Descartes: A Biography

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

 Notes to Pages–

.Descartes to Mersenne,June(iii.) andJuly(iii.); Descartes

to Hygens,July(iii.).

.Descartes to Mersenne,November,(iii.) andJanuary(iii.);

Descartes to Regius (November): ‘The printing of myMeditationswas com-

pleted three months ago in Paris, but I have not received a copy yet. For that reason

Ihaveagreed to have a second edition done in this country’ (iii.).

.Descartes to Mersenne,November(iii.).

.Descartes to Huygens,April(iii.). The first part is paginated–;

the second part, containing the Seventh Objections, Descartes’ replies, and the

Letter to Father Dinet, is paginated–.

.This is developed at great length in the Seventh Replies, vii.–. The letter

to Father Dinet also claimed that ‘all the principles of the philosophy that I am

preparing’ are contained in theMeditations(vii.).

.Descartes used this metaphor on two occasions, in his replies to Hobbes (vii.)

and in his letter to Father Dinet (vii.).

.Descartes to Mersenne,October(ii.): ‘I had much less difficulty

reading it [Herbert’sOn Truth]inFrench than I had earlier in going through it in

Latin.’ See also Descartes to Pollot,January(iv.). Among theletters

in the Adam and Tannery edition, onlyare written in Latin.

.Many texts clarify this position. For example: ‘When we say that some idea is

innate in us, we do not think that it is always present to us; in that sense no idea

would be innate. We mean only that we have within us a power to produce the

idea in question’ (vii.); ‘by “innate ideas” I have never understood anything

else apart from what he himself [i.e., Regius] explicitly claims as true...namely:

“that we have in us a natural power by which we are capable of knowing God.”

Ihavenever either thought or written that the ideas in question are actual....I

cannot refrain from laughing when I see the large number of arguments which this

gentleman...has laboriously put together to prove that infants in their mother’s

womb have no actual knowledge of God, as if he were thereby launching a magnifi-

cent attack on me’ (viii-.). See also Descartes to Hyperaspistes, August:

‘I do not think, as a result, that an infant’s mind meditates about metaphysical

questions in its mother’s womb’ (iii.).

.Descartes spelled that out in reply to Hobbes: ‘For who is there who does not

perceive that there is something that they understand? Who therefore does not

have the form or idea of understanding and, by extending this indefinitely, does

not form the idea of God’s understanding, and by a similar procedure an idea of

the other attributes of God?’ (vii.)

.Oliver Ranner has reminded me that it is also found in Aristotle. See Aristotle

(),(a): ‘if someone who sees perceives that he sees, and one who

hears that he hears, and one who walks that he walks, and in the case of other

activities there is similarly something that perceives that one is engaged in them,

so that, if we perceive, we perceive that we perceive, and if we think, we perceive

that we think; and if to perceive that we perceive or think is to perceive that we

exist (since we saw that to exist is to perceive or think).’