Descartes: A Biography

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Descartes and Princess Elizabeth 

I get your opinion, because you are good enough to agree to cure me both mentally

and physically. (iv.)

This request opened up a new line of discussion that soon returned

to the original question that had caught Elizabeth’s attention, namely,

the ways in which body and mind are so related that each affects the

other.

Descartes’ extended discussion of the blood and the spleen, in May

or June, presupposes the kind of close interaction between mind

and body that their earlier discussion had failed to explain. He uses an

example that was familiar from his school days to explain the effects

onan audience of watching a tragedy on stage. When people go to the

theatre, they know intellectually that the scenes performed on the stage

are ‘imaginary fables’. Nonetheless, once their imagination is caught up

in the experience, various bodily consequences follow automatically. He

speculates that thicker particles in the blood may cause an obstruction

in the spleen, while the more subtle and active particles travel to the

lungs and trigger a cough.He then develops a theme that became a

constant feature of his account of the imagination. We cannot directly

affect our imagination simply by deciding to change it, any more than we

can affect our passions by a simple decision. However, our imagination

may be indirectly controlled if we imagine other things that can displace

harmful images or at least counteract their influence. As confirmation

of this theory, Descartes gives the example of the ‘dry cough and pale

complexion’ that he inherited from his mother, as a result of which most

doctors told him that he would die young. He claims to have overcome the

effects of his unlucky inheritance by always considering things from the

most favourable perspective – which sounds implausible, based on the evi-

dence of many of his letters – so that his inherited indisposition gradually

disappeared.

This kind of psychotherapy, however, did not preclude other traditional

medical therapies. Accordingly, Descartes recommends that Elizabeth also

take the spa waters, and follow the usual advice of physicians when doing

so. He seems to have been interested in pursuing such physical therapies

in parallel because, according to one of his contemporaries in Utrecht, he

‘investigated night and day without intermission the nature of things by

trying to explain the properties of plants and animals’.Since Elisabeth

evidently knew about these investigations into the therapeutic properties