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 Central Works of Philosophy
Central Works of Philosophy is a multi-volume set of essays on the core texts of the Western
philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to the present day, the volumes range over 2,500
years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of
some of our greatest philosophers. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an
overview of the work and clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas. Together these
essays introduce the masterpieces of the Western philosophical canon and provide an unrivalled
companion for reading and studying philosophy.
 Central Works of Philosophy

Edited by John Shand

Volume 1: Ancient and Medieval

Volume 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Volume 3: The Nineteenth Century

Volume 4: The Twentieth Century: Moore to Popper

Volume 5: The Twentieth Century: Quine and After

Central Works of Philosophy Volume 2

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Edited by John Shand

In memory of my parents, Alexander Hesketh Shand and Muriel Olive Shand

First published in 2005 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Editorial matter and selection, 2005 John Shand. Individual contributions, the contributors.

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In
using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of
others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors,
assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products
liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products,
instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN 13: 978-1-84465-014-9 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-84465-015-6 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Designed and typeset in Garamond by Kate Williams, Swansea.

 Contents
Contributors
Preface
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy: Introduction
John Shand
1 René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy
Janet Broughton
2 Baruch Spinoza: Ethics
Steven Nadler
3 G. W. Leibniz: Monadology
Douglas Burnham
4 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
G. A. J. Rogers
5 John Locke: An Essay concerning Human Understanding
J. R. Milton
6 George Berkeley: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
Tom Stoneham
7 David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
P J. E. Kail
8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
Jonathan Riley
Index
 Contributors
Janet Broughton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley Her main
philosophical interests lie in the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy She is
the author of Descartes's Method of Doubt.

Douglas Burnham is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Staffordshire University He is the author

of An Introduction to Kant's Critique of Judgement and Kant's Philosophies of Judgement.

P.J. E. Kail is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of

Projection and Realism in Huyne (forthcoming) and a number of articles in the history of
philosophy

J. R. Milton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College, London. He has written widely on
various aspects of Locke's thought, and has just completed work on an edition of Locke's early
writings on religious toleration.

Steven Nadler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his

recent books are Spinoza: A Life and Spinoza's Heresy.

Jonathan Riley is Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. His most recent book is Mill's
Radical Liberalism.

G. A. J. Rogers is Professor of the History of Philosophy Emeritus at Keele University and, since
1993, the Founder-Editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. His most recent
book, with the late Karl Schuhmann, is a critical edition of Hobbes' Leviathan.

John Shand is an Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and is the author of
Arguing Well and Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (Acumen).

Tom Stoneham is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. Prior to that he was a Fellow
of Merton College, Oxford, where he still owns the house in Holywell Street where Berkeley died.
He is the author of Berkeley's World.
 Preface
The works in the Central Works of Philosophy volumes have been chosen because of their
fundamental importance in the history of philosophy and for the development of human thought.
Other works might have been chosen; however, the underlying idea is that if any works should be
chosen, then these certainly should be. In the cases where the work is a philosopher's magnum
opus the essay on it gives an excellent overview of the philosopher's thought.
Chapter 1 by Janet Broughton introduces Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, which is
usually taken as marking the beginning of modern philosophy Descartes takes an intellectual
journey, that is both logically rigorous and psychologically convincing, moving from sceptical
subjectivity to establishing that there may be objective and certain knowledge. He also seeks to
determine the ultimate nature of reality, and concludes that it can be divided into unextended
consciousness or thought, and unthinking extended matter. The overall aim is to set aside the
contingent aspects of our perspective on the world and so arrive at an objectively true conception
of reality.
Chapter 2 by Steven Nadler presents Spinoza's Ethics. This work aims to connect at a
fundamental level metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza sets out to show that ultimately there can be
only one substance: something that includes within itself the full explanation for both its nature
and existence. He calls this "God", but it has none of the features of a traditional personal God,
and instead God is identified with the universe as a whole. There can only be one possible
universe, and occurrences within it unfold with necessary logical inevitability. The appearance of
contingency is merely a consequence of our ignorance of causes. Mind and matter are two
attributes of this single substance. We are morally responsible and most truly ourselves when we
act according to reason, free from immediate external contingent influences, and we act according
to reason in so far as our ideas are active and thus adequately reflect the structure of reality.
Chapter 3 by Douglas Burnham discusses Leibniz's The Monadology, which condenses and
sums up his philosophy He seeks to identify the nature of true substance. Although Leibniz agrees
with Spinoza that substance is autonomous and must appeal to nothing outside itself for an
explanation of its nature, he does not include the explanation of its existence as part of its essence.
Substances - unextended, simple, purely qualitative, and without parts - he calls "monads". God
chooses to bring into existence one of an infinite number of possible universes of monads; the
explanation for His choosing this universe is that it satisfies the condition of its being the best.
Once created the universe unfolds with logical necessity. What we call appearances, or the
physical world, are well-founded phenomena that reflect systematic changes in the monads. The
guiding idea of Leibniz and Spinoza is to give an account of fundamental reality, if there is to be,
as there must, a complete explanation for why it is as it is.
Chapter 4 by G. A. J. Rogers gives an account of the political philosophy of Hobbes's Leviathan.
In this work Hobbes presents a view of human nature as fixed: base, brutal and without a natural
capacity for mutual trust. The only way to avoid an endless war of all against all in a state of
nature - the worst of all worlds - is for individuals to mutually agree to hand over virtually all
their rights to a sovereign who will through sanctions impose moral order.
Chapter 5 by J. R. Milton looks at Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. The
fundamental aim of this book is to set proper limits on what we can be said to know about the
world, by arguing that any knowledge we have of the world must be based on ideas that derive
from experience. There are no innate ideas from which one could gain an understanding of the
world independently of experience. There is a liberal impulse to this, so that we are encouraged to
think things through for ourselves and not to rely on mere authority or appeals to innate,
supposedly natural, intuitions. Locke also insists that we need not abandon ourselves to
scepticism where we cannot have certain knowledge, because in these areas - which in fact
constitute most of what we claim to know - we are still capable of probable belief and thus of
rationality.
Chapter 6 by Tom Stoneham presents the arguments of Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the
Principles of Human Knowledge. The overriding aim of this work is to overcome what Berkeley
sees as scepticism caused by the illegitimate and nonsensical positing of a material substance that
might exist in some way other than how it can be talked about by reference to our ideas. Whether
this constitutes an ontological reduction of the world to ideas and the minds that have them is
open to debate. But by closing the gap between our ideas of the world and the world itself
existing as a collection of sensible things, he seeks to eliminate any doubt we may have in talking
about the existence of the world or its nature as we come to know it in our experience. He also
reintroduced a dependence on God through His benign maintenance of an ordered world.
Chapter 7 by E J. E. Kail explores Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature. There is a tension
between scepticism and naturalism in Hume's philosophy On the one hand, he shows that we
have no rational justification for our most basic beliefs - such as causality, a persistent self, and
the existence of the external world - beliefs that underpin all our other substantive non-trivial
beliefs. If we did have such a rational justification in these cases they would either be logical
truths or we would find that experience supported our belief in them, but in fact we find neither.
Hume does not however conclude that we should abandon such beliefs, or that such beliefs are
irrational just because they cannot have a rational justification. Rather, nature through actual
experience and the inherent disposition of the human mind takes care that we firmly hold these
beliefs; thus such beliefs are impervious to sceptical arguments since our having them is not
dependent on argument.
Chapter 8 by Jonathan Riley explores the political philosophy of Rousseau's The Social
Contract. Although he took the view that man's nature is malleable, and potentially perfectible -
in opposition to the view of Hobbes - arguably he comes to similar authoritarian conclusions
about the ideal state. Just because human nature may be moulded he does not ascribe the bad
aspects of human behaviour to our inherent nature, but to the effects of the wrong kind of society.
The aim of the ideal State is not to control the ineradicable brutality and lack of moral
responsibility inherent in human nature, but to change human nature through the correct sort of
socialization into something more rational, moral, and concerned with the common good.
John Shand
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy
Introduction

