Abstract
A dialogue reply to Locke’s Essay: against the tabula rasa, the soul is not empty but contains the principles in germ — ‘nothing is in the intellect that was not in the senses, except the intellect itself.’ Insensible minute perceptions explain the continuity of mental life. Leibniz sides with Plato, Locke with Aristotle.
Testo originale inglese · Delphi Classics, 2025 · pubblico dominio
PREFACE.
THE ESSAY ON the Understanding, by an illustrious Englishman, being one of the most beautiful and esteemed works of the time, I have resolved to make Remarks on it, because, having sufficiently meditated for a long time on the same subject and upon most of the matters which are therein touched upon, I have thought that it would be a good opportunity to put forth something under the title of New Essays on the Understanding, and to obtain a favorable reception for my thoughts by putting them in such good company. I have thought also that I should be able to profit by the work of another, not only to lessen my own (since in fact it is less difficult to follow the thread of a good author than to labor entirely de novo), but also to add something to what he has given us, which is always easier than to begin; for I think I have cleared up some difficulties which he had left in their entirety. Thus his reputation is advantageous to me; besides being inclined to do justice, and far from wishing to lessen the esteem in which that work is held, I would increase it, if my approval was of any weight. It is true that I often differ from him, but far from denying the merit of celebrated writers, we bear witness to it, by making known in what and why we separate ourselves from their opinion, when we think it necessary to prevent their authority from prevailing over reason on certain points of importance; besides by satisfying such excellent men, we make truth more acceptable, and it must be supposed that it is principally for truth that they labor.
In fact, although the author of the Essay says a thousand fine things of which I approve, our systems differ very much. His has more relation to Aristotle, and mine to Plato, although we both diverge in many things from the doctrines of these two ancients. He is more popular, and I am forced at times to be a little more acromatic and more abstract, which is not an advantage to me, especially when I write in a living language. I think nevertheless that by making two persons speak, one of whom expounds the views taken from the Essay of the author and the other joins thereto my observations, the parallel will be more to the liking of the reader than wholly dry remarks the reading of which would be constantly interrupted by the necessity of referring to his hook to understand mine. It will nevertheless he well to compare now and then our writings and not to judge of his views except by his own work, although I have ordinarily preserved its expression. It is true that the subjection which the discourse of another, the thread of which must be followed, gives in making Remarks, has prevented me from thinking to secure the embellishments of which the dialogue is susceptible: but I hope that the matter will make up for the defect of style.
Our differences are on subjects of some importance. The question is to know whether the soul in itself is entirely void like the tablet on which nothing has yet been written (tabula rasa) according to Aristotle and the author of the Essay, and whether all that is traced thereon conies solely from the senses and from experience, or whether the soul contains originally the principles of several notions and doctrines which external objects merely awaken on occasions, as I believe with Plato and even with the schoolmen and with all those who take with this meaning the passage of St. Paul (Romans, 2, 15) where he remarks that the law of God is written in the heart. The Stoics called these principles prolepses, that is to say, fundamental assumptions, or what is taken for granted in advance. The mathematicians call them common notions. Modern philosophers give them other beautiful names, and Julius Scaliger in particular named them semina aeternitatis, also zopyra, as meaning living fires, luminous rays, concealed within us, but which the encounter of the senses makes appear like the sparks which the blow makes spring from the steel. And it is not without reason that these glitterings are believed to indicate something divine and eternal which appears especially in necessary truths. Whence there arises another question, whether all truths depend on experience, that is to say, on induction and examples, or whether there are some which have still another basis. For if some events can be foreseen before any proof which may have been made of them, it is manifest that we contribute something on our part thereto. The senses although necessary for all our actual knowledge are not sufficient to give it all to us, since the senses never give anything except examples, that is to say, particular or individual truths. Now all the examples of whatever number they he, which confirm a general truth, do not suffice to establish the universal necessity of this same truth, for it does not follow that what has happened will happen just so. For example, the Greeks and Romans and all other peoples of the earth known to the ancients, have always noticed that before the expiration of twenty-four hours day changes into night and the night into day. But we would be deceived if we, believed that the same law holds good everywhere else, for since then the contrary has been experienced in the region of Nova Zembla. And he would still deceive himself who believed that in our climates at least it is a necessary and eternal truth which will last always, since we must think that the earth and the sun themselves do not exist necessarily, and that there will perhaps be a time when that beautiful star will no longer be, at least in its present form, nor all its system. Whence it would seem that necessary truths such as are found in the pure mathematics and especially in arithmetic and in geometry, ought to have principles the proof of which does not depend on examples, nor, consequently, on the testimony of the senses, although without the senses we would never take it into our heads to think of them. This ought to be well recognized, and this is what Euclid has so well understood that he often demonstrates by the reason that which is sufficiently seen through experience and by sensible images. Logic also, together with metaphysics and ethics, one of which forms theology and the other jurisprudence, both natural, are full of such truths, and consequently their proof can only come from internal principles which are called innate. It is true that we must not imagine that these eternal laws of the reason can be read in the soul as in an open book, as the edict of the pretor is read upon his album without difficulty and without search; but it is enough that they can be discovered in us by force of attention, for which occasions are furnished by the senses, and the success of experiences serves also as confirmation to the reason, very much as proofs serve in arithmetic for better avoiding error of reckoning when the reasoning is long. It is also in this that the knowledge of men and that of the brutes differ: the brutes are purely empirics and only guide themselves by examples, for they never, as far as we can judge, come to form necessary propositions; whereas men are capable of demonstrative sciences. It is also for this reason that the faculty which brutes have of making consecutions is something inferior to the reason which is in man. The consecutions of the brutes are merely like those of simple empirics, who claim that what has happened sometimes will happen also in a case where that which strikes them is similar, without being able to judge whether the same reasons hold good. This is why it is so easy for men to entrap brutes and so easy for simple empirics to make mistakes. This is why persons who have become skilled by age or by experience are not exempt from error when they rely too much upon their past experience, as has happened to many in civil and military affairs; because they do not sufficiently consider that the world changes and that men become more skilled by finding a thousand new dexterities, whereas deers and hares of the present day do not become more cunning than those of past time. The consecutions of the brutes are only a shadow of reasoning, that is to say, they are but connections of the imagination and passages from one image to another, because in a new juncture which appears similar to the preceding they expect anew what they found conjoined with it before, as if things were linked together in fact because their images are in the memory. It is true that even reason counsels us to expect ordinarily to see that happen in the future which is conformed to a long past experience, but this is not for this reason a necessary and infallible truth, and success may cease when we expect it least, if the reasons which have sustained it change. This is why the wisest do not rely upon it so much that they do not try to discover something of the reason (if it is possible) of this fact, in order to judge when it will be necessary to make exceptions. For reason is alone capable of establishing sure rules, and of supplying what is lacking to those which were not sure by inserting their exceptions; and of finding, finally, certain connections in the force of necessary consequences, which often gives the means of foreseeing the event without having need of experiencing the sensible connections of images, to which the brutes are reduced; so that that which justifies the internal principles of necessary truths, distinguishes also man from the brutes.
Perhaps our able author will not differ entirely from my opinion. Tor after having employed the whole of his first book in rejecting innate lights, taken in a certain sense, he nevertheless avows at the beginning of the second and in what follows, that the ideas which do not originate in sensation come from reflection. Now reflection is nothing else than attention to what is in us, and the senses do not give us that which we already carry with us. This being so, can it be denied that there is much that is innate in our mind, since we are innate, so to say, in ourselves? and that there is in us ourselves, being, unity, substance, duration, change, action, perception, pleasure, and a thousand other objects of our intellectual ideas? And these objects being immediate to our understanding and always present (although they cannot be always perceived on account of our distractions and wants), why be astonished that we say that these ideas, with all which depends on them, are innate in us? I have made use also of the comparison of a block of marble which has veins, rather than of a block of marble wholly even, or of blank tablets, that is to say, of what is called among philosophers tabula rasa. For if the soul resembled these blank tablets, truths would be in us as the figure of Hercules is in marble when the marble is entirely indifferent toward receiving this figure or some other. But if there were veins in the block, which should mark out the figure of Hercules rather than other figures, the block would be more determined thereto, and Hercules would be in it as in some sort innate, although it would be necessary to labor in order to discover these veins and to cleanse them by polishing and by cutting away that which prevents them from appearing. It is thus that ideas and truths are innate in us, as inclinations, dispositions, habits, or natural capacities, and not as actions; although these capacities are always accompanied by some actions, often insensible, which correspond to them.
It seems that our able author claims that there is nothing virtual in us and nothing even of which we are not always actually conscious, but he cannot take this strictly, otherwise his opinion would be too paradoxical; since, moreover, acquired habits and the stores of our memory are not always consciously perceived and do not even come always to our aid at need, although we often easily bring them back to the mind on some slight occasion which makes us remember them, just as we need but the beginning of a song to remember it. He modifies also his assertion in other places, by saying that there is nothing in us of which we have not been at least formerly conscious. But in addition to the fact that no one can he sure by reason alone how far our past apperceptions which we may have forgotten may have gone, especially according to the reminiscence of the Platonists, which, fabulous as it is, has nothing in it incompatible at least in part with the bare reason; in addition to this, I say, why is it necessary that all he acquired by us through the perceptions of external things, and that nothing can be unearthed in ourselves? Is our soul then such a blank that, besides the images imprinted from without, it is nothing? This is not an opinion (I am sure) which our judicious author can approve. And where are there found tablets which are not something varied in themselves? For we never see a plain perfectly even and uniform. Why then could we not furnish also to ourselves something of thought from our own depths, if we should dig therein? Thus I am led to believe that at bottom his opinion on this point is not different from mine or rather from the common opinion, inasmuch, as he recognized two sources of our knowledge, the Senses and Reflection.
I do not know whether it will be as easy to bring him in accord with us and with the Cartesians, when he maintains that the mind does not always think and particularly that it is without perception when we sleep without dreaming. And he objects that, since bodies may he without movement, souls may also well be without thought. But here I reply a little differently than is wont to be done, for I maintain that naturally a substance cannot be without action, and even that there is never a body without movement. Experience already favors me, and one has only to consult the hook of the illustrious Mr. Boyle against absolute repose, to be persuaded of it; but I believe that reason also favors it and it is one of the proofs which I have for destroying atoms.
Furthermore there are a thousand indications which lead us to think that there are constantly numberless perceptions in us, but without apperception and without reflection; that is to say, changes in the soul itself of which we are not conscious because the impressions are either too slight or in too great a number or too even, so that they have nothing sufficient to distinguish them one from the other, but joined to others, they do not fail to produce their effect and to make themselves felt at least confusedly in the mass. Thus it is that custom causes us not to take notice of the motion of a mill or of a waterfall when we have lived near it for some time. It is not that the motion does not always strike our organs, and that something does not enter the soul which answers thereto, on account of the harmony of the soul and the body; but these impressions which are in the soul and in body, being destitute of the charms of novelty, are not strong enough to attract our attention and our memory, attached as they are to objects more engrossing. For all attention requires memory, and often when we are not admonished, so to speak, and advised to attend to some of our own present perceptions, we let them pass without reflection and even without being noticed; but if some one calls our attention to them immediately afterwards and makes us notice, for example, some noise which was just heard, we remember it and are conscious of having had at the time some feeling of it. Thus it was with the perceptions of which we were not immediately conscious, the consciousness only coming in this case from the warning after some interval small though it may be. And to judge still better of the minute perceptions which we are unable to distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed to make use of the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes one when on the shore. To understand this noise as it is made it would be necessary to hear the parts which compose the whole, that is to say, the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises only makes itself known in the confused collection of all the others together, that is to say, in the roar itself, and would not be noticed if the wave which makes it was alone. For it must be that we are affected a little by the motion of this wave and that we have some perception of each of these noises however small; otherwise we would not have that of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand nothings cannot make something. One never sleeps so profoundly but that he has some feeble and confused feeling, and he would never be awakened by the greatest noise in the world if he did not have some perception of its small beginning, just as one would never break a rope by the greatest effort in the world if it was not stretched and lengthened a little by smaller efforts, although the little extension which they produce does not appear.
These minute perceptions are then of greater efficacy by their consequences than is thought. It is they which form I know not what, these tastes, these images of the sensible qualities, clear in the mass but confused in the parts, these impressions which surrounding bodies make upon us, which embrace the infinite, this connection which each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said that in consequence of these minute perceptions the present is big with the future and loaded with the past, that all things conspire; and that in the least of substances eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole course of the things in the universe. Quae sint, quae fuerint, quae mox futura trahantur. These insensible perceptions indicate also and constitute the same individual, who is characterized by the traces or expressions which they preserve of the preceding states of this individual, in making the connection with his present state; and these can be known by a superior mind, even if this individual himself should not be aware of them, that is to say, when the express recollection of them will no longer be in him. But they (these perceptions, I say) furnish the means of finding again this recollection at need by the periodic developments which may happen some day. It is for this reason that death can be but a sleep, and cannot indeed continue, the perceptions merely ceasing to be sufficiently distinguished and being, in animals, reduced to a state of confusion which suspends consciousness, but which could not last always; not to speak here of man who must have in this respect great privileges in order to preserve his personality.
It is also through the insensible perceptions that the admirable pre-established harmony of the soul and the body, and indeed of all monads or simple substances, is to be explained; which supplies the place of the unmaintainable influence of the one upon the others, and which in the judgment of the author of the finest of Dictionaries exalts the greatness of the divine perfections above what has ever been conceived. After this I would add little if I should say that it is these minute perceptions which determine us in many a juncture without it being thought of, and which deceive the vulgar by the appearance of an indifference of equilibrium, as if we were entirely indifferent to turning (for example) to the right, or to the left. It is not necessary also that I notice here, as I have done in the book itself, that they cause that uneasiness which I show consists in something which does not differ from pain except as the small from the great, and which nevertheless often constitutes our desire and even our pleasure, in giving to it a salt which stimulates. It is also the inconceivable parts of our sensible perceptions which produce a relation between the perceptions of colors, of heat and of other sensible qualities and between the motions in bodies which correspond to them, whereas the Cartesians with our author, thoroughly penetrating as he is, conceive the perceptions, which we have of these qualities as arbitrary, that is to say, as if God had given them to the soul according to his good pleasure without having regard to any essential relation between these perceptions and their objects: an opinion which surprises me and which appears to me little worthy of the Author of things who does nothing without harmony and without reason.
In a word, these insensible perceptions are of as great use in pneumatics as the insensible corpuscles are in physics, and it is equally as unreasonable to reject the one as the other under the pretext that they are beyond the reach of our senses. Nothing is done all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most verified, that nature never makes leaps: this is what I called the Lam of continuity, when I spoke of it in the first Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, and the use of this law is very considerable in physics. It teaches that we pass always from the small to the great, and vice versa, through the medium, in degrees as in parts, and that motion never arises immediately from repose nor is reduced to it except by a smaller motion, just as one never completes running any line or length before having completed a shorter line; although hitherto those who have laid down the laws of motion have not observed this law, believing that a body can receive in an instant a motion contrary to the preceding. And all this leads us to conclude rightly that the noticeable perceptions also come by degrees from these which are too minute to be noticed. To think otherwise is to little understand the immense subtilty of things which always and everywhere embraces an actual infinite.
I have also noticed that in virtue of insensible variations, two individual things cannot be perfectly alike, and that they must always differ more than numéro; which destroys the blank tablets of the soul, a soul without thought, a substance without action, a void in space, atoms and even particles not actually divided in matter, absolute rest, entire uniformity in one part of time, of space or of matter, perfect globes of the second element, born of perfect and original cubes, and a thousand other fictions of the philosophers which come from their incomplete notions, and which the nature of things does not permit, and which our ignorance and the little attention we give to the insensible, let pass, but which can not be tolerated, unless they are limited to abstractions of the mind which protests that it does not deny what it puts aside and what it thinks ought not enter into any present consideration. Otherwise if it is rightly understood, namely, that ‘things of which we are not conscious, are not in the soul nor in the body, we should be lacking in philosophy as in politics, in neglecting το μιχρον, insensible progress; whereas an abstraction is not an error, provided that we know what it is that we feign in it. Just as mathematicians employ it when they speak of perfect lines which they propose to us, of uniform motions and of other regulated effects, although matter (that is to say, the medley of the effects of the surrounding infinite) makes always some exception. It is in order to distinguish the considerations and to reduce, as far as is possible, the effects to reasons and to foresee some of their consequences, that we proceed thus: for the more attentive we are to neglect no consideration which we are able to regulate, the more practice corresponds to theory. But it pertains only to the Supreme Reason, which nothing escapes, to comprehend distinctly all the infinite and to see all the reasons and all the consequences. All that we can do as regards infinites is to know them confusedly and to know at least distinctly that they are thus; otherwise we judge very wrongly of the beauty and grandeur of the universe; so also we could not have a sound physics which should explain the nature of bodies in general, and still less a sound pneumatics which should comprise the knowledge of God, of souls and of simple substances in general.
