Descartes: A Biography

c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

Descartes and Princess Elizabeth 

passions in the wider sense).This effort soon resulted in a draft treatise

onthe passions, which Descartes wrote during the winter of–.

He apparently gave Elizabeth a copy of this draft treatise in March,

when he visited The Hague, and she began to read and comment on it in

April.

Elizabeth, as usual, both apologized for her ‘stupidity’ and raised some

telling objections to the Cartesian speculations. Descartes had suggested

that there is a small number of basic passions, such as wonder, love, hatred,

desire, joy, and sadness, and that each of these results from a specific flow of

animal spirits from the heart to the brain.Elizabeth asked, reasonably,

how he could determine which flows of animal spirits cause different

emotions.

Idonot see how it is possible to know the different movements of the blood which

cause the five primitive passions, because the passions never occur alone. For example,

love is always accompanied by desire and joy, or by desire and sadness, and as love gets

stronger the other emotions increase too....How is it possible, then, to distinguish the

difference in the beating of the pulse...and in other changes in the body, which are

used to discover the nature of these motions? The motion that you mention, for each

of the passions, is not the same for every temperament. In my own case, sadness always

takes away my appetite even though it is not accompanied by any aversion, which I

experience only on the death of some friend. (iv.–)

The mind-body connection continued to crop up in subsequent corre-

spondence between Elizabeth and Descartes. When she told him about

a stomach illness in June,heagreed that an appropriate diet and

exercise were a good idea. However, the remedies ‘of the soul’ are even

better.

The structure of our body is such that certain bodily movements follow naturally from

certain thoughts, as one sees that blushing follows from embarrassment, tears from

sorrow, and laughter from joy. I do not know of any thought that is more appropriate

forconserving one’s health than the strong conviction and firm belief that the structure

of one’s body is so good that, on condition that one has been healthy once, one cannot

easily fall ill unless one accedes to some significant excess or unless the air or other

external causes harm us. If someone then falls ill, they can easily recover their health

bythe sheer force of nature, especially when they are still young. (v.)

Descartes was exploring how the natural unity of mind and body was

central not only to metaphysics but to human health. He was encouraged

in that enterprise by Elizabeth’s questions about health, happiness, and