the idea of an immortality upon earth in the minds and lives of men. The appeals of priesthood to the ecclesiastical idea of immortality as a moral motive may be replaced by the appeal to the idea of immortality in the visible world. Animated by this idea, men would not be subject to the fear of death, and would live lives of helpfulness to their fellow-men. To contribute to the happiness of our fellow-men is to be truly useful. Utility is the criterion of morality. All men desire happiness: every one seeks his own self-love is the fundamental law of morals. The idea of God is a superstitious offspring of ignorance, unrest, unhappiness. Men need the word "God" only to designate unknown causes. The idea of God, like that of the soul, is a consequence of the error of mentally separating soul and body, spirit and matter. It is purely negative, and useless. The world needed no creator: the attributes of the uncreated indestructible elements are adequate to its production. If there were a God, where should he be located? If in nature, he would be merely matter or motion; if outside nature, he would be immaterial, and would have no place. The idea of God is not merely useless, it is chimerical, absurd, the cause of all evil in society. - The doctrine of D'Holbach is the purest expression of materialism in modern philosophy, and the last word on the subject. § 90. Pierre Jean Cabanis1 (1757-1808). - Cabanis studied with priests at Cosnac (his birthplace); he studied also at the College of Brives, and at Paris. Though for some years student and professor of belles-lettres (and ambitious of literary distinction), he turned to the study of medicine, took his degree in 1783, became professor of hygiene in a school in Paris, administrator of hospitals, and lecturer in the National Institute. During the period of the Revolution he was closely associated with Mirabeau, labored to 1 Noack; "Rapports du Physique et du Moral," etc. gether with him for the cause of public education, and attended him as physician in his last illness. He was at one time member of the Council of Five Hundred and of the Senate. Among his friends were, besides Mirabeau, Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, Condillac, Voltaire, Franklin, and Jefferson. Works. · Cabanis' philosophical works are a series of memorials, published first (1802) under the title "Traité du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme," again (1805) under the title, "Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme." Philosophy. All knowledge, says Cabanis, is knowledge of phenomena. So-called first, or metaphysical, causes, are beyond our ken. All mental or psychical phenomena must be referred to the bodily organization as their sole cause : the mental (or moral) is only the physical considered under certain particular points of view: psychology is but an aspect of physiology. Living or animate nature is distinguished from non-living or inanimate nature by the universal characteristic of sensibility, or the capacity to feel. But there forces itself upon us the "conjecture that between animal sensibility, on the one hand, and plant impulse, and even elective affinity and attraction of gravitation, on the other, there is an analogy; that vegetable impulses, chemical attraction, universal gravitation, are a sort of instinct which, though varying and indefinite in the lower stages, develops more and more in the following, and exhibits in the higher a suggestion of will and inclination." Sensibility, then, must be regarded as of physical origin and principle. There may be sensibility without the consciousness of it, or without sensation. Sensibility arrives at consciousness in the brain, the function of which is to "think" (to work over the nervous impressions received from without), as that of the stomach is to digest; to "secrete thought," as that of the liver is to "secrete bile." But even when unconscious it may be the determining condition of movement. It is excited to activity by impressions from without these impressions are transmitted to a distributing centre, whence the nerves convey them to the muscles. The medium of conduction is, Galvanism seems to show, electricity. The sympathetic connection of the parts of the organism with one another through the nervous system renders preposterous the statue of Condillac. The operations of the organism by which perceptions, conceptions, judgments, determinations of will, are brought about, instead of occurring singly and without affecting one another, occur in connection with one another and modify one another. From the motions of the brain resulting from external or internal impressions conveyed to it, arise all operations of the soul or mind; from the impressions of outer sense arise ideas; from those of inner sense or feelings in the internal bodily organs, instincts, as, for example, the maternal instinct, which arises from the action of inner organs during the period of gestation. Through the brain (and nerves) also the mind acts on the body. Les nerfs, voilà tout l'homme! In the nervous system and especially the brain—is the identity of the physical and moral which the method of natural science postulates. Cabanis outgrew (if we may say so) this pure materialism, and held to the belief in a universal intelligence and will above the physical world. His earlier doctrine is a complete anticipation in many respects of the physiological psychology of the present moment. § 91. - There The German “Illumination" (Aufklärung).1 were in the conditions of the age in which the LeibnitzoWolffian philosophy flourished, reasons why that philosophy should (in general) give place to a philosophy the object of whose interest should be, not truth in general and for its own sake, but a limited aspect of it and for utility's sake, — why, in other words, that would-be universalistic, scientific rationalism should give place to a pronouncedly limited, merely humanistic, and even individualistic one. There 1 Zeller, Erdmann, Noack. was in the very spirit of the age in Germany a distinct subjectivism which revolted against custom, authority, and law in all matters, and sought to determine everything anew and from inner original sources. This was reinforced, as regards philosophy, by an influx of French materialism (particularly at the court of the gallicized Frederick the Great) and of English empirical psychology, deism, and moral philosophy. Even in the Leibnitzo-Wolffian philosophy, indeed, there was an element that was entirely in harmony with all this. To say nothing of a certain individualism implied in its doctrine of monads, its insistence upon common intelligibility and practicality as prime requisites of a sound philosophy, upon the paramount importance of an "enlightened understanding" as a condition to human welfare and happiness, was calculated to throw the weight of its influence with the common mind entirely in the direction of a rather narrow rationalism, much narrower than the system of Wolff (as a system which professed to take all knowledge for its province) would admit of,— a rationalism that despised "metaphysics" and "mysticism," and extolled "common sense and "sound understanding." It was therefore in every way natural that the prime object of interest in philosophy should be man, and the question of his present and future welfare and happiness, that thought should centre upon his inner experiences and his faculties; that self-contemplation and diaries, confessions, autobiographies, etc., resulting from it should become a fashion; that philosophical discussion should run mainly along the lines of empirical psychology, æsthetics (utilitarian), moral philosophy (equally utilitarian), natural theology, and should be unsystematic and not altogether profound. Such at least was the case. By far the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment, as it is usually termed, are Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing. Besides these two should be mentioned here: Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), a pronounced Woffian (except as to the doctrine of pre-established harmony), who sharply opposed to the ruling orthodox theology the teachings of a rationalistic natural theology (containing a distinction of teleology into internal and external which was adopted by Kant), and taught a pronounced eudæmonism; Johann Georg Sulzer (17201779), noted chiefly as a writer in æsthetics, but author of an ethico-physical treatise in which the ground is taken (for example) that the divine goodness appears in the fact that cherries do not ripen in the winter, because then they would not taste so well as in the summer, an instance of the superficially anthropomorphic teaching in the teleology of this period; Nicolaus Tetens (1736-1805), a LeibnitzoLockian, who was one of the "first to co-ordinate feeling as a fundamental faculty with understanding and will," and was esteemed and followed by Kant as a psychologist, and was in turn capable of appreciating and being influenced by Kant; Johann Georg Heinrich Feder (1740-1820), a representative eclectic of the "common sense," utilitarian type, who, together with Christoph Meiners, established a "Philosophical Library" for the purpose of combating the Kantian Criticism; Johann Bernhard Basedow (17231790), a successful popular pedagogist, one of whose doctrines may here be mentioned because of the contrasts it offers to a corresponding one of Kant's, viz., that the doctrines of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul must be true because belief in them is morally beneficial. We may now turn to the two most important Illuminationists, Mendelssohn and Lessing. § 92. Moses Mendelssohn2 (1729-1786). Moses Mendelssohn was the son of a Jewish teacher and author, of Dessau. He went to Berlin at the age of fourteen, and in the face of many and great difficulties gained a livelihood (as a private teacher, and as a book-keeper and manager of a silk establishment), carried on his studies, and won the recognition of thinkers and scholars. Early educated as a Jew, he was always at heart a Jew, and labored most nobly for the elevation of his race, translating portions of the Old Testament 1 See Erdmann, § 300, 11. 2 Zeller, Erdmann, Noack. |