thority, and a freedom of thought that reached even a fantastic licence. Bruno in the spirit of the Eleatics and Plotinus, proclaimed the absolute unity of all things in the indeterminable substance, which is God; Vanini carried empiricism to atheism and materialism; and Campanella united the extremes of high churchman and sensationalist, mystical metaphysician and astrologist.

The thoughts of this period, from the fifteenth to well on in the sixteenth century, have been described as "the upturnings of a volcano." The time was indeed the volcanic epoch in European thought. The principal figures we can discern in it seem to move amid smoke and turmoil, and to pass away in flame. The tragic fate of Bruno in the fire at Rome, and that of Vanini in the fire at Toulouse-both done to death at the instance of the vulgar unintelligence of the Catholicism of the timeform two of the darkest and coarsest crimes ever perpetrated in the name of a Church. The Church, which claims to represent the truth of God, dare not touch with a violent hand speculative opinion. It is then false to itself.

In France, and in the university of Paris, the stronghold of Peripateticism, Ramus (1515-1572) attacked Aristotle in the most violent manner. In Ramus was concentred the spirit of philosophical and literary antagonism to the Schoolmen. It was wholly unmodified by judgment or discrimination, and it did not proceed on a thorough or even adequate acquaintance with the object of its assault. Ramus is remarkable chiefly for the extreme freedom which he asserted in oratorically denouncing what he considered to be the principles of Aristotle; but he made no real advance either in the principles of logical method which he professed, or in philosophy itself. At the same time, the rude intensity and the passionate earnestness of his life were not unworthily sealed by his bloody death on the Eve of St. Bartholomew. The death of Ramus, though attributed directly to personal enmity, was really a blow struck alike at Protestantism and the freedom of modern thought.

Bruno, Vanini, Campanella, and Ramus foreshadowed Descartes and the modern spirit, only in the emphatic assertion of the freedom, individuality, and supremacy of thought. What in thought is firm, assured, and universal, they have not pointed out. They were actuated mainly by an implicit sense of inadequacy in the current principles and doctrines of the time. It was not given to any of them to find a new and strong foundation whereon to build with clear, consistent, and reasonable evidence. Campanella said of himself not inaptly: "I am but the bell (campanella) which sounds the hour of a new dawn."

Alongside of those more purely speculative tendencies, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Bacon represented the new spirit and theory of observation applied to nature. The formalism of the Schools had abstracted almost entirely from the natural world. It was a “dreamland of intellectualism." And now there came an intense reaction, out of which has arisen modern science. Bacon had given to the world the Novum Organum in 1620, seventeen years before the Method of Descartes, but his precept was as yet only slightly felt, and he had but little in common with Descartes, except an appeal to reality on a different side from that of the Continental philosopher. Descartes had not seen the Organum previously to his thinking out the Method. He makes but three or four references to Bacon in all his writings.

If to these influences we add the spirit of religious reformation, the debates regarding the relative authority of the Scriptures and the Church, and mainly as a consequence of the chaos and conflict of thought in the age, the course of philosophical scepticism initiated. by Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), and made fashionable especially by Montaigne (1533-1592), and continued by Charron (1541-1603), with its self-satisfied worldliness and its low and conventional ethic, we shall understand the age in which the youth of Descartes

was passed, and the influences under which he was led to speculation. We shall be able especially to see how he, a man of penetrating and comprehensive intelligence, yet with a strong conservative instinct for what was elevating in morals and theology, was led to seek for an ultimate ground of certainty, if that were possible, not in tradition or dogma of philosopher or churchman, but in what commended itself to him as self-verifying and therefore ultimate in knowledge-in other words, a limit to doubt, a criterion of certainty, and a point of departure for a constructive philosophy.

III. THE COGITO ERGO SUM-ITS NATURE AND MEANING.

The man in modern times, or indeed in any time, who first based philosophy on consciousness, and sketched a philosophical method within the limits of consciousness, was Descartes; and since his time, during these two hundred and fifty years, no one has shown a more accurate view of the ultimate problem of philosophy, or of the conditions under which it must be dealt with. The question with him is-Is there an ultimate in knowledge which can guarantee itself to me as true and certain ? and, consequently upon this, can I obtain as it were from this supposing it found a criterion of truth

and certainty?

