Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy
Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy
Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy
Natural Philosophy
Stephen Gaukroger
DESCARTES SYSTEM OF
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
Towards the end of his life, Descartes published the first four parts
of a projected six-part work, The Principles of Philosophy. This was
intended to be the definitive statement of his complete system of
philosophy, dealing with everything from cosmology to the nature
of human happiness. Stephen Gaukroger examines the whole system, and reconstructs the last two parts, On Living Things and
On Man, from Descartes other writings. He relates the work to the
tradition of late Scholastic textbooks which it follows, and also to
Descartes other philosophical writings, and he examines the ways
in which Descartes transformed not only the practice of natural
philosophy, but also our understanding of what it is to be a philosopher. His book is the first comprehensive examination of Descartes
complete philosophical system.
Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and
History of Science at the University of Sydney. His books include Explanatory Structures (), Cartesian Logic (), Descartes, An
Intellectual Biography (), and Francis Bacon and the Transformation of
Early Modern Philosophy ().
DESCARTES SYSTEM
OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
STEPHEN GAUKROGER
Contents
Preface
References to Descartes works
page vii
viii
Introduction
Physico-mathematics
The Regulae
Le Monde and LHomme
La Discours and Les Essais
Metaphysics and the legitimation of natural philosophy
La Recherche de la verite versus the Principia
Contents
vi
Bibliography
Index
Preface
vii
viii
Introduction
Introduction
CHAPTER
AT IXB. .
Le Monde, with some important additions (such as the rules of collision and
the account of the formation of planets) and some important revisions
(such as the doctrine of the reciprocity of motion). The Principia appears,
in sum, as a revised version of the project of Le Monde/LHomme, prefaced
by a foundationalist metaphysics which reshapes some of the natural
philosophical doctrines of the earlier writings, and taking Les Passions de
lAme as providing a version of the final part of the exercise culminating
in an account of human psychology and the attainment of a moral
life.
The Principia, in its projected complete form, offers us the mature
Cartesian system, and, in order to come to terms with it, it is important
that we understand what this system developed from, why it developed
in the way it did, and just why Descartes chose to set out his system in the
form of the Principia. To this end, my aim in this chapter is to explore the
first and second of these questions by looking at Descartes own earlier
projects, particularly as they bear upon the Principia and its projected two
final parts, and then, in the next chapter, to explore the third question
by looking at possible models for the Principia.
PHYSICO-MATHEMATICS
Physico-mathematicians are very rare, wrote Isaac Beeckman in a diary
entry for December , shortly after meeting Descartes for the first
time, and he notes that Descartes says he has never met anyone other
than me who pursues his studies in the way I do, combining physics
and mathematics in an exact way. And for my part, I have never spoken
with anyone apart from him who studies in this way. It was Beeckman
who introduced Descartes to a quantitative micro-corpuscularian natural philosophy, one that he was to reshape and make into his own very
distinctive system of natural philosophy.
Descartes earliest writings, which derive from late /early ,
deal with questions in practical mathematical disciplines. He composed
a short treatise on the mathematical basis of consonance in music, exchanged letters with Beeckman on the problem of free fall, and worked
Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de a` , ed. Cornelius de Waard, vols. (The Hague,
), I. .
On the details of Descartes relationship with Beeckman, see Klaas van Berkel, Descartes Debt to
Beeckman: Inspiration, Cooperation, Conflict, in Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John
Sutton, eds., Descartes Natural Philosophy (London, ), . On how Descartes reshaped his
early work with Beeckman see Stephen Gaukroger and John Schuster, The Hydrostatic Paradox
and the Origins of Cartesian Dynamics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.
proportion. The proportional compass enabled one to perform geometrical operations, such as trisection of angles, and arithmetical ones, such
as calculation of compound interest, and Descartes asked how it was
possible for the same instrument to generate results in two such different
disciplines as arithmetic, which dealt with discontinuous quantities (numbers), and geometry, which deals with continuous quantities (lines). Since
the principle behind the proportional compass was continued proportions, he realised that there was a more fundamental discipline, which
he initially identified with a theory of proportions, later with algebra.
This more fundamental discipline had two features. First, it underlay
arithmetic and geometry, in the sense that, along with various branches
of practical mathematics such as astronomy and the theory of harmony,
these were simply particular species of it, and for this reason he termed
it mathesis universalis, universal mathematics. Its second feature was that
this universal mathematics was a problem-solving discipline: indeed, an
exceptionally powerful problem-solving discipline whose resources went
far beyond those of traditional geometry and arithmetic. Descartes was
able to show this in a spectacular way in geometry, taking on problems,
such as the Pappus locus-problem, which had baffled geometers since
late antiquity, and he was able to show how his new problem-solving
algebraic techniques could cut through these effortlessly. In investigating the problem-solving capacity of his universal mathematics, however,
Descartes suspected that there might be an even more fundamental discipline of which universal mathematics itself was simply a species, a master
problem-solving discipline which underlay every area of inquiry, physical
and mathematical. This most fundamental discipline Descartes termed
universal method, and it is such a method that the Regulae sought to set
out and explore.
When Descartes began work on the Regulae, it was intended to be in
three parts, each part to contain twelve Rules. What was offered was a
general treatise on method, covering the nature of simple propositions
and how they can be known (first twelve Rules), how to deal with perfectly
understood problems (second set of Rules), and imperfectly understood
problems (projected third set). The composition proceeded in two stages,
however, and the nature of the work shifted somewhat between stages. In
, Descartes completed the first eleven Rules, and then apparently
abandoned them. When he took up the Regulae again in , he revised two of these (Rules and ) and added Rules to , with titles
only for Rules . The thrust of the work remains methodological,
and mathematics is still taken very much as model which is what we
would expect, since the fact that the move to universal method comes
through universal mathematics is what provides the former with its plausibility. But the complete Rules of the second Part, particularly Rules
to , focus on the question of how a mathematical understanding of
the world is possible by investigating just what happens in quantitative
perceptual cognition, that is, just what happens when we grasp the world
in geometrical terms. The change in focus is interesting, but it is not thoroughgoing, and severe problems arise in reconciling universal method
with universal mathematics, which has now become algebra.
Specifically, the problem that Descartes faced was that universal
method was supposed to provide a general form of legitimation of knowledge, including mathematical knowledge, but algebra also provided its
own specific kind of legitimation of mathematical knowledge, and the
point at which the Regulae break off and are abandoned is exactly that
at which it becomes clear that these two forms of legitimation come into
conflict. The general form of legitimation provided by universal method
is one in which problems are represented in the form of clear and distinct ideas, and Rule spells out just what this means in the case of
mathematics: it means representing the pure abstract entities that algebra deals with in terms of operations on line lengths, and in this way the
truth or falsity of the proposition so represented is evident. To take a simple example, the truth of the proposition + = is not immediately
evident in this form of representation, but it is evident if we represent the
operation of addition as the joining together of two lines, as in Figure ..
Figure .
In this case we can see how the quantities combine to form their sum (and
this is just as evident in the case of very large numbers the numerical value
The work described here was again intended to be in three parts. The
first part (Le Monde), which covers inanimate nature, and the second,
which covers animal and human non-conscious functions (LHomme),
were to have been complemented by a third part, on the rational soul,
but, just as with the Regulae, this third part never appeared. And, again
as with the Regulae, the project was abandoned, but, whereas the Regulae was abandoned because problems internal to the project became
evident, in the case of this second project the problems were wholly external: Le Monde had set out to derive the truth of a heliocentric system
from first principles, and the condemnation of Galileos defence
of Copernicanism by the Roman Inquisition stopped Descartes in his
tracks.
Le Monde sets out a theory of the physical world as something consisting
exclusively of homogeneous matter, which can be considered as comprising three types of corpuscle, distinguished solely by size. On the basis
of laws describing the motion of these corpuscles, a mechanistic cosmology is set out which includes both a celestial physics and an account of
the nature and properties of light. Descartes begins with an argument
to the effect that the world may be different from our perceptual image
of it, and indeed that our perceptual image may not even be a reliable
guide to how the world is. This is in no sense a sceptical argument, and,
once Descartes has established the nature of the world, it is clear that it
is in fact very different from our perceptual image of it. He begins with
the nature of fire, partly because fire is the only terrestrial form of production of light and one of his main tasks is to offer a theory of light, and
partly because it showcases his very economical theory of matter. The
aim is to show how a macroscopic phenomenon can be accounted for
plausibly in micro-corpuscularian terms, and fire is a good example for
Descartes purposes: all we need to postulate in order to account for the
burning process, he argues, is the motion of parts of the wood resulting
in the separation of the subtle parts (flame and smoke) from the gross
parts (which remain as ashes).
Matter theory is developed in a more systematic way from the beginning of chapter , Descartes drawing attention to the prevalence of
change in nature by arguing that the total amount of motion in the
AT VI. .
Descartes refers to as the third element, and such pieces of matter form
the planets and the comets. Finally, the collisions yield very small parts
of matter, which accommodate themselves to the space available so that
a void is not formed but this first element is formed in a greater quantity
than is needed simply to fill in the spaces between pieces of second and
third element, and the excess naturally moves towards the centre because
the second element has a greater centrifugal tendency to move to the
periphery, leaving the centre the only place for the first element to settle.
There it forms perfectly fluid bodies which rotate at a greater rate than
surrounding bodies and exude fine matter from their surfaces. These
concentrations of first element in the form of fluid, round bodies at the
centre of each system are suns, and the pushing action at their surfaces
is what we shall take to be light.
The universe, as Descartes represents it (Fig. .), consists of an indefinite number of contiguous vortices, each with a sun or star at the
centre, and planets revolving around this centre carried along by the second element. Occasionally, however, planets may be moving so quickly
as to be carried outside the solar system altogether: then they become
comets. Descartes describes the difference between the paths of planets
and comets in terms of an analogy with bodies being carried along by
rivers, the latter being like bodies that will have enough mass and speed
to be carried from one river to another when rivers meet, whereas the
former will just be carried along by the flow of their own river. Planets
eventually enter into stable orbits, the less massive they are the closer to
the centre, and once in this orbit they are simply carried along by the
celestial fluid in which they are embedded. The stability of their orbits
arises because, once a planet has attained a stable orbit, if it were to
move inward it would immediately meet smaller and faster corpuscles
of second element which would push it outward, and if it were to move
outward, it would immediately meet larger corpuscles which would slow
it down and make it move inward again.
This accounts for the motions of comets, and the motion of planets
proper around the Sun, and Descartes now moves on to explain the
motions of planetary satellites and the diurnal rotation of a planet like
the Earth. The celestial matter in which the Earth is embedded moves
faster at one side of the planet than at the other, and this gives the Earth
a spin or rotation, which in turn sets up a centrifugal effect, creating a
small vortex around itself, in which the Moon is carried. Turning next
to consider what the weight (pesanteur) of the Earth consists in, Descartes
rejects the idea of weight as an intrinsic property. In earlier writings he
Figure .
AT X. .
AT I. .
made up from the third element. Moreover, it is the laws of motion that
underpin and explain the laws of refraction and reflection of light, and
the accounts of phenomena such as the rainbow and parhelia that are
based on these.
The laws of motion show us that, given the rotation of the Sun and the
matter around it, there is a radial pressure which spreads outwards from
the Sun along straight lines from its centre. This pressure is manifested
as a trembling movement, a property which is very suitable for light.
Indeed, the inhabitants of Descartes proposed new world have a nature
such that, when their eyes are pushed in this way, they will have a sensation
which is just like the one we have of light. The question that Descartes
now poses is whether this model accounts for the known properties of
light. Setting out twelve principal properties of light which a theory of
light must account for, he proceeds to show that his account is not only
compatible with all of these, but can actually explain them.
Descartes achievement in Le Monde is twofold. In the first place, his
vortex theory explains the stability of planetary orbits in a way that
presents an intuitively plausible picture of orbital motion which requires
no mysterious forces acting at a distance: the rapid rotation of the Sun
at the centre of our solar system, through its resultant centrifugal force,
causes the pool of second matter to swirl around it, holding planets
in orbits as a whirlpool holds bodies in a circular motion around it.
Moreover, it explains this motion in terms of fundamental quantifiable
physical notions, namely centrifugal force and the rectilinear tendencies
of moving matter. In other words, the heliocentric theory is derived from
a very simple theory of matter, three laws of motion, and the notion
of a centrifugal force. Secondly, this account also enables Descartes to
account for all the known principal properties of light, thereby providing
a physical basis for the geometrical optics that he had pursued so fruitfully
in the s.
Le Monde was not to appear in Descartes lifetime, however. At the end
of November , he wrote to Mersenne:
I had intended to send you my Le Monde as a New Year gift . . . but in the
meantime I tried to find out in Leiden and Amsterdam whether Galileos Sisteme
du Monde was available, as I thought I had heard that it was published in Italy
last year. I was told that it had indeed been published, but that all copies had
been burned at Rome, and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was
so surprised by this that I nearly decided to burn all my papers, or at least let
no one see them. For I couldnt imagine that he an Italian and, I believe, in
favour with the Pope could have been made a criminal, just because he tried,
as he certainly did, to establish that the Earth moves. . . . I must admit that if
this view is false, then so too are the entire foundations of my philosophy, for it
can be demonstrated from them quite clearly. And it is such an integral part of
my treatise that I couldnt remove it without making the whole work defective.
But for all that, I wouldnt want to publish a discourse which had a single word
that the Church disapproved of; so I prefer to suppress it rather than publish it
in a mutilated form.
Galileos Dialogo . . . sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo had in fact been
withdrawn shortly after its publication in Florence in March , and
it was condemned by the Roman Inquisition on July . The condemnation had clear implications for Le Monde. Galileos Dialogo provided
physical evidence both for the Earths diurnal rotation, in the tides, and
for its annual orbital motion, in cyclical change in sunspot paths. It also
provided a detailed and ingenious account of why our perceptual experience apparently does not accord with the Earths motion, in the principle
of the relativity of motion (albeit a very different principle from the one
that Descartes will propose in Principia). The Inquisitions condemnation
focused on the question of the physical reality of the Copernican hypothesis. A core issue in dispute in both the and condemnations of
Copernicanism was whether the heliocentric theory was a matter of faith
and morals which the second decree of the Council of Trent had given
the Church the sole power to decide. Galileo and his defenders denied
that it was, maintaining that the motion of the Earth and the stability
of the Sun were covered by the first criterion in Melchior Canos handbook of post-Tridentine orthodoxy, Locorum Theologicorum Libri Duodecim,
namely that when the authority of the Church Fathers pertains to the
faculties contained within the natural light of reason, it does not provide
certain arguments but only arguments as strong as reason itself when
in agreement with nature. Opponents of Galileo treated Scripture as a
source of scientific knowledge, and argued that the case was covered by
different criteria, such as the sixth, which states that the Church Fathers,
if they agree on something, cannot err on dogmas of the faith. In the
condemnation, the latter interpretation was effectively established,
and this meant that the physical motion of the Earth could not be established by naturalphilosophical means. In other words, the kind of
arguments that Galileo offered in the Dialogo had no power to decide the
issue, and this in effect meant that the kind of arguments that Descartes
had offered in Le Monde had no power to decide the issue either.
AT I. .
For details see Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (Notre Dame, ).
That it was indeed the condemnation of Galileo that prevented publication is clear not just from
the letter to Mersenne just quoted, but also from his request to Mersenne to tell Naude that the
only thing stopping him publishing his physics was the prohibition on advocating the physical
reality of the Earths motion: Descartes to Mersenne, December ; AT III. .
Descartes to Mersenne February ; AT II. .
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
down into small parts and then, through the action of heat from the
blood and that of various humours which squeeze between the particles
of blood, the food is gradually divided into excrementary and nutritive
parts. The heat generated by the heart and carried in the blood is the
key ingredient here, and Descartes devotes much more attention to the
heart and the circulation of the blood than to functions such as digestion
and respiration. He accepts that blood circulates throughout the body,
but, like most of his contemporaries, rejects Harveys explanation of
circulation in terms of the heart being a pump, preferring to construe
the motion as being due to the production of heat in the heart. The heart
is like a furnace, or rather like the sun, for it contains in its pores one
of those fires without light, which are comprised of the first element
that also makes up the sun. In fact, Descartes really had little option
but to reject Harveys account. To accept that the motion of the blood
was due to the contractive and expansive action of the heart would have
required providing some source of power for its pumping action, and
it was hard to conceive how he could do this without recourse to nonmechanical powers, whereas at least he can point to phenomena such
as natural fermentation in defending his own account of thermogenetic
processes creating pressure in the arteries. The most important feature of
the circulation of the blood from the point of view of Cartesian psychophysiology is the fact that it carries the animal spirits, which it bears up
through the carotid arteries into the brain. These are separated out from
the blood and enter the brain through the pineal gland, at the centre of
the cerebral cavities. This is a mechanical procedure in that the animal
spirits are the subtlest parts of the blood and hence can be filtered into
the pineal gland through pores too fine to admit anything larger.
Having dealt with the heart the heat of which is the principle of
life and the circulation of the blood, Descartes turns to the nervous
system. The nervous system works by means of the animal spirits, which
enter the nerves and change the shape of the muscles, which in turn
results in the movement of the limbs, an analogy being drawn with the
force of water in fountains. He sets out his programme as follows:
I wish to speak to you first of the fabric of the nerves and the muscles, and to
show you how from the sole fact that the spirits in the brain are ready to enter
into certain of the nerves they have the ability to move certain members at
that instant. Then, having touched briefly on respiration and other such simple
and ordinary movements, I shall say how external objects act upon the sense
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
organs. After that I shall explain in detail all that happens in the cavities and
pores of the brain, what route the animal spirits follow there, and which of our
functions this machine can imitate by means of them. For, were I to begin with
the brain and merely follow in order the course of the spirits, as I did for the
blood, I believe what I have to say would be much less clear.
The pineal gland is also responsible for the discharge of the animal spirits
to the muscles via the nerves, which are hollow tubes with a double membrane continuous with the brains pia mater and dura mater. In general
terms, what happens is that external stimuli displace the peripheral ends
of the nerve fibres, and a structural isomorph of the impression made on
the sense organ is transmitted to the brain. This results in changes in the
patterns formed by the animal spirits in the brain, which can produce
changes in the outflow of spirits to the nerves. At the muscle, a small
influx of spirit from the nerve causes the spirits already there to open
a valve into its antagonist. Spirits then flow from the antagonist which
causes it to relax, as well as causing the first muscle to contract.
Descartes deals in turn briefly with the control of breathing, swallowing, sneezing, yawning, coughing, and excretion, before turning to
automatic motions, which we shall be looking at in chapter . He then
deals with the external senses, concentrating on vision, before turning to
an account of the internal senses, where he not only attempts to explain
traditional areas such as imagination and memory in corporeal terms,
but also provides a sketch of various temperaments in terms of animal
spirits. The treatment of the latter simply translates various temperaments and humours into their supposed microscopic correlates in an
intuitive but simplistic way. Generosity, liberality, and love, for example,
are attributed to abundance of animal spirits; confidence and courage
are attributed to strong or coarse animal spirits; promptness, diligence,
and desire are attributed to unusually agitated animal spirits; tranquillity is attributed to the exceptionally uniform action of animal spirits; on
the other hand, malice is attributed to lack of animal spirits, timidity to
weak animal spirits, tardiness to lax spirits, and so on. Various conditions such as sneezing and vertigo are explained in a similarly primitive
way, as is the difference between the sleeping and the waking state: the
brain in a waking state is characterised as having all its fibres tense and
AT XI. .
AT XI. . In reflex action, as we shall see, the pineal gland is bypassed, so that the discharge of
animal spirits will be independent of the action of the pineal, and it will be the cerebral ventricles
that direct the animal spirits.
AT XI. .
AT XI. , .
AT VI. .
The point is reiterated in Les Meteores itself, where Descartes tells us that
his account of the rainbow is the most appropriate example to show
how, by means of the method which I use, one can attain knowledge
which was not available to those whose writings we possess.
One of the central problems in Les Meteores, to which Book is devoted,
is that of explaining the angle at which the bows of the rainbow appear
in the sky. He begins by noting that rainbows are not only formed in the
sky, but also in fountains and showers in the presence of sunlight. This
leads him to formulate the hypothesis that the phenomenon is caused by
light reacting on drops of water. To test this hypothesis, he constructs a
glass model of the raindrop, comprising a large glass sphere filled with
water, and, standing with his back to the sun, he holds up the sphere
in the suns light, moving it up and down so that colours are produced
(Fig. .). Then, if we let the light from the sun come
from the part of the sky marked AFZ, and my eye be at point E, then when
I put this globe at the place BCD, the part of it at D seems to me wholly red
and incomparably more brilliant than the rest. And whether I move towards
it or step back from it, or move it to the right or to the left, or even turn it in
a circle around my head, then provided the line DE always marks an angle of
around with the line EM, which one must imagine to extend from the centre
of the eye to the centre of the sun, D always appears equally red. But as soon as
I made this angle DEM the slightest bit smaller it did not disappear completely
in the one stroke but first divided as into two less brilliant parts in which could
be seen yellow, blue, and other colours. Then, looking towards the place marked
K on the globe, I perceived that, making the angle KEM around , K also
seemed to be coloured red, but not so brilliant.
Descartes then describes how he covered the globe at all points except B
and D. The ray still emerged, showing that the primary and secondary
bows are caused by two refractions and one or two internal reflections of
the incident ray. He next describes how the same effect can be produced
AT I. .
AT VI. .
AT VI. .
Figure .
with a prism, and this indicates that neither a curved surface nor reflection are necessary for colour dispersion. Moreover, the prism experiment
shows that the effect does not depend on the angle of incidence and that
one refraction is sufficient for its production. Finally, Descartes calculates
from the refractive index of rainwater what an observer would see when
light strikes a drop of water at varying angles of incidence, and finds
that the optimum difference for visibility between incident and refracted
rays is for the former to be viewed at an angle of to and the
latter at an angle of to , which is exactly what the hypothesis
predicts.
In so far as there is a method of discovery in Descartes, this is it. But
the later writings, most notably the Meditationes and the Principia, are even
less concerned with discovery than La Discours: their concern is with the
legitimation of Descartes natural philosophy.
AT VI. .
AT III. .
AT V. .
If the arguments of the Meditationes go through, what Descartes has established is that our starting point in natural philosophy must be a world
stripped of all Aristotelian forms and qualities, and consisting in nothing
but geometrically quantifiable extension. The only natural philosophy
compatible with such a picture is mechanism, in particular, mechanism
of the kind set out by Descartes in the matter theory and mechanics of
Le Monde. If we grant him his matter theory, and the two basic principles of his mechanics, the principle of rectilinear inertia and that of
centrifugal force, then, if the argument of Le Monde is correct, we have
heliocentrism, for this is all he needs. In this way, the Meditationes connect
up directly with Le Monde, providing a metaphysical route to the natural philosophy of the latter and providing a legitimation of the whole
enterprise.
But the Principia, which begins with what is, despite a reordering of
some arguments, in effect a summary of the Meditationes, does not simply lead into Le Monde. Much the same ground is covered, but the
material is reworked in terms of a metaphysical vocabulary wholly
absent from Le Monde, not required for the naturalphilosophical
(as opposed to the legitimatory) thrust of the Principia, and it is occasionally unhelpful in illuminating the naturalphilosophical questions it
raises.
AT VII. .
This is particularly so on the vexed question of force. As Alan Gabbey points out, Descartes clearly
has a realist view of forces (something determined by naturalphilosophical considerations), but
his metaphysics of substance and modes seems to leave no place for it, so its ontological status
is very unclear: New Doctrines of Motion, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds., The
Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge, ), : .
Descartes did not decide immediately on the textbook format for the
development of his ideas in natural philosophy after the Meditationes, and
there exists what is probably a first experiment in setting out his postMeditationes natural philosophy, La Recherche de la verite. Interestingly, this
unfinished dialogo pulls us in a very different direction from that evident
in the Principia.
La Recherche de la verite par la lumiere naturelle the search for truth
through the natural light [of reason] begins by telling us that this light
alone, without any help from philosophy or religion, determines what
opinion un honnete homme [literally, a good or honest man] should hold on
any matter that may occupy his thought, and penetrates into the secrets
of the most difficult sciences. The dialogue contrasts the fitness for
natural philosophy of three characters: Epistemon, someone well versed
in Scholasticism; Eudoxe, a man of moderate intelligence who has not
been corrupted by false beliefs; and Poliandre, who has never studied
but is a man of action, a courtier, and a soldier (as Descartes himself
had been). Epistemon and Poliandre are taken over the territory of sceptical doubt and foundational questions by Eudoxe, but in a way that
shows Poliandres preparedness for, or capacity for, natural philosophy,
and Epistemons lack of preparedness. Preparedness here is in effect preparedness for receiving instruction in Cartesian natural philosophy. The
honnete homme, Descartes tells us,
came ignorant into the world, and since the knowledge of his early years rested
solely on the weak foundation of the senses and the authority of his teachers,
it was close to inevitable that his imagination should have been filled with
innumerable false thoughts before his reason could guide his conduct. So later
on, he needs to have either very great natural talent or the instruction of a very
wise teacher, to lay the foundations for a solid science.
The thrust of Descartes discussion is that Poliandre has not had his
mind corrupted, because, in his role as an honnete homme, he has not spent
too much time on book-learning, which would be a kind of defect in
his education. The implication is that Epistemon has been corrupted
in this way, and so is not trainable as the kind of natural philosopher
Descartes seeks. It is only the honnete homme who can be trained, and it
is Poliandre whom Eudoxe sets out to coax into the fold of Cartesian
natural philosophy, not Epistemon.
AT X. .
AT X. .
AT X. .
This is in stark contrast with the Principia, where the aim is to engage
Scholastic philosophy, to some extent on its own terms, and in effect to
reform and transform Scholasticism into Cartesian natural philosophy.
Descartes sets out to convince his readers (the text is primarily aimed at
students who would otherwise be reading the late Scholastic textbooks
that Descartes himself was raised on) that they too should be Cartesians
in natural philosophy. It is true that we might think of the procedure
of radical doubt, and the purging that results, as a way of transforming
everyone into an honnete homme, and to some extent it is, although, as we
shall see, in his account of the passions Descartes makes it clear that,
once we leave the programmatic level, ridding ourselves of prejudices
and preconceived ideas is not so simple, and it requires the cultivation of
a particular mentality, which is really what we witness in La Recherche. La
Recherche does not so much contradict the trajectory of the Principia as we
shall see, the questions it raises are appropriate to the projected Part VI
of the Principia as provide a radically different route to thinking about
how one achieves the ends of establishing a Cartesian natural philosophy.
La Recherche raises such questions right at the beginning of the exercise,
whereas the Principia (on my reconstruction) defers them until the end.
Descartes decided in favour of the Principia, abandoning La Recherche
unfinished. To understand this choice, and to grasp what is going on
in the Principia, we need to understand the Scholastic textbook tradition
that it engages.
CHAPTER
Mersenne presumably informed Descartes that the abridgement or abstract he was seeking was the Summa Philosophi of Eustachius a Sancto
Paulo (first published ), for six weeks later he tells Mersenne that it
seems to him the best book of this kind ever written. Nevertheless, his
general opinion of the material it abstracts is low, and he tells Mersenne
that he does not believe the diversity of views among the Scholastics
makes their philosophy difficult to refute, for it is easy to overturn the
foundations, on which they all agree, and, this being done, all their disagreements will seem beside the point [inept].
Descartes then spells out his plan to write a complete textbook of
philosophy in which he will: simply put down my true conclusions, with
all the true premises from which I derive them, which I think I could
do without too many words. In the same volume, he adds, he will also
include a traditional textbook with notes at the end of each proposition,
in which his own views and those of others are compared. He seems to
have decided on Eustachius Summa as the textbook, but he also mentions
the textbook of Abra de Raconis, Summa totius Philosophiae () which
he intends to look at in the hope that it is shorter than Eustachius
(which is pages), in which case he would use that instead, but on
examining it he concludes that: it is less suited to my plan than that of
Eustachius. However, by January , on learning of the recent
death of Eustachius, he has changed his mind about the idea of printing
a textbook along with his own work.
This does not mean that the plan of pitting his project against the
Scholastic one has been abandoned, and in he wrote to Constantijn
Huygens that he was thinking of calling the work Summa Philosophi,
the same title as Eustachius textbook, to make it more welcome to
the Scholastics, who are now persecuting it and trying to smother it
before its birth. The point is made at greater length in the long selfjustificatory letter, appended to the seventh set of replies to objections to
the Meditationes, to Dinet, a Jesuit who had taught at La Fl`eche. Dinet
was a man of influence in his order and someone whom Descartes hoped
to win over. His enemies, Descartes tells Dinet,
grow in number every day, and as often happens the enthusiasm with which
they seek every chance to disparage me has not been matched by my supporters
in my defence. So I began to fear that their clandestine attempts to discredit
me may meet with some success, and that they will cause me greater trouble
if I were to stick to my plan of publishing nothing than if I were to openly
confront them; for by setting before them in its entirety the work of which they
are so afraid, I can at least make sure that they will have nothing further to be
afraid of. I have therefore decided to submit to the public the whole of my few
reflections on philosophy, and to fight for the widest possible acceptance of my
views, if they are true. Because of this I shall not present them in the same order
and style as I adopted when I wrote about many of these matters previously,
namely in the treatise [Le Monde/LHomme] which I outlined in La Discours de la
Methode, but instead I shall try to use a style more suited to the current practice
in the Schools. That is, I shall deal with each topic in turn, in short articles, and
present the topics in such an order that the proof of what comes later depends
solely on what has come earlier, so that everything is connected together into a
single structure. In this way I hope to be able to provide such a clear account of
the truth of all the issues normally discussed in philosophy, that anyone who is
seeking the truth may be able to find it in my book without difficulty.
There can, in short, be no doubt that Descartes sees his project as being
in direct competition with the Scholastic textbook, and he contrasts his
project, which is inspired by the desire for truth, with the Scholastic one,
motivated by the desire for controversy and contradiction.
