# Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/René Descartes

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​DESCARTES, RENE, was born at La Haye, in Touraine, on the 31st of March 1596, and died at Stockholm on the llth of February 1650. The small town of La Haye lies on the right bank of the Creuse, about midway between Tours and Poitiers. The house is still shown where he was born, and a métairie about three miles off still retains the name of Les Cartes. His family on both sides was of Poitevin descent, and had its head-quarters in the neigh bouring town of Chatellerault, where his grandfather had been a physician. Joachim Descartes, his father, having purchased a commission as counsellor in the Parlement of Rennes, introduced the family into that demi-noblesse of the robe, which, in stately isolation between the bourgeoisie and the high nobility, maintained a lofty rank in the hierarchy of France. For the one half of each year required for residence the elder Descartes removed with his wife, Jeanne Brochard, to Rennes. Three children, all of whom first saw the light at La Haye, sprung from the union a son who afterwards succeeded to his father in the Parlement, a daughter who married a M. du Crevis, and a second son Rene. His mother, who had been ailing beforehand, never recovered from her third confinement ; and the motherless infant was entrusted to a nurse, whose care Descartes in after years remembered by a small pension.
Descartes, who in the family circle was known as Du Perron, from a small estate destined for his inheritance, soon showed, say the chroniclers, an inquisitive mind, which made his father style him his philosopher. He was sent off at the age of eight to the school of La Fleche, which Henry IV. had lately founded and endowed for the Jesuits, and there he continued from 1604 to 1612. Of the educa tion there given, of the equality maintained among the pupils, and of their free intercourse, Descartes at a later period spoke in terms of high praise. He himself enjoyed exceptional privileges; his feeble health excused him from the morning duties, and thus early he acquired the habit of matutinal reflection in bed, which clung to him through- ​out life. Even then he had begun to distrust the authority of tradition and his teachers. Two years before he left school he was selected as one of the twenty-four gentlemen who went forth to receive the heart of the murdered king as it was borne to its resting- place at La Fleche. At the age of sixteen he went home to his father, who was now settled at Rennes, and had taken a second wife from Brittany. During the winter of 1612 he completed his preparations for the world by lessons in horsemanship and fencing ; and then in the spring of 1613, he started as his own master to taste the pleasures of Parisian life. Fortunately the spirit of dissipation does not seem to have carried him any perilous lengths ; the worst we hear of is a passion for gaming. Here, too, he made the acquaintance of Claude Mydorge, one of the foremost mathematicians of France, and renewed an early intimacy with Marin Mersenne, an old fellow-student, senior by some years, at La Fleche, and now become Father Mersenne, of the order of Minim Friars. The withdrawal of the latter in 1614 to a post in the provinces was the signal for Descartes to abandon social life and shut him self up for nearly two years in a secluded house of the Faubourg St Germain. Accident, however, betrayed the secret of his retirement ; he was compelled to leave his mathematical investigations, and to take part in en tertainments, where the only thing that chimed in with his theorizing reveries was the music. The scenes of horror and intrigue which marked the struggle for supremacy between the various leaders who aimed at guid ing the politics of France made Paris no fit place for a student, and held out little honourable prospect for a soldier. Accordingly, in May 1617, Descartes, now twenty-one years of age, set out for the Netherlands and took service in the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, one of the greatest generals of the age, who had been engaged for some time in a war with the Spanish forces in Belgium. At Breda he enlisted as a volunteer, and the first and only pay which he accepted he kept as a curiosity through life. There was a lull in the war ; and the Nether lands were distracted by the quarrels of Gomarists and Arminians. During the leisure thus arising, Descartes one day, as he roved through Breda, had his attention drawn to a placard in the Dutch tongue ; and as the language, of which he never became perfectly master, was then strange to him, he asked a bystander to interpret it into either French or Latin. The stranger, who happened to be Isaac Beeckman, principal of the college of Dort, offered with some surprise to do so into Latin, if the inquirer would bring him a solution of the problem, for the advertisement was one of those challenges which the mathematicians of the age, in the spirit of the tournaments of chivalry, were accustomed to throw down to all comers, daring them to discover a geometrical mystery known as they fancied to themselves alone. Descartes promised and fulfilled ; and a friendship grew up between him and Beeckman broken only by the literary dishonesty of the latter, who in later years took credit for the novelty contained in a small essay on music (Compendium Musicce) which Descartes wrote at this period and intrusted to Beeckman. 1 After thus spending two years in Holland as a soldier in a period of peace, Descartes, in July 1619, attracted by the news &lt;)f the impending struggle between the house of Austria and the Protestant princes, consequent upon the election of the palatine of the Rhine to the kingdom of Bohemia, set out for Upper Germany, and volunteered into the Bavarian service. The winter of 1619, spent 1 It was only published after the author s death ; and of it, besides tho French version, there exists an Eaglish translation "by a Person of Quality." fa quarters at Neuburg on the Danube, was the critical period in his life. Here, in his warm room (dans utt poele), he indulged those meditations which afterwards led to the Discourse of Method. It was here that, on the eve of St Martin s day, ha "was filled with enthusiasm, and discovered the foundations of a mar vellous science." He retired to rest with anxious thoughts of his future career, which haunted him through the night in three dreams, that left a deep impression on his mind. " Next day," he -continues,- " I began to understand the first principles of my marvellous discovery. " The date of his philosophical conversion is thus fixed to a day. But the light was as yet dim ; he had only glimpses of a method which should invigorate the syllogism by the co-operation of ancient geometry and modern algebra. For during the year that elapsed before he left Swabia (and whilst he sojourned at Neuburg and Ulm), and amidst his geometrical studies, he would fain have gathered some knowledge of the mystical wisdom attributed to the Rosicrucians ; but the Invisibles, as they called them selves, kept their secret, and he found them not. His restlessness of spirit is well shown by a vow (which he himself records with the date of September 23, 1620), to make a pilgrimage to Loretto " if possible, on foot from Venice ; if not, in the most devout manner he could." 3 Soon after the Bavarian troops were ordered into active service. He was present at the battle of Prague, where the hopes of the elector palatine were blasted (9th November 1620), passed the winter with the army in Southern Bohemia, and next ^ear served under Count Boucquoi in Hungary. On the death of this general Descartes quitted the imperial service, and in July 1621 began a peaceful tour through. Moravia, the borders of Poland, Pomeiania, Brandenburg, Holstein, and Friesland, from which he re-appeared in February 1622 in Belgium, and betook himself directly to his father s home in Brittany. The sole incident recorded of this excursion is his danger, when crossing in a small boat to Dutch Friesland, from the cupidity of the crew, who had taken him for a rich merchant, but at once abandoned their murderous designs when they saw him rise with drawn sword, in all the dignity of a French gentleman. At Rennes, where the young family of his stepmother was growing up, Descartes probably found little to interest him ; and, after he had visited the maternal estate which his father now put him in possession of, he took the opportunity of running up to Paris, where he found the Rosicrucians the topic of the hour, and heard himself credited with partnership in their secrets. A short visit to Brittany enabled him, with his father s consent, to arrange for the sale of his property in Poitou. The proceeds were invested in such a way at Paris as to bring him in a yearly income of between 6000 and 7000 francs, a sum probably equal to more than 500 at the present day. Towards the end of the year Descartes was on his way to Italy. The natural phenomena of Switzerland, and the political complications in the Valtellina, where the Catholic inhabitants had thrown off the yoke of the Grisons and called in the Papal and Spanish troops to their assist ance, delayed him some time ; but he reached Venice iu time to see the ceremony of the doge s wedlock with the Adriatic. After paying his vows at Loretto, he came to Rome, which was then on the eve of a year of jubilee an occasion which Descartes seized to observe the variety of men and manners which the city then embraced within its walls. In the spring of 1625 he returned home by Mount Cenis, observing the avalanches, 4 instead of, as his relatives hoped, securing a post in the French army in Piedmont. 2 (Euvres In&lits, i. 8. 3 CEuvres Inedita, i. 12. 4 CEuvres,v. 255. ​For an instant Descartes seems to have concurred in the plan of purchasing a post at Chatellerault, but easily gave up the idea, and settled in Paris (June 1625), in the quarter where he had sought seclusion before. By this time he had ceased to devote himself to pure mathematics, and in company with his friends Mersenne and Mydorge was deeply interested in the theory of the refraction of light, and in the practical work of grinding glasses of the best shape suitable for optical instruments. But all the while his aim was fixed on something beyond either mathematics or physics ; he was engaged with reflections on the nature of man, of the soul, and of God; and it need cause no surprise that Descartes for a while remained invisible even to his most familiar friends. But their importunity made a hermitage in Paris impossible ; and a graceless friend surprised the philosopher in bed at 11 o clock in the morning meditating on some problem, and occasionally taking notes. In disgust at the apparent hopelessness of the position for a student, Descartes started for the west to take part in the siege of La Rochelle, and entered the famine-stricken city with the victorious troops on the 30th October 1628. A meeting at which he was present after his return to Paris decided his vocation. lie had expressed an opinion that the true art of memory was not to be gained by technical devices, but by a philo sophical apprehension of things ; and the Cardinal de Berulle, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, was so struck by the tone of the remarks as to impress upon the speaker the duty of spending his life in the examination of truth. Descartes accepted the philosophic mission. In the end of 1628 he left Paris, and in the spring of 1629 he settled in Holland. His financial affairs he had intrusted to the care of the Abbe" Picot, and as his literary and scientific representative he adopted Pore Mersenne. Between the ages of thirty-three and fifty-three (1629-1649) Descartes lived almost entirely in Holland. Thrice only did he revisit France during that period in 1644, 1647, and 1648. The first of these occasions was in order to settle family affairs after the death of his father in 1640. The eldest brother seems to have been disposed to take all he could, and to have expected the philosopher to be yielding in money matters. So little notice did the family think it necessary to take of a brother who had sunk to the level of literature, that a letter of Ren to his father, affectionately excusing his long absence, reached Rennes only after that father was lying in the tomb. The second brief visit, in 1647, partly on literary, partly on family business, was signalized by the award of a pension of 