Initiation into Philosophy Part 6

CHAPTER III

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, General Politics, and Religious Politics.

LOCKE.--Locke, very learned in various sciences--physics, chemistry, medicine, often a.s.sociated with politics, receiving enlightenment from life, from frequent travels, from friendships with interesting and ill.u.s.trious men, always studying and reflecting until an advanced old age, wrote only carefully premeditated works: his _Treatise of Government_ and _Essay on the Human Understanding_.

Locke appears to have written on the understanding only in order to refute the "innate ideas" of Descartes. For Locke innate ideas have no existence. The mind before it comes into contact with the external world is a blank sheet, and there is nothing in the mind which has not first come through the senses. What, then, are ideas? They are sensations registered by the brain, and they are also sensations elaborated and modified by reflection. These ideas then commingle in such a manner as to form an enormous ma.s.s of combinations. They are commingled either in a natural or an artificial manner. In a natural manner, that is in a way conforming to the great primary ideas given us by reflection, the idea of cause, the idea of end, the idea of means to an end, the idea of order, etc., and it is the harmony of these ideas which is commonly termed reason; they become a.s.sociated by accident, by the effects of emotion, by the effect of custom, etc., and then they give birth to prejudices, errors, and superst.i.tions. The pa.s.sions of the soul are aspects of pleasure and pain.

The idea of a possible pleasure gives birth in us to a desire which is called ambition, love, covetousness, gluttony; the idea of a possible pain gives birth in us to fear and horror, and this fear and horror is called hatred, jealousy, rage, aversion, disgust, scorn. At bottom we have only two pa.s.sions, the desire of enjoyment, and the fear of suffering.

THE FREEDOM OF MAN.--Is man free? Appealing to experience and making use only of it and not of intimate feeling, Locke declares in the negative. A will always seems to him determined by another will, and this other by another to infinity, or by a motive, a weight, a motive power which causes a leaning to right or left. Will certainly exists--that is to say, an exact and lively desire to perform an action, or to continue an action, or to interrupt an action, but this will is not free, for to represent it as free is to represent it as capable of wishing what it does not wish. The will is an anxiety to act in such or such a fashion, and this anxiety, on account of its character of anxiety, of strong emotion, of tension of the soul, appears to us free, appears to us an internal force which is self-governed and independent; we feel consciousness of will in the effort. This tension must not be denied, but it must be recognised as the effect of a potent desire which the obstacle excites; this tension, therefore, is an indication of nothing except the potency of the desire and the existence of an obstacle. Now this desire, so potent that it is irritated by the obstacle, and, so to speak, unites us against it, is a pa.s.sion dominating and filling our being; so that we are never more swayed by pa.s.sion than when we believe ourselves to be exercising our will, and in consequence the more we desire the less are we free.

It is not essential formally and absolutely to confound will with desire. Overpowered by heat, we desire to drink cold water, and because we know that that would do us harm we have the will not to drink; but although this is an important distinction it is not a fundamental one; what incites us to drink is a pa.s.sion, what prevents us is another pa.s.sion, one more general and stronger, the desire not to die, and because this pa.s.sion by meeting with and fighting another produces in all our being a powerful tension, it is none the less a pa.s.sion, even if we ought not to say that it is a still more impa.s.sioned pa.s.sion.

LOCKE'S THEORY OF POLITICS.--In politics Locke was the adversary of Hobbes, whose theories of absolutism have already been noticed. He did not believe that the natural state was the war of all against all. He believed men formed societies not to escape cannibalism, but more easily to guarantee and protect their natural rights: ownership, personal liberty, legitimate defence. Society exists only to protect these rights, and the reason of its existence lies in this duty to defend them. The sovereign therefore is not the saviour of the nation, he is its law-maker and magistrate. If he violates the rights of man, he acts so directly contrary to his mission and his mandate that insurrection against him is legitimate. The "wise Locke," as Voltaire always called him, was the inventor of the Rights of Man.

In religious politics he was equally liberal and advocated the separation of Church and State; the State, according to him, should not have any religion of its own, its province being only to protect equally the liberty of all denominations. Locke was discussed minutely by Leibnitz, who, without accepting the innate ideas of Descartes, did not accept the ideas through sensation of Locke, and said: "There is nothing in the intelligence which has not first been in the senses," granted ... "except the intelligence itself." The intelligence has not innate ideas born ready made; but it possesses forms of its own in which the ideas arrange themselves and take shape, and this is the due province of the intelligence. And it was these forms which later on Kant was to call the categories of the intellect, and at bottom Descartes meant nothing else by his innate ideas. Locke exerted a prodigious and even imperious influence over the French philosophers of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER IV

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Berkeley: Highly Idealist Philosophy which Regarded Matter as Non-existent.

David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy.

The Scottish School: Common Sense Philosophy.

