itself, there is the power of pure thought. This the mind possesses in its own right. But the mind is also influenced by its connection with the body, and this gives rise to certain modes of consciousness emotions, sensations, and the like—which, intellectually at least, are of a lower order. For Descartes, as for most of the ancients, the true type of life is the intellectual life.

6. The Cartesians. Occasionalism. The influence which Descartes exerted was immediate and profound. By his disciples, his words were taken almost as those of one inspired. In Holland a school of enthusiastic Cartesians sprang up, but the most important speculative development was in France. Here a number of famous names, notably those of Geulincx and Malebranche, are found among the thinkers who professed themselves Cartesians. Only one point in connection with these men will be mentioned here.

Descartes had admitted the fact of a mutual influence between the soul and the body, without going on to explain its possibility. With this his followers were not wholly satisfied. The main difficulty for them lay in the question how, if matter and mind are so absolutely diverse in nature, there can be any such thing as an influence of one upon the other. The answer given by Geulinex took the form which became known as Occasionalism. The difficulty of an interaction was admitted, but it was solved by falling back on the omnipotence of God. It is no power of the human mind that effects an alteration in the physical world, but a direct act of God. A particular exertion of the will does not move the human body, but on occasion of this act of will God intervenes, and changes the direction of the body in a way to secure the same result. There is thus no need of any influence passing between the two unlike substances.

Occasionalism proved to be only a temporary stoppingplace; it did not reach the deeper aspects of the problem. But already it showed the direction in which the logic of Descartes' standpoint was to lead. Descartes had left the

world divided into three constituent parts-the two sub stances, mind and matter, and a third more ultimate reality, God. Now it was by appealing to this last reality that the division could, it seemed, most naturally be overcome, if the distinction which Descartes had so clearly drawn was not again to be confused. Descartes, indeed, had recognized this. Defining a substance as that which can be conceived through itself alone, he had seen that after all mind and matter are no true substances, since they are not to be conceived apart from God; and so that in the strict meaning of the term only one substance - God - exists. Consequently Occasionalism had a glimpse of the true problem when it fell back upon an appeal to God's power. But this solution remained only an external one; the way to a more intimate connection between God and the world was brought to light by Spinoza.

LITERATURE

Descartes, Chief Works: Discourse upon Method (1637); Meditations (1640); Principia Philosophia (1644); Emotions of the Soul (1649). Translations: Veitch (Method, Meditations, Selections from the Principles); Lowndes (Meditations); Torrey (Selections).

Mahaffy, Descartes.

Fischer, Descartes and his School.

Huxley, Methods and Results.

Caird, Essays on Literature and Philosophy.

Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy.

Iverach, Descartes, Spinoza, and the New Philosophy.

Haldane, Descartes, His Life and Times.

§ 29. Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew, born in 1632 in Amsterdam, where his parents had taken refuge from persecution. On account of the scandal growing out of his heretical opinions, he was excommunicated from the synagogue, in 1656, after vain efforts to bribe him to maintain at

least an outward conformity. So bitter were the feelings against him that an attempt was even made to get rid of him by assassination. His opinions were hardly less objectionable to Christians, however, than to Jews, and he spent the rest of his days apart from men and social life, supplying his very simple wants by grinding lenses, for which he earned a wide reputation. His profound intellect and the beauty of his character attracted, however, a few friends and disciples. His fame gradually extended, and he was offered at one time the chair of Philosophy at Heidelberg; but he preferred the liberty to hold without restriction his own beliefs, and think his own thoughts. Money possessed no greater attraction for him than fame and position. The patrimony of which his sisters had attempted to deprive him, he voluntarily relinquished, after first securing his title to it by a legal process. He refused a present from the French king, which a simple dedication would have secured. An admirer, Simon de Vries, who proposed to leave Spinoza his property, was dissuaded by him in favor of the natural heir; and when the latter, after De Vries' death, fixed a pension which had been willed to Spinoza at five hundred florins, he declared the sum too great, and refused to take more than three hundred. His own death occurred in 1677.

It is not easy to give a brief account of Spinoza's philosophy that shall at once be intelligible, and do justice to its inner spirit. Couched as it is in abstract and scholastic terms, and given the form of rigid mathematical demonstration, an understanding of the chain of close reasoning which constitutes his system calls for a somewhat technical acquaintance with metaphysics. Furthermore, the acknowledged inconsistencies in Spinoza's thought render a systematic exposition complicated. Without attempting this, accordingly, it will be enough to suggest in a more general way what it is that Spinoza, in his philosophy, is trying to accomplish.

The estimates of Spinoza have been somewhat startling

in their divergence. For the most part, he has been exe crated, by Jew and Christian alike, as an atheist and a foe to religion. And yet, by others, his philosophy has been thought to be so fundamentally religious, that Novalis gave to him the name "God-intoxicated." Both these judgments stand for factors in his thought that are necessary for its proper understanding. From the standpoint of orthodox theology, there is no doubt that Spinoza is irreligious. He denies outright the personal God of the Christian, the government of the world according to purpose, and the freedom of the will. It is often difficult to distinguish his theory from a thoroughgoing naturalism, which identifies God with the necessary laws of the physical universe. But, on the other hand, Spinoza evidently supposes that he is vindicating the only worthy idea of religion; and he opposes the ordinary conceptions as themselves, in reality, irreligious. God is the beginning and the end of his philosophy. This philosophy is not, in the last analysis, merely theoretical, in spite of its abstractness. As the title - Ethica of his most important book implies, it is practical, a philosophy of life and of redemption.

The central idea of Spinoza, and that which gave him his deep influence somewhat later on, when the period of the Enlightenment was drawing to a close, is his recognition of the unity of things; and that not only as an intellectual necessity, but as a requirement of feeling, a religious requirement, as well. Descartes had split the world up into two substances distinct from each other, and a God separate from both of them. The Rationalism which took its rise from him, tended still further to remove God from the world, until he became a mere far-away observer, with scarcely any relation to his work. Such a separation was fatal in two ways. It emptied the idea of God, on the one hand, of all content, and so made him superfluous; and it rendered it impossible to give any ultimate and unitary explanation of the world of things. In opposition to this, it was Spinoza's task to insist upon the connection of

God with the world, and to find in him the ultimate reality, alongside which the independent reality of other so-called substances fades into nothingness.

This, then, is the starting-point of Spinoza's thoughtthe perception of the unreality of finite things. Man begins by taking the world as a collection of independent persons and objects, each complete in itself and real in itself. But he soon discovers the futility of this. Intellectually, he cannot stop with any object by itself. He finds he is unable to understand it apart from its connections with other things; and he thus is led continually on from one relationship to another, in an endless series. Nor, emotionally, can he rest his affections on the changing facts of the finite world. They are ever leaving him disappointed and disillusioned, and he craves some permanent and perfect object to satisfy his ideal. "After experience had taught me," Spinoza says, in a passage which describes how he was led to philosophy, "that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly to the exclusion of all else; whether in fact there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.' Such happiness, he saw very clearly, neither riches, nor fame, nor pleasures of sense could give. "Further reflec tion convinced me that if I could really get to the root of the matter, I should be leaving certain evils for a certain good. I thus perceived that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek with all my strength for a remedy, however uncertain it might be; as a rich man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death will surely be upon him unless a remedy be found, is compelled to seek such a remedy with all his strength, inasmuch