with the psychological school again, to inquire into the
limits and the scope of the mind's power. Such a specu-
lative Dogmatist was Descartes. But Spinoza was doubly
so. Descartes, though he quickly enough dogmatised, had at
least his preliminary doubt. Spinoza had none. Descartes,
though he speculated freely enough as to the hidden nature
of things, at least tried to recognise what he found, and
fell into his inconsistencies because he would labour to
reconcile undoubted facts and natural experience with his
speculation. Spinoza speculated with a perfect disregard
of natural experience, and, because he would not stoop
to any such accommodation, appears less inconsistent wilh
himself.

The pantheistic element in Descartes' thought, viz. the
tendency to conceive the notion of substance in the truest
sense as being only One, and the naturalistic element, viz.
the tendency to conceive the One Substance or God as
Order of Nature, were brought together and set in the
front of Spinoza's thought as the mother-idea of it all.
For this his thought must, as I have said, be regarded as
the necessary logical development of the Cartesian system,
as the last word that can and must be said about the
universe upon Cartesian principles. And the rigid manner
of the development, the spirit of philosophic calm in which
that last word is uttered, are such are, in spite of all
criticism, which touches the conception far more than the



282 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.

execution, such that Spinoza's philosophy remains as yet,
and is likely to remain, the very type of a Naturalistic
Pantheism.

Spinoza also inherits from Descartes the notions of
' attribute ' and ' mode/

Now, for Spinoza, mode gets into a direct relation with
substance, as it does not for Descartes. For the latter
modes are not things, while for the former they are the
only explanation of res particulares, being the way in which
the one substance expresses itself. Mode in Descartes is
attribute specialised in a certain way, and is understood
quite apart from the question of substantiality. That he,
had settled at the beginning by positing infinite substance
and finite substance. Spinoza could not quite so easily
accept Descartes' compromise. The business of philosophy
being to account for our experience, i.e. for particular
things, and Spinoza having undertaken to do so by Monism,
he had to eliminate from ' mode ' the notion of substantiality.
No less has he to account for ' attributes,' such as thought,
extension, &c. How far he has consistently fitted both
terms into his system is a much controverted point 1 . To
me it seems that he is not without inconsistencies to answer
for in his usage of the terms, going, in language at least,
straight from substance to mode (cf. Elh, I. Def. iv. and
Props, iv. 2 and vi. Proof), and yet no less referring modes
to attributes (cf. I. Prop. xxv. Cor.) His inconsistencies
show (i) that he had not quite made up his mind in this

1 See especially Martineau's Spinoza and Kuno Fischer's and
Erdmann's Histories of Philosophy on this point. The lecturer (in
1891) entered in detail into the controversy, but space prevents me
from reproducing. ED.

3 Do not take Spinoza too strictly here in his use of ' substance ' in
the plural.



xxv.] Elements of General Philosophy. 283

connexion, (ii) that he felt the difficulties entailed by holding
on to Descartes while being determined to arrive at a
different conclusion, (iii) that he felt the difficulties inherent
in Substantialism difficulties which, in becoming by a later
age fully realised, have altered the position of philosophy
concerning that which was the ultimate viciousness in the
attitude of the age.

(2) The method of mathematics is not the only speculative
method in philosophy, but it is a speculative method. A
thinker may reject it, like Hegel for his dialectic method,
and still be intensely speculative, but the thinker must
also be intensely speculative who accepts it : for the use
of it commits him to the assertion that resort to specific
experience is as unnecessary in metaphysics as in mathe-
matics, that the most general truth about the nature of
all things is already as well ascertained, or as ascertainable
and ready to be formulated and fit to be applied in new
cases, as the most general truth about number and form.
A bold assertion ! It was however a very common assertion
in the seventeenth century, and one that men might be
excused for at least desiring to be able to make. The
certainty of mathematical truth, which Schoolmen had con-
cerned themselves so little about, and the uncertainty of
philosophical truth, which Schoolmen had been working
at for centuries, could not fail to appear in somewhat dis-
agreeable contrast, and the contrast in turn to excite bound-
less hopes if the method that led to uncertainty and dispute
might be changed for the method that ended in certitude
and unanimity. That the contract should particularly strike
and excite a born mathematical genius like Descartes the
first great mathematician since the Arabians was only
natural. It led him to what we know and have seen:



