sarily true. But such an account of knowledge and such a dualistic 

 view of the world, though for a time it met with immense success, 

 could not remain for long unchallenged. The problem of succeed- 

 ing thinkers was to centre, mainly, around the relation of mind and 

 matter as denned by Des Cartes. 



Of greater importance in regard to this problem than the 

 Occasionalists, Geulinx and Malebranche, was the so-called Mate- 

 rialistic school that arose. La Mattrie, one of the most outspoken 

 of these in France, endeavoured to overcome the dualism of Des 

 Cartes by denying the necessity for any substance called mind. 

 If animals are automata, and Des Cartes had affirmed this, then 

 man, too, may be called a machine, though, to be sure, a very com- 

 plicated one. This tendency ran a varied course in the teachings of 

 Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius and Cabanis, but the refutation to all 

 such materialism lies in the method which Des Cartes himself had 

 suggested, a method which leads one to see, or should lead one to 

 see the indubitable character and the actual nature of the imme- 

 diate facts of his experience. A more interesting and important 

 successor of Des Cartes than any of the Occasionalists or Material- 

 ists was Spinoza, who endeavoured to overcome the dualism of 

 Des Cartes by working out the logical consequences of his defini- 

 tion of substance, showing that there can really be but one sub- 

 stance. This substance Spinoza called God. It has infinite attri- 

 butes of which the human intellect knows but two, extension and 

 thought. Matter and mind, then, are not two opposite substances, 

 they are two different ways of conceiving one and the same sub- 

 stance. Particular bodies and particular minds are modes of 

 extension and of thought respectively. This, in brief, is the essence 

 of Spinoza's advance, if advance it be, upon the dualistic position 

 of Des Cartes. He endeavours to follow the method of geometry 

 closely throughout, commencing with certain definitions and 

 axioms, which are, he claims, clear and distinct to the reason. 

 But in the starting point of Spinoza lay his mistake, for his defini- 

 tions were not matters-of-fact or statements thereof; they were 

 merely verbal, and so, while the dualism of Des Cartes was avoided, 

 not to say overcome, his dogmatism was perpetuated. 



The work of Leibnitz, however different in form as well as in 

 matter from that of Spinoza, still illustrates the same rationalistic 



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