OCCASIONS
196
OCCASIONS
tweon body and soul, do la Forge approached the
later Leibnizian doctrine of a pre-e.stal)lish('d liar-
mony. God must have willed ami broufjht about the
union between body and soul, therefore He willeil to do
all that is necessary to perfect this union. The union
between body and niinil involves the appearance of
thoughts in coi\sciousiu'ss at the presence of bodily
activities and the sequence of bodily movements to
carr>- out the ideas of the mind. God williuf; the
union between body and mind willed also to iiroduce,
as first and universal cause, the thoufihls that should
correspond to the organic moveiiu'Uls of sensation,
and the movements which follow upon the presence
of some conscious processes. But there are other
movements for which the soul itself is responsible as
efficient cause, and these are the effects of the spon-
taneous activitv of our free will.
The Occasionalism of Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) is ethical rather than cosmological in its inception. The first tract of his "Ethics" (Land's ed. of the Opera, The Hague, 1891-93) is a study of what he termed the cardinal virtues. These are not prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. Virtue according to Geulincx is the love of God and of Reason (III, 16-17; 29). The cardinal virtues are the properties of virtue which immediately flow from its very essence and have nothing to do with anything external. These properties are diligence, obedience, justice, humility (III, 17). The division which Geulincx makes of humility is one of fundamental importance in his phi- losophy. It divides his view of the world into two parts — one, the understanding of our relation to the world, and the other, the concept of our relation to God. Huraihty consists in theknowledgeof self and the for- saking of self. I find in myself nothing that is my own but to know and to will. I therefore must be conscious of all that I do, and that of which I am not conscious is not the product of my own causality. Hence the uni- versal principle of causality — guod 7iescis quo modo fiat, nonfacis — if you do not know how a thing is done then you do not do it. Since then, the movements of my body take place without my knowing how the nervous impulse passes to the muscles and there causes them to contract I do not cause my own bodily actions. " I am therefore a mere spectator of this machine. In it I form naught and renew naught, I neither make anything here nor destroy it. Everything is the work of someone else " (111,33). This one is the Deity who sees and knows all things. The second part of Geulincx's philosophy is connected with Occasional- ism as the effect with the cause. Its guiding principle is: Where you can do nothing there also you should desire nothing (III, 222). This leads to a mysticism and asceticism which however must not be taken too seriously for it is tempered by the obligation of caring for the body and propagating the species.
Nicolas Malebranche (q. v.) developed Occasional- ism to its uttermost limit, approaching so near to Pan- theism that he himself remarked that the difference between himself and Spinoza was that he taught that the universe was in God and that Spinoza said that God was in the universe. Starting out with the Cartesian doctrine, that the essence of the soul is thought and that of matter is extension, he sought to prove that crea- tures have no causality of their own . Experience seems to tell us that one body acts upon another, but all that we know is that the movement of one body follows upon that of another. We have no experience of one body causing the movement of another. Therefore, says Malebranche, one body cannot act upon another. By a similar argument he attempts to prove that body cannot act upon mind. Since experience can tell us only that a sensation follows upon the stimulus, there- fore the stimulus is not the cause of the sensation. He uses the argument of Geulincx to prove that mind cannot act upon body. Not only is there no interac- tion between body and mind, and between one body
and another, but there is no causality within the mind
itself. Our sensations, for example, are not caused
by bodies, and are independent of ourselves. There-
fore they must be produced by some higher being.
Our ideas cannot be created by the mind. Neither
can they be copied from a present object, for one
would have first to perceive the object in order to copy
it, after which the production of an idea would be
superfluous. Our ideas cannot be all possessed as
comi)letc products from the beginning, because it is
a fact t hat the mind goes through a process of gradual
development. Nor can the mind possess a faculty
that produces by a sufficient causality its own ideas,
because it would have to produce also the ideas of ex-
tended bodies and extension is excluded from the
essence of the mind and therefore from the scope of
its causal efficiency. If then there is no way of ac-
counting for ideas and sensations either by the effi-
ciency of the mind itself or by that of the outside world
they must be produced by God, the infinite, omni-
present, universal Cause. God knows all things be-
cause He produced all things. Therefore the ideas of
all things are in God, and on account of His most in-
timate union with our souls the spirit can see what is
in God.
Among the Occasionalists is also mentioned R. H. Lotze (1817-Sl). His Occasionalism is really only a statement that we are ignorant of any interaction be- tween body and mind, or between one material thing and another. He is not an Occasionalist in the meta- physical sense of the word. In estimating the value of the Occasionalistic position we must realize that it sprang from a twofold problem, the interaction of body and mind and the relation of body, mind, and world to God, the first cause of all. The success of the Occasionalist answer to the first diflnculty was de- pendent upon the fate of the Cartesian philosophy. If man is composed of two absolutely distinct sub- stances that have nothing in common, then the con- clusion of the Occasionalists is logically necessary and there is no interaction between body and mind. What appears to be such must be due to the efficient causality of some external being. This difficulty was not felt so keenly in Scholastic philosophy because of the doctrine of matter and form, which explains the relation of body and soul as that of two incomplete but complementary substances. Very soon, too, it be- gan to lose its hold upon modern thought. For Car- tesianism led, on the one hand, to a Monistic Spirit- ualism and, on the other, to Materialism. In either case the very foundations of.Occasionalism were under- mined. In its attempt to solve the second difficulty, Occasionalism did not meet with any particular suc- cess. From its doctrine of the relation between body and soul it argued to what must be the relation be- tween God and the creature in general. The super- structure could not stand without the foundation.
St. Th()Ma8, Summa, I, Q. cv, a. 5; Kayserling. Die Idee der Kausalitat in den Lehren der Occasuinalislrn (Heidelberg, 1896); MtiLLER, Johannes Clauberp und , < j - >',lht:,.: an Cartesianismtti mit besonderer Beriicksichtigunfj ■-< ' 1 ' i ,s*ts zu der ocea-
sionatistinchen Theorie (Jena, 18!ll ■ I i > i it, Arnold Geulincx
als Hauplvertreler der okkasionali n rl.< ,i M. i<, /ilij/sik und Ethik (Tubingen, 1882) ; Idbm, LeibniU und Gnilinrz (Tubingen, 1884); Samtleden. Geulincx ein Vorgttnger Spinozas (Halle, 1885); Set- FARTH, Louis de la Forge und seine Stellung im Occasionalismus (Jena, 1887) : Stein, Zur Genesis des Occaaionalismus in Archiv/Ur Ge8ch. der Phil., I (1888), 53-61; Idem, Antike und miltelalterliche VoTUiufer des Occasionalismusin Arch. J. Gesch.d. Phil., II (1889, V.y.i-2\Ti)\ TucH, Lotzes Stellung zum Occasionalismus (Hamburg, 181)7) ; nee also bibliography under Malebranche.
Tho.mas v. Moore.
Occasions of Sin are external circumstances whether of things or persons which either because of their special nature or because of the frailty common to humanity or peculiar to some individual, incite or entice one to sin. It is important to remember that there is a wide difference between the cause and the occasion of sin. The cause of sin in the last analysis
