Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/131

 OCCASIONALISM : GEULINCX. 109 to reconcile with it the view, popular in the Middle Ages, that the preservation of the world is a perpetual crea- tion. In the former case the relation of God to the world is made an external relation ; in the latter, an internal one. In the one the world is thought of as a clock, which once wound up runs on mechanically, in the second it is likened to a piece of music which the composer himself recites. If God preserves created things by continually recreating them they are not substances at all ; if they are substances, preser- vation becomes an empty word, which we repeat after the theologians without giving it any real meaning. Matter and spirit stand related in our thought only by way of exclusion ; is the same true of them in reality ? They can be conceived and can exist without each other; can they, further, without each other effect all that we per- ceive them to accomplish? There are some motions in the material world which we refer to a voluntary decision of the soul, and some among our ideas {c- g-i perceptions of the senses) which we refer to corporeal phenomena as their causes. If body and soul are substances, how can they be dependent on each other in certain of their activities, if they are of opposite natures, how can they affect each other ? How can the incorporeal, unmoved spirit move the animal spirits and receive impulses from them ? The substantial-/ ity (reciprocal independence) of body and mind, and theirl interaction (partial reciprocal dependence), are incompatible, 1 one or the other is illusory and must be abandoned. The' materialists (Hobbes) sacrifice the independence of mind, the idealists (Berkeley, Leibnitz), the independence of mat- ter, the occasionalists, the interaction of the two. This forms the advance of the last beyond Descartes, who either naively maintains that, in spite of the contrariety of material and mental substances, an exchange of effects takes place be- tween them as an empirical fact, or, when he realizes the diflficulty of the anthropological problem, — how is the union of the two substances in man possible, — ascribes the inter- action of body and mind, together with the union of the two, to the power of God, and by this abandonment of the attempt at a natural explanation, opens up the occasionalistic way of escape. Further, in his more detailed description of.