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Cartesianism in France

Augustinianism. The Oratorian Malebranche was awakened to philosophical reflexion by the perusal of Descartes' Traité de l'homme ; afterwards (1665-1712) he put together his brilliant system by attributing, through the inspiration of Plato and Saint Augustine, to God Himself the ideas designated as "clear" by the author of the Méditations. At Port-Royal, in the Church, in literature, in the Universities, and in the law-courts the influence of Descartes gradually grew to be considerable, and even dominant. Thus it was the Cartesian philosophy which inspired the celebrated Logique de Port-Royal, in which the art of reasoning, which was the very end and object of scholastic logic, is subordinated to the art of thought or judgment. that is, to the art of distinguishing between truth and falsehood by means of reason or good-sense, shared by all men. According to Pascal, it is not by "barbara and baralipton" that the faculty of reasoning can be trained and formed; "you must not hoist the mind up by a crane." It is mainly owing to the influence of Descartes that, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, religion and philosophy were reconciled, and came to form a harmonious whole. A Malebranche, a Bossuet, a Fénelon, far from distrusting reason, sound the praises of its power and authority. Did not Descartes show with mathematical precision that reason itself contains the principles of belief in God and of the spirituality of the soul, which are the foundations of religion? Reason, perfect and eternal, said Fénelon, is common to all men, and, withal, superior to man. "What is this supreme reason? Is it not the God whom I seek?"

In the seventeenth century it was chiefly the metaphysics of Descartes of which the authority was acknowledged Towards the close of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth century his physics, and his method in general, were supreme. Fontenelle (1657-1757) extolled Descartes not as a metaphysician, who had attacked unanswerable questions, but as the thinker who had effected a revolution in mathematics and physics, as the promoter of the true method of reasoning. And Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois (1748), undoubtedly makes use of the Cartesian method itself, applying it to political matters.

The influence of the Cartesian philosophy continued more and more to prevail in France until 1765, when the French Academy proposed the eulogy of Descartes as the subject of competition for the prize of rhetoric. After this date the system of innate ideas and of vortices was succeeded by English empiricism and by the philosophy of Newton. But Cartesianism will never die out in the land where the love of clearness and of the logical connexion of ideas is a part of the national temperament.

Cartesianism was not as much at home in Germany as it was in France. However, it spread in Germany also and, to a great extent, contributed to the philosophical movement in that country. Not only

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at Herborn in Nassau, and at Duisburg near Düsseldorf, where Clauberg lectured with so much success, but also at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, at Bremen, and at Halle we find Cartesian professors. At Frankfort taught John Placentius, Professor of Mathematics and author of Renatus Cartesius triumphans; at Bremen, Daniel Lipstorpius, author of Specimina philosophiae Cartesianae (1653), and Eberhard Scheveling, Professor of Law; at Halle, John Sperlette. At Leipzig the Cartesian philosophy was supported with brilliant success by Andreas Petermann, Michael Rhegenius, and Gabriel Wagner. But the chief title to fame of the Cartesian philosophy in its relation to German thought was the important part which it played in the development of the philosophical genius of Leibniz. The system of this great man, in several of its essential parts, may be regarded as an endeavour to penetrate still deeper into the principles from which the Cartesian philosophy was built up.

In Switzerland the Cartesian Robert Chouet was made Professor at Geneva in 1669. Among his pupils in that city was Pierre Bayle.

