ourselves at all, or we should be conscious of ourselves as infinite. The image of God is so impressed by him upon us, that we “conceive that resemblance wherein the idea of God is contained by the same faculty whereby we are conscious of ourselves.” In other words, our consciousness of ourselves is at the same time consciousness of our finitude, and hence of our relation to a being who is infinite.
The principle which underlies the reasoning of Descartes is that to be conscious of a limit, is to transcend it. We could not feel the limits either upon our thought or upon our existence, we could not doubt or desire, if we did not already apprehend something beyond these limits. Nay, we could not be conscious of our existence as individual selves if we were not conscious of that which is not ourselves, and of a unity in which both self and not-self are included. Our individual life is therefore to us as self-conscious beings a part of a wider universal life. Doubt and aspiration are but the manifestation of this essential division and contradiction of a nature which, as conscious of itself, is at the same time conscious of the whole in which it is a part. And as the existence of a self and its consciousness are one, so we may say that a thinking being is not only an individual, but always in some sense identified with that universal unity of being to which it is essentially related.
If Descartes had followed out this line of thought, he would have been led at once to the pantheism of Spinoza, if not beyond it. As it is, he is on the verge of contradiction with himself when he speaks of the consciousness of God as in some sense prior to the consciousness of self. How can anything be prior to the first principle of knowledge? It is no answer to say that the consciousness of God is the principium essendi, while the consciousness of self is the principium cognoscendi. For, if the idea of God is prior to the idea of self, knowledge must begin where existence begins, with God. The words “in some sense,” with which Descartes qualifies his assertion of the priority of the idea of God, only betray his hesitation and his partial consciousness of the contradiction in which he is involved. Some of Descartes’s critics presented this difficulty to him in another form, and accused him of reasoning in a circle when he said that it is because God cannot lie that we are certain that our clear and distinct ideas do not deceive us. The very existence of the conscious self, the cogito, ergo sum, which is the first of all truths and therefore prior in certitude to the existence of God, is believed only because of the clearness and distinctness with which we apprehend it. How then, they argued, could God’s truthfulness be our security for a principle which we must use in order to prove the being of God? The answer of Descartes is somewhat lame. We cannot doubt any self-evident principle, or even any truth based on a self-evident principle, when we are directly contemplating it in all the necessity of its evidence; it is only when we forget or turn away from this evidence, and begin to think of the possibility of a deceitful God, that a doubt arises which cannot be removed except by the conviction that God is true.[1] It can scarcely be said that this is a dignus vindice nodus, or that God can fitly appear as a kind of second-best resource to the forgetful spirit that has lost its direct hold on truth and its faith in itself. God, truth, and the human spirit are thus conceived as having merely external and accidental relations with each other. What Descartes, however, is really expressing in this exoteric way is simply that beneath and beyond all particular truths lies the great general truth of the unity of thought and existence. In contemplating particular truth, we may not consciously relate it to this unity, but when we have to defend ourselves against scepticism we are forced to realize this relation. The ultimate answer to any attack upon a special aspect or element of truth must be to show that the fate of truth itself, the very possibility of knowledge, is involved in the rejection of it, and that we cannot doubt it without doubting reason itself. But to doubt reason is, in the language of Descartes, to doubt the truthfulness of God, for, in his view, the idea of God is involved in the very constitution of reason. Taken in this way then, the import of Descartes’s answer is, that the consciousness of self, like every other particular truth, is not at first seen to rest on the consciousness of God, but that when we realize what it means we see that it does so rest. But if this be so, then in making the consciousness of self his first principle of knowledge, Descartes has stopped short of the truth. It can only be the first principle if it is understood, not as the consciousness of the individual self, but in a sense in which the consciousness of self is identical with the consciousness of God.
