Part IV. REVIVAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Chap. IV. Pantheism. Geulinx

The starting-point of Cartesian philosophy was idealistic, but the development of it was essentially materialistic. It was not surprising that, on the one hand, materialism attempted to found a new system upon the basis of Baconian Empiricism. On the other hand, it was inevitable that the doctrine which Descartes had left unsolved should also be attempted from the idealistic side, and that the suggestion which he had thrown out of a transition from mind to matter by means of the idea of God, should be taken up afresh.

We have, therefore, to give some account of those thinkers who developed the principles of Descartes on their idealistic side and brought them to their natural conclusion—viz., Geulinx, Malebranche, and Spinoza.

1. The name of Geulinx is usually associated with the theory of Occasionalism,—the attempt to overcome the difficulty created by Descartes in his separation of mental and physical processes. He was born at Antwerp in 1625, was professor of philosophy at Leyden, and died in 1669. He applied himself to the system of Descartes and attempted, by attributing all movements, both mental and physical, directly to God, to account for their relation and sympathy. According to him, neither the soul acts directly on the body, nor the body on the soul.

Were the soul to act immediately on the body I should be conscious of the manner in which the influence was produced, which I am not. Nor can the body act directly on the soul, for the soul is something entirely distinct, and a material thing cannot be the cause of anything so immaterial as thought. How then, it may be asked, do we receive our impressions of the outside world? The answer must be, Geulinx held, that God alone makes the world visible to the mind. We are merely spectators. It is God who is the direct agent of all our perceptions of the soul and of all the movements of the body. On the occasion of the action of my will, God moves my body. And on the occasion of the movement of my body, He creates a thought in my mind. The one is but the occasion, not the cause of the other. It is a concomitant movement, produced directly by the Divine Being. Their harmony is similar to that of two watches which keep the same time and strike the same hours, without the one in any way acting on the other. Corporeal movement and mental volition, while acting in harmony, are independently produced by the supreme artificer of both. This relation is based on the assumption that everything in the world, including the human will, is absolutely determined by divine causality, and that God is the one and only moving-cause in the universe. The further consequence can scarcely be avoided that the independent existence of finite things is annulled. Geulinx calls the human spirit, with Spinoza, only a form of the Divine, and in common with that same philosopher, he maintains that we are nothing more than beholders of what God, as the supreme agent, Himself does and causes us to do, and that, therefore, the true attitude of man to his Maker is one of humble acquiescence in His will.