John Shand

The philosophers in this volume mark what may be argued is the second major watershed in the
intellectual development of mankind. If Plato is the father of the coming of age of mankind, then
the philosophers gathered around the Enlightenment are the thinkers who spread this more
mature intellectual outlook deeply and widely throughout the psyche and institutions of the
Western world. Kant was asked in 1784 to say what is Enlightenment, and he replied that:
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own
understanding without guidance of another. It is self-incurred, when it depends on a deficiency, not of reason, but of the
resolve and courage to use it without external guidance. Thus the watch word of enlightenment is Sapere aude! Have the
courage to use one's own reason!
(Kant 1784: 481, translation modified1)

Maturity of mind is a pretty good definition of philosophy: using one's own reason and
understanding to think things out for oneself, and following this through wherever it may lead.
Plato began this process, but the battle to complete that process was not won by him, and for the
generality of humanity it probably never will be. Many seem all too willing to have others tell
them what they ought to think, even as they may strongly claim they are making up their own
minds. However, there are degrees of success. From Plato it took another two thousand years for
the philosophical spirit to spread as an intellectual outlook throughout the educated portions of
mankind and then to begin to have significant consequences for large portions of the human
population. Eventually came modern science and huge advances in mathematics, the beginnings
of democratic institutions and the emergence of the importance of such notions as the rule of law,
rights and freedom. In fact, it is from the Enlightenment that the substance of almost everything
we take for granted in the modern world emerged. The underpinning of this radical
transformation of outlook is philosophy and the new philosophical ideas that appeared during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period philosophy and science reinforced one
another. In fact, it is to a large extent a mistake to mark a sharp distinction between philosophy
and science during this time.
The hope characteristic of the Enlightenment, that man may be master of his own destiny, was
unprecedented. Thinkers of the ancient world had valued reason and used it to attempt to control
and understand their lives. Nevertheless, through Greek and Roman times there remained a
fatalism that many features of reality were overwhelmingly beyond our management; a world full
of mysterious portent, uncertainly avoided or placated. The Renaissance, lying between the
medieval period and the Enlightenment, was not ready to propose that human beings may be free
of the vagaries of incomprehensible chance. Thus, the Prince of Machiavelli guided by virtu
(usually translated "prowess", encapsulating the combination of virtuoso strength and cunning a
Prince requires to rule well) had thereby still only the best chance of defying the uncertain
deliverances of fate but could not guarantee to overcome them. With the Enlightenment a truly
new sort of optimism arose for mankind, one where we need not be passive helpless subjects of
the grinding wheels of fate. There was a growing belief that the efforts of reason to understand
and control would be rewarded. There was also as part of this a movement away from mysticism
and towards secularism. Man could actually get where he wanted to go on his own, not just hope
for the best. In the ancient world he still considered the uncontrollable opposition of mysterious
fate overwhelming. In the medieval world uncertain yet inevitable fate combined with the belief
that man could not get where he wanted without divine aid was entrenched as the very structure
of reality. The Christianity of medieval Europe, which intervened between the ancient world and
the Enlightenment world, is seen by some as having compounded the passivity, hopelessness and
powerlessness felt in antiquity as well as denying the value of this world in relation to the next.
This view of the medieval period is forcefully described by Gilbert Murray as:
a rise in asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal
human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a
conversion of the soul to God.
(1935: 123)

