250 PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY. 6 done in it must be done immediately by God. Leibnitz thought this unworthy of God. If man can make a machine that will work by itself, how much more can God? Why may not He, like the human mechanist, retire from His work? He would be," says Leibnitz, a bad workman whose engines could not work unless he were himself standing by and giving them a helping hand; a workman who having constructed a time-piece would still be obliged himself to turn the hands to make it mark the hours.' God has made a perfect machine. It is governed by immutable laws. We cannot even suppose, as Locke and Newton did, that God sometimes interferes to restore it, or to keep it in repair. The very perfection of His workmanship must exclude every such thought. He is a Perfect Worker, and therefore His work must be perfect too. But is it perfect? Leibnitz says this is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire says it is the worst. Leibnitz says that out of an infinity of possible worlds Infinite Wisdom must have formed the best. It is not indeed a world without evils, but 'Discord, is harmony not understood All partial evil, universal good,' 'Then say not man's imperfect, heaven at fault, May, must be right as relative to all.' The Divine Mind has so arranged that all things shall work together for good. In making a contingent world God foresaw what would happen through the action of moral agents and natural causes, and provided for these accidents, that they might be over-ruled for the general welfare of the universe. There was a pre-established harmony by which all things were necessary, and yet man was left free; God 'Binding nature fast in fate Left free the human will.' This universal order we see everywhere rising above apparent disorder, and triumphing over it. How numerous are the marks of wisdom, visible in creation. How beautiful the proportions. How benevolent the intentions. How wisely are the relations calculated, and how solidly organized. The harmony in which they are maintained is permanent and universal. That harmony has an Author. It is He who has arranged that this infinite diversity of beings, shall maintain their places in the order of creation; that there be a continuous gradation and a mutual dependence among all kingdoms, species, families, and individuals. Leibnitz explaned all things by his pre-established harmony. By it the monads come together to form composite beings. By it all monads and composite beings maintain a perfect order in their existence. By it God operates upon mind and matter. He wound them up like two clocks, so that when we see a thing it is not because mind acts upon matter, or matter upon mind, but because it was pre-arranged from eternity that the object and the fact of our seeing it should occur at the same instant. The rational explication which Leibnitz gave of the world, and his vindication of the perfections of God through maintaining that after all it is a perfect world, necessarily brought him in collision with the commonly received doctrine of original sin. If the world was once better, and may be better again, how is it now the best of all possible worlds?* Leibnitz's answer has been partly anticipated in his doctrine of relative perfection, and the educing of good from seeming evil. But to meet the objection fully he divides evil into three kinds: metaphysical evil or imperfection, physical evil or suffering, and moral evil or sin. The two first he ascribes directly to God. The evil of imperfection is inevitable, it belongs to the creature. Everything created must be limited. In a relative and dependent world, weakness must be mingled with strength, and light with darkness. The uncreated alone can be free from fault, infinite, and truly perfect. As to physical evils we cannot say that God has absolutely willed them. He may have willed them conditionally, that is to say as suffering justly inflicted for our faults, or as the means of leading us to good; the true end of man and the only source of happiness. As to moral evil, Leibnitz falls back on the metaphysical doctrines of the fathers and the schoolmen. God gives us liberty. He respects that liberty in us. He sets before us good and evil, and leaves us to choose. We cannot charge human perversity upon God. He gives all things-that is true. He is the first cause of all things; the first original of the power which we have to do evil; the material element of sin as S. Augustine expressed it. But this power indispensable to every action, good or bad, is itself a boon, and in giving it God bears witness of His goodness. That then in sin which is * Voltaire, in his charming romance Candide which was written to ridicule the doctrine of Leibnitz, causes Dr. Pangloss and Candide to be arrested by the Inquisition at Lisbon for saying, among the ruins of the houses, after the earthquake, 'It is all for the best in this best of all possible worlds.' The doctors of the Inquisition thought the doctrine amounted to a denial of original sin. real and positive comes from God; that which is perfect and unreal belongs to us. On the great question of the conformity of faith and reason Leibnitz, like Spinoza, was purely Cartesian. The spirit of wisdom is the spirit of liberty. The wise man alone is free, said the ancient Stoics. Where the spirit of God is, there is liberty, said S. Paul. And what is wisdom but the Spirit of God? That which constitutes a created monad is its power of thinking. Much more must God who gives us this power possess it supremely in Himself. God is thought; yea, the very essence of all intelligence, of all reason, and all knowledge. The first original of all things is a Supreme Mind. The doctrines of religion, if they come from