c. As regards the turning of the soul to God, Malebranche says what

Spinoza said from his ethical point of view: “It is impossible that God should have an end other than Himself (the Holy Scriptures place this beyond doubt);” the will of God can only have the good, what is without doubt universal as its end. “Hence not only is it essential that our natural love, _i.e._ the emotion which He brings forth in our spirit, should strive after Him”—“the will is really love towards God”—“but it is likewise impossible that the knowledge and the light which He gives to our spirit should make anything else known than what is in Him,” for thought only exists in unity with God. “If God were to make a spirit and give it the sun as an idea or as the immediate object of its knowledge, God would have made this spirit and the idea of this spirit for the sun and not for Himself.” All natural love, and still more knowledge, and the desire after truth, have God as their end. “All motions of the will as regards the creatures are only determinations of motion as regards the creator.” Malebranche quotes from Augustine “that we see God even from the time we first enter upon this life (_dès cette vie_), through the knowledge that we have of eternal truths. The truth is uncreated, unchangeable, immeasurable, eternal above all things; it is true through itself, and has its perfection from no thing. It makes the creator more perfect, and all spirits naturally seek to know it: now there is nothing that has these perfections but God, and thus the truth is God. We perceive these unchangeable and eternal truths, hence we see God.” “God indeed sees but He does not feel sensuous things. If we see something sensuous, sensation and pure thought are to be found in our consciousness. Sensation is a modification of our spirit; God occasions this because He knows that our soul is capable of it. The Idea which is bound up with the sensation is in God; we see it, etc. This relation, this union of our mind and spirit with the Word (_Verbe_) of God, and of our will with His love, is that we are formed after the image of God and in His likeness.”[213] Thus the love of God consists in relating one’s affections to the Idea of God; whoever knows himself and thinks his affections clearly, loves God. We further find sundry empty litanies concerning God, a catechism for children of eight years of age respecting goodness, justice, omnipresence, the moral order of the world; in all their lifetime theologians do not get any further.

We have given the principal of Malebranche’s ideas; the remainder of his philosophy is composed partly of formal logic, and partly of empirical psychology. He passes to the treatment of errors, how they arise, how the senses, the imagination, the understanding, deceive us, and how we must conduct ourselves in order to effect a remedy. Then Malebranche goes on (T. III. L. VI. P. I. chap. i. pp. 1-3) to the rules and laws for recognizing the truth. Thus here the term Philosophy was even applied to the manner in which reflections on particular objects are drawn from formal logic and external facts.

B. SECOND DIVISION.

It was Locke who became the instrument of setting forth this entire manner of thinking in a systematic way, for he worked out Bacon’s position more fully. And if Bacon made sensuous Being to be the truth, Locke demonstrated the universal, Thought, to be present in sensuous Being, or showed that we obtained the universal, the true, from experience. From Locke a wide culture proceeds, influencing English philosophers more especially; the forms adopted by this school were various, but the principle was the same; it became a general method of regarding things in a popular way, and calls itself Philosophy, although the object of Philosophy is not to be met with here.

1. LOCKE.

When experience means that the Notion has objective actuality for consciousness, it is indeed a necessary element in the totality; but as this reflection appears in Locke, signifying as it does that we obtain truth by abstraction from experience and sensuous perception, it is utterly false, since, instead of being a moment, it is made the essence of the truth. It is no doubt true that against the hypothesis of the inward immediacy of the Idea, and against the method of setting it forth in definitions and axioms, as also against absolute substance, the demand that ideas should be represented as results, and the claims of individuality and self-consciousness, assert their rights to recognition. In the philosophy of Locke and Leibnitz, however, these necessities make themselves known in an imperfect manner only; the one fact which is common to both philosophers is that they, in opposition to Spinoza and Malebranche, take for their principle the particular, finite determinateness and the individual. According to Spinoza and Malebranche substance or the universal is the true, the sole existent, the eternal, that which is in and for itself, without origin, and of which particular things are only modifications which are conceived through substance. But hereby Spinoza has done an injury to this negative; he hence arrived at no immanent determination, for all that is determined and individual is merely annihilated in his system. Now, on the contrary, the general inclination of consciousness is to maintain the difference, partly in order to mark itself out as implicitly free in opposition to its object—Being, nature, and God, and partly in order to recognize the unity in this opposition, and from the opposition itself to make the unity emerge. But those who were the instruments of this tendency comprehended themselves but little, they had still no clear consciousness of their task, nor of the manner in which their claims could be satisfied. With Locke, this principle makes its first entrance into Philosophy in a manner so completely at variance with the inflexible undifferentiated identity of the substance of Spinoza, that the sensuous and limited, the immediate present and existent, is the main and fundamental matter. Locke does not get beyond the ordinary point of view of consciousness, viz. that objects outside of us are the real and the true. The finite is thus not grasped by Locke as absolute negativity, _i.e._ in its infinitude; this we shall not find until we come to deal in the third place with Leibnitz. It is in a higher sense that Leibnitz asserts individuality, the differentiated, to be self-existent and indeed objectless, to be true Being. That is to say, it is not according to him finite, but is yet distinguished; thus, each monad is itself the totality. Leibnitz and Locke hence likewise stand in a position of mutual independence and antagonism.

