Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/152

 T30 DEVELOPMENT OF CARTESIANISM. {sive corporum ; II. prop. 7), and in application to man, " the order of the actions and passions of our body is simultaneous in nature with the order of the actions and [passions of the mind " {.. prop. 2, schoL). The attempt to solve the problem of the relation between the material and the mental worlds by asserting their thoroughgoing correspondence and substantial identity, was philosophically justifiable and important, though many evident objections obtrude themselves upon us. The required assumption, that there is a mental event corre- sponding to every bodily one, and vice versa, meets with invol- untary and easily supported opposition, which Spinoza did nothing to remove. Similarly he omitted to explain how body is related to motion, mind to ideas, and both to actual- ity. The ascription of a materialistic tendency to Spinoza is not without foundation. Corporeality and reality appear well-nigh identical for him, — the expressions corpora and res are used synonymously, — so that there remains for minds and ideas only an existence as reflections of the real in the sphere of [an] ideality (whose degree of actuality it isdiflfi- cult to determine). Moreover, individualistic impulses have been pointed out, which, in part, conflict with the monism which he consciously follows, and, in part, subserve its interests. An example of this is given in the relation of mind and idea: Spinoza treats the soul as a sum of ideas, as consisting in them. An (at least apparently substan- tial) bond among ideas, an ego, which possesses them, does not exist for him : the Cartesian cogito has become an im- personal cogitaUir or 2, Dens cogitat. In order to the unique substantiality of the infinite, the substantiality of individual spirits must disappear. That which argues for the latter is their I-ness {Ichheit), the unity of self-consciousness ; it is destroyed, if the mind is a congeries of ideas, a composite of them. Thus in order to relieve itself from the self-depend- ence of the individual mind, monism allies itself with a spiritual atomism, the most extreme which can be conceived. The mind is resolved into a mass of individual ideas. Mention may be made in passing, also, of a strange con- ception, which is somewhat out of harmony with the rest of the system, and of which, moreover, little use is made.