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Updated: September 4, 2025
No one was ever more deeply implicated in the scheme of necessity than Descartes. “Mere philosophy,” says he, “is enough to make us know that there cannot enter the least thought into the mind of man, but God must will and have willed from all eternity that it should enter there.” His argument in proof of this position is short and intelligible. “God,” says he, “could not be absolutely perfect if there could happen anything in this world which did not spring entirely from him.” Hence it follows, that it is inconsistent with the absolute perfections of God to suppose that a being created by him could put forth a volition which does not spring entirely from him, and not even in part from the creature.
He was a member of Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before it had received the name. Boyle's HYDROSTATICS was "of infinite delight" to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle.
"I shall try to explain our whole bodily machinery in such a way, that it will be no more necessary for us to suppose that the soul produces such movements as are not voluntary, than it is to think that there is in a clock a soul which causes it to show the hours." These words of Descartes might be appropriately taken as a motto by the author of any modern treatise on physiology.
Descartes held no such opinion; it was the precise point of disagreement at which Spinoza parted from him; and therefore, since in point of date Spinoza had the advantage of Leibnitz, and we know that Leibnitz was acquainted with his writings, we must either suppose that he was directly indebted to Spinoza for an obligation which he ought to have acknowledged, or else, which is extremely improbable, that having read Spinoza and forgotten him, he afterwards re-originated for himself one of the most singular and peculiar notions which was ever offered to the belief of mankind.
But the only intelligent agent to whom Descartes allows access to his corporeal machinery is one who not only has no notion how to apply a moving force except to some few portions of the machinery, but with regard to the other portions has most likely no suspicion that they even exist.
No one will deny that Descartes was a finer intelligence than Hobbes, or that his meticulous respect for French susceptibilities gave an altogether improbable turn to his speculations. In the eighteenth century it was the English who did the discovering and the French who, on these discoveries being declared admissibles, brought them to perfection.
From all this it follows that what I may term legitimate materialism, that is, the extension of the conceptions and of the methods of physical science to the highest as well as the lowest phenomena of vitality, is neither more nor less than a sort of shorthand Idealism; and Descartes' two paths meet at the summit of the mountain, though they set out on opposite sides of it.
After 1500, when this attraction began to decline, philosophers fell back on some vis a tergo instinct of danger from behind, like Darwin's survival of the fittest; and one of the greatest minds, between Descartes and Newton Pascal saw the master-motor of man in ennui, which was also scientific: "I have often said that all the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still."
The philosophy of Descartes was denounced as leading to irreligion; the doctrines of Locke were said to produce materialism; and in our own day, Dr. Buckland, Mr. Sedgwick, and other leading geologists, have been accused of overturning revelation with regard to the constitution and history of the earth.
But Philosophy did not remain altogether negative. The new movement extended itself to Metaphysics, and under the leadership of Descartes a resolute effort was made to reform Philosophy on sympathetic lines. It was in the true spirit of Socrates that Descartes advanced his famous method of Doubt.
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