Garber Descartes Embodied

DESCARTES EMBODIED
This volume collects some of the seminal essays on Descartes by Daniel

Garber, one of the preeminent scholars of early-modern philosophy.
A central theme unifying the volume is the interconnection between
Descartes’ philosophical and scientific interests, and the extent to
which these two sides of the Cartesian program illuminate each other,
a question rarely treated in the existing literature.
Among the specific topics discussed in the essays are Descartes’
celebrated method, his demand for certainty in the sciences, his
account of the relation of mind and body, and his conception of God’s
activity on the physical world.
This collection will be a mandatory purchase for any serious student
of or professional working in seventeenth-century philosophy, history
of science, or history of ideas.
Daniel Garber is Lawrence Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor

in Philosophy and in the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations
of Science at the University of Chicago. He is inter alia the author of
Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics and coeditor of The Cambridge History of
Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.
DESCARTES EMBODIED
Reading Cartesian Philosophy through
Cartesian Science
DANIEL GARBER
University of Chicago
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments page ix
Abbreviations, Citations, and Translations xi
Introduction 1
Part I. Historiographical Preliminaries
1 Does History Have a Future? Some Reflections on
Bennett and Doing Philosophy Historically 13
Part II. Method, Order, and Certainty
2 Descartes and Method in 1637 33
3 A Point of Order: Analysis, Synthesis, and Descartes’
Principles (with Lesley Cohen) 52
4 J.-B. Morin and the Second Objections 64
5 Descartes and Experiment in the Discourse and Essays 85
6 Descartes on Knowledge and Certainty: From the
Discours to the Principia 111
Part III. Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature
7 Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes
and Leibniz 133
8 Understanding Interaction: What Descartes Should
Have Told Elisabeth 168
9 How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance,
and Occasionalism 189
10 Descartes and Occasionalism 203
vii
viii contents
11 Semel in vita: The Scientific Background to Descartes’
Meditations 221
12 Forms and Qualities in the Sixth Replies 257
Part IV. Larger Visions
13 Descartes, or the Cultivation of the Intellect 277
14 Experiment, Community, and the Constitution of
Nature in the Seventeenth Century 296
Sources 329
Index 333
ABBREVIATIONS, CITATIONS, AND
TRANSLATIONS
Although these essays were originally published at different times, in

different places, and using different abbreviations and conventions of
citation, I have tried to bring a certain amount of consistency to the
collective whole, at least when dealing with the writings of Descartes.
In the essays that follow, I have used the following abbreviations:
AT Descartes, René, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed., Charles Adam

and Paul Tannery, new edition. (11 vols.) Paris: CNRS/Vrin,
1964–74. References by volume number and page (e.g.,
AT VII 74).
CSM Descartes, René, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed.
and trans., John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald
Murdoch (2 vols.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984–85. References by volume number and page (e.g.,
CSM II 74).
CSMK Descartes, René, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume
III: The Correspondence, ed. and trans., John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. References
to page numbers (e.g., CSMK 146).
AT remains the standard original-language text, and CSM and CSMK

have become the standard English translations. In some essays, there
are references to both AT and an English translation; more often,
not. Since CSM and CSMK key their texts directly to AT, it should be
xi
xii abbreviations, citations, translations
easy enough to move from the AT citations that I usually give to those
translations. Though I do not always cite them, I often do borrow from
them in essays written after they became available. In the earlier essays,
I made some use of earlier translations that they replaced. In par-
ticular, some of the earlier pieces in this collection borrow from the
once standard translations of Haldane and Ross1 and the volume of
Descartes’ letters edited and translated by Anthony Kenny2 (which
metamorphasized into CSMK), as well as the translations of Anscombe
and Geach,3 Laurence J. Lafleur,4 Paul J. Olscamp5 (for the Dioptrics and
Meteors), and others that are lost in the sands of time and on the shelves
of my library. To these helpful crutches go all the praise and none of
the blame: If I have borrowed their mistakes in translation (or, even
worse, made original mistakes of my own), it’s my own damned fault.
In any case, direct references to outdated translations in the original
essays have been eliminated.
I have not tried to revise essays or footnotes in any extensive way.
When I found that I no longer agreed with a view expressed in an essay
I published some years ago, I was more inclined to omit it from this
volume than try to correct it. Also, I have made no attempt to update
the notes and references. Changes are limited to making the system of
references more consistent from one essay to the next, adding some
cross references to other essays in this volume, and, in the case of one
essay, translating the quotations from Latin and French into English.
I also tried to omit some overlapping passages. However, these essays
were written to be independent and free-standing, and given the inter-
connected themes, some amount of overlap is inevitable.
1 Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. and trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross
(2 vols.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911, and often reprinted.
2 Descartes, Philosophical Letters, ed. and trans. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970, later reprinted, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.
3 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. E. Anscombe and P. Geach. Edinburgh:
T. Nelson, 1954, and often reprinted.
4 Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, ed. and trans. Laurence J. Lafleur.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, ed. and
trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
5 Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
INTRODUCTION
My interest in Descartes was originally piqued when, as a graduate

student, I had to assist in an introduction to philosophy. The Descartes
I was asked to teach the students didn’t make much sense to me; I
couldn’t figure out his point of view, why he was asking the kinds of
questions he was asking, and why he was giving the kinds of answers he
was giving. Something about his larger intellectual context seemed to
be missing. But even then I knew that Descartes was deeply involved in
the physical sciences of his day, and even without knowing exactly what
Cartesian science meant, I had a deep suspicion that it was somehow
connected with the philosophical writings I was teaching my under-
graduates, the Meditations and the Discourse on the Method. At the time I
was also very interested in the latest currents in contemporary philos-
ophy, particularly the philosophy of Quine. Quine’s enormously influ-
ential “Epistemology Naturalized” had just appeared, and everyone was
talking about a more general naturalization of philosophy and the inti-
mate connection between philosophy and the sciences.1 That gave me
all the more reason to turn to Descartes and his contemporaries, who,
in a sense, took it for granted that there was a continuum between what
we call philosophy and what we consider the sciences.
And so I undertook a serious study of Descartes’ science, as well as
that of his contemporaries. This led me to a number of interesting
observations. I came to see that Descartes’ thought must be understood
in the context of the attempt to reject Aristotelian physics, and replace
1 See W. V. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1969, pp. 69–90.
1
2 introduction
it with a different kind of physics, one grounded in a mechanistic con-
ception of nature. For an Aristotelian physicist, natural philosophy is
ultimately grounded in the irreducible tendencies bodies have to
behave one way or another, as embodied in their substantial forms.
Some bodies naturally fall, and others naturally rise; some are naturally
cold, and others are naturally hot; some are naturally dry, and others
are naturally wet. For the mechanist, though, the world is a machine,
all the way down. According to the mechanical philosophy, of which
Descartes was a founder, I would argue, everything in the physical world
must be explained in the way in which we explain machines, through
the size, shape, and motion of their parts. Descartes was not the only
thinker of the period to hold such a view. Though there are some
interesting and important differences among them, differences that
Descartes himself emphasized in many cases, one must also include
here contemporary figures such as Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi,
Hobbes, Roberval, and Beeckman, later Boyle, Locke, and many
others. Nor was the mechanical philosophy the only alternative to Aris-
totelianism; there were also alchemical, astrological, hermetic, Platonic,
and other alternatives in the mix. One must understand Descartes’
philosophy as a part of this larger program to replace the Aristotelian
philosophy with a new and better alternative.
But there is a particular way in which Descartes approached the task
of replacing the Aristotelian philosophy with a mechanical philosophy.
Although Descartes was interested in what we would call mathematical
and scientific questions, it was important for him to ground his view of
the make-up of bodies and the laws that they observe in what he called
a metaphysics. In a celebrated passage from the preface to the French
edition of the Principia, Descartes writes that “all philosophy is like a
tree, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose
branches, which grow from this trunk, are all of the other sciences,
namely medicine, mechanics, and morals.”2 In the philosophical liter-
ature, particularly that written by Anglo-American historians of philos-
ophy, almost all the attention has been to the metaphysical roots. I
thought that it would be very useful to turn my attention to the part of
the tree above ground, the trunk and the branches which were, if any-
thing, more visible to Descartes’ contemporaries than the metaphysical
roots.
2 AT IXB 14. See the note on abbreviations and translations for the conventions used in
citing Descartes’ writings.
introduction 3
One of the fruits of this work was my book, Descartes’ Metaphysical
Physics.3 In this book, I tried to give a critical exposition of Descartes’
physical thought, and discuss the arguments and positions that Descartes
offered in his writings on physics, mainly Le Monde (1633) and the Prin-
cipia Philosophiae (1644), paying special attention to the way in which they
are grounded in metaphysics. But, at the same time, I was also working
on some of the more traditional questions in Descartes’ thought, ques-
tions about knowledge, method, mind, and matter, exploring the way
in which understanding Descartes’ scientific thought might illuminate
those more familiar aspects of Descartes’ philosophy. Many of the essays
in this collection are part of this effort. In taking the approach I do in
these essays, I do not mean to argue that it is the only approach that one
can take, that the only way one can understand Descartes is through his
scientific writings. Descartes was a multifaceted character, and there are
a number of approaches that one can take to illuminate his thought. All
I mean to assert is that this is one of them.
I should also say something about the historiographical ideas that lie
behind these essays. The last twenty or thirty years have seen enormous
changes in the way in which the history of philosophy is written, at least
in English. When I first began working in the field in the mid-1970s,
the dominant trend in Cartesian studies was to give careful attention to
Descartes’ arguments and positions, and scrutinize them in accordance
with the current philosophical standards and doctrines. What it also
meant, often enough, was a Cartesian philosophy pulled out of its intel-
lectual context, with any historical considerations explicitly marginal-
ized. I can remember in the late 1960s one of my undergraduate teachers
wondering, in all seriousness, whether Descartes wrote before or after
Newton! Furthermore, the texts were almost always studied in transla-
tion, with no need to know either the original language texts or any of
the literature outside of English. Things have changed considerably
since then; the history of philosophy, at least in the early-modern period,
is more and more genuinely historical. It is getting less and less possible
to do history of philosophy in translation alone, with no attention to his-
torical context, and I am proud to have had some small part in this
change of standards. This historiographical theme is also reflected in the
essays collected here. For me, understanding Descartes historically
means first and foremost situating him in the context of the larger
3 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. It has recently appeared in French as La

physique métaphysique de Descartes, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
4 introduction
intellectual trends. However, it should also involve the attempt to under-
stand Descartes as a living, breathing human being, who learns (and
forgets) things, whose views develop and change over time, even if he
himself is not always aware of that dimension of his thought.
My historical temperament should not be taken to mean that I am
uninterested in philosophy, and that I am abandoning a genuinely
philosophical history of philosophy for a contextual history of ideas
or an intellectual biography. Like many philosophical historians of
philosophy, I believe in engaging historical figures, such as Descartes,
in critical discourse, and even in rationally reconstructing their
positions. However, as a historian of philosophy, I want as much as
possible to do so on their own terms. Insofar as my job is to illuminate
the thought of a Descartes or a Leibniz or a Locke, I would prefer to
do so by using terms and doctrines that they would find intelligible,
to debate with them in their own language. Again, I acknowledge
that this is not the only valid way of approaching the subject: It is
important for us now to understand why a Cartesian account of the
physical world is no longer acceptable, and to do this involves engag-
ing Descartes in a discussion with modern philosophy of science and
even modern physics. But unless we understand Descartes’ projects
on their own terms, in the terms in which they were conceived, we
cannot really understand what exactly his views really were, how they
really relate to current conceptions, and what their true philosophical
significance is.
It is for reasons like this that I want to downplay (or perhaps even
blur) the distinction between history of philosophy and history of ideas.
As Bernard Williams characterizes the distinction in his classic book,
Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry,4 “history of ideas is history before
it is philosophy, while with the history of philosophy it is the other way
round.” When dealing with an historical text, the history of ideas,
according to Williams, focuses on the question “what did it mean” for
its contemporaries, whereas the history of philosophy focuses on the
question of its philosophical content. Williams writes: “The history of
philosophy of course has to constitute its object, the work, in genuinely
historical terms, yet there is a cut-off point, where authenticity is
replaced as the objective by the aim of articulating philosophical ideas.”
Williams casts his lot with history of philosophy understood in this
way, and offers a self-consciously twentieth-century reconstruction of
4 New York: Penguin Books, 1978. All the quotations are taken from pp. 9–10.
introduction 5
Descartes’ thought. But can we really make the kind of separation that
Williams (and many, many others) postulate? I can certainly understand
those who want to ignore history, and attack philosophical questions
directly; this, in a way, is the Cartesian spirit. However, if one chooses
to write about Descartes (or Spinoza, or Locke, or . . .), then, it seems,
this entails a kind of commitment to understand what they are trying
to say; a history of philosophy based on myths and partially understood
texts is neither good history nor good philosophy, substituting for
Descartes’ authentic thought a pale reflection of the contemporary
views of interest to us. If we are to learn philosophy from Descartes, as
opposed to using him as a mere foil for our contemporary views, then
we must try to reach genuine understanding of what he thinks. And
genuinely understanding an historical figure requires significant his-
torical work, often going beyond the texts themselves and into the con-
temporary culture to understand their presuppositions. Similarly, one
cannot approach good history of ideas (in Williams’ sense) without
understanding the philosophy as philosophy, as arguments and dis-
tinctions and attempts at addressing systematically what are taken to be
important problems. I don’t think that one should have to choose
between the one and the other, between philosophical interest and
historical sophistication. One needs both. Period.
Though the essays in this collection are all attempts at recovering a
genuinely historical Descartes, in reading them over again, I am struck
by how far scholarship has come in the last years. When I originally
wrote them, and when they were originally published, many of these
essays were then on the outer edge of what was acceptable in the history
of philosophy; it is only through the kindness of editors who invited me
to contribute to collections or special issues of journals that many of
them found their way into print. But looking back at them now, they
seem, in a sense, rather old-fashioned. The essays are based on a careful
reading of the texts, all the texts, and not just the few generally read in
philosophy classes. Also, I try very hard to put those texts in the context
of other texts then in circulation, particularly late scholastic texts.
However, two main things are missing. Although there is a smattering
of names unfamiliar to historians of philosophy, there are not enough
of them. In part this defect is addressed in the Cambridge History of
Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,5 which I co-edited with Michael Ayers.
There we made sure that less familiar names such as Sir Kenelm Digby,
5 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

6 introduction
Henry More, Louis de La Forge, and many others were reintegrated in
the story. But what is missing even there is the social context. Ideas exist
in people, and people exist in societies. As a consequence, social factors
can sometimes play a nonnegligible role in philosophy. Although this
is a commonplace now in the history of science (indeed, probably over-
done), it is, I suspect, still a heresy in the history of philosophy. While
I was doing my best to be heretical in some of the essays published in
this volume, the social historical approach was a kind of heresy that I
hadn’t yet come to appreciate. It will be better represented in some
work currently in progress, a general study of the rise of the “new
philosophy” in Paris in the 1620s and beyond.
It may be helpful to the reader to provide a brief guide to the con-
tents of the book, and point out some themes and connections that
might not be evident at first reading.
Part I of the book (“Historiographical Preliminaries”) is a general
historiographical essay, (1) “Does History Have a Future?” In this
essay, I treat the general question of how one ought to do the history
of philosophy, and why one ought to do it. I argue, most centrally
against Jonathan Bennett, but also against many who share his con-
ception of the history of philosophy, that the history of philosophy
should be done in a historically responsible way, and that the only way
to recover the true philosophical significance of historical figures is to
understand them in their proper historical context. I further try to show
what the history of philosophy done in this way can contribute to the
enterprise of philosophy, how it can be used to challenge assumptions
that we take for granted by exhibiting philosophical programs with
perspectives very different from ours. This essay serves to present
the methodology that I follow in the remainder of the essays in the
collection.
Part II of the collection (“Method, Order and Certainty”) is con-
cerned with methodological and epistemological issues in Descartes’
philosophy. In (2) “Descartes and Method in 1637,” I treat the method
as articulated in Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1620–1628
(?)) and the Discourse on the Method (1637). It is generally assumed that
the method that Descartes articulates in those earlier works follows
him throughout his career. In opposition to that, I argue that in an
important sense, the official method is abandoned in Descartes’ later
writings, both scientific and philosophical. In the following two essays,
(3) “A Point of Order: Analysis, Synthesis, and Descartes’s Principles”
introduction 7
(written jointly with Lesley Cohen) and (4) “J. B. Morin and the Second
Objections,” I treat the question of geometrical method in Descartes’
writings. There is a standard reading of Descartes in accordance with
which the Meditations (1637) are written in the analytic style, suppos-
edly following the method of discovery of the Rules and the Discourse,
whereas the more scientifically oriented Principles of Philosophy (1644)
was written in the synthetic style characteristic of Euclidean geometry.
This distinction has shaped a number of readings of Descartes’ philos-
ophy, including most visibly the influential reading of Martial Guer-
oult.6 In “A Point of Order” I argue against this dogma of Cartesian
scholarship and suggest how to understand the different styles of these
two central works in Descartes’ corpus. In “J. B. Morin and the Second
Objections” I extend the argument by showing that one of the texts that
supposedly grounds this interpretation, the end of the Second Replies to
the Meditations, was originally written not to endorse the synthetic
method in any way, but as a reaction against another philosopher (and
well-known Aristotelian, anti-Copernican, and astrologer of his day),
Jean-Baptiste Morin, who wrote a short tract on the existence of God
in the style of a Euclidean geometry text, a tract from which Descartes
clearly wanted to dissociate himself. The last two essays in this part
concern Descartes’ actual method of conducting experimental
inquiries in his earlier and later works. In (5) “Descartes and Experi-
ment in the Discourse and Essays” I show how, Descartes’ method
from the Rules and the Discourse was used in the practice of experi-
mental science by examining his analysis of the rainbow as given in the
Meteors, published with the Discourse in 1637. In that essay, I try to show
how, for Descartes in this period, experiment is fully consistent with
certainty. In (6) “Descartes on Knowledge and Certainty,” I show how
the problems of experimental philosophy ultimately move Descartes
to abandon the claim that he can have certain knowledge of the
microstructure of matter, something that I think he had earlier believed
he could have.
Part III of the collection (“Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature”) is
concerned with a number of central metaphysical and scientific ques-
tions in Descartes’ philosophy. In (7) “Mind, Body, and the Laws of
6 See Martial Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, trans.
Roger Ariew. (2 vols.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; and Nouvelles
réflexions sur la preuve ontologique. Paris: Vrin, 1955.
8 introduction
Nature in Descartes and Leibniz,” I discuss the relation between
voluntary activity and the laws of nature. It has been a standard view of
Descartes that he had wanted to make all the physical behavior of the
human being consistent with his law of the conservation of quantity of
motion. On that reading, Descartes is supposed to have held that the
human will can change the direction of the motion of a body, but not
its speed. Since Descartes’ conservation law governs only speed and not
direction, it was thought that this account allowed Descartes to render
human voluntary activity consistent with his conservation law. However,
Leibniz showed that Descartes’ conservation law is incorrect, and that
the correct conservation laws constrain direction as much as they do
speed. And so, Leibniz argued, that ploy won’t work. By carefully exam-
ining Descartes’ conception of the laws of nature and how they derive
from God, I argue that Descartes never intended human beings to be
governed by his laws of nature. I also show how Leibniz’s metaphysics
differs profoundly from Descartes’ in this regard, and why for him, the
human being cannot stand outside of nature, as it can for Descartes.
The following essay, (8) “Understanding Interaction: What Descartes
Should Have Told Elisabeth,” also concerns mind and body in
Descartes. It argues that Descartes’ famous letters to Elisabeth in 1643,
explaining mind-body and body-body interaction, are importantly mis-
leading. In those letters, Descartes claims that mind-body interaction
and body-body interaction are each understood through their own sep-
arate primitive notions. This, I claim, is inconsistent with some of
Descartes’ most basic commitments elsewhere. Rather, I argue, body-
body interaction, the interaction between inanimate physical objects,
must be understood ultimately through God, whose activity determines
the laws of motion. The activity of God, in turn, must be understood
through our own experience of how we act on our own bodies. In this
way, mind-body interaction is the ultimate model in terms of which we
understand all physical interaction for Descartes. The analysis of the
physical interaction among bodies is continued in the next piece, (9)
“How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance, and Occa-
sionalism,” where I discuss how the dependence of the laws of nature
on God gives rise to accusations of occasionalism in Descartes, and
explicit arguments for occasionalism in some of his followers. I argue
that the way in which Descartes conceives of divine activity leads him
to reject a full occasionalism, where God is the only genuine causal
agent. However, differences in the way some of his followers conceive
of divine activity lead them in another direction, to the occasionalism
introduction 9
characteristic of the later Cartesian tradition. In the following essay,
(10) “Descartes and Occasionalism,” the question of Descartes’ occa-
sionalism is examined in a more general way, where it is argued that
contrary to much of the critical literature, Descartes was not a genuine
occasionalist. The last two essays in this section, (11) “Semel in vita: The
Scientific Background to Descartes’ Meditations” and (12) “Forms and
Qualities in the Sixth Replies” both deal more directly with the relation
between Descartes’ metaphysics and his physics. “Semel in vita” gives a
general overview of the way in which Descartes’ metaphysics and epis-
temology undermine Aristotelian science and ground the new physics
that he is presenting in his works. “Forms and Qualities” discusses more
specifically the issue of Descartes’ rejection of Aristotelian forms and
qualities, particularly as it is treated in a crucial passage at the end of
the Sixth Replies.
In Part IV of the collection (“Larger Visions”), I include two essays
that give larger views of Descartes’ philosophy. In (13) “Descartes, or
the Cultivation of the Intellect,” I present a view of Descartes’ concep-
tion of the educated person, and how his conception of the human
being and the natural world led to a revolutionary conception of
education, rejecting the authority of the book and the teacher for
the authority of the intellect. Finally, in (14) “Experiment, Community,
and the Constitution of Nature in the Seventeenth Century,” I put
Descartes’ epistemology in the context of larger movements in seven-
teenth-century thought, and show how Descartes’ radically individual-
istic epistemology eventually gave way to a more social conception of
knowledge and scientific inquiry, as institutions such as the Royal
Society of London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris entered the
scene, and redefined the scientific world.
The careful reader may have noticed an oddity in the subtitle of this
collection, “Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science.”
Strictly speaking, this title makes little sense for the seventeenth
century. At that time, neither philosophy nor science as we now know
them could properly be said to exist as distinct domains of knowledge:
What we call philosophy and what we call science were part of a single
domain of inquiry, which went under the rubric of philosophy. But
within Descartes’ thought there certainly was a distinction between the
foundational disciplines of philosophy, what he called “first philosophy”
or sometimes “metaphysics,” and natural philosophy, between the roots
of his tree of philosophy and the trunk. It is this distinction that I have
10 introduction
in mind when I am talking about reading the philosophy through the
science. What I am attempting to do is put some of the Cartesian
metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological doctrines on which
philosophers have concentrated in recent years into the perspective of
Descartes’ larger system.
PART I
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PRELIMINARIES
1
DOES HISTORY HAVE A FUTURE?
Some Reflections on Bennett and Doing Philosophy Historically
The history of philosophy seems to play a very significant role in the

actual practice of philosophy; historical figures come up again and
again in the courses we had to take, both as undergraduates and as
graduate students, and historical figures continue to come up again and
again in the papers we read, the courses we teach, the conferences we
attend. Philosophy seems to be a subject that is obsessed with its past,
but it is more than just an obsession. Most of us would agree that under-
standing the history of philosophy is somehow important to doing phi-
losophy, that we are better philosophers for knowing the history of our
subject. I think that this is true. As philosophers, we have an obligation
to ourselves to reflect on this fact: why is history important to our enter-
prise, and how is history important to our enterprise?
This is what I would like to do in this short essay, make some obser-
vations about the ways in which history of philosophy can and does
influence the practice of philosophy. I shall begin by discussing the view
of history found in Jonathan Bennett’s recent and already enormously
influential book, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. I have chosen to talk about
that book in good part because it is, I think, the best representative of
a certain genre of writing in the history of philosophy; Bennett nicely
articulates a view of the history of philosophy that is widespread among
writers on the subject, particularly those writing in English. Bennett’s
view, widely shared, is that history is important because studying his-
torical figures can teach us philosophy; in the history of philosophy we
have a storehouse of arguments and positions worth taking seriously as
philosophy, worth discussing and debating in the same way the work
of a very good contemporary philosopher is worth discussing and
13
14 historiographical preliminaries
debating. I shall not really criticize Bennett’s view of the matter. There
is a sense in which he and the multitude of other philosophers and his-
torians of philosophy who share his view are absolutely correct. But, I
shall argue, Bennett makes use of only a portion of the riches that
history has to offer. In the second part of this essay I shall try to sketch
and illustrate a somewhat different conception of the use of history in
philosophy that complements the conception Bennett offers.
History as Storehouse
I would like to begin my discussion by outlining what I take to be
Jonathan Bennett’s attitude toward history in his recent book, A Study
of Spinoza’s Ethics. My interest in the book will be largely metaphilo-
sophical (or, perhaps, metahistorical); though I have some disagree-
ments with Bennett on matters of substance, I shall do my best not do
drag them in here and muddy the waters.
Early in the book, Bennett gives the reader ample indication of the
nature of his interest in Spinoza. “I am not writing biography,” he notes.
“I want to understand the pages of the Ethics in a way that will let me
learn philosophy from them.”1 A bit later in the book, Bennett indi-
cates that his interest is “not with Spinoza’s mental biography but with
getting his help in discovering philosophical truth.”2 At the end of the
book Bennett writes:
The courtly deference which pretends that Spinoza is always or usually right,
under some rescuing interpretation, is one thing; it is quite another to look
to him, as I have throughout this book, as a teacher, one who can help us to
see things which we might not have seen for ourselves. That is showing him
a deeper respect, but also holding him to a more demanding standard.3
Bennett’s interest here is clear: it is finding philosophical truth and

avoiding philosophical falsehood that he is after, and the study of
Spinoza is supposed to help us in this search. What he says about
Spinoza presumably holds more generally for the study of other figures
in the history of philosophy. So conceived, the history of philosophy is
a kind of storehouse of positions and arguments, positions and argu-
ments that we can use as guides or inspirations to the positions we
should take, or illustrations of dead ends that we should avoid.
1 Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing

Company, 1984), p. 15.
2 Ibid., p. 35. 3 Ibid., p. 372.
does history have a future? 15
This last provision is important. The point is not that Spinoza (or any
other historical figure) will simply hand us philosophical truth on a
platter, arguments or positions that we can immediately adopt without
change. Bennett’s Spinoza often makes mistakes, and bad ones; hardly
an argument in the Ethics can stand without some correction. Yet we can
learn from Spinoza even when he is wrong (or, at least we usually can;
Bennett seems unsure about whether anything can be learned from the
mistakes Spinoza makes when discussing the eternity of the mind).4
Bennett writes:
I do say that Spinoza’s total naturalistic program fails at both ends and in the
middle; as though he undertook to build a sturdy mansion all out of wood,
and achieved only a rickety shack using bricks, as well as wood. But his
attempt was a work of genius; and a thorough, candid study of it can be won-
derfully instructive. The failures have at least as much to teach as the suc-
cesses, if one attends not only to where Spinoza fails but why.5
Bennett completes the thought a few pages later:

I spoke of how much we can learn from Spinoza’s successes and, especially,
his failures. It is his minimalism that makes his work so instructive. If you set
a mechanical genius to build an automobile engine out of a Meccano set,
you won’t get a working engine from him, but as you watch him fail you will
learn a lot about automobile engines.6
(In giving these quotations I don’t mean to imply that they are trans-
parently intelligible or true on their face, but I would like to postpone
those questions for the moment.)
What does the history of philosophy look like from Bennett’s point of
view? We begin by trying to reconstruct the arguments the philosopher
we are studying gave, trying to follow the train of thought he followed.
But our ultimate goal is philosophical truth, and it is with that in mind
that we must approach our reconstruction; we must carefully examine
the truth of the premises, the validity of the inferential steps, and with a
cold and unsentimental eye, judge the truth or falsity of the conclusion
and the adequacy of the means by which the conclusion was reached. If
appropriate, we might make some attempt to patch up the argument,
adding new premises, substituting better premises for worse, trying a new
path to the conclusion in question, or whatever. This is, I think, a fair
representation of what Bennett is doing in the Spinoza book.
4 Ibid., pp. 372, 357. 5 Ibid., p. 38. 6 Ibid., p. 41.

All of this is interesting and, in an important sense, valuable activity.
But if we are to follow Bennett and hold that the history of philosophy
is valuable primarily insofar as it helps us to find philosophical truth,
in some more or less direct sense, then there are certain consequences
we must accept.
First of all, if we insist on philosophical truth as the only motivation
for studying history, then a great deal of the history of philosophy may
turn out to be marginal to the philosopher. Bennett would agree that
few historical figures have any large store of doctrines or arguments
that we would now consider live candidates for truth or even approxi-
mate truth. There are those who study Aristotle or Saint Thomas, Kant
or Marx, because they think that at least some of what they wrote is
close to being true, and because they believe that attention to their writ-
ings can help lead us directly to insights we would not otherwise have.
But how many study Descartes or Leibniz or Spinoza for this reason?
The noble attempts of the past, one might argue, are instructive in their
failures. But while failures can be instructive, a few can go a long way.
The student architect can learn to fit the building to the available
materials and know the strengths and weaknesses of both from the
building that collapsed. But one learns to design successful buildings
by studying successful buildings, not just failures. Having had a deprived
childhood, I’m not sure I know exactly what a Meccano set is, but if it
is what I think it is, I doubt that I could learn much about automobile
engines by watching someone try to build one from a Meccano set, no
matter how talented one might be. Similarly, the philosopher must
learn to recognize a bad argument and must be trained to avoid the
mistakes people make. This is only a small portion of one’s philosoph-
ical education, which, I think, should focus on positions and arguments
that people think are live candidates for the truth, at least insofar as
one is being trained to seek philosophical truth. Bennett may overesti-
mate what we can learn directly from failed arguments and programs.
Insofar as the great majority of historical arguments, positions, and pro-
grams are failures when judged against the high standard of philo-
sophical truth (as we see it), the study of the history of philosophy may
have less to contribute to philosophy than Bennett seems to think, and
less than we historians would like.
There is another feature of Bennett’s position worth drawing out.
Bennett’s position has the danger of distorting the history of philosophy.
First of all, insofar as we regard history of philosophy as contributing to
the discovery of philosophical truth, we are led to emphasize those por-
tions of a philosopher’s work that speak to our interests, that address our
conception of where philosophical truth is to be found, leaving other
aspects of the work aside, thereby mutilating what may be a unified and
systematic point of view. Bennett has not done any such thing to Spinoza,
but one can call to mind the numerous commentaries on Descartes and
anthologies of his writing that barely mention his work in mathematics,
physics, or biology; the accounts of Pascal that focus on the wager argu-
ment without indicating its larger context; books like Anthony Kenny’s
little book Aquinas, in the Past Masters series, or John Mackie’s Problems
from Locke, which quite self-consciously use standards of contemporary
relevance to choose what to discuss and what to ignore. In each case, the
focus on philosophical truth distorts our historical understanding of the
figure and his position. But there is another way in which historical dis-
tortions may enter. If our interest is philosophical truth, then the point
of the historical enterprise is to capture whatever philosophical truth or
interesting philosophical falsehood there may be in some philosopher’s
writings. What this has often meant in practice is what has been dubbed
rational reconstruction, taking the argument or position as given and
making sense of it in terms that make sense of it to our philosophical
sensibilities, whether or not the reformulation captures anything the
philosopher himself would have acknowledged. Examples of this
include Bernard Williams’s reconstruction of the argument of Descartes’
Meditations using modern epistemological concepts, or Benson Mates’s
reconstruction of Leibniz’s doctrine of possible worlds using contem-
porary modal logic. Bennett is tempted in this direction as well. In a
passage, part of which we have already quoted, he writes:
I want to understand the pages of the Ethics in a way that will let me learn
philosophy from them. For that, I need to consider what Spinoza had in
mind, for readings of the text which are faithful to his intentions are likely
to teach me more than ones which are not – or so I believe, as I think him
to be a great philosopher. And one can be helped to discover his intentions
by knowing what he had been reading, whose problems he had been chal-
lenged by, and so on. But this delving into backgrounds is subject to a law of
diminishing returns: while some fact about Maimonides or Averroes might
provide the key to an obscure passage in Spinoza, we are more likely to get
his text straight by wrestling with it directly, given just a fair grasp of his
immediate background. I am sure to make mistakes because of my inatten-
tion to Spinoza’s philosophical ancestry; but I will pay that price for the ben-
efits which accrue from putting most of one’s energies into philosophically
interrogating Spinoza’s own text.7
7 Ibid., pp. 15–16.

Indeed, many benefits come from directly interrogating a historical
text, leaving aside nice worries about historical context, but there is a
danger of misunderstanding. (In Bennett’s Spinoza book this comes
out most clearly in his discussion of space and his attribution of a “field
metaphysic” to Spinoza in chapter 4, a lovely philosophical position,
but one that I do not think occurred to Spinoza.)
This may sound like a criticism of the approach Bennett takes to
history, but I assure him, it is not. If our only goal is philosophical truth,
then history of philosophy may turn out to be marginal, if not alto-
gether expendable; If our goal is simply philosophical truth, we must
face up to the facts in an unsentimental way. And, if our goal is philo-
sophical truth, then historical veracity can have only an instrumental
value at best; it is of value only insofar as it helps us attain our princi-
pal goal. The point of interpretation, on this view, is to make the phi-
losophy breathe, to make it available to us, and historical veracity is
important only insofar as it serves this end.
In calling for us to focus on the truth and falsity of Spinoza’s claims,
the adequacy and inadequacies of his arguments, Bennett is implicitly
contrasting the approach that he takes with other more disinterestedly
historical and, in one sense, less philosophical approaches that one
might take to the material. In one place Bennett contrasts his approach
with that of “intellectual biography,” with “mental biography” in
another, and with that “which pretends that Spinoza is always or usually
right, under some rescuing interpretation” in a third passage.8 Now, it
seems to me that the disinterested historian shouldn’t always assume
that Spinoza is right. But insofar as we agree with Bennett that Spinoza
was “a great philosopher,” we should at very least subscribe to the
working hypothesis that what Spinoza is up to is sensible, the sort of thing
that a smart person might believe in a particular historical context,
given what he had learned, what others around him believed, the
assumptions taken for granted, and so on. (This is just a special case of
what has been called the principle of charity or, in variant, the princi-
ple of humanity in the theory of interpretation in the philosophy of
language.) This is not to say that we should not expect to find lapses of
reasoning and judgment, even when the whole context is open to us,
or that this kind of historical inquiry will clear up all our puzzlements.
It is important to remember that Spinoza, for example, was a puzzle to
his contemporaries as well, and they had more access to his context
8 Ibid., pp. 15, 35, 372.

than any of us can ever hope to have. In its way, this kind of rationality
is no less demanding a standard to hold Spinoza to than philosophical
truth is.
Unlike philosophical truth, which judges Spinoza by what is true, or
by what we have come to think is true, this standard is internal. The
alternative to the sort of history Bennett advocates is an historical recon-
struction of Spinoza’s views, the attempt to understand Spinoza’s posi-
tions and arguments in terms that he or a well-informed contemporary
of his may have understood. It involves coming to understand what
Spinoza or a contemporary of his would have considered unproblem-
atic background beliefs, what they would have had trouble with, and in
the light of that and other similar contexts, coming to understand what
Spinoza’s conception of his project was, how he thought he had estab-
lished the conclusions he had reached, and what he thought was impor-
tant about those conclusions, all under the assumption that, by and
large, Spinoza’s project is the work of a smart person working within a
particular historical context. This sort of investigation is not biography
of any sort, neither intellectual nor mental; it is, quite simply, the history
of philosophical ideas.
In practice, the kind of history I was sketching may come out looking
very little different from the history Bennett prefers. As Bennett has
pointed out, if it is the lessons of history for philosophical truth that
interest us, then the lessons are likely to be more interesting the closer
we come to a genuine representation of Spinoza’s (or whoever’s)
thought. The only conspicuous difference may be the relative lack of
judgments of truth and falsity in the sort of disinterested history I
propose. If our interest is in historical reconstruction, the question of
the ultimate truth or falsity of the doctrines is simply not at issue; the
only thing that is important is whether or not our account has made
the beliefs intelligible. Sometimes this will call for a judgment that on
his own terms, some premise or inference a philosopher uses may not be
available to him, properly speaking. If we are interested in historical
reconstruction, then, for example, the falsity of a premise then univer-
sally accepted is not a relevant part of the story.
Bennett would certainly have to agree that there is a real project
here, whether or not he himself is interested in carrying it out. I think
that he would also have to agree that there is no reason why one must
choose one conception of the history of philosophy over the other.
While in practice a single scholar may find it difficult to pull off both
sorts of history at the same time, within the confines of a single essay
or book, they are not competing programs in the sense in which, say,
deontological programs for ethics compete with teleological programs.
One can find the history of philosophy richer for having both
approaches represented in the literature, one can find both interesting
and never be put into the position of having to choose one over the
other. In this sense the two approaches to history of philosophy are
complementary rather than competing.
A question remains, a central question. On Bennett’s view, the
history of philosophy is important to philosophy in an obvious way; on
his conception, history of philosophy actually contributes to the
unearthing of philosophical truths. Now, as I noted, the sort of disin-
terested historical reconstruction I have sketched can contribute
to Bennett’s enterprise, but taken by itself, does it have any philosoph-
ical interest at all? Leaving aside the question of the philosophical
truth it may help to uncover, is the purely historical study of philo-
sophical ideas of more than antiquarian interest? Is there any reason
for philosophers qua philosophers to take an interest in such dis-
interested history?
In Defense of Disinterested History

In arguing for the philosophical significance of disinterested history, I
would like to proceed historically and begin with a consideration of the
views of a philosopher whose opinion on the matter is in many ways
attractive to me. The philosopher I have in mind here is Descartes. As
Bennett proposes we learn from Spinoza, I propose that there is much
we can learn from Descartes.
Descartes may seem at first glance an odd character to turn to in this
connection. Descartes was conspicuously unsympathetic to the study of
books, old or new. In the Discours, Descartes wrote:
[A]s soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I
entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other
than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the
world, I spent the rest of my youth in traveling. . . . For it seemed to me that
much more truth could be found in the reasoning which a man makes con-
cerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes
in his study about speculative matters. For the consequences of the former
will soon punish the man if he judges wrongly, whereas the latter have no
practical consequences and no importance for the scholar except that
perhaps the further they are from common sense the more pride he will take
in them, since he will have had to use so much more skill and ingenuity in
trying to render them plausible.9
This attitude also comes out nicely in a letter from 1638. Unfortunately,
the recipient of the letter is unknown, as is the book Descartes is com-
menting on in the letter, but his point is clear:
[The author’s] plan of collecting into a single book all that is useful in every
other book would be a very good one if it were practicable; but I think that
it is not. It is often very difficult to judge accurately what others have written,
and to draw the good out of them without taking the bad too. Moreover, the
particular truths which are scattered in books are so detached and so inde-
pendent of each other, that I think one would need more talent and energy
to assemble them into a well-proportioned and ordered collection . . . than
to make up such a collection out of one’s own discoveries. I do not mean
that one should neglect other people’s discoveries when one encounters
useful ones; but I do not think one should spend the greater part of one’s
time in collecting them. If a man were capable of finding the foundation of
the sciences, he would be wrong to waste his life in finding scraps of knowl-
edge hidden in the corners of libraries; and if he were no good for anything
else but that, he would not be capable of choosing and ordering what he
found.10
Descartes does not mince words here. If it is truth we are after, books
will not help us to find it. He does not seem to think that we can learn
much from other people’s mistakes, unlike Bennett; mistakes just
engender other mistakes. The truths we find in books are so rare and
so scattered that anyone who has the ability to recognize them and seek
them out would be better off simply looking for them on his own,
directly, without the help of these paper-and-ink teachers. If it is philo-
sophical truth you are after, Descartes tells Bennett (and anyone else
who will listen), then don’t look to the philosophers of the past. (It is
somewhat disquieting to the historian when one of his or her subjects
talks back in such a rude way.)
Descartes, in general, has little truck with scholarship, with the study
of the past, but Descartes was not altogether dismissive of history.
Though he thought it inappropriate to look for philosophical truth in
history, he did not think that reading the authors of the past is altogether
without value. In the Discours he wrote:
9 Descartes, Discours de la methode, I, AT VI 9–10; CSM I 115.

10 AT II 346–47; CSMK 119.
I knew . . . that reading good books is like having a conversation with the most
distinguished men of past ages – indeed, a rehearsed conversation in which
these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.11
This conversation is valuable to us for an interesting reason. According

to Descartes:
[C]onversing with those of past centuries is much the same as traveling. It is
good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so that we may
judge our own more soundly and not think that everything contrary to our
own ways is irrational, as those who have seen nothing of the world ordinar-
ily do.12
Through such experience in books and in the world Descartes claims

that he learned that there are “many things which, although seeming
very extravagant and ridiculous to us, are nevertheless commonly
accepted and approved in other great nations; and so I learned not to
believe too firmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by
example and custom.”13
The idea is an interesting one. We can learn from the past in some-
thing of the same way we can learn from travel. By traveling we can get
a certain kind of perspective on our lives and the way we lead them, the
things we do and the things we believe. We go to other countries, learn
their languages, observe their customs, eat their foods (or, at least,
observe the kinds of foods they eat), discuss their beliefs about the
world. This, Descartes thinks, can give us a certain perspective on our
own lives. It can, among other things, free us of the belief that the way
we see things is the way things have to be, that X is fit for human con-
sumption but Y is not, that weeks must have seven days, that children
must be raised by their own parents, etc. Descartes’ point is not rela-
tivistic here; he would be among the last to say that anything goes. Even
though we observe others eating a certain food we do not, we may still
shun it and continue to hold the belief that it is unhealthy or improper
for us to eat. Seeing what others do may at least get us to raise the ques-
tion for ourselves why we have the beliefs and customs we do and,
perhaps, lead us to see what is arbitrary and what is well grounded in
our beliefs and behavior.
A similar case can be made with respect to the study of the past in
general, and the study of past philosophy in particular, Descartes sug-
11 Discours I, AT VI 5; CSM I 113. 12 Discours I, AT VI 6; CSM I 113–14.

13 Discours I, AT VI 10; CSM I 115–16.
gests. Many of the philosophical beliefs we now take for granted are not
shared by figures in the past. By studying the past, taking the past seri-
ously, we are led to reflect on our beliefs, in just the same way as we are
led by travel to reflect upon our customs. Such reflection need not lead
to a change in our beliefs. The fact that some past geographers thought
the earth flat, or past physicists thought that there is such a thing as
elemental fire that by its nature rises, these historical observations
should not move us to give up our present conceptions of geography
or combustion. Reflection on some of the things people have believed
should at least cause us to ask ourselves why we believe the things we
do, and whether our grounds are sufficient to support the explicit or
implicit beliefs we have and assumptions we make.
Is such reflection important for us as philosophers? It does not
directly contribute to the discovery of philosophical truth in the way in
which discovering a good argument (or an interesting false one) in the
work of a historical figure perhaps might, in the way in which Bennett
conceives of history contributing to the practice of philosophy. The sort
of contribution Descartes saw was of a different, and more subtle,
though no less important kind. Historical investigation conceived in
this alternative way gives us a kind of perspective on the beliefs we have
and the assumptions we make. It helps us sort the good from the bad,
the arbitrary from the well grounded, insofar as it challenges us to
reflect on why we believe what we do. While it may not help lead us
directly to new arguments and new philosophical truths, it leads us
directly to something just as valuable: philosophical questions.
All of this is very abstract and cries out for some concrete examples,
specific assumptions and beliefs we make that are illuminated by such
historical reflection. Before I present such an example, I would like to
continue a bit longer in this abstract vein.
Descartes has suggested a philosophical use for the history of phi-
losophy different from the one Bennett suggests; the suggestion, as I
have developed it, is that the history of philosophy can be important
not because it leads to philosophical truths, but because it leads to philo-
sophical questions. But what sort of history is relevant here? To learn
from history in the way Descartes suggests we can involves trying to
understand historical figures on their own terms. If I travel to Tokyo or
Nairobi, look for what is familiar to me in the alien setting, and seek it
out, I may acquire a nice camera cheaply, or learn one way not to make
a pizza. I may indeed have a lovely vacation, but I will not learn what
I might. Similarly, if what I am looking for in history is a guide to
philosophical truth, if I look for things recognizable to me as interest-
ing philosophical problems and promising (if possibly flawed) philo-
sophical arguments, as Bennett seems to suggest we should, then I may
miss features of philosophy as it has been that might raise interesting
questions about philosophy as it is. To learn from history in the way
Descartes suggests, we should – we must, I think – undertake the kind
of disinterested historical investigation I suggested earlier as an alter-
native to the sort to which Bennett’s views lead him. If it is an histori-
cal perspective on our beliefs and assumptions we are interested in, then
the truth or the falsity of past views is simply irrelevant. It matters not at
all whether Descartes’ or Aristotle’s or Kant’s views are true or false for
this use of history. What is important is that we understand what their
views were, and that we understand how it is that smart people could
have regarded them as true. It is not their truth, much less their falsity,
that causes us to reflect on our own beliefs; it is the fact that smart
people took seriously views often very different from ours that is
important here.
This, I think, answers the question posed at the end of the last
section. The sort of disinterested historical reconstruction I proposed
as a complement to Bennett’s philosophically informed investigation of
the history of philosophy is philosophically significant, a worthwhile
activity for philosophers to engage in, though for a reason somewhat
different from what Bennett suggests for his program. Bennett’s history
seeks philosophical truth, answers to philosophical questions; mine
seeks the questions themselves.
Raising Questions: Science and Philosophy

I have been sketching out a way of doing philosophy historically, using
a disinterested historical reconstruction of past thought as a way of
raising important philosophical questions that might otherwise escape
our notice. A brief example illustrates the approach I have been
advocating.
Bennett makes an interesting statement in the course of his com-
mentary on Spinoza. He writes: “Much of the Ethics is philosophical
rather than scientific, i.e., is answerable to conceptual analysis rather
than to empirical observation”14 The claim is not central to Bennett’s
reading of Spinoza, and in raising questions about it I don’t mean to
14 Bennett, Spinoza, p. 24.

cast doubt on Bennett’s larger interpretation (though I do think that
on at least one occasion it does lead him a bit astray). The quotation
appeals to a certain widely held conception of philosophy: that it is an
activity pretty largely distinct from scientific activity, and that philoso-
phy makes use of conceptual analysis, whereas science makes use of
observation and experience. This conception of philosophy and its rela-
tion to science is worth some historical examination.
We might begin by noting that in Spinoza’s day, things were not so
neatly partitioned. It is now generally recognized that the words “phi-
losophy” and “science” didn’t have distinct and separate meanings in
the seventeenth century. Whereas “philosophy” was sometimes used
narrowly, in perhaps something of the way we use it now,15 it was also
used more broadly to include knowledge in general, including what we
now call science, as in the title to Descartes’ Principia Philosophiae, three-
fourths of which is scientific by our standards. Similarly, whereas
“science” was sometimes used as we do now,16 it often took on a meaning
derived from its Latin origin, scientia, knowledge. This, of course, is only
a matter of terminology. The important question is not what things were
called, but whether Spinoza and his contemporaries drew an interest-
ing distinction between what we call philosophy and what we are
inclined to call science, between a certain collection of foundational
questions, investigated through argument and conceptual analysis, and
a different set of questions about the natural world, investigated
through observation and experience.
Here, I think we can say that while we can certainly find different
questions studied by different thinkers using different modes of inves-
tigation, there is no radical distinction between what we call philo-
sophical and what we call scientific.
It is quite widely known that arguments that are in general terms
philosophical play a major role in seventeenth-century science. A nice
example is the derivation Descartes gave for his laws of motion.
Descartes started from two main premises. The first was an analysis of
the “nature of time,” which, Descartes claims, is “such that its parts are
not mutually dependent,” and from which he argued that God is
required to keep everything in existence at every moment.17 The
15 See, e.g., Discours I, AT VI 6, 8–9; CSM I 113, 114–15.

16 See, e.g., the preface to the French translation of the Principia Philosophiae, AT IXB 14,
CSM I 186.
17 Principia I 21, AT VIIIA 13; CSM I 200.
second premise was that God is immutable by his nature and operates
“in a manner that is always constant and immutable.”18 From these
premises Descartes argued that a constant quantity of motion is main-
tained in the world, and that bodies in uniform rectilinear motion will
tend to remain in uniform rectilinear motion.19 These conclusions, con-
clusions that spring from Descartes’ metaphysical foundations, were
enormously influential on later seventeenth-century physicists. Though
not altogether correct in detail, Descartes’ conclusions constituted the
first published statement of a conservation principle and the first clear
version of what Newton was later to call the principle of inertia. When
Newton presented his version of these laws in his Principia almost
fifty years later, the metaphysical argument was gone. But it wasn’t
dead. Leibniz, Newton’s great and greatly maligned contemporary,
a physicist and mathematician whose only clear better was Newton
himself, made free use of metaphysical arguments in his physics. Like
Descartes, Leibniz chose to derive the laws of motion from God, though
in a different way: from God the creator of the best (and so, most
orderly) of all possible worlds, not God the moment-by-moment
sustainer of all. God, Leibniz reasoned, would want to create the world
in such a way that whatever power, whatever ability there is to do work
in a complete cause, must be found intact in its full effect. Using this
as his main premise, Leibniz established two of the main principles of
classical mechanics, the law of conservation of what we call kinetic
energy (mv2, vis viva), and the conservation of what we call momentum
(mv).20
These arguments establish what we would call scientific conclusions
by way of what we would call philosophical premises. There are also
instances in which what we would call (and Bennett has called) con-
ceptual analysis taken more narrowly is used in the service of science.
What I have in mind is Descartes’ celebrated arguments for the identi-
fication of space and body, and his conclusion that there is no empty
space, no vacuum. In one representative version, noted by Spinoza in
his Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy, quoted and discussed by Bennett in
his commentary, the claim reads:
18 Principia II 36, AT VIIIA 61; CSM I 240.

19 Principia II 36–39, AT VIIIA 61–65; CSM I 240–42.
20 For an account of Leibniz’s work here, see, e.g., Martial Gueroult, Leibniz: dynamique et
metaphysique (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967), chapter 3.
Space and body do not really differ [because] body and extension do not
really differ, and space and extension do not really differ. It involves a
contradiction that there should be a vacuum [i.e.] extension without bodily
substance.21
Bennett claims that this position is a purely philosophical one, and that
neither Descartes nor, following him, Spinoza should confuse this with
doing science. He writes: “[W]hen he [Descartes] says that there is no
vacuum, he is not predicting what you will find if you ransack the phys-
ical universe. His point is a conceptual one.”22 Bennett furthermore
regrets “that he words this possible philosophical truth so that it sounds
like a scientific falsehood” and goes on to chastise Descartes and
Spinoza for their occasional lapses into thinking that this philosophi-
cal argument has empirical consequences for physics.23 Bennett is too
charitable here, and in his charity, he misses the point of the argument,
both in Descartes and in Spinoza. Descartes’ point was precisely to estab-
lish that there is no vacuum in the physical world, and I know of no
reason to believe that Spinoza read the argument any differently.
Whether or not there is a philosophical truth in the claim, it was what
we have come to recognize as a scientific falsehood that interested
Descartes and his contemporaries; the denial of a vacuum not only
in philosophy but also in rerum natura was an important feature of
Cartesian physics, one that grounds Cartesian cosmology, the vortex
theory of planetary motion.24
The examples so far are of cases in which philosophical argument,
conceptual analysis, leads to what we would consider scientific conclu-
21 C. Gebhardt, ed., Spinoza Opera (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925), 1:187–88, as para-
phrased in Bennett, Spinoza, p. 100. Spinoza refers the reader here to Descartes’ Principia
II 17–18, AT VIIIA 49–50; CSM I 230–31.
22 Bennett, Spinoza, p. 101. 23 Ibid.
24 Descartes’ view was that the present state of the world can be explained if we imagine an
initial state of disorder, which sorts itself out into swirls of fluid by way of the laws of motion
alone. These swirls of fluid, vortices, are what Descartes identifies with planetary systems,
a sun at the center of each, and planets circling about the sun. Essential to this account
is the assumption that all motion produces circular motion, which Descartes derives from
the doctrine of the plenum. It is because all space is full, he argues, that all motion must
ultimately be circular, one hunk of material substance moving to make room for a given
moving body, a third hunk moving to make room for the second, and so on until a final
hunk moves to take the place left by the original moving body. In this way, Descartes’
whole cosmology depends on the denial of the vacuum. For the account of motion as
circular, see Principia II 33 (AT VIIIA 58–59; CSM I 237–39) and for the derivation of the
cosmos from an initial state, see Principia III 46ff. (AT VIIIA 100ff.; CSM I 256ff.).
sions. There are a few interesting and, to the modern mind, very
strange instances in which seventeenth-century philosophers used
empirical claims to support conclusions that we would consider philo-
sophical. The case is strange, and I’m not entirely sure I have it right,
but Leibniz seems to have taken such a position. Leibniz held (or, at
least, he often held) that animals are genuine substances, corporeal sub-
stances. As substances, Leibniz argued, they cannot arise through
natural means, nor can they perish by natural means. This is a conclu-
sion Leibniz often establishes by pure philosophical argument; it is a
conclusion of the celebrated predicate-in-notion argument of Discourse
on Metaphysics, §8,25 and, Leibniz sometimes argues, of the no-less-
philosophical principle of continuity.26 Leibniz also called on the
exciting discoveries of microscopists like Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi
for support. For example, he wrote to Queen Sophie Charlotte in May
1704 concerning an important consequence of his view of corporeal
substance:
Speaking with metaphysical rigor, there is neither generation nor death, but
only the development and enfolding of the same animal. . . . Experience con-
firms these transformations in some animals, where nature herself has given
us a small glimpse of what it hides elsewhere. Observations made by the most
industrious observers also lead us to judge that the generation of animals is
nothing but growth joined with transformation.27
Microscopic examiners are being called upon to support one of the

basic propositions of Leibniz’s metaphysics, the natural ungenerability
and incorruptibility of substance.
If this strikes us as being a bit strange, stranger still is Henry More,
who calls upon the world of ghosts and goblins as empirical support for
his belief in the existence of incorporeal souls. In his Immortality of the
Soul (1662 edition) More calls our attention to
such extraordinary Effects as we cannot well imagine any natural, but must
needs conceive some free or spontaneous Agent to be the Cause thereof,
whereas yet it is clear that they are from neither Man nor Beast. Such are
25 See C. I. Gerhardt, ed., Leibniz: Philosophische Schriften (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhand-

lung, 1875–1890), 4:432–33, translated in Leroy Loemker, ed. and trans., Leibniz: Philo-
sophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), pp. 307–8. See also the letter to
Arnauld, 28 November/8 December 1686, Gerhardt 2:76.
26 See Leibniz’s letter to Queen Sophie Charlotte, 8 May 1704, Gerhardt 3:345.
27 Ibid. See the discussion of this and the references cited in Michel Serres, Le systeme de
Leibniz (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 1:354ff.
speakings, knockings, opening of doors when they were fast shut, . . . shapes
of Men and several sorts of Brutes, that after speech and converse have
suddenly disappeared.28
That there are such happenings is, for More if not for us, an empirical
fact. For More these apparitions speak strongly in favor of souls distinct
from body: “Those and like extraordinary Effects . . . seem to me to be
an undeniable Argument that there be such things as Spirits or Incor-
poreal Substances in the world.”29 More may have been deluded in think-
ing that there are ghosts and obscure about how the phenomenon in
question is supposed to support his conclusion, but he certainly seemed
to think that the question of the existence of incorporeal substance, a
metaphysical question par excellence, could be settled by a trip to a
haunted house. In this he was not alone. Hobbes, no advocate of imma-
terial substance, made a special point of denying the reality of ghosts
as part of his case against incorporeal souls.30 Although he did not
support the view More was pressing, Hobbes certainly seemed to think
that empirical evidence was germane to the question.
Why are these historical observations interesting? For one, they do
pertain to the proper interpretation of Spinoza and his contemporaries;
they suggest that we should be careful about attributing our distinction
between philosophy and science to earlier thinkers. There is a philo-
sophical lesson to be learned as well. My point is not that we should look
for philosophical truth in the sorts of arguments I was discussing; the
laws of motion shouldn’t be derived from God, nor should the ques-
tion of the vacuum be settled by an appeal to our intuitions about space
and extension. Nor do I think that metaphysical issues about the nature
of substance can be settled by looking into microscopes, nor should we
consider seriously the ontological status of ghosts and goblins. Much
that was live in seventeenth-century thought is now dead, and I don’t
intend to revive it. The examples I have given do raise an interesting
question: Why is it that we tend to see such a radical break between phi-
losophy and science, and, more important, should we? The question can
be raised directly, without the need for history, as Quine has done. But
history brings the point home in an especially clear way: It shows us an
assumption we take for granted by pointing out that it is not an assump-
tion everyone makes.
28 Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 50, in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings
of Dr Henry More (London: William Morden, 1662).
29 Ibid. 30 Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 46; cf. chapter 2.
Conclusion
Some years ago, an anthropologist friend told me something of what it
is like to do field work. When one enters a new community, she said, it
is all very alien, an alien language, alien customs, alien traditions. After
a while things change; the language and customs become familiar, and
one is inclined to think that the differences are only superficial, that
the once-alien community is just like home. The final stage comes when
the similarities and differences come into focus, when one recognizes
what one’s subjects share with us, while at the same time appreciating
the genuine differences there are between them and us. The case is
similar for the history of philosophy. We cannot ignore the ways in
which past thinkers are involved in projects similar to ours, and the ways
in which we can learn from what they have written, how it can con-
tribute to our search for philosophical enlightenment. At the same
time, we cannot ignore the ways in which they differ from us, the way
in which their programs differ from ours, the way in which they ask dif-
ferent questions and make different assumptions. Both are important
to a genuine historical understanding of the philosophical past, but just
as important, we as philosophers can learn from both.
PART II
METHOD, ORDER, AND CERTAINTY

2
DESCARTES AND METHOD IN 1637
The Discourse on the Method and the three essays that were published with
it, the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry, make up a very curious
book. The very title page emphasizes the preliminary discourse, and
that discourse, the Discourse on the Method, emphasizes method, the
importance that method had for Descartes in making the discoveries
he made, the importance that the method Descartes claims to have
found will have for the progress of the sciences and for the benefit of
humankind as a whole. Descartes is not, of course, telling us that we
are obligated to follow his method; the Discourse is, after all, proposed
“as a story, or, if you prefer, as a fable” (AT VI 4). But Descartes expects
that we will all see the light, the light of reason, of course, and follow
his example. It is curious, then, that Descartes gives the reader only
brief hints of what that method is, four brief, vague, and unimpressive
rules that, taken by themselves, would hardly seem to justify Descartes’
enthusiasm, not to mention a whole discourse in their honor. Further-
more, explicit methodological concerns are hardly in evidence in the
Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry, which are, Descartes claims,
“essays in this method,” as he identifies them on his title page. Indeed,
one is hard pressed to find much evidence of the method at all after
1637, either explicit discussions of the method or explicit applications
of the method in any of Descartes’ writings, published or unpublished.
Very curious.
These observations raise quite a number of questions about the
development of Descartes’ thought and the state of his program as of
1637. In this essay I shall address two of these questions: (1) What pre-
cisely was the method Descartes had in mind in 1637, when he sang its
33
34 method, order, and certainty
praises so enthusiastically? and (2) Why does that method appear so
little in the publications of 1637 and appear to drop out altogether
after that? Briefly, I shall argue that the method of 1637 was just the
method Descartes had put forward more clearly in the earlier Rules for
the Direction of the Mind, or, at least, the dominant method that shows
through the latest stages in its composition. But, I shall argue, perhaps
by 1637 and certainly after, that method began to show its limitations,
and the method that was one of Descartes’ first discoveries, one of
his first inspirations proved itself inadequate to the mature program
that it led Descartes to undertake. Obviously there is not the space to
present the detailed discussions these questions require. But I shall
try to present in broad strokes one way of understanding the develop-
ment of Descartes’ methodological thought as he passed from youth to
maturity.
I
I have claimed that the method of 1637 is essentially the method of the
Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and to make good on that claim, we
must first turn to that work. The Rules, started as early as 1619 and aban-
doned in 1628, is a very difficult work; despite its superficial organiza-
tion, it is often strikingly unmethodical and disorderly for a work that
is supposed to be Descartes’ most systematic exposition of his method.
It is blatantly a work in progress that never progressed to anything like
a finished draft, and the text we have shows obvious signs of having
been picked up and put down at different times throughout the period
of composition.1
To begin unraveling Descartes’ complex thought on method in the
Rules we must look to the earliest strata of the work, where Descartes
sets out the goal of the method in passages likely to have been written
in November 1619, shortly after the dreams of November 10.2 Descartes
wrote:
1 For questions of dating, see J.-P. Weber, La constitution du texte des Regulae (Paris: Société
d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1964). Weber believes that Descartes wrote the text
of the Rules in ten discrete “phases.” Though the stages of composition are difficult to dis-
tinguish with such exactitude, Weber’s arguments are often useful for dating particular pas-
sages of the Rules. I have also used datings suggested by John Schuster in his “Descartes’
Mathesis Universalis, 1619–28,” in S. Gaukroger (ed.), Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and
Physics (Sussex: the Harvester Press, 1980).
2 See Weber, La constitution, §§ 13, 55.
descartes and method in 1637 35
The goal [finis] of studies ought to be the direction of one’s mind [ingenium]
toward having solid and true judgments about everything which comes
before it. (AT X 359)
But, Descartes thinks, such “solid and true judgments,” such “certain
and indubitable cognition” (AT X 362) as he calls it in the following
rule, can come to us in only two ways, through intuition, or through
deduction, “for in no other way is knowledge [scientia] acquired” (AT
X 366). And so, what we should seek is an intuition, “the undoubted
conception of a pure and attentive mind” (AT X 368), or a deduction,
a chain of such intuitions, grounded in intuition, arrived at through “a
certain movement of our mind [ingenium],” inferring one thing from
another (AT X 407). To find such knowledge, though, Descartes thinks
that we need a method (Rule 4). But what is this method and how is it
supposed to work?
From the start Descartes had in mind a two-stage process. Writing in
Rule 5, again from late 1619,3 Descartes summarized his rule of method
as follows:
This rule is observed exactly if we reduce involved and obscure propositions
step by step to simpler ones, and thus from an intuition of the simplest we
try to ascend by those same steps to a knowledge of all the rest. (AT X 379)
The rule of method thus has two steps. First there is a reductive step in
which “involved and obscure propositions” are reduced to simpler ones.
This is followed by a constructive step, in which we proceed from an
intuition of the simplest back to the more complex.4
But what in concrete terms does the method come to? How is it to
be used in specific cases? It is quite possible that Descartes’ vision in
3 See ibid. §§ 19, 55.

4 To avoid confusion, I am breaking with most commentators, who refer to these as the ana-
lytic and synthetic steps, following the distinction Descartes draws in the Second Replies. See,
for example, Ch. Serrus, La méthode de Descartes et son application à la métaphysique (Paris:
Librarie Félix Alcan, 1933), chapter I; Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, L’oeuvre de Descartes (Paris: J.
Vrin, 1971), pp. 173ff; L. J. Beck, The Method of Descartes (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1952), chapter XI, etc. This is a distinction that has little direct relevance to the stages
of the method of the Rules. In the Rules we are dealing with a distinction between two
parts of a single method; though they are distinct, both are necessary for a true applica-
tion of the method. But the distinction between analysis and synthesis in the Second Replies
is completely different. There we are dealing with different ways of setting out a single line
of argumentation, and we must choose one or the other. See AT VII 155–56 or AT IX–A
212. On analysis and synthesis, see Garber and Cohen, “A Point of Order,” essay 3 in this
volume.
1619 was cloaked in poetic enthusiasm, and that Descartes himself may
not have had a clear and distinct conception of precisely how the
method was to work in actual practice. Matters are clarified consider-
ably in an example Descartes gave late in the composition of the Rules,
where the programmatic bravado of the earlier years is translated into
practice. The example I have in mind is the anaclastic line, which
Descartes discusses in Rule 8. The example is closely connected with
optical investigations Descartes undertook probably between 1626 and
1628, and probably dates from that period.5 But whenever it dates from,
it displays what I take to be the method as Descartes understood it at
the time he abandoned the project of the Rules, and represents what
he means by method in 1637, I shall argue.
The argument is set out in Table 1. The problem Descartes poses is
that of finding the shape of a line (lens) that focuses parallel rays of
light to the same point (AT X 394). Now, Descartes notices – and this
seems to be the first step in the reduction – “the determination of this
[anaclastic] line depends on the relation between the angle of inci-
dence and the angle of refraction.” But this question is still “composite
and relative,” and we must proceed further in the reduction, to the
question of how this refraction is caused by light passing from one
medium into another, which in turn raises the question as to “how the
ray penetrates into the whole transparent thing, and the knowledge of
this penetration presupposes that the nature of illumination is also
known” (AT X 394–95). But in order to understand what light is,
Descartes claims, we must know what a “natural power [potentia natu-
ralis]” is. This is where the reduction ends. At this point Descartes seems
to think that we can “clearly see through an intuition of the mind” (AT
X 395) what a natural power is, something that we understand in terms
of local motion.6 Once we have this intuition, we can then begin the
5 See Schuster, “Mathesis,” pp. 55, 88 n.68. Weber dated this text to the year 1621, basing his
argument on the dating of the discovery of the law of refraction that G. Milhaud proposed;
see Weber, La constitution, § 23bis. I follow Schuster here. Setting aside the dating of the
law of refraction, it appears clear that the text concerning the “noblest example,” an appli-
cation of the method to epistemological questions (AT X 395, l. 17), a text that Weber cor-
rectly links to the anaclastic example, does not date from 1621. This text on the “noblest
example” is intimately connected with the following text, AT X 396 l. 26ff, which Weber
dates to the years 1625–27; see La constitution, §§ 23–24, 60. We discuss the epistemologi-
cal project of Rule 8 in part III of this essay.
6 In Rule 9 Descartes says that “if one wants to examine” this natural power, one must turn
to “local motions of bodies” [AT X 402]. According to Schuster, this passage probably dates
from the same period as the anaclastic line example; see Schuster, “Mathesis,” p. 87 n.60.
Table 1. Anaclastic Line Example

(Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule 8)
Q1. What is the shape of a line (lens) that focuses parallel rays of light to the
same point?
Q2. What is the relation between angle of incidence and angle of refraction (i.e.,
the law of refraction)?
Q3. How is refraction caused by light passing from one medium into another?
Q4. How does a ray of light penetrate a transparent body?
Q5. What is light?
Q6. What is a natural power?
Intuition: A natural power is. . . .
Construction: The construction consists in traversing the series of questions from
Q5 to Q1, deducing the answer to each question from that of the preceding
question.
constructive step, and follow back in order through the questions raised
until we have answered the original question, Q6 allowing us to deduce
an answer to Q5, Q5 allowing us to deduce an answer to Q4, and so on
until we reach an answer to Q1, deductively.7
This example suggests the following conception of method. Method-
ical investigation begins with a question. This question is reduced to
simpler questions, questions whose solution is presupposed for the solu-
tion of the question originally posed. That is, Q1 is reduced to Q2 if
we must answer Q2 before we can answer Q1. Descartes thinks that this
process leads us from more specific questions to more general, more
basic, more fundamental questions, from the shape of a specific lens,
to the law of refraction, to the nature of light and the nature of a natural
power. Descartes thinks that when we follow out this reductive series,
we will ultimately reach an intuition. Here the reduction ends and con-
struction begins. At this point we can turn the procedure on its head,
and begin deducing answers to the questions that we have successively
raised, in an order the reverse of the order in which we raised them.
When we are finished it is evident that we shall have certain knowledge;
the answer arrived at in this way will constitute a conclusion deduced
ultimately from an initial intuition.
7 For a lucid discussion of the anaclastic line example, see Pierre Costabel, Démarches origi-
nales de Descartes savant (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), pp. 53–58.
Descartes’ strategy here is extremely ingenious. The stated goal of
the method is certain knowledge, a science deduced from intuitively
known premises. What the method circa 1628 gives us is a workable pro-
cedure for finding an intuition and a deductive chain from which such
knowledge can be attained. This workable procedure is the reduction
of a question to more and more basic questions, questions we can iden-
tify as questions whose answers are presupposed for answering the ques-
tion originally posed. The efficacy of the reductive step of the method
depends upon a substantive assumption about knowledge, the assump-
tion that knowledge, scientia, is structured in a very specific way, a doc-
trine that Descartes seems to have held in one form or another since
the crucial night of 10 November 1619 (cf. AT X 204, 215, 255, 361).
It is not at all clear how in detail Descartes may have seen this structure
in 1619. But Rule 12 of the Rules suggests that by 1628 Descartes saw
all knowledge grounded in intuitions about the very most general fea-
tures of the world, thought, extension, shape, motion, existence, dura-
tion, etc. On these intuitions are grounded layers of successively less
general propositions. If knowledge is structured in this way, then
Descartes thinks we should be able to solve any problem in an orderly
and methodical way, tracing step by step through the layers, back toward
the intuition, and deducing down from there to the question that
interests us.
My account of method in the Rules ignores numerous complexities.
I have said relatively little about the stages of composition of the Rules,
and nothing about simple natures or the use of experiment in the
method (though I will touch on that a bit later). Also, I have said
nothing about the mathesis universalis of Rule 4 and Rule 14, which some
argue is identical to the method (they are wrong, I think, but it would
take me too far from my main theme to argue the case).8 And finally,
8 The question of the mathesis universalis and its connection to the method is very important
for my interpretation; to the extent that we are interested in the usage (and the lack of
usage) of the method in Descartes’ thought, we have to understand what Descartes under-
stood by “method.” Now, some have supposed that Descartes identified the method with
the mathesis universalis; see, e.g., G. Milhaud, Descartes savant (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1921), p.
69; Paul Mouy, Le développment de la physique cartésienne: 1646–1712 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1934)
pp. 4–5; Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1981), §§ 9–11;
Desmond Clarke, Descartes’ Philosophy of Science (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1982), pp. 166ff. The question is complicated, but I think that this inter-
pretation is mistaken. My aim here is not to establish my conclusion with certainty, but it
appears to me that the method of the anaclastic line example is the definitive method of
the Rules, that which reappears in the Discourse, as we have seen. It is true that, from time
to time in the Rules, Descartes seems to identify his method with the mathesis universalis,
I have neglected to mention the numerous other assumptions, largely
unwarranted, I think, that Descartes needs to make his method work.9
But what I have given is an account of the method Descartes held
in 1628 or so when he stopped work on the Rules to turn to the con-
struction of his system.
II
It is this method, I claim, that Descartes had in mind in 1637 when
he published the Discourse on the Method. The method I attributed to
Descartes in the Rules agrees well enough with the brief exposition of
the method, the four rules that he gives in part IV, particularly the
second and third of those rules. The second rule requires us “to divide
every difficulty . . . into as many parts as one can,” and the third sug-
gests that I conduct “my thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest
objects, those easiest to understand, to rise little by little, as by degrees,
up to the most composite knowledge” (AT VI 18). Although I think that
commentators have not, in general, grasped the method Descartes
recommends in the Rules, the obvious correspondence between the
two-stage method Descartes recommends in the Rules, the reduction
followed by the construction, and these two rules he recommends in
the Discourse have often been noted.10
above all in Rule 14. My hypothesis is this. In the last stage of the composition of the Rules,
Descartes had a brilliant idea. The most important thing about the method, as presented
in the anaclastic line example, is order. But Descartes had been interested perhaps ten
years earlier in a science of pure order, that is, in what he called the mathesis universalis.
Descartes might have thought that this science of order was applicable to the method
of Rule 8, and in one way or another, that one could use the mathesis universalis in
the methodical solution of problems. That seems to me to be the idea of Rule 14. And
perhaps, in this same moment of enthusiasm, Descartes attached an older exposition of
the mathesis universalis to what was then extant of Rule 4, where he introduced the method,
intending to return to Rule 4 and integrate the old with the new, a conjecture which might
explain certain strange aspects of the text in this Rule; cf. Weber, La constitution, chapter
I. But it seems to me that this marriage between mathesis and method did not work, and
Descartes abandoned the idea very quickly. There is not a single example of the method
that Descartes suggests in Rule 14, and there is no reason to think that Descartes had any
more than a vague and impressionistic idea of the mathesis as method.
9 For example, Descartes supposed that the simpler questions are also those that are meta-
physically more fundamental. Furthermore, in the anaclastic line example, the intuition,
the step presented as the last in the reduction, is very obscure. Finally, it is not certain
that one can deduce, properly speaking, the answer to a question originally posed from
the intuition to which the method leads one.
10 See, for example, Étienne Gilson, René Descartes: Discours de la méthode, texte et commentaire,
4me éd. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967), p. 205; L. J. Beck, Method, pp. 149ff; etc.
But our account of Descartes’ views on method in 1637 cannot stop
with the Discourse. The Discourse, Descartes tells his correspondents,
does not contain a genuine exposition of the method. Descartes wrote
to Mersenne on 20 April 1637, discussing the title he chose for his
Discourse:
I did not call it Treatise on the Method but Discourse on the Method, which is the
same as Advice on the Method, to show that I did not intend to teach it, but
only to discuss it. Since, as one can see from what I said about it, it consists
more in practice than in theory. (AT I 349)
The method, then, “consists more in practice than in theory.” But what
“practice” should we examine? In writing to P. Vatier about the method
on 22 February 1638, Descartes makes a suggestion: “I have given a
glimpse [of the method] in describing the rainbow” (AT I 559). The
reference here is to the eighth discourse of the Meteors, where Descartes
gives his celebrated account of the rainbow. Descartes there tells the
reader that
I could not choose material more appropriate to show how, by the method I
use, one can arrive at knowledge which those whose writings we have didn’t
possess. (AT VI 325)
A study of the account Descartes gives of the rainbow is, then, sup-
posed to teach us the method by showing us how it works “in practice.”
But, as Descartes also told Vatier, “the matter is very difficult” (AT I
559), and it is not at all easy to discern the clear outlines of Descartes’
method in the mists that surround the rainbow.
Very briefly,11 Descartes uses a combination of reasoning and exper-
iments with spherical flasks for water and with prisms to lead him to an
explanation of the two principal features of the rainbow, the colors we
see, and the fact that the rainbow is always composed of two separate
regions of color that are separated by a dark space. From the experi-
ments with prisms, Descartes concludes that colors arise when light is
bent in refraction; he argues that the color is caused by the tendency
to rotate that the balls receive during refraction. From observations
on the flask of water, and calculations made with the help of his law
of refraction, Descartes concludes that most sunlight passing into a
11 This paragraph is a summary of the argument given in Discourse 8 of the Meteors, AT VI

325ff. For a fuller development of the claim that this example exemplifies the method,
see “Descartes and Experiment in the Discourse and Essays,” essay 5 in this collection.
droplet of water and following certain paths will leave at one of two
angles, about 42 degrees and about 52 degrees. Putting these together
we have the rainbow, roughly speaking, two regions of color that arise
through refraction, separated by about 10 degrees.
It is not easy to extract a method from this morass of detail, but one
can see in Descartes’ account the outlines of the two-step method, the
reductive step followed by the constructive step that constitutes the core
of Descartes’ method in the Rules. In Table 2 have rearranged the argu-
ment a bit to show its structure. In the diagram, Q1–Q5 constitute the
reduction of the initial question, the ordered succession of questions
Descartes would answer to answer the question originally posed. The
reduction ends with an intuition about the nature of light and how
it passes through bodies. (In the Meteors Descartes actually appeals to
the Dioptrics, where the nature of light is presented as a hypothesis. See
AT VI 331 and 84.) D1–D4 constitute the constructive stage of the
method, where Descartes goes from the intuition to the solution to
the problem originally posed. (Again, Descartes actually appeals here
to results that are derived in the Dioptrics, the law of refraction. See AT
VI 337 and 93ff.) Viewed in the way I suggest, the account of the
rainbow nicely displays the method of the Rules that we saw in the ana-
clastic line example.
While it does not pertain to my main theme in this essay, I should
point out how nicely the rainbow example shows us the role of experi-
ment in the method.12 It is worth noticing that experiment enters only
in the reductive stage of the method; it helps us to find a path from
our complex question to the intuition from which that question will be
answered. But the answer itself is purely deductive, and makes no use
of experiment. The chain of causes that the Cartesian scientist seeks in
reason is exemplified in the causal connections one finds in nature
itself. Insofar as these later connections are open to experimental deter-
mination, we can use experiment to sketch out the chain of causes and
find what causally depends on what, and thus use the connections we
find in nature as a guide to the connections we seek in reason. It may
not be obvious how we can go deductively from the nature of light to
the rainbow, but poking about with water droplets, flasks, and prisms
may suggest a path for the deduction to follow. But this does not make
the deduction superfluous; while it may be through effects that we are
12 For a fuller development, see, again, “Descartes and Experiment,” essay 5 in this
collection.
Table 2. Descartes’ Account of the Rainbow (Meteors, Eighth Discourse)
Q1. What causes the rainbow (two regions of color)?
[Rainbows appear only in the

presence of water droplets; size is
irrelevant to the phenomenon.]
Q2. What causes the two regions of color in any spherical ball?
Q2a. What causes the two regions? Q2b. What causes the color?
[The two regions result from two [Color is produced without a curved
combinations of reflection and surface and without reflection; it
refraction.] requires a restricted stream of light,
and a refraction.]
Q3a. Why do the two combinations Q3b. How does refraction cause color
of reflection and refraction result in under appropriate circumstances?
two discrete regions?
Q4. How does light pass through media?

Q5. What is light?
Intuition: The nature of light, and how it passes through media [Cf. Q5, Q4].
D1a. Law of refraction D1b. The only change in a restricted

stream of light passing from one
medium to another (refraction aside)
is a differential tendency to rotation.
D2a. All parallel rays of light D2b. Color can only be the
converge into two discrete streams differential tendency to rotation
after two refractions and one or two produced in passing from one
reflections, emerging from the drop medium to another in refraction
(flask) in two discrete regions [Cf. Q3b].
[Cf. Q3a].
D3. Parallel rays of light produce two discrete regions of color on a spherical ball
of water [Cf. Q2].
D4. Sunlight (parallel rays of light) on a region of water droplets will produce
two regions of color [Cf. Q1].
led to causes, it is from knowledge of those causes and the deductions
we can make from them that our knowledge actually derives.
But let us return to the main theme. An examination of the rainbow
example, Descartes’ own announced example of the method in 1637,
strongly suggests that the method Descartes had in mind in the context
of the Discourse and Essays was just the method of the Rules, the two-
stage method we saw in the anaclastic line example, the reduction of a
question to an intuition, and the construction of an answer to that ques-
tion from intuition. But it is interesting to note that the account of the
rainbow we have been discussing is probably not contemporaneous with
the Discourse; while it is impossible to be certain, it is likely that that
portion of the Meteors dates from late 1629, not long after the Rules
were set aside.13 When the account of the rainbow appears eight years
later in the Meteors, it appears as a kind of ghost from an earlier period.
This is significant, for the account of the rainbow is the only place in
the Essays where Descartes explicitly calls attention to the method of his
preliminary discourse and it is the only example of the method to which
he calls attention in his letters. Though the method “consists more in
practice than in theory” (AT I 349), the practice in question is not
exemplified elsewhere in the Essays. The Essays are, of course, not
unconnected in Descartes’ mind with the method. Descartes wrote to
Mersenne in April 1637:
I call the treatises that follow essays in this method because I claim that the
things they contain couldn’t have been found without it, and that through
[what I have discovered] one can know the value [of the method]. (AT I 349)
But though they show the value of the method, the Essays do not them-
selves use the method. Writing to Vatier on 22 February 1638, Descartes
explains this as follows:
I couldn’t show the usage of the method in the three treatises which I gave
because [the method] requires an order for investigating things that is
very different from that which I thought necessary to use to explain them.
(AT I 559)
13 In a letter of 8 October 1629 Descartes wrote to Mersenne that he is working on “a small

treatise which will contain the explanation of the colors of the rainbow (to which I have
given more care than all the rest) and generally the explanation of all sublunar phe-
nomena” (AT I 23). This small treatise will doubtless become the Meteors, and Descartes’
words to Mersenne suggest that Descartes probably solved the problem of the rainbow
before October 1629.
The mode of exposition Descartes chose for the Dioptrics and the Meteors
was, of course, hypothetical. Both works begin with appropriate hypothe-
ses which ground the results which follow, hypotheses that allow
Descartes to show some of his results, but in a way that does not force
him to divulge the first principles of his system, something for which, he
believed, the public was not ready (AT I 370, 563–64; AT III 39).
But it is interesting to note that even in other contexts, where
Descartes is not too shy to divulge the foundations of his system,
the method is hardly in evidence. In the earlier World, for example,
Descartes divulges more of the foundations of his physics than he will
do later in the Essays; though certain metaphysical issues that Descartes
was concerned with at the time are hidden, he is forthcoming about
the nature of matter, the nature of light, the role God plays in main-
taining the world, and so on. But it is difficult to discern the formal
method of the Rules in the World. And when a few years later Descartes
sets aside his scruples and presents his system in its full and proper form
in the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy, there is as little of the
method as there was in the World and the Essays. Descartes does con-
tinue to build on first principles, to start with intuition (ultimately the
cogito), and deduce down from there, from the more general and more
metaphysical to the more specific. This, of course, is a feature of the
order of reasons that M. Gueroult emphasized, and it looks a great deal
like the constructive stage of the method. And his continued interest
in experiment and observation show that he is still keenly aware of the
problem of finding an appropriate path from intuition to the solution
of particular problems in physics. For example, Descartes’ keen inter-
est in embryology and sexual reproduction in the 1640s was, I think,
part of an attempt to bridge physics and biology;14 perhaps an under-
standing of how purely mechanical processes result in the genesis of a
new organism will show how in nature organisms arose from lifeless
matter, Descartes thought. But there is little evidence of the earlier
method in his later writings, in particular, little evidence of a formal
reduction that precedes the constructive deduction of conclusions from
intuition, the reduction that earlier had constituted the principal secret
of the method. This is so even in the Meditations, a work whose origin,
Descartes tells the Doctors of the Sorbonne, was in part a response to
a request for him to apply his celebrated method to God and the soul
(AT VII 3), a work written in the analytic mode, Descartes tells the
14 See, for example what Descartes says in the Discourse, AT VII 45–46, and the commentary
in Gilson, Commentaire, pp. 393ff.
second objectors, a work that is intended to follow “the true way
through which a thing was . . . discovered” (AT IXA 121). In the Medi-
tations, the intuition that constitutes the starting place of the deduction,
the cogito, is carefully prepared in the First Meditation. But the prepa-
ration does not seem to be a reduction in the precise sense of the term.
The First Meditation does many things; it clears away prejudice, estab-
lishes a standard for certainty, introduces the problem of knowing our
creator as the essential preliminary for any further knowledge. But it
does not sketch out the sequence of steps to be followed in resolving a
question, the way a proper reduction is supposed to do.
One cannot deny that the Meditations are carefully organized and
ordered. But even though there is an order, this order is not evident to
the meditator at the start of the Meditations. From the cogito of Medita-
tion I to the end of Meditation VI there are numerous places where the
meditator tries to lead the argument into a dead end, where the med-
itator begins an argument that simply does not pan out. For example,
at the beginning of Meditation III, the meditator tries to demonstrate
the existence of the external world, before giving the proof for the exis-
tence of God. However, at this point in the argument of the Meditations,
the meditator doesn’t have the means to make his proof work, and he
must set the question aside, and turn to another question, to God,
leaving aside the question of the external world until Meditations V and
VI, where it can finally be settled. These digressions are very important
to the structure of the Meditations.15 The Meditations are addressed, in
part, to a very specific audience that Descartes knows quite well, to the
unconverted, readers full of prejudice for their senses and for the mate-
rial world, and these digressions are very important to convince them
that the arguments that they are inclined to accept, arguments that take
for granted a faith in the senses, arguments that take for granted a pri-
ority in belief in the external world – these arguments Descartes wants
to show are mistaken. And the way he does this is by letting the
meditator try to show that they work, only to show that they don’t.
This is the function of the failed argument for the existence of body in
Meditation III, for the wax example of Meditation II, and for other
arguments in the Meditations.16
15 Other important digressions include the celebrated piece of wax in Meditation II and the
argument for the existence of the external world drawn from the faculty of imagination
at the beginning of Meditation VI.
16 See Garber, “Semel in vita: The Scientific Background to Descartes’ Meditations,” essay 11
in this volume for an elaboration of some of these themes.
There is method in this procedure, to be sure, but the method is not
the strict method of the Rules or the Discourse. In the method of his
youth, the reductive step brings it about that the entire constructive
step is sketched out, before the first deduction, and the construction
follows directly the order as set out in the reductive step; this, indeed,
is the main point of having a reduction, so that one will know how
to perform the deduction, and this reductive step is the principal
secret of the method, what makes it work. In this method there is
no place for the sorts of digressions so important to the purpose of
the Meditations. Furthermore, it is not clear to me that one can isolate
one well-defined question to which Descartes addresses himself in the
Meditations – a minimal condition required for the method of the
Rules to apply. In this sense one can say that the meditator doesn’t follow
the method, nor can the reader learn the method by reading the
Meditations.
In claiming that Descartes’ later works do not display his earlier
method I am making a controversial claim, one that would be chal-
lenged by other scholars, who have claimed to find the method of the
Rules and Discourse in the Meditations, at very least.17 But even if they are
right (and I don’t think they are), it is beyond dispute that Descartes
himself hardly mentions his method after the Discourse and the
letters that immediately follow its publication. If method is the key to
knowledge and the key to the later Cartesian system (as it seemed to
be in 1637), Descartes himself does not call attention to that fact.
Indeed, when the earlier method comes up in his later writings, it has
a decidedly subordinate role in his thought. In the Letter to Picot that
serves as a preface to the French edition of the Principles of Philosophy
of 1647, Descartes recommends that the student of philosophy “ought
to study logic, not that of the schools, but that which teaches one
how to conduct his reason to discover truths that one doesn’t know”
(AT IXB 13–14). It would be good, Descartes says, for him to “prac-
tice the rules concerning easy and simple questions for a long time”
until “one acquires a certain habitude for finding truth in these ques-
tions” (AT IXB 14). But in this respect, the method has roughly the
status of the provisional morality (which immediately precedes it in the
Letter), one of those preliminaries that should be undertaken by the
student of nature before undertaking the serious business of philoso-
17 See Serrus, La méthode, chapter III; Beck, Method, chapter XVIII; Peter Schouls, The
Imposition of Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapters IV–V; etc.
phy; it is an exercise useful primarily in sharpening the mind and
helping us to recognize truth, an exercise that has in 1647 roughly the
same role that Descartes earlier gave the scholastic logic he otherwise
rejected in the Rules (cf. AT X 363–64). Whatever it is, it is clearly not
nearly so important to Descartes in the 1640s as it appeared to be
in 1637.
How can we account for these curious facts? How can we explain the
fact that method gets such little play in Descartes’ actual scientific writ-
ings? How can we explain the fact that the method, the central focus
of his theory of knowledge and inquiry in 1637, is barely mentioned in
later writings? My claim is this. The method was Descartes’ first inspi-
ration, and was crucial for the first results of his system, as he reports
in the Discourse. But, I shall argue, two basic changes in Descartes’
thought made the method largely obsolete.
III
Descartes’ method first dates from mid- and late November 1619, it
is generally agreed, the days and weeks following the crucial three
dreams. It had been a year since Descartes had run into the young Isaac
Beeckman in Breda and had his first sympathetic introduction to the
mechanical approach to nature that was later to dominate his thought.
Beeckman was not a systematic thinker, it is fair to say, in the sense that
he had no large, overarching system. He was interested in the solution
of individual problems, and it is with the discussion of individual prob-
lems, taken one by one, that his notebooks are filled.18 It was this way
of doing physics and mathematics that he transmitted to the young
Renatus Picto, or René du Perron as Descartes styled himself at the
time. Beeckman’s notebooks show that Descartes worked on a number
of such problems, set for him by his older friend, including the be-
havior of water contained in a vessel, the behavior of a body in free-fall,
18 See the summary of the questions on which Beeckman worked between 10 November
1618 and January 1619, when he was in contact with the young Descartes, as given in his
journal, AT X 41–45. The very variety of the questions is very impressive. But it is also
interesting to note the form of the articles in his journal. Most often the questions are
quite specific and deal with specific phenomena: “candelarum scintillatio unde oriatur,”
“cometarum caudae quid sint,” “aves cur in aere volare possint,” etc. There are, to be sure, ques-
tions about motion and the laws of motion, but there are no questions about the nature
of a natural power, as one finds in Rule 8. And, above all, there is little interest in any
comprehensive system encompassing all the sciences.
and numerous problems in music and geometry (AT X 46–78).19 It is
not surprising, then, that the method that Descartes first attempted to
formulate in November 1619 and developed in the 10 years that fol-
lowed, was a method for the solution of individual problems. To make
use of the method, we must first set a specific question for ourselves,
what is the shape of a lens with such-and-such properties, or, what causes
the rainbow, or whatever. Once we have a specific question, we can then
apply the method, reduce the question to simpler questions until we
reach an intuition, and deduce back up to an answer to the question
originally posed. The method is a method for doing science as, say,
Beeckman conceived of it, as a series of discrete questions about the
natural world.
But as I noted earlier in discussing the method of the Rules, the
method presupposes a certain conception of the structure of knowl-
edge. All knowledge, for Descartes, is interconnected, grounded ulti-
mately in a small number of intuitively knowable propositions from
which all else follows deductively. This, as I noted, was one of the things
that Descartes probably learned in that night of enthusiasm in Novem-
ber 1619, and this is the key to the method he developed in the years
following. It is precisely because all knowledge is interconnected in this
way that the method is possible, that it is possible to take a question and
reduce it to an intuition from which an answer could be deduced. But
this very doctrine that makes the method possible leads to its demise.
For if all knowledge is interconnected, then what we should be doing
is not solving individual problems, but constructing the complete
system of knowledge, the interconnected body of knowledge that starts
from intuition and comes to encompass everything capable of being
known. Though he may have recognized this implication from the start,
in 1619, it will be ten years before he begins such a system, in 1629
with the first metaphysics, unfortunately lost, followed immediately by
the composition of the World. This project is what is striking and dis-
tinctive about Descartes’ mature system, the system we find sketched in
parts IV and V of the Discourse and developed in the Meditations and
Principles of Philosophy. Unlike those of others, Galileo, for example (cf.
AT II 380), Descartes’ strategy is to start not with individual questions,
19 According to Gouhier, it is also probable that a part of the Cogitationes Privatae containing
the Parnassus presents problems that Descartes discussed with Beeckman. See AT X
219–48, and Henri Gouhier, Les premières pensées de Descartes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958), pp. 15,
24.
but to start at the beginning, with the intuitively graspable first princi-
ples that ground the rest, and progress step by step from there down-
ward to more particular matters. No longer a mere problem solver,
Descartes has become a system builder.
But as a system builder, what role can he find for a method whose
goal is the solution of individual problems? With this crucial change in
Descartes’ conception of scientific activity, a change motivated by the
same doctrine of the interconnection of knowledge that motivated his
method, the method becomes obsolete; or if not obsolete, at very least
it is less central than it once had been.
This is one way in which the evolution of the Cartesian program led
to the demise of method. But there is another consideration as well.
The method is a procedure for answering a question by deducing an
answer from intuition; it tells us how to find the appropriate intuition,
and how to find a path from intuition to the answer we seek. But this
naturally leads us to the question as to why we should trust intuition
and deduction at all, and why we should consider them to be the
only source of knowledge. The history of Descartes’ struggle with this
problem is very complex and I can only sketch briefly some of the most
important stages. The issue first arises in Rule 8, in what is probably the
very last stage of the composition of the Rules, just before Descartes set
it aside in 1628 or so.20 There it appears as the “noblest example” of
the method, something useful for preventing ourselves from attempt-
ing to solve problems beyond our ability, or preliminary to the actual
use of the method in the same way that it is useful for the blacksmith
to build sturdy tools before attempting to make horseshoes [AT X
395–98].21 It is not altogether clear what status this investigation had
in 1628, whether it was a mere preliminary to investigation, or part of
the system of knowledge itself, whether it is essential in order for us to
have any knowledge, or whether it is simply a practical suggestion about
where we might begin. The status of this investigation of the grounds
20 See Schuster, “Mathesis,” pp. 58–59.