This knowledge of insensible perceptions serves also to explain why and how two souls, human or otherwise, of the same kind, never come from the hands of the Creator perfectly alike, and each always has its original relation to the points of view which it will have in the universe. But this it is which already follows from what I have remarked of two individuals, namely, that their difference is always more than numerical. There is still another point of importance, on which I am obliged to differ not only from the opinions of our author but also from those of the greater part of modern philosophers; this is, that I believe with most of the ancients that all genii, all souls, all simple created substances are always joined to a body and that there never are souls entirely separated. I have à priori reasons for this; but this advantage is also found in the doctrine, that it resolves all the philosophical difficulties as to the condition of souls, as to their perpetual conservation, as to their immortality and as to their action. The difference of one of their states from another never being and never having been anything but that of more sensible to less sensible, of more perfect to less perfect, or vice versa, it renders their past or future state as explicable as that of the present. One feels sufficiently, however little reflection one makes, that this is rational, and that a leap from one state to another infinitely different could not be natural. I am astonished that by quitting the natural without reason, the schoolmen have been willing to plunge themselves purposely into very great difficulties and to furnish matter for apparent triumphs of the strong-minded, all of whose reasons fall at a single blow by this explanation of things, where there is no more difficulty in conceiving the conservation of souls (or rather according to me of the animal) than there is in conceiving the change of the caterpillar into the butterfly, and the conservation of thought in sleep, to which Jesus Christ has divinely well compared death. Also I have already said that a sleep could not last always, and it will last least or almost not at all to rational souls who are always destined to preserve the personality which has been given them in the City of God, and consequently remembrance: and this in order to be more susceptible to chastisements and recompenses. And I add also that in general no derangement of the visible organs is able to throw things into entire confusion in the animal or to destroy all the organs and to deprive the soul of all its organic body and the ineffaceable remains of all preceding traces. But the ease with which the ancient doctrine has been abandoned of subtile bodies united to the angels (which was confounded with the corporality of the angels themselves), and the introduction of pretended separate intelligences in creatures (to which those who make the heavens of Aristotle revolve have contributed much), and finally the poorly understood opinion into which we have fallen that the souls of brutes could not be preserved without falling into metempsychosis and without conducting them from body to body, and the embarrassment in which men have been placed by not knowing what to do with them, have caused us, in my opinion, to neglect the natural way of explaining the conservation of the soul. This has done great injury to natural religion and has made many believe that our immortality was only a miraculous grace of God, of which also our celebrated author speaks with some doubt, as I shall presently remark. But it were desirable that all who are of this opinion had spoken as wisely and with as good faith as he, for it is to be feared that many who speak of immortality through grace do it but to save appearances, and approximate at heart those Averroists and some bad Quietists who picture to themselves an absorption and the reunion of the soul with the ocean of divinity; a notion the impossibility of which perhaps my system alone makes evident.
It seems also that we differ further as regards matter, in that the author thinks a vacuum is here necessary for motion because he thinks that the minute parts of matter are rigid. And I acknowledge that if matter were composed of such parts motion in a plenum would be impossible, just as if a room were full of a quantity of small pebbles without there being the least vacant space. But this supposition, for which there appears also no reason, is not admissible, although this able author goes to the point of believing that rigidity or cohesion of minute parts constitutes the essence of body. It is necessary rather to conceive space as full of an originally fluid matter, susceptible of all the divisions and even actually subject to divisions and subdivisions ad infinitum, but nevertheless with this difference that it is divisible and divided unequally in different places on account of the motions which already more or less concur there. This it is which causes it to have everywhere a degree of rigidity as well as of fluidity, and which causes no body to be hard or fluid to the highest degree, that is to say, no atom to be found of an insurmountable hardness nor any mass entirely indifferent to division. The order also of nature and particularly the law of continuity destroy both equally.
I have shown also that cohesion, which could not itself be the effect of impulse or of motion, would cause a traction taken strictly. For if there were a body originally inflexible, for example, an Epicurean atom which should have a part projecting in the form of a hook (since we can conceive atoms of all sorts of figure), this hook pushed would carry with it the rest of the atom, that is to say, the part which is not pushed and which does not fall in the line of impulsion. Nevertheless our able author is himself opposed to these philosophical tractions, such as were attributed formerly to the abhorrence of a vacuum, and he is reduced to impulse, maintaining with the moderns that one part of matter operates immediately upon another only by pushing it by contact. In which I think they are right, since otherwise there is nothing intelligible in the operation.
It is however necessary not to conceal the fact that I have noticed a sort of retraction by our excellent author on this subject; whose modest sincerity in this respect I cannot refrain from praising as much as I have admired his penetrating genius on other occasions. It is in the reply to the second letter of the late Bishop of Worcester, printed in 1699, p. 408, where to justify the opinion which he had maintained in opposition to that learned prelate, namely, that matter might think, he says among other things: I admit that I home said (book 2 of the Essay on the Understanding, chap. 8, §11) that body acts by impulse and not otherwise. This also was my opinion when I wrote it, and still at present I cannot conceive in it another manner of acting. But since then I have been convinced by the incomparable booh of the judicious Mr. Newton, that there is too much presumption in wishing to limit the power of God by our limited conceptions. The gravitation of matter towards matter, by ways which cure inconceivable to me, is not only a demonstration that God can, when it seems good to him, put in bodies powers and ways of acting which transcend that which can be derived from our idea of body or explained by what we know of matter; but it is further an incontestable instance that he has really done so. I shall therefore take care that in the next edition of my book this passage be corrected. I find that in the French version of this book made undoubtedly according to the latest editions it has been put thus in this § 11: It is evident, at least so far as we are able to conceive it, that it is by impulse and not otherwise that bodies act on each other, for it is impossible for us to understand that body can act upon what it does not touch, which is as much as to imagine that it can act where it is not.
I cannot but praise that modest piety of our celebrated author, which recognizes that God may do above what we are able to comprehend, and that thus there may be inconceivable mysteries in the articles of faith; but I should not like to be obliged to resort to miracle in the ordinary course of nature, and to admit powers and operations absolutely inexplicable. Otherwise too much license will be given to poor philosophers, under cover of what God can do, and by admitting these centripetal virtues or these immediate attractions from afar, without its being possible to render them intelligible, I see nothing to hinder our scholastics from saying that everything is done simply by their faculties and from maintaining their intentional species which go from objects to us and find means of entering even into our souls. If this is so, omnia jam fient, fieri quae posse negabam. So that it seems to me that our author, quite judicious as he is, goes here a little too much from one extremity to the other. He is squeamish concerning the operations of souls, when the question merely is to admit that which is not sensible, and now, behold, he gives to bodies that which is not even intelligible, granting them powers and actions which surpass all that in my opinion a created spirit could do and understand, for he grants them attraction, and that even at great distances, without limiting himself to any sphere of activity, and this to maintain an opinion which does not appear less inexplicable; namely, the possibility of the thought of matter in the natural order.
The question which he, with the celebrated prelate who attacked him, agitates, is whether matter can think; and as this is an important point, even for the present work, I cannot exempt myself from entering upon it a little and from taking notice of their controversy. I will present the substance of it on this subject and will take the liberty of saying what I think of it. The late Bishop of Worcester, apprehending (but in my opinion without good reason) that our author’s doctrine of ideas was liable to certain abuses prejudicial to the Christian faith, undertook to examine some passages of it in his Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity; and having done justice to this excellent writer by recognizing that he regards the existence of spirit as certain as that of body, although one of these substances is as little known as the other, he asks (p. 241 seqq.) how reflection can assure us of the existence of spirit, if God can give to matter the faculty of thinking, according to the opinion of our author, bk. 4, chap. 3, since thus the way of ideas which must serve to discern that which is suitable to the soul or the body would become useless; whereas he had said, bk. 2 of the Essay on the Understanding, ch. 23, §§ 15, 27, 28, that the operations of the soul furnish us the idea of mind, and the understanding with the will renders this idea as intelligible to us as the nature of body is rendered by solidity and impulse. This is how our author replies to it in the first letter (p. 65 seqq.): I believe that I have proved that there is a spiritual substance in us, for we experience in ourselves thought; now this action or this mode could not be the object of the idea of a thing subsisting of itself, and consequently this mode needs a support or subject of inhesion, and the idea of this support forms what we call substance… For since the general idea of substance is everywhere the same, it follows that the modification, which is called thought or power of thinking, being joined to it, there results a mind without there being need of considering what other modification it has in addition; that is whether it has solidity or not. And on the other hand, the substance which has the modification called solidity will be matter, whether thought be joined to it or not. But if by a spiritual substance you understand an immaterial substance, I confess that I home not proved that there is one in us, and that it cannot be proved demonstratively on my principles. Although what I have said on the systems of matter (bk. 4, ch. 10, § 16), in demonstrating that God is immaterial, renders it extremely probable that the substance which thinks in us is immaterial —
However I home shown (adds the author, p. 68) that the great ends of religion and of morals are assured by the immortality of the soul, without its being necessary to suppose its immateriality.
The learned Bishop in his reply to this letter, in order to show that our author was of another opinion when he wrote his second hook of the Essay, quotes, p. 51, the passage (taken from the same book, ch. 23, § 15) where it is said, that by the simple ideas which we have deduced from the operations of our mind, we can form the complex idea of a mind. And that putting together the ideas of thought, of perception, of liberty and of power of moving our body, we have as clear a notion of immaterial substances as of material. He quotes still other passages to show that the author opposed mind to body. And he says (p. 54) that the ends of religion and of morals are the better assured by proving that the soul is immortal by its nature, that is, immaterial. He quotes again (p. 70) this passage, that all the ideas which we have of particular and distinct hinds of substances are nothing but different combinations of simple ideas; and that thus the author believed that the idea of thinking and of willing gives another substance different from that which the idea of solidity and of impulse gives, and that (§ 17) he observes that these ideas constitute the body as opposed to mind.
The Bishop of Worcester might add that from the fact that the general idea of substance is in the body and in the mind, it does not follow that their differences are modifications of one and the same thing, as our author has just said in the passage which I have adduced from his first letter. It is necessary to distinguish carefully between modifications and attributes. The faculties of having perception and of acting, extension, solidity, are attributes or perpetual and principal predicates; but thought, impetuosity, figures, movements are modifications of these attributes. Furthermore, we must distinguish between physical (or rather real) genus, and logical or ideal genus. The things which are of the same physical genus, or which are homogeneous, are of the same matter, so to speak, and may often he changed the one into the other by the change of the modification, as circles and squares. But two heterogeneous things may have a common logical genus, and then their differences are not simply accidental modifications of the same subject or of the same metaphysical or physical matter. Thus time and space are very heterogeneous things, and we should do wrong to imagine I know not what real common subject which had but the contained quantity in general and the modifications of which should make time or space appear.
Perhaps some one will mock at these distinctions of philosophers of two genera, the one merely logical, the other real; and of two matters, the one physical which is that of bodies, the other only metaphysical or general; as if some one said that two parts of space are of the same matter or that two hours are also of the same matter among themselves. Nevertheless these distinctions are not merely of terms, but of things themselves, and seem to come in here very appropriately, where their confusion has given rise to a false consequence. These two genera have a common notion, and that of the real genus is common to the two matters, so that their genealogy will be as follows:
I have not seen the second letter from the author to the Bishop, but the reply which this prelate makes to it hardly touches on the point regarding the thinking of matter. But the reply of our author to this second answer, returns to it. God (he says very nearly in these words, p. 397), adds to the essence of matter the qualities and perfections which he pleases, simple movement in some pants, but in plants, vegetation, and in animals, feeling. Those who agree up to this point, cry out as soon as one more step is taken, saying that God can give to matter thought, reason, will, as if this destroyed the essence of matter. But to prove it, they allege that thought or reason is not included in the essence of matter, a point of no consequence, since movement and life are not included in it either. They assert also that we cannot conceive that matter thinks; but our conception is not the measure of the power of God. After this he cites the example of the attraction of matter, p. 99, but especially p. 408, where he speaks of the gravitation of matter toward matter attributed to Mr. Newton (in the terms which I have quoted above), confessing that we could never conceive the manner of it. This is in reality to return to the occult or, what is more, inexplicable qualities. He adds, p. 401, that nothing is more fit to favor the sceptics than to deny what we do not understand; and, p. 402, that we do not conceive even how the soul thinks. He will have it, p. 403, that the two substances, material and immaterial, capable of being conceived in their bare essence without any activity, it depends on God to give to each the power of thinking. And he wishes to take advantage of the avowal of his opponent who had granted feeling to brutes, but who would not grant them any immaterial substance. It is claimed that liberty and consciousness (p. 408), and the power of making abstractions (p. 409), can be given to matter, not as matter but as enriched by a divine power. Finally he adduces the remark (p. 434) of a traveller as important and as judicious as M. de la Loubere, that the peasants of the east know the immortality of the soul without being able to comprehend its immateriality.
On all this I will remark, before coming to the explanation of my opinion, that it is certain that matter is as little capable of mechanically producing feeling as of producing reason, as our author agrees; that in truth I acknowledge that it is not right to deny what we do not understand, but I add that we are right in denying (at least in the natural order) what is absolutely neither intelligible nor explicable. I maintain also that substances (material or immaterial) cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity; that activity belongs to the essence of substance in general; that, finally, the conception of creatures is not the measure of the power of God, but that their conceptivity or force of conceiving is the measure of the power of nature; everything which is conformed to the natural order being capable of being conceived or comprehended by some creature.
Those who would conceive my system will think that I could not conform myself in everything to one or the other of these two excellent authors, whose controversy, however, is highly instructive. But to explain myself distinctly, before all else it is necessary to consider that the modifications which may belong naturally or without miracle to a subject, must come into it from the limitations or variations of a real genus or of a constant and absolute original nature. For it is thus that philosophers distinguish the modes of an absolute being from that being itself; as it is known that size, figure and movement are manifestly limitations and variations of corporeal nature. For it is clear in what way a limited extension gives figures, and that the change which is made in it is nothing but motion. And every time that we find some quality in a subject, we must believe that if we understood the nature of this subject and of this quality, we should conceive how this quality can result therefrom. Thus, in the order of nature (miracles set aside), it is not optional with God to give to substances indifferently such or such qualities, and he will never give them any but those which shall be natural to them; that is, which can be derived from their nature as explicable modifications. Thus it may be asserted that matter will not naturally have the above mentioned attraction, and will not move of itself in a curved line, because it is not possible to conceive how this takes place there; that is, to explain it mechanically; whereas that which is natural, must be able to become distinctly conceivable if we were admitted into the secrets of things. This distinction between what is natural and explicable and what is inexplicable and miraculous, removes all the difficulties; and by rejecting it, we should maintain something worse than the occult qualities; and in this we would renounce philosophy and reason, by opening retreats for ignorance and idleness, through a dead system which admits not only that there are qualities which we do not understand, of which there are only too many, but also that there are some which the greatest mind, if God gave him all the opening possible, could not comprehend; that is, which would be either miraculous or without rhyme and reason; and also that God should make miracles ordinarily, would be without rhyme and reason, so that this useless hypothesis would destroy equally our philosophy which seeks reasons, and divine wisdom which furnishes them.
