GIFT OF 
 SEELEY W. MUDD 
 
 and 
 
 GEORGE 1. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER 
 DR. JOHN R. HAYNES WILLIAM L. HONNOLD 
 JAMES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH F. SARTORI 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
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 JOHN FISKE
 
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 TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY 
 
 MART1NEAU
 
 London 
 HENKY FBOWDE 
 
 Oxford University Press Warehouse 
 Amen Corner, E.G.
 
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 BY 
 
 JAMES MAKTINEAU, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF MANCHESTER NEW COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
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 ABIST. ETH. EUD. VII. xiv. 
 
 VOL. I 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 M DCCC LXXXV 
 [ All rights reserved ] 
 
 80502
 
 *" 
 
 IN GRATITUDE TO MY TEACHERS, 
 
 OF WHATEVER AGE OR SCHOOL, 
 I DEDICATE THIS WORK TO THE PUPIL* 
 
 WHOM DURING FIFTY YEARS 
 
 I HAVE BROUGHT TO SIT AT THEIR FEET, 
 IN THE PURE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THESE volumes would have appeared to more advantage 
 had they been preceded, as originally designed, by a com- 
 pendium of logical psychology, presenting, in explicit form, 
 the principles and processes of knowledge which are here 
 assumed and implicitly operative throughout. Such a manual 
 \ has been written and repeatedly re-written: but the litera- 
 r< ture of what is called Wissenschaftslehre has so rapidly in- 
 creased, that at last I am unable to overtake it : I relinquish, 
 therefore, the hope of adequately equipping my avant-courier 
 for his mission. I consign the old herald to the superannu- 
 
 <D ates' almshouse, and am content to let the Ethical Doctrine 
 CQ 
 
 01 introduce and explain itself. 
 
 In the absence of regular Prolegomena, a few words of in- 
 
 2 formal prelude may perhaps be helpful and welcome to the 
 ra reader, before his patience is more severely tasked. In study- 
 
 *rS 
 
 fe ing the later productions of a writer on abstruse subjects, 
 I have more than once found myself repelled by a table of 
 contents bristling with barbarous terminology, and been dis- 
 mayed by sentences and pages which, though visible and 
 grammatical enough, lay before me in total intellectual dark- 
 ness ; and, after days and even weeks of meditative scrutiny 
 and experimental exegesis, I have reached only some hesi- 
 tating solution of riddles too slippery for a persistent grasp. 
 If any accident has afterwards brought me into contact with 
 the same author's immature, perhaps fugitive and forgotten, 
 writings, I have found them, to my surprise, not only lucid 
 in themselves, but alive with scintilla: that dart upon the
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 impenetrable surface of what I had read before, and relieve 
 it with points of light. Still more, if, following up this ex- 
 perience, I have then gone with him through the series of 
 his writings, and fallen in chronologically with the turns and 
 openings of his thought, I have insensibly gained the key 
 to his final mysteries, and, having passed through the inter- 
 mediate dialects, can now construe the new language by the 
 old. Nay, I confess to having accepted aid from a far more 
 commonplace commentary on the difficulties of an author's 
 work, viz. the realisation of his personal characteristics, his 
 human relations, his preponderant sympathies, and the study 
 especially of the transitions of his thought and the testing 
 crises of his life. Intellectual pride and self-ignorance alone 
 can blind us to the fact that systems of philosophical opinion 
 grow from the mind's instinctive effort to unify by sufficient 
 reason, and justify by intelligible pleas, its own deepest affec- 
 tions and admirations. At all events, I attempt no more ; 
 and shall not hesitate, therefore, to touch upon one or two of 
 the personal experiences, to which these volumes owe their 
 chief features. 
 
 When I first woke up, before and during my College life, to 
 the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations, I carried 
 into them, from previous training for the profession of civil 
 engineer, a store of exclusively scientific conceptions, rendered 
 familiar in the elementary study of mathematics, mecha- 
 nics, and chemistry. Small as it was, it was my all, and 
 necessarily dictated the only rules of judgment which I could 
 apply. I had nothing to take with me into logical and 
 ethical problems but the maxims and postulates of physical 
 knowledge ; and as the instructions of the philosophical class- 
 room, excellent of their kind, moved strictly within the same 
 ^limits, I was inevitably shut up in the habit of interpreting 
 the human phenomena by the analogy of external nature. 
 Steeped in the ' empirical ' and ' necessarian ' mode of 
 thought, I served out successive terms of willing captivity 
 to Locke and Hartley, to Collins. Edwards, and Priestley, to
 
 PREFACE. ix 
 
 Bentham and James Mill ; and though at times I was driven 
 to disaffection by the dogmatism and acrid humours of the 
 last two of these philosophers, my allegiance was restored 
 and brightened by literary and personal relations with the 
 younger Mill. His vast knowledge, his intellectual conscien- 
 tiousness, his analytical skill, his sincere humanity, pre- 
 sented the excellences of his school in so finished a form as 
 to proclaim him its undisputed coryphaeus, and reanimate 
 the confidence of its disciples. 
 
 Greek and Latin critics have noticed, with amusement, 
 the tone of plump assurance in which the ancient Epicurean 
 was accustomed to propound and argue the principles of his 
 system ; as if to doubt were to be disgraced, and he had 
 freshly arrived from the council of the gods 1 . Whether 
 the school is naturally affected by this characteristic, and 
 still retains its large balance of positiveness unexpended, I 
 cannot pretend to judge. But memory too faithfully tells 
 me that, in my own period of zeal for its doctrines, I amply 
 deserved the satirical rebuke which I have cited. So self- 
 evident appeared the maxims of mechanical causality on 
 which I stood, and so clear the whole surrounding field 
 within my sharply defined horizon, that in my heart I 
 deemed it blindness if any one professed a different vision 
 from my own, and never suspected that it might be due to 
 a far-sightedness which reached a zone beyond, and fetched 
 in the modifying lights of other relations. It is no wonder 
 then that, in skimming over my notes of work in those dis- 
 tant years, I seem to be communing with some tight-swathed 
 logical prig, in whose jerky confidence and angular mimicry 
 of life I am humbled to recognise the image of myself. If 
 any one believes the fault to be purely personal and in.no 
 way chargeable on the system of thought, I shall not resist 
 the imputation ; certainly he can select, from the records 
 
 1 Turn Velleius, fidenter sane, ut solent isti, nihil tarn verens quam ne dubi- 
 tare aliqua de re videretur, tanquam modo ex deorum concilio et ex Epicuri 
 intennundiis descendisset, Audite, inquit, &c. Cicero, de Natura Deorum, 
 i. 8. 
 
 b
 
 x PREFACE. 
 
 of the same school, many examples of true modesty and 
 reverence. But unless the old tradition is wholly illusory, 
 there must be some average coexistence of the moral with 
 the intellectual phenomenon ; though it may still be doubted 
 whether the doctrine plays the part of cause or of effect to 
 the objectionable temper. 
 
 If, in conformity with the advice of Callicles l , I had con- 
 cerned myself with philosophy only as an element in liberal 
 education, and desisted from it in later life, the modicum 
 which I had picked up might have stereotyped itself in my 
 habitual thought, and indirectly have exercised some influ- 
 ence, even when it was forgotten, upon the physiognomy of 
 character. This is all that such studies accomplish for the 
 great majority of busy men: such shreds of speculative 
 tissue as cling to them in permanence and float into con- 
 sciousness as they listen to a sermon or meditate a speech, 
 are memories of the tutor's room or the examination hall, 
 and do but reproduce the past. But it fell to my lot to be 
 always teaching these subjects ; and that, not merely as a 
 lecturer to an inexpert audience too ready to take my word, 
 but as a tutor to students, not always my juniors even, and 
 often of keen intellectual discernment and insatiable thirst 
 for the deepest draughts of truth. A lonely writer on specu- 
 lative problems, taking his own way, chooses probably the 
 line of least resistance, and makes it more his beaten track 
 than ever; but under a fusillade of questions from a class 
 of sharpshooters, the instructor has to look well to his de- 
 fences, perhaps to fall back upon less exposed ground ; is at 
 all events tested by a perpetual dialectic, in which to learn 
 his weakness will be his best gain of strength. Under such 
 discipline, in concurrence no doubt with deepening expe- 
 rience of the inward contents of human life, I seemed to dis- 
 cover a hitherto unnoticed factor in all the products which 
 I had taken as explained ; to recognise, after resolving 
 all knowledge into relations, the presence of an invisible 
 
 1 Plato, Gorgias, 484, 485.
 
 PREFACE. xi 
 
 condition of relation itself; and the more I scrutinised the 
 physical science assumptions, which I had carried as axioms 
 into philosophy, the less could I rest in them as ultimate 
 and valid for all thought. Above all, I had to concede to 
 the self-conscious mind itself, both as knowing and as will- 
 ing, an autonomous function distinct from each and all the 
 phenomena known and changes willed, a self-identity, as 
 unlike as possible to any growing aggregate of miscellaneous 
 and dissimilar experiences. Visiting me first as mere suspi- 
 cious, these ideas insensibly loosened the set attitude of my 
 convictions, before I became distinctly conscious of a gradual 
 veering in the direction of my thought : the same text-books 
 were still in use, though doubtless with more frequent com- 
 ments of dissent ; but in effect, I was educating myself out 
 of a school into which I supposed that I was educating 
 others. 
 
 A syllabus of my College lectures having fallen into Mr. 
 J. S. Mill's hands (early in 1841), he noticed the change 
 and, with his keen intellectual glance, measured its extent 
 better than I had done myself: for old attachment and admi- 
 ration still lingered with me and led me to minimise my 
 breach with the past ; and what was dim to me, seen through 
 the spectrum of various feeling, was well defined to him, in 
 his clear logical light. Though he saw to the bottom of my 
 apostasy, he did not cut me oft* as a lost soul. On the con- 
 trary, his manifestation of friendly interest in my future 
 work at the old problems on new lines was gracious and 
 respectful: in expressing his desire to see its results, he 
 exhorted me against long delay of their publication : on these 
 'great subjects,' he said, 'I do not want to have to wait for 
 your lectures, which, like Brown's, will no doubt be published 
 some day ; but before that time I may very likely be studying 
 them in another state of existence' (May 21, 1841). This un- 
 expected turn of thought it is which has chiefly saved the 
 remembrance of the correspondence. From a flexible compliant 
 man of the world, accustomed to be ' all things to all men,' it 
 
 62
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 would have had little significance ; but coming from one who 
 was scrupulously precise in word, absolutely sincere in pro- 
 fession, and tempted by no play of humour to empty graces 
 of accommodation, it seemed to me an interesting trait. 
 
 It was the irresistible pleading of the moral consciousness 
 which first drove me to rebel against the limits of the merely 
 scientific conception. It became incredible to me that no- 
 thing was possible except the actual ; and the naturalistic 
 uniformity could no longer escape some breach in its closed 
 barrier to make room for the ethical alternative. The secret 
 misgivings which I had always felt at either discarding or 
 perverting the terms which constitute the vocabulary of 
 character, 'responsibility,' 'guilt,' 'merit,' 'duty,' came to 
 a head, and insisted upon speaking out and being heard ; 
 and to their reiterated question, ' Is there then no ought to 
 be other than what is?' I found the negative answer of Diderot 
 intolerable, and all other answer impossible. This involved 
 a surrender of determinism, and a revision of the doctrine of 
 causation : or rather, I should say, a recall of the outlawed 
 causes from their banishment and degradation to the rank 
 of antecedents ; and constituted therefore a retrograde move- 
 ment on the line of Comte's law, back from physics to meta- 
 physics ; terminating in the definition that a cause is that 
 which determines the indeterminate. 
 
 During a fifteen months' furlough (granted me in 1848-9), 
 the inroads upon my early modes of thought might here have 
 paused for a while, after gaining the territory which seemed 
 necessary to the life of conscience ; had I not passed (now 
 thirty-six years ago) through a kind of second education in 
 Germany, mainly under the admirable guidance of the late 
 Professor Trendelenburg. That I might learn the utmost from 
 so great an Aristotelian, I gave myself chiefly to Greek studies, 
 and only read more largely authors of whom I had supposed 
 myself to know something before. The effect I cannot describe 
 but as a new intellectual birth : after a temporary struggle out 
 of the English into the Greek moulds of conception, I seemed
 
 PREFACE. xiii 
 
 to pierce, through what had been words before, into contact 
 with living thought, and the black grammatical text was 
 aglow with luminous philosophy. It was as if the mental 
 stereoscope through which I had looked at Plato or Aristotle 
 had had its double picture, Greek and English, with dis- 
 torted halves, producing only a blurred and overlapping flat ; 
 whilst now the slide of true correspondence was there, and 
 the eye, after a momentary strain of adaptation, beheld the 
 symmetrical reality in all its dimensions. The experience 
 thus forced upon me by a new way of entrance upon ancient 
 literature could not fail to spread, and carry an interpreting 
 light into modern studies ; it was essentially the gift of fresh 
 conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-con- 
 sciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls be- 
 hind ; and, once gained, was more or less available through- 
 out the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from 
 the pages of Kant and even Hegel. It was impossible to 
 resist or distrust this gradual widening of apprehension: it 
 was as much a fact as the sight of Alps I had never visited 
 before. I thus came into the same plight, in respect of the 
 cognitive and aesthetic side of life, that had already befallen 
 me in regard to the moral. The metaphysic of the world 
 had come home to me, and never again could I say that 
 phenomena, in their clusters and chains, were all, or find 
 myself in a universe with no categories but the like and 
 unlike, the synchronous and successive. The possible also 
 is, whether it happens or not ; and its categories, of the 
 right, the beautiful, the necessarily true, may have their 
 contents defined and held ready for realisation, whatever 
 centuries lapse ere they appear. To do this is the work, 
 not of objective science, but of self-reflection. 
 
 By this division of labour, the whole group of natural 
 sciences is left absolutely free to legitimate development, 
 without the possibility of collision with Ethics. Apprehen- 
 sion of facts, in their laws, being the business of the one, 
 the appreciation of springs of action, in their ranks, that of
 
 xiv PREFACE. 
 
 the other, they can nohow contrive to contradict each other ; 
 and if ever either physicist or moralist fears lest discovery 
 should relax the force or modify the incidence of human 
 obligation, it can only be from inexact conception of the 
 respective provinces. Thus the uneasiness so often mani- 
 fested lest the theory of Evolution should eat away the very 
 basis of human duty has no justification, except in the general 
 prevalence of the very confusion of thought which it exempli- 
 fies. We have long been familiar with the process of growth 
 in organisms, with the weaving and discrimination of tissue 
 and the modifications of brain ; and the extension of this 
 process of development from the thread of the single animal 
 life to the chain of species introduces no disturbing problem : 
 it supplies new chapters of natural history ; but changes not 
 a word in the eternal law of right. Moral existence is not 
 constituted by organism, simple or complex, or by instincts 
 lodged in it to do its work ; but by the presence of a self- 
 conscious, free, and reflecting subject, to whom both organism 
 and instincts are objective facts ; and as no such presence 
 can be alleged in concomitance with the prior animal forms, 
 the evolution misses all contact with the essential prerequi- 
 site of morals. Though the modern doctrine, therefore, should 
 widen its conquests till the whole story of nature is recast, 
 and every present manual of instruction in the laws of her 
 phenomena is obsolete, the interest in that vast revolution 
 would be purely scientific ; without affecting in the least 
 the inner duties and pieties of human life. 
 
 It will be seen from these remarks why, in the following 
 pages, I cannot treat Ethics as a Science, giving account of 
 that which is. It would be nearer the truth to call it an 
 ^Art, or system of rules directed upon an end. But the 
 species of ends contemplated in the common use of the 
 word Art, differs in two respects from that which here con- 
 cerns us ; they are products external to the artist, as a 
 house or a picture ; and they are definite acts or objects. 
 The end of the moral consciousness, on the other hand, is
 
 PREFACE. xv 
 
 intrinsic, complete for the moment in simple compliance 
 with its own law ; and is also indefinite in its range, being 
 nothing less than a perfection eternally in advance of the 
 will. To define this ideal of the conscience would be the 
 business of Ethics, did it not, as infinite, transcend defini- 
 tion: we make the nearest approach to that impossible func- 
 tion, if we lay down the lines of direction which, when pro- 
 duced, trace the true path towards the ultimate perfection. 
 
 Thus to indicate what ought to be is, however, impossible 
 without a large study of what is; so that Ethics are de- 
 pendent upon scientific conditions, though not complete in 
 them. Two classes of facts it is indispensable for them to 
 know: what are the springs of voluntary conduct, and what 
 are its effects; and the systematic reduction of both these 
 under intellectual cognisance is involved in the problem of 
 Moral Philosophy. The chief attention is usually concen- 
 trated upon the latter. In the following treatise, the pre- 
 ponderance is assigned to the former, for reasons explained 
 in due course. 
 
 The chapter on Spinoza in the present work is not a re- 
 production or abridgment of the monograph on that phi- 
 losopher which I published two years ago ; but a fresh 
 treatment of the given material which is necessarily common 
 to both; marked indeed by no change of interpretation or 
 judgment on important points, but only by such shifting 
 of emphasis as the special exigency of an ethical treatise 
 demanded. 
 
 I am conscious that a rigorous reader may complain of 
 this book, as combining elements too heterogeneous, and say 
 that it is neither a history, nor a system, of philosophical 
 opinion, but a little of both. Perhaps he is right: if he is, 
 he hits a fault, not of the book alone, but of the author. 
 The mixture of exposition and of search in these volumes 
 is the involuntary expression of personal experience. I have 
 always been a teacher ; I have not ceased to be a learner ; 
 in the one capacity, I must tell the little that I know; in
 
 xvi PREFACE. 
 
 the other, I must strive after some glimpse of the immeasur- 
 able light beyond. I cannot rest contentedly on the past ; 
 I cannot take a step towards the future without its sup- 
 port. Only by taking to heart and reporting what I have 
 heard in the chief schools of wisdom, can I become aware 
 of the places blank with a remaining silence, or win the 
 resources and quicken the impulse to reclaim them for in- 
 telligible speech. The concurrence of criticism and construc- 
 tion is but the renunciation of individual self-sufficiency, 
 and a homage due to the cumulative continuity of human 
 thought. Of the many authors passed under review in these 
 volumes, I do not remember one to whom I am not grate- 
 ful for intellectual service or delight. 
 
 A theory elicited, like that in the following pages, from 
 mere interpretation of the moral consciousness is open to 
 the charge of depending upon an act of faith: it collapses 
 at once for anyone who persuades himself that the moral 
 consciousness is not to be believed. Unless he can accept 
 his inward assurance of free-will and of a Divine authority 
 in right, the whole organism of deduced rules lies in ruins. 
 Why then have I not done more to verify these essential 
 positions ? Why have I been content to give them explicit 
 statement, and claim them as postulates'? Do I not thus 
 leave the whole scheme hanging in the air? I not only 
 acknowledge that it is so, but particularly desire to fix at- 
 tention upon the fact, for two reasons : (1) because it com- 
 pels us to realise, in a definite instance, what alone 'verifi- 
 cation ' can mean ; that in the connection of truth with 
 truth, on any line of knowledge, you come to the end of 
 your tether at some point, a point which is fixed by no 
 Bother, but stands fast in your trust ; that, on different tracks 
 ~of knowledge, these terminal links are different: and that, 
 when all are gathered in presence of each other, no logical 
 hammer, though worked by a Vulcan, can make a chain of 
 them all, or give primacy to one : so that no ' verification ' 
 remains possible, except the reciprocal security of an equi-
 
 PREFACE. xvii 
 
 librated system of faiths, and the general devastation if any 
 one is expelled or explodes upon the rest. (2) The parti- 
 cular averments of the moral consciousness which are here 
 accepted as postulates form the organic connection between 
 Ethics and Religion, and define the relation between the 
 human spirit and the Divine ; and so far as they can be 
 lifted out of immediate knowledge, and submitted to me- 
 diate tests of certainty, it can only be by carrying them into 
 the court of Metaphysics, to be tried among the questions 
 of transcendent Ontology. Pleadings so extensive it was 
 impossible to intercalate in the midst of a compend of ethical 
 experience : they more naturally belong to the ulterior theory 
 of Religion, to the characteristic conceptions of which they 
 must make continual appeal. For some such sequel to the 
 present treatise, these topics are reserved ; in case the even- 
 ing twilight of life should linger a little longer with me, 
 and leave my powers of industry still unspent. 
 
 LONDON, 
 January 1, 1885.
 
 CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Ethical Facts. Modes of Interpreting them ..... i 
 
 II. Historical Instances. Subdivisions . . . . . . . 14 
 
 PART I. UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. 
 
 BOOK I. METAPHYSICAL. 
 
 BRANCH I. TRANSCENDENTAL. PLATO 23 
 
 1. Doctrine of Ideas ......... 25 
 
 2. Classification of Sciences and Faculties . 49 
 
 3. Positive and Negative Factors of the Cosmos ... 54 
 
 4. Conceptions of Character . 63 
 
 5. The Ideal State 73 
 
 6. Summary of Characteristics 80 
 
 7. Myth of Er the Armenian ....... 93 
 
 8. Ethical Features . . 103 
 
 BEANCH II. IMMANENTAL 112 
 
 CHAP. I. Descartes 116 
 
 1. From Monism to Dualism . . . . . . . 116 
 
 2. Theory of the Order of Knowing 121 
 
 3. Theory of the Order of Being 128 
 
 4. Conception of Matter 130 
 
 5. Conception of the Relation between Body and Soul . . 134 
 
 6. Ethical Doctrine 139 
 
 7- Incompatible Positions . . . . . . . . 143 
 
 8. Rejection of Final Causes 145 
 
 9. Controversies, Influence, and Death . . . . 147 
 
 10. 'Occasional Causes' of Geulinx 149 
 
 CHAP. II. Malebranche 151 
 
 1. Life and Personality 152 
 
 2. Illusions through the Senses and Imagination . . . 156 
 
 3. Doctrine of Ideas 159 
 
 4. The Will; its 'Inclinations' and 'Affections' . . . 166 
 
 5. Errors in Pursuit of Good, Absolute, Personal, Social . 169 
 
 6. Nature, Process, and Errors of the 'Affections' . . . 178 
 
 7. Rules for the Attainment of Truth 190 
 
 8. Estimate of the System 194
 
 xx CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAP. III. Spinoza 234 
 
 1. Authorities for his Biography . . . . . . 235 
 
 2. Life and Personality 237 
 
 3. Are Geometrical Ethics possible? . . . . . . 262 
 
 4. Conjectural History of Spinoza's Thought . . . . 272 
 
 5. Absolute Entity ; what is its Name? 277 
 
 6. Attributes 287 
 
 7. Modes, Infinite and Finite. Man 294 
 
 8. Gradations of Knowing 305 
 
 9. Transition from Knowing to Doing ..... 318 
 
 10. Dependent Affections and their Primaries . . . . 322 
 
 11. Autonomous Affections 326 
 
 A. Fortitude 330 
 
 B. Amor Intellectuals Dei 332 
 
 12. Conflict of Passive and Autonomous Affections . . . 343 
 
 13. Destination of the Human Mind ...... 350 
 
 14. Place of Spinozism, and Bearing on Ethics .... 363 
 
 BOOK II. PHYSICAL. 
 
 Comte 370 
 
 1. Life and Personality 375 
 
 2. Outline of his System of Thought 401 
 
 A. Limits of Knowledge ....... 401 
 
 B. Contents and Order of Knowledge .... 403 
 
 C. Development of Knowledge ...... 410 
 
 D. Concomitant Esthetic and Moral States . . . 417 
 
 E. Ethical Doctrine 421 
 
 3. Estimate of the System ; in regard to the 
 
 A. Limits of Knowledge 426 
 
 B. Contents and Order of Knowledge .... 439 
 
 C. Development of Knowledge . . . . 450 
 
 D. Idea of Progressive Humanity, whence? . . . 462 
 
 E. Ethical Doctrine 465 
 
 F. Positivist Religion 469 
 
 General Conclusion of Part I. 475
 
 CONTENTS OF VOL. II. 
 
 PART II. PSYCHOLOGICAL ETHICS. 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I. Transition 
 
 II. Postulates Discussed 4 
 
 BOOK I. IDIOPSYCHOLOGICAL ETHICS. 
 
 CHAP. I. Fundamental Ethical Fact 17 
 
 i. Its Contents Developed ........ 19 
 
 1. Objects of Moral Judgment . . . . . . 19 
 
 2. Mode of Moral Judgment 40 
 
 ii. Incidental Tests of the Theory of Conscience .... 54 
 
 CHAP. II. Theory of Prudence 65 
 
 i. Objects of Prudential Judgment 65 
 
 ii. Modifications by coexisting Moral Judgment .... 69 
 
 CHAP. III. Merit and Demerit 75 
 
 CHAP. IV. Nature of Moral Authority 92 
 
 i. Inadequate Interpretations Considered : 
 
 1. Bentham's 92 
 
 2. Paley's 102 
 
 3. Other accounts 106 
 
 ii. Whether Obligation can be Transcended in 
 
 iii. How Prudence becomes Obligatory 117 
 
 CHAP. V. Springs of Action Classified. Psychological Order 1 20 
 
 i. Primary, how Distinguished 126 
 
 1. Propensions: Organic Appetites; Animal Spontaneity . 130 
 
 2. Passions: Antipathy; Fear; Anger . . . . 131
 
 xxii CONTENTS. 
 
 Chap. V. Springs of Action, etc. (continued). PAGE 
 
 3. Affections : Parental; Social; Compassionate . . 134 
 
 4. Sentiments: Wonder; Admiration; Reverence . 141 
 
 ii. Secondary Transformations, how Distinguished . . . . 155 
 1. Secondary Propensions : Love of Pleasure, Money, 
 
 Power 158 
 
 2. Secondary Passions : Malice ; Vindictiveness ; Sus- 
 
 piciousness 160 
 
 3. Secondary Affections: Sentimentality . . . . 164 
 4. Secondary Sentiments : Self-culture ; ^stheticism ; In- 
 terest in Religion . . . . . . . . 165 
 
 iii. Ulterior Compound ... 169 
 
 iv. Relation of Prudence and Conscience to Springs of Action . 1 73 
 
 CHAP. VI. Springs of Action Classified. Moral Order . . 176 
 
 1. Secondary Passions alone inadmissible . . . . 176 
 
 2. Appetites, Secondary and Primary 179 
 
 3. Love of Gain, relatively to the Primary Passions . . 181 
 
 4. Secondary Affections, relatively to the Primary Passions 1 86 
 
 5. Place of both, relatively to the Love of Power . . 191 
 
 6. Love of Culture, relatively to the Love of Power . . 197 
 7. Primary Affections, how placed with regard to Wonder 
 
 and Admiration . . . . . . . . 200 
 
 8. Primary Affections, inter se ...... 203 
 
 9. Supreme place of Reverence 206 
 
 10. How to Estimate Mixed Incentives . . . . 218 
 
 11. Relations of Merit: Gratitude; Generosity; Justice . 226 
 
 12. Veracity 236 
 
 13. Table of Springs of Action ...... 246 
 
 14. How far a Life must be chosen among these . . 247 
 
 15. Resulting Rule; compared with Benthain's . . . 250 
 
 CHAP. VII. Objections Considered 257 
 
 INTRODUCTION ... - 257 
 
 1. Is the Love of Virtue among the Springs of Action? . 259 
 2. Intuitive Moralists do not agree as to 
 
 A. Benevolence and Moral Sense .... 265 
 
 B. Self-love 267 
 
 C. Imperative Claims of Justice 268 
 
 D. Relative Claims of Intellectual Desires and Per- 
 
 sonal Affections 270 
 
 E. Love of Fame and Love of Power . . . 272 
 
 3. Difficulty of Reading our Motives 273 
 
 4. The Rule reducible to that of 'Rational Benevolence' . 276
 
 CONTENTS. xxiii 
 
 BOOK II. HETEEO-PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BRANCH I. HEDOXIST ETHICS 283 
 
 CHAP. I. Utilitarian Hedonism 283 
 
 i. Psychologically considered 283 
 
 1. Expositions of Principles by Hobbes, Helvetius, Ben- 
 
 tham, James Mill ....... 284 
 
 2. Refinements introduced by the Hartleyans, as J. S. Mill 
 
 and Bain 293 
 
 3. Meanings given to the word 'Pleasure' . . . 297 
 
 i. Passage to and from Disinterestedness .... 301 
 
 5. J. S. Mill's Gradations of Quality in Pleasures . . 303 
 
 ii. Ethically considered 308 
 
 1. From 'Each for Himself,' to 'Each for All,' No Road 308 
 2. Theory of the Moral Sentiments as an Engine of Social 
 
 Management .... . . . .320 
 
 3. General Rules do not bind against their own Raison 
 
 d'etre 329 
 
 CHAP. II. Hedonism with Evolution 335 
 
 1. Psychology, how Affected by the Idea of Evolution . 335 
 2. The Law of Evolution, sec. Darwin ; sec. Spencer . 342 
 3. Spencer's Genesis of Ethics, and Conversion into In- 
 tuition 345 
 
 4. The Theory Considered, as applied to Intellectual Ap- 
 prehension 349 
 
 5. As applied to Moral Judgment 361 
 
 6. Hitches in the Evolutionary Deduction .... 364 
 
 7. Conscience Developed into Social Consensus and Religion 372 
 
 8. Objections to the Doctrine of Conscience considered . 376 
 
 9. Darwin's Explanation of Remorse 388 
 
 10. Meaning of 'Higher' and 'Lower' in Evolution . . 391 
 
 BRAXCH II. DIAJS~OETIC ETHICS 394 
 
 CHAP. I. Cudworth 396 
 
 1. Life, Personality, and Writings 396 
 
 2. Outline of his Philosophy : 
 
 A. Psychology .... .... 406 
 
 B. Ontology . . . . . . . . . 413 
 
 C. Ethical Theory 418 
 
 CHAP. II. Clarke 425 
 
 1. Life, Personality, and Writings . . . . 425 
 
 2. Abstract and Estimate of his Doctrine .... 429 
 
 CHAP. III. Price 439
 
 xxiv CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BRANCH III. ESTHETIC ETHICS 448 
 
 CHAP. I. Shaftesbury 449 
 
 1. Life, Personality, and Writings 449 
 
 2. Sketch of his Doctrine ....... 454 
 
 3. Appreciation of the Doctrine 46:; 
 
 CHAP. II. Hutcheson 474 
 
 1. Life, Personality, and Writings 474 
 
 2. Contents of his Doctrine : 
 
 A. ' Sense ' Defined. External Senses . . . 483 
 
 B. Sense of Beauty 487 
 
 C. Moral Sense 494 
 
 D. Springs of Action 501 
 
 E. Optimist Estimate of Virtue 506 
 
 3. Appreciation of the Doctrine . . . . . . 510 
 
 A. Relation of Benevolence and Self-love . . . 511 
 
 B. Relation of Benevolence and Moral Sense . . 513 
 
 C. Want of Moral Gradation 516 
 
 D. Determinism 519 
 
 Conclusion 521 
 
 INDEX 5-25
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I. ETHICAL FACTS. MODES OF INTEP.PKETING THEM:. 
 
 ETHICS may be briefly defined as the doctrine of human 
 character. They assume as their basis the fact, that men are 
 prone to criticise themselves and others, and cannot help 
 admiring in various degrees some expressions of affection and 
 will, and condemning others. This tendency displays itself 
 actively in every aspect of life ; giving pungency to the gossip 
 of a village, the chief interest to biography and fiction, the 
 needful authority to law, and the highest power to religion. 
 All these take their origin from the consciousness of a better 
 and a worse in human beings and affairs ; and aspire, with 
 more or less distinctness, to realise the good and exclude the 
 ill. But while they all join in the confession that there is an 
 interval between life as it is and life as it ought to be, they 
 investigate no standard, they seek no ground for their own 
 feeling ; but are content with reporting the estimates that rise 
 spontaneously in the mind ; with animadverting on particular 
 traits, and proclaiming actual admirations. These current 
 judgments constitute a body of ethical facts ; and it is the aim 
 of ethical science to strip from them their accidental, impulsive, 
 unreflecting character ; to trace them to their ultimate seat in 
 the constitution of our nature and our world ; and to exhibit, 
 not as a concrete picture, but in its universal essence, the ideal 
 of individual and social perfection. To interpret, to vindicate, 
 and systematise the moral sentiments, constitutes the business 
 of this department of thought. 
 
 VOL. i. B
 
 a INTRODUCTION. 
 
 In dealing with its problems, it is impossible to remain 
 within the limits of mere self-interrogation. The sentiments 
 which we propose to investigate have regard to the character 
 and actions of mankind ; the fitness of which must depend 
 not simply on the internal springs whence they issue, but also 
 on external adaptation to the sphere of their display. The 
 feeling suitable to a certain imaginary universe may be quite 
 out of place in this ; and a purely speculative doctrine of 
 Ethics, were such a product possible, might involve us in 
 judgments wholly false respecting actual persons and com- 
 munities. The conditions by which man is surrounded and 
 hemmed in, by determining his opportunities, must affect his 
 duties ; and springs of conduct which intrinsically would 
 attract the highest admiration may forfeit our approval, should 
 the world open to them no range of possible operation. As, 
 in the case of the individual, the right course is marked out 
 not simply by the sentiments of his nature, but in part by the 
 specialties of his lot ; and, in the case of a nation, the shape 
 of its best aims must be given by its historical place as well 
 as its inner genius ; so, for humanity at large, we cannot fix 
 the form of perfect character, without reference to its position 
 in the whole system of things, to the possibilities open to its 
 enterprise, and the enduring objects existing for its affection. 
 Hence it is inevitable that ethics should run out beyond 
 the circle of mere introspection, in order to determine 
 the objects in whose presence man continually stands, the 
 relations he bears to them, and the dealings he can have with 
 them. 
 
 What these objects are that constitute the scene around 
 him, may be expressed in two words, Nature and God ; un- 
 derstanding by the former the totality of perceptible pheno- 
 mena ; and by the latter, the eternal ground and cause whose 
 essence they express. These two are the companions that no 
 one can ever quit, change as he may his place, his age, his 
 society : they fill the very path of time on which he travels, 
 and the fields of space into which he looks ; and the questions 
 what they are, and what exactly they have to do with him, 
 cannot but affect the decision of what he ought to be. Whether 
 you will first address yourselves to them, or will rather make
 
 INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 your commencement with him, may seem a matter of small 
 moment, inasmuch as all three must be relatively surveyed ; 
 but in fact it makes the greatest difference, the whole differ- 
 ence between the most opposite schools of opinion, between 
 an objective and a subjective genesis of doctrine, between 
 ancient and modern philosophy. If you give priority to the 
 study of nature and God, and resort to them as your nearest 
 given objects, you are certain to regard them as the better 
 known, and to carry the conceptions you gain about them 
 into the remaining field as your interpreters and guides : you 
 will explain the human mind by their analogy, and expect in 
 it a mere extension of their being. If, on the other hand, you 
 permit the human mind to take the lead of these objects in 
 your enquiry, the order of inference will naturally be reversed ; 
 and with the feeling that it is the better known, you will 
 rather believe what the soul says of them, than what they 
 have to say about the soul. In both instances, no doubt, they 
 stand related to man as macrocosm to microcosm ; and we 
 may be asked, ' what matters it whether we think of man as a 
 finite epitome of the universe, or of the universe as the in- 
 finite counterpart of man ? ' In the last resort, the difference, 
 I believe, will be found to consist in this ; that when self-con- 
 sciousness is resorted to as the primary oracle, an assurance is 
 obtained and is carried out into the scheme of things, of a free 
 preferential power ; but when the external whole is the first 
 interrogated, it affords no means of detecting such a power, 
 but, exhibiting to the eye of observation a course of necessary 
 evolution, tempts our thought to force the same type of de- 
 velopment upon the human soul. In the one case we obtain 
 a volitional theory of nature ; in the other, a naturalistic 
 theory of volition ; and on the resulting schemes of morals 
 the great difference is impressed, that according to the re- 
 spective modes of procedure, the doctrine of proper responsi- 
 bility is admitted or denied. Thus then we obtain our first 
 distinction of method, deducing it simply from the opposite 
 lines of direction which the order of investigation may take. 
 Ethics may pursue their course and construct their body of 
 doctrine either from the moral sentiments outwards into the 
 system of the world ; or from the system of the world inwards 
 
 2
 
 4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to the moral sentiments. The former method may be called 
 the Psychologic; the latter we will for the present oppose to it 
 by the mere negative designation of the Unpsychologic. 
 
 So far the line of demarcation is obvious enough ; plain as 
 the contrast between within and without ; and thoroughly 
 familiarised to us by the current language and prevailing con- 
 troversies in philosophy during the last century. The whole 
 debate of our modern schools turns upon the well-worn anti- 
 thesis of subject and object, and seeks, in the laws of our 
 knowledge, to discriminate the legislative work of external 
 nature and of the mind, and assign the due validity to each. 
 There is no difficulty therefore in seizing what is meant by a 
 psychologic process. It is otherwise when we advance a step 
 further, and mark out the definite directions which the un- 
 psychologic method may take ; for we are immediately thrown 
 upon a distinction, found indeed at the very roots of our 
 thought, and pervading the whole of the ancient philosophy, 
 but so little familiar to our ordinary habits of reflection, and 
 so ill provided with fitting expression in our language, that it 
 is not easy to render it exoterically clear. It has been already 
 hinted at in our division of the objective world into the two 
 elements Nature and God; only that these names, though 
 indicating the proper realms on which attention should fix, 
 fail to suggest the particular characteristics which bring them 
 into contrast; and they are liable, with their modern significance, 
 to put us on a false intellectual scent. Laying aside for the 
 moment the conception of nature as a creation at a certain 
 date, and of God as its personal author existing before and 
 without it, and looking forth afresh through the young eye of 
 heathen wonder, we find that our thought seizes, with in- 
 stinctive persuasion, on two opposite aspects of existence, 
 that which appears and that which is, the transient pheno- 
 menon and the abiding ground, the moving succession of 
 actual change and the still potencies and permanent entities 
 from whose depths they come. No one can help thinking of 
 something behind what he sees and hears and feels ; and if 
 he denies it in the interests of a favourite theory, the very 
 language in which he couches his denial confutes him ; for 
 the fundamental forms of grammatical construction embody
 
 INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 the conceptions of substance and of power which he would 
 explain away. The colour, the form, the sound which he 
 perceives ; the joy, the hope, the admiration which he expe- 
 riences ; these he cannot imagine to float as unattached qualities, 
 homeless attributes of nothing, successions with vacuity at 
 the core ; he is obliged to refer them to a body which, apart 
 from these effects, he does not perceive, or a mind, of which, after 
 reckoning its transitory states, he has no separate consciousness. 
 He cannot use the first personal pronoun of himself without 
 claiming an existence other than that of his own evanescent 
 feelings : for in doing so he certainly means, what he directly 
 says, not that he is, but that he has the several thoughts and 
 emotions that make the thread of his experience. Whether 
 this meaning that he has is true or false, whether there is any- 
 thing corresponding to it in naturd rerum or it be a ' fiction of 
 the mind,' is a question which we need not touch : be it given 
 by a faculty or entailed by an incapacity, certain it is that this 
 notion of a permanent reality as the supporting centre of all 
 transient appearance, is inseparable from the very action of 
 the intellect. A universe of mere ' successions and coexistences ' 
 of change is wholly unpresentable in thought, and could not 
 be intelligibly spoken of, were it not helped out by the com- 
 plemental act of the mind itself restoring in fact what is 
 suppressed in phrase. Phenomena alone, supported by no 
 nucleus of the real, would be but as flapping drapery hanging 
 upon no solid form, but folded round the empty outline of a 
 ghost. 
 
 And this distinction forces itself upon us in other shapes. 
 As Attribute flings us back on Substance, so does the ac- 
 cidental upon the essential ; and in both cases we are landed 
 on the conception of something enduring, central, regulative, 
 reposing in the midst of the momentary whirl of appearances. 
 It is impossible not to recognise in each separate kind of 
 being, especially in the species of the organised world, a 
 distinct expression of character, every departure from which, 
 though found in ever so many actual individuals, is con- 
 demned as distortion or defect. Nor can we help attributing 
 unity to this generic character, and feeling it to be a single 
 type, though it has never insulated itself before our eye, or
 
 6 INTRODUCTION, 
 
 become detached from its entanglement with mixed and 
 multifarious specimens. And if you insist that it is a mere 
 product of abstraction, the average impression collected from 
 the sum of all our observations, the explanation is liable 
 to this embarrassing objection ; that our ideal of any species 
 (say, of man), far from coinciding with the average of ex- 
 amples, is realised in the fewest or in none ; and you feel 
 that, tried by the inner meaning or project of each nature, 
 the whole circle of your experience has brought you only 
 poor attempts and approximations. If so, however, it is 
 difficult to escape the acknowledgment that the type is a 
 permanent standard, a pre-existent and imperishable idea, 
 towards which, as to a model conception, all single births 
 imperfectly strive: and, far from assenting to the dictum 
 that in truth there are nothing but individuals and only in 
 human fancy are there classes, we are brought to conceive 
 inversely of the procedure of nature, as a descent from the 
 generic thought as prior, into individualisation as posterior. 
 He who follows this course, and represents to himself the 
 primary ideal bursting into the actual, the unspoiled unity 
 breaking into the disappointing multiplicity, naturally as- 
 cribes to the earliest and genetic type a more positive as well 
 as a higher reality than belongs to the individuals embodying 
 it. If he be a Platonist, he calls it an eTSos : if an Aristote- 
 lian^ TO ri TJV dvai : if a Scholastic, a Universal : but in any 
 case, he regards it as nearer the fountain of existence than 
 anything which merely passes across the stage, and indeed 
 as the essence which, occupying this and that particular 
 being, gives it what reality it has. 
 
 It is unnecessary to follow out into further applications this 
 mode of contemplating the objects of human ken. The op- 
 posites which it discovers, substance and attribute, unity 
 and plurality, are all gathered up into one comprehensive 
 antithesis, by which the universe is distributed into ovra and 
 yiyyo'/xezxx 1 , what always is and what for a while appears. 
 The history of nature thus comes to be conceived of in a 
 manner very different from ours : a certain stock of eternals 
 
 1 See Plato, Timaeus, 28, A.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 transmigrates through various forms, which must therefore be 
 deemed the evanescent embodiment of divine realities : no 
 augmentation, no diminution of the totality of being is pos- 
 sible ; it can but pass into the visible field and lapse into 
 latency again. Phenomena are the veil that hides yet hints 
 the essential ideal, which is also the truest real, world; and 
 when that has been read off, we have reached the ultimatum 
 of knowledge, the evolving thought, to commune with which 
 is to be admitted among the immortal gods. 
 
 But how gain access to that higher realm ? or have we 
 access to it at all ? This was the grand controversy of the 
 Greek schools : but, however variously it was resolved, one com- 
 mon principle pervades the answers. With all their mutual 
 contradictions, they invariably assume that, in order to know 
 a thing, you must have a share of its nature in yourself, 
 and that without such common element to mediate between 
 it and you, the reciprocal dissimilarity keeps you hopelessly 
 estranged. According to this assumption, if man is to know 
 the universe spread around him, he must be similarly com- 
 posed ; its two factors must extend to him, and give him a 
 double sympathy, answering face to face, and exchanging looks 
 of recognition, now with the inner ground, now with the outer 
 appearance, of the world. He was accordingly conceived of 
 as actually the compendium, as he was the finished product, 
 of the universe ; whose types of thought, simply existing in 
 other natures, but rising into consciousness in him, constitute 
 his share of Reason; and whose material phenomena, pro- 
 voking responsive movements in his corporeal organism, 
 pass into the susceptibility of Sense. As the universe, acting 
 downwards, divaricates into these two endowments in him, 
 so does each, in its instinctive return upward, find its own 
 proper parent : Sense apprehending the world of phenomena ; 
 Reason, the store of essential realities : the one conversing 
 with the relative and transitory ; the other, with the absolute 
 and eternal. The former, if it realises its highest aim, ter- 
 minates in physical knowledge ; the latter, in metaphysical. 
 For this, be it observed, is the proper meaning of these two 
 words : physics, the doctrine of things so far as they enter 
 and quit our field of perception; metaphysics, the doctrine
 
 8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of things so far as they are permanent entities, and, with- 
 holding themselves from Sense, are objects of Reason alone. 
 
 Now between these two doctrines there was no less fierce 
 a controversy in ancient than in modern times ; but with 
 this difference: that the contest was conducted then upon 
 the field of nature and the universe, now upon the enclosure 
 of the human faculties. The primary question then was, Is 
 there anything but phenomena to be known ? but now it is, 
 Are we competent to know anything but phenomena ? Those 
 who maintained the negative asserted, in old times, that the 
 whole system of things was resolvable into mere currents of 
 incessant change, and were called the flowing philosophers : 
 but in our day, they prefer the statement, that the mind's 
 whole life is a tissue of disguised sensations, and receive 
 the name of the Sensational school. The opposite party in 
 Elea (Lower Italy) shaped their position thus, that change 
 and motion, far from being all in all, were impossible, and 
 the totality of being was One, immutable and absolute : but 
 with us they rather say, that Reason ought to be believed, 
 when constraining us to think as if there were fundamental 
 existences, e.g. Soul and God, as the ground of every change. 
 This distinction of philosophical method is of the utmost 
 importance for the correct apprehension of the Greek schools. 
 They were all essentially unpsychological and objective ; reason- 
 ing downwards from the data of the universe, whether real 
 or phenomenal, into the qusesita of our faculties, whether of 
 intellect or sense: whereas we rather take the inverse 
 direction, and find in the universe the real or the phenomenal, 
 according as we take on trust the assumptions of thought 
 or the impressions of sense. Hence it is that, although the 
 same schemes of doctrine have re-appeared among us that gave 
 distinction to the names of Parmenides and Zeno, Protagoras 
 and Epicurus, yet little or no use can be made by the 
 moderns of the reasoning of their Hellenic prototypes ; the 
 logical locomotion is in the opposite direction; and though 
 there is the same ferry to cross, the boat is moored on the 
 wrong side for us, and another must be taken. How little 
 conviction, for instance, is now produced by the Platonic 
 arguments for the immortality of the soul ! so that precisely
 
 INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 the readers in deepest sympathy with the author's feeling 
 and conclusion are the first to lament the hazardous de- 
 pendence of a sublime moral truth on the precarious assump- 
 tions of a metaphysical realism. And how foreign to the 
 genius of Bentham and Mill are the maxims and reasoning 
 of Heraclitus, to prove that motion and semblance, without 
 rest and substance, constitute the universe! And if forced 
 to acknowledge the essential identity of their conclusions 
 with his, how ready would they be with condescending apolo- 
 gies for the old Greek's perverseness in making his logic 
 stand upon its head! In a word, the controversy between 
 the pretensions of change and the unchanging is common 
 to ancient and modern times ; but in the former the stress 
 of the battle was thrown upon the macrocosm, and fought 
 out between the real and phenomenal, and then the victory 
 was pushed home into human nature ; while in the latter, 
 the tug of war is in the microcosm, between the maxims of 
 reason and of sense ; and this outpost being carried, the field 
 of the great universe is won. 
 
 Now suppose a Greek Realist to bring his doctrine down 
 into human life, and interpret by it the varieties of sentiment 
 and character. He sees in the soul the co-presence of what 
 already he has discriminated everywhere else, only now 
 wakened into self-consciousness. Whatever belongs to the 
 senses, the pleasures and pains of their experience, the passions 
 and desires which impel to their exercise, the principles of con- 
 duct which consult for their gratification, in short, the whole 
 apparatus of our sentient nature that adapts us to the world 
 of phenomena, he will regard as not fundartiental, but subsi- 
 diary and evanescent, not the positive essence of our life, but 
 the mere negative condition for the concrete expression of 
 what is behind. Whatever on the other hand is constant 
 through all sentient mutations, the ideas that abide with us 
 and recur, while objects and phenomena pass by and perish, 
 of the true, the beautiful, the good, with the aspirations that 
 seek and the faculties that seize them, in short, the whole 
 essence of our rational nature that is in communion with the 
 world of eternal things, he will recognise as the very ground- 
 work of our being, the endless warp of divine reality, coiled,
 
 10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 as it passes, upon our loom, and taking only an iridescent 
 pattern from the woof of flying phenomena. When he en- 
 counters therefore men whose tastes are selfish and worldly, 
 whose aims are satisfied with mere ease or reputation, whose 
 rules of conduct are only a device of longer or shorter pru- 
 dence for winning these ends, he will assuredly look down 
 upon them as falling infinitely short of the proper standard 
 for a man ; and will contrast with them the nobler few who, 
 enamoured of truth and goodness, chase them at all costs 
 wherever they appear. These last, he will say, show the 
 divine nature of the soul, and vindicate its real essence amid 
 the flood of natural change by which the majority are over- 
 whelmed. You will probably feel that his moral criticism is 
 essentially just; that in distinguishing between the good and 
 the evil, he separates the right things ; and that if he had 
 the shaping of the world, it would be less unlike a kingdom 
 of heaven. But though he pitches upon the right sort of men 
 to be called good men, what is it that constitutes them good 
 in his eyes'? that, by a happy infection or infusion, more 
 of the essence of the universe has got into them than into 
 others ; that the magnetic wires from the fount of real ideas 
 pass the currents of the fair and good with peculiar intensity 
 through them, and evolve within them the responsive and 
 * miniature god. What is praised in them is thus only a 
 margin or local extension of the outer ground of the universe ; 
 is the very same thing in another place ; and in no other sense 
 belongs to them than that they are the theatre of its mani- 
 festation: rather do they belong to it as its creature and 
 medium of exercise. The real, appearing in their conscious- 
 ness, becomes ideal, the divine becomes human, in them ; and, 
 apart from this development in concurrence with their per- 
 sonality and on the scene of their physical existence, there 
 is nothing in them to applaud. The sentiment therefore 
 directed towards them is no other than that which may be 
 felt towards a fine form or a noble face ; or towards the products 
 of Art and Science ; or towards the several types of in- 
 tellectual genius. All these belong, in this theory, to one 
 and the same category ; they are the essential principles, the 
 eternal life, the formative thoughts of the universe, cropping
 
 I NT ROD UCTION. 1 1 
 
 up into manifestation on the human stage ; and all are to be 
 welcomed with the same kind of admiration. This complete 
 merging of all moral approbation in the love of beauty and 
 truth, is especially visible in the system of Plato ; and has its 
 distinctest expression in his Socratic doctrine, that virtue is 
 an eTTioT?///,?] that may be taught. It is evident that no dis- 
 tinction is drawn, in such a scheme, between natural and 
 moral evil : no room is left for guilt, as opposed to ignorance ; 
 or for retribution, as different from discipline. Yet it is 
 remarkable that Plato could not hold himself exclusively to 
 this point of view : the instincts of his nature were too much 
 for the restraints of a philosophy, comprehensive indeed, but 
 still short of the compass of his mind ; and when, as at the 
 close of his Republic, his dialectic, unequal to the inner 
 pressure of his moral inspiration, bursts its formal shell, and 
 takes flight upon the air of myth, he proclaims penalties to 
 sin quite too solemn, were it but a mental ugliness, and even, 
 in cases of extremest guilt, announces them as eternal. This, 
 however, is little else than the revolt of his inmost moral 
 sentiment against the checks of his philosophy ; and that his 
 philosophy necessitated the revolt, and found no place for 
 feelings that insisted on expression, enables us to mark the 
 great defect of the whole method. The metaphysic doc- 
 trine of Ethics, which regards human virtue, in conjunction 
 with human beauty and human science, as a mere community 
 of essence, transmuted into conscious sympathy, with the 
 realities of the universe, treats man as an irresponsible de- 
 velopment, and fails to vindicate the indestructible sentiments 
 which we entertain towards moral as distinguished from 
 natural ill. Morals, ^Esthetics, and Philosophy fuse them- 
 selves, in this scheme, into one ; and are but the blossoming 
 in the consciousness of man of the real root of the eternal 
 universe. 
 
 To the 'metaphysic doctrine of Ethics stands opposed (still 
 within the unpsychological circle) the physical; which de- 
 scends into human life from the phenomenal instead of the 
 real side of the world. Resolving every thing into phenomena, 
 the disciple of this school recognises in man no reliable 
 functions except those which stand in relation to phenomena ;
 
 1 2 1NTROD UCTION. 
 
 none, therefore, beyond the range of the senses themselves 
 and their elaborated or disguised impressions. As in the 
 former system the leading idea was that of Permanence, and 
 the ethical aim was to keep the mind in sympathy and com- 
 munion with the abiding ground of things ; so, in this, the 
 leading idea is that of Change, and the great end is to live 
 in adaptation to the Laivs of Change. Fixed standard of 
 good amid the flow of events, reality behind the semblances 
 of the world, there is none ; and to maintain in one's self 
 a persistency to which nothing outward corresponds, is a 
 mark, not of wisdom, but of stubbornness. Pliant accommo- 
 dation of the mind to the shifting phases of the scene in 
 which it is placed, free surrender to nature's facts, whatever 
 they be, is the only virtue. It is impossible to escape from 
 the purely relative existence in which we find ourselves ; to 
 ' gain any test of truth, except what seems to be true ; of good, 
 except what seems to be good : and if, in different persons, or 
 in different moods of the same, this seeming should not be 
 the same, the true and good must be held to have altered 
 too. It follows that there is no knowledge which is more 
 than opinion ; and only a sentient test of beauty or virtue. 
 All this would hold, even if man were his own master, and 
 could defy his relations to the world of phenomena. But he 
 is himself nothing but a product of that world, and throughout 
 his being only one of its phenomena ; and, whether he owns 
 it or not, he is as absolute subject of its laws, which are only 
 physical laws, as his dog or his flower-garden. He himself, 
 what is he ? simply a succession of feelings and thoughts, a 
 thread of temporary consciousness spun off from the wheel 
 of a physiologic Fate ; and not one component element in 
 the series of his life can come without its cause, or would 
 come the same if the cause were different. Act from volition, 
 x > volition from desire, desire from idea, idea from sensation, 
 sensation from vital connection with the physical world, 
 form the links by which man is chained to the legislation of 
 material Nature. The effect which this manner of thinking 
 must have on the configuration of ethical doctrine will be 
 obvious at once ; and will in part agree with the results of 
 the inetaphysic scheme. There is the same exclusion of any
 
 INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 proper notion of responsibility: the same reduction of all 
 moral evil to the category of natural evil ; only that in the 
 metaphysic doctrine it comes rather under the head of ugli- 
 ness and unreason, and is looked on with disgust, while in 
 the physical it is more analagous to disease and suffering, and 
 is contemplated with pity : but in neither is there room for 
 regarding it with disapproval as a sin. The mode in which 
 man is hung on to the outer universe, and his original or 
 personal causation is excluded, is somewhat different in the 
 two systems. For the usual ethical conception of freedom, 
 viz. a true preferential power, capable of determining the 
 previously indeterminate, the metaphysic doctrine substitutes 
 the notion of mere spontaneity, or undisturbed development 
 from within, by a force wholly indigenous to the being 
 himself: while the physical doctrine subjugates him to an 
 external necessity, referring his seeming activity back into 
 prior conditions not inherent, and explaining them away from 
 efficient causes into natural effects. It may also be remarked, 
 as a consequence or rather perhaps only another phase of 
 this distinction, that the idea of Personality is differently 
 conceived in the two schools ; being identified with the active 
 power of rational mind in the one case ; with the passive 
 continuity of unbroken consciousness in the other. In the 
 metaphysic scheme, the spontaneous energy of thought evolv- 
 ing itself in products, constitutes a person; in the physical, 
 the mere having impressions, or being the theatre of feelings, 
 joined with the power of giving them a collective name, 
 constitutes a person. The former necessarily regards the 
 human person as subordinate or miniature to the divine, the 
 counterpart and symbol of its great prototype ; and though 
 the notion of personality may be altogether an inadequate 
 one, it is not less elevated and full in relation to the Mind of 
 the universe than in relation to our own. But the latter 
 theory, when fairly carried out, as it is in our days, makes 
 man the first person that has existed, so far as we know : it 
 is not that an eternal divine Reason has come down and 
 appeared on the scale of his small life ; but that phenomenal 
 laws and blind currents of force have so converged as to 
 warm and colour the clay of which he comes, and set up the
 
 14 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 surprise of a self-conscious being. Thus between the systems 
 there is all the difference of the higher embracing and sup- 
 porting the lower, or the lower creating the higher. 
 
 Thus then we obtain the leading division of ethical sys- 
 tems, by referring to the generating idea or method out of 
 which they spring. If the primary assumptions are taken 
 from within, and you proceed by light of self-knowledge to 
 interpret what is objective, you have a psychological system 
 of Ethics. Invert the procedure, and you have an unpsycho- 
 logical system. This may be of two kinds, according as you 
 begin with assuming real, eternal, intellectual entities, and 
 thence descend into the human world; or only phenomena 
 and their laws. If the former, you have a metaphysical ; if 
 the latter, a physical system, of Morals. 
 
 II. HISTORICAL INSTANCES; AND SUBDIVISIONS. 
 
 Before following out our first distribution of ethical theories 
 into further divisions, we may advantageously notice one or 
 two points of interest in regard to their ascendency in different 
 periods of history. It is curious that psychological ethics are 
 altogether peculiar to Christendom. Of the various anterior 
 doctrines, much as they concerned themselves with the true 
 ideal of conduct and character, there is not one which seeks 
 its first principles in human consciousness, and endeavours 
 thence to determine the moral position of man in the uni- 
 verse. The order of investigation is always the reverse ; fetch- 
 ing its primary truths from the objective sphere, and by their 
 help lighting its way through the labyrinth of inner thought 
 and experience. It is not that psychological observation and 
 reflection are absent from the ancient philosophy, or fail to 
 occupy an important place in it: the writings of Plato and 
 Aristotle abound not only in judgments on life as seen from 
 the outside, but in the results of a profound self-knowledge : 
 while the daemon of Socrates, the Stoic ' man within the breast,' 
 the Epicurean resolution of all human phenomena into sensa- 
 tion, obviously imply an attention, more or less deliberate, to 
 the processes of the self-conscious mind. But the store of 
 mental and moral facts, whatever it might be, was to them
 
 INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 the fruit, and not the seed, of their system of belief: a de- 
 ducible from their prior theory of the universe, which it con- 
 firmed by showing how the actual came out correctly from 
 the hypothesis. The genius of the Greeks, notwithstanding 
 our logical obligations to them, was essentially objective ; not 
 only perceptive in the highest degree, in relation to the ex- 
 ternal world, but investing with form and substance the very 
 data of thought itself: nor could they readily deal with any- 
 thing as an inner fact, till they had had their look at it as an 
 hypostatised reality beyond their own centre. Hence their 
 systems are all either metaphysical or physical in their bases ; 
 and their ethical element is in no case intelligible, till it is 
 studied as a sequel to this earlier portion of the scheme. In 
 short, wherever the chief wonder is felt to reside, there will 
 philosophy be sure to begin ; and the speculative eye of the 
 Athenians, unlike that of their own bird of wisdom, was fond 
 of light and space, and first felt the mystery of the universe 
 on straining further into them than it could see. The 
 earliest glimpse of ethical speculation came in therefore to 
 supplement their wide sweep over the curve of Nature ; and 
 the individual mind, though included in its compass, was not 
 its regulative centre, but only one of the loci of its countless 
 ordinates. 
 
 In the Christian religion, on the other hand, the interest, 
 the mystery of the world were concentrated in human nature. 
 All the relations between it and God became immediate and 
 direct, not incident to it merely as part of the universal or- 
 ganism, but due to its own special state and essence ; so com- 
 pletely, that they would remain the same were the visible 
 frame of things to vanish and leave us alone in the infinite 
 Presence. The sense of Sin, a sentiment that left no trace 
 in Athens, involves a consciousness of personal alienation 
 from the supreme Goodness: the aspiration after holiness di- 
 rects itself to a union of affection and will with the source 
 of all Perfection : the agency for transferring men from their 
 old estrangement to new reconciliation was a Person in whom 
 the divine and human historically blended ; and the sanctify- 
 ing spirit by which they are sustained at the height of their 
 purer life is a living link of communion between their minds
 
 1 6 I NT ROD UCTION. 
 
 and the Soul of souls. This was the circle of ideas in which 
 Christian sentiment revolved : the fatal separation of two 
 spiritual natures, and then their permanent reunion by their 
 meeting once on the stage of a single personality; and this 
 circle was complete without the least reference to the mate- 
 rial universe, in which the Greek sought for the divine ground 
 of all. Nature, which was a principal before, sank into the 
 accidental and the neutral, the mere scene on which the great 
 drama of real being was performed, and flung its lights and 
 shades. Connected with this transference of divine manifes- 
 tation from the universe to man, is another feature of Chris- 
 tianity ; that it resolves the whole administration of the 
 world into a moral idea, and makes the state of human cha- 
 racter the determining condition of all the good and ill that 
 can be hoped or feared. The consequence of this mode of 
 thought inevitably was, that the scene of divine audience was 
 changed : Wonder, instead of roaming comprehensively abroad, 
 retired intensely within ; moral psychology penetrated to its 
 deep foundations; and subjective maxims became regulative 
 of objective theory. The whole complexion of thought and 
 language on ethical subjects alters on crossing the line from 
 heathendom to Christendom ; and even where the Pagan phi- 
 losopher draws more truly and more severely the outer boun- 
 daries of right and wrong, the Christian disciple will show 
 a deeper apprehension of the inner quality and colouring of 
 both. How it was that the new habits of self-knowledge 
 ripened into no systematic Ethics, it would be foreign to my 
 purpose to discuss : I will mention but one disturbing cause, 
 which, from its vast and protracted operation, is too remark- 
 able to be overlooked. The Augustinian theology is founded 
 upon a sense of sin so passionate and absolute as to plunge 
 the conscience into unrelieved shadows. It pledges itself to 
 find traces everywhere of the lost condition of humanity, in 
 virtue of which there is no longer any freedom for good, and 
 a hopeless taint is mingled with the very springs of our ac- 
 tivity. This doctrine is evidently the utterance of a deep but 
 despairing moral aspiration : it estimates with such stern 
 purity the demands of the divine holiness upon us, that only 
 the first man, fresh with unspoiled powers, was capable of
 
 INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 fulfilling them ; and since he was false, the sole opportunity 
 of voluntary holiness has been thrown away, and we must 
 live in helpless knowledge of obligations which we cannot 
 discharge. Hence there has never been more than one soli- 
 tary hour of real probation for the human race : during that 
 hour there was a positive trust committed to a capable will, 
 and the young world was under genuine moral administra- 
 tion ; but. ever since, evil only has been possible to human 
 volition, and good can pass no further than our dreams. It 
 follows that, as the human game is already lost, we no longer 
 live a probationary life, and can have no doctrine of applied 
 Ethics which shall have the slightest religious value: the 
 moralities, considered as divine, are obsolete as Eden ; and 
 human nature, as it is, can produce no voluntary acts that are 
 not relatively neutral, because uniformly offensive, to the sen- 
 timent of God. Its restoration must proceed from sources ex- 
 traneous to the will ; and unless snatched away in some fiery 
 chariot of grace, it must gaze in vain upon the heaven that 
 spreads its awful beauty above the earth. Thus a doctrine 
 which begins with the highest proclamation of the divine 
 moral law, ends with practically superseding it. The history 
 of the universe opens with an act of probation and closes with 
 one of retribution : but through every intervening moment is 
 destitute of moral conditions ; and man, the central figure of 
 the whole, though a stately actor at the first, and an infinite 
 recipient or victim at the last, so falls through in the mean- 
 while between the powers that tempt and those that save 
 him, that as an ethical agent he sinks into nonentity, and be- 
 comes the mere prize contended for by the spirits of darkness 
 and of light. In this system, the human personality, by the 
 very intensity with which it burns at its own focus, consumes 
 itself away ; and the very attempt to idealise the severity and 
 sanctity of divine law does but cancel it from the actual, and 
 banish it to the beginning and end of time. The man of to- 
 day is no free individuality at all, but the mere meeting-point 
 of opposite forces foreign to his will, ruined by nature, res- 
 cued by God, with no range of power, therefore none of re- 
 sponsibility between. It is as if the Augustinian system took 
 its doctrine of nature from Protagoras and Epicurus, and its 
 VOL. i. c
 
 18 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 doctrine of grace from Parmenides and Plato : in the one not 
 reaching so high a level as that of moral obligation, in the 
 other overflying it with a dangerous transcendental wing ; 
 and combining therefore, without any mediating term, the ex- 
 treme tendencies of the physical and metaphysical schools. 
 
 The consequence has been the forfeiture once more of the 
 great advantage which Christianity, by its appeal to the moral 
 consciousness, had promised to philosophy, and a return, under 
 the guidance and especially in the native land of the reforma- 
 tion, of both the unpsychological tendencies, whose dominance 
 in the ancient world I have described : France for the most 
 part preferring the physical, and Germany the metaphysical, 
 substitute for psychological ethics. With the proclamation and 
 spread of Protestantism, the religious value of morals disap- 
 peared, and they were deserted by that sentiment of reve- 
 rence which alone can generate a true science. They were 
 treated by Luther himself from a merely outward point of 
 view, as simply useful for civil peace and order, matters of 
 social police, fitly placed under guardianship of the magistrate. 
 Hence the political turn given to almost all the disquisitions 
 on moral doctrine produced under the influence of ' the new 
 learning' ; the State assuming in them the position which in 
 Catholic books is held by the Church, and secular regulation 
 or human compact replacing the divine law. The psycho- 
 logical clue being lost, attempts were inevitable to evolve a 
 theory of society and morals from either physical or meta- 
 physical assumptions ; and in circles remote from Church 
 interests and animated by purely speculative aspirations, 
 the opposition of these two directions became more and 
 more marked. At the one extreme stands Hobbes, as the great 
 -representative of physical absolutism ; at the other, Spinoza, 
 of metaphysical ; and if the spirit of the former, after various 
 minor epiphanies, transmigrated into Comte, that of the latter 
 survives in the school of Hegel ; and in both we find repro- 
 duced the very controversies and characteristics which divided 
 learned Greeks in the days of Heraclitus and Aristotle. 
 So much is this the case that it might almost seem as if the 
 current of Hellenic philosophy, when lost from the upper 
 light, had taken a subterranean course below the world where
 
 I NT ROD UCTION. 1 9 
 
 Christendom had its history, and had burst to the surface of 
 our age again ; were it not that it makes a show of taking up 
 and carrying with it the elements of Christian truth, and 
 perhaps does so on condition of dissolving them all away. In 
 modern, as in ancient times, the extreme points between which 
 philosophy has oscillated are the same : positively described, 
 they are the pantheistic and (if I may invent a phrase) the 
 pamphysical poles of doctrine ; negatively, they are the 
 atheism of Lamettrie, and what Hegel calls the akosmism of 
 Spinoza. But wherever the Augustinian system has not pre- 
 vailed, and whencesoever it has receded in favour of a milder 
 theology, the psychological tendency has re-asserted itself ; has 
 driven back, on either side, the physical and the metaphysical 
 domination within their proper limits ; has reinstated the 
 superseded personality of man ; and re-discovered a religious 
 significance for morals. This return to the essential founda- 
 tion at once of the Christian religion and of ethical philosophy 
 is due in this country to Bishop Butler. Unfortunately it has 
 been but scantily imitated and accepted ; and with the excep- 
 tion of the writers of the Scottish school and their editors, 
 critics, and disciples in Paris, it is difficult to find any class 
 of recent moralists who have declined to betray their science 
 to the physiologist on the one hand, and the ontologist on the 
 other. 
 
 From this rapid glance it will be evident that, of each kind 
 of system, examples might be derived from widely separated 
 periods. Without any primary regard to the order of time, I 
 propose to select and exhibit a well-marked specimen of each, 
 not only of the principal theories, but of their most important 
 subordinate varieties. Beginning with metaphysic schemes, we 
 might resort for illustrative instances to the schools of Athens, 
 Elea, or Tarentum ; to the conventual class-rooms of the 
 middle ages ; or to the auditories of modern Heidelberg or 
 Berlin. As, however, there is a genealogy in the successions of 
 ideas not less than in the descent of race, it is desirable to 
 ascend to the great founders of our chief dynasties of thought, 
 wherever history has left their intellectual features still dis- 
 tinct ; and I shall therefore in the first instance seek in Greece 
 the incipient line of approach to theoretic Morals ; and only 
 
 C2
 
 20 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 slightly indicate its continued direction through the medieval 
 times to our own day. Our first category, however, we must 
 previously divide into two, and choose a representative of each 
 member. The ground of this division a few words will 
 exhibit. 
 
 The entire sphere of existence resolving itself before our 
 mind into the real and the phenomenal, metaphysics, we have 
 said, seize upon the real, and vindicate its rights against the 
 exclusive pretensions of the phenomenal. Among those, however, 
 who agree to the general vindication, a question arises how 
 far precisely those rights may go, whether to simple co-ex- 
 tension with the rival claims, or whether indefinitely further. 
 
 One says : ' The real eternal Ground of all must be older than 
 
 > 
 
 the transitory appearances that are born from it and perish : 
 the infinite and universal Cause must be wider than its 
 particular effects : the formative Thought which lies at heart 
 as the essence of each kind must be purer than its imperfect 
 embodiment ; so that every way, in time, in scope, in quality, 
 the divine potency whence all things come must transcend 
 the totality of phenomena : God is greater than Nature ; and 
 His resources of perfection are not exhausted or fully expressed 
 in the organism of the visible universe.' This doctrine is 
 called, in the language of the schools, the system of Tran- 
 scendency ; and we may express its logical characteristic by 
 saying that, while it declares God to be the essence of the 
 universe, it refuses to convert the proposition and affirm that 
 the essence of the universe is God. Again, and in reply, 
 another says : ' If the ground of things is eternal, so too has 
 its manifestation been, for there never was a time void of all 
 phenomena ; while they are transient one by one, their series 
 has neither beginning nor end ; nor can we conceive that 
 there are outlying deserts of space where the Divine Cause 
 exists, yet, for want of effect, is truly cause no more ; and 
 whether or not the types of actual being spread around us are 
 imperfect, they are the most perfect that we know ; nor have 
 we any reason to suppose that their idea has existed in other 
 time or other place or less mixed with alloy, than in the very 
 objects themselves ; so that Nature is every way co-extensive 
 with God ; is simply the appearance of His essence, an essence
 
 I XT ROD UCTION. 2 1 
 
 intrinsically incapable of being latent; and does "exhaust," 
 in the sense of fully covering, the whole ground of His re- 
 sources, moment by moment, though leaving still a fertility 
 in reserve adequate to eternal demands.' This doctrine is 
 called, in distinction from the other, the system of Immanency ; 
 and its logical characteristic is given when we say that it 
 makes not only God to be the essence of the universe, but the 
 essence of the universe to be God. Within the present genera- 
 tion an active controversy prevailed in Germany between 
 these two modes of conception : the advocates of the former, 
 the younger Fichte, Chalybseus, and Ulrici, conceiving that 
 in upholding it they were vindicating the interests of Theism 
 against the unqualified Pantheism of the new Hegelians. The 
 distinction, however, for which they contend, though un- 
 doubtedly essential to their religious object, is a very inade- 
 quate security for any proper scheme of Theism ; and it is 
 quite possible to present both doctrines in such a form as to 
 lie strictly within the Pantheistic limits, as we shall find to 
 have been clearly the case in the ancient schools. The accurate 
 relation between the two is this : that the doctrine of Imma- 
 nency excludes Theism, while that of Transcendency leaves it 
 still possible ; but whether the margin of being and power 
 beyond the phenomenal universe be rightly termed GOD de- 
 pends on something more than this mere overlapping of the 
 scope of nature ; depends on the presence or absence there of 
 those moral attributes which constitute a Person. It is to be 
 regretted that so momentous a truth should be made to take 
 the risks of a distinction so fine and shadowy ; but this is the 
 form which the controversy between the two theologies as- 
 sumes, when denuded of its ethical and psychological con- 
 ditions, and reduced to a question of bare metaphysics. 
 Though the names by which I have denoted these modes of 
 thought are modern, the doctrines themselves are not so. They 
 sustained an active and prolonged conflict with each other, 
 and with a scheme that disputed the claims of both, during the 
 scholastic period : for the Nominalist doctrine which disturbed 
 Europe from the time of Abelard to that of Huss, was opposed 
 by two forms of Realism (Universalia ante res and in rebus) 
 exactly corresponding to the transcendental and immanenta\
 
 22 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 theories of the present day ; and these again refer us back for 
 their respective origin to the Academy and the Lyceum. To 
 each of these chief types we must assign its characteristics ; 
 and I propose to select Plato as the best developed example of 
 the first. To give anything like a complete account of his 
 philosophy would carry me too far away from my limited 
 object; but I hope to show how the main elements of his 
 metaphysical system propagated their influence downwards 
 upon his ethical doctrine and imparted to it the peculiarities 
 of its shape and contents.
 
 PART I. 
 
 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEOEIES. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 METAPHYSICAL. 
 
 BRANCH I. 
 
 TRANSCENDENTAL. 
 
 PLATO. 
 
 PLATO, in common with the rest of his speculative coun- 
 trymen, did not trouble himself at all with the question to which 
 the whole of our modern philosophy addresses itself, how do the 
 mind and the universe communicate with one another, and what 
 security have we that they really find each other out ? He never 
 raised the doubt whether, perhaps, there might not be a cheat or 
 forgery in their conference with one another, an optical illusion 
 of our faculties, which prevented any correspondence between 
 the phantasms of thought and the scenery of fact. He as- 
 sumed, as every one then did, that nature out of the mind 
 was just the same as nature in the mind ; that what is must 
 be identical with what is thought ; what passes with what 
 is felt. The universe did not stand opposite to the soul, to 
 be its object and antithetic term ; but came up in us in the 
 shape of soul, and simply looked in its own glass and broke 
 into its own soliloquy. Like only could know like, or any-
 
 24 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 how act on like ; so that things, to be cognisable by thought, 
 must be thoughts themselves ; and thoughts, to hold good 
 of things, must be of the essence of things themselves l . 
 Hence we do not want two sets of terms, one to designate 
 the world within us, the other to describe the world with- 
 out us : it is the same world, taken at different ends ; and 
 psychology is but the translation of nature, and nature but 
 the potential germ of psychology. Or, if we choose to speak 
 separately of the two great departments of the universe, viz. 
 the permanent ground and the transient changes, we may 
 say on the one hand, that perception is only phenomena at 
 their sensitive end, and phenomena only perception in the 
 bud ; and, on the other, that ideas are but the rational side 
 of reality, and reality the cosmical side of ideas 2 . Thus 
 merging into one system these subjective and objective 
 spheres which we find it so difficult to adjust, Plato was 
 haunted by another question : how do the real and the phe- 
 nomenal conduct dealings with one another? how manage 
 to co-exist? and what prevents either from altogether swal- 
 lowing up the other? and how are we to answer Heraclitus, 
 who will have nothing but phenomena? and Parmenides, 
 who fuses them all away into the unity of being ? Into Plato's 
 polemic on these points I must not enter ; in the Thesetetus 
 he attacks the one-sidedness of the negative or phenomenal 
 school ; in the Sophistes and Parmenides, that of the positive 
 or ontological. His own answer to the question is contained 
 in his celebrated doctrine of ideas ; to which, as the centre 
 and turning-point of his whole philosophy, I must devote 
 a few pages ; the more so, because it is here that he en- 
 counters the direct resistance of Aristotle, and that the two 
 philosophers, both Realists and both Pantheists, separate 
 as representatives respectively of the transcendental and 
 immanental theories. 
 
 1 See e.g. the argument that knowing and being involve interacting power, 
 Plato, Soph. 247, E ; 248, D. E. 
 
 2 Plato, Soph. 248, A. 'Sw^art [itv ij/^as ytvtaft Si' ala6r)afcas Koivcwetv, Sia 
 \oyiapov 5t tyvxy wp^y rty OVTOIS ovaiav, fjv dtl Kara ravra wvavrcus fX (tv 
 ytVffftv S aXAort
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 1$ 
 
 1. Doctrine of Ideas. 
 
 There can be little doubt that Plato's doctrine, so far as 
 it modified that of previous philosophers, arose in his mind 
 from the same point which in later writers gave birth to 
 the theory of ' universals ; ' viz. the logical distinction be- 
 tween the invariable attribute of a class, and the variable 
 accidents of its individual members. The constant character 
 which repeats itself in every sample of any natural kind, 
 and which neither wanders over into any other kind, nor 
 absents itself from any cases of this, presented itself 
 to his mind as a unit of ultimate reality, serving as 
 a nucleus for the play and movement of successive change l . 
 This constant character not only pervades all the simul- 
 taneous individuals of the same order, but perseveres through 
 the generations of organised beings; so as to force upon 
 us the feeling that it is a determinate type given in the 
 very ground of things, the look which expresses a single 
 meaning in nature. In us it appears in the shape of a 
 general notion, the notion of the essence of the class, cleared 
 of all that is special to any of its members 2 ; and as in 
 the universe the type is the base of all individualisation, 
 so in the mind is the general notion the ground of all 
 particular inference, and the only thing which has scientific 
 value and productiveness for the intellect 3 . This configura- 
 tion of existence, this rational and invisible image, which 
 lies at the heart of things as their essence and of knowledge 
 as its principle, is an dbos, or idea*. It is variously de- 
 scribed as the universal in the individual ; the durable amid 
 change ; the rational amid the sensible ; the unit amid plu- 
 rality ; the self-identical amid the diverse. It was evi- 
 dent that no actual object, as it comes before us in the 
 physical world, is the same that presents itself to our mind 
 when we hear its common name ; and if all its attributes 
 were on an equal footing, and there were nothing in it 
 
 1 Farm. 132, C. Elra OVK efSos tarcu TOVTO TO voovfitvov l> dvai, del ov TO aura 
 iirl traaiv. 
 
 3 Theaet. 148, D. Euthyph. 5, D. 6 D. Farm. 132, A. D. 
 
 3 Thetet. 185, E 186, E. 
 
 * Rep. 596, A. EfSos yap wov n tv tKaarov tiwQaptv riOtaOat vtpl titaffra rci 
 woAAd, 01$ ravTuv ovopa firHptpofity.
 
 26 VNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Cook I. 
 
 more intrinsically reliable than its individual features, it 
 would be a mere shifting bundle of phenomena, on which 
 thought would have no hold. But so far as the thing 
 coalesces with the thought, the abiding essence is present, 
 and rests with one end in our reason and the other in 
 the world. Were there not these durable essences, were the 
 evanescent phenomena of sense the whole sphere open to 
 us, knowledge would be impossible; for of the evanescent 
 there is no knowledge 1 . 
 
 The ideas of Plato are then the fundamental essences of 
 things, in virtue of which they are what they are. Being 
 thus constitutive of all reality, they are co-extensive with 
 all reality; and there is an idea for whatever can at all 
 be made the object, not indeed of perception, but of thought. 
 That of which there should be no idea would be ipso facto 
 a non-existent; and of the non-existent there can be no 
 thought, only the negation of thought 2 . The number of 
 ideas is accordingly indefinite ; and they are present, not 
 only in the generations of organised being, but in whatever 
 plurality may be indicated by a single name, even the most 
 insignificant; so that when the young Socrates in the Parmenides 
 hesitates to allow that there can be an etSoy of hair and dirt 
 and bed and table, as well as of likeness and unlikeness, 
 of the just, the beautiful, the good, he is told that philosophy 
 has not yet got 'the hold of him which it will afterwards 
 obtain, or he would not be afraid, from the apparent mean- 
 ness of these things, to allow their partnership in ideas 3 . 
 There are ideas, common to nature and the mind, for every 
 sort of geometrical figure and grammatical form: of attri- 
 bute (as colour, sound, magnitude, strength), and relation 
 (as equal and unequal, double and half) ; and even of the 
 contradictory opposites of these ideas, as the bad, the shame- 
 ful, the unreal. In short, wherever a plurality of phenomena 
 
 1 Soph. 249, C. D. Crat. 440, A. B. 
 
 3 Farm. 134, B E. Theset. 188, 6189, A - 
 
 3 Farm. 130, B E. Compare, however, Aristotle's statement, Metaph. 1070, 
 a, 13, that Plato did not include among his tiSr/ conceptions of fabricated objects, 
 or negative and merely relative conceptions. Yet we find Plato himself assigning 
 ideas to bed, and table, Rep. 596, B. See Zeller's note on this inconsistency, 
 Phil, der Griechen, Th. II. Abth. i. Abschn. 2 sec. 6. 3. S. 587.
 
 Branch 1.] PLATO. 2J 
 
 is capable of being gathered up under any one notion, and 
 does not yet fly off into the absolutely individual and tran- 
 sient, there you are still within the circle of ideas *. 
 
 All these et8rj, however, though equally hypostatised by 
 Plato, are not left side by side as a democracy of real being. 
 As it is their general or notional character which saves them 
 from the fate of phenomena, so the more general exhibit this 
 title in a purer form and stand in higher rank than the less. 
 There is, accordingly, a regular series or graduated organism 
 of ideas, from the confines of particular phenomena to the 
 highest unity of being; and of these, each higher is to be 
 conceived as determining the lower, and having priority 
 in respect to it ; so that in the order of reality and causa- 
 tion, the course is ever from the wider notion to the nar- 
 rower ; as in the process of rational deduction the under- 
 standing descends from the universal to the particular 2 . In 
 fact, if you take the logician's account of the predicamental 
 line, with its summuin genus including secondary genera, and 
 coming down through species and sub-species to the in- 
 dividual, and, appljdng this pedigree of notions to the ob- 
 jective universe, accept it as a true history of the develop- 
 ment and relations of real being, you will approach very near 
 to the Platonic system of ideas. The procedure in the universe 
 that makes it what it is was held to be the same with that 
 of a deductive science, which carries out a comprehensive 
 formula, first into vast groups of facts bound together by 
 some inner analogy, and thence into instances more and more 
 particular: the system of things was regarded as having 
 thought itself out into its present form ; and all that our 
 science had to do was to copy and repeat in ourselves this 
 dialectic of reality. Human deduction was but the photo- 
 graphic transcript of the development of positive existence. 
 
 Plato, however, encountered a manifest difficulty, when he 
 endeavoured to describe the relation inter se of the higher 
 and lower ci5rj. He could not resort to our logical method, 
 of regarding the lower as contained in the higher, or the 
 higher by merely unfolding themselves yielding the lower: 
 
 1 The boundary line of the world of idea is traced, in Phil. 1 6, D. 
 * Soph. 253, B D.
 
 28 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 for this implies movement and explication, the free merging 
 and evolution of ideas, the one in the other ; and Plato had 
 barred himself from this resource by assigning a fixed ob- 
 jective existence to his ideas, and giving to the unideal 
 phenomena the exclusive privilege or discredit of genesis and 
 change. True, his 1817 were invisible, incorporeal entities, 
 abiding not in any conceivable space, but in the seat of 
 thought (TO'TTOS vorjros) : but as they were affirmed to be self- 
 subsisting and numerically plural and distinct without being 
 successive in time, no means were left of describing at once 
 their objective co-existence and their logical relation ; the 
 expressions which served the one function sacrificed the other. 
 The most usual device for marking the relation of ideas is 
 to say that the lower has part in the higher, or community 
 with it l ; as when it is said that self-restraint has part in 
 the idea of courage, or the sphere in that of roundness: 
 a phrase hard to reconcile with the unextended and in- 
 divisible character ascribed to the clbr] 2 . 
 
 This difficulty, however, was far from being unperceived by 
 Plato ; and, in common with most others that can be advanced 
 against his doctrine, is stated in the Parmenides ; and the 
 illustration employed to relieve it, viz. that the whole idea 
 is ^esent to the object all at once, just as the day exists 
 undivided in many places at the same time, is rejected as 
 inadequate ; on the ground that, in its extension, the day 
 is like a sail spread over a number of men, each of whom 
 has only a part of it over him, whereas an idea, in each of 
 its individuals, is whole and indivisible 3 . Yet, a little further 
 on, these perplexities are declared to be insufficient reasons 
 for rejecting the doctrine, as the only ground whereon a 
 basis of real knowledge can be won 4 . For this, it should 
 always be remembered, is the interest in which Plato's doc- 
 trine is propounded, and without regard to which its purport 
 cannot be rightly estimated. He assumes knowledge to be 
 
 1 Farm, passim : e.g. avtaoTrjros 5?) \Ltri\t\. T& tv, 161, C. Soph. 253, A. iras ovv 
 difitv oirofa OTTO/OIS Svvara K<HVWVIV. 
 
 2 Farm. 130, E; 131, A. SoKfi <roi eivai eiSij arra, wv raSe TOL d\\a 
 vovra ras eircuj'ii/i/as avrSiv ia\(iv, dlov ofiotorrjros fj.tv ^fraXa^ovra. uftota, 
 Bovs 8J (*tya\a, KO.\\OVS 8 KM SiKaioavvrjs SiKata T( KOI Ka\a yiyvfffOat. 
 
 8 Ibid. 131, B. C. * Ibid. 135, B. C.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 2$ 
 
 possible. He found both the previous doctrines which divided 
 the schools unsatisfactory and paradoxical, as rendering it 
 impossible. Knowledge implies something persistent, and 
 something diverse and plural : the Heraclitic school denied 
 the first, by resolving everything into the relative and 
 unstable: the Eleatic denied the second, by comprehending 
 all existence in an unchangeable unity. Plato insisted on 
 the existence and apprehension of unity amid variety ; and 
 detected the unity in the intellectual or universal element 
 with which science has to deal, and which the mind could 
 not apprehend, were it not really there ; and variety in the 
 sensible or individual accidents, which change with the mu- 
 tations of feeling and the successions of instances. Yet this 
 variety he did not relegate wholly to the perceptible world. 
 He left room for it also within the sphere of the real by 
 the plurality of ideas, the multitude of kinds, which that 
 sphere embraced. As, all of them, partaking of being, they 
 were one : as having each its own determinate essence or type 
 of being, they were many: and so far as this is what that 
 is not, the being of one is the non-being of another ; but, since 
 that other is there, being and non-being alike exist ; and any 
 negation which you can truly predicate is not absolute, but 
 only relative, simply affirming otherness of being, and not 
 its absence. Such otherness, constituted by mere exclusion 
 from a definite kind, is any otherness ; it is unlimited (airci.pov), 
 as opposed to determinate (ire'pas). It is among the differences 
 of the ei8?j that the whole scope of true and false predication 
 lies and human conceptions hit or miss the essences of things. 
 Take away these definite differences, whether by concen- 
 trating the essences into one, or by blowing them off into an 
 infinite dust of phenomena, and knowledge becomes impos- 
 sible 1 . But the ideas, at once eternal and uncreated, yet 
 present in the transient and originated, at once plural and 
 yet ranged in gradations which carried them up into a su- 
 preme One, at once essences subsisting really in things, and 
 thoughts present in the mind, combined the requisites which 
 earlier doctrines had separated, and completed the conditions 
 of reconciliation between knowledge and being. In its results 
 
 1 Soph. 254, 258, B.
 
 30 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 the doctrine is tantamount to that which Aristotle has ex- 
 pressed in one short maxim: that 'like is known by like, 
 and that things have existence from their first principles 1 .' 
 The dpxal whence things are must be the q'/>Xu whence things 
 are knoivn ; and the first principles of knowing and of being 
 must coalesce. 
 
 The tentative character of Plato's speculation, intentionally 
 marked in the prevailing structure of his dialogues, is 
 nowhere more evident than in his efforts to define his 
 doctrine of ideas. They present the liveliest image of a mind 
 struggling with the inadequacy of language to shape into 
 consistent expression relations which, nevertheless, co-exist 
 in reality. That he was not wholly satisfied with the terms 
 in which he had recorded his written thought we know from 
 Aristotle ; who tells us of quite a new form into which his 
 characteristic doctrine had been cast. In this, his ei8?j are 
 called 'numbers' (apidpofy, only with the strange qualifica- 
 tion that they are not made up of units, and are not sus- 
 ceptible of additive combination (ov fj.ovabi.KOi and aoT^SArjroi 2 ). 
 Under such conditions, one naturally asks, what numerical 
 characteristic can remain ? what else do we mean by ' num- 
 ber ' than the aggregation of units ? How Plato would have 
 answered these questions can only be conjectured; as 
 Aristotle, in interpreting his comparison of ideal with mathe- 
 matical relations, specifies only the features of difference and 
 is silent about the points of analogy. But as each eT8os was 
 ev TI, in nature and in thought, and yet was not excluded 
 from more or less concurrence with others, it seems to be 
 and to do much the same as an arithmetical unit which 
 enters now into this, now into that higher figure. Further 
 than this, however, the resemblance cannot be carried. The 
 units of calculation are all self-repetitions ; the ideal units 
 are all separate essences. To combine the former into greater 
 values, you have only to tie them together into lots of various 
 size ; to unite the latter, no such mechanic process will avail, 
 but you must see how far the essence of each kind agrees 
 
 1 De An. I. ii. 7 ftyvuffKfaOai yap ry uuoi/y TO ofioioy, rd 5t irpayfjMTa tie TUIV 
 \wv fivai. 
 
 2 Metaph. 1080, a. 12 seqq.
 
 Branch 1.] PLATO. 3! 
 
 with that of another. The propositions which arise in the 
 former case are quantitative equations ; in the latter, are 
 qualitative predications ; measured, in the one case, by the 
 extension, in the other, by the comprehension of the terms. 
 In the comparison of et8/j that are not wholly heterogeneous, 
 the specific conception is fuller than the generic, and cor- 
 responds with the higher of two numbers ; and in the order 
 of genesis it must be regarded as the later, since it pre- 
 supposes and carries the other, while the other can exist 
 without it. Hence it is that Plato claims the relation of 
 ' before and after ' for his ideal numbers ; they range them- 
 selves in a predicamental line of unalterable order. It is 
 true that he also speaks of a certain ' before and after ' having 
 place among arithmetical numbers ; but there the phrase 
 denotes quite a different relation, viz. that of factor and 
 pi'oduct : if 6 arise from 2 x 3, it is posterior to them. The 
 difference is that between ideal subsumption and numerical 
 multiplication l . 
 
 If the several forms of expression which Plato gives to the 
 ' one and many ' are closely scrutinised, it will be found 
 that there are three distinct subjects of the plurality : (l) the 
 61877 themselves are many entities: (2) each etSos 'par- 
 taking of any other which is predicable of it, has a plurality 
 in its contents: (3) each e?8os has dependent species, except 
 indeed the lowest, which has only individuals under it. Many 
 ideas : many qualities : many kinds. 
 
 In defending the claim of his 1877 to a place in the 
 sphere of real being, Plato was well aware that the alternative 
 theory must be, that they were only thoughts present to some 
 thinking subject. This position accordingly he assails by a 
 direct refutation, founded indeed on an inadmissible assump- 
 tion, but none the less forbidding us to impute to him the 
 opinion which he rejects. If each universal is only a thought 
 in some mind, it attests, wherever it exists, the presence of 
 a mind. But the single thought must be of a single some- 
 thing, and a single universal must be that of a single nature, 
 i.e. the subjective i8os is the cognition of an objective 
 
 1 See an exhaustive note (5) of Zeller's in the third edition of Phil, der Griechen, 
 II. i. S. 569574-
 
 32 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. Book I.] 
 
 By the hypothesis, this apprehended ei8os is only 
 a thought, and everything that has it must be a thinker ; 
 unless you will say that there are thoughts which are never 
 thought 1 . The argument, which thus reduces us to the 
 dilemma of ' idealism or contradiction,' is evidently a mere 
 play with an ambiguity in the word etSos. Because this 
 same term is used to denote now a cognitio and then a 
 cognitum, it is inferred that the predicates of the two must 
 be identical, though one is a psychological fact, and the 
 other a class of natural objects. But the reason, however 
 invalid, manifestly discards the subjective explanation of 
 the flbr] as an absurdity. That in our mind at all events we 
 cannot look for their seat is further concluded from their 
 absolute character, as coinciding with the very essences of 
 things ; ' for no one,' it is urged, ' who assigns to each 
 nature an absolute essence, can pretend that any one of 
 them is in us; since this would make it not absolute 2 ,' 
 and reduce it to a phenomenon of another nature. There 
 remains, however, still a resource for saving the subjective 
 theory : may not the absolute ideas be referred by Blato to 
 the Divine Mind ? Do they not simply mean, in his philoso- 
 phy, the preconceptions which the universe has realised? 
 The suggestion promises so great a relief to the modern 
 imagination, and brings the Greek speculation so much nearer 
 to our own, that it has found favour with not a few eminent 
 critics, like Brandis and Stallbaum, whose judgments always 
 reward careful study. Yet the balance of evidence appears 
 to me decisively on the other side. True it is that in several 
 of the poetical and semi-mythical passages of the Phsedrus, 
 the Timeeus, and the Republic, dealings are described be- 
 tween God and the etSrj which seem to subordinate them to 
 His disposal : He knows them 3 ; He contemplates them 4 ; He 
 gives them place in the system of the world 5 ; nay, in a 
 single instance, He is even spoken of as the Maker of them . 
 
 1 Farm. 132, B. C. a Farm. 133, C. 
 
 3 Farm. 134, C. E ; Tim. 53, D. 4 Tim. 28, A. B. s Tim. 29, A C. 
 
 6 Eep. 597. The aim of this curious passage is, to show that the ultimate 
 source of each Kind of objects must be a single essence; and that so long as 
 our cognition stops short of this goal and is still detained among number, we
 
 Branch 1.] PLATO. 33 
 
 But in none of these relations are they presented as psycho- 
 logical phenomena of himself ; on the contrary they are data 
 on which a transitive activity is directed ; he knows them 
 because they are already there ; he contemplates them as 
 infinite models of all finite order and beauty ; he sets them 
 in the cosmos by mingling with them the conditions of 
 visible and temporal existence ; and if, for a moment, he is 
 conceived as making them, it is still as an artist creates an 
 external work, and not as a thinker experiences his inward 
 thoughts. Had Plato held the Divine Mind in reserve as the 
 subjective seat of his ideas, how could he have argued that, 
 if they are only thoughts everything that partakes of them 
 must be a thinker ? This would not follow at all, if, through- 
 out the finite sphere, there were an infinite subject to think 
 them. Of the various epithets indeed by which the efSq are 
 characterised, there is hardly one that is compatible with 
 this interpretation : they are eternal 1 , self-subsistent 2 , un- 
 changeable 3 , separate in their existence from the objects that 
 partake in them 4 , and prior to these. On this last feature 
 (that they are ya>pi(rra) it is that Aristotle fixes in his criti- 
 cism of the doctrine 5 : a criticism which, as Zeller justly 
 remarks, would have no relevancy if applied to ideas of the 
 divine mind c . 
 
 are conversing with copies and not with the real. Secondary agents can work 
 out only imitations : these may repeat themselves two or three deep, but are 
 all dependent at the upper end on an ideal type which must be credited to 
 the very nature of things. Resorting as usual to a homely example, Socrates 
 supposes a drawing to be executed of a bed : as the artist copies the work of 
 the cabinet-maker, so the cabinet-maker copies the idea of bed in its true 
 essence, of bed as it means to be. Behind this you cannot go ; it comes out 
 of no workshop ; and if you want what shall stand to it in such relation 
 as that of the artisan to his wooden bed, you can name nothing but the 
 nature of things, or God. The purport of the passage is complete when it 
 has thrown back the (iSi) into the last resort of reality. In allowing the lan- 
 guage of his analogy to carry him beyond this purport, Plato commits a unique 
 inconsistency. Everywhere else the tiSrj appear as unoriginated ; and though 
 God is represented both as ITOITJTIJS and as Srjfuovpyos, the product of His work is 
 quite other than the ' eternal ideas.' 
 
 1 Tim. 29, A. dtStov. * Soph. 255, C. avrcL teatf avra. 
 
 3 Symp. 211, A. fitO' avrov //orotiSts dt ov. 
 
 * Farm. 130, B. x^pi* /*'' '^ avra drra, x^f** '* T ^ TOVTW av ft(ri\ovra. 
 
 5 Met. 1040. b, 26 seqq. 1086. a, 31 seqq. 
 Phil, der Griechen II. i. II. vi. 2. p. 561. j** Aufl. 
 VOL. I. D
 
 34 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 Thus relegated to separation from the world, and without 
 native claim on either the human or the divine mind, these 
 homeless essences seem lifted by Plato into a sublime but 
 somewhat disconsolate position ; and it is not surprising 
 that his later followers tried to leave them less at large. 
 When we ask him to take us more determinately into their 
 presence and show us their real seat, he only forbids us to 
 look for them in space, or any living natures throughout 
 earth or sky l , and sends us to an invisible heaven above 
 the heavens 2 , a thought-sphere 3 , where at last are found the 
 formless, colourless, impalpable essences of beauty, temper- 
 ance, righteousness, and truth 4 . Whatever else may lie hid 
 in the glow of this transfigured philosophy, it at least means 
 that true knowledge has its principle, not in the perceptions 
 of sense, but in the categories of reason ; and that these, far 
 from being illusory compends of animal feeling, are the 
 essences of real existence emerging into conscious thought. 
 
 The most difficult problem presented by the Platonic 
 'ideas' is also the most important; viz. to determine 
 whether any inherent movement or causal activity is at- 
 tributed to them. The evidence, on the face of it, is not 
 self-consistent ; and in dealing with the highly imaginative 
 writings which contain it, the interpreter on either side finds 
 it easy to dismiss as merely figurative whatever tells against 
 him. When we remember that the ideas were the forms under 
 which all real being was conceived, and meet with the state- 
 ment, 'I therefore affirm, as the definition of real being 
 (TO. OVTO), that it is simply power 5 ;' when we are told, in 
 illustration of this, that real being is the object of knowledge, 
 and the soul the knower of it, and that so a relation of 
 passive and active subsists between them, each in its way 
 operating on the other ; we seem to have alighted on incon- 
 trovertible proof of the causality of the ideas ; especially 
 when it winds up with the enthusiastic outburst 'And, 
 good God ! can we really be ready to believe that movement 
 and life and soul and thought are not present with absolute 
 being ; that it neither lives nor thinks, but, for all its august 
 
 1 Symp. 211, A. a virtpovpavtov r6irov, Phsedr. 247, C. 
 
 3 roitov VOTJTUV, Rep. 517, B. * Phaedr. 247, C. D. s Soph. 247, E.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 35 
 
 and sacred look, stands fast in mindless immobility 1 ?' Before 
 surrendering ourselves to the impression of these words, two 
 aids in their interpretation must be invoked and estimated. 
 (1) They are put into the mouth, not of Socrates (Plato's 
 usual spokesman), but of the ' Stranger,' who in this dialogue 
 represents more nearly, and yet criticises also, the Eleatic 
 doctrine and who, in a direct attack upon the doctrine of 
 ' Ideas,' extorts from the Platonist the assertion that ' real 
 being is always unchangeably the same, and that variation 
 is limited to the phenomenal 2 .' The stranger's definition 
 of being is therefore offered not in expounding but in con- 
 troverting the theory of ei8rj; and even if we suppose that 
 Plato is here confessing, in the person of another, difficulties 
 of which he had become conscious himself, the conclusion 
 will be, that he had receded somewhat, in the interlocutor's 
 direction, from his characteristic doctrine ; not, that the 
 doctrine, in its complete form, invested the 'ideas' with 
 causality. (2) It is easy to divine the mode and degree of 
 concession by which Plato made room, in his system of real 
 being, for the predicate of ' power ' demanded by the stranger. 
 That demand is first pressed, in the dialogue, not upon Plato's 
 inanifold conception of real being, but upon the Eleatic con- 
 ception of real being in its absolute unity ; and hence the 
 speaker, to prepare the way for his criticism, as directed 
 upon his master Parmenides, deprecates the charge of ' parri- 
 cide,' and declares that he enters upon his task with trembling 
 heart 3 . He proceeds to show that the doctrine of absolute 
 being cannot be stated so as to cover all the nature of being, 
 and makes no provision for any 'coming into being' which 
 might supply the lack 4 . It is impossible to work out a theory 
 which treats the All as one fixed existence, without begin- 
 ning, end, or parts, self-contained and self-identical: con- 
 tradictions without end emerge from it, unless some principle 
 of movement is admitted into it. This objection applies to 
 every doctrine of absolute being, to Plato's many e?8?7 as 
 well as to the Eleatic unity : Being that cannot stir, or enter 
 into relations, does not complete the essence of being ; it 
 
 1 Soph. 248, D. E. * Soph. 248, B. 
 
 3 Ib. 241, D. * Ib. 245, C. D. 
 
 D2
 
 36 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 must at least be capable of being known. Somewhere or 
 other, therefore, room must be found for the predicate of 
 causality. In the Eleatic unity it can have no entrance 
 without contradicting and annihilating the whole doctrine, 
 by affirming and denying immobility of the same subject. 
 But in the Platonic plurality of flb-q there was already an 
 organism of logical sequence and interdependence, determin- 
 ing a certain track and movement of thought, and participant 
 communion of each with some others ; and if only the supreme 
 term were invested with the required causality, the rest, taken 
 one by one, might remain as they were, partaking as before 
 of its nature in the order of their dependence. It would still 
 be true, therefore, that the t8?j, as TroXXa, were without ac- 
 tivity : no one of them could set itself in motion, except that 
 which stood at the head of all : only as ev, i. e. homogeneous 
 in entity with their head, had they part and lot in its Swapis. 
 In thus far setting them free from a state of fixity, Plato is 
 avowedly relinquishing a feature in his published theory of 
 them, and confessing its need of amendment. The difficulties 
 indeed which meet the interpreter of the Sophistes are partly 
 due to its being, in more than one respect, a dialogue of 
 retractation : in the person, on the one hand, of the ' Stranger,' 
 before whom Socrates sits silent ; on the other, of Thesetetus, 
 the Eleatic disciple who renounces Parmenides, while Plato 
 deserts himself : in each case under the same conviction, viz. 
 that causality must receive a more effective recognition, and 
 not be put off with an ignominious banishment into the 
 sphere of non-being. In the Sophistes, the author contents 
 himself with acknowledging the defect ; his mode of remedy- 
 ing it is reserved for another occasion. 
 
 Against this plea, that the admission of causality into the 
 scheme of 'ideas' was an afterthought, it is urged that they 
 are spoken of as causes in the earlier dialogues which are spe- 
 cially their own. In the Phaedo, e.g. it is said l that the cause 
 of any pair of things being two is their partaking of the idea 
 of duality ; and of each of them being one, its partaking of 
 the idea of unity ; and that whatever is beautiful or good or 
 
 1 Phaedo, 100, D 101, D.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 37 
 
 great owes its predicate to an absolute ' idea ' of beauty, or 
 goodness ; and that all other attempts to account for these 
 characters, whether by processes such as addition or subtrac- 
 tion, or by material elements such as light or shape or tone, 
 or by sensations, such as warmth and fragrance, are nugatory 
 and confusing. But here, surely, the ambiguity of the word 
 ahia cannot escape us. The eT8os is no otherwise the 'cause' 
 of the particular sample of beauty than as every generic whole 
 is the cause of its own instances. When you find that the 
 phenomenon an instance of a larger law (or, in Platonic 
 phrase, belongs to a more comprehensive essence), it is indeed 
 accounted for, in the sense of being no longer an object of se- 
 parate and isolated curiosity, inasmuch as it is lost in a cate- 
 gory already settled, and its place has been determined in the 
 order of your reason: but its physical cause, i.e. the power 
 which has produced it, or ordered its appearance here rather 
 than there, is not explained by naming its genus. This is 
 only to say that classification, whatever be its theory, is not 
 causation. If Plato had intended, in this passage, to endow 
 his 'ideas' with susceptibility of action and passion, the in- 
 terplay involved in this relation must have subsisted among 
 themselves. Instead of this, however, he expressly contends 1 
 that ideas admit of no modification or control by the influence 
 of others which are opposite ; on the approach of such oppo- 
 sites, they simply retire and decline to have their self-identity 
 compromised: the idea of 'greatness' e.g. flies off, when an 
 object in which it was seated comes 'to partake of smallness :' 
 it disdains to stay and become small or become in any re- 
 spect other than it was. And so it is, he adds, with all the 
 ideas. No more distinct denial of their changeableness can be 
 conceived. 
 
 The doctrine of these passages then leaves us free to accept 
 in their natural sense the epithets, excluding the notion of 
 active power, which are habitually applied to the fibrj. When, 
 by a natural variation, the 'idea' becomes an 'ideal' (-napa- 
 6eiy/x.a 2 ), these epithets recur: as the pattern contemplated not 
 only by human reason in its intellectual acts, but by the di- 
 vine as the artist of the world, each absolute eiSos is eternal, 
 o, 102, D. E. 2 T.m. 37, D. E. 
 
 80503
 
 38 UNPSYCHO LOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 motionless, unchangeable, self-identical, intrinsically appre- 
 hensible by mind alone. The original of Time, eg. is a living 
 eternity (5oz> af&toy), stationary duration (jptv&v cua>r \v ert), 
 the copy of which became ' a moving thing going by num- 
 ber' (KCIT' dpiOfj-ov lov<rav), and circling in days and nights and 
 months and years ; and it is precisely because the Creator in 
 His work looked only ' to the same and the unchangeable,' 
 which is cognisable by reason alone, that 'the world is the 
 most beautiful of creations and He the best of causes V These 
 pre-existent patterns of the universe, copied into it as the 
 objective essence of each intelligible nature, are expressly 
 identified with the self-existent ideas unperceived by sense, 
 and ' apprehended by mind alone, in which none but the gods 
 and very few men have share 2 .' After every allowance for 
 the poetical dress of these statements, we cannot miss the 
 assumption which lies not in their form but in their very 
 substance, viz. that the 'ideas' are the prior conditions of 
 all creative activity, and are not themselves the agents which 
 exert it, but only the passive prototypes which, but for the 
 energy of an extrinsic power, would never be born into a 
 phenomenal world. 
 
 The disciple of Hegel, however, is pressed by a natural 
 temptation to identify the 'Idee' of his school with the Pla- 
 tonic ' Ideas ;' and is unwilling to withhold from the latter 
 the process of inherent movement which he attributes to the 
 former. If he can but wake up the eiS?? from their apparent 
 slumber, and persuade them to claim a power of self-realisa- 
 tion, he will win to his side the greatest of allies. This hope 
 receives some countenance from the changed style of Plato's 
 later dialogues, in which Pythagorean and Eleatic phrase- 
 ology almost supersedes the language of the ' ideas,' and raises 
 doubts about the relative scope of the old conceptions and the 
 new. The Philebus in particular offers a doctrine of causality 
 which does not readily adjust itself to the positions hitherto 
 laid down, and which Zeller, with characteristic skill, directs 
 against them. On the strength of a celebrated passage in this 
 dialogue, he confidently invests the 'ideas' with dynamic at- 
 tributes, and absorbs into them, as inherent in their essence, 
 
 1 Tim. 29, A. 2 Tim. 51, B E.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 39 
 
 the whole of the agency which, in the Timreus and elsewhere, 
 is referred to a separate Creator. It is due to so great a 
 master in Greek philosophy to weigh his interpretation with 
 respectful care. 
 
 In order to settle the relative positions of pleasure and of 
 intellect to each other, and of both to the good, a fourfold 
 classification is offered by Socrates 'of all now -existing 
 things 1 .' God has shown us, (l) a determinate kind of ex- 
 istence (TO Trepas): (2) an indeterminate or infinite (TO airapov): 
 (3) a mixture of these two: (4) the cause of this mixture. 
 We have here a new series of categories, in which no men- 
 tion is made of the 'ideas,' and we are at a loss to settle 
 their intended place. It is evident that much depends on 
 the correct assignment of that place. If, with Brandis, we 
 refer them to the first head, they are among the passive ele- 
 ments disposed of by 'the Cause,' and enter as constituents 
 into the 'mixture' which it sets up. If, with Zeller, we 
 range them under the fourth head, they become identical 
 with 'the Cause,' and play the part of supreme power, of 
 which the universe is the self-realisation. The first head, 
 when thus deserted by them, has to look out for a new 
 meaning ; which Zeller thinks is adequately supplied by 
 taking Wpas to denote purely mathematical relations. The 
 choice between these interpretations requires us to collect the 
 defining marks of each of the four heads. 
 
 The strongest plea for the strictly numerical and geome- 
 trical reading of TO -rre'pas is contained in the following sen- 
 tence 2 : ' All things which, instead of admitting indefinite 
 grades of more or less, admit their opposites, viz. first the 
 equal and equality, then the equal and double, and whatever 
 is related as number to number, or measure to measure, we 
 should rightly refer to the class of the determinate.' This 
 certainly looks very like an account of definite proportions ; 
 and if it were intended to exhaust, instead of simply exem- 
 plifying, the contents of the first head, it would establish 
 Zeller's inference. But the inference must be held in suspense 
 till we see whether, under the class of determinate essence, 
 anything more is included than definite proportions. If the 
 1 Phil. 23, C. 2 Phil. 25, A.
 
 40 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 class lies within the bounds of the words just cited, its con- 
 stitutive condition is a constant ratio between two compo- 
 nents of a nature, as between oxygen and hydrogen in 
 water, 'number to number, measure to measure.' Yet else- 
 where it comes upon the stage without any such mark, as 
 a mere group of things resembling each other in some single 
 quality. The reputed work of Thoth, e.g. in reducing the 
 manifold elements of articulate speech to their true classes of 
 vowels, liquids, mutes, etc. is adduced as an example of Tttpas 
 discovered tv r<3 d-nelpy l . And, in order to attain to any real 
 knowledge, this detection of a uniting 8eo-/xos must be applied 
 to all things in which there is unity, likeness, sameness, and 
 their opposites 2 . Moreover, in the final recapitulation of the 
 results of the dialogue, we find moral qualities, viz. the mo- 
 derate and seasonable (ptTpiov nal naipiov), named under this 
 head 3 . It is inadmissible, therefore, to confine the meaning 
 of Trepas to mathematical relations. They are selected to illus- 
 trate the conception, only as giving the most distinct samples 
 of definite kinds. 
 
 What more irepas includes than quantitative relations will 
 best be understood, if we first clear up the opposite concep- 
 tion, of the ' indefinite,' or ' infinite,' for the word aireipoy is 
 used to cover both these very different meanings. Plato sup- 
 plies two distinct keys for opening to us the contents of this 
 term : it signifies gradation without number ; and it signifies 
 number without measure. The former presents itself in every 
 indivisible quality, as heat and cold, pleasure and pain, whose 
 variations of intensity are nuxional, not differential, and are 
 without assignable beginning or end. The latter presents 
 itself wherever we meet ' the many' without 'the one,' i.e. the 
 irreducible multitudes that, having no centres of common 
 affinity, defy classification and remain a mere sand-desert of 
 individuals. In the one case its symbol is ^a\\6v re KCU TJTTOV ; 
 in the other, it is irXfjQos. Vague sensation, as opposed to dis- 
 criminative thought ; wild force expended without rule ; the 
 raw matter of creation prior to the organic world ; are thus, 
 for evident reasons, brought under this negation of limit. In 
 the phenomenal sphere all changes that have no constancy of 
 
 1 Phil. 1 8, B. C. * Phil. 19, B. 3 Phil. 66, A.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 4! 
 
 law ; in descending division all singulars below the infima 
 species where likeness is banished by pure difference, belong 
 to the unreclaimed realm of the a-rrcipov. 
 
 These things being premised, the proof that the ' ideas ' are 
 assigned to the first head assumes the simplest form. Things 
 which are identical with the same are identical with one 
 another ; and we find in the Philebus a middle term, viz. ' the 
 One,' used as the equivalent, now of tlbos, and now of irepas. 
 The philosophical problem of the ' one and many ' arises, it is 
 said, not in the case of any single concrete object (of ' things 
 that are born and die '), but in regard to the unity of essence 
 involved in generic appellations and abstracts, as man, ox, 
 beauty, good : here we encounter the questions, ' first, whether 
 we are to assign real existence to such units : and then, how 
 these, being each invariably one and the same and admitting 
 of neither genesis nor destruction, resolutely persist in this 
 unity, while yet our next step must be to plant this or that 
 one of them in the infinitude of originated things, either by 
 dispersion and reduction to many, or as everywhere entire in 
 itself though separate from itself, one and the same in the one 
 and the many, which would seem to be the most impossible of 
 all 1 .' Here, it is plain, the ev which is subject of discussion 
 is simply etSos, the essence of a kind ; and the perplexing 
 questions which it starts are the very same which are raised 
 in the Parmenides out of the doctrine of ideas. The iroXXd, on 
 the other hand, called also aTreipa, are the phenomenal instances 
 or objects into which the essence is born. 
 
 The ' One ' which is here identified with ' idea ' is on the 
 next page identified with ' the determinate.' In a highly curious 
 passage 2 Socrates expounds the right method of discovery by 
 the discussion of scientific conceptions ; and describes it as a 
 process of logical division, copied from the actual composition 
 of things in the world out of the two elements of real and 
 phenomenal. Through this mixture, present in all concrete 
 objects, we are to pursue ' the one,' and disengage it in thought 
 from the variable many, i. e. to alight upon the essence of 
 any genus which may lurk in the multitude : then, we are 
 further to look out for secondary unities within this primary, 
 1 Phil. 15, A. B. 2 Phil. 16, C E.
 
 42 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 i.e. for species which dispose the members of the genus in 
 orderly groups ; and not to abandon this successive quest for 
 subordinate centres of union, till we find ourselves in a mere 
 crowd of unallied individuals. This is expressed by saying 
 that ' we are not to apply to the multitude the idea of the inde- 
 terminate (TOV dirdpov) till we have got into view every 
 definite number (dptfyidv) which it has between the indeter- 
 minate (or the infinite) and the one (//rau TOV ct-rmpou re KCU 
 TOV evos)' The ground assigned for this procedure is, that it re- 
 traces the steps of nature in the genesis of things as they now 
 are, laying out by analysis the elements of her synthesis : for 
 our postulate must be that in their present existence all things 
 are made up of the one and many, of the determinate and the 
 indeterminate l . 
 
 Here, the correlative of a-neipov is now given as <!v, and now 
 as Trtpas; and these terms, while interchangeable with each 
 other, are also replaced by the word t8ea 2 . Surely there is no 
 escape from the conclusion that it is the category of the deter- 
 minate under which the ' ideas ' are to be found. And, if so, 
 there is nothing as yet to disturb the etbr] from their eternal 
 immobility. 
 
 The ' ideas ' then, being in the first head, cannot carry the 
 causality which constitutes the fourth : they are, on the con- 
 trary, the objects, with the aireLpov, of its blending and evolv- 
 ing activity. It is from the union of these opposites that the 
 universe arises, and supplies the contents of the third head. 
 It only remains to press a little nearer to the cause of that 
 union, and collect any predicates which may make the con- 
 ception more definite. 
 
 In the first place, we find Socrates insisting on the absolute 
 necessity of setting up his fourth category, on the ground that 
 the others provide only the materials and the products of the 
 creative process ; and ' all that comes into being must needs do 
 so by reason of some cause 3 ;' and ' we make a fourth head of 
 this cause, having sufficiently proved it to be distinct from the 
 other three 4 .' In the next place, he asks what he is to put 
 into this blank category ; and whether ' a just reverence does 
 
 Se mi diretpiav iv O.VTOIS v(Juf>vTOV \-)(ovT<av. 
 fjiiav I8fav Otnivovs $]Ttiv, 3 Phil. 26, E. * Ib. 2 7, B.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 43 
 
 not require that wisdom and knowledge and mind should be 
 placed there ; all philosophers agreeing that Mind is king of 
 heaven and earth V In vindication of this position, he then 
 turns the focus of his scrutiny upon man, as a universe in 
 little, in order to find out what constitutes each of the 
 categories in him, and especially what elements it is which 
 perform the function of the fourth. Here, it is the living 
 organism which is the product of matter tempered by law : 
 but that which wields it with directing power and disciplines 
 it for wholesome ends is always some one or other of the 
 forms of wisdom 2 : without mind, man would be effect alone, 
 and not a Cause. From the microcosm learn to read the 
 macrocosm. If the former has its little modicum of material 
 and of law from the vast storehouse of the latter, whence but 
 from the same source can it draw its allowance of causality ? 
 Homogeneous therefore must be the ordering and acting power 
 in the human person and in the universe: the difference is 
 only that between the individual soul and the Soul of souls. 
 And the position is thus made good, that ' in the All there is a 
 copious indeterminate datum and adequate determinate essence, 
 and besides these a Cause of no ordinary kind, which, ordering 
 and disposing years and seasons and months, has the fullest 
 right to the name Wisdom and Mind. But Wisdom and Mind 
 can come into expression only through a psychical life : we 
 therefore say that ' in the nature of Zeus (the living cosmos) 
 there proves, by reason of the causal power, to be an indwell- 
 ing royal ^ux?7 and royal Mind 3 .' The reasoning of this 
 much-debated passage is unintelligible, unless it runs thus: 
 ' Cause you must have : Mind is the only cause : therefore 
 there must be immanent Mind : else, the need of a causal 
 power remains unsatisfied.' It all depends on the position 
 (established in the previous sentence) that Mind and Cause are 
 two names for one and the same thing, and, in their denotative 
 character, are interchangeable ; and its cogency and meaning 
 would be lost, if we tore them asunder from this coalescence, 
 and substituted between them a successive relation by treat- 
 ing the vovs as the effect of the alria. Yet into this incon- 
 sequence we are betrayed, if we accept Zeller's comment that 
 
 1 Phil. 28, A. C. 3 Ib. 30, B. 3 Phil. 30, C. D.
 
 44 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. Book I.] 
 
 the universal mind ' is here referred to a superior cause ' (viz. 
 ' die Idee,' i.e. the eiS/j 1 ), and Jowett's corresponding transla- 
 tion, ' Would you not say that in the divine nature of Zeus 
 there is the mind and soul of a King, and that the poioer of 
 the cause engenders this?' By this reduction of Mind to a 
 created thing, the argument is baulked of its plainly intended 
 conclusion, viz. that vovs in the universe must occupy the same 
 relative place as that which it holds in man, i.e. the fourth 
 category, which, as Causal, is intrinsically frepov from the 
 rest. From this category our critics displace it, and by 
 throwing it back into the third, allow the whole reasoning to 
 collapse in confusion 2 . Yet the care which Plato had taken 
 
 1 Philosophic der Griechen, II. i. S. 558. 
 
 2 The passage in the original runs thus : OVKOW tv plv ry rov Aios ipits <f>va(i 
 &aai\iic))v fjifv if/vxfiv, fiaaiKiitov St vovv iyyiyvfcrOai Sid rty TTJS curias Swa^iv. That 
 this sentence, taken by itself and apart from its logical context, admits of the 
 translation given to it, I will not deny ; although, to express the notion of being 
 engendered,, I should have expected to find the word (yyewdaOai rather than 
 i~1~li~fvta9ai. As the word, however, may certainly mean 'to be lorn in,' the 
 difference is not material. But this meaning itself, if not already archaic in 
 Plato's time, had prevailingly given way to the more abstract signification, to be 
 in by nature,' or 'to shoto itself as inherent,' or 'prove to be inherent:' just as 
 Vfj.evi)s yiyvtaOai means ' to show one's self well-disposed,' ol (ff9\ol yfvofjifvoi, ' those 
 who prove to be good,' without any implication of 'coming to be' so. In this use 
 of the verb, the subject of it is said to give evidence of the attribute affirmed 
 respecting it ; and if to the mere affirmation a Sid ri is appended, it will tell what 
 is our reason for believing the attribute, not what is the cause of its being. What 
 is the reason that has been pressed in argument and is here summed up for be- 
 lieving in a cosmic Mind ? that, without it, the course and order of the world 
 will be destitute of their indispensable causal power : it is therefore ' on account 
 of the power of the cause,' that we must say, 'a kingly intellect evinces itself as 
 inherent in the nature of the divine universe,' It will not be questioned that this 
 rendering is more consistent than the other with the proper accusative meaning 
 of the preposition Sid ; though I am aware that instances may be adduced, even 
 from this dialogue (e.g. 26. E. Sid nva alriav), of a usage in which the distinction 
 is apparently lost between the logical and the physical ground. One more remark : 
 Is it right to fuse the two phrases fiaaiKittty utv \liv\iiv, fiaari\iK&v St vow into one 
 undivided conception, ' the soul and mind of a king ? ' or is the distinction between 
 them to be observed, that vovs is eternal entity, and \f x>7 medium constituted for 
 its manifestation ? I cannot persuade myself that this relation between them is here 
 to be disregarded ; especially as the immediately preceding proposition emphasises 
 it as a step in the argument : aotyia /ijjc *o2 vovs dvev if/vx^s OVK dv nore yevoiffOrjv, 
 ' wisdom surely and mind could never come into manifestation without x v xh' ( n t 
 'cannot exist'). From Mind as the causal power two conclusions result : its su- 
 preme sway in the universe ; and its exercise of this sway in the phenomenal 
 sphere through its created medium of an Anima mundi. Beyond the tf/i>x^ there 
 is vovs as its curia : beyond the vovs there is nothing higher : it is alria itself.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 45 
 
 to secure the fourth place for Mind alone is shown by his repe- 
 tition of the claim with every variety of expression. ' Mind is 
 Cause : ' ' that is its class : ' ' of that family it is : ' and if any- 
 thing else among the four heads is ever called by the family 
 name, vovs is ' ancestor ' (yerovo-njs) to the claim. ' Nor is this 
 doctrine uttered as a random word ; but in support of those 
 who of old set forth that Mind for ever rules the universe V 
 
 The conclusion which is thus reached, that Plato with- 
 holds causality from his ' ideas,' and assigns it to another 
 category, is confirmed by the earliest criticism directed 
 against his doctrine, viz. that his pattern ideas in which 
 the concrete instances partake are but idle talk and poetic 
 metaphor ; inasmuch as he provides no working agency to 
 make copies from them 2 . This remark of Aristotle's is 
 indeed quite groundless, made in forgetfulness of the su- 
 preme powers that play so great a part in the Timseus, the 
 Republic, and the Philebus ; but it shows that, in the critic's 
 opinion, the eiSrj were inherently in want of a cause to bring 
 them to phenomenal birth. 
 
 I have already hinted that this passiveness of the class 
 was not absolutely universal, but admitted an exception 
 in the supreme term. Hitherto we have found Plato iden- 
 tifying Cause with Mind: we must now add that he iden- 
 tifies Mind with the Good ; and that ' the good ' is with 
 him the apex and crown of the system of 'ideas.' The 
 first of these positions is no matter of inference, but is laid 
 down totidem verbis. After Philebus, in the dialogue that 
 bears his name, has been worsted in his advocacy of ' plea- 
 sure' as identical with 'good,' Socrates, who represents 
 the counter-claim of Mind, sums up thus: 'I think it 
 then sufficiently proved that Philebus's goddess is not to 
 be considered as identical with the good.' Philebus retorts, 
 'Neither is your Mind, Socrates, the good; the same ex- 
 ception will be taken to it.' Socrates answers : ' Perhaps 
 so, Philebus, to my mind ; but not to the true and divine 
 Mind ; the case is different there 3 .' Nor is it only under 
 its name of ' Mind ' that this subject is identified with 
 
 Phil. 30, D 31, A. * Arist. Metaph. 991. b, 20 23. 
 
 Phil. 22, C.
 
 46 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 ' the good : ' under its other name of ' Cause ' the process 
 is repeated. In the latter part of the dialogue, Socrates, 
 unable to define the essence of ' the good ' in its absolute- 
 ness, determines it step by step through three of its contents, 
 Beauty, Symmetry, Truth : and winds up with the words, 
 'If then we cannot seize "the good" by chasing it with 
 one idea, yet when we have caught it by the help of three, 
 beauty, symmetry, truth, we may say that we have the 
 best right to treat it as Cause of the mingled elements, 
 and may affirm that it proves itself such precisely in that 
 it is good V 
 
 The evidence of the second position, that ' the good ' is 
 the ultimate pinnacle of the range of ' ideas,' is contained 
 in some highly characteristic passages of the Republic. 
 The first which I shall quote might perhaps suffice ; for it 
 directly affirms the proposition to be established : ' God 
 knows whether it be true ; but this is what is evi- 
 dent to me ; in the sphere of the known the idea of the 
 Good is ultimate and needs an effort to be seen: but, once 
 seen, compels the conclusion that here is the cause, for all 
 things else, of whatever is beautiful and right: in the 
 visible world, parent of light and of its lord ; in the in- 
 tellectual world, bearing itself the lordship and from itself 
 supplying truth and mind. And this it is which must 
 fix the eye of one who is to act with wisdom in private 
 or in public life 2 .' These remarkable words, besides de- 
 termining the place of 'the Good' as the culminating 
 i8os, affirm its dynamic causality no less clearly than its 
 logical supremacy; for it is the author of light and of 
 the sun, over and above being the absolute original of all 
 particular truth, beauty, and right. 
 
 If, under the loose cover of the word curia, the idea of 
 the Good could thus play the double part of physical cause 
 and rational ground, we may well believe Aristotle's report 
 that Plato identified it with the absolute One 3 ; for if it can 
 
 1 Phil. 65, A. a Republic, 517, B. C. 
 
 3 Met. 1091. b, 14, avTo TO tv TO ayadov CLVTO tlvai. That Plato, though not 
 named, is here referred to, is to be seen from the context, and from comparison 
 with 988. a, 14. See Bonitz's note, p. 587 of his edition of Arist. Met.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 47 
 
 unify those dissimilar things, it deserves no less. But every 
 system of monism has to break a number of antitheses which 
 cling to the very nature of human thought ; and Plato's first 
 principle has yet a harder feat to perform, in being at once 
 itself and another, the apprehender of truth and the truth 
 apprehended, the object which is not the subject and the 
 subject which is not the object. For this achievement he 
 lends it the aid of his happiest imagination, and main- 
 tains that it has only to do what the sun constantly effects, 
 in that it supplies both terms of the relation between vision 
 and the visible. ' The idea of the Good, then, you are to say, 
 is that which imparts truth to the objects known, and faculty 
 to the knower: you are to consider it as the cause at once 
 of knowledge and of truth as known. And, beautiful as 
 are these two, knowledge and truth, this their Cause 
 you will rightly deem other and fairer than they. Yet, 
 just as light and vision were before rightly deemed by 
 us sunlike without being the sun, so now are these two 
 rightly referred to the type of the Good without being the 
 Good : for that a place must be reserved of yet higher honour V 
 Nor do the resources of this ingenious analogy stop here : the 
 Sun has other functions than to illuminate ; and the Idea of 
 the Good, than to enlighten: from each goes forth a creative 
 energy over a boundless field beyond. ' The Sun, I think 
 you will say, imparts to visible things not only their visi- 
 bility, but also their genesis and growth and nurture, without 
 being itself a genesis 2 ; and so, we must say, it is the Good 
 which imparts to things known not only their susceptibility 
 of being known, but also their existence and their essence, 
 though the Good is not itself an essence, but far transcends 
 essence in venerableness and power 3 .' Here then, it is 
 evident, this august principle is invested with not only 
 a primacy among the ideas (CLKLV^TOVS ova-ias, as Aristotle 
 calls them) 4 , but with a causality withheld from all the 
 
 1 Rep. 508, E. 
 
 8 He recurs to this favourite thought respecting the ' Sun, of this great world 
 both eye and soul :' AVTOS (i.e. 6 ^Aior) o ras rt &pas -napix^v, KCU tviavrovs Kal 
 iravra iiriTpoirfvcav roi iv r> dpcuf^tvy rovy, teal lic*iv<uv uiv a<ptts tupoiv rpovov rtvd 
 wdvriuv amos. Rep. 516, C. 
 
