Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

If you find it surprising that I do not use qualities that are called ‘heat’, ‘cold’, ‘humidity’

and ‘dryness’ in order to explain these elements, as the philosophers do, I shall tell you

that these qualities seem to me to be in need of explanation themselves and, if I am

not mistaken, that not only these four qualities but all the others too, and even all the

formsofinanimate bodies, can be explained without having to assume for that purpose

anything else in their matter apart from the motion, size, shape and arrangement of

its parts. (xi.–)

The project of explaining natural phenomena is thus reduced to imagining

various combinations of parts of matter in motion that could conceivably

cause our perceptions of such phenomena.

Such explanations are evidently hypothetical. This feature of the enter-

prise is made explicit when Descartes invites readers to imagine a com-

pletely new world:

I wish to cloak part of my discourse in the invention of a fable through which, I hope,

the truth will appear sufficiently and will be no less pleasing to see than if I presented

it completely naked. Thus allow your thought to go outside this world, for a short

time, to come to see a completely new world that I shall bring to life before you in

imaginary spaces. The philosophers tell us that these spaces are infinite; we should

believe them in this case, because they themselves invented them....let us suppose

that God creates anew all around us so much matter that, in whatever direction our

imagination may be able to stretch, it would no longer perceive any place in it [infinite

space] that is empty. (xi.–)

This imaginative ploy releases its author from the obligation to explain

immediately how the hypothetical world he constructs matches the world

of our daily experience. He can begin anew, tracing the steps of a hypo-

thetical Creator, by placing matter in space, giving it an initial quantum of

motion, and imposing on matter in motion whatever laws are appropriate

to the creative designs of the Creator. The challenge then is to explain

how, from these modest beginnings, all the natural phenomena that we

experience could have evolved over time.

ForGod has established these laws so wondrously that, even if we were to imagine that

he created nothing more than what we have mentioned so far, and even if he imposed

onit no order or proportion, but made it like the most confused and disordered chaos

that poets could describe, the laws are enough to cause the parts of this chaos to

disentangle from each other and to become arranged in such a good order that they

would have the form of a very perfect world, in which one could see not only some

light but also all the other things, both general and particular, that appear in the real

world. (xi.–)