3000 francs, obtained from the royal bounty by Cardinal Mazariu in consideration of the advantages which Descartes s investigations conferred upon mankind, and to aid him in continuing his experiments. The pension was punctually paid. The last visit in 1648 was less fortunate. A royal order summoned him to France for new honours an additional pension and a permanent post for his fame had by this time gone abroad, and it was the age when princes sought to attract genius and learning to their courts. But when Descartes arrived, he found Paris rent asunder by the civil war of the Fronde. He paid the costs of his royal parchment, and left for his Dutch home without a word of reproach. The only other occasions on which he was out of the Netherlands were in 1630, when he made a flying visit to England to observe for himself some alleged magnetic phenomena, and in 1634, when he took an excursion to Denmark. During his residence in Holland he lived at thirteen different places, and changed his abode twenty-four times. In the choice of these spots two motives seem to have in fluenced him the neighbourhood of a university or college, and the amenities of the situation. Franeker, one of the neatest towns in Friesland, was the seat of a university founded in 1585 ; Harderwyk contained a venerable gymna sium, of some note in the pliysical sciences and theology; Deventer possessed a seminary still well endowed, but less famous than it had been in the days of Erasmus ; l Utrecht acquired a university so late as 1634 ; and Leyden had a notable one founded in 1575. Amersfoort, where he also lived, seems to be connected with a love affair, the only one in his life ; at least it was there that his daughter Francine died in 1640, at the age of five. Amsterdam, where he often lodged, Leeuwarden in Friesland, and Dort were also residences. He once settled near Utrecht, as well as in the town; but the three spots which seem to have been most attractive were Endegeest, a country house more than a mile north-west of Leyden, of which Sorbiere has given a pleasing description in one of his letters, and the two villages of Egmond op den Hoef and Egmond the Abbey, situated between Zaandam and the ocean, in one of the prettiest localities of North Holland. The time thus spent seems to have been on the whole happy, even allowing for some warm discussions with the mathematicians and metaphysicians of France, and for some harassing controversies in the Netherlands. Friendly agents chiefly Catholic priests were the intermediaries who forwarded from Dort, Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leyden his correspondence to his proper address, which he wished kept completely secret ; and Father Mersenne was only too willing to send him loads of objections and questions. During the first twenty years of his life his health had been weak 2 and his complexion pale. After that time the disease in his frame seems to have worked itself off, not without some effervescence. This is the period of his camp life (due, as he himself says, to " heat in the liver "), 3 of his wanderings, enthusiasm, dreams, and vows. With his thirtieth year this struggle seems at an end ; his health seems established ; and the washed-out vermilion of his prime gives place to a dark olive complexion in his riper manhood. It is touch ing to hear his delight in the freedom from intruders. " I sleep here ten hours every night," he writes from Amsterdam, " and no care ever shortens my slumber." " I take my walk every day through the confusion of a great multitude with as much freedom and quiet as you could find in your rural avenues." 4 At his first coming to Franeker he arranged to get a cook acquainted with French cookery ; but, to prevent misunderstanding, it may be added that his diet was mainly vegetarian, and that he rarely drank wine. New friends gathered round him who took a keen interest in his researches. Once only do we find him taking an interest in the affairs of his neigh bours, to ask pardon from the Government for a homicide. 5 He continued the profession of his religion. Sometimes from curiosity he went to the ministrations of anabaptists, 6 to hear the ranting of peasants and artisans. He carried few books to Holland with him, but a Bitle and the Siimma of Thomas Aquinas were amongst them. 7 One of the recom mendations of Egmond the Abbey was the free exercise there allowed to the Catholic religion. At Franeker his house was a small chateau, " separated by a moat from the rest of the town, where the mass could be said in safety." 8 And one motive in favour of accepting an invitation to England lay in the alleged hanings of Charles L to the older church. The best account of Descartes s mental history during his life in Holland is contained in his letters, which extend 1 (Euvr. vi. 214. 4 (Euvr. ix. 203. 3 (Euvr. viii. 70. 4 (Euvr. vi. 199. 5 (Euvr. viii. 59. 6 (Euvr. vii ; . 173. 7 (Euvr. viii. 181. 8 (Euvr. vi. 123.
​over the whole period, and are particularly frequent in the latter half. The majority of them are addressed to Mersenne, and deal with problems of physics and musical theory (in which he took a special interest). Mathematical subjects are a common topic. Several letters between 1643 and 1649 are addressed to the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of the ejected elector palatine, who lived at the Hague, where her mother maintained the semblance of a royal court. The princess was obliged to quit Holland, but kept up a philosophical correspondence with Descartes. It is to her that the Principles of Philosophy were dedi cated; and in her alone, according to Descartes, were united those generally separated talents for metaphysics and for mathematics which are so characteristically co-operative in the Cartesian system. Two Dutch friends, Zuylichem, the father of the more celebrated Huyghens, and Hoogheland, figure amongst the correspondents, not to mention various savants, professors, and churchmen (particularly Jesuits). His residence in the Netherlands fell on the most pros perous and brilliant days of the Dutch state, under the stadtholdership of Frederick Henry (1625-1647). Abroad its navigators monopolized the commerce of the world, and explored unknown seas ; at home the Dutch school of painting reached its acme in Rembrandt (1607-1669) ; and the philological reputation of the country was sustained by Grotius, Vossius, and the elder Heinsius. And yet, though Rembrandt s Nightwatch is dated the very year after the publication of the Meditations, not a word in Descartes breathes of any work of art or historical learning. The contempt of aesthetics and erudition is characteristic of the most typical members of the Cartesian school, especially Malebranche. Though Descartes probably read more than some of his admirers supposed he was not in any strict sense a reader. His wisdom grew mainly out of his own rellections and experiments, calmly yet ceaselessly pursued. Of mere learning and scholarship he had no esteem. The story of his disgust, when be found that Queen Christina devoted some time every day to the study of Greek under the tuition of Vossius, is at least true in substance. 1 It gives no evidence of science, he remarks, to possess a tolerable knowledge of the Roman tongue, such as once was possessed by the populace of Rome. 2 In all his travels, and in the different places at which he settled, his interest seems untouched either by art or history ; he looks only to the phenomena of nature and the actual aspects of human life. He was a spectator rather than an actor on the stage of the world. If he entered the army, it was merely bscause the position gave a vantage-grouud from which to make his obser vations. In the political interests which these contests involved he took no part ; his favourite disciple, the Princess Elizabeth, was the daughter of the banished king, against whom he had served in Bohemia ; and Queen Christina, his second royal follower, was the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. In many ways Descartes is a type of that self-reliant, harsh, and abstract spirit of science to which erudition and all the heritage of the past seem but elegant and un worthy trifling. The science of Descartes was physics in all its branches, but especially as applied to physiology. Science, he says, may be compared to a tree ; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine, and morals, the three applications of our knowledge to the outward world, to the human body, and to the conduct of life. 3 Such then was the work, and such the ends, that Descartes had iu view in Holland. His residence was generally divided into two parts one his workshop for 1 (Euvr. x. 375. a (Euvr. ix. 6. * (Euvr. iii. 24. science, the other his reception-room for society. " Here are my books," he is reported to have told a visitor, as he pointed to the animals he had dissected. " I am now," he writes in 1630, " studying chemistry and anatomy together ; and every day I learn something which I could not find in books." 4 He is working hard at his book on refraction, and at the same time is busy dis secting the hends of different animals in order to explain imagination and memory, which he considers physical pro cesses. 5 It need not from this be supposed that Descartes was a laborious student. " I can say with truth," he writes to the Princess Elizabeth, 6 " that the principle which 1 have always observed in my studies, and which I believe has helped me most to gain what knowledge I have, has been never to spend beyond a very few hours daily in thoughts which occupy the imagination, and a very few hours yearly in those which occupy the understanding, and to give all the rest of my time to the relaxation of the senses and the repose of the mind." But his expectations from the study of ana tomy and physiology went a long way. " The conservation of health," he writes in 1646, " has always been the principle end of my studies." 7 In 1629 he asks Mersenne to take care of himself " till I find out if there is any means of getting a medical theory based on infallible demonstrations, which is what I am now inquiring." 8 And to Zuylichen he writes in 1638. 9 " I have never taken so much care of myself as at present ; and whereas I used to think that death could take from me only thirty or forty years at most, it could not overtake me now without depriving me of the hope of more than a century." And similar views seem to have been expressed by him to Sir Kenelm Digby, who visited him in Holland. Astronomical inquiries in connection with optics, meteorological phenomena, and, in a word, the whole field of natural laws, excited his desire to explain them. His own observation, and the reports of Mersenne, furnished his data. Of Bacon s demand for observation and collection of facts he is an imitator ; and he wishes (in a letter of 1632) that " some one would undertake to give a history of celestial phenomena after the method of Bacon, and describe the sky exactly as it appears at present, without introducing a single hypothesis." 10 He had several writings in hand during the early years of his residence in Holland, but the main work of this period was a physical doctrine of the universe which he termed The World. Shortly after his arrival he writes to Mersenne that it will probably be finished in 1633, but meanwhile asks him not to disclose the secret to his Parisian friends. Already anxieties appear as to the theological verdict upon two of his fundamental views the infinitude of the universe, and the earth s lotation round the sun. 11 But towards the end of year 1633 we find him writing as follows : 12 "I had intended sending you my World as a New Year s gift, and a fortnight ago I was still minded to send you a fragment of the work, if the whole of it could not be transcribed in time. But I have just been at Leyden and Amsterdam to ask after Galileo s cosmical system, as I imagined I had heard of its being printed last year in Italy. I was told that it had been printed, but that every copy had been at the same time burnt at Rome, and that Galileo had been himself con demned to some penalty." He has also seen a copy of Galileo s condemnation at Lie ge (20th September 1633), with the words " Although he professes that the (Coper- nican) theory was only adopted by him as a hypothesis." His friend Beeckman lent him a copy of Galileo s work, 4 CEuvr. ri. 101. B (Euvr. vi. 234. (Euvr. ix. 131. 7 (Euvr. ix. 341. 8 (Euvr. vi. 89. (Euvr. vii. 412. 10 (Euvr. vi. 210. 11 (Euvr. vi. 73. 15 (Euvr. vi. 239.