What he does in the Principia is to rewrite his philosophy in Scholastic
terms, and to present it as a total system in the way in which the Scholastic
textbooks presented their system. The plan for an explicit comparison is
abandoned, but there can be no doubt that there is an implicit one. The
question is why, when he clearly has such a low view of at least the content
of the Scholastic textbook tradition, having rejected the idea that this is a
productive way of pursuing natural philosophy twenty years earlier and,
given his evident lack of familiarity with anything at all in the area written
since then, he had clearly not returned to it he now finds it necessary to
engage this tradition in such a large-scale way. For, in engaging it, he not
only has to recast the presentation of his own philosophy into a traditional
format, he has also to rewrite this philosophy in Scholastic terms so that
comparison is possible, and in doing this he has to engage doctrines the
motivation for which lies outside his own project in natural philosophy.
Each of these carries an element of risk: Descartes is fighting the enemy
on their own terrain, so to speak, and under their rules of engagement.
He can do this only because he is so sure of his own position: after
all, as we have just seen, his view is that Scholastic philosophy can be
refuted easily because it rests on untenable assumptions. Still, he could
presumably demonstrate the untenability of these assumptions, and then
proceed to set out his own programme on his own terms. Why, having
refuted the assumptions underlying Scholastic philosophy, does he then
follow the Scholastic route of encyclopedic presentation? The answer
can only be that he did not simply want to destroy Scholastic philosophy,
he wanted to replace it with his own, so his aim is, at least in part, to show
that his own philosophy meets the needs of Scholastic philosophy, that
is, meets the kinds of requirements that Christianised Aristotelianism
set for itself and failed to realise. Descartes was not the only one of
The key problem that underlies the textbook tradition is the relation
between metaphysics and natural philosophy, and the depth and complexity of this problem, as well as its importance for Descartes project,
are such that some detail is needed if we are to appreciate just what was
at stake.
Aristotle had divided knowledge or science into the theoretical, the
practical, and the productive sciences. There were three theoretical sciences: mathematics (which deals with those things that do not change
and have no independent existence), physics or natural philosophy (which
with Cartesianism in Jesuit textbooks of Buffier, Rapin, and Regnault: see Desmond M. Clarke,
Occult Powers and Hypotheses: Cartesian Natural Philosophy under Louis XIV (Oxford, ), .
See, for example, the Introduction to the Syntagma, where he points out that just as the medieval
Christian philosophers were able to expunge his serious errors, his task is to expunge the errors of
Epicurus so as to make Epicureanism the philosophy of Christianity: Opera Omnia, vols. (Lyons,
), I. cols. . On this project, see Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi (Dordrecht, ), ch. .
The material in this section is drawn from work in progress, in which my aim is to understand
the origins of modernity. Part of the argument of this project is that the failure to reconcile
Aristotelian natural philosophy and a theologically driven metaphysics plays a key role in the
early development of modernity.
deals with those things that do change and have an independent existence), and metaphysics or first philosophy (which deals with those things
that do not change and have an independent existence). Natural philosophy was the pivot on which everything else turned here: both the relation
between natural philosophy and metaphysics, and that between natural
philosophy and mathematics, were problematic.
The latter became a problem of general significance only in the wake
of the Condemnation of Copernicanism, however, and, while there
were occasionally questions raised about the standing of mathematics
within the Aristotelian tradition, when it did become a problem this
was due to a conflict between Aristotelianisms qualitative approach to
naturalphilosophical explanation and competing conceptions of natural philosophy in which the quantitative understanding of natural processes was the chief aim. The relation between metaphysics and natural
philosophy, on the other hand, had a much longer history. It is the single
most problematic and important theme of the textbook tradition, and
indeed it had been the major source of philosophical concern since the
revival of interest in Aristotle in the Christian West.
From the middle of the twelfth century, almost as quickly as the texts
of Aristotle were being translated into Latin for the first time, a series
of commentaries began to be produced at the University of Salerno,
and these and other sources made Aristotles work available to theologians and philosophers at centres such as Paris for the first time in the
Christian West around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The
introduction of Aristotles works was accompanied by a series of condemnations, beginning in , when the University of Paris banned
all public and private teaching of Aristotles natural philosophy in the
Arts Faculty, under penalty of excommunication. The ban was renewed
on several occasions, until , when Aristotles works were finally al
lowed to be taught; but, in , the Bishop of Paris, Etienne
Tempier,
issued a condemnation of Aristotelian philosophy, and in the condemnation, with the encouragement and support of Pope John XXI,
was extended to theological and philosophical propositions. The
Condemnation drew into the open a number of fundamental ambiguities about just what the relative standing of theology, metaphysics,
and natural philosophy was, and it was instrumental in establishing or
See Danielle Jacquart, Aristotelian Thought in Salerno, in Peter Dronke, ed., A History of TwelfthCentury Western Philosophy (Cambridge, ).
On the history of Latin translation of Aristotle see Bernard Dod, Aristoteles Latinus, in
N. Kretzman et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, ).
reinforcing a set of constraints on how questions were decided as being metaphysical or naturalphilosophical. These constraints would be
widely contested in the course of the next three and a half centuries, but,
at least until the early decades of the sixteenth century, were contested
within a framework that was established in the thirteenth century.
The introduction of Aristotelian philosophy undermined a traditional,
secure understanding of the relation between theology, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, which Augustine did more than anyone else to establish. In the Patristic period, we witness the gradual Christianisation
of philosophy (metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics etc.), begun by
the early Church Fathers and brought to completion by Augustine. In
its early stages, the project is that of nurturing what is worthwhile in
pagan thought in the nourishing atmosphere of Christian teaching with
Clement of Alexandria, for example, presenting himself as Christs gardener, cutting twigs from the rank, dried-back and brittle bushes of pagan literature, and grafting them onto the stock of Christs truth. In
its later development, especially in the writings of Augustine, the project
amounts to nothing short of a total translation of all philosophy into
Christian terms. Christianity is conceived of as the final form of philosophy. Using the language of the classical philosophers to formulate his
theology, Augustine attempts to show that Christianity is able to answer
all the questions of classical metaphysics. In general terms, not only does
Christianity supplement classical philosophy here, it appropriates the
teachings of this philosophy, denying that they were ever the property
of the ancients in the first place, and it construes every philosophical
question in terms of Christian teaching.
This appropriation of earlier thought by Christianity made it possible
for it to present itself as the final answer to what earlier philosophers
were striving for, and it meant four things. First, it effectively meant that
it had no external competition. No system of thought was alien to it, not
even paganism, because it had effectively appropriated all other intellectual systems and made them its own, and in the strongest possible way:
by providing what (it considered) they all lacked in its Christianisation
of earlier philosophies. Second, it had assimilated a relatively sophisticated body of philosophical doctrine, derived above all from Stoicism
and Neoplatonism, which, with the decline of speculative philosophical schools at the end of the Hellenistic era, meant that it assumed an
intellectual leadership. Third, it meant that philosophy in which one
The only significant exception is Philoponus: see Richard Sorabji, ed., Philoponus and the Rejection
of Aristotelian Science (London, ).
Charles Lohr, Metaphysics, in Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, ), .
two may not be able to be reconciled, for Aquinas they must be consonant with each other, but there is no synthesis of an Augustinian kind:
nor in a sense could there be, because Augustinian theology was formulated within Neoplatonic terms, taking a Neoplatonic conception of
the divinity and Christianising it, whereas Christianised Aristotelian
metaphysics has to start with a Neoplatonically formulated Christianity
and reshape it as best it can. It is a mixture, or at best an amalgam, with
an internal balance that is much more delicate than anything needed in
the Augustinian synthesis, and which is pursued via the doctrine of analogy. But it also has a flexibility which the Augustinian synthesis lacked.
And, indeed, it is this flexibility that makes sure that Christian philosophy can adapt, and indeed remake itself, at least in the short to middle
term, when naturalphilosophical questions come to the centre of the
philosophical enterprise.
The attempt to solve the problems of transcendentalism and Averroism took the form of a revival of Thomism. With the failure of the
Council of Basle ( ) and the restoration of the supremacy of the
papacy, there was a renewed interest in the Thomist programme, with
its distinction between truths of reason and truths of revelation, and
its attempted balance between the claims of theology, metaphysics, and
natural philosophy. The institutional attractiveness of Thomism, particularly at the all-important University of Paris, cannot be underestimated. As far as the Theology Faculty was concerned, Aquinas epistemology, with its Aristotelian stress on sense perception as the basis
for knowledge, left open a space for revelation, because God necessarily transcends human faculties. In particular, Aquinas denial of some
higher intellectual knowledge which allows one to penetrate revealed
religion (a doctrine dear to Neoplatonists) retained a unique role for
the clergy in interpreting revelation. And there were advantages for
the secular Arts programme as well. As Lohr has pointed out, the
idea of a philosophy autonomous in its own realm, but guided both
positively and negatively by revelation, represented a kind of pragmatic sanction, defining the powers of the clergy in its relation to
science . . . Just as the papacy had to recognise the authority of secular rulers in the temporal sphere, so also the clergy whose function had
The authority of such a reading derived not just from Augustine but also from the Neoplatonically
formulated mystical theology of the sixth-century Neoplatonic writer, Pseudo-Dionysius the
Aeropagite, who was wrongly identified (by some right up to the nineteenth century) with the
first-century Dionysius whom Paul converted. His writings had an immense authority because
of his assumed closeness to the origins of Christianity, and to its de facto founder, Paul.
Lohr, Metaphysics, .
The Italian Neoplatonic revival, begun in earnest in Ficinos Theologia Platonica, which appeared
between and , culminated (as far as natural philosophy is concerned) in a distinctively
Platonic natural philosophy in Patrizis Nova de universis philosophia of . This turned out to be
of some importance in the development of early modern philosophy, but its distinctive natural
philosophical claims became caught up in a general Italian naturalist movement which also
included revivers of Stoicism and pre-Socratic thought notably Telesio as well as Averroist
Aristotelians such as Pomponazzi. Even Keplers early Neoplatonically inspired cosmology is
formulated within the terms of Aristoteli`an natural philosophy.
I say largely because there was also a third wave of textbooks, which took the form of a
conservative reaction to the Jesuit textbooks. This third wave comprises the ultra-Thomist commentaries of the Complutenses, based at the Philosophical College of the Discalced Carmelites
at Alcala (Lat. complutum), and Salmanticenses, based at the Theological College at Salamanca.
The Complutenses commentaries began with the logic commentary of Diego de Jesus, which
was first published in , and they appeared in a definitive five-volume version in . Although they dealt with naturalphilosophical questions, they seem to have had no influence on
naturalphilosophical disputes outside Catholic clerical circles, and none at all on Descartes.
The Salamancan commentaries began to appear in with the theological works of Antonio
de la Madre de Dios, and the last volume of the definitive collection of these commentaries
appeared in . These commentaries were primarily concerned with theology rather than
natural philosophy, and were treated as the embodiment of Thomist orthodoxy in the Roman
Catholic Church from the eighteenth century onwards.
which is quite a radical shift of genre. Moreover, they are less orthodox, and on the crucial question of our knowledge of God follow the
transcendentalist doctrine of Scotus.
The root of the problem is that Christianised Aristotelian metaphysics
straddles theology on the one side and natural philosophy on the other.
On the one hand, since metaphysics deals with whatever is unchanging
and independent, and natural philosophy with whatever is changing and
independent, we seem to have straightforwardly distinct domains. But
Aristotelian metaphysics in its Christianised version included under its
rubric both uncreated or infinite being, and created or finite being, so
that topics such as the nature of the soul, which could be seen as straightforwardly naturalphilosophical issues, could also be seen to fall under
metaphysics, and not just under metaphysics, but under a metaphysics
which graded reality in degrees from inert matter to God, so that the
apparently sharp distinction between truths of reason and truths of revelation became even more blurred. This is true of Aquinas, writing in
the thirteenth century, but it is also true of the writers following in the
wake of the fifteenth-century Thomist revival. Suarez, for example, in the
most influential Scholastic treatise on metaphysics of the early modern
era, tells us that we must provide firm foundations in metaphysics before
proceeding to theology, but that we must not forget that philosophy is
the servant of divine theology.
So, while there can be no doubt that, during the fourteenth century,
natural philosophy thought of in distinction to the transcendentalist
construal of theology begins to take on a degree of autonomy, as it
is conceived less as a species of the general science of being and more
as a distinct discipline with less direct implications for metaphysics, and
See Laurence W. B. Brockliss, Rapports de structure et de contenu entre les Principia et les cours de
philosophie des coll`eges, in Jean-Robert Armogathe and Giulia Belgioiso, eds., Descartes: Principia
Philosophi, (Naples, ), . Brockliss makes the intriguing suggestion ()
that Descartes may not have been aware of these condensations until , but that when he
was introduced to them he realised their potential as a means of popularising his own mechanist
natural philosophy. It is worth noting in this respect that the new condensations laid a far greater
emphasis on natural philosophy than the older commentaries had done: see Charles B. Schmitt,
The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook, in Charles B. Schmitt et al. eds., The Cambridge History
of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, ), : .
See Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca, ), ch. .
This had always been the case in the Platonist tradition, where the distinction between natural
theology and revelation was always grey, and Renaissance Platonists devoted much time to
uncovering the divine revelation they considered to lie beneath Platos doctrines, which many of
them believed he may have learned from Moses. But, clearly, the causes of, or motivation behind,
the blurring in the Platonist and Aristotelian cases are very different.
Francisco Suarez, Disputationes Metaphysicae (st pub. , repr. Hildesheim, ), Preface, unpag.
hence for theology, there can also be no doubt about the grounds on
which theology and natural philosophy could be pulled back together
again in the fifteenth-century Thomist revival. Metaphysics bridges the
two, so that, while natural philosophy can be pursued independently
to some degree, ultimately it must be subordinated to theology via this
metaphysical bridge. In other words, metaphysics begins to act as a way
of connecting theology and natural philosophy, and the skill comes in
trying to develop these two in their own directions while keeping them
consonant with one another.
The beginning of the end of this project comes in the early decades
of the sixteenth century. If the Condemnation marks the failure
of an Augustinian synthesis of Christian revelation and a Neoplatonic
philosophy and theology, and the beginning of a reconciliation between
a (Neoplatonically formulated) Christian theology and an Aristotelian
metaphysics and natural philosophy, then the fifth Lateran Council
() marks the beginning of the end of this reconciliation, as a
wedge was driven between theology and natural philosophy. This is not
to say that the exact nature of the wedge is always clear, however. There is
some case to be made that it divides natural philosophy and metaphysics
from theology, so that metaphysics becomes constitutive of philosophy
in the sixteenth century, with theology left to float off on its own, but
the full situation must be more complex than this because metaphysical
discussion in the seventeenth century can still engage core theological
questions about the nature of God, as in Descartes account of the nature
of eternal truths, or in Leibnizs theodicy.
What is clear is that what drives the wedge is not the kind of thing that
might have driven it in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, namely a
transcendentalist conception of God, but rather a revival of the heresy
that stood at the centre of the Condemnation: Averroism. More
specifically, it was the doctrine of double truth, namely, the idea that
natural philosophy and theology might, each in their own way, generate
independently legitimate but apparently contradictory truths: that there
is no metaphysics that can reconcile them. Matters came to a head on
the issue of mortalism, associated above all in the sixteenth century
with the Paduan philosopher, Pietro Pomponazzi, and condemned by
the Lateran Council in . Pomponazzi accepted on faith the Church
teaching of the personal immortality of the soul, and he argues that
Aquinas decisively refuted Averroes view that there cannot be individual
souls. But he also argues that Aquinas own proposal makes no sense in
terms of Aristotelian metaphysics/natural philosophy. Philosophically
speaking, the soul was the form of the body, and there was no such thing
as an uninstantiated form, so that the death and corruption of the body
resulted in the disappearance of the soul.
Pomponazzis dilemma is that two completely different lines of
thought, each of which he has every reason to believe to be completely
compelling and neither of which he was prepared to renounce, lead to
incompatible conclusions. Somehow one must embrace both. The one
question can be contextualised and pursued in two completely different
ways, with every expectation that they will lead to the same solution, but
what in fact happens is that we end up with two contradictory solutions,
each achieved by perfectly legitimate means. Note also that the Lateran
Councils solution to this dilemma is not simply to condemn Aristotelian
natural philosophy, but to instruct theologians and philosophers to reconcile philosophy with theology on this issue.
The problems here turned out to be insuperable. As I have indicated,
the Augustinian synthesis had been viable only because it worked with
philosophical resources which, by the standards of the revival of Aristotle,
were impoverished. Once this had become clear to philosophers and
theologians, as it had to many by the end of the thirteenth century,
Aristotelianism took command of the philosophical resources deployed,
and the task became that of reconciling a Christian theology which
had been developed from, and thought through in terms of, a Neoplatonic metaphysics and natural philosophy, with Aristotelian metaphysics
and natural philosophy. But the metaphysics of Neoplatonism and
Aristotelianism were wholly antithetical, as were their natural philosophies. Moreover, the relative priorities of metaphysics differed; in Neoplatonism natural philosophy was, generally speaking, wholly subordinate
to metaphysics, whereas there were two possible views of the priority
in Aristotelianism, metaphysical priority and independence. But even
Aristotelian metaphysical priority was profoundly different from that of
The response to this need took the form of the late Scholastic textbook tradition. In the letter to Mersenne quoted at the beginning of
this chapter, Descartes writes that he remembers only some of the Conimbricenses, Toletus, and Rubius. The Jesuit commentators based at
Coimbra, the Jesuit commentators based at the Collegio Romano, of
whom Toletus is the most distinguished representative, and Rubius, who
In chapter of Book of De Anima (a), Aristotle talks of active and passive intellects,
and this seemed to imply to Muslim and Christian commentators the existence of two different
intellects, one of which was not bound to the body and was not perishable. On early interpretations
of this passage, see Ross discussion in his introduction to his edition of De Anima (Oxford, ),
.
See the discussion in Charles H. Lohr, The Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Aristotelian
Division of the Speculative Sciences in D. R. Kelley and R. H. Popkin, eds., The Shapes of Knowledge
from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht, ); and Lohr, Metaphysics.
See Joaquim F. Gomez, Pedro da Fonseca: Sixteenth Century Portuguese Philosopher, International Philosophical Quarterly (), : . The later Carmelite Complutenses commentaries set out to reverse this trend.
There is a good account of these questions in Charles H. Lohr, Metaphysics and Natural
Philosophy as Sciences: the Catholic and Protestant Views in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, in Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa, eds., Philosophy in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Aldershot, ). Alan Gabbey has pointed out that the scholastics believed
their explanatory schemes and ontological categories coped adequately with the universal range
of natural phenomena, and one gets the impression in reading their treatises that no empirical
discovery or philosophical upheaval, present or future (or indeed from their recent past) could
lead to a revision or displacement of that scheme, The Principia Philosophiae as a Treatise in
Natural Philosophy, in Jean-Robert Armogathe and Giulia Belgioiso, eds., Descartes: Principia
Philosophiae, (Naples, ), : .
early modern period a shifting recognition of the fundamental character of the distinction between the living and the non-living, manifest for
example in the hostility to attempts, such as those of Descartes, to construe organic processes, such as foetal development, as something purely
mechanical. What lies at the basis of Aristotles classification of natural
phenomena is completely different: not a distinction between the living
and the non-living, but a distinction between those things that have an
intrinsic principle of change, and those things that have an extrinsic principle of change. Acorns, and stones raised above the ground, both come
in the first category; the former has within itself the power to change its
state, into an oak tree, the latter has within itself the power to change
its position, to move to the ground. In neither case is anything external
required. Aristotle thinks that we explain and understand things by understanding their natures. To give the nature of something is to give the
ultimate characterisation of it. If we ask why a stone falls, the answer is
simply that it falls because it is a heavy object that is how heavy things
behave just as, if we are asked why a particular tree puts out broad
flat leaves in spring and keeps them through the summer, we may reply
that it does that because it is a beech. In other words, it is not necessary
to look outside the thing to account for its behaviour. And wherever we
can explain a things behaviour without looking outside the thing, then
that behaviour, and the feature that it acquires or retains, is natural. It
is natural for stones to fall, it is the nature of beeches to have broad flat
leaves. The fundamental distinction is between natural objects and processes, and artefacts and constrained processes (making furniture out of
trees, raising bodies above the ground).
Second, there has been an increasing tendency from at least the nineteenth century to explain biological phenomena in physical (e.g. biochemical) terms, but never physical process in biological terms. Aristotle,
by contrast, uses a biological model to enable him to think through all
natural processes. Natural objects have within themselves the source of
their own making, artefacts do not: the paradigm case that is invoked
to understand this is the process of organic growth, and the crucial distinction he wants to capture is that between growth and manufacture.
The category of natural things and processes, as opposed to artefacts and
artificial or externally induced processes, is what physics or natural philosophy is concerned with. Not only does this category of things include
living things, but the general model that Aristotle uses is biological in its
There is a good account of these issues in William Charlton, Aristotles Physics I, II (Oxford, ).
This is not to say that he conceives of inorganic things as being organic. The Stoics held something
like this, but Aristotle did not. He has a biological model: he does not advocate a biological
reduction. The division of the subject matter of natural philosophy into natural processes and
artificial or constrained processes, and the use of a biological model to think through natural
processes generally, are separate questions. What marks out natural processes is the fact that they
occur as a result of something internal to the body, something that follows from the nature of the
body, as opposed to something imposed from outside. It has nothing to do with biological versus
non-biological processes: there are artificial biological processes grafting, for example just as
there are artificial non-biological ones, and there are natural non-biological processes bodies
falling to the earth just as there are natural biological ones. The fact that biology helps Aristotle
model natural processes does not mean that he treats these processes as biological: in contrast to
the Stoics, who were inclined to do so, for example in their occasionally animistic construal of
the cosmos.
But what is particularly interesting about the inclusion of logic and ethics
is the way in which, as often as not, they seem to go together, as if they
The question of what topics would be included in a comprehensive ordering of knowledge, and the order in which these topics should be
presented, is an instructive one. Restricting our attention to three
well-known textbooks, namely the two that Descartes mentions, those of
Eustachius and dAbra de Raconis, and that of Scipion Dupleix, we find
that logic, physics, metaphysics, and ethics each have a book devoted to
them. These are also just the topics that Descartes takes us through in the
Discours. The two textbook alternatives to the Scholastic textbook tradition, both deriving from the s, Descartes Principia and Gassendis
Syntagma, each exclude a section. Gassendi excludes metaphysics, and
Descartes Principia, in the projected full version, excludes logic. More
schematically, we have:
Eustachius
Summa
()
Dupleix
Corps de
Philosophie
()
Abra de
Raconis
Summa
()
Logic
Ethics
Physics
Metaphysics
Logic
Ethics
Physics
Metaphysics
Logic
Ethics
Physics
Metaphysics
Descartes
Discours
()
Descartes
Principia
(s)
Gassendi
Syntagma
(s)
Logic
Metaphysics Logic
Ethics
Physics
Physics
Metaphysics Ethics
Ethics
Physics
Roger Ariew looks at the question of ordering, but focuses on the analysis/synthesis question.
See Roger Ariew, Les Principia et la Summa Philosophica Quadripartita, in Jean-Robert Armogathe
and Giulia Belgioiso, eds., Descartes: Principia Philosophiae, (Naples, ), . See
also Brockliss, Rapports de structure et de contenu entre les Principia et les cours de philosophie
des coll`eges. Brockliss ignores the two last projected books of the Principia, however, and treats
the project as comprising solely metaphysics and physics (), which distorts what is at stake.
Note that the ordering of the material in the textbook does not reflect the order of appearance
of the parts. Dupleixs work, for example, appeared in the following order: logic (), physics
(), metaphysics (), ethics (). Once the material was arranged into textbook form,
however, it assumed the standard order, with ethics interposed between logic and physics.
not surprising since, amongst other things, this provides the language for
building ones system, and it provides the basic categories and techniques
by which we must proceed if we are to progress scientifically. But what lies
behind the ordering of the other topics? The placing of metaphysics after
natural philosophy follows a traditional hierarchical ordering of subject
matters, working from the most concrete to the most abstract forms of
knowledge: knowledge is a pyramid, as it were, with metaphysics, as the
highest science, at its apex. In his Syntagma, Gassendi puts a very radical
gloss on this, collapsing metaphysics into natural philosophy. He rejects
the idea of metaphysics (which he calls theology) as a discipline separate
from natural philosophy, a separation he traces back to Plato, and follows
the Hellenistic division of philosophy into logic, natural philosophy, and
ethics:
The Stoics, Epicureans, and others combined theology with physics. Since the
task of theology is to contemplate the natures of things, these philosophers
considered that the contemplation of the divine nature and of the other immortal beings was included, especially since the divine nature reveals itself in the
creation and government of the universe.
Gassendis idea was that, in pursuing natural philosophy, one automatically pursues questions about the nature of God because one finds
abundant evidence of divine purpose, and hence of the nature of divine
causation. He criticises Descartes for failing, in Meditation III, to follow
the Royal Way of philosophising, namely the discovery of design and
purpose in nature. This conception reverses the traditional theology/
natural philosophy priority, so that now natural philosophy, rather than
being guided or constrained by a theologically driven metaphysics, is
taken as a starting point, with a natural theology being derived from
natural philosophy. Indeed, this approach was to be fostered in a striking way in the seventeeth century, particularly in England, and natural philosophy began to produce its own version of God, as deism was
born.
Descartes approach is different again. The order in which he goes
through the topics in the Discours deviates from that of the textbooks.
Having started with logic (i.e. method) and ethics, we might have expected him to go from concrete to abstract and proceed from physics to
On this aspect of Gassendis approach see Olivier Bloch, La philosophie de Gassendi (The Hague,
), and Brundell, Pierre Gassendi.
Petrus Gassendi, Opera Omnia, I. col. .
See the discussion in Brundell, Pierre Gassendi, .
Bearing this in mind, let us now turn to the question of where ethics
fits into the scheme. All the Scholastic textbook authors place ethics
second, after logic. Gassendi by contrast places ethics last, explicitly
following the Hellenistic classification in which ethics is the culmination
of the exercise. Moreover, Hellenistic ethics is profoundly naturalistic,
and considerations of nature and our place in it precede and shape, and
in the case of Epicureanism largely dictate, our moral theory.
In the Principia, Descartes also places ethics last: his model of roots,
trunk, and branches puts ethics at the end of the project, as, arguably,
does his view of ethics as the final stage of wisdom. But this should not
be taken to put him on the side of Gassendi rather than of the Scholastic
textbooks. Note, first, that in the Discours Descartes places ethics between
logic and metaphysics. Second, although ethics is designed to occupy the
AT IXB. . This ordering, with logic restored, in the form of Cartesian method, is followed
in Cartesian textbooks such as Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Syst`eme de philosophie, contenant la logique, la
metaphysique, la physique et la morale, vols. (Paris, ).
sixth and final Part of the Principia, in the prefatory letter to Les Principes
the French translation of the Principia Descartes warns that the very first
thing one must do if we aim to instruct ourselves, is to devise for oneself
a code of morals sufficient to regulate the actions of ones life. In other
words, ethics has a place both at the beginning of the Principia and at
the end of it. One thing this might mean is that ethics is too important
to be put to one side while one embarks on a systematic programme
of instruction about the world. Unlike knowledge of terrestrial and cosmological questions, where, in the Principia version of things, we must
start with something approaching a tabula rasa as we follow Descartes
arguments through to their conclusions, we cannot suspend our morality
until we reach Cartesian enlightenment. But if this is all there were to the
question, we should ask why single out morality here: surely the same
considerations would have held in the case of basic Christian theology.
After all, just as one cannot begin from a position of amorality, so one
cannot begin from atheism. It is true that the existence and nature of
God are established right at the beginning of the Principia, whereas the
ethics is missing from the work, but would this really explain why ethics
is picked out? After all, it is surely odd to remark that we must operate
with a provisional ethics unless we are to be presented with a definitive one,
and the Principia as published and the Preface is, of course, a preface to
the published version does not offer an ethics at all. Most puzzling of
all, however, is why we need an ethics, provisional or otherwise, in order
to pursue natural philosophy.
This is really the key to Descartes project: he seems to be insisting
that we do indeed need an ethics of some kind, just as we need a logic of
some kind, if we are to proceed in metaphysics and natural philosophy in
the first place. As I have indicated, metaphysics and natural philosophy
were deeply contested in the history of philosophy from the thirteenth
century onwards, and the situation became even more heated at the beginning of the sixteenth century. At La Fl`eche, where Descartes studied,
metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics were reserved for e lite senior
students, and masters were required to have attended advanced courses
in theology and show evidence of orthodoxy to be qualified to teach such
courses, and even then contentious parts of Aristotles Metaphysics were
avoided altogether. We are dealing here with questions of orthodoxy
and obedience to Church teaching, and therefore with moral questions.
One must come to the study of contentious and potentially dangerous
AT IXB. .
Eustachius, Summa, Part II, Prfatio in universum hoc opus philosophicum: Ad lectorum.
AT IXB. .
AT IXB. .
AT IXB. .
The contrast here is with writers such as Clavius, who, as we have seen, tried to bring out what
they believed was the syllogistic structure lying behind mathematics.
principles. But when he uses the notions of analysis and synthesis in the
context of non-mathematical arguments, in the Replies to Meditation II,
they are contrasted not so much as methods of discovery and presentation
respectively, but as different methods of presentation, one reflecting how
the proposition in question was discovered but not carrying the same degree of conviction that the synthetic means of presentation does. The
relation between analysis and synthesis as employed in a mathematical
context, on the one hand, and this usage, on the other, is at best a very
loose analogy, and is of little help in explicating the latter; nor, indeed,
is the latter usage of any help in understanding how the mathematical
procedures might be generalised. However, the intuition that lay behind Descartes original attempt to devise a universal method was that
there must be a way of presenting at least some questions such that it is
immediately clear, simply from reflection upon the question, whether the
information contained is true or false. For example, it is not clear from
the formula + = that and , when added together, do actually
equal : we need to understand the symbols, operators, and the nature
of the operations. But, when we represent numbers as line lengths or
dots, we grasp the truth of the proposition immediately. It is immediately clear from putting one pair of dots, :, next to another pair of dots, :,
that what we obtain is ::. There is no room for mistake or confusion.
Could there be something analogous to this in the non-mathematical
case? In the s, Descartes discovers that there can be, although he
finds only one instance of it, the cogito. The cogito acts as a paradigm case
of cognitive grasp: once we grasp the thought, we grasp that it could
not but be true. Somehow we shall be looking at exactly how in the
next chapter all thought must be modelled upon the type of cognitive
grasp afforded by the cogito. Here we have something that achieves at
least one aspect of what universal method was supposed to achieve, the
provision of a means of making the conceptual content of a proposition
so transparent that in grasping it we immediately grasp its truth or falsity.
