History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [366]
There is first of all a difference of method. British philosophy is more detailed and piecemeal than that of the Continent; when it allows itself some general principle, it sets to work to prove it inductively by examining its various applications. Thus Hume, after announcing that there is no idea without an antecedent impression, immediately proceeds to consider the following objection: suppose you are seeing two shades of colour which are similar but not identical, and suppose you have never seen a shade of colour intermediate between the two, can you, nevertheless, imagine such a shade? He does not decide the question, and considers that a decision adverse to his general principle would not be fatal to him, because his principle is not logical but empirical. When—to take a contrast—Leibniz wants to establish his monadology, he argues, roughly, as follows: Whatever is complex must be composed of simple parts; what is simple cannot be extended; therefore everything is composed of parts having no extension. But what is not extended is not matter. Therefore the ultimate constituents of things are not material, and, if not material, then mental. Consequently a table is really a colony of souls.
The difference of method, here, may be characterized as follows: In Locke or Hume, a comparatively modest conclusion is drawn from a broad survey of many facts, whereas in Leibniz a vast edifice of deduction is pyramided upon a pin-point of logical principle. In Leibniz, if the principle is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid, all is well; but the structure is unstable, and the slightest flaw anywhere brings it down in ruins. In Locke or Hume, on the contrary, the base of the pyramid is on the solid ground of observed fact, and the pyramid tapers upward, not downward; consequently the equilibrium is stable, and a flaw here or there can be rectified without total disaster. This difference of method survived Kant's attempt to incorporate something of the empirical philosophy: from Descartes to Hegel on the one side, and from Locke to John Stuart Mill on the other it remains unvarying.
The difference in method is connected with various other differences. Let us take first metaphysics.
Descartes offered metaphysical proofs of the existence of God, of which the most important had been invented in the eleventh century by St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Spinoza had a pantheistic God, who seemed to the orthodox to be no God at all; however that may be, Spinoza's arguments were essentially metaphysical, and are traceable (though he may not have realized this) to the doctrine that every proposition must have a subject and a predicate. Leibniz's metaphysics had the same source.
In Locke, the philosophical direction that he inaugurated is not yet fully developed; he accepts as valid Descartes' arguments as to the existence of God. Berkeley invented a wholly new argument; but Hume—in whom the new philosophy comes to completion—rejected metaphysics entirely, and held that nothing can be discovered by reasoning on the subjects with which metaphysics is concerned. This view persisted in the empirical school, while the opposite view, somewhat modified, persisted in Kant and his disciples.
In ethics, there is a similar division between the two schools.
Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes. There are in Spinoza two unreconciled views on ethics, one that of Hobbes, the other that the good consists in mystic union with God. Leibniz made no important contribution to ethics, but Kant made ethics supreme, and derived his metaphysics from ethical premisses. Kant's ethic is important, because it is anti-utilitarian, a priori, and what is called 'noble'.