​which he glanced through in his usual manner with other men s books ; he found it good, and " failing more in the points where it follows received opinions than where it diverges from them." 1 The consequence of these reports of the hostility of the church to the doctrine on which his theory reposed led him to abandon all thoughts of publish ing. The World was consigned to his desk ; and although doctrines in all essential respects the same constitute the physical portion of his Principia, it was not till after the death of Descartes that fragments of the work, including Le Monde, or a treatise on light, and the physiological tracts L Homme and La Formation du Fcetus, were given to the world by Clerselier, in 1664. Descartes was not dis posed to be a martyr ; he had a sincere respect for the church and for authority, and had no wish to shock pre judices, or to begin an open conflict with established doctrines. In 1G36 Descartes had resolved to publish some speci mens of the fruits of his method, and some general observa tions on its nature which, under an appearance of simplicity, might sow the good seed of more adequate ideas on the world and man. " I should be glad," he says, when talking of a publisher, 2 " if the whole book were printed in good type, on good paper, and T should like to have at least 200 copies for distribution. The book will contain four essays, all in French, with the general title of Project of a Uni versal science, capable of raising our nature to its highest perfection ; also Dioptrics, Meteors, and Geometry, wherein the most curious matters which the author could select as a proof of the universal science which he pro poses are explained in such a way that even the unlearned may understand them. " The work appeared anonymously at Leyden (published by Jean Maire) in 1637, under the modest title of Essais Philosophiques ; and the project of a universal science becomes the Discours de la methode pour lien conduire sa raison et chercher la verite dans les sciences. In 1644 it appeared in a Latin version, revised by Descartes, as Specimina Philosophies. A work so widely circulated by the author naturally attracted atten tion, but in France it was principally the mathematicians who took it up, and their criticisms were more pungent than complimentary. Fermat, Roberval, and Desargues took exception in their various ways to the methods employed in the geometry, and to the demonstrations of the laws of refraction given in the Dioptrics and the Meteors. The dispute on the latter point between Fermat and Descartes was continued, even after the philosopher s death, as late as 1662. In the virgin soil of the youthful Dutch universities the effect of the Cartesian essays was greater. The first public teacher of Cartesian views was Henri Renery, a Belgian, who at Deventer and afterwards at Utrecht had introduced the new philosophy which he had learned from personal intercourse with Descartes. Renery only survived five years at Utrecht ; and it was reserved for Regius (Henri De Roy), who in 1638 had been ap pointed to the new chair of botany and theoretical medicine at Utrecht, and who visited Descartes at Egmond in order more thoroughly to learn his views, to throw down the gauntlet to the adherents of the old methods. With more eloquence and vigour than judgment or prudence, he pro pounded and defended theses bringing into prominent relief the points in which the new doctrinos clashed with the old The attack was opened by Gisbert Voe t, foremost among the theological professors and clergy of Utrecht, a preacher of note and a stronghold of orthodoxy. In 1639 he published a series of arguments against atheism, in which the Cartesian views were not obscurely indicated as perilous for the faith, though no name was mentioned. Next year he 1 CEuvr vi.
persuaded the magistracy to issue an order forbidding Regius to travel beyond the received doctrine ; for Regius, contrary to the advice of Descartes, had formulated his view of Cartesianism in the phrase that man was a unity merely by accident, and meddled in his lectures with topics not usually associated with a chair of medicine. The magisterial views seem to have prevailed in the pro fessoriate, which formally in March 1642 expressed its disapprobation of the new and pretended philosophy as well as of its expositors. As yet Descartes was not directly attacked. Voe t now issued, through the medium and under the name of Martin Schoock, one of his pupils, a pamphlet with the title of Methodus nova? philosophies Renati Descartes, in which atheism and infidelity were openly declared to be the effect of the new teaching. Descartes replied to Voe t directly in a long and vigorous letter, published at Amster dam in 1643. Yet notwithstanding, he was summoned before the magistrates of Utrecht to defend himself against charges of irreligion and slander. What might have happened we cannot tell ; but Descartes threw himself on the protection of the French ambassador and the prince of Orange, and the city magistrates, from whom he vainly demanded satisfaction in a dignified letter, 3 were snubbed by their superiors. About the same time (April 1645) Schoock was summoned before the university of Groningen, of which he was a member, and forthwith disavowed the more abusive passages in his book. So did the effects of the odium theologicum, for the meanwhile at least, die away. In the Discourse of Method Descartes had sketched the main points in his new views, with a mental autobio graphy which might explain their origin, and with some suggestions as to their applications. His second great work, Meditations on the first Philosophy, which had been begun soon after his settlement in the Netherlands, expounded in more detail the foundations of his system, laying especial emphasis on the priority of mind to body, and on the absolute and ultimate dependence of mind as well as body on the existence of God. In 1640 a copy of the work in manuscript was despatched to Paris, and Mersenne was requested to lay it before as many thinkers and scholars as he deemed desirable, with a view to getting their views upon its argument and doctrine. Mersenne was not slack in submitting the work to criticism, and Descartes soon had a formidable list of objections to reply to. Accordingly, when the work was published at Paris in August 1641, under the title of Meditationes de prima philosophia ubi de Dei existentia et Animce immortalitate (though it was in fact not the immortality, but the immateriality of the mind, or, as the second edition described it, animce humancc a corpore distindio, which was maintained), the title went on to describe the larger part of the book as containing various objections of learned men, with the replies of the author. These objections in the first edition are arranged under six heads : the first came from Caterus, a theologian of Louvain ; the second and sixth are anonymous criticisms from various hands ; whilst the third, fourth, and fifth belong respectively to Hobbes, Arnauld, and Gassendi. In the second edition appeared the seventh objections from Pere Bourdin, a Jesuit teachei of mathematics in Paris ; and subsequently another set of objections known as those of Ilyperaspistes, was included in the collection of Descartes s letters. The anonymous objections are very much the statement of common sense against philosophy ; those of Caterus criticise the Cartesian argument from the traditional theology of the church ; those of Arnauld are an appreciative inquiry into the bearings and consequences of the meditations for religion 3 (Ewr. ix. 250.