Now, as to thought, it is certain, and the author recognizes it more than once, that it could not be an intelligible modification of matter or one which could be comprehended and explained; that is to say, that the feeling or thinking being is not a mechanical thing like a clock or a mill, such that we might conceive sizes, figures and movements, the mechanical conjunction of which might produce something thinking and even feeling in a mass in which there was nothing such, which should cease also in the same way by the irregularity of this mechanism. It is hence not natural to matter to feel and to think; and this can only take place within it in two ways, one of which will be that God should join to it a substance, to which it is natural to think, and the other that God should put thought in it by miracle. In this, then, I am entirely of the opinion of the Cartesians, except that I extend it even to brutes and that I believe that they have feeling and immaterial souls (properly speaking) and are as imperishable as the atoms of Democritus or Gassendi; whereas the Cartesians, groundlessly embarrassed by the souls of brutes and not knowing what they are to do with them if they are preserved (for want of having bethought themselves of the preservation of the same animal reduced to miniature), have been forced, contrary to all appearances and to the judgment of the human race, to deny even feeling to brutes.
But if some one should say that God at least may add the faculty of thinking to the prepared mechanism, I would reply that if this were done and if God added this faculty to matter without depositing in it at the same time a substance which was the subject of inhesion of this same faculty (as I conceive it), that is to say, without adding to it an immaterial soul, it would be necessary that matter should he miraculously exalted in order to receive a power of which it is not naturally capable; as some scholastics claim that God exalts fire even to the point of giving it the force to burn immediately spirits separated from matter, a thing which would be a miracle, pure and simple. And it is enough that it cannot be maintained that matter thinks without putting thereto an imperishable soul or a miracle, and that thus the immortality of our souls follows from that which is natural, since their extinction could be effected only by a miracle, whether by exacting matter or by annihilating the soul. For we well know that the power of God could render our souls mortal, however immaterial (or immortal by nature alone) they may be, for he can annihilate them.
Now this truth of the immateriality of the soul is undoubtedly of importance. For it is infinitely more advantageous to religion and to morals, especially in the times in which we live (when many people hardly respect revelation alone and miracles), to show that souls are immortal naturally, and that it would be a miracle if they were not, than to maintain that our souls ought naturally to die, but that it is by virtue of a miraculous grace, founded in the promise of God alone, that they do not die. Also for a long time it has been known that those who have wished to destroy natural religion and reduce all to revealed religion, as if reason taught us nothing concerning it, have been regarded with suspicion, and not always without reason. But our author is not of this number; he maintains the demonstration of the existence of God, and he attributes to the immateriality of the soul a probability in the highest degree, which could pass consequently for a moral certainty, so that I imagine that, having as much sincerity as penetration, he could accommodate himself easily to the doctrine which I have just stated and which is fundamental in every rational philosophy; for otherwise I do not see how one can prevent himself from falling back into the fanatical philosophy, such as the Philosophia Mosaica of Fludd which saves all phenomena by attributing them to God immediately and by miracle, or into the barbaric philosophy, like that of certain philosophers and physicians of the past, which still bore the marks of the barbarity of their century and which is to-day with reason despised, who saved appearances by forging expressly occult qualities or faculties which they imagined to be like little demons or goblins capable of producing unceremoniously that which is demanded, just as if watches marked the hours by a certain horodeictic faculty without having need of wheels, or as if mills crushed grains by a fractive faculty without needing anything resembling mill-stones. As to the difficulty which many people have had in conceiving an immaterial substance, it will easily cease (at least in good part) when they do not demand substances separated from matter; as indeed I do not believe there ever are any naturally among creatures.
Are there Innate Principles in the Mind of Man?
IT IS NECESSARY that I tell you anew that I am no longer a Cartesian, and that nevertheless I am farther removed than ever from your Gassendi, whose knowledge and merit I elsewhere recognize. I have been impressed by a new system, of which I have read something in the philosophical journals of Paris, of Leipsic, and of Holland, and in the marvellous Dictionary of M. Bayle, article Rorarius; and since then I believe I see a new aspect of the interior of things. This system appears to unite Plato with Democritus, Aristotle with Descartes, the scholastics with the moderns, theology and ethics with reason. It seems to take the best from every side and then afterwards to go farther than any one has yet gone. I find in it an intelligible explanation of the union of the soul and body, a thing of which I had before despaired. I find the true principles of things in the Unities of Substance which this system introduces, and in their harmony preëstablished by the primitive substance. I find in it a surprising simplicity and uniformity, so that it may be said that it is everywhere and always the same thing, nearly in the degrees of perfection. I see now what Plato meant when he took matter for an imperfect and transitory entity, what Aristotle meant by his entelechy; what the promise which Democritus himself made of another life is, with Pliny; just how far the Sceptics were right in inveighing against the senses; how the animals are in reality automata according to Descartes, and how they have, nevertheless, souls and feeling according to the opinion of the human race; how it is necessary to explain rationally those who have lodged life and perception in all things, like Cardan, Campanella, and better than they, the late Countess of Connaway, a Platonist, and our friend, the late M. François Mercure van Helmont (although elsewhere bristling with unintelligible paradoxes), with his friend, the late Mr. Henry More. How the laws of nature (a large part of which were unknown before this system) have their origin in principles superior to matter, and how, nevertheless, everything takes place mechanically in matter; in which respect the spiritualistic authors whom I have just mentioned, had failed with their Archaei and even the Cartesians, in believing that immaterial substances changed if not the force, at least the direction or determination of the motions of bodies, whereas the soul and body perfectly retain their laws, each its own, according to the new system, and yet one obeys the other as far as is necessary. Finally, it is since I have meditated on this system that I have found out how the souls of brutes and their sensations are not at all prejudicial to the immortality of human souls, or, rather, how nothing is more adapted to establish our natural immortality than to conceive that all souls are imperishable (morte carent animae), without, however, there being metempsychoses to be feared, since not only souls but also animals remain and will remain living, feeling, acting; it is everywhere as here, and always and everywhere as with us, according to what I have already said to you. Unless it be that the states of animals are more or less perfect and developed, without there ever being need of souls altogether separate, while nevertheless, we always have minds as pure as possible, notwithstanding our organs, which cannot disturb by any influence, the laws of our spontaneity. I find the vacuum and atoms excluded very differently than by the sophism of the Cartesians, founded on the pretended coincidence between the idea of body and of extension. I see all things regulated and adorned beyond anything conceived of up to this time, matter everywhere organic, no sterile, neglected vacuum, nothing too uniform, everything varied but with order; and what surpasses the imagination, the whole universe in epitome, but with a different aspect in each of its parts and even in each of its unities of substance. In addition to this new analysis of things, I have better understood that of notions or ideas and of truths. I understand what is a true, clear, distinct, adequate idea, if I dare adopt this word. I understand what are primitive truths, and true axioms, the distinction between necessary truths and those of fact, between the reasoning of men and the consecutions of brutes which are a shadow of it. Finally, you will be surprised, sir, to hear all that I have to say to you, and especially to understand how knowledge of the greatness and perfection of God is thereby exalted. For I cannot conceal from you, from whom I have had nothing secret, how much I am imbued now with admiration and (if we may venture to make use of this term) with love for this sovereign source of things and of beauties, having found that those which this system reveals, surpass everything hitherto conceived. You know that I had gone a little too far formerly, and that I began to incline to the side of the Spinozists, who leave only infinite power to God, without recognizing either perfection or wisdom as respects him, and, scorning the search after final causes, derive everything from brute necessity. But these new lights have cured me of this.
§ 1. I have always favored, as I do still, the innate idea of God which M. Descartes maintained, and consequently other innate ideas which cannot come to us from the senses. Now I go still farther in conformity with the new system, and I even believe that all the thoughts and actions of our soul come from its own depths and cannot be given to it by the senses, as you shall see in the sequel. But at present I shall set aside this investigation, and accommodating myself to the received expressions, since in truth they are good and maintainable and since in a sense it may be said that the external senses are in part causes of our thoughts, I shall examine how in my opinion it must be said, even in the common system (speaking of the action of bodies on the soul, as the Copernicans speak with other men of the motion of the sun, and with reason), that there are ideas and principles which do not come to us from the senses, and which we find in us without forming them, although the senses give us occasion to become conscious of them.
I imagine that your able author has remarked that under the name of innate principles one often maintains his prejudices, and wishes to exempt himself from the trouble of discussions, and that this abuse has animated his zeal against this supposition. He has wished to combat the indolence and the superficial manner of thinking of those who, under the specious pretext of innate ideas and truths engraved naturally on the mind, to which we easily give assent, do not concern themselves with seeking and examining the sources, connections and certainty of this knowledge. In this I am altogether of his opinion, and I even see farther. I would that our analysis should not be limited, that definitions of all terms capable thereof should be given, and that all the axioms which are not primitive, should be demonstrated or the means of demonstrating them be given; without distinguishing the opinion which men have thereof, and without caring whether they give their consent thereto or not. This would be more useful than is thought. But it seems that the author has been carried too far on the other side by his zeal, otherwise highly praiseworthy. He has not sufficiently distinguished, in my opinion, the origin of necessary truths whose source is in the understanding, from that of the truths of fact, drawn from the experiences of the senses, and even from the confused perceptions which are in us. You see therefore, sir, that I do not admit what you lay down as fact, that we can acquire all our knowledge without having need of innate impressions. And the sequel will show which of us is right.
§ § 2. 3. 4. I do not base the certainty of innate principles on universal consent, for I have already told you that my opinion is that we ought to labor to be able to prove all the axioms which are not primitive. I grant also that a consent very general, but which is not universal, may come from a tradition diffused throughout the human race, as the practice of smoking tobacco has been received by almost all nations in less than a century, although some islanders have been found who, not knowing even fire, were unable to smoke. Thus some able people, even among theologians, but of the party of Arminius, have believed that the knowledge of the Divinity came from a very ancient and general tradition; and I believe indeed, that instruction has confirmed and rectified this knowledge. It appears, however, that nature has aided in reaching it without instruction; the marvels of the universe have made us think of a superior power. A child born deaf and dumb has been seen to show veneration for the full moon, and nations have been found who seemed not to have learned anything else of other people, fearing invisible powers. I grant that this is not yet the idea of God, such as we have it and as we demand; but this idea itself does not, cease to be in the depths of our souls, without being placed there, as we shall see, and the eternal laws of God are in part engraved thereon in a way still more legible, and by a sort of instinct. But, they are practical principles of which we shall also have occasion to speak. It must be admitted, however, that the inclination which we have to recognize the idea of God, lies in human nature. And even if the first instruction therein should be attributed to Revelation, the readiness which men have always shown to receive this doctrine comes from the nature of their souls. I conclude that a sufficiently general consent among men is an indication and not a demonstration of an innate principle; but that the exact and decisive proof of these principles consists in showing that their certainty comes only from what is in us. To reply again to what you say against the general approbation given to the two great speculative principles, which are nevertheless the best established, I may say to you that even if they were not known, they would none the less be innate, because they are recognized as soon as heard; but I will add further, that at bottom everyone knows them and makes use at, every moment of the principle of contradiction (for example) without examining it distinctly, and there is no barbarian, who, in a matter which he considers serious, would not be shocked at the conduct of a liar who contradicts himself. Thus these maxims are employed without being expressly considered. And it is very much so that we have virtually in the mind the propositions suppressed in enthymemes, which are set aside not only externally, but also in our thought.
§ 5. Not on the mind naturally imprinted, because not known to children, idiots, dec.] If you are so prejudiced as to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul which it does not perceive, am not surprised that you reject innate knowledge. But I am astonished that it has not occurred to you that we have an infinity of knowledge of which we are not always conscious, not even when we have need of it. It is for memory to retain it and for reminiscence to represent it to us, as it often does, but not always when needed. This is very well called remembrance (subvenire), for reminiscence requires some help. And it must he that in this multiplicity of our knowledge we are determined by something to renew one rather than another, since it is impossible to think distinctly and at once of all that we know. In a sense it must be said that all arithmetic and all geometry are innate and are in us virtually, so that they may be found there if we consider attentively and arrange what is already in the mind, without making use of any truth learned by experience or by the tradition of others, as Plato has shown in a dialogue, where he introduces Socrates leading a child to abstract truths by mere questions, without telling him anything. We may therefore invent these sciences in our libraries and even with closed eyes, without learning by sight or even by touch, the truths which we need; although it is true that we would not consider the ideas in question if we had never seen or touched anything.
Since an acquired knowledge may be concealed in the soul by the memory, as you admit, why could not nature have also hidden there some original knowledge? Must everything which is natural to a substance which knows itself, be known there actually in the beginning? Can not and must not this substance (such as our soul), have many properties and modifications, all of which it is impossible to consider at first and altogether? It was the opinion of the Platonists that all our knowledge was reminiscence and that thus the truths which the soul has brought along at the birth of the man and which are called innate, must be the remains of an express anterior knowledge. But this opinion has no foundation. And it is easy to judge that the soul must already have innate knowledge in the preceding state (if pre-existence were a fact), however distant it might be, just as here; it therefore would have to come also from another preceding state, or it would be finally innate or at least concreate, or it would be necessary to resort to the infinite and make souls eternal, in which case this knowledge would be innate in truth, from the fact that it would never have a beginning in the soul; and if someone claimed that each anterior state has had something from another more anterior which it has not left to the succeeding, the reply will be made, that it is manifest that certain evident truths must have been in all these states. And in whatever way it may be taken, it is always clear in all the states of the soul that necessary truths are innate and are proved by what is internal, it not being possible to establish them by experiences as we establish truths of fact. Why should it be necessary also that we could possess nothing in the soul of which we had never made use? And is to have a thing without making use of it the same thing as to have merely the faculty of acquiring it? If it were so, we should never possess anything except the things which we enjoy; whereas we know that in addition to the faculty and the object, there must often be some disposition in the faculty or in the object or in both, in order that the faculty be exercised upon the object.
If the mind had only the simple capacity of receiving knowledge or passive power for that, as indeterminate as that which the wax has for receiving figures, and a blank tablet for receiving letters, it would not be the source of necessary truths, as I have just shown it to be; for it is incontestable that the senses do not suffice to show their necessity, and that thus the mind has a disposition (as much active as passive) to draw them itself from its depths; although the senses are necessary in order to give it the occasion and attention for this, and to carry it to some rather than to others. You see, therefore, sir, that these people, otherwise very able, who are of a different opinion, seem not to have sufficiently meditated on the consequences of the difference which there is between necessary or eternal truths and the truths of experience, as I have already remarked, and as all our discussion shows. The original proof of the necessary truths comes from the understanding alone, and the other truths come from experiences or from the observations of the senses. Our mind is capable of knowing both, but it is the source of the former; and whatever number of particular experiences we may have of a universal truth, we could not be assured of it forever by induction, without knowing its necessity through the reason.
§ 11. It is the particular relation of the human mind to these truths which renders the exercise of the faculty easy and natural as respects them, and which causes them to be called innate. It is therefore, not a naked faculty which consists in the mere possibility of understanding them; it is a disposition, an aptitude, a preformation, which determines our soul and which brings it about that they may be derived from it. Just as there is a difference between the figures which are given to the stone or marble indifferently, and those which its veins already mark out or are disposed to mark out if the workman profits by them.
The intellectual ideas, which are the source of necessary truths, do not come from the senses; and you recognize that there are ideas which are due to the reflection of the mind when it reflects upon itself. For the rest, it is true that the express knowledge of truths is posterior (tempore vel natura) to the express knowledge of ideas; as the nature of truths depends on the nature of ideas, before we expressly form one or the other, and the truths into which the ideas which come from the senses enter, depend on the senses, at least in part. But the ideas which come from the senses are confused, and the truths which depend upon them are confused also, at least in part; whereas the intellectual ideas and the truths which depend on them, are distinct, and neither the one class nor the other has its origin in the senses, although it may be true that we would never think of them without the senses.
§ 18. [If such am, assent be a mark of innate, then, that one and two are equal to three, that sweetness is not bitterness, and a thousand the like, must be innate.] I do not see how this: what is the same thing is not different, can be the origin of the principle of contradiction, and easier; for it seems to me that you give yourself more liberty by advancing that A is not B, than by saying that A is not non-A. And the reason which prevents A from being B, is that B includes non-A. For the rest, the proposition: the sweet is not the bitter, is not innate, according to the meaning which we have given to the term innate truth. For the feelings of sweet and of bitter come from the external senses. Thus it is a mixed conclusion (hybrida conclusio), where the axiom is applied to a sensible truth. But as for this proposition: the square is not a circle, it may be said to be innate, for in considering it, you make a subsumption or application of the principle of contradiction to what the understanding itself furnishes as soon as you are conscious of innate thoughts.
