DESCARTES.*
Tars little book is one of those which it is not easy to review with much liveliness of interest for the reviewer, or of precise instruction for the reader, because of their neutral, moderate, average quality. Mr. Mahaffy's account of Descartes is creditably executed and useful. In a sketchy volume of about 200 pages, not much more was to have been expected. It possesses neither originality of matter nor
• Descartes. By J. P. Mahaffy, M.A. London: W. Blackwood and Sons.
brilliancy of style. This, however, we are bound to say, and have pleasure in saying, that Mr. Mahaffy is evidently well acquainted with the history and philosophy of Descartes. He has not read up just enough to enable him to produce a pass- able monograph, but from ample knowledge has selected what he can conveniently present in a handy book. Those who know nothing of Descartes, and all who wish to refresh their recollection of his life and philosophy, will find it worth reading.
Descartes came of a noble family, settled in the four- teenth century in Touraine, and escaped the risk of bondage to the duties of a French country gentleman and Councillor of the Parliament of Bretagne by being his father's third child,— Rene, born in March, 1596, at La Haye, between Tours and Poitiers. He was a weakly, large-headed little boy, whose "pale complexion and constant, dry cough" made his rearing a delicate business ; but his father was kind, the gardens of southern Touraine were balmy, and he had, for playmate, a squinting girl, who made life so agreeable that he liked squints ever after. His thoughtfulness was conspicuous from the first, and his father called him "his little philosopher." To the end of his eighth year he enjoyed what we agree with Pro- fessor Mahaffy in considering the great good-fortune of not being pressed to do any brain-work; and thus was handed over, "fresh and eager," to the Jesuit preceptors of La Fleche. There were 1,200 ordinary students at this famous seminary, besides four and twenty gentilshonnnes who shone in aristo- cratic pre-eminence ; of these last, Descartes was one. Whether on account of his rank or of the delicacy of his constitution, he was allowed "to lie in bed o' mornings," a habit he persisted in during his life, and "regarded as above all conducive to intel- lectual profit and comfort." "All his best meditation," says Mr. Mahaffy, " was done in the morning hours while lying in bed."
From a period too early to fix, Descartes presents the spec- tacle of a two-fold life. He was a man of scclety,—he was a philosopher; the two were so completely distinct, that they never came into collision. On the one side he was inflexible, a pillar of intellect never deviating by a hairbreadth from rigid perpendicularity ; on the other, he was all things to all men. For his intellect the law was rejection of authority, assertion of absolute freedom ; for the rest of him—for the man, distinguished from the philosopher—the law was courteous compliance all round, polite acquiescence in every require- ment of custom and conventionality. Not only was he an affectionate and docile pupil of the Jesuits, but he retained throughout life the friendships formed among them in boyhood. He scrupulously honoured his Mother Church, made a de- vout pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady of Loretto, and summoned all the force of his dialectics to prove that his doctrine of matter was not irreconcilable with the dogma of the Real Presence. As a philosopher, on the other hand, he took the whole universe to pieces with the calmest intrepidity, proposing to show how it might be all put together again, if you granted the philosophical architect the modest equipment of extension and motion. Animals he reduced to automata, and the arguments by which he guarded himself against the inference that men must be automata also, as well as against the inference that the scheme of creation by means of matter and motion renders a God superfluous, have seemed to many so much less strong than the arguments which suggest those inferences, that his personal honesty has been called in question. It is certain that Descartes, though vehemently denying that his system tended to subvert the faith of Christen- dom, Catholic or Protestant, was alive to the fact that it might well be imagined to do so. While standing on terms of the utmost politeness with priests and Jesuits, he took care to place himself beyond reach of those powers that had crushed Galileo. Professor Huxley, an ardent admirer of his philosophical character, has spoken sarcastically of his having thrown a sop to Cerberns, and of Cerberus being far too shrewd to swallow it. There is no doubt that he was attacked by theo- logians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, and alleged to hold atheistic opinions. We believe him, however, to have been sin- cere in repudiating the consequences which others deduced from his system, and in pluming himself on having contributed to the reconciliation of reason and faith by his arguments for the independent existence of the soul and for the existence of God. It is a more genial, and will, we are convinced, be found, on the whole, a more profitable plan, to trust distinguished men, when they say that they hold one doctrine and do not hold
another, than to accept the logic of critics who assume to un- derstand them better than they understood themselves.
