c CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Thoughts of Retirement sometime between August and November.Elzevier printed copies
forthe Dutch market and also sent copies to Paris with an amended title
page, to be published officially by Henry La Gras. It was translated into
Latin by ‘H.D.M.’ (Henri Desmarets) and was published posthumously
bythe same Dutch printer the following year.
The comments in the anonymous letters apparently addressed to
Descartes in the Preface to the volume were accurate. They linked the
Treatise on the Passionswith the unfinishedPrinciples,inparticular with
the writing on animals and human nature that Descartes wished to com-
plete. TheTreatise on the Passionswas thus a foretaste of what might have
been realized if Descartes had had the financial resources to pursue his
research project and if he had made the progress that he thought, less plau-
sibly, was being inhibited only by a lack of observations and experiments.
It is difficult to estimate how successful that project might have been had
Descartes lived longer, in a more suitable research environment. Apart
from such guesswork, the context in which thePassionsshould be read
was captured perfectly by Descartes’ prefactory letter. There was nothing
unusual about a philosopher writing a book on the passions. However, it
was distinctive to approach the topic as a ‘physicien’, that is, as a natural
philosopher or, in today’s language, as a scientist. In doing so, Descartes
came as close as he had ever come to addressing directly the question of
how mind and body interact.
Emotions or, in the traditional language he chose to use, passions were
classified by Descartes as a special kind of feeling. The nearest equivalent
were the sensations we have when we are affected by external stimuli (such
as hearing a sound) or the internal sensations we have when stimulated
byour own bodily conditions (such as feeling hunger or pain). The most
characteristic feature of such sensations, for Descartes, was that the subject
is not in control of what is experienced. Apart from very unusual situations,
onecannot simply decide not to feel pain or not to hear loud noises. In that
sense, the subject is passive, and the sensations in question are therefore
‘passions’. Descartes wanted to maintain the close connection between
such sensations and emotions by also classifying emotions as passions.
The only difference, then, between emotions and other kinds of feeling
or sensation was that emotions are stimulated by what Descartes called
‘animal spirits’.Since one of the primary functions of animal spirits
was to transmit signals throughout the body – a function performed by
the nervous system in more recent medical theory – the emotions were