Part 23

The question of morals to Malebranche is the question how these _natural inclinations_ are related to the particular passions. Sensation and passion arise out of the connexion of body and soul, and their use is only to urge us to attend to the wants of the former. We can scarcely hear without a smile the simple monastic legend which Malebranche weaves together about the original nature of the passions and their alteration by the Fall. "It is visibly a disorder that a spirit capable of knowing and loving God should be obliged to occupy itself with the needs of the body." "A being altogether occupied with what passes in his body and with the infinity of objects that surround it cannot be thinking on the things that are truly good."[27] Hence the necessity of an immediate and instinctive warning from the senses in regard to the relations of things to our organism, and also of pains and pleasures which may induce us to attend to this warning. "Sensible pleasure is the mark that nature has attached to the use of certain things in order that without having the trouble of examining them by reason, we may employ them for the preservation of the body, but not in order that we may love them."[28] Till the Fall the mind was merely united to the body, not subjected to it, and the influence of these pleasures and pains was only such as to make men attend to their bodily wants, but not to occupy the mind, or fill it with sensuous joys and sorrows, or trouble its contemplation of that which is really good. Our moral aim should therefore be to restore this state of things, to weaken our union with the body and strengthen our union with God. And to encourage us in pursuing this aim we have to remember that union with God is natural to the spirit, and that, while even the condition of union with the body is artificial, the condition of subjection to the body is wholly unnatural to it. Our primary tendency is towards the supreme good, and we only love the objects of our passions in so far as we "determine towards particular, and therefore false goods, the love that God gives us for himself." The search for happiness is really the search for God in disguise, and even the levity and inconstancy with which men rush from one finite good to another, is a proof that they were made for the infinite. Furthermore, this natural love of God, or inclination for good in general, "gives us the power of suspending our consent in regard to those particular goods which do not satisfy it."[29] If we refuse to be led by the obscure and confused voice of instinctive feeling, which arises from and always tends to confirm our union with the body, and wait for the light of reason which arises from and always tends to confirm our union with God, we have done all that is in our power, the rest is God's work. "If we only judge precisely of that which we see clearly, we shall never be deceived. For then it will not be we that judge, but the universal reason that judges in us."[30] And as our love, even of particular goods, is a confused love of the supreme good, so the clear vision of God inevitably brings with it the love of him. "We needs must love the highest when we see it." When it is the divine reason that speaks in us it is the divine love that moves us, "the same love wherewith God loves himself and the things he has made."[31]

The general result of the ethics of Malebranche is ascetic. The passions, like the senses, have no relation to the higher life of the soul; their value is only in relation to the union of soul and body, a union which is purely accidental or due to the arbitrary will of God. The more silently they discharge their provisional function, and the less they disturb or interfere with the pure activity of spirit, the more nearly they approach to the only perfection that is possible for them. Their ideal state is to remain or become again simple instincts that act mechanically like the circulation of the blood. Universal light of reason casts no ray into the obscurity of sense; its universal love cannot embrace any of the objects of particular passion. It is indeed recognized by Malebranche that sensation in man is mixed with thought, that the passions in him are forms of the love of good in general. But this union of the rational with the sensuous nature is regarded merely as a confusion which is to be cleared up, _not_ in a higher unity of the two elements, but simply by the withdrawal of the spirit from contact with that which darkens and defiles it. Of a transformation of sense into thought, of passion into duty--an elevation of the life of sense till it becomes the embodiment and expression of the life of reason--Malebranche has no conception. Hence the life of reason turns with him to mysticism in theory and to asceticism in practice. His universal is abstract and opposed to the