John Locke was born in 1632, at Wrington, in England. He studied for himself the Cartesian philosophy at Oxford, setting aside the scholastic philosophy which was still in vogue. He devoted himself to the study of medicine, which, however, on account of his delicate health, he never really practised. In 1664 he went with an English ambassador for a year to Berlin. After his return to England, he became acquainted with the intellectual Earl of Shaftesbury of that time, who availed himself of his medical advice, and in whose house he lived without requiring to give himself up to practice. When Lord Shaftesbury became Lord Chancellor of England, Locke received an office from him, which, however, he soon lost by a change of ministry. Owing to his dread of falling a prey to consumption, he betook himself in 1675 to Montpellier for the benefit of his health. When his patron came into power again he once more recovered the place he had lost, only to be again deposed on a fresh overthrow of this minister, and he was now compelled to flee from England. “The act by means of which Locke was driven from Oxford” (what post he held there we are not told) “was not an enactment of the University, but of James II., by whose express command, and by the peremptory authority of a written warrant, the expulsion was carried out. From the correspondence that took place, it is evident that the college submitted itself against its will to a measure which it could not resist without compromising the peace and quiet of its members.” Locke went to Holland, which was at that time the land wherein all who were obliged to effect their escape from any oppression, whether political or religious, found protection, and in which the most famous and liberal-minded men were to be met with. The Court party persecuted him even here, and by royal warrant he was ordered to be taken prisoner and sent to England; consequently he had to remain hidden with his friends. When William of Orange ascended the English throne, after the Revolution of 1688, Locke returned with him to England. He was there made Commissioner of Trade and Plantations, gave to the world his famous treatise on the Human Understanding, and finally, having withdrawn from public office on account of the delicacy of his health, he spent his remaining years in the country houses of English nobles; he died on the 28th day of October, 1704, in the seventy-third year of his life.[214]

The philosophy of Locke is much esteemed; it is still, for the most part, the philosophy of the English and the French, and likewise in a certain sense of the Germans. To put it in a few words, it asserts on the one hand that truth and knowledge rest upon experience and observation; and on the other the analysis of and abstraction from general determinations is prescribed as the method of knowledge; it is, so to speak, a metaphysical empiricism, and this is the ordinary method adopted in the sciences. In respect of method, Locke thus employs an exactly opposite system to that of Spinoza. In the methods of Spinoza and Descartes an account of the origin of ideas may be dispensed with; they are accepted at once as definitions, such as those of substance, the infinite, mode, extension, etc., all of which constitute a quite incoherent list. But we require to show where these thoughts come in, on what they are founded, and how they are verified. Thus Locke has striven to satisfy a true necessity. For he has the merit of having deserted the system of mere definitions, which were before this made the starting point, and of having attempted to make deduction of general conceptions, inasmuch as he was, for example, at the pains to show how substantiality arises subjectively from objects. That is a further step than any reached by Spinoza, who begins at once with definitions and axioms which are unverified. Now they are derived, and no longer oracularly laid down, even if the method and manner whereby this authentication is established is not the right one. That is to say, here the matter in question is merely subjective, and somewhat psychological, since Locke merely describes the methods of mind as it appears to us to be. For in his philosophy we have more especially to deal with the derivation of the general conceptions, or ideas, as he called them, that are present in our knowledge, and with their origin as they proceed from what is outwardly and inwardly perceptible. Malebranche no doubt likewise asks how we arrive at conceptions, and thus he apparently has before him the same subject of investigation as has Locke. But firstly, this psychological element in Malebranche is merely the later development, and then to him the universal or God is plainly first, while Locke commences at once with individual perceptions, and only from them does he proceed to Notions, to God. The universal to Locke is, therefore, merely a later result, the work of our minds; it is simply something pertaining to thought, as subjective. Every man undoubtedly knows that when his consciousness develops empirically, he commences from feelings, from quite concrete conditions, and that it is only later on that general conceptions come in, which are connected with the concrete of sensation by being contained therein. Space, for example, comes to consciousness later than the spacial, the species later than the individual; and it is only through the activity of my consciousness that the universal is separated from the particular of conception, feeling, etc. Feeling undoubtedly comes lowest, it is the animal mode of spirit; but in its capacity as thinking, spirit endeavours to transform feeling into its own form. Thus the course adopted by Locke is quite a correct one, but all dialectic considerations are utterly and entirely set aside, since the universal is merely analyzed from the empirical concrete. And in this matter Kant reproaches Locke with reason, the individual is not the source of universal conceptions, but the understanding.