He sums this up crushingly as a "failure of nerve". The Enlightenment was just the opposite of
this, a "recovery of nerve" (Gay 1969: 6). It was a time that signalled the end of the sure belief that
the striving for human improvement was futile. Rather, there was a confidence that in science and
philosophy such effort would triumph, and in the establishment of a good and just social order
that would bring about a better life for man in this world. There was also a rise in secularism. In
short, the Enlightenment marked an utterly new view of the human condition.
This view, although not uncontentious, is I think basically correct. It should perhaps be
balanced a little by pointing both to the way in which medieval notions still have value in our
worldview - much of the work in the philosophy of logic and semantics for instance - and the
way in which some Enlightenment philosophers saw themselves as building on, rather than
overthrowing and replacing, medieval notions. The much studied notion of substance in the
medieval period - substance being the basic building block of reality - although almost
unrecognizably different in philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, is still in them a
pursuit of substance in its most basic meaning, as that which does the explaining of other
phenomena and is not itself in need of explanation. The guiding idea of Spinoza and Leibniz is to
give a rational account of how reality must be fundamentally if it is to have, as it must, a
complete explanation for why it is as it is. Descartes thought he needed to posit the mind as a
separate non-physical substance in order to accommodate, among other things, the disembodied
existence of the soul in accordance with religious beliefs that he doubtless held sincerely. Leibniz's
conception of substances as "monads" indeed bears similarities to that of Aristotle. It is not, as in
Aristotle, a natural kind at the level of things as they appear to us, but it shares with Aristotle's
substance that it is something that captures the notion of an individual: something that can
undergo change while remaining the same sort of thing. In Leibniz, however, substance both lies
beyond appearances and provides the foundation of those appearances as "well-founded
phenomena". God is required to explain the bare existence of monads but not their subsequent
states, which arise autonomously according to their essential nature. Nor did Enlightenment
thinkers suddenly become atheists (although some did, and some like Hume became at the least
agnostic). Galileo and Newton were both profound believers, as was Locke. However, religion
rested in an utterly new place when it came to explaining and understanding the reality of the
world around us. In that capacity it took second place as a source of knowledge to reason and
experience. Belief in God was not usually repudiated. Rather He was placed outside the world as
well as outside explanations - beyond His bringing about the bare fact of the world's existence -
as to why the world appears as it is and operates in the way it does, rather as a clockmaker stands
apart from his clocks. There were remarkable exceptions to this in the shape of philosophical
idealists such as Berkeley, who, in a reaction to the mechanical model of reality that placed God
in a perilously irrelevant position, made reality more dependent on God than even the most
devout medieval theistic philosopher would have contemplated. At the same time as God was
pushed aside in theories about reality, attempts at direct understanding of the Godhead too were
increasingly regarded as futile. The rise of Protestantism was partly both cause and consequence
of this. The metaphysical ambitions of religion, in which it pronounced on the truth about the
totality of reality, declined. A premium was placed instead on a direct experiential and moral
relationship with God guided by personal experience and Biblical reading without the need of the
intervention of a metaphysically empowered priestly class, which was in marked contrast to the
ethos of the established church of medieval Catholicism. New philosophical systems were built
that tended to avoid direct theorizing about God and placed Him in a peripheral role in the
explanation of the workings of reality, but which left a separate realm for Him in a personal faith
beyond reason. The same was true in science, so that to praise God was to admire, and hence to
understand, the beauty of His creation, an understanding that did not require direct reference to
God in order to explain the nature of that creation. Locke was highly influential on non-
conformist religion, and this was based largely on his notion that it was every person's duty to
make his knowledge his own by checking it against his own personal experience, and not rely on
the mere authority of others. Locke was also, it must be said, opposed to what he called religious
enthusiasm, which, as he had seen, had caused the shedding of too much blood. With prescience,
Erasmus in the Renaissance realized that if religion wished to win people's trust and belief, but
insisted on going head-to-head with science in attempting to provide an explanation of the world
around us, then religion was only going to lose, and in the process thereby undermine its
authority generally. Better to give up the science and restrict religious knowledge and authority to
the transcendent realm of the spiritual and that of morality, beyond the grasp of the factual
enquiries of natural science and of mere speculative philosophy. This separation becomes firmly
established in the Enlightenment thinkers, and it culminates in Kant, heir to the Enlightenment,
who, in order to make room for faith, not only refrains (if not consistently) from speculative
metaphysics generally and theistic metaphysics in particular, which lie beyond the bounds of
experience, but endeavours to show that such speculation is impossible.
The common characteristic of the work of the philosophers discussed in this volume is to ask
questions at their most fundamental level and, with great originality, to take ideas fearlessly to
their limits; to draw out and explore fully their ramifications come what may There is a tendency
towards wanting to sweep clean, and set ideas finally in order, at long last on their proper path to
understanding and truth, and moreover a certainty that such an aim is not merely vain hope.
There is an intermingling of what would today be distinguished as science and philosophy in
most of the thinkers. Some of the philosophers, such as Descartes and Leibniz, are also significant
original scientists and mathematicians in their own right; others, such as Locke and Hume, drew
upon science directly or indirectly, as well as in return trying to underpin its presuppositions and
methods. With some of the philosophers of this period an underlying idea is to draw the
boundaries of what we could properly be said to know and think about, thereby rejecting the
copious amount of theorizing directed at matters beyond those boundaries as pointless and
possibly even meaningless.
The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are sometimes divided into
rationalists and empiricists. Often the ideas of both are brought under the title of modern
philosophy. The rationalists are Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and the empiricists Locke,
