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Religion and Science from Galileo to Bergson

CHAPTER IV SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY REACTIONS   A Law of Thought.—Whenever a tendency of thought has been vigorously prosecuted for any length of time, a reaction invariably displays itself. This rule is illustrated by the history of thought in the seventeenth century. Mechanical categories, as we have seen, had been steadily extending themselves for the better part of two centuries, and with the materialism of Hobbes the process seemed fairly complete. Meanwhile, however, human thought began to explore other avenues. Though reaction from mechanical ways of thinking did not (at any rate, in the circles with which we are concerned) take the form of an obscurantist retreat into prejudice or superstition, the results of the new science and its attendant mechanistic philosophy served as a base for further explorations. The principles which Descartes and Hobbes had laid down were criticised by being carried out to their logical conclusions. Spinoza.—The philosopher with whom we shall first concern ourselves was a Jew of Spanish extraction, living in what was then the freest country in Europe—Holland. Spinoza (1632-1677) was undoubtedly the greatest thinker of his own age, which was highly fertile in that respect, and he still stands as one of the most notable figures in the long history [Pg 29]of European thought. Not only is his outlook comprehensive, and his thought many-sided, but his standpoint was "detached" to a degree hitherto unknown. He was untainted, so far as a human being ever can be, by "anthropomorphism"; he endeavoured to transcend the merely human outlook. Here is always the dividing line between the great and the merely mediocre thinker. Spinoza's Method.—Spinoza's philosophical ancestry may be traced back to Bruno, whose acquaintance we made in a previous chapter, but in whose company we did not long remain. This highly original mind had already, by the doctrine of the infinitude and the divinity of nature, shown how the concept of God and the concept of nature might be closely bound up together. By similar means, Spinoza hoped to indicate the reality of the spiritual, without disturbing the mechanical world-conception which the new science and new philosophy had created between them. He wished somehow to find God not outside, but in Nature; not in disturbances of the order of Nature, but in that order itself. The Term Nature.—It would be a misapprehension to suppose that the terms "God" and "Nature" are regarded by Spinoza as interchangeable, though his numerous critics were accustomed to declare that this was the case. On the contrary, Spinoza, in order to anticipate the misunderstanding which he saw might arise on this point, reintroduced into philosophy a pair of terms which the Scholastics had long before brought into currency, but which had since fallen out of fashion—Natura naturans and Natura naturata. We might perhaps translate the former of these, "Creative Nature," and the latter, "Created [Pg 30]Nature." Natura naturans is equivalent to "Nature as a creative power," or "The creative power immanent in Nature." Natura naturata is equivalent to "Nature as it is when created," or "The results of the creative power immanent in Nature." And the Natura naturans is active in the Natura naturata at all points: the creative power is immanent in creation. As Spinoza puts it in one of his letters: "I assert that God is (as it is called) the immanent, not the external cause of all things. That is to say, I assert with Paul, that in God all things live and move.... But if any one thinks that the Theologico-Political Treatise (one of his works) assumes that God and Nature are one and the same, he is entirely mistaken."[8] Thus, for Spinoza, the order of nature, which had seemed to so many of his contemporaries, from the religious point of view, such a devastating conception, as leaving no room for the spiritual, was itself only explicable if interpreted spiritually. "Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God" (Ethics i. 15) sums up his attitude. All things may be, as the new science taught, 'determined' but they are determined "by the necessity of the divine nature" (Ethics i. 29). The "Ethics."—Spinoza may rightly be termed a man of one book. In his Ethics is to be found a complete and final expression of his philosophy. "How boundless," says Goethe of this great book, "is the disinterestedness conspicuous in every sentence, how exalted the resignation which submits itself once for [Pg 31]all to the great laws of existence, instead of trying to get through life with the help of trivial consolations; and what an atmosphere of peace breathes through the whole!" According to its teaching the true happiness and highest activity of men is to be found in what Spinoza terms "the intellectual love of God." The phrase seems to have been used to designate that full and clearer knowledge which is aware that we ourselves and all the conditions of our life are determined by the infinite Nature, by God Himself, who moves in us as well as in all things acting upon us. The initiated no longer regard themselves as single, isolated, impotent beings, but as included in the divine nature. Themselves and