Delphi Collected Works of René Descartes

  The popularity which Cartesianism thus gained in the social and literary circles of the capital was largely increased by the labours of Pierre-Sylvain Regis (1632-1707). On his visit to Toulouse in 1665, with a mission from the Cartesian chiefs, his lectures excited boundless interest; ladies threw themselves with zeal and ability into the study of philosophy; and Regis himself was made the guest of the civic corporation. In 1671 scarcely less enthusiasm was roused in Montpellier; and in 1680 he opened a course of lectures at Paris, with such acceptance that hearers had to take their seats in advance. Regis, by removing the paradoxes and adjusting the metaphysics to the popular powers of apprehension, made Cartesianism popular, and reduced it to a regular system.

  But a check was at hand. Descartes, in his correspondence with the Jesuits, had shown an almost cringing eagerness to have their powerful organization on his side. Especially he had written to Père Mesland, one of the order, to show how the Catholic doctrine of the eucharist might be made compatible with his theories of matter. But his undue haste to arrange matters with the church only served to compromise him more deeply. Unwise admirers and malicious opponents exaggerated the theological bearings of his system in this detail; and the efforts of the Jesuits succeeded in getting the works of Descartes, in November 1663, placed upon the index of prohibited books, — donec corrigantur. Thereupon the power of church and state enforced by positive enactments the passive resistance of old institutions to the novel theories. In 1667, the oration at the interment was forbidden by royal order. In 1669, when the chair of philosophy at the Collège Royal fell vacant, one of the four selected candidates had to sustain a thesis against “the pretended new philosophy of Descartes.” In 1671 the archbishop of Paris, by the king’s order, summoned the heads of the university to his presence, and enjoined them to take stricter measures against philosophical novelties dangerous to the faith. In 1673 a decree of the parlement against Cartesian and other unlicensed theories was on the point of being issued, and was only checked in time by the appearance of a burlesque mandamus against the intruder Reason, composed by Boileau and some of his brother-poets. Yet in 1675 the university of Angers was empowered to repress all Cartesian teaching within its domain, and actually appointed a commission charged to look for such heresies in the theses and the students’ note-books of the college of Anjou belonging to the Oratory. In 1677 the university of Caen adopted not less stringent measures against Cartesianism. And so great was the influence of the Jesuits, that the congregation of St Maur, the canons of Ste Geneviève, and the Oratory laid their official ban on the obnoxious doctrines. From the real or fancied rapprochements between Cartesianism and Jansenism, it became for a while impolitic, if not dangerous, to avow too loudly a preference for Cartesian theories. Regis was constrained to hold back for ten years his System of Philosophy; and when it did appear, in 1690, the name of Descartes was absent from the title-page. There were other obstacles besides the mild persecutions of the church. Pascal and other members of Port Royal openly expressed their doubts about the place allowed to God in the system; the adherents of Gassendi met it by resuscitating atoms; and the Aristotelians maintained their substantial forms as of old; the Jesuits argued against the arguments for the being of God, and against the theory of innate ideas; whilst Pierre Daniel Huet (1630-1721), bishop of Avranches, once a Cartesian himself, made a vigorous onslaught on the contempt in which his former comrades held literature and history, and enlarged on the vanity of all human aspirations after rational truth.

  The greatest and most original of the French Cartesians was Malebranche (q.v.). His Recherche de la vérité, in 1674, was the baptism of the system into a theistic religion which borrowed its imagery from Augustine; it brought into prominence the metaphysical base which Louis Delaforge, Jacques Rohault and Regis had neither cared for nor understood. But this doctrine was a criticism and a divergence, no less than a consequence, from the principles in Descartes; and it brought upon Malebranche the opposition, not merely of the Cartesian physicists, but also of Arnauld, Fénelon and Bossuet, who found, or hoped to find, in the Meditations, as properly understood, an ally for theology. Popular enthusiasm, however, was with Malebranche, as twenty years before it had been with Descartes; he was the fashion of the day; and his disciples rapidly increased both in France and abroad.

