Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

what the Bible means, even in passages about natural phenomena. How-

ever, he distinguished between the authoritative teaching of the church,

as expressed by the Pope or a general council, and the decisions about

what books should be published or censored, which was an administrative

decision by a small group of cardinals or theologians. That provided an

alternative resolution to the one proposed by Galileo, and it gave him

enough wiggle room to avoid Rome’s decision without directly addressing

the fundamental issue about how to interpret Scripture.

Descartes soon began to show signs of paranoia or, at least, of extra

sensitivity (in May), when he alerted Mersenne that some of their

letters had been intercepted, probably by people who recognized their

handwriting and who were hoping to intercept a copy ofThe World.This

is more likely a symptom of Descartes’ anxiety about the orthodoxy of his

physics, or of the unreliability of the messengers who delivered letters,

than evidence that some of his critics were planning to report him to the

Inquisition. Whatever the truth of the matter, Descartes had laboured for

over four years to write his first book, and, just as it was ready to be shown

to Mersenne, he felt constrained to hide it and to return to Amsterdam.

The Worldremained unpublished until thirty years later, when Descartes’

literary executor, Claude Clerselier, published a French edition of the first

part in.

The World, or A Treatise on Light

It is not clear what was included in the treatise that Descartes promised

to send to Mersenne in. The manuscript ofThe Worldwas not found

intact during the inventory of Descartes’ writings after his death.Baillet

claims, but without providing supporting evidence, that the text ofThe

Worldthat was published by Clerselier inwas ‘very imperfect’ and

that it had been ‘reduced to a very small summary’.This may well be

correct. The frequent references in Descartes’ correspondence during the

period–suggest that he was working on a wide range of issues in

physics and physiology, and that he hoped to integrate many of these dis-

parate studies into a comprehensive, unified theory. Some parts of this

large-scale project were later reworked and published as theDioptrics,

Meteors and Geometry(), and some were recast to provide the main

ideas for Parts II–IV of thePrinciples of Philosophy(). The