the charge of masking his mere assertion under an unprofitable ritual. I~ may still be asked whether the senses, though unable t o testify to .the t~uth by themselves, may not play their part in the more mclusive syst em of knowledge which we call science. !he problem is important , but at this st age of the argument it cannot be answered. We are in quest of certainty, and this the senses cannot provide. When it has been attained it will b~ time t.o look back and ~nquire whether the senses ar~ wholly ahen to it. In the meantime we must say nothing to commit ~s to :;m y positive view concerning the status of the percept m reality. §z. In the cour~e of a tentative suggestion which history was to render frmtful, Descartes put forward the view that our per:epts may after all be produced by some subterranean f~culty m o~rselves. 1 _This is, in fact, the nemesis of representative percep~10n,. for if we know only through the medium of represei:itative ideas, how do we know that there is anything except ideas? But Descartes, otherwise assured of an external 1

Med. , III, VII . 38.

J-

80

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

COGITO, ERGO SUM

world, t akes the theory at its face value. Suppose, he says, body, eyes, head, hands, and so on, were imaginary, 'we still have to admit that there are other things, simpler and more universal which are true and exist, and that from their confusion . . . all those images of things which settle in our thought, hether true and real, or invented and fantastic, are conructed'.1 To this class belongs 'the general nature of bodies nd their extension'. Here, at least, we should have 'something certain and indubitable'. 'Whether I wake or sleep, two and three together will always make five, and the square will never have more than four sides; and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and obvious should be suspected of any falsity or uncertainty.' 2 This is not the place to outline the method of 'clear and distinct ideas' to which Descartes resorts to e;xplain the achievements of science, for its final significance is apparent only in the light of an established metaphysic. But it cer~ainly invol".es the view that the primary axioms of mathematics and physics are directly apprehended by an intuition which is utt:rly independent of sensuous experience, and at the s~me time imposes itself on the reflective intelligence as self-evident and unan swerable. By a certain 'illumination of the spirit', it knows the objects which perception perceives. Henceforward we know that perception does not play even a minor part in knowl~dge. It is the mixed product of soul and body, and can contribute nothing but confusion to the pure insight of th~ spirit._ The progress of science in the exploration of. nature will c~nsist of the substitution for empirical generalizat10ns of mechanical law. But intuition itself is not exempt from the operation of methodical doubt. It has no more real status than perception, and differs from it only in that it is completely satisfactory to human standards of reason. But how do we know that the things we cannot help thinking are true? We cor_istantly. make mistakes in reasoning; why should we not be mistaken m our anding of two and three? We. talk about an omnipotent God; ( might He not have made us m such a way that we are most convinced we are right when in fact we are most wrong ?3 We cannot argue that we are never deceived; we are clearly and continuously deceived by sensuous appearances. We may simply be the victims of a wholesale practical joke. And if we do not care to attribute this cosmic imposture to God, we may suppose, as philosophers if not as citizens, that there is

no God. 1 We may postulate instead a wicked genius, who employs all the craft and all the weapons of omnipotence to deceive us. In the face of such an enemy the insight of the mathematician is as helpless as the most gullible sensationalism. The firm rock of our scientific faith has crumbled beneath us . The significance of this conclusion is that science has failed to effect the passage from the ideal to the real, from essence to existence. We do not yet know whether it can be effected at all; whether, in fact, metaphysics are po sible. But if in any sense, we can be assured that the real is rational, the rationality of science will guarantee its real validity. Every judgment \ i~ based on an act of faith: it assumes that the world is right- I side-up. We must go farther and inquire whether this faith ~a~ be justified. Till then, as regards reality, our scepticism is mtact. The appeal beyond science, however, leaves the detail of science unquestioned. Metaphysical sanction is one thing; metaphysical intrusion another. Science may as yet have no status in _reality, but, on the other hand, no theory of reality can alter it. The spectre of formal and final causes is banished together with the perceptual mists in which it made its home'. ~very in_tuition is decisive in its own field. Science must pass mto reality as a whole or not at all. A proper application of the me~hod will establish ideally a complete system of necessary connex10ns. The extended world is exclusively the mathematician's province. But if the structure of reality is unreasonable, our strongest reasoning goes for nothing. At the worst, our supposed reasoning may actually be gibberish; and at the best it is the desperate sally of a beleaguered garrison against a hostile universe. _The. sceptical J?rocedure of Descartes is entirely honest. H1stoncally speakmg, he was aware of the limitations of science long before he had formulated his metaphysics, and if the result is to establish the supremacy of religious values, that is no adequate reason for supposing that it is prearranged . None th: le~s, the completeness of Descartes's scepticism at this pomt i? the argument is vitally linked to his positive theory of reality. In the first place, it enables him to establish God ) before he establi~hes science, and thus to depict their relation as one of respective bounty and dependence; and in the second

~

r

1

Med., I, VII.

20.

'

Ibid.

3

Ibid.,

2i.

8r

'P~inc._, I. 7, VIII. 7. In Med., I, VII. 27, the tone is softer, but the meanmg is the same. The summary in the Discours, intended for the general public, is most inadequate.

