COMMENTS ON FOUCHER
Translation © George MacDonald Ross, 1974–1999
Comments on Foucher’s objections to the New System, c.1695
[490] (a) [He says he has been telling me what he thinks of my system] ‘for more than ten years,’ i.e. before I published my new system. I have observed Horace’s rule: ‘Keep it suppressed for nine years.’ [n.1]
(b) [He says] ‘You are right to demand unities to make extension a real composite . . . . a unity that can always [491] be divided is only a chimaerical composite, the elements of which do not exist. . . . The essential elements of extension could not really exist.’ The author of this objection seems to have misunderstood me. Extension (space), and the surfaces, lines, and points one can conceive in it, are only relations of order, i.e. orders of co-existence both for something that actually exists and for something possible which could be put in the place of what is there. Thus they have no elements of which they are composed, any more than number has. A fraction (e.g. a half) can be further divided into two quarters or four eighths, etc., and so on ad infinitum, without one ever being able to reach any smallest fractions, or conceive number as a whole formed by the aggregation of ultimate elements. And it is the same with a line, which can be divided in exactly the same way as a number. Also, strictly speaking, the number ‘a half’ in abstract is a completely simple relation, in no way formed by the compounding of other fractions, although in numbered things two quarters do equal a half. And the same can be said of an abstract line, composition occurring only among concrete things, or masses of which these abstract lines indicate the relations. And it is also in this way that mathematical points have position, though they are still only modalities, i.e. extremities. And as everything is indefinite in an abstract line, one is concerned with anything possible in it (as in the fractions of a number), without worrying about the divisions that have actually been made, and which designate these points in a different way. But in actual substantial things, the whole is a resultant or aggregate of simple substances, or rather of a multiplicity of real unities. And it is confusion of the ideal with the actual that has muddled everything, and brought about the labyrinth of the composition of the continuum. Those who compose lines out of points have tried to find primary elements among ideal things or relations in a totally inappropriate way; and those who have realised that relations, like number or space (which embraces the order or relation of co-existent possible things), could not be formed by the aggregation of points, have for the most part made the mistake of denying that substantial realities have primary elements if they have no primitive unities, i.e. as if there did not exist any simple substances. However, although there is no such composition, number and line are certainly not chimaerical things, for they are relations which include [492] eternal truths by which the phenomena of nature are regulated. Hence one can say that a half or a quarter, taken in abstract, are independent of each other, or rather that the complete relation ‘half’ is prior (considered as an object of reason, as the scholastics say) to the partial relation ‘quarter’, since, when dealing with the realm of the ideal, it is by subdivision of a half that one arrives at a quarter. Likewise in the case of a line, the whole is prior to the part, since this part is only possible and ideal. But among realities, where it is only a question of divisions that have actually been made, the whole is only a resultant or aggregate, like a flock of sheep. It is true that the number of simple substances incorporated into a mass, however small, is infinite; for, in addition to the soul which brings about the real unity of the animal, the body of the sheep (for example) is actually subdivided, that is to say, it is also an aggregate of invisible animals or plants, which are likewise composites, in addition to having their own soul in virtue of which they too are unities; and although this continues to infinity, it is obvious that, on the last analysis, everything reduces to these unities, the remainder (the resultants) being nothing but well-founded phenomena.
(c) ‘I do not at all see how this justifies your postulating a sensitive principle in animals which is substantially different from that of men.’ I do this because we know that animals do not indulge in the sort of reflections which rationality consists in, and which make the soul capable of having a personality by giving it knowledge of necessary truths, i.e. truly scientific knowledge. Animals can distinguish good and evil, since they have perception; but they are completely blind to moral good and evil, which presuppose reason and conscience.
(d) ‘What can be the point of all this enormous complexity in substances, if not to create the illusion that they act on each other, even though this does not happen?’ This enormous complexity which brings it about that each substance corresponds to all the others is necessary since all substances are the effects of a sovereign wisdom; and there would be no other way (at least in the natural course of events and without miracles) of making them dependent, and of making the changes of one dependent on, or follow from, the changes of another. However, it remains true that they do interact, as long as this is taken in its proper sense — that action between created substances consists only in this dependence which God has given them. [493] But if we imagine a mutual influence, that is a mistake of our own making, in that our reasoning is at fault. And God is not obliged to create a system in which we would not be subject to self-deception, just as he was not obliged to avoid the heliocentric system in order to preserve us from the error which nearly all astronomers before Copernicus fell into.
(e) ‘It would be more worthy of God if he produced the thoughts and modifications of the soul all at once, without there being any bodies to serve as a rule for him.’ However, God did not produce all thoughts all at once (for they must follow each other), but a nature which produces them in an orderly fashion. And this is precisely what I want: the only thing the body does is to correspond to them. But bodies were necessary for producing not only our unities and souls, but also those of the other corporeal substances (animals and plants) which are in our bodies and in those that are around us.
(f) ‘Material things are capable of efforts and movement. . . . Spiritual beings can also make efforts.’ He wants to conclude from this that they can interact. But their efforts are internal to them, and do not go from one to another; for they are nothing but tendencies to change according to the laws of each one separately.
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