GEULINCX, ARNOLD. - Philosopher, b. in Antwerp on 31 Jan. 1624, d. of plague in Leiden in Nov. 1669. He studied and was a professor in Louvain; then, having converted to Calvinism, at the University of Leiden. His most important work is Γνῶθι αἰσυντὸν sive Ethica; published in part in Leiden in 1665 (De virtute... Tractatus ethicus primus), it came out complete, with this title, posthumously (Leiden 1675). The occasionalist doctrine, which, united with a rigorous rationalism and a lively misticism, constitutes the characteristic of G.'s philosophy, already present as a background in the Ethica, is set out at length in the Metaphysica vera (posthumous, Amsterdam 1695).
Like Descartes, G. seeks the essential attribute of corporeal substance in extension. Space is not a sum, but a unity; it grounds the possibility of division and of movement, but is not itself divided and moved. As the point stands to the line, the line to the surface, the surface to the solid, so the body stands to space; that is, space and the individual body are placed in the relation of a logical prius and posterius. The concept of body is contained in the concept of space, physics is deducible from geometry. The corporeal world, the passive object of movement that propagates by impact and pressure, cannot be in itself a cause, it demands God as its cause. But even its movement, which makes of the one space the plurality of bodies, is not, in its reality, deducible from the essence of the corporeal world; it therefore leads back to a cause outside it, to God.
Sense perception gives only a confused image; it is fundamentally a modification of our consciousness, conditioned by the external world. The office of knowledge is to replace sense perceptions with a clear and distinct concept of the intellect; hence the notable idea in G. that even the intellectual knowledge of an object contains subjective factors, additions, which science must eliminate, in order to know the object as it is in itself. The approach to Kant becomes greater when he declares it impossible to free ourselves from the forms of the intellect: «solere homines illos modos suarum cogitationum in res obiectas transfundere» (Opera, II, p. 204).
The soul does not act on the body, nor the body on the soul, and the apparent causal nexus derives from the fact that God has placed the manifestations of the soul and of the body in such an accord that on the occasion of the one the others necessarily present themselves (cf. Ethica, I, sect. 2, § 2). A reciprocal action between the soul and the body is not possible, because body and soul are two totally different substances, nor do we know how to produce such an activity («Quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis»).
The attribution of every efficiency and causality to God logically implies pantheism. Traces of it are not infrequent in G. and recall Malebranche and Spinoza: now the relation of God to the human spirit is compared to that of space to individual bodies («Sumus modi mentis, non mentes, ut corpora particularia sunt modi corporis. Si auferes modum, remanet ipse Deus»); now mathematical concepts are explained as something in the divine spirit, which we intuit in God («duo et tria sunt quinque» sunt in mente divina, non in nostra, cum itaque nos consideramus ideas istas, consideramus eas in Deo et sic ipsum Deum»).
With occasionalism is connected the thought that, since it is not in our power to act in the external world, we must not set ourselves ends of such a nature: «ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis», hence resignation: «ita est, ergo ita sit». The interior disposition is «despectio sui» founded on the «inspectio sui». We must abandon ourselves to the divine reason, without any egoism.
Among the remaining works of G. should be remembered: Quaestiones quodlibeticae (Antwerp 1653); Logica... (Leiden 1662); Annotata praecurrentia ad R. Cartesii principia (Dordrecht 1690); Annotata maiora ad principia philosophiae R. Cartesii (ibid. 1691).
Bibliography7 works
Andrea Ferro