Chapter XX · (continued 2)

But should be kept within bounds. 64. These astonishing revelations of natural mysteries, fresh tidings of which crowd in upon us every day, may be likely to overwhelm all sober hesitation as to the capacities of the human mind, and to bring back that confidence which Bacon, in so much less favourable circumstances, has ventured to feel. There seem, however, to be good reasons for keeping within bounds this expectation of future improvement, which, as it has sometimes been announced in unqualified phrases, is hardly more philosophical than the vulgar supposition that the capacities of mankind are almost stationary. The phænomena of nature indeed, in all their possible combinations, are so infinite, in a popular sense of the word, that during no period, to which the human species can be conceived to reach, would they be entirely collected and registered. The case is still stronger as to the secret agencies and processes by means of which their phænomena are displayed. These have as yet, in no one instance, so far as I know, been fully ascertained. “Microscopes,” says Herschel, “have been constructed which magnify more than one thousand times in linear dimension, so that the smallest visible grain of sand may be enlarged to the appearance of one million times more bulky; yet the only impression we receive by viewing it through such a magnifier is that it reminds us of some vast fragment of a rock; while the intimate structure on which depends its colour, its hardness, and its chemical properties, remains still concealed; we do not seem to have made even an approach to a closer analysis of it by any such scrutiny.”[208]

Limits to our knowledge by sense. 65. The instance here chosen is not the most favourable for the experimental philosopher. He might perhaps hope to gain more knowledge by applying the best microscope to a regular crystal or to an organised substance. And it is impossible not to regret that the great discovery of the solar microscope has been either so imperfectly turned to account by philosophers, or has disappointed their hopes of exhibiting the mechanism of nature with the distinctness they require. But there is evidently a fundamental limitation of physical science, arising from those of the bodily senses and of muscular motions. The nicest instruments must be constructed and directed by the human hand; the range of the finest glasses must have a limit not only in their own natural structure but in that of the human eye. But no theory in science will be acknowledged to deserve any regard, except as it is drawn immediately, and by an exclusive process, from the phænomena which our senses report to us. Thus, the regular observation of definite proportions in chemical combination has suggested the atomic theory; and even this has been sceptically accepted by our cautious school of philosophy. If we are ever to go farther into the molecular analysis of substances, it must be through the means and upon the authority of new discoveries exhibited to our senses in experiment. But the existing powers of exhibiting or compelling nature by instruments, vast as they appear to us, and wonderful as has been their efficacy in many respects, have done little for many years past in diminishing the number of substances reputed to be simple; and with strong reasons to suspect that some of these, at least, yield to the crucible of nature, our electric batteries have up to this hour played innocuously round their heads.

66. Bacon has thrown out, once or twice, a hint at a single principle, a summary law of nature, as if all subordinate causes resolved themselves into one great process, according to which God works his will in the universe: Opus quod operatur Deus a principio usque ad finem. The natural tendency towards simplification, and what we consider as harmony, in our philosophical systems, which Lord Bacon himself reckons among the idola tribûs, the fallacies incident to the species, has led some to favour this unity of physical law. Impact and gravity have each had their supporters. But we are as yet at a great distance from establishing such a generalization, nor does it appear by any means probable that it will ever assume any simple form.

Inductive logic; whether confined to physics. 67. The close connexion of the inductive process recommended by Bacon with natural philosophy in the common sense of that word, and the general selection of his examples for illustration from that science, have given rise to a question, whether he comprehended metaphysical and moral philosophy within the scope of his inquiry.[209] That they formed a part of the Instauration of Sciences, and therefore of the Baconian philosophy in the fullest sense of the word, is obvious from the fact that a large proportion of the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum is dedicated to those subjects; and it is not less so that the idola of the Novum Organum are at least as apt to deceive us in moral as in physical argument. The question, therefore, can only be raised as to the peculiar method of conducting investigations, which is considered as his own. This would, however, appear to have been decided by himself in very positive language. “It may be doubted, rather than objected, by some, whether we look to the perfection, by means of our method, of natural philosophy alone, or of the other sciences also, of logic, of ethics, of politics. But we certainly mean what has here been said, to be understood as to them all; and as the ordinary logic, which proceeds by syllogism, does not relate to physical only, but to every other science; so ours, which proceeds by induction, comprizes them all. For we as much collect a history and form tables concerning anger, fear, shame and the like, and also concerning examples from civil life, and as much concerning the intellectual operations of memory, combination and partition, judgment and the others, as concerning heat and cold, or light, or vegetation, or such things.”[210] But he proceeds to intimate, as far as I understand the next sentence, that, although his method or logic, strictly speaking, is applicable to other subjects, it is his immediate object to inquire into the properties of natural things, or what is generally meant by physics. To this indeed the second book of the Novum Organum, and the portions that he completed of the remaining parts of the Instauratio Magna bear witness.

Baconian philosophy built on observation and experiment. 68. It by no means follows, because the leading principles of the inductive philosophy are applicable to other topics of inquiry than what is usually comprehended under the name of physics, that we can employ all the prærogativæ instantiarum, and still less the peculiar rules for conducting experiments which Bacon has given us, in moral, or even psychological disquisitions. Many of them are plainly referrible to particular manipulations, or at most to limited subjects of chemical theory. And the frequent occurrence of passages which show Lord Bacon’s fondness for experimental processes, seem to have led some to consider his peculiar methods as more exclusively related to such modes of inquiry than they really are. But when the Baconian philosophy is said to be experimental, we are to remember that experiment is only better than what we may call passive observation, because it enlarges our capacity of observing with exactness and expedition. The reasoning is grounded on observation in both cases. In astronomy, where nature remarkably presents the objects of our observation without liability to error or uncertain delay, we may reason on the inductive principle as well as in sciences that require tentative operations. The inference drawn from the difference of time in the occultation of the satellites of Jupiter at different seasons, in favour of the Copernican theory and against the instantaneous motion of light, is an induction of the same kind with any that could be derived from an experimentum crucis. It is an exclusion of those hypotheses which might solve many phænomena, but fail to explain those immediately observed.

Advantages of the latter. 69. But astronomy, from the comparative solitariness, if we may so say, of all its phænomena, and the simplicity of their laws, has an advantage that is rarely found in sciences of mere observation. Bacon justly gave to experiment, or the interrogation of nature, compelling her to give up her secrets, a decided preference whenever it can be employed; and it is unquestionably true that the inductive method is tedious, if not uncertain, when it cannot resort to so compendious a process. One of the subjects selected by Bacon in the third part of the Instauration as specimens of the method by which an inquiry into nature should be conducted, the History of Winds, does not greatly admit of experiments; and the very slow progress of meteorology, which has yet hardly deserved the name of a science, when compared with that of chemistry or optics, will illustrate the difficulties of employing the inductive method without their aid. It is not, therefore, that Lord Bacon’s method of philosophising is properly experimental, but that by experiment it is most successfully displayed.

Sometimes applicable to philosophy of human mind. 70. It will follow from hence that in proportion as, in any matter of inquiry, we can separate, in what we examine, the determining conditions, or law of form, from everything extraneous, we shall be more able to use the Baconian method with advantage. In metaphysics, or what Stewart would have called the philosophy of the human mind, there seems much in its own nature capable of being subjected to the inductive reasoning. Such are those facts which, by their intimate connection with physiology, or the laws of the bodily frame, fall properly within the province of the physician. In these, though exact observation is chiefly required, it is often practicable to shorten its process by experiment. And another important illustration may be given from the education of children, considered as a science of rules deduced from observation; wherein also we are frequently more able to substitute experiment for mere experience, than with mankind in general, whom we may observe at a distance, but cannot control. |Less so to politics and morals.| In politics, as well as in moral prudence, we can seldom do more than this. It seems however practicable to apply the close attention enforced by Bacon, and the careful arrangement and comparison of phænomena, which are the basis of his induction, to these subjects. Thus, if the circumstances of all popular seditions recorded in history were to be carefully collected with great regard to the probability of evidence, and to any peculiarity that may have affected the results, it might be easy to perceive such a connection of antecedent and subsequent events in the great plurality of instances, as would reasonably lead us to form probable inferences as to similar tumults when they should occur. This has sometimes been done, with less universality, and with much less accuracy than the Baconian method requires, by such theoretical writers on politics as Machiavel and Bodin. But it has been apt to degenerate into pedantry, and to disappoint the practical statesman, who commonly rejects it with scorn; partly because civil history is itself defective, seldom giving a just view of events, and still less frequently of the motives of those concerned in them; partly because the history of mankind is far less copious than that of nature, and in much that relates to politics, has not yet had time to furnish the groundwork of a sufficient induction; but partly also from some distinctive circumstances, which affect our reasonings in moral far more than in physical science, and which deserve to be considered, so far at least as to sketch the arguments that might be employed.

