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1596
René Descartes French mathematician,
scientist, and philosopher; he thought, therefore he was. He stopped thinking
in this world on 11 February 1650. {He was not a Methodist}
Because
he was one of the first to oppose scholastic Aristotelianism, he has been
called the father of modern philosophy. He began by methodically doubting
knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, then found certainty
in the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed
in the famous statement “I think, therefore I am.” He developed
a dualistic system in which he distinguished radically between mind, the
essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension
in three dimensions. Descartes's metaphysical system is intuitionist, derived
by reason from innate ideas, but his physics and physiology, based on sensory
knowledge, are mechanistic and empiricist.
Descartes was born in La Haye (now Descartes), France. Although La Haye
was in Touraine, Descartes's family connections were south across the Creuse
River in Poitou, where his father, Joachim, owned farms and houses in Châtellerault
and Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councilor in the Parliament of Brittany
in Rennes, Descartes inherited a low rank of nobility. Descartes's mother
died when he was one year old. His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him
in La Haye to be raised by his maternal grandmother and a nurse and probably
also by his great-uncle Michel Ferrand, lieutenant general (court judge)
in Châtellerault. The Descartes family was Roman Catholic, but Poitou
was a Huguenot stronghold and Châtellerault a “secure city,”
in which the Edict of Nantes, which gave Protestants freedom of worship
in France, was worked out in 1597–1598. Descartes returned to Poitou
regularly until 1628.
In 1606 Descartes
was sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, established in 1604
by Henri IV. At La Flèche 1200 young gentlemen were trained for careers
in military engineering, the judiciary, and government administration. Besides
classical studies, science, mathematics, and metaphysics, students were
taught acting, music, poetry, dancing, riding, and fencing. Descartes's
philosophy professor was Father François Véron, known later
as the scourge of the Protestants. Aristotle was taught from scholastic
texts. In addition, Descartes received special attention from a relative,
Father Charlet, later rector of La Flèche. In 1610 Descartes participated
in an imposing ceremony in which the heart of Henry IV [13 Dec 1553 –
14 May 1610] was placed in the cathedral of La Flèche. Henry IV's
assassination had destroyed the hope of religious tolerance in France and
Germany.
In 1614 Descartes went to Poitiers,
where he took a law degree in 1616. At this time Huguenot Poitiers was in
virtual revolt against Louis XIII [27 Sep 1601 – 14 May 1643]. Descartes's
father probably expected him to enter Parliament, but, because the legal
age for that was 27, Descartes had seven years to wait. In 1618 he went
to Breda in the Netherlands for 15 months as a student in mathematics and
military architecture in the peacetime army of the Protestant ruler, Maurice,
prince of Orange [13 Nov 1567 – 23 Apr 1625]. There Descartes met
the physicist Isaac Beeckman, who encouraged him in science and mathematics
and for whom Descartes wrote his Musicae Compendium (written 1618,
published 1650).
During the period 1619
to 1628, Descartes traveled in northern and southern Europe, saying that
he was studying the book of the world. While in Bohemia in 1619, he had
three dreams that defined for him his career as a scientist and a philosopher
seeking knowledge for the benefit of humanity. By 1620 he had conceived
of a universal method of deductive reasoning,applicable to all the sciences.
He had also investigated reports of esoteric knowledge such as theosophical
claims to command nature. Although disappointed with the followers of the
magician Raymond Lulle and the alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von
Nettesheim [14 Sep 1486 – 18 Feb 1535], Descartes was impressed by
the German mathematician and Rosicrucian Johann Faulhaber.
Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and habits of life. Like
Rosicrucians, he lived a single, secluded life, changing residence often
(during his 22 years in the Netherlands, he lived in 18 different places),
practiced medicine without charge, tried to increase human longevity, and
expressed optimism about the ability of science to improve the human condition.