7

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

COG/TO, ERGO SUM

it excludes in advance the theory of final causes. If at this stage science were allowed even a limited met aphysical status, it would be permissible to argue direct t o its origins, thus restoring the confusion between science and metaphysics which Descartes is at all cost s anxious to abolish . To admit this is not t o accuse him of adapting metaphysics to science. Any sound system is composed of reciprocal parts, and those which are first expounded are bound to imply those which are held in reserve. And yet Descartes's scepticism is not, and cannot be, complete. It is overthrown by the one thing he has not called in question, and that is his biographical statement of the problem. He is re-living the experience of the philosopher as he undert akes, 'once in his life', t o arrive at a theory of reality. In his pursuit of a criterion he st ands, as it were, behind the scenes. His old prejudices, affections, and convictions are the fi gures on the stage, and at his cue they retire, one by one, till none is left. But, t o arrange the exits, the stage-manager is still at his post. Without the sceptic there can be no scepticism.

his whole philosophy. Now that something exists , we are not without hope of rediscovering in reality what we have hitherto been compelled t o regard as merely ideal. The distinction is vital, for the procedure of metaphysical doubt has sometimes been supposed t o bear upon t he exist ence of ideas as such. Gassendi, for example, accused Descartes of 'espousing a prejudice', on the ground that he assumes a definite meaning for the word 'thought'. As D e~cartes points out in his reply, it would be impossible to rid ourselves of all the notions which had ever t aken root in the mind. The point is that we must refrain from affirming them. It is premature judgments that he has denied, 'and not notions such as these, which are known without any affirmation or negation'.' The same confu ion underlie. the common obj ection that t he verb 'to think' is transitive, so that Descartes has no right t o establish the real self without simultaneously establishing a real object . Of course, thinking must have an object, and Descartes never denies it even by implication ; but there is no reason t o argue that it must be real unless we assume t o begin with that there are either real objects or no objects at all. In fact , the real self is actually discovered at the moment of its concern wit h obj ects whose reality has been explicitly declared doubtful. It follows that the only reason why the self, as it thinks, can be admitted as real is that it is not an obj ect . That which is t hought is always exposed to met aphysical doubt ; but that which thinks is the condition of met aphysical doubt itself. Thinking is the one point of contact bet ween the ideal and the real. It is fo rmally possible t o think away our physical existence, for in the act of thinking we are not walking or breathing or digesting. The association of thinking with these activities is habitual and not essential, of fact and not of necessity. To break it may be contrary to all our experience, but it is not intrinsically absurd. But we cannot think away our thinking without thinking in order t o do it, a nd however much the thinking which we think away is under suspicion, the thinking whi.ch thinks it away remains, and as long as it is not objectified no doubt can assail it. Thus it is t o an immediate intuition of ourselves as subj ects t hat we owe our initial certainty; and this may help us to face the ob jection that it depends on the prior recognition of the law of contradiction. If this were true, it would reveal a fat a l

82

l

§3. The exception , however, is not arbitrary. It means that scept icism has reached its limit. In doubtin g the truth of everything else, I cannot doubt that I am doubting. 'While I was trying t o think that everything was false, it was impossible that I, who was thinking this, should not be somethin g ; and noticing that this truth, "I think therefore I am" , was so certain and assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were powerless to shake it, decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of philosophy fo r which I was seekin g.' 1 This argument disposes also of the wicked genius: 'if he deceives me, it cannot be doubted that I am'. 2 Descartes's problem is to pass from the admitt ed content of the mind t o some metaphysical reality . H e does not doubt that the idea, as such, exist s ; what he wants t o know is how far -x it is true. The conclusion 'I am' is important because it affirms )( for the first time a fact which is more than an idea, and can )( be stat ed without reservations as to its ideality . Philosophy, for Descartes as for the Middle Ages, is the study of existence, a nd unless his unquestioning realism is understood the movement of his thought from the ideal to the real self will appear trivial or even tautological. Actually, it is the starting-point of

-f

•Disc., VI. 32.

•Med., II, VII. 25 .

1

Reply to the Instances of Gassendi, IX.

204 .

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES flaw in Descartes's procedure, for the law of contradiction, like all other logical axioms, is open t o metaphysical doubt, and any conclusion founded on it is in the same pl_ig~t. As the ~aw of contradiction was recognized as the first pnnciple of philosophy by Arist otle and by the whole scholastic t:adition, this problem was bound sooner or later t o oit>trude its~lf on Descartes's notice, and it was in fact brought before him by Clerselier in a letter of 1646. In his reply, Descartes draws attention t o two possible senses of the word principle. 'It is one thing t o look for a common notion, which shall be so clear and general as to serve as a principle fo r proving the exist ence of all forms of being which we may aft erwards get to kno_w; and another t o look for a form of being, the existence of which shall be better known to us than that of anything else, so that it may serve as a principle for getting to know them. ' 1 _Th~ l_aw of contradiction is a principle in the first sense, the ~ntu~t~on of the self is a principle in the second. It follows that the mtmt_ion is prior to the law of contradiction, and that the law acqmres its st atus from the intuition, not the intuition from the law. And the reason is that the law, for all its self-evidence, is objective, and therefore ideal, ~hile _the i_n tuition illustrates an immediate identity before its dist ortion by conceptual analy is, and is the absolute condition of all ideality whatever.• The argument we have outlined does not, however, exhaust the attempts t o derive the intuition of the self from some general proposition. Both Gas~e~di a_nd the a.uthors o_f the Second Objections assert that it imphes a maJor prem~se t_o which we are not entitled. If from the fact that I thmk it follows that I am, it is only through the medium of the general truth that he who doubts is, and all general statements are under challenge. In replying, Descartes strongly emphasizes the unique and particular character of the intuition . 'The. most considerable mist ake here', he writes to Clerselier, alludmg to Gassendi's objection, 'is that this writer supposes that the knowledge of particular propositions should always be deduced from universal propositions. Herein he shows that he kn?'"'.s very little about the way truth should be looked for. For it is ' To Cler selier, I V. 444. • In the Principles D escartes uses the word 'repugnat' t o describe the impossibility of separating 'cogito' and 's u~· · It is often used t o denote contradiction in the ordinary sense, but is probably broad enough to cover the immediat e identity which Descart es certainly intends to describe.