 3 Rtp. 509, B. ' Met. 1091. b, 13.
 
 48 UNPSYCHOLOCICAL THEORIES. [Book I." 
 
 rest as its progeny, the derived essences of things. Relatively 
 to them, as a class, it holds an exceptional position ; and 
 when we ask, ' is it one of them, or is it beyond them ? ' 
 the answer must be, ' it is both : ' it is one of them, by 
 their participation of its being ; it is beyond them, by its 
 exclusive spontaneity of power. 
 
 When we assemble together the predicates which, one 
 by one, have gathered upon the Idea of the Good, of sub- 
 jective unity, of eternal reality, of discriminative thought, 
 of affinity with beauty, symmetry, and right, and of power 
 to realise them in the birth and growth of things, we cannot 
 be surprised to find this supreme elbos assuming the Divine 
 name. Intellect and causality directed upon the Good, and 
 occupying the absolute headship of all, must be spoken of, 
 when fused into one conception, in terms of intending thought, 
 will, and character, and become interchangeable with the 
 idea of God. The only wonder is that Plato himself betrays 
 so little consciousness of this, and instead of passing off and 
 on between elbos and Oeos in any dialogue which treats 
 of either, only once 1 (so far as I remember) identifies the 
 Oflos vovs with TciyaOov, and else conducts quite separately 
 his discussion of the Idea of the Good, and his exposition 
 of the Creator's work and relation to the world. the one in 
 the Philebus and Republic, the other in the Timseus. It is 
 usually assumed that the former alone was the expression 
 of serious philosophical conviction ; and that the theistic 
 form of the latter is purely mythical, and, as addressed 
 only to the pupil's imagination, has no significance for 
 the critic of Plato's doctrine. To this point I shall hereafter 
 revert. 
 
 1 In the passage already quoted from Phil. 22, C.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 49 
 
 2. Classification of Sciences and Faculties. 
 
 At the seat of Causality which we have reached, we hold 
 the link which connects the Metaphysics with the Physics of 
 Plato. But before we avail ourselves of this transition, it 
 is important to say a few words of his application of the 
 theory of ideas to the classification of the sciences, and the 
 distribution of the human faculties. The subjective division 
 of our nature corresponds in his view with the objective 
 counterpart in the universe ; the senses putting us in relation 
 with the negative or phenomenal element ; the intellect, with 
 the eternal ideas. Yet his distribution is rather threefold 
 than dualistic ; for, in consequence of his assumption that 
 like only could have dealings with like, a mediating term 
 was introduced, both into the universe and into man, in order 
 to unite the two extremes. We have seen from the passage 
 in the Philebus l that a \^ux 7 / was thought necessary in order 
 to let the vovs pass into the phenomenal world ; and so, in 
 man, a soul or animating principle occupies a middle place 
 between the simply corporeal and the purely intellectual 
 nature. This soul is the seat, neither of mere passive sensa- 
 tion on the one hand, nor of reflective thought on the other ; 
 it is more than blind receptivity, less than clear intellection ; 
 and constitutes the instinctive and impulsive life in regard 
 to action, and the domain of accidental judgment and mother- 
 ivit, of conjecture and ungrounded belief, in relation to 
 matters of mental discernment. Hence the triad so con- 
 stantly presented in the dialogues, of ala-drjcns, 5o'a, e-Trion^Tj, 
 in reference to the intelligent operations ; and of eTrtflu/zia, 
 0vp.6s, and vovs, in reference to the principles of action 2 : the 
 highest term in both series, be it observed, denoting the same 
 power, and giving preponderance to the rational element over 
 the aflectional. Nothing can be more curiously precise than 
 the relation which Plato has established among the states and 
 objects of the human understanding, in a celebrated passage 
 
 1 Phil. 30, C. 
 
 a E.g. Eep. 439-441 ; 580, D. E. Tim. 69, E; 70, A. Phaedr. 246. 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 50 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 of his Republic 1 . He first distinguishes between the phe- 
 nomenal and the ideal world, calling the former visible 
 (oparov) and the latter cogitable (vor^rov) ; and then divides 
 each of these again into two domains; the visible world 
 including (1) images, as (a) shadows, (6) reflections and such 
 optical phenomena; (2) actual and material things (such as 
 animals, plants, fabricated objects, &c.), to which the images 
 correspond. The cogitable world distributes itself into the 
 two departments of Mathematics and Dialectic ; which differ 
 from each other in both the materials they deal with, and 
 the procedure they adopt. The materials with which the 
 Mathematics deal are Images or figures : while Dialectic uses 
 only Ideas. The procedure of the mathematics is always 
 from certain assumptions (vTrofleVeu) taken as ap\ai or first 
 principles, down to the end (Zm reXeurrfv) : while that of 
 dialectic is twofold, partly in the same direction with the 
 mathematical, but not till after a previous investigation in 
 the opposite. For (1) it picks up some assumptions (inroOfa-eis) 
 not as first principles, but merely as starting-points and steps 
 (eirifiaa-eis and opjuas) for the investigation, and therefore 
 distinguishable from the mathematical assumptions by being 
 really assumptions (r<3 ovri vTrofleVeis) : and from these it 
 reasons upwards to a first principle which is not hypotJietical 
 (amnoOfTov): and having gained this prize, it then (2) proceeds 
 downwards through ideas, into ideas and them alone. It is 
 clear that by the descending process Plato denotes proper 
 deduction: whether, in the case of mathematics, in the 
 analytic or in the synthetic order, will depend on the nature 
 of the assumptions, taken as first principles ; if they are the 
 data already obtained, the procedure will be synthetic; if 
 they are the qucesita, tentatively adopted, it will be analytic. 
 Since he contrasts them with real assumptions (i.e. assump- 
 tions in the strict sense, with no pretension to anything more) 
 he probably means to denote such universally recognised 
 conceptions as are found in the definitions of geometry and 
 arithmetic, and contemplates therefore the synthetic geometry, 
 of which these are the fundamental data. He illustrates them 
 
 1 Rep. 509, D 511, E.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 5 1 
 
 by examples thus : ' You know that those who occupy them- 
 selves with geometry and calculations and such studies 
 assume the odd and even and the diagrams and three kinds 
 of angles, and the like, in each branch : feeling quite familiar 
 with these things, they set them up as their assumptions 
 (v7ro0eVeis), without thinking it worth while to give any 
 account, either to themselves or others, of matters so plain 
 to everybody ; and starting from these without more ado, they 
 pass on through what follows coherently to the final point 
 which they set out to determine V The defect which Plato 
 finds in this procedure evidently is, that it treats as first 
 principles what have no claim to any higher character than 
 assumptions. Since we are accustomed to regard the ele- 
 mentary mathematical positions as exhibiting the perfection 
 of ' self-evidence,' it may well be asked how he could reduce 
 them to the rank of hypotheses, and what account he could 
 expect them to give of themselves which would enhance their 
 authority. The answer will be found in his estimate of the 
 different faculties to which the several kinds of apprehended 
 things report themselves. The clearness of geometrical and 
 arithmetical relations is that of imagination, exercised in 
 pictures of co-existing parts or counting of successive 
 numbers, and is dependent on the lessons of external per- 
 ception: it is too near to the senses to carry us beyond the 
 phenomenal world. The figures with which theorems, and 
 the notation with which calculations are worked, are only 
 representative symbols employed to set supposed cases before 
 the mind's eye ; and whatever is proved is conditional upon 
 an 'if;' it emerges from an hypothesis. At the same time 
 the truth which the reasoner seeks is not about these re- 
 presentative media, but about the things represented ; ' and 
 while he is using his visible figures and arguing upon them, 
 his thought is intent not on them but on the originals which 
 they copy, the absolute square and diameter instead of this 
 particular one which he draws: and so in all other cases. 
 The immediate forms which he shapes and draws, and which 
 in their turn have copies thrown off in their shadows and 
 
 1 Hep. 510, C. 
 
 E 2
 
 52 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 reflections in water, he uses as likenesses, while really trying 
 to see the essential objects which cannot be seen except with 
 the Understanding 1 .' Thus, the instruments of the mathe- 
 matician's work are empirical: his results ideal: and Plato 
 feels a want of congruity between the beginning and the end. 
 As distinguished from these assumptions in the disguise of 
 ap\ai, the assumptions proper on which dialectic seizes are 
 propositions provisionally taken for the mere purpose of 
 investigation ; some thesis as to the truth of which we wish 
 to prosecute an enquiry: beginning thence, we begin with 
 our qucesitum, and working it clear of foreign or false 
 adhesions, we isolate its essence and trace it to its real 
 ground, narrowing the way as we proceed till we reach an 
 apx?7 in the awnoQtTov. So far the procedure has a direction 
 the reverse of the mathematical ; which from the original 
 assumption moves forward to its consequences, taking on 
 new truths and so widening its field as it advances towards 
 its termination. Here, however, the antithesis of the two 
 methods ceases: for dialectic having ascended to its source 
 in the avro TO aya66v, then reverses its steps, and follows the 
 development of the contained eiSrj into the relations of the 
 actual world. Thus both the analytic ascent and the syn- 
 thetic descent are effected without any recourse to sensible 
 objects, every step from first to last being rigorously true to 
 the consecution of ideas. 
 
 These things being premised, the proportion by which Plato 
 expresses the relations of human knowledge will be intelli- 
 gible : he says that 
 
 oparov : VOT)TOV images : actualities = mathematics : dialectic. 
 So the corresponding ) II II II II 
 
 subjective states ) flxaaia : irlans = oiavoia : votjais or iirt- 
 
 In Rep. 601, E. & 602, A. the single word 8oa embraces 
 tt'fccuria and TTIOTIS, while vorjcris is extended to cover biavoia. 
 And in Tim. 29, C. the expression changes again, a\r]Qda 
 being substituted for fTnar^tj : so that in Plato oAqfleia = 
 (ni<mrnj.r) = v6r)(ri$ = bia\tKTiKri : and in accordance with the 
 physical object of the Timseus, the oparov is there called 
 and the vorjTov, ovo-ia. This system of analogies is 
 
 1 Eep. 510, D.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 53 
 
 the only attempt preserved in Plato's own writings to exhibit 
 under a mathematical expression the degrees of certainty 
 attaching to the several cognitive states of mind. But, ac- 
 cording to Aristotle 1 , he resorted to another, founded on his 
 later doctrine of ideal numbers. Unfortunately, the obscurity 
 of that doctrine is rather increased by this special application ; 
 for, besides supplying no key to his ideal numeration, it 
 resorts to geometrical terms convertible only with arith- 
 metical equivalents. Mind (vovs), he is reported to have 
 said, is one (TO ev) ; Knowledge (eTuorTj/ATj), two (TO. bvo) ; 
 Opinion (8o'a), the number of the superficies (6 TOV fmirl- 
 bov apiOpos ;) Perception (ato-fl^cris), that of the solid (6 TOV 
 orepeou). Here, the first two terms being numerical, and the 
 last two geometrical, it is not easy to gain a clear conception 
 of the quantitative symbols as a system. The most probable 
 conjecture is, that they were originally imagined as points, 
 taken as geometrical loci, and then counted into arithmetical 
 expression: the single point, fixing the initial position of 
 all possibilities ; the two points, as limits of the straight 
 line ; the three, as, when united, all in the same plane ; the 
 four, as forming, when joined, the first and simplest of solids, 
 the pyramid. But how this series, when constructed, sym- 
 bolises the mental conditions severally assigned to its 
 members, it is impossible to say ; the interpreting idea which 
 promises well for one part of the series failing to suit 
 another. Thus Simplikius, the sixth-century commentator 
 on the De Anima, tells us why Knowledge is represented 
 by the straight line from point to point, viz. because it goes 
 in no path but one to its end (/ioi>ax<Ss yap efi fv), direct at 
 truth, which is single. And this supplies the next term with 
 an intelligible and consistent difference: for opinion, with 
 its contingency of truth or falsehood, is liable to deflection, 
 and even if it ever arrives at the right, takes circuits to it 
 through wrong intermediate points. But this clue will guide us 
 no further ; for what other variety of judgment, besides the true 
 and the false, remains to make up (with the judging mind) 
 the fourth point which is brought in by sensible perception ? 
 I can think of only one plausible answer to this question. 
 
 1 De An. I. ii. 7.
 
 54 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 Thus far, the states which we have supposed to be described 
 are those of Thought alone exercising itself upon its proper 
 data: so long as thought is limited, it will be intrinsically 
 subject to error as well as capable of truth, in its communion 
 with the objects before it. But now that the Senses come 
 in, they cut it off from direct intercourse with realities, and 
 imprison it with mere images and shadows of them ; and 
 with this additional feature, of dealing with representations 
 instead of originals, Perception is at one remove further from 
 pure Mind than even Opinion. Simplikius here, instead of 
 thus continuing to work out the same fundamentum 
 divisionis, shifts to another, and says that Perception has 
 ' the number of the solid,' because the objects it has to do 
 with are solid bodies, and of these the first, which stands 
 for all, is constituted by joining four points. It is clear 
 that this in no way carries out the retreat from vovs : it cites 
 a feature which might be put forward by one who placed 
 perception on the highest instead of the lowest step of 
 <ra<f)rivia. However curious this reported theory may be, 
 it is fortunate that, as it makes no appearance in Plato's own 
 writings, it can be left in its obscurity without seriously 
 impairing our legitimate impressions of his philosophy *. 
 
 3. Positive and Negative Factors of the Cosmos. 
 
 From the sketch which has been given of Plato's doctrine 
 of Ideas, it will be evident that its function was to mediate 
 between man as knower and the universe as known ; to 
 supply a middle term between the mutable and the absolute ; 
 to give a nucleus of unity to phenomena, and to the real 
 a principle of plurality. And the close connection will be 
 immediately understood between the dialectic of Plato and 
 his physics; the first exhibiting the process by which we 
 untwine the transient and accidental from our thought till 
 we contemplate the essential ground of the universe; the 
 
 1 See Platonis de Ideis et Nuraeris Doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata. Frid. 
 Adolph Trendelenburg. Lips. 1826. And Christ. Aug. Brandis De Perditis 
 Aristotelis Libris de Ideis et de Bono. Bonnae. 1826.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 55 
 
 other showing how, in the first instance, naked eternities 
 clothed themselves with the transient conditions of relative 
 appearance, and came on to the decorated stage of sense : each 
 therefore being but the other read backwards. Accordingly, 
 the difficulty which we have encountered already, of esta- 
 blishing a clear relation between the ideal and the phe- 
 nomenal world, recurs in the physics and cosmogony of Plato. 
 We can approximately understand his description of the 
 eternal eiSrj, as the primitive types of being, alone possessing 
 reality and constituting the essence of whatever exists ; can 
 think of them as given forms, inherently without motion or 
 susceptibility of change, so that their presence may explain 
 the permanent and self-identical in things, but not the 
 various and transient ; and can allow to their highest term, 
 the Idea of the Good, an exceptional causal spontaneity and 
 active power, capable of putting in motion all the rest. But, 
 all this while, we remain wholly in the ideal world; and 
 we want the means of passing thence into the sphere of 
 phenomena. Whence comes all that is not eZSos in the objects 
 of sensible experience? How do transiency and admixture 
 join themselves to essences intrinsically unsusceptible of 
 them? Wherein consists the genesis of what for ever is? 
 In order to resolve these questions, Plato balances the flbrj 
 with an element wholly opposed to them, which he places 
 on the other side of their supreme Disposer, as the condition 
 or material of their manifestation. Whatever predicate be- 
 longs to them is to be denied of this opposite datum : as they 
 are all rest, it is all motion : as they are self-identical, it is 
 all else: as they are determinate, it is formless and inde- 
 terminate: as they have all existence, it has no existence: 
 as they are rational essences, it is all blind necessity. This 
 boundless realm, being the antithetic term to the only 
 positive being, is described, as far as possible, by negatives ; 
 and Plato endeavours to escape the necessity of admitting 
 its reality side by side with the eiSq, by treating it merely 
 as their negation, and as having no tenure of being except 
 as their contradictory. In the same way as Space is unreal 
 and indefinite itself, yet the condition of whatever is definite 
 and real, so is this immeasurable chaotic sea of non-being
 
 56 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 the condition of all distinctive being. The logical law, that 
 we can think of nothing except by cutting it off from the 
 circumambient sphere of all else, that to posit one thing is to 
 exclude and therefore to deal with and recognise an inde- 
 terminate residue, Plato employs as a cosmical principle. 
 He gives it both quantitative and qualitative expression ; 
 the former in the Philebus, where the origination of things 
 is imagined to take place by the blending of Measure (irepas) 
 with the immeasurable (aneipov), so as to yield, by mechanical 
 mixture of figure and number with formless material, definite 
 properties and relations of magnitude * : the latter in the 
 Timseus, .where the same process is conceived rather as a 
 merging of the indivisible ideals into a compound with the 
 indeterminate divisible material, so as to mark out this or 
 that same essence amid an infinite other than this 2 . Each 
 of these views supplies terms in which to describe the two 
 opposites, viz. the blind and negative element (TO JUT; ov) on the 
 one hand ; and the seeing or intellectual element (vovs) on 
 the other. The cosmical function ascribed to the blind in- 
 finitude as indispensable to the genesis of things is incom- 
 patible with the purely negative character within which Plato 
 endeavours to restrain it ; and in spite of every effort it passes 
 into a sort of matter, present as a datum prior to the creation, 
 and performing a part in that process not less than the eiSrj 
 which owe to it their manifestation: and the system, without 
 intending it, becomes in effect a dualistic scheme evolving 
 the universe from the co-operation of matter and mind. Or, 
 to express the same criticism in other words, Plato's TO /AT; ov 
 is by no means tantamount to absolute non-existence 3 , but 
 has still something objective in it, so as to be the condition 
 of effects which would not otherwise arise. It is rather an 
 infinite indeterminate somewhat which he sets as the back- 
 ground to all real and determinate existence, and whose 
 necessity he vindicates very nearly as Hegel asserts the 
 identity of his Nicht-seyn and Seyn, being only an Anders- 
 seyn as opposed to Etwas, and in general treats every 
 
 E.g. Phil. 25, D. E. 2 E.g. Tim. 35, A ; 37, A. 
 
 3 Soph. 237, C 239, B.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 57 
 
 negative not as the denial, but as the differentiation of the 
 positive. In this chaotic realm then lie the rudiments of 
 the material world, but without form or distinction. In the 
 heavenly space, on the other hand, are the uncreated types 
 of thought, clear and perfect, but without active power. 
 The causal power, however, is found in the supreme in- 
 tellect or God, Himself designated sometimes as the high- 
 est flbos, or the very Good (avrb TO ayaOov 1 ). By Him 
 the blind waste of Necessity is persuaded to receive the 
 ei8?7 2 , and so allow the essences of things to embody them- 
 selves and arise ; and thus He becomes a true Creator, 
 with poetic function (770117777?) as disposer of the ideas, with 
 demiurgic (brjuiovpyos) as prevailing over matter to accept 
 them 3 . The execution of this work was impossible without 
 some middle principle to bring the two extremes into approxi- 
 mation ; and as mathematical relations are regarded by Plato 
 as the middle term between the spheres of Sense and of 
 Thought, the Creator resorts to these, and in conformity with 
 them first blends the two elements into a living principle or 
 universal soul 4 . This fa^n f nature is the centre and 
 meeting-point of the intellectual and the corporeal ; the prior 
 condition and the inner principle of the whole organic de- 
 velopment of the universe. Stress is laid on the position, 
 that God created the soul not later than the body of the 
 world, but earlier, to be its empress and ruler from the first ; 
 and spread her presence co-extensively with the universe, 
 to revolve for ever in herself and bear the system with her, 
 and be its eternal and self-conscious life 5 . Next to the 
 production of this soul of the world, the Creator distributes 
 the indeterminate mass into the five fundamental elements, 
 each distinguished by the geometric forms of which it is 
 composed, viz. earth, by the cube ; fire, by the pyramid ; air, 
 by the octahedron ; water, by the icosahedron ; ether, by the 
 dodecahedron ; and by accommodating these to the harmo- 
 nious relations of the universal soul, he frames the system 
 of the spheres 6 . In their concentric circles are set the stars as 
 
 1 Rep. 379, B. C. Conf. 508, E. * Tim. 48, A. 
 
 5 Phil. 27, A. Tim. 28, C. Rep. 596, C. D. * Tim. 31, E; 35, A. 
 
 5 Tim. 34, E; 36, E. Tim. 55, 56, C.
 
 58 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 chronometers, and as receptacles each of a divine eternal es- 
 sence 1 . The form thus given to the universe is the best possible, 
 the most expressive of the divine nature itself, the spherical ; 
 and the motion imparted to the vault of the fixed stars is 
 that which is alone self-uniform and self-identical. In both 
 respects God frames what bears the nearest possible resem- 
 blance to Himself; for He is good, and goodness gi*udges 
 nothing ; and determines freely to impart Himself, and frame 
 a system copying into it all His communicable perfection. It 
 is in this sense that Plato speaks of the world as the product 
 of the divine ungrudgingness; and of God as the measure 
 and standard of aU things 2 . The universe thus constituted 
 is a living and animated nature (cp^xov (&ov), nay, a 
 blessed God (eu8ai//o>y 0eo's) 3 : having all material things as 
 part of its body, and an imperishable life in virtue of its 
 participation in the divine intellect: incapable therefore of 
 growing old and perishing, though the constant scene of 
 phenomena : needing no eyes or limbs, because having nothing 
 external to itself; and in all respects a transcript as perfect 
 as anything originated can be, of the self-living (avrofaov), 
 invisible, and absolutely good Deity 4 . This notion, of an 
 unavoidable evil of imperfection in all created things, of a 
 limit of possibility beyond which the resemblance of the 
 copy to the divine ideal could not be carried, is frequent with 
 Plato ; and the seat and source of this negative restraint he 
 undoubtedly finds in the unmanageable character of the 
 material (called by Aristotle the v\rj) which cannot but affect 
 the eft)?/ with a portion of its own non-existence and hinder 
 their phenomenal realisation. It was this inertia in the 
 chaotic realm that led him to call it the sphere of Necessity, 
 and to contrast it sharply with the free spontaneity of Mind, 
 on whose action it put a drag 5 . And it was with the same 
 feeling that he insisted with the greatest emphasis on the 
 distinction which the philosophy of our own time abolishes, 
 between a proper Cause (curi'a) and a mere Condition 
 
 1 Tim. 30, B; 38, C. D; 40, B. 
 
 " Tim. 34, A; 29, E. Comp. Phsedrus, 247, A. <f>06vos yap ffu Odov \opov 
 
 3 Tim. 68, E ; 34, D. Tim. 33. 29, E. 5 Tim. 4 8, A.
 
 Branch 1.] PLATO. 59 
 
 (VVCUTLO) ; claiming causality exclusively for Mind, and dis- 
 criminating material nature as that without which a cause 
 could not exercise its causality l . 
 
 It is a rule in Plato's cosmogony, that the Demiurgus 
 himself forms whatever is to be immortal in the universe, but 
 consigns the production of all that is perishable to the created 
 divinities 2 . When the general structure of the world is com- 
 pleted, and the stars have been furnished with their godlike 
 natures, and the origination of man is taken in hand, the 
 created divinities fabricate the human body and the mortal 
 part of the soul, while God himself provides its immortal 
 element, compounding it in the same vessel in which the 
 general soul of the universe had been before prepared, and 
 by the same rules, only with a result less pure 3 . In man, 
 as in the universe, the soul is the uniting term between the 
 rational and the phenomenal sphere, between thought and 
 sense. Without it, thought would have no life and movement; 
 and movement would have no thought: its essence unites 
 the two ideas, to think, and to live, and can never admit the 
 opposite of either. Hence it is incapable of death 4 : it so 
 partakes of the causal spontaneity of the originating intellect, 
 as to be a self-moving principle, having its action from with- 
 in, and not contingent on external commencement or arrest ; 
 consequently, without beginning and without end. However 
 strange and precarious may seem to ua the dependence of a 
 doctrine of immortality upon that of the pre-existence of the 
 soul, the two notions are inseparable and indeed identical in 
 
 1 Tim. 46, C E ; 68, E. Phil. 37, A. 
 
 2 Tim. 42, E ; 69, B. C. * Tim. 41, C E. 
 
 4 Phsedo, 105, C 106, D. This argument, in proof of the essential and in- 
 herent immortality of the soul, is hardly consistent with the doctrine of the Ti- 
 mseus, 41, A. where the Creator, addressing the created divinities, tells them 
 that all which is created is subject to dissolution, and that their own exemption 
 from it is contingent upon His will : ' Whatever is compacted is dissoluble, though 
 none but an evil being would choose to dissolve what is well adjusted and right. 
 Hence, although as created you are not wholly immortal and indissoluble, you 
 shall be quite untouched by dissolution and exempt from the fate of death ; 
 having in my will a bond greater and more availing than those which were 
 fastened on you at your creation." If this applied to the created divinities, a 
 fortiori it applied to the human race which they were commissioned to call into 
 being.
 
 60 VNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 the philosophy of Plato. His reasoning on the subject as- 
 sumes, throughout, the division of all objects of thought into 
 two classes, one comprising whatever i-s and never passes 
 in and out, the other, what always passes in and out and 
 never is: and his only question is, to which of these two, 
 judging by its essence and characteristics, does the soul be- 
 long ? Grant this fundamental principle of classification, allow 
 that all genesis of visible things is due to composition of the 
 eternal with the evanescent, and the proofs which the Phaedo 
 urges of the soul's immortality will lose their fanciful aspect, 
 and the reason will be appreciated why they are so framed 
 as to claim a life before as well as after this. Not indeed 
 that Plato is content with showing the soul to be no function 
 of the body, and claiming for it a place in the non-evanescent 
 part of man l ; for this would only establish the perpetual 
 being of the soul in the same sense in which every et8o?, 
 (that, e. g. of tree or water) is eternal. The vital point is, 
 not whether the soul is an ei&oy, so as always to be, but what 
 sort of an ftbos it is, and whether among its predicates the 
 special ones of life and of self -movement, as well as the 
 general one of existence, are to be found 2 . Plato decides that 
 it belongs to the very essence of this Kind to live ; and if 
 its opposite, Death, approaches, to get out of its way and 
 decline to admit it; else, it would lose its self-identity and 
 become another ei8o?; which is absurd, as ascribing genesis to 
 TO del ov. To this belief in the uncreated and imperishable 
 nature of the soul Plato adheres with such evident earnest- 
 ness, that we must interpret in harmony with it the mythical 
 account in the Timaeus of the formation of souls by the 
 Creator 3 . Nor is this difficult ; for as the word ^rvxn always 
 expresses a step at one remove from pure vovs, and denotes 
 thought in a condition to appear, the first creation of souls 
 in the Timaeus may be understood to mark only their being 
 introduced upon the stage of the universe. The Creator, it 
 
 1 This is done in refuting the hypothesis that the soul is 'a harmony' (function 
 of a material instrument), Phaedo, 93 seqq. The ideal argument follows. 
 
 3 Phaedr. 245, C E ; conf. Legg. 896, A. where Plato calls TT}V $waiiivT)v avr^v 
 airr?)t> Kivttv icivrjaiv the constituting essence of 
 
 3 Tim. 41, D.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 6 1 
 
 is said, formed as many souls at first as there are stars, on 
 each of which, as on a chariot, He planted one, to watch from 
 that heavenly station the divine order of things ; but, after 
 a time, to be born into a human corporeal life. According 
 to the earlier doctrine of the Phsedrus, this fate is the con- 
 sequence of a lapse already from the destined blessedness of 
 that starry existence : so that men are, universally, heavenly 
 natures, fallen from their sphere 1 . But, according to the 
 Timseus, the consignment to a human lot is in virtue of a 
 general law, and the souls do not begin their probation till 
 the mortal birth 2 . The Greek estimate of the sexes betrays 
 itself in the statement that on the first trial the souls are 
 permitted to be 'men. If they conquer the tendencies of Sense 
 and vindicate their higher nature, they return at each interval 
 to their stars, and remain a thousand years free from the body 
 among the choir of the gods. If otherwise, they are born 
 the second time as women ; and if again unfaithful, they are 
 degraded the third time to the life of brutes ; nor will this 
 circulation cease, till by subjection of the lower nature they 
 have found their way back to their original perfection. Be- 
 tween the different lives, however, is interposed in every 
 case not merely a judgment upon the previous probation, 
 but a period of a thousand years, spent in a journey of 
 merited suffering or blessedness ; and not till after that are 
 they called to choose another life 3 . From this return to the 
 earth there are only two exceptions : the incorrigibly guilty 
 are denied all further opportunity, and given over to eternal 
 retribution 4 : and, on the other hand, those who during three 
 successive lives have devoted themselves to philosophy and 
 been distinguished for sanctity, are finally replaced, after the 
 third millennium, in their celestial abode, and troubled no 
 more with a corporeal existence 5 . 
 
 From this conception of the soul, as a divine nature sub- 
 mitted to the conditions of an undivine life, and for this end 
 united with perishable elements, Plato's division of its powers 
 will be readily understood. The leading distinction between 
 its immortal and its mortal part is expressed by the words 
 
 1 Ptosdrus 248, C. * Tim. 42, B. C. s Rep. 615, A. 
 
 4 Rep. 615, D. s Phaedr. 249, A. Conf. however Tim. 42, B.
 
 6a UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 Reason and Sense ; and illustrated by comparison with the 
 sea-god Glaucus, of whom sailors and fishermen caught 
 glimpses beneath the green waters, as he yearly visited the 
 coasts l . No one, to look at him, would suspect the immortal 
 nature shrouded in such a form ; disfigured by shell-fish and 
 sea-weed and pebbles clinging to him, he might be taken 
 for a monster rather than a god ; and only those who know 
 how he can prophesy and will fulfil his oracles find out what 
 he really is. So do the adhesive entanglements of sense and 
 passion grow around the soul, and cover her with an earthy 
 mass so dense and wild, that her primitive divine nature is 
 unperceived ; but if you only notice the insight she can show 
 into the true and good, and the converse she aspires to with 
 the godlike and immortal, you may imagine what she would 
 be if surrounded by these alone, and how she would appear 
 if lifted out of the gulf in which her life is plunged, and with 
 the unsightly accretions all struck off. The immortal part 
 of the soul is simple and uncompounded ; but the other is 
 composed of a nobler and a less noble part, of which the 
 higher, 6 OVJJLOS, impulse, or energy of Will, mediates be- 
 tween the extremes of Intellect and Sense ; and the lower, 
 e-ntfvfjiriTiKov or (^iXoxp^arov, appetite, or selfish desire of 
 having rather than of being, is in complete opposition to 
 reason, and through the force of the intervening dvpos to be 
 kept in rightful subordination to it 2 . This threefold dis- 
 tribution of the soul on the practical side corresponds with 
 the triad already noticed on the cognitive: desire bearing 
 the same inferior relation to virtue that perception does to 
 knowledge: while mere vigour of character (Ovpofibes), ter- 
 minating in good habits, is as far above appetite and beneath 
 sanctity as good sense, terminating in correct but ungrounded 
 impressions, is more than perception and less than reason: 
 and the topmost term is vovs in both. The body of man 
 itself is built in three stories, to lodge these three inhabitants 
 at their appropriate elevations: the immortal Reason in the 
 'Acropolis' of the uplifted head, scarcely deigning to be united 
 with the rest by the narrow isthmus of the neck : and, of 
 
 1 Rep. 6n, C. seqq. 
 
 2 Rep. 435, B ; 449, E ; 441, C ; 580, D. E.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 63 
 
 the mortal parts which divide the proper corpus between 
 them, the brave energies find themselves at home in the 
 beating heart and panting lungs ; while the mere appetencies 
 occupy the basement beneath the diaphragm, and by their 
 low position confess a natural servitude and liability to 
 shame 1 . These three components of the soul are differently 
 mixed in different men and nations ; the higher always carry- 
 ing with it and comprehending the lower, but the lower not 
 implying the higher. The trading nations, the Egyptians 
 and Phoenicians, are distinguished by the predominance of 
 Desire ; the northern barbarians, of Force of character ; the 
 Greeks, of Intellect 2 . This last alone is exclusively human ; 
 for the brutes are not without the courageous nature ; or the 
 plants without a share of instinctive appetency. 
 
 4. Conceptions of CJiaracter. 
 
 This threefold nature of man's soul on the one hand belongs 
 to its very composition, and on the other prescribes its 
 appointed work ; and forms the transition therefore from 
 the Physics to the proper Ethics of Plato. The origin and 
 formation of man as an element of the universe determines 
 what it is possible and well for him to aim at: to define 
 his moral destination, his position and the factors of his life 
 must be appreciated. This order of derivation, by which the 
 doctrine of human character is deduced not from direct in- 
 terpretation of the moral sentiments but from the consideration 
 of man as a natural object placed and constituted in a certain 
 way, is the characteristic of the ancient Ethics. Accordingly, 
 the notion of Duty retreats with them into the background ; 
 and in its place they investigate the Highest Good, a more 
 comprehensive object, including, along with Morality, Beauty 
 also and Wisdom, a combination which, though fitted to dig- 
 nify and adorn it, misses its peculiar and paramount authority, 
 and changes it from a matter of universal obligation into the 
 
 1 Tim. 69, C 70, A ; 90, A. B. 
 ' Rep. 435, E.
 
 64 UNPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 monopoly of philosophers. Plato's highest good being, as we 
 have seen, identical with intellect as opposed to sense, his 
 conception of perfect life assumes either of two forms, 
 according as he reasons from the lower or from the upper 
 end of our nature as his datum. Are we entangled in the 
 delusions and fascinations of Sense "? we must clear our- 
 selves from them, learn to converse with ideas, subjugate the 
 body, and welcome death as an emancipation from the last 
 hindrance of our wisdom. Are we sharers in that divine Rea- 
 son which informs and organises the universe 1 we must recog- 
 nise and welcome it everywhere, and follow it out as it rami- 
 fies through the world of sense, and touches pleasure itself with 
 a light of beauty. There is nothing inconsistent in this double 
 view, which regards the material system, now as the opaque 
 veil to hide, and now as the transparent medium to reveal, the 
 inner thought which is the divine essence of all ; and seeks 
 at one time to ascend into the intellectual glory by escape 
 from detaining appearances ; at another, to descend with that 
 glory as it streams into the remotest recesses of the phe- 
 nomenal world. But without reference to this negative 
 and positive side of the same doctrine, the opposite aspects 
 of Plato's ethical delineation would present the appearance 
 of contradiction. At one time, in his polemic against the 
 claims of pleasure, he appears to advocate an ascetic con- 
 tempt for the senses, and to enjoin a cold separation from 
 human affairs, for the sake of attaining a state of intel- 
 lectual perfection 1 . At another, he denounces the life with- 
 out pleasure and pain as a miserable apathy, and contending 
 that the idea of the good distributes itself through all the 
 elements of existence, protests against its being ignored 
 even in the sphere of perception; stipulating only for a 
 careful distinction of worthy from unworthy pleasure, for 
 the ascendency of measure and the recognition of beauty 
 in all 2 . Under this positive aspect of his doctrine, he finds 
 a function for parts and expressions of human nature 
 
 1 See e.g. Phsedo, 64-68. Thezet. 173, C E; 176, A. Rep. 347, B D; 519, 
 520. 
 
 3 See e.g. Phil. 28, A; 60, E; 63, E; 64, C. Symp. 206, B; 215, D.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 6$ 
 
 which asceticism is most apt to persecute and suppress. 
 Art, specially music, is with him an indispensable element 
 of culture 1 . And Love, in its various stages of impulse 
 from the lowest to the highest, he recognises as the sigh 
 of the mortal after the immortal, the tendency of the finite 
 back to the infinite, showing itself first in a fascination 
 with beautiful form, a single form to begin with, then 
 with all ; next, in a passion for beautiful souls, and the 
 creation by interchange with them of noble thoughts and 
 endeavour's ; then, in the aspiration after the symmetry and 
 grandeur of intellectual truth, wherever science may have 
 seized it ; and finally, in the aim to reach the divine eternal 
 beauty, in which love dies from having realised its quest 2 . 
 By a graceful and happy myth, Plato describes this yearning 
 impulse, that runs through the whole action of the mind, 
 as a joint product of the poverty and affluence of the soul, 
 expressing by features at once of sadness and of hope, 
 the influence of want and of possession : Eros is the child 
 of Penia and Poros. Nor does he leave it doubtful what 
 kind of possession it is to which this yearning owes its 
 life ; for Poros again is the child of Metis ; so that we 
 have nothing and can sigh for nothing but what is born 
 of divine wisdom and inherits a spiritual nature 3 . In this 
 representation, carried out with the most exquisite grace 
 in the Symposium, and under severer limits in the latter 
 part of the Philebus 4 , it is evident how much beyond the 
 range of an ascetic doctrine was Plato's conception of 
 the highest human good. The leading features of this 
 more comprehensive notion must be taken with us into 
 the study of his idea of virtue, as unfolded in his Re- 
 public. 
 
 In the Platonic notion of virtue, no distinction is observed 
 between voluntary and involuntary qualities, natural propen- 
 sities and acquired tendencies. A soul happily constituted 
 and healthily acting out its proper destination is virtuous, 
 whether its harmony be the result of native aptitude or of self- 
 
 1 Legg. 654, seqq. ; 660, A. Rep. 398, C. seqq. 
 
 2 Symp. 201, D 212, A. J Symp. 203, B. C. 
 
 * Philebus, 65, D 66, A. 
 TOL. I. F
 
 66 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 imposed discipline. Virtue is that action of the soul by which 
 it tends towards the highest good, and realises so much of it as 
 its faculties allow. How much that is depends on the essence 
 of the soul, which is the same in all, and on the temperament 
 and proportion of its component parts, which are liable to 
 differ in each. The three elementary endowments, Keason, 
 Impulse, Appetite, have their several perfections or best con- 
 ditions ; and so supply us with three fundamental virtues ; 
 Wisdom, as the expression of Reason : Courage, regulated by 
 a just conception of the proper objects of fear, as the acme of 
 Impulse: and Moderation, or Self-restraint, as the excellence 
 which gives an ethical character to Appetite. These so far 
 follow the order of rank and relation subsisting among the 
 faculties corresponding with them, that Courage is higher than 
 Self-restraint, and Wisdom as the highest virtue comprehends 
 the rest. While Plato's ethical arrangement is thus made to 
 rest on a psychological base, and not upon any considerations 
 of the external objects and occasions of duty, a remarkable 
 difference is observable between his earlier and his maturer 
 writings in the function assigned to Intellect and its virtue of 
 Wisdom. According to the Phaedrus 1 , the soul, resembling in its 
 . composition a chariot and its driver, has Courage and Appe- 
 tite for its steeds, and Reason for its charioteer; and the 
 difficulty of directing its course arises in our case from this ; 
 that while beings diviner than we have not only the reins in 
 the hand of perfect skill, but horses of best descent and mettle, 
 ours are ill yoked together, one being good and noble, the 
 other just the opposite ; the one akin to the living soul of all, 
 and tending upwards on the wing to catch glimpses of its 
 native heaven ; the other, without plumage to sustain it, and 
 always wanting to sink safely home into the rest of bodily 
 existence. The function of the wing is to bear the heavy 
 aloft into the abode of the gods, the place beyond the 
 heavens, which no poet has ever sung or can sing, the form- 
 less, incorporeal, colourless realm where the essences of thought 
 and justice dwell, and the divine steeds may pasture and grow 
 their plumage on the wise, the beautiful, the good, which are 
 
 1 Phaedr. 346, B ; 247, B.
 
 Brarch I.] PLATO. 6j' 
 
 alike the food of gods and men. Onoe gain that region, and 
 the wings will have new breadth and power : miss it and take 
 inferior aliment, and they become thin and waste away. 
 When the great Lord of heaven leads out with his winged 
 chariot, he is followed by the troop of gods and spirits, dis- 
 posed by his order in eleven trains ; and as they make the 
 round of the lower heavenly vault, whoever can and will may 
 join the procession and survey the glories in whose neighbour- 
 hood it sweeps. But at last comes the time when the godlike 
 race that leads the way goes to the banquet prepared for them 
 beyond the margin of the lower heaven, and the rim is reached 
 which only the spirits of strong pinion can pass. Here then 
 occurs the grand struggle of the soul: while the gods have 
 easily reached the inner meadows of eternal truth, and turned 
 out their horses to pasture on ambrosia and drink of nectar, 
 even the immortal power of the human soul pushes on with 
 difficulty to the near edge of that upper heaven. A few may 
 so far prevail as to stand just clear above the margin, and look 
 round through the divine space and admire the beauties and 
 sanctities it contains. Others get their head just through, and 
 have a brief chance of gazing round ; but have so much trouble 
 with their steeds, that they have scarce time to look. There 
 are more who push for an instant through, but are plunged 
 down again by their refractory steeds, so as to see a little, but 
 miss the most. Below and behind these comes the throng of 
 incapable drivers and stubborn horses, whose sole proof of 
 nobleness is in a vain wish to follow, and who do but jostle 
 and trample one another, and with strife and wrangling hurt 
 a vast deal of plumage, and after all lose the entire vision of 
 divine realities. 
 
 In this celebrated myth, it will be observed that Reason is 
 the charioteer, and is thus not co-ordinated with the steeds, 
 which represent the parts of the soul, but set above them on a dif- 
 ferent level. In the Republic the same three principles re-appear : 
 high spirit maintains its place as distinct from appetency, and 
 as the subordinate ally of reason ; to which, as the superior of 
 both, the care and direction of the soul is frequently referred l . 
 
 1 Ke t \ 441, E; 442, C. 
 
 F2
 
 68 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 But in reproducing this system of relations Plato becomes 
 conscious that it is not self-sustaining and complete. The 
 right movement and condition of the soul may still be in- 
 secure, though no desire overrides and suppresses another, 
 and high spirit never dares too little or too much, and reason 
 keeps her insight always clear. For, each of these, however 
 well ordered in itself, may occupy too large a place within the 
 soul, and impair the functions of the rest ; and then they will 
 quarrel among themselves ; and some umpire is needed, with 
 authority to keep the associates in harmony and prevent the 
 intermeddling of any one with the business of another. As, in 
 the constitution of a healthy state, there must be a due propor- 
 tion of workers for industrial wants, and soldiers for defence, 
 and of guardians for governing ; so, in the individual nature, 
 must the propensions, the impulsive energies, and the reflective 
 reason be held to their respective places by some controlling 
 influence embracing all l . From this obvious need the proper 
 conclusion would be, that the three principles must be supple- 
 mented by a fourth, which might indeed, like the rest, be 
 separately named as ' a part ' of the soul, but which, by its 
 dominance over the rest, would in fact be identical with the 
 voluntary personality itself. No such conclusion does Plato 
 overtly draw. Had he drawn it, and had he readjusted to it 
 the Phsedrus myth, the chariot would have been a triga instead 
 of a biga, and the reins would have been delivered into the 
 hands of another power. Though this implied fourth power, 
 which imposes their proper bounds upon the rest, is left with- 
 out a name, a clue to it is indirectly given ; for, just as in the 
 other cases, its best state constitutes a special virtue ; which, 
 accordingly, is added to the triad, wisdom, courage, and self- 
 restraint, and is set over it to ensure the harmony of the 
 whole. And this new-comer is introduced with emphasis and 
 by name ; it is Justice or Right 2 . May we not then ask, what 
 is that power of the soul of which this is the perfect expression, 
 as self-restraint is of appetite, and courage of high spirit, and 
 wisdom of reason ? If from the fourfold ethical division we 
 may complete a fourfold psychology, what faculty can we 
 
 1 Rep. 453, 434, 2 Eep. 432, B ; 435, B.
 
 Branch I.] PLA TO. 69 
 
 name as having Justice or Right as its manifestation, if it be not 
 Conscience, or the proper Moral Faculty 1 ? May not Plato have 
 felt that Intellect, as such, could not after all be put upon the 
 seat of guidance, but must itself be made available in the 
 career of life, by a power over it, resolved to lash it to its 
 work ? It is certainly remarkable that Plato, who first, so far 
 as I know, introduced the Greek enumeration of four cardinal 
 virtues, does not co-ordinate them, but treats btKatoa-vvr] as em- 
 press of the rest, the bond of unity which combines them 
 into a moral system, and obliges them to keep their place. 
 The comprehensive supervision exercised by this principle of 
 Right is otherwise expressed by Plato, when he says that the 
 individual soul is too small a sphere for its activity ; that, 
 ruling as it does the whole moral life of man and gathering 
 into its hand all the threads of ethical relation, it can be studied 
 as a whole only on the scale of the State, where its univer- 
 sality has full scope, and its features and administration are seen 
 magnified. Where can be found a finer description of the office of 
 Conscience than this ? 'And such (i.e. holding every function to 
 its place) is Right in its real essence : concerning itself, how- 
 ever, not with the outward doings of a man's affections, but 
 with the inward springs which are his true self and life ; for- 
 bidding each to quit its own field, in meddlesome encroach- 
 ment on other elements of the soul : but when, by setting all 
 in the order of their own real limits, he has attained self- 
 mastery and self-disposal, with the fruits of peace within ; and 
 has attuned to concord his three principles just like the three 
 notes, highest, lowest, and middle of a scale, with any inter- 
 mediates there may be: then, when he has woven all these 
 threads into a web, and become no longer manifold in 
 character, but one compact and balanced nature, he is at 
 last prepared so to act, be it in affairs of property or health or 
 politics or private contract, as to think and call that conduct 
 right and good which concurs with this character and upholds 
 it, and that knowledge which directs it Wisdom : and on the 
 other hand, that conduct ivrong which may ever impair it, 
 and that judgment Ignorance which directs such conduct 2 .' 
 
 1 Rep. 441, D; 443, D 444, B. * Rep. 443, C E.
 
 70 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 In the maturity of his philosophy, then, Plato conceived of a 
 plurality of virtues brought into unity by an organising sense 
 of Right. In his earlier years he had rather held by the 
 Socratic formula, that all virtue is one ; that its plurality is 
 nominal and deceptive ; and that it is capable of being taught. 
 The later doctrine is not a contradiction, but a development 
 of the earlier. For, in judging of this, we must remember the 
 peculiarity of Socrates' idea of teaching as the art (illustrated 
 by his standing comparison of it with midwifery 1 ), not of 
 depositing information upon the mind, but of evolving the 
 contents of its latent consciousness 2 . That virtue may be taught 
 meant that, by simply interrogating the soul and making it 
 fetch out its thoughts into the light, you may cause men to 
 see and feel the right ; and that, if ever they seem to prefer 
 the wrong, it is from the undeveloped state of their moral 
 insight. Really to see the good, and to know it as such, yet 
 not to love and pursue it, is impossible ; the vision carries 
 with it its own persuasion and authority ; and the vision is so 
 far one and single, that either all is seen, or nothing with any 
 clearness ; and it is the character of the luminous soul to 
 grow pure and good in all its dimensions at once ; and it is 
 only the unreal and imitative virtue of mere habit and happy 
 usage, that makes it seem as though goodness could be broken 
 into fragments and be turned up piecemeal. This gives the 
 true meaning to the celebrated saying, that no one is volun- 
 tarily bad 3 , and that all moral aberrations are reducible to 
 mental blindness and mistake. This maxim, by a curious 
 fate, has become characteristic alike of the systems of Plato 
 and of Bentham ; and there are passages in which it presents 
 the momentary appearance of announcing the same thought in 
 both: yet assuredly it is the symbol with Bentham of the 
 doctrine (of the supremacy of pleasure and pain) to which 
 Plato everywhere manifests the intensest repugnance 4 . When 
 Bentham says, that wrong-doing is nothing but false reck- 
 oning, he means, ' Show the perpetrators how much more 
 
 1 Theaet. 150, B. seqq. 3 Meno, 82-86. 
 
 3 Prot. 345, D. E. Tim. 86, D. Gorg. 509, E. Legg. 731, C. 
 * Gorg. 497, D; 500, A. TWV dyaOwv apa tvtKa Sef KCU ra\\.a ndi TO. ijSea wpar- 
 Ttiv, d\\' ov rdyaOd TUIV ijSeW. Cf. 506, C E.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 7 1 
 
 advantage they would have in another course, and they will 
 not repeat the ill.' With Plato it means, ' Make them feel how 
 much better they would be with other preferences, and this 
 new light will change their soul.' In the one case, the rule ex- 
 presses the all-conquering power of external consequences; 
 in the other, the subduing suasion of moral beauty and in- 
 trinsic worth 1 . As if to put in the strongest light the con- 
 trast between the conceptions which have both taken refuge 
 in this same maxim, Plato has emphatically condemned, as 
 among the worst of all, two forms of conduct which Bentham 
 treats, in the one case with leniency, in the other with com- 
 mendation : viz. delinquency through ignorance, and obedience 
 for the sake of its rewards. Of the former he declares, that 
 ignorance and unconsciousness, far from palliating the wrong, 
 are just what constitute its badness ; and that if evil must be 
 perpetrated at all, it is better, were it possible, that it should 
 be done intentionally and with open eyes, than without pur- 
 pose ; for when you tell to others a conscious falsehood, you 
 deceive but them ; when an unconscious, you deceive yourself 
 as well, and shut out the truth at every door 2 . And as to the <a 
 latter, Plato denies all character of goodness to actions done 
 for the sake of extrinsic benefits, whether in this life or in any 
 other 3 : if you dare a little to-day from the prospect otherwise 
 of greater terror to-morrow, your very bravery expresses only 
 fear : if you refrain from indulgence now, that you may have 
 a richer banquet hereafter, your very moderation is but greedi- 
 ness : and that can be no true virtue which thus illicitly sets its 
 heart on the very things it professes to renounce, and secretly 
 worships the idols it dethrones ; but a mere slavish counter- 
 feit of genuine goodness, whose attribute it is to stipulate for 
 no wages to personal appetite or desire, but accept the in- 
 trinsically good for its own sake as the sterling coin for which 
 all else may fairly be exchanged away. Instead of regarding 
 moral evil as deplorable chiefly on account of the natural 
 suffering which it brings, so that guilt would be guilt no 
 more, could the entail of its consequences be cut off, Plato 
 affirms that impunity is a more dreadful curse than any 
 
 1 Eep. 589, C E. 2 Hipp. Min. 373, seqq. Rep. 535, E. 
 
 s Rep. 362, E. seqq. Cf. 445. 612, A. B.
 
 72 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 punishment, and that nothing so good can befall the criminal 
 as his retribution, the failure of which would but make a 
 double discord on the order of the universe 1 . The offender 
 himself may spend his arts in devices of escape, and think 
 himself happy if he is not found out, or is easily let off; but 
 all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin ; and 
 when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really 
 is, he will yield himself up as the prisoner of eternal justice, 
 and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so, for the 
 first time, to be set at one with truth 2 . 
 
 The identification of virtue with insight may perhaps re- 
 mind us of Carlyle's favourite dogma, that stupidity and 
 wickedness invariably go together ; and that clear intelligence 
 carries with it moral nobleness. Yet, as in the case of 
 Bentham, the agreement of the ancient with the modern 
 thinker is only apparent. At least, whatever it be that 
 Carlyle understands by intellect, it certainly does not agree 
 with Plato's notion : for that very ' Unconsciousness ' which 
 the former pronounces to be a characteristic of genius is just 
 what the latter deprecates as ignorance, and tolerates only as 
 the prelude to awakened wisdom. The fundamental aim of 
 the Socratic school was to carry into every field of thought 
 and action that entire self-knowledge and open-eyed reflection 
 which Carlyle denounced as a disease ; and to banish the in- 
 stinctive spontaneity the loss of which he so pathetically 
 bewailed 3 . Plato put no trust in mere natural sagacity and 
 sound moral health, except as the rudiments of ulterior dis- 
 tinctness of vision 4 : right to-day, they might be wrong to- 
 morrow, like the tact of an ill-taught physician, or the quick- 
 sightedness of a pilot in a strange sea : nor could mother-wit 
 afford any permanent security, till brought to a conscious and 
 systematic apprehension of the real grounds of truth and good, 
 and capable of stating them to itself and others 5 . Without 
 this, right judgment depends too much on happy accidents of 
 bodily condition and favouring circumstances ; and accord- 
 
 . 472, E ; 509, B ; 511, A. a Gorg. 476. 525, B. 
 
 3 Apol. 22 ; Kep. 475, 480. Cf. Meno 99, B D. 
 
 4 Meno, 97. s Symp. 202, A. Rep. 506, C. Tim. 51, D, E.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 73 
 
 ingly no souls, says Plato, so often choose their second pro- 
 bationary life amiss as those who have passed through the first 
 in constitutional rather than philosophical virtue 1 ; insomuch 
 that they run the chance, by successive errors of transmigra- 
 tion, of getting down at last to the life of bees or ants. In this 
 satire, I admit, he has in view not altogether Carlyle's class of 
 UTiconscious heroes, of strong and healthy instinct, but rather 
 the regular folks of decent habit, whose virtue is scarcely less a 
 mere organised routine than the orderly ways of some colony 
 of constructive insects 2 . Plato, however, makes little distinc- 
 tion between the two classes; and charges upon both the 
 cardinal fault of a Hind unconsciousness towards themselves. 
 
 5. The Ideal State. 
 
 The unity of all the virtues being found in Justice, the defi- 
 nition of justice involves the whole theory of morals. It is to 
 investigate this that Plato institutes his enquiry into the na- 
 ture and proper constitution of a State : which, as a magnified 
 personality, giving at once an enlarged image of the indivi- 
 dual, and a miniature of the universe, presents ethical rela- 
 tions in the external form and on the middle scale most suited 
 to our apprehension 3 . This mode of introducing his Republic 
 sufficiently proves that Plato regarded the State as an ex- 
 pression of the moral life of man, and not as a mere mutual 
 assurance company : and makes it certain that he was only 
 ridiculing a current theory and not stating seriously his own, 
 when he assigns, as the adequate cause of human society, the 
 mere inability of mankind otherwise to provide for their 
 bodily support and enjoyment, and pretends to regret the 
 development which has removed it from the primitive rude- 
 ness of a city of pigs 4 . The treatise, however, though pro- 
 fessedly aiming at an ethical end, really stops short with 
 the mechanism adapted for reaching it. It is a treatise on 
 
 1 Rep. 519, C. * Phaedo, 69, A C. 
 
 3 Rep. 368. 369, A. * Rep. 372, D.
 
 74 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 political philosophy, rather than on morals ; and the reduc- 
 tion of the great picture into the cabinet size of the 
 individual soul is left to be accomplished, for the most 
 part, by the optical instruments of the reader's own mind. 
 In truth, these two branches of human study were to 
 a Greek entirely inseparable ; the scope of private life 
 bearing a much smaller proportion than with us to the 
 whole, and the commonwealth presenting as it did the 
 highest and largest sphere for the exercise of character. 
 It is surprising that any one who has the least appre- 
 ciation of Plato's philosophy should suppose him to be 
 amusing himself with a mere chimerical vision, in the 
 delineation of his imaginary State. The picture is drawn 
 in deep earnest ; and when he speaks of it as little likely 
 to be realised on earth, he no more intends to resign it 
 to the realm of fancy than the moralist and the prophet 
 mean to abate the claims of divine law when, in proclaim- 
 ing its sanctity, they deplore the shortcomings of human 
 weakness. It is not a dream, unless every ideal is a 
 dream, but the real standard of which all actual social 
 constitutions are but shadows and distortions, and to which, 
 in proportion as wisdom can find opportunity, approxima- 
 tion should be continually made. He computes through- 
 out the difficulties which must oppose themselves to its 
 realisation, and allows for them ; he provides a mechanism 
 for conquering or charming them away ; and deals with 
 them as his Demiurgos is said to deal with the refractory 
 and negative elements of nature, not as discouragements 
 from the act of creation, but as ground for ceaseless striving 
 after a type too perfect for empirical exhibition. However 
 hard we may find it to believe this respecting a system 
 which in several points so seriously offends our moral 
 sentiments, by giving sanction to regulated lying, to com- 
 munity of wives and exposure of infants, it will be found 
 that even these revolting suggestions are products of an 
 earnest moral idea, of the unconditional self-sacrifice of 
 the individual to the state, of the part to the whole. With 
 that feeble and dilute conception of personality which 
 marks every Pantheistic philosophy, Plato, in common
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 75 
 
 with all the great Hellenic thinkers, regarded particular 
 persons as mere organs of a common social life, which, 
 as the higher and more real unity, was entitled to mul- 
 tiply or suppress them, to move and mould them, according 
 to the exigencies of its perfection. Once allow that the 
 universe is a struggle of divine thought and beauty to 
 express itself by conquering negation and difficulty ; that 
 society is to be the copy and counterpart of the idea and 
 method of the universe ; and the individual again to be 
 the reproduction of society in little ; and it follows that 
 the macrocosm is entitled to dispose of the microcosm ; 
 that natural beauty and perfection must determine the 
 personal and ethical ; and that the individual can acquire 
 no rights and plead no duties against the universal. The 
 unrelenting rigour with which the Republic carries out 
 this idea constitutes its great value ; and while inevitably 
 producing details repugnant to feelings that start from the 
 opposite end, attests the unshrinking earnestness of the 
 author. With this general remark I must be almost content 
 in dealing with a subject too large for more special criticism. 
 The outline of Plato's construction of his ideal society is 
 well known. As the universe is a triad of Intellect, Soul, 
 and Matter ; and as the individual man is composed of 
 Reason, Impulse, and Sense ; so the commonwealth must 
 be constituted of three classes ; the guardians, composed 
 of gold (embodiment of its thought) ; the warriors, of 
 silver (who express its courage), and the industrious, of 
 brass l (who represent and provide its physical and sen- 
 tient good). Each of these is to be the origin and treasury 
 of an appropriate virtue : the first, of wisdom ; the second, 
 of high spirit ; the third, of self-restraint and moderation ; 
 and to secure the respective production of these, all the 
 threads of causation which draw them forth are to be ga- 
 thered up into the hand of Law. Hence, the connection be- 
 tween the sexes, the number of births, the distribution of 
 property, the "choice of occupation, the daily meal, the course 
 of training and instruction, the control of literature and art, 
 
 1 Rep. 415, A.
 
 76 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 the construction of dwellings, and all the minutest particulars 
 of life and habit, are to be the objects of public care. This 
 however applies especially to the guardians ; and in no 
 case beyond the two higher classes ; to whom alone, in 
 order to screen them from the seductions of personal 
 interest, the obnoxious prohibitions of property and mar- 
 riage refer l . As they are to be the embodiment of the 
 highest and all-comprehending virtue, their whole training 
 requires the most careful regulation, that no spoiling 
 influence may come near them. It is indispensable at 
 any price to give them true philosophic insight. 'Until 
 in our states either philosophers are kings, or the present 
 nominal kings and princes become genuine and competent 
 philosophers, and political power and philosophy coalesce, 
 and the ordinary natures that seek the one without the 
 other are forced to stand aside, there is no rest from ills 
 for states, or indeed for human kind, and this common- 
 wealth of ours cannot possibly be born and see the light 2 .' 
 The philosophic training should begin with the mathematical 
 sciences ; to be succeeded, after the thirtieth year, by dialectic 
 discipline ; at thirty -five are to commence fifteen years of 
 active service among the military class ; and at fifty the 
 proper inauguration is to take place into the ruling order. 
 Exercises in music and gymnastics are to precede and ac- 
 company this course of education, and to be shared with 
 the warrior class ; the greatest care being taken to exclude 
 all wild Lydian music which excites the passions, and all 
 poetry which, like Homer's and Hesiod's, gives low and un- 
 worthy representations of the gods. With a view to a vigorous 
 physical development, Plato prescribes for women participation 
 in gymnastic exercises and in war. Of the third or industrial 
 
 1 The word (f>v\cue(s is used sometimes of the political governors alone, e.g. 
 421, B. (where the fniKovpoi coupled with them are the warriors), 428, D. (where 
 it is admitted that the epithet rt\tioi or d^rjOivoi should be added to make the 
 limited meaning clear) ; at other times, of the political and military orders taken 
 together, e.g. 463, C. (where it has the same extent as the compound phrase pre- 
 viously employed, acarr}pa.s rt KCLI firticovpovs}. This ambiguity makes it sometimes 
 difficult to determine whether the regulations provided for the responsible classes 
 of the state are intended for both sections, or only for the higher. 
 
 3 Bep. 473, D.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 77 
 
 class he takes scarcely any notice ; they are treated as 
 by nature subject to the others as their rulers: nor is any 
 higher hope or ambition manifested for them, than that they 
 should be brought to the life of orderly self-restraint and 
 willing co-operation win the public law. In this respect, and 
 in his unhesitating allowance of slavery as the consequence 
 of foreign conquest l , Plato betrays his personal dislike of the 
 Athenian democracy, and his Hellenic pride towards the bar- 
 barian world. Indeed the mind of Plato (unlike that of Ari- 
 stotle) was throughout intensely Greek; and if in his sense 
 of beauty, his dramatic perception, his dialectic acuteness, 
 his vivid simplicity, his religious depth, he exhibits the 
 genius of his race in the richest blossom, we must deal 
 tenderly with the limitations incident to the same type 
 of race and season of the world. At the same time, the 
 peculiarites of his social doctrine no further belong to his 
 race, than that his race determined his philosophy. The 
 complete merging of the individual in the common life, 
 the suppression of all egoism, which he required, the 
 visible enthroning of the universal good in the institution 
 of a ruling order, all resulted directly from his belief 
 in the ideal essence of the universe, and in the necessity 
 of impregnating with it and regulating by it the material 
 sphere of phenomena and experience. The sharp opposition 
 which he thus brought into the human realm from the 
 cosmic between the divine and the earthly, the universal 
 and the particular, is not unlike the distinction familiar 
 to Christendom between the kingdom of heaven and the 
 domain of secular affairs : and he justifies the philosopher's 
 abstinence from actual political life by the very reasons 
 which have withheld enthusiastic Christians from the 
 exercise of a citizen's duty and the strife of civil con- 
 test 2 . States as they are express chiefly the lowest (or 
 epithumetic) part of human nature, and are the arena on 
 which men under its rule contend for the prizes of wealth 
 and honour: the just and wise will shun a scene through 
 
 1 Rep. 469, B D. Legg. 776, B 778, A. 
 3 Theaet. 173, 0176.
 
 78 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 which the higher elements of the soul cannot pass un- 
 injured 1 . An ideal state there is, the model of which is 
 stored in heaven ; and in that divine polity, if ever it 
 comes down to earth, he will take part 2 . Plato's State 
 indeed presents, amid undeniable Contrasts, some curious 
 points of analogy with the hierarchical form of the Christian 
 Church. Both aim at the realisation of a divine idea in 
 human life through the framework of a social organism. 
 Both regard this divine element as having its unity in 
 the corporate society, by affiliation with which each be- 
 comes at once its participant and organ. Both agree in 
 treating the personal nature of" individuals left to them- 
 selves as wild and ruinous, and requiring its subjection, 
 if possible by internal surrender, if not, by external 
 obedience, to the righteousness embodied in the whole. 
 When Plato says that if a multitude cannot be brought 
 to know and serve holiness itself, it is well for them to 
 do it at second hand by obeying holy men 3 , we seem 
 to hear the very voice of a mediaeval priest. The systems 
 again concur in leaving the desires of the individual most 
 free in the class which is least in esteem ; and in de- 
 manding the completest self-abnegation where there is 
 the highest trust of dignity and power. Nay, the very 
 sacrifices by which Plato would ward off temptation from 
 his <t>v\a.Kfs are akin to those which Catholicism has 
 enforced upon her priests ; viz. the foregoing of domestic 
 life, the relinquishment of private property, the sur- 
 render of all voice in the selection of the personal position. 
 The forcible repression of private claims on behalf of 
 a corporate personality, the allowance of them only in 
 so far as they give individualised expression to the idea 
 of the whole, the creation of distinct classes to be living 
 representatives of the divine type in its several parts and 
 functions, betrays the origin of the Roman Catholic Church 
 from the same spiritual Realism which constructed the 
 Republic of Plato: as his commonwealth was the earthly 
 
 1 Gorg. 521, D 522, B. Rep. 503. 517, C. D. a Rep. 592. 
 
 3 Rep. 590, D. E.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 79 
 
 embodiment of a celestial and universal righteousness, so 
 was the Church the visible body of the invisible and 
 heavenly Christ, at once his witness and abode: and 
 as in the former case each particular man derived all 
 his worth and significance from his intertexture with 
 the system, apart from which he became detached from 
 the eternal Justice, so in the latter did each one receive 
 his sacred mark through baptismal inauguration, with- 
 out which he remained an alien from grace ; and drew 
 his moral nourishment and life from the Church, which 
 superinduced upon his helpless and lower self a higher 
 spiritual nature. Hegel justly contrasts this relentless 
 subjugation of the individual, into which Plato was in 
 part provoked by the corruption of Greek cities through 
 the wantonness of private passions, with the principle 
 of Christianity which raises every single soul to an in- 
 finite importance, and so gives a religious inspiration to 
 the claims of democratic equality 1 . But this principle 
 after all represents only one side of Christianity, though 
 the side most familiar to Protestants ; and to complete 
 it we must add the Catholic conception, that the in- 
 dividual soul first finds her divine dignity and receives 
 the seal of consecration, when obediently gathered into 
 the great community which represents the heavenly rule 
 on earth. On this side there is no contrast, but the 
 closest analogy, between the Platonic and the Christian 
 notion ; and it is by embodying this feeling that Eoman 
 Catholicism so curiously forms the middle term' between 
 the ancient and the modern systems of society and 
 polity, the one dealing with individuals as organs and 
 media of a common life entitled to priority, the other 
 constituting a state by the aggregation of individuals, 
 who bring to it their antecedent ends and constrain it to 
 work them out. Nor wouli either Plato or the hierarchy 
 allow that the restraints they put on separate self-will 
 at all contradict the principle of the divine worth of 
 the individual soul. On the contrary, it was precisely 
 
 1 Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophic, II. 260.
 
 80 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 on the souls they loved and honoured most that they laid 
 the heaviest burden of restraint ; they reversed the rule of 
 worldly scorn and tyranny, which strip the many of liberty 
 and goods to enrich and indulge the few; and conceding 
 to the multitude freedom of employment, with the rights of 
 family and of property, reserved the severities of self-denial 
 to strew with thorns the path of power, and deter the 
 selfish and unworthy from approach l . The real failure both 
 of the Platonic State and of the Catholic Church was this ; 
 that, though they acknowledged each person to constitute an 
 end in himself as well as to be the member of a whole, 
 they fulfilled this end for him by social institutions, instead 
 of making it contingent on a subjective condition limited 
 to his own consciousness ; and it was not till the Reforma- 
 tion proclaimed the doctrine of justification by faith, that Chris- 
 tianity vindicated to itself an element to which no parallel 
 can be found in the Greek or the mediaeval conception. 
 
 6. Summary of Characteristics. 
 
 We have now examined in its leading features the whole 
 fabric of the Platonic system ; and have shown how curiously 
 its ethics depend upon its physics, and its physics upon its 
 dialectic. Before we leave it, we may gather up the threads 
 which determine its moral pattern, and discriminate it from 
 other doctrines with which it may be compared. 
 
 (1) The proper aim of man is not pleasure or the contentment 
 of the sensitive nature, but a good which may run counter 
 to this, and the chief elements of which are truth, beauty, 
 right. These are to be sought, not for the sake of anything 
 ulterior, but on their own account, as having intrinsic and 
 ultimate worth, and entitled to 'legitimate the pursuits which 
 lead to them. Plato thus denies the postulate of the he- 
 donist morality. 
 
 (2) This good, though including the just regulation of 
 
 1 See Ferd. Ckr. Baur's 'Das Christliche des Platonismus/ p. 28, seqq.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 8 1 
 
 the active principles of conduct, does not terminate here, 
 but takes in also the right direction of the rational powers ; 
 nay, is so far intellectual in its last essence that it is properly 
 called insight or wisdom, a comprehensive term which car- 
 ries within it every form of excellence, be it of intelligence 
 or character. Plato thus sides with those who seek for moral 
 ideas in the rational faculty. 
 
 (3) The good which supplies the proper human aim, is not 
 merely subjective and dependent on the constitution of the 
 human faculties. It has an objective reality, which would 
 remain though we were not: nor in any possible universe 
 could the evil and the good change predicates. Moreover, it 
 is as little relative to the phenomena of created things as to 
 the temper of our minds ; for it was present and was good 
 before all phenomena, and was at once the sphere and ope- 
 rating cause from which they sprang. Ere yet any perishable 
 thing arose, it was ready as a universe of organising thought, 
 able to persuade negation to assume a form. Thus the end 
 to which human life directs itself is declared to be super- 
 human, eternal, absolute, divine. Its separate existence prior 
 to all phenomena constitutes its transcendency ; and this, 
 together with its predicate of Intellect, justifies its assumption 
 of the name God. 
 
 (4) This highest good then has its seat both at home and 
 abroad, in us and out of us. How does it pass from the 
 one to the other? We are not mere recipients of it from a 
 foreign source ; it does not come to us for the first time from 
 the external scene ; but in apprehending it we give as much 
 as we take. Its various types, embodied in the visible uni- 
 verse, are also indigenous treasures of the human mind, which 
 has pre-existed as well as they, and been familiar with them 
 in an earlier state ; and when now they present themselves 
 before our conscious thought, it is that we recover them by 
 remembrance, and recognise the ancient face of truth and 
 reality under its phenomenal disguise. Whatever is good is 
 evolved from us by appeal to memory ; virtue is learnt ; and 
 learning is remembrance 1 . 
 
 1 Phsedo, 72 77. 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 82 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 (5) It follows from this that our relation to God as the 
 divine ground and source of the universe is a relation of 
 likeness, arising from identity of essence, of the little to 
 the great, the mixed and disguised to the pure and clear, 
 the partial copy to the perfect original, within the compass 
 of the same kind of being. All that is highest in the souls 
 of men, the true, the beautiful, the good, is not so much 
 a possession gained by faithfulness of will, as the unspoiled 
 residue of an uncreated nature and a diviner life 1 . It is the 
 emergence and self-assertion, from beneath the overwhelming 
 floods of transient phenomena, of a godlike and eternal element 
 which may be latent but not lost. In this conception, virtue 
 is divested altogether of the character of Law ; the aim at 
 it is in no sense an obedience ; its realisation establishes us 
 in communion with God, but can hardly be said to win His 
 approbation. Instead of the force of moral legislation and 
 authoritative distinction of right and wrong, we are referred 
 to the inherent attraction of kindred being, thought for 
 thought, and harmony for harmony. In trusting itself to 
 this principle of love and homeward aspiration, Plato's moral 
 persuasion comes into comparison with those forms of Chris- 
 tianity which insist upon the Gospel to the exclusion of Law, 
 and rely, for the sanctification of the human mind, on the 
 kindred established with the heavenly Christ, and the assimi- 
 lating affection directed upon His holy nature. There is, how- 
 ever, this great difference : that while those Christians regard 
 such love and tendency towards an infinite perfection as 
 prseternaturally superinduced on a reluctant nature, Plato 
 treats it as the very ground and essence of the soul, the 
 sigh of the exile for her native air. 
 
 (6) Whether this communion of the human with the divine, 
 as of like with like, amounts in Plato's doctrine to conscious 
 sympathy or intercourse, as between mind and mind, is a 
 difficult question, depending on our solution of a more com- 
 prehensive one, viz. whether he teaches the personality of 
 God. It is only between persons that sympathy and inter- 
 course can take place; and if there should be reason to be- 
 
 1 Tim. 90, A. B.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 83 
 
 lieve that in the dialogues of Plato personal predicates are 
 only mythically attributed to God, and that he really never 
 passed beyond the conception of some essence of Thought with- 
 out a Thinker, of spontaneous Power without Will, of plastic 
 Art without an Artist, we must deny to his sense of relation- 
 ship between the human and the universal Mind any higher 
 character than attaches to the yearning of instinct, as con- 
 trasted with the mutual interchange and intelligent interpre- 
 tation of living looks. It may seem at first sight absurd to 
 raise such a question ; for are not all the terms by which 
 Plato designates the first principle and ground of things 
 terms denoting rational being? Does he not call God In- 
 tellect, and ascribe to Him knowledge, justice, ungrudging- 
 ness ? and how but in a person can these mental attributes 
 be conceived ? It is, however, certain that in the ancient philo- 
 sophy such a rule as this would frequently mislead us ; words 
 expressive of mental life and action were employed where 
 no proper idea of personality was present, merely to describe 
 a dynamical evolution by steps accordant with the movement 
 of intelligence in us. Diogenes of Apollonia taught the origin 
 of all things from an intelligent atmosphere ; and Anaxagoras 
 referred the system of nature to a formative vovs; neither 
 of which can be supposed by anyone to amount to a doctrine 
 of proper Theism. The same remark applies to Aristotle's 
 definition of God, as 'thought of thought 1 ;' and Plato him- 
 self, not in his myths, but in the course of strict philosophic 
 exposition, speaks of the cosmos, or created God, as an object 
 of prayer ; e. g. Timseus at the commencement of the Crito 
 implores this being to confirm him in whatever may be right 
 and true, and administer suitable correction for whatever may 
 be wrong in what he has advanced 2 . The notion of person- 
 ality indeed was held very indistinctly and with great fluctu- 
 ation by the Greek philosophers. not less so_in relation to 
 the human than in regard to the divine ; and if we carry the 
 modern idea of its more determinate form back into the 
 ancient systems, we shall search in vain for any positive 
 answer to the questions which it starts all round. Were we 
 
 1 z< iffriv }) vorjais. vorjafax voyffis, Met. XII. 9. * Crito, 106, A.B. 
 
 G 2
 
 84 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 to push the enquiry, what Plato taught about the personality 
 of man, his anthropology might be shown to have the same 
 difficulties as his theology ; the boundary between one's self 
 and nature, between subject and object, is not at all clearer 
 within the human circle, than in the great whole is the sepa- 
 ration between God and the universe. I cannot resist the con- 
 viction that, in whatever sense Plato conceived man to be 
 '.' a person, in the same sense he supposed God to be a person : 
 nor can we go far wrong in saying, that (like the modern 
 German schools) he placed the essence of personality in re- 
 flective self -consciousness. To awaken this and evolve its 
 treasures of truth and revelations of reality was the great 
 end of his dialectic, which was but the philosophic path of 
 the Socratic self-knowledge ; and since, just in proportion as 
 it neared its final goal, our ideas became at once distinctly aware 
 of themselves and akin to His, the perfecting of the personal 
 attribute brought us into the likeness as well as the friend- 
 ship of God. This strict correspondence between the human 
 thought and the divine leaves it but little doubtful that the 
 self-consciousness which was the consummation of the one 
 could not be denied to the other. Moreover the transcendent 
 existence attributed to God (or the idea of the good), prior 
 to any creative efficiency, points in the same direction ; for 
 though we may perhaps, by a questionable strain of abstract- 
 ing power, infuse Thought into actual nature as its inner 
 principle of development without any idea of personality, we 
 can hardly assign to it a pre-existence or an existence beyond, 
 without the recognition of its self-consciousness ; a Natura 
 iiaturans is tied down by indissoluble relation to a Natura 
 naturata ; and if not yet busied with this, if flung back into 
 an anterior loneliness, cannot remain idle there, but must 
 turn in upon itself and be self-conscious. The divine life was 
 regarded as a descent into the creation of phenomena by the 
 same steps, the series of flbrj, which our reason ascends in 
 the opposite direction on its way to its proper goal ; and if 
 studious regress suffices to invest the traversing thought with 
 personality, the creative progress cannot certainly do less. 
 Again, if we turn to the Platonic triads and remember that, 
 as the human being contains the three descending consti-
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 85 
 
 tuents of reason, soul, and body, so the entire system of 
 things includes the divine reason, the soul of the universe, 
 and matter ; and if we ask ourselves in which of the three 
 human elements Plato would find the seat of self-conscious- 
 ness, we cannot hesitate to reply, in the reason; not cer- 
 tainly in the body, whose special disgrace is its resistance 
 to this endowment ; nor in the tyvxn, which is distinctly the 
 animal principle with its group of mere instincts and im- 
 pulses ; but in the reason, which is above them both and 
 anterior to both. Kesiding thus in the primaeval and eternal 
 part of us, self-consciousness is not a thing that has first 
 come upon the stage in the process of genesis ; it is not 
 incident to the transition from real to phenomenal being; 
 but, inherent in the former, is brought down thence into 
 the latter. Finding it then in ourselves before we were differ- 
 enced from God, we should violate consistency were we not 
 to attribute it to Him. This conclusion is confirmed by the 
 fact that Plato certainly assigns no personal self-consciousness 
 to the soul of the universe, whose formation is perfectly ana- 
 logous to that of ours ; yet this he must have done, had he 
 regarded this endowment as due to the evolution and not 
 to the primal data of existence. His philosophy therefore 
 either provides no account at all of the faculty which is its 
 constant pride and glory, or fixes it in that eternal reason 
 which is the common ground of divine and human perfectness. 
 Against these considerations, however, the principle of Plato's 
 own dialectic is turned. It is urged that his graduated world 
 of ideas ascends by steps from the less to the more general, 
 ever more and more widely denotative, less and less fully con- 
 notative ; so that, as we rise, all composition and number dis- 
 appear, and at the summit we reach absolute unity, excluding 
 plurality. That summit is the idea of the good, i.e. God. If 
 He therefore, regarded as thought or essence, is absolutely 
 simple, He can have no predicates ; for to predicate anything 
 of Him is to attribute characteristics to Him, to say that He 
 partakes of some other i5os. To speak of 'personal Godhecnl ' 
 refers us either to personality that partakes of the idea of God- 
 head ; or to Godhead that partakes of the idea of personality ; 
 either of which gives us not the culminating Unit, but a lower
 
 86 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 plurality. This objection is undeniably conceived in the 
 genuine spirit of the doctrine of 61677 ; the rigorous consequences 
 of which, as of every attempt at unitary deduction of a universe 
 by predicamental logic, carries us upward to an impersonal 
 First Cause, and downward to an unmoral world. But the 
 instances are so numerous in which Plato has committed the 
 inconsequence, that the argument from it has no weight. He 
 has everywhere left the upper strata of his Ideal doctrine in 
 great obscurity ; its summit is lost in cloud ; and though, as far 
 as we can trace it, it slopes up as if it would lead to a single 
 pinnacle bathed in eternal light, yet wherever a breath of 
 poetry and love sweeps the veil partially away, there is a 
 glimpse disclosed of the two-peaked Parnassus of a majestic 
 Dualism. We may the less scruple to admit in Plato a 
 religious theory inconsistent with his ideal doctrine, because 
 he has himself virtually allowed it. Having laid it down that 
 the ei8?j are in themselves motionless entities, which, if active, 
 are so by partaking of the further etSos of activity ; and having 
 also described the idea of the good as one of them, though the 
 highest ; he could not overlook the fact, that he was thus 
 destitute of any principle of motion, unless he violated, on 
 behalf of this supreme term, the rule of inaction which he held 
 for all the others. This, accordingly, he openly does, and (as 
 we have seen) expressly fixes the seat of causality in reason 
 and wisdom, to which, he says, Zeus himself (i.e. the cosmic 
 organism) owes his kingly intellect and soul 1 . What is here 
 denoted by the terms reason and wisdom and made the causal 
 fountain of all is the same that elsewhere is intended by the 
 idea of the good : to this therefore he undeniably ascribes an 
 exceptional self-activity, which, in mind that is prior to all and 
 destitute of external relations, involves self-consciousness. On 
 these grounds I think that we must go a little further than 
 Zeller, who decides that Plato usually conceived of God as if 
 personal, yet was restrained by a doctrine inconsistent with 
 such conception from approaching it closely or setting it 
 deliberately on any scientific ground ; and that we may re- 
 gard him as fully aware of the conditions of the problem, and, 
 
 1 Phil. 30, c.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 87 
 
 though unable to solve it without lesion of his dialectic, 
 yet deliberately pronouncing judgment on the side of his 
 religious feeling. 
 
 In these remarks, however, I have spoken as if the person- 
 ality of a being were properly determined by the test of his 
 self-consciousness. Were we to adopt a more exact criterion, 
 and enquire for his Will, we should not be able to vindicate 
 so confidently Plato's faith in a personal God. No distinction 
 is at all clearly marked, in either his anthropology or his 
 theology, between the two types of mental activity, the volun- 
 tary and the involuntary ; both are fused together into the 
 common conception of the spontaneous or self-moving. That 
 which is the beginning of motion, which has its initiatory 
 activity within it, is mind, according to this philosopher ; 
 nothing more is necessary in order to bring a being under this 
 category than to shut off all foreign impulse and find that still 
 it is not reduced to rest. The spontaneity may work itself out 
 by laws not less determinate than those of the material world, 
 only in the form of evolution from within instead of pressure 
 or impulse from without ; it may be the simple outcome of the 
 necessity of the being's nature ; it fulfils none the less the 
 conditions of personality. Accordingly, the divine action in 
 constituting the frame of things is described as an intellectual 
 process, rather than an exercise of choice ; he rather thinks out 
 the universe into realisation than wills it ; and though he is 
 said to create the best, to produce, as near as may be, an ap- 
 proximation to himself, and a faint background of inferior 
 things rejected is thus retained, yet the notion of volition, en- 
 tering the field of contingency, and from indeterminate possi- 
 bilities determining one actuality, never comes clearly forward. 
 If therefore we were to place the essence of personality in the 
 preferential power of the mind, were to make a being's self 
 consist in the individuality of this nucleus, and to regard the 
 streams of involuntary thought as the outlying conditions of 
 its exercise, we might be obliged to confess that the God of 
 Plato was impersonal. But it must still be remembered that 
 his picture of human nature is, with some qualifications, open 
 to the same remark. And this concurrence of theory respect- 
 ing the mind of God and that of man is enough to assure us
 
 88 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDEXT. [Book I. 
 
 that the communion between the two attained by the wise and 
 
 good was not regarded as a mere unconscious partnership in 
 
 the same possession, but as a living amity of kindred beings. 
 
 (7) How far Plato's ethics recognised the doctrine of human 
 
 responsibility is a question of some difficulty ; but the answer 
 
 is partly contained in the foregoing remarks. We must first 
 
 observe that, in his view, all that is excellent and noble and 
 
 wise belongs to the uncreated element of our nature, and 
 
 inheres in us as pre-existent and eternal beings ; it is the very 
 
 ground and essence of the mind, which may be covered over 
 
 by rank and deforming growths, but cannot be brought to more 
 
 than its original purity. In what sense then can this eternal 
 
 deposit constitute a trust ? In this alone ; it is ours to keep, 
 
 but not to win ; however we may spoil it, we cannot improve 
 
 it ; it cannot afford a ground of merit, though it may turn by 
 
 abuse to our disgrace ; when disengaged into clearest view, it 
 
 is like the divine perfection, which has not been gained, but 
 
 always was. Thus the Platonic responsibility in any case 
 
 limits itself to conservation of the given. Next, we must 
 
 admit that this task is sometimes described as so encumbered 
 
 with difficulties as to discourage the belief of its possibility at 
 
 all. Plato insists so much on the effect upon the soul of an 
 
 unhappy bodily constitution and depraving influences in early 
 
 life, he so distinctly shifts the blame of evil doing from the 
 
 shoulders of the offender to the society that trains him ill, 
 
 he seems to hope so much from the disciplinary arrangements of 
 
 his state, that a superficial reader might imagine him to be a 
 
 thoroughgoing advocate of the doctrine of circumstances 1 . 
 
 And on the same side might be urged the celebrated maxim, 
 
 already explained, that ' no one is voluntarily bad.' But all 
 
 this amounts in fact to no more than the admission, readily 
 
 made by the most strenuous defender of free will, that the 
 
 surrounding conditions on which the mind's elective power is 
 
 exercised may become more and more oppressive, restricting 
 
 the mental view and narrowing the range of choice and 
 
 palliating the false moral step. That every moral problem 
 
 was still a case of preference for which the agent might justly 
 
 1 Rep. 415. 416. 459. Tim. 86, B. seqq. Legg. 903, D.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 89 
 
 be called to account, is never questioned ; that the entangle- 
 ment of unfavourable conditions, and even the depraved bodily 
 conditions, are usually to some extent self-incurred, is mani- 
 festly implied : and even where the whole environment of this 
 life seems unfavourable, Plato provides an escape for the law 
 of responsibility ; for in the pre-existent state, when the soul 
 was called upon to select a life, she was free to choose among 
 various lots, and warned that the decision was momentous: 
 there, at the fountain head, was no constraint or necessity ; 
 the responsibility was with the chooser, and no charge could 
 lie against God. Even the least advantageous of the lives 
 presented then afforded scope enough for wisdom and good- 
 ness, and compelled no sin : virtue indeed is placed under no 
 Lord, and he who falls into any moral slavery is self-en- 
 thralled. This idea recurs in the Timseus, with obvious 
 reference back to the Republic: the Creator is said to have 
 explained to the human souls, when launched into temporal 
 existence, the decrees appointed for them, assuring them that 
 ' their first birth would be the same for all, and that no one 
 should suffer at his hands.' Indeed, in the myth which closes 
 the Republic, the relation between the freedom and the 
 necessity which meet in human nature is defined with pur- 
 posed exactitude. There is one thing, it is there said, which 
 it is not open to the spirits to choose, when they elect their 
 next existence, viz. the rank of the soul 1 ; and for this reason ; 
 that its rank is affected by the conditions of its outward lot, 
 according as they are more or less favourable to the evolution 
 of its worth ; and were a choice allowed both of its inherent 
 rank and also of its external life, combinations of incompatible 
 conditions would arise ; the very probation of the soul would 
 be lost, which consists in rightly determining the kind of lot 
 most fitted to raise the soul to the highest excellence. Nor in 
 this remark has Plata regard merely to the life on which the 
 soul is about to enter, but not less to that from which it has 
 already come. The lots offered to the soul are flung out of the 
 lap of Lachesis, the Fate of the Past; a mythical incident 
 denoting that our range of choice for the future is limited by 
 
 1 Eep. 618, B.
 
 90 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 the history and habits of time already gone ; that the heretofore 
 is the seed-vessel of possibility for the hereafter ; so that the 
 soul, however intrinsically free to choose, has her data in part 
 prescribed and restricted by the whole term of existence 
 she has left behind. This is one of the conditions imposed 
 beforehand upon human liberty ; and another follows as the 
 posthumous effect of its exercise ; for, no sooner have the souls 
 selected their several lots than their filaments are made fast to 
 the spindle of Necessity and twined unchangeably into the 
 thread of the Future. In other words, there can be no exercise 
 of our freedom which does not create a new necessity, and 
 make irrevocably determinate what was indeterminate before ; 
 and we live between a Past which brings limits on our choice, 
 and a Future whose open questions we are ever closing by our 
 will. Still, there remains a Present with ample space for pre- 
 ference not thus hemmed in ; and Plato urges these restrictions 
 only to make more solemn the responsibility of choice. Ob- 
 serve too the order of sequence and derivation in which he 
 exhibits the two opposite factors of our existence. Does he 
 represent the soul's freedom as a semblance, a delusive 
 phenomenon, turned up by the play of composite necessities, 
 the disguise under which confluent physical laws meet in our 
 consciousness 1 On the contrary, he admits no necessity but 
 as the consequence or after-stage of freedom, and puts the 
 Will before the Must, fetching the determinate out of the inde- 
 terminate as its prior. It is not till the soul has selected her 
 life by unconstrained vote, that she finds it made fast to the 
 spindle of Necessity ; and if she complains that only her outer 
 lot and not her spiritual rank is given her to choose, this is 
 because she has already, in the freedom of an earlier being, 
 done much to determine this, and made some things impossible 
 that were possible before. It is the function of the Fates to 
 wait upon the decisions of free souls, to take only the threads 
 which volition offers, and lending them the machinery of the 
 universe, to weave from them the tissue of the irrevocable. I 
 acknowledge the difliculty of making safe deductions from the 
 mythical passages of Plato's writings. But they often express 
 the doctrines most sacred to his faith, though least effectually 
 grounded in his philosophy ; and the careful construction of
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 91 
 
 the last pages of the Republic, the precision of the parts 
 and the balance of the whole, forbid us to set down to the 
 score of mere embellishment any marked feature of the pic- 
 ture, and justify the conclusion that he attributed to the 
 soul a free will which rendered impossible her escape from 
 responsibility. 
 
 (8) At the same time, this doctrine occupies, it must be con- 
 fessed, an uneasy and unadjusted seat in his philosophy, and 
 has little effect on his applied ethics. How much the soul's 
 freedom is expended at the juncture between her successive 
 lives, and how little may remain to her when once she has 
 made her irrevocable choice of a new lot, is evident from this : 
 that the choice determines not only her particular place and 
 function in the sphere of human affairs, not only her re-ap- 
 pearance as man or woman, but even whether her existence 
 shall be that of mankind at all, and not rather that of the 
 birds or brutes. The very same kind of souls, those that have 
 already played their conspicuous part in history, are repre- 
 sented as some of them returning into the old field, and others 
 retiring into the lower regions of natural history and figuring 
 as swans and apes. As it is impossible to apply to such crea- 
 tures the notion of moral responsibility, Plato must have con- 
 ceived of the soul as exhausting its freedom in the one act of 
 fatal choice, and thenceforward passing into the captivity of 
 an animal existence ; and though no human life could involve, 
 in his judgment, a thraldrom so complete, yet the very mix- 
 ture of the cases together under the same head, shows that, 
 even here, an approximate loss of freedom might be incurred 
 in almost every degree. A primitive and ideal liberty com- 
 mon to the souls of brutes and men could be of little avail for 
 the moral theory of human life ; and though attesting Plato's 
 faith in eternal rectitude as the ground of the universe and 
 the key to its dispositions, proves at the same time that, to 
 find the just law and the moral freedom which his feeling 
 demanded, he was obliged to look beyond the present scene 
 of things ; and that, when dealing with its interior, he had to 
 acquiesce in a pressure of necessitating conditions analogous 
 to the organic laws which fence off the species and regulate 
 the life of brutes. Thus there was nothing in his doctrine of
 
 92 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 free will to prevent his proposing to deal with human persons 
 as he would with dogs and horses : to pay attention to the 
 breed, to study the breaking-in, to allot the proper work 
 and discipline, and in all respects subordinate the indi- 
 vidual to the improvement of the race. It is necessarily a 
 two-faced philosophy which fits up all animated nature from 
 the same stock of souls, which recognises old Ajax in a lion, 
 and suspects its bosom friend to be no other than Argos, 
 Ulysses' dog: whether the doctrine tends more to humanise 
 our treatment of the brutes, or to degrade our sentiments 
 towards men, is a problem which the differing tempers of 
 believers will oppositely solve. For the soul in its own 
 essence, and for great and good souls among mankind, Plato 
 certainly had the deepest reverence ; but he had no share in 
 the religious sentiment of democracy which dignifies man as 
 man, and regards with indifference the highest personal quali- 
 ties in comparison with the essential attributes of common 
 humanity. He did not attain to the Christian feeling, that 
 the capacity for duty ennobles and sanctifies the life and mind 
 of smallest scale ; on the contrary, his intentness on a supreme 
 and ideal good made him look down on what was far below, 
 and gave to his aspiration, so sublime on its upward face, an 
 expression, on the obverse side, of indifference or contempt. 
 It has been said that his whole spirit, as well as the institu- 
 tion of his ideal state, was intensely aristocratic. In one 
 sense, the statement is undoubtedly true. He rated so high 
 the difficulty of attaining genuine insight and goodness, that 
 he thought it much if they could be realised even in a few ; 
 and had no hope that the mass of men, overborne by the pres- 
 sure of material necessity and unchastened desires, could be 
 brought, under the actual conditions of this world, to more 
 than the mere beginnings of wisdom. To neutralise the evil 
 in them, and dispose them to recognise and obey the goodness 
 of disinterested men higher than themselves, was the utmost 
 that Plato expected from them. He did not even suppose 
 that, left to themselves, they would be likely to make choice 
 of the persons best fitted to govern them ; he held that to dis- 
 cover insight in another requires it in one's self; and to let 
 loose upon the multitude a free competition between the mild
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 93 
 
 persuasion of the wise and the demagogue's appeal to blind 
 and passionate desires, was to give the good no chance. In 
 the ballot-box of ignorance and prejudice and self-will, there 
 would ever be a black ball against the noblest names. So far, 
 Plato was at one with the opponents of democracy. But his 
 resistance proceeded rather from a theocratic than an aristo- 
 cratic principle ; and brings him into analogy much more with 
 the position of the Roman Catholic hierarchy than with that 
 of the feudal nobility. The feeling with which he looked on 
 the mass of mankind was not the scorn of a Coriolanus, but 
 the compassion of a Gregory ; and if on the one hand he denied 
 the virtues of mere aggregated littleness and mediocrity, he no 
 less denounced on the other the pretensions of selfish oligarchy 
 and usurpation, and invariably reckoned the tyrant (the man 
 who seizes a power to which he has no right, and uses it for 
 his own ends) as the meanest and basest object in the uni- 
 verse, the one offender for whom divine retribution never 
 relents. His judgment indeed of rulers is much severer than 
 of the ruled ; and his exclusiveness consists only in this ; that 
 he acknowledges no title or capacity for governing, except 
 wisdom and nobleness of character, tested and confirmed by 
 self-denial and laborious discipline ; and that for the multi- 
 tude of men, who occupy a lower stage of character, there is 
 nothing so good as to be under the guidance of this higher 
 sway. The idea of submitting divine questions to their suf- 
 frage he would have repudiated as decidedly as the Curia at 
 Rome: but those with whom the determination rested were 
 bound to regard themselves as organs of a higher spirit, and 
 to make that spirit felt through the body politic by letting it 
 penetrate themselves, and making the very exercise of rule a 
 supreme act and expression of obedience. 
 
 7. Myth of Er, the Armenian. 
 
 I have so often had occasion, in the foregoing summary, to 
 refer to the myth at the end of the Republic, that it may per- 
 haps interest the English reader to see the whole of it. If it 
 is not exact philosophy, neither is it empty fiction; but pre-
 
 94 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 sents views of life and the universe with which Plato certainly 
 intended his philosophy to be compatible. It runs thus : 
 
 ' Such, said I, are the prizes, rewards, and gifts which, in ad- 
 dition to the good things provided by Justice herself, accrue to 
 the upright man during life from the hands of gods and men. 
 
 ' And right noble and solid they are, he said. 
 
 ' Yet these are nothing either in number or magnitude com- 
 pared with the awards which await each of the two opposite 
 characters after death ; and these must be told, in order that 
 each of the two may get to hear what our subject yet owes 
 him. 
 
 ' Speak on, he said, and believe that you have a hearer to 
 whom few things could be more acceptable. 
 
 'I shall not, however, said I, tell you an Alcinous ('AA/ayou) 
 story, but that of a certain brave (dAKi/xou) Armenian, Er, of 
 the family of Pamphylus. He was once killed in war ; and 
 when after ten days the bodies of the slain were taken up 
 already in a state of decay, his was found in perfect pre- 
 servation, and was carried home for the funeral. And on 
 the twelfth day, as it lay on the pile, he came to life again, 
 and on re-entering life related what he had seen in the other 
 world. He said, that on its exit his soul, proceeding in 
 company with many others, arrived with them at a certain 
 wonderful place, where were two clefts in the earth adjacent 
 to one another, and opposite to these two corresponding ones 
 in the heaven above. Between these were seated judges, who, 
 when the verdict was passed, ordered the departure of the 
 just, with certificates of their sentences suspended in front, 
 by the right-hand cleft upwards through the heaven ; and 
 that of the unjust, only with the certificates of all that they 
 had done hung behind, by the left-hand downward cleft. 
 On his arrival, he was told that he was to act as reporter 
 to mankind of what happened there, and instructed to observe 
 by eye and ear everything in the place. So there he saw 
 the souls after judgment go off by each of these two clefts 
 of the heaven and the earth ; and by the other two were souls 
 arriving ; from that in the earth, ascending covered with dust 
 and dirt, from the remaining one descending pure from 
 heaven. The souls, as they arrived, seemed to come as from
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 95 
 
 a vast journey, and went with joy into the meadow to en- 
 camp, as in a great gathering of kindred tribes ; and greetings 
 were exchanged by all that knew one another ; and those 
 who had arrived from the earth asked about the things above, 
 and the new comers from heaven about the things below. 
 And in this exchange of tidings, the terrestrial souls wept 
 and lamented, on recalling all that they had suffered and seen 
 on their subterranean way, it was a journey of a thousand 
 years, while the celestial souls told of a happy experience, 
 and sights of unimaginable beauty. The greater part of the 
 recital, Glaucon, it would take (he said) too long to tell; 
 but these he declared to be the chief points. For all his 
 acts of wrong and all the persons he had wronged, every 
 one suffered retribution in detail, ten times for each, re- 
 newed, that is, century by century, that being the estimated 
 length of a human life ; that they might pay tenfold the 
 penalty for injustice. If there were some, for instance, who 
 had been the cause of many deaths, by betraying a city or 
 a camp into slavery, or had been accomplices in any other 
 misdeed, for every one of all these things they were to receive 
 a tenfold anguish ; and if, on the other hand, there were some 
 who had shown themselves men of beneficence and upright- 
 ness and sanctity, they were to receive their desert by the 
 same rule. Of those who are just born and live but a short 
 time he said something of a different kind, which I need not 
 now repeat. But he declared that in regard to reverence or 
 irreverence towards the gods and towards parents, and in 
 regard to murder, retribution was awarded on a still higher 
 scale. For he was present, he said, when one of the souls 
 asked another where Ardiseus the Great was. Now this 
 Ardiseus had made himself tyrant in a Pamphylian city a 
 thousand years before that time, having put to death his 
 old father and his elder brother, and (tradition said) com- 
 mitted many other impious deeds. To this question the soul, 
 he said, replied, " He has not come hither, nor will he come ; 
 for among the dreadful sights we saw was this : when we 
 were near the mouth of the cleft, and having gone through 
 everything were on the point of emerging, suddenly we 
 beheld him with others, chiefly tyrants, though not without
 
 96 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 some who in private stations had perpetrated great crimes ; 
 and just as they were expected to emerge, the cleft refused 
 them passage through its mouth, and uttered a roar, when 
 any soul thus incorrigibly wicked or as yet inadequately 
 punished attempted to come out. On this appeared instantly 
 at hand, knowing what this sound meant, certain wild beings 
 of human aspect and fiery to behold, who clasped some of 
 them and carried them away ; but bound Ardiseus and others 
 hand and foot and head, and hurled them down and flayed 
 them, by dragging them against thorns along the side-wall 
 of the passage ; explaining at the same time to the passing 
 souls as they went by, for what guilt this torture was in- 
 flicted, and how they were on their way to be thrown into 
 Tartarus: whereupon, greater than all the various fears ex- 
 perienced in their journey, the terror seized each spirit there, 
 lest that roar should meet him when he reached the top ; 
 while, if all kept still, he came up with joy." Such was the 
 nature of the punishments and retribution there ; while the 
 blessings awarded were just the counterpart of these. 
 
 ' Now when they had spent each seven days in that meadow, 
 on the eighth they had to break up and move on ; and after 
 four days more they reached a spot whence they saw a 
 columnar line of light stretching from above right across 
 the whole heaven and earth, like a rainbow, only brighter 
 and purer. This itself they reached after another day's 
 journey ; and there, in the middle of the light, they saw 
 extending out of heaven the ends of its fastenings ; for this 
 light is the band of heaven, holding together the whole 
 circumference, like the undergirth of ships ; and out of these 
 ends proceeds the spindle of Necessity, by means of which 
 all the revolving bodies perform their circuits; the shaft 
 and winch being of adamant, but the spool a compound of 
 this and other materials. Now the nature of the spool is 
 as follows: in shape it is like what we employ; but, ac- 
 cording to his account, we must think of it as if within the 
 
 O ' 
 
 hollow of one large spool scooped out all through in the 
 interior, were adjusted another smaller one of the same kind, 
 like barrels that fit one within another; and then, further 
 within, a third and a fourth, with afterwards four more : for
 
 Branch I.] 
 
 PLATO. 
 
 97 
 
 there are eight spools in all, lying one within another, pre- 
 senting circular edges as seen from above, together making 
 up an apparent continuous surface as of a single spool around 
 the spindle, which is driven in the centre right through 
 the eighth. The first and outermost spool has its circular 
 edge the broadest ; after that, the sixth ; next, the fourth ; 
 then, the eighth ; followed in order by the seventh, the fifth, 
 the third ; and, last of all, the second. And again, the edge 
 of the largest is variegated ; that of the seventh the most 
 brilliant, while that of the eighth has its colour from the 
 light of the seventh : those of the second and fifth are very 
 like each other, and yellower than the rest ; that of the third 
 has the whitest colour, of the fourth a reddish, of the sixth 
 the whitest but one. In the turning of the spindle the same 
 revolving motion is given to the whole : but while the whole 
 is carried round, the seven interior circles glide with slow 
 rotation in the opposite direction ; and of these the quickest 
 in its motion is the eighth: next come, all with the same 
 velocity, the seventh, sixth, and fifth : after that, as it seemed 
 to them, was the cycle of the fourth ; then the third ; and, last 
 of all, the second l . The spindle turns in the lap of Necessity ; 
 and, carried round with the circles, one resting on the upper 
 
 1 The several arrangements into which Plato here throws these bodies, in 
 respect of concentricity, breadth of edge, velocity of revolution, and colour, may 
 be exhibited in one view : 
 
 
 i. 
 
 a. 
 
 3- 
 
 4- 
 
 
 Concentric Order. 
 
 Breadth of 
 Edge. 
 
 Velocity of 
 Revolution. 
 
 Colour and Brightness. 
 
 I. 
 
 Fixed Stars, or Zo- 
 
 
 
 
 
 diacal Band. 
 
 I. 
 
 
 iroimXoc. 
 
 a. 
 
 Saturn. 
 
 8. 
 
 5- 
 
 like the 5th, (avOorfpa 
 
 
 
 
 
 than the rest. 
 
 3- 
 
 Jupiter. 
 
 7- 
 
 4- 
 
 \tvKorarov. 
 
 4- 
 
 Mars. 
 
 3- 
 
 3- 
 
 InripvOpov. 
 
 5- Mercury. 
 
 6. 
 
 
 like the 2nd, ^avQortpa. 
 
 
 
 
 
 than the rest. 
 
 6. 
 
 Venus. 
 
 a. 
 
 ' 
 
 StVTfpOV \tVKOTI)Tt. 
 
 7- 
 
 Sun. 
 
 5- 
 
 
 ^.afj.vp6rarov . 
 
 8. 
 
 Moon. 
 
 4- 
 
 i. 
 
 rb Xpwfj.0. dir^ rov iftf>6- 
 
 It is impossible to combine all the particulars given in the text into a self- 
 consistent picture of the universe, conceived as disposed around the earth as a 
 VOL. I. H
 
 98 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 surface of each, and uttering one single note, were Sirens ; 
 whose eight voices together composed a harmony. Moreover, 
 at equal intervals around sat, each upon a throne, in white robes 
 and with chaplets on their heads, Necessity's three daughters, 
 the Fates, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos: to the Sirens' 
 harmony they sung, Lachesis, the Past, Clotho, the Present, 
 and Atropos, the Future. And Clotho, from time to time, 
 helped with the touch of her right hand to turn the spindle's 
 outermost circle, and Atropos with the left in like manner 
 those within; while Lachesis with either hand touched both 
 in turn. Now the souls had no sooner arrived here, than 
 they had to present themselves at once before Lachesis. First, 
 a prophet disposed them in their order ; then, taking out of 
 the lap of Lachesis a number of lots on the one hand and 
 samples of different modes of life on the other, he ascended 
 a lofty bema and said : " This is the word of the virgin 
 
 centre. The statements tabulated in the first, third, and fourth columns correctly 
 describe the apparent facts, except that the places of Mercury and Venus in the 
 concentric order are inverted, as they are also in the Timseus, 38, D. But it is 
 impossible to reconcile the figures in the second column with any interpretation of 
 the spools and their breadth of edge. The object or system contemplated by the 
 observer is undoubtedly the Zodiacal belt of the heavens, which, if cut out from 
 the total sphere by disregarding the rest, would answer to the description of a 
 barrel, containing, one within another, the circles or rims of the planets, sun, and 
 moon. If the spectator looks at this from the line of the polar axis, indefinitely 
 produced, he will see orbit within orbit lying, like circles on a slate, sufficiently 
 near to occupy in his thought the same plane ; and the interval between each two 
 might be regarded as the edge of the outer barrel or spool. In this way the dif- 
 ferent breadfhs would correspond with the distances of orbit from orbit ; but the 
 figures do not range themselves in the order of any intelligible geocentric estimate 
 of these apparent zones. If we remove the spectator to the only other conceivable 
 position, and plant him in the plane of the equator beyond the milky way, he 
 would see each orbit, in virtue of its inclination to that plane, ascending and de- 
 scending through the Zodiacal belt ; and if, from the summit and bottom points 
 reached, planes were run out parallel to his own, the space embraced between them 
 would be a cylinder (or spool) presenting its side or breadth, and not its top, to 
 view. In this way, the several breadths would be measured by the inclinations 
 of the orbits ; and neither with these do the assigned figures agree ; if they did, 
 they would run thus : I, 6, 8, 5, 2, 4, 3, 7- Notwithstanding this inexactitude, the 
 reader is probably intended to assign the observer to the polar point of view. The 
 columnar band of light can hardly be anything else than the milky way, which 
 passes sufficiently near the poles to find its mythical fastening there. And the 
 spindle of Necessity is evidently the polar axis, which, through the hand of Clotho, 
 determines the motion of the cosmic sphere from east to west, while the retrogra- 
 dation of the planets from west to east is provided for by the Atropos.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 99 
 
 Lachesis, daughter of Necessity : " Souls of a day ! for the 
 mortal race begins another mortal course: no destiny (5eu- 
 jj.(Dv) shall cast lots for you, but you shall choose your 
 destiny: let him to whom the first lot falls select a life, by 
 which he will then of necessity abide. But virtue is sub- 
 ject to no lord; and each, as he honours or dishonours it, 
 will have more or less of it ; the charge is with the chooser ; 
 chargeless is God." This said, he threw the lots among them 
 all, and each took up that which fell at his side, except Er 
 himself, who was not allowed. And on taking up his lot, 
 every one discovered what number had fallen to him. Next, 
 he put before them on the ground the samples of lives, in 
 number far exceeding the souls present ; and all sorts were 
 there, lives of all kinds of animals, and human lives of 
 every class. For among them were tyrannies, some per- 
 manent, others overthrown in mid career and ending in 
 poverty, exile, and beggary ; and lives of men distinguished, 
 some for their personal qualities whether of beauty or 
 strength or athletic aptitude, others for their family and 
 the virtues of their ancestry; and of undistinguished men 
 in like variety, and so of women too. The soul's rank, indeed, 
 was not given among the objects of choice, because by 
 electing a different life the soul necessarily becomes different ; 
 but all the other elements were presented in various com- 
 bination with one another, wealth and poverty, sickness 
 and health, with every intermediate stage. So here it seems, 
 dear Glaucon, lies the whole stake for man ; and hence the 
 chief care must be, that each of us, regardless of other attain- 
 ments, prosecute and master simply this, to discover, if any 
 attention can do it, who is likely to give him capacity and 
 skill, through discrimination of the good from the bad life, 
 to choose always and everywhere the better of the possi- 
 bilities before him ; and by taking into account, in a spirit 
 of careful comparison, what has now been said, and dis- 
 tinguishing its bearing on the virtue of life, to learn under 
 what constitution of soul Beauty (for instance) in union with 
 poverty or wealth conduces to evil or good ; and how high 
 or low birth, private or official station, vigour or weakness 
 of body, facility or slowness of mind, and all such conditions 
 
 H2
 
 TOO METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 as nature and circumstances place around the soul, operate 
 in their several combinations : so as to be able, by compu- 
 tation from all the given elements, and with due regard to 
 the inherent nature of the soul, to discriminate the worse 
 from the better life, meaning by the worse that which will 
 lower the sense of right, by the better that which will exalt 
 it, heedless of everything besides ; for this we have seen to 
 be the best principle of choice, whether for life or for its 
 sequel after death. Indeed, in going to the unseen world it 
 is indispensable to have this conviction fixed with adaman- 
 tine firmness, that there too the soul may be unmoved by 
 riches and such evils, and may not throw itself into tyran- 
 nous usurpations and other acts of the same kind, to the 
 creation of manifold and irremediable external ills, yet to 
 its own still greater hurt ; but may know how, in relation 
 to such things, always to choose the middle life and shun 
 the extremes in either direction, both in this life as far as 
 possible and in all that shall succeed ; for so it is that man 
 finds his greatest well-being. 
 
 ' So our messenger from the unseen world proceeded to 
 relate that the prophet addressed them thus : " Even to him 
 whose turn is last, if he chooses wisely and lives resolutely, 
 there is reserved no bad or ineligible life : let neither the 
 first to choose be careless, nor the last desponding." No 
 sooner had the prophet (said he) finished these words, than 
 the bearer of the first lot went up and chose the greatest 
 tyranny ; misguided by folly and greediness, he chose without 
 adequate regard to all the conditions, and failed to notice 
 the destiny involved in his decision, the devouring of his 
 own children and other ills ; but when he contemplated the 
 case at leisure, he struck his head in anguish and bewailed 
 his choice, unheeding of the prophet's warning ; for he charged 
 the evil not upon himself, but on fortune and the gods and 
 everything rather than himself. Now he was one of the souls 
 that had come out of heaven ; for he had lived through his 
 former life in a well-constituted state ; only his hold on virtue 
 was from custom, without philosophy. Indeed one might say, 
 in general, that those who came from heaven were not less 
 often caught than others by such false baits, having had
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. 1OI 
 
 no experience of difficulties : while most of those who came 
 from this world, having both witnessed and felt the struggle 
 with difficulties, did not make their selection on the first 
 impulse. From this cause, together with the cast of the lots, 
 the result to most of the souls was a change from good to 
 evil, or from evil to good. Whereas, according to the messen- 
 ger's tidings from that world, if a man, on being sent into 
 this life, were to engage himself soundly in the pursuit of 
 wisdom, and his turn for choice had fallen not quite among 
 the last, he might not only be happy here, but make his 
 passage thither from this state and back again, not by the 
 rugged subterranean way, but by a smooth and heavenly. 
 Now as to the way in which the souls severally selected their 
 lives, it was a sight, he said, worth seeing, pitiable and 
 ludicrous and strange ; for most were determined in their 
 choice by some experience in their former life. Thus he saw, 
 as he declared, the soul that had once belonged to Orpheus 
 select the life of a swan, through hatred of womankind, 
 occasioned by his death at their hands, and reluctance to be 
 born of a woman. The soul of Thamyros he saw choose a 
 nightingale's life ; a swan on the other hand preferring the 
 change to a human life ; and other musical creatures in like 
 manner. The soul that held the twentieth lot chose a lion's 
 life ; it was that of Ajax son of Telamon, and it determined 
 against becoming human from recollecting the decision as to 
 the arms. Next came that of Agamemnon ; and as he too 
 had been filled by his sufferings with aversion to the human 
 nature, he took instead an eagle's life. The turn of Atalanta's 
 soul came about the middle ; and on observing the great 
 honours an athlete might win, she could not resist them, 
 and made choice accordingly. And after her he saw the soul 
 of Epeus son of Panopeus take the character of a female 
 artist ; and far on among the last he saw that of the buffoon 
 Thersites putting on the nature of an ape. It so happened that 
 Ulysses' soul had drawn the last chance of all, and advanced 
 to make his choice: remembering his former toils, he now 
 rested from all ambitious cares, and went about for a long 
 time in quest of a private life remote from the turmoil of 
 affairs ; with some trouble he found one lying somewhere
 
 102 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book r. 
 
 that had been neglected by all the rest ; on seeing which 
 he declared he should have done the same if his turn had 
 been the first, and took it with delight. There were in like 
 manner animals' souls that would take the form of men, 
 and those of one species that would change into another ; 
 the unrighteous souls turning into wild beasts, the righteous 
 into tame ; nor was there wanting any kind of mixture 
 and exchange. So when all the souls had made their choice, 
 they were brought in the order of their lots before Lachesis ; 
 who sent with each the genius (Sai'/zwy) he had chosen to be 
 the guardian of his life and the accomplisher of his choice. 
 He led the soul first to Clotho, to have the chosen lot made 
 fast under her hand as she turned the spindle ; and having 
 attached it to this, he led the way to Atropos, that her 
 spinning might make the thread of destiny unchangeable. 
 Thence without once turning round he went under the throne 
 of Necessity ; and when he had passed through it, and the 
 others had passed too, they all proceeded through parching 
 and dreadful heat to the plain of Lethe, for it is bare of 
 trees and all that grows upon the earth. Evening having 
 already overtaken them, they encamped by the river Careless 
 (a^e\?j?), whose water no vessel can hold. A certain portion 
 of the water all were obliged to drink, but those who were 
 not restrained by reason drank more than the portion ; 
 and each, as he drank, forgot everything. When now they 
 had lain down to sleep, at midnight there came thunder 
 and an earthquake ; and suddenly, as with the shoot of stars, 
 they were snatched away in every direction up to the birth. 
 The Pamphylian was not allowed to drink of the water ; 
 and how and by what course he came back into the body 
 he did not know; but all at once, on looking up in the 
 morning, he found himself already lying on the funeral 
 pile. 
 
 'And this relation, Glaucon, has been preserved from 
 perishing, and may be our preservative, if we are attentive 
 to it ; and then we shall cross the stream of Lethe well 
 and with immaculate soul. But if my counsel avail, then 
 shall we always, under persuasion that the soul is immortal 
 and equal to the burden of every evil and every good, hold
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. IOJ 
 
 on the upward path, and strive in every way after rectitude 
 with reason, that we may be in friendship with ourselves 
 and with the gods, not only while abiding here, but when 
 as conquerors we go round and gather in the prizes of our 
 victory ; and that both now, and on the millennial journey we 
 have described, it may be all well with us V 
 
 8. Ethical Features. 
 
 If from the complex tissue of Plato's thought we try to 
 isolate the ethical elements for separate estimate, we must 
 not hastily assume that they all legitimately belong to his 
 theory of the world, but must carefully consider whether 
 they are to be credited to his system or to his personality. 
 It is one thing to feel the glow of moral enthusiasm in his 
 writings, and quite another to treat it as an emanation from 
 the central principles which control the orbit of his specu- 
 lation ; and it will be found, if I mistake not, that the 
 passages which, by their solemn import, most deeply touch 
 the modern reader, are often those which have the least 
 coherence with the reasoning they affect to illustrate. Had 
 he been able to justify his irresistible convictions of right 
 and wrong by rigorous dialectic, he would not have dispensed 
 with that severer security, and left them to depend on the 
 persuasive charm of his symbolic myths. But there was 
 a limit at which his metaphysics stopped short of the 
 exigencies of his poetic and spiritual nature, and, bringing 
 his counted steps to an end, compelled him to take wing 
 and pass the barrier through the air and in the light 
 of intuitive truth. It has been shown how, in his later 
 period, even his systematic thought brought him to the very 
 verge of a doctrine of Conscience ; and few dialogues are 
 without scattered passages evincing his deep sympathy with 
 the primitive moral sentiments and beliefs, untouched as yet 
 by the disenchantments of philosophy. His estimate of human 
 life as a probation, of its sequel as a judicial recompense, 
 and of the whole circulation of the soul as determined by 
 its deserts ; his anxiety to fix the responsibility of its lot 
 
 1 Rep. X. 614621, D.
 
 104 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 upon itself, and vindicate the equity of God ; his assertion 
 that to do wrong is a far worse evil than to suffer it, and 
 to escape punishment than to endure it, so that the best 
 use you can make of persuasive speech is to bring first 
 yourself and next your nearest friend to justice for any 
 offence committed; his indignation at the abuse of power, 
 and especially at the crimes of tyrants in order to grasp 
 and to retain it; are among the many indications of a 
 profound sense of merit and demerit, of justice and injustice 
 in their treatment, of personal righteousness and guilt, con- 
 sistent only with that free-will which leaves each agent the 
 architect of his own character. These are the pure expressions 
 of Plato's psychological experience. 
 
 Are they as true to his philosophy as they are to himself? 
 Surely not. If the mind in me is but the local emergence of 
 the universal Mind, which again is the supreme term of all 
 the fifty ; if these ideas are the eternal and unchangeable es- 
 sences of things, affiliated to each other by irreversible inter- 
 dependence ; if their passage from pre-existence to birth is a 
 union of them with material avayta] ; then must the resulting 
 soul be a compound of logical and material Necessity, the 
 former in its immortal, the latter in its mortal part ; and 
 though these two may conflict and contradict each other, the 
 issue must be settled by mere preponderance ; they leave no 
 room for an acting personality between, free to elect the better 
 or the worse, and to deserve well or ill accordingly. Hence 
 Plato's ethical appreciations remain without theoretical sup- 
 port; and are apt to lose their purity and nobleness, when 
 they cease to be the expression of individual enthusiasm, and 
 are deduced, by relentless intellectual process, from his assum- 
 ed principles. His metaphysics, e.g. lead him to group all 
 living and sentient natures together, under the category of 
 souls ; and consequently to include all other animals as well 
 as man in his scheme of probationary government of the 
 world ; so that the same conscious will, without breach of 
 continuity, might conduct the affairs of a hero, a horse, and a 
 wasp. To the true moral feeling, based as it is entirely on 
 the distinction between human volition and animal instinct, 
 such a conception can never appear anything but a carica-
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. IO5 
 
 ture ; a legitimate instrument of satire to humorists like 
 and Lafontaine, but precisely because, in any serious applica- 
 tion, it is grotesque and absurd. Equally repugnant to all just 
 valuation of character is Plato's preference of voluntary pra- 
 vity to involuntary, a preference openly defended by him 
 against the protest of natural feeling l . Whence this paradox ? 
 It comes from the supremacy assigned to conscious Thought. 
 If this is to have no superior, but to be identified with the 
 absolute 'idea of the good,' it raises every state of feeling 
 which has it above competition with all that have it not ; and 
 the intending murderer may look down upon the blundering 
 homicide. Thus to affirm that the worst intention is better 
 than no intention, in other words that you had better be a 
 villain than a fool, might indeed convey a truth under one 
 condition, viz. that the villainy is a passing act, and the 
 folly a permanent incapacity: it would then mean that 
 even crime, as the expression of a nature great and free, is 
 itself a potential goodness ; while a blind creature of undis- 
 criminated instincts is ipso facto excluded from all candida- 
 ture of character and is altogether out of the ethical field. No 
 such comparison, however, as that of the responsible nature 
 with the moral idiot is here contemplated : both are supposed 
 to be measurable by the human standard ; and the difference 
 is simply the presence or absence, in the same act, of intellec- 
 tual apprehension of its bearings. So great is the superiority 
 given to this apprehension, that no turpitude can forfeit it, 
 and no innocence replace it. This exaggeration of reflective 
 Reason at the expense of intuitive Right divests the moral law 
 of that intrinsic and unconditional authority which is precisely 
 what it means ; and reduces it from a universal light of 
 humanity, flashing through the soul wherever the springs of 
 action meet, to the monopoly of gifted and philosophic minds, 
 which, like the prism, can turn the common beam of day into 
 the spectrum. Nothing can be more equalising than a proper 
 doctrine of Duty : nothing less so than an ideal of character 
 approachable only through skill and depth of thought, and 
 reserved therefore for ' the gods ' and for the schools. 
 
 Ungrounded as a doctrine of Duty, Plato's ethics must be 
 
 1 Hipp. Min. 375, D.
 
 106 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 judged as a doctrine of Virtue. In this aspect it has many 
 noble features, so long as it works upon its proper field, of the 
 voluntary life. Its high demands for the mastery of appetite 
 and passion, its scorn of flattery and pretence, its undazzled 
 estimate of wealth and honours and abhorrence of selfish 
 ambition, its insistency on public fidelity at any cost of private 
 interest, death itself being more welcome to a good citizen 
 than to do and say what is wrong, bespeak a mind possessed 
 by an intense and lofty conception of Righteousness. Had he 
 stopped there, this impression would have remained alone. 
 But it suffers a disappointing qualification, when we find his 
 virtue extending its boundary and spreading over the invo- 
 luntary field of life, and denoting the best condition of any 
 quality, whether of natural genius or of personal acquirement ; 
 so that intellect also and imagination have their virtues and 
 enter into character, no less than Will, irrespectively of the 
 intentional direction given to them. In other words, the idea 
 of the Right is dissolved in that of the Good, and indistin- 
 guishably mingled with that of the True and that of the 
 Beautiful; and is held to be realised wherever a gain can 
 be shown on any of these types of 'the Good.' From this 
 equalisation of rational, aesthetic, and ethical judgments it 
 naturally follows that any one of these may supply the place 
 1 of another ; so that, in order to save an advantage of the in- 
 tellectual or imaginative order, we need not hesitate to let 
 drop a nearly equivalent moral claim. That this cause pro- 
 duces in Plato many a relaxation of the nerve of righteousness 
 cannot be denied. In his impatience of helplessness and de- 
 formity, he recommends the exposure and murder of unpro- 
 mising infants 1 . To preserve the purity and ascendency of 
 the Hellenic race, he would consign to slavery its foreign 
 prisoners of war 2 , and even its own hopeless inferiors 3 . In 
 the service of the State, breaches of .veracity are as freely 
 admitted by him as the administration of medicines on the 
 part of the physician 4 . To the preconceived perfection of the 
 whole social organism everything is to give way, not the 
 interests only of the individual, but his character ; and, to be 
 
 1 Rep. 460, B. C. Rep. 469, B. 3 Polit. 309, A. 
 
 Rep. 389, B. C ; 459, C.
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. IOJ 
 
 a patriot, he must consent to become, in his own person, the 
 liar, the assassin, nay, the stock-breeder, of his country. And 
 yet the statesman, from whom these sacrifices are demanded, 
 belongs to the class which alone is to realise and represent the 
 consummate form and entire contents of virtue ; while from 
 the others, on which he exercises his arts of government, are 
 expected only the inferior layers of character, courage and 
 self-restraint. Apart from any inconsistency in its applica- 
 tion, this moral stratification of persons carries into Ethics all 
 the mischiefs of the institution of castes ; paralysing the con- 
 scious universality of the Divine law, superciliously dispens- 
 ing with large portions of it for the mass of men, and so mark- 
 ing them off as a race of stereotyped incapables. This feature, 
 it is true, is softened by the provision, that whenever natures 
 of exceptional promise are born in the industrial order, they 
 shall be adopted and trained among the 'guardians.' But 
 there is no elevation of their class in such removal of them 
 out of it ; rather is it bereft of all the richer elements which 
 might give it a progressive impulse, and condemned to per- 
 petual stagnation. The truth which suggested this artificial 
 social structure no doubt is, that your expectations from men 
 are proportioned to their opportunities, and that to whom little 
 is given, of him will little be required. The error is, in treat- 
 ing this variable requirement as a moral quantity or consti- 
 tuent element of character, instead of mere unmoral material 
 of which the conscience disposes as the instrument of its ends. 
 Of the rich you expect, on behalf of others, larger gifts, but 
 not more generosity, than from the poor ; of the full and dis- 
 ciplined mind, more copious diffusion of knowledge than from 
 the uninstructed, but not more willingness to lend what light 
 there is ; just as, with equal dependence on industry of will, 
 you would set a child to weed a flower-bed and a man to 
 plough a field. But the moment you lose sight of this distinc- 
 tion, and fling Right and Intellect and Beauty all into the 
 same crucible, the ' Good ' which you turn out from their 
 fusion will be but an alloy ; and, however fine the mould into 
 which it is cast, will never have the true ring of righteousness. 
 But the subordination of the citizen's nature to the needs 
 of the state involved still more fatal sacrifices. From the
 
 108 METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 ideal or 'noetic' character of Plato's highest good, nothing 
 would seem less possible than that, in his imaginary society, 
 the animal passions should be released from any of the re- 
 fining and glorifying influences -which transform them in the 
 elite of civilised men. To no requirement of his philosophy 
 did he yield himself with more evident zest than to its pro- 
 test against the theory of the materialists in its assumptions 
 and in its supposed consequences : nor has any Greek inter- 
 preter lifted the conception of Eros to an intellectual height 
 more nearly divine than he in the speech of the prophetess 
 Diotima. Yet what his philosophy gained by being anti- 
 materialist, it lost again by being anti-affectional. In the 
 model citizens of his ideal state the propensions which in- 
 stitute the conjugal and parental relations were retained and 
 even provided with their high festivals ; but the relations 
 themselves were absolutely expunged : the mother was not 
 the wife ; she knew not her own child or his father ; nor 
 did they distinguish her among the host of women of the 
 same age. The connections which, above all others in human 
 life, must depend for any blessed fruits upon their perma- 
 nence, were to be formed and forgotten in an hour ; and this 
 for the express purpose of preventing those forms of home- 
 love which redeem the soul from vulgar selfishness, and those 
 claims of pressing duty which give sacredness to common 
 work and joy to sacrifice. It is difficult for a modern, with 
 whom the household is the fundamental unit of the common- 
 wealth, to conceive a state of society which could provoke 
 a desire in Plato to extinguish the family relations, and 
 encourage a hope of universal devotion by disuse of all 
 private attachments. A country would not be a very promis- 
 ing school of patriotism in which there were no domestic 
 traditions of heroism and faith, no hearth and altar, no pa- 
 rents, sons, and daughters, but only public schools, and club- 
 dinners, and shameless temples of Aphrodite to defend ; and 
 to tempt such a conception into existence, society must al- 
 ready, one would think, have become putrescent at the core. 
 And even if the one disinterested enthusiasm, the devotion 
 to the State, were gained, how strangely mutilated is the 
 ideal of personal character in order to secure it ! Strike out
 
 Branch 1.] PLATO. log 
 
 from the individual soul the power of love, the light of its 
 romance, the fervour of its ambitions, the tenderness of its 
 cares, the vigour of its purity and faithfulness : take from 
 the mother the office of queen of the nursery, and leave her no 
 function but that of child-bearing and wet-nursing to the Repub- 
 lic ; and from the father the responsibilities of bread-winner, 
 educator, and king of his own house ; and from the child the 
 filial trust and reverence, the fraternal and sisterly heart- 
 affinities which can never be generalised: and the human 
 being is bereft of the most precious springs from which the 
 moral life arises, and can emerge only as a strange medley of 
 the brute, the politician, and the philosopher. A commonwealth 
 of such subjects would hardly, in our estimation, be worth pre- 
 serving. That Plato thought of it as something divine, with pat- 
 tern stored in heaven till the earth became worthy to receive it, 
 is directly due to the fundamental principles of his philoso- 
 phy, that the idea of the absolute Good coincided with the in- 
 tellectual, which alone was immortal and real ; while all that is 
 phenomenal, dependent on the processes of birth, growth, and 
 death, all that belongs to the sphere of genesis and the mortal 
 part of the soul, is at the opposite and meanest extreme of 
 value, and should, as far as possible, be subordinated, if not 
 suppressed, by the wise. Under this latter head, it is plain, 
 come all the affections that are incident to the rise of suc- 
 cessive generations, and to the differences marking the be- 
 ginning, middle, and end of human life ; and so the domes- 
 tic institutions and their feelings are flung into the disparaged 
 miscellany of material and emotional things. By this fatal 
 classification, the sweet charities that best wean the heart 
 from self-love are condemned as its allies ; and the one social 
 affection on which all demand is concentrated, viz. civic zeal, 
 is cut off from its tributary nourishment, and required to 
 grow and blossom without its roots. The perfection which 
 consists in contemplation of the absolute or the attempt to 
 copy it may be the consummation of Reason, but not of 
 character : the moral will lives and moves among the con- 
 ditions of the relative ; and its whole material is found in 
 those personal affections and alternative motives and tran- 
 sient possibilities, which are intermediate between the blind
 
 HO METAPHYSICAL. TRANSCENDENT. [Book I. 
 
 necessity of instinct and the self-conscious gaze at the eternal 
 Good. 
 