At the end of his life, he left a chest of personal papers, none of which
has survived, with his close friend, the Rosicrucian physician Corneille
van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands. Descartes, however,
rejected the Rosicrucians' magical and mystical beliefs. For him it was
a time of hope for revolution in science. The English philosopher Francis
Bacon [22 Jan 1561 – 09 Apr 1626], in Advancement of Learning
(1605), had already proposed a new science of observation and experiment
to replace the traditional Aristotelian science, as did Descartes later.
In 1620 Descartes was in the Roman Catholic
army of Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria [17 Apr 1573 – 27 Sep 1651],
who defeated the Protestants in Bohemia. There is, however, no evidence
that Descartes ever participated in any battles; he said military life was
idle, stupid, immoral, and cruel. In 1622 Descartes moved to Paris. There
he gambled, rode, fenced, and went to the court, concerts, and the theatre.
Among his friends were the poets Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac [1597 –
18 Feb 1654], who dedicated his Le Socrate chrétien (1652)
to Descartes, and Théophile de Viau [1590 – 25 Sep 1626], who
was burned in effigy and imprisoned in 1623 for writing verses mocking religious
themes. Descartes also made friends with the mathematician Claude
Mydorge [1585 – Jul 1647] and with Father Marin
Mersenne [08 Sep 1588 – 01 Sep 1648], a man of universal learning
who during his lifetime wrote thousands of letters to hundreds of scholars,
writers, mathematicians, and scientists, keeping everyone aware, despite
his almost unreadable handwriting, of what everyone else was doing. Mersenne
was Descartes's main contact with the larger intellectual world. Descartes
regularly hid from his friends in order to work, writing treatises, now
lost, on fencing and metals. He acquired a high reputation long before he
published anything.
At a talk in 1628,
Descartes denied the alchemist Chandoux's claim that probabilities are as
good as certainties in science and demonstrated his own method for attaining
certainty. The Cardinal de Bérulle [04 Feb 1575 – 02 Oct 1629],
who had founded the Oratorian teaching order in 1611 to rival the Jesuit
order and who was forming the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, a militant,
secret society of laymen to fight Protestantism, was impressed and invited
Descartes to a conference. Bérulle was a strange combination of astute
politician, courtier, and mystic who often advised the Queen Mother and
talked familiarly with God and angels every day. Many commentators speculate
that Bérulle urged Descartes to write an Augustinian metaphysics
to replace Jesuit teaching. There can be no question that, in one way or
another, Bérulle tried to recruit Descartes to the Catholic cause.
The result, however,was that within weeks Descartes left for the Netherlands,
which was Protestant, took great precautions to conceal his whereabouts,
and did not return to France for 16 years. Rather than taking Bérulle
as director of his conscience, as some argue, it is probable that Descartes,
who was a Roman Catholic but not an enthusiast, who was accused of being
a Rosicrucian, who was from a Huguenot province, who glorified reason, and
who advocated religious tolerance, was frightened by the mystical, militant
Bérulle.
Descartes said that he
went to the Netherlands to enjoy a greater liberty than was available anyplace
else and to avoid the distractions of Paris and friends so that he could
have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had inherited enough money and
property to live independently.) The Netherlands was a haven of tolerance.
Descartes could be an original, independent thinker there without fear,
for example, of being burned for giving natural explanations of miracles,
as was Lucilio Vanini in 1619, or of being drafted as a soldier for the
Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. He opposed vows that restricted liberty
and said, when accused of having illegitimate children, that, after all,
he was a man and had taken no vows of chastity. In France, by contrast,
religious intolerance was mounting. The Jews were expelled in1615, and the
last Protestant stronghold, La Rochelle, besieged for 14 months with Bérulle's
participation, capitulated unconditionally on 01 November 1628, only weeks
before Descartes's departure. Catholic commentators insist that Descartes
would have been safe in France, but the Parliament of Paris passed a decree
in 1624 forbidding attacks on Aristotle on pain of death. Although the Catholic
priests Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi [22 Jan 1592 – 24 Oct 1655] did
publish attacks without being persecuted, heretics continued to be burned,
and laymen lacked church protection. Descartes may have felt in some jeopardy
because of his friendship with such libertines as Father Claude Picot, a
bon vivant known as “the Atheist Priest,” with whom Descartes
left his financial affairs in France.
