Continental Rationalism

The expression continental rationalism refers to a set of views more or less shared by a
number of philosophers active on the European continent during the latter two thirds of
the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. Rationalism is most often
characterized as an epistemological position. On this view, to be a rationalist requires at
least one of the following: (1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and
experience, (2) regarding all or most ideas as innate rather than adventitious, (3) an
emphasis on certain rather than merely probable knowledge as the goal of enquiry. While
all of the continental rationalists meet one or more of these criteria, this is arguably the
consequence of a deeper tie that binds them together that is, a metaphysical
commitment to the reality of substance, and, in particular, to substance as an underlying
principle of unity.

1. Introduction
2. Descartes
3. Malebranche
4. Spinoza
5. Leibniz
Bibliography

1. Introduction
The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the heyday of metaphysical systembuilding, but the expression continental rationalism primarily connotes rather a set of
epistemological views. By contrast to British empiricism, which traces all knowledge to
sensory experience, these views emphasize a reliance on reason (ratio in Latin, hence
rationalism), the resources of which are taken to be sufficient in some sense for what we
know. Thus, a signature doctrine of rationalism is the doctrine of innate ideas, according
to which the mind has built into it not just the structure of knowledge but even its
content. Nonetheless, among the principals comprising the extension of the expression,
metaphysical issues, particularly the ontology of substance, occupy the central place.
Certainly, this is true of Leibniz and Spinoza, but also of Malebranche and other
Cartesians, and even of Descartes when properly understood.
If there seems to be a gap between the connotation of the term and its denotation,
this can be overcome somewhat by thinking of it in terms of Plato's divided line, which
establishes a parallel between objects known and the means by which they are known. In
fact, the order of objects, the ordo essendi ranging in importance down from the Good to
other forms, to individual things, and to images, and the order of knowing, the ordo
cognoscendi, ranging from intuition of various sorts down to sensory experience, is itself to
be found in various versions among the later rationalists. The important point, in any case,
is that, for the continental rationalists as for Plato, the epistemological distinctions are
grounded in ontological distinctions. Or, to put it terms that reflect rationalist thinking on
a number of issues, there is only a distinction of reason between the two orders. The orders
of being and knowing are not really distinct; they differ only in our ways of thinking about
them.

There is a good explanation of the close connection seen by the rationalists between
the epistemological and ontological orders, one that also accounts for their notable
reliance on reason. It derives from their answer to what Leibniz called the grand
metaphysical question: why is there something rather than nothing at all? There is
something because there must be something; there cannot be nothing (and this way of
putting it shows the ultimate debt of the rationalists to a tradition that goes back to
Parmenides). Reality, or at least some part of it has necessary existence, and that necessity
is something like logical necessity. With this answer, a whole philosophical outlook falls
into place. First of all, any significant role for sensory experience falls away, since what
exists can be known a priori by logic alone. Causal connections tend to be viewed as logical
connections; a principle of sufficient reason falls out which tends to be read as a matter of
logical deduction. One result is that there is an impulse toward monism: if the ultimate
cause must exist, then that for which it is the sufficient reason must also exist, and just how
the two can be distinguished becomes problematic (again, the Parmenidean antecedent is
clear).
This outlook was not articulated as such by any rationalist except, perhaps, Spinoza
indeed most were concerned to avoid such consequences of their views. But the outlook
does capture the intuitions behind the metaphysical systems they elaborated. And it
certainly draws the contrast between them and the empiricists, who tended toward tychism,
the view that the world is largely, or even entirely, a product of chance. On the empiricist
account, the universe consists of many independent individuals, which, if they are
connected, are so only accidentally, reducing causation to nothing more than a matter of
constant conjunction. (This physical, metaphysical and logical atomism is in the tradition
of Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius). Under such circumstances, only experience of the
world can provide knowledge of it.
While such a juxtaposition of rationalism with empiricism may be useful as an
interpretive tool, it should be borne in mind that such schematic outlooks are
constructions in retrospect. British philosophers in the relevant historical period were far
less disconnected from the continent than they are today. (Recall Passmore's report in this
regard of the newspaper announcement of fog on the English channel: continent
isolated.) In the period presently under consideration, philosophical crossings from
Britain were frequent and fruitful. In particular, Locke, Berkeley and Hume all crossed the
Channel. In contrast, the rationalists stayed on the continent, both literally and
figuratively.
The early modern period of philosophy, including continental rationalism, is generally,
and correctly, supposed to have been driven by the new science to a radical departure from
the Aristotelianism of the late medieval or renaissance period immediately preceding it.
The mechanization and mathematization of the world demanded by the inertial physics of
a moving Earth led to a revolutionary philosophy better described, at least in its rationalist
version, as Platonic, or even Pythagorean. Even so, Aristotelian concepts and terminology
persisted. Both were appropriated and deployed to deal with the new problems. The
principal Aristotelian concept taken over by the rationalists was the concept of substance.
Aristotle's term ousia is usually translated as substance. What exactly Aristotle
meant by the term is a thorny matter, much debated in the literature. His account of
substance in the Categories holds individual things, which he terms proper substances, to
be paradigmatic of substance. On this account, substance is best understood by analogy
with a grammatical subject it takes a predicate, and is not predicable of anything
further. Thus, while animal is predicable of horse, and horse of Bucephalus, Bucephalus
stands by himself, impredicable of, and hence, numerically different from anything else.

