c CUNYB/Clarke December, :
The ScientificEssaysand theDiscourse on Method in the case of the three scientific essays, Descartes borrowed some of its
content from material that he had written over a number of years and that
still remained unpublished. These sources included a draft autobiography
that he had discussed with Balzac in; theRules;anearly draft of
a treatise on metaphysics; and, most of all,The Worldand theTreatise
on Man,inwhich his general approach to natural philosophy had been
developed.He may have written the final section (Part VI) first, because
it is the only section that refers to the accompanying essays. Having done
that, he then added autobiographical material, four rules that summarize
his method, eight pages of a detailed description of blood circulation that
seems oddly out of context, and a somewhat protracted account of his
frequent changes of plan about publishing or not publishingThe World.
Descartes’ correspondence with Mersenne and Huygens, while the sci-
entific essays were in production, shows that he changed the content of
theDiscourse, and that he modified his original ambition from a ‘project
of a universal science’ to a ‘preface or advice about method’. This scaling
down of plans is reflected in the text of theDiscourseitself, when he writes
in Part I: ‘my plan here is not to teach the method that everyone must
follow in order to guide their reason, but merely to explain how I have
tried to guide my own’ (vi.). Since no one can argue that a fable is not
true, he lapses into that metaphor again to characterize his comments on
method. ‘Since I am proposing this work as a history or, if you prefer, a
fable...I hope it will be useful for some readers without being harmful
to others, and that everyone will be grateful for my frankness’ (vi.). The
same diffidence or defensiveness reappears in Part II, where he claims
that his aim was never more ambitious than ‘an attempt to reform my own
thoughts and to build on a foundation that was entirely my own’. He does
not advise ‘anyone else to imitate it’ (vi.). With all these disclaimers in
place, he then summarizes four rules that are borrowed from theRules,
butthat in fact give very little indication of how to realize the significant
results of the three essays.
Descartes thought that he could also illustrate the range of disciplines to
which his new method applied by giving examples of the progress that he
had made in metaphysics, physiology, and generally in natural philosophy.
The brief digression into metaphysics, by which he meant arguments
about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, outlined
the approach to which he returned later in theMeditations. Likewise, the
claim that he had discovered explanations of many natural phenomena was