Descartes: A Biography

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

In Search of a Career (–) 

Art,but a completely new science by which all questions that can be raised

about any kind of quantity, either continuous or discrete, may be solved by

a general method’ (x.–). He mentioned Lull again one month later,

onApril: ‘The day before yesterday I met a learned man at an

inn in Dordrecht with whom I discussed Lull’sBrief Art’ (x.). Since

he had no access to the books required to check the theories of Lull and

Agrippa, he asked Beeckman to investigate whether they provided a key to

all knowledge, as they claimed (x.). Descartes’ evaluation of the merits

of Lull eighteen years later, in theDiscourse,is entirely negative. ‘I noticed

that, in the case of logic, its syllogisms and most of its other rules are more

useful for explaining to someone else what one already knows than for

learning them or even, in the Lullian arts, for speaking uncritically about

things that one does not know’ (vi.).However, inhis knowledge

of the new sciences was confined to what he had learned in the limited

curriculum at La Fl`eche – which was almost nothing – and he may have

been interested to learn about Lull’s ‘art’ and its possible adaptation as a

general method of discovering truths.

Ramon Lull (–) was a medieval mystic who dedicated his life

to the conversion of Muslims and who conceived of his various ‘arts’ as

rhetorical skills that could be used to discover ‘the truth’ and to persuade

non-Christians of the validity of Christianity. He wrote and redrafted his

basic insights in many different forms, inThe Art of Finding the Truth

(c.),The General and Ultimate Art(–), and in a greatly sim-

plified and reduced version of the latter, theBrief Art(), which was

written when he was shipwrecked at Pisa. Lull’s enigmatic manipulation of

words, symbols, and tables was very influential in Paris in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, and it gave rise to numerous commentaries and inter-

pretations, including Jerome Sanchez’sAdmirable and General Method for

Learning all the Sciences more Easily and Quickly().It is clear, in

retrospect, that Descartes could not possibly have borrowed significantly

from their contents to construct a new scientific method. However, he

hardly knew the conclusion of his intellectual journey before its comple-

tion, and he seems to have had an open mind inabout initiatives that

he later rejected completely.

Forexample, Agrippa’s work, especially theThree Books of Occult Phi-

losophy(), provides a comprehensive summary of magic and a defence

against its exploitation by those who are opposed to the true Christian reli-

gion. Agrippa argues, in his letter to the reader, that the term ‘magician’