controvertible conclusions, was a generalization of mathematical argument. In
using it to build a science of the materially extended world, Descartes missed
the significance of empirical measurement and inductive mathematical princi-
ples in physics; he went so far as to dismiss Galileo’s law of gravity because it
was merely empirical.^36 Descartes’s methodological pronouncements missed the
actual procedures of the scientific revolution as badly as Bacon’s. Nevertheless,
Descartes’s deductive system became for a generation or more the leading
emblem of the “mechanical philosophy”; his Principles of Philosophy in 1644
was the most comprehensive statement across the range of science, incorpo-
rating everything from physics, chemistry, and physiology to celestial mechan-
ics into a single materialist system. Especially on the Continent, Descartes’s
science became the rallying point of the core scientific network, even as its
discoveries moved beyond him.
Descartes had no intention of retaining philosophy as a discipline distinct
from science; metaphysics was merely to contain the fundamental axioms from
which the scientific conclusions were to be deduced (Descartes, [1644] 1983:
xxiv). What makes Descartes dominant for the intellectual network is not his
originality but his clear arrangement of his materials. The pieces of his argu-
ment were lying about in contemporary discourse. The skepticism which
Descartes used as his famous starting point had been prominent both in the
previous generation and in his own. Montaigne had made it famous; this was
a typical appearance of skepticism in a period when the intellectual field was
overcrowded and no position was able to command much following. In an-
other direction, we find the fideist use of skepticism; Descartes’s teacher at La
Flèche, the Jesuit Veron, used it in famous polemics against the Protestants.
But Descartes turned the weapon to an entirely different strategy, to eliminate
his predecessors on the intellectual field and clear the grounds for the indubi-
table axioms from which secure knowledge could be built. Even this strategy
was not unique; Mersenne’s friend Gassendi had begun his career around 1621
by wielding skepticism against the Aristoteleans and occultists (Popkin, 1979:
100). Closer still to Descartes’s approach, Campanella had previously argued
in 1591 that philosophy begins in universal doubt, which is resolved by the
certainty of self-consciousness (EP, 1967: 2:11–12). But Campanella had not
exploited this opening with the single-mindedness of Descartes; Campanella
had gone on to argue for empirical knowledge on the claim that the knower
becomes transformed into the object known through intuition, whereas Des-
cartes invoked a mathematical standard and hence the prestige and resources
of the mathematical revolution.
Another crucial resource of Descartes was the scholastic philosophy that
he claimed to supersede. His procedures of universal doubt and self-evident
certainty enabled him to dispense with textual references, though his use of568 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths