Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

byhis lack of military success. He left almost immediately afterward,

with his two sons and his brother Charles, and landed at Hamburg on

July. He remained there until February, when he travelled to Paris

and may have met Descartes on route. Charles Cavendish had wished to

visit Holland immediately, where he hoped to see Descartes, but he was

informed that the French philosopher had already left for France.Instead

he wrote to John Pell and asked him to send a copy of thePrinciples.

He reported to Pell in September that he was ‘extreamlie taken with Des

Cartes his newe booke’, although he thought that ‘Kercher the Jesuit of the

loadestone hath prevented Descartes, for they differ little as I remember.’

He was also able to report, in October, about Hobbes’ assessment of

thePrinciplesand of his own response.

I received yesterdaie a letter from Mr. Hobbes, who had not seen De Cartes his newe

booke printed, but had reade some sheets of it in manuscript, and seems to receive little

satisfaction from it, and saies a friend of his hath reade it through, and is of the same

minde; but by their leaves I esteeme it an excellent booke, though I think Monsieur

Des Cartes is not infallible.

While the first readers were giving their opinions of the new book,

Descartes returned to the relative isolation of Egmond. From there he had

to acknowledge that he was not quite sure what various readers thought

about thePrinciples.Toprotect it from inappropriate objections, he makes

the same proposal to Father Mesland as he had made eleven years earlier

aboutThe World, that readers think of it as a ‘fable’.

Iwould have wished that you had had enough time to examine myPrinciplesin greater

detail. I dare hope that you would find in it at least that the parts are linked together

coherently so that one would have to reject everything that is contained in the two

final parts and to accept it only as an hypothesis or even as a fable, or else accept the

whole thing. Even if one accepted it only as an hypothesis, as I suggested, it seems to

me, nonetheless, that it should not be rejected until one has found a better hypothesis

to explain all the phenomena of nature.

However, I have no reason yet to complain about my readers. For since this last

treatise was published I have not heard of anyone who has undertaken to criticize

it....Nonetheless, I do not know what is said in my absence, and I am here in a corner

of the world where I would not fail to live very much at peace and contented even if

the judgment of all the learned were against me.

He also suggested, as he had on a similar previous occasion, that most of

his potential readers were so ignorant that their views were irrelevant to

him. ‘Although when one publishes a book one is always very anxious to