Berkeley and Hume. The distinction, although helpful to some degree, should not be seen as pure,
marking rather tendencies that vary in strength from philosopher to philosopher. The rationalist
tendency is to contend that the fundamental nature of what reality necessarily is like can be
known by the application of a priori pure reason alone, a reality that goes beyond what can be
accessed a posteriori by experience and may only be known independently of the need to refer to
such experience. The empiricist tendency is to deny that we may have knowledge of what reality
is ultimately necessarily like by the application of a priori pure reason alone, concerning matters
that lie beyond our possible experience, and to draw the boundary of what can be known (or
perhaps even be meaningful) to those matters that can be referred a posteriori to experience,
which presents a world whose features are always contingent. The empiricist may go further and
deny the meaningfulness of putative a priori theorizing about reality. One should beware,
however, of concluding that in some crude sense empiricists were concerned only with the solid
results of experimental work and the rationalists were fanciful armchair theorizers; in fact the
former could not avoid using concepts that failed to have a grounding in experience, despite
protestations that they would not, and the latter constantly drew upon, and sometimes
contributed to, the limited experimental results of their day.
The chief feature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemology and metaphysics is a
move away from divine authority and revelation in understanding ourselves and the world
towards what could be derived from the application of reason and verified through experience. In
metaphysics this emerges as a search for the ultimate nature of reality that in the rationalist
philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz opens up the gap between how things appear and
how they really are. This contrasts with the dominant Aristotelian tradition from which the
Enlightenment emerges. Aristotelian metaphysics basically takes things at their face value; the
ultimate building blocks of reality and the proper units of explanation are just what they appear
to be: horses, mountains, trees, water, human beings and the like. These are the fundamental
subjects to which various qualities are ascribed and that undergo change; change either from one
substance to another (wine into vinegar, Socrates becoming a corpse) or change within a
substance (wine turning into sour wine, Socrates becoming old). In substantial change we have
one kind of thing changing into another kind of thing; in non-substantial (accidental) change we
have one kind of thing remaining the same kind of thing, but changing its properties.
The ambition of the rationalist philosophers, however, is to establish a complete unification of
reality, which will underlie the apparent vast diversity of things. For them such everyday kinds of
things as appear to us are not the ultimate building blocks of reality. There must be something
more fundamental underpinning the apparent diversity of things beyond appearances of which
we can know the nature by intellectual reflection alone, and which gives us the ultimate and
necessary explanation for why the diversity of things appears as it does. The Aristotelian units of
reality and the explanation as to why things are as they are require an appeal to things outside
themselves, and so such entities cannot be true substances. Partly the motivation for this is
greater simplicity in explanations. The ideal rationalist aim is to find something - true substance
or substances - that requires no further explanation, but may act to explain everything else, and in
a simplified way. For Descartes, these substances are matter and immaterial (non-extended) mind.
For Leibniz, ultimate substance consists of non-extended atomic collations of qualities called
monads. For Spinoza (the major Jewish philosopher of this period), true substance is nothing less
than the whole of reality; he calls this God, but it bears little relation to the personalized God of
established religion, and was sufficiently other to have him dubbed a dangerous atheist, or at best
a pantheist. The commonality of these conceptions of substance is that, unlike the diverse array of
natural kinds presented as substances by Aristotle and the medieval Aristotelians, these
substances fit the bill of substance proper: that of requiring no further explanation beyond
themselves for why they are as they are. Spinoza is the most extreme in his search for substance,
for the requirement that there need be no further explanation beyond itself includes its very
existence, and so it must in the ultimate and true sense be fully self-caused. As we have reached a
unit of existence that requires no further explanation as to its nature - indeed, no explanation of
its existence in Spinoza's case - we have something that can act as the explanation of everything
else. It also produces huge explanatory power by treating different kinds as common in respect of
what is relevant to their explanation. In this way, an explanation referring only to one basic kind
of thing can be used to explain what appears as a variety of sorts of thing that previously seemed
to each require a separate special explanation. It should be noted that Spinoza's concern is
centrally ethical, but an ethics based necessarily on his metaphysics. Spinoza's enemy is
uncontrolled passion and its destructive consequences; but rather than propose that it should
merely be disciplined by act of will, he thought the problem was one of ignorance, and that once
we understood the true nature of reality such control would come from reason overpowering
passion. Again, the bringing of control through knowledge and eradication of ignorance, a
dissolving of dark mysteries and superstitions, is highly characteristic of the Enlightenment
mentality.
Locke's view on substance is more circumspect and ambivalent. As an empiricist philosopher
he was concerned that beyond the simple truths of logic and mathematics, if we were to have
knowledge, and knowledge of the world in particular, it must be derived from experience, not
from the speculations of reason as rationalism supposes is possible. Whereas the rationalists have
no philosophical problem with positing the requirement of substance such that it would be
beyond the bounds of possible experience, Locke wishes to replace a mysterious something that
supports all qualities, and thus becomes itself ineffable, with the merely contingently
unperceivable collations of atoms whose structure and operations produce things as they appear
to be. This again opens a gap between appearance and reality, and some would say that it means
that objects that appear red are not really red, but merely appear red because of the reflective
structures of their atoms, atoms that themselves are not coloured.
Berkeley may not have taken Locke to be positing a necessarily unknowable substratum as
some have supposed, but even if Locke is taken as proposing atomic structure as substance,
Berkeley still thinks this deeply mistaken. He is determined to show up contradictions in the
notion of matter itself when it is thought of as some stuff underpinning things as they appear that
