C CUNYB/Clarke December, :
AFabulous World (–) Earth as simply one planet that is moving in a vortex around the Sun. It is
easy to see why Descartes wrote to Mersenne, in the letter quoted earlier
from November, that the motion of the Earth around the Sun was
an integral part of his cosmology and that it could not be adjusted without
fundamentally recasting the whole theory. ‘It is so connected with all the
parts of my treatise, that I could not detach it from them without making
everything that remains defective’ (i.).
The official reason Descartes gave for withholding hisWorldfrom pub-
lication was the church’s condemnation of Galileo, and the fact that his
ownbook assumed the same heliocentric theory that had provoked that
judgment. However, the implications of theTreatise on Manfortraditional
theological beliefs were equally radical. Since no one readThe Worldfor
many years, its implications for a theory of the human mind came to the
surface only later in Descartes’ life, in the course of answering critics of the
Meditations. The scene for these later problems was clearly set in the early
s.
TheTreatise on Manopens with the following sentence, in which the
task of explanation is divided into two parts: ‘These men [i.e. those
described in thisTreatise] will be composed, as we are, of a soul and a
body. I must describe for you first the body on its own; and then the soul,
again on its own; and finally I must show you how these two natures would
have to be joined and united so as to constitute men resembling us’ (xi.
–). The distinction of body and mind reflects Descartes’ strategy
of attempting to explain all natural phenomena by analogy with complex
machines, and of leaving for further work those features of human expe-
rience that seem to be inexplicable in this way. ‘We see clocks, artificial
fountains, mills, and other similar machines which, even though they are
only made by men, have the power to move of their own accord in various
ways’ (xi.). If the human body is created by God, then it follows that a
divine artificer could construct a much more sophisticated machine than
anything that results from human ingenuity. The apparently self-moving
and self-controlling features of human bodies could therefore be explained
byanalogy with the machines in the royal gardens that had been designed
to simulate the behaviour of animals and human beings.
As already mentioned at the conclusion of Chapter, these had been
described by Salomon de Caus, and they provided a model for constructing
mechanical explanations of apparently nonmechanical phenomena. The
machines in the royal gardens, which were able to ‘play certain instruments