21 In this very interesting but very complicated text, Descartes puts forward three distinct
and different versions of the project: (1) AT X 395, l. 17 to 396, l. 25; (2) 396, l. 26 to
397, l. 3 or to 397, l. 26; and (3) 397, l. 4 or 397, l. 27 to 400 l. 11. In the first version,
the project is described as the “most noble” example of the method (AT X 395). The
blacksmith analogy is used in a paragraph that could belong to either the second or the
third version. The differences between these three successive versions shows Descartes at
the very moment when he is launching his epistemological program, and where he is
reflecting with great care about the exact formulation of the problem of knowledge. But
this isn’t our task here.
of intuition and deduction, now clear and distinct perception, is also
difficult to determine in the Discourse, where it appears to be something
of a digression, part of the answer Descartes gives the reader who
objects to the metaphysics presented earlier in part IV of the Discourse.
If you continue to think, contrary to what I have written (Descartes says)
that the material world of suns, stars, and tables is better known than
God and the soul, reflect on the fact that if we did not know that God
exists and is not a deceiver, then we could know nothing at all (AT VI
37ff.). But by the 1640s, the epistemological project, the investigation
of the trustworthiness of intuition and deduction, clear and distinct
perception has become the essential foundation of all knowledge; the
tree of knowledge from the 1620s, grounded in the intuition of the
most general notions concerning extension and thought, has grown
roots, and it is essential for us to understand the foundation of our
beliefs in God’s veracity for us to have any genuine knowledge at all
(AT IXB 14).
But with this change, method by itself can no longer lead us to
genuine knowledge. The reductive stage of the method starts with a
question, and then takes us back to questions presupposed, until we
finally reach an intuition. But when the reduction has reached an
intuition it goes no further. Thus the method of the Rules can at best
give us imperfect knowledge, the moral certainty we get when we take
intuitions for granted, rather than the metaphysical certainty that
comes from knowing that our clear and distinct perceptions are the
creation of a God who does not deceive (AT VI 37–38; AT VII 141).
I have argued that two changes in Descartes’ thought conspired to
make the method of the Rules largely inapplicable to the system of
knowledge he hoped to build: (1) the change from a problem-solving
conception of scientific activity to a system-building conception; and
(2) the adoption of the idea that intuition cannot be taken for granted
and must be validated, and that this is the essential preliminary to any
system of knowledge. Given these features of Descartes’ mature system
of the 1640s, it is no wonder that Descartes came to have relatively little
use for the method of the Rules, oriented to the solution of individual
problems, and incapable of leading us to metaphysical certainty.
But these considerations may also help to explain why the method
does not appear very much in the Essays either. Descartes suggests that
he does not use the method in the Essays because he did not want to
reveal the foundations of his physics. But this cannot be the whole story.
On the one hand, he was quite capable of using his method without
revealing any more of his foundations than he wanted to, as he did in
the rainbow example. And, on the other hand, even when he was not
especially worried about exposing the foundations of his physics, as in
the earlier World, method seems to play no substantive role. My own sus-
picion is that many of the changes in Descartes’ thought that make the
earlier method obsolete in the 1640s may also be present as early as
the first sketch of metaphysics Descartes attempted in 1629–30. Not
that Descartes was aware of what was going on. I suspect rather that
starting perhaps as early as the winter of 1629–30 method is no longer
relevant to his scientific practices, and is simply not used in the project.
And so, I suspect, when in the mid 1630s he sat down to gather together
some of this material and present it in his Essays, the method had as
little role to play as it did in its sources. But Descartes was perhaps not
aware of the change his thought had undergone. And so, when he sat
down to compose the preliminary discourse, out came the Discourse
on Method, a work that expressed a conception of scientific inquiry
that belonged to the earlier and somewhat more naive M. du Perron.
Though cognizant of the fact that his Essays did not make much use of
the method, he may not have realized why. This is a conjecture, of
course, and a very risky one. But it is indisputable that as his system
grew, perhaps from the first metaphysics of 1629–30 onward, method
became, first in practice, and then after 1637 in theory, less and less
important to Descartes.
If I am right, then, the volume Descartes published 350 years ago
in 1637 is a curious work, a beginning and, at the same time, an end.
It is, of course, the beginning of Descartes’ public career, and it con-
tains a preliminary sketch of the full system he will develop in suc-
ceeding years, the interconnected body of knowledge grounded in first
philosophy. But it also marks the end of a period, the last work in which
Descartes was to emphasize method as the key to knowledge. Descartes
in 1637 is, in a sense, like the butterfly, emerging from his cocoon,
spreading his new wings to dry in the sun, not yet fully aware that he
is no longer a caterpillar.
3
A POINT OF ORDER
Analysis, Synthesis, and Descartes’ Principles
The serious student of Descartes’ philosophy must deal with the fact
that Descartes’ metaphysics is presented in a number of different
ways in a number of different works. While the Meditations ought to
be regarded as the authoritative text, it is important to account for
the sometimes significantly different versions of the philosophy that
Descartes presents in the Discourse, the Principles of Philosophy, the Search
After Truth, and in numerous remarks scattered throughout the corre-
spondence. In this essay we shall examine one attempt to explain the
principal differences between two of these works: the Meditations and
the Principles. It is often claimed that these differences can be explained
by the fact that the Meditations are written in accordance with the ana-
lytic method, whereas the Principles are written in accordance with the
synthetic method. We shall argue against two somewhat different ver-
sions of this thesis. Although we have no counter-thesis of comparable
power or simplicity to offer, we shall suggest some ways of understand-
ing the relations between these two central works that better reflect the
texts and what appear to be Descartes’ intentions.
The main source for our understanding of Descartes’ distinction
between analysis and synthesis is the difficult thought often cited
passage at the end of the Second Replies (AT VII 155–156).1 In the Second
This essay was written jointly with Lesley Cohen.

1 References to Descartes’ works will generally be given in the text. All translations are our
own.
The technical terms “analysis” and “synthesis” come up very infrequently in Descartes’
writings. “Analysis” is mentioned in connection with the procedure of the Meditations in
only one other place, in the Fourth Replies (AT VII 249). All other appearances of the tech-
52
a point of order 53
Objections, Descartes is requested to present his argument in more geo-
metrico, with the full apparatus of definitions, postulates, and axioms
(AT VII, 128). Descartes complies with this request in the Geometrical
Appendix which follows his Second Replies where he provides a geometri-
cal exposition of some of his arguments. But first Descartes gives a
general discussion of the geometrical method of presentation. This dis-
cussion begins with a distinction between two aspects (res) of the geo-
metrical mode of writing (modus scribendi): ordo and ratio demonstrandi.
Ordo, Descartes says, is simply the arrangement of material in such a
way that that which is presented earlier can be known without having
to appeal to that which follows. The terms “analysis” and “synthesis” are
introduced when Descartes attempts to distinguish between two differ-
ent kinds of rationes demonstrandi that one could follow, presumably
without violating ordo. Analysis is presented as the ratio which shows “the
true way by which a thing was methodically and, as it were, a priori
discovered [methodice & tanquam a priori inventa est]” (AT VII 155).
Descartes’ account of synthesis is somewhat more complicated. He
explains:
Synthesis on the contrary, clearly demonstrates its conclusions in an oppo-
site way, proceding as it were a posteriori [tanquam a posteriori quaesitam]
(although the proof is here more often a priori than in the preceding case),
and makes use of a long series of definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems,
and problems. (AT VII 156)
In the Second Replies Descartes explicitly relates this distinction

between analysis and synthesis to his procedure in the Meditations.
There he states:
In my Meditations I followed only analysis, which is the true and best way for
teaching [via . . . ad docendum]. (AT VII, 156)
nical terms are in mathematical contexts. See, e.g., AT II 22, 30, 82, 337, 394, 400, 438,
637; AT III 99; AT VI 17–18, 20; AT X 373. For informal and non-technical uses of the
term “analysis” see, e.g., AT I 236–237; AT VII 444, 446. The only place in the corpus where
Descartes attempts explicitly to characterize the notions of analysis and synthesis and dis-
tinguish between the two is in the passage from the Second Replies that we discuss. In this
essay, we shall be concerned with the notions of analysis and synthesis only insofar as they
have been used by commentators to explain the differences between the Meditations and
the Principles. For more general historical accounts of analysis, synthesis, and the closely
related notions of resolution, composition, and method in general, see, e.g., J. Hintikka
and U. Remes, The Method of Analysis (Dordrecht: 1974); J. Hintikka, “A Discourse on
Descartes’s Method,” in M. Hooker, ed., Descartes (Baltimore: 1978), pp. 75–88; and J. H.
Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua: 1961).
However, the Second Replies itself provides no direct evidence as to how
the Principles fit into the distinction drawn there. Although Descartes
does present an example of synthetic argumentation in the Geometrical
Appendix to the Second Replies, he does not mention the as yet uncom-
pleted Principles in that connection. The only passage in the Cartesian
corpus in which there is a direct statement that the Principles are syn-
thetic occurs in the Conversation with Burman. Burman raises a question
relating to the two kinds of proofs for the existence of God offered in
the Meditations. In the course of his answer, Descartes points out that
in the Principles, unlike in the Meditations, the a priori argument pre-
cedes the a posteriori arguments. The explanation Burman reports
is this:
The way and order of discovery [via et ordo inveniendi] is one thing, that of
teaching [docendi] another; in the Principles he teaches, and proceeds
synthetically. (AT V 153)2
There is some doubt about the reliability of this passage, as with all of
the Conversation with Burman, particularly insofar as teaching is associ-
ated with synthetic method here rather than with analytic method as it
is in the unquestionably genuine Second Replies.3 But it does provide at
least prima facie evidence that Descartes thought that the Principles
are synthetic, and that he saw this as explaining at least some of the
differences between that work and the analytic Meditations.
These observations, however, are of little use in understanding the
differences between the two works in question until some further
content is given to the rather obscure distinction between analysis and
synthesis that Descartes offers in the Second Replies. One account of this
distinction is offered by Martial Gueroult in his numerous influential
writings on Descartes.4 According to Gueroult, the distinction between
2 It is interesting to note that this explanation for the divergence between the Meditations
and the Principles on this point is found in the literature on Descartes even before the first
publication of the Conversation in 1896. See, e.g., Joseph Millet, Descartes, sa vie, ses travaux,
ses découvertes, avant 1637 (Paris: 1867), pp. 216–217. Millet gives his account as if it were
common knowledge, and offers no documentation.
3 For resolutions of this seeming inconsistency, see John Cottingham trans. and ed., Descartes’
Conversation with Burman (Oxford: 1976), pp. 70–71 and Martial Gueroult, Descartes selon
l’ordre des raisons (Paris: 1953 and 1968), vol. I, pp. 357–358, note 58.
4 See Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons (Paris: 1953 and 1968), vol. I, pp. 22–28, 357–360; Nou-
velles réflexions sur la preuve ontologique de Descartes (Paris: 1955), pp. 17–20; and “La vérité
de la science et la vérité de la chose dans les preuves de l’existence de Dieu,” in Descartes
(Cahiers de Royaumont) (Paris: 1957), pp. 108–120, esp. pp. 112–117. This last paper is
a point of order 55
analysis and synthesis is properly understood as a distinction between
two orders of presentation, namely the order of knowledge (ratio
cognoscendi, la vérité de la science) and the order of being (ratio essendi, la
vérité de la chose). The order of knowledge, or the analytic order, follows
the order of things as they are known. Consequently, an analytic pre-
sentation of Cartesian metaphysics must, according to Gueroult, begin
with one’s own existence established by means of the Cogito, the first
thing which is known to us, and proceed from there to the existence
of other things, e.g., God and the material world, whose knowledge
depends on the knowledge of oneself. The order of being, or the syn-
thetic order, on the other hand, proceeds in quite a different way as
Gueroult understands it, presenting things in an order that reflects
the real dependencies that things have with respect to one another,
independent of our knowledge of them. Consequently, on this
understanding of the distinction, a synthetic presentation of Cartesian
metaphysics must begin not with the self and the Cogito, but with God,
the real cause on which all else, including one’s own existence,
depends.
Although Descartes himself never presents an account of the dis-
tinction between analysis and synthesis in quite these terms, a plausible
case can be made that this is what he had in mind. Descartes distin-
guishes between the order of knowledge and the order of being in a
passage from the Rules for the Direction of Mind which Gueroult often
cites as support for this position: “Individual things ought to be viewed
differently in relation to the order they have with respect to our knowl-
edge, than if we speak of them as they really exist” (AT X 418). While
Descartes does not explicitly use the terms “analysis” and “synthesis” in
this connection, it is natural to associate this distinction between the
order of knowledge and the order of things with the distinction
Descartes draws between the two rationes demonstrandi in the Second
Replies, as Gueroult does. The order of things “with respect to our
knowledge” in the Rules seems exactly what Descartes is referring to
some years later when he characterizes the analytic ratio demonstrandi as
showing the “true way by which a thing is discovered.” While synthesis
is not characterized in terms that directly suggest the order of being,
followed by an interesting discussion (pp. 121–140) to which we shall later refer. The inter-
pretation presented below is taken from the writings here cited. It is fair to say that the dis-
tinction between analysis and synthesis as Gueroult draws it plays a central role in his
elaborate interpretation of Cartesian metaphysics.
there is nothing in the characterization Descartes gives in the Second
Replies which prevents identifying synthesis with order of being, thus
completing the parallelism between the two passages.5 Such a conjec-
ture would make reasonable sense of Descartes’ remarks as reported by
Burman regarding the relative positions of the a posteriori and a priori
arguments for the existence of God in the Meditations and the Princi-
ples. If a synthetic exposition is one that follows the order of being, then
one should expect a synthetic treatment of Cartesian metaphysics to
put the a priori argument, which proceeds from the essence of God to
his existence, before the a posteriori argument, which proceeds from
a particular idea we have to the existence of God as a necessary cause
of that idea.
As elegant as Gueroult’s interpretation is, it unfortunately will not
stand up to the actual texts. Gueroult’s thesis offers a plausible and intu-
itively satisfying account of the different positions of the a posteriori
and a priori arguments for the existence of God in the Meditations and
the Principles. However, his reading runs up against a basic similarity
between the two works. Although the two presentations of the meta-
physics differ with respect to many important details, the two works
5 Well, almost nothing. The somewhat peculiar language of the Second Replies does raise some-
thing of a problem for relating those two passages and identifying analysis with the order
of knowledge and synthesis with the order of being, a problem that Gueroult does not deal
with. In the Second Replies, analysis is characterized as proceeding “tanquam a priori” and syn-
thesis as proceeding “tanquam a posteriori.” But Descartes, like his contemporaries, identi-
fied a priori arguments with arguments that proceed from cause to effect, and a posteriori
arguments with arguments that proceed from effect to cause. See AT I 250–251, 563; AT
II 433; AT IV 689; AT XI 47. And since causes are clearly prior to their effects in the order
of things, the Second Replies would thus seem to identify analysis with the ratio essendi and
synthesis with the ratio cognoscendi, exactly the opposite of what Gueroult claims! These pas-
sages also raise a more general problem of interpretation. While Gueroult’s interpretations
of the terms in question are in apparent contradiction with the Second Replies, they are in
accord with the traditional understanding of those terms, in accordance with which analy-
sis was almost invariably associated with a posteriori arguments from effect to cause, and syn-
thesis with a priori arguments from cause to effect. See, e.g., Lisa Jardine’s discussion of the
Renaissance uses of this terminology in Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cam-
bridge, England: 1974), pp. 249–250, and Louis Couturat’s discussion in La Logique de
Leibniz (Paris: 1901), pp. 176–179. Thus, the obvious reading of the Second Replies makes
Descartes’ usage of the terms “analysis” and “synthesis” radically at variance with the way
in which his contemporaries used them. For different resolutions of these problems, all
favorable to the Gueroult thesis, see F. Alquié, ed., Œuvres philosophiques de Descartes (Paris:
1963–1973), vol. II, p. 582, note 1; J. Brunschwig, “La preuve ontologique interprétée par
M. Gueroult,” Revue Philosophique 150 (1960), pp. 251–265, esp. pp. 257–259; and J.-M.
Beyssade, “L’Ordre dans les Principia,” Les Études Philosophiques 1976, pp. 387–403, esp.
pp. 394–395.
a point of order 57
seem constructed on largely the same plan. Both works begin with
doubt, both proceed from there to the Cogito, from the Cogito to God,
and from God to the external world. Given the similarities between the
structures of the two works, it is hard to understand how one could
hold that one work follows the order of knowledge and the other work
follows the order of being. Something, it seems, must be wrong with
Gueroult’s reading; either analysis and synthesis are not connected with
the distinction between order of knowledge and order of being, or the
Principles are not synthetic after all.6
However, it may be possible to retain the thesis that the Meditations
are analytic and the Principles synthetic if a different interpretation of
these terms can be offered, one that is more consistent with the texts.
Edwin Curley presents and argues for such an account in a recent
paper, “Spinoza as an expositor of Descartes.”7 Curley’s intuition is
simple. We know that the Geometrical Appendix to the Second Replies is syn-
thetic, and have good reason to believe that the Principles are as well. If
we are to discover what synthesis is and how it differs from analysis, then
the question we must ask is clear: What do the Principles and the appen-
dix to the Second Replies have in common that differentiates both of
them from the analytic Meditations?
Approaching the problem in this way, Curley presents two features
which, he claims, differentiate synthetic works from analytic presenta-
tions of the same material: the framing of “formal definitions of impor-
tant concepts,” and the “prompt and explicit recognition of eternal
truths.”8 In the Meditations key concepts, like that of clarity and dis-
tinctness, are introduced by examples, rather than by definition, as in
the Principles. And it is the Principles, not the Meditations, in which
Descartes seems to admit that the Cogito depends on the principle that
6 A similar point is made by J. Brunschwig in “La preuve ontologique interprétée par M.

Gueroult,” loc. cit. esp. pp. 255–257. Brunschwig’s arguments are attacked in B. Rochot,
“La preuve ontologique interprétée par M. Gueroult (Response aux “Objections” de M.
Jacques Brunschwig),” Revue Philosophique 151 (1961), pp. 125–130, and defended in J.
Brunschwig, “Reponse aux objections de M. Rochot,” Revue Philosophique 152 (1962), pp.
365–370. The question also arises in the discussion following Gueroult’s “La vérité de la
science et la vérité de la chose,” loc. cit., in remarks made by J. Hyppolite (pp. 125–126)
and F. Alquié (pp. 134–135). Gueroult’s initial response is to say that the Principles “sont
quelque chose d’un peu bâtard” insofar as they are really a mixture of analysis and synthesis
(see pp. 126 and 137). This position is also endorsed by Henri Gouhier. See his La pensee
métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: 1968), p. 109. J.-M. Beyssade, Op. Cit., works this position
out in some detail.
7 In Siegfried Hessing (ed.), Speculum Spinozanum (London: 1977), pp. 133–142.
8 Ibid., pp. 136–137.
what thinks must exist. Curley’s basic strategy might be used to uncover
even further differences between the purportedly synthetic Principles
and Geometrical Appendix, and the analytic Meditations, yielding eventu-
ally a rich and interesting account of the distinction between analysis
and synthesis, an account that does not suffer from the problem we
found in Gueroult. Following Curley’s line of thought, one might point
out that the Meditations are written in the first person, while the Prin-
ciples and the Geometrical Appendix are both written impersonally, or,
perhaps more substantively, the Meditations can be differentiated from
the purportedly synthetic works by virtue of the fact that in the Medi-
tations, unlike the other two works, we find whole chains of reasoning,
including false starts, heuristic arguments meant to motivate particular
premises, and strict arguments essential to establish conclusions. The
first causal proof for the existence of God as presented in Meditation III
illustrates this well. The argument proper is preceded by an investi-
gation based on the distinction between innate, adventitious, and
factitious ideas, an argument that leads, unfortunately, to no certain
knowledge (AT VII 37–40). The causal argument itself, when finally
presented, contains a number of lengthy subarguments. For example,
Descartes gives a long heuristic argument to motivate the premise that
there must be at least as much formal reality in the cause as there is
objective reality in the effect (AT VII 40–42). Also, the final conclu-
sion, that God must exist as the cause of our idea of Him, is given only
after a lengthy enumeration of our ideas and their possible causes (AT
VII 42–45). This contrasts radically with the presentation of the same
argument in the Principles and in the Geometrical Appendix. In both of
these works, there are no false starts or dead ends, and little heuristic
argument. The proof and its premises are presented unadorned and
bare (see AT VII 167; AT VIIIA 11–12).
But despite the attractiveness of Curley’s account, one large difficulty
remains. While Curley’s strategy is capable of yielding a plausible
account of the distinction that fits the texts, in the end it rests on
an unstable foundation. While Curley shows us how the concepts
of analysis and synthesis can be made to fit the Meditations and the
Principles, neither he nor Gueroult has shown us why we ought to see
the texts in that way. Neither has established with sufficient evidence
the basic premise in this exercise in interpretation, the claim that
Descartes really saw the distinction between analysis and synthesis
as being relevant to the differences between the Meditations and the
Principles.
a point of order 59
No one, of course, can question the claim that Descartes wrote the
Meditations according to the analytic ratio demonstrandi. He explicitly
tells us he did this in the Second Replies. But the direct evidence that
Descartes wrote the metaphysical part of the Principles synthetically is
very weak. The only textual evidence for this claim comes from the Con-
versation with Burman. But, it must be remembered, these words are
not from Descartes’ own hand. They are filtered through Burman and
almost certainly through Clauberg, and clearly contain a number of
mistakes.9 Thus it is difficult to be sure that the particular wording of
any given passage represents Descartes’ intentions, particularly when
the remarks relate to such an obscure point as the distinction between
analysis and synthesis. It is defensible to use that document to support
an interpretation drawn from more reliable texts. But it seems ques-
tionable to use passages from the Conversation as the basis of an inter-
pretation, which one must do if one is to maintain that the Principles
are synthetic.
In addition to the general concerns about the reliability of the Con-
versation, there are some rather more specific reasons for questioning
whether Burman’s report is trustworthy on this point. Descartes, of
course, never directly says that the Principles are not synthetic, any more
than he says that they are, outside of the Conversation. But it does seem
significant that in a number of contexts in which Descartes could quite
naturally have connected the Principles with the synthetic mode of
writing, he does not.
Descartes’ correspondence allows us to trace out the history of the
Principles and the Objections and Replies with some confidence. Descartes
seems to have finished his manuscript of the Meditations by April of
1640, for by 5 May 1640 he began to send it out for comment (AT III
61). During the time he was putting the final touches on the Medita-
tions, soliciting objections, and writing the replies that were to be pub-
lished with them, he began to work on his Principles. The earliest
reference to the Principles is in a letter written to Mersenne on 11
November 1640, where he talks about his intention
9 For recent discussions of the reliability of the Conversation, see F. Alquié (ed.), Œuvres
philosophiques de Descartes (Paris: 1963–1973), vol. III, pp. 765–767, Roger Ariew’s review
of J. Cottingham (trans. and ed.), Descartes’ Conversation with Burman (Oxford: 1976),
Studia Cartesiana 1 (1979), pp. 183–187, and Cottingham’s reply to Ariew, Ibid., pp.
187–189. Ariew also shared with us his “Descartes Really Said That?,” given at the Pacific
Division Meetings of the APA, March 1980. Curley discusses this question in Op. Cit., 140,
note 9.
to write a completely ordered course of my philosophy in the form of theses
where, without any excess of words, I will present only my conclusions along
with the true reasons from which I derive them. (AT III 233; cf. AT III
259–260)
By the end of December, it is clear that Descartes has actually begun to

work on the first part, that which contains his metaphysics. He writes
Mersenne in a letter of 31 December 1640:
I have resolved to spend [this year] writing my philosophy in such an order

that it can easily be taught. And the first part, that which I am working on
now, contains almost the same things as the Meditations which you have,
except that they are in an entirely different style. (AT III 276)
It is only after the Principles were in progress that Descartes received the
Second Objections, the reply to which contains the discussion of analysis
and synthesis. Mersenne promised to send them in December 1640 (AT
III 265), but Descartes does not seem to have received them until
January 1641 (AT III 282). Descartes worked on the response through
January and February (AT III 286, 293), and sent it to Mersenne by
early March 1641 (AT III 328). This raises a serious problem for the
thesis that the Principles were intended to be synthetic: if Descartes was
already well into the metaphysical sections of the Principles by the time
that he wrote the Second Replies, why does he not mention them? After
distinguishing between analysis and synthesis there, Descartes presents
“a certain few things [from the Meditations] in synthetic style . . . from
which, I hope, [my readers] will get some help” (AT VII 159). If
Descartes really thought of his Principles as synthetic, it would have
been very natural for him to have informed his readers that they could
expect the whole of his metaphysics in synthetic style in a work then in
progress. That he does not mention the Principles in this connection is
significant.
It could be objected here that Descartes may not have wanted to
publicize the Principles until they were further along. There is some-
thing to this objection, to be sure. When Descartes first tells Mersenne
of his new project in November and December of 1640, he does
ask him to keep the project secret (AT III 233, 259). But Descartes
seems to have changed his mind fairly soon. In the Fourth Replies, in a
passage that was written by the end of March 1641, within a month of
the completion of the Second Replies, Descartes refers to the work in
a point of order 61
progress.10 If he was willing to refer to the Principles in answering
Arnauld, it seems strange that he would neglect to mention them in
the discussion of analysis and synthesis in the Second Replies, if in fact he
thought of the new work as being synthetic. Still more difficult to
explain is why, if he considered the Principles to be synthetic, Descartes
would have neglected to refer to them in the French translation of the
Second Replies, which appeared in 1647, three years after the Principles
were published. In the translation there is significant alteration of
the sections of the Second Replies dealing with analysis and synthesis,
doubtless with Descartes’s approval and probably from his own hand.
After distinguishing between analysis and synthesis and before giving
the example of synthetic argumentation in his Geometrical Appendix,
Descartes eliminates a large section of the Latin text and replaces it
with the following short paragraph:
But, nevertheless, to show how I defer to your advice, I shall try here to imitate
the synthesis of the Geometers, and make an abridgement of the principal
arguments which I have used to demonstrate the existence of God and the
distinction between the human mind and body. This might perhaps serve to
lessen the attention required of the reader a bit. (AT IXA 123; cf. AT VII
157–159)
Surely, if Descartes really did think that the metaphysics was presented
synthetically in the Principles, this would have been a perfect opportu-
nity to tell his readers so, and refer them to that work. That he did
not is at least some evidence that the Principles were not meant to be
synthetic.
It is thus significant, we think, that Descartes does not mention the
Principles when he talks about analysis and synthesis. But it is perhaps
10 The reference to the Principles is given in AT VII 254. This reference, which is part of a
long discussion of transubstantiation, was not published in the Paris edition of 1641, and
first appeared in the Amsterdam edition of 1642. There is strong evidence, though, that
it was written in March 1641. In a letter of 18 March 1641 Descartes refers to the last
sheet of his reply to Arnauld, “where I explicate transubstantiation in accordance with my
principles,” as being in progress (AT III 340). It seems to have been finished and sent to
Mersenne by 31 March 1641 (AT III 349). Mersenne, though, suggested that he elimi-
nate this passage in order more easily to obtain the approbation of the authorities, a sug-
gestion that Descartes took (AT III 416). When the Paris edition appeared, the long
section on transubstantiation was reduced to a single sentence (given in the textual note
to line 21 in AT VII 252) which also contains a reference to his yet to be completed Prin-
ciples. The full discussion was restored for the Amsterdam edition at Descartes’s request
(AT III 449).
even more significant that he does not talk at all about analysis and syn-
thesis when he discusses the relations between the metaphysics of the
Meditations and the Principles, as he does on a number of occasions
outside of the Conversation. Sometimes Descartes describes the meta-
physics of the Principles as an “abrégé” of his philosophy (AT III 259;
AT V 291; cf. AT IXB 16). Sometimes Descartes focuses on the fact that
the Principles, unlike his previous writings, are written in short articles
(AT VII 577), or that the work is a simplified version of his Meditations,
containing only “my conclusions, with the true arguments from which
I derive them” (AT III 233). Sometimes he informs his correspondents
that the principal difference between the two works is that “that which
is given at length in the one is considerably shortened in the other, and
vice versa” (AT III 276). But nowhere in his correspondence or his pub-
lished writings does Descartes ever mention the distinction between
analysis and synthesis in connection with the Principles. This would be
very strange indeed if Descartes really thought that the Principles were
synthetic.
Thus, it seems reasonable to deny that Descartes intended the Prin-
ciples to be an example of the synthetic ratio demonstrandi. But in doing
so, we do not want to assert that they are analytic either. The discussion
of the Principles and their relation to the Meditations lacks any reference
at all to the distinction between analysis and synthesis. This strongly sug-
gests that the distinction between analysis and synthesis may be entirely
irrelevant to understanding the true relations between the metaphysical
arguments of the Meditations and the Principles.
This position leaves us with a problem: If we cannot appeal to the
distinction between analysis and synthesis how, then, are we to under-
stand the important differences between the two works? It seems to us
that there is no clear and simple answer to this question; Descartes’s
own words and our common sense are all we have to rely on. The brevity
of the metaphysical sections of the Principles may be attributed to the
fact that Descartes conceived of Part I of the Principles as a preface to a
scientific treatise, and not as a metaphysical treatise to stand on its own
(cf. AT III 523; AT IXB 16).11 Similarly, certain other features of its
11 Given this, it might be interesting to compare the metaphysics of the Principles with the
version of the metaphysics presented in part IV of the Discourse, another work intended
as the preface to a scientific work. While the two presentations differ in many important
respects, there are some striking similarities between the two. For example, both lack the
hypothesis of the evil genius, and in both, the real distinction between mind and body
seems to be proved before Descartes proves that God exists.
a point of order 63
intended use may explain the use of explicit definitions and quasi-
syllogistic argument in the Principles. Descartes’ hope that his Principles
might be used as a textbook in the schools might have influenced him
to set his arguments out in a more explicit way, more like a typical
scholastic textbook, than he did in the Meditations (see AT III 276; AT
VII 577). Also, he seems originally to have conceived of the Principles
as part of a larger publication, which was to include an annotated
scholastic treatise on metaphysics, and an explicit comparison between
his philosophy and the philosophy of the schools.12 This may have
induced Descartes to give explicit definitions and careful arguments, so
that the similarities and differences between his philosophy and that
of the Scholastics would be more apparent to the reader (cf. AT III
259–260).
These considerations do not explain all of the important differences
between the Meditations and the Principles by any means. For example,
they cannot explain why Descartes orders the arguments for the exis-
tence of God differently in the two works.13 Giving up the claim that
the Principles are synthetic does make the commentator’s job somewhat
more difficult. But, it seems to us, nothing is gained by trying to explain
the differences between the Meditations and the Principles in terms
foreign to Descartes’ own conception of their relations.14
12 See AT III 233, 259–260. The text he mentions in this connection is Eustachius a Sancto
Paulo’s Summa Philosophica, published first in Paris in 1609, but reprinted often through-
out the 17th century. Descartes refers to this as “the best book that has ever been written
on this material” (AT III 232; cf. AT III 251). Descartes abandoned this project in favor
of a straight presentation of his own ideas in part because Eustachius’ death on 26 Decem-
ber 1640 prevented Descartes from getting his permission to use his book in that way (AT
III 260, 286), and in part because he came to think that an explicit attack on the Scholas-
tics was not needed (AT III 470).
13 It should be noted, in this connection, that even if one accepts the claim that the Princi-
ples are synthetic, this difference between the Meditations and Principles is not easily
explained. Curley’s account of analysis and synthesis, for example, seems to leave this
divergence between the two texts unexplained.
14 We would like to thank Roger Ariew, Edwin Curley, Alan Donagan, Harry Frankfurt, and
Stephan Voss for helpful discussions and correspondence concerning the matters dis-
cussed in this essay.
4
J.-B. MORIN AND THE SECOND

OBJECTIONS
Of the seven sets of objections to the Meditations, two stand out as being
a bit different, the Second and the Sixth. In every other case we can
identify one person, a philosopher or a theologian, who is the author
of those objections. In the case of the Second and the Sixth, though,
we are dealing with objections that have been collected by one person,
the ever-present Father Mersenne, but that purport to represent the
work of a number of other scholars, who remain unidentified. For most
purely philosophical purposes, this does not matter a great deal; after
all, an idea is an idea, whoever happens to have it, and if what is impor-
tant is just the confrontation of ideas with one another, then the par-
ticular identity of the authors in question, those who contributed to
these two sets of objections, is relatively unimportant.
But for those of us with a more historical approach to the texts, this
is an unfortunate gap. First of all, it is intrinsically interesting from an
historical point of view to know who may have contributed to the draft-
ing of these objections. But more important, in order to understand
the objections, their meaning and import, it is very important to know
something about their authors. In particular, I shall argue that, behind
the scenes in the Second Objections and Replies, there is not merely
an author but a text that is important for understanding what Descartes
is doing, a text that is implicitly referred to in the Second Objections
Work for this essay was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, an inde-
pendent Federal Agency, under grant RH-20947 and by the National Science Foundation
under grant DIR-9011998. I would like to express my sincere thanks to those agencies for
their kind support.
64
morin and the SECOND OBJECTIONS 65
and is the direct object of Descartes’ reply in the geometrical presen-
tation of the arguments that follows the Second Replies.
The author in question, I claim, is Jean-Baptiste Morin, astrologer,
physician, and professor of mathematics at the Collège Royal, and the
text in question, his Quod Deus sit, a small tract, published in Paris in
1635, in which he presents an argument for the existence of God in
geometrical form, with definitions, axioms, and a string of theorems. I
will begin with a brief biographical sketch of Morin, one of the more
curious savants of his time. Then I will discuss his relations with
Mersenne and Descartes and make the case that he was behind at least
certain portions of the Second Objections to the Meditations. Finally, I
will discuss Descartes’ reaction to Morin’s pamphlet, and Morin’s later
reaction to Descartes, concentrating in both cases on the question of
the geometrical presentation of metaphysics, Morin’s advocacy, and
Descartes’ critique.
Jean-Baptiste Morin
Jean-Baptiste Morin was born on February 23, 1583, in Villefranche-
en-Beaujolais, which made him just a bit more than thirteen years
Descartes’ senior.1 Morin’s early years were not easy; illness and the
necessity of earning his keep prevented him from pursuing the studies
in natural philosophy that interested him from his earliest years. (One
interesting event is a grave injury he suffered in 1605, at the age of
twenty-two, mulieris causa, causing him to flee Villefranche. Though
he never married, Morin seemed always to have had a weakness for
the ladies.) Finally, in 1608, at the advanced age of twenty-five, he ob-
tained the protection of Guillaume du Vair, Premier-Président of the
Parlement d’Aix, who enabled him to have lessons in mathematics, then
helped him resume his studies, first in philosophy, then in medicine.
1 The biographical sketch that follows is largely taken from an anonymous biography that
appeared not long after Morin’s death, La vie de Maistre Jean Baptiste Morin . . . (Paris, Chez
Iean Henault, 1660). The editors of the Mersenne correspondence identify the author as
Guillaume Tronson; see Marin Mersenne, Correspondence du P. Marin Mersenne, religieux
minime, ed. C. de Waard et al., 17 vols. [Paris: Beau-Chesne (vol. 1), Presses Universitaires
de France (vols. 2–4), CNRS (vols. 5–17), 1932–1988], vol. III, pp. 127–28. I also made
use of the excellent biblio-biographical sketch by Monette Martinet, “Jean-Baptiste Morin
(1583–1656),” in Pierre Costabel and Monette Martinet, Quelques savants et amateurs de
science au XVIIe siècle: Sept notices biobibliographiques caractéristiques (Cahiers d’histoire et de philoso-
phie des sciences, NS no. 14). (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire des Sciences et des Tech-
niques et Éditions Belin, 1986), pp. 69–87.
Morin graduated from Avignon in May 1613. Shortly thereafter he went
to Paris, where he entered the service of the bishop of Boulogne,
Claude Dormy, as physician. Dormy encouraged Morin’s studies of
astrology and alchemy, and he sent Morin on a journey of discovery to
the mines of Hungary and Transylvania, a trip from which resulted
Morin’s first book, Nova mundi sublunaris anatomia, an account of the
interior of the earth, published in 1619 and dedicated to his former
patron du Vair. While in the mines, Morin had noticed the unusual
heat, and he wrote the book to offer an astrological explanation of it,
referring to the influence of the stars.
Morin even then had astrological inclinations, to be sure. But upon
his return to Paris, they were strengthened. Morin made the astrologi-
cal prediction that Dormy was in danger of death or imprisonment.
Sure enough, Dormy was carted off in 1617, though given Dormy’s
involvement in court politics, one would not have to have been a
master astrologer to have made that prediction. But Morin was further
confirmed in his vocation, and he went on to make numerous cele-
brated predictions, some of which were actually borne out.2 After
Dormy, Morin passed first to the patronship of the abbé de la
Bretonnière, with whom he spent four relatively quiet years. In 1621
he passed on to the service of the duc de Luxembourg, brother of
the favorite of the king, the duc de Luynes, who soon fell from favor.
During this period Morin composed a number of works, including two
astrological tracts and, in 1624, an interesting pamphlet attacking a
group of young scholars who had announced a public disputation
in which they proposed to refute the foundations of Aristotle’s natural
philosophy and replace it with a form of atomism.3 In the latter tract
Morin came out in favor of form and matter and against atoms –
indeed, against innovation in natural philosophy in general. In the
astrological tracts he came out against Copernicus and in favor of
Tycho, though in general he showed his interest in bringing astrology
2 See La vie de . . . Morin, pp. 62–91 for an account of Morin’s predictions. See also the
entertaining, though not altogether reliable account in Anne Soprani, Les rois et leurs
astrologues (Paris: MA Editions, 1987), pp. 175–82. Morin’s most disastrous prediction
was the incorrect prediction of the imminent death of Gassendi in the course of a
pamphlet war.
3 The two astrological works are: Astrologicarum domorum cabala detecta (Paris, 1623) and
Ad australes et boreales astrologos; pro astrologia restituenda epistolae (Paris, 1628). The polemi-
cal work is Réfutation des thèses erronées d’Anthoine Villon . . . & Estienne de Claues . . . (Paris,
1624).
up to date by making it consistent with the latest discoveries in obser-
vational astronomy, in particular the discovery and mapping of the
southern skies.4
Though Morin believed in the guidance of the stars, he did not leave
himself to their care alone. From all evidence, he was a firm believer
in freedom of the will and the value of self-promotion. And so, when a
chair of mathematics came open in 1629, he made himself a candidate,
and with the influence of the cardinal de Bérulle and the Queen
Mother, he received the appointment, which he held until his death in
1656. (The documents I have read imply that it was not his mathe-
matical talent alone that won him the chair.5) It was during this period
that Morin wrote most of his voluminous writings. Two extended dis-
putes stand out. The first concerned a scheme that Morin proposed as
early as 1633 for determining the longitudes of vessels at sea, a dis-
covery that Morin hoped would win him a pension from Cardinal
Richelieu. Though the method worked in theory, it turned out to be
not altogether practical, and despite roughly fifteen years of pleas and
pamphlets, Morin never got his pension. The second large controversy
was with Pierre Gassendi, over Morin’s critique of Gassendi’s atomism
and Gassendi’s critique of Morin’s astrology, a dispute that began in
earnest in the late 1640s. Also important from these years are two
volumes attacking Copernican astronomy and the Quod Deus sit of 1635,
to which we shall return. Through these years, though, starting in the
early 1630s and extending up to the time of his death, Morin was
working on his magnum opus, the Astrologia gallica, a Summa astrologica,
as it were, a work that summarized his career as a natural philosopher
and astrologist, published at The Hague in 1661, five years after his
death. Though it was directed mainly at outlining his astrological
system, this thick tome begins with a proof for the existence of God (a
later version of his Quod Deus sit) followed by a series of books on
natural philosophy, laying the foundations for the more properly astro-
logical questions to follow. The natural philosophy that Morin outlines
4 For an account of Morin’s progressive astrology, see Wilhelm Knappich, Histoire de l’astrologie
(Paris: Editions du Féslin, 1986), pp. 229–33.
5 See Bérulle’s letter to Richelieu, Corr. de Mersenne, vol. III, pp. 501–2. On the objections to
Morin’s elevation to the Collège Royal, see, e.g., M. L. Am. Sédillot, Les professeurs de
mathématiques et de physique générale au Collège de France (Rome: Imprimerie de Sciences
Mathématiques et Physiques, 1869), p. 101. Abuses of this sort seem to have been quite
common at the Collège Royal in the early seventeenth century; see Claude-Pierre Goujet,
Mémoire historique et littéraire sur le Collège Royal de France (Paris, 1758), vol. I, pp. 206ff.
there is definitely conservative. He explicitly attacks mechanist and
atomist views like those of Descartes and Gassendi. While there are
some modern elements – a theory of space that looks as though it is
derived from Patrizi, for example – Morin grounds his physics in the
theory of substantial forms.
But yet in a sense Morin considered himself a sort of progressive.
When Descartes’ Discourse and Essays came out in 1637, Morin was one
of the savants who received a copy. Descartes had hoped to collect a
variety of responses to his first publication and publish them together
with his responses, much as he was later to do with the Meditations. The
whole exchange is quite interesting, and I have discussed it elsewhere.6
For the moment, I would like only to note something that Morin said
in his first reply to Descartes. In his letter of February 22, 1638, Morin
wrote: “I do not know, however, what I should expect from you, for I
have been led to believe that should I discuss matters with you using
the terms of the Schools ever so little, you would immediately judge me
more worthy of scorn than of response. But in reading your discourses,
I find that you are not as much of an enemy of the Schools as you are
made out to be.” Morin continues with some remarks about his own
view of the Schools: “The Schools appear to me to have erred only
insofar as they are more occupied in speculation directed toward the
search for the terms that we must use to discuss things, than they are
in the search for the truth itself about things through good experi-
ments; so they are poor in the latter and rich in the former. That is why
I am like you in this matter; I seek the truth about things in nature
alone, and I no longer put my trust in the Schools, which serve me only
for terminology.”7
This may strike us as something of a distortion, and it is, in a sense.
But one can also see what Morin means. I mentioned Morin’s trip of
discovery to Hungary and Transylvania to visit the mines. In the preface
to his Anatomia of 1619 Morin discusses the motivation for his explo-
rations. The great diversity of opinion among the learned forms more
of an obstacle to learning than a help. And so, he argues, we must turn
away from books and to nature itself to discover how things really are.
In doing so, Morin thinks that he has found an account of the makeup
of the earth that is utterly unknown among the philosophers of the
6 See Daniel Garber, “Descartes, the Aristotelians, and the Revolution that Didn’t Happen in
1637,” The Monist, 71 (1988), pp. 471–86.
7 AT I 541.
Schools.8 I am sure that Morin saw this as exactly parallel to Descartes’
rejection of learning and his travels in search of experience. Like
Descartes, Morin professes to be following reason, not authority. In the
Astrologia gallica he writes: “In what is said below we shall not follow the
doctrines of the Schools, which are often in error, but we shall look to
the nature of things, which alone contains the truth.”9 Even his treat-
ment of astrology shows his open-mindedness. Though he agrees with
the tradition that the stars influence what happens here below, he is
not dogmatic about the details and sees the need to revise traditional
astrological doctrines in the face of newly discovered astronomical facts.
His is a progressive astrology, so to speak.10
At the same time, Morin’s instincts are undeniably conservative.
In doctrine, he follows Aristotle and opposes atomism and Coperni-
canism; at root, the traditional philosophy is right, if not in every
detail. He is conservative in other respects too. A social climber of
sorts, always looking out for a way to advance himself socially
and financially, he vigorously opposes challenges to the institutions
whose support and patronage he constantly sought. This, I think,
is at least in part behind the vigor of the attack he made in his
relative youth against a motley crew of anti-Aristotelians in 1624, in
support of the government’s condemnation and exile of three
young scholars who proposed publicly to refute Aristotle, along with
Paracelsus and the Cabala.11 Though he considers himself open-
minded, he has clearly hitched his star to the traditional philosophy
of the Schools.
8 See Morin, Nova mundi sublunaris anatomia (Paris: 1619), dedication (unpaginated), letter
to the reader, and, esp. chapter 5. Morin opens the letter to the reader with a frank dec-
laration of the novelty of his view: “Hic habes . . . Novam Mundi sublunaris divisionem,
novas divisionis causas, novaque de rebus physicis disserendi fundamenta.”
9 “Neque in infra dicendis sequemur doctrinas scholarum quae frequentius fallunt, sed
naturam rerum spectabimus, quae sola veritatem continet.” Astrologia gallica (The Hague,
1661), p. 39.
10 This is the main project of Ad australes et boreales astrologos of 1628. Of particular concern
to him there are the recent observations of the southern sky, and how they affect
astrology.
11 This is quite evident in the 1624 pamphlet, Réfutation des thèses erronées . . . , where he com-
plains more than once of the arrogance of the attack on Aristotle in the great city of Paris:
“Ils [i.e., Villon and de Clave] affichent . . . un defi publique à toutes les Escoles, sects &
grands Esprits . . . Et cecy non dans un village, mais dans une ville de Paris, à la face de la
Sorbonne, de toute l’université, & du plus fameux Senat qui soit au monde” [p. 6]. Morin
goes on to say that one of the reasons why he is attacking Villon and de Clave publicly is
“pour l’honneur de ceste Cité tres celebre de Paris” [pp. 19–20].
Morin, Mersenne, and Descartes

In general I find Morin to be a fascinating character. While his instincts
are conservative, he is not a dogmatic Schoolman (I wonder whether
anyone really was), and while he is a sort of progressive, he is no
Descartes or Gassendi. But interesting as it would be to continue this
discussion of Morin’s life and works, we must turn now more specifi-
cally to his relations with Descartes and with Mersenne, Descartes’
friend and the collector of the Second and Sixth Objections.
By the time Descartes had finished the Meditations and begun to cir-
culate it for comments, Descartes, Morin, and Mersenne had known
one another for quite some time. Mersenne, too, had opposed the anti-
Aristotelians of 1624 in print, as Morin had, and no doubt they became
acquainted then, if they did not know one another before.12 Descartes’
acquaintance with Morin is usually dated from 1626 or 1628, and
Morin is known to have helped Descartes get a piece of optical equip-
ment made in the late 1620s.13 Though Mersenne always opposed
astrology and came to support Copernicanism, he always seemed to
consider Morin a friend. When Morin was about to publish his argu-
ments against Copernicus, Mersenne, along with Gassendi, counseled
him against publishing the book, but after it was published, Mersenne
did not disown him.14 He even sent the book to Descartes, whose reac-
tion was, predictably, caustic.15 Still, Descartes and Mersenne sought
Morin’s opinion of Descartes’ Discourse and Essays when the book came
out in 1637. In this interesting exchange, Mersenne acted as a sort of
intermediary. He was with Morin when he received Descartes’ first
letter, in reply to Morin’s, and he continued to encourage Morin to
think of Descartes as someone knowledgeable in the School philosophy
and not unsympathetic to it, and to encourage Descartes to continue
to give Morin this (false) impression.16
Morin was clearly a friend of Mersenne’s. He may not have been a
12 See Marin Mersenne, La vérité des sciences (Paris, 1625), pp. 76–84 and 96–113.
13 See Charles Adam, Vie et oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: L. Cerf, 1910) p. 90, and Corr. de
Mersenne, vol. II, p. 420. There are references to Morin in letters of 1629 and 1630; see
AT I 33, 124, 129–31, etc. In a letter from 22 February 1638, Morin begins by recalling
his earlier acquaintance with Descartes in Paris, presumably before Descartes left for
Holland in 1628; see AT I 537.
14 See Gassendi to Joseph Gaultier, 9 July 1631, Corr. de Mersenne, vol. III, p. 173.
15 See Descartes to Mersenne, Summer 1632 (?), AT I 258.
16 On this, see Garber, “Descartes, the Aristotelians. . . .”
member of the circle who met regularly in Father Mersenne’s room in
the Minim Couvent near the Place Royale.17 He is, though, certainly a
reasonable candidate for membership in the anonymous group of
people who contributed to the Second and Sixth Objections, which
Mersenne collected.18 But one can go further than that. It can be estab-
lished with reasonable certainty that Morin was a part of that group of
objectors, and something plausible can be said about which specific
objections he might have contributed to the enterprise.
Most relevant here is Morin’s short treatise Quod Deus sit of 1635.
Briefly (we shall look into it more carefully below), Morin’s book is an
argument in geometrical style for the existence of God.19 Starting with
a series of formal definitions and axioms, the book comprises thirty
theorems purporting to establish the existence of God and his relation
to the world. Mersenne knew this book and seems to have thought well
enough of it to call it to Descartes’ attention. He sent Descartes a note,
now lost, apparently summarizing one of the arguments of Morin’s
Quod Deus sit; Descartes responded on November 11, 1640.20 Descartes’
response to Mersenne contains a critique of an argument that does not
correspond exactly to anything that I can find in Morin’s book itself,
and it is impossible to evaluate Descartes’ criticism without seeing
exactly how Mersenne represented the argument. But the book itself
followed shortly thereafter; it came from Mersenne via Huygens and
arrived on January 21, 1641.21
Later we shall look more carefully at Descartes’ response. But for the
moment I would like to note only that Morin’s name, and the name
of his pamphlet, almost certainly appeared in the first version of the
17 So argues Bernard Rochot; see his comment in Corr. de Mersenne, vol. X, p. 410n. I’m not
sure that Rochot is right.
18 There may be some precedent for Morin and Mersenne collaborating on a critique of
Descartes. Baillet reports that some of the objections to the Discourse and Essays Morin
sent Descartes may actually be due to Mersenne: “Le Père Mersenne sembloit avoir joint
quelques-unes de ses difficultez avec les objections de M. Morin” [Vie de M. Descartes (Paris,
1691), vol. I, p. 356].
19 For a detailed discussion of this text, see Joseph Iwanicki, Morin et les démonstrations math-
ématiques de l’existence de Dieu (Paris: Vrin, 1936). Iwanicki offers a good discussion of the
texts, the arguments, Descartes’ critique of the arguments, and the history of geometri-
cal arguments for the existence of God; he also notes the connection between Morin and
the Second Objections. However, Iwnaicki sees himself as rather an advocate for the histor-
ical and philosophical importance of Morin, and winds up greatly exaggerating Morin’s
place. Indeed, he concludes rather implausibly that it is Morin, not Descartes, that has
the best of their exchange on proofs for the existence of God.
20 AT III 233–34. 21 AT III 283.
Second Objections that Descartes received. Writing to Huygens on
January 16, 1641, Descartes notes: “I have been very eager to see the
book, Quod sit Deus [sic], because it is cited in the objections that Father
Mersenne wrote you that he would send me.”22 The point at which it
may have been cited is relatively easy to determine. At the end of the
Second Objections we find the following passage: “After giving your
solutions to these difficulties it would be worthwhile if you set out the
entire argument in geometrical fashion, starting from a number of defi-
nitions, postulates, and axioms. You are highly experienced in employ-
ing this method, and it would enable you to fill the mind of each reader
so that he could see everything as it were at a single glance, and be per-
meated with awareness of the divine power.”23 While this passage does
not make direct reference to Morin and his book (no passage in the
final published text does), it seems quite plausible that this is the
passage to which Descartes refers in his letter to Huygens. It is not alto-
gether clear why Morin’s name was dropped from the final published
text. It could be that Descartes made it a general policy not to mention
living authors by name. Another factor may have been the fact that
Descartes was not impressed with the book. Rather than saying some-
thing uncomplimentary about Morin, thus offending him, something
that he explicitly told Mersenne he did not want to do, Descartes may
have decided to drop the reference altogether.24 Perhaps, too, he did
not want to start the sort of pamphlet war in which the somewhat iras-
cible Morin had been known to engage with relish. Be that as it may, it
seems reasonably certain that Morin and his Quod Deus sit stand behind
this passage of the Second Objections.
With a little imagination, we may also be able to see Morin’s hand
in other passages of the Objections that Mersenne is known to have
assembled. Morin’s Astrologia gallica, a vast, encyclopedic work, begins
with a full account of metaphysics and physics, in order to ground the
astrology in the later sections. Scattered throughout these introductory
sections are passages criticizing Descartes, both his metaphysics and his
physics. While Descartes’ name occurs often in these pages, especially
interesting is a critique that appears at the very beginning of the book,
in a section entitled “Liber primus: De Vera cognitione Dei ex lumine
Naturae; per Theoremata adversus Ethnicos & Atheos Mathematico
more demonstrata.” This, not unsurprisingly, is an expanded version of
22 AT III 765–66. 23 AT VII 128.

24 See Descartes to Mersenne, 28 January 1641, AT III 294.
the pamphlet of 1635, the Quod Deus sit. (The expanded version had
been published in 1655 as a separate pamphlet.) As we shall see, a
number of interesting changes were made to the 1635 version, perhaps
as a response to Descartes’ criticism of that earlier work.
The most significant change is in the preface. While much of the
preface of the 1635 version is retained, Morin added much new mate-
rial, in fact a long and rather critical discussion of Descartes’ meta-
physics and his proofs for the existence of God. What is interesting here
is a certain correspondence between the criticisms in this new preface
and the contents of the Second Objections. Morin refers to the Second
Objections and Descartes’ replies a number of times, and to other sets
of objections only rarely. In Astrologia gallica the first serious objection
to the Meditations is the objection that the certainty of the cogito pre-
supposes the proof for the existence of God. This, in essence a version
of the circle objection that Arnauld brings up in the Fourth Objections
in a somewhat more direct way, is the third point in the Second Objec-
tions.25 Morin objects to the innateness of the idea of God and
Descartes’ causal principle, which corresponds to the second point in
the Second Objections.26 Morin also challenges Descartes’ version of
the ontological argument, a challenge that appears as the sixth point
in the Second Objections.27 Now, Morin does not bring up other points
from the Second Objections, and he does bring up a number of other crit-
icisms that are not found anywhere in the Objections, either in the
Second Objections or in any others. But the correspondence between
Morin’s later criticisms in the Astrologia gallica and specific sections of
the Second Objections suggests to me that Morin may well have con-
tributed those objections to the pool, and that even if Mersenne wrote
the final text, Morin may have formulated the criticisms. (It is inter-
esting that there is no correspondence at all between Morin’s critique
in the Astrologia gallica and the Sixth Objections. This suggests to me
that Morin probably had no hand in the later set.) There is a certain
amount of conjecture in my claim that Morin may have been responsi-
ble for these parts of the Second Objections, and I do not want to insist
on it. Morin was self-important enough that I suspect he might have
told his readers that he was behind those parts of the Second Objec-
tions if indeed he was. In the Astrologia gallica, for example, he certainly
25 Morin, Astrologia gallica, p. 2; AT VII 124–25.

26 Morin, Astrologia gallica, p. 4; AT VII 123–24.
27 Morin, Astrologia gallica, p. 5; AT VII 127.
claims credit for having elicited the geometrical appendix to the
Second Replies that is the answer to the request at the end of the
Second Objections for a geometrical development of the main argu-
ments.28 So while I think that it is quite possible that Morin did con-
tribute these objections, it is by no means certain.
Descartes’ Critique of Morin

I have set out the facts, so far as I can establish them. Morin stands
behind the Second Objections, in a sense; his Quod Deus sit was known
to Descartes, and Morin is probably responsible for the request that
Descartes present his arguments in geometrical form. Furthermore, it
is possible (though not certain) that Morin made other contributions
to the Second Objections, which Mersenne assembled. These are the
facts. But what about the philosophy? While a great deal could be said
here, I would like to concentrate on the issues raised by the geometri-
cal proof for the existence of God that Morin offers in the Quod Deus
sit, by Descartes’ response to this work, both in his letters and in the
Second Replies, and by Morin’s response to Descartes’ response to his
Quod Deus sit in his Astrologia gallica.
From the introduction to Morin’s booklet, his letter of dedication to
the Sacra Comitia Gallica, the assembled clergy of France, who gath-
ered in Paris in 1635, one can see why Mersenne would have found
Morin’s project sympathetic.29 In that introduction, Morin explicitly
opposes himself to “the unchecked sect of the atheists, who now have
become so haughty.”30 He does so by appealing to the certainty of
mathematical method to prove to atheists that they are constrained to
accept the existence of God. He writes:
I have never doubted that one could show, not what God is, but that he is by
way of the most evident light of nature alone. I also grasped that the great-
est good deriving from this lies in the fact that the natural light still remains
28 See Astrologia gallica, p. 5. See also Morin’s Defensio dissertationis . . . (Paris, 1651), p. 90,
where he indirectly implies that he was behind Mersenne’s question to Descartes: “Carte-
sius fuerit provocatus a . . . R. P. Mersenno, ut simili methodo conaretur demonstrare
existentiam Dei, . . . nec tamen viris doctis satisfaceret.”
29 There is also a dedication to the same group in the second edition of 1655, on the occa-
sion of the next meeting of the group in Paris. Bayle suggests Morin had hoped to gain
a pension from that group; see Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire historique et critique (Amsterdam:
1720), vol. III, p. 2015, art. Morin, note H.
30 Morin, Quod Deus sit (Paris: 1635), p. 4.
to the atheists, though they resist it, and with the help of that alone, they
remain capable of grasping the first principles of nature, which they cannot
fail to perceive even while they are denying them, because they are the per se
objects of that [natural] light. Consequently, at the very least this path for
discussing the existence of God with atheists is open to us, so that they might
know their greatest error. Therefore, having undertaken this task for the
glory of God, for the confirmation of faith, and to return the atheists to their
senses, using a mathematical method, I carried it out to such an extent that
once they concede those things I laid down as principles, perceptible by the
light of nature alone, atheists cannot deny that God exists, that he created
this world in time, and that he governs it by his providence, unless they them-
selves also deny that they exist.31
(Morin, like Descartes, appeals frequently to the light of nature.)

Morin’s introduction resembles Mersenne’s project in the commentary
on Genesis from 1623, which begins with a ferocious attack on the athe-
ists of his day, followed by a multitude of arguments for the existence
of God drawn from every conceivable premise.32 It also resembles the
letter of dedication to the doctors of the Sorbonne, which precedes
Descartes’ Meditations, emphasizing the necessity of refuting atheism by
proving God’s existence.33 Like Descartes, Morin argues that knowledge
of the existence of God is foundational for all other knowledge. He
claims that many other important theorems can be derived from the
ones he gives. Indeed, Morin claims: “It is not difficult to extend the
principles I posit, and the theorems I set out to many other wonderful
theorems about God and his creatures; indeed, . . . using the same
method, one can prove the immortality of the soul and all the natural
sciences.”34 In this respect Morin seems to resemble Descartes and the
project of the Meditations. One can see why Mersenne would have
thought that Descartes would find this sympathetic. Mersenne, in
sending him the booklet, no doubt thought that he would draw Morin
and Descartes closer together; it is interesting (and perhaps revealing
of Mersenne’s character) that he miscalculated so badly. Despite their
superficial similarity, Descartes found Morin to be quite a different
kettle of fish.
31 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

32 Mersenne, Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, 1623). The proofs for the existence
of God begin on col. 25, and the subject isn’t set aside until cols. 669–74, where Mersenne
presents a long diatribe against atheism. In all, Mersenne offers 36 arguments for the
existence of God.
33 AT VII 1–2. 34 Morin, Quod Deus sit, p. 7.
Morin’s Quod Deus sit contains a total of thirty theorems, but the argu-
ment for the existence of God is really quite simple and can be found
in Theorems 14–16. Theorem 14 reads: “Omne ens finitum habet esse
ab Ente infinito,” “Every finite thing has its being from an infinite
thing.”35 Morin offers two proofs for this theorem. The first is a direct
regress argument. “Whatever there is must derive either from itself [sit
seipso] or have its being from something else.” This is one of Morin’s
axioms. But as a finite thing, something cannot derive from itself
(“nullum ens finitum est seipso”); this is true by Morin’s Theorem 12.
Since there cannot be an infinite regress of causes or a circle (Prop.
13), there must be, somewhere in the series, an infinite cause. Thus
every finite thing must have its being from an infinite cause, either
directly or mediated by other finite causes. The second proof is some-
what different. Morin begins with a curious proof that would seem to
establish that there can only be a finite number of finite things. Con-
sider the number of people. Suppose that it is infinite. Then, Morin
argues, it will contain all people who were, are, and will be, by his Axiom
10 (“There can be nothing greater or larger than the infinite, nor can
any such thing be conceived”36). But, Morin notes, experience shows
that new people are born every day. This, he infers, could not happen
if the number of people were infinite, since, presumably, one cannot
add anything to a number that is already infinite. Thus, the number of
people must be finite.37 But since each finite thing needs a cause, it
follows that there must be something that is not finite that is the cause
of everything else. And so, again, every finite thing has its being from
an infinite cause.
Theorem 15 then establishes that “mundus hic finitus est,” “this
world is finite.” The principal argument for this conclusion is grounded
on Morin’s refutation of the Copernican claim and his view that the
earth is at rest in the center of the universe. Now assume that the uni-
verse is infinite. If so, the universe would occupy an infinite space. Since
the universe turns around the earth once every twenty-four hours, it
would then follow that matter would traverse an infinite space in a finite
amount of time, which is absurd. And so, Morin concludes, the universe
must be finite.
From these two theorems, it follows directly that there must be an
infinite being. For if finite things have their being from something
35 Ibid., p. 15. 36 Ibid., p. 10.

37 Ibid., pp. 16–17. A similar argument is found later, in Theorem 17.
infinite (Theorem 14) and if this universe is finite (Theorem 15), then
there must be an infinite being. This is Morin’s Theorem 16.
The earlier theorems deal with more general questions about infi-
nite and finite beings. Before establishing that God exists, Morin estab-
lishes, for example, that the infinite being is purus actus (Theorem 2),
that there are not two infinite beings (Theorem 5 – shades of Spinoza),
that the infinite being is indivisible and simple (Theorems 6 and 7),
and so on. After establishing that the infinite being exists, Morin estab-
lishes that the infinite being produced everything by a simple act of will
(Theorem 21), that the infinite being continually produces and con-
serves the finite beings he produces (Theorem 22), that the world was
created in time (Theorem 27), and, finally, that the infinite being is the
ultimate end ( finis) of all finite beings (Theorem 30).
Needless to say, Descartes was not altogether impressed with this. He
didn’t expect much to start with. His dealings with Morin on the subject
of his Dioptrics mostly left him unimpressed. Writing to Mersenne on
December 31, 1640, Descartes noted: “I would not be unhappy to see
what M. Morin has written about God because you say that he proceeds
as a mathematician. But just between you and me, I don’t expect very
much of it, since I have never before heard of him involving himself with
a writing of this kind.”38 Descartes’ expectations were not disappointed.
When he finally received the book, shortly after writing this note to
Mersenne, he must have read it immediately. In his letter of January 28,
1641, Descartes transmitted his comments on the book to Mersenne:
I perused M. Morin’s little book. Its main shortcoming is that throughout he
treats infinity as if his mind were above it, and could comprehend its prop-
erties. This is a shortcoming common to almost everyone, which I have care-
fully tried to avoid, since I have never treated infinity except to submit myself
to it, and not to determine what it is or what it is not. Then, before giving
any explanation of controversial matters, in his sixteenth theorem, where he
begins to try to prove that God exists, he bases his reasoning on his purported
refutation of the motion of the earth, and on the claim that the entire
heavens move around it, something that he hasn’t proved at all. And he also
assumes that one cannot have an infinite number there, etc., something that
he doesn’t know how to prove either. Thus, everything he sets out right up
until the end is quite far from being evident and quite far from the geomet-
rical certainty that he seems to promise at the beginning. I say this just
between ourselves, if you please, because I don’t want to displease him at all.39
38 AT III 275. 39 AT III 293–94.

Descartes’ reaction here seems quite fair. Morin’s proofs, like those of
Spinoza, who would later offer a very different geometrical proof for
the existence of God, are strongly based on the notion of infinity;
Morin’s God is from the first and primarily an infinite being, and it is
on this divine attribute that Morin’s arguments are grounded. And
Descartes is certainly correct to note that Morin makes some very odd
statements about infinity. Furthermore, Descartes correctly observes
that Morin’s geometrical proof in the Quod Deus sit depends crucially
on the nongeometrical premise that the earth is at rest in the center of
the universe.
This was the last time Descartes mentioned Morin in his correspon-
dence, at least in that which survives, and it is the only passage in which
Descartes explicitly addressed Morin’s book. But it seems to me that
much of what Descartes has to say about the geometrical mode of expo-
sition in the Second Replies is also directed specifically against Morin.
Descartes begins by distinguishing between two things, the order of
exposition, the ordo scribendi, and the way of demonstrating, the ratio
demonstrandi. To write in order is simply to write in such a way that “the
items which are put forward first must be known entirely without the
aid of what comes later; and the remaining items must be arranged in
such a way that their demonstration depends solely on what has gone
before.” The ratio demonstrandi, on the other hand, is twofold and rep-
resents two different ways of realizing order. The ratio of analysis “shows
the true way by means of which the thing in question was discovered.”
This, Descartes tells us, is what he used in the Meditations. “Synthesis,
by contrast . . . demonstrates the conclusion clearly and employs a long
series of definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems, and problems, so
that if anyone denies one of the conclusions it can be shown at once
that it is contained in what has gone before.”40 By synthesis here
Descartes clearly means quite specifically the sort of method that Morin
used in Quod Deus sit, a quasi-geometrical demonstration using defini-
tions, axioms, and so on.
Descartes makes no bones about it: analysis is vastly to be preferred
to synthesis, at least in metaphysics. He writes:
In metaphysics . . . there is nothing which causes so much effort as making
our perception of the primary notions clear and distinct. Admittedly, they
are by their nature as evident as, or even more evident than, the primary
40 AT VII 155–56.
notions which the geometers study; but they conflict with many preconceived
opinions derived from the senses. . . . And so only those who really concen-
trate and meditate and withdraw their minds from corporeal things, so far as
is possible, will achieve perfect knowledge of them. Indeed, if they were put
forward in isolation they could easily be denied by those who like to contra-
dict just for the sake of it. This is why I wrote “Meditations” rather than “Dis-
putations,” as the philosophers have done, or “Theorems and Problems,” as
the geometers have done.41
This last phrase seems to be a clear reference to Morin’s pamphlet. And

a few lines later there is another, I think: “I am therefore right to require
particularly careful attention from my readers; and the style of writing
that I selected was one which I thought would be most capable of gen-
erating such attention. I am convinced that my readers will derive more
benefit from this than they will themselves realize; for when the syn-
thetic method of writing is used, people generally think that they have
learned more than is in fact the case.”42 Descartes thus has very little
regard for the use of the geometrical or synthetic style of writing in
metaphysics. At best, he argues, it is a style appropriate for geometry,
where “the primary notions which are presupposed for the demon-
strations of geometrical truths are readily accepted by anyone, since
they accord with the use of our senses.” But, it should be noted,
Descartes is not even particularly happy with the use of the geometri-
cal style of writing in geometry. He writes: “It was synthesis alone that
the ancient geometers usually employed in their writings. But in my
view this was not because they were utterly ignorant of analysis, but
because they had such a high regard for it that they kept it to them-
selves like a sacred mystery.”43
Synthesis thus seems to be good for very little. (This is yet another
reason to be suspicious of the often-made claim that Descartes volun-
tarily decided that he was going to write his Principles in the synthetic
style.) But yet, Descartes goes ahead and responds to the request of the
authors of the Second Objections and presents his arguments in the
style of the geometers. Given what he said about synthesis, this is not a
little puzzling. Granting the difficulty of his Meditations, Descartes tells
his readers that he is giving them this morsel of the argument not as a
substitute for the analytic Meditations, but in order to give them help in
comprehending some specific arguments that are particularly difficult
and particularly important.
41 AT VII 157. 42 AT VII 158–59. 43 AT VII 156.

But even this example of synthesis is an implicit critique of Morin’s
procedure in Quod Deus sit. Like Morin’s book, Descartes’ geometrical
arguments have definitions, axioms, and theorems. In general it is not
illuminating to compare in detail Descartes’ text with Morin’s. Unlike
Morin, Descartes seems to do his best to avoid the notion of infinity.44
The propositions simply formalize arguments found already in the
Meditations; there seems little there that can be regarded as a specific
reply to Morin’s pamphlet. But Descartes’ geometrical exposition has
something that Morin does not: postulates. In a standard Euclidean
geometry there is little to distinguish postulates from axioms; in both
cases we are dealing with propositions that must be assumed to do
proofs. But in Descartes’ geometrical arguments, the postulates are
something else, not propositions at all:
The first request I make of my readers is that they should realize how feeble
are the reasons that have led them to trust their senses up till now. . . . I ask
them to reflect long and often on this point. . . . Second I ask them to reflect
on their own mind and all its attributes. . . . Fifth I ask my readers to spend
a great deal of time and effort on contemplating the nature of the supremely
perfect being. Above all they should reflect on the fact that the ideas of all
other natures contain possible existence, whereas the idea of God contains
not only possible but wholly necessary existence. This alone, without a formal
argument, will make them realize that God exists.45
These are hardly postulates of the usual sort. They are in fact demands,
as the Latin postulare would suggest, things we are asked to do, not merely
to accept. In including such postulates in his geometrical presentation,
Descartes is answering the criticisms of the geometrical mode of writing
he made in the Second Replies; it is only because he includes such pos-
tulates, Descartes thinks, that the geometrical mode of presentation is
capable of leading us to knowledge of things metaphysical. In this way,
the differences between Descartes’ and Morin’s geometrical arguments
for the existence of God simply underscore Descartes’ rejection of
Morin’s chosen form of presentation. Thus the geometrical presentation
that follows the Second Replies can be read not only as a clarification of
the arguments, terminology, and assumptions used in the Meditations,
not only as a civil answer to a civil question from the authors of the
Second Objections, but also as a philosophical exercise directed against
the Quod Deus sit of Jean-Baptiste Morin.
44 However, note Descartes’ Axiom 6, in AT VII 165–66. 45 AT VII 162–63.

Morin’s Response
The Second Replies is the last text in which Descartes has anything to
say about Morin; as far as Descartes was concerned, the less said, the
better. But though Descartes may not have had anything more to say
about Morin, Morin had quite a lot to say about his more famous
colleague.
The response is found in Morin’s posthumously published Astrologia
gallica. While there is no direct evidence that Mersenne actually showed
Morin the direct criticisms Descartes made of his work, the paragraph
in the letter quoted above, the alterations Morin made in the new
edition of the Quod Deus sit – included in the Astrologia – suggest that
Mersenne may well have transmitted the essence of those criticisms.
Though in the end he does not give up his strong dependence on infin-
ity, nor does he actually alter many of the details of his proofs, the
rearrangements and the additional axioms and definitions show some
sensitivity to Descartes’ concerns.46 Also, later in the Astrologia there is
considerably more discussion of Descartes, particularly his physics.
Altogether, this amounts to an additional set of objections against the
Meditations, and against the Principles, too, objections especially worth
study given Morin’s rather interesting position in the intellectual world
of mid-seventeenth-century France. But rather than trying to survey the
whole of Morin’s attack against Descartes, let me just touch on a few
issues with respect to the questions of analysis versus synthesis and
Descartes’ geometrical arguments.
Morin begins his discussion of Descartes’ geometrical exposition by
noting that it was he, Morin, and his Quod Deus sit that elicited the
discussion:
Although my little book against the atheists pleased everyone, after the
publication of his Meditations, those who were not satisfied with his demon-
strations for the existence of God through our idea of him requested
Descartes to prove the same a posteriori through his creatures, as I had done.
To that same end, that same little book was requested of me, which the
46 For example, in the new version of theorem 15, now theorem 22 (“this world is finite”),
Morin eliminates the argument he had used earlier, and which had offended Descartes
so much, which depends on his refutation of Copernicus. See Astrologia gallica, p. 11.
Similarly, in the new version of theorem 27 (now theorem 35) Morin eliminated the
assumption about infinity that Descartes found so problematic, that one cannot add any-
thing to an infinite number. See Astrologia gallica, p. 13. There are other, smaller changes
as well that are suggestive.
Reverend Father Mersenne, known to all of the learned, sent him in
Holland, so that he might see my method for proceeding in the geometrical
fashion.47
Morin goes on to examine the three proofs that Descartes gives in his
geometrical appendix, finding them, one by one, unsatisfactory. Most
interesting, though, are his comments on Descartes’ remarks on the
analytic and synthetic modes of reasoning. He criticizes Descartes’ use
of both ways of proceeding.
Morin notes that Descartes does try to give a geometrical account,
like Morin’s own, using definitions, axioms, and theorems. But he also
takes note of the fact that Descartes makes use of postulates: “Then
there are also seven postulates, by which the mind binds itself. However,
I have demanded [postulaverim] nothing. Rather, I have left the mind
with its freedom of judgment.”48 It is interesting here that Morin does
not seem to understand exactly why Descartes adds the postulates in
the way he does, nor does Morin understand the rather radical differ-
ence between Descartes’ postulates and those more commonly found
in the tradition. All he says is that they seem to bind the intellect in a
way that he does not want to. He does continue, however, with a rather
uncharacteristically penetrating critique of Descartes’ Postulate 5: “I ask
my readers to spend a great deal of time and effort on contemplating
the nature of the supremely perfect being. Above all they should reflect
on the fact that the ideas of all other natures contain possible existence,
whereas the idea of God contains not only possible but wholly neces-
sary existence. This alone, without a formal argument, will make them
realize that God exists.”49 Morin comments: “Once we have conceded
this postulate, then no definitions, no axioms, nor any demonstrations
are needed, either through analysis or through synthesis.”50 Morin’s
point is a good one: Take this particular postulate seriously, and there
is no need for argument at all.
Morin does not discuss Descartes’ general remarks on the prefer-
ability of analysis over synthesis for metaphysics; the general theoreti-
cal position seems to escape him. But he does say why he thinks that
analysis is not an appropriate way of proving the existence of God.
Morin writes:
47 Morin, Astrologia gallica, p. 5. 48 Ibid. 49 AT VII 163.