In this sense, Descartes epistemologised metaphysics, which uses hyperbolic doubt to generate metaphysical foundations for knowledge,
stands in for, or replaces, a method of discovery. That is to say, it stands
AT VII. .
See my The Sources of Descartes Procedure of Deductive Demonstration in Metaphysics and
Natural Philosophy, in John Cottingham, ed., Reason, Will, and Sensation (Oxford, ).
I am leaving to one side here Wittgensteinian sceptical doubts about rule-following, which hinge
on the observation that rules do not fix their own application: the dot addition is a little more
secure against such doubts than the use of numerals is, but in the long run nothing is immune to
this form of scepticism (see Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford, )).
in for at least part of what is included under the rubric of logic in the
Scholastic textbook tradition. And its deductive structure meets the same
requirements of presentation as the textbook tradition, at least in general
outline, for no one in the textbook tradition actually managed to present
anything like a comprehensive system syllogistically, and the best that
could be achieved was some kind of deductive rigour.
Given the nature of his metaphysics, Descartes does not strictly need
to set out a separate method of discovery/presentation. So the Principia
lacks an introductory book on logic. But his earlier work in natural
philosophy indicates that he does not need a metaphysics in order to do
natural philosophy. Is the separate treatment of metaphysics really necessary to the project? I have mentioned that Gassendi collapsed metaphysics into natural philosophy. Something like this had, in effect, been
the approach of Descartes and Beeckman in their collaboration in the
early s, and in the early s, when Descartes was working on
Le Monde. Moreover, it was the approach followed by Descartes Dutch
disciple Regius, who was sent Le Monde in , and who developed its
naturalistic approach, eschewing the idea of a need for separate metaphysical foundations, much to the annoyance of Descartes. It is of note
that it was also the approach of the standard authoritative exposition
of Cartesian natural philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth
century, namely Rohaults Traite de Physique ().
Gassendi thought that metaphysics and theology could be pursued by
means of natural philosophy because he had a teleological understanding
of nature as manifesting Gods intentions. Descartes completely rejects
this view. Indeed, in Part IV of the Principia, he gives an account of
the formation of the Earth which wholly excludes any considerations
of design, something which, more than anything else, evoked a hostile
response to Descartes in England in the second half of the seventeenth
century. Moreover, Descartes God is both completely inscrutable and
completely transcendent, and natural philosophy could never be the
kind of guide to theology that it was for Gassendi and seventeenthcentury English natural philosophers.
See Gaukroger and Schuster, The Hydrostatic Paradox and the Origins of Cartesian Dynamics.
See my Descartes, An Intellectual Biography, ch. .
See Theo Verbeek, The Invention of Nature: Descartes and Regius, in Stephen Gaukroger
et al. eds., Descartes Natural Philosophy (London, ), . On the details of Regius natural
philosophy see Paul Mouy, Le Developpement de la physique cartesienne, (Paris, ), .
See Peter Harrison, The Influence of Cartesian Cosmology in England, in Stephen Gaukroger,
John Schuster, and John Sutton, eds., Descartes Natural Philosophy (London, ), .
See Gaukroger, Descartes, A Intellectual Biography, .
Descartes view of the relation between metaphysics and natural philosophy is, in this sense, closer to the Scholastic view than Gassendis. To
the extent to which there is an intimate relation between metaphysics
and natural philosophy, metaphysics provides a grounding for natural
philosophy, not the other way around. But, in that case, one might ask
whether any price is paid in Le Monde for foregoing such grounding. As
far as substantive naturalphilosophical doctrine is concerned, there is
little in Parts II and III of the Principia that is not already in Le Monde, and
what there is that is new with the possible exception (depending on
ones interpretation of it) of the doctrine of the reciprocity of motion
is entirely compatible with Le Monde.
The metaphysics of Part I of the Principia is a legitimatory enterprise. Its
aim is to provide a foundation for the natural philosophy which follows,
a natural philosophy which has manifestly not been thought through on
the basis of a sceptically driven foundationalist metaphysics, but which
has been worked out quite independently. This is evident from Le Monde,
but this is not to say that Le Monde is metaphysics-free, for it harbours a
number of fundamental considerations about the nature of space, matter,
motion, and the nature of Gods activity in the natural world that are certainly metaphysical in one legitimate sense of that term. Nevertheless,
these have quite a different role from that played by metaphysical considerations in Gassendis project, and, for example, from that played by
Henry Mores attempt to move from his critical reflections on Descartes
concept of space and matter to a conception of what God must be like.
Descartes never thinks of natural philosophy as a basis for natural theology, implicitly rejecting Gassendis royal road.
The metaphysics underlying the natural philosophy of Le Monde is
deeply embedded in that natural philosophy, and works hand in hand
with it to an extent that separation is difficult if not impossible. In Parts I
and II of the Principia, Descartes makes the metaphysics underlying his
natural philosophy explicit and reworks it into a vocabulary borrowed
from the Scholastic textbook tradition. This involves two things. First, to
make this metaphysics explicit he must separate it out from the natural
philosophy. In some respects this separation is unnatural and forced,
whereas in other respects it is useful in drawing out otherwise hidden consequences that need to be scrutinised. Second, the descriptive
metaphysics underlying the natural philosophy must be matched both
See the discussion in Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, ),
.
CHAPTER
Part I of the Principia covers much the same material that Descartes had
already set out in the Meditationes, and Descartes tells one correspondent that it is only an abridgement of what I wrote in the Meditationes.
The Meditationes, however, gives every impression of being self-contained,
whereas Part I of the Principia is only one of six Parts of the project as
initially envisaged, and effectively forms an introduction to what follows
by providing a metaphysical basis for the natural philosophy that is developed there. In understanding the role of Part I in the larger project,
it will be helpful to begin by mapping out the dangers, as we will have
to steer a path through the Charybdis of treating the remainder of the
Principia as an appendage to Part I, and the Scylla of treating Part I as a
redundant introduction to the remainder.
If the Meditationes is as self-contained as it appears, we must ask what
the purpose of the Principia is. Certainly, on one widespread reading
of the Meditationes, the real novelty and originality of Descartes project
consist in his showing, by means of a project of radical doubt, the need
for foundations for knowledge, and then providing these foundations, so
that we might reconstruct anew the world that Meditation I called into
doubt. In other words, the project consists in the attempt to establish
that our grounds for believing the world has the properties it has are
insecure, and then going on to show that these grounds can be replaced
by something secure if, in subjecting our beliefs to intense sceptical doubt,
we find something that is resistant to such doubt, so that we can then
proceed to build knowledge up on the basis of this. It is worth noting
that such an understanding of Descartes project would accord with the
Aristotelian doctrine of regressus, pursued in detail in the sixteenth century,
AT V. .
Here, far from the Meditationes being the core of the exercise, it is treated
as merely an introduction to the real work.
This being the case, we can ask why we need Part I at all. In one sense,
the chronology of Descartes writings shows that we do not need it. Le
Monde and LHomme had been written without the benefit of the foundationalist metaphysics of the Meditationes, and those parts of the Principia
that go beyond Le Monde, such as the laws of collision and the doctrine
of the reciprocity of motion, in no way depend upon this metaphysics.
But Descartes own view was that the metaphysics of Part I was in fact
an essential and inseparable part of the project. This is made very clear
in his dispute with Regius, to whom he had sent a copy of at least parts
of Le Monde and LHomme. Regius, previously Descartes disciple, had set
out his own account of a Cartesian natural philosophy on the basis of his
reading of Le Monde and LHomme in his Fundamenta physices (), and
Descartes attacked Regius in his Not in Programma, which appeared at
the beginning of . The main thrust of the response was that, because Regius work lacks metaphysical grounding, of the kind that the
Principia provides, it is subject to all manner of confusions.
In other words, while Descartes natural philosophy may stand on its
own for some purposes, for others it needs to be incorporated into a metaphysical system. What these other purposes are is a difficult question.
It goes without saying that they include the task of metaphysical legitimation of Descartes natural philosophy, that is, the attempt to show
that his natural philosophy follows from basic metaphysical principles
which no one can doubt, adherents of Scholastic thought included (he
had tested the mettle of his Scholastic contemporaries in their Replies
to the Meditationes and found nothing to concern him). But there are
also more specific questions that are worked through in some detail in
a metaphysical way which bear directly on his naturalphilosophical
concerns, such as the nature of the division between mind and body,
and the causal relation between God and nature. The question of Gods
immutability had been raised in Le Monde, but, far from introducing metaphysical considerations there, what it did was to show why theological
and metaphysical questions are not relevant to natural philosophy, because the constancy of Gods action means that nature runs smoothly, so
smoothly that discussion of the source of this constancy does not further
AT VIIIB. .
See Theo Verbeek, Le contexte historique des Not in Programma Quoddam, in Theo Verbeek,
ed., Descartes et Regius (Amsterdam, ), ; and The Invention of Nature: Descartes and
Regius.
Abstract mathematics, i.e. geometry, arithmetic, and algebra, as opposed to practical mathematics, which includes areas such as astronomy, harmonics, statics etc.
explained in this way, as one can judge from what follows, I believe that no other
physical principles should be accepted or even desired. (Part II art. )
Note two things about this statement. First, the natural philosophy is deduced from physical principles, not metaphysical ones. All scientia-style
i.e. textbook presentations of natural philosophy use first principles.
Descartes is telling us that his first principles are those of mechanism:
they postulate an inert, homogeneous matter which moves in particular
ways and nothing else, for nothing else is needed to obtain his results.
Moreover, this enables him to pursue natural philosophy quantitatively,
as Kepler, Galileo, Beeckman and others were doing. In other words,
what Descartes is drawing attention to is not the fact that he is making
deductions from first principles, since this is unremarkable, but the content of those first principles, which marks his project out starkly from
those of Scholastic textbooks.
Second, Descartes is not saying that deduction is a means of discovery
of results in natural philosophy. The method he advocates for discovery
in natural philosophy, as is clear from La Dioptrique and his treatment
of the rainbow in Les Meteores, which, as we saw in chapter , he singles
out as the example of his method in the letter to Antoine Vatier of
February , is to start from problem-solving, and his method
is designed to facilitate such problem-solving. The problems have to
be posed in quantitative terms, and there are a number of constraints
on what form an acceptable solution takes: one cannot posit occult
qualities, one must seek simple natures, and so on. The solution is
then tested experimentally to determine how well it holds up compared
with other possible explanations meeting the same constraints which also
appear to account for the facts. Finally, the solution is incorporated into
a system of natural philosophy, and the principal aim of the Principia is
to set out this natural philosophy in detail. The Principia is a textbook,
it sets out a scientia, and the aim of textbooks is not to show one how
the empirical results were arrived at for that one needs to go to La
Dioptrique, or Discourse VIII of Les Meteores, or the various letters and
other unpublished writings on mechanics and optics but to set them
out in a systematic way.
A textbook gives one a systematic overview of the subject, presenting its ultimate foundations, and showing how the parts of the subject
are connected. Ultimately, the empirically verified results have to be
fitted into this system, but these empirical results themselves are not
shown to be true or false by their incorporation within this system: they
It is worth noting in this context just how modest Descartes is in arts. and of Part IV
about just what degree of certainty is achievable.
doubt to systematically reject various sensory and other cognitive criteria, and to establish clear and distinct ideas as the only criterion able to
secure veridicality.
Traditionally one might have expected a treatise of this kind to begin
by establishing common ground, but Descartes begins by moving in the
opposite direction. Any potential common ground is undermined by hyperbolic doubt this is the primary reason for introducing hyperbolic
doubt and it is distinctive both in the form of doubt involved, which
is epistemological rather than epistemic (it concerns knowledge claims
rather than beliefs), and in the fact that it is hyperbolic, because it raises
problems not about things that are intrinsically doubtful but about matters of which we can be certain. On the first question, traditional forms of
scepticism, such as that of the ancient Pyrrhonists, were directed against
beliefs: the argument was basically that no belief we hold is any more
justified than the opposite belief because beliefs are always relative to
a whole range of variable and contingent factors. Sensory beliefs, for
example, are relative to the state of the thing perceived, to the medium
in which it was perceived, and to the state of the perceiver, and no state
could be singled out as being objective or even optimal. As a consequence
we were not entitled to any of our beliefs. Descartes scepticism is different from this. He does not ask us to abandon our beliefs, just the claim
that any of these beliefs constitutes knowledge (until it is firmly based).
Second, Descartes asks us to doubt things which we may well continue
to believe, and with good reason, such as the propositions that two and
two equal four, or that there is an external world. We can be justified in
acting upon these beliefs, we may even be unable to conceive of what it
would be like for those beliefs to be false (this is particularly the case with
mathematical beliefs), but our not being able to conceive how something
could be false does not mean it cannot be false. Gods powers are such
that he could deceive me into thinking there was a physical world when
in fact there was not one, by manipulating my cognitive states (art. ).
More generally, what we can or cannot conceive is not a constraint on
Gods powers: just because we could not conceive the radii of a circle
being of unequal lengths does not mean that it was not possible for God
to make them of unequal lengths.
We might think of this doctrine as hyperrealism: how things are is
independent not only of what evidence we could have concerning them,
See my The Ten Modes of Aenesidemus and the Myth of Ancient Scepticism, British Journal for
the History of Philosophy (), .
This is the example used in Descartes to Mersenne, May ; AT I. .
but even of how it is possible for us to conceive of them being. It is this hyperrealism that provides the conceptual space for hyperbolic doubt. This
might seem to generate a problem for Descartes doctrine that we must
have a clear and distinct grasp of the properties of something before we
can inquire into the existence of whatever it is that has those properties.
For, if how things are is independent of how it is possible for us to conceive of them, what is the point of starting from our conceptions and then
trying to establish whether anything corresponds to these conceptions?
Descartes point is that we can, in fact, make a connection between our
conception of things and how things really are, but on two conditions.
First, we must conceive of them clearly and distinctly, and, second, God
must guarantee that whatever we conceive clearly and distinctly is true.
If it is God who has provided us with the capacity to make clear and
distinct judgements in the first place, then, given the nature of God, there
would be no point us having this capacity unless it did, in fact, enable us
to grasp things as they really are. Descartes point is that it is impossible
for us to grasp how things are simply by relying on human resources,
and this is why clear and distinct grasp requires a divine guarantee.
We saw in chapter that Descartes believed from an early stage, initially in a mathematical context, that there must be a way of presenting
at least some questions such that it is immediately clear, simply from
reflection upon the question, whether the information contained is true
or false. We also saw that he devised a way of representing numbers as
line lengths such that arithmetical operations performed upon these line
lengths could be made completely transparent: once we grasp the operation we grasp its truth or falsity. The cogito affords a non-mathematical
example of such grasp: the one thing we are unable to doubt is that we
are doubting, or, more generally, thinking, since doubting is a form of
thinking. The very act of doubting reveals to me something that I cannot
doubt, namely that I am thinking, and this is how the cogito stops the
regress of doubt. It is able to do this because it is a clear and distinct
grasp, just as my grasp of + = , represented by bringing together
two line lengths of two units each and placing them end to end, is such
that I cannot be mistaken. But, between the s, when his concern
was with the representation of arithmetical operations, and the metaphysical concerns of the s onwards, there has been a development
in Descartes thought that changes the nature and significance of the
doctrine of clear and distinct ideas. While he was concerned with the
On the complex history of the development of Descartes doctrine of clear and distinct ideas see
my Descartes, An Intellectual Biography, esp. chs. and .
Descartes seems to run the two together. Nevertheless, while in the usual
case there is a gap between the two, we cannot rule out the possibility
that there may be exceptional cases in which we do not have criteria
of identity before we have at least some kind of grasp of the essence
of the thing in question. Descartes treats the cases of his fundamental
substances God, the mind, and the physical world like this.
The way in which the essence before existence approach is used differs
somewhat in the three cases, however. In the case of God, there may
well be agreement that the task is to establish the existence of something
whose essence we have set out carefully. In the case of the arguments for
the nature of the mind and its difference from the body, Descartes sees
the question in one respect in the reverse: we clearly know the existence
of the mind, and this means we must somehow already understand its
essence clearly. He replies to Gassendi:
I am surprised that you should say here that all my considerations about the
wax demonstrate that I distinctly know that I exist, but not that I know what
I am or what my nature is: for the one cannot be demonstrated without the
other.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that the inferential direction is from
existence to essence, but rather that, when we grasp the existence of
something, we must have already grasped its essential properties. For
Descartes, our knowledge of the self that is, our mind comes not
through a grasp of its existence but through the grasp of its properties.
As he points out article ,
it is very well known through the natural light [of reason] that no properties or
qualities belong to nothingness; and accordingly, whenever we perceive some
properties or qualities, we must necessarily find a thing or substance to which
they belong there; and that the more properties or qualities we perceive in the
thing or substance, the more clearly we know it. However, it is obvious that
we perceive more properties or qualities in the mind than in any other thing,
since absolutely nothing can cause us to know something other than our mind,
without at the same time bringing us with even more certainty to the knowledge
of our mind itself.
AT VII. .
and which cannot be necessarily captured or demonstrated philosophically. Seventeenth-century Christianity was no exception: one begins
with a reasonably specific understanding of what God is, and then shows
that this thing exists. The defining features of what one wants to establish the existence of are always going to be closer to essential features in
an era in which what was at issue was not the existence of God, which
was not in contention, but what kind of God there was: these disputes
had shifted since the Middle Ages from disputes between Christians and
non-Christians (particularly Muslims), to disputes between Catholics and
Protestants, and between various sects or movements within these confessions. Remember that Descartes contemporaries were not atheists,
and he was writing for a Christian audience fully convinced of the existence of a broadly Christian God. His aim is not to convince someone
who does not believe in the existence of God that God exists, but rather
to establish something about the nature of God.
One key issue in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophical
disputes was the question of Gods transcendence. There had been a
move amongst both Neoplatonists and more naturalistically inclined
Aristotelians in the Renaissance to invest the natural realm with so many
powers that God became incorporated into nature to varying degrees.
Mersenne had developed a form of mechanism to combat this development, which he saw as leading to pantheism and other heretical doctrines,
and to restore the transcendence of God. Realising that Scholasticism
was unable to deal decisively with the threat because Aristotelian forms
were in some cases the source of it, he stripped nature of Aristotelian
forms and potentialities, as well as more radical kinds of natural activity,
thereby forcing a strict separation between Gods supernatural activity and the inertness of the natural realm, the latter having the great
advantage that it made nature much easier to quantify.
Transcendence is the most important thing that Descartes proofs for
the existence of God set out to establish, and this is above all true of
the ontological proof. The ontological proof is different from traditional
proofs of the existence of God such as those offered by Aquinas, in that
these typically deduce Gods existence from some feature of creation:
from the harmony in nature, from the necessity for a chain of causation
to begin somewhere, from the apparent goal-directedness of natural processes, and so on. In this way, our approach to God is always through
See my Descartes, An Intellectual Biography, , and, for a detailed account, see Robert Lenoble,
Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme, nd edn (Paris, ).
something other than himself: we can show his existence only if we think
of him as the creator of the physical world, for example. The ontological
argument, by contrast, treats God quite independently of anything he
might have done. It is not part of the essential nature of God that he
created the world, and the ontological proof is designed, in Descartes
hands, to capture something about the essential nature of God. Moreover, the ontological argument invites us to reflect on a clear and distinct
idea and to draw out its consequences without any reference to empirical
questions. The argument works by reflecting on the nature of God as
something that has every perfection (this is in effect proposed as a clear
and distinct idea of God), and asking whether something could have
every perfection if it did not exist, for surely it is more perfect to exist
than not to exist, so something with every perfection must exist. The
problems with the argument are notorious: first, as Aquinas pointed out
(thinking of Anselms version), the argument assumes that God has every perfection, but classical Greek philosophers, for example, would not
have thought of God in this way; second, it is not possible for something
literally to have every perfection (perfectly round and perfectly square,
perfectly good and perfectly bad, etc.); third, the argument depends, as
Aquinas also pointed out, on the assumption that existence is a property,
whereas existence seems more like a precondition for something having
a property than a property itself; and, finally, even if we could accommodate all these points, all the argument would show would be that if
there existed something with every perfection, then the existence of this
something would be necessary, which is very far from showing that in fact
there does exist something whose existence is necessary. But, of course,
this last point is irrelevant if the audience does accept that God exists,
as Descartes audience did, for what is then demonstrated is, first, the
transcendence of this God, and, second, his necessary existence. Gods
transcendence and perfection are then reinforced in the next argument
(arts. ), which is designed to show that Gods perfections are transcendent perfections, and could not possibly be an extrapolation from
human perfections, but also that we can grasp these perfections because
of their simplicity.
In order to align this transcendent perfect God fully with that of Christianity, it remains to be shown that he also a creator, and here Descartes
treats us to one of his most ingenious arguments. The idea underlying
it is that cause and effect must be simultaneous, because if events are
not temporally proximate they cannot affect one another; this being the
case, only something present can be the cause of something present. My
existence is present, so we can ask what the cause of my present existence is, and the answer cannot be something past, such as the fact that
I existed a few minutes ago. It must be something present, but what? I
do not have the power to put myself into existence, so the cause of my
present existence must be something outside of me, and God is really the
only candidate.
The upshot of the arguments for the existence of God is that God is
transcendent, perfect, and the creator of everything: and these are qualities God must have if he is to be God, not qualities which we discover as
a matter of fact he has. The ontological argument in particular trades on
the idea that essence precedes existence in the case of God. And there
is certainly a case to be made that for something to be God, i.e. to genuinely be God, it would have to have a particular set of characteristics.
Another quality God must have is goodness. Descartes intended audience would of course have agreed with him that God was good, in the
sense of morally good, but what is at issue for Descartes God is not so
much freedom from moral deceit as freedom from epistemological deceit. How could Descartes establish this? One possibility is to point out
that, since God has given us our cognitive capacities, and since he has
given them to us in order that we might know the world he has created,
these capacities yield a truthful account of what the world is like. It was
traditionally accepted that nature (for Aristotle) or God (for his Christian
followers) had provided us with the cognitive organs we have in order
that we might know the structure of the world. In this sense it would have
been assumed by Descartes readers that God is free from cognitive deceit. The traditional understanding of this doctrine, however, had been
that God had guaranteed the veridicality of our sense organs. Descartes
rejects this account of our sense organs, arguing that sensation, when
unchecked, does in fact mislead us, and misleads us systematically, about
the nature of the world, and that we should not assume that the reason we
have sense organs is so that they might reveal its basic structure to us. As
There are many questions we might want to raise about this demonstration, not least why present
existence needs to be caused in the first place: surely it is coming into existence and going out
of existence that need explanation, not remaining in existence. One common objection is that
this argument for Gods existence from the nature of causation implies that no earlier event can
bring about a later one, but this does not, in fact, follow. Descartes believed that bodies remain
in inertial states, such as rectilinear motion, without external causes, and it is because of this
that later events can result from earlier ones, even though they are not in temporal proximity:
as a result of a collision, for example, the inertial state of a body may be caused to change, but
it will remain in this changed inertial state at all later times unless it enters into another causal
interaction. What is not clear is how Descartes can allow this in the case of physical inertial states
without allowing it in the case of existence per se.
AT VII. .
It is worth noting here that we can substitute nature for God in these arguments (thereby
effectively taking them back to their original Aristotelian version), or even, with a little adjustment,
evolution (thereby placing them in the realm of modern evolutionary epistemology), to obtain
a more general assessment of their force.
On the background to this complex question see Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical
Antiquity (Berkeley, ).
Gods doing nor simply the absence of truth, it is something for which
we must take responsibility.
To explain how error comes about, Descartes invokes two modes of
thinking, namely the perception of the intellect and the operation of
the will (art. ). The former is not the source of error, for we may
perceive something unclearly or indistinctly, but it is only when we make
a judgement on the basis of an unclear perception that error arises. This
is perhaps clearest in his account of colour. For Descartes, our perception
of size and figure is different from our perception of such phenomena
as colour and pain. We ascribe each of these to objects (to a part of our
body in the case of pain), but on very different grounds. In the case of
the first two, the ascription is on the basis of a clear and distinct idea, in
the case of the latter it is not. When we say that we perceive colours in
objects, for example, this is just to say that we perceive something in the
objects whose nature we do not know, by means of a clear, vivid sensation
which we call the sensation of colour (art. ). In fact, colours are not in
objects on Descartes account, but this does not mean that we make a
mistake when we see colours as being in objects, only when, on the basis
of this, we judge that they are in objects. Such a judgement is the work of
the will, and Descartes proceeds to defend the traditional view that free
will is the highest human perfection (art. ), freedom that is manifest to
us in the process of doubt itself (art. ). Descartes avoids the traditional
problem of the irreconcilability of Gods omnipotence and the existence
of free will simply by reminding us of Gods transcendence, and of the
fact that just because we cannot grasp something does not mean that it
does not occur (art. ). The same argument had been put forward earlier
in the case of our knowledge of empirical and mathematical questions,
but access had finally been allowed to these through the faculty of clear
and distinct ideas. Descartes view in the case of free will, however, seems
to be that we have not been granted clear and distinct perception in this
case, so there is no point pursuing the question of reconciling free will
and Gods foreknowledge further.
As regards the sources of error, Descartes lists four at the end of Part I
(arts. ). The first two relate to our inability to distinguish those
things which are properly mental from those that are properly physical,
for example in the ascription of qualities of sensations, such as colours,
to physical objects. Descartes argument is that we naturally make these
misascriptions in childhood and then they pass into adulthood with us
because they have been so deeply engrained. We shall return to the
mind/body distinction later. The third source of error is lack of attention
and concentration, with the result that we rely upon common opinons.
This is a theme that runs through Descartes writings from the Regulae
onwards, and the notion of attention is central to the psychology of
clear and distinct perception. Fourth, Descartes tells us that we attach
our concepts to words which do not accurately correspond to things
(art. ). The lack of correspondence between words and things was
a common seventeenth-century complaint, and Descartes had earlier
mused on the possibility of a language in which natural correspondences
could be established, but he had not considered the project realistic.
Our only guarantee of freedom from error is to assent solely to what
we perceive clearly and distinctly (art. ). Now one of the sticking points
of Descartes account lies in the question of just what a clear and distinct perception consists in. Indeed, this problem appeared to many of
Descartes contemporaries and sucessors alike to be the weakest point
in his whole argument. While Malebranche, in his distinction between
ideas and sensations, and Spinoza, in his account of adequate ideas,
will set out from a version of the Cartesian doctrine, neither of them developed it in a Cartesian way, and other philosophers just ignored it. The
difficulty with the doctrine turned on the fact that we are seemingly free
to choose what we consider ourselves to perceive clearly and distinctly.
As Gassendi pointed out in his comments on the Meditationes, what one
person claims to have conceived clearly and distinctly, another regards
as confused and obscure, and there seems to be no way of deciding such
issues, with the result that the criterion is useless.
We can trace the genealogy of Descartes doctrine of clear and distinct ideas back to its roots in the rhetoricalpsychological theories of
the Roman rhetorical writers, especially Quintilian. Quintilian was
concerned with the qualities of the image, with the search for and presentation of images that are distinctive in their vividness and particularity,
above all with the question of what features or qualities they must have if
they are to be employed effectively in convincing an audience. Whether
one is an orator at court or an actor on stage, Quintilian tells us, our aim
is to engage the emotions of the audience, and perhaps to get it to behave
in a particular way as a result, and what one needs in order to do this
See James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, (Toronto, ),
and M. M. Slaughter, Universal Language and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge,
).
AT I. .
See, for example, Gassendis point about how different people have different clear and distinct
ideas on the taste of a water melon, depending on ones age, state of health etc., AT VII. .
See my Descartes, An Intellectual Biography, .
For an example of the presentation of geometrical operations in a clear and distinct way (algebraically), see ibid., .
position to grasp things clearly and distinctly and who is not. It has looked
up to now that clear and distinct grasp is something that is available to
everyone without precondition. But in fact there are preconditions, and
they are such that access to clear and distinct ideas, at least in the case of
natural philosophy, is much more restricted than we might have thought.
We cannot deal with this question fully until we have examined Descartes
account of the passions, which bears directly on the issue of how one goes
about creating the right state of mind for knowledge acquisition, but we
can at least register what is at stake here.
In La Recherche de la verite, which I have indicated was probably a first
experiment in setting out his natural philosophy, before he settled on
the format of the Principia, Descartes raises the question of the kind of
mentality needed to be a natural philosopher. This is a question that
Francis Bacon, whose works were well known in Descartes circle, had
pursued in detail, and Bacons model of the natural philosopher as a
practical (as opposed to a merely contemplative) man who could bypass
Scholastic learning and think and, above all, experiment for himself
was a powerful model from the s onwards. La Recherche contrasts
the honnete homme and the Scholastic philosopher, suggesting that the
former, the man of action who is not highly educated but is honest
and trustworthy in his views, is fitted, in a way that the disputatious
Scholastic is not, to be trained as a Cartesian natural philosopher. In
the terminology of clear and distinct ideas, it is the honnete homme who has
the capacity for grasping truths because he is able to, and inclined to, use
his natural faculty of clarity and distinctness: he has been led astray less
than the Scholastic. When it comes to details for which we must wait
until we have a proper understanding of cognitive and affective states in
human beings we see that as much rests on a capacity for clarity and
distinctness as does on just what clarity and distinctness amount to. The
ability to formulate and recognise clear and distinct ideas requires the
overcoming of obstacles, and it turns out (as is clear from La Recherche) that,
in practice, this is an exercise for which not everyone is equally equipped.
If Descartes can make good his idea of the honnete homme, then he must
have some way of checking the apparent variation in what appears clear
and distinct from person to person. It might be thought that he should
not have to do this, since hyperbolic doubt erases our beliefs to such
an extent that we each become a naturalphilosophical tabula rasa. But
Descartes realises, practically, that people come to natural philosophy not
with a tabula rasa but with different sets of highly developed beliefs which
are motivated in different ways and developed to different degrees, and
it is a consequence of this that some are more fitted than others to follow
the path of instruction/enlightenment in natural philosophy. He needs
to provide an account of how one achieves clear and distinct ideas which
goes beyond the idealised procedure of hyperbolic doubt and faces up to
the psychological complexities of the prejudices that one encounters.