​and morality ; while those of Hobbes and Gassendi both somewhat senior to Descartes and with a dogmatic system of their own already formed are a keen assault upon the spiritualism of the Cartesian position from a generally " sensational " stand-point. The criticisms of the last two are the criticisms of a hostile school of thought ; those of Arnauld are the difficulties of a possible disciple. In 1644 the third great work of Descartes, the Principia Philosophise, appeared at Amsterdam. Passing briefly over the conclusions arrived at in the Meditations, it deals in its second, third, and fourth parts with the general principles of physical science, especially the laws of motion, with the theory of vortices, and with the phenomena of heat, light, gravity, magnetism, electricity, &c., upon the earth. This work exhibits some curious marks of caution. Un doubtedly, says Descartes, the world was in the begin ning created in all its perfection. " But yet as it is best, if we wish to understand the nature of plants or of men, to consider how they may by degrees proceed from seeds, rather than how they were created by God in the beginning of the world, so, if we can excogitate some extremely simple and comprehensible principles, out of which, as if they were seeds, we can prove that stars, and earth, and all this visible scene could have originated, although we know full well that they never did originate in such a way, we shall in that way expound their nature far better than if we merely described them as they exist at present." 1 The Copernican theory is rejected in name, but retained in substance. The earth, or other planet, does not actually move round the sun ; yet it is carried round the sun in the subtle matter of the great vortex, where it lies in equilibrium, carried like the passenger in a boat, who may cross the sea and yet not rise from his berth. In 1647 the difficulties that had arisen at Utrecht were repeated on a smaller scale at Leyden. There the Cartesian innovations had found a patron in Adrian Heerebord, and were openly discussed in theses and lectures. The theological professors took the alarm at passages in the Meditations ; an attempt to prove the existence of God savoured, as they thought, of atheism and heresy. When Descartes complained to the authorities of this unfair treatment, 2 the only reply was an order by which all mention of the name of Cartesianism, whether favourable or adverse, was forbidden in the university. This was scarcely what Descartes wanted, and again he had to apply to the prince of Orange, whereupon the theologians were asked to behave with civility, and the name of Descartes was no longer proscribed. But other annoyances were not wanting from unfaithful disciples and unsympathetic critics. The Instantice of Gassendi appeared at Amsterdam in 1644 as a reply to the reply which Descartes had published of his previous objections; and the publication by Regius of his work on Physical Philosophy gave the world to understand that he had ceased to be a thorough adherent of the philosophy which he had so enthusiastically adopted. It was about 1648 that Descartes lost his friends Mersenne and Mydorge by death. The place of Mersenne as his Parisian representative was in the main taken by Claude Clerselier (the French translator of the Objections and Responses), whom he had become acquainted with in Paris. Through Clerselier he came to know Pierre Chanut, who in 1645 was sent as French ambassador to the court of Sweden. Queen Christina, the daughter of the great Gustavus, was not yet twenty, and took a lively, if a somewhat whimsical interest in literary and philosophical culture. Through Chanut, with whom she was on terms 1 Princip. L. iii. S. 45 8 GEuvr. x. 26. of familiarity, she came to hear of Descartes, and a corre spondence which the latter nominally carried on with the ambassador was in reality intended for the eyes of the queen. The correspondence took an ethical tone. It began with a long letter on Love in all its aspects (February 1647), 3 a topic suggested by Chanut, who had been discus sing it with the queen ; and this was soon followed by another to Christina herself on the Chief Good.^ An essay on the Passions of the Mind (Passions de I Ame), which had been written originally for the Princess Elizabeth, in development of some ethical views suggested by the De Vita Beata of Seneca, was inclosed at the same time for Chanut. It was a draft of the work published in 1650 under the same title. Philosophy, particularly that of Descartes, was becoming a fashionable divertissement for the queen and her courtiers, and it was felt that the presence of the sage himself was necessary to complete the good work of education. An invitation to the Swedish court was urged upon Descartes, and after much hesitation accepted ; a vessel of the royal navy was ordered to wait upon him, and in September 1649 he left Egmond for the north. The position on which he entered at Stockholm was cer tainly no sinecure, and utterly uusuited for a man who had always tried to be his own master. The young queen, full of plans and energy, wanted Descartes to draw up a code for a proposed academy of the sciences, and to give her an hour of philosophic instruction every morning at five. And in order to tie him down to the country she had already determined to create him a noble, and begun to look out an estate in the lately annexed possessions of Sweden on the Pomeranian coast. But these things were not to be. His friend Chanut fell dangerously ill ; and Descartes, who de voted himself to attend in the sick-room, was obliged to issue from it every morning in the chill northern air of January, and spend an hour in the palace library. The ambassador recovered, but Descartes fell a victim to the same disease an inflammation of the lungs. The last time he saw the queen was on the 1st of February 1650, when he handed to her the statutes he had drawn up for the proposed academy. Ten days after he was dead. The queen, in her first grief and enthusiasm, would have liked to bury him grandly at the feet of the Swedish kings, and to raise a costly mausoleum in his honour : but these plans were overruled, and a plain monument in the Catholic cemetery was all that marked the place of his rest. Sixteen years after his death the French treasurer D Alibert made arrangements for the conveyance of the ashes to his native land ; and in 1667 they were interred in the church of Ste Genevieve du Mont, the modern Pantheon. In 1819, after being temporarily deposited in a stone sarcophagus in the court of the Louvre during the Revolutionary epoch, they were transferred to St Germain-des-Pres, where they now repose between Montfaucon and Mabillon. A monument was raised to his memory at Stockholm by Gustavus III.; and some years ago a statue was erected to him at Tours, with the inscription Je pense, done je suis on the pedestal. Descartes was never married, and probably had little of the amorous in his temperament. He has alluded to a childish fancy for a young girl with a slight obliquity of vision ; but he only mentions it a propos of the consequent weakness which led him to associate such a defect with beauty. 4 Mythical rumours represent him as telling a belle that he found no beauty comparable to the beauty of truth. In person he was a little man, with large head, projecting brow, prominent nose, and eyes wide apart, with black hair coming down almost to his eyebrows. His voice was feeble. He usually dressed in black, with unobtrusive propriety.
* (Euvr. x. 3.
* CEuvr. x. 53.
​The end of all study, says Descartes in one of his earliest writings, ought to be to guide the mind to form true and sound judgments on every thing that may be presented to it. 1 The sciences in their totality are but the intelligence of man ; and all the details of knowledge have no value save as they strengthen the understanding. The mind is not for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge for the sake of the mind. This is the re-assertion of a principle which the Middle Ages had lost sight of that knowledge, if it is to have any value, must be intelligence, and not erudition. But how is intelligence, as opposed to erudition, possible 1 The answer to that question is the method of Descartes. That idea of a method grew up with his study of geometry and arithmetic, the only branches of know ledge which he would allow to be " made sciences," those which the Jesuits best taught, and which he himself cultivated most zealously in early life. But they did not satisfy his demand for intelligence. "I found in them," he says, " different propositions on numbers of which, after a calculation, I perceived the truth ; as for the figures, I had, so to speak, many truths put before rny eyes, and many others concluded from them by analogy ; but it did not seem to me that they told my mind with sufficient clearness why the things were as I was shown, and by what means their discovery was attained." 2 The mathematics of which he thus speaks included the geometry of the ancients, as it had been handed down to the modern world, and arithmetic with the developments it had received in the direction of algebra. The ancient geometry, as we know it, is a wonderful monument of ingenuity a series of (ours de force, in which each problem to all appearance stands alone, and, if solved, is solved by methods and principles peculiar to itself. Here and there particular curves, for example, had been obliged to yield the secret of their tangent; but the ancient geometers apparently had no consciousness of the general bearings of the methods which they so successfully applied. Each problem was something unique ; the elements of transition from one to another were wanting ; and the next step which mathe matics had to make was to find some method of reducing, for instance, all curves to a common notation. When that was found, the solution of one problem would immediately entail the solution of all others which belonged to the same series as itself. The arithmetical half of mathematics, which had been gradually growing into algebra, and had decidedly established itself as such in the Logistica Spedosa of Vieta (1540-1603), supplied to some extent the means of generalizing geometry. And the algebraists or arithmeti cians of the 16th century, such as Lucas de Borgo, Cardan, and Tartaglia, had used geometrical constructions to throw light on the solution of particular equations. But progress was "made difficult, in consequence of the clumsy and irregu lar nomenclature employed. "With Descartes the use of exponents as now employed for denoting the powers of a quantity becomes systematic; and without some such step by which the homogeneity of successive powers is at once recognized, the binomial theorem could scarcely have been detected. The restriction of the early letters of the alphabet to known, and of the late letters to unknown quantities is also his work. In this and other details he crowns and completes, in a form henceforth to be dominant for the language of algebra, the work of numerous obscure pre decessors, such as Etienne de la Roche, Stiefel, and others. Having thus perfected the instrument, his next step was to apply it in such a way as to bring uniformity of method into the isolated and independent operations of geometry. 1 Regulse, (Euvr. xi. 202.
" I had no intention," he says in the Mefltod,"* of attempt ing to master all the particular sciences commonly called mathematics ; but as I observed that, with all differences in their objects, they agreed in considering merely the various relations or proportions subsisting among these objects, I thought it best for my purpose to consider these relations in the most general form possible, without refer ring them to any objects in particular except such as would most facilitate the knowledge of them. Perceiving further, that in order to understand these relations I should some times have to consider them one by one, and sometimes only to bear them in mind or embrace them in the aggregate, I thought that, in order the better to consider them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines, than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more distinctly represented to my imagination and senses ; and on the other hand that, in order to retain them in the memory or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters, the briefest possible." Such is the basis of the algebraical or modern analytical geometry. The problem of the curves is solved by their reduction to a problem of straight lines ; and the locus of any point is determined by its distance from two given straight lines the axes of co ordinates. Thus Descartes gave to modern geometry that abstract and general character in which consists its superi ority to the geometry of the ancients. In another question connected with this, the problem of drawing tangents to any curve, Descartes was drawn into a controversy with Fermat (1590-1663), Roberval (1602-1673), and Desargues (1593-1662). Fermat and Descartes agreed in regarding the tangent to a curve as a secant of that curve with the two points of intersection coinciding, while Roberval regarded it as the direction of the composite movement b)^ which the curve can be described. Both these methods, differing from that now employed, are interesting as preliminary steps towards the method of fluxions and the differential calculus. In pure algebra Descartes expounded and illustrated the general methods of solving equations up to those of the fourth degree (and believed that his method could go beyond), stated the law which connects the positive and negative roots of an equation with the changes of sign in the consecutive terms, and introduced the method of indeterminate coefficients for the solution of equations. 4 Attempts have been recklessly made to claim some of these innovations for the English algebraists Oughtred and Harriot, and others for the mathematicians of the Continent ; but such assertions are based upon no proof, and, if true, would only illustrate the genius of the man who could pick out from other works all that was productive, and state it with a lucidity which makes it look his crwn discovery. The Geometry of Descartes, unlike the other parts of his essays, is not easy reading. It dashes at once into the middle of the subject with the examination of a problem which had baffled the ancients, and seems as if it were tossed at the heads of the French geometers as a challenge. An edition of it appeared subsequently, with notes by his friend De Beaune, calculated to smooth the difficulties of the work. All along mathematics was regarded by Descartes rather as the envelope than the foundation of his method ; and the " universal mathematical science " which he sought after was only the prelude of a universal science of all-embracing character. 5 The method of Descartes rests upon the proposition that all the objects of our knowledge fall into series, of which the members are more or less known by means of one 3 Disc, de Methode, part ii.
