History of Modern Philosophy Part 9
In his moral philosophy[1] Hume shows himself the empiricist only, not the skeptic. The laws of human nature are capable of just as exact empirical investigation as those of external nature; observation and a.n.a.lysis promise even more brilliant success in this most important, and yet hitherto so badly neglected, branch of science than in physics. As knowledge and opinion have been found reducible to the a.s.sociative play of ideas, and the store of ideas, again, to original impressions and shown derivable from these; so man's volition and action present themselves as results of the mechanical working of the pa.s.sions, which, in turn, point further back to more primitive principles. The ultimate motives of all action are pleasure and pain, to which we owe our ideas of good and evil. The direct pa.s.sions, desire and aversion, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, are the immediate effects of these original elements. From the direct arise in certain circ.u.mstances the indirect pa.s.sions, pride and humility, love and hatred (together with respect and contempt); the first two, if the objects which excite feeling are immediately connected with ourselves, the latter, when pleasure and pain are aroused by the accomplishments or the defects of others. While love and hate are always conjoined with a readiness for action, with benevolence or anger, pride and humility are pure, self-centered, inactive emotions.
[Footnote 1: Cf. G. von Gizycki, Die Ethik David Humes, 1878.]
All moral phenomena, will, moral judgment, conscience, virtue, are not simple and original data, but of a composite or derivative nature. They are without exception products of the regular interaction of the pa.s.sions. With such views there can be, of course, no question of a freedom of the will. If anyone objects to determinism, that virtues and vices, if they are involuntary and necessary, are not praise-or blame-worthy, he is to be referred to the applause paid to beauty and talent, which are considered meritorious, although they are not dependent upon our choice. The legal att.i.tude of theology and law first caused all desert to be based upon freedom, whereas the ancient philosophers spoke unhesitatingly of intellectual virtues.
Hume does not, like nearly all his predecessors and contemporaries, find the determining grounds of volition in ideas, but in the feelings. After curtailing the rights of the reason in the theoretical field in favor of custom and instinct, he dispossesses her also in the sphere of practice. Impa.s.sive reason, judging only of truth and falsehood, is an inactive faculty, which of itself can never inspire us with inclination and desire toward an object, can never itself become a motive. It is only capable of influencing the will indirectly, through the aid of some affection. Abstract relations of ideas, and facts as well, leave us entirely indifferent so long as they fail to acquire an emotional value through their relation to our state of mind. When we speak of a victory of reason over pa.s.sion it is nothing but a conquest of one pa.s.sion by another, i. e., of a violent pa.s.sion by a calm one. That which is commonly called reason here is nothing but one of those general and calm affections (e. g., the love of life) which direct the will to a distant good, without exciting any sensible emotion in the mind; by pa.s.sion we commonly understand the violent pa.s.sions only, which engender a marked disturbance in the soul and the production of which requires a certain propinquity of the object. A man is said to be industrious "from reason," when a calm desire for money makes him laborious. It is a mistake to consider all violent pa.s.sions powerful, and all calm ones weak. The prevalence of calm affections const.i.tutes the essence of strength of mind.
As reason is thus degraded from a governor of the will to a "slave of the pa.s.sions," so, further, judgment concerning right and wrong is taken away from her. Moral distinctions are determined by our sense of the agreeable and the disagreeable. We pa.s.s an immediate judgment of taste on the actions of our fellow-men; the good pleases, evil displeases. The sight of virtue gives us satisfaction; that of vice repels us. Accordingly an action or trait of mind is virtuous when it calls forth in the observer an agreeable, disinterested sentiment of approbation.
What, then, are the actions which receive such general approval, and how is the praise to be explained which the spectator bestows on them? We approve such traits of character as are immediately agreeable or useful, either to the person himself or to others. This yields four cla.s.ses of praiseworthy qualities. The first cla.s.s, those which are agreeable to the possessor (quite apart from any utility to himself or to others), includes cheerfulness, greatness of mind, courage, tranquillity, and benevolence; the second, those immediately agreeable to others, modesty, good manners, politeness, and wit; the third, those useful to ourselves, strength of will, industry, frugality, strength of body, intelligence and other mental gifts. The fourth cla.s.s comprises the highest virtues, the qualities useful to others, benevolence and justice. Pleasure and utility are in all cases the criterion of merit. The monkish virtues of humility and mortification of the flesh, which bring no pleasure or advantage either to their possessor or to society, are considered meritorious by no one who understands the subject.
If the moral value of actions is thus made to depend on their effects, we cannot dispense with the a.s.sistance of reason in judging moral questions, since it alone can inform us concerning these results of action. Reason, however, is not sufficient to determine us to praise or blame. Nothing but a sentiment can induce us to give the preference to beneficial and useful tendencies over pernicious ones. This feeling is evidently no other than satisfaction in the happiness of men and uneasiness in view of their misery-in short, it is sympathy. By means of the imagination we enter into the experiences of others and partic.i.p.ate in their joy and sorrow. Whatever depresses or rejoices them, whatever inspires them with pride, fills us with similar emotions. From the habit of sympathetically pa.s.sing moral judgment on the actions of others, and of seeing our own judged by them, is developed the further one of keeping a constant watch over ourselves and of considering our dispositions and deeds from the standpoint of the good of others. This custom is called conscience. Allied to this is the love of reputation, which continually leads us to ask, How will our behavior appear in the eyes of those with whom we a.s.sociate?
