Delphi Collected Works of René Descartes

by René Descartes

  The first public teacher of Cartesian views was Henri Renery, a Belgian, who at Deventer and afterwards at Utrecht had introduced the new philosophy which he had learned Spread of Cartesianism. from personal intercourse with Descartes. Renery only survived five years at Utrecht, and it was reserved for Heinrich Regius (van Roy) — who in 1638 had been appointed to the new chair of botany and theoretical medicine at Utrecht, and who visited Descartes at Egmond in order more thoroughly to learn his views — to throw down the gauntlet to the adherents of the old methods. With more eloquence than judgment, he propounded theses bringing into relief the points in which the new doctrines clashed with the old. The attack was opened by Gisbert Voët, foremost among the orthodox theological professors and clergy of Utrecht. In 1639 he published a series of arguments against atheism, in which the Cartesian views were not obscurely indicated as perilous for the faith, though no name was mentioned. Next year he persuaded the magistracy to issue an order forbidding Regius to travel beyond the received doctrine. The magisterial views seem to have prevailed in the professoriate, which formally in March 1642 expressed its disapprobation of the new philosophy as well as of its expositors. As yet Descartes was not directly attacked. Voët now issued, under the name of Martin Schoock, one of his pupils, a pamphlet with the title of Methodus novae philosophiae Renati Descartes, in which atheism and infidelity were openly declared to be the effect of the new teaching. Descartes replied to Voët directly in a letter, published at Amsterdam in 1643. He was summoned before the magistrates of Utrecht to defend himself against charges of irreligion and slander. What might have happened we cannot tell; but Descartes threw himself on the protection of the French ambassador and the prince of Orange, and the city magistrates, from whom he vainly demanded satisfaction in a dignified letter, were snubbed by their superiors. About the same time (April 1645) Schoock was summoned before the university of Groningen, of which he was a member, and forthwith disavowed the more abusive passages in his book. So did the effects of the odium theologicum, for the meanwhile at least, die away.

  In the Discourse of Method Descartes had sketched the main points in his new views, with a mental autobiography which might explain their origin, and with some suggestions Discourse of Method, and Meditations. as to their applications. His second great work,. Meditations on the First Philosophy, which had been begun soon after his settlement in the Netherlands, expounded in more detail the foundations of his system, laying especial emphasis on the priority of mind to body, and on the absolute and ultimate dependence of mind as well as body on the existence of God. In 1640 a copy of the work in manuscript was despatched to Paris, and Mersenne was requested to lay it before as many thinkers and scholars as he deemed desirable, with a view to getting their views upon its argument and doctrine. Descartes soon had a formidable list of objections to reply to. Accordingly, when the work was published at Paris in August 1641, under the title of Meditationes de prima philosophia ubi de Dei existentia et animae immortalitate (though it was in fact not the immortality but the immateriality of the mind, or, as the second edition described it, animae humanae a corpore distinctio, which was maintained), the title went on to describe the larger part of the book as containing various objections of learned men, with the replies of the author. These objections in the first edition are arranged under six heads: the first came from Caterus, a theologian of Louvain; the second and sixth are anonymous criticisms from various hands; whilst the third, fourth and fifth belong respectively to Hobbes, Arnauld and Gassendi. In the second edition appeared the seventh — objections from Père Bourdin, a Jesuit teacher of mathematics in Paris; and subsequently another set of objections, known as those of Hyperaspistes, was included in the collection of Descartes’s letters. The anonymous objections are very much the statement of common-sense against philosophy; those of Caterus criticize the Cartesian argument from the traditional theology of the church; those of Arnauld are an appreciative inquiry into the bearings and consequences of the meditations for religion and morality; while those of Hobbes (q.v.) and Gassendi — both somewhat senior to Descartes and with a dogmatic system of their own already formed — are a keen assault upon the spiritualism of the Cartesian position from a generally “sensational” standpoint. The criticisms of the last two are the criticisms of a hostile school of thought; those of Arnauld are the difficulties of a possible disciple.

