Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

There is no record of what Descartes and Digby discussed in Paris. The

Englishman may have shown his visitor an advance copy of his new book.

Had he done so, Descartes could not have read it. More significantly,

he could not have known (in October) that Digby’s book would

be published later that year with the Sorbonne’s approval, something

that Descartes had requested for theMeditationsso importunately and

unsuccessfully three years earlier. Digby got a ‘nihil obstat’for his book

only onNovember.

Digby continued to live in Paris, to undertake diplomatic missions,

including a lengthy unsuccessful visit to Rome,–,torequest the

Pope’s assistance on behalf of Queen Henrietta Maria. He eventually pub-

lished an extremely popular book that confirmed, for many critics, the

implausibility of his natural philosophy and the conclusions about the

soul’s immortality that depended on it:ALateDiscourse Touching the Cure

of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy.Here Digby argued that bodies of

the ‘same nature’ can affect each other at a distance. The crucial observa-

tion on which he relied was that the ‘powder of sympathy’, when applied

to a bandage from a soldier’s wound, can cure the wound itself because of

the ‘faculty and force’ with which it affects the blood in the wound, even

without coming into contact with it.

According to Baillet, Descartes also visited Roberval, with whom he

had disputed after publication of hisGeometry, and they found enough

common ground to reconcile.He then travelled overland to Calais, a dis-

tance of approximatelykilometres, where he was delayed for twelve

days by bad weather while he awaited a boat for Dordrecht. He used

the enforced interruption to read over Picot’s draft French translation

of Parts I and II of thePrinciples.Hetold Picot, in a letter since lost,

that he found the translation to be excellent and that he could not have

hoped for anything better.This translation, when completed, was to

appear three years later. Meantime Mersenne, who had deferred a jour-

ney to Italy so that he could be in Paris when Descartes arrived, set

off at about the same time on a journey that was to last for ‘eight or

nine months’.That implied that his almost weekly correspondence with

Descartes was broken off for more than a year. The next letter available

between the two Frenchmen dates fromMarch. Mersenne seems to

have returned from Italy in July, and to have set out again for the same

destination during the winter, coming back to Paris only in September

.