 These strictures, I am well aware, are chargeable with a 
 certain inevitable injustice. They are the easy commonplace 
 of a late critical age applied to the genius of an early creative 
 one ; and it is not without a sense of inward apology and 
 almost of shame, that for a moment I estimate the most pro- 
 ductive of thinkers by a standard to which he is not amena- 
 ble. To know what he was, and by what quickening elements 
 he enriched the stores and still more the powers of human 
 thought, he must be studied in his place and time, and in 
 his transmitted life in other minds. So it is that we judge 
 of the poets, the historians, the dramatists of lands and 
 centuries remote. But philosophy aspires to rise above the 
 transitory and gain the vision of eternal truth ; and it pays 
 the penalty of this proud pretension in being tried by codes 
 and courts for ever new, and having to satisfy the claims 
 of all. Appealing to the absolute, it forbids us to give it 
 only an historical hearing; and we should do it its most 
 aggravating wrong, did we not bring it face to face with 
 the cumulative experience and matured insight of the human 
 mind. As we want all the help it can give to our own 
 problems, we must transpose it into the conditions and re- 
 lations of the present ; nor is there any better way, than by 
 such successive comparisons, of realising its own end and 
 saving what is imperishable in it. 
 
 In this process it is but too possible, in spite of scrupulous 
 care, to commit involuntary wrong. Between the abstract 
 conceptions of widely separated periods and races there is 
 no accurate correspondence ; and the dialectic of philosophic 
 intercourse across the chasm is apt to become faint and con- 
 fused; and whenever this happens, the perplexed inquirer 
 vainly wishes for some clearing change of phrase, and laments 
 that the voices of the past are silent, and that their words 
 lie there without their wings. I have honestly tried to say 
 what Plato means ; but it may well be, that if he were back 
 among his interpreters, he would flutter us all with reproaches 
 for our stupidity ; not, however, without kindly allowance for 
 the difficulties of our task; for, notwithstanding his great
 
 Branch I.] PLATO. Ill 
 
 literary power, no one was more aware of the imperfection 
 of written language as the instrument of the higher thought, 
 or more clearly foresaw the certainty of misconstruction. 
 ' Writing,' he says, ' has this terrible disadvantage, which 
 puts it on the same footing with painting. The artist's 
 productions stand before you, as if they were alive : but if 
 you ask them anything, they keep a solemn silence. Just 
 so with written discourse. You would fancy it full of the 
 thoughts it speaks: but if you ask it something that you 
 want to know about what is said, it looks at you always 
 with the same one sign. And, once committed to writing, 
 discourse is tossed about everywhere indiscriminately among 
 those who understand and those to whom it is nought ; and 
 cannot select fit audience from the unfit. And when maltreat- 
 ed and unjustly abused, it always needs its father to help 
 it ; for it has no power to help or defend itself 1 .' 
 
 1 Phsedr. 275, D. E.
 
 BEAKCH II, 
 
 IMMANENTAL. 
 
 Of the unpsychological series of ethical doctrines which 
 offer themselves to our notice I have selected Plato's for our 
 first examination, and have sketched its outlines in the fore- 
 going chapter. It was chosen as the most well-marked and 
 eminent example of strictly Metaphysical systems ; of systems, 
 that is, which assume as the proper objects of intellect a 
 certain store of real, eternal existences, the abiding ground 
 of whatever is transient and only crosses the stage. And 
 among these systems it occupies the place at which it was 
 desirable that our survey should begin; for it is the most 
 distinguished of Transcendental schemes; schemes, that is, 
 which assign to the eternal principle of things a range beyond 
 the sphere of all extant phenomena, so as not to be all ex- 
 pended within their limits of time, space, and quality, but 
 to exceed their measure every way. Plato's first eiSos, his 
 supreme type of the good, his God, we found to be not 
 only through all, but before all, beyond all, above all the 
 manifested expressions of himself. The effect of this mode 
 of thought upon the configuration of Ethical theory and feeling 
 has been traced. 
 
 We have not, however, done with the metaphysical sources 
 of moral theory. There remains the Immanental scheme ; 
 which, while recognising, like the other, both ovra and ytyvo- 
 ptva, allows no overpassing realm to the former, but makes 
 them simply coextensive ; equating in all the modes of 
 quantity, and distinguishing only by qualitative predicates 
 Nature and God, the ground or meaning of the universe, and 
 its facts. The forms are very various in which this co-pre-
 
 Branch II.] IMMANENTAL, 113 
 
 sence, through just the same field, of the fixed Divine element 
 and the transient and perishable appearance, has been main- 
 tained ; and somewhere between Aristotle and Hegel we 
 must choose a representative who will bring out into strong- 
 est relief the characteristics of the theory, and especially its 
 bearings upon the Moral sentiments. 
 
 Who then shall guide us through the mysteries of the Im- 
 manental Metaphysics ? Who is fittest to stand up and con- 
 tradict the Transcendental doctrine of Plato, and correct its 
 overbalance into religion? Were we engaged upon a mere 
 History of Philosophy, we should go no further than his own 
 pupil Aristotle ; who on some accounts would the more fitly 
 represent to us this one special point of contrast, from his 
 large agreement with his master in other respects. But in 
 these two contemporaries the divergence of tendency which 
 we desire to notice is too near its commencement to be very 
 striking and conspicuous : their respective doctrines concern- 
 ing the divine principle of thought in the universe stand at a 
 less distance than it is in their nature to attain ; and if we 
 would observe the difference in its full extent, it is better to 
 remove into a widely separated age, where the real inner con- 
 trast is softened and concealed by no affinities of place and 
 culture. Indeed, the remark applies generally to the com- 
 parison of Plato and Aristotle. Whoever has been accustomed 
 to regard their names as representing two diametrically 
 opposed directions of the human mind, the mystical and the 
 practical, abstract speculation and concrete experience, poetical 
 faith and sceptical analysis, will probably be astonished to 
 find, on close study of their own writings, how much less 
 ground there is than he had expected, in the substance of 
 their doctrines, for this competing position at the head of 
 extreme Schools ; and it is well if, trusting the tradition of 
 rivalry more than his own perception of extensive agreement, 
 he does not (with Whately and others) mistake Aristotle for a 
 Nominalist, and confound his polemic against Plato's tlby with 
 an approval of the modern sensational theory of classification. 
 The opposition of these great philosophers in the general 
 direction of their genius is no doubt real ; but in their own 
 persons and writings it was not half developed. If in the 
 
 VOL. I. I
 
 114 METAPHYSICAL THEORIES. [Book I. 
 
 form of their works (which differ as a drama from a memo- 
 randum-book) it is wholly expressed, in the structure of their 
 schemes of doctrine it is much less evident ; and probably no 
 Athenian contemporary ever set them before his imagination 
 in that sharp antithesis to which the history of philosophy has 
 consigned them. Considerable as the conscious difference was, 
 the unconscious was far greater ; and could only unfold itself 
 with time, as the seeds of their thought fructified in minds 
 congenial with their characteristics but devoid of their com- 
 prehensiveness. As my object is not that of the historian, to 
 trace the mutations of doctrine in their genesis, but of the com- 
 parative critic, to find them in their full maturity, it will be 
 better to change the scene at once to modern times ; and 
 though examples of the Immanent scheme crowd upon us, we 
 cannot hesitate in our selection. The quiet, systematic, un- 
 shrinking Spinoza has claims upon us which no other name 
 can bring ; his theory occupying a unique position in meta- 
 physics ; his influence being greater now than ever ; and the 
 very faintness of his personality being in a sort of mysterious 
 harmony with his system, and holding our eye unmoved as 
 on the ghostly presence of a thinking piece of space. Early in 
 this century it was the fashion to treat his name with con- 
 tempt, and dismiss his work with a critical expression of amaze- 
 ment and horror ; and Dugald Stewart reflects on Paulus, the 
 learned editor of Spinoza, for his audacity, being a Doctor of 
 Theology, in lending his sanction to such an impious writer ; 
 surely an unworthy reproach, which would apply no less to 
 Bentley and Creech and Munro for their labours on Lucretius, 
 and to Franklin for translating Lucian. The reaction in the pre- 
 sent day is proportionally violent; and a paradoxical admiration 
 is directed on a system which, rightly understood, responds to 
 no enthusiasm, pretends to no beauty but that of cold consist- 
 ency, and maintains no higher attitude than that of serene 
 neutrality towards all that is and happens in heaven and 
 earth. It is a strange but unquestionable fact that in the 
 fervour of young doubt and mental need the precise and 
 passionless propositions of the Ethica, the severest of all 
 books, have often been seized with an intense eagerness. It 
 is perhaps that the hottest fever loves the coldest drink. The
 
 Branch II.] IMMANENTAL. 115 
 
 account which I must give of Spinoza will be unaffected by 
 either the horror of the older writers or the homage of the 
 younger generation. His influence is a fact, and his system 
 a very curious phenomenon, in the history of philosophy ; nor 
 can they be ignored without leaving blank vast latitudes on 
 the map of human thought. 
 
 To interpret him aright, we must study him, not in 
 isolation, but as completing a contemporary tendency, which 
 had other and less perfect representatives. 
 
 12
 
 CHAPTER 1. 
 
 DESCARTES. 
 
 1. From Monism to Dualism, 
 
 We cannot, however, leap down at once from the Academy 
 to the Hague, as if they were contiguous spots. The transition 
 is great from the genius of the Attic speculation to that of the 
 revived philosophy of the seventeenth century ; and could be 
 accomplished only through the discipline and preparation of an 
 intermediate period, viz. that of the medieval and scholastic 
 learning, essentially different from both. The difference which 
 separates each of these ages from the other in the spirit of its 
 culture may be presented in various ways, no one of which, 
 taken by itself, gives any complete expression of the whole ; but, 
 for our present purpose, the following statement will perhaps 
 adequately serve. The speculative curiosity of men moves about 
 through the circle of three great objects, God, Nature, and the 
 Soul, and is ever attempting to determine the relations sub- 
 sisting among these. The problem is beset with peculiar 
 difficulty because, while its terms are three, human thought 
 does not readily deal with more than two, but has ever a 
 tendency to place its objects in antithesis, and finds them 
 more intelligible when they are withdrawn into opposite foci 
 and shed the light of contrast on each other. Thus a dualism 
 of the intellect has to play with a triad of intelligibles ; and 
 the effect is always thus far the same, that one of the three
 
 DESCARTES. 117 
 
 objects is thrown into logical subordination ; being either 
 silently absorbed into one of the other two, so as not to receive 
 its due rights ; or else left outside them both, unprovided with 
 any definite inner relation to either, and taking an uncertain 
 chance of recognition at all. It will be found that the several 
 periods of philosophical development award this secondary 
 position to a different object ; and apply accordingly a different 
 antithesis as the key to the interpretation of existence. The 
 Greeks engaged themselves with the relations of God and the 
 Cosmos, and dealt with man as not separate from these ; the 
 Christian Church was absorbed in the relation of God and 
 Man, and treated Nature as subservient and accidental ; while 
 modern speculation investigates the relations of Man and 
 Nature, subject and object, either identifying God with the 
 latter, or conceiving of Him as essentially external to both. 
 The human element, the cosmical, and the Divine has each in 
 turn failed of its just rights. With this general formula the 
 phenomena of the successive periods will be found, I believe, 
 to accord. 
 
 If it be thought paradoxical to describe the Hellenic age as 
 so occupied with settling terms between the universe and God 
 as to leave human nature to take its chance, I would only 
 recall the fact that all its philosophical problems turned upon 
 the omnipresent antithesis of the real and the phenomenal, flvat 
 and yfyvfo-Oai. ; and that of these, the former, comprising the un- 
 created and eternal datum of being, is the Greek equivalent for 
 God ; while the latter, including whatever has come up instead 
 of being ever there, corresponds with our sphere of Nature. Be- 
 tween these two claimants man was divided ; his reason 
 belonging to the divine, and his body with its senses to the 
 transient realm. He was not therefore recognised as a third 
 term at all, but lost his individuality by suffering partition 
 between the two remaining extremes. This is quite consistent 
 with the peculiar humanism of the Greeks, and that lively 
 anthropological view of nature which leads them to regard 
 nothing as dead and inexpressive, but to discern beneath the 
 veil of matter the movement and meaning of thought and 
 feeling like our own. For, the divine principle which pene- 
 trated the whole organism of things had its fullest realisation
 
 Il8 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 in man, the blossom and crown of the world, the culminating 
 effort of poetic and demiurgic power. The intention and signi- 
 ficance therefore of the grand Cosmos was most distinctly 
 reflected in this fair miniature ; and whoever would carry into 
 nature the true idea by which to read off the lineaments must 
 fetch it from the life of men. As this was the point to which 
 the evolution of being tended, this gave the solution to the 
 whole process; and to read the universe backward from 
 humanity was to apprehend its drift, and bring its thick and 
 confused utterance into just the clear articulate music which 
 lay ineffectually at its heart. Hence it was that the Greeks, 
 instead of stripping Nature of all spiritual attributes, found 
 its essence in these alone, and communed with it as a living 
 being, replete with anthropomorphic gods. It was not because 
 they took their stand on the human soul as any cardinal point 
 of departure for their philosophy ; but because it was to them 
 the nearest and most perfect form assumed by the one eternal 
 thought beaming through the features of the world. 
 
 Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy, one 
 only was real and self-subsisting ; and that one was Ideal ; 
 Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and 
 mould. The other, corresponding to our ' Nature,' was in 
 itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, 
 having no predicates that held true for two moments together ; 
 in short, redeemed from negation only by indwelling realities 
 appearing through. Nothing in itself, it was the mere con- 
 dition of manifestation to that which alone is real, but else 
 were latent. Hence, the Greek has no power of resting in 
 the conception either of mind without visible organism, or of 
 matter without mental expression. The one was to them only 
 a logical abstraction, reality construed back into its own 
 empty possibility ; the other, a nonentity to which we resort 
 when we want to deny, instead of to affirm, being. Their 
 genius flew at once to /orm, as the indispensable means of 
 fetching up reality into thought ; and had recourse to matter 
 only as the medium of form ; and when it had served this pur- 
 pose, they dismissed all else it had to say to them into non- 
 existence, as being nothing to them. Nature therefore had no 
 separate metaphysical element for them ; take out of it the
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 119 
 
 divine indwelling idea, and nothing remained but the pheno- 
 menal flow of unreality. 
 
 The modern philosophy is in striking distinction from the 
 ancient on this point. Its Realism is not single, confined to 
 the intellectual pole of the universe ; but double, opposing 
 mind and matter as two substantive existences; the latter, 
 the basis of phenomena as they occur ; the former, the basis 
 of phenomena as felt and known. We have no longer the 
 one divine intellect, constituting at once the meaning in 
 nature and the mind in man, and supplying the sole positive 
 existence and causality whether within us or without ; and 
 then, opposed to this, only the negation of being (TO /HTJ ov), 
 the blank realm without which causality would want a 
 theatre of self-display; but we hear of (1) the human in- 
 tellect, known to us as the ground of the thoughts we have, 
 (2) external Body, as the ground of the attributes and 
 changes we observe ; both equally real ; neither before or 
 after the other ; bearing the same fundamental relation to 
 the phenomena they issue ; and having parallel rights to 
 recognition in their respective spheres. The materialism 
 which Plato opposed was accordingly quite different from 
 the system known in modern times under the same name. 
 Heracleitus resolved everything into the flow of perpetual 
 change, and denied all abiding existence ; and as he thus 
 provided no source whence change could come, and gave 
 a doctrine of motion with nothing to be moved, he laid his 
 system open to the refutation of Plato and Aristotle, that 
 he constituted everything out of nothing, and used the 
 negative element of the universe, the mere condition of its 
 development, as its positive equivalent. There was nothing 
 in the prevalent doctrines of the time to prevent Plato from 
 describing what we should call matter by purely privative 
 terms, and treating it as being to reality in nature what 
 denial is to afiirmation in logic ; from identifying all causality 
 with thought, and assuming that to trace the vestiges of 
 dynamic action in the world was to follow the steps of the 
 divine intellect. On the other hand, modern materialism, 
 though often affecting to resolve everything into phenomena, 
 is penetrated throughout with the notion of force and causa-
 
 120 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 tion quite distinct from thought, and of body as substantive 
 existence removed from negation at least as far as mind. 
 With Descartes we enter -upon the true era of metaphysical 
 dualism, in which philosophy, developing itself from pure 
 self-reflection, and no longer from d priori deduction, re- 
 cognises and equipoises, as having parallel and original rights, 
 matter and mind, spiritual and corporeal substance. Even 
 where, as in Empedocles and his school, we find among the 
 Greeks the modern positive notion of matter, it is not as 
 the companion but as the substitute of the positive notion 
 of intellect; and the only question was, whether the one 
 principle out of which everything was to be evolved should 
 be regarded as corporeal or intellectual. Monism constituted 
 the universal assumption of the ancient philosophy ; the 
 genius of the Ionic races leading them to explain everything 
 by deduction from the material of which it is made ; while 
 that of the Doric people resorted to the determining power 
 of form ; the first tending to physical atheism ; the other to 
 intellectual pantheism. At whichever end the primal reality 
 was sought, the other was contrasted with it as dependent and 
 unreal. The balance of independent prerogative was first held 
 even in modern philosophy, when nature was brought into 
 antithesis with man rather than with God. 
 
 Of the intermediate period of Catholic culture it is needless 
 to prove, that it was mainly concerned in investigating the 
 relations between Man and God. I would only observe that 
 it vindicated the independent reality of both these terms ; 
 attributing to the human soul a free-will which rendered it 
 a separate entity and gave it a sphere of its own. To settle 
 and harmonise the relations between these two beings, to 
 mediate between them in their opposition, and preserve them 
 distinct in their union, was the great problem of the universe, 
 to the interests of which nature and events were wholly 
 subordinate. In its service, physical laws became flexible, 
 and matter itself pliant and transparent ; the natural gave 
 way to the supernatural; the universe placing itself at 
 disposal as its theatre and witness. The Church paid no 
 respect to the material world as having any irrefragable 
 rights or even subsistence of its own : it was but the fabric
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 121 
 
 and manifestation of a divine power ever free to mould it 
 to special purposes and divert its customary ways: it had 
 nothing to oppose to God and the human soul, when they 
 were intent on finding each other out. Thus the Greek in- 
 termingling of God and nature, the identification of their 
 energies, was not contradicted, rather was it adopted, by 
 the medieval Christian theory: the Hellenic monism was, so 
 far, transmitted unimpaired. But man was snatched from 
 a like absorption, and set up in separate prerogative and 
 trust. The transition therefore to a dualistic philosophy 
 began upon the moral side. The liberties which the Church 
 took with her neglected element, the realm of nature, 
 provoked a reaction on its behalf; and in vindicating the 
 inflexible certainty of external law, modern science converted 
 the dualism from moral to physical, and fixed the poles of 
 primary belief in the mind which perceives and the universe 
 which is the object of perception. 
 
 2. Theory of the Order of Knowing. 
 
 The modern dualism, which assigns an equal ontological 
 reality to mind and matter, a conscious self, and unconscious 
 other-than-self, obtained its first distinct expression in Des- 
 cartes ; whose fundamental notions must be apprehended 
 as an indispensable condition for the understanding of 
 Spinoza. Those who have heard nothing of Descartes but 
 his celebrated inference, Cogito, ergo sum, and who are aware 
 that this was the point of departure for his whole system, 
 may be surprised at the assertion that he was a dualist, 
 and placed a second entity on the same line with this 
 primitive Ego. On the same line of certain knowledge, he did 
 not ; but on the same line of positive existence, he did. For 
 there is in his philosophy a curious want of correspondence 
 between the logical order in which thought steps from truth 
 to truth, and the real order in which the objects of knowledge 
 stand inter se. 
 
 His theory about the order of certainty in human know-
 
 122 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 ledge is perhaps best understood by its contrast, probably 
 intentional, with that of Bacon, who had passed from the 
 scene eleven years (1626) before Descartes' first publication 
 (Essays, 1637). The methodised observations and experi- 
 ments on which the English philosopher relied for the dis- 
 covery of truth rested ultimately upon Perception by the 
 senses: they were entrusted with the ingathering of those 
 primary facts whence, by successive generalisations, laws 
 of widening scope were read off and carried into the in- 
 terpretation of the world ; so that the maxim of the schools 
 was still unchallenged, that ' in the Understanding there can 
 be nothing but the prior experience of Sense.' This funda- 
 mental principle Descartes disputes at the outset 1 . He insists 
 that in the ' evidence of our Senses ' and the vividness of our 
 representations there is no security against illusion : a person 
 with the jaundice sees all things yellow: the stars give us 
 no true report of their size ; and the images of our dreams 
 are not less distinct than those of waking vision, and per- 
 fectly simulate reality. In this field of outward perception, 
 therefore, it is always possible that we may be deceived; 
 and all that it gives us needs to be tested by some principle 
 of certainty more deeply seated in the Keason. 
 
 In order to find this ultimate ground, the only way is to 
 push your scepticism to the utmost limits of possibility, and 
 suppose everything false which admits of being questioned: 
 whatever then remains, when denial has done its worst, must 
 be the immutable base of certainty. Following this rule, 
 I may doubt the presence of external things, including my 
 own body, and say to myself, 'Perhaps it is all a dream:' I 
 may distrust my reasonings, even about mathematical quanti- 
 ties, seeing that geometers themselves are at times entrapped 
 into paralogisms : I may suspend my belief in the existence 
 of God as a probability that may be differently estimated. 
 But, though all else be in doubt, my doubts at least are 
 matters of certainty: I cannot both have them and deny 
 them ; and in knowing them as mine, I know that I exist ; 
 ' je pense, done je suis.' In other words, the consciousness of 
 
 1 Disc, de la Methode, Cousin. I. 163.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 
 
 Self as the subject of thought is the primary certainty. Let 
 thoughts remain, I am sure of the thinker : take them away, 
 and though all else they had imagined be really there, both 
 it and I lie in the dark for me. ' Thus I learn that I am 
 a substantive being, whose nature or essence it is to think ; 
 and to have, for its existence, no need of place or of any 
 material thing; so that this Self, i.e. Soul, whereby I 
 am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even 
 more easily known than body, and would not cease to be 
 what it is though body were not V 
 
 Having gained this first certainty, Descartes submits it 
 to scrutiny in order to discover what is the feature in it 
 which constitutes its assured truth ; once found, the same 
 feature will serve as a general criterion of truth in other 
 instances. He decides that what makes me sure of the 
 proposition ' I think, therefore I am,' is simply that I see 
 clearly it must be so ; and hence lays down a rule, that 
 things which we conceive very clearly and distinctly are 
 all true ; only that there is some difficulty in accurately 
 determining those which really possess this mark. Thus, 
 with Descartes, the ultimate test of truth is intrinsic, 
 not extrinsic ; an idea authenticates itself by its own clear- 
 ness and distinctness, and does not depend on any external 
 voucher. This is an important element of the whole Cartesian 
 logic. 
 
 In advancing to the next certainty, Descartes takes as 
 his clue the contrast between his doubts and his assur- 
 ance. He is aware that to know is a higher condition than 
 to doubt ; that the latter state is a mark of imperfection, 
 and that in seeking to remove it and conceiving of a 
 mind without it, he has the idea of a nature exempt from 
 the limits of his own. Whence this idea? Does it rank 
 with his other ideas, of the heavens, the earth, the light, 
 the heat, and other outward things ? Not so ; for in these 
 he sees nothing superior to himself; so that, if these be 
 true ideas, they may be due to his own thinking nature 
 as an organ of truth ; and if not true, he has them with- 
 
 1 Disc, de la Methode, Cousin. I. 158-9. 332.
 
 124 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 out valid tenure, in virtue of some defect in himself. Does 
 the idea then come from himself? That cannot be ; for it 
 is more perfect than he ; and can no more therefore depend 
 upon the less perfect than from nothing can something 
 proceed. The only remaining possibility must be admitted 
 as the real fact; it is implanted by a nature having in 
 itself all the perfection of which he conceives ; i. e. by God. 
 There is necessarily therefore a perfect being on whom we 
 depend, and from whom we have our all. In order to know 
 God, as far as our nature admits, we have only to ask re- 
 specting any attribute, whether to possess it is an element of 
 perfection or of imperfection ; and to admit or reject it accord- 
 ingly. This rule excludes from His nature all such mental 
 conditions as doubt, inconstancy, sadness. And that our ideas 
 of material things are not to be applied to Him appears from 
 this ; that they are totally foreign to an intellectual nature, 
 and represent properties which could be combined with such 
 a nature only by composition ; and since composition is in it- 
 self an evidence of dependence, and dependence a mark of 
 defect, God cannot be composed of two natures ; but, if there 
 be in the world bodies, or minds that are not perfect, they 
 must depend upon His power, so as to be unable without Him 
 to subsist for an instant. Thus Descartes obtains his second 
 certainty, the existence of God. This, like the former, he re- 
 gards as immediately given, or self-evident from the idea, 
 without going beyond for proof or verification; a grade of 
 certainty which can go no further. 
 
 In order to see, however, whether it may not be pushed 
 through one step more, he next addresses himself to geome- 
 trical relations as the reputed models of certainty in objects 
 of outward apprehension. The fundamental conception is 
 here that of continuous body, or of space indefinitely extended 
 in length, breadth, and depth, divisible into parts different 
 in size and shape, and variously moveable. On going over 
 some of the simpler demonstrations, Descartes found that the 
 special certainty lay in the necessary sequence of ideas within 
 the structure of the proofs, and not in the data whence they 
 start ; in other words, that it is hypothetical, not absolute ; 
 showing, for example, that if there be a triangle, its three
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES, 125 
 
 angles will be equal to two right angles ; but not that there 
 is such a thing as a triangle in the world. This is quite differ- 
 ent from the case of the Divine nature ; the existence of that 
 nature is not hypothetical ; but is involved in the idea we 
 have of a perfect being, precisely as in the idea of a sphere is 
 involved the equal distance of all points on its surface from its 
 centre. 
 
 Hence, the existence of outward things, even in the geome- 
 tric form, has no metaphysical certainty, like that of the two 
 previous cases ; and could never be freed from doubt until we 
 presuppose the existence of God. If we suppose ourselves 
 better assured of the existence of the earth, the stars, and our 
 own bodies, than of God and the Soul, we delude ourselves by 
 an irrational confidence in the impressions of Sense ; for we 
 can give no reason, if the universe be without a God, for 
 trusting our waking images in preference to those of our 
 dreams, in which we seem to have a different body and to see 
 other earth and stars. The very rule that our clear and dis- 
 tinct ideas are true rests on the assumption that these ideas 
 come from a perfect being and are His gift of truth ; while 
 ideas which have not this character, but are confused, are false 
 because coming from nothing, i.e. because due to our defect of 
 being ; for imperfection and falsity cannot come from God, any 
 more than perfection can come from nothing. However clear 
 and distinct our ideas, we could not treat them as certainly 
 true, but for the prior knowledge of the perfection whence 
 they come. 
 
 This knowledge once gained, our dreams no longer affect us 
 with any distrust of our clear and distinct waking thoughts. 
 For, if the same sort of clear and distinct ideas, e.g. a geometric 
 demonstration, occurred in a dream, it would not thereby lose 
 its truth ; and if, on the other hand, the mere lively images of 
 a dream deceived us, they are apt also to practise the same 
 deception on us when we are awake. In either state our ima- 
 gination leads us wrong, our reason leads us right. But this 
 distinction holds only because the former is a residue of defect, 
 while the latter is a faculty secured on the veracity of a per- 
 fect being l . 
 
 1 Disc, de la M^thode, 4 me P. I. 160-6.
 
 126 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 This rule, however, still does not avail to justify our belief 
 in external things, unless they can be rescued from the field of 
 sense and imagination (to which they have been hitherto refer- 
 red), and shown to be in some way the objects of clear and 
 distinct ideas. To this task accordingly Descartes addresses 
 himself next. Besides the clear and distinct idea which I have 
 of myself as a thinking being (wherein the essence of me con- 
 sists), I find in myself another idea, perfectly distinct from 
 this, of body as an extended thing which does not think ; and 
 since distinctness of idea means distinctness of fact, it is cer- 
 tain that my soul as thinking essence is independent of my 
 body and can exist without it. Thus the idea of extension, 
 co-existing with that of thought, yet in clear distinction from 
 it, vouches for the reality as external. 
 
 Again, when from the pure idea of the Ego I turn to its 
 special ways of acting, I find a variety of powers, e.g. sense 
 and imagination, which are not necessary to constitute the 
 idea of myself, but which, on the other hand, are themselves 
 inconceivable without that idea : they are a kind of thought, 
 and are related to me as a modification of my essence. Simi- 
 larly, I am conscious of change of place and power of move- 
 ment, which are inconceivable as unattached phenomena, and 
 imply in their idea some body or extended substance to which 
 they happen. Thus, motion discloses itself as a mode of mat- 
 ter, like sense and imagination as modes of mind. 
 
 Moreover, I undoubtedly have in me a passive susceptibility 
 of ideas of sensible things ; which involve somewhere an active 
 power of producing these ideas : where is it ? not in me ; for 
 these ideas come without my having anything to do with them, 
 and presuppose no thought of mine. Therefore it is in some 
 substance other than myself, viz. either from God or some 
 superior created nature which has the ideas eminenter ; or 
 from bodies which have them formaliter. Not the former ; 
 because if God thus gave them without enabling me to know it, 
 and even with a natural disposition to refer them to corpo- 
 real objects, he would be deceiving me ; therefore they must 
 be actually given me by external bodies. This conclusion, 
 however, must be limited to what is clear and distinct in 
 them, and not extended to the part of the sensible impres-
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 127 
 
 sion which is obscure and confused ; i.e. it holds good for 
 all that comes under the cognisance of geometry, viz. the 
 relations of space and its dimensions. 
 
 Having thus obtained assurance of externality in gene- 
 ral, Descartes uses the same argument, of the veracity of 
 God, to establish the reality of all particular things which 
 our nature permits us to see in it, provided only we find 
 in ourselves the means of correcting and clearing whatever 
 is confused in our first ideas of them. On the same ground 
 we may trust, on the active side of our life, the natural 
 impulses to seek this and avoid that, which arise from the 
 union of mind with body, until we learn to substitute the 
 rule of reason for this ruder guidance. But the mind, pure 
 and simple, must always be applied to win clear and distinct 
 ideas from the mixed and blind feelings to which our com- 
 pound nature subjects us. If we are qualified to do this, and 
 yet neglect it, we cannot complain that our nature deceives 
 us. If, for example, we take up at once with the belief that 
 the space around us is empty, when we see and feel nothing 
 in it, or that there is a resemblance between heat as exist- 
 ing in the fire and heat as felt in us, we have only ourselves 
 to blame and not God, who has given us the means of know- 
 ing better. His veracity is engaged no further than the uni- 
 versal, permanent, and inevitable beliefs imposed upon us by 
 our nature 1 . 
 
 In the order of thought, therefore, we know (1) our own 
 existence as thinking beings ; (2) the existence of God, as 
 given in thought ; and both of these are immediately known ; 
 and then (3) material things, given to us in mixed experience, 
 and vouched for by the divine perfection ; therefore mediately 
 known. 
 
 1 Meditation 6 rae . I. 331-343.
 
 128 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 3. Theory of the Order of Being. 
 
 When we address ourselves to the existences thus ascer- 
 tained, we may range them all under the name Substance; 
 not, however, in precisely one and the same sense. For this 
 word is defined, ' That which so exists as to need only itself 
 for its existence.' In strictness this holds good only of God ; 
 for everything else stands in need of Him every moment for 
 the continuance of its existence, a need recognised in the 
 established phrase, Concursus Dei. But to created natures 
 the word may be applied in a relative sense, when any one of 
 them exists without need of any other, and so has its tenure 
 from the divine concurrence alone. ' Hence,' says Descartes, 
 ' the Schoolmen are right in saying that the name " substance " 
 is not univocal l in regard to God and His creatures, i.e. there 
 is no distinctly conceived meaning of the word which fits at 
 once Him and them ; but since, among created things, there are 
 some of such a nature as to be incapable of existence without 
 others, we distinguish these from such as need only the ordi- 
 nary concursus Dei, by calling the latter substances, and the 
 former qualities or attributes of these substances V 
 
 By this rule, though neither mind nor body can claim to be 
 Substance in the absolute sense, both are on a par as sub- 
 stances in the relative sense ; each, we perceive, being able to 
 exist without aid from the other. Whether either of them is 
 
 1 This is an example of an unfortunate abuse of the epithet univocal, an abuse 
 not the less confusing from its frequency and long standing. The Latin Univocus 
 and JEquivocus are translations of Aristotle's pair, awuwfjios and o/uj/u/xoy, which 
 are applied by him never to words but always to things. Those things are syno- 
 nymous or univocal which bear the same name in the same sense (or with the 
 same definition) ; while those things are homonymous or (equivocal which bear 
 the same name in a different sense (or with different definition). Thus, a dog and 
 a cat are univocal, as coming under the term ' animal ' in the same sense ; the 
 constellation Ursa and a certain animal in the Zoological Gardens are sequivocal, 
 as both being called bear, but in a different sense. But this classification of 
 things is constantly treated by logicians and others (e.g. by Whately) as if it 
 were a classification of words or names ; and so Descartes uses it here. If this 
 interpretation be carried to the reading of Aristotle, he becomes unintelligible. 
 See Arist. Cat. I. p. i. a. i. Top. IV. iii. p. 123 a. 28, vi. p. 127. b. 6 ; Eth. Nicom. 
 V. iv. p. 1 1 30 a. 33. 
 
 3 Princ. Phil. P. I. 51.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 12$ 
 
 in actual existence here or there, now or then, can be deter- 
 mined only by its proclaiming itself through some properties 
 that speak to our perceptions or consciousness : then we know 
 it, for if there be properties, they cannot be properties of No- 
 thing, but of something. Any property will suffice to betray 
 the presence of a substance ; but there is always one in par- 
 ticular which constitutes its essence, and on which all the rest 
 depend. Thus, in the case of Body, Extension in its three 
 dimensions of length, breadth, and depth is the defining attri- 
 bute ; in the case of Mind, Thought : on the former depend 
 figure with all its relations, and motion with its varieties of 
 direction and velocity, and (as Descartes assumes) every other 
 property of material things ; on the latter, memory, imagina- 
 tion, will, &c., as so many modifications of thinking. Of these 
 two created substances we have clear and distinct ideas, if we 
 keep the attributes carefully apart from each other. And so 
 may we of uncreated and independent thinking substance, i.e. 
 of God, provided we neither assume that this idea represents 
 all that there is in Him, nor attach to it any fiction of our 
 understanding which is incompatible with perfection of being. 
 
 There is a difference insisted on by Descartes between the 
 qualities or modes of a substance on the one hand, and its 
 attributes on the other. We never speak of the qualities or 
 modes of God; and the reason is that these words imply 
 change and diversity, like the phenomena which distinguish 
 one species from another of the same genus ; and this cannot 
 be predicated of an infinite and eternal being. All that is in 
 Him is immutably there ; and this relation of inherence and 
 permanent coexistence in one nature is expressed by the word 
 attrllmte. This alone therefore can be used of God ; and even 
 in the case of created things we resort to it when we wish to 
 mark what they invariably have, such as their 'existence' and 
 duration. Observe, however, that Descartes reckons the { exis- 
 tence ' of ' a thing ' as one among its attributes, and not as that 
 u'hich all attributes presuppose. In this an important fallacy 
 lies hid. 
 
 Descartes further distinguishes between qualities or attri- 
 butes belonging to things themselves, and those which are 
 merely creatures of our thought, varieties in our mode of looking 
 
 VOL. i. K
 
 130 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 at them. To exemplify this distinction he takes the predi- 
 cates duration and time; the former he plants in the thing 
 which endures ; the latter he treats as merely relative to us, 
 as the way we have of thinking about that duration. The 
 only reason which he assigns is the following : ' We do not 
 conceive the duration of moving things to be other than that 
 of things stationary ; as is evident from the fact that, if two 
 bodies are in motion for an hour, the one fast and the other 
 slow, we do not credit the one with more time than the other, 
 though we suppose more motion in one of the two. But in 
 order to bring the duration of all things under one and the 
 same measure, we usually resort to the duration of certain 
 regular movements that form days and years, and call it time 
 after having thus compared it ; though in fact what we so call 
 is nothing over and above the real duration of the things but 
 a way of thinking 1 .' This doctrine of the subjectivity of 
 Time, which reappears in Spinoza, derives so little support 
 from these illustrations, that it seems to me to be rather 
 refuted by them. If the quick and the slow hands of a clock 
 occupy the same time between 12 and 1, and are so conceived 
 by us, our thought makes no difference between time and 
 duration ; and if the cycles of the heavenly bodies which we 
 take as our standards of time are identical with portions of 
 planetary duration, and understood by us to be so, then where 
 the time is there the duration must be ; and there is no 
 ground for setting one of them to the credit of our thought, 
 and planting the other in the outward objects. The difference 
 is adequately expressed by saying, that duration is a conti- 
 nuum and time the segment of it occupied by finite objects 
 and phenomena. 
 
 4. Conception of Matter. 
 
 In treating separately of his two created Substances, Des- 
 cartes vindicates in the first instance his conception of matter, 
 which lies at the foundation of his system of Physics. He is 
 aware that his resolution of it into simple extension will 
 
 1 Princ. Phil. P. I. 57.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 131 
 
 appear paradoxical, and answers his objectors by anticipation. 
 To those who cannot part with the idea of solidity (or ' hard- 
 ness') from their conception of body, he remarks that this 
 quality is evidenced only by touch and resistance to move- 
 ment ; that if, on applying the hand to a body here or there, 
 it gave way and let the hands pass on without a check, no 
 solidity would be perceived, and yet, so long as the body kept 
 its dimensions, it would be acknowledged as a thing in that 
 place ; there is no reason therefore for saying that by so be- 
 having it had lost that which made it body. The same holds of 
 its weight, its heat, its colour ; we can think of it as without 
 any of these qualities, and yet we should know clearly and 
 distinctly that it has all it wants to make it body, while 
 its dimensions remain. 
 
 When it is objected that the same body, if rarefied, is more 
 extended than if condensed, without any change in its essence, 
 Descartes replies that rarefaction is inconceivable without 
 more bodies than one ; since it implies a separation of par- 
 ticles to a distance not embraced in it before, i.e. the existence 
 or increase of interstices between them, which are occupied 
 by some other body, and therefore belong to its extension 
 and not to that of the containing body. Thus there is no 
 change in the total dimensions of the original, but only a 
 displacement of its component items ; and in condensation 
 the story is simply inverted. The case is similar to that 
 of a sponge, now distended by absorbing water, and now 
 compressed by expelling its contents: the increment and 
 decrement of the external superficies belongs, not to the 
 sponge, but to the water. It involves a contradiction to 
 suppose that a thing can be enlarged by a size which it 
 does not possess; or that you can reduce its size without 
 reducing itself. In truth, there is no difference between the 
 largeness of a thing and the thing that is large. 
 
 Hence, there can be no such thing as empty space. 
 As Nothing cannot possibly have extension, wherever ex- 
 tension is, there must be something extended ; and all that 
 we mean when we speak of any place as empty is, that it 
 has not its usual contents ; e.g. a jug is said to be empty 
 when it has no water, though it is full of air ; and a ship, 
 
 K2
 
 132 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 when it has no cargo ; and a house, when it has no inhabit- 
 ants or furniture. From observing that there is no necessary 
 connection between a vessel's capacity and the nature of 
 its contents, which may be quicksilver, or milk, or gas, we 
 fancy that God could exclude everything from it, and keep 
 it as it is, without replacing the body removed by any other. 
 But, though there is no necessary connection between the 
 capacity of a bowl and any particular kind of matter, there 
 is a necessary connection between the concavity of the bowl's 
 internal superficies and the outside convexity of the form 
 which it embraces, just as there cannot be a mountain 
 without a valley ; and as Nothing cannot be convex, or 
 have any form or extension whatever, there must be an 
 extended somewhat, i.e. matter, inside. The answer therefore 
 is, that, were the supposition realised, of God's removing 
 all contents, the sides now apart from each other would 
 be in contact; for to say that they are at a distance, yet 
 that that distance is nothing, is to affirm and deny the same 
 thing with the same breath. On these grounds Descartes 
 maintains the doctrine of a plenum, and pronounces a vacuum 
 inconceivable. 1 
 
 Extension being adopted as the essence of body, the curious 
 result follows, that the quantity of matter is in all cases to be 
 measured by bulk and not by moss. No part of material 
 substance can occupy more room at one time than at another ; 
 and a vessel filled with gold or lead has no more matter in it 
 than when occupied by air ; for the size of the component 
 parts of a body does not depend on their weight and hardness, 
 but only on the extension, which for the same vessel is always 
 the same 2 . 
 
 Similar reasoning led Descartes to the conclusion that 
 matter as identified with extension is not resolvable into 
 ultimate atoms, but is infinitely divisible ; that it is homo- 
 geneous throughout the universe ; and that its apparent 
 varieties are distinguished only by the different division 
 and movement of its parts. Motion is purely relative, and 
 should not be defined in the usual way as ' change of place/ 
 
 1 Op. cit. P. II. 4_i 8. a Op. cit. P. II. 19.
 
 Branch IT.] DESCARTES. 133 
 
 as if ' place ' were any absolute datum without share in the 
 change ; but as ' the transport of a body from the vicinity 
 of those which are in immediate contact with it to the 
 vicinity of others.' Unless you thus name the correlative 
 object, you allow your senses to leave you with a false 
 conception of motion. A pilot who stands still upon a ship 
 seems to be at rest, as long as you do not look beyond the 
 limits of the vessel ; if you are coasting within sight of land, 
 you say he has the movement of the craft and all that is 
 on board ; if he could sail westward as fast as the earth spins 
 eastward, he would indeed make the circuit of the world, 
 yet see the sun (within a degree) stationary in the heavens : 
 and so he is at once in motion and at rest, according to the 
 confines with which you choose to compare him ; and, for 
 exactitude's sake, these confines should be named l . 
 
 The total amount of motion and rest in the universe 
 Descartes assumes to be a constant quantity, assigned by 
 God's omnipotence to the parts of matter at its creation ; 
 all the observed variations in velocity being local, and 
 marking the transference of motion from one object to 
 another. In describing this transference, Descartes adheres 
 to his paradoxical measure of matter by bulk instead of 
 mass ; and says, ' when a portion of matter moves twice as 
 fast as another, and this other is twice as large as the first, 
 we are to think that there is just as much motion in the 
 smaller as in the larger ; and as often and as much as the 
 motion of one part diminishes, does that of another (propor- 
 tionately) increase.' The laws of motion, like its quantity, 
 are unchangeable, in virtue of the divine immutability. 
 It is not necessary to follow Descartes' enumeration of them. 
 The first of them alone has some interest in connection with 
 Spinoza ; it runs thus : ' each particular thing persists in the 
 same state as far as it can, and never changes it but by the 
 impact of others ; ' and is supported by the consideration that 
 rest and motion are contrary, and that a thing cannot possibly 
 be carried by the instincts of its nature to what is opposite to 
 itself 2 . 
 
 1 Op. cit. II. 2228. 3 Op. cit. II. 36, 37.
 
 134 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 5. Relation between Body and Soul. 
 
 In the human person the Physics and the Psychology of 
 Descartes, long kept asunder as the history of separate sub- 
 stances, are obliged to meet and divide, if they can, their 
 rightful domains ; no easy task for the keenest surveyor, 
 entangled as the territories are by numerous interlocking 
 regions. Starting with the principle that mind and body are 
 ' entirely and truly distinct,' so that in no case can body 
 be mind and perform the thinking function, he provides two 
 categories, and only two, between which all phenomena are 
 to be distributed. Yet, when he comes to treat of perception 
 through the senses, and of imagination, he is obliged, on the 
 one hand, to accept them as modes of thinking, and, on the 
 other, to admit that they could not exist without body ; not 
 the senses, because they are themselves a part of the corporeal 
 organism ; not the imagination, because the images which 
 it gives involve extension. Instead, however, of lodging these 
 phenomena under a third head, he regards them as a confused 
 mixture of the other two, due to the close union in which 
 mind and body live together in our nature ; and sets himself 
 to the task of analysing the compound process, so as to clear 
 the intellectual from the physical elements, and let body and 
 mind each have its own. 
 
 The soul, i.e. the thinking principle, though united with the 
 whole body, exercises its chief functions in the brain ; where, 
 besides its own processes of pure understanding, it imagines 
 and perceives ; the medium of its sensations being nerves 
 running from its seat in the brain to every part of the body. 
 The movements propagated from the peripheral extremities 
 to the central spot excite different sensations, partly accord- 
 ing as the nerves are different, partly as the motion in the 
 same nerve is of a different kind. Descartes enumerates seven 
 distinct senses ; two interior, of which one is the vehicle of 
 hunger and thirst and the natural appetites generally, and 
 has appropriated to it the nerves from the alimentary and 
 other corresponding organs ; and the second is the minister 
 f jy> sorrow, love, anger, and the other 'passions' (i.e. 
 involuntary feelings), and depends chiefly on a small nerve
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 135 
 
 going to the heart, while others pass to the diaphragm 
 and its vicinity. The different state of the blood affects 
 these nerves with different kinds of motion: if it be pure 
 and well tempered, it quickens their sensibility, and gives 
 them an action which excites natural joy in the soul ; if it 
 be gross and sluggish, a heavier movement ensues which 
 carries a feeling of depression to the soul. And whenever, 
 from any other cause than the state of the blood, these 
 different movements are imparted, the corresponding feeling 
 will recur. When, for example, we contemplate the arrival 
 of some good, this imagination does not, Descartes says, 
 in itself carry the feeling of joy, but sends 'the animal 
 spirits' on an errand from the brain down the muscles 
 to the insertion of the heart-nerves ; which are then, through 
 dilatation of its cavities, affected by the special motion felt as 
 joy at the head-quarters of the soul. This joyous sensation, 
 however, is to be distinguished from another and 'purely 
 intellectual' joy of which the soul per se is susceptible: if 
 we are told a piece of news, the soul first considers whether 
 it is good or bad ; if good, then is it affected by ' a spiritual 
 joy,' so completely independent of bodily changes that the 
 Stoics did not deny it to their ' Wise man,' exempt though 
 he was to be from every passion. But, as soon as this joy 
 passes from the understanding to the imagination, the process 
 is set a-going, as just described, which terminates in the 
 sensational consciousness. This may serve as a sample of 
 what Descartes invariably means by the passions of the soul ; 
 they are all of them states of confused consciousness which 
 the soul would not have of itself alone, but which, being 
 incident to its union with the body, are induced by the 
 contact of the soul with nerves of various movement. The 
 feelings thus excited, while including, besides the natural 
 appetites, love, hate, fear, anger, and a long list besides, are 
 wholly different from the desire and will we have to eat 
 and drink, and the idea we have of what is to be loved, hated, 
 feared, &c. ; though from the frequent concomitance of the 
 passionate and the intellectual states, their names have not 
 been kept separate J . 
 
 1 Op. cit. P. IV. 189,190.
 
 136 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 The remaining, or external, senses are the five that are 
 ordinarily enumerated. On these as treated by Descartes 
 there is nothing special to remark, unless it be that here again 
 he attributes each separate feeling of the same sense (such as 
 of hardness, weight, warmth, moisture, all assigned by him 
 to Touch] to a distinct variety of movement in the same nerve ; 
 and that by this quality in the external body no more is to be 
 understood than the power in that body, whatever it be, to set 
 on foot this or that particular movement of the nerve. The 
 possible qualities of body are therefore simply the unknown 
 causes of known sensations in us. Thus far only can we speak 
 of the causes as known ; they cannot be anything else in the 
 external bodies than the different size, position, figure, and 
 movement of their parts ; but these differences we are unable 
 to define. We are also brought upon the track of a future 
 doctrine in the remark that, up to a certain point, an excep- 
 tional excitement given to the nerve will intensify the ' con- 
 fused thought,' i.e. sensation, in the soul, and be naturally 
 agreeable as attesting the vital force of the body which is its 
 companion ; but that ever so little added stimulus beyond this 
 point, bringing injury to the body, reverses the sensation in the 
 soul and turns it into distress, in sympathy with the harm 
 that is done to the organism. Opposite feelings are thus 
 occasioned by causes nearly identical 1 . 
 
 In support of his localisation of feelings in the brain, 
 Descartes adduces a striking case of their being experienced as 
 if at the extremity of nerves which had been already truncated 
 by amputation. A young girl, under treatment for a sore hand, 
 was unable to bear the surgeon's dressing without having her 
 eyes bandaged. When this had become habitual, it was found 
 that, after all, she must lose the lower half of the arm. 
 The operation was performed without her discovering that 
 there was anything unusual ; and the loss was concealed from 
 her by arranging long folds of linen into the semblance of an 
 arm and hand. In this state of things she continued to com- 
 plain of a variety of pains now in one, now in another, of 
 the fingers that were gone ; doubtless because the remaining 
 
 1 Op. cit. P. IV. 191. 1.98.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 
 
 section of the shortened nerves were affected by the kind of 
 motion appropriate to these sensations and previously started 
 at the finger ends. This early mention of a fact now familiar 
 deserves to be remembered x . 
 
 By thus lodging the Soul in the brain at the very seat of 
 the Sensus communis, where the nerve movements are de- 
 livered and whence the animal spirits carry understanding 
 and impulse to the muscles, Descartes set up a compound 
 being, from one or other of whose parts all our phenomena 
 might seem to be explained. But the Soul he pronounced to 
 be exclusively human, and, in the human being, a substance 
 ' entirely distinct ' from the body. Take away then the soul 
 from our double constitution, and you leave the animal nature 
 complete ; to understand which we must consider what 
 elements, previously present, fall out by this subtraction. 
 Up to the cerebral centre, the nervous changes were purely 
 mechanical, initiated by movements in external bodies, or by 
 heat and fluid action in the blood, propagated by the consti- 
 tution of the nervous filaments themselves. And if there fol- 
 lowed any motion of the corporeal members, this also was 
 the mechanical result of a descending current of animal spirits 
 flowing down through the muscles. But what happens at the 
 meeting point between this up and down transaction "? It was 
 the presence of the soul that turned the nerve movements into 
 sensations, and the sensations that constituted the passions, 
 and the passions that wakened the instinctive energies mani- 
 fest in all involuntary action ; and Descartes habitually speaks 
 of the passions of ' the soul,' and of the Sense experience as 
 belonging to it. If then you subtract the soul, must not 
 sensation, passion, instinct, vanish too ? This inevitable conse- 
 quence was accepted by the followers of Descartes, and ap- 
 parently by himself when he pronounced the lower animals to 
 be mere ' automata] in whose nature processes which go forward 
 consciously in us were simulated by a clock-like mechanism. 
 And no doubt a coherent conception can be formed of the 
 make of an animal after this pattern, if only it fitted as well 
 to the facts of natural history as the usual doctrine which lets 
 
 1 Op. cit. P. IV. 196.
 
 138 METAPHYSICAL, IMMANENT, [Book T. 
 
 the creatures feel. As by the reflex arrangement of the sensory 
 and motory nerves, and their susceptibility of unfelt stimulus, 
 you can galvanise a paralysed or dead animal into various 
 coordinated movements, there are doubtless resources in nature 
 for extending such experiments till earth, air, and water 
 become a vast Polytechnic exhibition of running, grinning, 
 and roaring automata. The Cartesians actually supposed 
 themselves to be living in such a world ; and pleaded the 
 doctrine as a good answer to those who thought it too bad 
 that the sin of our first parents should have brought suffering 
 and death upon the innocent beasts of the field ; and used it 
 also as an excuse for taking cruel liberties with their dumb 
 companions who had only sham feelings. But Descartes him- 
 self did not mean to carry his denial so far as this : he was too 
 well aware of the close analogy between the actions of the 
 inferior animals and our own instinctive life (which we know 
 at first hand to be anything but insensible), to strip them of 
 what remains to us in this part of our nature ; and meant to 
 withhold from them not sensibility, but self-consciousness 
 alone ; to say that, while they see, and feel, and hear, they do 
 not know that they do so, or reflect upon what it means, but 
 are carried impulsively to the appropriate objects or through 
 the appropriate experience. He speaks of their ' cries of joy or 
 pain ; ' and of ' acting on their hopes and fears of bodily 
 pleasure or pain; which is the principle of all training of 
 animals.' 'All the things that you make dogs or horses or 
 monkeys do are only movements of their fear, their hope, or 
 their joy, which can be made without any thought V Again, 
 he says of animals, ' all make pronounced natural movements 
 of anger, fear, hunger, and the like ; and speaks of ' the signs 
 which dogs make with their tails ' as being ' only the move- 
 ments which accompany the affections 2 ' Nay, he carefully 
 disclaims the very opinion which, strangely enough, has come 
 to be regarded as one of his chief characteristics : ' I must 
 observe,' he says, ' that it is of thought, and not of life or feel- 
 ing, that I speak; for I do not deny life to any animal, 
 making it only consist of the heart's heat ; nor do I refuse 
 
 1 (Euvres, IX. pp. 423-4-5. 2 (Euvres, X. pp. 207. 240.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 139 
 
 them sensation, so far as it depends on the organs of the 
 body 1 . 
 
 It is obvious, therefore, that even with respect to the lower 
 animals, the modern doctrine of automatism, viz. that the 
 observed action of the organism is complete without feeling, 
 and in its absence would go on exactly as in its presence, re- 
 ceives no support from Descartes. Far from treating sensibility 
 as a superfluous appendage to a mechanical process, and as 
 leading to nothing, he treats it as the sole instrument for 
 moulding dependent creatures to our will ; thus not only re- 
 cognising its existence, but acknowledging its physical power. 
 The utmost that can be said is that, if he had thoroughly 
 carried out his dualistic antithesis of extension and thinking, 
 he ought to have reached the conclusion that the body could 
 go of itself and sit free of the mind. No doubt his logic came 
 to grief when he stumbled on the phenomenon of animal feel- 
 ing, which he could not resolve into ' extension,' and which yet 
 fell short of thought. Not knowing what to do with it, he 
 awards it sometimes to the corporeal, at others to the mental 
 nature ; but in any case allows it efficient power in the direc- 
 tion of living activities. No such weakness of conception can be 
 charged upon our modern automatists who profess to carry out 
 his doctrine. With severe consistency they dispense, in their 
 human physiology, with every form of consciousness, be it 
 feeling or be it thought ; treating it as altogether outside the 
 dynamics of life, an ornamental flourish of Nature's pen as 
 she finishes her story, adding nothing to its significance, and 
 opening no new chapter for its sequel. Whether the waver- 
 ing lines of Descartes' doctrine are rendered truer by being 
 thus pulled out straight, I must not stop to consider. 
 
 6. Ethical Doctrine. 
 
 ' It is the nature of substances,' says Descartes, ' that they 
 exclude each other V This mutual independence of substances 
 seems to be forgotten as soon as Descartes treats practically 
 
 1 CEuvres, X. pp. 207, 208. * Reap. IV. Vol. II. p. 49.
 
 140 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 of the relations between the body and the soul in the conduct 
 of life. He divides our volitions, for instance, into ' two 
 classes, viz. (1) pure actions of the soul, which begin and end 
 within itself, as when we will to love God, or, generally, to 
 apply our thought to some object which is not material ; and 
 (2) actions which terminate in our body, as when, from merely 
 having the will to walk, it follows that our legs move and we 
 walk V ' The will,' he says in another proposition, ' is so free 
 in its nature that it can never suffer restraint ; and of the two 
 kinds of volitions which I have distinguished in the soul, the 
 first are absolutely in its own power, and can only indirectly 
 be changed by the body ; while, on the other hand, the others 
 depend absolutely on the act which executes them, and these 
 can only indirectly be changed by the soul, except when the 
 soul itself is their cause. And every action of the soul con- 
 sists in this ; that, by merely willing something, it causes the 
 little gland to which it is closely united to move in the way 
 required for producing the effect contemplated by the will V 
 Here the reciprocal interaction of mind and body is not only 
 admitted but defined. And in the assertion of Free-will we 
 have a further important characteristic of Descartes' doctrine, 
 which is used by him in a most characteristic way. He carries 
 it with him into his intellectual philosophy, to explain the 
 nature of error ; he leaves it behind him in his ethical theory, 
 which assumes the form, not of a doctrine of Duty, but only of 
 a doctrine of Good ; thus putting into it an illusory meaning, 
 and missing its real significance. We fall into errors, he sup- 
 poses, because our understanding is limited and our will 
 indefinite ; that is, we choose to affirm or deny far beyond the 
 range of our clear and distinct ideas: where the terms of a 
 possible predication are not yet free from confusion in the 
 understanding, the will rashly puts them together into a 
 proposition which has only a chance of truth. It is to be 
 observed that between understanding and will Descartes 
 recognises no distinction of kind, but only this inequality of 
 range: every affirmation is volition, and every volition is 
 
 1 (Euvres: Passions de 1'lme, Art. 18, V. p. 54. 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. 71-2. Art. 41.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 14! 
 
 affirmation ; but we do not credit the understanding with it 
 except where truth is secured by clear and distinct conceptions. 
 In short, there is no facultative plurality in the mind; it is a 
 single organ of true judgment for all purposes, cognitive or 
 practical ; just as we have seen in Plato that vovs is the 
 supreme term both of intellection and of virtue. 
 
 As both matter and mind are merely created substances, 
 their separate essences and all the relations and properties 
 therein involved are derivative ; dependent on the absolute 
 will of God for their origin and their conservation, moment by 
 moment. But the essence of matter is extension, whose pro- 
 perties and relations are defined by geometry ; and the essence 
 of mind is thinking, whether intellectual or volitional ; whose 
 laws of true knowing are determined by Logic, and of right 
 doing, by Ethics. God therefore is the author, by absolute 
 Will, of the true and false, and of the right and wrong ; and 
 might, if he chose, have caused Euclid to be a farrago of lies, 
 and the devil to be the model of perfection. The ideas 
 of ' necessary truth,' and of ' immutable righteousness,' are 
 thus exploded, and replaced by a doctrine of 'arbitrary 
 decrees.' Hence the will of God becomes, not the revealer, but 
 the inventor, of moral distinctions, and has itself, as being 
 prior to them, no moral quality, and can be the object of 
 obedience only, and not of such homage and aspiration as the 
 conscience renders to perfect holiness. From this conception 
 of a Divine absolutism the Ethics of Descartes derive a peculiar 
 character, which made them more acceptable to the world than 
 to the Church of his own time. As they are matters of mere 
 institution (0eVei, not <f>v<ra), for the regulation of human 
 society, and rest only on power, they scarcely rise above the 
 prudential level, and, catching no religious fire, glow with no 
 ' enthusiam of humanity.' His supreme virtue, Generosity, 
 is itself presented in a highly aristocratic form, in which self- 
 appreciation and conscious dignity have at least as much con- 
 cern in a mild treatment of ignorance and weakness, as any 
 genuine sympathy and brotherhood with the children of God. 
 And not the least curious feature of his sketch is that, 
 although his philosophy leads him to insist on the immorta- 
 lity of the soul, his moral conception of human life remains
 
 142 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 wholly unaffected by this doctrine, and keeps the narrow scale 
 and the secular colouring which it would rightly have, if there 
 were no capacities in reserve for larger fields of being, and no 
 perpetuity for high affections which here can only try their 
 wings. 
 
 And yet Descartes cannot be said to have consistently 
 carried out this conception of God, as anterior to the differ- 
 entiation of truth from falsity, of right from wrong. For 
 the idea of God which reveals His existence and expresses 
 His essence is that of an ' entirely perfect being ;' and that 
 by 'perfect' is meant not simply ' complete' in the sense of 
 total reality, but 'possessed of every excellence,' is evident 
 from this, that it embraces Veracity among its contents, and 
 is assigned as our ultimate ground of reliance on what He 
 imparts to our thought. ' The first property of Gpd which we 
 have here to consider,' he says, ' consists in this, that He is 
 absolutely true, and the Giver of all light. It is therefore 
 impossible that He should deceive us, or, in the literal and 
 positive sense, be the cause of our errors, to which, as ex- 
 perience shows, we are subject 1 .' Here is a moral excel- 
 lence implanted in the Divine essence itself, and therefore 
 eternally existing ; which could not be, if the very inven- 
 tion and creation of moral differences were acts of His will. 
 And the particular moral excellence which is singled out, 
 Veracity, is that which implies a ' truth of things' with 
 which it is a perfection for the truth of inward and of com- 
 municated thought to be in exact accord ; so that intellectual 
 discrimination and faithfulness in character are at one time 
 assumed in the infinite nature, and at another made to wait 
 for the finite. A theory of the universe which resolves every- 
 thing into the arbitrary power of the potter over his clay is 
 deduced from the assumption of the Divine action within the 
 limits of an eternal law of righteousness. 
 
 1 Princ. Phil. P. I. 29. Vol. III. p. 81.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 143 
 
 7. Incompatible Positions. 
 
 When we look back upon this system as a whole, all its 
 minor inconsistencies are lost in comparison with the funda- 
 mental variance between its doctrine of being, and its doc- 
 trine of knowledge. In the former, we are introduced to two 
 natures, intellectual and material, of which as substances 
 neither can have anything in common with the other, or 
 any power of revealing it ; so that, although co-present as 
 neighbours, they are invisible to each other, and, for any 
 mutual converse, might as well be at opposite ends of the 
 diameter of the solar system. That our body and our mind 
 should lodge together on these uncomfortable terms would 
 be a sorry conclusion to a philosophy of knowledge ; resolv- 
 ing it all into mental self-knowledge, and, beyond that, and 
 in the field of outward objects, into universal nescience. To 
 avoid this failure, Descartes goes aside into his logical theory, 
 and borrows thence the idea of God which his self-scrutiny 
 has laid open to him, and invokes it to mediate between the 
 strangers that are waiting for an introduction to each other. 
 From this idea in himself he can pass to the reality of God, 
 for they are both of the same kind, viz. thinking natures, 
 related moreover as effect to cause, finite conception to In- 
 finite source. And then, finding in this Divine reality a 
 veracity on which he can depend, and in himself a belief, 
 imparted thence, in a body which he carries about with him 
 among other bodies, he is lifted over the impassable gulf, and 
 makes friends with his own limbs and the organism of the 
 world. In this circuit of reasoning, however, we have no 
 legitimate logical continuity, but an appeal carried to the 
 supposed ordo cognoscendi, to reverse the sentence of the 
 ordo essendi, and take away the rule of negation which 
 had been pronounced absolute. And if the judgment be 
 justly reversed, and it be allowed that the mind rightly sup- 
 poses itself to know external things, then the doctrine proves 
 false that thinking and extension are incapable of dealings 
 with one another, and constitute parallel worlds that never 
 touch. If the word ' substance is to be seriously taken in its
 
 144 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 proper meaning as applied to all the factors of the argument, 
 the contradictions involved are still more marked. In that 
 case a third substance, viz. the Divine, is called in, in order 
 to bring the other two into communication: with the effect, 
 however, of increasing instead of resolving the difficulty ; for, 
 as substance, this third should have no contact with the 
 others, between which he is required to mediate ; while they, 
 as substances, should need no other in order to exist and 
 act, yet are made dependent upon Him as both their author 
 and interpreter. In both instances, therefore, functions and 
 relations are ascribed which are directly contradictory of the 
 very notion of Substance. If mind and matter are derived 
 from God, and operate only through His aid, then there is 
 another than themselves necessary to their existence, and 
 one mark of substantive being fails, and they drop out of 
 the category. If, conversely, God acts on them, being sub- 
 stances, then He is not excluded from them, and the other 
 mark of substantive existence fails, and He drops out of 
 the category. And if all three be substances, then is no 
 one before or after the rest, or entitled to the preeminent 
 Divine name ; and it is not less impossible for God than 
 for matter to impart an idea to mind. This palpable incon- 
 sistency Descartes has no better method of evading than by 
 a confessedly equivocal use of the word substance, dispens- 
 ing with one of its two characters in the case of mind and 
 matter; with the other in the case of God. They exclude 
 each other, but need Him ; He needs only Himself, but is not 
 excluded from them, A distinction is thus drawn between 
 infinite and finite, creative and created, substance ; at the 
 expense, however, of every advantage that could be hoped 
 from resort to this logical notion. In the lower part of the 
 scheme of deduction, its resources for explaining the genesis 
 of things are fairly used ; each of the two substances comes 
 out in its attribute, and the attribute ramifies into the modes. 
 But in the higher stage of the process there is no such rela- 
 tion, and an impassable chasm separates between God, as 
 supreme term, and the two which are said to be derived 
 from Him ; if He is called substance in relation to them, 
 they are not allowed to be attributes in reference to Him.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES, 145 
 
 His existence, therefore, in this character explains nothing 
 respecting their origination ; it is not from Him, qua Sub- 
 stance, but in some other and unexpounded capacity, that 
 they proceed. In short, this theological apex of Descartes' 
 doctrine is merely suspended over it in the air, and does not 
 really repose on its foundations. God occupies merely an 
 external relation, as a tertium quid, to mind and matter ; 
 which He produces, sustains, unites, not by any intelligible 
 evolution from His nature, but by arbitrary miracle ; by 
 passing out of Himself to set up other existences beside Him. 
 He is the physical creator of the universe, not its rational 
 ground: He has put into man this or that idea as a deposit, 
 and into matter this or that constitution, which might have 
 been quite different ; so that there is no deduction of things 
 as they are from His essence, as there is of human know- 
 ledge and natural physics from the essence of mind as think- 
 ing and matter as extended. Causation, in the Cartesian 
 system, takes, on its upper step, only a dynamical leap ; but 
 on its lower proceeds by way of notional development. If 
 the appeal to God's power explains the existence of mind 
 and matter, their essence is permitted to remain arbitrary 
 and accidental ; i.e. not elicited from His essence, but a de- 
 tached fact, which has to be accepted, not deduced. This 
 philosophy, therefore, had to be supplemented by faith ; a 
 feature which, however innocent and even necessary in itself, 
 is justly chargeable as a fault in a writer who did not intend 
 to omit anything from the scope of his system, but claimed 
 for it an all-comprehensive character. This failure to realise 
 its ambitious aim provoked into existence the larger doctrine 
 of Spinoza. 
 
 8. Rejection of Final Causes. 
 
 One feature of Descartes' philosophy I have yet to men- 
 tion, which, though not peculiar to him, recommended him 
 with special effect to the favour and disfavour of contem- 
 poraries and successors. He rejected the whole doctrine of 
 Final Cannes, and insisted that in studying the dependence 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book 1. 
 
 of things we can never reason, in the order of thought, from 
 the end to the means, but always in the order of production, 
 from the means to the end ; keeping strictly to the track of 
 efficient causation. ' We shall not stop,' he says, ' to examine 
 the ends which God has proposed to Himself in creating the 
 world, and shall entirely reject from our philosophy the 
 search for final causes ; for we ought not to be so presump- 
 tuous as to believe that God has chosen to take us into His 
 counsel ; but, considering Him as the Author of all things, 
 we shall apply ourselves only to make out, by the reasoning 
 faculties which He has implanted in us, how the things which 
 we perceive through the medium of our senses can have been 
 produced ; and we shall be certain, from those of His attri- 
 butes of which He has willed us to have some knowledge, 
 that whatever we have once perceived clearly and distinctly 
 to belong to the nature of these things is secure of 
 being true 1 .' This proposition was a natural consequence 
 of the author's application of purely mathematical and me- 
 chanical method to the study of nature, not only in its 
 physics and astronomy, but even in its animal physiology. 
 The properties of an ellipse are not put into it by design, 
 but are elicited from its definitions; nor can the laws of 
 matter be discovered by considering what they have to do 
 and therefore ought to be, but only by noticing how it be- 
 haves in spite of varying conditions. And whoever forms 
 his conception of all knowledge from the procedure of these 
 primary sciences must necessarily repudiate all reference to 
 the question, 'What is it for 1 ?' But the modern naturalist 
 is well aware that, in tracing the relations and development 
 of animal life, he cannot avoid the "frequent enquiry, ' What 
 is the advantage gained by this or that modification of 
 structure or of instinct?' a question with which no reader 
 of Darwin's writings can fail to be familiar ; and which is 
 vindicated by authors so little theological as Schopenhauer 
 and Hartmann. 
 
 1 Princ. Phil. P. I. 28. Tom. III. 81.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 147 
 
 9. Descartes Controversies, Influence, and Death. 
 
 Descartes' verdict on this point was eagerly seized upon for 
 approval by scientific physicists in Holland, especially by 
 Le Koy (Heinrich Regius), lecturer on medicine and physics 
 in Utrecht, Ludwig Meyer (afterwards editor of Spinoza's 
 posthumous works), and Balthasar Bekker, in Amsterdam. On 
 the other hand, it sharpened the hostility of the theologians, 
 to whose aversion vehement expression was given by Gisbert 
 Voet, Rector of the University at Utrecht, and by Martin 
 Schook, Professor at Groningen, in a series of controversial 
 tracts, and particularly in a Discourse by the latter on occa- 
 sion of his taking possession of his chair. The passionate 
 advocacy of Le Roy, dividing the students of the University 
 into turbulent factions, gave an advantage to the enemies of 
 Descartes ; and the teaching of his philosophy was proscribed 
 by the Rector (1643). Though Descartes, on appealing to the 
 magistrates, obtained redress for some of the calumnies cir- 
 culated against him, and found a partial protection from the 
 Prince of Orange and the States General, yet he was indicted 
 as a public offender before the city court; and in 1645 the 
 printing and sale of his works was prohibited. The reply 
 which he made to his opponents, in his letter to the magis- 
 trates of the city of Utrecht against MM. Voet, father and 
 son (probably June, 1645) 1 , is able and vigorous enough, 
 but in its tone and temper gives him no moral advantage 
 over his enemies. While the Calvinists of Holland raised 
 this storm around him, the Roman Catholics were divided 
 in their feeling towards his philosophy. Under Jesuit in- 
 fluence the Curia at Rome put his writings under the ban 
 in 1663, and the influence of the Sorbonne was directed 
 against them ; but, on the other hand, they were studied 
 with favour at the Oratory, and especially treated with re- 
 spect by Antoine Arnauld ; so that Descartes' prudential 
 deference towards the Church was not wholly without its re- 
 ward. He was more happy in winning the admiration and 
 regard of princely protectors really competent to appreciate the 
 
 1 Tom. IX. p. 250. 
 
 L2
 
 148 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 characteristics of his thought. His correspondence with the 
 Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate shows that it was some- 
 thing more than a courtier's compliment when he said that, of 
 all his friends, she best understood his philosophy. This accom- 
 plished lady was the eldest daughter of the King of Bohemia 
 (Friedrich V. of the Palatinate), who lost his crown at the 
 battle of Prague, and died in 1632 of the plague, at Mainz 
 (the year of Spinoza's birth) ; and sister of the liberal-minded 
 Carl Ludwig of the Palatinate, who opened his territory as 
 an asylum for persecuted faiths, and offered Spinoza a pro- 
 fessorship at Heidelberg ; and niece of Charles I. of England, 
 on whose death there is a letter of condolence to her from 
 Descartes. Her mother's exile had settled the family at the 
 Hague ; and there Elizabeth, already a linguist, a mathema- 
 tician, and not strange to philosophical literature, fell in, be- 
 fore she was twenty, with Descartes' first publication. It so 
 laid hold of her, as to decide her devotion for life to philo- 
 sophical studies. She declined all projects of marriage, and 
 though never indifferent to the practical course of human 
 affairs, reserved her independence chiefly with a view to in- 
 tellectual pursuits. It was his friendship for her that chiefly 
 determined Descartes to take up his residence near Leyden. 
 His Principia Pkilosaphice are dedicated to her ; and his cor- 
 respondence with her, commenced in 1643, ended only with 
 his death. On its ethical side it has a durable interest. Less 
 fortunate was his relation with another royal disciple, Chris- 
 tina, Queen of Sweden, the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. 
 With strange reaction from her father's faith, she conformed 
 to the Roman Catholic Church ; and, taking Descartes' pro- 
 fessions of ecclesiastical allegiance au semeux, she felt safe 
 in indulging her desire to become his pupil, and earnestly 
 pressed him, with liberal offers, to take up his abode at 
 Stockholm. He complied with her request, and removed 
 thither in the autumn of 1649 ; and for a few months was 
 daily at the palace at 5 A.M. in attendance upon the queen's 
 leisure hours. But the life was uncongenial to him : the lan- 
 guage was strange to him ; the food" was unpalatable ; the 
 early morning hours intolerable ; the houses uncomfortable ; 
 the climate blighting ; and his own position that of an exile.
 
 Branch II.] DESCARTES. 149 
 
 His strength and spirits gave way, and he died of fever on 
 February 11, 1650, at the age of 53, receiving the sacra- 
 mental viaticum in his last hours at the hands of the priest. 
 His remains, after sixteen years' repose in Sweden, were sent 
 to France, and re-interred at St. Genevieve du Mont. 
 
 10. ' Occasional Causes' of Geulinx. 
 
 I shall not attempt to follow the philosophy of Descartes 
 along the several lines of direction which it took after his 
 death. Ere long it raised up metaphysical thinkers suffi- 
 ciently strong to own their obligation to it, yet win an in- 
 dependent position ; and they cannot be passed by without 
 a special study. A minor effort to remedy the most obvious 
 weakness of the system, admits of brief explanation, and 
 forms a natural link between Descartes himself and the great- 
 est of his successors. 
 
 We have seen what embarrassments arose from recognising 
 Extension and Thinking as alike substantive, whilst yet 
 making them both dependent upon a higher, God, also treated 
 as substance. The only way of escape from this embarrass- 
 ment is boldly to strip mind and matter of their substantive 
 pretensions, and, after reducing them to phenomenal being, 
 to carry the idea of substance up to the supreme term (God), 
 and fix it there as its exclusive seat. To do this, however, 
 was to complete the weakest part of the scheme at the 
 expense of the strongest ; to win it for monism by relentlessly 
 sacrificing that fundamental dualism, of self and the outer 
 world, in which the system arose, and for which it subsisted. 
 This was too heavy a price for the first disciples of the school 
 to pay for consistency ; and less thorough attemps to remedy 
 the imperfection were made, before the keen edge of Spinoza's 
 logic cut away the solid mass of the doctrine and preserved 
 only the securer parts of its nexus for the weaving of another. 
 The impassable chasm left between thinking being and ex- 
 tended being, forbidding either to operate on the other, left it 
 unintelligible how objects could appear to give us percep- 
 tions, and we in turn could seem to act on objects. It was to 
 solve this mystery that Geulinx (Professor of Philosophy
 
 150 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT, 
 
 at Leyden, 1646 1669) devised his doctrine of ' Occasional 
 Causes] a doctrine which so manoeuvred the three substances, 
 without relinquishing any of them, as to explain the corre- 
 spondence of mental and material phenomena, yet save (it 
 was supposed) their independence. No influence ever passed 
 between body and soul ; but, on occasion of a corporeal 
 change, God put an idea of it into our mind ; and on oc- 
 casion of a volition on our part, God moved the limb and 
 did the act for us. The body and the mind thus coexist, but 
 pursue their separate courses without any causal connection. 
 With the succession of volitions in the one correspond, term for 
 term, the successive motions of the limbs in the other; but 
 only as the beats of two clocks may be made to keep time 
 together, though really independent of each other. Causation 
 in this view distributes itself among the three substances 
 in the following manner: (1) Mind can act on itself, and, 
 within its own enclosure, bring forward thought on thought, 
 and will on will, but can know nothing, and do nothing, in 
 relation to the sphere beyond itself; (2) Body can act on 
 body, and turn up phenomenon after phenomenon of the 
 material world ; (3) God interpolates all the mental pheno- 
 mena of which outward and corporeal things are the objects, 
 and all the material phenomena which answer to mental ante- 
 cedents. The hypothesis, no doubt, fills up the whole series 
 of facts, and supplies an exhaustive explanation. But it still 
 introduces the first and Divine substance as operating on or 
 within both the secondary ones; which is just as difficult to 
 conceive, just as little reconcilable with the nature of sub- 
 stance, as the agency of the secondaries on each other. Geu- 
 linx himself was perfectly aware that his doctrine crossed the 
 proper boundary of philosophy, and passed into the super- 
 natural ; for he declares that, did the earth itself tremble 
 when the word ' earth ' was pronounced, the miracle would 
 be no greater than the actual movement of the speaker's 
 tongue in uttering it. This escape into miracle, it is needless 
 to say, is no explanation, but simply a despair of explanation. 
 And the chief service rendered by the scheme of Occasional 
 Causes is, that it brings very distinctly into view the logical 
 infirmities of the Cartesian School.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 MALEBRANCHE. 
 
 To make room for the coexistence of finite and infinite 
 causality has ever been the crux philosophwum ; for no 
 sooner is the infinite invoked than the finite flies. This is 
 just what happens in the transition from Geulinx to Male- 
 branche. The former seemed to have reduced our power low 
 enough, when he said that, in all our voluntary movements, 
 and in all outward perceptions, we are mere spectators of 
 phenomena without agency of our own. But he charged upon 
 us no other inability than of the mind to act upon the body, 
 and the body on the mind ; still leaving to each the function 
 of conducting its own history. This reservation is disallowed 
 by Malebranche ; in whose theory God becomes the sole and 
 universal cause, within as well as between the two spheres 
 of mind and matter. In him therefore philosophy goes over 
 from the hesitating position in which Descartes had placed 
 it into complete supernaturalism ; as, in Spinoza, it passes 
 into complete naturalism. The contrast between them is 
 interesting, as showing the divergent directions which the 
 inevitable struggle for consistency may take, when a system 
 deficient in coherence is seized on and worked out by minds 
 of opposite tendency. Had Spinoza really been influenced 
 by the mystical turn of thought which is ascribed to him, 
 and which at first sight his language sometimes appears to 
 favour, he would have found his task already accomplished 
 by his French contemporary ; and his Ethics would have 
 repeated, instead of superseding, the Recherche de la Ve'rite. 
 But the speculative genius which was common to both men 
 served a different need in each of them ; in Malebranche, to 
 give base and persuasiveness to Religion ; in Spinoza, to give
 
 153 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 unity and universality to Science ; in the one, to exhibit the 
 universe as divine; in the other to prove it 'geometrical;' 
 starting, in each case, with premisses taken from Descartes. 
 This different interest, animating their philosophy, is con- 
 spicuous, not less in their life than in their writings. 
 
 1. Life and Personality. 
 
 Malebranche, son of a royal secretary in Paris, was born 
 in 1638 (six years after Spinoza), the youngest of a family 
 of ten ; and being weakly and sensitive from a malformation 
 of the spine, was brought up at home till old enough to go 
 to college, first for the study of philosophy at the College de 
 la Marche, and then, at the age of twenty-two, for the theolo- 
 gical course of the Sorbonne. So far he was carried without 
 giving indication of any superior gift : the drill of ordinary 
 education found and left him languid ; and neither the logic 
 of the schools, nor the Church history and technical theology 
 of his ecclesiastical teachers, laid any hold upon him or 
 touched any inward spring of power. Yet in Richard Simon 
 he had no common master in Hebrew and Biblical criticism. 
 As if conscious of a function for which he must still wait, 
 he declined a canonry in Notre Dame, and, for purposes of 
 further study, joined the congregation of the Oratorians. 
 During a walk in the city, he took up at a book-shop Des- 
 cartes' posthumous treatise De Homine and looked into it : 
 it rivetted him, and struck right home to the needs of his 
 genius : as he read it, he was thrown into such palpitations 
 of delight that he had to pause for recovery. It was his 
 moment of ' conversion,' which waked up his sleeping gifts 
 and determined his career : he thenceforth devoted himself 
 to the systematic study of the human mind, in its relation 
 to the body, to external bodies, and to God, guided by the 
 light of Descartes' leading principles. After ten years' uninter- 
 rupted labour upon these themes, he gave the results to the 
 world in the first volume of his chief work, the Recherche de 
 la Verite", containing the first three of its six books, on the 
 sources of error in the Senses, the Imagination, and the
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 153 
 
 Understanding; the second volume following in the next 
 year (1675), treating of the Inclinations, the Passions, and the 
 method of attaining Truth. The book immediately called 
 forth the liveliest enthusiasm and antipathy, and passed in 
 twenty years through six editions, constantly amended and 
 enlarged by supplement and explanations, till it received its 
 final form in the Latin translation of the Abbe' L'Enfant 
 in 1684. The attack from the philosophical side was de- 
 livered against the first volume by an ecclesiastic, the Abbe* 
 Simon Foucher, an ultra-Cartesian, who founded his criti- 
 cism on the sceptical principles of the Middle Academy: he 
 was promptly answered in the Preface to the second vo- 
 lume. Far more numerous were the theological objections, 
 not only from the Jesuits, but from the Jansenists; Rdgis 
 (Pierre Sylvain) assailed the transcendental turn given to 
 the Cartesian doctrine of ideas, which he had himself modified 
 in the opposite or empirical direction ; and Quesnel (Pas- 
 quier), controverting Malebranche's doctrine of Grace, re- 
 ferred the dispute to the arbitration of the aged Antoine 
 Arnauld, and drew from him the condemnation which he 
 desired. Malebranche's reply, Traitt de la Nature et de la 
 Grace, first sharply criticised in 1683 by Arnauld's Traite des 
 'i'<iies et des fausses Idees, led to a series of polemical tracts 
 which will be found in the collected works of both authors. 
 In these writings, as well as in his MeUitations Chretiennes et 
 Me'taphysiques (1683), and his Entretiens sur la Me'taphysique 
 et sur la Religion, Malebranche's favourite appeal, notwith- 
 standing his deference to the Church as the interpreter of 
 revelation, is to Reason, as the final ground on which religion 
 itself reposes. Among the adversaries that were scared by 
 his originality was the formidable Bossuet himself; who re- 
 corded his opinion of the treatise on Nature and Grace by 
 writing in his copy the words ' Pulchra, nova, falsa,' and who 
 tried in vain to provoke him to an oral discussion of his 
 characteristic doctrine ; and, on Malebranche's resolute re- 
 fusal to commit himself to an unwritten statement, is believed 
 to have consigned to Arnauld the literary duel which was 
 hardly suitable to his own dignity. He won back, however, 
 the good-will of Bossuet in a later controversy (1697) with
 
 154 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 a Benedictine father, Fra^ois Lamy, who, in a Treatise on 
 the Connaissance de soi-meme, had attributed to him the 
 Quietist doctrine that love to God must be absolutely dis- 
 interested. Malebranche would not accept responsibility for 
 an opinion already condemned in Rome as an enthusiasm ; 
 and explained himself in a treatise De I' amour du Dieu, which 
 completely satisfied the Bishop of Meaux, but was accused 
 by Lamy of inconsistency with the 'Enquiry after Truth.' 
 The explanation consisted essentially in identifying the ' pos- 
 session of God' with the joy attached to it, instead of separat- 
 ing them as means and end : the union with Him is indeed 
 the supreme pleasure, and in desiring it, we desire the plea- 
 sure ; but only as an inseparable element and nurture of Love 
 to Him, and not as a private interest to which He is made 
 subservient. His last controversy was occasioned by a 
 work of Boursier's (Laurent-Francis) on the ' action of God 
 upon created objects/ the purpose of which seems to have 
 been to defend the idea, favoured by the followers of Aquinas, 
 of the preordination of all physical movements, as against 
 the new doctrine of God's immediate and living agency in 
 the causation of every change. Malebranche replied in an 
 essay entitled Reflexions sur la pre'motion Physique (1715). 
 Few of these metaphysical writings give any adequate idea 
 of his attainments in mathematical and physical science: he 
 reserved for the Academy of Sciences, of which he was elected 
 a member in 1699, his essays on subjects of this kind ; but 
 in one of these (on the communication of motion) he criticises 
 and corrects a Cartesian physical doctrine which he had 
 advanced in his 'Enquiry into Truth,' viz. that the quantity 
 of motion in nature is invariable. 
 
 Malebranche's incessant intellectual activity was sustained 
 against the frequent oppression of infirm health. Like 
 Berkeley, he had his favourite remedy for all maladies: his 
 elixir vitce was more accessible even than tar-water, for it 
 was water pure and simple ; of which he took profuse 
 draughts, refusing everything else, whenever his ailments 
 returned upon him. If the story be true which is told 
 of Berkeley, that he visited Malebranche in Paris in 1715, 
 the two philosophers may have compared notes about their
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 155 
 
 respective panaceas ; but if so, the event gave a deplorable 
 victory to Berkeley ; for, as the tradition goes, their discussion, 
 in spite of hydropathy, was fatal to Malebranche ; inducing 
 an inflammation of the lungs, which carried him off, Oct. 15th 
 of that year. It is, however, very doubtful whether the two 
 idealists ever met. Neither of them has recorded any in- 
 terview with the other ; and though Berkeley, two years 
 before this time, had a letter of introduction to Malebranche, 
 no evidence exists of its having ever been presented. Had 
 they met, however great their moral sympathy, based upon 
 common virtues, might have been, no philosophical approxi- 
 mation could well have resulted from their intercourse ; for 
 though both might agree to resolve the changes of the 
 physical world into the action of God, their conceptions were 
 irreconcilably different of the relation between finite spirits 
 and the infinite. 
 
 The life of Malebranche was essentially that of a thinker, 
 not of an actor, or even of a scholar. A despiser of mere 
 learning, without historical curiosity, impatient of critical 
 studies, careless of politics and social affairs, he communed 
 with himself, with nature, and with God; and was 
 never tired of sounding the speculative depths to which 
 the problems regarding them descended. For quiet me- 
 ditation on them he frequently retired to the country, 
 alternating his walks in the woods with seclusion in a 
 room shaded by drawn blinds. Not that he was an aus- 
 tere recluse; for he was always accessible and affectionate 
 to his many friends, and, when he could unbend, enjoyed 
 nothing so much as to talk and play with children. His 
 ecclesiastical training had done nothing to spoil his pure and 
 open love of truth ; and his habitual piety imparted at once 
 an elevation and a winning modesty to his character which 
 made him universally beloved. Few philosophical writers 
 present their thoughts in so lucid and attractive a style. His 
 great work, says Fontenelle, ' left the impression of originality 
 by the author's great art of setting abstract ideas in the 
 clearest light, of connecting them together, of skilfully 
 mingling with them a number of matters less abstract, which, 
 being entirely understood, encouraged the reader to attack
 
 156 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 the rest, and flattered him with the hope of understanding 
 them. Besides, the diction is pure and chaste ; it has 
 all the dignity which the subject requires, and all the grace 
 of which it admits.' In this eulogy there is, perhaps, a little 
 French exaggeration ; at least, the modern reader, accustomed 
 to a more rigorous treatment of philosophical problems, 
 will, perhaps, be less affected than Fontenelle by the diffuse 
 elegance of Malebranche, and would at times gladly exchange 
 it for a more compressed and severe exposition of his 
 reasoning. His minor controversial writings partake more 
 of the vivacity and point which are said to have given a 
 charm to his conversation ; sometimes at the expense of the 
 courtesy due to worthy opponents : and yet, if they are tried 
 by the contemporary standard of polemical manners, they 
 bear comparison with the best examples of temper and 
 fairness. So much for the man; now for his system of 
 thought. 
 
 2. Illusions through the Senses and Imagination. 
 
 An enquiry into the Pursuit of Truth is an enquiry into 
 the avoidance of error ; for error, the great source of human 
 misery, is but a missing of the truth ; and the sources of it 
 must be as numerous as our possibilities of knowledge. In 
 other words, each of our capacities for knowing is a liability 
 to ignorance, and must be examined in its turn, in order 
 to our protection from mistake. The enquiry, therefore, 
 will arrange itself into a review, one after another, of the 
 several faculties of our nature. 
 
 As matter is a substance having Extension for its essence, 
 so is the human mind a simple substance having Thought 
 for its essence. And of these two each has a pair of capa- 
 bilities whereby a certain correspondency is established 
 between them. Matter is capable of assuming this or that 
 figure, and this or that motion; Mind, of understanding, 
 and of Drilling. The liability of matter to be shaped, and 
 the liability of the mind to have perceptions and ideas, are 
 pure passivities, the states in question being given to the
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 157 
 
 respective subjects. Again, all motion in matter, however 
 commenced, tends to take and keep a rectilinear direction ; 
 and similarly, all varieties of moving impulse in the mind 
 are towards Good, or God as the absolute good, each being 
 drawn to some particular aspect of this totality. Though the 
 Author of Nature is the universal cause, alike of material 
 movement and of mental inclination, there is this difference 
 between the two cases ; that matter cannot, without external 
 interruption, arrest or change its advance in a right line ; 
 whereas the Will has an inherent power of variously deter- 
 mining, towards this or that, the indeterminate impression 
 or inclination towards good-in-general which it receives from 
 God. This power of specialising the good, which, in its 
 universality, is the object of the Will, is Liberty. It is not 
 a ' Liberty of indifference,' to will or not to will : will we 
 must ; it is the very movement impressed upon our nature, 
 which we can no more stay than the falling stone can stand 
 still in the air ; but we can bend it towards any preconceived 
 type of good other than that which preoccupies it now. 
 All that is needful for the exercise of this power is, that the 
 mind be furnished with this preconception ; to choose a par- 
 ticular good, we must know it. Understanding, therefore, or 
 the possession of ideas, must come before selection and action : 
 understanding never judges, or passes beyond the reception of 
 mental materials. It is the Will that really judges and 
 decides on what is presented to it by the Understanding; 
 and it may be variously betrayed into error by the matter 
 that is thus offered to its determining power 1 . 
 
 The cognitive faculties which supply all the objects to 
 our will are the Senses, the Imagination, and the Under- 
 standing. Through the senses, external objects act upon the 
 brain, occasioning an immediate sensation, and leaving a 
 durable vestige there. In the sensations themselves there is 
 nothing misleading or hurtful ; and if we are deceived through 
 their means, we are self-deceived ; the fault is with the will, 
 which, abusing its liberty, draws hasty inferences from im- 
 perfect data. The several classes of illusion, especially visual, 
 are expounded by our author, involving misjudgments of the 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, I. I.
 
 158 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 distance, size, form, and motion or rest of objects. All these 
 it is possible to escape, by scrupulous analysis of our ex- 
 perience. But for want of this, four perfectly distinct factors 
 in the sensible phenomenon are habitually confounded to- 
 gether ; viz. (1) what happens in the object affecting us (say, 
 a burning log), e.g. the agitation of particles throwing heat- 
 vibrations upon our hands ; (2) what happens in our own 
 organs of sense, e. g. the molecular undulations of the special 
 nerves up to the brain ; (3) the sensation, a phenomenon of 
 the mind ; (4) the mental judgment, that what we feel is in 
 our own hand and in the burning object. It is the union 
 in us of body and mind that occasions our confusion of these 
 separate things together : so far it is natural ; but it admits 
 of correction by the application of reasonable attention. By 
 far the most considerable error, however, is found in the 
 prevalent belief that the senses give us a knowledge of an 
 object as it is in itself; whereas they tell nothing except of 
 its relation to our body. Only within these limits are their 
 reports offered to us and admissible by us l . 
 
 In the phenomena of Imagination there is no external 
 object to initiate the organic movement ; but, in place of it, 
 the ' animal spirits ' spontaneously institute the same agita- 
 tion of the nerves, and through these the same impression on 
 the brain, and the same image in the mind. We are aware 
 in this case that it is not external ; but, coexisting with the 
 pictures given by outward objects, blending with them and 
 sometimes resembling them, it becomes the source of many 
 illusions ; as when men read a human face on the moon's 
 disc, and see horses and battles in the clouds ; or, if devoted 
 to the study of some one object, find that object everywhere ; 
 like Gilbert, who, after long engagement with magnetic 
 phenomena, ascribed to the magnet all sorts of natural 
 changes which were due to other causes. To this kind of 
 mistake studious persons are exceptionally liable ; since it 
 is easier to read than to think, they surrender themselves to 
 a favourite author or an ancient authority, and prefer a 
 finished picture presented by another to the laborious con- 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, I. 6 13. 20.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 159 
 
 struction of a new one for themselves ; or, if once an author 
 has invented some new system into which he frames his 
 world, he has no place left for disturbing facts, and becomes 
 a captive in his own prison. Others, again, reading with 
 critical intelligence rather than with any depth of judgment, 
 discern only the flaws and failures in the books which pass 
 through their hands ; and draw the conclusion that certainty 
 is nowhere to be found, and that all supposed knowledge 
 is but insecure conjecture. The stronger the imagination, i.e. 
 the more susceptible the brain of deep impressions from the 
 action of the nerve undulations, the more subject will the 
 mind be to the tyranny of these illusions 1 . 
 
 3. Doctrine of Ideas. 
 
 In proceeding to the Understanding, as a possible occasion 
 for error, Malebranche apologises for the more abstract treat- 
 ment imposed upon him by the nature of the subject. For here 
 he takes leave of the phenomena due to the presence of the 
 bodily organism, and is concerned with the intellect pure and 
 simple ; by which he means the faculty we have of knowing 
 external objects without forming any image of them in the 
 brain to serve as their representative : i.e. the power of think- 
 ing of them. This power is relative, and has to be considered 
 in itself as subjective to us ; and in respect of the object of our 
 thought. 
 
 In the former aspect, it is simply the mind itself, and not 
 any modification of it, like sensation, imagination, will ; for 
 thinking is the very essence of mind, as extension is of mat- 
 ter ; there might be matter without motion ; there might be 
 mind without will ; but if you take away thought, mind is no 
 longer there ; it thinks, and thinks always, even in sleep or 
 swoon; but as this takes place in it as spiritual, it leaves 
 no trace upon the brain, and therefore is not in the custody 
 of memory, and is lost to our waking consciousness. All 
 modes of mind are susceptible of degree ; we may feel more, 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, II. i. I, 2. 5, 6; ii. 2. 4 8; iii. i.
 
 160 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 and imagine more, at one time than at another ; but for the 
 mind to think more now than then is as little possible as for 
 matter to be more extended at one hour than at another 1 . 
 Here we recognise the Cartesian doctrine against which was 
 written the chapter of Locke's essay, entitled ' Men think not 
 always.' 
 
 Next comes the question, what is the object of our appre- 
 hension when we have cognisance of anything outside of us. 
 When we perceive the sun, does the mind quit the body and 
 run along the radius vector to get within familiar proximity 
 to him ? It is not likely. Rather is the immediate object of 
 the mind something which is in intimate union with our soul, 
 entering it along with the visual image but not identical with 
 it, viz. the Idea of the sun. The difference between images 
 or representations and ideas is the difference between knower 
 and known: a perception of sense, a representation of the 
 imagination, is a modification of the mind itself ; an idea is 
 the object of the mind in its cognitive act, presupposed in its 
 perception, and the true cause of that mental modification. 
 You cannot have a representation of an object unless you 
 have an idea of what is represented ; but it does not follow 
 that there is anything external resembling this idea ; for we 
 may have ideas of things which do not externally exist. It is 
 indispensable to conceive of a relation between sensible objects 
 and their ideas in an order inverse to that which is usually 
 given ; i.e. the ideas are not taken from an object as their sam- 
 ples ; but are themselves the models which created things im- 
 perfectly express, and which have a real, immutable, and eter- 
 nal existence, not even depending on God's will or causality, 
 inasmuch as they are uncaused and necessary 2 . 
 
 There are five ways conceivable by which we may be put 
 in possession of our knowledge of objects. (1) The ideas we 
 have of them may come from the objects themselves. This 
 supposition is excluded by the following considerations among 
 others ; that whatever comes from the Tbody must be corporeal 
 and therefore impenetrable ; so that if representative ideas, or 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, III. I, 2, init. VI. i. v. init. 
 
 * Ibid. III. ii. i. Illustr. ad II. sup. Nat. idearum. Expense a B^gis, II. 12. 
 14. 23.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 161 
 
 similars, are for ever flowing off from all things in heaven and 
 earth to all persons, they must be very much in each other's 
 way, and arrive considerably out of shape from collisions. 
 And it is inexplicable how images of solid objects, say the 
 different sides of a cube, can be sent out all of the same size 
 and form, and arrive in perspective, variously reduced and 
 contorted. (2) The mind may itself produce the ideas by its 
 intrinsic power. This is ' an arrogant conceit : ideas are of a 
 spiritual nature, with more and higher reality than material 
 things ; and to claim for ourselves the power to create them 
 is to credit ourselves with work superior to that of the Author 
 of nature. The error arises from the common habit of treating 
 concomitant or immediately consecutive phenomena as cause 
 and effect, the real cause being latent ; as when the impact of 
 one ball is taken for the cause of movement in another. So, 
 when by an impulse of attention we call up ideas of which we 
 are in want, we set them down to our own account, and treat 
 our will as their cause ; instead of being content to say that, 
 in the order of nature, this is the usual connection in which 
 they are given us. (3) Ideas of objects may be implanted in 
 us by God, either innately or pro re natd. This is highly 
 improbable. For, as the objects of which we need ideas are 
 infinite in number and heterogeneity, God would have to 
 create and store up in every mind an entire universe of ideas ; 
 from which, in some incomprehensible way, the mind would 
 have to select and turn out the particular ideas wanted from 
 moment to moment. Or, if this dealing out of ideas by exi- 
 gency is assigned to God, it renders Him subservient to our 
 caprice, placing His creative power at the disposal of human 
 nonsense and folly. (4) The mind may be supposed, by its 
 mere introspection, to gain all ideas of outward things in con- 
 templating itself and its own perfection ; so that it needs 
 nothing but its own nature in order to read the world. This 
 hypothesis, however, claims for ourselves what can be affirmed 
 only of God. In Him indeed, i.e. in His ideas, the universe is 
 preformed, and all that is or can be exists in thought, while 
 yet it is not ; so that He sees created objects in Himself. This 
 is the attribute of the Infinite being. But how can a finite 
 mind thus contain all beings within itself, and by its own 
 VOL. i. M
 
 162 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 reflective light read the essence and the existence of everything 
 else 1 1 
 
 The rejection of these four doctrines brings Malebranche to 
 the characteristic principle of his philosophy, viz. that we see 
 all things in God. The possibility of this is evident from two 
 considerations ; that in God there must be ideas of all things 
 created, for else He could not have created them ; and that God 
 is in intimate omnipresence with our minds. Hence our minds 
 are in contact with the very seat of all ideas. God is the place 
 of all spirits, as space is the place of all bodies. This being 
 so, can we doubt how the fact really stands ? God has but to 
 leave this infinite store open to our minds, i.e. to let us have 
 ideal capacity for it (without which what could 'mind' be?), 
 and the problem of our knowledge solves itself in the simplest 
 way, without any apparatus of an infinitude of ideas sepa- 
 rately created for each individual finite mind. Moreover, the 
 process of thought in fixing our attention on a particular ob- 
 ject is always a descent from the general to concentration upon 
 the special ; nor can we predicate about an individual without 
 referring it to a species, or of a species without including it in 
 a genus-; so that the mind is ever furnished with a higher 
 term, and in the last resort sees all beings comprised in One, 
 i.e. all ideas in God. Further, it has the idea of the Infinite, 
 which cannot proceed from finite resources ; and, what is more, 
 has it earlier than the idea of the finite ; inasmuch as the finite 
 can be thought only as a limitation within the infinite. The 
 very ground, therefore, of our thinking is no other than the one 
 boundless and universal Being ; and its process is a commu- 
 nion with His ideas. We, like all else, are made for Him as 
 our supreme end ; and he is the real object of all our know- 
 ledge and all our love 2 . 
 
 The startling nature of this doctrine occasioned so many 
 objections, that Malebranche made it the subject of more 
 special treatment in his Appendix of illustrations. Taking 
 it as universally admitted that man is a rational being, 
 .capable of knowing what is true, he insists that the Reason, 
 which is common to us all, and which makes us certain, 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, III. ii. 15. Ibid. III. ii. 6.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 163 
 
 not only that twice two are four, but that this relation holds 
 for a Chinaman, an Egyptian now a mummy, or a man 
 in the moon, cannot be the property of any individuality, 
 but must be universal, the ground not of this or that created 
 mind, but of Mind in general, prior to all differences of 
 personality. It is therefore as partakers, in our imperfect way, 
 of an intellectual essence infinite and everlasting, that we 
 apprehend certain immutable and necessary truths, not only 
 mathematical but also moral ; e.g. that a man must care for 
 his coachman more than for his horse, for his friend more 
 than for a dog ; and that minds are superior to bodies. 
 These relations belong to an eternal order independent of 
 all legislative will, and are conformed to as unalterable even 
 by God Himself; not that they are external or prior to Him 
 (for that nothing can be, and He has only Himself to consult) ; 
 but they are coeternal and consubstantial ; identical with 
 His wisdom, by communication of which we are admitted 
 to them. This doctrine, however, must be guarded against 
 two errors which lie upon its borders. The ideas which we 
 read in God are intellections of the pure reason only, not 
 the perceptions of sense or imagination which often clothe 
 and contain them : the former alone give us the essences of 
 things whence their properties are necessarily deducible ; 
 the latter would not be there at all, if the mind were alone, 
 but are due to its union with the body : the former are clear 
 and luminous ; the latter confused and obscure. Again, we are 
 not to suppose that, because we see things in God, we see 
 His Essence, i.e. Himself. What we apprehend intellectually, 
 i.e. in ideas, is the essence of created things, in a successive 
 and limited way, now this, now that, as these essences exist 
 in Him. But this is not to see His essence, the containing 
 infinitude .and universality ; just as to see objects reflected 
 in a mirror, does not involve seeing the mirror itself. 
 We apprehend only particular beings, in their finite es- 
 sence ; but God is all being, and although One, not one out 
 of a number x . 
 
 The place which the doctrine of ideas occupies in Male- 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, Illustr. ad II. sup. nat. idearum. Object, et Resp. 
 p. 86. 
 
 M 2
 
 1 64 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 branche's philosophy will be more distinctly seen, if we 
 examine his classification of the different modes of ' seeing,' 
 i.e. of knowing. Of these there are four: viz. (1) objectively 
 immediate, when that which is known penetrates or mingles 
 with our mind ; (2) by mediate representation, i.e. through 
 ideas, which are other than the things known ; (3) subjectively 
 immediate, when the knower and the known are the same, 
 and the knowledge is mere self-consciousness ; (4) mediate by 
 analogical inference, or 'conjecture,' when we suppose an 
 unknown thing to be present from marks of similarity to 
 what is known. The principle of this classification will be 
 found to lie in the assumed parallelism and mutual exclusion 
 of body and spirit. To mind there can be nothing immediate 
 but mind; nor is immediate interaction possible ta finite 
 minds, so far as we have experience; their finiteness being 
 constituted by their being lodged in a bodily organism, and 
 so kept apart from acquaintance except through signs. But 
 each mind is present to itself, and can have thought direct 
 from thought; and God is present to all minds, and can 
 pervade them with the knowledge of Himself. On the other 
 hand, between outside bodies and the mind an impenetrable 
 darkness spreads ; and unless they can find representatives in 
 the ideal world, they can never be known. Proceeding upon 
 this principle, Malebranche decides upon the range of his four 
 categories as follows. 
 
 (1) Qod only is known as immediate object ; and though it 
 is conceivable that other spiritual natures might be put into 
 direct communion with each other and with ours, in point 
 of fact it is not so- in this life ; and He alone can illuminate 
 the mind by His own substance of very being. To know an 
 infinite being otherwise than directly is impossible ; for what 
 can there be to represent Him? All other existences, being 
 special, are ipso facto disqualified for representing the uni- 
 versal ; and, as finite, are within the infinite, and are the 
 negation of its meaning. God is self -revealed. 
 
 (2) Of the contents of the universe, viz. bodies with their 
 properties and spirits with their properties, the former are 
 known through their ideas ; i.e. through their intelligible 
 essence which was in the mind of their Creator while yet
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 165 
 
 they were not, and is in our mind so far as we understand 
 them. Thus, the idea of Extension is that whence the proper- 
 ties of figure and motion and all that follows thence are 
 deduced, and a system of thought constructed corresponding 
 to the relations of physical nature. To have this idea is to 
 see the essence of matter as it is in God ; and so far we 
 know it as He knows it ; and were our mind infinite the 
 two knowledges would coalesce ; but through the defect of 
 our intelligence, the properties we miss are in boundless ex- 
 cess of those which we apprehend. Still, what we do see, we 
 see in Him. 
 
 (3) Our own mind we know by what is called the ' Inner 
 Sense' or consciousness: and, therefore, only so far as our 
 consciousness goes ; i.e. the particular phenomena which we 
 have experienced from time to time, such as sensations of 
 colour, feelings of anger, desire of rest, &c. But these scat- 
 tered changes that turn up teach us nothing of the essence of 
 our mind ; nor is there any one of them from which we could 
 tell our capacity for another: from the consciousness of vision, 
 for example, we should never guess the pleasure of music or 
 the pangs of remorse. This knowledge therefore is altogether 
 imperfect, and stops at the past gains without being fruitful 
 of more ; it is not a knowledge through ideas : God knows 
 the essence of our mind, but we only know its variations 
 as they pass. Of the existence of our mind, however, and of 
 its natural superiority to the body, we are absolutely assured 
 by the self-consciousness. 
 
 (4) The minds of others are inaccessible to us by any of 
 these methods ; and are known only by their inferred likeness 
 to our own. Their existence is indicated by the appearance 
 in other human bodies of actions and gestures exactly like 
 those which in ourselves are the natural language of mental 
 states. Their similitude to our own mind is inferred with 
 more or less certainty according to the parts of the two inner 
 experiences that are compared, i.e. whether or not they 
 involve the bodily organisms, in which there is room for 
 difference. Our assurance that twice two is four, that it is 
 better to be righteous than to be rich, that pain and evil are 
 to be avoided, is absolute, and a matter of pure intellection ;
 
 1 66 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 and wherever mind is at all, these positions must hold good 
 as unconditionally true. In knowing them, we know the 
 universal mind of God, and therefore that of all particular 
 spirits. But when I feel hot or faint, when I see this or that 
 form or colour, I cannot so certainly judge my neighbour's 
 experience by my own ; these sensible affections depend upon 
 the union of the mind which is homogeneous, with bodies 
 which are separate and more or less heterogeneous ; and may 
 not therefore duplicate themselves in the two l . 
 
 4. The Will: its ' Inclinations' and ' Affections.' 
 
 In passing from the cognitive to the active part of our 
 nature, Malebranche unfolds the analogy between motion in 
 the material and will in the mental world. If God had left 
 matter to its own essence alone, without adding to it any 
 motion (which does not belong to its essence), there would 
 have been no difference among bodies ; all would have been 
 a uniform spread of infinite dimensions, expressing the 
 immensity and power of its Author ; but without the variety 
 which makes the beauty of things, or the succession which 
 makes their history ; which together fill created minds with 
 admiration of the Divine wisdom. Motion is the source of all 
 physical differentiation. 
 
 Had minds been left without natural inclinations (all of 
 which are summed up in the word Will), they would similarly 
 have been undistinguishable from each other. It is the variety 
 of mental impulses which gives all the play of character, and 
 the lights and shades on the moral scenery of life ; just as it 
 is material movements that mould a chaos into a cosmos, 
 and that give to view not the bare sublimity of God, but His 
 justice, His compassion, His goodness 2 . In this new and 
 dynamical realm, Malebranche distinguishes two orders of 
 impulses: (1) those which belong to minds, as such, and 
 which would still be operative in them though they were 
 pure spirit apart from any organism ; (2) those which are 
 
 1 De Inqnirenda Veritate, III. i : . ;. a Ibid. IV. I.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 167 
 
 conditional on their union with a sensitive body, and which 
 agitate the mind through disturbances of the blood and the 
 animal spirits. This distinction is the same in its basis with 
 that which, in the cognitive part of our nature, separates the 
 pure understanding from the senses and the imagination, 
 rendering the former the source of clear ideas, the latter of 
 confused. Malebranche admits that the purely spiritual will 
 is presupposed in all the physical tendencies, and is the 
 generic type of all our energy ; so that the difference is 
 between this type pure and simple, and the same working 
 under conditions of corporeal association. The impulses under 
 the former head he calls ' inclinations ' or ' natural move- 
 ments of the mind ; ' those under the latter, ' affections ' or 
 ' passions ; ' conceiving of the first mainly as energies from 
 within : of the second, as what we receive or undergo from 
 without, i.e. from our organism ; though this again is subject 
 to the qualification, that the 'inclinations,' though prime 
 movers relatively to the rest of our nature, are impressed 
 on it by God, and so far are data from another spirit, as the 
 passions are what we suffer from our own body 1 . This 
 distinction it is the more important to understand, because 
 it plays a large part in the psychology of that age, reappears 
 in the writings of Spinoza, and gives to the words ' affections ' 
 and 'passion' a special meaning which with us they have 
 long lost. 
 
 From the peculiar Theism of that age the idea was in- 
 separable that the Creator was once alone ; and that in that 
 solitude He preconceived the scheme of created things, and 
 in due time executed the work which He had thought out. 
 Hence, when the question was raised, what induced this 
 change from lonely existence to a peopled universe, the 
 end in view could only be sought within the Infinite nature 
 itself; other nature beyond, foreign field of contemplation, 
 there was not ; what He made, He made for satisfaction of 
 His own Perfection ; if He made it for love, the product of 
 His love was but a function of Himself, a portion of a universe 
 which is Himself externalised. In conformity with this mode 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. I.
 
 1 68 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 of thinking, Malebranche lays it down c that God cannot have 
 any other principal end of His agency than Himself, though 
 He may have many secondary ends, all tending to the con- 
 servation of the beings He has created. He cannot have for 
 His principal end anything different from Himself, because 
 He cannot have a mistaken aim and set up His ultimate end 
 in beings that do not comprise all good in themselves. But 
 for a secondary end He may have the conservation of created 
 beings ; for since all beings are sharers of His own goodness, 
 they are necessarily good, yes, " very good," as the Scriptures 
 say. God therefore loves them ; and indeed it is by His 
 love that they are preserved ; for all things subsist simply 
 because God loves them 1 .' Hence Malebranche concludes, 
 that, as all things subsist only by His will, God's chief end 
 is His own glory, but that, with a view to this end, He wills 
 also the conservation of His creatures. Thus it is a conse- 
 quence of identifying God with the All, i.e. of predicating 
 of Him an infinitude which leaves nothing else, that in Him 
 all other love is resolved into Self-love or made dependent 
 upon it : it is for His own sake that He loves His creatures. 
 Yet, when we change the scene to the field of human cha- 
 racter, we are required to invert this order ; we are to love 
 others for the sake of God, and God for His own sake, and 
 neither for the sake of ourselves ; and, without this dis- 
 interestedness, the affection is but a moral pretence. A higher 
 perfection is thus possible to man, and demanded for him, 
 than is accessible to God; and we are brought to the para- 
 dox, that in obeying. Him we morally transcend Him. This 
 principle is the key to the mysterious dicta of the Pantheis- 
 tic school, that both God's love to His creatures, and also 
 man's love to Him, are identical with God's Self-love; 
 strange enigmas, taken in Spinoza for a sublime idealism, 
 but really solved by a quasi-trick of algebraic substitution. 
 
 The will, that is, the natural inclinations of all minds, being 
 simply the impulse imparted by God, is everywhere, in us 
 no less than in angels, like His own ; that is, directed on the 
 same object, namely Himself, the sum of all good ; and, if 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, IV. I, 2.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 169 
 
 specialised upon subordinate objects, yet, like His, none the 
 less One Love for being distributed on partial forms of good 
 embraced within the whole and rendered good on that ac- 
 count. There is therefore no inclination of our mind that 
 is not good and even Divine, nay, identical with the impulse 
 of the most perfect natures ; nor has the entrance of Sin done 
 anything to alter this fundamental fact. All love is still of 
 God, in the greatest sinner no less than in the saint: they 
 do well to love ; they cannot love badly ; but they may love 
 bad things, that is, the wrong things, out of the due order in 
 which God bids them set their love ; especially, resting in 
 this or that created object which they like, as if it were the 
 prime source instead of the mere occasion of their joy, and 
 so allowing it to turn them away from God instead of draw- 
 ing them to Him. To such abuse of their liberty men are 
 tempted chiefly by the incidents of their corporeal life, i.e. by 
 what the senses and imagination mingle with the pure in- 
 telligence. With the 'inclinations' which come from God, 
 the dangerous competitors are the ' affections ' or ' passions ' 
 which spring from the body ; and whoever chooses to sur- 
 render himself to these, falls into oblivion of God, and loses 
 himself by total misdirection of His Divine gift of love. 
 
 5. Errors in Pursuit of Good, Absolute, Personal, Social. 
 
 Notwithstanding the Supreme Source of our natural in- 
 clinations, they become the occasion, under our misuse of 
 them, of several distinctive errors ; in the survey of which 
 Malebranche refers them to three different heads: (1) those 
 which are connected with our inclination to Good in gene- 
 ral, the root of all our love ; (2) those which belong to our 
 principle of self-conservation and clinging to our happiness ; 
 (3) those occasioned by our inclination towards other created 
 objects that are serviceable to ourselves or those we love. A 
 few words are needed on each of these 1 . 
 
 Of the first of these tendencies it must be said that, as it 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, IV. i, 3.
 
 170 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 is our supreme prerogative, so is it our chief disquietude. 
 It is an infinite capacity lodged in a finite mind, and agitating 
 it with a yearning that cannot be satisfied, with a straining 
 of the spiritual vision for what is beyond its horizon. Under 
 its influence, the will, craving universal good, urges the in- 
 tellect to find some object that represents it ; but whatever is 
 offered pleases but for an hour, and then is convicted of defect 
 and flung aside, and the will cries out for something truer to 
 its boundless wants. For ever borne away in love towards 
 what is good and wonderful, and has a semblance of infini- 
 tude, the mind, in the void of the common and familiar, 
 oscillates between the spring of hope and the collapse of 
 disappointment ; and this unrest of will betrays us into 
 various errors. 
 
 From preoccupation with its own possible good, the will 
 enlists our intellect exclusively in pursuit of objects related 
 to ourselves and carrying in them the illusory promise of 
 personal happiness, the useful rather than the true ; and even 
 within these limits, engages its efforts only by fits, now 
 upon this, then upon that, nothing finite being able either 
 to content or to arrest the pursuit of a good that is infinite. 
 Hence result a distaste for things in which we see no con- 
 nection with ourselves, an incompetency for disinterested 
 thought, and a consequent ignorance of matters related to 
 us in the highest but in the least sensible way. Whatever 
 subjects, for instance, involve abstract thought, are from this 
 cause in the most backward state, harbouring still, after 
 thousands of years, humiliating contradictions and paralo- 
 gisms. Thus Ethics, ranging over the whole field of duty, 
 and even of life eternal, and susceptible of systematic proof, 
 attract but little notice from men, because resting on meta- 
 physic principles which do not speak to the senses and 
 imagination. And so, under cover of confused ideas, we have 
 false Ethics made to suit men's convenience and pleasure ; 
 just as, were men's conception equally confused of the pro- 
 position that similar triangles have their sides proportional, 
 and did their interests require that the sides should not be 
 proportional, we should have a false geometry to humour 
 their passions ; the truth all the while coming in their way
 
 Branch 1 1 .] MALEBRANCHE. 1 7 1 
 
 as if it were their enemy. 'The restless will of men in- 
 cessantly turns their intellectual vision upon sensible objects, 
 which please by their variety ; for it is the multiplicity and 
 variety of them which prevents the recognition of their 
 vanity, and keeps men in perpetual hope of finding in them 
 the true good of which they are in quest.' Of this another 
 example is found in the stupid acquiescence of men in doubt 
 about so stupendous a question as their own immortality ; 
 a question by no means difficult to determine, only having 
 its decisive evidence, not in sensible experience, but in ab- 
 stract principles and rigorous reasoning, and therefore giving 
 too much trouble to minds accustomed to flit from one sensa- 
 tional object to another, and incapacitated for steady and 
 strenuous thought. 'No doubt, attention and accurate ex- 
 amination of things costs some pains ; but what good can be 
 won without labour 1 ? for sagacious men and philosophers who 
 concern themselves with the investigation and defence of truth, 
 it is disgraceful to talk without understanding what they talk 
 about, and idly to acquiesce in that which they in no wise 
 comprehend 1 .' 
 
 The same pressure of their nature towards a good beyond 
 its grasp occasions also a tendency the very reverse of this 
 acquiescent indifference, viz. an intense curiosity about what- 
 ever is new and out of the way ; a tendency vastly superior 
 to false and lazy security, and having a legitimate function 
 for every progressive mind ; yet, performing this function 
 only under certain conditions, which Malebranche reduces to 
 three laws : (1) that men are not to seek novelty in matters 
 of Faith which are withdrawn from the cognisance of reason ; 
 (2) that novelty constitutes no ground for the acceptance of 
 opinions as good and true ; (3) when we have adequate reason 
 for believing that certain truths are so recondite as to be 
 to all intents and purposes undiscoverable, and productive 
 of only slight and unsatisfactory advantage to us, we must 
 not yield to the attraction of their novelty and specious 
 aspect. In commending the first of these rules, Malebranche 
 shows himself a good ecclesiastic in his deference to Catholic 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, IV. 3.
 
 172 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 authority and his contempt for heresy. In treating of the 
 others, he reverts to the habitual good sense which charac- 
 terises his writings quite as much as their better known 
 mystical piety. He adduces Hobbes as an example, in his 
 criticism of Euclid, of misapplied love of novelty ; inasmuch 
 as an inclination intended to operate for the attainment of 
 truth, and to subside when the treasure is secured, is here 
 morbidly bent on undoing what has been solidly done, and 
 scattering in confusion the gains of the past. The passage 
 is curious, as an evidence that Hobbes was well known in 
 France, even to one who was no great reader 1 . 
 
 The second of our natural inclinations, Self-love and the 
 desire of self-conservation, has an origin nothing short of the 
 highest ; for it is but the human form of God's love for us as 
 for all His creatures, and of that perpetual preservation of 
 them without which they would cease to be. Since He loves 
 us, our love is not misplaced in resting on the same objects. 
 But then it must be only in due subordination to that which 
 we give to worthier objects, and above all to the infinitely 
 Good ; and it is in the loss of this relative position, and in its 
 various forms of setting up for itself, that it becomes the source 
 of aberration and misery. Malebranche reviews it under two 
 forms : the craving for a large scale of being ; and the craving 
 for pleasurable being ; the one, intent upon outward quantity ; 
 the other, upon inward quality or tension 2 . The elements 
 which increase the range of life are power, dignity, indepen- 
 dence, all of them unfit objects, except under severe restric- 
 tions, for a nature whose supreme relation is that of absolute 
 dependence, and which forgets itself when trying to play the 
 god. In this first form the aim at greatness is evidently rela- 
 tive ; even in the field of knowledge and character, its ambi- 
 tion is to excel others in attainment and virtue ; and with such 
 emulative struggle towards the perfection of our nature there 
 would be little fault to find, if that perfection were truly con- 
 ceived, and its parts kept in their right proportion. But in 
 quest of distinction we are apt to consult, not what is best in 
 itself, but what men most admire ; and since they are wonder- 
 
 1 De InquirendaVeritate, IV. 3, 4. 2 Ibid. IV. 5.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 173 
 
 struck by the showy and the rare, rather than by the reason- 
 able and true, we are tempted to throw our, energy into per- 
 verse directions. The most essential knowledge is by no 
 means that which wins applause, viz. of such metaphysic 
 truths as underlie religious faith itself, and form the precon- 
 ceptions of all the sciences, and the basis of our knowledge of 
 man. The knowledge of Nature, and the mathematics as its 
 indispensable instrument, stand in close relation with the life 
 of God in the universe ; yet are often treated with indifference 
 or ignorant aversion by pious people who say- that they are 
 of no concern to a Christian, and by furious bigots who de- 
 nounce as an atheist any man who explains the natural laws 
 of the thunderstorm and its effects. This thought kindles in 
 Malebranche an indignant memory of Voet's attack upon the 
 writings and personal influence of Descartes ; and in a vigor- 
 ous digression he defends the reputation of his master against 
 the feeble contumelies of the Dutch pastor. It must be admit- 
 ted, however, that his pleading for even natural knowledge is 
 far from being consistently broad : he approves of Anatomy, 
 partly as a study of man, and partly as promising an abate- 
 ment of human maladies ; but Astronomy he regards as an 
 utter waste of tune : what, he asks, does it signify to us whe- 
 ther the zone round Saturn is a ring or a great cluster of 
 planets'? And all Philological erudition and scholarship, all 
 the ponderous labour spent upon ancient, literatures, reli- 
 gions, and history, all Rabbinical, Arabic, and Grecian learn- 
 ing, he disposes of as so much solemn trifling, a mere 
 ' Doctrina stultorum.' It all rests upon false worship of the 
 exceptional, irrespective of worth ; and results in nothing but 
 pride l . 
 
 Nor is the pursuit of wealth and dignity less fatal to the 
 attainment of truth than devotion to false learning. The man 
 ambitious of social or political eminence has neither time nor 
 taste for serious enquiry into subjects involving deep reflection 
 and remote from immediate interests. He is surrounded by 
 admirers and partisans, who fill him with the idea that he 
 knows all that is worth knowing, and habituate him to look 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, IV. 6, 7, 8.
 
 174 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 down upon intellectual superiors of more modest station. And 
 he is dependent on the suffrage of others who know and think 
 even less than himself, and whose ignorant humours he must 
 consult, if he is not to be disappointed of his aim. Enveloped 
 in these influences, he lives and breathes in an atmosphere of 
 illusion l . 
 
 The second form of self-love, viz. the aim not at large being, 
 but at well being, or happiness, leads Malebranche to defend 
 against the Stoics the position that pleasure is good and pain 
 is evil. The eloquent ingenuity of these philosophers may 
 persuade you, when you read them at your ease, that you may 
 be happy in the keenest sufferings, and wretched amid plea- 
 surable excitements ; but when the torture grasps you, nature 
 will be too strong for their sophistries, and an irresistible in- 
 ward consciousness will cry out that it is not well with you. 
 God has created pleasure as a good, pain as an evil : He uses 
 them expressly as such, the one as reward, the other as punish- 
 ment: He constitutes all living natures to welcome the one 
 and shun the other ; and it is an idle paradox to ignore these 
 indelible characters of good and ill. 
 
 Yet, though pleasure is always a good, it is not always right 
 to seek, or even to accept it. It is instituted, and attached to 
 the created objects which we enjoy, not to fix our affections 
 on them, or on ourselves, as if either were its cause, but to 
 draw us to Him who is its real and only cause : but, since Sin 
 entered the world, it has bewitched men with sensible things 
 and hindered their life in God ; and so far as it catches us in 
 this snare, it is to be shunned as an enemy. Moreover, its 
 institution is, in this life, not for its own sake simply, but as 
 a reward of conformity with God's will, and as an encourage- 
 ment to persist in that conformity: it is therefore in place, 
 only when we deserve it ; and, conscious as we must be, since 
 the state of innocence was lost, of deserving nothing, or far 
 less than the least which we receive, we should be ashamed to 
 seek or to take what is not really ours. If we do so, we are 
 taking a kind of mean advantage of God ; and because He 
 faithfully adheres to the order of nature, which He established 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, IV. 9.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 175 
 
 for an innocent race, we snatch from Him the good prepared 
 for guiltless souls, and put a violence upon His justice. It can- 
 not be expected that this will remain unredressed : it is ren- 
 dered possible now by the union of body and mind in the 
 same nature ; when death dissolves the union, the reckoning 
 with the mind will be made straight. Of this moral disquali- 
 fication for any large volume of pleasure a secret suspicion, if 
 not a clear consciousness, lurks in us all ; so that a shadow of 
 uneasiness and anxiety steals over the plenitude of happiness ; 
 and in some at least of our bitterest pains, as in those of con- 
 trition, there is a dawning light of peace. For these reasons 
 those who do not yet identify all good with God, and habitu- 
 ally refer it to the invisible hand that dispenses it, will do 
 well, while avowing that happiness is always in itself good, 
 often to turn aside from it into a more thorny path l . 
 
