After expounding his opinion concerning God, our author, in article XV, thinks to refute all the arguments by which I have proved God’s existence. At this point it occurs to one to marvel at the man’s self-confidence, in that he imagines that he can so easily and in so few words overturn all that I have built up by dint of long and concentrated meditation, and to the explanation of which I have devoted a whole volume. But all the arguments which I have adduced in this matter can be subordinated to two. In the first place I have shown that we have a notion or idea of God such that, when we sufficiently attend to it and ponder the matter in the manner I have expounded, we realise from this contemplation alone, that it cannot be but that God exists, since existence, not merely possible or contingent as in the ideas of all other things, but altogether necessary and actual, is contained in this concept. This argument, which is held as certainly and obviously proved, not only by myself but by several others, and these men pre-eminent in learning and genius who have sedulously investigated the matter — this argument, I say, the author of the Programme thinks to refute in this fashion: ‘Our concept of God, or the idea of God which exists in our mind, is not an argument sufficiently strong to prom the existence of God, since all things do not exist of which concepts are observed within us.’ By these words he shows that he has read my writings, but has in nowise had either the power or the will to understand them. For the point of my argument is, not the idea in general, but its peculiar property, a property which is evident in the highest degree in the idea we have of God, and which can be found in the concept of no other thing, namely, the necessity of existence, which is required as that crown of perfections without which we cannot comprehend God. The other argument by which I proved the existence of God, I deduced from my clear proof of the fact that we should not have had the faculty for conceiving all the perfections which we recognise in God, had it not been true that God existed, and that we were created by Him. This argument our friend thinks he has more than exploded by saying that the idea we have of God does not, more than the concept of any other thing, transcend our proper powers of thinking. If by these words he only means that the concept which we have of God without the aid of supernatural grace is no less natural than all the concepts we have of other things, he is at one with me; but on that basis nothing can be concluded against me. If, however, he thinks that that concept does not involve more objective perfections than all the others taken together, he is obviously wrong. I myself, on the other hand, have founded my argument entirely on this preponderance of perfections, in which our concept of God transcends other concepts.
In the six remaining articles there is nothing worthy of note except the fact that, when he wishes to distinguish the properties of the soul, he speaks of them confusedly and inappropriately. I have said that these are all to be subordinated to two predominant properties, one of which is the perception of the understanding, the other the determination of the will. These two our friend calls ‘understanding’ and ‘ will.’ Then he subdivides what he calls ‘ understanding ‘ into ‘perception’ and ‘ judgment.’ In this point he differs from me, for when I saw that, over and above perception, which is required as a basis for judgment, there must needs be affirmation, or negation, to constitute the form of the judgment, and that it is frequently open to us to withhold our assent, even if we perceive a thing, I referred the act of judging, which consists in nothing but assent, i.e. affirmation or negation, not to the perception of the understanding, but to the determination of the will. Thereafter he enumerates, among the species of perception, nothing but sense, memory, and imagination; from which one may gather that he admits no pure intellection (i.e. intellection which deals with no corporeal images), and, accordingly, that he himself believes that no cognition is possessed of God, or of the human mind, or of other immaterial things. Of this I can imagine but one cause, namely, that the thoughts he has concerning these things are so confused that he never observes in himself a pure thought, different from every corporeal image.
Finally, in closing, he adds these words, taken from some portion of my writings: ‘ No men more easily attain a great reputation for piety, than the superstitious and the hypocrites.’ What he means by these words I fail to see, unless perhaps he ascribes to hypocrisy the use he has made of irony, in many places, but I do not think that by that means he can attain a great reputation for piety.
For the rest, I am constrained to admit here, that I am covered with shame to think that in time past I lauded this author as a man of most penetrative genius, and wrote somewhere or other that ‘I did not think he taught any doctrines which I should be unwilling to acknowledge as my own.’ But in truth when I wrote these words I had as yet seen no specimen of his work in which he was not a faithful copyist, except only on one occasion in one little phrase, which brought such ill results to him, that I hoped he would make no further venture in that line; and, as I saw him in other matters embrace with a great show of zeal the opinions that I deemed nearest the truth, I attributed this to his genius and penetration. But now a manifold experience compels me to conclude that he is swayed not so much by love of truth as by love of novelty. As he holds all he has learned from others to be old-world and out-worn, thinking nothing sufficiently novel except what he has hammered out of his own brain; and, at the same time, is so unhappy in his inventions, that I have never noted a single word in his writings (excluding what he transcribed from other men), which I did not condemn as containing some error, I must therefore warn all those who are convinced that he is a champion of my opinions, that of these opinions — I speak, not only of those in the Metaphysics, on which he openly opposes me, but also of those in the Physics, for he treats of this subject somewhere in his writings — there is none which he does not state awry and distort. Hence it causes me more indignation that such a Physician should handle my writings and undertake to interpret, or, in other words, to falsify them, than that other men should attack them with the utmost bitterness.