Within the fourth and most important cla.s.s, the social virtues, Hume distinguishes between the natural virtues of humanity and benevolence and the artificial virtues of justice and fidelity. The former proceed from our inborn sympathy with the good of others, while the latter, on the other hand, are not to be derived from a natural pa.s.sion, an instinctive love of humanity, but are the product of reflection and art, and take their origin in a social convention.
In order that an action may gain the approval of the spectator two other things are required besides its salutary effects: it must be a mark of character, of a permanent disposition, and it must proceed from disinterested motives. Hume is obliged by this latter position to show that disinterested benevolence actually exists, that the unselfish affections do not secretly spring from self-love. To cite only one of the thousand examples of benevolence in which no discernible interest is concerned, we desire happiness for our friends even when we have no expectation of partic.i.p.ating in it. The accounts of human selfishness are greatly overdrawn, and those who deduce all actions from it make the mistake of taking the inevitable consequences of virtue-the pleasure of self-approval and of being esteemed by others-for the only motives to virtue. Because virtue, in the outcome, produces inner satisfaction and is praised by others, it does not follow that it is practiced merely for the sake of these agreeable consequences. Self-love is a secondary impulse, whose appearance at all presupposes primary impulses. Only after we have experienced the pleasure which comes from the satisfaction of such an original impulse (e. g., ambition), can this become the object of a conscious reflective search after pleasure, or of egoism. Power brings no enjoyment to the man by nature devoid of ambition, and he who is naturally ambitious does not desire fame because it affords him pleasure, but conversely, fame affords him pleasure because he desires it. The natural propensity which terminates directly on the object, without knowledge or foresight of the pleasurable results, comes first, and egoistic reflection directed toward the hoped-for enjoyment can develop only after this has been satisfied. The case is the same with benevolence as with the love of fame. It is implanted in the const.i.tution of our minds as an original impulse immediately directed toward the happiness of other men. After it has been exercised and its exercise rewarded by self-satisfaction, admiration, thanks, and reciprocation, it is indeed possible for the expectation of such agreeable consequences to lead us to the repet.i.tion of beneficent acts. But the original motive is not an egoistic, regard for useful consequences. If, from the force of the pa.s.sion alone, vengeance may be so eagerly pursued that every consideration of personal quiet and security is silenced, it may also be conceded that humanity causes us to forget our own interests. Nay, further, the social affections, as Shaftesbury has proven, are the strongest of all, and the man will rarely be found in whom the sum of the benevolent impulses will not outweigh that of the selfish ones.
In the section on justice Hume attacks the contract theory. Law, property, and the sacredness of contracts exist first in society, but not first in the state. The obligation to observe contracts is, indeed, made stronger by the civil law and civil authority, but not created by them. Law arises from convention, i. e., not from a formal contract, but a tacit agreement, a sense of common interest, and this agreement, in turn, proceeds from an original propensity to enter into social relations. The unsocial and lawless state of nature is a philosophical fiction which has never existed; men have always been social. They have all at least been born into the society of the family, and they know no-more terrible punishment than isolation. States are not created, however, by a voluntary act, but have their roots in history. The question at issue between Hobbes and Hume was thus adjusted at a later period by Kant: the state, it is true, has not historically arisen from a contract, yet it is allowable and useful to consider it under the aspect of a contract as a regulative idea.
Only once since David Hume, in Herbert Spencer, has the English nation produced a mind of like comprehensive power. Hume and Locke form the culminating points of English thought. They are national types, in that in them the two fundamental tendencies of English thinking, clearness of understanding and practical sense, were manifested in equal force. In Locke these worked together in harmonious co-operation. In Hume the friendly alliance is broken, the common labor ceases; each of the two demands its full rights; a painful breach opens up between science and life. Reason leads inevitably to doubt, to insight into its own weakness, while life demands conviction. The doubter cannot act, the agent cannot know. It is true that a subst.i.tute is found for defective knowledge in belief based upon instinct and custom; but this is a makeshift, not a solution of the problem, an acknowledgment of the evil, not a cure for it. Further, Hume's greatness does not consist in the fact that he preached modesty to the contending parties, that he banished the doubting reason into the study and restricted life to belief in probabilities, but in the mental strength which enabled him to endure sharp contradictions, and, instead of an overhasty and easy reconciliation, to suspend the one impulse until the other had made its demands thoroughly, completely, and regardlessly heard. Though he is distinguished from other skeptics by the fact that he not only shows the fundamental conceptions of our knowledge of nature and the principles of religion uncertain and erroneous, but finds necessary errors in them and acutely uncovers their origin in the lawful workings of our inner life, yet his historical influence essentially rests on his skepticism. In his own country it roused in the "Scottish School" the reaction of common sense, while in Germany it helped to wake a kindred but greater spirit from the bonds of his dogmatic slumbers, and to fortify him for his critical achievements.