Induction less conclusive in these subjects. 71. The Baconian logic, as has been already said, deduces universal principles from select observation, that is, from particular, and, in some cases of experiment, from singular instances. It may easily appear to one conversant with the syllogistic method less legitimate than the old induction which proceeded by an exhaustive enumeration of particulars, and at most warranting but a probable conclusion. The answer to this objection can only be found in the acknowledged uniformity of the laws of nature, so that whatever has once occurred will, under absolutely similar circumstances, always occur again. This may be called the suppressed premise of every Baconian enthymem, every inference from observation of phænomena, which extends beyond the particular case. When it is once ascertained that water is composed of one proportion of oxygen to one of hydrogen, we never doubt but that such are its invariable constituents. We may repeat the experiment to secure ourselves against the risk of error in the operation or of some unperceived condition that may have affected the result; but when a sufficient number of trials has secured us against this, an invariable law of nature is inferred from the particular instance; nobody conceives that one pint of pure water can be of a different composition from another. All men, even the most rude, reason upon this primary maxim; but they reason inconclusively from misapprehending the true relations of cause and effect in the phænomena to which they direct their attention. It is by the sagacity and ingenuity with which Bacon has excluded the various sources of error, and disengaged the true cause, that this method is distinguished from that which the vulgar practise.

Reasons for this difference. 72. It is required, however, for the validity of this method, first that there should be a strict uniformity in the general laws of nature, from which we can infer that what has been will, in the same conditions, be again; and secondly, that we shall be able to perceive and estimate all the conditions with an entire and exclusive knowledge. The first is granted in all physical phænomena; but in those which we cannot submit to experiment, or investigate by some such method as Bacon has pointed out, we often find our philosophy at fault for want of the second. Such is at present the case with respect to many parts of chemistry; for example, that of organic substances, which we can analyse, but as yet can in very few instances recompose. We do not know, and, if we did know, could not perhaps command, the entire conditions of organic bodies (even structurally, not as living), the form, as Bacon calls it, of blood, or milk, or oak galls. But in attempting to subject the actions of men to this inductive philosophy, we are arrested by the want of both the necessary requisitions. Matter can only be diverted from its obedience to unvarying laws by the control of mind; but we have to inquire whether mind is equally the passive instrument of any law. We have to open the great problem of human liberty, and must deny even a disturbing force to the will before we can assume that all actions of mankind must, under given conditions, preserve the same necessary train of sequences as a molecule of matter. But if this be answered affirmatively, we are still almost as far removed from a conclusive result as before. We cannot without contradicting every day experience, maintain that all men are determined alike by the same exterior circumstances; we must have recourse to the differences of temperament, of physical constitution, of casual or habitual association. The former alone, however, are, at the best, subject to our observation, either at the time, or, as is most common, through testimony; of the latter, no being, which does not watch the movements of the soul itself, can reach more than a probable conjecture. Sylla resigned the dictatorship, therefore all men, in the circumstances of Sylla, will do the same, is an argument false in one sense of the word circumstances, and useless at least in any other. It is doubted by many, whether meteorology will ever be well understood, on account of the complexity of the forces concerned, and their remoteness from the apprehension of the senses. Do not the same difficulties apply to human affairs? And while we reflect on these difficulties, to which we must add those which spring from the scantiness of our means of observation, the defectiveness and falsehood of testimony, especially what is called historical, and a thousand other errors to which the various “idola of the world and the cave” expose us, we shall rather be astonished that so many probable rules of civil prudence have been treasured up and confirmed by experience than disposed to give them a higher place in philosophy than they can claim.

Considerations on the other side. 73. It might be alleged in reply to these considerations, that admitting the absence of a strictly scientific certainty in moral reasoning, we have yet, as seems acknowledged on the other side, a great body of probable inferences, in the extensive knowledge and sagacious application of which most of human wisdom consists. And all that is required of us in dealing either with moral evidence or with the conclusions we draw from it, is to estimate the probability of neither too high; an error from which the severe and patient discipline of the inductive philosophy is most likely to secure us. It would be added by some, that the theory of probabilities deduces a wonderful degree of certainty from things very uncertain, when a sufficient number of experiments can be made; and thus, that events depending upon the will of mankind, even under circumstances the most anomalous and apparently irreducible to principles, may be calculated with a precision inexplicable to any one who has paid little attention to the subject. This, perhaps, may appear rather a curious application of mathematical science, than one from which our moral reasonings are likely to derive much benefit, especially as the conditions under which a very high probability can mathematically be obtained, involve a greater number of trials than experience will generally furnish. It is, nevertheless, a field that deserves to be more fully explored: the success of those who have attempted to apply analytical processes to moral probabilities has not hitherto been very encouraging, inasmuch as they have often come to results falsified by experience; but a more scrupulous regard to all the conditions of each problem may perhaps obviate many sources of error.[211]

Result of the whole. 74. It seems upon the whole that we should neither conceive the inductive method to be useless in regard to any subject but physical science, nor deny the peculiar advantages it possesses in those inquiries rather than others. What must in all studies be important, is the habit of turning round the subject of our investigation in every light, the observation of everything that is peculiar, the exclusion of all that we find on reflection to be extraneous. In historical and antiquarian researches, in all critical examination which turns upon facts, in the scrutiny of judicial evidence, a great part of Lord Bacon’s method, not, of course, all the experimental rules of the Novum Organum, has, as I conceive, a legitimate application.[212] I would refer any one who may doubt this to his History of Winds, as one sample of what we mean by the Baconian method, and ask whether a kind of investigation, analogous to what is therein pursued for the sake of eliciting physical truths, might not be employed in any analytical process where general or even particular facts are sought to be known. Or if an example is required of such an investigation, let us look at the copious induction from the past and actual history of mankind upon which Malthus established his general theory of the causes which have retarded the natural progress of population. Upon all these subjects before-mentioned, there has been an astonishing improvement in the reasoning of the learned, and perhaps of the world at large since the time of Bacon, though much remains very defective. In what degree it may be owing to the prevalence of a physical philosophy founded upon his inductive logic, it might not be uninteresting to inquire.[213]

Bacon’s aptitude for moral subjects. 75. It is probable that Lord Bacon never much followed up in his own mind that application of his method to psychological, and still less to moral and political subjects, which he has declared himself to intend. The distribution of the Instauratio Magna, which he has prefixed to it, relates wholly to physical science. He has in no one instance given an example, in the Novum Organum, from moral philosophy, and one only, that of artificial memory, from what he would have called logic.[214] But we must constantly remember that the philosophy of Bacon was left exceedingly incomplete. Many lives would not have sufficed for what he had planned, and he gave only the horæ subsecivæ of his own. It is evident that he had turned his thoughts to physical philosophy rather for an exercise of his reasoning faculties, and out of his insatiable thirst for knowledge, than from any peculiar aptitude for their subjects, much less any advantage of opportunity for their cultivation. He was more eminently the philosopher of human, than of general nature. Hence, he is exact as well as profound in all his reflections on civil life and mankind, while his conjectures in natural philosophy, though often very acute, are apt to wander far from the truth in consequence of his defective acquaintance with the phænomena of nature. His Centuries of Natural History give abundant proof of this. He is, in all these inquiries, like one doubtfully, and by degrees, making out a distant prospect, but often deceived by the haze. But if we compare what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth books De Augmentis, in the Essays, the History of Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in his works, on moral and political wisdom, and on human nature, from experience of which all such wisdom is drawn, with the Rhetoric, Ethics, and Politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human character, with Thucydides, Tacitus, Philip de Comines, Machiavel, Davila, Hume, we shall, I think, find that one man may almost be compared with all of these together. When Galileo is named as equal to Bacon, it is to be remembered that Galileo was no moral or political philosopher, and in this department Leibnitz certainly falls very short of Bacon. Burke, perhaps, comes, of all modern writers, the nearest to him; but though Bacon may not be more profound than Burke, he is still more copious and comprehensive.

Comparison of Bacon and Galileo. 76. The comparison of Bacon and Galileo is naturally built upon the influence which, in the same age they exerted in overthrowing the philosophy of the schools, and in founding that new discipline of real science which has rendered the last centuries glorious. Hume has given the preference to the latter, who made accessions to the domain of human knowledge so splendid, so inaccessible to cavil, so unequivocal in their results, that the majority of mankind would perhaps be carried along with this decision. There seems however to be no doubt that the mind of Bacon was more comprehensive and profound. But these comparisons are apt to involve incommensurable relations. In their own intellectual characters, they bore no great resemblance to each other. Bacon had scarce any knowledge of geometry, and so far ranks much below not only Galileo, but Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz, all signalised by wonderful discoveries in the science of quantity, or in that part of physics which employs it. He has, in one of the profound aphorisms of the Novum Organum, distinguished the two species of philosophical genius, one more apt to perceive the differences of things, the other their analogies. In a mind of the highest order neither of these powers will be really deficient, and his own inductive method is at once the best exercise of both, and the best safeguard against the excess of either. But upon the whole, it may certainly be said, that the genius of Lord Bacon was naturally more inclined to collect the resemblances of nature than to note her differences. This is the case with men like him of sanguine temper, warm fancy, and brilliant wit; but it is not the frame of mind which is best suited to strict reasoning.