This can only be realised, if at all, in his theory of the passions, for it is
only here that we can begin to glimpse how the persona of the natural
philosopher can be shaped out of that of the honnete homme.
THE METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE
There are two things that particularly mark out the project of the Principia
from that of Le Monde. The first is the use of the doctrine of clear and
distinct ideas the need for which had been established through the use
of hyperbolic doubt to set out the fundamental characteristics of God,
the mind, and the physical world. The second is a system of fundamental
metaphysical categories, based terminologically on those of Scholastic
metaphysics, but whose content is filled out in a novel way. Both of
these are absent from Le Monde, as we have seen, but both are equally
fundamental to the way in which the legitimatory programme of the
Principia works.
The metaphysical discussion starts out badly, but in an interesting
way. Instead of offering one definition of substance, as we might reasonably have expected, Descartes offers two incompatible definitions. In
article he defines substance as whatever exists in such a way that it
needs no other thing in order to exist. God is a substance in this sense,
but mind and matter clearly are not. In article he defines substance
as whatever needs only the participation of God in order to exist. This
clearly accommodates mind and matter, but it seems to exclude God.
Descartes concludes that the term substance is not univocal. Nevertheless, it might seem that there is a way in which we can adapt the second
definition to include God. As the ontological argument has shown, the
existence of God depends on nothing but Gods essence. Since, given
his essence, God could not fail to exist, and since the existence of the
other substances depends not on their own essences but on the existence
kinds of properties it has, and the distinction between mind and matter in
terms of their characteristic properties. Descartes account of substances
works at several levels: first, the distinction between attributes, qualities,
and modes; second, the distinction between those attributes and modes
that are in the thing and those that are merely a way of thinking about the
thing (universals); third, the three kinds of distinctions between things,
namely real, modal, and rational.
His general classification of the properties of substance (art. ) is a
threefold one:
We understand by modes here exactly the same as what we mean by attributes or
qualities elsewhere. We talk of modes when we consider the substance as being
affected by these things. When the modification enables us to identify the substance as being of a particular kind, we use the term quality. When we are simply
thinking of them in a more general way, as being inherent in a substance, we
call them attributes.
This is not the most helpful presentation of the distinction, but from the
way in which he goes on to use it in the remainder of the Principia, and
other passages in which which it is discussed, it is clear that the crucial
distinction is that between attributes and modes. This distinction, at
least, is relatively clear cut: attributes are those properties of something
without which it would cease to be what it is, whereas the modes of
something are those of its properties that can vary without changing
the nature of the thing. Attributes include such things as existence and
duration, but also the distinguishing features of substances, such as the
attributes of extension and thought: if a body were to become unextended
it would no longer be a body, for example, just as if a mind were to stop
thinking it would cease to be a mind. Modes of substances include such
things as a bodys being in a particular state of motion or rest, or a minds
having particular memories or thoughts. God, being unchangeable, has
only attributes, not modes.
The distinction between attributes and modes to some degree mirrors
the Scholastic distinction between essential and non-essential accidents
or forms, a crucial part of the Aristotelian doctrine of form and the
Scholastic metaphysics based upon it. Substance is something that
exists in its own right, whereas accidents or forms are properties, and
properties cannot have an independent existence: this was a fundamental
On the complex medieval disputes on the questions of substances and their individuation, see
Jorge Gracia, Individuation in Scholasticism: the Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation,
(Albany, N.Y., ).
others, for example, are all real distinctions. The basis of such distinctions
is always the clarity and distinctness of our grasp of the differences we are
concerned with. But real distinctions between one body and another
and one mind and another are problematic for Descartes, and were a
source of intense dispute for his successors such as Cordemoy, Spinoza,
and Leibniz. Leibniz, returning to late Scholastic notions, offered the
doctrine that a substance had to have both a principle of unity, which
made it into an individual thing, and a principle of identity, which made
it the same thing over time. To secure this, Leibniz argued, we need to
reintroduce the notion of substantial forms, rightly expelled by Descartes
and others from natural philosophy proper, but vital to the metaphysical
underpinnings of natural philosophy, for without these there would be
no basis for treating material things as substances in a strict sense, since
they would lack both unity and identity. This was a radical proposal
which neither Descartes nor his followers would have been likely to
embrace, but the problems were deep ones. We shall look at the question
of how bodies can be distinct from one another in the next chapter, for
Descartes does offer some account of this in Book II of the Principia,
although there is no agreement on just what his account is. The problem
of distinguishing minds from one another in terms of a real distinction is
even more serious, but receives no discussion at all. Embodied minds can
be distinguished from one another in that they have different sensations,
memories etc., but, even with continuity of consciousness, what makes
them the same mind over time? Indeed, why do different memories and
sensations form a basis for distinguishing minds from one another? As
one of Descartes correspondents pointed out, in connection with the
establishment of the idea of the self as res cogitans in the Meditationes,
you do not know whether it is you yourself who think or whether the
world soul in you does the thinking, as the Platonists believe. What
is at issue is actually the Averroist doctrine (subsequently assimilated
by sixteenth-century Platonists, and quite compatible with some forms
of Neoplatonism) that there can only be one intellect in the universe,
because intellect, unlike matter, is not the kind of thing that can be
divided up. The problems in this respect are exacerbated when we turn
to disembodied mind, which has no sensations or memories properly
speaking. Descartes metaphysics has no resources by which to establish
See, for example, Leibniz, Discours de metaphysique, XII: Die philosophische Schriften von G. W. Leibniz,
ed. C. I. Gerhardt, vols. (Berlin, ), IV. . See also Leibniz to Arnauld, April ,
Die philosophische Schriften, II. .
*** to Descartes [ July ]; AT III. .
the unity and identity of individual minds and, particularly in the case
of disembodied minds, his criterion of clear and distinct ideas can have
no purchase either.
The next kind of distinctions are modal ones (art. ), which hold in
two types of case: between a mode and the substance of which it is a mode,
and between two different modes of the same substance. In the first case,
the difference between a substance and a mode of that substance is clear
from the fact that we can conceive of a substance without that mode, but
not vice versa. In the second, the difference is evident from the fact that
we can recognise one mode without the other and vice versa, but we
can recognise neither without the substance to which they belong. We
can recognise the squareness and the motion of a rock independently
of one another, for example, but we cannot recognise either of them
without recognising the substance to which they belong. The distinction
between the modes of two different substances is a real and not a modal
difference, however, because we cannot grasp the modes clearly without
grasping the substances of which they are the modes. Finally, rational
distinctions (art. ) hold between a substance and something that must
be attributed to it if we are to comprehend it, that is, if we are to form
a clear and distinct grasp of it. So, for example, because any substance
ceases to be if it ceases to endure, substance is distinguished from its
duration only in the reason.
The first application of these distinctions which will be especially
important throughout the Principia is to the question of the nature of
mind and body. The distinction between these two substances is known
in two ways. The first is via their attributes, as thinking and extended
substances, and this is the way in which they are most clearly and distinctly understood (art. ). The second is via their modes, as when we
think of a body having various shapes but retaining the same volume.
Descartes then makes the crucial move (art. ):
We shall best understand the many different modes of thought, such as understanding, imagining, remembering, willing, etc., and also the diverse modes of
extension or those pertaining to extension, such as all figures, and situation and
movements of parts, if we regard them only as modes of the things in which
they are.
CHAPTER
Descartes project does not distinguish mechanics and matter theory, although I hope to show
in this chapter that the conceptual basis for the distinction is there in Descartes work, as it
was in the work of his contemporaries such as Beeckman and Galileo. Two things should be
noted in this connection. First, by mechanics I mean a group of disciplines statics, kinematics,
dynamics at least the first two of which would have been included by Descartes under the term
physico-mathematics rather than under the rubric of mechanics. Descartes uses the latter
term to refer to simple machines and their operation, a topic not touched upon in work intended
for publication but developed in letters: see Alan Gabbey, Newtons Mathematical Principles
of Natural Philosophy: A Treatise on Mechanics?, in P. M. Harman and Alan Shapiro, eds.,
The Investigation of Difficult Things (Cambridge, ), ; Alan Gabbey, Descartes Physics
and Descartes Mechanics: Chicken and Egg?, in Stephen Voss, ed., Essays on the Philosophy and
Science of Rene Descartes (New York, ), ; and Daniel Garber, A Different Descartes:
Descartes and the Programme for a Mathematical Physics in his Correspondence, in Stephen
Gaukroger et al. eds., Descartes Natural Philosophy (London, ), . Second, the meaning
of the term mechanics as I am using it here is an eighteenth-century one, established above
all by Euler, but two of the practices it picks out, statics and kinematics, were well established
in the work of Stevin and Galileo, for example. For a detailed account of how Descartes tries
to rethink the traditional mechanical discipline of statics in terms of his own natural philosophy
(in turn developed primarily in terms of matter theory), and some general considerations on the
relations between the traditional disciplines of practical mathematics and natural philosophy, see
Gaukroger and Schuster, The Hydrostatic Paradox and the Origins of Cartesian Dynamics.
For details see Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: the Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
(Chicago, ).
Leonhard Euler, Mechanica sive motus scientia analytice exposita, vols. (St Petersburg, ); Jean
le Rond dAlembert, Traite de Dynamique (Paris, ); Louis de Lagrange, Mechanique analytique
(Paris, ). See Michel Blay, La Naissance de la mecanique analytique (Paris, ).
Euler, Mechanica. See the contributions of Clifford Truesdell to Leonhardi Euleri opera omnia: The
Rational Mechanics of Flexible or Elastic Bodies, , series , vol. , section (Zurich,
); Rational Fluid Mechanics, , series , vol. (Zurich, ); and Stephen
Gaukroger, The Metaphysics of Impenetrability: Eulers Conception of Force, British Journal for
the History of Science (), .
See Gaukroger and Schuster, The Hydrostatic Paradox and the Origins of Cartesian Dynamics.
There were some such attempts, which worked through Aristotles notion of the subordinate
sciences: see Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: the Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution
(Chicago, ).
The first articles of Part II of the Principia set out the theory of material
extension. Descartes begins with a defence of his theory of matter a
theory in which extension or space turns out to be identical with matter
that is designed to be fundamental to his mechanics. The discussion turns
on the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas in three ways.
First, we use our clear and distinct ideas of God, mind, and matter to
show that these are distinct. However, the mind and the body are united,
in that sensations, for example, clearly derive from the body and are not
self-induced by the mind. Descartes puts off discussion of this question,
and it is the proper subject of the projected Parts V and VI, so we shall
come back to it in chapters and . Second, Descartes reminds us of
the inability of our senses to deliver clear and distinct ideas about the
nature of matter. The senses, he tells us, do not teach what really exists
in things, but only what can harm or benefit the union of the mind and
the body (art. ). Consequently, we must lay aside those prejudices that
derive from the senses and this means rejecting the idea that the nature
of body consists in sensory qualities such as weight, hardness, or colour.
Third, we must start our exploration of the nature of matter from our
clear and distinct idea of it.
Our clear and distinct idea of matter tells us that the nature of body
consists in extension alone. A crucial part of the criterion of clarity and
distinctness here is whether we can imagine a substance to lack some
quality. Descartes argues that we can imagine a body lacking hardness,
colour, weight, and other sensory qualities, but we cannot imagine it
lacking extension. He gives the example of hardness: we can imagine
bodies always receding from us as we approach them, so that we were
never able to touch them, but we do not think that such bodies thereby
fail to be bodies, so we can imagine bodies without hardness (art. ). What
is at issue here becomes clear in article , when, discussing rarefaction
See my The Foundational Role of Statics and Hydrostatics in Descartes Natural Philosophy.
and air, he remarks that there is no reason why we should believe that
all bodies that exist must affect our senses.
What does it mean to say that the nature of body consists in extension
alone? In article we are told:
The terms place and space, then, do not signify anything different from the
body which is said to be in a place. They merely refer to its size, shape, and
position relative to other bodies. To determine position, we have to look at
various other bodies which we regard as immobile; and in relation to different
bodies we may say that the same thing is both changing and not changing its
place at the same time.
To understand Descartes concern here, we need to grasp the wider context of thought about the nature of space. The idea that space, something
whose properties were generally conceived to be purely geometrical (that
is to say, intellectual rather than physical), and which was causally inert,
could be a substance in its own right, was a great source of concern to
many in the seventeenth century. The problems were compounded by
the fact that if one made space a substance it was difficult to see how
one could avoid making it ontologically prior to its material content, for
space could exist without matter (there could be empty space) but matter
could not exist without space.
One doctrine to which Descartes is opposed is the Aristotelian doctrine
of place. On this doctrine, a bodys place carries dynamical implications
that mere spatial location never could. The Aristotelian notion of place
is intended to designate something absolute. A thing is not in a particular place with respect to some other thing, it is in a particular place
per se. The cosmos has an absolute directional structure. Left and right,
and backwards and forwards, are absolute directions defined in terms of
the (absolute) motion of the stars, but the crucial directions are up and
down, for these form the basis for Aristotles doctrine of natural place,
which determines the motions of different kinds of substance. In the absence of external constraint, for example, fire will tend to move upwards
and heavy bodies will tend to move downwards. Place shapes the dynamic behaviour of the body. The rationale behind this lies in Aristotles
general approach to the problem of change, which he characterises in
terms of a variation in properties or qualities of the thing undergoing the
change. Local motion is a change in respect of place, and like all forms
of change, it can be specified in terms of a terminus a quo and a terminus
ad quem, where in this case the termini are contraries. The terminus ad
quem provides the process with an end or goal which it realises: without
it, there is no process, no motion, at all. Aristotles concern is with a general theory of change, which includes everything from processes whose
termini are contradictories, such as generation and corruption, to those
whose termini are contraries, such as change of shape. The doctrine of
place, with its absolute directions, is crucial to the Aristotelian doctrine
of dynamics: why things move is central to how they move.
Descartes response to this doctrine is threefold. First, he separates
questions of why things move from how they move. We shall understand
motion best, he tells us in Part I article , if we think only of local motion
and do not enquire into the force by which it is produced, and indeed he
proceeds in Part II by discussing the nature of motion without reference
to cause, turning only in article to the discussion of causation. This
is a distinctive way of proceeding in early modern natural philosophy,
to be found in different forms in Galileo, Beeckman, Hobbes, Gassendi,
and others, and indeed it yields dividends, but there is no defence of
it offered. The only argument we find in this connection is the claim in
Le Monde that the Aristotelian conception yields a definition of motion
that is unintelligible. This is disingenuous, however, for an intelligible
account of the Aristotelian understanding of local motion can be given,
and in any case Descartes own definition of motion in Le Monde, as
bodies passing from one place to another and occupying all the spaces in
between, turns out to be not so straightforward once place and body
have been defined.
The difficulties turn on the fact that place, space, and body are
interdefined in Descartes, as they are, albeit it in a very different way, in
Aristotle. This brings us to the second and third features of Descartes
response to the Aristotelian conception. The second is that he argues
that place and body are the same thing; the third that he abandons the
doctrine of absolute direction. These are difficult and much disputed
questions, and it will be helpful to have some idea of the reaction of
On the origins of Descartes distinctive approach in this respect, see Gaukroger and Schuster,
The Hydrostatic Paradox and the Origins of Cartesian Dynamics.
Quoting the definition of motion given in Physics b, he writes: They themselves admit that
the nature of their motion is very little understood. And trying to make it more intelligible, they
have still not been able to explain it more clearly than in these terms: Motus est actus entis in potentia,
prout in potentia est. These terms are so obscure to me that I am compelled to leave them in Latin
because I cannot interpret them. (And in fact the words motion is the act of a being which is in
potency, in so far as it is in potency are no clearer for being in the vernacular.), AT XI. .
AT XI. .
other seventeenth-century natural philosophers to the Aristotelian notion before we turn to Descartes response.
The range of non-Scholastic views on space is well represented in
English natural philosophy in the seventeenth century. At the beginning
of that century, we find William Gilbert attacking the Aristotelian notion
of place, whereby a bodys behaviour is determined by the fact that it will
move towards its natural place, for example (earthy bodies downwards,
fire upwards). Gilbert objects on the grounds that the location of a body
cannot have a causal effect. Position is nothing, he writes, it does not
exist; all power resides in bodies themselves. Hobbes goes further in
chapter of his De Corpore, the composition of which began around
the time Descartes was working on the Principia. He denies the reality
of space: it is not a substance that acts as a container for bodies, for
bodies are complete in themselves and need no such container. Space
is just a subjective frame of reference, not real in its own right. It is
our awareness of body simply i.e. of body having no other attribute
except that it is located somewhere. But, although body certainly exists
outside our minds, the space which body occupies is a purely mental
construction. Space is a phantasm, a mental abstraction, an imaginary
extension it is the system of co-ordinates or external locations which the
mind constructs out of its experience of real extended things. Real space
is space inherent in body. In other words, real space is corporeality itself:
so that a body is to imaginary space what a thing is to the knowledge of
that thing, for our knowledge of existing things is that imagination which
is produced by the action of these things on our senses, and therefore
imaginary space, which is the imagination of body, is the same as our
knowledge of existing body. Space is, in short, privation of body. The
meaning of privation depends in the first place on our knowledge of body,
and refers only to the possibility of body coming into being. Considered
by itself, privation of body is a figment or empty imagination.
At the same time that Hobbes was working on De Corpore, Henry More
was beginning to reflect on the nature of space in a wholly different way,
William Gilbert, De mundo nostro sublunari nova (Amsterdam, ), Book II, ch. , p. ; quoted in
Milic Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York, ), . Francis Bacon
echoes this, rejecting the idea that heavy bodies naturally move downwards and light ones
upwards because there is no local motion which is not excited either by the parts of the body
moved, or by the adjacent bodies, or by those contiguous or proximate to it, or at least by those
which lie within its sphere of activity (The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert
Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, vols. (London, ), V. ).
Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed., Sir William Molesworth, vols.
(London, ) I. .
As well as the works collected in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, ), see also
his Enchiridium metaphysicum (London, ). See the discussion in Koyre, From the Closed World to
the Infinite Universe, ch. .
De Gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum. Text and translation in A. Rupert Hall and Marie
Boas Hall, eds., Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, ), .
See Descartes to More, April ; AT V. ; also Reply to Sixth Set of Objections to the
Meditationes; AT VII. . See also Descartes to More, February ; AT V. , on the problem
of why extension should be given preference over impenetrability if they are coextensive.
regions of space in terms of differences between impenetrable and penetrable regions of space was developed separately in the eighteenth
century in the pioneers of rational mechanics, Euler and dAlembert,
and was to prove one of the mainstays of classical mechanics.
One thing a broader consideration of seventeenth-century conceptions of space highlights is the fact that space and place are bound up
with conceptions of matter not just in the Aristotelian conception but in
its seventeenth-century competitors. Descartes is offering none of these,
but, before we turn finally to look at just what he is offering, we need
to say a word about his claim that to determine position, we have to
look at various other bodies which we regard as immobile. In the wake
of the Principia, various protracted and fundamental disputes broke out
over the existence of absolute space, on the question of whether spatial
locations, and changes in spatial location, are absolute or relative. These
were provoked by the revision of Descartes rules of collision by Huygens,
by Newtons defence of absolute space, and particularly by the dispute
between Leibniz and Clarke over the existence of absolute space, coming
to a head in Mach and then finally in Einstein. It is far from clear that
this is the context in which we should read Descartes remarks about the
relativity of motion, even though it may well have been these remarks
that initially stimulated Newton, for example, to think about the question
of absolute space.
Descartes rejects notions of place and space equally, identifying both
with body and then telling us that to determine position, we have to look
at various other bodies which we regard as immobile. One difference we
are perhaps inclined to point to is that place is directional whereas space
is not: Newtons absolute space does not have directions such as up and
down. What is absolute about it is that, of the many co-ordinate systems
that can be mapped on to it, one of these is unique (if undiscoverable),
in that it genuinely distinguishes bodies at rest from bodies not at rest,
whatever their motion, whether inertial or not. There is no reason to
think that this kind of conception is what Descartes is arguing against. If
we think of the cosmological systems that were in contention at the time
On Euler see my The Metaphysics of Impenetrability. DAlembert begins his Definitions and
Preliminary Notions with the statement that: If two regions of extension which are similar and
equal to one another are impenetrable . . . each of these two regions of extension will be what is
called body (Traite de Dynamique, ).
Mach thought that directionality was a feature of the distribution of matter in the universe rather
than a feature of space, while Einstein revised the notion of space radically, a result of which
was that space could causally interact with matter, which transformed the whole question of
directionality.
that Descartes was writing, then the one that operates with something
we might unambiguously label space as opposed to Aristotelian place
is the Epicurean system. But despite being a space of infinite extent,
and having no absolute framework of the Aristotelian kind, Epicurean
space is manifestly directional. The atoms all fall in the same direction
because of their weight, which acts downwards, and indeed this is why
the Epicurean swerve is introduced, for without some deviation from
this primitive atomic rain, no worlds would be formed.
Since by far the most likely contender for the notion of space that
Descartes has in mind is the Epicurean one, when he rejects place
and space he is not rejecting a directional notion of space and a nondirectional one, but two directional ones, which suggests his target is the
idea that space has an intrinsic directionality. This would, naturally, also
make much more sense of the fact that he groups them together, and
then argues for the relativity of motion. The argument for the relativity
of motion is Descartes way of establishing the universe has no intrinsic directionality. Of course, there are other conceptions which do not
involve intrinsic spatial directionality Newtons for example but it is
important that we distinguish between what reasons there might be to
accept Descartes rejection of intrinsic directionality and what the arguments for his alternative are. What he rejects is something that Newton
would equally have rejected, had the intrinsic directionality of space still
been an issue at the time he was writing. But it was not still an issue,
and Newton is not proposing an alternative solution to the problem
of intrinsic directionality direction of motion is simply a function of
gravitation and inertia for Newton. Rather, the issue for Newton was
the absolute nature of motion, something that Descartes solution to the
original problem had denied.
THE NATURE OF MOTION
If we see the problem that Descartes is concerned with as being, in the first
instance, one of directionality rather than being that of whether space is
absolute or not, then we can grasp the rationale behind his solution. To
determine (purely kinematically) whether a body is moving or not, and
On the revival of atomism and Descartes reaction to it, see Garber, Descartes Metaphysical Physics,
ch. . Garber (p. ) quickly passes over the question of the direction of atoms.
See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book II, . Lucretius was widely read in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century France; see Simone Fraisse, LInfluence de Lucr`ece en France au Seizi`eme Si`ecle
(Paris, ).
The image is one that fits the Cartesian cosmos well: it is indefinite in
extent which for these purposes is the same as its being infinite and
it can be thought of as comprising an indefinite number of interlocking
parts, along the lines of a system of interlocking gears of varying sizes
which contain no empty spaces between them, and which in effect go on
to infinity. If we think of the cosmos as an indefinitely extended system
of interlocking gears with what is in effect an infinitely complex system
of motions and counter-motions, it will indeed be natural to think of the
motions of gears relative to one another.
The reference point against which we judge motion has to be local on
Descartes account, and indeed takes the form of identifying a body that
we take as stationary, and determining motions in respect to that body.
Descartes outlines how the latter might work in article :
To determine position, we have to look at various other bodies which we regard
as immobile; and in relation to different bodies we may say that the same thing
is both changing and not changing its place at the same time. For example, when
a ship is under way, a person seated in the stern always remains in one place as
far as the parts of the ship are concerned, for he maintains the same situation
in relation to them. But this same person is constantly changing his place as
far as the shores are concerned, since he is constantly moving away from some
and towards others. Furthermore, if we think the Earth moves, and travels from
west to east exactly as far as the ship progresses from the east towards the west,
we shall again say that the person seated in the stern does not change his place,
because we are now determining his place in relation to certain fixed points
in the heavens. Finally, if we think that there are no truly motionless points to
be found in the universe (a supposition we will show below to be probable) we
shall conclude that nothing has a permanent place, except as determined by
our thought.
In other words, contra the Aristotelian view, a body in motion does not
have some extra quality (an amount of speed) that a body at rest lacks, any
more than a round body has an extra quality (an amount of roundness) that
a square one lacks: they just have different qualities. What is perplexing
is that Descartes treats these as contrary qualities, telling us that rest and
motion are different modes of body (art. ), and rest is the contrary of
motion (art. ). What we might expect him to have said is that a body
is in a particular modal state with respect to motion, which can take
any number of values, one of which is zero, which is the value it takes
when the body is at rest. The trouble is that moving bodies and bodies
at rest do not behave in the same way in Descartes account of collision.
Rule (art. ) describes the outcome of the collision of two equal bodies
See the alphabetical entries in Franco Aurelio Meschini, Indice dei Principia Philosophi di Rene
Descartes (Florence, ).
to do was to represent them clearly and distinctly in terms of operations on line lengths. As I indicated in chapter , this project failed, as
Descartes was unable to represent more complex algebraic operations in
these terms. So, too, in the Principia, the rewriting of his physical theory in
clear and distinct terms (where a very geometrical conception of motion
has taken over the role that line lengths had, as the paradigm of clarity
and distinctness), does not work either. Because the Principia rewriting of
physical theory is far more extensive than the Regulae rewriting of algebra,
it intrudes into the physical theory far more deeply, yielding something
which has the ability to profoundly redirect physical theory. On the other
hand, because we are provided with significant detail in the Principia, it
is easier to identify just where things start to come apart.
What Descartes wants, ideally, is a purely kinematic, geometrically
defined, conception of motion. There are a number of purely kinematic
refinements that Descartes makes to the definition offered in article ,
and these do go some way to remedying some of the difficulties. A crucial
ingredient in this refinement is the definition of the position of a body in
terms of its external space in article , which
can be taken to be the surface which most closely surrounds what is in that place.
It should be noted here that surface does not mean any part of the surrounding
body, but merely the boundary between the surrounding and the surrounded
bodies, which is just a mode. Or to put it another way, we understand by surface
the common surface which is not a part of one body more than of the other, and
which is considered to be the same so long as it has the same size and shape. For
even if the whole surrounding body, with its surface, is changed, we do not on
that account judge that the surrounded body changes its place if it maintains
the same situation among those external bodies which we consider to be at rest.
moving body more than one motion at any given time; because at any given
time, only a certain number of bodies can be contiguous to it.
Figure .
body AB; we do not on that account understand that the Earth moves from B
toward A, or from the [East] toward the [West].
Why, given the reciprocity of motion, do we not say the Earth moves
equally? There are basically two reasons. First, a body is in motion if its
whole surface, and not merely a portion of its surface, moves relative to
its neighbourhood: this allows AB and CD to move, but not the Earth.
Second, AB and CD can move in relation to the Earth but the Earth
cannot move in relation to them, for it would have to move in two
contradictory directions, East and West, at the same time. The only way
to keep the kinematics consistent is to deny that the larger body is in
motion.
This appears to give us a kinematic criterion by which to decide which
bodies are really in motion, but it does so at the cost of making the key
notion of reciprocity of motion wholly obscure: on the one hand, the
Earth is moving because of the principle of reciprocity of motion, but,
on the other hand, it cannot be moving, for the motion it would have
would be an impossible one. The question comes to a head in Descartes
correspondence with More. More questions Descartes account of reciprocity of motion. Commenting on article , he suggests we let AB
be a tower and CD be a westerly wind blowing through its window.
Can we just as easily treat the air as being at rest and the tower as
moving towards the West?, asks More. Descartes replies by trying to
bring out what is at issue by changing the example. He asks More to
imagine two men trying to free a grounded boat, one pushing the boat
from the shore, the other sitting in the boat and pushing against the
shore:
If the force exerted by the men is identical, the effort (conatus) of the man on
the shore contributes to the boats motion no less than that of the man in the
boat, who is transferred along with it. Therefore it is obvious that the action
by which the boat recedes from the shore is equally in the shore as in the
boat.
See Gaukroger and Schuster, The Hydrostatic Paradox and the Origins of Cartesian
Dynamics.
See, for example, John Schuster, Descartes Opticien: The Construction of the Law of Refraction
and the Manufacture of its Physical Rationales, , in Stephen Gaukroger et al. eds.,
Descartes Natural Philosophy (London, ), .
AT XI. .
AT VI. .
AT VI. .
E.g. AT XI. , , , .
Morin to Descartes August ; AT II. .
AT XI. .
AT XI. , developing .
This is only to say that at least some quantity must be conserved, it does not mean that total
closure of the system is necessary. Newton, for example, has conservation of momentum, but
not conservation of energy, and allows that motion can be lost in hard-body collisions, whereas
Leibniz argues that the system must be completely closed and that both must be conserved. For
details see Wilson L. Scott, The Conflict between Atomism and Conservation Theory, (London,
). By the middle of the nineteenth century, total closure had become a general desideratum.
See Richard Sorabji, Necessity, Cause and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotles Theory (London, ).
It is clear what Descartes has done: he has simply translated from the
statical case to the kinematic one, leaving weight much as it is and transforming instantaneous displacement into speed.
The immutability of God which underlies the conservation of motion
(size times speed) is manifested in the form of laws of nature which are the
secondary and particular causes of the various motions that we notice in
individual bodies (art. ). The first of these laws of nature specifies what
form the conservation of motion takes. Just as bodies retain their shape,
so they retain their state of rest if they are at rest, and their state of motion
if they are in motion. More generally, in absence of external causes a body
will retain its state of motion or rest. The rationale behind this is that given
in article : rest is the opposite of motion, and nothing moves by virtue
of its own nature toward its opposite or its own destruction. In the case of
remaining in the same state of motion (i.e. maintaining the same speed),
as opposed to just remaining in motion, his rationale depends on the idea
I am indebted here to the discussion in Peter McLaughlin, Force, Determination and Impact,
in Stephen Gaukroger et al. eds., Descartes Natural Philosophy (London, ), .
See Descartes to Clerselier, February ; AT IV. .
On determination see Alan Gabbey, Force and Inertia in the Seventeenth Century: Descartes
and Newton, in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (New York,
), ; and McLaughlin, Force, Determination and Impact.
that all motion is, of itself, along straight lines; and consequently, bodies
that are moving in a circle always tend to move away from the centre of
the circle that they are describing. Here we get to what, for Descartes, will
be the cutting edge of his cosmology: a force acting radially out from the
centre, which we shall call centrifugal force. The two laws of nature that
he has already provided employ minimal, non-dynamic, and relatively
uncontentious premises. The principal premise is Gods immutability,
and he has managed to construe motion and rest in such a way that
immutability rules out moving bodies coming to rest because of some internal principle, while at the same time keeping the argument very much
within the framework of a Christianised Aristotelianism. On the other
hand, what these laws of nature give us is, as it stands, not a great deal of
use in the cosmological arguments for which Part II is really just a preparation. The introduction of centrifugal force changes all this, partly because it is a dynamic notion, and partly because of the radical use to which
he will put it in his account of the origin and structure of the solar system.