Geometric, book iii. VII. rfi
​another. In every such series or group there is a dominant element, simple and irresoluble, the standard on which the rest of the series depends, and hence, so far as that group or series is concerned, absolute. The other members of the group are relative and dependent, and only to be understood as in various degrees subordinate to the primi tive conception. The characteristic by which we recognize the fundamental element in a series is its intuitive or self-evident character ; it is given by " the evident con ception of a healthy and attentive mind so clear and distinct that no doubt is left." 1 Having discovered this prime or absolute member of the group, we pro ceed to consider the degrees in which the other members enter into relation with it. Here deduction comes into play to show the dependence of one term upon the others ; and, in the case of a long chain of intervening links, the problem for intelligence is so to enunciate every element, and so to repeat the connection that we may finally grasp all the links of the chain in one. In this way we, as it were, bring the causal or primal term and its remotest dependent immediately together, and raise a derivative knowledge into one which is primary and intuitive. Such are the four points of Cartesian method : (1) Truth requires a clear and distinct conception of its object, excluding all doubt ; (2) the objects of knowledge naturally fall into series or groups ; (3) in these groups investigation must begin with a simple and indecomposable element, and pass from it to the more complex and relative elements ; (4) an exhaustive and immediate grasp of the relations and interconnection of these elements is necessary for knowledge in the fullest sense of that word. 2 " There is no question," he says in anticipation of Locke and Kant, "more important to solve than that of knowing what human knowledge is and how far it extends." " This is a question which ought to be asked at least once in their lives by all who seriously wish to gain wisdom. The inquirer will find that the first thing to know is intellect, because on it depends the knowledge of all other things. Examining next what immediately follows the knowledge of pure intellect, he will pass in review all the other means of knowledge, and will find that they are two (or three), the imagination and the senses (and the memory). He will therefore devote all his care to examine and distinguish these three means of knowledge ; and seeing that truth and error can, properly speaking, be only in the intellect, and that the two other modes of knowledge are only occasions, he will carefully avoid whatever can lead him astray." 3 This separation of intellect from sense, imagination, and memory is the cardinal precept of the Cartesian logic ; it marks off clear and distinct (i.e., adequate and vivid) from obscure, fragmentary, and incoherent conceptions. The Discourse of Method and the Meditations apply what the Rides for the Direction of the Mind had regarded in particular instances to our conceptions of the world as a whole. They propose, that is, to find a simple and inde composable point, or absolute element, which gives to the world and thought their order and systematization. The grandeur of this attempt is perhaps unequalled iu the annals of philosophy. The three main steps iu the argument are the veracity of our thought when that thought is true to itself, the inevitable uprising of thought from its fragmentary aspects in our habitual consciousness to the infinite and perfect existence which God is, and the ultimate reduction of the material universe tD extension and local movement. These are the central dogmas of logic, metaphysics, and physics, from which start the subsequent inquiries of Locke, Leibnitz, and Newton. They are also 1 CEuvrcs, xi. 212. * Disc, de Methode, part ii. 3 CEuvres, xi. 243. the direct antitheses to the scepticism of Montaigne and Pascal, to the materialism of Gassendi and Hobbes, and to the superstitious anthropomorphism which defaced the re awakening sciences of nature. Descartes laid down the lines on which modern philosophy and science were to build. But himself no trained metaphysician, and un susceptible to the lessons of history, he gives but fragments of a system which are held together, not by their intrinsic consistency, but by the vigour of his personal conviction transcending the weaknesses and collisions of his several arguments. " All my opinions," he says, " are so conjoined, and depend so closely upon one another, that it would be impossible to appropriate one without knowing them all." 4 Yet every disciple of Cartesianism seems to disprove the dictum by his example. The very moment when we begin to think, says Descartes, when we cease to be merely receptive, when we draw back and fix our attention on any point whatever of our belief, that moment doubt begins. If we even stop for an instant to ask ourselves how a word ought to bo spelled, the deeper we ponder that one word by itself the more hopeless grows the hesitation. The doubts thus awakened must not be stifled, but pressed systematically on to the point, if such a point there be, where doubt con futes itself. The doubt as to the details is natural ; it is no less natural to have recourse to authority to silence the doubt. The remedy proposed by Descartes is (while not neglecting our duties to others, ourselves, and God) to let doubt range unchecked through the whole fabric of our customary convictions. One by one they refuse to render any reasonable account of themselves ; each seems a mere chance, and the whole tends to elude us like a mirage which some malignant power creates for our illusion. Attacked in detail, they vanish one after another into as many teasing spectra of uncertainty. We are seeking from them what they cannot give. But when we have done our worst in unsettling them, we come to an ultimate point in the fact that it is we who are doubting, we who are thinking. We may doubt that we have hands or feet, that we sleep or wake, and that there is a world of material things around us ; but we cannot doubt that we are doubting. We are certain that we are think ing, and in so far as we are thinking we are. Je pense, done je suis. Of this we cannot doubt, and therefore this is true. In other words, the criterion of truth is a clear and distinct conception, excluding all possibility of doubt. The fundamental point thus established is the veracity of consciousness when it does not go beyond itself, or does not postulate something which is external to itself. We are thinking ; we are minds ; and from the mere primary intuition, which results when we analyze our doubts, we cannot tell that we are more. At this point Gassendi arrested Descartes and addressed his objections to him as pure intelligence, mcns I But even this mens, or mind, is but a point we have found no guarantee as yet for its continuous existence. The analysis must be carried deeper if we are to gain any further conclusions. Amongst the ideas or elements of our thought there are some which we can make and unmake at our pleasure ; there are others which come and go without our wish ; there is also a third class which is of the very essence of our thinking, and which dominates our conceptions. We find that all our ideas of limits, sorrows, and weaknesses pre suppose an infinite, perfect, and ever-blessed something beyond them and including them, that all our ideas, in all their series, converge to one central idea, in which they find their explanation. The formal fact of thinking is what constitutes our being ; but this thought of which we 4 (Euvres, vii. 381.