50 Morin, Astrologia gallica, p. 6. Morin goes on to say that if we don’t concede the postulate,
then we cannot pass from the idea of God in the mind to his existence in reality, but that
is a longer story.
And indeed it seems remarkable to me that M. Descartes chose the analytic
method for proving the existence of God, which is utterly inappropriate for
this purpose. Analysis is defined by Viète as the assumption of that which is sought
as if it were conceded, then through consequences [passing] to that which is generally
conceded as true. If it is generally conceded as true that he [Descartes] exists
from the fact that he thinks and, indeed, that he has an idea of an infinitely
perfect being, which he calls God, then that which we seek will be whether
God exists. Now, from the definition of analysis we should assume that God
exists, as if it were conceded, and from that concession, we should seek [to
show] as a consequence that M. Descartes, or he who has the idea of an infi-
nitely perfect being, that is, God, thinks and therefore exists. But in his analy-
sis, he demonstrates nothing of the sort; indeed, nothing of the sort can be
demonstrated. For God exists from eternity, but M. Descartes has not thought
from eternity, and therefore did not exist, nor did he have the idea of God
[from eternity]. Therefore it is obvious that analysis can do nothing toward
proving the existence of God from the idea of God which he says that he has,
considering that idea as the concept of a being of greatest perfection or of
infinite nature, as he often does.51
The criticism is just, if we assume that Descartes had in mind Viète’s

conception of analysis here. While it would take us too far afield to
demonstrate this, I think that Morin’s criticism shows that he simply
misunderstood what Descartes was up to in calling the Meditations ana-
lytic, just as he missed the deeper points behind Descartes’ critique of
the geometrical mode of writing in metaphysics. It is quite clear that
Descartes’ Meditations are not intended to be analytic in the sense in
which Viète’s mathematics is.52
But Morin kept insisting, stubbornly, on the fact that he was right on
this issue, as on others, and Descartes was wrong. His final proof was,
in his eyes, definitive: the doctors of the Sorbonne gave his Quod Deus
sit the approbation that they denied Descartes’ Meditations. Here is an
argument from authority if ever there was one.53
51 Ibid., p. 7.
52 For one interpretation of what Descartes means when he calls the Meditations analytic, see
the discussion of the Meditations in Daniel Garber, “Semel in vita: the Scientific Background
to Descartes’ Meditations,” in Amélie Rorty (ed.), Essays in Descartes’ Meditations (University
of California Press, 1986), pp. 81–116, essay 11 in this volume.
53 Jean-Robert Armogathe has recently argued that contrary to what Morin thought,
Descartes actually did receive the approbation of the Sorbonne. See J.-R. Armogathe,
“L’approbabion des Meditationes par la Faculté de Théologie de Paris (1641),” Bulletin
Cartésien 21 (1994) [in Archives de Philosophie 57 (1994)], pp. 1–3.
In this essay I have argued that Jean-Baptiste Morin and his Quod Deus
sit stand behind at least parts of the Second Objections, and that it was
specifically to Morin and his little book that Descartes was responding
at the end of the Second Replies and in the geometrical appendix. But
how does this change our understanding of those passages? Perhaps not
at all; interesting as that bit of historical information may be to those
of us with an antiquarian bent, it may not have any real philosophical
bearing. But then maybe it does.
I would like to end with a kind of conjecture, a stab at an argument
that one might make on the basis of my historical argument. I think
that what I have presented here strengthens the case for saying that
however important it might be for earlier thinkers, however much it
may be emphasized by later commentators, the doctrine of analysis and
synthesis may not be a central tenet in Descartes’ own thought, not a
basic category in terms of which Descartes liked to think of his work
and that of others. Rather, I suspect that it is a very specific response
to a very specific proposal for how to do metaphysics, a proposal embod-
ied in the example of Morin’s Quod Deus sit. And, I think, it is a clear
rejection of that way of doing metaphysics. Even though Descartes does
develop his ideas in synthetic form in the geometrical appendix to the
Second Replies, it must be emphasized that this is largely (only?) to
show the inadequacy of that form and the problems inherent in an
enterprise of the sort that Morin was attempting to undertake. This
does not establish for certain that Descartes did not then generalize the
notion of synthesis, or take it seriously in his own later works. But, I
think, the argument should somewhat undermine whatever temptation
we might have to see synthesis as a more general category and to try to
include the Principles as synthetic, as many readers from Martial
Gueroult to Edwin Curley and J. M. Beyssade have done.54 In late 1640
and early 1641, when Descartes confronted the geometrical argument
of Morin and penned his response, both his private response to
Mersenne and his more public response in the Second Replies, and
when he began drafting what was to become the Principles of Philosophy,
he saw nothing to recommend a geometrical metaphysics of the sort
that Morin was attempting to establish.
54 For a more systematic attack on the idea that the Principles should be understood as syn-
thetic, see Daniel Garber and Lesley Cohen, “A Point of Order: Analysis, Synthesis, and
Descartes’s Principles,” in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 64 (1982), pp. 136–47, essay
3 in this volume.
5
DESCARTES AND EXPERIMENT IN THE

DISCOURSE AND ESSAYS
It is generally recognized that knowledge for Descartes is the clear and

distinct perception of propositions by the intellect; knowledge in the
strictest sense is certain, indeed indubitable, and grounded in the
purely rational apprehension of truth. But it is also generally recog-
nized that Descartes was a serious experimenter, at least in his biology
and his optics, and that in these areas, at least, he seemed to hold that
knowledge requires an appeal to experience and experiment. Writing,
for example, in Part VI of the Discourse on Method, Descartes laments the
fact that he has neither the time nor the resources to perform all the
experiments (expériences) necessary to complete his system, and calls
upon his readers to “communicate to me those that they have already
made, and to help me in performing those which remain to be done”
(AT VI 65). (One can see in the Discourse a clear anticipation of an
important later literary form, the grant application.)
To the twentieth-century philosopher this looks a bit puzzling: How
can Descartes be both a rationalist, who sees knowledge as deriving from
the intellect, and an experimentalist, who sees experiment and obser-
vation as essential to the enterprise of knowledge? This is the puzzle I
would like to address in this essay. I shall argue that not only is there
no contradiction here, but that the appeal to experience is an essential
part of the method for constructing a deductive science. We shall begin
Other than the abbreviations used throughout this book (AT, CSM, CSMK), when quoting
the Meteors or the Dioptrics I use the following abbreviation:
Ols Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
85
with a brief account of Descartes’ procedure for constructing his
science, his method. While Descartes’ method is discussed at great
length in any number of books and papers, there is hardly a clear
account in any of the literature of what it is in practice. Then, once we
have a clear picture of what Descartes’ method is, and the precise
deductive structure of the body of knowledge that he is building, we
can turn directly to the question of experiment, and see how it fits into
the program.
Method
I hold the view that Descartes, in an important sense, gave up his
famous method sometime in the late 1630s or early 1640s, and so I do
not want to identify the question of Descartes’ scientific procedure with
that of his method.1 But to understand Descartes’ procedure in science
it will be helpful to begin with a brief account of the method as it is in
itself and as it is in application, and work from there. In discussing the
method, I shall concentrate on the account Descartes gives in the early
Rules for the Direction of the Mind, which Descartes worked on inter-
mittently from 1618 or so until 1628 or thereabouts; though never
finished and never published, it is by far the most thorough account
of method in the Cartesian corpus, far more intelligible than the brief
and enigmatic account of the method Descartes gives in Part IV of the
Discourse.
In order to understand the method, we must understand the goal of
inquiry in the Rules, for the method of the Rules is precisely a method
of attaining that goal. The goal of inquiry is the subject of the first
two rules:
The goal [finis] of studies ought to be the direction of one’s native abilities
[ingenium] toward having solid and true judgments about everything which
comes before it. . . . We should concern ourselves only with those objects of
which our native abilities seem capable of certain and indubitable cognition.
(AT X 359; AT X 362)
By “certain and evident cognition” here, Descartes seems to mean

knowledge grounded in what he calls intuition and deduction. In Rule
III Descartes defines intuition:
1 For a full defense of this view, see D. Garber, “Descartes and Method in 1637,” essay 2 in
this volume, and Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), chapter 2. The account of method in this essay is drawn from these sources.
descartes and experiment 87
By intuition I understand not the fluctuating faith in the senses, nor the
deceitful judgment of a poorly composed imagination, but a conception of
a pure and attentive mind, so easy and distinct that concerning that which
we understand no further doubt remains; or, what is the same, the undoubted
conception of a pure and attentive mind, which arises from the light of reason
alone. (AT X 368)
Deduction is defined in terms of intuition; it is a chain of intuitions,

the intuitive grasping of a connection between one proposition and
another (AT X 369–370, 407). This, Descartes argues in the Rules, is
the only way to knowledge (AT X 366).
Method is what, in the Rules, is supposed to lead us to such knowl-
edge. But what is this method? Descartes writes in Rule IV:
By method I understand certain and easy rules which are such that whoever
follows them exactly will never take that which is false to be true, and without
consuming any mental effort uselessly . . . will arrive at the true knowledge
[vera cognitio] of everything of which he is capable. (AT X 371–372)
Descartes summarizes these “certain and easy rules” in Rule V:

The whole of method consists in the order and disposition of those things
toward which the mental insight [mentis acies] is to be directed so that we dis-
cover some truth. And this rule is observed exactly if we reduce involved and
obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and thus from an intuition
of the simplest we try to ascend by those same steps to a knowlege of all the
rest. (AT X 379)
Descartes’ rule of method has two steps, a reductive step, in which

“involved and obscure propositions” are reduced to simpler ones, and
a constructive step, in which we proceed from simpler propositions back
to the more complex.2 But the rule makes little sense, nor does it
connect very clearly with the account of knowledge and certainty in
terms of intuition and deduction, unless we know what Descartes means
here by the reduction to simples, and the construction of the complex
from the simples.
The precise method Descartes has in mind is nicely illustrated by an
example he gives of methodical investigation in Rule VIII (see Table
1). The problem Descartes poses for himself is that of finding the ana-
clastic line, that is, the shape of a surface “in which parallel rays are
2 I should point out that I am breaking with most commentators, who refer to these as the
analytic and synthetic steps. See my remarks on this in “Descartes and Method in 1637,”
note 4, essay 3 in this volume.
Table 1. Anaclastic Line Example

(Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule VIII)
Q1. What is the shape of a line (lens) that focuses parallel rays of light to the
same point?
Q2. What is the relation between angle of incidence and angle of refraction (i.e.,
the law of refraction)?
Q3. How is refraction caused by light passing from one medium into another?
Q4. How does a ray of light penetrate a transparent body?
Q5. What is light?
Q6. What is a natural power?
Intuition: A natural power is. . . .
Construction: The construction consists in traversing the series of questions from
Q5 to Q1, deducing the answer to each question from that of the preceding
question.
refracted in such a way that they all intersect in a single point after
refraction” (AT X 394). Now, Descartes notices – and this seems to be
the first step in the reduction – that “the determination of this [ana-
clastic] line depends on the relation between the angle of incidence
and the angle of refraction” (AT X 394). But, Descartes notes, this ques-
tion is still “composite and relative,” that is, not sufficiently simple, and
we must proceed further in the reduction. Rejecting an empirical inves-
tigation of the relation in question, Descartes suggests that we must next
ask how the relation between the angles of incidence and refraction is
caused by the difference between the two media, for example, air and
glass, which in turn raises the question as to “how the ray penetrates
the whole transparent thing, and the knowledge of this penetration
presupposes that the nature of the illumination is also known” (AT X
394–395). But, Descartes claims, in order to understand what illumi-
nation is we must know what a natural power (potentia naturalis) is. This
is where the reductive step ends. At this point, Descartes seems to think
that we can “clearly see through an intuition of the mind” what a natural
power is (AT X 395). Other passages suggest that this intuition is inti-
mately connected with motion.3 Once we have such an intuition, we can
3 Rule IX tells us that in order to understand the notion of a natural power, “I will reflect
on the local motions of bodies” (AT X 402). What this suggests is that the understanding
of illumination is, somehow, an intuitive judgment about the simple nature, motion, though
it is not clear how exactly he thought this would work.
begin the constructive step, and follow, in order, through the questions
raised until we have answered the original question, that of the shape
of the anaclastic line. This would involve understanding the nature of
illumination from the nature of a natural power,4 understanding the
ways rays penetrate transparent bodies from the nature of illumination,
and the relation between angle of incidence and angle of refraction
from all that precedes. And finally, once we know how angle of inci-
dence and angle of refraction are related, we can solve the problem of
the anaclastic line.5
This example develops the programmatic statement of the method
as given in Rule V in a fairly concrete way. If we take the anaclastic line
example as our guide, then methodical investigation begins with a ques-
tion, a question which, in turn, is reduced to questions whose answers
are presupposed for the resolution of the original question posed
(i.e., Q1 is reduced to Q2 if and only if we must answer Q2 before we
can answer Q1). The reductive step of the method thus involves, as
Descartes suggests in Rule VI, ordering things “insofar as some can be
known from others, so that whenever some difficulty arises, we will
immediately be able to perceive whether it will be helpful to examine
some other [question], and what, and in what order” (AT X 381). And
so, in a sense, the reduction leads us to more basic and fundamental
questions, from the anaclastic line, to the law of refraction, and back
eventually to the nature of a natural power and to the motion of bodies.
Ultimately, Descartes thinks, when we follow out this series of questions,
from the one that first interests us, to the “simpler” and more basic
questions on which it depends, we will eventually reach an intuition.
When the reductive stage is taken to this point, then we can begin the
constructive stage. Having intuited the answer to the last question in
the reductive series, we can turn the procedure on its head, and begin
4 Descartes writes, “If, at the second step, he is unable to discern at once what the nature
of light’s action is . . . he will make an enumeration of all the other natural powers, in
the hope that a knowledge of some other natural power will help him understand this one,
if only by analogy” (AT X 395). In personal correspondence John Nicholas has emphasized
to me the importance (and complexity) of this step in the construction. He suggests,
plausibly, I think, that “human limitations are such that in practice we commonly cannot
carry out the downward deduction, and have to fall back on the surrogate step of
analogizing and comparing with other natural agencies that the targeted one.” Insofar as
this analogizing may depend on our experience with the phenomenon in question, as well
as with other phenomena, this suggests to him that there may be another use of experi-
ence in Descartes than the one that I emphasize in the following sections. He might well
be right.
5 See Pierre Costabel, Démarches originales de Descartes savant (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 53–58, for
an account of the historical background to this example.
answering the questions that we have successively raised, in an order
the reverse of the order in which we have raised them. What this should
involve is starting with the intuition that we have attained through the
reductive step, and deducing down from there, until we have answered
the question originally raised. Should everything work out as Descartes
hopes it will, when we are finished it is evident that we will have certain
knowledge as Descartes understands it in the earliest portions of the
Rules; an answer arrived at in this way will constitute a conclusion
deduced ultimately from an initial intuition.
Descartes’ strategy here is extremely ingenious. The stated goal of
the method is certain knowledge, a science deduced from intuitively
known premises. What the method gives us is a workable procedure for
discovering an appropriate intuition, one from which the answer to the
question posed can be deduced, and it shows us the path that deduc-
tion must follow. This workable procedure is the reduction of a ques-
tion to more and more basic questions, questions that we can identify
as questions whose answers are presupposed for answering the question
originally posed; this reduction both leads us to an intuition, Descartes
thinks, and shows how we can go from that intuition back to the ques-
tion originally posed.
This is the story as of 1628 or so, when Descartes abandoned the
composition of the Rules. As noted earlier in this section, I think that
Descartes’ thinking about method changes in his later years. Put briefly,
while Descartes always maintains the view that knowledge is to be
grounded in intuition, in the immediate apprehension of truths, he
changes his mind about which truths lie at the bottom, and about how
it is that we are to find them. In the Rules he seems to take the view that
our knowledge of the physical world is grounded in certain truths,
immediately grasped, about the nature of bodies, natural powers, and
so forth.6 But in the later writings, the grounding is ultimately in meta-
physics, our knowledge of ourselves and God, and in God’s role as the
guarantor of our clear and distinct perceptions; in the later writings,
the intuitions he takes for granted in the Rules must be grounded in
God our creator and in us, God’s creation. And furthermore, in the
6 See especially the development in Rule XII (AT X 419) where Descartes discusses the so-
called simple natures on which all our knowledge is supposed to be grounded. The simple
natures divide into three classes: intellectual, material, and common. The intellectual
simple natures include knowledge, doubt, ignorance, volition. The material simple natures
include shape, extension, and motion. The common simple natures include existence,
unity, and duration.
latter writings, the reductive step of the method, a step that can lead us
only as far as the unjustified intuitions, is abandoned in favor of a direct
attack on the foundations.7 Despite these changes, though, it will be
helpful to begin attacking the question of experiment in Descartes by
examining the role it plays in his method.
Method and Experiment

In the previous section of this essay I emphasized what might be called
the deductive structure of Descartes’ project, the view of a completed
science as a deduction from initial intuitions. In calling the structure
deductive I do not mean to say that it is deductive in precisely the
modern sense, or that it is deductive in any precise sense at all. It must
be remembered that when Descartes introduces the notion of deduc-
tion in the Rules it is in explicit contrast to the formal logic of the
Schools, indeed, in explicit contrast to any formal procedures at all. For
Descartes, intuition and deduction are the immediate grasping of the
truth of propositions and the inferential connections between propo-
sitions, and so there is no in principle reason why a deduction cannot
be an ampliative inference in the modern sense of the term, as, for
example, the cogito seems to be.8 But despite Descartes’ refusal to pin
down the notion of a deduction in any formal way, a completed science
is supposed to be deductive for him in a rather strict sense; derivative
and more complex propositions are supposed to be deduced in his
sense from propositions simpler and more basic, and grounded ulti-
mately in intuition.
However, Descartes is clear, his natural philosophy is definitely not
supposed to be a priori in the modern sense of the term, knowledge
obtained without the help of experience. Although Descartes seems to
want to proceed deductively, experience and experiment have a signif-
icant role to play in this business. It is, of course, well known by now
that Descartes was a dedicated experimenter, observer, and dissector,
and that the empirical investigation of nature is given significant atten-
7 For a fuller account of the changes, see the references given in note 1 in this essay.
8 See Garber, “Science and Certainty in Descartes,” in Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays,
ed. Michael Hooker (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 114–151, esp.
116–123. Desmond Clarke argues that the term “deduction” is so broad for Descartes
that even hypothetical arguments count as deductions for him. See D. Clarke, Descartes’
Philosophy of Science (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982),
63–70, 201–202, 207–210.
tion in the Rules, the Discourse, and other writings where he discusses
his natural philosophy. Of course, this raises an important problem:
How is the appeal to experience consistent with the apparently deduc-
tive structure of Descartes’ project? There is a considerable literature
on this basic question, and answers range from denying (or better,
ignoring) the interest in experiment, to denying that Descartes’ science
was ever intended to be deductive, to claiming that Descartes was simply
inconsistent – deductive in theory, and empirical in practice.9 This is
the problem I would like to address in this section. I shall try to show
something that may sound a bit paradoxical, that for Descartes experi-
ment functions as an important and, in fact, indispensable tool for
discovery in his deductive science, and it is to experience that we
must turn to help us sort our the details of the deductive hierarchy of
knowledge.
A reasonable place to begin is with a passage from Part VI of the
Discourse, where Descartes attempts to explain to the reader the use of
experiment in his thought. The passage begins with a lengthy account
of where experiment is not really necessary. Descartes reports that he
began his investigations with “the first principles or first causes” of
everything, which can be discovered from “certain seeds of truth which
are naturally in our souls.” From this Descartes derived “the first and
most ordinary effects that one can deduce from these causes,” the
heavens, stars, the earth, water, air, fire, and so on. The passage then
continues as follows:
Then when I wanted to descend to those which were more particular, I was
presented with so many different kinds of things that I did not think that it
was possible for the human mind to distinguish the forms or kinds of bodies
which are on the earth from an infinity of others that could have been there,
if God had wanted to put them there, nor, consequently, to make them useful
to us, unless one proceeded to the causes through their effects, and attended
to many particular experiments. Afterward, reviewing in my mind all of the
objects which have ever been presented to my senses, I venture to say that I
have never noticed any thing that I could not easily enough explain by the
principles that I have found. But I must also admit that the power of nature
is so ample and so vast, and that these principles are so simple and so general,
that I have found hardly any particular effect which from the first I did
not know could be deduced in many ways, and [I admit] that my greatest
difficulty is ordinarily to find in which of these ways it depends on these
principles. (AT VI 64–65)
9 For a survey of the various views taken in the literature, see Clarke, Descartes’ Philosophy of
Science, 9–10.
Experiment seems not to be at issue in the early stages of investiga-
tion. Where experiment becomes important, Descartes indicates, is
when we move from the very most general features of the world, and,
as he puts it, descend to particulars. There, he says, the direct deduc-
tion from first principles must stop, and we must “proceed to the causes
through their effects, and attend to many particular experiments.” This
has suggested to many, and not implausibly, that at this stage science
must become a posteriori, arguing from effect to cause by a kind of
hypothetico-deductive method of the kind practiced in the Essays and
defended in the correspondence of 1637 and 1638.10 While this may
describe Descartes’ views later, in certain pessimistic sections of the
Principles, this is not, I think, what Descartes had in mind in the Dis-
course.11 In the passage in question, Descartes seems clear that he is
still interested in deduction, even after he has descended to particulars.
The problem is that in any given case, there are many possible ways in
which one can deduce from the general principles, “so simple and so
general,” to the particular effects we observe. Experiment is somehow
supposed to help us find the right deductions, the ones that pertain to
our world and to the phenomena that concern us. In this way, experi-
ments seem not to replace deductions, but to aid us in making the proper
deductions.12
The view is initially quite paradoxical. How can some deductions be
right and others wrong? How can it be that experiment is essential for
10 Charles Larmore suggests such a view in “Descartes’ Empirical Epistemology,” in Descartes:

Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Sussex: The Harvester Press,
1980), 6–22, esp. 9, 12. I presented a similar view in “Science and Certainty in Descartes,”
though I no longer think that it is correct.
11 One might point here to the obvious use of hypotheses in the Dioptrics and Meteors, well
before the Principles of Philosophy; see AT VI 83ff., 233ff.; Ols 66ff., 264ff. But the Essays
constitute an attempt to give the results of inquiry without revealing the full system, and
they are not intended to replace proper argument in natural philosophy, which proceeds
from cause to effect. By arguing from hypotheses he thought that he could show some of
his results without having to divulge the first principles of his physics, for which, he
believed, the public was not ready. But, while pleased with his Essays, he was clear that
they represent not the definitive treatment of his thought, in accordance with his method
of inquiry, but, rather, interesting experiments in exposition. There is an extended dis-
cussion of this in Part VI of the Discourse : AT VI 76–77. This theme also runs through
Descartes’ correspondence in the period; see AT I 562–564; AT II 141–144, 199–200;
CSMK 87–88, 103–104, 107. See also Garber, “Science and Certainty in Descartes” and
Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics, chapter 2.
12 See also Descartes’ remarks in Principles III 4. There he talks about having to turn to the
phenomena at that stage in his exposition, “not to deduce an account of causes from their
effects,” but “to direct our mind to a consideration of some effects rather than others from
among the countless effects which we take to be producible from the selfsame causes.”
a deductive explanation of a phenomenon? And how could Descartes
possibly have maintained a deductive structure in his science, if he
admits that there are circumstances in which we must “proceed to
causes through their effects”? To see how this might work, let us turn
to some examples.
As discussed previously, the anaclastic line problem from Rule VIII
involves finding the shape of a surface that refracts all parallel rays into
a single point. Descartes’ solution to the problem requires us to follow
a certain series of steps, first a reduction of the problem to a series of
simpler ones, then a constructive step, where the reductive series is tra-
versed backwards, resulting in a deductive solution to the problem, if all
works well. Descartes never tells us here where we can or must appeal to
experience; experience comes up only in a negative way, where Descartes
asserts that we should not try to discover the relation between the angle
of incidence and the angle of refraction through experiment, for that
would violate Rule III, which tells us that only intuition and deduction
are sources of real knowledge (AT X 368). But there is at least one place
in the reduction where an appeal to experience would seem to be
helpful, if not altogether obligatory. In the very next step of the reduc-
tion, Descartes says that the investigator must notice that the relation
between the angles of incidence and refraction itself depends on the
changes in these angles due to the differences in the media through
which the ray is passing (e.g., from air into glass, or water into air), and
that these changes, in turn, depend on the way in which the ray pene-
trates the transparent body (AT X 394). Descartes does not mention
experiment or experience in this context. But it is difficult to imagine
that this is a step that we can make on the basis of the “seeds of truth”
alone. While it may not require sophisticated optical experiments, it
seems that we at least require some minimal experience with light rays
and lenses, or other actual instances of refraction, in order to see that
light is typically bent by passing from one medium into another, and to
come to the realization that in order to discover the law refraction obeys
we must first understand how light passes through media of different
sorts. In this way experience would seem to help us to see how we might
proceed in our investigation by suggesting what further questions it
might be useful for us to look into.
Experiment comes up at best only implicitly in the anaclastic line
example. But it is quite a visible feature of another example Descartes
gives of his method. The example I have in mind is the account Descartes
gives of the rainbow in the Eighth Discourse of his Meteors. This
passage contains the only explicit mention of the method in all of the
Essays, and it is singled out in a letter from 1638 as an exemplary use of
the method in practice (see AT VI, 325; Ols. 332 and Descartes to Vatier,
22 February 1638; AT I 559; CSMK, 85). The example is a very compli-
cated one, one of Descartes’ best but most complex scientific arguments.
I shall begin by summarizing the argument, and then try to show how
the mass of experimental detail and complex argument sorts itself out
into a methodical framework (see Fig. 1).13
The problem is to explain how it is that rainbows come about. The
account begins with the observation that rainbows appear when and only
when there are water droplets in the air. Descartes then turns to the
study of large spherical flasks of water which, he claims, duplicate
the effects seen in individual droplets of water that appear to cause the
rainbow. Observations on the flask allow Descartes to measure the
angles at which colors are observed, and allow him to determine that
there are two regions of color whose red portions are about 42 and 52
degrees from the angle at which they are hit by the rays of the sun (see
Fig. 1). These experiments also allow Descartes to determine that these
two regions of color derive from two different combinations of reflec-
tion and refraction within the water flask; the brighter color region
(which corresponds to what is now called the primary bow) at 42
degrees results from two refractions and one internal reflection, while
the dimmer color region (the secondary bow) at 52 degrees results
from two refractions and two internal reflections. (The two paths can
be discerned within the flask represented in Fig. 1.) These investiga-
tions led Descartes to two further questions, why there is color at all in
these cases, and why it is that the colors appear at two specific angles.
The first question, that of color, is explored experimentally, through a
prism, in which, like the flask, colors are produced through the reflec-
tion and refraction of light (see Fig. 2). Observations made with the
prism show that a curved surface, like that of the raindrop or the flask,
13 My own interest in the rainbow case here is largely as an illustration of the method of the
Rules. For discussions of Descartes’ account of the rainbow that emphasize its place in the
history of such discussions and in the history of optics more generally, see Carl B. Boyer,
The Rainbow (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), Chapter 8, and Jean-Robert
Armogathe, “L’arc-en-ciel dans les Météores, in J.-L. Marion and N. Grimaldi, eds. Le Discours
et sa méthode, 145–162. Considering Descartes’ account in its historical perspective makes
it quite clear that despite the impression he gives in the Meteorology of having discovered
everything himself, he owes a great deal to previous investigators. Interesting and impor-
tant as these historical considerations are, I will focus instead on Descartes’ presentation of
his theory in an attempt to untangle the methodological underpinnings of his argument.
Figure 1
is not needed to produce color; nor is a reflection necessary, Descartes

discovers through experiment. What seems to be necessary, Descartes
finds, is at least one refraction, and a restricted stream of light. But in
order to understand how the refraction of a restricted beam of light
can produce color, we must press deeper into the nature of light and
the way it passes through a transparent body, the very questions that we
were pressed back into in the anaclastic line case. The nature of light
we know from the Dioptrics: “[The nature of light is] the action of move-
ment of a certain very fine material whose particles must be pictured
as small balls rolling in the pores of earthly bodies” (AT VI, 331; Ols.
336).14 And, Descartes argues, what happens when a restricted beam of
14 This is the paraphrase Descartes gives in the Meteors; the passage he is referring to in the
Dioptrics can be found at AT VI 89–93.
Figure 2
light passes from one medium into another in refraction is that the balls
are given differential tendencies to rotate, depending on where they
are in the stream (see Figs. 2 and 3). Since, refraction aside, that is the
only mechanical effect that passing from one medium into another has
on the light, Descartes argues that color just must be caused by the dif-
ferential tendency to rotation. Those balls with a greater tendency to
rotate produce the color red in us, Descartes claims, while those that
have a lesser tendency to rotate produce the color blue/violet in us.
(Remember, of course, Descartes held that in the strictest sense, color
is only in the mind, and not in bodies.) And so, from the nature of light
and the way it passes through media, we have shown how colors are pro-
duced, Descartes thinks. But it still remains to show why the colors are
produced in two discrete regions, at characteristic angles from that of
sunlight. To solve that problem, Descartes turns back to the flask.
Appealing to the law of refraction, which Descartes alludes to in the
anaclastic line example, and derives (after a fashion) in the Second Dis-
course of the Dioptrics, he demonstrates that after two refractions and
one reflection, the vast majority of a bundle of parallel rays hitting the
flask, wherever they may hit, will emerge from the flask between 41 and
42 degrees with respect to the angle of the incident light, and after two
Figure 3
refractions and two reflections, the majority will emerge at between 51

and 52 degrees (AT VI 336ff.; Ols. 339ff ).15 From this it follows that
at those two regions on the surface of the sphere, there will be two
discrete streams of light that emerge from the flask, moving from one
medium into another. And from the previous argument, this will result
in two regions of color at the two angles earlier observed. And so, from
15 Descartes does the calculation by considering a spherical droplet of water hit by parallel
rays over one hemisphere, and calculating where various of the rays would emerge after
an appropriate number of reflections and refractions. His conclusion, carefully stated,
reads:
I found that after one reflection and two refractions, very many more of [the rays] can
be seen under the angle of 41 to 42 degrees than under any lesser one; and that none
of them can be seen under a larger angle. Then I also found that after two reflections
and two refractions, very many more of them come toward the eye under a 51 to
52 degree angle, than under any larger one; and no such rays come under a lesser.
(AT VI 336; Ols. 339)
While the conclusion is arrived at by calculation, that calculation must make explicit
appeal to the index of refraction for water. When the question comes up in the Second
Discourse of the Dioptrics, he notes that we must appeal to experience in order to deter-
mine the value of this constant for various sorts of materials (AV VI 101–102). This would
seem to be another place in which experiment would enter into the method. However,
one presumes that Descartes believed that the index of refraction could itself be arrived
at by calculation, were we to know the size, shape, and motion of the corpuscles that make
up water.
the nature of light, the way it passes through media, and the law of
refraction, it follows that the rays of sunlight hitting the flask will result
in two regions of color at two characteristic angles. When we have a
multitude of such drops, we have a rainbow.
It is by no means obvious how this somewhat confused mass of
experiment and reasoning can be fitted into the rather rigid mold of
Descartes’ method. The schematic representation of the argument
given in Table 2 indicates one plausible way in which the argument
might fit. In the schematic representation of the argument, Q1 through
Q5 represent the reduction, which leads us from the question originally
posed, “what is the cause of the rainbow,” back to the intuitions which
are the starting point of the Cartesian deduction, intuitions about the
nature of light and how it passes through media. But the important
thing is, of course, the specific path that Descartes follows to go from
the initial question to the intuition, for it is that path that will deter-
mine the path followed in the deduction. In this case Descartes pro-
ceeds by splitting the question into two questions, one about color and
one about the two regions. Included in square brackets are the empir-
ical results derived from experiment at the point in the argument in
which Descartes appeals to them. The path followed after the intuition
is relatively straightforward. Here we are dealing with the same steps
followed in the reduction, only in the reverse order, as we pass from
intuition to the final answer to the question originally posed. But unlike
the reduction, experiment and its results seem to play no role in this
part of the argument. The example is certainly much more complex
than the anaclastic line example, but it seems to have much in common
with it in structure.
Before turning back to my main theme, the use of experiment in
these arguments, I would like to comment on the kind of deduction
that is involved in this case. In the anaclastic line case, we had a defi-
nite question, the shape of a lens with such-and-such properties, and at
the conclusion of the procedure we can expect a deductive answer to
the question, a deduction from basic principles (ultimately, the nature
of a natural power) that a lens with this-or-that shape will have such-
and-such characteristics. But the situation here is a bit different. What
we are seeking is the cause of the rainbow. The answer to this question
is, in a sense, not deduced; rather, it is revealed in the deduction itself.
The deduction shows us how we can go from the nature of light to the
phenomenon of the rainbow; what is deduced, strictly speaking, is just
the phenomenon itself, the patches of color in the sky. But the path
Table 2. Descartes’s Account of the Rainbow (Meteors, Eighth Discourse)
Q1. What causes the rainbow (two regions of color)?
[Rainbows appear only in the

presence of water droplets; size is
irrelevant to the phenomenon.]
Q2. What causes the two regions of color in any spherical ball?
Q2a. What causes the two regions? Q2b. What causes the color?
[The two regions result from two [Color is produced without a curved
combinations of reflection and surface and without reflection; it
refraction.] requires a restricted stream of light,
and a refraction.]
Q3a. Why do the two combinations Q3b. How does refraction cause color
of reflection and refraction result under appropriate circumstances?
in two discrete regions?
Q4. How does light pass through media?

Q5. What is light?
Intuition: The nature of light, and how it passes through media [Cf. Q5, Q4].
D1a. Law of refraction D1b. The only change in a restricted

stream of light passing from one
medium to another (refraction aside)
is a differential tendency to rotation.
D2a. All parallel rays of light D2b. Color can only be the
converge into two discrete streams differential tendency to rotation
after two refractions and one or produced in passing from one
two reflections, emerging from the medium to another in refraction
drop (flask) in two discrete [Cf. Q3b].
regions [Cf. Q3a].
D3. Parallel rays of light produce two discrete regions of color on a spherical ball
of water [Cf. Q2].
D4. Sunlight (parallel rays of light) on a region of water droplets will produce
two regions of color [Cf. Q1].
followed in deducing the phenomenon shows us that the cause is the
passing of light from one medium to another, the differential tendency
to rotate this passage gives the particles of light, and the way that
the law of refraction causes light rays to converge into two discrete
streams at two characteristic angles. This a deduction, but a deduction
of a very different sort from the one in the anaclastic line example.
One can quite plausibly ask if Descartes can really be sure that he
has given the true sequence of causes that produce the rainbow, as
opposed to a possible sequence that produced the same appearances.
Descartes himself will later come to see that as a problem.16 But in the
Meteors it is not; he seems confident that the methodical procedure of
investigation he is following assures him that he has captured the
real causes.
To return to my main thread, a number of interesting things emerge
from these two examples. First of all, it would appear that experiment
functions strictly at the reductive stage of method, the stage in which we
are trying to go from a question posed to the intuition from which the
answer is to be derived; experiment seems not to be involved in the
actual deduction. And in that initial stage of inquiry, it seems to func-
tion in two not altogether separable roles. First of all, it helps better
define the phenomenon to be deduced or the problem to be solved.
This is not at issue in the anaclastic line example, where the problem
is set with sufficient precision. But it is an important function of exper-
iment in the rainbow example, where Descartes appeals to experiment
to fix what the rainbow is, that it consists of two separate bows, and that
the two bows are always at such-and-such an angle with respect to the
rays of the sun; in this way, experiment clarifies the question that is to
be answered.17 But just as important, experiment aids the reduction by
suggesting how things depend on one another, and, in that way, sug-
gesting at a given juncture what question we might turn to next. It is
because we know from experiment that refraction depends on a light
ray passing from one medium to another that we know that we must
investigate light rays, media, and how light passes through a medium
in order to determine the law of refraction. Similarly, it is because of
experiments with the prism that we know that reflection is irrelevant to
16 See, for example, Descartes’ remarks in Principles IV 204–206; see the discussion of these
passages in Garber, “Science and Certainty in Descartes.”
17 See the discussion in Rule XIII, AT X 430–431, where Descartes discusses the importance
of specifying in exact terms what is being sought in an investigation.
color, but refraction is not, and it is because we know that colors can
arise from the refraction of light that we know that the nature of color
is to be sought in an examination of what light is, and how it is altered
by refraction. Once we understand Descartes’ method and the roles
that experiment does (and does not) play in it, it should come as no
surprise that Descartes might suggest that “it would be very useful if
some . . . person were to write the history of celestial phenomena in
accordance with the Baconian method . . . without any arguments or
hypotheses” (Descartes to Mersenne, 10 May 1632: AT I 251; CSMK
38). The sorts of tales that Bacon recommends to the investigator in
Book II of his Novum Organum can tell us, for instance, that factor A
(color, say) is always accompanied by factor B (refraction, say), but that
factor C (say reflection) is present in some cases but absent in others.
In an investigation of A, this could lead us to questions about B, and
prevent us from raising irrelevant questions about C, as when in the
rainbow example we learn that refraction is relevant to color, but reflec-
tion is not. Such tables of phenomena and their correlations with one
another, independent of any theory, are precisely what Descartes needs
to define problems and to determine the relations of dependence of
one phenomenon on another necessary to perform the reductive step
of the method.
In this way, it seems that experiment is not a replacement for deduction,
but part of the step preliminary to making a deduction. Science remains
deductive for Descartes; in the end our knowledge of the cause of the
rainbow depends on our performing a deduction of the phenomena
from an initial intuition. But experiment seems to play its role in
preparing the deduction. Insofar as it helps perform the reductive part
of the method, the sequence of steps that leads from a question to an
intuition, it helps determine the deduction, the same steps followed in
reverse order that leads from intuition to the answer to the question
posed. The deductive chain that the Cartesian scientist seeks in reason,
the chain that goes from more basic to less, is exemplified in the con-
nections one finds in nature itself. Insofar as these latter connections
are open to experimental determination, we can use experiment to
sketch out the chain of connections in nature and find out what
depends on what, and thus we can use the connections we find in nature as
a guide to the connections we seek in reason. It may not be obvious to us at
first just how we can go deductively from the nature of light to the
rainbow, but poking about with water droplets, flasks, and prisms may
suggest a path our deduction might follow.
This understanding of how experiment and observation may be
useful in a deductive science of the sort that Descartes was attempting
to construct allows us to make some sense of some of the more puz-
zling aspects of Descartes’ remarks. On this understanding, we do find
causes through their effects, in a sense; experiment is quite necessary
in solving problems and helping us to discover the real causes of
phenomena in our world. But in no sense are we replacing deductive
with a posteriori reasoning. Though we must appeal to experiment,
experiment only prepares the deduction that will establish the cause.
Furthermore, we can now see how experiment can point the way to the
“correct” deduction, and eliminate the “incorrect” deductions. There
can be alternative derivations of a given phenomenon in the sense that
the same bare effect may be produced by different chains of causes. For
example, a distribution of colors in a pair of bows in the sky (a bare
effect) may be produced by the reflection and refraction of light
through raindrops (as it actually is in our world), or by a distribution
of tiny colored balls suspended in the air, or by colors projected by a
slide projector on a cloud of dust, or by any number of other perverse
means. But experiment helps us find the correct deduction, that is, the
correct chain of causes, by making the phenomenon more precise, and
suggesting how it is that the phenomenon is actually produced in this
world. In this way experiment can lead us to the correct derivation,
correct in the sense that it represents the way the phenomena are
caused in our part of the universe. Alternative deductions are not
wrong, strictly speaking; one might be able to produce something that
looks to us very much like a rainbow in any number of ways. But it’s
just that it is not the way things are done here, at least not the way it is
done in nature.
So far I have talked about experiment in the context of Descartes’
official method. But, as I pointed out at the very beginning of this essay,
I think that Descartes later came to set his method aside. In his later
writings, those that follow the Discourse, I would argue that Descartes
abandoned the reductive stage of his method in favor of a direct attack
on the tree of knowledge, starting from intuition (or, rather, first prin-
ciples, first philosophy) and deducing on down from there. But I think
that much of what I said about experiment in the method also holds
good for the system-building orientation of later works like the Princi-
ples of Philosophy. Though in the later writings an explicit reductive step
is not in evidence, Descartes must find some way of constituting his
deductive chain, and here experiment will be useful for the same reason
it is in the method. It is, I think, no accident that at the moment that
Descartes was working on extending the system of the Principles from
the inanimate world, derived by the laws of nature from an initial chaos,
to the world of plants and animals, Descartes was also doing experi-
ments on the formation of the fetus.18 I am certain that Descartes
thought that in sexual reproduction, the development of a living body
from mechanical causes, he might find clues about how living bodies
originally arose on this earth through mechanical causes, and that such
clues would help him extend the deduction of terrestrial phenomena
begun in the Principles to living things.
Experiment and the Priority of Reason

In the previous section I tried to show how experiment plays a role in
Descartes’ scientific procedure, how experiment is needed in at least
certain circumstances to aid in the deduction that leads us to genuine
knowledge through deduction. But this raises an interesting question.
Descartes is usually identified, and rightly so, as the philosopher of
reason, the philosopher who rejected the dependence on the senses
that characterizes the Aristotelian philosophy that he was eager to
replace, in favor of dependence on clear and distinct perception, the
immediate dictates of the light of reason. I have tried to show how
Descartes’ deductive science is not compromised by the way in which
he appeals to experiment, how the particular conception Descartes
has of the deductive structure of knowledge is fully consistent with the
use of reason as an auxiliary to the reductive step of his method. But
a deeper question still remains, how any use of experiment at all is
consistent with his strictures against the appeal to experience.
Descartes certainly does oppose naive dependence on the senses in
passages too numerous to cite; he warns us that things are not at all as
our senses tell us they are, that they are not red and green, sweet or
salty, that our naive belief that all of our knowledge derives ultimately
from our senses is a prejudice of sense- and body-bound youth, a prej-
udice that must be rejected before we will be able to penetrate to the
true nature of things. In his Meditations, he begins with a series of skep-
tical arguments that are directed in large part, if not entirely, against
our naive trust in the senses, and in the Fourth Meditation, he appears
to recommend that we must limit ourselves to knowledge derived from
18 See Descartes, La description du corps human, AT XI 252ff.

the light of reason; he appears to argue that only by limiting ourselves
to clear and distinct perception can we guarantee that we do not stray
into intellectual sin, that is, error. And if we are to limit ourselves to
clear and distinct perceptions, then there would seem to be no room
for any appeal to experience at all, even the sort of appeal that I out-
lined in the previous section.19
But, I think, the situation is a bit more complex than this textbook
summary of Descartes’ epistemology might suggest. Descartes does
certainly favor reason over the senses, but he certainly does not rec-
ommend rejecting the senses altogether. The fullest account of
Descartes’ views on the senses and the role that they play in the acqui-
sition of knowledge occurs in the Sixth Meditation.
The reconsideration of the senses, rejected earlier in the First Med-
itation, begins early in the Sixth Meditation. Earlier and unsuccessful
attempts to prove the existence of bodies led the meditator to consider
more carefully the faculty of imagination and the closely related faculty
of sensation (AT VII 74). And so the meditator goes back over the con-
siderations that led him first to trust the senses, ending with a review
of the considerations that originally led him to question the senses
(AT VII 74–77). At this point, the meditator notes,
But now, after I have begun to know myself and my author a bit better, I do
not think that everything that I seem to get from my senses should simply be
accepted, but then I don’t think that everything should be rendered doubt-
ful either. (AT VII 77–78)
The senses loom large in the rest of the Meditation. The meditator
first distinguishes between the mind and the body. Then the question
turns to the external world, and it is here that the senses make their
first positive contribution to the enterprise. The meditator begins:
“Now there is in me a certain passive faculty of sensing, that is, of receiv-
ing and knowing the ideas of sensible things” (AT VII 79). We have a
passive faculty of sensation. But this would be of use only if there were,
somewhere, an active faculty for producing these ideas, a cause. This,
Descartes argues, could not be in me, for it seems to involve neither my
understanding nor my will, the two faculties I have. So, the meditator
reasons, the ideas of sensation he has must come from outside of him,
19 For a development of some of these themes in Descartes, see Garber, “Semel in vita: the
Scientific Background to Descartes’ Meditations,” in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed.,
A. Rorty (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 81–116, essay
11 in this volume.
either from God or from bodies (i.e., bodies as understood in the Fifth
Meditation, things extended and extended alone) or from something
else. The meditator reasons that it must be from bodies themselves
that our ideas derive; God has given me a “great propensity for believ-
ing that they come to me from corporeal things,” while he has given
me “no faculty at all” for learning that this propensity might be mis-
taken (AT VII 79–80). So, the meditator argues to himself, God would
be a deceiver if it turned out that our ideas of bodies come from any-
where else but from bodies themselves. And so, he concludes, bodies
exist.20
The argument is a very interesting one. A conclusion is established
not because we have a clear and distinct perception that bodies exist,
exactly, but because the meditator has a “great propensity” for believing
something, and God has given him no way of correcting that propen-
sity.21 Descartes admits here that there are at least some circumstances
in which a belief that we seem to get from sensation, the inclination to
believe that seems to come to us with the sensation, is worthy of our trust.
It may not be as worthy of our trust as a genuine clear and distinct per-
ception, as he implies in the Synopsis of the Meditations (AT VII 16), and
it may not always be true, as a clear and distinct perception is. But when
sensation leads us to a belief, as it does in this case, and when that belief
is not overridden, as it were, by a reason for rejecting it, as is the case
with our beliefs about colors actually being in things, say, then we can
trust the senses.22 This is the strategy that Descartes pursues in the
remainder of the Sixth Meditation in his discussion of the senses. He
argues that what he calls the “teachings of nature,” which include the
beliefs that appear to arise spontaneously with sensations, can be trusted
as being for the most part true when corroborated by reason, that is when
reason does not give us better grounds for rejecting a judgment from the
20 For a fuller presentation of this argument, see ibid.

21 In the version of the argument given in Principles II 1, Descartes does seem to argue
from the fact that “we seem clearly to see” that sensation proceeds to us from the object
of our idea of body to the real existence of body, and does not appeal to the “great propen-
sity” that is the nub of the argument in the Meditations. It is not clear why the later text
differs from the earlier one on this point. It may represent a genuine change in Descartes’
epistemology. But then it may simply reflect Descartes’ desire not to enter into his full
account of the senses in the Principles. For the relation between the Meditations and the
Principles, see Garber and Cohen, “A Point of Order,” essay 3 in this volume.
22 That is, we can trust at least some of the judgments that characteristically accompany our
sense perceptions. What seems to be at issue here is the third of Descartes’ three grades
of sensation; see AT VII 436–437.
senses, or when reason is in accord with that judgment, or when reason
is silent on the question.
As with clear and distinct perceptions, Descartes is here dealing with
something that God gave us, beliefs that are, in a certain sense, innate:
“I am dealing only with those things that God gave me as a composite
of mind and body” (AT VII 82). As such, Descartes argues, they must
be in some sense true: “It is doubtless true that everything that nature
teaches me has some truth in it” (AT VII 80). When it is truth about
the nature of things that we are interested in, it is the light of reason,
clear and distinct perceptions, that we must turn to first. Descartes
writes,
And so, my nature teaches me to flee what gives me pain and to seek what
gives me pleasure, and the like. But it does not appear that it teaches us to
conclude anything about things outside of us from the perceptions of the
senses without a prior examination of the intellect, since knowing the truth about
things seems to pertain to the mind alone, and not to the composite [of mind
and body]. (AT VII 82–83; emphasis added)
And so, while some of the teachings of nature will turn out to be true,
it is only the intellectual examination of them that will establish this. In
this way Descartes restores the senses and rejects the hyperbolic rejec-
tion of the senses that begins the Meditations; indeed, he goes on to
reject even the dream argument that is so prominent in the First Med-
itation (AT VII 89–90). But though the teachings of nature, what we
learn from our senses, are restored, they are subordinate to reason; they
may be trusted to some extent and in some circumstances, but only
after they have been given a clean bill of health by reason.
It is with this in mind that we should return to the use of experiment
in the rainbow case discussed earlier. One can say that insofar as
Descartes does allow the appeal to the senses in at least a general way,
there is no inconsistency in Cartesian epistemology; as long as what
Descartes takes from the experiments to which he appeals falls within
the bounds of proper caution, there is no special problem here. But
there is something more interesting to be said in this case about the
way in which experience is subordinate to reason.
In the previous section, I showed that while experiment might func-
tion as an auxiliary to a deduction, it is the deduction itself and not the
experiment that yields the knowledge. So, for example, in the anaclas-
tic line case, while experience might suggest to us that there is some
lawlike relation between angle of incidence and angle of refraction, it
is only through deduction that the actual law can be established (see
Rule VIII: AT X 394). But the point goes deeper still. In the rainbow
case, Descartes begins by observing that on his flask, the stand-in for
the raindrop, there are two regions of color, at roughly 42 and 52
degrees from the ray of sunlight, which angles are then deduced in the
end from his theory. After giving his account, Descartes notes that an
earlier observer, the sixteenth-century mathematician Franciscus Mau-
rolycus, set the angles incorrectly at 45 and 56 degrees, on the basis of
faulty observations. Descartes notes that “this shows how little faith one
ought to have in observations which are not accompanied by the true
reason” (AT VI 340; Ols 342).23 It is only because we can calculate the
angles of the primary and secondary bows from the account we have
of the rainbow that we can be sure of what they are, despite the fact that
the investigation began with an experimental determination of those
angles.24 Though it is an observation that starts the ball rolling, it is only
through a Cartesian deduction that the phenomena and causal depen-
dencies observed can actually enter the body of scientific knowledge,
strictly speaking. Similarly, it is only because a deduction can, indeed,
be made in the reverse order of the causal dependencies that experi-
ment has found, that those dependencies ought to be trusted. Descartes
is, of course, aware that color can arise not only from refraction of light,
but from the reflection of light off of a surface whose texture is appro-
priate to cause the changes in the light necessary to produce the color
seen. At one point in his discussion of the rainbow Descartes seems pre-
pared to consider such an account of color in the rainbow, because, at
first glance, the restriction on the beam of light necessary to produce
color through refraction seems to be absent (AT VI 335; Ols 338–339).
And so, it seems, the causal dependence of the colors of the rainbow
on refraction and reflection suggested by experiment is only provi-
sional; while the experimental determination of the path the light
follows through the droplet may suggest to us a deductive path that we
23 For a discussion of Maurolycus’ theory of the rainbow, see Boyer, The Rainbow, 156–163.
The implication of Descartes’ remarks is that Maurolycus’ values for the angles derive from
observation alone. This is not entirely fair. Maurolycus had his reasons for setting the
angles as he did, reasons based on his (incorrect) analysis of the path the light follows
within the raindrop; indeed, he knew that his calculated value differs from what was
known through observation, something for which he attempted to offer an explanation
(pp. 159–160).
24 We must, of course, remember that the calculation does appeal to an experimentally deter-
mined value for the index of refraction; however, as I pointed out earlier, Descartes would
surely have thought that a “reason” could be given for that too.
might be able to follow, it is the actual success of the deduction from
intuition to phenomena that actually establishes the causal connections
that produce the phenomena. Experiment is important in helping to
find the deduction, but it is the deduction that, in an important sense,
fixes both the causal path and the phenomena. Experience is impor-
tant, but only under the control of reason, as Descartes took great pains
to emphasize in the Sixth Meditation.
This feature of Descartes’ position connects in an interesting way
with an often discussed problem in the philosophy of science, the ques-
tion of the theory-ladenness of observation. Whether or not one
can have an observation that is not in an important way dependent on
some theory or other is a question too often discussed in the abstract.
Descartes’ appeal to experiment in the rainbow case shows an inter-
esting complexity in the whole dispute. Descartes does use observation
to motivate the theory that he is proposing, or, perhaps, to guide us to
that theory. In this sense, observation would seem to be a-theoretical
for Descartes. But at the same time it is extremely important to realize
that the observations Descartes presents as motivating his account of
the rainbow, or at least guiding it, are not to be trusted fully until we
have an account of the matter, until we can derive those observations
from more basic principles. There is such a thing as pre-theoretical
observation for Descartes, and this does seem to have a role to play
in his procedure. But, at the same time, there is an important sense in
which observation does not attain the status of fact until it becomes inte-
grated with theory, indeed, until it becomes subordinated to theory.
In this way, for Descartes, experiment by itself can establish no facts;
while experiment can lead us to facts, it is only the final deduction of
a phenomenon from intuited first principles that establishes the cre-
dentials of a fact, even if first “discovered” through experiment. In his
recent writings, Ian Hacking argues that experiment must be viewed as
in an important sense independent of theorization in science; “experi-
ment has a life of its own,” he insists.25 By this he means to point out,
among other things, that experiment does not function exclusively in
the service of theoretical argument, furnishing premises for theoreti-
cal arguments, testing theories proposed, allowing us to eliminate one
of a pair of competing theories and accept another, and so forth. This
may be true enough for a wide variety of figures. But it is not true for
25 Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
150.
Descartes. For Descartes, at least in the context of the rainbow, exper-
iment plays a carefully regimented role in what is from the start a
theoretical project. But, at the same time, neither do experimental phe-
nomena have a role assigned to them in standard hypothetico-deduc-
tive conceptions of scientific method, as the touchstone of theory, the
a-theoretical facts to which we can appeal to adjudicate between alter-
native theories. If my account of experiment is correct, then however
much experiment might help us to find the correct account, it is
ultimately reason, not experiment, that is the touchstone of reality, for
theory as well as for the experimental facts that help us construct
theories.26
On the standard view of things, widely shared since the late eigh-
teenth century or so, there are two sorts of philosophers: rationalists
and empiricists. Descartes is traditionally viewed as a rationalist, in fact,
the founder of the school, in modern times at least. When the extent
of Descartes’ dependence on experiment and observation is recog-
nized, there is a temptation simply to think that Descartes must have
been placed in the wrong slot, and conclude that he must really be some
sort of empiricist.27 I would resist that temptation. It seems to me that
what the case of Descartes shows is how crude the scheme of classifi-
cation really is. For Descartes both reason and experience are impor-
tant, though in different ways. His genius was in seeing how experience
and experiment might play a role in acquiring knowledge without
undermining the commitment to a picture of knowledge that had moti-
vated him since his youth, a picture of a grand system of certain knowl-
edge, grounded in the intuitive apprehension of first principles.
26 Descartes does say some things that would appear to go against my conclusion. For
example, immediately following the long passage from Part VI of the Discourse I quoted
earlier, Descartes writes,
I know of no other means to discover this [i.e., how a particular effect depends on the
general principles of nature] than by seeking further experiments [expériences] whose
outcomes vary according to which of these ways provides the correct explanation.
(AT VI 65)
But, I think, this must be understood in the context of the interpretation I have offered
earlier. The experiments in question must be viewed as leading us down one deductive path
rather than down another, and not as a theory-neutral means of choosing between inde-
pendently constructed theories; for, as Descartes elsewhere insists, we cannot really be
sure of an experimental fact until after we have already determined what the correct
deduction is.
27 See, e.g., Clarke, Descartes’ Philosophy of Science, 205.
6
DESCARTES ON KNOWLEDGE
AND CERTAINTY
From the Discours to the Principia
Descartes is usually classed among the rationalists, those philosophers

who privilege reason over experience. And indeed he belongs there.
On the other hand, though, Descartes was also very interested in exper-
iment. The Dioptrique and Météores make a number of references to
Descartes’ experiments; the Discours discusses the importance of exper-
iments at some length. In the Principia, written starting in early 1641
and published in 1644, Descartes refers to a number of experimental
results to support his views, most visibly in the discussion of the magnet.
And at the end of that book, he goes so far as to suggest that his vision
of the world is ultimately supported by the fact that it is capable of
explaining observed phenomena, and nothing more. Where is the
real Descartes? Is he mathematician or experimenter? rationalist or
empiricist?
This is the larger question that I would like to explore in this essay.
But I would like to address it in a rather particular and somewhat special
way. Generally, discussions of Descartes’ views about knowledge and
experience concentrate on texts like the Meditations, and on issues con-
cerned with knowledge of the kinds of grand questions that he takes
up there, the knowledge of self, body, the distinction between mind and
body, God, and so on. What I want to focus on is something much more
mundane. The water we drink every day has a nature, from which follow
certain well-known properties; water is wet and liquid at room temper-
ature, solid when very cold, quenches thirst, admits light, but causes
certain illusions, like the famous bent-stick illusion. All of this is
somehow connected with its structure. The question I want to address
is this: how did Descartes think that we could know the internal
111
structures, the natures of particular things like water and wine, gold
and wood?
To appreciate Descartes’ problem here we must make a few back-
ground remarks. The view about individual natures that Descartes and
his contemporaries learned in school was straightforwardly based on
Aristotelian principles. According to Aristotle, water (maybe not the
water we encounter in everyday life, but pure water) is an element,
defined by a particular substantial form. That form, joined to bare
matter, gives water the characteristic properties that it has. And so, on
this view, water is just the kind of stuff that by its nature tends to be cold,
wet, and liquid, that tends by its nature to fall below the sphere of air
and above that of earth, to name two others of the Aristotelian ele-
ments; these are just its innate tendencies to behavior. And that is all
the explanation that one can give, period. Mixtures of the elements and
their properties add considerable complexity to the question. But even
then, the idea that things have natures, substantial forms that give them
innate tendencies to exhibit the manifest properties they do is basic to
the Aristotelian scheme of things.
But Descartes and his mechanist friends take another view alto-
gether. According to Descartes, all body is of the same nature; every-
thing in the physical world is extended substance, and its tendencies to
behavior are defined by the laws of motion. Descartes writes in the
Principia:
The matter existing in the entire universe is thus one and the same, and it is
always recognized as matter simply in virtue of its being extended. All the
properties which we clearly perceive in it are reducible to its divisibility and
consequent mobility in respect of its parts, and its resulting capacity to be
affected in all the ways which we perceive as being derivable from the move-
ment of the parts.1
How then are we to explain the special properties water has? As

Descartes suggests, we can only appeal to “its divisibility and consequent
mobility in respect of its parts”. That is, the special properties this water
has can only be explained in terms of the size, shape, and motion of
the tiny parts that make it up. Different samples of water presumably
have a common structure of smaller bodies, corpuscles, whose
1 Principia II, 23. For a fuller account of Descartes’ mechanist program in contrast with
Aristotelian hylomorphism, see D. Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics, Chicago, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1992, chapters 3, 4.
descartes on knowledge and certainty 113
characteristic size, shape, and motion give it its characteristically
observed properties. Let us call this particular nature its “corpuscular
substructure.”
This, then, is the problem I would like to explore in Descartes. For
the scholastic scientist, the characteristic properties of a thing derive
from a form, often a hidden form, an occult quality. For Descartes,
there are no such occult qualities. But there are hidden natures, cor-
puscular substructures that are hidden from our view. How can they be
found?
There are actually a number of questions here that we might sepa-
rate. First of all, how do we discover these hidden mechanisms? And
having conjectured a particular candidate for a corpuscular substruc-
ture, how do we justify the claim that we have found the correct one?
And in this argument, I want to ask, what role does experience and/or
experiment play? And finally, what are the limits of certainty with
respect to our knowledge and belief in the corpuscular substructures
of particular kinds of things?
In order to answer these questions, we must, I shall argue, distinguish
the positions that Descartes takes at different times in his career. And
so, we shall proceed chronologically. First we shall examine the views
Descartes seems to have had in mid-1630s, when he was completing his
first works for publication, the Discours and the accompanying Essais.
Then we shall turn to his views a few years later, in the early 1640s, com-
posing the Principia. Despite appearances, there is, I shall argue, a
radical change between Descartes’ views at the one time and the other.
Descartes, I shall claim, moves from the position that we can have
genuine certain knowledge of the corpuscular substructure, to the
rather different view that our conjectures about corpuscular substruc-
tures are at best devices that enable us to predict future experience,
and in that way prolong our lives.
1. Knowledge of Particulars in the Discours and Essais

First, then, let us turn to Descartes in the period of the Discours and
Essais. The most extensive discussion of the issues connected with
knowledge of particulars takes place in Part VI of the Discours, where
Descartes goes to some length to talk about the need for experiments,
and argues that his program could progress only if he had sufficient
funds for doing experiments. (Even 350 years ago, scientists had to beg
for the money they needed to keep up their laboratories!) The passage
begins with a lengthy account of where experiment is not really neces-
sary. Descartes reports that he began his investigations with “the first
principles or first causes” of everything, which can be discovered from
“certain seeds of truth which are naturally in our souls.” From this
Descartes derived “the first and most ordinary effects that one can
deduce from these causes,” the heavens, stars, the earth, water, air, fire,
etc. The passage then continues as follows, and addresses more directly
how it is that we can come to know the corpuscular substructures that
underlie the greatest part of the particulars we know from everyday
experience:
Then when I wanted to descend to those which were more particular, I was
presented with so many different kinds of things that I did not think that it
was possible for the human mind to distinguish the forms or kinds of bodies
which are on the earth from an infinity of others that could have been there,
if God had wanted to put them there, nor, consequently, to make them useful
to us, unless one proceeded to the causes through their effects, and attended
to many particular experiments.2
It is not easy to interpret this passage. But it is not surprising that

this is often read as endorsing a certain conception of how we can know
the natures of particular things by way of what we might call hypothet-
ical argument.3
What I call hypothetical argument is suggested later in the Discours
where Descartes discusses a curious feature of the Météores and Diop-
trique. In both of these treatises, Descartes begins by making certain
“suppositions,” assumptions or hypotheses about the nature of light, the
make-up of water, oils, etc., from which he then derives various features
of the world. In the Météores, for example, Descartes writes, in a chapter
entitled De la nature des cors terrestres:
2 AT VI 64.
3 For some recent interpretations along that line, see, e.g., D. Clarke, “Descartes’ Philosophy
of Science and the Scientific Revolution,” in J. Cottingham ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Descartes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 258–285, and Ettore Loja-
cono, “L’attitude scientifique de Descartes dans les Principion,” in J.-R. Armogathe and
Giulia Belgioioso, eds., Descartes: Principion Philosophiae (1644–1994), Naples, Vivarium,
1996, pp. 409–433. What I call hypothetical argument Lojacono calls “le procédé par sup-
position.” He emphasizes that this “procédé” should not be called a method, a term that
Descartes reserves for the very different procedure he outlines in the Regulae. I would like
to thank him for correcting my more careless use of language in an earlier draft of
this essay.
I assume that the small particles of which water is composed are long, smooth,
and slippery like little eels, which are such that however they join and inter-
lace, they are never thereby so knotted or hooked together that they cannot
easily be separated; and on the other hand, I assume that nearly all particles
of earth, as well as of air and most other bodies, have very irregular and rough
shapes, so that they need be only slightly intertwined in order to become
hooked and bound to each other, as are the various branches of bushes that
grow together in a hedgerow.4
In a slightly later passage in Discours VI, Descartes writes about these

suppositions as follows:
Should anyone be shocked at first by some of the statements I make at the
beginning of the Dioptrique and the Météores, because I call them “supposi-
tions” and do not seem to care about proving them, let him have the patience
to read the whole book attentively, and I trust that he will be satisfied. For I
take my reasonings to be so closely interconnected that just as the last are
proved by the first, which are their causes, so the first are proved by the last,
which are their effects. . . . For as experience makes most of these effects [i.e.,
observed phenomena] quite certain, the causes from which I deduce them
serve not so much to prove them as to explain them; indeed, quite to the
contrary, it is the causes which are proved by the effects.5
To say that the causes are “proved by effects,” as Descartes does, sug-
gests very strongly the causes conjectured are established as true by the
fact that they are capable of explaining the observed phenomena.
There are many other passages from this period, both in the published
texts and in the letters that suggest much the same. But the view comes
out most clearly in the writings of one of Descartes’ followers, the
French physicist Jacques Rohault. Writing in his Traité de physique of
1671, only a bit more than 20 years after Descartes’ death, he gives his
version of the proper way of building a natural philosophy:
In order to find out what the Nature of any Thing is, we are to search for
some one Particular in it, that will account for all the Effects which Experi-
ence shows us it is capable of producing. Thus, if we would know what the
Heat of the Fire is, we must endeavour to find out some particular Thing, by
means of which, it is capable of producing in us that Sort of Tickling, or pleas-
ant agreeable Heat which we feel at a little distance from it. . . . In a word, it
must explain all the Effects that Fire produces. . . . What is now said of Heat,
may be applied to all other Things: And by this Rule, every Thing hereafter
4 AT VI 233. 5 AT VI 76; cf. AT II 141–144, 199–200; AT VI 334.

is to be examined, If that which we fix upon, to explain the particular Nature
of any Thing, does not account clearly and plainly for every Property of that
Thing, or if it be evidently contradicted by any one Experiment; then we are
to look upon our Conjecture as false; but if it perfectly agrees with all the
Properties of the Thing, then we may esteem it well grounded, and it may
pass for very probable.6
This illustrates what I earlier called hypothetical argument. An hypo-

thetical argument for some conclusion proceeds as follows. We are
trying to explain some feature of the physical world, say fire and its
heat. We first conjecture a structure of smaller particles in motion; this
is the hypothesis about the nature of the fire that is under considera-
tion. We might hypothesize, for example, that fire is made up of small,
dagger-shaped corpuscles that move very, very fast. This hypothesis is
then tested against experience; if it is capable of explaining all experi-
ments that we can make on fire, and clearly contradicts none, then the
conjecture is esteemed “well grounded, and it may pass for very prob-
able.” For example, we may imagine that the pain we experience when
putting a finger in the fire is explained by the dagger-like shape and
motion of the particles that make up the fire. But if a conjecture “be
evidently contradicted by any one Experiment; then we are to look
upon our Conjecture as false,” says Rohault.
But, I must insist, it is quite wrong to attribute this view to Descartes
in the period of the Discours. Immediately after the above quoted
passage, Descartes writes:
And I have called them “suppositions” simply to make it known that I think
that I can deduce them from the primary truths I have expounded above;
but I have deliberately avoided carrying out these deductions in order to
prevent certain ingenious persons from taking the opportunity to construct,
on what they believe to be my principles, some extravagant philosophy for
which I shall be blamed.7
But if it is not the procedure of hypothetical argument that Descartes

is espousing here, then what is it? And how does his evident interest
in experiment fit in, if it isn’t an hypothetical argument that is at
issue here? What kind of deduction does Descartes have in mind
here?
6 J. Rohault, A System of Natural Philosophy, Illustrated with Dr. Samuel Clarke’s Notes . . . Done into
English by John Clarke, 2 vols., London, James Knapton, 1723, vol. I, pp. 13–14.
7 AT VI 76; cf. AT I 563; AT II 200; AT III 39.
Let me begin with a brief example from an earlier work, the Regulae
ad Directionem Ingenii. The assumption behind the method Descartes
presents in that book is that real knowledge, knowledge worthy of the
name, derives from intuition and deduction. Intuition is a faculty we
have by virtue of which we are capable of grasping truths directly;
deduction is a complementary faculty, by virtue of which we can intuit
the connections between one proposition and another.8 Descartes’
method in the Regulae consists of a reduction, followed by an intuition,
followed by a construction, that is, a deduction of the answer to the
question originally posed, starting from the intuition that we have
attained.9 This is what we might call the appeal to intuition and deduc-
tion, or, more simply, the appeal to intuition, as distinct from the sort
of hypothetical argument I noted earlier. If Descartes is right, then all
knowledge is derived by deduction from intuition.
In the text of Rule 8 Descartes gives an example of his celebrated
method.10 The question at issue is the shape of a particular lens, one
that is capable of focusing parallel rays to a single point. The reduction
starts with the question posed, the shape of the lens in question, and
leads us back from that by posing a series of presupposed questions. In
order to determine the shape of the lens in question, we must deter-
mine the law of refraction, i.e., the law that governs the bending of
light. But in order to determine that, we must determine the way
light is altered when it passes from one medium to another. But to
determine that we must determine how light passes through a medium.
Ultimately, we are led back to the question of the nature of a natural
power. Intuiting the answer to that question, we then pass back the
other way, intuiting from the nature of a natural power the answers to
such questions as the nature of light, the way it passes through a
medium, and ultimately, the law of refraction and the shape of the lens
in question.
Although he is not terribly explicit about it, I think that this proce-
dure is what is behind the view in the Discours and the Essais. This comes
out reasonably clearly in Descartes’ treatment of the rainbow in the
eighth discourse of the Météores.11 There also it is more evident just how
8 See Regula III, AT X 366 ff. 9 See Regula V and VI, AT X 379 ff.
10 See AT X 393 ff.
11 The rainbow is discussed in AT VI, 325 ff. For a more detailed discussion of this case, see
D. Garber, “Descartes and Experiment in the ‘Discourse’ and ‘Essays’ ” in S. Voss, ed.,
Essays in the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993,
pp. 288–301, essay 5 in this volume.
important experiment is to Descartes. The problem posed is the expla-
nation in corpuscular terms of the phenomenon of the rainbow.
Descartes begins with the experimental and observational fact that the
rainbow consists of two bows of color that are always at a characteristic
angle with respect to sunlight, 42 and 52 degrees, to be exact. Experi-
ment is then appealed to, again, to reduce the question, the cause of
the observed phenomena, to simpler questions. For example, the fact
that color can be produced in a prism shows that the cause of color has
nothing to do with a curved surface, and arises when light passes from
one medium into another; in this way, the question of the genesis of
color is “reduced” to the question as to how light is changed in passing
from one medium to another. One proceeds in this way until reaching
something about which one has direct intuitive knowledge, in this case
the nature of a natural power. The causal explanation is completed
when one can do a derivation of the observed phenomena from the
intuition of the most general principles, using the causal paths sug-
gested by the auxiliary experiments and observations that constitute the
reduction (“from the way in which light changes when passing from
one medium to another, it follows that color is . . .”); the derivation of
the phenomena from the most general causes then displays the causal
explanation.12 In this case, Descartes uses this kind of procedure to
establish, with certainty, presumably, the corpuscular substructure that
constitutes the rainbow: it is an arrangement of water droplets of appro-
priate size and arrangement to reflect and refract the incoming sun-
light and cause the bands of color that we see in the sky.
This obviously uses experiment, like hypothetical argument, and like
hypothetical argument, the point seems to be to fit a hypothesis to the
phenomena. But there are important differences. First of all, the
microstructure of the rainbow is not hypothesized to fit the phenom-
ena; it is derived making use of the phenomena. At no point in the pro-
cedure does one make a hypothesis; when properly used, observation
is supposed to lead us directly to the underlying mechanism. But more
important, unlike hypothetical argument, the phenomena have no
validity independent of the causal explanation proposed. Descartes’
account of the rainbow begins with an observation about the charac-
teristic angles of the two bows that make up the rainbow; at the end of
the argument, these angles are derived from his causal account.
Descartes remarks, though, that other observers have observed differ-
12 See D. Garber, “Descartes and Experiment,” cit., pp. 95–101 in this volume.
ent values for these angles. His comment is very significant: “This shows
how little faith one should have in observations that are not accompa-
nied by the true reason.”13 It is only after we give an explanation, a
derivation of the phenomena from first principles that the phenomena
enter the realm of genuine facts, despite the fact that it was the
observed phenomena that started the process in the first place. Obser-
vation and experiment may pose problems for us, and may suggest
causal paths for their explanation, but they are not facts until they are
successfully deduced from first principles. This is a use of experiment,
to be sure, but not an hypothetical argument. Experience is used rather
in the way in which we use diagrams in geometry. We can carefully draw
diagrams on paper, carefully measure sides, angles, and arcs, and
hypothesize relationships. But it is only the actual proof of a theorem
that establishes anything as true.
But why didn’t Descartes want to make the direct appeal to intuition
more visibly than he did in the Discours and Essais? Why did he think it
necessary to use hypothetical argument if it was intuition that he really
preferred?
Let me remind you of a passage I cited earlier. Referring to the sup-
positions he actually used in the Météores and the Dioptrique, Descartes
writes:
And I have called them “suppositions” simply to make it known that I think
that I can deduce them from the primary truths I have expounded above;
but I have deliberately avoided carrying out these deductions in order to
prevent certain ingenious persons from taking the opportunity to construct,
on what they believe to be my principles, some extravagant philosophy for
which I shall be blamed.14
Now it is clear enough how the appeal to intuition involves us in the

foundations of Descartes’ philosophy; the intuitions that he leads us to
will reveal the very foundations of his natural philosophy, the nature of
body, the nature of a natural power, the nature of light, etc. But why
would he want to hide that? Why shouldn’t he, on the contrary, want
to proclaim his new ideas to the world in the most public way?
To understand why not, we must put ourselves back into Descartes’
shoes in the mid-1630s. Descartes knew that matters were somewhat
delicate as far as he was concerned. He knew that his philosophy was
in contradiction with the official Aristotelian philosophy, taught both
13 AT VI 340. 14 AT VI 76.
at Catholic universities, like the University of Paris, and at Protestant
schools, like the University of Utrecht. That didn’t seem to bother him
when he wrote Le Monde in the early 1630s, explicitly attacking the
sterility of the Aristotelian orthodoxy, indeed, even mocking the Aris-
totelian definition of motion! But Descartes was seriously taken aback
by the condemnation of Galileo in 1633. He withdrew Le Monde, and,
indeed, renounced any ambitions to publish his thought. That did not
last long, though, and within a short time, Descartes was making plans
for a new publication, the Discours and Essais. But there was to be a
crucial difference between Le Monde and this later work. Le Monde told
all, and gave the foundations of Descartes’ thought, which made it clear
that he rejected forms and qualities, and placed the sun at the center
of the planetary system, making the earth just another planet. But in
the Discours and Essais, all of this was to be hidden. In writing the Essais,
Descartes hoped only to “choose some topics which would not be too
controversial, which would not force me to divulge more of my princi-
ples than I wished to, and which would demonstrate clearly enough
what I could or could not do in the science.”15
In the mid- and late 1630s, then, we have a rather clear answer to
the questions posed about the knowledge of particulars. While it may
be hypothetical argument that Descartes chooses for presenting his
conclusions in his published works, it is really the appeal to intuition
that is close to his heart. Intuition, the immediate apprehension of
truth, and its coordinate faculty, deduction, lead us to a comprehen-
sion of the particular nature, the corpuscular substructure that is the
ground of the manifest properties of things. While experiment comes
in, it is just an auxiliary to the intuition and deduction. Reason would
seem to reign, with experiment in the subordinate position of a trusted
advisor, at best.
Or so it would seem. But all is not well. The intuition that is at the
core of Descartes’ solution to the problem of particular natures and
corpuscular substructures at this time is profoundly mysterious. Can we
really intuit the nature of a natural power? The nature of light? Under-
standing deduction in the strict sense Descartes intends, can we really
deduce from these things that we are supposed to know the way in
which color arises in the rainbow from the passage of light from one
medium to another? As attractive as the view in the Regulae and Discours
15 AT VI 75. For a fuller account of the story, see D. Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics,
chapter 1.
may seem to be at first glance, I find it ultimately very unsatisfying.
Though it promises to reveal the hidden nature of things, to make
occult qualities and hidden mechanisms manifest, the process by which
such hidden natures and mechanisms are supposed to be revealed, the
intuition and deduction to which Descartes appeals are themselves
hidden and occult in the extreme. This is particularly so when applied
to the knowledge of particular natures. And, I suspect, Descartes
himself came to realize that as well.
2. Knowledge of Particulars in the Principia Philosophiae

Now I would like to turn away from the period of the Discours and Essais,
and toward the later period, in the early 1640s, when Descartes was
working on his Principia Philosophiae. From the very title it is evident that
he had set aside his earlier scruples, and had decided that he would
present his whole system, his true views grounded in their proper meta-
physical foundations. The Discours had been published, as had the Med-
itations, and the sky had not fallen on Descartes’ head. So, he judged,
it was the time to reveal all. And so, in the Principia Descartes begins
with his first philosophy (Part I), proceeding from there to the general
part of his physics (Part II), including the nature of body, motion, and
the laws of motion, before descending to particulars in the final two
parts, cosmology and the heavens (Part III) and terrestrial physics (Part
IV). In the Principia, especially the final two parts, Descartes is very
much concerned with the nature of particulars, their corpuscular sub-
structures, and offers a number of specific analyses. But, we might ask,
how does he claim to have knowledge of such particular natures and
corpuscular substructures?
There is reason to believe that Descartes was still, in a way, attracted
by the appeal to intuition that we saw displayed in the case of the lens
from the Regulae or the rainbow example in the Météores, and still some-
what suspicious of hypothetical argument, at least as a preferred way of
establishing his conclusions. For example, in the opening sections of
Part III, Descartes presents a variety of astronomical phenomena to con-
sider. Before presenting them, though, he writes:
Our purpose is not to use these phenomena as the basis for proving anything
[ad aliquid probandum], for we aim to deduce an account of effects from their
causes, not to deduce an account of causes from their effects. The intention
is simply to direct our mind to a consideration of some effects rather than
others from among the countless effects which we take to be producible from
the selfsame causes.16
Similarly, in the middle of Part IV, Descartes presents an account of

the nature and corpuscular substructure of the magnet. Some sections
after presenting his account of the magnet, he gives a list of thirty-four
phenomena that he thinks can be explained by his theory. This list of
experimental facts is preceded by the following remarks:
All these things [i.e., the previously presented account of the nature of the
magnet] follow from the principles of Nature expounded above, in such a
way that even if I were not considering those magnetic properties which I
have undertaken to explain here [i.e., the experimental phenomena that he
is about to present], I nonetheless would not judge these things to be other-
wise. However, we shall see that with their help [i.e., the help of the account
of the magnet, iron, etc., that which follows from his principles] a reason for
all those properties is furnished so clearly and perfectly that this fact also
would seem sufficient to convince us of the truth of these things, even if we
did not know that they followed from the principles of Natreu.17
Descartes here does admit that the properties of the magnet discov-
ered by experiment certainly do support the account he earlier gave of
the nature of the magnet on other grounds, and had he not had such
a priori grounds, the experimental fit would have sufficed. As in the
Discours and Essais, it does seem as if hypothetical argument is, at best,
a second-best form of argument, and, one might suppose, the appeal
to intuition is to be preferred.
But I think things are more complex than that. Indeed, there is very
good reason to believe that in the Principia, Descartes ends by com-
mitting himself to the very sort of hypothetical argument that he so
clearly rejected in his earlier writings.
Descartes turns to the question of the knowledge of particular
natures and corpuscular substructure at the very end of the book, in
Part IV. Descartes reminds us that on his view, bodies are made up of
small particles, corpuscles too small for us to see. “Who can doubt,” he
writes, “that there are many bodies so minute that we do not detect
them by any of our senses?”18 But, as Descartes realizes, this raises an
important epistemological question: “In view of the fact that I assign
determinate shapes, sizes, and motions to the imperceptible particles
of bodies just as if I had seen them, but nonetheless maintain that they
cannot be perceived, some people may be led to ask how I know what
16 Principia, III 4. 17 Ibid. IV 145. 18 Ibid. IV 201.

these particles are like.”19 His answer is this (at least in the Latin edition
of 1644, a bit expanded in the French edition of 1647):
First of all I took the simplest and best-known principles, knowledge of which
is naturally implanted in our minds; and working from these I considered,
in general terms, first, what are the principal differences which can exist
between the sizes, shapes, and positions of bodies which are imperceptible
by the senses merely because of their small size, and second, what observable
effects would result from their various interactions. Later on, when I observed
just such effects in objects that can be perceived by the senses, I judged that
they in fact arose from just such an interaction of bodies that cannot be per-
ceived – especially since it seemed impossible to think up any other expla-
nation for them.20
The view seems quite clearly to be what I called hypothetical argu-

ment earlier. We begin by conjecturing an hypothetical substructure
that, we hope, explains the phenomena. For example, we suppose that
water is made of eel-shaped particles of a particular size and shape, or
that earth is made up of branch-shaped particles that interconnect with
one another. From the conjectured structure we then derive observa-
tional consequences, consequences which are compared against expe-
rience. To the extent, then, that the observable consequences tally
against what we actually observe in the world, the conjectured struc-
ture, the conjectured cause, is “proved by the effects.” After a brief
exposition of what would appear to be hypothetical argument,
Descartes adds a further refinement of this:
But we shall know that we have determined such causes correctly afterwards,
when we notice that they serve to explain not only the effects which we were
originally looking at, but all these other phenomena, which we were not
thinking of beforehand.21
In this way, the proof is stronger to the extent that the effects
explained were not known at the time that the hypothesis was first put
forward.
Descartes also notes the way in which he came to formulate the
hypotheses that he puts to the test. He writes:
In this matter I was greatly helped by considering artifacts. For I do not
recognize any difference between artifacts and natural bodies except that
the operations of artifacts are for the most part performed by mechanisms
which are large enough to be easily perceivable by the senses. . . . The effects
19 Ibid. IV 203. 20 Ibid. IV 203. 21 Ibid. III 42.

produced in nature, by contrast, almost always depend on structures which
are so minute that they completely elude our senses.22
And so, Descartes proposes:

No one who uses his reason will, I think, deny the advantage of using what
happens in large bodies, as perceived by our senses, as a model [exemplum]
for our ideas about what happens in tiny bodies which elude our senses
merely because of their small size.23
Putting all these considerations together, the procedure seems to

be this, in the end. We begin with our experience of everyday things in
the world, machines of various sorts, perhaps bushes whose branches
become entangled, grapes in vats, eels in buckets. On the basis of this
experience we conjecture possible substructures to explain the behav-
ior of things. For example, we might conjecture that the particles of
earth are branched like bushes, to explain why it is that earth coheres
in solid clumps, or that water is made up of eel-shaped particles that
can easily pass over one another, to explain why water is liquid. We then
derive new observable phenomena from our conjectured structure. If
the consequences so derived are actually observed, then the conjecture
is proved, or, at least, made credible.
So far so good. But while Descartes seems reasonably clear about the
new way of finding knowledge of these substructures, he is not so clear
about the status of such knowledge. How certain can we be of particu-
lar natures discovered and “proved” in this way? Here there seems to
be at least some ambivalence in Descartes’ view.
At one extreme, Descartes seems on at least one occasion to suggest
that this procedure gives us genuinely certain knowledge of the inner
structure of things. He writes:
It could scarcely happen that a cause from which all phenomena can clearly be deduced
might be false. . . . We would seem to be doing God an injustice if we suspected
that the causes of things discovered in this way were false, as if He had given
us such an imperfect nature that we could be deceived by reason, even when
we were using it properly.24
22 Ibid. IV 203. 23 Ibid. IV 201.

24 Ibid. III 43. This is a very strong reading of this passage. The words omitted in the quo-
tation in the text are as follows: “Suppose, then, that we use only principles which we see
to be utterly evident, and that all our subsequent deductions follow by mathematical rea-
soning.” . . . This suggests that Descartes may have intended to make the somewhat weaker
point that if we begin with intuition, and proceed by deduction, then we are entitled to
certainty.
Sometimes, though, Descartes suggests more modestly that while we
may lack the absolute certainty we have in God, mathematics, and the
distinction between mind and body, we still have what he calls moral
certainty about the conjectured corpuscular substructure of particular
things. He writes:
It would be disingenuous, however, not to point out that some things are con-
sidered as morally certain, that is, as having sufficient certainty for applica-
tion to ordinary life, even though they may be uncertain in relation to the
absolute power of God.25
Descartes then goes on to compare our situation with respect to the

hidden natures of particular things with the person trying to decode
a letter. If by replacing some letters with others in an orderly way,
someone can turn the text into one that makes sense,
he will be in no doubt that the true meaning of the letter is contained in
these words. It is true that his knowledge is based merely on a conjecture,
and it is conceivable that the writer [intended] a different message; but this
possibility is so unlikely . . . that it doesn’t seem credible.26
What Descartes is talking about here is not just the corpuscular sub-
structures of particular things, but also the general principles on which
they are based. But his remarks here would seem to hold true for the
particular substructures that Descartes is positing in the Principia.
Elsewhere still in the Principia Descartes takes a step beyond even
moral certainty when he suggests that the particular natures he posits
may well be false, however useful they may be as a guide to life. He
writes:
With regard to the things which cannot be perceived by the senses, it is enough to explain
their possible nature, even though their actual nature may be different. However,
although we can understand how all the things in nature could have arisen
in this way, it should not therefore be inferred that they were in fact made
in this way. Just as the same craftsman could make two clocks which tell the
time equally well and look completely alike from the outside but have com-
pletely different assemblies of wheels inside, so the supreme craftsman of the
real world could have produced all that we see in several different ways. . . .
I shall think that I have achieved enough provided only that what I have
written is such as to correspond accurately with all the phenomena of nature.
[French version: We shall achieve our aim irrespective of whether these
25 Ibid. IV 205. 26 Ibid.

imagined causes are true or false, since the result is taken to be no different,
as far as the observable effects are concerned.] This will indeed be sufficient
for application to ordinary life, since medicine and mechanics, and all the
other arts which can be fully developed with the help of physics are directed
only toward items that can be perceived by the senses and are therefore to
be counted among the phenomena of nature.27
Similarly, Descartes writes that he wants the causes he sets out to be

mere hypotheses, whose truth is irrelevant. Even if one of his hypothe-
ses is taken to be false, he writes,
I think that I shall have achieved something sufficiently worthwhile if every-
thing deduced from it agrees with our observations; for if this is so, we shall
see that our hypothesis yields just as much practical benefit for our lives as
we would have derived from knowledge of the actual truth.28
Indeed, he then goes on to make a hypothesis that he knows to be

false, that God created the world not as is set out in Genesis, but in an
initial state of chaos, from which everything we see around us follows
out by way of the laws of nature alone.29 This is not the first time that
Descartes has said such things. In the beginning of the Dioptrique, when
setting out the “suppositions” that he will use in the course of that work,
Descartes notes:
In this I am imitating the astronomers, whose assumptions are almost all false
or uncertain, but who nevertheless draw many very true and certain conse-
quences from them because they are related to various observations they have
made.30
Like the astronomers, he argues, what counts is the ability to predict

new phenomena, and not the truth of the hypothesis. In 1637 this was
only to justify using hypothetical argument as a provisional mode of
exposition, a way of presenting the results of Descartes’ physics without
having to present its foundations. But in 1644 Descartes seems to be
saying that this is all we can expect from his physics as far as knowledge
of particulars is concerned, conjectures that we have every reason to
believe may well be false, but which are useful in the prediction of
phenomena. What is extremely interesting here is Descartes’ rather
cavalier attitude toward truth when it comes to the corpuscular sub-
27 Ibid. IV 204, Latin version with French variant inserted.

