Cartesianism

“ It is interesting to observe how, here also, the positive science of the age had a large share in determining its philosophic character. Founded on the discovery of the earth’s true shape, Aristotle’s metaphysics had been overthrown by the discovery of the earth’s motion. And now the claims of Cartesianism to have furnished an exact knowledge of matter and a definition of it whence all the facts of observation could be deduced à priori, were summarily refuted by the discovery421 of universal gravitation. ”

“ It is perhaps exceptional that a teacher at a University of Protestant Northern Europe has been under the influence of Cartesianism, but it is highly commendable that he openly confesses his change of opinion because the facts under observation demonstrate its erroneousness. ”

“ This absolute separation of Form and Matter, under their new names of Thought and Extension, once grasped, various principles of Cartesianism will follow from it by logical necessity. First comes the exclusion of final causes from philosophy, or rather from Nature. There was not, as with Epicurus, any anti-theological feeling concerned in their rejection. With Aristotle, against whom Descartes is always protesting, the final cause was not a mark of designing intelligence imposed on Matter from without ”

“ In France Cartesianism won society and literature before it penetrated into the universities. Clerselier (the friend of Descartes and his literary executor) , his son-in-law Rohault (who achieved that relationship through his Cartesianism) , and others, opened their houses for readings to France.which the intellectual world of Paris—its learned professors not more than the courtiers and the fair sex,—flocked to hear the new doctrines explained, and possibly discuss their value. ”

“ Locke, when Cartesianism had raised the problem of the contents of consciousness, and the spirit of Baconian positivism could not accept of anything that bore the ill-omened name of innate ideas, elaborated a theory of knowledge which is psychological in the sense that its problem is how the simple data with which the individual is in contact in sensation are worked up into a system. ”

“ Boileau himself is reported to have said that "the philosophy of Descartes has cut the throat of poetry;" [436] and there can be no doubt that this is the exaggerated expression of a certain inevitable truth. The excessive insistence on the reason brought with it a corresponding undervaluation of the imagination. The rational and rigidly scientific basis of Cartesianism was forced on classicism; and reality became its supreme object and its final test:—
"Rien n'est beau que le vrai." ”

“ The last official recognition of Cartesianism in France seems to have been in 1740, when the prize offered by the Academy for an essay on the tides was shared between a Cartesian and three eminent Newtonians (§ 230) .
The rapid development of gravitational astronomy that ensued between this time and the beginning of the 19th century was almost entirely the work of five great Continental mathematicians, Euler, Clairaut, D’Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace, of whom the eldest was born in 1707 and the youngest died in 1827, within a month of the centenary of Newton’s death. ”

“ But it took fully fifty years and more, besides, before these ideas had won general acceptance by the common people, so wedded were they to the traditional view through custom and a superstitious reverence for the Bible. Briefly then, the De Revolutionibus appeared in 1543; and quietly won some supporters, notably Bruno, Kepler and Galileo; the Congregations of the Index specifically opposed it in 1616 and 1633; however it continued to spread among scholars and others with the aid of Cartesianism for another fifty years till the appearance of Newton's Principia in 1687. ”

“ These are apprehended solely by the mind, which may, however, be led to them by an inductive process. After Aristotle, the term was used by the Stoics and the school of Ramus for a proposition simply, and Bacon (Nov. Organ. i. 7) used it of any general proposition. The word was reintroduced in modern philosophy probably by René Descartes (or by his followers) who, in the search for a definite self-evident principle as the basis of a new philosophy, naturally turned to the familiar science of mathematics. The axiom of Cartesianism is, therefore, the Cogito ergo sum. ”

“ If we answer them in the affirmative, then states of consciousness become undistinguishable from material things; for it is the essential nature of matter to be the vehicle or substratum of mechanical energy.
There is nothing new in all this. I have merely put into modern language the issue raised by Descartes more than two centuries ago. The philosophies of the Occasionalists, of Spinoza, of Malebranche, of modern idealism and modern materialism, have all grown out of the controversies which Cartesianism evoked. Of all this the pseudo-science of the present time appears to be unconscious ”

“ And as the Cartesians, more than any other school of philosophical speculation before or since, made their own minds the measure of all things, and refused, on principle, to believe that Nature had done what they were unable to see any reason why she must do, they affirmed it to be impossible that a material and a mental fact could be causes one of another. They regarded them as mere Occasions on which the real agent, God, thought fit to exert his power as a Cause. When a man wills to move his foot, it is not his will that moves it, but God (they said) moves it on the occasion of his will. ”

“ The writers whom I oppose declare this inconceivable, but can conceive that mind, or volition, is per se an efficient cause: while the Cartesians could not conceive even that, but peremptorily declared that no mode of production of any fact whatever was conceivable, except the direct agency of an omnipotent being; thus giving additional proof of what finds new confirmation in every stage of the history of science: that both what persons can, and what they can not, conceive, is very much an affair of accident, and depends altogether on their experience, and their habits of thought ”

“ I have often explained why I regard an influxus physicus in the sense of Cartesian dualism as an impossibility, and believe the conception of a parallelism between mental and physical processes to be required by empirical psychology. . . . The Cartesian theory is untenable because it assumes a causal connection between entirely incomparable facts. A sensation can no more be explained by a motion than a motion by a sensation.
It goes without saying that an external movement as a physical process can only be explained by a previous physical process, as for example by a sensory excitation ”