284 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.

the method of science is one, and is to be drawn and
generalised from mathematics; is deductive from certain
and fixed principles ; passes from causes to effects ; dis-
plays a must-be of things ; works so certainly from principles
so large that the only difficulty is in selecting from among
the ' infinity of possible effects ' those that correspond with
the actual things and facts of this poor universe. Descartes
has all this, and it is not little ; but his mathematic is
implicit ; he does not go farther not even in his systematic
work to evolve the results from his principles in regular
geometrical form (except when expressly challenged in the
' Objections'). That was left to Spinoza. Definitions,
Axioms, Theorems, Lemmas, Corollaries Spinoza adopts
the whole machinery adopts or tries to adopt, and believes
he sustains the whole responsibility of it. Descartes' practical
departure from mathematical method and the abrupt collapse
of his project in the Regies (never, though he had plenty
of time, resumed), are explicable from his very mathematical
power, or at least from his tact or common sense ; he saw
that the thing could not in fact, or should not, be done.
Spinoza was kept back from attempt and achievement by
no such superiority of scientific ability. And as an inferior
mathematician he was pedantic in his use of the method.
Leibniz, the next great mathematician and philosopher after
Descartes, found fault after fault in Spinoza.

Spinoza however was so thoroughly a Dogmatist that
he could not but work by this method. Kant rightly dis-
cerned that the dogmatist cannot proceed in philosophy
by any other method l . With him, as with the mathe-

1 V. Kritik of Pure Reason (Max Muller's translation"*, pp. 6ro 633:
' On the Discipline of Pure Reason in the Sphere of Dogmatism.'
Students were emphatically referred to this passage. ED.



xxv.] Elements of General Philosophy. 285

matician, first not'ons are given, not sought. The essence
of Dogmatism is to be prepared from the first with an
equation between thought and reality. Tf the day comes
when we do discern the riddle of the universe and there
is nothing more to know, then the melhod of setting it
forth will be the mathematical method of philosophy. But
I venture to predict that its matter and conclusions will be
very different from Spinoza's. For us, working where we
now stand, I have nothing but the strongest disapproval of
the use of mathematics in philosophy.

For consider : how is it that in geometry we are able
to proceed from fixed principles to propositions that are
necessary ? Because we are here dealing with matter that
we make, control, constitute. But this does not make the
method valid in regard to nature. If it is applicable and
in so far as it is applicable to nature, it is because all our
sensations are, more or less, ordered in space. If then
we can make out anything with regard to space, we can
apply it to nature generally.

We perceive space by activity put forth. We make
space in the knowing of it. We know it in the making
of it. If this is the proper explanation of the mathematical
method, the only question to be asked is, are we in philo-
sophy occupied in the same way ? Philosophy is the ultimate
interpretation of experience. Is experience something that
we make in the way that we make space ?

Now experience is not something that we simply receive.
It is in a manner, as Kant taught, a construction of ours.
Our thoughts about things are our mental activity func-
tioning in various ways. But there is a difference. Activity
is involved in thinking, and therefore in experience. But
there is also an element in experience that is given. That



286 Elements of General Philosophy.

element may be greater or less, but experience is in any
case reproductive and representative. We have to wait for
what comes to us before we can know. In metaphysic
therefore, as in physical science, definitions are statements of
results arrived at, and not principles proceeded from. Our
metaphysical notions cause, substance, &c. continually
change as mathematical notions do not. And our notions
of substance have changed since Spinoza. Hence he has
not, as he implies, solved the riddle of the universe for all
time. He meant to be strict, honest, exact, but he attempts
the impossible. His work is a model of what can and of
what can0/ be done on these lines.



LECTURE XXVI.

ON CARTESIANISM (continued).