28 Ibid. III 44. 29 See ibid., III 45.
30 AT VI 83; for other discussions of the use of false or questionable hypotheses among the
astronomers, see AT VII 349; AT X 417; AT II 198–99.
structures and particular natures that he is discussing: It simply does not
matter if the conjectures are false, as long as they agree with the phe-
nomena of experiment and observation. What is important for Descartes
is now simply that the consequences of his conjectured particular natures
agree with experience. For if they do, then whether true or false, they
can be used to predict future experience, and in that way serve as reli-
able guides to life. In this way we can say that for Descartes, experience
doesn’t confirm the truth of conjectures about the corpuscular sub-
structure, but their reliability as predictors of future experience.
The claim that the beliefs about corpuscular substructure arrived at
through hypothetical argument are only morally certain, or even false
is highly significant. In his very early Regulae, Descartes was quite certain
that anything less than absolutely certain knowledge was simply not
worth having. In Rule 1 he declares that “the aim of our studies should
be to direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgments
about whatever comes before it.” Rule 2 is even more demanding: “We
should attend only to those objects of which our minds seem capable
of having certain and indubitable cognition.”31 This strict view of
what we as investigators are seeking is, I think, reflected in the official
view of the Discours and Essais. Descartes’ insistence that he is using
hypothetical argument only as a convenient way of presenting his view
without divulging its full foundations, and his at least implicit claim that
his conclusions really come from intuition and deduction is, I think,
connected with this earlier commitment to certainty; Descartes, I think,
was under the illusion that his appeal to intuition yielded certain knowl-
edge of the inner nature of things. But Descartes is clear that whatever
its virtues, hypothetical argument does not yield certainty, and in
endorsing it in the Principia, he is clearly changing his view in a very
significant way.
Indeed, in treating our knowledge of the inner structure of things
in the way in which he does, as arguing that it provides us not with cer-
tainty but only with a guide to life, Descartes is placing our knowledge
of the inner nature of things at an epistemological level no higher than
that of sensation itself, and perhaps even lower. In the Meditations,
Descartes characterizes sensation as follows:
The proper purpose of the sensory perceptions given me by nature is simply
to inform the mind of what is beneficial or harmful for the composite of
31 AT X 359, 362.
which the mind is a part; and to this extent they are sufficiently clear and dis-
tinct. But I misuse them by treating them as reliable touchstones for imme-
diate judgments about the essential nature of the bodies located outside us;
yet this is an area where they provide only very obscure information.32
This, in a way, is the most that we can hope for from our hypotheses
about the inner nature of particular things as well, that they will provide
us predictions about what to expect in the world, and in that way, help
us to survive in this uncertain world; this is just what it means for a belief
to have moral certainty. But perhaps even this is too much to expect.
Descartes infers from his account of sensation that since it is given to
us as a guide of life, we know that it is, in a sense, trustworthy: “I know
that in matters regarding the well-being of the body, all my senses report
the truth much more frequently than not.”33 But we can’t even say
this about our conjectures about hidden natures; for all we know they
may be genuinely false. Nor does it really matter to us, as long as the
phenomena they entail constitute a reliable guide to life. Regarded
in this way, the hidden mechanism, the corpuscular substructure, the
real nature of a body has become a mere calculating device for pre-
dicting future phenomena, and lost the status of even being a candi-
date for knowledge or ignorance; all that really seems to count are the
phenomena.
The progression here is very significant. We began in the early
Regulae and the later Discours with certain knowledge, and progressed
in the Principia to mere moral certainty and genuine ignorance;
from the certainty of intuition to the lesser grade of certainty associ-
ated with the senses, good enough for guiding life, but not for finding
truth. But, at the same time, we also passed from a certain knowledge
of hidden natures, obtained through a hopelessly obscure cognitive
process (intuition), to a clear and manifest cognitive process (analogy
and hypothetical argument) that claims to give us not truth, but only
utility.
Why the change? In defending his use of hypothetical argument, it
is important to remember that Descartes can’t appeal to the need to
hide his views any more; he has made the decision to go public with
the foundations of his physics, and cannot use the need to hide them
as a justification for his use of this apparently inferior way of arguing.
One can only suppose that Descartes adopts hypothetical argument as
32 AT VII 83. 33 AT VII 89.

a way of finding particular natures because he genuinely believes that
this is the best that he can do. Perhaps he came to appreciate the obscu-
rity of the appeal to intuition, his earlier conception of how corpuscu-
lar substructures are to be found, and saw in hypothetical argument the
clarity he sought, even if it meant sacrificing certainty. Perhaps in actu-
ally working out and defending his views on the inner nature of things,
he came to appreciate the sheer complexity of nature, and saw in hypo-
thetical argument a better way of coming to grips with the world. But
for whatever reason, Descartes was led to give up his earlier extravagant
claims about what we can know and how, in favor of the relatively more
modest claims in the Principia.
PART III
MIND, BODY, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

7
MIND, BODY, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

IN DESCARTES AND LEIBNIZ
One of the central doctrines of Descartes’ metaphysics was his division

of the created world into two kinds of stuff: mental substance whose
essence is thought and material substance whose essence is extension.
And one of the central problems that later philosophers had with
Descartes’ doctrine was understanding how these two domains, the
mental and the material, relate to one another. Descartes’ solution was
to claim that these two domains can causally interact with one another,
ABBREVIATIONS
Books and Collections

C Couturat, L., ed., Leibniz: Opuscules et Fragments Inédits (Paris: 1903).
G Gerhardt, C. I., ed., Leibniz: Philosophischen Schriften (Berlin: 1875–1890).
GM Gerhardt, C. I., ed., Leibniz: Mathematische Schriften (Berlin: 1849–1855).
L Loemker, L., ed. and trans. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosphical Papers and
Letters, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: 1969).
M Mason, H. T., ed. and trans. The Leibniz–Arnauld Correspondence (Manchester:
1967).
NE Langley, A. G., ed. and trans. Leibniz: New Essays Concerning Human Understand-
ing (La Salle, IL, 1949).
Individual Works
DM Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique. Found in G IV 427–63 and translated in L
303–28.
Mon. Leibniz, Monodologie. Found in G VI 607–23 and translated in L 643–52.
PA Descartes, Les passions de l’âme. Found in AT XI 291–497.
Theod. Leibniz, Essais de theodicée. Found in G VI 21–471.
References to books and collections are given by volume (when appropriate) and page.
References to individual works are given by part (in the case of Pr) and section number.
Original language citations are given first, followed by an English translation in parentheses
when available.
133
134 mind, body, and the laws of nature
that bodily states can cause ideas, and that volitions can cause bodily
states. But this claim raises a number of serious questions. The most
obvious problem arises from the radical distinction that Descartes draws
between the two domains and from our difficulty in conceiving how two
sorts of things so different could ever interact with one another. As
the Princess Elisabeth complained to Descartes, “it is easier for me
to concede matter and extension to the mind than [it is for me to
concede] the capacity to move a body and to be affected by it to an
immaterial thing.”1 Though the story is complex, it is generally held
that this problem led later in the century to the doctrine of occasion-
alism, in which the causal link between mind and body was held to
be not a real efficient cause but an occasional cause. Thus, it was
claimed, it is God who causes ideas in minds on the occasion of
appropriate events in the material world and events in the material
world on the occasion of an appropriate act of will.2 The causal link
between mind and body remains but is reinterpreted as an occasional
causal link, a causal link mediated by God. But Descartes’ interaction-
ism raises another problem as well. For the seventeenth century, the
material world was thought to be governed by a network of physical
laws. But, it would seem, if the material world is governed by law, then
there can be no room for minds to act; if mind can be either the effi-
cient or the occasional cause of changes in the material world, then, it
would seem, physical laws must fail to hold in any system that contains
animate bodies, bodies under the influence of minds.3 Particularly vul-
nerable to such violations are the conservation laws, laws that stipulate
that certain physical quantities must remain constant over time, since
it is difficult to see how a mind could influence the course of the mate-
rial world, either by itself or with the intermediation of God, without
altering some physical magnitude. Leibniz seizes upon just this feature
of Descartes’ position in an argument intended to persuade us to reject
1 AT III 685.
2 The most prominent adherent of this position is, of course, Nicolas Malebranche. See his
The Search after Truth and Elucidations of the Search after Truth, ed. and trans. by Thomas
Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1980), pp.
446–52 and 657–85; or Dialogues on Metaphysics, ed. and trans. by Willis Doney (New York:
Abaris Books, 1980), pp. 144–69.
3 In this essay, the term “animate body” will be used to designate any body related in an
appropriate way to a mind or soul, as, for example, the human body is for both Descartes
and Leibniz. This has the unfortunate consequence that on my somewhat special use of
the term Cartesian animals must be considered inanimate. But I could find no more natural
way of designating the special class of bodies with which I will be concerned in this essay.
descartes and leibniz 135
interactionism and accept his doctrine of pre-established harmony.
Leibniz argues:
M. Descartes wanted . . . to make a part of the action of the body depend on
the mind. He thought he knew a rule of nature which, according to him,
holds that the same quantity of motion is conserved in bodies. He did not
judge it possible that the influence of the mind could violate this law of
bodies, but he believed, however, that the mind could have the power to
change the direction of the motions which are in bodies. . . . [But] two impor-
tant truths on this subject have been discovered since M. Descartes. The first
is that the quantity of absolute force which, indeed, is conserved, is different
from the quantity of motion, as I have demonstrated elsewhere. The second
discovery is that the same direction is conserved among all of those bodies
taken together which one supposes to act on one another, however they may
collide. If this rule had been known to M. Descartes, he would have rendered
the direction of bodies as independent of the mind as their force. And
I believe that this would have led him directly to the hypothesis of pre-
established harmony, where these rules led me. Since beside the fact that the
physical influence of one of these substances on the other is inexplic-
able, I considered that the mind cannot act physically on the body without
completely disordering the laws of nature.4
Leibniz’s argument is elegant and straightforward. The claim is that

even though Descartes thought that he could reconcile the causal inter-
action of mind and body with the universality of physical law, he was
mistaken. The true laws of nature block Descartes’ solution, Leibniz
argues, and lead us away from causal interactionism and directly to the
hypothesis of pre-established harmony as the true account of the appar-
ent relations that hold between the mental and the material.
In this paper, I shall explore this argument of Leibniz’s in some
detail. I shall begin with a careful exposition of the argument, sketch-
ing in some of the details of his position and Descartes’ that Leibniz
leaves out. I shall then examine the extent to which the position Leibniz
attacks is the position that Descartes actually held and argue that
Descartes’ actual position allows him a plausible answer to Leibniz’s
attack on interactionism. In the end, I shall argue that the opposition
between Cartesian interactionism and Leibnizian harmony is only a
symptom of a much deeper difference, a difference between two
4 Theod. 60–61. See also Mon. 80; G II 94 (M 117–18); G III 607 (L 655); G IV 497–98;
G VI 540 (L 587). The argument in these passages concerns only the metal causation of
physical events. Consequently, I will not discuss the problems raised by the physical causa-
tion of mental events.
opposing conceptions of the laws of nature and of the place of mind
in the physical world.
1. Motion, Momentum, and Pre-Established Harmony

Cartesian physics is a physics of geometrical bodies, bodies all of whose
properties are modes of extension, acting on one another through
direct impact. Basic to such a physics, of course, are the laws of motion
and impact, the laws that govern the only kinds of change allowed in
the world of material things. And basic to the laws of motion and impact
for Descartes is his conservation law, derived directly from the activity
of God. As Descartes wrote in his Principia:
God . . . in the beginning created matter along with motion and rest, and now,
through His ordinary concourse alone, conserves just as much motion and
rest in the whole of it [i.e., the material world] as He put there at that time.
For although that motion is only a mode of moving matter, it has a certain
determinate quantity which can easily be understood to remain always the
same in the totality of things, even though it is changed in the individual parts.
And so, for example, we believe that when one part of matter moves twice as
fast as another, and the latter is twice as big as the former, there is as much
motion in the smaller as in the larger; and as much motion as is lost by one
part slowing down is gained by another of equal size moving more quickly.5
Descartes’ example suggests that his conservation principle can be sum-

marized by a simple quantitative law: The total quantity of motion, as mea-
sured by the mass of each body multiplied by its speed, remains constant
for the whole of the material world.6
It is tempting, but wrong, to assimilate Descartes’ conservation law to
the modern principle of the conservation of momentum. The conser-
vation of momentum, a law that entered classical physics only later in the
seventeenth century, holds that the total quantity of momentum remains
constant, where momentum is understood as mass times velocity and
5 Pr II 36. The conservation law is first stated in the ill-fated Le Monde. See AT XI 43.
6 This is the standard reading of Descartes’ law. It should be noted that my use of the term
“mass” here is anachronistic. Although it helps one to see the relations between Descartes’
incorrect law and later conservation principles, such as Leibniz’s, Descartes himself would
have given his law in terms of “size” rather than “mass.” For a discussion of some of the
further intricacies in interpreting Descartes’ conservation law, see Pierre Costabel, “Essai
critique sur quelques concepts de la mécanique cartésienne.” Archives internationales d’his-
toire des sciences, Vol. 20 (1967), pp. 235–52, esp. pp. 240–51. None of these questions of
interpretation are relevant to the use Leibniz makes of Descartes’ conservation law in the
argument under discussion, though.
where velocity is understood as a vector quantity, speed and its direction.
Thus, the law of the conservation of momentum governs both the speed
and the directions that bodies have. So, for example, if a body moving
from right to left were to reverse its direction (because of a collision with
another body, say), then the conservation of momentum would require
that some other body or bodies (say, the body that had been hit) would
have to begin moving at an appropriate speed from left to right in order
to preserve the total momentum in the world.
Descartes’ conservation law is quite a different matter, though. Basic
to Descartes’ physics is a strict distinction between the motion or quan-
tity of motion a body has, and its determination as he calls it, roughly speak-
ing, the direction in which that body is moving.7 Now, even though this
distinction between (quantity of ) motion and determination does not
explicitly appear in any statement of Descartes’ conservation law, it is
clear both from the lack of any mention of determination in that law and
from the way Descartes actually applies the conservation law that it is
meant to govern the motion alone. Thus, for example, when discussing
impact, Descartes quite carefully separates out the two factors in the phys-
ical situation, using the conservation law only to determine the postcol-
lision speeds of the bodies in question.8 So, if in a system of bodies one
body changes its direction, then, as long as it maintains its original speed,
there is no change in the total quantity of motion; no compensatory
change in the direction of another body is required to satisfy Descartes’
law, as is the case with the conservation of momentum.9 In holding that
7 The distinction is most clearly drawn in Pr II 41. Once again, this is the standard reading.
Though it is sufficient for our purposes here, Descartes’ notion of determination is much
more complex than the simple equation of determination and direction would suggest. On
this, see Pierre Costabel, op. cit., 236–40; J. Ohana, “Note sur la théorie cartésienne de la
direction du mouvement,” Les Etudes philosophiques, Vol. 16 (1961), pp. 313–16; Ole
Knudsen and Kurt Pedersen, “The Link between ‘Determination’ and Conservation of
Motion in Descartes’ Dynamics,” Centaurus, Vol. 13 (1968–1969), pp. 183–86; A. I. Sabra,
Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (London: Oldbourne Press, 1967), pp. 116–27; and
Alan Gabbey, “Force and Inertia in the Seventeenth Century: Descartes and Newton,” in
Stephen Gaukroger, ed., Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (Sussex: Harvester
Press, 1980), pp. 230–320, esp. pp. 248–61.
8 See, e.g., Pr II 41; AT IV 185–86; AT VI 94, 97.
9 This is exactly the situation envisioned in Descartes’ infamous fourth rule of impact, given
in Pr II 49. According to that rule, if C is larger than B and if C, at rest, is hit by B, then
B will reverse its direction and rebound from the collision with exactly the speed with which
it originally approached C. Strictly speaking, though, even this very simple case would
require innumerable changes in the speeds and directions of other bodies in the system,
since the Cartesian world is a plenum.
the conservation law does not govern the directions in which bodies
move, Descartes is not saying that direction is completely arbitrary. Both
(quantity of ) motion and direction are modes of body, and, as such,
neither will change without an appropriate cause.10 The point is just that
whatever causes might result in changes in direction, such changes in
direction are, by themselves, irrelevant to the law of the conservation of
motion. One can alter the directions in which bodies in the world move
as much as one like, and as long as the speeds remain unchanged, the
total quantity of motion will remain unaltered.
This feature of Descartes’ conservation law opens an obvious possi-
bility with respect to his account of mind-body interaction. Descartes
clearly held that minds can cause events in the physical world. And
it is also at least initially plausible to suppose, as Leibniz did, that
Descartes wanted such interaction to take place without violating his
conservation law. These two commitments can be easily reconciled,
given the particular conservation law that Descartes adopted. If we
suppose that mind acts on body by changing the direction in which some
piece of matter is moving without changing its speed, then the problem
is solved: mind can act on body without violating the conservation law.
Mind can thus fit into the gap left open in Descartes’ conservation law
and help to determine what that law makes no pretense of governing.
We will have to examine the textual evidence there is for attributing
this line of reasoning to Descartes. But it is a position that he could
have taken, and it is clearly the position that Leibniz thought that he
did take.
However, it is just as clear that this is a position that Leibniz does not
think Descartes is entitled to take. As the passage quoted above suggests,
Leibniz’s argument depends crucially on his refutation of Descartes’
conservation law and its replacement by two somewhat different con-
servation principles. The arguments are complex, and a full examina-
tion of them would take us far beyond the scope of this paper. Put
briefly, though, Leibniz was able to show that Descartes’ conservation
law has the absurd consequence that if it were the only law that bodies
in motion were constrained to observe, then it would be possible to
build a perpetual motion machine. More generally, he showed that in
body-body interactions (collisions, for example) governed only by the
principle of the conservation of quantity of motion, it is possible for
10 See Pr II 41; AT III 75; AT IV 185; AT VI 94, 97.

the system to either gain or lose the ability to do work (the ability to
raise a body of a given weight a given height, for example). This situa-
tion violates the principle of the equality of cause and effect, a meta-
physical principle that, Leibniz held, governs this best of all possible
worlds. According to that principle:
The entire effect is equal to the full cause, and therefore, there is no mechan-
ical perpetual motion, nor can a cause produce an active effect which can do
more than the cause itself, but neither can there be an entire effect that can
do less than the cause itself.11
Leibniz argues that if the equality of cause and effect is to be main-

tained, we must conserve not quantity of motion, mass times speed, but
a different physical magnitude, living force (vis viva), which, he argues,
is measured by mass times the square of the speed.12 This new law is an
improvement over Descartes’ to be sure. But by itself it does not seem
to constrain directionality any more than Descartes’ conservation law
did. In a system of bodies, each of which is governed only by the con-
servation of living force, it seems as if one could change the directions
of the bodies without changing the living force in the system. However,
from this basic conservation law Leibniz is able to derive a second con-
servation law, a new law that constrains directionality in a way that
Descartes’ law does not.
Consider an aggregate of bodies in motion that constitutes a closed
system, i.e., one in which no force is being added from the outside. This
system contains living force in two different respects. First of all, each
body in the aggregate has its own force, as measured by the mass of
each body times the square of its speed. The sum of all these individ-
ual forces is what Leibniz calls the “respective or proper force” of the
aggregate. But in addition, the aggregate has what Leibniz calls “direc-
tive or common force . . . , that by which the aggregate can itself act
11 GM VI 437. See also G III 45–46.

12 This argument is implicit in the critique of Descartes’ conservation law given in Leibniz’s
important “Brief Demonstration of a Notable Error in Descartes . . .” of 1686, the first of
Leibniz’s mature publications in physics. The next of this is given with a later appendix
in GM VI 117–23 (L 296–302). For other presentations of the same basic argument, see,
e.g., DM 17, G IV 370–72 (L 393–95); GM VI 243–46 (L 442–44); GM VI 287–92; etc.
For discussions of the argument, see, e.g., Carolyn Iltis, “Leibniz and the Visa Viva Con-
troversy,” Isis, Vol. 62 (1971), pp. 21–35; George Gale, “Leibniz’ Dynamical Metaphysics
and the Origin of the Vis Viva Controversy,” Systematics, Vol. 11 (1973), pp. 184–207;
and Martial Gueroult, Leibniz: Dynamique et Métaphysique (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967),
pp. 28–34.
externally.”13 This force is the force that the aggregate considered as a
whole has, and it is measured by the total mass of the aggregate times
the square of the speed of the center of mass of the aggregate. Now, just
as the force in each individual body remains unchanged if nothing
external affects it, so should the directive force of the aggregate remain
unchanged if no force is added. But, Leibniz shows, this entails that
within the aggregate any change in the direction of one body (through
a collision with other bodies in the aggregate, say) must be compen-
sated for by a change in the direction of some other body or bodies
in the aggregate (say, the body or bodies hit), or else the speed of the
center of mass of the aggregate as a whole will change, changing the
directive force of the aggregate. Using reasoning like this, Leibniz estab-
lishes that if the total force of an aggregate is to be conserved, then not
only must the respective force be conserved, the mass times the square
of the speed of each individual body in the aggregate, but also the total
quantity of momentum, mass times velocity, speed and direction! And since
the universe as a whole constitutes such an aggregate, the conservation
of momentum must govern the universe as a whole.14 Thus, Leibniz
argues, the principle of equality of cause and effect governs not only
the speeds bodies have but their directions as well; a change in either the
speed or the direction of a given body not compensated for by
appropriate changes in other bodies is not permitted in the best of all
possible worlds.15
13 For the distinction between these two kinds of force, see GM VI 238–39 (L 439); GM VI
462; GM VI 495.
14 The theorem is stated in numerous places. See, e.g., Theod. 61; G II 94 (M 117–18); G
IV 497–98; GM VI 216–17 (NE 658); GM VI 227 (NE 667). A detailed argument is given
in the Dynamica, GM VI 496–500. The crucial lemmas are given on GM VI 440, where
Leibniz argues that “the same power [potentia] remains in any system of bodies not com-
municating with others” and concludes that, since the universe is such a system, “the same
power always remains in the universe.” This kind of argument is somewhat problematic
for Leibniz when applied to momentum, since it is difficult to see what sense he could
make of the speed of the center of mass of the universe as a whole. It should be noted
that “momentum” is not Leibniz’s term for the quantity at issue. Leibniz uses a number
of terms, sometimes “quantity of nisus” (GM VI 462), sometimes (quantity of ) “progress”
(GM VI 216–17 [NE 658]; GM VI 227 [NE 667]) but most often “direction,” “total direc-
tion,” or the like (Theod. 61; Mon. 80; G II 94 [M 117–18]; G III 607 [L 655]; G VI 540
[L 587]; G IV 497; etc.).
15 It seems as if this general kind of argument could have been used directly against Descartes’
conservation law to show that it, too, ought to govern directionality and not just speed.
Thus, Leibniz’s replacement of quantity of motion by vis viva as the physical magnitude
conserved is not, strictly speaking, relevant to the argument against interactionism.
This argument quite effectively blocks the reasoning that Leibniz
attributed to Descartes. There is no room in Leibniz’s conception of
the material world for Cartesian minds to act. Cartesian interactionism
is impossible without a violation of what were for Leibniz the basic meta-
physical and physical laws that govern our world. This, Leibniz claims,
led him and would have led Descartes, if he had grasped the true laws
of nature, to reject interactionism and adopt the hypothesis of pre-
established harmony. The hypothesis of pre-established harmony is, of
course, one of Leibniz’s proudest inventions. In its strictest formula-
tion, it posits a perfect correspondence among the perceptions of all
monads. As such, it is intimately connected with Leibniz’s conception
of the world as a collection of monads that are, by their nature, inca-
pable of any genuine causal interaction.16 But Leibniz also formulates
the doctrine of pre-established harmony in a somewhat different way,
a way that can be understood, argued for, and adopted independently
of Leibniz’s idiosyncratic views about the ultimate nature of the world
and the ultimate reduction of material bodies to well-founded phe-
nomena grounded in a world of monads. In this version, the doctrine
of pre-established harmony is less a claim about the interrelations
among all created substances than it is a claim about two very special
ones, the human mind and the human body. In its less rigorous
formulation, the doctrine states simply that events in the mind and
those in the body correspond to one another not because of any
genuine causal link between the two, as Descartes held, and not because
of the intervening action of God, as the occasionalists would have
it, but because God, in the beginning, created mind and body inde-
pendent of one another in such a way that there would always be an
appropriate correspondence between what was going on in the one and
what was going on in the other. As Leibniz succinctly summarized his
theory:
If we posit the distinction between mind and body, their union can be
explained without the common hypothesis of influence, which cannot be
understood, and without the hypothesis of occasional causes, which summons
a deus ex machina. For GOD from the beginning so constituted both the
mind and the body at the same time, with such wisdom and such skill that
from the first constitution and essence of each, everything that comes about
16 This conception of the doctrine of pre-established harmony is found in G I 382–83; G II

68–70 (M 84–86); G IV 518 (L 493); G VII 412 (L 711–12).
through itself in the one corresponds perfectly to everything that happens
in the other, just as if [something] passed from the one into the other.17
This hypothesis, of course, deals neatly with the problem that had
worried so many about how things as different as minds and bodies
could be causally connected with one another. On Leibniz’s theory they
aren’t. But, in this respect, Leibniz’s theory is at best a small improve-
ment over occasionalism, substituting one large divine labor in creat-
ing mind and body in harmony with one another for numerous lesser
divine actions in coordinating the moment-by-moment states of the two.
The deeper differences between pre-established harmony and occa-
sionalist interactionism become clearer when we examine the problems
raised by physical law. Although occasionalism addresses the problem
of the mechanism of interaction, there is nothing in the occasionalist
position that bears on the problem of interactionist violations of phys-
ical law. For the occasionalist, just as for the direct interactionist, every
voluntary action would seem to violate some law of nature. Not so for
Leibniz’s pre-established harmony. If God can create a world in which
events in minds and bodies can correspond with one another in an
appropriate way without the necessity for either real or occasional
causal links, He can also create things in such a way that this corre-
spondence can take place without violating any of the laws that hold
universally in the physical realm. Thus, Leibniz wrote:
Minds follow their laws, which consist in a certain development of percep-
tions in accordance with goods and evils, and bodies also follow theirs, which
consist in the laws of motion. But these two things entirely different in kind
join together and correspond like two time-pieces perfectly well regulated to
the same time, even though perhaps of entirely different construction.18
Or, even more graphically, Leibniz wrote to Arnauld:

It is thus infinitely more reasonable and more worthy of God to suppose that
He created the machine of the world from the beginning in such a way that
without violating at any moment the two great laws of nature, those of force
and direction, and instead in following them perfectly (excepting the case of
miracles), it happens that the springs of bodies are ready to act of themselves,
as is necessary, just at the moment that the soul has a volition, . . . and thus
17 C 521 (L 269). For other statements of this version of pre-established harmony, see,
e.g., DM 33; G II 57–58 (M 64–65); G II 112–14 (M 144–46); G IV 483–85 (L 457–58);
G IV 498–500 (L 459–60); G IV 520 (L 494); G VII 410–11 (L 710–11); etc.
18 G VI 541 (L 587).
that the union of the mind with the machine of the body and the parts which
it contains and the action of one on the other consist only in that concomi-
tance which marks the admirable wisdom of the creator much better than
does any other hypothesis.19
Given this particular statement of the doctrine, it is clear why Leibniz’s

reflections on mind-body interaction and physical law might have led
him to pre-established harmony. Pre-established harmony seems to be
an attractive way in which a dualist could account for the posited cor-
respondence between acts of will in a nonmaterial mental substance
and appropriate events in a nonmental body without violating any of
the laws of nature that, Leibniz held, govern every event in the mater-
ial world.
2. Interaction and Conservation in Descartes

Leibniz’s argument is an elegant one, a paradigmatic example of the
interconnection between physics and metaphysics that characterizes
rationalist science. And Leibniz seems to have focused on one of
the central questions raised by any dualist interactionist philosophy of
mind. Now, as a purely philosophical argument. Leibniz’s attack on
Descartes is worthy of serious consideration, to be sure.20 But what inter-
ests me here is a somewhat more historical question: Is the position that
Descartes actually held open to this kind of attack?
There is no question but that Descartes held the conservation law to
which Leibniz alludes in his statement of the argument, and there is no
question but that Descartes’ law is wrong and the laws that Leibniz sub-
stitutes for it correct, at least within the world of classical physics. But
Leibniz’s attack on Cartesian interactionism makes at least one further
assumption, the assumption that the laws of nature must, miracles aside,
hold universally, without exception for all bodies in the material world,
including animate bodies like our own. Leibniz certainly believed in the
19 G II 94–95 (M 118). See also Mon. 78; Theod. 62; G II 71 (M 87); G II 74 (M 92); G II
205–6; G IV 484 (L 458); G IV 559–60 (L 577–78); G V 455 (NE 553); G VI 599 (L 637);
G VII 412 (L 712); G VII 419 (L 716–17). These passages make it evident just how deeply
Leibniz was influenced by the materialism of Hobbes and the dual aspect theory of
Spinoza. In these passages, Leibniz emphasizes that every event in the material world has
an explanation in terms of the laws of physics alone.
20 For the classic examination of this objection to dualist interactionism from a purely philo-
sophical point of view, see C. D. Broad, Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trubner and Co., 1925), pp. 103–9.
universality of natural law in this sense and attributed the same belief
to Descartes, claiming that this commitment forced Descartes to hold
that minds can change only the directions in which bodies move and
not their speeds. But curiously enough, even though Leibniz was well
versed in the Cartesian corpus, he refers to no passages from Descartes’
writings to support those attributions. Nor could he have. For a close
examination of Descartes’ writings gives us good reason to believe that
he never held the positions that Leibniz attributed to him, either the
change-of-direction account of mind-body interaction or the universal-
ity of the laws of motion.21
Let us begin with the change-of-direction account of mind-body
interaction. The most striking evidence against the claim that Descartes
held such a position is the simple fact that nowhere in what currently
survives of Descartes’ writings do we find anything like a clear statement
of the account that Leibniz attributed to him; nowhere did he ever say
that he held that minds can only change the direction in which bodies
move. Typically when presenting his position he is content to assert
simply that mind can cause motion in bodies. For example, Descartes
wrote the following passage in a letter to the Princess Elisabeth in the
context of an explanation of the primitive notion we have of the union
of mind and body:
As regards mind and body together, we have only the notion of their union,
on which depends our notion of the mind’s power to move the body [la force
qu’a l’ame de mouuoir le corps], and the body’s power to act on the mind and
cause sensations and passions.22
Similarly, Descartes wrote to Arnauld:

Moreover, that the mind, which is incorporeal, can set a body in motion
[corpus possit impellere] is shown to us every day by the most certain and most
21 Although not generally recognized, this feature of Cartesian thought has been pointed
out from time to time, only to be forgotten and then rediscovered by successive genera-
tions of scholars. On this, see Octave Hamelin, Le Système de Descartes (Paris: Librairie Félix
Alcan, 1911), pp. 372–73; Jean Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Uni-
versitaires de France, 1950), pp. 245–48; Norman Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian
Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 83 n.2; Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (ed.), Descartes:
Passions de l’Ame (Paris: J. Vrin, 1970), p. 92 n.1. The most recent rediscovery is in Peter
Remnant, “Descartes: Body and Soul,” Canadian Journal of Philosphy, Vol. 9 (1979), pp.
377–86. Needless to say, there is substantial overlap between my argument in this section
and the arguments presented in the other commentaries cited. However, the continued
unfamiliarity of this point plus the new bits of evidence I have found make it worthwhile
to review the case for this interpretation once again.
22 AT III 665.
evident experience, without the need of any reasoning or comparison with
anything else.23
And finally, consider a passage that Descartes wrote to Henry More:
The force moving [a body] [vis . . . mouens] can be that of God Himself . . .
or also that of a created substance, like our mind, or that of some other
thing to which He gave the force of moving a body [cui vim dederit corpus
mouendi].24
There is no mention of directionality in these passages. Descartes is

content to say only that our minds have the ability to move our bodies.
But these remarks are, admittedly, casual and were given in the context
of nontechnical and almost off-the-cuff explanations of his position.
However, it is significant that this casual lack of attention to the ques-
tion of change of speed versus change of direction is also found in the
strict and more technical accounts of mind-body interaction that
Descartes gave.
Consider, for example, the discussion of interaction that Descartes
gives in the Passions de l’âme, a sort of auto mechanic’s manual for the
mind-body union, where Descartes outlines in rather specific ways the
nuts and bolts of how the mind acts on the part of the body to which
it is most directly connected, the pineal gland.25 Some of Descartes’
most careful discussions of the direct action of the mind on the pineal
gland there do indeed suggest that at least sometimes the mind acts on
the human body by changing the direction in which the pineal gland
is moving. Thus, Descartes writes in the Passions that “when the mind
wants to remember something, this volition makes the gland incline
23 AT V 222.
24 AT V 403–4. This passage will be discussed in greater detail below.
25 On the direct connection between the mind and the pineal gland, see, e.g., PA 31; AT
VII 86, AT XI 176–77, 183. It should also be noted that, in addition to the direct con-
nection between mind and body, Descartes also holds that by virtue of being directly con-
nected to the pineal gland the mind is indirectly connected to the human body as a whole.
See, e.g., PA 30. Margaret Wilson sees these as two opposing conceptions of mind-body
unity. See her Descartes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 204–20. I see the
two conceptions as perfectly consistent and, in fact, complementary, as their juxtaposition
in PA 30–31 suggests. Though I quote exclusively from the PA in discussing the action of
the mind on the pineal gland, Descartes also discusses this question in the earlier Traité
de l’Homme. But the discussions there are much less useful for our purposes. Most of the
discussions that deal with the pineal gland deal with its role in sensation. See, e.g., AT XI
143–46, 176–77, 181, 183. And when volition is discussed in l’Homme, Descartes gives
almost no detail as to how mind actually manipulates the pineal gland. See, e.g., AT XI
131–32, 179.
successively in different directions [vers divers costez].”26 Similarly, in
talking about the opposition between the mind and the animal spirits,
a bodily substance also capable of moving the pineal gland and, in so
doing, causing both passions and involuntary movement of the body,
Descartes notes that the pineal gland “can be pushed in one direction
[poussée d’un costé ] by the mind, and in another by the animal spirits.”27
But there is nothing to suggest that the only way that the mind acts in
the pineal gland is by changing the direction of its motion. In the Pas-
sions, Descartes often says simply that the pineal gland “can be moved
in different manners by the mind [diversement meuë par l’ame]” or that
a volition of the mind can “make the small gland to which it is closely
joined move in the manner [façon] that is required to produce the
effect which corresponds to that volition.”28 These passages suggest that
the mind can alter the state of the pineal gland in ways other than by
changing its direction.
Descartes’ casual talk of mind simply moving body, both in strict and
technical writings and in looser, nontechnical writings, together with
the lack of any clear positive statement of the change-of-direction
account is evidence enough against Leibniz’s attribution. But, in addi-
tion, there are some passages among Descartes’ writings whose sense
seems to run directly contrary to the account that Leibniz attributes to
Descartes. Consider, for example, some passages of the Passions in
which the mind is said to act on the pineal gland in ways that appear
difficult to reconcile with the change-of-direction account of interac-
tion. Descartes discusses in the Passions the circumstance in which the
animal spirits are moving the gland in such a way as to cause in the
mind a desire for something that the mind wants to avoid, as, for
example, when the animal spirits, stirred up by the sight and smell of
a glass of fine wine, cause the gland to move in such a way as to implant
the passion of desire for the wine in the mind at the same time that the
mind wills that the body abstain. Descartes analyzes this familiar situa-
tion as a struggle (combat) “between the effort by which the [animal]
spirits push the gland to cause the desire for something in the mind,
and that by which the mind pushes it back by the volition it has to avoid
that same thing.”29 Descartes gives a similar account of the conflict
26 PA 42. 27 PA 47. 28 PA 34, PA 41. See also PA 43.

29 PA 47. It is important to note here the distinction between the passion of desire and a
volition.
between the natural tendencies of the pineal gland and the volition of
the mind in his account of how it is that we fix our attention: “Thus
when one wants to hold one’s attention to consider the same object for
some time, this volition holds the gland inclined to the same side
throughout that time.”30 In both these passages, Descartes represents
the mind as resisting the movement that the pineal gland would have,
left to purely mechanical causes; our minds are preventing the gland
from having motion that it would otherwise have. It is difficult to see
how this can be reconciled with the change-in-direction account of
mind-body interaction, and it seems unlikely that Descartes would have
allowed such passages to creep into his most careful account of the
mind’s action on the pineal gland if he genuinely held the account that
Leibniz attributed to him.
Or consider, for instance, the comparison that Descartes draws
between the action of mind on body and the scholastic account of heav-
iness (gravity). According to that theory, at least as Descartes under-
stood it, the heaviness of a body is taken to be a real quality, something
real and distinct from the body itself that causes the body to move
toward the center of the earth.31 Although Descartes rejects this account
of heaviness in favor of a purely mechanical account of the phenome-
non in terms of the laws of motion and impact and the size, shape, and
motion of the particles that make up the heavy body and its ambient
medium, the scholastic theory, still familiar in his day, was of some use
to Descartes in explaining his own account of mind-body interaction.
For, Descartes claims, if one can understand the scholastic account of
heaviness, then one ought to be able to understand how an immater-
ial substance can cause changes in a material substance. Thus, Descartes
wrote to Arnauld:
Many philosophers who think that the heaviness of a stone is a real quality
distinct from the stone believe that they understand well enough how such
a quality can move the stone toward the center of the earth, since they think
that they have a manifest experience of it. I, who have persuaded myself that
there is no such quality in nature, nor thus is there any true idea of it in the
human intellect, believe that they use the idea which they have of incorpo-
real substance to represent that heaviness to themselves. Thus, it is no more
30 PA 43.
31 For a discussion of the scholastic theory of gravity and Descartes’ rejection of it, in the
context of his rejection of substantial forms, see Etienne Gilson, Etudes sur le Rôle de la
Pensée Médiévale dans la Formation du Système Cartésien (Paris: J. Vrin, 1930), pp. 141–90.
difficult for us to understand how mind moves body than it is for them [to
understand] how this heaviness bears a stone downwards.32
This example is intended to take away some of the mystery surround-

ing the question as to how a nonbodily thing can act on a body by giving
an example of a nonbodily thing (the real quality of heaviness) that
Descartes’ contemporaries had no trouble accepting as a cause of
motion. But this would be a curious example to use if Descartes thought
that mind could change only the direction in which a body was moving.
In the case of a body falling toward the center of the earth, there is no
mere change in direction. Rather, the quality of heaviness is thought to
produce new motion in the heavy body where there was none before.
The implication is that mind acts on body in the same way.
This implication is clearest of all in another passage relating the action
of mind on body to heaviness, this time comparing the action of mind
on body not with the scholastic theory of heaviness but with Descartes’
own theory. On Descartes’ account of heavy bodies and free fall, the
falling body is impelled downward toward the center of earth by means
of collisions between that body and other smaller and more quickly
moving bodies in the surrounding medium.33 Thus he wrote in a passage,
ironically enough, preserved only in a copy Leibniz made:
If a body is pushed or is impelled to motion by means of a uniform force
[semper aequali vi], of course imparted to it by mind (for there can be no such
force otherwise), and if it is moved in a vacuum, then it would always take
three times longer to travel from the beginning of the motion to the mid-
point than from the mid-point to the end. However, there can be no such
vacuum. . . . But suppose that the body were impelled by heaviness. Since that
heaviness never acts uniformly like mind, but [acts by] some other body
which already is in motion, is can never happen that a heavy body is impelled
more quickly than that which moves it.34
32 AT V 222–23. See also AT III 667–68; AT VII 441–42.

33 For this account of heaviness and free fall, see, e.g., Pr IV 20. Matters are complicated by
a somewhat different account of heaviness that Descartes offers in Le Monde and mentions
later in the Principia, in accordance with which heaviness is due to the centrifugal force
that pushes the small particles of the subtle matter turning quickly around the earth away
from the center of the earth. On this account, heavy bodies are pushed to the center of
the earth to take the place of the subtle matter that is receding, in accordance with
Descartes’ claim that there can be no vacuum. For this account, see AT XI 72–80 and Pr
IV 23. It is not clear how these two accounts of heaviness are related to one another.
34 AT XI 629–30. This interesting passage comes from a manuscript entitled “Problemata,”
preserved only in a copy Leibniz had made. Though one must use these documents with
some care, the passage seems unquestionably authentic. The (mistaken) formula for the
Descartes’ main point in this passage is the contrast between the uniform
acceleration due to the activity of mind, and the nonuniform accelera-
tion due to heaviness. But it is clear from this passage that Descartes
thought that the action of mind on bodies does not result in a mere
change in direction. Rather, Descartes quite clearly thought, mind can
produce a real change in the speed of a body, if fact, that mind is the only
natural means by which a uniform change in speed is possible.
It is, of course, possible that all the passages I have presented can be
reconciled with the change-of-direction thesis or that Descartes thought
they could or that he actually rendered them consistent with that thesis
in some now lost fragment, perhaps even one that Leibniz saw in Paris
when Clerselier showed him Descartes’ literary remains. But the pas-
sages I have cited, together with the lack of any clear and positive state-
ment of the change-of-direction account in any of the numerous
writings that do survive, make it likely that Descartes just did not hold
the account of mind-body interaction that Leibniz attributed to him. At
the very least, the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to claim that
Leibniz’s account of Descartes is correct.35 This by itself leaves us in the
acceleration of a body in a vacuum given a uniform force is uniquely Cartesian and

appears in a number of documents as the law of free fall for heavy bodies from 1618 to
1629 and is mentioned as a law that Descartes once held in a letter of 1634. See AT X
75f, 219; AT I 71–73, 304–5. For an account of Descartes’ struggles with the problem of
free fall, see Alexander Koyré, Galileo Studies (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press,
1978), pp. 79–94. Dating the fragment, though, is problematic. In this fragment,
Descartes is clearly distinguishing the problem of acceleration given a uniform force from
that of free fall. But until at least 1629 Descartes identified the two problems. See AT I
71–73. This suggests that the passage dates from later than 1629. It is also unlikely that
the passage dates from later than 1640, the last date in which we have evidence of
Descartes worrying about the derivation of the laws of free fall. See AT III 164–65. But it
is hard to date the fragment more closely than that. It may be associated with a letter of
1631 in which Descartes claims that “I can now determine the proportion by which a
descending stone increases its speed, not in vacuo, but in this air” (AT I 231). But it could
just as well be associated with a letter of 1637 in which Descartes asks Mersenne to excuse
him from answering a question “concerning the retardation which the movement of heavy
bodies receives from the air where they move,” claiming that such an account involves his
whole physics and is inappropriate for a letter (AT I 392). External factors suggest a third
date from the mid-1630s. One fragment in the “Problemata” is dated 5 February 1635
and corresponds to material in the Météores of 1637. See AT XI 626.
35 This, of course, raises the question as to why Lebniz attributed the position to Descartes.
The best conjecture is that the change-of-direction account of mind-body interaction was
common among later Cartesians, and Leibniz just assumed that it must have been
Descartes’ position as well. Norman Kemp Smith (op. cit., p. 83 n. 2) cites Clauberg in
this connection. Alan Gabbey has also called my attention to a letter written after
Descartes’ death by Claude Clerselier, Descartes’ friend, translator, and editor, in which
Clerselier argues that mind can change only the direction in which bodies move but
dark about the relations between mind-body interaction and Descartes’
conservation law, however. Even if Descartes did not hold the change-
of-direction account of mind-body interaction, perhaps he had some
other way of rendering interactionism consistent with a universal con-
servation law. Perhaps he would have argued that whenever a mind puts
a body into motion, something somewhere else in the material world
loses the requisite quantity of motion, so that mind serves only to redis-
tribute motion in the world, for example.36 Although such a move is
open to Descartes, there is no textual evidence that he as much as con-
sidered it. The overwhelming impression that one gets from the texts
is that Descartes just was not very concerned about reconciling his inter-
actionism with his conservation law. Now, the apparent lack of atten-
tion to this problem may be explained in a number of ways. There is
always the possibility that Descartes simply neglected to see the serious
problem that his position raises. But there is another, better explana-
tion for this apparent gap in Descartes’ argument. The case can be
made, I think, that, from Descartes’ point of view, there just is no
problem reconciling interactionism with the laws of nature. That is,
there is reason to believe that Descartes may never have been commit-
ted to the position that his conservation law holds universally and may
have allowed for the possibility that animate bodies lie outside the scope
of the laws that govern inanimate nature.
Many versions of the conservation law do, indeed, suggest that
the law is intended to hold universally. For example, when introducing
the conservation law in the Principia, Descartes writes: “God . . . in the
cannot add motion. See Clerselier to de La Forge, 4 December 1660, in Clerselier, ed.,
Lettres de Mr. Descartes, Vol. III (Paris: 1667), pp. 640–46. I have not been able to examine
Kemp Smith’s citation. But it is interesting to note that in the letter Gabbey cites
Clerselier does not explicitly attribute the change-of-direction account to Descartes. Fur-
thermore, the grounds on which Clerselier advances the claim involve a significant depar-
ture from Descartes’ thought on motion and determination. Clerselier’s argument
depends on the claim that to create a motion requires as much power as to create matter
itself, whereas determination “n’adjoûte rien de réel dans la Nature” and can thus be manip-
ulated by finite minds (Clerselier, loc. cit., pp. 641–43). But this contradicts what Descartes
wrote to Clerselier in a letter 15 years earlier, a letter that Clerselier published in Volume
I of his edition of Descartes’ correspondence. Descartes wrote:
It is necessary to consider two different modes in motion: one is the motion alone, or
the speed, and the other is the determination of this motion in a particular direction,
which two modes change with equal difficulty. (AT IV 185)
Thus, the Clerselier letter of 1660 gives us no grounds for attributing the change-of-
direction account to Descartes himself.
36 This, in essence, is Broad’s response to the objection. See C. D. Broad, op. cit., pp. 107–9.
beginning created matter along with motion and rest, and now, through
His ordinary concourse alone, conserves just as much motion and rest
in the whole of it as He put there at that time.”37 It is hard to see how
God could conserve “just as much motion and rest” as He initially
created if minds are allowed to add and subtract motion from the world
literally at will. But when Descartes is being especially careful, he seems
to allow that his conservation law may admit of some exceptions. As I
will discuss in some detail below, Descartes’ conservation law follows
from the immutability of God. Thus Descartes writes just a few lines fol-
lowing the passage just quoted:
Therefore, except for changes [in quantity of motion] which evident experience or
divine revelation render certain, and which we perceive or believe to happen
without any change in the Creator, we ought not to suppose that there are
any other changes in His works, lest from that we can argue for an incon-
stancy in Him.38
Here Descartes clearly admits that there can be violations of the conser-
vation law, circumstances in which motion is added or taken away. The
reference to divine revelation suggests that some such violations might
arise from miracles. But Descartes also makes reference to violations that
“evident experience . . . renders certain.” an obvious suggestion as to
what Descartes has in mind here is the ability that the human mind has
to set the human body in motion, which, as he told Arnauld, “is shown
to us every day by the most certain and most evident experience.”39 This
natural reading is confirmed a few pages later in the Principia, where
Descartes is discussing his third law of motion, a law explicitly governed
by the conservation law, in which Descartes sets out the general features
of his account of impact. Descartes writes:
And all of the particular causes of the changes which happen to bodies are
contained in this third law, at least insofar as they are corporeal; for we are not
inquiring into whether or how human or angelic minds have the force [vis]
to move bodies.40
This is, to be sure, something less than a clear and positive statement
that minds can cause violations in the laws of nature. But, together with
the lack of any attempt to reconcile interactionism with his conserva-
tion law, these passages suggest that in the Principia Descartes, at very
37 Pr II 36. 38 Ibid. Emphasis added.

39 AT V 222. Emphasis added. 40 Pr II 40. Emphasis added.
least, left open the possibility that the activity of minds is not con-
strained by the laws of nature that hold for bodies.41
At this point we can return to the questions raised at the beginning
of this section. The passages cited earlier strongly suggest that Descartes
did not hold the change-of-direction account of mind-body interaction
that Leibniz attributes to him. Even more radically, although the texts
are not completely decisive on the question, they do suggest that
Descartes at least left open the possibility that his conservation law may
be violated by animate bodies. The philosophical point should be clear.
Descartes might have answered Leibniz’s attack on interactionism by
simply denying that the conservation laws must hold for animate bodies.
If this were Descartes’ answer, as I suspect it would have been, then even
if Leibniz were to convince him of the falsity of his own conservation law,
Descartes would not have been forced to reject interactionism. There is
no reason to think that Descartes would have held Leibniz’s conserva-
tion laws to be any more universal than he seems to have held his own
to be. And if Leibniz’s conservation laws are not taken to govern the
behavior of animate bodies, then they pose no obstacle at all to the claim
that minds can alter the course of events in the material world.
3. God and the Laws of Nature

In the previous section I outlined one answer that Descartes could have
given to Leibniz’s argument. I have claimed that, given what he says
about mind-body interaction, it is open to Descartes to deny the uni-
versality of physical law and to deny that antimate bodies are con-
strained by the same laws that govern the purely material world.
41 There is one passage in Le Monde that seems to contradict this interpretation. In chapter
VII of that work, after having given the laws of motion and having claimed that these laws
suffice for an “a priori demonstration of everything that can be produced” in the new
world that Descartes is building in Le Monde (At XI 47), Descartes says:
And finally, so that there will be no exceptions which prevent [such a priori demon-
strations], we shall add to our assumptions, if it pleases you, that God will produce no
miracles, and that the intelligences or rational minds, which we might assume below
[in the Traité de l’Homme], will not disrupt the ordinary course of nature in any way.
(AT XI 48)
This might be read as a denial that God can perform miracles or that minds can interfere
in the “ordinary course of nature” in any way. But given what Descartes says about mind-
body interaction elsewhere, it is more reasonable to read this as a simplifying assumption
known to be false but helpful in simplifying the initial presentation of the mechanist world
that Descartes intended to give in Le Monde.
Thus, it seems, the difference between Descartes’ interactionism and
Leibniz’s pre-established harmony comes down to a more basic differ-
ence with respect to the scope of physical law. This, however, raises still
deeper questions. First of all, there is the question of the coherence of
Descartes’ own position. Is the position that the texts suggest consistent
with Descartes’ otherwise mechanistic world view? Can the exclusion of
animate bodies from the laws of the material world be anything but
arbitrary? And, second, there are arguments of Leibniz’s to deal with.
Leibniz took it for granted that the laws of nature apply to animate
bodies. Are Leibniz’s reasons for holding this position binding on
Descartes as well? In the argument I presented at the beginning of this
essay, Leibniz attempts to trace Descartes’ interactionism to a relatively
uncontroversial and straightforward mistake about the true laws of
motion. The argument I offered in the previous section suggests that
Leibniz’s argument may not be applicable to the position that Descartes
actually held. But Descartes’ position may still rest on a mistake, a
mistake different from the one that Leibniz attributes to him, to be
sure, a mistake about the scope of physical law rather than its content,
but a mistake nevertheless. We must, then, explore whether there is
some unobjectionable way for Descartes to exclude animate bodies
from the scope of physical law.
One place we might begin is with Descartes’ discussion of the union
of mind and body. In an interesting essay, the only discussion of this
question that I known of in the literature, Peter Remnant attempts
to link the exclusion of animate bodies from the laws of motion to the
discussion of mind-body unity and interaction found in Descartes’
celebrated correspondence with Elisabeth.42 Remnant notes that for
Descartes the world of created things is understood through three dis-
tinct primitive notions, the notions of extension, thought, and the
union of mind and body. Descartes writes to Elisabeth that
there are in us certain primitive notions which are as it were models on which
all our other knowledge is patterned. . . . As regards body in particular, we
have only the notion of extension which entails the notions of shape and
motion; and as regards soul in particular, we have only the notion of thought.
. . . Finally, as regards soul and body together, we have only the notion of their
union, on which depends our notion of the soul’s power [force] to move the
body, and the body’s power to act on the soul and cause sensations and
passions.43
42 See op. cit. 43 AT III 665. Quoted in Remnant, op. cit., p. 382.
These notions are primitive in the sense that they must be grasped one
by one, apart from all other notions, and cannot be explicated in terms
of one another. As Descartes wrote:
If we try to solve a problem by means of a notion that does not apply, we

cannot help going wrong. Similarly, we go wrong if we try to explain one of
these notions by another, for since they are primitive notions, each of them
can only be understood by itself.44
Thus, Remnant claims, “each of these primitive notions defines an

autonomous sphere of knowledge.”45 We must understand mind in
terms of its primitive notion and the laws that follow from it, and body
in terms of its primitive notion and the laws that follow from it. And,
most important, we must understand the animate body, the thing com-
posed of the union of mind with body in terms of its primitive notion
and the laws that follow from it. To impose the laws of inanimate matter
on animate bodies, unions of mind and body, is for Descartes, on
Remnant’s reading, a basic mistake that can lead only to confusion and
misunderstanding; it is an instance of attempting to apply one primi-
tive notion (that of extension and the laws it obeys) to an object to
which it does not apply. Thus Remnant concludes:
On Descartes’s view there is a system of principles which applies to all purely

physical interactions among bodies (including most biological processes)
and another system which describes intellectual processes. But there is
also a third realm, that of animated bodies. Animated bodies can participate
in purely physical interactions and when they do their behavior conforms to
the laws of motion. . . . But when they are behaving qua animated the laws
of motion do not apply to them – their behavior conforms to a different set
of principles, falling under the primitive notion of the union of soul and
body. . . . If all the activities of bodies consisted in animated behavior then
the laws of motion would have no application; similarly, if all the activities of
the soul involved its union with its body . . . the principles of intellection
would have no application; it is only because bodies also behave purely qua
bodies and minds purely qua minds that these two sets of principles have
application. But this is consistent with the occurrence of another sort of
behavior, subject to another set of principles, namely that of animated
bodies.46
44 AT III 665–66. Quoted in Remnant, op. cit., p. 383. 45 Remant, op. cit., p. 383.
46 Ibid., pp. 384–85. Remnant, like most commentators, is too quick to trust Descartes’
answer to Elisabeth here. On this point, see my essay, “Understanding Interaction: What
Descartes Should Have Told Elisabeth,” essay 8 in this volume.
Remnant’s account of the matter has the ring of truth. Descartes
does, indeed, treat the union of mind and body almost as if it were a
separate substance, and it is plausible to suppose that he thought of the
animate body as satisfying laws different from the ones that inanimate
bodies satisfy.47 But this cannot be the whole story. Surely, some of the
laws applicable to inanimate bodies are also applicable to bodies united
to minds. Surely, the geometrical properties of the pineal gland are the
same, whether that gland is connected to a mind or not. Surely, a living
human being can no more be in two places at the same time than can
a corpse. And surely, although the mind enables us to do much that
cannot be done in inanimate nature, it does not allow us to create a
vacuum in Descartes’ world. Thus, even though animate bodies may be
exempt from the laws of motion, there are many other laws that all
bodies must obey, even those that are behaving qua animated, to use
Remnant’s phrase. And this raises a basic question: What specifically is
it about the laws that govern motion that exempts the union of mind
and body from their scope? Why are the laws that govern shape, for
example, one mode of extension, greater in scope than the laws that
govern motion, another mode of extension? The arbitrariness still
remains on Remnant’s account; there still seems no reason why
Descartes can exclude animate bodies from the laws of motion. If there
is any reason why animate bodies can violate the laws that hold for
inanimate nature, it must concern not only the doctrine of primitive
notions that Descartes expounds to Elisabeth but also his conception
of the laws of motion. And if there is any way that Descartes can
sustain his position against Leibniz’s claims, it must be found in the dif-
ferent accounts of those laws that the two philosopher-scientists offer.
Thus, we must for the moment turn away from minds and bodies and
investigate the ways in which Descartes and Leibniz treat the laws of
motion.
For Leibniz, the laws of motion, like every other contingent feature
of this world, are grounded in God. In particular, they are grounded in
God’s ends, in his decision to create the best of all possible worlds.
Leibniz writes:
47 On the mind-body union as a substance distinct from mind and body, see, e.g., Geneviève
Rodis-Lewis, L’Oeuvre de Descartes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1971), Vol. I, pp. 352–54, and the refer-
ences cited in Vol. II, p. 543 n. 29. Rodis-Lewis is quite correct to reject the claim that
Descartes thought of the union of mind and body as a distinct substance, but Descartes’
frequent use of the notion of “substantial union” in connection with the mind and body
(AT VII 228; AT III 493; AT III 508; etc.) does suggest something of the sort.
. . . The true physics should in fact be derived from the source of the divine
perfections. It is God who is the ultimate reason of things and the knowledge
of God is no less the source of sciences [principe des sciences] than His essence
and His will are the source of beings. . . . Far from excluding final causes and
the consideration of a being who acts with wisdom, it is from these that every-
thing must be derived in physics. . . . I agree that the particular effects of
nature can and ought to be explained mechanically, though without forget-
ting their admirable ends and uses, which providence has known how to con-
trive. But the general principles of physics and mechanics themselves depend
on the action of a sovereign intelligence and cannot be explained without
taking it into consideration.48
Leibniz’s physics, then, begins with a consideration of God as the final

cause of the world. Leibniz’s position is, of course, that God acts
in accordance with the principle of perfection, that God chose our
world from among an infinity of other possible worlds because it is
the most perfect, the one that has the most order consistent with
the greatest variety in phenomena. Now, the order that Leibniz
attributes to the world God creates is complex and involves a
number of important metaphysical principles. But among these prin-
ciples are the laws of nature in general, and among the laws of nature
are the laws of motion and the more general metaphysical principles
on which they rest. Thus Leibniz wrote in the Principles of Nature
and Grace :
The supreme wisdom of God has made Him choose especially those laws
of motion which are best adjusted and most fitted to abstract or metaphysical
reasons. There is conserved the same quantity of total and absolute force,
or of action; also the same quantity of relative force, or of reaction; and
finally, the same quantity of directive force. Furthermore, action is always
equal to reaction, and the entire effect is equivalent to its full cause. It is
surprising that no reason can be given for the laws of motion which
have been discovered in our own time . . . by a consideration of efficient
causes or of matter alone. For I have found that we must have recourse
to final causes and that these laws do not depend upon the principle of neces-
sity, as do the truths of logic, arithmetic, and geometry, but upon the prin-
ciple of fitness [principe de la convenance], that is to say, upon the choice of
wisdom.49
48 G III 54–55 (L 353). 49 G VI 603 (L 639–40).

The laws of motion, then, are intertwined with the order that God has
imposed on our world as a consequence of His decision to create the
best of all possible worlds.50
These basic laws governing nature are not without exception, though.
God, acting in accordance with some higher principles of order, prin-
ciples of supernatural order that, Leibniz thought, lie beyond our com-
prehension, can violate the laws that He set down for finite things to
observe. As Leibniz wrote in the Discourse on Metaphysics:
Now, since nothing can happen which is not according to order, it can be
said that miracles are as much subject to order as are natural operations and
that the latter are called natural because they conform to certain subordi-
nate maxims which we call the nature of things. For we may say that this
nature is merely a custom of God’s with which He can dispense for any reason
stronger than that which moved Him to use these maxims.51
However, it is important to note, such violations of the subordinate

maxims that constitute the laws of nature are miracles, happenings that,
Leibniz argues, must lie beyond the capability of finite beings to bring
about if miracles are to be genuinely distinct from the ordinary course
of nature. Thus Leibniz explained to Clarke:
If a miracle differs from what is natural only in appearance and with respect
to us, so that we call a miracle only that which we seldom see, there will be
no internal real difference between a miracle and what is natural, and at the
bottom every thing will be either equally natural or equally miraculous. Will
divines like the former, or philosophers the latter? . . . In good philosophy
and sound theology we ought to distinguish between what is explicable by
the natures and powers of creatures and what is explicable only by the powers
of the infinite substance. We ought to make an infinite difference between
the operation of God, which goes beyond the extent of natural powers, and
the operations of things that follow the law which God has given them, and
50 For a discussion of the contingency of the laws of nature in Leibniz, see Margaret Wilson,
“Leibniz’s Dynamics and Contingency in Nature,” in P. K. Machamer and R. G. Turnbull,
eds., Motion and Time, Space and Matter (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press,
1976), pp. 264–89; reprinted in R. S. Woolhouse, ed., Leibniz: Metaphysics and Philosophy
of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 119–38.
51 DM 7. See also Theod. 207; G II 41 (M 44–45); G II 51 (M 57); G II 92–93 (M 115–16).
Leibniz claims that the supernatural order that governs miraculous violations of the laws
of nature is beyond our comprehension in DM 16 and in G III 353.
which He has enabled them to follow by their natural powers, though not
without His assistance.52
So, even though God can violate natural law for the sake of a higher
order, for the sake of supernatural law, nothing in nature can. These sub-
ordinate laws govern nature as a whole and without exception, save for
the extraordinary (and infrequent) interference of God.
This conception of natural law and its place in the order that God
imposes on nature has important consequences for Leibniz’s account
of mind and its relation to body. By the argument sketched in section
1, if mind could act on body, either directly or through the intermedi-
ation of God, then bodies animated by rational minds would violate
the laws that govern inanimate bodies. Now, such violations are by no
means impossible, even if the laws that God imposed on matter are uni-
versal in scope and make no distinction between animate and inani-
mate matter. But, if God’s laws are universal in that sense, as Leibniz
almost always assumes, then any such violations would be miraculous,
even if such violations occurred in an entirely lawlike and regular way.
Thus Leibniz writes:
. . . The common system [i.e., direct interactionism] has recourse to
absolutely inexplicable influences, while in the system of occasional causes
God is compelled at every moment, by a kind of general law and as if by
compact, to change the natural course of the thoughts of the soul to adapt
them to the impressions of the body and to interfere with the natural course
of bodily movements in accordance with the volitions of the soul. This can
only be explained by a perpetual miracle.53
Though such a world of perpetual miracles is possible, Leibniz rejects

such an account of the matter for both methodological and metaphys-
ical reasons. Methodologically, the appeal to God that is required to
account for the constant violation of natural law is an ad hoc appeal to
a deus ex machina in quite a literal sense of the phrase. Leibniz writes:
Problems are not solved merely by making use of a general cause [i.e., God]
and calling in what is called the deus ex machina. To do this without offering
52 G VII 416–17 (L 715). See also G II 93 (M 116); G IV 520 (L 494). Leibniz sometimes
also suggests a more epistemic definition of a miracle as “a divine act which transcends
human comprehension.” See C 508–9; G III 353.
53 G VI 541 (L 587). See also Theod. 207; G II 57–58 (M 65); G II 94 (M 117–18);
G III 354. It should be noted that Leibniz recognizes a number of senses in which
interactionism, particularly of the occasionalist variety, involves perpetual miracles. See
M. Gueroult, Malebranche (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1955–1959), Vol. II, pp. 241–53.
any other explanation drawn from the order or secondary causes is, properly
speaking, to have recourse to miracle. In philosophy we must try to give a
reason which will show how things are brought about by the Divine Wisdom,
in conformity with the notion of the subject in question.54
And metaphysically, the perpetual miracle that interactionism requires

is objectionable insofar as it attributes an imperfection to God’s work.
Thus Leibniz writes to Clarke:
But they who fancy that the soul can give a new force to the body, and that
God does the same in the world in order to mend the imperfections of His
machine, make God too much like the soul by ascribing too much to the soul
and too little to God. For none but God can give a new force to nature, and
He does it only supernaturally. If there was a need for Him to do it in the
natural course of things, He would have made a very imperfect work.55
So, if the laws of motion that God decreed are universal and make
no distinction between human being and stone, then order and per-
fection, not to mention good scientific method, require that we reject
the hypothesis of interaction as miraculous. But, one might ask, how
does Leibniz know that the laws of motion are universal? Surely, God
could have set things up in such a way that animate bodies followed
different laws from bare matter, so that it would be a law of nature that
when a mind has an appropriate volition, the animate body to which it
is attached is exempted from laws that otherwise govern its behavior.
One might suggest, for example, that the laws of nature are hierarchi-
cal, as it were, that the laws of physics are dominated by the psy-
chophysical laws of mind-body interaction in the same way that, for
Leibniz, the totality of laws of nature are dominated by the supernat-
ural laws that govern God’s activity and in accordance with which He
can suspend the laws of nature to satisfy higher laws.56 What is wrong
with such a conception of natural law? Although Leibniz usually takes
the universality of physical law for granted, rarely arguing the point
explicitly, Leibniz has an answer to this question. From Leibniz’s point
of view, though such a hierarchical world is possible, such a world is less
54 G IV 483–84 (L 457). 55 G VII 375–76 (L 689).

56 The position sketched here is Malebranche’s. On the hierarchy of laws, see, e.g., Nicholas
Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics, ed. and trans. Willis Doney (new York: Abaris
Books, 1980), pp. 320–21. On the ability of the mind-body laws to cause suspensions of
the laws of physics, see Nicholas Malebranche, The Search after Truth and Elucidations of the
Search after Truth, ed. and trans. by Thomas Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus, Ohio:
Ohio State University Press, 1980), pp. 580–81, 594.
perfect than a world governed by pre-established harmony and, thus,
would not have been created. Consider two possible worlds, wg, a world
in which there is direct or occasional interaction, a world that thus
embodies a hierarchy of “gappy” laws and a world wh that is governed
by pre-established harmony, a world governed by universal and excep-
tionless laws. Suppose, first, that wg and wh contain exactly the same
phenomena: Sensation and bodily state, volition and action correspond
in exactly the same way in each. But, despite the agreement on the phe-
nomena, it is obvious that wh, the world of universal and exceptionless
laws, is considerably simpler and more orderly than wg, the world gov-
erned by the hierarchy of gappy laws.57 So, from Leibniz’s point of view,
wh must be preferable to wg. But what if wg and wh differ in the variety
of their phenomena? One might argue, in fact, that they must differ in
some phenomena if they are to have genuinely different laws. Here the
argument is more difficult. But, even in this case, Leibniz seems to hold
that wh is the more perfect world. Leibniz’s position is that simplicity is
more important than variety of phenomena, so that even if the variety
of phenomena in wg were greater than that in wh, the simplicity of the
laws in wh would tilt the balance in favor of that world. The argument
I have sketched is presented most explicitly in a passage from the Theod-
icée. Leibniz writes:
Thus, it is necessary to judge that among the general rules which are not
absolutely necessary, God chooses those which are the most natural, those
which are the easiest to account for and which also serve to account for other
things. This is doubtless most beautiful and pleasing, and were the system of
pre-established harmony not otherwise necessary to eliminate superfluous mir-
acles, God would have chosen it, since it is the most harmonious [system].
The ways of God are the most simple and the most uniform: They are to choose the
rules which limit one another least. They are also the most fruitful with respect
to the simplicity of means. . . . One can, indeed, reduce these two conditions,
simplicity and fruitfulness, to a single advantage, which is to produce as much
perfection as is possible. . . . But even if the effect were supposed greater, but
the means less simple, I think that one could say that all and all, the effect
itself would be less great, counting not only the final effect but also the
mediate effect. Thus those who are wisest act, as much as possible, so that
the means are, in a way, ends as well, that is to say, desirable not only for what
57 It is, of course, a commonplace observation in contemporary philosophy of science that

any statement can be presented as a universal statement. But the distinction between uni-
versal and “gappy” laws is clear enough for our purposes here.
they do, but for what they are. Complicated ways occupy too much ground,
too much space, too much place, too much time that could have been
better used.58
Leibniz thus concludes that the doctrine of pre-established harmony,

in which the laws that govern bodies and the laws that govern minds
“limit one another least,” is “infinitely more reasonable and worthy of
God”59 than is any variety of interactionism. Leibniz’s principle of per-
fection, the principle in accordance with which God creates the best of
all possible worlds, demands that the laws that God decrees for inani-
mate nature hold for human beings as well. Human beings, complex
bodies animated by rational minds, must, by the principle of perfec-
tion, be an integral part of the world of finite things governed by the
simple and uniform principles that God decrees as the laws of nature,
principles that only He can violate, principles whose violation can only
be miraculous. And if the scope of natural law is to include human
beings as well as tables, chairs, and potted palms, then, unless we are
willing to embrace the odious hypothesis of perpetual miracle, inter-
actionism of any sort must be out of the question.
Leibniz’s position on the scope of physical law is, thus, grounded
in some of his most basic metaphysical commitments, the connection
between perfection and order and the principle that God creates the
best of all possible worlds. Because of these principles, Leibniz must
hold that the laws of nature are universal, and because of these princi-
ples, supplemented with some commonsense scientific methodology,
Leibniz must reject the perpetual miracles that interactionism entails
for him. But, for all that, Leibniz’s position is by no means invulnera-
ble. There are, to be sure, any number of gaps in Leibniz’s arguments
that a clever Cartesian might well be able to exploit in defense of a
more limited scope for physical law and in support of an interactionist
dualism. One might, for example, point out the ad hoc way in which
Leibniz favors order over variety of phenomena in arguing for pre-
established harmony over its alternatives. But Descartes himself would
have found Leibniz’s claims vulnerable to attack on the most basic level.
The considerations of perfection, order, and God’s ends in construct-
ing the best of all possible worlds, considerations that led Leibniz to
include animate bodies within the scope of the laws of physics, and that
58 Theod. 208; emphasis added. The argument is also suggested in G II 94–95 (M 118) and
G III 340–41.
59 G II 94 (M 118).
led him from interactionism to pre-established harmony, would have
moved Descartes little, if at all. For Descartes, the immensity and incom-
prehensibility of God preclude any appeal to such reasoning to estab-
lish the laws that govern the material world. Thus Descartes wrote in
response to Gassendi:
Although in Ethics, where it is often permissible to use a conjecture, it is
sometimes pious to consider what end we can conjecture for God to have set
out for Himself in ruling the universe, this is certainly out of place in Physics,
where everything ought to shine with the firmest reasons. Neither can we
pretend that some of God’s ends are better displayed to us than others; for
all [of God’s ends] are hidden in the same way in the abyss of His inscrutable
wisdom.60
In fact, given Descartes’ radical voluntarism with respect to the eternal

truths, God has no aims or goals, strictly speaking. His volitions are free
with a freedom of complete indifference. God did not set out to create
the world that would be the most perfect; God did not create this world
because it is the most perfect one. Rather, it is the most perfect one
because God created it.61
The rejection of final causes in physics marks a basic difference
between Cartesian and Leibnizian physics. But this does not mean that
Descartes rejects Leibniz’s grounding of physics in the activity of God
or Leibniz’s claim that true knowledge of the physical world must be
derived from our knowledge of God. Neither does it mean that the laws
of physics are inaccessible to rational argument or demonstration.
Rather, Descartes claims, they are to be derived not from God as a final
cause but from God as an efficient cause. Thus he wrote:
And finally, we shall not seek the reasons for natural things from the ends
which God or nature propose for themselves in making them, since we ought
not to be so arrogant as to think that we participate in their counsels. But
considering Him as the efficient cause of everything, we must see what can
be concluded from those attributes of which He allows us some notion, about
those of His effects which the senses make apparent to us, by means of the
light to nature which is innate in us.62
The laws of nature, then, are to be derived not from considerations of

order, perfection, and God’s ends in creating this world, as they are for
60 AT VII 375. See also AT VII 55.

61 See AT VII 432. For Leibniz’s remarks on this claim, see, e.g., DM 2.
62 Pr I 28. For Leibniz’s comments on this, see, e.g., G IV 360–61 (L 387).
Leibniz, but from His nature and the way in which He operates in the
world. The laws of nature are not chosen by God and imposed on the
world. Rather, they follow directly from the way in which God acts on
the world. To use a distinction familiar from recent moral theory,
whereas Leibniz’s God is a teleologist, acting for the end of order and
perfection, Descartes’ God is a deontologist, doing the right thing
from moment to moment, whatever might come of it. Consequently,
for Descartes, one cannot appeal to order and perfection to justify one
conception of the world over another.
This strategy for deriving the laws of nature is apparent in the argu-
ment that Descartes offers for his conservation law. The law is resented
in the context of a discussion of the “universal and primary” cause
of motion, that which is the “general cause of all motions which are in
the world.” This general cause is, of course, “none other than God
Himself,” who
in the beginning created matter along with motion and rest, and now,
through His ordinary concourse alone, conserves just as much motion and
rest in the whole of it [i.e., the material wold] as He put there at that time.
. . . We also understand God to be perfect not only insofar as He is, in
Himself, immutable, but also in that He works [operetur] in as constant and
immutable a way as possible. Therefore, except for those changes [in quan-
tity of motion] which evident experience or divine revelation render certain,
and which we perceive or believe to happen without any change in the
Creator, we ought not to suppose that there are any other changes in His
works, lest from that we can argue for an inconstancy in Him.63
The precise intuitions behind Descartes’ proof are illuminated by other

passages in which Descartes discusses the operation of God in the world.
Descartes notes that the nature of time is such that:
its parts do not depend on one another, and never exist simultaneously; and
therefore from the fact that we exist now, it does not follow that we will also
exist in the next following time unless some cause, indeed the same one
which produced us at first, continually re-creates us, that is, conserves us.64
Thus, Descartes claims, God must continually re-create the world at

every moment, or else it would pass into nonexistence. This provides
an obvious way of seeing how God’s immutability results in the conser-
vation law for Descartes. Descartes argues: “[God] conserves [motion]
63 Pr II 36. 64 Pr I 21. See also AT VII 48–49.

just as it is at the moment in which it is being conserved, without regard
to what it was a bit before.”65 God’s immutability requires that when He
re-creates the world from one moment to the next, He must recreate
it as much as possible as it was the previous moment. In part, He must
re-create the world with the same quantity of motion it had the moment
before.
In this argument Descartes is quite explicitly following the strategy
he set out for deriving “reasons for natural things.” He is considering
God as an efficient cause, the cause of motion in the beginning, and the
continuing cause of motion in the moment-by-moment conservation
of the world.66 He then considers God’s attributes, the fact that God’s
perfection involves constancy of operation and argues from that to the
conservation law. Descartes’ reasoning is not without its problems
here. The derivation is obscure, complex, and the conclusion ultimately
wrong, as Leibniz successfully showed. But it is the strategy that I am
interested in here, what Descartes thought he was doing, and that is
clear enough. The conservation law for Descartes is not a law that God
imposes on the world to further some end; it is intended to be a con-
sequence of the constraints that God’s nature imposes on God as an
efficient cause of motion in the material world.
Descartes’ conception of the conservation law and its ground in the
65 Pr II 39. See also the parallel passage in Le Monde, AT XI 44. The argument is somewhat
more complex than the brief exposition I have given suggests. Since each moment
is without duration, there can be no motion, strictly speaking, at any given moment, as
Descartes fully realized. See, e.g., Pr II 39; AT II 215. What is preserved from one moment
to the next, then, cannot be motion itself but the tendency or inclination to motion. And,
Descartes would have had to have held, in order to preserve the tendency to motion from
one moment to the next, God would have to create the moving body at a somewhat dif-
ferent place from one moment to the next if this tendency is ever to result in any actual
motion. On the notion of momentary tendency to motion, Descartes’ need for such a
notion, and the problems it raises for his metaphysics, see, e.g., F. Alquié, ed., Oeuvres
Philosophiques de Descartes (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1963–1973), Vol. I, p. 359 n. 1; Thomas
L. Prendergast, “Motion, Action, and Tendency in Descartes’ Physics,” Journal of the History
of Philosophy, Vol. 13 (1975), pp. 453–62; and Martial Gueroult, “The Metaphysics and
Physics of Force in Descartes,” trans. in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., Descartes: Philosophy, Math-
ematics and Physics, pp. 196–229. Gueroult’s final judgment is that “instantaneous moving
force, the distinction between the instant of motion and the instant of rest, . . . pose[s] an
insoluble problem for Cartesian metaphysics” (p. 222).
66 Peter Machamer argues that, whatever Descartes’ intentions were, final causes inevitably
creep into his derivation of the laws of nature. See his “Causality and Explanation in
Descartes’ Natural Philosophy,” in P. K. Machamer and R. G. Turnbull, eds., op. cit., pp.
168–99. Although I think that Descartes can be defended on this point, it is beyond the
scope of this essay to do so. What is important in this context is simply how Descartes con-
ceived of his enterprise.
immediate activity of God has important consequences for the way in
which he conceives of mind in the context of the order of nature. The
conservation law is, for Descartes, a law that follows out of the way in
which God acts as an efficient cause of motion. As an efficient cause
of motion, He must, by virtue of His nature, act in such a way as to
preserve the same quantity of motion from moment to moment. But,
Descartes says, although God is the “universal and primary” cause of
motion,67 He is not the only cause. As he wrote to More:
The translation which I call motion, is a thing of no less entity than shape: it
is a mode in a body. The force moving [a body] can be that of God Himself
conserving the same amount of translation in matter as He put in it in the
first moment of creation; or also [it can be] that of a created substance, like
our mind, or that of some other thing to which He gave the force of moving
a body.68
Now, when God causes motion, the motion He causes must observe the
conservation law. But there is no reason at all to impose similar con-
straints on finite and imperfect causes of motion. That is, even though
finite, imperfect minds may act in some law like way, deriving from their
finite and imperfect natures, the motion they cause need not satisfy the
conservation principle. They may add or subtract motion from the world,
even if God cannot. To suppose that they do argues for no change in God
Himself and does not give us grounds for imputing an “inconstancy in
Him.”69 Thus, it seems, there is nothing arbitrary or inconsistent with
Descartes’ principles to suppose that animate bodies, bodies capable of
being acted upon by minds, can violate the conservation principle. Such
bodies stand, as it were, outside the world of purely mechanical nature.
The conservation principle governs only purely material systems in nature,
systems in which God is the only cause of motion.70
67 Pr II 36.
68 AT V 403–4. This position is not without its problems. This passage puts the activity of
mind in causing motion on a par with that of God. But, surely, however minds cause
motion, they do not do it as God does, by way of a continual re-creation. In fact, it seems
difficult to see how the mental causation of motion could be reconciled with the contin-
ual recreation pricture at all. Malebranche seizes on exactly this problem, using it to push
Descartes to occasionalism in the seventh of his Dialogues on Metaphysics. There is no reason
to believe, though, that Descartes was aware of this difficulty with his position.
69 Pr II 36.
70 The precise wording in the letter to More quoted above (“the force . . . can be that of God
Himself conserving the same amount of translation in matter as He put in it in the first
moment of creation”) suggests a somewhat different conclusion from the one I have
It should be clear by now that Descartes’ interactionism rests on no
simple mistake, either about the content or the scope of physical law.
Because of his general rejection of final courses in physics, he has a
defense against the arguments from the principle of perfection that led
Leibniz to pre-established harmony.71 And because of his conception of
drawn. Read literally, it seems to say that what is conserved from moment to moment is
precisely the quantity of matter that God put into the world at the beginning, implying that,
even if minds could add motion in one moment, God would simply fail to preserve it in
the next. If this were Descartes’ position, then even though minds could, in a sense, cause
motion, the motion would not persist; the conservation principle would govern all bodies,
animate and inanimate, with the exception of momentary lapses. But there is no reason
to attribute such a strange position to Descartes. The position that the literal reading of
that sentence suggests is inconsistent with the account of God’s continuous re-creation of
the world given in the context of Descartes’ derivation of the laws of motion, in accor-
dance with which “[God] conserves [motion] just as it is at the moment in which it is
being conserved, without regard to what it was a bit before” (Pr II 39; see also AT XI 44).
For God to destroy motion added by mind would require Him to “remember” how much
motion there was at the beginning in deciding how much to create at the next moment.
Given the central role that this conception of continuous re-creation plays in the deriva-
tion of the laws of motion, it seems most likely that Descartes’ remarks to More are not
meant to be read so literally.
71 There is reason to believe that Descartes may have been explicitly aware that there is some
connection between the admission of final causes, the claim that God created the most
perfect world, and a position much like Leibniz’s pre-established harmony. In a remark-
able but almost entirely unnoticed passage, Descartes wrote:
It is a strong conjecture to affirm anything which, if assumed, would make God under-
stood as being greater or the world as being more perfect: as, for example, that the
determination of our will to local motion always coincides with a corporeal cause deter-
mining motion; that miracles are always consistent with natural causes, etc. (AT XI
654)
The passage is found in a series of gleanings from Descartes’ manuscripts preserved
among Leibniz’s papers. This portion of the manuscript is entitled “Annotations which
Descartes seems [videtur] to have written in [or, on] his Principia Philosophiae” and may, I
suspect, have been marginalia in Descartes’ own copy. For a brief account of the manu-
scripts and their history, see AT X 207–10. The remark quoted is the second in a series
of discrete paragraphs. The paragraph preceding the quote can plausibly be read as a
comment on Pr I 26, and the paragraphs succeeding the quote link up naturally with Pr
I 30, Pr I 30, Pr I 31, Pr I 33, Pr I 37, and so on in order. This suggests that the text quoted
may well be a comment on Pr I 28, a passage quoted above in which Descartes explicitly
rejects the appeal to God’s purposes in particular and final causes in general. This, in
turn, suggests that Descartes thought that if his strictures against final causes were lifted,
then pre-established harmony would be a reasonable position to adopt. Although this
passage indicates that Descartes may have been aware of some connection between a
version of pre-established harmony and the appeal to God as the creator of the best of all
possible worlds, it gives us no reason to believe that Descartes was aware of the full posi-
tion, as Leibniz develops it, nor does it give us any indication as to how precisely Descartes
saw the connection between the claim that the world is perfect and the claim that “the
determination of our volition to local motion always coincides with a corporeal cause
the laws of motion as deriving from the action of God as an efficient
cause of motion, Descartes can exempt animate bodies from the laws
that govern inanimate bodies in motion in a coherent and nonarbitrary
way and allow mind to affect the behavior of body. Descartes’ interac-
tionism thus rests reasonably secure against Lebniz’s attack. This is an
interesting conclusion in and of itself. But, I think, the defense I have
sketched gives something even more interesting, an insight into the
real differences that separate Descartes’ and Leibniz’s positions. What
forces Leibniz to reject interactionism and to adopt pre-established
harmony is the fact that for him mind is an integral part of a world
governed by principles of order, overarching metaphysical principles
decreed by a wise and benevolent God. In Leibniz’s best of all possible
worlds, simplicity and tidiness dictate that the laws of nature that God
decreed must, miracles aside, govern all bodies, both animate and
inanimate, thus ruling out any variety of interactionism. For Descartes,
though, the wisdom of God is beyond our reach; simplicity and order
are just not at issue. The laws of motion are not, for Descartes, prin-
ciples of order that God imposes on the world but, rather, a direct
consequence of the laws that God Himself obeys as one of a number
of possible causes of motion in the world. Because mind is a cause of
motion that lies outside the scope of the laws that govern God’s activity,
Descartes can maintain his interactionism in spite of Leibniz’s argu-
ment. What explains Leibniz’s rejection of interactionism, then, can
be no simple discovery that Descartes’ conservation law is wrong, as
Leibniz seems to have believed. Rather, what separates Leibniz’s
account of the relation between mind and body from Descartes’ is
something much deeper and more significant, a change in the place of
mind in the natural order of things, a change motivated by a funda-
mental shift in the very conception of what a law of nature is and how
it derives from God.
determining motion.” However, the fact that this passage was preserved in a copy Leibniz
made during his crucial stay in Paris in 1672–1676, before Leibniz’s mature system
emerged, suggests that Leibniz’s contact with Descartes’ thought may have played some
role in the formulation of the doctrine of pre-established harmony.
8
UNDERSTANDING INTERACTION
What Descartes Should Have Told Elisabeth
A typical textbook account of the philosophy of mind in the seventeenth

century goes something like this. Descartes believed in two kinds of stuff,
mental stuff and material stuff, substances distinct in nature that go
together to constitute a single human being. But Descartes also took it
for granted that these two substances were capable of genuine causal
interaction, that minds can cause bodily events, and that bodies can
cause mental events, i.e., that acts of will can genuinely cause changes in
the state of the human body, and that the state of the sensory organs and
the brain can cause sensation and imagination in the mind. But, the story
goes, Descartes went astray here and vastly underestimated the philo-
sophical problems inherent in his position. Descartes, it is claimed,
repressed, or even worse, simply ignored the central question his posi-
tion raises: How is it even possible that an immaterial substance, like the
mind, could conceivably act on an extended substance like the human
body? According to the standard account, later philosophers recognized
the inherent unintelligibility of Descartes’ position and started one of
the largest cottage industries in the history of philosophy, the attempt to
provide satisfactory solutions to the mind-body problem, intelligible
accounts of how mental and physical events are related to one another.
Realizing the unintelligibility of the doctrine of causal interactionism,
this cottage industry produced such noteworthy products as occasional-
ism, dual-aspect theory, pre-established harmony, and so on, all in the
attempt to fill in the gap in Descartes’ dualist program.1
1 This standard account dates back to the seventeenth century. For an account of this reading
in the texts of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Malebranche, see, e.g., Jean Laporte, Le Rationalisme
168
understanding interaction 169
This general outline can (and has) been challenged; the actual
history of philosophy is much richer than any of its rationalized
reconstructions. Sympathetic commentators usually call attention to an
important pair of letters that Descartes wrote to the Princess Elisabeth
in 1643,2 where Descartes takes up just this question, the intelligibility
of mind-body interaction, and offers a philosophically interesting and
sophisticated account of why he thinks that the notion of mind-body
interaction is perfectly intelligible on its own terms, and why it neither
needs nor admits of clarification.3
Now, the letters to Elisabeth are carefully thought out responses to
the very questions that troubled later philosophers about Descartes’
view, and as such, they deserve careful study. But there is a curious
difficulty in using these letters as the key to Descartes’ position. No one
seems to have noticed that Descartes is just not entitled to the answer
he gives Elisabeth; despite Descartes’ clear endorsement, the answer
he gives Elisabeth is blatantly inconsistent with other well entrenched
aspects of the Cartesian system.
The defense of this claim will be the central task of this essay. I
shall begin with an exposition of the account Descartes gives of mind-
body interaction in the letters he wrote to Elisabeth in May and June
of 1643, letters that form the first line of defense for Descartes’ inter-
actionism among those commentators who are committed to defend-
ing Descartes’ position. After a short digression on a curious analogy
Descartes makes between his position and the Scholastic account of
heaviness and free fall, I shall examine Descartes’ answer to Elisabeth
in some detail, and argue that it is inconsistent with the foundations
Descartes gives to his theory of motion. Finally, I shall attempt to sketch
out an answer that Descartes could have given to Elisabeth in 1643, an
answer that seems both philosophically interesting, and consistent with
the rest of his writings.
de Descartes (Paris, 1950), pp. 220–25. Richard Watson discusses similar themes in
lesser known Cartesians of the late seventeenth century in his book, The Downfall of Carte-
sianism (The Hague, 1966). The claim that interaction is the scandal of Descartes’ philos-
ophy is still commonplace in the standard commentaries. See, e.g., Anthony Kenny, Descartes
(New York, 1968), pp. 222–26; and Bernard Williams, Descartes (New York, 1978),
pp. 287–88.
2 Descartes to Elisabeth, 21 May 1643, AT III 663–68; Descartes to Elisabeth, 28 June 1643,
AT III 690–95.
3 For instances of this more sophisticated reading, see, e.g., Jean Laporte, op. cit., pp. 220–54;
Henri Gouhier, La Pensée Métaphysique de Descartes (Paris, 1962), pp. 321–44; and Robert
Richardson, “The ‘Scandal’ of the Cartesian Interactionism,” Mind 91 (1982).
Before entering into the argument proper, though, I would like to
make a few prefatory remarks concerning the issues I intend to take
up, and the issues I don’t. The issue that I intend to focus on is that of
the intelligibility of mind-body interaction. The issue is, admittedly, a
fuzzy one, as fuzzy as the notion of intelligibility itself. But historically
speaking, it is an important one, as the reaction of Descartes’ contem-
poraries and successors shows. To make the question a bit more precise,
I shall construe it, as Descartes and his contemporaries often seemed
to do, as the problem of whether the notion of mind-body interaction
is somehow intelligible on its own terms, or whether its intelligibility
requires an explication, analogy, or analysis in terms of some other dis-
tinct variety of causal interaction, itself more basic, or, at least, better
understood. To be more precise still, given the prominence of the
notion of impact in the then modish mechanistic world view, the ques-
tion of the intelligibility of mind-body interaction quickly becomes a
question of whether mind-body interaction can be understood without
somehow relating it to the way in which bodies cause changes in one
another through impact.4 The question of intelligibility should be dis-
tinguished from the closely related question of whether or not the mind
and body do, as a matter of fact, actually interact with one another.
Though Descartes and his correspndents and critics often link the two
questions for obvious reasons, they are really somewhat independent.
One can hold that despite the intelligibility of mind-body interaction,
minds and bodies do not, as a matter of fact, interact with one another.
Philosophically, some reason must be given over and above the bare
intelligibility of interactionism for adopting that position. Descartes
does have an answer to this question, and an interesting one: It is ex-
perience, he claims, “the surest and plainest everyday experience,”5 as
he writes to Arnauld, that convinces us of the truth of interactionism.
4 There are, of course, other ways in which the question of the intelligibility of mind-body
interaction could be raised. One could take it to be a question about how interaction can
be reconciled with certain commonsense notions about causality, in particular with the so
called “reality principle” (the cause must, in some sense, contain everything that is in the
effect), or with the intuition that causal relations can only hold among things that are suf-
ficiently similar. On this question see, e.g., Richard A. Watson, op. cit., passim, but espe-
cially pp. 33–36; Louis Loeb, From Descartes to Hume (Ithaca, 1981), pp. 134–43; and
chapters I and II of Eileen O’Neill’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Mind and Mechanism
(Princeton, 1983). Another kind of incoherence involves the question as to how mind-body
interaction can be reconciled with a law-governed conception of the material world like
Descartes’. On this question see, e.g., Louis Loeb, op. cit., pp. 143–48, and Daniel Garber,
“Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz,” Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy 8 (1983), essay 7 in this volume.
5 Descartes for [Arnauld], 29 July 1648, AT V 222.
But as important as this question is, it will not interest me here. My
concern will be with bare intelligibility.
Even more specifically, my main focus will be the bare intelligibility
of the causal link in only one direction. Descartes’ interactionism has
two aspects: the mental causation of bodily events (volition) and the
bodily causation of mental events (sensation and imagination). While
both aspects are important, I shall be concerned mainly with the
former, mind-body rather than body-mind causation. In part this is to
narrow the range of the discussion. But more important, the account
of body-body causation that, I shall argue, runs through Descartes’ writ-
ings on physics makes it, to my mind at least, virtually impossible to
understand how he conceived of body-mind causation. The reasons for
this will become clearer as the argument progresses, I hope, and I shall
point them out when the time comes. But this is an issue that I would
like to sidestep in this essay.
And finally, there is one last issue I would like to sidestep. It will
become apparent that mind-body interaction is closely connected with
the question of the unio substantiale, as Descartes called it, the substan-
tial or real union between the mind and body. As a consequence of this
doctrine, strictly speaking, one should not talk about a causal interaction
between two different things, a mind and a body; one should talk about
the causal explanation of certain behavior or states of a single thing, the
mind-body union, in terms of mental acts of will or the physical states
of the body.6 But while I recognize that an understanding of Descartes’
doctrine of the unio substantiale is important to a full understanding of
Descartes’ position on sensation and voluntary action, I shall try as
much as possible to avoid this tangled issue. And, consequently, I shall
follow Descartes’ usual practice, and that of his correspondents, and
consider the problem as one of making intelligible the interaction
between two substances.
I. The Doctrine of the Three Primitive Notions

Any attempt to come to terms with Descartes’ thought on mind-body
interaction must begin with a few short letters exchanged between
Descartes and the Princess Elisabeth, the most explicit discussion of the
6 For an account of the substantial union of mind and body and some aspects of its relation
to the problem of interaction, see, e.g., Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, L’Oeuvre de Descartes (Paris,
1971), vol. I, pp. 351–65, and the numerous references cited there; and Henri Gouhier,
op. cit.
problems raised by Descartes’ interactionism in the corpus of his
writings. The exchange begins with a question Elisabeth raises. She asks
Descartes to explain:
how the mind of a human being can determine the bodily spirits [i.e., the
fluids in the nerves, muscles, etc.] in producing voluntary actions, being only
a thinking substance. For it appears that all determination of movement is
produced by the pushing of the thing being moved, by the manner in which
it is pushed by that which moves it, or else by the qualification and figure of
the surface of the latter. Contact is required for the first two conditions, and
extension for the third. [But] you entirely exclude the latter from the notion
you have of the body, and the former seems incompatible with an imma-
terial thing.7
Or, as Elisabeth put the question when, unsatisfied with Descartes’ first
answer, she wrote for further clarification:
And I admit that it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension
to the mind than it would be for me to concede the capacity to move a body
and be moved by one to an immaterial thing.8
The problem Elisabeth has is an obvious and understandable one; she

finds it impossible to conceive of how a non-extended mind can cause
changes in an extended body. On the other hand, she finds the mech-
anist’s conception of how one body can change the motion of another
body at least reasonably unproblematic. There appears to be no mystery
for Elisabeth with the phenomenon of impact that constitutes the basic
concept in a mechanist physics like Descartes’ own. What she seeks is
some connection between the two domains, a way of understanding the
seemingly incomprehensible mechanism of mind-body interaction in
terms of the relatively more intelligible phenomenon of body-body
interaction.
Descartes’ reply is reasonably clear. Put briefly, Descartes denies that
the mechanical explanation of change in terms of impact is relevant to
the question as to how mind acts on the body. The claim is that we have
a special notion in terms of which we understand mind-body interac-
tion, a notion distinct from the notions in terms of which we under-
7 Elisabeth to Descartes, 6/16 May 1643, AT III 661.