(c) The Scottish School.-Priestley's a.s.sociational psychology, Berkeley's idealism, and Hume's skepticism are legitimate deductions from Locke's a.s.sumption that the immediate objects of thought are not things but ideas, and that judgment or knowledge arises from the combination of ideas originally separate. The absurdity of the consequences shows the falsity of the premises. The true philosophy must not contradict common sense. It is not correct to look upon the mind as a sheet of white paper on which experience inscribes single characters, and then to make the understanding combine these originally disconnected elements into judgments by means of comparison, and the belief in the existence of the object come in as a later result added to the ideas by reflection. It is rather true that the elements discovered by the a.n.a.lysis of the cognitive processes are far from being the originals from which these arise. It is not isolated ideas that come first, but judgments, self-evident axioms of the understanding, which form part of the mental const.i.tution with which G.o.d has endowed us; and sensation is accompanied by an immediate belief in the reality of the object. Sensation guarantees the presence of an external thing possessing a certain character, although it is not an image of this property, but merely a sign for something in no wise resembling itself.
This is the standpoint of the founder[1] of the Scottish School, Thomas Reid (1710-96, professor in Aberdeen and Glasgow; An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 1764; Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 1785, Essays on the Active Powers, 1788, together under the t.i.tle, Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind. Collected Works, 1804, and often since, especially the edition by Hamilton, with valuable notes and dissertations, 7th ed., 2 vols., 1872). We may recognize in it a revival of the common notions of Herbert, as well as a transfer of the innate faculty of judgment inculcated by the ethical and aesthetic writers from the practical to the theoretical field; the "common sense" of Reid is an original sense for truth, as the "taste" of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson was a natural sense for the good and the beautiful. Like Jacobi at a later period, Reid points out that mediate, reasoned knowledge presupposes a knowledge which is immediate, and all inference and demonstration, fixed, undemonstrable, immediately certain fundamental truths. The fundamental judgments or principles of common sense, which are true for us, even if [possibly] not true in themselves, are discoverable by observation (empirical rationalism). In the enumeration of them two dangers are to be avoided: we must neither raise contingent principles to the position of axioms, nor, from an exaggerated endeavor after unity, underestimate the number of these self-evident principles. Reid himself is always more sparing with them than his disciples. He distinguishes two cla.s.ses: first principles of necessary truth, and first principles of contingent truth or truth of fact. As first principles of necessary truth he cites, besides the axioms of logic and mathematics, grammatical, aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical principles (among the last belong the principles: "That the qualities which we perceive by our senses must have a subject, which we call body, and that the thoughts we are conscious of must have a subject, which we call mind"; "that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause which produced it"). He lays down twelve principles as the basis of our knowledge of matters of fact, in which his reference to the doubt of Berkeley and Hume is evident. The most important of these are: "The existence of everything of which I am conscious"; "that the thoughts of which I am conscious, are the thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person"; "our own personal ident.i.ty and continued existence, as far back as we remember anything distinctly"; "that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be"; "that we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will"; "that there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men"; "that there is a certain regard due... to human authority in matters of opinion"; "that, in the phenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like what has been in similar circ.u.mstances."
[Footnote 1: In the sense of "chief founder"; cf. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875, pp. 36, 68 seq., which is the standard authority on the school as a whole.-TR.]
The widespread and lasting favor experienced by this theory, with its invitation to forget all earnest work in the problems of philosophy by taking refuge in common sense, shows that a general relaxation had succeeded the energetic endeavors which Hume had demanded of himself and of his readers. With this declaration of the infallibility of common consciousness, the theory of knowledge, which had been so successfully begun, was incontinently thrust aside, although, indeed, empirical psychology gained by the industrious investigation of the inner life by means of self-observation. James Beattie continued the attack on Hume in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism, 1770, on the principle that wisdom must never contradict nature, and that whatever our nature compels us to believe, hence whatever all agree in, is true. In his briefer dissertations Beattie discussed Memory and Imagination, Fable and Romance, the Effects of
Poetry and Music, Laughter, the Sublime, etc. While Beattie had given the preference to psychological and aesthetic questions, James Oswald (1772) appealed to common sense in matters of religion, describing it as an instinctive faculty of judgment concerning truth and falsehood. The most eminent among the followers of Reid was Dugald Stewart (professor in Edinburgh; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1792-1827; Collected Works, edited by Hamilton, 1854-58), who developed the doctrines of the master and in some points modified them. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), who is highly esteemed by Mill, Spencer, and Bain, approximated the teachings of Reid and Stewart to those of Hume. The philosophy of the Scottish School was long in favor both in England and in France, where it was employed as a weapon against materialism.
By way of appendix we may mention the beginnings of a psychological aesthetics in Henry Home (Lord Kames, 1696-1782), and Edmund Burke (1728-97).[1] Home, in ethics a follower of Hutcheson, is fond of supporting his aesthetic views by examples from Shakespeare. Beauty (chap. iii.) appears to belong to the object itself, but in reality it is only an effect, a "secondary quality," of the object; like color, it is nothing but an idea in the mind, "for an object is said to be beautiful for no other reason but that it appears so to the spectator." It arises from regularity, proportion, order, simplicity-properties which belong to sublimity as well (chap, iv.), but to which they are by no means so essential, since it is satisfied with a less degree of them. While the beautiful excites emotions of sweetness and gayety, the sublime rouses feelings which are agreeable, it is true, but which are not sweet and gay, but strong and more serious. Burke's explanation goes deeper. He derives the ant.i.thesis of the sublime and the beautiful from the two fundamental impulses of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation and the social impulse. Whatever is contrary to the former makes a strong and terrible impression on the soul; whatever favors the latter makes a weak but agreeable one. The terrible delights us (first depressing and then exalting us), when we merely contemplate it, without being ourselves affected by the danger or the pain-this is the sublime. On the other hand, that is beautiful which inspires us with tenderness and affection without our desiring to possess it. Sublimity implies a certain greatness, beauty, a certain smallness. Delight in both is based on bodily phenomena. Terror moderated exercises a beneficent influence on the nerves by stimulating them and giving them tension; the gentle impression of beauty exerts a quieting effect upon them. The disturbances caused by the former, and the recovery induced by the latter, are both conducive to health, and hence, experienced as pleasures.