(3) FROM the mathematical method, adopted by Descartes
and his followers in the peculiar scientific conditions of the
time, the exclusion of so-called Final Causes of Aims or
Ends necessarily followed. A Schoolman, more theologian
than philosopher, may read all great things in the world
according to some religious idea of a divine purpose, and
in his ignorance of natural causes may pretend to a science
of smaller things in vain general statements about the ends
that things serve. A thinker like Aristotle, casting the first
scientific glance over the multiplicity of nature, may less
vainly eke out his explanation in such a way ; or labouring
to comprehend in magnificent, if premature abstraction the
first principles of being, may credit nature with an immanent
Tt'Aos, or End, of which all motion and mutation is the slow
accomplishment. A thinker like Kant, seeing nothing in the
realm of nature but a vast complex of phenomena linked each
to each by the iron chains of cause and effect forged within
the mind, may look beyond to a region of supra-sensible
noiimena, and conceive it as a Realm of Ends to get free
play for that power of self-determination in moral beings
which he will not resign.

But in proportion as any thinker takes the mathematical
analogy and follows it out consistently in the whole field



288 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.

of knowledge, or of assumption, he must submerge the
teleological view. It is not as the means to any end that
the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right '.ingles ;
the triangle, we say, ' makes ' them so (and makes them so
with a causation which anybody might call universal and
necessary), but no purpose is served, no aim thereby pro-
moted. This Descartes did not fail to see, and the idea
guided much of his scientific action, guiding it well in
physics away from the emptiness of Scholastic explanation.
Spinoza saw it, and the idea guided his every thought as it
never guided the thought of mortal man before or since.

The point is so important, so specially significant, as to
require a more particular handling. Descartes' rejection of
final causes is but partial compared with Spinoza's. It lies
to hand to connect this with his less rigid employment of
the deductive (geometrical) method. The main idea of the
method Descartes doubtless has, but, beginning his meta-
physics with a datum of the mature consciousness, and
evolving from it and with it whatever it will give, he cannot
be said to apply the method with any strictness at the first
stage of his speculation. This he does rather in his Physics
only. With his metaphysical notion of Body or Matter as
extended and nothing more, and his assumption that all
mutation, real or phenomenal, is mechanical, he does then
rigidly enough proceed to construct and explain from fixed
principles. Now it is precisely at this stage that he makes
exclusion of final causes *, and the exclusion, while it con-
stitutes his advance upon those who went before, struck
a right note for those who came after him in the history
of science. But while the exclusion is limited for, as we
know, it is not by him extended in any sense to the greater
1 Read Princifia, iii 1-3.



xxvi.] Elements of General Philo ophy. 289

world of mind, every mind according to him being absolutely
self determinant, and thought not being bound by a law
of cause and effect it is at the same time put upon grounds
that betray a manifest unsteadiness of vision. Not because
final causes would be unwarrantably foisted in by the mind
upon a scene of mere mechanical action and reaction (as
even Kant who accepts them elsewhere declared), but only
because it is too great presumption for a human mind to
measure the universe by human needs, or try to fathom the
purposes of the Deity, does Descartes enter his protest
against a teleological physics. That is a view, no doubt, but
not the view (still less favourable to final causes), that
depends upon the adoption of a peculiar method in philo-
sophy. If we will see the method strictly adopted, and with
singleness of mind carried out to its last conclusion in the
direction we are now considering, we must look beyond
Descartes to Spinoza.

Spinoza clearly is held back by no mental preoccupation
from following wheresoever his method of philosophical in-
quiry leads him. If God and Nature to him are one, and if
Nature is best exhibited as a system in which from lh^ core
outwards everything is as it cannot but be, he will not, like
a Schoolman, embark on the search for divine ends, or,
like Descartes, draw back from the search only because it is
too high for man *. Nor, like Descartes again, can he allow
any such difference between Mind and Body as would require
the assumption of a different scientific procedure. Mind
and Body are for him perfectly distinct. Not Descartes with
his two opposed substances could draw the dividing line
more strictly and hold it more unfailingly than does Spinoza,
with his opposed attributes of Thought and Extension, pre-
1 Read Etlira. i. Appendix.



