Eleatic philosophy. The famous theorem of Spinoza, 'Omnis determinatio est
negatio,' is already contained in the 'negation is relation' of Plato's
Sophist. The grand description of the philosopher in Republic VI, as the
spectator of all time and all existence, may be paralleled with another
famous expression of Spinoza, 'Contemplatio rerum sub specie eternitatis.'
According to Spinoza finite objects are unreal, for they are conditioned by
what is alien to them, and by one another. Human beings are included in
the number of them. Hence there is no reality in human action and no place
for right and wrong. Individuality is accident. The boasted freedom of
the will is only a consciousness of necessity. Truth, he says, is the
direction of the reason towards the infinite, in which all things repose;
and herein lies the secret of man's well-being. In the exaltation of the
reason or intellect, in the denial of the voluntariness of evil (Timaeus;
Laws) Spinoza approaches nearer to Plato than in his conception of an
infinite substance. As Socrates said that virtue is knowledge, so Spinoza
would have maintained that knowledge alone is good, and what contributes to
knowledge useful. Both are equally far from any real experience or
observation of nature. And the same difficulty is found in both when we
seek to apply their ideas to life and practice. There is a gulf fixed
between the infinite substance and finite objects or individuals of
Spinoza, just as there is between the ideas of Plato and the world of
sense.

Removed from Spinoza by less than a generation is the philosopher Leibnitz,
who after deepening and intensifying the opposition between mind and
matter, reunites them by his preconcerted harmony (compare again Phaedrus).
To him all the particles of matter are living beings which reflect on one
another, and in the least of them the whole is contained. Here we catch a
reminiscence both of the omoiomere, or similar particles of Anaxagoras, and
of the world-animal of the Timaeus.

In Bacon and Locke we have another development in which the mind of man is
supposed to receive knowledge by a new method and to work by observation
and experience. But we may remark that it is the idea of experience,
rather than experience itself, with which the mind is filled. It is a
symbol of knowledge rather than the reality which is vouchsafed to us. The
Organon of Bacon is not much nearer to actual facts than the Organon of
Aristotle or the Platonic idea of good. Many of the old rags and ribbons
which defaced the garment of philosophy have been stripped off, but some of
them still adhere. A crude conception of the ideas of Plato survives in
the 'forms' of Bacon. And on the other hand, there are many passages of
Plato in which the importance of the investigation of facts is as much
insisted upon as by Bacon. Both are almost equally superior to the
illusions of language, and are constantly crying out against them, as
against other idols.

Locke cannot be truly regarded as the author of sensationalism any more
than of idealism. His system is based upon experience, but with him
experience includes reflection as well as sense. His analysis and
construction of ideas has no foundation in fact; it is only the dialectic
of the mind 'talking to herself.' The philosophy of Berkeley is but the
transposition of two words. For objects of sense he would substitute
sensations. He imagines himself to have changed the relation of the human
mind towards God and nature; they remain the same as before, though he has
drawn the imaginary line by which they are divided at a different point.
He has annihilated the outward world, but it instantly reappears governed
by the same laws and described under the same names.

A like remark applies to David Hume, of whose philosophy the central
principle is the denial of the relation of cause and effect. He would
deprive men of a familiar term which they can ill afford to lose; but he
seems not to have observed that this alteration is merely verbal and does
not in any degree affect the nature of things. Still less did he remark
that he was arguing from the necessary imperfection of language against the
most certain facts. And here, again, we may find a parallel with the
ancients. He goes beyond facts in his scepticism, as they did in their
idealism. Like the ancient Sophists, he relegates the more important
principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and unmeaning as
this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his successors, not
unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and Berkeley upon Hume
himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in almost equal degrees.
Neither they nor their predecessors had any true conception of language or
of the history of philosophy. Hume's paradox has been forgotten by the
world, and did not any more than the scepticism of the ancients require to
be seriously refuted. Like some other philosophical paradoxes, it would
have been better left to die out. It certainly could not be refuted by a
philosophy such as Kant's, in which, no less than in the previously
mentioned systems, the history of the human mind and the nature of language
are almost wholly ignored, and the certainty of objective knowledge is
transferred to the subject; while absolute truth is reduced to a figment,
more abstract and narrow than Plato's ideas, of 'thing in itself,' to
which, if we reason strictly, no predicate can be applied.

The question which Plato has raised respecting the origin and nature of
ideas belongs to the infancy of philosophy; in modern times it would no
longer be asked. Their origin is only their history, so far as we know it;
there can be no other. We may trace them in language, in philosophy, in
mythology, in poetry, but we cannot argue a priori about them. We may
attempt to shake them off, but they are always returning, and in every
sphere of science and human action are tending to go beyond facts. They
are thought to be innate, because they have been familiar to us all our
lives, and we can no longer dismiss them from our mind. Many of them
express relations of terms to which nothing exactly or nothing at all in
rerum natura corresponds. We are not such free agents in the use of them
as we sometimes imagine. Fixed ideas have taken the most complete
possession of some thinkers who have been most determined to renounce them,
and have been vehemently affirmed when they could be least explained and
were incapable of proof. The world has often been led away by a word to
which no distinct meaning could be attached. Abstractions such as
'authority,' 'equality,' 'utility,' 'liberty,' 'pleasure,' 'experience,'


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