Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

fundamental intuition was that certain mental events and corresponding

bodily events become linked when the mind is first joined with the human

body, and that they remain correlated in pairs in such a way that, in later

life, the occurrence of either member triggers the occurrence of the other.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that certain movements of the heart are naturally

linked in this way with certain thoughts, which they do not resemble in any way. For,

since the nature of our soul is such that it was capable of being joined to a body, it also has

the property that each of its thoughts can become associated with various motions or

other dispositions of the body in such a way that, whenever the same dispositions occur

in the body again, they induce the same thoughts in the soul. Conversely, when the same

thought returns, it prepares the body to have the same disposition again. Similarly,

when one learns a language one links the letters or the sounds of certain words,

which are material things, with certain meanings, which are thoughts. As a result,

when one later hears the same words, one conceives of the same things, and when one

thinks about the same things one is reminded of the same words. (iv.–)

This allows Descartes to speculate that the human soul must experience

joy and love as its first thoughts when it is joined with an appropriately

disposed body – because its earliest sensations result from the pleasurable

feeling of being fed – and that it feels hatred and sadness only later. There

is no attempt here to explain how this natural coincidence of bodily states

and mental states occurs. It is simply a fact of nature.

The second question that was prompted by Chanut’s letter involved

deep theological divisions that had troubled christianity since the time of

Saint Augustine. While it seemed like an innocent question to ask ‘whether

the natural light, alone, teaches us to love God and whether it is possible

to love Him by the power of this light’ (iv.), it was obvious that any

answer he gave could become entangled in disputes about the necessity

or otherwise of divine grace. Descartes tried to defend his own intuitions

and, at the same time, to avoid theological controversy by replying: ‘I have

no doubt that we can truly love God by the power of our nature alone. I do

not guarantee that this love is meritorious without grace, and I leave the

theologians to disentangle that’ (iv.–). Given his trust in the powers

of reason, unaided by divine grace, Descartes explained the way in which

wecan conceive of God by analogy with our own mind. However, he was

also careful to point out that God is infinite and that we are constantly

in danger of reducing God’s infinity to dimensions that we can imagine.

Those who reduce the greatness of God’s creation and who ‘would like

to think that the world is finite’ (iv.)make that mistake. Descartes