A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  He admits, however, one limitation on the duty of submission to sovereigns. The right of self-preservation he regards as absolute, and subjects have the right of self-defence, even against monarchs. This is logical, since he has made self-preservation the motive for instituting government. On this ground he holds (though with limitations) that a man has a right to refuse to fight when called upon by the government to do so. This is a right which no modern government concedes. A curious result of his egoistic ethic is that resistance to the sovereign is only justified in self-defence; resistance in defence of another is always culpable.

  There is one other quite logical exception: a man has no duty to a sovereign who has not the power to protect him. This justified Hobbes’s submission to Cromwell while Charles II was in exile.

  There must of course be no such bodies as political parties or what we should now call trade unions. All teachers are to be ministers of the sovereign, and are to teach only what the sovereign thinks useful. The rights of property are only valid as against other subjects, not as against the sovereign. The sovereign has the right to regulate foreign trade. He is not subject to the civil law. His right to punish comes to him, not from any concept of justice, but because he retains the liberty that all men had in the state of nature, when no man could be blamed for inflicting injury on another.

  There is an interesting list of the reasons (other than foreign conquest) for the dissolution of commonwealths. These are: giving too little power to the sovereign; allowing private judgement in subjects; the theory that everything that is against conscience is sin; the belief in inspiration; the doctrine that the sovereign is subject to civil laws; the recognition of absolute private property; division of the sovereign power; imitation of the Greeks and Romans; separation of temporal and spiritual powers; refusing the power of taxation to the sovereign; the popularity of potent subjects; and the liberty of disputing with the sovereign. Of all these, there were abundant instances in the then recent history of England and France.

  There should not, Hobbes thinks, be much difficulty in teaching people to believe in the rights of the sovereign, for have they not been taught to believe in Christianity, and even in transubstantiation, which is contrary to reason? There should be days set apart for learning the duty of submission. The instruction of the people depends upon right teaching in the universities, which must therefore be carefully supervised. There must be uniformity of worship, the religion being that ordained by the sovereign.

  Part II ends with the hope that some sovereign will read the book and make himself absolute—a less chimerical hope than Plato’s, that some king would turn philosopher. Monarchs are assured that the book is easy reading and quite interesting.

  Part III, “Of a Christian Common-wealth,” explains that there is no universal Church, because the Church must depend upon the civil government. In each country, the king must be head of the Church; the Pope’s overlordship and infallibility cannot be admitted. It argues, as might be expected, that a Christian who is a subject of a non-Christian sovereign should yield outwardly, for was not Naaman suffered to bow himself in the house of Rimmon?

  Part IV, “Of the Kingdom of Darkness,” is mainly concerned with criticism of the Church of Rome, which Hobbes hates because it puts the spiritual power above the temporal. The rest of this part is an attack on “vain philosophy,” by which Aristotle is usually meant.

  Let us now try to decide what we are to think of the Leviathan. The question is not easy, because the good and the bad in it are so closely intermingled.

  In politics, there are two different questions, one as to the best form of the State, the other as to its powers. The best form of State, according to Hobbes, is monarchy, but this is not the important part of his doctrine. The important part is his contention that the powers of the State should be absolute. This doctrine, or something like it, had grown up in Western Europe during the Renaissance and the Reformation. First, the feudal nobility were cowed by Louis XI, Edward IV, Ferdinand and Isabella, and their successors. Then the Reformation, in Protestant countries, enabled the lay government to get the better of the Church. Henry VIII wielded a power such as no earlier English king had enjoyed. But in France the Reformation, at first, had an opposite effect; between the Guises and the Huguenots, the kings were nearly powerless. Henry IV and Richelieu, not long before Hobbes wrote, had laid the foundations of the absolute monarchy which lasted in France till the Revolution. In Spain, Charles V had got the better of the Cortes, and Philip II was absolute except in relation to the Church. In England, however, the Puritans had undone the work of Henry VIII; their work suggested to Hobbes that anarchy must result from resistance to the sovereign.

  Every community is faced with two dangers, anarchy and despotism. The Puritans, especially the Independents, were most impressed by the danger of despotism. Hobbes, on the contrary, was obsessed by the fear of anarchy. The liberal philosophers who arose after the Restoration, and acquired control after 1688, realized both dangers; they disliked both Strafford and the Anabaptists. This led Locke to the doctrine of division of powers, and of checks and balances. In England there was a real division of powers so long as the king had influence; then Parliament became supreme, and ultimately the Cabinet. In America, there are still checks and balances in so far as Congress and the Supreme Court can resist the Administration; but the tendency is towards a constant increase in the powers of the Administration. In Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan, the government has even more power than Hobbes thought desirable. On the whole, therefore, as regards the powers of the State, the world has gone as Hobbes wished, after a long liberal period during which, at least apparently, it was moving in the opposite direction. Whatever may be the outcome of the present war, it seems evident that the functions of the State must continue to increase, and that resistance to it must grow more and more difficult.

