He thus approximates to that recognition of the difference between "sensuous perception" and "intellectual apprehension," the carrying out of which would change his philosophy into almost all that we could desire. Similarly, Mr. Spencer's theology has its hopeful side. He even refers to an ultimate cause, most mysterious and incomprehensible, to which he gives the selfcontradictory name "the unknowable." To this supreme and inscrutable Being we must assign no limits,* and (most important of all) if Mr. Spencer declines to affirm "personality" of this Being, it is because (p. 109) any conception we can form of "personality" is inadequate, because below the unspeakable reality. A consideration of these favourable characteristics will commend not only Mr. Spencer's system, but Mr. Spencer himself, to the goodwill of Catholics. Would that he could be persuaded for a time, if only hypothetically, to believe in the "relativity" of his own system as he understands it, and to open his mind to an unprejudiced examination of philosophy, uncorrupted by the errors of Descartes and his successors! Far more still is it to be desired that he would open his mind to Catholic theology; therein he would find all that would reconcile the philosophic and scientific truths he holds, and would meet with that "universal congruity," which he sayst is "the goal" which philosophy can alone aspire to reach, and which would lead him to join with us in the adoring exclamation: "Ex quo omnia, per quem omnia, in quo omnia-Spes nostra, salus nostra, honor noster, ô beata Trinitas!" ST. GEORGE MIVART. "First Principles," vol. i. p. 99. + "Psychology," vol. ii. p. 502. ART. III.-THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. PART III. 1. Euvres complètes de Voltaire. Sixty-two Vols. Paris: chez Renouard, 1819-1822. 2. Euvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau. Thirty-eight Vols. Paris chez Poinçot, 1788-1793. 3. Mémoires de Madame du Hausset. Paris, 1824. 4. La Femme au Dix-huitième Siècle. Par E. et J. DE GONCOURT. Paris, 1878. 5. Rousseau. By JOHN MORLEY. 6. Voltaire. By JOHN MORLEY. London, 1878. 7. Works of John Locke, with Life. Eleventh Edition. Ten Vols. London, 1812. PROPOSE in this Paper to offer some remarks upon the condition of European thought in the eighteenth century, and it will be necessary for me, by way of introduction, to refer to two Articles of mine which have already been published in this REVIEW. In the first, which appeared in April last, I observed that when I speak of the eighteenth century I must be understood to mean the century which intervenes between the English Revolution often-and, on the whole, I think, justly -designated glorious, and the great French Revolution, to which no such epithet is prefixed: the hundred years between 1688 and 1788. I further observed, "I regard that century as the closing years of a period in the history of Europe: as the years in which the ideas animating that period are to be seen in their ultimate development and final resolution: the period which began with the movement known, according as one or another of its aspects is contemplated, as the Protestant Reformation, the Revival of Letters, the Rise of the New Monarchy, and which may with much propriety be designated the Renaissance Epoch. For this movement was essentially a rebirth, and that which was reborn was Materialism." I went on to remark how this character is written upon it, as in every other department of life, so in the intellectual province and in the political how in the one its negation of the supernatural order centring round the Apostolic Chair, strips truth of its objective character, and throws men back upon the individual reason as the only arbiter: while in politics it is a reproduction of the ancient Cæsarism, whose only basis was brute force. And then I went on to sketch, in outline, the action of Renaissance ideas both in the public order and in the philosophical. The first stage in their history, I pointed out, might be considered, roughly speaking, to terminate with the sixteenth century: the publication of Montaigne's Essays in 1580, and the ruin of the Catholic League by the battle of Ivry, marking their firm establishment. The seventeenth century I regarded as their second stage, the period of their systematic development, of which the Monarchy of Louis XIV. and the philosophy of Locke might be taken as types. And this brought me to the threshold of my proper subject-the eighteenth century. "I shall have to consider," I wrote, "first the progress of the Renaissance political idea, next of the philosophical, in Continental Europe during the last century, and then I shall glance at our own country and try to indicate the position which it occupied with respect to those ideas, and the influence which it exercised upon their career.”* The first part of this task I endeavoured to accomplish in a Paper which appeared in the last number of this REVIEW. I shall now be occupied with the second portion of it. The third I must leave to a future occasion. The eighteenth century is as emphatically "le siècle Français" in the intellectual order as in the political. It may be designated both conveniently and accurately, so far as its spiritual and moral characteristics are concerned, the age of the philosophes, for the school of French thinkers known by that name gave it its distinctive tone and colour. They were everywhere read and admired, and the whole Continent was penetrated by their ideas. Other countries exercised but little influence on the world's thought. Germany may be said to have been dumb from Leibnitz to Lessing, for the voices of Spener and Semler, of Wolf and Moses Mendelssohn, were not world voices: never penetrating beyond their narrow Teutonic range, their echoes soon died away. Leibnitz and Lessing are thinkers of a very different calibre, but of them it is not necessary for me to speak. The great opponent of Locke quite failed to check the progress of the tide of scepticism, and the precursor of the Auf-Klärung belongs to the new school whose beginnings must indeed be referred to the last century, but