Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science
Appendix 9. (fn. 347).
The observation I have made about brute matter, whose concept implies an essential relationship with feeling, explains many philosophical opinions and errors. As far as I know, philosophers did not clearly see that there is a concomitant, relative, conceptual mode of being. Hence the invention of false systems to explain the reality of matter. There are basically three of these systems: the first simply says that matter is inexplicable and unintelligible; the second (idealism) denies outright the existence of matter (it causes too much trouble in philosophy); the third confuses matter with feeling, giving matter the attributes of feeling or even of intelligence, that is, it makes matter itself feeling and intelligent.
The first system, that of Plato and Aristotle, contains some truth, as Plato understood it. According to him, matter is not intelligible through itself but only through the light of the mind. Aristotle on the other hand favoured dividing matter from all its forms and making it an abstraction. But this abstract being, which in reality is nothing, is therefore truly unintelligible. The question under discussion does not concern abstract matter but inanimate, real matter, lacking only the form of feeling.
The second system, idealism, did not begin with Berkeley; it has always been present wherever philosophy has been pursued. In India the Bracmans, or Brahmins as they are now called, teach that the material world is simply an illusion, a dream or magical deception. Bodies, to exist in reality, would have to cease to exist in themselves and be absorbed into that which is nothing (properly speaking, this nothing is the idea) which through its simplicity forms the perfection of all beings (cf. Brahmins in Naigeon's Enciclop. Method. Philos. anc. et mod.).
The third system has been repeated many times. It took various forms, for example, the soul of the world. Another form, similar to idealism, is the Platonists' teaching that our souls made our bodies (cf. Macrob. Somn., Scip., bk. 1, c. 6, 14 and 17; bk. 2, c. 3; also Huet, QQ Alnet., bk. 2, c. 8). A third form is T. Campanella's system: in his well-known book De sensu rerum et magia he attributes feeling to all bodies: `We cannot give to another what we do not have in ourselves. Hence, all that is contained in an effect must also be found in the cause. Animals have feeling, but because feeling does not come from nothing, we must conclude that the elements, the constitutive principles of the animal, also have feeling. The animal therefore feels heaven and earth.' These ideas of Campanella seem to have led Leibniz to his two systems of monads and the minute immortal animal. A legitimate offspring of this is the tiny ethereal body which, according to Bonnet's presupposition, perpetually envelops souls.
All these systems are clearly exaggerated. The most we can say about matter is that 1. it has real existence, 2. its real mode of being is concomitant with the existence of feeling, 3. its conceptual mode of being (the concept we have of it) logically implies an essential relationship with feeling. To go further would be to transcend the limits of the question; it would mean that inadvertently we were speaking about the corporeal principle or the cause of matter, rather than about matter itself and its concept (in the way we actually possess it).