  The reason that Hobbes gives for supporting the State, namely that it is the only alternative to anarchy, is in the main a valid one. A State may, however, be so bad that temporary anarchy seems preferable to its continuance, as in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917. Moreover the tendency of every government towards tyranny cannot be kept in check unless governments have some fear of rebellion. Governments would be worse than they are if Hobbes’s submissive attitude were universally adopted by subjects. This is true in the political sphere, where governments will try, if they can, to make themselves personally irremovable; it is true in the economic sphere, where they will try to enrich themselves and their friends at the public expense; it is true in the intellectual sphere, where they will suppress every new discovery or doctrine that seems to menace their power. These are reasons for not thinking only of the risk of anarchy, but also of the danger of injustice and ossification that is bound up with omnipotence in government.

  The merits of Hobbes appear most clearly when he is contrasted with earlier political theorists. He is completely free from superstition; he does not argue from what happened to Adam and Eve at the time of the Fall. He is clear and logical; his ethics, right or wrong, is completely intelligible, and does not involve the use of any dubious concepts. Apart from Machiavelli, who is much more limited, he is the first really modern writer on political theory. Where he is wrong, he is wrong from over-simplification, not, because the basis of his thought is unreal and fantastic. For this reason, he is still worth refuting.

  Without criticizing Hobbes’s metaphysics or ethics, there are two points to make against him. The first is that he always considers the national interest as a whole, and assumes, tacitly, that the major interests of all citizens are the same. He does not realize the importance of the clash between different classes, which Marx makes the chief cause of social change. This is connected with the assumption that the interests of a monarch are roughly identical with those of his subjects. In time of war there is a unification of interests, especially if the war is fierce; but in time of peace the clash may be very great between the interests of one class and those
of another. It is not by any means always true that, in such a situation, the best way to avert anarchy is to preach the absolute power of the sovereign. Some concession in the way of sharing power may be the only way to prevent civil war. This should have been obvious to Hobbes from the recent history of England.

  Another point in which Hobbes’s doctrine is unduly limited is in regard to the relations between different States. There is not a word in Leviathan to suggest any relation between them except war and conquest, with occasional interludes. This follows, on his principles, from the absence of an international government, for the relations of States are still in a state of nature, which is that of a war of all against all. So long as there is international anarchy, it is by no means clear that increase of efficiency in the separate States is in the interest of mankind, since it increases the ferocity and destructiveness of war. Every argument that he adduces in favour of government, in so far as it is valid at all, is valid in favour of international government. So long as national States exist and fight each other, only inefficiency can preserve the human race. To improve the fighting quality of separate States without having any means of preventing war is the road to universal destruction.

  * Quoted from Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Part VI, Ch. II.

  † Ibid.

  * Burckhardt, op. cit.. Part VI, Ch. I.

  * This remained true until 1870.

  * It is curious to find this anticipation of Rousseau. It would be amusing, and not wholly false, to interpret Machiavelli as a disappointed romantic.

  * As regards the life of Erasmus, I have mainly followed the excellent biography by Huizinga.

  * See Three Copernican Treatises, translated by Edward Rosen, Chicago, 1939-

  * On this subject,, see the chapter “Scientific Instruments” in A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by A. Wolf.

  * Elsewhere he says that the heathen gods were created by human fear, but that our God is the First Mover.

  CHAPTER IX

  Descartes

  RENÉ DESCARTES (1596-1650) is usually considered the founder of modern philosophy, and, I think, rightly. He is the first man of high philosophic capacity whose outlook is profoundly affected by the new physics and astronomy. While it is true that he retains much of scholasticism, he does not accept foundations laid by predecessors, but endeavours to construct a complete philosophic edifice de novo. This had not happened since Aristotle, and is a sign of the new self-confidence that resulted from the progress of science. There is a freshness about his work that is not to be found in any eminent previous philosopher since Plato. All the intermediate philosophers were teachers, with the professional superiority belonging to that avocation. Descartes writes, not as a teacher, but as a discoverer and explorer, anxious to communicate what he has found. His style is easy and unpedantic, addressed to intelligent men of the world rather than to pupils. It is, moreover, an extraordinarily excellent style. It is very fortunate for modern philosophy that the pioneer had such admirable literary sense. His successors, both on the Continent and in England, until Kant, retain his unprofessional character, and several of them retain something of his stylistic merit.

  Descartes’s father was a councillor of the Parlement of Brittany, and possessed a moderate amount of landed property. When Descartes inherited, at his father’s death, he sold his estates, and invested the money, obtaining an income of six or seven thousand francs a year. He was educated, from 1604 to 1612, at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, which seems to have given him a much better grounding in modern mathematics than he could have got at most universities at that time. In 1612 he went to Paris, where he found social life boring, and retired to a secluded retreat in the Faubourg Saint Germain, in which he worked at geometry. Friends nosed him out, however, so, to secure more complete quiet, he enlisted in the Dutch army (1617). As Holland was at peace at the time, he seems to have enjoyed two years of undisturbed meditation. However, the coming of the Thirty Years’ War led him to enlist in the Bavarian army (1619). It was in Bavaria, during the winter 1619-20, that he had the experience he describes in the Discours de la Méthode. The weather being cold, he got into a stove* in the morning, and stayed there all day meditating; by his own account, his philosophy was half finished when he came out, but this need not be accepted too literally. Socrates used to meditate all day in the snow, but Descartes’s mind only worked when he was warm.