[Footnote 1: Home, Elements of Criticism, 1762. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry info the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1756.]
CHAPTER VI.
THE FRENCH ILLUMINATION.
In the last decade of the seventeenth century France had yielded the leadership in philosophy to England. Whereas Hobbes had in Paris imbibed the spirit of the Galilean and Cartesian inquiry, while Bacon, Locke, and even Hume had also visited France with advantage, now French thinkers take the watchword from the English. Montesquieu and Voltaire, returning from England in the same year (1729), acquaint their countrymen with the ideas of Locke and his contemporaries. These are eagerly caught up; are, step by step, and with the logical courage characteristic of the French mind, developed to their extreme conclusions; and, at the same time, spread abroad in this heightened form among the people beyond the circles of the learned, nay, even beyond the educated cla.s.ses. The English temperament is favorable neither to this advance to extreme revolutionary inferences nor to this propagandist tendency. Locke combines a rationalistic ethics with his semi-sensational theory of knowledge; Newton is far from finding in his mechanical physics a danger for religious beliefs; the deists treat the additions of positive religion rather as superfluous ballast than as hateful unreason; Bolingbroke wishes at least to conceal from the people the illuminating principles which he offers to the higher cla.s.ses. Such halting where farther progress threatens to become dangerous to moral interests does more honor to the moral, than to the logical, character of the philosopher. But with the transfer of these ideas to France, the wall of separation is broken down between the theory of knowledge and the theory of ethics, between natural philosophy and the philosophy of religion; sensationalism forces its way from the region of theory into the sphere of practice, and the mechanical theory is transformed from a princ.i.p.al of physical interpretation into a metaphysical view of the world of an atheistical character. Naturalism is everywhere determined to have its own: if knowledge comes from the senses, then morality must be rooted in self-interest; whoever confines natural science to the search for mechanical causes must not postulate an intelligent Power working from design, even to explain the origin of things and the beginning of motion-has no right to speak of a free will, an immortal soul, and a deity who has created the world. Further, as Bayle's proof that the dogmas of the Church were in all points contradictory to reason had, contrary to its author's own wishes, exerted an influence hostile to religion, and as, moreover, the political and social conditions of the time incited to revolt and to a break with all existing inst.i.tutions, the philosophical ideas from over the Channel and the condition of things at home alike pressed toward a revolutionary intensification of modern principles, which found comprehensive expression in the atheists' Bible, the System of Nature of Baron Holbach, 1770. The movement begins in the middle of the thirties, when Montesquieu commences to naturalize Locke's political views in France, and Voltaire does the same service for Locke's theory of knowledge, and Newton's natural philosophy, which had already been commended by Maupertuis. The year 1748, the year also of Hume's Essay, brings Montesquieu's chief work and La Mettrie's Man a Machine. While the Encyclopedia, the herald of the Illumination, begun in 1751, is advancing to its completion (1772, or rather 1780), Condillac (1754) and Bonnet (1755) develop theoretical sensationalism, and Helvetius (On Mind, 1758; in the same year, D'Alembert's Elements of Philosophy) practical sensationalism. Rousseau, engaged in authorship from 1751 and a contributor to the Encyclopedia until 1757 comes into prominence, 1762, with his two chief works, Emile and the Social Contract. Parallel with these we find interesting phenomena in the field of political economy: Morelly's communistic Code of Nature (1755), the works of Quesnay (1758), the leader of the physiocrats, and those of Turgot, 1774.
Our discussion takes up, first, the introduction and popularization of English ideas; then, the further development of these into a consistent sensationalism, into the morality of interest, and into materialism; finally, the reaction against the illumination of the understanding in Rousseau's philosophy of feeling.[1]
[Footnote 1: On the whole chapter cf. Damiron, Memoires pour Servir a l'Histoire de la Philosophie au XVIII. Siecle, 3 vols., 1858-64; and John Morley's Voltaire, 1872 [1886], Rousseau, 1873 [1886], and Diderot and the Encyclopedists, 1878 [new ed., 1886].]
