Aquinas worked out his ideas at a time when the philosophy of Aristotle was again becoming familiar in western Europe after a period of being largely forgotten, and many of his detailed theories show Aristotelian influence. He assumed the general truth of the Aristotelian picture of the natural world and the general correctness of Aristotle’s way of interpreting natural phenomena. He also took over many of Aristotle’s ideas in the fields of ethics and politics. He gave the latter, however, a distinctively different twist by making the final end of man not philosophical contemplation but the attainment of the beatific vision of God; it was Christian rather than Greek ideas that finally shaped his view of the summum bonum (“greatest good”). Similarly, his celebrated proofs of God’s existence proceeded against a background that is obviously Aristotelian but that need not be presupposed for their central thought to have validity. Thomism can certainly be seen, and historically must be seen, as the system of Aristotle adapted to Christian purposes. It is important, however, to stress that the adaptation resulted in something new, a distinctive way of looking at the world that still has its adherents and still commands the respect of philosophers. Cartesianism
René Descartes worked out his metaphysics at a time of rapid advance in human understanding of the physical world. He adopted from Galileo the view that physical things are not what they are commonly taken to be on the strength of sense experience—namely, possessors of “secondary” properties such as colour, smell, and feel—but are rather objects characterized only by the “primary” qualities of shape, size, mass, and mobility. To understand why a constituent of the physical world behaves as it does, what should be asked is where it is, how large it is, in what direction it is moving, and at what speed; once these questions are answered, its further properties will become intelligible. Descartes held further that all change and movement in the physical world is to be explained in purely mechanical terms. God was needed to give initial impetus to the physical system as a whole, but once it had got going it proceeded of its own accord. To pretend, as the Aristotelians had, to discern purposes in nature was to make the impious claim to insight into God’s mind. Descartes applied this theory to the movements of animals as much as to those of inanimate bodies; he thought of both as mere automatons, pushed and pulled about by forces over which they had no control.
Although Descartes thus acquiesced in, indeed emphasized, the mechanistic tendencies of contemporary science, he was far from being a Materialist. Besides material substance there was also thinking substance, and this was in fact wholly different from matter both in kind and in operation. Bodies had as their essence to occupy space; minds were not in space at all. Bodies, again, were determined in their movements; minds were in some sense free, because they possessed will as well as intelligence. Descartes was less explicit on this point than he might have been; the principles on which mental substance is supposed to operate are not made clear, with the result that critics have said that Descartes thought of mental activities in para-mechanical terms. Whether this is true or not, however, there was no reason for Descartes to be in any special difficulty over this point. All he needed to urge was that minds act in the strict sense of the term, which is to say that they take cognizance of their situation and respond more or less intelligently to it. That they can do this differentiates them fundamentally from material things, which are caused to do what they do and are entirely unaffected by rational considerations.
The main crux in Descartes’s metaphysics was the difficulty of bringing together the two orders of being, once they were separated. Mention has already been made of the expedient to which later Cartesians were driven in trying to solve this difficulty: in effect, they made the unity of the universe a continuing miracle, dependent upon the grace of God. It is worth mentioning here another move in the same area that many have found instructive. Kant, who was in some respects both a latterday Cartesian and a latter-day Platonist, argued that human activities could be looked at from two points of view. From the theoretical standpoint they were simply a set of happenings, brought about by antecedent events in precisely the same way as occurrences in the natural world. From the standpoint of the agent, however, they must be conceived as the product of rational decision, as acts proper for which the agent could be held responsible. The moment he began to act, a man transferred himself in thought from the phenomenal world of science to an intelligible world of pure spirit; he necessarily acted as if he were not determined by natural forces. The transference, however, was a transference in thought only (to claim any knowledge of the intelligible world was quite unjustified), and because of this the problem of the unity of the universe was dissolved. There was no contradiction in a man’s thinking of himself both as a subject for science and as a free originator of action. Contradiction would appear only if he were present in both respects in an identical capacity. But appeal to the doctrine of the two standpoints was thought by Kant to rule this out.
It is only with some hesitation that one can speak of Kant as having put forward a metaphysics. He was in general highly suspicious of claims to metaphysical knowledge, and a principal aim of his philosophy was to expose the confusions into which professing metaphysicians had fallen. Nevertheless, it is clear that Kant had metaphysical convictions, for all his denial of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge; he was committed to the view that men can conceive a non-natural as well as a natural order and must necessarily take the former to be real when they act. The language he used—particularly his talk about man as phenomenon and man as noumenon—is not to the taste of present-day philosophers, but the thought behind it certainly survives. It is in this form, indeed, that Cartesianism may still be said to present a serious intellectual challenge. Idealism
Descartes and Kant were both adherents of metaphysical dualism, though they worked out their dualisms in interestingly different ways. Many thinkers, however, find dualism unsatisfactory in itself; they look for a single principle by which to compass whatever exists. There are two broad steps that are open to the person who confronts a dualism of mind and matter and finds it unsatisfactory: he can either try to show that matter is in some sense reducible to mind, or conversely seek to reduce mind to matter. The first is the solution of Idealism, the second that of Materialism. Idealism has already been treated at length, and it will not be necessary to go into it again here. Only one point about it needs emphasis. As was pointed out, there are various forms of Idealism. In one version, this philosophy maintains that there literally is no such thing as matter; what the common man takes to be material things are, upon closer consideration, nothing but experiences in minds. Nothing exists but minds and their contents; an independently existing material world is strictly no more than an illusion. This was the view taken by Berkeley. In the more sophisticated Idealism of Hegel, however, it is not maintained that mind alone exists; material things are, in one way, taken to be as real as minds. The thesis advanced is rather that the universe must be seen as penetrated by mind, indeed as constituted by it. Spirit, to use Hegel’s own word, is the fundamental reality, and everything that exists must accordingly be understood by reference to it, either as being directly explicable in spiritual terms or as prefiguring or pointing forward to spirit. Whatever the merits of this thesis, it is clear that it differs radically from that maintained by Berkeley. Idealism in the form espoused by Berkeley relies largely on arguments drawn from epistemology, though formally its conclusions are ontological, because they take the form of assertions or denials of existence. Hegel, however, had little or nothing to say about epistemology and was not even concerned to put forward an ontology. What he wanted to urge was a doctrine of first principles, a thesis about the terms in which to understand the world. The Hegelian “reduction” of matter to mind was thus reduction in a somewhat attenuated sense. It is important to get this point clear, if only because it has its parallel in the rival doctrine of Materialism. Materialism