Descartes: A Biography

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

The French Liar’s Monkey and the Utrecht Crisis 

James Primrose (–) wrote a detailed refutation in England, to

which Regius replied in a published pamphlet. The very title of this reply

reveals the kind of nasty personal attacks that were typical of the polemical

language used in academic disputes at the time:A Sponge with which to clean

the filth of the Objections that James Primrose, Doctor of Medicine, recently

published against the Theses in support of Blood Circulation that were recently

disputed at Utrecht University.Having expanded the scope of his lectures

from medicine to natural philosophy, Regius asked Voetius and Descartes,

in Spring, whether it would be better to publish a book on physiology

or to present his ideas in the form of disputations. Voetius, who had become

rector of the university onMarch(for a one-year term), advised

that a book would be less likely to antagonize his colleagues, whereas

Descartes encouraged Regius to proceed with further disputations, so

as to clarify his views before publishing them as a monograph.Regius

adopted Descartes’ suggestion and continued to send him advance copies

of proposed disputations.

In response to one such draft disputation, Descartes suggested, prob-

ably in early May, that Regius should not confuse what some people

called a ‘soul’ in animals with what is called a ‘mind’ in human beings. ‘I do

not accept that the power of growing and sensing in animals deserves to be

called a soul, as the mind does in the case of human beings. Those who are

not well educated wished to do so because they did not know that animals

lack a mind and that the word “soul” is therefore equivocal when applied

to animals and humans’ (iii.). Since Descartes’ name was included on

the title page of these disputations, he felt obliged to read the texts very

carefully lest they attribute views to him publicly that he did not hold.

Apart from many other detailed suggestions, he reminded Regius that, for

Catholics, it would be heretical to suggest that human beings had a ‘triple

soul’.

Regius apparently did not appreciate the sensitivity of these questions

about the human soul and its relation to the body. The widely accepted

Christian view at the time was that the soul is immortal, while the human

body evidently is not so. However, Christians also believed in what was

called ‘the resurrection of the body’, which was to occur after a final

judgment by God in which the sins and virtues of all mankind are reviewed.

This theological position required some way of thinking of the soul as an

entity that could exist on its own, after the individual’s death and, at the

same time, as something that does not exist separately during one’s life