Much of Aristotle's account in the Metaphysics written years later seems to accord
with this. However, Metaphysics (1017b10-26) complicates the story. Aristotle there
describes four uses of the term. He concludes by reducing these to two broad senses (1)
substance as hypokeimenon, the ultimate substratum, which is not predicated of anything
further; and (2) substance as form that which makes each thing the kind of thing that it
is. Indications within the text suggest that, by the time that he was giving the lectures that
are collected in the Metaphysics, Aristotle regarded not individual things but the matter of
which these individual things are formed, as the ultimate subject of predication. On this
conception, there is some sense in which Bucephalus is himself predicable of matter. Thus,
while the substance of the Categories serves as a principle of individuation, the substance of
the Metaphysics is more complicated, serving both to individuate Bucephalus and Seabiscuit
and to capture the connection or sameness that holds between them.
That substance should be called upon to account for both difference and sameness in
the world indicates an inherent tension in the concept. Certainly, the two senses of the
term substance were in tension during the seventeenth century. The momentum of
rationalist argument was to resolve the tension by folding the first sense into the second:
there is no real differentiation in the world, only the appearance of difference. Seventeenth
century rationalists assigned to substance three roles of connection. Substance was taken
(1) to connect attributes as attributes of the same thing at a time (a given shape and a given
size as the shape and size of the same thing), (2) to connect them over time (the later shape
and size, perhaps different from the earlier, as nonetheless the shape and size of the very
same thing), and (3) to connect them as somehow related to the thing as a certain kind of
thing (for the Cartesians, shape and size would indicate the thing to be of the kind
extended). However, Spinoza alone among the continental rationalists fully embraced
the conception of substance as a fundamental connection between things. The other
members of the movement struggled to retain a notion of substance as individuator, but
did so with varying degrees of success.

2. Descartes
The rationalism of the most famous of the rationalists is problematic on two counts. First,
Descartes is known as the father of modern philosophy precisely because he initiated the
so-called epistemological turn that is with us still. Since Descartes, philosophy has been
especially concerned with the theory of knowledge, both in itself and as it affects other
areas of philosophy. Ethics, for example, has often been concerned with how the good
might be known rather than with what the good might be. With his fundamental objective
of achieving certainty for his beliefs, Descartes has thus been principally responsible for the
incomplete characterization of rationalism as not just etymologically but essentially
connected to the claims of reason. While Descartes certainly sought to justify the claims of
reason and relied upon them, even for him there are corresponding ontological views that
are no less important to his system.
The second problematic aspect of Descartes's rationalism is more difficult to resolve.
Descartes was a radical voluntarist who thought that all truth, including what we take to
be necessary truth, depends on the will of God. Care needs to be taken in how this view is
expressed, for Descartes did not hold simply that what we take to be necessary in fact is
contingent. He held that actually necessary truth depends on God's unconstrained will,
such that even propositions that are logically contradictory might simultaneously be true.
Reason itself thus seems no longer reliable, and experience would seem to be the only way