77. It is no proof of a solid acquaintance with Lord Bacon’s philosophy, to deify his name as the ancient schools did those of their founders, or even to exaggerate the powers of his genius. Powers they were surprisingly great, yet limited in their range, and not in all respects equal; nor could they overcome every impediment of circumstance. Even of Bacon it may be said, that he attempted more than he has achieved, and perhaps more than he clearly apprehended. His objects appear sometimes indistinct, and I am not sure that they are always consistent. In the Advancement of Learning, he aspired to fill up, or at least to indicate, the deficiencies in every department of knowledge, he gradually confined himself to philosophy, and at length to physics. But few of his works can be deemed complete, not even the treatise De Augmentis, which comes nearer to it than most of the rest. Hence, the study of Lord Bacon is difficult and not, as I conceive, very well adapted to those who have made no progress whatever in the exact sciences, nor accustomed themselves to independent thinking. They have never been made a textbook in our universities; though after a judicious course of preparatory studies, by which I mean a good foundation in geometry and the philosophical principles of grammar, the first book of the Novum Organum might be very advantageously combined with the instruction of an enlightened lecturer.[215]

A living writer of high reputation, who has at least fully understood his own subject, and illustrated it better than his predecessors from a more enlarged reading and thinking, wherein his own acuteness has been improved by the writers of the Baconian school, has been unfortunately instrumental, by the very merits of his treatise on Logic, in keeping up the prejudices on this subject, which have generally been deemed characteristic of the university to which he belonged. All the reflection I have been able to give to the subject has convinced me of the inefficacy of the syllogistic art in enabling us to think rightly for ourselves, or, which is part of thinking rightly, in detecting those fallacies of others which might impose on our understanding before we have acquired that art. It has been often alleged, and, as far as I can judge, with perfect truth, that no man, who can be worth answering, ever commits, except through mere inadvertence, any paralogisms which the common logic serves to point out. It is easy enough to construct syllogisms which sin against its rules; but the question is, by whom they were employed. It is not uncommon, as I am aware, to represent an adversary as reasoning illogically; but this is generally effected by putting his argument into our own words. The great fault of all, over-induction, or the assertion of a general premise upon an insufficient examination of particulars, cannot be discovered or cured by any logical skill; and this is the error into which men really fall, not that of omitting to distribute the middle term, though it comes in effect, and often in appearance, to the same thing. I do not contend that the rules of syllogism, which are very short and simple, ought not to be learned; or that there may not be some advantage in occasionally stating our own argument, or calling on another to state his, in a regular form (an advantage, however, rather dialectical, which is, in other words, rhetorical, than one which affects the reasoning faculties themselves): nor do I deny that it is philosophically worth while to know that all general reasoning by words may be reduced into syllogism, as it is to know that most of geometry may be resolved into the superposition of equal triangles; but to represent this portion of logical science as the whole, appears to me almost like teaching the scholar Euclid’s axioms, and the axiomatic theorem to which I have alluded, and calling this the science of geometry. The following passage from the Port-Royal logic is very judicious and candid, giving as much to the Aristotelian system as it deserves: “Cette partie, que nous avons maintenant à traiter, qui comprend les règles du raisonnement, est estimée la plus importante de la logique, et c’est presque l’unique qu’on y traite avec quelque soin; mais il y a sujet de douter si elle est aussi utile qu’on se l’imagine. La plupart des erreurs des hommes, comme nous avons déjà dit ailleurs, viennent bien plus de ce qu’ils raisonnent sur de faux principes, que non pas de ce qu’ils raisonnent mal suivant leurs principes. Il arrive rarement qu’on se laisse tromper par des raisonnemens qui ne soient faux que parce que la conséquence en est mal tirée; et ceux qui ne seroient pas capables d’en reconnoître la fausseté par la seule lumière de la raison, ne le seroient pas ordinairement d’entendre les règles que l’on en donne, et encore moins de les appliquer. Néanmoins, quand on ne considéreroit ces règles que comme des vérités spéculatives, elles serviroient toujours à exercer l’esprit; et de plus, on ne peut nier qu’elles n’aient quelque usage en quelques rencontres, et à l’égard de quelques personnes, qui, étant d’un naturel vif et pénétrant, ne se laissent quelquefois tromper par des fausses conséquences, que faute d’attention, à quoi la réflexion qu’ils feroient sur ces règles, seroit capable de remédier.” Art de Penser, part iii. How different is this sensible passage from one quoted from some anonymous writer in Whateley’s Logic, p. 34. “A fallacy consists of an ingenious mixture of truth and falsehood so entangled, so intimately blended, that the fallacy is, in the chemical phrase, held in solution one drop of sound logic is that test which immediately disunites them, makes the foreign substance visible, and precipitates it to the bottom.” One fallacy, it might be answered, as common as any, is the false analogy the misleading the mind by a comparison, where there is no real proportion or resemblance. The chemist’s test is the necessary means of detecting the foreign substance; if the “drop of sound logic” be such, it is strange that lawyers, mathematicians, and mankind in general, should so sparingly employ it; the fact being notorious, that those most eminent for strong reasoning powers are rarely conversant with the syllogistic method. It is also well known, that these “intimately blended mixtures of truth and falsehood” deceive no man of plain sense. So much for the test.

His prejudice against mathematics. 78. The ignorance of Bacon in mathematics, and, what was much worse, his inadequate notions of their utility, must be reckoned among the chief defects in his philosophical writings. In a remarkable passage of the Advancement of Learning, he held mathematics to be a part of metaphysics; but the place of this is altered in the Latin, and they are treated as merely auxiliary or instrumental to physical inquiry. He had some prejudice against pure mathematics, and thought they had been unduly elevated in comparison with the realities of nature. “I know not,” he says, “how it has arisen that mathematics and logic, which ought to be the serving-maids of physical philosophy, yet affecting to vaunt the certainty that belongs to them, presume to exercise a dominion over her.” It is surely very erroneous to speak of geometry, which relates to the objective realities of space, and to natural objects so far as extended, as a mere handmaid of physical philosophy, and not rather a part of it. Playfair has made some good remarks on the advantages derived to experimental philosophy itself from the mere application of geometry and algebra. And one of the reflections which this ought to excite is, that we are not to conceive, as some hastily do, that there can be no real utility to mankind, even of that kind of utility which consists in multiplying the conveniences and luxuries of life, springing from theoretical and speculative inquiry. The history of algebra, so barren in the days of Tartaglia and Vieta, so productive of wealth, when applied to dynamical calculations in our own, may be a sufficient answer.

Bacon’s excess of wit. 79. One of the petty blemishes which, though lost in the splendour of Lord Bacon’s excellencies, it is not unfair to mention, is connected with the peculiar characteristics of his mind; he is sometimes too metaphorical and witty. His remarkable talent for discovering analogies seems to have inspired him with too much regard to them as arguments, even when they must appear to any common reader fanciful and far-fetched. His terminology, chiefly for the same reason, is often a little affected, and, in Latin, rather barbarous. The divisions of his prerogative instances in the Novum Organum are not always founded upon intelligible distinctions. And the general obscurity of the style, neither himself nor his assistants being good masters of the Latin language, which at the best is never flexible or copious enough for our philosophy, renders the perusal of both his great works too laborious for the impatient reader. Brucker has well observed that the Novum Organum has been neglected by the generality, and proved of far less service than it would otherwise have been in philosophy, in consequence of these very defects, as well as the real depths of the author’s mind.[216]

