contemporaries. Although these philosophers belonged to various schools, they were characterized by the com. mon motive of seeking to constrict the area over which mathematical knowledge is valid. Pierre Gassendi1 (1593-1655), who introduced Epicureanism into mod ern Europe, opposed Descartes' corpuscular theory with Epicurean atomism; but like the refined skepticism which had been fundamental in French literature since Montaigne (1533-1592), he restricted the mechanical principle to science where it was destined to rule. The leaders of the Jansenist school at Port Royal are other examples of the influence of Descartes. In their strife with the Jesuits the Jansenists did not render any particular philosophical service except in systematizing the Cartesian principle. The so-called Port Royal logic (L'art de penser, 1662), which was edited by Arnauld (1612-1694) and Nicole (d. 1695), was the most perfect expression of the Cartesian method. The strenuous requirements of Cartesian mathematics drove the pious and unselfish Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who was an inmate of Port Royal and one of the most unselfish men of his time, to found his mysticism upon skepticism. He opened the fight against the Jesuit ethics in his famous and effective satire, Lettres provinciales. He maintained that mathematical science is restricted to space and its axioms, and that only religious feeling can penetrate reality and the various complexities of life.2

Occasionalism. However, it was among the German

1 Gassendi was a Catholic priest, a member of the Cartesian circle in Paris and in strained relations with Descartes. He was probably the only man in Europe who could with safety introduce Epicureanism to the time.

2 In this way Pascal united skepticism and mysticism with the Cartesian method. The secret of the magical and enduring influence of Pascal lay in his personality.

and Dutch scholars of the lower Rhine region that Descartes' teaching got its most sympathetic interpretation. These teachers in the universities drew attention to the weak point in the Cartesian dualism; viz., to his anthropology, to the causal relation between the human soul and body. In attempting to define this relationship specifically these thinkers in the course of time became more inclined to deny any interaction between the conscious and the extended substances. The body cannot influence mind, nor the mind the body.1

The most prominent of this group was Arnold Geulincx2 (1625–1669), whose philosophy is called Occasionalism. The soul which is the reason, can produce only clear and distinct ideas, and can see only its own products. What, then, is the source of the sensations, the confused ideas? It cannot be the soul; it cannot be the body, since the body cannot influence the soul. When, therefore, the mind seems to act on the body and the body on the mind, the only explanation is to be found in the intervening causality of God. The will does not move so heterogeneous a substance as the

1 In this group of Cartesians were Regis (1632-1705), Clauberg (1622– 1665), Louis de la Forge, Cordemoy (d. 1684), and Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698). In the hands of the Jansenists and Gassendi Cartesianism received little or no development.

2 Geulinex was born at Antwerp, and led an efficient but harassed life in the universities of Lyons and Leyden. His philosophy is best presented in his Ethics, where he says that the theoretical basis of moral conduct is found only by introspection. This was the principle which the Enlightenment of the next century used in theoretically transforming the outer world. Geulincx, however, found in introspection the impelling motive for the mind to look in the opposite direction, viz., within itself. For the soul cannot penetrate the outer world nor should it attempt to do so. The mind is shut up to its own states, and thus in its humility it should trust all that God enacts within and without. Introspection (inspectio sui) is therefore at the same time humility (despectio sui).

body; physical changes cannot produce in us our confused sensations. God is the efficient cause. Physical changes are the occasional causes for God to produce sensations in us; the will is the occasional cause for God, the efficient cause, to produce changes in the outer world.