all things are seen under the form of eternity. This thought is, according to Spinoza, the fruit of the highest activity of the human mind; this is the amor intellectualis dei; and the supreme good for man. His doctrine of immortality is bound up with this intellectual form of religious mysticism—knowledge of God involves participation in His immortality: "Death is the less harmful the more the mind's knowledge is clear and distinct, and the more the mind loves God.... The human mind may be of such a nature that the part of it which we showed to perish with the body may be of no moment to it in respect to what remains." He who is "affected with love towards God" has a mind "of which the greater part is eternal." Thus the soul achieves its emancipation by identifying itself with God—who is the object of its knowledge and love. The path is arduous, and the closing passage of the Ethics admits this: [Pg 32]"If the road I have shown is very difficult, it can yet be discovered. And clearly it must be very hard when it is so seldom found.... But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare." Spinoza and Religion.—It is interesting to note that Spinoza, though a "free-thinking" Jew, adopts towards the fundamental dogma of Christianity an attitude which approximates to the classical expression of it in the Fourth Gospel. He held that "God's eternal wisdom, which reveals itself in all things, and especially in the human mind, has given a special revelation of itself in Christ." Perhaps his ethic, like that of the Stoics, with whom he had so much in common, was better adapted to satisfy the needs of the philosopher than of the ordinary man. But, in the seventeenth century, it was the philosophers and learned men that were in need of a spiritual interpretation of the universe; common men had theirs already, in the traditional pietism which philosophers are often too ready to despise. To Spinoza—and this is one of the many indications of the genuine profundity of his thought—the simple believers seemed already to be in possession of too much of the truth for it to be desirable or profitable for them to indulge in speculation. To the question of his landlady at the Hague as to whether she could be saved by the religion which she professed, his reply was that her religion was good, that she should seek no other, and that she would certainly be saved by it if she led a quiet and pious life. Spinoza's Personality.—The figure of Spinoza stands as one of the most imposing and attractive in the whole history of philosophy, and his was an unworldliness, a simplicity, and a humility purely[Pg 33] Franciscan. Like all Jews then, he knew a trade—that of lens grinding—and by this he was able to live frugally, while he elaborated his thought. He dedicated his life to the labour of quiet contemplation; nor was he ambitious of recognition, which indeed generally came to him in the form of abuse. He did not escape "the exquisite rancour of theological hatred," but it was his belief, and the conviction inspired his life, that— "Neither riches, nor sensuous enjoyment, nor honours, can be a true good for man"; but on the contrary, "that the only thing which is able to fill the mind with ever-new satisfaction is the striving after knowledge, by means of which the mind is united with that which remains constant while all else changes." "The God-intoxicated," was the name given to Spinoza long afterwards in Germany. He died (like St. Francis) at forty-five, worn out with the toil of thought. And it renews one's faith in the perspicacity of commonplace people to learn that his barber, sending in a bill after the death of the philosopher, alluded to his late customer as "Mr. Spinoza of blessed memory." It was left to a contemporary theologian to describe him as "an unclean and foul atheist." Leibniz.—Spinoza had taken over from Descartes and Hobbes their mechanical and determinist conception of nature, though he gave to it, as we have seen, an interpretation of his own. His attitude was a blend of that rationalism and mysticism which were characteristic of so much seventeenth century thought. A far more complete reaction, however, displays itself in the system of a contemporary of Spinoza's—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716); who, when already[Pg 34] a youth, had become an enthusiastic devotee of the new science; the study of Kepler, Galileo and Descartes caused him to feel as though "transported into a different world." Though a German by birth, Leibniz lived continuously in France, and wrote habitually in the language of that country. Contrast to Spinoza.—Spinoza and Leibniz stand as examples of two distinct methods of eluding the despotism of mechanics—methods which will meet us again in the course of our survey. Spinoza accepts the mechanical view as being inevitable and even desirable, but subjects it to a spiritual interpretation—he regards it as the way in which the Natura naturans works.[9] Leibniz, on the other hand, viewed existence from an entirely different standpoint. He was bold enough to reject the mechanical view altogether; or rather he preferred to regard it as a convenient abstraction, or a useful formula, which might reflect certain aspects of reality, but could not do justice to its concrete richness and complexity. A Philosophy of Individuals.