contrary, the base of the pyramid is on the solid ground of observed fact, and the pyramid tapers
upward, not downward; consequently the equilibrium is stable, and a flaw here or there can be
rectified without total disaster. This difference of method survived Kant's attempt to incorporate
something of the empirical philosophy: from Descartes to Hegel on the one side, and from Locke
to John Stuart Mill on the other, it remains unvarying.
The difference in method is connected with various other differences. Let us take first
metaphysics.
Descartes offered metaphysical proofs of the existence of God, of which the most important had
been invented in the eleventh century by Saint Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury. Spinoza had a
pantheistic God, who seemed to the orthodox to be no God at all; however that may be, Spinoza's
arguments were essentially metaphysical, and are traceable (though he may not have realized this)
to the doctrine that every proposition must have a subject and a predicate. Leibniz's metaphysics
had the same source.
In Locke, the philosophical direction that he inaugurated is not yet fully developed; he accepts as
valid Descartes' arguments as to the existence of God. Berkeley invented a wholly new argument;
but Hume--in whom the new philosophy comes to completion--rejected metaphysics entirely, and
held that nothing can be discovered by reasoning on the subjects with which metaphysics is
concerned. This view persisted in the empirical school, while the opposite view, somewhat
modified, persisted in Kant and his disciples.
In ethics, there is a similar division between the two schools.
Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among
empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary,
despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted.
Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes. There are in Spinoza two
unreconciled views on ethics, one that of Hobbes, the other that the good consists in mystic union
with God. Leibniz made no important contribution to ethics, but Kant made ethics supreme, and
derived his metaphysics from ethical premisses. Kant's ethic is important, because it is anti-
utilitarian, a priori, and what is called "noble."