Descartes: A Biography

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Thoughts of Retirement 

body, then even the heaviness that scholastic philosophers talked about is

not genuinely corporeal. It is not clear how this reply could have helped

Arnauld. He was not a traditional scholastic philosopher, and he did not

believe in the existence of a distinct quality called heaviness any more than

Descartes did.He might have accepted that Cartesian talk about mind-

body interaction was just as intelligible as scholastic talk about heaviness

moving bodies toward the centre of the Earth. This, however, was a very

low threshold for success, similar to the strategies used in a scholastic

disputation when one defends one’s position merely by showing that an

opponent’s view is even less credible.

In his replies to Arnauld, Descartes also qualified the apparent ration-

alism of his discussion of God. It invariably seemed to theologians who

talked at length about the mysterious features of God that Cartesian phi-

losophy relied on the limitations of human intelligence to decide what

God could or could not do. Descartes explicitly rejects that suggestion,

byturning the argument around, just as he was to do a year later for

Henry More. On this occasion he rejects the idea that God might be able

to create a space beyond the boundaries of the universe where, according

to scholastics, there is no matter.

Formypart, I do not think that we should ever say about something that God cannot

do it....Iwould not dare say that God cannot arrange that there would be a mountain

without a valley or that one plus two would not be three. I merely claim that he has

endowed me with a mind such that I cannot conceive of a mountain without a valley

or that the sum of one plus two would not equal three, etc., and that such things imply

acontradiction in my thought. I think that the same should be said of a space that is

completely empty or of a nothing that is extended, and of a universe of things which

is limited. (v.)

Descartes could not conceive of a limit or boundary to the universe with-

out thinking of matter beyond it. Nor could he conceive of a completely

empty barrel that has the property of being extended, although the exten-

sion is predicated of nothing. ‘For wherever there is extension, there is

also necessarily a body’ (v.). In the case of God, likewise, there is no

suggestion that God’s powers are limited by our conceptions. It is simply

that there are logical limits to what we can or cannot conceive. If there

are realities that exceed our powers of conception, we simply cannot say

anything intelligible about them.

Descartes also had an opportunity during his stay in Paris to visit

Mersenne, who was still living at that time in the Minim friary near the