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Updated: May 19, 2025
After the Cartesian philosophy had given decisive expression to the tendencies of modern thought, and had been developed through occasionalism to its completion in the system of Spinoza, the line of further progress consisted in two factors: Descartes's principles one-sidedly rationalistic and abstractly scientific, as they were were, on the one hand, to be supplemented by the addition of the empirical element which Descartes had neglected, and, on the other, to be made available for general culture by approximation to the interests of practical life.
The denial of the reciprocal dependence of matter and spirit leads to sharper accentuation of their common dependence upon God. Thus occasionalism forms the transition to the pantheism of Spinoza, Geulincx emphasizing the non-substantiality of spirits, and Malebranche the non-substantiality of bodies, while Spinoza combines and intensifies both.
For this purpose I shall consider a few maxims which have played a great part in the history of philosophy. "Cause and effect must more or less resemble each other." This principle was prominent in the philosophy of occasionalism, and is still by no means extinct.
It degrades all second causes to mere occasions, and turns men into passive instruments. Mechanism. Many, alarmed at the consequences which occasionalism would seem to involve, have embraced an opposite scheme. They criticise the definition of the laws of nature, and contend that occasionalism derives all its plausibility from adroitly availing itself of the ambiguities of language.
So excellent a man as Baxter was misled by this hypothesis, which evidently is as derogatory to God as occasionalism is fatal to the moral agency of man. The authors of the third scheme respecting the mode in which Providence permits sin sought to be "Eclectics" or to find a path intermediate between Mechanism and Occasionalism.
The meaning of this doctrine is misapprehended when it is assumed, an assumption to which the Leibnitzian account of occasionalism may mislead one, that in it the continuity of events, alike in the material and the psychical world, is interrupted by frequent scattered interferences from without, and all becoming transformed into a series of disconnected miracles.
On Cartesianism and miracle: Cartesianism in the form of occasionalism does involve miracle, for though God is said by it to act according to laws in conforming body and mind to one another, he thereby causes them to act beyond their natural capacities. On the problem, how can the simple act otherwise than uniformly? Leibniz distinguishes: some uniform action is monotonous, but some is not.
Occasionalism appeared to introduce God that he might make physical matter do what it had no natural tendency to do, viz. to obey the volitions of finite mind.
Although the real interaction of body and mind be denied, some explanation must, at least, be given for the appearance of interaction, i.e. for the actual correspondence of bodily and mental phenomena. Occasionalism denotes the theory of occasional causes. Louis de la Forge, a physician of Saumur, Tractatus de Mente Humana, 1666, previously published in French; cf. Seyfarth, Gotha, 1887.
It is the unit-soul, which first, by freely avoiding overhasty judgment, cognizes the truth, to exemplify it later in moral conduct. Occasionalism: Geulincx.% The propagation and defense of a system of thought soon give occasion to its adherents to purify, complete, and transform it.
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