1. The Entrance of English Doctrines.
Montesquieu[1] (1689-1755) made Locke's doctrine of const.i.tutional monarchy and the division of powers (pp. 179-180), with which he joins the historical point of view of Bodin and the naturalistic positions of the time, the common property of the cultivated world. Laws must be adapted to the character and spirit of the nation; the spirit of the people, again, is the result of nature, of the past, of manners, of religion, and of political inst.i.tutions. Nature has bestowed many gifts on the Southern peoples, but few on those of the North; hence the latter need freedom, while the former readily dispense with it. Warm climates produce greater sensibility and pa.s.sionateness, cold ones, muscular vigor and industry; in the temperate zones nations are less constant in their habits, their vices, and their virtues. The laws of religion concern man as man, those of the state concern him as a citizen; the former have for their object the moral good of the individual, the latter, the welfare of society; the first aim at immutable, the second at mutable good. Laws and manners are closely interrelated. Right is older than the state, and the law of justice holds even in the state of nature; but in order to a.s.sure peace positive right is required in three forms, international, political, and civil.
[Footnote 1: Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 1721; Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of their Decadence, 1734; Spirit of Laws, 1748.]
Each of the four political forms has a pa.s.sion for its underlying principle: despotism has fear; monarchy, honor (personal and cla.s.s prejudice); aristocracy, the moderation of the n.o.bility; democracy, political virtue, which subordinates personal to general welfare, and especially the inclination to equality and frugality. While republics are destroyed by extravagance, l.u.s.t, and self-seeking, a monarchy can dispense with civil virtue, patriotism, and moral disinterestedness, since in it false honor, luxury, and wantonness subserve the public good. Great states tend toward despotism; smaller ones toward aristocracy, or a democratic republicanism; for those of medium size monarchy, which is intermediate between the two former, is the best form of const.i.tution. Although Montesquieu, in his Lettres Persanes, shows himself enthusiastic for the federal republics of Switzerland and the Netherlands, his opinions are different after his return from England, and in his Esprit des Lois he praises the English form of government as the ideal of civil liberty.
Political freedom consists in liberty to do (not what we wish, but) what we ought, or in doing that which the laws allow. Such lawful freedom is possible only where the const.i.tution of the state and criminal legislation inspire the citizen with a sense of security. In order to prevent misuse of the supreme power, the different authorities in the state must be divided so that they shall hold one another in check. In particular Montesquieu demands for the judicial power absolute independence of the executive power (which Locke had termed the federative) as well as of the legislative power. The last belongs to parliament, which includes in its two houses an aristocratic and a democratic element.
Voltaire[1] (1694-1778)-he himself had made this anagram from his name, Arouet l(e) j(eune)-seemed by his many-sided receptivity almost made to be the interpreter of English ideas; in the words of Windelband, he "combines Newton's mechanical philosophy of nature, Locke's noetical empiricism, and Shaftesbury's moral philosophy under the deistic point of view." The same qualities which made him the first journalist, enabled him to free philosophy from its scholastic garb, and, by concentrating it on the problems which press most upon the lay mind (G.o.d, freedom, immortality), to make it a living force among the people. His superficiality, as Erdmann acutely remarks, was his strength. True religion, so reason teaches us, consists in loving G.o.d and in being just and forbearing to our fellow-men as to our brothers; morality is so natural and necessary that it is no wonder that all philosophers since Zoroaster have inculcated the same principles. The less of dogma the better the religion; atheism is not so bad as superst.i.tion, which teaches men to commit crimes with an easy conscience. He considered it the chief mission of his life to destroy these two miserable errors. He endeavored to controvert atheism by rational arguments, while with pa.s.sionate hatred and contemptuous wit he attacked positive Christianity and his persecutors, the priesthood. The existence of G.o.d is for him not merely a moral postulate, but a result of scientific reasoning. One of his famous sayings was: "If G.o.d did not exist it would be necessary to invent him; but all nature cries out to us that he exists." He defends immortality in spite of theoretical difficulties, because of its practical necessity; his att.i.tude toward the freedom of the will, which he had energetically defended in the beginning, grows constantly more skeptical with increasing age. His position in regard to the question of evil experiences a similar change-the Lisbon earthquake made him an opponent of optimism, though he had previously favored it.
[Footnote 1: David Friedrich Strauss, Voltaire, sechs Vortrage, 1870.]
2. Theoretical and Practical Sensationalism.
We turn next from the popular introduction and dissemination of Locke's doctrines, which left their contents unchanged, to their principiant development by the French sensationalists. Condillac (1715-80) always thinks of his work as a completion of Locke's, whose Essay he held not to have gone down to the final root of the cognitive process. Locke did not go far enough, Condillac thinks, in his rejection of innate elements; he failed to trace out the origin of perception, reflection, cognition, and volition, as also the relation between the external senses, the internal sense, and the combining intellect, which he discussed as separate sources, the two former of particular, and the last of complex, ideas; in short, he omitted to inquire into the origin of the first function of the soul. Berkeley was right in feeling that a simplification was needed here; but by erroneously reducing outer perception to inner perception, he reached the absurd conclusion of denying the external world. The true course is just the opposite of this-the one already taken by the Bishop of Cork, Peter Browne (died 1735; The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of the Human Understanding, 1728): understanding and reflection must be reduced to sensation. All psychical functions are transformed sensations. The soul has only one original faculty, that of sensation; all the others, theoretical and practical alike, are acquired, i.e., they have gradually developed from the former. Condillac is related to Locke as Fichte to Kant; in the former case the transition is mediated by Browne, in the latter by Reinhold. Each crowns the work of his predecessor with a unifying conclusion; each demands and offers a genetic psychology which finds the origin of all the spiritual functions-from sensation and feelings of pleasure and pain up to rational cognition and moral will-in a single fundamental power of the soul. But there is a great difference, materially as well as formally, between these kindred undertakings, a difference corresponding to that between Locke's empiricism and Kant's idealism. The idea of ends, which controls the course of thought in Fichte as in Leibnitz, is entirely lacking in Condillac; that which is first in time, sensation, is for the Science of Knowledge and the Monadology only the beginning, not the essence, of psychical activity, while Condillac makes no distinction between beginning and ground, but expressly identifies principe and commencement. With Fichte and Leibnitz sensation is immature thought, with Condillac thought is refined sensation. The former teach a teleological, the latter a mechanical mono-dynamism. The Science of Knowledge, moreover, makes a very serious task of the deduction of the particular psychical functions from the original power, while Condillac takes it extraordinarily easy. Good ill.u.s.trations of his way of effacing distinctions instead of explaining them are given by such monotonously recurring phrases as memory is "nothing but" modified sensation; comparison and simultaneous attention to two ideas "are the same thing"; sensation "gradually becomes" comparison and judgment; reflection is "in its origin" attention itself; speech, thought, and the formation of general notions are "at bottom the same"; the pa.s.sions are "only" various kinds of desire; understanding and will spring "from one root," etc.