of determining which of the worlds even beyond logic such a powerful and unconstrained
God has created. Not many of the rationalists, even among the Cartesians, followed
Descartes in this radical voluntarism, and some in recent times have seen the view as
ultimately incoherent. Even so, Descartes seems to have taken the view as the basis at least
of his physics, and perhaps of his whole system. After all, it was this doctrine of created
truth that enabled Descartes to frame the most radical doubt hitherto conceived, when in
the Meditations he entertained the possibility that he was always deceived by a mendacious
deity, even when considering what appeared to him most obviously true, to wit, the
existence of the simplest things that are the subjects of arithmetic and geometry. While a
doubt (and a doctrine) this radical might lead one to despair of ever achieving sure
knowledge, for Descartes, it was the catalyst for his discovery of the cogito, and with it, his
first indubitable truth the truth of his own existence.
At every stage of Descartes's argument in the Meditations, there are ontological
implications: the mind's independence of sensory perceptions (perceptions whose
reliability is ultimately upset by the possibility that he is dreaming), the literally
unimaginable sort of thing that a physical object such as a piece of wax must be, the
existence of a veracious God, who provides a guarantee for the reliability of reason, and
finally the existence of a physical world consisting of extended things. Arnauld immediately
suggested to Descartes that his argument contained a circle: we can rely on reason only if
we know that God exists, but we know that God exists only by relying on reason. Thus,
Descartes has established the certainty only of his own existence, but nothing beyond that.
Descartes thought that he had a response to this criticism, but whether he did, and how
cogent it is as a rebuttal, have been perennial questions of debate among Descartes
scholars. One way to understand Descartes's procedure is that while he does not claim to
prove even that he exists, he does claim to show that it is unreasonable to think otherwise.
That is, he shows that the argument of the skeptic fails because the consistent application
of reason leads to the view not that reason is unreliable, but precisely the opposite. The
skeptic might be right, but he is unreasonable. Descartes thus emerges at least as a
bootstrap rationalist, in a way that mirrors the non-absolute status of his necessary truths.
The rationalist connection between the orders of being and knowing is thus preserved.
But what sense can be made of the doctrine of created truth? By what kind of causality
did God create the eternal (necessary) truths? In response to this very question Descartes
replied that God did so in just the way that He created everything else, that He is the total
and efficient cause not only of the existence of created things, but also of their essence. The
eternal truths are just this essence of created things. As before, Descartes did not elaborate
his answer, but, once again, he provided enough elsewhere for us to do so. It is clear that
for Descartes, as for many other theologically orthodox thinkers, the existence of things
results from an unconstrained exercise of God's omnipotent will to create ex nihilo. What
Descartes might be saying, then, is that an eternal truth or essence is also something that is
created ex nihilo. The eternal truths might thus be instances of what Descartes called
substance.
In the Principles, Descartes defined substance as a thing that exists such that its
existence does not depend on any other thing. He immediately added that, strictly
speaking, the term applies only to God, who, as uncreated, alone depends on nothing else
to exist. However, he allowed that in an extended sense it applies to things that depend
only on God's creation and continuing conservation. These created substances are really
distinct from other substances insofar as they are conceivable apart from each other. They
do not require a subject of inherence, and are thus ontologically, if not causally,
independent. These created substances are distinguished from other things, such as

qualities, which not only depend on God causally, but also depend ontologically on other
things, ultimately on created substances, as subjects of inherence. In this sense, a created
substance for Descartes is like the hypokeimenon of Aristotle, playing both its roles, as
individuator and bearer of qualities. However, with his definition of the real distinction, he
built in an unintended tendency toward monism a tendency that Spinoza exploited. For
Descartes, one thing is really distinct from another just in case it can be conceived apart
from that other. But, if this test of independence is applied to causal relations, it produces
the result that there is but one substance, God.
What types of things counted as created substances for Descartes? Clearly, he takes an
individual mind to be a created substance. If a mind did not have this status, then
Descartes's argument for its immortality, that it can be conceived apart from all else except
God, and a fortiori from the body, would collapse. Beyond minds, however, an ambiguity
appears. Although there are texts in which Descartes speaks of individual things like a piece
of wax as substances, there are others that indicate that there is but a single extended
substance, of which individual things are the modes. At a minimum, there is an asymmetry
in his treatment of minds and material things, perhaps reflecting the tension between a
hypokeimenon, accounting for difference, and the other sense of ousia, accounting for
sameness. To say that Peter and Paul are substances is to say that their minds are
numerically distinct; but to say that a piece of wax and piece of wood are substances might
be to say that they are both extended things.
However many instances of each kind there might be, there is a dualism of two kinds
of substance, according to Descartes: thinking things, or minds, and extended things, or
bodies. This dualism generated two well-known problems, resolved by Descartes with only
partial success. His polite critic, Elizabeth of Bohemia, wanted to know how in voluntary
action the will, which is a property of the unextended mind, could have an effect on the
body, given that, according to Descartes's mechanistic physics, a material thing can be
affected only by what is in contact with it. Descartes replied with a rather mysterious
account of how the mind and body formed a unique kind of composite.
Descartes's effort to resolve a second difficulty is more promising, and also exemplifies
the rationalistic character of his thought. The problem is to show how the mind can know
something such as a material thing that is different in kind from it, given a long-standing
principle that only like can know like. He rejected this essentially Aristotelian principle,
but still had to give an account of such knowledge. From scholastic sources, Descartes was
able to construct a theory of ideas according to which to know something is to have an
idea of it, the idea being the very thing known in so far as it is known. He saw the term
idea as ambiguous: taken materially, it has formal reality, as a mode of the mind; taken in
another sense, it has objective reality, as the thing represented. But there is no real
distinction between these realities, only a rational distinction. They are really the same
thing considered differently. A welcome epistemological upshot of this rationalist gambit is
that Descartes has no skeptical problems generated by ideas standing as a tertium quid
between the knower and what is known.
This result is indicated by Descartes's use of the term, picked up and emphasized by
Malebranche, according to which there are no false ideas; every idea in this sense is
materially true in that it has an object, and that is the object it appears to have. This
conception of an idea is the basis for Descartes of what has been called the transparency of
mind: I cannot be mistaken that I am thinking about what I am thinking about.
Malebranche (whose entire philosophy was colored by his struggles with Descartes's theory
of ideas), in fact, later erected such incorrigible intentionality into the fundamental
principle of his epistemology. Meanwhile, Descartes's view that material or formal reality

and objective reality are only rationally distinct might be taken to mean that minds are
intrinsically intentional. A mind just is the sort of thing whose states are about something
else. Arnauld extended this thesis, which adumbrates later thinkers such as Brentano, to
include all mental phenomena, even sensations.