## particular; instead of explaining it, it explains it away.

A certain tender beauty as of twilight is spread over the world as we view it through the eyes of this cloistered philosopher, and we do not at first see that the softness and ideality of the picture is due to the gathering darkness. Abstraction seems only to be purifying, and not destroying, till it has done its perfect work. Malebranche conceived himself to be presenting to the world only the purest and most refined expression of Christian ethics and theology. But if we obey his own continual advice to think clearly and distinctly, if we divest his system of all the sensuous and imaginative forms in which he has clothed it, and reduce it to the naked simplicity of its central thought, what we find is not a God that reveals himself in the finite, and to the finite, but the absolute substance which has no revelation, and whose existence is the negation of all but itself. Thus to tear away the veil, however, there was needed a stronger, simpler, and freer spirit--a spirit less influenced by opinion, less inclined to practical compromise, and gifted with a stronger "faith in the whispers of the lonely muse" of speculation than Malebranche.

_The Philosophy of Spinoza._--It is a remark of Hegel's that Spinoza, as a Jew, first brought into European thought the idea of an absolute unity in which the difference of finite and infinite is lost. Some later writers have gone further, and attempted to show that the main doctrines by which his philosophy is distinguished from that of Descartes were due to the direct influences of Jewish writers like Maimonides, Gersonides, and Hasdai Crescas, rather than to the necessary development of Cartesian ideas. And it is undoubtedly true that many points of similarity with such writers, reaching down even to verbal coincidence, may be detected in the works of Spinoza, although it is not so easy to determine how much he owed to their teaching. His own view of his obligations is sufficiently indicated by the fact, that while in his ethics he carries on a continual polemic against Descartes, and strives at every point to show that his own doctrines are legitimately derived from Cartesian principles, he only once refers to Jewish philosophy as containing an obscure and unreasoned anticipation of these doctrines. "Quod quidam Hebraeorum quasi per nebulam vidisse videntur qui scilicet statuunt Deum Dei intellectum resque ab ipso intellectas unum et idem esse."[32] It may be that the undeveloped pantheism and rationalism of the Jewish philosophers had a deeper influence than he himself was aware of, in emancipating him from the traditions of the synagogue, and giving to his mind its first philosophical bias. In his earlier work there are Neoplatonic ideas and expressions which in the _Ethics_ are rejected or remoulded into a form more suitable to the spirit of Cartesianism. But the question, after all, has little more than a biographical interest. In the Spinozistic philosophy there are few differences from Descartes which cannot be traced to the necessary development of Cartesian principles; and the comparison of Malebranche shows that a similar development might take place under the most diverse intellectual conditions. What is most remarkable in Spinoza is just the freedom and security with which these principles are followed out to their last result. His Jewish origin and his breach with Judaism completely isolated him from every influence but that of the thought that possesses him. And no scruple or hesitation, no respect for the institutions or feelings of his time interferes with his speculative consequence. He exhibits to us the almost perfect type of a mind without superstitions, which has freed itself from all but reasoned and intelligent convictions, or, in the Cartesian phrase, "clear and distinct ideas"; and when he fails, it is not by any inconsistency, or arbitrary stopping short of the necessary conclusions of his logic, but by the essential defect of his principles.

Geometrical method applied to metaphysics.

Spinoza takes his idea of method from mathematics, and after the manner of Euclid, places at the head of each book of his _Ethics_ a certain number of definitions, axioms, and postulates which are supposed to be intuitively certain, and to form a sufficient basis for all that follows. Altogether there are twenty-seven definitions, twenty axioms, and eight postulates. If Spinoza is regarded as the most consequent of philosophers it cannot be because he has based his system upon so many fragmentary views of truth; it must be because a deeper unity has been discerned in the system than is visible on the first aspect of it. We must, therefore, to a certain extent distinguish between the form and the matter of his thought, though it is also true that the defective form itself involves a defect in the matter.