As to Locke’s further reflections, they are very simple. Locke considers how the understanding is only consciousness, and in being so is something in consciousness, and he only recognizes the implicit in as far as it is in the same.

a. Locke’s philosophy is more especially directed against Descartes, who, like Plato, had spoken of innate ideas. Locke likewise makes special examination of the “inborn impressions (_notiones communes in foro interiori descriptæ_)” which Lord Herbert assumes in his work _De veritate_. In the first book of his work Locke combats the so-called innate ideas, theoretic as well as practical, _i.e._ the universal, absolutely existent ideas which at the same time are represented as pertaining to mind in a natural way. Locke said that we arrive first at _that_ which we call idea. By this he understands not the essential determinations of man, but conceptions which we have and which are present and exist in consciousness as such: in the same way we all have arms and legs as parts of our bodies, and the desire to eat exists in everyone. In Locke we thus have the conception of the soul as of a contentless _tabula rasa_ which is by-and-by filled with what we call experience.[215] The expression “innate principles” was at that time common, and these innate principles have sometimes been foolishly spoken of. But their true signification is that they are implicit, that they are essential moments in the nature of thought, qualities of a germ, which do not yet exist: only in relation to this last there is an element of truth in Locke’s conclusions. As diverse conceptions essentially determined they are only legitimatized by its being shown that they are implied in the essential nature of thought; but as propositions which hold good as axioms, and conceptions which are immediately accepted as laid down in definitions, they undoubtedly possess the form of that which is present and inborn. As they are regarded they are bound to have value in and for themselves; but this is a mere assertion. From the other point of view the question of whence they come is a futile one. Mind is undoubtedly determined in itself, for it is the explicitly existent Notion; its development signifies the coming to consciousness. But the determinations which it brings forth from itself cannot be called innate, for this development must be occasioned by an external, and only on that does the activity of mind react, in order that it may for the first time become conscious of its reality.

The grounds on which Locke refutes innate ideas are empirical. “There is nothing more commonly taken for granted than that there are certain principles, both speculative and practical, universally agreed upon by all mankind: which therefore, they argue, must needs be constant impressions which the souls of men receive in their first Beings.” But this universal consent is not to be found. We may instance the proposition, “Whatsoever is, is; and It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be; which of all others I think have the most allowed title to innate.” But this proposition does not hold good for the Notion; there is nothing either in heaven or earth which does not contain Being and non-Being. Many men, “All children and idiots,” says Locke, “have not the least apprehension of these propositions.” “No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of.... ’Tis usually answered, That all men know and assent to them” (the propositions) “when they come to the use of reason.... If it be meant that the use of reason assists us in the knowledge of these maxims, it would prove them not to be innate.” Reason is said to be the deriving from principles already known unknown truths. How then should the application of reason be required to discover supposed innate principles? This is a weak objection, for it assumes that by innate ideas we understand those which man possesses in consciousness as immediately present. But development in consciousness is something altogether different from any inherent determination of reason, and therefore the expression innate idea is undoubtedly quite wrong. Innate principles must be found “clearest and most perspicuous nearest the fountain, in children and illiterate people, who have received least impression from foreign opinion.” Locke gives further reasons of a similar nature, more especially employing those which are of a practical kind—the diversity in moral judgments, the case of those who are utterly wicked and depraved, devoid of sense of right or conscience.[216]

