A System of Logic · John Stuart Mill
NOTE SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING CHAPTER.
The author of the Second Burnett Prize Essay (Dr. Tulloch), who has employed a considerable number of pages in controverting the doctrines of the preceding chapter, has somewhat surprised me by denying a fact, which I imagined too well known to require proof--that there have been philosophers who found in physical explanations of phenomena the same complete mental satisfaction which we are told is only given by volitional explanation, and others who denied the Volitional Theory on the same ground of inconceivability on which it is defended. The assertion of the Essayist is countersigned still more positively by an able reviewer of the Essay:[27] "Two illustrations," says the reviewer, "are advanced by Mr. Mill: the case of Thales and Anaximenes, stated by him to have maintained, the one Moisture and the other Air to be the origin of all things; and that of Descartes and Leibnitz, whom he asserts to have found the action of Mind upon Matter the grand inconceivability. In counterstatement as to the first of these cases the author shows--what we believe now hardly admits of doubt--that the Greek philosophers distinctly recognised as beyond and above their primal material source, the [Greek: nous], or Divine Intelligence, as the efficient and originating Source of all: and as to the second, by proof that it was the _mode_, not the _fact_, of that action on matter, which was represented as inconceivable."
A greater quantity of historical error has seldom been comprised in a single sentence. With regard to Thales, the assertion that he considered water as a mere material in the hands of [Greek: nous] rests on a passage of Cicero _de Naturâ Deorum_: and whoever will refer to any of the accurate historians of philosophy, will find that they treat this as a mere fancy of Cicero, resting on no authority, opposed to all the evidence; and make surmises as to the manner in which Cicero may have been led into the error. (See Ritter, vol. i. p. 211, 2nd ed.; Brandis, vol. i. pp. 118-9, 1st ed.; Preller, _Historia Philosophiæ Græco-Romanæ_, p. 10. "Schiefe Ansicht, durchaus zu verwerfen;" "augenscheinlich folgernd statt zu berichten;" "quibus vera sententia Thaletis plane detorquetur;" are the expressions of these writers.) As for Anaximenes, he, even according to Cicero, maintained, not that air was the material out of which God made the world, but that the air was a god: "Anaximenes aëra deum statuit:" or according to St. Augustine, that it was the material out of which the gods were made; "non tamen ab ipsis [Diis] aërem factum, sed ipsos ex aëre ortos credidit." Those who are not familiar with the metaphysical terminology of antiquity, must not be misled by finding it stated that Anaximenes attributed [Greek: psychê] (translated _soul_, or _life_) to his universal element, the air. The Greek philosophers acknowledged several kinds of [Greek: psychê], the nutritive, the sensitive, and the intellective.[28] Even the moderns with admitted correctness attribute life to plants. As far as we can make out the meaning of Anaximenes, he made choice of Air as the universal agent, on the ground that it is perpetually in motion, without any apparent cause external to itself: so that he conceived it as exercising spontaneous force, and as the principle of life and activity in all things, men and gods inclusive. If this be not representing it as the Efficient Cause, the dispute altogether has no meaning.
If either Anaximenes, or Thales, or any of their cotemporaries, had held the doctrine that [Greek: nous] was the Efficient Cause, that doctrine could not have been reputed, as it was throughout antiquity, to have originated with Anaxagoras. The testimony of Aristotle, in the first book of his Metaphysics, is perfectly decisive with respect to these early speculations. After enumerating four kinds of causes, or rather four different meanings of the word Cause, viz. the Essence of a thing, the Matter of it, the Origin of Motion (Efficient Cause), and the End or Final Cause, he proceeds to say, that most of the early philosophers recognised only the second kind of Cause, the Matter of a thing, [Greek: tas en hylês eidei monas ôêthêsan archas einai pantôn]. As his first example he specifies Thales, whom he describes as taking the lead in this view of the subject, [Greek: ho tês toiautês archêgos philosophias], and goes on to Hippon, Anaximenes, Diogenes (of Apollonia), Hippasus of Metapontum, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. Anaxagoras, however, (he proceeds to say,) taught a different doctrine, as we know, and it is _alleged_ that Hermotimus of Clazomenæ taught it before him.