What in the first instance recommends the geometrical method to Spinoza is, not only its apparent exactness and the necessity of its sequence, but, so to speak, its disinterestedness. Confusion of thought arises from the fact that we put ourselves, our desires and feelings and interests, into our view of things; that we do not regard them as they are in themselves, in their essential nature, but look for some final cause, that is, some relation to ourselves by which they may be explained. For this reason, he says, "the truth might for ever have remained hid from the human race, if mathematics, which looks not to the final cause of figures, but to their essential nature and the properties involved in it, had not set another type of knowledge before them." To understand things is to see how all that is true of them flows from the clear and distinct idea expressed in their definition, and ultimately, it is to see how all truth flows from the _essentia Dei_ as all geometrical truth flows from the idea of quantity. To take a mathematical view of the universe, therefore, is to raise ourselves above all consideration of the end or tendency of things, above the fears and hopes of mortality into the region of truth and necessity. "When I turned my mind to this subject," he says in the beginning of his treatise on politics, "I did not propose to myself any novel or strange aim, but simply to demonstrate by certain and indubitable reason those things which agree best with practice. And in order that I might inquire into the matters of this science with the same freedom of mind with which we are wont to treat lines and surfaces in mathematics, I determined not to laugh or to weep over the actions of men, but simply to understand them; and to contemplate their affections and passions, such as love, hate, anger, envy, arrogance, pity and all other disturbances of soul not as vices of human nature, but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder pertain to the nature of the atmosphere. For these, though troublesome, are yet necessary, and have certain causes through which we may come to understand them, and thus, by contemplating them in their truth, gain for our minds as much joy as by the knowledge of things that are pleasing to the senses." All our errors as to the nature of things arise from our judging them from the point of view of the part and not of the whole, from appoint of view determined by their relation to our own individual being, and not from a point of view determined by the nature of the things themselves; or, to put the same thing in another way, from the point of view of sense and imagination, and not from the point of view of intelligence. Mathematics shows us the inadequacy of such knowledge when it takes us out of ourselves into things, and when it presents these things to us as objects of universal intelligence apart from all special relation to our individual feelings. And Spinoza only wishes that the same universality and freedom of thought which belongs to mathematics, because its objects _do not_ interest the passions, should be extended to those objects that _do_ interest them. Purity from interest is the first condition of the philosopher's being; he must get beyond the illusion of sense and passion that makes our own lives so supremely important and interesting to us simply because they are our own. He must look at the present as it were through an inverted telescope of reason, that will reduce it to its due proportion and place in the sum of things. To the heat of passion and the higher heat of imagination, Spinoza has only one advice--"Acquaint yourself with God and be at peace." Look not to the particular but to the universal, view things not under the form of the finite and temporal, but _sub quadam specie aeternitatis._

Sense the source of error.

The illusion of the finite--the illusion of sense, imagination and passion, which, in Bacon's language, tends to make men judge of things _ex analogia hominis_ and not _ex analogia universi_, which raises the individual life, and even the present moment of the individual life, with its passing feelings, into the standard for measuring the universe--this, in the eyes of Spinoza, is the source of all error and evil to man. On the other hand, his highest good is to live the universal life of reason, or what is the same thing, to view all things from their centre in God, and to be moved only by the passion for good in general, "the intellectual love of God." In the treatise _De Emendatione Intellectus_, Spinoza takes up this contrast in the first instance from its moral side. "All our felicity or infelicity is founded on the nature of the object to which we are joined by love." To love the things that perish is to be in continual trouble and disturbance of passion; it is to be full of envy and hatred towards others who possess them; it is to be ever striving after that which, when we attain it, does not satisfy us; or lamenting over the loss of that which inevitably passes away from us; only "love to an object that is infinite and eternal feeds the soul with a changeless and unmingled joy." But again our love rests upon our knowledge; if we saw things as they really are we should love only the highest object. It is because sense and imagination give to the finite an independence and substantiality that do not belong to it, that we waste our love upon it as if it were infinite. And as the first step towards truth is to understand our error, so Spinoza proceeds to explain the defects of common sense, or in other words, of that first and unreflected view of the world which he, like Plato, calls opinion. Opinion is a kind of knowledge derived partly from hearsay, and partly from _experientia vaga_. It consists of vague and general conceptions of things, got either from the report of others or from an experience which has not received any special direction from intelligence. The mind that has not got beyond the stage of opinion takes things as they present themselves in its individual experience; and its beliefs grow up by association of whatever happens to have been found together in that experience. And as the combining principle of the elements of opinion is individual and not universal, so its conception of the world is at once fragmentary and accidental. It does not see things in their connexion with the unity of the whole, and hence it cannot see them in their true relation to each other. "I assert expressly," says Spinoza, "that the mind has no adequate conception either of itself or of external things, but only a confused knowledge of them, so long as it perceives them only in the common order of nature, i.e. so long as it is _externally determined_ to contemplate this or that object by the accidental concourse of things, and so long as it is not _internally_ determined by the unity of thought in which it considers a number of things to understand their agreements, differences and contradictions."[33]

