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Notes and Discussions "CHEVALIER" RAMSAY'S CRITIQUE OF SPINOZA Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686-1743), better known among the few that know of him as Chevalier Ramsay, is usually treated as a philosophical and religious romancer or aventurier. Like his friend and countryman, David Hume, he spent much of his time in France and more of his time on French literature. He was an ardent free-mason, a member of Madame Guyon's quietist circle, a disciple of F@nelon, and author of a best-seller, The Travels o/ Cyrus. But he was also a philosophe and some of his philosophical ideas are worth calling attention to both for their historical and for their current interest. The Appendix of his two-volume treatise, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion Un/olded in a Geometrical Order (Glasgow: 1748), is devoted to a critique of Spinoza's Ethics. The treatise opens with the words: "In this twilight of human understanding 'we see things darkly as in a glass'." Such consciousness of twilight signified the dawning of the Enlightenment, when the seeing of things darkly was giving way to seeing things, as Heine said, "through the lenses ground by Spinoza." With these lenses of geometrical method and natural reason, Ramsay is emboldened to declare on the first page of his treatise and immediately after an expression of "the greatest self-diffidence" that "revelation never contradicts reason." It is really with medieval confidence that he proposes to prove this thesis. Using Spinoza's own method, he tries to show that the trinitarian theory of God's nature is more rational than Spinoza's theory of the two attributes. Ramsay is aware that both "the schoolmen" and Descartes were not sufficiently precise in their distinction between a "clear idea" and an "adequate idea." His critique of Spinoza is based on his conviction that the Ethics is a confirmation and exploitation of these confusions. Thus, his treatise is supposed to take its place beside Locke's The Reasonableness o] the Christian Religion and beside the many other attempts of the philosophers of his age to translate the substance of their religious faith into the language and "lenses" of mathematical science. Noteworthy is the relative conservatism of Ramsay's theology. This is not unitarian propaganda (as Locke's treatise may have been) ; it is not theosophical syncretism as was much of the philosophical writing of other free-masons; it is not anticlerical as was much of Spinoza's deism, nor is it materialistic as were the extremists of the French Enlightenment. It seems to be sympathetic toward Arminianism and is in general agreement with the position popularly represented by the latitudinarian Anglican Wollaston in his Religion o/Nature. The metaphysics is neither Calvinistic nor Thomist; it is influenced by the Cartesian tradition, notably by Malebranche, and in it Bishop Berkeley is referred to several times with approval. But in general Ramsay tries to avoid any doctrinaire position; on the contrary, he tries to defend what he calls the "pre-Lockean" [9i] 92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY use of metaphysical terms, such as substance, essence, creation, causation, and freedom. Thus, being radical in his method and conservative in his conclusions, Ramsay deserves some attention as a representative of the prevalent deism. There are two approaches to natural theology and two parts to Ramsay's Treatise. The first part sets forth Christian theology as a rational philosophy, organized by definitions, axioms, and theorems. "All the propositions and corollaries of this essay are derived from the simple idea of a Self-existent Being; which all must allow, whether Atheists or Theists; Deists or Christians. This is the seed which contains the hidden tree, with all its roots, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits" (Preface, p. vi). Superficially, it seems that Ramsay's basic definitions and axioms are so close to Spinoza's that there should be little difference in the "fruits" which finally grow from the demonstrations. He defines a self-existent substance as "a Being that contains in itself a reality which makes its existence necessary and its non-existence impossible" (p. 2). Such a being is the "Absolute Infinite" or God, defined as "the most perfect negation of finite...

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