In 1629 Descartes went to the university at Franeker, where he stayed with
a Roman Catholic family and wrote the first draft of his Meditationes.
He registered at the University of Leiden in 1630, where he gained as a
disciple the physician Henri Reneri. In 1631 he visited Denmark and in 1633–34
was in Germany with the physician and alchemist Étienne de Villebressieu,
who invented siege engines, a portable bridge, and a two-wheeled stretcher.
The physician Henri Regius taught Descartes's views at the University of
Utrecht in 1639, starting a fierce controversy with the Calvinist theologian
Gisbertus Voetius [1589-1676] that continued until the end of Descartes's
life. In his Letter to Voetius of 1648, Descartes made a plea for
religious tolerance and the rights of man. He said that he wrote not only
for Christians but also for Turks, meaning libertines, infidels, deists,
and atheists. He argued that, because Protestants and Roman Catholics worship
the same God, both can hope for heaven. When the controversy became intense,
however, Descartes sought the protection of the French ambassador and of
his friend Constantijn Huygens [04 Sep 1596 – 28 Mar 1687], secretary
to Prince Frederick Henry [29 Jan 1584 – 14 Mar 1647], ruler of the
Dutch Republic.
In 1635 Descartes's daughter
Francine was born to Helena Jans and was baptized in the Reformed Church
in Deventer. Although Francine is referred to as Descartes's illegitimate
daughter, her baptism is recorded in a register for legitimate births. Descartes
said that his greatest sorrow was Francine's death of scarlet fever at the
age of five and that he was not a philosopher who believed that one must
refrain from tears to prove oneself a man.
In 1633 Descartes was about to publish Le Monde (published 1664),
when he heard that the Italian astronomer Galileo [15 Feb 1664 – 08
Jan 1642] Galilei had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that
the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central
to Descartes's cosmology and physics, he suppressed Le Monde, hoping
that the church would retract its condemnation and make it possible for
him to publish his work later. He feared the church, but he also hoped that
his physics would one day replace Aristotle's in church doctrine.
In 1637 Descartes published Discours de la méthode, one
of the first important modern philosophical works not written in Latin.
Descartes said that he wrote in French so that all who had good sense, including
women, could read his work and learn to use their reason to think for themselves.
He believed that everyone could tell true from false by the natural light
of reason. In three essays forming part of the Discours de la méthode,
he illustrated his method for utilizing reason in the search for truth in
the sciences. In Dioptrics he then presented the law of refraction, in Meteorology
he explained the rainbow, and in Geometry he gave an exposition of analytic
geometry, which is a method of representing geometric figures with algebraic
equations that made many previously unsolvable problems solvable. He also
introduced the conventions of representing known numerical quantities with
a, b, c, . . . , unknowns with x, y, z, . . . , and squares, cubes, and
other powers with numerical superscripts, as in x 2, x 3, . . . , which
made algebraic notation much clearer than it had been before.
In Discours de la méthode and in Regulae
ad Directionem Ingenii, written by 1628 but not published until
1701, Descartes gave four rules for reasoning: (1) Accept nothing as true
that is not self-evident. (2) Divide problems into their simplest parts.
(3) Solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex. (4) Recheck the
reasoning. These rules are a direct application of mathematical procedures.
Descartes insisted that key notions and the limits of each problem must
be clearly defined.
In Discours de
la méthode he also provided a provisional moral code (later
presented as final) for use while seeking truth: (1) Obey local customs
and laws. (2) Make decisions on the best evidence and then stick to them
firmly as though they were certain. (3) Change desires rather than the world.
(4) Always seek truth. This code exhibits Descartes's prudential conservatism,
decisiveness, stoicism, and dedication. For Descartes all knowledge was
like a tree—with metaphysics forming the roots, physics the trunk,
and medicine, mechanics, and morals the branches—on which the fruit
of knowledge is produced.
