A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day

by Bertrand Russell

The “proof” quoted above might be expressed as follows: Every increase in the understanding of what happens to us consists in referring events to the idea of God, since, in truth, everything is part of God. This understanding of everything as part of God is love of God. When all objects are referred to God, the idea of God will fully occupy the mind.

At this point Spinoza tells us that he has now given us “all the remedies against the emotions.” The great remedy is clear and distinct ideas as to the nature of the emotions and their relation to external causes.

There is a further advantage in love of God as compared to love of human beings: “Spiritual unhealthiness and misfortunes can generally be traced to excessive love of something which is subject to many variations.” But clear and distinct knowledge “begets a love towards a thing immutable and eternal,” and such love has not the turbulent and disquieting character of love for an object which is transient and changeable.

Moreover, from the point of view of mental health, the impulse to revenge is likely to be so strong that, if it is allowed no outlet, a man’s whole outlook on life may become distorted and more or less insane.

CHAPTER XI Leibniz LEIBNIZ (1646-1716) was one of the supreme intellects of all time, but as a human being he was not admirable.

The consequence is that there are two systems of philosophy which may be regarded as representing Leibniz: one, which he proclaimed, was optimistic, orthodox, fantastic, and shallow; the other, which has been slowly unearthed from his manuscripts by fairly recent editors, was profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic, and amazingly logical.

It was the popular Leibniz who invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds (to which F. H. Bradley added the sardonic comment “and everything in it is a necessary evil”) ; it was this Leibniz whom Voltaire caricatured as Doctor Pangloss.

His contacts in Paris were of great importance for his intellectual development, for Paris at that time led the world both in philosophy and in mathematics. It was there, in 1675-6, that he invented the infinitesimal calculus, in ignorance of Newton’s previous but unpublished work on the same subject.

Leibniz brought into their final form the metaphysical proofs of God’s existence. These had a long history; they begin with Aristotle, or even with Plato; they were formalized by the scholastics, and one of them, the ontological argument, was invented by Saint Anselm. This argument, though rejected by Saint Thomas, was revived by Descartes. Leibniz, whose logical skill was supreme, stated the arguments better than they had ever been stated before. That is my reason for examining them in connection with him.

Leibniz’s arguments for the existence of God are four in number; they are (1) the ontological argument, (2) the cosmological argument, (3) the argument from the eternal truths, (4) the argument from the pre-established harmony, which may be generalized into the argument from design, or the physico-theological argument, as Kant calls it. We will consider these arguments successively.

Kant countered this argument by maintaining that “existence” is not a predicate.

The cosmological argument is more plausible than the ontological argument. It is a form of the First-Cause argument, which is itself derived from Aristotle’s argument of the unmoved mover. The FirstCause argument is simple.

Leibniz based his philosophy upon two logical premisses, the law of contradiction and the law of sufficient reason.

Leibniz, in his private thinking, is the best example of a philosopher who uses logic as a key to metaphysics. This type of philosophy begins with Parmenides, and is carried further in Plato’s use of the theory of ideas to prove various extra-logical propositions. Spinoza belongs to the same type, and so does Hegel. But none of these is so clear cut as Leibniz in drawing inferences from syntax to the real world.

Leibniz is a dull writer, and his effect on German philosophy was to make it pedantic and arid. His disciple Wolf, who dominated the German universities until the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, left out whatever was most interesting in Leibniz, and produced a dry professorial way of thinking. Outside Germany, Leibniz’s philosophy had little influence; his contemporary Locke governed British philosophy, while in France Descartes continued to reign until he was overthrown by Voltaire, who made English empiricism fashionable.

CHAPTER XII Philosophical Liberalism THE rise of liberalism, in politics and philosophy, provides material for the study of a very general and very important question, namely: What has been the influence of political and social circumstances upon the thoughts of eminent and original thinkers, and, conversely, what has been the influence of these men upon subsequent political and social developments?

Early liberalism was a product of England and Holland, and had certain well-marked characteristics. It stood for religious toleration; it was Protestant, but of a latitudinarian rather than of a fanatical kind; it regarded the wars of religion as silly. It valued commerce and industry, and favoured the rising middle class rather than the monarchy and the aristocracy; it had immense respect for the rights of property, especially when accumulated by the labours of the individual possessor.

The philosophers of Greece, down to and including Aristotle, were not individualists in the sense in which I wish to use the term. They thought of a man as essentially a member of a community; Plato’s Republic, for example, is concerned to define the good community, not the good individual. With the loss of political liberty from the time of Alexander onwards, individualism developed, and was represented by the Cynics and Stoics. According to the Stoic philosophy, a man could live a good life in no matter what social circumstances. This was also the view of Christianity, especially before it acquired control of the State. But in the Middle Ages, while mystics kept alive the original individualistic trends in Christian ethics, the outlook of most men, including the majority of philosophers, was dominated by a firm synthesis of dogma, law, and custom, which caused men’s theoretical beliefs and practical morality to be controlled by a social institution, namely the Catholic Church: what was true and what was good was to be ascertained, not by solitary thought, but by the collective wisdom of Councils.

The first important breach in this system was made by Protestantism, which asserted that General Councils may err.

Meanwhile individualism had penetrated into philosophy. Descartes’s fundamental certainty, “I think, therefore I am,” made the basis of knowledge different for each person, since for each the starting-point was his own existence, not that of other individuals or of the community.

