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 Pre-established 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 a 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 Pre-established Harmony, according to which there is no more connection 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 II., chap. iii., of his Sixth Book, having first said that matter can not 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 vent raisonner selon ses lumières, qu'il n'y a aucun esprit créé qui puisse remuer quelque corps que ce soit comme cause véritable on 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.[1]
A doctrine more precisely the reverse of the Volitional theory of causation can not 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 can not 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- ↑ In the words of Fontenelle, another celebrated Cartesian, "les philosophes aussi bien que le peuple avaient cru que l'âme et le corps agissaient réellement et physiquement l'un sur l'autre. Descartes vint, qui prouva que leur nature ne permettait point cette sorte de communication véritable, et qu'ils n'en pouvaient avoir qu'une apparente, dont Dieu était le Médiateur."—(Œuvres de Fontenelle, ed. 1767, tom. v., p. 534.)
for our uses. While I decline to express any opinion here on this vexata quæstio, I ought not to mention Mr. Powell's volume without the acknowledgment due to the philosophic spirit which pervades generally the three Essays composing it, forming in the case of one of them (the "Unity of Worlds") an honorable contrast with the other dissertations, so far as they have come under my notice, which have appeared on either side of that controversy.
