Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

was to exploit the ‘natural’ coincidence of some thoughts and brain states

in order to direct animal spirits in the patterns required for appropriate

bodily motions.

The mind, although it does not have the power of moving a body from one place to

another, has nevertheless in itself the power to direct spirits that are in motion into

oneplace or another in the same way as it has in itself the power of understanding or

willing. Nor is it necessary to attribute to the mind a power of moving bodies, when the

motion of animal spirits is sufficient to cause motion in different parts of the body.

Regius completed his physicalist account of the human mind by openly

denying one of the most characteristic theses of Cartesian philosophy, that

the mind has innate ideas.

It seems as if the mind does not need any innate ideas, images, notions or axioms

in order to think. Instead, the innate faculty of thinking alone is enough for it to

perform all acts of thinking. This is evident in the case of sorrow, colour, taste, and

the perceptions of all similar ideas, which are genuinely perceived by the human mind

even though none of these ideas is innate in the mind. Nor is there any reason why

some ideas, rather than others, should be innate by nature.

As is implicit in this quotation, Regius suggested that what other people

call ‘innate ideas...arise from the observation of things’.

It may have been painful for Descartes to lose the support of someone

like Regius, on whose behalf he had become embroiled in the Utrecht crisis.

However, the source of this new dispute was not simply a stubbornness on

the part of Regius or an inability to follow subtle metaphysical arguments.

This personal parting between former friends was primarily a symptom of

a real tension within Descartes’ own philosophy, which was merely made

explicit when Regius borrowed some of the implications of theTreatise

on Man. Descartes complained to various correspondents in October and

Novemberthat Regius had borrowed material about the action of

muscles from an unpublished Cartesian work, and that he had understood

it poorly. His letter to Mersenne (November) was typical in this

respect.

It is twelve or thirteen years [i.e.,/] since I described all the functions of the

human body, or of an animal, but the paper on which I wrote is so confused that I

would have difficulty myself in reading it. However, that did not stop me, four or five

years ago, from lending it to one of my closest friends, who made a copy which, in

turn, was transcribed with my permission by two others but without me checking or

correcting them. I asked them not to show the copies to anyone, and I never wished that