In science, any clash between the individual and society is in essence transitory, since men of science, broadly speaking, all accept the same intellectual standards, and therefore debate and investigation usually produce agreement in the end. This, however, is a modern development; in the time of Galileo, the authority of Aristotle and the Church was still considered at least as cogent as the evidence of the senses. This shows how the element of individualism in scientific method, though not prominent, is nevertheless essential.

Early liberalism was individualistic in intellectual matters, and also in economics, but was not emotionally or ethically self-assertive.

A new movement, which has gradually developed into the antithesis of liberalism, begins with Rousseau, and acquires strength from the romantic movement and the principle of nationality.

The cult of the hero, as developed by Carlyle and Nietzsche, is typical of this philosophy.

There is yet another philosophy which, in the main, is an offshoot of liberalism, namely that of Marx. I shall consider him at a later stage, but for the moment he is merely to be borne in mind.

The first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy is to be found in Locke, the most influential though by no means the most profound of modern philosophers.

The new king, being Dutch, brought with him the commercial and theological wisdom for which his country was noted. The Bank of England was created; the national debt was made into a secure investment, no longer liable to repudiation at the caprice of the monarch. The Act of Toleration, while leaving Catholics and Nonconformists subject to various disabilities, put an end to actual persecution. Foreign policy became resolutely anti-French, and remained so, with brief intermissions, until the defeat of Napoleon.

CHAPTER XIII Locke’s Theory of Knowledge JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) is the apostle of the Revolution of 1688, the most moderate and the most successful of all revolutions.

His chief work in theoretical philosophy, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was finished in 1687 and published in 1690.

Locke’s father was a Puritan, who fought on the side of Parliament. In the time of Cromwell, when Locke was at Oxford, the university was still scholastic in its philosophy; Locke disliked both scholasticism and the fanaticism of the Independents. He was much influenced by Descartes.

Essay on the Human Understanding. This is his most important book, and the one upon which his fame most securely rests; but his influence on the philosophy of politics was so great and so lasting that he must be treated as the founder of philosophical liberalism as much as of empiricism in theory of knowledge.

His influence in eighteenth-century France, which was immense, was primarily due to Voltaire, who as a young man spent some time in England, and interpreted English ideas to his compatriots in the Lettres philosophiques. The philosophes and the moderate reformers followed him; the extreme revolutionaries followed Rousseau. His French followers, rightly or wrongly, believed in an intimate connection between his theory of knowledge and his politics.

In England this connection is less evident. Of his two most eminent followers, Berkeley was politically unimportant, and Hume was a Tory who set forth his reactionary views in his History of England. But after the time of Kant, when German idealism began to influence English thought, there came to be again a connection between philosophy and politics: in the main, the philosophers who followed the Germans were Conservative, while the Benthamites, who were Radical, were in the tradition of Locke.

CHAPTER XIV Locke’s Political Philosophy A. THE HEREDITARY PRINCIPLE

B. THE STATE OF NATURE, AND NATURAL LAW

having shown the impossibility of deriving the authority of government from that of a father, he will now set forth what he conceives to be the true origin of government.

C. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

civil government is the result of a contract, and is an affair purely of this world, not something established by divine authority.

I suppose his tacit consent to taxation in accordance with majority decision is presumed to be involved in his citizenship, which, in turn, is presumed to be voluntary.

The theory that government was created by a contract is, of course, pre-evolutionary. Government, like measles and whooping-cough, must have grown up gradually, though, like them, it could be introduced suddenly into new regions such as the South Sea Islands. Before men had studied anthropology they had no idea of the psychological mechanisms involved in the beginnings of government, or of the fantastic reasons which lead men to adopt institutions and customs that subsequently prove useful. But as a legal fiction, to justify government, the theory of the social contract has some measure of truth.

E. CHECKS AND BALANCES

Locke’s political philosophy was, on the whole, adequate and useful until the industrial revolution.

The power of property, as embodied in vast corporations, grew beyond anything imagined by Locke.

CHAPTER XV Locke’s Influence FROM the time of Locke down to the present day, there have been in Europe two main types of philosophy, and one of these owes both its doctrines and its method to Locke, while the other was derived first from Descartes and then from Kant.

The heirs of Locke are, first Berkeley and Hume; second, those of the French philosophes who did not belong to the school of Rousseau; third, Bentham and the philosophical Radicals; fourth, with important accretions from Continental philosophy, Marx and his disciples.

CHAPTER XVI Berkeley GEORGE BERKELEY (1685-1753) is important in philosophy through his denial of the existence of matter—a denial which he supported by a number of ingenious arguments. He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived.

His argument against matter is most persuasively set forth in The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous.

CHAPTER XVII Hume DAVID HUME (1711-76) is one of the most important among philosophers, because he developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent made it incredible. He represents, in a certain sense, a dead end: in his direction, it is impossible to go further.

His chief philosophical work, the Treatise of Human Nature, was written while he was living in France during the years 1734 to 1737*

Part II. From Rousseau to the Present Day CHAPTER XVIII The Romantic Movement FROM the latter part of the eighteenth century to the present day, art and literature and philosophy, and even politics, have been influenced, positively or negatively, by a way of feeling which was characteristic of what, in a large sense, may be called the romantic movement.