Fame of Bacon on the Continent. 80. What has been the fame of Bacon, “the wisest, greatest, of mankind,” it is needless to say. What has been his real influence over mankind, how much of our enlarged and exact knowledge may be attributed to his inductive method, what of this again has been due to a thorough study of his writings, and what to an indirect and secondary acquaintance with them, are questions of another kind, and less easily solved. Stewart, the philosopher who has dwelt most on the praises of Bacon, while he conceives him to have exercised a considerable influence over the English men of science in the seventeenth century, supposes, on the authority of Montucla, that he did not “command the general admiration of Europe,” till the publication of the preliminary discourse to the French Encyclopædia by Diderot and D’Alembert. This, however, is by much too precipitate a conclusion. He became almost immediately known on the continent. Gassendi was one of his most ardent admirers. Descartes mentions him, I believe, once only, in a letter to Mersenne, in 1632;[217] but he was of all men the most unwilling to praise a contemporary. It may be said that these were philosophers, and that their testimony does not imply the admiration of mankind. But writers of a very different character mention him in a familiar manner. Richelieu is said to have highly esteemed Lord Bacon.[218] And it may in some measure be due to this, that in the Sentimens de l’Académie Français sur le Cid, he is alluded to, simply by the name Bacon, as one well known.[219] Voiture, in a letter to Costar, about the same time, bestows high eulogy on some passages of Bacon which his correspondent had sent to him, and observes that Horace would have been astonished to hear a barbarian Briton discourse in such a style. The treatise De Augmentis was republished in France in 1624, the year after its appearance in England. It was translated into French as early as 1632; no great proofs of neglect. Editions came out in Holland, 1645, 1652, and 1662.[220] Even the Novum Organum, which, as has been said, never became so popular as his other writings, was thrice printed in Holland, in 1645, 1650, and 1660.[221] Leibnitz and Puffendorf are loud in their expressions of admiration, the former ascribing to him the revival of true philosophy as fully as we can at present.[222] I should be more inclined to doubt whether he were adequately valued by his countrymen in his own time, or in the immediately subsequent period. Under the first Stuarts, there was little taste among studious men but for theology, and chiefly for a theology which, proceeding with an extreme deference to authority, could not but generate a disposition of mind, even upon other subjects, alien to the progressive and inquisitive spirit of the inductive philosophy.[223] The institution of the Royal Society, or rather the love of physical science out of which that institution arose, in the second part of the seventeenth century, made England resound with the name of her illustrious chancellor. Few now spoke of him without a kind of homage that only the greatest men receive. Yet still, it was by natural philosophers alone that the writings of Bacon were much studied. The editions of his works, except the Essays, were few; the Novum Organum never came separately from the English press.[224] They were not even much quoted; for I believe it will be found that the fashion of referring to the brilliant passages of the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum, at least in books designed for the general reader, is not much older than the close of the last century. Scotland has the merit of having led the way; Reid, Stewart, Robison, and Playfair turned that which had been a blind veneration into a rational worship; and I should suspect that more have read Lord Bacon within these thirty years than in the two preceding centuries. It may be an usual consequence of the enthusiastic panegyrics lately poured upon his name, that a more positive efficacy has sometimes been attributed to his philosophical writings than they really possessed, and it might be asked whether Italy, where he was probably not much known, were not the true school of experimental philosophy in Europe, whether his methods of investigation were not chiefly such as men of sagacity and lovers of truth might simultaneously have devised. But, whatever may have been the case with respect to actual discoveries in science, we must give to written wisdom its proper meed; no books prior to those of Lord Bacon carried mankind so far on the road to truth; none have obtained so thorough a triumph over arrogant usurpation without seeking to substitute another; and he may be compared with those liberators of nations, who have given them laws by which they might govern themselves, and retained no homage but their gratitude.[225]

There is also an edition, without time or place, in the catalogue of the British Museum.

Sect. III.

On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Descartes.

Early life of Descartes. 81. René Descartes was born in 1596 of an ancient family in Touraine. An inquisitive curiosity into the nature and causes of all he saw is said to have distinguished his childhood, and this was certainly accompanied by an uncommon facility and clearness of apprehension. At a very early age he entered the college of the Jesuits at La Fleche, and passed through their entire course of literature and philosophy. It was now, at the age of sixteen, as he tells us, that he began to reflect, with little satisfaction, on his studies, finding his mind beset with error, and obliged to confess that he had learned nothing but the conviction of his ignorance. Yet he knew that he had been educated in a famous school, and that he was not deemed behind his contemporaries. The ethics, the logic, even the geometry of the ancients, did not fill his mind with that clear stream of truth, for which he was ever thirsting. On leaving La Fleche, the young Descartes mingled for some years in the world, and served as a volunteer both under Prince Maurice, and in the Imperial army. Yet during this period there were intervals when he withdrew himself wholly from society, and devoted his leisure to mathematical science. Some germs also of his peculiar philosophy were already ripening in his mind.

His beginning to philosophise. 82. Descartes was twenty-three years old when, passing a solitary winter in his quarters at Neuburg on the Danube, he began to resolve in his mind the futility of all existing systems of philosophy, and the discrepancy of opinions among the generality of mankind, which rendered it probable that no one had yet found out the road to real science. He determined, therefore, to set about the investigation of truth for himself, erasing from his mind all preconceived judgments, as having been hastily and precariously taken up. He laid down for his guidance a few fundamental rules of logic, such as to admit nothing as true which he did not clearly perceive, and to proceed from the simpler notions to the more complex, taking the method of geometers, by which they had gone so much farther than others, for the true art of reasoning. Commencing, therefore, with the mathematical sciences, and observing that, however different in their subjects, they treat properly of nothing but the relations of quantity, he fell, almost accidentally, as his words seem to import, on the great discovery that geometrical curves may be expressed algebraically.[226] This gave him more hope of success in applying his method to other parts of philosophy.

He retires to Holland. 83. Nine years more elapsed, during which Descartes, though he quitted military service, continued to observe mankind in various parts of Europe, still keeping his heart fixed on the great aim he had proposed to himself, but, as he confesses, without having framed the scheme of any philosophy beyond those of his contemporaries. He deemed his time of life immature for so stupendous a task. But at the age of thirty-three, with little notice to his friends, he quitted Paris, convinced that absolute retirement was indispensable for that rigorous investigation of first principles he now determined to institute, and retired into Holland. In this country he remained eight years so completely aloof from the distractions of the world, that he concealed his very place of residence, though preserving an intercourse of letters with many friends in France.

His publications. 84. In 1637 he broke upon the world with a volume containing the Discourse upon Method, the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry. It is only with the first that we are for the present concerned.[227] In this discourse, the most interesting perhaps of Descartes’ writings, on account of the picture of his life, and of the progress of his studies that it furnishes, we find the Cartesian metaphysics, which do not consist of many articles, almost as fully detailed as in any of his later works. In the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, published in Latin, 1641, these fundamental principles are laid down again more at length. He invited the criticism of philosophers on these famous Meditations. They did not refuse the challenge; and seven sets of objections, from as many different quarters, with seven replies from Descartes himself, are subjoined to the later editions of the Meditations. The Principles of Philosophy, published in Latin in 1644, contains what may be reckoned the final statement, which occupies most of the first book, written with uncommon conciseness and precision. The beauty of philosophical style which distinguished Descartes is never more seen than in this first book of the Principia, the translation of which was revised by Clerselier, an eminent friend of the author. It is a contrast at once to the elliptical brevity of Aristotle, who hints, or has been supposed to hint, the most important positions in a short clause, and to the verbose, figurative declamation of many modern metaphysicians. In this admirable perspicuity Descartes was imitated by his disciples Arnaud and Malebranche, especially the former. His unfinished posthumous treatise, the “Inquiry after Truth by Natural Reason,” is not carried farther than a partial development of the same leading principles of Cartesianism. There is consequently a great deal of apparent repetition in the works of Descartes, but such as on attentive consideration will show, not perhaps much real variance, but some new lights that had occurred to the author in the course of his reflections.[228]

He begins by doubting all. 85. In pursuing the examination of the first principles of knowledge, Descartes perceived not only that he had cause to doubt of the various opinions he had found current among men, from that very circumstance of their variety, but that the sources of all that he had received for truth themselves, namely, the senses, had afforded him no indisputable certainty. He began to recollect how often he had been misled by appearances, which had at first sight given no intimation of their fallacy, and asked himself in vain, by what infallible test he could discern the reality of external objects, or at least their conformity to his idea of them. The strong impressions made in sleep led him to inquire whether all he saw and felt might not be in a dream. It was true that there seemed to be some notions more elementary than the rest, such as extension, figure, duration, which could not be reckoned fallacious; nor could he avoid owning that, if there were not an existing triangle in the world, the angles of one conceived by the mind, though it were in sleep, must appear equal to two right angles. But even in this certitude of demonstration he soon found something deficient; to err in geometrical reasoning is not impossible: why might he not err in this; especially in a train of consequences, the particular terms of which are not at the same instant present to the mind. But above all, there might be a superior being, powerful enough and willing to deceive him. It was no kind of answer to treat this as improbable, or as an arbitrary hypothesis. He had laid down as a maxim that nothing could be received as truth which was not demonstrable, and in one place, rather hyperbolically, and indeed extravagantly in appearance, says that he made little difference between merely probable and false suppositions; meaning this, however, as we may presume, in the sense of geometers, who would say the same thing.

His first step in knowledge. 86. But, divesting himself thus of all belief in what the world deemed most unquestionable, plunged in an abyss, as it seemed for a time, he soon found his feet on a rock, from which he sprang upwards to an unclouded sun. Doubting all things, abandoning all things, he came to the question, what is it that doubts and denies? Something it must be; he might be deceived by a superior power, but it was he that was deceived. He felt his own existence; the proof of it was that he did feel it; that he had affirmed, that he now doubted, in a word, that he was a thinking substance. Cogito: Ergo sum—this famous enthymem of the Cartesian philosophy veiled in rather formal language, that which was to him, and must be to us all, the eternal basis of conviction, which no argument can strengthen, which no sophistry can impair, the consciousness of a self within, a percipient indivisible Ego.[229] The only proof of this is that it admits of no proof, that no man can pretend to doubt of his own existence with sincerity, or to express a doubt without absurd and inconsistent language.