whose work has been done in this. The south of Europe was sunk in mental torpor. Intellectually considered, Italy and Spain were during the eighteenth century a great void. England, it is true, produced a school of writers whose influence upon European thought was of the greatest moment. It was, however, through the medium of the French intellect that this influence was * DUBLIN REVIEW, October, 1879, p. 330. exercised. The doctrines dominant throughout Europe a hundred years ago may all be traced from Locke's famous Essay. But Europe learnt them, not from the English thinker, but from his French disciples, who bettered his instruction. The name of Locke is one of great importance in the moral and spiritual history of our race. It is not that his personal endowments, natural or acquired, were transcendently great; far from it. But they were exactly of the kind required for the work which he performed. Dry, prosaic, unimaginative, of no wide culture, and indeed of a nature not susceptible of much culture, he was admirably fitted to become the oracle of a system of metaphysics built upon that side of human nature of which alone he had knowledge, and ignoring or denying the existence of any other side. Mr. Mill reckons him the founder of "the analytical philosophy of the human mind," meaning thereby, I suppose, pretty much what was meant by d'Alembert's assertion that "he reduced metaphysics to what it ought to be, the experimental physics of the mind." So Voltaire eulogizes him as having been the first to pursue the true method in treating of the soul. Great philosophers before him, in Voltaire's judgment, had given very positive decisions on the subject; but since they knew nothing whatever about it their conclusions were naturally widely divergent. Tant de raisonneurs (he goes on) ayant fait le roman de l'âme, un sage est venu qui en a fait modestement l'histoire. Locke a developpé à l'homme la raison humaine, comme un excellent anatomiste explique les ressorts du corps humain. Il s'aide partout par le flambeau de la physique; il ose quelquefois parler affirmativement, mais il ose aussi douter. Locke, après avoir ruiné les idées innées, après avoir bien renoncé à la vanité de croire qu'on pense toujours, ayant bien établi que toutes nos idées nous viennent par les sens, ayant examiné nos idées simples, celles qui sont composées, ayant suivi l'esprit de l'homme dans toutes ses opérations, ayant fait voir combien les langues que les hommes parlent sont imparfaites, et quel abus nous fesons des termes à tout moment; Locke, dis-je, considère enfin l'étendue, ou plutôt le néant des connaissances humaines. C'est dans ce chapitre qu'il ose avancer modestement ces paroles: Nous ne serons peut-être jamais capables de connaître si un être purement matériel pense ou non. * This is the account given of Locke by the chief of the philosophes, with his unfailing clearness, vigour, and incisiveness. And it is in the main a true account. Personally a religious man, according to the conceptions of religion in which he had * "Lettres sur les Anglais,” xiii. “Œuvres,” t. xxiv. p. 63. been reared, Locke must be held to be the initiator of the sceptical movement in the ultimate phase which bolder and more logical minds worked out. No doubt earlier thinkers held many or all of the opinions which were most distinctive of him. But Locke was the first to formulate, systematize, and popularize the theory which we find in the "Essay on the Human Understanding. His system is the logical embodiment of the principle of self; of that doctrine of the independence and allsufficiency of the human reason which is the raison d'être, the soul of Protestantism. He claims that the individual-the centre of his system-shall comprehend and explain everything, and accept no principles until "fully convinced of their certainty;" and in this, as he judges, "consists the freedom of the understanding." With him the senses are all in all. They are not merely the windows through which the soul looks out on the external world, but the actual sources of cognition. The mind is not the active judge, but the passive recipient of their impressions. The will is not, in truth, free* for him, nor is it an instrument of knowledge; neither is faith an intellectual act, its object truth, its result certitude. His method is purely physical, and everything in our compound nature which does not come within its scope-the immaterial, the supersensual, the mysterious-he ignores. That there is any sentient power in man, inherent and independent of sensation, any aionois The Luxus, any sensus intimus our first and surest source of knowledge, he does not understand. He puts aside those "prima principia quorum cognitio est nobis innata"t of which S. Thomas speaks; he knows nothing of what a grave author of his own age denominates "rational instincts," "anticipations, * I mean he does not recognize freewill as a spiritual supersensuous force in man." "Prima principia quorum cognitio est nobis innata sunt quædamı similitudines increato veritatis, unde secundum quod per eas de aliis judicamus, dicimur judicare de rebus per rationes immutabiles vel veritatem increatam."-De Mente, Art. 6. ad 6m. I think it right to add that these words, which are part of an answer to an objection No. 6, taken from St. Augustine, do not fully represent St. Thomas's doctrine as it is set forth in the body of the article to which they are subjoined, and which concludes as follows:-" Scientiam a sensibilibus mens nostra accipit: nihilominus tamen ipsa anima in se similitudines rerum format in quantum per lumen intellectus agentis efficiuntur formæ a sensibilibus abstractæ intelligibiles actu, ut in intellectu possibili recipi possint. Et sic etiam in lumine intellectus agentis nobis est quodammodo omnei scientia originaliter indita, mediantibus uni versalibus conceptionibus, quæ statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur, per quas sicut per universalia principia judicamus de aliis et ea præcognoscimus in ipsis. Et secundum hoc illa opinio veritatem habet, quæ ponit nos ea quæ addiscimus ante in notitia habuisse." |