COGITO, ERGO SUM

85

certain that, t o discover it, we should always begin with the particular notions in order to a ttain t o the general afterwards, though we may in turn, after discovering the general notions, deduce from them others which are particular.' 1 So in the ca:c:e before us, as Descartes replies t o the Second Objections, 'when we perceive that we a re things which think, it is a primitive notion which is drawn from no syllogism; and when anyone says, " I think, therefore I am or exist," he does not conclude his existence from his thought on the strength of any syllogism, but as something which is known of itself: he sees it by a simple inspection of the spirit'. 2 The certainty is implied in the living act of thought, which seizes itself with all the immediacy of the senses. The nature of the truest apprehension is vision. The lumbering of the logician yields to the insight of the poet. )(Thus, in its immediacy and in its independence of all arguent, the metaphysical intuition of the self resembles the /Primary intuitions of natural knowledge. They a re both, in a ~ense , 'clear and distinct ideas '. This affiliation, however, emphasizes the similarity in the mode of apprehension at the expense of a grave difference in the st atus of what is apprehended. The intuitions of science are caught in the toils of what may be described as 'objectivism': they have t o be affirmed objectively before they can be taken as true. Whereas , in the intuition of the self, subj ect and object are identical, so that there is no call for the reference, in all other cases so prejudicial, to a world beyond. It is evident that it must have some special virtue or it would not be accepted, any more than the intuitions of science, as the solvent of metaphysical doubt; and these latter would have been their own justification . It is certainly against his own deeper meaning that Descartes, in the Discours, passes direct from the surpassing clearness of the 'cogito' t o the r truth of all ideas which can genuinely be shown t o be clear 1 R eply to the Instances of Gassendi, IX. 205-206. Cf. the important statement to Burman , V. 14 7: 'Ante h anc conclusionem, Cogit o ergo sum, sciri potest ilia rn aior, q uicquid cogitat est, q ui a reipsa prior est mea conclusione, et m ea conclusio ea nititur. E t sic in P rincipiis dicit auctor earn praecedere, quia scilicet implicit e semper praesupponitur et praecedit: sed non ideo semper expresse et explicite cognosco illam praecedere et scio an t e m eam conclusionem , quia scilicet ad id t antum attendo qu od in me experior, ut, cogito ergo sum, non autem ita attend o ad generalem illa m n oti onem, quicquid cogitat, est: nam, ut ante monitum, n on separamus illas propositiones a singularibus, sed eas in illis consideramus.' This passage is all the m ore instru ctive because it shows Descartes in the ac t of trying to break away from his form a l logical training. • JJae. Resp., VII . l40--14I.

86

I

.-

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

and distinct. 1 Fundamentally, though Descartes is far from . making. th~ distinction explicit, the :cogito' does not represent an application of the method. It achieves something which the method has tried to achieve without success : it has found its { way t o the very temple of truth. The met aphysical method is not beholden t o the method of scientific logic. As we shall see, Descartes's actual procedure in metaphysics is a scandal t o almost every principle of hi scientific logic; and when, as sometimes happens, he treat s the two as identical, he creates a serious and unnecessary confusion, and does violence to his own profoundest inspiration. §4. It is settled, then, that I exi t . But who, and what, a m I, who exi t? I cannot rest content with my old uncri tical views about myself, for they may include in my natu"fe a.ttributes which have dissolved under metaphysical doubt. I have now the advantage of knowing at least that I am; but confusion will. continue unless I separat e present certainty from past conJecture. I must therefore proceed to pass in review the qualities I u ed to assign to myself, considering them one by one, and doubting each anew, until I discover exactly how much of what I thought was myself is indispen. able t o the single act of doubt; as a man with a basket of apples, some of which he kno".l's t o be good and others bad, examines each, in the light of his own standard of goodness or badness in apples, without any prejudice, except such as the sta ndard itself has fixed in his mind.• And first of all I must reject the description of myself as a man. What indeed is a man ? A r ational animal, according t o Arist otle; but what is 'rational', and what is an 'animal' ? Such inquiries will take us too far afield : let us descend from definitions t o particulars. I used to think I had a body; but neither its sensuous det ail nor the uniformity of its extension can survive the full blast of doubt. I used t o think I could walk and eat ; but if I have no body, this is clearly delusion. Even eeling, so far as it implies the connexion of soul and body, annot belong t o my essential being. The attribute of thought lone is left. I am, in fact, something which thinks ; and this something cannot be explained away as a tenuous form of matter (this for the most recent disciple of Democritus, Gassendi), for matter is still enveloped in the suspicion from which thought has at last emerged.3

a

~ ..

1

3

Disc., VI. 33. Med., II, VII. 25-26.

1

Author's Notes on Obj. V II, VII. 481 :

COGITO, ERGO SUM

3..,I

But, further, what exactly do we mean by thinking? It involves, to follow Descartes, doubting, understanding, conceiving, affirming, denying, willing, not willing, and also imagining and feeling.' Setting aside the last two items for special discussion, we can see at once that all the others are expressions of the two activities without which no doubt is possible : intellect and volition. Descartes interprets his theory of judgment aright when he insists that both are required. It is by an act of will that we are able to resist the importunity of the senses, and to refuse assent to the self-evident axioms of science. Ideas in themselves, as Descartes points out again and again, are neither true nor false, and the judgments which make them so are, as truly as any overt act, personal commitments, which we can choose to make or withhold. At the same time, our voluntary decisions are not arbitrary : we resist some judgments and accede to others, because the latter impress us as rationally adequate, and the former do not. This is important, as showing that t o a seeker for reality, such as Descartes, the rational connexions of an ideal syst em are not rationally satisfying. His faith drives him to the postulate of a rational which is also real, between which and the ideal system ·'.i further connexion must be est ablished, or the rational process will have stopped short of fulfilment. Thus, if we consider the self at its best, as it turns awav ~rom all specious allurem~nt.s by a ~eroic exercise of suspendedr JUdgment , we find that it is constituted equally by will and reason. But there is some excuse for the view that it is will rather than reason which in the system of Descartes is the real kernel of the self. For though, as a matter of actual fact, Descartes discovers the self at the moment of its universal defiance, he does not insist that it is only at that moment that it can be discovered. Indeed, he sometimes implies that I exist just as much when I fall to temptation as when I resist it. This is how, in the Meditations, he eludes the wicked genius. If he deceives me, I am.' And if, if~ aeh a Ea;-~. I inquire what I am, the reply is that I am simply an act of will, the nature of which sufficiently advertises its divorce from intelligence. All that can be said is that my exist ence can be t apped by the 1 Med., II, V II. 28 . Cf. Prine., I. 9, \'III. 7, a nd especially Jlae . Resp., VII . 160: ' Cogitationis nomine complect or illud omne quod sic in nobis est, ut eius immediate conscii simus. !ta omnes voluntatis, intellectus, imag inationis et sensuuqi operationes sunt cogitationes .' •Med., I, VII. 25; cf. p. 82, note 2.