​are certain leads us back, when we consider its concrete contents, to the necessary pre-supposition on which our ideas depend, the ultimate totality in which they are all reconciled, the permanent cause on which they and we as conscious beings depend. We have therefore, says Descartes, the idea of an infinite, perfect, and all powerful being which cannot be the creation of ourselves, and must be given by some being who really possesses all that we in idea attribute to him. Such a being he identifies with God. But the ordinary idea of God can scarcely be identified with such a conception. " The majority of men," he says himself, " do not think of God as an infinite and incom prehensible being, and as the sole author from whom all things depend ; they go no further than the letters of his name." 1 " The vulgar almost imagine him as a finite thing." The God of Descartes is not merely the creator of the material universe ; he is also the father of all truth in the intellectual world. "The metaphysical truths," he says, " styled eternal have been established by God, and, like the rest of his creatures, depend entirely upon him. To say that these truths are independent of him is to speak of God as a Jupiter or a Saturn, to subject him to Styx and the Fates." 2 The laws of thought, the truths of number, are the decrees of God. The expression is anthropomorphic, no less than the dogma of material creation ; but it is an attempt to affirm the unity of the intellectual and the material world. Descartes establishes a philosophic monotheism, by which the mediaeval poly theism of substantial forms, essences, and eternal truths fades away before God, who is the ruler of the intellectual world no less than of the kingdom of nature and of grace. To attach a clear and definite meaning to the Cartesian doctrine of God, to show how much of it comes from the Christian theology and how much from the logic of idealism, how far the conception of a personal being as creator and preserver mingles with the pantheistic conception of an infinite and perfect something which is all in all, would be to go beyond Descartes and to ask for a solution of difficulties of which he was scarcely aware. It seems impossible to deny that the tendency of his principles and his arguments is mainly in the line of a metaphysical absolute, as the necessary completion and foundation of all being and knowledge. Through the truthfulness of that God as the author of all truth he derives a guarantee for our perceptions in so far as these are clear and distinct. And it is in guaranteeing the veracity of our clear and distinct conceptions that the value of his deduction of God seems in his own estimate to rest. All conceptions which do not possess these two attributes of being vivid in themselves and discriminated from all others cannot be true. But the larger part of our conceptions are in such a predicament. We think of things not in the abstract elements of the things themselves, but in connection with, and in language which presupposes, other things. Our idea of body, e.g., involves colour and weight, and yet when we try to think carefully, and without assuming anything, we find that we cannot attach any distinct idea to these terms when applied to body. In truth therefore these attributes do not belong to body at all ; and if we go on in the same way testing the received qualities of matter, we shall find that in the last resort we understand nothing by it but extension, with the secondary and derivative characters of divisibility and mobility. But it would again be useless to ask how extension as the characteristic attribute of matter is related to mind which thinks, and how God is to be regarded in reference to extension. The force of the universe is swept up and gathered in God, who communicates motion to the parts of 1 (Euvres, vi. 132. a (Euvres, vi. 109. extension, and sustains that motion from moment to moment ; and in the same way the force of mind has really been concentrated in God. Every moment one expects to find Descartes saying with Hobbes that man s thought has created God, or with Spinoza and Malebranche that it is God who really thinks in the apparent thought of man. After all, the metaphysical theology of Descartes, however essential in his own eyes, serves chiefly as the ground for constructing his theory of man and of the universe. His fundamental hypothesis relegates to God all forces in their ultimate origin. Hence the world is left open for the free play of mechanics and geometry. The disturbing conditions of will, life, and organic forces are eliminated from the problem ; he starts with the clear and distinct idea of extension, figured and moved, and thence by mathematical laws he gives a hypothetical explanation of all things. Such explanation of physical phenomena is the main problem of Descartes, and it goes on encroaching upon territories once supposed proper to the mind. Descartes began with the certainty that we are thinking beings ; that region remains untouched ; but up to its very borders the mechanical explanation of nature reigns unchecked. The physical theory, in its earlier form in the World, and in its later in the Principles of Philosophy (which the present account follows), rests upon the metaphysical conclusions of the Meditations. It proposes to set forth the genesis of the existing universe from principles which can be plainly understood, and according to the acknow ledged laws of the transmission of movement. The idea of force is one of those obscure conceptions which originate in an obscure region, in the sense of muscular power. The true physical conception is motion, the ultimate ground of which is to be sought in God s infinite power. Accordingly the quantity of movement in the universe, like its mover, can neither increase nor diminish. The only circumstance which physics has to consider is the transference of move ment from one particle to another, and the change of its direction. Man himself cannot increase the sum of motion ; he can only alter its direction. The whole conception of force may disappear from a theory of the universe ; and we can adopt a geometrical definition of motion as the shifting of one body from the neighbourhood of those bodies which immediately touch it, and which are assumed to be at rest, to the neighbourhood of other bodies. Motion, in short, is strictly locomotion, and nothing else. Descartes has laid down three laws of nature, and seven secondary laws regarding impact. The latter are to a large extent incorrect. The first law affirms that every body, so far as it is altogether unaffected by extraneous causes, always perseveres in the same state of motion or of rest ; and the second law that simple or elementary motion is always in a straight line. 3 These doctrines of inertia, and of the composite character of curvilinear motion, were scarcely apprehended even by Kepler or Galileo ; but they follow naturally from the geometrical analysis of Descartes, Extended body has no limits to its extent, though the power of God has divided it in lines discriminating its parts in endless ways. The infinite universe is infinitely full of matter. Empty space, as distinguished from material extension, is a fictitious abstraction. There is no such thing really as a vacuum, any more than there are atoms or ultimate indivisible particles. In both these doctrines of a priori science Descartes has not been subverted, but, if anything, corroborated by the results of experimental physics for the so-called atoms of chemical theory already presuppose, from the Cartesian point of view, certain aggregations of the primitive particles of matter. Descartes regards matter as uniform in character 3 Princip., pt. ii. 37.
​throughout the universe ; he anticipates, as it were, from his own transcendental ground, the revelations of spectrum analysis as applied to the sun and stars. We have then to think of a full universe of matter (and matter = extension) divided and figured with endless variety, and set (and kept) in motion by God ; and any sort of division, figure, and motion will serve the purposes of our supposition as well as another. " Scarcely any supposition," 1 he says, in ominous language, " can be made from which the same result, though possibly with greater difficulty, might not be deduced by the same laws of nature ; for since, in virtue of these laws, matter successively assumes all the forms of which it is capable, if we consider these forms in order, we shall at one point or other reach the existing form of the world, so that no error need here be feared from a false supposition." As the movement of one particle in a closely-packed universe is only possible if all other parts move simultaneously, so that the last in the series steps into the place of the first ; and as the figure and division of the particles varies in each point in the universe, there will inevitably at the same instant result throughout the universe an innumer able host of more or less circular movements, and of vortices or whirlpools of material particles, varying in size and velocity. Taking for convenience a limited portion of the universe, we observe that in consequence of the circular movement the particles of matter have their corners pared off by rubbing against each other; and two species of matter thus arise, one consisting of small globules which continue their circular motion with a (centrifugal) tendency to fly off from the centre as they swing round the axis of rotation, while the other, consisting of the fine dust the filings and parings of the original particles gradually becoming finer and finer, and losing its velocity, tends (centripetally) to accumulate in the centre of the vortex, which has been gradually left free by the receding particles of globular matter. This finer matter which collects in the centre of each vortex is the first matter of Descartes it constitutes the sun or star. The spherical particles are the second matter of Descartes, and their tendency to propel one another from the centre in straight lines towards the circumference of each vortex is what gives rise to the phenomenon of light radiating from the central star. This second matter is atmosphere or firmament, which envelops and revolves around the central accumulation of first matter. A third form of matter is produced from the original particles. As the small filings produced by friction seek to pass through the interstices between the rapidly revolving spherical particles in the vortex, they are detained and become twisted and channelled in their passage, and when they reach the edge of the inner ocean of solar dust they settle upon it as the froth and foam produced by the agita tion of water gathers upon its surface. These form what we term spots in the sun. In some cases they come and go, or dissolve into an ether round the sun; but in other cases they gradually increase until they form a dense crust rcnnd^JJjie central nucleus. In course of time the star, with its expansive force diminished, suffers encroach ments from the neighbouring vortices, and at length they catch it up. If the velocity of the decaying star be greater than that of any part of the vortex which has swept it up, it will ere long pass out of the range of that vortex, and continue its movement from one to another. Such a star is a comet. But in other cases the encrusted star settles in that portion of the revolving vortex which has a velocity equivalent to its own, and so continues to revolve in the vortex, wrapt in its own firmament. Such a reduced and _____ __ ______^^^___ 1 Princip., pt. iii. 47. impoverished star is a planet ; and the several planets of our solar system are the several vortices which from time to time have been swept up by the central sun-vortex. The same considerations serve to explain the moon and other satellites. They, too, were once vortices, swallowed up by some other, which at a later day fell a victim to the sweep of our sun. Such in mere outline is the celebrated theory of vortices, which for about 20. years after its promulgation reigned supreme in science, and for much longer time opposed a tenacious resistance to rival doctrines. It is one of the grandest hypotheses which ever have been formed to account by mechanical processes for the movements of the universe. While chemistry rests in the acceptance of ultimate heterogeneous elements, the vortex-theory assumed uniform matter through the universe, and reduced cosmical physics to the same principles as regulate terrestrial phenomena. It ended the old Aristotelian distinction between the sphere beneath the moon and the starry spaces beyond. It banished the spirits and genii, to which even Kepler had assigned the guardianship of the planetary movements ; and, if it supposes the globular particles of the envelope to be the active force in carrying the earth round the sun, we may remember that Newton himself assumed an ether for somewhat