Descartes: A Biography

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The Quarrel and Final Rift with Regius 

Regius would see it because I knew what he was like. Besides, since I was considering

publishing my views about that matter, I did not want anyone else to deprive them of

their novelty. (iv.–)

This was Descartes’ perspective when it was already too late to retrieve

the situation, when he was accusing Regius of borrowing his ideas and

misunderstanding them. However, there was another equally plausible

interpretation available.

Regius may have put his finger on a genuine problem in Descartes’ work

when he pointed to the apparent anomaly of his metaphysics. It was not

that Cartesian metaphysics was inconsistent with the natural philosophy

that it was designed to support. It was almost as if the two parts of his

work represented the writings of two different people. Everything that

Descartes had written, both published and unpublished, about the role

of the brain in perception, memory, and imagination suggested that a

theory of the human mind would be an explanation that relied on detailed

work in physiology and neurology. On the other hand, the discussion of

mental events in theMeditationsconstituted a first-person description of

how thinking appears to the individual subject, and it failed completely

to persuade any of those who wrote objections that it is impossible for

this mental activity to be a complex activity of the central nervous system.

There was therefore a genuine sense in which Regius was not disagreeing

with Descartes but articulating a view that resulted from Descartes’ own

work, one that he found impossible to integrate into the metaphysical

foundation offered in theMeditationsand thePrinciples(Part I).

Intimations of Mortality

In contrast with the confident expectations of a long, healthy life and with

the combative confrontations with almost all his correspondents that char-

acterized the earlys,Descartes acknowledged a growing awareness of

advancing years and a willingness to resile from controversy in–.

Even his lifelong penchant for travelling seems to have abated, as he settled

into the comparative isolation of Egmond-Binnen and complained about

the effects of the long, cold winters. To modern eyes, he seems to have

suffered from depression.

There were intimations of mortality as early as February,whenhe

thanked Huygens for the poem in honour of thePrinciples.Herefrained

from answering in verse, he explained, because ‘Socrates never wrote