Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

included heliocentrism. He offered instead some samples of the results

that one could expect from his basic theory when applied to specific areas

such as dioptrics. For good measure, he made sure that the book appeared

anonymously. The lead-in period took more than three years.

Amsterdam,–

During the yearsto,Descartes lived in Amsterdam for about

oneyear only, March/Aprilto spring, before continuing

his peripatetic existence in Utrecht, Leiden, and Alkmaar. While at

Amsterdam, he lodged with a bookseller and former French teacher,

Jacob Thomasz Sergeant, in the house that is now Westermarkt, scarcely

a hundred metres from another house that has since become much more

famous as Anne Frank’s refuge from German agents during the Second

World War.Toward the end of June, his former house companion, Henri

Reneri, moved to Utrecht to take up his new post as professor of philos-

ophy at the Higher School of Utrecht – which became a university two

years later. This period was dominated by work on optics, an interest that

paralleled Beeckman’s research on lenses and caused the Dutch physicist

to visit Amsterdam on a number of occasions to consult with an English

lens grinder.When Beeckman came as usual from Dordrecht, on Satur-

day,August,hebrought with him a copy of Galileo’s controversial

book, which was not generally available in the United Provinces. He left

again on Monday morning, so Descartes had the book for no more than

‘thirty hours’ and had an opportunity merely ‘to glance through the entire

text’ (i.). When he reported his reading of Galileo to Mersenne, his

reaction was generally positive, but dominated throughout by comparison

to the unpublishedWorld, the ‘treatise that I decided to suppress’ (i.).

He then quoted for Mersenne part of the text of Galileo’s condemnation

that had been published by the papal legate at Liege on` September

:

The most eminent cardinals, inquisitors general, pronounced and declared that there

seemed to be a serious suspicion that Galileo was heretical because he adopted a false

doctrine, contrary to the sacred and divine scriptures. He claimed that the Sun is the

centre of the world, that it does not move from dawn to dusk; that, on the contrary,

the Earth moves and is not the centre of the world; and he believed that this theory

could be defended as probable even though it had been declared contrary to sacred

scripture. (i.)