§ 19. [Such less general propositions known before these universal maxims.] We build on these general maxims, as we build on majors which are suppressed when we reason by enthymemes; for although very often we do not think distinctly of what we do in reasoning, any more than of what we do in walking and jumping, it is always true that the force of the conclusion consists partly in what is suppressed and could not come from elsewhere, as will be found if you should wish to prove it.
§ 20. [One and one equal to two, &c. not general nor useful, answered.] It is true that we begin sooner to perceive particular truths, when we begin by more composite and gross ideas; but this does not prevent the order of nature from beginning with the most simple, and the reason of more particular truths from depending on the more general, of which they are only examples. And when we wish to consider what is in us virtually, and before all apperception, we are right in beginning with the most simple. For the general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary to it as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not think of it. The mind leans upon these principles at all times, but it does not so easily come to distinguish them and to represent them to itself distinctly and separately, because that requires great attention to what it does, and most people, little accustomed to meditate, have hardly any. Have not the Chinese, like ourselves, articulate sounds? and yet being attached to another way of writing, they have not yet thought of making an alphabet of these sounds. It is thus that one possesses many things without knowing it.
§ 21. [These maxims not being known sometimes till proposed, proves them not innate.] The nature of things and the nature of the mind agree. And since you oppose the consideration of the thing to the apperception of that which is engraved on the mind, this objection itself shows, sir, that those whose side you take, understand by innate truths only those which would be approved naturally as by instinct, and even without knowing it, unless confusedly. There are some of this nature, and we shall have occasion to speak of them. But that which is called natural light supposes a distinct knowledge, and very often the consideration of the nature of things is nothing else than the knowledge of the nature of our mind and of these innate ideas which we do not need to seek outside. Thus I call innate, those truths which need only this consideration in order to be verified. I have already replied § 5, to the objection § 22, which claimed that when it is said that innate ideas are implicitly in the mind, this must mean simply, that it has the faculty of knowing them; for I have shown that in addition to this, it has the faculty of finding them in itself, and the disposition to approve them when it thinks of them as it should.
§ 23. [The argument of assenting on first hearing, is upon a false supposition of no precedent teaching. ] I would name as propositions whose ideas are innate, the propositions of arithmetic and geometry, which are all of this nature, and as regards necessary truths, no others could be found.
§ 25. [These maxims not the first known.] The apperception of that which is in us, depends upon attention and order. Now, it is not only possible, but it is also proper, that children pay more attention to the ideas of the senses, because the attention is regulated by the need. The result, however, shows in the sequel, that nature has not uselessly given herself the trouble of impressing upon us innate knowledge, since without it there would be no means of arriving at actual knowledge of the truths necessary in the demonstrative sciences, and at the reasons of facts; and we should possess nothing above the brutes.
§ 26. [And so not innate.] Not at all, for thoughts are actions; and knowledge or truths, in so far as they are in us, even when we do not think of them, are habits or dispositions; and we know very many things of which we hardly think.
[It is very difficult to conceive that a truth be in the mind, if the mind has never thought of this truth.]
It is as if someone said that it is difficult to conceive that there are veins in marble before they are discovered. This objection also seems to approach a little too much the petitio principii. All those who admit innate truths without basing them upon the Platonic reminiscence, admit those of which they have not yet thought. Moreover, this reasoning proves too much; for if truths are thoughts, we should be deprived not only of the truths of which we have never thought, but also of those of which we have thought and of which we no longer actually think; and if truths are not thoughts but habits, and aptitudes, natural or acquired, nothing prevents there being some in us of which we have never thought, nor will ever think.
§ 27. [Not innate, because they appear least where what is innate shows itself clearest.] I believe that we must reason here very differently. Innate maxims, appear only through the attention which is given them; but these persons [children, idiots, savages], have very little of it, or have it for entirely different things. They think of hardly anything except the needs of the body; and it is reasonable that pure and detached thoughts should be the prize of nobler pains. It is true that children and savages have the mind less altered by customs, but they also have it exalted by the teaching which gives attention. It would not be very just that the brightest lights should burn better in minds which deserve them less, and which are enveloped in thicker clouds. I would not like one to give too much honor to ignorance and barbarity, when one is as learned and as clever as you are; that would be to depreciate the gifts of God. Some one will say, that the more ignorant one is, the nearer he will approach to the advantage of a block of marble or of a piece of wood, which are infallible and sinless. But unfortunately, it is not in this way that one approaches thereto; and as far as we are capable of knowledge, we sin in neglecting to acquire it, and we shall fail so much the more easily as we are less instructed.
Of Ideas in general, and whether the soul always thinks.
§ 1. [IDEA is the object of thinking.] I admit it, provided that you add that it is an immediate internal object, and that this object is an expression of the nature or of the qualities of things. If the idea were the form of thought, it would come into existence, and would cease with the actual thoughts which correspond to it; but in being its object it might be anterior and posterior to thoughts. The external sensible objects are but mediate, because they cannot act immediately upon the soul. God alone is the immediate external object. It might be said that the soul itself is its own immediate internal object; but it is so in so far as it contains ideas or what corresponds to things; for the soul is a microcosm in which distinct ideas are a representation of God, and in which confused ideas are a representation of the universe.
§ 2. [All ideas come from sensation or reflection.] The tabula rasa, of which so much is said, is, in my opinion, a fiction which nature does not admit of, and which has its foundation in the incomplete notions of philosophers, like the vacuum, atoms, and rest, absolute or relative, of two parts of a whole, or like the materia prima which is conceived as without form. Uniform things and those which contain no variety, are never anything but abstractions, like time, space, and the other entities of pure mathematics. There is no body, the parts of which are at rest, and there is no substance which has nothing by which to distinguish it from every other. Human souls differ not only from other souls, but also among themselves, although the difference is not of the nature which is called specific. And according to the demonstrations, which I think I have, everything substantial, whether soul or body, has its relation, which is peculiar to itself, to each of the others, and the one must always differ from the other by intrinsic characteristics; not to mention that those who speak so much of this tabula rasa, after having taken away from it ideas are not able to say what is left to it, like the scholastic philosophers who leave nothing to their materia prima. It may, perhaps, be answered that this tabula rasa of the philosophers means that the soul has naturally and originally only bare faculties. But faculties without some act, in a word, the pure powers of the school, are also but fictions unknown to nature, and which are obtained only by abstraction. For where in the world will there ever be found a faculty which confines itself to the mere power, without exercising any act? There is always a particular disposition to action, and to one action rather than to another. And besides the disposition, there is a tendency to action, of which tendencies there is always an infinity at once in each subject; and these tendencies are never without some effect. Experience is, I admit, necessary in order that the soul be determined to such or such thoughts, and in order that it take notice of the ideas which are in us; but by what means can experience and the senses give ideas? Has the soul windows? does it resemble tablets? is it like wax? It is evident that all who think of the soul thus, make it at bottom corporeal. This axiom received among the philosophers, will be opposed to me, that there is nothing in the soul which does not come from the senses. But the soul itself and its affections must be excepted. Nihil est in intellectu, quod, non fuerit in sensu, excipe: nisi ipse intellectus. blow the soul comprises being, substance, unity, identity, cause, perception, reason, and many other notions which the senses cannot give.
In order to avoid a discussion upon what has delayed us too long, I declare to you in advance, sir, that when you say that ideas come to us from one or the other of these causes [sensation or reflection], I understand it of their actual perception, for I think that I have shown that they are in us before they are perceived, so far as they have anything distinct about them.
§§ 9 and 10. [The soul begins to home ideas when it begins to perceive. The soul thinks not always.] Action is no more connected with the soul than with body; a state without thought in the soul and an absolute repose in body, appear to me equally contrary to nature and without example in the world. A substance once in action will be so always, for all the impressions remain and are merely mixed with other new ones. By striking a body we excite or rather determine an infinity of vortices, as in a liquid, for at bottom every solid has a degree of liquidity, and every liquid a degree of solidity, and there is no means of ever arresting entirely these internal vortices. Now we may believe that if body is never in repose, the soul, which corresponds to it, will never be without perception either.
It is certain that we slumber and sleep, and that God is exempt from this. But it does not follow that while sleeping we are without perception. Bather just the opposite is found to be the case, if it is well considered.
Beal powers are never simple possibilities. There is always tendency and action.
I do not say that it is self-evident that the soul always thinks. A little attention and reasoning is needed to discover it. The common people perceive it as little as the pressure of the air or the roundness of the earth.
It is decided as it is proved that there are imperceptible bodies and invisible movements, although certain persons ridicule them. There are likewise, numberless perceptions which are not sufficiently distinguished for them to be perceived or remembered, but they are made known by certain consequences.
I have not read the book which contains this objection [that it is an inference from Locke’s position, that a thing is not, because we are not sensible of it in our sleep], but it would pot have been wrong to object to you, that it does not follow because the thought is not perceived that it ceases for that reason; for otherwise it could be said for the same reason, that there is no soul during the time when it is not perceived. And in order to refute this objection it is necessary to point out in particular of the thought that it is essential to it that it be perceived.
§ 11. [It is not always conscious of it.] There [that it is not easy to conceive that a thing can think and not be conscious that it thinks] is, undoubtedly, the knot of the affair and the difficulty which has embarrassed able men. But here is the means of getting out of it. We must consider that we think of many things at once, but we attend only to the thoughts which are most important; and it could not be otherwise, for if we attend to all it would be necessary to think attentively of an infinity of things at the same time, all of which we feel and which make an impression upon our senses. I say even more: there remains something of all our past thoughts and none can ever be entirely effaced. Now when we sleep without dreaming and when we are stunned by some blow, fall, symptom or other accident, there is formed within us an infinite number of minute confused sensations, and death itself can produce no other effect upon the souls of animals who without doubt ought, sooner or later, to acquire important perceptions, for all goes in an orderly manner in nature. I acknowledge, however, that in this state of confusion, the soul would be without pleasure and without pain, for these are noticeable perceptions.
§ 12. [If a sleeping man thinks without knowing it, the sleeping and waking man are two persons.] I, in turn, will make you another supposition, which appears more natural. Is it not true that it must be admitted that after some interval or some great change, one may fall into a condition of general forgetfulness? Sleidan, it is said, before his death, forgot all that he knew; and there are numbers of other examples of this sad occurrence. Let us suppose that such a man became young again and learned all de novo. Would he be another man for all that? It is not then memory which properly makes the same man; nevertheless, the fiction of a soul which animates different bodies by turns without what happens to it in one of these bodies interesting it in the other, is one of those fictions contrary to the nature of things, which come from the incomplete notions of the philosophers, like space without body, and body without motion, and which disappear when one penetrates a little farther; for it must be known that each soul preserves all its preceding impressions and cannot divide itself equally in the way just mentioned. The future in each substance has a perfect connection with the past. It is this which constitutes, the identity of the individual. Moreover, memory is not necessary nor even always possible, on account of the multitude of present and past impressions which cooperate toward our present thoughts for I do not believe there are in man thoughts of which there is not some effect at least confused, or some remnant mixed with subsequent thoughts. Many things can be forgotten, but they could also be remembered long afterward if they were recalled as they should be.
§ 13. [Impossible to convince those that sleep without dreaming, that they think.] One is not without some feeble feeling while asleep, even when the sleep is dreamless. Waking itself shows it, and the easier it is to awaken one, the more feeling one has of what is going on without him, although this feeling is not always sufficiently strong to cause the awakening.
§ 15. [Upon this hypothesis, the thoughts of a sleeping man, ought to be the most rational.] All impressions have their effect, but all the effects are not always noticeable. When I turn to one side rather than to another, it is very often through a series of minute impressions of which I am not conscious, and which render one movement a little more uncomfortable than the other. All our unpremeditated actions are the results of a cooperation of minute perceptions, and even our customs and passions, which have such influence in our deliberations, come therefrom; for these habits grow little by little, and consequently without the minute perceptions, we should not arrive at these noticeable dispositions. I have already remarked that he who would deny these effects in morals, would imitate the poorly instructed persons who deny insensible corpuscles in physics; and yet I see that there are among those who speak of liberty those who, taking no notice of these insensible impressions, capable of inclining the balance, imagine an entire indifference in moral actions, like that of the ass of Buridan divided equally between two meadows. And of this we shall speak more fully in what follows. I acknowledge, however, that these impressions incline without necessitating.
§ 23. [When does a man begin to have ideas?] I am of the same opinion [namely, that it is when he has some sensation]; but it is by a principle a little peculiar, for I believe that we are never without thoughts and also never without sensation. I distinguish only between ideas and thoughts; for we have always all pure or distinct ideas independently of the senses; but thoughts always correspond to some sensation.
§ 25. [In the perception of simple ideas the soul is for the most part passive.] How can it be that it is merely passive with regard to the perception of all simple ideas, since, according to your own avowal, there are simple ideas the perception of which comes from reflection, and since the mind gives itself thoughts from reflection, for it is itself which reflects? Whether it can refuse them is another question, and it cannot do it undoubtedly without some reason which turns it aside from them, when there is some occasion for it.
Of solidity.
§ 1. [We receive this idea from touch.] And at bottom solidity, in so far as the notion is distinct, is conceived by the pure reason, although the senses furnish to the reason that by which to prove that it is in nature.
Of simple ideas of divers senses.
THESE IDEAS WHICH are said to come from more than one sense, as those of space, figure, motion, rest, are given us rather by the common sense, that is to say, the mind itself, for these are ideas of the pure understanding, but which have relation to that which is exterior and which the senses make us perceive; also they are capable of definitions and demonstrations.
Of ideas which come from sensation and from reflection.
§1. [PLEASURE AND pain, power, existence, etc.] It seems to me that the senses could not convince us of the existence of sensible things without the aid of the reason. Thus I believe the consideration of existence comes from reflection. Those of power and of unity come also from the same source and are of an entirely different nature from the perceptions of pleasure and of pain.
Other considerations concerning simple ideas.
§ [PRIVATIVE QUALITIES.] I had not believed that the privative nature of repose could be doubted. It suffices for it that motion in body be denied; but it does not suffice for motion that repose be denied, and something more must be added in order to determine the degree of motion, since it receives essentially more or less, while all repose is equal. It is another thing when we speak of the cause of repose, which must be positive in secondary matter or mass. I should further believe that the very idea of repose is privative, that is, that it consists only in negation. It is true that the act of denying is a positive thing.
§ 10. [Secondary qualities.] I believe that it can be said that power, when it is intelligible and can be distinctly explained, ought to be counted among primary qualities; but when it is only sensible and gives but a confused idea, it ought to be put among secondary qualities.
Of perception.
§ 1. [PERCEPTION the first simple idea of reflection.] It might, perhaps, be added that brutes have perception and that it is not necessary that they have thought, that is to say, that they have reflection or what may be its object. Also we ourselves have minute perceptions of which we are not conscious in our present state. It is true that we could very well perceive them and reflect on them if we were not turned aside by their multitude which distracts our minds, or if they were not effaced or rather obscured by the greater ones.
§ 4. I should prefer to distinguish between perception and consciousness (s’apercevoir). The perception of light or of color, for example, of which we are conscious is composed of many minute perceptions of which we are not conscious; and a noise of which we have a perception but to which we do not attend, becomes apperceptible by a little addition or augmentation. For if what precedes made no impression on the soul, this small addition would also make none and the whole would make no more.
§ 8. [“The problem of Molineux.”] I think that supposing that the blind man knows that these two figures which he sees are those of the cube and of the globe, he would be able to discern them and to say without touching them, this is the globe, this is the cube.