At first Geulincx employed this theory of the intervention of God only to the relations between the human soul and body. Later he developed a physical theory and so broadened the system of occasional causes as to include all the changes in the physical world. Since no finite substance can be the efficient cause of the change in the condition of another physical body, the transition of movement from one body to another must be explained by the Godhead. Later still, as his thought developed, Geulincx replaced his conception of a universal miracle by that of an orderly arrangement which has been determined once for all by God. There is a prearranged order and no intervention in each individual case. To explain this he used the figure of the two clocks, which Leibnitz afterwards employed.1

Malebranche. The Cartesian doctrine, which had thus been developed into Occasionalism in the Netherlands, had a similar development in France. We have already seen how widespread was the influence of St. Augustine among the French Protestants and scholars. In the Congregation of the Fathers of the Oratory of Jesus, Augustinianism was united with Cartesianism

1 Occasionalism makes the causal law of nature an irrational and noncomprehensible thing. It is supernatural. All things are in God, who is the one substance. We live in a wonder world. Geulincx abandoned entirely the mathematical method of Descartes, and if he had pursued his thought to its logical conclusion he would have developed a mysticism in which the substantiality of finite things would have to be given up.

into a mysticism which was likewise very expressive of the thought of this epoch.1

Malebranche (1638-1715), perhaps the second greatest French philosopher, developed the Cartesian theory on the lines of Augustinianism.2 He held the general thesis that God is the place of minds, following by analogy Descartes' teaching that space is the place of bodies. What did this mean to Malebranche? That we are not minds, but the modes of one mind, just as to Descartes' particular bodies are modes of space. God is infinite substance and infinite existence. All finite things participate in the infinite God. Our ideas are only the modes of God's reason, our wills of his will. God illumines the human mind as the light illumines the eye.3

But how are bodies contained in God? One of Malebranche's problems was to explain the relation between God and matter. Bodies as actual substances cannot

1 This Oratory was an Order without a hierarchy. It was a free union of men in retreat from the world that they might build up the Church doctrine in a scientific way. As it represented the Augustinian and Platonic tendency within the Church, the Jesuits naturally looked askance at it. This Cistercian abbey of the Oratory was a few miles south of Paris.

2 The fact that neither Malebranche nor Spinoza was acquainted with the Occasionalism of Geulincx, and that Spinoza preceded Malebranche in the writing of his philosophy, makes us certain that the Occasionalism of Geulinex, the Idealism of Malebranche, and the Pantheism of Spinoza were three quite independent developments of Cartesianism. Malebranche's work appeared in 1675, although he knew Descartes' work in 1664. Spinoza had parts of his Ethics ready in 1661 and all parts assembled for his friends in 1663. The similarities in these three teachings prove that there was in the air, so to speak, a common trend of philosophic thought in France and the Netherlands at this time. The traditional theory is incorrect that the Cartesian philosophy got a cumulative development at the hands first of Geulincx, then of Malebranche, who passed it on to Spinoza.

3 As in Augustine's doctrine, moral responsibility was also to Malebranche an enigma and the freedom of the will insoluble. Geulinex said that God acts in me; Malebranche said that God also thinks in me.

be contained in God because He is spirit. However He is creator and He must have created bodies. How? He has in Himself the archetypal Idea of body (NeoPlatonism); and actual bodies are modes of this Idea. Our minds are the modes of God's mind; bodies are modes of the archetypal Idea in his mind.

How, then, do we, being minds, know material bodies? We can have no direct knowledge of bodies, for body and mind are mutually exclusive. There is no interaction (influxus physicus) between body and mind. While to Geulinex we have no control over bodies, to Malebranche we cannot even think bodies. Our knowledge of bodies comes only in a roundabout way through God. "We see all things in God." Our ideas partake of the archetypal Idea of body which resides in God. The actual world may exist or not. We have no means of knowing its existence; we know only its ideal existence in God.

Malebranche thus gave the Cartesian dualism a consistency by completely sundering the scientific world of matter from the religious world of mind. He made the two worlds analogous and reduced both to uniformity. He universalized Cartesianism into a complete pantheism. Indeed, he has been called "the Christian Pantheist." Accepting the Augustinian doctrine he blended self-consciousness with the consciousness of God and thus gave us a living pantheism without emanations; but it is a perpetual miracle at the expense of the actuality of matter. The contrast between this religious conception of the living omnipresence of God and Spinoza's equally religious conception of the lifeless omnipresence of God is the more marked because of their propinquity in time. Spinoza, to whom we now