290 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.

serving their opposition into the most transient mode of
each. But, opposed as they are, they, at every stage, high
and low, are in correspondence. No mode of Thought
without its parallel mode of Extension ; no fact of body
unaccompanied by some mode of thought (Eth. iii. 2. Schol.) ;
and \vhere there are two chains, in which link answers to
link, although they are two, the links of the one for itself
hold as rigidly together as the links of the other, because
each is a chain. Thoughts in nature being thus not less
bound together and mutually conditioned amongst themselves
than are things, the necessities of science are in each case
alike. A body in motion moves another, and the law of
the movement, not the end or object of it, is the physical
science of the case. A thought begets a thought, and
not any free initiative of a mind creating its own purpose
should be assumed, but the law of the production is all
that should be sought.

Now Descartes, where he negatives Final Causes, namely,
in his physical science, puts forward Efficient Causes; and
this constitutes the great merit of it. Everywhere indeed in
his philosophy, metaphysical as well as physical, this notion
of Cause, meaning Efficient Cause, stands forward ; and to
him it is greatly due that in modern times we have so far
left behind that vague Aristotelian notion of Cause, covering
the four principles of things : Material, Formal, Efficient
or Movent, and Final as to have come to associate the
notion exclusively with the Efficient principle ; and this not
only in all science, but even in philosophical discussions
about Causation (where, as in Hume, Hamilton, &c., the
question is as to there being any potency and virtus,
or only mere antecedents of a certain kind, in the cause
which is efficient). The notion of Efficient Cause, embodied



xxvi.] Elements of General Philosophy. 291

in the Ex mhilo, &c., is what carries Descartes, at his meta-
physical stage, over the otherwise impassable gulf fixed by
himself between his self-consciousness and objective reality ;
and his whole physical philosophy consists in nothing else
but the attempt to show that everything in nature results
from mechanical interaction of bodies bodies in their
character of being extended, taking and giving amongst
themselves the unchanging quantum of movement once com-
municated to them by the Creator. So that, notwithstanding
his references to mathematical method and the deductive
cast of his intellect, Descartes' philosophical explanation is
seldom a mere manipulation and explication of notions and
abstract principles assumed.

But such it ought to be, if the full responsibility of the
method is accepted ; and such Spinoza aims at being.

For, as to the first point, it should be remarked, beyond
what has already been said, that Final Causes are not more
excluded from mathematical truth than is the notion of
Efficient Causation. When, to use the former example, the
triangle is said to make its angles equal to two right angles,
it makes them in any properly causative sense as little as
it makes them for any end or purpose. Even those who
recognise a necessity of connexion between cause and effect
will not, if like Kant they are wise, confound it with necessity
of implication. The equality of the angles to two right
angles follows from triangular nature quite otherwise than
it follows that a body if let go will fall to the ground. What
ie contained in a notion follows from the notion, and comes
within the mind's ken in one way ; a thing that is caused in
nature by another thing follows upon this, and is apprehended
by the mind as following, in another way. A system of
philosophy, if conceived and worked out on mathematical



292 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT

principles, will deal in notional connexions, not in causal
relations. But if this could ever be said of a philosophic
system, it is to be said of Spinoza's.

Let me not be misunderstood. Spinoza speaks often
enough of cause, and even has the phrase causa efficiens ;
but where he speaks of efficient cause : ' Deum omnium
rerum esse causam efficientem ' (Eth, I. 1 6) it is made
clear that the efficiency is only inclusion in the definiiion,
conclusion from the definition and, immediately afterwards
(I. 1 8), that the cause is immanent and in no sense transient;
whilst in speaking of cause simply, he either, if it is of modes,
means it in a sense not ultimate, or when the sense is ultimate',
means precisely this implication of all in the idea of the one
Substance.

For Spinoza is pre-eminently the demonstrative thinker.
He believes, if ever man did, and far more than Descartes
ever did, that he has grasped the inner secret of the universe
and can lay bare in the orderly evolution of thought the
meaning of all that is. The demonstration he himself
supposes to rest upon a few truths perfectly self-evident
at least when he sets them forth, for no man before him
had the same insight into them and to be the most irre-
fragable, clear, and final exposition of the whole system
of things. Another might say that the principles upon
which the demonstration is supposed to rest are neither
truths nor at all self-evident, but only a rash, though striking
abstraction from experience, and that the demonstration
itself halts and is insufficient, or at the best is eked out by
sidelong glances at the actual. But demonstration, and
strict demonstration, is nevertheless what Spinoza aims at
and believes he has achieved.