—Leibniz's criticism of Descartes and the mechanical school proceeded along different lines from that of Spinoza, who, as we have seen, accepted the mechanical view as the basis of his speculation. An axiom of that view was (as we know) the conservation of motion. For this conservation of motion, Leibniz substitutes the conservation of force as being logically the more fundamental concept. True reality, according to him, is not motion itself, but the force which is its cause. Force and existence became for[Pg 35] him identical terms; to work and to exist were the same. That force is the true reality, Leibniz expressed in the language of his time by saying, "Force is substance, and all substance is force"—a proposition which would not be repudiated by modern science—and upon this statement his philosophy is built. But it was not "force in general" or some "universal force" that was regarded by him as the final reality: Leibniz was not a forerunner of Herbert Spencer. Reality for him consisted in individual centres of force—a multitude of individual and independent beings, each with its own idiosyncrasy, and following its own lines. Existence was, in fact, for him, individual. It was the individual centres of force—not general principles, universal substances, laws or forces—that make up reality. Doctrine of Monads.—This view of reality was formulated by Leibniz in his famous doctrine of "monads." "Monad" was the technical name applied by him to those absolute individuals which he regarded as constituting true reality. The word, meaning "unity," was simple and appropriate. And he declared that the "monad," to be rightly understood, must be regarded as analogous to our own souls. This principle of analogy was described by Leibniz as mon grand principe des choses naturelles. Thus reality was interpreted by him not in physical but in psychical terms, or if the expression be preferred, in terms of personality.[10] Of these "monads" there exist, according to this view, infinitely many degrees. In fact all existence[Pg 36] differs only in degree from our own. Even between mind and matter there is only a quantitative and not a qualitative gulf. For there are sleeping, dreaming, and more or less waking monads; and matter is a form of unconscious mind; the monads which compose material objects being "minds without memory," "momentary minds." Let Leibniz speak for himself:— "Each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, but is also actually subdivided without end.... Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fishes.... Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe...."[11] Leibniz may indeed be said to have been the first to outline a theory of "panpsychism" (as it is termed), according to which there is nothing that is not, in its degree, alive. As we shall have occasion to observe, Leibniz was here (as elsewhere) a forerunner of much recent philosophy. The significance of the Spinozist and Leibnizian systems of thought, though regarding existence from such diverse standpoints, was, for practical purposes the same. Both alike led out, though by different paths, beyond the mechanical theory of the universe. They, indeed, represent two types of thought which attempt to reach the same end by different methods. Their counterparts will meet us again as this history proceeds. Pascal.—But before passing out from the seventeenth century, one thinker ought to detain us; for[Pg 37] from more than one point of view he was a notable personality, and of first-rate importance in the history of religious, as distinct from purely philosophical thought. He was indeed one of those figures who are distinguished among distinguished men of all times. Blaise Pascal was born in 1623, and was a boy of precocious mathematical ability. By the age of twelve he is said to have worked out independently most of the first and second books of Euclid; at sixteen he wrote a treatise on Conics which attracted the attention of Descartes; at nineteen he completed a calculating machine—a device that had never been dreamt of before. At this point it is not surprising to learn that his health broke down. Pascal is not a systematic philosopher; but his acute intellect was united to an inner restlessness of soul. Neither science nor philosophy could bring him peace, for his needs were far deeper than any merely rational systematisation of ideas could satisfy. Some have said of him that he was fundamentally a sceptic, but one for whom religious faith was essential; certainly in him were united an acute critical faculty and an intense religious experience. Perhaps the two are not so incompatible after all. The "Pensées."—Pascal is chiefly famous for two works, the Lettres Provinciales and the Pensées. The former is controversial literature, but yet a classic of the French language: in sum, it is an attack on the Jesuits; but it need not here detain us, for with theology, as such, we are not concerned, and still less with ecclesiastical systems. The Pensées is a collection of fragments, the material for an Apology for Christianity which was never written. The autograph[Pg 38] MS. preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris "is made up of scraps of paper of all shapes and sizes, written often on both sides ... and dealing with all sorts of subjects." One is reminded of the mythical scraps of manuscript from which the genius of Carlyle distilled the philosophy of the sagacious Teufelsdröch. But it is in these detached fragments that Pascal has expressed his spiritual and intellectual struggles; they contain his philosophy of life. And, however unsystematic in arrangement, they do reveal a fairly definite temper and attitude of mind. Pascal's Philosophy.