His mind. 87. The scepticism of Descartes, it appears, which is merely provisional, is not at all similar to that of the Pyrrhonists, though some of his arguments may have been shafts from their quiver. |Not sceptical.| Nor did he make use, which is somewhat remarkable, of the reasonings afterwards employed by Berkley against the material world, though no one more frequently distinguished than Descartes between the objective reality, as it was then supposed to be, of ideas in the mind, and the external or sensible reality of things. Scepticism, in fact, was so far from being characteristic of his disposition, that his errors sprang chiefly from the opposite source, little as he was aware of it, from an undue positiveness in theories which he could not demonstrate, or even render highly probable.[230]

Beattie, in the essay on Truth, part ii. chap. 2, has made some unfounded criticisms on the scepticism of Descartes, and endeavours to turn into ridicule his, Cogito; ergo sum. Yet if any one should deny his own, or our existence, I do not see how we could refute him, were he worthy of refutation, but by some such language; and, in fact, it is what Beattie himself says, more paraphrastically, in answering Hume.

He arrives at more certainty. 88. The certainty of an existing Ego easily led him to that of the operations of the mind, called afterwards by Locke ideas of reflection, the believing, doubting, willing, loving, fearing, which he knew by consciousness, and indeed by means of which alone he knew that the Ego existed. He now proceeded a step farther; and reflecting on the simplest truths of arithmetic and geometry, saw that it was as impossible to doubt of them as of the acts of his mind. But as he had before tried to doubt even of these, on the hypothesis that he might be deceived by a superior intelligent power, he resolved to inquire whether such a power existed, and if it did, whether it could be a deceiver. The affirmative of the former, and the negative of the latter question Descartes established by that extremely subtle reasoning so much celebrated in the seventeenth century, but which has less frequently been deemed conclusive in later times. It is at least that which no man, not fitted by long practise for metaphysical researches, will pretend to embrace.

His proof of a Deity. 89. The substance of his argument was this. He found within himself the idea of a perfect Intelligence, eternal, infinite, necessary. This could not come from himself, nor from external things, because both were imperfect, and there could be no more in the effect than there is in the cause. And this idea requiring a cause, it could have none but an actual being, not a possible being, which is undistinguishable from mere non-entity. If, however, this should be denied, he inquires whether he, with this idea of God, could have existed by any other cause, if there were no God. Not, he argues, by himself; for, if he were the author of his own being, he would have given himself every perfection, in a word, would have been God. Not by his parents, for the same might be said of them, and so forth, if we remount to a series of productive beings. Besides this, as much power is required to preserve as to create, and the continuance of existence in the effect implies the continued operation of the cause.

Another proof of it. 90. With this argument, in itself sufficiently refined, Descartes blended another still more distant from common apprehension. Necessary existence is involved in the idea of God. All other beings are conceivable in their essence, as things possible; in God alone his essence and existence are inseparable. Existence is necessary to perfection; hence, a perfect being, or God, cannot be conceived without necessary existence. Though I do not know that I have misrepresented Descartes in this result of his very subtle argument, it is difficult not to treat it as a sophism. And it was always objected by his adversaries, that he inferred the necessity of the thing from the necessity of the idea, which was the very point in question. It seems impossible to vindicate many of his expressions, from which he never receded in the controversy to which his meditations gave rise. But the long habit of repeating in his mind the same series of reasonings gave Descartes, as it will always do, an inward assurance of their certainty, which could not be weakened by any objection. The former argument for the being of God, whether satisfactory or not, is to be distinguished from the present.[231]

I have made this extract from a very short tract, called Contemplatio Philosophica, by Brook Taylor, which I found in an unpublished memoir of his life printed by the late Sir William Young, in 1793. It bespeaks the clear and acute understanding of this celebrated philosopher, and appears to me an entire refutation of the scholastic argument of Descartes; one more fit for the Anselms and such dealers in words, from whom it came, than for himself.

His deductions from this. 91. From the idea of a perfect being, Descartes immediately deduced the truth of his belief in an external world, and in the inferences of his reason. For to deceive his creatures would be an imperfection in God; but God is perfect. Whatever, therefore, is clearly and distinctly apprehended by our reason, must be true. We have only to be on our guard against our own precipitancy and prejudice, or surrender of our reason to the authority of others. It is not by our understanding, such as God gave it to us, that we are deceived; but the exercise of our free will, a high prerogative of our nature, is often so incautious as to make us not discern truth from falsehood, and affirm or deny, by a voluntary act, that which we do not distinctly apprehend. The properties of quantity, founded on our ideas of extension and number, are distinctly perceived by our minds, and hence the sciences of arithmetic and geometry are certainly true. But when he turns his thoughts to the phenomena of external sensation, Descartes cannot wholly extricate himself from his original concession, the basis of his doubt, that the senses do sometimes deceive us. He endeavours to reconcile this with his own theory, which had built the certainty of all that we clearly hold certain on the perfect veracity of God.

Primary and secondary qualities. 92. It is in this inquiry that he reaches that important distinction between the primary and secondary properties of matter, the latter being modifications of the former, relative only to our apprehension, but not inherent in things, which, without being wholly new, contradicted the Aristotelian theories of the schools;[232] and he remarked that we are never, strictly speaking, deceived by our senses, but by the inferences which we draw from them.

93. Such is nearly the substance, exclusive of a great variety of more or less episodical theories, of the three metaphysical works of Descartes, the history of the soul’s progress from opinion to doubt, and from doubt to certainty. Few would dispute, at the present day, that he has destroyed too much of his foundations to render his superstructure stable; and to readers averse from metaphysical reflection, he must seem little else than an idle theorist, weaving cobwebs for pastime which common sense sweeps away. It is fair, however, to observe, that no one was more careful than Descartes to guard against any practical scepticism in the affairs of life. He even goes so far as to maintain, that a man having adopted any practical opinion on such grounds as seem probable should pursue it with as much steadiness as if it were founded on demonstration; observing, however, as a general rule, to choose the most moderate opinions among those which he should find current in his own country.[233]

Objections made to his Meditations. 94. The objections adduced against the Meditations are in a series of seven. The first are by a theologian named Caterus, the second by Mersenne, the third by Hobbes, the fourth by Arnauld, the fifth by Gassendi, the sixth by some anonymous writers, the seventh by a Jesuit of the name of Bourdin. To all of these Descartes replied with spirit and acuteness. By far the most important controversy was with Gassendi, whose objections were stated more briefly, and I think with less skill, by Hobbes. It was the first trumpet in the new philosophy of an ancient war between the sensual and ideal schools of psychology. Descartes had revived, and placed in a clearer light, the doctrine of mind, as not absolutely dependent upon the senses, nor of the same nature as their objects. Stewart does not acknowledge him as the first teacher of the soul’s immateriality. “That many of the schoolmen, and that the wisest of the ancient philosophers, when they described the mind as a spirit, or as a spark of celestial fire, employed these expressions, not with any intention to materialize its essence, but merely from want of more unexceptionable language, might be shown with demonstrative evidence, if this were the proper place for entering into the discussion.”[234] But though it cannot be said that Descartes was absolutely the first who maintained the strict immateriality of the soul, it is manifest to any one who has read his correspondence, that the tenet, instead of being general, as we are apt to presume, was by no means in accordance with the common opinion of his age. The fathers, with the exception, perhaps the single one, of Augustin, had taught the corporeity of the thinking substance. Arnauld seems to consider the doctrine of Descartes as almost a novelty in modern times. “What you have written concerning the distinction between the soul and body appears to me very clear, very evident, and quite divine; and as nothing is older than truth, I have had singular pleasure to see that almost the same things have formerly been very perspicuously and agreeably handled by St. Augustin in all his tenth book on the Trinity, but chiefly in the tenth chapter.”[235] But Arnauld himself, in his objections to the Meditations, had put it as at least questionable, whether that which thinks is not something extended, which, besides the usual properties of extended substances, such as mobility and figure, has also this particular virtue and power of thinking.[236] The reply of Descartes removed the difficulty of the illustrious Jansenist, who became an ardent and almost complete disciple of the new philosophy. In a placard against the Cartesian philosophy, printed in 1647, which seems to have come from Revius, professor of theology at Leyden, it is said: “As far as regards the nature of things, nothing seems to hinder but that the soul may be either a substance, or a mode of corporeal substance.”[237] And More, who had carried on a metaphysical correspondence with Descartes, whom he professed to admire, at least at that time, above all philosophers that had ever existed, without exception of his favourite Plato, extols him after his death in a letter to Clerselier, as having best established the foundations of religion. “For the peripatetics,” he says, “pretend that there are certain substantial forms emanating from matter, and so united to it that they cannot subsist without it, to which class these philosophers refer the souls of almost all living beings, even those to which they allow sensation and thought; while the Epicureans, on the other hand, who laugh at substantial forms, ascribe thought to matter itself, so that it is M. Descartes alone of all philosophers, who has at once banished from philosophy all these substantial forms or souls derived from matter, and absolutely divested matter itself of the faculty of feeling and thinking.”[238]

Theory of memory and imagination. 95. It must be owned that the firm belief of Descartes in the immateriality of the Ego or thinking principle, was accompanied with what in later times would have been deemed rather too great concessions to the materialists. He held the imagination and the memory to be portions of the brain, wherein the images of our sensations are bodily preserved; and even assigned such a motive force to the imagination, as to produce those involuntary actions which we often perform, and all the movements of brutes. “This explains how all the motions of all animals arise, though we grant them no knowledge of things, but only an imagination entirely corporeal, and how all those operations which do not require the concurrence of reason are produced in us.” But the whole of his notions as to the connexion of the soul and body, and indeed all his physiological theories, of which he was most enamoured, do little credit to the Cartesian philosophy. They are among those portions of his creed which have lain most open to ridicule, and which it would be useless for us to detail. He seems to have expected more advantage to psychology from anatomical researches than in that state of the science, or even probably in any future state of it, anatomy could afford. When asked once where was his library, he replied, showing a calf he was dissecting, This is my library.[239] His treatise on the passions, a subject so important in the philosophy of the human mind, is made up of crude hypotheses, or at best irrelevant observations, on their physical causes and concomitants.

