end CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Notes to Pages–.Descartes uses the term ‘essay’ here in the sense of an attempt to write metaphysics
or a sample of his efforts to do so. In the same paragraph, he assured Mersenne
that he was not as deprived of books as might have been thought, since he had a
copy of Aquinas’ ‘Summa[presumably theSumma of Theology]andaBible that I
brought from France’ (ii.).
.Descartes to Mersenne (March) (i.–).
.Descartes explicitly endorses this interpretation in his replies to Burman in April
. ‘There is a summary of theseMeditationsin that section of theDiscourse on
Methodwhich ought to be explained by theMeditationsthemselves’ (v.).
.Forexample, Descartes to Mersenne,March:‘Icannot say how much
weight is required to equal the force of a hammer stroke because that is a factual
question, in which reasoning is useless without the experience’ (iii.–); ‘I cannot
determine the speed with which every heavy body descends initially, because that
is a completely factual question’ (iii.). The same comment appears about the
urine of a mad person (iii.), and about the declination of a magnetic needle
(iii.).
.Silhon (),.
.Ibid.,–.
.Sextus Empiricus (). That this is the principal source of sceptical objections
is acknowledged in Schoock (),–,–;Verbeek (),,, which
is discussed in Chapter.
.De Gournay (). This interpretation of De Gournay has been developed by
Eileen O’Neill.
.‘A nybody can provide as many examples as he pleases of the ways our senses deceive
or cheat us....’; ‘why should we therefore not doubt whether our thinking and
acting are but another dream; our waking, some other species of sleep?’ ‘If this
appearance has once deceived me, if my touchstone regularly proves unreliable
and my scales wrong and out of true, why should I trust them this time, rather
than all the others?’ Montaigne (),,,–.
.Descartes to Mersenne,July(iii.).
.Richeome ().
.Denzinger (), par.; Richeome (),.
.Richeome (),–.
.Ibid.,.
.Ibid.,.
.Ibid.,.Iamusing the word ‘animal’ here as an abbreviation for ‘nonhuman
animal’ and as a translation of the French term‘bˆete’.
.La Mothe le Vayer (),.
.Ibid.,.
.This interpretation is confirmed by Descartes to Mersenne, September,in
which he writes following the publication of theMeditations: ‘In publishing it, I
did what I thought I was obliged to do for the glory of God and the demands of
myconscience’ (iii.). The motto of the Jesuits was then, and still remains: ‘For
the greater glory of God.’