Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

to them as soon as they hear a similar tune again. On the contrary, if others

have never heard the music for a galliard without falling into some mis-

fortune, they would infallibly become sad as soon as they heard it again’

(i.).

There is one major assumption at the heart of this theory, something

that Descartes cannot explain and that he has to accept as a natural fact:

that there are relatively few, primitive, innate connections between certain

mental states and certain bodily states, and that the reality of mind-body

interaction depends essentially on that natural condition. Once that is

accepted, Descartes’ account of the emotions presupposes only that human

beings are capable of acquiring new connections between specific thoughts

and bodily states. This extra claim is supported by the experience of animal

conditioning. Since each individual’s emotional responses are determined

byhis or her own personal history, it is not surprising that different people

react very differently to the same situation. Descartes gives examples of

people who, as children, were frightened of cats or got a headache from

the smell of roses, and for whom cats or roses remained forever after a

trigger for aversion (xi.). Given the diversity of human experiences,

the general principle that he presupposed had to acknowledge significant

variations among individuals. ‘I shall be content to repeat the principle on

which everything that I have written about the causes of the passions rests:

that our soul and body are so linked that, once we have joined some bodily

action with a specific thought, neither of them occurs to us subsequently

without the other also occurring, and that it is not always the same actions

which are joined with the same thoughts’ (xi.).

ThePassions of the Soulwas not exactly the completion of thePrinciples

that Descartes had hoped to achieve. He was not in a position to realize

that such a project would have required better optical instruments, such as

a microscope, and significant advances in both chemistry and physiology,

which were simply not available in. Instead, thePassionsbrought his

discussion of conditioning to the attention of the public, and it also pro-

vided his best attempt yet to construct a theory of how mind and body inter-

act. The residual dualism of a mind and body remained unchallenged.

He had reached the limits of his theory of animal functioning. Any further

progress would have required a reconsideration of the dualism of mind

and body that he had defended in theMeditations. That this was the nat-

ural next step was more likely to have been noticed by his critics than by

his supporters. For example, the Minim friar Father Maignan wrote from