Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

questions than an explanation of inanimate bodies. Thus Descartes was

implicitly acknowledging to Dinet, in the same paragraph, that readers

would find his book ‘innocent’ because it did not contain any discussion

of controversial topics about living creatures.

The letter to Father Bourdin was accompanied by a rather generous

gift of twelve copies of thePrinciples,one for himself and the others for

distribution to various Jesuits who knew Descartes. He mentions Father

Charlet and Dinet – evidently, he was expecting Father Bourdin to forward

a copy of his book and the accompanying letters to both of them (iv.).

Other copies were intended for Father Jean Franc ̧ois, who had taught

philosophy and mathematics at La Fl`eche when Descartes was a student,

and Fathers Vatier, Mesland, Fournier, and Grandamy. Once these gifts

were dispatched, Descartes would return to the challenge, in early,of

encouraging the Jesuits to adopt thePrinciplesas a basis for the philosophy

courses they taught in colleges throughout France.

Descartes seems to have spent less than two weeks in Paris in October

, since he was anxious to return to the reclusive life he enjoyed near

Alkmaar. Before leaving, he met Kenelm Digby, who was then resident in

Paris as chancellor to the English queen in exile, Henrietta Maria. Digby

was about to publish hisTwo Treatisesof,inwhich he had adopted

a line of argument about the human soul that was similar to Descartes’.

Digby’s project was more explicitly an attempt to enhance the status of the

human soul by emphasizing the limitations of material bodies – so much

so that he thought he should justify the apparent paradox in the first of two

Prefaces to his book. Digby’s worry was the following. If one explains mere

bodies and their properties by reference to ‘powers’, simply because they

are not understood well enough for us to provide genuine explanations,

and if one subsequently discovers that such powers are nothing more than

relatively complex material properties, critics are likely to draw the same

conclusion about the human soul. In a word, the widespread tolerance of

formsand qualities as explanatory entities in natural philosophy is likely

to undermine arguments for the immateriality of the soul.

Forwhat hope could I have, out of the actions of the soule to convince the nature of

it to be incorporeale; if I could give no other account of bodies operations, then that

they were performed by qualities occult, specificall, or incomprehensible? Would not

myadversary presently answere, that any operation, out of which I should presse the

soules being spirituall, was performed by a corporeall occult quality: and that as he

must acknowledge it to be incomprehensible, so must I likewise acknowledge other