The aim is to let centrifugal force ride on the relatively secure arguments establishing the first two laws. Here is how Descartes establishes
the rationale for the second law in article (I include the phrases added
in the French version):
When the stone A is rotated in the sling EA [Fig. .] and describes the circle
Figure .
At first glance, this passage seems unproblematic. The stone is constrained to move in a circle, along LA, but if the constraint were removed at A, it would not continue along the curved path ABF but
along a rectilinear path at a tangent to the curve at A, namely along
ACG. In other words, its natural or unconstrained motion is a rectilinear one.
In chapter of Le Monde, Descartes had offered the same analysis
of motion in a sling in setting out his rules of motion. However, in
chapter , in elaborating on the importance of the law for his cosmology,
he offered an interpretation of what happens in this case which actually
depends on our analysing the motion of the stone in a completely different way. He argues that the tendency of the stone to move at a tangent
(ACG) to the circular path it is following is to be analysed in terms of two
components of this tendency. One is a radial tendency outwards (EAD),
which I am calling centrifugal force, the other is the motion along the
circular path ABF which, we are told, is in no way impeded by the sling.
In other words, the circular motion of the stone in the sling is not caused
by any external constraint, including anything imposed by the sling: the
body naturally follows this path. And in kinematic terms, this means that
this circular motion is an inertial motion! Descartes is thinking of a body
being held in a stable circular path in terms of forces that act outwards
from the centre being exactly balanced by forces that act inwards from
the periphery, and the notion of equilibrium seems quite appropriate
here. The trouble is that this statical model, which is what Descartes
appeals to when he wants to think through a problem dynamically,
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
See the perceptive account in Westfall, Force in Newtons Physics, .
the motion by which an ant, starting at the same point A, would also be moved
towards C. We are assuming [Fig. .] EY to be a rod on which the ant would
Figure .
be walking in a straight line from A toward Y, while the rod was being rotated
around centre E, and its point A would thus describe the circle ABF. We are
also assuming the rotation of the rod to be in such a proportion to the motion
of the ant, that the ant would be at point X when the rod was at C, at point Y
when the rod was at G, and so on. Thus the ant itself would always be on the
straight line ACG.
but radially outwards. The presentation of the second law in the Principia
certainly looks more consistent than that of Le Monde, but in fact it is
just that the difficulties are buried more deeply in the Principia. Le Monde
in effect offered two analyses, one in chapter which was consonant
with Descartes kinematic definition of motion, and a different one in
chapter which was consonant with his attempt to develop a dynamical
account instrumental in his cosmology. His analysis of the motion of
the stone in a sling in Le Monde is fundamentally flawed, and the main
casualty is what I have called centrifugal force. There is simply no force
acting radially outwards from the centre. His elementary kinematics
cannot establish that there is, and his more elaborate dynamical model,
derived from statics, takes us in a completely inappropriate direction.
This problem has not disappeared in the Principia, it is just less evident.
But, in the final analysis, the same transition has to be made there: it is the
pulling on the string that is identified as being of great importance, and
will be so frequently used in what follows that it must be very carefully
noticed here. The pulling on the string is what illustrates the tendency
in all rotating bodies to move away from the centre of the circle that
they are describing. Yet this pulling on the string has no basis in his
kinematics.
THE THIRD LAW OF MOTION
The first and second laws deal with isolated bodies, telling us, respectively,
in what way their first-order and second-order modes are conserved. The
third law, and the rules of collision appended to it, tell us what happens
when two of these bodies meet, in an idealised case. The main features of
this case are that there is no other matter present (so that we can think of
them as travelling in a void), and that the only collisions are in a straight
line in two dimensions. Above all, however, the bodies are considered
to be perfectly hard that is, are not deformed in collision and it is
central to Descartes account that behaviour of bodies in collision must be
explained fully in terms of the conservation of motion: the ball rebounds
simply because its motion, as an absolute quantity, persists. To think
of the rebound as being caused by elasticity would be to introduce, at a
fundamental explanatory level, a poorly understood (and, for Descartes,
unquantifiable) force which could never meet his stringent requirements
of clarity and distinctness.
The third law employs a dynamic language right from the start, and
even the title of article gives us an indication of the contest model
that underpins Descartes understanding of collision:
The third law: that a body upon coming into contact with a stronger one, loses
none of its motion; but that, upon coming into contact with a weaker one, it
loses as much as it transfers to that weaker body.
Elaborating on the law, Descartes talks of the weaker body having less
force to continue to move in a straight line than the other has to resist
it. We are given no definition of what this force is, and we have to try to
work out from context, or from passages elsewhere in his writings, just
what notion, or notions, he is employing.
In demonstrating the third law, Descartes makes crucial use of the
distinction between the first-order mode, motion, and the second-order
mode, determination. The motion of a body can remain intact, he tells
us, while its determination changes. Indeed, there is a fundamental distinction to be made between motion and determination. Motion is simple and, in virtue of this simplicity, will continue unless destroyed by an
external cause. Determination, on the other hand, is not simple:
In an encounter with an unyielding body, there certainly appears to be a cause
that prevents the motion of the body that strikes the other from maintaining
its determination in the same direction. However, there is no cause that would
remove or decrease the motion itself since motion is not contrary to motion.
From which it follows that motion must not be diminished. (art. )
What Descartes has in mind here is the case of light rays being reflected
from a surface, which he models on a tennis ball being reflected from a
surface. The case is described in La Dioptrique. Fig . shows a tennis
ball travelling from A to B, bouncing off a reflecting surface CBE, and
being reflected to F in the same time it takes to travel from A to B. The
impact of the ball at B Descartes treats as the collision of two perfectly
inelastic bodies, in which the ball retains its speed but changes direction. The rationale behind this is that if the force of motion, or speed,
and direction of motion were the same thing, then the ball would first
have to stop before it changed direction, and if it stopped a new cause
would be needed for it to move again. But there is no such new cause
available: therefore, its force or speed is not affected in the impact, only
Descartes is, of course, thinking of real tennis, where the balls are highly inelastic, as opposed to
lawn tennis, which was a mid-nineteenth-century development which introduced elastic balls.
AT VI. .
Figure .
Note also that, like motion, it is a magnitude: Descartes writes to Clerselier on February
that, in collision, a body can pass to another more than half its speed and more than half its
determination: AT IV. . In the end, however, it seems that determination turns out to resist
any completely consistent reading; see McLaughlin, Force, Determination and Impact for the
best statement of the difficulties, and a realistic solution to them.
of resolving the motion into its orthogonal components, must have the
opposite direction.
The third law covers collision, so there must be some form of opposition between bodies. Motions of equal speed are never opposed to
another, but the determination of a body to move in a given direction
is opposed to a body in its path which is either at rest or moving in a
contrary manner (art. ). This opposition is set out in terms of opposing
forces in article :
Each thing strives, as far as is in its power, to remain in the same state, in
accordance with the first law stated above. From this it follows that a body that
is joined to another has some force to resist being separated from it, while a body
that is separate has some force to remain separate. A body at rest has some force
to remain at rest, and consequently to resist everything which might change it;
while a moving body has some force to continue its motion, that is, to continue
to move at the same speed and in the same direction. Furthermore, this force
must be measured not only by the size of the body in which this force exists, and
by the extent of the surface which separates this body from those around it, but
also by the speed and nature of its motion, and by the different ways in which
bodies come into contact with one another.
Note here that we have both a force of a moving body to resist change
of state, that is, to continue in its directed motion, and a force of a body
at rest to resist change of state. Now the ontological standing of forces
in the Principia has been the subject of much controversy, some writers
denying that forces exist at all, and maintaining that all we have at the
most fundamental level is matter in motion, while others have argued
that forces are inherent in bodies. As we have seen, Descartes does talk
about forces, and indeed talks of bodies having more force the larger
they are or the quicker they move. I have suggested above that Descartes
cannot get by without the language of forces, and we have seen that,
in his earlier writings, questions such as the behaviour of fluids and the
propagation of light (both questions that will be crucial for Part III) are
explicitly thought through in dynamic terms. In the Principia, Descartes
attempts to reformulate his natural philosophy in clear and distinct
terms, and this does impose severe constraints on what kinds of notions
he can employ. But, even within these constraints, he seems to find some
Advocates of this view include E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanisation of the World Picture (New York,
), ; Eric J. Aiton, The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motions (London, ), ; and Garber,
Descartes Metaphysical Physics, passim.
Advocates of this view include Martial Gueroult, The Metaphysics and Physics of Force in
Descartes, in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (New York,
), ; and Gabbey, Force and Inertia in the Seventeenth Century.
in Rule (art. ), which describes the collision of two bodies of unequal sizes but equal speeds, and Rule (art. ), which describes the
collision of two bodies of equal sizes but unequal speeds. The problem
with Rules and is quite different however. Rule (art. ) tells us
that when a smaller moving body encounters a larger stationary one,
it rebounds with its original speed, leaving the larger body unaffected.
Rule (art. ) tells us that when a larger moving body encounters a
smaller stationary one, then both proceed in the direction of the motion
after impact with a speed equal to the product of the size of the larger
body times the velocity of the larger body, divided by the sum of the two
sizes.
This is peculiar for a number of reasons. Rule specifies that a smaller
body can never move a larger one, no matter what its speed, and no matter how slight the difference in size. It is quite contrary to our empirical
experience (to the extent that we can extrapolate to the case of perfectly
inelastic bodies) that a rapidly moving body which was very marginally
smaller than a larger stationary body, would simply rebound on impact
with it, having failed to affect the larger body at all, and leaving it in the
same stationary state as it was before impact. Descartes seems to recognise this, telling us in article (French version) that experience seems
to contradict the rules I have just explained, and telling us explicitly in
the introduction to Rule that it may not hold when the body is surrounded by air or some other fluid. More importantly, given Descartes
definition of motion, which body is moving and which is stationary is a
matter of determining the appropriate reference point, and it would be
very easy to find a reference point from which the larger body would be
the moving body and the smaller body the stationary one, but then we
would be in the situation described by Rule , which provides a completely different outcome. Of course, we could argue that the outcome
of the collision will retrospectively tell us which of the bodies was moving
and which was stationary (leaving to one side the fact that there are also
going to be reference points that indicate that both bodies are moving),
but this will require us to conceive of motion in a far more absolute way
than that sanctioned by the kinematic criteria that Descartes provides.
Kinematically, the two rules are inconsistent.
It is not too difficult to understand why Descartes should have insisted
on Rule , for it underpins his optics, and it is perhaps his realisation that
it is needed for his optics that led him to change his mind on this question,
for five years earlier he had written to Mersenne on two occasions allowing that a smaller moving body can dislodge a larger stationary one, and
even indicating how the resultant speed is determined. In seeking to explain why light rays, which follow rectilinear paths, behave in particular
geometrically defined ways when they are reflected or refracted, he models light micro-mechanically. In reflection, for example, light corpuscles
strike a larger body and are reflected from its surface. Kinematically specified laws of collision, of the kind Descartes provides, should be enough
to describe the various kinds of interaction possible here, and in this
way should underpin an explanation of why light behaves in particular
geometrically defined ways when it encounters a reflecting surface, or
when it moves from one optical medium to another. The linchpins of
this treatment are his accounts of reflection and refraction, and we can
confine our attention to the former, which we have already looked at in
trying to elucidate the notion of determination. Descartes starts from the
idea that when a light ray strikes a reflecting surface obliquely, the angle
of incidence equals the angle of reflection. To show why this happens,
he resolves the ray into components, and he distinguishes the speed of the
ray and its determination. In fleshing out the geometry of the situation
in physical terms, Descartes simply has to imagine the light ray being
composed of minute corpuscles and striking a larger body. Now, if such
a body were to be moved by a light corpuscle, then of course the light
corpuscle would have to transfer some of its motion to the larger body,
in which case it would be retarded, and not only its direction but also its
speed would be affected. And, if this happened, the angle of reflection
would not then equal the angle of incidence: rather, the situation would
be more like refraction, where a change in the speed of the light ray
causes the bending of the ray. The kinematics have got to match what
we know about the geometry of reflection, and the geometry of reflection
does not deal with approximations: geometrical optics is just a particular interpretation of geometry, which is the paradigm of exactness. In
providing a physical model for the geometrical behaviour of light rays,
this exactness, which is of the essence of geometry, cannot be lost. If the
geometrical analysis of the behaviour of light shows that the angle of
incidence equals the angle of reflection, it equals it exactly, whether the
light is striking a raindrop or the ocean. And, if that is the case, the light
corpuscle cannot move the body from whose surface it is reflected.
This explains why Rule is so important for Descartes, but it does not
explain what he thinks makes Rule correct. If one looks to Descartes for
a rationale of the law, what one finds is a physical claim that a smaller
moving body colliding with a larger stationary one cannot affect the state
of the larger body filled out in quasi-Scholastic naturalphilosophical
terms. There are two important premises in Descartes treatment. The
first is that rest has as much reality as does motion: rest is not simply a
privation of motion as the Scholastics had argued. The second is that
rest and motion are opposed to one another: they are modal contraries.
We must therefore think of the interaction of the bodies in terms of the
smaller having a particular quantity of motion, and the larger having a
particular quantity of rest. These are opposing states, so the bodies will
be in dynamic opposition, and Rule therefore describes a contest, as it
were, between a larger body at rest and a smaller body in motion. The
bodies exercise a force to resist changes of their states, and the magnitude
of this force Descartes considers to be a function of their size. A body
in motion cannot, for that reason alone, have more force than one at
rest; nor can greater speed confer greater force upon it. Either of these
would undermine the ontological equivalence of rest and motion that
Descartes wants to defend. Now, bearing this in mind, we can ask what
happens when the smaller moving body collides with a larger stationary
one. Clearly they cannot both remain in the same state in collision, so
there will have to be a change of state. And, since the smaller or weaker
body can hardly change the state of the larger or stronger one, it is
the smaller one that has its state changed (the direction of its motion is
reversed), the larger body remaining unaffected in the process.
This account explains why it has to be an all-or-nothing matter. We
might be tempted to ask why the smaller body should not move the
larger one if the smaller body had sufficient speed, or if the difference
in size were very marginal. The answer to the first question is that the
ontological equivalence of motion and rest makes the speed of the smaller
body irrelevant to the outcome of the collision. The answer to the second
is that, because of the irrelevance of speed, the only remaining factor
is size. Still, it does seem somewhat peculiar that the outcome would
be the same irrespective of whether the difference in size were very
significant, or whether the two bodies were almost exactly the same size.
The peculiarity is removed immediately once we think of the situation in
terms of statics, however. Think of the bodies as occupying the two pans
of an (idealised frictionless) beam balance. The arm will always be tipped
down on the side of the heavier, no matter how slight the difference in
weight. That this is indeed the reasoning behind Descartes account is
made clear in a letter to Hobbes in which Descartes responds to Hobbes
claim that the extent to which a body is moved is proportional to the
force exerted on it, so that even the smallest force will move a body to
some extent. Descartes replies:
His assumption that what does not yield to the smallest force cannot be moved by any force
at all has no semblance of truth. Does anyone think that a weight of pounds
in a balance would yield to a weight of one pound placed in the other pan of
the scale simply because it yields to a weight of pounds?
in clear and distinct terms is how the Principia operates, and that this
inevitably requires translation of dynamically formulated doctrines into
different terms. But these dynamic underpinnings occasionally erupt
onto the surface of the Principia as well, and Rule and the doctrine of
centrifugal force one of which hinges on the beam balance, the other
on the idea of forces in equilibrium are important evidence of this, all
the more important as they lie at the foundations of Cartesian optics and
Cartesian cosmology respectively.
THE MECHANISATION OF MATTER THEORY:
SOLIDS AND FLUIDS
Rule , in the French version, adds a crucial qualification to his statement of the Rule, namely that it holds only if the larger stationary body
has, not only no apparent motion, but also is not surrounded by air or
some other fluid (which makes the hard bodies immersed in such a fluid
very easily movable, as I shall show) (art. ). Immediately after setting
out the rules, Descartes makes a general qualification about their applicability, in article . Experience often seems to contradict the rules
I have just explained, he tells us. What are described in the rules of
collision are the interactions of bodies separated from one another, but
because there cannot be any bodies in the world that are thus separated from
all others, and because we seldom encounter bodies that are perfectly solid, it is
very difficult to perform the calculation to determine to what extent the motion
of each body may be changed by collisions with others. Before we can judge
whether these rules do or do not hold here, we must simultaneously calculate
the effects of all those bodies that surround the bodies in question and which
affect their motion. But these effects differ greatly, depending on whether the
surrounding bodies are solid or fluid, and therefore it is necessary that we should
enquire immediately into the difference between fluid and solid bodies.
There are in fact two kinds of revision or elaboration needed before the
applicability of the rules of collision can be seriously assessed. The first
kind of questions is purely mechanical. The rules have described only
one kind of collision, and once we consider fully the range of possible
collisions in a three-dimensional space, it is clear that Descartes has
covered only a small range of possible types of collision. Moreover, the
Descartes himself was responsible for the revisions to the French version, and he writes to
Mersenne to tell him that if he sees Picot, the French translator, he should tell him that his
revisions have been delayed because he has had difficulty finding the time in which to clarify
my laws of motion, Descartes to Mersenne, April ; AT IV. .
surface area of the colliding bodies is crucial, above all the area of contact,
which means that the shape of the body has to be taken into account.
Even in the idealised form that they are given, there is a strong case to
be made that the rules apply to cubes rather than spheres, and, in the
context of the cosmology, the situation is even more complicated, as the
surface area of the constituents of stars affects their degree of agitation:
for although the quantity of second-element matter in all the corpuscles that
occupy a given amount of space is the same, whether they are small or large, the
smaller ones have less force because they have more surface area in proportion
to the quantity of their matter, and therefore can be drawn off course and turned
aside in other directions more easily than larger ones. (Part III art. )
See McLaughlin, Force, Determination and Impact, and Peter Damerow et al., Exploring the
Limits of Preclassical Mechanics (New York, ), .
See the second half of the First Day of Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences (Madison, ), ;
and Book II of Newtons Principia (Berkeley, ).
resisting the motion but as being largely constitutive of it. It is because the
medium behaves in the way it does that the body behaves in the way it
does: just as bodies immersed in fluids behave in the way they do because
of their immersion in the fluid, where the properties of the fluid are at
least as fundamental as those of the body, and need to be understood
before we can identify what the relevant properties of the body are going
to be. For this reason, the standing of Descartes laws of motion and
collision rules is different from that of the basic laws of Newtons natural
philosophy. They do not provide the skeleton which can be progressively
fleshed out, but rather just one ingredient in a more complex picture.
Galileo, in his treatment of falling bodies, can just treat the air as a source
of resistance, separating out different types of resistance, such as buoyancy effect and friction, without being in any way obliged to look at the
material constitution of air, far less to offer a mechanistic account of its
constituents, if his account is to be successful. Descartes, by contrast, is
obliged to give details of why the fluids in which bodies move behave in
the way they do, and, if his explanation of this is not in terms of his basic
mechanical principles, then his project has failed. As the last article of
Part II puts it: I do not accept or desire in physics any other principles
than in geometry or abstract mathematics, because all the phenomena
of nature are explained thereby (art. ).
Descartes account takes the form of a theory of the difference between
fluid and solid bodies in which they, and their distinctive properties, are
distinguished purely on a mechanical basis. The basic phenomenological
difference between solids and fluids for Descartes lies in the fact that fluids
will offer no resistance to bodies entering them, whereas solids will, and
he puts this down to the parts of fluid bodies moving whereas those of
solid bodies are stationary:
those which are moving do not prevent the places they are leaving of their
own accord being occupied by others, whereas those that are at rest cannot
be driven out of their places without some external force which causes this
change. From this we may conclude that those bodies that are divided into
very small parts which are agitated by a variety of independent motions are
fluid, while those bodies whose parts are all contiguous and at rest are solid.
(art. )
The parts of the solid body are joined together, we are told, simply by the
fact that they are at rest with respect to one another (art. ), although,
See Gaukroger, The Foundational Role of Statics and Hydrostatics in Descartes Natural
Philosophy.
if this is the case, it is unclear in what sense they are genuine, as opposed
to purely notional, parts of the body in the first place.
Although they are the same thing material extension the motion
of fluids and solids is different. Descartes takes the fact that air and water
can act upon solid bodies so as to break them down (as in rusting and
dissolving), as evidence of the rapid motion of the constituent parts of
fluids, since no physical action of that kind can occur without the parts
moving (art. ). Descartes cosmology, however, will rely upon the fact
that the fluids cause, rather than offer resistance to, the motion of bodies
embedded in them, so it is crucial that the motion of the constituent parts
of fluids does not impede the motion of solid bodies in any way, as we
might initially have expected. As for a body at rest embedded in a fluid,
Descartes maintains that the parts of the fluid, which are in constant
motion, act upon the stationary body equally from all sides, so that the
net effect is zero, and the body remains at rest. In the case of a moving
body, however, the moving parts of the fluid help or reinforce the motion,
allowing a large body to be moved by a small force (Fig. .):
Let us first suppose that the solid body B is not yet in the fluid FD, but that the
particles aeioa of the fluid arranged in the form of a ring, are moving circularly
in the order of the symbols aei, and that others auyao are moving similarly in
Figure .
the order of the symbols ouy. For in order for any body to be fluid, its particles
must move in various ways, as we have said. If the solid body B is at rest in this
fluid FD, between a and o, what will happen? The particles aeio will certainly be
prevented by B from moving o toward a to complete the circle of their movement;
and similarly the particles ouya will be prevented from continuing from a toward
o. Those coming from i toward o will drive B toward C, while those coming
from y toward a will drive it back equally toward F. As a result, these particles
alone will have no force to move B, but will be driven back from o toward u,
and from a toward e; and one circulation will be formed from two, following
the order of the symbols aeiouya. Thus the collision with body B will not in any
way affect the [quantity of] motion of these particles, but will only change their
determination, so that the lines they move along will not be as straight, or as
nearly straight, as those they would have followed had they not struck B. Finally,
if some external force intervenes, driving B toward C, then this force, however
slight, joined to that by which the particles of the fluid coming from i toward
o also drive B toward C, overcomes that by which the particles coming from y
toward a drive B back in the opposite direction. They will therefore be enough
to change their determination and cause them to travel in the order of the
symbols ayuo to the extent required so that the movement of body B not be
impeded, because when two bodies are determined to move in directly opposite
directions, the body having the greater force must change the determination of
the other. (art. )
The fluid will impede the body if it is moving faster than the particles of
the fluid (art. ) but, within limits, the body may also acquire motion
from the fluid (arts. and ). A solid body immersed in a fluid will be
carried along by the fluid (art. ) and indeed by Descartes definition
of motion must not be considered to be moving, because there is no
transference with respect to contiguous bodies (art. ). In other words,
the speed of a body in a fluid will depend to a large extent upon the
speed of the parts of the fluid, and this is going to be a crucial result for
Descartes cosmology, as it will be the main ingredient in the explanation
of why planets remain in stable orbits.
CHAPTER
Augustine, De doctrina christiana II. XXIX. , cited and discussed in Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis
of the Copernican World (Cambridge, Mass., ), .
See Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, (Cambridge,
Mass., ).
On this question see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass., ),
especially Part IV (pp. ). Blumenberg presents a detailed and persausive argument that
the legitimacy of curiositas is one of the defining features of modernity.
For details, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge Mass., ), and
Robert Westman, The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of
the Copernican Theory, Isis (), .
See Robert Westman, The Astronomers Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study,
History of Science (), .
By the seventeenth century, what exactly one was defending when one
defended Copernicanism was more varied than it had been in the
sixteenth century, and Descartes will not defend Copernicus own system,
but a far more radical version of heliocentrism.
Descartes discussion of the nature of the cosmos opens with questions
of size and distance (arts. ). He points out that observation and calculation (for example, on the basis of parallax) reveal that the Moon and
the Sun are further away than they appear, that the Moon is comparatively small as far as celestial bodies go, and that the Sun is far larger
than it appears; that the planets are much further away than had traditionally been imagined, and that there is every indication that the fixed
stars lie at an immense distance from us; and finally, that the apparent
size of celestial bodies will vary depending on where we are located in
the universe. So far, this is quite compatible with Copernicus model in
De revolutionibus (see Fig. . ). But then, in the course of arguing that the
intensity of the light of the Sun is such that it must be a source of light,
by contrast with the planets and the Moon, which merely reflect light,
Descartes makes a move that Copernicus never did:
if we consider how bright and glittering the rays of the fixed stars are, despite
the fact that they are at an immense distance from us and from the Sun, we will
not find it hard to accept that they are like the Sun. Thus if we were as close to
one of them as we are to the Sun, that star would in all probability appear as
large and luminous as the Sun. (art. )
One reason Copernicus did not make this move is that he believed
that the Sun was the centre of the universe. He may have believed this
because of a staunch adherence to the rigidity and impenetrability of
celestial spheres. Certainly on one reconstruction, this was what caused
him to reject Ptolemys equants in the first place, since these required
rotation around an off-centre axis, something physically impossible if
the spheres are indeed rigid. This meant he would have had to look for
an alternative mechanism, the epicycles described by thirteenth-century
Arab astronomers being the best candidate, and substituting these for
Figure .
Ptolemys equants was what pointed Copernicus in the direction of heliocentrism. In Copernicus cosmos, the Sun is supposed to be literally at
the centre of the cosmos. But to be at the centre requires a finite space,
whereas Euclidean space cannot be finite: there cannot be a non-spatial
region bounding it, as philosophers since antiquity had realised. A number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century natural philosophers pointed out
that an infinite space cannot have a centre, and argued nevertheless
for the infinity of space. Nicholas of Cusa did so in the middle of the
fifteenth century, and Bruno was to restate the thesis in the s, but the
See Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel (London, ),
.
question was not revisited, at least in print, until Descartes published his
Principia, although after Descartes the idea quickly became commonly
accepted, even though Descartes himself, as we have seen, prefers to
talk of its indefinite extent rather than its infinite extent.
Because it has a centre around which the planets and fixed stars revolve, Copernicus space has an intrinsic directionality, a notion that
Descartes definitively rejects, as we have seen. Descartes cosmos has
an indefinite number of planetary solar systems, each of them rotating
around its own central sun, and each of these suns itself revolving on its
own axis. His illustration of the system (see Fig. .), where Y, f , F, S etc.
are suns, leaves no doubt at all that he is advocating a multiple heliocentric system, with each sun at the centre of a vortex of rotating fluid
matter which carries its planets along with it.
Descartes defence of this system, which is the same as the system
proposed in Le Monde, begins with the fact that our perception of the
apparent rest or motion of the planets is relative to our own rest or
motion, and we may be unable to tell whether, and to what degree, the
cause of their apparent motion is a motion which we undergo, but of
which we may be unaware, or whether it is due to a motion in what
we are observing. Various astronomical hypotheses have been devised
to account for the phenomena, Descartes tells us, without considering
whether they conformed to the truth (art. ). The Ptolemaic system
the paradigm geocentric system is rejected on the grounds that it fails
to account for the telescopically observed phases of Venus, which are
only explicable if Venus orbits the Sun. He notes that the Copernican
and Tychonic systems account for the observations equally, but, whereas
Copernicus has the Earth move, Tycho can see no physical rationale for
this, so he attempts to devise a system in which the Earth is stationary. In
fact, Descartes argues, if we adhere to his conception of motion, the Earth
in Tychos system has more motion than it does in that of Copernicus
(art. , and in detail in arts. ).
In the system Descartes proposes, we must assume that the Sun
resembles fire in its motion and the fixed stars in its situation (art. ).
Fire is simply the very rapid motion of the small particles of a very fluid
and very mobile matter, for it is only if we construe it as such that we
See Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to
Kant (Cambridge, ) chs. and on the background. For details of Bruno, see Koyre, From the
Closed World to the Infinite Universe; Paul Henri Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno (Paris, );
Sidney Thomas Greenberg, The Infinite in Giordano Bruno (New York, ).
Kuhn points out the lacuna in public defences of the infinity of the world in The Copernican
Revolution, .
Figure .
can understand (in mechanical terms) how fire is able to cause the disintegration of bodies. The parts move only in relation to one another,
however, not as a whole, for the motion that constitutes fire is not that
of the transportation of bodies. As for the total motion or transportation
of the Sun, we can judge that it resembles the fixed stars in that it does
not move from one place in the heaven to another. The Sun, like each
of the fixed stars, must be surrounded by a vast space: in Figure ., for
example, S is the Sun, while F and f are fixed stars, and we will understand that numerous others exist, above, below, and beyond the plane of
this figure, scattered throughout all the dimensions of space (art. ).
The idea of indefinitely many local solar systems is a distinctive feature
of Descartes account compared for example with those of Copernicus,
Kepler, or Galileo but so too, though to a lesser extent, is the idea of
celestial bodies moving in a fluid, as opposed to empty space. Article
reads:
We must acknowledge that the matter of the heavens, like that which forms the
Sun and the fixed stars, is fluid. This is an opinion that is now commonly held
by all astronomers, because they see that otherwise it is almost impossible to
give a satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of the planets.
That a fluid medium should have been commonly held by all astronomers is possibly an exaggeration, but it is close to the truth. There
had indeed been a move to interpret the crystalline spheres in fluid terms,
and, with the breakdown of the sharp distinction between physical and
astronomical questions, by the early decades of the seventeenth century
this does seem to have been a widespread view. For many it was a way
of keeping the crystalline spheres in the wake of Tychos demonstration
that comets pass through the orbits of planets, which rules out shells of
ice or crystal maintaining them in their orbits. The liquefaction of the
crystalline spheres was a relatively painless way of rethinking the question of what kept planets and the fixed stars in their orbits, especially
for those who accepted some form of geocentric theory. But there was
also an attraction for someone like Descartes, who wanted to account
for all physical processes in terms of a physical theory that restricted
physical interaction to contact action. Indeed, in Descartes case the
motivation for postulating a fluid medium is even stronger, because he
See William H. Donahue, The Solid Planetary Spheres in Post-Copernican Natural Philosophy,
in Robert S. Westman, ed., The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley, ), .