  In 1705 Cartesianism was still subject to prohibitions from the authorities; but in a project of new statutes, drawn up for the faculty of arts at Paris in 1720, the Method and Meditations of Descartes were placed beside the Organon and the Metaphysics of Aristotle as text-books for philosophical study. And before 1725, readings, both public and private, were given from Cartesian texts in some of the Parisian colleges. But when this happened, Cartesianism was no longer either interesting or dangerous; its theories, taught as ascertained and verified truths, were as worthless as the systematic verbiage which preceded them. Already antiquated, it could not resist the wit and raillery with which Voltaire, in his Lettres sur les Anglais (1728), brought against it the principles and results of Locke and Newton. The old Cartesians, Jean Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678-1771) and especially Fontenelle, with his Théorie des tourbillons (1752), struggled in vain to refute Newton by styling attraction an occult quality. Fortunately the Cartesian method had already done its service, even where the theories were rejected. The Port Royalists, Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) and Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), had applied it to grammar and logic; Jean Domat or Daumat (1625-1696) and Henri François Daugesseau (1668-1751) to jurisprudence; Fontenelle, Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Jean Terrasson (1670-1750) to literary criticism, and a worthier estimate of modern literature. Though it never ceased to influence individual thinkers, it had handed on to Condillac its popularity with the masses. A Latin abridgment of philosophy, dated 1784, tells us that the innate ideas of Descartes are founded on no arguments, and are now universally abandoned. The ghost of innate ideas seems to be all that it had left.

  In Germany a few Cartesian lecturers taught at Leipzig and Halle, but the system took no root, any more than in Switzerland, where it had a brief reign at Geneva after 1669. In Germany. Italy the effects were more permanent. What is termed the iatro-mechanical school of medicine, with G. A. Borelli (1608-1679) as its most notable name, entered in a way on the mechanical study of anatomy suggested by Descartes, but was probably much more dependent upon the positive researches of Galileo. At Naples there grew up a Cartesian school, of which the best known members are Michel Angelo Fardella (1650-1708) and Cardinal Gerdil (1718-1802), both of whom, however, attached themselves to the characteristic views of Malebranche.

  In England Cartesianism took but slight hold. Henry More, who had given it a modified sympathy in the lifetime of the author, became its opponent in later years; and England. Cudworth differed from it in most essential points. Antony Legrand, from Douai, attempted to introduce it into Oxford, but failed. He is the author of several works, amongst others a system of Cartesian philosophy, where a chapter on “Angels” revives the methods of the schoolmen. His chief opponent was Samuel Parker (1640-1688), bishop of Oxford, who, in his attack on the irreligious novelties of the Cartesian, treats Descartes as a fellow-criminal in infidelity with Hobbes and Gassendi. Rohault’s version of the Cartesian physics was translated into English; and Malebranche found an ardent follower in John Norris (1667-1711). Of Cartesianism towards the close of the 17th century the only remnants were an overgrown theory of vortices, which received its death-blow from Newton, and a dubious phraseology anent innate ideas, which found a witty executioner in Locke.

  For an account of the metaphysical doctrines of Descartes, in their connexions with Malebranche and Spinoza, see Cartesianism.

  Bibliography. — I. Editions and Translations. — The collected works of Descartes were published in Latin in 8 vols. at Amsterdam (1670-1683), in 7 vols. at Frankfort (1697) and in 9 vols. by Elzevir (1713); in French in 13 vols. (Paris, 1724-1729), republished by Victor Cousin (Paris, 1824-1826) in 11 vols., and again under the au
thority of the minister of public instruction by C. Adam and P. Tannery (1897 foll.). These include his so-called posthumous works. The Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Search for Truth by the Light of Nature, and other unimportant fragments, published (in Latin) in 1701. In 1859-1860 Foucher de Careil published in two parts some unedited writings of Descartes from copies taken by Leibnitz from the original papers. Six editions of the Opera philosophica appeared at Amsterdam between 1650 and 1678; a two-volume edition at Leipzig in 1843; there are also French editions, Œuvres philosophiques, by A. Garnier, 3 vols. (1834-1835), and L. Aimé-Martin (1838) and Œuvres morales et philosophiques by Aimé-Martin with an introduction on life and works by Amedée Prévost (Paris, 1855); Œuvres choisies (1850) by Jules Simon. A complete French edition of the collected works was begun in the Romance Library (1907 foll.). German translations by J. H. von Kirchmann under the title Philosophische Werke (with biography, &c., Berlin, 1868; 2nd ed., 1882-1891), by Kuno Fischer, Die Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung seiner Philosophie (1863), with introduction by Ludwig Fischer (1892). There are also numerous editions and translations of separate works, especially the Method, in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian. There are English translations by J. Veitch, Method, Meditations and Selections from the Principles (1850-1853; 11th ed., 1897; New York, 1899); by H. A. P. Torrey (New York, 1892).