Descartes, however, is far from a clear apprehension of the ultimate unity of thought and being, which nevertheless he strives to find in God. Beginning with an absolute separation of the res cogitans from the res extensa, he is continually falling back into dualism just when he seemed to have escaped from it. Even in God the absolute unity, idea and reality fall asunder; our idea of God is not God in us, it is only an idea of which God’s existence is the cause. But the category of causality, if it forms a bridge between different things, as here between knowing and being, at the same time repels them from each other. It is a category of external relation which may be adequate to express the relation of the finite to the finite, but not the relation of the finite to the infinite. We cannot conceive God as the cause of our idea of him, without making God a purely objective and therefore finite existence. Nor is the case better when we turn to the so-called ontological argument,—that existence is necessarily involved in the idea of God, just as the property of having its angles equal to two right angles is involved in the idea of a triangle. If indeed we understood this as meaning that thought transcends the distinction between itself and existence, and that therefore existence cannot be a thing in itself out of thought, but must be an intelligible world that exists as such only for the thinking being, there is some force in the argument. But this meaning we cannot find in Descartes, or to find it we must make him inconsistent with himself. He was so far from having quelled the phantom “thing in itself,” that he treated matter in space as such a thing, and thus confused externality of space with externality to the mind. On this dualistic basis, the ontological argument becomes a manifest paralogism, and lies open to all the objections that Kant brought against it. That the idea of God involves existence, proves only that God, if he exists at all, exists by the necessity of his being. But the link that shall bind thought to existence is still wanting, and, in consistency with the other presuppositions of Descartes, it cannot be supplied.
But again, even if we allow to Descartes that God is the unity of thought and being, we must still ask what kind of unity? Is it a mere generic unity, reached by abstraction, and therefore leaving out all the distinguishing characteristics of the particulars under it? Or is it a concrete unity to which the particular elements are subordinated, but in which they are nevertheless included? To answer this question, we need only look at the relation of the finite to the infinite, as it is expressed in that passage already quoted, and in many others. Descartes always speaks of the infinite as a purely affirmative or positive existence, and of the finite in so far as it is distinguished from the infinite, as purely negative, or in other words as a nonentity. “I am,” he says, “a mean between God and nothing, between the Supreme Being and not-being. In so far as I am created by God, there is nothing in me that can deceive me or lead me into error. But on the other hand, if I consider myself as participating in nothingness or not-being, inasmuch as I am not myself the Supreme Being, but in many ways defective, I find myself exposed to an infinity of errors. Thus error as such is not something real that depends on God, but simply a defect; I do not need to explain it by means of any special faculty bestowed on me by God, but merely by the fact that the faculty for discerning truth from error with which he has endowed me, is not infinite.”[2] But if we follow out this principle to its logical result, we must say not only that error is a consequence of finitude, but also that the very existence of the finite as such is an error or illusion. All finitude, all determination, according to the well-known Spinozistic aphorism, is negation, and negation cannot constitute reality. To know the reality of things, therefore, we have to abstract from their limits, or in other words, the only reality is the infinite. Finite being, qua finite, has no existence, and finite self-consciousness, consciousness of a self in opposition to or limited by a not-self, is an illusion. But Descartes does not thus reason. He does not see “anything in the nature of the infinite which should exclude the existence of finite things.” “What,” he asks, “would become of the power of that imaginary infinite if it could create nothing? Perceiving in ourselves the power of thinking, we can easily conceive that there should be a greater intelligence elsewhere. And even if we should suppose that intelligence increased ad infinitum, we need not fear that our own would be lessened. And the same is true of all other attributes which we ascribe to God, even of his power, provided only that we do not suppose that the power in us is not subjected to God’s will. In all points, therefore, he is infinite without any exclusion of created things.”[3] The truth of this view we need not dispute; the question is as to its consistency with Cartesian principles. It may be a higher idea of God to conceive him as revealing himself in and to finite creatures; but it is a different idea from that which is implied in Descartes’s explanations of error. It is an inconsistency that brings Descartes nearer to Christianity, and nearer, it may also be said, to a true metaphysic; but it is not the less an inconsistency with his fundamental principles, which necessarily disappears in their subsequent development. To conceive the finite as constituted not merely by the absence of some of the positive elements of the infinite, but as in necessary unity with the infinite; to conceive the infinite as not merely that which has no limits or determinations, but as that which is self-determined and self-manifesting, which through all finitude and manifestation returns upon itself, may not be erroneous. But it would not be difficult to show that the adoption of such a conception involves the rejection or modification of almost every doctrine of the Cartesian system.
In connexion with this inconsistency we may notice the very different relations in which Descartes conceives mind on the one side and matter on the other, to stand towards God, who yet is the cause of both, and must therefore, by the principle of causality, contain in himself all that is in both. Matter and mind are to Descartes absolute opposites. Whatever can Mind and matter.be asserted of mind can be denied of matter, whatever can be asserted of matter can be denied of mind. Matter is passive, mind is active; matter is extended, and therefore divisible ad infinitum;
