253 
Unconscious thought in nature was affirmed by the Neo- 
Platonists. Says Zeller ( Philosophic der Griechen, 2nd ed., iii. 
2, p. 492) “ Nature [in the system of Plotinus] is, it is true, in 
its essence, thought, yet not conscious thought, but, the rather, 
simple, foi’mative activity, without conscious purpose ’ ; or, if 
it possesses a kind of consciousness, Plotinus “ compares it to 
that of a person in sleep.” This conception of nature may be 
regarded as a fit correlate to the Plotinic conception of the 
supreme cc One,” the ineffable source of all existence, itself so 
transcending the categories of human thought, that neither 
definite being nor thought can be ascribed to it. God is supe- 
rior to thought, nature is debility of thought, the last result of 
a series of involuntary emanations from Deity. 
Passing over, now, the Scholastic Philosophy of the Middle 
Ages, the reveries of German Mysticism, and the attempts to 
revive various ancient systems of philosophy in the Renaissance 
period, in all of which ancient ideas reappear more or less 
profoundly modified by the doctrines of Christian theology, 
we find Descartes, the* founder of modern speculative philo- 
sophy, assuming a double realm of existence, material and 
spiritual. The essential attribute of the former is extension, 
of the latter, thought. In the former all processes are me- 
chanical, in the latter they are expressly declared to be without 
exception conscious, even though the thinking agent may not 
always remember to have been conscious of them. The two 
spheres of existence, wholly incommensurable, act upon each 
other by virtue of the Divine assistance. Properly speaking, 
neither matter nor created spirit has inherent active power. 
God creates, and by a constantly renewed creation preserves 
them both, according to Descartes, such as they are and in the 
relations in which at each instant they are actually found to 
exist. Everything depends directly on His omniscient will, 
and is, fundamentally speaking, in itself a dead, passive pro- 
duct of the omnipotent Deity. But this theocentric point of 
view disappears in Descartes’ actual and detailed treatment of 
the definite contents of the universe (matter and mind, or 
extension and thought, and their laws), and by his practical 
admission of the possibility of an independent material realm, 
the scene of purely blind mechanical processes, entirely 
separated by nature from the influence of thought, because 
utterly unideal, he opened at the beginning of modern philo- 
sophy the door for the modern theories of pure materialism, in 
which God, the divine thinker, is dispensed with, and thought 
is swallowed up in mechanism. Strange inversion of the 
natural order of ideas ! in which the relatively unknown 