Francis Bacon is a case in point: see my The Role of Matter Theory in Baconian and Cartesian
Cosmologies, Perspectives in Science (), .
This has been by far the predominant view, and I defended it myself, on grounds which are no
longer evident to me, in my Descartes, An Intellectual Biography. Dissenters, whose ranks I now join,
include Garber and Des Chene.
that all the same things happen to the planets; and this is all we need to explain
all their remaining phenomena.
The planets are carried in a vortex around the Sun, with their periods
approximately proportional to their distance from the Sun, but two of
the planets, the Earth and Jupiter, also have moons that Descartes is
aware of (four of Jupiters moons having been discovered by Galileo in
), and he explains the motion of these in terms of vortices as well, the
period of the moons of Jupiter again being proportional to their distance
from the centre (art. ). He is careful to note, however, that the centres
of planets will not always necessarily be in exactly the same plane, and
that the orbits they describe will not always be perfectly circular (art. ).
On the first question, variation of the planets in latitude, he notes slight
variations from the ecliptic (the plane of the Earths orbit) in the planes of
other planets, but points out that all these planes pass through the centre
of the Sun (art. ). On the second question, the longitudinal motion of
the planets, he notes that the planets appear more distant from the Sun
at particular times in their orbits (art. ). It is possible that Descartes
knew of Keplers work on planetary orbits, since Beeckman was studying
Kepler carefully from the middle of and there is some reason to
think that he showed this material to Descartes at their meetings at the
end of and early , but, if he did, there is no evidence that
Descartes is referring to elliptical orbits here when he talks of orbits not
being perfectly circular. It is true that in article he talks of the shape
of the orbit of the Moon as coming close to that of an ellipse, but he
never extends this to the orbits of the planets, and in any case what he
is referring to here is not a strict ellipse, which has two foci, but rather a
shape distorted so that it resembles an ellipse, but still has a single centre.
We are in the realm of a mix of mechanics and matter theory here, where
contingencies, not precise mathematics, determine the shapes of orbits.
Planets are always attempting to move in circular orbits, article points
out, but inasmuch as all the bodies in the universe are contiguous and
act on one another, the motion of each is affected by the motions of all
the others, and therefore varies in innumerable ways.
This is evident in Descartes dismissal of the detailed observations
and calculations of Tycho and others, which placed comets between the
Earth and the Sun. Descartes view is that they must be located outside
the orbit of Saturn (considered to be the outermost planet in Descartes
See John Schuster, Descartes and the Scientific Revolution, , vols. (Ann Arbour, Mich.,
), II. .
time), and his reasons for holding this depend not upon more detailed
observations or more detailed calculations, but upon the observation that
they
require this extremely vast space between the sphere of Saturn and the fixed
stars in order to complete all their journeys, for these are so varied, so immense,
and so dissimilar to the stability of the fixed stars and to the regular revolutions
of the planets around the Sun, that they seem inexplicable by any laws of nature
without this space. (art. )
In other words, the underlying mechanical and mattertheoretic principles of Cartesian cosmology require that they be the objects most distant
from the centre of our solar system and, as we shall see when Descartes
comes to discuss comets in detail (arts. ), that the assumed mass
or size of these objects is also determined wholly by these principles.
Descartes fully realises what is at issue here, and in effect he defends
his general procedure in telling us that if what he deduces, from his basic
principles or causes, is in exact agreement with all natural phenomena,
then it seems that it would be an injustice to God to believe that the causes
of the effects that are in nature and which we have thus discovered are
false (art. ). He talks of deducing these in a mathematical sequence,
by which he presumably means synthetically, from first principles, since
there is no mathematical demonstration of any kind in the Principia. The
crucial phrase is that about an injustice to God, which is a clear signal
that what is at issue is our starting out from clear and distinct principles,
and proceeding in a way that preserves this clarity and distinctness: if
we can do this then, as was made clear in the Meditationes and in Part I
of the Principia, we will not go astray, because God has guaranteed that
what we perceive clearly and distinctly is true. Nevertheless, Descartes
is careful to point to the hypothetical nature of his own enterprise: if we
start from clear and distinct principles and proceed in the appropriate
way then we cannot go wrong, but, of course, not everyone is going
to take Descartes word for it that his principles actually satisfy these
criteria, so he is content to have them treated as hypotheses, so long as
we recognise that what he will deduce from them will agree entirely with
the phenomena (art. ).
CELESTIAL MATTER AND THE TRANSMISSION OF LIGHT
One reason that these disclaimers come at this point is that Descartes
is now about to present his matter theory, and this is something for
See Edward Slowik, Perfect Solidity: Natural Laws and the Problem of Matter in Descartes
Universe, History of Philosophy Quarterly (), .
Figure .
Figure .
though actual motion may not result from this pressure (art. ). Light
is, in short, a pressure caused by a tendency to centrifugal motion.
VORTEX THEORY
Figure .
One might think that the further from the centre of the vortex a body
is, the more quickly it moves; and this will indeed be an assumption
in Descartes account of the motion of comets. However, he also knew
that Mercury rotates more quickly than Saturn, so speed of motion
cannot be a simple function of distance from the Sun. What is needed to
save the appearances here is a twofold mechanism, and Descartes had
already provided this in Le Monde. What he argued was that the closer
globules of second matter are to the centre of the vortex, the smaller
and faster they are. But this only holds up to the orbit of the outermost
planet, Saturn. Beyond Saturn, the globules move outwards with added
increments in speed (art. ). The reason for this is that there is an
artificial augmentation of the speed of the globules in the region between
the Sun and Saturn, caused by the rotation of the Sun, which causes
bodies contiguous to its surface to rotate more rapidly, accelerating those
contiguous to these as well, but to a slightly lesser degree, and so on out
to Saturn, where the effect finally peters out. The result is that, as one
moves both inwards from Saturn towards the Sun, and outwards from
Saturn towards the periphery, the speed of the globules increases, and
it follows from this that globules nearer the Sun must be smaller than
those further away, because if they were the same size they would have
more centrifugal force, in which case they would be projected outwards
beyond the latter (art. ).
Subtle matter is not completely uniform in size and agitation, something that Descartes puts down to the fact that it is formed from rubbings
and scrapings. Some of the larger parts of this first element are able to
join together, and in the process of doing this they transfer motion to
the smaller parts. The former will be found predominantly flowing in
a straight line from the poles to the centre of the vortex, whereas the
smaller parts, because they are smaller and more agitated, are able to
circulate throughout the vortex. The larger parts of the first element
have to pass around the tightly packed globules of the second element,
and they become twisted into grooved threads, those coming from opposite poles being twisted in opposite directions, that is, having left- and
right-handed screws (art. ), a point that is going to be important in his
account of magnetism in Part IV.
Grooved particles also play a key role in the account of the formation
of sunspots. Descartes provision of two mechanisms for dealing with the
fact that bodies beyond the orbit of Saturn need to increase in speed the
AT XI. .
Aiton, The Vortex Theory of the Planetary Motions ( n. ), notes that this implies that the stability
of the vortex requires that the centrifugal force must not decrease with distance from the centre.
further out they lie, whereas bodies between Saturn and the Sun need to
decrease in speed the further out they are from the centre, is successful
as far as it goes, but there is an extra problem that Descartes had not
attempted to deal with in Le Monde, namely that sunspots move more
slowly than any of the planets, which seems to contradict the theory
that the Sun rotates so rapidly it accelerates the fluid surrounding it.
His response to this, the postulation of a solar atmosphere that slows
down the spots and extends as far as Mercury (art. ), adds a third
mechanism on top of the other two, and has the unfortunate effect of
beginning to make these mechanisms look like they are piling up merely
to save the phenomena, a core criticism of the epicycles that heliocentrism
was designed to eradicate. Sunspots are crucial to Descartes account,
however, as indeed they were to the physical defence of heliocentrism,
being an indication both of the motion of the Sun and of the corruptibility
of the heavens. The key to their formation on Descartes account is the
grooved particles of subtle matter.
These grooved particles, as we have just seen, move to the centre of
the vortex. On account of their relatively small degree of agitation and
their irregular surfaces, they easily lock together to form large masses at
the surface of the star from which they emerge. Because of their size and
small degree of agitation, they resist that action in which we said earlier
that the force of light consists (art. ) and as a result they appear as a spot
on the surface of the Sun. Descartes compares the process by which they
are formed to the boiling of water which contains some substance which
resists motion more than the water: it rises to the surface on boiling to
form a scum, which, by a process of agglutination, comes to acquire the
character of the third element. These spots can cover the whole surface
of a star and cause it to slowly disappear, and very occasionally the fine
matter in such a covered star can break to the surface so it suddenly
shines brightly, as was the case, Descartes maintains, with the new star
(supernova) observed by Tycho Brahe in Cassiopeia in (arts.
). Indeed, this account provides an explanation for why some stars
can alternately appear and disappear, and why an entire vortex may
occasionally be destroyed by being absorbed by other vortices.
COMETS, PLANETS, AND MOONS
Vortices are destroyed when the stars at their centre become occluded
by spots. When the star remains free from spots, the vortex of which
it is the centre cannot be destroyed, but if it becomes covered in spots,
then how long it will last depends on how much it hinders the action
Figure .
The theory that ours was not the only solar system was singled out in many of the condemnations
of Cartesianism. Proposition of the Condemnation of the Faculty of Theology at Louvain, ,
Descartes to Ciermans, March ; AT II. : I dont know why you think the corpuscles
of celestial matter do not maintain the rotation that gives rise to colours as well as the rectilinear
motion in which light consists, for we can grasp both equally well by our reasoning.
talks of the two planets having moons, namely Jupiter and the Earth,
each being at the centre of their own vortex, which carries its satellites
around with it. The implication is that planets without satellites and
no other satellites had been discovered lacked such vortices, but it is
difficult to tell how they differ from planets with satellites, since they have
been formed in the same way, from occluded rotating stars. Presumably,
they have rotated since they were stars, and their ejection from the centre
of another vortex does not seem to impede their rotation (see Part IV
art. ). The natural reading here, I suggest, is that each planet maintains
its own vortex (allowing the slight diminution due to the surrounding
medium mentioned in art. ), but that only two of them have captured
bodies which subsequently revolve around the planet. Satellites are of the
same material as comets and planets, however, and they have reached
levels closer to the centre than Saturn, so the question arises why they
do not behave like planets, finding their own layer in the fluid and being
moved around the Sun by it.
Descartes suggests two possibilities as to the origins of the Earth/Moon
relationship. Either the Moon moved towards the Earth before the Earth
began to orbit the Sun (he considers that this is what happened in the
case of Jupiter), or, more likely, the Moon, having the same density as
the Earth but a greater force of agitation, had to revolve at the same
distance from the centre as the Earth but more quickly. Both these possibilities are accounted for in the model that Descartes proposes (art. ).
Letting S be the Sun, and T be the Earth (see Fig. .), the circle NTZ
is the appropriate orbit for the two bodies. Assume the Moon travels
along NTZ. Wherever it begins its motion, it will sooner or later arrive at A, close to the Earth, because it moves more quickly than the
Earth. At A it will encounter resistance from the Earths atmosphere
(air and sky), which extends to there from T, and it will be deflected
towards B, because this requires less deviation from a straight line than
deflection towards D. While moving from A to B, all celestial matter
contained in the space ABCD, which carries the Moon along, will be
rotated around centre T like a vortex. This will also cause the Earth to rotate on its axis, while at the same time all these things will be transported
around centre S along the circle NTZ. Here, contrary to article , it
sounds as if it is the motion of the Moon around ABCD that causes
the vortex. It is impossible to tell which of these accounts of the origin
of the vortex Descartes has in mind, possibly both: it is possible that
the vortex is initially caused by the rapid rotation of a planet accelerating the fluid matter around it, and the force of this vortex is then
Figure .
The Principia, .
inconsistent. The vast literature defending vortex theory from the publication of Descartes Principia in to Fontenelles Theorie des tourbillons
of , a literature to which some of the greatest mathematicians and
natural philosophers of the age contributed, indicates the lasting power
of the model that Descartes advocated.
See ibid., .
CHAPTER
Descartes attempt to account for the formation of the Earth lay at the
foundation of a complete transformation of our understanding of the
nature of our planet and its age, a transformation that was to have far
On theories of the Earth in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, see Clarence J. Glacken,Traces on
the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley, ), chs. .
Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Ithaca, ), . See also his The Cartesian Model
and its Role in Eighteenth-Century Theory of the Earth , in T. Lennon et al. eds., Problems of
Cartesianism (Kingston, ), .
AT V. .
greater consequences than the removal of the Earth from the centre
of the cosmos. Descartes and his contemporaries took the Earth to be
about six thousand years old, on the grounds of biblical chronology. By
the second half of the eighteenth century, the calculations of Buffon
whose great Histoire Naturelle was prefaced, with obvious Cartesian precedents, by a Discourse on Method followed by examples of this method
in the following discourses, the Theory of the Earth, the Formation of
the Planets, and the Generation of Animals were putting the figure
at up to ten million years. Although biblical chronology, with its natural disasters such as the Flood, was far more conducive to the idea
of a natural history of the Earth than the cyclical model of history of
the ancients, in which there were no irreversible events in the history
of the Earth, its narrative was a mythological one, and when natural
philosophy replaced biblical chronology it was not only one of the most
important developments in our understanding of the sequence of natural
events at a cosmological level, but a watershed in the establishment of
the autonomy of natural philosophy.
THE NATURE OF THE EARTH
In Part III of the Principia, Descartes had explained how the occlusion of
stars by spots which gradually build up as the star becomes less and less
able to expel the hardened material that forms on it surface causes the
vortex in which the star is located to collapse, and the occluded star is
forced into a neighbouring vortex, where, moving inwards until it finds
a layer in which it is in equilibrium with the surrounding celestial fluid,
it becomes a planet and is carried around the centre by that fluid. This
account is now used in Part IV as a basis for a hypothetical theory of
the formation of the Earth, in which events are reconstructed so that
the outcome of this process would result in the Earth having exactly the
same features as those it actually has (art. ). Descartes is interested only
in what kind of physical processes could have resulted in the formation
Roger, Buffon, .
See Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke
to Vico (Chicago, ), , and Roger, Buffon, .
On this contrast see G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity
to the Reformation (Berkeley, ).
The context in which these events occurs is, of course, extremely complex, and there was continuous dispute over the kind of guidance offered by the Bible in the early modern era; see, for
example, Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, ),
and Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia,
).
In other words, God having decided to give the Earth the characteristics
it has, he could have chosen the physical process that Descartes describes
and have got the same result as that he achieved by supernatural means.
The reconstruction of the Earths formation from a star and its journey
into this solar system provide an indication of what its internal constitution must be like. The innermost region of the planet, marked I (see
Fig. .), is composed of subtle matter and is of the same consistency
Figure .
as the Sun, except that it is not so pure. The middle region consists of
dense material, of a similar consistency to sunspots, which is impervious to the globules of the second element but able to admit grooved
particles and other subtle matter. Finally, the outermost region, which
is what Part IV is primarily concerned with, consists of particles of the
third and, to a lesser extent, second element. Descartes tells us that the
innermost nature of these particles can be known from the way in which
We shall look at Descartes account of the manufacture and properties of glass, in articles ,
below.
As regards the third and fourth kinds of action, light and heat,
Descartes notes that light, being nothing other than a certain pressure
that occurs along straight lines drawn from the Sun to the Earth, can
exert a pressure through layers of matter and that matter can be agitated
by the Suns rays, although this does not happen in a regular way. This
agitation is called heat or rather, it is what causes the sensation of heat
in us and the heat may remain after the light has ceased. Moreover,
because it is an irregular form of agitation, it breaks up practically all
terrestrial bodies and causes them to expand.
THE FORMATION OF THE EARTH
As the Earth enters the solar system and moves into the appropriate
layer of celestial matter, there will be an exchange of matter between
the Earth and the fluid in which it is embedded, the smaller globules on
its surface changing places with the heavier globules of the surrounding
fluid, a process that forces the third element matter to join together to
form large clumps which inhibit the activity of celestial globules. The
process is illustrated in Figure ., which represents various stages in the
Unfortunately, as Regis was later to point out, if weight results from circulation of surrounding
matter, it should be directed not towards the centre but towards the axis of rotation; Regis, Syst`eme
de philosophie, I. .
Figure .
Figure .
Figure .
matter has to pass a little more quickly between the Moon and , and as
a result the Earth is pushed a little towards D, so that its centre T moves
away slightly from M. Because the air and water surrounding the Earth
are fluid bodies, the force that moves the Earth slightly away from M
will also move them towards T, acting on them from sides , and , .
This causes a compensatory rise at , and , , and hence that part
which is not at F (below the region B and where the ocean is as shallow as
possible) will be at G after six hours (below the region of point C where
the ocean is deepest); and after six more hours at H, below the region
of point D, and so on (art. ). Since the Earth rotates counterclockwise
once every twenty-four hours, points , and , will move giving rise
to two high and two low tides daily.
This theory also accounts for the monthly, half-monthly, and halfyearly cycles. Monthly cycles are put down to the fact that the moon
makes a full rotation around its axis once every lunar month, so that
every six hours it makes / of its circuit, with the result that the tides
do not change precisely every six hours but lag behind approximately
twelve minutes. As regards half-yearly cycles, because the axis BD is
slightly shorter than the axis AC, the Moon moves more rapidly at B,
where it is full, and at D, where it is new, than at A and C, when it
is at quadrature (art. ). Finally, there is also a half-yearly cycle (not
mentioned in Le Monde) whereby the tides are higher at the equinoxes
because the moons plane is near to ecliptic, whereas the Earths diurnal
motion is along the plane of the equator, and the two planes intersect
at the equinoxes and are at their greatest distance at solstices (art. ).
The third of the traditional elements, earth, is dealt with in the context of a discussion of the interior and exterior of the Earth, and here
we encounter a form of matter theory of a very traditional Epicurean
sort, in which mechanical considerations play no effective role, as it is
shape, rather than size, speed, and direction, that drives the discussion.
In such cases, explanation just takes the form of an extrapolation from
macroscopic structural features of bodies to the microscopic level. The
structure of the outer part of the interior shell C, in Figure . for
example, is described in terms of branching particles, presumably because the macroscopic analogues (such as chainmail) constitute the most
strongly bound material that nevertheless remains porous, and its interior is described in terms of smooth, rod-like, polished particles. There
is, of course, no argument for such a structure, and the best Descartes
can offer is the statement that it is credible (art. ). The chemistry of
changes near the Earths core is given a similarly speculative treatment,
with acids being formed from the heating of rod-like particles and their
transformation into sharp, pointed particles (art. ). The treatment of
the exterior of the Earth E in Figure . is likewise speculative, qualitative, and again consists in an extrapolation from such physical features
of macroscopic bodies as their shape and flexibility to the supposed qualities that microscopic particles must have if they are to have the effects
that we experience. So, for example, just as the properties of acids are
explained in terms of sharp, pointed particles, the properties of sulphur
are described in terms of branching particles mingled with acrid juices
and metallic particles (art. ).
The fourth traditional element, fire, is something that Descartes had
devoted some considerable attention to in Le Monde, and it was a test
case of how a mechanical explanation could replace an elemental one.
In Part IV, this mechanical construal is, of course, still what lies behind his
account, but he chooses to deal here with a range of phenomena where a
are so miniscule that they escape the senses, and which are said to have various
sizes, shapes, and movements, because no one can doubt that there are indeed
many such bodies, as has just been shown. It has been rejected, first, because it
supposed these bodies to be indivisible, for which reason I also reject it. Second,
because it imagined that there was a void around these bodies, which I show
cannot be the case. Third, because it attributed weight to these bodies, whereas
I understand that there is no weight in any body considered in isolation, but only
in so far as that body depends on the situation and movement of other bodies,
and relates to them. And finally, because it did not show how individual things
resulted solely from the encounters of small bodies, or if it showed this about
some things, not all of the reasons were consistent with one another. (art. )
These objections show the mechanical underpinnings of Descartes approach to micro-corpuscularianism, and, even though those underpinnings might not be so evident in the kind of mattertheoretic approach
he adopts in the cases we have just looked at, it is there in reserve, so
to speak, and these reserves are now drawn upon in his treatment of
magnetism.
MAGNETISM AND RELATED PHENOMENA
concluded that the magnet is animate and acts in a similar way to the
human soul.
Clearly Descartes is having nothing of this, and he had raised a problem with using magnetism to explain other phenomena as early as Rule
of the Regulae, arguing that we cannot take phenomena such as astral influences and magnetic attraction to be something primitive, and explain
other phenomena in terms of them, for they are more poorly understood
than what they are invoked to explain. Nevertheless, recourse to magnetic explanations seemed forced upon natural philosophers in a number
of areas, not least cosmology. With the removal of the celestial spheres and
the rejection of the Aristotelian physics underlying the traditional geocentric cosmology, magnetism provided what many geocentrists and
heliocentrists alike saw as the key to the understanding of what keeps
the planets in a stable harmonious relation to one another and to the
Sun: magnetic attraction was what bound them together into a system.
Gilbert had provided the model in De Magnete, arguing that elemental
earth is magnetic and that the Earth itself is, as a consequence, a giant
lodestone, which he assumed rotates around its magnetic poles (since
he assumed these to be identical with its geographical poles). Magnetic
motion was circular, argued Gilbert, and, since the parts of the Earth
are magnetic, it is hardly surprising that the Earth has a circular diurnal
motion. He was followed by various Jesuit defenders of geocentrism up
to the s, and by defenders of heliocentrism such as Stevin, who construed stability in terms of a magnetic attraction between planets, and
by Kepler, who argued that the planetary orbits were stable in virtue of a
combination of several factors, including the tangential forces generated
by their rotation and the Suns central attraction, which was magnetic.
Moreover Galileo, before he developed his account of circular inertia,
defended a heliocentric account in terms of magnetic forces.
But, whatever its apparent use, the explanatory force of something as
poorly understood as magnetism prevented it from providing anything
other than a stopgap measure. Descartes does not use magnetism to explain other phenomena; he sets out to explain it, using the same theory he
has used to explain the stability of planetary orbits, the nature of weight,
and the formation of solar systems. For Descartes, the only way to deal
with magnetism is to mechanise it, because that is the only way we can
understand any material process. At the end of his discussion in Part IV,
he tells us that he has shown that magnets have no qualities so occult,
nor effects of sympathy and antipathy so marvellous as to render them
inexplicable by the principles of magnitude, size, position, and motion
(art. ). Descartes was not alone in pressing this view, and Mersenne for
one had struggled with the question, as had Gassendi, who proposed
the old hooked particles of the Epicureans, but Descartes was the first
mechanistic account of magnetism: and not just the first but the only
detailed and remotely plausible mechanistic account.
The core of his account of magnetism which he develops in the
context of the lodestone but then applies to the Earths magnetism
is the existence of long threaded pores or channels in lodestone which
admit grooved particles, depending on whether the particle has a righthand screw or a left-hand one. These pores are aligned along the polar
axes of the lodestone and one set admits grooved particles in one polar
direction, the other grooved particles in opposite polar direction. The
generation of these grooved particles had been set out in Part III (arts.
). Their grooves derive from the fact that they are squeezed through
the interstices of contiguous spherical globules (see Fig. .). As a result
Figure .
See the discussions of magnetism in Marin Mersenne, Quaestiones in Genesim (Paris, ), cols.
and , and La Verite des Sciences (Paris, ), .
Gassendi, Opera Omnia, I. col. col. ; . col. col. .
I am treating Huygens various works on magnetism (in vol. X I X of Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres
compl`etes de Christiaan Huygens, vols. (The Hague, )) as a development of Descartes
account, even though Huygens revises this account significantly. It is worth noting that Newton
had almost nothing to say on magnetism, and he did not believe that the inverse square law
applied to magnetism; see Principia, (Part I I, prop. , coroll. ).
Figure .
enter from one Pole and travel to the other along passages through the
Earth, some allowing particles with a right-hand thread, others allowing
particles with a left-hand thread. When they emerge, they are deflected
by the air, whose pores are unable to accommodate them, so they return
to their point of origin forming a kind of vortex (art. ). Their course
during this return explains the dip and declination of the magnetic compass needle, and their right-handed and left-handed orientations explain
polarity.
Grooved particles will naturally be found in significant concentrations
where there are bodies with pores that can accommodate them, and
this is why they accumulate in and around the lodestone. When two
magnets, aligned so that their contrary poles are facing one another,
come sufficiently close that the grooved particles issuing from one can
reach the other before being deflected by the air, they will continue along
the path of least resistance, producing a magnetic vortex on a small scale
(Fig. .). The resulting vortical flow drives the air from between the
Figure .
magnets, and the displaced air circling to their rears, T and R, pushes
them together. The same process is at work in the magnetisation of
iron by the lodestone, whose pores are of a size and situation necessary
to accommodate the grooved particles, once they have been threaded
by the vortex of the lodestone. Indeed, what is particularly remarkable
about the magnetisation of iron is the vortical pattern formed, as when
one sprinkles iron filings around a magnet (art. ), which provides
striking observational confirmation of the vortex theory.
The last topic of Part IV, electricity, follows on naturally from magnetism in that, as Descartes points out, just as magnetism exhibits a force
of attraction, so, too, do amber, wax, resin, and other similar things
(art. ). Moreover, the aim in both cases is to provide an account of the
phenomena in terms of mechanics and matter theory, perhaps on the
model of what he has just offered in the case of magnetism. But electricity
was much more poorly understood than magnetism, and there was no
equivalent of Gilberts De Magnete, from which Descartes had culled almost all his observational information in his treatment of magnetism. He
confines his treatment to the behaviour of glass, which, as we have seen,
was dealt with earlier in Part IV in his examination of the properties of
fire. The account of the structure of glass presented there conflicted with
a theory of static electricity which had been advocated by the English natural philosophers Kenelm Digby, Thomas White, and Thomas Browne,
and it was a theory that was to have wide currency in England in the
mid seventeenth century. Descartes writes:
Although I cannot examine this force in jet or amber without first deducing from
various observations many of their other properties, and thus investigating their
innermost nature, nevertheless because the same force is also in glass (which I
was obliged to discuss a little earlier in order to demonstrate the effects of fire),
if I did not explain this force then perhaps the other things that I have written
about glass could be questioned. Especially since some men, seeing that this
force occurs in amber, in wax, in resin, and in practically all oily substances, will
perhaps think it consists in the fact that certain slender and branching particles
of these bodies have been moved by friction (for friction is usually required
to arouse this force), scatter themselves through the nearby air, and, adhering
to one another, immediately return and bring with them the tiny bodies that
they strike on their way. Just as we see that a drop of liquefied fats of this kind,
suspended from a rod, can be shaken by slight movements in such a way that
one part of the drop still adheres to the rod, while another part descends for
some distance and immediately returns and also brings with it the tiny straws
or other minute bodies which it has encountered. For no such thing can be
imagined in glass, at least if its nature is as we described it above; and therefore
another cause of this attraction in it must be indicated. (art. )
The structural difference between glass and oily substances is that the
latter have interlinking branching parts (see art. ), whereas glass has
large smoothly joined constituents. The explanation for the behaviour
of glass is to be found in the mechanical arrangement of its constituent
matter rather than in some chemical property of this matter. As with
magnetism, Descartes sees the solution in the distinctive pores of glass.
The heating process through which glass is formed has produced long
thin channels which run from one end of the glass to the other and
which are filled with subtle matter, which forms itself into long thin
ribbons (Fig. .). These ribbons, being formed of subtle matter, are
See Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, . The theory is set out in
Kenelme Digby, Two Treatises (Paris, ), .
Figure .
highly agitated, but are confined within the pores of the glass because
their shapes have been fixed in the cooling of the glass and they cannot
accommodate themselves to the pores of the surrounding air. Rubbing of
the glass agitates these ribbons to such an extent that they escape into the
nearby air and the pores of nearby bodies, picking up material from these
as it adheres to them, but returning in the end to the glass for this is the
only thing that can accommodate their shape. This account is not specific
to glass, however, but should hold for at least most electrical bodies.
What Descartes believes he has achieved in Parts III and IV of the Principia is set out in article , which is the end of the proper subject matter
of Part IV, namely the theory of the Earth. Taking us through some of
the more recalcitrant phenomena he has attempted to explain in terms
of the basic principles set out in the Principia electricity, magnetism,
fire, and the transmission of light over great distances he concludes
that everyone
will be easily persuaded that there are, in rocks and plants, no forces so secret,
no marvels of sympathy or antipathy so astounding, and finally no effects in
all of nature which are properly attributed to purely physical causes or causes
lacking in mind or thought, the reasons for which cannot be deduced from these
principles. Consequently, it is unnecessary to add anything else to them.
The test of this claim will now come in Part V, where Descartes principles
will be extrapolated into the realm of the organic, the most ambitious
extension of his system of natural philosophy imaginable. It is here that
the real test and one of the real strengths of his system lies.
CHAPTER
In Parts III and IV, Descartes tells us, he has considered the inorganic
world as a machine: the topic of Part V is living things, which Descartes
also considers as machines. As he puts it at the close of LHomme:
I desire that you consider that all the functions that I have attributed to this
machine, such as the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and the arteries,
the nourishment and growth of the bodily parts, respiration, waking and sleeping; the reception of light, sounds, odours, smells, heat and other such qualities
by the external sense organs; the impression of the ideas of them in the organ
of common sense and the imagination, the retention or imprint of these ideas
in the memory; the internal movements of the appetites and the passions; and
finally the external movements of all the bodily parts that so aptly follow both
the actions of objects presented to the senses, and the passions and impressions
that are encountered in memory: and in this they imitate as perfectly as is possible the movements of real men. I desire, I say, that you should consider that
these functions follow in this machine simply from the disposition of the organs
as wholly naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from
the disposition of its counterweights and wheels. To explain these functions,
then, it is not necessary to conceive of any vegetative or sensitive soul, or any
other principle of movement or life, other than its blood and its spirits which are
agitated by the heat of the fire that burns continuously in its heart, and which
is of the same nature as those fires that occur in inanimate bodies.
AT X. .