b. In the second book Locke goes on to the next stage, to the origin of ideas, and seeks to demonstrate this process from experience—this is the main object of his efforts. The reason that the positive point of view which he opposes to any derivation from within, is so false, is that he derives his conceptions only from outside and thus maintains Being-for-another, while he quite neglects the implicit. He says: “Every man being conscious to himself, that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about, while thinking, being the ideas that are there; ’tis past doubt, that men have in their minds several ideas, such as those expressed in the words, whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others.” Idea here signifies both the ordinary conception and thought; we understand something quite different by the word idea. “It is in the first place then to be inquired, how he comes by them” (these ideas)? Innate ideas have already been refuted. “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished?... To this I answer in a word, from Experience: in that all our knowledge is founded.”[217]

As to the question in point we must in the first place say that it is true that man commences with experience if he desires to arrive at thought. Everything is experienced, not merely what is sensuous, but also what excites and stimulates my mind. Consciousness thus undoubtedly obtains all conceptions and Notions from experience and in experience; the only question is what we understand by experience. In a usual way when this is spoken of the idea of nothing particular is conveyed; we speak of it as of something quite well known. But experience is nothing more than the form of objectivity; to say that it is something which is in consciousness means that it has objective form for consciousness or that consciousness experiences it, it sees it as an objective. Experience thus signifies immediate knowledge, perception, _i.e._ I myself must have and be something, and the consciousness of what I have and am is experience. Now there is no question as to this, that whatever we know, of whatever kind it may be, must be experienced, that rests in the conception of the thing. It is absurd to say that one knows anything which is not in experience. I undoubtedly know men, for instance, from experience, without requiring to have seen them all, for I have, as man, activity and will, a consciousness respecting what I am and what others are. The rational exists, _i.e._ it is as an existent for consciousness, or this last experiences it; it must be seen and heard, it must be there or have been there as a phenomenon in the world. This connection of universal with objective is however in the second place not the only form, that of the implicit is likewise absolute and essential—that is, the apprehension of what is experienced or the abrogation of this apparent other-being and the knowledge of the necessity of the thing through itself. It is now quite a matter of indifference whether anything is accepted as something experienced, as a succession of empirical ideas, if one may so say, or conceptions; or whether the succession is a succession of thoughts, _i.e._ implicitly existent.

Locke treats of the various kinds of these ideas imperfectly and empirically merely.

α. According to Locke simple ideas arise partly from outward, and partly from inward experience. For experiences, he says, are in the first place sensations; the other side is reflection, the inward determinations of consciousness.[218] From sensation, from the organs of sight for instance, the conceptions of colour, light, etc., arise; there further arises from outward experience the idea of impenetrability, of figure, rest, motion and such like. From reflections come the ideas of faith, doubt, judgment, reasoning, thinking, willing, etc.; from both combined, pleasure, pain, etc. This is a very commonplace account of the matter.

β. After Locke has presupposed experience, he goes on to say that it is the understanding which now discovers and desires the universal—the complex ideas. The Bishop of Worcester made the objection that “If the idea of substance be grounded upon plain and evident reason, then we must allow an idea of substance which comes not in by sensation or reflection.” Locke replies: “General ideas come not into the mind by sensation or reflection, but are the creatures or inventions of the understanding. The mind makes them from ideas which it has got by sensation and reflection.” The work of the mind now consists in bringing forth from several simple so-called ideas a number of new ones, by means of its working upon this material through comparing, distinguishing and contrasting it, and finally through separation or abstraction, whereby the universal conceptions, such as space, time, existence, unity and diversity, capacity, cause and effect, freedom, necessity, take their rise. “The mind in respect of its simple ideas is wholly passive, and receives them all from the existence and operation of things, such as sensation or reflection offers them, without being able to make any one idea.” But “the mind often exercises an active power in making these several combinations. For it being once furnished with simple ideas it can put them together in several combinations.” According to Locke therefore thought itself is not the essence of the soul, but one of its powers and manifestations. He maintains thought to be existent in consciousness as conscious thought, and thus brings it forward as a fact in his experience, that we do not always think. Experience demonstrates dreamless sleep when the sleep is profound. Locke quotes the example of a man who remembered no dream until he had reached his twenty-fifth year. It is as in the Xenien,—[219]

Oft schon war ich, und hab’ wirklich an gar nichts gedacht.

