Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

(i.)inorder to avoid the temptation to complete and publish it.

Huygens’ disappointment was obvious. He wrote again in November,

requesting that Descartes publish his other writings because they were

destined to ‘cleanse the world of a universal flood of errors and ignorance’

(i.). However, this request was no more successful than Mersenne’s

of the previous year. The author’s determination to keepThe Worldsecret

was confirmed when Descartes told Pollot, in, that the original rea-

sons for suppressing publication ‘seemed to get stronger from one day to

the next’ (i.). If he had to choose, he would prefer that people blame

him for his silence rather than for the alleged unorthodoxy of what he had

written. Nonetheless, while he continued to resist requests to publishThe

World, Descartes frequently appealed to the unpublished text to support

replies to objections to hisEssays. This cannot have been a satisfactory

response for his critics, who were told in effect that he had stronger argu-

ments to support his assumptions than they had seen but that they could

not read them.

This studied appeal to general principles that had been outlined in

The Worldtook the form of claiming, as Descartes had already intimated

in theDiscourse, that all the apparently disparate elements of his natu-

ralphilosophy fitted together into a coherent whole. Consequently, his

conclusions could not be examined piecemeal, independently of the fun-

damental, unpublished insights on which they depended. For example, he

wrote to Mersenne (January): ‘I would be very pleased if those who

wished to raise objections took their time and if they tried to understand

everything that I wrote before judging one part of it, because the whole

fits together and the conclusion serves to prove the beginning’ (i.–).

He provided a longer version of the same argument for Father Vatier:

As regards light, if you consult page three of theDioptrics,you will see that I said

there explicitly that I would speak about it only hypothetically. In fact, the treatise that

contains the whole body of my physics carries the nameOn Light,inwhich I explain

light more fully and in greater depth than anything else. Therefore I did not wish to

repeat the same things elsewhere....mythoughts are so interconnected that I dare to

hope that my principles – once people have studied them enough to become familiar

with them and to consider them all together – will be found to be as well proved by

the consequences that are drawn from them as the waxing and waning of the moon

proves that its light is borrowed. (i.,)

There is an obvious sleight of hand involved here. It is true that Descartes

had usedOn Lightas an alternative title for the first part ofThe World, and