 The love of pleasure is followed by Malebranche from the 
 ethical into the speculative field, and made responsible for the 
 same misdirection of intellectual power, the same inaptitude 
 for abstract thinking, the same feeble sense of the demon- 
 strated existence of God, which he has already charged upon 
 the first type of natural inclination. In support of his argu- 
 ment he enters into a defence, more acute than satisfactory, of 
 Descartes' d priori proof of the existence of God : with the 
 exception of this episode, he moves entirely on lines of thought 
 which we have already traced 2 . 
 
 Finally, this quest of happiness is pursued beyond the con- 
 fines of this life ; still with the same view, to illustrate the 
 errors and distresses into which its intensity betrays us. 
 When aggrandised by the stupendous idea of eternity, it is 
 apt to acquire an overwhelming power, far more upon its ter- 
 rible side, the dread of anguish, than on the opposite, the hope 
 of joy. This ascendency of religious fear is due to the secret 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, TV. 10. 
 
 2 Ibid. IV. ii. As usual, when he wants an example of human ignorance 
 and slavery to sensible impressions, he cites in this chapter the common belief 
 that the brutes feel pain when they howl and crouch and whine under blows ; 
 men being too stupid to see that the abstract proof of automatism is most clear 
 and certain, with nothing to set against it but a confused presumption from their 
 own senses. P. 296.
 
 176 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book T. 
 
 consciousness of sin, an intimate and haunting reality which 
 eclipses the mere faith in the infinite mercy. This disturbing 
 fear becomes, especially with the sensitive and weak, the 
 source of grievous ills. Some, unable to bear the incubus of 
 terror, yet confess it a delusion by a suicide which else would 
 instantly realise it. Others, credulous as the sick from self- 
 incurred maladies, resort to the worthless nostrums of super- 
 stition, and impose on themselves an external discipline of 
 Pharisaic servilities before God, which are simply deprecatory 
 for themselves, and are anything but the spiritual worship of 
 a contrite heart. There is yet a different class in whom this 
 fear produces an obstinate resistance to all new ideas in which 
 they cannot find the sacred formulas of the Scriptures and the 
 Church ; e.g. they cling to the ignorant belief that animals 
 really feel pain ; and that sensible qualities are seated in the 
 objects which affect us ; their salvation will be in peril, if they 
 listen to the alleged evidence that the earth goes round the 
 sun ; and they never ask themselves the question whether 
 Joshua was acquainted with the solar system ; and whether, 
 if he were, he would speak before his soldiers in terms of his 
 own or of their astronomy ? Such are the miserable effects of 
 self-love, when it seizes and profanes the hopes and fears of 
 religion. 
 
 The third natural inclination, viz. to fellowship with other 
 created beings, especially of our own kind, is again a develop- 
 ment and indeed a part, of God's love to all that He has made ; 
 and is therefore another feature of our similarity to Him, and 
 of the organic unity of His creation. The sympathy which 
 connects us with the whole scene to which we belong may be 
 long latent, while we are immersed in relations immediately 
 proximate ; but betrays itself at once when any sudden ap- 
 peal wakens us to remoter interests. Day by day we care 
 little about the stars ; but, when told of a comet or an eclipse, 
 we are on the qui vive with curiosity. Amid our private 
 affairs, we may seem to care little for the State of which we 
 are citizens : but let a conflict break out with a neighbouring 
 country, and in a moment the hidden affection starts up ; in 
 eagerness for the public news we can hardly transact our 
 private business ; the suspense of battle, the defeat, the vie-
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 177 
 
 tory, agitate us with anxiety, with dismay, with exultation. 
 Nothing indeed is more marvellous than the natural co-ordina- 
 tion of mental needs and bodily movement, and the conta- 
 giousness of both among a multitude of men, constituting a 
 very miracle of latent sympathy. A sudden cry of pain mecha- 
 nically extorted from a sufferer strikes upon the ear of some 
 who are not too far to render help ; it startles their attention, 
 be they of what nation or condition they may ; for such a cry 
 is meant to be, and is, vernacular to every rank and every 
 tongue. It flutters the brain, and in a moment changes the 
 whole attitude of those whom it pursues. In a trice it kindles 
 in their minds a desire to succour the utterer of that natural 
 prayer, which speaks to them in truth less as an intreaty than 
 as a command 1 . In such closely woven texture do the ties 
 unite us to each other and to God, which constitute the Divine 
 organism of the world. 
 
 There is, moreover, a beneficent balance between our self- 
 love and our social sympathy. If the former makes us am- 
 bitious of superiority over others, the latter reminds us that 
 this superiority cannot be acceptable to those whom it re- 
 latively depresses, and induces us to keep it in the background 
 and soften the grievance by graciousness and willing sympathy ; 
 and when this proceeds,' not from any assumed courtesy, but 
 from the true prompting of a gentle heart, it smooths the in- 
 equalities of nature, and reconciles the social union with the 
 real varieties and inevitable competitions of mankind. At the 
 same time, even this unselfish propensity is not without its 
 dangers and mistakes. In the narrower circles of intercourse, 
 it gives an artificial weight to the opinions and dispositions of 
 our friends ; predisposing us to accept them idly and dispense 
 with the rational tests which they require ; or even to suppress 
 incipient doubts of their correctness and uphold them without 
 clear assurance of their truth. And in the wider relations of 
 public life, sympathy with the mixed multitude may too 
 easily tempt a superior man, even without ends of personal 
 affection, to conceal and excuse their errors, to overpraise 
 their good qualities, to make the most of their grievances and 
 
 1 Compressed from a fine paragraph, too long to quote, De Inquirenda Veritate, 
 IV. 13, p. 304. 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 178 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 the least of their faults ; and so, through an unregulated 
 benevolence, to become rather their corrupter than their guide. 
 These errors justify the frequent saying, that we have more to 
 learn from our enemies than from our friends 1 . 
 
 6. Nature, Process, and Errors of the 'Affections.' 
 
 The affections or passions of the mind, not less than the 
 natural inclinations, we have as impressions from the Author 
 of nature ; with this difference : that they induce love for our 
 body and for whatever tends to preserve it ; while the inclina- 
 tions take us to the love of God as the supreme good. ' They 
 are occasioned by a movement of the animal spirits into an 
 adjustment suitable to the object perceived, and to the co-opera- 
 tion of body and mind with regard to it. The adjustment is 
 instituted, in order to adapt the bodily movements for duly 
 executing our volitions, and to attach to the bodily move- 
 ments, mechanically excited by the presence of an object, a 
 mental affection which disposes our will towards what the 
 body then wants. This is the perpetual impression of the 
 Divine will in us, whereby we are closely united with a 
 certain portion of given material ; and were that impression 
 of the Divine will to cease for an instant, we should be set 
 free from the dependence in which we are held on all the 
 changes in our body 2 .' Through this dependence on an 
 organism we are bound up in relations more or less close with 
 a vast system of external beings, from the family and State to 
 the earth and stars. It is in vain for the Stoic to tell a race 
 thus constituted that they are kings of an independent realm, 
 masters of all things, and subject to no vicissitude that need 
 affect them : they know that the mind is superior to the body ; 
 yet liable, nevertheless, to suffer with it ; nor can they pretend 
 that the pain is no ill. Instead of proudly challenging and 
 defying it, a Christian man would deem it more reasonable to 
 avoid it, if he rightly can, and if not, to meet it worthily, 
 when he must. 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, IV. 13. * Ibid. V. I, p. 312.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 179 
 
 There are varieties of range and degree in this our depend- 
 ence on external objects. It is limited by the area of our 
 knowledge : the peasant has few ties beyond his village, while 
 the statesman's interests may extend over half a world. 
 Objects familiar only to the imagination are less to us than 
 those which we have seen and remember. And the more we 
 habitually discipline ourselves to withstand the importunity 
 of the passions and live on the pure good possible to the 
 mind, the slighter will be our thraldom to outward things. 
 Besides these general rules of variation, special differences arise 
 from age, sex, station, religion ; and from predispositions occa- 
 sioned by these influences we can often forecast the action of men 
 almost as surely as the astronomer an eclipse ; ' for though 
 men are free, yet they seldom use their freedom against the 
 vehement resistance of their natural inclinations and affec- 
 tions.' 
 
 It might be supposed that, as the ' natural inclinations ' are 
 inherent in the pure mind, they would go through their history 
 without any sensitive consciousness or cerebral change. But it 
 is not so. In consequence of the present union of the mind 
 with the body, these inclinations, directed upon spiritual 
 things, e.g. love of truth, of justice, of God Himself, are 
 attended by movements of the animal spirits which leave 
 vestiges on the brain ; and so pass into sensible affections more 
 or less vivid. And even as an aid in remembering and think- 
 ing over abstract truths, such as the relations of quantity, we 
 resort to a record which can be imagined, like the notation of 
 arithmetic and algebra ; and by these means are able to follow 
 a texture of relations through intricacies which else we could 
 not disentangle, to truths beyond our mere intellectual sur- 
 mise. Thus, sensible affection or feeling spreads over every- 
 thing human ; nor is there anything conceivable of which we 
 could assert that, in regard to it, all men are exempt from the 
 sway of feeling l . 
 
 Malebranche analyses the rise and operation of an affection 
 or passion into seven stages, from the first presentation of the 
 external object to the final fascination of the mind by it, and 
 
 1 De InquirendaVeritate, V. 2. 
 
 N2
 
 l8o METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 seizure of it by bodily action. This analysis, resting on the 
 obsolete physiology of ' animal spirits,' it is needless to follow. 
 Two features in it may, however, be specified as interesting 
 in relation to later doctrines. (1) He lays it down, that, 
 although the sensation of pain is no more the mere privation 
 of pleasure than pleasure is the mere absence of pain, yet 
 there is nothing objectively evil except what is relative to some 
 good and the negation of that good ; so that the natural move- 
 ment of the mind by which it wards off evil is the same as 
 that by which it is driven towards good, viz. the love of good ; 
 and there is no need to call in the hatred of evil as a separate 
 passion. Here we have already the theory, afterwards im- 
 portant, of the purely negative character of evil. (2) In treat- 
 ing of the transformation of sensory excitement conducted 
 to the brain into motory sent into the limbs, Malebranche 
 attributes two simultaneous effects to the same arriving 
 stimulus, viz. a mental consciousness and a mechanical delivery 
 of motion ; ' the same cerebral agency stirs the mind and the 
 animal spirits V This is precisely the position assumed by the 
 advocates of human automatism, unless they adopt the Leib- 
 nizian hypothesis of parallelism : they simply add, that the 
 line of causation, after this divarication, continues on the 
 mechanical track, and goes no further than this one step upon 
 the mental. 
 
 The whole process of the ' affections ' is instinctive and in- 
 voluntary ; and the sole concern of our will is to assent and 
 yield, or to protest and withstand. There is nothing but con- 
 fused impulse, nothing clear, nothing authoritative, in these 
 promptings of the senses ; we should have them if we had no 
 minds ; and they are subject to the dictates of reason, i.e. to 
 the inward voice of God. Only so far as they stand com- 
 parison with this test can we assent to them without misuse 
 of liberty. It is indeed plausibly contended by Epicurus that, 
 as pleasure is admitted to be always either good or a sign of 
 good, men cannot go astray in surrendering themselves to the 
 desires of their hearts ; nor is the Stoic denial of this principle 
 rationally tenable. But the true answer is simple. The good 
 
 1 De Inquireuda Veritate, V. 3, p. 326.
 
 Branch 11.] MALEBRANCHE. l8l 
 
 to which sensible pleasure is a real and correct index is the 
 good of the body ; and if this were all our store, there would 
 be no fault to find with the hedonistic doctrine. But we have 
 also minds, whereby we are united immediately to God ; in 
 Him is our supreme good ; and Him, as the spirit of our 
 spirits, we are to love, not blindly with instinctive drift, but 
 freely, and with clear inward eye of choice, and conscious 
 reciprocity of thought. To this end of our nature, no ante- 
 cedent sensible pleasure conducts us ; and though it is the 
 highest peace, we cannot know it until we have it : self-denial 
 goes before it ; and the joy is found only as its crown. Those 
 who reverse this order, and cannot stir till they take the hand 
 of pleasure as their guide, may indeed attain the condition of 
 fine animals ; but are hopeless wanderers from the true light 
 and blessedness of human life l . 
 
 The union of the mind with God which constitutes human 
 perfection is effected by the knowledge of truth and the love 
 of virtue ; for this is to see things as they really are, and ap- 
 preciate them at their real worth ; i. e. to have His knowledge 
 and His love of them, so far as the limits of our nature permit. 
 The identity between Divine and human knowledge consists 
 in this : that God has neither senses nor imagination ; and 
 that we, so far as our ideas are clear, use neither senses nor 
 imagination ; so that, in both, the things known are appre- 
 hended as intelligible, without representation ; and it is the 
 light of God in our minds which gives them whatever in- 
 telligence they have. Similarly, love according to the law 
 of virtue is love to God ; for then we freely follow the im- 
 pression of love in our heart by which God is always draw- 
 ing us towards Himself, and pervert it into no self-love, or 
 fascination with sensible things. ' To love according to the 
 law of virtue is to love God alone ; to love Him in all 
 things, and love things as they partake of His goodness 
 and perfection; i.e. to love them as they merit love; in 
 a word, to live under the impression of the same love 
 with which God loves Himself; for when we love as we 
 ought, we are moved to that love with which God loves 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. 4.
 
 l8a METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 Himself and all related to Him. Therefore we then love as 
 God loves V 
 
 Why is it that, while all men ardently desire the perfection 
 of their being, they yet do not concern themselves to deepen 
 their union with God, which alone can bring them to that 
 perfection ? It is because, while every good renders them both 
 more perfect and more happy, these two effects do not always 
 and at once follow in the same degree ; and in the competition 
 between sensible and spiritual good under mutual interference, 
 the former is readier with its gift of immediate pleasure, 
 the latter offering a higher perfection, but a less clamorous 
 joy. That which we take to be a part of ourselves, or to 
 which we as a part belong, we naturally regard with 
 love, the stronger the more close the union. The union 
 is evidenced either by the instinct of Sense or the evi- 
 dence of Reason. By the former we feel ourselves united 
 with our body: our assurance of this arises from the pain 
 or pleasure we experience in the contact with other bodies, 
 e.g. from the difference it makes to us whether our clothes 
 are torn, or a lock of hair is plucked out. We are thus led 
 to fancy ourselves identified with the body ; but if we listened 
 to Reason, we should know that mind and body are two 
 substances intrinsically heterogeneous and independent, and 
 that the concomitance of their phenomena is due to the will 
 of God and our union with Him ; so that it is an illusion to 
 suppose that sensible things have any claim to our regard 
 as elements in our mental identity. With intelligible things, 
 the objects of thought, the opposite holds good ; our relation 
 to them is no foreign conjunction, but inherent in the reason 
 itself; which, moreover, we know to be not our reason but 
 the universal Reason whereby all minds subsist in God. 
 Without Him we are nothing, can know nothing, can feel 
 nothing ; He is the whole of what we are ; and, were the body 
 gone, would still be in the same intimate union with us, the 
 cause of every other union, and the total proper object of our 
 love. Eut this, which is clear to us in the light of reason, 
 is not thrust upon our sensible experience : we do not see it, 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. 5, p. 335.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 183 
 
 like the sun, or hear it, like the wind; and, through the 
 effect of Sin, the impressions of Sense are more efficacious 
 with their momentary illusions, than the dictates of Reason 
 with their eternal truths l . And so the body, which ought 
 to serve the spirit, sets up for itself, and intercepts, as a 
 pretender, our just allegiance to God. 
 
 The errors into which we are betrayed by the affections 
 are similar to those which have been noticed in treating of 
 the senses. As in that case we assign as qualities to the 
 body perceived the sensible phenomena which we experience, 
 so in this we credit anyone whom we love or hate with 
 a like feeling towards us. Nay, we are apt to take for 
 granted that towards other objects he must direct the same 
 sentiments as our own ; and, by a similar illusion, to endow 
 even the brutes with an inward life resembling ours. And 
 the love which unites us to a friend hides from us all his 
 defects and faults, turning his personal deformities into beauty, 
 and elevating his common-places into effusions of genius. 
 Hatred, on the other hand, is blind to every better feature 
 in the object on which it fixes, and blackens the whole image 
 it contemplates ; and thus becomes fruitful in insult and in- 
 justice. For want of truth in these their prepossessions, 
 such passions are liable to sudden revulsions ; when you 
 discover that your favourite dislikes you, your feeling turns 
 round upon him, and you fancy yourself shamefully wronged : 
 if your supposed enemy proves to be your lover, your 
 penitent surprise sets him at once into higher favour than if 
 you had never hated him. Such errors and inconsistencies 
 appear on a more conspicuous scale, when multitudes are 
 given up to the same affections, to party spirit, in the Church 
 or in the State: right and wrong are then determined no 
 longer by reason and conscience, but by blind sympathy and 
 pledged admiration. ' What is true in Spain is false in 
 France ; what Paris receives, Rome rejects ; what the Fran- 
 ciscans take for certain, the Dominicans condemn as error. 
 The latter hold by Thomas Aquinas ; why ? because the holy 
 Doctor was one of themselves. The former embrace the 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. 5.
 
 184 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 doctrine of Duns Scotus, because he was a Franciscan.' 
 Prejudices from this cause are even chargeable with cruel 
 persecutions, extending to multitudes beyond the original 
 object of hate: though Mordecai alone among the Jews had 
 offended Haman, the whole race within his reach was in- 
 volved in his revenge l . 
 
 From the general characterisation of the affections, Male- 
 branche proceeds to treat of them in detail, and, for that 
 purpose, to reduce them to some rational arrangement. Were 
 he to classify them according to the objects on which they 
 are directed, the enumeration, he says, would be endless ; for 
 there is nothing open to human perception or imagination 
 which may not fascinate or repel our feeling. Affections are 
 not really differences in the external things to which they 
 tend : whether a man sets his heart on obtaining a Marshal's 
 baton or a Pontiffs crook, he is swayed by the same love 
 of honour. Malebranche prefers therefore to seek a basis for 
 division in differences among the affections themselves. To 
 the whole order, constituted as it is by the sentiment expe- 
 rienced towards imagined good or ill, he prefixes one tendency 
 which seems to stand alone, as not fulfilling this condition, 
 and yet to be not referable to the pure reason ; viz. Wonder 
 or Admiration. It is the feeling into which we are thrown by 
 the appearance of anything new, whether a total object or an 
 accessory to an object already familiar ; and its characteristic 
 is simply to fix a keen attention upon it, not as good or bad, 
 but as suitable to be scrutinised and understood. Hence the 
 physiological concomitants are different from those which 
 attend upon an affection ; the animal spirits, on being sent 
 to the brain, do not thence flow down into the muscles to 
 produce action towards or from the object, or into the heart, 
 and nerves, &c., to quicken the blood and occasion a vivid 
 emotion ; but stay there and spread their stimulus upon 
 the organic fibres with whose changes thought is in cor- 
 respondence. If, however, the object is something remark- 
 able by its vastness or its insignificance, there will be the 
 kind of feeling usually associated with these qualities, viz. of 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. 6.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE, 185 
 
 exaltation or slight, though still without any suggestion of 
 good or bad ; and hence the animal spirits will descend from 
 the brain to the heart, for this feeling's sake, but not to the 
 muscles with a view to any action. When we ourselves are 
 the contemplated object of this feeling, the large scale in 
 which any natural quality is found in us produces pride, 
 its defective magnitude, abasement ; not, however, in the 'moral 
 sense, but as a mere relative self-estimation in the grade of 
 natural being; involving in the whole body a demeanour of 
 dignity or humility, visible also in the lower animals, except 
 in birds, which can fly away from their superiors. All the 
 natural operation of this sentiment is to establish true 
 relations between ourselves and the beings around us ; but, 
 through our abuse of it, it becomes the source of many 
 errors. 
 
 Whoever has the imagination in exceptional vigour is 
 doubly tempted to a fatal self-applause ; he is conscious of 
 surpassing others in an attribute which shows off' well in the 
 eyes of men ; and through this magnifying attribute itself he 
 paints his case before his own eyes. Hence he is apt to be 
 puffed up with conceit, to be imperious and scornful towards 
 others, to be content with his attainments and dispense with 
 further care for truth ; especially as it is to him that men of 
 the opposite type resort as disciples, to help them out of their 
 feeble and confused conceptions. Surrounded by admirers, he 
 cultivates only what wins their praise, not the higher wisdom 
 that transcends him, but the shining accomplishments which 
 attract them. The imagination is dazzled, and dazzles, by 
 everything rather than the spiritual endowments of thought 
 and holiness, which alone unite us to God ; by display of 
 personal gifts, of external splendour, of rare knowledge 
 however worthless, of pompous or sparkling talk ; and even 
 learned men are not ashamed of contemptuously turning 
 away from their own superiors for no better reason than 
 their plain exterior. A scholar of this class, for instance, 
 thought nothing of the Cartesian philosophy, because, after 
 meeting and talking with Descartes, he noticed nothing extra- 
 ordinary in him that should give him any claim to eclipse 
 Aristotle ; this was sufficient answer to all the reasoning
 
 1 86 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 of the new philosophy ! ' I wish,' says Malebranche, ' that men 
 of this stamp could see Aristotle as he really was when liv- 
 ing on earth, and have some hours' conversation with him, 
 not in Greek but in French, and without knowing his name 
 till after they had given their opinion of him.' As the learned 
 are captivated by antiquity, so are the weak and impression- 
 able by rhetoric : they are always caught by ' magnifica ista 
 verborum moles, the passionate flashes of declaimers ; so 
 vividly does this power work on their imagination, that they 
 axe astounded, worshipping the influence which prostrates 
 and blinds them, and enraptured with confused emotions as 
 if they were clear truths V 
 
 In spite of these dangers, the feeling of Wonder has in 
 itself a function of the utmost value. It fixes and concentrates 
 our attention with an energy which the mere intellectual 
 will would be unable to put forth ; and where it is deficient, 
 there is always a difficulty felt in earnest and protracted 
 study ; the thoughts wander ; intruding images call off the 
 mind ; sensations of weariness deaden it ; the links of reason- 
 ing drop off; and nothing is effectually done. But once let 
 wonder be awake, with the curiosity which follows it, and 
 the mental processes perform themselves with spontaneous 
 alacrity, and at every step get nearer to the end in view. 
 In all the sciences, therefore, wonder is the prime mover of 
 successful action. It may, however, be too intense ; detaining 
 us upon some special point, bright to our feeling, it may pre- 
 vent us from adequately contemplating its relations to sur- 
 rounding conditions and similar objects, and by force of 
 admiration may paralyse our knowing. If once we begin to 
 rest in the mere pleasure of wonder, so that it suspends in- 
 stead of quickening the intellectual powers, we become the 
 ready prey of endless delusions, of fortune-tellers and magi- 
 cians and false prophets. Against this danger, of which we 
 need never be unconscious, it is possible to guard by disci- 
 plinary rules: e.g. where we are run away with on a line of 
 feeling, we may, so to speak, reverse the engine, i.e. throw 
 the mind upon some object interesting in the very opposite 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. 7 (especially p. 356).
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 187 
 
 way; or, if a less absolute change of direction is needed, 
 look out for something that lies upon a divergent track on 
 to which we can turn our course of thought; or, if these 
 minor deliverances are too little ready, the eternal Sum of 
 all good, the very Soul of our souls, is for ever at hand, to 
 receive our surrender and answer our prayer l . 
 
 Quitting this ambiguous phenomenon of Wonder, and enter- 
 ing on the series of proper affections, Malebranche compre- 
 hends them all under the general antithesis of Love and 
 Hatred ; the latter always presupposing the former and aris- 
 ing from its being hurt. In treating of Love, as thus the 
 fundamental principle, he betrays a curious wavering respect- 
 ing the origin of its forms. When he consults his metaphysic 
 doctrine, he sees them all as the transfusion of the Divine 
 love into our nature : God loves us and all the beings He has 
 made ; and the love we bear to ourselves and them is only 
 a participation in His, and naturally has, on a reduced scale, 
 the proportions and excellence of the original. But, on turn- 
 ing to the actual characters of men, Malebranche finds that 
 they love objects only as belonging to themselves and minis- 
 tering to the needs of their own being ; and that their affec- 
 tion is graduated by the felt closeness of this personal relation. 
 Not only wealth and honour, family and friends, are cared 
 for as part of the individual's well-being ; but even the State 
 and the Church, nay even Truth and Justice, and God Him- 
 self, are similarly appropriated and embraced, as his. In 
 this view, it would appear that Self-love is not only the 
 dominant but the sole affection, of which all others are but 
 the extension ; and thus the former order becomes inverted ; 
 and we must say that ' God is ours,' instead of ' We are God's.' 
 There are accordingly passages of moral psychology in Male- 
 branche which read almost like the cynicism of Hobbes ; 
 and others which breathe the spirit of Master Eckhart and 
 Tauler. The coexistence of the two conceptions was rendered 
 possible to him by the doctrine of the Fall ; the effect of 
 which was to shift the centre of gravity in human affections 
 from God to self, and thereby to contort all the proportions 
 
 1 De Inquirenda VerlUte, V. 8.
 
 1 88 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 of the moral life. In the real nature of things and our own 
 ultimate consciousness, the love of God is all in all, and con- 
 tains within it every lesser love ; and this order is not going 
 to be disappointed ; it eternally asserts its truth ; but we 
 meanwhile have fallen from its apprehension and its power, 
 and sunk into the measurement of all things by their relation 
 to ourselves. Even thus, we betray the unquenched light 
 when we reverence in others the disinterestedness and de- 
 votion which are lost in ourselves; and the whole purpose 
 of the dispensation of Grace is to reinstate those who accept 
 it in the first order of nature, and rebuild the ruined sanctuary 
 of humanity. Thus, there are two editions, so to speak, of 
 human nature, whence Malebranche may draw his portrai- 
 tures ; and it is not wonderful if their features do not always 
 disclose their identity. The great distinction which separates 
 him from Hobbes is, that the meaner movements of selfishness 
 which, to the latter, are from the ultimate and total essence 
 of our being, are by him represented as fundamentally un- 
 natural, the temporary hallucination of a mind that has better 
 knowledge in reserve. 
 
 The Love and Hatred which arise from the contemplation, 
 respectively, of good and ill are, in Malebranche's view, the 
 fundamental affections. From them he derives the three 
 varieties which he calls Primitives, viz. Desire, Joy, Distress l . 
 It would be easy to advance hence to more special affec- 
 tions, were it not that each of these is susceptible of many 
 degrees ; from which, in their possible combinations, the new 
 modifications are endless and often anonymous. Each, how- 
 ever, has a certain number of distinct derivatives ; e.g. Desire 
 supplies hope, fear, suspense. Joy takes the form of cheer- 
 fulness (alacritas), exultation (gloria), favour, gratitude ; Dis- 
 tress appears as disgust, weariness, grief, commiseration, indig- 
 nation. And other passions arise from the combination of two 
 or all of the Primitives ; e.g. impudence, anger, revenge, from 
 Desire and Joy; shame, grief, indignation, from Desire and 
 Distress ; which two are also always present as partners in the 
 exercise of the will. Malebranche, however, points out that 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. 9.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 189 
 
 even with the principal of these modifications, though reckon- 
 oned as separate affections, the change introduced upon their 
 original to make them specific is not properly affectional, but 
 intellectual; e.g. Hope and Fear qualify the Desire whence 
 they arise, not by throwing in an additional passion, but 
 by contributing a judgment, viz. that the desire is likely or 
 is unlikely to be realised. The process of judgment indeed - 
 clings closely to the affections. It precedes them ; for the 
 affection fastens on that which, on some evidence or other, be 
 it of reason or of sense, is deemed a good. It follows them ; for 
 the affection is no sooner in operation than it enters into the 
 estimate we make of the object pursued. In the former case 
 there may be some suffrage of the reason, and therefore at 
 least an admixture of truth ; but in the latter, the feeling has 
 usurped the place of power, and we judge of the object, not 
 as it is in itself, but as it affects us, and that perhaps only in 
 its immediate relation; so that what we believe under the 
 impulse of an emotion is almost always false l . 
 
 Of the sophistries thus created none are more conspicuous 
 to others, more ensnaring to ourselves, than the excuses which 
 every passion invents to justify itself; and which, though 
 obviously looked up for this purpose, it gravely puts forth as 
 if they were the ground of its existence. The extreme case 
 may be seen in every madhouse, where the patient who 
 believes himself a deposed king has always a more or less 
 coherent story of the conspiracy which has robbed him of his 
 crown, and of the combinations by which he means to outwit 
 the traitors and return in triumph. His assumptions, supplied 
 by his inflated self-importance, are his fixed ideas, which you 
 in vain assail ; and if, leaving them undisturbed, you argue 
 from them against his delusions, you may probably meet 
 your match. So is it with all the minor insanities of pre- 
 dominant affection. If you give yourself up to some hatred of 
 another, you must make out a case to warrant it ; and so you 
 put the worst construction on his words and conduct towards 
 you, and trace malicious meanings in looks, in acts, or in 
 omissions, purely accidental. You first see these things, 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. 10.
 
 190 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 because you hate him ; and then, when you see them, you 
 hate him more. And the corresponding illusions in lovers, 
 by which the most homely beings are turned into gods and 
 goddesses, and proved to be so by irrefragable evidence, have 
 in all ages furnished amusement to the world. In these pro- 
 cesses, blind feeling need never be at a loss for what it wants ; 
 the object, whatever it be, on which it is fixed, is sure, like 
 all created things, to have its good and to have its evil ; and 
 either of these it can set in the focus of its vision, so as to per- 
 ceive nothing else ; and by the very truth of the parts it is 
 cheated into falsehood about the whole. Such is the conse- 
 quence of shifting the real centre of thought and viewing all 
 things in their mere relation to ourselves, and that as measured 
 by feeling and imagination. Reason, instead of ruling, is re- 
 duced to serve ; no longer permitted to lead us by intellectual 
 forethought, it is degraded to the rinding of plausible after- 
 thoughts to palm off a bad cause upon ourselves and others 1 . 
 And the worst of it is that, in these perversions, the darker 
 passions arising from the apprehension of evil are far more 
 intense and wild than those which are fascinated by good. 
 Hence the terrible effects of antipathy and fear, when their 
 contagion seizes upon a multitude ; especially in the religious 
 form of false zeal, thinking to deserve the favour of God by 
 yielding to blind impulses of violence and cruelty 2 . 
 
 7. Rules for the Attainment of Truth. 
 
 In the concluding book of his treatise Malebranche turns 
 from the survey of error to the methods of truth. He starts 
 from the fundamental Cartesian rule, that ' we are never to 
 assent to propositions unless so clearly true that assent cannot 
 be refused without an internal feeling of a certain punish- 
 ment and secret reproach of reason ; i. e. unless we cannot re- 
 fuse assent without clearly knowing that to do so is an abuse 
 of our freedom.' The conditions of this clearness are twofold ; 
 (1) in ourselves, straight or direct mental gaze (like the power 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, V. u. 2 Ibid. V. 12.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 19! 
 
 of accommodating the eye to the objects' distance) ; and 
 strenuous attention to the scrutiny of intelligible truths ; 
 (2) beyond ourselves, ideas for conceiving of things ; if God did 
 not (as the spiritual light of the world) supply these, we 
 should no more know anything than see objects in the dark- 
 ness. Since, however, by the immutable will of God, they are 
 for ever present, even when we do not attend to them, all that 
 is needed for maintaining clearness of apprehension is to render 
 our mind closer in attention, and larger in capacity ; not only 
 in regard to objects in themselves, but in regard also to their 
 numerous relations l . 
 
 The difficulty which has to be overcome in gaining clear 
 apprehensions of things arises from two opposite infirmities of 
 our nature, the one lying in the Senses and Imagination, the 
 felt phenomena of which are modifications of our mind ; the 
 other in the Reason, cognisant of Ideas, which are objects of 
 the mind. The former no sooner come into play than they so 
 excite and engage us that we have no eye for anything but our 
 own feelings, and are self-inclosed in our personal mental 
 changes ; at least everything we look at is coloured by them 
 and seen in false lights. Yet, on the other hand, when the 
 reason is left alone, in the absolute sleep of our sensitive 
 capacity, we are indeed united with God and in contact with 
 His ideas, but without knowing of their presence ; the sole 
 proper objects of our intellectual perceptions of things are 
 latent for want of representation in our consciousness. Thus, 
 we are suspended in a position between false knowledge and 
 no knowledge. The remedy must be sought in the right 
 'measure of sensitive excitement, and the subordination of its 
 proportions to the activity of the reason. All vivid sensations 
 and emotions must be avoided ; everyone knows how the mind 
 is disabled for thought by noise, by too intense a light, by 
 keen pain or pleasure, by agitating news, by eager affections. 
 Though in this life we cannot dispense with some amount of 
 awakened feeling, yet the purity and tranquillity of the 
 imagination must be vigilantly guarded, and the ascendency 
 preserved for the pure understanding 2 . 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, VI. i. Ibid. VI. 2.
 
 192 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 It is a deplorable fact that the stimulus to the search for 
 truth is often given by affections least akin to it, e.g. the 
 love of reputation ; which has carried many a mind, other- 
 wise indifferent to knowledge, through great intellectual 
 labour. But, in the service of such a motive, men are care- 
 less whether they cultivate a fruitful or a barren field ; they 
 go wherever the applauding multitude is found ; they seek 
 the startling rather than the true, the unique rather than the 
 great, such as perpetual motion and the squaring of the 
 circle ; anything, in short, which will set them above others 
 on the roll of fame. Far better than this morbid craving of 
 the imagination is the desire of using the understanding well, 
 of correcting prejudices, and of gaining light enough for right 
 self-direction in life. Under the influence of such quiet but 
 adequate motives, we shall escape the danger of judging by 
 feelings instead of by the clear features of reality ; yet shall 
 apply the imagination to its genuine scientific use, viz. of 
 furnishing, as in the diagrams of geometry, the aids needful 
 to carry on the processes of thought otherwise too abstract 
 or too intricate to be long pursued l . 
 
 The sensible helps to accurate thought produce their effect 
 in two ways ; by facilitating and holding the mind's attention ; 
 and by extending its range of. thought. The first of these 
 benefits is conferred by geometry ; the second by arithmetic 
 and algebra. In both cases, the advantage is gained by resort 
 to symbols of the ideas involved ; consisting in the former 
 of a particular representative instance, picturing the truth 
 evolved ; in the latter, of less or more general terms exhibiting 
 to the eye the relations of abstract quantities and the changes 
 possible to them under given conditions. It is shown how, 
 by lines of given measure and direction, the parallelogram 
 of forces indicates the place at any moment of a body set 
 in motion by two simultaneous impacts of known amount ; 
 and, under the law of accelerated motion of falling bodies, 
 detects the parabolic curve of terrestrial projectiles ; and how 
 similar methods clear up the theory of the musical scale, and 
 reduce mechanical science to exactitude. Though weights and 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, VI. 3.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 193 
 
 movements are not lines and areas, yet, like these, they have 
 their equalities and inequalities, which may be represented 
 by them, and so brought into the field of vision and made to 
 exhibit their history under variation. This it is which so 
 greatly facilitates the mind's attention l . 
 
 In showing the enlargement of intellectual range obtained 
 by the use of arithmetic and algebra, Malebranche is somewhat 
 embarrassed by his doctrine that neither can matter have more 
 extension, nor mind more thought at one time than at another. 
 If this is so, enlargement of mental capacity would seem to 
 be impossible. He does not shrink from the paradoxical 
 assertion, that there is no such thing as greater or less 
 emptiness of mind ; that the quantity of thinking is inva- 
 riable ; and that the only difference between the most torpid 
 and the most effective intelligence is, that the former is 
 droning over confused ideas of sense and imagination, or per- 
 haps simply experiencing mere alimentary sensations, while the 
 latter is intent on clear and true ideas, and busy in tracking 
 their relations. If an equation of thought is established be- 
 tween these two, it is difficult to conceive what the unit of 
 thought can be. However, it does not perhaps much matter 
 whether the advantage of arithmetic and algebra is called 
 a clearance or an extension of thought. At all events it 
 enables us to follow the simple conception of equality and 
 inequality through a complexity of relations which else we 
 could not penetrate and disengage ; and so to solve with 
 mechanical ease innumerable problems wholly beyond the 
 grasp of mere unrecorded abstract thought. Malebranche 
 wrote under the fresh influence of Descartes' great improve- 
 ments in the application of mathematical analysis ; and it is 
 no wonder that, in his admiration, he looks upon the new 
 methods as the sublimest instrument of reason, bearing a 
 character almost Divine. Yet he is careful to say, that even 
 these must retire before our quest of union with the infinite 
 God 2 . 
 
 1 De Inquirenda Veritate, VI. 4. * Ibid. VI. 5. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 194 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 8. Estimate of the System. 
 
 In studying this interesting scheme of thought, it is impos- 
 sible not to feel oneself in contact with a mind of much higher 
 moral order than Descartes', if of less intellectual originality. 
 Even in a work devoted to the methods of search, the chief 
 differences which distinguish the disciple from the master are 
 suggested, less by logical scruples, than by the desire to purify 
 the mind from the self-incurred blindness of low passions, 
 and recall it to the supreme good. No one can doubt that 
 the resulting system commended itself to him as sustaining 
 the aspirations, not only of the reason, but of the conscience 
 under the highest calls of meditative piety. With Descartes 
 we can hardly feel a similar assurance. Anxious though he 
 is to clear his doctrine of objections from the ethical and 
 religious side, it is rather lest the doctrine should suffer dis- 
 advantage, than lest it should be responsible for harm to the 
 gravest interests of life: he speaks down to others' state of 
 mind, more than ingenuously out of his own ; and you are 
 never sure, as with Malebranche, that there is no esoteric 
 thought behind that which he chooses to put forth. Where 
 we have to do with a mind acute as Malebranche's, this 
 earnestness affords no slight intellectual presumption in 
 favour of his speculations. Still, criticism must address 
 itself, not to their sincerity, but to their consistency, and to the 
 security of their foundations ; and it is not without reason 
 that both of these have been impugned. 
 
 (1) The dualistic assumption, which forms the basis of his 
 natural philosophy, of the mutual exclusion of extension and 
 thought, so that they constitute two worlds coexisting and 
 intermingled, yet without common predicate or communication, 
 and embrace all things in their parallel categories, is con- 
 stantly insisted on as fundamental, and almost as constantly 
 violated in application. Under which head are we to rank 
 those wonderful 'animal spirits,' which, like Iris, messenger 
 of the gods, flit to and fro between the earth and heaven of 
 our nature, reporting aloft what is going on below, and taking 
 back the answering orders for action? Are they material?
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 195 
 
 or are they spiritual ? As they are disclaimed for mind pure 
 and simple, and are ascribed to its union with the body, and 
 as their part is played in the field of sense and imagination, 
 which perish with the body, they would seem to be corporeal. 
 They are, moreover, described as thrown off or exuded from 
 the blood, and perform a variety of movements, swift or slow, 
 to select parts of the body, muscles, heart, viscera, and nerves. 
 Yet, though thus busy with our organic history, they are not, 
 as they ought to be, forbidden to go beyond. They flow to 
 the internal parts, and we feel; they press upon the brain, 
 and we have an image of sense or fancy, persistent in pro- 
 portion to the depth of the cerebral vestige ; and these are 
 phenomena of the mind, which is by hypothesis foreign to all 
 physical changes. It might indeed be said by the Cartesians : 
 ' Up to this last term the mechanism goes ; but stops short 
 at the threshold of it ; and the mental sequel is supplied by 
 the immediate act of God; the physiologist has to arrest 
 himself somewhere; and if we fix his terminus at the last 
 undulation of the animal spirits, the Divine agency may as 
 well enter there as at any earlier stage.' A reply of this 
 kind, frankly adopting the 'animal spirits' into the mere 
 bodily system, would certainly enable the theory to work J ; 
 but it is not within the meaning of the doctrine as pro- 
 pounded by the seventeenth century schools. When they said 
 that matter could not transact business with mind, they 
 thought of such matter as that with which mathematical 
 physics deal ; when they said that mind could not affect 
 matter, they thought in like manner that a spirit, as such, 
 could not, for example, throw a stone ; and that no unitary 
 nature could be made by kneading up together a ghost and 
 
 1 It must be admitted that this condition is sometimes really fulfilled. There 
 are passages in Malebranche, at least in his later writings, which distinctly 
 assign the 'animal spirits' to the bodily organisation. "The Creator of bodies,' 
 he says, 'is alone able to move them. This principle suffices to link together, 
 no, not to link, but to affiliate, all our pretended faculties. For, after all, the 
 animal spirits are bodies, however small they may be ; they are but the more 
 subtle part of the blood and humours. God alone then is able to move these 
 small bodies ; He alone understands how to make them run from the brain 
 along the nerves, from the nerves through the muscles, from one muscle to its 
 antagonist ; all of which is indispensable to the movement of our limbs.' Entret. 
 VII. 249, 250. 
 
 02
 
 196 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 a lump of clay. Starting from this type of conception, they 
 endeavoured to treat the human being as a mechanical 
 mixture of heterogeneous elements, of which one worked by 
 the pure laws of motion, the other by those of thinking. 
 But when they came upon phenomena difficult to class under 
 either head, such as instinctive impulse and feeling, ex- 
 plicable by neither physics nor logic, a nondescript medium was 
 set up between the two realms, with indeterminate relations 
 to either, and fulfilling the office attributed, as I have men- 
 tioned, to ^/vxn among the Greeks. Had this medium been 
 regarded as simply matter, it would not have been called 
 'spirits;' and where would have been the use of invent- 
 ing it and its fictitious history, if it were not to smooth a 
 way of transition from matter to mind by attenuation and 
 vivacious movement in the former 1 ? If to append a mental 
 feeling or thought to a bodily change needed the intervention 
 of a Divine volition, the effect was as competent to that 
 volition at first as at last; and there could be no reason 
 for suspending it till to the initial and known change link 
 after link had been added by mere hypothesis, as if to narrow 
 the chasm which the will of God had to clear. Thus the 
 theory, which begins by pronouncing the gulf impassable, 
 except by miracle, ends with trying its hand at building 
 a bridge across. This is rendered indubitable by the passage 
 which I have already quoted (p. 46), affirming that 'the 
 same cerebral agitation stirs the mind and the animal spirits.' 
 The ' cerebral agitation ' is at all events a movement of matter ; 
 and here it is said to give rise to effects both in the mind 
 and in the ' animal spirits ; ' apparently at the same moment 
 and on the same terms. Yet elsewhere we find Malebranche 
 saying, ' your body cannot act immediately upon your mind. 
 Thus, if your finger be pricked by a thorn, though your brain 
 be disturbed by its action, neither the one nor the other can 
 act immediately on the mind, because your brain and your 
 finger are only matter l '. 
 
 But the significance of Malebranche's dualism is destroyed 
 by his adding to it a feature not borrowed from Descartes. 
 
 1 Entretiens, VII. pp. 222, 223.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 197 
 
 The causality which had been cancelled between body and 
 mind, had been retained between body and body, and within 
 each mind itself. This residue of power in created objects 
 Malebranche removes ; he denies that one moving body can 
 set another in motion, that one human thought can produce 
 another ; in both cases the consecution is due to the eternal 
 efficiency of God, repeating at every instant the act of crea- 
 tion whence each first phenomenon arose *. It is thus super- 
 fluous to insist that matter and spirit cannot act on each 
 other, when they cannot even act on themselves ; there is no 
 distinction between the supposed chains of causation, if all 
 alike are constituted by the energy of the Divine Reason or 
 Will at every link. 
 
 The truth is, the doctrine of the mutual exclusion of body 
 and mind arose from the treatment of them as different Sub- 
 stances, under the rule that no substance can have anything 
 in common with another. This, however, can only be, so long 
 as each was practically regarded as an ultimate of being. 
 
 1 ' The force,' he says, ' which moves a body is only the efficiency of God's will, 
 preserving it successively in different places. Suppose then that this ball is rolled, 
 and that in the line of its motion it impinges on another at rest ; experience tells 
 us that this other will without fail be set in motion according to certain propor- 
 tions exactly observed. Now it is not the first that moves the second. This is 
 clear from the fundamental principle. For one body cannot move another without 
 communicating to it some of the motive force. But the motive force of a body in 
 motion is only the will of the Creator preserving it successively in different places. 
 It is not a quality belonging to the body.' Entretiens, VII. 242, 243. And, simi- 
 larly, with regard to the mind of two persons conversing together, he says : ' We 
 are both of us in union with the universal Eeason which illumines all intelligences.' 
 ' I am persuaded that there is no such thing as a visible object, nothing which can 
 act in the mind and reveal itself there, but the intelligible as well as efficient Sub- 
 stance of Eeason. Nothing do we see in this material world where our bodies 
 dwell, except so far as our mind intently moves in another, and contemplates the 
 beauty of the intelligible and archetypal word contained in (the universal) Reason. 
 As our bodies live upon the earth, and repair their waste on its fruitful products ; 
 so do our minds find their aliment on the same truths which the intelligible and 
 immutable substance of the Divine Word contains. The words which Theodore 
 addresses to my ear give me notice, in virtue of the laws of union between soul 
 and body, to give heed to the truths which he discovers in the Sovereign Reason. 
 My mind is thus turned in the same direction as his ; I see what he sees, because 
 I look where he looks. And by the words in which I answer his, however empty 
 here and there, I am in communion with him, and with him enjoy a good which 
 is common to all. For we are all united in essence with (the universal) Reason ; 
 so united, that without it, we can have no human tie.' Ibid. 256, 257.
 
 198 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 As soon as they came into distinct view as things created, 
 the rule became inapplicable ; because it was an admitted 
 axiom that between cause and effect there must always be 
 something in common ; so that two products of one and the 
 same cause are precluded from being entirely alien and, both 
 by their dependence and by their common affinities to a 
 higher term, become disqualified from further substantive 
 pretensions. In Malebranche, this derivative character re- 
 ceives the intensest emphasis ; the very foundations of the 
 doctrine of dualistic parallelism are removed ; and it lingers 
 as a last shred of traditional thought which he has forgotten 
 to fling into his basket of philosophical waste paper. 
 
 (2) The philosophy of Malebranche leaves no room for the 
 conceivable coexistence and relation of finite beings and their 
 infinite source ; and, among finite beings, especially of per- 
 sons. All the positive predicates of created objects are, one 
 by one, taken away from them and delivered back to their 
 Creator, not only as having come from Him, but as being 
 now and for ever items of His agency, till all particular na- 
 tures are absolutely emptied out, and there is left simply 
 One Sole Cause, whose effects can never be on any other 
 than Himself. All changes are His self-modifications. This 
 extreme result is not left to mere inference by the reader ; it 
 is repeatedly expressed in terms the most direct. God is not 
 a Being. He is all Being, or universal Being, covering the 
 whole of what exists. 'The idea of God,' he says, 'i.e. of 
 Being in general, Being without restriction, infinite Being, 
 is no figment of the mind, of a composite nature that can 
 involve a contradiction : nothing can be simpler, although 
 it embraces whatever exists or can exist. This simple and 
 natural idea of Being or the Infinite, includes necessary ex- 
 istence ; for evidently being (I do not say a particular 
 being] has existence per se, and being cannot but actually 
 be.' ' Those who do not see that God exists are not thinking 
 of being at its full scope, but of an individual being, and 
 therefore of that which either may or may not exist V Again, 
 he says, ' That clear, intimate, necessary idea of God, i. e. of 
 
 1 Kecherche de la Verite, IV. u, p. 295.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 199 
 
 being, without any special restriction, of being in general, 
 which presents itself to the human mind, acts on it more 
 powerfully than the presence of all finite objects 1 .' Still 
 more explicit is the following account of the relation of God 
 to finite natures : ' The soul is not in the body, nor the body 
 in the soul, though their variations are reciprocal in virtue 
 of the general law of their union ; but both are in God, who 
 is the real cause of this reciprocity. Minds are in the Divine 
 reason, and bodies in the Divine immensity ; but neither can 
 be in the other : their essences are unrelated ; with God alone 
 have they necessary relation. Mind can think without body, 
 but can know nothing save in the Divine reason. Body can 
 be extended without mind ; but can exist only in the immen- 
 sity of God. The qualities of body have nothing in common 
 with those of mind ; body cannot think ; mind cannot be 
 extended ; but both have participation in the Divine existence ; 
 God, who gives them their reality, is the possessor of that 
 reality ; for He possesses all the perfections of things without 
 their limitations. He knows, as minds do : He is extended, 
 as bodies are ; but all in a way different from theirs : thus 
 God pervades the universe and transcends it.' The inter- 
 locutor, to whom these words are addressed, finding them hard 
 to understand, presses the question, ' Before the world was, 
 and God's agency in it, where was He ? ' and in answer it is 
 said : ' Before the creation of the world, God was where He 
 now is, and where He would be were the world to return to 
 nought. He was in Himself. When I tell you that God is 
 in the universe, and infinitely beyond it, you do not enter into 
 my thought if you suppose that the universe and space, as 
 we imagine it, are, so to speak, the place which is occupied 
 by the infinite substance of the Divinity. God is in the 
 universe only because the universe is in God ; for God is in 
 Himself alone, in His immensity. If He created new spaces, 
 He would not thereby acquire an extended presence ; He knows 
 neither new space, nor increment to His immensity. He is 
 eternally and necessarily where these new spaces are created ; 
 but is not there locally, like the spaces. Extension is a 
 
 1 Eecherche de la V<*rit, III. ii. 8, p. 218.
 
 200 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 reality, and in the Infinite all realities are found. God then 
 is extended, no less than bodies are ; for He possesses all 
 absolute realities, i. e. all perfections. But God is not 
 extended after the manner of bodies, not having the limita- 
 tions and imperfections of His creatures. God, as well as 
 created minds, has knowledge ; but does not think after their 
 manner. He is Himself the object of His knowledge. There 
 is in Him no succession or variety of thoughts ; one does not, 
 as with us, exclude all others. Similarly, God is extended, 
 no less than bodies ; but His substance has no parts ; and there 
 is no exclusion of one part by another ; the place of His sub- 
 stance is nothing but that substance itself. He is always one 
 and always infinite, perfectly simple, and composed, so to 
 speak, of all realities and all perfections. God is Being, and 
 not a being (tel etre), as He Himself said to His servant 
 Moses by the mouth of His commissioned angel ; being without 
 restriction, not finite being ; being, compounded, so to speak, 
 of being and non-being 1 .' One further remark deserves 
 citation, as anticipating an important feature in Spinoza ; viz. 
 that although body and spirit include all the created natures, 
 therefore all the aspects of the Divine essence known to us, 
 we are not to assume that no others exist : God is infinite ; 
 and the contents of His being cannot be estimated by the 
 samples shown to us of His countless perfections. Hence, 
 though it is quite right to say that ' God is a Spirit,' 
 in order to indicate that He is not corporeal, and that 
 He is much rather spirit than body, yet we must beware of 
 taking the proposition absolutely, and so of carrying into 
 His nature the features of mind copied from our own expe- 
 rience 2 . 
 
 Now let us see in what light this doctrine exhibits (in the 
 first place) our own nature, whether on the cognitive or on the 
 active side. The relation of dependent union of the human 
 with the Divine mind, is marked by two sets of terms, de- 
 scribing two modes of identification ; one affirming unity of 
 the apprehensive act in us and in Gfod ; the other, unity of 
 the thing apprehended. The former we have when Male- 
 
 1 Entretiens, VII. 279 283. 
 
 2 Recherche de la Ve"rit<5, III. ii. 9. 227, 228.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 2OJ 
 
 branche says that Reason is not personal, but universal ; that 
 the human intellectual faculty is a fiction, being only a local 
 gleam of an omnipresent light ; that God is the illumination 
 of all minds ; that our thought is (ad modum recipientis] His 
 thought, and our love His love. If these expressions have 
 any determinate meaning, they forbid us to appropriate to 
 our own subjectivity the intelligent acts of which we are 
 conscious, and require us to regard them as a partial incidence 
 of the Divine thinking. Is it possible to form any clear and 
 consistent conception of such a relation between man and 
 God? Can we bring under it any particular instance of 
 rational apprehension, e.g. our knowledge that the surface of 
 a sphere is equal to the area of a circle of twice its diameter ? 
 When you think this equation, and deduce it from essential 
 properties of sphere and circle, to what mind's consciousness 
 does that fact belong? Have you reasoned it out? or is it 
 only God ? If He be the sole subject of the process in your 
 case, He is no less so in every other ; and though there be a 
 million recognitions of the truth, there is but one thinker for 
 all these thoughts. To extract any such meaning, or rather 
 no-meaning, out of what is called the universality of Reason 
 is to play tricks with words. What is there ' universal ' in 
 this geometrical equation ? Simply this : that any mind may 
 apprehend it ; you may know it ; I may know it ; God knows it ; 
 it may repeat itself to consciousness wherever there is any in- 
 telligence for its seat. But all these acts are numerically dis- 
 tinct, and are counted by the list of knowers who realise the 
 truth : they are separate conditions of individual consciousness 
 in which no partnership is possible. Every cognition, by the 
 very meaning of the term, is the act of an Ego or personal 
 subject ; that which makes an Ego is a twofold condition ; 
 viz. (1) the continuous identity of subject for many successive 
 cognitions, and (2) the non-identity of this subject with any 
 other, or the exclusion from it of any acts of cognition simul- 
 taneous with its own. Of this Ego, or soul, of ours, Male- 
 branche declares that we have absolute assurance by self- 
 consciousness, not indeed of its essence, but of its existence 
 as a reality ; how is it possible, after thus setting it up as a 
 known separate entity, to cancel its status and hand over its
 
 202 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 contents to another subject ? The dictum that God illumines 
 all minds is true, if we are to understand by it that He quali- 
 fies them to know (in their degree) what He knows ; but false, 
 and indeed senseless, if it asserts that their knowing and His 
 knowing are one and the same act of knowledge. The com- 
 parison with the sun in heaven will not relieve so great a 
 paradox. The daylight is indeed, as Plato says in no dis- 
 similar connection, in many places at the same time, and, 
 though a single element, enables myriads of men to see ; but 
 this common presence does not fuse all exercises of sight into 
 one : none the less are there ten thousand acts of vision, each 
 the incommunicable predicate of a separate subject. If these 
 particular agents are explained away in order to leave the 
 'universal reason' as the sole subject and all-absorbing cause, 
 it follows that it would make no difference whether there 
 were human minds or not; or whether, if there were, they 
 knew anything or did not know ; and we might apply rigour- 
 ously to the intellectual consciousness of the universe what is 
 poetically said of its life, 
 
 "The eternal fire that feeds each vital frame, 
 Collected or diffused, is still the same : " 
 
 and whether a million people, or only Euclid, apprehended 
 our proposition, or it were known to none but God, it would 
 in any case be known only once, as a constituent in the 
 eternal reason. This surely is absurd. The same considera- 
 tions apply, mutatis mutandis, to the asserted identity of 
 our love with God's love. We have only to ask the question 
 whether, if we love and if He loves, there are two lovers or 
 one, and we shall realise the contradiction which the assertion 
 involves ; especially on considering that, if there be only one, 
 the apparent mutuality of affection is an illusion, and the 
 forthgoing love is thrown back into self-love, i.e. ceases to be 
 love at all. 
 
 Malebranche's second mode of identifying the human with 
 the Divine mind is, by giving them the same objects, instead 
 of making them the same subject. The things known by both 
 are said to be Ideas, or the intelligible aspect of things, as 
 distinguished from the material. It is not easy to convey a
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 203 
 
 distinct notion of what is meant by these ' ideas.' But if you 
 assume as true two propositions, viz. (1) that extension as such, 
 i.e. Body, cannot have any dealings with thought, so as to get 
 known ; and (2) that we actually have knowledge of bodily 
 things, being able to reason about them, and to verify our 
 reasoning; it follows that, over and above their corporeality, 
 they must carry something intellectual, enabling them to 
 speak to our thinking nature. This spiritual something is 
 their 'Idea.' It is not dependent on their actual material 
 existence ; if there had never been any sphere or circle 
 marked out in the infinite space, it would still have been 
 true that the surface of any sphere equals the area of a 
 circle of twice its diameter ; and this truth must have been 
 present to omniscient thought prior to the formation of solids 
 and the demarcation of areas, and so have constituted the 
 object of that thought. On the question whether it was 
 always there, a remarkable difference exists between Descartes 
 and Malebranche. The former, if we construe his language 
 strictly, makes all truth, even geometrical, dependent on the 
 Creator's Will, which sets up and might take down all the 
 relations, mathematical and ethical, defined by the sciences : 
 it is therefore a matter of volition that there is such a field at 
 all as that of the true and false, of the right and wrong : God 
 can make anything true and anything right that He pleases. 
 Malebranche, on the other hand, insists on the eternal and 
 immutable character of both quantitative and moral truth, 
 and places it beyond the reach of any will, even the Divine : 
 it was never made necessary, but always was so ; not indeed 
 imposed on God by any extraneous existence ; but, while 
 interior to His infinite nature, present there on such terms as 
 to supply the data of contemplation to His intellect, and of 
 movement to His will. Hence, Ideas, in their pre-existence, 
 are the archetypes of created things ; in their embodiment are 
 the essences of things ; and in their relation to us are what 
 we know of things. On them therefore the intellectual gaze 
 is fixed, of God beforehand and for ever, of ours afterwards ; 
 and the thought which meets on them, be it Divine or human, 
 is the same. In attending to any particular thing, we are 
 engaged upon its idea, which is and ever has been in God's
 
 204 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 mind, and are therefore attending to a particular perfection of 
 His. All ideas are in Him ; in Him it is that we see them ; 
 and as He too contemplates them there, there is no difference 
 in the knowledge except in range ; to the limits of our finite 
 nature, ours coalesces with His. 
 
 Though, however, we were to grant the doctrine of ideas, 
 still, sameness in the object of thought does not constitute 
 sameness in the thinkers, or justify the language in which 
 Malebranche speaks of their union in act and in nature. You 
 and I may contemplate one given truth ; but the contempla- 
 tions will be two, though our conceptions be only numerically 
 distinguishable ; the singleness of object does not destroy the 
 plurality of the subjects ; either the consciousness of the truth 
 occurs twice over, or it does not ; if it does not, either you or 
 I disappear from the scene and are not there ; if it does, the 
 minds are two and not one, nor is one a part of the other. 
 And so must it be between the human and Divine mind, 
 unless self-consciousness be denied to the intellect of God. 
 Whatever be the " idea " to which I attend, my thinking of it 
 is a subjective fact distinct from the existence of the idea. 
 If God contemplates that idea, His thinking of it is another 
 subjective fact, distinct from the existence of the idea ; 
 and as these subjective facts are not predicable of one and 
 the same self-consciousness, they cannot be merged into 
 each other, and reduced to unity. They are separate modifica- 
 tions of different minds. 
 
 Of this inevitable conclusion Malebranche must have had 
 some inkling ; for he sets up a special doctrine in order to 
 fence it out. He artificially limits the field within which he 
 admits 'modifications of mind:' they are confined, he says, 
 to the senses and imagination ; and do not enter the area 
 of the Keason. The changes and differences of sensation, 
 representation, of emotion, impulse, will, are phenomena of 
 the subject, modes of mental susceptibility, lights and shades 
 of the personal history. But the varieties of the reason are 
 exclusively Ideas, which are not our modes of thinking but 
 the objects of our thought, extrinsic to our personality, and 
 not to be reckoned among subjective vicissitudes. On this 
 principle, identity of idea would be identity of reason ; and
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 205 
 
 all rational contemplation of a given object, however dis- 
 tributed or concentrated, would be referable to one universal 
 mind. For this restriction of personality to the senses and 
 imagination there does not appear to be the slightest ground. 
 Nor is it secured by withholding from ideas the name of 
 'modifications of the mind.' For if they are 'objects' 
 thought of by the reason, the reason has not only to hold 
 them, but to think of them ; and is certainly modified accord- 
 ing as it thinks of A, or B, or 0. That the ideas are stationary 
 and eternal does not hinder the attention to them from being 
 shifting and transitory ; and so we are re-introduced, within 
 this sacred region, to the personal modifications of conscious- 
 ness. To claim for the reason an object of thought, yet deny 
 to it a subjective modification, is a contradiction in terms. 
 
 Malebranche's process, then, of unifying the Divine and 
 the human reason, makes their coexistence, as rational, 
 impossible : the human resigns its individuality and lapses 
 into the infinite element, like a wave, which seems to be an 
 advancing body with a horizontal run, but is really but a 
 vertical movement on a stationary deep. The eternal thought 
 is but the totality of these infinite undulations, actual and 
 possible ; and has its infinitude and perfection, not in being 
 their other, but in being their All. This evanescence of par- 
 ticular minds in the universal, unintended by Malebranche, 
 yet the inevitable result of his positions, he would himself 
 acknowledge to be at variance with the primary postulates of 
 all knowledge. 
 
 It is hardly needful to show, by applying a corresponding 
 line of reasoning to the active side of our nature, how its 
 individuality also disappears when Malebranche's doctrine 
 is pressed home to its results. He retains, in terms, Descartes' 
 assertion of our liberty as moral agents ; and speaks as if it 
 were a liberty even towards God, i.e. to conform or not to 
 the Divine will. He states, for instance, that ' God has made 
 us such that we can follow or not follow a natural and 
 indispensable law ; and therefore, as a necessary consequence, 
 such as to be susceptible of punishment or reward. Yes ; if 
 we are free, it follows that we have the alternative of happi- 
 ness or misery ; and if we have the alternative of happiness
 
 206 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 or misery, it is a sure proof that we are free V When, however, 
 we consult him about the exact contents and meaning of this 
 free agency, it first seems doubtful whether the possession is 
 not illusory ; and then, whether the possessor himself exists, 
 i.e. whether, if there be the alleged power, a competent Ego 
 can be produced to wield it. The active energy of our being, 
 i.e. our will, is the aggregate of our natural inclinations, 
 working under the conditions of the bodily irad^aTa. These 
 inclinations are to our minds exactly what motion is to 
 bodies ; in neither case belonging to the essence ; in both, 
 the immediate impression of the Divine agency continuously 
 administered, moment by moment. Further, the passive 
 conditions amid which these inclinations work, are due to 
 the union with the mind of a body which could never 
 transmit any influence, did not God Himself directly inter- 
 polate a feeling or an image between the last cerebral and 
 the first mental change, in each sensible experience. Hence, 
 both these dynamic factors, the primary force and the 
 modifying condition, are Divine ; and they constitute the 
 total causality. It is expressly declared that our essence 
 carries none, and that none would ever step in, but for the 
 interposition of God. What room then can there be for 
 liberty under these superinduced influences? Malebranche 
 finds it in the intellectual judgment which Reason forms 
 about the pleas offered by natural inclination on the one 
 hand, and the modifying feelings on the other ; the former 
 we know to present some form of the true good embraced 
 in the love of God ; the latter to recommend at best only 
 what is good for the body. Our assent, that is, is due to the 
 former, and we are free to assent to it ; and if, instead of 
 this act, we yield to the passive tendency towards ease and 
 pleasure, we neglect to use our freedom, and assent to what 
 we are aware is false. Or rather, to avoid conceding to us 
 any positive power, such as would be involved in deciding 
 against evidence, Malebranche allows us only freedom to 
 suspend our assent ; which we can always do, he says, 
 till clear and indubitable evidence obliges us to give it. 
 
 1 Entretiens, VIII. p. 307.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 207 
 
 This freedom is the compensation for our ignorance and 
 imperfection ; we need not decide while these are confusing 
 us ; but can wait for distinct vision, and move only when 
 we see our way. At the same time that he asserts this as 
 a possibility and a duty, he denies that it is 'a faculty 
 of our nature ; ' declares that the capacity for it is very 
 different in different men ; and that ' without pain we cannot 
 prolong reflection, far less suspend our assent, i.e. the judgment 
 which determines the movements of mind and of body. 
 Whenever a good presents itself to the soul, and draws it 
 by some charm, it is not at ease if it remain stationary ; for 
 there is no harder work than to stand fast in a current ; cease 
 your action, and you are borne away 1 .' In spite therefore 
 of the alleged negative or suspensive character of this 
 liberty, it turns out, after all, to be 'hard work,' involving 
 an active effort that cannot for an instant be dropped ; none 
 the less is it a force for being spent in resistance instead of in 
 motion. Where then is the agent exercising that force 1 ? 
 Whence is the resistance? The tendency withstood is the 
 eagerness of the senses or imagination for what charms them ; 
 the withstanding effort is from the rational inclination for 
 more indubitable good. This inclination belongs to the con- 
 tents of our Will; the whole of which, as we have seen, 
 Malebranche resolves into the immediate and perpetual im- 
 pulsion of God, and affirms to be as little inherent in the 
 finite soul as motion in created bodies. So that the alleged 
 liberty is removed from the human stage of being to the 
 Divine ; and as the same is true of the force which it resists, 
 the whole game of conflict in which we seem to be in the 
 lists is conducted between two attributes or energies of God. 
 This is the ultimate meaning of the frequent assertions that 
 our finite natures are absolutely ' impotent ; ' that our ' liberty 
 is no faculty ; ' that we are not agents but spectators of even 
 our own history ; that we have no causality, God being the 
 only cause. It is in the interest of the same theory that Will 
 itself, the sum total of apparent activity in us, is made to 
 consist of affirmation and denial, and regarded as interchange- 
 
 Morale, ch. yi. 6.
 
 208 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 able with assent given or withheld. It is thus resolved back 
 into an intellectual function, and identified in its essence with 
 Reason ; and is therefore removed, along with the Reason in 
 man, from the properties of the finite Ego, into the sphere of 
 the universal Reason ; which accordingly engulfs our entire 
 personal nature ; not only absorbing all our powers, but 
 melting away the very subject in which they might be 
 lodged. 
 
 (3) In its doctrine of God, Malebranche's system is not self- 
 consistent ; intending to be Theism, it becomes Pantheism ; 
 and, among pantheistic schemes, it ranges sometimes with 
 the transcendental, at others with the immanental. 
 
 That his idea of God retained in it all the features essential 
 to Christian devotion and personal relations with the object 
 of worship, there can be no doubt. The ' perfection ' which 
 he predicates of the Divine nature, though at times apparently 
 interchangeable with the quantitative term 'infinitude,' is not 
 yet stripped of its moral significance and used in the Spinozistic 
 sense of ' reality ' or complete inclusion of all that is ; but is 
 distinctly stated to embrace the attributes not only of under- 
 standing and will, but of wisdom, goodness, justice, compas- 
 sion 1 . And S the love of these virtues is declared to be in 
 us only the finite form of God's own love for them, the attri- 
 butes must be understood as essentially the same in both 
 natures. Malebranche, moreover, deviating from Descartes' 
 denial of final causes, habitually speaks of God's designs., and 
 though finding them only within the Divine nature itself, 
 treats them distinctly as ends in view, thoughts or precon- 
 ceptions whence the creative will passes into expression in 
 the universe. The Divine administration of the world is 
 conducted on a principle of probation, involving liberty 
 in man and moral awards to him by his Creator. All 
 these are plain characteristics of a sincere Theistic faith, 
 which certainly lay deep in the heart and mind of Male- 
 branche. 
 
 Consistently to maintain this position, however, certain 
 conditions must be observed. For the exercise of Will, there 
 
 1 Entretiens, VIII. passim.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 209 
 
 must be objects amenable to it. For the operation of love, of 
 goodness, of compassion, there must be other beings present, 
 with the sensitive and moral qualities which earn these affec- 
 tions. And a world administered with justice must be con- 
 stituted of persons, that is, of those who have a certain range 
 of independent and fiduciary power. Are these conditions 
 fulfilled by Malebranche ? 
 
 His philosophy probably had an earlier and a later phase. 
 At first, fresh from Descartes, he was possessed with the con- 
 ception of a dual , universe of extension and thinking, and 
 worked it out on the principle of parallelism. Body, he as- 
 sumed, could act upon body ; mind upon mind ; but neither 
 upon the other. This was their nature, and lay in their 
 very essence. There was therefore such a thing as natu- 
 ral causality, within the limit of its proper line. But then, 
 over and above what was thus brought about, experience 
 showed that the events on the two lines kept time together, 
 advancing in uniform double file, the same cerebral fact hav- 
 ing always the same mental fact for its companion. This 
 was supernatural, secured by immediate and constant Divine 
 agency. 
 
 In this compound of Nature and God, let us now see what 
 account is given of the former. Its two factors, extension and 
 thinking, are both of them inherently in God, not inventions 
 or creations of His. They are of His essence ; whence, as 
 derivative essences, they constitute the matter and mind of 
 the universe. From each of these essences flow the properties, 
 and from the properties the particular phenomena, of these 
 parallel departments of nature. What we call essences, when 
 referred to the objects created, are ideas when referred to the 
 creative intellect. And these ideas, as we have seen, Male- 
 branche affirms to be not products but data of the Divine 
 reason, eternal, immutable, and archetypal. It follows that 
 none of the essences of things could be other than they are ; 
 and that all that happens along the lines of material and 
 mental change is necessarily evolved. In calling God the 
 Author of things as they are, in the physical and spiritual 
 world, we must not understand that He determined their 
 nature by selection, any more than the circle chooses 90 for 
 
 VOL. I. P
 
 210 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 the angle which a radius makes with the tangent at its 
 extremity ; that nature inevitably results from His nature, 
 and is indeed nothing else than its direct expression. 
 
 Thus the cosmos turns out to be, in part the necessary 
 nature, in part the free will, of God ; its essences and pro- 
 perties being determined by the former ; the synchronisms of 
 its phenomena by the latter ; the one containing only what 
 God is; the other, what He does. Both are supernatural, if 
 we use that word as coextensive with Divine at first hand. If 
 we allow the words ' nature ' and ' natural "* to be carried back 
 behind the phenomenal order into what is immutable in God, 
 then the synchronisms, being volitional, are alone supernatural ; 
 the rest, natural ; but still, both identified with God. 
 
 In this first phase, therefore, already the All is God ; there 
 are no second causes ; there is no nature but His nature ; no 
 will but His will. And this is strictly what we mean by 
 Pantheism. 
 
 It would seem, however, as if Malebranche had repented of 
 allowing so much scope to the cogency of the eternal ' ideas,' 
 and the necessary sequence from them of the essences and 
 ulterior properties and ultimate phenomena of things, whether 
 in extension or in thought. He apparently did not like the 
 necessity to quit its fountain head and travel down the chain ; 
 it seemed to invest each link with the prerogative of setting up 
 the next ; though in reality it was but the logical pre-requisite. 
 He was jealous for the undivided rights of the Supreme 
 Source ; and lest any shred of causality (curia) should escape 
 thence under the disguise of rational consequence (Ao'yos), he 
 recalled or disclaimed any leave for power to pass down from 
 the essence of God into the essence of things. He permitted 
 them to be what they must be by reasoning themselves out 
 from their premisses, but to do nothing ; for motion, that is 
 action, could be reasoned into them from nothing, nor out of 
 them into anything ; it was no logical product, and could be 
 transmitted by no deduction. Created things, therefore, their 
 essences and properties, were impotent; and if body could 
 move body, and thought excite thought, it lay not in them- 
 selves to do so, but a power from the primal source stepped 
 in and effected the change. Thus, the miracle of synchronism
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. ail 
 
 is no longer solitary ; it is supported on either hand by a 
 separate and perpetual miracle of succession ; and the entire 
 dynamics of the universe are resolved into the immediate 
 volition of One Will. The change in this second phase of 
 doctrine consists in a different partition of the universe 
 between the necessary and the free attributes of God ; the 
 province of the latter is enlarged at the expense of the 
 former, and volitional agency is made accountable for all 
 that begins or ceases to be. The supernatural, in the more 
 restricted sense of the word, gains new fields, and governs the 
 whole territory of phenomena. 
 
 The result, in spite of this modified division of its contents, 
 comes out in similar terms. The universe is constituted by 
 what things are and what they do. The former, that is, their 
 essences, are the form of the One Reason; the* latter, that is, 
 their powers, of the One Will. The total, therefore, is the 
 aggregate of the eternal necessity and the eternal freedom of 
 God. There is nothing but God ; He is not only Sole Cause, 
 but entire effect ; He is All in all. 
 
 How little suspected or intended was this result by Male- 
 branche himself is curiously illustrated by a passage in his 
 Dialogues, in which he attacks, not without vehemence, a 
 recent doctrine which identified the universe and God. One 
 of the interlocutors had shown some interest in this doctrine, 
 without eliciting reply, dropping, for instance, the remark : 
 ' From what you say, I can well understand that that impious 
 man of our time who made the universe his God, had no God ; 
 he was a genuine atheist 1 .' The same speaker, determined 
 apparently to elicit from his teacher some judgment on this 
 opinion, afterwards affects to adopt it, and says : ' We are a 
 part of the Divinity ; the infinitely perfect Being is the 
 universe ; it is the aggregate of all that is.' ' This again ! ' 
 says his teacher. 'Do not suppose, Theodore, that I am 
 impious and senseless enough to give in to these dreams ; 
 but I am delighted to learn from you how to refute them. 
 For I have heard say, that there are minds corrupt enough to 
 be fascinated with them.' Theodore : ' I do not know, Aristes, 
 
 1 EntretienB, VIII. p. 289. 
 
 P 2
 
 21 a METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 whether we can quite depend on what is now said of certain 
 people ; and whether even the ancient philosopher who con- 
 ceived the opinion which you adduce ever believed it. For, 
 though there are few extravagances too great for mankind, 
 I would willingly believe that the authors of such chimeras 
 have scarcely put faith in them. For, after all, the author 
 who has revived this impiety agrees that God is the infinitely 
 Perfect Being. This being so, how could he have believed that 
 all created beings are but part or modifications of the Divi- 
 nity ? Is it a perfection to be unjust in one's parts, unhappy 
 in one's modifications, ignorant, senseless, impious ? There are 
 more sinners than honest men, more idolaters than faithful : 
 what disorder, what conflict, between the Divinity and its 
 parts ! what a monstrous, frightful, absurd chimera ! A God 
 necessarily hated, blasphemed, set at nought, or at all events 
 ignored by the greater part of Himself ; for how few think of 
 acknowledging such a Divinity ! A God who is necessarily 
 either unhappy or unconscious in the majority of His parts 
 and modifications ! A God punishing Himself, administering 
 retribution to Himself! In a word, a being infinitely perfect, 
 yet composed of all the disorders of universe ! What notion 
 can be more replete with evident contradictions? Certainly, 
 if there are people who can accept a counterfeit God so 
 monstrously conceived, it is either that they do not want 
 sight of one at all, or else there must be minds with a native 
 tendency to seek in the idea of the circle for all the proper- 
 ties of the triangle. Believe me, Aristes, no man of sense has 
 ever been convinced of such a craze, though several persons 
 have maintained it as if they were well convinced of it. For 
 so whimsical is self-love, that it can furnish motives for 
 inducing boon-companions to trust one's profession of such 
 belief, and for wishing to appear convinced of it. But it is 
 impossible really to believe it, if you have ever so little 
 capacity for reasoning, and fear of illusion. Those who 
 maintain it cannot have been inwardly persuaded of it, unless 
 the corruption of their heart had so blinded them, that the 
 attempt to enlighten them would have been mere waste of 
 time V 
 
 1 Entretiens, VIII. pp. 315 317.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 213 
 
 Who was the anonymous reviver of ancient Pantheisni 
 that was the ' occasional cause ' of this outburst ? It can 
 hardly be any other than Spinoza, whose posthumous Ethics 
 had been published eleven years before, and had elicited 
 several replies likely to be known in France ; especially by 
 Aubert de Verse* 1 , and Pierre Poiret 2 . The latter is pretty 
 certain to have been familiar to Malebranche, and to have 
 fixed his attention on Spinoza's doctrine ; for Poiret, like 
 himself, was at once a distinguished Cartesian, and in 
 sympathy with the mystical devotion of the 'Theologia 
 Germanica,' and the French Quietists. In the very titles of 
 these replies, the epithets ' impious ' and ' atheist,' applied in 
 the foregoing citation, are given to Spinoza, as if they had 
 passed into current use. As the unnamed writer, though 
 ' of our time,' is spoken of in the past tense, it is obvious that 
 he was no longer living; and the charge brought against 
 him, of making the universe his God, is precisely that which 
 early assumed the foremost place in the Spinozistic con- 
 troversy, and, even when based only on his Theologico- 
 political Treatise, drew forth from Bredenburg, in 1675, a 
 refutation in the form of geometrical proof. If, as these 
 reasons render probable, Spinoza is the object of Male- 
 branche's attack, it is curious to witness the antagonism 
 of two philosophers who were destined ever after to be 
 regarded as allies ; and to observe that the offence in Male- 
 branche's eyes was in effect the same that was to be brought 
 home to himself. Whether he had any unconfessed appre- 
 hension of this, and wished to have the first word for self- 
 protection, must be left to conjecture ; but, though in a few 
 years he was repeatedly accused of Spinozism, I am not aware 
 that at the date of the Dialogues he had incurred any such 
 imputation. That the affinity of his doctrine with Spinoza's 
 should conceal itself from him, in spite of its logical certainty, 
 is conceivable enough from the different order in which it 
 
 1 L'impie Convaincu, ou Dissertation centre Spinoza. Dans laquelle on refute 
 les fondeinens de son Athelsme. Amsterdam, 1684. 
 
 2 Fundamenta Atheismi eversa, sive specimen absurditatis Spinozianae. Amstel. 
 1695. (Appended to a second edition of the Treatise Cogitationes Rationales de 
 Deo, anima et malo )
 
 214 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 arose in the two cases. In both, God and the universe were 
 identified. But Spinoza translated God into the universe ; 
 Malebranche transfigured the universe into God. The one 
 made over infinitude to Nature ; the other reduced Nature 
 to zero. To rigorous thought the difference may be nothing ; 
 but to feeling it may be everything. 
 
 I have said that Malebranche wavers between the imma- 
 nental and the transcendental relations of God to the world. 
 When he says that ' God is extended, like bodies,' yet is not 
 body, and we ask ' Wherein lies the difference ? ' the answer 
 is, ' In him it is intelligible extension ; in body it is actual 
 extension.' If we further ask, 'Do these then differ from 
 each other in range 1 ' the answer is, ' No, both are infinite.' 
 Now, intelligible extension gives, so to speak, the range of 
 God ; actual extension gives the range of the universe ; both 
 being infinite, they are the same. Here then we have the 
 immanental theory, which also underlies the expression that 
 God is ' the Infinite, whose property it is to be at the same 
 time One and All things ; ' that He is the totality of being, 
 universal being, and not a being among beings ; that ' He 
 alone, the infinite, the indeterminate being, or the infinite 
 infinitely infinite, can comprise the reality infinitely in- 
 finite which I see when I think of Being, and not of such 
 and such beings, or of such and such infinities V Here we 
 have the very same predicates employed to indicate the range 
 of being in God and in the universe of being. Yet we meet 
 with phrases no less distinctly cast in the transcendental 
 mould; e.g. when he says, that 'the Divine Substance is 
 everywhere, not only in the universe, but beyond 2 ; ' that 
 it is less true to affirm ' God to be in the world, than the 
 world to be in Him, or in His immensity ; just as eternity is 
 not in time, but rather time in eternity 3 .' Appeal might 
 perhaps be also made to the caution against regarding ex- 
 tension and thinking as the only attributes of God, because 
 they are the only ones that make our world ; were it not that, 
 in admitting innumerable others unknown to us, he would 
 
 1 Entretiens, II. pp. 43, 43. * Ibid. VII. p. 274. 
 
 s Ibid. VIII. p. 276.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 215 
 
 also admit along with them corresponding other worlds simi- 
 larly unknown to us. But, at all events, the supernatural 
 synchronism by which, in our nature, mind and body are 
 made to go together, affords a plain example of Divine inter- 
 calation into a presupposed system of nature. In this view, 
 God is regarded as All nature and something more. Not 
 only was this always the preponderant character of Male- 
 branche's Pantheism, but, as time went on, the 'something 
 more ' continually encroached upon the ' All nature,' till the 
 whole was enwrapped within its blaze ; the free-will of God 
 gained upon His necessary nature, till the order of the world 
 and the vicissitudes of men became incidents of His life and 
 traits of His sole activity. 
 
 (4) The Ethics of Malebranche inevitably contain the same 
 heterogeneous and incompatible elements as the philosophy 
 on which they rest ; assuming the free-will and responsibility 
 of man, yet rendering them inconceivable in presence of the 
 sole causality of God. Moral obligation implies a sphere in 
 which we can do something of ourselves : the ' absolute im- 
 potence of the creatures' means that we can do nothing of 
 ourselves. As Malebranche asserts both, one part of his system 
 destroys the other. The mode in which he tried to reconcile 
 the two was by dispensing, as far as possible, with the demand 
 for power in morals, and forcing them into the category of 
 intellectual judgments, and giving them the aspect of 
 assent to truth, due to the necessary influence of evidence. 
 Throughout the Cartesian school the tendency was always 
 strong to identify the Understanding and the Will ; Descartes 
 himself differencing them not in their nature but in their 
 range, the Will affirming more than the Understanding ; 
 Spinoza making them unconditionally the same ; Malebranche 
 maintaining the intermediate position, that they ought to 
 be the same \ and would be so, as soon as the will learned 
 to suspend its affirmation till the understanding made it 
 too. By thus attenuating the functions of the will to a mere 
 
 1 Trait6 de Morale VI. i a : Les jugemens de la volont<$ ne doivent pas avoir 
 plus d'e'tendue que les perception de 1' esprit. II faut suivre, pas k pas, la lumiere, 
 et ne pas la preVenir.
 
 2l6 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 abstinence from movement, he thought that he had silenced its 
 claim to any energy of its own, and handed over the whole 
 business of determining this or that to the understanding. 
 So long, however, as assent is suspended against the pressure 
 of passions from the bodily side, and is suspended not for us 
 but by us, it is not inert ; and precisely because it is not 
 inert, and is exercised by the Ego, there is a moral crisis wrap- 
 ped up in it. However narrow may be the corner into which 
 free-will is driven, be it no more than the opening or shut- 
 ting the eyes, on it depends, and by it is saved, the possi- 
 bility of moral obligation. It matters not whether the executive 
 power which carries out a volition be ours or God's, provided 
 that the determination of it hither or thither rests with 
 us. And with us Malebranche's 'liberty of the mind ' means to 
 leave it, in spite of his denial of its facultative nature, and 
 his attempt to convey over all our forces into the omnipotent 
 hand. Enough escapes unseen from this transfer to afford 
 a base for his ethical doctrine. 
 
 The conception which Malebranche formed of the relation 
 between our 'liberty' and God's power is highly character- 
 istic. There are two systems of Order prevailing in the 
 universe. Both of them are Divine ; one, from the inner 
 essence of God as eternal and universal Reason ; the other, 
 from the free volitional power of God as Creator of all. The 
 first is the immutable Law of God, the order of His own per- 
 fection, and, as imparted to us, of our relative and dependent . 
 perfection of truth and righteousness. The second is the 
 Energy of God, the order of Nature, the scheme of instituted 
 general laws which he has set up, not for man in par- 
 ticular, or spiritual beings collectively, but for ends of wider 
 scope, attainable only by steadfast adherence to the methods 
 selected. These two systems by no means coincide in their 
 phenomenal particulars ; and though God always wills in 
 harmony with the former on the universal scale, yet his acts, 
 taken in detail, often contravene it, and impair the good 
 which is recognised by his and our eternal law. He forms 
 monsters, and sends destructive avalanches and floods ; not 
 to mar the beauty of life, or to lay waste the field of human 
 industry, but in fidelity to uniformities so beneficent or just
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 217 
 
 in their total sweep as to absorb these qualifying incon- 
 veniences. What we have to follow and obey is the eternal 
 order, not the order of nature ; and where it is possible for 
 us, by resisting the spontaneous consequences of the latter, 
 to bring it into closer accord with the former, e. g. by diverting 
 a torrent, or irrigating a desert, or combating a disease, we 
 are obedient to God in correcting His work l . He indeed Him- 
 self is still the agent there, for we are but ' occasional 
 causes,' and He is the executant of our volitions ; having 
 engaged Himself to be so, whether they be right or wrong. 
 Our position, therefore, is simply that of workers of signals 
 at our several stations ; we make signs to Him to cause this 
 or that ; He binds Himself to do it, whether it be conformable 
 or not with the supreme order. Thus, 'though we can do 
 no one any good or harm by our own power, we can oblige 
 God by our practical desires, in virtue of the laws of union 
 between soul and body, to do good and harm to other men ; 
 for it is we who will the movement of tongue and arms, but 
 God who alone can effect it V In this view, God places His 
 power at our disposal pro re natd, instead of lending us a 
 store of it for our own keeping, sufficient for us to draw on 
 through life. 
 
 In representing Moral distinctions as objects of Rational 
 discernment, Malebranche did not mean to say that, in a con- 
 flict and decision of conscience, the matter judged was of the 
 same kind with that involved in a conclusion of the under- 
 standing ; or that the purely quantitative ideas which suffice 
 for logical procedure would also supply ethical results. He 
 would not, I suppose, have denied that the conditions of 
 intellect are conceivable without any perception of the con- 
 tents of character ; only, such intellect would have only one 
 side of that larger 'Reason' which he predicates of God 
 and man. The main interest in which he puts mathematical 
 and moral certainty under the same head is, that he may 
 claim them both as having the same security of intuition, 
 notwithstanding their difference of kind ; and so be able to 
 treat them as the common data of all known minds. He was 
 
 1 TraitS de Morale, I. 2023. * Ibid. XV. x. 8.
 
 21 8 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 intent on universalising morals, as all men agree to univer- 
 salise geometry; and emphasised the eternal and immutable 
 character of Right by planting it in the essence of God, 
 side by side with truth similarly eternal and immutable. 
 From that infinite Source he derived, in the order of being, 
 the insight possessed by the human conscience, no less than 
 the axioms of the human understanding : the Divine ' order 
 is graven on the heart of man, and he has but to retire into 
 himself to learn it x ; ' and not he alone, but any other thinking 
 nature in the universe ; ' for all minds contemplate the same 
 primary objects of intelligence, and necessarily find there the 
 same relations of magnitude, the same speculative truths ; 
 they find there also the same truths of conduct, the same laws, 
 the same order, when they apprehend the relative perfection 
 prevailing among the objects of intelligence included in the 
 same reality of Divine Wisdom ' (literally, ' in the same sub- 
 stance of the Word 2 '). And this reading of the inward heart- 
 writing is by immediate vision, and not by inferential judg- 
 ment: it is the characteristic of truth alone, of real rela- 
 tions, to be self-revealing, so that one has nothing to judge, 
 except that there they are, clearly visible 3 . Since the order 
 of knowing is the inverse of the order of being, this doctrine, 
 when read backwards, is tantamount to saying, that our 
 inward conscience carries, in its essential beliefs, the witness 
 of an eternal and immutable moral order : our own intuitions 
 are the evidence of it, the only evidence there could be ; for 
 if the first principles of knowledge do not tell the truth, how 
 else can it ever pass into a mind of which these are the sole 
 threshold? Thus interpreted, Malebranche's system trans- 
 forms itself into an ethical scheme of the psychological type, 
 not really deduced from his metaphysics, but having its 
 ultimate credentials in the moral consciousness ; and within 
 that genus, it specifically belongs to the class of intuitive 
 theories. Mackintosh accuses him of taking for granted all 
 that an ethical philosophy has to establish, viz. ' the reality 
 of moral distinctions, and the power of the moral feelings ; ' 
 
 1 Trait^ de Morale, II. 9. * Ibid. I. 7. 
 
 Ibid. I. 8.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 219 
 
 instead of proving these, he is content with asserting them 1 . 
 The criticism is groundless. How is any one to prove 'the 
 reality of moral distinctions?' If he finds that what are 
 called ' moral distinctions ' are resolvable into something non- 
 moral, on which they depend, he can, by disclosing this con- 
 dition, explain them away and prove them unreal, i.e. a 
 mere subjective transformation of what is other than moral. 
 But if he finds- that he cannot go behind their recognition in 
 consciousness, any more than behind his belief in infinite 
 space and time, how can he go about to prove their reality 1 
 A thing cannot be proved unless you have a better known 
 to work with ; and whatever, when closely scrutinised, stands 
 on the line of best known, can have no further voucher for 
 its reality. If moral distinctions are real, they can occupy 
 no other position than this, relatively to our minds ; to see 
 whether they do so is therefore our only resource ; and to this 
 Malebranche has resorted. And as to the ' power of the moral 
 feelings,' in few writers, prior to Butler, does it receive more 
 ample and impressive illustration than in Malebranche's 
 treatise. 
 
 In what Malebranche discovers, when he retires within to 
 consult his intuitive light, there is a peculiarity which de- 
 serves, and has not received, special notice. Other philoso- 
 phers, as Cudworth, have insisted on 'the eternal and im- 
 mutable ' nature of morality ; and, like Dr. Samuel Clarke, have 
 defined that nature, not as something absolute, but as consisting 
 of certain unalterable relations, not less exact and self-evident 
 than the elementary relations of number; so that in the 
 just and unjust there was an inherent fitness and unfitness of 
 things. But in these and kindred theories the result always 
 was, to establish the single antithesis of Right and Wrong, to 
 put all voluntary conduct under one or other of these two 
 heads, and the same act invariably under the same head. The 
 moral picture of the world, therefore, was all painted in black 
 and white. With Malebranche it is different. The ' order ' 
 of which he reads the intuitive report is a graduated order, 
 involving not simply relations, but proportions of things, 
 
 1 Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy. Whewell's Ed. p. 180.
 
 220 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 a more or less of excellence from zero to perfection. And by 
 this mark, of qualitative worth, as opposed to mathematical 
 or logical equivalents, he discriminates ethical from intellectual 
 apprehension. ' Supposing man to be a rational being, we 
 certainly cannot deny him some knowledge of what God 
 thinks, and of the way in which God acts. For, in contem- 
 plating the essence of the Divine Wisdom (literally, the sub- 
 stance of the Word), which constitutes my rationality and all 
 intelligence, I can clearly see the relations of magnitude among 
 the ideas which it comprises ; and these relations are the 
 same eternal truths which God sees. For God sees as well 
 as I that twice two are four, and that triangles on the same 
 base and between the same parallels are equal. I can also 
 discover, at least dimly, the relations of perfection among 
 these ideas ; and these relations are the immutable order 
 which God consults when He acts ; the order which ought to 
 regulate the respect and love of all intelligences V Whoever 
 inwardly sees this graduated order of perfection, sees as God 
 sees ; if he judges by it alone, he is infallible ; if he conforms 
 to it, he follows the law which God follows, and has the same 
 love ; and to love as he loves is to love in proportion as things 
 are lovable 2 . By thus comprising, within his conception of 
 Moral Order, the idea of a preferential scale of worth ranging 
 over several degrees, Malebranche struck, I believe, an im- 
 portant truth ; rather perhaps (as he virtually confesses) 
 ' dimly felt ' than made out in distinct detail ; for he gives 
 no clear account of what the objects or ideas are which stand 
 upon this scale of relative perfection: sometimes they are 
 beings ; sometimes they are thoughts ; and again, they are 
 kinds of attainable good ; but his general formula, however 
 little worked out, plants ethical theory upon the right track. 
 Unhappily, no successor appreciated it sufficiently to rescue 
 it from its indeterminate state, and carry it forward to fruit- 
 ful results. 
 
 The importance attached by Malebranche to this character- 
 istic principle is evidenced by his setting up our ' Love of the 
 law of Order' as the Sole Virtue, or rather, as the all-com- 
 
 1 TraiW de Morale, I. 6. 2 Ibid. I. 9. 14.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 221 
 
 prehensive formula under which every particular virtue is 
 embraced. It is as if we were to say, that fidelity to an 
 illuminated conscience was the only or total excellence. Who- 
 ever invariably discerns the better and prefers it to the worse, 
 will realise all the virtue demanded from him ; and his sepa- 
 rate moral qualities, such as justice, bravery, veracity, will 
 be constituted by differences in the impulses that come into 
 play, and in the outward conditions amid which they operate. 
 Malebranche is perhaps too exacting when he demands that 
 no act should be admitted as virtuous which issues from any 
 other principle than love for the law of order: if we are 
 charitable, courageous, patient, under the influence of some 
 particular affection, and without intentional observance of 
 the Divine order, no moral worth (he intimates) attaches to 
 our will. There are, however, two senses in which this assertion 
 may be taken. If it means that a mere impulsive act, put forth 
 by some one affection having for the moment sole possession 
 of us, cannot be virtuous, this is certainly true : the moral 
 character first enters when the better affection is preferred to 
 a competitor also present to the mind ; and if that preference 
 takes practical effect, the act is certainly virtuous, though 
 performed simply on comparison of these two rival feelings, 
 and without any generalised love of a larger order coming 
 into play. Perhaps this is all that Malebranche meant. If 
 his words imply that, over and above the right solution of 
 the individual problem, there must be a separate deliberate 
 resolve to preserve the gradations of a universal scale, he 
 makes the same mistake which we should make if we said, 
 that everything was ethically worthless which was not done 
 with a view to being conscientious. It is one thing to follow 
 the higher whenever it comes ; another to contemplate the 
 whole scale of gradations, and act with a view to save it from 
 breach. The former suffices to render volition what it ought 
 to be ; and it is not needful to suppose that Malebranche 
 demanded more. 
 
 By proclaiming allegiance to the law of order to be the 
 whole of virtue, Malebranche seems to clash with the Moral 
 Theology of the Catholic Church, which assigns that rank to 
 Charity or Christian love in the largest sense. By a single
 
 222 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 mediating thought, however, he ingeniously identifies the two. 
 All virtue is love ; but not all love is virtue ; to render it so, 
 it must be in proportion to the worth of the objects loved ; 
 supreme, for instance, towards God, conditional towards human 
 beings, so as to yield if ever the diviner call requires. And 
 when the affection has adjusted itself to the true and har- 
 monious measure of its claim, it contains in itself the law of 
 order and coalesces with it. We are drawn towards related 
 objects by two kinds of love ; (1) by love of union with them, 
 so far as their power over us or affinity with us makes them 
 needful to our happiness ; (2) by the love which we call good- 
 will or benevolence ; this is directed upon their merit, and is 
 proportioned to it, without any regard to a dependence of 
 ourselves upon them. The latter, therefore, is purely disin- 
 terested ; the former, though it be our tie of relation with God 
 and His perfections, is concurrent with self-love, and capable 
 of both justifying and controlling it. For self-love is in itself 
 neither virtue nor vice: it is but the invincible desire of 
 happiness inherent in all conscious natures: its function is 
 indispensable, and is legitimate, so far as the desire is regu- 
 lated by the real proportions of good, and is supreme towards 
 God, the sum of it all. Short of this condition, it is the great 
 enemy of virtue ; for it stands in the way of the other, the 
 benevolent love, and poisons with personal interests the very 
 springs of reverence and affection. In a mind thus preoccupied, 
 the proportions are all distorted of the perfections which 
 claim the moral homage of the heart 1 . So great is our 
 danger of this, that in order to preserve the scale of ethical 
 values unspoiled, it is best to curtail even the legitimate 
 rights of self-love; it is sure to take care of itself, without 
 any nursing by our will : never mind the happiness ; leave 
 that to God; and give exclusive heed to the law of order, 
 which is the key to all virtue 2 . 
 
 In comprehending all excellence under the love of the 
 Divine order, Malebranche does not decline to specify certain 
 distinct virtues which it comprises. These are not so much 
 parts of it, when it is fully realised, as the voluntary methods 
 
 it^ de Morale, III. 3 Ibid. I. 19.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRAXCHE. 22$ 
 
 of its formation in minds that have to grow into it. They 
 are three : (1) strength of 'mind ; (2) liberty of mind ; (3) obe- 
 dience to the perceived order. The first is the condition 
 of light; the second is the security against error; the third 
 (which is not attained without Divine grace in aid of reason) 
 completes the circuit of the other two, and lets them flash 
 from the reason to the will. 
 
 Strength of mind consists in concentration and tenacity of 
 Attention, without which true 'ideas' will never visit us and 
 disperse the darkness of sense. Not that it is able of itself 
 to reach them : they are in God, who alone and always gives 
 intellectual light : but He gives it according to general rules ; 
 and the condition or ' occasional cause ' of His imparting it 
 to us is our earnest attention, which is ' a natural prayer ' for 
 the illumination of reason. This prayer is chiefly hindered 
 by the too vivid impression of sensible things, the distractions 
 of imagination, the preoccupations of passion. From these 
 we must resolutely shake ourselves free ; and meditate only 
 on clear ideas, whether of quantitative or moral relations ; 
 seeking our knowledge of man (which is of prime im- 
 portance) not from outward observation but from inward 
 reflection; and of God (which is supreme), not from ex- 
 perience or tradition, but from contemplating the idea of 
 infinitely perfect being. Truth will flow into the soul thus 
 purified x . 
 
 Liberty of mind consists in suspending assent and arresting 
 the attention of the will, till the light of evidence leaves no 
 option to the understanding. In matters of speculative truth, 
 it is not difficult to exercise this virtue ; for there the ideas 
 are distinct and seen through a translucent medium. But, in 
 affairs of practical morals, they are in themselves set apart by 
 finer gradations, and are viewed through an atmosphere 
 tremulous with feeling or clouded by passion. So that there 
 is strong temptation to let interest decide while reason pauses, 
 and to loose the curb on the impatient will. When this is the 
 case, we are almost sure to fall into error; for we judge, not 
 because we see, but only because we will ; the judgment is 
 
 Morale, V.
 
 224 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 our own work, and not from the act of God within us ; it is a 
 leap in the dark, not a walking in the light. And the more 
 we are pressed upon by social influence, and have the din of 
 chance opinion ever in our ears, the more needful and yet the 
 harder is it to carry every question to the retreats of rational 
 reflection, where alone it can be truly solved. Whoever insists 
 on doing so may lose the suffrages of the hour, but shall gain 
 an unwasting treasure. ' Let a man spend but a single year in 
 intercourse with the world, hearing all that is said, and put- 
 ting faith in none of it, retiring into himself, moment by 
 moment, to listen whether the truth within holds the same 
 language, and always suspending his assent until the light 
 appears ; and him shall I deem more learned than Aristotle. 
 wiser than Socrates, more enlightened than the divine Plato. 
 The facility which he will have in meditating and sus- 
 pending his assent, I reckon higher than all the virtues of the 
 greatest men of pagan antiquity; for if the soil which he 
 cultivates is not ungrateful, he will have gained by his labour 
 more strength and liberty of mind than one can well imagine. 
 What a difference there is between reason and opinion ; 
 between the lord of the inner soul who convinces by evidence, 
 and the men who persuade by instinct, by gesture, by tone, 
 by air and manner ; between men at once deceivers and 
 deceived, and the eternal wisdom, the truth itself ! Let those 
 who have not reflected on these things pass their censure on 
 me, and begin it by renouncing Reason V 
 
 These two, which are the ' Cardinal Virtues,' are the inward 
 preparation for the third, which conducts them to their 
 outward end, viz. living obedience to the Divine law of 
 order. The hindrances of passion and opinion are not finally 
 gone, when we have saved our mental vision from their 
 illusions: even when we clearly see the truth, they hang 
 around the will that proceeds to follow it, and by countless 
 unseen threads detain or divert the intended steps. The union 
 with the body, for ever thrusting to the front the importunate 
 craving for immediate ease and pleasure, contests the supreme 
 union with God, which offers only the silent, tranquil, in- 
 
 1 Trait^ de Morale, VI. 13.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 225 
 
 visible joy of Divine reason and love, and ' deceives, if it be 
 possible, even the elect.' So far as, through the entrance of 
 Sin, we are unfairly matched against this besetting foe, the 
 balance is now redressed by Grace, with the aid of which we 
 are no longer unequal to the fight. The ' means of grace ' are 
 the weapons put into our hands ; meditation on religious 
 truth, on the Christian view of human life, on Death, and on 
 Immortality, before the face of which the passions dare not 
 appear; prayer and self-denial, and a constant self-remem- 
 brance of the relative magnitude of temporal things and 
 eternal. It is true that Death alone can release us into our 
 real and final union with God ; but in a large measure we 
 may truly die to the body while yet we live with it ; die to 
 its superfluous wants, to its self-incurred ailments, to its 
 inordinate desires, to all that interferes with its purity as a 
 temple of the Holy Spirit, with its dignity as a watchtower 
 of intellectual contemplation; and thus we may attain to 
 some true vision of God, although here we can but ' see in 
 part.' Some there may be who are strong enough to rise into 
 such beginnings of immortal things, while mingling with the 
 full current of human affairs in great cities and mighty 
 States ; but for weaker souls it will be safer to break off, 
 as far as possible, from the entanglements of secular interests, 
 and leave a clear space for meditative thought and love to 
 expand and dominate l . The need of this is evident when we 
 consider that it is impossible to strengthen the union of the 
 soul with the body without enfeebling its opposite union with 
 God; and the great strengthener of that dangerous alliance 
 is the Imagination, which withdraws the intellect from its 
 proper objects, and suborns it to play with phantasms of 
 thought and flashes of speech. Under its fascination we forget 
 the fundamental principle, that ' what happens to the soul 
 through the body is far the body only,' and must never be 
 assumed by the mind as belonging to its ends. Into this snare 
 none fall more readily than men of natural wit. They learn to 
 delight in sparkling surprises of thought, and to seek them at 
 any cost of exaggeration and false combination ; they move 
 
 1 Trait^ de Morale, VII XI. 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 226 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 about through the scene of things with their eyes open to 
 nothing but their oddities and contradictions, and study in 
 mankind chiefly their follies and conceits, till the deeper 
 meanings of life slip from their notice. At the same time, 
 less vivacious natures feel a strange delight in being startled 
 by the electric lustre of their conversation, and surround them 
 with admirers : their reputation becomes staked upon their 
 power to dazzle and amuse, and the fatal habit becomes 
 confirmed, of turning life into a jest, and degrading its solemn 
 drama into a farce. From these perils Malebranche finds no 
 adequate escape but by absolute self-sacrifice of the passions 
 and imagination: they must be treated as unconditionally 
 contrary to wisdom and virtue : we must avoid the objects 
 which excite them ; must test them by the light of Reason, 
 and see how irregular and absurd they are ; and invoke 
 Divine assistance to keep us true to the law of the spirit 1 . 
 
 It will be observed that thus far Malebranche has spoken 
 of Virtues only, and not of Duties; and of virtues (since he in- 
 cludes 'strength of mind' under them) nearly in the Greek 
 sense of the best condition of some aspect or activity of the 
 mind. Not, however, quite in the Greek sense ; because though 
 he extends the term to intellectual insight, he does not mean 
 to attach it to any best condition except such as has been 
 gained by voluntary power. Essentially, however, his treatment 
 of virtue is a treatment of mental perfection, both of the 
 reason and of the will. But now, for the second half of his 
 treatise, he takes up the subject of Duties. Like the earlier 
 chapters, it abounds in just remarks on human life, and 
 subtle analysis of character. But, for want of a careful 
 definition at the outset, the conception of Duty is left 
 indeterminate, and is held to no consistent use. He had 
 already said, that it was one of the greatest mistakes of 
 philosophers to confound duty with virtue, whereas we might 
 acquit ourselves of our duty, say of humility or generosity, 
 from mere natural inclination, without any tincture of these 
 virtues ; and in that case, being unguided by reason, we 
 should be in fact vicious to excess, while flattering ourselves 
 
 1 Trait^ de Morale, XII, XIII.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 227 
 
 that we are heroes in virtue. And, on the other hand, in 
 following the inviolable order, we are often called upon to 
 disregard some duty, as when we refuse to succour or indulge 
 our particular friend upon guilty terms l . Here, it is obvious, 
 the word ' Duty ' is employed of such external offices as usually 
 spring from love rightly adapted to the relations of life, but 
 which may be imitated by an affection or habit ivrongly adapted 
 to these relations. As it is only the Tightness of the affection 
 that constitutes the duty, it is absurd and mischievous to retain 
 the name, when the act has lost its essence and identity. 
 
 In this example, the divorce alleged between virtue and 
 duty is from failure of the inner principle. Malebranche 
 dwells also on the inverse case, where, in presence of the 
 inner principle, wicked things are nevertheless done, for want 
 of right apprehension of external relations. A really good 
 man, inspired with the love of the Divine order, may so 
 misconstrue his fellows and the system of the world as, from 
 mistaken zeal, to perpetuate futile and forbidden acts, hurtful 
 to the rights of others, and blinding to his own soul. By 
 appeal to this danger, Malebranche enforces the necessity of 
 studying, besides the inward harmony of the mind, the whole 
 scheme of personal relations of which our life is part ; else, 
 however right our virtues, our duties will go wrong. Here 
 then the word ' Duty ' is used exclusively of applied morals, 
 the form of concrete action ethically suitable to the outward 
 economy of the world to which we belong. We thus alight 
 upon the usual meaning of the term ; and, in conformity with 
 it, the second part of the treatise surveys in succession the 
 three kinds of personal relation in which we stand, to God, 
 to our fellow-creatures, and to ourselves ; with the view to 
 define the forms of action which they respectively render 
 obligatory upon us. The general result should be a code of 
 ethical conduct, i.e. a system of executive rules for giving best 
 expression to the virtues deduced in the earlier chapters. 
 From so large an undertaking he excuses himself, on the plea 
 that, the combinations of external conditions being exhaustless. 
 the variations of duty are little short of infinite, and cannot 
 
 1 Traite de Morale, II. 5, 6. 
 
 Q2
 
 228 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 be overtaken by definition. Leaving to each man his own 
 particular problems, he will attempt only a few general laws 
 to cover the ground which is common to all l . 
 
 From this announced intention we expect to be led forth 
 by the author into the outer field of conduct, and taught what 
 we must do to carry out the Divine order now here, now 
 there. But, in spite of his promise, and doubtless his purpose, 
 it is rarely so. His strong reflective tendency is too much 
 for him, and is continually pressing him in upon himself and 
 tempting him to dwell rather on what the soul should be than 
 on what the will should do. Chapter after chapter, we find 
 him deducing the states of mind, the judgments and senti- 
 ments appropriate to the relation which he is considering, 
 without seriously addressing himself to the problems of overt 
 action which were to engage his skill : in other words, he still 
 lingers upon 'the virtues,' and evades the advance into the 
 duties. At last, as if he found it impossible to work out his 
 distinction between them, he relinquishes it with apparent 
 unconsciousness, declares all our duty to be inward, con- 
 sisting of judgments and stirrings of the soul, as is fit 
 where the Source of duty is ' a Spirit who must be worshipped 
 in spirit and in truth V He adds indeed, from time to time, 
 that the duty is incomplete till it has expressed itself in 
 exterior form: his own treatment of it however is applied, 
 not to its possible varieties of form, but to the essence of it 
 in the spirit. Here, therefore, his original conception of duty, 
 as outward offices that might spring from the most dissimilar 
 motives, is turned completely round ; and they become interior 
 affections, and retain their identity through all modifications 
 of external manifestation. Malebranche was, in truth, no 
 casuist; both from temperament and from his recluse habit, 
 he was deficient in the jurisprudential imagination which can 
 play with the conflicts of motive, and anticipate the combi- 
 nations of experience ; and he gladly escaped from the tangle 
 of circumstances under which the framer of law lives, to spread 
 his ingenuity into the region of great principles and simple 
 affections. The result upon his book is, that the second half 
 
 1 Trait^ de Morale, II. 14. * Ibid. II. 15, 10.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 229 
 
 does not adequately supplement the first, but, especially in 
 the best portions, repeats and reinforces it ; only arranging 
 the matter in a new order, viz. of our personal relations, in- 
 stead of the moral constitution of the soul. Hence it will 
 suffice if, in order to avoid iteration, we select for notice only 
 two or three characteristic features. 
 
 Towards God, as the All-perfect, our duty is summed up 
 in the requirement, to become as true a copy of Him as possible 
 through contemplation of Himself. But each attribute, when 
 seen in relation to us, enjoins on us as dependent beings 
 special affections of the spirit which can have no place in 
 Him. His Poiver, for instance, is no sooner understood by 
 us than it takes from us all our own, and from all creatures 
 around us whatever they seem to have. Hence, every personal 
 pretension vanishes : all admiration which terminates in others 
 becomes idolatry, and all glory and reverence revert to the 
 fountain-head ; and the soul assumes the consciousness of 
 dependent union with Him. Securely to preserve this, it 
 is well even to turn aside altogether from all created things 
 that can intercept the supreme union ; especially to decline the 
 witcheries of pleasure, which, even at the best, brings us into 
 captivity to finite objects. So, when we know that God's 
 Wisdom is our only light of thought, our duties of judgment 
 and decision assume the aspect of a reference to Him : the fact 
 that an effort of attention in us is the occasion of His gift, no 
 longer tempts us to credit ourselves with it ; so that a pure 
 humility becomes as natural as it is right ; yet not unbalanced 
 by a firm courage ; for the judgment of others, so far as it is 
 negatived by Reason, becomes nought to us, just like our own ; 
 and we carry a perpetual appeal from the opinion of men to 
 the verdict of God. Again, in reflecting upon the Love of 
 God, we know that it can fix only on all that is lovable, that 
 is, on Himself, the absolute and total good ; and that from 
 this primal spring all human love is but a partial outflow, 
 similarly directed upon good and good alone (though often 
 mistaken as to where it lies), and leading upwards to the Sum 
 of all. If in Him and us it is but one love, it must have the 
 same proportions in both, and give itself to objects according 
 to their true scale of good. The order of the Divine perfection,
 
 230 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 the order of the eternal law, we, like God, must love more 
 than any part that it contains. Hence, we must fix our 
 hearts, not on happiness, which exists to be the crown and 
 reward of goodness, but on perfection, which is its condition, 
 and without approaching which it is a delusion and a snare. 
 The duty imposed b'y God's love is therefore conformity with 
 His wisdom, and willing obedience to His law ; not any limited 
 and special service, but self-identification with the one com- 
 prehensive virtue. 
 
 Towards our neighbours, as co-members with us of a social 
 organism, our duties are determined by the Divine purpose 
 of our common life. To this we must give our heart and will ; 
 and to the parts which it includes, in proportion to their 
 excellence. Society exists for a twofold end, (1) temporal 
 good ; (2) spiritual good ; and has its scheme of provisions for 
 attaining both ; the State for the one, the Church for the other. 
 The former is rendered necessary by the union in our nature 
 of the soul with the body, to the consequences of which its 
 functions and its duration are limited. The latter addresses 
 itself to the soul alone, treats it as enrolled in an eternal 
 society, and prepares it for that diviner commonwealth. In 
 the subsidiary and transient nature of the first kind of good, 
 compared with the unlimited character of the second, we see 
 the order of duty plainly prescribed : for others, as well as for 
 ourselves, we must be chiefly intent on the spiritual well- 
 being which no death can touch, and on its known con- 
 ditions, union with God, conformity with Christ, and 
 affections true to the gradations of human excellence. All 
 intercourse, therefore, should tend to mutual sanctification, and 
 should keep the inward eye fixed on real perfection ; though 
 for this end we have to shun the precincts of Courts and the 
 resorts of ambition, where the outer brilliancy quenches 
 solemn thought and tender memories. Subject to this general 
 rule of preference for spiritual good, many modifications of 
 duty arise from personal relations, of family and civic life, of 
 authority, equality, or dependence, of friendship or enmity. In 
 commenting on these, Malebranche shows a strange mixture of 
 considerate piety, and almost cynical criticism of character. 
 When he pleads for the ' honour due to all men,' he urges with
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 231 
 
 persuasive force, that the meanest have from God the full hu- 
 man capacity, though unopened yet ; that the poor were the 
 favourites and first followers of Christ ; that the sinner is but 
 the sheep that has gone astray, and may yet be found of the 
 Good Shepherd; and that, in those who please us not, the 
 inward intent is hid, and is perhaps better than we dream ; 
 and that, even in the heart of our enemy, there may be a secret 
 way of reconciliation, if we close it by no wrong of anger or 
 contempt. But when he treats of our relation to equals, there 
 is a curious leaven of policy mingled with his wisdom. We 
 are to take the lowest place, which, as he truly says, we may 
 sincerely do, because we must have a more intimate know- 
 ledge of our own demerits than any other man's. But we are 
 to take pains to satisfy others that they hold the place in our 
 esteem which they suppose themselves to deserve ; we are to 
 make ourselves agreeable by an air of modesty and respect, 
 not negligent, not stately, not haughty. We are not to expect 
 too much ; remembering that ' there are no such things as 
 disinterested friends ;' for the best have only this distinction, 
 that they expect their reward from God, instead of from us. 
 May we not indulge a smile at the heterogeneous union in 
 these counsels of moral insight, and French politesse, and 
 mercenary religion 1 ? 
 
 If, in treating of ' duty towards ourselves,' Malebranche falls 
 into some confusion and vacillation, it is only the necessary 
 consequence of trying to work out a self-contradictory con- 
 ception. It takes two persons to make a duty ; for it is what 
 I owe to another, and is not constituted by the interior 
 egoistic relations of a single subject. No doubt, it makes a 
 great difference to myself whether I do this or that ; but a 
 difference which lies within the scope of Prudence, and in- 
 volves no consequences but those of error. If I am a sot 
 instead of a philosopher, you may call me a fool ; but the 
 moment you say I am responsible and must answer for it, 
 you assume the presence (Society aside) of an authoritative 
 Law ; that is, of a higher personality that has rights over 
 me ; and such assumption lurks in every recognition by the 
 conscience of a higher and lower object of the will. Whatever 
 therefore, in action purely egoistic, may put on the aspect
 
 232 METAPHYSICAL, IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 of something more than prudence, is duty, not towards our- 
 selves, but towards God, the inspirer of conscience. If once 
 you push the idea of Duty down to the territory of Prudence, 
 it is caught as in a trap, and you can never get it out again 
 alive ; its captor, finding it delivered into his hands, invades 
 and annexes all its provinces ; and proclaims a universal 
 empire of eudsemonist or hedonistic rule. Malebranche, having 
 taken the fatal step, struggles hard, but in vain, to evade its 
 inevitable drift. Self-love, that is, the quest of happiness, 
 is the invincible and unceasing necessity of our nature, which 
 we are free to direct on this line or that, but not to suspend 
 or abate. It is our universal motive, to the best choice as 
 to the worst ; our motive for conforming to the Law of Divine 
 order, for loving God and seeking union with Him as the 
 Supreme Good. If we seek Perfection, it is because it merits 
 happiness, and will be hereafter crowned by it. But for this 
 assurance, we should make a different choice. ' In this life, 
 the soul may be happy that is all in disorder ; the exercise 
 of virtue is hard and painful, and must be so, to test our faith 
 and enable us to gain genuine merit. But it is not always 
 to be so, and cannot be. There is no God unless the soul 
 is immortal ; and a time is coming when the face of things 
 shall change ; for an unjust God is a phantom God. All this 
 the mind clearly sees ; and what inference must be drawn by 
 its enlightened self-love, its invincible and insatiable desire 
 of happiness ? that, for solid happiness, it must submit itself 
 wholly to the Divine will 1 . 
 
 So far, we seem to listen to a consistent doctrine of self-love 
 as the animating power, not of ethics only, but of religion ; 
 and, except that it dwells more on the rewarding than on the 
 penal side of the Divine Sovereignty, we could fancy it was 
 Hobbes himself clenching his moral law with the proclamation, 
 ' There is no kicking against the pricks V Yet, this is not 
 what Malebranche meant ; and, as if to force himself away 
 from such a tendency, he has no sooner said that the desire 
 of happiness must be our motive for love and obedience to 
 God, than he adds that nevertheless the happiness must not be 
 
 1 TraiW de Morale, XXVII. 4. 2 De Cive. III. xv. 7.
 
 Branch II.] MALEBRANCHE. 
 
 our end, and that we must prefer the Divine law to all things l . 
 This is as much as to say, that what we are necessarily 
 desiring we are not to aim at. The only sense that I can 
 devise for such a proposition is that, though we desire the 
 object, we are to take no steps to get it ; and this is not the 
 author's meaning ; for the desire is just what is to put us on 
 the obedience and love which gain the happiness. The dis- 
 tinction between the ' motive ' and the ' end ' is here altogether 
 a verbal illusion. There are but two varieties of motive (i. e. 
 of influences tending to volition) ; a blind impulse from be- 
 hind, and a conceived good before us. The former is a mere 
 pressure of feeling, like that which finds vent in natural 
 language and gesture, or in bursts of anger, or other instinctive 
 animal action. The latter differs from this in having a 
 purpose or preconceived end, the attraction of which sets us 
 on finding and using the means for its attainment. It is with 
 this latter kind alone that Malebranche's proposition has to 
 do ; and here the motive actually is the end in view, and 
 cannot be otherwise defined. His doctrine, therefore, leaves 
 no relation possible between our love of God and of his law on 
 the one hand, and our happiness on the other, than that of 
 means to an end ; and his exhortations to us to prefer per- 
 fection to happiness, and to love God and the law of eternal 
 order on their own account, are unsusceptible of being 
 rationally carried into effect. In truth, his cynical rejection 
 of disinterested friendship must be extended to all forms of 
 love, whether its object be human or Divine. As no one can 
 set up an affection for a purpose, or work his self-love into 
 self-forgetfulness, Malebranche could not face the absurdity 
 of this conclusion : his better feelings required him to keep 
 it out of sight : he demands an enthusiasm which his avowed 
 principle would render impossible: he oscillates between the 
 psychological supremacy of self, and the ontological supre- 
 macy of God. The reader, if clear-minded, cannot go with 
 him in both directions ; but, if also just, will surely own, that 
 it is his logic that is superficial, his piety that is profound. 
 
 1 Trait^ de Morale, XXVII. 5.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 SPINOZA. 
 
 The intimate dependence of philosophical development on 
 theological impulse is illustrated in each of the successive 
 writers of the Immanental school. They all owed the first 
 excitement of their speculative genius to some religious train- 
 ing. Descartes was a scholar of the Jesuits ; Geulinx, a con- 
 vert to the Protestantism of the Low Countries ; Malebranche, 
 a Priest of the Oratory ; Spinoza, a pupil of the Rabbis. In 
 their several characters they not inexactly represent the adroit 
 intellectual diplomatist, the sad and severe Calvinist, the 
 gentle and meditative mystic, the passionless rationalist. The 
 courtly temper and social position of Descartes, his skill in 
 dialectic fence, his flexibility in external compliance with the 
 professions of his age, his susceptible vigilance over his own 
 reputation, succeeded in neutralising the suspicions and resist- 
 ance awakened by his doctrines among the guardians of the 
 Church, and would perhaps have sufficed to insinuate into 
 equally tranquil circulation even the ulterior development of 
 the system which he left to his successors. But the poor Jew 
 of Amsterdam, who is now to claim our attention, had neither 
 outward station nor dexterous arts with which to cover the 
 tendency of his speculations : though not entirely free from 
 the circumspect speech of his nation and his age, he uses it 
 so baldly and transparently, that it answers no purpose: the 
 simple mind with its real meaning everywhere shines through ; 
 and the genuine love of truth, coldly dominating over a still 
 and unambitious nature, gives an unshrinking thoroughness 
 to the structure of his philosophy. Hence, an opposition 
 which had but partially resisted the earlier movement of 
 thought in this direction, and which the affectionate piety
 
 SPINOZA. 235 
 
 of Malebranche disarmed, broke with full force upon the 
 system of Spinoza ; and, by singling it out for attack, con- 
 cealed from view the near relation in which it stands to its 
 antecedents of less obnoxious name. 
 
 1. Authorities for his Biography. 
 
 In a house on the Veerkay at the Hague was a back room 
 of the second etage in which Spinoza had lived for a time, 
 cared for by a certain widow. The same room was occupied, 
 some twenty years later, by a worthy and inquisitive Luthe- 
 ran clergyman, Jean Coler, whom the genius loci inspired 
 with a kindly and sympathetic curiosity respecting the per- 
 sonality and habits of Spinoza, notwithstanding a strong theo- 
 logical aversion to his opinions. To his painstaking enquiries, 
 which did not scorn the minutest details of gossip, we owe 
 the only authentic and connected early biography of Spinoza. 
 Though not published till 1706 (twenty-nine years after the 
 philosopher's death), it has needed little correction from sub- 
 sequent researches, though supplemented by some additional 
 facts, either contributed by annotators, or ascertained by the 
 discovery of new materials. Of the former class the chief 
 additions are due to a manuscript 'Vie de Spinoza,' published 
 in 1719 by Henri de Sauzet of Amsterdam, in the tenth volume 
 of his periodical ' Nouvelles Littdraires,' and simultaneously 
 reproduced from the same types along with an appended 
 ' Trait^ des trois Imposteurs ' (Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 
 Hobbes, Spinoza), under the enlarged title ' La Vie et 1' Esprit 
 de Mr. Benoit de Spinosa.' Of this compound book, the two 
 parts are written in completely opposite interests ; the Trea- 
 tise by a vehement opponent, the Life by an admiring disciple, 
 declared in the preface to be Lucas, a physician at the Hague. 
 The contributions from this source were interwoven with 
 Coler's text in a book entitled 'Refutations des Erreurs de 
 Benoit de Spinosa, par M. de Fenelon, Archeveque de Cam- 
 bray, par le P. Lami, Be'nedictin, et par M. le Comte de Bou- 
 lainvilliers ' (Bruxelles, 1731) : a book issued, notwithstanding 
 its title, in the interest of Spinozism, and known to have been
 
 236 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 edited by the Abbe* Lenglet Du-Fresnoy. The interpolations 
 thus introduced into Coler's biography are again separated 
 and thrown into foot-notes by Paulus in his edition of Spinoza's 
 works (1802-3), with some further citations from another MS. 
 copy of Lucas's ' Life.' A notice prefixed, that only seventy 
 copies were printed, accounts for the rapid disappearance of 
 this Sauzet publication, except in a few manuscript survivals ; 
 and its union with a brochure of contrary tendency explains 
 the strange mixture of conflicting elements in Lenglet's edition. 
 The correspondence of Spinoza, as it appeared in the Opera 
 Posthuma of 1677, and some scattered notices of him by con- 
 temporaries, especially Leibniz, complete the sources on 
 which, till 1852, we exclusively depended for our conception 
 of Spinoza's history and characteristics. 
 
 In that year, however, Professor Edouard Boehmer of Halle 
 published some outlines (lineamenta) which he had found in 
 manuscript a few months before at a learned bookseller's, 
 Friedrich Muller's, of Amsterdam, of an early and unpublished 
 treatise of Spinoza, ' On God, and Man and his Wellbeing : ' 
 the manuscript was appended to a copy of Coler's life (both 
 in Dutch). Shortly after, Muller found a Dutch copy of the 
 entire treatise, written apparently in the middle of the last 
 century, annexed to a Dutch translation of Spinoza's abstract 
 of Descartes' 'Principia;' and, with some further search, alighted 
 upon a store of autograph letters between the philosopher 
 and his friends, which had lurked unnoticed in a Baptist 
 Orphanage at Amsterdam. All these, together with a Treatise 
 on the Rainbow, anonymously published, and supposed to 
 have been destroyed by Spinoza, Muller gave to the world 
 in his Supplementum ad B. de Spinoza Opera, under the 
 editorial care of Dr. J. van Vloten, who supplied a Latin 
 translation of the Dutch text. A second Dutch manuscript 
 of the ' Short Treatise on God,' &c. written probably in the 
 author's lifetime, was discovered and published by Muller in 
 1869 ; and the editor, Professor Schaarschmidt of Bonn, who 
 had already put forth an edition of the first-known manu- 
 script, found the second so superior that he made it the basis 
 of an excellent German translation (2nd edition, 1874). These 
 new sources have considerably deepened and widened our
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 237 
 
 knowledge of Spinoza ; the letters, of his life ; the treatise, 
 of the genesis of his philosophy ; and have largely contributed 
 to the revived interest, during the present generation, in his 
 personality and his system of thought. 
 
 2. Life and Personality l . 
 
 Baruch Spinoza was born November 24, 1632, in a family of 
 (probably) Spanish Jews, who about twenty-five years before 
 had escaped in a Portuguese craft to the revolted provinces, 
 and settled in Amsterdam. In this city, which they called 
 their New Jerusalem, the Israelitish fugitives from Portugal 
 alone needed a synagogue for four hundred members ; and 
 though there was as yet no State charter of religious liberty, 
 and the clergy would have given no rights to the intruders, 
 the magistrates were sufficiently free from intolerant prejudice 
 to welcome the settlement of an orderly people, who brought 
 with them large capital, commercial enterprise, and not a 
 little of the best culture of the age. They were accordingly 
 permitted to raise their synagogue and school, by a self- 
 imposed percentage on their trade returns, and to retain their 
 national usages unmolested. Spinoza's home was not one of 
 the three hundred great mansions by which the refugees from 
 the peninsula are said to have adorned the city ; but the 
 house of a moderate shopkeeper, who needed economy to pro- 
 vide a competent education for his two daughters and son. 
 Of these daughters, one (Rebecca) remained single ; the other 
 (Miriam Karkeris) was the mother of Daniel, who inherited 
 some of the few articles of property left by his uncle. Of the 
 interior relations of this home nothing is known ; and of the 
 father only one thing is told, to show how he trained his son 
 to estimate people by their practical honesty, and not by their 
 sanctimonious pretensions. The boy was sent, when only ten 
 years old, to receive payment of a debt due from a neighbour- 
 
 1 The references in this and the remaining sections on Spinoza are to the recent 
 admirable edition, by J. Van Vloten and J. P. N. Land, Benedict! de Spinoza 
 Opera, quotquse reperta sunt. 2 Voll. Hagse Com. 1883. For Coler's Life, how- 
 ever, which the Editors have not reproduced, reference is made to Paulus's 
 edition, in two Vols. 1802-3.
 