In 1641 Descartes
published in Latin (because it was dedicated to the Jesuit professors at
the Sorbonne in Paris) Meditationes
de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstrantur.
. Mersenne submitted it before publication to eminent thinkers, among whom
were the Jansenist philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld [06 Feb 1612
– 08 Aug 1694], the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes [05 Apr 1588
– 04 Dec 1679], and the Epicurean atomist Pierre Gassendi [22 Jan
1592 – 24 Oct 1655]. Mersenne collected their critical responses and
published them with the Meditationes. Even though Descartes said
that the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin, a respondent added in the second
edition (1642), was a fool, these objections and replies constitute a landmark
of cooperative discussion in philosophy and science at a time when dogmatism
was the rule.
Descartes begins Meditationes
with methodic doubt, rejecting as though false all types of knowledge by
which he was ever deceived. His arguments derive from the Pyrrhonism of
the Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus as reflected in the skeptical writings
of Michel de Montaigne [28 Feb 1533 – 23 Sep 1592] and Pierre Charron
[1541 – 16 Nov 1603]. Thus knowledge based on authority is set aside
because even experts are sometimes wrong. Knowledge from sensory experience
is declared untrustworthy because people sometimes mistake one thing for
another, as with mirages. Knowledge based on reasoning is rejected as unreliable
because one often makes mistakes as, for example, when adding. Finally,
knowledge may be illusory because it comes from dreams or insanity or from
a demon able to deceive men by making them think that they are experiencing
the real world when they are not. Descartes finds certainty in the intuition
that when he is thinking, even if deceived, he exists: “Cogito, ergo
sum”. The cogito is a logically self-evident truth that gives certain
knowledge of a particular thing's existence—that is, one's self—but
the cogito justifies accepting as certain only the existence of the person
who thinks it. If all one ever knew for certain was that one exists and
if one adhered to Descartes's method of doubting all that is uncertain,
then one would be reduced to solipsism, the view that nothing exists but
one's individual self and thoughts. To escape this, Descartes argues that
all ideas that are as clear and distinct as the cogito must be true, for,
if they were not, the cogito also, as a member of the class of clear and
distinct ideas, could be doubted. Since “Cogito, ergo sum” cannot
be doubted, all clear and distinct ideas must be true.
On the basis of clear and distinct innate ideas, Descartes then establishes
that each mind is a spiritual substance and each body a part of one material
substance. The mind or soul is immortal because it is unextended and cannot
be broken into parts, as can extended bodies. Descartes also advances proof
for the existence of God. He begins with the statement that he has an innate
idea of God as a perfect being and then intuits that God necessarily exists,
because, if he did not, he would not be perfect. This ontological proof
for the existence of God is at the heart of Descartes's rationalism, for
it establishes certain knowledge about an existing thing solely on the basis
of reasoning from innate ideas, with no help from sensory experience. Descartes
then argues that, because God is perfect, he does not deceive human beings;
therefore the world exists. Thus Descartes claims to have given metaphysical
foundations for the existence of his own mind, of God, and of the world.
A famous objection to Descartes's procedure
is Arnauld's Cartesian Circle, which exposes the circularity inherent in
Descartes's reasoning. To know that God exists, one must trust the clear
and distinct idea of God; but, to know that clear and distinct ideas are
true, one must know that God exists and does not deceive man. Descartes
the rationalist rejected magic, but he failed to see that his ontological
proof is word-magic based on the superstition that things can be determined
by ideas and thoughts. In opposition to Descartes's rationalism, empiricists
hold that descriptions of things must come after, not before, one knows
by experience that they exist.