Anaxagoras represented, that even if these various theories of the universal material were true, there would be need of some other cause to account for the transformations of the material, since the material cannot originate its own changes: [Greek: ou gar dê to ge hypokeimenon auto poiei metaballein heauto; legô d' oion oute to xylon oute ho chalkos aitios tou metaballein hekateron autôn, oude poiei to men xylon klinên ho de chalkos andrianta, all' heteron ti tês metabolês aition], viz., the other kind of cause [Greek: hothen hê archê tês kinêseôs]--an Efficient Cause. Aristotle expresses great approbation of this doctrine (which he says made its author appear the only sober man among persons raving, [Greek: oion nêphôn ephanê par' eikê legontas tous proteron]); but while describing the influence which it exercised over subsequent speculation, he remarks that the philosophers against whom this, as he thinks, insuperable difficulty was urged, had not felt it to be any difficulty: [Greek: ouden edyscheranan en heautois]. It is surely unnecessary to say more in proof of the matter of fact which Dr. Tulloch and his reviewer deny.
Having pointed out what he thinks the error of these early speculators in not recognising the need of an efficient cause, Aristotle goes on to mention two other efficient causes to which they might have had recourse, instead of intelligence: [Greek: tychê], chance, and [Greek: to automaton], spontaneity. He indeed puts these aside as not sufficiently worthy causes for the order in the universe, [Greek: oud' au tô automatô kai tê tychê tosouton epitrepsai pragma kalôs eichen]: but he does not reject them as incapable of producing any effect, but only as incapable of producing _that_ effect. He himself recognises [Greek: tychê] and [Greek: to automaton] as co-ordinate agents with Mind in producing the phenomena of the universe; the department allotted to them being composed of all the classes of phenomena which are not supposed to follow any uniform law. By thus including Chance among efficient causes, Aristotle fell into an error which philosophy has now outgrown, but which is by no means so alien to the spirit even of modern speculation as it may at first sight appear. Up to quite a recent period philosophers went on ascribing, and many of them have not yet ceased to ascribe, a real existence to the results of abstraction.
Chance could make out as good a title to that dignity as many other of the mind's abstract creations: it had had a name given to it, and why should it not be a reality? As for [Greek: to automaton], it is recognised even yet as one of the modes of origination of phenomena, by all those thinkers who maintain what is called the Freedom of the Will. The same self-determining power which that doctrine attributes to volitions, was supposed by the ancients to be possessed also by some other natural phenomena: a circumstance which throws considerable light on more than one of the supposed invincible necessities of belief. I have introduced it here, because this belief of Aristotle, or rather of the Greek philosophers generally, is as fatal as the doctrines of Thales and the Ionic school, to the theory that the human mind is compelled by its constitution to conceive volition as the origin of all force, and the efficient cause of all phenomena.[29]
With regard to the modern philosophers (Leibnitz and the Cartesians) whom I had cited as having maintained that the action of mind upon matter, so far from being the only conceivable origin of material phenomena, is itself inconceivable; the attempt to rebut this argument by asserting that the mode, not the fact, of the action of mind on matter was represented as inconceivable, is an abuse of the privilege of writing confidently about authors without reading them: for any knowledge whatever of Leibnitz would have taught those who thus speak of him, that the inconceivability of the mode, and the impossibility of the thing, were in his mind convertible expressions. What was his famous Principle of the Sufficient Reason, the very corner stone of his philosophy, from which the Preestablished Harmony, the doctrine of Monads, and all the opinions most characteristic of Leibnitz, were corollaries? It was, that nothing exists, the existence of which is not capable of being proved and explained _à priori_; the proof and explanation in the case of contingent facts being derived from the nature of their causes; which could not be the causes unless there was something in their nature showing them to be capable of producing those particular effects.