3. Malebranche
The battle between the Cartesians and their opponents in the latter half of the seventeenth
century was one of the great struggles in the history of philosophy, but it was one in which
the lines were not clearly drawn. For, although those in the Cartesian camp claimed the
banner of Descartes, there were as many differences among them as between them and
their opponents. Perhaps the most important difference among them hinged on whether or
not they accepted Descartes's doctrine of created truth. Desgabets and his student Rgis
were the most important among the few who did accept the doctrine. Along with their
acceptance of the doctrine, however, came nascent tendencies toward empiricism. On the
other hand, Malebranche, the most notable among the Cartesians who rejected the
doctrine of created truth, developed a philosophical system with a purer rationalistic
character than Descartes's own. Descartes had advised his followers to follow not him but
their own reason. Malebranche, like other heterodox Cartesians, justified his differences
from Descartes as the result of following this injunction. On his view, his rejection of the
doctrine of created truth followed from his commitment to other, deeper views in
Descartes. He thus represented himself as more Cartesian than Descartes himself.
The philosophy of Malebranche is sometimes portrayed as a synthesis of Descartes and
Augustine, but a more precise way to put this relation is that Malebranche used Augustine
to rectify shortcomings he perceived in the philosophy of Descartes. Chief among these was
Descartes's theory of ideas, which, according to Malebranche, not only fails to reflect
human beings' proper dependence on God, and, moreover, leads inevitably to skepticism.
Initially, Malebranche thought that he agreed with Descartes's theory, but in the long
debate over the nature of ideas he had with Arnauld, who held a close version of
Descartes's theory, Malebranche came to see a need for a different account.
Not implausibly, Arnauld took Descartes's claim about the ambiguity of the term
idea to mean that idea, or perception, refers to one and the same thing, a thing
which stands in two different relations. Insofar as it is related to what is known, it is called
an idea; insofar as it is related to the mind, it is called a perception. This (act of)
perception he took to be related to the mind as a mode of it. It is at this point that
Malebranche detected the threat of skepticism. What we know, indeed what we know in
the most important instances of knowledge, is universal, necessary, and infinite, as in the
case of certain mathematical knowledge. But nothing that is the mode of a particular,
contingent and finite mind can be universal, necessary or infinite. If ideas were modes of
the mind, then we would not have such knowledge; but since we do have such knowledge,
ideas must be something else. Malebranche argued that the only being in which such ideas
could exist is God. Following Augustine, he took ideas to be the exemplars in the mind of
God after which He creates the world. This construal had the additional advantage for
Malebranche of guarding against skepticism because, although idea and object are no
longer identical, they are nonetheless necessarily connected as exemplar and exemplum.
Even so, it remained true for Malebranche that, when we look at a material thing, what we
in fact see is not that thing but its idea. This is the core of his view of vision of all things
in God, which he welcomed as an indication of human beings' dependence on the deity.

The immediate vehicle whereby we have such knowledge is a particular, contingent, and
finite mode of the mind; but the universal, necessary, and infinite object of that mode can
exist only in some other kind of being. How are these ideas known to the mind if they are
not in it, at least not as modes of it? Although ideas are not innate to the mind, for that
would make them modes of it, they are nonetheless always present to it. In seeking to
know, whether we realize it or not, we are consulting Reason, which Malebranche
identifies with the second person of the Trinity, the logos of neo-Platonic theology. Our
effort to know is a natural prayer that Reason always answers. Malebranche was thus a
majuscule rationalist.
As for individual substances, Malebranche clearly thought that every material thing
and every mind is a substance in the sense of a hypokeimenon. But when pressed late in his
life to show how this status for them comported with the rest of his system, how they
could be anything but modes of a single substance, in short how he avoided the drift into
Spinozistic monism, he was in fact hard pressed. In the Search After Truth, Malebranche
clearly committed himself to the view that everything is either a substance or a mode. In
addition, he accepted Descartes's criterion for a substance that it be conceivable apart
from everything else. However, he maintained that any given portion of extension is
conceivable apart from the rest of extension and is thus a substance. (Descartes did not
think this, otherwise void space would be possible for him.) Since extension is conceptually
divisible to infinity, Malebranche is committed to an infinite number of extended
substances. Apart from the whole of extension, moreover, every substance contains an
infinite number of substances, of (each of) which it is a mode. It is also a part of an infinite
number of substances, which are modes of it. The explanatory value of the concept of
substance would seem to have been lost with such results as these. Malebranche's view
seems to be a degenerate version of Descartes's texts to the effect, surprising but coherent,
that there is but one material substance, res extensa, whose modes are particular material
things. Here the effect is to reverse the Aristotelian logic of substance. To say of x, a
particular thing, that it is extended E, is to say not that a substance x has a property E, but
that x is a mode of res extensa.
These difficulties in accounting for substance on Malebranche's part seem to derive
from his Platonism. As a Platonist, he was interested less in substance as the hypokeimenon,
which accounts for difference, than in its other sense of ousia, which accounts for sameness.
Thus, Malebranche's skid to Spinozism is greased even when he talks about mind, the
essence of which is thought not this or that thought, but substantial thought, thought
capable of all sorts of modifications or thoughts. Since the same substantial thought is had
by all possessed of a mind, Malebranche's view smacks even of the single intellectual soul
for all men of the Latin Averroists. In this sense too, then, his heterodoxy as a Cartesian is
part and parcel with his deep commitment to rationalism, and in particular with his
rationalistic reduction of phenomenal difference to real sameness.
The final rationalistic aspect of Malebranche's thought that deserves attention here is
his theory of causation. For Malebranche, a cause is that between which and whose effect
there is a necessary connection. On his view, the causal connection that is characterized by
this kind of necessity is that between God's will and its effects. Thus, for Malebranche,
only God has causal efficacy. What we take to be real causes for example the motion of
a billiard ball that collides with another that then begins to move are in fact only
occasional causes, the occasions for the operation of the only real cause. Given
Malebranche's combined rationalistic and theological commitments, none of this is
surprising. The surprise, or at least irony, comes when Malebranche's arguments that
natural causes even and especially human volitions cannot be real causes cross the