God, must be rational. This was a great question in Leibnitz's day, and always will be a great question with men who think earnestly and who are sincere and honest with themselves. For those who are too idle to think, or who are attached to some favorite dogma, it is convenient to decry reason and philosophy. The most enlightened theologians of the Catholic Church-Pascal, Malebranche, Bossuet, and Fenelon received what they called Catholic doctrines, as mysterious dogmas to which no principles of reason could be applied. Some even said that the more the mysteries shocked the reason and the conscience, the more devoutly they were to be believed. Baronius called reason that Hagar who was to be cast out with her profane Ishmael. Nor was this spirit confined to the Catholic Church. Luther is full of it. The more, enlightened Protestants tried to harmonize the teachings of the Bible with those of reason and conscience, the more those who had to defend the dogmatic forms of the Churches, cried out against reason. Bayle, with his encyclopedic learning, had set forth all the received doctrines of Christianity, and in a spirit of the deepest scepticism had tried to show how incompatible they all are with reason. From this armoury in later times Voltaire drew the darts, which, with winged sarcasm, he aimed at the Theologians who defied reason. Leibnitz had Bayle before him when he discoursed of the conformity of faith with reason. He maintains that what God reveals to man, must agree with what man knows to be right. God's goodness, and God's justice cannot differ from ours, except in being more perfect. There may be revealed doctrines above our reason, but not contrary to it. Even the mysteries may be explained so far as it is necessary for us to believe them. The Lutherans defended the doctrine of consubstantiation as CHRISTIANITY RATIONAL. 253 When rational. The Trinity is no contradiction in reason. we say the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet these are not three but one God, the word God has not the same meaning at the beginning of the sentence which it has at the end. In the one case it signifies a person of the Trinity and in the other, the divine Substance. The old fathers refuted the heathen religions by arguments drawn from reason; and defended the Christian doctrines as in the highest sense rational. It is beside our purpose to follow Leibnitz further. Though sprung from the school of Des Cartes, he is henceforth the representative Theist of Germany. The authorities for this chapter, besides the Histories of Philosophy mentioned at the end of the chapter on Greek Philosophy, are Morell's History of Philosophy; A Critical History of Rationalism, by Amand Saintes, translated from the French; Kahnis' German Protestantism; Œuvres de Des Cartes; M. Saisset's Essay on Religious Philosophy,' translated from the French; Benedict de Spinoza opera quae supersunt omnia edidit Carolus Hermannus Bruder, (This edition contains more than any of the previous editions.) Euvres de Spinoza traduites par Emile Saisset avec une Introduction du Traducteur; (We have nothing in English on Spinoza of any value except what Mr. Maurice has written in his Modern Philosophy, and an article by Mr. Froude in the Westminster Review, July, 1855.) Œuvres de Malebranche, especially Recherche de la Vérité and Entretiens sur la Metaphysique; Oeuvres de Leibnitz, especially Théodicée, La Monadologie, Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, Lettres entre Leibnitz et Clarke sur Dieu, L'Ame, L'Espace, La Durée, &c., and M. Bartholmess' Histoire Critique des Doctrines Religieuses de la Philosophie Moderne. CHAPTER XIII. TRANSCENDENTALISM. FROM French Idealism to German Transcendentalism we pass over a full century. That century was the remarkable eighteenth, despised as superficial by all true philosophers, lamented as Godless by all truly religious men. The philosophy of Locke, which rejected all enquiry into Being' and 'Essence,' guarded the English mind from all doctrines that savored of Pantheism or mysticism. Carried into France, that philosophy bore its legitimate fruit; an atheism such as the world had never seen. It was reserved for Germany to revive Idealism; to re-assert that there is in the human soul an overwhelming conviction of the existence of God, and with this to restore the rejected Pantheisms and neglected mysticisms of past ages. KANT. Transcendental philosophy, which is merely another name for German Idealism, takes its beginning from Kant. He, however, only laid the foundation, his successors reared the superstructure. Kant, like Locke, was a reformer in philosophy, concerning himself not so much with being, as with our modes of knowing being. So far as he was instrumental in the restoration of a philosophy of being and essence, he was only an unwilling contributor. Idealism in the hands of Hume had met the same fate that materialism had met in the hands of the Idealists. Hume returned to absolute doubt—we have ideas, but we know nothing more-we have no right to identify thought with reality. Cartesianism, as interpreted by Leibnitz, and systematized by Christian Wolf, was the orthodox philosophy of Germany. It had grown into an extravagant dogmatism, no longer tenable in presence of the searching scepticism that had come from France and England. Kant applied himself to the criticism of philosophy that he might save it, both from this dogmatism, and this scepticism. He tested the powers of the intellect, and essayed to fix the limits of reason. He tried to hold the balance between the materialist and the idealist, maintaining with the one the necessity of experience to give validity to our intellectual cognitions; with the other, that the intellect is the basis of our |