,.., ~

,_..

88

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

same method at a higher level, and that the imperfect experi:nent ~oes not re~d~r t?e more perfect impossible. Taken by itself, it does an m1ushce to the full content of the original intuition of reality, and would prejudice the argument from the s~lf to the existence of God: for though it is from our imperfection that that argument proceeds, it is the imperfection of the doubter who seeks to know, and not that of the arrogant dogmatist possessed by the lie in the soul. §5. There remains the problem ofjm ina.tion.and erce tion. - ore er However strenuously we may deny t eirs punous c us beyond themselves, there can be no doubt that they do exi t as p::;ychical facts. Their evidence may be wholly false: 'but, at least, it is certain that I seem to see light, t o hear noise, a nd to feel heat' .1 But if we ask what their st atus is in the mental life to which they confessedly belong we are confronted with a difficulty. According to the st atement of the Discours, which we have followed, it is in the voluntary and intellectual act of doubt that the self is discovered, and to imagination and perception will and intelligence owe absolutely nothing. On this line of argument, therefore, it would appear that certain undisputed psychical facts do not appertain t o the self as affirmed in the 'cogito'. But as the capital t ext of the Meditations maintains that they do,> there is undoubtedly a prima f acie contradiction. In the absence of any indication why Descartes should have changed his mind between 1637 and 1641, the simplest hypot~esis is that the intuition which in the Discours proves the existence of the self serves merely t o illu trate a whole series ~f intuitions in each of which the primary truth is equally self-evident. 'I breathe, therefore I am', is illegitimate, as breathing is a purely physical function ; but 'I erceive, therefor ', is as effective an affirmation of · is e c as 'I thin:K, therefore I am', in the narrower sense. If imagination and perception are really to be included in the self, this is the only possible conclusion. But even in the Meditations Descartes is by no means sure on this point. In defining the self which 1 M ed., II, VII . 29. With some hesitation, I t ransla t e 'sentire' as 'to p erceive'. It is intended t o cover both feeling and p erception, and it seems even more strained t o use the t erm feeling t o cover perception than t o use the t erm perception t o cover feeling . In what fo llows, it must be remembered tha t perception includes feeling. 2 See above, p. 87, note I.

COGITO, ERGO SUM

89 the 'cogito' reveals he says that 'perceiving in the exact sense of. th~ word ~s no di~erent from thinking' : thus giving thmkmg the widest possible connotation. On the other hand in t~e approach t o the 'cogito' he excludes perceiving from th~ att ributes of the soul, together with feeding and walking, on the ground that 'one cannot feel without the body'. Now, unless we are t o acknowledge a plain contradiction, the only resource left t o u.s is to see whether these conflicting sta~e:ne~ts can be explamed and reconciled in the light of their posit10n m the argument. At first sight, however, this p rocedure does not appear t o help us. What Descartes has done is t o discard from the self all the attributes which are alleged t o involve its relation to a body until the exist ence of the self is proved, and then, when the elf which is revealed through the operation of pure thought and will is e tablished on that exclusive basis to proclaim that its scope is in fact much wider, and include~ ~ny attrib_ute whi.ch falls under the heading of spirit in ordinary ii:itrospect10n. This procedure appears both perverse a nd inconsistent: so much so that it might seem simplest to dismiss the objection t o the admission of perception, on the ground that it assumes the existence of the body, which has not yet been proved. We could then accept without demur the view that perception, equally with doubting, establishes the existence of the self. Yet may it not be possible that the self should have as it were, an inner and outer layer : the former revealing in its~lf the essential nature which is continued and corroborat ed in the latter, while the latter, though partaking of the essential nature, cannot itself substantiat e it save through the mediation of the forme r ? If Descartes's selection of doubt rather than ~erc.eption as the actual medium of intuitive certainty is s i.g?~ficant and n~t me:ely_due t o its greater dramatic possibilities . (for certamty issumg from doubt certainly is more ?ram~hc than certainty issuing from feeling), he must have m mmd some p oint of discrimination which makes doubt ii;herei:itly prefera~le t o perception for the purpose of founding his philos op~y . His own suggestion, that perception involves the co-operat10n of the body, while doubt, as a form of thought or will,'does not, would supply a ground for such discrimination for in an activity which demands the co-operation of the body the. true nature of mind cannot be unambiguously disclosed. It is true, as we have observed, that this suggestion cannot 1

2

1

Med., II, VII. 29.

