Descartes: A Biography

end CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

 Notes to Pages–

.Descartes to Huygens,January(.), and Huygens to Descartes,

January(.).

.Beaugrand (), a short book of twenty-seven pages with his own signature on

the accompanying privilege.

.Mersenne to Descartes,February(i.–).

.Descartes to Huygens,February,gaveasimilar justification for his choice

of a title for the Preface. He wrote to Huygens, in a much more conciliatory tone

than to Mersenne: ‘Since I did not intend to explain my whole method but only

to say something about it, and I do not like to promise more than I deliver, that

is why I wrote “discourse on method”. Whereas I wrote simply “the Dioptrics”

and “the Meteors” because I tried to include in them everything that is relevant

to my subject....I also think that I should omit all the gloss that I had included

atthe end and leave simply these words: Discourse on the Method, etc. together

with the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry, which are illustrations of this

method’ (i.–). The same idea is shared with an anonymous friend in April (?)

:‘Ipropose...a general method, which I truly do not teach, but for which I

try to provide some justification in the three treatises that follow and which I join

to the discourse in which I speak about it....’ (i.)

.The text was found almost immediately after his death inand was subse-

quently published in various editions.

.Descartes to Huygens,March(i.–).

.Huygens to Descartes,March(i.–). See Descartes to Plemp (

October), in which he acknowledges: ‘I am not unaware of the fact that my

Geometrywill have very few readers’ (I,).

.Writing to an anonymous correspondent (April?), Descartes identifies some

elements of the objectionable draft privilege: that he would seem to readers to be

praising himself, that he would be described as the inventor of many fine things, and

that he would promise to publish other treatises, although he wrote the opposite

in the ‘discourse which serves as a preface’ (i.).

.Descartes to Huygens,February(i.–).

.His letter to Huygens on the death of his wife (May) indicates that he has

withdrawn ‘rather a long distance from the world’ (i.), and that he is living near

Alkmaar (i.). Another letter to Colvius,June, shows that he had been

travelling ‘for more than six weeks’ (i.). He probably departed from Leiden at

the end of April.

.CM, vi..

.The original privilege was published in full in the Latin edition of the text (),

and it explicitly names ‘Des Cartes’ as the author (vi.). Descartes used an

abbreviated version in which his anonymity was protected in theedition,

which referred simply to ‘the author of the book entitledDiscourse on the Method,

etc.’ (vi.).

.In, Louis XIII had approved ‘his Highness’ as the official French form of

address for his ally against the Spanish, Prince Frederik Hendrik. The States

General followed suit inbyamending ‘his Excellency’ to ‘his Highness’. See

Israel (),.