  II. Biographical. — A. Baillet, La Vie de M. Des Cartes (Paris, 1691; Eng. trans., 1692), exhaustive but uncritical; notices in the editions of Garnier and Aimé-Martin; A. Hoffmann, René Descartes (1905); Elizabeth S. Haldane, Descartes, his Life and Times (1905), containing full bibliography; A. Barbier, René Descartes, sa famille, son lieu de naissance, &c. (1901); Richard Lowndes, René Descartes, his Life and Meditations (London, 1878); J. P. Mahaffy, Descartes (1902), with an appendix on Descartes’s mathematical work by Frederick Purser; Victor de Swarte, Descartes directeur spirituel (Paris, 1904), correspondence with the Princess Palatine; C. J. Jeannel, Descartes et la princesse palatine (Paris, 1869); Lettres de M. Descartes, ed. Claude Clerselier (1657). A useful sketch of recent biographies is to be found in The Edinburgh Review (July 1906).

  III. Philosophy. — Beside the histories of philosophy, the article Cartesianism, and the above works, consult J. B. Bordas-Demoulini Le Cartésianisme (2nd ed., Paris, 1874); J. P. Damiron, Histoire de la philosophie du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1846); C. B. Renouvier, Manuel de philosophie moderne (Paris, 1842); V. Cousin, Fragments philosophiques, vol. ii. (3rd ed., Paris, 1838), Fragments de philosophie cartésienne (Paris, 1845), and in the Journal des savants (1860-1861); F. Bouillier, Hist. de la philosophie cartésienne (Paris, 1854), 2 vols., and Hist. et critique de la révolution cartésienne (Paris, 1842); J. Millet, Descartes, sa vie, ses travaux, ses découvertes avant 1637 (Paris, 1867), and Hist. de Descartes depuis 1637 (Paris, 1870); L. Liard, Descartes (Paris, 1882); A. Fouillée, Descartes (Paris, 1893); Revue de métaphysique et de morale (July, 1896, Descartes number); Norman Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy (1902); R. Keussen, Bewusstsein und Erkenntnis bei Descartes (1906); A. Kayserling, Die Idee der Kausalität in den Lehren der Occasionalisten (1896); J. Iverach, Descartes, Spinoza and the New Philosophy (1904); R. Joerges, Die Lehre von den Empfindungen bei Descartes (1901); Kuno Fischer, Hist. of Mod. Phil. Descartes and his School (Eng. trans., 1887); B. Christiansen, Das Urteil bei Descartes (1902); E. Boutroux, “Descartes and Cartesianism” in Cambridge Modern History, vol. iv. (1906), cha, with a very full bibliography, p-953; P. Natorp, Descartes’ Erkenntnisstheorie (Marburg, 1882); L. A. Prévost-Paradol, Les Moralistes français (Paris, 1865); C. Schaarschmidt, Descartes und Spinoza (Bonn, 1850); R. Adamson, The Development of Modern Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1903); J. Müller, Der Begriff der sittlichen Unvollkommenheit bei Descartes und Spinoza (1890); J. H. von Kirchmann, R. Descartes’ Prinzipien der Philos. (1863); G. Touchard, La Morale de Descartes (1898); Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Hist. of Mod. Philos. in France (Eng. trans., 1899), p-76.

  IV. Science and Mathematics. — F. Cajori, History of Mathematics (London, 1894); M. Cantor, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Mathematik (Leipzig, 1894-1901); Sir Michael Foster, Hist. of Physiol. during the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1901); Duboux, La Physique de Descartes (Lausanne, 1881); G. H. Zeuthen, Geschichte der Mathematik im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (1903); Chasles, Aperçu historique sur l’origine et le développement des méthodes en géométrie (3rd ed., 1889).

  BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: RENÉ DESCARTES by Clodius Piat

  From Catholic Encyclopedia 1913, Volume 4

  Renatus Cartesius, philosopher and scientist, born at La Haye France, 31 March, 1596; died at Stockholm, Sweden, 11 February 1650. He studied at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, one of the most famous schools of the time. In 1613 he went to Paris, where he formed a lasting friendship with Father Mersenne, O. F. M., and made the acquaintance of the mathematician Mydorge. He afterwards enlisted in the armies of Maurice of Nassau, and of the Duke of Bavaria. On 10 November, 1619, he felt a strong impulse to set aside the prejudices of his childhood and of his environment, and to devote his life to the restoration of human knowledge, which was then in a state of decadence; and for him this mission took on quite a mystical character. He had a dream which he interpreted as a revelation, and he became convinced that “it was the Spirit of Truth that willed to open for him all the treasures of knowledge”. After much journeying in Brittany, Poitou, Switzerland, and Italy, he returned to Paris in 1625. There he remained for two years during which it was his fortune to meet Cardinal Bérulle who encouraged him in his scientific vocation. But as Paris offered neither the peace nor the independence his work demanded, he set out in 1629 for Holland, and there in the midst of a commercial people he enjoyed the advantage of living as quietly as in a desert. From this retreat he gave to the world his “Discours de la méthode” (1637), “Méditations” (1641), “Principes” (1644), and “Passions”(l649). “Le Monde” had been completed in 1633, but the condemnation of Galileo frightened Descartes who preferred to avoid all collision with ecclesiastical authority. He deferred the publication of this clever work without, however, losing hope of eventually bringing it out. In 1649, yielding to the entreaties of Queen Christina, he went to Sweden, and died at Stockholm of inflammation of the lungs.