 238 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 ing old woman. The child, finding her reading her Bible, was 
 ordered to be quiet till her pious exercises were over. While 
 counting out the money at last, she kept praising his father 
 for his faithfulness to the Mosaic Law, and prayed heaven 
 that the child might in due time be as good a man. This 
 style of remark was not to the boy's taste ; and instead of 
 letting her pour the coins into his bag on her own reckoning, 
 he insisted on counting them himself ; and found that, through 
 a slit in the table, two ducats had been dropped into a till 
 below. Recovering these, he took back the money and the 
 story to his father, from whose contempt for the old hypocrite 
 and praise of himself his love of truth and uprightness were 
 strongly confirmed 1 . 
 
 Of Baruch's childhood no other tale is told. Not far from 
 his home there had been established an extensive Jewish 
 school, ranging, in its seven classes, through the whole course 
 of traditional education, from the rudiments of Hebrew gram- 
 mar to the most subtle wordplay of the Rabbinists and the 
 speculations of the mystic interpreters ; and here no doubt it 
 was that he learned whatever his early years acquired from 
 others' teaching. The head of the school, as of the Synagogue, 
 Saul Levi Morteira, was but a commonplace person, not 
 unfurnished with the ordinary learning of a Rabbi, but with- 
 out intellectual penetration or strength of character, a slave 
 of decorum and a master of flattery, with whom the art of 
 life lay chiefly in the evasion of difficulties. The quick and 
 thirsty understanding of the boy carried him rapidly through 
 the studies in which such guidance suffices ; and by the time 
 he was fifteen, the lessons in the Hebrew Scriptures suggested 
 to him questions on which Morteira gave him no satisfaction, 
 and which, though modestly pressed no further, fermented in 
 his mind and kept him eager for relief from other sources. 
 They impelled him to a closer private reading of the Biblical 
 literature, and then of the pertinent parts of the Talmud : 
 the way cleared as he went along : at twenty years of age his 
 suspense was over, his difficulties had dispersed, but had car- 
 ried away with them his traditional faith, and left him to 
 
 1 B. de Spin. Opera, Paulus, II. pp. 629, 630, note.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 339 
 
 seek his theory of the world from some more enduring source 
 than Moses. 
 
 It -was probably at this crisis of his inner life, between 1650 
 and 1654, that he sought help from the more speculative Jewish 
 literature, and gained what acquaintance his writings indicate 
 (it is by no means great) with Ibn-Ezra, Maimonides, and 
 Chasdai Kreskas. For, so long as he could find sympathy with 
 his rationalising tendency, and hope of a satisfying religious 
 philosophy, among the schools of his own people, he would 
 naturally try whether there was shelter for him there ; but 
 when once he had broken away from the house of his fathers, 
 and applied himself to overtake the Gentile culture, it is not 
 likely that he would turn back to the sources which had 
 failed him. No doubt, when the writings of these learned 
 Israelites had gained a place in his memory, there would be 
 nothing to prevent him from referring to them, as to other 
 books, for anything that was apposite to the subject on which 
 he was engaged ; but his later citations from them, or repro- 
 duction of their thoughts, have the character of relics of a past 
 knowledge, much more than of any fresh and present depen- 
 dence. His substantive study of them belongs, I believe, to the 
 latter part of his life ' under the covenant.' His essential disap- 
 pointment with them left his mind open and thirsting for 
 sources of truth in other and foreign fields : the inward loss 
 of Judaism was an inward attraction towards Gentilism ; and 
 among the new acquaintances which he formed beyond the 
 circle of his nation, he fell in with two types of character, 
 both of which, in spite of their contrariety, drew him by a 
 powerful sympathy. Each of these requires a few words. 
 
 The cruel uncertainty of Jewish life in Christian lands had 
 established the usage in every family of training each youth 
 to some profitable skill or industry ; and Baruch Spinoza had 
 learnt from some optician the art, rendered every year more 
 important by the recent invention and constant improvement 
 of the telescope, of grinding and polishing lenses. It was 
 probably in the intercourses of this business that he came to 
 know a small tradesman of Amsterdam, afterwards one of his 
 confidential correspondents, viz. Jarigh Jelles, who, becoming 
 prosperous, bore the cost of his first publication ; and, surviv-
 
 240 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 ing the philosopher, wrote in Dutch for his posthumous works 
 the preface which either Glasemaker or Ludwig Meyer trans- 
 lated into Latin. This man was an Anabaptist or Mennonite, 
 and probably of that small section whose members, from their 
 union in Collegia, or fraternal clubs without any clerical office, 
 were called Collegiants. Proscribed by the proscribed Remon- 
 strants, these sectaries maintained themselves in Holland till 
 the close of the last century, with a quiet patience like that of 
 the Quakers in our own country, and proceeding indeed from 
 very similar principles. For they so held to the perpetuity of 
 the Divine Spirit in man as to insist upon dogmatic freedom : 
 they refused to take an oath or to serve in war, and had been 
 released from these obligations by a special law (of 1578) : they 
 allowed any brother, spiritually moved, to speak in their 
 assembly ; and, with the exception of baptism by immersion, 
 retained no ritual element in their Christianity. They were 
 rigorous in guarding the moral purity of their community, 
 and remarkable for their frugality, veracity, and industry; 
 and with their simplicity and austerity of habit combined in 
 an unusual degree an openness to knowledge and love of 
 scientific truth. Such were apparently the first kind of Chris- 
 tians whom the alienated Jew learned to know; and it is 
 easy to understand how congenial to him would be their in- 
 tellectual and spiritual freedom, their inwardness of religion, 
 their peaceable disposition, and their simplicity of life. We 
 may fairly presume that his predilection for these people 
 implied at first an approval of their characteristic opinions, 
 speculative as well as ethical, though it survived several sub- 
 sequent divergencies ; and as they were Arminians, living in 
 protest against the first principles of the Calvinistic theology, 
 his intimacy with them would most naturally be formed with- 
 in the time when he still adhered to the doctrine of Free-will. 
 It also deserves to be remembered that he derived his first 
 impressions of Christianity from these brethren of the free 
 spirit, whose reverence for Christ was founded on His moral 
 union with God and revelation of the perfect human life ; for, 
 if Spinoza early caught up the essence of this estimate, we 
 need the less charge him with insincere accommodation, when 
 he says that ' Christ communed with God, mind with mind ;
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 
 
 but this spiritual closeness is unique 1 ;' and that to Christ 
 alone did God give revelations, not conformed to His subjec- 
 tive opinions, but immediately to the mind ; that is, that 
 Christ really understood the things revealed, which, being 
 universal, involved only conceptions everywhere true 2 . Such 
 language doubtless requires to be translated from the vernacular 
 into the Spinozistic symbolism, before it yields its real mean- 
 ing; but there is a satisfaction in believing that, from the 
 aspect under which the Christian characteristics first pre- 
 sented themselves to him, it may have had a true meaning 
 for himself, and not have been a mere empty play upon his 
 reader's thought. Throughout his life these Collegiants seem 
 to have formed the social circle nearest to his feeling ; the 
 batch of letters recently discovered were in their custody ; 
 for the Baptist orphanage in which they lay had belonged 
 to them. And the interest they felt in his philosophy was 
 evinced by opposition as well as by discipleship ; for one of 
 their brotherhood, John Bredenburg, a weaver of Rotterdam, 
 reported to be a Socinian, published an answer to the treatise 
 just quoted; supplying a 'geometrical' disproof of its al- 
 leged fundamental principle, viz. that Nature and God are 
 identical 3 . 
 
 The second type of new friend gained by the young Baruch 
 was very different. From his Hebrew studies he had turned 
 to the acquisition of languages in more general use. From 
 the Spanish of his father's house to Italian, and from the 
 Dutch of his city streets to German, the extension was not 
 very difficult; but he continually felt the need of Latin 
 scholarship, without which literary intercourse with foreign- 
 ers was impossible, and half of every library was closed to 
 him. Timely help was offered him for this attainment by 
 a scholarly physician and wit, Franz van den Ende, on con- 
 dition of his residing in the house, and giving assistance in 
 a school which was more profitable to the physician than 
 
 1 Tract Theol.-Pol. cap. i. Vol. I. 383. 
 
 3 Ibid. cap. iv. Vol. I. 427. 
 
 3 Job. Bredenburgii enervatio tractatua theologico-politici ; una cum Demon- 
 stratione Geometrico ordine disposita Naturam non ease Deum. Cujus effati con- 
 trario prsedictus Tractatus unice innititur. Roterodami, 1675. 
 VOL. I. B
 
 242 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book 1. 
 
 his practice. This arrangement took effect for probably two 
 years, ending in 1655 ; and brought him into an atmosphere 
 unlike that of any prior experience. Van den Ende was de- 
 voted to physical science, and developed the taste for it in 
 his assistant. He was moreover a dashing and reckless ' free- 
 thinker,' apparently without any remnant of religious belief, 
 and never tired of satirising the superstitions of mankind. 
 So little was his caustic humour restrained by either per- 
 sonal prudence or tenderness for others' feeling, that he soon 
 drew upon himself the anger of the families who sent him 
 pupils, and was obliged to quit not the city only, but the 
 United Provinces. Withdrawing himself to France, he could 
 not rest long without engaging in a conspiracy to raise an 
 insurrection and land Dutch troops in Normandy: the plot 
 was detected, the leaders were beheaded, and Van den Ende 
 ignominiously hanged. 
 
 The influence of a man of this strong and coarse fibre 
 could hardly fail to be considerable on a susceptible youth 
 with undetermined convictions. It would inevitably harden 
 his sceptical rationalism : it enlarged his scientific know- 
 ledge, and probably fixed him in his naturalistic mode of 
 thinking; and perhaps infused into his temper the tincture 
 of compassionate contempt which betrays itself in his esti- 
 mate of average men. The story of his often receiving his 
 lessons from the clever daughter of the house instead of 
 from her father, and so becoming entangled in a romantic 
 attachment to her, which the bribe of a pearl necklace 
 tempted her to relinquish in favour of a richer suitor, has 
 been so gracefully turned to account by the art of Berthold 
 Auerbach 1 , as to give a charm to his life for thousands 
 who have no conception of his philosophy. But the recent 
 discovery of the young lady's (Clara Maria) register of mar- 
 riage to the purse-proud rival (Kerckrinck), with the entry 
 of her age, cruelly discredits this tradition, by showing that 
 Spinoza left the house before she was twelve years old 2 . 
 And so vanishes the only indication that he ever inter- 
 
 1 Spinoza, ein Denkerleben. Mannheim, 1854. 
 8 Van Vloten, Supplementum, p. 290, note.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 243 
 
 rupted an abstract speculation by any intruding vision of 
 womankind. 
 
 Once withdrawn from his father's house by this school 
 engagement, he would naturally fall away from Jewish usages 
 which had no longer any hold upon his conscience : his at- 
 tendance at the synagogue became rare, and his reticence and 
 respect for what was due to others did not protect him from 
 suspicion. Morteira probably surmised how matters stood, 
 but being fond of the youth, perhaps afraid of him, and 
 averse to scandals, thought it wisest ' quieta non movere.' 
 Two young prigs, however, class-fellows with him under the 
 Rabbi, managed, by affecting doubts of their own, to worm 
 out of him some avowals of opinion inconsistent with scrip- 
 tural conceptions of God and spiritual beings ; and, by artful 
 use of these confidences, succeeded in creating a religious 
 panic which the rabbinate could not disregard. He was sum- 
 moned before the synagogue court; and, naturally enough, 
 when he was charged with contempt of the law, his profes- 
 sions of innocence, which could only be very general, availed 
 little against the definite statements of his accusers, that he 
 ridiculed the Jews as ignorant alike of physics and of theo- 
 logy ; that he represented Moses as an adroit manager of a 
 people requiring to be deceived ; and said that none knew 
 less of God than the race which boasted of being peculiarly 
 His. In spite of these charges, perhaps in consequence of their 
 obvious spitefulness, the judges visited him at first with only 
 the lesser anathema, which allowed of retractation within 
 thirty days l . And even this, it is probable, would not have 
 been passed, had not the mildest and most enlightened mem- 
 ber of the court, Manasseh ben Israel, been absent in England. 
 During the month of suspense, personal influence was vainly 
 tried to extort a pledge of silence from Baruch ; and a pen- 
 sion of 1,000 gulden was promised to him, without any condi- 
 tion of recantation, if he would only keep his opinions to him- 
 self. When it was found that nothing would induce him to 
 sell the truth and turn his future into an hypocrisy, the 
 
 1 See Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, B. X. p. 176, who remedies the confusion 
 of the earlier accounts by suggesting the order of incidents given in the text. 
 
 B 2
 
 244 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 exasperation against him became extreme, and so wrought 
 upon an orthodox fanatic, that he lay in wait for the heretic 
 as he issued from some public place (synagogue or theatre), 
 and struck an assassin's blow at him. It was evaded, and only 
 pierced his coat. Warned by this danger, Spinoza withdrew 
 from Amsterdam, and took refuge with one of his Collegiant 
 friends, who lived in a village on the road to Oudekerk. In 
 his absence, on July 27, 1656, the great ban of excommu- 
 nication was launched against him, which finally cut him 
 off from Israel. This curious specimen of ecclesiastical wrath 
 deserves to be quoted. ' With the judgment of the angels and 
 saints we anathematise, separate, curse, and execrate Baruch 
 d'Espinoza, with concurrence of the Church court, and the 
 whole of our sacred community, in presence of the sacred 
 books with their 630 precepts, with the anathema wherewith 
 Joshua anathematised Jericho, with the curse wherewith 
 Elisha cursed the boys, and with all the curses written in the 
 book of the Law. Cursed may he be by day and by night, 
 cursed in sleeping and waking, cursed in going out and com- 
 ing in. May the Lord never pardon him ; may He make His 
 fury and anger burn against the man ; may He lay upon him 
 all the curses written in the book of the Law, and destroy 
 his name under heaven ; and may the Lord separate him for 
 evil from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of heaven 
 (fimnamenti) in the book of the Law. And you who adhere 
 to the Lord your God, may it be well with you ; taking heed 
 that no one may speak with him by word of mouth or by 
 writing ; no one is to do him any kindness, no one to stand 
 under the same roof with him, or to be within four ells of 
 him ; no one to read any document or writing of his V 
 
 To this denunciation Spinoza is said to have sent in a 
 written reply in his own defence. But it no longer exists, 
 except so far as parts of it are probably embodied in his 
 Theologico-political Treatise. He took his ostracism imper- 
 turbably, observing that it only placed him in the very posi- 
 tion which he should voluntarily have assumed, and detached 
 him not so much from privileges as from bonds. His enemies 
 are said to have followed up their ecclesiastical proscription 
 
 1 VanVloten, Suppl. 291 293.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 245 
 
 by an application for his perpetual civic banishment. This 
 they certainly did not procure ; but if the magistrates, as the 
 tradition says, consulted the city clergy on the charge against 
 him, it may be true that for a few months, till the excitement 
 of the synagogue had subsided, they imposed upon him the 
 exile which he had already chosen. His transference from 
 the Jewish to the Gentile world he marked by assuming the 
 name Benedict in place of Baruch. 
 
 Throughout his intercourse with the ' uncovenanted ' w~orld, 
 Spinoza had lived in a Cartesian atmosphere. His Collegiant 
 friends were imbued with the metaphysics, Van den Ende 
 with the physics, of that school ; and the noise of the Utrecht 
 controversy filled the public ear. The characteristic formulas 
 and general drift of the philosophy in vogue must have been 
 favourably known to him, and awakened the curiosity of so 
 keen a mind. It may well have been this very curiosity 
 which made him lament his want of Latin, for in that language 
 both the ' Meditations ' and the ' Principia ' were written ; and 
 it does not appear that the French translations would have 
 served him any better. His regular study of Descartes may 
 therefore be reasonably assigned to the latter part of his 
 residence in Van den Ende's house, and the years immediately 
 following (say 1654 1658). There can be no doubt that he 
 was completely captivated, and felt the relief of an organising 
 principle at work among the broken and crossing lights of 
 his thought. I do not say that, prior to his introduction to 
 Descartes, he had only negatived his original beliefs, and was 
 without any speculative conception of the system of things. 
 In the first part of his ' Short Treatise on God,' &c. there are 
 two dialogues artificially interwoven, which are apparently 
 products of his prse-Cartesian time ; and in these we find 
 already, in the baldest form, that identification of Nature and 
 God which was to emerge as the result of his finished philo- 
 sophy. But here it is arbitrarily forestalled and crudely 
 presented, as if picked up by sympathy with some writer who 
 rendered the doctrine attractive ; and, both in its substance 
 and in its form, is like a flat imitation of Giordano Bruno. 
 The thought is loose and vague, the floating suggestions of 
 a mind unsystematised, altogether different from the rigorous
 
 246 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 and strongly linked order, whereby, from the moment of his 
 acquaintance with Descartes, he strove to assimilate philo- 
 sophy to geometry. As a matter of speculative, feeling, he 
 probably preoccupied the pantheistic terminus which was 
 the logical goal of Cartesianism ; but the ivay to it, the starting- 
 point from which to set out, the lines within which he must 
 keep, and the caution required at each critical turn, he learned 
 directly or indirectly from Descartes. To no predecessor did 
 he owe any obligation which detracts from his just reputation 
 as an independent thinker ; but to say with Avenarius that 
 he was ' never a Cartesian V seems to me an assertion of his 
 originality at once paradoxical and superfluous. 
 
 During his residence in his friend's country house, a number 
 of young men interested in the new philosophy gathered 
 around him, and acquired the habit of referring their intel- 
 lectual difficulties to him, and afterwards discussing them 
 together with the light of his replies. To this little club of 
 Cartesians, which still maintained itself when he had removed 
 to a distance, belonged especially Simon van Vries, Ludwig 
 Meyer, and John Bresser, medical students, who continued 
 through life in intimate relations with him. With these three 
 we meet in after years, among the correspondents and friends 
 of Spinoza: with Bresser indeed, engrossed in professional 
 practice, the intimacy on the speculative side seems to have 
 slackened, not without good-humoured remonstrance and 
 attempt to revive it on the part of the master ; who, in his 
 turn, gives him proof of his confidence by consulting him 
 about an attack of tertian ague, and sending to him for some 
 ' conserve of red roses ' which he had prescribed for it 2 . Meyer 
 attended the philosopher's last hours, and edited his post- 
 humous volume. Van Vries, who apparently acted as secre- 
 tary of the club, a youth of good fortune and fine promise, 
 foreseeing his early death, and having no one dependent on 
 him, wished to make Spinoza his heir ; but was persuaded by 
 him not to divert the property from a younger brother, and 
 
 1 Ueber die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus, und das Ver- 
 haltniss der zweiten zur dritten Phase. Von Richard Avenarius. Leipz. 1868. 
 6, p. 1719. 
 
 2 Epp. XXVIII, XXXVII.
 
 Branch II.] 
 
 SPINOZA. 
 
 247 
 
 to be content with a small rent-charge upon the estate by 
 way of life-pension ; which the philosopher himself made 
 smaller by reducing it from 500 to 300 florins per annum 1 . 
 An affection at once so disinterested and so considerate could 
 subsist only between two noble natures. 
 
 The study and discussion of Descartes was no passive 
 process of absorption and interpretation of foreign ideas : 
 careful abstracts were made, which brought the several parts 
 of the scheme of doctrine into their logical relations, and 
 gradually revealed its weaker junctures ; and when Spinoza 
 came, as he evidently did, to give lessons on it to learners, 
 he could not but detect every misfit with his own prior as- 
 sumptions. Hence, while he expounded the system he also 
 modified it, and reached the first phase of his own doctrine, 
 namely that which finds expression in the ' Short Treatise on 
 God,' &c. (exclusive of the dialogues). The most marked de- 
 viations from Cartesianism are two ; the adoption of the theory 
 of determinism ; and the denial of any possible beyond the 
 actual, or, in other words, the unconditional identification of 
 God with Nature. Outside these exceptions, there is a large 
 reproduction of Descartes, his a priori proofs of the existence 
 of God from the Idea of God ; the duality of substance ; the 
 synchronism of body and mind ; the relation between under- 
 standing and will ; the immortality of the soul ; and, above 
 all, a psychology of 'the passions,' the list of which (ex- 
 cepting two omissions) is, as Sigwart says, almost a servile 
 copy 2 . This first phase of systematised doctrine must have 
 
 1 Coler, ap. Paulus, II. p. 623. 
 
 2 I take from Sigwart (Spinoza's Neuentdeckter Tractat, p. 97), the following 
 comparison of the two lists : 
 
 Spinoza de Deo, Nomine, Ac. 
 II. c. 3 & 4. Admiratio. 
 Amor. 
 Odium. 
 Cupiditas. 
 Laetitia. 
 
 Cartesius de Passionibus. 
 II. 69-148. Admiratio. 
 
 Mseror. 
 
 HI 149-152. Existimatio et Despectus. 
 153-156. Generositas et Humilitas. 
 157-161. Superbia et Humilitas vi- 
 tiosa. 
 
 5. Amor. 
 
 6. Odium (Aversio). 
 
 7. Cupiditas. 
 ,, Laetitia. 
 
 Tristitia. 
 
 8. Existimatio etContemptus. 
 Generositas, Humilitas. 
 
 Superbia, Abjectio.
 
 248 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 been constituted between 1658 and 1661 ; and as he was then 
 about to leave the neighbourhood of Amsterdam, it is not un- 
 likely that he reduced it to written form, and placed the 
 ' Short Treatise ' in the hands of his disciples, as a manual for 
 reference when they could no longer personally consult him. 
 The annotations which appear in almost every page are, with 
 the exception of one to the Preface of Part II, almost certainly 
 not his : they are probably the comments of the students who 
 applied themselves to the treatise, and heard the explanations 
 transmitted by him in reply to their enquiries. 
 
 In 1661 he quitted for good the neighbourhood of his 
 native place, and took up his abode at Rhijnsburg, near 
 Leyden, where there was so large a colony of Collegiants that 
 the sect was familiarly known by the name of Rhijnsburger. 
 Here he was visited, during that summer, by a foreigner 
 whose name figures most largely in his correspondence ; 
 Oldenburg, the first Secretary of our Royal Society, an in- 
 dustrious common-place German, who made it his business 
 to maintain communication, on behalf of his constituents, 
 with the leading men of Science throughout Europe. Devoted 
 to Baconian rules of observation and experiment, he sought 
 
 Cartesius de Passionibvs. Spinoza de Deo, Homine, &c. 
 III. 162-164. Veneratio et Dedignatio. 
 
 165. Spes et Metus. II. c. 9. Spes et Metus. 
 
 1 66. Securitas et Desperatio. Securitas, Desperatio. 
 167-169. Zelotypia. 
 
 170. Animi Fluctuatio. Animi Fluctuatio. 
 
 171. Animositas et Audacia. ,, Intrepiditas et Audacia. 
 
 172. ^Emulatio. ^mulatio. 
 
 174-176. Pusillanimitas et Conster- Pusillanimitas et Consternatio. 
 
 natio. Invidia (Boehmer, Zelotypia, 
 
 Belgzugt). 
 
 177. Conscientise Morsus. 10. Conscientise Morsus. 
 
 178-181. Irrisio et Jocus. n. Irrisio et Jocus. 
 
 182-184. Invidia. Invidia. 
 
 186-189. Commiseratio. 14. Commiseratio. 
 
 190. Acquiescentia in se ipso. 
 
 .191. Pcenitentia. Pcenitentia. 
 
 192. Favor. 13. Favor. 
 
 193-194. Gratitudo et Ingratitude. 
 
 195-203. Indignatio et Ira. 
 
 204-206. Gloria et Pudor. 
 
 207. Impudentia. 
 
 Gratitudo et Ingratitude. 
 ,, Ira, Indignatio. 
 12. Honor et Pudor. 
 Impudentia.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 249 
 
 Spinoza for his optical knowledge and skill, as much as for 
 his intellectual repute ; and the correspondence which followed 
 is a curious cross-fight between two minds that cannot meet ; 
 the enthusiasm of the one expending itself on nitre and the 
 air-pump, that of the other in daring metaphysics that take 
 away the Secretary's breath. By sending him Kobert Boyle's 
 treatises as they appeared, and inviting his criticism on these 
 and other similar publications, Oldenburg almost compelled 
 Spinoza's attention to physics and chemistry ; and at no later 
 time do these subjects come so much to the front in his own 
 letters or those of his young disciples at Amsterdam. For 
 the first time, it is probable, he now took the measure of 
 Descartes, not only by his own reflections, but by confronting 
 him directly with the opposite methods of Bacon and Hobbes. 
 The reply to Oldenburg's first letter, and his work De Intel- 
 lectus Emendatione, on which he was now engaged \ both of 
 them indicate the recent reading of Bacon. And a book 
 which appeared in 1663, reproducing Hobbes's theory of the 
 State, was so generally ascribed to Spinoza's school as to 
 imply that the prevalence of that doctrine among them was 
 already matter of notoriety ; though, in point of fact, the 
 treatise in question, if Leibniz is not mistaken, is the pro- 
 duction of Van den Hoof 2 . In any case it is pretty certain 
 that by this time Spinoza himself had elaborated the doctrine 
 of Civil Society, expounded in Chaps. XVI, XVII. of his Theo- 
 logico-political Treatise ; for it forms the basis of that defence 
 of free-thinking in Chap. XX. which is universally regarded 
 as a part of his reply to the decree of excommunication 3 . It 
 was apparently for the resident pupil at Rhijnsburg (most 
 likely Albert Burgh, a pompous youth who became Romanist, 
 
 1 Ep. XI. Apr. 3, 1663. 
 
 2 See Leibn. Theodice'e, 375. The title of the Treatise in question is Lucii 
 Antistii Constantis de jure Ecclesiasticorum. Alethopoli. Ap. C. Val. Pennatum. 
 Its aim is to show that the rights attributed to the clergy are fictitious, and that 
 sovereigns and magistrates are supreme. 
 
 3 Graetz reckons the composition of the Theol.-pol. treatise as part of the work 
 on which Spinoza was engaged between 1660 and 1664 (X. p. 178). This is pro- 
 bably correct with regard to the theoretical outline of the treatise ; but the more 
 special Biblical part was evidently occupying him in the year following. See 
 Ep. XXIX.
 
 250 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book T. 
 
 and tried to convert his heretical instructor l ), that Spinoza 
 analysed the first book of Descartes' Principia, and reduced 
 it to geometrical form; afterwards (1663) publishing it, with 
 the second similarly treated, and with an appendix of Cogitata 
 Metaphysica, as the vehicle of his own independent reflections. 
 It is curious to find, in this supplement, a strenuous defence of 
 free-will, as inseparable from the nature of the human soul ; and 
 also, twice over, the balanced statement, that the necessity of 
 the Divine decrees and the liberty of the human will are both 
 alike certain, and yet irreconcilable 2 , though we know from 
 his ' Short Treatise ' that he had for some years been a com- 
 plete determinist. Meyer's excuse for him 3 that, having en- 
 gaged to instruct his pupil -in Cartesianism, he was bound in 
 honour not to criticise his text-book, presents him in the false 
 light of a truly servile teacher ; and, even if it held good for 
 the mere personal relations of the hour, can have no application 
 to a book revised and completed for public use ; for whatever 
 engagement there is between author and reader, is surely a 
 promise not of disguise but of simple truth-telling. 
 
 Besides the three treatises already mentioned, his great 
 work, the Ethica, was not only projected, but under his hand ; 
 for the correspondence of Van Vries and Meyer 4 shows that 
 Part I. had been forwarded to the Amsterdam Club and dis- 
 cussed at its meetings. The propositions criticised are en- 
 tirely identified ; but they did not occupy then the position 
 ultimately assigned to them. Thus his largest enterprise had 
 made its first and most difficult steps of advance in 1663 ; and, 
 in completing the catalogue of Rhijnsburg labours, marks the 
 two years there as by far the most intellectually energetic of 
 Spinoza's life. They originated every philosophical work, ex- 
 cept the political fragment, which proceeded from his pen; 
 and carried one of them to publication, all of them pretty far 
 in medias res; and, as a pre-requisite to this, they matured 
 and fixed his conceptions of ' Geometrical Method,' as appli- 
 
 1 Epp. LXVII, LXXVI. 
 
 2 Cogit. Metaph. II. cap. xii. (Vol. II. pp. 502505) ; I. iii. (Vol. II. p. 471) ; 
 II. xi. (Vol. II. p. 500.) 
 
 3 Preface (Vol. II. pp. 377, 378). 
 
 4 Epp. VIII X, XII.
 
 Branch II] SPINOZA. 
 
 cable to non-geometric subjects ; and finally settled his exact 
 relations to Descartes' philosophy, and so altered its propor- 
 tions as to give symmetrical place to the new thought he had 
 to put into it. 
 
 His critical attitude towards Cartesianism, which the clergy 
 had now taken to patronising, brought some obloquy upon 
 him ; and, in order to go out of hearing of this, he removed in 
 1663 to the village of Voorburg, about a league from the Hague, 
 and made it his place of residence for the next seven years. 
 The history of his thought and of his industry now becomes 
 one of simple persistency in tasks begun. From his desire to 
 d'Hiie his logical procedure before he followed it, he addressed 
 himself first to his essay De Intellectus Emendatione, and 
 never lost sight of it : yet he soon found that the metaphysical 
 truths towards which it was to mark out the way had to be 
 assumed either at the outset, or in laying the track ; so that 
 he could not secure the subordination he required, and might 
 just as well go at once into the heart of his philosophy, and 
 let its logic speak for itself. The result was that the book 
 intended to be preliminary lagged behind its proposed sequel, 
 and remained a fragment at last ; yet betrayed its first design 
 by promising for the greater work more than it contained 1 . 
 It was evidently on the Ethics that he was concentrating his 
 zeal. By June, 1665, he sends to Bresser the portion of MS. 
 which reaches the twenty-first proposition of Part IV 2 , with 
 the remark that he had not intended to part with it till his 
 work was done ; but finding the conclusion linger more than 
 
 1 This significant fact is pointed out by Sigwart (Op. Cit. p. 158), who gives as 
 examples of it the unfulfilled promises to explain in his ' Philosophy' the meaning 
 of the phrases ri-s nativa, opera intellectual ia, and qu&rere in animd ; and to de- 
 termine the question ' whether ideas themselves are subject to decay.' The pro- 
 mises are found in the notes to De Intell. Emend. Vol. I. pp. n, 12, 28. 
 
 2 Ep. XXVIII. ; in which the MS. is said to go as far as the Sot h proposition of 
 the Third Part. There is no such high figure in any of the parts as they now stand. 
 Trendelenburg has doubtless given the true explanation, by reckoning the Third 
 and Fourth Parts together as one in the original design, and subsequently divided 
 in order to prevent excessive disproportion in the parts. The Both proposition from 
 the opening of the Third Part (which alone he professes to send) brings us to IV. 2 1 . 
 The order of subject, as laid out at first, was more logically compact than the re- 
 vised arrangement: viz. (i) metaphysic ; (2) doctrine of knowledge; (3) the emo- 
 tions ; (4) the intellect. See Trendelenburg's Historische Beitrage zur Philosophic, 
 III. pp. 294, 295.
 
 252 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 he expected, deems it better to make two parcels instead of 
 one. In the next September, we find him telling Oldenburg 
 that he is at work upon ' angels, prophecies, and miracles J ;' 
 evidently implying that he has turned his hand to the Biblical 
 part of the Theologico-political Treatise ; so that his posthu- 
 mous work was actually finished, while his first original pub- 
 lication (for the Princ. Phil. Cart, was but an exposition) was 
 yet on the stocks, and his philosophy had set into its final 
 form when he was thirty-three years of age. The completion 
 of his Theological Treatise he could hardly spread over more 
 than a couple of years. Above all his productions, it bears 
 traces of being written currente calamo, as indeed we should 
 expect from a defensive record of long-formed opinions for 
 which he had suffered. As it was published in 1670, and he 
 had apparently no ulterior literary design, we cannot won- 
 der if he felt himself at liberty to listen at last to the en- 
 treaties of friends, that he would quit his village retire- 
 ment and remove to the Hague, within constant reach of 
 the books and men and affairs that had the highest interest 
 for him. 
 
 To the Hague accordingly he went ; first, to the widow Van 
 Werve, but soon to a less expensive room in the house of a 
 painter, Henry van der Spijck, and his wife, on the Pavil- 
 joensgracht ; the chief economy being that here he could pro- 
 vide his own meals, and so spend as little on them as he chose. 
 It is certainly remarkable that here, in this city of free and 
 energetic life, his intellectual productiveness seems to suffer 
 sudden arrest ; and that the only fruit of the remaining seven 
 years should be the fragment of a Political Treatise on no 
 great scale. It seems too early, at the age of thirty-eight, for 
 so strong an arm to rest upon the oar and float down the 
 stream. Nor does it appear that he reverted at the Hague to 
 anything like the personal position which he had occupied at 
 Amsterdam, as the virtual head of a growing school, training 
 itself under his influence. His room indeed, even at Voorburg, 
 and still more in the city, was sought by frequent visitors ; 
 but, instead of docile pupils on the spot, they were inquisitive 
 and perhaps jealous foreigners, like Leibniz, or neighbours, 
 
 1 E P . XXIX.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 253 
 
 like Huyghens, no less entitled to be law-givers than himself. 
 In the absence of any further literary biography, his relations 
 with some of these distinguished men assume a prominent in- 
 terest. His correspondence with Huyghens, if we had but both 
 sides of it, would present a study of comparative personality 
 of exceptional value : but the letters of the great physicist we 
 see only in Spinoza's three replies l . As it is, we gain the im- 
 pression that, while Huyghens' mind engaged itself deeply 
 in metaphysical reflections, Spinoza's interest in physical 
 problems, beyond his optical range, was comparatively lan- 
 guid ; for when Oldenburg eagerly enquires from him, as an 
 observer on the spot, about Huyghens' pendulum clock and 
 cycloidal pendulum, he replies that he knows nothing about 
 them, and seems quite insensible to the magnitude of these 
 inventions and discoveries. This one-sided sympathy was 
 perhaps the reason why a correspondence commenced when 
 the writers were within a league of each other (for it belongs 
 to the Voorburg period) was not continued when one was at 
 the Hague and the other at Paris (whither Huyghens removed 
 in 1666). 
 
 In 1674 there appears upon the scene another correspondent, 
 of genius less capacious than Huyghens, but scarcely less bril- 
 liant and penetrating, Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhausen, 
 a Bohemian noble, then twenty-three years of age, who had 
 studied at Leyden, and early gained high distinction in mathe- 
 matical and physical science. It would detain us too long to 
 follow him through his energetic and romantic career. We 
 can mark only the characteristics which retain his name in 
 the history of human knowledge. He fixed attention on caus- 
 tic curves, and determined their equation and properties: he 
 invented the burning lens, and contrived to produce it on an 
 enormous scale ; and the art of porcelain-manufacture is due 
 to him. Impulsive and open-minded, he scattered his pro- 
 fusion of ideas with a generosity which often deprived him 
 
 1 Epp. XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI. The person indicated by the six or seven 
 asterisks prefixed to these letters is identified as Huyghens by a reference, near the 
 end of the last, to his ' small treatise on Dioptrics ;' of which, in a letter written 
 near the same time, Oldenburg makes mention as being by Huyghens. See Ep. 
 XXIX. ; and Trendelenburg, Op. Cit. p. 393.
 
 254 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 of their fruits ; and, expecting others to do the same, he 
 asked Spinoza's leave to show Leibniz in Paris the MS. of 
 the Ethica, and was surprised to receive a refusal from the 
 author's Jewish circumspection 1 . The acquaintance with 
 Leibniz (then, i.e. 1675, set. 29) was new to them both : both 
 were struck by his large accomplishments ; in the presence 
 of which Tschirnhausen was as ready with his trust as Spi- 
 noza (who as yet knew him only by letter) with his suspi- 
 cions. For these there was some semi-political pretext ; for 
 Leibniz, then in the service of the Elector of Mainz, had lent 
 himself to a project of that prince and his minister Von Boy- 
 neburg (a convert to the Church of Rome) for reuniting the 
 Catholics and Protestants and, in the interests of such union, 
 establishing a rigorous censorship of the press ; and as this 
 project looked to Paris for support, the doubt arose, whether 
 it was not on some secret mission that Leibniz had gone 
 thither from his work at Frankfort. But behind this pretext 
 there lay an inherent antipathy between the ingenuous and 
 the ingenious philosopher, the transparent truth-seeker and 
 the contriving system-maker ; an antipathy which, a year 
 later, suddenly became mutual, after Leibniz had visited 
 Spinoza at the Hague. Though the interview was occupied 
 chiefly in political conversation, yet Leibniz speaks of Spi- 
 noza's metaphysics as ' strange,' and ' full of paradoxes V 
 He had certainly got a sight of the MS. Ethics at Paris ; so 
 that Spinoza's prohibition appears to have come too late. 
 
 Tschirnhausen's letters present, in a tone of modest inde- 
 pendence, a series of acute and pertinent enquiries on all the 
 characteristic principles of Spinoza's philosophy, its Deter- 
 minism 3 , its theory of Discovery 4 , its ontological doctrine of 
 God and Nature 6 ; on the first, adhering to Descartes ; on the 
 third, suggesting a fatal difficulty, which Spinoza confesses 
 himself obliged to reserve for future removal ; and only on 
 the second, acknowledging large agreement and important 
 obligations ; the measure of which is apparent to any one 
 
 1 Epp. LXX, LXXII. 
 
 3 Theodic^e, 376. Comp. Ep. to the Abbe Galoia. 
 
 3 Epp. LVII, LVIIL 4 Epp. LIX, LX. 
 
 5 Epp. LXIII LXVI, LXXX LXXXIIL
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 255 
 
 who compares his Medicina Mentis (1695) with Spinoza's 
 fragment, De Intellectus Emendatione. The replies to these 
 letters are unusually careful, not to say anxious ; as if Spi- 
 noza felt himself confronted by a critic as truth-loving as 
 himself, who had the art of touching weaknesses never owned 
 before. 
 
 The favourable impression of Tschirnhausen's intellectual 
 genius which we gain from this correspondence, is extended 
 to his moral nature by some delightful letters of his to Huy- 
 ghens, found by Van Vloten in the Leyden library, and pub- 
 lished, with one of Huyghens's own, in his Supplement 1 . 
 Seldom has the pure scientific spirit assumed a more attrac- 
 tive form than in the lives and relations of these two men. 
 
 In the third year (1673) of his residence at the Hague, 
 Spinoza was invited by the Elector Palatine, Karl Ludwig, 
 to become Professor Ordinarius of Philosophy at Heidelberg. 
 This prince was brother to Descartes' correspondent, the 
 Princess Elizabeth ; and shared the liberal interest in philo- 
 sophical studies which prevailed in his family ; and he au- 
 thorised Professor Johann Ludwig Fabricius, in communicating 
 the invitation, to guarantee perfect liberty of teaching, pro- 
 vided only that the religion of the country were not made 
 the object of attack. The indefinite character of this proviso, 
 and a reluctance to exchange the habits of a solitary thinker 
 for those of a pledged teacher, induced Spinoza to decline the 
 appointment, and remain in his safe retirement. 
 
 This invitation was the more liberal on the part of the 
 Elector, and perhaps the less attractive to Spinoza, from its 
 coinciding in time with the panic excited by the Theologico- 
 political Treatise. Though this book was anonymous, the 
 authorship was no secret ; and, though written in Latin, it 
 created an excitement far beyond the circle of the learned ; 
 so that Spinoza, who abhorred the disturbance it was always 
 his fate to produce, was alarmed by the rumoured intention 
 of a certain Professor to issue a Dutch translation in satis- 
 faction of the public curiosity, and wrote eagerly to Jarigh 
 Jelles to find out the translator and stop his proceeding. 
 His anxiety was in part occasioned by the appearance of a 
 
 J Suppl. pp. 319 350.
 
 256 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 book (Homo Politicks), which brought discredit on his theory 
 of society, through shameless inferences drawn from its prin- 
 ciple of egoism and its right of the strongest; commending 
 whatever license and fraud and perfidy could be perpetrated 
 with impunity. The very impudence of the book suggests 
 that it may have been only the satire of a critic ; but 
 Spinoza, to whom everything was serious, took it for the 
 aberration of a disciple, and, in his first disgust, thought 
 of disclaiming and answering its reasonings *. Though he 
 abandoned this and every other polemical purpose, he noted 
 the effect of his book with sensitive vigilance. It was at- 
 tacked at Leipzig by Jacob Thomasius, at Utrecht by Mel- 
 chior and Mansvelt, at Jena by Museus, at Leyden by Van 
 Blyenbergh. Of these he takes no notice. But when a private 
 correspondent (John Oosten, a Rotterdam surgeon) forwards 
 to him a letter of Dr. Lambert van Velthuysen, containing 
 a critical abstract of the treatise, he explains and defends his 
 position, though strongly protesting that the report of his 
 book is hardly less a caricature than Voet's account of Des- 
 cartes 2 . When preparing, four years afterwards, some notes 
 for a new edition, he applied to Velthuysen for permission 
 to cite his criticisms (anonymously, if preferred), as the basis 
 of a reply 3 . The work being proscribed by the States, at the 
 instigation of the Synods, the intended revision of the text 
 never took place ; and the materials for it appeared in the 
 form of annotations to the treatise in the collected works. 
 
 This treatise, with the previous exposition of its principles 
 while it was in progress, was apparently the chief cause of 
 a ten years' suspension of intercourse with Oldenburg (viz. 
 
 1 Ep. XLIV. 
 
 2 Epp. XLII, XLIII. Until the appearance of Van Vloten and Land's second 
 volume, the chronological place of these two letters had to be determined purely 
 by internal evidence ; from consideration of which Professor Pollock had referred 
 them to 1673 ; and I, to 1676. It now appears, however, that the Dutch manu- 
 script of the first letter carries its own date, Jan. 24, 1671, which was absent from 
 the published Latin form. The answer, naturally, would not be many days later. 
 This disposes of all conjectural reasoning on the matter : and I take the oppor- 
 tunity of accepting the learned editors' refutation, in the preface to their second 
 volume, of a note of mine on the subject, on p. 98 of a little book called ' A Study 
 of Spinoza.' 
 
 Ep. LXIX.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 
 
 1665 to 1675). On receiving the author's presentation, he 
 had sent, with his acknowledgment, a criticism upon its 
 hostile bearing towards religion, which Spinoza refrained 
 from answering. The coolness and silence which ensued are 
 suddenly ended in June, 1675, by a letter from Oldenburg, 
 retracting his former opinion of the treatise, begging Spi- 
 noza to write openly, and promising to keep his confidence 
 and defend him against prejudice 1 . What can have brought 
 about this volte-face in the Secretary's attitude 1 ? The next 
 month brings from Amsterdam a letter of Schuller's which 
 suggests the explanation. Tschirnhausen is in London ; and 
 reports that Oldenburg and Boyle had been possessed by the 
 strangest conception of Spinoza's character, till he had the 
 opportunity of setting them right ; but that they were most 
 ready to be corrected, and now gave him all honour, and 
 even held his treatise in high esteem 2 . It is the misfortune, 
 however, of theological as of conjugal reconciliations that, if 
 needed once, they are apt to be needed again ; and scarcely 
 is a month gone before Oldenburg, having heard that the 
 formidable Ethics are about to be published, entreats the 
 author to introduce nothing ' which may seem to invalidate 
 the practice of religious virtue ; the degeneracy of the age 
 eagerly catching at doctrines which in their results seem to 
 support current vices.' This said, he consents to take charge 
 of a few copies, provided they are snugly sent in a parcel 
 to a private merchant, without any indication of the con- 
 tents 3 . Whether, if he had published, Spinoza would have 
 submitted to all these disinfecting processes, he is not obliged 
 to say ; for at Amsterdam he finds such an array of hostile 
 antipathy drawn up to give the book a ruinous reception, 
 that he determined to hold it in reserve. So far, he can 
 relieve the Secretary's trepidations. But, that he may profit 
 by the admonitions given him, he begs to be informed what 
 doctrines of his are supposed to invalidate the practice of 
 religious virtue ; and what are the passages of his published 
 treatise which suggest this danger, and excite scruples in 
 the minds of learned men 4 . Oldenburg, in a curt reply, 
 
 1 Ep. LXI. 2 Ep. LXIII. s Ep. LXn. 
 
 Ep. LXVIII. 
 VOL. I. 8
 
 258 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 having enumerated the objectionable points, (1) identifica- 
 tion of God and nature ; (2) the invalidity of miracles ; (3) the 
 silence about Christ's incarnation and satisfaction, a three 
 months' correspondence on these points ensues, without pro- 
 ducing any satisfactory result, the last word being said by 
 Oldenburg, nearly two years before Spinoza's death. 
 
 Throughout the correspondence of Spinoza there is one 
 negative feature which excites a natural surprise. It runs 
 through a period of intense political excitement in Western 
 Europe, in which Holland played a central part. Two wars 
 with England, rendered memorable by fleets and naval battles 
 on a scale unknown before, and claiming such victims as 
 Van Tromp, De Ruyter, and Turenne ; alliance with England 
 and Sweden, disgraced by the treachery of our Charles II; 
 invasion of the United Provinces by Louis XIV ; pushed, by 
 favour of a drought in 1672, as far as Utrecht, and then, on 
 the apparent eve of conquest, vanishing in disastrous retreat ; 
 a Dutch fleet raiding in the Thames, and threatening London 
 itself; vehement domestic dissensions between the adherents 
 of the House of Orange and the Republicans, leading up to 
 the murder of the De Witts ; all this was passing while the 
 pen was in Spinoza's hand, and he was directing letters to 
 Paris, to London, to the anxious cities of his own land ; and 
 yet his reader might suppose, for all that he tells him, that 
 the world was in the profoundest calm. From Oldenburg 
 he hears of the plague in London, and the migration of the 
 Royal Society to Oxford ; of the fire of London ; of an ex- 
 pected second great sea-fight ; and receives distinct enquiries 
 respecting the proposals for peace, the conveyance of Swedish 
 troops into Germany, the march of the Bishop of Miinster, 
 with an expression of opinion that next summer all Europe 
 will be involved in war ; but on no one of these topics does 
 his reply contain a single word. Nothing so strongly marks 
 the intellectual solitude of his nature, as this reticence with 
 regard to the living drama of the world. Yet, when its action 
 came near enough to his experience and his friends, he was 
 ready with his convictions and even with his sympathy. He 
 was intimate with the De Witts, and indeed had a small life- 
 pension from them ; he sided with them against the sup-
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 359 
 
 porters of the House of Orange ; and at the news of their 
 violent death (August 27, 1672) he burst into a passion of 
 tears. And in this grief there was no selfish alloy ; for, when 
 the heirs of the statesmen contested his further claim to the 
 pension, he was so ready to surrender it rather than allow 
 of any dispute, that they were touched by his self-abnegation 
 and withdrew their objection. What was thus secured to him 
 was his chief dependence for the remainder of his life. 
 
 Once, and not long after this, we find Spinoza in a position 
 surprisingly at variance with his usual habits and ways of 
 thinking ; viz. in the camp at Utrecht of the French invaders 
 of his country ; and that, not as a negotiator for their de- 
 parture, but as invited guest, and under the special pass- 
 port, of their Commander-in-chief, the Prince de Condd. The 
 account given of this violent misplacement of the recluse 
 philosopher rather enhances than relieves its incomprehensi- 
 bility. In the army of the Prince was an Evangelical Lieute- 
 nant-Colonel (afterwards Brigadier) Stoupe, of Swiss troops, 
 who had been a preacher in the Walloon Church of the 
 Savoy, London, in Cromwell's time, and continued to take 
 a lively interest in theology. In a book upon religion in 
 Holland, he had reproached the clergy in that country for 
 allowing the ' Theologico-political Treatise ' to remain with- 
 out any effective reply ; and had entered into a correspon- 
 dence with Spinoza of which the contents are unknown. It 
 led, however, to a proposal that the philosopher should visit 
 the camp and be introduced to the Prince, who was anxious 
 to see him ; and the proposal was reinforced by the assurance 
 that the Grand Monarque would accord a pension to Spinoza, 
 on receiving any work dedicated to him. The proposal, which 
 was accompanied by a safe-conduct, was accepted ; but the 
 Prince being absent on business which detained him, the 
 interview took place only with Luxemburg, the second in 
 command, and with other officers of rank. After several days 
 of fruitless waiting for Conde', Spinoza returned home ; not 
 without declining the offered pension, on the pretext that 
 he had no present purpose of publishing any book. It is not 
 wonderful that, on his reappearance at the Hague, he was 
 looked on as a spy, and that Van der Spijck was afraid lest 
 
 82
 
 260 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 a mob should wreck his house. Spinoza reassured him by 
 saying that, if they came, he would go out to tell them how 
 good a Republican he was, and how the object of his journey 
 had been well known and approved by 'the most consider- 
 able persons of the State ; ' and if then they chose to treat 
 him as they had treated the De Witts, so it must be 1 . On 
 this story I will make but two remarks: (1) the private 
 motives assigned for the visit to an enemy's quarters are 
 altogether inadequate and out of character ; it would need 
 the vainest of men, and the emptiest of public spirit, to be 
 thus coaxed and nattered into the salons of Utrecht, usurped 
 by the conquering foe, and to listen without instant indig- 
 nation to the hint of a foreign patron's bribe ; nor can any- 
 thing be more ludicrously matched with Spinoza's retenue 
 and severe simplicity. (2) The language of Spinoza to his 
 frightened landlord implies some public purpose in his visit, 
 approved by the chief persons in the State ; and such pur- 
 pose, in the extremely critical state of affairs, it might be 
 important to conceal by intrusting it to the least likely of 
 all agents, and disguising it under personal pretexts: that 
 it died away without making any sign may be due simply 
 to the absence of Conde', and the rapidly succeeding disasters 
 that overtook the army of occupation. We have no con- 
 jectural clue to any possible intended negociation, beyond 
 this : that the House of Orange represented the Netherlands 
 of which France was jealous and afraid ; and that House 
 was no less the object of suspicion and dread to the Repub- 
 lican citizens at home ; and it is conceivable that this con- 
 current enmity might serve as a basis for negociating, on 
 the one hand, the withdrawal of the military occupation, and 
 on the other, the establishment of a Federal Commonwealth 
 without the unity of an hereditary head. A wet season and 
 a flooded country in 1673 dispensed with the necessity of 
 making any terms with the invader ; the army could neither 
 stay nor fly, but wasted away in baffled retreat, and left the 
 Dutch factions to settle their own affairs. 
 
 The deepening interest of domestic politics doubtless helped 
 Spinoza to concentrate his attention on the theory and struc- 
 
 1 Coler and Boulainvilliers, ap. Paulas, II. pp. 624 627.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 26 1 
 
 ture of the State, as expounded in his last unfinished treatise. 
 Else it is probable that his declining strength would have 
 rendered his later years still less fruitful. Though not 
 subject to serious illnesses, or perhaps preserved from them 
 by frugal living and regular hours, he apparently inherited 
 a consumptive constitution ; as is pretty plainly betrayed 
 by the fine portrait at Wolfenbiittel, with its bright eyes and 
 narrow chest, and somewhat hollow cheeks ; and his vitality 
 seems to have slowly ebbed away for some years before the 
 end. But his even and uncomplaining temper, his habitual 
 cheerfulness, his steady industry with his lenses and recrea- 
 tion with his microscope, his friendly chats with his hostess, 
 and pipe with her husband, and good words with the children, 
 kept the mechanism of their common life going so simply, 
 that no change was observable. In all his intercourse with 
 liis inferiors he was at ease with himself and most winning 
 to them ; his wariness and mistrust were reserved for his 
 equals and his opponents. In reading some few passages of 
 his writings in which he has not suppressed the thrill of scorn 
 and indignation, and in looking at his swarthy complexion 
 and intensity of face, we may well believe that there was in 
 him a southern fire which rendered his equanimity an at- 
 tainment not easy to be secured. If so, however, the conquest 
 was so complete that his nearest associates, the weak and 
 dependent, who usually come in for the last remnants of 
 irritability, never felt it at all. ' This it is,' says Renan, 
 ' that is perhaps his truest honour, that he had the sincere 
 esteem and affection of the simple natures living around him. 
 Rien ne vaut 1'estime des petits ; leur jugement est presque 
 toujours celui de Dieu 1 .' On Saturday, February 20, 1677, 
 Spinoza came down from his room as usual in the afternoon, 
 and while enjoying a pipe with his host, asked him about 
 the sermon which he and his wife had been attending in 
 preparation for the Shrovetide communion ; returning up- 
 stairs in time for early rest. Next morning, he again came 
 down and talked with them before church-time. They 
 
 1 Spinoza: Conference tenae K la Haye le 21 FeVrier, 1877, 200* anniversaire 
 de la mort de Spinoza. Paris, 1877, p. 17.
 
 262 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 noticed nothing unusual, except that Ludwig Meyer, his phy- 
 sician, had come over to him from Amsterdam. By his order, 
 they boiled a chicken and gave him the bouillon; and both 
 then, and again after church, he took his food with good 
 appetite. There was nothing to suggest any departure from 
 the habits of the day, and the good people of the house went 
 to their afternoon service. When they returned, they learned 
 with astonishment that at 3 P.M. Spinoza had died. Meyer, 
 who alone was with him, returned by the evening boat to 
 Amsterdam, without, apparently, reporting any particulars 
 respecting the last hour; but having helped himself, as 
 Van der Spijck was careful to tell, to a ducatoon and some 
 little money that was on the table, as well as to a silver- 
 handled knife. The funeral took place on February 25. 
 Its expense and a few small debts having been paid, his 
 sister Rebecca found the residue not worth claiming. The 
 one enduring legacy which he left, his desk, with its manu- 
 script contents, went, as he had desired, to Johann Rieuwertz, 
 a printer at Amsterdam, who was apparently authorised to 
 act as his executor. So ended his life-record. But his true 
 history scarcely opens till this is closed. 
 
 3. Are Geometrical Ethics Possible? 
 
 To a modern, and especially an English reader, no two 
 things can appear more incongruous than the subject and the 
 method announced on the title-page of Spinoza's great post- 
 humous work: 'Ethics,' treated in ( geometrical fashion.' Take 
 any familiar ethical question, e.g. whether it is ever right to 
 tell a.", lie ; or to threaten a refractory urchin with the birch 
 rod ; or to touch wine ; or to use force against wrong. How 
 are we to answer such questions 'geometrically?' And if they 
 can be so answered, why are they yet debated ? Does not 
 Spinoza here combine two incompatible types of problem, viz. 
 the 'moral, where there is always, and the mathematical, where 
 there is never, a possible alternative ? 
 
 This is a pertinent enquiry, and hits at once the fundamental 
 difference between Descartes and Spinoza in the preconceptions
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 263 
 
 which they brought to their speculations. Neither Geometry 
 nor Ethics were to Spinoza what they had been to Descartes. 
 Not the former ; for to Descartes its demonstrations had only 
 a contingent certainty, instituted by the will of God, who 
 might, if He had preferred^ -have made false what now is true ; 
 while to Spinoza (and, as we\ have seen, to Malebranche) the 
 relations of quantity and figure were uncreated and immutable, 
 as much eternal data for the highest mind as for the human. 
 No't the latter ; for to Descartes, Moral law was a rule which 
 it was possible for us either to obey or to disobey, and which 
 we were bound to take as our guide ; while to Spinoza it was 
 only Natural law in the happiest instances of its inevitable 
 working. In both cases, the peculiarity of the newer phi- 
 losopher consists in the subjection or reduction of all being, 
 whether Divine or human, to Necessity, and the exclusion 
 of any possible other than the actual. When this is done, 
 Geometry becomes absolute truth, giving law to all Mind, 
 infinite or finite, and the cogency of its reasonings expresses 
 eternal connections in real existence : it tells the things, not 
 that simply are, but that must be. And Ethics become a 
 doctrine, no longer of what we ought to be, but of what we 
 shall be, under assignable conditions, an account of our con- \ 
 
 stitution as a natural object, modified by the conjoint play 
 of its inward make and its outward exposure. In the light, 
 or under the shadow, of this common preconception of an all- 
 determining Necessity, the relation between Geometry and 
 Ethics ceases to be obscure. In the ' applied mathematics ' 
 we have already carried quantitative relations, determined in 
 the abstract, into physical things, weights, motions, pressures 
 intensities, and thus created science after science, from mecha- 
 nics to electricity. By extension of the same process, to the 
 measurement of sensory and motory stimuli in living beings, 
 it is conceivable that they too might be brought under know- 
 ledge as exact as that of the chemist or astronomer. And if 
 the ideas special to man are uniform data of his nature, or 
 determinately contributed or modified by his experience, it 
 can only be the greater complexity of his phenomena that 
 delays their reduction to a decipherable order. When the 
 delay is over, the whole of nature will be seen in unbroken
 
 264 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 continuity, rigorously deduced from self-evident primary 
 certainties as little questionable as the axioms and postulates 
 of the geometer. To 'demonstrate ethics in a geometrical 
 way' is therefore, in this view, to show how the several 
 varieties of human character arise from the nature of things, 
 just as necessarily as the equality of alternate angles from 
 parallelism in the lines intersected to make them. That this 
 is Spinoza's meaning he himself explains in these words : 
 ' The affections of hatred, anger, envy, &c. in themselves con- 
 sidered, follow from the same necessity and power of nature 
 as all other particular things ; and refer themselves therefore 
 to definite causes, and possess definite properties, which are 
 just as worth knowing as the properties of anything else 
 which we find it interesting simply to contemplate. So I 
 shall treat of the nature and energy of the affections and the 
 mind's influence on them, as of God and the mind in the pre- 
 ceding books ; and shall deal with human actions and ap- 
 petencies just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and 
 solids V 
 
 Supposing this design successfully executed, it would 
 obviously give us only a psychological account, and not at 
 all an ethical doctrine, of the human affections ; just as a 
 natural history of instincts in birds and beasts, detecting their 
 causes and defining their properties, does not constitute a 
 moral science. Perhaps it will be said that it is psychological 
 only so long as- you confine yourself to the study of cause 
 and effect among the phenomena ; but that, as soon as you 
 compare them together as better or worse, with a view to 
 minimise the latter, the enquiry becomes ethical ; so that this 
 character depends upon the fact that ' man may be modified,' 
 and his more harmful affections restrained. But the beasts 
 also may be modified, and their more troublesome propensities 
 controlled ; without on that account our regarding the horse- 
 breaker, or even the trainer of a ' happy family,' as a moralist. 
 It is not modification by others, but self-modification; not 
 the application of an irresistible necessity, but the alternative 
 possibilities of a free will, with which ethical phenomena 
 enter, and from which ethical language obtains all its meaning. 
 
 1 Eth. III. Intr. Vol. I. 125.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 265 
 
 Short of this, there can be no doctrine of Duty, but only a 
 doctrine of relative Good. To this accordingly Spinoza's 
 ' Ethics ' are limited. 
 
 Taking them under this limitation, let us consider whether 
 they admit of being investigated more geometrico, so as to 
 take rank with the sciences of exact demonstration. It was 
 Descartes who inspired the ambition to extend the mathe- 
 matical procedure to the whole field of human enquiry. At 
 the opening of his ' Treatise on Method,' he expresses his sur- 
 prise that the only secure form of proof, the mathematical, 
 had never been applied in philosophy, but had stopped short 
 with mechanics ; and, in following this hint, Spinoza only 
 works on the same lines as in his abstract of Descartes' 
 ' Principia' and his own appended ' Cogitata Metaphysica.' The 
 question is, whether he can thus gain for philosophy the 
 'security' which is the acknowledged advantage of the 
 mathematics : to 'ascertain this, we must examine where that 
 security lies. 
 
 It does not lie in the severity of the deductive process. In 
 geometry we deduce, by the application of certain stated rules 
 of thought (Axioms), assumed as self-evident, the properties 
 of certain defined hypothetical existences (Definitions), as- 
 sumed as real (Postulates). The rigour of the deduction may 
 be unimpeachable ; but if the assumptions from which it 
 starts are questionable, the conclusions reached cannot but 
 be insecure. It is indeed a practice familiar to the mathe- 
 matician to reason out, for some subsidiary purpose in a 
 large investigation, the consequences of a supposition known 
 to be more or less wide of the truth. This process might 
 easily be extended till not one of the original assumptions 
 remained true, yet all the inferences from them were logically 
 drawn ; and so a geometry purely fictitious would arise from 
 the perverse ingenuity of some Pseudo-Euclid. It would be 
 possible, I suppose, to construct a system of Optics on the 
 supposition that darkness was a positive element, and light 
 its negation, just as you may interpret and measure motion 
 by taking your stand on either of the two bodies which are 
 changing their relations, as if there you were at rest. Nay, 
 it is not impossible that from two inconsistent hypotheses
 
 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 may result, to an astonishing extent, the very same system 
 of consequences, actually verified in experience ; as in the 
 case of the Newtonian and the undulatory theories of light ; 
 though at last, no doubt, some phenomenon is sure to turn up 
 which is missing from one of the logical chains. Geometry 
 would be undistinguishable from a mere hypothetical science, 
 if it had no credentials beyond its strict reasoning. 
 
 From this fate it is saved by the nature of the assumptions 
 from which it starts. All its definitions are definitions of 
 figures ; figures are limitations cut out of Space ; Space is to 
 us an a priori or necessary thought of a necessary thing, i. e. 
 of a thing the non-being of which is inconceivable. Thought 
 and thing are here inseparably united ; the idea of Space in 
 the mind is the knowledge of Space out of the mind. It gives 
 us the very meaning of reality, the condition and field of 
 Dasein or objective existence. If you choose to say with 
 Kant, it is but ' the form of Sense,' it makes no difference ; 
 in that case, so too is Dasein or objective existence ; and the 
 antithesis of thought and being itself becomes ideal. But 
 whatever we mean by existence, by objectivity, by reality, 
 is there, whenever we think of Space. Hence the definitions 
 of geometry are not nominal, but real: they give, not the 
 meaning of a word alone, or the essential parts of a conception, 
 but the nature of a thing : they carry with them an assumption 
 which it is impossible for us to question, that what is defined 
 exists or may exist ; and therefore the properties which they 
 enable us to deduce are features present in the nature of 
 things ; and geometry is intrinsically ready to play the part 
 of an applied science. It is this start from a position common 
 to both worlds, of thought and of being, that makes the 
 rational progression of the geometrician an advance also into 
 the ordo rerum ; and renders the cogency of the thought an 
 exponent of the necessity of the corresponding things ; and 
 weaves the system of the world into a tissue of relations 
 answering to the organism of demonstrated truths. 
 
 It was certainly a tempting suggestion that perhaps, if 
 Substance instead of Space were put at the starting-point, 
 the contents of Being might be made to emerge, with all the 
 necessity attaching to the properties of figure ; for, was not
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. l6>J 
 
 the thought of ' substance ' (viroKffaevov) also the thought of 
 a real existence ? Why then should we not be able to work 
 out a Hypokeimenometry, as we have constructed a geometry, 
 a deduction of the properties of the universe from its sub- 
 stantive ground, just as we reach the properties of particular 
 spaces from defined modifications of the universal? The 
 analogy was sufficiently promising to induce an attempt to 
 extract the All from the One. 
 
 The analogy, however, is misleading. Granting that in our 
 minds the words Space and Substance both stand for d priori 
 ideas, and that beyond our minds they stand for real existence, 
 there is yet this difference between them ; that the one is 
 single and absolute, the other is but a member of a pair, and 
 only relative ; the necessity of the one is unconditional, the 
 necessity of the other is conditional. If you think of a 
 quality, attribute, or phenomenon, you must think of a Sub- 
 stance that has it : the idea is of a relation, as much as the 
 idea of father and child, of back and front ; but, in the absence 
 of phenomenon or quality, there is no need and no room for 
 substance in our thought, any more than for a back where 
 there is no front, or likeness where there is but unity. But 
 there is no such condition attached to your thinking of Space 
 and cognising it as real : you cannot think at all, even of 
 Nothing, without its being there : whatever else you discharge 
 from your presence, you cannot clear it out ; and if you could, 
 it would carry away Substance too. Substance, in the world 
 of being is conditional on Space, and in the world of thought 
 on quality or perceived phenomenon ; Space is conditional on 
 nothing, and is the condition of all else. Relative indeed to 
 the thinking Ego it may be (in order to provide for Kant's 
 doctrine) ; but in the non-ego it is absolute, which Substance 
 is not. 
 
 And hence results a further difference. When you have 
 said that Substance is the ground of quality, you have as- 
 signed to it its only predicate ; there is no more to be said 
 about it ; nor is this proposition fruitful of ulterior ones, unless 
 you like to take it in the inverse direction and say that 
 quality inheres in Substance. As a principle of further know- 
 ledge it is altogether barren. If it were susceptible of analysis,
 
 268 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 it would yield only the components of its meaning, and no 
 definite qualities. But Space, as the ground of quantity, has 
 d priori several distinct predicates. It is infinite ; it has three 
 dimensions ; it is susceptible of containing forms through in- 
 closure of parts. And it is out of this plurality of predicates 
 that the numerous definitions and axioms are supplied whence 
 undiscovered relations of magnitude and figure emerge. With- 
 out this affluence of objective contents, mere nominal defi- 
 nitions of conceptions would fail to help geometry forward a 
 single step. But Spinoza imagined that he had only to start 
 with an accurate series of such conceptions reduced to their 
 essence, in order to follow the tracks of necessity through 
 nature, and demonstrate the inner construction of the world. 
 He professes to show that from the absolute nature of sub- 
 stance are derivable all the experienced characteristics of 
 things, as inevitably as from the definition of a triangle the 
 equality follows of its three angles to two right angles 1 . 
 There can be no greater fallacy. From no definition of a 
 general conception can you ever infer a more specific that 
 falls under it; precisely because what makes it specific is 
 some added mark not present in the general, but taken on by 
 it, so as to increase its comprehension while contracting its 
 range. Besides the marks of the genus we must have a 
 principle of differentiation, before we can advance to the 
 species ; and this the deductive method cannot supply. Had 
 we nothing to work with but the definition of a triangle, we 
 could never discover the equality of its angles to two right 
 angles ; we have to call to our aid the definition of right 
 angle, the representation of external angles, and the equation 
 of an external angle with adjacent internal to two right 
 angles ; and these are elements, not of the mere conception 
 of triangle, but supplied by construction from the a priori pre- 
 dicates of space. This was clearly seen by Tschirnhausen, and 
 pointed out by him when it was too late 2 . In his reply, 
 
 1 Ego me satis clare ostendisse puto (Prop. 16) a summa Dei potentia sive in- 
 nnita natura infinita infinitis modis, hoc est, omnia necessario effluxisse, vel semper 
 eadem necessitate sequi, eodem modo ac ex natura trianguli ab eterno et in eter- 
 num sequitur, ejus tres angulos equari duobus rectis. Eth. I. xvii. Schol. 
 
 2 Ep. LXXXII.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 269 
 
 otherwise unsatisfactory, Spinoza candidly admits the justice 
 of the criticism ; and hits upon the distinction which affords 
 the only hope of escape from it ; viz. that the definitions 
 which are barren are exclusively nominal ; but that those of 
 real being present an essence which may be developed into 
 numerous predicates. Under this cover he proposes to protect 
 his definition of ' Substance ; ' without, however, rescuing it 
 from its character of a purely relative notion, or settling it in 
 any relation to reality except as its synonyme 1 . I have some- 
 times fancied that these deductive world-builders may have 
 deceived themselves by the mere sound of the logical rule 
 ' Veritas universalis infert veritatem particularis,' especially 
 in an age when the word ' veritas ' was used not only for 
 the truth of a proposition, but for the real existence of a thing. 
 But, of course, when we thus say that all the marks of the 
 genus will be found in the species, we imply an overlapping 
 residue which the genus does not provide. 
 
 Mathematics and metaphysics, then, do not start from 
 similar primary assumptions, and invite by their analogy 
 the same method of treatment; nor can we hope, by deduc- 
 tion from a list of definitions and axioms, to gain such a 
 conspectus of the system of the universe as the geometricians 
 give us of the properties and relations of figures. We cannot 
 make ontology an exact science of necessary thought. But 
 there is another fallacy involved in this fancied analogy with 
 the mathematics. Besides putting together heterogeneous 
 studies in the field of thought, it confounds under the same 
 name (Necessity) heterogeneous relations in the distinct fields 
 of thought and being. The ' Necessity' by which all things 
 flow from the Supreme nature is a causal necessity, determin- 
 ing their genesis and their succession ; or even if they be, not 
 particular objects, but permanent laivs of objects, still it gives 
 them the field of extended being for their operation ; and that 
 operation on individuals is successive in time. But the ' ne- 
 cessity' which connects the equality of the three angles of 
 a triangle to two right angles with the data of deduction is in 
 the geometrician's understanding, and not in the things under- 
 
 1 Ep. LXXXIII.
 
 2 ;0 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 stood. He learns this property from the data, and other pro- 
 perties again from this ; so that there is an order of knowing 
 in which he passes from truth to truth about the triangle ; and 
 each step taken by his intelligence may be treated as cause of 
 the next. This consecution, however, is limited to the cogni- 
 tive process, and does not exist among the objects of cognition. 
 The data do not produce the equality between the three angles 
 and the two right angles ; nor does this property produce the 
 others which are subsequently inferred. They are all a co- 
 existing group connected by a reciprocal necessity, without 
 any history of their origin, one after another. Hence, there is 
 no one exclusive order in which the learner is obliged to cir- 
 culate among them ; take what property he will as his datum, 
 he can work his way logically thence to all the rest. For in- 
 stance, you may define an ellipse from either of two modes of 
 generating it ; viz. the revolution, round the two foci, of the 
 intersecting point of a vector from each ; or the section of a 
 right cone by a plane inclined to the base at an angle less 
 than that which the sides make with the base ; and, starting 
 from either definition, you can arrive, only from opposite 
 directions, at all the properties of the figure. They are as a 
 chain which may be hung up from either end; or rather as 
 a network, whose meshes may be counted off in several forms 
 of series. Here, therefore, there is no causality ; for causal 
 order can never be inverted, or turned from consecutive into 
 reciprocal; nor, among things that eternally coexist, can 
 any one claim to be cause of another. The relations uniting 
 them constitute an ordo essendi ; whereas the relations of de- 
 pendence in which derivative things flow from the all-deter- 
 mining Nature, constitute an ordo fiendi ; and here for the 
 first time do we alight upon the idea of Cause, or necessary 
 order in Time, as distinguished from necessary co-ordination 
 of the Timeless. This difference between alria and Ao'yo?, 
 Causa and Ratio, is ignored by Spinoza: the nexus that 
 unites the group and the nexus that links the chain he 
 describes by the same terms : terms of sequence, applicable 
 only to one, are given to both: from the essence of this or 
 that nature attributes 'follow' which are always there: dy- 
 namic terms, proper only to the phenomenal province, are
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 2J1 
 
 thrust in among eternal coexistences : it is the supreme ' po- 
 tentia,' ' sive natura,' whence infinite properties ' follow,' just 
 in the way in which, from the triangle's nature 'follows' the 
 equivalence of its angles to two right angles. Only, we never 
 say that it is the ' power ' of the triangle which makes this 
 equivalence. It is of the utmost consequence to remember, in 
 the study of Spinoza, this identification of logical cogency 
 with dynamical efficiency; so that causation has with him 
 its supreme expression in the relation between premisses and 
 conclusion. It is remarkable that nowhere in his 'Ethics' 
 does he supply any general definition of the word ' Cause,' 
 or discuss the doctrine of which it is the symbol. We are left 
 to infer his idea of it from its incidental use ; nor is it pos- 
 sible to make these inferences consistent with each other. 
 For example, he tells us that the human understanding is 
 the cause as well as the totality of the conceptions (Begriffe) 
 which it has ; and he uses this proposition to justify the as- 
 sertion that God is the cause, at the same time that He is the 
 totality, of creatures and effects *. This certainly implies that 
 the understanding has a producing efficiency, and is a faculty 
 with conceptions at command. Yet, if we find him elsewhere 
 identifying understanding with will 2 , he further explains 
 away will as a mere ' ens rationis,' a common term for all 
 particular volitions, and no more the cause of them than 
 humanity is the cause of Peter or any particular man 3 ; and, 
 similarly, understanding is not a faculty at all, but is related 
 to particular acts of intelligence, precisely as stoniness is 
 related to this or that stone 4 . It is a mere 'notio univer- 
 salis,' the passive residuum of our conceptions when all their 
 differences drop out ; it neither answers to anything real, nor 
 can do anything over and above what the particular con- 
 ceptions do. Thus, he distinctly divests of causality the 
 very 'understanding' for which before he had emphatically 
 claimed it. 
 
 1 Short treatise, ' De Deo,' &c. ist Dial, sub fin. Vol. II. p. 278. 
 ' Eth. II. xlii. Cor. 
 
 3 Ep. II. sub fin. 
 
 4 Eth. II. xlviii. Schol.
 
 272 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 4. Conjectural History of Spinoza s Thought. 
 
 The ' geometrical method ' on which I have commented was 
 far, I believe, from being the first thought or framework of 
 Spinoza's philosophy: rather was it the mould in which its 
 constituent parts, separately formed, were ultimately com- 
 pressed or fused into an apparent unity. If it were my pur- 
 pose to work out from his writings a chronological sketch of 
 the genesis of his doctrine, I could not do better than adopt the 
 three phases which Avenarius has treated as successive in his 
 mental history : viz. (1) Naturalistic All-in-One ; (2) Theistic 
 All-in-One ; (3) Substantive All-in One 1 . The first of these 
 he regards as expressed in the dialogues interwoven with the 
 ' Short Treatise ;' the second, in that treatise itself; the third, 
 in the ' Ethics.' But looking less at relative dates (which after 
 all are by no means certain) than at the known successive 
 influences that were dominant in his mind, I prefer to say 
 that in his problem there were two parts which engaged 
 him, one after the other, and were brought into more or 
 less definite form, before he had settled their relation to 
 each other as members of a whole ; the doctrine of God, and 
 the doctrine of matter and mind. The former of these was 
 the residuary presence of his Jewish Theism, transformed and 
 naturalised, it may be, by the influence of Bruno and of the 
 semi-pantheistic Hebrew philosophers. The latter was the 
 direct adoption of the Cartesian dualism, of extension and 
 thinking, as the component data of the known world. The 
 one was essentially a theology; the other, mainly, an an- 
 thropology; in his hands the former was still a critique 
 of religion ; the latter a critique of science. And I think 
 they subsisted for some time, side by side, in an indeter- 
 minate way, before they were welded into a system. 
 
 This distinction is not destroyed by the fact that we 
 already meet, in the dialogues, with an express identifica- 
 tion of Nature and God : Nature is the infinite all-including 
 being, the immanent cause of all phenomena and creatures, as 
 well as their totality ; and though this is said all through of 
 
 1 TJeber die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus, und das Ver- 
 haltniss der 2 ten zur 3* n Phase. Von Richard Avenarius. Leipzig, 1868, p. n.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 273 
 
 'Nature,' just at the end the word 'God' is slipped in as 
 its substitute and equivalent l . In the text of the ' Short 
 Treatise ' itself, we find the same interchange of terms ; ' God 
 is Truth, and truth is God,' the word ' truth ' being used for 
 ' reality V And to this Pantheism we cannot even ascribe a 
 transcendent type ; for an express argument is introduced 
 to prove that in God's understanding there is nothing which 
 is not realised in Nature, and that the actual and the possible 
 are coextensive, the world exhausting the perfections of God 3 . 
 And it is even said that the Divine thought is simply the sum 
 of creaturely thought ; for so we must understand the words 
 ' No modes of thought are to be ascribed to God but those 
 which are in the creatures 4 .' Such passages, if they stood 
 alone, would certainly oblige us to say that the naturalistic 
 conception had completely superseded the theistic. But, on 
 the other hand, we meet with predicates of God which, 
 evidently used without figure of speech, cannot be trans- 
 ferred to the world: we hear of not only His omnipotence, 
 but His ' goodness,' and His ' simplicity of will 5 .' It is also 
 evident that, in speaking of the ' perfection ' of God, Spinoza 
 had not yet reduced the word to the mere quantitative mean- 
 ing of completeness or all-inclusiveness, or, as he expressed it, 
 ' reality,' irrespective of any qualitative idea of excellence or 
 good. And, finally, he distinctly recognised the presence of 
 purpose in the constitution of things ; using the following 
 illustration: as bees have no other object in their work than 
 to store honey for the winter, while man who keeps them has 
 another object, viz. to get honey for himself; so the par- 
 ticular end of our nature is different from the ultimate end 
 of infinite nature, which uses us as tools 6 . This is the more 
 significant, because at a later time there was no interpretation 
 of the world which so touched in Spinoza the springs of 
 passionate contempt, as that which saves in it anything like 
 action for an end. From the internal inconsistency of these 
 indications we may infer, that his ontological theory had not 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. I. ii. ist Dial. Vol. II. 278. 
 
 2 Ibid. II. v. xv. Vol. II. 310. 328. 3 Ibid. I. ii. Vol. II. 266275. 
 Ibid. II. xxiv. Vol. II. p. 354. * Ibid. I. ii. Vol. II. 268, 269. 
 
 6 Ibid. II. xxiv. Vol. II. 355, 356. See Trendelenburg. Beitr. III. p. 351. 
 VOL. I. T
 
 274 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 yet been thoroughly worked out, and that its naturalism, while 
 fascinating his imagination, had still to make some conquest 
 in his intellect. And from the vestiges of theistic conception 
 it is evident, that his theological problem was only gradually 
 solved, and as a centre of interest had not yet been left 
 behind. From both features taken together it appears pro- 
 bable, that he formed his idea of the Supreme term of being 
 not by atheistically expunging his original belief, and then 
 reconstituting a substitute from the data of natural philo- 
 sophy ; but by rescinding from his religious conception one 
 constituent after another as he found it to be untenable, i.e. 
 incompatible with his postulates ; parting by degrees with 
 design, with free volition, with thought of a possible beyond 
 the actual ; reducing moral relations to natural necessity, 
 and ideal perfectness to quantitative totality. There re- 
 mained the idea of Causality, involving in some form or 
 other that of priority ; and this I conceive he left for a 
 time, undefined and in darkness, suspended over the uni- 
 verse, while he descended and separately studied the world 
 of which it was to give account. 
 
 The key to that world he found, with Descartes, in the 
 twofold nature of man, whose body and soul were only the 
 culminating sample of extended being and thinking being, 
 the coexistence of which constituted the universe. So long as 
 he took this object apart for study, after the fashion of the 
 natural philosopher, he retained the Cartesian language, and 
 treated its two factors as 'Substances.' Thus, he says that 
 'phenomenal nature' (being only a modification of these 
 factors) 'cannot be rightly conceived without these sub- 
 stances J ; ' and that the ' nature of man cannot exist or 
 be conceived without the attributes which are admitted to 
 be substances 2 .' And even when he calls them 'attributes' 
 at this early time, he gives to that word the very same defini- 
 tion which in his Ethics he reserves for Substance, viz. ' things, 
 or rather a self-subsisting essence which, as such, is self- 
 revealing and self-evident 3 ; or again, with a variation of 
 phrase, 'by attribute I understand all that is conceived of 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. I. viii. Vol. II. 296. 2 Ibid. II. Pref. Vol. II. 301. 
 
 3 Ibid. I. vii. Vol. II. 294.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 
 
 itself and in itself, so that the conception of it does not 
 involve the conception of anything else V Nevertheless, he 
 does not consistently identify the two terms. He applies 
 the term ' attribute ' (in the ordinary sense) to certain pre- 
 dicates of God, which it would be absurd to call ' substances ; ' 
 viz. necessary agency, Providence (identified with the striving 
 for self-conservation throughout all nature), and fore-ordina- 
 tion 2 . Yet in the same treatise he already announces the 
 doctrine that, among the innumerable ' attributes ' which 
 must belong to an infinite nature, extension and thinking 
 are the only two through which we conceive His essential 
 operation. If there is any rule which he follows in the use 
 of this mixed language, it is this: that what he treats as 
 Substance relatively to phenomenal nature below it, he re- 
 gards as attribute relatively to a prior infinite nature above 
 it. In working out the former relation into its particular 
 varieties, especially in the body and mind of man, he does 
 not as yet advance beyond the amphibious dualism of 
 Descartes. The parallelism of extension and thinking seems 
 to be involved in the position, that one substance cannot 
 produce or affect another ; but the ' animal spirits ' step in 
 and intercept the inference, precisely as we found them do 
 in the Cartesian physiology. Indeed, interaction between the 
 two ' substances ' or ' attributes ' is even expressly affirmed ; 
 e.g. the expression occurs ' whenever these attributes operate 
 upon each other 3 .' In almost all instances it is implied 
 that the interaction takes place in the direction from exten- 
 !<ni to thinking, and not in the opposite; e.g. where it is 
 maintained that all understanding is passive, produced by 
 the operation of the external object; which in fact, it is 
 said, is the affirmer or denier in perception, and not ice 4 . 
 And we find it distinctly said that no mode of thinking 
 can produce motion or rest in the body 5 ; though no similar 
 general statement in the inverse direction can be cited from 
 the ' Short Treatise.' It is obvious that if the mind is thus 
 
 1 Ep. II. * De Deo, &c. I. iv, v, vi. 
 
 3 De Deo, &c., II. xix. Vol. II. 342. 
 
 * Ibid. II. xv. Vol. II. 328 ; xvi. 332 ; ivii. 335. 
 
 s Ibid. II. Tix. Vol. II. 341. 
 
 T 2
 
 276 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 inoperative on body, yet the passive reflector of bodily objects, 
 so that it merely photographs their affirmations, thinking is 
 in us not in co-ordination with extension, but in subordination 
 to it ; and the ideal phenomena are thrown back into the 
 material. Thus Spinoza is found oscillating between two 
 opposite inconsistencies. If extension and thinking are in- 
 dependent ' substances,' or ' attributes ' defined as such, man, 
 as the lodging-house of these independents, is two natures, 
 and not one ; and the synchronism of these two natures is 
 inconceivable without the doctrine of parallelism, which has 
 no place in this early treatise ; and, even with that doctrine, 
 remains a mere mystery. If, on the other hand, thought is 
 the passive copy of what things have to say of themselves, 
 then extension alone is substantive, and the statement that 
 ' there is in nature only a single thinking thing, which is 
 expressed in an infinitude of ideas corresponding to the 
 infinitude of things that are in nature 1 ,' affirms 'a thing' 
 which has no existence ; and, further, every idea, being the 
 direct delivery into thought of the object itself, must be true, 
 and there can be no departure of idea from ideatum ; did we 
 predicate of the object either more or less than we passively 
 received from it, we should do a bit of thinking for our- 
 selves, actively creating what was not given, or cancelling 
 what was. Error therefore is excluded by this alternative 
 hypothesis. 
 
 These unreconciled elements were gradually reduced to a 
 self-consistent dualistic order, chiefly by discharging 'the 
 animal spirits,' and setting up unconditionally the doctrine 
 of parallelism. The world thus becomes to Spinoza the co- 
 equal development and expression of two substances, never 
 separate, though never interacting. Yet somehow, in us, the 
 two contrived to set up a unity ; and similarly, in the uni- 
 verse, they cannot be supposed to be ultimately unrelated, 
 and unable to give account of their invariable concurrence. 
 So the next problem was, to find a formula of conception into 
 which both these opposites could pass and be united. This 
 could evidently not be done till they were divested of the 
 character of substances, and compelled to surrender it to a 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. II. xx. Vol. II. 348.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 277 
 
 term above them. The invention of this formula took Spi- 
 noza back to that Supreme region of being which his theo- 
 logy had left in such deep shadow ; and required him to 
 bridge over the theoretic chasm between the Unitary and 
 the Manifold infinitude. This feat of speculative construc- 
 tion was needful to make a whole of his metaphysics and his 
 natural science. 
 
 5. Absolute Entity; ivfutt is its Name? 
 
 It was easy enough to take the first step, and determine 
 what the deposed substances were to become ; for they had 
 already been accustomed to the alternative name of Attri- 
 butes. But attributes of ivhat ? how are we to call ' that which 
 is extended and thinks ? ' If we say ' God,' we alter the 
 meaning of that word by including under it material things. 
 If we say ' Nature,' we arbitrarily assume that all natural 
 objects ' think.' If we select for the purpose the word which 
 has been resigned, and say 'Substance,' we commit a tau- 
 tology ; for ' substance ' is simply that which has ' attributes ;' 
 so that our position is that ' extension and thought are at- 
 tributes of that which has the attributes.' Spinoza employs 
 them all, in spite of the misleading effect of such new signi- 
 fication, or no signification ; Nature predominating at first ; 
 Substance at last, fixed by rigorous definition ; and God 
 being identified with either, and then persistently used all 
 through, as the most convenient term of comparison for the 
 erroneous beliefs which he wishes to expose. 
 
 All these terms he takes up at first as if they were well 
 understood and needed no definition. ' God ' denotes the all- 
 perfect Being, the sum total of all reality, and as such the 
 Supreme Cause. ' Nature ' is the actually realised aggregate 
 of things, considered in distinction from the merely ideal or 
 possible. By ' Substances ' he does not at the outset under- 
 stand an existence more than relatively independent: there 
 may be a plurality of them, each infinite and complete itself, 
 and all dependent upon God as their cause, and not therefore 
 carrying existence in their own essence. In this sense it was
 
 278 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 that he applied the word to extension and thinking, both 
 infinite, each in its own kind, carrying its essence through 
 all its instances, but having nothing in common with any 
 other. The conversion of this relative idea of substance into 
 an absolute, the reduction of the plurality into the unity, was 
 effected by the mediation of the other terms ; and especially 
 by the identification of Nature with God. 
 
 This identification is preceded in the ' Short Treatise ' by 
 so-ealled proofs of God's existence, which constitute, in truth, 
 not a proof but a definition, attaching existence to His es- 
 sence ; i.e. determining that the word God shall mean ex- 
 istence as such, shall go as far as existence, and contain 
 nothing that does not exist. We might say that he has an 
 easy task, for he simply defines God into existence when he 
 says that His ' essence involves existence.' But, lest we should 
 think this a mere verbal trick, we must remember that to 
 him Essence was not simply the meaning of a word, but the 
 real nature of what the word denoted ; and that the idea of 
 it in us was the counterpart in thought of that very nature 
 in the field of being ; so that the clearness of that idea was 
 the certainty of the essence, and whatever we saw in the one 
 was predicable of the other. Our idea of God is that of 
 infinite being ; this then is His essence ; and He exists. 
 Another argument is founded on the assumption, universal 
 in his time, that the essences of things have always been, 
 and will always be, without change ; but the essence of God 
 is existence; so He has always been, and will always be. 
 To this d priori argument he adds an d posteriori one, which 
 we have met with in Malebranche ; that we have the idea 
 of a being infinite and perfect ; but this we could not 
 have through the resources of our finite nature, and from 
 the experience of our finite world ; or from any source 
 short of the infinite reality ; it is therefore the witness of 
 His existence. 
 
 The identity of the Being thus secured for our knowledge 
 with Nature is likewise made out, partly by d priori reason- 
 ing and partly d posterioi*i. ' Nature,' we have seen, ex- 
 presses the actual as distinguished from the merely ideal or 
 possible. Now in God's understanding, or the infinite thought,
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 279 
 
 there can be nothing, whether substance or attribute, which 
 is not realised ; for to the Infinite all is equal, and there 
 can be no cause why He should have created this rather than 
 that ; and if you say that He can never create so much but 
 that He might create still more, this is tantamount to affirm- 
 ing that He can never create that which He can create ; which 
 is a contradiction. All therefore that is in thought is also 
 in being ; and the real is coextensive with the possible ; i.e. 
 Nature with God. The a posteriori confirmation of this is 
 simply an appeal to the observed unity of Nature ; which 
 could never constitute a whole, were it a composite of differ- 
 ent substances, one unable to produce another or enter into 
 the line of a common history l . 
 
 The conviction thus gained of the unity of nature, and 
 its coalescence with God, renders it impossible to retain the 
 notion of a plurality of substances. Body and mind may be 
 so called, in so far as their modifications form different sets, 
 love, feeling, will, &c. under the latter ; form, size, motion, &c. 
 under the other. But, in relation to the absolute infinitude of 
 Nature or God, the two kinds of infinitude predicable of ex- 
 tension and of thought can only be as modifications of One 
 existence comprehending both 2 . That existence is their sub- 
 stance, of which they are attributes ; and having the same 
 predicates, eternal, infinite, uncaused, already attached to 
 the previous terms, it is the same with Nature and with God. 
 
 Of these three equivalents, Substance is that which finally 
 assumes the place of Head to the whole system, and which 
 prescribes the language of the dependent metaphysical or- 
 ganism : viz. Attributes, the expressed essence of substance ; 
 and Modes, the variations under which an attribute appears. 
 The word Nature is dropped as an exact term. The word God 
 is defined by other marks than those chosen for ' substance,' 
 but marks so directly involved in these, that they differ only 
 as property from essence, and give the same ideatum under 
 a modified idea. This is true also of a third phrase, which, 
 though previously used, first plays an important part in the 
 ' Ethica ; ' I mean ' Causa sui,' which still renders account 
 of itself from the same group of marks, and is therefore 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. I. ii. Vol. II. 266269. 2 Ibid. I. ii. iat Dial. Vol. IL 275.
 
 28o METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 only a new name for the same thing. The definitions are as 
 follows : 
 
 DEFINITION 1. ' By Causa sui I understand that whose 
 essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot 
 be conceived but as existing.' 
 
 DEFINITION 3. ' By Substantia I understand that which is 
 in itself (in se) and conceived by itself (per se) ; i.e. the 
 conception of which needs not, for its formation, the 
 conception of anything else.' 
 
 DEFINITION 6. ' By God I understand Being absolutely 
 infinite, i.e. Substance consisting of an infinite number 
 of attributes, each expressing an infinite and eternal 
 essence.' 
 
 He explains that the phrase ' absolutely infinite ' is meant to 
 distinguish from the case of infinitude sui generis, which 
 occurs in each one of the attributes, as extension and thinking. 
 Of anything possessing merely this relative infinitude you 
 can deny all the attributes but one ; of the absolutely infinite 
 you can deny none *. 
 
 It must have cost Spinoza something to adopt the phrase 
 ' Causa sui' for the very first words of his Ethics ; unless he 
 had forgotten his own criticism upon it in his early treatise, 
 where the following remark occurs : ' to say that Desire is 
 free is equivalent to saying that this or that appetency is 
 causa sui, i. e. that before it existed, it produced its existence ; 
 which is absurdity itself and impossible 2 .' Yet, at the moment 
 of writing this criticism, he can hardly have remembered that 
 he had already, on an earlier page, used the very phrase, of 
 God ; defending the a priori proof, through His essence, of His 
 existence by the plea, that ' since God is cause of Himself [and 
 things are proved by their cause], it is sufficient that we prove 
 Him through Himself, a much more valid proof than the a 
 posteriori, which usually is effected only through external 
 causes 3 .' This oscillation between condemnation and adop- 
 tion of the phrase finds something like a reconciling medium 
 in another passage, occurring in his DelntellectusEmendatione, 
 
 1 Eth. I. Deff. i. 3. 6. 2 De Deo, &c. II. xvii. sub fin. Vol. II. 336. 
 
 3 Ibid. I. vii. sub fin. Vol. II. 295.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 281 
 
 which supplies at once an equivalent and an apology for the 
 expression : ' Si res sit in se, sive, ut vulgo dicitur, causa 
 sui 1 .' To convey his idea with readiness, he has to resort 
 to the current vocabulary of philosophy and waive the scruples 
 which at another time it would provoke ; but to guard it from 
 misinterpretation he provides it with tantamount words. 
 These words, it will be observed, express self-existence, and 
 are identical with the first clause in the definition of ' sub- 
 stance.' So far, then, the definitions coincide ; or rather, 
 the definition of Substance is itself defined in that of Causa 
 sui: Substance = id quod in se est= Causa sui=id cujus 
 essentia involvit existentiam. The second, or conceptional 
 clauses, are also equivalent ; for that whose nature cannot 
 be conceived but as existing, is conceived per se ; were it con- 
 ceived per aliud, it would be dependent, and need not be 
 conceived as existing. The first and third definitions therefore 
 cover exactly the same ground. How is the sixth, the defini- 
 tion of God, related to them ? They have given the marks 
 of the self-existing ; this gives the extent of the self-existing : 
 they take the self-existing by itself, apart from relation to its 
 contents ; this takes the self-existing along ^vith all that 
 folloivs from it and expresses it essence. God is the totality 
 of the existence named in the prior definitions, in se, therefore, 
 and substance; with essence, however, involving not only 
 existence, but also attributes, each infinite, like itself, and 
 together constituting several infinitudes in suo genere, like 
 the two known to us, extension and thinking. But these 
 ' several ' cannot be limited in number ; for there is nothing 
 to limit them ; not anything from without, for they are the 
 All, with no beyond; not anything from within, for the essence 
 they express is limitless. So the abstract self-existent is en- 
 riched in this definition with innumerable attributes, each 
 expressing an eternal and infinite essence. The relation of the 
 attributes inter se (or, rather, absence of relation) is explained 
 in the definition of ' Finite : ' 
 
 DEFINITION 2. 'That is called finite of its kind which can 
 be bounded by another of the same nature : e.g. a Body 
 
 1 De Intell. Emend. Vol. I. p. 30.
 
 282 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 is said to be finite, because we always conceive of 
 another greater. So a Thought is bounded by another 
 thought. But body is not bounded by thought, or 
 thought by body.' 
 
 Each attribute, therefore, as a whole, is unbounded by any 
 other, and they are an aggregate of distinct infinitudes. 
 Though, therefore, you have set up the term Substance to hold 
 them all, they are but housed and assembled there, and form 
 no real unity. There is not one of them that can be deduced 
 from the definition of substance, or that, when known, can 
 give the slightest insight into the presence and nature of any 
 other. This becomes clearer when we turn to the definition of 
 ' Attribute,' which is a counterpart of that of Finite : 
 
 DEFINITION 4. ' By Attribute I understand that which intel- 
 lect perceives of Substance as constituting its essence.' 
 
 The essence of substance is self -existence ; therefore eternity ; 
 for in yet another definition it is said, 
 
 DEFINITION 8. ' By Eternity I understand existence itself, 
 so far as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the 
 object's mere definition.' 
 
 Each attribute then expresses, i.e. enables intellect to per- 
 ceive, an eternal and infinite essence. But no one attribute 
 enables intellect to perceive anything which another does ; so 
 that what is perceived, so far as expressed by a second attri- 
 bute, is different from what was given by the first ; and 
 similarly with the third, fourth, &c. to the end of the chapter. 
 The essence expressed, therefore, is new every time ; and there 
 are, to intellectual perception, as many essences of Substance 
 as there are attributes. But a plurality of essences is a 
 plurality of things ; for each has one and only one ; why are 
 there not then many substances ? where is the oneness of this 
 heterogeneous multiplicity ? by what right do we agglutinate 
 its unrelated members as predicates of a single subject? 
 
 This difficulty is not removed by an ingenious proof which 
 Spinoza furnishes, that Substance must be One. Existence 
 necessarily follows from the definition of substance. Whatever 
 follows from the definition of a thing belongs entirely to its 
 nature, and is part of the contents of that nature. If of that
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 283 
 
 nature there be seven or eight instances, there must be some 
 extrinsic cause for this definite number, neither more nor less ; 
 for the definition carries only the nature, irrespective of 
 number. The existence of plural things, therefore, being 
 always caused externally to them, while the existence of 
 substance is intrinsic to its nature as defined, the latter is not 
 plural l . The only effect of this proof, if we allow its validity, 
 is, that we are required by it to exclude plurality from an 
 object of thought which has been already so described that we 
 can think of it only as a nest of plurality. It is utterly im- 
 possible to combine in thought the number of coexisting attri- 
 butes and the unity of the substance to which they belong. 
 The proof burdens us with a contradiction, be it ever so good. 
 But it is not good ; and its failure lies in this ; that although 
 the definition of substance provides within itself for the exist- 
 ence of substance, and does not provide for any numerical 
 determination, neither on that account does it exclude such 
 determination, but remains neutral to one or many. Defini- 
 tion always gives the comprehension of a term, and is silent 
 on its extension ; but this silence holds no less where the ex- 
 tension is one than where it is plural. Do you say that in the 
 latter case we want a cause for there being a plurality rather 
 than one ? I reply, then no less shall we require a cause for 
 there being one rather than a plurality. Perhaps you will 
 say, this is supplied by the definition, which ' involves exist- 
 ence ; ' but it is not so ; for the existence of a nature excludes 
 only non-existence, or none of it, and is just as compatible 
 with many of it as with one. For the cause of either fact 
 alike you have to go out beyond the definition or inner 
 elements of the conception ; the statistics of reality cannot be 
 extracted from the factors of thought. This want of a cause, 
 Spinoza tried to satisfy in the case of substance by having 
 recourse to the strange idea of ' Causa sui,' thinking thus to 
 keep causality at home within the definition, instead of having 
 to seek it out of doors. But if this device will serve the pur- 
 pose, what is to hinder us from applying it to a number also, 
 and declaring it to be self-determined ? In both instances alike 
 what we really do is not to find a cause but to dispense with 
 
 1 Eth. I. viii. Schol. 2.
 
 284 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 it. Moreover, exactly the same reasoning which Spinoza here 
 applies to the numerical predicate of substance would equally 
 hold of attribute, viz. that if plural, there must be a cause for 
 each and for the number ; yet he seeks for no such cause ab 
 extra, and pretends to no deduction of any attribute from the 
 definition of substance. He cannot escape from explaining the 
 number on the plea of its infinitude ; for the selection of two, 
 as alone relative to us, shows that the infinitude at least con- 
 tains and distinguishes definite number, and so falls under his 
 rule and requires its cause. The reference of them all to one sub- 
 stance as their seat is not an adequate cause ; for it keeps them 
 all upon a footing, and explains only their sameness, or com- 
 mon attributive character, and not their differences inter se. 
 
 On this question, of the Unity of substance, a correspondence 
 with Huyghens took place in 1666, in which Spinoza replied 
 to his Mend's difficulty so nearly in the words of this scholium 
 as to prove that it was already written. Huyghens remained 
 unconvinced by the argument l . And it is curious to observe 
 that, eight years later, Spinoza himself takes up the position 
 that the terms Unus and Unicus, being purely denotative and 
 applicable to objects only in their extension, cannot be predi- 
 cated of God, whose existence is identical with His essence 2 . 
 This is equivalent to Halebranche's saying, that God is not a 
 Being, but All being ; and goes far to justify Schelling's inter- 
 pretation 3 of the First Definition in its clause, that Causa sui 
 ' cannot be conceived but as existing,' viz. that ' existence is 
 its only predicate,' that it does nothing but exist ; and not 
 that ' existence is an inseparable predicate of it.' A term of 
 this kind, from which all denotation disappears, and in which 
 the connotation (or comprehension) is a solitary idea, is a mere 
 abstraction, calling itself existence, but verging upon Nought. 
 
 I have already pointed out the inexact use by Spinoza of the 
 word Cause, his resort to the terms ' necessity ' and ' causality ' 
 as interchangeable, and his failure to distinguish between the 
 ratio essendi and the causa fiendi. In this feature of his 
 thought we have the key to his phrase Causa sui. He as- 
 sumes as axiomatic the proposition, that 'whatever has no 
 
 1 Epp. XXXIV XXXVI. * Ep. L. 
 
 8 Pliilosophie der Offenbarung. Sammtl. Werke, III. 2* Abtheilung, 156, 157.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 285 
 
 cause of its existence cannot exist 1 ;' and again, that 'everything 
 which exists must have a cause of its existing, instead of not- 
 existing ; ' and that ' this cause must be either in its own 
 nature or external to it 2 .' If it be found within the nature, 
 then the thing in question ' causes itself,' and is ' in se ; ' if 
 beyond the nature, then the thing is caused by something else, 
 and is 'in olio' We are thus thrown at once upon the 
 absurdity, that from within the nature something acts before 
 that nature exists. The axiom is illusory ; it is not existence, 
 as such, that demands a cause, but the coming into existence 
 of what did not exist before. The intellectual law of causality 
 is a law for phenomena, and not for entity ; and though we 
 may speak of inward causes, as distinct from foreign agency, 
 we can only mean by them the powers of a nature already 
 there to put forth phenomena new in its history. To apply, 
 therefore, the language of causality to eternal things is to cheat 
 ourselves with distorted formulas that quickly entangle us in 
 contradictions. A cause may be eternal, but nothing that is 
 caused can be so. 
 
 There is, however, another motive assignable for Spinoza's 
 resort to this paradoxical phrase. He had set up God or 
 Substance as necessary cause ; of what ? Of something out- 
 side? of foreign objects that might have been quite different? 
 Not so ; but of properties emerging from their source, just as 
 those of the parabola follow from its definition. It is not of 
 new and unmediated beings arbitrarily invented or cast up 
 that our world consists ; but of derivative modifications of one 
 substantive being, along the lines of its two known attributes 
 of extension and thought. The effect is therefore not alien to 
 its cause, but a simple development of it, and still organically 
 belonging to it : that which the substance has produced is but 
 a part of its own history : the effect takes us to no other 
 nature, but retains our contemplation still within the same. 
 This identity or continuity of being between the primary Real 
 Existence and the ultimate phenomenal is strongly marked by 
 saying that what is caused is after all only a form of the cause 
 itself. Both are Nature in different aspects ; and so, by the 
 phrase Causa sui, preparation is made at the outset for the 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. I. vi. Vol. II. 289. " Eth. I. xi. Dem. a.
 
 286 METAPHYSICAL, IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 subsequent distinction drawn, between the Natura JVaiurcms and 
 Natura Naturata ; the former denoting ' Substance with such 
 attributes as express an eternal and infinite essence ; the latter, 
 all that follows from the necessity of the Divine nature or of 
 one of its attributes, i.e. all modifications of attributes consi- 
 dered as existing in God, and incapable without God of either 
 existing or being conceived V It should be carefully noticed 
 that, in this antithesis, the upper member includes, not merely 
 ' substance,' but the attributes of extension and thinking ; and 
 that the lower begins with the phenomena derivative from these. 
 Spinoza takes up the phrase from philosophies already current. 
 The disciples of Aquinas applied the term Natura naturans to 
 God 2 . And in a dialogue of Giordano Bruno's, it is so applied 
 by a ridiculous pedant of the peripatetic school, with whom at 
 the same time Form and Matter take the place which Spinoza 
 gives to the two attributes of thinking and extension, 
 ' Form ' being glorified as masculine, and ' Matter ' abused as 
 feminine. The pedant, attributing all evil to Matter, proves 
 his point by the Fall in Paradise ; Form, that is Adam, ex- 
 cuses himself to Natura naturans, that is God, in the 
 words, the woman that thou hast given to be with me, that 
 is Matter, she hath deceived me, that is, is the cause of all 
 my sin 3 . In order to leave the line quite clear between 
 these two provinces of Natura, I ought to give the definition 
 of Mode which coincides with the range of the second : 
 
 DEFINITION 5. ' By Mode I understand the affections of 
 substance, or whatever is inherent in something else, 
 through which it is conceived V 
 
 The explanation which has been given of Causa sui 
 removes all obscurity from the much agitated proposition, 
 ' God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all 
 things V The antithesis of ' Immanens ' and ' Transiens ' 
 might be interpreted either of time or of position and motion. 
 Taken in the former sense it would here affirm constancy 
 
 1 Eth. I. xxix. Schol. 2 De Deo, &c. I. viii. Vol. II. 295, 296. 
 
 3 Von der Ursache, dem Princip und dem Einen, iibersetzt von Adolf Lasson. 
 Berl. 1872, p. 97. * Eth. I. Def. 5. 
 
 5 Eth. I. xviii. Comp. Ep. LXXIII : ' Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, 
 non vero transiens.'
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA, 287 
 
 of the Divine causality in distinction from intermittency. 
 Taken in the latter, it would predicate action from within the 
 All, in contrast with interposition from without. The word 
 ' transiens ' has fixed attention chiefly on the former ; but 
 it is to be rendered not ' transient ' in the sense of temporary, 
 but ' transitive,' i. e. passing on to things and off them as 
 objects extrinsic to the agent ; and the leading thought 
 undoubtedly is that God's causality is identical with the 
 internal forces of the universe, and beyond them has no 
 station whence it can enter to modify them. This thought 
 itself carries with it, it is true, a time-contrast also ; but 
 in a secondary way ; and the intention is, to claim both agent 
 and patient in the causal relation as constituting one and the 
 same organism, comprehended alike under the term God ; so 
 that the causa causati is Causa sui. 
 
 6. Attributes. 
 
 In descending from the ' absolute nature ' of Substance to 
 its first manifestations, the ' geometrical method ' should lay 
 for us a stepping-stone of deduction from the definition to the 
 essential attributes connected with it by ' inevitable necessity.' 
 Instead of this, it leaves us to find them as we can, empirically, 
 and fit them in, when found, to the theory of the Nature which 
 has them. Picking them up in this way, we might doubt, in 
 each case, whether we had hit upon a mere property derivative 
 from the essence, or upon an attribute immediate to that 
 essence itself. The doubt is removable by a simple rule: if 
 what we have found requires for its definition any generic idea 
 under which it comes, it is a property of something finite ; if 
 not, it belongs to the essence of Nature or God *. By this test, 
 all the contents of our cognisable world run up to extension 
 and thinking as the two highest genera, neither of which can 
 be resolved into the other or into anything else: they are 
 therefore our immediate expression of the infinite and eternal 
 essence of God. They are not co-ordinate factors, both necessary 
 to constitute that essence ; but each expresses that essence, 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. I. ii. Second Dial. Vol. II. 280, 281.
 
 288 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 only in a different way, like two definitions of the same thing. 
 And since no being can be without that which is essential to 
 all being (or substance), extension and thinking are predicable 
 of everything : all material objects are animate ; and all think- 
 ing things are extended ; the concomitance between body and 
 idea is universal. And the same is true of all the other attri- 
 butes which, unknown to us, exist in infinite number in 
 Substance. Yet these co-present attributes in every object 
 have no collateral relations, or anything in common beyond 
 their being all predicable of substance ; they are separate and 
 heterogeneous, though parallel. The predicates of substance 
 are thus all disparate, a state of things which contradicts 
 the very idea of a single subject, and resolves it into an 
 aggregate. This flaw in the doctrine is irremediable ; for 
 if, in hope of removing it, you allow the attributes to have 
 something in common, you thereby establish them in causal 
 relations, and, being no longer self-existing and self-conceived, 
 they cease to be attributes, and hand over that term to the 
 genus above them. 
 
 This disparate character of the attributes issues, in the 
 case of man, in the proposition that ' neither does the body 
 determine the mind to think, nor the mind determine the body 
 to move V It is obvious that, if the two attributes thus lie 
 apart, and conduct their history without regard to each 
 other, the things that are must be entirely strange to the 
 things that are thought, and there can be no guarantee of 
 accord between idea and ideatum, unless there be some 
 special provision instituted for that end. It is in this 
 interest that the law of parallelism is invented ; that ' the 
 order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and 
 connection of things V Thus the intelligible universe reflects 
 the actual, without being caused by it ; and actual objects 
 seem to dispose themselves by our will, though determined 
 in quite another sphere ; and the correspondency which so 
 exactly mimics causality is our sole security for truth. If 
 you ask Spinoza how he can distinguish between such cor- 
 respondency and causality, and why he objects to say out- 
 right that it is the ideatum which gives the idea, he answers 
 
 1 Eth. III. ii. Ibid. II. vii.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 289 
 
 that, if you examine the case, say, of an actual circle and of 
 your idea of a circle, your idea cannot be had except by 
 another mode of thought as its proximate cause (your mind 
 that has it is itself = the idea of the body), and that again by 
 another, etc. in infinitum ; and the circle cannot be had except 
 by operations in extension, whereby it is drawn ; so that, as 
 long as you view the order of nature as a modus of thought, 
 it must be explained by one attribute ; and so long as you 
 regard it as a modus of extension, it must be explained, i.e. 
 find its cause, through another. The obvious objection, that 
 close correspondency between two independent series without 
 causality is an unsolved mystery, Spinoza endeavours to 
 reduce, by insisting that the separate attributes are, after all, 
 but the same thing expressed in two ways ; the body and the 
 mind of man, e.g. being a single res, appearing now under the 
 aspect of res extensa, and now under that of res cogitans. In 
 spite of this verbal assertion of identity, it remains, however, 
 impossible to constitute a conceivable unity out of parallel 
 dissimilars. 
 
 A further difficulty is forced upon our attention, when we 
 remember the infinite number of attributes, besides those 
 which are accessible to our apprehension. The same law ap- 
 plies to all alike, and must do so, as each is but another aspect 
 of the same reality. For them also, accordingly, it holds, that 
 the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and 
 connection of things. Though the ' things,' or modifications 
 of the other attributes, are foreign to us, we share the attribute 
 of Thinking, and have ideas in order and connection ; and 
 since it is not the ideata that give the ideas, but the ideas that 
 give the ideata, why have we no apprehension of these 
 unknown attributes? If there is nothing that fails to be 
 reflected in the order and connection of ideas, the thinking 
 attribute cannot be the associate of extension alone ; it must 
 be the common concomitant of all the attributes: what 
 hinders it then from telling the tale of each in the audience 
 chamber of all the rest ? It is obvious that this law of pa- 
 rallelism, in the very endeavour to balance our two attri- 
 butes, destroys their equilibrium, and gives an overwhelming 
 preponderance to the thinking attribute ; fitting it up, like a 
 
 VOL. i. u
 
 290 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 polygonoid of innumerable sides, with a reflecting face towards 
 every one of the remaining infinite attributes as well. Modes of 
 extension have their material world ; but modes of thought are 
 denizens of all the worlds. These difficulties did not escape the 
 acuteness of Tschirnhausen, who presses Spinoza for some proof 
 that we can apprehend only two of the countless attributes, 
 and points out that, if it be true, it is inexplicable. He 
 obtains no satisfactory reply; and apparently produced on 
 Spinoza a stronger impression than he had himself received 1 . 
 No aspect of the doctrine of parallelism is more staggering 
 than its assertion that all bodies are animate. Did Spinoza 
 really believe, we naturally ask, that a nugget or a boulder 
 had an idea of itself? Let us consult his own writings. 
 ' There can be nothing in nature,' he says, ' of which there is 
 not, in the soul of that same thing, an idea ; and the more or 
 less perfect the thing is, so much the more or less perfect is 
 the union, and the effect of the idea upon the thing or upon 
 God Himself 2 .' Again, having laid down the positions, that 
 ' the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the 
 body,' and that ' man consists of mind and body,' he adds that 
 these statements are just as true of all other objects as of 
 man ; for that ' all individual things are animate, though in 
 different degrees V The difficulty of this surprising doctrine 
 may perhaps be relieved by attention to two considerations : 
 that the ' object ' of an idea does not mean ' that which is con- 
 sciously contemplated in the idea ; ' and that ' the soul of a 
 thing' is not regarded as localised in the thing. To explain 
 the first of these points it may be useful to recall Hamilton's 
 revival of the Democritic doctrine of Perception, viz. that the 
 sole ' object perceived' is always 'that which is in immediate 
 contact with the organ,' so that ' all the senses are but modi- 
 fications of touch V Thus interpreted, the object of vision 
 is not the thing of which we gain cognisance by sight, but 
 the ethereal undulations which impinge upon the retina ; and 
 if I am ignorant of their existence, I ' immediately perceive ' 
 an ' object ' of which I am wholly unaware. Nothing can less 
 conduce to precision than thus to confound the ' cause of per- 
 
 1 Epp. LXm LXV. LXX. De Deo, &c. II. xxu. Vol. II. 351. 
 
 3 Eth. II. xiii. Schol. * Hamilton's Eeid, p. 247 B, note.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 
 
 ception,' which may be unperceived, with the ' object,' which 
 is the thing perceived. The word ' perception ' is not a physical 
 term, denoting a particular link in a chain of molecular move- 
 ments ; but a mental term, denoting the contents of a self- 
 conscious act ; and it must not be sent out to seek its meaning 
 beyond that self-consciousness. Spinoza, however, takes the 
 side of Democritus and Hamilton ; with him also ' the object of 
 an idea ' is the particular bodily affection (though undeciphered 
 or even unknown by us) on which the idea attends ; so that ' the 
 idea of the body ' (i.e. the mind), or ' the idea ' of a bodily change 
 or process, is not necessarily the thought of it, but the thought 
 or feeling from it (as the ordinary physiologist would say) ; 
 concomitant with it, as Spinoza would rather have it. It 
 is indeed possible for the cause, or occasion, of perception, to 
 be also the thing perceived 1 ; and in that case the two meanings 
 of the word ' idea ' would coalesce ; but it makes no difference 
 to Spinoza whether they do or do not ; the idea or soul of a 
 thing is any conscious state that may attend its presence or its 
 changes. While calling Democritus' doctrine in aid as an 
 illustration, I ought, however, to point out two minor particu- 
 lars in which the analogy fails. The Greek philosopher placed 
 the ' object ' of perception in the last link of change outside 
 the organ ; Spinoza, in the molecular movements within the 
 organism itself; and while the former treated the relations 
 between the material and the mental phenomenon as one of 
 causality, the latter reduced it to one of correspondency. 
 
 Next consider that, when once the attributes of thinking and 
 extension have parted company with each other, and stand in 
 no relations but that of Time correspondency, there is no 
 longer any meaning in the questions, ' Where is the idea or soul 
 of a material object ? Is it in the thing ? What sign does the 
 thing give of such a possession ? ' All that Spinoza affirms is 
 that the thing has not only a material but also an ideal 
 existence ; that it has a place and function, as in a system of 
 
 1 The late Professor T. H. Green held ' that the exciting cause, the stimulant, 
 of the sensation involved in a perception, is never the object perceived in a per- 
 ception.' He overlooked perhaps the case of direct physiological experiments, 
 like those of Fechner, Helmholtz, Wundt, and other writers on Psychophysik. 
 See his admirable criticism of Lewes and Mill in his Prolegomena to Ethics, Bk. I. 
 ch. ii. 60. seqq. 
 
 U 2
 
 292 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 extension, so in a system of thought, and can no more be 
 excluded from the organism of intelligence than from the 
 equilibrium of bodies. For this position it suffices that the 
 object be a thinkable or intelligible thing : of course, it cannot 
 itself, as a material individual, be intelligent, so as to under- 
 stand itself ; for it belongs to the other attribute, which has no 
 ideas. If you still press the enquiry for the thinking subject, 
 the answer must be given in Spinoza's statement, ' There is in 
 Nature only a single thinking thing, which is expressed in an 
 infinitude of ideas corresponding to the infinitude of things 
 that are in Nature V Provided, therefore, that within this 
 single res cogitans an idea arises answering to the thing of 
 which we speak, the condition of correspondency is fulfilled, 
 and it has gained its soul. Thought, thinker, thinkable, are 
 all ' ideas,' and fall together under the category of the res 
 cogitans, and the margins melt away which separate them. 
 
 An attempt has been made to rescue the doctrine of dis- 
 parate attributes from its difficulties by withdrawing them 
 altogether from substantive reality, and treating them as mere 
 subjective forms of conception on our part. And at first sight 
 the attempt seems to be favoured by the definition of attribute, 
 viz. 'that which the intellect perceives of substance as consti- 
 tuting its essence ; ' which might be taken to mean ' that which 
 we think on to substance, as its expression relatively to us.' 
 If only this were intended, the failure of unity in the essence 
 of ' Substantia ' would be our error instead of its fault, a mere 
 illusion of human imperfection. Erdmann defends Spinoza by 
 this interpretation. But it is irreconcilable with his habitual 
 language, which distinctly plants the attributes in the real 
 essence of things themselves ; e.g. ' the more reality or exist- 
 ence anything has, the more attributes are predicable of 
 it ; the more attributes I predicate of a thing, the more 
 existence I predicate of it, i.e. the more do I conceive of 
 it as real (sub ratione veri)*\ nay, he speaks, totidem verbis, 
 of the attributes of substance as being ' extra intettectum ; ' 
 ' there is nothing outside the intellect by which to distinguish 
 a plurality of things among themselves, except substance, or, 
 ivhat is the same thing, their attributes and affections.' Here 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. II. xx. Vol. II. 348. 2 Ep. IX.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 293 
 
 the attributes are not only placed beyond the intellect, but 
 are actually pronounced to be the same thing with substance, 
 i.e. reality itself 1 . And in truth the definition itself, which 
 has suggested the subjective interpretation, goes really against 
 it ; for it speaks not of what the mind assigns to substance, 
 but of what intellect 'perceives of substance,' a phrase which 
 Spinoza never uses except of true apprehension. Still further 
 evidence is afforded by the obvious meaning of the word 
 ' intellect ' in the definition. Does it here denote our human 
 mind ? If it did, there would be no attributes except exten- 
 sion and thinking, for they are all that our mind perceives 
 as constituting the essence of substance. Spinoza is defining 
 Attribute in general, and for him there is an infinite number 
 of them : the ' intellect,' therefore, of which he speaks as per- 
 ceiving them must be taken in a sense large enough for them 
 all to reach ; in other words, must be ' infinite intellect ; '- 
 a phrase which, accordingly, is in frequent use with him. It 
 denotes no actual mind, of an individual or of a race, but a 
 hypothetical thinking power, before which comes as object 
 some reality he is discussing. This meaning betrays itself, 
 for example, in the form of phrase ' Omnia quse sub intellec- 
 tum infinitum cadere possunt.' Had he been thinking here of 
 the intellect of God (to whom, as we shall see, he denies 
 intellect), he would not have said can fall, as if there could 
 be an alternative, of their not falling, but, categorically, do 
 fall. He is putting an imaginary case, of all things which might 
 fall under an intelligence, or an aggregate of intelligences, like 
 yours or mine, only clear and adequate by removal of bounds 2 . 
 It must be carefully remembered that the 'thinking attri- 
 bute' which Spinoza assigns to substance involves no self- 
 consciousness or .understanding. Intelligence, i.e. thinking 
 through ideas, in which for the first time self-consciousness 
 appears, is distinctly affirmed to be absent from the Natura 
 naturans, and to belong exclusively to Natura naturata, 
 like will, desire, love, &c. : it is only a particular sort of 
 thinking, one among many, into which the attribute opens 
 out ; and the attribute itself, absolutely taken, is but the 
 common ground or prior possibility of them all 3 . It is the 
 
 1 Eth. I. iv. Dem. 2 Ibid. I. xvi. Dem. 8 Ibid. I. xxxi.
 
 294 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 basis in Nature for all that becomes self-conscious mind in 
 finite beings. As extension is the presupposition of body, 
 so is thinking (or ideation) of mind ; but it would be as 
 improper, in virtue of this presupposition, to ascribe Body 
 to God or Substance, as to ascribe Mind. He (or It) has 
 neither intellect nor will, except in the natures of dependent 
 creatures 1 . ' Understanding and will belong in every form,' 
 says Camerer, 'to the produced and not the producing na- 
 ture ; in the latter, according to Spinoza, there is no sort of 
 knowing or willing, but only power without consciousness, 
 although such a power as generates consciousness ; a power 
 which acts exclusively by the law, of realising everything 
 which it potentially includes 2 .' Thus we are naturally 
 handed over from the doctrine of attributes to the doctrine of 
 
 7. Modes. 
 
 The word ' Mode ' (in the sense of ' modification '), already 
 familiar to us in the writings of Descartes and Malebranche, 
 is older than ' attribute' and came into use as the correlative 
 of ' substance.' ' Substance and its modes ' was an exhaustive 
 classification of things ; and in Spinoza's ' Short Treatise ' ' ex- 
 tension and thinking' are called 'modes' of ' substance ;' just 
 as willing, feeling, loving, &c. are modes of thinking. Nor 
 did the interposition of the intermediate conception of attri- 
 bute ever displace this bifurcate arrangement, which indeed 
 reappears even in the definition (already cited) of 'mode,' 
 where it is said, ' Substance and modes make up all that 
 exists.' It seems at first strange that, after introducing the 
 subaltern genus, attribute, Spinoza should revert to the prac- 
 tice of referring its species to the highest genus. The reason 
 is, that of no attribute do the modes ever constitute indivi- 
 dual things, but only their qualities or phenomena ; e.g. shape 
 and motion, of extension, perception and reasoning, of think- 
 ing ; so that the things themselves, combining both within 
 their essence, cannot be ranged under either, but only under 
 substance, which also has them both. The other mark which 
 the definition affixes upon ' mode,' viz. that it is not conceiv- 
 
 1 Eth. I. xxxii. Cor. 2. Comp. Epp. IX. LIV. 
 
 2 Die Lehre Spinoza's, von Theodor Camerer, p, 16.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 295 
 
 able in se but in alio, places it, however, in direct relation 
 to attribute, as the genus by which it is understood ; exten- 
 sion, for example, being the aliud in which shape lies ; and 
 thinking, the aliud on which perception introduces its differ- 
 entia. Observe also that, when you pair together ' substance 
 and modes,' the relation between the members is not the same 
 as between the two members of the other pair, ' attribute and 
 modes.' In the latter case, it is of the attribute that the 
 modes are varieties ; in the former, it is not of substance 
 that the modes are varieties : you can predicate thinking of 
 perception, you can predicate extension of shape ; but you 
 cannot predicate substance of man. He is a mode of each of 
 its attributes, and not of itself ; so that, after all, you cannot 
 tack on the word ' modes ' immediately to ' substance,' without a 
 subauditur of attribute to complete the meaning of the phrase. 
 In descending from substance to attribute we have not yet 
 quitted the region of the eternal and infinite. And since out 
 of the eternal and infinite nothing can follow by necessity of 
 nature except what is eternal and infinite, the modes deduced 
 from the nature of extension and thinking must no less be 
 eternal than the properties which are involved in the essence 
 of a geometrical figure. The same principle, however, must 
 hold, it would seem, at the next step of reasoning ; so that 
 the sub-deducible still detains us among eternal things, only 
 now 'mediated by the first derivatives, instead of being im- 
 mediately dependent on the attribute. Spinoza accordingly 
 establishes a class of Eternal Modes, which he thus divides 
 into immediate and mediate 1 ; and the difficulty is to see 
 how, by ' geometrically ' working down the line of ' necessity,' 
 he can ever alight upon anything else, and make acquaint- 
 ance with any finite and perishable nature. Reserving this 
 difficulty for the present, let us say that what he gets by 
 successive evolution from the absolute nature of an attribute, 
 through its chain of deducibles, is the essences of things, such 
 as they might be preconceived by a reasoning mind, and not 
 their existence; just as the properties of a parabola could 
 be elicited from its equation, whether or not the figure was 
 ever drawn. He did not depart from the received doctrine, 
 
 1 Eth. I. xxi xxiii.
 
 396 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 that the essences of things were eternal ; only, instead of sup- 
 posing them due to creative invention and separate acts of will, 
 he conceived of them as necessitated links issuing in irrever- 
 sible order out of the primary data or absolute essence of nature. 
 When pressed for explanatory examples of his 'eternal 
 modes,' immediate and mediate, Spinoza gives but a curt 
 and obscure answer. Immediate to the attribute of exten- 
 sion, he names Motion and Rest ; to the attribute of think- 
 ing, absolutely infinite Understanding. And as a mediate 
 eternal mode, under the head of extension, he gives the 
 ' aspect of the whole universe ' (fades totius universi), which, 
 though varied in infinite ways, yet remains always the same. 
 In this last instance he apparently means that, conformably 
 with the laws of motion, no internal changes of position in 
 the parts of a body affect the equilibrium of the whole 1 . 
 The two immediates, Motion and Understanding, which he 
 here gives only as samples of the first rank of eternal modes, 
 are, in his ' Short Treatise,' expressly mentioned as the only 
 ones; and his language in regard to them is very remark- 
 able : ' of modes immediately dependent upon God we know 
 but two, Motion in matter, and Understanding in res cogitans. 
 Of them we say that they have been from all eternity and 
 will remain unchanged to all eternity ; truly a work so great 
 as to be worthy of the greatness of its Master.' With still 
 wider departure from his usual way of speech, he adds that, 
 on the one hand, Motion, depending upon the attribute of 
 extension, and, on the other hand, Understanding, depending 
 on the attribute of thinking, is ' a Son of God,' in the sense 
 of 'a creature or immediate product,' eternally proceeding 
 and eternally unchanged 2 . Perhaps we have here a key to 
 a wonderful passage of self-defence (in reference to the Incar- 
 nation) which occurs in a letter to Oldenburg, as follows: 
 'to declare my mind more clearly, I say that it is not at all 
 necessary ad salutem to know Christ after the flesh; but 
 with regard to that eternal Son of God, i.e. the eternal wis- 
 dom of God which has manifested itself in all things, and 
 especially in the human mind, and most of all in Jesus 
 
 1 Ep. LXIV. Comp. Eth. II. Lemma vii. Scholium following Prop. xiii. 
 8 De Deo, &c. I. ix. Vol. II. 296, 297.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 297 
 
 Christ, it is far otherwise. For without this no one can 
 attain to a state of blessedness, seeing that this alone tells 
 what is true and false, good and evil 1 .' The real drift of 
 this language, when accurately estimated, is simply the fol- 
 lowing : well-being depends on discriminating true from false, 
 i.e. on understanding; of understanding Jesus is to us the 
 highest example in the individual, and human nature in the 
 race, though everything has place in an intelligible order ; 
 if we call this 'the wisdom of God,' it is not that God has 
 or is understanding, but that it is a product of God, inas- 
 much as the thinking attribute in Him, i.e. in the nature of 
 things, is its prerequisite condition. It is perfectly obvious, 
 from the parallel case of Motion, that the intellectual life enters 
 only at the secondary stage ; as extension is the condition of 
 motion, and yet is short of it, so is the thinking attribute in 
 need of a differentia before it can become inteUectus. 
 
