Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

in his garden, and performing anatomical dissections in order to make

progress with the explanation of animal life that he had begun many years

earlier.He wrote to Tobias Andreae in Julythat he was dedicat-

ing all his resources and energies to anatomical experiments for a full

year. Apart from a short visit to Leiden and the Hague, ‘he did not leave

his house at Egmond, to which he had brought from Alkmaar and other

places all kinds of animals that were suitable for dissection.’One gets the

same impression from his communications with the marquis of Newcas-

tle. William Cavendish seems to have been interested almost exclusively in

whatever Descartes could contribute to an understanding of animals. Years

later, as he waited in Antwerp for the Restoration, he published a book

ondressage.This abiding interest was reflected in his conversations and

correspondence with Descartes.In October, Descartes mentions

to Newcastle ‘a treatise on animals on which I began to work more than

fifteen years ago’.He concedes that he has not had an opportunity to do

all the experiments required to complete that work, that he still has not

done so, and that it is unlikely that he can finish the treatise in the near

future.Sorbiere provides a snapshot of this period in a letter to Petit,`

written more than a decade later.

One of his friends went to visit Descartes at Egmond. This gentleman asked him,

about physics books: which ones did he most value, and which of them did he most

frequently consult. ‘I shall show you’, he replied, ‘if you wish to follow me.’ He led

him into a lower courtyard at the back of his house, and showed him a calf that he

had planned to dissect the next day. I truly believe that he hardly read anything any

more.

Borel gives a slightly different account of this event, in his biography

of Descartes, in which he has Descartes point to the dissected calf and

proclaim: ‘this is my library!’Sorbi`ere acknowledges that the dissecting

of animal or human bodies was not unusual, and he mentions various other

practitioners whom he met.However, whereas others applied themselves

‘to dissecting animals without a theory, Descartes applied himself to theory

without having all the observations that it required’.

Borel’s version of the story, that Descartes thought of his laboratory

as his library, was even more explicit than Sorbiere’s in mentioning that,`

in this phase of his life, he ‘did not wish to have many books because he

knew that, apart from mathematical books, they were not truthful’.This