In the autumn of 1649, Descartes betook himself to the philosophical Queen of Sweden. Christina had about her a galaxy of pedants, each trying to outshine the others ; and Descartes was looked on with an evil eye, as a dangerous rival. In November the Queen began serious study with him, and he was required to be in attendance at five in the morning several days in the week. The misery which this entailed upon a man who, in France and in summer, thought it beneficial to lie in bed until nearly noon, may be imagined. Descartes, however, was always courtly in his deference to crowned heads, and in the depths of a winter severe even for Sweden, complied. The result was an attack of inflammation of the lungs, which occasioned his death in the succeeding February.
Born in the last decade of the sixteenth century, Descartes was a young man at about the very centre of that epoch of change which began with the Renaissance and ended with Puritanism. The idea which, at that time, every young gifted head in Western Europe heard ringing in the air around it, was that the old was outworn, and that all things must be made new. He felt that, in proposing to ascertain and set forth what was philosophically true, it was necessary for him to begin by claiming assent to nothing that could reasonably be called in question. He professed to doubt everything, until he saw reason to believe in something. Every one is familiar with the celebrated words in which he announced that he had pushed from shore,— " Cogito, ergo slim." It is easy to show that it is in some sense a false start. Obviously, it is not one assertion, but two,—" I think ; I am," and the insertion of the word " therefore " to bind the two together, implying the affirmation of some kind of logical bond between them, amounts to a third. Nevertheless, there is in this proposition a substantial bit of philosophical work, a true piece of initiation. The mind is conscious of itself only in the outgoing of energy, in thought, action, or emotion ; and the consciousness of personal identity arises in, and is inseparable from, consciousness of activity. Des- cartes might safely challenge all men to deny that, in thinking, they know themselves to exist, and require no further proof of that fact. Whether the law of cause and effect is consciously recognised in the moment when, through thought or feeling, personal identity is certified, may be a question. There can be no doubt that Descartes meant his " therefore " to imply that this law was appealed to. Hence his stock argument,—" Can a non-entity think ?" "Can a con- scions thinker be non-existent ?" "Can nothing have any qualities, active or passive ?"
Beginning with consciousness, Descartes glided naturally into mathematics, geometry being essentially a science of the think- ing mind. He was himself a mathematical genius, passionately addicted to the solution of problems. His system of physics is a most ingenious attempt ts construct the world on mathematical principles, nothing being granted him but extension and motion- " He starts," says Mr. Mahaffy, "from the intelligible hypo- thesis, confirmed in strange ways by modern experiment, that matter is homogeneous, that it is conterminous with extension, and that all differences of quality are simply produced by a different mechanical composition, and a difference of motion in its parts." Mr. Mahaffy and Professor Huxley have both been struck by the power of Descartes' genius in anticipating by some- thing like two hundred years the discoveries, or rather the specu- lations of modern physicists. "He anticipated," says Professor Mahaffy, "the mechanical theory of the transmission of light . and heat ; and had he known that an appreciable time elapses during the process, he would have been strongly confirmed in his a priori conjecture. The production of sound he perfectly understood and explained. His denial of a void, and his asser- tion that beyond the atmosphere there must be some subtle substance, because there is extension,—this theory was not verified till quite recently, and by the delay of the movement of bodies through what was supposed to be empty space." We have, nevertheless, the clearest persuasion that, on the physical side, the philosophy of Descartes was defective. As Mr. Mahaffy makes plain, he worked on the deductive, a priori method, and had recourse to experiment, not with a view to discovery, but to verification. Be a man's genius what it may, such a system of physics can be nothing better than an affair of magnificent guessing. The fact is that, whereas Descartes, by- commencing with thought and consciousness, opened for himself an avenue into the world of mind, his method presents no logical access to matter. In firing the seat of the human personality in mind, in asserting the primacy of the Ego, he performed n great and an eminently practical ser- vice in the cause of truth. But the avenue of mind will never lead you out to matter, and the legitimate issue of Cartesianism, as a physical philosophy, was not modern science, but idealism. Mind may (conceivably) give you matter as an idea, but cannot give you matter as a fact,—it may give you matter as extension, not as trees, and stones, and atoms. This can be done only by the perceptive act, in which matter intervenes, making a true commencement for itself, presenting to mind, through the senses, something which mind has not ercogitated. The essential defect of Cartesianism lay in the incompleteness of its start. It would probably have seemed horrible to Descartes to propose two starts, one for mind, one for matter. The proud and paradox-loving philosophers who have succeeded him have, for the most part, preferred to patch up some pretext of unity, rather than adapt their philosophies to the dualism they could not resolve. But, for the present, the only complete philo- sophy is one which says that, by consciousness, we are admitted to the world of mind, and that matter, presenting itself to con- sciousness through sense, spreads out to us the chart of the physical universe.
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