similar purposes. The great argument on which the Cartesians founded their opposition to the Newtonian doctrines was that attraction was an occult quality, not wholly intelligible by the aid of mere mechanics. The Newtonian theory is an analysis of the elementary movements which in their combination de termine the planetary orbits, and gives the formula of the proportions according to which they act. But the Cartesian theory, like the later speculations of Kant and Laplace, proposes to give a hypothetical explanation of the circum stances and motions which in the normal course of things led to the state of things required by the law of attraction. In the judgment of D Alembert the Cartesian theory was the best that the observations of the age admitted ; and " its explanation of gravity was one of the most ingenious hypotheses which philosophy ever imagined." That the explanation fails in detail is undoubted : it does not account for the elliptic! ty of the planets ; it would place the sun, not in one focus, but in the centre of the ellipse ; and it would make gravity directed towards the centre only under the equator. But these defects need not blind us to the fact that this hypothesis made the mathematical progress of Hooke, Borelli, and Newton much more easy and certain. Descartes professedly assumed a simplicity in the phenomena which they did not present. But such a hypothetical simplicity is the necessary step for solving the more complex problems of nature. The danger lies not in forming such hypotheses, but in regarding them as final, or as more than an attempt to throw light upon our observation of the phenomena. In doing what he did, Descartes actually exemplified that reduction of the processes of nature to mere transposition of the particles of matter, which in different ways was a leading idea in the minds of Bacon, Hobbes, and Gassendi. The defects of Descartes lie rather in his apparently imperfect apprehension of the principle of movements uniformly accelerated which his contemporary Galileo had illustrated and insisted upon, and in the indistinctness which attaches to his views of the transmission of motion in cases of impact. In modern times, it may be added, a theory of vortex-atoms has been suggested to explain the constitution of matter. But except in name it has but slight analogy with Cartesian doctrine, and finds a parallel, if anywhere, in a modification of that doctrine by Malebranche. Besides the last two parts of the Principles of Philosophy, the physical writings of Descartes include the Dioptrics
​and Meteors, as well as passages in the letters. His optical investigations are perhaps the subject in which he most contributed to the progress of science ; and the lucidity of exposition which marks his Dioptrics stands conspicuous even amid the generally luminous style of his works. Its object is a practical one, to determine by scientific considera tions the shape of lens best adapted to improve the capa bilities of the telescope, which had been invented not long before. The conclusions at which he arrives have not been so useful as he imagined, in consequence of the mechanical difficulties. But the investigation by which he reaches them has the merit of first prominently publishing and establishing the law of the refraction of light. Attempts have been made, principally founded on some jealous remarks of Huyghens, to show that Descartes had learned the principles of refraction from the manuscript of a treatise by Willebrord Snell, but facts do not bear out the charge ; and, so far as Descartes founds his optics on any one, it is on the researches of Kepler. In any case the glary of the discovery is to a large extent his own, for his proof of the law is founded upon the theory that light is the tendency or inclination of the subtle particles of ethereal matter to propagate their movement in straight lines from the sun or luminous body to the eye. And thus he approxi mates to the wave theory of light, though he supposed, like his contemporaries, that the transmission of light was instantaneous. The chief of his other contributions to optics was the explanation of the rainbow an explanation far from complete, since the unequal refrangibility of the rays of light was yet undiscovered but a decided advance upon his predecessors, notably on the De radiis visus et lucis (1611) of Marc-Antonio de Dominis, archbishop of Spalato, from whom careless critics have assumed that he derived his ideas. If Descartes had contented himself with thus explaining the phenomena of gravity, heat, magnetism, light, and similar forces by means of the molecular movements of his vortices, even such a theory would have excited admiration by its daring grandeur. But Descartes did not stop short in the region of what is usually termed physics. Chemis try and biology are alike swallowed up in the one science of physics, and reduced to a problem of mechanism. This theory, he believed, would afford an explanation of every phenomenon whatever, and in nearly every department of knowledge he has given specimens of its power. But the most remarkable and daring application of the theory was to account for the phenomena of organic life, especially in animals and man. " If we possessed a thorough know ledge," he says, 1 " of all the parts of the seed of any species of animal (e.g., man), we could from that alone, by reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole figure and conformation of each of its members, and, con versely, if we knew several peculiarities of this conforma tion, we could from these deduce the nature of its seed." The organism in this way is regarded as a machine, con structed from the particles of the seed, which in virtue of the laws of motion have arranged themselves (always under the governing power of God) in the particular animal shape in which we see them. The doctrine of the circulation of the blood, which Descartes adopted from Harvey, supplied additional arguments in favour of his mechanical theory, and he probably did much to popularize the discovery. A fire without light, compared to the heat which gathers in a haystack when the hay has been stored before it was properly dry heat, in short, as an agitation of the particles is the motive cause of the contraction and dilatations of the heart. Those finer particles of the blood which become extremely rarefied during this process 1 (Euvres, iv. 494. pass off in two directions one portion, and the least important in the theory, to the organs of generation, the other portion to the cavities of the brain. There not merely do they serve to nourish the organ, they also give rise to a fine ethereal flame or wind through the action of the brain upon them, and thus form the so-called " animal " spirits. From the brain these spirits are conveyed through the body by means of the nerves, regarded by Descartes as tubular vessels, resembling the pipes conveying the water of a spring to act upon the mechanical appliances in an artificial fountain. The nerves conduct the animal spirits to act upon the muscles, and in their turn convey the im pressions of the organs to the brain. Man and the animals as thus described are compared to automata, and termed machines. The vegetative and sensitive souls which the Aristotelians had introduced to break the leap between inanimate matter and man are ruthlessly swept away ; only one soul, the rational, remains, and that is restricted to man. One hypothesis supplants the various principles of life ; the rule of absolute.mechanism is as complete in the animal as in the cosmos. Reason and thought, the essential quality of the soul, do not belong to the brutes ; there is an impassable gulf fixed between man and the lower animals. The only sure sign of reason is the power of language i.e., of giving expression to general ideas; and language in that sense is not found save in man. The cries of animals are but the working of the curiously-contrived machine, in which, when one portion is touched in a certain way, the wheels and springs concealed in the interior perform their work, and, it may be, a note supposed to express joy or pain is evolved ; but there is no consciousness or feeling. " The animals act naturally and by springs, like a watch." 2 "The greatest of all the prejudices we have retained from our infancy is that of believing that the beasts think." 3 If the beasts can properly be said to see at all, " they see as we do when our mind is distracted and keenly applied elsewhere ; the images of outward objects paint themselves on the retina, and possibly even the impressions made in the optic nerves determine our limbs to different movements, but we feel nothing of it all, and move as if we were automata." 4 I will not believe, said the Cartesian Chanet. that a beast thinks until the beast tells me so itself. The sentience of the animal to the lash of his tyrant is not other than the sensitivity of the plant to the influences of light and heat. It is not much comfort to learn farther from Descartes that " he denies life to no animal, but makes it consist in the mere heat of the heart. Nor does he deny them, feel ing in so far as it depends on the bodily organs." 5 Descartes, with an unusual fondness for the letter of Scrip ture, quotes oftener than once in support of this monstrous doctrine the dictum that " The blood is the life ;" and he remarks, with some sarcasm possibly, that it is a comfort able theory for the eaters of animal flesh. And the doctrine found acceptance among some whom it enabled to get rid of the difficulties raised by Montaigne and those who allowed more difference between animal and animal than between the higher animals and man. It also encouraged vivisection a practice common with Descartes himself. 8 The recluses of Port Royal seized it eagerly, discussed automatism, dissected living animals in order to show to a morbid curiosity the circulation of the blood, were careless of the cries of tortured dogs, and finally embalmed the doctrine in a syllogism of their logic, No matter thinks ; every soul of beast is matter : therefore no soul of beast thinks. But whilst all the organic processes in man go on 8 (Euvres, ix. 426. * (Euvres, vi. 339. 6 (Euvres, iv. 452 and 454. 3 (Euvres, x. 204. 6 (Euvres, x. 208.
​mechanically, and though by reflex action he may repel attack unconsciously, still the first affirmation of the system was that man was essentially a thinking being ; and, while we retain this original dictum, it must not be supposed that the mind is a mere spectator, or like the boatman in the boat. Of course a unity of nature is impossible between mind and body so described. And yet there is a unity of composition, a unity so close that the compound is " really one and in a sense indivisible." You cannot in the actual man cut soul and body asunder ; they interpenetrate in every member. But there is one point in the human frame a point midway in the brain, single and free, which may in a special sense be called the seat of the mind. This is the so-called conarion, or pineal gland, where in a minimized point the mind on one hand and the vital spirits on the othsr meet and communicate. In that gland the mystery of creation is concentrated ; thought meets exten sion and directs it; extension moves towards thought and is perceived. Two clear and distinct ideas, it seems, pro duce an absolute mystery. Mind, driven from the field of extension, erects its last fortress in the pineal gland. In such a state of despair and destitution there is no hope for spiritualism, save in God; and Clauberg, Geulincx, and Malebranche all take refuge under the shadow of His wings to escape the tyranny of extended matter. In the psychology of Descartes there are two fundamental modes of thought, perception and volition. " It seems to me," he says, " that in receiving such and such an idea the mind is passive, and that it is active only in volition ; that its ideas are put in it partly by the objects which touch the senses, partly by the impressions in the brain, and partly also by the dispositions which have preceded in the mind itself and by the movements of its will." 1 The wiL therefore, as being more originative, has more to do with true or false judgments than the understanding. Unfortu nately, Descartes is too lordly a philosopher to explain distinctly what either understanding or will may mean. But we gather that in two directions our reason is bound up with bodily conditions, which make or mar it, according as the will, or central energy of thought, is true to itself or not. In the range of perception, intellect is subjected to the material conditions of sense, memory, and imagination ; and in infancy, when the will has allowed itself to assent pre cipitately to the conjunctions presented to it by these material processes, thought has become filled with obscure ideas. In the moral sphere the passions or emotions (which Descartes reduces to the six primitive forms of admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness) are the perceptions or sentiments of the mind, caused and maintained by some movement of the vital spirits, but specially referring to the mind only. The presentation of some object of dread, for example, to the eye has or may have a double effect. On one hand the animal spirits " reflected" 2 from the image formed on the pineal gland proceed through the nervous tubes to make the muscles turn the back and lift the feet, BO as to escape the cause of the terror. Such is the reflex and mechanical movement independent of the mind. But, on the other hand, the vital spirits cause a movement in the gland by which the mind perceives the affection of the organs, learns that something is to be loved or hated, admired or shunned. Such perceptions dispose the mind to pursue what nature dictates as useful. But the estimate of goods and evils which they give is indistinct and unsatis factory. The office of reason is to give a true and distinct appreciation of the values of goods and evils ; or firm and determinate judgments touching the knowledge of good and evil are our proper arms against the influence of the passions. 