end CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Notes to Pages–.Morin to Descartes,February(i.–). This lengthy letter requires
twenty pages in the standard edition.
.Morin seems to have been genuinely open to the possibility of getting replies from
Descartes, and he concludes his letter by saying that ‘among all the men of letters
that I know, you are the one that I admire the most’ (i.).
.Descartes wrote a twenty-four-page response,July(ii.). He asked
Mersenne (March)totell Morin that ‘he had received his discourse very
gladly, and that he would not fail to reply to it as carefully, as civilly, and as soon
as possible’ (ii.).
.One might compare Descartes’ efforts in this regard with those of Robert Boyle
in ‘On a Good Hypothesis and an Excellent Hypothesis’ (Boyle:), or
with the much later and more famous defence of the same procedure by Chris-
tiaan Huygens in the Preface to hisTreatise on Light(). See Boyle (),
pp. vi, vii.
.It is one of the ironies of this correspondence that Descartes addresses directly
achallenge that was raised much later by Martin Schoock, inAdmiranda Metho-
dus(). Schoock criticized the alleged demand by followers of Descartes for a
degree of certainty in natural philosophy that was impossible to realize. He con-
trasted the certainty of divine revelation with the relative uncertainty of medical
science and then added: ‘Just as it would be a mistake to demand of medicine a
degree of certainty that is comparable to the dogmas of theology, so likewise one
could not excuse those who would demand, for all the dogmas of physics, that their
demonstrations would achieve the exactitude that is found only in mathematics.’
Schoock (),;Verbeek (),–.
.Morin to Descartes,August(ii.).
.Descartes to Morin,September(ii.). He had used the same expres-
sion, about an unknown ‘philosophical entity’, at ii.. Descartes often rejected
suggestions that he should borrow scholastic terms to develop his explanations,
because he objected not to the words used, but to the various entities that they
denoted. Thus he wrote to the Jesuit, Father Ciermans (March) that he
did not wish to return to ‘all the qualities and forms that I abhor’ (ii.).
.Descartes to Mersenne,November(ii.).
.Roberval arrived in Paris after assisting at the siege of La Rochelle in,and
there became acquainted with a number of mathematicians, including Hardy,
Picot, Mydorge, andEtienne Pascal. He was among the first group of intellectuals ́
appointed to the Academie royale des Sciences in ́ .
.Fermatto Mersenne, April or May(i.–).
.Fermat to Mersenne, April or May(i.), where he refers to the ‘brief time
that Mr. Beaugrand gave me to glance over’ the treatise on dioptrics.
.Ibid. (i.). Descartes had contrasted, in Ruleof theRules, the methodical
search for the truth that he recommended with the hit-or-miss strategy followed
byothers who hoped to stumble by accident on the truth (x.).
.Descartes wrote (December) that Beaugrand’sGeostaticswas worthless, and
that when he claims to ‘provide (in a preface) the means of finding tangents to all