In the settlement of these questions, the organon of Descartes is doubt. This with him means an examination by reflection of the facts and possibilities of consciousness. Of what and how far can I doubt? I can doubt, Descartes would say, whether it be true, as my senses testify or seem to testify, that a material world really exists. I am not here by any necessity of thought shut within belief. I can doubt, he even says, of mathematical truths at least when the evidence is not directly present to my mind. At what point then do I find that a reflective doubt sets

limits to itself? This limit he finds in self-consciousness, implying or being self-existence. It will be found that this method makes the least possible postulate or assumption. It starts simply from the fact of a conscious questioning; it proceeds to exhaust the sphere of the doubtable; and it reaches that truth or principle which is its own guarantee. If we cannot find a principle or principles of this sort in knowledge, within the limits of consciousness, we shall not be able to find either ultimate truth or principle at all. possible.

Philosophy is im

But the process must be accurately observed. There is the consciousness—that is, this or that act or state of consciousness-even when I doubt. This cannot be sublated, except by another act of consciousness. To doubt whether there is consciousness at a given moment, is to be conscious of the doubt in that given moment; to believe that the testimony of consciousness at a given time is false, is still to be conscious-conscious of the belief. This, therefore, a definite act of consciousness, is the necessary implicate of any act of knowledge. The impossibility of the sublation of the act of consciousness, consistently with the reality of knowledge at all, is the first and fundamental point of Descartes. This it is very important to note, for every other point in his philosophy that is at all legitimately established depends on this: and particularly the fact of the "I" or self of consciousness. The reality of the "I" or "Ego" of Descartes is inseparably bound up with the fact of the definite act of consciousness. But, be it observed, he does not prove or deduce the "Ego from the act of consciousness; he finds it or realises it as a matter of fact in and along with this act. The act and the Ego are the two inseparable factors of the same fact or experience in a definite time. But as the consciousness is absolutely superior to sublation, so is that which is its essential element or co-factor-in other words, the whole fact of experience—the con

scious act and the conscious "I" or actor are placed on the same level of the absolutely indubitable.

By "I think" or by "thinking" Descartes thus does not mean thought or consciousness in the abstract. It is not cogitatio ergo ens, or entitas, but cogito ergo sum; that is, the concrete fact of me thinking. That this is so, can be established from numerous statements. "Under thought I embrace all that which is in us, so that we are immediately conscious of it.”1 "A thing which thinks is a thing which doubts, understands, [conceives,] affirms, denies, which wills, refuses, imagines also, and perceives."2 Here thinking is as wide as consciousness; but it is not consciousness in the abstract; it is consciousness viewed in each of its actual or definite forms. From this it follows that the principle does not tell us what consciousness is; it knows nothing of an abstract consciousness, far less of a point above consciousness; but it is the knowledge and assertion of consciousness in one or other of its modes-or rather it is an expression of consciousness only as I have experience of it-in this or that definite form.

Arnauld and Mersenne in their criticism of Descartes were the first to point out the resemblance of the cogito ergo sum to statements of St Augustin. Descartes him

self had not previously been aware of these. The truth is, he belonged to the school of the non-reading philosophers. He cared very little for what had been thought or said before him. The passage from Augustin which has been referred to as closest to the statement of Descartes is from the De Civitate Dei, 1. xi., c. 26. It closes as follows: "Sine ulla phantasiarum vel phantasmatum imaginationė ludificatoria, mihi esse me, idque nosse et amare certissimum est. Nulla in his veris Academicorum argumenta formido dicentium: Quid, si falleris? Si enim fallor, sum. Nam qui non est, utique nec falli potest: ac per hoc sum, si fallor. Quia ergo

1 Definitiones, Resp. ad Sec. Obj., p. 85 (1670).

2 Meditations, ii. p. 23.