3 We are free, therefore, through knowledge : ex (Euvres, ix. 166. 2 Passions de I Ame, 36. 3 Passions de 1 Ame, 48. magna luce in intdlectu sequitur magna propensio in volun- tate, and omnis peccans est ignorans. " If we clearly sea that what we are doing is wrong, it would be impossible for us to sin, so long as we saw it in that light." 4 Thus the highest liberty, as distinguished from mere indifference, proceeds from clear and distinct knowledge, and such knowledge can only be attained by firmness and resolution, i.e., by the continued exercise of the will. Thus in the perfection of man, as in the nature of God, will and intellect must be united. For thought, will is as necessary as understanding. And innate ideas therefore are mere capacities or tendencies, possibilities which apart from the will to think may be regarded as nothing at all. The philosophy of Descartes fought its first battles and gained its first triumphs in the country of his adoption. In his lifetime his views had been taught in Utrecht and Leyden. In the universities of the Netherlands and of Lower Germany, as yet free from the conservatism of the old-established seats of learning, the new system gained an easy victory ever Aristotelianism, and, as it was adapted for lectures and examinations, soon became almost as scholastic as the doctrines it had supplanted. At Leyden, taught by De Raey, Heerebord, Heidan, and Voider ; at Utrecht, by De Bruyn and P. Burmann, and Lambert AVelthuysen (the last a private student); at Groningen, by Maresius, Gousset, and Tobias Andre ; at Franeker, by Kuardus Andala ; at Breda, Nimeguen, Harderwyk, Duisburg, and Herborn, and at the Catholic university of Louvain, Cartesianism was warmly expounded and defended in seats of learning, of which many are now left desolate, and by adherents whose lucubrations have for the most part long lost interest for any but the antiquary. The Cartesianism of Holland was a child of the uni versities, and its literature is mainly composed of com mentaries upon the original texts, of theses discussed in ihe schools, and of systematic expositions of Cartesian philosophy for the benefit of the student. Three names stand out in this Cartesian professoriate, Wittich, Clauberg, and Geulincx. Wittich (1625-1688), professor at Duisburg and Leyden, is a representative of the moderate followers, who professed to reconcile the doctrines of their school with the faith of Christendom, and to refute the theology of Spinoza. Clauberg (like Wittich, a German), professor of philosophy at Herborn and Duisburg, died while still young in 1665. Like a schoolman on Aristotle, he has, clause by clause, commented upon the Meditations of Descartes ; but he specially claims notice for his work De corporis et animae in homine conjunctio, where he main tains that the bodily movements are merely procatarctic causes (i.e., antecedents, but not strictly causes) of the mental action, and sacrifices the independence of man to the omnipotence of God. The same tendency to absorb all particular causes and movements in God is still more pronounced in Geulincx (1625-1669), who for the last six years of his life taught privately at Leyden. With Geuliiicx the reciprocal action of mind and body is altogether denied ; they resemble two clocks, so made by the artificer as to strike the same hour together. The mind can only act upon itself; beyond that limit, the power of God must intervene to make any seeming interaction possible between body and soul. Such are the half-hearted attempts at consistency in Cartesian thought, which eventually culminate in the pantheism of Spinoza. Descartes occasionally had not scrupled to interpret the Scriptures according to his own tenets, while still main taining, when their letter contradicted him, that the Bible was not meant to teach the sciences. Similar tendencies are found amongst his followers. Whilst Protestant
​opponents put him in the list of atheists like Vanini, and the Catholics held him as dangerous as Luther or Calvin, there were zealous adherents who ventured to prove the theory of vortices in harmony with the book of Genesis. It was this rationalistic treatment of the sacred writings which helped to confound the Cartesians with the allegorical school of John Cucceius, as their liberal doctrines in theology justified the vulgar identification of them with the heresies of Socinian and Arminian. The chief names in this advanced theology connected with Cartesian doctrines are Meyer, the friend and editor of Spinoza, author of a work termed Philosophia Scriptures Interpres (1666) ; Balthasar Bekker, whose World Bewitched helped to discredit the superstitious fancies about the devil ; and Spinoza, whose Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is in some respects the classical type of rational criticism up to the present day. Against this work and the Ethics of Spinoza the orthodox Cartesians (who were in the majority), no less than scepti cal hangers-on like Bayle, raised an all but universal howl of reprobation, scarcely broken for about a century. In France Cartesianism won society and literature before it penetrated into the universities. Clerselier (the friend of Descartes and his literary executor), his son-in-law Rohault (who achieved that relationship through his Cartesianism), and others, opened their houses for readings to which the intellectual world of Paris its learned profes sors not more than the courtiers and the fair sex., flocked to hear the new doctrines explained, and possibly discuss their value. Grand seigneurs, like the prince of Conde, the Due de Nevers, and the Marquis de Vardes, were glad to vary the monotony of their feudal castles by listening to the eloquent rehearsals of Malebranche or Regis. And the salons of Madame de Sevigne, of her daughter Mine, de Grignan, and of the Duchesse de Maine for a while gave the questions of philosophy a place among the topics of polite society, and furnished to Moliere the occa sion of his Femmes Savantes. The chateau of the Due de Luynes, the translator of the Meditations, was the home of a Cartesian club, that discussed the questions of automatism and of the composition of the sun from filings and parings, and rivalled Port Royal in its vivisections. The Cardinal de Retz in his leisurely age at Commercy found amusement in presiding at disputations between the more moderate Cartesians and Don Robert Desgabets, who interpreted Descartes in an original way of his own. Though rejected by the Jesuits, who found peripatetic formulae a faithful weapon against the enemies of the church, Cartesianism was warmly adopted by the Oratory, which saw in Descar tes something of St Augustine, by Port Royal, which discovered a connection between the new system and Jansenism, and by some amongst the Benedictines and the order of Ste Genevieve. 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, like a public benefactor in some old Greek town, was made the guest of the civic corporation. In 1671 scarcely less enthusiasm was aroused in Montpellier ; and in 1680 he opened a course of lectures at Paris, with such acceptance that intending hearers had to secure their seats some time before the lecture began. Regis, by removing the paradoxes and adjusting the meta physics to the popular powers of apprehension, made Car tesianism popular, and reduced it to a regular system. But a check was at hand. Descartes, in his correspond ence with the Jesuits, had shown an almost cringing eagerness to have their powerful organization on his ,ude Especially he had written to Pere 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 theologi cal 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, donee corrigantur. Thereupon ths 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 College Royal fell vacant, one of the four selected candidates had to sustain a thesis against " the pretended new philo sophy 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 Parliament 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, com posed 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 Genevieve, and the Oratory laid their official ban on the obnoxious doctrines. From the real or fancied rapproche ments 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 Huet, 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. His Recherche de la Verite, 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 De la Forge, 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, Fenelon, 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, Mairan and especially Fontenelle, with his Theorie des Tourlillons (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, Nicole and Arnauld, had applied it to grammar and logic ; Domat and Daguesseau to jurisprudence; Fontenelle, Perrault, and Terrasson 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 popu larity 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 aban doned, The ghost of innate ideas seems to be all that it had left. In Germany a few Cartesian lecturers left their names at Leipsic and Halle, but the system took no root, any more than in Switzerland, where it had a brief reign at Geneva after 1669. In Italy the effects were more permanent. What is termed the iatro-mechanical school of medicine, with 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 mem bers 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 life time of the author, became its opponent in later years ; and Cudworth differed from it in most essential points. Antony Legrand, from Douay, 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, bishop of Oxford, who, in his attack on the irreligious novelties of the Cartesian treats Descartes (such is the irony of history) 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 over grown 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 Des cartes, in their connections with Malebrauche and Spinoza, see the article CARTESIANISM. The chief editions of the collected works of Descartes are the two Latin texts in 9 vols. 4to by Elzevir 1713, and in 7 vols. 4 to, Frankfort, 1697, and the French edition by Cousin in 11 vols. 8vo, Paris, 1824- 26. These include his so-called posthumous works, The Rides for the Direction of the Mind, The Search for Truth by the Sight of Nature, and other unimportant fragments, published (in Latin) in 1701. In 1859-60 Foucher de Careil published in two parts some unedited writings of Descartes from copies taken by Leibnitz from the original papers. An edition of the philosophical works in 4 vols. 8vo, edited by Gamier, appeared at Paris, 1835. There is a good English translation of the Method, Meditations, and a small part of the Principles, first published at Edinburgh, 1853. For the life of Descartes the chief authority is Baillet, Vie de Descartes, in 2 vols. 4to, 1691 ; of which a small abridgment, after wards translated into English, appeared in 1692. There is a sum mary of it in Garnier s edition, and in Kuno Fischer s Geschichte der Neuern Philosophic, Band i. Th. 1, Svo, Mannheim, 1865. See the Eloge of Thomas in Cousin s edition. For the philosophy of Descartes, see besides the works referred to under CARTESIAN ISM, Bordas-Demoulin, Le Cartesian isme, 2d ed. Par. 1874 ; Damiron, Ilistoire de la Philosophic du XVII. Siecle ; Renouvier, Manuel de Philosophic Moderne, Paris, 1842 ; Cousin, Fragments Philosophiqucs, vol. ii., Paris, 1838, Fragments de Philosophic Cartesienne, Paris, 1845, and in the Journal dcs Savants, 1860-61. A good estimate of the physical and mathematical labours is given in Ersch and Gruber s Encydopadie ; and Professor Huxley has lately, in the Fortnightly Review, vol. xvi., called atten tion to automatism. There are also several German works treating of his theology and metaphysics. (W. W. )