The Cartesian philosophy was introduced into England mainly by Antoine Legrand, of the Brotherhood of St Francis of Douai, who published in London two works expounding the philosophy in a scholastic form. Samuel Parker, of Oxford, having simultaneously confuted Hobbes and Descartes, as alike supporters of the mechanical theory, in 1659 Legrand indited an Apologia pro R. Descartes contra S. Parkerum, in which he showed with what power Descartes had proved the existence of God against the materialistic supporters of the mechanical theory. Though expelled from Oxford, the Cartesian philosophy played an important part at Cambridge. The opponent of Descartes in this University, the celebrated Platonist Cudworth, a colleague of Henry More of Christ's College, accepted the Cartesian mechanism with regard to dead matter, but pronounced it false and fatal to religion to extend this mechanism to living organisms. Between thought and extension he introduced a universal plastic nature, by means of which God controls the motion of things. The Cartesian ideas concerning physics were introduced into the University of Cambridge by English and Latin translations of the physics of Rohault, one of the first to spread the Cartesian philosophy in France. Up to the time of Newton, this work was considered as a classic at Cambridge. The fecundity of Cartesianism manifested itself in England chiefly though the part played by it in the formation of the intellectual system of Locke, which was in its turn to exercise so considerable an influence on the entire later development of philosophy.

In Italy the Cartesian philosophy, especially as a scientific doctrine, established itself in the territory of Naples, the birthplace of Giordano Bruno and of Campanella. It was introduced here by Tommaso Cornelio, and powerfully supported by Fardella. On the other hand Vico (16881744), on behalf of concrete, historical, and social studies, opposed the

philosophy of pure reason as disregarding the phenomena relative to time and space.

Cartesian thought is the most original and the most productive of all intellectual systems that existed on the Continent in the period of the Thirty Years' War. Its essential characteristics were its conception of reason, which it regarded as the common centre of knowledge, life, science, morality, and religion. It signified the reëstablishment of order and reason in the intellects and in the souls of men, by means of those very sciences and those modern ideas which writers without ballast were ready to place in opposition to philosophical certainty and to the religious faith of mankind.

Powerful, however, as was the influence exercised by the genius of Descartes, it was not the only important intellectual movement noticeable during this period. In France itself two further names, unequal to each other in importance, call for mention as representing tendencies distinct from his, but endowed like it with permanent vitality.

Descartes had sought to confute the free-thinkers, the sceptics, and the naturalists, and, as a matter of fact, his philosophy had in course of time to a great extent overshadowed them. But just at first they refused to disarm, the more so because they hoped to find a fitting formula and a satisfactory defence of their theories, especially in the teaching of a man of learning, who, during his lifetime, enjoyed a reputation similar to that of Descartes. This was Gassend, or Gassendi.

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), the Christian Epicurean, is chiefly famous for his antagonism to Descartes, and for the point of view maintained by him in opposition to that of the great rationalist. He was born in Provence, near Digne. He took Orders early in life and became an irreproachable priest; he conscientiously said mass, drank nothing but water, and was a vegetarian. He died from fasting with undue rigour during Lent, having received the holy viaticum and the extreme unction three times more majorum.

His chief characteristic is that he lived two lives: the one devoted to religion, the other to philosophy. No doubt, Descartes virtually seems to have done the same. But with him, philosophy and religion were finally reunited in reason, the universal source of all our thoughts, the necessary principle and guide of all our knowledge. Now Gassendi rejected all idea of connexion or comparison between religious faith and philosophical doctrine. It mattered little to him whether the two were in harmony or opposition. As a Christian, he submitted his opinions wholly to the judgment of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church. As a philosopher, he held that the truth is contained in the system of Epicurus. The substance of the world to him consisted of purely material atoms; a mind which could think without the organs of

Descartes and Gassendi at variance

793 thought, innate ideas which existed before all experience, truths which could be other than the expression of external reality penetrating the experience of the senses, were to him mere idle philosophical inventions. Moreover, being of a moderate frame of mind, he did not consider himself bound to abide by all the consequences flowing from Epicurean principles. But the modified Epicureanism of Gassendi owes its strength and its importance to the fact that he found a link between it and modern experimental science. In contradiction to Descartes, who held that the mind more readily admits of being understood than the body, Gassendi believed that the nature of our being is revealed to us more especially by means of anatomy and chemistry. What he sees and appreciates in Bacon is not an abstract theory, a merely philosophical doctrine, but rather the positive modern idea of science and nature, such as it presented itself to a Kepler or a Galileo. Gassendi himself was a zealous student of mathematics, physics, medicine, and astronomy. He believed in the absolute worth of science as such, and declared that, when reason and experiment appear to be in contradiction, it is to the evidence of experience that we must appeal.