  In 1644 the third great work of Descartes, the Principia philosophiae, appeared at Amsterdam. Passing briefly over the conclusions arrived at in the Meditations, it deals The Principia. in its second, third and fourth parts with the general principles of physical science, especially the laws of motion, with the theory of vortices, and with the phenomena of heat, light, gravity, magnetism, electricity, &c., upon the earth. This work exhibits some curious marks of caution. Undoubtedly, says Descartes, the world was in the beginning created in all its perfection. “But yet as it is best, if we wish to understand the nature of plants or of men, to consider how they may by degrees proceed from seeds, rather than how they were created by God in the beginning of the world, so, if we can excogitate some extremely simple and comprehensible principles, out of which, as if they were seeds, we can prove that stars, and earth and all this visible scene could have originated, although we know full well that they never did originate in such a way, we shall in that way expound their nature far better than if we merely described them as they exist at present.” The Copernican theory is rejected in name, but retained in substance. The earth, or other planet, does not actually move round the sun; yet it is carried round the sun in the subtle matter of the great vortex, where it lies in equilibrium, — carried like the passenger in a boat, who may cross the sea and yet not rise from his berth.

  In 1647 the difficulties that had arisen at Utrecht were repeated on a smaller scale at Leiden. There the Cartesian innovations had found a patron in Adrian Heerebord, and were openly discussed in theses and lectures. The theological professors took the alarm at passages in the Meditations; an attempt to prove the existence of God savoured, as they thought, of atheism and heresy. When Descartes complained to the authorities of this unfair treatment, the only reply was an order by which all mention of the name of Cartesianism, whether favourable or adverse, was forbidden in the university. This was scarcely what Descartes wanted, and again he had to apply to the prince of Orange, whereupon the theologians were asked to behave with civility, and the name of Descartes was no longer proscribed. But other annoyances were not wanting from unfaithful disciples and unsympathetic critics. The Instantiae of Gassendi appeared at Amsterdam in 1644 as a reply to the reply which Descartes had published of his previous objections; and the publication by Heinrich Regius of his work on physical philosophy (Fundamenta physices, 1646) gave the world to understand that he had ceased to be a thorough adherent of the philosophy which he had so enthusiastically adopted.

  It was about 1648 that Descartes lost his friends Mersenne and Mydorge by death. The place of Mersenne as his Parisian representative was in the main taken by Claude Clerselier (the French translator of the Objections and Responses), whom he had become acquainted with in Paris. Through Clerselier he came to know Pierre Chanut, who in 1645 was sent as French ambassador to the court of Sweden. Queen Christina was not yet twenty, and took a lively if a somewhat whimsical interest in literary and philosophical culture. Through Chanut, with whom she was on terms of familiarity, she came to hear of Descartes, and a correspondence which the latter nominally carried on with the ambassador was in reality intended for the eyes of the queen. The correspondence took an ethical tone. It began with a long letter on love in all its aspects (February 1647), a topic suggested by Chanut, who had been discussing it with the queen; and this was soon followed by another to Christina herself on the chief good. An essay on the passions of the mind (Passions de l’âme), which had been written originally for the princess Elizabeth, in development of some ethical views suggested by the De vita beata of Seneca, was enclosed at the same time for Chanut. It was a d
raft of the work published in 1650 under the same title. Philosophy, particularly that of Descartes, was becoming a fashionable divertissement for the queen and her courtiers, and it was felt that the presence of the sage himself was necessary to complete the good work of education. An invitation to the Swedish court was urged upon Descartes, and after much hesitation accepted; a vessel of the royal navy was ordered to wait upon him, and in September 1649 he left Egmond for the north.