  Descartes’ work is important rather because of its quality than of its quantity. Let us see first of all wherein his method is new. He observed, as Bacon had already done before him, that there is no question on which men agree. “There is nothing”, he says “so evident or so certain that it may not be controverted. Whence then this widespread and deep-rooted anarchy? From the fact that our inquiries are haphazard” (Règles pour la direction de l’esprit, 4e Règle). The first problem, then, is to discover a scientific method. How is success in this difficult task to be assured? To begin with, we must cease to rely on authority; and for two principal reasons. “In whom can we trust” when “there is hardly a statement made by one man, of which the opposite is not loudly supported by some other?” And even “if all were agreed, the knowledge of their teaching would not suffice us.” “Had we by rote all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we should not be any the more philosophers unless we were able to bring to bear on any given question a solid judgment of our own. We should have indeed learned history but not mastered a science” (3e Règle) Philosophy presupposes the understanding of problems — and consequently its method cannot be external, it must be essentially immanent. The true method is to seek for reasonable evidence and the norm of such evidence is to be found in the science of mathematics (Discours de la méthode, 2e partie). “It is not that arithmetic and geometry are the only sciences to be learned, but that he who would progress on the road to truth must not delay over any object about which he cannot have a certainty equal to that given by arithmetical and geometrical demonstrations” (2e Règle).

  Is everything, then, capable of being known in this way, and consequently can human knowledge become the complete counterpart of reality? Descar
tes says so over and over again; it is his controlling idea; and he endeavours to prove it both from the nature of our thought and from the universal connexion of things. The mind is equally intelligent however diverse the objects it considers; and those objects because of their perfect enchainment are always equally intelligible. There is, therefore, no question “so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach or so deeply hidden that we cannot discover it”, provided only that we persevere and follow the right method (Disc. de la méth. 2e partie; 4e Règle). Such is the rationalism of Descartes, surpassing even that of Plato, in which under the name of “the Infinite” three-fourths of reality remains for ever unknowable. How then is this mathematical evidence to be obtained. Two methods, dangerous at once and sterile, must be avoided. We cannot build on the experience of our senses; “for they are often deceptive”, and consequently need a control which they have not in themselves. Bacon was misled on this point (2e Règle). Neither can we adopt the syllogistic method; for this is not, as was formerly thought, a means of discovery. It is simply a process in which, two terms being given, we find by means of a third that the former two are linked together, i. e. that they have some common characteristic. Now if they have this common characteristic it is useless to search for it with any light other than their own. Let them pass under direct scrutiny; let their natures be studied, and in time the common trait will reveal itself. This is the mind’s straight road to discovery, passing on from one idea to another without the aid of a third. The syllogism is of no use until the discovery has been made; it simply serves the purpose of exposition (14e Règle). There are but two ways leading to mathematical evidence: intuition and deduction (3e Règle). Intuition “is the conception formed by an attentive mind so clear and distinct that it admits of no doubt: or what amounts to the same thing, it is the clear conception of a sound and attentive mind, the product of unaided reason” (3e Règle). Intuition is not, therefore, perception by the senses — it is an act of the understanding brought to bear on an idea. The senses do not supply the object but merely the occasion. A movement, for instance, awakens in us the idea of motion, and it is that idea we must regard as the object of intuition. In very simple matters intuition acts quickly; thus “everyone can know intuitively that he exists; that a triangle is terminated by three angles, neither more nor less, and that a globe has but one surface” (3e Règle; 12e Règle; Rép. aux deux objections). In the case of objects more or less complex, intuition proceeds by way of analysis. Since it deals with ideas, and ideas are but one aspect of thought, everything must be reduced to clear and distinct elements, to ultimate or “indecomposable” parts. These ultimate parts must be inspected one after another, until the object is exhausted, “by passing from those that are easily known to those that are less easily known” (6e Règle). In the long run everything will be spread out in full light.