goes beyond what can be translated into talk of the ideas we have of things. But even Locke's
atomic structures suppose this, for his atoms as the causes of colour are themselves without any
colour. Berkeley questions whether we can even imagine anything with no colour whatsoever.
Berkeley's motivation tor this is to stymie what he sees as the widespread scepticism that
would arise from the new materialism. Berkeley is keen to close completely the gap between how
things appear and how they really are as a metaphysical distinction, as opposed to one made by
referring to qualitative differences in the course of our experiences. This is not to revive the
division of the world into Aristotelian natural kinds, with such kinds as substances, the ultimate
units of reality. Nor does it mean that we cannot make mistakes as to how things really are as
opposed to how they appear to be. The gap he is closing is between our knowledge of the world as
based on ideas in our minds and the world being some kind of stuff quite other than ideas. If we
never have immediate access to the world - a world that may, it is supposed, exist unperceived
but only have ideas of what we think the world is like, we have in principle no way of checking
that our ideas correspond to how things really are, or indeed correspond to anything. In that case,
we are locked solipsistically in our world of ideas and prone to irredeemable all-pervasive
scepticism. It should be said also that Berkeley thinks that materialism leads to atheism, for it
makes the operations of the world in principle independent of the need for divine control. One
should note, however, that Berkeley is not returning to revelation and church dogma in the
medieval manner to bolster his arguments. Berkeley's solution is to say that the world just is
metaphysically a construction out of well-ordered ideas occurring in minds. Although he employs
an array of complex arguments, the knockdown argument underpinning his position is his request
to say something of what the world is like, if it is supposed that the world is not made up of ideas
in minds, in a way that does not in fact still refer to ideas: things we can perceive, hear and touch.
Berkeley thus does not reject substance, for there is substance, mental substance in which ideas
adhere.
 The epistemological counterpart to the metaphysical foundation of substance is the foundation
of certainty for knowledge and the refutation of scepticism. We are not talking of particular
sceptical doubts, but a corrosive universal doubt that knowledge of reality is possible at all. For
how can knowledge be possible if everything we assert may be undermined by denial without
contradiction, counter-argument and the possibility of our being subject to systematic illusion?
The most determined attempt to settle this matter once and for all is found in Descartes. He
imagines a situation where we would be most subject to entertaining false beliefs, one where we
are systematically misled by a demon with near God-like powers, who could get us to believe
anything he wanted. In this case would there be any beliefs immune from the demon that he
could not get us to believe, ones that could not be false? Descartes's answer is that there is one:
that he is thinking, and that therefore he must exist. The demon could not get him to believe he
did not exist, whatever beliefs, false or true, he puts into his mind, because the very act of
thinking them - thinking required even if he were to be deluded by the demon on some subject -
requires and confirms that he exists. This gives Descartes the touchstone of certainty from which
he builds up all other knowledge, that of clarity and distinctness; beliefs apprehended with clarity
and distinctness must only be true beliefs. What is striking about this, as a significant part of the
Enlightenment outlook, is how it portrays man as alone and as engaged in an individual odyssey,
responsible for getting his own beliefs right, and unable to shift responsibility for doing the
thinking that would lead to what he should believe on to others. Descartes needs God, it turns
out, to escape his scepticism fully; but God becomes a consequence of the most fundamental
argument, not an ultimate premise.
The death of scepticism was not so easily brought about. Indeed, we now tend to take it for
granted that we have to live with a rationality that must coexist with a lack of certainty, with
fallibility. Hume showed serious cracks in a rationality that might be supposed to be based on
unshakable foundations. On the metaphysical side he was much more of a consistent empiricist
even than Berkeley, who, after all, posits mental, if not material, substance. Hume rejects the
notion of substance as nonsensical and meaningless because it is in principle beyond the bounds
of experience. In short, if we cannot find an impression in our experience that some thing we talk
about as an idea corresponds to, then we are either talking nonsense or, in fact, mean something
quite other than we think we mean when talking about that thing. This leads to a pervasive
tension in Hume's thought between scepticism - that we find we have no reason to believe some
of the most basic things we take for granted - and naturalism - that there is a psychological
explanation for why we believe what we do, and a good thing too that nature takes care that we
do, because reason cannot do the job of bringing us to hold these beliefs. The fundamental beliefs
Hume has in mind are those to do with causation: what it means to say one event brings about
another, rather than their merely happening to occur together; that the way the world has gone
on, with water being wet, and fire being warm, will continue in that way; that there exists an
external world beyond the ideas in our mind, and that things do not come and go out of existence
as we enter and leave a room; that there is something identifiable as who we are, a self that
persists through whatever happens to us over our lives. All these things, which form the structure
of every particular belief we have, are thrown into doubt by its being shown that we have a
reason to believe them, while nevertheless we cannot abandon such beliefs. Hume extends this
line of thought into ethics, for here he notes that whichever way we look at an action we take to
be evil, we never perceive in the act the impression of evil, from which the idea of evil could be
derived, and it must therefore be that we are affected by the act in a certain way, and so strongly,
that we project our feeling of abhorrence onto the world in such a way that we mistakenly take a
moral quality such as evil to be really in the world. Whether all this makes Hume a sceptic is
open to debate, for it could be said, as he sometimes seems to, that all he has shown is that our
basic beliefs are not derived from our concluding that they are rationally based. That does not
show they are irrational, or indeed false; they could be derived non-rationally owing to facts
about the way our minds work, and be true.
While the Enlightenment was a revolution in the way human beings thought they should think
about things in the fundamental areas of metaphysics and epistemology, thinkers at the same time
were applying themselves in similarly radical ways to how societies should be ordered. Rather
