Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/114

 9* DESCARTES. period for the heart : a return to uncorrupted nature. This faith in the unartificial, the original, the natural, this radical and naturalistic tendency is characteristically French. The purification of the mind, its deliverance from the rubbish of scholastic learning, from the pressure of authority, and from inert acceptance of the thinking of others — this is all. Descartes finds the clearest proof of the mind's ca- pacity for truth in mathematics, whose trustworthiness he never seriously questioned, but only hypothetically, in order to exhibit the still higher certainty of the " I think, there- fore I am." He wants to give philosophy the stable char- acter which had so impressed him in mathematics when he was a boy, and recommends her, therefore, not merely the evidence of mathematics as a general example, but the mathematical method for definite imitation. Metaphysics, like mathematics, must derive its conclusions by deduction from self-evident principles. Thus the geometrical method begins its rule in philosophy, a rule not always attended with beneficial results. With this criterion of truth Descartes advances to the c onsideration of ide as. He distinguishes volition and judg- ment from ideas in the narrow sense {imagines), and divides the latter, according to their origin, into three classes: ideeB innatce, adventitice, a me ipso factcB, considering the I second class, the "adventitious" ideas, the most numerous, but the first, the "innate" ideas, the most important. No lidea is higher or clearer than the idea of God or the most perfect being. Whence comes this idea? That every lidea must have a cause, follows from the " clear and dis- tinct" principle that nothing produces nothing. It follows ' from this same principle, ex nihilo nihil fit, however, that the cause must contain as much reality or perfection — realitas and perfectio are synonymous — as the effect, for otherwise the overplus would have come from nothing. So much (" objective," representative) reality contained in an idea, so much or more ('' formal," actual) reality must be contained in its cause. The idea of God as infinite, inde- pendent, omnipotent, omniscient, and creative substance, has not come to me through the senses, nor have I formed it myself. The power to conceive a being more perfect