8 Elisabeth to Descartes, 10/20 June 1643, AT III 685. Other contemporary critics and cor-
respondents made the same point to Descartes. See, e.g., Gassendi’s remarks in his Fifth
Objections, AT VII 341; Arnauld to Descartes [ July 1648], AT V 215; More to Descartes, 11
December 1648, AT V 238–39.
stand things that pertain to the mind or to the body taken separately.
Descartes argues as follows in his first reply to Elisabeth:
First I observe that there are in us certain primitive notions which are, as it
were, the originals on the pattern of which we form all of our other thoughts.
. . . First, there are the most general ones, such as being, number, and dura-
tion. . . . Then, as regards body in particular, we have only the notion of exten-
sion, which entails the notions of shape and motion; as regards mind in
particular, we have only the notion of thought, which includes the concep-
tions of the intellect and the inclinations of the will. Finally, as regards the
mind and body together, we have only the notion of their union, on which
depends our notion of the mind’s power to move the body, and the body’s
power to act on the mind and cause sensations and passions. I observe next
that all human science consists solely in clearly distinguishing these notions
and attaching each of them to the things to which it applies. For if we try to
solve a problem by means of a notion that does not apply, we cannot help
going wrong. Similarly, we go wrong if we try to explain one of these notions
by another, for since they are primitive notions, each of them can only be
understood by itself. The use of our senses has made the notions of exten-
sion, shape, and movement more familiar to us than the others; and the main
cause of our errors is that we commonly want to use these notions to explain
matters to which they do not apply. For instance, we try to use our imagina-
tion . . . to conceive the way in which the mind moves the body after the
manner in which one body is moved by another. . . . So I think that we have
hitherto confounded the notion of the mind’s power [force] to act on the
body with the power one body has to act on another.9
Descartes’ full answer to Elisabeth is what might be called the doctrine

of the three primitive notions. General notions aside, we have within us
three basic ideas, that of mind, that of body, and that of their union. Each
is separate, each is distinct, and each has its own domain of application;
each is per se intelligible, and cannot be explained in terms of other
primitive notions. Elisabeth’s mistake is that of trying to explain one
notion, that of mind-body interaction, which pertains to the primitive
notion of the union of mind and body, in terms of impact, which per-
tains to another primitive notion, that of extension or body, something
that is neither necessary, since each notion is per se intelligible, nor pos-
sible, since the notions are completely distinct. Mind-body interaction
can be grasped only by grasping the unity of mind and body. Since the
primitive notion of mind-body units is made “familiar and easy to us”
9 Descartes to Elisabeth, 21 May 1643, AT III 665–66. See also Descartes to Elisabeth, 28
June 1643, AT III 691–92; and Pr I 48.
only through the senses, Descartes recommends that the young Princess
abstain from philosophy, and re-enter everyday life.10 We have a notion
that is per se intelligible in terms of which to understand interaction,
and if anyone, like Elisabeth (or Arnauld, or Gassendi, or More, or
Reguis . . .) fails to see this, it must be because their minds are confused
and cluttered. What is called for is a bit of therapy, not argument or expla-
nation. Go about your daily life, and you will find the appropriate notion,
just as the unreflective man in the street does.
This is how Descartes tries to explain himself. It can, admittedly, look
somewhat suspicious, as if Descartes is simply declining to deal with a
serious problem, claiming to understand something that is just unin-
telligible. Worse than that, Descartes looks as if he is patronizing the
sincere but penetrating young Princess who, many later readers have
judged, actually got the better of the older and more distinguished
Descartes in this exchange.
But I don’t think that this is fair. I agree with Descartes’ sympathetic
commentators in seeing Descartes as offering a philosophically sophis-
ticated answer to Elisabeth’s serious question. The doctrine of the three
primitive notions is an interesting and not implausible claim about what
is going on in the mind, about our native endowments. It is, further-
more, a claim that coheres well with the epistemology and account of
our mental faculties that Descartes already worked out in the unpub-
lished Regulae and the then recently published Meditations.
Descartes’ answer is a philosophically serious answer. While it may
not ultimately hold up under philosophical scrutiny (what answer to
what problem, alas, has?), it cannot be dismissed as begging the ques-
tion or patronizing the questioner. On this much I agree with a number
of friends of Descartes’. But the defense of the intelligibility of Carte-
sian interactionism cannot end here. For the answer Descartes gave to
Elisabeth, while interesting and, perhaps, defensible, is flawed in an
important way; it is, I claim, not the answer that should have been
offered by the author of Le Monde and the Principia.
II. The Heaviness Analogy

Before making good on my claim, though, I would like to digress for a
few pages, and point out one comparison that Descartes does think
10 This is the general theme of the letter, Descartes to Elisabeth, 28 June 1643, AT III
690–95.
illuminates the account of mind-body interaction, a comparison that
involves the Scholastic account of free fall or heaviness. In part, I want
to deal with an obvious question that this raises: How is this compari-
son different from the one that Elisabeth suggests? How is the use of
this comparison consistent with Descartes’ apparent claim that com-
parisons can be of no use in illuminating mind-body interaction? But
in addition to dealing with these questions, I want to point out some-
thing that this discussion of Descartes’ suggests, a way of looking at
Descartes’ conception of mind-body interaction that will be helpful in
understanding the account of that notion that, I shall argue, better suits
Descartes’ system than the one he offered.
On the Scholastic account of heaviness, at least as Descartes under-
stood it, the heavy body is impelled to the center of the earth by the
real quality of heaviness, something distinct from the body itself, some-
thing incorporeal.11 This account, which Descartes thinks is intelligible
and generally understood,12 can be helpful in getting his correspon-
dents to understand his conception of mind-body union and interac-
tion. Thus, Descartes writes to Elisabeth:
When we suppose that heaviness is a real quality of which all we know is that
it has the power [force] to move the body that possesses it towards the center
of the earth, we find no difficulty in conceiving how it moves the body or
how it is united to it. We do not suppose that the production of this motion
takes place by a real contact between two surfaces, because we experience in
ourselves that we have a specific notion to conceive it by. I think that we
misuse this notion when we apply it to heaviness, which as I hope to show in
my physics [i.e., the yet to be published Principia Philosophiae], is not anything
really distinct from body; but it was given us for the purpose of conceiving
the manner in which the mind moves the body.13
It is important here to appreciate the difference between the analogy

that Descartes appeals to, and the comparison Elisabeth makes between
11 For an account of the Scholastic theory of form and quality as Descartes understood it,
and one of his principal lines of attack against it, see Etienne Gilson’s classical essay, “De
la critique des formes substantielles au doute méthodique” in his Etudes sur le rôle de la
pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris, 1930), pp. 141–90.
12 At least he usually concedes this. Descartes takes a different position in his letter to Regius,
January 1642, AT III 506, 507.
13 Descartes to Elisabeth, 21 May 1643, AT III 667–68. Descartes uses similar comparisons
in other writings as well. See, e.g., Descartes to Hyperaspistes, August 1641, AT III 424;
Descartes for [Arnauld], 29 July 1648, AT V 222–23; and the Letter of Mr. Descartes to Mr.
C.L.R. [i.e., Clerselier], AT IXA 213.
mind-body and body-body interaction, a comparison that Descartes
rejects. Descartes’ criticism of Elisabeth is that she is attempting to
understand one primitive notion in terms of another, something that can
only lead to grief. But the situation is altogether different with the
Scholastic analogy to which Descartes appeals. As Descartes claimed in
his reply to the Sixth Objections, in a passage to which he calls
Elisabeth’s attention, the common idea of heaviness, the idea the
Scholastics and the common man and the idea that Descartes himself
had in his naive and sense-bound youth, is, in fact, derived from the
idea we have of mind. Descartes writes:
The chief sign that my idea of heaviness was derived from that which I had
of the mind is that I though that heaviness carried bodies toward the center
of the earth as if it contained some cognizance [cognitio] of this center within
it. For it could not act as it did without such cognizance, nor can there be
any such cognizance except in the mind.14
Thus, Descartes can claim, as he did to Elisabeth in the passage I quoted

earlier, our notion of how the real quality of heaviness acts on the body
to which it is attached must be derived from the notion we have of how
the mind acts on the body. Now, since Descartes assumed that his
readers were conversant with the Scholastic account of heaviness, he
thought that he could use this familiar doctrine to call his skeptical
reader’s attention to the notion of mind-body union and interaction,
and point out that, despite their claims of not being able to conceive
how an incorporeal mind could act on an extended body, they really
do have the notion in question. This is what he explained to Arnauld,
to whom he offered the same analogy in 1648, five years after the letters
to Elisabeth:
So, it is no harder for us to understand how the mind moves the body than
it is for them [i.e., the Scholastics] to understand how such heaviness moves
a stone downwards.15
Whether or not this explanatory device was successful,16 it is clear that

Descartes is entitled to use it. Unlike the comparison Elisabeth presses,
the comparison between mind-body causation and mechanical causa-
tion, in Descartes’ comparison there is no real analogy, no comparison
14 Sixth Replies, AT VII 442. 15 Descartes for [Arnauld], 29 July 1648, AT V 222–23.
16 We don’t know Arnauld’s reaction, but the tactic wasn’t particularly successful with
Elisabeth. See Elisabeth to Descartes, 10/20 June 1643, AT III 684.
between two different notions. Rather, Descartes claims, there is an
identity: The same notion, that of mind-body union and interaction is at
issue in both contexts. Only in one of those contexts it is misapplied.
This is all a fairly straightforward and unproblematic exposition of
what Descartes was up to, of why Descartes thought the analogy drawn
from Scholastic science was helpful, and, unlike the analogy Elisabeth
tries to draw from mechanist science, unproblematic. But I would like
to point out an interesting aspect of Descartes’ use of the heaviness
analogy. The account that Descartes gives of the Scholastic theory of
heaviness makes the primitive notion of mind-body unity and the
correlative notion of mind-body interaction conceptually basic in an
extremely interesting sense. Descartes’ claim is that the Scholastic sci-
entist is just projecting his innately given conception of his own com-
posite nature onto the inanimate world;17 unless the Scholastic scientist
had this primitive notion pertaining to the union of mind and body, he
couldn’t understand the explanations he gives of phenomena in the
inanimate world. That is, as Descartes understands it, our comprehen-
sion of Scholastic explanations in terms of substantial forms and real
qualities is parasitic on the notions we have of mind-body unity and
interaction. The notion we have of the interaction between mind and
body is a kind of paradigm notion, a notion that is intelligible on its own
terms (i.e., through the closely related notion of mind-body unity), but
one in terms of which at least some other seemingly distinct varieties
of causal explanation are intelligible. Two things are worth noting
about this paradigm. For one, it should be pointed out that though
mind-body interaction is a paradigm with respect to Scholastic
explanations, Descartes is unambiguous in thinking that Scholastic
explanations in terms of forms and qualities are bad explanations. The
Scholastic projection of mind and mental activity onto the material
world is an illicit projection, in Descartes’ judgment. And second, and
more important, it should be noted that although mind-body interac-
tion is a paradigm for causal explanation, it is not the only paradigm, it
is not universally applicable. There are, Descartes seems to claim in his
reply to Elisabeth, some causal explanations, those that involve the
mechanical interactions of bodies with one another, that cannot be
understood through our understanding of mind-body interaction; our
understanding of voluntary action in animate beings can no more
17 This is exactly parallel to the account Descartes often gives of the common belief that
material things are really red, or hot, or sweet. See, e.g., Pr I 66–71.
clarify mechanical explanations than vice versa. Or so, in any case,
Descartes tells Elisabeth.
III. Motion, Impact, and God

Let us return now to the main thread of my argument. In section I I
presented Descartes’ answer to Elisabeth’s worries about the intelligi-
bility of mind-body interaction. However, I suggested there that there
is something radically wrong with the answer that Descartes gave
Elisabeth; it is an answer, I claim, that goes against some of Descartes’
most deeply held beliefs about the foundations of physics. Now I must
make clear just what I have in mind.
I would like to begin by focusing in on the comparison Elisabeth
attempts to draw between mind-body interaction and body-body inter-
action, i.e., impact. Elisabeth finds body-body interaction perfectly
intelligible. What she is asking Descartes, in effect, is to explain the one
in terms of the other; she wants Descartes to explain how a nonex-
tended and incorporeal mind can literally make contact with and impel
an extended body. Descartes’ answer is to say that body-body and mind-
body interaction are both intelligible, but on their own terms, that each
must be comprehended through its own primitive notion, body-body
interaction through the notion of extension, and mind-body interac-
tion through the notion of the unity of mind and body.
Let us examine these claims of Descartes’. Since we are dealing with
claims that relate to primitive notions and the notions that derive from,
are comprehended through, fall under, etc., these primitive notions, we
must first inquire into how it is that the primitive notions are related
to the less primitive notions that fall under them. Descartes, if you
remember, characterizes the relation as follows:
First I observe that there are in us certain primitive notions which are, as it
were the originals [comme des originaux] on the pattern of which [sur le patron
desquels] we form all of our other thoughts [connoissances].18
Descartes is none too clear in this passage. But at very least, I think that
Descartes means to say that if a given idea Q falls under a primitive
notion P, then having P is in some sense necessary for having Q, and
that no primitive notion distinct from P is necessary for having Q. P is
the original of and pattern for Q in at least this minimal sense.
18 Descartes to Elisabeth, 21 May 1643, AT III 665.

The problem I see with Descartes’ answer to Elisabeth relates to the
claims that he seems to make about precisely what ideas fall under the
primitive notions he enumerates. Now, it is tempting to suppose that
the real problem must arise in connecting mind-body interaction to the
primitive notion of mind-body unity that Descartes claims we have, to
suppose that Descartes’ answer must break down there if it breaks down
anywhere at all. But this is not what worries me. Although Descartes’
conception of mind-body unity has its obscurities, I am reasonably con-
fident that one can concoct a plausible account of mind-body unity that
makes comprehensible just why Descartes saw mind-body interaction as
falling under the primitive notion of mind-body unity.19
I certainly concede that working out this account may involve
Descartes in some unforeseen difficulties. But be that as it may, the
obvious problems lie not with unity and interaction, but with the prima
facie more plausible account of the idea of body-body interaction as it
relates to the primitive notion of extension. Descartes’ answer seems to
suggest that impact, body-body interaction falls under the primitive
notion of extension. But does it?
In answering Elisabeth, Descartes gives only two examples of ideas
that derive from the primitive notion of body: shape, and motion. It is
clear why shape is included there. Shape is a mode of extension, in
Descartes’ technical vocabulary.20 And it is plausible to suppose that we
cannot have an idea of a mode, like shape, without having an idea of
the kind of substance of which it is a mode, i.e., extended substance,
and that no other idea is required for us to be able to have an idea of
shape. That is, the idea of shape falls under the primitive notion of
extension in the appropriate sense.
The same case can be made for the idea of motion. Though there are
some complexities here, Descartes was clear in considering motion to be
a mode of body, a mode of extension, just like shape. Descartes wrote in
his Principia in offering a formal definition of the notion of motion:
19 One might even suggest that when Descartes says that mind and body are united, this
claim simply means that they are capable of appropriate causal interaction. See, e.g., Henri
Gouhier, op. cit., p. 335. For a contrary view, that the mind-body union results in a third
substance, a substance over and above the mental and material substances that make it
up, see, e.g., G. Rodis-Lewis, op. cit., vol. I, p. 353 and the references cited in vol. II,
p. 543, note 29; or Janet Broughton and Ruth Mattern, “Reinterpreting Descartes on
the Notion of the Union of Mind and Body,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1978),
pp. 23–32.
20 See, e.g., Pr I 53, 61.
If we consider how motion must be understood . . . in accordance with the
truth of the matter, we must say that it is the translation [translatio] of one
part of matter, or of one body from the vicinity of those bodies which imme-
diately touch it and which are regarded as being at rest, into the vicinity of
others. . . . And I say . . . strictly speaking that it is a mode [of body], not some-
thing substantial, just as shape is a mode of a thing with shape, and rest is a
mode of a thing at rest.21
Similarly, Descartes wrote to Henry More:

The translation that I call motion is a thing of no less entity than shape: It is
a mode in a body.22
Consequently, one can say that motion is understood through the prim-
itive notion of extension in roughly the same way as shape is.23
But, it should be noted, Elisabeth’s question didn’t deal with motion
per se. The comparison she is attempting to press is not a comparison
between mind-body interaction and motion, i.e., the translation a body
undergoes with respect to other bodies, but between the way in which
a mind can cause motion in bodies, and the way in which bodies can
cause motion in other bodies. That is, the comparison is not between
interaction and motion, but between two purported ways of causing
motion. And while motion itself may be a mode of body, something
comprehended through the notion of extension, change in motion and
its causes are something altogether different.
Now, how are we to understand body-body interaction, the way in which
one body can change the speed or direction of another body’s motion
through impact? Elisabeth takes this to be intelligible in and of itself and
to be in need of no further explanation. And although Descartes seems to
concur with this in his answer to her, quite a different answer emerges
from his more careful writings on physics from early to late. A way into
Descartes’ position is through the question: What are the laws that govern
the behavior and interaction of bodies, and why do bodies obey the laws
they do? One might, as some of Descartes’ contemporaries tried to do,
answer this question either through empirical studies24 or through an
21 Pr II 25. See also Pr II 27.

22 Descartes to More, August 1649, AT V 403.
23 Despite what Descartes says, this cannot be quite right, since motion, unlike shape, involves
time or, at very least, change.
24 Though the question is hotly debated, this is at least one reading of what Galileo thought
he was up to. For this reading, see, e.g., Stillman Drake, Galileo Studies (Ann Arbor, 1970),
especially Drake’s polemical introduction. For Descartes’ nutshell assessment of Galileo’s
physics, see Descartes to Mersenne, 11 October 1638, AT II 380.
analysis of the nature of body and motion.25 But for Descartes, the laws
that govern bodies in motion and impact must derive from the causes of
motion.
But what are the causes of motion for Descartes? He answers this
question in very general terms in a letter to More that I quoted earlier.
Descartes writes:
The translation which I call motion is a thing of no less entity than shape: it
is a mode in body. The force causing motion [vis . . . mouens] may be that of
God Himself conserving the same amount of translation in matter as He put
in it the first moment of creation; or it may be that of a created substance,
like our mind; or of any other thing to which He gave the force to move
a body.26
The causes of motion, then, are God, or minds.27 Now, the mental cau-
sation of motion is something of great importance to Descartes, as we
have seen already. But in physics, it is the divine causation of motion
that is mostly at issue. And it is from an understanding of how God
causes motion that the laws of motion are derived.
Descartes begins his discussion of the causes of motion and the laws
it obeys with the following statement:
25 This seems to be the strategy Thomas Hobbes adopts, e.g., in De Corpore, chapter 15. This
is also the strategy that Leibniz sometimes attributed to his own youthful works in physics,
the Theoria Motus Abstracti and the Hypothesis Physica Nova. See, e.g., Leibniz’s remarks at
the time these works were being written, in Leibniz to Oldenburg, 13/23 July 1670, in
Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (ed. Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften),
series II, vol. I (Darmstadt, 1926), p. 59; or Leibniz’s later remarks on this early program
in Part I of his Specimen Dynamicum (1695), in G. W. Leibniz (ed. C. I. Gerhardt), Mathe-
matische Schriften, vol. VI (Halle, 1860), p. 240, translated in P. P. Weiner (ed.), Leibniz
Selections (New York, 1951), p. 128. In some of his polemical writings against the Carte-
sians, Leibniz gives the misleading impression that for Descartes, too, the laws of motion
are to be derived from the nature of body. See, e.g., the essay that Weiner has entitled,
“Whether the Essence of a Body Consists in Extension,” in Leibniz (ed., C. I. Gerhardt),
Die Philosophischen Schriften, vol. IV (Berlin, 1880), pp. 464–66, translated in Weiner,
op. cit., pp. 100–2.
26 Descartes to More, August 1649, AT V 403–4.
27 P. H. J. Hoenen has suggested that the “other things” to which God gave the ability to
cause motion in bodies are just other bodies. See the excerpt from his Cosmologia, trans-
lated as “Descartes’s Mechanicism” in Willis Doney, ed., Descartes (Garden City, 1967),
pp. 353–68, esp. p. 359. But it is interesting that in the sections of Principia II that
deal with the causes of motion, properly speaking, sections 36 and following, bodies are
never mentioned as genuine causes. However, in Pr II 40 Descartes does mention, in addi-
tion to human minds, angelic minds as possible causes of motion. Angelic minds as causes
of motion also come up in the letter Descartes wrote to More that immediately precedes
the one from which I quoted. See Descartes to More, 15 April 1649, AT V 347. This
suggests that the “other things” in question in the August 1649 letter are not bodies,
but angels.
After having considered the nature of motion, we must consider its cause,
and that is twofold: first, indeed the universal and primary cause, which is
the general cause of all motions in the world; and then the particular cause,
by which it happens that individual parts of matter acquire motions which
they did not have before. And it seems obvious to me that the general cause
in question is nothing else but God Himself.28
The distinction between the universal and particular causes that

Descartes announces here makes it look as if he is dealing with a dis-
tinction between a prime-mover God who is the first cause, setting the
world in motion, and other corporeal causes, which result in the world
changing from moment to moment. But this is not the picture at all.
The universal and general cause, God, not only sets the world in
motion, but preserves motion in the world; the secondary causes to which
Descartes refers, as it turns out, are not causes of motion over and above
God, but rather three laws in accordance with which God Himself pre-
serves motion in the world from moment to moment.
In order to understand just how this works, we must remember that
for Descartes, the world must be preserved from moment to moment
by God, if it is not to pass out of existence. But since preservation and
creation are the same thing, Descartes argues, this is to say that God
must continually re-create the world for it to persist.29 So, Descartes’
God is not merely the prime mover; He is the general cause of motion
insofar as it is His continual activity, His changing of the relative places
of bodies from moment to moment while keeping them in existence
that constitutes motion in the world.30 Consequently, the laws that bodies
in motion obey must derive from the way in which God continuously
re-creates the world. And this, indeed, is just how Descartes derives
those laws. The first general principle Descartes notes is his famous con-
servation of motion law. This law is derived from the immutability of
God. Descartes argues that:
28 Pr II 36. See also Descartes to [the Marquis of Newcastle], October 1645, AT IV 328.
29 See Meditation III, AT VII 48–49; Second Replies, AT VII 165; Pr I 21.
30 The continual re-creation account of God’s activity creates a curious difficulty for the
mental causation of events in the material world. When God is re-creating the material
world from moment to moment, He must put each material thing somewhere when He re-
creates it. But if it is God who determines the position of bodies from moment to moment,
how is it possible for minds to affect the momentary position of a body? There seems to
be no room for minds to act on Descartes’ continual re-creation picture. Nicolas
Malebranche develops this difficulty into an argument for occasionalism in the seventh
of his Entretiens sur la métaphysique.
We must understand God to be perfect not only insofar as He is immutable,
but also insofar as He works with the greatest constancy and immutability.
. . . Whence it follows that it is most consistent with reason that we think that
from this alone, that God moved the parts of matter in different ways when
He first created them, and now conserves all that matter in the same way and
for the same reason He created it before, that He would also conserve the
same amount of motion in it always.31
This is Descartes’ “master law” of motion. But the secondary laws are
also derived, as the master law was, from God’s activity. Descartes writes:
And from this same immutability of God, certain rules or laws of nature can
be understood, which are secondary and particular causes of the different
motions which we notice in individual bodies.32
The dependence of the first two of the secondary laws on God’s

immutability as a cause of motion is evident. These laws, the so-called
Cartesian laws of inertia (laws of persistence would be more accurate)
mandate that certain states in bodies, the state of motion itself in the
first law, and the state of moving in a particular direction in the second,
persist. These follow directly from the immutability of God, who,
Descartes writes, “preserves motion precisely as it is in that very moment
of time in which he conserves it.”33
The third law, the law dealing with impact and the way in which one
body can change the state of another body, is somewhat more difficult.
In order to continue to argument, Descartes must argue that the
immutability of God requires that He change the motion of a given body
under certain circumstances, when, for example, it is hit by another
body of appropriate size and speed (force of going on). And this,
indeed, is how Descartes argues. The intuition is this. The fact that
there is no space devoid of body,34 together with the fact that God
created a world of bodies in motion35 entails that if God is to preserve
motion in the world, as His immutability requires, He must change the
motion of at least some bodies as they encounter one another. Thus
Descartes writes in the Principia, in defense of his law of impact:
All places are filled with body, and at the same time the motion of every body
is rectilinear in tendency; so clearly, when God first created the world, He
must not only have assigned various motions to its parts, but also have caused
their mutual impulses and the transference of motion from one to another;
and since He now preserves motion by the same activity and according to the
31 Pr II 36. 32 Pr II 37. 33 Pr II 39. 34 Pr II 5–19. 35 Pr II 36. Pr III 46–47.

same laws, as when He created it, he does not preserve it as a constant inher-
ent property of given pieces of matter, but as something passing from one
piece to another as they collide. Thus the very fact that creatures are con-
tinually changing argues for the immutability of God.36
Descartes’ reasoning here is hardly a model of clarity and distinctness.

But at least this much is clear: For Descartes, impact and the changes in
bodily motion that result from impact are nothing but the changes that
God must make in re-creating the world from moment to moment in
order to accommodate the motion of bodies to one another. Strictly
speaking, bodies in motion are not real causes of change in impact, it
would appear; motion transferred, motion begun, and motion ended in
impact must derive from God himself, shuffling bodies about as part of
the process of “conserving the same amount of translation in matter as
He put in it the first moment of creation,” as he wrote to More.37
(Here, by the way, is the reason why body-mind causality must be
problematic for Descartes, as I suggested earlier. The picture one gets
from the physics is one of inert matter being shuffled around from
moment to moment by an active God and, from time to time, by active
incorporeal minds. But given the inertness of matter on this picture, in
what sense can one say that the body can cause changes in mental
stuff ?)
The discussion of the last few pages has taken us a bit out of our way.
I started with the claim that Descartes seems to make to Elisabeth, that
body-body causation must be understood through the primitive notion
of extension. I claimed that while this may be true of motion simpliciter
which is, indeed, a mode of body, the case of body-body interaction or
impact is more complex, at least as analyzed in Descartes’ writings on
physics. An account of impact led us from motion simpliciter to its causes,
to God and the way in which He acts on the world in shuffling bodies
about from moment to moment. So, it seems, a full understanding of
body-body interaction requires that we understand not only motion, a
mode of extension, but the way in which God acts on the world. But
under which of Descartes’ three primitive notions does this fit?
Descartes never takes this question up in quite those terms. But a
very similar question does arise in the all too brief correspondence with
More at the end of Descartes’ life. One of More’s deepest criticisms of
Descartes concerns the doctrine that the essence of material substance
36 Pr II 42. 37 Descartes to More, August 1649, AT V 403–4.

is extension. More argues that material substance is not mere exten-
sion, but tangible or impenetrable extended stuff. As part of his attack,
More makes the claim that spirits and even God are extended.38 In the
case of God, More argues:
Now, the reason why I judge that God is, in His way, extended is that He is
omnipresent and intimately fills the whole machine of the universe and each
of its individual parts. For how could He imprint motion on matter, which
He once did, and which He actually does now, according to you [i.e.,
Descartes], unless He now as it were touches the matter of the universe, or
at least once did? . . . God is thus in His way extended, and consequently, God
is an extended thing.39
Descartes’ answers to More’s general attack are quite interesting, and

bear interesting relations to his responses to Elisabeth’s general worries
about how incorporeal substances can move extended bodies.40 But most
interesting is his answer as to how we can conceive of a nonextended
God as being able to act on an extended world. Descartes writes:
It is no disgrace to a philosopher to believe that God can move a body, without
regarding God as corporeal; it is no more of a disgrace to Him to think the
same of other incorporeal substances. Of course I do not think that any mode
of action [modus agendi] belongs univocally to both God and creatures, but I
must confess that the only ideal I can find in my mind to represent the way
[modus] in which God or an angel can move matter is the one which shows
me the way in which I am conscious I can move my own body by my own
thought.41
This comes as close as one could like to answering my question. The

way God acts upon the world in sustaining motion and rearranging
bodies in impact must, it seems, be derived from the conception I have
of how I act upon my body; it, too, must be derived from the primitive
notion of the unity of mind and body. Descartes’ answer to Elisabeth,
38 See, e.g., More to Descartes, 11 December 1648, AT V 238–40; More to Descartes, 5 March
1649, AT V 301; More to Descartes, 23 July 1649, AT V 379.
39 More to Descartes, 11 December 1648, AT V 238–39. This seems similar to a point Spinoza
makes in defense of his claim that God must have the attribute of extension. See Ethics
I, prop. 15, scholium, in Spinoza (ed. Carl Gebhardt), Opera (Heidelberg, 1925), vol. II,
p. 57.
40 Compare, e.g., the discussion of the sense in which God is extended in potentia in the
letters to More (Descartes to More, 15 April 1649, AT V 342; Descartes to More, August
1649, AT V 403) with Descartes’ remarks to Elisabeth about the sense in which it is proper
to say that mind is extended (Descartes to Elisabeth, 28 June 1643, AT III 694).
41 Descartes to More, 15 April 1649, AT V 347.
thus, cannot have been the correct answer, the answer that he should
have given, on his own principles. Body-body interaction is not fully
intelligible under the primitive notion of extension. A full under-
standing of bodies in impact, of how one body can alter the motion of
another, requires that we understand how God acts on the world. And
this, in turn, requires that we be familiar with the way our minds act
upon our bodies. So, if there is something wrong with the comparison
that Elisabeth tries to draw between mind-body and body-body interac-
tions, it cannot be what Descartes says it is; it cannot be an illicit inter-
mingling of discrete primitive notions. For the same primitive notion is
ultimately involved with both.
IV. What Descartes Should Have Told Elisabeth

The argument of the previous section undermines Descartes’ answer
to Elisabeth. Elisabeth’s attempt to understand interaction through
impact is not wrong for the reason Descartes says it is; Elisabeth is not
confusing concepts that fall under different primitive notions. This
much is clear. But the most interesting question still remains to be
faced: how does this observation affect the claim for which Descartes is
trying to argue? In responding to Elisabeth, Descartes is attempting to
establish that mind-body interaction is per se intelligible, or, at least,
intelligible through the closely related notion of mind-body unity, and
that Elisabeth’s attempt to connect mind-body interaction with body-
body interaction is neither possible nor needed. I have shown that the
argument he offers for these claims through the doctrine of the three
primitive notions is not, on Descartes’ own terms, correct. But what
becomes of the claims themselves? Ironically enough, I think that my
Cartesian refutation of Descartes’ actual response to Elisabeth, if any-
thing, strengthens his position. The considerations concerning motion
and impact drawn from Descartes’ writings on the foundations of
physics suggest a line of defense for the claims in question which is
more consistent with the rest of his works than the one he offered to
Elisabeth, and which is, I think, philosophically stronger than the one
he actually used. I should point out here that I make no claim that
Descartes ever used, or even saw the argument that I will try to develop
in this section. All I claim is that it is an argument he could have used,
and perhaps, should have used.
Let me begin setting out this new and improved answer to Elisabeth
by recalling the earlier discussion of the analogy that Descartes appeals
to in explaining his position, the analogy with the Scholastic account of
heaviness. I pointed out that what allows Descartes to use that analogy is
his claim that in this case we are not dealing with two different notions,
but only one. The claim is that the Scholastic account of heaviness is com-
prehensible because it involves a projection of our composite nature
onto the inanimate world. The real quality of heaviness is thought of as
a kind of mind, united to the heavy body in just the way that the human
mind is united to the human body, and, it is claimed, we conceive of heav-
iness acting on the heavy body in drawing it to the center of the earth in
just the way we conceive of the mind acting on the body. Thus, the
Scholastic mode of explanation is parasitic on the idea we have of mind-
body interaction in the sense that if we didn’t understand how minds
acted on animate bodies, then we wouldn’t understand how forms or
qualities act in inanimate bodies. Furthermore, one can, perhaps, say
that the notion we have of mind-body interaction is a paradigm notion
with respect to the Scholastic account of heaviness, and, more generally,
with respect to all Scholastic explanations in terms of form and quality,
insofar as our understanding of these modes of explanation involves a
projection of our notion of mind-body interaction onto the world of
inanimate things.
The discussion of motion and impact suggests that something similar
can be said about the relation between mind-body interaction and the
mechanical conception of explanation in terms of impact. Now, it is
true that the notion of mind-body interaction is not a paradigm notion
with respect to impact in quite the same way as it is with regard to the
Scholastic conception of heaviness. While the notion of mind-body
interaction does enter into a full understanding of interaction, it is not
a simple projection of our composite nature onto the inanimate world,
as the Scholastic theory is. The notion of mind-body interaction enters
in at only the deepest level of analysis of the notion of impact, when we
attempt to understand how God, the first and continuing cause of
motion in the world, the real cause for the changes in the motion of
bodies in impact, can act upon the material world. Consequently,
impact cannot be used as Descartes tries to use the Scholastic theory of
heaviness, to call attention to the idea of interaction he claims we all
have. But, the notion we have of impact is like the notion we have of
the Scholastics account of heaviness in an important respect. Elisabeth,
like most of her contemporaries, at least those sympathetic to the new
mechanist science, took impact to be per se intelligible, in fact, the very
model of intelligibility. What Descartes’ analyses of motion and its laws
purport to show is that this is not so. A full understanding of motion
in the material world requires reference to God and His action on the
material world, and through this, requires reference to our mind’s
action on our bodies. In this way we can say that the notion of impact,
like the Scholastic notion of heaviness, is parasitic on the notion we
have of mind-body interaction; for impact as for the Scholastics’ heav-
iness, mind-body interaction is a notion without which the notion of
body-body interaction is, strictly speaking, unintelligible, despite
appearances to the contrary. And though mind-body interaction is not
paradigmatic in the easy and obvious way that it is with respect to
Scholastic science, a full understanding of body-body interaction
requires an appeal to the way our minds can move our bodies.
This suggests an interesting line of defense for Descartes’ position
on the intelligibility of mind-body interaction. Mind-body interaction
seems to be, for Descartes, a paradigm for both mechanist and Scholas-
tic causal explanation. Since there were the two main competitors at
the time, we can say that, for Descartes, mind-body interaction is the
paradigm for all causal explanation, it is that in terms of which all other
causal interaction must be understood. And in this there lies a defense
for the intelligibility of interaction altogether different from the one,
based on the doctrine of the three primitive notions, that he offered to
Elisabeth. Mind-body interaction must be basic and intelligible on its
own terms since if it were not, then no other kind of causal explanation
would be intelligible at all; to challenge the intelligibility of mind-body
interaction is to challenge the entire enterprise of causal explanation.
Furthermore, we cannot give a simpler or more easily understood
account of causal interaction than mind-body interaction because there
are no more basic or more inherently intelligible ways of explaining the behav-
ior of anything open to us. We cannot appeal to analogies with impact to
clarify mind-body interaction, as Elisabeth does, not because of any con-
fusion of primitive notions, but because we must work the other way:
body-body interaction must ultimately be understood through the
notion we have of the way in which the mind acts on the body.
I should repeat that, despite suggestions of a position like this in the
writings on motion, Descartes never said anything like this, to the best
of my knowledge. But it is a philosophically interesting answer, one that
is open to him and, I think, more consistent with his conception of
causal interaction in the physical world than the account that he actu-
ally offered. It is, I think, the way of understanding interaction that
Descartes should have offered Elisabeth.
9
HOW GOD CAUSES MOTION
Descartes, Divine Sustenance, and Occasionalism
In his Traité de l’esprit de l’homme (1664),1 Louis de La Forge, one of

Descartes’ early followers, wrote:
I hold that there is no creature, spiritual or corporeal, that can change [the
position of a body] or that of any of its parts in the second instant of its cre-
ation if the creator does not do it himself, since it is he who had produced
this part of matter in place A. For example, not only is it necessary that he
continue to produce it if he wants it to continue to exist, but also, since
he cannot create it everywhere, nor can he create it outside of every place,
he must himself put it in place B, if he wants it there, for if he were to have
put it somewhere else, there is no force capable of removing it from there.
(Traité, p. 240)
De La Forge’s argument is an interesting one. He begins with two

premises. The first is the doctrine of divine sustenance, that God must
sustain the existence of every body, indeed, of every thing, mind or
body, at every moment of its existence. Second, de La Forge assumes
as a result, it would seem, that God causes motion in the material world
by re-creating bodies in different places at different times. From this de
La Forge draws the conclusion that only God can move a body. When
God sustains bodies, He must sustain them in some place or other; He
cannot sustain them everywhere, nowhere, or in any way independently
of some place or other. And so causes of motion beside God, causes of
motion as our own minds are supposed to be, are neither possible nor
1 Pierre Clair, ed. Louis de La Forge: Oeuvres Philosophiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1974). A similar argument is also found in dialogue seven of Nicolas Malebranche,
Dialogues on Metaphysics, trans., Willis Doney (New York: Abaris Books, 1980).
189
needed; if motion and rest are direct results of God’s sustenance of the
material world, it would seem that there can be no room for other
causes.
The position de La Forge is trying to establish here is a variety of
occasionalism, and the argument I have sketched is one among many
which Descartes’ followers used to establish the claim that God is the
only genuine cause in the material world, at least.2 On this view, causal
relations between two bodies, or between a mind and body, are not true
causal links, but only occasional causal links which depend for their effi-
cacy on God actually to impart the appropriate motion to the appro-
priate body. What is especially interesting is that de La Forge starts from
what many commentators assume to be genuinely Cartesian doctrines
to establish his conclusion. Descartes emphasizes in a number of places
that “we have no force through which we conserve ourselves,” and so
for this we must turn to God, who “continually reproduces us, as it were,
that is, conserves us” (Pr I 21).3 Descartes appeals to this doctrine of
divine conservation in proving his laws of nature, both in Le Monde and
in the Principia Philosophiae, arguing that God is the first and continu-
ing cause of motion in the world, and that acting with constancy in pre-
serving His material creation, He must necessarily sustain the world in
such a way that certain general constraints on motion are satisfied;
quantity of motion is thus conserved, as is motion along a straight path
(Pr II 36–42). The close connection between God’s sustenance of the
world and His role as cause of motion in the inanimate world have led
a number of commentators to see something like de La Forge’s view in
Descartes, the view that God’s role as a cause of motion in the world is
inseparable from His role as a sustainer of the world, that God causes
motion by creating bodies in different places at different times.4
De La Forge’s premises seem to belong to Descartes as well. But, if
so, then it would appear that, like it or not, Descartes too must be com-
2 For a brief account of occasionalism among seventeenth century Cartesians, see chapter 5
of Jean-François Battail, L’Advocat philosophe Géraud de Cordemoy (1626–1684) (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). There are a number of varieties of occasionalism. Here I am only
concerned with the claim that God is the only genuine cause of motion in the material
world.
3 The numerous references to Descartes’ texts will be given in the body, for the most part.
4 See, e.g., Jean Wahl, Du rôle de l’idée de l’instant dans la philosophie de Descartes (Paris: Felix
Alcan, 1920); Martial Gueroult, “The Metaphysics and Physics of Force in Descartes,” in
Stephen Gaukroger, ed., Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (Sussex: Harvester
Press, 1980), pp. 196–229, esp. 218–220; G. Hatfield, “Force (God) in Descartes’ Physics,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, X (1979): 113–140, esp. 127.
how god causes motion 191
mitted to de La Forge’s conclusion that God can be the only cause of
motion in His material world, that, contrary to our “most certain and
most evident experience,” mind cannot really cause motion in the
world (AT V 222). This is the question I would like to examine in this
essay. In the end, I shall argue that, when we understand Descartes’ doc-
trine of divine sustenance and of the way God enters the world as a
cause of motion, we shall see that, wherever de La Forge’s views lead
him, Descartes need not be committed to occasionalism, at least not in
this way. When we understand just how God causes motion, we shall
see that Descartes’ God can leave plenty of elbow room for other causes
to produce their effects, indeed, produce them as directly as God
Himself does.
I
It will be helpful to begin the story with a brief discussion of Descartes’
doctrine of divine sustenance. Descartes writes in Meditation III:
All of the time of my life can be divided into innumerable parts, each of which
is entirely independent of the others, so that from the fact that I existed a
short time ago, it does not follow that I ought to exist now, unless some cause
as it were creates me again in this moment, that is, conserves me. [AT VII 49
(CSM II 33)]
Now, Descartes argues, “plainly the same force and action is needed to
conserve any thing for the individual moments in which it endures as
was needed for creating it anew, had it not existed” [AT VII 49 (CSM
II 33)]. Clearly such a power is not in us; if it were, Descartes reasons,
I would also have been able to give myself all the perfections I clearly
lack [AT VII 168 (CSM II 118)]. And so he concludes that it must be
God that creates and sustains us [AT VII 111, 165, 168, 369–70 (CSM
II 80, 116, 118, 254/5); Pr I 21]. This conclusion, of course, holds for
bodies as well as for us. It is not just souls, but all finite things that
require some cause for their continued existence. And, as with the idea
of ourselves, “when I examine the idea of body, I perceive that it has
no power [vis] in itself through which it can produce or conserve itself”
[AT VII 118 (CSM II 84); cf. AT VII 110 (CSM II 79)]. And so we must
conclude that the duration of bodies, too, must be caused by God, who
sustains the material world He created in the beginning.
Descartes conceives of God’s continual sustenance of his creatures
as their efficient cause: “I should not hesitate to call the cause that
sustains me an efficient cause” [AT VII 109 (CSM II 79)]. But God’s
causality here is in one respect importantly different from other effi-
cient causes that we are familiar with from our experience. In reply to
Gassendi’s Fifth Objections, Descartes distinguishes between two sorts of
efficient causes, a causa secundum fieri, a cause of becoming, and a causa
secundum esse, a cause of being. Roughly speaking, as Descartes under-
stands the notions, a causa secundum esse is a cause which must continue
to act for its effect to continue, unlike a causa secundum fieri, which pro-
duces an effect that endures, even after the cause is no longer in oper-
ation or even in existence. An architect, thus, is the cause of becoming
with respect to a house, as is a father with respect to his son. But
Descartes claims
the sun is the cause of the light proceeding from it, and God is the cause of
created things, not only as a cause of becoming, but as a cause of being, and
therefore must always flow into the effect in the same way, in order to con-
serve it. [AT VII 369 (CSM II 254/5)]
And, so just as we ordinarily think that the sun must continue its illu-
mination for daylight to persist, so must God continue His activity in
order for the world and its motion to be sustained.5 This continual sus-
tenance is also unlike the more ordinary efficient causes insofar as it
requires a kind of power beyond the capacities of created things.
Whereas finite things may be able to stand as the efficient causes secun-
dum fieri of things in the world, only God, strictly speaking, can stand
as their cause secundum esse. As we noted earlier, in Meditation III
Descartes declares that: “plainly the same force and action is needed to
conserve any thing for the individual moments in which it endures as
was needed for creating it anew, had it not existed” [AT VII 49 (CSM
II 33)]. From this Descartes infers that “it is also one of those things
obvious by the light of nature that conservation differs from creation
only in reason” [AT VII 49 (CSM II 33)]. That is, the activity and power
needed to sustain a thing in its existence is identical to the activity and
power necessary to create anything from nothing [cf. also AT VII 165,
166 (CSM II 116, 117)]. Elsewhere he puts the point a bit differently,
suggesting that conservation is to be understood as the “continual pro-
duction of a thing” [AT VII 243 (CSM II 169); cf. Pr II 42], or, more
5 Descartes does concede, under challenge, that the sun may not be an especially good
example of a causa secundum esse. See AT III 405, 429.
guardedly, suggesting that God as it were (veluti) continually reproduces
His creatures [Pr I 21; cf. AT VII 110 (CSM II 79)].
In the following section, we shall investigate how Descartes’ God
causes motion while sustaining the world. But, before turning to that
question, I would like briefly to discuss an issue closely related to the
questions under discussion here, that of temporal atomism. A number
of commentators take Descartes’ language quite literally when he says
that God must continually re-create His creatures. On their view, Carte-
sian time must, as a result, be a series of discrete timeless instants, created
one after another like the frames of a motion picture.6 Such a view seems
inevitably to lead to a position like de La Forge’s. The cartoonist creat-
ing an animated cartoon can cause his creatures to move only by drawing
them in different positions in successive frames; so too for God, it would
seem, were we to conceive of Him as the grand cartoonist with respect
to His creation. In this way, God’s sustenance would seem to be insepa-
rable from His role as cause of motion, and all genuine causes of motion
other than God would seem to be frozen out.
But it is not at all clear that Descartes held such a position. In a recent
study, Jean–Marie Beyssade7 has argued that Descartes’ God sustains the
continuously flowing time of our experience. On Beyssade’s view, time
for Descartes is much like body, infinitely divisible and not composed
of any ultimate elements, elements such as the durationless temporal
atoms are supposed to be. Beyssade does not deny, of course, that
Descartes is concerned with timeless instants in a number of important
contexts, and, indeed, that he even talks about God conserving bodies
as they exist at a given instant [AT XI 44 (CSM I 96); Pr II 39]. But,
Beyssade argues, such instants are not, strictly speaking, parts of dura-
tion. A hunk of extended substance can be divided into innumerable
parts. But, for these divisions to be genuine parts of a body, they must
be extended as well. Points, lines, surfaces, and geometrical objects that
lack extension in length, width, and breadth, are not parts of a body,
but limits or boundaries. So, Beyssade suggests:
In the same way, every duration or part of duration contains a before and
after . . . ; the instant is its limit or boundary. If we are not mistaken, Descartes
always takes this word [“instant”] and its Latin original “instans” in the strict
sense of a limit. (La philosophie première, p. 348; cf. p. 353)
6 See, e.g., the references cited in note 4.

7 La philosophie première de Descartes (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), pp. 129–143.
Durations, no matter how small, can be parts of an enduring world, and
thus can be candidates for God’s sustaining activity. But, although there
may be instants in duration as boundaries of finite durations, instants,
Beyssade suggests, cannot be parts of an enduring world; they cannot
compose durations, nor can we intelligibly talk about God creating a
single instant by itself without creating the duration it serves to bound,
any more than we can talk about God creating a two-dimensional
surface, a mode of body, without the body that it bounds [AT VII 250/1,
433 (CSM II 174, 292)].
With this in mind, it is easy to see that there is really nothing in
Descartes’ texts that unambiguously implies temporal atomism. The
idea that all the parts of time are independent, the view we saw earlier
in Meditation III, certainly does not; the parts of time in question there
might plausibly be read as genuine parts of time, parts with duration,
parts which are independent in the sense that God could create any
stretch of time without creating preceding or succeeding portions of
time. One can give similar readings to other passages in which Descartes
talks about the independence of the present time from other moments
or moments from one another. Even where Descartes talks of creating
the things anew at every moment, even where Descartes makes it clear
that God sustains things as they are in a timeless instant, there is no
need to attribute temporal atomism to him.8 To say that God re-creates
the world at every instant is to say that every instant can be regarded
as the beginning, as the boundary of a newly created world. But,
although every instant can be regarded as a moment of creation, it does
not follow that what is being created is a bare instant or a sequence of
bare instants, or that God could create an atemporal instant without
creating a duration for that instant to bound.
But, just as Descartes was not committed to temporal atomism,
neither was he committed to its denial; I know of few passages that
cannot be plausibly interpreted either way. Indeed, I know of no
passage to suggest that Descartes was particularly interested in the ques-
tion of temporal atomism, one way or the other. And so it seems
improper to argue from Descartes’ supposed temporal atomism to the
claim that God causes motion through re-creating bodies in different
positions at different times. If we want to know how God causes motion
for Descartes, we should face the question directly.
8 For the former formulations see AT VII 49, 109 (CSM II 33, 78/9); for the latter see AT
XI 44, 45 (CSM I 96/7), Pr II 39.
II
In presenting his account of God as continual sustainer of the world,
Descartes did not think he was telling his readers anything they had not
already heard. As far as he was concerned, he was appealing to an old
and widely accepted doctrine with which his audience could be
expected to be both familiar and generally sympathetic. When in the
Fifth Objections Gassendi challenged his appeal to a conserving God [AT
VII 300 (CSM II 209)], Descartes responded: “When you deny that to
be conserved we require the continual influx of a first cause, you deny
something that all metaphysicians affirm as obvious” [AT VII 369 (CSM
II 254); cf. AT VI 45 (CSM I 133)]. And, in defending himself against
Gassendi’s criticisms, he seems to have turned directly to his copy of St.
Thomas Aquinas.9 God’s sustenance of this world of created things is
explicitly discussed in the Summa Theologiae I, q 104, a 1, and this
passage may be the source of Descartes’ answer to Gassendi. Like
Descartes, Aquinas distinguishes between causes secundum fieri and
secundum esse, and appeals to the same examples Descartes does – the
builder of a house, the parent of a child, and the sun as illuminator –
to clarify the sense in which God is the cause of the world as enduring
(ST I, q 104, a 1 c). And, although Aquinas does not say exactly that
God’s activity in sustaining the world is identical with His activity in cre-
ating it, many of Descartes’ contemporaries would have been happy to
agree with Descartes that “this conservation is the very same thing as
creation, differing only in reason.”10
In his monumental commentary on the Discours, Étienne Gilson11
noticed this similarity between Descartes and Aquinas. But Gilson also
noted an apparent (and important) difference:
The being of the things Descartes’ God conserves is so different from that
which St. Thomas’s God conserves, that there is a profound difference
9 In December 1639, Descartes tells Mersenne that he owns “vne Somme de S. Thomas,”
though it is not altogether clear to me whether this means a copy of Aquinas’s Summa
Theologiae or a summary of Aquinas. See AT II 630.
10 Guilelmus Amesius, Medulla theologica (1628), quoted in Heinrich Heppe and Ernst Bizer,
ed., Die Dogmatik der evangelisch-reformierden Kirche (Neukirchen, kreis Moers: Buchhand-
lung des Erziehungsvereins, 1935), p. 208. For other of Descartes’ contemporaries on
the question, see Heppe, Dogmatik, Locus XII; G. T. Thomson, Reformed Dogmatics, trans.,
Heinrich Heppe (London: Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1950), chapter XII; Étienne Gilson,
Index Scholastico-Cartesien (Paris: J. Vrin 1979), §§64, 112.
11 Discours de la méthode: texte et commentaire (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967).
between their two notions of continual creation. The Thomist God conserves
the being of a world of substantial forms and essences. . . . But, on the con-
trary, in Cartesianism, there are no substantial forms any more. (Commentaire,
p. 341)
Gilson goes on to argue that, lacking substantial forms, Descartes,

unlike the Scholastic, is doomed to a movie-show world of still frames,
mocking the continuity of time and motion that the Scholastic is gen-
uinely entitled to. Gilson’s full argument is too complex to enter into
here. But I would like to explore his initial observation a bit.
Descartes does, for the most part, reject substantial forms and this
does indeed make a difference, as Gilson emphasizes. But what differ-
ence it makes depends on how the notion is understood, and what it is
that takes the place of the absent forms. Now, the notion of a substan-
tial form is a basic notion in Aristotelian thought, and there are impor-
tant differences of conception among Scholastic thinkers with regard
to that notion. But, to understand the importance of the rejection of
substantial forms to Descartes’ thought, we must begin with an account
of what the notion meant to him.
In very general terms, a substantial form is that which, joined to
matter (the materia prima of the Scholastics, ultimately) results in a com-
plete substance. But, more substantively, substantial form is that from
which the characteristic behavior of the various sorts of substances
derives. And, so Descartes notes, writing to his then disciple Henricus
Regius in January 1642, “they [i.e., forms] were introduced by philoso-
phers to explain the proper action of natural things, of which action
this form is the principle and the source” (AT III 506). Or, as the Con-
imbrian Fathers wrote in a book Descartes likely learned from as a
schoolboy,
There are individual and particular behaviors [ functiones] appropriate to

each individual natural thing, as reasoning is to human beings, neighing is
to horses, heating to fire, and so on. But these behaviors do not arise
from matter. . . . Thus they must arise from substantial form. (Gilson, Index,
§209)
More concretely, Descartes views substantial forms as substances of a

sort: “By the name ‘substantial form’ I have understood a certain sub-
stance joined to matter, and with it composing something whole that is
merely material” (AT III 502). And the sorts of substances they are is
mental substance, Descartes thinks, “like little souls joined to their
bodies” (AT III 648).12 And so Descartes characterizes the Scholastic
account of heaviness which he himself once held as follows:
But what especially showed that the idea I had of heaviness was derived from
that of mind was the fact that I thought that heaviness bore bodies toward
the center of the earth as if it contained in itself some knowledge of it [i.e.,
the center of the earth]. For this could not happen without knowledge, and
there cannot be any knowledge except in a mind. [AT VII 442 (CSM II 298)]
If substantial forms are supposed to explain the characteristic behavior

of bodies of various sorts, then we must be thinking of them as inten-
tional entities, agents of a rudimentary sort, things capable of forming
intentions and exercising volition, little souls joined to matter. And so
the Scholastic doctrine of form and matter is, in a sense, just the image
of the Cartesian human being, an unextended soul united to extended
body and projected out onto the material world. Indeed, Descartes often
uses the supposed familiarity of the Scholastic model of heaviness (which
everyone would have learned at school) to persuade those who have
trouble with mind–body interaction on his view that they already under-
stand how interaction is possible; if one can understand the Scholastic
account of heaviness, then one can understand how the soul can move
the body, Descartes reasons, since the two cases are just the same.13
It should be evident from Descartes’ account of substantial form that
he does not reject forms altogether. Given that the human mind is the
very model of a form, it is not surprising to find Descartes saying from
time to time that the human soul is “the true substantial form of man”
(AT II 505); indeed, it is “the only substantial form” he recognizes [AT
III 503; cf. AT IV 346, AT VII 356 (CSM II 246)]. Descartes from time
to time also uses Scholastic terminology and talks of the soul “inform-
ing” the body [AT IV 168; AT X 411 (CSM I 40)]. In this sense, Gilson
perhaps overestimates the difference between the world Descartes’ God
sustains and that which Aquinas’s sustains, insofar as both contain at
least some substantial forms.14
12 The remark in question relates to real qualities, strictly speaking, qualities that follow
directly from forms. But, in his polemics against the Scholastics, Descartes drew no dis-
tinction between substantial forms and real qualities.
13 For a fuller account of this, see §II of Daniel Garber, “Understanding Interaction: What
Descartes Should Have Told Elisabeth,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXI supp. (1983):
15–32, essay 8 in this volume.
14 For a recent discussion of the human soul as substantial form in Descartes, see Marjorie
Grene, “Die Einheit des Menschen: Descartes under den Scholastikern,” Dialectica, XL
(1986): 309–322.
But it is significant that Descartes’ world has many fewer forms than
Aquinas’s does, that Descartes rejects all forms but those which pertain
to human beings.15 This raises something of a problem for Descartes,
however. The substantial form was that in terms of which the charac-
teristic behavior of a body of a certain sort was to be explained. But,
without form, what is to explain why horses neigh and fire heats, why
cannon balls fall and smoke rises? In one sense, the replacement for
explanation in terms of form is explanation in terms of size, shape, and
motion – mechanical explanation. Indeed so, but the story does not
end there. In order to explain the behavior of a body (say a cannon
ball) mechanistically, we must know more than just the size, shape, and
motions of its parts and the surrounding medium; we must also know
the relevant laws of motion, how a body as such can be expected to
behave, what results when two bodies of given sizes, shapes, and motions
encounter one another in collision, etc. Descartes replaces the multi-
plicity of Aristotelian substances, each with its own form and distinct
characteristic behavior, with one kind of body which fills the entire uni-
verse and behaves everywhere in accordance with the same laws (cf. Pr
II 23). But, in the absence of Scholastic substantial forms, Descartes
must find some way of explaining the characteristic behavior of mater-
ial substance, the laws of motion. And it is here that God enters as the
“universal and primary [cause of motion], which is the general cause
of all motions there are in the [physical] world” (Pr II 36). God is the
cause of motion, what takes the place of the Scholastic forms Descartes
banished from the inanimate world of nonhuman beings.
But this, of course, leads us back to the question I posed earlier in
this essay: How does God cause motion in the world? And how is God’s
role as cause of motion related to His role as sustainer of body?
To answer this first question, we must, I think, reflect on how souls
and the other forms Descartes attributed to the Scholastics were
thought to cause motion. We must keep in mind here that the issue is
under a cloud, so to speak, and it may turn out that, because of an argu-
ment like the one de La Forge gave, Descartes is not entitled to hold
that the human soul causes motion. But, prima facie and despite the
doubts of a number of his readers, Descartes certainly thought the ques-
tion relatively unproblematic. Writing to Arnauld on 29 July 1648,
Descartes noted:
15 For the still standard account of Descartes’ rejection of forms, see Gilson, Études sur le rôle
de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris: J. Vrin, 1975), pp. 141–190.
That the mind, which is incorporeal, can impel a body, is not shown to us by
any reasoning or comparison with other things, but is shown daily by the most
certain and most evident experience. For this one thing is among the things
known per se, which we obscure when we try to explain through other things.
(AT V 222)
The mind can cause motion in a body, Descartes holds; it is something

we know through experience directly, something we cannot explain in
other terms. Insofar as we comprehend it, it is because “we have within
us certain primitive notions, on the model of which we form all our
other knowledge,” Descartes explains to Elisabeth (AT III 665). And,
Descartes goes on to explain, we understand the schoolman’s substan-
tial forms to work in exactly the same way; indeed, as I noted earlier,
the understanding we have of forms derives from the notions we were
given to understand how human mind works on body.
Descartes is not very informative about just how mind (or form)
moves body; on his view, there is not much that can be said, other than
to direct our attention to the experience we all have that is supposed
to make it all clear.16 But, although there is not much we can say, there
is no confusing the sense in which mind causes motion in a body with
the way God sustains the body that mind supposedly moves. One of the
axioms Descartes uses in the geometrical presentation of his arguments
appended to the Second Replies reads as follows: “It is greater to create
or conserve a substance, than it is to create or conserve the attributes
or properties of a substance” [AT VII 166 (CSM II 117)]. The passage
is not without its difficulties.17 But the clear sense is that Descartes wants
to distinguish causes that change the modes or properties of a thing
(modal causes, as I shall call them) from causes that create or sustain
the very being of a substance (substantial causes, perhaps). God, sus-
taining the world, is clearly a substantial cause. But minds are clearly
not; insofar as they cause changes in the motion of bodies, they at best
can count as modal causes. And, insofar as substantial forms are under-
stood on the model of souls acting on bodies, Descartes would have had
little trouble classifying them, with minds, as modal causes; they are
16 This, in any case, is what he insisted on in writing to Elisabeth. See AT III 663–668,
690–695. What exactly he meant here is not entirely clear.
17 The passage raises an obvious question about the relation between an attribute and a sub-
stance, a question the young Burman raised to Descartes in coversation. See AT V 154,
and trans. and ed., John Cottingham, Descartes’ Conversation with Burman (New York:
Oxford, 1976), pp. 15, 77–80.
causes of motion, a mode in bodies assumed to be sustained by the
divine Sustainer who is the unique substantial cause.
God enters Descartes’ physics to do the business substantial forms did
in the Aristotelian system, as he understood it, to cause bodies to behave
in their characteristic ways. And, I claim, when doing the business of
forms, Descartes’ God is understood to cause motion in just the way
forms were taken to do it, that is, on Descartes’ account, in just the way
that we do it: by way of an impulse that moves matter in a way that we
can comprehend only through immediate experience. This is not at all
clear as late as 1644 when, in proving his laws of nature in the Principia,
Descartes’ account of God as cause of motion is deeply (and obscurely)
intertwined with his account of God as sustainer of the world (Pr II
36–42). But, by April 1649, Descartes wrote to Henry More:
Although I believe that no mode of acting belongs univocally to God and to

His creatures, I confess nevertheless, that I can find no idea in my mind which
represents the way in which God or an angel can move matter, which is dif-
ferent from the idea that shows me the way in which I am conscious that I
can move my own body through my thought. (AT V 347)
And, so Descartes suggests to More, God is conceived to move bodies

in just the way we do, using the same primitive notion we use to under-
stand how we move our own bodies.
If this is how we conceive of God as a cause of motion, then, it would
seem, we are conceiving of Him as a modal cause when it comes to
motion. Conceived as such, there would appear to be a distinction
between God as sustainer of the world, a substantial cause keeping
things in existence, and God as cause of motion, a modal cause causing
bodies to have the particular motion they have, determining, at least in
part, their modes. The difference between these two roles God plays
for Descartes comes out again in the correspondence with More. In his
letter of 5 March 1649, More asked Descartes if “matter, whether we
imagine it to be eternal or created yesterday, left to itself, and receiv-
ing no impulse from anything else, would move or be at rest?” (AT V
316). Descartes answers in his letter of August 1649: “I consider ‘matter,
left to itself, and receiving no impulse from anything else’ as plainly
being at rest. But it is impelled by God, conserving the same amount
of transference in it as He put there from the first” (AT V 404). The
picture that comes through here is a simple one. Bodies can be con-
served with or without the divine impulse. Without the impulse, they
are at rest; with it, in motion. God’s conservation of body seems sepa-
rable from His role as cause of motion, and as cause of motion, He
seems to act as we would in the circumstances; God’s motion seems to
result from a divine act of will, a divine shove.
III
Now that we understand something of how God causes motion, we can
return to the question originally posed and offer an answer.
As de La Forge construed Descartes’ views on God, continual re-
creation, and God’s role as cause of motion, Descartes seems pushed
inevitably toward occasionalism and the view that God is the only
genuine cause of motion in the world; if God causes motion by re-
creating bodies in different places at different times, then there seems
to be no room for finite causes to act. But by now it should be clear
why Descartes need not be committed to such a view.
I have argued that, for Descartes, God enters as a cause of motion in
order to replace the Scholastics’ substantial forms, and, in that role, he
can (and, in the More letters, at least, is) construed as acting in just the
way forms were thought to cause motion, that is, in just the way we cause
motion. As such, God both sustains bodies in their being and sustains
bodies in their motion. But, it is important to note, these two activities
seem to be quite distinct; in the one case, God is acting as a modal cause,
in the other, as a substantial cause. This is an extremely important
observation. There is no substantial cause but God, nor can there be,
since no other being has the ability to create and sustain the universe.
But, although God is a modal cause with respect to motion, there is no
reason to hold that God is the only such cause. God is conceived to act
as we do in causing motion; just as the finite cause of motion does not
exclude others, so the fact that God causes motion does not seem to
exclude other causes. This seems true even when we are talking about
causing motion in the same body. Just as two human beings can exert
their contrary impulses on the same bit of matter, so can we impose an
impulse contrary to the one God imposes. Indeed, we do so every time
we life a stone, on which God is imposing an impulse to move toward
the center of the earth.
And so Descartes would have to agree with de La Forge that God
cannot sustain bodies that are in no place at all or in indeterminate
places; the very possibility is absurd. But, I think Descartes might insist,
although God sustains bodies that have place, it is not the act of sus-
taining them that gives them place. What gives them place and the
motion that puts them in different places at different times is impulse
or the lack thereof, a cause quite distinct from that by which bodies are
sustained. These impulses may come from God Himself, but they might
come from other causes, like our own minds [cf. AT V 403/4]. And,
when they come from God, they are not to be identified with the cause
by which He sustains the bodies He moves.
There are a number of important questions relevant to the topic at
hand which space will not permit us to discuss. Most important, it would
be valuable to discuss the relations between the conception of motion
and its divine cause which I have been developing with the discussion
of motion and rest and their laws in Part II of the Principles and in
chapter 7 of The World – the sense in which motion and rest are distinct
and the sense in which they are not, the sense in which motion and rest
are states, and the way in which motion and rest give rise to forces that
come into play at the time of collision. My story will not be complete
until we see how the way in which Descartes’ immutable God causes
motion leads him to the conception of motion (and its associated forces
and laws) which underlies his program in natural philosophy.
But, incomplete as my preliminary sketch of Descartes’ position may
be, it allows us to see one important feature that differentiates
Descartes’ metaphysic of motion and his use of God as cause of motion
from that of his avowedly occasionalist followers. What lies behind occa-
sionalism as advanced by de La Forge and by many Cartesians of his
generation is a deep worry about causality in the world of finite things;
what comes up again and again is the view that finite things are inca-
pable of any genuine causal efficacy, that producing an effect is beyond
the power of any finite thing. God enters as the only being capable of
producing any change in the world.18 Descartes’ view is quite different.
Descartes never rejects finite causes as such; indeed, it is on the model
of one particular finite cause, us, that all causes are understood, con-
servation excepted.19 When God enters as a cause of motion, it is simply
on account of the fact that some finite causes needed to do the job are
not available. But, even when God undertakes this task, it seems to me
that Descartes can quite well hold that finite causes of motion are in
no way squeezed out. Mind, indeed, can remain as direct a cause of
motion for Descartes as God Himself.
18 See especially Nicolas Malebranche, De la récherche de la vérité, bk. VI pt. II, chapter III, and
the XV e Éclaircissement.
19 See Garber, “Understanding Interaction.”
10
DESCARTES AND OCCASIONALISM
The doctrine of occasionalism was, of course, central to seventeenth-

century metaphysics. On this widely held view, the changes that one
body appears to cause in another on impact, the changes that a body
can cause in a mind in producing a sensation, or that a mind can cause
in a body in producing a voluntary action are all due directly to God,
moving bodies or producing sensations in minds on the occasions of
other appropriate events. And so, on this view, the tickling of the
retina and subsequent changes in the brain are only the “occasional
causes” of the sensory idea I have of a friend in the distance; the real
cause is God, who directly moves my sense organs when the light
approaches them, moves the parts of the brain when the sensory organs
are moved, and then produces the sensory idea I have in my mind of
another person’s face when my sense organs and brain are in an appro-
priate state. Similarly, it is God who is the actual cause of my arm’s move-
ment when I decide to raise it to wave; my volition is only an occasional
cause.
Now, occasionalism was widely held among many of Descartes’
followers; it can be found in various forms in Clauberg, Clerselier,
Cordemoy, La Forge, Geulincx, and, most notably, in Malebranche.1
1 For general accounts of occasionalism among the members of the Cartesian school, see,
for example, Joseph Prost, Essai sur l’atomisme et l’occasionalisme dans la philosophie cartésienne
(Paris: Paulin, 1907); Henri Gouhier, La vocation de Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1926),
chapter III; Jean-François Battail, L’avocat philosophe Géraud de Cordemoy (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 141–46; and Rainer Specht, Commercium mentis et corporis:
über Kausalvorstellungen im Cartesianismus (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann
Verlag, 1966), chapters II and III.
203
And throughout its seventeenth-century career it is closely associated
with Descartes’ followers.2 But to what extent is it really Descartes’ own
view? To what extent is it fair to attribute this view to the founder of the
Cartesian school? This is the question that I shall explore here.
I. A Letter to Elisabeth
I will begin my investigation with a passage from a letter that Descartes
wrote to the Princess Elisabeth on 6 October 1645:
All the reasons which prove the existence of God and that He is the first and
immutable cause of all the effects which do not depend on the free will of
men, prove in the same way, it seems to me, that He is also the cause of all
of them that depend on it [i.e., free will]. For one can only prove that He
exists by considering Him as a supremely perfect being, and He would not
be supremely perfect if something could happen in the world that did not
derive entirely from Him. . . . God is the universal cause of everything in such
a way that He is in the same way the total cause of everything, and thus
nothing can happen without His will.3
This passage would seem to be quite clear in asserting that God is the
real cause of everything in the world; if “nothing can happen without
His will,” as Descartes tells Elisabeth, then surely it is reasonable to infer
that Descartes was an occasionalist.
He may, in the end, turn out to be an occasionalist, but I think that
this passage is not so clear as it may look at first. When reading this, it
is very important to place it in context, and understand what exactly
Descartes was addressing in the passage. In this series of letters,
Descartes is trying to console Elisabeth in her troubles. In a letter of 30
September 1645, she wrote:
2 Indeed, when it first appears, it is closely associated with Descartes himself. It is an integral
part of de La Forge’s commentary on Descartes’ Treatise on Man, and it is one of the central
points of a letter Clerselier, Descartes’ literary executor, wrote to de La Forge in Decem-
ber 1660, a letter that appeals to the authority of “nostre Maistre” on a number of occasions
and that Clerselier published alongside Descartes’ own letters in one of his volumes of
the philosopher’s collected correspondence. On de la Forge, see Gouhier, La vocation de
Malebranche, pp. 93–94; for the Clerselier letter, see Claude Clerselier, Lettres de Mr Descartes
. . . [tome III] (Paris, 1667), pp. 640–46. I am indebted to Alan Gabbey for calling the
Clerselier letter to my attention.
3 AT IV 313–14. This letter appeared in the first volume of Clerselier’s edition of Descartes’
correspondence in 1657.
descartes and occasionalism 205
[The fact] of the existence of God and His attributes can console us in the
misfortunes that come to us from the ordinary course of nature and from
the order which He has established there [as when we lose some good
through a storm, or when we lose our health through an infection in the air,
or our friends through death] but not in those [misfortunes] which are
imposed on us by men, whose will appears to us to be entirely free.4
Descartes’ reply, as quoted above, is that all things, including human

beings acting freely, are under the ultimate control of an omniscient,
omnipotent, and benevolent God. In saying this, Descartes does not
take himself to be saying anything particularly original; it is, indeed, a
theological commonplace. While these kinds of theological issues have
led thinkers in various theological traditions to take the issue of
occasionalism seriously,5 it is not appropriate to infer the full-blown
metaphysical doctrine of occasionalism from this commonplace obser-
vation, and conclude that Descartes held that God is the only real
cause in nature; his words to Elisabeth are meant as consolation, not
metaphysics.
The question of Descartes’ occasionalism is still open. To settle it we
have to turn to a more detailed investigation of his metaphysical and
physical writings. I will divide the investigation into three parts, dis-
cussing first the case of body-body causation (one billiard ball hitting
another), then mind-body causation (voluntary motions in human
beings), and finally body-mind causation (sensation).
II. The Case of Body-Body Causation

I will not pause (too) long over this case. It seems to me as clear as
anything that, for Descartes, God is the only cause of motion in the
inanimate world of bodies, that bodies cannot themselves be genuine
causes of change in the physical world of extended substance. To
understand why, let me turn for a moment to Descartes’ reflections on
motion and its laws.6
4 AT IV 302.
5 For a recent discussion of some of this larger theological debate, see Alfred Freddoso,
“Medieval Aristotelianism and the Case against Secondary Causation in Nature,” in Divine
and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, ed., Thomas V. Morris (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1988).
6 For a fuller account of Descartes on the laws of motion, see Daniel Garber, Descartes’
Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Descartes’ conception of physics must be understood as being in
opposition to an Aristotelian one, as a substitute for the kind of physics
that was taught in the schools. Basic to the physics of the schools was
the notion of a substantial form. According to the Aristotelian physics,
each kind of thing had its own substantial form, and it was through this
that the basic properties of things were to be explained. And so fire
rises and stones fall because of their forms, for example. In this way,
things were thought to have basic, inborn tendencies to behavior;
physics consisted in finding out what these basic tendencies were and
in explaining the manifest properties of things in those terms.
A basic move in Descartes’ philosophy, something he shared with
other contemporary adherents of the so-called mechanical philosophy,
was the elimination of these substantial forms, these basic explanatory
principles. But how, then, are we to explain the characteristic behavior
of bodies? Descartes’ strategy was simple; instead of locating the basic
laws that govern the behavior of things in these forms, he placed them
in God. That is, it is God, not substantial forms, that will ground the
laws that govern bodies.
How God grounds the laws of motion is illustrated in the proofs that
Descartes gives for them. These proofs are grounded in his celebrated
doctrine of continual re-creation. Descartes writes in Meditation III:
All of the time of my life can be divided into innumerable parts, each of which
is entirely independent of the others, so that from the fact that I existed a
short time ago, it does not follow that I ought to exist now, unless some cause
as it were creates me again in this moment, that is, conserves me.7
Now, he argues,
plainly the same force and action is needed to conserve any thing for the
individual moments in which it endures as was needed for creating it anew,
had it not existed.8
Clearly such a power is not in us; if it were, then, Descartes reasons, “I

would also have been able to give myself all of the perfections I clearly
lack.9” And so, he concludes, it must be God that creates and sustains
us.10 This conclusion, of course, holds for bodies as well as it does for
us. It is not just souls, but all finite things that require some cause for
their continued existence. And as with the idea of ourselves, “when I
7 AT VII 49. 8 Ibid. 9 See AT VII 48, 168.

10 See AT VII 49–50, 111, 165, 168, 369–70; and Principles of Philosophy I 21.
examine the idea of body, I perceive that it has no power [vis] in itself
through which it can produce or conserve itself.”11 And so, we must
conclude that the duration of bodies, too, must be caused by God, who
sustains the physical world He created in the beginning.
This view of divine sustenance underlies Descartes’ derivations of the
laws of motion, both in The World of 1633 and in the Principles of Phi-
losophy of 1644. Arguing for his conservation principle in the Principles
(for example, the law that God maintains the same quantity of motion
in the world), Descartes writes:
We also understand that there is perfection in God not only because He is

in Himself immutable, but also because He works in the most constant and
immutable way. Therefore, with the exception of those changes which evident
experience or divine revelation render certain, and which we perceive or
believe happen without any change in the creator, we should suppose no
other changes in His works, so as not to argue for an inconstancy in Him.
From this it follows, that it is most in harmony with reason for us to think
that merely from the fact that God moved the parts of matter in different
ways when He first created them, and now conserves the totality of that matter
in the same way and with the same laws [eademque ratione] with which He
created them earlier, He always conserves the same amount of motion in it.12
Similarly, consider his argument for the law that a body in motion tends
to move rectilinearly, as that argument is given in the Principles:
The reason [causa] for this rule is . . . the immutability and simplicity of the
operation through which God conserves motion in matter. For He conserves
it precisely as it is in the very moment of time in which He conserves it,
without taking into account the way it might have been a bit earlier. And
although no motion takes place in an instant, it is obvious that in the indi-
vidual instants that can be designated while it is moving, everything that
moves is determined to continue its motion in some direction, following a
straight line, and never following a curved line.13
The picture in both of these arguments is reasonably clear: God stands

behind the world of bodies and is the direct cause of their motion. In
the old Aristotelian philosophy, the characteristic behavior of bodies
was explained through substantial forms; in Descartes’ new, up-to-date
11 AT VII 118; see also p. 110. 12 Principles of Philosophy II 36.

13 Principles of Philosophy II 39.
mechanism, forms are out, and God is in; in Descartes’ new philoso-
phy, the characteristic behavior of bodies is explained in terms of an
immutable God sustaining the motion of bodies.
I think that it is reasonably clear, then, that in the material world, at
least, God is the only genuine causal agent. There are some further sub-
tleties in the argument that I will set aside for the moment, returning
to at least one of them later. But before moving on to the somewhat
more difficult cases of mind-body and body-mind causation, I would
like to pause a moment and examine one complexity in the case.
Though it is clear that God is the real agent of change, the real cause
of motion in the physical world, it is not at all clear how He does it,
how He pulls it off. Though it is not appropriate to argue it in full detail
here, it seems to me that there are at least two somewhat different
models that one can find in Descartes for this.14 On one model, God
sustains the world by re-creating a succession of discrete, timeless world
stages, one after another, like frames in a movie film. On this view, God
is conceived to cause motion by re-creating bodies in different places
in different frames of the movie, as it were. We might call this the cin-
ematic view of how God causes motion. But Descartes sometimes sug-
gests something a bit different. On this alternative view, what God
sustains is a world of bodies existing continually in time. Now, in this
world, some bodies are at rest, while others are in motion. Those in
motion, Descartes sometimes suggests, receive a kind of impulse from
God. Writing to Descartes on 5 March 1649, More asked if
matter, whether we imagine it to be eternal or created yesterday, left to itself,
and receiving no impulse from anything else, would move or be at rest?15
Descartes answered:
I consider “matter left to itself and receiving no impulse from anything else”
as plainly being at rest. But it is impelled by God, conserving the same amount
of motion or transference in it as He put there from the first.16
On this view, what might be called the divine-impulse view, God causes
motion by impulse, by a kind of divine shove.
It is interesting to try to understand how Descartes thought of God
as a cause of motion. But this distinction I have tried to make between
14 For a fuller development of this idea, see Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics, chapter 9,
or Daniel Garber, “How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance, and Occa-
sionalism,” Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 567–80, essay 9 in this volume.
15 AT V 316. 16 AT V 404.
the cinematic view and the divine-impulse view of God as a cause of motion
will come in very handy when we are discussing Descartes’ thoughts on
mind-body causation, to which we must now turn.
III. The Case of Mind-Body Causation

The problem of mind-body causation is, of course, a central concern
of Cartesian scholarship; there are few issues in his philosophy about
which more ink has been spilled. But my interest in it here is relatively
narrow: To what extent does Descartes think that there can be genuine
mental causes of motions in the physical world, and to what extent does
he believe, with the majority of his followers, that God is the true cause
of motion in the world of bodies?
Here, as on the issue of body-body causation, I believe that the case
is reasonably clear: For Descartes, I think, mind can be a genuine cause
of motion in the world, indeed, as genuine a cause as God Himself.
But though the case is, in the end, clear, it is not without its com-
plications. As a number of later philosophers have noted, Descartes’
views on God’s role as continual re-creator, that which underlies the
derivation of the laws of motion, as we have seen, would seem to lead
us directly to a strong version of occasionalism, where God can be the
only cause of change in the physical world. The argument is formulated
neatly by Louis de La Forge:
I hold that there is no creature, spiritual or corporeal, that can change [the
position of a body] or that of any of its parts in the second instant of its cre-
ation if the creator does not do it Himself, since it is He who had produced
this part of matter in place A. For example, not only is it necessary that He
continue to produce it if He wants it to continue to exist, but also, since He
cannot create it everywhere, nor can He create it outside of every place,
He must Himself put it in place B, if He wants it there, for if He were to have
put it somewhere else, there is no force capable of removing it from there.17
The argument goes from the doctrine of continual re-creation, authen-

tically Cartesian, to the conclusion that God can be the only cause of
motion in the world. When God sustains a body, He must sustain it some-
where, and in sustaining it where He does He causes it to move or be at
17 Louis de La Forge, Oeuvres Philosophiques, ed. Pierre Clair (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1974), p. 240. A similar argument can also be found in Dialogue VII of
Malebranche’s Dialogues on Metaphysics.
rest. And so, it seems, there is no room for any other causes of motion
in the Cartesian world, in particular, mind; if mind is to have a role to
play in where a given body is from moment to moment, it must work
through God, who alone can sustain a body and who is ultimately
responsible for putting a body one place or another.18
This argument is not decisive, I think. First of all, however good an
argument it might be, I see no reason to believe that Descartes ever saw
such consequences as following out of his doctrine of continual re-
creation. But, more than that, I do not think that the argument is
necessarily binding on Descartes. It is certainly persuasive, particularly if
one takes what I called the cinematic view of God as a cause of motion,
the view in which God causes motion by re-creating a body in different
places in different instants of time. But the argument is considerably less
persuasive if one takes what I earlier called the divine-impulse view of
God as a cause of motion. On that view, God causes motion by provid-
ing an impulse, much as we take ourselves to move bodies by our own
impulses. If this is how God causes motion, then His activity in sustain-
ing bodies is distinct from His activity in causing motion, and there is no
reason why there cannot be causes of motion distinct from God.19
There can be causes of motion for Descartes other than God. But it
still remains to be shown that he thought that there are such causes.
The question comes up quite explicitly in Descartes’ last response to
Henry More:
That transference that I call motion is a thing of no less entity than shape is,
namely, it is a mode in body. However the force [vis] moving a [body] can
be that of God conserving as much transference in matter as He placed in it
18 Though the argument concerns motion, states of body, and their causes, it would seem
to hold for the causes of states of mind as well, insofar as the divine Sustainer must sustain
minds with the states that they have as much as He must sustain bodies in the places that
they occupy. To these arguments from continual re-creation, one might also call attention
to the several passages in which Descartes uses the word occasion to characterize particu-
lar causal relations (see Prost, Essai). But as argued in Gouhier, La vocation de Malebranche,
pp. 83–88, this is hardly worth taking seriously as an argument. See also Jean Laporte, Le
rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), pp. 225–26. For
general discussions of the term, see Battail, L’avocat philosophe, pp. 141–46, and Géraud
de Cordemoy, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed., P. Clair and F. Girbal (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, 1968), p. 322, n. 10; for a general discussion of the language of indirect
causality in Descartes and the later Scholastics, see Specht, Commercium mentis et corporis,
chapters II and III.
19 This argument is developed at greater length in Garber, “How God Causes Motion.”
at the first moment of creation or also that of a created substance, like our
mind, or something else to which [God] gave the power [vis] of moving
a body.20
Descartes is here quite clear that some created substances, at the very
least our minds, have the ability to cause motion. Furthermore, there
is no suggestion in this passage that minds can cause motion in bodies
only with God’s direct help, as the occasionalists would hold. Indeed,
our ability to cause motion in the world of bodies is the very model on
which we understand how God does it, Descartes sometimes argues.
Writing to Henry More in April 1649, he remarks:
Although I believe that no mode of acting belongs univocally to God and to

His creatures, I confess, nevertheless, that I can find no idea in my mind
which represents the way in which God or an angel can move matter, which
is different from the idea that shows me the way in which I am conscious that
I can move my own body through my thought.21
It would then be quite strange if Descartes held that minds are only the
occasional causes of motion in the world. At least two passages in the
Principles also suggest that he meant to leave open the possibility that,
in addition to God, minds could cause motion in the world. In defend-
ing the conservation principle, for example, Descartes argues that we
should not admit any changes in nature “except for those changes,
which evident experience or divine revelation render certain, and
which we perceive or believe happen without any change in the
creator.”22 Such a proviso would certainly leave open the possibility
that finite substances like our minds can be genuine causes of motion.
Similarly, in presenting his impact law (law 3) in the Principles II 40,
Descartes claims that the law covers the causes of all changes that can
happen in bodies, “at least those that are corporeal, for we are not now
inquiring into whether and how human minds and angels have the
power [vis] for moving bodies, but we reserve this for our treatise On
Man.”23 Again, Descartes is leaving open the possibility that there may
be incorporeal causes of bodily change, that is to say, motion. And so,
I think, we should take him completely at his word when on 29 July
1648 he writes to Arnauld:
20 AT V, 403–4. 21 AT V, 347. 22 Principles of Philosophy II 36.