than taking for granted the hierarchy of the medieval Great Chain of Being, with the pecking
order in society reflecting that divinely ordained in the cosmos as a whole (God at the top, and
below, in order, angels, man, animals and so on), the new prevailing mood was towards human
beings having equal value, and that it is what you do with your life that merits the standing you
have. Again, there is the optimism that if matters are thought through from fundamentals, and
not merely derived trustingly from the albeit venerable deliverance of contingent historical
accident, we can change things for the better and set them on a proper footing.
Rousseau and Hobbes are the two key thinkers in political philosophy represented in this
volume. They are interesting counterparts, both because of how they are similar and how they
differ, and what leads to those similarities and differences. Fundamental to their political thought,
as to that of most others, is their view of human nature. One can either think human nature is
fixed and something to be accommodated as best one can by society, or one can think of it as
malleable and thus corruptible or redeemable according to the circumstance, in particular the
kind of social order that surrounds it. If fixed, human nature can be thought of as either low and
base or high and noble. Hobbes took the view that human nature is fixed and brutal; Rousseau
took the view that human nature is malleable and perfectible, which also meant it could be
fundamentally corrupted too. For Rousseau, human beings in a state of nature, at a time before
civic society, may have been noble, but only in the limited sense of not having yet been corrupted
by the wrong kind of socialization. Rousseau's state of nature should not be taken as historical,
but rather as a hypothetical contrast to the dire effects on human nature of the ill-ordered society
he saw around him. In any case, there is no going back to the state of nature, nor would it be
desirable; for with civic society comes the possibility of a true humanity, one where, as opposed
to being little more than animals enslaved to our passion and desires in a state of nature, human
beings may become morally aware and responsible. The crucial question is what kind of civic
society we should have, as it is society that brings the worst out in people. If human nature is
malleable, then human beings can be changed for the good by changing the structure of the
society in which they live. Rousseau was not, however, optimistic that this ould actually be
brought about. Hobbes takes a different view. Human nature being fixed and essentially brutal, he
sees the greatest danger as man, in a state of nature, living in an anarchy that would be a war of
all against all; a desperate fight for survival that would include taking pre-emptive violent action
to ward off real and perceived constant threats. Interestingly, Rousseau and Hobbes from these
opposing, if not opposite, views of human nature, both end up advocating authoritarian - indeed
virtually absolutist in Hobbes's arguments states; in Hobbes's case this is once and for all to avert
the slump back into universal anarchy and a desperate personal war of survival; in Rousseau's
case to forge human beings into creatures who would live by the best moral qualities, born of the
firm idea that the good-life can be etched definitively by the uncorrupted human spirit combining
with the application of reason. To what degree Rousseau can be viewed as a liberal is a difficult
matter, and would seem to depend on how far the general will - which determines definitively
what is in the common interest of all, and may legitimately be imposed on those who dissent - is
seen as extending into the particular detail of our lives. Rousseau is certainly concerned with
freedom, but it is a controversial conception of freedom based on self-mastery in accordance with
reason brought about by a certain kind of benign socialization, and not the liberal conception
allowing for the greatest range of individual personal choice and diverse views as to what
constitutes the good life. In obeying the general will an individual is free, for in obeying it he is
doing what is truly in his best interest, and what he would choose if he were fully the rational
master of himself, that is to say, free. For Rousseau, freedom and the benefits of society are seen
as not necessarily being a trade-off, as they are seen in liberalism. Rousseau is in some ways an
archetypal Enlightenment figure, but in some ways he is not. He is suspicious of the elevation of
reason alone as being capable of changing human character, as some Enlightenment figures
hoped. In addition, unfettered reason creates within us ornate fabulous structures of belief, which
because they are unconnected to our feelings crumble under the pressure of attack or real life,
leaving us with less of substance to believe than we had before. Rather we must not merely point
to reason as the solution, but form a society that awakens and improves our best natural
sensibilities, and does not corrupt and crush them. This is not, then, a call for a return to a state of
nature, which would be impossible, but rather for a society where feeling and reason go hand-in-
hand. Nevertheless, Rousseau may set too much store in reason to definitively settle answers to
the basic question of how we should live and to determine what it means for us to be free. Some
would argue that this leads to the conceit of reason, and the overreaching of what it could
determine definitively, resulting in the bloodbath of the French Revolution. In this sense, Hobbes
is a counter-Enlightenment figure; he does not share the optimism that our innate reason can
control the brutality of our human nature, and he opts instead for its external totalitarian control
by the state. So dire are human beings, their brutal natures fixed and unamenable to improvement
either by appeal to reason or socialization, that Hobbes thinks it is only by handing over nearly all
our rights to an unassailable sovereign who coerces people into obeying the moral law, that we
can hope to attain the stability that prevents a collapse into the worst of all things, a lawless
violent chaos in which only a fool would act morally. In both Rousseau and Hobbes, however,
open argument that is not seriously trammelled by sacred or traditional restrictive assumptions is
what guides them to their conclusions, and thus they are both part of the sweep of Enlightenment
thought.
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clubs the Civic Club is devoted to rescue work, the Phyllis Wheatley
Club to maintaining a permanent home for colored working girls, the
Parents’ School Club to securing better school conditions, a
Neighborhood Club to making local improvements. Several other
women’s clubs, which take care of special cases in need of relief and
co-operate with the United Charities, are eager for guidance as to
the best method of Charitable administration. There are forty-one
clubs of colored women in the city, with a total membership of
1,200, most of them devoted to philanthropy and closely allied to
the women’s aid societies found in all the colored churches. Two
clubs for colored women are of a somewhat different character,
federated with the Cook County League of Women’s Clubs and co-
operate in general social movements.