  The position on which he entered at Stockholm was unsuited for a man who wished to be his own master. The young queen wanted Descartes to draw up a code for a proposed Death. academy of the sciences, and to give her an hour of philosophic instruction every morning at five. She had already determined to create him a noble, and begun to look out an estate in the lately annexed possessions of Sweden on the Pomeranian coast. But these things were not to be. His friend Chanut fell dangerously ill; and Descartes, who devoted himself to attend in the sick-room, was obliged to issue from it every morning in the chill northern air of January, and spend an hour in the palace library. The ambassador recovered, but Descartes fell a victim to the same disease, inflammation of the lungs. The last time he saw the queen was on the 1st of February 1650, when he handed to her the statutes he had drawn up for the proposed academy. On the 11th of February he died. The queen wished to bury him at the feet of the Swedish kings, and to raise a costly mausoleum in his honour; but these plans were overruled, and a plain monument in the Catholic cemetery was all that marked the place of his rest. Sixteen years after his death the French treasurer d’Alibert made arrangements for the conveyance of the ashes to his native land; and in 1667 they were interred in the church of Ste Geneviève du Mont, the modern Pantheon. In 1819, after being temporarily deposited in a stone sarcophagus in the court of the Louvre during the Revolutionary epoch, they were transferred to St Germain-des-Près, where they now repose between Montfaucon and Mabillon. A monument was raised to his memory at Stockholm by Gustavus III.; and a modern statue has been erected to him at Tours, with an inscription on the pedestal: “Je pense, donc je suis.”

  Descartes never married, and had little of the amorous in his temperament. He has alluded to a childish fancy for a young girl with a slight obliquity of vision; but he only mentions it à propos of the consequent weakness which led him to associate such a defect with beauty. In person he was small, with large head, projecting brow, prominent nose, and eyes wide apart, with black hair coming down almost to his eyebrows. His voice was feeble. He usually dressed in black, with unobtrusive propriety.

  Philosophy. — The end of all study, says Descartes, in one of his earliest writings, ought to be to guide the mind to form true and sound judgments on every thing that may be presented to it. The sciences in their totality are but the intelligence of man; and all the details of knowledge have no value save as they strengthen the understanding. The mind is not for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge for the sake of the mind. This is the reassertion of a principle which the middle ages had lost sight of — that knowledge, if it is to have any value, must be intelligence, and not erudition.

  But how is intelligence, as opposed to erudition, possible? The answer to that question is the method of Descartes. That idea of a method grew up with his study of geometry Mathematics. and arithmetic, — the only branches of knowledge which he would allow to be “made sciences.” But they did not satisfy his demand for intelligence. “I found in them,” he says, “different propositions on numbers of which, after a calculation, I perceived the truth; as for the figures, I had, so to speak, many truths put before my eyes, and many others concluded from them by analogy; but it did not seem to me that they told my mind with sufficient clearness why the things were as I was shown, and by what means their discovery was attained.” The mathematics of which he thus speaks included the geometry of the ancients, as it had been handed down to the modern world, and arithmetic with the developments it had received in the direction of algebra. The ancient geometry, as we know it, is a wonderful monument of ingenuity — a series of tours de force, in which each problem to all appearance stands alone, and, if solved, is solved by methods and principles peculiar to itself. Here and there particular curves, for example, had been obliged to yield the secret of their tangent; but the ancient geometers apparently had no consciousness of the general bearings of the methods which they so successfully applied. Each problem was something unique; the elements of transition from one to another were wanting; and the next step which mathematics had to make was to find some method of reducing, for instance, all curves to a common notation. When that was found, the solution of one problem would immediately entail the solution of all others which belonged to the same series as itself.

  The arithmetical half of mathematics, which had been gradually growing into algebra, and had decidedly established itself as such in the Ad logisticen speciosam notae priores of François Vieta (1540-1603), supplied to some extent the means of generalizing geometry. And the algebraists or arithmeticians of the 16th century, such as Luca Pacioli (Lucas de Borgo), Geronimo or Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), and Niccola Tartaglia (1506-1559), had used geometrical constructions to throw light on the solution of particular equations. But progress was made difficult, in consequence of the clumsy and irregular nomenclature employed. With Descartes the use of exponents as now employed for denoting the powers of a quantity becomes systematic; and without some such step by which the homogeneity of successive powers is at once recognized, the binomial theorem could scarcely have been detected. The restriction of the early letters of the alphabet to known, and of the late letters to unknown, quantities is also his work. In this and other details he crowns and completes, in a form henceforth to be dominant for the language of algebra, the work of numerous obscure predecessors, such as Étienne de la Roche, Michael Stifel or Stiefel (1487-1567), and others.