Vices of abstraction and imagination.

There are two kinds of errors which are usually supposed to exclude each other, but which Spinoza finds to be united in opinion. These are the errors of abstraction and imagination; the former explains its vice by defect, the latter its vice by excess. On the one hand, opinion is abstract and one-sided; it is defective in knowledge and takes hold of things only at one point. On the other hand, and just because of this abstractness and one-sidedness, it is forced to give an artificial completeness and independence to that which is essentially fragmentary and dependent. The word "abstract" is misleading, in so far as we are wont to associate with abstraction the idea of a mental effort by which parts are separated from a given whole; but it may be applied without violence to any imperfect conception, in which things that are really elements of a greater whole are treated as if they were _res completae_, independent objects, complete in themselves. And in this sense the ordinary consciousness of man is often the victim of abstractions when it supposes itself most of all to be dealing with realities. The essences and substances of the schoolman may delude him, but he cannot think these notions clearly without seeing that they are only abstract elements of reality, and that they have a meaning only in relation to the other elements of it. But common sense remains unconscious of its abstractness because imagination gives a kind of substantiality to the fragmentary and limited, and so makes it possible to conceive it as an independent reality. Pure intelligence seeing the part as it is in itself could never see it but as a part. Thought, when it rises to clearness and distinctness in regard to any finite object, must at once discern its relation to other finite objects and to the whole,--must discern, in Spinozistic language, that it is "modal" and not "real." But though it is not possible to _think_ the part as a whole it is possible to picture it as a whole. The limited image that fills the mind's eye seems to need nothing else for its reality. We cannot think a house clearly and distinctly in all the connexion of its parts with each other without seeing its necessary relation to the earth on which it stands, to the pressure of the atmosphere, &c. The very circumstances by which the possibility of such an existence is explained make it impossible to conceive it apart from other things. But nothing hinders me from resting on a house as a complete picture by itself. Imagination represents things in the externality of space and time, and is subjected to no other conditions but those of space and time. Hence it can begin anywhere and stop anywhere. For the same cause it can mingle and confuse together all manner of inconsistent forms--can imagine a man with a horse's head, a candle blazing in vacuo, a speaking tree, a man changed into an animal. There may be elements in the nature of these things that would prevent such combinations; but these elements are not necessarily present to the ordinary consciousness, the abstractness of whose conceptions leaves it absolutely at the mercy of imagination or accidental association. To thought in this stage anything is possible that can be pictured. On the other hand, as knowledge advances, this freedom of combination becomes limited, "the less the mind understands and the more it perceives the greater is its power of fiction, and the more it understands the narrower is the limitation of that power. For just as in the moment of consciousness we cannot imagine that we do not think, so after we have apprehended the nature of body we cannot conceive of a fly of infinite size, and after we know the nature of a soul we cannot think of it as a square, though we may use the words that express these ideas."[34] Thus, according to Spinoza, the range of possibility narrows as knowledge widens, until to perfected knowledge posibility is lost in necessity.

Insufficiency of the individual.