Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

matter – is also there.’The suggestion about the qualitative features of

bread or gold being attached, even by divine power, to different underlying

substances was inconsistent with the account of substances that Descartes

had developed over a number of years.

There is a slightly more honest acknowledgement of the problems

involved in this issue, in another letter of. Here Descartes iden-

tified two problems for the traditional account of changing a substance

while leaving the observable qualities unchanged.

There are two principal questions pertaining to this mystery [of the Eucharist]. One

is how it can happen that all the accidents of the bread remain in some place where the

bread is no longer present and there is a different body in its place. The other question

is how the body of Jesus Christ can be present under the same dimensions as the

bread. (iv.–)

Descartes concedes that, in reply to the first question, he should provide

an answer different from the one taught in the schools, because he had a

different account of how qualities are related to the subject of which they

are qualities. However, he declines to repeat what that answer should be.

As to the second question, he claims that he has no obligation to look for

anewexplanation and that, even if he could find one, he would not wish

to tell anyone about it, ‘because in such matters the more common views

are the best ones’.However, even here he could hardly resist intimating

the way in which both he and the traditional theologians ought to answer

the question.

When one bodily substance is changed into another and when all the accidents of the

first substance remain, what has been changed? They [theologians] should reply, as

Ido,that nothing at all of what is observable has been changed nor, consequently,

nothing of whatever is the basis for giving different names to those substances.

Foritiscertain that the differences in names that have been given to substances

result only from the fact that different observable properties have been noticed

in them. (iv.)

If this is translated into plain language, it means that we give different

names to various physical things because of the observable qualities that

wenotice in them. For example, we call one liquid ‘wine’ not only because

of its liquidity, but because of its colour, taste, viscosity, and so on, while we

call another liquid ‘water’ because it has some different properties. Thus,

if none of the observable properties of a glass of wine have changed, then

it is still what we call ‘wine’. Descartes leaves open the possibility that the