channel and are deployed by Hume. The radical empiricist account of causation that
Hume gave in terms of constant conjunction is just Malebranche's rationalist
occasionalism without the role assigned to God. For Hume, Malebranche's occasional
causes are the only causes.

4. Spinoza
The centrality of substance for the continental rationalists is further borne out by the
importance of that concept for Spinoza, especially within his Ethics. Spinoza devoted the
entire first book of that work to a consideration of substance, or, as he also termed it
Deus sive Natura (God, in other words, Nature). The remaining books trace the
consequences of his conception of substance for epistemology, psychology, physics, and
ethics. While Spinoza's account of substance is quite rightly regarded as a development
and working-out of Descartes's metaphysics, there are also (as with Descartes and
Malebranche) considerable, and important, differences between the two. What is
important for our present purposes, however, is that, (as with Malebranche) Spinoza's
departures from Descartes are almost always the manifestation of a form of rationalism
purer than Descartes's own. Most radically, Spinoza replaced Descartes's substance
pluralism with a monistic account modelled on Cartesian extended substance. Just as, for
Descartes, bodies are mere modes of a single extended substance, so, for Spinoza, all
individuals both bodies and minds are modes of a single substance.
Spinoza arrived at this position by way of a decidedly un-Cartesian account of
attributes. While Descartes held that two substances of the same type can share the same
principal attribute, Spinoza rejected this. Any two substances, argued Spinoza, must be
distinguished either by their attributes (Spinoza dropped the modifier principal.) or by
their modes. But, since modes are themselves both ontologically and causally dependent on
the substances of which they are affections, they cannot be the individuating principle for
them. Thus, it must be the attributes themselves that individuate substances (and not just
types of substances, as Descartes argued). Similarly, while Descartes held that each
substance is characterized by one and only one principal attribute, Spinoza invoked the
principle of plenitude to show that substance must have infinite attributes. Based on a
variation of the ontological argument, he maintained that substance is pure, utterly
unlimited being. It must therefore, he argued, possess infinite attributes, in the dual sense
of possessing unlimited attributes and of possessing all attributes. Since substance is
characterized by infinite attributes, and since no two substances can share a single
attribute, there can be only one substance.
Spinoza's one substance is at the farthest possible remove from Aristotle's proper
substances. Whereas, for Aristotle, individual things such as Bucephalus, are paradigmatic
substances, Spinoza denies their substantiality. But does this mean that, unlike Aristotelian
proper substances, which are not predicable of anything else, Spinoza's finite modes are
predicable of substance? Scholars are divided on this point. Curley has argued that Spinoza
retains the conception of the substance-mode distinction as a distinction between
independent and dependent being, but rejects the view that the substance-mode
distinction correlates to the distinction between a subject of predication and its predicate.
Bennett, however, argues that Spinoza does indeed regard finite modes as predicable of
substance, or, as he puts it, as adjectival on the world. Bennett characterizes Spinoza's
account of substance as a field metaphysic in which individual things are simply clusters
of qualities within regions of space. Just as a blush is merely a confluence of properties on a

