Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/168

 146 DEVELOPMENT OF CARTESIANISM. think; it thinks always {I'dme pense ioujours), only it does not always remember the fact. The kinds of knowled<je differ with the classes of things cognized. God is known immediately and intuitively. He is necessary and unlimited being, the universal, infinite being, being absolutely; he only is known through himself. The concept of the infinite is the presupposition of the con- cept of the finite, and the former is earlier in us ; we gain the conception of a particular thing only when we omit some- thing from the idea of " being in general," or limit it. God is cogitative, like spirits, and extended, like bodies, but in an entirely different manner from created things. We know our own soul through consciousness or inner per- ception. We know its existence more certainly than that of bodies, but understand its nature less perfectly than theirs. To know that it is capable of sensations of pain, of heat, of light, we must have experienced them. For knowledge of the minds of others we are dependent upon conjecture, on analogical inferences from ourselves. But how is the unextended soul capable of cognizing extended body? Only through the medium of ideas. The ideas occupy an intermediate position between objects, whose archetypes they are, and representations in the soul, whose causes they are. The ideas, after the pattern of which God has created things, and the relations among them (necessary truths), are eternal, hence uncaused ; they constitute the wisdom of God and are not dependent on his will. Things are in God in archetypal form, and are cognized through these their archetypes in God. Ideas are not produced by bodies, by the emission of sensuous images,* nor are they originated by the soul, or possessed by it as an innate possession. But God is the cause of IS acute and still worthy of attention. If bodies transmitted to the sense-organs forms like themselves, these copies, which would evidently be corporeal, must, by their departure, diminish the mass of the body from which they came away, and also, because of their impenetrability, obstruct and interfere with one another, thus destroying the possibility of clear impressions. A further point against the image theory is furnished by the increase in the size of an object, when approached. And, above all, it can never be made conceivable how motion can be transformed into sensations or ideas.
 * Malebranche's refutation of the emanation hypothesis of the Peripatetics