c CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Descartes and Princess Elizabeth examine later whether those different names signify different things or
oneand the same thing’ (vii.).
This seems like a reasonable argument, and it might have been accepted
as such had Descartes not attempted to develop it into an argument in
favour of the immateriality of the human mind when he was pressed
further by other objections. Not only the objections of Hobbes – whose
view might have been predictable – but all the other five sets of objections to
theMeditationsincluded versions of the same question. Caterus, Gassendi,
Arnauld, and Mersenne all requested more convincing reasons to support
the Cartesian conclusion. Mersenne put the point as follows, in the Sixth
Objections: ‘Someone might maintain...that you are nothing else but
bodily motion. Can you show us...that it is impossible for thoughts to
emerge from these motions?’ (vii.). Descartes acknowledges the impact
of these objections to theMeditations,inthe ‘Preface to the Reader’.The first objection was: from the fact that the human mind reflecting on itself does
not perceive itself as anything other than a thinking thing, it does not follow that its
nature or essence consists merely in the fact that it is a thinking thing, where the
word‘merely’ excludes everything else that might also be said to belong to the nature
of the soul. I reply to this objection that, in that context, I did not wish to exclude
other things with respect to the truth of the question...butmerely with respect to
myownperception....Iwill show below how, from the fact that I do not know
anything else that belongs to my essence, it follows that nothing else does in fact
belong to it. (vii.–)This attempted defence captures neatly the transition that worried critics.
Descartes claimed that, from the point of view of our subjective expe-
rience, thinking lacks many of the features that normally characterize a
physical process. For example, it makes no sense to think of a thought as
having a particular size or shape, as being coloured or plain, as being at
rest or pushed about by impact with other bodies. His reply to Hobbes
supported only the cautious conclusion: one should not assume in advance
that thinking is, or is not, a physical process. However, he evidently thought
that he had supplied an argument in theMeditationsforthe much stronger
conclusion that the human mind is in fact as immaterial as it appears to
be. That is the focus of Elizabeth’s question.
Unfortunately, either Descartes failed to reply to this question from
Elizabeth or his reply has been lost. He was distracted in the following
weeks by the summons from theVroedschapof Utrecht to appear before
them to answer charges of defaming Voetius. His energies were therefore