For I never yet saw one of these bitter critics who did not father on me opinions different from mine by a whole heaven, and so maundering and preposterous, that I had no fear that any man of intelligence could be persuaded that they were mine. Thus, even as I write these words, two new pamphlets are brought me — productions of an adversary of this type. In the first of these it is stated that ‘There are some Neoterics who deny all credibility to the senses, who contend that the Philosophers deny God, and dare to doubt His existence, and who, meantime, admit that there are implanted by Nature in the human mind actual notions, species, and ideas of God! In the second it is said that ‘these Neoterics barefacedly proclaim that God is, not only negatively, but positively, the efficient cause of Himself! In either pamphlet the only thing effected is the conglomeration of numerous arguments to prove, first, that we have no actual knowledge (cognitio) of God in our mother’s womb, and accordingly that ‘no actual species or idea of God is inborn in our mind’; secondly, that ‘we must not deny God’ and that ‘they are atheists and punishable by law who deny Him’; and thirdly and finally that ‘God is not the efficient cause of Himself.’
I might well suppose that all these dicta were not directed against me, because my name is not mentioned in the pamphlets, and of the opinions attacked in them there is none which I do not think absurd and erroneous. Nevertheless, as they are not dissimilar to those which have often ere now been slanderously imputed to me by men of that kidney, and as there are no other persons recognizable to whom these opinions could be attributed; as, finally, there are many who do not doubt that I am the object of attack in these pamphlets, I take this occasion to admonish their author to this effect:
First: — By innate ideas I never understood anything other than that which he himself, on page 6 of his second pamphlet, affirms in so many words to be true, viz that ‘there is innate in ns by nature a potentiality whereby we know God’; but that these ideas are actual, or that they are some kind of species different from the faculty of thought I never
wrote nor concluded. On the contrary, I, more than any other man, am utterly averse to that empty stock of scholastic entities — so much so, that I cannot refrain from laughter when I see that mighty heap which our hero — a very inoffensive fellow no doubt — has laboriously brought together to prove that infants ham no notion of God so long as they are in their mother’s womb — as though in this fashion he was bringing a magnificent charge against me.
Secondly: — I have never taught that God is to be denied, or that He can deceive us, or that one must doubt about every thing, or that all credibility is to be denied to the senses, or that sleep cannot be distinguished from waking, or the like — doctrines which are sometimes thrown in my teeth by ignorant detractors. I have repudiated all these doctrines expressly and with the strongest arguments — stronger, I make bold to say, than any that have by any man before me been brought to the refutation of these doctrines. That I might the more fittingly and effectively compass this end, I proposed, at the beginning of my Meditations, to regard as doubtful all the doctrines which did not owe their original discovery to me, but had been for long denounced by the sceptics. What could be more unjust than to attribute to a writer opinions which he states only to the end that he may refute them? What more foolish than to imagine that, at least for the time being, while these false opinions are being propounded previous to their refutation, the author commits himself to them, and that, accordingly, the man who states the arguments of the Atheists is an Atheist for the time? What more childish than to say that, if he were to die meantime, before writing or evolving the hoped for refutation he would die an Atheist — that he taught pernicious doctrine merely as a preliminary, but that ‘evil should not be done that good may come of it’ and so forth? Some one will say, perhaps, that I related these false opinions, not as the opinions of others, but as my own. But what of that? In the self-same book in which I related them I refuted them all. From the very title of the book it might be understood that I was altogether hostile to these beliefs, for it purports to give ‘proofs of the existence of God’ Is there anyone obtuse enough to think that the man who compiled such a book was ignorant, so long as he was penning its first pages, of what he had undertaken to prove in the following? I enunciated the objections as though they were my own, to suit the exigencies of the style of ‘meditations,’ which I judged the style best fitted for unfolding arguments. If this explanation does not satisfy our captious critics, I should like to know what they say of Holy Scripture — with which no human documents are to be compared — when they see in it some things that cannot be rightly understood unless they be supposed to be the utterance of impious men, or, at least, of others than the Holy Ghost and the Prophets? Such are Ecclesiastes, chap, ii., these words ‘ There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw that it was from the hand of God. For who can eat or who else can hasten thereunto more than I?’ and, in the following chapter, ‘I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts; for that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth so dieth the other: yea they have all one breath: so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast,’ etc. Do they believe that here the Holy Spirit teaches us that we should indulge the belly, and have abundance of delights, and that our souls are no more immortal than the souls of beasts? I do not think they are so mad. Neither should they calumniate me because in writing I have not made use of the precautions which are observed by some other writers, but not by the Holy Spirit.
