Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/135

 OCCASIONALISM : GEULINCX. IIJ tion ; they are (unsuitable) instruments, effective only in the hand of God ; he brings it to pass that my will goes out beyond my soul, and that corporeal motion has results in it. The meaning of this doctrine is misapprehended when it is assumed, — an assumption to which the Leib- nitzian account of occasionalism may mislead one, — that in it the continuity of events, alike in the material and the psychical world, is interrupted by frequent scattered interfer- ences from without, and all becoming transformed into a series of disconnected miracles. An order of nature such as would be destroyed by God's action does not exist ; God brings everything to pass ; even the passage of motion from one body to another is his work. Further, Geulincx expressly says that God has imposed such laws on motion that it harmonizes with the soul's free volition, of which, how- ever, it is entirely independent (similar statements occur also in De la Forge). .And with this our thinker appears — as Pfleiderer* emphasizes — closely to approach the pre- established harmony of Leibnitz. The occasionalistic theory certainly constitutes the preliminary step to the Leibnitzian ; but an essential difference separates the two. The advance does not consist in the substitution by Leib- nitz of one single miracle at creation for a number of isolated and continually recurring ones, but (as Leibnit- himself remarks, in reply to the objection expressed by Father Lami, that a perpetual miracle is no miracle) in the exchange of the immediate causality of God for natural causation. With Geulincx mind and body act on each other, but not by their own power ; with Leibnitz the monads do not act on one another, but they act by their own power.f — When Geulincx in the same connection ad- vances to the statements that, in view of the limitedness and passivity of finite things, God is the only truly active, because the only independent, being in the world, that al! physik und Ethik, Tubingen, 1882 ; the same, Leibniz und Geulincx mit beson- direr Beziehung auf ihr Uhrengleichnis, Tubingen, 1884. f See Ed. Zeller, Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissenscha/Un, 1884, P- 673 seq.; Eucken, Fhiloscphische Monatshe/te, vol. xix., 1S93, p. MJ ieg.;yo. xxiii., 1887, p. 587 seq.
 * Edm. Pfleiderer, Geulincx, ah Hauptvertreter der occasionalistischen Meia-