The demand for a single fundamental psychical power comes from Descartes, and Condillac does not hesitate to retain the word penser itself as a general designation for all mental functions. Similarly he holds fast to the dualism between extension and sensation as reciprocally incompatible properties, opposes the soul as the "simple" subject of thought to "divisible" matter, and sees in the affections of the bodily organs merely the "occasions" on which the soul of itself alone exercises its sensitive activity. Even freedom-the supremacy of thought over the pa.s.sions-is maintained, in striking contrast to the whole tendency of his doctrine and to the openly announced principle, that pleasure controls the attention and governs all our actions. He has just as little intention of doubting the existence of G.o.d. All is dependent on G.o.d. He is our lawgiver; it is in virtue of his wisdom that from small beginnings-perception and need-the most splendid results, science and morality, are developed under the hands of man. Whoever undertakes to complain that He has concealed from us the nature of things and granted us to know relations alone, forgets that we need no more than this. We do not exist in order to know; to live is to enjoy.
The theme of the Treatise on the Sensations, 1754, is: Memory, comparison, judgment, abstraction, and reflection (in a word, cognition) are nothing but different forms of attention; similarly the emotions, the appet.i.tes, and the will, nothing but modifications of desire; while both alike take their origin in sensation. Sensation is the sole source and the sole content of the life of the mind as a whole. To prove these positions Condillac makes use of the fiction of a statue, in which one sense awakes after another, first the lowest of the senses, smell, and last the most valuable, the sense of touch, which compels us (by its perception of density or resistance) to project our sensations, and thus wakes in us the idea of an external world. In themselves sensations are merely subjective states, modes of our own being; without the sense of touch we would ascribe odor, sound, and color to ourselves. Condillac distinguishes between sensation and ideas in a twofold sense, as mere ideas (the memory or imagination of something not present), and as ideas of objective things (the image, representative of a body); this latter sense is meant when he says, touch sensations only are also ideas.
For the details of the deduction, which often makes very happy use of a rich store of psychological material, the reader must be referred to the more extended expositions. Here we can only cite as examples the chief among the genetic definitions. Perceptions (impressions) and consciousness are the same thing under different names. A lively sensation, in which the mind is entirely occupied, becomes attention, without the necessity of a.s.suming an additional special faculty in the mind. Attention, by its retentive effect on the sensation, becomes memory. Double attention-to a new sensation, and to the lingering trace of the previous one-is comparison; the recognition of a relation (resemblance or difference) between two ideas is judgment; the separation of an idea from another naturally connected with it, by the aid of voluntary linguistic symbols, is abstraction; a series of judgments is reflection; and the sum total of inner phenomena, that wherein ideas succeed one another, the ego or person. All truths concern relations among ideas. The tactual idea of solidity accustoms us to project the sensations of the other senses also, to transfer them thither where they are not; hence arise the ideas of our body, of external objects, and of s.p.a.ce. If we perceive several such projected qualities together, we refer them to a substratum-substance, which we know to exist, although not what it is. By force we mean the unknown, but indubitably existent, cause of motion.
There are no indifferent mental states; every sensation is accompanied by pleasure or pain. Joy and pain give the determining law for the operation of our faculties. The soul dwells longer on agreeable sensations; without interest, ideas would pa.s.s away like shadows. The remembrance of past impressions more agreeable than the present ones is need; from this springs desire (desir) then the emotions of love, hate, hope, fear, and astonishment; finally, the will as an unconditional desire accompanied by the thought of its possible fulfillment. All inclinations, good and bad alike, spring from self-love. The predicates "good" and "beautiful" denote the pleasure-giving qualities of things, the former, that which is agreeable to smell and taste (and the pa.s.sions), the latter, that which pleases sight, hearing, feeling (and the intellect). Morality is the conformity of our actions to laws, which men have established by convention with mutual obligations. In this way the good, which at first was the servant of the pa.s.sions, becomes their lord.
