t philosophy by
its violent abstraction had destroyed the unity of the known and
intelligible world, and was, therefore, forced to seek that unity in
the region of the unknown and unintelligible. If our light be
darkness, then in our darkness we must seek for light; if reason be
contradictory in itself, truth must be found in unreason. The
development of the Cartesian school was soon to show what is the
necessary and inevitable end of such worship of the unknown.

Ethics.

To the ethical aspect of his philosophy, Descartes, unlike Spinoza,
only devoted a subordinate attention. In a short treatise, however, he
discussed the relation of reason to the passions. After we have got
over the initial difficulty, that matter should give rise to effects
in mind, and mind in matter, and have admitted that in man the unity
of mind and body turns what in the animals is mere mechanical
reception of stimulus from without and reaction upon it into an action
and reaction mediated by sensation, emotion and passion, another
question presents itself. How can the mere natural movement of
passion, the nature of which is fixed by the original constitution of
our body, and of the things that act upon it, be altered or modified
by pure reason? For while it is obvious that morality consists in the
determination of reason by itself, it is not easy to conceive how the
same being who is determined by passion from without should also be
determined by reason from within. How, in other words, can a spiritual
being maintain its character as self-determined, or at least
determined only by the clear and distinct ideas of the reason which
are its innate forms, in the presence of this foreign element of
passion that seems to make it the slave of external impressions? Is
reason able to crush this intruder, or to turn it into a servant? Can
the passions be annihilated, or can they be spiritualized? Descartes
could not properly adopt either alternative; he could not adopt the
ethics of asceticism, for the union of body and mind is, in his view,
natural; and hence the passions which are the results of that union
are in themselves good. They are provisions of nature for the
protection of the unity of soul and body, and stimulate us to the acts
necessary for that purpose. Yet, on the other hand, he could not admit
that these passions are capable of being completely spiritualized; for