Descartes's
goal was to be master of nature. He provided understanding of the trunk
of the tree of knowledge in The World, Dioptrics, Meteorology,
and Geometry and revealed its roots in Meditations; he
then spent the rest of his life working on the branches of mechanics, medicine,
and morals. Mechanics is the basis of his medicine, or physiology, which
in turn is the basis of his moral psychology. Descartes believed that all
material bodies, including the human body, are machines that operate by
mechanical principles. In his physiological studies, he dissected animal
bodies to show how their parts move. He argued that, because animals have
no souls, they do not think or feel; thus vivisection, which Descartes pioneered,
is permitted. He also described the circulation of the blood but came to
the erroneous conclusion that heat in the heart expands the blood, causing
its expulsion. Descartes's L'Homme, et un traité de la formation
du foetus was published in 1664.
In 1641 Descartes was visited by Picot and Jacques Vallée Desbarreaux,
known as “the Grand Debauché,” who had published the
libertine poet Théophile de Viau. Descartes used them as models for
characters (he was himself model for a third) in his dialogue Recherche
de la Vérité (1701). In 1642 Samuel Sorbière,
the French translator of Sextus and Hobbes, visited Descartes and wrote
a charming description of him as host. Descartes then lived in the small
but very elegant château of Endegeest, outside Leiden, near the court
in The Hague.
In 1644 Descartes published
Principia Philosophiae, a compilation of his physics and metaphysics.
He dedicated this work to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Elizabeth Stuart,
titular queen of Bohemia, who was in exile in The Hague, for he had developed
his moral philosophy in correspondence with her. According to Descartes,
a human being is a union of mind and body, two dissimilar substances that
interact in the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland must be
the uniting point because it is the only non-double organ in the brain,
and double reports, as from two eyes, must have one place to merge. He argued
that each action on a person's sense organs causes subtle matter to move
through tubular nerves to the pineal gland, causing it to vibrate distinctively.
These vibrations give rise to emotions and passions and also cause the body
to act. Bodily action is thus the final outcome of a reflex arc that begins
with external stimuli and involves first an internal response, as, for example,
when a soldier sees the enemy, feels fear, and flees. The mind cannot change
bodily reactions directly (for example, it cannot will the body to fight)
but it can change the pineal vibrations from those that cause fear and fleeing
to those that cause courage and fighting.
Descartes furthermore argued that men can be conditioned by experience to
have specific emotional responses. He, for example, had been conditioned
to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he had loved a cross-eyed playmate
as a child. When he remembered this fact, however, he was able to rid himself
of his passion. This insight was the basis for Descartes's defense of free
will and of the mind's ability to control the body. Despite such arguments
in defense of free will, in his Les Passions de l'âme, dedicated
in 1649 to Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes holds that most bodily actions
are determined by external material causes.
Descartes's morality was anti-Christian in that, in contrast to Calvinists
and Jansenists, he suggested that grace is not necessary for salvation but
that human beings are virtuous and able to achieve salvation when they do
their best to find and act upon truth. His optimism about the ability of
human reason and will to find truth and reach salvation is in stark contrast
with the pessimism of the Jansenist (predestinarian) apologist and mathematician
Blaise Pascal [19 Jun 1623 – 19 Aug 1662], who believed that salvation
comes only as a gift of God's grace. Descartes was correctly accused of
holding the
view of Jacobus Arminius [10 Oct 1560 – 19 Oct 1609], an anti-Calvinist
Dutch theologian, that virtuous behavior depends on free
will rather than on grace.
Descartes also held that, unless people believe in God and immortality,
they will see no reason to be moral.
Free will, Descartes stated, is the sign of God in human nature, and human
beings can be praised or blamed according to their use of it. People are
good only if they act in goodwill for the good of others; such generosity
is the highest virtue. Descartes was Epicurean in his assertion that human
passions are good in themselves and an extreme moral optimist in his belief
that to understand the good is to want to do it; because passions are willings,
to want something is to will it. He was also stoic, however, in his admonition
that human beings should control their passions rather than change the world.
Although Descartes wrote no political philosophy,
he approved of Seneca's admonition to acquiesce in the order of things.
He rejected the recommendation of Machiavelli [03 May 1469 – 21 Jun
1527] to lie to friends, because friendship is sacred and life's greatest
joy. Human beings cannot exist alone but must be parts of social groups,
such as nations and families, and it is better to do good for the group
than for oneself.