Seat of soul in pineal gland. 96. It may be considered as a part of this syncretism, as we may call it, of the material and immaterial hypothesis, that Descartes fixed the seat of the soul in the conarion, or pineal gland, which he selected as the only part of the brain which is not double. By some mutual communication which he did not profess to explain, though later metaphysicians have attempted to do so, the unextended intelligence, thus confined to a certain spot, receives the sensations which are immediately produced through impressions on the substance of the brain. If he did not solve the problem, be it remembered that the problem has never since been solved. It was objected by a nameless correspondent, who signs himself Hyperaspistes, that the soul being incorporeal could not leave by its operations a trace on the brain, which his theory seemed to imply. Descartes answered, in rather a remarkable passage, that as to things purely intellectual, we do not, properly speaking, remember them at all, as they are equally original thoughts every time they present themselves to the mind, except that they are habitually joined as it were, and associated with certain names, which being bodily, make us remember them.[240]

Gassendi’s attacks on the Meditations. 97. If the orthodox of the age were not yet prepared for a doctrine which seemed so favourable at least to natural religion as the immateriality of the soul, it may be readily supposed, that Gassendi, like Hobbes, had imbibed too much of the Epicurean theory to acquiesce in the spiritualising principles of his adversary. In a sportive style, he addresses him, O anima! and Descartes, replying more angrily, retorts upon him the name O caro! which he frequently repeats. Though we may lament such unhappy efforts at wit in these great men, the names do not ill represent the spiritual and carnal philosophies; the school that produced Leibnitz, Kant, and Stewart, contrasted with that of Hobbes, Condillac, and Cabanis.

Superiority of Descartes. 98. It was a matter of course that the vulnerable passages of the six Meditations would not escape the spear of so skilful an antagonist as Gassendi. But many of his objections appear to be little more than cavils; and upon the whole, Descartes leaves me with the impression of his great superiority in metaphysical acuteness. It was indeed impossible that men should agree, who persisted in using a different definition of the important word, idea; and the same source of interminable controversy has flowed ever since for their disciples. Gassendi adopting the scholastic maxim, “Nothing is in the understanding, which has not been in the sense,” carried it so much farther than those from whom it came that he denied anything to be an idea but what was imagined by the mind. Descartes repeatedly desired both him and Hobbes, whose philosophy was built on the same notion, to remark that he meant by idea, whatever can be conceived by the understanding, though not capable of being represented by the imagination.[241] Thus we imagine a triangle, but we can only conceive a figure of a thousand sides; we know its existence, and can reason about its properties, but we have no image whatever in the mind, by which we can distinguish such a polygon from one of a smaller or greater number of sides. Hobbes, in answer to this, threw out a paradox which he has not, at least in so unlimited a manner, repeated, that by reason, that is, by the process of reasoning, we can infer nothing as to the nature of things, but only as to their names.[242] It is singular that a man conversant at least with the elements of geometry should have fallen into this error. For it does not appear that he meant to speak only of natural substances, as to which his language might seem to be a bad expression of what was afterwards clearly shown by Locke. That the understanding can conceive and reason upon that which the imagination cannot delineate, is evident not only from Descartes’ instance of a polygon, but more strikingly by the whole theory of infinites, which are certainly somewhat more than bare words, whatever assistance words may give us in explaining them to others or to ourselves.[243]

Stewart’s remarks on Descartes. 99. Dugald Stewart has justly dwelt on the signal service rendered by Descartes to psychological philosophy, by turning the mental vision inward upon itself, and accustoming us to watch the operations of our intellect, which, though employed upon ideas obtained through the senses, are as distinguishable from them as the workman from his work. He has given indeed to Descartes a very proud title, Father of the experimental philosophy of the human mind, as if he were to man what Bacon was to nature.[244] By patient observation of what passed within him, by holding his soul as it were an object in a microscope, which is the only process of a good metaphysician, he became habituated to throw away those integuments of sense which hide us from ourselves. Stewart has censured him for the paradox, as he calls it, that the essence of mind consists in thinking, and that of matter in extension. That the act of thinking is as inseparable from the mind as extension is from matter, cannot indeed be proved; since, as our thoughts are successive, it is not inconceivable that there may be intervals of duration between them; but it can hardly be reckoned a paradox. But whoever should be led by the word essence to suppose that Descartes confounded the percipient thinking substance, the Ego, upon whose bosom, like that of the ocean, the waves of perception are raised by every breeze of sense, with the perception itself, or even, what is scarcely more tenable, with the reflective action, or thought; that he anticipated this strange paradox of Hume in his earliest work, from which he silently withdrew in his Essays, would not only do great injustice to one of the acutest understandings that ever came to the subject, but overlook several clear assertions of the distinction, especially in his answer to Hobbes. “The thought,” he says, “differs from that which thinks, as the mode from the substance.”[245] And Stewart has in his earliest work justly corrected Reid in this point as to the Cartesian doctrine.[246]

Paradoxes of Descartes. 100. Several singular positions which have led to an undue depreciation of Descartes in general as a philosopher, occur in his metaphysical writings. Such was his denial of thought, and, as is commonly said, sensation to brutes, which he seems to have founded on the mechanism of the bodily organs, a cause sufficient, in his opinion, to explain all the phænomena of the motions of animals, and to obviate the difficulty of assigning to them immaterial souls;[247] his rejection of final causes in the explanation of nature, as far above our comprehension, and unnecessary to those who had the internal proof of God’s existence; his still more paradoxical tenet that the truth of geometrical theorems, and every other axiom of intuitive certainty, depended upon the will of God; a notion that seems to be a relic of his original scepticism, but which he pertinaciously defends throughout his letters.[248] From remarkable errors, men of original and independent genius are rarely exempt; Descartes had pulled down an edifice constructed by the labours of near two thousand years, with great reason in many respects, yet perhaps with too unlimited a disregard of his predecessors; it was his destiny, as it had been theirs, to be sometimes refuted and depreciated in his turn. But the single fact of his having first established, both in philosophical and popular belief, the immateriality of the soul, were we even to forget the other great accessions which he made to psychology, would declare the influence he has had on human opinion. From this immateriality, however, he did not derive the tenet of its immortality. He was justly contented to say that from the intrinsic difference between mind and body, the dissolution of the one could not necessarily take away the existence of the other, but that it was for God to determine whether it should continue to exist; and this determination, as he thought, could only be learned from his revealed will. The more powerful arguments, according to general apprehension, which reason affords for the sentient being of the soul after death, did not belong to the metaphysical philosophy of Descartes, and would never have been very satisfactory to his mind. He says, in one of his letters, that “laying aside what faith assures us of, he owns that it is more easy to make conjectures for our own advantage and entertain promising hopes, than to feel any confidence in their accomplishment.”[249]

His just notion of definitions. 101. Descartes was perhaps the first who saw that definitions of words, already as clear as they can be made, are nugatory or impenetrable. This alone would distinguish his philosophy from that of the Aristotelians, who had wearied and confused themselves for twenty centuries with unintelligible endeavours to grasp by definition what refuses to be defined. “Mr Locke,” says Stewart, “claims this improvement as entirely his own, but the merit of it unquestionably belongs to Descartes, although it must be owned that he has not always sufficiently attended to it in his researches.”[250] A still more decisive passage to this effect, than that referred to by Stewart in the Principia will be found in the posthumous dialogue on the Search after Truth. It is objected by one of the interlocutors, as it had actually been by Gassendi, that, to prove his existence by the act of thinking, he should first know what existence and what thought is. “I agree with you,” the representative of Descartes replies, “that it is necessary to know what doubt is, and what thought is, before we can be fully persuaded of this reasoning; I doubt, therefore I am, or what is the same, I think, therefore I am. But do not imagine that for this purpose you must torture your mind to find out the next genus, or the essential differences, as the logicians talk, and so compose a regular definition. Leave this to such as teach or dispute in the schools. But whoever will examine things by himself, and judge of them according to his understanding, cannot be so senseless as not to see clearly, when he pays attention, what doubting, thinking, being, are, and as to have any need to learn their distinctions. Besides, there are things which we render more obscure, in attempting to define them, because, as they are very simple and very clear, we cannot know and comprehend them better than by themselves. And it should be reckoned among the chief errors that can be committed in science for men to fancy that they can define that which they can only conceive, and distinguish what is clear in it from what is obscure, while they do not see the difference between that which must be defined before it is understood and that which can be fully known by itself. Now, among things which can thus be clearly known by themselves, we must put doubting, thinking, being. For I do not believe any one ever existed so stupid as to need to know what being is before he could affirm that he is; and it is the same of thought and doubt. Nor can he learn these things except by himself, nor be convinced of them but by his own experience, and by that consciousness and inward witness which every man finds in himself when he examines the subject. And as we should define whiteness in vain to a man who can see nothing, while one can open his eyes and see a white object requires no more, so to know what doubting is, and what thinking is, it is only necessary to doubt and to think.”[251] Nothing could more tend to cut short the verbal cavils of the schoolmen, than this limitation of their favourite exercise, definition. It is due, therefore, to Descartes, so often accused of appropriating the discoveries of others, that we should establish his right to one of the most important that the new logic has to boast.