 If this sort of process could be indefinitely continued, of 
 stepping down from primordial attributes, through all the 
 successive derivative cases of them, till their most specific 
 expressions and combinations were reached, there would at 
 last be assembled before us all the essences of things, whether 
 as yet they had phenomenal existence or not. We should 
 know all natures, considered as eternal objects of thought, 
 and see them as mediate, and ever more mediate, modes of 
 their first sources ; whether they were only a thought scheme, 
 or were exemplified in instances more or fewer, here or there, 
 our inference would not inform us. In assuming such hypo- 
 thesis of deduction for the purpose of exposition, I do not 
 concede it : it is impossible to overlook the fallacy pervading 
 Spinoza's 'geometrical' descent from an 'absolute' nature of 
 widest sweep to the natures near the terminus of derivation. 
 It is a descent throughout from the more general to the more 
 particular ; and of the latter he can render no account out of 
 the general alone : he must take on a differentia in order to 
 construct a species out of a genus ; and his ' inevitable Neces- 
 sity ' will be at fault for new essences, unless he can open out 
 for it some unworked mine of differentiation. Waiving this, 
 however, I turn now to another question : ' How are we to 
 
 1 E P . LXXIII.
 
 298 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 pass from the "eternal modes" hitherto noticed to "Finite 
 modes" and "concrete things'?" Supposing the ideal essence 
 of the vaccine nature to be eternally set up, still how will 
 you get it on four legs, with a maid to milk it before break- 
 fast?' This brings us to one of the hinge-points in Spinoza's 
 theory, the origination of single things from ' the necessity 
 of the Divine nature.' He admits that the essence of these 
 things, which follows from the supreme essence, does not in- 
 volve existence l ; that the Supreme essence does, and in fact 
 is identical with existence 2 . How, from the absolute essence 
 of existence, something should necessarily follow which does 
 not carry existence, is sufficiently difficult to conceive ; and 
 the difficulty is increased when we are told that, somehow 
 else than through His absolute essence, God does cause the 
 existence of single things 3 . He is the causa essendi from 
 His essence, or, which is the same, the essence of some attri- 
 bute ; He is the causa fiendi, from what? what else is there, 
 when you have reckoned with the essence, with its involution 
 of existence, and not found what you want ? If the highest 
 essence can and must distribute itself into subaltern essences, 
 why not the highest existence, which is inseparable from it ? 
 Else, God being cause of both, the two inseparables part 
 company at the first step of His causality, and proceed thence- 
 forth on different lines. The answer to this riddle is curious. 
 The 'existence' of which you want an account is of single 
 things, i.e. of determinate or limited things : that, however, 
 is partial non-existence, an exclusion from more than a tri- 
 fling residue of being. Finiteness consists in a series of pri- 
 vations, a boundary of time, a restriction of place, a check to 
 action, a narrowed horizon of knowledge*. And when you 
 ask for the cause of an object under such conditions, you 
 really ask two questions ; what causes the survival of some 
 existence? and what causes the negation of the rest? The 
 former, i.e. the essence of each nature so far as it is expressed, 
 may be set down as a development of the supreme essence, of 
 which in truth it is but a part. If it had its way, it would 
 
 1 Eth. I. xxiv. a Ibid. I. xx. 3 Ibid. I. xxv. Cor. 
 
 * Epp. XXXIV. XXXVI ; Eth. II. ix. xxxi. Cor. III. Def. 2. Prop. i. iii. with 
 Schol.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 299 
 
 be eternal as its source ; and it actually does persist, in spite 
 of mortal conditions, through the generations of each living 
 kind. But when you quit this side of the positive being, 
 and seek an explanation of the negative characteristics or 
 individuality, you find the limitation caused by the presence 
 of another nature of the same kind which bounds the former 
 and renders it determinate. No attribute has any barrier to 
 fear from another : extension and thought keep each its own 
 infinitude. But one thought takes its beginning from another, 
 and comes to an end with another ; and one measure of ex- 
 tension is inclosed by another ; and the imposition of these 
 confines upon the eternal continuum of each attribute is not 
 from its essence, but ab extra, i.e. from a homogeneous piece 
 of attribute adjacent. How the attribute comes to be thus 
 cut into lengths not inherent in its nature, how the deriva- 
 tive essences are on terms to press against each other and 
 mutually prevent a portion of existence, how things wholly 
 made up of timeless attributes x can become phenomenal ; 
 in short, how from the infinite there springs a finite, remains 
 unexplained. Once possessed of a few finites, you may see 
 your way to plenty more ; but they must be taken as fresh 
 data ; for, elicited from the definitions of the supreme cause 
 they cannot be. They institute a new kind of causality, 
 other than that by which property depends on essence, viz. 
 that by which thing comes from thing ; they institute a n&w 
 kind of infinitude, other than that of immutable reality, viz. 
 that of unbeginning and unending series; they institute 
 a new order of nature, other than the order of rational neces- 
 sity calculating from the dual attributes, viz. an order of 
 scientific experience, spreading a network of successional con- 
 nection through all dimensions of the world. This great inno- 
 vation, in which Spinoza rushes from his d priori cave and 
 makes off with the clothes of the inductive observers while 
 they are bathing, is introduced in Eth. I. xxviii, which runs 
 thus : ' No single thing, i.e. having a finite and determinate 
 existence, can exist and be determined to act, unless deter- 
 mined thereto by some other cause, also having a finite and 
 determinate existence ; which again cannot exist and act, 
 
 1 Eth. I. xxv. Cor.
 
 300 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 unless determined thereto by some other finite and deter- 
 minate cause, and so on in infinitum.' The 'proof which 
 he gives of this proposition is merely negative, viz. that from 
 the absolute nature of God nothing but the infinite can come ; 
 so that in order to produce the finite, that nature must be 
 modified into some finite form, i.e. must act in a finite ob- 
 ject. Or, as he is fond of expressing it, the particular thing 
 is ' caused by God, not as infinite, but as affected in the mode 
 of an actually existing particular thing ; of which also he is 
 the cause, not as infinite, but as affected by a third 1 ,' &c. 
 I call this proof ' negative,' because all that it establishes is, 
 the impossibility of extracting the finite from the infinite ; 
 but though it thus creates the want of finite causes, if we 
 are to elicit finite effects, it does not help us to get them. 
 It tells us that the limitation or imperfection of objects 
 comes, not from within their essence, but from without : yet, 
 what is there without? nothing but other essences, equally 
 derived from the essence of the same attribute, and claiming 
 in like manner to be its property; and how then can these 
 coexisting properties of one nature, without which surely that 
 nature would be imperfect, clash with one another and weaken 
 its perfection ? Spinoza, therefore, does not effect the transi- 
 tion, but makes the leap, from his infinite to his phenomenal 
 causality, and sets up, as an assumption from experience, the 
 consecutive action of particular objects in perpetual series. 
 In other words, he supplements the logical evolution of na- 
 tures by the causal nexus of existences ; and, without noticing 
 their distinction, calls them both 'necessity of nature,' and iden- 
 tifies them both with potentia, though the one is an immanent 
 cogency of thought, and the other a dynamic efficiency of being. 
 The general result of this new turn of doctrine is, that 
 in every finite thing two elements or momenta are united, 
 an eternal and a transitory, viz. its essence expressing a 
 modified attribute ; and the conditions partially suppressing 
 that essence, and subjecting it to limitations of time, place, 
 and energy, and translating its proper ' eternity ' into infinite 
 succession. These two, treated as inner and outer causality, 
 
 1 Eth. II. ix. where, however, the language is employed within the attribute 
 of Thinking, instead of Extension. Comp. I. xxviii. Schol.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 30! 
 
 play a most important part in the ulterior psychology and 
 ethics of Spinoza. The former, the inherent power of our 
 essence, passes into the active effort of reason to assert 
 itself in us and through us ; the latter, the controlling 
 power of the world's external order, flings upon us all that 
 we have to feel, imagine, and suffer : the one, the free play 
 of our proper nature ; the other, the restrictive mechanism 
 of nature beyond us. In the self-liberation of the former 
 from the operation of the latter is summed up the perfection 
 both of intellect and character. 
 
 Man. 
 
 It would be interesting, if it were not too discursive, to 
 follow Spinoza over the new field thus opened up by the causal 
 nexus among finite things. His account of the dependence 
 of link on link of objects in succession; of simple bodies, 
 that have no properties but motion and rest ; of compounds, 
 rendered hard or fluid by molecular arrangement ; of the 
 laws of motion and equilibrium ; constitutes a doctrine of 
 Physics which, though obsolete even in his own time, is 
 historically curious as a remnant of A priori interpretation 
 of nature. But I must be content with putting on record 
 a single important assumption, which lies at the base of 
 his theory of external causality ; viz. the following : ' That 
 which has nothing in common with another thing cannot be 
 the cause of that other thing's existence V Twice he repeats 
 this position in his correspondence 2 ; supporting it in one 
 instance by the reason that 'if the effect had nothing in 
 common with the cause, all that the effect had would come 
 from nothing 3 .' Not only is this community essential to 
 the relation of cause and effect, it is the sole essential; 'to 
 have community with other things is to be produced by them, 
 or to produce them V It is in this character, viz. as identical 
 with the common properties of all that exists, that God is 
 called the cause of all ; that every idea of a particular thing is 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. Appendix, Axiom 5. 
 
 2 Ep. III. where Oldenburg quotes it from a previous letter, Sept. 27, 1661. 
 
 3 Ep. IV. * De Intell. Emend. Vol. I. p. 14, Adnot.
 
 303 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 said to involve His eternal and infinite essence ; and that all 
 men are declared to have adequate knowledge of that eternal 
 and infinite essence l . What is common to all exists in each ; 
 and any one thing is sufficient to reveal it. The thing known 
 introduces you to extension; and the knowing introduces 
 you to thinking ; and these two give the eternal and infinite 
 essence of God. Thus the causality of God is resolved into 
 the interaction of the homogeneous properties of things. 
 
 Man, however, is the only finite object in which we can study 
 with direct insight the interplay of the two causalities, the 
 energy of the inner essence, and its subjection to external 
 counteraction ; and Spinoza's anthropological doctrine claims 
 attention as the real source and centre, though not the pro- 
 fessed initiative, of his whole philosophy. In our own mixed 
 nature we have both extension and thinking at home with 
 us ; and here it is that we catch their relation in its elemen- 
 tary form. I have already mentioned the position which 
 sounds to us so strange, that 'the idea which constitutes the 
 human mind is the idea of the human body, i.e. a definite 
 mode of extension in actual existence 2 ; ' and by ' idea ' he 
 means 'the first, immediate modification of thinking, from 
 which all the rest, love, desire, pleasure, &c. are derived 3 .' 
 This idea, however, though ' immediate,' ' is not simple, but 
 composed of very many ideas ; ' for the body is very complex, 
 and subject to be sensibly affected in all its constituent parts ; 
 and the sum of all these modifications of feeling makes up the 
 idea of the body 4 . The true key to these statements is found 
 when for ' idea of the body ' we substitute, as before suggested, 
 ' idea FROM the body,' i.e. the conscious state arising on occa- 
 sion of a corporeal change, a state which Spinoza habitually, 
 but erroneously, treats as if it were equivalent to a knowledge 
 of the corresponding change. He began, I am convinced, by 
 regarding the body as the source of the mind ; starting the 
 mind, after the method of the empirical psychology, with the 
 sensible affections directly due to bodily phenomena ; holding 
 to the rules, that we know only what we feel ; that we feel 
 only the changes in our organism ; and that we cannot feel 
 
 1 Eth. H. xlv. xlvi. xlvii. and Schol. 2 Eth. III. xiii. 
 
 3 De Deo, &c. Appendix, Vol. II. 367. * Ibid. II. xv.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 303 
 
 without knowing what we feel. Thus assumed and inter- 
 preted, the causality of the body was to him, as to Demo- 
 critus, the objectivity of the body, not only the condition of 
 perception, but the thing perceived. And if you ask ' per- 
 ceived by what?' he will not allow you any percipient 
 ready to become the subject of the idea, or at all distinct 
 from the idea itself. He does not say that the mind gets 
 the idea, but that the idea is the mind, the first rudiment 
 that constitutes it ; the word ' mind ' being only a shorthand 
 abstract for the total cumulus of ideas. He identifies the 
 Ego with its phenomena ; he begins these phenomena with 
 a cognition, and makes the object of that cognition the 
 human body, a thing in the sphere of extension, not a 
 phenomenon in the sphere of thought. This objectivity 
 of body, which originally slipped in under shelter of its 
 causality, he still retained after he had severed the tie of 
 dependence and interaction between the two attributes ; and 
 though he no longer supposed that the idea of a body was 
 the effect of that body, and so had something in common 
 with it, he did not cease to treat it as knowledge of the body, 
 i.e. as the presence in thought of the essence of the thing. 
 It does not seem to strike him that, in the absence of causa- 
 tion, it is incumbent on him to explain how we can be sure 
 of agreement between idea and ideatum, belonging as they 
 do to spheres incapable of communication. The essence, as 
 thought, is known to us only as contained in an idea, i.e. 
 within the thinking attribute, and not as in extension, which 
 is its own ; and if, as an ideal phenomenon, it needs a prior 
 within the same attribute, and so on, we are set upon an 
 infinite regress, without ever escaping from the world of 
 thought. He gives us no help over the chasm which thus 
 distances us from reality ; but assumes the world of things, 
 beginning with our own body, as a given object, i.e. as the 
 same for us that it is in itself. Truth, it is expressly said, is 
 simply ' to have the essence of a thing present to the mind 
 as an object of thought,' ' habere essentias rerum objectivas ; ' 
 and this, he says, is ' the same thing as to have ideas,' ' aut, 
 quod idem est, ideas habere;' so that, in virtue of this 
 assumption of correspondency or identity of essence, he can
 
 304 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 predicate about both spheres at once ; notwithstanding his 
 statement, apparently on the other side, that 'Idea vera 
 est diversum quid a suo ideato V 
 
 Our idea of an object then authenticates itself, and is to 
 be believed on its own word. But further ; this idea of a 
 reality is itself a new reality or experienced phenomenon, 
 which, in its turn, becomes an object of thought; for we 
 cannot know without knowing that we know ; it belongs 
 to the very nature of an idea that whoever has it is aware 
 that he has it. There arises, therefore, of necessity an idea 
 of the idea (idea idese), which again is a new fact or modi- 
 fication in the thinking attribute, and must have its cor- 
 responding idea, liable in its turn to fall into the ordo 
 rerum and have its counterpart in the ordo idearum; and 
 so on, in infiniturn 2 . This infinite series, however, does not 
 make itself up in discrete parts that can be counted in suc- 
 cession; being only a reduplicated reflection of the same 
 reflection, its self-similars fuse themselves together and 
 coalesce into one continuum of self-consciousness. This 
 ' knowledge of the human mind,' i.e. of ' the order and 
 connection of ideas corresponding to those of things,' is 
 'united with the mind as the mind is united with the 
 body 3 ; ' an expression which is intended to attach self- 
 consciousness to idea as inseparably as idea to thing; but 
 which is not quite exact in its comparison of relations ; in- 
 asmuch as both idea and the knowledge of it are within 
 the same attribute of thinking, while mind and body belong 
 to the different attributes of thinking and extension: the 
 union is causal in the one case, it is a correspondency in 
 the other. This curious theory of self-consciousness really 
 means, that it is made up by adding all the items of idea, 
 with the running accompaniment of their being known as 
 soon as they are had; merely to be conscious of a bodily 
 affection would not constitute knowledge of the mind, did 
 it not involve further our making the idea of it our object, 
 and repeating that process indefinitely and identically with 
 every idea, a continuous thread through all successions ; 
 
 1 De Intell. Emend. Vol. I. p. u. 2 Eth. II. xx. 
 
 3 Eth. II. xxi. and Schol.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 305 
 
 the ' mind ' is nothing but the ideas, as far as they have gone, 
 unified by the invariable recurrence of the same knowledge 
 of them. Consciousness, which begins with an affection of 
 the organism, necessarily involves self-consciousness, which 
 is knowledge of the mind 1 . We have here, in subtle and 
 obscure form, an anticipation, not perhaps without influence 
 from Hobbes, of the doctrine of Condillac and James Mill. 
 The theory, although professedly founded on the exact 
 parallelism between the two attributes, really contradicts 
 it twice over ; and that in contradictory ways. On the 
 one hand, by making the union between the body and 
 its idea identical with that between that idea and its re- 
 flection in self-consciousness, Spinoza treats the relation as 
 alike causal in both cases, and, with the empirical psycho- 
 logists, regards the body as answerable for the idea ; so 
 that the thinking mode surrenders its pretensions to the 
 extended. On the other hand, when, forgetting this, he 
 takes the two attributes as parallel, they are already brought 
 to equipoise as soon as for every extended object he has 
 provided an answering idea; this done, the ordo idearum 
 and the ordo rerum sway the universe as two consuls differ- 
 ing neither in term nor right. But when he adds that, over 
 and above this, each idea is the object of another, and each 
 other of a third, &c. to infinitude, so that all the modes of 
 thinking are, through self-contemplation, boundlessly pro- 
 lific of further thoughts, it is obvious that he indefinitely 
 multiplies the phenomena of the ideal attribute as compared 
 with the extended, and raises the nominal colleague into 
 the Dictator. And so it is that the scheme leans over, 
 according to the needs of the context, now to the material- 
 istic, and now to the idealistic side. 
 
 8. Gradations of Knowing. 
 
 The composite nature of man prevents him from being 
 either a mere physical automaton, or a mere logical instru- 
 ment; and renders him the subject of certain mixed states 
 
 1 Eth. II. xxii. xxiii. 
 VOL. I. X
 
 3C>6 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 in which the mechanism of the world, playing upon his 
 own, affects him with sensitive conditions disturbing to his 
 clearness of thinking. The hindrances to adequate know- 
 ledge of finite things are various. Knowledge of an effect 
 depends upon knowledge of its cause: in the case of an 
 eternal truth or mode, as of a geometrical property, this 
 can be had ; we know the essence which yields a property, 
 the attribute which yields the mode: here the causality is 
 of the immanent kind. But a finite thing is turned up, not 
 by its essence, but by a prior thing in the order of pheno- 
 mena, which is again predetermined by another, &c. ; and 
 we can never know its total cause which thus retreats out 
 of reach into infinity 1 . So is it with the human body, the 
 base of all our ideas: we know it, not in its cause, or in 
 itself as a unitary nature, but only through ideas of par- 
 ticular successive states through which it passes : each of 
 these has its concomitant idea ; and the sum of these items 
 is all we know about the body 2 . There is a further source 
 of imperfection. These corporeal affections themselves arise 
 from two factors, viz. the constitution of our own body, and 
 the operation of other bodies ; and in the answer of our con- 
 sciousness to their relation, their respective functions are not 
 disentangled, but the natures of both are confusedly rolled 
 up together 3 . The existence indeed of foreign bodies we 
 learn from their presence affecting our own ; else they would 
 have no being relatively to us; but what share they have 
 with us in the joint effect, that effect does not report in its 
 idea. And, once more, the mind's self-knowledge necessarily 
 comes in for the same imperfection ; for it is only the know- 
 ledge of this identical imperfect knoivledge, the ideas of the 
 bodily states reflected in consciousness 4 . Under these mani- 
 fold limitations, the first and lowest order of ideas which we 
 gain may be appropriately called 
 
 IMAGINATION. Under this term Spinoza includes memory 
 and perception, as well as the ideal representation to which 
 it is usually restricted ; classing them together in virtue of a 
 physiological theory common to them all, and originally 
 
 1 Eth. II. ix. and Cor. xii. I. Ax. 4. * Ibid. II. xix. s Ibid. II. xvi. 
 
 * Ibid. II. xxiii. xxviii. Schol. xxix. and Cor.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 307 
 
 expressed in terms of the 'animal spirits.' In acting upon 
 an organ of sense, an external body impels the nervous fluids 
 upon the brain, and by their pressure alters the configuration 
 of its local surface ; and each variety of such change has 
 its special concomitant idea ; which is called an ' image,' not 
 from any supposed resemblance to the external object, but 
 from its attending on a physical vestige of the object's action 
 on the brain. The characteristic of such image is that it 
 objectifies the external body and gives it to us as present', 
 the vestige is in the sphere of extension ; the image, in the 
 sphere of thought J . But next, it may happen that the fluids, 
 once having learned the way, may, from lighter hint than the 
 outward object, repeat their pressure and imitate the vestige ; 
 the image will then recur, and give a quasi-presence to a really 
 absent thing, representation in place of presentation, or, if 
 recognised as such and distinguished from its original, 
 memory as ivell 2 . This order of ideas is necessarily confused 
 and inadequate 3 . It is a passivity put upon us, not an action 
 of the mind's essence 4 . It ' expresses the present condition 
 of the human body (though confusedly) more than that of the 
 external body 5 ;' yet, giving the latter as present, induces us 
 to plant out into it as qualities the warmth, the smell, the 
 beauty, &c. which are in our own feeling ; and so it refers us 
 to two related terms, our own body and the foreign body. 
 without an account of their relation, and still less with any ap- 
 prehension of either beyond the limits of this one relation. 
 
 The images thus supplied are susceptible of both compo- 
 sition and resolution, which yield innumerable new products, 
 none of which escape the imperfections of their source. Mere 
 empirical concurrence of integral images will make them cling 
 together and form an artificial whole 6 . And in tracing the 
 transformations effected by ' the association of ideas ' Spinoza 
 is not behind Hobbes in psychological ingenuity. Unlike the 
 later expositors of the process, he treats it chiefly as the source 
 of illusions. And it is in a similar spirit of detection that 
 
 1 Eth. II. xvii. Cor. and Schol. Ibid. II. xviii. * Ibid. II. xxviii. 
 
 * Ibid. III. Def. 2. IV. ii. De Intell. Emend. Vol. I. p. 8. 
 5 Ibid. II. xvi. Cor. 2. IV. i. I. App. Vol. I. p. 74. 
 
 Ibid. II. xviii. xliv. Schol. 
 
 X 2
 
 308 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT, [Book I. 
 
 he follows out the opposite process of Association of ideas, 
 by which integral representations are shaken to pieces by 
 recurrence under variation, so as to crowd out and drop the 
 interfering features, and retain only the elements that never 
 change or fail, in the shape of common concepts or abstract 
 notions. These are nothing but mutilated images, to which 
 no reality corresponds, though the words which hold them, 
 e. g. ' thing,' ' being,' or ' beauty,' ' power,' ' humanity,' are 
 apt to impose upon us a belief in their objective significance J . 
 And so are innumerable associated images mere accidental 
 agglutinations, giving no clue to any relations of cause and 
 effect, yet taking our thought captive to their connection and 
 disabling us from holding them apart. All existences are in 
 reality necessary ; either from their essence, so as to be ' eter- 
 nal ; ' or from the nexus naturae, so as to be finite and phe- 
 nomenal. In the latter case, we are often aware of their 
 finiteness, but ignorant of the causes which determine their 
 various limits ; so that we have to discriminate these varieties 
 by names in the dark ; marking the relative extent to which 
 they fail of existence, the relative order of the several defects, 
 and the relative degree of our ignorance about them. For the 
 purpose of such distinctions it is that we resort to the ideas 
 of Duration, to denote less or more privation of existence 2 ; 
 of Time, to denote this or that position in the series of exist- 
 ence ; Contingency, to denote the doubts about existence which 
 our blindness involves 3 ; Freedom, to denote our unhindered 
 pursuit of an end, while unconscious of what determines us 
 towards it 4 . All these terms form a vocabulary, not of know- 
 ledge, but of negation of knowledge : they are all devices of 
 imagination, for picturing to ourselves the vacancies in our 
 system of ideas, the subjective feelings which fill the gaps of 
 real apprehension. But we use them just as we do the lan- 
 guage of reality, and become unconscious of the difference ; 
 and so come to attribute contingency to events, and freedom 
 to beings, as inherent qualities ; and to conceive of duration 
 and time, not simply as subjective measures, but as entities 
 measured. Hence, these ideas of imagination are a confused 
 
 1 Eth. II. xl. Schol. I. 2. a Ep. XII. 
 
 a Ibid. II. xliv. Schol. I. xxxiii. Schol. I. * Eth. I. Append. Vol. I. p. 70.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 309 
 
 medley of true and false thought, and the copious fountain 
 of illusion. In themselves, if simply taken for what they are, 
 they practise no deception: they also are facts, with some- 
 thing corresponding to them in the field of extension ; and to 
 have them is not to be in error. But they are not knowledge ; 
 and when taken for it they pass into falsity. 
 
 With this ' Cognitio primi generis ' Spinoza takes leave of 
 the province of 'confused and inadequate ideas,' and under 
 the names Ratio and Intuitus passes to the second and the 
 third, where all is f clear and adequate.' 
 
 RATIO. By this term must be understood the process of 
 legitimate inference, or mediate attainment of truth, as distin- 
 guished from intuitus, the immediate reading it off by insight. 
 The difference between Ratio and Imagination is best seen by 
 comparing two apparently similar but really contrasted orders 
 of ideas, characteristic of them respectively, viz. notiones uni- 
 versales, and notiones communes. The former are class ideas, 
 or the meaning we connect with common nouns, consisting of 
 a mere blurred and mutilated image of an individual, where 
 it is an accident what may be the surviving and permanent 
 features for you and what for me. Such a term may be 
 a convenient arbitrary sign for referring to any one of a 
 given number of objects ; but it corresponds in its contents to 
 neither any imaginative picture nor any real essence. No- 
 tiones communes, on the other hand, are ' ideas of what all 
 things have in common and what is alike in the part and 
 in the whole ; ' or, if we are attending to a more restricted 
 world, 'ideas of what the human body has in common with 
 a portion of the bodies external to it, and what is alike in 
 a part of these and in the whole.' Whatever complies with 
 this condition can never be absent, or otherwise than wholly 
 present: from experience therefore, though prolonged to in- 
 finitude, it has no supplement to receive, but only to undergo 
 perfect repetition. Hence the idea is adequate. Moreover, 
 what is common to the human body and other bodies is 
 not varied by being in both, or adulterated by confusion 
 with a foreign nature, but only extended in range : its idea 
 is consequently clear and distinct in the human mind 1 . 
 
 1 Eth. II. xxxviii.
 
 310 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 Nor does this consideration apply less to such properties as 
 the human body may have in common with only some other 
 bodies ; because these ' some ' might have been all, and are 
 actually all that affect the human body, i.e. that exist for 
 it. It thus appears that, since the area of clear and adequate 
 ideas is coextensive with the properties common to the human 
 body with other bodies, the more the body has in common 
 with other bodies, the more is the mind competent to know 1 . 
 These ' common notions, which unfold the essence of no par- 
 ticular thing,' are the data whence all reasoning springs, 
 the ' fundamenta rationis : ' nothing can follow from them 
 but adequate ideas ; and to deduce these is the special function 
 of Katio 2 . 
 
 From this account it is plain that the highest example of 
 a communis notio must be extension, as the common essence 
 of all body, and alike in the part and in the whole. It is 
 given in the idea of our own body, which involves that of 
 the attribute under which it comes ; and it is identical with 
 the eternal and infinite essence of God. Our own body is the 
 object of the idea which constitutes our mind ; all that hap- 
 pens in the object is attended by modification of the mind, i.e. 
 is perceived by the mind : but all that happens in the body is 
 from external bodies, through what they have in common with 
 it ; therefore the affection of our body involves the idea of 
 what is common to all bodies : the idea, however, of the com- 
 mon properties of all is the idea of God's eternal and infinite 
 essence ; and this idea all men necessarily and adequately 
 have, because they have the idea of their own body, and of its 
 idea, and of external bodies, all from experience of their cor- 
 poreal affections 3 . 
 
 The notiones communes, however, which thus arise come 
 from our knowledge, not of the body's phenomenal existence 
 in the order of finite causation, but of its essence as necessary, 
 i.e. as belonging, in common with other bodies, to the infinite 
 and eternal attribute of extension. The Rational contents of 
 our knowledge of the human body are the common properties 
 of the essences of things, which are unaffected by the nexus 
 
 1 Eth. II. xxxix. & Cor. ' Ibid. II. xliv. Cor. 2. 
 
 3 Ibid. II. xlv xlvii.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 311 
 
 "naturce and all its determinations. They are deduced from 
 the definition or conception itself, and are always and every- 
 where predicable, not as what is, but as what must be ; and 
 in knowing them as thus necessary, we know them l sub 
 specie eternitatis,' the invariable mark of clear and adequate 
 ideas, and of the ordo ad intelleetum, as distinguished from 
 the experientia vaga of imagination l . The difference between 
 the adequate apprehensions which we gain from the common 
 properties of all bodies, and those which arise from what is 
 common to our body with only some other bodies, is this: 
 that the former constitute the characteristics or universal 
 principles of Reason ; the latter constitute the special know- 
 ledge of the human affections. 
 
 Spinoza has worked out his doctrine of reason less clearly 
 and fully than that of imagination. Perhaps the relation 
 between the two is best seen in the light in the following 
 Scholium, introduced by him in quite another connection: 
 ' We conceive of things as actual in two ways ; in so far as 
 we conceive them to exist in definite relations of time and 
 place ; or in so far as we conceive them to be comprised in 
 God and to follow from the necessity of the Divine nature. 
 Things conceived as true or real in this second way we 
 conceive sub specie eternitatis, and the ideas of them involve 
 the eternal and infinite essence of God, as shown in II. xlv, 
 the Scholium to which may be consulted 2 .' The 'actuals' 
 of the first type are particular things, each taken as a unit 
 made up of many properties ; the ' actuals ' of the second type 
 are such of those properties as reappear in all, and form each 
 an eternal unit pervading the manifoldness of things. Imagi- 
 nation lives among the former, and sees nothing but the group- 
 ing and incidents of the concrete world, and that, just as 
 it appears, without analysis, and without detecting its links of 
 succession. Reason lives in the latter, reading the single attri- 
 bute underlying the multitude of things and presupposed 
 in all, and contemplating it apart till it yields the con- 
 sequences it necessarily involves ; and so, of any other 
 attribute, till the eternal data, with their dependent trains. 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxix. a Ibid. V. xxk. Schol.
 
 312 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 are assembled in thought, ready to be followed in their distri- 
 bution through the modes of phenomenal existence. 
 
 INTUITUS. Still more obscure is the account of Intuitive 
 knowledge. The name prepares us to meet some mode of 
 apprehension at a glance, in which all process is dispensed 
 with and the end is struck by a flash. And this is consistent 
 with a curious statement in which Spinoza seems to attempt 
 some rationale of this third grade of cognition : ' it depends,' he 
 says, ' on the mind itself, as its real (formalis) cause, in virtue 
 of the mind itself being eternal ; for under the form of eternity 
 the mind conceives nothing except so far as it thus conceives 
 the essence of its own body, i.e. so far as it is eternal ; and so, 
 qua eternal, it has the knowledge of God, a knowledge 
 necessarily adequate ; therefore the mind, as eternal, is quali- 
 fied to know whatever follows from this given knowledge 
 of God, i. e. things of the third kind of knowledge V And 
 again, he says, 'the essence of our mind being knowledge, 
 of which God is the principle and foundation, it is clear 
 how our mind depends, essence and existence alike, on God ; 
 an impressive example to show how superior is that 
 knowledge of particular things which, as intuitive, is called 
 of the third kind, to the general knowledge called of the second 
 kind 2 .' Through these dark sayings, which can hardly be unin- 
 tentionally enigmatical, one ray of hope is seen in the epithet 
 (formalis) attached to the mind as ' cause ' of this particular 
 kind of knowledge. The mind of course is, in some sense, the 
 , cause of all knowledge ; but in other cases it is the receptive or 
 responding condition, i.e. it reflects in itself the nature of the 
 thing known, and makes it an object of thought ; the thing 
 known is the real or 'formal ' object, and is something diversum 
 from the ' idea,' though the latter be true to it. In the present 
 case, this ' diversum quid ' disappears ; the seat of reality 
 is changed, and is now in the very make and essence of 
 the mind itself; the knowing act and object known are 
 coalescent instead of antithetic. The mind knows the eternal 
 (i.e. timeless or necessary reality), because it is eternal: this 
 knowledge is not a case of the infinite passing over into 
 the grasp of the finite (which might well be deemed im- 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxxvi. Schol. * Ibid. V. xxxi.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 313 
 
 possible), but of the infinite coming home to itself. The 
 mind is the idea of the body's essence ; but that is extension, 
 which is timeless and necessary ; and so is its idea ; and this 
 eternity, common to both, finds itself out in the latter ; the 
 idea, as a thing, having the same necessity which it perceives 
 in its object. If the mind can predicate eternity of any 
 essence, it is because eternity is its own predicate. And 
 herein it has knowledge, not only of its own body and of 
 itself, but of God ; for the eternal part or essence of both 
 are simply modes of His attributes, and are conceivable 
 through them alone ; i. e. they are examples of extension 
 and thinking. 
 
 This difficult position of Spinoza, that intuitive knowledge 
 has the mind itself for its real cause, may be rendered perhaps 
 more conceivable, if regarded as Kant's doctrine of the subjec- 
 tivity of space, taken in reverse. Ideal space and objective space 
 are the same (Kant teaches), because the latter has no reality 
 beyond the mind : its infinitude, its necessity, are modes of our 
 thinking, not predicates of anything ' extra intellectum ; ' they 
 pass upon the outer nature because given with the inner ; but 
 all the while they have but one seat, viz. in the percipient idea. 
 Now suppose the dualism of knowledge to be similarly reduced 
 to unity, only beginning from the other end of the relation ; 
 then the infinity, the necessity, of extension beyond the mind 
 will also form the essential predicates of its idea ; they are the 
 common predicates of both worlds : extension is infinite, ne- 
 cessary, eternal ; thinking is infinite, necessary, eternal ; what 
 necessity or eternity is in the ideatum, that is it in the idea ; 
 but in the ideatum it is real Timelessness ; so is it therefore in 
 the idea ; which is accordingly qualified to read in the object 
 what is identical in itself. Thus the unification of percipient 
 and perceived leads in one direction to the ideality, in the 
 other to the reality of the infinites given to our thought. 
 
 Besides this dependence on the mind itself, intuitive know- 
 ledge receives two other marks at Spinoza's hand. It is con- 
 fined to single things (res singulares) *. And it ' advances 
 from the adequate idea of the real essence of certain attributes 
 of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things V 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxxvi. Schol. 2 Ibid. II. xl. Schol. 2.
 
 314 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 This last characteristic seems to constitute a process of reduction, 
 and therefore to contradict the very idea of knowledge at a 
 glance. But the inconsistency is only apparent ; for he is de- 
 scribing not simply the contents or features of the third kind 
 of knowledge, but its difference from the second ; and this it 
 is which consists of ' an advance ' from the general to the 
 particular ; in the second, we reason out the consequences of 
 an attribute ; in the third we apprehend the essence of a given 
 thing. This he calls 'an advance from' the former, not 
 because it is gained by way of inference from it, but because, 
 being immediate instead of mediate, it is superior to it. The 
 other specialty of intuitive knowledge, viz. that it is concerned 
 with ' single things,' does not mean that it apprehends only 
 isolated facts and finite- objects among the successions of the 
 world, so as never to apply itself to the necessary and eternal ; 
 but only that it sees the necessary and eternal in the instance, 
 without requiring to get at it through prior cognisance of the 
 total genus ; and indeed leaps to the genus in and through the 
 instance. Thus, you need only have the sample of extension 
 in your own body in order to have, in the idea of it, a know- 
 ledge of all extension as infinite and necessary ; you do not 
 reason, deductively, from the attribute down to the particular 
 mode ; or climb, inductively, from all observed modes to the 
 attribute ; but immediately understand the given case as a 
 TrapaSety^a embodying the essence of the attribute. Spi- 
 noza illustrates this meaning, not very happily, by an example 
 which he gives both in his Short Treatise and in his Ethics ; 
 of the different ways in which you may know and use the rule of 
 three. You may trust it and apply it from mere authority 
 and custom, in which case your knowledge is only of the first 
 kind, a blind preconception. You may proceed on the strength 
 of Euclid's proof of the common property of proportionals ; 
 and then your reckoning is a deduction, and your knowledge 
 rational, under the second head. Or, on simple inspection of 
 the numbers one, two, three, you may perceive at a glance, 
 without any calculation, that the true fourth is six J . It does 
 not seem to occur to Spinoza that, in such instances, the con- 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. II. i. Vol. II. 302 ; Eth. II. xl. Schol. See also De Intell. Emend. 
 Vol. I. p. 9, where the same example is adduced.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 315 
 
 elusion may be reached by a rapid process of thought, which 
 only appears to be an intuitus because in its fleetness it dis- 
 penses with all record by words or symbols : yet, where there 
 are data or premisses, it is hardly possible to conceive that they 
 are not used in reaching the guasitum ; and if they are used, 
 it is through their mediation, and not immediately, that the 
 truth is gained ; just as Newton, in virtue of his swift flight 
 over a long train of mathematical reasoning, seemed to seize 
 without transition the solution of problems which to others 
 cost days or weeks of labour. 
 
 Though both the second and the third kinds of knowledge 
 contemplate real universals, or the common pi*operties of all 
 tJ'ings, or the attributes of God (which are but different ex- 
 pressions for the same thing), the second contemplates them 
 only in their separation, one by one, and follows them down 
 into the essence of particular things : but as no particular 
 thing is made up of either attribute alone, the constitution 
 of its essence is thus only partially seen, though of its 
 modal relation to the attribute the idea is clear and ade- 
 quate. The third species of knowledge, on the other hand, 
 contemplates res singulares, sees the attributes united in the 
 nature of each, and seizes the whole individual essence which 
 they constitute : the former reads them as two eternals, 
 each in suo genere ; the latter perceives them as making up 
 one concrete eternal. It must be admitted that, after every 
 attempt to penetrate the darkness of Spinoza's intuitive 
 knowledge, it remains very obscure. And, although it is one 
 of the most persistent features of his philosophy, appearing 
 in his first treatise and reappearing in his last fragment, 
 indications are not wanting that he was himself conscious of 
 its defective light. From the supreme place which he assigns 
 to it, both in the intellectual and the affectional excellence 
 of man, we naturally expect to find it invested with some 
 large functions in his mental history. Yet in one of his 
 last pages Spinoza confesses 'that, thus far, the truths 
 which he can assign to this kind of apprehension have 
 been extremely few (perpauca fuerunt) V 
 
 These two higher stages of cognition together constitute 
 
 1 De Intell. Emend. Vol. I. p. 9.
 
 316 METAPHYSICAL. IMMAXENT. [Book I. 
 
 Intellect, as distinguished from Imagination, to which the 
 first belongs, and to which the fatal disqualification attaches, 
 of having no means of discriminating truth from error. Its 
 mutilated representations, its fictions of abstraction, its com- 
 binations thrown together by the accidents of experience, 
 expose us to uncertainty and error ; and all the variances 
 of thought among men will be found referable to this head. 
 Agreement begins as soon as you can bring them upon the 
 intellectual ground. And if the question be asked, How 
 then is truth separated from error? Spinoza replies that in 
 the ideas of the understanding there is a power of Self- 
 veri/Lcation, which resolves itself in the last resort into their 
 simple clearness and distinctness in themselves, and their 
 adequacy for the deductive use which is assigned to them 1 . 
 The truth of an idea, i.e. its agreement with its ideaturn, may 
 always be known by the special feeling of certainty which 
 attends upon clear and distinct thought, and puts it out of 
 ^-your power to doubt it. Beyond this subjective criterion 
 Spinoza could never be pressed, often as his friends tried to 
 draw from him some common measure that would escape 
 the risks of private interpretation. He thought it sufficient 
 to say, in defence of his position, that a true idea was itself 
 the only possible detector of the false, just as light revealed 
 at once both itself and the darkness which it banished 2 . 
 
 1 See Epp. LIX, LX. 
 
 2 Eth. II. xliii. Schol. The passage is so characteristic that I cite it : ' No one 
 who has a true idea is unaware that a true idea involves the highest certainty. 
 For to have a true idea simply means to know a thing perfectly or in the best 
 way ; and of this, it must be admitted, no one can be in doubt, unless he takes 
 an idea to be some dumb object like a picture, instead of a mode of thinking, viz. 
 the very act of understanding. And who, I wonder, can know that he under- 
 stands a thing, without first understanding it 1 i.e. who can know that he is cer- 
 tain of it, unless he is first certain of it ? Besides, what can there be clearer or 
 more certain than a true idea, to serve aa a criterion of truth ? As light reveals 
 both itself and darkness, so, you must admit, truth is the rule of itself and of the 
 false. This is my answer to the following questions : (i) " If a true idea is dis- 
 tinguished from a false only so far as its alleged agreement with the ideatum is 
 concerned, it has no advantage of reality or perfection over a false one (the dis- 
 tinction being wholly extrinsic), and consequently a man who has true ideas is no 
 better off than one who has only false ones ;" (2) "How comes it that men have 
 false ideas?" (3) and finally, "How can any one know for certain that he has 
 ideas agreeing with the ideata?" These questions I regard as already answer- 
 ed. As for the difference between a true and a false idea, it has been shown in
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 317 
 
 In Spinoza's conception of human nature there is an occa- 
 sional wavering which has its explanation in the foregoing 
 threefold distribution of ideas. In order to include the whole, 
 the essence of man is said to be constituted of both adequate 
 and inadequate ideas; and this account holds of him as he 
 stands in actual experience. But then, so regarded, he is the 
 product of two factors, viz. his inward nature, as a mode of 
 the Divine attributes, and the finite causes external to him, 
 that limit and variously control him. So far as he is subject 
 to the latter, he is under a foreign influence, and is only par- 
 tially himself. And this repressive agency has its field entirely 
 in the imagination and its confused inadequate ideas ; so that, 
 after all. this area and its contents appear not properly reckoned 
 as a province of his personality ; they belong to the surround- 
 ings of his existence, not to the contents of his true essence : 
 if that essence were free to realise itself with unstinted expres- 
 sion, it would have no alloy of confused and inadequate ideas, 
 but would emerge into pure intellectual light. Thus, there is 
 a difference between the essence of the human mind as it 
 might be, if relieved of controlling conditions, and as it is in 
 its subjection to them ; and it is spoken of in both ways, 
 
 II. xxxv. that the true is related to the false as being to non-being ; now the causes 
 of falsity I have most clearly shown in Proposition II. xix. xxxv, with the Schol. 
 to this last ; whence also the difference is made evident between the man who has 
 true ideas and the man who has only false. Then, with regard to the last ques- 
 tion, how a man is to know that he has an idea agreeing with the ideatum, I have 
 given proof enough and more than enough, that it is simply by having an idea 
 agreeing with itn ideatum, i.e. that truth is its own criterion. And besides, our 
 mind, in so far as it apprehends things truly, is part of the infinite intellect of 
 God ; so that the mind's clear and distinct ideas are as necessarily true as are the 
 ideas of God.' This last consideration comes in curiously. Besides being at 
 variance with Spinoza's denial of intellect to God, it can receive no meaning 
 which adds anything to the previous reasons. What is ' the infinite intellect of 
 God,' the ideas of which are true with absolute certainty? It is simply that 
 attribute of ' thinking' which is parallel with that of ' extension' in the universe, 
 the intelligible aspect of the Seal which is actual and conscious thought in 
 man, potential everywhere ; i.e. it is Reality turned into Truth, the Ideal 
 reflection of Being ; and to say that its ideas are true with absolute certainty 
 is mere tautology, and no synthetic proposition. And therefore to say that our 
 mind, so far as its ideas are true, is a part of this, is to say that our ideas, so far 
 as they are true, are true, or faithfully correspond with their realities, within the 
 sphere of total reality. This relation of the part to the whole gives no new as- 
 surance, but merely conveys over into the former what is assumed in the defini- 
 tion of the latter.
 
 31 8 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 sometimes with inclusion, at others with exclusion, of the 
 negative element from the imagination l . 
 
 9. Transition from Knowing to Doing. 
 
 With Spinoza, as with the current philosophy of his age, all 
 the human phenomena were varieties of Idea. All the pro- 
 perties of a nature, it was assumed, were to be educed from its 
 essence, on which they depend ; the essence of man (i.e. what 
 distinguished him from other kinds) was his understanding; 
 and so his cognitive states were taken as presupposed in the 
 active, and were installed in the leading place of every psy- 
 chology. Feeling, affection, will, were different types of idea, 
 or modes of thinking. Hence, in advancing to Spinoza's doc- 
 trine of character, we meet again the intellectual laws and 
 classifications which we have been reviewing, charged with 
 new functions, yet claiming an unimpaired identity. The 
 first enquiry must be for the link of connection between 
 parts of our nature that appear so little dependent in causa- 
 tion, and so little concurrent in their proportions. 
 
 That link is supplied by a Law, boldly assumed as univer- 
 sal in nature, though not apparently involved in either of the 
 attributes that constitute our world ; viz. that, inherent in the 
 /essence of each existing thing, there is an endeavour (conatus) 
 to persist in its existence. I speak of this law as ' assumed ' 
 notwithstanding the proof adduced in its support, because it is 
 proved in one sense, and applied in another : the plea urged 
 on its behalf is the mere negative consideration that a parti- 
 cular thing, being a determinate mode of the attributes, cannot 
 have in itself any suicidal element, but, being in existence, 
 will not disappear without any external cause 2 . This 
 amounts to no more than an absence of spontaneous change, 
 and is only a statement, respecting any and everything, of the 
 law of inertia for bodies in motion or at rest 3 . But to exclude 
 a cause of destruction is not to provide a cause of fresh pheno- 
 mena, and secure the development of a determinate history ; 
 
 1 Eth. III. iii. and Schol. * Ibid. III. vi. 
 
 * See Trendelenburg's Beitrage, II. p. 82, especially note I.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 319 
 
 and it is nothing less than this that Spinoza lays upon the 
 shoulders of his conatus, when he plants it and sets it to work 
 within our human nature. It is not content with offering a 
 dead weight against non-existence: it keeps at a distance 
 whatever would reduce, and selects and appropriates whatever 
 may increase, the scope of the nature which it guards : it in- 
 spires love and aversion for helps and hindrances respectively : 
 it is the secret spring of all volition ; and conducts the whole 
 drama of enterprise and passion. Of no such positive power 
 as this does the negative demonstration afford the slightest 
 evidence ; so far as it is granted, it must be as a postulate. 
 
 The inadequacy of this principle to the work it has to do 
 becomes yet more evident, when we take into account Spi- 
 noza's doctrine of the two causalities, and the relation between 
 essence and existence. Only in God (substance) and not in 
 finite things, does essence involve existence : there is nothing in 
 the essence of man to determine into existence, or out of 
 existence, Paul or John or other men, few, many, or all : it is 
 equally perfect as a definition of potential existence, whether 
 actually realised or not. Now the seat of the conatus is in the 
 essence of each thing l ; this it is which asserts itself and insists 
 upon its adequate expression in a mode of extension, and which 
 repels whatever would remove it and deny it way. If so, 
 however, the essence, instead of being neutral towards the 
 existence and inoperative upon it, treats it as an effect which 
 it is entitled to command and control ; the attempt is in the 
 essence, while the thing attempted is the existence. And 
 thus Spinoza, after renouncing the field of existence and sur- 
 rendering it to the nexus natural, re-invades it in the name 
 of the essence, and claims over it at least a partial juris- 
 diction. 
 
 The truth is, Spinoza had to effect the passage in some 
 way from idea to action ; and it was beyond the resources 
 
 1 Eth. III. vii. ' The conatus of each thing to persist in its existence is simply 
 the actual essence of the thing itself.' For, 'from each thing's essence neces- 
 sarily follow certain results ; and it is competent to nothing but what follows 
 from its nature ; therefore the power or endeavour by which each thing tries to 
 act is nothing but its actual essence.' Yes ; but if it is competent to nothing 
 but what follows from its nature, and if, as we have been told, existence does not 
 follow from its nature, then it cannot try for existence.
 
 320 METAPHYSICAL, IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 of his deductive method to find it ; just as motion does not 
 necessarily follow from extension, so neither does agency 
 from thinking. He tried to link them together by using 
 affirynation as an intermediary: affirmation was the logical 
 outcome of thought ; and it was presupposed in volition, 
 which makes affirmation of a thing as good 1 . Why not say 
 then that intellect and will are the same, so far as both consist of 
 predication ; with only the difference, that the one limits itself 
 to true predication, while the other risks a good many that 
 
 1 It is impossible to give any account of the T'oluntas of Spinoza against 
 which some passages may not be quoted. There is indeed one position respecting 
 it from which he starts and with which he ends ; viz. that it has its origin in 
 cognition and involves an act of judgment. ' We insist,' he says (De Deo, 
 II. ii. Vol. II. 304) ' on knowledge as the immediate cause of all passions in the 
 soul ; considering it as absolutely impossible that anyone, without the above- 
 mentioned modes of conception, could be brought to love, desire, or any other 
 modifications of will.' And again (Ibid. II. xvi. Vol. II. 329), 'Desire is an in- 
 clination which the soul has towards something which it elects as good. Hence, 
 before our desire directs itself externally upon anything, we have previously 
 formed a judgment that the thing in question is something good ; which affir- 
 mation, or (in universal terms) power of affirming and denying, is called Will.' 
 This identification of Will with judgment is repeated in Eth. II. xlviii. Schol. : 
 ' by Will I understand the power of affirming and denying, and not Desire (cu- 
 piditas) : the power, I mean, whereby the mind affirms and denies what is true or 
 false, and not the desire by which the mind seeks and shuns things.' Though in 
 the first of these passages he calls Desire ' a modification of Will/ and in the last 
 excludes it from Will, it is merely that he had come to take at two stages the 
 fact which he began by treating as one ; and now separated, as ' Will,' the prior 
 'judgment that the thing is good,' from the consequent executive movement 'of 
 the soul towards the object of election;' confining the word 'Desire' to the 
 latter. In this readjustment of the terms, there is nothing to disturb the ori- 
 ginal conception of the order of the phenomena, viz. (i) an affirmation of a thing 
 as good; and then, as effect of this, (2) an appropriating 'direction of the soul 
 towards it.' But what are we to say to the following statement (Eth. III. ix. 
 Schol.) : 'it is plain that we try for (conari), will (velle), appetise and desire no- 
 thing because we judge it good ; but, inversely, judge a thing to be good because 
 we try for, will, appetise, and desire it ? ' This surely is a complete reversal of 
 the former doctrine, and makes the affection the necessary prefix to what before 
 had been insisted on as its ' immediate cause.' Moreover, in spite of the notice 
 given in Eth. II. xlviii. Schol., that by Will (voluntas) he does not mean Desire 
 (cupiditas), we find these alienated neighbours fully reconciled in the next Part ; 
 e.g. 'This will or propension (appetitus) to benefit is called benevolence, and is 
 simply Desire (cupiditas}, arising from Pity ' (Ibid. III. xxvii. Cor. 3, Schol ). 
 And again, in explaining his definition of Cupiditas (Ibid. III. Affect. Def. I.), 
 Spinoza says ; ' Under the word Desire I understand any of man's conatus, im- 
 petus, appetitus, et volitiones.' See Camerer, p. 114, note, who has noticed the 
 inconsistency of the ' Ethica ' in the use of the word Voluntas.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 321 
 
 are not true? The answer is that, for intellectual judgment, 
 you have only to predicate : for voluntary agency you need 
 something more: it does not terminate in the monotonous 
 award of its stock epithets ' good ' and ' bad,' and die away 
 in interior assent and dissent ; but prolongs itself in the 
 sphere of extension, betraying its presence by movements 
 of the body and a determinate series of material phenomena. 
 It is this migration of activity from the field of thought 
 to that of being, which constitutes volitional agency, and 
 which is totally irresolvable into affirmation and denial. 
 Precisely the same illusion is involved in attaching a cona- 
 tus to every essence : the essence belongs to the category 
 of the eternal and immanent : the conatus is a device for 
 getting work out of it in the field of finite and material 
 things. The doctrine involves an intercommunication between 
 the two attributes quite at variance with their alleged paral- 
 lelism ; and it surreptitiously introduces a dynamic causality 
 under the guise of thought sequence, which can give it no 
 credentials. If Spinoza thus unconsciously misused his higher 
 spiritual conception in an uncongenial field, it is not the 
 first time that angels have been not only entertained un- 
 awares, but set to do menial service for the tent of their 
 temporary abode. 
 
 On this conatus, however (which he had early treated as 
 identical with life 1 ), Spinoza leaps the parallels and rides 
 across from the eternities to the world of phenomena, from 
 affirmation to volition, from deductive thinking to action 
 and passion. Taken as wniversal in nature, it imports thither 
 potentia in place of Ratio ; regarded as human, i.e. belonging 
 to body and mind together, it assumes the form of appetitus ; 
 as limited to mind alone, it is voluntas (which may be mere 
 blind inclination) ; as recognised by the self-conscious mind, 
 it is cupiditas 2 . So far as it is put forth by our adequate 
 ideas, i.e. on an unobstructed path, it constitutes OUT freedom: 
 so far as by our inadequate, i. e. on a path beset by controlling 
 causes, it subjects us to the thraldom of inflicted feelings. 
 These are what Spinoza especially means by the affections : 
 
 1 Per vitam intelligimus vim per quam ret in suo esse persererant. Cog. 
 Met. II. vi. Vol. II. 486. * Eth. III. ix. Schol. 
 
 VOL. I. Y
 
 322 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 they involve both the body and the mind, and would be 
 impossible but for the passivity which we have from the 
 former. But there are self-conscious mental states in which 
 we leave behind all immediate and present relation to 
 the body, yet retain some feeling originally attendant on 
 its changes ; so that, in simply thinking, we now feel. 
 As it is not worth while to invent a separate name for 
 this case, the word affection may be extended so as to take in 
 all the emotions ; not only the great mass that stir upon the 
 plane of the imagination, but the exceptional few that rise to 
 the altitude of Reason and Intuition. They are all of them 
 different varieties of the conatus, which is the mainspring of 
 the whole ethical life. 
 
 10. Dependent Affections, and their Primaries. 
 
 Spinofca reckons three primary affections ; of which, how- 
 ever, two only, Lcetitia, Tristitia, pleasure and pain, are 
 placed strictly upon the same line, while the third, Cupiditas, 
 desire, is dependent on the other two and presupposes them. 
 Pleasure is the feeling in which the mind passes to greater per- 
 fection : pain, that in which it passes to less ; the word ' perfec- 
 tion ' being used, it will be remembered, for ' reality ' or scope 
 of being 1 . It is not meant that the mind compares the former 
 with the present state of itself and the body, and pronounces 
 accordingly a pleasant or painful judgment ; but only that, 
 without any reflection on the case, there is a felt enhancement 
 or abatement of bodily and mental power 2 . This consciousness 
 refers immediately to the body ; and the idea of increase or 
 diminution of its power is attended by a corresponding 
 increase or diminution of the thinking power in the mind. 
 Pleasure and pain thus serve as notices to the mind, of how 
 its states stand related to the instinct of self-conservation ; 
 without them, this instinct would be blind ; but furnished 
 with them, it takes the form of the third primary affection, 
 
 1 Eth. III. xi. Schol. 
 
 * Ibid. III. Def. of the Affections ; Explicatio at the end of the book.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 323 
 
 Desire, viz. to preserve the increment, or arrest the decrement, 
 of being : the desire being intense in proportion to the measure 
 of the change 1 . Yet one qualification must be added ; 
 viz. that the desire which springs from pleasure, caused ab 
 extra, is stronger than that from similar pain ; because 
 pleasure heightens, while pain lowers, the self-conserving 
 conatus ; and though, in the latter case, the effort is in propor- 
 tion to the pain, yet it is the effort of a nature weakened 
 by the suffering. Besides, in the former case, you have the 
 external cause for the ally, in the latter, for the opponent, 
 of your native power ; and you wield the sum, instead of 
 the difference, of the two forces 2 . The title of these three 
 affections to stand as primary is obvious from this ex- 
 position: without pleasure and pain there would be no 
 desire ; without desire, no awakening and no direction of 
 conatus; and therefore no possibility and no contents of 
 the ethical life. 
 
 From these data Spinoza traces the origin of more than 
 thirty derivative affections, many of them (as hope and fear) 
 arising in antithetic pairs. Instead of following him through 
 the ingenious psychology by which he effects this construc- 
 tion, I must content myself with indicating the few leading 
 principles on which he relies for accomplishing it. This is the 
 less difficult, because these principles either already belonged, 
 or have come to belong, to the common stock of psychological 
 resources, and are familiar to every reader of modern philoso- 
 phical literature. They might perhaps be all included in the 
 doctrine of ' association of ideas ; ' but only by forcing on Spi- 
 noza a simplification foreign to his thought ; and it will be 
 more true to him to distribute his exposition into smaller 
 parcels. 
 
 (1) Pleasure and Pain are converted into Love and Hate by 
 being referred to an external object as Cause. And this 
 inevitably takes place, because we scarcely ever experience 
 them except in presence of some other body which is partner 
 with our own in the effect we feel. To the image of the 
 object cling the ideas of what we enjoy or suffer when it 
 is there ; and this investiture of it with attractive or repulsive 
 
 1 Eth. III. xxxvii. Ibid. IV. xviii. 
 
 Y2
 
 324 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 colouring is what we mean by love and hate. So far, we are 
 not taken beyond the definition of Hobbes, that love is the 
 idea of a pleasure associated with the idea of its cause. The 
 varieties of love and hate are as numerous as the objects which 
 please and displease, though separate names are acquired only 
 by the broader differences, either in the external objects or 
 in the parts of our nature to which they speak ; and even 
 then it is frequently their excess alone that gives them a 
 place in our vocabulary ; as, for example, intemperance and 
 gluttony. 
 
 (2) The form which the natural conatus takes in the 
 imagination is that of a spontaneous maintenance of all 
 pleasant images and banishment of their opposites, with 
 the effect of increasing the corporeal and mental power. 
 To this cause may be referred many an enhancement and 
 perversion of love and hate ; the enjoyment of fancied 
 harm to an object of aversion ; the attempt to find excuses 
 which justify our dislike ; the dwelling upon our own merits, 
 and shutting our eyes to our own faults ; the dream of others' 
 praise, and the shrinking from their censure ; the magnifying 
 of the good qualities of our friends and of the evil of our 
 enemies. 
 
 (3) A fruitful source of new varieties Spinoza finds in 
 what he calls Imitatio affectuum, a principle which, under 
 the name of Sympathy, was worked out with infinite in- 
 genuity by Adam Smith in his ' Theory of the Moral Senti- 
 ments.' It simply assumes that, when we attend to any 
 visible affection in our like, we become similarly affected 
 ourselves. Of this ' fellow-feeling ' the most obvious forms 
 are direct compassion and benevolence, i.e. adoption in ourselves 
 of the suffering and happiness of others. But it may take even 
 the inverse order, of a desire that others should feel as we do 
 and ratify our love and hatred ; and then this demand on 
 others that they shall repeat ourselves becomes ambition. 
 In self-applause, in emulation, in repentance, we do but 
 adopt the pleasure, the desire, the censures, of others ; 
 and, even in envy, we enter into the success of another, 
 only with a pang from failure of our own. 
 
 (4) By what is called the ' Law of transference,' objects in
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 325 
 
 themselves indifferent to us become interesting by their connec- 
 tion with the causes of pleasure and pain ; a process rendered 
 familiar by the stock example of money ; the power of which 
 over the imagination goes far beyond its intrinsic value, and is 
 measured rather by all collectively than by each disjunctively 
 of the advantages it can command. The same principle finds 
 endless illustrations in human life : there is scarcely a liking 
 or disliking that is not in part due to it : it can endear the 
 most homely objects and the least lovely features ; and sadden 
 the most envied life with regret for something missed or lost in 
 which no observer would suspect any charm at all. Even 
 a faint connection, distant perhaps by two or three removes, 
 with what we love or hate, suffices to invest an object with the 
 interest of favour or aversion ; a slight resemblance to my 
 friend's friend bespeaks my predilection, and admiration of 
 his rival repels me. 
 
 (5) As it is the function of imagination to bring objects 
 before us as present, so are its functions enfeebled by what- 
 ever contradicts their presence, and puts them away into the 
 past or the future ; i.e. Time associations modify the feelings 
 towards things pleasant and unpleasant. Pleasure only pro- 
 mised, pain only threatened, become variable and wavering, and 
 are called Hope and Fear ; which, on the removal of uncer- 
 tainty, pass into confidence and despair; or, on the arrival 
 of the moment which suddenly takes the doubt away, into 
 joy and disappointment. Countless shades of human pas- 
 sion are due to this prolific influence ; without which the 
 drama of life would be tame, and the aspect of character 
 monotonous. 
 
 (6) The belief which men, blind to the necessity of nature, 
 entertain of their own freedom, and of a contingency in events . 
 is wholly answerable for some affections, and greatly deepens 
 and intensifies others. But for this, no one could be angry 
 with the wicked, more than with the blind or the insane ; 
 or inflict retribution for injury, or render gratitude for 
 unearned benefits; and the self-judgments of remorse and 
 approval would disappear with the ideas of merit and demerit 
 on which they rest. It cannot be doubted (Spinoza admits) 
 that our moral affections towards one another are on a far
 
 326 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 greater scale than they would be, if we did not suppose 
 ourselves and others free 1 . 
 
 Such are the passive affections imposed upon us by the 
 play of external causes and the inadequate ideas of the 
 imagination, contesting and confusing the conatus of our 
 rational essence. They constitute what Spinoza calls our 
 'servitude.' From the review of them 'it is plain,' he says, 
 1 that we are tossed about by external causes in many ways, 
 and that, like waves of the sea stirred by opposite winds, 
 we sway hither and thither, not knowing to what our fate 
 will bring us 2 .' 
 
 2. Autonomous Affections. 
 
 Since all pain (tristitia) is what we feel in declension 
 to less perfect being, it would never be experienced were 
 it not for the external causes which limit and control our own 
 proper essence ; and it falls away from view when we quit the 
 field of imagination with its inadequate ideas, and concentrate 
 attention upon the adequate ideas of the second and third 
 kinds of cognitio z . These are all of them pure expressions of 
 the mind's rational essence, its own self-activity, unchecked 
 by foreign interference : they are therefore cases of successful 
 conatus, in which we pass to more perfect being, i.e. ex- 
 perience pleasure (Icetitia), and consequently its attendant 
 desire. These two elements of feeling, therefore, survive 
 our emergence from the life of imagination into that of 
 understanding, and carry over an affectional colouring to 
 the pure intellectual functions 4 . As this transition is simply 
 an immunity from extrinsic pressures, and an opening of free 
 play to the mind's own essence, it is action, it is power, it 
 is virtue, being unqualified conformity to our proper law 5 ; it 
 is self-conservation, being the asserted claim of our nature's 
 highest good 6 ; it is freedom, since it clears the space around 
 that nature of all that can deflect it from its path 7 . To 
 
 1 Eth. III. xlix. and Schol. Ibid. III. lix. Schol. s Ibid. III. lix. 
 
 4 Ibid. III. Iviii. 5 Ibid. IV. Def. 8, xxiii. 
 
 * Ibid. IV. xxiv. 7 Tract. Pol. ii. 7. Vol I. pp. 286, 287.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 327 
 
 Spinoza, therefore, it was no paradox to say that to understand 
 is to act ; that knowledge is power ; that power is virtue ; 
 that virtue is self-interest 1 ; that inward necessity is perfect 
 freedom 2 . When he insists on the principle that no virtue 
 can be prior to the effort for self-conservation, which is 
 the very foundation of virtue 3 , we must remember that 
 the ' self ' of which he speaks is not the receptive imagina- 
 tion (which is precisely the mind's foreign exposure or 
 non-ego), not therefore the 'passions' and sensibilities, but 
 the understanding, which is the essence and regulating centre 
 of our being ; the ' self-conservation ' of which means, not 
 the indulgence, but the control, of the senses and imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 While it is only just to accept this as the real thought of 
 Spinoza, it is undoubtedly obscured by the wavering boundary 
 which he assigns to the Self with its conatus. The effect of 
 its uncertain position becomes apparent, when we ask for the 
 'motive power which is to equip the essential self for its resist- 
 ance to invasion from without. We are told in answer, that 
 the true armour is found in ' the knowledge of good ; ' only, it 
 must not be a mere intellectual assent to a true proposition 
 about ' good,' but a feeling for it that is more than a match 
 for the affection it may have to overcome: a proviso which 
 (I may remark en passant) itself admits that knowledge and 
 desire do not always vary their degrees together 4 . This word 
 'good' being new in Spinoza's scheme of thought, and hitherto 
 discarded as a vulgar subjectivity, we naturally beg to have 
 it defined ; and learn that by ' good ' and ' bad ' are meant all 
 helps and hindrances to self-conservation. How then are we 
 to ' know ' them, when we see them 1 The answer is, their 
 marks are, respectively, pleasure and pain (Icetitia and tris- 
 t'd'ni), the consciousness of which carries in it a recognition 
 of their cause, i.e. a knowledge of the good and bad 5 . Thus 
 it turns out, that pleasure and pain are the marks or arbiters 
 of good and bad ; and when we feel the pleasurable, we know 
 the good, and are furnished with the motive power required. 
 
 1 Eth. IV. xix, xx. 3 Tract. Pol. ii. 7. Vol. I. pp. 286, 287. 
 
 3 Eth. IV. xxii. and Cor. xxv. Ibid. IV. xiv. 
 
 5 Ibid. IV. viii.
 
 328 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 In order to test this rule, we must determine what ' pleasure ' 
 is. Say that it means the satisfaction of desire, and pre- 
 supposes this 1 ; and further, that desire is nothing but the 
 conatus of our essence to assert itself 2 ; then, to define its 
 limits, we must settle when we are within and when we are 
 without the limits of that essence. If they go no further 
 than the understanding, then the only conatus, the only de- 
 sire, the only pleasure, is that of clear and adequate ideas ; 
 and the 'knowledge of the good' is the knowledge how to 
 get them; and to aim at self-conservation is to become, as 
 far as possible, the organ of pure and proportionate truth. 
 This is to set up the autonomous activity of the mind as the 
 authority which is to bend to nothing. But suppose two 
 alterations made in the conceptions thus defined. (1) Widen 
 the scope of our essence, so as to embrace the imagination as 
 well as the understanding ; then, the conatus works indiffer- 
 ently for inadequate and adequate ideas : desires tend to both 
 alike ; and pleasure comes from the satisfaction of both de- 
 sires ; and the mark of good equally attaches to the objects 
 of the passive and of the autonomous affections. (2) Invert 
 the assumed relation between desire and pleasure: let plea- 
 sure be the primary datum, the experience of which gives 
 rise to subsequent desire ; then it is prior to the conatus in 
 which our activity is centred, and is something delivered 
 upon our mere receptivity ; and, when taken as the mark and 
 arbiter of good, commends to us, as of first-hand worth, pre- 
 cisely the passive sensibilities which alloy our essence with 
 so many inadequate ideas. Now Spinoza's intended ethics 
 are doubtless conformed to the first and stricter order of con- 
 ceptions ; but his theory is so loosely stated as to be unguarded 
 against the second interpretation. He not only extends the 
 conatus to the inadequate and confused ideas, so as to endow 
 the understanding with no special advantage from it, but he 
 also allows the existence of other pleasure (laititia) than that 
 from the satisfaction of desire ; speaking of ' every kind of 
 pleasure, and especially that ivhich satisfies any sort of de- 
 sire V 
 
 1 Eth. III. ix. Schol. * Ibid. III. Iviii. 
 
 3 Ibid. III. xxxix. Schol.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 329 
 
 Accepting the former interpretation as giving the serious 
 meaning of Spinoza, we find him identifying the human per- 
 sonality with the intellect, and therefore bringing all the 
 proper functions of our nature, as active, to one, viz. to 
 understand or knoiv 1 . This constitutes the whole contents 
 of the perfect life ; love of it, with self-conformity to it, is 
 the sole autonomous affection and the sole virtue ; and by 
 their tendency to help or hinder this, must all things else 
 be pronounced good or bad. Of knowledge, however, not- 
 withstanding its unity, there are two fields : we need to 
 understand ourselves: we need to understand other things; 
 and it is not always the same influence that subserves -them 
 both. If we summon the passive affections to come up for 
 trial by this standard, they will receive unequal sentences, 
 though none can escape with entire acquittal. To content 
 ourselves with one or two illustrative examples, it is obvious 
 that the opposites, Pride and Self-disparagement, are alike 
 incompatible with Self-knowledge, being deviations from it 
 in the direction of excessive and defective appreciation ; the 
 former doubtless the more dangerous foe, reinforced as the 
 inner tendency to it is by flatterers who echo it. Even Hu- 
 mility, consisting of a mere negative consciousness of what 
 we have not, impairs the self-knowledge of what we have; 
 and Repentance and Shame involve similar illusions, from 
 concentration of insight upon our weakness, and from blind- 
 ness to our true essence, i.e. our strength. The opposite feel- 
 ings, of Self-contentment and love of reputation, may be more 
 or less well founded ; but are very liable to lapse into vain 
 passions. 
 
 Turning to the knowledge of things around us, we find it 
 on all sides confused by the affections which they cause in 
 us. Hope and Fear, as modifications of pleasure and pain, 
 exist in virtue of our ignorance of the order of nature, and 
 in their turn disturb the clear vision by which we might 
 know it better. And there is scarcely an affection awakened 
 in us by our fellow men, that does not prevent us from seeing 
 things as they are. To say nothing of Jealousy, of Revenge, 
 of Antipathy, with their notorious illusions, the mere habit, 
 
 1 Eth. IV. xxvi, xxvii.
 
 330 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 common enough where there is no malice, of over-estimation 
 or of disparagement of others, gives a false preponderance in 
 our view to their agreeable or their disagreeable qualities. 
 And compassion is continually putting an unreal colouring 
 or an unreal intensity into the signs of suffering, diverting us 
 from the study of causes, and impelling us to acts which we 
 have reason to regret. There are doubtless occasions when 
 good work may apparently be got out of a blind affection, as 
 when a man founds a church to atone for his sins, or serves 
 his country from ambition, or gives a public park from osten- 
 tation. But the accidental strokes of right action thus put 
 forth by the dependent feelings would arise as necessary con- 
 sequences of Reason. The self-denials of avarice, the gene- 
 rosities of ambition, cease when their immediate end is gained, 
 and the repressed passions throw off their disguise ; but the 
 ground of rational virtue is constant, being nothing less than 
 the very foundation of things. 
 
 A. FORTITUDO. How then are we to designate the single 
 autonomous affection in which all virtue is comprehended ? It 
 is Fortitudo ; i.e. firmness and steadfastness of character, to 
 act from the inward essence of the mind alone, and stand free 
 from the sway of the passive affections. It is the life of a 
 nature that has knowledge of itself and things, and is con- 
 formed to that knowledge. Penetrating and occupying as it 
 does the whole field of character, it assumes two aspects, ac- 
 cording as it expresses itself in action purely personal, or in 
 action relative to others. In the former case, it takes the 
 shape of Animositas, i.e. courage or high spirit to put the 
 heel on importunate desires and withstand assailing passions. 
 In the latter case, it is best described as Generositas, i.e. a 
 temper which excludes all mean illusions and aversions that 
 interfere with the harmony of men. In nothing does the 
 man of high spirit more clearly evince his characteristic than 
 in his bearing towards the ordinary objects of human fear. 
 Guided always by the real values of things, he estimates the 
 future as it will be when it is present, and the present as it 
 will be when it is past, and prefers the greater good to the 
 less, wherever it may lie in time ; and, in the face of un- 
 certain things, is ready, with equal composure, to go forth and
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 331 
 
 meet a danger, or to retire before it, as the true balance 
 of advantage may indicate ; being neither rash from false 
 shame, nor unmanned by terror. As all his desires are but 
 the inward energy of his rational essence, they are always 
 directed upon positive good, and can never be the passive 
 recoil from some tristitia : they are the happy expression of 
 himself alone: the objects they pursue are dear to him on 
 their own account, and not as means of seeking or shunning 
 some external thing. Hence, he is undisturbed by anxiety 
 for his safety : ' he thinks of anything rather than death, and 
 his wisdom is a reflection on life, not on death 1 .' Equally 
 free is he, in his dealings with others, from all the unsocial 
 passions which proceed from inadequate ideas, and betray the 
 mind's subjection to external things ; and just in this im- 
 munity consists his ' Generosity' No doubt this temper may 
 be hopelessly out of character with the fixed ideas of the 
 people around him ; but so far as he is compelled to live 
 among fools, he will entangle himself with few relations to 
 them ; and especially will decline, as far as possible, the re- 
 ceipt of benefits from them, since he cannot honestly measure 
 them by their rule, as will naturally be expected from him : 
 yet, to avoid leaving a fake impression of churlishness, he 
 may find it truer at times not to repel their advances. But 
 such concessions to good-will must not be confounded with 
 selfish and cowardly prudence: they are a sacrifice, not to 
 falsehood, but to truth ; and ' the free man never acts with 
 evil artifice, but always in good faith ; ' a rule which Spinoza 
 treats as absolute, and will not allow to be violable, even to 
 save one's life 2 . This high tension of moral rigour in regard 
 to veracity it is unusual to find in a system of Necessarian 
 ethics. Less surprising is the lofty claim preferred for patient 
 love, as the true return for hatred and the medicine for all the 
 evil passions that assail our life ; for whoever looks on these, 
 not as guilt incurred, but only as sores and diseases of which 
 men are victims, is quite consistent in commending them 
 simply to hospital treatment, and pleading for the tender 
 mercy which will best provide it. Spinoza, therefore, is 
 strictly within his own logical limits when he claims for hia 
 1 Eth. IV. Ixvii. " Ibid. IV. bcrii. SchoL
 
 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 J generous' man, himself entirely free from all inharmonious 
 passions, the disposition to exorcise them in every mind less 
 sane by the power of rational affection ; and crowns his 
 claim with the memorable words, ' He who would return 
 hatred for injury lives a miserable life indeed. But one who 
 sets himself to lay siege to hatred with love you cannot 
 deny to be a safe and happy warrior. With equal ease he 
 faces a single foe or a host, and asks no aid from fortune. 
 Yes ; and those whom he conquers yield to him with joy, 
 not with beaten but with augmented strength 1 .' It is no 
 wonder that this noble passage should be appealed to in 
 evidence that the ethics of Spinoza rose to the level of the 
 Christian ; there is not here the faintest discord between 
 the two. Only, there is this difference to be remembered: 
 that Spinoza makes room for this enterprise of love by 
 removing the ideas of sin and duty out of the way ; Chris- 
 tianity proclaims it, not only without any such sacrifice, 
 but while kindling these very ideas to the highest inten- 
 sity. In this, the paradox of Philosophy, is the triumph of 
 Religion. 
 
 The rational life, which sums itself up in Fortitudo, is more 
 free as well as more complete in a commonwealth than in 
 solitude, where the individual is his own master ; for, till he 
 is in relation with others, he does not reach the common or 
 concurrent elements of life, which are the base of all reason- 
 able conatus for self-conservation, and is in danger of desires 
 which conflict with the conditions of social harmony. So the 
 peculiar security of the autonomous life, i.e. the guarantee for 
 constancy in its immunity from passion, lies in the knowledge 
 of God ; i.e. in the assurance which is felt that all comes out 
 of the necessity of nature, against which human passions fret 
 in vain. To have only adequate and clear ideas is to be 
 in absolute consonance with the real order and essence of 
 things, and so removed from the possibility of surprise 
 and fluctuation. 
 
 B. AMOR INTELLEGTUALIS DEI. Were we limited to imagi- 
 nation and reason, we should be capable of both the varieties 
 of Fortitudo. Our advance to the third, the Intuitive, 
 
 1 Eth. IV. xlvi. and Schol.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 333 
 
 grade of knowledge opens to us a higher and all-inclusive 
 excellence, the, Intellectual Love of God. In his account of this 
 affection Spinoza seems to reach his deepest shade of ob- 
 scurity; which, however, is not altogether impenetrable, if 
 the reader has courage to take the word ' God ' rigorously in 
 the Spinozistic sense, of the common properties of things, 
 the underlying base of all the differentiations in nature ; and 
 to divest it of all the contents which give it religious signi- 
 ficance. The whole stress of this virtue, as special to the in- 
 tuitive stage, is thrown upon the epithet intellectualis ; for 
 we are already familiar, in the prior stage, with the ' idea,' 
 the ' knowledge,' the ' love ' of God, unaccompanied with this 
 predicate. Thus, we have been told that ' every idea of any 
 body or particular thing involves God's eternal and infinite 
 essence,' the 'knowledge of which,' thus gained, is adequate 
 and complete l : and again it is said, that ' the mind can get 
 to refer to the idea of God all bodily affections and images 
 of things 2 ; and further, that ' he who clearly and distinctly 
 understands himself and his affections loves God, and the more 
 so, the more he understands them 3 .' To see what these high- 
 sounding propositions really amount to, we must remember 
 that, in the dialect of our philosopher, to understand a phe- 
 nomenon or affection is to read it in its cause, and that its 
 cause is the essence of which it is a property, and that the 
 essence is a modification of either extension or thinking, and 
 that these are attributes of Being per se, or Substance, i.e. 
 God. The affections, then, of a body, say, of a planet, are 
 understood, when its orbit is resolved into its centrifugal and 
 centripetal determinants, and the several minor elements of 
 its motion have been laid out in their proportions, so that its 
 conditions in space, as a mode of the extended universe, are 
 distinctly conceived. Thus to see it in its real relations to 
 the universal attribute of extension is ' to refer it to the idea 
 of God.' ' God ' here means extension, or matter in its essence 
 or ultimate laws. The phenomenon, when analysed, goes back 
 to these and shows them ; and then we know God. And, even 
 short of scientific apprehension, we have at all events to think 
 of a real for every phenomenon, of substance for every pro- 
 
 1 Eth. II. xlv, xlvi. Ibid. V, xiv. Ibid. V. xv.
 
 334 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 perty, of cause for every effect ; and in so far as any bodily 
 affection throws us on these ideas as a background, it { refers 
 us to the idea of God.' But still we have not got to Spinoza's 
 goal ; for this logical relation of the finite appearance to the 
 infinite base does not amount to the love of God ; and his 
 claim is content with nothing less. Here we must take no- 
 tice, that it is only for seZ/-knowledge, not for all knowledge 
 of particular things, that he asserts the amor Dei as a con- 
 sequence. The reason lies in his doctrine of imagination and 
 the passive affections, as distinguished from the activity of 
 the proper human essence. When an external thing impinges 
 on our senses, the affection is a confused medley of its nature 
 and of our nature, usually with much more of the latter than 
 of the former, though the imagination always gives the larger 
 credit to the former. To understand ourselves and our affec- 
 tions means, to cure this confusion and correct this error, and 
 become master by insight over the experience of which we 
 had been the passive recipient ; we then read exactly what 
 our rational essence has to do with it, and separate what is 
 thrown in by foreign causes. In this exercise of discovery, 
 the mind is aware of its own intelligent power, and feels glad 
 in the successful action of its nature. And this gladness is 
 referred to its cause, viz. the reality or truth which is dis- 
 covered, i.e. God, who is all reality and truth. Now pleasure 
 referred to its cause is love ; therefore, this self-knowledge is 
 love of God. This affection thus turns out to mean no more 
 than the happy consciousness of our own clear idea as a re- 
 lated part of the whole truth of nature. 
 
 What then is added to this affection to qualify it for the 
 special epithet intellectualis ? Spinoza has rendered no dis- 
 tinct account of the marks by which the predicate is earned ; 
 and it is no wonder if, in attempting to supply the deficiency, 
 his interpreters are not quite consistent with one another or 
 even with themselves. Certain it is that the characteristics 
 must be looked for in the third kind of knmvledge. This 
 at once puts out of court one of the marks insisted on by 
 even so careful an expositor as Camerer, viz. that, to awaken 
 this intellectual love, the mind must be engaged upon neces- 
 sary knowledge, and apprehend its object sub specie eterni-
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 335 
 
 tatis 1 . For, this condition, as we have seen, is fulfilled by 
 both the second and third grade of knowledge, and is already 
 claimed as one of the indispensable features of Ratio and its 
 communes notiones 2 ; and when again, in preparing for the 
 topic of intellectual Divine Love, it is introduced as a joint 
 feature of self-knowledge and the knowledge of God 3 , it 
 is only to secure it as a requisite, not to assert it as a 
 differentia. 
 
 Knowledge of the third kind differs from ratio by appre- 
 hending res singulares, not indeed in their temporal presence, 
 but in their essence as related to the essential attributes of 
 nature, i.e. to the eternal essence of God. On this feature 
 it is that the intellectual love depends ; and the supreme 
 example of this dependence is seen when the res singularis 
 is the mind's own self. In the knowledge of other things, 
 we see how their essences resolve themselves back into the 
 laws of extension, i.e. how they lapse into the nature of God ; 
 and thus we look at them all as in God. But in knowing 
 ourselves, in the consciousness of clear ideas in necessary 
 links, we are aware that the inner necessity of our thought 
 is identical with the real necessity of all thought, and that 
 what ideally exists in us is but a mode of what eternally 
 exists as true, i.e. we know God in knowing ourselves, and 
 see ourselves to be in God : our mind is the seat of eternity 
 (necessary knowledge) ; God is the seat of eternity ; in the 
 system of eternal truths both are identified, so far as mode 
 can be identified with substance. What we think is part 
 of the real attribute of thinking. Here we have an inward 
 relation to God, through which he is cause of the mind's 
 
 1 Camerer, Die Lehre Spinoza's, p. 259: Denn 'sofern unser Geist sich selbst 
 und seinen Korper unter der Form der Ewigkeit erkennt, und das ist ja die 
 Erkenntniss der dritten Sttife, hat er nothwendig die Erkenntniss Gottes, und 
 weiss dass er in Gott ist und durch Gott begriffen wird. Die Dinge unter der 
 Form der Ewigkeit begreifen heisst sie begreifen als vennoge des Wesens Gottes 
 real seiend oder vermoge dieses Wesens die existenz in sich schliessend.' The 
 parenthetical clause here introduced doubtless affirms no more than is true, viz. 
 that knowledge of the third grade is a knowledge sub specie eternitatis ; but, as 
 knowledge of the second grade is so too, the proposition which Camerer is citing 
 and thus explains cannot be limited to Intuition, or treated as accounting for 
 what is special in the Amor Intellectualis Dei. 
 
 8 Eth. II. xliv. Cor. a. * Ibid. V. xxix, xxx.
 
 336 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 knowing, not as an external agent, but as its constituting 
 essence, as its very principle and foundation ; through which, 
 further, we see in Him, not all things in general, regarded as 
 objects, but our own particular mind, as the subject of in- 
 telligent power; and we think of Him, not as an imagined 
 presence, but as the eternal and infinite element in which 
 our true ideas subsist. Hence, the delight which we have 
 in necessary knowledge, referred as it is to the universal 
 real necessity as its cause, is at once intellectual self-con- 
 tent, and intellectual love of God: self-content, when the 
 luminous ideas are contemplated as ours, won by the conatus 
 of our thinking: love of God, when they are contemplated 
 as His, belonging to all mind, and inherent in the essence 
 of thinking itself. 
 
 From these characters assigned to the intellectual love of 
 God it results, that this affection is nothing more than 
 devotion to truth, or enthusiasm for philosophy. The lan- 
 guage in which it is described may in part have commended 
 itself to Spinoza by its mystical aspect, giving it a religious 
 look to others and possibly to himself; but it is consistent 
 with his general doctrine of cognition, as the delivery into 
 the mind of the essences of things existing out of the mind, 
 or the transmutation of the nature in extension into the 
 nature in idea. God is the totality of essences in reality 
 and in thought ; our knowledge, in its highest stage, i.e. 
 our mind, is made up of essences in idea,: it is, therefore, 
 partially one with God, and, in virtue of its self-conscious- 
 ness, is aware of this, and rejoices in it. The many fine 
 qualities which Spinoza claims for this love are all of them 
 compatible with this interpretation of it as zeal for know- 
 ledge. Wherever it is paramount, no envy or jealousy can 
 have place ; for it is enhanced by the numbers who share 
 it, and speaks in the aspiration ' Would to God that all the 
 Lord's people were prophets ! ' Nor can it, like other love, 
 turn to hate ; for this happens only from passively suffering 
 something at the hand of the object loved ; and here, as it 
 comes of the mind's pure self-activity, receptivity, and there- 
 fore Tristitia, are excluded, and the very material for hate 
 is absent. These predicates are truly and intelligibly attached
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 337 
 
 to the aspiration after intellectual insight into the nature of 
 things. But we are brought to a pause of doubt, -when told 
 that this love is 'eternal;' for that 'it is a necessary con- 
 sequence of the mind's nature, so far as this nature is 
 considered as eternal truth involved in the nature of God.' 
 And this is the only love that is eternal : the passive affec- 
 tions have the mere duration of the body 1 . And so the 
 fear of death disappears under its influence. The more the 
 mind can get to understand in the second and third ways 
 of knowledge, the greater is the part of it which is eternal 
 and remains untouched by the fear of death 2 . This language 
 seems plainly to teach the exemption of the human mind, 
 at least of its highest power, from death ; for, though Spinoza 
 warns us against taking his word ' eternal ' as saying any- , 
 thing about duration more or less, and begs us to understand 
 it as putting total negation upon time and affirming only 
 existence per se, yet when he himself employs it in antithesis 
 to death, and when he divides the human mind into two parts, 
 one perishable, the other ' eternal,' and speaks of the latter as 
 capable of being greater or less relatively to the other, what 
 can we make of such eternity except imperishableness or con- 
 tinued duration in spite of the lapse of the connected body 
 and imagination? Does he not here set the example of dis- 
 regarding his own warning 1 ? Does the mere avoidance of 
 the word 'immortality' save him from committing himself 
 to any time predication ? Not so ; for what he affirms is 
 deatJdessness, which is the same thing. Or, can it be pleaded 
 that this denial of a terminus is only in virtue of his denial 
 of what can be terminated, i.e. duration 1 ? If so, the denial 
 carries its exclusion also to the other extremity, for the 
 ' eternal,' as timeless, can no more begin than end ; yet he 
 has repeatedly taught us that ' the first thing that constitutes 
 the essence of the human mind is the idea of the body,' an 
 idea which, as parallel concomitant of the body, he certainly 
 does not exempt from its commencement. It is no wonder, 
 therefore, that, in this proposition, Spinoza should have been 
 supposed to teach that the ' intellectual love of God ' conferred 
 adai-curia on the individual soul imbued with it. The reason 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxxiii, xxxiv. and Cor. * Ibid. V. xxxviii. 
 
 VOL. I. Z
 
 338 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 for otherwise understanding him I will reserve for another 
 section, in which we may examine his doctrine as to the 
 destination of the. human mind. 
 
 Meanwhile, we have to learn yet another and crowning 
 glory of this intellectual love: hitherto we have contem- 
 plated it as the highest virtue of man ; but it is more, we 
 are now assured: it is no less to be affirmed, and that in 
 infinite measure, of God ; ' God loves Himself ivith infinite 
 intellectual love 1 .' To prove this, it is alleged that God, 
 being absolutely infinite, has infinite perfection, i.e. all reality, 
 to take pleasure in (gaudet infinita perfectione) : to all reality 
 there is a concomitant idea : He has, therefore, an idea of His 
 perfection ; and of Himself as its cause, since he is causa sui : 
 but to have Icetitia together with the idea of its cause is Love ; 
 therefore, He loves Himself with infinite intellectual love. On 
 first hearing this language, everyone, I suppose, would under- 
 stand it to be spoken of a personal Deity self-identified with 
 the happiness of His creation. Those who are aware how 
 little such a conception can be attributed to Spinoza would 
 still, I think, assume without a doubt that, in predicating 
 these things of God, he intends to affirm them of the Natura 
 naturans, the substantive source of all. Yet, if we so in- 
 terpret him, we bring him into direct contradiction with 
 himself ; for he has told us, a few propositions further back, 
 that God has no feelings, and cannot be affected by that 
 last it ia which here figures as the very nerve of his argument. 
 Nay, he carries out this negation to its conclusion, and warns 
 us that God can have no love or aversion 2 . We meet with 
 precisely the same apparent self-contradiction in regard to 
 the predicate ' intellect : ' he denies intellect to God ; and yet 
 he speaks of our understanding as part of the infinite in- 
 tellect of God. The explanation is the same in both instances. 
 The denial refers to the Natura naturans : the affirmation to 
 the Natura naturata. In God, i.e. in the nature of things, 
 self-conscious understanding and self-conscious love first 
 come up into actuality in man (or other finite rational 
 beings) ; and there it is, in the history and experience of 
 the totality of originated minds, that we must seek for the 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxxv. * Ibid. V. xvii. and Cor.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 339 
 
 truth of the mysterious proposition I have quoted ; for the 
 la-titia, for the delight in perfection, and the sense of 
 causality, and the consequent intellectual love: they are 
 spoken of God, but they are meant for man. In trying to 
 do the utmost justice to Spinoza, I have sometimes fancied 
 him replying thus : ' In denying feeling to God, yet affirm- 
 ing hit it la of Him, I am chargeable with no inconsistency ; 
 for I have defined Icetitia to be the passing of a nature 
 into greater perfection 1 ; and why may not a being pass 
 into greater perfection ivithout feeling it? just as the earth 
 is held to have become the scene of organic from inorganic 
 existence, and the solar system to have evolved its varieties 
 from previous homogeneous conditions'? In the sense of my 
 definition, these things have had and have their Icetitia ; with- 
 out on that account being treated as sensitive animals.' This 
 plea would undoubtedly reconcile the claim of Icetitia with 
 the disclaimer of feeling, for ' the nature of God ; ' but there 
 remains the contradiction that transition to greater perfection 
 is essential to Icetitia and impossible to God. Nor do I think 
 that Spinoza would resort to this plea, or had any intention 
 of providing for an unfelt Icvtitia ; for his definition limits 
 itself to the case of man, 'Lsetitia est hominis transitio' 
 &c. ; and though no connotation of feeling is involved 
 in the word transitio, it is involved in the qualifying word 
 hominis. 
 
 The ' infinite perfection ' then in which, he says, the Divine 
 nature gaudet, cannot possibly be the absolute perfection of 
 God: it is not the perfection of an infinite esse, but of an 
 infinite fieri ; for there is nothing on which he lays greater 
 stress than on the dependence of gaudium on change of state ; 
 ' Dico transitionem : nam laetitia non est ipsa perfectio V 
 We must seek it in the Natura naturata ; it is the joy of 
 a universe become self-conscious, and especially of man; of 
 a nature not strange to its own conatus and realising it, and 
 so always passing to greater perfection ; of a mind becoming 
 ever more the seat and medium of necessary truth, and 
 possessing itself of an ideal cosmos coincident with the 
 real. You will say, ' Why then, if this joy is felt by man, 
 
 1 Eth. III. Affectuum, Def. i. * Ibid. III. Affectnum Explicatig. 
 
 Z 2
 
 340 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 does Spinoza make God the subject of it 1 ?' In order to 
 generalise it and compel you to apply his doctrine of im- 
 manence in the intensest and amplest way: you are to 
 think, not psychologically, of an individual mind, but uni- 
 versally, of all minds, actual or possible, which as modes 
 may represent the eternal res cogitans. Spinoza knows no 
 God other than the .total extension and thought of the 
 universe of extended and thinking beings ; and when their 
 predicates are taken up and handed over to him, it is to 
 warn us that we are to read them in their infinitude of 
 essence, and not merely in their temporal existence. When 
 this warning is duly applied, the purport of our proposition 
 will turn out to be simply this : that ' what has been said 
 about the intellectual love as a property of man might just 
 as well be said of it as a property of God; inasmuch as 
 what we mean by ( God,' as a possible subject of love, is 
 nothing else than that mode of attribute which we call the 
 human mind.' This will come out more distinctly, after 
 we have examined the next proposition ; which is probably 
 answerable for more metaphysical delirium than any equal 
 number of written lines that ever proceeded from a philo- 
 sopher's pen, though I am far from saying that in due time 
 Hegel may not wrest the palm from Spinoza. The pro- 
 position runs thus : ' The mind's intellectual love towards 
 God is the very love of God with which He loves Himself ; 
 loves, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He is 
 expressed by the essence of the human mind considered 
 under the form of eternity (sub specie eternitatis) : i.e. the 
 mind's intellectual love towards God is part of the infinite 
 love with which God loves Himself 1 .' The proof of this 
 thesis is as follows : ' Eor, this love in the mind must be 
 referred to the mind's activity, whereby it contemplates 
 itself, with an attendant idea of God as cause ; i.e. an 
 activity in which God, so far as the human mind can 
 express Him, contemplates Himself, with the attendant idea 
 of Himself; and so, this love in the mind is part of God's 
 infinite love to Himself.' ' Hence,' it is added in a corollary, 
 'God, so far as He loves Himself, loves men; and con- 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxxvi.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 341 
 
 sequently, the love of God towards men, and the intellectual 
 love of the mind towards God, are one and the same.' For 
 God's love to Himself, when identified with the love of 
 man to God, is inseparable from a Icvtitia in man himself, 
 therefore from love of man towards himself. 
 
 After what has been said of the preceding proposition, 
 I hope that the key to this paradoxical statement will be 
 easily found and applied. Notwithstanding the appearance, 
 under the names of ' The Mind ' and ' God,' of two subjects 
 and objects of Love, there is in truth only one, under two 
 labels ; and the whole transaction described is purely human. 
 It is expressly said that, when the mind intellectually loves, 
 it is God that is the lover: the human mind then is God. 
 To relieve the shock of this identification, Spinoza qualifies 
 it by making it partial, instead of total : the human mind 
 is God, as far as it goes; and God is the human mind, 
 not of course in His infinitude, but so far as His nature 
 takes the form of this particular essence. In this specialised 
 form, love, like understanding, emerges in His nature, which, 
 as infinite, can have no such predicate: if you ask for the 
 consciousness of it, there is but one, and that is the human: 
 you may also call it Divine, if you like ; but this only provides 
 a second name for the same fact. One other question may 
 be raised: what is the effect of the subordinate qualifying 
 clause, ' the essence of the human mind under the form of 
 eternity?' Simply to limit our attention to the necessary 
 nature of the mind as a mode of the thinking attribute, in 
 contradistinction from its temporal existence in this or that 
 instance through the laws of phenomenal succession. The 
 doctrine, therefore, here laid down as to the seat of love is 
 that mans love is what we must mean when we speak of God's 
 love, and that the latter is simply the infinite sum-total of 
 the love experienced by all finite minds. And, as to the 
 object of love, there is no difference on the two sides of 
 the main equation : our ' intellectual love ' is directed upon 
 ' God;' and so is God's self-love: the term in both instances 
 denotes the necessary truth of things as apprehended by the 
 necessary laws of thinking. 
 
 In the corollary, however, the same trick is practised on
 
 342 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 the object which has been already applied to the subject ; 
 and the Self that God loves turns out to be Mankind. 
 After the previous identification, there can be no difficulty 
 about this : the essence of humanity is one with the uni- 
 versal or Divine nature no less in you than in me ; and the 
 substitution of the modal for the supreme name is no less 
 legitimate in the predicate, than that of the supreme for 
 the modal in the subject. So it comes out, that for God 
 to love Himself is for Him to love men. But His love 
 to Himself, we have seen, is equivalent to man's love to 
 Him ; therefore, His love towards man is equivalent to 
 man's love towards Him. These wonderful transformations 
 are all wrought by the mere verbal device of duplicate 
 denomination of the same thing ; one and the same feature, 
 of love, is slipped, now under one name, now under another : 
 the double names being of persons with the personality 
 emptied out ; and the result is a tissue of apparent contra- 
 dictions which, on examination, prove to be a monotonous 
 tautology. It was long before I could find courage to look 
 behind the venerable mask of these empty propositions ; 
 and it was not without pain that I found, in the guise 
 of mystical devotion, what I can hardly rank higher than 
 logical thimble-rigging. 
 
 The ' intellectual love of God ' is, in Spinoza's view, the cul- 
 minating point of human excellence, into which Fortitudo be- 
 comes sublimed, and where it reaches its repose. As it is 
 simply devotion to truth, its supreme position marks the 
 transcendency, in his mind, of knoivledge over Ethics, the de- 
 pendence of character upon thought ; the final transfiguration 
 of virtue into serene and luminous intellect. This is highly 
 characteristic of Spinoza's philosophy ; in which the affections 
 and impulses are born from cognitive ideas, and in cognitive 
 ideas expire ; the strife of the moral nature emerging, not into 
 the ' saint's rest,' but into the philosopher's. Having looked at 
 the origin and the end of this ethical history, and surveyed 
 the separate affections that appear upon its stage, let us now 
 see how its causalities work together ; especially whether they 
 are so related as to supply the conditions of Duty.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 343 
 
 12. Conflict of Passive and Autonomous Affections. 
 
 The complete freedom which is attained in the intellectual 
 love of God consists in escape from the inadequate ideas of 
 the imagination and the final dominance of the adequate ideas 
 of the understanding. Prior to this emancipation, we are the 
 subjects of both: not indeed simultaneously in any half-and- 
 half way (for there can be no compromise between the true 
 and the untrue), but in an alternative way, different in 
 different minds, and successively in the same ; so as to exhi- 
 bit defects of freedom in various degrees and with many fluc- 
 tuations. As freedom consists in the sole ascendency of the 
 mind's own rational essence, and its defect in subjection to 
 external causes, which mark their presence by passive affec- 
 tions, this mixed and imperfect state is in its nature a conflict 
 of energies, of our own against what is not our own, of the 
 mind against things. On the issue of this conflict our entire 
 well-being is staked ; victory pronounced on one side flinging 
 us into a restless sea of sinful troubles ; on the other, planting 
 us on the eternal rock of virtue and peace. How then is the 
 suspense of this strife determined, and why determined differ- 
 ently in different cases ? Are we combatants only, with a 
 fixed measure of strength, so as to be at the mercy of a re- 
 lative allotment of forces which we cannot alter ? or arbiters 
 also, empowered to pour in whatever reserves may be needful 
 for the triumph of the ' melior pars ? ' If the former, the 
 problem is merely one of natural dynamics, to be settled by 
 the calculus of physical equilibrium : if the latter, it is qua- 
 lified to take its place in the moral field, and to contain 
 within it the conditions of personal obligation. 
 
 Now when we enquire of Spinoza how the slavery to 
 passive affections is to be ended, and the rightful ascendency 
 of the free mind established, he tells us by what process of 
 thought the power of these affections is abated ; and supplies 
 us with some excellent rules, by following which we shall 
 preserve our rational balance amid the influences that would 
 sway us hither and thither. To render passion harmless, we 
 must get to know it. We must not allow its external cause 
 to linger in our imagination and bewitch it, but must scruti-
 
 344 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 nise it, define its exact relations to our nature, so as to break 
 tip its image into clear and distinct ideas. It is disenchanted, 
 as soon as it is brought into the light of adequate knowledge : 
 an affection ceases to be passive, when worked upon and 
 superseded by activity of intellect ; what was before confused 
 loses its confusion, when reduced by rational analysis. The 
 exciting object, thus treated, becomes dissociated from us, and 
 takes its place, not in our history, but in the outward order 
 of natural necessity ; and, when thus stripped of its aspect of 
 causal promise or individual free power, sinks in importance 
 and fascination ; while the emotion it excited, referred to our- 
 selves as a sensitive weakness incurred through limitation of 
 our proper essence, grows pale and faints away through its 
 own detection. Thus, self-knowledge becomes tantamount to 
 self-mastery. This effect in morals is analogous to the changed 
 view of individual objects which, in science, follows a dis- 
 covery of the energies and laws that subscribe to produce 
 them. To the eye of sense and imagination, the world is an 
 assemblage of concrete things, each of which appeals to us as 
 a detached individual. To the eye of science, the world is made 
 up of a group of energies or separate types of movement, 
 which, in their combinations, set up the properties, of wider 
 or narrower sweep, that concentrate themselves in parts 
 of space under the aspect of objects. The ideas of these are 
 the communes notiones with which all intellectual procedure 
 works ; and they play the same part in the ethical relation of 
 outward things to our feeling, as in their intellectual relation 
 to our thought ; recombining the dispersive interest of count- 
 less insulated objects into the sublime simplicity of a few com- 
 prehensive laws. This self-knowledge, and subjection of the 
 affections to adequate knowledge, must be sought at times 
 when we are not agitated by them, but can see them as they 
 are : the rational estimate of them, which may then be gained, 
 will get associated with their idea and rise with them into 
 thought when they recur, so as to moderate or even disarm 
 them. 
 
 Subsidiary to this prescription, of intellectual dissolution of 
 the passions, is the advice to form, in hours of impartial reflec- 
 tion, a distinct preconception of the right life, with detail
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 345 
 
 sufficient to protect us on all sides from wavering or surprise ; 
 and to distribute and define this preconception in fixed rules 
 and maxims, impressed upon the memory, both as general pro- 
 positions and in examples of individual character ; e.g. that 
 hatred is to be conquered by love : that mutual friendship and 
 society are the true source of self-content : that men, like all 
 other objects, are disposed of by necessity of nature (he does 
 not add, 'and that we, being men, are so too'). With a store 
 of such approved principles at hand, that which best fits the 
 passing crisis will be sure to come to our aid, and serve as 
 our ally in the conflict with passion. In virtue of the 
 parallelism of mental and bodily states, these associations 
 will not limit themselves to the order of ideas, but will 
 extend to the corporeal conditions, and control the phy- 
 siology not less than the psychology of feeling. In Spinoza's 
 exposition of the rationale of these counsels of moral wisdom, 
 we have a remarkable anticipation of the Hartleyan doctrine 
 in its application to the formation of habit, whether in thought 
 or in action. 
 
 Such rules as these are no doubt useful safeguards 
 against the illusions of captivated feeling; yet they do 
 but put off the question ' Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ? ' 
 Rules do not fulfil themselves, anymore than a statute- 
 book can quell a riot : they need an executive to adapt 
 and apply them, and be the depositary of the power 
 which they presuppose and profess to guide. If we go 
 behind these rules and ask ' to whom are they addressed ? ' 
 'on what activity, on what judgment do they rely to 
 set them in motion and give them timely application ? ' 
 we are referred to nothing but the mind's own essence, 
 and tJiat after casting out the imagination as a mere 
 passive relation to the external realm : the conatus of the 
 understanding towards the realisation of knowledge, with 
 the satisfaction attending its success, is the spring of 
 agency on which all depends, the pi^imus motor of the 
 resistance needed ; yet not the primus, for this essence itself 
 is but a necessary mode of another eternal essence, and 
 is what it is in virtue of an attribute of the Absolute. 
 There is therefore no power to execute the rules except
 
 346 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 the understanding that makes them ; and whatever that 
 may be, it is predetermined in the nature of things with 
 no less certainty than the Pythagorean property in the 
 right-angled triangle: it can as little be made greater or 
 less, as the square of the hypothenuse can be made to 
 exceed the squares of the sides. Moreover, what is this 
 Mind, whose ' essence ' is to put forth the energy ? We 
 have been expressly warned against regarding it as more 
 than a mere ens rationis, a fiction of logical abstraction, 
 with no other reality than that of the successive ideas, 
 first of the bodily affections and then of their ideas, 
 which spin the phenomenal thread of our life ; and we 
 are forbidden to invest it with any ' faculty,' whether of 
 reason or of will, beyond the happening to us of grouped 
 and serial ideas according to certain laws. How this denial 
 of ' faculty,' i.e. power of doing, can be reconciled with the 
 self-asserting conatus for which so much is claimed that it 
 is in fact made to do duty as an Ego, remains unexplained. 
 Waiving this, however, we still occupy the position, that 
 the conatus of the understanding is the sole agency in moral 
 conflict, and is a determinate quantity, which is not consti- 
 tuted by the person, but constitutes him. 
 
 So much for the active side in this story of temptation. 
 The passive feeling which threatens to enervate it and leave 
 the field to Sense and Imagination, comes from external 
 objects, from the play upon ourselves of natures other than 
 ours. It is, therefore, the expression of their power: the 
 conatus of their essence, which contests the pretensions of 
 our own, and tries to hem it in and mar its development. 
 Since both the rival types are set up as modes out of the 
 same infinite attributes by inevitable deduction, it seems 
 strange that they should clash ; each we should expect to 
 have its own full right, without contradicting the other. And 
 contradict, in strict sense, it does not : it does not question 
 the other's truth, but it wants the other's room and time : it 
 is not about their eternal coexistence, but about being born 
 into actual existence, now and here, that their quarrel is ; and 
 it is only through this competition that timeless essences can 
 limit one another, and the finite spring from the infinite.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 347 
 
 We are here upon the field of the second kind of causality, the 
 successive nea;us natures, which determines the order of phe- 
 nomena. Though the links of this order are not logical, like 
 the others, so as to be read a priori, but dynamic, discoverable 
 only a posteriori, yet are they also adequately assured to us 
 as necessary. So that, in every conflict between understanding 
 and passion, the powers really confronting each other are the 
 two causalities, the inner necessity of our essence, and the outer 
 necessity of the finite order of this scene of things. Inasmuch 
 as both of these are unconditionally, though differently, deter- 
 minate, the resultant of their collision, however hidden, cannot 
 be doubtful : the case is complete in the conatus of one nature 
 against the conatus of others ; beyond which neither can step 
 to modify the predestined award of victory. The opposed 
 natures are alike without originating power, and are but the 
 transmitting media of their respective causalities, the one im- 
 manent, the other transitive : each of which has its assign- 
 able sequence, modified only by pressure of the other, and never 
 picking up on its way the command of an alternative. 
 
 If the determination of character is thus the mere adjust- 
 ment of two necessities, the diagonal of a parallelogram of 
 forces, it is plain that there is a total failure of all ethical 
 conditions, as distinguished from physical. There can be no 
 obligation to the impossible ; and if what we are and do is the 
 sole possibility for us, there can be no duty to be and do any- 
 thing else. All the sentiments with which we retrospectively 
 regard conduct, approval and disapproval, praise and blame 
 for others, content or compunction of conscience for ourselves, 
 all the awards of justice and institutes of law, are baseless and 
 illusory ; and the feeling which is alone appropriate to the 
 differences of character is akin to that with which we contem- 
 plate differences of temperament and feature. Whatever terms, 
 originally ethical, we may retain, must be thrown, like coins 
 after a revolution, into the melting-pot, and reissued with a 
 new image and superscription, representing, instead of the 
 scales of equity, the laurel of ambition or the half-open flowers 
 of hope : they must all be prospective, an artifice of manage- 
 ment, to extort, by stimulus of promise or check of deterrent 
 fear, the conduct which we want. But praise administered by
 
 348 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 way of patronage, indignation pretended by way of preventive, 
 are tricks of discipline, empty of moral affection, and are at 
 best like the beneficent insincerity of the physician who is 
 intent on keeping up at all events the spirits of his patient. 
 I conclude therefore that, in reducing the conflict of affections 
 to a simple trial of strength between two necessities, Spinoza 
 leaves no room for a doctrine of Duty, and renders morality 
 possible for man, only in the sense in which you may predicate 
 it of a horse. 
 
 In treating the conflict between feeling and understanding 
 as an encounter of two necessities, I may seem perhaps to mis- 
 represent Spinoza; inasmuch as he claims one of them, viz. 
 the activity of the mind's own essence, as the very type of 
 Freedom, and in the last Part of his ' Ethica ' selects the phrase 
 ' free man ' to designate the subject of this activity. This is 
 true ; but the very same relation which is here described as 
 ' freedom ' is in the earlier part of the work taken as the true 
 type of ' necessity.' For it is nothing else than his ' geometri- 
 cal ' nexus, the immanent sequence of the explicit from the im- 
 plicit contents of a defined essence, which is the vital root of 
 all his philosophy; and it is to this that he resorts whenever 
 he wants the most impressive illustration of necessity. The 
 essences of things emerge from the Divine attributes, the pro- 
 perties of men from the essence of humanity, with the same 
 ' necessity ' that equalises the radii of a circle, and determines 
 all modes to follow from 'the nature of God.' That all nature 
 is a scheme of necessity, and that we are but items in nature, 
 is the main thesis of the whole philosophy. The self-develop- 
 ment, then, of the mind's essence is but an instance of this 
 inevitable sequence ; and if there be any sense in treating 
 ' freedom ' as opposite or different, it excludes freedom. The 
 fact is that, so long as Spinoza is treating only of his first type 
 of causality (the immanent) as if that were all, the idea of ne- 
 cessary sequence has its own way in his mind with absolute 
 dominance : he has no relation to consider except that between 
 datum and inference. But, as soon as he alights upon a second 
 type of causality, which is not deductive, and which determines 
 not essences but existences, he has to consider in addition their 
 synchronous relation to each other; this is one of mutual inter-
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 349 
 
 ference on the field of time ; the essence of a thing cannot 
 always fully express itself in actuality ; and actual existence 
 cannot be given to what the essence forbids. What shall he 
 call this new relation, this interruption of previously unhin- 
 dered sequence ? He can find no word for it but ' necessity ; ' 
 so we have ' necessity ' submitted to ' necessity ; ' in contra- 
 distinction from which its first state, prior to this submission, 
 is now called its Freedom. Each cause is free when let alone 
 by any other ; it is but then also that its sequences are abso- 
 lutely necessai^y. Thus it comes to pass that both epithets are 
 applied to one and the same process. 
 
 On this usage I have two remarks to make: (1) If, to be 
 free, a cause must be left in sole occupancy, and abandoned to 
 its own necessity, nothing is free ; and for Spinoza to speak of 
 ' the free man ' is an inconsistency ; since, in his view, the 
 ' mind's own essence ' can never be in sole occupancy : man is 
 an object in nature, as well as a being in himself ; nor can there 
 be any separate action of the t- TO causalities, which converge 
 upon him as an extended and as a thinking nature : they must 
 always be concomitant. (2) This use of the word ' free ' is 
 peculiar to the determinists, and is tantamount to a petitio 
 principii on behalf of their doctrine. The term was certainly 
 intended to mark a feature which is special to rational and 
 moral beings, and which is not theirs in common with stones 
 and raindrops and carbon and oxygen. If ever we say that 
 these substances are free to fall, or to combine, we certainly 
 employ it in Spinoza's sense, of the absence of hindrance; but 
 we are conscious of using it in another sense, when we say 
 Peter in denying his Master abused his freedom. We still 
 mean that there was nothing to hinder ; but ' nothing to 
 hinder ' what ? Not, as before, some single thing, alone pos- 
 sible to the nature, but either of two, both of which are alike 
 possible to the agent, to tell the truth or to tell the lie. And 
 It is to express this disjunctive option that the word has been 
 evoked ; its extension to cases purely physical, where there is 
 no choice, is figurative and secondary ; and were this derivative 
 meaning set up as the only one, a familiar experience of human 
 nature, the power of alternative causation, would stand as a 
 vacant place, unmarked and dumb. Deprived of ' speech and
 
 350 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 language' in which to tell its tale, it slips out of notice and is 
 ruled out of existence. 
 
 There is thus no provision in Spinoza's universe for per- 
 sonal causation, or command of an alternative, or action for 
 an end as distinguished from action from a force. Both his 
 types of causality, notwithstanding their difference, agree in 
 being ' efficient causation! in which the determining element 
 is wholly out of the past, and the appearance of two possibles 
 is stripped off as illusory, and nature is exhibited as having 
 already chosen one. He thus removes the essential postulate 
 and possibility of morals, and reduces the difference of cha- 
 racter to the same footing with differences of health or beauty. 
 As Trendelenburg remarks (though in a slightly different 
 connection), ' Spinoza certainly takes a noble direction in his 
 ethical conceptions ; but if they are to hold good and be rati- 
 fied, they must be more deeply grounded in human nature V 
 
 13. Destination of the Human Mind. 
 
 We have seen that Spinoza claims, as the crowning glory 
 of the intellectual love of God, that it is ' eternal ;' and as, in 
 doing so, he contrasts with it parts of our mental nature which 
 perish with the body, he seems for once to use this epithet as 
 synonymous with 'immortal.' The proposition thus opens a 
 wider question than the ethical rank of the intellectual love, 
 viz. Spinoza's doctrine of Death, and the real meaning of the 
 distinction which he draws between what it leaves and what 
 it takes away. Does he affirm immortality for the individual 
 mind, i.e. a conscious continuance of intellectual activity and 
 affection 1 ? Nothing more plainly attests the obscurity of his 
 philosophy than the opposite answers to this question given 
 by his chief interpreters. Camerer has no doubt that he 
 meant to insist on the immortality of the individual soul ; and 
 in this he does but enforce by new reasons the prevailing judg- 
 ment of earlier critics. Pollock, on the other hand, comes to the 
 aid of Lotsij, the vigorous Dutch Spinozist, in maintaining 
 the opposite opinion, which had already, on other grounds, 
 
 1 Historische Beitrage zur Phil. B. II. p. 100.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 351 
 
 been held by Van der Linde and Sigwart. Between these 
 extremes appear a number of critics in suspense, who are 
 content, like Kirchmann, with contrasting Spinoza's philo- 
 sophical immortality with the Christian spiritual faith, and 
 saying that the former is good for nothing, from the defect of 
 moral interest and the virtual merging of personality. Of re- 
 cent interpreters Camerer appears to me to reason most closely 
 from the loca probantia of his author's text ; and if he fails 
 to convince me, it is chiefly because he is too generous in 
 crediting Spinoza with rigorous consequentiality, and so sup- 
 posing that he must mean exactly that which, to be consistent, 
 he ought to have meant. This is never a safe assumption for 
 a commentator to make ; and in the present instance is ren- 
 dered the less secure, because Spinoza had already committed 
 himself, both in his ' Cogitata Metaphysica ' and the ' Short 
 Treatise ' in the hands of his disciples, to a more sympathetic 
 treatment of the doctrine of immortality, which he might 
 naturally desire rather to qualify than to retract ; and because 
 his extreme caution, not simply personal but from tenderness 
 and reverence towards others, undoubtedly led him into de- 
 grees of reticence and disguise of speech hardly compatible 
 with uniform consistency. We shall proceed with the safest 
 steps in quest of his real thought, if we attend first to his 
 earlier doctrine ; next, to the features of our nature which he 
 excludes from survival ; and then endeavour to estimate the 
 kind of ' eternity ' which is intelligibly predicable of the rest. 
 In the ' Cogitata Metaphysica ' he reasons thus : ' Since it 
 clearly follows from the laws of nature that a substance 
 cannot perish, either of itself or through any other created 
 substance, as I have already, if I mistake not, abundantly 
 proved, we are constrained to lay down that, by the laws of 
 nature, the soul is immortal. And on still closer insight into 
 the matter we shall be able most plainly to prove that it is 
 immortal. For, as just shown, the immortality of the soul 
 clearly follows from the laws of nature. Now the laws of 
 nature are decrees of God, revealed by natural light.' ' Next, 
 the decrees of God are immortal, as we have shown. From 
 all which we clearly conclude that God has made known to 
 men His immutable will concerning the duration of the soul,
 
 352 METAPHYSICAL, IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 not only by revelation, but also by natural light.' ' Whence ' 
 (he says, after removing an unimportant objection) 'it is a 
 most evident certainty that minds are immortal V 
 
 Here, there cannot be the smallest doubt, the doctrine 
 avowed is that which is usually understood by the phrase 
 'the immortality of the soul.' Nor is there any reason for 
 supposing that the argument for it, founded upon the Carte- 
 sian admission of thought to the rank of Substance, was a 
 mere accommodation to a discarded philosophy. The work 
 in which it occurs, though elucidating Descartes' principles, 
 does so by fresh and independent thoughts, which are entitled 
 to the presumption of sincerity ; nor would a mere expositor 
 interlard his explanation with gratuitous professions of per- 
 sonal confidence in proofs which, all the while, he deemed 
 to be invalid. His belief, therefore, during his first philo- 
 sophical period, is exposed to no fair doubt. 
 
 In the ' Short Treatise,' ' De Deo,' &c. a different path is taken, 
 but apparently to the same point. If we accept as Spinoza's 
 the note at the opening of the Second Part, the soul is now 
 ' no substance,' but only a 'mode of the attribute of ' thinking,' 
 as the body is a mode of 'extension.' Now one body is 
 distinguished from another, only by its particular ratio of 
 molecular motion and rest, assumed, in the case of the human 
 body, to be that of one to three : so long as this ratio, not- 
 withstanding partial changes, remains true of the aggregate 
 of constituents, the identity of the body is undisturbed ; but 
 as soon as the changes are such as to break it, the body 
 becomes another, i.e. in the case of man, dies, Further, the 
 idea or knowledge of a body is its soul, which undergoes, as 
 a thinking modus, exactly parallel changes to those of the 
 body : ' so that the death of the body is the annihilation of 
 the soul, so far as it is a knowledge of a body provided with 
 a certain given proportion of motion and rest.' But, then, 
 our soul knows something else than the body: 'it is a mode 
 in the thinking substance ; so that it has this also, besides 
 the substantive extension, as object of knowledge and love ; 
 and by uniting itself with this, it can render itself eternal V 
 
 1 Cog. Met. II. c. xii. Vol. II. 502. 
 
 * De Deo, &c. P. II. Pref. note, Vol. II. 299.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 353 
 
 Here Spinoza, it is plain, saves the soul by some second 
 relation from the fate which would be involved in the 
 extinction of the first: but there is some doubt what this 
 second relation really is. We may understand it thus: on 
 the death of the human body, the idea of it (i.e. the soul) 
 perishes : but the human body, on losing its constitutive ratio 
 of motion and rest, ceases, not to be body, but only to be 
 human: it becomes another body; and with it, its idea 
 ceases, not to exist, but only to be that particular idea: it 
 becomes the idea of another body. For, the thinking at- 
 tribute of which it is a mode is infinite and eternal, like the 
 extended with which it is concomitant and parallel ; and as 
 one extended thing only changes into another, so, along with 
 it, does its idea only change into another, passing from mode 
 to mode of its own attribute, without losing the character of 
 an idea or soul. It is obvious, however, that if this im- 
 mortality by metamorphosis of identity were all that is meant, 
 it would be predicable, not of our soul in any distinctive 
 sense, but of the souls universally with which Spinoza endows 
 the corporeal objects in the world. 
 
 I cannot persuade myself that he means to palm off this 
 barren form upon his readers as a doctrine of human immor- 
 tality ; and prefer to find in his words another meaning which 
 they not only will bear, but plainly require, unless the verbs 
 know and love are to be stripped of their proper essence. We 
 have already shown how the -alleged parallelism between ex- 
 tension and thinking has to give way in favour of the latter, 
 because, while each extended thing has but a single companion 
 in its idea, each idea is doubly attended, apprehending at once 
 both the extended thing and also itself, the former as a mode 
 of one attribute, the latter as a mode of the other. In virtue of 
 this difference, the soul knows, not only the particular pheno- 
 mena of which it consists, and the particular bodily phenomena 
 in correspondence with them, but the common properties of all 
 these phenomena in their respective kinds, i.e. extension itself 
 as the essence of body, and thinking as the essence of soul : 
 in other words, God, in His cognisable attributes. To know 
 is, in Spinoza's view, to be united with that which is known ; 
 its ' formal ' essence becomes ' objective ' in our thought, and 
 
 VOL. i. A a
 
 354 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book 1* 
 
 is also to love, being the satisfaction of the rational conatus, 
 together with the idea of its cause. Under the influence of 
 these preconceptions, he sets up in the 'Short Treatise' the bold 
 principle, that if the object known and loved is eternal, so 
 must be the soul that knows it: their intellectual union 
 secures to them that common predicate. And this is what 
 he means when he says that, ' in knowing and loving think- 
 ing substance, the soul so unites itself to this as to render 
 itself eternal.' Add to this, that the object of possible know- 
 ledge is infinite, and therefore the growth of understanding 
 unlimited ; and the key is found to the following passage : 
 'it is to be further remarked that only love, &c. is exempt 
 from limits, i.e. will become more and more excellent the 
 more it increases, since it is directed upon an infinite object ; 
 on which account it can grow for all eternity, a property 
 to be found in nothing else. And this perhaps will hereafter 
 furnish us with matter, whence to prove the immortality of 
 the soul, and in what way this can be realised V This pro- 
 mised proof is presented in the twenty-third chapter, and 
 stands thus : to find the duration of the soul you have only 
 to consider what it is, viz. an idea in the thinking attribute 
 of the All arising from the existence of something present in 
 nature. The duration or change of this thing will give you 
 the duration or change of the soul. Is it only the perishable 
 body 1 ? then the soul will perish too. Is it something un- 
 changeable and permanent ? So too will its companion be ; 
 for the soul united with the imperishable has no cause of 
 perishing, either intrinsic or extrinsic 2 . This doctrine, that 
 ' union with God ' confers immortality, certainly looks at first 
 like a new argument for the same conclusion which, in the 
 ' Cogitata Metaphysica,' is drawn from the substantive nature 
 of the soul ; the only difference being that now the persistence 
 of the soul is treated, not as inherent, but as dependent on 
 the persistence of its object. It would even appear that we 
 have here a deeper religious element ; instead of a mere 
 metaphysical continuity, a personal union of the human spirit 
 with the Divine, of far richer significance. This appearance, 
 
 1 De Deo, &c P. II. xiv. Vol. II. 326, 327. 
 
 2 Ibid. P. II. xxiii. Vol. II. 353.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 355 
 
 however, dissolves away, as soon as we quit the general 
 proposition, and press for an exact account of its two 
 component terms that name the members of this ' union : ' 
 what does Spinoza here mean by ' God ? ' and what by the 
 ' Soul ? ' By the former, he means simply the universal base 
 of nature, its real as opposed to its phenomenal characters, 
 its two eternal 'attributes' with all that they necessarily 
 imply, i.e. the whole matter of exact knowledge. By the 
 latter, he means the ' idea ' of this, considered as its reflection, 
 wherever found: not as your idea, or mine, or as otherwise 
 appropriated, for it is all one in itself, however often broken 
 or distributed in finite consciousness ; and a right thought 
 in a million people is still a single truth or true idea. When 
 Spinoza speaks, therefore, of ' our understanding ' or ' soul/ and 
 attributes to it immortality, he refers, not to the individual 
 sample of our thinking nature, but to that nature itself. ' Your 
 Will ' (or understanding) ' and mine,' he says, ' are one and the 
 same, and so we constitute one and the same nature, which 
 is in continuous agreement throughout 1 .' And the 'power 
 of tasting union with God' he explains by the equivalent 
 expression, ' the power of evolving true ideas V W T hen these 
 substitutions are made, to what does the doctrine amount, 
 that the soul is an idea in the thinking attribute, and abides 
 or perishes according as its object-matter is permanent or 
 transitory ? Simply to this, that true thought will stand the 
 test of time ; and Spinoza may well say, that ' he has proved, 
 in a way different from previous methods, the eternal and 
 persistent duration of our understanding 2 .' The human un- 
 derstanding, having been identified with reality itself turned 
 into idea, and reality being God, both share the same eternity. 
 This is an immortality which, it is plain, has nothing to do 
 with the individual's history, and could never be propounded 
 by a believer in personal continuance beyond death. Sigwart, 
 admitting this, still thinks that the earlier chapters which I 
 have quoted maintain the doctrine in the ordinary sense, and 
 are thus at variance with the later, which make much nearer 
 approaches to the 'Ethica 3 .' I do not see the need of 
 
 1 De Deo, &c. P. II. c. xxvi. Vol. II. p. 362. a Ibid. P. II. c. xxvi. Vol. II p. 3*3. 
 3 Spinoza's Neuentdeckter Tractat. p. 83. 
 
 A a 2
 
 356 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 charging this inconsistency on Spinoza. Though he recedes 
 more and more, as his treatise advances, from the stereotyped 
 form of doctrinal language, and having given the key to his 
 thought, clothes it more freely in his own terms, yet the older 
 formulas are all along meant, I am persuaded, to carry his 
 sense, and not their own ; and their promise to the eye and 
 ear rapidly vanishes under close cross-questioning. He does 
 not really establish on his principle more than this : viz. that 
 so long as there is being, there will be ideas; so long as 
 there are ideas, there will be self-conscious understanding ; 
 i.e. knowledge is as imperishable as truth. 
 
 Turning to the ' Ethica,' let us now notice the parts of our 
 nature which he surrenders to the fate of the body. To 
 appreciate the value of his profession ' Non omnis moriar,' 
 we must press him to tell us how much is to be covered 
 by the funeral pall. (1) Imagination vanishes in death ; 
 for it is through the affections of our body that we conceive 
 the existence both of other bodies and of our own, and of their 
 phenomena as actual : when the corporeal organism is gone, 
 the apparition of actually existing things totally vanishes 1 . 
 (2) Memoi^y also is wiped out ; for it is but the concatenation 
 of images of things outside the body, retained through the 
 affections of our own ; and when the retaining tablet is 
 broken, the record is irrecoverably lost 2 . (3) Love towards 
 God, the most constant of all affections, must nevertheless, 
 so far as it is referred to the body, be destroyed with it 3 . 
 What is meant by the qualifying clause, ' so far as it referred 
 to the body?' I suppose, 'so far as it is & personal feeling, 
 belonging to a finite Ego! The word 'affection' properly 
 meant with Spinoza only a bodily change attended by feeling. 
 In extending it afterwards to the 'intellectual love of God,' 
 he did not intend to carry over into this application the 
 emotional feature of an affection, but to guard against the 
 notion of mere contemplative intellectuality, and preserve 
 the idea of active tendency able to satisfy itself. Hence, 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxi. 2 Ibid. V. xxi. with II. xviii. Schol. 
 
 3 Ibid. V. xx. Schol. : Concludere possumus hunc erga Deum amorem omnium 
 affectuum ease constantisshnurn, nee, quatenus ad corpus refertur, posse destrui, nisi 
 cvm ipso corpore.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 357 
 
 the ' love of God ' has affinities, on the one side, with the 
 emotional susceptibilities of the individual life, with its per- 
 sonal memories and gallery of images ; and, on the other, 
 with the pure understanding and its coinatus towards more 
 perfect knowledge of necessary truth. In the former aspect it 
 is the predicate of an individual, is different in each of us, and 
 is ' referred to the body ; ' in the latter, it is the predicate 
 of intellect universally, and goes wherever it goes, being 
 impersonal and unsusceptible of appropriation ; ' it is referred 
 to mind alone.' If this be the true interpretation, the love 
 of God, as personal affection, drops with the body. (4) Besides 
 these features, which are expressly placed upon the perishable 
 list, we must, by inevitable inference, similarly mark for 
 extinction all characteristics of different human beings by 
 which they are distinguished from each other, with the 
 single exception of the particular gradations they may re- 
 spectively have reached on the homogeneous ladder of neces- 
 sary knowledge. For, varieties of genius, of skill, of inven- 
 tion, of enthusiasm, are all dependent on imagination, on 
 memory, on affection, even on bodily temperament ; and if, 
 as we are assured, 'the eternal part of the mind is understand- 
 ing, while that which perishes is imagination 1 ,' all these rich 
 varieties of type become the cast-off clothes of the surviving 
 humanity 2 . 
 