Social There are four settlements in Chicago in or

near the neighborhoods of colored people.
Settlements
The pioneer was the Frederick Douglas
Center on the South Side of Chicago, founded to promote a better
understanding between white and colored people and to help
remove the arbitrary disabilities from which the latter suffer in their
civil, political and industrial life. The founder and head resident, who
had for years been troubled by the increasing race antagonism
against the colored people, believes that much can be accomplished
by a frank discussion of the situation between the two races if it be
carried on with justice and good will; cases of unusual discrimination
are often arbitrated and adjusted.
The Wendell Phillips settlement was also organized by a board of
white and colored people who were concerned over the conditions
obtaining in the colored district on the West Side of the city. Two
young colored women, graduates of Fiske University, are in charge
and have developed an excellent system of clubs and classes. Both
of these settlements own their own property.
The Negro Fellowship League was founded as an outgrowth of the
discussion following the Springfield riots, when it was said that the
difficulty arose from idle young men out of work, maintains a
reading room, a lodging house, and an employment agency on State
street in the midst of the “Black Belt.” The League performs many
offices for the colored men who have newly arrived in Chicago
similar to those of the League for the Protection of Immigrants; in
fact, the needs of the two classes of people are similar in many
respects, implying lack of adjustment rather than lack of ability.

The Enterprise Institute on State street has classes in various lines,

at present numbering 150 pupils. There are in Chicago an entire
group of institutions which have arisen as colored people were
discriminated against in existing institutions, such as the Home for
the Widows of Colored Soldiers and the Home for the Aged, all
supported by associations of colored women.

Race Prejudice A day nursery for colored children was

Found Even in organized a year ago because several day
Day Nurseries nurseries refused to receive colored children
and Dependent on the ground that “the other people
Homes objected to them.” There are likewise five
homes for colored dependent children; two
were the outgrowths of apparent discrimination against colored
children in two state industrial schools receiving public funds,
although in the case of the Illinois Industrial School for Girls,
situated at Park Ridge, Illinois, the Institution is responsible for the
branch maintained in Chicago for colored girls and defrays all
expenses. The board managers believe that this segregation is
equally valuable to both sets of children. The similar school for boys
at Glenwood, Illinois, does not maintain a separate branch, but in
various ways avoids taking colored boys into the school. At the time
of the investigation, the Glenwood School contained 500 white boys
and fifteen colored boys, a number disproportionate to the cases of
colored boys brought into the Juvenile Court. It is becoming a
custom, on the part of many places, to refuse colored children, with
the cryptic utterance, “We have no room.”
In order to provide for dependent and delinquent colored children, a
colored workman, previously a probation officer, established the
Louise Juvenile Home, which cares for twenty dependent boys. The
Eldridge Home and the Marcy Home each provides for smaller
children. The Amanda Smith Home was founded by an ex-slave with
a remarkable gift for public speaking and great religious devotion.
She spent twelve years in China, Japan and Africa under the
auspices of the English Missionary and Temperance Society.
Returning home to Chicago in 1900, she invested the savings of her
lifetime, ten thousand dollars, in the Home, which is chartered under
the provision of the industrial school act. The Home cares for fifty
children, but since Mrs. Smith left, on account of ill health, it has
been greatly crippled for lack of funds. All of these homes for
colored children are supported wholly by colored people. The Illinois
Technical School for colored girls is maintained in Chicago by the
Catholic Church; there are fifty-one girls in the school, ranging from
four to sixteen years of age and receiving most excellent care. In
spite of these various efforts, the care for dependent and semi-
delinquent colored children is totally inadequate, a situation which is
the more remarkable as the public records all give a high percentage
of negro criminals; the police department gives 7.7 per cent; the
Juvenile Court 6.5 per cent; the county jail 10 per cent.

Those familiar with the police and the courts believe that negroes
are often arrested on excuses too flimsy to hold a white man; that
any negro who happens to be near the scene of a crime or disorder
is promptly arrested and often convicted on evidence upon which a
white man would be discharged. The Juvenile Protective Association
has on record cases in which negroes have been arrested without
sufficient cause and convicted on inadequate evidence, and it is well
known that a certain type of policeman, juryman, and prosecuting
attorney have apparently no scruples in sending “a nigger up the
road” on mere suspicion.

To take one record from the files of the

Negroes Frequently
Convicted on Association, the case of George W., a colored
Suspicion boy, nineteen years old, who was born in
Chicago and had attended the public schools
through one year at the high school. He lived with his mother and
had worked steadily for three years as a porter in a large grocery
store, until August 22, 1912, when he was arrested on the charge of
rape. On the late afternoon of that day an old woman of eighty-
three was assaulted by a negro and was saved from the horrible
attack only by the timely arrival of her daughter, who so frightened
the assailant that he jumped out of a window. Two days later George
was arrested, charged with the crime. At the police station he was
not allowed to sleep; was beaten, cuffed and kicked, and finally,
battered and frightened, he confessed that he had committed the
crime. When he appeared in court, his lawyer advised him to plead
guilty, although the boy explained that he had not committed the
crime and had confessed simply because he was forced to do so.
The evidence against him was so flimsy that the judge referred to it
in his instructions to the jury. The State’s Attorney had failed to
establish the ownership of the cap dropped by the fleeing assailant
and the time of the attempted act was changed during the
testimony. Though the description given by the people who saw the
colored man running away did not agree with George’s appearance,
nevertheless the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and the judge
sentenced the boy to fourteen years in the penitentiary. When one
of the men who had seen the guilty man running away from the old
woman’s house was asked why he did not make his testimony more
explicit, he replied, “Oh, well, he’s only a nigger anyway.” The case
was brought to the Juvenile Protective Association by the employer
of George W., who, convinced of the boy’s good character, felt that
he had not had a fair trial. The Association found that the boy could
absolutely prove an alibi at the time of the crime and is making an
effort to get him out of the penitentiary.

A Man’s Fate Occasionally it happens that very little time is

Decided in given to a case where a negro is concerned.
Sixteen Minutes Some time ago a colored man was arrested
and charged with murder. He pleaded guilty
and was sentenced by the judge to imprisonment for life in the
penitentiary. It took just sixteen minutes from the time the negro
was brought into the court to the time he left it, to have his case
brought up, to plead guilty and to have a sentence of lifelong
imprisonment pronounced. It surely seems as if such a serious crime
as the taking of life and the commitment of a man to prison for as
long as he lives, should at least require less haste and more mature
deliberation.

The reasons given by the leading colored

Economic Condition
Largest men of Chicago for the large amount of
Factor in crime among their people are curiously
Production confirmed by the results of this investigation.
of Crime They contend that first, the negroes in
Chicago are so limited in the choice of
employment that they under-bid each other and are forced to work
for the smallest wages. This obliges the wife and mother to go out
to work and the consequent neglect of the children leads to truancy,
incorrigibility and crime. Second, that the colored people of Chicago
are obliged to pay such a high rental that a large number of families
are forced to take in lodgers, which results in much immorality and
indecency among colored people who would otherwise remain
respectable. Third, that the colored people are forced to make their
homes in and near the openly immoral districts of the city so that
the only white people many colored children ever see are those
frequenting the vice district. Fourth, the disproportionate number of
negro criminals is due to the fact that their desire for the friendship
and sympathy of the white people is often exploited by white
criminals who wish to secure shelter from the police. Some obscure
colored family, happy to render a service to a white man, takes him
in sometimes for weeks or months, and he naturally influences the
colored men with whom he associates.