23 Principles of Philosophy II 40.
That the mind, which is incorporeal, can set a body in motion is shown to us
every day by the most certain and most evident experience, without the need
of any reasoning or comparison with anything else.24
Minds can cause motion in Descartes’ world; there is genuine mind-

body causation for him, it would seem. But before going on to examine
the last case, that of body-mind causation in sensation, I will pause for
a moment and examine a question raised by the passage from the letter
to More that we have been examining: What is the “something else to
which [God] gave the power [vis] of moving a body” to which Descartes
refers? Angels are certainly included, the passage from Principles II 40
suggests; angels are also a lively topic of conversation in the earlier
letters between Descartes and More. Indeed, when Descartes is dis-
cussing with him how we can comprehend God as a cause of motion
through the way we conceive of ourselves as causes of motion, Descartes
explicitly includes angels as creatures also capable of causing motion,
like us and like God.25 It is not absolutely impossible that Descartes meant
to include bodies among the finite substances that can cause motion.26
But I think that it is highly unlikely. If Descartes really thought that
bodies could be causes of motion like God, us, and probably angels,
I suspect that he would have included them explicitly in the answer to
More; if bodies could be genuine causes of motion, this would be
too important a fact to pass unmentioned. As I noted earlier, Descartes’
whole strategy for deriving the laws of motion from the immutability
of God presupposes that God is the real cause of motion and of
change of motion in the inanimate world of bodies knocking up against
one another; this reading of Descartes’ view of inanimate motion seems
too secure to be shaken on the basis of a possibly oblique remark in
a letter.
Before going on to discuss the next case, I will take up one more
brief issue. It is a standard view that, for Descartes, mind cannot cause
motion in a body because to do so would violate his conservation law,
that the total quantity of motion in the world must always remain con-
stant. And so, it is claimed, minds can change the direction with which
bodies move but cannot change the actual motion that they have. This
24 AT V 222.
25 See AT V 347.
26 P. H. J. Hoenen, “Descartes’s Mechanism,” in Descartes, ed. Willis Doney (New York:
Doubleday, Anchor, 1967), pp. 353–68, esp. p. 359, claims that he did include bodies
here.
is certainly a position that many of Descartes’ later followers held. But
I see no reason to believe that he himself ever maintained such a view.
The argument is a bit complex, and I cannot develop the details here.27
But briefly, there is no passage in Descartes that suggests in any but the
weakest way that he ever held such a position, and there are other pas-
sages that strongly suggest that he did not. Furthermore, Descartes’
conception of the grounds of the laws of motion in divine immutabil-
ity would seem to impose no constraint on finite causes of motions, like
minds. As I noted earlier, Descartes grounds the laws of motion in God’s
immutability; because God is immutable, He cannot add or subtract
motion from the world. But though the conservation principle may
constrain God’s activity, it does not in any way constrain ours; in our
mutability and imperfection, we are completely free to add or subtract
motion to or from the world.
IV. The Case of Body-Mind Causation

We have established, I think, two reasonably clear cases: For Descartes,
God is responsible for all motion in the inanimate world, while in the
world of animate creatures, creatures like us who have souls, minds
can cause motion in bodies. The last case we have to take care of is
that of body-mind causation, the situation in which the motion of a
body causes sensations in a mind. Again, our question is this: Is there
genuine causality in this circumstance, or must God link the cause to
the effect?
Here, unfortunately, I know of no easy way of settling the question
about Descartes’ views. It seems to me that he should be committed to
the position that the body cannot be a genuine cause of sensation in
the mind. It seems to me that if the motion of bodies is due directly to
God, and if bodies cannot be genuine causes of changes in the states
of other bodies, then it follows that bodies cannot be genuine causes
of changes in minds either. This, at least, is the logic of Descartes’ posi-
tion. While, to the best of my knowledge, there is no passage in his
27 In Daniel Garber, “Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz,” Midwest
Studies in Philosophy 8 (1983): 105–33, essay 7 in this volume, I argue that, in fact, the laws
of motion that Descartes posits for inanimate nature do not hold for motion caused by
minds, and that, in this way, animate bodies, bodies attached to minds, stand outside the
world of physics. I argue that the position widely attributed to Descartes, that the mind
can change the direction in which a body is moving but not add or subtract speed (thus
apparently violating the conservation principle) is not actually his view.
writings that settles the question with assurance, there is some reason
to believe that this is a view that Descartes may have come to hold by
the late 1640s, at least.
The evidence I have in mind is connected with the proof Descartes
offers for the existence of a world of bodies. The argument first appears
in 1641 in Meditation VI:28 “Now there is in me a certain passive faculty
for sensing, that is, a faculty for receiving and knowing the ideas of sen-
sible things. But I could make no use of it unless a certain active faculty
for producing or bringing about those ideas were either in me or in
something else.” So the argument begins. Descartes’ strategy is to show
that the active faculty in question is not in me (i.e., my mind), or in
God, or in anything but bodies.
This [active faculty] cannot be in me, since it plainly presupposes no intel-

lect, and these ideas are produced without my cooperation, and, indeed,
often involuntarily. Therefore it remains that it is in some substance differ-
ent from me. . . . This substance is either body, or corporeal nature, namely,
that which contains formally everything which is in the ideas [of bodies]
objectively, or it is, indeed, in God, or some other creature nobler than body
in which it [i.e., corporeal nature] is contained eminently.
To show that bodies really exist, Descartes will eliminate the latter two
possibilities, and show that the active faculty must be in bodies them-
selves, or else God would be a deceiver.
The argument in Meditation VI clearly asserts that bodies have an
“active faculty” that corresponds to the “passive faculty” of sensation;
the clear implication is that the body that exists in the world is the cause
of my sensation of it. The same basic argument comes up again, a few
years later, in Part II, section 1, of the Principles of Philosophy of 1644,
where it begins as follows:
Now, it can scarcely be doubted that whatever we sense comes to us from

some thing which is distinct from our mind. For it is not in our power to
bring it about that we sense one thing rather than another; rather, this [i.e.,
what we sense] plainly depends on the very thing that affects our senses.
28 The quotations below all come from AT VII 79–80; for fuller treatment of the argument,
see Martial Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, trans.
Roger Ariew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), vol. II, chapter XIV;
Daniel Garber, “Semel in vita: The Scientific Background to Descartes’ Meditations,” in
Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Rorty (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1986), essay 11 in this volume, pp. 251–53.
As in the Meditations, Descartes goes on to examine the question as to
whether the sensation might proceed from me, from God, or from
something other than bodies. Talking about that from which the
sensory idea proceeds, he says:
[W]e clearly understand that thing as something plainly different from God
and from us (that is, different from our mind) and also we seem to ourselves
clearly to see that its idea comes from things placed outside of us, things to
which it [i.e., the idea] is altogether similar, and, as we have already observed,
it is plainly repugnant to the nature of God that He be a deceiver.
And so, Descartes concludes, the sensory idea proceeds from a body.
The argument is the Principles is obviously similar to the one in the
Meditations. But there is at least one crucial difference. The argument
in Meditation VI starts with the observation that I have “a certain passive
faculty for sensing”; what we seek is the active faculty that causes the
sensations I have, and the ultimate conclusion is that that active faculty
is found in bodies. But, interestingly enough, in the argument of the
Principles there is no appeal to an active faculty. Indeed, the terminol-
ogy Descartes uses to describe the relation between our sensation and
the body that is the object of that sensation seems studiously noncausal;
we all believe, Descartes tells us, that “whatever we sense comes to us
[advenit] from something which is distinct from our mind,” that the
idea of body “comes from [advenire] things placed outside of us.” The
concern I have attributed to Descartes here is suggested further by a
variant that arises between the Latin version of Principles II 1, which we
have been discussing, and the French version published three years
later in 1647. In the Latin, the crucial phrase reads as follows:
We seem to ourselves clearly to see that its idea comes from things placed
outside of us.29
In the French translation, the phrase reads:

it seems to us that the idea we have of it forms itself in us on the occasion of
bodies from without.30
One must, of course, be very careful drawing conclusions from variants

between the Latin text and Picot’s French translation; while some alter-
natives are clearly by Descartes, it is often unclear whether a given
29 Principles of Philosophy II 1, translation of Latin version.

30 Principles of Philosophy II 1, translation of French version; emphasis added.
change is due to the author or to his translator. But this change is con-
sistent with the trend already observed between Meditation VI and Prin-
ciples II 1, Latin version, and weakens the causal implications further
still. Rather than asserting that the idea comes from the thing, the French
text says only that it “forms itself in us on the occasion of bodies from
without.” Furthermore, while it is by no means clear how to interpret
the word occasion in Descartes’ vocabulary, the word is certainly sug-
gestive of what is to become a technical term in later Cartesian vocab-
ulary, that of an occasional cause, a cause whose effect is produced
through the activity of God.31
It is difficult to say for sure why the two arguments differ in this
respect, and one should always be open to the explanation that, as
Descartes suggests in a number of places, metaphysical issues are taken
up in the Principles in a somewhat abbreviated and simplified fashion,
and that the Meditations must be regarded as the ultimate source for his
considered views in that domain.32 But it is tempting to see in this vari-
ation the shadow of an important philosophical question Descartes was
facing. It is possible that he eliminated the reference to an active faculty
precisely because he was no longer certain that bodies could correctly
be described as active causes of our sensations. The language he sub-
stitutes is, of course, consistent with bodies being active causes of sen-
sations, as he may well have believed; but it is also consistent with a
weaker view, on which our sensations come from bodies, but with the help
of an agent, like God, distinct from the bodies themselves, which, in
the strictest sense, are inert.
There is another place that is sometimes thought to support the attri-
bution of occasionalism to Descartes. The passage I have in mind is the
celebrated one from the Notae in Programma (1647):
Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs
except certain corporeal motions. . . . But neither the motions themselves
nor the shapes arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur
in the sense organs, as I have explained at length in my Dioptrics. Hence it
follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the shape are
innate in us. The ideas of pain, colors, sounds, and the like must be all the
more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to
31 See the reference given in note 18 above in connection with the word occasion.
32 On the relations between the Meditations and Part I of the Principles, see, for example,
AT III 233, 259; AT V 291; and AT IXB 16.
be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between
these ideas and the corporeal motions.33
The use of the word “occasion” in this context (as well as in a previous
sentence on the same page) does lend some support to the claim that
the use of the corresponding French word in the French translation of
the Principles, published in the same year, is no accident, and may be
significant for the way in which Descartes is thinking about body-mind
causality. But it is important to recognize that the claim that the sensory
idea is innate in the mind is, I think, irrelevant to the issue of Descartes’
occasionalism. His worry here is not (primarily) the causal connection
between the sensory stimulation and the resulting sensory idea; what
worries him is their utter dissimilarity, the fact that the sensory idea is
nothing like the motions that cause it. To make an analogy, consider,
for example, a computer with a color monitor capable of displaying
complicated graphics and pictures. Suppose that if I tap in a certain
sequence of keystrokes, a picture of the Notre Dame in Paris appears
on the screen. One might perhaps want to point out that the actual
sequence of motions (i.e., the keystrokes) that causally produce the
picture in no way “resembles” the picture, and one might reason from
that fact to the claim that the picture must be innate in the machine,
that is, stored in its memory. But one probably would not want to reason
from that that the keystrokes are not in some sense the direct cause of
the picture’s appearing, that the keystrokes did not really elicit the
picture; and one certainly would not want to infer that it was God who
somehow connected the keyboard with the screen of the monitor.
I think that the situation is similar with respect to Descartes’ point in
the passage quoted from the Notae in Programma; in this case, as in the
computer case, Descartes’ main point is simply that sensory ideas
cannot come directly from the motions that cause them, but must, at
best, be innate ideas that are elicited by the motions communicated to
the brain by the sense organs.
But even though this passage does not lend much support to the view
that Descartes may have come to see God as connecting bodily motions
with sensations, neither does it detract from the evidence I presented
earlier. And so, while the evidence is not altogether satisfactory, it seems
reasonable to think that while Descartes may have seen bodies as
genuine causes of sensations at the time that the Meditations was
33 AT VIIIB 359.
published in 1641, by the publication of the Principles of Philosophy a few
years later he may have changed his view, holding something closer
to what his occasionalist followers held, that God is the true cause of
sensations on the occasion of certain motions in bodies.
V. Was Descartes an Occasionalist?

In the earlier parts of this essay we have examined three different sorts
of causal relations as treated by Descartes in his thought. While it seems
clear that mind can be a genuine cause of motion in the physical world,
it also seems clear that God is the real cause of change in the inanimate
world of physics, and it seems probable that God is the real cause
behind body-mind interaction, the causation of sensations in the mind.
It thus seems clear that while Descartes may share some doctrines with
the later occasionalists of the Cartesian school, he is not an occasion-
alist, strictly speaking, insofar as he does allow some finite causes into
his world, minds at the very least.
Might we say, on this basis, that Descartes is a quasi-occasionalist, an
occasionalist when it comes to the inanimate world, though not in the
world of bodies connected to minds? The doctrine of occasionalism is
certainly flexible enough to allow this. But even if we choose to view
Descartes in this way, we must not lose sight of an important difference
between Descartes and his occasionalist followers.
For many of Descartes’ later followers, what is central to the doctrine
of occasionalism is the denial of the efficacy of finite causes simply by
virtue of their finitude. Clerselier, for example, argues for occasional-
ism by first establishing that only an incorporeal substance can cause
motion in body. But, he claims, only an infinite substance, like God,
can imprint new motion in the world “because the infinite distance
there is between nothingness and being can only be surmounted by a
power which is actually infinite.”34 Cordemoy argues similarly. Like
Clerselier, he maintains that only an incorporeal substance can be the
cause of motion in a body, and that this incorporeal substance can only
34 Clerselier, Lettres de Mr Descartes . . . [tome III]. p. 642. Clerselier argues that while a finite
incorporeal substance, like our mind, cannot add (or destroy) motion in the world, it can
change its direction, because, unlike motion itself, “the determination of motion . . . adds
nothing real in nature . . . and says no more than the motion itself does, which cannot be
without determination” (ibid.). This, though, would seem to conflict with what Descartes
himself told Clerselier in the letter of 17 February 1645, that motion and determination
are two modes of body that “change with equal difficulty” (AT IV 185).
be infinite; he concludes by saying that “our weakness informs us that
it is not our mind which makes [a body] move,” and so he determines
that what imparts motion to bodies and conserves it can only be
“another Mind, to which nothing is lacking, [which] does it [i.e., causes
motion] through its will.”35 And finally, the infinitude of God is central
to the main argument that Malebranche offers for occasionalism in his
major work, De la recherche de la vérité. The title of the chapter in which
he presents his main arguments for the doctrine is “The most danger-
ous error in the philosophy of the ancients.”36 And the most dangerous
error he is referring to is their belief that finite things can be genu-
ine causes of the effects that they appear to produce, an error that,
Malebranche claims, causes people to love and fear things other than
God in the belief that they are the genuine causes of their happiness
or unhappiness.37 But why is it an error to believe that finite things can
be genuine causes? Malebranche argues as follows:
As I understand it, a true cause is one in which the mind perceives a neces-
sary connection between the cause and its effect. Now, it is only in an infi-
nitely perfect being that one perceives a necessary connection between its
will and its effects. Thus God is the only true cause, and only He truly has
the power to move bodies. I further say that it is not conceivable that God
could communicate to men or angels the power He has to move bodies.38
For these occasionalists, then, God must be the cause of motion in

the world because only an infinite substance can be a genuine cause of
anything at all.
But, as I understand it, Descartes’ motivation is quite different. He
seems to have no particular worries about finite causes as such. If I am
right, he is quite happy to admit our minds and angels as finite causes
of motion in the world of bodies. Indeed, it is through our own ability
to cause motion in our bodies that we have the understanding we do
of God and angels as causes of motion. When God enters as a cause of
motion, it is simply to replace a certain set of finite causes, the sub-
stantial forms of the Schoolmen, which, Descartes thinks, are unavail-
35 Cordemoy, Oeuvres philosophiques, p. 143.

36 See Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité VI.2.iii, in Malebranche, Oeuvres complètes
de Malebranche, ed., André Robinet (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958–70), vol. I, p. 643, trans. in
Malebranche, The Search after Truth, trans., T. M. Lennon and P. J. Olscamp (Columbus,
OH: Ohio State University Press, 1980), p. 446.
37 Malebranche, Oeuvres, vol. I, pp. 643–46; Search, pp. 446–48.
38 Malebranche, Oeuvres, vol. I, p. 649; Search, p. 450.
able to do the job. He argued that the substantial forms of Scholastic
philosophy were improper impositions of mind onto matter and must,
as such, be rejected. But, one might ask, if there are no forms, what
can account for the motion that bodies have, for their characteristic
behavior? What Descartes turns to is God. In this way he seems less
a precursor of later occasionalism than the last of the Schoolmen,
using God to do what substantial forms did for his teachers.39
39 Portions of this essay have also appeared in Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics.
11
SEMEL IN VITA
The Scientific Background to Descartes’ Meditations
Descartes opens Meditation I with his persona, the meditator, reflect-

ing on the project to be undertaken. Descartes writes:
I have observed for some years new how many false things I have admitted
as true from my earliest age, and thus how dubious are all of those things
that I built on them; and so, I observed that once in life [semel in vita] every-
thing ought to be completely overturned, and ought to be completely rebuilt
from the first foundations, if I want to build anything firm and lasting in the
sciences. (AT VII 17)1
And with this, the project has begun. Descartes’ meditator quickly
begins by rejecting the commonsense epistemological principles on
which everything he formerly believed rested, and quickly sets about
putting the world back together again. Of course, one of the central
projects undertaken in this connection must be the replacement of the
epistemological principles rejected with new, more trustworthy prin-
ciples. Just as Descartes’ meditator undermined his former beliefs
by undermining the epistemology on which they were based, he will
rebuild his world by rebuilding its epistemology. New epistemological
principles thus seem to be the very “first foundations” on which he will
build something “firm and lasting in the sciences.” But an obvious ques-
tion to raise about this, the opening sentence of the Meditations, and
about the project that follows out of it, is why? Why does Descartes
believe it necessary even once in life to rebuild all of our beliefs in the
way he suggests? Why does Descartes feel called to such an epistemo-
1 All textual citations will be given in the body of the essay.
221
logical project? Why is any genuine knowledge, anything “firm and
lasting in the sciences” not possible without entering into such a
Herculean labor, cleaning out and rebuilding from the bottom up the
cluttered stable-stalls of the mind?
There is an answer to this question that has been put forward by a
wide variety of commentators, and has become, perhaps, the standard
account of Descartes’ motivation for taking up epistemology in the Med-
itations. In that view, one sees Descartes as engaged in a debate with
radical skepticism; the claim is that the call to new foundations is pri-
marily a call to find epistemological principles immune to skeptical
attack.2 This is a reading for which there is a great deal of support; both
the general intellectual climate, the revival of skeptical thought in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the details of Meditation
I where Descartes presents a number of arguments derived from the
skeptical tradition for later response, point to skepticism as a major
intellectual problem for Descartes in the Meditations.
But, I claim, this is not the whole story. In a letter Descartes wrote to
his close friend Marin Mersenne on 28 January 1641, while he was com-
posing the Replies to the Objections submitted to his Meditations, and
preparing the whole work for publication, Descartes confided:
I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditations contain the entire
foundations for my physics. But it is not necessary to say so, if you please,
since that might make it harder for those who favor Aristotle to approve them.
I hope that those who read them will gradually accustom themselves to my
principles and recognize the truth in them before they notice that they
destroy those of Aristotle. (AT III 297–298)3
2 For recent developments of this reading, see Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and
Madmen (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), esp. pp. 174–175; Richard H. Popkin, The
History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press, 1979), chapter 9; and Alexandre Koyré’s introductory essay in E.
Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Descartes: Philosophical Writings. E. M. Curley’s Descartes Against
the Skeptics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978, pp. 8–9) also suggests such
a view. But in private communication, Curley has emphasized that in stressing the attack
on skepticism, he did not mean to deny that the Meditations plays other equally important
roles in Descartes’ philosophy, most prominently in the grounding of his physics. See his
chapter 8. For a valuable discussion of Descartes’ attitude towards skepticism, see Henri
Gouhier, La Pensée Métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1978), chapter 1.
3 On the importance of the Meditations project as the first step in building his new science,
see also the introduction to the French edition of the Principles of Philosophy (AT IXB 13–17).
The importance of the program of the Meditations as a foundation for the sciences is also
suggested by Descartes’ critique of the apostate Henricus Regius. See, e.g., AT IXB 19–20
and AT IV 625.
S E M E L I N V I TA 223
Descartes, thus, is absolutely clear that the program of the Meditations
is not an autonomous philosophical project, but the prelude to a larger
scientific program; his remarks to Mersenne suggest that the motiva-
tion for the Meditations cannot be merely the refutation of skepticism,
a problem that, it would seem, is of no pressing concern to the prac-
ticing scientist.4 The Meditations is, as it were, a Trojan horse that
Descartes is attempting to send behind the lines of Aristotelian science.
Now, there are a number of ways in which the Meditations can be seen
to lay the foundations for Cartesian science. One can see, for example,
in the discussions of body, its distinction from mind and its nature
as extension and extension alone, hints of Descartes’ mechanistic
accounts of the human body, and the world of physics, as we shall later
see. But I think that Descartes meant something deeper still. I shall
argue that the Meditations are intended to give the epistemological foun-
dations of the new science as much as its metaphysical foundations;5 the
account of knowledge, of clear and distinct perception, imagination,
and sensation that forms the backbone of the Meditations is, I claim,
intended to undermine the epistemology that underlies Aristotelian
physics, and lead directly to its replacement by a Cartesian conception
of the way the world is. It is in this sense, too, that the Meditations con-
tains “the entire foundations for my physics.”6
This, then, is what I’ll try to do in this essay – set the epistemologi-
cal project of the Meditations into the broader context of the Cartesian
program for science,7 and show why Descartes thought that such an
epistemological project was a necessary preliminary to scientific inves-
4 For an account that suggests that skepticism was a problem for practicing scientists, see,
e.g., Philip Sloan, “Descartes, the Skeptics, and the Rejection of Vitalism in Seventeenth-
Century Physiology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 8 (1977):1–28. But see also
my discussion of this essay in Studia Cartesiana 2 (1981):224–225.
5 I don’t intend, in putting the matter this way, to suggest that there is a radical distinction
between metaphysical and epistemological concerns. Descartes’ epistemology strongly
depends on issues relating to the nature of mind, its relation to the body, and its relation
to the benevolent God who created it.
6 For similar readings of Descartes’ project, see, e.g., Étienne Gilson, Études sur le Rôle de la
Pensée Médiévale dans la Formation du Système Cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1975), Part 2, chapter 1;
and Margaret D. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 3–4; 104.
Wilson’s point of view is contrasted with Curley’s in Willis Doney’s “Curley and Wilson on
Descartes,” Philosophy Research Archives, Jan. 1, 1980.
7 It should be noted that I am using the term science in an anachronistic way here, and mean
it to refer to areas of inquiry that we call scientific, physics, biology, etc. In Latin, science,
scientia, means just knowledge. Thus Descartes wrote in Rule II of his early Rules for the Direc-
tion of the Mind: “All science is certain and evident cognition” (AT XI 362).
tigation. I shall begin with a brief discussion of the Cartesian program
in physics, and the conception of the world against which it was explic-
itly directed. I shall argue there that Descartes saw both the Aristotelian
and common views of the world as closely connected with certain deeply
held but very mistaken epistemological views. I shall then try to show
how both the skeptical arguments of Meditation I and the more posi-
tive arguments of the succeeding Meditations function in the overthrow
of the commonsense epistemology and the Aristotelian metaphysics it
supports, and in the establishment of epistemological foundations for
the Cartesian science. In this way, I hope to show one motivation, over
and above any worries about skepticism, for entering into the episte-
mological project of the Meditations.
Mechanism, the Vulgar Philosophy, and the Sins of Youth

If we are to read the Meditations as a prelude to Cartesian science, then
we must begin with a few words about just what Descartes’ conception
of science was. While there are complications in dealing with Cartesian
medicine and psychology, complications introduced by the mind and
its union with body, in physics the program is straightforward: Descartes
the physicist was a mechanist, and held that all physical phenomena
were ultimately explicable in terms of the shape, size, and motion of
the normally insensible corpuscles that compose the gross bodies of
everyday experience.8
A full account of Descartes’ physics is far beyond the scope of this
essay.9 But the program as given in Part 2–4 of his Principles of Philoso-
phy, its most careful and systematic development, can be summarized
as follows.10 Descartes begins with an account of the nature of body,
8 For general accounts of the so-called mechanical philosophy, see, e.g., Richard Westfall,
The Construction of Modern Science (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971); Marie Boas,
“The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy,” Osiris X (1952):412–541; or E. J.
Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1961), esp. Part 4, chapter 3.
9 For some general accounts of Cartesian physics, see, e.g., Paul Mouy, Le Développement de
la physique Cartésienne (Paris: Vrin, 1934), 1–71; J. F. Scott, The Scientific Work of Descartes
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1952); and E. J. Aiton, The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motions
(New York: Neale Watson, 1972).
10 The principal statements of Cartesian physics are the Le Monde of 1632 (in AT XI; trans-
lated by Michael Mahoney as René Descartes: The World [New York: Abaris Books, 1979]);
the Dioptrics and Meteors of 1637 (in AT VI translated by Paul J. Olscamp in René Descartes:
Discourse on Method; Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965]),
and Principles of Philosophy of 1644. The Principles is the only attempt Descartes made at a
complete and systematic exposition of his physics.
which, as he says, “does not consist in weight, hardness, color, or the
like, but in extension alone” (Pr II 4; cf. Pr II 11), and an account of
the modes of body, shape, size, and motion. Of these, motion, defined
as “the translation of one part of body, or of one body, from the neigh-
borhood of those bodies which immediately touch it . . . and into the
neighborhood of others” (Pr II 25), gets special attention. Descartes is
careful to distinguish motion, a mode of extension, so he claims, from
its principal cause, God, who, in continually re-creating the world from
moment to moment, is responsible for the changes in place bodies are
observed to have.11 And from the activity of God, “not only because He
is a Himself immutable, but also because He acts in as constant and
immutable a way as possible” (Pr II 36), Descartes derives the laws of
motion, the laws that govern bodies as such, the conservation of quan-
tity of motion, the persistence of size, shape, and rectilinear motion,
and the laws bodies obey in impact (cf. Pr II 36–42).12 And with this,
the mechanist program is off and running. Since all matter is of the
same sort and obeys the same laws, we have no choice but to explain
the special behavior that individual bodies exhibit (the heaviness of
stones and the lightness of air, the color of milk and the attractive prop-
erties of lodestones) in terms of the differing size, shape, and motion
of the smaller bodies (or corpuscles) that make them up, and the laws
of geometry and motion that govern them (cf. Pr II 22–23). Descartes
thus wrote in his Principles II, 64, after this analysis of motion and just
prior to the execution of his program in III and IV:
I openly acknowledge that I know of no other matter in corporeal things
other than that which is divisible, shapable, and movable in every way, and
which the geometers call quantity, and take as the object of their demon-
strations; and that there is nothing in it to consider except those divisions,
shapes, and movements; and that nothing concerning these can be accepted
as true unless it is deduced from these common notions, whose truth we
cannot doubt, with such certainty that it must be considered as a mathe-
11 See Pr II 36 and AT V 403–404. This latter passage suggests that God is not the only cause
of motion in the world, and that mind can be a genuine cause of at least some motion.
On this see my essay 7 in this volume. “Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes
and Leibniz”. On the role of God plays in the derivation of the laws of motion in Descartes,
see, e.g., Gary Hatfield, “Force (God) in Descartes’ Physics,” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 10 (1979):113–140; and Martial Gueroult, “The Metaphysics
and Physics of Force in Descartes,” in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., Descartes: Philosophy,
Mathematics, and Physics (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 196–229.
12 For an account of the derivation of the laws of motion, see, e.g., Alan Gabbey, “Force and
Inertia in the Seventeenth Century: Descartes and Newton,” in Stephen Gaukroger,
Descartes, 230–320.
matical demonstration. And because all natural phenomena can thus be
explained, as will appear in what follows, I think that no other principles of
physics should be accepted, or even desired (Pr II 64. Cf. AT II 542; AT
III 686)
And thus Descartes observes in his Sixth Replies that, in his physics, all
of the sensible properties that bodies seem to have, all color, sound,
heaviness, and lightness are to be eliminated from the physical world,
leaving only geometry and the laws of motion behind:
I observed that nothing at all belongs to the nature [ratio] of body except
that it is a thing with length, breadth, and depth, admitting of various shapes
and various motions; that its shapes and motions are only modes which no
power could make to exist apart from it; that colors, odors, tastes, and the
like are merely sensations existing in my thought, and differing no less from
bodies than pain differs from the figure and motion of the weapon that
inflicts it; and finally that heaviness [gravitas], hardness, the powers [vires] of
heating, attracting, purging, and all other qualities which we experience in
bodies consist solely in motion or its absence, and in the configuration and
situation of their parts. (AT VII 440)
The details of Descartes’ ambitious program, the imaginative

accounts of light, color, magnetism, gravity, and a host of other phe-
nomena that Descartes attempted to explain in these terms, are very
interesting and well worth the study, even if they tell us more about
Descartes’ scientific personality than about the world. But for the
moment I would like to turn away from Cartesian physics and examine
an alternative conception of the physical world.
Descartes’ mechanism is in explicit opposition to a different con-
ception of the world, a combination of common sense and Scholastic
Aristotelianism. In the commonsense view of the world, at least as
Descartes imagines it, everything is, for the most part, just as it appears
to us. Things really are colored, they are hot or cold, bitter or sweet,
and pains are, for the most part, just where you think they are.13 Bodies,
in this view, have some internal property (resistance) by which they
resist motion, and something (heaviness or gravity) by virtue of which
they move themselves toward the center of the earth. And, Descartes
thinks, when we see no body, common sense is inclined to believe that
no body is present, that is, there is vacuum.14
13 See, e.g., the commonsense mistakes that Descartes calls attention to in Pr I, 46, 66–68.
14 On the commonsense conception of resistance, see, e.g., Pr II 26: AT II 212–213. It is in
this sense that Descartes denies “inertia or natural tardiness” to bodies, a tendency to come
This much is common sense, what most people take the world to be.
But, Descartes thinks, it is this that underlies the principal opponent
to his mechanism in the learned world, the Aristotelian worldview
common to the Scholastics that Descartes was taught at La Flèche, what
he called on occasion the “vulgar philosophy,” in recognition of its
widespread acceptance (cf. AT I 421; AT III 420; AT IV 30). Late
Scholastic Aristotelianism, the philosophy taught in the universities
and colleges in Descartes’ day, was a phenomenon of great complexity,
encompassing a number of different schools of thought with important
differences on a number of different issues.15 But Descartes was not
interested in the fine points of the Scholastic debates. Descartes writes
in a letter to Mersenne from 1640:
I do not think that the diversity of the opinions of Scholastics makes their
philosophy difficult to refute. It is easy to overturn the foundations on which
they all agree, and once that has been done all their disagreements over detail
will seem foolish. (AT III 231–232)
What he objected to in Scholasticism was something he saw as common

to all schools, a common conception of the makeup of the physical
world together with a closely connected pattern of explanation in
physics.
Basic to that view, as Descartes understood it, was the notion of a
form or a real quality, and the explanation of the behavior of bodies in
these terms.16 Forms and qualities are, as Descartes put it, “the imme-
to rest or a resistance to being set in motion from rest (AT II 466–467), although Descartes
is perfectly willing to admit as a consequence of his conservation law that one body moving
another will lose some of its own motion (AT II 543; AT II 627). On commonsense
conceptions of heaviness, see, e.g., AT III 667; AT VII 441–442. On the commonsense
prejudices that lead to a belief in vacua, see, e.g., Pr II, 17–18.
15 For a survey of some aspects of late Scholasticism relevant to the foundations of physics,
see William A. Wallace, “The Philosophical Setting of Medieval Science,” in David C.
Lindberg, ed., Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
91–119. For an account of the diversity of seventeenth-century Scholasticism on
some of the issues about substance relevant to Descartes, see A. Boehm, Le “Vinculum Sub-
stantiale” chez Leibniz: ses Origines Historiques (Paris: Vrin, 1962), 33–81. For an account of
Descartes’ relations with late Scholasticism, see Gilson, Rôle, and the extremely valuable
collection of Scholastic texts that Gilson published in his Index Scolastico-Cartésien (Paris:
Vrin, 1979).
16 It should be noted that Descartes’ representation of Scholastic doctrine is not always accu-
rate. As Gilson notes (Rôle, 163), Descartes’ view is that the Scholastic form is a substance
(AT III 502), a conception that is a matter of some controversy among Scholastics. Also,
Descartes draws no distinction between the Scholastic conceptions of form and real
quality. Cf., e.g., Descartes’ defintion of form in AT III 502 with the conception of real
diate principles of action of things,” introduced “so that through them
we can explain the actions proper to natural things, of which the form
is the principle and source” (AT III 503, 506). And so, corresponding
to salient qualities or characteristic kinds of behavior, the Scholastic
posits a form whose function it is to explain the quality or behavior
observed. Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, a seventeenth-century Scholastic
whose work Descartes knew and considered representative of the tra-
dition, thus wrote:
There are individual and particular behaviors [ functiones] appropriate to
each individual natural thing, as reasoning is to human beings, neighing to
horses, heating to fire, and so on. But these behaviors do not arise from
matter. . . . Thus, they must arise from the substantial form.17
The extent to which forms are linked to specific behaviors is empha-

sized in another passage, where Descartes gives his confidant Mersenne
an account of what he takes to be “the most common explanation of
heaviness of all in the Schools” in preparation for giving his own mech-
anistic account:
Most take it [i.e., heaviness] to be a virtue or an internal quality in every body
that one calls heavy which makes it tend toward the center of the earth; and
they think that this quality depends on the form of each body, so that the
same matter which is heavy, having the form of water, loses this property of
heaviness and becomes light when it happens that it takes on the form of air.
(AT II 223)18
Here the observed behavior is so closely linked to a specific form that

a change in characteristic behavior from heavy to light requires a
change in form.
Insofar as the activity the Scholastic attributes to the body itself is,
Descartes thinks, comprehensible only through the category of the
mental, the Scholastic account of the characteristic properties of bodies
quality expressed, e.g., in AT III 648; AT III 667; AT V 222; AT VII 441–442. Consequently,
I shall draw no distinction between form and quality. The account of the Scholastic con-
ception of substance given in the text is not intended to be an accurate account of Scholas-
tic doctrine. It should be read as a representation of what the Scholastic opponent looked
like to Descartes.
17 Gilson, Index, sec. 209. See also Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Summa Philosophica . . . (Cam-
bridge: Roger Daniel, 1648), 123–124, 127, 140; and a passage from Suarez, Disputationes
Metaphysicae . . . given in Gilson, Index, sec. 211. For Descartes’ judgment of Eustachius,
see AT III 232.
18 Cf. Gilson, Rôle, 159–162.
amounts to the attribution of a “tiny mind,” as he put it, linked with
specific behavior, to inanimate bodies, in order to explain that behav-
ior (AT III 648; cf. AT VII 441–442). And so, for example, Descartes
thinks of the Scholastic notion of heaviness as something mental, a sub-
stance linked to body that “bears bodies toward the center of the earth
as if it contains some thought of it [i.e., the center of the earth] within
itself ” (AT VII 442). This allows Descartes to appeal to the Scholastic
account of heaviness to convince confused correspondents that insofar
as they find the philosophy they learned in school comprehensible, they
should have no particular trouble with Descartes’ own conception of
mind-body interaction; the Scholastic account of gravity is, in essence,
a misapplication of a notion that “was given us for the purpose of con-
ceiving the manner in which the soul moves the body” (AT III 667), a
projection of our dual nature onto the inanimate world.19 And thus
Descartes wrote in a letter in 1641:
The first judgments that we have made since our childhood, and since then,
the vulgar philosophy [i.e., Scholasticism] have accustomed us to attribute to
bodies many things which only pertain to mind and to attribute to mind many
things that only pertain to body. One ordinarily mixes the two ideas of
body and mind, and in the compounding of these ideas, one fashions real
qualities and substantial forms, which I think should be entirely rejected.
(AT III 420)
There are, to be sure, traces of Scholastic ontology in Descartes’ own

metaphysics, and ways of reconciling Descartes’ own mechanical phi-
losophy with the Scholasticism he rejects.20 But there is, from Descartes’
19 See also the discussion of this question in sec. 2 of my essay, “Understanding Interaction:
What Descartes Should Have Told Elisabeth,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, supplement to
vol. 21 (1983):15–32, essay 8 in this volume.
20 One trace of Scholastic ontology is the notion of tendency that is essential to Descartes’
derivation of the laws of motion. On this and the closely related notion of force, see, e.g.,
Gueroult, “Metaphysics and Physics,” and Thomas L. Prendergast, “Motion, Action, and
Tendency in Descartes’ Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (1975):453–462.
Another trace of Scholasticism is in his notion of the relation between mind and body.
Descartes sometimes claims that mind can be regarded as the substantial form of the body,
the only such form he recognizes. See, e.g., AT III 503, 505, AT IV 168, 346. On this see,
e.g., Gilson, Rôle, 245–255; Geneviève [Rodis-]Lewis, L’Individualité selon Descartes (Paris:
Vrin, 1950), 67–81. It is also possible to assimilate Aristotelian ideas to Cartesian in the
other way, by interpreting Aristotle as a Cartesian. This was an idea that attracted the young
Leibniz. See his letter to Jacob Thomasius, April 20/30, 1669, in Leroy Loemker, ed. and
trans., G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), 93–103. In
that letter, Leibniz cites a number of his lesser known contemporaries in connection with
this view.
point of view, at least, a clear contrast between the two. Thus Descartes
writes in Le Monde, comparing his own theory of combustion with that
of the Scholastics:
When it [i.e., fire] burns wood or some other such material, we can see with
our own eyes that it removes the small parts of this wood, and separates them
from one another, thus transforming the more subtle parts into fire, air, and
smoke, and leaving the grossest parts as cinders. Let others imagine in this
wood, if they like, the form of fire, the quality of heat, and the action which
burns it as separate things. But for me, afraid of deceiving myself if I assume
anything more than is needed, I am content to conceive here only the move-
ment of parts. (AT XI 7)
And in more general terms Descartes writes in a 1638 letter:
Compare my assumptions [suppositions] with the assumptions of others.

Compare all their real qualities, their substantial forms, their elements, and
their other countless hypotheses with my single assumption that all bodies
are composed of parts . . . . All that I add to this is that the parts of certain
kinds of bodies are of one shape rather than another. (AT II 200)
The contrast is a basic one. For the Scholastic, there is an indefinitely

large variety of distinct principles of action in the world, one corre-
sponding to each kind of characteristic behavior that the Scholastic
chooses to recognize in his physics. But for Descartes, while there are
an infinite number of ways that extended matter may subdivide into
smaller parts, there is only one kind of stuff in the physical world, and it
all behaves in the same way, in accordance with geometry and the laws
of motion; it is in terms of this matter, its laws, and the particular geo-
metric configurations it forms in different bodies that all bodily phe-
nomena are to be explained. In the Cartesian world, no body is literally
heavy, or hot, or red, or tasty. All these observed properties are a result
of geometry and motion. The mechanistic explanations of such phe-
nomena Descartes gives, their reduction to configurations of matter in
motion, may in the end turn out to be every bit as ad hoc as the stage
Aristotelian’s dormitive virtue explanation of the behavior of opium; it
is just as easy to appeal to an unknown corpuscular substructure, an
occult mechanism, as it is to appeal to an occult quality. But there is no
confusing the two kinds of explanations.
Given Descartes’ conception of Scholastic philosophy, it is not diffi-
cult to see why he often links the errors of Scholasticism with the errors
of common sense.21 Common sense attributes to bodies the qualities and
tendencies to behave in particular ways that bodies appear to have, the
properties our senses tell us bodies have. The Scholastic philosopher
takes this one step further, and posits in bodies forms and qualities, prin-
ciples of action that are intended to explain the properties that sense
tells us are in bodies. Since the qualities that sense attributes to bodies
are largely mental qualities, the sensations and volitions of the mind
itself, projected onto the physical world as colors, tastes, and tendencies,
the forms and qualities must be “tiny minds,” mental substances capable
of receiving the properties that common sense attributes to them. The
Scholastic world is, thus, nothing but the world of common sense, with
sensible qualities transformed into mental substances – forms and real
qualities – and embedded in the world of bodies.22 Put briefly, the
Scholastic world, as Descartes understood it, is simply a metaphysical
elaboration of the world of common sense.23
This, then, is how Descartes sees the matter, his own conception of the
world, the forces of light, against the dark world of common sense and
the obscurities of Scholasticism. But although he thought his opponents
wrong, he did not underestimate the attractiveness and virtual inevitabil-
ity of their position. For, Descartes thought, the commonsense worldview
and the Scholastic metaphysics it gives rise to is a consequence of one of
the universal afflictions of humankind: childhood.
Though childhood is a stage through which we all must pass,
Descartes finds little to recommend it. It is a time when reason and the
soul are eclipsed by matters corporeal, when we are “governed by our
appetites and by our teachers” (AT VI 13), and when we acquire most
21 For example, in the quasi-autobiographical account of the origin of his views on the phys-
ical world in the Sixth Replies (AT VII 441–442), Descartes makes no real distinction
between the commonsense world, and the Scholastic account of the behavior of body.
See also AT II 213 where the opinions of the common people are linked to those of “la
mauvaise Philosophie,” and AT III 420 where the “vulgar philosophy” is linked to “the
earliest judgments of childhood,” where Descartes thinks that the commonsense faith
in the senses derives, as we shall see. See also Gilson, Rôle (pp. 168–173), “La psycholo-
gie de la physique aristotélicienne.”
22 In seeing the errors of Scholasticism as deriving from the errors of commonsense episte-
mology, Descartes does not mean to suggest that the Scholastic metaphysics is a completely
uncritical translation of commonsense sensory beliefs into metaphysics. Contrary to
common sense, for example, the orthodox Scholastic would deny that there are vacua.
23 For a more explicit development of what is much the same idea, see Nicholas Male-
branche, De la Recherche de la Vérité, Bk. 1, chapter 16, and Bk. 6, Part 2, chapter 2, in
Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp, trans., Nicolas Malebranche: The Search After Truth
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 73–75; 440–445.
of the prejudices that cloud the adult mind and make it difficult to
apprehend the truth. Descartes writes in the Principles:
And indeed in our earliest age the mind was so immersed in the body that
it knew nothing distinctly, although it perceived much clearly; and because
it even then formed many judgments, it absorbed many prejudices from
which the majority of us can hardly ever hope to become free. (Pr I 47; cf.
Pr I 71; AT IV 114; etc.)
Childhood, in Descartes’ view, is the cause of a variety of prejudices.

The immersion of the mind in the body, its domination by the imagi-
nation and sensation, faculties that, in Descartes’ account, derive from
the mind’s union with the body, cause us, for example, to confuse the
ideas we have of the mental with the material, if not ignore the former
altogether, and make it difficult for us to comprehend the distinction
between mind and body.24 This confusion of the mental and the mate-
rial is an important prop for the commonsense and vulgar philosophies,
the imposition of colors, tastes, and tendencies onto a senseless and
unwilling world. But underlying this largely metaphysical confusion
and, in a way, leading us directly to it is a basic epistemologic confu-
sion. The immersion of the mind in the body, the domination of the
mind by the corporeal faculties of sensation and imagination, lead us
to the unfounded prejudice that those faculties represent to us the way
the world really is. Descartes writes in the Principles:
Every one of us has judged from our earliest age that everything which we
sensed is a certain thing existing outside his mind, and is clearly similar to
his sensations, that is, to the perceptions he has of them. (Pr I 66; cf. AT
VII 74f.)
Or, as Descartes develops the theme in a later section of the Principles:

In our earliest age, our mind was so allied with the body that it applied itself
to nothing but those thoughts alone by which it sensed that which affected
the body, nor were these as yet referred to anything outside itself. . . . And
later, when the machine of the body, which has been so constituted by nature
that it can of its own inherent power move in various ways, turned itself
24 Descartes’ account of sensation and imagination as deriving from the connection between
the mind and the body, see, e.g., Pr IV 189–197; Passions of the Soul, 19–26. Sensation and
imagination are, for Descartes, both faculties we have by virtue of which we can have
mental pictures, and differ only as to whether those pictures derive from the sense organs
(sensation) or the brain (imagination). On our early confusion between mind and body,
see, e.g., AT III 420; AT III 667; AT VII 441–442.
randomly this way and that and happened to pursue something pleasant or
to flee from something disagreeable, the mind adhering to it began to notice
that that which it sought or avoided exists outside of itself, and attributed to
them not only magnitudes, figures, motions, and the like, which it perceived
as things or modes of things, but also tastes, smells, and the like, the sensa-
tions of which the mind noticed were produced in it by that thing. . . . And
we have in this way been imbued with a thousand other such prejudices from
earliest infancy, which in later youth we quite forgot we have accepted without
sufficient examination, admitting them as though they were of the greatest
truth and certainty, and as if they had been known by sense or implanted by
nature. (Pr I 71; cf. Pr I 73)
In our earliest years, then, aware of only what the bodily faculties tell
us, but, through our dealings with the world, aware that there are things
outside of our immediate control and thus outside of us, we came
almost spontaneously to the belief in a world of external objects similar
to our sensations. These judgments became so natural to us, Descartes
thinks, that we confused them with the sensations themselves, and we
came to believe that it is our sensory experience itself that gives us the
belief in an external world of sensible properties. As Descartes wrote to
the authors of the Sixth Objections:
In these matters custom makes us reason and judge so quickly, or rather, we

recall the judgments previously made about similar things, and thus we fail
to distinguish the difference between these operations and a simple sense
perception. (AT VII 438)25
In this way, we come, in our adulthood, to put our trust in the senses
as an accurate representation of the way the world is.
The prejudice in favor of the senses, the belief that the senses rep-
resent to us the way the world of bodies really is, gives rise to a multi-
tude of prejudices, as this passage suggests. In an obvious way, it leads
us to think that “seeing a color, we saw something which existed outside
of us and which clearly resembled the idea of that color which we then
experienced in ourselves” (Pr I 66). Similarly, when we have a painful
or pleasant sensation, this epistemological prejudice leads us to believe
25 The discussion of sensation in the Sixth Replies from which this passage is excerpted
makes it clear that, strictly speaking, the prejudice for the senses which for Descartes is
characteristic of common sense is a prejudicial judgment about the cause or content of
our ideas of sensation. That is, what is wrong is the judgments we make about sensory
ideas; the ideas themselves, Descartes is clear, are neither true nor false.
that it is “in the hand, or in the foot, or some other part of our body”
(Pr I 67. Cf. Pr I 47, 68). Such prejudices also lead us to posit vacua
where we sense no objects (cf. Pr II 18; AT V 271), to think that more
action is required to move a body than to bring it to rest (Pr II 26), that
bodies in motion tend to come to rest (Pr II 37), and that bodies have
an internal resistance to motion (AT II 213–214). And with these
prejudices, which make up what I earlier called the commonsense
worldview, we have laid the groundwork for Scholastic physics, the meta-
physicalization of this commonsense world of sensible properties and
tendencies and the positing of forms and qualities.
At this point we can turn back to the Meditations. These prejudices,
grounded in the epistemological prejudices of youth are, I think, chief
among the “many false things I have admitted as true from my earliest
age” that Descartes has in mind in the opening sentence of Meditation
I, and one of the chief purposes of the Meditations is to eliminate those
prejudices and replace them with a true picture of the way the world
is. It is in this sense that the Meditations is intended to lay the founda-
tions for Cartesian science and eliminate the foundations of the Aris-
totelian. But in order to overturn these prejudices, we must find a way
of setting aside the prejudice for the senses that we have had since
youth, and replace our dependence on the senses with an altogether
different epistemological principle; Descartes’ revolution in physics
must begin with a revolution in epistemology. It is in this sense that
Descartes holds that “once in life [semel in vita] everything ought to be
completely overturned, and ought to be rebuilt from the first founda-
tions,” from our epistemology up, “if I want to build anything firm and
lasting in the sciences,” if I want to find out how the world really is. This
project, as Descartes carries it out in the Meditations, involves two prin-
cipal stages. We must first break the hold of the senses and of all the
prior beliefs we have held that are based on our faith in the senses; what
is called for is a kind of intellectual infanticide, to use Gouhier’s some-
what violent image, the elimination of the child that remains within
us.26 This, I shall argue below, is one of the important functions of
Meditation I. And, second, we must carefully reexamine the epistemo-
logical foundations of knowledge, and replace our exclusive depen-
dence on the senses and the imagination with a more sophisticated view
of knowledge that puts the senses in their proper place and subordi-
26 See Henri Gouhier, Pensée Métaphysique, p. 58.

nates them to another cognitive faculty, which will allow us to establish
the real nature of the world, as opposed to how it appears to us –
extended stuff, nonextended rational souls, and God – and will allow
us to set aside the prejudices of common sense and the errors of the
Scholastic philosophy. This, I shall argue, is one of the important func-
tions of the remaining Meditations.
Skeptical Therapy
So far I have concentrated on the opening sentence of the Meditations,
and offered an interpretation of it in terms of what Descartes wrote
outside of the Meditations itself. I have argued that the Meditations must
be read not merely as a philosophical project to defeat skepticism but,
more generally, as an epistemological preparation for science. It is now
time to turn to the Meditations themselves and work out some of the
details of the reading I propose. The first question to be taken up must
be the skeptical arguments of Meditation I. Meditation I seems to
announce skepticism as the problem of the Meditations. But, I claim, it
does more than that. Meditation I, I claim, is the first step in building
a new epistemology, the destruction of the prejudice in favor of the
senses and in favor of the closely related faculty of imagination, which
constitutes a necessary first step in the construction of an epistemology
appropriate for Cartesian science.
In the previous section, I emphasized Descartes’ account of our intel-
lectual development, our initial trust in the senses and the conception
of the world that grows out of it. These prejudices, Descartes thinks,
interfere with our perception of the way things are, and must be
removed before we can find true and certain knowledge; we must, as
Descartes puts it, withdraw our minds from the senses, from the body,
from the things we formerly believed. And so Descartes wrote in the
Second Replies that, even though the account of the foundations of the
world that he is attempting to outline in the Meditations is, to the open
mind, even more obvious than geometry,
yet being contradicted by the many prejudices of our senses to which we have
since our earliest years been accustomed, they cannot be perfectly appre-
hended except by those who give strenuous attention and study to them, and
withdraw their minds as far as possible from bodily matters. (AT VII 157;
cf. AT I 350–351; AT IV 114; AT VI 37)
And thus Descartes tells a correspondent in 1638, “those who want to
discover truth must distrust opinions rashly acquired in childhood”
(AT II 39).27
It is with this in mind that we should approach the skeptical argu-
ments that are the main business of Meditation I. Much of the content
of the Meditations had been made public some four years earlier, in Part
4 of the Discourse. But some readers had problems following the argu-
ments there. Part of the problem derived from the brevity of treatment
in the Discourse. But Descartes acknowledged another problem as well.
In a letter written in 1637, Descartes sympathizes with one such reader
and confesses that “there is a great defect in that work you have seen,
and I have not expounded the arguments in a manner that everyone
can easily grasp.” But, Descartes continues,
I did not dare to try to do so, since I would have had to explain at length the
strongest arguments of the skeptics to show that there is no material thing
of whose existence one can be certain. Thus I would have accustomed the
reader to detach his thought from sensible things. (AT I 353)
In the Meditations the defect is corrected, and Descartes rehearses at

some length important skeptical arguments missing in the earlier
work.28 And one prominent reason he gives for doing so is the reason
he suggested to his earlier correspondent. It is this motivation, the ther-
apeutic value that skeptical arguments have in eliminating prejudice,
that Descartes emphasizes in the synopsis he gives of Meditation I:
In the First Meditation, I present the reasons why we can doubt generally of
all things, and particularly of material things, at least as we have no other
foundations of the sciences than those that we have had up until now. Even
though the utility of such a general doubt is not apparent at first, it is,
however, quite considerable, since it delivers us from all sorts of prejudices,
and prepares for us a very easy way to accustom our mind to detach itself
from the senses. (AT VII 12).
27 This claim offers Descartes an interesting reply to objectors not convinced by his argu-
ments. Descartes can claim that his objectors are still dominated by the prejudices of
youth, and for that reason cannot see what is present to their mind’s eye (cf., e.g., AT III
267 and AT VII 9–10).
28 In a sense, all of Part 1 of the Discourse can be read as a skeptical argument. But the explicit
skeptical arguments that occupy a full Meditation in the later work occupy just a few lines
in Part 4 of the Discourse. Furthermore, the Meditations contains two arguments missing in
the Discourse, the deceiving-God argument and the hypothesis of the evil demon.
Similarly, when Hobbes grumbled that he “should have been glad if our
author . . . had refrained from publishing these matters of ancient lore”
(AT VII 171),29 Descartes replied that the arguments were put there
quite deliberately. The skeptical arguments that open the Meditations
set up questions answered in the course of the work, and provide a stan-
dard of certainty for later arguments, Descartes explains. But the very
first reason Descartes gave Hobbes for rehearsing them at such length
is that they “prepare the minds of the readers to consider intellectual
things and distinguish them from corporeal things, for which those
arguments always seemed necessary” (AT VII 171–172). The separation
of the intellectual from the corporeal is an obvious reference to the dis-
tinction between mind and body, which is one of the central conclu-
sions of the Meditations. But it also refers to the distinction between the
intellectual faculties and the corporeal, between reason and sense,
whose confusion underlies the confusion between the mental and the
material, as noted earlier. The skeptical arguments of Meditation I,
then, are to eliminate prejudice and prepare us to see things as they
are, as reason, the intellect sees them, as opposed to the way things
appear to us through our corporeal faculties.
And it is clear when one reads Meditation I that the trust in our cor-
poreal faculties, our senses, the most fundamental prejudice we have
from youth, is a central focus of Descartes’ attention. The task of Med-
itation I, as Descartes puts it, is the “general overthrow of my opinions”
(AT VII 18). This task is to be accomplished not by eliminating them
one by one, as his later metaphor of the apple basket suggests (cf. AT
VII 481), but by eliminating the foundations on which all those preju-
dices rest:
Since the destruction of the foundations by itself brings about the downfall
of that which is built on it, I shall now attack only those principles on which
all that I once believed rested. (AT VII 18)
And these foundations, these principles, are epistemological, Descartes

thinks – the most prominent being the faith we have had in the verac-
ity of the senses. Descartes seems to begin by eliminating, first of all,
the epistemic principle in accordance with which everything we learn
from the senses is trustworthy. This epistemic principle is easily set aside
29 It is interesting to note that when, somewhat later, Hobbes presented his own philosophy,
he made use of a device similar to hyperbolic doubt, though without the full battery of
skeptical arguments that Descartes used. See De corpore, chapter 7, sec. 1.
with the observation that the senses sometimes deceive (cf. AT VII 18).
Descartes then continues with the consideration of a second epistemic
principle, again concerned with sensory knowledge:
But it may be that although the senses sometimes deceive us concerning
certain things that are small or remote, there are yet many others about which
we clearly cannot doubt, although we take them in by their means [i.e., by
means of the senses]. (AT VII 18)
This second principle, a guarded statement of the first, limiting the

trustworthiness of the senses to middle-sized objects in our immediate
vicinity, is eliminated by means of Descartes’ celebrated dream argu-
ment, however precisely it is taken to work.30
So far we have been dealing with purported knowledge acquired
directly from the senses. But at this point, the argument takes an inward
turn: “Now let us assume that we are asleep,” Descartes says, “and that
all these particulars, e.g., that we open our eyes, shake our head, extend
our hands, indeed that we have such hands, or such a body, are false”
(AT VII 19). Under this assumption Descartes formulates a third and
a fourth epistemic principle. The third is suggested in the following
passage:
At the same time we must at least confess that those things which are seen
[visus] in sleep are like certain painted images [imagines] which can only have
been formed as things similar to real things; and therefore these general
things, eyes, head, hands, and the whole body, are not [merely] imaginary,
but really exist. (AT VII 19)
Here the suggestion is that dream images are formed of components

that correspond to things that exist at some indefinite time in a real
external world, even if they may not be arranged in the real world as
they are in our dreams. So, one would claim on the authority of this
principle, one can establish the sorts of things there really are in the
world on the basis of our dream experience. This third epistemic prin-
ciple, though, quickly gives way to a fourth:
And for the same reason, although these general things, eyes, head, hands,
and the like, may be [merely] imaginary, we must however confess that
certain other things, yet more simple and universal, are real, from which our
30 See Margaret Wilson, Descartes (chapter 1, secs. 4 and 6) for an account of the main lines
of interpretation in the literature and an extremely plausible proposal for reconstructing
the argument.
images [imagines] of things, whether true or false, are made, just as all of
them are made from true colors. The nature of body in general, its exten-
sion, and also the shapes of the extension of things, quantity . . . , the place
in which it exists, and the time through which it endures, and the like seem
to be of this sort. (AT VII 20)
And, Descartes continues:

That is why we will perhaps not be reasoning badly if we conclude that physics,
astronomy, medicine, and all the other sciences which depend on the con-
sideration of composite entities are, indeed, uncertain whereas arithmetic,
geometry, and the other sciences of this sort, which treat only of the simplest
and most general things, without sufficiently concerning themselves [parum
curant] about whether they occur in nature or not, contain something certain
and indubitable. For whether I am awake or whether I am asleep, two and
three together will always make the number five, and the square will never
have more than four sides; and it does not seem possible that truths so evident
[perspicuae] can ever be suspected of any falsity. (AT VII 20)
The epistemic principle here is somewhat tricky. The idea seems to be

that even if our dream experience does not inform us about the world
as it is now, or give us access to things like eyes and hands, it does display
the most general features of the real world, extension, time, and,
perhaps, color, the elements “from which our images of things . . . are
made,” just as, in the third principle, eyes, hands, and the like are con-
sidered as the elements of our dream images and, for that reason, are
supposed to be real. When the meditator takes this principle to under-
lie the certainty of geometry and arithmetic, it is not because these dis-
ciplines concern truths that are wholly independent of the real world.
Rather, they can be certain in spite of the fact that they don’t give suf-
ficient consideration to the question of whether or not circles and tri-
angles exist in nature, and they can get away with this lapse in argument
because the fourth principle of evidence guarantees that such objects
do exist. This is why geometry and arithmetic are on better foundations
than physics, astronomy, and medicine, the existence of whose objects
is doubtful under the assumption that we are dreaming.31
31 Cf. Frankfurt’s explication of this passage in Demons (pp. 74–76). While I am not certain
that I can agree with everything he says about the treatment of mathematics in Medita-
tion I (see Demons, chapters 7–8), I do agree with Frankfurt that, in the particular pas-
sages under consideration, the meditator is clearly thinking of mathematics as a science
that pertains to certain features of an external world. (In general, I should point out that
my account of the arguments in Meditation I owes an obvious debt to Part 1 of Demons.)
While the third and fourth principles of evidence may appear to have
little to do with our faith in the senses, there is, in Descartes’ mind, an
intimate connection. What we are dealing with in these two principles
is sensation taken in the very most general way, knowledge about the
makeup of the world which we claim to derive from sensory images,
considered apart from any assumptions about their immediate causal
history; what we are dealing with are our mental images of bodies con-
sidered irrespective of the question as to whether they are genuine sen-
sations, images that derive from the sense organs, or mere imaginations,
mental pictures that we have from some other source.32 In this way,
then, when the final skeptical argument of this series, the deceiving-
God argument, eliminates the third and fourth epistemic principles, it
eliminates (among other things, perhaps) what appears to be the last
hope of knowledge from the senses and, more generally, from all the
corporeal faculties, both sensation and imagination, those that arise
from our connection to our body.33
The skeptical arguments of Meditation I, then, are carefully directed
at the youthful prejudice in favor of the senses that, Descartes argues,
must be eliminated before we can attain real knowledge. Their func-
tion as therapy intended to withdraw the mind from the senses is under-
scored in the final pages of the Meditations. Descartes writes:
But it is not sufficient to have made these remarks; we must also be careful
to keep them in mind. For these habitual opinions will still frequently recur
in my thoughts, my long and familiar acquaintance with them giving them
the right to occupy my mind against my will. (AT VII 22)
As strange as this account of mathematics may seem, it may well have been the way in
which Descartes himself thought about mathematics in his earlier years. On this see John
A. Schuster, “Descartes’ Mathesis Universalis: 1619–28,” in Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes,
41–96. Schuster’s suggestion seems to be that in the late 1620s, Descartes thinks of the
primary objects of mathematics as imaginative pictures, mental representations of
physical impressions in the brain.
32 Dream images, under consideration in this context, are, for Descartes, a kind of imagi-
nation, one that derives from the activity of the brain. (See Passions of the Soul, 21, 26.)
But this portion of the argument is intended, I think, to deal with imagination of all
varieties, both involuntary (like dreams) and voluntary, all of which derive from the union
of mind with a body, and any knowledge that we may claim to have from imagination.
33 I don’t mean to suggest that this is the only thing that the deceiving-God argument elimi-
nates. It is plausible to read it, as most commentators have, as eliminating all the medi-
tator’s former beliefs, both those from the senses as well as those beliefs he may have had
from reason, thus setting up the problem that is ultimately resolved in Meditation IV with
the validation of clear and distinct perception. But this is a question that relates to the
function of Meditation I as setting skeptical questions to be answered in the later Medi-
tations, a question that goes beyond the scope of my interest in Meditation I here.
It is for this reason that Descartes proposes the famous demon hypoth-
esis, to fix the elimination of prejudice that the skeptical arguments
began:
I will therefore suppose that not the best God, who is a fountain of truth, but
some malignant demon, no less deceitful than powerful, has bent all his
efforts to deceive me. (AT VII 22)34
The role of Meditation I as skeptical therapy directed against the

prejudices of youth is also underscored by the indications he gives
readers as to how the arguments of Meditation I should be read. In the
appendix to the Second Replies, the arguments from the Meditations
drawn up modo geometrico at the request of the objectors, the following
postulate (postulata – literally a request or demand) is what corresponds
to Meditation I:
The first request I press upon my readers is a recognition of the weakness of
the reasons on account of which they have hitherto trusted their senses, and
the uncertainty of all the judgments that they have based on them. I beg
them to turn this over in their minds so long and so frequently that they will
acquire the habit of no longer reposing too much trust in them. For I deem
this necessary in order to attain to a perception of the certainty of things
metaphysical. (AT VII 162)
This strongly suggests that the arguments of Meditation I are to be

treated in the same way, meditations in the truest sense of the term,
exercises to practice in order to free the mind from prejudice.35 We
must take very seriously the remarks Descartes made about Meditation
I in the Second Replies when he wrote:
Nothing conduces more to the obtaining of a secure knowledge of reality
than a previous accustoming of ourselves to entertain doubts especially about
corporeal things. . . . I should be pleased also, if my readers would expend
not merely the little time which is required for reading it, in thinking over
the matter of which the Meditation treats, but would give months or at least
34 In presenting the demon hypothesis in this way, as a therapeutic device, I mean to reject
Martial Gueroult’s celebrated reading, in accordance with which the demon hypothesis is
intended as a genuine argument, distinct from the deceiving-God argument. According
to Gueroult, the demon argument is answered by the causal argument for the existence
of God in Meditation III, whereas the deceiving-God argument is answered by the
ontological argument in Meditation V. For a clear and concise statement of Gueroult’s
position, together with the defense of a position much like the one I am advancing here,
see Henri Gouhier, “L’Ordre des Raisons selon Descartes,” in Cahiers du Royaumont:
Descartes (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1957), 72–87.
35 Cf. Gilson, Rôle, 186.
weeks, to this, before going on further; for in this way the rest of the work
will yield them a much richer harvest. (AT VII 130)
Descartes is also quite serious when he says in the introduction to the

Meditations (to what must have been his publisher’s dismay) that “I don’t
recommend reading this to anyone except those who want to meditate
seriously with me, and who can detach their minds from the senses, and
deliver them from all kinds of prejudices” (AT VII 9; cf. AT IXA 1, 3 and
AT VII 157–159). To fail in this way, to simply read the Meditations rather
than meditate with Descartes is to miss the point of the book.
The skeptical arguments of Meditation I do, indeed, set up arguments
for Descartes to answer in the course of the Meditations. But they are also
exercises we must undertake before beginning science, a necessary
prelude to constructing an epistemology that will lead us to knowledge
of things, not as they appear to us, but as they really are.36
Reason, Sense, and Imagination

The elimination of our infantile prejudices in favor of the senses is an
essential first step toward the true science, Descartes thinks. But it is only
a first step. Descartes must then replace the conception of knowledge
rejected in Meditation I with a different foundation for knowledge, one
that will allow us to see things for what they really are. The new founda-
tion is, of course, clear and distinct perception, the light of reason, a light
capable of illuminating the mind without the aid of the sensory organs.
Reason will show us the true nature of body, extension, and extension
alone, offering us the means to begin rebuilding the world well lost in
Meditation I, a brave new world without color or sound, taste or heavi-
ness, form or real quality, a world not without sense and imagination,
but a world in which the light perceptible to the eye is properly subor-
dinated to the light directly perceptible by the mind. The validation of
reason must, then, be a central project in the Meditations and its trust-
worthiness as important to the theme I am stressing, the laying of epis-
temological foundations for the sciences, as it is for the theme more
often emphasized, the refutation of skepticism. But, it is important to
note, the defense of reason against skeptical attack is not the only epis-
temological project Descartes undertakes in the Meditations. In the body
36 For similar readings of the aim of Meditation I, see Gilson, Rôle, 184–190; Gouhier, Pensée
Métaphysique, chapter 2; Wilson, Descartes, chapter 1, sec. 3; and Mike Marlies, “Doubt,
Reason, and Cartesian Therapy,” in Michael Hooker, ed., Descartes: Critical and Interpretive
Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
of the Meditations there is, I claim, a series of arguments very carefully
and systematically directed against the commonsense prejudice for the
senses; the disease treated by skeptical therapy in Meditation I is sub-
jected to the light of reason in the Meditations that follow. The careful
treatment of the prejudices of the senses throughout the epistemologi-
cal discussions of the Meditations demonstrates, I think, that Descartes
was concerned not only with the refutation of skepticism, but with the
elimination of a false epistemology and its replacement by the true, with
the elimination of the commonsense dependence on the faculties of sen-
sation and imagination that lead toward Aristotelianism, and their
replacement with a conception of knowledge appropriate to grounding
the new, mechanical philosophy.
Before entering into these arguments, it will be helpful to say some-
thing about how the Meditations is written. The authors of the Second
Objections asked Descartes to set out his principal arguments more geo-
metrico, with formal definitions, postulates, axioms, and with careful
formal proofs (cf. AT VII 128). While Descartes complied with their
request (cf. AT VII 160–170), he was not entirely comfortable doing
so. For reasons obvious from the discussion of the previous section, he
told the objectors that, while the Euclidean mode of exposition is fine
for geometry, it is unsuited to the material at hand, which requires, for
its proper comprehension, the therapeutic withdrawal from the senses
which, I have argued, is an important function of Meditation I. It is in
this context that Descartes tells his objectors a bit about how the Med-
itations themselves were written. “In my Meditations I have followed only
analysis, which is the true and best way for teaching,” Descartes wrote
(AT VII 156). Analysis, in contrast to the more usual mode of argument
(ratio demonstrandi) in geometry, what Descartes calls synthesis, is pre-
sented as the mode of argument that shows “the true way by which a
thing was methodically and, as it were, a priori discovered” (AT VII
155).37 Descartes’ conception of analysis and its precise distinction from
synthesis is obscure and has given rise to much discussion.38 But an
37 “A priori” seems meant in an epistemic rather than in the usual metaphysical sense. For
a short discussion of the textual problems this sentence raises, see Daniel Garber and
Lesley Cohen, “A Point of Order: Analysis, Synthesis, and Descartes’ Principles,” Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie 64 (1982):136–147, esp. n. 5, and the references cited there.
This appears as essay 3 in this volume.
38 For discussions of Descartes’ conception of analysis and synthesis, see Garber and Cohen,
“Point of Order,” and E. M. Curley, “Analysis in the Meditations,” in Amélie Rorty, ed., Essays
in Descartes’ Meditations (Berkeley and Los Angeles’. University of California Press, 1986).
examination of the six Meditations shows one clear sense in which they
can be read analytically, showing how one might actually come to dis-
cover for oneself the conclusions reached. Actual discovery involves
false steps as well as true, bad arguments considered and rejected as
well as good arguments that ultimately lead to enlightenment. This, I
claim, is an important aspect of the expository strategy of the Medita-
tions. In the course of reestablishing the epistemic foundations of
knowledge and showing the inadequacy of common sense, Descartes
allows the commonsense bias for the senses to have its turn at trying to
establish the way the world is. As a consequence, woven through the
texture of positive arguments in the Meditations is a genuine dialogue
between the claims of common sense and the claims of reason, between
the prejudices of youth and the wisdom of Cartesian maturity, a dia-
logue all too easily missed by the reader who focuses too closely on the
validation of clear and distinct perception and the refutation of skep-
ticism. While the dialogue pervades much of the text, I would like to
emphasize two important exchanges, the discussion of the wax example
in Meditation II, and the aborted proof for the existence of body from
our adventitious ideas of sensation in Meditation III, before showing in
some detail how the claims of sensation and reason are finally resolved
in the discussion of the existence of body that Descartes presents in
Meditation VI and in the discussion of the teachings of nature that
immediately follows.
The path to knowledge begins, of course, in Meditation II, with the
cogito and the sum res cogitans, arguments that establish the existence of
the knowing subject as a thinking thing, “the first and most certain of
all that occurs to one who philosophizes in an orderly way,” as Descartes
puts it in the Principles (Pr I 7). But as soon as that first step in the argu-
ment is taken, there is an objection from common sense: Certainly
bodies, things that we are acquainted with by way of the corporeal fac-
ulties of sensation and imagination, are better known to us than the
mind, which can be conceived through neither of those faculties. As
the meditator puts it:
But nevertheless it still seems to me and I cannot keep myself from believing
that corporeal things, images [imagines] of which are formed by thought,
and which the senses themselves examine, are much more distinctly known
than that something I know not what of myself which does not fall under the
imagination. (AT VII 29)
Descartes’ response to this objection, which he considers natural in the

fullest sense, is to let the mind wander and consider what it is that it
really knows and how it knows it. Through the consideration of the cel-
ebrated piece of wax, Descartes tries to show us that, contrary to the
prejudices of youth as embodied in common sense, neither sensation
nor imagination gives us access to the nature of bodies, and that what-
ever we are able to learn about the existence of body through the senses
and imagination, our knowledge of the existence of mind is prior to
that of body in a well-defined sense, despite the inaccessibility of mind
to the faculties of sensation and imagination.
Descartes begins the response to common sense by pointing out that
sensation cannot give us the distinct comprehension of the piece of wax
under consideration, since all of its sensible properties can change,
while the wax itself remains the same; put it by the fire, melt it, and
“what remains of the taste evaporates, the odor vanishes, its color
changes, its shape is lost, its size increases,” and so on (AT VII 30). Thus,
the nature of the wax, what makes it the thing it is, what persists through
change, is inaccessible to the senses. But it is also inaccessible to the
imagination. “Rejecting everything which does not belong to the wax,”
Descartes suggests that the wax itself, what persists through the sensi-
ble changes, is just “something extended, flexible, movable” (AT VII
31). But if so, then I conceive the wax as something able to take on an
infinite number of shapes, round, square, triangular, and everything in
between, an idea that goes beyond my imagination, the capacity I have
for forming mental pictures (cf. AT VII 31). Although the full consid-
eration of the nature of body will have to await Meditation V, Descartes
at this stage believes that he is entitled to conclude that it is an inspec-
tion of the mind alone (solius mentis inspectio) that reveals the nature of
the wax (AT VII 31), that it is the mind itself, working apart from the
body-connected faculties of sensation and imagination that allows us to
“distinguish the wax from its external forms, and consider it as if naked,
having removed its clothing” (AT VII 32). “It is only the prejudices of
youth, and later habits derived from those prejudices, that could con-
vince me otherwise” (AT VII 31–32).39
It is thus no challenge to the priority of the cogito and sum res cogi-
tans argument to say that the object under consideration, the mind, is
not known through the senses. Neither is the body. And at this point it
is easy for Descartes to establish his second claim, that the knowledge
39 Descartes claims here that we are deceived by our ordinary ways of speaking into think-
ing that we literally see the wax, just as we are, strictly speaking, mistaken when we say that
we see people in the street below the window; if we can be said to see anything at all, it
is coats and hats.
of the existence of the mind is prior to the knowledge of the existence
of body. For whether or not the wax I see or imagine really exists, the
sensations or imaginations themselves entail that mind exists; and
however sensory experience may serve to establish the existence of
body, any such sensory experience demonstrates, with certainty and
immediacy, the existence of a mind (cf. AT VII 33). It is in this precise
sense that mind is “better known than the body,” as Descartes puts it in
the title of Meditation II.
The wax example tames the unruly prejudices of childhood, but only
temporarily. Although the meditator seems to accept the priority of
knowledge of mind over knowledge of body, he keeps on pressing the
insistent claims of commonsense knowledge of body. Meditation III
begins with a kind of introduction, where Descartes reflects on the
conclusions reached so far and lays out the strategy of the argument
to come. Descartes tells us that having established the existence of the
knowing subject, we must establish the existence and nature of its
creator before anything can be known for certain (AT VII 34–36). But
after this introduction, Descartes returns to the argument proper: “and
now good order seems to demand that I should first classify all my
thought into certain types and consider in which of these types there
is, properly, truth or falsity” (AT VII 36–37). That is, having established
the existence of mind as a thinking thing, we must see what can be
drawn from an examination of the thoughts themselves. And at this
point, almost as soon as the order of argument is resumed, the claims
of common sense assert themselves again. The meditator again
attempts to show that the senses lead us directly to a knowledge of the
external world of bodies.
The meditator begins by distinguishing ideas, properly speaking,
thoughts that are like images of things (tanquam rerum imagines) insofar
as they are representative, unlike volitions or emotions (AT VII 37).40
The ideas are then broken down into three categories, the innate ideas
that seem inborn, the adventitious ideas that seem to come from
without, and the factitious ideas that seem to have been created by me
(cf. AT VII 37–38). Of particular interest to Descartes’ meditator are
40 This passage naturally enough misled Hobbes into thinking that all ideas are mental
images for Descartes, i.e., that the only cognitive faculties are sensation and imagination.
In his reply to Hobbes, Descartes is clear that this is not the intention in this passage. (See
AT VII 179–181.) Ideas are tanquam rerum imagines only insofar as ideas and images are
representative of things other than themselves.
the adventitious ideas: “If I now hear some noise, if I see the sun, if
I feel heat, I have hitherto judged that these sensations proceeded
from some things which exist outside of myself . . . and resemble those
objects” (AT VII 38). The reasons given for these commonsense judg-
ments are three: (1) Nature seems to teach me so; (2) the sensations I
have are independent of my will; and (3) “nothing is more plausible
[obvium]” than that the external thing imposes its own likeness (simi-
litudo) on me rather than anything else (AT VII 38; cf. AT VII 75–76).
The claim is a familiar one; it is, in essence, a reprise of the second prin-
ciple of evidence from Meditation I, the claim that our senses give us
access to the familiar world of middle-sized bodies around us.
And, once again, common sense is rejected. Descartes first of all dis-
tinguishes the teachings of nature from the light of nature, the faculty
to which he will appeal in his own argument for the existence of God,
later in that same meditation (AT VII 40). The teachings of nature,
what causes me to judge that my sensory ideas derive from body, is a
mere inclination to believe (quodam impetu . . . ad hoc credendum) rather
than an irresistible impulse to belief, a faculty, like the light of nature,
which is indubitable in the sense that “there can be no other faculty
which could teach me that what this light of nature shows me as true
is not so, and in which I could trust as much as in the light of nature
itself ” (AT VII 38–39).41 And, Descartes notes, since natural inclinations
have in the past led me astray in distinguishing good from bad, I should
not trust them uncritically in this case either (cf. AT VII 39). As for the
fact that sensations are involuntary, this too is insufficient reason for
thinking that they derive from something external to us. Recalling the
dream argument of Meditation I, Descartes suggests that, for all I know,
there might be some faculty in me independent of my will that I do
not, at this point, know of, which is responsible for my present sensory
ideas, without the need for an external cause, just as some such faculty
may cause the dream experiences I have in sleep (AT VII 39).42 And
41 It is interesting here that Descartes says of the light of nature at this stage, before it has
been validated in Meditation IV, that it “shows me that which is true.” The teachings of
nature seem to be the customary judgments connected with the senses from early youth,
which we have mistaken for direct deliverances of the senses. (See AT VII 436–439 and
the discussion above in Part 1.)
42 This objection relates closely to the dream argument of Meditation I as interpreted in
Wilson’s Descartes (chapter 1, sec. 6). According to Wilson, in Meditation I Descartes is
not worried about our supposed inability to tell whether or not we are awake. Rather, she
claims, the question is why, since we are not tempted to think that our dream experiences
represent an external reality, do we think our waking experiences are any different on
finally, Descartes challenges the claim that our ideas of sense resemble
external things, even if it is conceded that they are caused by things
external. The claim is that the idea we have of an object from our senses
is different from the idea we have of the same object through reason
(“certain innate ideas”), and that “reason persuades me that the idea
that seems to come directly from the thing is that which least resem-
bles it” (AT VII 39). Although the example he uses here is different
(the sun as regarded by the senses and by the astronomers), the point
here is largely the same as the one he made earlier in connection with
the wax example.
At this point in the argument, Descartes puts aside the ideas of sense
and the question of external bodies, and initiates a train of argument
that leads in a fairly direct way to the existence of God in Meditation
III and to the validation of reason in Meditation IV. While the preju-
dices of youth are addressed on a number of occasions in the course
of these arguments,43 it isn’t until Meditation V that the question of
our knowledge of the external world is addressed again and, in fact,
becomes the focus of Descartes’ attention:
having noticed what must be avoided or done in order to arrive at the knowl-
edge of the truth, my principal task now is to attempt to escape from the
doubts into which I have fallen in these last few days, i.e., in the previous
[Meditations] and to see if we can know anything certain about material
things. (AT VII 63)
this score? The objection to the commonsense reason for believing in an external world
is similar. The fact that our sensations are involuntary is no indication that they proceed
from something external, since our dream experience, which is also involuntary, may not
require an external cause.
43 In the course of the causal argument for the existence of God in Meditation III Descartes
examines the ideas of sense, attempting to persuade common sense that these ideas are
obscure and confused. (See AT VII 43–44 and Wilson, Descartes, chapter 3, sec. 2.) Later
in that same Meditation, after concluding the first causal argument for the existence of
God, Descartes raises and answers three objections (AT VII 45–47). At least two of those
objections depend on the belief that any ideas we have of infinity and perfection must
derive from ideas we have of the finite and imperfect, a belief quite natural to the sen-
sualist, for whom every idea derives from sensory experience of finite and imperfect
things. And in Meditation IV, the question of the grounds of our belief in corporeal things
comes up in the course of an analysis of error (AT VII 58–59). Descartes there contrasts
the spontaneous and irresistible urge to believe in the existence of the mind with the less
strong inclination to believe in body, arguing that only the former is a proper use of the
faculty of judgment, in a passage that recalls the distinction between the light of nature
and the teachings of nature in Meditation III.
Descartes begins the project in Meditation V, with an account “of the
essence of material things” (AT VII 63), an explicit statement of some
ideas first introduced in the wax example of Meditation II. The “some-
thing extended, flexible, movable” that is the nature of wax, inaccessi-
ble to sensation or imagination (AT VII 31), is identified in Meditation
V with the nature of body itself: what I “imagine distinctly” in bodies
and what must, therefore, constitute their nature is “extension in
length, width, and depth,” together with various modes that pertain to
individual extended things, “sizes, shapes, positions, and motions”
together with duration (AT VII 63).44 This settles part of the debate
between reason and common sense; the argument of Meditation V is
intended to give us a definitive refutation of the commonsense claim,
prominent in earlier discussions, that bodies resemble our sensory ideas
of them. And once this question is settled, Descartes turns to the ques-
tion of the existence of material things in Meditation VI. Here, though,
the treatment of common sense is more subtle. Like common sense,
Descartes believes in the existence of bodies external to the mind, even
though his geometrical conception of body is quite distant from the
sensuous world of common sense. And, like common sense, Descartes
believes that sensation and imagination and the teachings of nature
have roles to play in our coming to believe in a world of bodies, even
though the roles they play are importantly different from the roles
assigned them by common sense. The final move in the dialogue
between truth and prejudice is not so much a refutation of common
sense as it is a reinterpretation, an attempt to find what is right in
common sense and show how at least some of our youthful convictions
can find their place in the Cartesian system. It is in this way that the
dialogue is finally concluded.
The final reconciliation begins in Meditation VI with a consideration
of imagination, and a discussion of the extent to which imagination can
establish the existence of an external world of bodies. Imagination,
Descartes points out, the faculty we have for forming mental pictures, is
something quite different from pure intellection, the faculty we have for
44 Duration seems new here. It is also interesting that the starting place for Descartes’ analy-
sis of the idea of body is an idea of imagination, a mental picture of body. He begins the
analysis with the claim that “ I imagine quantity distinctly” (AT VII 63). When a short
while later an example is considered (AT VII 64), it is the idea of a triangle in imagina-
tion (“And when, for example, I imagine a triangle . . .”).
grasping the concepts of, say, geometrical objects in a nonsensuous way.
This faculty, Descartes claims, “is in no way necessary to my essence”
and thus “depends on something other than myself ” (AT VII 73).
And, Descartes continues, appealing to a conviction, presumably from
common sense, a conviction suggested earlier in Meditation II, “I readily
conceive that if some body exists with which my mind is so joined that it
can consider it whenever it wishes, it could be by this means that it imag-
ines corporeal things” (AT VII 73; cf. AT VII 28).45 The passage con-
cludes with an appeal to an argument from the best explanation: “I easily
conceive, I say, that the imagination can work in this fashion, if indeed
bodies exist, and because I cannot find any other way in which this can
be explained equally well, I therefore conjecture that bodies probably
[probabiliter] exist” (AT VII 73). But, Descartes notes, “this is only
probable, and although I carefully consider all aspects of the question,
I nevertheless do not see that from this distinct idea of the nature of
body which I find in my imagination, I can derive any argument which
necessarily proves the existence of any body” (AT VII 73).46 The faculty
of imagination can, indeed, lead us to a belief in body, Descartes seems
to concede. But, the claim is, not in the way that common sense might
originally have thought. The argument Descartes offers is very different
from the kinds of arguments suggested in the third and fourth princi-
ples of evidence in Meditation I, where the meditator suggested that a
consideration of our dream experience, a variety of Cartesian imagina-
tion, might give us access to some of the general features of an external
reality. The argument Descartes offers to common sense in its place is
an argument from the very faculty of imagination, and Descartes sug-
gests, somewhat dogmatically, this is the only argument we are to get from
imagination. Furthermore, the consideration of imagination will give us
only probability, only a belief in the plausibility of an external world, and
not the real conviction that we thought we had.
45 The passage from Meditation II reads: “to imagine is nothing but to contemplate the shape
of a body or its image.” It is not clear here whether Descartes is claiming that imagina-
tion is the contemplation of a mental picture, or the contemplation of a physical picture
in the brain (the pineal gland), which is the cause of the mental picture. (Cf. the account
of sensation and imagination in the Treatise of Man [AT XI 174–177], in Thomas Steele
Hall, trans., René Descartes: Treatise on Man [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972],
84–87. In Descartes’ account there, sensation and imagination are literally the contem-
plation of a shape in the pineal gland, a shape that is isomorphic to an external body in
the case of sensation.)
46 The conclusion here is probable, plausible rather than certain, because of the hypo-
thetical form of argument, presumably.
For real certainty we must turn to the senses, Descartes thinks. The
final argument for the existence of external bodies, the argument that
Descartes finally and unambiguously endorses is an argument that
appeals crucially to sensation and the teachings of nature, considera-
tions prominent in the abortive Meditation III argument, but now used
in a way that is not open to the objections raised earlier. The argument
goes as follows.47 I find in myself “a certain passive faculty of sensing,
that is, of receiving and recognizing the ideas of sensible objects.” From
this it follows that there must be a certain “active faculty for producing
or forming these ideas, either in me, or in something else.” This active
faculty cannot be in me, Descartes argues. While this step of the argu-
ment is obscure, it seems to depend on two doctrines assumed or estab-
lished earlier. One such doctrine is the claim that the mind contains
only two faculties, a cognitive faculty for the apprehension of ideas, and
volition. While this doctrine is not argued for explicitly in the Medita-
tions it seems to underlie the analysis of error that leads to the epistemic
principle of clear and distinct perception in Meditation IV (cf. AT VII
56f.; Pr I 32; Passions of the Soul, 17). The second assumption necessary
for this step is the claim that all cognitive faculties, like imagination and
sensation, are modes of pure intellection. This is suggested in the argu-
ment from imagination, earlier in Meditation VI, where Descartes
distinguishes imagination from pure intellection, and argues that imag-
ination (presumably unlike intellection) is not essential to mind. In a
passage immediately preceding the argument we are now considering,
Descartes extends this conclusion to sensation, and clarifies the status
of both. Sensation and imagination are, he claims, distinct from pure
intellection in the same way that shapes are distinct from extension, as
modes from that of which they are modes: “thus in the notion that we
have of these faculties . . . they contain some sort of intellection, from
which I conceive that they are distinct from me as figure, motion, and
other modes or accidents of body are from the bodies which sustain
those modes” (AT IXA 62).48 The implication here is that all cognitive
faculties must be modes of pure intellection.49 From these two doctrines
47 All quotations from Descartes’ statement of the argument are from AT VII 79–80.
48 I quote here from the French edition, which in this instance is much clearer than the
Latin. The significance of the difference between the two texts suggests Descartes’ own
hand in this passage of the French edition.
49 On this, see Wilson, Descartes, chapter 4, sec. 2. In this important discussion, Wilson argues
for the primacy of the pure intellect in Descartes’ conception of the mind, as against the
view that all mental events, sensations, imaginations, and pure intellections are on the
Descartes can establish that the active faculty that causes sensations in
me is not, itself, in me. That active faculty “plainly presupposes no intel-
lect,” Descartes claims, from which it follows that it cannot, like sensa-
tion and imagination, be a mode of the cognitive faculty of intellection.
And since the sensations I have “are produced without my cooperation
and often against my will [invitae],” they cannot derive from my will.50
Thus they must derive from something outside of me. But, Descartes
argues, God would be a deceiver if they derived from Himself or from
anything other than from bodies themselves:
For since He plainly gave me no faculty to know that [i.e., that ideas of sensa-
tion come from something other than body] but on the contrary a very great
propensity [propensitas] to believe that they come from corporeal things, I do
not see how God could for any reason fail to be a deceiver if they [i.e., the ideas
of sensation] come from anything but corporeal things. (AT VII 79–80)
From which, Descartes concludes, corporeal things, bodies, exist.51