“ We have establish'd it as a principle, that as all ideas are deriv'd from impressions, or some precedent perceptions, 'tis impossible we can have any idea of power and efficacy, unless some instances can be produc'd, wherein this power is perceiv'd to exert itself. Now as these instances can never be discover'd in body, the Cartesians, proceeding upon their principle of innate ideas, have had recourse to a supreme spirit or deity, whom they consider as the only active being in the universe, and as the immediate cause of every alteration in matter. ”

“ The philosophy of the eighteenth century opens the second period of the Cartesian era; it proposed to itself to apply the method already discovered and too much neglected,—it applied itself to the analysis of thought. Disabused of ambitious and sterile attempts, and, like Descartes, disdainful of the past, the eighteenth century dared to think that every thing in philosophy was to be done over again, and that, in order not to wander anew, it was necessary to set out with the modest study of man. ”

“ That a piece of mechanism could not do work perpetually without being fed with power in some form, was a thing perfectly apparent to him; yet he did not understand that the machinery of the mind can only transform knowledge, but never originate it, unless it be fed with facts of observation. He thus missed the most essential point of the Cartesian philosophy, which is, that to accept propositions which seem perfectly evident to us is a thing which, whether it be logical or illogical, we cannot help doing. ”

“ Philosophers still busied themselves about its causes; and in order to salve the scepticism which his own reform had provoked, Des Cartes came to the rescue of the material universe armed with these two arguments: first, that matter, although not the cause, is nevertheless the occasion, of our perceptions. It affords the occasions on which the Deity (the efficient cause and true source of all our knowledge) calls up in our minds the appropriate presentations. This is the Cartesian doctrine of occasional, as distinguished from efficient, causes. ”

“ The assumption of the independent individual implies the independent existence of matter. The Enlightenment assumed the Cartesian theory as correct. While many were the polemics against metaphysical speculation, the Cartesian dualism was nevertheless in control. Here within is the independent existence of mind; and it would naturally follow that there without is the equally independent existence of matter. The conception might fade into a ghost-like dualism, as in Berkeley and Hume, but the dualism never entirely vanished. ”

“ The principle of which the whole Cartesian Method, from its fundamental to its most remote character, is but a manifestation and development in a variety of forms, is, that with a view to truth and certainty, to the realization of the end of Philosophy, there must be accorded to the thinker the perfect, that is, the free and full, action of the faculties of knowledge. ”

“ He also rejected the dualism of mind and matter, holding that there are innumerable substances all in a greater or less degree mental, and none in any degree material. He maintained that every substance is immortal, and that there is no interaction between one substance and another—this last being a view derived from the Cartesian independence of mind and matter. He also extended to his many substances the belief in parallelism which had existed for the two substances of the Cartesians. ”

“ It was not for want of experience that the Cartesians were unable to conceive [Pg 299] that one body could produce motion in another without contact. They had as much experience of other modes of producing motion, as they had of that mode. The planets had revolved, and heavy bodies had fallen, every hour of their lives. But they fancied these phenomena to be produced by a hidden machinery which they did not see, because without it they were unable to conceive what they did see. The inconceivableness, instead of representing their experience, dominated and overrode their experience. ”

“ Now one-half of Cartesian philosophy shows conclusively that amidst the countless infinity of human notions, the [Pg 193] one single and solitary certainty of independent and self-evident authority is the existence of thought, and nothing else whatever, therefore, can be entitled to be regarded as absolutely certain which cannot be shown to rest mediately or immediately upon this. One thing which can, by strictest logical process, be shown so to rest, is the existence of a thinking self; and another is the existence of a non-self or external universe ”

“ The early enthusiasm for it in French literary circles and among professors in the universities of Holland scarcely [Pg 4588] outlasted a generation. Within a dozen years after the philosopher's death, the Cartesian philosophy was prohibited by ecclesiastical authorities and excluded from the schools. In the British Isles and in Germany the system has been usually considered as an interesting curiosity in the cabinet of philosophies. Yet the unity of all truth through relations vital, subtle, firm, and universal, though seen only in a vision of the night, abides when the night is gone. ”

“ For some of them, as the Cartesians in particular, having establish'd it as a principle, that we are perfectly acquainted with the essence of matter, have very naturally inferr'd, that it is endow'd with no efficacy, and that 'tis impossible for it of itself to communicate motion, or produce any of those effects, which we ascribe to it. As the essence of matter consists in extension, and as extension implies not actual motion, but only mobility; they conclude, that the energy, which produces the motion, cannot lie in the extension. ”

“ The second proposition of the Cartesian philosophy is hence the immediate certainty of thought. Certainty is only knowledge as such in its pure form as self-relating, and this is thought; thus then the unwieldy understanding makes its way on to the necessity of thought. ”

“ Even the strictest Cartesian would never think of petting his chronometer as he pets his poodle, or would expect the former to respond to his caresses as the latter does. Practically he subverts his own metaphysical system by the distinction which he makes between them, [Pg 67] treating one as a machine and the other as a sentient being, endowed with mental powers and passions corresponding, in some degree, to those which he himself possesses. We infer from our own individual consciousness that other persons, who act as we do, are free and intelligent agents, as we claim to be. ”

“ One characteristic of the Cartesian school is obvious. Descartes, a great mathematician at the period when mathematical investigations were showing their enormous power, invented a mathematical universe. Mathematics presented the true type of scientific reasoning and determined his canons of inquiry. The 'essence' of matter, he said, was space. The objective world, as we [Pg 146] have learned to call it, is simply space solidified or incarnate geometry. Its properties therefore could be given as a system of deductions from first principles, and it forms a coherent and self-subsistent whole. ”