Man's superiority to the brute depends on the greater perfection of his sense of touch; on the greater variety of his wants and his a.s.sociations of ideas; on the idea of death, which leads him to seek not merely the avoidance of pain but also self-preservation; and the possession of language. Without denomination no abstractions, no thought, no handing down of knowledge. Although all that is mental has its origin, in the last a.n.a.lysis, in simple sensations, its development requires emanc.i.p.ation from the sensuous, and language is the means for freeing ourselves from the pressure of sensations by the generalization and combination of ideas.
A more moderate representative of sensationalism was Charles Bonnet, who later exercised a considerable influence in Germany, especially until Tetens (1720-93; Essay in Psychology, or Considerations on the Operations of the Soul, 1755; a.n.a.lytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul, 1760; Philosophical Palingenesis, or Ideas on the Past and the Future of Living Beings, 1769, including a defense of Christianity; Collected Works, 1779). Sensations, to which he, too, reduces all mental life, are, in his view, reactions of the immaterial soul to sense stimuli, which operate merely as occasional causes. On the other hand, he emphasizes more strongly than Condillac the dependence of psychical phenomena on physiological conditions, and endeavors to show definite brain vibrations as the basis not only of habit, memory, and the a.s.sociation of ideas, but also of the higher mental operations. In harmony with these views he adheres to determinism, and finds the motive of all endeavor: in self-love, and its ultimate aim in happiness. To the latter the hope of immortality is indispensable. The link between Bonnet's theory of the thoroughgoing dependence of the soul on the body and his orthodox convictions, is formed by his idea of an imperishable ethereal body, which enables the soul in the life to come to remember its life on earth and, after the dissolution of the present material body, to acquire a new one. Animals as well as men share in the continuance of existence and the transition to a higher stage.
The material earnestness of these thinkers is in sharp contrast to the superficial and frivolous manner in which Helvetius (1715-71) carries out sensationalism in the sphere of ethics. His chief work, On Mind, came out in 1758; and a year after his death, the work On Man, his Intellectual Faculties and his Education. The search for pleasure or self-love is, as Helvetius thinks he has discovered for the first time,[1] the only motive of action; the laws of interest reign in the moral world as the laws of motion in the physical world; justice and love for our neighbors are based on utility; we seek friends in order to be amused, aided, and, in misfortune, compa.s.sionated by them; the philanthropist and the monster both seek only their own pleasure.
[Footnote 1: In reality not only English moralists, but also some among his countrymen, had antic.i.p.ated him in the position that all actions proceed from selfishness, and that virtue is merely a refined egoism. Thus La Rochefoucauld in his Maxims (Reflexions, ou Sentences et Maximes Morales, 1665), La Bruyere (Les Characteres et les Moeurs de ce Siecle, 1687), and La Mettrie (of. pp, 251-253).]
Helvetius draws the proof for these positions from Condillac. Recollection and judgment are sensation. The soul is originally nothing more than the capacity for sensation; it receives the stimulus to its development from self-love, i.e., from powerful pa.s.sions such as the love of fame, on the one hand, and, on the other, from hatred of ennui, which induces man to overcome the indolence natural to him and to submit himself to the irksome effort of attention-without pa.s.sion he would remain stupid. The sum of ideas collected in him is called intellect. All distinctions among men are acquired, and concern the intellect only, not the soul: that which is innate-sensibility and self-love-is the same in all; differences arise only through external circ.u.mstances, through education. Man is the pupil of all that environs him, of his situation and his chance experience. The most important instrument in education is the law; the function of the lawgiver is to connect public and personal welfare by means of rewards and punishments, and thus to elevate morality. A man is called virtuous when his stronger pa.s.sions harmonize with the general interest. Unfortunately the virtues of prejudice, which do not contribute to the public good, are more honored among most nations than the political virtues, to which alone real merit belongs. And self-interest is always the one motive to just and generous action; we serve only our own interests in furthering the welfare of the community. As the promulgator of these doctrines was himself a kind and generous man, Rousseau could make to him the apt reply: You endeavor in vain to degrade yourself below your own level; your spirit gives evidence against your principles; your benevolent heart discredits your doctrines.
The morality of enlightened self-love or "intelligent self-interest" appears in a milder form in Maupertuis (Works, 1752), and Frederick the Great,[1] to the latter of whom D'Alembert objected by letter that interest could never generate the sense of duty and reverence for the law.
[Footnote 1: Essay on Self-love as a Principle of Morals, 1770, printed in the proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. Cf. on Frederick, Ed. Zeller, 1886.]
