Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

This healing of the strained relations with the French Jesuits continued

during the subsequent years. When Descartes visited Paris in the summer

of,hehad an opportunity to visit with Father Bourdin and to report

later to Father Dinet that Bourdin gave him reason to hope that they could

be friends.When thePrincipleswas published in, Descartes sent

adozen copies to Bourdin and asked him to distribute them among the

Jesuits in France. Given these developments, it was not surprising that

Descartes’ final contribution to the Utrecht controversy, hisApologetic

Letterof/, referred to the Seventh Objections and his own replies in

these words: ‘That whole book was written against a certain Jesuit whom,

however, I am now happy to have as my friend’ (viii-.[French],

[Latin]).

The philosophical problems about the nature of the soul were not

resolved as easily as the apparent hostility of the Jesuits. Descartes

remained an implacable critic of real qualities and substantial forms,

because he thought they were useless for explaining any natural phe-

nomenon. For example, he wrote to Mersenne in April:

Idonot assume that there are any ‘real qualities’ in nature which are added to a

substance like little souls to their bodies and which could be separated from them

bydivine power....My principal reason for rejecting these real qualities is that I do

not see that the human mind has within itself any notion or specific idea by which

it conceives them. Thus when we name them and claim that there are such things,

weassert something that we do not conceive and we do not understand what we are

saying ourselves. The second reason is that philosophers assumed these real qualities

only because they believed that, otherwise, they could not explain all the phenomena

of nature. On the contrary, I find that one can explain such phenomena much better

without them. (iii.–)

The philosophers who proposed philosophical entities such as ‘real qual-

ities’ and ‘substantial forms’ thought of them as two different types of

reality. Descartes, however, tended to discuss them together, as postulated

entities that had been invented to explain natural phenomena but that

failed miserably in their intended function. Despite this consistent crit-

icism, Descartes continued to speak of the human mind as an exception

to his general rejection of substantial forms, and this is reflected in the

letter just quoted in which he compares real qualities in other natural

phenomena to ‘little souls’.

Thus, in parallel with the critique of substantial forms in other contexts,

Descartes continued to defend a real distinction between the soul and the