•Ibid., II, VII. 27.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

COGJTO, ERGO SUM

legitimately be raised at a point of the argument at which the existence of the body has not yet been proved: but, after all, the order of exposition should be a tool and not a tyrant, and Descartes is justified in anticipating a conclusion which would engulf his assumptions in a reductio ad absurdum. The further question at issue, however, is whether perception really does, as Descartes here suggests, involve the co-operation of the body. As we shall see later, this is an issue on which Descartes is far from consistent with himself. It is true in so far as he deems it necessary to postulate a new substance to explain feeling: it is not true in so far as he holds that all ideas are innate, so that perception can take place without any form of interaction. It is perhaps his vacillation between these two views which is reflected in the difficulty before us: and in that case there can be no solution until this whole question comes up for discussion. But in any case the selection of the act of doubt to illustrate the immediate intuition of the self's real existence has a clear explanation in the facts of history. Descartes regards his whole introduction to philosophy as an argumentum ad hominem against the sceptic. He has accepted a challenge to fight with the sceptic's own weapons: from the sceptic's own mouth, and from no other source, will he compel the recognition of absolute certainty. To discover that certainty in perception might be convincing in its own way, but it would not entrap the sceptic at the moment of his scepticism. There is nothing to prevent the sceptic from saying that he does not perceive. His statement may be untrue, but it will be impossible to bring its falsehood home to him. It is at least formally possible to doubt whether one perceives : but is not even formally possible to doubt one's doubt, for however far the regress is pressed one is still doubting. This practical prepossession would in itself be sufficient to account for Descartes's method of presentation. At the same time, the significance of his tactics is not merely practical. No doubt it is absurd, as Descartes has pointed out, to doubt the fact of perceiving at the moment of perceiving, but if one choo es to be perverse, it is still formally pos ible. This is admitted by Descartes himself in the strictly parallel case of the possibility of doubting the veracity of that which is self-evidently true. Affirmation, for Descartes, is an act of will, and he adds that the human will is formally infinite; that is to say, there is nothing which it is inherently incapable of making its object. If we exercise its liberty to the full, what is there to prevent

us from willing to believe that we are not perceiving when in fact we are perceiving? There is 'no formal contradiction, for it is not necessary to perceive in order to doubt whether we are perceiving, as it is necessary to doubt in order to doubt whether we are doubting. From this point of view it is clear the only aspect of the self which cannot be resolved into pure objectivity is its capacity for doubt. Perception, for example, may become a n object of doubt without retaining its place in the nature of the doubting subject. But doubt cannot be objectified save as the object of a doubt which belongs t_o a subject: and thus alone, in the absurdity of denying as obJect what the subject affirms in denying it, can the method of doubt be legitimately ended. . Now if this line of argument could be taken as final, it would be necessary to define the self solely in terms of intellect and will. We have seen that this is a view to which Descartes is unwilling to commit himself. Doubtless he has in mind already the absolute distinction between soul and body, which compels him to put perception, as a non-extended form of exist~nce, on the side of soul. But if his confutation of the sceptic be pursued into its remoter implications, it reveals a concept~on of the self ba ed exclu ively on the act of doubt through which it is discovered. Any other conception of the self put forward a t this point of the argument must, like the conception of the body, be purely ideal, and await the metaphysical sanction which only the limited conception of the real self can supply. Fortunately, however, there is no need to settle the issue between rival conceptions of the self in order to prepare the ground for the proof of the existence of God. What is essential to that proof is the recognition of human imperfection, and on either theory this is evident. I~ery respe~t, whether mere!_ in the act of doubt or in the act o percept10n also, the self is By i s inability to assert with certainty: the most inlimi significan proposition concerning any world outside itself: and yet, by its very nature, it cannot help I?_ronouncmg_ on tri: and falsehood. It is governed by a standard of perfect10n which it cannot attain. I may say 'I perceive, but I do not know', or, 'I doubt, but I do not know', but in both cases my limitations a~e as eviaent as my existence. Thus, if we widen the meaning we attach to the word 'doubt' to cover all forms of not-knowing, while we undoubtedly shelve an important issue, we can be assured of an undisputed, if still somewhat ambiguous,

f

92

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

conception of the self, the implicitly diverging tendencies in which are linked by a common acknowledgement of the self's dependence and imperfection. §6. The next point to investigate is whether the existence of the self is or is not a substantial existence. This problem is vital to Descartes's philosophy, for it bears directly on the distinction of soul and body. If the self, as revealed in the 'cogito', can be described as a substance, it follows at once that it requires nothing else in order to exist, and therefore is totally independent of any other form of existence, such as extension, which metaphysical argument may subsequently discover. If, on the other hand, the self is not a substance, it is possible that the subsequent discoveries may add to our knowledge of its nature something of which we are unaware in the original intuition. The question of the distinctness of soul and body would not, it is true, be finally settled by a failure to establish the self as a substance at this stage of the argument, for what is now unprovable might well be proved by its later developments. But if the substantiality of the self can be proved at once, the question is settled for good and all: for the self is already real, and beyond the reach of metaphysical doubt. Now there are peculiarities about Descartes's view of substance which render almost inevitable the conclusion that the self of the 'cogito' is substantial. The scholastic view of substance recognized 'inseparable attributes', which always adhere to the substance, but Descartes recognizes a single 'essential attribute', which appertains to a single substance only, and, on the other hand, constitutes the complete essence of that substance, which is therefore simply the characterizing essence substantialized. 1 From this it follows that a substance can be known through its essence: that the fact of the essence implies the existence of a substance which contains it, for nothing has no properties: and finally that, except through the essence, we have no knowledge of the substance whatever. The m ain t ext for this is !Jae. Resp., VII. 161: 'Omnis res cui inest immedi at.e, ut in subiect o, sive p er quam existit aliquid quod percipimus, hoc est ahqua proprietas, sive qualitas, sive attributum, cuius realis idea in nobis est, vocatur substantia. Neque enim ipsius substantiae praecise sumptae aliam habemus ideam , quam quod sit res, in qua formalite r v el eminenter existit illud aliquid quod percipimus, sive quod est obiective in aliqua ex nostris ideis.' Cf. Interview with Burman, V. 156. 1