Descartes’ argument is not altogether unproblematic or convincing,
as later philosophers have been quick to remark. But rather than
dwelling on the infirmities of the argument, I would like to clarify the
way it fits into the debate between commonsense sensualism and
reason, which we have been tracing. This argument for the existence
of body makes prominent use of two of the commonsense beliefs that
formed the basis of the abortive Meditation III argument. As he did in
the Meditation III argument, Descartes here appeals to the involun-
tariness of sensation. But in contrast to the argument in Meditation III,
this commonsense fact about sensation is not, by itself, taken as grounds
same footing. I think that Wilson goes too far, though, when she claims that “Descartes
regarded his mind as essentially only intellect” (p. 181). While the intellect may be the only
passive faculty that pertains essentially to mind, Descartes also recognizes an active faculty,
volition, which is distinct from the intellect.
50 It is because the imagination is, at least sometimes, under our voluntary control, that the
argument must proceed from sensation rather than from imagination.
51 It is interesting to compare this argument with the parallel argument for the existence of
body in Pr II, 1. That version lacks the twist at the end, that if my inclination to believe
in bodies were mistaken, the veracious God would have given me a faculty to correct it.
In Pr II. 1 the claim is that we “seem to see clearly that the idea [i.e., of a material thing]
comes from something outside of us.” The claim is that God would be a deceiver if this
clear idea were mistaken. This seems to be a direct application of the validation of clear
and distinct perceptions to our inclination to believe in bodies, as opposed to the Medi-
tations version of the argument, where the inclination to believe is an ingredient in a more
complex reasoning, and where Descartes never makes the claim that we clearly perceive
the external existence of bodies.
for believing in bodies. In the Meditation VI argument the involun-
tariness of sensation gives us only a piece of the argument, the claim
that the active faculty causing sensation is external to mind. And even
this weaker conclusion is endorsed only in the context of certain claims
about mind and its faculties, claims that undermine the hidden-faculty
objection Descartes raised against the appeal to the involuntariness of
sensation in Meditation III. The final argument also makes use of the
teachings of nature, the strong inclination we have to believe that our
sensations derive from bodies, which was presented as one of the prin-
cipal supports of our belief in the external world in Meditation III. In
Meditation III the inclination to believe is taken as, itself, grounds for
belief, grounds that are rejected because of the known untrustworthi-
ness of inclinations in other circumstances. But in Meditation VI, the
inclination to believe in bodies as the cause of my sensations is used
only in the context of a careful examination of when such inclinations
are reliable and when they are not. The claim is that if, in any particu-
lar case, the teachings of nature were untrustworthy, then the veracious
God would have given us the means to correct it. Because, in the spe-
cific case at hand, he didn’t, and only because he didn’t give us any-
thing to correct the belief our inclination leads us to, we can, in this
specific instance, trust the teachings of nature and believe that our sen-
sations proceed from bodies, in spite of the fact that our inclinations
are not always trustworthy. But when another faculty, reason, of course,
gives us the means to correct the teachings of nature, then they must
be rejected. Such is the case with the inclination we have to believe that
objects resemble the sensations we have of them, an inclination that is
explicitly noted in the abortive Meditation III argument, and is closely
connected to the wax example of Meditation II. In the end, while
Descartes uses sensation to establish the existence of bodies, he is very
careful to claim that sensation, by itself, does not establish the nature of
bodies. Immediately after concluding that bodies exist, he wrote:
Nevertheless, they [i.e., bodies] are not perhaps entirely as we comprehend

them through sense, since there are many ways in which the comprehension
of the senses is very obscure and confused. But at least everything that I clearly
and distinctly understand is in them, that is, everything, generally speaking,
which is included among the objects of pure mathematics. (AT VII 80)
That is, the bodies whose existence the argument from sensation has
proved, are not the objects of sensation, colored, warm or cold, salty or
sweet, but the extended things of Cartesian science.
It should be clear that implicit in the argument for the existence of
bodies, which Descartes finally endorses, is a general principle of
evidence that pertains to all the claims of common sense, a principle
of evidence that can guide the use of sensation, imagination, and the
natural and habitual inclinations to belief which Descartes calls the
teachings of nature. And just as Descartes draws the principle of clear
and distinct perception from the example of the cogito argument in the
beginning of Meditation III, he draws his new principle of evidence for
the teachings of nature from the example of the argument for the
existence of bodies in Meditation VI (cf. AT VII 35).52 In the paragraph
following the proof, Descartes writes:
As for the rest, there are other beliefs which are very doubtful and uncertain,
as that the sun is of such a size or shape, etc., or less clearly understood, as
light, sound, pain, and the like. But however dubious and uncertain they are,
from the fact that God is not a deceiver, and that consequently He has not
permitted any falsity in my opinions, without my having some faculty to
correct them, I have a certain hope of learning the truth about these things
as well. (AT VII 80)
Common sense is not always wrong, Descartes claims. But before we

can trust it, we must examine it carefully using reason, the faculty
which, by the argument of Meditation IV, is always trustworthy if used
properly, the only faculty that God (and Descartes) have given us to
correct common sense. If reason concurs or is silent, then we can trust
common sense, otherwise not. The convictions of youth, unceremoni-
ously shuffled out in Meditation I, now return, properly tamed by
reason.53
And in this we have the resolution of the debate between common
sense and reason that we have been tracing throughout the Meditations.
52 I don’t mean to claim that in the Meditations the principle of clear and distinct percep-
tion is derived from the example of the cogito alone. At the beginning of Meditation III
the cogito suggests the principle to the meditator. But in Meditation IV it is given a careful
derivation from an analysis of the proper use of the faculty of judgment and the veracity
of God. (See AT VII 56–60.) In that derivation, the earlier statement of the principle plays
no role whatsoever.
53 It is interesting that this principle of evidence for sensation seems missing from the Prin-
ciples, a fact closely related to the version of the argument for the existence of body in Pr
II, 1. See the discussion of this argument in note 51. It is not clear to me whether this
represents a change in Descartes’ position, or whether it is a consequence of the fact that
Descartes intends only a simplified presentation of the contents of the Meditations in the
Principles.
Common sense, sensation, imagination are not eliminated. They
remain part of Cartesian epistemology, but under the watchful eye and
domination of reason. Thus Descartes writes in Meditation VI:
But I do not see that it [nature] teaches me that I should conclude anything
from these sense perceptions concerning things outside of ourselves unless
the intellect has previously examined them. For it seems to me that it is the
business of the mind alone, and not of the being composed of mind and
body [from which derives sensation and imagination] to decide the truth
concerning such matters. (AT VII 82–83; cf. AT VII 438–439)
With this, the new epistemology is in place. All that remains is to work
out the details of the new world that reason will show us with the
assistance of the senses.54
In the Meditations, Descartes is thus interested in more than the refu-
tation of skepticism. This is not to deny that the refutation of skepti-
cism is important; until the skeptical challenges to knowledge are
settled, we can have no genuine knowledge. But Descartes is interested
in more than the possibility of knowledge. He is interested in the actual
pursuit of knowledge, in formulating the true account of the way the
world is. The Meditations is intended both to establish the possibility of
knowledge, against the skeptics, and to set knowledge on its proper epis-
temic foundations. By delineating the proper path to knowledge, the
priority of the intellect and its clear and distinct perceptions over the
deliverances of the senses, Descartes is intending to lay the epistemic
groundwork for his revolution in physics, and for the arguments that
establish the world of mechanism and allow us to set aside the com-
monsense and sense-bound world that the Aristotelians have mistaken
54 The fact that sensory knowledge is admitted, under appropriate circumstances, is crucial
to reconciling Descartes’ demand for certainty in science with his frequent claims to being
an experimental scientist. For a discussion of this question, see my essay, “Science and
Certainty in Descartes,” in Hooker, Descartes, 114–151. The breakdown in certainty comes,
I claim, not with experiment, which can, if used properly, under the control of reason,
lead to certain knowledge, but with the use of something like hypothetico-deductive
method, which can never lead to certainty. (For more recent reflections on these ques-
tions, see essays 5 and 6 in this volume.) For another recent attempt to deal with these
questions, see Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’ Philosophy of Science (University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). Clarke, arguing from Descartes’ scientific writ-
ings rather than from his philosophical writings about science (see p. 2), also emphasizes
the proper use of experience in Descartes’ science, under the control of reason (see
chapters 2 and 3). But Clarke argues that Descartes’ actual method in science is largely
hypothetico-deductive (chapters 5 and 6).
for the world we live in. It is this project, the dethroning of the senses
that, from our earliest years, ruled the mind, and the elevation of
reason, the rightful sovereign of the intellect, which must be under-
taken, once in life, lest we remain trapped in the false world we have
from our earliest years imagined ourselves to inhabit.55
55 I would like to thank Amélie Rorty and E. M. Curley for helpful comments on earlier
drafts.
12
FORMS AND QUALITIES IN

THE SIXTH REPLIES
The Sixth Objections, like the Second Objections, were collected by Father
Marin Mersenne, and purport to represent the views of the group of
philosophers and theologians who belong to the so-called Mersenne
circle.1 The very first objection that Mersenne and his friends make to
the Meditations in the Second Objections concerns the real distinction
between mind and body; Mersenne and his friends simply do not under-
stand how Descartes’ arguments exclude the possibility that thought is
not a kind of motion, and why a body cannot think (AT VII 123).
Descartes, of course, attempts to answer this question in the Second
Replies (as well as in the Third and Fifth Replies), but evidently not to
Mersenne’s satisfaction. For in the Sixth Objections, the very same ques-
tion is raised yet again (AT VII 413). Mersenne goes on to suggest that
even the Church Fathers believed that thought “could occur by means
of corporeal motions” (AT VII 413). The Sixth Objections ends with an
appendix and a letter “from some philosophers and geometricians to
M. Descartes” in which these very same doubts are voiced again:
However much we ponder on the question of whether the idea of our mind
(or a human mind), i.e., our knowledge and perception of it, contains any-
thing corporeal, we cannot go so far as to assert that what we call thought
1 The Sixth Replies were composed some time between 23 June 1641 (at which time Descartes
complains that he has not received all the sheets Mersenne sent him), and 22 July 1641;
see Descartes’ letters to Mersenne on these dates, AT III 385 and 415. Descartes seems to
have received the objections from Mersenne in bits and pieces, and arranged them himself,
probably adding a few sentences here and there to Mersenne’s texts; see Descartes to
Mersenne, 22 July 1641, AT III 415.
257
cannot in any way belong to a body subject to some sort of motion. . . . We
have read what you have written seven times, and have lifted up our minds,
as best we could, to the level of the angels, but we are still not convinced.
(AT VII 420–21)2
That in the end is the problem: Mersenne and his friends simply do
not find Descartes’ arguments convincing. Though in the end they have
no specific objections to bring, they are simply not convinced.
Descartes takes these last worries seriously. But rather than respond-
ing with yet another version of the argument to distinguish mind and
body, in the Sixth Replies Descartes offers something very different: an
intellectual autobiography of sorts, an account of how he came to dis-
cover that the mind and the body are distinct, that thought and exten-
sion are different, and how he overcame his natural propensity to
confuse the two. We shall return to the details of this account later. But
for the moment I would like to point out an interesting feature of the
account. After discussing how in his youth he had confused mind and
body, Descartes makes the following remarks:
But later on I made the observations which led me to make a careful

distinction between the idea of the mind and the ideas of body and
corporeal motion; and I found that all those other ideas of “real qualities”
or “substantial forms” which I had previously held were ones which I had
put together or constructed from those basic ideas. And thus I very easily
freed myself from all the doubts that my critics here put forward. (AT VII
442–43)
This is very curious. In the course of a discussion of the distinction

between mind and body, Descartes introduces a question, and a very
important question that the objectors appear never to have mentioned:
the problem of substantial forms and real qualities. Why? And what
does this problem have to do with the distinction between mind and
body? I shall begin with a discussion of the history of these problems
in Descartes’ thought before the Meditations. Then we shall turn to the
Sixth Replies, first to the question of mind and body, and then to the
question of forms and qualities.
2 The appendix appears to summarize objections made by R. P. de la Barde; the letter which
follows appears to be from a different source. Both documents seem to be distinct from
the text that Mersenne gathered as the Sixth Objections, and seem to have been added to
that text by Descartes himself. See Descartes to Mersenne, 23 June 1641, AT III 385, and
Descartes to the Abbé de Launay (?), 22 July 1641 (?), AT III 420.
forms and qualities 259
Forms and Qualities before the Meditations

The Scholastic account of body in terms of matter and form is, not sur-
prisingly, a doctrine of great complexity, with a variety of different
schools holding a variety of different positions on the central issues.
But, by and large, Descartes was not interested in the subtleties of
Scholastic thought. Writing to Mersenne on 11 November 1640, while
preparing to receive the objections to his Meditations, Descartes notes
with great confidence:
I do not think that the diversity of the opinions of the Scholastics makes their
philosophy difficult to refute. It is easy to overturn the foundations on which
they all agree, and once that has been done, all their disagreements over
detail will seem foolish. (AT III 231–32)
What interested Descartes were the foundations of Scholastic thought,

and what lay at the foundations was the doctrine of body in terms of
(primary) matter and (substantial) form.3
Matter is, quite generally, the subject of properties of a thing, that
which remains constant as a thing changes from one sort of thing to
another. The notion of a substantial form is somewhat more complex.
Most simply, the form is that which, added to primary matter, results in
a complete substance. But more substantively, substantial form is that
from which the characteristic behavior of the various sorts of substances
derives, and thus that in terms of which their behavior is to be
explained. And so, Descartes notes, writing to Regius in January 1642,
helping him to formulate his attack on Voëtius, “they [i.e., forms] were
introduced by philosophers for no other reason but to explain the
proper actions of natural things, of which actions this form is to be the
principle and the source” (AT III 506). And so, for example, heaviness,
the tendency some bodies have to fall toward the center of the earth
(universe) is taken to be a quality (what Descartes often calls a real
quality) they have by virtue of having the substantial form they do. And
so Descartes characterized the scholastic account of heaviness:
Most take it [i.e., heaviness] to be a virtue or an internal quality in every body
that one calls heavy which makes it tend toward the center of the earth; and
they think that this quality depends on the form of each body, so that the
3 For a fuller account of the issues discussed in this section, see my Descartes’ Metaphysical
Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chapter 4, from which this section is
largely drawn.
same matter which is heavy, having the form of water, loses this quality of
heaviness and becomes light when it happens that it takes on the form of air.
(AT II 223)
Closely connected with substantial forms in Descartes’ discussions

are real qualities. For the most part, Descartes is concerned with qual-
ities like heaviness (gravitas) that follow directly out of the substantial
forms of heavy bodies like earth and water. But they do come up in a
somewhat different context earlier on in the Fourth and Sixth Replies.
Descartes terms “real accidents” those qualities that remain in the host
in transubstantiation, the color, taste, smell, etc. (see AT VII 248–49,
434–35). They are qualities that can exist independently of the sub-
stance in which they are found at one time, and can attach themselves
to another substance, as when in transubstantiation, the bread blessed
becomes the body of Christ; though the substance changes, it has the
same sensible qualities that the bread before it had.
Descartes’ metaphysics and physics are fundamentally opposed to
the forms and qualities of the Schools. For Descartes, as is well known,
all there is in body is extension, and thus, he argues, everything in body
is to be explained in terms of the modes of extension, the size, shape,
and motion of the smaller bodies that compose a larger one. There are,
thus, no forms in Descartes’ world.4 And since the only qualities he
recognizes are those that are modes of extension, there is no apparent
place in Descartes’ world for qualities that can detach themselves from
one substance and attach themselves to another.5
Representative of Descartes’ attitudes in his early writings is the
following passage from the World:
When flame burns wood or some other similar material, we can see with the
naked eye that it sets the minute parts of the wood in motion and separates
them from one another, thus transforming the finer parts into fire, air, and
smoke, and leaving the coarser parts as ashes. Others may, if they wish,
imagine the form of fire, the quality of heat, and the process of burning to
be completely different things in the wood. For my part, I am afraid of mis-
takenly supposing there is anything more in the wood than what I see must
4 At least there are no such forms in the world of inanimate bodies. Descartes does explic-
itly hold that the human soul is the form of the body; see, e.g., Descartes to Regius, January
1642, AT III 503, 505.
5 In his responses to Arnauld’s Fourth Objections, Descartes does suggest that there may be
real accidents that God can separate from a substance, without our being able to under-
stand how that could happen; see AT VII 249. But that would seem to contradict what he
says elsewhere, for example in the Sixth Replies, AT VII 434–35.
necessarily be in it, and so I am content to limit my conception to the motion
of its parts. (AT XI 7)
Here Descartes makes it rather explicit that forms are to be rejected

since they are not needed for explanation; everything that goes on in
the burning wood can be explained simply in terms of extended matter
in motion, and there is no need to bring in anything else. This is
particularly true since, as Descartes notes a bit later in the World, the
forms and qualities the Schoolmen use are themselves quite obscure.
Descartes writes:
If you find it strange that in explaining these elements I do not use the qual-
ities called “heat,” “cold,” “moisture,” and “dryness” – as the philosophers
do – I shall say to you that these qualities themselves seem to me to need
explanation. Indeed, unless I am mistaken, not only these four qualities but
all the others as well, including even the forms of inanimate bodies, can be
explained without the need to suppose anything in their matter other than
the motion, size, shape, and arrangement of its parts. (AT XI 25–26)
But even though Descartes boldly attacks his teachers in the World,
it is extremely important to point out that this attack remained unpub-
lished in Descartes’ lifetime. In general Descartes is very careful to avoid
explicitly contradicting the Scholastic view in public, at least after the
condemnation of Galileo. Typical is Descartes’ treatment of the ques-
tion in his Discourse and Essays. The only mention of forms and quali-
ties in the entire book occurs in the following passage from the Meteors,
which Descartes himself cites a number of times as an example of his
caution in dealing with the issue. Descartes writes:
You should know . . . that, in order not to disrupt the peace with the philoso-
phers, I in no way want to deny what they imagine in bodies over and above
what I have said, such as their substantial forms, their real qualities, and
similar things. But it seems to me that my reasons should be all the more
accepted if I make them depend on fewer assumptions. (AT VI 239)6
There is an implicit argument here against forms and qualities, but only
an implicit one, that they are not needed for explaining things in the
world. And, at the same time, Descartes can deny (as he does) that he
rejects the philosophy of the Schools. It is important to remember just
6 These words were chosen with great care, and Descartes cited them elsewhere; see Descartes
to Regius, January 1642, AT III 492 and the Fourth Replies, AT VII 248. Furthermore, it is
interesting to note that in the Discourse and Essays, Descartes does not say that the essence
of body is extension, or that the sun is at the center of the planetary system.
how controversial it was to deny the basic Aristotelian metaphysics of
form and matter while Descartes was composing and publishing his first
works. As late as 1624, a group of maverick philosophers was officially
condemned and exiled by the Parlement of Paris for publicly contra-
dicting the philosophy of Aristotle, and their denial of the doctrine of
matter and form was at the heart of the official displeasure.7 In late
1641, after the Meditations were out, the Dutch theologian Gisbertus
Voëtius was to attack Descartes’ philosophy, in good part because of
its implications for the Aristotelian metaphysics of matter and form.
Descartes knew well that any challenge to the accepted doctrines of the
Schools could cause serious difficulties, and he was in general very
eager to avoid such problems.
But in the Sixth Replies one finds, for the first time, an explicit and
public attack on forms and qualities, and an argument quite different
from any found even implicitly in Descartes’ earlier writings.
Mind and Body in the Sixth Replies

As I pointed out earlier, it is worries about Descartes’ doctrine of mind
and body in the Sixth Objections that elicit the attack on form and quality
in Descartes’ response. But to understand Descartes’ remarks about
form and quality there, we must first understand these more direct con-
cerns, and Descartes’ more direct response to them. Here it is impor-
tant to remember that unlike most of the other objections Descartes
had to answer, the Sixth Objections were the work of many hands, and
do not necessarily represent a single coherent point of view. Behind the
objections expressed by the authors of the Sixth Objections, I think that
one can find at least two different sorts of alternatives to Descartes’
dualism.
In the second section of the Sixth Objections, the objectors remark:
When you say you are thinking and that you exist, someone might maintain
that you are mistaken, and are not thinking but are merely in motion, and
that you are nothing else but corporeal motion. For no one has yet been able
to grasp that demonstration of yours by which you think you have proved that
what you call thought cannot be a kind of corporeal motion. . . . Can you
7 See Jean-Baptiste Morin, Réfutation des thèses erronées . . . (Paris: 1624), reprinted in part in
Le Mercure françois, t. X (1625), pp. 503–12. It is interesting to note that Mersenne was a
very visible critic of this group as well; see Mersenne, La vérité des sciences (Paris: 1625), pp.
78–84, 96–113.
therefore show us . . . that it is self-contradictory that our thoughts should be
reducible to these corporeal motions? (AT VII 413)8
In the third section of the Objections, the objectors note that several
Church Fathers held that both angels and the rational soul are corpo-
real, but yet that they think:
[The Church Fathers] appear to have believed that [thought] could occur
by means of corporeal motions, or even that angels were themselves corpo-
real motions; at any rate they drew no distinction between thought and such
motions. (AT VII 413–14)
The objectors go on to note that they, with Descartes, believe that

animals are purely corporeal, yet believe that it is necessary to appeal
to the notion of sensation, presumably a variety of thought, to explain
their behavior, suggesting, again, that thought is a variety of motion (AT
VII 414).9
The alternative to Descartes’ theory that the objectors are present-
ing in these passages seems to be some variety of materialism,10 the view
that a thought is in some sense identical to a certain motion in the body,
or, more generally, to a certain purely physical state of the body. This
is clearly how Descartes interprets these passages. After citing his objec-
tors’ request that he demonstrate the impossibility “that our thoughts
should be reducible to these corporeal motions,” Descartes notes that
this can only be understood as asserting that “our thought and corpo-
real motion are one and the same” (AT VII 424–25).11
8 I am following the Latin text in this last sentence. The French translation is somewhat
weaker: “Can you therefore show us . . . that it is self-contradictory that our thoughts are
spread out [répandues] in these corporeal motions?” A very similar remark can also be
found in the Second Objections that Mersenne also collected; see AT VII 122–23.
9 This section of the Sixth Objections was constructed by Descartes from (at least) two dif-
ferent objections that Mersenne had sent him; see Descartes to Mersenne, 22 July 1641,
AT III 415. It is possible that the point about animal thought was originally a separate
question, which Descartes is responsible for connecting to the question of the identifica-
tion of thought and motion in the Church Fathers. It is also possible that it was Mersenne
himself who linked the two, and that the point Descartes added was a third and different
point discussed in this section, that “there are plenty of people who will say that man
himself lacks sensation and intellect, and can do everything by means of mechanical struc-
tures” (AT VII 414). One wonders who exactly they had in mind.
10 Using the term in this way is, I acknowledge, somewhat anachronistic; cf. Olivier Bloch,
Le matérialisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985) for a history of the term.
But I don’t think that this seriously distorts the historical issues under discussion.
11 There seem to be two distinct varieties of materialism at issue here. In the first quotation,
the identification of thought and motion seems to entail that properly speaking, “you are
not thinking at all” (AT VII 413). Presumably, the objectors mean to suggest that if
But there may be another kind of alternative suggested in the text
of the Sixth Objections. In the appendix to the Sixth Objections, the objec-
tor asks: “How do I know for certain that this idea [i.e., the idea of the
soul] contains nothing of a corporeal nature?” (AT VII 420). In the
letter that follows and ends the objection, the objectors remark that “we
cannot go so far as to assert that what we call thought cannot in any
way belong to a body subject to some sort of motion” (AT VII 420).12
Similarly, they ask Descartes: “how can you possibly have known that
God has not implanted in certain bodies a power or property enabling
them to doubt, think, etc.?” (AT VII 421).
While it is not entirely clear what they are suggesting, it is possible
that these objectors have in mind something quite different from the
sort of radical materialism that we saw earlier. On the standard Scholas-
tic view, body, properly speaking, is made up of matter and form; matter
is properly just a constituent of body, and form is as well.13 And thus,
insofar as the human body has a rational soul, which is its form, it is
the human body that can properly be said to think, reason, will, doubt,
etc., and not just the soul. It is possible that these last objections are
meant to present this kind of Scholastic alternative to Descartes’ radical
dualism of extended body and thinking soul.
I think that it is fair to presume that Descartes’ answer at the very
end of the Sixth Replies is intended to answer not only the specific
passage that elicits the response, the appendix, and supplementary
letter to the Sixth Objections, but the general worries behind all of the
difficulties that the sixth objectors had in being convinced by the argu-
thought and motion are identical, then there is no thought, strictly speaking. (This sug-
gests a variety of what has been called eliminative materialism in recent analytic philoso-
phy.) But the rejection of exactly such a view seems to be the point of a later passage from
the Sixth Replies, cited above, in which the objectors argue that although animals are purely
corporeal, yet we must appeal to thought to explain their behavior. The point here seems
to be that although thought is a kind of motion, it is still proper to attribute thought so
understood to animals. (This suggests a variety of what has been called the identity theory
in recent analytic philosophy.) Given that the Sixth Objections is a compilation, we should
not be too surprised to discover certain internal contradictions.
12 I follow here the Latin; the French translation makes reference to “a body agitated by
secret motions.”
13 For an interesting polemical use of this view, see J.-B. Morin’s Réfutation des thèses erronées.
. . . Morin appeals to this conception of body to argue against a group of anti-Aristotelians
who had denied that there are forms. Morin claims that since body is matter and form,
if they deny forms, they must also deny the existence of bodies in the world. This, of
course, conflicts with the Bible, since at the Last Supper Christ held up the bread and
declared: “this is my body,” something false if there were no bodies (Morin, pp. 36–49).
ment for the distinction between mind and body. Whether or not
Descartes recognized distinctions among the different kinds of objec-
tions raised in the Sixth Objections, Descartes offers one general response
to those who claim to be unconvinced by his arguments.
Descartes admits that when he first came to the conclusion that the
mind and body are radically distinct, he, too, was unconvinced, like
astronomers, “who have established by argument that the sun is several
times larger than the earth, and yet still cannot prevent themselves
judging that it is smaller, when they actually look at it” (AT VII 440).
But after he reflected a bit on the question, he came to see that his
resistance to the arguments came not from their weakness, but from
his own prejudice. When young, Descartes notes, “the mind employed
the bodily organs less correctly than it now does, and was more firmly
attached to them; hence it had no thoughts apart from them and
perceived things only in a confused manner” (AT VII 441). Descartes
continues:
Although it [i.e., the soul] was aware of its own nature, . . . it never exercised
its intellect on anything without at the same time picturing something in the
imagination. It therefore took thought and extension to be one and the same
thing, and referred to the body all the notions which it had concerning things
related to the intellect. Now I had never freed myself from these precon-
ceived opinions in later life, and hence there was nothing that I knew with
sufficient distinctness, and there was nothing I did not suppose to be corpo-
real. (AT VII 441)
But, Descartes reports, as a fact about his own particular history, “later
on I made the observations which led me to make a careful distinction
between the idea of the mind and the ideas of body and corporeal
motion . . . and thus I very easily freed myself from all the doubts that
my critics here put forward” (AT VII 442–43). Once he realized that
he resisted the arguments for the distinction between mind and body
only because of this childhood error, this confusion between the mental
and the material, the doubts he had simply fell away.14 No doubt he
expects his readers to have the same experience that he had; as in the
Discourse on the Method, the first-person narrative, the “histoire ou fable”
(AT VII 4) constitutes a kind of argument to persuade his readers, an
example for them to follow to lead them to the kind of enlightenment
that Descartes, himself, has achieved.
14 The comparison with Freudian therapy here is obvious.

Descartes sees his objectors’ resistance to his dualism as arising out
of a characteristic confusion of things corporeal with things spiritual;
the little autobiography that he presents in the Sixth Replies is an attempt
to get his readers to see the error of their ways, not by direct arguments
(which he gives elsewhere), but by a kind of persuasion. This, and the
psychological analysis on which it rests is hardly new in this passage.
The very same analysis is found in Descartes’ response to the authors
of the Second Objections, who raise the very same problem (AT VII
130–31), and can be found as early as the Discourse on the Method of
1637, four years earlier (AT VII 37; there are other texts too). But there
is something new here, something worth our attention: For the first
time I know of, Descartes links the issue of the distinction between mind
and body with that of forms and qualities. And for the first time,
Descartes discusses that delicate issue in public.
Forms and Qualities in the Sixth Replies: The Argument

The confusion of mind and body that dates from our earliest youth
makes it difficult for us to appreciate the force of Descartes’ arguments
for the distinction between mind and body.15 But, Descartes suggests in
the Sixth Replies, the same confusion also leads us to posit the forms and
qualities of the schools. Consider the following paraphrase of the
argument presented at the end of the Sixth Replies that Descartes prob-
ably sent to the Abbé de Launay on the very day that he sent the text
to Mersenne:
The earliest judgments which we made in our childhood, and later on the
influence of traditional philosophy, have accustomed us to attribute to the
body many things which belong only to the soul, and to attribute to the soul
many things which belong only to the body. So people commonly mingle the
two ideas of body and soul when they construct the ideas of real qualities and
substantial forms, which I think should be altogether rejected. (Descartes to
de Launay (?), 22 July 1641 (?), AT III 420)
In this passage, and in the passage from the Sixth Replies that it sum-
marizes, Descartes offers an implicit argument against the forms and
qualities of the Schoolmen, something very different from what he (or
anyone else) had offered earlier. But the argument is complex, and
requires some careful unpacking.
15 See, again, my Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics, chapter 4, for a fuller account of these issues.
As I understand it, the argument has three distinct stages. (1)
Descartes begins by interpreting the notions of form and quality in
terms of his own ontology of mind and body. In short, in the Sixth Replies
Descartes Cartesianizes the Scholastic ontology. (2) Once understood
in his own terms, Descartes has an explanation for how we come to
believe in the Scholastic ontology of form and matter, a sort of psy-
chological account of how we come to hold the Scholastic view of the
world. According to Descartes, the Scholastic view is a consequence of
the confusions we have in our youth; just as we project colors and pains
out onto the world, we project other qualities and tendencies, and in
that way, come to believe in the forms and qualities of the Schoolmen.
And (3), this leads Descartes to a new argument against the School-
men, or, at least, a sort of therapy. Once we realize the errors involved
in our belief in form and matter, we will be cured of the temptation to
believe in them any more. Let me explain in more detail.
First, the understanding of form and quality. In the Sixth Replies
Descartes gives an account of how he used to think of the notion of
heaviness (pesanteur), as an illustration of how we confuse mental and
corporeal things in our youth. This example is not lightly chosen. It is
important to remember here that heaviness is one of the basic quali-
ties that distinguishes the Aristotelian elements from one another; by
their nature, the elements earth and water are heavy, while the elements
air and fire are light. Descartes writes:
For example, I conceived of gravity as if it were some sort of real quality, which
inhered in solid bodies; and although I called it a “quality,” thereby referring
it to the bodies in which it inhered, by adding that it was “real” I was in fact
thinking that it was a substance. In the same way clothing, regarded in itself,
is a substance, even though when referred to the man who wears it, it is a
quality. Or again, the mind, even though it is in fact a substance, can nonethe-
less be said to be a quality of the body to which it is joined. And although I
imagined gravity to be scattered throughout the whole body that is heavy, I
still did not attribute to it the extension which constitutes the nature of a
body. For the true extension of a body is such as to exclude any interpene-
tration of the parts, whereas I thought that there was the same amount of
gravity in a ten foot piece of wood as in one foot lump of gold or other metal
– indeed I thought that the whole of the gravity could be contracted to a
mathematical point. Moreover, I saw that the gravity, while remaining co-
extensive with the heavy body, could exercise all its force in any one part of
the body; for if the body were hung from a rope attached to any part of it, it
would still pull the rope down with all its force, just as if all the gravity existed
in the part actually touching the rope instead of being scattered through the
remaining parts. This is exactly the way in which I now understand the mind
to be coextensive with the body – the whole mind in the whole body and the
whole mind in any one of its parts. But what makes it especially clear that my
idea of gravity was taken largely from the idea I had of the mind is the fact
that I thought that gravity carried bodies towards the center of the earth as
if it had some knowledge of the center within itself. For this surely could not
happen without knowledge, and there can be no knowledge except in a
mind. (AT VII 441–42)
Heaviness, as conceived by the Scholastics, is thus mentalistic in a

number of ways. It is imagined to be diffused throughout a body, yet
capable of acting on a single point, just like the Cartesian soul, which
is somehow thought to be diffused throughout the human body while,
at the same time, it is especially connected to the pineal gland.16 Like
the human soul, it is extended, not as bodies are extended, but by virtue
of being able to act on body, what he calls an extension of power (exten-
sio potentiae) a few years later in a letter to Henry More, in contrast to
the extension of substance (extensio substantiae).17 And finally, the notion
of heaviness is mentalistic insofar as it appears to attribute to the heavy
body a kind of volition or intention, the intention to bear the body
toward a particular place, the center of the earth, something that could
only happen if the real quality of heaviness had some knowledge of the
center of the earth. This last observation, an observation that Descartes
himself considers most important, cuts right to the heart of the Scholas-
tic doctrine. If substantial forms and the real qualities that are supposed
to follow from them are supposed to explain the characteristic behav-
ior of bodies of various sorts, then we must be thinking of them as inten-
tional entities, agents of a rudimentary sort, things capable of forming
intentions and exercising volition, little souls joined to matter. Indeed,
Descartes thinks, body as understood by the Scholastic philosophers,
form and quality joined to matter, is just the image of the Cartesian
human being, immaterial soul united to extended body, projected out
onto the material world.18
16 See, e.g., Descartes, Passions of the Soul, §§ 30–31.

17 See Descartes to More, 15 April 1649, AT V 342. See also Descartes to Elisabeth, 28 June
1643, AT III 694.
18 This is a theme that comes up a number of times in the 1640s. When he is pressed to
explain how the human mind and its body are joined to one another and how they can
interact, as many correspondents sought to understand in the years following the expo-
sition of that doctrine in the Meditations, Descartes often compares his account with the
Once we understand forms and qualities in these mentalistic terms,
we have a clear understanding of how we came to posit them, a psy-
chological account of how we came to view the world in that way; this
is what I called the second stage in the argument. As I discussed earlier,
Descartes holds that in our youth, we attribute to bodies properties that
belong to mind, and to minds, properties that belong to bodies. In par-
ticular, we attribute redness to apples, pain to fingers. And we attribute
the tendency to be cold to water, and the tendency to be dry to earth,
the tendency to fall to rocks, and the tendency to rise to fire. It is in
attributing these mental qualities to bodies themselves that we create
forms and qualities. Once forms and qualities are assimilated to mental
substances, it is possible to see their attribution to bodies as the same
mistake that we make when we attribute pain to the finger that hurts
or red to the apple.
And with this, we arrive at the third stage of the argument, the rejec-
tion of forms and qualities. The implication here is that once we come
to maturity (at least Descartes’ conception of what maturity is), we will
recognize the distinction between the mental and the corporeal, see
our mistake, and reject the forms and qualities that we mistakenly
attribute to bodies, just as we reject the attribution of color and pain to
bodies.
This is the argument that Descartes presents at the end of the Sixth
Replies. But does he really make a compelling case for rejecting forms
and qualities?
Descartes’ argument shows that if forms and qualities exist, then they
must be regarded as substances of a sort, mental substances. The
Schoolman might be brought to agree with that. But is that sufficient
to show the Scholastic philosopher that he is wrong? The problem with
the argument becomes evident when we reflect on what it entails for
human beings and their bodies. If extension is the nature of body, then
human bodies cannot think, strictly speaking, as Descartes insisted. (See,
e.g., AT VII 444.) But he does not conclude from that that people don’t
Scholastic account of form, quality, and matter. See, e.g., Descartes to Hyperaspistes,
August 1641, AT III 424; Descartes to Elisabeth, 21 May 1643, AT III 667–68; Descartes
to Clerselier, 12 January 1646, AT IXA 213; Descartes to Arnauld, 29 July 1648, AT V
222–23. It is not clear that this view of form and matter corresponds to any Scholastic
account in particular. But this, in a way, is not the right question to ask. Descartes’ char-
acterization of the Scholastic view here should be regarded as polemical rather than
exegetical, a kind of rational reconstruction (and probably something of a caricature) that
precedes a rational rejection of the foundations of Scholastic physics.
think, or that everything in the human body is explicable in purely
mechanical terms. Rather, he concludes that human beings have minds,
immaterial souls distinct from their bodies, which think and, under
appropriate circumstances, guide the behavior of the unthinking body.
But, we might ask, why can’t the Scholastic argue in a parallel way to
his position? Descartes’ argument shows that thought is not in bodies
but in the soul. This shows that a body, strictly speaking, an extended
thing, cannot contain knowledge of the center of the earth, nor can
it will itself to move in that direction. But why can’t we infer from that
that heavy bodies must have tiny souls, souls distinct from their
bodies, in order to think about the place they would rather be and will
the bodies to which they are attached in the appropriate direction? And
so, a Scholastic might respond to Descartes’ argument, the claim that
the essence of body is extension no more establishes the mechanical
explicability of the behavior of a falling stone than it establishes the
mechanical explicability of the behavior of the human being who
dropped it.
To put it another way, from the point of view of the Scholastic oppo-
nent, Descartes can show, perhaps, that if hylemorphism is true, it
involves attributing tiny immaterial souls to extended bodies. But if the
argument is to refute the doctrine of hylemorphism, Descartes must
show why there are not or cannot be such tiny souls in nature, why
human bodies are to be treated so differently from their inanimate
cousins, why outside of humans there is no thought, in body or in mind.
Descartes might well have an answer to that; in essence, this is the
problem he confronts when he is attempting to argue that there are no
souls in animals, a question into which I don’t want to enter right now.
But it is important here to see that to refute the Scholastic account of
body, it is necessary to draw a real distinction not only between mind
and body, but between human bodies, which have minds, and other
bodies in nature, which don’t. And this is something that goes far
beyond the account Descartes gives in the Sixth Replies.
Forms and Qualities in the Sixth Replies:

Further Considerations
In the Sixth Replies Descartes presents his first public attack on the
Scholastic ontology of form and matter, and for the first time, he pre-
sents it in terms of his own ontology of mind and body. Why there? Why
does Descartes choose to answer a question he was not even asked, and
turn the discussion of mind and body toward the highly controversial
question of forms and qualities?
Part of the answer may be that the Scholastic account of body is, in
a way, implicated in the very questions that he is asked. As I pointed
out earlier, one plausible reading of the objection that elicits this
response involves an implicit appeal to a Scholastic view of body. If my
interpretation is correct, one objection to Descartes’ account of mind
and body is the counterclaim that body is, by definition, matter and
form, and that when the body in question is a living human body, and
the form its soul, then the body can, indeed, think. On that reading,
the challenge to Descartes to show that a body can’t think is precisely a
challenge to show that this Scholastic analysis of body is incorrect. If
that is the question, then Descartes’ answer is that the soul is a sub-
stance separate from the body, and when we think of the mind or soul
as a constituent of body, part of what makes our body the body it is,
then we are confusing mental with material. If that is how Descartes
understood the objection, then introducing the notions of form and
quality into his answer would be quite natural, only making explicit
what was already implicit in the question. Understood in this way, it is
not Descartes who introduces form and quality into the discussion, but
his objectors.
However, it is not clear that Descartes understood these objections
in this way. And even if he did, he no doubt also had the more mate-
rialistic objections of the earlier passages of the Sixth Objections in mind.
These other objectors suggest a more materialistic point of view, that
thought is simply a kind of motion. This, too, represents a confusion
of the mental and the material insofar as thought, which pertains exclu-
sively to the mental, can in no way be identified with motion, which
belongs exclusively to the material. Understood in this way, the intro-
duction of the question of form and quality into Descartes’ discussion
may have a sort of rhetorical or polemical function, perhaps. Read in
this way, Descartes is claiming that the materialist identification of
thought and motion rests on exactly the same confusion that gives rise
to a view of the human being generally thought to be diametrically
opposed to it, the view taught in the Schools. One can, perhaps, read
Descartes’ appeal to forms and qualities here as making the point
that the two accounts of human beings, so apparently different, are at
root instances of the same mistake. (Here we might see Descartes as
addressing the Epicureanism of Pierre Gassendi as well, trying to show
that despite his anti-Aristotelian pretensions, Gassendi’s views are no
better than those of the Schools.)19
I think that there is some truth in both of these explanations. But I
would also like to call attention to something else at work behind the
scenes in the Sixth Replies, and offer a more historical explanation for
Descartes’ concern with forms and qualities at this time.
It is important to remember that at the very time that Descartes is com-
posing the Replies to the Objections, he is also beginning work on his Prin-
ciples of Philosophy, which was to appear a few years later, in 1644. The
objections to the Meditations first start coming in December 1640, and
continue through the early part of 1641. But the project of the Princi-
ples first takes shape in the autumn of 1640 as well. In September 1640
Descartes wrote to Mersenne asking him to suggest some Scholastic text-
books he might peruse, presumably to prepare himself for the remarks
on the Meditations he expected to receive from the Schoolmen, remarks
that he intended to answer in preparation for the publication of the work
the following year. By November 11 he had received Mersenne’s sug-
gestions, and reports having purchased the Summa philosophica of Father
Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, which he judged to be “the best book which
has ever been done on that subject” (AT III 232). It is in this same letter
that he first announces the publication of his system:
I would willingly answer your question about the flame of a candle and similar
things but I see that I can never really satisfy you on this until you have
seen all the principles of my philosophy. So I must tell you that I have resolved
to write them before leaving this country, and to publish them perhaps
within a year. My plan is to write a series of theses which will constitute a com-
plete textbook of my philosophy. I will not waste any words, but simply put
down all my conclusions with the true premises from which I derive them. I
think I could do this without many words. In the same volume I plan to have
printed a textbook of traditional philosophy, perhaps Father Eustachius’s,
with notes by me at the end of each proposition. In the notes I will add the
different opinions of others, and what one should think of them all, and
perhaps at the end I will make a comparison between the two philosophies.
(AT III 232–33; see also AT III 259–60 and a probable reference at AT
III 270)
19 One might include Hobbes here, too. But in 1641 Hobbes’ materialism would not have
been nearly so well known to Descartes as Gassendi’s Epicureanism. At that point,
Gassendi, friend of Mersenne and a well known figure, would have been the obvious
materialist opponent for Descartes to attack.
Given Descartes’ past practices, this passage is quite remarkable. After
years of caution, Descartes announces that he will discuss, explicitly and
in public, his differences with the philosophy of the Schools.
Descartes soon gave up the plan to write a commentary on
Eustachius; Eustachius died the very next month, in December 1640,
and Descartes thought it inappropriate to attack him after his death.
But by the end of December 1640, Descartes was at work on Part I of
his new book at the very same time he was answering the objections
made to the Meditations. And even though he had abandoned the idea
of an explicit response to Eustachius, there is every reason to believe
that Descartes continued to think of his Principles as an answer to the
philosophy of the Schools for some time thereafter, at least until the
end of 1641.20 It is in this context that I think Descartes first came up
with the idea that the Scholastic theory of form and quality rests on the
confusion of mind and body, and the projection of the Cartesian soul
onto nature as a whole. And so when in early 1641 Mersenne and his
friends queried him about the distinction between mind and body, it
is not surprising that his thoughts would turn to substantial forms
and real qualities; though forms and qualities may not have been on
Mersenne’s mind, they were very much on Descartes’ at that moment,
and very much linked to the question of mind and body.
In the end, following his own practice in the Discourse and Essays,
Descartes seems to have decided not to attack his Scholastic opponents
so directly. Perhaps Descartes’ instinctive caution returned to him, or
perhaps his celebrated problems with Voëtius reminded him of the
dangers of attacking the “vulgar philosophy,” as he called it from time
to time. Although Part I of the Principles as it comes down to us con-
tains much of the psychology of Aristotelianism that we find in the Sixth
Replies (see particularly Principles I 71ff.) it contains nothing of the dis-
cussion of forms and qualities; indeed, nowhere in the book Descartes
published in 1644 is there the direct attack on forms and qualities that
he seems to have envisioned when he first planned the Principles in
December 1640. (See, though, Principles IV 200ff.) But in the Sixth
Replies we have, perhaps, the first draft of the doctrine of the Principia,
directed explicitly against its intended target, the forms and qualities
of the Schoolmen.
20 It is not until December of 1641 that there is any indication that Descartes has given up
the idea of explicitly attacking Scholastic philosophy. See Descartes to Mersenne, 22
December 1641, AT III 470.
PART IV
LARGER VISIONS
13
DESCARTES, OR THE CULTIVATION

OF THE INTELLECT
René Descartes (1596–1650) aimed to sweep away the past, and start
philosophy anew. Much of what made Descartes important for his con-
temporaries, and for us as well, concerns the contents of his philoso-
phy. Descartes’ philosophy was directed squarely against the
Aristotelian philosophy taught in the Schools of his day. For the Aris-
totelians, all cognition begins in sensation: Everything in the intellect
comes first through the senses. Descartes’ philosophy, on the other
hand, emphasizes the priority of reason over the senses. Furthermore,
Descartes substitutes a purely mechanical world of geometric bodies
governed by laws of motion for an almost animistic world of Aristotelian
substances with innate tendencies to different kinds of behavior. These
original doctrines, together with his work in metaphysics, optics, math-
ematics, the theory of the passions, among other areas, made Descartes
a central figure in his age.1
But in this essay I would like to concentrate on something different.
Descartes opposed himself not only to the content of the philosophy of
the Schools, but to their very conception of what knowledge is and how
it is to be transmitted. Connected with the new Cartesian philosophy is
a genuine philosophy of education, a conception of the aims and goals
of education very different from the one that dominated the School
where Descartes himself had been educated as a youth. My project in
this essay is to tease out some aspects of this philosophy.
1 This is not the place to present a full picture of Descartes’ philosophical and scientific
accomplishments. For a recent overview of Descartes’ thought, see John Cottingham, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992).
277
278 larger visions
Rejecting Authority
Let us begin with one of Descartes’ most important texts, the Discourse
on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in
the Sciences, published in 1637 as the introduction to three scientific
texts, the Geometry, the Dioptrics, and the Meteors. The Discourse is pre-
sented as the autobiography of the author, outlining the path he took
to the discoveries that he outlines later in the Discourse (Parts IV and
V), and selections of which he gives in the three treatises with which it
appeared. But though presented as an autobiography, the Discourse is a
kind of moral tale, “a history or, if you prefer, a fable” as Descartes puts
it [AT VI 4 (CSM I 112)].2 Let us leave aside the question of historical
veracity and simply call the protagonist of the Discourse “RD.”
Part I of the Discourse is largely concerned with RD’s adventures in
school; it gives an interesting account of what school might have been
like for the young Descartes. (Descartes attended the Jesuit college of
La Flèche.) The account begins:
From my childhood I have been nourished upon letters, and because I was
persuaded that by their means one could acquire a clear and certain knowl-
edge of all that is useful in life, I was extremely eager to learn them. [AT VI
4 (CSM I 112–13)]
The young RD was thus eager for learning, eager for school. The school
he was sent to was “one of the most famous schools in Europe, where
I thought there must be learned men if they existed anywhere on earth”
[AT VI 5 (CSM I 113)]. Furthermore, he thought himself among the
best of the students there, and did not doubt that “the age in which we
live [is] as flourishing, and as rich in good minds, as any before it”
(Ibid.). But yet, all he found was disappointment:
But as soon as I had completed the course of study at the end of which one
is normally admitted to the ranks of the learned, I completely changed my
opinion. For I found myself beset by so many doubts and errors that I came
to think I had gained nothing from my attempts to become educated but
increasing recognition of my ignorance. [AT VI 4 (CSM I 113)]
Because of his dissatisfactions with the learning of the Schools, RD

decided to leave it all behind and travel the world:
2 References to Descartes’ writings will generally be given in the text of the essay, with the
original language edition followed by the translation, in parentheses.
the cultivation of the intellect 279
That is why, as soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my
teachers, I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no
knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great
book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling. [AT VI 9
(CSM I 115)]
Travel for RD ultimately led to contemplation; having put to one side

what he learned in school, RD made the following resolution:
But after I had spent some years pursuing these studies in the book of the
world and trying to gain some experience, I resolved one day to undertake
studies within myself too and to use all the powers of my mind in choosing
the paths I should follow. [AT VI 10 (CSM I 116)]
This is the project that Descartes then represents in the Meditations,

published four years later in 1641. Descartes begins the first of the
Meditations with the following observation:
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had
accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the
whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was
necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely
and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything
at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. [AT VII 17
(CSM II 12)]
As with the Discourse, the Meditations begins in rejection. The Meditator,

to give the protagonist of the Meditations a name, begins by rejecting all
former beliefs, doubting everything that can be called into doubt, from
the most obvious deliverances of the senses to the simplest truths of
arithmetic and geometry. The First Meditation ends with the hypothe-
sis of the evil genius, “a malicious demon of the utmost power and
cunning [who] has employed all his energies in order to deceive me”
[AT VII 22 (CSM II 15)]. By reflecting on this hypothesis, supposing it
to be true, I can keep all my former beliefs and prejudices at bay, and
maintain myself in this state of epistemic detachment. Unlike RD of the
Discourse, who simply sets his former beliefs to one side, the Meditator
uses the strongest arguments possible, arguments derived from the
skeptical tradition, to cleanse the mind of all former belief.
In this way, the rejection of the past, of tradition, of the authority of
teachers seems central to the Cartesian philosophy. There is rejection
at a number of different levels. First, there is the rejection of the senses.
Descartes begins Meditation I with an explicit discussion of the senses,
280 larger visions
how they can and do deceive us, both while awake and while we are
asleep and dreaming. Every schoolboy in Descartes’ day was drilled in
the Aristotelian dictum that “everything in the intellect comes first
through the senses.” While the senses return in Meditation VI, they
never regain the full authority that they appear to have had before
beginning the process of meditation; Descartes’ final judgment is that
they cannot tell us the way things really are, nor are they even com-
pletely reliable in the practical situations for which they were given to
us. The point of the opening of the Meditations, then, is at least in part
to lead the mind away from its dependence on the senses.3
But the rejection is more profound than that. The skeptical arguments
in Meditation I attack not only the senses, but, more generally, every-
thing which the Meditator had learned in the past. At the conclusion of
the series of arguments, the Meditator admits that “there is not one of
my former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised” [AT
VII 21 (CSM I 14–15)]. Here the arguments of Meditation I join the
comments Descartes made on his own education in the Discourse on the
Method. Descartes lived in a learned intellectual culture, one that empha-
sized the importance of tradition and authority. St. Thomas’s Summa the-
ologica, for example, still authoritative in the Jesuit college of La Flèche
where Descartes studied from about 1606 to 1615 or so, is full of rea-
soned arguments. But it is also grounded in the authority of Aristotle and
the Church Fathers, whose opinions are constantly cited and discussed.
Many of the other books to which Descartes would have been exposed
at school were commentaries on Aristotle’s texts, which regularly quoted
and discussed the philosophers of the past, both ancient and medieval,
contrasting their opinions, weighing their authority.4 In the Renaissance,
there were various reactions against the intellectual tradition of the
Schools, a diverse movement that went under the general name of
Humanism. Descartes would have been exposed to Humanist trends in
the Jesuit academy, along with the more orthodox Scholasticism that was
at the core of the curriculum there. But Humanism, too, was a learned
tradition, grounded in new scholarship concerning the texts of Greek
3 For an excellent treatment of Meditation I that emphasizes the rejection of the senses, see
Harry Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen (Indianapolis, IN, Bobbs-Merrill, 1970),
esp. chapters 1–9.
4 On the place of Aristotle and Aristotelianism in the School curriculum in this period, see
L. W. B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cul-
tural History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987) and Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and
the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1983).
and Roman antiquity, seeking to introduce into the canon new texts, lit-
erary and philosophical. Like Scholasticism, Humanism was grounded
in a respect for the past. To be educated, then, in the early seventeenth
century, was to know the wisdom of the past, to understand the differ-
ent intellectual traditions.5
It is in this context that we must read Part I of the Discourse and the
opening of the Meditations. Descartes seems to be rejecting an entire
intellectual tradition, Scholasticism and Humanism, the idea that we
must begin with the wisdom of the past, as well as the authority of those
who teach the tradition. What Descartes seems to be telling his con-
temporaries (and us as well) is that the tradition and those who teach
it are not relevant to real knowledge. It is significant here that an admir-
ing disciple reports that Descartes gave all his books away when he left
La Flèche.6 While this is probably not true, it says something about the
way in which some of Descartes’ contemporaries read him. If there is a
philosophy of education in Descartes this would seem to be it: True
education must be done by the individual alone, outside of history,
outside of tradition, outside of school.
But all this is rather negative; it tells us something about what Carte-
sian pedagogy is not, but it tells us little if anything about what it is, what
Descartes thinks the schools and their students should be doing. It is
that to which we must turn.
Intuition, Deduction, and Knowledge

Descartes’ philosophy begins with a rejection of the past. But the first
positive step is the affirmation of the self. In the Discourse, after reject-
ing the learning of the Schools, RD takes off, alone, to experience the
world, ultimately to reject that too, and to turn to himself. In the Med-
itations, after the skeptical arguments of Meditation I, the Meditator
begins the reconstruction of the world with the famous cogito argument,
“I think therefore I exist,” building the world out of the self. For
Descartes, the rejection of tradition and authority goes hand in hand
with the view that knowledge, properly so-called, must be grounded in
the individual and in the individual alone.
This view can be traced back to one of Descartes’ earliest surviving
5 For a recent survey of the Humanist tradition, see Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996).
6 The report is contained in the notes of Frans van Schooten the elder, given in AT X 646.
282 larger visions
writings, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Regulae ad directionem
ingenii). This work is a treatise on the method of finding truth, which
Descartes probably wrote between 1620 and 1628, abandoning it
incomplete approximately ten years before he published his Discourse,
though it is summarized in Part II of that work. The main focus of
the book is the development of a procedure for investigation which,
Descartes claimed, will lead us to genuine knowledge. As a preliminary
to this investigation, Descartes begins with an account of the nature of
knowledge, the goal of this inquiry. Rule 3 reads:
Concerning objects proposed for study, we ought to investigate what we can
clearly and evidently intuit or deduce with certainty, and not what other
people have thought or what we ourselves conjecture. For knowledge can be
attained in no other way. [AT X 366 (CSM I 13)]
Intuition is defined as follows:

By “intuition” I do not mean the fluctuating testimony of the senses or the
deceptive judgment of the imagination as it botches things together, but the
conception of a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that
there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding. Alterna-
tively, and this comes to the same thing, intuition is the indubitable concep-
tion of a clear and attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of
reason. [AT X 368 (CSM I 14)]
Intuition is, for Descartes, supplemented by deduction. By deduction

Descartes means “the inference of something as following necessarily
from some other propositions which are known with certainty” [AT XI
369 (CSM I 15)]. Strictly speaking, deduction is not entirely separate
from intuition. As Descartes writes, “the self-evidence and certainty of
intuition is required not only for apprehending single propositions, but
also for any train of reasoning whatever” [AT XI 369 (CSM I 14–15)].
In this way, a deduction is just a train of intuitions. Were our memory
better, we could dispense with deductive reasoning altogether, and
know by intuition alone. In this way it is fair to say that for Descartes,
knowledge, strictly speaking, is grounded in intuition, the immediate
operation of this faculty.
Descartes’ view is that we are all blessed with an innate ability to see
certain truths. The opening passage of the Discourse reads:
Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks
himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please
in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this
it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken . . . [T]he power of judging well and
of distinguishing the true from the false – which is what we properly call
“good sense” or “reason” – is naturally equal in all men. [AT VI 1–2
(CSM I 111)]
There is a touch of sarcasm in this, to be sure. But, at the same time,

it is a good summary of one of Descartes’ basic commitments: we all
have reason, a faculty given to us by God for distinguishing true from
false. This is what he means when he talks of intuition in the Rules.
As Descartes conceives them, intuition and deduction are grounded
in the experiences individuals have. Knowledge, for Descartes, does not
reside in books or in authorities; for an individual to have genuine
knowledge, he or she must actually have the experience that counts as
an intuitive grasp of the truth of a proposition or the validity of an infer-
ence from one proposition to another. In this way, learning cannot be
a spectator sport, a passive absorption of what the teacher has to tell.
The student who does not have the actual experience itself has no
knowledge, properly speaking. Descartes wrote in the Rules:
And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we
shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgment
on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem
to have learnt would not be science but history. [AT X 367 (CSM I 113)]
True knowledge thus can come neither from teacher nor from tradi-
tion. This has obvious consequences for Descartes’ conception of
education. True education, then, must involve not the transfer of infor-
mation, doctrine, or dogma, but simply the cultivation of the
intellect.
The Cultivation of the Intellect

The Rules for the Direction of the Mind is, in a very general sense, meant
as a pedagogical work intended to teach us a way to use our native intel-
ligence (the literal translation of ingenium in the Latin title of the work)
as well as we can. As such it includes mental exercises to help prepare
the reader to use the method for finding truth that Descartes there out-
lines. The idea of the cultivation of the intellect is basic to this regimen.
In Rule 9, for example, Descartes suggests the following exercise:
We must concentrate our mind’s eye totally upon the most insignificant and
easiest of matters, and dwell on them long enough to acquire the habit of
intuiting the truth distinctly and clearly. [AT X 400 (CSM I 33)]
284 larger visions
He goes on to say later in the body of the Rule:
Everyone ought therefore to acquire the habit of encompassing in his

thought at one time facts which are very simple and very few in number – so
much so that he never thinks he knows something unless he intuits it just as
distinctly as any of the things he knows most distinctly of all. Some people of
course are born with a much greater aptitude for this sort of insight than
others; but our minds can become much better equipped for it through
method and practice. [AT X 401–2 (CSM I 34)]
This idea, that we need to practice having intuitions and making deduc-
tions before beginning the process of following Descartes’ method and
seeking knowledge in earnest, appears again in the Discourse, in only
slightly different form. There the cultivation of the intellect is not a
preparation for using the method. Rather, Descartes recommends in the
voice of RD that we accustom our minds to having intuitions and
making deductions by practicing the method itself in the domain of
mathematics, where intuitions and deductions seem easier to come by.
He writes:
Reflecting, too, that of all those who have hitherto sought after truth in the
sciences, mathematicians alone have been able to find any demonstrations –
that is to say, certain and evident reasonings – I had no doubt that I should
begin with the very things that they studied. From this, however, the only
advantage I hoped to gain was to accustom my mind to nourish itself on
truths and not to be satisfied with bad reasoning. [AT VI 19 (CSM I 120)]
It is, thus, by practicing this method that RD trained his intellect to

grasp truth through intuition and deduction. He writes, again in the
Discourse:
But what pleased me most about this method was that by following it I was
sure in every case to use my reason, if not perfectly, at least as well as was in
my power. Moreover, as I practised the method I felt my mind gradually
become accustomed to conceiving its objects more clearly and distinctly. [AT
VI 21 (CSM I 121)]7
7 When Descartes here talks about mathematics as an appropriate subject for cultivating the
intellect, he doesn’t mean Euclidean geometry, the kind of mathematics taught in the
Schools. RD was no happier with the mathematics taught in School than he was with any
other subjects. See AT VI 17–18 (CSM 119–20). The kind of mathematics Descartes has in
mind here is his own analytic geometry. For a discussion of Descartes’ mathematics, see
Stephen Gaukroger, “The nature of abstract reasoning: Philosophical aspects of Descartes’
work in algebra,” in Cottingham, ed., Cambridge Companion to Descartes.
A view very similar to that of the Discourse and the Rules is also found in
one of Descartes’ latest and most self-consciously pedagogical texts. In
the 1640s, after having published the Discourse and the Meditations,
Descartes began to ruminate about how to get his own philosophy into
circulation in the Schools, and how to get it to replace Aristotle as the
new master. It is with this in mind that he undertook to write a book, the
Principles of Philosophy, published in Latin in 1644 and in French in 1647.8
While it is not exactly like any textbook in philosophy then in use, it is a
more systematic presentation of his philosophy than is found elsewhere
in the corpus. For the French translation, Descartes composed a preface
that addresses explicitly the question of how one ought to learn philos-
ophy. The idea of the method as a kind of mental exercise for training
the intellect is very prominent there as well. After providing for ourselves
a code of behavior to govern our actions while we are rebuilding our
beliefs, Descartes recommends that we study logic:
I do not mean the logic of the Schools, for this is strictly speaking nothing
but a dialectic which teaches ways of expounding to others what one already
knows or even of holding forth without judgment about things that one does
not know. Such logic corrupts good sense rather than increasing it. I mean
instead the kind of logic which teaches us to direct our reason with a view to
discovering the truths of which we are ignorant. Since this depends to a great
extent on practice, it is good for the student to work for a long time at prac-
ticing the rules on very easy and simple questions like those of mathematics.
Then, when he has acquired some skill in finding the truth one these
questions, he should begin to tackle true philosophy in earnest. [AT IXB 13
(CSM I 186)]
The true logic, he tells us later in the preface, is just the doctrine of
method as taught in Part II of his Discourse, itself a summary of the
method as taught in the Rules [see AT IXB 15 (CSM I 186)]. In this
preface to the Principles, as in the Rules and the Discourse, Descartes
suggests that we begin by cultivating reason, practicing finding truth.
In recommending the cultivation of the intellect through practice in
intuition and deduction, Descartes set himself squarely against two
features of the Scholastic educational regimen that were intended to
exercise the intellect: the study of formal logic and the practice of dis-
putation.
8 On the conception of the Principles as a textbook for the classroom, see, e.g., Descartes to
Mersenne, 31 December 1640, AT III 276 (CSMK 167).
286 larger visions
A course on logic, based on Aristotle’s Organon, digested into sim-
plified form and rules of thumb by many generations of pedagogues,
was a central part of the arts curriculum (i.e., the course of studies pre-
liminary to advanced work in law, medicine, or theology) in every
school in Europe in the early seventeenth century.9 As taught in the
Schools, Aristotelian logic was very formal and abstract. Learning logic
was a matter of memorizing numerous rules to enable the student to
recognize valid and invalid syllogisms.
While on occasion Descartes felt that he had to mute his public rejec-
tion of formal logic, just as he had to tone down his opposition to other
aspects of Scholastic doctrine and practice,10 it is clear that Descartes
thought little of formal logic as a part of the education of the young.
First of all, Descartes argues, the kind of logic taught in the Schools is
of extremely limited utility. Unlike his method, which Descartes some-
times refers to as logic, the Aristotelian logic of the schools cannot help
us find new truths, but only to arrange truths that we have already dis-
covered by some other means. He writes in the Rules:
On the basis of their method, dialecticians are unable to formulate a syllo-
gism with a true conclusion unless they are already in possession of the sub-
stance of the conclusion, i.e., unless they have previous knowledge of the very
truth deduced in the syllogism. It is obvious therefore that they themselves
can learn nothing new from such forms of reasoning, and hence that ordi-
nary dialectic is of no use whatever to those who wish to investigate the truth
of things. Its sole advantage is that it sometimes enables us to explain to
others arguments which are already known. [AT X 406 (CSM I 36–37); cf.
AT VI 17 (CSM I 119); AT IXB 13 (CSM I 186)]
Furthermore, Descartes notes, the rules taught in logic are confusing

and may lead the student astray. And so, he remarks in the Discourse:
And although logic does contain many excellent and true precepts, these are
mixed up with so many others which are harmful or superfluous that it is
9 See Brockliss, French Higher Education, pp. 194–205 for the teaching of logic in France.
10 See, e.g., Descartes’ answers to the Jesuit Father Bourdin’s Seventh Objections to the Medi-
tations, AT VII 522, 544 (CSM II 355, 371). Descartes at that moment was particularly
keen to get the Jesuits, his old teachers, on his side, and bent over backwards not to offend
them. This was not an isolated incident. In writing to his then disciple Henricus Regius
in January 1642, Descartes explained his general policy of tempering his views in delicate
situations so as not to cause unnecessary hostility; see AT III 491–92 (CSMK 205). Regius
had recently gotten in some trouble at the Protestant University of Utrecht for present-
ing his Cartesian views with too much boldness, and Descartes was trying to tell him how
to avoid future troubles of this kind.
almost as difficult to distinguish them as it is to carve a Diana or a Minerva
from an unhewn block of marble. [AT VI 17 (CSM I 119)]
And so, Descartes suggests in his dialogue, The Search after Truth, we
should set formal logic aside, and cultivate the light of reason directly:
When this light operates on its own, it is less liable to go wrong than when it
anxiously strives to follow the numerous different rules, the inventions of
human ingenuity and idleness, which serve more to corrupt it than render
it more perfect. [AT X 521 (CSM II 415); cf. AT X 439–40 (CSM I 57)]
The practice of disputation was also a central element of Scholastic edu-

cation in the early seventeenth century. According to the Jesuit Ratio
studiorum, or “Order of study,” an overarching curriculum that gov-
erned Jesuit education at the time that Descartes attended La Flèche,
students were to participate regularly in these exercises, in which they
were expected to argue extemporaneously for and against theses that
were posed.11
Again, as with his criticism of Scholastic logic, Descartes sometimes
mutes his criticisms of the practice. In the Rules, for example, he writes:
Yet I do not wish on that account to condemn that method of philosophiz-
ing which others have hitherto devised, nor those weapons of the School-
men, probable syllogisms, which are just made for controversies. For these
exercise the minds of the young, stimulating them with a certain rivalry; and
it is much better that their minds should be informed with opinions of that
sort – even though they are evidently uncertain, being controversial among
the learned – than that they should be left entirely to their own devices.
[AT X 363–64 (CSM I 11)]
But even in his apparent praise, there are criticisms of the practice. First
of all, insofar as the aim of the disputation is to convince the listener
of the truth of one side of the disagreement, the emphasis is generally
not on certainty, but on the probable syllogisms used in rhetoric, syllo-
gisms whose premises are not necessarily certain, but only plausible to
the intended audience. This, Descartes argues in the Discourse, if any-
thing only undermines the student’s ability to discern the truth, unlike
the kind of cultivation of the intellect that he proposes in its place.
He writes:
11 For the rules concerning disputations in the Ratio studiorum of 1599, which governed La
Flèche while Descartes was studying there, see Edward A. Fitzpatrick, ed., St Ignatius and
the Ratio Studiorum (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1933), pp. 144ff.
288 larger visions
Nor have I ever observed that any previously unknown truth has been dis-
covered by means of the disputations practiced in the Schools. For so long
as each side strives for victory, more effort is put into establishing plausibil-
ity than in weighing reasons for and against; and those who have long been
good advocates do not necessarily go on to make better judges. [AT VI 69
(CSM I 146)]
Furthermore, the student who considers argument a competitive sport

will actually resist the light of reason if it appears to oppose a position
he is obligated to defend. Descartes writes in the Second Replies:
This is why I wrote “Meditations” rather than “Disputations.” . . . In so doing
I wanted to make it clear that I would have nothing to do with anyone who
was not willing to join me in meditating and giving the subject attentive con-
sideration. For the very fact that someone braces himself to attack the truth
makes him less suited to perceive it, since he will be withdrawing his consid-
eration from the convincing arguments which support the truth in order to
find counterarguments against it. [AT VII 157 (CSM II 112)]
Finally, in contrast to his regimen, which leads to certainty, and thus to

agreement, the practice of disputation leads only to conflict. Writing in
the preface to the French Principles, Descartes notes:
The truths contained in these principles, because they are very clear and very
certain, will eliminate all ground for dispute, and so will dispose people’s
minds to gentleness and harmony. This is the opposite result to that pro-
duced by the debates in the Schools, which – slowly and without their notic-
ing it – make the participants more argumentative and opinionated, and
hence are perhaps the major cause of the heresies and disagreements which
now plague the world. [AT IXB 18 (CSM I 188)]
In an era very much aware of the religious wars that plagued France in
the late sixteenth century and still plagued Europe during Descartes’
lifetime, this was a powerful consideration. Descartes’ hope was that in
a world in which every student was taught to cultivate reason and seek
only certainty, disagreement would end and harmony would reign.
The Order of Reasons: Starting on a Firm Foundation

Cartesian pedagogy begins with the cultivation of the intellect, exercises
designed to practice finding truth, accustoming the mind to settling for
nothing less than the certainty of intuition and deduction. But after
these exercises, one must “begin to tackle true philosophy in earnest,”
as Descartes advises the reader in the preface to the French Principles
[AT IXB 14 (CSM I 186)]. At this point the Cartesian pedagogy follows
the Cartesian philosophy. We begin with the self, with the cogito argu-
ment establishing the existence of a thinking thing (Meditation II).
From the self flows everything else. From the idea of God found in the
self Descartes proves the existence of God external to the mind (Med-
itation III). From the existence of God, His benevolence, and certain
features of the mind, Descartes is then able to argue that everything
that he clearly and distinctly perceives is true (Meditation IV). On this
he is able to ground his arguments for the real distinction between
mind and body, and his proof of the existence of a real world of bodies,
conceived without color or taste, heat or cold, a world of geometrical
objects made real (Meditations V and VI). And with this his physics is
off and running, leading him from the general laws of nature, through
a cosmology to a biology, and eventually, he hoped, to an account of
the human being sufficient to ground both medicine and an account
of the passions, which, in turn, is to ground a truly scientific moral
theory. In this way he offers a systematic mechanist alternative to the
philosophy of Aristotle and the Schools.
The full details of this story go far beyond the bounds of this essay,
and constitute an account of the Cartesian philosophy itself. But there
is one aspect of this story that is very important to note in this con-
nection. Descartes’ philosophy is clearly organized in a hierarchical
manner. As he writes in the preface to the French Principles,
The whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk
is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other
sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine,
mechanics, and morals. [AT IXB 14 (CSM I 186)]
This hierarchy has an obvious epistemological consequence for

Descartes. If we are to have real knowledge, then we must study these
sciences in the proper order, beginning with the metaphysical founda-
tions in the self and God, progressing then to body and physics, before
ending with the practical sciences. In an important letter to his friend
Marin Mersenne, Descartes wrote the following explanation of his pro-
cedure in the Meditations:
It should be noted that throughout the work the order I follow is not the
order of the subject matter, but the order of the reasoning. This means that
I do not attempt to say in a single place everything relevant to a given subject,
because it would be impossible for me to provide proper proofs, since my
supporting reasons would have to be drawn in some cases from considerably
290 larger visions
more distant sources than in others. Instead, I reason in an orderly way from
what is easier to what is harder, making what deductions I can, now on one
subject, now on another. This is the right way, in my opinion, to find and
explain the truth. The order of the subject matter is good only for those
whose reasoning is disjointed, and who can say as much about one difficulty
as about another. [AT III 266–7 (CSMK 163), cf. AT VII 155 (CSM II 110)]
This attitude is central to Descartes’ assessment of the science of Galileo

(1564–1642), a rough contemporary who, like him, opposed the
philosophy of Aristotle and the Schools. He writes, again in a letter
to Mersenne:
Generally speaking, I find he philosophizes much more ably than is usual, in

that, so far as he can, he abandons the errors of the Schools and tries to use
mathematical methods in the investigation of physical questions. On that
score, I am completely at one with him, for I hold that there is no other way
to discover the truth. But he continually disgresses, and he does not take time
to explain matters fully. This, in my view, is a mistake: it shows that he has
not investigated matters in an orderly way, and has merely sought explana-
tions for some particular effects, without going into the primary causes in
nature; hence his building lacks a foundation. [AT II 380 (CSMK 124)]
Approaching the study of nature in this way, Descartes thinks, takes us

to new heights. In the preface to the French Principles, Descartes notes
five levels of wisdom. The first includes self-evident truths “so clear in
themselves that they can be acquired without meditation”; the second
includes what we learn from the senses; the third involves what we learn
by talking with others, and the fourth, what we learn by reading books
“written by people who are capable of instructing us well.” To these
Descartes adds a fifth degree, which, he modestly claims, he is the first
to attain:
This consists in the search for the first causes and the true principles which
enable us to deduce the reasons for everything we are capable of knowing.
. . . I am not sure, however, that there has been anyone up till now who has
succeeded in this project. [AT IXB 5 (CSM I 181)]
In emphasizing the proper order of instruction, Descartes perhaps

thought of himself as departing from his teachers. One suspects that in
the practical world of the classroom, where one is told to do ethics one
year, physics another, teachers were not nearly so careful about follow-
ing the order of reasoning as Descartes would have liked to have been.
But in a deeper sense, his concern with order and the interconnected-
ness of knowledge is connected with deeper strands in Scholastic
thought. Scholastic pedagogues worried considerably over the question
of the order of the curriculum, what should be taught before what, and
why. Furthermore, the more general point, that true knowledge is
grounded in knowledge of first causes, is something that teachers would
have acknowledged, though they would have disagreed about the start-
ing place of knowledge. In this way, perhaps, the insistence on starting
with the most basic, and proceeding in order down from there would
not have been such a radical idea.12
Indeed, on this score, the true radicals may have been those like
Galileo and, later, Newton, who relaxed the Cartesian (and Aristotelian)
insistence on starting with first principles and ultimate causes, and
worked in the other direction, from phenomena observed, back
towards the first causes. Galileo, for example, started with observations
of balls falling down inclined planes and bobbing at the end of pendula,
and arrived at mathematical accounts of the motion of heavy bodies.
Newton (1642–1727), working later in the century, famously claimed
to “deduce causes from effects,” and in this way claimed to discover the
theory of universal gravitation. Neither worried about the basic princi-
ples and ultimate causes with which Descartes insisted on beginning.
Ironically enough, the freedom that came from this move may have
allowed natural philosophers to come closer to penetrating the real first
causes than Descartes himself did.
A Final Question: A Place for Books and Teachers

In the beginning of this essay, I discussed the way in which Descartes
begins in rejection, rejection of authority of all kinds, including the
kind of authority represented by books and teachers. But this would
seem to raise a special problem for Descartes; he would seem to be
posing as an authority who is telling us to reject authority, an author
who writes books telling us not to read books! To write a book whose
message is not to read books – this book included – would seem to be
self-contradictory; to stand up in front of a class as a teacher, teaching
the lesson that one cannot learn from teachers, would seem to be self-
defeating. How can Descartes set himself up as a teacher, even if it is as
a teacher who is teaching us this radical truth?
12 On the relations between Descartes and the Schoolmen on the question of starting with
first causes and the order of knowledge and instruction, see Daniel Garber, Descartes’
Metaphysical Physics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 58–62.
292 larger visions
Descartes was very much aware of this paradox. His answer lies in the
personae that he adopts to present his philosophy. In Descartes’ day, it
was common for the teacher to stand in front of the class, his lectures
carefully written out, and dictate them to the students, who would copy
them word for word into their copybooks, to be carefully studied. In
such a classroom, it was clear who was the master, and who was the
student, who had the knowledge and wisdom, and who was receiving
it.13 The Principles is a textbook, written for the classroom in the hope
of being used in teaching children, and it shares the didactic qualities
of other textbooks of the era. But Descartes’ personae in others of his
writings, in the Search after Truth, the Discourse, and the Meditations,
Descartes’ stand-in Eudoxus, as well as RD and the Meditator, as I have
called them, are not teachers of this sort.
In the Search after Truth, Descartes begins in his introduction to the
dialogue with a discourse about how we should not judge opinions on
the grounds of who it is that holds them. He writes:
I hope, too, that the truths I set forth will not be any less well received for
their not being derived from Aristotle or Plato, and that they will have cur-
rency in the world in the same way as money, whose value is no less when it
comes from the purse of a peasant than when it comes from a bank. More-
over I have done my best to make these truths equally useful to everybody. I
could find no style better suited to this end than that of a conversation in
which several friends, frankly and without ceremony, disclose the best of their
thoughts to each other. [AT X 498 (CSM II 401)]
The dialogue form is an ideal way of presenting philosophical ideas in

a non-dogmatic way. Though it is clear from the beginning which posi-
tion Descartes himself endorses (unfortunately, in his use of the form,
Descartes is not the equal of Plato or Hume, or even Berkeley), it is
through debate and the interchange of arguments that the reader is
led to see the wisdom of the Cartesian point of view, and not through
being told what to think.
While the dialogue is a very traditional form of philosophical instruc-
tion, in others of his works, Descartes experiments with different
13 Many such copybooks survive, which provide a window into the early seventeenth-century
classroom. A number of such books of notes are listed as “courses” in the bibliography of
manuscripts in Brockliss, French Higher Education, pp. 486ff. For some excerpts from
philosophy courses that particularly concern seventeenth-century Scholastic reactions
to Descartes’ philosophy, see Étienne Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la
formation du système cartésien (Paris, Vrin, 1975), pp. 316–33.
literary devices for presenting his thought in non-dogmatic ways. In the
Discourse, Descartes’ protagonist RD emphasizes that he does not have
any special talent or wisdom that sets him above others: “For my part,
I have never presumed my mind to be in any way more perfect than
that of the ordinary man” [AT VI 2 (CSM I 111)]. Rather, he claims, it
was luck that led him to his discoveries, the method that he will outline
in Part II of the Discourse and the scientific discoveries that he will
present in the three “essays” that the Discourse introduces:
[T]he diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more
reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along dif-
ferent paths and do not attend to the same things. For it is not enough to
have a good mind; the main thing is to apply it well. . . . I consider myself
very fortunate to have happened upon certain paths in my youth which led
me to considerations and maxims from which I formed a method whereby,
it seems to me, I can increase my knowledge gradually and raise it little by
little to the highest point allowed by the mediocrity of my mind and the short
duration of my life. [AT VI 2, 3 (CSM I 111, 112)]
Even this is not presented dogmatically; RD freely admits that he may

be deceived here: “perhaps what I take for gold and diamonds is
nothing but a bit of copper and glass” [AT VI 3 (CSM I 112)]. And so,
he tells the reader:
My present aim, then, is not to teach the method which everyone must follow
in order to direct his reason correctly, but only to reveal how I have tried to
direct my own. One who presumes to give precepts must think himself more
skillful than those to whom he gives them; and if he makes the slightest
mistake, he may be blamed. But I am presenting this work only as a story [his-
toire] or, if you prefer, a fable in which, among certain examples worthy of
imitation, you will perhaps also find many others that it would be right not
to follow; and so I hope it will be useful for some without being harmful
to any, and that everyone will be grateful to me for my frankness. [AT VI 4
(CSM I 112)]
In another image that he uses, RD tells the reader that he is present-

ing his intellectual history “as if in a painting, so that everyone may
judge it for himself” (ibid.). This may be something of a pose; I strongly
suspect that the historical Descartes did think himself to be more intel-
ligent than the common person, and that he had enormous confidence
in his method and in the discoveries that he made with its help. But no
matter. What is important is that he did not represent himself in that
way: his persona RD does not see himself as transmitting truth to the
294 larger visions
reader, but as telling a story, providing an example, some aspects of
which the reader may find worthy of following. If RD is a teacher, he is
teaching by the example of his own life; he is not telling you to reject
teachers, but showing you how he did, and hoping that you will agree
that the results are worthy of imitation.
Descartes’ Meditator, his persona in the Meditations, is somewhat dif-
ferent from RD. Though one can read the opening of the Meditations
as a kind of continuation of the Discourse, RD sitting down to actually
pursue the intellectual program that he prepares in Parts I and II of
the Discourse (and, in a preliminary version, outlines in Part IV), the
rhetorical strategy is not the same in the two works. Whereas RD is the
companion at the tavern, telling you his life’s story, the Meditator is a
kind of guide. “Guide” is, perhaps, not quite the right word here.
Descartes writes in the preface to the reader “I would not urge anyone
to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate
seriously with me” [AT VII 9 (CSM II 8)]. The point is that the Medi-
tations is not simply a book to be read as an account of what its pro-
tagonist (the Meditator) happened to think on a particular occasion,
as the Discourse represents itself. Nor is it a book whose conclusions
we are supposed to believe simply because we are told that they are
true by the author. Rather, we are supposed to enter into the argu-
ments, and meditate with the protagonist. When we read the skeptical
arguments of Mediation I, we are supposed to feel their force, and we
must reject everything we formerly believed. When in Meditation II
the Meditator discovers his own existence as a thinking thing through
the cogito argument, we are each supposed to discover our own existence.
For the Meditations to work then, we must actually identify with the
Meditator, and have, for ourselves, the experiences that lead toward
intellectual enlightenment.14 Again, Descartes is not telling you what
to believe, but, in a way different from that in the Discourse,
showing you how you can come to the knowledge that he thinks he has
obtained.
In these ways, then, Descartes can play the teacher without violating
his own philosophy of education, and lead us to reject authority, turn
to ourselves, and discover, for ourselves, the truths that Descartes
would have us learn. But a touch of irony still remains. Descartes, the
14 On the background to Descartes’ use of the meditation as a literary form for his
philosophy, see the essays by A. Rorty and G. Hatfield in A. Rorty, ed., Essays on Descartes’
Meditations (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1986).
fresh, new voice in the 1630s and 1640s, when he burst upon the scene,
the philosopher who sought to liberate philosophy from the past, has
over the years become one of the classics himself, one of the ancient
authors from which we must liberate ourselves, if we are to follow his
own advice.
14
EXPERIMENT, COMMUNITY, AND THE

CONSTITUTION OF NATURE IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Introduction
In his important and influential book, How Experiments End,1 Peter
Galison discusses how it is that scientists decide when a given experi-
ment is finished and when the supposed fact that it purports to estab-
lish can be accepted as fact and not a mistaken reading of the apparatus,
not a result of a malfunctioning piece of equipment, not a misinter-
pretation of a given observation, and so on. This epistemological ques-
tion – the transition between individual observations, individual runs
of a complex experiment, and the experimental fact that they are sup-
posed to establish – is a matter of some discussion in the recent litera-
ture in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science.2 It is this
question that Galison (and others) have called attention to that I would
like to explore in this article.
What strikes me as interesting here is that the very question under
scrutiny has a history; while, in a sense, the question has been with us
as long as people turned to experience to try to figure out how the
world is, people were not always interested in or aware of the question,
and when they were, the answers that they suggested were not always
1 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

2 In addition to Galison, see, for example, Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: the Con-
struction of Scientific Facts, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Steven
Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental
Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), etc.
296
experiment, community, and nature 297
the ones that we find most comfortable now. That is what will interest
me here, the history of the notion of an experimental fact, if you will,
or, as Lorraine Daston has dramatically dubbed it, the “prehistory of
objectivity.” In Robert Boyle and his generation in the Royal Society, as
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have emphasized, we have much of
what we take for granted in experimental life, experiments performed
on complex and temperamental equipment that often goes wrong, the
centrality of the idea of reproducibility, the idea of a community of sci-
entists, and so on. But a generation before Boyle, much of this famil-
iar landscape was missing. What I would like to do is give a preliminary
sketch of the way all that came to be. What I would like to do is sketch
how the experimental life, as we now think of it, began. In particular,
I am interested in the way in which the establishment of experimental
facts became social. Recent writers have emphasized the role played by
the community of investigators in deciding what counts as an experi-
mental fact and what does not. This is a very prominent feature of the
account of experimental facthood in the Royal Society. However, I shall
argue, this is a very recent development.
One cannot tell the whole story in these few pages, though, and I
will have to be selective. I will begin with a brief discussion of experi-
mental facthood in late Renaissance thought before turning to Bacon
and Descartes and showing the extent to which their conception of
experimental facthood is radically individualistic. I will then discuss the
self-consciously social conception of experimental facthood found
in the writings of the early Royal Society. After a digression about some
recent issues concerning the rhetoric of scientific experiments in the
period, I will end with some speculations about why the transition
occurred when it did. The transformation in the philosophical view
about the role of community in the establishment of experimental facts,
I suggest, is closely connected with the emergence of a community enti-
tled to make the judgments necessary to establish such facts.
Before beginning my story, I should comment briefly on the notions
of experiment and observation. It is important to many discussions to
distinguish between observation and experiment, between information
we get about the world from observing it as it follows its own natural
course and information we get from torturing nature, as Bacon put it,
setting up situations not normally found in nature and observing what
happens. Important as this distinction is in the seventeenth century,
it will not be relevant for my story. And so I will speak indifferently of
observation, experiment, and experience.
298 larger visions
Some Common Sense

People have turned to their senses for information about the world on
which to ground their natural philosophy, their medicine, and so on as
long as there have been such disciplines. And as long as there have been
such disciplines, halfway reflective people must have worried at least to
some degree about how it is that one can establish empirical facts about
the world at the very lowest level – how you can be sure that the indi-
vidual and particular observations you make on a given occasion are
not misleading in some way, the product of chance or happenstance,
malfunctioning equipment, a distracted observer, a nonrepresentative
specimen, and so on. And to this apparently simple question, we find
in much early literature a relatively simple answer: When in doubt about
a given observation or experiment, do it again.3
Peter Dear has recently found a very nice instance of this way of
thinking about experiment in an obscure and generally unremarkable
Jesuit textbook on optics published in 1613 by one Franciscus Aguilo-
nius. Aguilonius writes, “A single sensory act does not greatly aid in the
establishment of sciences and the settlement of common notions,
since error can exist which lies hidden for a single act. But if the act is
repeated time and again, it strengthens the judgment of truth until
[that judgment] finally passes into common assent; whence afterwards
they [i.e., the “common notions”] are put together, through reasoning,
as with the first principles of a science.”4 As Dear emphasizes, there is
nothing particularly original in Aguilonius’ statement here. He points
out that this statement is, in a way, just a paraphrase of Aristotle himself.
Writing in the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle notes, “So from perception
there comes memory, as we call it, and from memory (when it occurs
often in connection with the same thing), experience; for memories
3 This, of course, will not work for astronomy, where the events observed are radically unique,
the observation of a particular heavenly body in a particular position in the sky at a given
time. Different strategies evolved for dealing with the fallibility of astronomical observa-
tions, generally involving numerous observations made over long periods of time. See, e.g.,
the discussions of the determination of mean motions of heavenly bodies in N. Swerdlow
and O. Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (2 vols.) (New
York: Springer-Verlag, 1984), passim.
4 Franciscus Anguilonius, Opticorum libri sex (Antwerp, 1613), pp. 215–16, quoted and trans-
lated in Peter Dear, “Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into
Science in the Seventeenth Century,” in Peter Dear, ed., The Literary Structure of Scientific
Argument: Historical Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp.
135–63, quoted on p. 139.
that are many in number form a single experience.”5 Aristotle’s
meaning here is by no means clear.6 But it is not too implausible to see
Aristotle as standing behind Aguilonius’ statement. The point is that
Aristotelian science is grounded not on individual events of sensory
experience, particular observations made on particular occasions, but
on the general course of experience, on common assent. It is not suf-
ficient for an Aristotelian science that we have a particular observation
that it snowed on the morning of January 23, 1979, in Chicago, Illi-
nois, or that on a September 26, 1664, a particular apple was observed
to fall from a tree and hit one Isaac Newton on the head. What is nec-
essary for Aristotelian science is that it be generally accepted that it
snows in northern climes in the winter months or that heavy bodies fall;
this is what constitutes experience, properly speaking, as opposed to
mere perception. And to go from perception, the individual deliver-
ance of the senses on a particular occasion, to what Aristotle and Aguilo-
nius call experience, what we might call an experiential fact, requires
the repetition of these individual perceptions. Should these individual
perceptions speak with sufficient unanimity, then memory will trans-
form them into experiential facts, facts that can be acknowledged by
common consensus and used as the foundation of a genuine body of
knowledge. In this way an experimental fact can be regarded as a kind
of low-level general statement established by repetition.
Now, these perceptions can be repeated by many different observers,
of course. But (and this is something I want to emphasize) it is suffi-
cient for them to be repeated by one observer alone; one observer,
repeating the observation a sufficiently large number of times, is
capable of constituting an experiential fact, on this conception. This
conception of facthood is reflected in quite a number of figures in early
modern science and represents what might well be considered the
commonsense view on the question at hand, the question as to how
experimental facts are to be constituted. Consider, for example, William
Gilbert, one of the most obviously experimental of the very early
moderns. Gilbert writes in the preface to his De Magnete of 1600, “Let
whosoever would make the same experiments, handle the bodies
carefully, skillfully, and deftly, not heedlessly and bunglingly; when an
5 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19, 100a 5–7, trans. in Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle’s Posterior
Analytics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 81. See also Metaphysics I.1, 980b
28–30.
6 See Barnes, Posterior Analytics, p. 253 for some indications of the complexities.
300 larger visions
experiment fails, let him not in his ignorance condemn our discover-
ies, for there is naught in these Books that has not been investigated
and again and again done and repeated under our eyes.”7 Gilbert is
very aware that the complexity of the experiments he has performed
and the temperamental nature of the equipment he used may make it
difficult for others to get the same outcomes that he did on his trials.
Indeed, he begins the book proper by reporting on the mistaken results
that others have gotten from antiquity to the present, mistakes that are
corrected by his own, more careful experiments. Gilbert is completely
convinced that his own results are correct, that he has captured genuine
experimental facts by virtue of the fact that he repeated his trials over
and over again: “There is naught in these Books that has not been inves-
tigated and again and again done and repeated under our eyes,” Gilbert
writes, and these repetitions give him the authority to present his obser-
vations as fact.
Gilbert is hardly unusual here. Dear reports finding the same thread
going throughout a number of other writers of the period, including
Galileo and Marin Mersenne:8 “I did the trial a hundred times, and it
came out the same on every occasion” is a phrase that for these
natural philosophers (and for many others, too, I strongly suspect) con-
stitutes the ultimate justification for their confidence in a given exper-
imental fact.
This may look a great deal like modern notions of the repeatability
of an experiment as a criterion for accepting the experimental fact
that it purports to establish. It is. But it is important to emphasize
here that what is at issue is not repeatability in general but repeatabil-
ity by the individual experimenter; to constitute a genuine fact, it must
be possible for an experiment or observation to be reproducible, but
to establish reproducibility, it is sufficient for the individual investiga-
tor to be able to reproduce the result a sufficiently large number of
times. And so the individual investigator speaks with complete author-
ity. If you the reader are not convinced, you can, of course, try the
experiment yourself. But the benefits of this repetition accrue to you
and you alone; as far as the investigator is concerned, the numerous
repetitions that he did suffice to establish the result of his experiment
as fact.
7 William Gilbert, De Magnete, trans. P. Fleury Mottelay (New York: Dover Books, 1958),
p. xlix.
8 See Dear, “Narratives.”
So much for common sense. Although natural philosophy and med-
icine had depended on observation of nature and experiment for many
years before the new philosophers of the seventeenth century, with
the new science, the increasing dependence on experience, and the
increasingly sophisticated forms that the appeal to experience took,
there came a new attention to the notion of experiment and experi-
ence. I would like to turn now to a number of such accounts. I shall
begin with some reflections on the premier theorist of experimental
science in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon, and then turn to
René Descartes before confronting the thought of the early members
of the Royal Society.
Bacon and Experimental Facts

No seventeenth-century figure is more closely identified with the new
experimental spirit in science than Bacon. His program for science, his
Instauratio magna, a plan for the revival and restoration of the sciences,
has at its center the Novum organum of 1620, a new logical instrument
that is supposed to tell us how to build a new science more adequate
than the Aristotelian science that still very much dominated the
intellectual world in which Bacon grew up. And at the center of the
new method outlined in the Novum organum are observation and exper-
iment, the collection of facts and their arrangement into natural
histories.
In rough terms, the procedure goes like this. The first step is simply
the collection of experiments and observations. Bacon writes, “For first
of all we must prepare a natural and experimental history, sufficient
and good; and this is the foundation of all, for we are not to imagine
or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.”9
But a natural history, a random collection of facts, is too unwieldy to
work with directly. And so, Bacon suggests, “We must therefore form
tables and arrangements of instances, in such a method and order that
the understanding may be able to deal with them.”10 Take, for example,
the investigation of the nature of heat, the example that Bacon devel-
9 Novum organum II.10. In the Novum organum itself, Bacon gives little guidance as to how
we might plan a series of experiments. On this see the discussion in the De augmentis
(1623) V.2, in Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed., J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D.
Heath (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1863), vol. IX, pp. 71ff.
10 Novum organum II.10.
302 larger visions
ops in most detail in the Novum organum. Bacon begins with what he
calls the table of “Instances Agreeing in the Nature of Heat,” or “Table
of Essence and Presence,” in which are listed a variety of circumstances
in which heat may be found, including fiery meteors, quicklime sprin-
kled with water, iron dissolved in acid, and fresh horse dung.11 The
second table is what Bacon calls “Instances in Proximity Where the
Nature of Heat Is Absent.” In this table, Bacon examines one by one
the entries in the table of essence and presence and tries to find similar
circumstances in which heat is absent. So, for example, connected with
the observation that iron in acid produces heat, Bacon notes that softer
metals such as gold and lead do not give off heat when dissolved in
acid. The third table is what Bacon calls the “Table of Degrees.” Here,
Bacon makes observations about things that contain the nature of heat,
for example, in greater or lesser degree. And so he observes that while
old dung is colder than fresh dung, it has what Bacon calls a potential
for heat insofar as it will produce heat when enclosed or buried, he
claims. Similarly, Bacon observes that different substances burn with
different degrees of heat.12
Once we have compiled the natural history and arranged it into the
proper tables, we are ready for the inductive step, at least the first induc-
tive step, what Bacon calls the first vintage. At this point, Bacon says,
“The problem is, upon a review of the instances, all and each, to find
such a nature as is always present or absent with the given nature, and
always increases and decreases with it.”13 That is, in the case of heat, we
want to find that which is always present when heat is present and always
absent when heat is absent. This proceeds in two stages. First, Bacon
uses his tables to exclude possible natures. And so, for example,
although Bacon thinks that heavenly bodies are hot, being a heavenly
body cannot be part of the nature of heat, since there are terrestrial
bodies that are hot as well.14 Once we have excluded candidates for the
nature of heat in this way, we can then examine what is left and say what
it is that all hot things have in common. What Bacon suggests in the
case at hand is that heat is a particular kind of motion: “Heat is a
motion, expansive, restrained, and acting in its strife upon the smaller
particles of bodies, . . . not sluggish, but hurried and with violence.”15
This, Bacon claims, is what all instances of heat found in the tables of
our natural history have in common. After this, the Novum organum is
11 Novum organum II.11. 12 Novum organum II.13. 13 Novum organum II.15.