That is to say, my object is not a thought. But sensuous perception and recollection are thought, and thought is truth.[220] Locke, however, places the reality of the understanding only in the formal activity of constituting new determinations from the simple conceptions received by means of perception, through their comparison and the combination of several into one; it is the apprehension of the abstract sensations which are contained in the objects. Locke likewise distinguishes (Bk. II. chap. xi. § 15-17) between pure and mixed modes. Pure modes are simple determinations such as power, number, infinitude; in such expressions as causality we reach, on the other hand, a mixed mode.

Locke now explains in detail the manner in which the mind, from the simple ideas of experience, reaches more complex ideas; but this derivation of general determinations from concrete perception is most unmeaning, trivial, tiresome and diffuse; it is entirely formal, an empty tautology. For instance we form the general conception of space from the perception of the distance of bodies by means of sight and feeling.[221] Or in other words, we perceive a definite space, abstract from it, and then we have the conception of space generally; the perception of distances gives us conceptions of space. This however is no deduction, but only a setting aside of other determinations; since distance itself is really space, mind thus determines space from space. Similarly we reach the notion of time through the unbroken succession of conceptions during our waking moments,[222] _i.e._ from determinate time we perceive time in general. Conceptions follow one another in a continual succession; if we set aside the particular element that is present we thereby receive the conception of time. Substance (which Locke does not accept in so lofty a sense as Spinoza), a complex idea, hence arises from the fact that we often perceive simple ideas such as blue, heavy, etc., in association with one another. This association we represent to ourselves as something which so to speak supports these simple ideas, or in which they exist.[223] Locke likewise deduces the general conception of power.[224] The determinations of freedom and necessity, cause and effect, are then derived in a similar way. “In the notice that our senses take of the constant vicissitude of things, we cannot but observe, that several particulars, both qualities and substance, begin to exist; and that they receive this their existence from the due application and operation of some other being. From this observation we get our ideas of cause and effect,” for instance when wax is melted by the fire.[225] Locke goes on to say: “Every one, I think, finds in himself a power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several actions in himself. From the consideration of the extent of this power of the mind over the actions of the man, which every one finds in himself, arise the ideas of liberty and necessity.”[226]

We may say that nothing can be more superficial than this derivation of ideas. The matter itself, the essence, is not touched upon at all. A determination is brought into notice which is contained in a concrete relationship; hence the understanding on the one hand abstracts and on the other establishes conclusions. The basis of this philosophy is merely to be found in the transference of the determinate to the form of universality, but it was just this fundamental essence that we had to explain. As to this Locke confesses of space, for example, that he does not know what it really is.[227] This so-called analysis by Locke of complex conceptions, and his so-called explanation of the same, has, on account of its uncommon clearness and lucidity of expression, found universal acceptance. For what can be clearer than to say that we have the notion of time because we perceive time, if we do not actually see it, and that we conceive of space because we see it? The French have accepted this most readily and they have carried it further still; their _Idéologie_ contains nothing more nor less.

γ. When Locke starts by saying that everything is experience and we abstract for ourselves from this experience general conceptions regarding objects and their qualities, he makes a distinction in respect of external qualities which was before this made by Aristotle (De anima, II. 6), and which we likewise met with in Descartes (_supra_, pp. 245, 246). That is to say, Locke distinguishes between primary and secondary qualities; the first pertain to the objects themselves in truth, the others are not real qualities, but are founded on the nature of the organs of sensation. Primary qualities are mechanical, like extension, solidity, figure, movement, rest; these are qualities of the corporeal, just as thought is the quality of the spiritual. But the determinations of our individual feelings such as colours, sounds, smells, taste, etc., are not primary.[228] In Descartes’ case this distinction has however another form, for the second class of these determinations is defined by him in such a way as that they do not constitute the essence of body, while Locke says that they exist for sensation, or fall within existence as it is for consciousness. Locke, however, no doubt reckons figure, etc., as still pertaining to reality, but by so doing nothing is ascertained as to the nature of body. In Locke a difference here appears between the implicit and being ‘for-another,’ in which he declares the moment of ‘for-another’ to be unreal—and yet he sees all truth in the relation of ‘for-another’ only.