Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

because it is intimately related to the activities of the body. Theologians had

turned to philosophy for an appropriate way of describing this unusual kind

of entity. Scholastic philosophers had divided all realities into two classes,

substances and accidents. They used the word ‘accident’ for qualities of

things, such as the colour of a cat or the shape of a tree. It would not make

sense to think of a colour as existing on its own, without being the colour

of something or other. By contrast, they applied the word ‘substance’ to

things that are not necessarily predicated of other things and that could be

thought of as existing on their own. That raised the problem: is a human

mind a substance? It would seem that it is, if it can survive the death of the

body. However, it would also seem that it is not a completely independent

reality in its own right, because it depends on the human body for many

of its characteristic functions.

This conundrum was avoided temporarily by appeal to another distinc-

tion that was used in the schools. Philosophers had distinguished between

(a) the principal or defining feature of any substance in virtue of which it

is the kind of thing it is, and (b) the matter of which it is made and which it

shares with other things. The term ‘substantial form’ was used to describe

the former. This provided theologians with a provisional compromise.

The human mind was said to be the ‘substantial form’ of human beings,

because it was the ultimate, quasi-substantial reality that distinguished

humans from nonhuman animals. However, as a form, it was necessarily

united with some appropriate matter. Thus this Aristotelian distinction

of form/matter was mapped onto the corresponding Christian belief in

an immortal soul/mortal body. This solution implied that, if there was

any tampering with the borrowed philosophical language, it would raise

serious theological objections.

In a disputation over which Regius presided onDecember,

Henricus van Loon (c.–) proposed that a human being is some

kind of accidental union of two distinct substances, a soul and a body.

‘Together with the body, the human mind does not constitute a being

that is one in itself [unum per se]but a being that is accidentally one

[unum per accidens], because they [body and soul] are individually complete

or perfect substances.’Descartes was alarmed by this, and he advised

Regius with some urgency: ‘There is hardly anything more unacceptable,

or anything that would provide a greater opportunity for offence and

accusation, than to put the following in your theses: “man is an accidental

being” ’ (iii.). Descartes also suggested a way of correcting the apparent