14 Novum organum II.18. 15 Novum organum II.20.
not altogether clear where we go. Presumably, the first vintage is
followed by successive vintages in which we press more knowledge of
nature from our initial observations. Furthermore, Bacon suggests, the
knowledge we have derived from experiment will in some way suggest
to us new experiments to perform, although he does not indicate how
exactly this might work.16
The method of the Novum organum is exemplified in the organiza-
tion of the House of Salomon, the perfect scientific society that Bacon
envisions in his science fiction story, New Atlantis, published posthu-
mously in 1627. At the bottom of the organization are those who form
the tables of natural history, a total of twenty-four investigators. Twelve
“Merchants of Light” “sail into foreign countries under the names of
other nations . . . [and] bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns
of experiments of all other parts.”17 Three “Depredators” collect
experiments from books three “Mystery-men” collect experiments from
mechanical arts and liberal sciences, and three “Pioneers or Miners” try
new experiments of their own devising. They are joined by three “Com-
pilers,” who arrange these observations and experiments into proper
tables.18 Twelve workers are employed at the next stage of the enter-
prise. Three “dowry-men or Benefactors” examine the initial tables
compiled by the Compilers and draw out both technological applica-
tions and the first theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from the
tables, presumably what Bacon calls the first vintage in the Novum
organum. Three “Lamps,” as he calls them, then draw new experiments
out of the work of the Compilers and Benefactors, which experiments
are then performed by three “Inoculators.” And finally, “we have three
that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observa-
tions, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call Interpreters of Nature.”19
In this way, Bacon’s method for investigating nature is quite readily
adapted to science as a social and cooperative enterprise; it is no
wonder that organizations such as the Royal Society looked back to
Bacon for inspiration.
16 See Novum organum II.10, where Bacon suggests that the interpretation of nature involves
both deriving axioms from experience and deducing and deriving “new experiments from
axioms.”
17 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1906), p. 273.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 274. These thirty-six investigators are, of course, assisted by helpers and servants
of various kinds.
304 larger visions
A great deal of attention has been given to the inductive stage in
Bacon’s method, what it is and why it does not really work. But I would
like to focus instead on the first and apparently less problematic stage,
the collection and construction of natural histories, in particular, on
the way Bacon thinks that the empirical facts contained in a natural
history are to be established and checked.
In Advancement of Learning (1605), and later in the expanded and
Latinized version of that work, De augmentis (1623), Bacon offers a cat-
egorization of all human learning based on his conception of the mind:
“The best division of human learning is that derived from the three fac-
ulties of the rational soul, which is the seat of learning. History has ref-
erence to the Memory, poesy to the Imagination, and philosophy to
Reason.”20 Of most interest to us here is Bacon’s conception of the
category of history. Bacon recognizes a number of different kinds of
history; in addition to natural history, Bacon recognizes civil, ecclesias-
tical, and literary history. Unlike philosophy proper, which deals with
abstractions and generalities, history deals with particulars, on Bacon’s
conception, particular events in nature that happened at particular
times. But, Bacon suggests in De augmentis, matters are somewhat com-
plicated here. He writes, “History is properly concerned with individu-
als, which are circumscribed by place and time. For though Natural
History may seem to deal with species, yet this is only because of the
general resemblance which in most cases natural objects of the same
species bear to one another; so that when you know one, you know all.
And if individuals are found, which are either unique in their species,
like the sun and moon; or notable deviations from their species, like
monsters; the description of these has as fit a place in Natural History
as that of remarkable men has in Civil History.”21 History is the domain
of atomic facts, as it were. But Bacon recognizes that some of these facts
are more general than others. When we are dealing with knowledge
about specific individuals, the sun, the moon, Julius Caesar, and so on,
then history deals with statements keyed to particular places and times:
The sun or moon was observed to be at such and such a position in the
sky from such and such a place at such and such a time; Julius Caesar
was observed to have uttered such and such words at a particular place
at a particular time. But when dealing with natural historical matters,
20 De augmentis II.1 (Bacon, The Works, vol. VIII, p. 407); cf. Advancement of Learning II.I.1
(Bacon, Advancement, pp. 75–76). See also the account in the Descriptio globi intellectualis
(Bacon, The Works, vol. X, p. 404).
21 Ibid. See also The Works, vol. X, p. 407.
a certain kind of generality can creep in. One can drop a certain piece
of gold in a particular vat of aqua regia at a given time and note that
it dissolves. This, of course, might happen because of the particulari-
ties of the situation, the particular characteristics of the samples of
gold or aqua regia, or, indeed, the observer may be mistaken in think-
ing that the gold dissolved on that occasion. But, given the general
similarity of samples of gold and aqua regia and the general reliability
of observers, at least with respect to events such as this, “it would be a
superfluous and endless labor to speak of [each individual case]
severally,” as Bacon put it elsewhere.22 And so, in compiling natural
histories it is permitted to speak generally and include as a fact
that gold dissolves when put in aqua regia. In general, this is exactly
the sort of entry one finds in Bacon’s own natural histories.23 Although
the facts are based on observation and experiment, Bacon includes
not the reports of the particular observations and experiments he (or
others) might have made at some particular place and time but the
report of the general fact that came out of the particular events of
observation or experiment. In this I suspect that Bacon exemplifies
what I called the commonsense conception of how experimental
facts are to be established. For Bacon, as for the commonsense view,
experimental facts seem to be just the unproblematic generalization
of repeated experience, similar instances repeated, that constitute a
general experience.
But there is a further complexity in Bacon’s account worth noting.
Bacon’s natural histories are compiled from a number of sources, from
his own observations and experiments, from those others have made
and either published or related to him, from accounts travelers have
brought back, from books, encyclopedias, ancient accounts, and even
from common sayings and proverbs.24 Bacon suggests that we should
22 Descriptio globi intellectualis II (Bacon, The Works, vol. X, p. 406).

23 In the Historia ventorum, for example, an account of the winds, Bacon writes that “the west
wind is the attendant of the afternoon, for it blows more frequently than the east wind
when the sun is declining. The south wind is the attendant of the night, for it rises oftener
in the night, and blows stronger” (Bacon, The Works, vol. IX, p. 399). It is clear here that
this represents not one particular observation but the general run of our experience.
24 For example, on one page of the Historia ventorum, Bacon takes some observations about
the winds from Herodotus and Pliny and another from what is simply identified as “the
narrative of a Spanish pilot” (Bacon, The Works, vol. IX, p. 395). Other sources cited passim
in this work include Acosta, Columbus, Aristotle, Knolles’s History of the Turks, Gilbert, and
Virgil. At one point he writes, “In Britain, the east wind is considered injurious, insomuch
that there is a proverb, When the wind is in the east, ‘Tis neither good for man nor beast”
(Bacon, The Works, vol. IX, p. 402).
306 larger visions
be quite liberal in what we are to include in our natural histories; the
only things that he categorically excludes are “superstitious stories . . .
and experiments of ceremonial magic,” which he dismisses as “old
wives’ tales.”25 But, among the sorts of things that Bacon does allow in
his natural history, he recognizes that there will be differences in the
degree of certainty. In the Parasceve, the portion of the Instauratio magna
in which Bacon discusses the preparation of the natural history, he
notes that possible entries in the natural history will be of three sorts:
certainly true, certainly false, and doubtful.26 As for the first two cate-
gories, there is no particular problem; facts that are certainly true
belong in, and commonly accepted “facts” that are generally accepted
but false should be exposed and rejected as such. But Bacon’s treat-
ment of the third category is the most interesting. Bacon suggests that
we add them to the natural history, but with appropriate indication of
their status. He continues, “Nor is it of much consequence to the busi-
ness in hand because . . . mistakes in experimenting, unless they
abound everywhere, will be presently detected and corrected by the
truth of axioms.”27 Bacon’s idea seems to be something like this.
Inevitably, we will find in the reports of others, or even in our own
experimental work, that false statements are accepted as experimental
facts. When too many of the entries in our natural history have that
character, we are obviously in trouble. But if our natural history is gen-
erally reliable, then we have a way of weeding out these nonfacts. For
Bacon suggests, we can use the general statements derived by induction
from our natural history to correct that natural history. That is, once
we have derived general statements from our experience using the
careful method that Bacon outlines in the Novum organum, we are enti-
tled to reject anything that does not conform to those general state-
ments, “axioms” as he calls them. In this way, Bacon writes in the
Instauratio magna, “the senses deceive, but then at the same time they
supply the means of discovering their own errors” (Plan of the “Instau-
ratio magna” ).28
In this way, Bacon seems to go beyond the commonsense conception
of facthood that I outlined earlier in this article. For common sense, a
25 Parasceve III (Bacon, The Works, vol. VIII, p. 360). See also the Plan of the Instauratio magna
(Bacon, The Works, vol. VIII. p. 49).
26 Parasceve VIII (Bacon, The Works, vol. VIII, pp. 366–68).
27 Parasceve VIII (Bacon, The Works, vol. VIII, pp. 366–68); see also Novum organum I.118.
28 Bacon, The Works, vol. VIII, p. 43.
fact is established as a fact through repetition alone; one begins with
the individual occurrence, the particular observation, the single run of
an experiment and repeats the event until it is certain that there is no
mistake of any sort. But to this Bacon adds another criterion, at least
when we are dealing with doubtful results. Facts, as embodied in a
natural history, determine theory. But, Bacon holds, theory determines
fact as well; for a purported experimental or observational fact to enter
the body of knowledge, it must conform to theory.
As interesting to me as the account Bacon hits upon is the one that
he misses. One presumes that in at least many of the doubtful cases that
Bacon has in mind, at least one investigator has done the experiment
in question numerous times and has established to his own satisfaction
that he has identified a genuine experimental fact. It would be a natural
suggestion that the doubtful results could be checked by having other
investigators try the experiment as well. But Bacon does not suggest
this. It is quite striking to me that in Bacon’s elaborately organized
House of Salomon, among the thirty-six investigators employed full-
time in exploring nature, not one is ever asked to redo an experiment
originally done by another investigator. As we shall see, matters are
quite different when the House of Salomon is actually organized a gen-
eration later as the Royal Society. But, before turning to the question
of experiment in the Royal Society, I would like to turn to another
important theorist of method in early seventeenth-century natural
philosophy, Descartes.
Descartes and Experimental Facts

For us, Bacon and Descartes are opposites, the experimentalist versus
the rationalist. There is, of course, a good deal of truth in this. But, at
the same time, it is important to recognize that the two are not so
distant from one another as we might think. Both are moderns from
the point of view of the early seventeenth century, opponents of the
sterile Aristotelian science of the Schools, and both saw a new method
of investigation as central in the attack against the old and in the estab-
lishment of a new science more adequate than the old. Descartes makes
a number of complimentary references to Bacon and his program in
his correspondence, and in his Discours de la méthode of 1637 one can
see the echo of the very rhetoric of the Instauratio magna, published
while the young Descartes was working out his own ideas about
scientific procedure in the unfinished and unpublished Regulae of the
308 larger visions
1620s.29 Descartes is certainly more circumspect about experiment than
Bacon is and trusts to reason more than Bacon does. But it is impor-
tant to recognize that while experiment may play a somewhat more
restricted role in Descartes’ enterprise than it does in Bacon’s,
Descartes considered experiment crucial to the advance of his own
program as well. Experiment appears prominently in his celebrated
account of the rainbow in Discourse 8 of the Météores, a discussion that
he points to as a paradigm of the method of the Discours; there
Descartes appeals to experiments done with prisms and flasks of water
to support his conclusions about the cause of the rainbow.30 In response
to a criticism of his Principia philosophiae of 1644, transmitted by
Huygens, that his views are insufficiently confirmed by experience
or experiment, Descartes claims that there are “almost as many
experiments as there are lines in my writings.”31 And, finally, in Part 6
of the Discours, Descartes’ most prominent complaint is that the com-
pletion of his work is hindered by the lack of sufficient observations
and experiments.32
But, before turning to Descartes’ conception of experiment and the
constitution of experimental facts, it would be helpful to take a brief and
sketchy excursion into Descartes’ conception of method, particularly as
it is set out in the early Regulae.33 What Descartes ultimately wants to con-
struct is a deductive science. At the bottom is what Descartes calls intu-
ition, the ability we have to immediately grasp certain truths and to grasp
them with complete certainty. Descartes thinks that we can also see intu-
29 References to Bacon can be found in AT I 109, 195–96, 251. On the relation between
Bacon’s and Descartes’ writings, see A. Lalande, “Sur quelques textes de Bacon et
Descartes,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 19 (1911), 296–311. Unless otherwise noted,
the translations are from Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans.,
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (3 vols.)
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), where they are keyed to the page
numbers of AT.
30 The account of the rainbow can be found in AT VI 325–44; it is identified as a product
of the method on p. 325, line 7, the only reference to the method of the Discours in any
of the three Essais that accompany it. Furthermore, it is identified as “a brief sample of
the method,” the only example so identified, in a letter, Descartes to Vatier, 22 February
1638, AT I 559.
31 Descartes to Huygens(?), June 1645(?), AT IV 224.
32 See, for example, AT VI 63, 65, 73.
33 For a fuller account of the method of the Regulae, see Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chapter 2, or Garber, “Descartes and
Experiment in the Discourse and Essays,” essay 5 in this volume. The discussion here
borrows liberally from the discussions in those two places.
itive connections between some propositions known and others; this is
what he calls deduction. All knowledge properly speaking, scientia, must
come from intuition and deduction; completed science will have the
structure of conclusions deduced from initially intuited premises. His
method is a procedure for constructing such a science.34
The precise method Descartes has in mind is nicely illustrated by an
example he gives of methodical investigation in Rule 8 of the Regulae.
As illustrated in that example, Descartes’ method has two parts: a reduc-
tive step, leading us from a question posed to an intuition, and a con-
structive step, in which a deduction of the answer to the question is
presented. The problem Descartes poses for himself in Rule 8 is that
of finding the anaclastic line, that is, the shape of a surface “in which
parallel rays are refracted in such a way that they all intersect in a single
point after refraction.”35 Now, Descartes notices – and this seems to be
the first step in the reduction – that “the determination of this [ana-
clastic] line depends on the relation between the angle of incidence
and the angle of refraction.”36 But, Descartes notes, this question is still
“composite and relative,” that is, not sufficiently simple, and we must
proceed further in the reduction. Rejecting an empirical investigation
of the relation in question, Descartes suggests that we must next ask
how the relation between the angles of incidence and refraction is
caused by the difference between two media – for example, air and glass
– which in turn raises the question as to “how the ray penetrates the
whole transparent thing, and the knowledge of this penetration pre-
supposes that the nature of the illumination is also known.”37 But,
Descartes claims, in order to understand what illumination is we must
know what a natural power (potentia naturalis) is. This is where what we
might call the reductive step of Descartes’ method ends. At this point,
Descartes seems to think that we can “clearly see through an intuition
of the mind” what a natural power is.38 Other passages suggest that this
intuition is intimately connected with motion.39 Once we have such an
intuition, we can begin the constructive step and follow, in order,
through the questions raised until we have answered the original ques-
tion, that of the shape of the anaclastic line. This would involve under-
standing the nature of illumination from the nature of a natural power,
the ways rays penetrate transparent bodies from the nature of
illumination, and the relation between angle of incidence and angle
34 See Rules 1–3, AT X 359–70. 35 AT X 394. 36 AT X 394.

37 AT X 394–95. 38 AT X 395. 39 AT X 402.
310 larger visions
of refraction from all that precedes. Finally, once we know how angle
of incidence and angle of refraction are related, we can solve the
problem of the anaclastic line.
If we take the anaclastic line example as our guide, then methodical
investigation begins with a question, a question which, in turn, is
reduced to questions whose answers are presupposed for the resolution
of the original question posed (i.e., q1 is reduced to q2 if and only if we
must answer q2 before we can answer q1). And so, in a sense, the reduc-
tion leads us to more basic and fundamental questions, from the ana-
clastic line to the law of refraction and eventually back to the nature
of a natural power and to the motion of bodies. Ultimately, Descartes
thinks, when we follow out this series of questions, from the one that
first interests us to the “simpler” and more basic questions on which it
depends, we will eventually reach an intuition. When the reductive
stage is taken to this point, we can begin the constructive stage, turn
the procedure on its head, and begin answering the questions that we
have successively raised in an order the reverse of the order in which
we have raised them. What this should involve is starting with the intu-
ition that we have attained through the reductive step and deducing
down from there until we have answered the question originally raised.
Should everything work out as Descartes hopes it will (which it will not,
but that is another story), when we are finished we will have the certain
knowledge he wants; an answer arrived at in this way will constitute a
conclusion deduced ultimately from an initial intuition.
All of this is impressive, in a way. But where does experiment come
in? How could Descartes have thought that experiment fits into his con-
ception of scientific practice? There is not the space in this article to
enter into this question in the full detail that it deserves.40 But, in brief,
I think that the answer goes something like this. Experiment does not
enter into the method proper. Rather, Descartes conceives of experi-
ment as a kind of auxiliary in the reductive stage of the method, one
that allows us to pass from one question to the next.
Consider the anaclastic line example, for instance. At one point in
the argument, Descartes says that the investigator must notice that the
relation between the angles of incidence and refraction itself depends
on the changes in these angles due to the differences in the media
through which the ray is passing (e.g., from air into glass or water into
air) and that these changes, in turn, depend on the way in which the
40 For a fuller account, see Garber, “Descartes and Experiment.”

ray penetrates the transparent body.41 While it may not require sophis-
ticated optical experiments, it seems that this step requires at very least
some minimal experience with light rays and lenses or other actual
instances of refraction in order to see that light is typically bent by
passing from one medium into another and to come to the realization
that in order to discover the law that refraction obeys, we must first
understand how light passes through media of different sorts. Experi-
ment thus helps to perform the reduction and to determine what ques-
tion we should take up next in our investigation.
Descartes uses such appeals to experience more explicitly in his dis-
cussion of the rainbow. In that case, he is interested in discovering how
it is that colors arise in the rainbow. On the basis of experiments with
a spherical flask of water, Descartes claims that the rainbow has two dis-
tinct bands of color, a primary and a secondary bow, and that the two
bows of the rainbow derive from two combinations of reflection and
refraction in a droplet of water. From this, one might conjecture that
the color might arise from the reflection, the refraction, or the fact that
the droplets are spherical. But experiments with a prism show that color
can arise from refraction alone. Reflection and the spherical surface of
the droplet are thus judged irrelevant to the phenomenon, and in the
next step of the reduction, Descartes focuses on the question as to how
refraction might produce colors in white light. Once again, experiment
helps us to determine what question we should next ask ourselves.
Descartes’ use of experiment is quite different from Bacon’s.
Science, although experimental in a sense, remains deductive for
Descartes; Baconian induction has no apparent role to play. But exper-
iment seems to play a role in preparing the deduction. Insofar as it
helps perform the reductive part of the method, the sequence of steps
that leads from a question to an intuition, it helps determine the deduc-
tion, the same steps followed in reverse order that lead from intuition
to the answer to the question posed. The deductive chain that the Carte-
sian scientist seeks in reason, the chain that goes from more basic to
less, is exemplified in the connections one finds in nature itself. Insofar
as these latter connections are open to experimental determination, we
can use experiment to sketch out the chain of connections in nature
and find out what depends on what, and thus we can use the connec-
tions we find in nature as a guide to the connections we seek in reason.
It may not be obvious to us at first just how we can go deductively from
41 AT X 394.
312 larger visions
the nature of light to the rainbow, but poking about with water droplets,
flasks, and prisms may suggest a path our deduction might follow.
Descartes’ science is not grounded in natural history in the direct
way that Bacon’s is, yet the sorts of tables that Bacon recommends are
not altogether irrelevant to Descartes’ procedure. Writing to Mersenne
May 10, 1632, Descartes notes that “it would be very useful if some . . .
person were to write the history of celestial phenomena in accordance
with the Baconian method . . . without any arguments or hypotheses.”42
Such tables of phenomena and their correlations with one another,
independent of any theory, are precisely what Descartes needs to
determine the relations of dependence of one phenomenon on
another necessary to perform the reductive step of the method. But
what status do the experimental facts that go into a natural history have
for Descartes?
Descartes, of course, is well known for his distrust of the senses. And
distrust them he did; he warns us that things are not at all as our senses
tell us they are, that they are not red and green, sweet or salty, that our
naive belief that all our knowledge derives ultimately from our senses
is a prejudice of sense- and body-bound youth, a prejudice that must
be rejected before we will be able to penetrate to the true nature of
things. But it is important to recognize that he did not reject experi-
ence altogether.
The fullest account of the senses is in Meditation 6. Descartes’
account there is complicated, but, in brief, the strategy is as follows.
Descartes is here dealing with something that God gave us, just as He
gave us clear and distinct perceptions. As such, Descartes argues, they
must be in some sense true: “It is doubtless true that everything that
nature teaches me [and this includes the senses] has some truth in it.”43
When it is truth about the nature of things that we are interested in, it
is the light of reason, clear and distinct perceptions, that we must turn
to first. And so, while some of the teachings of nature will turn out to
be true, it is only the intellectual examination of them that will estab-
lish this. In this way, Descartes rejects the hyperbolic rejection of
the senses that begins the Meditations and, indeed, goes on to reject
even the dream argument that is so prominent in Meditation 1.44 But,
although the teachings of nature – what we learn from our senses – are
restored, they are subordinate to reason; they may be trusted to some
42 AT I 251. 43 AT VII 80. 44 AT VII 89–90.

extent and in some circumstances, but only after they have been given
a clean bill of health by reason.
What this means in more specific terms can be illustrated by an
example from the rainbow case discussed earlier. In the rainbow case,
Descartes begins by observing that on his flask, the stand-in for the rain-
drop, there are two regions of color at roughly 42 and 52 degrees from
the ray of sunlight; these two regions correspond to the primary and
secondary bows of the rainbow. This observation is the starting place
of his account, and one can presume that he repeated it often enough
to convince himself that it was trustworthy.45 But, in the end, Descartes
actually deduces from his law of refraction that parallel rays of light
from the sun will converge at almost exactly those two angles after the
appropriate number of reflections and refractions. After giving his
account, Descartes notes that an earlier observer, Maurolycus, set the
angles incorrectly at 45 and 56 degrees on the basis of faulty observa-
tions. Descartes remarks that “this shows how little faith one ought to
have in observations which are not accompanied by the true reason.”46
It is only because we can calculate the angles of the primary and sec-
ondary bows from the account we have of the rainbow that we can be
sure of what they are, despite the fact that the investigation began with
an experimental determination of those angles. Although it is an obser-
vation that starts the ball rolling, it is only through deduction that an
experimental fact observed can actually enter the body of scientific
knowledge, in strict terms. Experience is important, but only under the
control of reason, as Descartes took great pains to emphasize in Medi-
tation 6. In a way, Descartes uses experiment here in the way one might
in geometry. In geometry, one might use carefully drawn diagrams and
measurements made from them to suggest possible theorems. But still,
one would want to hold, any geometrical facts found in this way are
grounded in the geometrical demonstration and not in the diagram
that may have originally suggested the fact to the investigator. In this
way, Descartes notes, “When [Pierre Petit] promises to refute my [laws
of ] refraction through experience, there is no more reason to listen
than if he wanted to show that the three angles of a triangle aren’t equal
45 See the letter to Mersenne, 29 January 1640, AT III 7, where he suggests that in order to
have complete assurance, a given observation with respect to the declinations of a magnet
should be performed “a thousand times” rather than just three, as another investigator,
John Pell, had done. We can presume that this is a standard that he would have adopted
for his own work, in principle if not in practice.
46 AT VI 340.
314 larger visions
to two right angles by way of some faulty square rule.”47 Observation
and experiment may play an important role in establishing an experi-
mental fact, but it is reason that must confer the ultimate status of fact-
hood on an observation. While there are important differences in
detail, of course, Descartes’ account here is not unlike Bacon’s; for both
there is an important sense in which theory must constitute experi-
mental facts.
There is one further feature of Descartes’ attitude toward experi-
ment and experimental facts that I would like to call attention to here.
One of Descartes’ basic commitments, indeed, one of his obsessions, is
the rejection of authority and the consequent centrality of the individ-
ual over community. In the Regulae Descartes emphasizes that only what
an individual intuits and deduces is real knowledge for him; knowledge
by authority is no knowledge at all (Rule 3). The whole message of the
Discours de la méthode is the rejection of authority and the importance
of the individual’s building a world for himself.48 This is the project that
is actually taken up in the Meditations, where the meditator begins by
obliterating the world around him and, starting from scratch, builds a
world from the cogito, the thought of a solitary self. This radical indi-
vidualism is also reflected in Descartes’ attitude toward experimental
science. Part 6 of the Discours de la méthode is concerned with the need
for additional experiments in order to complete Descartes’ scientific
program. Descartes begins by reporting the attitude he took in his
youth. Originally, he reports, he believed that he should publish the
details of his foundations for physics and the full system based on those
in order to stimulate the work of others, to get others to build on the
foundations he had laid and make the new observations necessary to
finish the job. And so, Descartes thought, publishing his thoughts
would convince others to “assist me in seeking those [observations]
which remain to be made” (i.e., send money). At that time Descartes
also hoped that others would “communicate to me the observations
47 Descartes to Mersenne, 9 February 1939, AT II 497.

48 In Part 1 of the Discours, e.g., Descartes elaborately goes through what he learned at
School, only to argue that there is little of value in it; instead, he concludes, he must
leave School and the traditions that it embodies and find out how things are for himself.
In Part 2, he employs city planning and architectural metaphors to put forward the view
that the best cities and houses are those that arise not from the accidents of history but
from the careful planning of a single individual. It is no accident that the Discours is written
in the first person, as a single individual giving an account of the world he builds for
himself.
they have already made.”49 But, motivated at least in part by the con-
demnation of Galileo in 1633, Descartes reports that he changed his
mind about the wisdom of publishing his full system of physics.50 And
with that change came others. He came to think, first of all, that others
were not really in much of a position to advance his program; as the
building metaphors of Part 2 of the Discours suggest, that work is best
done that is done by a single individual.51 But Descartes also changed
his mind about the value of experiments done by others. Descartes
admits that “as regards observation . . . one man could not possibly
make them all.”52 But, he asserts, apart from paid assistants, “he could
not usefully employ other hands than his own.”53 Descartes continues,
“And as for observations that others have already made, even if they
were willing to communicate them to him . . . they are for the most part
bound up with so many details or superfluous ingredients that it would
be very hard for him to make out the truth in them. Besides, he would
find almost all of these observations to be so badly explained or indeed
so mistaken . . . that it would simply not be worthwhile for him to spend
the time required to pick out those which he might find useful.”54
Descartes concludes, “So, if there were someone in the world whom we
knew for sure to be capable of making discoveries of the greatest pos-
sible importance and public utility, and whom other men accordingly
were eager to help in every way to achieve his ends, I do not see how
they could do anything for him except to contribute towards the
expenses of the observations that he would need and, further, prevent
unwelcome visitors from wasting his free time.”55 The message is clear:
send your money, not your observations, to R. Descartes, care of the
publisher. (And do not visit, either.) Experimental science is thus, for
Descartes, a solitary activity, one that does not require a community,
one that would be in fact hindered by having to take place within a
community.
While Descartes and Bacon may agree to some extent about the con-
stitution of experimental facts, the contrast with Bacon here is dramatic.
In response to the failure of the philosophy of the Schools – their argu-
ments from authority, their book learning, and their disputations –
Bacon turns to a new society and new forms of cooperative enterprise.
Bacon’s new society, the House of Salomon, is a society that institution-
49 AT VI 65; see also AT VI 63. 50 AT VI 60, 65.

51 AT VI 69; on the building metaphor, see AT VI 11ff.
52 AT VI 72. 53 Ibid. 54 AT VI 73. 55 Ibid.
316 larger visions
alizes his new experimental philosophy and exists outside the Schools.
Descartes’ response to the crisis in the Schools is altogether different.
Instead of trying to create a new society, Descartes sees inherent prob-
lems in any cooperative conception of the creation of new knowledge.
Descartes thus chooses to place the scientist outside society.
The Royal Society and the New Experimental Philosophy

When Thomas Sprat stepped forward in 1667 to defend the new Royal
Society of London, a self-professed society for the promotion and per-
fection of the experimental approach to science, it was Bacon to whom
he turned as a distinguished ancestor. He writes,
I shall onely mention one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the
whole extent of this Enterprize, as it is now set on foot; and that is, the Lord
Bacon. In whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments,
that can be produc’d for the defence of Experimental Philosophy; and the
best directions, that are needful to promote it. All which he has already
adorn’d with so much Art; that if my desires could have prevail’d with some
excellent Friends of mine, who engag’d me to this Work: there should have
been no other Preface to the History of the Royal Society, but some of his
Writings.56
But in what sense was Bacon an inspiration? Certainly Sprat and his
colleagues were attracted by his emphasis on experiment and natural
history as the basis of all natural philosophy and by his emphasis on the
cooperative and communal nature of scientific investigation. Thus,
Joseph Glanvill writes in his Plus ultra (1668), a sympathetic, although
not-quite-authorized, account of the Society:
The deep and judicious Verulam [i.e., Bacon] . . . proposed . . . to reform and
inlarge Knowledge by Observation and Experiment, to examine and record
Particulars, and so to rise by degrees of Induction to general Propositions,
and from them to take direction for new Inquiries, and more Discoveries,
56 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowl-
edge (London: 1667; reprinted Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1958),
pp. 35–36. The “excellent Friends” Sprat mentions in this passage are the other members
of the Royal Society. Sprat’s History was closely supervised by the Society, and it is fair to
read it as a representation of their collective views; on the history of the History, see
Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1967), pp. 9–19; P. B. Wood, “Methodology and Apologetics: Thomas Sprat’s History
of the Royal Society,” British Journal for the History of Science 13 (1980), pp. 1–26.
and other Axioms . . . So that Nature being known, it may be master’d,
managed, and used in the Services of humane Life. This was a mighty Design,
groundedly laid, wisely exprest, and happily recommended by the Glorious
Author, who began nobly, and directed with an incomparable conduct of Wit
and Judgment: But to the carrying it on, It was necessary there should be
many Heads and many Hands, and Those formed into an Assembly, that
might intercommunicate their Tryals and Observations, that might joyntly
work, and joyntly consider. . . . This the Great Man desired, and form’d a
SOCIETY of Experimenters in a Romantick Model; but could do no more:
His time was not ripe for such Performances.57
The “Romantick Model” is, of course, the House of Salomon in New

Atlantis; although the time may not have been ripe for the realization
of such a design in the 1620s, when Bacon envisioned it, Glanvill and
his friends thought that the 1660s was just the time to realize Bacon’s
ambitious vision.
But, although Bacon was the inspiration for the Society and was
lauded for his great vision, he was not followed in every particular.
Sprat, for example, appears to reject systematic rules of experimental
method: “The true Experimenting has this one thing inseparable from
it, never to be a fix’d and settled Art, and never to be limited by con-
stant Rules.”58 Although it is not entirely clear exactly what Sprat means
to reject, and although Bacon is not mentioned by name here, it is not
implausible to see in this a criticism of Bacon’s fixed (although not
rigidly so) methodology for experimental procedure. But most inter-
esting for my purposes is another criticism Sprat directs at Bacon:
His Rules were admirable: yet his History not so faithful, as might have been
wish’d in many places, he seems rather to take all that comes, then to choose;
and to heap, rather, then to register. But I hope this accusation of mine can
be no great injury to his Memory; seeing, at the same time, that I say he had
not the strength of a thousand men; I do also allow him to have had as much
as twenty.59
Although Bacon saw the importance of observation and experiment for

the advancement of science, his natural histories are defective, Sprat
argues. Sprat seems to recognize that Bacon does eventually sort
through and reject some of the purported experimental facts that find
57 Glanvill, Plus ultra: or, the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the Days of Aristotle
(London: 1668), pp. 87–88. On the status of Glanvill’s Plus ultra, and its relation to the
Royal Society, see Purver, The Royal Society, pp. 13–14.
58 Sprat, The History, p. 89. 59 Sprat, The History, p. 36.
318 larger visions
their way into his natural histories; although Bacon initially takes “all
that comes,” he does eventually choose what to base his induction on
and does eventually reject observations that conflict with the general
principles arrived at by induction. But, Sprat suggests, one must be
more selective in the first place and weed out bad observations before
they find their way into one’s natural history. Such careful attention to
the establishment of experimental facts is basic to the mission of the
new Royal Society, Sprat argues; indeed, it is built into the very struc-
ture of that community.
The Royal Society was interested in gathering experimental facts
from all who had them to contribute. But, Sprat writes, “I shall lay it
down, as their Fundamental Law, that whenever they could possibly get
to handle the subject, the Experiment was still perform’d by some of
the Members themselves.”60 It is crucial here that the experiment be
performed not by one of the members, but by some of the members.
When the Royal Society took it on itself to sponsor an experiment or
series of experiments, it was a matter of policy, Sprat reports, that
a number of different members be involved. Experiments were
organized, Sprat writes,
either by allotting the same Work to several men, separated one from
another; or else by joyning them into Committees. . . . By this union of eyes,
and hands there do these advantages arise. Thereby there will be a full com-
prehension of the object in all its appearances; and so there will be a mutual
communication of the light of one Science to another: whereas single labours
can be but as a prospect taken upon one side. And also by this fixing of several
mens thoughts upon one thing, there will be an excellent cure for that defect,
which is almost unavoidable in great Inventors. It is the custom of such
earnest, and powerful minds, to do wonderful things in the beginning; but
shortly after, to be overborn by the multitude, and weight of their own
thoughts; then to yield, and cool by little and little; and at last grow weary,
and even to loath that, upon which they were at first the most eager. . . . For
this the best provision must be, to join many men together.61
The claim that experiments must be done by a number of different

hands is quite explicit and quite carefully thought out; it is only if a
60 Sprat, The History, p. 83. When reporting this as “their Fundamental Law,” Sprat is report-
ing what they agreed to do; what they actually did is quite another question, of course. In
what follows I shall limit myself to a discussion of what the Royal Society thought of
themselves as doing, their avowed practice, and shall not be concerned with what they
actually did.
61 Sprat, The History, pp. 84–85; cf. 100. See also Glanvill, Plus ultra, pp. 108–9, 114.
number of different people are involved in carrying out experiments
and replicating the experiments that others submit that we can avoid
the errors that inevitably creep in if only one experimenter is involved,
even if he repeats his experiment numerous times.
In addition to the claim that experiments must be repeated by a
variety of hands, Sprat further reports that facts must be established
through the consensus of the community as a whole. He writes:
[After the performance of an experiment] comes in the second great Work
of the Assembly; which is to judg, and resolve upon the matter of Fact. In this
part of their imployment, they us’d to take an exact view of the repetition of
the whole course of the Experiment . . . ; never giving it over till the whole
Company has been fully satisfi’d of the certainty and constancy; or, on the
otherside, of the absolute impossibility of the effect. This critical, and reiter-
ated scrutiny of those things, which are the plain objects of their eyes; must
needs put out of all reasonable dispute, the reality of those operations, which
the Society shall positively determine to have succeeded. . . . There is not any
one thing, which is now approv’d and practis’d in the World, that it is con-
firm’d by stronger evidence, than this, which the Society requires; except
onely the Holy Mysteries of our Religion.62
Experimental facts are now established by the community as a whole.

In this way, we have a new sense of reproducibility entering into the
conception of an experimental fact. On the commonsense view, a view
common to the generation preceding the Royal Society, what was
important was simply the repetition of an observation or experiment;
it did not matter who or how many did the actual repetition as long as
it was done a number of times sufficient to convince the investigator(s)
that the result was a genuine experimental fact and not just a fluke of
circumstances. But, on the view of the Royal Society, this is not suffi-
cient. For Sprat and his “excellent Friends,” to establish an experi-
mental result as a genuine fact, to enshrine it in one’s natural history
and use it as the basis of induction, the result must be repeatable (and
be repeated) by a number of different persons, or, at least, it must have
been repeated in their presence.63 Repeatability in this sense is a con-
siderably more stringent requirement for facthood.
In this we also have an important transformation in Bacon’s con-
ception of the scientific community. Sprat’s appeal to community is a
62 Sprat, The History, pp. 99–100.

63 See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 55ff. on the practice of per-
forming experiments in public for this purpose.
320 larger visions
repudiation of the Cartesian ideal of the solitary investigator, to be sure,
but it is also a repudiation of Bacon’s conception of experimental
science. Bacon saw experimental philosophy as a cooperative venture.
But for Bacon, the main advantage of the numerous investigators
working together is that more facts can be collected for one’s natural
history and consequences derived more expeditiously. As I pointed out
earlier, not one of the thirty-six investigators in the House of Salomon,
Bacon’s “Romantick Model” for the Royal Society, is involved in repro-
ducing experiments done originally by others; experiments, done by
individuals, working alone (with their servants and assistants acting only
as extensions of themselves), enter into the natural histories directly.
Nor do they ever gather together to discuss the experiments that some
members of the House are deputed to perform. But things are very dif-
ferent when the House of Salomon is built in London. There it is built
into the very structure of the Society that experiments are to be per-
formed by many hands, witnessed by many eyes, and certified as fact
by the Society as a whole. For what I have called the commonsense
conception of experiment, an experimental fact is established by an
individual through the senses. For Bacon, and in a different way for
Descartes, an experimental fact is also established by an individual,
although not directly through the senses; although Bacon recognizes
the importance of community to the advance of knowledge, in the
establishment of particular experimental facts, he seems to be as
much an individualist as Descartes is. But, on the new conception of
the Royal Society, an experimental fact can be established through the
senses but not by an individual. Experiments end and experimental
facts are constituted not when the individual investigator decides that
it is time but after an experiment is repeated by more than one inves-
tigator and when the community as a whole is satisfied that a fact has
been established.
My account of the view of experimental facthood in the Royal Society
is, in a way, not particularly novel; in essence, it is at the backbone of
Shapin and Schaffer’s important study, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.64 But
64 See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 55ff. I should emphasize that the
questions that most interest me are different from the questions that Shapin and
Schaffer attempt to answer in Leviathan and the Airpump. Their questions concern the
history of experimental philosophy as such, why experimental philosophy as such arose in
England when it did, and how and why it came to triumph over a different and nonex-
perimental conception of science, such as that represented by Hobbes. To answer this,
they appeal to the political context of the debates, and the way Hobbes’s and Boyle’s posi-
tions fit into that context. The answer they offer is interesting and worth taking seriously;
what I want to emphasize is that this communitarian view of experi-
mental facthood was something quite new, a self-conscious innovation
introduced by the Royal Society in the 1660s. One might possibly be
able to find precedents for this, although I doubt it. But what is impor-
tant is that it is an idea that is not found in the important theorists of
scientific practice in the generations immediately preceding the foun-
dation of the Royal Society and was regarded as an innovation by the
Royal Society itself, a new and improved way of thinking about experi-
ment. Which is to say that the social conception of experimental facthood is
an idea with a history; it arises at a particular time, in particular con-
tingent circumstances.
The Rhetoric of Experimental Reports and the

Constitution of Experimental Fact
Recent work on mid-seventeenth-century experimental science, partic-
ularly that of the Royal Society, has called attention to a very interest-
ing feature of the way in which experimental results are reported. The
claim is that in the mid-seventeenth century, experimental reports
become quite radically particular in contrast to what they had been in
earlier writers. In earlier writers, it is claimed, experimental reports are
given in quite general terms: Such and such may be observed in such
and such circumstances. It is striking, though, when one turns to the
reports of experimental results in the Royal Society, for example, how
particular they are; what one finds characteristically is the report of
exactly what was observed to happen in a particular place, at a partic-
ular time, with particular equipment, and particular people in atten-
dance, both the successes and the failures. This, indeed, seems to be a
matter of conscious policy. Sprat writes, “Whatever they have resolv’d
upon; they have not reported, as unalterable Demonstrations, but as
present appearances: delivering down to future Ages, with the good
success of the Experiment, the manner of their progress, the Instru-
ments, and the several differences of the matter, which they have
apply’d: so that with their mistake, they give them also the means of
finding it out.”65
but it isn’t an answer to the questions that interest me most. Shapin and Schaffer seem
to take it for granted that the very idea of experimental science carries with it a social
criterion of experimental facthood. See, e.g., Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the
Air-Pump, pp. 25ff., 77–78, 225–26, 281–82. My interest is in the circumstances under
which this criterion first arose.
65 Sprat, The History, p. 108.
322 larger visions
Dear has been particularly insistent on this point in a series of
penetrating articles.66 Dear relates this change to the rejection
of an Aristotelian conception of natural philosophy. He writes:
“Experience” as an element of scholastic natural philosophical discourse
took the form of generalized statements about how things usually occur;
as an element of characteristically seventeenth-century, non-scholastic
natural philosophical discourse it increasingly took the form of statements
describing specific events. . . . For the scholastic natural philosopher, writing
his commentaries on Aristotle, the grounding in experience of the physical
facts debated in his discussions was guaranteed by their generality as experi-
ential statements – “heavy bodies fall” is a statement to which all could assent,
through common experience embodied in authoritative texts. . . . The new
“experience” of the seventeenth century . . . established its legitimacy in his-
torical reports of events, often citing witnesses.67
This apparently stylistic difference between the old and the new is actu-
ally quite substantive, Dear argues. When experience functions as the
illustration of the universal statements that constituted the starting
place of a scientific syllogism, as it does in Aristotelian science, there is
little reason to expect controversy; all will agree that stones fall and fire
rises. But in the new experimental science, particularly as practiced in
the Royal Society, experiment functions to create novel facts. And here
the situation is quite different. And when we are dealing with novel
facts, there is a possibility for controversy that simply did not exist in
earlier, Aristotelian science. Dear writes, “Controversy, however, or the
threat of controversy, demanded more radical measures, and at the
same time placed greater emphasis on discrete events as justification
for assertions.”68 When experiment makes novel claims, Dear argues,
then the reporting of an observation or an experiment has a new func-
tion, not that of reminding the reader of something already known but
that of actually convincing the reader that the conclusion reported actu-
ally happened. This was done, Dear claims, by particularizing the report
66 Peter Dear, “Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis
76(1985), pp. 145–61; Dear, “Jesuit Mathematical Science and the Reconstitution of
Experience in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
18(1987), pp. 133–75; Dear, “Narratives,” See also Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the
Air-Pump, pp. 60ff.
67 Dear, “Jesuit Mathematical Science,” p. 134. The quotation is offered by Dear as a
summary of the main argument of Dear, “Totius in verba.”
68 Dear, “Jesuit Mathematical Science,” p. 169.
and making it the report of a particular witness on a particular occa-
sion, a procedure that bears an obvious relation to legal reasoning, as
Shapin and Schaffer note.69 Shapin and Schaffer go on to argue that
an important point of this new style of presentation is to give the reader
faith in the truth of the outcomes reported by giving him faith in the
scientist producing those outcomes. In the case of Boyle, they argue,
“It was the burden of Boyle’s literary technology to assure his readers
that he was such a man as should be believed. He therefore had to find
the means to make visible in the text the accepted tokens of a man of
good faith.”70 And what made Boyle a credible witness was detail upon
detail that made the story credible as a report of something that actu-
ally happened in the world in a particular place and at a particular
time.71
The phenomenon that Dear, Shapin, and Schaffer are pointing to
is certainly quite real; although one can certainly find earlier writers
who appear to be presenting direct reports of actual events and later
writers who present their experimental results in general terms, there
is certainly a general trend in the experimental literature toward more
and more particularity in reporting the results of experiments. And
Dear has certainly made the case that in some circumstances, at least,
this increased particularity is connected with the problem of convinc-
ing an audience to accept novel and unexpected results.72 But, I think,
novelty and the rejection of an Aristotelian conception of the function
of experience in natural philosophy are not the only factors at
work here.
Let me begin by noting that the use of general statements in report-
ing the outcomes of experiments is not necessarily connected either
with an Aristotelian conception of the use of experience or with the
reporting of non-novel facts. Take the case of Francis Bacon. Bacon
69 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 56–57.

70 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 65. On the notion of a literary tech-
nology, see p. 25. The style has another function for Shapin and Schaffer, to bring the
reader into the community of experimenters, and thus make him a “virtual” witness of
the experiment, contributing to its success in constituting an experimental fact. See
pp. 60, 63.
71 One should not overestimate the degree of detail in Boyle’s experimental reports. In the
Proëmial Essay to his Certain Physiological Essays and Other Tracts (1661), Boyle notes that
he often leaves out important particulars in reporting his experiments, for a variety of
reasons. See Robert Boyle, The Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle in Six Volumes, ed., Thomas
Birch, 2nd ed. (London: 1772), vol. I, pp. 315–16.
72 See, e.g., Dear, “Jesuit Mathematical Science,” p. 169; “Narratives,” p. 163n.
324 larger visions
takes great pains to emphasize that his use of experience is quite dif-
ferent from Aristotle’s. His is a new organon, a completely different way
of going from experience to a knowledge of the world; for Bacon, as
for his later followers, it is quite clear that his science will be built from
a collection of facts, many of which will be quite novel. Yet, as we have
seen, Bacon is quite clear that the statements of fact that make up the
bulk of his natural histories will be general rather than particular.
Although “history is properly concerned with individuals, which are cir-
cumscribed by place and time,” he writes in De Augmentis, “because of
the general resemblance which in most cases natural objects of the same
species bear to one another,” natural history most often deals with
general statements about species of things: “when you know one, you
know all.”73
Consider also the case of Gilbert. Gilbert takes great pains to empha-
size the originality of his exploration of the magnet. He writes, “This
natural philosophy [physiologia] is almost a new thing, unheard-of
before; a very few writers have simply published some meagre accounts
of certain magnetic forces. . . . Our doctrine of the loadstone is con-
tradictory of most of the principles and axioms of the Greeks.”74 But,
despite the self-conscious novelty of the experiments that Gilbert is
reporting, the form of the reports is decidedly general. Often Gilbert
simply reports the properties he has observed (numerous times, pre-
sumably) in his lodestones. For example, he writes, “Iron rubbed and
excited by a loadstone is seized at the fitting ends by a loadstone more
powerfully than iron not magnetized.”75 Even when more complicated
and more directly experimental facts are related, they are given in a rel-
atively nonparticular way: “A concave hemisphere of thin iron, a finger’s
width in diameter, is applied to the convex polar superficies of a load-
stone and properly fastened; or an iron acorn-shaped ball rising from
the base into an obtuse cone, hollowed out a little and fitted to the
surface of the stone, is made fast to the pole. . . . Fitted with this con-
trivance, a loadstone that before lifted only 4 ounces of iron will now
lift 12 ounces.”76 Although the important details are there, Gilbert gives
us only the results of the experiment, and those in general terms; in
his report there are no indications of time or place, who performed the
experiment or observed it, how many times the experiment was per-
formed, what difficulties there might have been in constructing the
73 De augmentis II.1, Bacon, The Works, vol. VIII, p. 407; see also ibid., p. 406.
74 Gilbert, De magnete, p. 1. 75 Ibid., p. 159. 76 Ibid., p. 137.
apparatus, and so on – all the features that we can find in later Royal
Society experiments, such as those of Boyle. Yet, what Gilbert was relat-
ing was decidedly novel, as he fully recognized.
The new importance of novel facts in science cannot completely
explain the new forms that experimental reports took; the importance
of novel facts was recognized without necessarily resulting in any
changes in the way in which experimental results were reported. What
other factors are relevant here? Why did the Royal Society find it nec-
essary to couple novelty of results with a new form of presentation for
those results? My suggestion is that we look to the change in the con-
ception of experimental facthood that I have been developing in this
article.
I have tried to show that with the Royal Society, we have a new
conception of experimental facthood. For earlier investigators, it
was possible for an individual working entirely alone to establish an
experimental fact, either through simple repetition of a trial or through
reasoning. And so, when a Gilbert or a Bacon or a Descartes reports
the outcome of an experiment, he can report it as fact; others may chal-
lenge what he claims to have established, but the epistemology of exper-
imental facthood does not in any way demand the concurrence of
others to constitute a fact. But, I have argued, matters are entirely dif-
ferent with respect to the conception of experimental facthood in the
Royal Society. There it is essential that others perform the experiment
and witness the results before a purported experimental fact can enter
the register of attested facts. And so, when an experimenter reports the
outcome of an experiment, or even a series of experiments, he is not
reporting anything that could possibly be an experimental fact; facts
cannot be established in that way. And so, the best that can be reported
is, as Sprat puts it, “present appearances,” the way things looked to an
individual at a given time in a given place. Only by putting this together
with the observations of others can we constitute a fact. And so, I
suggest, it is no surprise that new conventions for reporting the
outcomes of experiments come at the same time as the Royal Society
is explicitly rethinking how it is that experimental facts are to be
established.
Community and Fact

In the earlier parts of this article, I have been tracing the development
of a social conception of experimental facthood or, better, the explicit
326 larger visions
recognition of the social character of experimental facts. This is an
interesting claim in the history of the philosophy of science, perhaps.
But there is something even more interesting going on here, I
think.
It seems clear that at very least, the social criterion of experimental
facthood that I discussed in connection with the Royal Society pre-
supposes certain social structures. To consider just one way in which
this is true, consider the strong notion of reproducibility. On that
notion, as embodied in the communal conception of facthood, to
be a candidate for an experimental fact, a given experimental result
must be capable of being reproduced by different hands and eyes,
and it requires the consensus of the scientific community as a whole. It
is important here that not just anyone can participate in this enter-
prise.77 If an experiment is performed by a member of the community,
and I, for example, cannot reproduce it, that would not necessarily
count against it in the least; standing outside of the community, I
am not competent to cast my vote for or against a purported experi-
mental fact. But, on the other hand, if others in the community could
not reproduce an experiment, that might count against it. And so, the
very standard of strong reproducibility would seem to presuppose some
criterion for membership in the community of peers. In a similar way,
it presupposes various kinds of social structures that are relevant to
doing experiments and evaluating their outcomes in an appropriately
public way.
It is important to recognize that the social structures necessary for
one to be able to adopt the Royal Society’s conception of experimen-
tal facthood were not always present in society. Indeed, the community
necessary to support such a conception of science was created only in
the mid-seventeenth century, and then quite explicitly to enable its
members to realize such a communal conception of scientific activity.
This is not to say that there were not communities before the mid-
seventeenth century. To be sure, there were communities, there were
schools and universities, there were even academies and scientific soci-
eties of a sort. But (and this seems quite crucial to me) they were not
organized in a way appropriate for the performing and reperforming
of experiments or for the communal judging of the outcome of
77 Sprat, The History, p. 344, claims that virtually anyone, no matter how idle or industrious,
how learned or ignorant, can participate in the program of experimental science. But, of
course, in practice, this was not so.
experiments. This is not to say that such communities could not have
arisen before then. Descartes might perhaps have transformed the
Jesuit fathers of La Flèche or the Collège de Clermont or the members
of the Mersenne Circle into such a group. But he did not, and no one
else did either. Such a community might also have come with Bacon as
well. But even though Bacon dreamed of a community of gatherers of
facts and gave it many tasks and an elaborate organization, he never
dreamed that they would cooperate with the production of facts, and
the structure he proposed assumed that the many workers in the
House of Salomon would work alone. This suggests to me that we
must view the rise of the new communal conception of experimental
facthood, a feature of the way practitioners thought about their natural
philosophy, as intimately connected with the social transformation of
the institutional structure in which science (natural philosophy) is
done. I do not know which, if either, came first – the social transfor-
mation or the philosophical transformation. But it seems clear that the
two must go hand in hand. Thus, of course, does not answer the ques-
tion as to why the social conception of experimental facthood arose
when it did. But it does suggest a direction in which we might look for
an answer: The rise of the social conception of facthood must go hand
in hand with the emergence of the institutions appropriate to its
support.
This leads me to a final moral. It has recently become very fashion-
able to press the social factors in experimental facthood and the role
that the community plays in the establishment of experimental facts.
Indeed, the importance of social factors in recent experimental science
has led some to the view that the establishment of experimental
facts can be explained entirely in sociological terms. On their view,
establishing an experimental fact is simply a matter of social negotia-
tion among members of the relevant community. With regard to the
concept of experimental facthood in the Royal Society, Shapin and
Schaffer write that “the objectivity of the experimental matter of fact
was an artifact of certain forms of discourse and certain modes of social
solidarity.”78 Indeed, they go so far as to claim that matters of fact
are “social conventions,” the result of “negotiations between experi-
menters.”79 “A fact,” Bruno Latour writes in a similar spirit, “is what is
collectively stabilized from the midst of controversies when the activity
78 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 77–87; cf. p. 25.
79 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 226; see also pp. 281–82.
328 larger visions
of later papers does not consist only of criticism or deformation but
also of confirmation.”80
While I have considerable sympathy for the view, I think that it has
some historical limitations. One might take it for an almost a priori
truth: Belief in experimental facts, as in everything, must simply be a
function of some communal agreement or other, explicit or tacit; belief,
one might claim, as with the language in which it is framed, is by its
nature social, and whatever Descartes or Bacon or anyone else might
have thought about it, they, too, were caught up in the invisible web of
social structure. Understood in this way, the thesis would seem to be
grounded in very, very general facts about language, belief, and society,
largely independent of any particularities about history and circum-
stance. Regarded in this way, though, the thesis is a general philo-
sophical claim, one largely without any special interest to the historian
or philosopher of science. But if the sociological claim is taken to be a
thesis with real content and relevance for the historian of philosophy
and science, then I think that, at best, it can only be an account that
holds for experimental science as practiced in the last 350 years or so,
since the appropriate social (and intellectual) structures were simply
missing before then.
But, even when the social constructivist is suitably historicized, I have
my doubts. The thesis that the world of facts established by science is
simply a matter of social agreement has an obvious deflationary con-
sequence for the whole enterprise of science, turning what was thought
to be objective fact into the collective illusion of a particular commu-
nity. It would be a great irony if the social criterion of experimental fact-
hood that, in a sense, marks the beginning of modern experimental
science also marks the beginning of its demise.
80 Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 243; Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 42. For the more general account, see Latour
and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, pp. 174–83, 236–52; and Latour, Science in Action, pp. 41–44.
This, of course, is at one extreme of those who call themselves social constructivists. There
is a wide variety of such views in the literature, many too many to survey in this short
article.
SOURCES
I. Historiographical Preliminaries
1. “Does History Have a Future? Some Reflections on Bennett and
Doing Philosophy Historically” was originally published in P. Hare, ed.,
Doing Philosophy Historically (Buffalo: Pergamon Press, 1989), pp. 27–43.
It is reprinted with permission.
II. Method, Order, and Certainty

2. “Descartes and Method in 1637” was originally published in French
as: “Descartes et la méthode en 1637,” in J.-L. Marion and N. Grimaldi,
eds., Le Discours et sa méthode (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1987), pp. 65–87. It was later published in an English version as
“Descartes and Method in 1637,” in A. Fine and J. Leplin, eds., PSA
1988: Proceedings of the 1988 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science
Association (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1989), vol.
2, pp. 225–36. It is reprinted with permission from both the Presses
Universitaires de France and from the Philosophy of Science
Association.
3. “A Point of Order: Analysis, Synthesis, and Descartes’ Principles”
(with Lesley Cohen) was originally published in Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie 64 (1982), pp. 136–47. It is reprinted with permission of the
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie and Walter de Gruyter and Co.
(Berlin).
4. “J.-B. Morin and the Second Objections” was originally published in
Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, eds., Descartes and His Contemporaries:
329
330 sources
Meditations, Objections, and Replies (University of Chicago Press, 1995),
pp. 63–82. © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
5. “Descartes and Experiment in the Discourse and Essays” was originally
published in Stephen Voss, ed., Essays on the Philosophy and Science of
René Descartes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
pp. 288–310. Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used
by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
6. “Descartes on Knowledge and Certainty” was originally published
in J.-R. Armogathe and Giulia Belgioioso, eds., Descartes: Principia
Philosophiae (1644–1994) (Naples: Vivarium, 1996), pp. 341–63. It is
reprinted with permission.
III. Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature

7. “Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz” was
originally published in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 8 (1983), 105–33.
8. “Understanding Interaction: What Descartes Should Have Told
Elisabeth” was originally published in Southern Journal of Philosophy
21 supp. (1983), 15–32. It is reprinted with permission.
9. “How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance, and Occa-
sionalism” was originally published in Journal of Philosophy 10 (1987),
pp. 567–80. It is reprinted with permission.
10. “Descartes and Occasionalism” was originally published in Steven
Nadler, ed., Causation in Early Modern Philosophy (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 9–26. Copyright 1993
by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher.
11. “Semel in Vita: the Scientific Background to Descartes’ Meditations”
was originally published in Amélie Rorty, ed., Essays in Descartes’
Meditations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1986), pp. 81–116. It is reprinted with permission.
12. “Forms and Qualities in the Sixth Replies” was originally published
in French as: “Formes et qualités dans les Sixièmes Réponses,” in J.-M.
Beysadde and J.-L Marion, eds., Objecter et répondre (Paris: Presses
sources 331
Universitaires de France, 1994), pp. 449–69. It is reprinted in transla-
tion with permission.
IV. Larger Visions

13. “Descartes, or the Cultivation of the Intellect” was originally pub-
lished in Amélie Rorty, ed., Philosophers and Education (London and New
York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 124–38. It is reprinted with permission.
14. “Experiment, Community, and the Constitution of Nature in the
Seventeenth Century” was originally published in Perspectives on Science
3 (1995), pp. 173–205. © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights
reserved. It is reprinted with permission.
INDEX
Alquié, F., 56n, 57n, 59n, 164n and Descartes, 102, 307–308, 312,
Amesius, Guilelmus, 195n 314, 315–316
analysis, 243–244 Baillet, A., 71n
digressions in, 45 Barnes, Jonathan, 299n
and the Meditations, 52–63 Battail, J.-F., 203n, 210n
and synthesis, 35n, 52–63, 78–84, Beck, L.J., 35n, 39n, 46n
87n Beeckman, Isaac, 2, 47–48
synthesis and the Principles, 52–63, Belgioioso, Giulia, 114n
79, 84 Bennett, Jonathan, 6, 13–30
Anguilonius, Franciscus, 298–299 Bérule, Cardinal Pierre de, 67
animals, Cartesian conception of, 270 Beyssade, J.-M., 56n, 57n, 84, 193–194
Anscombe, E., 222n Bizer, Ernst, 195n
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 16, 195–198, Bloch, Olivier, 263n
280 Boas, Marie, 224n
Ariew, Roger, 59n, 214n body
Aristotle, 16, 222–223, 229n, 280, existence of, 45, 105–106, 214–216,
298–299, 305n, 324 244–255
Armogathe, J.-R., 83n, 95n, 114n nature of, 26–27, 112, 179–180, 253
Arnauld, Antoine, 172n wax example, 45, 244–246
astrology, 66–67 Boehm, A., 227n
astronomy, 298n Bourdin, Father, 286n
atomism, 66, 69 Boyer, Carl, 95n, 108n
temporal, 193–194 Boyle, Robert, 2, 297, 320n, 323
authority, 70n, 314–315 Brahe, Tycho, 66
Descartes on, 278–281 Broad, C.D., 143n, 150n
and the teacher, 291–295 Brockliss, L.W.B., 280n, 286n, 292n
Averroes, 17 Broughton, Janet, 179n
Ayers, Michael, 5 Brunschwig, J., 56n, 57n
Bacon, Francis, 102, 301–307, cause

316–318, 319–320, 323–324, 327 final, 155–157, 162–163
333
334 index
cause (cont.) and social structure, 326–327
secundum esse vs. secundum fieri, and theory, 109–110
192–193, 195 external world, see body, existence of
total, 204–205
certainty, 7, 111–129, 287–288, 306 fact, experimental, 296–328
childhood, 231–233, 266 in Bacon, 301–307
Clair, Pierre, 189n, 210n in Descartes, 108–109, 307–316
Clarke, Desmond, 38n, 91n, 92n, in the Royal Society, 316–321, 325
110n, 114n, 255n Fitzpatrick, Edward, 287n
Clauberg, J., 149n, 203 Fontialis, Jacobus, 200n
clear and distinct perception, 105–107 form, substantial, 112, 196–200,
validation of, 49–50 207–208, 219–220, 227–231,
Clerselier, Claude, 149n–150n, 203, 257–273
204n, 218 Frankfurt, Harry, 222n, 239n
Cohen, Lesley, 7, 35n, 52n, 106n, Freddoso, Alfred, 205n
243n
Columbus, Christopher, 305n Gabbey, Alan, 137n, 149n–150n,
Copernicanism, 69, 76 225n
Copernicus, Nicholas, 66 Gale, George, 139n
Cordemoy, G. de, 203, 218–219 Galilei, Galileo, 2, 180n, 290
Costabel, Pierre, 37n, 65n, 89n, 136n, condemnation of, 120
137n Galison, Peter, 196
Cottingham, John, 54n, 59n, 114n, Gassendi, Pierre, 2, 67, 70, 172n, 272
199n, 277n, 284n Gaukroger, S., 34n, 93n, 137n, 164n,
Couturat, Louis, 56n 190n, 225n, 240n, 284n
Curley, E.M., 57–58, 59n, 63n, 84, Geach, P.T., 222n
222n, 223n, 243n Geulincx, Arnold, 203
Gilbert, William, 299–300, 305n,
Daston, Lorraine, 297 324–325
Dear, Peter, 298, 300n, 322–325 Gilson, Étienne, 39n, 147n, 175n,
deduction, see intuition and deduction 195–196, 198n, 223n, 227n,
Dijksterhuis, E.J., 224n 228n, 229n, 231n, 242n, 292n
disputation, academic, 287–288 Girbal, F., 210n
distinction Glanvill, Joseph, 316–317, 318n
mind-body, 257–273 God
Doney, Willis, 134n, 159n, 181n, 212n, arguments for the existence of, 56,
223n 58, 71, 74–78
Drake, Stillman, 180n and divine sustenance, 163–164,
189–202, 206–208, 209–210
education, Descartes on, 20–23, and the laws of nature (motion),
277–295 155–167, 181–186
Elisabeth, Princess, of Bohemia, 134, and motion, 136, 163–165,
172, 176n, 204–205 181–186, 189–202, 206–210
Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, 63n, 228, as total cause, 204–205
272 Gouhier, Henri, 48n, 57n, 169n, 171n,
experiment, 7, 41–43, 85–110, 179n, 203n, 204n, 210n, 222n,
111–129, 296–328 234n, 241n, 242n
index 335
Goujet, C.-P., 67n intuition and deduction, 35, 48,
gravity, see heaviness 86–87, 91–94, 99–103, 107, 117,
Grene, Marjorie, 197n 119, 120–121, 124n, 281–283,
Grimaldi, N., 95n 308–309
Gueroult, Martial, 7, 26n, 54n–55n, intuition, 90–91, 305n
56–57, 84, 139n, 164n, 190n, validation of, 49–50
214n, 225n, 229n, 241n Iwanicki, Joseph, 71n
Hacking, Ian, 109 Jardine, Lisa, 56n

Hall, Thomas, 250n
Hamelin, Octave, 144n Kant, Immanuel, 16
harmony, pre-established, 135, Kemp Smith, Norman, 144n,
141–143, 160–161, 166n 149n–150n
Hatfield, Gary, 190n, 225n, 294n Kenny, Anthony, 17, 169n
heaviness, 147–149, 175–177, 187, Knappich, Wilhelm, 67n
197, 227n, 228–229, 259–260, knowledge
267–268 of particulars, 111–129
Heppe, Heinrich, 195n social factors in, 296–328
Hessing, Siegfried, 57n Knudsen, Ole, 137n
Hintikka, J., 53n Koyré, Alexandre, 149n, 222n
historiography, 3–6, 13–30 Kraye, Jill, 281n
Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 29, 143n, 181n,
237, 246n, 272n, 320n La Forge, Louis de, 189–191, 198,
Hoenen, P.H.J., 181n, 212n 201, 203, 204n, 209
Hooker, Michael, 53n, 91n, 242n, Lalande, A., 308n
255n Laporte, Jean, 144n, 168n–169n,
humanism, 280 210n
hypotheses, 115–116 Larmore, Charles, 93n
hypothetical mode of exposition, Latour, Bruno, 296n, 327–328, 328n
44 laws of nature (motion), 8, 25–26,
hypothetical reasoning, 93, 27n, 112, 180–184, 198, 206–208,
115–116, 118–119, 121–129 229n
Hyppolite, J., 57n and God, 155–167
and mind-body interaction,
ideas, 246–247 133–167, 212–213
Iltis, Carolyn, 139n Leeuwenhoek, A. van, 28
imagination, 245, 249–250 Leibniz, G.W. von, 1, 8, 16, 26, 28,
impact, see interaction, body-body 133–167 passim, 168n, 181n,
intellect, 237, 245, 249–250, 251–252, 229n
277 Lennon, Thomas, 134n, 159n, 219n,
cultivation of, 283–295 231n
interaction Lindberg, David, 227n
body-body, 170, 172, 178–188, Locke, John, 2
205–209, 212 Loeb, Louis, 170n
body-mind, 213–218 Loemker, Leroy, 229n
mind-body, 8, 133–167, 168–188, logic, 46–47, 91, 285–287
209–213 Lojacono, Ettore, 114n
336 index
Machamer, Peter, 157n, 164n observation, theory-ladenness of,
Mackie, John, 17 109–110
magnet, 122 occasionalism, 8–9, 134, 142, 160,
Mahoney, Michael, 224n 189–202, 203–220
Maimonides, 17 Ohana, J., 137n
Malebranche, Nicolas, 134n, 159n, Olscamp, Paul, 134n, 159n, 219n,
165n, 182n, 189n, 202n, 203, 224n, 231n
209n, 219, 231n O’Neill, Eileen, 170n
Malpighi, Marcello, 28 order of reasons, 44, 289–291
Marion, Jean-Luc, 38n, 95n
Marlies, Mike, 242n Pascal, Blaise, 17
Martinet, Monette, 65n Patrizi, Francesco, 68
Marx, Karl, 16 Pedersen, Kurt, 137n
Mates, Benson, 17 Pell, John, 313n
mathematics, 284 Petit, Pierre, 313
mathesis universalis, 38–39 philosophy
Mattern, Ruth, 179n mechanical, 2, 112–113, 156, 206,
Maurolycus, Franciscus, 108, 313 222–256 passim, 277
mechanical philosophy, see philosophy, Scholastic, 68–69
mechanical and science, relations, 1, 9,
Mersenne, Marin, 2, 64, 70–71, 75, 82 24–29
method, 6–7, 33–51, 86–91, 117, 285, tree of, 2, 289
308–311 physics
anaclastic line example, 36–37, Cartesian, 133–167 passim
87–90, 94, 107–108, 117, 309–311 commonsense, 226, 231, 234
Baconian, 102, 301–307 epistemological foundations of,
and experiment, 91–103 222–256
in the Meditations, 44–46 Leibnizian, 138–140
the “noblest example,” 49–50 mechanist, see philosophy,
Milhaud, G., 38n mechanical
Millet, Joseph, 54n Scholastic, 1, 112, 119–120, 227,
mind-body distinction, see distinction, 234. See also heaviness.
mind-body Pickering, Andrew, 296n
mind-body interaction, see interaction, pineal gland, 145–147
mind-body Popkin, Richard, 222n
mind-body union, see union, mind- Prendergast, Thomas, 164n, 229n
body Prost, Joseph, 203n, 210n
miracles, 157–159 Purver, Margery, 316n, 317n
More, Henry, 28–29, 172n, 184–185,
200 quality, real, 147–148, 175–177, 197n,
Morin, J.-B., 7, 64–84, 262n, 264n 227–231, 257–273
Morris, Thomas, 205n Quine, W.V.O., 1, 29
Mouy, Paul, 38n, 224n
rainbow, 40–43, 94–104, 108–109,
Neugebauer, Otto, 298n 117–119, 311–312, 313–314
Newton, Isaac, 26 Randall, J.H., 53n
Nicholas, John, 89n Ratio Studiorum, 287
index 337
reason dream argument, 238–239
vs. common sense, 222–256 passim Soprani, Anne, 66n
and experience, 104–110 Specht, Rainer, 203n, 210n
Regius, Henricus, 222n, 286n Spinoza, Benedict, 13–30 passim,
Remes, U., 53n 143n, 168n, 185n
Remnant, Peter, 144n, 153–155 Sprat, Thomas, 316–321, 325, 326n
Richardson, Robert, 169n Swerdlow, Noel, 298n
Richelieu, Cardinal Alphonse-Louis du synthesis, see analysis, and synthesis
Plessis de, 67
Roberval, Gilles Personne de, 2 Thomson, G.T., 195n
Robinet, André, 219n transubstantiation, 61n
Rochot, B., 57n, 71n tree analogy, see philosophy, tree of
Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève, 35n, 144n, Tronson, Guillaume, 65n
155n, 171n, 179n, 229n Turnbull, Robert, 157n, 164n
Rohault, Jacques, 115–116
Rorty, A., 83n, 105n, 214n, 243n, union, mind-body, 153–155, 171
294n
Royal Society of London, 297, 316–321 vacuum, 26–27, 227n, 231n, 234
Vair, Guillaume du, 65
Sabra, A.I., 137n Virgil, 305n
Schaffer, Simon, 296n, 297, 319n, Voëtius, Gisbertus, 273
320, 320n–321n, 322n, 323, 327 Voss, S., 117n
Schmitt, Charles, 280n
Schooten, van, Franz the elder, 281n Waard, C. de, 65n
Schouls, Peter, 46n Wahl, Jean, 190n
Schuster, John, 34n, 49n, 240n Wallace, William, 227n
Sédillot, M.L. Am., 67n Watson, Richard, 169n, 170n
senses and sensation, 45, 104–110, wax example, see body, wax example
127–128, 232–235, 277, 279–280, Weber, J.-P., 34n, 39n
298–299, 312–313 Westfall, Richard, 224n
knowledge from, 222–256 passim Wiener, P.P., 181n
and the Meditations, 104–107 Williams, Bernard, 4–5, 17
Serres, Michel, 28n Wilson, Margaret, 145n, 157n, 223n,
Serrus, Charles, 35n, 46n 238n, 242n, 247n, 248n, 251n
Shapin, Steven, 296n, 297, 319n, 320, wisdom, levels of, 290
320n–321n, 322n, 323, 327 Wood, P.B., 316n
skepticism, 222–223, 235–242, 255, Woolgar, Steve, 296n, 328n
279–280 Woolhouse, R.S., 157n

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DESCARTES EMBODIED

This volume collects some of the seminal essays on Descartes by Daniel

Daniel Garber is Lawrence Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor

Although these essays were originally published at different times, in

AT Descartes, René, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed., Charles Adam

AT remains the standard original-language text, and CSM and CSMK

My interest in Descartes was originally piqued when, as a graduate

3 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. It has recently appeared in French as La

5 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

DOES HISTORY HAVE A FUTURE?

Some Reflections on Bennett and Doing Philosophy Historically

The history of philosophy seems to play a very significant role in the

Bennett’s interest here is clear: it is finding philosophical truth and

1 Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing

Bennett completes the thought a few pages later:

4 Ibid., pp. 372, 357. 5 Ibid., p. 38. 6 Ibid., p. 41.

7 Ibid., pp. 15–16.

8 Ibid., pp. 15, 35, 372.

In Defense of Disinterested History

9 Descartes, Discours de la methode, I, AT VI 9–10; CSM I 115.

This conversation is valuable to us for an interesting reason. According

Through such experience in books and in the world Descartes claims

11 Discours I, AT VI 5; CSM I 113. 12 Discours I, AT VI 6; CSM I 113–14.

Raising Questions: Science and Philosophy

14 Bennett, Spinoza, p. 24.

15 See, e.g., Discours I, AT VI 6, 8–9; CSM I 113, 114–15.

18 Principia II 36, AT VIIIA 61; CSM I 240.

Microscopic examiners are being called upon to support one of the

25 See C. I. Gerhardt, ed., Leibniz: Philosophische Schriften (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhand-

METHOD, ORDER, AND CERTAINTY

DESCARTES AND METHOD IN 1637

3 See ibid. §§ 19, 55.

Table 1. Anaclastic Line Example

11 This paragraph is a summary of the argument given in Discourse 8 of the Meteors, AT VI

Q1. What causes the rainbow (two regions of color)?

[Rainbows appear only in the

Q4. How does light pass through media?

D1a. Law of refraction D1b. The only change in a restricted

13 In a letter of 8 October 1629 Descartes wrote to Mersenne that he is working on “a small

20 See Schuster, “Mathesis,” pp. 58–59.

Analysis, Synthesis, and Descartes’ Principles

This essay was written jointly with Lesley Cohen.

In the Second Replies Descartes explicitly relates this distinction

6 A similar point is made by J. Brunschwig in “La preuve ontologique interprétée par M.

By the end of December, it is clear that Descartes has actually begun to

I have resolved to spend [this year] writing my philosophy in such an order

J.-B. MORIN AND THE SECOND

Morin, Mersenne, and Descartes

22 AT III 765–66. 23 AT VII 128.

25 Morin, Astrologia gallica, p. 2; AT VII 124–25.

Descartes’ Critique of Morin

(Morin, like Descartes, appeals frequently to the light of nature.)

31 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

35 Ibid., p. 15. 36 Ibid., p. 10.

38 AT III 275. 39 AT III 293–94.

This last phrase seems to be a clear reference to Morin’s pamphlet. And

41 AT VII 157. 42 AT VII 158–59. 43 AT VII 156.

44 However, note Descartes’ Axiom 6, in AT VII 165–66. 45 AT VII 162–63.

47 Morin, Astrologia gallica, p. 5. 48 Ibid. 49 AT VII 163.

The criticism is just, if we assume that Descartes had in mind Viète’s

DESCARTES AND EXPERIMENT IN THE

It is generally recognized that knowledge for Descartes is the clear and

By “certain and evident cognition” here, Descartes seems to mean

Deduction is defined in terms of intuition; it is a chain of intuitions,