Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

However, he would be willing to discuss the issue orally with Arnauld, so

that no record of his views would become public.

Since the Council of Trent itself did not wish to explain how Christ’s body is present

in the Eucharist, and since it wrote that ‘it was present with a type of existence that

wecan scarcely express in words’, I would be afraid of being accused of temerity

if I dared to decide anything about that question. Besides, I would prefer to explain

myconjectures orally rather than in writing.

Arnauld replied that he could not meet Descartes personally for such

atete-ˆ a-t` ete, since he was ‘out of the city’ (v.ˆ ), but that he would

take advantage of the opportunity to raise his questions in letters. He had

to accept Descartes’ reluctance to write to him about Christ’s presence

in the Eucharist. However, he tried once more to persuade his cautious

correspondent to say something about the topic in a letter.

Apart from the request to clarify what he meant by an intellectual

memory – an obscure argument that seemed to hinge on the fact that

wesucceed in remembering things of which we do not have images and

therefore, presumably, cannot have memory traces as physical events in

the brain – Descartes replied to a number of other queries from Arnauld.

One concerned the way in which mind and body interact, and this pro-

voked one of the clearest statements by Descartes of the reality of this

interaction, even if he acknowledged that he did not understand it.

However, the most certain and evident experiences – rather than any reasoning or

comparison with other things – shows us daily that the mind, which is incorporeal,

can move the body. This is one of those self-evident things that we make obscure when

wetry to explain it by reference to other things.Nonetheless, I shall use an analogy

here. Most philosophers who think that the heaviness of a stone is a real quality, which

is distinct from the stone, believe that they understand well enough how that quality

can move the stone towards the centre of the earth, because they think they have a clear

experience of it. However, I am convinced that there is no such quality in nature and,

consequently, that there is no true idea of it in the human mind. Consequently, I think

that they use the idea they find in themselves of an incorporeal substance to represent

this heaviness to themselves. Therefore, it is no more difficult for us to understand how

the mind moves the body than for them to understand how such a heaviness moves a

stone downwards. (v.–)

Descartes exploits the comparison further by arguing that the mind may

be described as corporeal if we understand the term to mean ‘whatever

belongs to a body’, because the mind is adapted for being united with the

body. However, if we describe as ‘corporeal’ only what has the nature of a