And this "something" which accounts for the production of physical effects, he was able to find in many physical causes, but could not find it in any finite minds, which therefore he unhesitatingly asserted to be incapable of producing any physical effects whatever. "On ne saurait concevoir," he says, "une action réciproque de la matière et de l'intelligence l'une sur l'autre," and there is therefore (he contends) no choice but between the Occasional Causes of the Cartesians, and his own Preestablished Harmony, according to which there is no more connexion between our volitions and our muscular actions than there is between two clocks which are wound up to strike at the same instant. But he felt no similar difficulty as to physical causes: and throughout his speculations, as in the passage I have already cited respecting gravitation, he distinctly refuses to consider as part of the order of nature any fact which is not explicable from the nature of its physical cause.
With regard to the Cartesians (not Descartes; I did not make that mistake, though the reviewer of Dr. Tulloch's Essay attributes it to me) I take a passage almost at random from Malebranche, who is the best known of the Cartesians, and, though not the inventor of the system of Occasional Causes, is its principal expositor. In Part 2, chap. 3, of his Sixth Book, having first said that matter cannot have the power of moving itself, he proceeds to argue that neither can mind have the power of moving it. "Quand on examine l'idée que l'on a de tous les esprits finis, on ne voit point de liaison nécessaire entre leur volonté et le mouvement de quelque corps que ce soit, on voit au contraire qu'il n'y en a point, et qu'il n'y en peut avoir;" (there is nothing in the idea of finite mind which can account for its causing the motion of a body;) "on doit aussi conclure, si on veut raisonner selon ses lumières, qu'il n'y a aucun esprit créé qui puisse remuer quelque corps que ce soit comme cause véritable ou principale, de même que l'on a dit qu'aucun corps ne se pouvait remuer soi-même:" thus the idea of Mind is according to him as incompatible as the idea of Matter with the exercise of active force. But when, he continues, we consider not a created but a Divine Mind, the case is altered; for the idea of a Divine Mind includes omnipotence; and the idea of omnipotence does contain the idea of being able to move bodies. Thus it is the nature of omnipotence which renders the motion of bodies even by the divine mind credible or conceivable, while, so far as depended on the mere nature of mind, it would have been inconceivable and incredible. If Malebranche had not believed in an omnipotent being, he would have held all action of mind on body to be a demonstrated impossibility.[30]
A doctrine more precisely the reverse of the Volitional theory of causation cannot well be imagined. The volitional theory is, that we know by intuition or by direct experience the action of our own mental volitions on matter; that we may hence infer all other action upon matter to be that of volition, and might thus know, without any other evidence, that matter is under the government of a divine mind. Leibnitz and the Cartesians, on the contrary, maintain that our volitions do not and cannot act upon matter, and that it is only the existence of an all-governing Being, and that Being omnipotent, which can account for the sequence between our volitions and our bodily actions. When we consider that each of these two theories, which, as theories of causation, stand at the opposite extremes of possible divergence from one another, invokes not only as its evidence, but as its sole evidence, the absolute inconceivability of any theory but itself, we are enabled to measure the worth of this kind of evidence; and when we find the Volitional theory entirely built upon the assertion that by our mental constitution we are compelled to recognise our volitions as efficient causes, and then find other thinkers maintaining that we know that they are not, and cannot be such causes, and cannot conceive them to be so, I think we have a right to say, that this supposed law of our mental constitution does not exist.
Dr. Tulloch (pp. 45-7) thinks it a sufficient answer to this, that Leibnitz and the Cartesians were Theists, and believed the will of God to be an efficient cause. Doubtless they did, and the Cartesians even believed, though Leibnitz did not, that it is the only such cause. Dr. Tulloch mistakes the nature of the question. I was not writing on Theism, as Dr. Tulloch is, but against a particular theory of causation, which if it be unfounded, can give no effective support to Theism or to anything else. I found it asserted that volition is the only efficient cause, on the ground that no other efficient cause is conceivable. To this assertion I oppose the instances of Leibnitz and of the Cartesians, who affirmed with equal positiveness that volition as an efficient cause is itself not conceivable, and that omnipotence, which renders all things conceivable, can alone take away the impossibility. This I thought, and think, a conclusive answer to the argument on which this theory of causation avowedly depends. But I certainly did not imagine that Theism was bound up with that theory; nor expected to be charged with denying Leibnitz and the Cartesians to be Theists because I denied that they held the theory.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.