Descartes had been
a puny child with a weak chest and was not expected to live. He therefore
watched his health carefully and became almost a vegetarian. In 1639 he
bragged that he had not been sick for 19 years and expected to live to be
100. He told Elizabeth to think of life as a comedy; bad thoughts cause
bad dreams and bodily disorders. Because there is always more good than
evil in life, one can always be content, no matter how poorly off one is.
In his later years Descartes said that he
had once hoped to learn to prolong life to a century or more, but he then
saw that, in order to achieve that goal, the efforts of many generations
would be required; he himself had not even learned to prevent a fever. Thus,
he said, instead of continuing to hope for long life, he had found an easier
way, namely to love life but not fear death. It is easy, he claimed, for
a true philosopher to die tranquilly.
After 16 years in the Netherlands, Descartes returned to France for brief
visits in 1644, 1647, and 1648, on financial business and to oversee the
translation into French of Principia Philosophiae, Meditationes,
and Objections and Replies. (The translators were, respectively,
Picot, the Duke de Luynes, and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he also met with
Gassendi and Hobbes and suggested to Pascal the famous experiment of taking
a barometer up Mount Puy-de-Dôme to determine the influence of the
weight of the air. In Paris Descartes joined with Pierre d'Alibert, treasurer
general of France, in a plan to establish a workshop school of arts and
crafts in the Royal College. Picot returned with Descartes to the Netherlands
for the winter of 1647–1648. During Descartes's final stay in Paris
in 1648, the revolt of the nobility against the crown, known as the Fronde,
broke out. As a result, Descartes left Paris precipitously on 17 August
1648, only days before his mortally ill old friend Mersenne died. Back at
his retreat in Egmond, in the Netherlands, Descartes was visited by the
young Frans Burman, whose Conversations (first published in 1896)
gives a genial and illuminating picture of Descartes.
Hector Pierre Chanut, Clerselier's brother-in-law, helped to procure a pension
for Descartes from Louis XIV (which was never paid). Then Chanut, who was
French resident and later ambassador to Sweden, gained an invitation for
Descartes to the court of the Swedish monarch, Queen Christina [08 Dec 1626
– 19 Apr 1689], who by the close of the Thirty Years' War had become
one of the most important and powerful monarchs in Europe. Descartes went
reluctantly, arriving early in October 1649. He may have gone because he
needed protection; the Fronde seemed to have destroyed his chances in Paris,
and the Calvinist theologians were still harassing him in the Netherlands.
The 22-year-old Christina perversely made
the 53-year-old Descartes rise at 05:00 to give her philosophy lessons,
even though she knew of his habit of meditating in bed until 11:00. [See
Descartes
Teaching Christina, painting by Dumesnil; 1728x2112pix, 470kb].
She also is said to have ordered him to write a ballet in verse, La
Naissance de la paix (1649), celebrating Christina's role in the Peace
of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, and a comedy in five acts,
now lost. In addition he wrote the statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts
and Sciences. While delivering these statutes to the Queen at 05:00 AM on
01 February 1650, Descartes caught a chill. In this land, where he said
that in winter men's thoughts freeze like the water, Descartes developed
pneumonia. He died in Stockholm on 11 February 1650. Many pious last words
have been attributed to Descartes, but the most trustworthy report is probably
that of his German valet, Schulter, who said that Descartes was in a coma
and died without saying anything at all. The last thing Descartes wrote
was a letter asking his brother to continue the pension Descartes had been
paying to their old nurse.
After his
death, Descartes's papers came into the possession of Clerselier, a pious
Catholic, who began the process of turning Descartes into a saint by cutting,
adding to, and selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work culminated
in 1691 in the massive biography by Father Adrien Baillet, who had previously
published a 17-volume Lives of the Saints. Even while Descartes
was still alive, there were questions as to whether he was a Roman Catholic
apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an
atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while
establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer,
not least because many papers and manuscripts available to Clerselier and
Baillet are now lost. The Roman Catholic church made its decision in 1667
by putting Descartes's works on the Index of Forbidden Books on the very
day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont
in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called
him a Jesuit and a papist, but he said that they were intolerant, ignorant
bigots. Up to about 1930, the majority of scholars, many of whom were religious,
believed that Descartes's major concerns were metaphysical and religious.