region of a face, so the face indeed, the person whose face it is is a confluence of
properties on a region of substance.
Whether or not Spinoza rejected the predicability of finite modes, it is clear that he
did not regard them as either causally or conceptually independent in the way that is
requisite for substance. For Spinoza, substance is in itself and is conceived through itself,
whereas a mode is in something else and is conceived through something else. The in
itself/in something else aspect of these two definitions captures Descartes's conception of
causal independence, while the conceived through itself/through something else aspect
refers to Descartes's conceivability-apart criterion for ontological independence. Descartes,
it will be recalled, regarded divine substance as both causally and ontologically
independent, but created substances as ontologically, but not causally, independent, since
they depend on God's creative (and conservative) power for their existence. It is in this
sense that, for Descartes, the term substance is used equivocally for God and created
substances. Spinoza, however, denied that substance is an equivocal term. In so doing,
he eliminated two asymmetries in Descartes's metaphysics that between divine and
created substance, and that between extended and thinking substance. For Spinoza, finite
minds are not themselves substances, but rather modes of thinking substance. That is, for
Spinoza, at the most fundamental level, all minds reduce to the thinking substance of
which they are affections.
Spinoza's account of the eternal verities marks a similar rationalistic advance over
Descartes's metaphysics. For Spinoza, God is just substance simpliciter. He lacks volition
and personality; his only characteristics are pure being, infinity, necessity and activity.
While Spinoza agreed with Descartes that God is the cause of all things, he regarded him
not as a transeunt cause, creating the universe from the outside through an act of will,
but as an immanent cause, from whom the universe unfolds out of his own necessity. For
Spinoza, all things therefore follow by logical (and not merely causal) necessity from God's
eternal and infinite nature. In this sense, not only mathematical truths but indeed such
apparently contingent facts as Caesar's having crossed the Rubicon are necessary truths for
Spinoza. The difference between them is not the necessity of the truths themselves but
rather the route that we take to arrive at them. While mathematical truths, for instance,
are deducible by reason alone, Spinoza recognized that the finitude of human
understanding prevents, or at least impedes, our similarly deducing empirical facts about
the world. In contrast with the empiricists, who regard cause and effect as mere constant
conjunction, for Spinoza, the relationship between cause and effect has the force of a
logical entailment; empirical facts are themselves necessary truths. The universe is thus, in
principle at least, perfectly intelligible to reason.
For Spinoza, as for Descartes, the metaphysical commitment to substance underwrote
a rationalist epistemology that strongly privileges reason and intuition over sensation and
imagination. The distinctive character of Spinoza's epistemological rationalism is rooted in
his principle that the order and connection of ideas is the order and connection of
things. For Descartes, the mind and the body are, though intimately connected, radically
heterogeneous. How it is that the mind comes to know things about the physical world
therefore remains, despite his best efforts, a somewhat murky business. By rejecting the
substantiality of both minds and bodies, and by regarding them both as modes of a single
substance, Spinoza obviated this difficulty. For Spinoza, the mind and the body are the
very same thing conceived in two different ways. Persistent clusters of qualities in space are
bodies. The ideas or, in Descartes's terminology, the objective reality of these bodies
are minds. Just as a single body has a corresponding objective reality, so collections of
bodies characterized by various relations also have a corresponding objective reality with

isomorphic parts and relations. Since there is no gap between minds and bodies, there is
therefore no difficulty in principle in perceiving the physical world. On Spinoza's account,
we perceive the physical world in two ways (1) by perceiving the actions of our own
bodies, and (2) by perceiving the effects of other bodies on ours. Thus, when one's body
runs, the correlative ideas are in one's mind. Likewise, when someone steps on one's toe,
the physical effects on the toe likewise have their counterparts in the mind's ideas.
Despite the necessary connection the mind has with the body, argued Spinoza,
sensation and imagination are inherently limited. The idea of substance qua substance
must be a perfect unity. However, the idea which constitutes the human mind is complex
not a unity but a plurality of ideas. That idea is therefore confused, rather than clear
and distinct. Clear and distinct understanding, on Spinoza's account must partake of the
unity of the idea of substance, and not of the fragmentary nature of the idea of the human
body and its affects. This cognitive unity is achieved in two ways through reason (which
Spinoza termed knowledge of the second kind) and through intuition (knowledge of
the third kind). When we cognize through sensation and imagination (knowledge of the
first kind), we try to grasp many ideas at once, and thereby produce confusion. Reason
and intuition, by contrast, provide us with access to just one idea the substantial unity
underlying our body and our mind. Reason does this from the fact that we have common
notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things, while intuition proceeds from an
adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God. To understand the
substantial unity that is the necessary cause of our body and our mind is to grasp them sub
specie aeternitatis.
This epistemological ideal forms the core of Spinoza's rationalistic ethics and,
hence, on one plausible account, the core of his Ethics. Spinoza's monism entails that the
sort of individuals that Aristotle regarded as primary substances are distinguished not by
their own substantial unity, but by their conatus their striving to persist. Thus, selfpreservation is not just one possible goal of ethical agents; it is the very thing that makes
those agents individuals. Our essence, and our ethical task, is thus to be active, whereas, by
contrast, to be passive threatens our persistence. The mind persists through activity and is
threatened by passivity. It is therefore in our self-interest to pursue adequate ideas through
knowledge of the second and third kinds. The more we join our minds with God through
adequate knowledge of things under the form of eternity, the less we are affected by
external things and, hence, by our own passions, which are nothing but our passivity in the
face of forces external to us. Adequate knowledge of God gives us equanimity and calm,
and literally ensures our persistence. Ethical virtue is thus fundamentally epistemological.
For Spinoza, the most rationalist of figures discussed here, the good life is the utterly
rational life.