Here then \ve touch the true difference between Descartes



xxvi.] Elements of General Philosophy, 293

and Spinoza, and can apprehend the speculative stride taken
by the younger thinker. It is not only that where the one
gets rid of final causes in physical science, and upon grounds
that may be called theological, the other bans them utterly
from the universe upon the ground of strict philosophical
principle, but it is that whereas Descartes deduces and
constructs with a principle of Efficient Causation, Spinoza
rejects, or tends to reject, also the notion of Efficient Cause,
and, with perfect consistency, resolves, or fain would resolve,
everything upon a principle of Necessity of Implication.

A word finally on Spinoza's psychology and epistemology.
The latter is a very remarkable doctrine and very closely
interwoven with his psychology and his metaphysic of mind
and body, but always with an explicit ethical object (Elh. II.
Pref.) In Parts I and II of the Eihica he is laying the
foundations and preparing the materials for his doctrine of
how man may be ethically perfect.

Special note should be taken of the seventh proposition,
Part II 1 a metaphysical assertion on which all his psycho-
logical observation is based. It is the first explicit utterance
of the later doctrine of Parallelism. This is now always
purely phenomenal in assertion 2 , serving the purposes of
psychological science without prejudicing ultimate hypotheses,
being held by Dualists no less than by Monists of to-day.
The doctrine of the latter both in its phenomenal and meta-
physical aspects has great affinity with that of Spinoza, but
hr.s been got at differently, viz. by induction. The common
result has brought Spinoza into vogue, so much so that

1 ' The order and connexion of ideas is the same as the order and
connexion of things.'

2 Thus: 'With every psychosis is concomitant a neurosis.'
(Elements of Psychology. Lect. VI.) ED.



294 Elements of General Philosophy. [LECT.

younger students need to be reminded that it is only lately
he has been seriously considered as a thinker. Spinoza
starts as a dogmatic metaphysician, thinking that by his
definition of substance he can account for mind and body as
they appear. In the end he practically abandons his first
position and writes as a Phenomenalism Law of Nature
replaces Substance. Phenomenalism has got up to where he
came down. His dogmatic Substantialism is overlooked.

There was nothing new in Spinoza's Parallelism. Aristotle
was a Parallelist, dogmatic also in his procedure. Descartes
and the Occasionalists are so also. Leibniz in his Monadism
was a Parallelist. My emphasis is due to the attitude of
modern Parallelists, who write as if they were first in the field
even inventing the term Automatism or at most connecting
themselves with Descartes only. Everything modern on
body and mind is in Spinoza in principle, and is also much
more clearly thought out than it is by many, his detail
being often remarkable, e. g. when dealing with Perception,
Conception, Memory, &c. Hence Spinoza is in the front
and will remain there.

No part of him should be more studied than the latter half
of Pait II giving his epistemology '. Nor should Part III be
slurred over, with its psycho-physical doctrine, systematic
beyond anything of the kind previously attempted. Note (i)
in the definition of emotion how the subjective and the bodily
side are both brought forward, and (ii) that the forty-
eHit definitions are, as in all natural science, statements
of results. Note also (iii) the distinction between active
emotions and passions, these being a measure, an indication
of human bondage, i. e. of mind as limited, as confused in its

1 Note especially Prop. XL. Note II, containing his expression of
thorough-going Realism (Platonic; and of Nominalism.



XXVL] Elements of General Philosophy. 295

representations (Props. 58, 59). By connecting 'affect ' and
self-consciousness with activity 1 , he prepares the way for his
solution of the ethical question in Part V, where he trans-
forms the notion of knowledge into emoiion. Before our
knowledge is effective for purposes of life it must be ' touched
with emotion.' Morality for Spinoza is knowledge emotion-
ally transformed. Thus while he begins as a bare formalist,
he ends by being a rapt myslic. Through the stiff crust