Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

12 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
31 cf. to Mersenne, 11 October 1638 (CSM iii, p. 124), where Descartes criticizes
Galileo on the grounds that ‘his building lacks a foundation’. (See also G. Molland,
Chapter 3 of this volume, p. 129.)
32 This view has been challenged, where Spinoza is concerned, by Alan Donagan
(Spinoza, Brighton, Harvester, 1988, esp. p. 68). Donagan argues that Spinoza did
not so much try to justify the principles of the new physics as generalize from them.
It has also been argued by Stuart Brown that Leibniz was a foundationalist only
during his early years, but later took the view that the philosopher should seek out
and explore fruitful hypotheses (Stuart Brown, Leibniz, Brighton, Harvester, 1984).
I have discussed this thesis in my paper, ‘Leibniz’s Philosophical Aims:
Foundation-laying or Problem-solving?’, in A. Heinekamp, W.Lenzen and
M.Schneider (eds) Mathesis Rationis: Festschrift für Heinrich Schepers (Münster,
Nodus, 1990), pp. 67–78.
33 Meditations V, CSM ii, 45. Compare Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, IV. 11.14, on the
‘eternal truths’ of mathematics.
34 There were two such methods, traditionally known as ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’.
These are discussed in this volume in Chapter 3 (pp. 107–9), Chapter 5 (pp. 183–6)
and Chapter 8 (pp. 279–80).
35 Though Leibniz added the qualification that it must first be shown that the concept
of God—i.e. of a most perfect or necessary being—is self-consistent. See, for
example, Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, sec. 23.
36 cf. p. 4 above.
37 The main sources of deism were Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate (1624), and
Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). However, they were not the sole
sources; as Professor Stuart Brown has pointed out to me, there is reason to believe
that the seventeenth-century rationalists had some influence on deistic thought.
Deism has a long history, and the term meant different things to different people.
(Samuel Clarke, in his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704–6),
recognized no fewer than four types of deism.) What matters here is that many
deists believed in a creative deity whose wisdom and power are such as to make it
irrational to suppose that he should intervene in the workings of the universe, once
he has created it. This position is close to that taken by seventeenth-century
rationalists. Pascal declared that he ‘could not forgive’ Descartes for reducing
God’s role in the workings of the universe almost to nothing (Pensées, Brunschvicg
ed., No. 77), and a similar position is implied by what other seventeenth-century
rationalists said about miracles. For Spinoza, it was impossible that any miracles
should occur; for Leibniz and Malebranche, God’s miraculous intervention in the
universe was a possibility, but such interventions were very few. See, for example,
G.H.R.Parkinson, ‘Spinoza on Miracles and Natural Law’, Revue internationale de
philosophie 31 (1977) 145–57, and Logic and Reality in Leibniz’s Metaphysics
(Oxford, Clarendon, 1965), pp. 102, 155–6; Daisie Radner, Malebranche (Assen,
Van Gorcum, 1978), p. 32.
38 Descartes tried to derive universal laws of science from the immutability of God.
Spinoza seems to have thought that no scientific laws other than those that actually
hold are strictly speaking thinkable, though in his attempt to establish such laws he
was compelled to appeal to experience. (See Chapter 8, pp. 289, 298, on Spinoza’s
‘postulates’. See also Chapter 3, pp. 131–2, for Descartes’s views about hypotheses