Perhaps Molineux and the author of the Essay are not so far from my opinion as at first appears, and that the reasons of their opinion, contained apparently in the letter of the former who has employed it with success in order to convince people of their folly, have been suppressed purposely by the latter in order to give more exercise to the mind of his readers. If you will weigh my answer you will find that I have put a condition in it which can be considered as comprised in the question; it is, that the only thing in question is that of distinguishing, and that the blind man knows that the two figured bodies which he must distinguish are there, and that thus each of the appearances which he sees is that of the cube or that of the globe. In this case, it seems to me beyond doubt that the blind man who ceases to be blind, can distinguish them by the principles of the reason joined to what touch has provided him with beforehand of sensible knowledge. For I do not speak of what he will do perhaps in fact and immediately, being stunned and confounded by the novelty and otherwise little accustomed to drawing consequences. The foundation of my opinion is that in the globe there are no points distinguishable on the side of the globe itself, all being there level and without angles, whereas in the cube there are eight points distinguished from all the others. If there were not this means of distinguishing the figures a blind man could not learn the rudiments of geometry by touch. Nevertheless, we see that those born blind are capable of learning geometry and have even always some rudiments of natural geometry, and that most often geometry is learned by the sight alone, without employing touch, as a paralytic, or other person to whom touch has been almost interdicted, might and even must do. And it must be that these two geometries, that of the blind man and that of the paralytic, meet and coincide and even return to the same ideas although there are no common images. This again shows how necessary it is to distinguish images from exact ideas which consist in definitions. It would certainly be very interesting and even instructive to examine well the ideas of one born blind to hear his descriptions of figures. For he might come to this and he might even understand the doctrine of optics in so far as it depends upon distinct and mathematical ideas, although he would not be able to reach a conception of what is clear-confused, that is to say, the image of light and of colors. — It would also be very important to examine the ideas that a deaf and dumb man might have of non-figured things. — Men are very negligent in not getting an exact knowledge of the ways of thinking of such persons.
§11[Perception puts the difference between animals and inferior beings.] I am inclined to believe that there is also among plants some perception and desire, because of the great analogy there is between plants and animals; and if there is a vegetable soul, as is the common opinion, it must have perception. However, I do not cease to ascribe to mechanism all that takes place in the body of the plants and animals, except their first formation. Thus I agree that the movement of the plant called sensitive comes from the mechanism, and I do not approve of having recourse to the soul when the detail of the phenomena of plants and animals is to be explained.
§13. Very good; and I think almost as much could be said of plants. But as to man, his perceptions are accompanied by the power of reflection which passes to the act when there is occasion. But when he is reduced to a state in which he is like one in a lethargy and almost without feeling, reflection and consciousness cease and universal truths are not thought of. Nevertheless, the innate and acquired faculties and dispositions and even the impressions which are received in this state of confusion do not cease for that reason and are not effaced although they are forgotten; they will even have their turn in order to contribute some day toward some noticeable effect; for nothing is useless in nature; all confusion ought to develop itself, animals even, having passed through a condition of stupidity, ought to return some day to more exalted perceptions; and since simple substances last forever, it will not do to judge of eternity by some years.
Of the faculty of discerning ideas.
§ 10. [BRUTES abstract not.] I am of the same opinion. They know apparently whiteness and notice it in chalk as in snow; but this is not yet abstraction, for it requires a consideration of what is common, separated from what is particular, and consequently there enters therein the knowledge of universal truths, which is not given to brutes. It is well observed also that the brutes that speak do not make use of words to express general ideas, and that men deprived of the use of speech and of words do not fail to invent other general signs.
§ 11. The brutes pass from one imagination to another by the connection which they have felt here before; for example, when the master takes a stick the dog is apprehensive of being struck. And on many occasions children, as likewise other men, have no other procedure in passages from thought to thought. This might be called consecution and reasoning in a very broad sense. But I prefer to conform to the received usage in confining these words to man and in restricting them to the knowledge of some reason of the connection of perceptions which sensations alone could not give their effect being but to cause us naturally to expect another time the same connection which has been noticed before, although the reasons are no longer the same; a fact which often deceives those who govern themselves merely by the senses.
Of complex ideas.
IN ORDER TO render the resemblance greater it would be necessary to suppose that there was in the dark room to receive the species a cloth, which was not smooth but diversified by folds representing innate knowledge; that, furthermore, this cloth or canvas being stretched had a sort of elasticity or power of acting, and even an action or reaction accommodated as much to past folds as to newly arrived impressions of the species. And this action would consist in certain vibrations or oscillations, such as are seen in a stretched cord when it is touched, of such a kind that it gives forth a sort of musical sound. For not only do we receive images or traces in the brain but we also form them anew when we consider complex ideas. Thus the cloth, which represents our brain, must be active and elastic. This comparison would explain tolerably well what takes place in the brain; but as to the soul, which is a simple substance or monad, it represents without extension these same varieties of extended masses and has perception of them.
This division of the objects of our thoughts into substances, modes and relations is satisfactory to me. I believe that the qualities are but modifications of substances, and that the understanding adds thereto the relations. This is of more consequence than is thought.
§ 5. [Simple and mixed modes.] Perhaps a dozen or score are but relations and are constituted by relation to the understanding. Units are separate and the understanding puts them together however dispersed they may be. Nevertheless, although relations are from the understanding they are not without foundation and reality. For the first Understanding is the origin of things; and even the reality of all things, except simple substances, consists only in the foundation of the perceptions of the phenomena of simple substances. It is often the same thing as regards mixed modes, that is to say, that it would be necessary to refer them back to other relations.
Of simple modes, and first of those of space.
§ 17. [WHETHER space is substance or accident, not known.] I have reason to fear that I shall be accused of vanity in wishing to determine what you, sir, acknowledge not to know. But there is room for believing that you know more on this point than you say or believe you do. Some have believed that God is the place of things. Lessius and Guerike, if I am not mistaken, were of this opinion; but then place contains something more than we attribute to space which we strip of all action; and in this way it is no more a substance than time, and if it has parts it could not be God. It is a relation, an order, not only among existing things but also among possible things as if they existed. But its truth and reality is founded in God, like all the eternal truths.
It is best then to say that space is an order, but that God is its source.
§ 19. [Substance and accident of little use in philosophy.] I acknowledge that I am of another opinion, and that I believe that the consideration of substance is a point of philosophy of the greatest importance and of the greatest fruitfulness.
Of duration and its simple modes.
§ 16. [IT is not motion but the constant train of ideas in our minds while awake that furnishes us with the idea of duration.] A train of perceptions awakens in us the idea of duration but it does not make it. Our perceptions never have a train sufficiently constant and regular to correspond to that of time, which is a uniform and simple continuum, like a straight line. The change of perceptions gives us occasion to think of time, and it is measured by uniform changes; but if there should be nothing uniform in nature, time would not cease to be determined, just as place would not cease to be determined also if there should be no fixed or immovable body.
§ 24. The void which can be conceived in time indicates, like that in space, that time and space apply as well to possible as to existing things.
§ 26. Time and space are of the nature of eternal truths which concern equally the possible and the existing.
§ 27. Eternity.] But in order to derive the notion of eternity it is necessary to conceive more, viz. that the same reason subsists always for going farther. It is this consideration of the reasons which completes the notion of the infinite or of the indefinite in progresses. Thus the senses alone could not suffice to make us form these notions. And at bottom it may be said that the idea of the Absolute is anterior in the nature of things to that of the limits which are added. But we do not notice the first save in beginning with what is limited and which strikes our senses.
Of infinity.
§ 1. [INFINITY, in its original intention, attributed to space, duration and number.] The true infinite, strictly speaking, is only in the Absolute, which is anterior to all composition and is not formed by the addition of parts.
§ 3. [Hence we come by the idea of infinity.] Take a straight line and prolong it in such a way that it is double the first. Now it is clear that the second, being perfectly similar to the first, can be doubled in the same way in order to give a third which is also similar to the preceding; and the same reason subsisting always it will never be possible to stop; thus the line can be prolonged ad infinitum; in such a way that the consideration of the infinite comes from that of the similarity or of the same reason, and its origin is the same as that of universal and necessary truths. This shows how what gives completion to the conception of this idea is found in us and could not come from the experiences of the senses; just as necessary truths could not be proved by induction nor by the senses. The idea of the Absolute is in us internally, like that of being. These absolutes are nothing but the attributes of God and it can be said that they are no less the source of the ideas than God is himself the principle of beings. The idea of the absolute in relation to space is no other than that of the immensity of God, and so of the others. But we deceive ourselves in imagining an absolute space, which would be an infinite whole, composed of parts. There is no such thing. It is a notion which involves a contradiction, and these infinite wholes and their opposites, the infinitely minutes, are only admissible in the calculations of geometers just like the imaginary roots of algebra.
§ 16. [We home no positive idea, of infinity nor of infinite duration] I believe that we have a positive idea of both, and this idea will be true provided it is not conceived as an infinite whole but as an absolute or attribute without limits, which is the case as regards the eternity in the necessity of the existence of God, without depending on parts and without forming the notion by an addition of times. From this is also seen, as I have already said, that the origin of the notion of the infinite comes from the same source as that of necessary truths.
Of the modes of thinking.
§ 1. [SENSATION, remembrance, contemplation, &c.] It is well to clear up these notions and I shall try to aid in it. I will say then that it is sensation when we perceive an external object; that remembrance is its repetition without the object returning; but when we know that we have had it, it is memory. Contemplation is commonly employed in a sense different from yours, namely, for a condition where we free ourselves from business in order to apply ourselves to some meditation. But since there is no word that I know of which fits your notion, sir, the one you employ may be applied to it. We give attention to the objects which we distinguish and prefer to others. When attention continues in the mind, whether the external object continues or not, and even whether it is present or not, this is consideration; which when it concerns knowledge without reference to action will be contemplation. Attention, the aim of which is to learn (that is to say, to acquire knowledge in order to preserve it), is study. To consider in order to form some plan is to meditate; but revery appears to be nothing but the pursuing of certain thoughts through the pleasure taken in them without having other end; this is why revery may lead to insanity: one forgets self, forgets the dic cur hic, approaches dreams and chimeras, builds castles in Spain. We cannot distinguish dreams from sensations except because they are not connected with them; they are, as it were, a world apart. Sleep is a cessation of sensations, and so trance is a very profound sleep from which one can be aroused with difficulty, which comes from a transient internal cause which distinguishes it from the profound sleep which comes from a narcotic or from some lasting injury to the functions, as in lethargy. Trances are sometimes accompanied by visions; but there are some without trance; and vision, it seems, is nothing but a dream which passes for a sensation, as if it taught us the truth of the objects. And when these visions are divine there is in fact truth; which may be known, for example, when they contain particularized prophecies which the event justifies.
§ 4. [Hence it is probable that thinking is the action, not the essence of the soul.] Undoubtedly thought is an action and could not be the essence; but it is an essential action, and all substances have such. I have shown above, that we have always an infinity of minute perceptions without our being conscious of them. We are never without perceptions but it is necessary that we be often without apperceptions, namely, when there are no distinct perceptions. It is for want of having considered this important point that a philosophy loose and as little noble as solid has prevailed among so many men of good minds, and because we have hitherto almost ignored what there is most beautiful in souls. This has also caused men to find so much plausibility in the error which teaches that souls are of a perishable nature.
Of modes of pleasure and pain.
§ 1. [PLEASURE and pain, simple ideas.] I believe that there are no perceptions which are entirely indifferent to us, but it is enough that their effect be not noticeable in order that they may be called so, for pleasure and pain appear to consist in an aid or in a noticeable impediment. I assert that this definition is not nominal and that one cannot be given.
§ 2. [Good and evil, what.] I am also of this opinion. The good is divided into the praiseworthy, agreeable, and useful; but at bottom I believe that it must be either itself agreeable or contributing to something else which can give us an agreeable feeling; that is to say, the good is agreeable or useful and the praiseworthy itself consists in a pleasure of the mind.
§§ 4, 5. [Love. Hatred.] I gave very nearly this same definition of love when I explained the principles of justice in the preface to my Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus, namely, that to love is to be led to take pleasure in the perfection, well-being or happiness of the beloved object. And for this reason we do not consider nor demand any other pleasure for self than just that which is found in the well-being or pleasure of the one loved; but in this sense we do not properly love what is incapable of pleasure or of happiness, and we enjoy things of this nature without, for that reason, loving them, if this is not by a prosopopoeia, and as if we imagine that they themselves enjoy their perfection. It is not then properly love when we say that we love a beautiful picture because of the pleasure we take in thinking of its perfections. But it is permissible to extend the meaning of the terms, and usage varies here. Philosophers and theologians even distinguish two kinds of love, namely, the love which they call love of conquest, which is nothing else than the desire or feeling we have for what gives us pleasure without our interesting ourselves as to whether it receives pleasure; and the love of benevolence, which is the feeling we have for him who, by his pleasure or happiness, gives the same to us. The first causes us to have in view our pleasure and the second that of others, but as making or rather constituting ours, for if it should not react upon us in some sort we could not interest ourselves in it, since it is impossible, whatever may be said, to be indifferent to one’s own good. And this is how disinterested or nonmercenary love must be understood, in order to conceive well its nobleness and yet not to fall into the chimerical.
§ 6. [Desire]. This consideration of uneasiness is a capital point in which the author has particularly shown his penetrating and profound spirit. This is why I have given it some attention, and after having considered the matter well, it appears to me that the French word inquietude (restlessness), if it does not sufficiently express the meaning of the author, fits nevertheless, in my opinion, the nature of the thing; and the English word uneasiness, if it stands for a displeasure, fretfulness (chagrin), inconvenience, and in a word some effective pain, would be inappropriate. I should prefer to say that in desire in itself there is rather a disposition and preparation toward pain than pain itself. It is true that this perception sometimes does not differ from that which is in pain than as less does from more, but this is because the degree is the essence of pain, for it is a noticeable perception. This is also seen by the difference which there is between appetite and hunger; for when the irritation of the stomach becomes too strong it incommodes; so that it is necessary also to apply here our doctrine of perceptions too minute to be apperceptible; for if what takes place in us when we have an appetite and desire were sufficiently magnified it would cause us pain. This is why the infinitely wise author of our being has acted for our good, when he ordained that we should be often in ignorance and in confused perceptions. This is in order to act more promptly by instinct and not to be incommoded by the too distinct sensations of many objects, which do not altogether come back to us, and which nature has not been able to do without in order to obtain its ends. How many insects do we not swallow without our being conscious of it? how many persons do we see who having too fine a sense of smell are thereby incommoded? and how many disgusting objects should we see if our vision were sufficiently piercing? It is also by this skill that nature has given us the incitements of desire, like the rudiments or elements of pain or, so to speak, semi-pains, or (if you wish to speak so as to express yourself more forcibly) minute inapperceptible pains, to the end that we may enjoy the advantage of evil without being incommoded thereby. For otherwise if this perception were too distinct we would always be miserable in waiting for the good, whereas this continual victory over these semi-pains which are felt in following one’s desire and satisfying in some sort this appetite or this longing, gives us many semi-pleasures, the continuation and collection of which (as in the continuation of the impulse of a heavy body which descends and acquires force) becomes in the end an entire and real pleasure. And at bottom without these semi-pains there would be no pleasure, and there would be no means of perceiving that something, by being an obstacle which prevents us from putting ourselves at our ease, assists us and aids us. It is also in this that the affinity of pain and of pleasure is recognized, which Socrates notices in the Phaedo of Plato when the feet long to be in action. This consideration of the minute aids or small deliverances and imperceptible disengagements of the arrested tendency from which noticeable pleasure finally results, serves also to give some more distinct knowledge of the confused idea which we have and ought to have of pleasure and of pain; just as the feeling of heat or of light results from many minute movements which express those of the objects, as I have said above (ch. 9, § 13), and do not differ therefrom save in appearance and because we are not conscious of this analysis; whereas many to-day believe that our ideas of sensible qualities differ toto genere from motions and from what takes place in the objects, and are something primitive and inexplicable, and even arbitrary, as if God made the soul feel what seems good to him in place of what takes place in the body; an opinion very far removed from the true analysis of our ideas. But to return to uneasiness, that is to say, to the minute imperceptible solicitations which keep us always in breath, these are confused determinations such that we often do not know what we lack, whereas in inclinations and passions, we at least know what we need, although the confused perceptions enter also into their manner of acting, and the same passions also cause this uneasiness or longing. These impulses are like so many small springs which try to unbend and which cause our machine to act. And I have already remarked thereon, that it is through this that we are never indifferent, when we appear to be most so, for example, to turning to the right rather than to the left at the end of a path. For the side which we take comes from these insensible determinations mingled with the actions of the objects and of the interior of the body, which cause us to find ourselves more at our ease in one than in the other way of moving ourselves. The pendulum of a clock is called in German Unruhe, that is to say, uneasiness. It can be said that it is the same in our body which can never be perfectly at its ease because if it should be so, a new impression of the objects, a slight change in the organs, in the vessels, and in the viscera would change at once the balance and would cause them to make some slight effort in order to regain the best state which they can be in; which produces a continual strife, which causes, so to speak, the uneasiness of our clock; so that this term is satisfactory to me.