5. Leibniz
As we have seen, rationalist epistemology is grounded in a metaphysical commitment to
substance. The concept of substance allowed the rationalists to reduce all complexity and
plurality to an underlying simplicity and unity, versus the empiricists, who, in their
skepticism about substance, were committed to regarding reality as fundamentally plural
and complex. Spinoza's metaphysics marked the culmination of this rationalist
momentum. In Leibniz, the last great continental rationalist, we see its final movement.
Leibniz, like other rationalists before him, regarded quotidian things as phenomena that
ultimately reduce to perfectly simple substances. However, for Leibniz, there is an infinite

number of these simple substances, each of them causally and perceptually isolated from all
of the others. Leibniz reasoned that this is the best of all possible worlds because it
balances the maximal possible complexity with the maximal possible order. In thus
privileging neither unity nor plurality, neither simplicity nor complexity, and in striking the
balance that he did on purely rational principles, Leibniz exemplified a more complex,
more comprehensive and, ultimately, more mature rationalism than that of his
predecessors.
For Leibniz, at the most fundamental level, reality is characterized by simple
substances, or monads. Since there are composites, Leibniz argued, there must be simple
substances that, together, constitute these composites. Being simple, monads have neither
parts, nor extension, nor form, nor divisibility. Leibniz saw them as the true Atoms of
nature. While Leibniz thus retained a strong commitment to substance, he resisted
rationalism's synechistic momentum by rehabilitating substance's Aristotelian role as an
individuator. However, while, for Aristotle, Bucephalus is a proper substance, Leibniz
regarded Bucephalus not as a substance but as himself comprising a collection of simple
substances. Leibniz agreed with Aristotle's characterization of substance as the
grammatical subject of predication and not itself predicable of anything else. However, he
complained that this account does not go far enough. For Leibniz, the essence of substance
lies not in the fact that it is the subject of predication, but in the fact that every possible
predicate may be asserted or denied of it. In this way, every individual substance has a
complete concept, a conception so complete (that is, so fully determinate) that every fact
about the substance, and about its situation in the universe past, present or future
follows from it analytically. In fact, Leibniz offered a statement of this very principle as his
Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Leibniz's insistence that every individual substance has a complete concept entailed
that, unlike Spinoza, he regarded Cartesian thinking substance and not Cartesian extended
substance as paradigmatic of substance. Descartes' extended substance (like Spinozistic
substance) is, on Leibniz's account, not a substance at all since it does not afford a
principle of individuation. Leibniz argued that, whereas a real substance has a complete
concept, the Cartesian notion of extended substance is an abstraction arrived at through an
incomplete concept. Matter on its own is insufficient to form or to constitute a substance.
For Leibniz, a body could never be a candidate for substance since bodies are susceptible
to alteration and are infinitely divisible. We can thus never arrive at a body of which it can
be said, Here really is an entity. Moreover, whereas Cartesian extended substance is
totally inert, Leibniz insisted that activity is the hallmark of substance. Anything that acts
is a substance; every substance constantly and uninterruptedly acts. For Leibniz, this
position follows from God's perfection. God's planning of the universe was so perfect that
it only required to be set in motion by him. True substances (that is, entia per se) are active
and self-causing. On Leibniz's account, God would lack all dignity were he the sole cause
in the universe that is, if occasionalism or interventionalism were necessary. God's
perfect planning avoids the necessity for (continual or continuous) extraordinary
concourse. Thus, God's perfection entails that all substances are active; passive extension is
only matter, not substance.
The activity, or appetition, that Leibniz regards as characterizing the monads is
intimately bound up with his Principle of Sufficient Reason. For Leibniz, a monad contains
its whole history because each monadic state (except for those states creation is
paradigmatic of these that are the result of divine causation) has its sufficient cause in
the preceding state. In turn, the present state is the sufficient cause of all succeeding states.
Despite this emphasis on the inherent activity of substance, Leibniz, like Spinoza, rejected