BERKELEY.--To the "sensualist" Locke succeeded Berkeley, the unrestrained "idealist," like him an Englishman. He began to write when very young, continued to write until he was sixty, and died at sixty-eight. He believed neither in matter nor in the external world. There was the whole of his philosophy. Why did he not believe in them? Because all thinkers are agreed that we cannot know whether we see the external world _as it is_. Then, if we do not know it, why do we affirm that it exists? We know nothing about it. Now we ought to build up the world only with what we know of it, and to do otherwise is not philosophy but yielding to imagination. What is it that we know of the world? Our ideas, and nothing but our ideas. Very well then, let us say: there are only ideas. But whence do these ideas come to us? To explain them as coming from the external world which we have never seen is to explain obscurity by denser darkness. They are spiritual, they come to us without doubt from a spirit, from G.o.d. This is possible, it is not illogical, and Berkeley believes it.

This doctrine regarded by the eyes of common sense may appear a mere phantasy; but Berkeley saw in it many things of high importance and great use. If you believe in matter, you can believe in matter only, and that is materialism with its moral consequences, which are immoral; if you believe in matter and in G.o.d, you are so hampered by this dualism that you do not know how to separate nature from G.o.d, and it therefore comes to pa.s.s that you see G.o.d in matter, which is called pantheism. In a word, between us and G.o.d Berkeley has suppressed matter in order that we should come, as it were, into direct contact with G.o.d. He derives much from Malebranche, and it may be said he only pushes his theories to their extreme. Although a bishop, he was not checked, like Descartes, by the idea of G.o.d not being able to deceive us, and he answered that G.o.d does not deceive us, that He gives us ideas and that it is we who deceive ourselves by attributing them to any other origin than to Him; nor was he checked, like Malebranche, by the authority of Scripture, which in Genesis portrays G.o.d creating matter. He saw there, no doubt, only a symbolical sense, a simple way of speaking according to the comprehension of the mult.i.tude.

DAVID HUME.--David Hume, a Scotsman, better known, at least in his own times, as the historian of England than as a philosopher, nevertheless well merits consideration in the latter category. David Hume believes in nothing, and, in consequence, it may be said that he is not a philosopher; he has no philosophic system. He has no philosophic system, it is true; but he is a critic of philosophy, and therefore he philosophizes. Matter has no existence; as we know nothing about it, we should not say it exists. But we ourselves, we exist. All that we can know about that is that in us there is a succession of ideas, of representations; but _we_, but _I_, what is that? Of that we know nothing. We are present at a series of pictures, and we may call their totality the _ego_; but we do not grasp ourselves as a thing of unity, as an individual. We are the spectators of an inward dramatic piece behind which we can see no author. There is no more reason to believe in _oneself_ than in the external world.

INNATE IDEAS.--As for innate ideas, they are simply general ideas, which are general delusions. We believe, for instance, that every effect has a cause, or, to express it more correctly, that everything has a cause.

What do we know about it? What do we see? That one thing follows another, succeeds to another. What tells us that the latter proceeds from the former, that the thing B must necessarily come, owing to the thing A existing? We believe it because every time the thing A has been, the thing B has come. Well, let us say that every time A has been (thus far) B has come; and say no more. There are regular successions, but we are completely ignorant whether there are causes for them.

THE LIBERTY AND MORALITY OF HUME.--It results from this that for Hume there is no liberty. Very obviously; for when we believe ourselves free, it is because we believe we can fix upon ourselves as a cause. Now the word "cause" means nothing. We are a succession of phenomena very absolutely determined. The proof is that we foresee and nearly always accurately (and we could always foresee accurately if we completely knew the character of the persons and the influences acting on them) what people we know will do, which would be impossible if they did as they wished. And I, at the very moment when I am absolutely sure I am doing such and such a thing because I desired to, I see my friend smile as he says: "I was sure you would do that. See, I wrote it down on this piece of paper." He understood me as a necessity, when I felt myself to be free. And he, reciprocally, will believe himself free in doing a thing I would have wagered to a certainty that he would not fail to do.

What system of morality can Hume have with these principles? First of all, he protests against those who should deduce from his principles the immorality of his system. Take care, said he wittily (just like Spinoza, by the way), it is the partisans of free-will who are immoral. No doubt! It is when there is liberty that there is no responsibility. I am not responsible for my actions if they have no connection in me with anything durable or constant. I have committed murder. Truly it is by chance, if it was by an entirely isolated determination, entirely detached from the rest of my character, and momentary; and I am only infinitesimally responsible. But if all my actions are linked together, are conditional upon one another, dependent on one another, if I have committed murder it is because I am an a.s.sa.s.sin at every moment of my life or nearly so, and then, oh! how responsible I am!

Note that this is the line taken up by judges, since they make careful investigation of the antecedents of the accused. They find him all the more culpable if he has always shown bad instincts.--Therefore they find him the more responsible, the more he has been compelled by necessity.--Yes.