The doctrine of the animal machine was without doubt the most notorious Cartesian doctrine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and brought upon him more opprobrium than all his other doctrines put
together. Yet, as we shall see, the doctrine has been widely misunderstood, above all because it has been construed as eliminating any sentient
and cognitive states in animals, whereas, in fact, not only does Descartes
not deny such states to animals, his mechanist account is designed to
offer an explanation of such states.
In the light of such misunderstandings, it is important in looking at
Descartes account of physiology to begin by asking about the aim of
a mechanised physiology, that is, what Descartes hoped to achieve by
such a programme. The first thing to note is that it is a direct continuation of his account of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. It works
within the same theory of matter and the same mechanist constraints as
his account of these, allowing no qualitative distinction between types
of matter, allowing no internal forces or activities, and explaining various differences between the properties of things in terms of three sizes
of matter. There are three kinds of approach to which his mechanist
physiology can be seen as an alternative, and by contrasting Descartes
account with these we will get a better idea of the novelty and value of his
approach. These approaches attempt to provide an account of physiology that aims to explain various functional differences between organs
either, first, in terms of qualitatively different kinds of matter, or, second,
in terms of some non-material principle guiding those functions, or, third,
in goal-directed terms which cannot be captured mechanistically.
In the first case, what was usually invoked was the traditional doctrine
of the four elements earth, air, fire, and water but, as we have seen,
Descartes had questioned both the basis for this doctrine and whether
the accounts it produced could have informative content or explanatory
value, and he had offered his own accounts of phenomena such as burning, and the different physical properties of solids and fluids, in terms of
his much more economical single-matter theory. At a general level, the
argument is that invoking the traditional theory of the elements explains
nothing, and the cases they are invoked to explain in physical theory can
actually be accounted for fully in terms of a single type of matter, material
extension. When we turn to physiology, the same considerations apply.
Why try to account for differences in physiological function in terms of
On the development of the doctrine see Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From BeastMachine to Man
Machine, rev. edn. (New York, ), and Jean-Claude Beaune, Lautomate et ses mobiles (Paris,
).
a theory of matter which would not explain anything anyway, and which
can be replaced by something much more economical?
In the second case, a parallel set of considerations holds. Instead of
a theory of elements, what are invoked are various classes of soul
vegetative souls, sensitive souls, and rational souls and Eustachius and
Dupleix for example each set out this doctrine routinely and in detail.
These are supposed to capture various qualitative differences that
emerge as we ascend the chain of being from inanimate matter, to
vegetable life, to animal life, to human beings; or alternatively, as we
ascend from those functions we share with plants, to those we share
with animals, to those that are distinctively human. Descartes certainly
thinks that distinctively human capacities require the postulation of a
separate soul, but the postulation of a hierarchy of souls and, more
specifically, the postulation of a sensitive soul to account for animal
sentience is a different matter. First, it is unnecessary, since one can,
Descartes believes, explain vegetable and animal capacities simply in
terms of matter. Second, the postulation of a hierarchy of souls does not
actually explain anything: it does nothing more than label the stages
at which various differences are considered to emerge, while giving the
impression that the cause of the difference has been identified. Third,
a hierarchy of souls obscures the all-important distinction between the
soul and the body, suggesting that the differences may be ones of degree,
something that Descartes singles out for criticism in his theory of the
passions, as we shall see in the next chapter.
The third case, that of the apparent goal-directedness of certain physiological processes, is the most serious challenge to a mechanist physiology, and the cases of the development of the foetus and perceptual cognition are the most problematic kinds of case for a mechanist account.
Descartes deals with both in some detail, and, as we shall see, his treatment of them differs considerably, highlighting two very different kinds
of strategy available within a mechanist physiology. His account of embryology is radically revisionary and effectively eliminates any element
of goal-directedness in foetal development. His account of perceptual
cognition, on the other hand, aims to save the appearances to a large extent, and is reductionist, in that nothing other than mechanical processes
one, but to show that there are only two things, not the four postulated by
his Aristotelian contemporaries, namely body, vegetative soul, sensitive
soul, and rational soul. Indeed, mind comes neither in different types,
nor in the form of higher and lower faculties, for Descartes insists there
is only one kind of mind, just as there is only one kind of matter. Many of
the functions that his contemporaries ascribed to lower faculties of the
mind, especially those associated with non-rational sentience, must, on
Descartes account, be assigned purely to corporeal faculties and their
mechanistic underpinnings.
BASIC PHYSIOLOGY
Under the category of basic physiology, I include all those nondevelopmental forms of physiology that do not have a direct bearing
on cognition. It is important that we restrict the term cognition to those
cognitive processes working by means of a cognitive representation of
the stimulus, however, for Descartes also conceives of a very different
kind of sensory process, which does not involve cognitive representation,
namely reflex action in animals and in some plants, something that he
associates with the possession of a circulatory system.
Of the functions traditionally ascribed to the vegetative soul, Descartes
has little to say on digestion, respiration, and reproduction. He has a deep
interest in the movement of the blood and growth, however, and he does
discuss nutrition, which is closely tied to growth and will be used as a
model for the mechanism of foetal development. The basic aim of the
project is set out in La Description du Corps Humain in these terms:
It is true that it may be hard to believe that the disposition of organs alone is
sufficient for the production in us of all the movements that are not determined
by our thought. This is why I shall try to demonstrate this here, and to explain
the entire machine of our body in such a way that we will have no more reason
to think that it is our soul that excites in us those movements that we do not
experience as being directed by our will, than we have to judge that there is a
soul in a clock that makes it tell the time.
AT XI. .
of nutrients through the blood to the various parts of the body, and
sensation, through the circulation of various spirits through the blood,
nerve fluids, or some other medium from sense organs or sensitive parts
of the body to other parts such as the brain.
Descartes account of the circulation of the blood is his most novel
contribution to basic physiology. Galenic physiology had distinguished
diastole, in which the cavities of the heart dilate and shorten, and systole,
in which the heart lengthens and the ventricles contract, but the venous
and arterial systems are autonomous on the Galenic account, and blood
moves away from and towards the heart in both. Harvey established that
the blood circulates around the body, and supplied a mechanism for this
circulation: the pulsific faculty or pumping action of the heart, which
is wholly muscular. Descartes rejected the details of Harveys account of
the muscular action of the heart on a number of grounds, but above
all he could not accept a primitive pumping action, as if it were simply
a natural function of the body, for how could such a natural function be
accommodated to a mechanist framework? Some cause of the pumping
had to be found, and more specifically some mechanically construable
process had to be invoked to explain it. What Descartes offers in its
place is an ebullition theory, whereby the cause of the expansion and
contraction of the heart is traced to the production of heat in the heart.
Descartes tells Plempius that heat of the heart instantaneously rarefies
the blood by breaking up its parts, making them take up a greater
volume and causing the heart to swell as a result. This forces the closing
of the atrioventricular valves, which prevents more blood coming into
the ventricles, and the opening of the semilunar valves, which releases
the pressure by forcing the rarefied blood into the arteries, causing them
to swell. As the blood cools, the arteries and ventricles that contain it
contract, the semilunar valves close, and the process is repeated. Because
Descartes construes heat in terms of the violent motion of the parts of
matter, as we have seen, the thermogenetic processes responsible for the
creation of pressure in the arteries are amenable to a purely mechanical
explanation.
How seriously Descartes took his account of the cause of circulation
is clear from his remark to Mersenne that he was prepared to admit that
if what I have written on this topic . . . turns out to be false, then the
AT XI. .
rarity. For after having described the movement of the heart in a way that can
apply as easily to plants as to animals, if the organs found there are the same,
I have no difficulty in conceiving how the movement of the plant can come
about; but I would not undertake to say definitively how it happens, if I have
not seen and examined it first.
AT II. . Descartes did try to obtain specimens for dissection and experiment, but there is no
evidence that these attempts came to anything. On October, he wrote to Mersenne thanking
him for an offer of seeds, telling him that he is now working on a part of his speculations
concerning plants (AT II. ). On November, he wrote to Mersenne again thanking him for
the offer of seeds, but saying he knew they would be available at the Leiden botanical gardens,
only they had not ripened and the time to sow them had already come, and asking for a plant
catalogue from the Jardin Royal in Paris (AT II. ). This is the last trace I can find of the issue
in either Descartes or Mersennes correspondence.
Descartes remarks give the impression that he has not come across the plant before, but Beeckman
had described it in his Journal, as early as ( Journal, I. ), and Descartes may well have had
access to this material. There is also a later reference in the Journal (II. ) dating from .
Principes (fuller than the Latin version) Part IV, art. .
the parts of the organism are connected. What we are dealing with here
is in effect a reflex response, and comparison with Descartes account of
the reflex response in animals shows it to be essentially the same kind of
thing.
Descartes is often credited with the discovery of the reflex response
in animals, but his account of it has been widely misunderstood. In the
account of reflex response in LHomme, he gives an example of a man
machine. [Fig. .] His foot, B, is next to a fire, A, and because the parts
Figure .
of fire move very swiftly they displace the area of skin that they touch,
pulling the end of the thread c which is there. When this is pulled the
pore de, which is located in the brain where the thread terminates, is
opened simultaneously, just as happens when one pulls a cord and the
bell at the other end rings simultaneously. The entrance to the pore de
being opened, the animal spirits from cavity F enter and are carried
through it, part into the muscles that serve to withdraw this foot from
the fire, part into those that serve to turn the eyes and head to look at it,
and part into those that serve to advance the hands and bend the whole
body to protect it. Such automatic motion is completely mechanical
and Descartes at one point compares the mechanical control of muscular
motion to the operations of a church organ:
If you have ever had the curiosity to examine the organs in our churches, you
know how the bellows push air into receptacles called (presumably for this
reason) wind-chests. And you know how the air passes from there into one or
other of the pipes, depending on how the organist moves his fingers on the
keyboard. You can think of our machines heart and arteries, which push the
animal spirits into the cavities of its brain, as being like the bellows, which push
air into the wind-chests; and of external objects, which stimulate certain nerves
and cause spirits contained in the cavities to pass into particular pores, as being
like the fingers of the organist, which press certain keys and cause the air to pass
from the wind-chests to particular pipes. Now the harmony of an organ does
not depend on the externally visible arrangement of pipes or on the shape of
the wind-chests or other parts. It depends solely on three factors: the air that
comes from the bellows, the pipes that make the sound, and the distribution of
air in the pipes. In just the same way, I would point out, the functions we are
concerned with here do not depend at all on the external shape of the visible
parts that anatomists distinguish in the substance of the brain, or on the shape of
the brains cavities, but solely on three factors: the spirits that come from the
heart, the pores of the brain through which they pass, and the way in which
these spirits are distributed in these pores.
The organ simply produces the music as a result of an input: it does not
represent the notes to itself, in the way that the organist might. Similarly
with mimosa and with the man machine.
The crucial feature of the man machine, and the feature that has
caused the greatest misunderstanding, is the organ labelled F in
Figure .. It has usually been assumed that this is the pineal gland, but
the function of the pineal gland, as we shall see, is to produce cognitive
representations, and no such representations are present in reflex
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
responses. Indeed, it is crucial to Descartes understanding of reflex responses that they be immediate and automatic if they are to be effective.
It is also worth noting that Descartes calls F a cavity, and he never refers
to the pineal gland as a cavity. It is almost certainly one of the cerebral
ventricles. Animals are capable of genuine perceptual cognition on
Descartes account, as we shall see, but his account of reflex, applicable
as it is to plants as well as animals, is not genuine perceptual cognition.
It does not require or involve the pineal gland which means it does not
involve any cognitive representation of the stimulus only a circulatory
system, and he does not consider such a system to be peculiar to animals.
DEVELOPMENTAL PHYSIOLOGY
One of the principal tasks of a mechanist natural philosophy in the seventeenth century was the elimination of teleology. In the case of mechanics,
optics, and cosmology, there were, outside the question of the formation
of the Earth, few reasons to question this approach once Aristotelianism had been abandoned. Physiology was a different matter, however,
and among the phenomena that a mechanized physiology had to deal
with were a number of processes that seemed clearly goal-directed. Here
at least, it was not a question of Aristotles misguided concern to provide teleological explanations where they werent needed, but rather that
of how one could possibly avoid reference to goals in explaining these
processes.
As we saw in the previous chapter, in Part IV of the Principia, Descartes
offered an account of the formation of the Earth that attracted wide criticism, especially in England. He was accused of Epicureanism, for, on
his account, the processes that led to the formation of the Earth were
either chance processes or were driven by necessity, and what was conspicuously absent was any providential guidance. Providential guidance
introduces an element of goal-directedness into the question: the Earth
is there for a specific reason and is formed so as to serve a particular
function, as a home for human beings, at least until the Last Judgement.
The argument was that if we ignore that function, we will fail to understand what the Earth is, just as surely as if we try to understand a watch
without realising that it is designed to keep the time.
There are a number of similarities between Descartes account of
the formation of the Earth and his description of the formation of the
foetus in La Description. Both had traditionally been construed as intrinsically goal-directed processes, and it is important to appreciate here
In other words, God is the only final cause. In his natural philosophy, Descartes is concerned with internal or intrinsic causes, and
these are missing, for Augustine as for Descartes, in the case of foetal
development.
What Descartes denies, then, is intrinsic goal-directedness. Such
intrinsic or internally generated goal-directedness is a feature of
Aristotelian natural philosophy, where it was thought to be characteristic of any natural process. There, organic processes, such as a seed
developing into a tree, and inorganic processes, such as the fall of a
body to the earth, are put down to some intrinsic goal-directedness.
Mechanism dismantles the conceptual apparatus whereby processes are
construed as being goal-directed, because it removes the doctrine of
forms, which is crucial to the notion of something striving to realise its
natural state. It does this not just in the cases where goal-directedness
seems an artificial way to construe what happens once Aristotelianism
has been abandoned, however, but also in cases where this remains a
to the case where the organs are not being built up but are actually being
formed anew.
The phenomenon of growth, in the less problematic non-foetal case,
comes under the maintenance of bodily organs. In his treatment of nutrition in La Description, Descartes argues, as we have seen, that the organs
of the body are nourished by blood from the arteries. To understand this
more distinctly, he tells us,
we must bear in mind that the parts of those living bodies that are maintained
through nourishment, that is, animals and plants, undergo continual change, in
such a way that the only difference between those that are called fluids, such as
the blood, humours and spirits, and those that are called solids, such as bone,
flesh, nerves, and membranes, is that the latter move much more slowly than
the others.
That all the parts of the body move, those of the solid bodily members
just as much as the parts of bodily fluids, is a crucial point, increasing
the degree of homogeneity of the matter making up the body, and hence
making it easier to account for the transformation of nutrients into the
fabric of the body. This constant motion causes rubbing, which, in turn,
can cause various bodily parts to become smaller, or to combine into
larger parts. At this point we get the explanation of growth, change of
bodily shape, and aging of the body:
When one is young, for example, because the filaments that make up the solid
parts are not joined to one another very firmly, and the channels along which
they flow are quite large, the motion of these filaments is not as slow as when
one is old, and more matter is attached to their roots than is detached from
their extremities, which results in their becoming longer and stronger, and their
increase in size is the means by which the body grows. When the humours
between these filaments do not flow in great quantity, they all pass quite quickly
along the channels containing them, causing the body to grow taller without
filling out. But when these humours are very abundant, they cannot flow so
easily between the filaments of the solid parts, and in the case of those parts that
have very irregular shapes, in the form of branches, and which consequently
offer the most difficult passage of all between the filaments, they gradually
become stuck there and form fat. This does not grow in the body, as flesh does,
through nourishment properly speaking, but only because many of its parts join
together and stick to one another, just as do the parts of dead things. And when
the humours become less abundant, they flow more easily and more quickly,
because the subtle matter and the spirits accompanying them have a greater
force to agitate them, and this causes them little by little to pick up the parts
AT XI. .
of the fat and carry them along with them, which is how people become thin.
And as we get older, the filaments making up the solid parts tighten and stick
together more closely, finally attaining such a degree of hardness that the body
ceases entirely to grow and even loses its capacity for nourishment. This leads
to such an imbalance between the solid and the fluid parts that age alone puts
an end to life.
Descartes then turns to the question of how the requisite form of nourishment gets to the right part of the body. This is, of course, something
one might be inclined to think of in goal-directed terms, but Descartes
approach is resolutely mechanical. Can we seriously suppose, he asks,
that each bodily part can choose and guide the parts of the food to the
appropriate place? To do so would be to attribute more intelligence to
these than even our soul has. Rather, he argues, there are only two
factors that can be responsible for the movement of nutrients to the appropriate place: their initial position in relation to that organ, and the
size and shape of the pores in the membranes through which the nutrients pass, and in this connection Descartes looks at the paths which
the blood takes around the body and discusses the sieving effects of the
pores.
At this point, Descartes tells us that we will have a better knowledge
of how nutrition works if we consider how the bodily parts are formed
from seed, and we are thereby launched into the formation of the
foetus via a consideration of nutrition: just about as mechanist a route
as is possible. The reproduction of plants, which Descartes, of course,
treats as asexual, is distinguished from the conception of animals, which
is sexual, comprising the mixing of male and female fluids, which act
on each other like a kind of yeast, heating one another so that some of
the particles acquire the same degree of agitation as fire, expanding and
pressing on the others, and in this way putting them gradually into the
state required for the formation of parts of the body. The shift from a
liquid state to one on a par with fire is simply an increase in the degree of
fluidity in Descartes natural philosophy; the point in the present context
is that the materials from which the foetus is initially formed are as fluid
as possible, allowing them to take on any form.
The explanation of the differentiation of these parts now begins. The
initial form of differentiation occurs due to the heat generated in this
mixture, which acts in the same way as does new wine when it ferments,
or as hay which is stored before it is dry, causing some of the particles
AT XI. .
AT xi. .
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
to collect in a part of the space containing them, and then makes them
expand, pressing against the others. This is how the heart begins to be
formed. But, because the tiny parts of matter which have been expanded
by the heat in this way tend to continue in their movement in a straight
line, following Descartes principle of rectilinear inertia, and because the
heart, which is now forming, resists them,
they slowly move away and make their way to the area where the brain stem will
later be formed, in the process displacing others which move around in a circle
to occupy the place vacated by them in the heart. After the brief time needed
for them to collect in the heart, these in turn expand and move away, following
the same path as the former. This results in some of the former group which
are still in the same position together with others that have moved in from
elsewhere to take the place of those that have left in the meantime moving
into the heart. And it is in this expansion, which occurs thus in a repeated way,
that the beating of the heart, or the pulse, consists.
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
Even sexual differentiation in the foetus is covered, although not in La Description, but in the
Latin notes Prima cogitationes circa generationem animalium (AT XI. ). Here Descartes offers
two quite different accounts. On the first of these, when the head of the foetus is facing towards
the mothers navel, its buttocks pushed towards her spine, the penis will be formed outside the
body and the foetus will develop into a male; when the body of the foetus is facing in the other
direction, the penis curves back into the interior of the foetus becoming a vagina, so that the
foetus develops into a female. But Descartes follows this with a different explanation, whereby
the foetus either excretes liquids and retains solids, causing the penis to extrude from its body,
or, being less robust, excretes solids and retains liquids, causing the penis to form inside the
body, and inside out, as it were. See the discussion in Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks, . Des
Chene plausibly suggests that Descartes may have come up with the second account as a result
of realising that foetuses are not randomly oriented in the womb ( n. ).
Descartes basic physiology requires nothing more than inert matter, differentiated in three sizes, and an understanding of circulatory systems.
His developmental physiology can also get by with these, but his account of psycho-physiology requires an expansion in the resources of his
mechanism. In his account of the development of the foetus he pursues
a programme designed to show that what had traditionally been seen
as a goal-directed process need not be thought of as goal-directed at all,
and could be construed in terms of straightforward mechanical causation. However, in his treatment of perceptual cognition in animals
and in humans in cases where the intellect is not operative, that is,
where it is simply a case of psycho-physiology he does not attempt
to show that perceptual cognition does not occur, but rather invokes a
kind of receptive capacity which stretches what one might normally think
There is a grey, quasi-reflex area here: for example, when an animal spots a predator, and
responds immediately by fleeing. We shall see below that, in his account of memory, Descartes talks
of associative cases where we construct a cognitive representation from very partial information.
I believe such an account could be used to explain the case I have mentioned, but there are all
kinds of instinctual and habitual forms of behaviour which Descartes does not clearly distinguish
from reflex, which would have to be distinguished in any full account of these matters.
AT VII. .
John Cottingham, A Brute to the Brutes?, Philosophy (), : . The association of
the mechanical with the inert, by contrast with the organic, seems to be a late eighteenth-century
notion; see Judith Schlanger, Les metaphores de lorganisme (Paris, ), .
AT XI. .
Engravings of a number of these hydraulic devices appeared in Salomon de Caus, Les raisons des
forces mouvantes avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes ausquelles sont adjoints plusioeurs desseigns de
grotes et fontaines (Frankfurt, ), with which Descartes was familiar.
AT VI. and . The analogy is repeated at the end of article of Les Passions de lAme. It also
appears at the beginning and end of Le Monde.
See, for example, Descartes to the Marquess of Newcastle; AT IV. . We shall return to this
question at the end of this chapter.
See my Aristotle on the Function of Sense Perception, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
(), .
it will imagine or will sense any object. This indicates that there are
representations on the pineal gland of the automaton. It is, in fact, difficult to see how they could not have representations of the world if we
are to talk about visual cognition. And it makes no sense to talk about
them having representations but not being aware of the content of these
representations. Moreover, Descartes certainly does not deny states such
as memory to animals, and remembering something is just about the
paradigm case of grasping the content of a representation.
By contrast, in the Replies to the sixth set of Objections to the Meditationes, Descartes seems to move in exactly the opposite direction, effectively denying that automata have sensations at all. Distinguishing three
grades of sensory response, he remarks:
The first is limited to the immediate stimulation of the bodily organs by external
objects; this can consist in nothing but the motion of the particles of the organs,
and any change of shape and position resulting from this motion. The second
grade comprises all the immediate effects produced in the mind as a result of
its being united with a bodily organ that is affected in this way. Such effects
include the perceptions of pain, pleasure, thirst, hunger, colours, sound, taste,
smell, heat, cold and the like, which arise from the union and as it were the
intermingling of mind and body, as explained in the Sixth Meditation. The third
grade includes all the judgements about things outside us which we have been
accustomed to make from our earliest years judgements that are occasioned
by the movements of these bodily organs.
AT X. .
AT VII. .
AT I. .
AT V. .
AT III. .
This distinction might be questioned on the grounds that anything tables, chairs, hydrogen
atoms might be said to have sensations but not like ours, if this latter qualification is construed
broadly. On the other hand, if we insist that something has sensations only if they have sensations
just like mine, then we may find ourselves with the problem of other minds, for other human
beings may not have sensations exactly like mine. The fact that we have no difficulty recognising
cognitive advance up the evolutionary scale there is an increase in the complexity and quality
of the sensation we are prepared to ascribe to earthworms, dogs, apes, and humans suggests
that we have no practical difficulty in distinguishing forms of sensation different from ours, even
if we are wholly unable to describe the phenomenology of such sensations.
the visual cognition that we have as a result of this. Previously, his account
had focused on getting the perceptual part of perceptual cognition right,
whereas here he concentrates on the cognition side of the question. By
contrast with the Regulae, for example, in Le Monde perceptual cognition
is not thought of in causal terms, and it is not thought of as a multi-stage
process. Rather, the treatment focuses on two questions: the form of the
representation, and the question of how we are able to respond to certain
properties or events as information.
On the first question, Descartes rejects a resemblance theory of perception of the kind that Aristotle and his followers had assumed must
hold if perception is to be veridical. He argues that in order to represent
the world, the perceptual image need not resemble it. Indeed, many
features of our perceptual image of the world colours, sounds, odours
etc. are not features of the world at all. In LHomme he goes on to apply the representation account to another cognitive operation, namely
memory, with very significant consequences. Because his contemporaries
had assumed that mnemonic representations, or memory traces, must
resemble the original perceptual source, since that is what we recall, their
attention was devoted to how such a huge amount of detail could possibly be stored, and they proposed various accounts of storage, many of
which focused on the large surface area provided by the crinkled surface
of the brain. Descartes approach is completely different to this.
What memory does, on Descartes account, is to enable previous representations on the pineal gland to be formed again, without the existence
of the objects to which they correspond. His account of both storage
and retrieval of memory is organised around ease of accommodation to a
mechanistic model, and this dictates what questions he is and is not concerned with. He shows no interest at all in the traditional practical questions of memory which had dominated sixteenth-century discussions,
which centred around mnemonics, for example, but nor does he show
much interest in the details of localisation of memory, which had played
such a crucial role not just in the anatomical tradition but in the late
Scholastic treatment of memory also. Rather, he is concerned with how
memory is stored, and the account he offers has two distinctive features.
First, just as in his account of visual cognition, no resemblance between
experience and memory is required, and this gives the account a significant degree of flexibility. Contrary to what was a universal assumption at
the time, on Descartes account pineal patterns do not have to be stored
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
separately and faithfully they do not have to be kept in the same form
between experiencing and remembering but just in a way that enables
the idea to be presented again on the pineal gland. His account suggests a dispositional model in which storage may be implicit rather than
explicit: a memory may be generated from stored items without itself
being a stored item. Secondly, storage and retrieval are accounted for
in exclusively physical terms. Storage is effected through bending and
rearranging of brain filaments, and retrieval is helped by repetition of
recall. An analogy is drawn with a linen cloth which has several needles
repeatedly passed through it (see Fig. .). The holes in the cloth will
Figure .
mostly remain open after the needles have been withdrawn, but those
that do not will still leave physical traces which can easily be reopened.
AT XI. .
AT XI. .
natural sign of joy. One of the things that distinguishes signs from causes
is that whether a sign signifies something to us that is, whether we can
call it a sign in the first place depends on our ability to recognise and
interpret the sign, and it is this ability on our part that makes the signs
what they are. Causation is clearly different from this, for causes do not
depend in any way upon our ability to recognise them. The question
is what makes natural signs signs. It cannot be, or cannot merely be,
something in nature, for something cannot be a sign for us unless we can
recognise it, so it must be something in us that makes tears, or laughter,
or a particular kind of motion, signs. This something in us must be an
acquired or an innate capacity; and Descartes view is that it is an innate
capacity which, it will turn out, God has provided us with. There would
be no natural signs unless we had the capacity to recognise them as such.
Here, I suggest we have the two key pieces in the account of sentience. Sentient responses are different from non-sentient responses in
that, in the latter case, we can give a full account merely by showing
the causalmechanical processes involved. In the case of sentient responses, this will not tell us everything we need to know, and we need
to supplement it with a different kind of account. There is an element
of reciprocity in perceptual cognition as linguistically modelled that we
do not find in the causalmechanical account. The linguistic model enables us to grasp what perceptual understanding consists in, whereas the
causalmechanical account describes what physical-cum-physiological
processes must occur if this understanding is to take place. This is the
core difference between sentience and non-sentience. Non-sentient responses to stimulus, such as reflex activity in animals and in sensitive
plants, are accounted for fully when we are able to provide the appropriate causalmechanical account, but this will only ever be an ingredient
in a complete account of sentient responses, the characteristic feature of
which is that they involve a representation of the stimulus.
The next question is whether the form of interpretation modelled
on language is realisable in a mechanistic physiology alone. What we
need, over and above the causalmechanical account that we provide
of non-sentient responses, is some means of forming representations in
response to perceptual stimuli, and we need some means of storing and
recalling these representations. In one sense, many automata those
to which we are inclined to ascribe some kind of sophistication in perceptual cognition, such as higher mammals clearly have the physiological means to do this. They have pineal glands, which is where
The human mind separated from the body does not have sense-perception strictly so called
(Descartes to More, August ; AT V. ).
AT VII. .
various shades of the same colour are indicated by completely different colours,
so that they are less liable to mistake them.
A. Arnauld, On True and False Ideas, ed. and trans. Stephen Gaukroger (Manchester and New
York, ), .
Strictly speaking, what we have here is a transverse motion of the fine matter packing the interstices
between the corpuscles making up the medium, whose action is transmitted instantaneously in
a straight line; see ch. of Le Monde; AT X. .
AT XI. .
The criteria just mentioned simply tell us how we judge distance, without
explaining how it is possible in the first place that we might see things
that we are not in contact with. Mechanism restricts all action to contact
action, and this is, at least in the first instance, a problem for distance
perception such as that which occurs in vision. In visual perception, we
not only see distant things, we see them (within limits of precision) as
being at a particular distance: how is this possible when our eyes are
stimulated simply by corpuscles in contact with them? Here Descartes
theory of the eyes natural geometry is crucial, because it is designed
to tell us how something in contact with the eye can convey information
about the distance of its source. Descartes compares our distance vision
to a blind man holding out two sticks so that they converge on an object
(Fig. .), and calculating the distance of the object from the base angles
Figure .
of the triangle so formed, where the base is simply the distance between
the sticks in the mans hands. The blind man does not know the lengths
of the sticks, but he can calculate this by means of a natural geometry
from the length of the base and the base angles. Analogously with the
eyes (Fig. .): here the base angles are given by the angles at which the
Figure .
light rays strike the eye, and an apparently innate natural geometry
enables us to calculate the distance of the object in the same way that the
blind man does. This doctrine, which is fully in accord with the account
of the nature of light and its action offered in Le Monde, secures both the
restriction of all influence to contact action, and the possibility of genuine
distance vision. We are not aware of any such calculation, of course, and
Descartes describes the process as being ordained by nature, which
indicates it comes under psycho-physiology rather than mental activity
proper: in particular, it is not a matter of intellectual judgement.
It might be asked how an inferential process like calculation, unconscious or otherwise, could be ascribed to a mindless animal. But in
Rule of the Regulae, Descartes tells us that none of the errors to which
AT X. .
men men, I say, not brute animals are liable is ever due to faulty
inference because our inference is always guided by the natural light
of reason, which is infallible. In other words, brute animals make inferences, but, lacking the natural light of reason, these are at least occasionally faulty: Descartes is prepared to construe inference, at least at
some level, as a psycho-physiological process. Animals are, of course,
unable to reflect upon the inferential processes they engage in, and, to
the extent that they calculate, in distance perception for example, they
are completely unaware of what they are doing.
AFFECTIVE STATES IN ANIMALS
Sentient animals have not only cognitive states but affective ones as well.