  In 1621 he gave up fighting; after a visit to Italy, he settled in Paris in 1625. But again friends would call on him before he was up (he seldom got up before midday), so in 1628 he joined the army which was besieging La Rochelle, the Huguenot stronghold. When this episode was finished, he decided to live in Holland, probably to escape the risk of persecution. He was a timid man, a practising Catholic, but he shared Galileo’s heresies. Some think that he heard of the first (secret) condemnation of Galileo, which had taken place in 1616. However that may be, he decided not to publish a great book, Le Monde, upon which he had been engaged. His reason was that it maintained two heretical doctrines: the earth’s rotation and the infinity of the universe. (This book was never published in its entirey, but fragments of it were published after his death.)

  He lived in Holland for twenty years (1629-49), except for a few brief visits to France and one to England, all on business. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation. Hobbes had to have his books printed there; Locke took refuge there during the five worst years of reaction in England before 1688; Bayle (of the Dictionary) found it necessary to live there; and Spinoza would hardly have been allowed to do. his work in any other country.

  I said that Descartes was a timid man, but perhaps it would be kinder to say that he wished to be left in peace so as to do his work undisturbed. He always courted ecclesiastics, especially Jesuits—not only while he was in their power, but after his emigration to Holland. His psychology is obscure, but I incline to think that he was a sincere Catholic, and wished to persuade the Church—in its own interests as well as in his—to be less hostile to modern science than it showed itself in the case of Galileo. There are those who think that his orthodoxy was merely politic, but though this is a possible view I do not think it the most probable.

  Even in Holland he was subject to vexatious attacks, not by the Roman Church, but by Protestant bigots. It was said that his views led to atheism, and he would have been prosecuted but for the intervention of the French ambassador and the Prince of Orange. This attack having failed, another, less direct, was made a few years later by the authorities of the University of Leyden, which forbade all mention of him, whether favourable or unfavourable. Again the Prince of Orange intervened, and told the university not to be silly. This illustrates the gain to Protestant countries from the subordination of the Church to the State, and from the comparative weakness of Churches that were not international.

  Unfortunately, through Chanut, the French ambassador at Stockholm, Descartes got into correspondence with Queen Christina of Sweden, a passionate and learned lady who thought that, as a sovereign, she had a right to waste the time of great men. He sent her a treatise on love, a subject which until then he had somewhat neglected. He also sent her a work on the passions of the soul, which he had originally composed for Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the Elector Palatine. These writings led her to request his presence at her court; he at last agreed, and she sent a warship to fetch him (September 1649). It turned out that she wanted daily lessons from him, but could not spare the time except at five in the morning. This unaccustomed early rising, in the cold of a Scandinavian winter, was not the best thing for a delicate man. Moreover Chanut became dangerously ill, and Descartes looked after him. The ambassador recovered, but Descartes fell ill and died in February 1650.

  Descartes never married, but he had a natural daughter who died at the age of five; this was, he said, the greatest sorrow of his lif
e. He always was well dressed, and wore a sword. He was not industrious; he worked short hours, and read little. When he went to Holland he took few books with him, but among them were the Bible and Thomas Aquinas. His work seems to have been done with great concentration during short periods; but perhaps, to keep up the appearance of a gentlemanly amateur, he may have pretended to work less than in fact he did, for otherwise his achievements seem scarcely credible.

  Descartes was a philosopher, a mathematician, and a man of science. In philosophy and mathematics, his work was of supreme importance; in science, though creditable, it was not so good as that of some of his contemporaries.

  His great contribution to geometry was the invention of co-ordinate geometry, though not quite in its final form. He used the analytic method, which supposes a problem solved, and examines the consequences of the supposition; and he applied algebra to geometry. In both of these he had had predecessors—as regards the former, even among the ancients. What was original in him was the use of coordinates, i.e., the determination of the position of a point in a plane by its distance from two fixed lines. He did not himself discover all the power of this method, but he did enough to make further progress easy. This was by no means his sole contribution to mathematics, but it was his most important.

  The book in which he set forth most of his scientific theories was Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644. There were however some other books of importance: Essais philosophiques (1637) deals with optics as well as geometry, and one of his books is called De la formation du foetus. He welcomed Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, and was always hoping (though in vain) to make some discovery of importance in medicine. He regarded the bodies of men and animals as machines; animals he regarded as automata, governed entirely by the laws of physics, and devoid of feeling or consciousness. Men are different: they have a soul, which resides in the pineal gland. There the soul comes in contact with the “vital spirits,” and through this contact there is interaction between soul and body. The total quantity of motion in the universe is constant, and therefore the soul cannot affect it; but it can alter the direction of motion of the animal spirits, and hence, indirectly, of other parts of the body.