§7. [Joy]. There are no words in the languages sufficiently appropriate to distinguish kindred notions. Perhaps the Latin gaudium approaches nearer this definition of joy than laetitia, which is also translated by the word joy; but then it seems to me to signify a state in which pleasure predominates in us, for during the profoundest sorrow and amidst the most piercing griefs one can take some pleasure, as in drinking or in listening to music, but the pain predominates; and likewise amid the sharpest pains, the mind can be in joy, as happened to the martyrs.
§ 8. [Sorrow.] Not only the actual presence but also the fear of an evil to come can make sad, so that I believe the definitions of joy and of sorrow, which I have just given, come nearest to usage. As to uneasiness, there is in pain, and consequently in sorrow, something more; and uneasiness is even in joy, for it makes men wide awake, active, full of hope for going farther. Joy has been able to cause death by excess of emotion, and then there was in it even more than uneasiness.
§§ 9, 10. [Hope and Fear.] If uneasiness signifies a pain, I acknowledge that it always accompanies fear; but taking it for this insensible incitement which urges us on, it can also be applied to hope. The Stoics took the passions for opinions; thus their hope was the opinion of a future good, and fear, the opinion of a future evil. But I prefer to say that the passions are neither contentments or pains, nor opinions, but tendencies or rather modifications of the tendency, which come from opinion or from feeling, and which are accompanied by pleasure or displeasure.
§ 11. [Despair.] Despair taken for the passion will be a sort of strong tendency which finds itself wholly arrested, causing a violent struggle and much pain. But when the despair is accompanied by repose and indolence, it will be an opinion rather than a passion.
§ 12. Anger.] Anger seems to be something more simple and more general since brutes, to whom no injury has been done, are susceptible of it. There is in anger a violent effort which strives to free itself from evil. The desire of vengeance can remain when one is cool and when one experiences hatred rather than anger.
§ 13. [Envy.] According to this [Locke’s] notion, envy would be always a praiseworthy passion and always founded upon justice, at least in my opinion. But I do not know but that envy is often entertained toward recognized merit which one would not hesitate to misuse if one were master. Envy is even entertained of people who have a good which one would not care to have one’s self. One would be content to see them deprived of it without thinking to profit by their spoils, and even without being able to hope it. For some goods are like pictures painted in fresco which can be destroyed, but which cannot be taken away.
§ 11. [Shame.] If men took more pains to observe the exterior movements which accompany the passions, it would be difficult to conceal them. As to shame, it is worthy of consideration that modest persons, when they are simply witnesses of an improper action, sometimes feel movements resembling those of shame.
Of power and of liberty.
§1. [THE IDEA of power, how got.] If power corresponds to the Latin potentia it is opposed to act, and the passage from power to act is change. This is what Aristotle understands by the word motion when he says that it is the act or perhaps the actuation of what is in power. We can say then that power in general is the possibility of change. Now change or the act of this possibility, being action in one subject and passion in another, there will be also two powers, one passive the other active. The active could be called faculty and perhaps the passive could be called capacity or receptivity. It is true that active power is sometimes taken in a more perfect sense when in addition to the simple faculty there is a tendency; and it is thus that I employ it in my dynamical considerations. The word force might be appropriated to it in particular; and force would be either entelechy or effort; for entelechy (although Aristotle employs it so generally that it comprises also all action and all effort) appears to me more appropriate to primitive acting forces, and that of effort to derivative forces. There is even also a species of passive power more particular and more endowed with reality; it is this which is in matter when there is’ not only mobility, which is the capacity or receptivity for motion, but also resistance, which embraces impenetrability and inertia. Entelechies, that is to say, primitive or substantial tendencies, when they are accompanied by perception, are souls.
§ 4. [The clearest idea of active power had from spirit.] I am thoroughly in accord with you, that the clearest idea of active power comes to us from spirit. It is also only in things which have an analogy with spirit, that is to say, in entelechies, for matter properly only indicates passive power.
§ 8. [Liberty.] The term liberty is very ambiguous. There is liberty of right and of fact. According to that of right a slave is not free, a subject is not entirely free, but a poor man is as free as a rich man. Liberty of foot consists either in the power to will as one ought, or in the power to do what one wills. It is of the liberty of doing of which you speak, and it has its degrees and varieties. Generally he who has most means is most free to do what he wishes: but, in particular, liberty is understood of the use of things which are wont to be in our power and especially of the free use of our body. Thus the prison or sicknesses which prevent us from giving to our body and to our limbs the motion which we wish and which we are ordinarily able to give, lessens our liberty. It is thus that a prisoner is not free, and that a paralytic has not the free use of his limbs. Liberty to will is also taken in two different senses. One is when it is opposed to the imperfection or to the slavery of the spirit, which is a coaction or constraint, but internal like that which comes from the passions. The other sense appears when liberty is opposed to necessity. In the first sense the Stoics said that the wise man only is free; and in fact the spirit is not free when it is occupied with a great passion, for one cannot then will as he ought to, that is to say, with the deliberation which is requisite. It is thus that God alone is perfectly free, and that created spirits are so only in so far as they are superior to the passions. And this liberty concerns properly our understanding. But the liberty of the spirit opposed to necessity concerns the naked will and in so far as it is distinguished from the understanding. This it is which is called free-will, and it consists in this, that one wishes that the strongest reasons or impressions which the understanding presents to the will do not prevent the act of the will from being contingent, and do not give an absolute or so to say metaphysical necessity. And it is in this sense that I am accustomed to say that the understanding can determine the will in accordance with the prevalence of perceptions and reasons, in such a way that even when it is certain and infallible it inclines without necessitating.
§ 13. [Necessity, what.] It seems to me that, properly speaking, although volitions are contingent, necessity ought not to be opposed to volition but to contingency, and that necessity ought no to be confounded with determination, for there is not less of connection or of determination in thoughts than in motions (to be determined being quite different from being pushed or forced with constraint). And if we do not always notice the reason which determines us, or rather by which we determine ourselves, it is because we are as little capable of being conscious of the whole extent of our spirit and of its thoughts, most often imperceptible and confused, as we are of disentangling all the mechanisms which nature makes play in the body. Thus, if by necessity is understood the certain determination of man, which a perfect knowledge of all the circumstances of what takes place within and without the man could enable a perfect mind to foresee, it is certain that thoughts being just as determined as the motions which they represent, every free act would be necessary. But the necessary must be distinguished from the contingent though determined; and not only contingent truths are not necessary, but even their connections are not always of an absolute necessity, for it must be acknowledged that there is a difference in the manner of determination between the consequences which exist in necessary matter and those which exist in contingent matter. Geometrical and metaphysical consequences necessitate, but physical and moral incline without necessitating; the physical even having something moral and voluntary in relation to God, since the laws of motion have no other necessity than that of [the principle of] the best. [Now God chooses freely although he is determined to choose the best; and as bodies themselves do not choose (God having chosen for them), usage has settled that they be called necessary agents; to which I am not opposed, provided the necessary and the determined be not confounded, and that it be not imagined that free beings act in an indetermined manner; an error which has prevailed in certain minds and which destroys the most important truths, even this fundamental axiom, that nothing occurs without reason, without which neither the existence of God nor other great truths could be well demonstrated. As to constraint, it is well to distinguish two species of it. The one physical, as when a man is taken to prison in spite of himself, or is thrown over a precipice; the other moral, as, for example, the constraint of a greater evil, and this action, although in some manner forced, is nevertheless voluntary. One can also be forced by the consideration of a greater good, as when a man is tempted by having proposed to him a too great advantage, although this is not customarily called constraint.
§ 21. [Liberty belongs to the agent, or man.] When we reason about the liberty of the will, or about the free will, we do not ask if the man can do what he wishes, but if there is enough independence in his will itself. We do not ask if he has his limbs free or elbow-room, but if he has his spirit free and in what this consists. In this respect one intelligence could be more free than another, and the supreme intelligence will enjoy perfect liberty of which the creatures are not capable.
§§ 41, 42. [All desire happiness. Happiness, what.] I do not know whether the greatest pleasure is possible. I believe rather that it can grow ad infinitum; for we do not know how far our knowledge and our organs can be extended in all the eternity which awaits us. I believe then that happiness is a lasting pleasure; which could not be so without there being a continual progress to new pleasures. Therefore, of two persons, one of whom will go incomparably quicker and through greater pleasures than the other, each’ will be happy in himself and apart by himself, although their happiness will be very unequal. Happiness is then, so to speak, a road through pleasures; and pleasure is merely a step and an advancement towards happiness, the shortest which can be made according to the present impressions, but not always the best. The right road may be missed in the desire to follow the shortest, as the stone which goes straight may encounter obstacles too soon, which prevent it from advancing quite to the center of the earth. This shows that it is the reason and the will which transport us toward happiness, but that feeling and desire merely lead us to pleasure. Now, although pleasure can not receive a nominal definition, any more than light or color, it can however receive, like them, a causal definition; and I believe that at bottom pleasure is a feeling of perfection and pain a feeling of imperfection, provided it is noticeable enough to cause us to be conscious of it.
§ 47. [The power to suspend the prosecution of any desire makes way for consideration, and in this freedom of will consists.] The execution of our desire is suspended or arrested when this desire is not strong enough to move us, and to overcome the trouble and inconvenience of satisfying it. But when the desire is strong enough in itself to move us, if nothing prevents, it can be arrested by contrary inclinations, be it that they consist in a simple leaning which is like the element or the beginning of desire, be it that they extend to desire itself. Nevertheless as these inclinations, these leanings, and these contrary desires must be found already in the soul, it does not have them in its power, and consequently it cannot resist in a free and voluntary way where the reason can take part, if it had not also another means which is that of turning the mind elsewhere. But how can we think of doing it when there is need? for this is the point, especially if we are possessed by a strong passion. There is need, therefore, that the mind be prepared beforehand, and find itself already ready to go from thought to thought in order not to stop too long in a slippery and dangerous place.
For this, it is well to accustom one’s self generally not to think except in passing of certain things, in order the better to preserve the freedom of the mind. But the best way is to accustom one’s self to proceed methodically, and to attach one’s self to a train of thoughts the connection of which reason and not chance (that is to say, insensible and casual impressions) establishes. And in order to do this, it is well to accustom one’s self to collect one’s self from time to time, and to raise one’s self above the present tumult of impressions, to go forth, so to say, from the place where one is, to say to one’s self “dic cur hic? respice finem, or where are we? or are we coming to the point?” Men would often have need of some one, established with an official title (as Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, had), to interrupt them and to recall them to their duty. But, for lack of such an officer, it is well for us ourselves to be accustomed to perform for ourselves this office. Now being once in a condition to arrest the effect of our desires and of our passions, that is to say, to suspend action, we can find the means of combating them, be it by the contrary desires or inclinations, be it by diversion, that is to say, by occupations of another nature. It is by these methods and these artifices that we become, as it were, masters of ourselves, and that we can make ourselves think and do in time what we would will to and what reason commands. Nevertheless, it is always by determined ways and never without ground or by the imaginary principle of a perfect indifference or equilibrium, in which some would make the essence of liberty to consist, as if one could determine himself groundlessly and even against all ground, and go directly counter to the prevalence of the impressions and the inclinations.
§ 51. [The necessity of pursuing true happiness the foundation of liberty.] True happiness ought always to be the object of our desires, but there is ground for doubting whether it is. For often we hardly think of it, and I have remarked here more than once that the less desire is guided by reason the more it tends to present pleasure and not to happiness, that is to say, to lasting pleasure, although it tends to make it last. Cf. §§ 36, 41.
Of our complex ideas of substances.
§ 1. [IDEAS of substances, how made.] On the contrary it is rather the concretum as odorous, as warm, as glittering, which comes into our minds, rather than the abstractions or qualities (for it is they which are in the substantial object and not the ideas) as, namely, heat, light, etc. which are much more difficult to comprehend. It may even be doubted whether these accidents are real entities, as in fact they are very often only relations. It is known also that it is the abstractions which occasion most difficulty when it is desired to examine them minutely, as those know who are acquainted with the subtilties of the scholastics, whose most intricate speculations fall at one blow if we will banish abstract entities and resolve not to speak ordinarily except by concretes, and not to admit any other terms in the demonstrations of the sciences, but those which represent substantial subjects. Thus it is nodum quœrere in scirpo, if I dare say it, and to invert things, if we take the qualities or other abstract terms for what is easiest and the concrete ones for something very difficult.
§2. [Our idea of substance in general.] In distinguishing two things in substance, attributes or predicates and the common subject of these predicates, it is not strange that nothing in particular can be conceived in this subject. It must necessarily be so, since we have already separated all the attributes in which some detail could be conceived. Therefore to demand something more in this pure subject in general than what is necessary in order to conceive that it is the same thing (e. g. which understands and wills, which imagines and reasons), this is to demand the impossible and to run counter to one’s own supposition, made in abstracting and in conceiving separately the subject and its qualities or accidents. The same pretended difficulty could be applied to the notion of being and to all that is most clear and most primitive; for we could ask philosophers what they conceive in conceiving pure being in general; for all detail, being thereby excluded, there would be as little to say as when it is asked what pure substance in general is. I think, therefore, that the philosophers do not deserve to be ridiculed, as is done here in comparing them to the Indian philosopher, who when asked what the earth rested on, replied that it was a large elephant, and when asked what the elephant rested on, said that it was a great tortoise, and, finally, when pressed to tell what the tortoise rested on, was reduced to saying that it was something, I know not what. However, the consideration of substance, very inconsiderable as it seems to be, is not so void and sterile as is thought. Certain consequences come from it which are most important to philosophy, and which are capable of giving it a new aspect. [Cf. ch. 13, § 19.]
§ 4. [No clear idea of substance in general.] For my part, I believe that this opinion of our ignorance comes from our demanding a kind of knowledge which the object does not permit of. The true mark of a clear and distinct notion of an object is the means we have of knowing many truths of it by à priori proofs, as I have pointed out in an essay on truths and ideas inserted in the Acta of Leipsic of the year 1684. [Cf. ART. III.]
§ 15. [Ideas of spiritual substances, as clear as of bodily sub stances.] It is well said, and it is very true, that the existence of the mind is more certain than that of sensible objects.
Of relation.
§ 1. [RELATION, what.] Relations and orders are like entities of reason, although they have their foundation in things; for it may be said that their reality, like that of eternal truths and possibilities, comes from the supreme reason.
Of identity and diversity.
§ 1. [WHEREIN identity consists.] There must always be, in addition to the difference of time and of place, an internal principle of distinction; and although there are many things of the same species, it is nevertheless true there are never any perfectly similar: thus although time and place (that is, the relation to the external) serve us in distinguishing things which we do not well distinguish through themselves, things are none the less distinguishable in themselves. The characteristic of identity and of diversity does not consist, therefore, in time and in place.
§ 3. [Principium individuation is.] The principle of individuation corresponds in individuals to the principle of distinction of which I have just spoken. If two individuals were perfectly similar and equal, and (in a word) indistinguishable in themselves, there would be no principle of individuation; and I even venture to say that there would be no individual distinction, or different individuals, on this condition.
