end CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Notes to Pages– .Descartes to Pollot,February(v.).
.He refers to his summary statement of events in Utrecht in the letter to Pollot
just cited (v.). Brasset wrote to Chanut in Stockholm,February, that
Descartes was very strongly inclined to leave the United Provinces, and added: ‘I
have just read the taunt directed to his minister [Voetius] at Utrecht. It is a rather
churlishremember me’(v.).
.See Verbeek (),.For the context in which this book was written, see also
John Cottingham’s introduction to Descartes ().
.Descartes to Elizabeth,June(iii.).
.This reflection on the relative value of different parts of his oeuvre was offered
in the context of explaining his research on animals during the winter of–
(v.).
.Compare theDiscourse,Part I, from eleven years earlier: ‘But once I learned, as
something that is very certain, that the path to heaven is just as open to the most
ignorant as to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead there are
beyond our understanding, I did not dare subject them to the feebleness of my
reasoning, and I thought that one needed to have some extraordinary assistance
from heaven and to be more than human in order to study them successfully’
(vi.).
.Baillet (), ii.–.
.Descartes to Chanut,March(v.–).
.See Berce( ́), Foisil (), and Parchnev ().
.Brasset to Descartes,February(v.) andApril(v.).
.Descartes to Picot,April(v.).
.Baillet (), ii..
.Chanut had written to Descartes onApril, and when the letter arrived at The
Hague, Brasset asked M. van Zurck to deliver it by hand when Descartes was
passing through the city onMay. Since Descartes was leaving that morning for
Rotterdam, he took Chanut’s letter with him to Paris, from which he replied about
the middle of May. See v.note,note.
.Descartes to Chanut, May(v.).
.Arnauld to Descartes,June(v.), and Descartes to Arnauld,June
(v.).
.In a letter to an unknown correspondent, March/April,hehad written: ‘You
see the power you have over me, when you make me transgress the boundaries of
philosophizing which I have set for myself ’ (v.).
.Descartes to Arnauld,June(v.). Descartes quoted the decision of the
Council of Trent, session XIII (October), Chapter,inwhich the Council
decreed: ‘Nor is there any inconsistency in the fact that Our Saviour always sits at
the right hand of the Father in heaven in his natural mode of existence, and that,
nevertheless, he is sacramentally present to us in many places, in his substance,
in a mode of existence that we can hardly express even in words....’ Denziger
(), par.(p.).
.Arnauld to Descartes, July(v.).