of the phenomenon to the being, of the attribute to the substance, over the relation of the effect to the cause. When man has not been conceived as a free and voluntary cause, but as a desire often impotent, and as a thought always imperfect and finite, God, or the supreme model of humanity, can be but a substance and not a cause, the immutable substance of the universe, and not its productive and creative cause. In Cartesianism, the notion of substance played a greater part than that of cause; this notion of substance grown entirely predominant constitutes Spinozism.*

* Philosophical Fragments, the article entitled: Spinoza, and the Synagogue of the Portuguese Jews at Amsterdam. "In confounding desire with will, Spinoza has destroyed the true character of human personality, and, in general, too much obscured personality in existence. With him, God, being in itself, the eternal, the infinite, overwhelms too much the finite, the relative, and that humanity without which the most profound and most holy attributes of God are unintelligible and inaccessible. Far from being an atheist, of which he is accused, Spinoza possesses so strongly the sentiment of God, that he loses the sentiment of man. This temporary and limited existence, every thing that is finite seems to him unworthy of the name of existence, and for him there is no true being but the eternal being. This book, bristling as it is, in the manner of the times, with geometrical formula, so dry and so repulsive in its style, is at foundation a mystic hymn, a transport, a yearning of the soul towards him who alone can legitimately say: I am that I am. Spinoza calumniated, excommunicated, and persecuted by the Jews as having abandoned their faith, is essentially a Jew, much more so than he believed himself to be. The God of the Jews is a terrible God. No living creature has value in his eyes, and the soul of man is to him as the grass of the fields and the blood of the beasts of burden. (Ecclesiastes.) It belonged to another epoch of the world, to lights different from those of Judaism, to establish the boundary between the finite and the infinite, to separate the soul from all other objects, to tear it from nature to which it was, as it were, enslaved, and by a mediation and a sublime redemption, to place it in just relation with God. Spinoza was ignorant of this mediation. For him the finite remained on one side and the infinite on the other; the infinite producing the finite only to destroy it, without reason and without aim. Yes, Spinoza was a Jew, and when he prayed to Jehovah, he prayed sincerely in the spirit of the Jewish religion. His life was the symbol of his system. Adoring the eternal, ever in the presence of the infinite, he disdained this passing world; he knew neither pleasure, nor action, nor glory, for he did not suspect his own. Young, he desired to know love; but he knew it not, because he did not inspire it. Poor and suffering, his life was spent in waiting for and meditating upon death. He lived in a suburb of this city, where gaining, as a polisher of glass, the little bread and milk necessary for his subsistence, hated, repu

The point of departure of Malebranche* is the Cartesian theory that human thought cannot recognize itself as imperfect, and as relative, without conceiving God, perfect and absolute being; now as there is not a single thought which is not accompanied by the feeling of imperfection in itself, it follows that there is not a thought which is not accompanied by the conception of God, which communicates to it a force and superior authority. Thus the idea of God is contemporaneous with all our ideas, and the basis of their legitimacy; and, for example, the idea which we form of exterior bodies and of the world, would be vain, if this idea was not given in that of God. Hence the famous principle of Malebranche, that we see every thing, and the material world itself, in God; which means that our vision and conception of the world is accompanied by a conception of God, of infinite and perfect being, that adds its authority to the uncertain evidence of our senses and our thought. On the other hand, Malebranche does not destroy the notion of cause as Spinoza has done; he maintains it in God, but he degrades it in man; he makes the liberty of man very feeble and the action of God infinite. Hence the theory of God as the author and principle of our desires, of our acts, and of our thoughts; hence the theory of occasional

diated by the men of his communion; suspected by all others, detested by all the clergy of Europe whom he wished to subject to the State, escaping persecutions and outrages only by concealment, humble and silent, of a gentleness and patience that were proof to every thing, passing along in this world without wishing to stop in it, never dreaming of producing any effect upon it, or of leaving any trace upon it. Spinoza was an Indian mouni, a Persian soufi, an enthusiastic monk; and the author whom this pretended atheist most resembles, is the unknown author of the Imitation of Jesus Christ."

* Born at Paris in 1638, died in 1715. His principal works are: Examination of Truth, Paris, 1674, a single volume in-12; there were six editions of it published in France during the life of Malebranche; the last is of 1712, 2 vol. in-4, and 4 vol. in-12; Christian Conversations, 1677; Of Nature and of Grace, 1681; Christian Meditations, 1683; Discourses on Metaphysics and ReHigion, 1688; Conversation between a Christian philosopher and a Chinese philosopher, 1708; Reflections on Physical Predetermination, 1715.

causes, *found almost at the same time by Geulinx. The last term of this system is the absorption of man in God.

Such is the state in which sensualism and idealism, the school of Bacon and that of Descartes, were found at the close of the seventeenth century. It remains for me to speak of their struggle and of its results.

* On Malebranche, see the Introduction to the works of P. André, the Preface to the Thoughts of Pascal, p. xxxii., and in the Fragments of Cartesian Philosophy, the correspondence of Malebranche and Leibnitz, as well as that of Malebranche and of Mairan on the system of Spinoza.

† Of Antwerp, born in 1625, died in 1669. Among other works: Logica fundamentis suis, a quibus hactenus collapsa fuerat, restituta, Lugd. Bat., 1662. Tvæði oɛavróv, sive Ethica, Amstelod., 1665. Metaphysica vera, etc., Amstelod.

LECTURE XII.

MODERN PHILOSOPHY. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. SKEPTICISM AND MYSTICISM.

Struggle between sensualism and idealism. Leibnitz: an attempt at a conciliation which is resolved into idealism.-Skepticism: Huet, Hirnhaim, Glanville, Pascal, Lamothe Le Vayer, Bayle.-Mysticism: Mercurius Van Helmont, More, Pordage, Poiret, Swedenborg. Conclusion. Entrance into the second age of modern philosophy, or philosophy of the eighteenth century properly so called.

In the last lecture we saw modern philosophy divided from its birth into two opposite schools, equally exclusive, equally defective, which are represented and summed up at the beginning of the eighteenth century, on one side by Locke, and on the other by Malebranche. The struggle between these two great schools fills the first quarter, and almost the half of the eighteenth century; this struggle began at their very origin. You have seen Gassendi attack the idealism of Descartes, and Descartes the empiricism of Gassendi. At a later period, Locke, taking up the quarrel, submitted to a severe analysis the pretended innate ideas of Descartes,* and the vision in God of Malebranche ;† and even in the country of Locke, the friend and pupil of Locke, Shaftesbury, combated the principles and consequences of the Essay on the Human Understanding: in the midst of all this Leibnitz arrived.§ That which most especially characterized Leibnitz, among many

* Book 1st of the Essay on the Human Understanding. + Examination of the Opinion of Father Malebranche.

‡ Letter to a gentleman who is studying at the University, 1716.

§ Born at Leipsic in 1646; Journey in France in 1672, in England in 1783, in Germany and in Italy in 1687-1689; President of the Academy of Berlin in 1699, died in Hanover in 1716. Complete Works, ed. Dutens, 6 vol. in-4, Geneva, 1758.