>38 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



A lady published some letters addressed by 

 her to Prof. Moleschott, in which the following 

 sentiments occur : 



" The moral rule for each man is given by his 

 own nature only, and is dhTerent, therefore, for 

 each individual. What are excesses and passions 

 by themselves ? Nothing but a larger or smaller 

 overflowing of a perfectly legitimate impulse." 



A philosopher l belonging to the other sex in- 

 dulges in the following dithyrambus : 



" Enjoyment is good, and frenzy and love are 

 good, but hatred also ! Hatred answers well when 

 we cannot have love. Wealth is good, because it 

 can be changed into enjoyment. Tower is good, 

 because it satisfies our pride. Truth is good, so 

 long as it gives us pleasure ; but good is lying also, 

 and perjury, hypocrisy, trickery, flattery, if they 

 secure us any advantage. Faithfulness is good, so 

 long as it pays ; but treason is good also, if it 

 fetches a higher price. Marriage is good, so long 

 as it makes us happy ; but good is adultery also 

 for every one who is tired of marriage, or who 

 happens to fall in love with a married person. 

 Fraud is good, theft, robbery, and murder, if they 

 lead to wealth and enjoyment. Life is good, so 

 long as it is a riddle ; good is suicide also after the 

 riddle has been guessed. But as every enjoyment 

 culminates in our being deceived and tired, and as 

 the last pleasure vanishes with the last illusion, 

 he only would seem to be truly wise who draws 

 the last conclusion of all science — i. e., who takes 

 prussic acid, and that without delay." 



I need hardly say that Prof. Noire's style is 

 as far as possible removed from such ravings, at 

 which even a Greek cynic would have smiled, but 

 he is nevertheless by no means a timid philoso- 

 pher, and never shrinks from any conclusion that 

 is forced on him by facts or real arguments. What 

 distinguishes him from most philosophers is his 

 strong feeling for the history of philosophy. There 

 is in all he writes a warm sympathy with the 

 past, without which there is no prophet and no 

 philosopher. He is not always anxious to im- 

 press us with the fact that his system is a new 

 system, that his thoughts are quite his own, quite 

 original. He knows what has been said before 

 him on the old questions which disturb our own 

 philosophical atmosphere, whether by the ancient 

 philosophers of Greece, or by the schoolmen, or 

 by any of the great leaders of philosophic thought, 

 from Descartes to Kant. He never announces as 

 a new discovery what may be read in any manual 



1 R. Schuricht, as quoted in Carriere's remarkable 

 book, " Die sittliche Weltordming," p. 24 (Leipzig, 



1877). 



of the history of philosophy. He never indulges 

 in the excited language of the raw recruit with 

 whom every little skirmish is to rank as one of 

 the great battles of thought. He has a clear 

 perception that the roots of his own system of 

 philosophy go back through Schopenhauer, Kant, 

 and Leibnitz, to Spinoza and Descartes, and it is 

 with a full consciousness of what he owes to every 

 one of his intellectual ancestors, that he takes his 

 own position on the high-road of philosophic 

 thought. On the tower built up to a certain 

 height he rears his own story, and he invites us 

 to see whether it does not command a wider and 

 clearer view than the loop-holes of his predeces- 

 sors. If there is an evolution anywhere, it is in 

 philosophy, and a philosophy which ignores its 

 antecedents is like a tree without roots. The 

 great leaders in metaphysical speculation during 

 the last four centuries are to Noire not only 

 names to be cited, but living powers with whom 

 he has to reckon, and from whom, even when he 

 treats of the most recent problems of the day, 

 he demands an answer in accordance with their 

 principles. 



HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF NOIRE'S PHILOSOPHY 

 — DESCARTES. 



Thus, when he has to define the point from 

 which he himself starts, in approaching the great 

 questions of our time, and more particularly the 

 questions of the origin of reason and language, 

 he, like every true philosopher, feels the influence 

 of Descartes, the founder of modern metaphysics. 

 His Cogilo remains the starting-point of modern 

 philosophy, whatever we may think even of the 

 very first of his conclusions, ergo sum. What 

 separated Descartes from the philosophy of the 

 middle ages, and gave him that strong position 

 which he still holds in the history of philosophy, 

 was his fixing his starting-point on the subjective 

 side, and assigning to cognition the first place 

 among all philosophical problems. We must 

 know " how " we know before we ask " what " 

 we know. Every system of philosophy which 

 plunges into the mysteries of Nature without 

 having solved the mysteries of the mind, the sys- 

 tems of natural evolution not excepted, is pre- 

 Cartesian and mediaeval. 



But, though breaking the fetters of many of 

 the traditional ideas of the schoolmen, Descartes 

 remained under the sway of others. He remained 

 a dualist, never doubting the independent exist- 

 ence of two separate worlds, the world of thought 

 and the world of matter. The world of thought 

 was given him in his Cogito, but the world of 



