Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

concerns about expressing unorthodox religious views. However, when

Huygens sent him one of Campanella’s books in,hedid not mince

his words. He declined to read it, and explained why.

Iconfess that his language and that of the German who wrote the long preface [Adam

Tobias] prevented me from daring to have a conversation with them before I had

finished the letters that I had to write, for fear of being affected by their style. As

regards the doctrine, it is fifteen years [i.e., in] since I read the book entitledThe

Nature of Things[]bythe same author, together with some other treatises, and

perhaps this one was included among them. However, I found at the time so little

solidity in those writings that I retained nothing at all from them in my memory. Now

I can say nothing about them except that those who go astray while pretending to pass

through extraordinary paths seem to me to be much less excusable than those who

only go astray in the company of others by following the most well-worn paths.

(ii.)

The final sentence condemns the innovators as being even worse than

traditional scholastics. Later in the same year, Mersenne offered to send

Descartes another book by Campanella, and the response was the same.

‘Given what I saw earlier by Campanella, I cannot hope for anything good

from this book. Thank you for offering to send me a copy, but I have no

desire to see it.’

Descartes may not have had as clear an understanding as these texts

suggest of what was creative or otherwise among the novel ideas that were

widely reported in the earlys.The repudiation of all mysterious or

arcane inquiries depended on an extremely restrictive concept of expla-

nation that was not yet clear in his mind. Once it was adopted, however,

Descartes became one of the most notorious critics of any writing that

purported to explain matters mysteriously while in fact only adding to the

reader’s confusion.

France,–

Descartes spent the yearstoin France, with a base in Paris.

Despite the fact that Marin Mersenne had also attended La Fl`eche as a

student, Descartes probably met him for the first time during this period.

Mersenne combined the religious life of a Minim with that of an intellec-

tual who corresponded over a thirty-year period with almost every scholar

in Europe. Given Descartes’ own propensity for the life of a secular hermit,

Mersenne provided him for approximately twenty years with reliable