§ 9. [Personal identity.] I am also of the opinion that consciousness, or the feeling of the ego, proves a moral or personal identity. And it is in this that I distinguish the unceasingness of the soul of a brute from the immortality of the soul of man: both retain physical and real identity; but as for man, it is conformed to the rules of divine providence that the soul preserve in addition moral identity which belongs to us in order to constitute the same person, capable consequently of feeling punishments and recompenses. It appears that you, sir, hold that this apparent identity might be preserved, even if there should be no real identity. I should believe that this might perhaps be possible by the absolute power of God; but according to the order of things the identity apparent to the person himself, who feels himself the same, supposes the real identity at each following stage, accompanied by reflection or by the feeling of the ego, an intimate and immediate perception not being able to deceive naturally. If man could be only a machine and have in addition consciousness, it would be necessary to be of your opinion, sir; but I hold that this case is not possible, at least naturally. I do not mean to say either that personal identity and even the ego do not remain in us, and that I am not that ego which was in the cradle, under the pretext that I no longer remember anything winch I then did. It is sufficient in order to find moral identity by itself that there be a common bond of consciousness from a neighboring state, or even one a little removed, to another, even if some leap or forgotten interval should be mingled with it. Thus, if an illness had caused an interruption of the continuity of the connection of consciousness so that I should not know how I had come into the present state, although I might remember more distant things, the testimony of others might fill the gap of my remembrance. I might even be punished on this testimony if I had done some evil of deliberate forethought in an interval which I had forgotten a little while afterwards through this illness. And if I came to forget all past things, so that I should be obliged to let myself be taught anew, even to my name and to reading and writing, I could always learn from others my past life in my preceding state, as I have preserved my rights without its being necessary to divide myself into two persons, and to make myself my own heir. All this suffices for maintaining the moral identity which makes the same person. It is true that if others conspired to deceive me (as I might even be deceived by myself, by some vision, dream or illness, believing that what I dreamed had happened to me), the appearance would be false; but there are cases in which we may be morally certain of the truth upon the report of others; and in relation to God whose bond of union with us makes the principal point of morality, error cannot enter. As regards the ego, it will be well to distinguish it from the appearance of the ego and from consciousness. The ego forms the real and physical identity, and the appearance of the ego, accompanied by truth, joins to it personal identity. Thus not wishing to say that personal identity does not extend farther than memory, I would say still less that the ego or physical identity depends on it. The real and personal identity is proved as certainly as is possible in matter of fact, by present and immediate reflection; it is proved sufficiently for common use by our remembrance of the interval, or by the corroborating testimony of others. ‘But if God changed extraordinarily real identity, personal identity would remain, provided that man should preserve the appearances of identity, as well the internal (that is of consciousness) as the external, like those appearances which consist in what is evident to others. Thus consciousness is not the only means of establishing personal identity, and the report of others or even other marks may take its place. But there is difficulty if contradiction is found between these different evidences. Consciousness may be silent as in forgetfulness; but if it said very distinctly things which were contrary to the other evidences, we should be embarrassed in the decision and sometimes as if suspended between two possibilities: that of the error of our memory and that of some deception in the external evidences.
§ 14. An immaterial being or a spirit cannot be despoiled of all perception of its past existence. There remain to it impressions of everything which has formerly happened to it and it has even presentiments of everything which will happen to it; but these feelings are most often too slight to be distinguishable and for us to be conscious of them, although they may be developed some day. This continuation and connection of perceptions forms the same individual really; but apperceptions (that is, when we are conscious of past feelings) prove, farther, a moral identity and make the real identity appear — The late M. Van Helmont, the younger, believed, with certain rabbis, in the passing of the soul of Adam into the Messiah as into the new Adam. And I do not know whether he did not believe that he himself had been one of the ancients, very able man as he was otherwise. Now, if this passing of souls was true, at least in the possible way which I have explained above (but which does not appear probable), that is, that souls, retaining subtile bodies should pass suddenly into other gross bodies, the same individual would subsist always, in Nestor, in Socrates, and in some modern, and he might even make known his identity to that one who should sufficiently penetrate into his nature, by reason of the impressions or characters which would there remain of all that Nestor or Socrates has done, and which some sufficiently penetrating genius might read there. However, if the modern man had no internal or external means of knowing what he has been, it would be, so far as ethics is concerned, as if he had not been at all. But the probability is that nothing is neglected in the world, even in relation to morals, because God is its monarch, and his government is perfect. — Thus if souls passed into a new body gross or sensitive, they would always retain the expression of all of which they have had perception in the old, and it would even be necessary that the new body should feel it all so that the individual continuation will always leave its real marks.
§18. [Object of reward and punishment.] I confess that if God caused consciousnesses to be transferred to other souls, it would be necessary to treat them, according to ethical ideas, as if they were the same; but this would be to disturb the order of things groundlessly, and to make a divorce between the apperceptible and truth, which is preserved by insensible perceptions. This would not be rational because perceptions, at present insensible, may be developed some day, for there is nothing useless, and eternity presents a large field for changes.
§ 29. [Continued existence makes identity.] I have pointed out to you the source of true physical identity; I have shown you that morals do not contradict it, any more than memory; that they could not always mark out physical identity to the person himself in question, nor to those who are in communication with him; but that nevertheless they never contradict physical identity, and never are divorced from it; that there are always created spirits which know or may know what is the truth respecting it; but that there is reason for thinking that what is indifferent as regards persons themselves can he so only for a time.
Of other relations.
§ 5. [MORAL good and evil.] I should prefer, for myself, to take as the measure of moral good and of virtue the invariable rule of reason that God has charged himself to maintain. Also we may he assured that by his means every moral good becomes physical, or, as the ancients said, all that is praiseworthy is useful; whereas, in order to express the idea of the author, it would be necessary to say that moral good or evil is a good or evil of imposition or institutive, which he who has the power in his hand tries to bring about or to prevent by pains or recompenses. Good is that which by the general institution of God is conformed to nature or to reason.
Of clear and obscure, distinct and confused ideas.
§ 2. IN a short essay on ideas, true or false, clear or obscure, distinct or confused, inserted in the Acta of Leipsic in the year 1684, I have given a definition of dear ideas which is common to simples and compounds, and which accounts for what is said thereon here.
§ 13. [Complex ideas may be distinct in one part and confused in another.] This example [a chiliagon] shows that idea is here confounded with image. If someone proposes to me a regular polygon, sight and imagination could not make me understand the thousand sides which are in it; I have only a confused idea both of the figure and of its number, until I distinguish the number by counting. But having found it, I know very well the nature and the properties of the proposed polygon, in so far as they are those of a chiliagon, and consequently I have the idea of it; but I could not have the image of a chiliagon, and it would be necessary to have the senses and the imagination more delicate and better exercised in order to thereby distinguish it from a polygon which should have one side less. But knowledge of figures does not depend upon the imagination any more than that of numbers, although it is of use thereto; and a mathematician may know exactly the nature of an enneagon or of a decagon because he has the means of making and examining them, although he cannot distinguish them by sight. It is true then that a workman or an engineer, who should not perhaps know the nature of the figures sufficiently, might, have this advantage over a great geometrician, that he could distinguish them by merely seeing them without measuring them; as there are porters who will tell the weight of what they are to carry without the mistake of a pound, in which they will surpass the most skillful statistician in the world. This empirical knowledge, acquired by long practice, may have great advantage for acting promptly, as an engineer very often needs to do by reason of the danger to which he exposes himself by hesitating. However this clear image, or this feeling which we may have of a regular decagon or of a weight of ninety-nine pounds, consists only in a confused idea, since it is of no use in discovering the nature and the properties of this weight or of the regular decagon, which requires a distinct idea. And this example serves to show better the difference between ideas, or rather that between idea and image.
§ 15. [Instance in eternity] This example does not seem to me to fit your purpose any better: but it is very appropriate to mine, which is to disabuse you of your notions on this point. For there reigns here the same confusion between image and idea. We have a complete and proper idea of eternity, since we have a definition of it, although we have no image of it; but the idea of infinites is not formed by the composition of parts, and the errors which are committed in reasoning concerning the infinite do not come from the lack of image.
Of Knowledge in general.
§§ 1 AND 2. [1. Our knowledge conversant about our ideas. 2. Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.] Knowledge is employed still move generally, in such a way that it is found also in ideas or terms, before we come to propositions or truths. And it may he said that he who shall have seen attentively more pictures of plants and of animals, more figures of machines, more descriptions or representations of houses or of fortresses, who shall have read more ingenious romances, heard more curious narratives, he, I say, will have more knowledge than another, even if there should not be a word of truth in all which has been portrayed or related to him; for the practice which he has in representing to himself mentally many express and actual conceptions or ideas, renders him more tit to conceive what is proposed to him; and it is certain that he will be better instructed and more capable than another, who has neither seen nor read nor heard anything, provided that in these stories and representations he does not take for true that which is not true, and that these impressions do not hinder him otherwise from distinguishing the real from the imaginary, or the existing from the possible… But taking knowledge in a narrower meaning, that is, for knowledge of truth, as you do here, sir, I say that it is very true that truth is always founded in the agreement or disagreement of ideas, but it is not true generally that our knowledge of truth is a perception of this agreement or disagreement. For when we know truth only empirically, from having experienced it without knowing the connection of things and the reason which there is in what we have experienced, we have no perception of this agreement or disagreement, unless it be meant that we feel it confusedly without being conscious of it. But your examples, it seems, show that you always require a knowledge in which one is conscious of connection or of opposition, and this is what cannot be conceded to you.
Of the degrees of our knowledge.
§ 1. [INTUITIVE.] Primitive truths, which are known by intuition are of two kinds, like the derivative. They are either truths of reason, or truths of fact. Truths of reason are necessary and those of fact are contingent. Primitive truths of reason are those which I call by the general name of identical, because it seems that they do nothing but repeat the same thing without giving us any information. They are affirmative or negative…
As respects primitive truths of fact, they are the immediate internal experiences of an immediateness of feeling. And here it is that the first truth of the Cartesians or of St. Augustine: I think, hence I am, that is, I am a thing which thinks, holds good. But it should be known that just as the identicals are general or particular, and that the one class is as clear as the other (since it is just as clear to say that A is A, as to say that a thing is what it is), so it is also with first truths of fact. For not only is it clear to me immediately that I think; but it is just as clear to me that I have different thoughts; that sometimes I think of A, and that sometimes I think of B, etc. Thus the Cartesian principle is good, but it is not the only one of its kind. You see therefore that all primitive truths of reason pr of fact have this in common, that they cannot be proved by anything more certain.
§ 14. [Sensitive knowledge of particular existence.] But let us come to this controversy which the sceptics carry on with the dogmatists over the existence of things outside of us. We have already touched upon it, but it is necessary to return to it here. I have formerly discussed it thoroughly both verbally and in writing, with the late Abbé Foucher, Canon of Dijon, a learned and subtle man. — Now I made him admit that the truth of sensible things consisted only in the connection of phenomena, which must have its reason, and that it is this which distinguishes them from dreams; but that the truth of our existence and of the cause of phenomena is of another kind, because it establishes substances; and that the sceptics spoiled whatever they say that is good, by carrying it too far, and by wishing even to extend their doubts to immediate experiences and to geometrical truths (a thing which M. Foucher, however did not do), and to the other truths of reason, which he did a little too much. But to return to ourselves, sir; you are right in saying that there is ordinarily a difference between feelings and imaginations; but the sceptics will say that more or less does not change the kind. Besides, although feelings are wont to be more vivid than imaginations, it is a fact nevertheless that there are cases where an imaginative person is impressed by his imaginations as much or perhaps more than another is by the truth of things; so that I believe that the true criterion as regards the objects of the senses is the connection of phenomena, that is, the connection of that which takes place in different places and times, and in the experience of different men, who are themselves, each to the others, very important phenomena on this score. And the connection of phenomena, which guarantees truths of fact in respect to sensible things outside of us, is verified by means of truths of reason as the appearances of optics are explained by geometry. However it must be confessed that all this certainty is not of the highest degree, as you have well recognized. For it is not impossible, speaking metaphysically, that there may be a dream, continuous and lasting, like the life of a man; but it is a thing as contrary to reason as would be the fiction of a book which should be formed at haphazard by throwing the type together pell mell. For the rest, it is also true that, provided the phenomena he connected, it does not matter whether they are called dreams or not, since experience shows that we are not deceived in the measures taken concerning phenomena when they are understood according to the truths of reason
Of the extent of human knowledge.
§ 6. [“WHETHER any mere material being thinks or no.”] In the first place, I declare to you, sir, that when one has only confused ideas of thought and of matter, as one ordinarily has, it is not to be wondered at if one does not see the means of solving such questions. It is as I have remarked before that a person who has not ideas of the angles of a triangle except in the way in which one has them generally, will never think of finding out that they are always equal to two right angles. It must be considered that matter, taken for a complete being (that is, secondary matter opposed to primary, which is something simply passive and consequently incomplete), is only a mass, or that which results therefrom, and that every real mass supposes simple substances or real unities; and when we consider farther what belongs to the nature of these real unities, that is, perception and its consequences, we are transported, so to speak, into another world, that is to say, into the intelligible world of substances, whereas before we have been only among the phenomena of the senses. And this knowledge of the interior of matter shows sufficiently of what it is naturally capable, and that every time that God shall give organs fitted to express reasoning, the immaterial substance which reasons will not fail to be also given to it, by virtue of this harmony, which is again a natural result of substances. Matter could not subsist without immaterial substances, that is, without unities; after which it ought no longer to be asked whether God is at liberty to give them to it or not. And if these substances did not have in themselves the correspondence or harmony, of which I have just spoken, God would not act according to the natural order. To speak very simply of giving or of according powers is to return to the naked faculties of the schoolmen and to imagine minute subsisting beings, which can enter and depart like the pigeons of a pigeon-house. It is making substances of them without thinking of it. The primitive powers constitute substances themselves; and the derivative powers, or, if you like, the faculties are only modes of being which must be derived from substances, and they are not derived from matter as a machine merely, that is, in so far as we consider it abstractly only as the incomplete being of primary matter, or the simply passive. Here I think that you will agree with me, sir, that it is not in the power of a mere mechanism to cause perception, sensation, reason, to arise. They must therefore spring from some other substantial thing. To think that God acts differently and gives to things accidents which are not modes of being or modifications derived from substances, is to resort to miracles and to what the schoolmen called the obediential power, by a sort of supernatural exaltation, as when certain theologians claim that the fire of hell burns separated souls; in which case it might be even doubted if it were the fire which acted, and if God did not himself produce the effect, by acting in place of the fire —
The difficulty which remains is only in respect to those who wish to imagine what is only intelligible, as if they wanted to see sounds, or hear colors.
Of the reality of human knowledge.
§§ 1-5. [KNOWLEDGE placed in ideas may be all bare vision.Answer.] Our certainty would be slight or rather none, if it had no other foundation for simple ideas than that which comes from the senses. Have you forgotten, sir, how I showed that ideas are originally in our mind and that even our thoughts come to us from our own depths, without its being possible for other creatures to have an immediate influence upon the soul. Moreover the ground of our certainty in regard to the universal and eternal truths lies in the ideas themselves independently of the senses; as also pure and intelligible ideas do not depend upon the senses, for example, that of being, of one, of the same, etc. But the ideas of sensible qualities, as of color, of flavor, etc. (which in reality are only appearances), come to us from the senses, that is, from our confused perceptions. And the ground of the truth of contingent and particular things is in the succession, whereby the phenomena of the senses are connected just as the intelligible truths require. This is the difference which should be made between them; whereas that which you make here between simple and compound ideas, and compound ideas belonging to substances and to accidents, does not seem to me well founded, since all intelligible ideas have their archetypes in the eternal possibility of things.
Of truth in general.
§§ 1 AND 2. [1. What truth is. 2. A right joining or separating of signs; i. e. ideas or words.] But what I find least to my taste in your definition of truth, is that truth is there sought in words. Thus the same meaning, being expressed in Latin, German, English, French, will not be the same truth, and it will be necessary to say with Hobbes, that truth depends on the good pleasure of men which is speaking in a very strange way. Truth is even attributed to God, who you will admit (I think) has no need of signs. Finally, I have been already more than once surprised at the humor of your friends, who take pleasure in making essences and species, nominal truths.