COGITO, ERGO SUM

93

Now the self is clearly conceived while all else is uncertain, so that it evidently can be thought without reference to anything other than itself; and as the self is known to exist, the passage from essence to substance cannot in its case involve a ) passage from idea to existence. There must therefore be a substance in which the thinking quality inheres: and that substance is the thinking person, known, ~owever, only through his unique attribute of thought.I The problems involved in this view of substance and attribute cannot be adequately discussed except in the light of Descartes's completed theory of knowledge; but the special case of the thinking self calls for immediate treatment, and in this connexion it would appear best to see what happens to it under criticism in Descartes's own writings. We find it first in the Discours, stripped of its technicalities, but stated ingenuously and straightforwardly, without any hint of its difficulties. 'Attentively inquiring what I was, I saw that I could pretend I had no body, and that there was no world or locality in which I existed; but I could not therefore pretend that I did not exist at all. On the contrary, from the very fact that I was thinking in order to doubt the truth of other things, it followed very certainly and plainly that I did exist; whereas I had only to stop thinking, and, though everything else that I had imagined might be true, I would have no reason to believe that I existed at all. From this I recognized that I was a substance, whose whole essence or nature was simply to think, and which, to exist, requires no environment and depends on no material thing: so that I, that is, the soul, by which I am, am entirely distinct from the body; and even though there were no body, it would not fail to be all that it is now. ' 2 And in an explanatory letter, in a marginal note, as it were, directed to this same stage of the argument, Descartes draws the full conclusion. ) 'From the mere fact that the two natures of soul and body can be clearly and distinctly conceived as different, it is known that they really are different.'3 It will be noticed that Descartes here links the two notions

r

1 I Vae. Resp., VII. 222: ' Neque enim substantias immediate cognoscimus . .. sed tantum ex eo quod percipimus quasdam formas sive attributa, quae cum alicui rei debeant inesse ut existant, rem illam cui insunt vocamus substantiam.' The suggestion conveyed by the use of the plural, namely, that the self has more than one essential attribute, is really misleading, as Descartes is here considerin g the different aspects under which the single attribute of thought may be revealed. >Disc., VI. 32-33. 3 To • • •, II. 38 .

94

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

of substantiality and distinctness.1 They are, in fact , two facets of the same point of view. A substance is to be defined through its own essence ; and this is impossible unless the essence is conceived distinctly: i.e. apart from all the confusing intermixtures and inventions which arise from sense-perception and emotional disturbance. We are therefore justified in approaching Descartes's view that the self is a substance through the kindred view that the self of the 'cogito' is distinctly conceived. And on this point it may be well asked how we can know that it is distinct when we do not yet know whether anything else exists. May it not be that something so farunknown is required to complete the essence of the self : th at the self, as we so far know it, is only tl-ie fringe of an unexplored continent: and that our conception of it , however clear and certain, and however triumphant over metaphysical doubt, cannot be pronounced in advance to be distinct from that of any other existence which argument may establish? Now it is significant that even in the Discours Descartes does not explicitly describe the idea of the self as 'clear and distinct'. We perceive, 'very clearly', 'that in order to think one must exist', and the general rule, which we are to infer (falsely enough, as we have observed), is that ' things which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true'. 2 The scruple of conscience betrays the analogy, and suggests that the criterion of distinctness is smuggled in from another source. Properly speaking, it belongs not to metaphysics but to science, and it is devised to ward off the wiles of the senses.3 Within the mind, as against the senses, it has sovereign authority, but unless the real world is shown as a whole to be rational, its sway can reach no farth er. Clearness and distinctness can become criteria of reality only when all metaphysical doubt has been banished by the proof of the existence of God. To 1 It is urged in Ch. V that conceiving distinctly is not the same thing as conceiving su bst a nt ially, as conceiving d istinctly involves discrimination, and conceiving su bst antially imp lies an immedi at e recognition of self-subsist ence through the sole na ture of t he t hing conceived . This fact , however, does not affect the present argument, for in either case tha t which is conceived is set wholly ap art without reference to the guarantee of God . It is t o be not ed, h owever, that of the above quotations the first represents the self as _conceived subst antia lly, and the second as conceived distinctly. Descartes, as we sh all see , is not t oo clear ab out the difference. > Disc. , VI. 33. 3 As is evident from the context of the first rule of method , Disc., VI. 18.

COGITO, ERGO SUM

95

employ them as such at an e~rlier st~ge. involves . a fl~grant logical inversion. Clearness without d1stmctness (i. e. m the sense of being distinct from anything else) is the mark of the self as given in intuition, as the mutual involution of th~ self and God is lat er t o show. Apart, however, from the final issue, mere considerations of method forbid us t o set an arbitrary boundary to the one known existence without knowing what lies beyond it. Its apparent distinctness may be due to the incompleteness of our dialectic: as when, at the fo ?t of a great range, we affirm the distinctness of the spur which obscures the peak behind it . . . It may be surmised that Descartes faced th~se ~hfficulties in the course of the interval between the publication of the Discours and that of the M editations, for in the latter work he admits that he is not entitled to make a definite pronouncement so early in the discussion. 'It may happen', he says, 'that these same things which I suppose not to exist, because they are unknown to me, are in fact no different from the self which I know.' 1 'By which ', he adds, referrin g t o the passage in his reply t o the obj ections collected by Merse:ine, '.I expressly wished to assure the reader that I was at this po mt not yet inquiring whether the spirit is different from th e body , but simply examining those of its properties of which ~ m~y ha".e a clear and a~sured knowledge.' 2 The general disclaimer is plain enough; and the use of the word. 'assured' for the more explicit ' distinct' clinches it beyond dispute. Now if this is t o be accepted, the self ought not in Descartes's sense t o be called a substance, for we cannot be sure that its essence is in fact restricted t o the scope of our intuition. Or, if we do describe it as a substance, on the strength of a 'clear and distinct idea' of it , our affirmation is purely ideal, and the conception of the self loses its unique status as the gateway to reality. It is towards this latter solution that D.esc~rtes seems to be veering in his reply t o Arnauld's F ourth Ob1echons. Arnauld has been arguing that the exclusion of the body has so far been frankly a matter of mere method, so that the discovery that the thinking self really exists cannot be understood t o preclude the real union of thought and extension . 'F irst of all', Descartes responds, 'I shall explain in what place I have begun to show how, from the fact that I know nothing else belonging to my essence, that is to say, to the essence of my spirit, except that I am a something which thinks, it follows 'Med., II, VII. 27.