the possibility of transeunt causation among substances. Monads are windowless and
neither admit nor emit causal influence. Moreover, being thus windowless, monads can no
more receive perceptions from the world than they can any other external causation.
Rather, a monad's perceptions are built-in at creation. By pre-established harmony, these
perceptions perfectly align with the universe's infinite monadic states. This entails that
while there is no genuine transeunt causation at the monadic level, a kind of pseudocausation results from monads' harmonized perceptions of each other as their respective
appetitions convey them through successive changes. For Leibniz, causal relations thus
reduce to logical relations in that every change in a substance follows from its concept.
While Leibniz's view that every substance has a complete concept reinforces the
centrality of reason in his epistemology, in doing so, it seems to undercut human and even
divine volition, and thereby to slide toward Spinozism. If every fact about Julius Caesar,
and indeed, every other fact about the universe is rationally deducible from the Roman
Dictator's complete concept, then it would seem that only one course for the universe is
possible. However, this is not a step that Leibniz was willing to take. Were there no
distinction between contingent and necessary truths, argued Leibniz, fatalism would be
true, and human liberty of the will would be impossible. Leibniz sought to avert this result
by distinguishing between hypothetical and absolute necessity. Absolute necessity, he
argued, is governed by the principle of contradiction. Something is absolutely necessary if
its negation is logically impossible. Hypothetical necessity, on the other hand, describes a
state of affairs that is necessary ex hypothesi that is, just in case a particular antecedent
holds but not logically necessary. On Leibniz's account, the fact that Caesar crossed the
Rubicon is only hypothetically necessary; it follows necessarily from the existence of the
individual substance that is Caesar, but its denial is not logically impossible. According to
Leibniz, God at creation conceived of an infinite array of possible worlds. The myriad
contingent facts of each of these worlds are only hypothetically necessary. That is, they
would only be necessary if God were to instantiate that world. Since the present world is
the one that God chose to instantiate, all of the contingent facts of this world are certain.
However, they are nonetheless contingent since their negation implies no absurdity. That
is, there was no logical impossibility preventing Caesar from deciding not to cross the
Rubicon. In this sense, his will and, indeed, human will generally is free. Leibniz's
argument for hypothetical necessity has an obvious antecedent in Descartes's doctrine of
created truth. However, unlike Descartes, Leibniz limited the doctrine's scope to
contingent truths. He nonetheless hoped to avoid Spinozist necessitarianism. Whether or
not he succeeded in doing so is a matter of debate in the literature.
Inasmuch as it characterizes the universe as composed of a plurality of individual
existences, none of which has any genuine causal efficacy over any other, Leibniz's position
shows considerable affinities with Hume's empiricism. However, while Hume inferred
from this the importance of empirical experience, Leibniz instead took this ontology to
preclude adventitious knowledge. He thus remained committed on metaphysical grounds
to the doctrine of innate ideas. In his rejection of transeunt causation among substances,
Leibniz rejected the notion that we can learn new things about the world in the sense of
gaining new ideas that do not already exist in our souls. On Leibniz's account, the
temporal coincidence of a certain phenomenon with one's learning of the phenomenon
was pre-established at creation in the same way that all monadic states were. Leibniz
admitted that it is idiomatically acceptable to speak about acquiring knowledge via the
senses. However, he regarded all sensory reports as reducible to, and explicable as,
descriptions of logical relations. Leibniz's theory of knowledge thus relegates the
Aristotelian idea of human beings as blank slates who learn through induction to a mere
faon de parler. By contrast, he strongly endorsed Plato's doctrine of recollection to the

extent that it locates all knowledge in ideas already residing in the soul. Socrates's
exchange with Meno's slave boy, argued Leibniz, shows that the soul already possesses the
ideas upon which truths about the universe depend, and needs only to be reminded of
them.
On Leibniz's account, substances have built into them perceptions of the whole
universe. Every substance, he argued, is a mirror of the whole universe to the extent that
everything that has ever happened or existed or will ever happen or exist are included in its
complete concept. The perceptions of all substances, he maintained, thus resemble God's
infinite perception in their unlimited scope. It is with respect to clarity and distinctness
that the perceptions of created substance fall short of God's. For Leibniz, the best of all
possible worlds is that world that balances the maximal possible complexity with the
maximal possible order. The existing world satisfies this through the infinite variety of
perspectives taken by the monads. By the principle of order, each monad reflects the very
same world as do the other monads. However, by the principle of complexity, the monads
reflect the world from an infinite number of unique perspectives. This infinite variety in
perspectives entails that each monad reflects all of the others with varying degrees of clarity
and distinctness. In this way, the universe is replete with an infinite number of different
representations of God's works. Among these, only God's perceptions are universally clear
and distinct. While the complexity requirement for the best of all possible worlds would
seem to preclude in principle the possibility of human beings achieving knowledge of the
universe sub specie aeternitatis, Leibniz made a special exception for human souls. On
Leibniz's account, all monads have low-level perceptions, of the kind that we experience
when we are in a stupor. However, the souls of living things have, over and above this,
feelings and memories. Human souls have, besides this, through divine election, the power
of reason. It is reason that allows us to understand the universe as a system, through the
use of models and idealizations, and thereby to grasp the eternal truths. In this way, argued
Leibniz, human minds are not only mirrors of the universe of created things, but indeed
mirror God himself. While the rise of British empiricism, and of Kant's critical philosophy
marked the end of continental rationalism as a movement, Leibniz's elegant vision was a
fitting paean to the movement and, indeed, to the power of human reason.

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