His notion of substances. 102. He seems, at one moment, to have been on the point of taking another step very far in advance of his age. “Let us take,” he says, “a piece of wax from the honey-comb; it retains some taste and smell, it is hard, it is cold, it has a very marked colour, form, and size. Approach it to the fire; it becomes liquid, warm, inodorous, tasteless; its form and colour are changed, its size is increased. Does the same wax remain after these changes? It must be allowed that it does; no one doubts it, no one thinks otherwise. What was it then that we so distinctly knew to exist in this piece of wax? Nothing certainly that we observed by the senses, since all that the taste, the smell, the sight, the touch reported to us has disappeared, and still the same wax remains.” This something which endures under every change of sensible qualities cannot be imagined; for the imagination must represent some of these qualities, and none of them are essential to the thing; it can only be conceived by the understanding.[252]

Not quite correct. 103. It may seem almost surprising to us, after the writings of Locke and his followers on the one hand, and the chemist with his crucible on the other, have chased these abstract substances of material objects from their sanctuaries, that a man of such prodigious acuteness and intense reflection as Descartes should not have remarked that the identity of wax after its liquefaction is merely nominal, and depending on arbitrary language, which in many cases gives new appellations to the same aggregation of particles after a change of their sensible qualities; and that all we call substances are but aggregates of resisting moveable corpuscles, which by the laws of nature are capable of affecting our senses differently, according to the combinations they may enter into, and the changes they may successively undergo. But if he had distinctly seen this, which I do not apprehend that he did, it is not likely that he would have divulged the discovery. He had already given alarm to the jealous spirit of orthodoxy by what now appears to many so self-evident, that they have treated the supposed paradox as a trifling with words, the doctrine that colour, heat, smell, and other secondary qualities, or accidents of bodies, do not exist in them, but in our own minds, and are the effects of their intrinsic or primary qualities. It was the the tenet of the schools that these were sensible realities, inherent in bodies; and the church held as an article of faith, that the substance of bread being withdrawn from the consecrated wafer, the accidents of that substance remained as before, but independent, and not inherent in any other. Arnauld raised this objection, which Descartes endeavoured to repel by a new theory of transubstantiation; but it always left a shade of suspicion, in the Catholic church of Rome, on the orthodoxy of Cartesianism.

His notions of intuitive truth. 104. “The paramount and indisputable authority which, in all our reasonings concerning the human mind, he ascribes to the evidence of consciousness” is reckoned by Stewart among the great merits of Descartes. It is certain that there are truths which we know, as it is called, intuitively, that is, by the mind’s immediate inward glance. And reasoning would be interminable, if it did not find its ultimate limit in truths which it cannot prove. Gassendi imputed to Descartes, that, in his fundamental enthymem, Cogito, ergo sum, he supposed a knowledge of the major premise, Quod cogitat, est. But Descartes replied that it was a great error to believe that our knowledge of particular propositions must always be deduced from universals, according to the rules of logic; whereas, on the contrary, it is by means of our knowledge of particulars that we ascend to generals, though it is true that we descend again from them to infer other particular propositions.[253] It is probable that Gassendi did not make this objection very seriously.

105. Thus the logic of Descartes, using that word for principles that guide our reasoning, was an instrument of defence both against the captiousness of ordinary scepticism, that of the Pyrrhonic school, and against the disputatious dogmatism of those who professed to serve under the banner of Aristotle. He who reposes on his own consciousness, or who recurs to first principles of intuitive knowledge, though he cannot be said to silence his adversary, should have the good sense to be silent himself, which puts equally an end to debate. But so far as we are concerned with the investigation of truth, the Cartesian appeal to our own consciousness, of which Stewart was very fond, just as it is in principle, may end in an assumption of our own prejudices as the standard of belief. Nothing can be truly self-evident, but that which a clear, an honest, and an experienced understanding in another man acknowledges to be so.

Treatise on art of logic. 106. Descartes has left a treatise highly valuable, but not very much known, on the art of logic, or rules for the conduct of the understanding.[254] Once only, in a letter, he has alluded to the name of Bacon.[255] There are perhaps a few passages in this short tract that remind us of the Novum Organum. But I do not know that the coincidence is such as to warrant a suspicion that he was indebted to it; we may reckon it rather a parallel, than a derivative logic; written in the same spirit of cautious, inductive procedure, less brilliant and original in its inventions, but of more general application than the Novum Organum, which is with some difficulty extended beyond the province of natural philosophy. Descartes is as averse as Bacon to syllogistic forms. “Truth,” he says, “often escapes from these fetters, in which those who employ them remain entangled. This is less frequently the case with those who make no use of logic, experience showing that the most subtle of sophisms cheat none but sophists themselves, not those who trust to their natural reason. And to convince ourselves how little this syllogistic art serves towards the discovery of truth, we may remark that the logicians can form no syllogism with a true conclusion, unless they are already acquainted with the truth that the syllogism develops. Hence it follows that the vulgar logic is wholly useless to him who would discover truth for himself, though it may assist in explaining to others the truth he already knows, and that it would be better to transfer it as a science from philosophy to rhetoric.”[256]

Merits of his writings. 107. It would occupy too much space to point out the many profound and striking thoughts which this treatise on the conduct of the understanding, and indeed most of the writings of Descartes contain. “The greater part of the questions on which the learned dispute are but questions of words. These occur so frequently that, if philosophers would agree on the signification of their words, scarce any of their controversies would remain.” This has been continually said since; but it is a proof of some progress in wisdom, when the original thought of one age becomes the truism of the next. No one had been so much on his guard against the equivocation of words, or knew so well their relation to the operations of the mind. And it may be said, generally, though not without exception of the metaphysical writings of Descartes, that we find in them a perspicuity which springs from his unremitting attention to the logical process of inquiry, admitting no doubtful or ambiguous position, and never requiring from his reader a deference to any authority but that of demonstration. It is a great advantage in reading such writers that we are able to discern when they are manifestly in the wrong. The sophisms of Plato, of Aristotle, of the schoolmen, and of a great many recent metaphysicians, are disguised by their obscurity; and while they creep insidiously into the mind of the reader, are always denied and explained away by partial disciples.

His notions of free will. 108. Stewart has praised Descartes for having recourse to the evidence of consciousness in order to prove the liberty of the will. But he omits to tell us that the notions entertained by this philosopher were not such as have been generally thought compatible with free agency in the only sense that admits of controversy. It was an essential part of the theory of Descartes that God is the cause of all human actions. “Before God sent us into the world,” he says in a letter, “he knew exactly what all the inclinations of our will would be; it is he that has implanted them in us; it is he also that has disposed all other things, so that such or such objects should present themselves to us at such or such times, by means of which he has known that our free will would determine us to such or such actions, and he has willed that it should be so; but he has not willed to compel us thereto.”[257] “We could not demonstrate,” he says at another time, “that God exists, except by considering him as a being absolutely perfect; and he could not be absolutely perfect, if there could happen anything in the world which did not spring entirely from him.... Mere philosophy is enough to make us know that there cannot enter the least thought into the mind of man, but God must will and have willed from all eternity that it should enter there.”[258] This is in a letter to his highly intelligent friend, the princess Palatine Elizabeth, granddaughter of James I.; and he proceeds to declare himself strongly in favour of predestination, denying wholly any particular providence, to which she had alluded, as changing the decrees of God, and all efficacy of prayer, except as one link in the chain of his determinations. Descartes, therefore, whatever some of his disciples may have become, was far enough from an Arminian theology. “As to free will,” he says elsewhere, “I own that thinking only of ourselves we cannot but reckon it independent, but when we think of the infinite power of God we cannot but believe that all things depend on him, and that consequently our free will must do so too.... But since our knowledge of the existence of God should not hinder us from being assured of our free will, because we feel and are conscious of it in ourselves, so that if our free will should not make us doubt of the existence of God. For the independence which we experience and feel in ourselves, and which is sufficient to make our actions praiseworthy or blameable, is not incompatible with a dependence of another nature, according to which all things are subject to God.”[259]

Fame of his system and attacks upon it. 109. A system so novel, so attractive to the imagination by its bold and brilliant paradoxes as that of Descartes, could not but excite the attention of an age already roused to the desire of a new philosophy, and to the scorn of ancient authority. His first treatises appeared in French; and, though he afterwards employed Latin, his works were very soon translated by his disciples, and under his own care. He wrote in Latin with great perspicuity; in French with liveliness and elegance. His mathematical and optical writings gave him a reputation which envy could not take away, and secured his philosophy from that general ridicule which sometimes overwhelms an obscure author. His very enemies, numerous and vehement as they were, served to enhance the celebrity of the Cartesian system, which he seems to have anticipated by publishing their objections to his Meditations with his own replies. In the universities, bigoted for the most part to Aristotelian authority, he had no chance of public reception; but the influence of the universities was much diminished in France, and a new theory had perhaps better chances in its favour on account of their opposition. But the Jesuits, a more powerful body, were in general adverse to the Cartesian system, and especially some time afterwards, when it was supposed to have the countenance of several leading Jansenists. The Epicurean school, led by Gassendi and Hobbes, presented a formidable phalanx; since it in fact comprehended the wits of the world, the men of indolence and sensuality, quick to discern the many weaknesses of Cartesianism, with no capacity for its excellencies. It is unnecessary to say, how predominant this class was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in France and England.