'Ilae. R esp ., VII . 129.

\ 96

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

~

that there is also nothing which in fact belongs to it. It is in the same place in which I have proved that God exists, who can perform all the things which I clearly and distinctly conceive as possible. ' 1 The distinctness, and consequently the substantiality, of the self awaits t he cosmic guarantee. Unfortunately this statement implies that when God does establish in the real world the substantiality of the self, it is the self of the 'cogito' which becomes subst antial. This implies in its turn that it is the self of the 'cogito' which is originally conceived as a subst ance, and that the guarantee of God is required befo re we can know that it really is a substance. This reply fails to meet the objection, for it does not explain how the self of the 'cogito' comes t o be conceived as a substance, and if it were true we would have no metaphysical self from whica t o m ove t he existence of God. What Descartes ought t o do is, first , t o affirm the real self which does not claim to be distinct; next , t o affirm the ideal self, which, seeing that it is affirmed as a substance, does claim t o be distinct; next t o advance from the real self to God; and finally .to amplify the intuition of the 'cogito' by reference to the distinctness of the self which was formerly ideal, but has now advanced under God t o t he plane of reality. To this there is no objection; but the whole process is fatally frustrated if we try t o assert the original distinctness of the real self, and despite his apparent disclaimer this is what Descartes in his reply to Arnauld proceeds to do. 'Although perhaps there may be in me several things of which I am not yet aware, still, in so far as that which I know t o be in me is enough to enable me to live with it alone, I am assured that God could create me without the other things which I do not yet know, and to that extent that they do not belong t o the essence of my spirit.' 2 We have assumed hitherto that if the real self is not fully known, it is not known as a substance. This assumption we shall now have t o revise. The r eal self is not fully known, but its recognized attributes 'are sufficient to inform me that it is a substance' .3 Therefore any further attributes fwe may discover will belong of necessity to some other substance.4

• I Vae. R esp., VII . 2 1 9. 1 I bid . 3 Ibid., VII . 222. Descartes's scru p les, as evinced in the M t!ditations, h ave in fact led him to be false to his theo ry of subst a nce.-\.Vith regard t o tha t theory in general, it ser ves Descartes ad mirably in est ablishing the sep a ra t eness of soul and b od y , b ut it breaks d own badly when he tries t o sta te his 4

COGITO, ERGO S UM

97 This conclusion, in view of Descartes's accepted theory of substance, was inevitable from the first. It certainly is possible to think of the real self as pure thought, independently of all accretions which it may subsequently be shown t o possess. But if any attribute which can be clearly conceived necessarily inheres in a substance equal in scope with itself, it follows that the self which can be thought without reference to anything but thought really is nothing but thought. To think clearly is in fac t to think distinctly, and all attempts to separate the two criteria are doomed t o failure. The difference between the statement of the Discours and that of the Meditations is not fundamental : it is only that the latter reveals a subordinat e complication which the fo rmer has ignored but suffices to cover. Whether we are at the moment inquiring into the difference between thought and extension, or whether we are not , such a difference is in fact implied in the fact that thought may be independently conceived. ' Thus Descartes's rigorous application of a preconceived theory of substance is highly convenient as a means of establishing the distinctness of the t wo orders of being, which is of such importance to his theories both of theology and of science: so much so, that one is tempted to agree with M. Gilson that it was devised with this end in view. 1 It so disposes t he content of human experience that hereafter t he distinctness of soul and body cannot be broken down, even by God. But, as has already been pointed out, it involves the prejudicial assumption that the methods and principles of metaphysics are the same as those of science. No doubt the structure of reason is one; no doub t Descartes himself draws no cl~ar distinction bet ween its different aspect s. But it does not follow that its unity is not differentiated, or that Descartes's practice bears out his theoretical ambiguity. And, as a matter of logical procedure, even if the ap plication of the category of subst ance without modification to the real should turn out t o be justified, it is not admissible as an assumption at this stage of the argument. The real has been discovered through a method of doubt which does not shrink from supposing that none of our views on the rela tion of the self t o God. If bot h a re spirit, t h e one cann o t be t o t ally alien from the o ther. As t he d iscovery of God is t he primary ven t ure of met aphysics, we are therefore confront ed with the beginnin gs of a distinction be t wee n a non-met aphysical logic, which works throu gh clear a nd d isti nct ideas a nd is hypostatized into a theory of su bst a nce, and a m et aphysical logic of implication . See Ch . I V. 1 Commentary, p . 304.

8

98

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES

categories may be applicable to it. To go back on that supposition without the additional assurance of the existence of God is simply a hysteron proteron. §J. One of the results of applying the category of substance to the immediate intuition of existence is that the self resumes all its non-extended attributes, and as it clearly cannot exercise them all at the same time, it must resume also the continuity which it appears to possess in our everyday experience. This, however, is to undermine the momentary character of the act of doubt, \~ hich is a vital feature of Descartes's doctrine. 'Once in one's life' one must doubt one's established convictions; and from this single experience everything must be rebuilt. The continuity of the self is as much open to doubt as any external event . Indeed, in so far as it depends on memory, it springs from the very principle of deception, for it is the failure of memory which dims the lustre of clear and distinct ideas whenever we are not actually thinking,' and even when it is faithful it takes us back to our earlier illusions. 'Our spirit, 'as it were, can only be attentive to the same thing for a single moment'. 2 The indivisible instant is the form of that intuition which brings to light the permanent beneath the changeable. The problem of Descartes's method is to pass from one point of intuition to another, and the deceptiveness of memory makes this impossible until the assurance of God restores a belief in our ordinary faculties. As far as our private experience goes (and so far nothing else is real), the continuity of time itself is doubtful, and unless there is some further reality it is hard to see how it can be established. This is one of the main factors which lead us to doubt the validity of scientific knowledge. 'I discover nothing', writes Descartes, 'save by a long chain of reasonings' ;3 but how can we talk of a chain when, as far as we know, there is only a discrete succession of illuminations? There is no indication that Descartes ever questioned this line of argument, and in the Meditations it occupies a central place. 'I exist: that is certain; but how long ? As long as I am thinking ; for perhaps it might even happen that if I completely stopped thinking I should stop existing at the same time'. 4 Existence is asserted only in an act of thought 1

J

Prine., I. 44, VI II. To Mersenne, I. 22.