Hume then does not believe himself "foreclosed" in morality; he does not believe he is forbidden by his principles to have a system of morality and he has one. It is a morality of sentiment. We have in us the instinct of happiness and we seek happiness; but we have also in us an instinct of goodwill which tends to make us seek the general happiness, and reason tells us that there is conciliation or rather concordance between these two instincts, because it is only in the general happiness that we find our particular happiness.

THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL: REID; STEWART.--The Scottish School (end of the eighteenth century) was pre-eminently a school of men who attached themselves to common sense and were excellent moralists. We must at any rate mention Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. They were bent especially on opposing the transcendent idealism of Berkeley and the scepticism of David Hume, also in some measure Locke's doctrine of the blank sheet. They reconst.i.tuted the human mind and even the world (which had been so to speak driven off in vapour by their predecessors), much as they were in the time of Descartes. Let us believe, they said, in the reality of the external world; let us believe that there are causes and effects; let us believe there is an _ego,_ a human person whom we directly apprehend, and who is a cause; let us believe that we are free and that we are responsible because we are free, etc. They were, pre-eminently, excellent describers of states of the soul, admirable psychological moralists and they were the ancestors of the highly remarkable pleiad of English psychologists of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER V

FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Voltaire a Disciple of Locke.

Rousseau a Freethinking Christian, but deeply Imbued with Religious Sentiments.

Diderot a Capricious Materialist.

D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists.

Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations.

VOLTAIRE; ROUSSEAU.--The French philosophy of the eighteenth century, fairly feeble it must be avowed, seemed as if dominated by the English philosophy, excepting Berkeley, but especially by Locke and David Hume, more particularly Locke, who was the intellectual deity of those Frenchmen of that epoch who were interested in philosophy.

Whenever Voltaire dealt with philosophy, he was only the echo of Locke whose depths he failed to fathom, and to whom he has done some injury, for reading Locke only through Voltaire has led to the belief that Locke was superficial.

Rousseau was both the disciple and adversary of Hobbes, as often occurs, and dealt out to the public the doctrines of Hobbes in an inverted form, making the state of nature angelic instead of infernal, and putting the government of all by all in the place of government by one, invariably reaching the same point with a simple difference of form; for if Hobbes argued for despotism exercised by one over all, Rousseau argued for the despotism of all over each. In _emile_, he was incontestably inspired by the ideas of Locke on education in some degree, but in my opinion less than has been a.s.serted. On nearly all sides it has been a.s.serted that Rousseau exercised great influence over Kant. I know that Kant felt infinite admiration for Rousseau, but of the influence of Rousseau upon Kant I have never been able to discover a trace.

DIDEROT; HELVETIUS; D'HOLBACH.--It was particularly on David Hume that Diderot depended. The difference, which is great, is that David Hume in his scepticism remained a grave, reserved man, well-bred and discreet, and was only a sceptic, whilst Diderot was violent in denial and a man of paradoxes and jests, both impertinent and cynical.

It is almost ridiculous in a summary history of philosophy to name as sub-Diderots, if one may so express it, Helvetius and D'Holbach, who were merely wits believing themselves philosophers, and who were not always wits.

CONDILLAC.--Condillac belongs to another category. He was a very serious philosopher and a vigorous thinker. An exaggerated disciple of Locke, while the latter admitted sensation _and_ reflection as the origin of ideas, Condillac admitted only pure sensation and transformed sensation--that is to say, sensation transforming itself. The definition of man that he deduces from these principles is very celebrated and it is interesting: "The _ego_ of each man is only the collection of the sensations that he feels and of those his memory recalls; it is the consciousness of what he is combined with the recollection of what he has been." To Condillac, the idea is a sensation which has fixed itself and which has been renewed and vivified by others; desire is a sensation which wishes to be repeated and seeks what opportunity offers for its renewal, and the will itself is only the most potent of desires. Condillac was voluntarily and systematically limited, but his system is well knit and presented in admirably clear and precise language.

CHAPTER VI

KANT

Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it on Morality.

KNOWLEDGE.--Kant, born at Konigsberg in 1724, was professor there all his life and died there in 1804. Nothing happened to him except the possession of genius. He had commenced with the theological philosophy in use in his country, that of Wolf, which on broad lines was that of Leibnitz. But he early read David Hume, and the train of thought of the sceptical Scotsman at least gave him the idea of submitting all philosophic ideas to a severe and close criticism.

He first of all asked himself what the true value is of our knowledge and what knowledge is. We believe generally that it is the things which give us the knowledge that we have of them. But, rather, is it not we who impose on things the forms of our mind and is not the knowledge that we believe we have of things only the knowledge which we take of the laws of our mind by applying it to things? This is what is most probable. We perceive the things by moulds, so to speak, which are in ourselves and which give them their shapes and they would be shapeless and chaotic were it otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish the matter and the form of our knowledge: the matter of the knowledge is the things themselves. The form of our knowledge is ourselves: "Our experimental knowledge is a compound of what we receive from impressions and of what our individual faculty of knowing draws from itself on the occasion of these impressions."