  Having thus perfected the instrument, his next step was to apply it in such a way as to bring uniformity of method into the isolated and independent operations of geometry. “I had no intention,” he says in the Method, “of attempting to master all the particular sciences commonly called mathematics; but as I observed that, with all differences in their objects, they agreed in considering merely the various relations or proportions subsisting among these objects, I thought it best for my purpose to consider these relations in the most general form possible, without referring them to any objects in particular except such as would most facilitate the knowledge of them. Perceiving further, that in order to understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider them one by one, and sometimes only to bear them in mind or embrace them in the aggregate, I thought that, in order the better to consider them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines, than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other hand that, in order to retain them in the memory or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters, the briefest possible.” Such is the basis of the algebraical or modern analytical geometry. The problem of the curves is solved by their reduction to a problem of straight lines; and the locus of any point is determined by its distance from two given straight lines — the axes of co-ordinates. Thus Descartes gave to modern geometry that abstract and general character in which consists its superiority to the geometry of the ancients. In another question connected with this, the problem of drawing tangents to any curve, Descartes was drawn into a controversy with Pierre (de) Fermat (1601-1663), Gilles Persone de Roberval (1602-1675), and Girard Desargues (1593-1661). Fermat and Descartes agreed in regarding the tangent to a curve as a secant of that curve with the two points of intersection coinciding, while Roberval regarded it as the direction of the composite movement by which the curve can be described. Both these methods, differing from that now employed, are interesting as preliminary steps towards the method of fluxions and the differential calculus. In pure algebra Descartes expounded and illustrated the general met
hods of solving equations up to those of the fourth degree (and believed that his method could go beyond), stated the law which connects the positive and negative roots of an equation with the changes of sign in the consecutive terms, and introduced the method of indeterminate coefficients for the solution of equations. These innovations have been attributed on inadequate evidence to other algebraists, e.g. William Oughtred (1575-1660) and Thomas Harriot (1560-1621).

  The Geometry of Descartes, unlike the other parts of his essays, is not easy reading. It dashes at once into the middle of the subjects with the examination of a problem which had baffled the ancients, and seems as if it were tossed at the heads of the French geometers as a challenge. An edition of it appeared subsequently, with notes by his friend Florimond de Beaune (1601-1652), calculated to smooth the difficulties of the work. All along mathematics was regarded by Descartes rather as the envelope than the foundation of his method; and the “universal mathematical science” which he sought after was only the prelude of a universal science of all-embracing character.

  The method of Descartes rests upon the proposition that all the objects of our knowledge fall into series, of which the members are more or less known by means of one another. In Descartes’ method. every such series or group there is a dominant element, simple and irresoluble, the standard on which the rest of the series depends, and hence, so far as that group or series is concerned, absolute. The other members of the group are relative and dependent, and only to be understood as in various degrees subordinate to the primitive conception. The characteristic by which we recognize the fundamental element in a series is its intuitive or self-evident character; it is given by “the evident conception of a healthy and attentive mind so clear and distinct that no doubt is left.” Having discovered this prime or absolute member of the group, we proceed to consider the degrees in which the other members enter into relation with it. Here deduction comes into play to show the dependence of one term upon the others; and, in the case of a long chain of intervening links, the problem for intelligence is so to enunciate every element, and so to repeat the connexion that we may finally grasp all the links of the chain in one. In this way we, as it were, bring the causal or primal term and its remotest dependent immediately together, and raise a derivative knowledge into one which is primary and intuitive. Such are the four points of Cartesian method: — (1) Truth requires a clear and distinct conception of its object, excluding all doubt; (2) the objects of knowledge naturally fall into series or groups; (3) in these groups investigation must begin with a simple and indecomposable element, and pass from it to the more complex and relative elements; (4) an exhaustive and immediate grasp of the relations and interconnexion of these elements is necessary for knowledge in the fullest sense of that word.