21.

•To Mesland, IV. u6. 4 Med., II, VII. 27.

COGITO, ERGO SUM

99 (in an act of doubt, to speak more accurately).' But we cannot go on thinking, for our attention is limited to the moment: so that while our existence may be affirmed at any one moment, it cannot be affirmed from one moment to another. It follows that the extension of the self, in advance of God's sanction, beyond the immediate act of doubt, is once again at variance with the nature of the act itself, and this time with curious reactions on the theory of the self as substance. If it is real, it is not co-terminous with the essence of spirit, and if it is co-terminous with the essence of spirit it is not real. If it is to be substantial, it must be, firstly instantaneous, and, secondly, limited on each occasion on which it is a substance, to a particular act of doubt. If it is continuous and inclusive, it is not real and its essence is without a substance. In the former case it is only an aspect of the so-called essence of spirit which is promoted to reality ; in the latter, nothing can ever be promoted at all. In neither can God's sanction present us with a complete spiritual substance.

§8. But no amount of criticism on points of logic and detail should blind us to the revolutionary importance of Descartes's approach to philosophy. For the first time in the history of thought, personality (not experience as a content but the personality which asserts it) is taken as the primary philosophical concept. Professor WJ-. itehead has shown how the Renaissance appealed to the verifiable intimacy of experience over the head of abstract reasoning, 2 and it is certainly true of Descartes that the necessity from which he st arts is a being r::i.ther than an axiom, an existence and not a formula. But it is significant of the times that this existing fact i~ neither a brute fact nor an infinite whole, but a finite person. The Renaiss;i_nce, with its rich heritage of individual expansion, of eager and insatiable curiosity, of intellectual ferment and inquiry, rejecting tradition and bringing all things to the t est of an open judgment, is the first new influence in the new philosophy. In such an atmosphere the importance of the person, the need for a priv:i.te appropriation and reliving of the truth, was bound to receive the philosopher's emphasis. It is no accident that Descartes should have been anticipated in the formulation of the 'cogito' by Because doubt is the badge of imperfection. • Science and the Modern World, pp. 9-I2.

1

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESCARTES Campanella and by Gomez Pereira.1 Nor is there any need to invoke plagiarism. In some fo rm or other, it was bound to occur to any reflective onlooker in the presence of an assertive generation which had turned its face toward initiative and its back on consolidation; and it had the advantage of providing fo r those who wanted it a charter of freedom for the new science of nature. But though Descartes shared t o the full the confidence of the Renaissance, he was entirely free from its bombast, and had no desire to echo its noisy assertion of human supremacy. For one thing, the new science, itself a product of that protean movement of thought, had deterred him from the arrogance of mere humanism by its revelation of cosmic immensity, and in addition he had encountered the rising personalism in its religious aspect, which set out from personal experience only to assert its utter dependence on God. This humility has passed into the personalism of Descartes, for the self is discovered, not in the triumph of knowledge, but in the abandonment of doubt, out of which it looks helplessly to God for its fulfilment. In his whole attitude at this point Descartes stands in close resemblance to Augustine, who had likewise fallen back on the self as the sole refuge from scepticism. 'He who is not, cannot even be deceived; and so, if I am deceived, I am.' 2 This doctrine had been kept alive by the Platonists of the Middle Ages, from Scotus Erigena to Pico della Mirandola,3 and was bound to be well known wherever (as in the Oratory) the Augustinian tradition was paramount. This, however, is no slur on Descartes's originality, on which Pascal has spoken the last word. 'I know' , he says, 'what a difference there is between writing a word at random, without further or wider reflexion, and p erceiving in that word a marvellous succession of consequences, which proves the distinction of material and spiritual natures, so as to make it the foundation of a whole system of physics, as Descartes has claimed to do.'4 Descartes's doctrine of the personal approach to philosophy proves its authentic novelty by the light it throws on philosophy's persist ent problems. It is of course true of all, and not least of the scholastic, IOO

1 See the discussion of this p oint in Chevalier, Descartes, pp. 2 14-2 15, note. ' De ei:vitate D ei, XI. 26: quoted by Gilson, Commentary, p. 295 . 3 F or a convincing array of mediaeval qu otations, see Gilson, Comm entary, p. 296. 4 De l'esprit geometrique (ed . Brunschvicg, pp. 192-193), quoted by Chevalier, Descartes, p . 215.

COGITO, ERGO SUM

IOI

p~il?soph~r~, that their greatness depends on their power of onginal v1s10n. They give a twist of their own to common knowledge, and incalculably it breaks out into strange insight; they attack from an unexpected angle, and outflank the obstacles which checked the traditional strategy. Their philosophies belong, it is true, to the common world of reason but they are contributed t o its stock by their own creative effort. Usually, however, they wipe the sweat of the contest from their brows in secret, and appear before us in the placid serenity of matured achievement. It was left to Descartes t o show that. the struggle is P.art of the victory. It is not enough for the thinker to parade his laurels: for all we know, he might ~ave stolen th~m. The fact that he h as made his philosophy is a~ outstanding f~ature of that philosophy itself. It is not for th.e philosopher t o indulge his vanity by pr