We shall have therefore, farther, literal truths, which may be distinguished into truths of paper or of parchment, of the black of ordinary ink, or of printer’s ink, if truths must be distinguished by signs. It is better, therefore, to place truths in the relation between the objects of ideas, which causes one to be included or not to be included in the other. This does not depend on languages and is common to us with God and the angels; and when God manifests a truth to us we acquire that one which is in his understanding, for although there is an infinite difference between his ideas and ours as respects perfection and extension, it is always true that there is agreement in the same relation. It is therefore in this relation that truth must be placed, and we may distinguish between truths, which are independent of our good pleasure, and expressions, which we invent as seems good to us.
§11. [Moral and metaphysical truth]. Moral truth is called veracity by some, and metaphysical truth is taken commonly by metaphysicians for an attribute of being, but it is a very useless attribute and one almost void of meaning. Let us content ourselves with seeking truth in the correspondence of propositions which are in the mind with the things in question. It is true that I have also attributed truth to ideas in saying that ideas are true or false; but in that case I understand it in fact of the propositions which affirm the possibility of the object of the idea. And in this same sense it may be said farther that a being is true, that is to say, the proposition which affirms its actual or at least possible existence.
Of maxims.
§ 1. [THEY are self-evident] This investigation is very useful and even important. But you must not imagine, sir, that it has been entirely neglected. You will find in a hundred places that the scholastic philosophers have said that these propositions are evident ex terminis, as soon as their terms are understood; so that they were persuaded that the force of conviction was founded on the apprehension of the terms, that is, in the connection of the ideas. But the geometricians have done much more: for they have undertaken very often to demonstrate them — As regards maxims, they are sometimes taken for established propositions, whether they are evident or not. This might be well for beginners, whom scrupulousness arrests; but when the establishing of science is in question, it is another matter. They are also often taken thus in ethics and even by the logicians in their Topics, in which there is an abundance of them, but a part of this contains some which are sufficiently vague and obscure. For the rest, I said publicly and privately a long while ago that it would be important to demonstrate all the secondary axioms of which we ordinarily make use, by reducing them to primitive or immediate and undemonstrable axioms, which are those which I called lately and elsewhere, identical ones.
§ 7. It may always be said that this proposition, I exist, is most evident, being a proposition which cannot be proved by any other, or an immediate truth. And to say, I think therefore I am, is not properly to prove existence by thought, since to think and to be thinking are the same thing; and to say; I am thinking is the same as to say, I am. Nevertheless you may exclude this proposition from the number of axioms with some justice, for it is a proposition of fact, founded upon an immediate experience, and it is not a necessary proposition, whose necessity is seen in the immediate agreement of ideas. On the contrary, there is no one but God who sees how these two terms I and existence are connected, that is, why I exist. But if the axiom is taken more generally for an immediate or nomprovable truth, it may be said that the proposition I am is an axiom, and in any case we may be assured that it is a primitive truth or unum ex primis cognitis inter terminos complexos, that is, that it is one of the first known statements, that which is understood in the natural order of our knowledge; for it is possible that a man may never have thought of forming expressly this proposition, which is yet innate in him.
§§ 8, 9. I had further added that in the natural order to say that a thing is what it is, is prior to saying that it is not another; for here it is not a question of the history of our discoveries, which is different in different men, but of the connection and natural order of truths, which is always the same. But your remark, namely, that what the child sees is only a fact, deserves still more reflection; for the experiences of the senses do not give absolutely certain truths (as you yourself observed, sir, not long ago), nor such as are free from all danger of illusion. For if it is permitted to make metaphysically possible fictions, sugar might be changed imperceptibly into a rod to punish a child if it has been naughty, just as water is changed into wine with us on Christmas Eve, if it has been well rectified [morigrné], But the pain (you will say) which the rod inflicts will never be the pleasure which the sugar gives. I reply that the child will think of making an express proposition concerning it as little as of remarking the axiom that it cannot be said truly that what is, at the same time is not, although it may very well perceive the difference between pleasure and pain, as well as the difference between perceiving and not perceiving.
§ 10. Thus you must not here oppose the axiom and the example as different truths in this respect, but regard the axiom as incorporated in the example and rendering the example true. It is quite another thing when the evidence is not remarked in the example itself and when the affirmation of the example is a consequence and not merely a subsumption of the universal proposition, as may happen also in respect to axioms.
Of our knowledge of existence.
§§ 2 AND 3. [2. A threefold knowledge of existence. 3. Our knowledge of our mon existence is intuitive.] I am fully in accord with all this. And I add that the immediate apperception of our existence and of our thoughts furnishes us the first truths a posteriori or of fact, that is, the first experiences; as identical propositions contain the first truths a priori or of reason, that is, the first lights. Both are incapable of being proved and may be called immediate; the former, because there is immediation between the understanding and its object, the latter, because there is immediation between the subject and predicate.
Of our knowledge of the existence of a God.
§ 1. I do not wish to repeat what has been discussed between us concerning innate ideas and truths, among which I reckon the idea of God and the truth of his existence.
§§2-6. [2. Man knows that he himself is. 3. He knows also that nothing cannot produce a being, therefore something is eternal. 4. That eternal being must be most powerful. 5. And most knowing. 6. And therefore God.] I assure you, sir, with perfect sincerity, that I am extremely sorry to be obliged to say anything against this demonstration: but I do it in order to give you an opportunity to fill up the gap in it. It is principally in the passage where you conclude (§ 3) that something has existed from all eternity. I find ambiguity in it. If it means that there has never been a time when nothing existed, I agree to this; and it follows truly from the preceding propositions by a wholly mathematical sequence. For if there never had been anything, there would always have been nothing, nothing not being able to produce being; hence we ourselves would not be, which is contrary to the first truth of experience. But what follows shows first that in saying that something has existed from all eternity, you mean an eternal thing. Nevertheless it does not follow, in virtue of what you have advanced up to this time, that if there has always been something, it has always been a certain thing, that is, that there is an eternal being. For some opponents will say that I myself have been produced by other things and these things again by others. Farther, if some admit eternal beings (as the Epicureans their atoms) they will not believe themselves thereby obliged to grant an eternal being which should be alone the source of all others. For even if they should admit that that which gives existence gives also the other qualities and powers of a thing, they will deny that a single thing gives existence to the others and they will even say that for each thing several others must concur. Thus we will not arrive in this way alone at one source of all powers. However it is very reasonable to conclude that there is one, and even that the universe is governed with wisdom. But if one believes matter susceptible of feeling, one may be disposed to believe that it is not impossible that it may produce it. At least it will be difficult to bring forward a proof of it which should not show at the same time that matter is altogether incapable of it; and supposing that our thought comes from a thinking being, can it be taken for granted without having a bias for the demonstration, that this must be God?
§ 7. [Our idea of a most perfect being, not the sole proof of a God]. Although I hold to innate ideas and particularly to that of God, I do not believe that the demonstrations of the Cartesians drawn from the idea of God, are perfect — This [ontological argument] is not a paralogism, but it is an imperfect demonstration which supposes something which has still to be proved in order to render it mathematically evident. This is, that it is tacitly supposed that this idea of the all-great or all-perfect being is possible and implies no contradiction — The other argument of M. Descartes which undertakes to prove the existence of God because his idea is in our soul and it must have come from the original, is still less conclusive. For, in the first place, this argument has this defect in common with the preceding, that it supposes that there is in us such an idea, that is, that God is possible — And, secondly, this same argument does not sufficiently prove that the idea of God, if we have it, must come from the original. But I do not wish to delay here at present. You will say to me, sir, that recognizing in us the innate idea of God I ought not to say that we may question whether there is one. But I permit this doubt only in relation to a strict demonstration, founded upon the idea alone. For one is sufficiently assured otherwise of the idea and of the existence of God. And you will remember that I have shown how ideas are in us, not always in such a way that we are conscious of them, but always so that we may draw them from our own depths and render them perceptible. And this is also what I believe of the idea of God, whose possibility and existence I hold to be demonstrated in more than one way. And the Preestablished Harmony itself furnishes a new and incontestable means of doing so. I believe besides that almost all the means which have been employed to prove the existence of God are good, and might serve, if they were perfected; and I am not at all of the opinion that the one which is drawn from the order of things is to be neglected.
- Incogitative being cannot produce a cogitative]. I think the present reasoning the strongest in the world, and not only exact but also profound and worthy of its author. I am entirely of his opinion that there is no combination and modification of parts of matter, however small they may be, which can produce perception; all the more that the gross parts could not give it (as is clearly evident), and that everything in the small parts is proportional to what may take place in the large ones. It is another important remark upon matter, which the author here makes, that it must not be taken for a thing single in number, or (as I am accustomed to say) for a true and perfect monad or unity, since it is but a mass of an infinite number of beings. Here this excellent author needed but one more step to reach my system. For in fact I give perception to all these infinite beings, each one of which is as an animal, endowed with a soul (or with some analogous active principle, which forms its true unity) together with what is necessary to this being in order to be passive, and endowed with an organic body. How these beings have received their nature, active and passive (that is, what they possess of immaterial and material), from a general and supreme cause, because otherwise, as the author well remarks, being independent each of the others, they could never produce that order, that harmony, that beauty, which we observe in nature. But this argument, which appears to be only of moral certainty, is brought to a necessity altogether metaphysical by the new hind of harmony which I have introduced, which is the preestablished harmony. For each one of these souls expressing in its manner that which takes place outside and not being able to have any influence on other particular beings, or rather, being obliged to draw this expression from the depths of its own nature, each one must necessarily have received this nature (or this internal reason of the expressions of what is external) from a universal cause on which all these beings depend, and which causes one to be perfectly in accord and correspondent with another; a thing which is not possible without an infinite knowledge and power, and by an artifice great in respect especially to the spontaneous agreement of the mechanism with the actions of the rational soul. In regard to this, the illustrious author who made objections against it in his wonderful Dictionary, doubted whether it did not surpass all possible wisdom; saying that the wisdom of God did not appear to him too great for such an effect, and he at least recognized that never had the feeble conceptions which we are able to have of the divine perfection, been so set in relief.
Of our knowledge of the existence of other things.
§§ 1-10. [IT is to be had only by sensation, etc.] I have already remarked in our preceding conversations that the truth of sensible things is proved by their connection, which depends on the intellectual truths founded in reason, and on the constant observations in sensible things themselves, even when the reasons do not appear. And as these reasons and observations give us the means of judging of the future by relation to our interests, and as success answers to our rational judgment, we could not ask nor even have a greater certainty concerning these objects. We can account also even for dreams and for their lack of connection with other phenomena. Nevertheless I believe that the appellation of knowledge and of certainty might be extended beyond actual sensations, since clearness and manifestness extend beyond, which I consider as a kind of certainty: and it would undoubtedly be folly to seriously doubt whether there are men in the world when we do not see any. To doubt seriously is to doubt in relation to practice, and certainty might be taken for a knowledge of truth of which one cannot doubt in relation to practice without madness; and sometimes it is taken still more generally and applied to cases where we cannot doubt without deserving to be greatly blamed. But manifestness would be a luminous certainty, that is to say, where we do not doubt on account of the connection which we see between ideas. According to this definition of certainty, we are certain that Constantinople is in the world, that Constantine and Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar have lived. It is true that some peasant of Ardennes might with reason doubt of these for want of information; but a man of letters and of the world could not do so without a great derangement of mind.
§ 11. [Past existence known by memory.] It has already been remarked that our memory sometimes deceives us. And we believe it or not according as it is more or less vivid and more or less connected with the things which we know. And even when we are assured of the principal fact we may often question the circumstances.
§§ 13, 14. [13. Particular propositions concerning existence are knowable. 14. And general propositions concerning abstract ideas.] Your division appears to amount to mine, of propositions of fact and propositions of reason. Propositions of fact also may become general in a way, but it is by induction or observation; so that it is only a multitude of similar facts, as when it is observed that all quicksilver is evaporated by the force of fire; and this is not a perfect generalization because we do not see its necessity. General propositions of reason are necessary, although the reason also furnishes some which are not absolutely general and are only probable, as, for example, when we presume that an idea is possible until the contrary is discovered by a more exact research. There are, finally, mixed propositions which are drawn from premises, some of which come from facts and observations, and others are necessary propositions: and such are a number of geographical and astronomical conclusions concerning the globe of the earth and the course of the stars, which spring from the combination of the observations of travelers and astronomers with the theorems of geometry and arithmetic. But as, according to the usage of logicians, the conclusion follows the weakest of the premises and cannot have more certainty than they, these mixed propositions have only the certainty and universality which belong to the observations. As regards eternal truths, it must be observed that at bottom they are all conditional and say in effect, such a thing posited, such another thing is. For example, in saying, every figure which has three sides will also have three angles, I do nothing but suppose that if there is a figure with three sides, this same figure will have three angles…
The scholastics have disputed hotly de constantia subjecti, as they called it, that is, how the proposition made upon a subject can have a real truth if this subject does not exist. It is that the truth is only conditional and says that in case the subject ever exists, it will be found such. But it will be asked further, in what is this connection founded, since there is in it reality which does not deceive? The reply will be that it is in the connection of ideas. But in answer it will be asked, where would these ideas be if no mind existed and then what would become of the real foundation of this certainty of the eternal truths? This leads us finally to the ultimate ground of truths, namely, to that Supreme and Universal Mind, which cannot fail to exist, whose understanding, to speak truly, is the region of eternal truths, as St. Augustine has recognized and expresses in a sufficiently vivid way. And in order that it be not thought that it is unnecessary to resort to this, we must consider that these necessary truths contain the determining reason and the regulative principle of even existences, and, in a word, the laws of the universe. Thus these necessary truths, being anterior to the existences of contingent beings, it must be that they are founded in the existence of a necessary substance. Here it is that I find the original of the ideas and truths which are engraved in our souls, not in the form of propositions, but as the sources from which applications and occasions will cause actual enunciations to arise.
Of the improvement of our knowledge.
§§4-6. [DANGEROUS TO build upon precarious principles. But to compare dear complete ideas under steady names.] I am surprised, sir, that you turn against maxims, that is, against evident principles, that which can and must be said against the principles supposed gratis. When one demands praecognita in the sciences, or anterior knowledges, which serve to ground science, he demands known principles and not arbitrary positions, the truth of which is not known; and even Aristotle understands that the inferior and subaltern sciences borrow their principles from other higher sciences where they have been demonstrated, except the first of the sciences, which we call metaphysics, which, according to him, asks nothing from the others and furnishes them the principles of which they have need; and when he says δει πιστευειν τον μανθανοντα, the apprentice must believe his master, his opinion is that he must do it only while waiting, while he is not yet instructed in the higher sciences, so that it is only provisionally. Thus one is very far from receiving gratuitous principles. To this must he added, that even principles whose certainty is not complete may have their use if we build upon them only by demonstration; for although all the conclusions in this case are only conditional and are valid solely on the supposition that this principle is true, nevertheless, this connection itself and these conditional enunciations would at least be demonstrated; so that it were much to be desired that we had many books written in this way, where there would be no danger of error, the reader or disciple being warned of the condition. And practice will not be regulated by these conclusions except as the supposition shall be found verified otherwise. This method also serves very often itself to verify suppositions or hypotheses, when many conclusions arise from them, the truth of which is known otherwise, and sometimes this gives a perfect proof sufficient to demonstrate the truth of the hypothesis.
§ 13. [The true use of hypotheses.] The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypotheses, is like the art of deciphering, where an ingenious conjecture often shortens the road very much. Lord Bacon began to put the art of experimenting into precepts, and Sir Robert Boyle had a great talent for practising it. But if the art of employing experiences and of drawing consequences therefrom is not joined to it, we shall never with the utmost cost attain to what a man of great penetration might discover in the first place. Descartes, who was assuredly such, has made a similar remark, in one of his letters, in regard to the method of the Chancellor of England; and Spinoza (whom I do not hesitate to quote when he says something good), in one of his letters to the late M. Oldenbourg, Secretary of the Royal Society of England, printed among the posthumous works of this subtle Jew, makes a like reflection concerning a work by Mr. Boyle, who, to speak the truth, stops a little too much to draw from a number of fine experiences no other conclusion than this which he might take for a principle, namely, that everything takes place in nature mechanically; a principle which can be rendered certain by reason alone and never by experiences however numerous they may be.