 Now the question must be determined, What kind of exist- 
 ence, describable as an identical continuation of the human 
 mind, remains for us, after these exclusions have been made ? 
 Can we form any ' distinct and adequate idea ' of the residuary 
 heir of ' eternity ? ' If to abstract the understanding in its 
 essence from sense and imagination has been already difficult, 
 for the present life, where these depreciated functions can at 
 least play the pedagogue to their future superior, and bring 
 into its presence the bodies it has to reckon with and analyse 
 ere it can begin to learn its ' eternal ' lesson, and where, there- 
 fore, by successive training, the understanding may be sup- 
 posed able to set up for itself at last ; how are we to think 
 of it, after it has buried its companions, and survives alone, 
 
 1 Eth. V. xl. Cor. 
 
 3 See Camerer, p. 121, who draws this same inference.
 
 358 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 remembering nothing, bereft of its own body, and neither 
 perceiving nor imagining any other ; able to reason, if it only 
 had memory for the premisses ; having intuition for ' single 
 things,' except that they must be ' eternal,' of which there are 
 no more than two (extension and thinking); 'loving God,' 
 i.e. trying eternally to find the point in which these eternal 
 parallels unite. Difficult, however, as these conditions are, 
 they have not deterred Canierer from affirming that, for this 
 : remnant of the human mind 'personal self - consciousness 
 is claimed;' and the reasons which are conclusive with so 
 thorough a critic deserve respectful consideration. These may 
 be reduced to three : 
 
 (1) Self-consciousness is treated by Spinoza as inseparable 
 from every idea ; and whoever has a true idea knows that he 
 'has it, and cannot doubt its truth. To adequate and true 
 ideas he attributes survival beyond death : certainly, then, 
 not without the attendant self-consciousness. Yes, I grant it ; 
 wherever the true idea continues to exist, there, will also 
 be found its inseparable self -consciousness : but this tells 
 us nothing, till we know whether he who now has it is 
 the same as its former possessor who is now dead. There 
 is an ambiguity here in the word Self which may deceive us : 
 is it that the idea carries in it a consciousness of its self? 
 or is it that the idea carries in it a consciousness of my 
 self? if the former, it does not matter in what personality, 
 or in how many, the idea has its continuity; it is still 
 true to its self-reflection. It is only in the latter case 
 that 'personal self-consciousness' is involved. Now the 
 premisses of this argument have the former meaning: the 
 conclusion is drawn in the latter. When Spinoza speaks of 
 the ' human mind,' and analyses its nature so as to part 
 the transient from the permanent, we shall miss his con- 
 ception if we suppose him to be thinking of an individual 
 sample of that mind and not of its generic essence and 
 character : and especially when he deals with only its 
 adequate ideas of immutable realities, he ignores the dis- 
 tinction between this and that individual, and treats 'the 
 human understanding' as one organ of necessary truth. 
 Let a reality be eternal, its idea will be eternal ; and
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 359 
 
 that idea, wherever present, will know itself to be true. 
 This seems to me to satisfy the requirements of Spinoza's 
 language. 
 
 (2) Appeal is further made to the following positions 
 of Spinoza's : the ' idea of the idea must no less belong to 
 God than the idea itself: if the idea itself belongs to God 
 considered as constituting the human mind, i.e. if it is in the 
 human mind, so too must be the idea of it ; or the self- 
 consciousness connected with it must be in the human 
 mind 1 .' Now the surviving adequate ideas are in the 
 human mind, belonging to its essence ; so therefore must 
 be the self-consciousness connected with them, and share 
 its ' eternity.' The conclusion here again appears to me 
 to be invalidated by the same considerations. To say that 
 the idea's self - consciousness, as well as the idea itself, 
 must be ' in God,' means only that it must be in existence : 
 given the idea, its reflection is given. If, in particular, 
 it is given in the human mind, so then is the self-con- 
 sciousness of it. Applying this rule to the surviving ade- 
 quate ideas, we must grant them a self-conscious survival 
 as necessary or eternal truth. No doubt ; but in what 
 personal specimen of ' the human mind ? ' of what thread 
 of self -consciousness are they a continuation? Do they ac- 
 knowledge their relationship to John Thomas, their ci-devant 
 subject, whose total history is blotted out and in the dark ? 
 Can they be said ' to survive,' or to ' continue ' anything, 
 when there is no Past, and time and phenomena have va- 
 nished, and put an end to identity between things now and 
 then"? If a true idea is the same, and its consciousness 
 of truth the same, always and everywhere, if this is the 
 very meaning of its being necessai^y or sub specie eterni- 
 tatis, it is eternal irrespective of personality, just as th 
 equality of vertical angles is a known eternal truth, whether 
 in Euclid's original Greek or translated and ' surviving ' 
 in English. Spinoza, it should be remembered, habitually 
 gives unity to the totality of human understandings by 
 calling them 'the eternal and infinite intellect of God 2 ,' 
 
 1 Eth. II. xliii. 
 
 2 Ibid. V. xl. Schol. : Mens nostra, quatenua intelligit, ojternus cogitandi modus
 
 360 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 and treats each mind, not as an integer, but as part of 
 this infinite intellect 1 : for the eternity of an idea there- 
 fore it is, for him, quite indifferent in ivhat part of this 
 infinitude that idea may ' survive.' Whoever duly weighs 
 the significance of this doctrine will find in the evidence 
 produced no affirmation of conscious personal identity pre- 
 served through death. 
 
 (3) Yet another argument is constructed thus : the base 
 of all the necessary knowledge (sub specie eternitatis) which 
 constitutes the surviving part of the mind is described as 
 the knowledge of the essence of the human body. Now 
 the knowledge of the human body is also the idea which 
 gives self-consciousness of the mind ; therefore that self- 
 consciousness must attach to the surviving part of the mind. 
 This argument has one advantage over its predecessors, viz. 
 that if it holds good, the Self of which it establishes a con- 
 sciousness is not of an idea, but of an Ego, viz. of the indivi- 
 dual mind which belongs to the individual body. But I fear 
 it does not hold good ; the premisses being spoiled by an am- 
 biguous middle term ; the ' knowledge of the body ' which is 
 the foundation of necessary intellection is not the ' knowledge 
 of the body ' which gives the personal self-consciousness : the 
 former is a knowledge of the essence of the body 2 , i.e. of 
 extension, which is the essence of all body, and in apprehend- 
 ing which we apprehend an infinite and eternal attribute of 
 God: the latter is a knowledge of the actual body, as an 
 individuum, carrying with it a similar apprehension of its 
 concomitant idea, or mind, as an individuum 3 . The one 
 is absolutely simple ; the other is very complex : the one 
 contains only what is common to all : the other, the contents 
 of a res singularis ; and, what is more, it is in virtue of this 
 very difference that the eternal idea attaches to the one, and 
 the individual self-consciousness belongs to the other. In- 
 stead, therefore, of these two consequences becoming linked 
 together by the premisses, they are actually kept asunder by 
 
 eet, qui alio cogitandi modo determinatur, et hie iterum ab alio et sic in infini- 
 tum ; ita ut omnes simul Dei seternum et infinitum intellectum constituant. 
 
 1 Eth. II. xliii. Schol. : Mens nostra, quatenus res vere percipit, pars est infiniti 
 Dei intellectus. 
 
 3 Ibid. V. xxix. Ibid. II. xv.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 361 
 
 them. Spinoza, it is true, elsewhere tells us of a knowledge 
 which the mind may have of itself precisely analogous to this 
 knowledge of the body, viz. ' under the form of eternity ; ' but 
 the effect which he attributes to it is something quite dif- 
 ferent from individual consciousness, rather opposite to it : 
 ' our mind,' he says, ' so far as it knows itself and its body 
 under the form of eternity, has necessarily the knowledge of 
 God, and knows that it is in God, and is conceived through 
 God Y i.e. is a finite and phenomenal undulation of the infinite 
 attribute of thinking. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, I believe that the disappearance of 
 the word ' immortal ' from the ' Ethica ' has its full significance, 
 so far as Spinoza himself is concerned ; though the obscurity 
 in which his thought is wrapped was probably not undesigned, 
 but in accordance with the half-esoteric purpose of the whole 
 treatise. The substitution of the word ' eternal ' involved one 
 inconvenience, which did not escape his attention. When it is 
 employed, as in the connection we have been examining, to 
 express post-existence, it is impossible to forget that it no less 
 involves pre-existence. Yet Spinoza has throughout treated of 
 the mind's beginning, of its growth, both as recipient and as 
 active, nay, of its gaining these very ideas which, as sub 
 specie eternitatis, belong to it as eternal, and constitute 
 it eternal. His psychology has been accommodated to the 
 self-consciousness, with which his metaphysics are at variance. 
 To which then does he at last adhere? He tells us plainly that 
 the former is framed, for convenience of exposition, on a ficti- 
 tious hypothesis, the misleading effect of which the reader can 
 avoid by cautious allowance 2 : i.e. that the metaphysics, or 
 doctrine of being, must be applied to correct the doctrine of 
 knowing. This is tantamount to treating personality and its 
 consciousness as illusions, and replacing them, as sources of 
 knowledge, by the assumption of universal and eternal 
 necessity and the deduction of all that follows from it. 
 At all events, so far as the human understanding is concerned, 
 it is evident that if, by deserving the epithet ' eternal,' it is 
 saved from perishing, it is equally rescued from origination. 
 Tan der Linde well sums up his review of these curious 
 
 1 Eth. V. xxx. * Ibid. V. xxxi. Schol.
 
 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 propositions in the following sentence : ' the immortality 
 of the mind is here only apparently deduced by Spinoza. 
 For (firstly), it is not the mind, but a somewhat (aliquid), 
 which he calls (secondly), not immortal, but eternal, and 
 that without memory. This somewhat is literally an in- 
 cognitum quid, and this eternity no immortality; for it 
 is not the higher and continuous unfolding of the subjec- 
 tive life. Spinoza explicitly professes to have meant, by 
 the word ' eternity,' not endlessness, but absolute timelessness. 
 Eternity, not of a given Subject, but of that subject's idea 
 of God (though in Spinozism it is an inconsequence to 
 speak of a Subject), means only the eternity of Substance 
 and its ideas. With Spinoza, individualisation, being the 
 ideal stamp of the personal, and therefore the determinate, 
 is negation, and involving as such temporal non-being, cannot 
 involve eternal being V 
 
 I cannot refrain from adding, as a negative corroboration 
 of this judgment, that nowhere in Spinoza's letters, in the 
 reports of his conversation, or in the description of his per- 
 sonal traits, does any trace appear of an expectation beyond 
 this life, though he passed through private sorrows and pub- 
 lic dangers which could hardly leave such a thought, if it 
 was there, entirely dumb. And among the disciples who 
 gathered around him in his lifetime, and continued after- 
 wards to represent his school, the same silence may be ob- 
 served. Even when his philosopher's mantle fell upon a far 
 different personality, upon the tender and devout Schleier- 
 macher, the blank upon the future remained, or was relieved 
 only by a mystic cloud that tried to hide it with a hollow 
 glow. I point to this feature in the history of the school, 
 not in the least as a reproach, but simply to show that the 
 interpretation which I have given is consonant with the 
 thought of Spinoza's most intimate admirers. 
 
 1 Spinoza, seine Lehre und deren erste Nachwirkungen in Holland, p. 75.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 363 
 
 14. Place of Spinozism, and Bearing on Ethics. 
 
 In our preliminary grouping of Metaphysical systems, we 
 contrasted the Transcendental with the Immanental by re- 
 ferring to the relative Mange of the assumed primary Entity 
 and of its phenomenal manifestations ; the former treating it 
 as in excess of them ; the latter, as coincident with them. 
 Spinoza's doctrine was selected as the best representative 
 type of the latter, in conformity with the universal estimate 
 of its essential character. Without at all withdrawing it from 
 this position, which to all intents and purposes it practically 
 holds, I may notice, for exactness' sake, a feature of it which 
 might seem to claim for it a place in the other category. The 
 Cosmos, i.e. our Cosmos, the total Nature of which we can 
 speak, not only is provided for by the parallel attributes of 
 extension and thinking, but is all that they have done : they 
 are the immanent cause of its entire contents, which at the 
 same time leave none of their causality unexpressed. If at 
 this point Spinoza's doctrine came to an end, its place among 
 systems would define itself sharply enough. But he goes on 
 to say, that, besides this pair of attributes, the Substantive 
 unity has an infinite number inaccessible to us and unex- 
 pressed in our universe. Here then we are required to think 
 of an outlying margin of causal being, to which no actual 
 effects, but only possible, are assigned ; and this is precisely 
 the feature which characterises a theory as transcendental. 
 Have we then misplaced Spinoza 1 ? and ought we, in virtue 
 of this vast reserve of Divine power, to have associated him 
 with Plato ? By no means ; and that for two reasons : (1) his 
 unlimited store of anonymous attributes is a mere logical ad- 
 justment, needed in order to equalise his Substance, when 
 explicitly taken in terms of its attributes, with the same 
 Substance in the unity of its definition : having there called 
 it 'absolutely infinite,' he could not leave the number of 
 its attributes finite. But, having thus saved his consis- 
 tency, he makes no use of the vacant infinitude which he 
 has provided: it never appears upon the scene of his 
 theory ; but remains just as unemployed as the gods whom
 
 364 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book 1. 
 
 Epicurus, on the pretence of consulting for their ease, com- 
 plimented and bowed out of existence. It is, therefore, per- 
 missible, in estimating the working influence of the theory, 
 especially in its ethical relations, to treat this retired element 
 as though it were not. (2) But further : if any of these over- 
 lapping attributes came forward so as to be reckoned with, 
 they would bring with them a proportionate addition to the 
 cosmos, and maintain the equation between the actual and 
 the possible. And it is the same, Spinoza would tell us, in 
 their existence behind the scenes : from each of their essences, 
 whatever it is, follows the train of derivative natures with 
 their properties, just as, for us, the manifold laws of body and 
 mind flow from extension and thinking: only, their province 
 in the universe is dark to us, as ours perhaps is dark to 
 them. This supplementary conception, which reinstates the 
 immanental character, is no doubt true to Spinoza's thought : 
 but, for want of it, his doctrine has the appearance of giving 
 an infinite enlargement to the original Substantive Being, 
 beyond the requirements of the cosmical aggregate of phe- 
 nomena. We must let Spinoza stand where his real thought, 
 and not where this mere semblance, would place him. 
 
 A different fundamentum divisionis for Metaphysical 
 Systems, not by the range but by the quality of their First 
 Cause, has been adopted and applied by Trendelenburg, in 
 an admirable essay on 'The Ultimate Difference of Philo- 
 sophical Systems V All differences of Ontological theory run 
 up, he tells us, into one, expressed in the question, ' "Which 
 is first, Force, or Thought?' The Materialist postulates the 
 former, to begin with ; and whether he lodges it in atoms, 
 or in determinate points of free space, whether he tries to 
 work with it as homogeneous, or starts with given differ- 
 ences, as of attraction and repulsion, he conceives of it as 
 blind and unconscious ; and treats the rise of feeling and in- 
 telligence as its ulterior result, far down in the history of its 
 changes. The Spiritualist inverts this order of relation ; 
 postulates Mind as primary Agent and owner of Force, and 
 attributes to its intelligent Will the origination and disposi- 
 
 1 Ueber den letzten Unterschied der philosophischen Systeme. Historische 
 Beitrage zur Philos. II. i.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 365 
 
 tion of matter and its phenomenal order, as well as the con- 
 scious and thinking beings that make up its organic province. 
 Passing in review the great historic types of speculation, and 
 assigning each to one branch of this alternative, Trendelen- 
 burg arrives at Spinoza's, and finds it refractory to his dis- 
 posing hand. If he had begun with Extension, he would 
 have sided with the Materialists ; if with Thinking, with 
 the Spiritualists : but, as his Substance is both, he refuses an 
 advantage to either, and makes them look up to a tertium 
 quid, which is neither Mind nor Matter, but an anterior x, 
 which transcends their antithesis. Spinoza thus occupies a 
 balanced position, outside the Dual classification : so that you 
 cannot apply to him any of the predicates in current use for 
 characterising contrasted philosophies. This, at least, was his 
 intended peculiarity, by which, if rigorously carried out, he 
 might reasonably hope to baffle conventional criticism. It is 
 shown, however, that he was unable to maintain the equipoise 
 between the two opposite tendencies ; but was obliged (in 
 ways already explained) to give a vast preponderance to the 
 Thinking attribute in the genesis of phenomena; and so, in 
 spite of himself, to lean to the spiritual side. 
 
 There is a fascinating logical neatness in this estimate : but 
 whether it is wholly true depends on a condition that lies 
 behind the terminology employed. If Spinoza's Extension and 
 Thinking, as attributes of Substance, are synonymous respect- 
 ively with the Matter and Mind of other systems, Trendelen- 
 burg's adjustment is unimpeachable: if not, they do not afford 
 the means of directly comparing his theory with theirs. Now, 
 the evidence is irresistible that the 'attributes' meant, for 
 Spinoza, not Body and Mind, but the prior whence body and 
 mind were to come, the possibility of them and certainty of 
 them as to follow ; and that, in making them ' attributes ' of 
 'Substance,' he intended to destroy their antithesis as a 
 reality, and say that they both grow from one root, and are 
 only relatively different, ontologically the same. They are 
 not yet Matter and Mind ; nor can the preponderance of one 
 over the other be treated as any suffrage in favour of the 
 Materialist or the Spiritualist. To see this clearly, it is only 
 necessary to collect a few of the marks by which Spinoza
 
 366 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 expressly distinguishes his Substance, qua Thinking, from 
 what we mean by Mind. 
 
 (1) It will not be questioned that Intention, or acting for 
 an end, is an indispensable feature of Mind ; and any philo- 
 sophy which sets up vovs as the source of things resorts to 
 it on this account, because it is a prescient cause. But Spi- 
 noza absolutely denies to his Natura Naturans all action 
 for an end 1 , and reduces it to mere blind effectuating power ; 
 and this, not in the line of extension only, but in the thinking 
 attribute no less. We need not ask what 'thinking' there 
 can be in ' necessity ' pushing on deduction from behind, with- 
 out pursuing the advance into a before : it is sufficient to say 
 that a process so cut off, and stepping unconsciously forward 
 in automatic somnambulism, is not what any one ever meant 
 who supposed the universe evolved from Thought. It amounts 
 at most to the achievement of a calculating machine, which 
 certainly turns up the equivalents of thought without think- 
 ing ; but only because, instead of being an originating cause, 
 it is simply a tool preadjusted by an intelligent agent for the 
 end which it is to elicit. 
 
 (2) A more direct indication of the same thing is found in 
 the denial of Intellect and Will to God, and the express re- 
 striction of them to the Natura Naturata 2 . These, it will 
 not be disputed, enter into the very essence of ' Mind ; ' and 
 if they have a genesis lower down than the Supreme Cause, 
 that cause is something short of mind ; and whatever is in- 
 cluded in its infinite ' thinking ' attribute is not Thought, but 
 an ignotum quid which usurps the name. 
 
 (3) This is confirmed by Spinoza's remarkable admission 
 
 1 Eth. I. Appendix. Commenting upon Spinoza's argument that ' if God acts 
 propter finem, lie acts from desire and must feel some want' Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge says (Marginalia to Paulus' Spinoza, Vol. II. p. 72) : 'Minime propter 
 finem in hoc sensu, sed cum fine, nempe quia infinite cogitans es ^ Hanc vero 
 Appendicem inter infirma Spinozas ratiocinia audenter statuo, et quae in omni 
 parte indigentiam sanioris critices aperte testatur. Contra sua ipsius principia 
 affectiones Temporis Post et Prius cum Ente eterno commiscet, et Sophistam con- 
 tra Sophistas agit.' He adds, ' Nowhere does Kant manifest his superiority to all 
 preceding philosophers more convincingly than in this question of Final Causes : 
 vide his Ground Unique for demonstrating the Being of God, and the chapter in 
 his Urtheilskraft.' 
 
 8 Ibid. I. xxxi, xxxii. Cor a.
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 367 
 
 that what, in God's nature, is covered by these predicates, is 
 really no more intellect and will, than the dog-star is a bark- 
 ing quadruped 1 . This is only another way of saying, that 
 whoever assigns to God the properties of Mind, affirming 
 e.g. that ' God is a Spirit,' utters a foolish thing. 
 
 (4) When pressed by his disciples, Spinoza explains that 
 by Intellectus he means thinking by ideas; that this is not 
 only the human mode of thought, but would still belong to 
 Intellectus, even if it were infinite ; yet does not belong to 
 God as Natura Naturans, but exclusively to the Natura Na- 
 t a I'o.ta 2 . From Cogitatio, therefore, as expressing the Divine 
 nature, all Ideation, or conscious mental process, is shut out, 
 all distinction between Subject and Object, all apprehended 
 relations to finite beings. Well might Simon de Vries con- 
 fess himself at a loss to understand what could be meant by 
 ' Thought not by ideas;' because he found that, in getting rid 
 of the ideas, he had nothing left. Whether he was satisfied 
 with Spinoza's answer, to this effect, ' of course you haven't, 
 because you are only a 'mode, and ideas are the modal way of 
 thinking ; but if you were res ipsissirna, you really would not 
 miss them,' we are not told. If he ventured to ask, ' How 
 do you know that ? ' it would have been pleasant to see the 
 reply. But, for our present point we learn enough, viz. that 
 tlie whole of what we modal beings mean by Thought is ab- 
 sent from the Divine thinking, and must be unconditionally 
 denied of the Substantive Cause. 
 
 Against these unainbigious indications I find nothing ad- 
 duced, except the frequent assertion, ' In God there is ' this 
 or that idea ; or the inference, ' In God there must be ' this 
 or that kind of knowledge or self-consciousness. As, in these 
 cases, the word ' God ' is always used of the Natura Naturata, 
 these phrases are altogether irrelevant. Where they occur in 
 the assertive form, the restriction of their field, if not other- 
 wise evident from the context, is marked by the qualifying 
 clause, quatenus aliquo -modo affectus, or, quatenus per men- 
 tern humanam explicari potest: and where in the inferential 
 form, by the fact that the inference is drawn from the parallel 
 
 1 Eth. I. xvii. Schol. 
 
 * Epp. VIII, IX. two very instructive letters.
 
 368 METAPHYSICAL. IMMANENT. [Book I. 
 
 course of the two attributes through the modes ; evincing that 
 the argument is moving entirely on the plane of derivative 
 being. 
 
 When to these express intimations from the Metaphysical 
 side, we add the Moral, or rather unmoral, characteristic, that 
 the lover of God is to expect no return, inasmuch as God, 
 having no affections, neither loves nor hates, it becomes irre- 
 sistibly evident that Spinoza's 'thinking attribute,' however 
 preponderant over the extended, involves no ascendency of 
 Mind over Force in his theory of the origin of things, and 
 does not justify us in claiming his vote on the Theistic side 
 of the great controversy. As little can we say, that he holds 
 the balance even between them. He gives to Thought, in 
 any sense which saves the word from an absolute blank, no 
 place, great or small, at the Fountain-head of causation, but 
 brings it on to the stage after the opening and among the 
 products of the cosmical drama. His guarded language can- 
 not disguise the fact that, for him, it is not Mind that gives 
 birth to Nature, but Nature that gives birth to Mind. And 
 when that mind comes upon the scene, it is in finite samples 
 only, the aggregate of which, in their true and therefore con- 
 current ideas, constitutes the only intellectual unity there is, 
 ' the Infinite Understanding ' of the world. 
 
 So much for the Metaphysical aspect of Spinozism. Though 
 it is foreign to my proper subject to dwell upon its relation 
 to Physics, it may be well to mark, in transitu, its chief la- 
 cuna on this side, the absence of any coherent doctrine of 
 Causality. Starting with the lines of ' geometrical ' sequence, 
 as the proper type of causal necessity, he no sooner alights 
 upon work which this will not do, than he silently sets up 
 another type, the dynamic order of physical nature, whereby 
 concrete objects and individual phenomena are successively 
 produced, one out of another in infinitum. And this he does 
 without apparently discovering that he has passed in aliud 
 genus, and therefore without bringing the two conceptions 
 within the embrace of any common theory. 
 
 In its ethical relations, Spinoza's system escapes the incon- 
 sistencies of Malebranche by complete surrender to deter- 
 minism; at the cost, however, as we have seen, of the
 
 Branch II.] SPINOZA. 369 
 
 conception of Duty, and of all basis for 'what are recognised 
 as the proper Moral Sentiments of mankind. Identifying 
 the possible with the actual, he finds regret and condemna- 
 tion for failure of what might have been, and ought to have 
 been, out of keeping with the order of the world. Man is 
 a ' spiritual automaton 1 ; ' and nothing can be demanded 
 from him except that which, from moment to moment, he 
 will unfailingly produce. The automaton indeed, if it be out 
 of order, may be mended ; provided the neighbouring auto- 
 mata are so constructed and wound: up as to get hold of it, 
 and carry the proper tools for opening its inside, and rub- 
 bing off its rust, and oiling its joints, and riveting its broken 
 springs: but it can no more mend itself than it can wind 
 itself up. The extension of a mechanical theory of nature 
 to the human mind and life is necessarily fatal to their moral 
 aspect and pretensions, and brings the whole world within 
 the domain of Physics. Rather than consent to this, both 
 Plato and Descartes, as we have seen, allow to the mind a 
 self-moving power, which is a mechanical absurdity and a 
 moral certainty. We find them, though aware of the rivalry, 
 coquetting, now with the necessity of nature, now with the 
 liberty of man ; not pretending to reconcile them, but resolved 
 to let no logic rob them of half the beauty of the world. The 
 intellectual Puritanism of Spinoza could least of all bear a di- 
 vided allegiance. He cared little what world he lived in, pro- 
 vided it were only one. Even the two eyes given wherewith 
 to look at it disturbed its unity too much for him ; and to 
 secure the simplicity of a monocular view of it, he drew the 
 lids over the retina most sensitive to the phenomena of con- 
 science and the lights of character, and saw it all as an organ- 
 ism of absolute decrees. In such a universe, all things that 
 are have equal right to be; except, indeed, our approval of 
 them, or disapproval, which alone are out of place. 
 
 1 De Intellectus Emend. Vol. I. p. 29. The expression is probably suggested 
 by Descartes' Passions, 16, where the idea is limited in its application to move- 
 ments of the body and the ' Animal spirits,' which take place without the will. 
 Spinoza extends it to the whole nature. 
 
 VOL. I. B b
 
 BOOK IT. 
 
 PHYSICAL. 
 
 COMTE. 
 
 THE phenomena hitherto examined have concurred in re- 
 cognising a permanent ground and eternal entity from whose 
 essence all else is derived. They have further assumed that 
 this absolute dpxrj is cognisable by our faculties, and in- 
 deed is the proper object of their highest quest ; that, when 
 found and realised in thought, it is the true key to the inter- 
 pretation of whatever lies around or within us ; and that only 
 in so far as it is thus apprehended and applied, can we be 
 said to have knowledge, or to exercise that intellect which 
 is our distinctive prerogative. They agree moreover in iden- 
 tifying their ultimate principle with God, so as to make the 
 province of knowledge conterminous with that of religion. 
 In both Schools, the order of actual development is repre- 
 sented as taking place from the superior to the inferior, 
 from the more perfect whole to the less perfect instance: 
 in Plato higher thoughts, in Spinoza more comprehensive 
 powers, are the source of whatever is individually presented 
 to experience, and are the means by which Ave understand 
 it. It is by participating in the original intellectual factor 
 of the universe, that man is able to comprehend himself and 
 the scene in which he is placed. So that, every way, the 
 absolute is interpreter to the relative, the eternal to the
 
 COMTE. 371 
 
 temporal, the cause to the effect, the hyperphysical to the 
 physical, the logical to the perceptible. Whether, with Plato, 
 we assign to this higher principle an existence out beyond 
 the originated universe in space and time, or, with Spinoza, 
 treat the Naturaiis and Naturata as coextensive, makes 
 indeed many important differences in result and applica- 
 tion ; but none in this respect, that our ultimate faith reposes 
 upon an ontological foundation. 
 
 The system to which we now address ourselves denies all 
 these propositions, and reverses every postulate which has 
 hitherto remained undisturbed. Being, as distinct from 
 appearance, is not a higher reality, but an empty fiction ; 
 and, were it otherwise, would be wholly beyond our cog- 
 nisance. Human reason has no other object than phenomena, 
 which it may register in their succession and coexistence ; 
 but all enquiry after their causes is an illusory play of 
 imagination. What the earlier systems described as the 
 sole business of philosophy is here regarded as the special 
 sign of unreason ; and the empirical processes which in 
 their view fell short of the proper aim of human intelli- 
 gence are here constituted the essence of all knowledge. 
 That which is nearest to Sense has priority in certainty, 
 as well as in time of apprehension ; and general propositions 
 have no more truth and worth than may be brought into 
 them by the particulars which they consolidate in a single 
 formula. Whatever we are in the habit of opposing to the 
 physical, the relative, the originated, viz. the hyperphysical, 
 the absolute, the causal, is a phantasy of thought, and no 
 object of human knowledge, whether first or last. To ac- 
 cumulate facts and detect their order ; to apply to them the 
 gauge of quantity ; to observe the relations of their laws, and 
 follow the traces of expanding generalisation ; constitutes the 
 business of Science: while that of Philosophy is simply to 
 survey and methodise this process, and exhibit it as the 
 logical arganon of the human intellect. This doctrine, it is 
 evident, agrees with the schemes of Plato and of Spinoza in 
 approaching Man from the side of Nature beyond him, so 
 that anthropology is but the inner circle reached by con- 
 tracting the circumference of a wider realm. But it differs 
 
 Bb 2
 
 373 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 from them, in limiting itself to the field of observation and 
 induction, and denying all reality except to phenomena. Its 
 first requisite for the true philosopher is to rid himself of 
 all notion of Substance as the ground of manifestation, of 
 Causality as the source of effects, and to let the universe 
 resolve itself before him into facts like and unlike, serial 
 and synchronous. Of this doctrine we are fortunate enough 
 to have a thoroughgoing recent representative in M. Comte ; 
 and an English interpreter, perhaps of less original genius, 
 but of far more balanced judgment, in J. S. Mill. The latter 
 will most fitly come under review in a future chapter of 
 this treatise. The writings of the former, who made the 
 systematic exposition of the Physical doctrine the business 
 of his life, and projected an ethical and social organism in 
 conformity with it, will naturally furnish us with the 
 best means of delineating its contents and appreciating 
 its character. 
 
 I must premise, however, that not every Physical system 
 repudiates metaphysical conceptions as peremptorily as 
 Comte. The notion of Causation, if only in the shape 
 of Force, and that of Substance, if only under the name 
 of Atoms, have been so prevailingly retained in the schools 
 of inductive physics, as to have coloured the whole language 
 of natural science, rendered its relations absolutely incon- 
 ceivable without them, and become responsible for some of 
 its most signal discussions. Eoscovich, Dalton, and Grove, 
 to omit less noted examples, show that, since the time of 
 Bacon, not less than before, the men most familiar with the 
 experimental sciences have been unable to dispense with the 
 conceptions which Comte insists on banishing. He himself 
 appeals, not only to Bichat and Gall, but to Tholes and 
 Pythagoras, as his own proper antecedents, and claims to 
 be the modern representative of their intellectual tendency. 
 But the Ionian School presents no feature of resemblance to 
 him, beyond appearing on the same physical field. It ex- 
 pressly aimed at the discovery of some one material principle 
 from whose transformations the universe might be evolved ; 
 and whether water, air, or fire was assumed, the process 
 through which it was conducted was neither more nor less than
 
 II.] COMTE. 373 
 
 a Cosmogony 1 . Unless, therefore, it be simply as practical 
 engineer and mathematician at the Court of Sardes, who 
 computed a solar eclipse and embanked the Halys for King 
 Croesus, or else as chief of the Seven Sages, I know not how 
 the Ionic philosopher can afford any analogy to the founder 
 of Positivism. Still less does the Doric genius of Pythagoras 
 belong to the same type. Far from proclaiming that pheno- 
 mena alone are cognisable, he sought to derive them from a 
 higher principle ; in selecting which, he passed out beyond 
 the material elements of the lonians, and pitched upon the 
 relations of Number and Measure, as objects at once of per- 
 ception and intellect, and fit to mediate, therefore, between 
 the world of matter and of thought. This ascription of causal 
 power and cosmical reality to mathematical entities is the 
 very essence of the Pythagorean philosophy on its physical 
 side. A less inaccurate comparison is afforded by Heraclitus ; 
 whose doctrine of the perpetual succession and genesis of 
 things, in reaction from the ontology of Xenophanes which 
 had denied all motion and change, corresponds very nearly 
 with the exclusion by the Positive Philosophy of anything 
 more real than phenomena. But even here we do not find 
 the notion of Causation discarded, or intellectual curiosity 
 content to forego all questions of origination. This School 
 not only observed, but speculated on the genesis of things ; 
 deducing it from the conflict of opposites meeting on the 
 same point, and establishing an equilibrium or harmony of 
 positive and negative ; and, under the symbol of fire, repre- 
 senting the ever-living force or element of motion presupposed 
 in every manifestation of physical change. As in the School 
 of Elea we meet with the doctrine of pure substantive reality, 
 so in that of Heraclitus we encounter that of pure Force of 
 change; and since the one afforded no means of establishing 
 an evolution, and the other could give no account of its 
 correlative substratum, the Atomists sought to combine the 
 two, by domesticating the free force in given indivisible 
 fundamental constituents, discriminated in form but not in 
 attributes. The evolutions of nature were explained by the 
 permutations and local movements of these countless ele- 
 
 1 See Aristot. Metaph. A. 3. 983 b 984 a.
 
 374 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 ments ; all qualitative difference being resolved into quanti- 
 tative variety. In all these instances, it is evident how little 
 the genius of ancient philosophy could refrain, on Comte's 
 own field, from the gravest offences against his prohibitory 
 maxims. Even when dealing, like himself, only with Nature 
 and her phenomena, these Schools derived their whole impulse 
 from the desire to pass behind the veil, and explain in their 
 source, as well as dispose in their order, the assemblage of 
 effects. The problems which they attempt to solve are those 
 which Positivism forbids; it is simply in the difference of 
 their solutions to these problems that School is distinguished 
 from School. 
 
 It is a curious fact that this philosopher's laurels should be 
 chiefly English. In France and Germany his reputation has 
 not assigned him to the first rank of thinkers ; and it is only 
 in recent histories of modern Philosophy that his name has 
 begun to appear. In part, no doubt, this is due to the same 
 causes which so long detained Schopenhauer in unmerited 
 obscurity; the absence of an Academical position, and, as 
 in the case of the Frankfort recluse, the consequent contempt 
 for all Professional philosophy, a contempt so sore as to 
 defeat its own aim, and create a distaste for writings acrid 
 with class antipathies. But the chief cause is to be found 
 in the fact, that, like Bacon, he occupies a position outside 
 of philosophy, and deals not with the laws of thinking so 
 much as with the matter of thought ; classifying the sciences 
 according to the properties with which they deal, and giving 
 an encyclopedic view of their relations. Here it is that his 
 large grasp of thought becomes apparent ; not in any solution 
 of the difficult problems of philosophy, but in a better regu- 
 lated pursuit of knowledge, and a clearer apprehension of the 
 resources of each instrument of research. Towards psycho- 
 logy, logic, metaphysics, and theology, he presents only a 
 blind or negative side ; simply denying their worth or even 
 existence ; and as he is content to do this dogmatically, 
 without at all entering into their problems, or showing any 
 appreciation of their conditions, he presents no front for attack 
 or discussion on this side ; for it is impossible to refute mere 
 oracular contempt. He begins by assuming the postulates
 
 II.] COMTE. 375 
 
 of empirical perception ; and erects upon that basis, without 
 question of its security, the structure which is to lodge every 
 element of human knowledge. In this respect he differs from 
 Kant, who no less denied the validity of the speculative 
 processes of the metaphysician and theologian ; but instead 
 of merely chalking their house as empty, thundering at the 
 door to make a hollow sound, and then running away into 
 more populous streets, he entered with searching patience 
 into the interior, and traced all their winding passages, 
 following their own clues to show whither they would lead. 
 It is the unsupported pretension to legislative universality, 
 involving the arbitrary confiscation of whole provinces of 
 human thought, that provokes resistance to the French 
 dogmatist, and hinders the recognition of his extraordinary 
 merits. 
 
 1. Life and Personality. 
 
 For reasons which will presently appear, the story of 
 Comte's life supplies essential aids to the appreciation of 
 his philosophy ; and partly with intention, partly with un- 
 conscious self-revelation, he furnishes these in a series of 
 prefaces to his volumes and letters to disciples or public 
 men. The son of a tax-gatherer at Montpellier, he was born, 
 in 1798, into a family equally Catholic and Monarchical l ; 
 and impervious as he long seemed to this influence, the 
 response of his nature to it was rather deferred than absent ; 
 and to his mother especially (nee Rosalie Boyer) he ulti- 
 mately conceived himself indebted for his essential qualities 
 of mind, as well as of heart and character, though at home he 
 had not loved her as her virtues and misfortunes deserved 2 . 
 At nine years of age he was sent to the local High School, 
 one of the Lycdes which Napoleon had established under 
 prevailing ecclesiastical direction ; but whatever profit he 
 gained from his five years' study there, the benefit which 
 he best remembered was, that they 'emancipated him from 
 all theology,' and even made short work with any dabbling 
 
 1 Phil. Pos. VI. Pref. vi. 9 Pol. Pos. I. Pref. 12.
 
 376 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 in metaphysics, and left him equipped, at fourteen, for a 
 career, on the one hand, of devotion to the definite sciences, 
 on the other, of zeal for political and social regeneration 1 . 
 To the Polytechnic School at Paris, whither he next proceeded, 
 he carried a proficiency in mathematics which enabled him to 
 turn its admirable course of instruction to the best account, 
 and rapidly to reach the borderland of knowledge which, it 
 is generally supposed, exact methods of measurement cannot 
 cross. He felt dissatified with such sudden termination of 
 the scientific highway ; and cast a longing eye over the 
 ulterior provinces of biology and social law, to see whether 
 some continuous road could not be engineered across them, 
 which should bring them into the same intellectual empire 2 . 
 This presentiment of his future hierarchy of sciences probably 
 found expression in some form too little respectful towards 
 existing ideas and teachers ; for in 1816 he incurred expulsion 
 for breach of discipline, notwithstanding his acknowledged 
 merits in the class-room. Thus thrown out of his career, 
 he was expected to take refuge at home: but Paris had 
 spoiled him for Montpellier; and, in spite of his parents' 
 remonstrances, he determined to face the world alone, and, 
 remaining where he was, to seek a maintenance by private 
 mathematical tuition, and in its intervals to work out his 
 still vague conceptions of intellectual and social reconstruc- 
 tion 3 . In the first object he succeeded, to the modest measure 
 of his material wants ; the second incurred delay through the 
 interposition, in 1818, of an unfortunate influence which, he 
 confesses, disturbed for a while, without really interrupting, 
 the spontaneous evolution of his thought. He was fascinated 
 by the specious but sophistical pretensions of the Comte de 
 St. Simon 4 , and drawn within the circle of his School, in 
 Common with Thierry, Kodriguez, Bayard, and Enfantin ; 
 and it was at his instigation, and in his He view (VOr- 
 ganisateur), that he produced, in April, 1820, his first pub- 
 lished essay, Sommaire Appreciation de I'ensemble du Passe 
 moderne ; and it was in sequel to St. Simon's Cate'chisme 
 des Industriels, and under St. Simon's name, that in May, 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. I. Pref. 6. 2 Phil. Pos. VI. Pref. vii. 3 Ibid, x, xi. 
 
 * Ibid. Pref. note vii ix.
 
 II.] COMTE. 377 
 
 1822, he printed a hundred copies of his Plan des Travaux 
 scientijiques ne'cessaires pour reorganiser la Socie'te', which, 
 when reproduced two years after, under his own name, 
 received the second title Systeme de Politique Positive, and 
 served henceforth as the intended germ of his future Philo- 
 sophic Positive 1 . Though this essay was declared by St. 
 Simon to present his doctrine of society under too severe 
 and ' Aristotelian ' an aspect, and to slight its poetic and 
 religious elements, the disagreement cannot have occasioned 
 any total rupture of the young author's relations with him 2 ; 
 for they were prolonged, as he tells us, through six years ; and 
 we find Comte still in the interior circle of confidants who 
 suiTounded the deathbed of St. Simon on May 19, 1825, and 
 received his warning words, ' Not to suppose that religion 
 can ever die, and to remember that without enthusiasm 
 nothing great can be achieved.' He did not associate him- 
 self with the St. Simonian organisation which survived the 
 founder's death: but his external relation to it cannot have 
 been unfriendly, for during the next year he contributed 
 to its representative journal (le Producteur) two consider- 
 able essays: viz. in November 1825, Considerations philo- 
 sophiques sur les Sciences et les Savants ; and in March, 1826, 
 Considerations sur le Pouvoir Spiritual 3 . In the following 
 month he opened, at his private lodgings, the course of 
 lectures which constitute at once his fundamental and his 
 crowning work, before an audience including Alexander von 
 Humboldt, De Blainville, and Poinsot. It sums up, he tells 
 us, the results of his studies since he left the Polytechnique *. 
 As the last six of the ten intervening years present him to 
 us in unbroken literary co-operation with the St. Simonians, 
 it is less surprising that they should refer some kindling of 
 his genius to the inspiration of their leader, than that he 
 should resent the claim, and fiercely denounce him as 'a 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. IV. Append. Pref. Gen. iii. and 4. 47. 
 
 2 See St. Simon's Preface to Comte's Systeme, CKuvres XXXVIII. Catechisme, 
 3 me Cahier, closing thus : ' Notwithstanding the imperfections which we find in 
 M. Comte's work, from its satisfying only one half of our views, we formally 
 declare that to us it seems the best production ever published on general 
 politics,' p. 5. 
 
 3 Ibid, and 137. 177. Phil. Pos. I. v. ; VI. ix, x.
 
 378 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 depraved juggler' (un jongleur deprave 1 ), who had neither 
 letters nor science, and had done him nothing but mischief, 
 except by confirming his conviction, already obtained from 
 the economists, of the growing social importance of the 
 modern industrial development. It is impossible, at present, 
 to pronounce upon these conflicting assertions of originality ; 
 but, to prepare the way, a few words must tell the forgotten 
 story of the St. Simonian sect, so far as it illustrates the 
 relations between the two philosophers. 
 
 Its founder (Claude Henri), grandson of the Duke who was 
 the friend of Fe'nelon and author of the ' Memoirs of the Court 
 of France under Louis XIV. and his Successors,' was born in 
 1760, and received, from D'Alembert and other eminent teachers, 
 the liberal education due to his rank. A mixed impulse, of 
 generous sympathy and eagerness for personal distinction, 
 carried him at the age of seventeen into the army of Washing- 
 ton in the colonial struggle for independence. The close of 
 the war and the death of his father in the following year left 
 him free to follow the predominant bent of his nature, viz. 
 ' to study the course of the human mind in order to work for 
 the advancement of civilisation.' But his restless and flighty 
 will seemed incapable of steady purpose ; and he frittered 
 away fifteen years and the greater part of his fortune in result- 
 less travels and disappointed projects of industrial reform. 
 Convinced at last that the social regenerator needed a depth 
 of knowledge and a range of experience which he had never 
 gained, he devoted three years' study to the mathematical and 
 physical sciences, and two to the physiological ; visiting Eng- 
 land and Germany to glean the remaining fragments, but 
 coming to the usual French conclusion that out of Paris there 
 was nothing to be learned. Unhappily, the same logic which 
 had obliged him to master all human knowledge insisted on 
 his also going through all human experience: without a sample 
 of everything, he could judge of nothing. So he spent some 
 further time in impartially trying the varieties of life within 
 and without the limits of the moral law ; marriage, soon dis- 
 solved ; ascetic rigour and Oriental voluptuousness, solitude 
 and revelry, the nursing of health and the voluntary inocula- 
 1 Pol. Pos. III. Pref. xv, xvi.
 
 IT.] COMTE. 379 
 
 tion with loathsome diseases, the ball-room, the gaming-table, 
 the race-course, rapidly completed the philosophical experi- 
 ment with the exhaustion of his resources ; and left him at 
 last, as a Government clerk, qualified to redeem the human 
 race on ^'40 a year 1 . 
 
 His earliest pamphlet, indeed, published in 1803 under the 
 title Lettres dun habitant de Geneve d ses contemporains 2 , was 
 not wholly devoted to so sublime an end: it was specially 
 intended to conciliate the favour of the widowed Mme. de 
 Stael, to whom he made in vain the offer of his hand. It 
 traces the revolutionary anarchy of the time to the ever- 
 widening breach between authoritative belief and demon- 
 strated science, which sets the spiiitual power in society at 
 variance with itself, the intellectual with the religious, and 
 disorganises the equilibrium of the world. The medieval 
 period is adduced as the standard example of the opposite con- 
 dition, in which the representatives of the supreme faith were 
 also the possessors of the total knowledge then attained ; and, 
 thus wielding all the forces of spontaneous conviction, could 
 control the passions of men, and determine the path of the 
 temporal power without sharing any of its functions. Such 
 ages of unity in sentiment, with separate depositaries of secular 
 rule, the author calls organic : they are times of social order, 
 because the average aspiration is satisfied : they are times of 
 silent growth, because the mass moves all together : they are 
 creative times, because the imagination has free play without 
 any dissent of the reason. But they inevitably resolve them- 
 selves by degrees into their own opposites, the critical ages, 
 in which the imaginative beliefs consecrated by authority are 
 left behind by the movement of scientific conceptions, and 
 retain only an attenuated and at last a fictitious life. Such an 
 era declared its advent in the convulsions of the French Re- 
 volution ; undermining the priestly influence by the crumbling 
 away of its necessary base ; breaking up the feudal order by 
 the growth and emancipation of industry ; throwing to the 
 
 1 Sa vie &rite par lui-mSme, (Euvres de St. Simon and Enfantin, XV 6 Vol. 
 6488. 
 
 * (Euvres de St. Simon and Enfantin, Paris, Dentu, 1865. XV 8 Vol. pp. 
 
 / 60.
 
 380 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 front, for a transitional term, the ephemeral tribe of metaphy- 
 sicians to try their vain compromises between the theology of 
 the past and the knowledge of the future ; but waiting for a 
 reproduction of the medieval equilibrium, with a spiritual 
 power of scientific priests and a temporal of rich proprietors, 
 and a worship of the laws of nature, and a ceremonial directed 
 by artists, and a supreme council of the elite of human- 
 ity. When this consummation is reached, the law of labour 
 will be universal : with hand or mind, all must work, and be 
 recompensed according to their works ; the associates of the 
 spiritual power being supported at the public cost. 
 
 These letters were tolerably complete in their way. But the 
 author's next production afforded a signal example of the dis- 
 proportion between his vast conceptions and his abortive con- 
 clusions. Full of an encyclopedic scheme, for an historical and 
 critical account of the progress of the human mind in science 
 and social life during the last century, he published in 1808 
 a two-volume prospectus entitled Introduction av^x Travaux 
 scientifiques du XIX siecle, including in it, by way of 
 quotation, the whole of D'Alembert's celebrated discourse pre- 
 fixed to the French Encyclopedie 1 . As the project was still- 
 born, its promise is interesting only for the scattered thoughts 
 for which its announcement gave excuse. The author insists 
 that there is an exact parallel, in the stages of human evolu- 
 tion, between the individual and collective society ; an infancy, 
 a youth, a manhood (and, alas ! a decline), in nations, as in 
 each person : they first treat outward things as animate, like 
 themselves ; thence pass into a polytheistic mythology, and 
 forward into monotheism ; till the discovery of order among 
 phenomena substitutes the conception of Law, and relieves 
 supernatural causes of their function. But this last step 
 cannot be taken except slowly, and unequally by differently 
 prepared minds ; and the transition will not be effected with- 
 out a metaphysical Deism, gradually attenuated till it fades 
 away before universal Physics. It deserves remark that this 
 crowning stage of knowledge is here designated, for the first 
 time, as La philosophic positive; Descartes being praised because 
 ' II a senti que la philosophic positive se divisait en deux 
 1 Op. Cit. XV. pp. 62, 63.
 
 II.] COMTE. 381 
 
 parties egalment importantes : la physique des corps bruts et 
 la physique des corps organise's l . ' In St. Simon's next pub- 
 lication (1813), the Memoire sur la science de rhomme, the 
 phrase recurs in a context which renders its meaning perfectly 
 explicit : ' The tendency of the human mind since the fifteenth 
 century,' he says, ' is to base all its reasonings upon facts ob- 
 served and discussed ; and on this positive base, astronomy, 
 physics, and chemistry have already been reorganised. . . . 
 The particular sciences are the constituents of general science ; 
 general science, i.e. philosophy, was inevitably conjectural 
 just so far as the particular sciences were so ; half conjectural 
 and half positive, when a portion of the particular sciences had 
 become positive, while the rest were still conjectural ; and it 
 will be positive throughout, when all the particular sciences 
 are so. This will take place, whenever physiology and psycho- 
 logy shall be based upon facts observed and discussed 2 .' 
 Hence, in order to constitute the science of Man, two condi- 
 tions, which are on the eve of realisation, must be wrought 
 out : it must be shown biologically that, in the individual, 
 mental and moral phenomena are due to his organisation alone ; 
 and, historically that, in communities, the course of civilisation 
 follows a law of regular evolution, through which each social 
 state emerges necessarily from its predecessor. 
 
 The high appreciation of the medieval period, as organic, we 
 have already noticed in the ' Letters from Geneva.' A new 
 reason for it is emphasised in the author's essay on Universal 
 Gravitation (1813), which otherwise need not detain us. The 
 middle ages realised for the first time the effective separation 
 of the spiritual and temporal powers ; and so supplied a model 
 on which every regenerator of society should keep his eye. 
 To vest in one class all the resources of instruction and per- 
 suasion, and in another the exercise of coercive authority, and 
 suffer no encroachment of either on the other, is the prime 
 condition of social order and stability. This favourite con- 
 ception St. Simon is henceforward never tired of repeating. 
 
 1 CEuvres Choisies de C. H. de S. Simon, pr&e'de'es d'un Essai sur sa Doctrine, 
 Tom. I. p. 198. 
 
 a CEuvres XL. 1 7. See also Correspondance avec M. de Redern, CEuvres XV. 
 1 08, 109.
 
 382 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 Thus far, the speculations of St. Simon had aimed at no 
 more than the improvement of national life, whether in his 
 own or in other lands. But, in 1814, incited perhaps by the 
 enthusiasm of the young Augustin Thierry, now become his 
 collaborateur, he extended the scope of his projects, and dis- 
 cussed in an essay ' the reorganisation of European Society, 
 or the means of uniting the various nations of Europe into the 
 political body, and at the same time preserving the national 
 independence of each V He proposed for this end a decennial 
 election of distinguished persons, including a specified number 
 of the leaders in science and philosophy, to act as a European 
 council, for the codification of morals and directing of educa- 
 tion, the composing of international disputes, and the improve- 
 ment of intercommunication. But this federal Reichstag of 
 the apioroi was simply to be superinduced upon the prior legis- 
 latures and executives of the separate countries, without 
 disturbing the internal springs of their patriotic life. 
 
 In this conception, St. Simon does but expand a slight hint 
 incidentally dropped in the letters from Geneva. The same 
 may be said of another thought which now takes possession of 
 him, and by its growing magnitude demands a serial publi- 
 cation, I' Industrie, to itself 2 . In the passage of the human 
 mind from the Medieval theology to the Positive sciences, he 
 is struck by the inevitable concomitant change from the feudal 
 military organisation to the system of industrial relations ; he 
 assigns to the artisan and labouring classes a social importance 
 which he had not recognised before ; and claims that the public 
 economy, and education, and allotment of political rights 
 should be largely directed with a view to their well-being. 
 ' Political science indeed is that which has for its aim to 
 determine the order of things most favourable to all kinds of 
 production.' The issue of this periodical (1816 18), coincided 
 with Comte's first entrance into the author's circle ; and he was 
 entrusted with the editing of the third volume. The task, no 
 doubt, helped to fix in him, as he avows, the impression already 
 received from the Economists, of the great part which is 
 reserved for the working classes in the future development of 
 society. He himself, however, contributed nothing to these 
 
 1 (Euvres XV. 153 seqq. a (Euvres XVIII, XIX. 13173.
 
 II.] COMTE. 383 
 
 volumes ; and though well affected to their main object, is in 
 no way responsible for the wild disregard of natural laws often 
 apparent in their methods of pursuing it. 
 
 But how does this recognition of a new ' industrial power ' 
 settle accounts with the previous demand for a restored ' spiritual 
 power 1 ?' For awhile, the two ideas jostled each other in St. 
 Simon's mind, and he wavered about the proper constitution 
 of the temporal government, especially on the question whether 
 the artisan influence should be incorporated with it, or be 
 added on to the force of the intellectual function. It was evi- 
 dent that in the pursuits of industry theoretic science and 
 practical art were inseparably combined, so that the workman's 
 well-being depended at once upon the progress of knowledge 
 and the secular order ; of which of them, then, is he to be the 
 organ and ally 1 ? To determine this and similar doubts was 
 the main purpose of the successive papers which constitute St. 
 Simon's Organimteur, published in 1819 20 l . Here he 
 transfers the political predominance which he had vested in 
 the territorial classes to the manufacturing producers ; leaving 
 to the latter the whole power of ratifying and executing laws 
 and controlling the state finance ; but setting over them, as the 
 sole initiative and consultative authority, the representatives 
 of the intellectual professions, whether concerned with Science, 
 Letters, or Art. Thus the temporal power was concentrated 
 in the directors of capital and their subordinates, under the 
 condition of originating nothing and doing everything. 
 
 In his two remaining publications, the Systems Industriel 2 
 (1821) and the Catechisme deslndustriels* (1822 24), St. Simon 
 interests himself less about the division of political power 
 among existing classes, than about the unequal distribution of 
 property which makes these classes what they are ; and insists 
 upon it as the supreme problem of the State, to rescue the 
 producers of wealth from their anomalous position, as minimum 
 sharers in the good things which they create. From this fate, 
 which he treats as a lingering remnant of feudalism, they must 
 be delivered by two essential and inevitable changes : a uni- 
 versal education at the public cost, in schools, first of inorganic 
 
 1 (Euvres XX. * Ibid. XXI XXIII. 1795. 
 
 3 Ibid. XXXVII XXXIX. 47.
 
 384 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 science, and then for the study of moral and social laws ; and 
 the securing to everyone of remunerative labour in proportion 
 to its worth. In comparing the chance of realising these 
 changes in different countries, he assigns the earliest place to 
 France, which will outstrip England precisely on account of 
 the English parliamentary system, hitherto admired and praised, 
 but now condemned as an obstructive makeshift on the re- 
 former's path. On some of the teaching of the Cate'chisme, which 
 was to have been a joint production of St. Simon and Comte, 
 eager altercations took place between them, ending, as I have 
 explained, in the combined but distinct publication of their 
 respective parts. On the reproduction of these in 1824, each 
 author added a preface. In that of Comte occur these words : 
 ' Having long reflected on the ide'es meres of M. St. Simon, I 
 have set myself merely to systematise, to develop and complete 
 the portion of this philosopher's views which have relation to 
 the scientific direction. The result has been the formation of 
 the system of Positive Politics which I now begin to submit 
 to the judgment of thinkers. I have thought it my duty 
 publicly to make the foregoing declaration, in order that, if 
 my labours should appear to merit any approbation, it may be 
 passed on to the founder of the Philosophical School to which 
 I have the honour to belong V 
 
 During the composition of the Cate'chisme St. Simon, now 
 sunk into the lowest depths of want, had yielded to de- 
 spondency and attempted his own life. But the pistol-shot 
 only shattered his face and deprived him of an eye ; and he 
 yet lived to put his hand to one other unfinished work. His 
 Nouveau Christianisme 2 was intended to conciliate the 
 moral and religious feelings which his antitheological invec- 
 tives and his statements of social doctrine so often shocked ; 
 and to show that human life, when removed to his scientific 
 base of mere anthropologic law, afforded undiminished scope 
 for ethical and reverential affections. He gives it the form of 
 a dialogue between a Conservative and an Innovator ; but 
 carried their conversation no further than a preluding review 
 of the past, exposing the wants which the regenerating system 
 was to satisfy. The Divine element of Christianity consists 
 
 1 (Euvres XXXVIII. 9. s Ibid. XXIII. 100191.
 
 II.] COMTE. 385 
 
 wholly in its statement of human brotherhood, and its con- 
 sequent care for the physical and moral well-being of the poor : 
 to give effect to this principle is the proper end of all spiritual 
 and temporal power ; and for its special embodiment a Church 
 is needed, with a complete organisation of doctrine, ceremonial, 
 and moral code, administered by an adequate hierarchy and 
 a supreme head. These fragmentary hints were denied their 
 development by the author's death, at the age of sixty-five. 
 His followers did something to enlarge them by their exposi- 
 tions ; but here ends this significant episode in Comte's life : 
 henceforth, he walks alone. 
 
 Comte often adverts with pride, as to a happy crisis in the 
 history of his genius, to his discovery, in May, 18'22. and imme- 
 diate statement in his Plan des Travaux, of a fundamental 
 law of the human mind, individual and collective, viz. that, 
 ' in all the branches of our knowledge, it has to pass suc- 
 cessively in its progress through three different intellectual 
 states : the theological, or fictitious ; the metaphysical, or ab- 
 stract ; and finally, the scientific, or positive : ' the first, refer- 
 ring phenomena to supernatural beings ; the second, explaining 
 them by abstractions, neither supernatural nor natural ; the 
 third, content to reduce them to general laws without travel- 
 ling beyond the assembled facts themselves. He thus had 
 gained, at the age of twenty-four, the key to the history of 
 each science and the succession of all, and the means of pre- 
 dicting the sequel of such as are mid-way in their career. 
 Whether this law can be unconditionally accepted will be 
 considered hereafter. It is certainly thrown, in this early 
 essay, into a form of expression admirable for its succinct- 
 ness and precision, and so prepared for the wide application 
 as a formula which it received in the Philosophic Positive. 
 But the germ of it we cannot miss in the St. Simonian 
 position that mankind constitute a collective being, with 
 progressive development, invariably commencing in a theo- 
 logical stage, and terminating in a positive, through the 
 medium of a disintegrating metaphysical criticism. The 
 law is very differently applied to the course of history by 
 the two writers ; but surely in their conception of it they are 
 essentially at one. 
 
 VOL. I. C C
 
 386 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 The whole structure of the Philosophic Positive was deter- 
 mined by this law, which received a masterly exposition 
 in the first Lecon of April, 1826. After the third, the course 
 was interrupted by a sudden ' cerebral crisis,' a ' profond 
 orage ce're'bral,' brought on by excess of work and moral 
 suffering, and prolonged, as he affirms, by senseless medical 
 treatment at a private asylum l . As soon as he was pro- 
 nounced incurable and professionally left alone, to be cared 
 for only by his wife and mother, he rapidly recovered ; and 
 in August, 1828, after an interval of eighteen months, was able 
 to resume his lectures ; and, before he had forgotten his recent 
 experience of medical art, turned it to account in a review of 
 De Broussai's treatise on ' Irritation and Madness.' That his 
 intellectual vigour had fully returned is amply attested by the 
 originality and grasp of thought which characterise his new 
 chapter on the Physical sciences ; but that some morbid twist 
 of feeling remained and often recurred, as an uneffaced vestige 
 of that illness, is the mildest explanation which we can give 
 of an extreme suspiciousness henceforth never long asleep 
 towards friend or foe. In the very note which tells the 
 tale of his illness and recovery he charges his old teacher, 
 the eminent geometer Poinsot, with spitefully using against 
 him, to gratify a private enmity, this attack of insanity ; a 
 charge which, being refuted by Poinsot's noble conduct after- 
 wards, he had to withdraw with apologies 2 . 
 
 The wife whose care had put the doctors' prescriptions 
 to shame, Caroline Massin, he had married in 1825 by 
 civil contract. On his restoration to health, one of his first 
 acts was to crown this engagement by adding the religious 
 rite ; whether out of concession to her feeling and his mother's, 
 or from any relenting instinct of undefined gratitude, remains 
 unknown. The softened mood, whatever it was, had no 
 durability. His domestic life soon became a burden to him 
 through discordances of disposition, which grew harsher 
 with time ; and, after seventeen years, the marriage was 
 dissolved in 1842 3 . 
 
 1 Phil. Pos. VI. Pref. x. note. 
 
 8 Ibid. xi. Comp. Discours sur 1'Ensemble du Positivisme, Pref. xiii. 
 
 8 Pol. Pos. I. Pref. 8.
 
 II.] COMTE. 387 
 
 The renewed course of sixty lectures was completed 
 during the year 1829 ; but the process of committing them 
 to writing, which produced the first volume of the Philo- 
 sophie Positive in 1830, extended over twelve years. This long 
 demand on time was not due to laborious study or literary 
 fastidiousness ; for Comte tells us that he was no great reader, 
 and knew nothing, in the originals, of the chief foreign writers 
 on his own subjects, of Vico, or Kant, or Herder, or Hegel, 
 and never cared to look at the Journals, scientific or political : 
 the table of contents of the Academy's transactions was enough 
 for him. Nor did he waste a minute in moulding or mending 
 his composition ; but, having thought but his whole scheme 
 and got it under his hand, wrote out everything rapidly and 
 repented of little or nothing 1 . But many an involuntary 
 interruption arrested his work : the Paris revolution of 1830 ; 
 change of occupation through successive appointments at the 
 Polytechnique in 1832 and 1837 ; dissensions with objectionable 
 savans ; and res angusta domi, unrelieved, alas ! by patience 
 and harmony. 
 
 And when at last, in 1842, he is rid at once of his work and 
 of his wife, new troubles come upon him from the authorities 
 of the Polytechnic School. He had filled two offices there, 
 both of them subordinate, and both subject to annual election; 
 that of Repetiteur, or Tutor (from 1832), and that of Examiner 
 of candidates for admission (from 1837) ; neither of them well 
 remunerated, but each acceptable to him as more sparing of 
 his time than private teaching. They had incidentally af- 
 forded him a further advantage which he had not contemplated. 
 During a temporary absence of the chief Mathematical Profes- 
 sor in 1836, he had been entrusted with the duties of that im- 
 portant chair, and by his masterly performance of them had 
 earned a reputation with both the Director (Dulong) and the 
 students, which marked him out as its fittest occupant on the 
 next vacancy. When the vacancy occurred in 1840, his candi- 
 dature, eminently popular in the school, was supported by a 
 majority of the Council (which included the professors), with 
 the approval of its head. But Dulong died at the critical mo- 
 ment, and the smothered jealousy which his authority had 
 
 2 Phil. Pos. VI. Pref. xxxv xxxvii. and note. 
 
 C C 2
 
 388 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 suppressed sprang to ascendency ; and, unfortunately for 
 Comte, in this election the Council of the Institution was 
 associated with another body, the Academy of Sciences, 
 which he had treated with habitual contempt and blamed 
 Guizot for resuscitating, and in which he had made himself 
 numerous enemies by arrogant and disparaging words 1 . 
 Among the savans, the ' metaphysical party,' instinctively 
 hating him as their destined destroyer, had long pursued 
 the policy in the periodical literature which was mainly in 
 their hands, of 'burking' his writings and keeping him 
 in ignominious obscurity ; and their leader, Guizot, after 
 high appreciation of his survey of human knowledge in the 
 early volumes of his great work, had shirked the suggested 
 founding, in the College de France, of a chair of ' History of 
 the Positive Sciences,' because Comte alone was qualified to 
 fill it : and so, this powerful minister, being ' but an arrogant 
 pedant and piece of ambitious vulgarity 2 ,' was naturally 
 eager to suppress the man whom he had wronged. The 
 ' theological party,' offended at his affirming, in his annual 
 lectures on astronomy, that morals were independent of 
 religious belief, had the same reason for withholding from 
 him every public function as they had for procuring the 
 condemnation at Home, early in 1842, of the first part of 
 his PhUosophie Positive. 'The scientific party,' chiefly de- 
 voted to the inorganic field, were led by the mathematicians, 
 who resented his exposure of them as specialists and his 
 reduction of their claims ; while the scanty band of rising 
 biologists, though with De Blainville favourable to him, could 
 as yet only feebly struggle against the dominance of the 
 physiciens. Under this combination of influences, his very 
 letter of candidature was suppressed by the Committee of the 
 Academy, and the decisive recommendation was given to 
 an inferior competitor, a member of their own body 3 . 
 
 This irregular proceeding wrung from him indignant 
 protests, which, however natural, were sure to exasperate 
 his enemies more than they inspirited his friends, and so 
 
 1 Phil. Pos. VI. Pref. xiii. seqq. ; and Lettres de Comte a J. S. Mill, Avant- 
 propos and Annexes. 
 
 a Lettres a Mill, p. 33. s Phil. Pos. VI. Pref. xix xxix.
 
 II.] COMTE. 389 
 
 to increase the insecurity of his position. Complaint and 
 defiance do not go well together; the pity awakened by 
 the one is cancelled by resentment at the other ; and in 
 Comte's recitals of his wrongs there is an incongruous blend- 
 ing of whining and scorn which repels even willing sympathy. 
 In telling the story of his disappointed candidature, he had 
 treated powerful men, as Guizot and Arago, with acrimo- 
 nious invective, and had spurned for incapacity the authori- 
 tative intellectual classes of his country ; and it was hardly 
 possible "that the alienations thus occasioned should not at last 
 be brought home to him in some palpable form. He had 
 always regarded his annual re-election to his office in the 
 Polytechnic as merely formal, and had been justified by all 
 precedents in doing so ; but, to his dismay, the vote of the Coun- 
 cil in May, 1844, negatived his reappointment as Examiner by a 
 majority of nine against five 1 . As, however, the duties were 
 devolved upon no definite successor, but only on a locum tenens, 
 a reasonable hope remained of his reinstatement at the next 
 election ; and to provide him with an interim compensation, 
 Mr. Mill raised among a few of his friends, headed by Sir W. 
 Molesworth and Mr. Grote, a fund sufficient for his modest 
 wants 2 . When a second and a third year passed without his 
 restoration, the provisional contributions flagged 3 ; Mill be- 
 came tired and Comte querulous, and their correspondence 
 ceased 4 . In 1848, the suspense was ended by the final set- 
 tlement of the Examinership in other hands, entailing the 
 further loss of an engagement as mathematical tutor in a 
 dependent school 5 . His nearest disciples came to the rescue ; 
 and under their distinguished chief, M. Littrd, issued on 
 November 12 a Circular appealing to his known European 
 admirers, inviting them to join in securing him an annual 
 subsidy of 5,000 francs 6 . The response was encouraging, and 
 passed the required amount in 1852, when he was severed 
 from the Polytechnic by losing his second office of Rtpeti- 
 
 1 Robinet, ap. Lettres a Mill, Avant-propos ix. and Lettre XXV, p. 242. The 
 decision was confirmed by the Council in December, on a vote of ten to nine. 
 Ibid. p. 284. 
 
 2 Lettres a Mill, pp. 251. 265. 3 Ibid. pp. 270. 274. 388 seqq. 
 4 Ibid. pp. 393. 410. 425 ; and Avant-propos, x. 5 Pol. Pos. I. Pref. 22. 
 
 6 Ibid. IV. Pref. App. xxii.
 
 390 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 teur l . The fund settled into an institution ( ; Subside Sacer- 
 dotal'), a kind of Peter's Pence in support of the 'High 
 Priest of Humanity,' claimed and acknowledged by an 
 annual letter from its recipient 2 . 
 
 Mill, though declining the position of an English party- 
 agent in the dissensions of the Paris savans, made no secret 
 of his admiration for Comte's great work, and contributed 
 much to its reputation in this country. On his recommenda- 
 tion Sir John Herschel read it, and was thus led to make its 
 second volume, specially the Twenty-seventh Le9on on Sidereal 
 Astronomy, a subject of criticism in his Presidential Address at 
 the annual meeting (1845) of the ' British Association for the 
 Advancement of Science.' Comte, aware that he was study- 
 ing the book, had not expected a very favourable judgment 
 upon it ; for it absolutely repudiates all Sidereal Astronomy 
 (to which especially the Herschels had been devoted), as 
 beyond the range of human knowledge, and limits the science 
 to the Solar System. Notwithstanding, therefore, the 'in- 
 genious,' 'luminous,' and 'judicious' character of Herschel's 
 genius, he suspects him not 'profound' enough to appreciate 
 the Positive Philosophy 3 . It turned out, however, that the 
 President's criticism did not address itself to the attack upon 
 his favourite study, but dealt with an argument, occurring in 
 the same Le9on, on behalf of Laplace's hypothesis as to the for- 
 mation of the Solar System. Admitting that of such an hypo- 
 thesis a ' numerical verification 'is 'an indispensable criterion,' 
 Comte had sought and, as he supposed, found one, by com- 
 puting the consequences of Laplace's assumed elements, of a 
 rotating incandescent nebula, leaving behind, as it cools and 
 shrinks, successive planetary rings, and obtaining a series of 
 numbers which agree with the actually observed relations of 
 our planetary system 4 . It appears, however, when his primary 
 assumptions are closely scrutinised, that they omit, as compli- 
 cating the problem, all the conditions that are special to 
 Laplace's hypothesis, except its required time of the nebular 
 rotation (which by no means agrees with the sun's) ; and that 
 
 1 Robinet ap. Lettres a Mill, Avant-propos x. 
 
 3 Pol. Pos. IV. Pref. App. xxv. seqq. 3 Lettres a Mill, p. 276. 
 
 4 Phil. Pos. II. 376, seqq.
 
 II.] COMTE. 391 
 
 they are cut down to ' Huyghens's theorems for finding the 
 values of centrifugal forces in combination with the law 
 of gravitation,' i.e. to the simple conditions from which 
 Newton x demonstrates the third law of Kepler, ' that the 
 squares of the periodic times of planets are as the cubes of 
 their mean distances from the sun.' These numerical relations, 
 therefore, would equally exist, ' whether the sun threw off the 
 planets or not ; ' whilst, if it did, the time of his rotation could 
 not be what it is ; and the alleged verification suffers total 
 collapse 2 . ' I really should consider,' says Sir John Herschel, 
 ' some apology needed for even mentioning an argument of the 
 kind to such a meeting, were it not that this very reasoning, 
 so ostentatiously put forward and so utterly baseless, has been 
 eagerly received among us as the revelation of a profound 
 analysis.' In this last allusion he has in view the author of 
 the 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation 3 ,' together with 
 J. S. Mill, and probably Sir D. Brewster's notice of Comte in 
 the 'Edinburgh Review,' 1838. Mill immediately reported to 
 Comte this serious criticism and the discussion upon it, in 
 which Sedgwick joined as an ally of the President ; and it is 
 difficult to watch their condolence with each other without a 
 touch of amused sympathy. That they should make the least 
 of the intellectual slip might well be conceded to the first 
 impulse of self-excuse. But they vilify the motives of their 
 critic, so largely honoured before. ' You have already,' says 
 Comte, 'sufficiently proved, with an air of politeness, the 
 malevolence and even bad faith of Herschel. He has too 
 much judgment and knowledge to believe seriously and 
 with good faith in the insinuations of ignorance which he 
 dares to throw out.' ' He must inwardly feel the irresistible 
 force of my main argument ' against ' the pretended Sidereal 
 Astronomy ; ' ' and, depend upon it, will always be on the look- 
 out for pretexts for weakening my scientific authority. Such, 
 I take it, is the essential motive of his conduct towards me.' 
 Sedgwick is the object of a different suspicion. He is the un- 
 
 1 Princ. Phil. I. iii. 15. 
 
 3 British Association Reports, Cambridge meeting, 1845, xxxviii, xxxix, and note. 
 3 Now known to be the late Robert Chambers. See the recent edition, with its 
 interesting Preface by Mr. Ireland.
 
 392 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 conscious tool of Arago's malice ; and has been carefully 
 got up for his part by being surreptitiously furnished with a 
 manuscript Memoir e of Comte's, presented to the Academy 
 in 1835 and preserved in its archives ; no one but the virtual 
 dictator of the Academy is in a position to commit such a breach 
 of official confidence. For these reasons the Positive Philosopher 
 thinks ' neither of these two gentlemen deserves the honour of 
 any public reply ; ' and he will not, for such adversaries, break 
 his rule of silence. At the same time he intimates his inten- 
 tion, should the Philosophic Positive reach a second edition, of 
 cancelling the whole discussion of Laplace's cosmogony, as ' not 
 sufficiently positive ; ' though he proposes not only to retain, 
 but to strengthen, his attack upon Sidereal Astronomy 1 . Was 
 there ever a more melancholy shuffle out of the simple duty of 
 saying, ' I thank you for clearing me of an illusion "? ' 
 
 Comte, however, had to encounter this incident when he 
 was not at his best. He had left behind him the ' two years 
 of indispensable calm' which he felt needful after the dis- 
 solution of his marriage. He complains of a recurrence of 
 nervous excitement 2 which reminds him of a former crisis, 
 and warns him to keep worries at a distance. And he is in 
 the first stage of a new birth which is to plant him amid the 
 surprises of a fresh world of experiences. Hitherto, he was 
 only half 'evolved;' as the Scotch say, 'he was not all there;' 
 his organising intellect had taken advantage of its precocity 
 and assumed the supreme place. True it is that during the 
 ' profound negative phase ' of ' revolutionary aberration ' 
 which preceded his systematic development, a certain ' vene- 
 ration' and 'enthusiasm' 'preserved him from sophistical 
 demoralisation, though leaving him peculiarly exposed for 
 a time to the seductions of a shallow and depraved juggler 3 .' 
 But on the whole his affective nature had remained in the 
 chrysalis state: he had cared little for his mother till she 
 was gone ; becoming aware of the serious ' lacunae ' in his 
 character, he had taken a wife expressly to remedy his 'in- 
 voluntary defect ' of tenderness ; but was mortified to find 
 her, like the medicines of M. Esquirol, the ' greatest obstacle 
 
 1 Lettres k Mill, 362368. 373. 2 Ibid. 340. 342. 356. 
 
 3 Cat&jhisme positiviste, Pref. xxzii.
 
 II.] COMTE. 393 
 
 to his tardy coming to himself 1 .' Now, however, when he 
 was forty-seven years of age, a deliverer appeared who would 
 enable him to make up for lost time. He became acquainted 
 with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a lady who was suffering 
 through ' an equivalent fatality ' to his own loneliness, being 
 separated from a husband sentenced to the galleys, and who, 
 in her docility, was ready to exchange natures with him, and 
 consolidate herself into a Positivist whilst she softened him 
 into a romantic woman. In the fragments of her writings 
 and conversation there is nothing to explain the mood of 
 chivalric devotion to which she brought her new preceptor. 
 A novelette ('Lucie') of hers which Comte has reprinted 2 , and 
 which is founded on the story of her own unhappy matri- 
 monial lot, shows indeed that her respect for the marriage 
 tie was proof against the most persuasive incentives to hold 
 it annulled, and so evinces her sympathy with Comte' s own 
 approval of the strict Catholic doctrine of conjugal obliga- 
 tion ; but, beyond this favourable moral indication, it has no 
 literary interest to bear out the lofty praises of her intellectual 
 gifts, or warrant her own hope of overbalancing the influence 
 of George Sand. She wakened in him, however, and concen- 
 trated upon herself, the affections due to every relation of 
 life : she was to him at once his betrothed, his daughter, his 
 disciple, his redeemer, his divinity ; the ' incomparable angel,' 
 as he himself says, 'whom the ensemble of human destinies 
 had commissioned, to make him their worthy organ for finally 
 achieving the gradual perfection of our moral nature 3 .' The 
 change wrought, after mid-life, in this man of large, full, and 
 daring mind, by an undistinguished young woman of thirty, 
 is analogous, in its suddenness and depth, to what is known 
 as the process of conversion ; and its excesses, at once ludi- 
 crous and pathetic, are due to the incongruous heaping on 
 a finite nature of affections that are meant and measured 
 only for the Infinite. Certain it is that the 'two philo- 
 sophical lives,' separated by ' the incomparable moral regene- 
 ration due to his holy passion 4 ,' are more conspicuous for 
 contrast than for continuity; and though he regards the 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. I. Pref. 8. a Ibid. Pref. xxii. seqq. 
 
 3 Ibid. I. Pref 8. * Ibid. 6.
 
 394 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 second as yielding his ' main construction,' and labours to 
 establish its logical connection with the first, its superiority 
 consists in a recognition of moral conceptions and appreciation 
 of an order of sentiments plainly inadmissible on the prin- 
 ciples of his earlier philosophy. It enthrones affections, it 
 appeals to enthusiasms, it institutes practices, it predicts fu- 
 turities, which are chimerical, unless the logic of his funda- 
 mental structure be unsound. 
 
 In what then consists that 'moral resurrection ' which he 
 owed to this wonderful Clotilde, with her ' complete superiority 
 to all that is offered by the study of the past, the observation 
 of the present, and even the conception of the future l ? ' In 
 the discovery that the heart is to have the priwiacy over the 
 head 2 ; that the movement of humanity is from the affective 
 life, while the intellectual function is simply regulative and 
 selective. Hence, the laws of social progress, though working 
 within a world under physical, chemical, and organic rules, 
 must be sought in the constitution of the human affections ; 
 and the art of social progress must consist in making the best 
 of that constitution, and must go for its* power to the natures 
 in which the emotional impulses are most intense and gene- 
 rous. It is among women and the proletary classes that this 
 condition is best fulfilled 3 ; and from them, accordingly, Comte 
 henceforth chiefly learns, and to them he hopes first to teach, 
 that crowning science of Sociology, which his ' regeneration ' 
 now enables him to create. In this are summed up the intel- 
 lectual and moral results which 'all sympathetic hearts and 
 synthetic minds' will recognise in his fresh inspiration, and 
 which already draw forth the homage 'of both sexes to the 
 new Beatrice : ' this latest ' service of his will secure for her 
 name an inseparable union with his own in the most distant 
 memory of a grateful humanity : ' for has she not enabled him 
 to become a twofold organ of human progress, ' following up 
 the career of an Aristotle by that of a St. Paul 4 ? ' 
 
 It may well surprise us that Comte should be ambitious of 
 resembling so very theological a saint as the Apostle of the 
 Gentiles. Probably the analogy, as it opened upon him in 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. Pref. 9. a Ibid. Pref. 3, 4. 3 Cat^chisme Pos. Pref. xvii. 
 
 * Ibid, xxiii.
 
 II.] COMTE. 395 
 
 his new birth, was not less surprising to himself than it is to 
 us. But it is perfectly simple. Paul he invariably treats as 
 the Founder of Christianity : Comte is the Founder of the 
 Religion which steps into the place vacated by Christianity. 
 Paul instituted a Universal Christendom, crossing the boun- 
 daries of race and language, and abating political separation by 
 spiritual ties: Comte creates a Common Worship and inter- 
 national hierarchy for the ' Republic of the West,' in the pre- 
 sence of which the temporal power of each country shall be 
 but a provincial executive. That this apostolic conception 
 of himself was a new one, emerging from the influence of his 
 ' angelic disciple,' is proved by its total absence from even the 
 prophetic part of his first great work. There he is content 
 to stand on the intellectual roll of honour as the consum- 
 mator of philosophy ; and in his forecast of renovated society, 
 with its perfected education, morals, and art, there is no hint 
 of any substituted equivalent for the eliminated theological 
 ideas, of any cidtus, any priesthood, any temples, any Grand- 
 etre as the object of devotion. All these start into sudden 
 existence, and are eagerly systematised, introducing all sorts 
 of sacerdotal language and pontifical pretension. Indications 
 of this singular turn of mind already appear in the author's 
 first ' Philosophical Letter ' to Clotilde, while she is still greeted 
 on her Fete with the formal address ' Madame.' Here he 
 praises the ancient practice of Apotheosis, whereby the bene- 
 factors of mankind were introduced at death into the assembly 
 of the gods : it was at once a legitimate expression of venera- 
 tion and an impressive patronage of virtue : only, it had this 
 drawback: in a polytheistic system all 'the Divine depart- 
 ments were so well rilled up already, that these new gods 
 ivithout portfolios could seldom obtain much importance.' 
 'The simple beatification under the Christian monotheism 
 perfected this essential part of every social organisation 1 .' 
 Yet the Divine realm to which the saint is raised is pre- 
 occupied by an infinite excellence which eclipses and absorbs 
 him, and to which he can add nothing distinctive ; and the 
 images of the persons canonised will never be clear and their 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. Pref. xxxiv. Conf.Lettres a Mill XXXV, XXXVII. with the Saints 
 Clotilde of which the recipient of this ' Philosophical Letter ' is identical.
 
 396 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 impression durable, till they pass into a heaven empty of all 
 but human forms and capable of being enriched by fresh 
 types of moral beauty. While the sun dominates the sky, 
 you cannot see the stars ; and so, Comte seems to think, till 
 God is blotted out from the dome of thought, no eye can be 
 raised with discriminative reverence to the lights of various 
 magnitude that form the constellations of past genius and 
 goodness. He therefore fills the blank of a vacated infinity 
 by crowding it with the ghosts of personal or historic memory, 
 and sets up the borrowed moonlight of ' hero-worship ' as the 
 sole Divine luminary of life ; and, after long denouncing the 
 'anthropomorphism' of other religions, ends with systematic 
 adoration of actual men and women. For such in truth it is, 
 however veiled its character may be by running back to the 
 ' metaphysic stage ' for an abstract entity and calling it the 
 worship of 'Humanity;' and such it is confessed to be by 
 M. Littre 7 when he calls it 'Le culte des homines 1 ,' and by 
 Comte himself when he says, ' Henceforth the knee of man 
 will bend to woman only,' who will no longer have to fear 
 the ' terrible rivalry of a vindictive God V 
 
 It is a touching fact, however, which may almost silence 
 criticism, that the institutes of this new worship were the 
 creation of a deep and swift-coming sorrow. The 'angel 
 visit' of Clotilde was over in a year: while he was in the 
 midst of the regenerate social philosophy inspired by her in- 
 fluence, a painful illness snatched her away, on April 5, 1846 3 . 
 The more this event filled him with resentment against the 
 blundering universe 4 , the more did it intensify the love so 
 cruelly bruised, and rend away every limit till the affection 
 became infinite and passed into absolute worship. He erects 
 an altar to her in his room, at which, three times a day, he 
 realises her image and breathes forth his prayers. He makes 
 a pilgrimage to her tomb each week; he dedicates to her a 
 commemorative anniversary. And so little exclusive is her 
 spirit that in all this her image appears to him not alone, 
 but associated with those of his venerated mother and his 
 
 1 De la Phil. Pos. II. Application, 157. 
 
 2 Digconrs sur 1'Ensemble du Positivisme, p. 253. 
 
 8 Lettres H Mill, p. 413. Pol. Pos. D&licace, xv, xvi.
 
 II.] COMTE. 397 
 
 exemplary cook, Sophie Bliot; who, with her affectionate 
 fidelity and 'her happy inability to read,' afforded just the 
 sample he required of the serving- woman's worth: so that 
 from his devotions to the ' virtuous ensemble of these three 
 admirable feminine types ' his character acquired complete 
 conformity to the conditions of the social state, viz. venera- 
 tion for superiors, attachment to equals, and kindness to in- 
 feriors T . Thus did the inspiration of his ' pure and immortal 
 companion ' give birth to moral results beyond all hope, and 
 she who had been to him as his 'objective daughter' became 
 by death his ' subjective mother 2 ,' and through him the proto- 
 type of perfected society. 
 
 From this private ritual appears to have sprung the whole 
 of the ' Positivist religion.' Early in 1847 Comte delivered 
 weekly a public course of unwritten lectures, each of three 
 or four hours' duration, the introductory portion of which 
 was soon worked up into literary form, and published in 
 the summer of 1848, under the title Discours sur V Ensemble 
 du Positivisme. It constitutes in itself a compendious whole ; 
 but it stands also as the ' Preliminary Discourse ' to the first 
 volume (1851) of his Politique Positive. In this work the 
 rudimentary ideas and ceremonial of his own new life re- 
 appear with a vast expansion. The commemoration of the 
 beloved private dead is enlarged into the ' systematic worship 
 of humanity,' into the ideal of which they have but shed the 
 dew-drops of their pure lives ; and the conception is wrought 
 out into Levitical detail, of a composite ' Supreme Being,' 
 ' composed of his own adorers ' and ever growing as the his- 
 toric ages pass. An organised priesthood, a breviary of ser- 
 vices and fetes, a calendar of the thirteen months in the 
 readjusted year, each bearing the name of some towering 
 personality in the past, a list of retrograde wrong-doers re- 
 served for public cursing on an appointed day of malediction, 
 are all provided for and indicated with the exactness of an 
 Ephemeria*. Sentiment and imagination, once promoted to 
 the supreme place and secure of deference from the intellect, 
 are not soon stopped in the fascinating process of inventing 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. Pref. 12, 13. * Catechisme Pos. Pref. xxiv, xxv. 
 
 3 Discours, 326 346.
 
 398 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 a religion and aspiring to the prize which the 'Catholic unity' 
 has lost ; and so further steps are taken. In the next year, 
 the faithful are surrounded by a group of 'guardian angels,' 
 and instructed in the observance of ' the nine sacraments ; ' 
 at three of which Comte himself, in 1850. officiated in his 
 capacity of ' Priest of Humanity V At the close of that year 
 he was deeply engaged with ' The General Theory of Keligion,' 
 which opens the second volume of his Politique Positive; and 
 his thoughts were carried by it so far beyond the limits of 
 any 'general' treatment that, to preserve them while they 
 were fresh and present them while they were clear, he sus- 
 pended his main work and produced, by way of Excursus, 
 the Cate'chisme Positiviste, intended as a complete and per- 
 manent Manual of the new faith and cultus 2 . Several ad- 
 ditions and modifications are introduced to perfect the scheme ; 
 but the change which strikes the reader most is in the more 
 embittered antithesis between the 'servants of humanity' 
 and the 'slaves of God 3 ,' in the more intense aversion to 
 revolutionary restlessness and anarchy, and obvious leaning 
 towards absolute government, and the more confident spirit 
 of European propagandism. 
 
 The growing ascendency in Comte of mystical sentiment and 
 hieratic pretension changed more or less the character of his 
 following. It attracted some sensitive and enthusiastic natures 
 that were beyond the reach of his intellectual organisation of 
 the sciences; and actually began to produce a literature of 
 devotion: one of the young converts, M. Lonchampt, having 
 issued ' a valuable set of touching prayers ' for home use 4 . On 
 the other hand, it repelled the severe thinkers who had been 
 won by his commanding survey of the whole field of know- 
 ledge, and brilliant attempt to reduce history to law. They 
 did not want a reproduction of the Catholic directorate, 
 though they themselves were to be its priests ; nor did they 
 like the total alienation of Comte from the active self-assertion 
 of the Revolution ; his approval of the Parisian coup d'etat and 
 usurped dictatorship of 1851 5 ; his praise of Louis Napoleon's 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. I. Pref. 1 8, 19. 
 
 8 Ibid. II. Pref. ix. Catechisme Pref. xv, xvi. 3 Cat. Pref. i. 
 
 * Pol. Pos. I. Pref. 19. 5 Pol. Pos. III. Pref. xii.
 
 IT.] COMTE. 399 
 
 energy, prudence, and perseverance l , as guarantees of external 
 peace and promising internal regeneration 2 ; his ridiculous 
 advances by letter, with proffered presentation of his Cate- 
 chisme and published volumes of his Politique Positive, to the 
 Emperor Nicholas I, as the only European ruler who under- 
 stood his time and rightly balanced order and progress, and 
 to the Vizier Redshid Pasha at Constantinople 3 . Of those 
 who seceded under the influence of these motives, and 
 ' manifested their moral insufficiency ' by dropping their 
 subscriptions to his subsidy, a few relented and returned. 
 But the general effect of Comte's ' regenerate ' period of 
 production was to turn Positivism from a scientific organ- 
 ism into a sectarian institute, committing its adherents not 
 only to a common logic of research and synopsis of natural 
 laws, but to a polity, a ritual, and scheme of personal life, 
 little less peculiar in conception than those of the religious 
 orders. Nor can we say that they are less exclusive. The 
 problem which they aim at solving is thus defined : ' how 
 to reorganise society without God or king, under simply the 
 normal preponderance, private and public, of social feeling, 
 suitably supported by positive reason and real activity * ; ' 
 so that we ought to receive without surprise the august 
 proclamation which meets our eye on opening the Catechism, 
 ' In the name of the Past and of the Future, the Servants of 
 Humanity, speculative and practical, mean to assume as their 
 right the general direction of the world's affairs, to erect at 
 length the true Providence, moral, intellectual, and material ; 
 excluding, once for all, the slaves of God of every class, 
 Catholic, Protestant, Deist, as disturbers out of date V So 
 much in earnest is he with this anathema that it comes out 
 again before this preface closes : the positive regime, he tells 
 us, will put all retrograde folks out of the way, ' by treating 
 anyone who lingers in the theological or metaphysical state as 
 disqualified for government by weakness of brain V Even in 
 France, and among the competent appreciators of his first great 
 work, there are not a few whom this pontifical arrogance 
 
 1 Catechisme, Pref. ix. a Pol. Pos. IV. Pref. rix. 
 
 s Ibid. III. Pref. xiii, xiv ; Cat^chisme, Pref. vii, viii. 
 
 4 Discours, p. 123. 5 Pref. init. ' Ibid, xxxix.
 
 400 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 is sure to offend; and from the time of its assumption it 
 abated the attraction towards him of the higher and nobler 
 order of minds. 
 
 The 'Polytechnic spoliation' being complete in 1852, the third 
 and fourth volumes of the Politique Positive were rapidly pro- 
 duced, and appeared in the two succeeding years. With them 
 his life-work virtually closed. Whether or not he had really 
 created a new science, and secured Sociology as the apex to 
 the pyramid of knowledge, he had at least developed and 
 exhausted his conception of it, and had left no room for 
 another tier of true thought. He had indeed contemplated, 
 and briefly sketched at the close of his Philosophic Positive 
 a further series of works, the promise of which his second trea- 
 tise did not completely fulfil. Of that scheme there still re- 
 mained unexecuted (1) a synthetic exposition of mathematical 
 philosophy, which his successors should follow up by similar 
 development of philosophical method in astronomy, physics, 
 chemistry, and biology ; (2) in the sphere of applied sociology, 
 a volume on positive education ; and (3) a systematic treatise 
 on the action of man upon nature 1 . In 1854, he still indulged 
 the hope of carrying out this design 2 . Eut it advanced no 
 further than the first volume, published in 1856 under the 
 general title Synthese Subjective. His rate of production had 
 become less rapid ; and it is probable that the recasting of 
 familiar thoughts into a new order (and such was essentially 
 the task which he had set himself) was not very stimulat- 
 ing to him, as his later life steeped him more and more in 
 meditative feeling. His intellectual enthusiasm paled before 
 the deepening glow of his benevolence, in perfect accordance 
 with the rule of his philosophy ; and his habits resembled 
 those of an ascetic devotee rather than those of a reorganiser 
 of human knowledge. Every day he rose at five, and never 
 neglected his own ritual of 'prayer,' or his chapter of the 
 Imitatio Ckristi, or his passage of Dante; and every Wednes- 
 day afternoon he might be seen at the grave of Clotilde de 
 Vaux. His meals were scrupulously frugal and scanty ; and 
 his dinner regularly closed with the slow eating of a piece 
 of dry bread, with thoughts compassionately turned towards 
 
 1 Phil. FOB. VI. 887894. 2 Pol. Pos. Pref. 5, 6.
 
 II.] COMTE. 401 
 
 the multitude of poor by whom even such a morsel was 
 hardly earned. In this temper of undoubted and deepening 
 humanity he approached the end of his career, and died on 
 September 5, 1857. 
 
 2. Outline of his System of Thought. 
 
 In sketching the outline of Comte's system of thought, 
 I cannot avoid saying more than seems needful for my im- 
 mediate object (viz. to estimate its bearing on ethical theory), 
 yet less than will give an adequate impression of his large- 
 ness and keenness of intellectual view. As he himself insists 
 that his doctrine of Morals and Society is the last of several 
 links whence it must not be detached, it cannot be rightly 
 judged but as their dependent term ; and they must be 
 exhibited as its antecedents. But when he has conducted us, 
 step by step, to its principle, in the estimate of which our 
 work is done, he launches out, for inductive illustration, into 
 a vast historical survey of European life and morals through- 
 out the Pagan and Christian civilisation. This appears to 
 me by far his most brilliant achievement, and, though va- 
 riously open to special criticism, leaves a magnificent im- 
 pression of his sympathetic insight and his breadth of com- 
 bination. Even if it proved, however, the particular law of 
 development which it is adduced to establish, a generalisation 
 of history is not a philosophy of morals, and might be true 
 or untrue without affecting the fundamental doctrine of 
 obligation. I must, therefore, leave this sequel to our main 
 problem of method with the remark, that nowhere have I 
 found the molecular infinitude of human movements through 
 past centuries gathered into more luminous masses and traced 
 along clearer paths ; nowhere, especially, have I met with a 
 juster appreciation of the play of social elements in medieval 
 Christendom, than in the fifth and sixth volumes of the 
 Philosophic Positive. 
 
 The structural framework of principles pertaining to our 
 object may be laid out as follows : 
 
 A. LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE. The Limits of Knowledge 
 
 VOL. i. D d
 
 402 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 are assumed by Comte to extend no further than the observ- 
 able finite contents of Space and Time. So far as objects and 
 events in that field awaken in us perceptions of Sense, they 
 constitute the materials of cognition : we notice their similari- 
 ties and differences : we learn their order of occurrence ; and 
 there our dealings with them stop. We are naturally impelled, 
 it is true, to press upon them with further questions, which 
 look behind and within them as things perceived : especially 
 with regard to each kind of things, ' what is the one persistent 
 type that reappears in every member ? ' and with regard to 
 each kind of change, what is the cause to which it is due ? 
 Nor is it denied that this natural impulse is the original 
 spring of all our curiosity; that, but for it, no light of in- 
 telligence would ever have been sought or found. Never- 
 theless, it is purely illusory, and sets us on a quest that can 
 never be satisfied : it asks for reality other than appearance ; 
 for change, something more than its position in time ; and 
 neither of these is to be had for any asking. The true Posi- 
 tivist is taught, at his very initiation, ' the necessary inanity of 
 the search for causes,' and warned against the mystic's illusion 
 in pursuing them 1 . ' Every proposition which is not reducible, 
 in the last resort, to the simple statement of a fact, particular 
 or general, must be without real and intelligible sense V In 
 conformity with this rule, and in order ' to get rid of the vain 
 pretension to investigate the causes of phenomena,' Comte 
 would cancel all dynamic language and forbid the use of the 
 word force : ' Forces are only movements produced or tending 
 to be produced ; ' ' but though happily this is pretty well 
 understood now-a-days, yet an essential reform is still needed, 
 if not in the conception, at least in the habitual language, in 
 order to cancel altogether the old metaphysical notion of force, 
 and present more accurately than hitherto the true point of 
 view 3 .' We must even be upon our guard against mystifying 
 the only thing which we can apprehend about phenomena, 
 viz. their laws: the word denotes simply 'their invariable 
 relations of succession and resemblance V And, finally, under 
 phenomena we must not include more than external facts, that 
 
 1 Cat4chigme, pp. 43. 56; Discours, 391. a Phil. Pos. VI. 70'. 
 
 3 Phil. Pos. I. 544; III. 652. * Phil. Pos. I. 5.
 
 II.] COMTE. 403 
 
 may be objects of perception ; for it is a pure illusion that we 
 can know the changes of our internal history, e.g. our intellec- 
 tual processes, or our spontaneous emotions. When indeed we 
 have impulses that tend to rush into action and stir our limbs, 
 we may have self-knowledge of what takes place, because the 
 organ moved is an external object to the organ that impels ; 
 but where they coincide, and that which feels is no other than 
 that which has also to know, the double feat is pronounced by 
 Comte to be impossible : ' by an invincible necessity the 
 human mind can directly observe all phenomena except its 
 own 1 .' 
 
 The impossible knowledge, against the semblance of which 
 we are thus cautioned, Comte habitually designates as abso- 
 lute, doubtless under the idea that it pretends to understand 
 something per se, apart from any history of it in time ; and 
 possible knowledge he opposes to it as relative, because resolv- 
 able into a perceived order of grouping or of consecution 
 among changes observed. His ban against the former he con- 
 denses into the dictum, 'there is only one absolute principle, 
 that there is nothing absolute.' It is singular that instead of 
 adhering to the proper correlate of this excommunicated ad- 
 jective, viz. the word relative, he substitutes what is not far 
 from absolute over again, viz. the epithet Positive, and selects 
 it as the baptismal name of his own philosophy. The word, 
 it is plain, does not define, but only affirms : it does not single 
 out, from the contents of the general conception ' philosophy,' 
 the mark which saves the species from being confounded with 
 the ' absolute ' kinds ; it simply asserts that, when you have 
 got the undefined thing, you will have secured the genuine 
 treasure, and hit upon a reality and no sham. In Comte's 
 own defence of the term, this dogmatic feature in its significa- 
 tion comes out with great naivete: ' all the Western languages 
 use it,' he says, ' to indicate the two attributes of reality and 
 at Hit y, the combination of which must henceforth be all that 
 is needful to define the true genius of philosophy 2 .' It is 
 a pity, however, to overlook the difference between a title 
 and a puff. 
 
 B. CONTENTS AND ORDER OF KNOWLEDGE. After dis- 
 
 1 Phil. Pos. I. 35. * Discours, 56. 
 
 Dd2
 
 404 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 missing whatever is beyond human cognisance, the Posi- 
 tivist addresses himself to the survey of what lies within 
 its range. The Contents and Arrangement of Knowledge 
 were early studied by Comte, with a resulting classification 
 of sciences, which by its precision and luminousness has 
 excited high admiration far beyond the limits of his School. 
 His assumption, that perceptible phenomena constitute the 
 sole objects of knowledge, enabled and compelled him to be 
 content with a single fundamentuni division-is, and to raise 
 his whole structure upon the same base ; in contrast with 
 those who recognise some other source of truth (as self- 
 introspection) than sensible perception, and with whom 
 therefore the edifice must take the form rather of two 
 parallel columns than of an all-including pyramid. He 
 disposes the sciences in the order of their increasing com- 
 plexity, beginning with the simplest, viz. the Mathematics, 
 and ending with Sociology, which has to reckon with the 
 whole nature of the most fully organised being. Or, to 
 vary the mode of reaching the same arrangement, we may 
 say, each science takes charge of some specified attribute 
 or attributes of things, to investigate and interpret. Some 
 of these are universal, and cannot be absent anywhere, nay, 
 do not even want material things to house them at all ; as 
 extension and number need only the varieties of space and 
 successions of time for the existence of their relations. 
 Nothing, therefore, asks so little for its conditions as geo- 
 metry and arithmetic ; and nothing is so wide in applica- 
 tion; for everything has measure. 
 
 If there were but one kind of matter in the world, e.g. 
 hydrogen, or carbon, or silver, not without motion, there 
 would everywhere be definite forms and magnitudes and 
 velocities subject to quantitative comparison, and realising 
 geometrical relations. The first science, therefore, would be 
 at work upon the field. But when it had done all, there 
 would remain still a group of phenomena of which it could 
 render no account, e.g. changes in the aggregation of parts, 
 in the direction and rapidity of their motion, in the density 
 and cohesion of masses ; and to find the rules to which these 
 conformed would require protracted and recorded observa-
 
 II.] COMTE. 405 
 
 tions, reduced at last to generalised expression. The results, 
 when obtained, would constitute a second science, holding 
 good for every system built of the materials known to us. 
 That science is Physics, comprising the laws of all phenomena 
 depending on the universal properties of matter. It pre- 
 supposes, it needs, it uses the mathematics ; but is con- 
 stituted by superadded investigations of its own. 
 
 I have allowed myself here to deviate a little from Comte's 
 exposition, in order to be more strictly true to his idea. He 
 interposes Astronomy between the mathematics and physics. 
 But between celestial physics and terrestrial the only differ- 
 ence is this : that the heavenly bodies, being inaccessible 
 except to sight, disclose to us only a part of the phenomena 
 inseparable from all matter: to learn the rest, we have to 
 seek bodies which we can manipulate in experiment and com- 
 pel to answer our testing questions. It was natural that 
 the stars should stand as the most eminent representatives 
 of what happened to mere material masses, as such, so long 
 as they exhibit to us only motion and mechanism in excep- 
 tional isolation. But Newton has thrown the earth in among 
 them, and made one science run through all ; nor is there 
 more reason for distinguishing the physics than the optics 
 of the heavens from those of our planet. Moreover, if as- 
 tronomy is to include all sidereal studies, it already slips, in 
 one direction, over the boundary of physics which, on the 
 other, it does not reach ; inasmuch as the spectrum analysis 
 detects the heterogeneous composition of stars, and so carries 
 us into the ulterior field of Chemistry. 
 
 For, this third science enters whenever matter ceases to 
 be homogeneous and presents elements each with its own 
 distinctive properties. From the interplay of these differ- 
 ences a new army of phenomena starts into birth, and requires 
 fresh modes of experience to regiment and interpret its con- 
 tents by rule. To notice and register what happens, as the 
 several kinds, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, &c. com- 
 bine or separate, and to measure the quantitative stages of 
 such combinations, is the business of the chemist; a func- 
 tion which, being exercised on material already amenable 
 to the processes of the physical and mathematical observa-
 
 406 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 tory, is evidently added on to these as an upper story to a 
 lower. 
 
 When once the chemical laws respecting familiar bodies 
 have been ascertained, we can usually decompose and re- 
 compose them with nearly equal ease. But we encounter a 
 large class of cases in which the former process is possible 
 to us, but cannot be reversed: we can analyse a grain of 
 wheat, or a herring's spawn, and record the proportions ; 
 but we cannot make it ; the receipt for it is knowledge 
 only and not art. Yet the feat is spontaneously accom- 
 plished throughout the organic realm of the world ; which 
 thus presents a special order of phenomena, transcending 
 the resources of the chemical laboratory, though wrought 
 out under the conditions of its rules. These phenomena 
 are summed up under the name Life: they have to be 
 investigated separately, as if on their own account, but by 
 persons who know what has gone before ; and the resulting 
 body of generalised facts, i.e. laws, constitutes the fourth 
 science, viz. Biology. It is the first to emerge beyond the 
 inorganic field. 
 
 Among the living beings embraced within the researches 
 of biology Man stands at the summit, as the highest example 
 of organisation. The question naturally arises whether, in 
 this eminent position, he displays simply the animal attributes 
 in the supreme degree, so as to be wholly amenable to the 
 physiologist's methods ; or so clearly overpasses them as to 
 demand new modes for determining the laws of his nature. 
 Comte's answer may be anticipated from his total rejection, 
 already mentioned, of psychological self-knowledge ; for, in 
 the absence of this resource, we are thrown entirely upon 
 external observation, which is of just as much avail for man 
 as for other animals. With the Positivist, accordingly, an- 
 thropology, in its usual significance, is a purely zoological 
 study: the intellectual and affective and volitional human 
 phenomena are to be investigated, like the instincts of other 
 tribes, simply as functions of certain cerebral organs ; the 
 only difference being that those organs are, in this case, 
 more numerous and perfect than in any other. When you 
 have said that in man the recognised modes of measure-
 
 II.] COMTE. 407 
 
 ment show the brain to be relatively heavier than in his dumb 
 kindred, and that its anterior and superior regions are in 
 larger proportion to the whole, you have summed up the 
 scientific account of his characteristics as an individual 
 being. 
 
 But it was impossible to take leave of him with this 
 niggardly compliment. Comte did not think so lightly of 
 language, literature, and law ; of the formation and struggles 
 of nations ; of the sciences which he cultivated and the arts 
 and industries which they created ; or even of the temples 
 and the faiths that were no longer his ; as to feel no wonder 
 at these unique phenomena, or to find all their conditions 
 complete in an additional ounce or so of brain. He noticed 
 two things more to be prerequisites to them, Society and 
 Historic Time; without the former, individual personality 
 cannot arise and assert itself; without the latter, its type 
 cannot grow from generation to generation, or flow by 
 sympathy into collective and continuous masses of power. 
 Humanity, thus regarded, exhibited an evolution altogether 
 peculiar, and beyond the researches of the biologist ; for 
 it was a phenomenon of centuries and millenniums ; and 
 though it might be attended by slow and small organic 
 changes, he cannot recover the brain of an Alexander or 
 a Charlemagne to compare with that of a Napoleon or a 
 Bismarck. As the growth of an animal can be traced not 
 only in modified organs but in maturing instincts, even 
 within the interval between the embryo and the corpse, so 
 may the development of social life through a score of ages 
 reveal its order, though its countless members are gone, Ijy 
 the attested or surviving vestiges of activity. Historical 
 comparison, showing what they were and what they are, 
 and marking off the path and rate from start to goal, and 
 tested by the parallel story of distinct communities, will 
 bring to light the laws, if such there be, which define the 
 evolution of humanity. To establish and interpret these 
 laws is the aim, and, it is affirmed, the achievement of the 
 new and fifth science of Sociology. 
 
 To this hierarchy of sciences certain general features are 
 referred on which Comte lays great stress. Each of the
 
 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 earlier is simpler than its successor, as dealing with a 
 more elementary nature, i.e. with fewer properties. It is, 
 therefore, in logical phrase, of less comprehension, but of 
 wider extension. In virtue of this simplicity, the prior 
 terms have been the first to appear in the order of human 
 culture, and, both in individual education and in the in- 
 tellectual progress of the world, have made themselves good 
 as the base of that which follows. Further, the laws which 
 the several sciences register are of two kinds, unequally 
 present in different parts of the series ; one class defining 
 the conditions of some permanent existence; the other, 
 defining the conditions of some change: the former are 
 Statical; the latter Dynamical; and as the object must 
 exist ere it can move, the first care must be to secure the 
 statical element. There is no science on the list that has 
 not both. Even Geometry, though investigating necessary 
 and eternal properties of figure, becomes dynamical as soon 
 as it resorts to genetic definition, involving the conceived 
 motion of points and lines to create or modify relations. 
 In Physics, the positions and kinds of bodies in Space, if 
 all stood still ; in Chemistry, the enumeration of elements 
 and their combinations at any given moment; in Biology, 
 the anatomical disposition of organs ; in Sociology, the state- 
 ment of components that must coexist to make a family and 
 a State ; form the Statical groundwork of the theory ; while 
 Newton's law and Dalton's (with its later supplements), 
 Physiology, and the inductive determination of historical 
 laws, belong to its Dynamical superstructure. 
 
 Up to the verge of his final science, Comte's theory of 
 procedure has maintained a uniform direction through its 
 preceding terms ; but on reaching and entering it, performs 
 a sudden volte-face which needs explanation. The total body 
 of knowledge in each science consists, we have seen, of two 
 parts, viz. the laws already won and delivered into it, as 
 presuppositions, by its simpler predecessors ; and its own 
 inductions from its more complicated field. So long as 
 the added properties for which these inductions are needed 
 can be isolated and their phenomena exposed for separate 
 study, the new laws may be distinctly worked out and
 
 II.] COMTE. 409 
 
 joined on as a sequel to what was known before ; and the 
 ascending order will encounter no embarrassment. But the 
 more complex the functions become, the less possible is 
 such detached measurement of them : in all organised beings 
 the conditions of life, and above all in human society the 
 conditions of order, are made up of a tissue of reciprocal 
 relations with which it is difficult or impossible to reckon 
 one by one. The equilibrium depends on a consensus of 
 parts so numerous that the conception of it cannot be built 
 up piecemeal by superposition of its elements ; rather is it 
 gained, when the balance itself is lost through the over- 
 growth now of one of its tributaries, and now of another. 
 At this end of the scale, therefore, the phenomena of the 
 whole nature before us are better known than those of its 
 component functions, and the latter can emerge into view 
 only through changes in the former. Though man, objec- 
 tively regarded, i.e. as belonging to the furniture of the 
 world, is only a quadrumanous mammal plus a certain 
 appendix of functions, you cannot, by taking up and de- 
 fining one of these functions after another and throwing it 
 into your idea of an ape, get to know what human society 
 and history are : on the contrary, these are far better known 
 to you already from your participation in them by experience 
 and sympathy. Their laws, therefore, are to be learned from 
 the variations of their own phenomena, as resulting from 
 humanity as a whole ; and this must here be the primary 
 study ; while the gains of the previous sciences will hold 
 the secondai^y place, as giving account only of the scene 
 and environment of man, seldom coming into the socio- 
 logical reckoning, except as modifying the application of 
 general laws. This inversion of method from the ascend- 
 ing to the descending order, in the case of the final science, 
 is sometimes described by Comte as a change from the 
 objective to the subjective mode of treatment ; i.e. in the 
 one case you approach man from the universe : in the 
 other, the universe from man. Hence, his philosophy faces 
 both ways ; and, from imperfect attention to this fact, those 
 of his disciples who look chiefly at one face contradict at 
 times those who are attracted by the other. Thus M. Littre"s
 
 410 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 characterisation of ' the Positive Philosophy,' as a whole, is 
 that it proceeds 'from the world to man,' instead of 'from 
 man to the world,' like 'the metaphysical,' and so obtains 
 a commanding position, like astronomy when shifted from 
 a geocentric to a heliocentric position: its supreme merit 
 is that it subordinates 'subjective ideas to objective ideas.' 
 'It advances from the world to man, and not from man to 
 the world V Dr. Bridges, on the other hand, says of Comte's 
 ' Synthesis of Scientific Conceptions,' ' that synthesis was 
 subjective, and not objective. It discarded, that is to say, 
 all attempts to stand outside the universe, and to explain 
 it. The unifying influence, that which made it a synthesis, 
 was the recognition of man as the central object; of the 
 study of social and moral phenomena as the central science, 
 to which the rest were subsidiary.' It is elaborately con- 
 trasted, from this point of view, with the scientific system of 
 Descartes, whose ' Synthesis failed, because it was objective V 
 
 C. DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE. The Development of 
 human Knowledge is controlled, according to Comte, by 
 
 1 De la Phil. Pos. pp. 64. 66. 102. 
 
 2 Evolution and Positivism. Fortnightly Rev. June, 1877, pp. 853. 870; conf. 
 July 1877, p. 113. 
 
 The antithesis Subjective Objective seems to have been a snare to the 
 Positivists. Comte himself deems it indispensable, but uses it inaccurately. 
 And the sense apparently attached to the word objective by Dr. Bridges, to 
 judge from its application, I do not remember to have met with before. As a 
 designation of Method, it appears, in the very able papers cited in the text, to 
 denote Deduction of a Cosmogony from a few inadequate assumptions, as dis- 
 tinguished from Induction of such laws of phenomena as are of interest to man. 
 Out of these complex conceptions several antitheses might be extracted ; and it is 
 difficult to conjecture which is meant ; but so far as I can see, not one of them 
 answers to the terms said to be the equivalent. Induction is quite as objective as 
 deduction ; more so indeed, as the latter is a purely logical explication of con- 
 ceptions. The phenomena of his environment which interest man are no less 
 objective to him than what is inferred to happen in regions beyond his observa- 
 tion : in neither case is he the subject of them. If the principles from which a 
 deduction starts are legitimate and adequate, a Cosmos fetched out of them by 
 sound reasoning is no more objective than a solar system or a smaller domain 
 limited by the interests of man. If the principles are inadequate, it is either 
 because generalised from too partial observations, or because arbitrarily assumed 
 as & priori certainties. In the former case, the margin of swollen premiss beyond 
 the facts of the world is a logical excess, seated in the reasoner's thought ; in the 
 latter, the failure is in the substitution of a metaphysical chimera for a rule of 
 reality : in both, a gratuitous intrusion of subjective activity.
 
 II.] COMTE. 411 
 
 his triple law, valid alike for each individual mind and 
 for the historical life of humanity. The human inter- 
 pretation of the world's phenomena necessarily passes 
 through three stages, the theological, the metaphysical, 
 the positive: the two earlier dominated by the illusory 
 idea of Causation ; the third, delivered from this, and content 
 to read aright the time and space arrangements of objects and 
 events, and test its rules by successful prevision. In the first 
 stage, everything which awakens interest is referred to the 
 will of external agents living and moving in the changes and 
 outfit of the world: nature, especially in its grateful or 
 terrible aspects, is animated by beings of personal impulses 
 ^like the human ; and in their favour or displeasure its 
 changes find their adequate explanation. The scale on 
 which they act through the elements and seasons makes 
 them superhuman, and constitutes them gods. Personal 
 action, however, though it is the sole possible type of caus- 
 ation, is apparently an affair of arbitrary and uncertain 
 will ; and can seem to give account of the behaviour of 
 external things, only so long and so far as they affect men 
 with the surprise of caprice: every observed uniformity, 
 every calculable recurrence, escapes the embrace of this 
 primitive theory, and leaves to it only the ever narrow- 
 ing field of the startling and unforeseen. 
 
 The realm thus deserted by supernatural volition needs 
 something, it is felt, to fill the void. It is supplied without 
 violent departure from the same human analogy. Man does 
 not always move on impulse, or accomplish everything by 
 his own hand. His life is largely made up of habits ; and 
 many a purpose is worked out by deputy and with tools. 
 The fire that melts his metal or cooks his food, the wheel 
 that eases his labour, the dam that diverts his stream, carry 
 out his aims wholly or in part at second hand, and intro- 
 duce the idea of mechanical force inherent, but not alive ; 
 and is it not the same when the sun with his glow cooks 
 the supplies for human hunger, by mellowing the earth 
 and sprouting the grain 1 ? Of the second causes thus intro- 
 duced into thought, each one takes charge of a class of 
 homogeneous phenomena, and is in fact nothing but the
 
 412 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 abstract notion of their generic character. As nature falls 
 more and more into unvaried order before the observer, 
 these abstractions multiply and spread over nearly the whole 
 domain: lodged in the matter of the world, as gravitation, 
 or centrifugal force, or elective affinity, or vitality, they 
 are supposed to conduct its affairs without knowing it, 
 though it may be only on commission from originating 
 Will. This setting up of abstractions as essences, causes, 
 or entities, constitutes the metaphysical stage of mental 
 development. 
 
 Here, however, it is impossible for the mind to rest. It 
 soon becomes apparent that the mechanised order of the 
 second causes is what man is most concerned to know ; and 
 that, precisely because it is mechanised and rescued from 
 caprice, he is able to foresee its coming steps and conform 
 his action to them. His attention, therefore, fixes more and 
 more upon the unconscious and necessary type of causation, 
 which, even if cut off from its voluntary source and left there 
 alone, would give him all the prevision and control of nature 
 which he now exercises. Hence he becomes indifferent to 
 the primary will, and concentrated upon the delegated laws 
 of method. Nor will it signify to him whether the order of 
 phenomena which he has to accept or hopes to modify range 
 under this general name or under that, be it gravitation, or 
 heat, or magnetism : it is the facts that he wants, and the 
 rules of their occurrence ; and while he has these, it makes 
 little difference whether the heads under which they are 
 ranged and conceived are too many or too few ; were they 
 all to lapse into unity, it would but relieve his memory of 
 a few superfluous equations, now summed up in one. In 
 other words, the metaphysical second causes follow the theo- 
 logical primary and vanish: the idea of causation is dis- 
 charged, leaving for human interest and study simply the 
 laws of coexistence and succession among phenomena. Thus 
 is reached the final or Positive stage. 
 
 ' The education of the individual, so far as it is spon- 
 taneous, necessarily presents the same phases as that of the 
 species, and vice versa. Now in our own days every man 
 on the level of the age will easily verify the position in his
 
 Tl.] COMTE. 413 
 
 own case, that in childhood he was naturally a theologian, 
 in youth a metaphysician, in manhood a physicist. The his- 
 tory of the sciences directly proves that it has been the same 
 with the ensemble of the human race V So strictly does 
 Comte accept and apply this rule, that he names the age at 
 which the youth will begin to complete his evolution: at 
 fourteen he will stand at the upper limit of his theological 
 term, having already run through two prior segments of its 
 length ; and at twenty-one he will have left his metaphysics 
 behind, and stand forth the essential Positivist. Such at 
 least will be his history, so far as his education conforms itself 
 to the spontaneous growth of his powers and tendencies of 
 his nature 2 . 
 
 By no society, however, and hardly by any individual, is 
 the whole body of mental culture lifted from stage to stage 
 at the same time. As a general rule, the sciences accomplish 
 the passage through them in the order of their simplicity: 
 the inorganic long before the organic, and the mathematical 
 and physical first of all. This is only to repeat in other 
 words the relative dates of discovery for the several classes 
 of natural laws. Hence it follows that, till the process is 
 consummated, all three states will be co-present in the differ- 
 ent members of the same community, and even in the differ- 
 ent departments of the same mind ; so that even in the keen 
 defining light of Paris, some shreds of metaphysic network 
 still hang about biology, and for the student of morals a cer- 
 tain Divine nimbus lingers around the head of humanity, 
 and hides its naked zoological affinities. The mixed phe- 
 nomena due to this unequal advance inevitably complicate 
 the inductive evidence of the general law, and give value to 
 the additional support it may receive from theoretic con- 
 siderations. 
 
 Of the three stages in this history of evolution, the third 
 is of course regarded as final and therefore permanent. The 
 second has no stability, and is merely transitional, the help- 
 less struggle of thought in accelerated motion to check its 
 own velocity and escape its inevitable fate. The first, on 
 the other hand, is very protracted, and divides itself into 
 
 1 Pol. Pos. IV. App. Gen. pp. 137, 138. * Discours, 167 172.
 
 4H PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 three distinct stadia, each of which may persist through the 
 whole life of a single race of men. In the first of these, to 
 which Comte somewhat arbitrarily appropriates the word 
 fetichism, the instinctive disposition to animate all things 
 that affect the mind has as yet received no check, and indi- 
 vidual objects of interest, however accidental, are regarded as 
 living beings, helpful or dangerous by their propitious or 
 hostile mood, and in their turn susceptible of influence by 
 promises and threats. The concrete things which are thus 
 prseternaturalised, being casually thrown across each one's 
 path of life, are not the same for any two men : like amulets 
 or charms, they belong to the wearer ; and except under 
 agreement of partnership, the rule will be, Quot homines, 
 totidem Dii ; just as, among children of a family who per- 
 sonify their dolls, each sister will glorify her own, unless 
 two special companions are drawn to patronise the same. 
 
 As there is nothing which may not become a fetich, the 
 lot will sometimes fall upon an object that cannot perma- 
 nently stand isolated in thought. Let it be a stream flow- 
 ing by the hut of the savage, and requiring propitiation 
 against destructive flood. In his upland wanderings, he 
 discovers that, in that familiar current, it is not one frolic- 
 some or passionate being alone that leaps from the rocks 
 and tears through the meadow-land, but two or three, each 
 of which is apt to break bounds in hurling the head waters 
 down. Which to conciliate he can never tell: the effect 
 he would deprecate is one from all, and so must be the 
 will that brings it: it is a power identical with no single 
 tributary, but dwelling in the whole system and wielding 
 it: not any torrent here, or torrent there, but a river-god 
 that commands the waters and bids them do this or that. 
 Or, let the fetich be a tree. If it stands in a wood, it is 
 surrounded by similars, hardly distinguishable from it; and 
 they too must share its terrors and its honours. Eut count- 
 less repetitions of the same attitude of mind all through 
 the contents of the wood amount, by their fusion and co- 
 alescence, to one undivided feeling towards what is common 
 to the group. It is, therefore, this generic conception, and 
 no longer any single concrete mass, that is personified ; and
 
 II.] COMTE. 415 
 
 the worship of a forest-god has been begun. Thus deduced 
 by Cointe, Polytheism advances out of Fetichism pari passu 
 with generalisation: each constituted type of objects and 
 phenomena taking up and absorbing into itself the super- 
 natural character, which quits individual things and leaves 
 them dead material. 
 
 No such ingenious hypothesis is suggested to explain the 
 passage into Monotheism. The process is regarded as essen- 
 tially a continuance of the change which had set in during 
 the previous term. As the first generalisations were broken up 
 with the progress of observation and lost in wider, the number 
 of supernatural beings was reduced, and the visible and sen- 
 sible world was more and more brought to the condition of 
 homogeneous material, employed as means under definite com- 
 mission to produce and sustain a Cosmos. Thus an approach 
 was perpetually made to the idea of the Unity of Nature, 
 and of the invariable mechanism of Law ; and the council 
 of the gods was replaced by a monarchy l . The whole of 
 this vast curriculum is epitomised in every human being 
 before he is out of his teens ; and each of its modes of 
 conception and belief the educator is to recognise and sanc- 
 tion in its season ; encouraging the child in fetich- worship 
 till seven ; in polytheism till fourteen ; and then initiating 
 the youth into monotheism till he is qualified, at the end of his 
 second decade, to learn how false it is 2 . 
 
 The evidence of his great law of intellectual evolution, 
 Comte admits, it is not possible to obtain complete from 
 the history of any one society or continuous course of growing 
 civilisation. Where the latest stadia have been reached, and 
 can be traced, the earliest are lost to view in the darkness 
 of the past ; and where the earliest are present, they tell 
 no tales of what is to follow. It is only by piecing together 
 the two ends, and prefixing what is observed of contem- 
 porary savages to what is recorded of the most advanced 
 historic people, and assuming that the separate fragments 
 will unite into one chain, that the induction can be made 
 out. If this be a weakness, any doubt arising from it affects 
 only the initial stage, viz. of fetichism. In order to secure 
 1 Pol. Pos. IV. App. Gen. p. 139. Discours, 167172.
 
 41 6 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 an unbroken continuity thenceforward, Comte, limiting him- 
 self to the European nations, takes Greece and Rome as 
 exemplifying the Polytheistic culture, the Medieval Catholi- 
 cism as representing the Monotheistic, treating the latter 
 as evolved from the former ; and then finds, in the decline 
 of the Church power and the eventual spread of Protes- 
 tantism, the true type of his Metaphysical stage, corrosive 
 of everything and constructing nothing, but preparing a 
 cleared field for the final invasion of Positivism, inaugurated 
 by the French Revolution. That startling crisis was indeed 
 but the loud bursting of the storm, the first unheeded clouds 
 of which were already stealing up from the horizon of the 
 fourteenth century. The ecclesiastical system had betrayed 
 the need and the hopelessness of its regeneration, by the 
 meritorious but ineffectual rise of the monastic orders. A 
 spirit uncongenial, if not disaffected, breathed in the poetry 
 of Dante and the theology of Thomas a Kempis. The Papal 
 control of European society was weakened by the growing 
 independence of kings. The invention of gunpowder, of the 
 mariner's compass, of printing, and the discovery of the 
 western continent, enormously strengthened the counter in- 
 fluences of industry, commerce, and new ideas, and enlarged 
 the world beyond the stiffening grasp of Rome. Science 
 after science set up for itself as natural and not revealed : 
 when the earth was found to be in motion, it became a 
 ridiculous pretension in the Vatican to stand still: with 
 Galileo and the telescope the whole universe fell into new 
 form, and so demanded an immeasurable expansion of its 
 history: the organisation of knowledge on the basis of ex- 
 perience by Bacon, and on that of reflection by Descartes, 
 delivered it on either hand from the dead touch of authority, 
 and opened the way to the successive labours of Newton, 
 Clairaut, and Laplace, of Cavendish, Priestley, and Lavoisier, 
 of Franklin and Volta, which secured autonomy to the whole 
 inorganic world. Totally banished from this field, the theo- 
 logians and metaphysicians still lingered in the biological, 
 and above all in the sociological, and confused them by 
 their fictions ; till Cabanis, Bichat, and Gall pushed the con- 
 quest of natural law into the former; and Condorcet and
 
 II.] COMTE. 417 
 
 De Maistre, as forerunners, and Comte, as 'he that should 
 come,' drove it home through the entire breadth of the 
 latter. By this recent annexation of the provinces of Life 
 and Morals, the law of evolution completes its course ; the 
 ideal or speculative construction reaches its apex. In the 
 scheme of thought, nothing remains to be supplied or re- 
 moved : and if there be still anarchical destructives at work, 
 it is due either to their being themselves behind their day, 
 or to the practical resistance offered by retreating relics of 
 feudal and ecclesiastical usages which have lost their mean- 
 ing, yet will not take themselves off. 
 
 D. CONCOMITANT ESTHETIC AND MORAL STATES. If the 
 progress of the human mind has always left vestiges of this 
 order, it is certain that the movement of the intellectual 
 faculties follows a determinate law : Man, as a thinking 
 being, has his path prescribed by unalterable nature ; and, 
 from what he now deems true, you may forecast what he 
 will next believe. His understanding, after discharging all 
 but coexistences and successions from one part after another 
 of the inorganic world, will try the same simplification upon 
 the anthropological, and decline any other framework for its 
 contents. In doing so, he is true to his natural way of think- 
 ing : but it does not yet follow that he is true to the object 
 thought, viz. Humanity, individual and social. The mere 
 intellectual function in it he may indeed assume to be like 
 his own : but, in order to establish the new science, it needs 
 to be shown that the whole body of human phenomena, the 
 aesthetic, the moral, the religious, are reducible like the 
 logical, and are exhaustively known, when their resemblances 
 and relations in time have been learned. Comte admits that, 
 where the interacting functions are so numerous as in our 
 case, the conditions of exact prediction cannot be reached. 
 But he insists that the regularity is not intellectual alone. 
 With each stage of thought he finds associated a constant and 
 different condition of affection, of sense of beauty, of character, 
 marked not only in individual experience, but on the large scale 
 of public institutions, arts, and history. Of these invariable con- 
 comitants, exhibiting an habitual consensus of feeling, thought, 
 and action, I can only cite a few illustrative instances. 
 