—In the first place, the Thoughts voice a reaction against the "Cartesian intellectualism" which was then the prevalent tendency in scientific and philosophical circles. "The last attainment of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things beyond it" might perhaps have been published by Pascal's predecessors. "To laugh at philosophy is to be a true philosopher" would have seemed like blasphemy or nonsense to most of his contemporaries, but it was neither of these. Behind sayings of this description lay the strong conviction that mere logic was incapable of probing the depths of existence. "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing," is sound psychology, and not scepticism or obscurantism. Of course it all depends what one means by "reason." Too many of Pascal's contemporaries applied the word to a more or less shallow rationalism utterly opposed to a spiritual view of things, whereas reason properly understood is "the logic of the whole personality."[12] That Pascal was no mere narrow anti-rational[Pg 39] obscurantist is evident, not only from his own extraordinary insight, but from his continual reiteration of his idea that the essential dignity of man lies in his thought: "All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the smallest mind, for a mind knows them, and itself, and bodies know nothing." Here lies the true greatness of man. In respect of material bulk he is nothing, but his thought cannot be measured. "Man is only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, but he is a thinking reed." The saying has become famous, and the words that follow are hardly less so; they remove the overpowering and crushing incubus of man's illimitable material environment, which, since Copernicus, had weighed upon thinkers like a nightmare: "Were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which slays him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage that the universe has over him: of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all man's dignity lies in his thought."[13] Pascal's Pessimism.—It has been said that an unbridgeable gulf lies between those who believe and those who disbelieve in mankind. It is to the latter category that Pascal belongs. His faith in the dignity of man is paradoxically associated with a realisation of his weakness and imbecility: "What a chimera, then, is man! What an oddity, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, senseless earth-worm; depository of truth, cloaca of[Pg 40] uncertainty and error; the glory and the refuse of the universe." "We desire truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty; we seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We are unable not to wish for truth and happiness, and incapable either of certainty or felicity." In fact, we may say that Pascal was the first, in an age of exaggerated reverence for logic (the damnosa hereditas of the Scholastic theologians) to understand that the best arguments for religion are the facts of human experience, and the conditions of human life. "In vain, O men, do ye seek within yourselves the cure for your troubles! All your knowledge can only teach you that it is not within yourselves that ye find the true or good!" Here we have the language of religious experience. The result of Augustine's meditation upon life was the same: Inquietum cor nostrum dum requiescat in te. It is a tongue that the "psychic man" can never understand; it seems to him affectation; such language is foreign to the easy optimism of an age of confidence. Indeed Pascal, though so intensely modern, is a stranger, and his words often enigmas to our time. Vanitas vanitatum is thus the verdict that he passes upon human experience. "The last act is tragic, however fine the comedy of all the rest." Significance of Pascal.—It is not as a systematic thinker that Pascal is of importance to the historian of thought. He typifies that more or less inarticulate and unreasoned revolt which the arrogance and optimism of a new science or a new philosophy arouse against themselves. He voices the eternal protest that it is not by bread alone that men live. As is[Pg 41] generally the case with such protests, the pessimism of Pascal was no doubt exaggerated; but exaggeration is necessary if minds are to be impressed; and those who feel strongly see only one side of a question. Results.—Thus in the three figures that have passed before us, we see a threefold protest against that exclusion of the spiritual from the human view of life. Spinoza, the pantheist, sees God everywhere;[14] Leibniz finds in every recess of nature the principle of personality; Pascal finds the only cure for human frailty and misery in religion. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 42] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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