Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

metaphysics, namely, the existence of God and the immortality of the

human soul. Specifically, professors of philosophy were forbidden to teach

Averroes, and if they found anything worth reporting in his philosophy

they were encouraged to dissemble and pretend that they had found it

elsewhere: a professor ‘shall not treat of the digressions of Averroes...in

any separate treatise, and if anything good is to be cited from him, let him

bring it out without praise and, if possible, let him show that he has taken

it from some other source.’Twenty-five years later, Descartes adverts to

this in his letter of dedication of hisMeditationsto the theology faculty at

the Sorbonne.

School Days

The years during which Descartes attended La Fl`eche College are not

certain, but it is most likely that he arrived there at Easter, when

he was eleven years old, and that he left school at the end of the philoso-

phy cycle in, when he was nineteen.There had been an outbreak

of some unspecified contagious disease at the school in, and this,

together with Descartes’ own fragile health, may have delayed the begin-

ning of his formal education.When the day arrived to leave home and

venture forth, Descartes travelled aboutkilometres, by coach or on

horseback, carrying the essential provisions for his first school year. Apart

from prescribed books, each boarder brought their own cutlery and a gob-

let. They also needed enough money to pay for the services of a tailor,

and for the hairdresser who visited the school twice a week to cut and

powder their hair. The books alone were very expensive. They included

Nicot’s French–Latin dictionary, Cicero’sLetters, theAdagesof Erasmus,

student editions of Cicero and Virgil, and various religious books used at

the college, such as a life of St. Ignatius and Louis de Grenade’sGuide

for Sinners.By far the largest number of students lived in rented accom-

modations in the town, although they followed the same daily sched-

ule as the residents. Descartes, however, joined his brother Pierre as a

boarder.

The Jesuits are widely credited with introducing many changes into

schools that helped distinguish their curriculum from the monastic prac-

tices on which they had previously been modeled.Forexample, they

introduced a half-day holiday on Thursday, and annual summer holidays

that varied in length from the junior to the senior classes. These were taken