Henceforward his controversy with Descartes was something more than a quarrel between two metaphysicians. When Gassendi apostrophised Descartes as "O mens!" and the latter retorted "O caro!" many of their contemporaries concluded that the author of the Principes valued the ideas of his own mind more than the realities of experience; while the learning and somewhat confused eclectic teaching of the author of the Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri (1649) represented the advance of modern science towards the complete subordination of our conceptions to facts, to data, and to experiments.

Henceforward it mattered little that Gassendi had always been a docile Christian and a staunch supporter of Providence. His religious faith was not only without root in his philosophy, but appeared to be in contradiction with it. This faith could only be maintained by means of a radical dualism; and the state of dualism is one of instability for the mind of man, which sooner or later begins to compare different assertions with one another. Now, given the enormous progress which awaited experimental science, a belief at variance with the philosophical conception entertained of this science was fated to suffer from so close a contact with it, and to seem less justifiable and less important in proportion as the authority of science increased and its province was extended. And hence Gassendi, because of the exclusively empirical and naturalistic point of view which he assumed in the domain of philosophy, because of his identification of ancient atomism with modern experimental science, represents, as opposed to the broad rationalism of Descartes, the tendency of which, a hundred years later, the Encyclopédie was the outcome. In other words, he anticipated the apotheosis of natural science as having put to flight the phantom of the supernatural, and as being

able in itself to satisfy every actual need of the mind of man, whether practical or theoretical.

Notwithstanding the considerable reputation which he enjoyed amongst his contemporaries, the chief importance of Gassendi, who as a thinker was inconsistent and lacked originality, lies in the interpretation which the free-thinkers gave to his doctrines.

Of a very different stamp was the great adversary of the Cartesian philosophy, who is the chief glory of the Abbey of Port-Royal des Champs-Blaise Pascal. The most marvellous scientific capacity, a religious faith of extraordinary depth and intensity, and the choicest gifts of the thinker and the writer were united in this rare genius, which burst forth in childhood, and which death gathered in at the early age of thirty-nine (1623–62).

Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne; he came of a family belonging to the legal noblesse. The father, President of the Cour des Aides at Clermont, was conversant with mathematics and physics, and associated with the most intelligent men of the time. He gave his son an excellent education, especially from a scientific point of view. The child, however, had not been taught a word of mathematics, when one day he was then not yet twelve years of age- his father, taking him by surprise, found him employed in proving the thirty-second proposition of Euclid, which demonstrates the sum of the angles of a triangle to be equal to two right angles.

In the intellectual atmosphere in which he grew up the precocious genius of Pascal rapidly became productive. Before he was sixteen he had formed the first conception of his Essai pour les Coniques, a work which afterwards filled Leibniz with admiration. Pascal made important contributions to mathematical and physical science. Following in the footsteps of Gérard Desargues (1593-1662), a geometrician who was almost unknown in his lifetime, but whose works were of great utility, Pascal established the entire theory of conic sections on a general basis. He prepared the way for the infinitesimal calculus by his work on calculating machines, entitled Lettres de Dettonville, from which Leibniz declared himself to have derived the ideas that led him to his own discovery. D'Alembert said that this work formed the connecting link between Archimedes and Newton. Finally, together with the clever geometrician Fermat, of Toulouse (1595-1665), and Huyghens, the great astronomical mathematician of the Hague (1629-95), Pascal was one of the originators of the theory of probabilities.

In connexion with Torricelli's experiments on the possibility of a vacuum, which were then attracting the attention of all Europe, Pascal (in 1647) conceived the idea of the celebrated experiment of the Puy-de-Dôme, which proved the hypothesis of the atmospheric pressure being the cause of the suspension of the liquid column in the barometer.