Descartes make it clear that animals can express fear, hope, and joy:
If you teach a magpie to say good-day to its mistress when it sees her approach,
this can only be because you are making the utterance of this word the expression
of one of its passions. It will be an expression of the hope of eating, for example,
if it has always been given a tidbit when it says it. Similarly, all the things which
dogs, horses, and monkeys are taught to perform are only expressions of their
fear, their hope, and their joy; and consequently they can be performed without
any thought.
In the early modern era, parallels between animals and human beings
were predominantly parallels between their affective states rather than
between their cognitive states. The idea that different species of animals
manifested particular passions and/or virtues goes back at least to the Patristic writers, and supplied a staple diet of iconography for medieval and
Renaissance writers and painters. Early modern writers continue in this
tradition. Animals are always uniform in all their actions, one anonymous seventeenth-century writer, summing up centuries of reflection
AT X. .
Descartes to the Marquess of Newcastle, November ; AT IV. .
Descartes to More, February ; AT V. .
See Peter Harrison, Reading the Passions: the Fall, the Passions, and Dominion over Nature,
in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Soft Underbelly of Reason (London, ), . The references in
this paragraph derive from Harrisons enlightening account.
of these matters, tells us, the Lyon is always generous, the Hare ever
cowardly; the Tyger, cruel; the Fox, crafty. Moreover, these features
generally had an explanatory role. Thomas Wright, for example, in his
Passions of the Minde () introduces eleven basic passions, and illustrates them by making reference to the behaviour of the sheep and the
wolf. Marin Cureau de la Chambre, one of the most influential writers on the passions in the seventeenth century, sets out his account of
the various passions in terms of the characteristics of various animals,
so that courage, for example, is illustrated in terms of the behaviour of
lions. It is instructive here that having a low view of a particular species
means attributing a disreputable distinctive affective state to it: not refusing to attribute an affective state to it at all. Affective states appear
to be widely attributed to animals, and Descartes is no exception. But
what Descartes sees as distinctive about human beings in this respect
is instructive. He notes that the signs of passions in animals are, like
their cognitive behaviour, natural and invariant, and that animals are
unable to disguise their affective states, whereas those in humans can
be modified by the soul: the soul is able to change facial expressions,
he tells us, as well as expressions of the eyes . . . Thus we may use such
expressions to hide our passions as well as reveal them.
What distinguishes us from automata, at the level of affective states, is
not the absence of such states in automata, any more than what distinguishes us from automata at the level of cognitive states is the absence of
cognitive states in automata. Moreover, although there are differences
between the kinds of cognitive and affective states available to human being and those available to automata, this does not seem to be the crucial
issue either. Rather, the key difference seems to lie in the ability of human beings to stand back from, make judgements about, and ultimately
control their cognitive and affective states. Human beings are able to
shape and reform their cognitive and affective lives in a way automata
are not. It is to these questions that we now turn.
CHAPTER
See Aram Vartanian, La Mettries LHomme Machine: A Study in the Origins of An Idea (Princeton,
), which includes a critical edition of the text.
The treatment of animals in the seventeenth century was undeniably cruel by modern Western
standards, but it was not as dire as it is sometimes made out to be; see Keith Thomas, Man and
the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England (London, ).
of what exactly it is, on Descartes account, that the mind does over and
above the psycho-physical operations we share with automata.
COGNITION
AT VI. .
possible. Three things are involved in this form of cognition. The first
is the corporeal world, the second the pure intellect, which contains
abstractions, and the third the imagination, which is a corporeal organ
which Descartes will later identify with the pineal gland. The title of Rule
reads: The problem should be re-expressed in terms of the real extension of bodies and should thus be pictured in our imagination entirely by
means of bare figures. Thus it will be perceived much more distinctly by
our intellect. Given the context of the questions he is concerned with in
Rule , what this looks like is the claim that, first, we should represent
the corporeal world this is what he refers to as the re-expression of
the problem in the imagination in terms of geometrical lines, and that,
second, when we have done this, our intellect can inspect the contents
of the imagination. But, when we look at the details, the second part
of the process turns out to be achieved by representing the contents of
the intellect in the imagination. In the case of our quantitative cognitive
grasp of the world, what such grasp consists in is a twofold mapping
in which the concrete contents of the corporeal world are represented
symbolically in the imagination, and in which the abstract contents of
the pure intellect are represented symbolically in the imagination. As a
result of this, the one can now be mapped on to the other, such mapping
being constitutive of quantitative cognition of the world.
This is a radical departure from the standard Thomist account, where
the role of the imagination (taken to be a corporeal faculty) is to present
sensory information to the (incorporeal) intellect, the imagination then
dropping out of the picture as the intellect acts on the information in a
way that is constitutive of perceptual cognition. The process Descartes
envisages is one where the end point, the locus of perceptual cognition,
is the imagination rather than the intellect. This must be the case in his
account because the cognition consists in a particular kind of mapping
of representations, which can only take place in the imagination, not in
the intellect, because the mapping is a spatial one which needs a spatially
extended region in which to occur.
Descartes argument runs along the following lines. Extension and
body are represented by different ideas in the intellect, because we
can imagine all objects in the universe being annihilated and spatial
extension remaining, but they are represented by one and the same idea
in the imagination:
By extension we mean whatever has length, breadth and depth, leaving to
one side whether it is a real body or merely a space. This notion does not, I
think, need further elucidation, for there is nothing more easily perceived by our
Just as with extension, similarly with number. When we say that number
is not the thing counted or extension or shape is not body, the meanings
of number and extension here are such that there are no special ideas
corresponding to them in the imagination. These two statements are
the work of the pure intellect, which alone has the ability to separate out
abstract entities of this type. Descartes insists that we must distinguish
statements of this kind, in which the meanings of the terms are separated
from the content of the ideas in the imagination, from statements in
which the terms, albeit employed in abstraction from their subjects, do
not exclude or deny anything which is not really distinct from what they
denote.
The intellect, for Descartes as for Aquinas, has the role of separating out components of ideas by abstraction. But, for Descartes, entities
conceived in the intellect, because they are free of images or bodily representations, are indeterminate. The imagination is required to render
them determinate. When we speak of numbers, for example, the imagination must be employed to represent to ourselves something which can
be measured by a multitude of objects. The intellect understands fiveness as something separate from five objects (or line segments, or points,
or whatever), and hence the imagination is required if this fiveness is
to correspond to something in the world. Descartes wants to argue that,
in the mathematical case, what the intellect grasps are formal algebraic
quantities. It is in so far as the objects of algebra, the indeterminate
content of which has been separated out by the intellect, can be represented and conceived symbolically as lines and planes that they can
be identified with the real world. Algebra deals with completely abstract entities, conceived in the intellect, but these abstract entities must
be represented symbolically, and thus rendered determinate, which requires the aid of the imagination. The imagination thereby represents
AT X. .
AT X. .
AT X. .
If, on the Cartesian account, what marks out animals from human beings
at the level of the range of cognitive operations is less significant than it has
often been taken to be, it is nevertheless significant. But Descartes did not
treat these differences as being the core difference between human beings
and animals. The perceptual cognitive operations we have discussed,
The considerations that drive the rejection of a division into higher and
lower functions must also drive any attempt to account for the human
mind wholly in modular terms. For what cognitive unity whereby I can
say that these experiences are my experiences, that these memories are
my memories is possible on this account? How can we hold ourselves
morally responsible if there is not something that lies behind our various
cognitive and affective states? How are acts of will possible if the mind
is fragmented?
The difference between human beings and animals, on Descartes account, lies not so much in the nature of the cognitive states available to
human beings and animals (although there are some differences, as we
have seen), but in the fact that cognitive and affective states in animals
are fragmented and dispersed, or modularised, whereas human beings
have a self , something that holds together these cognitive and affective
states, this being a necessary condition of our ability to question whether
these cognitive states are veridical (e.g. to ask whether the world is really
coloured, as it appears to be), or whether particular affective states which
we experience are the appropriate ones. It is this self that we are aware
of when we go through the cogito, and it is the thinking thing, the res cogitans, that we discover in the cogito. Moreover, this self is what exercises
acts of will, and it gives human beings a unified mental life lacking in
automata, which is why, cognitively sophisticated as these automata may
be, we do not treat them as being able to reflect epistemologically on
the nature of their cognitive states, why we do not hold them morally responsible, and why they are not capable of language. A unified mental
life is indispensable for these functions, and full modularity, of the kind
Descartes effectively postulates in automata, is incompatible with everything from language to moral responsibility. This is what makes automata
machines.
We saw in the last chapter that Descartes pursues a reductionist account of cognition much further than has been thought. It should also be
noted in this connection that his sense of the limits of this project the
point beyond which the reductionist has to become an eliminativist, beginning to explain away, rather than explain, with all the implausibility
that comes with this is dictated less by some pre-given notion of the
human soul than by a well-founded judgement of the gap between the
nature of human experience and the picture that a modularised psychophysiology is able to provide.
Concern with the question of the fragmentation of the soul arises primarily in the context of the passions, rather than that of cognitive states,
however, and it is in the context of the passions that the importance of the
sharp distinction between mind and body becomes particularly evident,
for it is here that we begin to see a real rationale for Cartesian dualism,
a rationale not always evident in the Meditationes, for example, where the
defence of dualism can have the appearance of dogma. In the seventeenth century, it was in fact in the context of accounts of the passions that
discussions of the nature of the relation between mind and body generally
occurred. The passions were associated with bodily conditions, bringing them under the purview of medicine and physiology, but they were
also given ethical meanings, bringing them under the purview of moral
psychology and theology. Treatises on the passions traditionally shared
this combination of concerns, and Petrarchs De remediis, for example, a
compendium of Stoic techniques for healing the passions, can be read
as a treatise on morals, or as a treatise on psychotherapy: the distinction
is simply not there to be made. Much the same can be said of the
whole tradition of writing about the passions, including Descartes Les
Passions de lAme, which takes its purview to include the physiology of the
passions, psychosomatic states such as melancholia, and considerations
bearing on the fact that all good and evil in this life depend on [the passions] alone. The practical aim of treatises on the passions is, generally
Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris, Descartes Dualism (London, ), establish in detail why
this is only an appearance.
See Letizia A. Panizza, Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Petrarchs
De remediis, in Margaret Osler, ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity (Cambridge, ), .
Passions, art. ; AT XI. .
speaking, the healing of the soul, something which involves moral and
psycho-therapeutic considerations, and these require an understanding
of the bodily conditions associated with various afflictions of the soul
which may give rise to anything from immorality to madness. It is in
this light that we must understand Descartes remark in La Discours that
even the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition
of the bodily organs that if it is possible to find some means of making
men in general wiser and more skilful than they have been up to now, I
believe I must look for it in medicine.
It is true that in the Preface to Les Principes, morals is listed along
with mechanics and medicine as one of the three fundamental sciences, although we are to understand by the term the highest and most
perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the
other sciences [viz. medicine and mechanics] and is the ultimate level of
wisdom. In other words, moral philosophy is not sui generis. It emerges
naturally out of his natural philosophy, particularly his account of the
psycho-physiology of affective states, which in turn rests upon his account
of physiology and ultimately upon the general principles of his natural
philosophy. In , on hearing that his friend Chanut is undertaking a
study of moral philosophy, Descartes writes:
I agree with you entirely that the safest way to find out how we should live
is to discover first what we are, what kind of world we live in, and who is the
creator of this world, or the master of the house we live in. But I cannot at all
claim or promise that all I have written is true, and besides there is a very great
distance between the general notion of heaven and earth, which I have tried to
convey in my Principia, and a detailed knowledge of the nature of man, which
I have not yet discussed. However, I do not want you to think I wish to divert
you from your plan, and so I must say in confidence that what little knowledge
of physics I have tried to acquire has been a great help to me in establishing
sure foundations in moral philosophy. Indeed I have found it easier to reach
satisfactory conclusions on this topic than on many others concerning medicine
on which I have spent much more time. So instead of finding ways to preserve
life, I have found another, much easier and surer way, which is not to fear death.
But this does not depress me, as it commonly depresses those whose wisdom is
drawn entirely from the teaching of others, and rests on foundations that depend
only on human prudence and authority.
AT VI. .
AT IXB. .
AT XIB. .
Les Passions, Reply to Second Letter; AT XI. .
See John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge, ), .
On the difference between Augustines account of moral responsibility and that of his predecessors, see Dihle, The Theory of the Will.
Aquinas, Summa theologica, Qu. XXIV, art. .
Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XIV, cap. .
different classification. But the key feature of Vives account for our purposes is the way he makes the intellect and the will into autonomous faculties whose acts are mutually independent. As Levi has noted, in Vives
theory of the passions there is discernible a breakdown in the traditional
Scholastic psychology, and his work sets the stage for seventeenth-century
debates. Although the will should be guided by reason, which has as its
object the rationally perceived good, the reason does not actually cause
the will to choose in a particular way, for the will is essentially spontaneous in its liberty to choose. As Levi points out, what resulted was not
only a blurring of the distinction between the passions and the virtues,
but also a separation of the reason and the will such that it is difficult to
see how an act can at the same time be both rational and free. The
ultimate upshot of this was that the will and the reason were gradually
prized further apart, so that in the neo-Stoic revival of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (of which we may take Montaigne and Lipsius as
early representatives) it began to be urged that the reason could be relied
upon to the exclusion of the will. One might expect disputes pursued
along clear neo-Stoic versus Augustinian/Thomist lines to follow from
this, focusing on the question of whether the will did or did not play a
part, but this is not what happened. The issue was complicated by the
fact that, although he regarded them as mutually dependent, Aquinas
had defended a real distinction between the intellect and the will as two
faculties of the soul, one having the true as its object, the other having the
good. There is a fundamental instability or unclarity on the question of
the relation between the will and reason, and what one tends to find on
the anti-Stoic side in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
literature on the passions, whether Scholastic, devotional, or secular, is a
basic adherence to a generally Augustinian/Thomist position tempered
to a greater or lesser degree by elements drawn from Stoicism.
The deep problems in the literature can be glimpsed by considering
the discussion of the passions in Part II of the second Book, on ethics,
in Eustachius Summa philosophiae. Eustachius urges a sharp distinction
between the higher and lower parts of the soul, holding that the will is
related to the intellect in the higher part of the soul as the imagination
Ibid., .
Anthony Levi, French Moralists (Oxford, ), .
So begins a complex history of the relative roles of the reason and the will, on which see Susan
James, Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenth-century Philosophy (Oxford, ).
On Eustachius on the passions see Levi, French Moralists, ch. , and Leslie Armour, Descartes and
Eustachius a Sancto Paulo: Unravelling the MindBody Problem, British Journal for the History of
Philosophy (), .
is related to the sensitive appetite in the lower part. Aquinas had treated
reason, sense, and imagination as part of a single cognitive process, but
the Stoic tendency to use the term imagination pejoratively, combined
with a move to think of the imagination as being concerned with knowledge of material objects and the reason as being concerned with knowledge of immaterial objects (universals, etc.), had a significant impact on
later Scholastic thinking and the imagination becomes insulated from
reason and begins to be treated as the source of error. This opens up
the possibility of an act of will being at variance with the sensitive appetite and exercising no control over it. More generally, what results is
an extremely unstable amalgam of elements taken from the Scholastic
tradition and Stoicism, and the price paid is a fragmentation of the soul
which has no obvious benefits. This opened the door to an abandonment of the Scholastic account in favour of Stoicism, notwithstanding
the well-known difficulties with the Stoic account, for above all it offers
a unified conception of the soul.
This, then, is the context within which Descartes was writing. Where
the physiology of the passions was treated, there was an almost irresistible
tendency to apply properly mental and corporeal attributes interchangeably, and even to conceive of animal spirits in a vitalistic fashion; and
where the faculties were treated, there was an increasing fragmentation
of the soul or mind with various lower parts blending into the corporeal
functions. And this occurred with no discernible improvement in our understanding of the nature of human affective states. Descartes aim in
producing a systematic account of the passions was, more than anything
else, to restructure the whole question of the affective states around a
clear understanding of the distinction between mind and body, and on
the basis of such an understanding to formulate the appropriate notion
of a substantial union needed to account for the source and nature of
affective states.
In Les Passions, completed over the winter of /, Descartes sets out
to provide a comprehensive account of the various ways in which mind
and body interact. The three parts of the text are designated by Descartes
himself as providing a general account of the mind/body relation and
the general nature of passions (Part I), a classification of the passions
(Part II), and an account of particular passions (Part III), although from
near the end of Part II the discussion shifts to the moral/therapeutic
questions surrounding the passions.
The conflicts that we experience are, then, conflicts between the soul
and the body, for there is no sense in which they can be either conflicts
between higher and lower parts of the soul, or conflicts between different
powers of the soul. The spirits can move the pineal gland in a particular
way, stimulating a desire for something, and, while the will cannot halt this
directly, it can represent objects to itself so vividly that, by the principle
of association, the course of the spirits will gradually be halted. In these
circumstances, the soul will be impelled almost simultaneously both to
desire and not to desire the same thing, but the almost is important,
and this will not be a genuine conflict in the soul. A parallel case occurs
in the body, when the passions cause the organs or limbs to act in a certain way, and the soul attempts to stop this, causing conflict in the body.
What is required in both cases is mastery of ones passions, which derive
from firm and determined judgements (art. ). There is no question of
using one passion to offset another, and even less of trying to live without
passions: the passions are crucial for fortifying and sustaining individual
acts of will, and those who have no inclination for the passion of wonder,
for example, are usually very ignorant (art. ). Mastery of the passions for the Stoics was a matter of overcoming or of purging them. For
Descartes, by contrast, it was a matter of overcoming some and cultivating others. The passions are a necessary condition of a moral life: it is on
the passions alone that all the good and evil of this life depends (art. ).
Part II of Les Passions deals with the classification of the passions. The
basis for the classification is different from that of a writer like Aquinas,
Ibid., AT IV. .
resolution to use it well that is, never to lack the will to undertake and carry
out whatever he judges to be the best. To do this is to pursue virtue perfectly.
(art. )
AT IXB. .
Translated in ibid., n. .
We must not forget that these were questions that were paramount
throughout antiquity, and at least from Socrates onwards the philosopher took on or fostered a distinct persona and attitude, depending on
the philosophical doctrine or school. For Plato, for example, the persona
of the philosopher fitted him for kingship. For Diogenes the Cynic, on
the other hand, it fitted him to the life of a beggar or a slave, and this
was by no means something one merely fell into. It required an askesis, a
pattern of living, which involved indifference to hardship and suffering
(apatheia), self-sufficiency and a refusal to engage in the responsibilities of
civil society (autarkia), complete and blunt freedom of speech (parrhesia),
and lack of shame in performing bodily functions (anaideia).
This fostering of a philosophical persona is particularly marked in the
Hellenistic era, where ataraxia, peace of mind, was explicitly the aim of all
the major schools, and where regulation of the passions played a major
role for Epicureans and Stoics alike in attaining the state of mind, and
corresponding behaviour, worthy of or appropriate to a member of their
philosophical school. Indeed, as Hadot has remarked, it is love of wisdom,
which is foreign to the world, that makes the philosopher a stranger to it.
So each school will elaborate its rational depiction of this state of perfection in the person of a sage, and each will make an effort to portray him.
This philosophical self-fashioning was pursued in a different way in the
Christian era. This is nowhere clearer than in the disputes of the s
and s arising from the attempts to introduce an autonomous philosophical system, that of Aristotle, into Christian thought. The Averroist
Boethius of Dacia, one of the strongest advocates of philosophical selfaffirmation, argued that it was easier for the philosopher to be virtuous
than for anyone else, and that whoever does not live the life of a philosopher does not live rightly or virtuously. Tempier responded in the
Condemnation by condemning the propositions that no station in life is
to be preferred to the study of philosophy and philosophers alone are
the wise men of the world. No less striking is the idea of philosophical
self-fashioning that pervaded the Renaissance thought, with Pico della
Mirandolas eulogy on the dignity of man being in fact an attempt to
redefine the office of the philosopher as the paradigm sage, and to set out
a programme for the attainment of this goal. Works like Montaignes
Essais and Burtons The Anatomy of Melancholy show that the genre was
alive and well in the early modern era, and although the way in which it
was pursued differed, a theme that runs through all the literature is the
mastery of the passions.
Philosophical self-fashioning had always turned on the understanding
and regulation of the passions, and because of this they have a peculiar
centrality, for they have not merely been one object of study among others for philosophers, but something which must be understood if one is
to be philosophical in the first place. Mastery of the passions was not
only a theme in philosophy but a distinctive feature of the philosophical persona from Socrates onwards, and Renaissance and early modern
philosophers pursue the theme of self-control with no less vigour than
had the philosophers of antiquity.
In general terms, philosophers in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and
in the early modern era, were able, with varying degrees of success,
to construct images of themselves as paradigmatic bearers of moral,
aesthetic, and intellectual responsibility. Whatever deep philosophical
quarrels they may have had among themselves, it was important to establish that the philosophical view was not simply one kind of opinion amongst others. What was required to establish this was the construction of a philosophical persona capable of bearing and displaying
this authority: an authority which was very different from that borne
and displayed by theologians and statesmen, for example, whose claims
on moral, naturalphilosophical and other questions may have overlapped with, and perhaps competed with, those of philosophers. The
question raised here is one about the relation between philosophy and
the behaviour appropriate for the philosopher, or at least the philosophically educated: what kind of persona philosophy does or should shape or
encourage.
THE MORALITY OF PHILOSOPHERS
We have seen that morality emerges from Descartes theory of the passions, which in turn emerges from his psycho-physiology of affective
states, the same psycho-physiology that underlies his account of cognitive states, and one in which what is distinctive about human beings is
Note that there is no sense at all of philosopher kings here. Descartes sees politics as the business
of sovereigns, something quite distinct from considerations about the values and character of
private individuals. See Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, ),
.
their ability to stand back from their mental states, reflect upon them,
make judgements about them, and shape their behaviour accordingly. In
some respects, the point is not a new one, and Charron, in his immensely
popular De la Sagesse (), had identified two dispositions to wisdom,
the first being knowledge of oneself and the human condition, and the
second,
which follows from the first (and frees us from internal and external captivity
and confusion) is the full, complete, generous, and noble twofold freedom of the
mind, namely freedom of judgement and freedom of the will.
Pierre Charron, De la Sagesse, ed. Barbara de Nagroni (Paris, ), (Book II, ch. ).
AT X. .
AT X. .
AT VIIIA. . Cf. the second maxim of Descartes provisional morality in La Discours: to be as firm
and decisive in all my actions as I could, and to follow even the most doubtful opinions, once I
had adopted them, with no less constancy than if they had been quite certain (AT VI. ). Note,
however, Descartes clarification of this maxim in his letter to Reneri for Pollot, April or May
; AT II. .
On the question of autonomy in the moral realm see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy
(Cambridge, ).
The route of hyperbolic doubt is one route that we can take to natural
philosophy, and if we want a legitimation of this natural philosophy in
terms of first principles, then this is the route we have to take, just as, if we
want a rigorous proof of Pythagoras theorem, we will take the Euclidean
route from first principles, in which case the result can be demonstrated
in a completely compelling way to someone of no mathematical skills or
training, so long as this person can understand the proofs. However, if one
thinks of oneself as a working mathematician then, as the Regulae and La
Geometrie make clear, one will approach the theorem through problemsolving techniques which give one a feel for what is being shown and
help one build up new techniques, enabling one to deal with cognate
problems whose solutions have not yet been found. Analogously, if one
simply wants to be taken through natural philosophy in such a way that
the results are indisputable and, incidentally, in such a way that the
Roman Inquisitions ruling that natural philosophy alone cannot
decide questions about the structure of the cosmos is observed then
the foundationalist metaphysical approach is that one must follow, for
an examination of the nature of many different minds has led me to observe
that there are almost none at all so dull and slow as to be incapable of forming
sound opinions or indeed of grasping all the most advanced sciences, provided
they receive proper guidance. And this may be proved by reason. For since the
principles in question [namely, those of the Principia] are clear, and nothing is
permitted to be deduced from them except by very evident reasoning, everyone
has enough intelligence to understand the things that depend upon them.
Using ones eyes to get about is not something that everyone finds
equally easy, however. What Descartes is seeking are those who can
develop his system to completion:
the majority of truths remaining to be discovered depend on various particular
observations/experiments which we can never happen upon by chance but
AT IXB. .
AT IXB. .
which must be sought out with care and expense by very intelligent people. It
will not easily come about that the same people who have the capacity to make
good use of these observations will have the means to make them. What is more,
the majority of the best minds have formed such a bad opinion of the whole of
philosophy that has been current up until now, that they certainly will not apply
themselves to look for a better one.
We must recognise that some are more fitted than others to follow
the path of instruction/enlightenment in natural philosophy. And in La
Recherche, as we have seen, Descartes realises, practically, that people
come to natural philosophy not with a tabula rasa but with different sets
of highly developed beliefs which are motivated in different ways and
developed to different degrees. These rest upon various things, and
this is what leads him, in La Recherche, to construct an image of the honnete
homme as a model in which the moral sage and the natural philosopher
meet, for, as he puts it in the prefatory letter to Les Principes, the study
of philosophy is more necessary for the regulation of our morals and
our conduct in this life than is the use of our eyes to guide our steps.
Philosophy has a moral imperative, and in explaining his decision to
publish his La Discours and Les Essais, for example, he tells us that not to
publish would be to sin gravely against the law that obliges us to do all
in our power to secure the general welfare of mankind. In Les Principes,
philosophy is defined as
the study of wisdom, where by wisdom I mean not only prudence in our
everyday affairs but also perfect knowledge of all things that mankind is capable
of knowing, both for the conduct of life and for the preservation of health and
the discovery of all manner of skills.
AT IXB. .
Compare the remark in La Discours: I thought too how the same man with the same mind, had he
been brought up from infancy among the French or Germans, develops otherwise than he would
have had he always lived among the Chinese or cannibals . . . Thus it is custom and example that
persuade us, rather than any certain knowledge AT VI. .
Note in this respect the argument offered by John Marshall, in his Descartess Moral Theory (Ithaca,
), , that the reasons Descartes gives for his vocation as a philosopher are moral
reasons.
AT VI. .
AT IXB. .
AT IXB. .
as he puts it in the dedicatory letter to the Principia. What prevents acceptance of this philosophy is the fact that
the majority of those aspiring to be philosophers in the last few centuries have
blindly followed Aristotle. Indeed they have corrupted the sense of his writings
and attributed to him various opinions which he would not recognise to be his,
were he now to return to this world. Those who have not followed Aristotle (and
this group includes many of the best minds) have nevertheless been saturated
with his opinions in their youth (since these are the only opinions taught in the
Schools) and this has so dominated their outlook that they have been unable to
arrive at knowledge of true principles.
In the Principia, Descartes has set out to reform philosophy in its entirety,
but he does not see the project as establishing the kind of stagnant system
that Scholasticism had become, where what has caused the decline of the
system was clearly in large part due, in his view (and, it should be said,
in that of many of his contemporaries), to the slavish adherence of its
proponents to Aristotle. In this respect, Descartes is not in the slightest
interested in winning over Scholastic philosophers to his system: they
are simply not the kind of people who can develop it, and would only
lead it to the kind of stagnation to which they have led Aristotelianism.
A fortiori, they cannot act as paradigm philosophers, as sages whose
wisdom can guide the rest. This role falls instead to those who, reflecting
upon the current state of philosophy, have formed a low opinion of it,
and have avoided taking it up. This low opinion, wholly merited, is what
makes them honnetes hommes, and it is precisely these whom Descartes
sees as being potentially the new paradigm philosophers, marked by
an intellectual honesty which rescues philosophy from the intellectual
disgrace into which it has fallen. And what these honnetes hommes have
is the ability to foster their clear and distinct ideas, for this is the key to
Descartes philosophical system.
We have seen that Descartes prime concern, from the hydrostatics
manuscripts of to his last writing, Les Passions, was always in natural philosophy, but after he shifted from developing to legitimating
his natural philosophy. This legitimation was effected through a completely new kind of metaphysics in which the driving force was not a
AT IXB. .
Intellectual honesty will remain one of the keystones in the ideology of the scientist, reaching
its apogee in Karl Popper, for whom the scientist is in effect the only truly intellectually honest
person, for the scientist alone tries to falsify his theories, whereas everyone else tries to show
theirs to be true.
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Index
Index
intellect, ,
joy,
Jupiter (planet), ,
Kant, Immanuel (),
Kepler, Johannes ( ), , , ,
,
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (),
Lagrange, Joseph Louis de (),
language, ,
laws of motion/nature, , , ,
Index
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (), ,
, , n
Levi, Anthony,
light, , , , , , , , ,
, , ,
Lipsius, Justus (), ,
logic,
Lull, Ramon (),
Mach, Ernst (),
magnetism, ,
Malebranche, Nicolas (), , ,
Marcus Aurelius ( ),
mathematics, , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , ;
legitimation of, , : universal
mathematics (mathesis universalis),
matter theory, , , , , ,
, ; first matter (subtle matter), ,
, , , , ; second
matter (globules), , , ,
, , , , ; third
matter (corpuscles), , , ,
,
mechanics, , , , , , ,
mechanism, , , , , , , , ,
, , , ,
medicine, ,
Melanchthon, Philip (),
memory, , , , , , , ;
intellectual memory,
Mercury (planet), , , ,
Mersenne, Marin (), , , , ,
, , , , ,
metaphysics, , , , , , , ,
, , , ,
meteorology, ,
method, , , , , ,
mind, nature of the, , , ; see also
mind/body relation
mind/body relation, , , , n, ,
, , , , , ; see also
affective states, cognition, and soul,
rational
modes, , , ,
Montaigne, Michel de (), , ,
Moon, the, , , , , , ,
morality, , , , ,
More, Henry (), , , ,
Morin, Jean-Baptiste (),
motion: circular and rectilinear, , ,
, ; conservation of, ,
; direction of (determination), ,
, ; nature of, ;
reciprocity/relativity of, , , ,
Index
Sun, the, , , , , , , , , ,
,
sunspots, , ,
teleology and goal-directedness, , ,
,
Telesio, Bernadino (),
Tempier, Etienne
( fl. ), , ,
theology,
tides, , , , ,
Toletus, Francisco (), , ,
transparency, , , , ,
truth, unity of, , ,
universals, n, , , , ,
Vatier, Antoine (),
Venus (planet), ,
Vives, Juan Luis (),
void, , ,
vortex theory, , , , , ,