In the third place, and finally, I warn the author of these pamphlets that I never wrote that ‘God should be said to be, not only negatively, but positively, the efficient cause of Himself,’ as he affirms in a very rash and ill-considered manner in page 8 of his second pamphlet. Let him turn over, read, and thoroughly search my writings, he will find in them nothing like this, but the very reverse. The fact that I am far indeed from accepting such monstrous opinions is well known to all who have read my writings, or have any knowledge of myself, or, at any rate, do not think me utterly fatuous. On this account I am only moved to wonder what is the aim of these detractors; for if they wish to convince any one that I wrote things of which the very contrary is found in my writings, they should have taken the preliminary precaution of suppressing all my publications, and should even have wiped out the memory of them from the minds of those who had already read them; for so long as they fail to effect this they do themselves more harm than me. Moreover, I marvel that they should inveigh with such bitterness and such zeal against me, who have never troubled them, nor done them any hurt, though, perhaps, possessing the power to hurt them if they provoked me; and meantime should take no action against many other men who devote whole books to the refutation of their doctrine, and ridicule them as simpletons and blindfold gladiators. But I am unwilling to add any word here that might make them renounce their habit of impugning me in their pamphlets. I am glad to see that they think me of so much importance. Meantime I pray Heaven to grant them sanity.
Written at Egmond, in Holland, towards the end of December 1647.
PASSIONS OF THE SOUL
Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross
This treatise, Descartes’ last published work, was completed in 1649 and dedicated once again to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. In Passions of the Soul the author contributes to a long tradition of theorising “the passions” — experiences now commonly regarded as emotions, which were a subject of debate among natural philosophers since the time of Plato. Notable precursors to Descartes, who articulated their own theories of the passions, include St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Hobbes.
In 1643 Descartes began a prolific written correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, in which he answered her moral questions, especially the nature of happiness, passions and ethics. Passions of the Soul was composed as a synthesis of this exchange. Descartes regarded the passions neither as a moralist nor from a psychological perspective, but as a method of exploring a fundamental aspect of natural science. “My design is not to explain the passions as an Orator,” he wrote in a letter to his editor dated August 14, 1649, “nor even as a Philosopher, but only as a Physicist.” In doing so, Descartes broke not only from the Aristotelian tradition (according to which the movements of the body originate in the soul), but also the Stoic and Christian traditions that defined the passions as the illnesses of the soul and which dictate that they be treated as such. He therefore affirmed that the passions “are all intrinsically good, and that all we have to avoid is their misuse or their excess.”
In the context of the mechanistic view of life that was gaining popularity in seventeenth century science, Descartes perceived the body as an autonomous machine, capable of moving independently of the soul. It was from this physiological perception of the body that Descartes developed his theories on the passions of the soul. Previously considered to be an anomaly, the passions became a natural phenomenon, necessitating a scientific explanation.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
PREFATORY NOTE TO ‘THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL’.
PART FIRST. OF THE PASSIONS IN GENERAL, AND INCIDENTALLY OF THE WHOLE NATURE OF MAN.
PART SECOND. OF THE NUMBER AND ORDER OF THE PASSIONS AND AN EXPOSITION OF THE SIX PRIMITIVE PASSIONS.
THE ORDER AND ENUMERATION OF THE PASSIONS.
PART THIRD. OF PARTICULAR PASSIONS.
PREFATORY NOTE TO ‘THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL’.
Delphi Collected Works of René Descartes Page 42