Controversy with Voet. 110. Descartes was evidently in considerable alarm lest the church should bear with its weight upon his philosophy.[260] He had the censure on Galileo before his eyes, and certainly used some chicane of words as to the earth’s movement upon this account. It was, however, in the Protestant country, which he had chosen as his harbour of refuge, that he was doomed to encounter the roughest storm. Gisbert Voet, an eminent theologian in the university of Utrecht, and the head of the party in the church of Holland, which had been victorious in the synod of Dort, attacked Descartes with all the virulence and bigotry characteristic of his school of divinity. The famous demonstration of the being of God he asserted to be a cover for atheism, and thus excited a flame of controversy, Descartes being not without supporters in the university, especially Regius, professor of medicine. The philosopher was induced by these assaults to change his residence from a town in the province of Utrecht to Leyden. Voet did not cease to pursue him with outrageous calumny, and succeeded in obtaining decrees of the senate and university, which interdicted Regius from teaching that “new and unproved (præsumpta) philosophy” to his pupils. The war of libels on the Voetian side did not cease for some years, and Descartes replied with no small acrimony against Voet himself. The latter had recourse to the civil power, and instituted a prosecution against Descartes, which was quashed by the interference of the prince of Orange. But many in the university of Leyden, under the influence of a notable theologian of that age, named Triglandius, one of the stoutest champions of Dutch orthodoxy, raised a cry against the Cartesian philosophy as being favourable to Pelagianism and popery, the worst names that could be given in Holland; and it was again through the protection of the prince of Orange that he escaped a public censure. Regius, the most zealous of his original advocates, began to swerve from the fidelity of a sworn disciple, and published a book containing some theories of his own, which Descartes thought himself obliged to disavow. Ultimately he found, like many benefactors of mankind, that he had purchased reputation at the cost of peace; and, after some visits to France, where, probably from the same cause, he never designed to settle, found an honourable asylum and a premature death at the court of Christina. He died in 1651, having worked a more important change in speculative philosophy than any who had preceded him since the revival of learning; for there could be no comparison, in that age, between the celebrity and effect of his writings and those of Lord Bacon. The latter had few avowed enemies, till it was too late to avow enmity.[261]

Charges of plagiarism. 111. The prejudice against Descartes, especially in his own country, was aggravated by his indiscreet and not very warrantable assumption of perfect originality.[262] No one, I think, can fairly refuse to own, that the Cartesian metaphysics, taken in their consecutive arrangement, form truly an original system; and it would be equally unjust to deny the splendid discoveries he developed in algebra and optics. But upon every one subject which Descartes treated, he has not escaped the charge of plagiarism; professing always to be ignorant of what had been done by others, he falls perpetually into their track; more, as his adversaries maintained, than the chances of coincidence could fairly explain. Leibnitz has summed up the claims of earlier writers to the pretended discoveries of Descartes; and certainly it is a pretty long bill to be presented to any author. I shall insert this passage in a note, though much of it has no reference to this portion of the Cartesian philosophy.[263] It may perhaps be thought by candid minds, that we cannot apply the doctrine of chances to coincidence of reasoning in men of acute and inquisitive spirits, as fairly as we may to that of style or imagery; but, if we hold strictly that the older writer may claim the exclusive praise of the philosophical discovery, we must regret to see such a multitude of feathers plucked from the wing of an eagle.

Recent increase of his fame. 112. The name of Descartes as a great metaphysical writer has revived in some measure of late years; and this has been chiefly owing, among ourselves, to Dugald Stewart; in France, to the growing disposition of their philosophers to cast away their idols of the eighteenth century. “I am disposed,” says our Scottish philosopher, “to date the origin of the true philosophy of mind from the Principia (why not the earlier works?) of Descartes, rather than from the Organum of Bacon, or the Essays of Locke; without, however, meaning to compare the French author with our two countrymen, either as a contributor to our stock of facts relating to the intellectual phænomena, or as the author of any important conclusion concerning the general laws to which they may be referred.” The excellent edition by M. Cousin, in which alone the entire works of Descartes can be found, is a homage that France has recently offered to his memory, and an important contribution to the studious both of metaphysical and mathematical philosophy. I have made use of no other, though it might be desirable for the inquirer to have the Latin original at his side, especially in those works which have not been seen in French by their author.

Sect. IV.

On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Hobbes.

Metaphysical treatise of Hobbes. 113. The metaphysical philosophy of Hobbes was promulgated in his treatise on Human Nature, which appeared in 1650. This, with his other works, De Cive, and De Corpore Politico, were fused into that great and general system, which he published in 1651 with the title of Leviathan. The first part of the Leviathan, “Of Man,” follows the several chapters of the treatise on Human Nature with much regularity; but so numerous are the enlargements or omissions, so great is the variance with which the author has expressed the same positions, that they should much rather be considered as two works, than as two editions of the same. They differ more than Lord Bacon’s treatise, De Augmentis Scientiarum, does from his Advancement of Learning. I shall, however, blend the two in a single analysis, and this I shall generally give, as far as is possible, consistently with my own limits, in the very words of Hobbes. His language is so lucid and concise, that it would be almost as improper to put an algebraical process in different terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs. But, as a certain degree of abridgment cannot be dispensed with, the reader must not take it for granted, even where inverted commas denote a closer attention to the text, that nothing is omitted, although, in such cases, I never hold it permissible to make any change.

His theory of sensation. 114. All single thoughts, it is the primary tenet of Hobbes, are representations or appearances of some quality of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. “There is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.”[264] In the treatise on Human Nature he dwells long on the immediate causes of sensation; and if no alteration had been made in his manuscript since he wrote his dedication to the Earl of Newcastle in 1640, he must be owned to have anticipated Descartes in one of his most celebrated doctrines. |Coincident with Descartes.| “Because the image in vision, consisting in colour and shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that sense, it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion, that the same colour and shape are the very qualities themselves; and for the same, cause, that sound and noise are the qualities of the bell, or of the air. And this opinion hath been so long received, that the contrary must needs appear a great paradox; and yet the introduction of species visible and intelligible (which is necessary for the maintenance of that opinion), passing to and fro from the object, is worse than any paradox, as being a plain impossibility. I shall, therefore, endeavour to make plain these points: 1. That the subject wherein colour and image are inherent, is not the object or thing seen. 2. That there is nothing without us (really) which we call an image or colour. 3. That the said image or colour is but an apposition unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some external substance of the head. 4. That, as in vision, so also in conceptions that arise from the other senses, the subject of their inherence is not the object, but the sentiment.”[265] And this he goes on to prove. Nothing of this will be found in the Discours sur la Méthode, the only work of Descartes then published; and, even if we believe Hobbes to have interpolated this chapter after he had read the Meditations, he has stated the principle so clearly and illustrated it so copiously, that, so far especially as Locke and the English metaphysicians took it up, we may almost reckon him another original source.

Imagination and memory. 115. The second chapter of the Leviathan, “On Imagination,” begins with one of those acute and original observations we often find in Hobbes: “That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat stay it, though the reason be the same, namely, that nothing can change itself, is not so easily assented to. For men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves; and because they find themselves subject after motion to pain and lassitude, think everything else grows weary of motion and seeks repose of its own accord.” The physical principle had lately been established, but the reason here given for the contrary prejudice, though not the sole one, is ingenious and even true. Imagination he defines to be “conception remaining, and by little and little decaying after the act of sense.”[266] This he afterwards expressed less happily, “the gradual decline of the motion in which sense consists;” his phraseology becoming more and more tinctured with the materialism he affected in all his philosophy. Neither definition seems at all applicable to the imagination which calls up long past perceptions. “This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, but when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old and past, it is called memory. So that, imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.”[267] It is, however, evident that imagination and memory are distinguished by something more than their names. The second fundamental error of Hobbes in his metaphysics, his extravagant nominalism, if so it should be called, appears in this sentence, as the first, his materialism, does in that previously quoted.