By the late 20th century, however, numerous commentators had come to believe
that Descartes was a Catholic in the way he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that
is, by birth and by politics.
Descartes
himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God.
He once told the German protégée Anne-Maria de Schurman that
she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was
perfectly aware of, although he tried to conceal, the atheistic potential
of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes also seemed indifferent
to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked
into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man,
Descartes rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable
and sinful. Instead he exulted in the power of human reason to understand
the cosmos and to promote human happiness. He held that it was impertinent
to pray to God to change things, insisting rather that human beings must
try to improve themselves.
The history
of the original works of Descartes and their early translations into English
is as follows: Musicae Compendium (written 1618, published 1650); Renatus
Des-Cartes Excellent Compendium of Musick (1653); Regulae ad Directionem
Ingenii (written 1628, published 1701); Le Monde de Mr Descartes; ou, le
traité de la lumière (written 1633, published 1664);Discours
de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité
dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique; les meteores; et la geometrie (1637;
A Discourse of a Method for the Wel-guiding of Reason, and the Discovery
of Truth in Sciences, 1649); Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; and
its 2nd ed., with Objectiones Septimae, 1642; Six Metaphysical Meditations;
Wherein It Is Proved That There Is a God, 1680); Principia Philosophiae
(1644); and Les Passions de l'âme (1649; The Passions of the Soule,
1650).Descartes's correspondence has been collected in Lettres de Mr Descartes:
où sont traittées plusieurs belles questions touchant la morale,
physique, medecine, & les mathematiques, ed. by Claude Clerselier, 3
vol. (1666–67); and Correspondance, ed. by Charles Adam and Gaston
Milhaud, 8 vol. (1936–63, reprinted 1970). The standard edition of
complete works is the multivolume Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam
and Paul Tannery, published several times since it appeared in 12 vol. with
a supplement in 1897–1913. See it in a later edition, 11 vol. in 13
(1974–82). It includes Descartes's correspondence.Modern translationsinto
English, many with valuable commentaries, include such selections as The
Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T.
Ross, 2 vol. (1911–12, reprinted 1978); The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch,
2 vol. (1984–85); Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed.
by Anthony Kenny (1970, reprinted 1981); Descartes' Conversation with Burman,
trans. by John Cottingham (1976); Le Monde; ou, traité de la lumière,
trans. into English by Michael Sean Mahoney (1979); Treatise of Man, trans.
by Thomas Steele Hall (1972); Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and
Meteorology, trans. by Paul J. Olscamp (1965); Principles of Philosophy,
trans. by Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (1983); The Passions
of the Soul, trans. by Stephen Voss (1989); and Descartes, His Moral Philosophy
and Psychology. |
On
a 31 March: 
ss2002
Crane operator and three construction workers as two cranes fall
from the 60th floor of a high-rise building under construction due to 6.8
earthquake centered near Hualien, Taiwan, 10 km deep. Some 200 persons are
injured. Tremors frequently shake Taiwan, but most cause little or no damage.
However, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in September 1999 killed 2,378 people
and destroyed more than 40'000 homes.
Fisher established his distinctive style and themes with his first novel,
Toilers of the Hills (1928). The hero, Dock Hunter, embraces the
prevalent myth that he can successfully farm the high dry lands of Idaho
without irrigation. Even after repeated failures, Hunter refuses to admit
that the idea might be wrong and instead redoubles his futile efforts. Fisher's
best-known novel, Children of God, garnered considerable attention
for its honest depiction of Mormon bigotry, but the central theme was similar
to that of his first book: the dangers of obsessively following an idea,
and the human power to ignore grim reality in favor of fantasy. 