3. Skepticism and Materialism.
The ideas thus far developed move in a direction whose further pursuit inevitably issues in materialism. Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades (1751-72), which gathered all the currents of the Illumination into one great stream and carried them to the open sea of popular culture, reflects in his intellectual development the dialectical movement from deism through skepticism to atheism and materialism, and was a co-laborer in the work which brought the whole movement to a conclusion, Holbach's System of Nature. Two decades, however, before the latter work, the outcome of a long development of thought, appeared, the physician La Mettrie[1] (1709-51) had promulgated materialism, though rather in an anthropological form than as a world-system, and with cynical satisfaction in the violation of traditional beliefs-in his Natural History of the Soul, 1745, in a disguised form, and, undisguised, in his Man a Machine, 1748-and at the same time (Anti-Seneca, or Discourse on Happiness, 1748) had sketched out for Helvetius the outlines of the sensationalistic morality of interest. While ill with a violent fever he observed the influence of the heightened circulation of the blood on his mental tone, and inferred that thought is the result of the bodily organization. The soul can only be known from the body. The senses, the best philosophers, teach us that matter is never without form and motion; and whether all matter is sentient or not, certainly all that is sentient is material, and every part of the organism contains a vital principle (the heart of a frog beats for an hour after its removal from the body; the parts of cut-up polyps grow into perfect animals). All ideas come from without, from the senses; without sense-impressions no ideas, without education, few ideas, the mind of a man grown up in isolation remains entirely undeveloped; and since the soul is entirely dependent on the bodily organs, along with which it originates, grows, and declines, it is subject to mortality. Not only animals, as Descartes has shown, but men, who differ from the brutes only in degree, are mere machines; by the soul we mean that part of the body which thinks, and the brain has fine muscles for thinking as the leg its coa.r.s.e ones for walking.
[Footnote 1: La Mettrie was born at St. Malo, and educated in Paris, and in Leyden under Boerhave; he died in Berlin, whither Frederick the Great had called him after he had been driven out of his native land and from Holland. On La Mettrie cf. Lange, History of Materialism, vol. ii. pp. 49-91; and DuBois-Reymond's Address, 1875.]
If man is nothing but body, there is no other pleasure than that of the body. There is a difference, however, between sensuous pleasure, which is intense and brief, and intellectual pleasure, which is calm and lasting. The educated man will prefer the latter, and find in it a higher and more n.o.ble happiness; but nature has been just enough to grant the common mult.i.tude, in the coa.r.s.er pleasures, a more easily attainable happiness. Enjoy the moment, till the farce of life is ended! Virtue exists only in society, which restrains from evil by its laws, and incites to good by rousing the love of honor. The good man, who subordinates his own welfare to that of society, acts under the same necessity as the evil-doer; hence repentance and pangs of conscience, which increase the amount of pain in the world, but are incapable of effecting amendment, are useless and reprehensible: the criminal is an ill man, and must not be more harshly punished than the safety of society requires. Materialism humanizes and exercises a tranquilizing influence on the mind, as the religious view of the world, with its incitement to hatred, disturbs it; materialism frees us from the sense of guilt and responsibility, and from the fear of future suffering. A state composed of atheists, is not only possible, as Bayle argued, but it would be the happiest of all states.
Among the editors of the Encyclopedia, the mathematician D'Alembert (Elements of Philosophy, 1758) remained loyal to skeptical views. Neither matter nor spirit is in its essence knowable; the world is probably quite different from our sensuous conception of it. As Diderot (1713-84), and the Encyclopedia with him, advanced from skepticism to materialism, D'Alembert retired from the editorial board (1757), after Rousseau, also, had separated himself from the Encyclopedists. Diderot[1] was the leading spirit in the second half of the eighteenth century, as Voltaire in the first half. His lively and many-sided receptivity, active industry, clever and combative eloquence, and enthusiastic disposition qualified him for this role beyond all his contemporaries, who testify that they owe even more to his stimulating conversation than to his writings. He commenced by bringing Shaftesbury's Inquiry into Virtue and Merit to the notice of his countrymen; and then turned his sword, on the one hand, against the atheists, to refute whom, he thought, a single glance into the microscope was sufficient, and, on the other, against the traditional belief in a G.o.d of anger and revenge, who takes pleasure in bathing in the tears of mankind. Then followed a period of skepticism, which is well ill.u.s.trated by the prayer in the Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, 1754: O G.o.d! I do not know whether thou art, but I will guide my thoughts and actions as though thou didst see me think and act, etc. Under the influence of Holbach's circle he finally reached (in the Conversation between D'Alembert and Diderot, and D'Alembert's Dream, written in 1769, but not published until 1830, in vol. iv. of the Memoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages Inedits de Diderot) the position of naturalistic monism-there exists but one great individual, the All. Though he had formerly distinguished thinking substance from material substance, and had based the immortality of the soul on the unity of sensation and the unity of the ego, he now makes sensation a universal and essential property of matter (la pierre sent), declares the talk about the simplicity of the soul metaphysico-theological nonsense, calls the brain a self-playing instrument, ridicules self-esteem, shame, and repentance as the absurd folly of a being that imputes to itself merit or demerit for necessary actions, and recognizes no other immortality than that of posthumous fame. But even amid these extreme conclusions, his enthusiasm for virtue remains too intense to allow him to a.s.sent to the audacious theories of La Mettrie and Helvetius.
[Footnote 1: Works in twenty-two vols., Paris, Briere, 1821; latest edition, 1875 seq. Cf. on Diderot the fine work by Karl Rosenkranz, Diderots Leben und Werke, 1866.]
French natural science also tended toward materialism. Buffon (Natural History, 1749 seq) endeavors to facilitate the mechanical explanation of the phenomena of life by the a.s.sumption of living molecules, from which visible organisms are built up. Robinet (On Nature, 1761 seq.), availing himself of Spinozistic and Leibnitzian conceptions, goes still further, in that he endows every particle of matter with sensation, looks on the whole world as a succession of living beings with increasing mentality, and subjects the interaction of the material and psychical sides of the individual, as well as the relation of pleasure and pain in the universe, to a law of harmonious compensation.