 \'OL. I. E e
 
 41 8 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 Wherever Fetichism prevails, priesthoods and temples will 
 be absent. The supernatural powers, being nothing but con- 
 crete objects consecrated by personal caprice, superstition will 
 be sporadic, not social: each man may keep his god in his 
 hut, or carry him on his neck. Or, if the faith of a whole 
 village should settle upon the same thing, it would still be 
 accessible to all, and could be decorated or beaten accord- 
 ing to the exigencies of the moment. It is not till remote 
 objects, like the heavenly bodies, or meteoric stones that have 
 fallen to the earth on some spot reached only by pilgrim- 
 age, attract the wonder and terror of mankind, that homage 
 and deprecation have to be offered by deputy, and a mediator 
 is required. And this case will not occur till the Polytheistic 
 process has begun, and the concrete object is regarded as the 
 abode only, or the miessenger and instrument, of a Divinity 
 whose material sign it is. Beings thus behind special pheno- 
 mena of the world, or presiding over this or that kind of its 
 stated products and events, cannot be appropriated, and are 
 beyond the reach of private interpretation: their will and 
 the modes of conciliating it must be learned from those who 
 know the secrets of their nature and the rites of their ap- 
 pointed worship. Hence the sacerdotal order is born with 
 Polytheism. Concurrently with its development there will 
 be room for a marked activity of the aesthetic faculties : for, 
 after so recent an escape from concrete divinities, there will 
 be no repugnance to invest the gods with form ; yet, as they 
 are many, and no one has any given form, it is left to the 
 free imagination to distinguish them by symbolical expres- 
 sion of their characteristic functions. The whole growth of 
 mythology, its passage, at the point of contact with human 
 life, into the Epos and the Drama and, in its worship, into 
 lyric poetry and music and the dance, the rise of its temples 
 and sculptures, the diffusion of its myths in domestic archi- 
 tecture and painting, combine to afford scope for the utmost 
 influence of Art. On the other hand, the Sciences will have to 
 contend with great difficulties, where every realm of nature is 
 preoccupied by its own supernatural power : nor can they 
 possibly extend, except at the expense of some ejected or hu- 
 miliated Deity. Furthermore, most honoured among the gods
 
 II.] COMTE. 419 
 
 will always be some one, who is regarded as the Protector of 
 the land and its people ; and patriotism, thus identified with 
 religious loyalty, is intensified beyond the limits of a merely 
 social affection, and becomes too sensitive for the control of 
 prudence and the' love of peace. Hence, the military spirit 
 gains easy ascendency in polytheistic States, and tends to 
 assume aggressive forms ; and, in the moral estimates pre- 
 vailing there, the heroic virtues will be supremely prized, 
 the heroic faults will be condoned, and all beyond surren- 
 dered to neglect or contempt. In such societies, Slavei*y is a 
 constant feature, and is maintained by the supply of captives 
 in war. And, when judged in its historical place, as the sub- 
 stitute for the earlier usage of putting all prisoners to the 
 sword, it must be recognised as an indication of milder dispo- 
 sitions, and as a part of the real advance which the law of de- 
 velopment secures. The prominence, in this period, of the 
 sacerdotal and military orders at one end of the social scale, 
 with the surrender of the industrial arts to a servile class 
 at the other, tended to crystallise the whole of society 
 into a cluster of castes; among which the primacy of 
 the priesthood and the proximate dignity of the soldiers 
 in some degree foreshadowed the future relations between 
 the spiritual and the temporal powers. But in no polytheistic 
 age were these ever divided: religion, being national and 
 local, with its myths in the history of the country, and its 
 Olympus both on the map and in the heaven, was indissolubly 
 blended with the whole life of the State and absolutely 
 foreign to citizens of other lands. There could be no political 
 offence that was not an impiety ; and no impiety that was not 
 a political offence. Finally, it is affirmed that ' in the ancient 
 world, Morality, admirable as concerns the individual, was de- 
 fective in domestic life, and was a total blank in social and 
 political relations V Before the way could be opened to these 
 applications, further progress in generalisation was required. 
 
 The arrival of Monotheism dissolves these combinations 
 in favour of new ones. Here, the unity of religion, 
 coalescing with the unity of humanity, disregards all poli- 
 tical limits and assumes a universal aim and organisation: 
 
 1 Littrc?, De la Phil. Pos. I. 52 ; II 59, 60. 
 
 E e 2
 
 420 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 its voice is the voice of many languages ; its influence is 
 felt in all latitudes, and changes only as the magnetic 
 needle varies without ever sleeping or being dead. By this 
 expansion from local to human, the spiritual power at once 
 separates itself from the temporal, and asserts itself as in- 
 dependent ; surrendering all coercion to the State, but as- 
 suming unlimited range of persuasive regulation. Before, 
 Law and Morals were one body of social legislation: now, 
 they widely differ, in their extent, and in their resources 
 for moving the will. They require, therefore, distinct organs, 
 with qualifications by no means the same. The aptitudes 
 for the spiritual functions may present themselves in any 
 rank, nor does their free play of movement submit itself as 
 yet to any rule: but energy and skill in temporal govern- 
 ment are rarely formed without an experience through many 
 generations, so as still to give a presumption in favour of he- 
 redity. The transition to Monotheism, giving unity to Nature 
 as well as to Man, could not fail to be favourable to Science ; 
 taking away all restraint upon the detection of analogies and 
 the simplification of laws, and all scruple about recognising a 
 universal order. The aesthetic faculties, on the other hand, are 
 almost overpowered in so vast and august a field, filled with 
 a formless and unimaginable Deity ; and would fain have back 
 the days of picturesque mythology, and glens and groves 
 peopled with sportive gods, to excuse the play of a light and 
 limited fancy. They found, however, some compensating ma- 
 terial in the pathetic elements of the Evangelists' narratives, 
 and in traditions of saints and martyrs. And what the so- 
 lemnised imagination could still achieve was the erection of 
 majestic cathedrals, which became museums as well as monu- 
 ments of art, where chapels and altars were enriched by pic- 
 tures, and the tombs by sculptures, memorable in the history 
 of genius, and the choir pealed with a music undreamed of by 
 the ancient world. Yet more marked are the effects, in poli- 
 tical and social life, of the severance of the temporal power 
 from the spiritual. Where many States are embraced within 
 the area of one Church, a pressure of severe restraint limits the 
 aggressions of any one upon another ; a moderating influence 
 pervades and surrounds the field of combat, and, though spurned
 
 II.] COMTE. 421 
 
 in the first access of passion, waits for some weary or relenting 
 moment to interpose with mediating appeal. How often this 
 pacifying function was actually exercised in medieval Europe 
 by the Papacy is well known : and the international diplomacy 
 which has now succeeded to the same office owes its eificacy to 
 no other source ; for it succeeds only so far as it represents the 
 common moral feeling of European society and insists on the 
 subserviency of ambition to right. The military spirit, in. 
 short, changes its attitude from offensive to defensive ; a fact 
 especially obvious in the feudal system, which, with an orga- 
 nisation admirable for self-protection at home, bore with im- 
 patience, or refused to bear, the protracted strain of foreign 
 wars. Closely connected with this was the inevitable reduc- 
 tion of slavery to serfdom. A servile class, never replaced by 
 new victims of conquest needing to be coerced, but passing 
 into a settled peasantry, is best supported by a partition of its 
 industry between the proprietor's fields and its own allotments ; 
 and then it needs but an easy readjustment and fixed defini- 
 tion of the line between its obligations and its rights, to give 
 its members the position of free cultivators, whose rent is paid 
 in stipulated services. Here, too, entered again, with powerful 
 co-operation, the sentiment of spiritual equality before God, of 
 those who, in spite of their social severance, knelt together be- 
 fore the same altar and had need of the same prayers. Finally, 
 the ensemble of these changes results in a transfer of influence 
 from military to industrial activity ; inventors succeeding to 
 the honours of conquerors ; and the sword, no longer greedy 
 of alien treasures, being only the guardian of realised wealth 
 and peaceful work at home. This modified sentiment involves 
 the relative rise of the industrial classes into increasing social 
 importance, and the deeper impress of their characteristics 
 upon the moral feeling of communities. 
 
 We are thus brought, from surveying historically the con- 
 comitant conditions of the human evolution, to another and 
 concluding topic in Comte's philosophy, viz. the Foundation 
 and Contents of his properly Ethical doctrine. 
 
 E. ETHICAL DOCTRINE. To interpret him here with pre- 
 cision is rendered difficult by the inconstancy of his ana- 
 lysis of the human capacities and instincts. At one time, they
 
 423 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 are divided into intellectual, affective, and active : at another, 
 into ' personality ' and ' sympathy ; ' and then again they are 
 distributed as functions of all the phrenological organs, al- 
 though each one of these performs all the parts, of thinking, 
 feeling, willing, and is both an exercise of the Ego and attracted 
 to something other than itself. These cross divisions will pro- 
 bably adjust themselves in the way most true to his thought, 
 if the cerebral classification, which is brought into Sociology 
 ready made from the previous Biological studies, be taken as 
 fundamental, furnishing a complete list of the ultimate compo- 
 nents of our nature. Among these, groups may then be formed 
 on different principles of division ; yielding, for example, three 
 sets, if we go by the relative preponderance in them of thought, 
 feeling, and objective energy ; or two sets, if we look to the 
 ascendency in them of self-regard and of regard for others l . 
 
 Without exhibiting Comte's emendation of Gall's map of the 
 brain, it will suffice to state his general law, that the instincts 
 of the self-seeking organs are by nature invariably stronger 
 than those of the sympathetic. Yet, he maintains, this initial 
 advantage is lost in the process of development, and goes over 
 at the final stage to the side of social benevolence. It is na- 
 tural to enquire how this seeming marvel comes about. If I 
 rightly understand Comte, he attributes the result partly to 
 the withdrawal of a selfish stimulus, partly to the intensifying 
 of a social. 
 
 The former of these conditions he finds fulfilled in the dis- 
 appearance of theological belief. In his view, the Christian 
 religion is essentially the consecration of egoism, engaging the 
 mind in one tremendous problem, how to make peace with the 
 Infinite Power and secure eternal salvation. All that it does 
 against the natural selfishness of man is to set up ' an Infinite 
 egoistic Being 2 ' to counteract and overbear it. ' Every be- 
 liever,' he says, ' always pursues a purely individual end, the 
 
 1 It must be carefully observed that in Comte's writings the word Personnalite 
 means, not the conscious Selfdom, but the aggregate of the grosser appetites and 
 interested impulses. Hence, he speaks of it as 'this irresistible fatality,' and iden- 
 tifies it with selfish indifference to humanity. See Discours, 88 seqq. ; Cate'chisme, 
 8. 58. 'Personality,' therefore, far from being the distinctive characteristic of 
 man, consists of precisely that which he has in common with the brutes. 
 
 2 Catechisme, p. 360.
 
 II.] COMTE. 423 
 
 unrivalled preponderance of which tends to repress every af- 
 fection unrelated to it V ' The radical selfishness of the central 
 feeling in the Catholic scheme was especially offensive to the 
 best instincts of the feminine heart 2 : ' ' corrupting the heart 
 by an immense and incessant cupidity, and degrading the 
 character by a servile terror V Though it retains the names 
 ' love to God ' and ' love to man,' they both denote modes of 
 mere self-love,' and ' are incompatible with the natural 
 existence of benevolent instincts V No theology indeed, and 
 least of all Monotheism, can effect the regeneration of human 
 character by basing it upon the social affections 5 . 
 
 With this estimate of the Christian Monotheism, as arraying 
 the whole power of religion against the disinterested affections, 
 it is no wonder that Cornte reckoned on the decay of faith as 
 the hope of social morals. It would at least fling off a preoc- 
 cupying interest, and allow free play to the resources of the 
 spontaneous nature for rising above the level of self-seeking 
 desires. And this free play it is which Positivism turns 
 to account so effectually, as for the first time to insure 
 the progressive growth and ultimate ascendency of social 
 aims. 
 
 This second and constructive part of his theory I find it 
 difficult to present with satisfactory precision, being unable to 
 link together its component thoughts. Its preliminary prin- 
 ciple is that, in the social evolution of humanity, it is the 
 affective functions that take the lead and trace the lines of 
 movement : that the classes in which these are strongest will 
 come to the front, while the intellectual agencies will exercise 
 only a secondary and regulating power ; so that, to determine 
 the law of advance, the main condition is, to examine the 
 relations subsisting among the emotional springs of our nature, 
 and any law of variation which may affect them. The goal of 
 the Positivist being ' universal love,' and his starting-point 
 being universal selfishness, the transformation is referred to 
 the alliance of the rational faculties with the weaker instinct ; 
 for they will always give their vote for the general rather than 
 the private good, and recognise Man in Society as the object 
 
 1 Discours, p. 213. s Ibid. 220. s lbid. 392. 
 
 * Catechisme, 149, 150. * Ibid. 264.
 
 424 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 of the crowning term in the hierarchy of science. If, through 
 this reinforcement, the conflict between the opposing tendencies 
 is no longer unequal, the scale is turned by the cast of public 
 praise and encouragement upon the sympathetic side ; for the 
 preference of private good is only with the individual agent 
 who gets it, and never with the spectator who sees it fall to 
 the many or to the one. There is, moreover, a perfect consensus 
 of the agent's own intelligence, of his sympathetic affections, 
 and of the fellow-feeling of observers, in favour of self-forget- 
 fulness for others' sake : while the personal desires clash, not 
 only with them, but with each other ; and cannot themselves 
 be content without making sacrifices to the benevolent instincts. 
 The development of character in the direction of disinterested- 
 ness was further aided by the separation in Christendom of 
 Morals from Law, and the habit on which the spiritual power 
 had thus been forced to rely, of resorting for its influence, not 
 on enforced rules, but on winning ideals, a change which, when 
 fully carried out, replaces the obedience of fear by that of 
 spontaneous aspiration, and, instead of stereotyping morals, 
 leaves them open to unlimited amelioration and enlargement ; 
 and, as these ideals must be moulded from heroic and saintly 
 examples, inevitably humanises whatever appeals to us with 
 Divine authority. In the selection of its ideals, the Church 
 unconsciously contravened its own doctrine and virtually 
 inaugurated the worship of Humanity, and that in the very 
 form which becomes permanent in Positivism. For while in 
 its theory of the Incarnation, the dominant ecclesiastics 
 meant to insist upon the infinite contrast of the two elements 
 united, the Son of God and the Son of Man, to wrap up all the 
 claims to worship in the former phrase, and to reserve the 
 latter for the mortal weakness, the moral temptations, the 
 touches of sorrow and passages of tears, which interweave the 
 pathos with the life of Christ, the natural instincts of the 
 worshippers were too strong for the antithesis, and concen- 
 trated their reverence on precisely the human incidents of the 
 Evangelists' story, and prayed to Him who had been weary and 
 athirst and troubled in spirit, who had cried to heaven in 
 agony, and breathed out His soul upon the cross ; they took 
 the man to be their God, and used the concomitant Divinity
 
 II.] COMTE. 425 
 
 only to give all conceivable expansion to the inward scale of 
 His experience. Nor could the hierarchy stop here : from the 
 ' Holy Child ' the consecration was earned back by an irre- 
 sistible impulse to the mother who cared for His infancy and won 
 His obedience and watched Him to the very foot of the cross : 
 they who had been so united in life could not be kept asunder 
 in public homage ; and Mariolatry arose by inevitable sequence. 
 Yet here there was no pretence of Godhead at all ; it was an ideal 
 woman to whom the knee was bent and on whom the eye of 
 aspiration was fixed, and who inspired for some centuries half 
 the literature of devotion. It is well known that this was an 
 unwelcome change to the Catholic authorities, but was too 
 congenial with the temper of a chivalric age to be resisted 
 with effect ; and, especially in Spain and Italy, a place had 
 to be conceded to it. It was the settlement of a permanent 
 religious feeling upon humanity, pure and simple ; and the 
 recognition of its feminine characteristics as best representing 
 its perfection. Positivists do but generalise this conception, 
 releasing it from the individual person of Mary, and incor- 
 porating it in their doctrine and cultus as true for the whole 
 future evolution of mankind. Such an ideal powerfully 
 strengthens the disinterested affections and compensates 
 their natural weakness: though never fully realised, it is 
 approachable through the reverence directed upon it ; and the 
 consciousness and experience of this secures to it a real effi- 
 cacy which cannot be claimed for the hope of a future life l . 
 
 Such appears to be the combination on which Comte 
 depends for the subjection of 'personality' to 'sociability: '- 
 the consensus of more numerous though weaker instincts, the 
 accumulating pressure of public opinion, and the influence of 
 revered ideals. 
 
 It only remains to remark that the state of altruism 
 thus reached is what Comte means by 'morality.' Any 
 being, actuated by benevolent instincts, is ipso facto a 
 moral being. And if to this condition he adds the imagi- 
 native contemplation of a perfect social future, in which the 
 same disposition shall nowhere fail, he is thereby constituted 
 a religious being. 
 
 1 Discours, 351354.
 
 426 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 3. Estimate of the System. 
 
 The foregoing sketch aims, not to give a complete compend 
 of Positivism, but merely to bring together the chief assump- 
 tions and junctures in its philosophical framework, which tell 
 upon its ethical doctrine and render it comparable with other 
 modes of approaching the theory of Morals. In conformity 
 with this design I must now take up its leading principles, one 
 by one, with a view to verify or check them ; and, first, its 
 account of the 
 
 A. LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE. The doctrine on this head is 
 summed up in two propositions: phenomena we may know 
 as synchronous or successive, but not causes ; and by pheno- 
 mena we are to understand observable physical changes. Be- 
 fore criticising the proposition 'All we know is phenomena,' I 
 would fain learn whether it is offered as a definition or as a 
 substantive assertion. If you say, ' the perception of external 
 changes is all that we mean by knowledge,' I shall have to test 
 your definition by pursuing the word through its accepted 
 usages, and trying whether such an account accurately fits them, 
 or is too tight to cover their contents. If, on the other hand, 
 you take the conception of ' knowledge ' as settled and under- 
 stood between us, and affirm that the mental act so named is 
 complete in the idea of a phenomenon in and by itself, the 
 affirmation can be put to the proof only by laying out the 
 particulars of the mental act so conceived, and ascertaining 
 whether it adds on anything to the raw material of the sen- 
 sible impression, or is exhausted in the change of feeling. 
 With Comte, the proposition is neither justified as a defini- 
 tion, nor supported as an assertion, but is dogmatically thrown 
 down as if it were self-evident ; often with a rude impatience 
 of feeling, ' That is my knowledge : if yours is anything else, it 
 is a chimera.' In other words, he takes for granted, without 
 more ado, the postulate of the empirical school, and by a re- 
 trograde step starts again from the abandoned data of the 
 eighteenth century philosophy. 
 
 We shall better estimate this assumption, if we first give 
 Comte the benefit of a changed expression under which he
 
 II.] COMTE. 
 
 frequently presents it. The ' Absolute,' he tells us, is beyond 
 the range of the intellect : we know only ' the relative.' This, 
 which he supposes to be identical with the maxim ' we know 
 only phenomena,' is in fact its direct contradictory. In know- 
 ing ' the relative,' we necessarily have to deal with two terms, 
 and the act of intelligence consists in apprehending how they 
 stand towards one another ; and to say that we know only 
 one of them, and not the other, is to knock on the head the re- 
 lativity to which we have just awarded the cognitive mono- 
 poly. It is precisely because all knowledge is of relations, 
 that it is not and cannot be of phenomena alone ; for the word 
 ' phenomenon ' names only one member of a related pair : it 
 denotes a change, which cannot come into thought apart from 
 that which is the seat of change: take away the silent anti- 
 thesis of the permament or non-phenomenal, and the meaning 
 of the word is snuffed out. If two factors enter into every act 
 of cognition, to empty out one of them is, as the German pro- 
 verb has it, ' das Kind mit dem Bade auszuschiitten.' Either 
 both are in the knowledge, or neither. To forbid our thought 
 to pass behind the screen of phenomena is to put out the very 
 light that shows them. 
 
 Do I then claim for the understanding a capacity for know- 
 ing ' the Absolute 1 ' for such is the claim imputed to everyone 
 who does not surrender without terms to the Comtean assump- 
 tion. Metaphysics, it is said, deal with ' the Absolute : ' Po- 
 sitive doctrine with ' the relative ; ' and the latter alone is 
 accessible. The statement betrays a complete misconception. 
 Both Metaphysics and Positive doctrine deal with ' the rela- 
 tive : ' the former, with one of the members of the relation, viz. 
 its constant ground ; the latter, with the other, its variation or 
 change. It would be just as suicidal for Metaphysics to go 
 apart with its share and set it up in pure absolutism, as it is 
 for Positive doctrine to run off with its phenomenon and exhi- 
 bit it in vacuo : each is a senseless blank without the other ; 
 and they are differenced simply by reading the same relation 
 from its opposite ends, and reporting, each from its own station, 
 the view which it obtains of the other. Assuredly, 'the ab- 
 solute ' (i.e. the non-relative) cannot per se be known ; because, 
 in being known, it would, ipso facto, enter into relations and
 
 428 PHYSICAL THEORY. 
 
 be absolute no more. Eut neither can the phenomenal, per se, 
 be known, i.e. be known as phenomenal, without simultaneous 
 cognition of what is non-phenomenal. What is it that is said 
 to be known of phenomena ? Their coexistence and their suc- 
 cession. But for their coexistence there must be Space, for their 
 succession there must be Time, to hold them ; and these are 
 not phenomena, but the prior conditions of possibility for all 
 phenomena, presupposed already in the very mention of them. 
 It is objected to the metaphysical postulates of all thought, 
 improperly called 'absolute notions,' that they do not admit 
 of proof or disproof, and so cannot be verified. This is per- 
 fectly true ; but it is equally true of the postulates of the 
 ' positive sciences,' all of which, including the fundamental 
 mathematical notions, go back to indemonstrable beliefs, e.g. 
 of externality and its dimensions ; beliefs which, having no 
 dependence on any ulterior and higher certainty, are unsus- 
 ceptible of verification and must be taken on trust, if taken at 
 all, and if left, will withhold from existence the science which 
 needs them for its start. M. Littre' is so possessed by antipathy 
 to ' absolute notions ' as to see them through the whole course 
 of history trying their worst to strangle their relative enemies 
 at the birth. They are never tired of the strife, and always 
 beaten from the field. ' The struggle with Galileo about the 
 earth's motion is but an episode in this long drama better 
 known than the rest. Between absolute and relative notions 
 the decisive point is this, that the demonstration which is al- 
 ways impossible for the first is always available for the se- 
 cond 1 .' The bugbear of 'the absolute' must have become a 
 haunting prepossession for the imagination which could find it 
 in this controversy. All motion surely is relative ; and whether 
 it be in the earth or the sun, nothing ' absolute ' can be got out 
 of it. The competing doctrines were simply two interpretations 
 of a set of confessedly relative phenomena. 
 
 The word 'phenomenon,' I need hardly say, is borrowed 
 from the vocabulary of vision, denoting originally that which 
 is offered to the sense of sight. Of the mere sensation cor- 
 responding with the affection of the optic nerve, such as might 
 arise in the eel or snail, we should hardly use it : a simple 
 
 1 De la Phil. Pos. 63.
 
 II.] COMTE. 429 
 
 change of feeling, unless it be observed, does not earn the 
 word ; and for this purpose, it is not enough that the sensorium 
 be acted on : the change must be dealt with by thought in 
 two ways, viz. referred to an object that gives it, and taken 
 home to the subject that has it ; and then first it passes from 
 sensation into perception. Neither of these references, to an 
 external cause whence it comes, and to an internal self on 
 whose thread of consciousness it assumes its place, belongs to 
 the mere animal Sense : both are judgments added by the 
 Understanding, and are characteristics exclusively of intelligent 
 natures. Nor are they derivative judgments, dependent on 
 inference and generalisation, but original and spontaneous ; 
 being essential conditions of the first perceptive act as much 
 as of the last, and containing, in the ideas of outward cause 
 and of inward self, the fundamental categories of all experience 
 and all inference from it. These modes of handling the passive 
 material of sensation are the functional activity of the intellect 
 itself, which certainly we can never verify or refute until we 
 are able to go behind ourselves. As essential to constitute 
 phenomena, yet not, like phenomena, made up of the matter of 
 sensation, they are primary thought- forms or Noumena ; and 
 so far as, in this capacity, it is possible to discuss their validity, 
 they fall to the province of Metaphysics ; while the sensory 
 elements and variations of phenomena, in order to be classed 
 and measured, resort to the sciences of observation. There is 
 here no desertion of phenomena, no transcending of them, but 
 simply an analysis of them as given to sense and moulded by 
 reason : no abandonment of relativity, but the closest scrutiny 
 of relations between the constituents of every fact : no pretence 
 of escape into the ' absolute,' but simply a recognition of some 
 non-phenomenal ground to which phenomenal variations stand 
 related. 
 
 Among the notions which the intellect demands for the in- 
 terpretation of phenomena is that of Causality. On Comte it 
 seems to have a peculiarly provocative effect: his rebuke is 
 never sharper than when directed upon ' the search for causes.' 
 A great part, however, of his polemic against it, though not 
 intended to spare it at all, really applies only to illegitimate 
 or superfluous uses of it in the methods and literature of the
 
 430 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 natural sciences. His position seems unassailable when he 
 insists that from observation and experiment, however re- 
 solved and generalised, nothing can be learned but the order, 
 i.e. the laws of concomitance and succession, among the 
 changes of the world ; and further, that to know these is all 
 that is required for the consummation of scientific ambition, 
 viz. the prevision of the course of nature. And in cases (like 
 that of gravitation) where dynamic ideas enter into the ex- 
 pression of ascertained laws, the possibility must be granted 
 to him of dispensing with the language of Force, and trans- 
 lating the law into terms of mere time, space, and motion. And 
 again, not a few discoverers in the past must plead guilty 
 to his charge of mistaking a mere generalised fact for an 
 efficient entity, and so setting up as many independent forces 
 as there are dissimilar classes of phenomena, without being 
 aware that they are only mentally invented and not physically 
 found. But to what do these concessions amount? They 
 simply dislodge causes from the list of phenomena, and forbid 
 the perceptive faculty to be on the look-out for them : just as 
 you might restrain it from attempting to establish the infini- 
 tude of Space. But do they discredit the idea and belief of 
 causality behind or within the advent of phenomena ? Not in 
 the least. Do they make it absurd to think that something is 
 needed to determine the phenomena to be so and not otherwise, 
 and make their order to be this, and not that ? These ques- 
 tions they do not even approach ; and these cover the whole 
 demands of the doctrine of causality. It remains all the while 
 certain that of every witnessed phenomenon Cause is just 
 as much an inseparable correlative as Space : by an equally 
 imperative intellectual law we have to think of it as out of the 
 one and in the other : they are alike intuitive conditions of all 
 experience ; and the proposal to divest experience of either is 
 like the attempt to peel a bubble in search for its colours and 
 contents : ' in tenuern ex oculis evanuit aurarn.' 
 
 It is the less necessary to push the vindication of the idea 
 of causality beyond the range of Comte's objection, because of 
 late Science, though quite able to express its truths in terms 
 of simple antecedence and sequence, has shown less and less 
 disposition to conform to such a simplification, and does not
 
 II.] COMTE. 431 
 
 hesitate to allow dynamical conceptions (which are inter- 
 mediary between the causal and the phenomenal) to permeate 
 its whole account of ' laws/ and even substitute an enumera- 
 tion of forces for a classification of facts. That under cover of 
 this tendency illusions may easily creep in cannot be denied. 
 But when we compare the facility of thought and investiga- 
 tion which is thus obtained, with the artifices required in order 
 to conceive, e.g. of the law of gravitation, without any idea of 
 attraction, the presumption seems strong that nature reports 
 herself most truly in the dialect of causal energy, and by her 
 awkward submission protests that the commensurate formulas 
 of ' coexistence and succession ' are the fictitious equivalents. 
 It is true that, were the universe resolved into grouped and 
 regimented phenomena, no science would be evicted ; but the 
 fact that the most skilled expositors of even physics and 
 chemistry cannot dispense with the conceptions of action and 
 reaction, of pressure, of affinity, of repulsion, bears witness that 
 for the severest intellects science does not speak the last word, 
 but opens the door to an ulterior audience-chamber of philo- 
 sophy. Nay, this witness is again and again borne by Comte 
 himself. He speaks of the doctrine of equilibrium, of the 
 periodicity of the planetary perturbations, and of other 
 problems of physical astronomy, in language unmeaning in a 
 world of mere coexistence and succession. He recognises 
 intensities, greater or less, which can be predicated only of 
 force, and must be fluxionally rather than differentially con- 
 ceived. And he lays stress on the modifiable character of 
 natures in proportion to their complexity, and founds upon it 
 the rules of human self-government and the encouragement to 
 social advance. How. in the absence of agents who operate 
 on themselves or others, and of ' antecedents ' that cause their 
 ' consequents,' this feature of complex structures can be 
 turned to account, it is not easy to conceive ; or how there 
 can be evinced a capacity of being modified, without any 
 corresponding power of modifying. 
 
 A second limitation is imposed by Comte on human know- 
 ledge, by banishing from it all the supposed objects of introspec- 
 tive self-consciousness. ' By an invincible necessity the human 
 mind can directly observe all phenomena except its own.'
 
 432 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 This exclusion of all psychological self-knowledge, and con- 
 sequent restriction of the word 'phenomena' to external 
 changes, is so paradoxical in itself, and so little consistent with 
 Comte's own experience and history, that it is difficult to treat 
 it as the expression of an indigenous conviction ; and I am 
 disposed to regard it as a floating relic of Gall's inauspicious 
 influence ; the more so, because the argument by which he 
 supports it is the stock argument current among the phreno- 
 logists. It runs thus. In order to know, you must look at 
 what is proposed for knowledge, and therefore must stand out- 
 side it : you cannot stand outside your own states of mind : 
 they are at no distance from yourself, but are identical with 
 yourself: it is, therefore, impossible for you to know them. 
 If this evidence is conclusive, we should all be reduced to 
 confess a more than Socratic a^aBia, and each would be 
 obliged to say, ' I do not know whether I feel hot or cold, 
 pleased or angry, self-contented or ashamed ; whether I re- 
 member or forget the features of my friend ; whether I am 
 thinking of Darwin's theory or Mr. George's ; whether I am 
 stirred by any motive, or, if by two, whether they pull the 
 same way or opposite ways.' No abstract piece of reason- 
 ing can bear the strain of consequences so absurd ; and, in 
 spite of it, every one will admit the ' positive ' fact of self- 
 knowledge in the instances adduced. I shall venture then to 
 find a way out of the argument, by simply turning it round. 
 Instead of insisting, 'Identity of subject and object render 
 knowledge of the latter impossible : the self-conscious mind 
 is identical with its own states : therefore, it cannot know 
 them;' I will say, 'Identity of subject and object render 
 knowledge of the latter impossible : the self-conscious mind 
 knows its own states ; therefore, it is not identical with 
 them : ' a conclusion which at once detects the phrenological 
 fallacy. Thinker and thought, Feeler and felt, Chooser and 
 choice, are not rendered identical by their joint internal seat, 
 and the absence of any local distance furnishing for one a 
 station from which it looks at the other. Objectivity is not 
 given by externality alone : the separation from the attend- 
 ing mind which it requires may be supplied by Time as well 
 as Space ; and when we direct introspection upon our mental
 
 II.] COMTE. 433 
 
 states, they must already be in the past, since the introspec- 
 tion itself is in possession of the present. They are thus 
 qualified to become our ' objects,' as we are to be the ' sub- 
 jects ' that know them. As subjects, we are always knowers, 
 always feelers, always agents ; while the changes, of thought, 
 of feeling, of volition, that either arrive at us or go from us, 
 are by their very movement and transiency presented to our 
 apprehension and ranged upon the continuous thread of our 
 personal history. 
 
 Reserving the direct vindication of self-reflection for future 
 chapters on Psychological Ethics, I gladly leave the case at 
 present to rest upon the cautious but adequate defences of 
 Stuart Mill and Lewes, both of whom, notwithstanding their 
 admiration for Comte, declined to surrender the whole litera- 
 ture of mental and logical philosophy to the fear of his 
 wrath 1 . One remark only I would add to Mill's effective 
 criticism. To Comte's demand that what is called 'psycho- 
 logy' should be flung as mere cerebral function into the 
 physiology of the brain, inasmuch as all its uniformities are 
 derivative from molecular changes there, he replies that we 
 are hardly entitled to assume this, so long as we are far more 
 in the dark about the molecular changes than about the 
 mental uniformities, and that the latter, being independently 
 ascertainable and of serious concern to us, are meanwhile a 
 proper object of separate study. As a provisional plea, deriv- 
 ing its force from the present condition of cerebral knowledge, 
 the answer is adequate. But does it not concede too much to 
 a philosopher who disowns the idea of causality, yet is here 
 building his whole argument upon it ? The mental series of 
 changes must not, it seems, be admitted to separate study and 
 reduction to law, because they are derivative from the cere- 
 bral : if they were only constantly parallel, they would have a 
 right to form a science of their own. Suppose that we had 
 reached perfect knowledge of the brain, and could read and 
 register every molecular movement in its exact time-relation 
 to the changes in our consciousness : what would be the differ- 
 ence, in the absence of causation, of a derivative series and a 
 
 1 Mill's Logic, B. VI. ch. iv. a. Lewes, on Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences, 
 P. I. 20. 
 
 VOL. I. F f
 
 434 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 parallel series ? Invariable antecedence and sequence being 
 all that we have on hand, we cannot speak of any one term 
 producing, or failing to produce another that follows it, 
 whether in the same line or in its counterpart: the whole 
 account must run in terms of Time. The story then would 
 come out as follows : Let A, B, C represent three consecutive 
 molecular changes in the brain ; and a, /3, y the three corre- 
 sponding feelings. Then, on the occurrence of 
 
 A, follows B, so C 
 follows so so 
 
 Now the only way of determining to what series the several 
 items belong is to find their ' immediate ' or ' proximate ' ante- 
 cedents, and to link together the terms thus selected as coming 
 under the cognisance of the same science. Let us trace the 
 working of this rule. A is proximately followed by B, say, 
 in a second : it is also followed by a, also, let us say, in a 
 second. B is similarly followed, in another second, by C, and 
 by /3. ft therefore is just one second removed from both a 
 and B, which will therefore have, by the rule of proximity, 
 to quarrel for possession of it ; and the same dispute will 
 arise between p and C, and so on all along the series. Nor 
 will the case be mended by assuming an interval between the 
 two sequents (physical and mental) upon the molecular change. 
 If you put the cerebral consequent first, you make it the 
 proximate antecedent of the mental which belongs to its pre- 
 decessor : if the mental comes first, it is turned into proximate 
 antecedent of the next physical ; and the two series fall into 
 cross purposes throughout ; and the passage in time-succession 
 is just as frequent from the mental to the physical as from the 
 physical to the mental. The truth is, Comte's absorption of 
 psychology into physiology not only rests entirely on the 
 causality which he repudiates, but gives it action from the 
 material to the mental, while withholding it from the in- 
 verse direction. What he really thinks is this, that the 
 molecular change produces its thought change, while no 
 thought change produces either another or any molecular. 
 And yet the time-order is exactly the same as would be
 
 II.] COMTE. 435 
 
 required by the causal law when cut down to the rule of 
 invariable sequence. 
 
 The false identification of subject and object which is the 
 plea for rejecting self-knowledge involves a doctrine of 
 personality which reverses the psychological conception of it, 
 and marks more distinctly, or at least more fundamentally, 
 than any other feature, the difference which alienates Gall and 
 Comte from the metaphysician. The unity of the ego to which 
 all felt changes are brought home, its persistent identity 
 through ever varying affections, is regarded by the latter as 
 an ultimate postulate, which experience cannot give, because 
 without it experience cannot be given. By the phrenologists, 
 on the other hand, it is regarded as built up piecemeal from 
 the contributions of several faculties, cemented together by 
 concurrent action, their multiplicity being concealed from 
 feeling by their simultaneousness. The unity, therefore, is 
 last instead of first ; and is an illusion instead of a reality. 
 As it must cost more to unify a larger number of constituents 
 than a less, so complex a being as man cannot so readily be 
 set up into an ego as one of the lower animals ; and Cbmte 
 accordingly asserts that the sense of personality is much 
 stronger in them than in him. If we could follow down this 
 numerical reduction far enough, and scrutinise the feeling of 
 some being with but a single function, we ought to find the 
 conscious self-identity made absolute in a spinning animalcule. 
 This, however, would not follow, unless on the assumption 
 commended by the Mills, that ' to have a feeling and to know 
 that you have it ' are one and the same thing ; whereas 
 Comte, as we have seen, contends that if the feeling is yours, 
 you cannot know it. He therefore requires some organ of 
 knowledge to be added on to the organs of feeling and im- 
 pulse, before self-consciousness can be claimed; and though 
 he will not own it as a human characteristic, he does not 
 carry it below a certain grade of complexity of nature. In 
 this demand of cognitive functions, distinct from sensitive and 
 active, he is favourably distinguished from Gall and later 
 phrenologists ; with whom it is an established principle that 
 each organ has its own appropriate objects, and with these 
 objects does all the kinds of work that may be required, feels 
 
 Ff2
 
 436 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 them, remembers them, compares, discriminates, and judges 
 them ; these processes, in fact, involving each other, and being 
 only different aspects of one faculty. As each organ has but 
 its single function, this amounts to saying, that feeling, 
 memory, comparison, judgment, are all one, and that each of 
 these terms taken as subject has all the rest as its pre- 
 dicates : that feeling, for example, remembers, compares, 
 judges ; and memory feels, compares, judges, &c. ; in which 
 case feeling certainly knows itself, not to say a good deal 
 more ; and, in denying the possibility of self-knowledge, Gall 
 involves himself in contradiction. Within the unity of a 
 solitary organ there are the knower and the known : identity 
 of subject and object is provided for, without forfeiture of 
 cognition. Under these conditions a single organ would suffice 
 to set up a self-conscious personality ; and a compound being, 
 like man, would be an aggregate of persons, packed together 
 into one figure, like the multitudinous monster made up of 
 pigmies which stands in the frontispiece of Hobbes's ' Leviathan' 
 to represent the State. From this absurdity Comte guarded 
 himself by removing the knowing function into separate lodg- 
 ings, and then admitting that where the organs of feeling and of 
 cognition were different, self-inspection ceased to be impossible. 
 But in thus shaking subject and object out of their 
 coalescence he encounters the opposite danger, of setting the 
 one outside the other, as my hand and another's hand are 
 alike outside of my eye that sees them, and my voice and 
 another's voice are alike beyond my ear that hears them. 
 If one organ knows what another organ feels, where is the 
 unity of the knower and the feeler ? And where there are 
 numerous organs strange to each other's feelings and inca- 
 pable of interchanging them, and all known as heterogeneous 
 through a cognitive group different from all, how is it that 
 the host of incommensurable changes emerging from this 
 composite apparatus insist on being treated throughout as 
 predicates of the same subject ? It is admitted, indeed con- 
 tended, that they are not phenomena of a unitary being. 'Man 
 is eminently multiple,' says Comte ; using this phrase to denote, 
 not the variety of capacities committed to the same indivisible 
 agent, but the many organs of which now this group, and
 
 1I.J COMTE. 437 
 
 now that, may successively wake into energy and constitute 
 the agent for the time being. Yet it cannot be denied that, 
 to every one, doubt is impossible of the simple persistency 
 of his personal essence through all his changes of mood and 
 character. The question at issue is, therefore, what is the 
 order of true relation under which we are to conceive the 
 two recognised facts, the personal unity and the facultative 
 plurality of the human being. The psychologist accepts and 
 trusts the report of natural consciousness, and believes that 
 the one individual manifests the many phenomena. Comte 
 reverses the conception, and from the concurrence of many 
 independent functions derives an illusory feeling of indivi- 
 duality. Asked to explain the mode of its origin, he can only 
 assure us that it is merely the ' sympathy ' or the ' synergy ' 
 of the several faculties, words which account for nothing ; 
 for that several organs should feel in combination, or should 
 act in combination, can never teach us that there is no com- 
 bination at all. If each organ has its own feeling (and else 
 there is no sympathy) how can the simultaneous existence 
 of a number be nevertheless not a number but only one? 
 And, amid continual change of the particular organs sub- 
 scribing to make up an act or state, how can the resultant 
 unity, the conscious self, remain the same ? The thief who, 
 under the excitement of acquisitiveness, secretiveness, and 
 destructiveness, breaks open my house, shoots my servants, 
 and carries off my plate, owes his individuality to the ' synergy ' 
 of these select endowments. Some awakening conversion 
 brings into action his latent conscientiousness, benevolence, 
 and veneration, and, struck with remorse, he makes confession 
 and reparation. But the factors of his personality are now 
 a different set of powers, and the product of their synergy 
 cannot therefore be the same: the man who stole is not the 
 man who repents : the crime he bewails was the crime of 
 another ; his compunction is vicarious ; and the postulates of 
 all natural contrition are false. Every attempt to conceive 
 of the personal essence of the human being as a mere con- 
 fluence of independent streams of activity must end in such 
 absurd and mischievous results ; and incur the disadvantage 
 of contradicting the fundamental deposition of all our con-
 
 438 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 sciousness, without even the compensation of a plausible ex- 
 planation of its origin. As to the assertion that the feeling 
 of personality is not peculiar to man, the only proof of it 
 offered by Comte is, that a cat is not found to mistake her- 
 self for another : which is true enough, since she must then 
 know a difference between other and same. Need we say 
 that such a blunder would be an instance of the very self- 
 consciousness, only mistaken instead of correct, whose total 
 privation it is intended to exemplify. Absence of the idea 
 of self is not evinced by making erroneous propositions about 
 self: on the contrary, there can be no better proof that the 
 idea is there. The proper effects of conscious personality are 
 the ascription to oneself, as identical subject, of our own 
 acts and states, as our changing predicates : so that, over and 
 above the doing the acts and having the states, we know that 
 we do them and have them ; and the inevitable conformity of 
 our affections to this hypothesis ; so that we cannot help feel- 
 ing responsible as agents for our acts and states in a way 
 which would be groundless if they were our factors instead 
 of our products. These effects are undoubtedly human ; and 
 till the Positivist cat makes some further proficiency beyond 
 the mere keeping clear of an alias, we shall continue to hold 
 them characteristically human. 
 
 Comte's unjust antipathies are usually the inverted expres- 
 sion of some true insight and worthy admiration, tempted, by 
 a partisan disposition, to turn harmonious opposites into in- 
 veterate enemies. In his disaffection towards the psycholo- 
 gists he loves to display before them, to the shame of their 
 barren introspection, the copious fruits to be gathered from 
 the objective study of men, whether of other persons in the 
 living world around, or of the intellectual products of indivi- 
 dual genius and social experience, in language, science, litera- 
 ture, and laws. Logic is to be learned from the recorded rea- 
 sonings of great discoverers : the categories of thought and the 
 processes of abstraction from the history and moulds of speech : 
 the rules of beauty from the vhefs-d' ceuvre of painting, sculp- 
 ture, poetry, and music ; and the characteristics of Morals, from 
 the development of public sentiment and the growth of codes 
 in civilised States. All this is salutary truth ; but it is truth
 
 II.] COMTE. 439 
 
 so little opposed to the psychologist's method, that he alone is 
 qualified to avail himself of it. If he were blind to his own 
 internal history, he would stand amid this magnificent assem- 
 blage of spiritual treasures, and stare at them, like the cattle, 
 without any key of interpretation. If he could not analyse his 
 own thought, how could he test the reasoner's appeal to it, and 
 use him as an exponent of the ways of the human mind ? If 
 he admired, without power of reflecting on his admiration, and 
 of separating the elements of beauty from the common and un- 
 clean, in sensible and in moral experience, Phidias and Sopho- 
 cles, Dante, Raphael, Shakspeare, and Beethoven would teach 
 as much aesthetics to an idiot as to him. And so of morals : 
 were there no self-consciousness of different claims among 
 the springs of action, how could examples of Pity and Cruelty, 
 of Honour and Perfidy, speak to us respectively with inspiring 
 or hateful voices ? How could the sentiments of others wake 
 the response of inward content or shame, were there not chords 
 already vibrating there with the same preluding strain ? It is 
 the self-conscious life in each that throws open to intelligence 
 the cumulative products of self-consciousness in all. There is 
 doubtless perpetual action and reaction between the two, and 
 the reflective power gains immensely in the school and museum 
 of its own historical results. But to treat these results as its 
 source and not its fruits, and exhort it to renounce itself in 
 order to study them, is to put out the light the better to see 
 the way. 
 
 B. CONTENTS AND ORDER OF KNOWLEDGE. Three years 
 before the publication of the Philosophic Positive appeared 
 the first volume of Dr. Neil Arnott's Elements of Physics; 
 the introduction to which presents a classification of the 
 sciences identical with Comte's, except in two particulars: 
 (1) the Mathematics (in their higher researches) are taken last 
 instead of first ; and (2), as by Mill and Lewes, Psychology is 
 withdrawn from the category of Physiology, and is prefixed 
 (under the heading Mind) to the laws of Justice, Morals, Po- 
 litics, embraced by Comte under the name Sociology. The 
 transposition of the mathematics is due to the predominance, 
 in Arnott's mind, of an educational purpose, and is more ap- 
 parent than real. In effect, he divides mathematical studies
 
 440 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 into two stages ; of which he presumes the more elementary to 
 be brought by the learner in ready condition to the first 
 natural science : while the second and more recondite is post- 
 poned till the problems requiring them have been encountered, 
 and have furnished the incentive to further proficiency. The 
 theoretical priority he does not deny to the mathematics ; but, 
 for his educational purpose, the theory waives a portion of its 
 rights in concession to practical convenience. The last term 
 of the Positivist series, the Science of Humanity, did not (in 
 Arnott's mind) by any means anticipate Comte's conception 
 of Sociology ; its contents, though made up of the same subjects, 
 present but a miscellaneous assemblage of special topics, unor- 
 ganised by any central and disposing idea. They probably 
 never came within the range of the physician's serious studies, 
 so as to suggest to him any deeper interior relations among 
 them than might direct the arrangement of a library catalogue 
 of the ' moral and political sciences.' But, so far as the order 
 is concerned in which the successive strata of knowledge are 
 superimposed from the base to the apex of the pyramid, the 
 coincidence (assuredly unconscious) is remarkable. It bears 
 witness to the entire dominance obtained over the minds of 
 contemporary men by the achievements of the natural sciences, 
 and to the consequent conviction that every problem will yield 
 to the same methods, till all the movements in the world, from 
 the swaying of the tides to the flashes of genius and the revo- 
 lutions of nations, disclose a single organism of homogeneous 
 law. 
 
 I have ventured to modify Comte's hierarchy of knowledge 
 by throwing Astronomy into Physics, and have affirmed that 
 this is more true to his idea than his separation of the two. 
 To render this position clear, I must remark that, when objects 
 are disposed (like Comte's sciences) in the order of their rela- 
 tive ' simplicity,' there are two measures of simplicity between 
 which the choice intended should be distinctly announced. 
 When Hartley speaks of ' a simple idea of sensation,' he means 
 the image or vestige left on the mind by a single object, e.g. 
 an orange. When Locke speaks of ' a simple idea ' he means 
 the idea of any single quality of an object or a kind of objects, 
 e.g. the form of an orange, or its size, or its smell, all of which
 
 II.] COMTE. 441 
 
 would be comprised together within Hartley's simple idea, 
 making it in Locke's view highly complex. In awarding the 
 epithet, the one looks to unity of object, the other to unity of 
 quality. The difference lies between concrete and abstract 
 simplicity. In the former case, the universe is conceived as 
 made up of an indefinite assemblage of individual things ; in 
 the latter, of a small number of attributes whose various com- 
 binations constitute and classify all individual things. If two 
 minds could fully represent the cosmos to themselves in these 
 two ways respectively, the one would think of it in its exten- 
 sion, the other in its comprehension. In conformity with this 
 distinction, Comte discriminates ' Concrete sciences ' from 
 ' Abstract sciences l ; ' the former selecting for study some par- 
 ticular group of objects, or even a single object, and trying to 
 refer all its phenomena to their respective laws ; the latter 
 fastening upon some type of phenomenon or property that 
 reappears in many a group, and determining its conditions and 
 rules, irrespective of their application to this or that. The 
 latter alone fulfil the proper requirements of science, being 
 intellectually free from all restrictions of place and time, and 
 going wherever the steps of a spreading law may lead them ; 
 and only after they have worked out their general formulas, 
 can the concrete sciences address themselves to a detached 
 family of individual things, with the necessary keys for inter- 
 preting their facts. You cannot give account of the pheno- 
 mena of any object without having recourse to a plurality of 
 sciences : a drop of quicksilver exercises your Mathematics and 
 Physics ; of water, your Chemistry; of blood, your Physiology 
 as well : and if each of these separately be a science, the ac- 
 cidental use of excerpts from several of them together will not 
 constitute another. It would be better to withhold the name 
 ' science' altogether from such pursuits as Mineralogy, Botany, 
 Conchology, Meteorology, Geology, which define themselves by 
 their interest in integral objects, whether taken singly or 
 classified by external characters, and to treat them all as part of 
 ' Natural History,' regarded as a study of arrangement subser- 
 vient to the practical arts. Comte adopts this principle in 
 the case of Geology, as ' the special study of the earth, 
 
 1 Phil. Pos. I. 70.
 
 442 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 entirely dependent on all the fundamental sciences,' and 
 simply applying them without adding one new scientific 
 element *. But it is just as applicable to the special study of 
 the stars, and equally removes Astronomy from the category 
 of ' pure science ; ' the greatest of all discoveries in its field 
 consisting in the annulling of all fancied laws of its own, and 
 the identification of celestial with terrestrial physics. It 
 cannot have a separate place, except upon a list of the so- 
 called ' Concrete sciences.' In the hierarchy rising from the 
 base of abstract simplicity, it merges mainly in Physics, with 
 a certain minor interest in Chemistry, and even, Sir. W. 
 Thomson would persuade us, in Biology. 
 
 It seems evident that the difference between Arnott and 
 Comte in the allocation of Mathematics could not possibly 
 have arisen except in the case of this particular term in 
 the series. Physics, e.g. would not bear transposition with 
 Chemistry or Biology. Yet it does not appear to us im- 
 possible to postpone our measurement of quantity till after 
 we have become acquainted with the qualities to be measured, 
 from the most familiar (i.e. general or simple) to the least so. 
 Why is this ? If the relations of each term to the next above 
 it were the same all through, following merely the rule of 
 diminishing empirical generality, the Mathematics ought to 
 be as irremovable as any other member of the set. In 
 Comte's view, the relation is the same: he attaches exten- 
 sion, the ground of geometry, and number, that of cal- 
 culus, as qualities or attributes, to the objects of our 
 sensible experience, and supposes them disengaged thence in 
 thought by abstraction, in exactly the mode which furnishes 
 us with the notions of solidity and weight. The axioms of 
 Mathematics are no less inductions from experience than 
 the assumptions of the succeeding sciences ; only, they are 
 drawn from simpler experience, and immediately pressed 
 into the service of ulterior inference, and yield the maxi- 
 mum of deduction from the minimum of induction, from 
 so little indeed that it is almost nil and puts on the appear- 
 ance of intuition 2 . Of the well-known difficulties of this 
 doctrine he was apparently unaware: e.g. that the axioms 
 1 Phil. FOB. I. p. 73 ; LittaS, p. 80. 3 Littr<$, pp. 84, 85. 91.
 
 II.J COMTE. 443 
 
 per se are absolutely barren and yield no inference, though 
 regulating all: that without the presuppositions of space 
 and time, in which the axioms are already implicit, there 
 can be no experience, and therefore no induction: that 
 extension and duration cannot belong to objects, as their 
 phenomena, on the same terms with solidity and weight, 
 because their extension and duration would be there on 
 their own account, whether the objects were present in 
 them or not; and that they are so far from being depen- 
 dent affections of things, passing into mere figments of 
 thought when separated from such finite receptacles, that 
 the samples we meet with are only marked off from a real 
 infinitude and eternity. Is it not, then, more correct to say 
 that they are the conditions of existence for bodies, than 
 that they are among their phenomena 1 ? Certainly, the pre- 
 existence which must be assigned to them can be predicated 
 of no other corporeal properties. The prerequisites of Mathe- 
 matics are pure quantities, viz. Space, as susceptible of ideal 
 limitation by coexisting division; Time, as susceptible of 
 limitation by successive division or counting. The pre- 
 requisities of Physics are certain qualities of all sensible 
 objects ; of Chemistry, other qualities affecting them with 
 differences; of Biology, still further qualities, adding a 
 higher story of differences. The distinction, therefore, be- 
 tween the first and second term is quite other than that 
 between the second and third, which, once introduced, re- 
 peats itself in the subsequent steps. For this reason, a 
 more satisfactory classification would be gained by erecting 
 the science of quantity into an order separate from the 
 sciences of quality ; the former giving the d priori con- 
 ditions of experience, the latter its abstracted results, ar- 
 ranged on the scale of contracting generality. A very 
 ordinary and inexact experience suffices to instruct us in 
 the steps of this scale, and enables us to understand that 
 all things, e.g. have weight, but that not all things combine 
 like the powders of an effervescing draught, and still fewer 
 are alive, and that to know more about these three things, 
 we must go to a different kind of book for each ; so that the 
 rude outline of the qualitative series would readily form
 
 444 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 itself in an unmathematical mind. But on nearer approach 
 it is soon found that all qualities (whether because re- 
 solvable into motion, or not) are susceptible of varying 
 intensity, and that with such variations their phenomena 
 regularly change, and new relations among them arise ; 
 so that the need for measurement becomes imperative, and 
 the advance of knowledge must wait till the methods of 
 quantitative determination hasten to its aid. Theoretically, 
 it would have been more in order, if they had been ready 
 for the emergency by perfecting themselves first, and plant- 
 ing all their calculating engines on the field before any- 
 body asked for them. But, in point of fact, the great 
 achievements in mathematics have appeared in answer to 
 the requirements of some grand physical problem, else un- 
 manageable ; trigonometry working itself out to solve the 
 perplexities of the engineer and the astronomer ; the geometry 
 of curves enlarging itself to express the detected laws of 
 caustics and of the pendulum, and Newton's labours com- 
 pelling him to make his own tools as he went along. This 
 fact may well have induced Arnott to treat the Mathematics 
 rather as emerging from the mixed sciences than as their 
 prelude. Nor does their theory, rightly understood, bind 
 them to the same priority to Physics that Physics must 
 hold to Chemistry. 
 
 But a far more serious question arises as we approach 
 the summit of Comte's classification. Through its inor- 
 ganic stages and the vegetable and animal physiology at 
 the next step, he is partitioning the scene which environs 
 our existence ; but now, at last, he arrives at the being 
 himself who is so environed : it is Man that has here to get 
 known ; and man also that has to be the knower. Does 
 this make no difference ? Does it allow the simple continuity 
 of the previous method of procedure, as if this new object 
 were also exposed freely to view in the outward field, 
 and amenable to perceptive observation? This is precisely 
 what Comte assumes, and what is required by his extension 
 of the same axis through this crowning apex. For reasons 
 already stated, this assumption cannot be admitted. Not the 
 best eyesight in the world, with the most careful register
 
 II.] COMTE. 
 
 and comparison of what it shows, whether applied to the 
 movements of living populations or the surviving products of 
 the dead, will tell you more of human kind than you have 
 found it possible to learn of the swallows or the bees. 
 Yet certainly there is more to be known : there are 
 phenomena which are invisible, nay, whole dramas of con- 
 flict and catastrophe behind the scenes, often constituting 
 the very crises and defining the essence of life, to which 
 we should be for ever blind, were we not ourselves the scene 
 as well as the spectator. It is true that this secret history 
 does not die in silence : it speaks out in various forms of 
 art and language : but these signs would say nothing to us, 
 had we not in us the things signified. Self-consciousness, in 
 short, lifts the veil of a new world ; and in that new world 
 it is, and not in the physical and chemical, that is found 
 the Humanity, personal and social, which it remains for us to 
 know when we have finished the last page of our biology. 
 The series is here broken, because we alight upon not merely 
 phenomena that are sui generis, but upon a mode of knowing 
 that is sui generis; and the laws that may emerge, being 
 without contact, though parallel, with those already deter- 
 mined, take up nothing of their contents, and have no claim 
 to be their successors and consummation. Every affection 
 has its history in two directions which have no common 
 segment: it radiates outwards into visible action: it passes 
 inwards, and, impinging on the self-consciousness, undergoes 
 reflections and refractions, the lines of which no visual 
 organs can trace and no skilled bystander compute. If, when 
 we come to treat of the human affections, we refuse to quit 
 the old path of external observation, we miss the whole tissue 
 of this interior life. If, on the other hand, we gather up its 
 perceptible products in language, arts, and laws, and study 
 these as if they spake for themselves, we credit them with 
 a significance gained from an unnoticed source, and tacitly 
 use material of which we have given no account. This is 
 the fallacy of method into which Comte unwittingly falls. 
 He denies and derides the mind's self-knowledge ; and then, 
 in a fit of somnambulism, applies its secret key to the vast 
 edifice of social and moral existence which it has constructed
 
 446 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 and adorned, and moves about through its cloisters and 
 memorial chapels, interpreting them all under the illusion 
 that he is still standing in the plain outside. 
 
 Self-consciousness, then, involves in its very nature the 
 dualism of knowledge, and makes it impossible to range 
 the inner phenomena which it reveals, in one series with 
 the varieties of motory change cognisable by external per- 
 ception. The chasm between movement and feeling is im- 
 passable: from the nicest reading of either, no idea can be 
 gained of the other; and the more you succeed in proving 
 their eternal parallelism, the more hopeless becomes their con- 
 tinuity or coincidence. Each must take its own initiative, 
 and trace its separate course ; one supplying the axis for 
 the sciences of outward nature ; the other, the axis for those 
 of self-conscious man. Around the latter, psychology, aes- 
 thetics, morals, individual and social, group themselves and 
 vindicate their independent essence, without forgetting their 
 constant relation with the corresponding points of the 
 former. Nor need these human studies wait to begin 
 till, in arranging the objects on the external scene, we at 
 last alight on man : it is only as noticeable object in 
 the world that he is reserved for that place : but, as 
 knowing subject, he learns himself as soon as he learns 
 anything besides: he cannot prick himself without be- 
 coming acquainted with the pain, along with the form of 
 the finger and the pin ; and all through the rising stages of 
 Comte's hierarchy, from the simplest to the most complex 
 intellectual apprehensions, he gains simultaneous insight into 
 the objects of his thought and into his own processes in 
 thinking them ; so that in becoming an astronomer, a chemist, 
 a physiologist, he is at least gaining materials which have 
 only to be brought into the focus of his intelligent attention 
 to render him also a psychologist and a logician. The 
 scientific order of nature has thus its necessary reflection in 
 the mental development ; and it might be supposed that the 
 phenomena of self-consciousness could not do better than copy 
 in their arrangement the intellectual construction of the 
 natural series. For various reasons, however, this does not 
 hold good : among the rest, because not a tithe of the con-
 
 II.] COMTE. 447 
 
 tents of our self-conscious life is embraced -within the 
 discipline of scientific culture; nor do the dealings of 
 thought with its successive budgets of materials undergo 
 variations at all proportionate to the differences in the 
 materials themselves. To construct a reformed arrangement 
 on the principle of these hints is not within the scope of my 
 design. My purpose is simply to show that Comte's supreme 
 stratum does not repose securely upon its base: that it 
 needs to be lifted off and planted upon an area of its own ; 
 and that, thus placed, its contents will be found adequate, 
 under systematic redisposition, to the formation of a second 
 structure more worthy of its dedication to humanity than the 
 mere attic-story of any temple of material nature. 
 
 Comte's ' encyclopaedic scale ' of knowledge does not remain 
 in his hands a purely theoretical construction. It supplies 
 him with the general law of historical genesis and growth 
 among the sciences ; and with the true order in which they 
 should enter individual education 1 . I cannot but think that, 
 in both these instances, he has been misled by the idea that 
 he begins from the simplest end, which, it is natural to 
 suppose, must be most accessible to incipient intelligence. 
 He does so : but he overlooks the difference between the 
 abstract simple and the concrete simple: what he takes 
 for his scale is the former: what comes first in the in- 
 tellectual history, is the latter. Accordingly, it is by no 
 means true that, even in their elementary rules, the sciences of 
 measurement preceded the knowledge of the things measured. 
 What we now call ' the applied mathematics ' were really the 
 cradle of the mathematics ; and it was in the arts of embank- 
 ing rivers, and entrenching camps, and shaping altars, and 
 issuing multiple coins, and learning how to find the moon, and 
 make the shadow on the dial tell the time, that the relations 
 of magnitude and number were first apprehended and general- 
 ised. The practical inventions and physical speculations of 
 Thales and Anaximander had to precede the idealisation by 
 Pythagoras of measure, number, and proportion, as the ground 
 of the universe, and universal element of human knowledge. 
 
 1 Phil. Pos. pp. 84, 85 ; LittnS, p. 90.
 
 448 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 And though there are memorable instances, as in the 
 diamond's estimated refraction and the figures which hinted 
 at Neptune's invisible presence, in which purely mathematical 
 relations have anticipated physical discovery, far more usual 
 is the resort to calculation in order to test some preconception 
 of suspected but undetermined law. 
 
 Accepting Comte's just remark, that ' the starting-point for 
 the race is necessarily the same as for the individual,' I cannot 
 but apply these criticisms to his prescribed order of Educa- 
 tion. As you cannot go to work till you have got your tools, 
 the child must no doubt be early trained to some arithmetical 
 dexterity, both to make the faculties nimble and to serve the 
 exigencies of common life. But even this stage is most easily 
 passed by deserting the ' abstract ' simplicity and taking re- 
 fuge with ' concrete ' objects which can be counted and com- 
 bined in all sorts of visible ways. And, with most learners, 
 it will be difficult to maintain in vigour the incentives to 
 progress, unless a series of physical problems is presented 
 which kindles curiosity and awakens the urgency of conscious 
 defect. To enter upon education at the most abstract ex- 
 tremity of knowledge, is to forego the aid of natural propen- 
 sity in early life and encounter the maximum of natural 
 impediment. All incipient knowledge deals with concrete 
 objects ; and the intellectual aptitudes for classification and 
 distinction are most readily formed in the natural history ar- 
 rangements of integral things ; and cannot better learn their 
 first lessons of abstraction and reflective analysis than in the 
 exercise of language and the logical interpretation of grammar. 
 When the chief kinds of objects that fill the world, together 
 with men's modes of handling them in speech and thought, 
 have become familiar, the way is prepared for chasing the 
 like phenomena through unlike kinds, and gathering up these 
 fresh combinations into a new unit of conception ; and in that 
 moment the idea of law is born and the path of science is 
 entered. If such be the order which best turns to account the 
 wonderful memory and quick perception of children, while 
 straining after no abstractions that are not cast in the moulds 
 of common speech, it not only implies a long prelude to the 
 period of systematic science, but places in it some studies for
 
 li.- ; COMTE. 449 
 
 which Comte provides either a later place or none at all. 
 Seven years he dedicates to physical training of the senses and 
 the spontaneous activities, and the regulation of manners and 
 disposition, without even any commencement of reading and 
 writing. Seven more are given up to the fine arts and the 
 ' Western languages,' a courageous requirement for a child 
 that had not reached the alphabet at seven. Not till fifteen 
 does the seven years' scientific course begin ; two being set 
 apart for Mathematics and Astronomy, and then the same for 
 Physics and Chemistry, at a rate, through both terms, of two 
 lessons a week ; a rate which is halved through the three re- 
 maining years, devoted respectively to Biology, Sociology, and 
 Morals, with the addition, as accessories, of Greek and Latin 
 through the final biennium. The total omission from this 
 scheme of all reflective studies (except as implied in linguistic 
 attainments), and of all ' concrete sciences,' cannot fail to strike 
 us ; and akin to this in its significance is the extremely light 
 provision for the languages to be acquired, whether as prelude 
 or as completion of the youth's systematic discipline : together 
 with the strange inversion of the ancient and the modern 
 tongues. What sort of scholarship could be expected from 
 two years of Greek and Latin, taken as Neben-studien to 
 Sociology and Morals ? Nor is their misplacement in time less 
 strange than the small allowance of it. If the matchless in- 
 tellectual discipline which familiarity with these languages 
 and their literature affords is to be given at all, it should 
 come in time to send a finer and more practised mind into the 
 great theatre of scientific thought, and not be tacked on as 
 an appendix to the human studies in which its fruits are 
 most needed. Experience, consulted on a large scale, appears 
 to me distinctly to prove the superiority of the scholarly men 
 of science to the men of science pure and simple, with a thin 
 wash of literary colour for the outside film. Instances, no 
 doubt, there will always be of special genius wholly set apart 
 for the interpretation of external nature or the enlargement of 
 its subsidiary calculus ; and they are not to be pressed into 
 pursuits foreign to their possibilities of success. But plans of 
 education must be framed for average and not for exceptional 
 minds ; and for them, I am persuaded, the greatest vigour 
 VOL. i. G g
 
 450 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 and volume of faculty will not be reached, unless the literce 
 humaniores and, in general, the studies which exercise self- 
 consciousness, occupy an earlier and a more continuous place 
 than is assigned to them in Comte's scheme. 
 
 C. DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE. As the foregoing series 
 of sciences forms itself step by step, beginning with the 
 simplest, so does each member of it pass through three stages, 
 the succession of which is determined by a law of evolution 
 in the human mind that moulds them. It is long before man 
 can be content to take phenomena as he finds them, and 
 arrange them as they occur in space and time, though he comes 
 to this at last ; relinquishing the illusory search for causes, 
 which had led him to refer them, first, to personal agency, and 
 then to figments of abstraction, such as attraction, repulsion, or 
 other variety of imaginary power. Whatever be the order of 
 phenomena on which the mind, individual or collective, is en- 
 gaged, it treats them, in its childhood, theologically ; in its 
 youth, metaphysically ; in its maturity, positively. Such is 
 the law. How far does does experience verify it ? l 
 
 If its expositor were content to say, ' When men arrive at 
 Positivism, this is the path that brings them to it,' he would 
 probably meet with no dissent ; and to the truth contained in 
 this conditional proposition the law in its categorical state- 
 ment owes, I believe, whatever persuasive force it may possess. 
 But, in order to turn it into the unconditional form, the asser- 
 
 1 In the sketch of Comte's life I have shown how far he had been anticipated by 
 St. Simon in the enunciation of this law. It has been traced still further back 
 by some keen investigators of the genealogy of ideas, and found in Turgot's second 
 Discours, delivered as Prieur of the Sorbonne, Dec. 1 1, 1 750, Sur les progres svc- 
 cessifs de I'esprit humaine. CEuvres deTurgot. Paris, 1844. Tom. II. 601. But in 
 this historical sketch of the course of civilisation from its dawn to the 1 8th century, 
 there is no attempt to define the general law to which its changes are referable, 
 although the principle is recognised that they are not arbitrary in their succession ; 
 and, in the description of the starting-point and of the position reached, the domi- 
 nance of Supernaturalism in the one and of Naturalism in the other is indicated, 
 as, indeed, it could not fail to be. With regard to the former, e.g. Turgot says, ' The 
 first men, struck by sensible phenomena, supposed that all effects independent of 
 their own activity were produced by beings like themselves, only invisible and 
 more powerful, whom they put in the place of the Deity.' 'All the objects in 
 nature had their gods, who, formed on the pattern of men, had their attributes and 
 their vices.' But this remark is so little original, that it belongs to the common 
 stock of all the literature of the subject. I see not the least reason to believe that 
 Comte had ever seen Turgot's essay.
 
 II.] COMTE. 451 
 
 tion must be added, ' All men, in gaining acquaintance with the 
 coexistence and succession of phenomena, arrive at Positivism, 
 or will do so.' This is the affirmation in which lies the question- 
 able part of the alleged law ; and Comte's unconsciousness of 
 anything doubtful even here, his dogmatic assurance of un- 
 qualified truth, may perhaps be referred to a still remaining 
 ambiguity of which the expression must be divested. What is 
 meant by ' arriving at Positivism 1 ' Is it simply coming to 
 know the laws of phenomena (for in this consists Comte's 
 'positive knowledge')? Or is it, along with this, coming to 
 tli Ink that there is nothing else to be known, and, in par- 
 ticular, to discard the belief in causality? With the former 
 sense, the proposition before us is a tautology; with the latter, 
 it affirms as fact what is certainly not fact. Comte never 
 parted the meanings from each other : the falsehood was for 
 him incorporated with the tautology, and so treated as a truism 
 which only simpletons could deny. The annihilating element 
 of Positivism, hidden away in its wealth of knowledge, like 
 a bag of dynamite in a bale of silks, passes the heedless scru- 
 tineers, and gets warehoused as honest stock, with certainty of 
 explaining itself hereafter. 
 
 In the hope, nevertheless, of taking it out betimes, let us con- 
 sider whether the individual, in learning more and more of the 
 grouping and series of phenomena, has to unlearn his belief in 
 their causation, and dispense with any account of them beyond 
 their realised presence in time and space. Among the men of 
 science down to the present day who have attained the fore- 
 most rank in their several pursuits, I do not find any large 
 proportion that have reduced the relation of causality to that 
 of invariable antecedence and sequence. Certainly Huyghens' 
 measurement of ' centrifugal force,' Galileo's principle of ' com- 
 position of forces,' Newton's law of equal action and reaction, 
 were not conceived in terms of mere simultaneity and succes- 
 sion of movement apart from all idea of strain, of resistance, 
 of operative energy. And the frequency with which Newton 
 speaks of gravitation under the name ' attraction ' is censured 
 by Comte, as an indication that he was not free from the 
 illusory notion of causation 1 . As the critic himself continually 
 1 Phil. Pos. II. 246249. 
 
 Gg2
 
 452 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 uses, and must use, the word ' force,' and speaks of one body 
 ' acting upon another,' is it clear that he escapes his own cen- 
 sure 1 He thinks to do so by defining ' force ' as ' movement, 
 or tendency to movement ; ' and by remarking that ' two forces 
 that impress upon a given body the same velocity in the same 
 direction are regarded as identical, however different their 
 origin, be it a contraction of animal muscle, or gravitation 
 towards a centre of attraction, or the impact of a body, or the 
 expansion of an elastic fluid 1 .' But what is 'tendency to 
 movement "? ' Is it a present fact in the body of which you 
 predicate it ? and yet not a present movement there ? Then it 
 is not a phenomenon so far ; but only something that may turn 
 out a phenomenon by and by ; and how is such a present fact in 
 the body conceivable but as a reserved source of motion ? and 
 the fact adduced, that we do not care from what origin two 
 forces come which act upon a body in precisely the same way, 
 does not prove that we treat them -as without origin at all, and 
 without operation, and simply as movements loose from the 
 next change except in order of time. Instead of the advance 
 of science eliminating the conceptions and language of causa- 
 tion, it has more and more developed and elaborated them, 
 till they have become responsible for nearly the whole frame- 
 work of modern doctrine ; and to translate any recent phy- 
 sical treatise by Clerk Maxwell, or Tait, or Deschanel, with 
 its exposition of Energy conserved and transmuted and dissi- 
 pated, of attraction, repulsion, induction of currents, and lines 
 of force, into the phraseology of coexistence and succession of 
 phenomena would exhaust the patience, if not baffle the 
 ingenuity, of Comte and Mill themselves. In short, it is pre- 
 cisely in the foremost rank of the ' positive ' sciences that we 
 find the most systematic departure from the ' positivist ' anti- 
 causal doctrine, and the most constant resort to the 'meta- 
 physical conceptions ' of agency behind phenomena which we 
 are desired to dismiss as chimerical and obsolete. 
 
 Nor is it only the proximate ' metaphysical ' mode of thought 
 
 which thus proves to be compatible with the newest lessons of 
 
 nature. The earlier ' theological ' evinces the same persistency. 
 
 For I hold it entirely arbitrary to attribute the wave of 
 
 1 Phil. Pos. I. 544.
 
 II.] COMTE. 453 
 
 agnosticism which sweeps over the present age to our improved 
 knowledge of the order of the world, except so far as that 
 knowledge dissipates some Biblical preconceptions, and thus 
 disturbs those whose belief has rested on mere authority. It 
 is not among this immense multitude, but within the small 
 circle of scientific thinkers alone, that the tests of Comte's law 
 must be sought : they are the only witnesses of its last issues. 
 It is undeniable that the witnesses are divided ; not, so far as 
 I can see, in any proportion different from that which the 
 cleavage of thought produced in other ages of speculative doubt 
 and denial : in the times of Epicurus ; of Lucretius ; of the 
 Renaissance in Italy ; of the Encyclopedists in France. With 
 Comte's assertion in your mind, that every cultivated man has 
 been a theologian in childhood, a metaphysician in youth, and 
 a positivist in maturity, glance down the roll of honoured 
 savans and discoverers since the re-birth of the scientific spirit, 
 and the effrontery of his generalisation is apparent at once. 
 His favourite heroes and 'precursors,' Bacon, Descartes, and 
 Leibniz, give it no support : as applied to Galileo, Huyghens, 
 and the Cassini, to Newton, Pascal, and De Moivre, the maxim 
 is simply ridiculous. And if we are forbidden to expect its 
 evidence so far from Comte's advent, contradiction still meets 
 us in later generations : the whole spirit of John Dalton and 
 Thomas Young, of the two Herschels and the two Amperes, 
 are a protest against it. Are there any names more purely 
 representative of the inductive method, carried into the newest 
 department of physical research, than those of Oersted and 
 Faraday ? Of these two, the Englishman, in telling his last 
 thought to his countrymen, insisted, like Bacon, on the distinct 
 spheres, but the harmonious coexistence, of inductive know- 
 ledge and religious faith ; and the Dane left for posthumous 
 publication an Essay to prove that ' One Mind pervades all 
 Nature.' And notwithstanding the well-known voices that 
 loudly appropriate the agnostic rule, there is no country emi- 
 nent in modern science that does not record votes of high avail 
 against it ; from Fechner in Germany, from Pasteur in France, 
 from the late Clerk Maxwell, from Tait and Balfour Stewart, 
 from Carpenter and Allman in our own country. 
 
 Nor does history attest the triple law any more clearly than
 
 454 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 individual experience. Comte indeed extorts from it one 
 typical piece of evidence, coextensive with the period which he 
 submits to review: it is obtained by taking the Medieval 
 Catholicism as the advent of monotheism ; the revival of letters 
 as its resolution into metaphysics ; and the last two centuries 
 as the passage to Positivism. Even if these links were firm 
 and without flaw, they would supply but a fragment of needed 
 illustration; for the Monotheism with which they begin is, 
 according to Comte, only the last reach of the theological stage, 
 and has to be evolved out of Polytheism, as that again emerges 
 from Fetichism. Where then does he find those prior conditions 
 which led up to the institution of the Catholic Church 1 In the 
 Paganism of Rome and Greece ! in itself a growth out of prse- 
 Pelasgian worship of concrete objects ; so that the genealogy 
 of Christianity is to be sought in Olympus and the Alban 
 Mount, and not, as we had supposed, in Palestine. This curious 
 affiliation ought not perhaps to surprise us in a writer who re- 
 quires nothing in a cause but antecedence to its effect ; for, no 
 doubt, the Christian civilisation came after the Pagan. But to 
 treat the point of juncture between the two as the birth hour of 
 Monotheism, and deduce the Church from the heathen Temple in- 
 stead of from the Synagogue, is a distortion of history without 
 parallel. The only notice which Comte takes of the Jewish peo- 
 ple is to recognise their scattered presence in the cities of the 
 Roman empire, at a time when, all independent states being ex- 
 tinct, the polytheistic divinities were baffled and stood idle in 
 the Pantheon and unworshipped in the temple ; and when the 
 orbis terrarum, having become politically one, could no longer 
 live under the divided Heaven ; so that, when the unity of 
 humanity forced men into unification of worship, the process 
 was helped into shape by the vicinity everywhere of some 
 monotheistic colonies as organising centres. These, however, 
 were by no means necessary: so strong was the set of the 
 social current in the direction which religion took, that, had 
 they not been there, it would have forced its way to the same 
 course by some slight detour. This theory exaggerates the 
 Pr&paratio Evangelica which Christian writers on the ' Pro- 
 vidence of History ' have pointed out as furnished by the vast 
 area of universal peace, and common civilisation, and free
 
 II.] COMTE. 455 
 
 * 
 
 intercourse, opened by the early Roman empire to the mis- 
 sionaries of the Gospel. It treats this and other passive con- 
 ditions of a favouring field, as if they could have grown the 
 new religion without the sower and the seed. Nay, more : it 
 ignores the fact that the seed itself, instead of making itself up 
 out of the inorganic materials of a decaying Polytheism, was 
 the living growth of a foreign Monotheism, matured and en- 
 riched through the harvests of many a century. In his deter- 
 mination to limit his historic survey to the European nations, 
 Comte binds himself to find all that his theory requires within 
 their boundaries, and virtually shuts his eyes to the elements 
 of life which the winds and streams have brought thither from 
 afar. He deals with the world, as if the great Oriental races 
 had never been, or had left no legacy of thought and feeling to 
 the West. Now and then he betrays, for a moment, some 
 consciousness of the difficulties which their existence, especially 
 that of the Jewish family, opposes to his doctrine ; but they 
 draw from him no concession : he simply pushes aside the in- 
 convenient phenomena as anomalous intruders ; the Jews were 
 a peculiar people : they were born out of due time : they be- 
 came monotheistic 'prematurely!' they had no business to 
 be up so early : had they been aware of Comte's law, and set 
 their timepiece by it. they would not have been so forward to 
 disturb the house from its appointed ways. Such are the shifts 
 to which a writer is driven, who insists on setting up the 
 medieval Christianity as the typical example of evolved Mo- 
 notheism, and on developing it out of the Greek and Roman 
 Polytheism which it overthrew and dissipated. The religion 
 of modern Europe notoriously does not descend from the same 
 source as its civilisation, and is no continuation of the ancient 
 culture. It had an origin to which the Pagan feeling enter- 
 tained the intensest repugnance ; and so long as the Roman 
 culture was a living thing, no blending of the two was pos- 
 sible : the new religion and the old life remained hostile, till 
 the latter had disappeared ; and it was not till the revival of 
 letters, when the old world had been gone nearly a thousand 
 years, that the reconciliation could take place, and the sepa- 
 rated streams of heathen and of Christian thought found any 
 real confluence.
 
 456 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 
 
 No position is more emphasised by Comte than this : that 
 Monotheism carries with it, as its greatest benefit, a separation 
 of the spiritual from the temporal power, while Polytheism 
 unites the two. A glance at the Jewish and Mohammedan 
 Monotheisms would have modified this judgment ; for both of 
 them are so far from exhibiting this separation that they serve 
 as our standard examples of Theocracy ; in which there is no 
 human legislator ; and every executive officer, be he called king 
 or caliph, priest or general, administers some part or other of one 
 and the same unalterable Divine law, and is equally a minister 
 of the King of kings. The separation of the two functions 
 arises only where the spiritual obligations and the temporal 
 have a different geographical extension, one of them being 
 universal, the other local. With the Jews, as with polytheistic 
 states trusting in national gods, both were local, their whole 
 Law being a tribal inherited specialty. With the Moham- 
 medans, both are universal, intended for the conquest and 
 government of the world. But Christianity offers one religion 
 to many nations, and is content to consecrate life from its 
 inner springs and supply its moral character, leaving to each 
 land the moulding of its external rules of action and relation, 
 according to its genius, its history, and its needs. Hence it 
 alone has instituted the distinction which Comte so much 
 approves. 
 
 If from the alleged source we turn to the sequel of the 
 medieval theological stage, the illustration of the triple law 
 still seems to fail us. The whole break-up of the Catholic 
 system, in its discipline, its hierarchy, its dogma, during the 
 last five centuries, is presented to us as constituting the 
 ' Metaphysical ' stage of thought into which the ' Theological ' 
 necessarily resolves itself; and this epithet is especially 
 applied, with a certain gusto of contempt, to the Protestant 
 movement of open revolt. For the meaning of this word we 
 are fortunately at no loss ; for, in enouncing his Law, Comte 
 supplies the distinctive mark of the ' metaphysical ' state of 
 mind, viz. that it seeks for the causes of phenomena in abstract 
 entities, and no longer in supernatural volitions. How then 
 does ' Protestantism ' earn the word ? What abstract entities 
 does it set up ; to work its problems of causation ? What
 
 II.] COMTE. 457 
 
 supernatural Will does it forego 1 In which of its com- 
 munions, in which of its philosophies, does Divine agency play 
 a less part in the life of the world and of humanity, than in the 
 scheme of the older Church ? In both forms of Christianity, 
 God is the efficient presence alike in natural and spiritual 
 phenomena, by methods fixed or free ; if the younger con- 
 ception differs on the whole from the earlier, it is rather, I 
 should say, by more intensely spiritualising nature, than by 
 naturalising spirit. The word ' metaphysical ' must be 
 altered therefore in its definition before it can be intelligibly 
 applied to the contents of the Reformation movement. 
 
 And altered it certainly is, so as silently to fit its new 
 purpose. It is used to denote, not the particular turn of 
 thought which personifies entities, but any disintegrating in- 
 fluence which corrodes a prior theology, whether it produces 
 another, or substitutes abstractions, or leaves a blank ; so 
 that the epithet covers the whole free play of the insurgent 
 mind of Europe against the authority of the Medieval 
 Church. By calling every critical and dissolving process 
 ' metaphysics,' it is easily made out that metaphysics can do 
 nothing but destroy. Limit the word to its proper signifi- 
 cance, ' the disengagement of ultimate thoughts which must be 
 held valid for things,' or, inversely expressed, 'the enumera- 
 tion of realities guaranteed by ultimate necessities of thought ; ' 
 and there are no more metaphysics in Comte's second stage 
 than in the first ; and no less in the third than in either. His 
 own fundamental propositions, that ' we can know only 
 phenomena ; ' that ' knowledge by self-consciousness is im- 
 possible ;' that ' causality is a fiction ;' that ' personal identity 
 is an illusion,' are metaphysics pure and simple ; and if he 
 escapes the obsolete thing, it is by coolly assuming these 
 Principia, and offering nothing but excommunication to all 
 dissentients. The leaders in the intellectual and moral revolt 
 of the sixteenth and following centuries paid more respect to 
 the system which they desired to reform ; and if, in bringing 
 up their new metaphysics against the old, their batteries, in 
 demolishing the enemy, sometimes exploded upon themselves, 
 we need not regret that they did double duty, and cleared 
 away two indefensible posts at once. Their fresh conceptions,
 
 458 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 the product of enlarging life, were usually superior to the 
 crystallised assumptions of the ages past ; but, when shaped 
 into abstract principles, after the fashion of all nascent energy 
 of thought, they advanced a claim which the tests of time and 
 reflection were little likely to confirm. When the authority 
 venerated for ages had once been shaken, the endeavour to 
 recover a lost certainty turned with natural hope to the model 
 of highest proof afforded by the mathematics, and looked out 
 for d priori premisses with which infrangible links of infer- 
 ence might be forged ; so that not in theology only, but in the 
 first tentatives at ethical and political doctrine, and even in 
 physics, recourse was had to the deductive method ; with the 
 inevitable result, that on the list of self-evident principles were 
 set down, along with a few supplied by the very conditions 
 of thought, a number of unconscious and arbitrary gene- 
 ralisations that bore the aspect of truth only till some one 
 plucked off their mask. Hence the precarious and perishable 
 character of much of the new doctrine ; in view of which 
 Comte is fully justified in asserting that by such a method of 
 procedure nothing permanent could ever be raised ; and that, 
 however worthy may be the feeling embodied in such formulas 
 as ' the right of private judgment,' ' the natural equality of 
 men,' ' the sovereignty of the people,' they have only a rela- 
 tive and temporary function, and for durable intellectual use 
 prove hollow and collapse. But, after all, it remains with 
 good metaphysics to correct the bad, nor is there any other 
 instrument discovered for sifting out first-hand truth from 
 second-hand, and pure from mixed. If Descartes', or Grotius', 
 or Cousin's first principles will not hold water, the fault is in 
 their leaky vessels, and would not be mended by destroying 
 the potter's and cooper's art, and having nothing to draw with 
 from these deep wells. 
 
 The real relation of the three states of mind described as 
 theological, metaphysical, and positive, admits of being pre- 
 sented with qualified recognition of their successive rise, but 
 without allowing that the later supersedes the earlier. The 
 phenomena which strike upon human attention and form the 
 contents of our experience raise in us three questions, as to 
 their Source, their Scene, their Order: the first, in virtue of our
 
 II.] COMTE. 459 
 
 Causal intuition; the second (as before explained 1 ), to supply 
 their own correlative ; the third, to capture the marks of their 
 arrival. As causality other-than-ours is the pure counterpart 
 of ours, the first question meets its answer in the Will which 
 we discern in nature, and which at least terminates in being 
 one. As the correlative of a phenomenon is its permanent 
 subject or seat, the second question is answered by naming its 
 statical conditions. And as its order is determined by its 
 place among synchronous companions and in a serial line, the 
 third has its answer in mere terms of relative position and 
 date. The first, or theological, answer gives therefore the 
 Causal datum of the phenomenon ; the second, or meta- 
 physical, gives its Conditional data; and the third, or positive, 
 gives its Law. Of these, it is evident that the two first are 
 Noumena, guaranteed to us purely by the dual constitution of 
 all relative thought ; to us there cannot be a phenomenon that 
 is not an effect : it is an emerging fact that cannot be con- 
 ceived as an isolated existence, but only as produced : in the 
 meaning of the word there are two factors, of which the idea 
 of Cause is one. And so is it with the second datum. 
 Phenomenon, without some subject that has it, some field in 
 which it turns up, is unthinkable : to affirm it is to deny it, 
 and it lies cancelled in the very act: the idea of change 
 
 / 
 
 declines to appear but in antithesis to a permanent ground, 
 be it only Space on which it is superinduced. Again, there- 
 fore, we find ourselves dealing with a relation ; one member 
 of which is this condition. In both these instances, the 
 implicit terms are supplied by the intellect itself, as the 
 thinking power, and not by the external matter of the per- 
 ception : they therefore repeat themselves in every experience : 
 they are the constants of thought, inherent in it as a cognitive 
 act, and present ab initio, whether attended to or not. Of 
 the two, the Causal, from its dynamic character, and from its 
 externality to the phenomenon itself, is the more impressive ; 
 and the more certain, as the antithetic counterpart to our own 
 activity, to become explicit as an object of regard. But the 
 Conditions, of Space, Time, Substance, as silent assumptions, 
 incorporated in the very language of intelligence, become self- 
 
 1 See supra, 'The Limits of Knowledge,' p. 427 seqq.
 
 460 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 evident as soon as they are pointed out. When we come to 
 the third mode of mentally treating phenomena, viz. to find 
 their Law, these characteristics disappear. We have still to do 
 with them as in relation; not, however, with their cause, or 
 with their condition, but with one another, in their simultane- 
 ousness and their succession : relations, which do not indeed 
 exclude or discredit the others (as Comte appears to think), 
 but do not need them; and which, as wholly external and 
 lying in the matter perceived, have no constant element, 
 beyond the resemblances distributed through an ever-varying 
 experience. To detect and register and measure these re- 
 semblances, and group the facts observed in conformity with 
 them, is the business of induction, and results, so far as it 
 is accomplished, in a true expression of the Order of Nature. 
 Here, it is evident, the whole operation deals with the 
 variables of cognition. 
 
 Hence it follows that, in the main, the changes in know- 
 ledge, and the accessions to it, must be looked for only in this 
 third field ; from the vastness and fulness of which, compared 
 with the narrow limits and feeble instruments of human 
 observation, their advances cannot be other than slow and 
 late. But, as each step secured facilitates the next upon its 
 own series, and helps to define the neighbouring lines, the 
 speed accelerates as the survey is pushed on ; and seems at 
 times to excuse the most daring dreams of unlimited expan- 
 sion. In the two previous cases, the noumenal term of the 
 relation being constant, the knowledge of it is constant too ; 
 however they may shift or multiply, the phenomena con- 
 templated must always be from their cause and in their sub- 
 ject ; and the intellectual recognition of this does not change 
 with their variation or grow with their growth ; it is a ful- 
 crum of Reason, securing its stability, and not its adjustable 
 arms, whose leverage is applied now to this problem, and now 
 to that. There is, therefore, a real ground for the statement 
 that, while Science makes progress, metaphysics stand still, 
 always reproducing the same conceptions, never laying to rest 
 the questions which they start. This is meant as a reproach ; 
 but, so far as it affirms a general truth, it announces a merit 
 and not a fault, viz. that metaphysics faithfully vindicate, up-
 
 II.] COMTE. 461 
 
 hold, and deliver the unchangeable and eternal factor in all 
 knowledge, and prevent its being hustled out of view by the 
 tramp and pride of its advancing columns. Metaphysics, so 
 far as they are true to their work, are stationary, precisely 
 because they have in charge, not what begins and ceases to 
 be, but what always is. Science is ever on the march, 
 because its sole care is spent upon the changes of the world 
 in their relations to each other, and the story of their periods 
 or their indefinite evolution. To compare the two and 
 demand the same thing from them, is to mistake their 
 nature ; and to exalt the speed of science, at the expense of 
 the fixity of metaphysics, is not less absurd than to praise 
 motion for always making way, while disparaging space for 
 still being what it ever was : as if the motion you prefer could 
 be without the space which you reproach. 
 
 The stationariness, however, which is charged upon theo- 
 logy and metaphysics cannot be admitted without con- 
 siderable qualifications. Though the underlying data of all 
 phenomena, under the heads both of cause and of condition, 
 are always the same Noumena, the known universe of 
 phenomena which they cause and condition is continually 
 expanding, and opening to view new or modified relations ; 
 and the conceptions we have of their producing will and their 
 containing infinitude cannot fail to be enriched and exalted 
 by this enlargement. The essence of the predicates is the 
 same ; but their scale and range of application are indefinitely 
 magnified. Theology, too, has other roots in our nature than 
 this causal intuition, and draws through them a nutriment 
 and growth which it would be here irrelevant to trace. More- 
 over, the analysis from which any unimpeachable metaphysics 
 can emerge is so difficult, and the approaches to them are 
 beset by such a tangle of insidious abstractions, that many 
 unsuccessful tentatives have inevitably diverted explorers 
 from the true lines of search, and perhaps detain us still at 
 some distance from the end in view. But it can hardly be 
 denied that, especially since the time of Kant, the way is 
 much clearer than it was ; that, on the one hand, a host of 
 fancied ultimate ideas have been legitimately dismissed as 
 dressed-up abstractions; and that, on the other, the attempt
 
 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 to apply that method of discharge universally has signally 
 failed. The improvement consists, I admit, not in the more 
 that is known, but rather in the less that is mistaken ; but at 
 all events it rebukes impatient despair of the metaphysical 
 problem, by exhibiting our besetting illusions, one after 
 another, in the very act of vanishing away. 
 
 Comte's subordinate theory, of the three theological stages 
 in the first act of his triple law, I must pass with slight notice. 
 As a speculation, it is most ingeniously worked out ; but it is 
 left self-supported, without any adequate base of historical 
 evidence, or even collateral corroboration from the probable 
 analogy of existing barbarous and semi-barbarous tribes. This 
 is not the philosopher's fault. The materials do not exist, 
 probably never will exist, for anything like a safe inductive 
 inference, as to any uniform path by which Monotheism has 
 been reached. It is by no means determined even whether it 
 comes first or last ; if last, whether by movement on one line, 
 or on more : and if on one, whether what is called ' Fetichism ' 
 is the starting point. The utterly loose structure of all the 
 argument on these points which I have thus far seen, leaves, 
 I conceive, no higher claim than belongs to any admissible 
 psychological conjecture ; and, as I have nothing better to 
 offer, I withhold my foot from the trackless plain ; nor will I 
 try to show, that what others take for a clear road across its 
 expanse is but a brilliant beam shot along it from the light 
 and lenses of their own thought. One remark only will I 
 allow myself. Suppose it to be true that invisible will is read 
 by the human mind first into concrete objects, taken one by 
 one ; next, into classes of kindred things, or particular depart- 
 ments of nature ; and, at last, into the universe at large ; the 
 process is perfectly homogeneous throughout, and is simply 
 an expanding generalisation of the phenomenon to be ex- 
 plained, a fusion of the many into the few, and of the few 
 into the one. However grouped, however blended, the objects 
 in the scene may be, the account given of them persists with- 
 out change : Cause is Will at first : Cause is Will at last. 
 
 D. IDEA OF PROGRESSIVE HUMANITY, WHENCE ? The 
 moment when the triple law revealed itself to Comte's 
 'young intelligence, imbued with revolutionary ardour,' con-
 
 II.] COMTE. 463 
 
 stituted, in his view, an epoch in the life of humanity, because 
 in it was born the true spirit of history, unknown even to his 
 immediate predecessor, Condorcet 1 . Till then, Sociology was 
 impossible, for want of one of its constitutive factors, the 
 idea of Progress as inherent in the life of society, and furnish- 
 ing it with an ideal future, beyond the present order, as the 
 present is beyond the past. To form this conception, there 
 was need of three terms of comparison, tracing a continuous 
 line of change, such as are furnished by the theological, 
 metaphysical, and positive stages ; whereas there had never 
 been more than two ; in the medieval period, the conscious- 
 ness prevailing, of superiority in the Christian organisation 
 over the Pagan and Jewish, without any better future except in 
 the life after death ; and in the ancient world, the constitution 
 of the actual State being tested by some conceived philosophic 
 model which, if realised, would have only to stand still and 
 be. Both to the theological and to the metaphysical modes 
 of thinking, a stationary perfection presented itself as the 
 object of aspiration ; and, when once the true equilibrium was 
 reached, nothing remained but to ward off external disturb- 
 ance and cleanse away the germs of internal decay, and live 
 on in social immobility. Prior, therefore, to the discovery 
 of Comte's law, change was admissible only for removing 
 obstacles to the attainment of an absolute type of order ; 
 but no sooner was that discovery made, than order itself came 
 to consist of change in conformity with the detected law : the 
 idea was started of an evolution of humanity, and for the 
 vision of a crystallised perfection was substituted that of an 
 indefinite living growth. 
 
 So far as the criticism here given of the Greek theories of 
 society is considered, I see only a true appreciation of their 
 characteristic weakness ; a weakness which Comte himself 
 excuses, on the ground of the inadequate range of historical 
 experience for any wider induction at that early time. 
 Certainly upon the Pagan nations the idea had not dawned, 
 of an unfolding life in the communities of men, modifying 
 their component proportions, and developing new functions 
 from age to age ; and neither in Plato's ' Republic ' nor in 
 
 1 Discours, p. 63.
 
 464 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 Aristotle's ' Politics ' have we anything comparable with 
 Comte's measured but brilliant march through the stadia of 
 Christian history. But that he should charge this defect upon 
 the whole ' theological ' stage of the human mind, and see no 
 difference in regard to it between Greek and Jew, would be 
 surprising, did we not already know how he treats people 
 who get ideas into their heads ' prematurely.' The very 
 essence of the Jewish monotheism is its recognition of an 
 ordered plan opening out through all the ages, its faith in a 
 Providence of history, a faith which gives its finest literature 
 the form of prophecy, and its sweetest lyrics the tone of 
 aspiration. The nation's look was always prospective, to- 
 wards a ' Kingdom of heaven,' a consecration of humanity 
 by no means absolute or closed, but rich with indefinite con- 
 tents. It is true that the expectation centred upon one land 
 and race, and embraced but a dependent margin beyond; 
 only, however, till it came into contact with the Christian 
 spirit ; for no sooner did its meaning break upon the convert 
 of Damascus, than it burst into universality at once, and 
 became a scheme of progress coextensive with the habitable 
 earth, and unfolding so long as human life endures. It is also 
 true that, even with the apostle Paul, the form of the con- 
 ception was that, not of a law of spontaneous advance, but of 
 a divinely wrought change, leading on to an intended end. 
 But, unconsciously to himself, the very extension which he 
 gave to the idea absorbed and annihilated this distinction ; 
 for whatever is done, according to plan and rule, every- 
 where and always, thereby ceases to be exceptional (i.e. 
 miraculous), and takes its place in the system of natural 
 law. Accordingly, when the personal peculiarities and mis- 
 taken chronology of the Pauline vision fell away, its inward 
 thought remained and became permanent in the Christian 
 theory of the world ; which has never ceased to be imbued 
 with faith in progress and perfectibility, and drawn on by 
 ideal attractions to unattained heights of individual and social 
 character. Whatever, therefore, may be the scientific merit 
 of Comte's law, as defining the particular direction of 
 intellectual movement in the human mind, it cannot be 
 credited with the first suggestion of progress and of an
 
 II.] COMTE. 465 
 
 indefinite capacity for moral development in persons and 
 communities. 
 
 E. ETHICAL DOCTRINE. In adverting next to Comte's 
 Ethical doctrine, I regret that the requirements of my subject 
 limit me to a consideration of its theoretic base, and withhold 
 me from following it into the practical applications. On the 
 former I can find no footing that is clear and safe. But his 
 treatment of the ' Art of Morals,' though injured by fantastic 
 details, is full of wisdom, and pervaded by a noble humanity. 
 In his estimate of domestic life, as the miniature and school of 
 the social ; of the filial relation, as the source of reverence for 
 ancestry and sympathy with an historic past ; and of the pa- 
 rental relation, as throwing a like enthusiasm into the future ; 
 and of the fraternal, as the practising ground of all reciprocal 
 sociabilities ; of the sacredness of marriage, and the true place 
 and influence of woman ; of the importance, in education, of 
 setting the affections to plead their own cause, and the suicidal 
 folly of recommending sympathy by appeal to reason or to 
 interest: in his aversion to the self-asserting claim of 
 Rights, as suspending the consciousness of Duty: in his 
 acceptance of fundamental moral rules, as no less inwardly 
 self-attested and beyond discussion than the strictest demon- 
 stration : he shows, as it seems to me, a profound insight 
 into springs of human character and the needs of human 
 life l . But all these wise counsels and appreciations assume 
 an ethical constitution of our nature, involving especially 
 two propositions, viz. (1) that the preponderance of affection 
 over egoism is possible to will, though not necessitated by 
 law ; and (2) that, over and above the measure of energy in 
 affection, there is such a thing as Duty, rendering this pre- 
 ponderance imperative. In the foundations of Comte's theory 
 I find no security provided for either of these propositions ; 
 and, what is equally remarkable, I find an absolute iden- 
 tification of preponderant affection, however brought about, 
 with Moral character or obedience to Duty. 
 
 On this last point scarcely a word would be necessary, after 
 placing in juxtaposition the two states which are mistaken for 
 each other, were it not that the confusion which it involves is 
 
 1 Discours, 90 96. 
 VOL. I. H h
 
 466 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 apparently becoming habitual in modern treatises on ethics. 
 It amounts to an illusive retention of an eviscerated moral 
 vocabulary. If I am already so constituted as to feel the moral 
 differences among my springs of action, of course I shall know 
 that, among those which ought to prevail, the benevolent sym- 
 pathies occupy a very large (though not an exclusive) place ; 
 and were my problems of conduct written out, the majority of 
 them would consist in securing this preponderance. But the 
 mere presence in my nature of an ascendant affectionate in- 
 stinct, apart from any sense of its relative worth, does not 
 constitute me a moral being, or my surrender to it a moral act. 
 In many animal tribes the maternal instinct dominates over 
 every other, and almost suspends the operation of self-main- 
 taining energy, nay, even rushes on self-destruction ; yet no 
 one puts such victims of an absorbing impulse on a footing with 
 the voluntary hero of love that is also duty. When, therefore, 
 Comte, in defining his ethical requirements, names as his ' uni- 
 versal principle' the preponderance of the sympathetic over 
 the individual instincts, he is so far from covering, as he says, 
 the ensemble of morality \ that he does not even reach it at all, 
 but describes only an affectional constitution possible to a na- 
 ture wholly unmoral. Love is not synonymous with duty. 
 
 Turning now to the first postulate on which his practical 
 counsels rest, that the preponderance of affection over egoism 
 is voluntarily possible, let us see whether his theory concedes 
 it. In the first place, the preponderance has to be acquired ; 
 for by nature ' our active life ' is ' essentially egoistic,' and our 
 sympathetic feelings have, in comparison, but a ' feeble energy;' 
 and as we glance over the different members of the altruistic 
 series, we find the same rule prevailing : at every step we pass 
 to the less and less energetic but more and more elevated 2 . 
 This original relation of strong and weak requires to be in- 
 verted. In the next place, the theory offers us no personal 
 agent to perform this feat; for it makes the personality consist 
 exclusively of the selfish, as distinguished from the social im- 
 pulses, and acknowledges no such thing as optional will, but 
 resolves volition into the mastery gained by the stronger; so 
 that nothing can happen except what arises from relative 
 
 1 Discours, 88, 89. * Ibid. 37. 90.
 
 II.] COMTE. 467 
 
 strength. In the third place, then, it remains to consider what 
 provision can be found, within these limits, for transferring the 
 centre of gravity from personal selfishness to universal love. 
 This problem in mental dynamics leaves us, so far as I can see, 
 completely in the dark. He proposes no doctrine, like Hart- 
 ley's, for evolving new qualities by chemical composition or 
 ' association ' of ideas, and extracting disinterested affections 
 from selfish data : he does not profess to convert, but to lay to 
 sleep, the egoistic instincts : their organs keep their old lodg- 
 ings, and go their old ways ; but, through the advance of their 
 rivals, get fewer opportunities. These rivals having started at 
 a disadvantage, what has changed the balance and enabled 
 them to win ? From among vague and wandering replies I can 
 only select the more definite. The sympathetic instincts are 
 developed, it is said, by constant exercise in education and 
 subsequent experience. This certainly accounts for their 
 energy in the present being greater than in the past ; but not 
 for its having the upper hand over its former masters ; for they 
 too have been as busy as the rest, and have had equal chance 
 of growth. Again, Comte claims, through his hierarchy of 
 sciences, to have deprived egoism of the support of reason ; for, 
 has he not shown Sociology to be the crown of knowledge ? 
 and the social point of view, therefore, to be the regulative 
 principle, to which, accordingly, the personal must henceforth 
 acknowledge its subjection ? and is not this tantamount to say- 
 ing that ' the heart,' the sympathetic order of feeling, must 
 take the lead, and, in doing so, may plume itself on having 
 brought over reason to its side 1 1 I should be sorry to under- 
 rate the value of our philosopher's alliance ; but that a selfish 
 man will give up his aims lest he should spoil the symmetry 
 of the scientific pyramid, and become a convert to his sym- 
 pathies in order to preserve it, appears to me too sanguine an 
 expectation. Even if his egoism should insist on feeling rea- 
 sonable, and not contradicting Sociology, he need not despair, 
 any more than Hobbes and Bentham before him, of building 
 up a social theory on the basis of self-love, and proving that 
 the equilibrium of collective well-being is best found by every 
 one taking care of his own portion as far as others will let 
 
 1 Discours, pp. 36, 37. 
 
 H h 2
 
 468 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 him, and giving no more heed to theirs than must be paid as 
 the price of their help. Nay, Comte himself describes the final 
 ascendency of the affective states as the subordination of the 
 theoretic impulse (which, I suppose, is identical with 'reason') 
 to ' sentiment ' or feeling ; so that his position resolves itself 
 into the paradox, that at a certain point of development it 
 becomes rational no longer to consult the reason. 
 
 The main reliance, however, of the Positive as of the Utili- 
 tarian philosophy for the suppression of egoism, is on the pres- 
 sure of public opinion. This, it is distinctly said, is ' the moral 
 power.' A 'power' it may be, so far as it prevents or modifies 
 the spontaneous action of the individual ; but ' moral ' it is not, 
 so far as it merely alters the balance of his interests, and 
 affects him as an external coercion upon what else would be 
 his desire ; his motive impulse is the same, under a different 
 reckoning of conditions. Still, this social force may perhaps 
 solve our dynamic problem, and secure the preponderance of 
 the altruistic tendencies. Is it competent to this ? It would 
 seem at first view certain enough that, in a conflict between the 
 single and the collective will, the social voice must vote down 
 the individual, and enforce subservience to the general good : 
 so that everybody would be against self-love, and demand its 
 sacrifice to the claims of others. This presumption, however, 
 is by no means unconditionally true. Its validity depends on 
 the assumed constitution of the human nature of which it is 
 affirmed ; and it fails (as will be explicitly shown when we 
 treat of the Utilitarian ethics) under the particular condition 
 to which Comte binds himself, of a fundamental and univer- 
 sal dominance of the self-regarding desires. It is precisely and 
 only because we are not made upon this pattern that we take 
 sides, not with the self-seeking, but with the self-forgetting. 
 
 In vain, therefore, do we seek in this doctrine for either any 
 psychological law enabling the weak sympathetic instincts to 
 master the stronger egoistic, or any moral ground for the asser- 
 tion that they ought to do so. It provides no binding in- 
 fluence beyond the foreign pressure of opinion, which cannot 
 make a duty where there was none before : to call Right into 
 existence something else is needed than the conflict of many 
 wills against one, or the mandate of the loudest majority.
 
 II.] COMTE. 469 
 
 Comte is not entitled, by the terms of his expressed theory, to 
 speak of Duties at all, or use language denoting higher or lower 
 merit. The defect, however, was in his theory, not in himself: 
 his writings are imbued with an intense moral feeling: he 
 lays the utmost stress upon the sentiment of Duty ; and its deep 
 root in his nature may perhaps be the very reason why he gives 
 no account of it, but assumes it as self-evident that the social 
 sympathies ought to prevail, and so sets himself to make out 
 that they can prevail. Need I say, that this is not Positive 
 science, but intuitive morals ? What else indeed can we make 
 of his remarkable statement, that moral rules are to be laid 
 down as self-evident and beyond discussion ; inasmuch as, by a 
 true knowledge of ourselves, we read them in every affection, 
 thought, habit, and action, with a conviction as complete as 
 the strictest demonstrations could give, a conviction arising 
 simply from their intimate relation to the noblest instincts. 
 Yet more explicitly he adds, that the reason why we must not 
 rely on proof to produce moral convictions is, that proof is 
 necessarily objective, fetched from observation and judgment 
 exercised on others; whereas appreciation, to be moral, must 
 be subjective, drawn from the inward consciousness of our own 
 character l . These propositions alight upon momentous truths ; 
 but it is curious to receive them from one who habitually ridi- 
 cules the ' pretended possibility ' of self-knowledge, amounting 
 as they do to an explicit assertion of intuitive and psychologi- 
 cal morals. 
 
 F. POSITIVIST RELIGION. To the pure savans who appre- 
 ciated Comte's masterly conspectus of the sciences in his 
 PI ilosophie Positive, and welcomed its sentence of superannu- 
 ation against theology and metaphysics, nothing, I believe, was 
 ever more surprising than his reappearance as author of his 
 ' Catechism ' and High Priest of the Religion of Humanity. 
 That a writer for whom there was nothing beyond nature, 
 and nature, including man, resolved itself into clustered 
 and regimented phenomena, invariably but faultily com- 
 bined ; a writer who owned no possible except the actual, 
 
 1 Discours, pp. 95, 96. Yet elsewhere we find him saying that ' Positivism 
 bases moral science far more on observation of others than of oneself.' Catechisme, 
 PP- 58 59-
 
 470 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 and no rational exercise of thought except, from the fact that 
 is, to foresee the fact that will be ; who treated with habitual 
 contempt, as an idolatry of abstractions, all admission of 
 causes, attractions, repulsions, affinities, still more of any 
 alternative power of will ; should suddenly proclaim him- 
 self the founder of a new religion, engaged in the contem- 
 plation of ideals, intent on the conversion of the world, 
 with a catalogue of saints, a ritual of worship, a calendar of 
 stated prayers, seemed to many an Academician an indication 
 of premature dotage. Yet his first great work is not without 
 features which might have prepared discerning readers for a 
 practical philosophy, and especially for an estimate of man, 
 very different from the ordinary naturalism of Diderot and 
 D'Holbach. They too had brought the study of human life 
 and thought into the same line of knowledge with astronomy, 
 chemistry, and physiology ; but no sooner had they seized the 
 idea of the reign of Law throughout them all, than they fancied 
 it must be the same law a little disguised, and strained their 
 ingenuity to make physical rules suffice to do the work of 
 chemistry, and chemical that of physiology, and physiological 
 that of mind ; so as to resolve all into modes of motion and 
 bring out the result, ' Man a machine.' This attempt, to reduce 
 the distinctive phenomena of each higher science to the terms 
 of its predecessor, is denounced by Comte as a spurious gene- 
 ralisation: he calls it Materialism ; and in opposition to it 
 insists that each step as we ascend the scale, though resting 
 on the lower, lands us in the midst of new laws, depending on 
 fresh conditions and beyond the range of the prior calculus. 
 He would never listen, therefore, to any claim of mechanical 
 theory, except within the limits of the physical heavens and 
 earth ; he held it self-condemned, the moment it was pushed 
 into the province of biology and human character. 
 
 This principle might have been expressed in purely quan- 
 titative terms, by saying that the simpler law was incompetent 
 to explain the more complex, or inversely, that the more com- 
 plex could not be resolved back into the simpler ; i.e. he might 
 have taken the sciences as having no other difference than in 
 comprehension. But he recognises in them also a graduated 
 rank as higher or lower ; and by calling their series a
 
 II.] 'COMTE. 471 
 
 ' hierarchy ' admits his perception of a qualitative difference 
 upon a scale of worth or excellence. In this he oversteps the 
 bounds of Science, which, as a study of the time and space 
 order of phenomena, knows nothing of any better and worse, 
 and has no preference for heat vibrations over light, for 
 nitrogen over carbon, for human sensations over the pig's ; 
 and which, even in its cognisance of feeling and impulse, takes 
 account of them only as facts in the world's history, to be 
 reckoned with like the moving wind and the falling rain. 
 These qualitative comparatives constitute a complete breach 
 of the neutrality of science, and imply a measurement of things 
 by a preconceived standard of the good; and nothing is plainer 
 than that Comte carried such standard intuitively with him 
 into his estimate of phenomena, placing the organic above the 
 inorganic ; and within the former, the human as supreme ; 
 and among the human, the affective above the intellectual ; and 
 finally, the sympathetic emotions above the egoistic. Not only 
 does he assume this climax of quality, as inherent and self- 
 evolved in the very experience of the mental states, and as 
 supplying a natural principle of arrangement for the corre- 
 sponding phrenological organs, but he designates the difference 
 among them as moral, and as giving to that word its essential 
 meaning. ' In spite of its pretensions,' he says, ' intellectual 
 force is not at bottom more moral than material : ' ' in our 
 nature there is nothing directly moral but Love : it alone 
 tends to give to social feeling the ascendency over personal V 
 Of the superiority thus claimed and described he forbids us to 
 look for ' proofs : ' he dissuades us from trying to find it by 
 judgment of others : it is a ' subjective appreciation ' involved 
 in the self-conscious springs of our own character. He there- 
 fore lives and writes, whether he is aware of it or not, under 
 the feeling that our nature is subject to an authority higher 
 than its wishes and not borrowed from its associates, which 
 makes its inward experience a story of Duty, and its outward 
 world a scene of right and wrong. A mind which takes up 
 this station, think and speak as it may of its estrangement 
 from temples and theologies, is nevertheless upon the threshold 
 of a religion. 
 
 1 Discours, p. 206.
 
 472 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 That Comte's idea of religion comprises many noble 
 elements of ethical doctrine and discipline ought not to be 
 hidden from us by the grotesque scheme of ritualism to which 
 they are committed, or the hostile attitude assumed towards 
 earlier faiths and philosophies from which they are un- 
 consciously borrowed. He truly teaches that religion is heart- 
 worship, directed upon what is supreme in the universe : that 
 for us the highest conceivable is represented by the affective, 
 intellectual, and moral activity of man, perfected in dis- 
 interestedness and self-sacrifice : that this highest is realised in 
 our nature thus far only partially and in scattered instances, 
 rising as the ages pass, but is the ideal destination of a con- 
 tinuous humanity ; and that the admiring and venerating 
 contemplation of transcending examples in history and life 
 powerfully rebukes our own shortcomings and fosters the 
 secret enthusiasm of heroic goodness. In all this he remains 
 within the genuine essence of religion, as a personal affection 
 of transcendent reverence and trust towards a higher person- 
 ality. But these social and historical venerations, as he him- 
 self admits, are but subsidiary lines of approach, converging 
 towards the central shrine where the adoration is consum- 
 mated ; they are minor religions, exercised upon suggestive 
 symbols, and keeping the mind in tune for the last act of utter 
 homage and self-surrender to the All-Perfect. We cannot but 
 ask our guide, then, to lift the veil from that ' holy of holies,' 
 and show us that ultimate object, which gives significance to 
 all the rest. What does he produce ? Nothing but a looking- 
 glass, in which we see the image of our own expectant looks 
 and awestruck thought ! no highest person, no reality at all, 
 nothing that would be there if we were not ; only a phantom 
 blind and dumb that knows us not, and is but a phenomenon of 
 ourselves ! We are to worship our own ideal of humanity, i.e. 
 our conception of what we should be glad to think our nature 
 might hereafter become. Need I enumerate its disqualifications 
 for any such homage ? (1) We do not fixedly believe in it as 
 prophetic, but only transiently imagine it as not impossible. 
 (2) If we did, it would be the ideal of a race, not of individual 
 minds ; and men do not worship races. (3) If they did, they 
 would offend against the first principle of Positivism, by be-
 
 II.] COMTE. 473 
 
 coming victims of abstract ideas. (4) A conceptual future, 
 though an object of hope, cannot be an object of worship, not 
 being there to receive it ; and no one consciously addresses 
 adoration to nothing. (5) If a Divine future is regarded 
 as intentionally produced by a Divine agent in the 
 present and past, it will certainly deepen the sentiments of 
 worship towards its source ; but if it be regarded as blindly 
 worked out from the lowest antecedents, it assumes a fatalised 
 character from which religious feeling retreats. (6) And above 
 all, though what we worship is ideal, relatively to us, i.e. not 
 in our experience, but in our thought, it is not this negative 
 character, this absence from all but conceptual existence, that 
 renders it an object of homage; on the contrary, it is precisely 
 as reality immediate though infinite, present though eternal, 
 as the certain ground of all being, instead of perhaps coming 
 to be, as the Living and Loving original of all our higher 
 vision of life and love, that such an object draws forth our 
 trust and veneration, and moulds us by personal affection to 
 the likeness of the All-Good. 
 
 This supreme faith it is which supports and inspires all the 
 lesser religions of human admiration and reverence. The 
 broken gleams of loveliness and sanctity in character penetrate 
 us with mysterious power, from their relation to the infinite 
 light of a Divine beauty and holiness. Take away that rela- 
 tion, and they become fruitful in idolatry, artistic and heroic. 
 Invert the relation, treat them as passing contributions towards 
 a Grand-fare that is forming by epigenesis, and is meanwhile 
 worshipped for what it is going to be, and they can but foster 
 the sickliest sentimentality, and introduce into religious lan- 
 guage a perversion ruinous to all veracity. In the ancient 
 Paganism there was much that was morally worse, but not 
 much that was intellectually more humiliating, than the wor- 
 ship of a ' Supreme being' endowed at present with ' a nutritive 
 apparatus V 'not yet fully formed till after the assimilation of 
 all its organs V but ' eminently developable V &&& ' composed 
 of His own adorers, though superior to each 3 ,' and therefore 
 'necessarily made up of separable elements 4 ,' but at every 
 
 1 Discours, p. 329. * Ibid. p. 384. s Ibid. p. 388. 
 
 4 Ibid. p. 323.
 
 474 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 stage ' always ready to render a just homage to His different 
 precursors V 
 
 It would take me too far from the great lines of Comte's 
 philosophy were I to comment, in any adequate way, on his 
 historical criticism of religion in Christendom. It contains, as 
 it seems to me, a wonderful mixture of true insight and of 
 unaccountable illusion. Of the latter no more remarkable 
 instance presents itself than his unqualified identification of 
 Christianity with egoism, and his assertion that it necessarily 
 denies the existence of all disinterested affections in man 2 . 
 This misconception arises from the idea that the seeking of 
 Salvation is the supreme end in view with every believer. 
 He forgets that, even if it were so (and this is by no means to 
 be admitted without great qualification), the end is not egoistic, 
 but human, and, no less than any other universal good, appeals 
 to the altruistic just as it does to the personal enthusiasm ; and 
 it is difficult to understand how he could miss so obvious a 
 fact, in the presence of the vast and continuous efforts of mis- 
 sionary zeal, and the whole army of self-sacrificing labourers, 
 from whose compassion have sprung the distinctive institutions 
 of European benevolence. As for the theoretic recognition of 
 disinterested affections in our nature, it would be curious to 
 know in what ancient philosophy he would find it : how he 
 would explain the prevailing rejection and ridicule of it by 
 modern writers disaffected towards Christianity, as in the school 
 of Hobbes and Helvetius ; and, on the other hand, the vindi- 
 cation of it, in direct reply to them, by a host of Christian 
 authors, like Butler and Hutcheson. Unlike Renan, he seems 
 to have gained his impressions of the religion which he criti- 
 cises from some repulsive teaching or examples, and without 
 approaching the writings of the evangelists and apostles ; for 
 apparently he had not heard of the ' law of love ' which was 
 given as its 'new commandment,' and made all who came 
 under it ' members one of another,' and enabled them to return 
 their enemies ' blessing for cursing : ' or of the question, ' he 
 that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he 
 love God whom he hath not seen : ' or of the principle, 
 ' he that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love : ' ' he 
 
 1 Discours, p. 391. a Cat&hisme, pp. 149, 150.
 
 II.] COMTE. 475 
 
 that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth 
 in him.' Nay, when finally setting his ' Positive ' doctrine 
 ' free of theological oppression and metaphysical dryness,' 
 and condensing it into a maxim that shall hold it all, 
 he alights, unconscious of their source, upon the words 
 of Jesus, ' It is more blessed to give than to receive l ; ' 
 and yet this religion, which supplies him with the best 
 expression of his own, this, whose supreme thought and 
 pathetic symbol consecrate self-sacrifice, he characterises as 
 ' an immense cupidity and a servile terror V Paradox surely 
 can no further go. 
 
 GENERAL CONCLUSION OF PART L 
 
 Metaphysical and Physical theories have now been passed 
 under review in sufficient variety to answer the question, 
 whether they furnish, or as a class are capable of furnishing, 
 an adequate base for the indispensable postulates of ethical 
 doctrine. Each in turn, whatever its merits in other respects, 
 has been pronounced, for reasons given, incompetent in this one 
 relation ; and, among the reasons, there are some which 
 obviously apply to the series as a whole. They all descend 
 upon man and take him up for study as a particular article in 
 the created furniture of the world ; and bring with them pre- 
 conceptions of the contents and resources of the world before 
 and beyond him. Of these they all regard him as the product : 
 the factors of his nature are cosmically given, predetermining 
 what, in every instance, it shall be : by no means excluding 
 numerous differences and a range of modification in individual 
 growth, but all covered by the scope of the prior causality, 
 and not otherwise referable to the Self. Every phenomenon 
 of my life, therefore, active no less than passive, is an arrival 
 from ' foreign parts : ' at the moment it may be from within ; 
 but the 'within' itself is from without; and I am only a world- 
 
 1 Discours, p. 316; Acts xx. 35. a Ibid. p. 392.
 
 476 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 parasite, nurtured by sap drawn through other roots. All that 
 I am, all that I feel, all that I do, is dependent and derivative, 
 and though chargeable upon my will, recoverable by that will 
 from an agency beyond. Under these conditions, it is in vain 
 that Plato saves in me an uncreated part, that brings to the 
 mortal birth millennial memories of its heavenly abode : this is 
 no more my human self than is the corporeal organism with 
 which it is blended ; both are but elements of my nature, con- 
 tributing different data to my experience, the one, glimpses of 
 truth and beauty, the other, varieties of sensible pleasure and 
 pain. If each works in me in its own way, be it with opposing 
 or with concurrent force, and if I am wholly made up of them, 
 what am I but either the theatre or the resultant of their play? 
 Nothing is possible to me but to be the storehouse for the 
 deliverance now of the godlike, now of the brute constituents 
 of my life. No new and responsible subject is set up by any 
 mere ligament of fate and circumstance which may unite the 
 Divine and the animal into an inseparable organism, and send 
 it as a twin-birth into the world. If all that is good in me is 
 the unextinguished residue of a preexistent state, and all that 
 is evil an incident of corporeal structure, I am not the source 
 of the first, and can no more feel compunction for the second 
 than I could repent of birth-sin. Should there arise any 
 conflict between the two, they settle it together by trial of 
 strength upon the field, but without the mediation, of my 
 consciousness. 
 
 Nor do we gain any scope for moral agency by removal 
 into the Immanental metaphysics. The dual composition of 
 the universe out of Thought and Extension, the joint expres- 
 sions of God, which form parallel chains of separate causa- 
 tion, turns up in man, and makes his constitution of mind 
 and body a partnership of two necessities. His life is made up 
 of their synchronous histories, written in distinct columns, 
 side by side ; and, by skilled observers, any unseen phenome- 
 non in one may be inferred, either from its antecedent in its 
 own line or its companion in the other. Alternative there is 
 none ; and what seems uncertainty in human things is but 
 indistinctness in our vision of them, the wavering guesses we 
 make at objects obscured by floating mist. True it is that
 
 II.] COMTE. 477 
 
 Descartes, the founder of this School, refused to discredit his 
 consciousness of freedom : yet he left it confessedly unrecon- 
 ciled with the Divine preordination of all things ; and no 
 sooner did his system develop itself in the hands of his 
 followers than its tendency became clear: in riveting its 
 logical joints, the clinging shred of ethical faith was inevi- 
 tably struck off. Malebranche would hear of no Cause in the 
 universe but God ; and formulated the impotency of man 
 in the saying, ' ive are not agents, but only spectators, even of 
 our own history.' And Spinoza, at the very outset of his 
 speculations, takes up a position which negatives the essen- 
 tial presupposition of Morals, when he affirms that nothing 
 is possible except the actual. If the two spheres are abso- 
 lutely coextensive, if conduct and character have always been 
 all that they could be, if there is no interval between what is 
 likely to be and what might be, then there is no sense in 
 saying that this or that ought to be, and that we are bound to 
 bring it to pass. 
 
 So long as we allow ourselves to speculate on any sub- 
 stantive entity at all behind the changes of ourselves and of 
 the world, we have not yet shut out the possibility of moral 
 obligation: whether it is present or absent will depend 
 upon what that entity is. If Intending Mind, the conditions 
 remain of the better Will or the worse : if Optionless Necessity, 
 no living act is more right or wrong than another. But even 
 this contingent possibility of duty disappears, as soon as we 
 resolve to dispense with the metaphysical background of all 
 intelligence, and, with the Positivist, find our all in all in the 
 grouping and succession of phenomena assumed to be in- 
 variable. When Comte lays down the maxim, that every 
 proposition is unmeaning which is irreducible to a simple 
 statement of fact, particular or general, he ties down all 
 thought to what has been, what is, what will be, and treats 
 as folly all ideal alternatives that shame us with the vision of 
 what ought to be. When Philosophy has thus flung its own 
 essence away, it shrinks into coalescence with Science ; which 
 culminates in the application of a known law to the de- 
 ciphering of the past and the future. The door is thus rudely 
 slammed in the face of Ethics ; their chief concern being
 
 PHYSICAL THEORY. [Book 
 
 with possibilities which, unhappily, are not facts, but aspire 
 to become so. True it is, that in order to verify them as 
 possibilities, appeal must be made to adequate ' facts ; ' not, 
 however, of the external kind intended by Comte's word ; 
 but of that inward experience and self-knowledge which, 
 disowned by him, the Moralist takes as the true key to the 
 capabilities of human nature. 
 
 The rejection of teleology, which begins with Descartes and 
 extends to Comte, appears also difficult to harmonise with any 
 moral theory of life. In the absence of intending thought in 
 the universe, its whole becomes empty of any ends in view, 
 any antithesis of good and evil operating upon an apprehend- 
 ing Mind ; and how is it conceivable that a being, thus 
 without preference, should exercise any moral government, 
 pledged to administer the world with constant regard to dis- 
 tinctions of character? Accordingly, the denial of Final 
 Causation in the Divine nature is usually extended, in effect 
 though not in terms, to the human ; i.e. the act of choice, 
 which seems to be freely directed upon an alternative end, is 
 explained away as necessarily determined from behind by 
 antecedent conditions, so as really to be a linear continuation 
 of an infrangible series, and reduce the apparent problem 
 between a better and a worse to an illusion. Thus an un- 
 moral cosmos gives an unmoral human life ; and to take 
 away ideal affections from the Soul of souls is to bring a 
 blight upon the possibilities of conscience anywhere. 
 
 Such appear to me the ethical disqualifications of the theo- 
 ries hitherto reviewed. Were their authors then destitute of 
 moral affections and convictions? What copious indications 
 of the contrary their lives and writings afford, no reader of 
 the foregoing pages can fail to observe. The philosopher's 
 thought is seldom the exact, and never the coloured, photo- 
 graph of himself: it shows him as he sits still and medi- 
 tates, not as he lives and moves and has his being ; and 
 did we see him in the flush of indignation, or the surprise 
 of grief, or the melting of contrition, startling images 
 would pass before us that would seem impossible to 
 emerge from that calm statuesque figure. He is not 
 an intellectual automaton stirred by the wires of specu-
 
 H.] COMTE. 479 
 
 lation ; the instincts of nature rush in, and interpolate 
 many a burst of action and affection which the logical reason 
 cannot overtake. With a noble inconsistency, all the great 
 writers whose doctrine we have studied betray the tenacious 
 vitality of the intuitive consciousness of duty, throughout the 
 very process of cutting away its philosophic roots ; and Plato, 
 in his ' divine wrath ' at the tyrant flung into Tartarus ; 
 Malebranche, self-extinguished in the Absolute Holiness ; 
 Spinoza, lifted from the thraldom of passion into the freedom 
 of Infinite Love ; Comte, on his knees before the image of a 
 Perfect Humanity, are touching witnesses to the undying fires 
 of moral faith and aspiration. 
 
 END OF VOL. I.