Remedies As remedies against the unjust discrimination

Suggested against the colored man suspected of crime,
a leading attorney of the race in Chicago
suggests: (a) Generalizing against the negro should cease; the fact
that one negro is bad should not fix criminality upon the race. The
race should be judged by its best as well as by its worst types. (b)
The public press never associates the nationality of a criminal so
markedly in its account of crime as in the case of a negro. This
exception is most unjust and harmful and should not obtain. (c) The
negro should not be made the universal “scapegoat.” When a crime
is committed, the slightest pretext starts the rumor of a “negro
suspect” and flaming headlines prejudice the public mind long after
the white criminal is found.
The colored man complains of race prejudice exhibited first in the
readiness to condemn the untried negro as a criminal; second, in the
refusal to give him employment fitted to his skill and capacity; third,
in crowding the colored population into the most undesirable houses
in the city. He does not resent social ostracism, but he does make a
vigorous demand for his civil and economic rights.
In order to test the many times repeated statement that colored
people are discriminated against at public cafes, a young colored
woman, at the request of the investigators, visited sixteen of the
leading confectioners of Chicago in the most crowded portion of the
city, asking to be served with a cup of hot chocolate. In every place
she was served, always by white men or women, and the white
patrons seated at adjoining tables paid no attention to her presence.
At one place, however, she was obliged to wait for a long time, but
was finally served without remark. At another place, after waiting for
twenty minutes, she was asked to take a seat at the counter and
told that white people would not sit at the same table with her. At
two other places she fancied that she was made fun of by the
waiters, but in none of the places did she encounter actual rudeness.
Possibly this treatment would not have been accorded to her at the
hotels. Quite recently the County Federation of women’s clubs
arranged a luncheon at one of the leading hotels of the city. When
the proprietor objected to the presence of the colored delegates, the
officers of the federation gave up the luncheon rather than to
countenance such discrimination, although the objection was made
so late that a committee was obliged to stand at the door of the
hotel to tell the members that the luncheon had been given up and
the program postponed. Naturally some of the delegates objected,
but the large majority approved the action of the officers in spite of
the great inconvenience involved.

Colored People All colored people are especially fond of

Especially Fond music, but almost the only outlet the young
of Music people find for their musical facility is in
vaudeville shows, amusement parks and
inferior types of theaters. That which should be a great source of
inspiration tends to pull them down, as their love of pleasure, lacking
innocent expression, draws them toward the vice district, where
alone the color line disappears.

Model Dance An effort was recently made by some colored

Hall Opposed people on the South Side to start a model
by White dance hall. The white people of the vicinity,
People assuming that it would be an objectionable
place, successfully opposed it as a public
nuisance and this effort toward better recreation facilities had to be
abandoned.
Colored Boys Even the waters of Lake Michigan are not
Cannot Bathe available for colored children. They are not
in Lake welcomed by the white children at the
Michigan bathing beaches and late last summer one
little colored boy who attempted to bathe at
the Thirty-ninth street beach was mobbed and treated so roughly
that the police were obliged to send in a riot call.
This investigation would certainly explain the presence of so large a
proportion of colored boys in the county jail on the following
grounds: First, the colored children are forced to live in the very
worst neighborhoods in Chicago and even there the colored families
are charged such high rents that the house is filled with “floaters” of
a very undesirable class, so that the children witness all kinds of
offenses against decency within the house as well as on the streets.
Second, the fathers of the families, because they are so
circumscribed in their lines of occupation, work for very small wages,
with the inevitable outcome that the mothers go out to work and
neglect their children. As a result, the colored children are underfed,
irregular in school attendance, make slow progress in their studies
and drop out of school at the earliest possible moment.
Third, there are not enough places in Chicago where negro children
may find wholesome amusement. Of the fifteen small parks and
playgrounds with field houses, only two are really utilized by colored
children.
They avoid the others because of friction and difficulty which they
constantly encountered with the white children. The commercial
amusements found in the neighborhoods of colored people are of
the lowest type of pool rooms and saloons, which are artificially
numerous because so many young colored men find their first
employment in these two occupations and with their experience and
very little capital are able to open places for themselves.
Perhaps the greatest factor of all is the difficulty which all colored
people have in finding employment; and after an ambitious boy has
been refused employment again and again in the larger mercantile
and industrial establishments and comes to the conclusion that there
is no use in trying to get a decent job, he is in a very dangerous
state of mind. Idle and discouraged, his neighborhood environments
vicious, such a boy quickly shows the first symptoms of delinquency
and the remedial agencies which should be prompt in his case are
the very weakest at this point. Added to this is the conviction held by
many colored boys and young men that “the police have it in for
them and do not accord them fair treatment.”
In suggesting remedies for this state of affairs, the broken family
life, the surrounding of a vicious neighborhood, the dearth of
adequate employment, the lack of preventive institutional care and
proper recreation for negro youth, the Juvenile Protection
Association finds itself confronted with the situation stated at the
beginning of the investigation, that the life of the colored boy and
girl is so circumscribed on every hand by race limitations that they
can be helped only insofar as the entire colored reputation in
Chicago is understood and fairly treated.
For many years Chicago, keeping to the tradition of its early history,
had the reputation among colored people of according them fair
treatment. Even now it is free from the outward signs of
“segregation,” but unless the city realizes more fully than it does at
present the great injustice which discrimination against any class of
citizens entails, we shall suffer for our indifference by an ever
increasing number of idle and criminal youth, which must eventually
vitiate both the black and white citizenship of Chicago.

Press of Rogers & Hall Co., Chicago

 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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been retained.
The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public
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