by Will Durant
It is simple now, profiting from three centuries of discussion, to point out weaknesses in this brave first modern “system” of philosophy. The idea of reducing philosophy to geometrical form condemned Descartes to a deductive method in which, despite his experiments, he relied too recklessly on his flair for reasoning. To make the clarity, distinctness, vividness, and immediacy of an idea the test of its truth was suicidal, for on that basis who would dare deny the revolution of the sun around the earth? To argue that God exists because we have a clear and distinct idea of a perfect and infinite being (do we?), and then to argue that clear and distinct ideas are trustworthy because God would not deceive us, is a form of reasoning as circular and dubious as Descartes’ planetary orbits. This philosophy is dripping with the medieval Scholastic conceptions that it proposed to reject. Montaigne’s doubt was more basic and lasting than that of Descartes, who merely removed traditional nonsense to make room for his own.
Even so there remained enough in his science, if not in his metaphysics, to make him fear persecution. His theory of universal mechanism left miracles and free will in a parlous state despite his professions of orthodox belief. When he heard of Galileo’s condemnation (June 1633) he put aside the major work, Le Monde, in which he had planned to unite all his scientific work and results; and he wrote sadly to Mersenne:
This has so strongly affected me that I have almost resolved to burn all my ms., or at least to show it to no one. … If it [the motion of the earth] is false, all the principles of my philosophy [of world mechanism] are erroneous, since they mutually support one another…. But on no account will I publish anything that contains a word that might displease the Church.108
At his death only a few fragments of Le Monde could be found.
The attack came not (in his lifetime) from the Roman Church but from the Calvinist theologians in the universities of Utrecht and Leiden. They considered his defense of free will as a heresy dangerous to predestinarianism, and they saw in his mechanical cosmogony a descent to within a step of atheism. If the universe could get along with merely an initial impetus from God, it was only a matter of time till God would be absolved from that inaugural push. In 1641, when a Utrecht professor adopted the Cartesian system, the rector of the university, Gisbert Voetius, persuaded the city magistrates to ban the new philosophy. Descartes retorted with an attack upon Voetius, who answered bitterly and was rebutted by Descartes. The magistrates summoned the philosopher to appear before them (1643). He refused to come; judgment was passed against him, but his friends at The Hague intervened, and the magistrates contented themselves with a decree forbidding any further public argument either for or against Descartes’ ideas.
He was consoled by the friendship of Princess Elizabeth, who with her mother, Electress Palatine Elizabeth, the dethroned Queen of Bohemia, was living at The Hague. The Princess was nineteen when the Discours appeared (1637); she read it with delighted surprise that philosophy could be so intelligible; and Descartes, meeting her, saw with delight that metaphysics could be beautiful. He dedicated to her the Principia philosophiae in terms of enraptured flattery. She ended as an abbess in Westphalia (1680).
Not quite so happy in Holland as before, Descartes now frequently visited France (1644, 1647, 1648). His patriotism was stirred by a pension from the new government of Louis XIV (1646). He angled for a post in the administration, but the approach of civil war—the Fronde—frightened him back to Holland. In February 1649 he received an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to come and teach her philosophy. He hesitated, but was attracted by her letters, which revealed in excellent French an eager mind already won to the “dear delight.” She sent an admiral to coax him, then a warship to fetch him. He yielded, and in September he sailed from Amsterdam for Stockholm.
He was received with every honor, but was alarmed to find that the Queen wished to be instructed three times a week, always at five o’clock in the morning; Descartes had long been accustomed to lie late in bed. For two months he conformed to the royal schedule, walking through the winter dawn and snow from his rooms to the Queen’s library. On February 1, 1650, he caught a cold, which became pneumonia; on February 11 he died, after receiving the last rites of the Catholic Church.
He had taken as a motto Bene vixit qui bene latuit—”He has lived well who has hidden well”; but his fame had become international many years before his death. The universities rejected his philosophy, and the clergy sniffed heresy in his piety; but scientists applauded his mathematics and physics, and the fashionable world in Paris took up with pleasure the works that he had written in lucid and engaging French. Molière laughed at the femmes savantes who bandied vortices in salons but “could not endure a vacuum.” The Jesuits had heretofore been tolerant of their brilliant pupil; they had silenced one of their number who had attacked him;109 but after 1640 they withdrew their protection, and in 1663 they were instrumental in having his works placed on the Index. Bossuet and Fénelon welcomed Descartes’ proofs of the basic Christian beliefs, but saw danger to faith in resting it on reason. Pascal denounced the reliance on reason as a reed shaken by the wind.
It was precisely this Cartesian trust in reason that stirred the mind of Europe. Fontenelle summed up the matter: “It is Descartes … who gave us a new method of reasoning, much more admirable than his philosophy itself, in which a large part is false or very doubtful according to the very rules that he has taught us.”110 The Cartesian doubt did for France—for the Continent in general—what Bacon had done for England: it freed philosophy from the barnacles of time and set it bravely sailing the open sea, even if, in Descartes, it soon returned to safe and familiar ports. Not that there was any immediate victory for reason; through France’s most brilliant age, the grand siècle of Louis XIV, tradition and Scripture more than held their own; it was the epoch of Port-Royal, Pascal, and Bossuet rather than of Descartes’ inheritors. But in Holland that same period was the age of Spinoza and Bayle, and in England it was the time of Hobbes and Locke. The seed was sprouting.
Descartes’ work had some influence on French literature and art. His style was a refreshing innovation. Here was philosophy in the vernacular, dangerously open to all, and seldom had a philosopher spoken with such charming intimacy, recounting the adventures of reason as vividly as Froissart recounting an exploit in chivalry. That brief and digestible Discours de la méthode was not only a masterpiece of French prose; it set the tone, both in its language and in its ideas, for the classic age in France—for order, intelligence, and moderation in letters and arts, in manners and speech. Its emphasis on clear and distinct ideas suited the Gallic mind; its exaltation of reason became in Boileau the first principle of the classic style:
Aimez donc la raison; que toujours vos écrits
Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix.
(“Love reason, then; let your writings ever derive from it alone their luster and their worth.”)111 For two centuries the French drama became the rhetoric of reason competing with the turbulence of passion. Perhaps French poetry suffered from Descartes: his mood and his mechanisms left small scope for imagination or feeling. After him the ebullient chaos of Rabelais, the formless meandering of Montaigne, even the violent disorders of the Religious Wars, gave way to the rational arguments of Corneille, the rigid unities of Racine, the logical piety of Bossuet, the law and order, form and manners, of the monarchy and the court under Louis XIV. Unwittingly Descartes had shared in inaugurating a new style in French life as well as in philosophy.
His influence in philosophy was probably greater than that of any other modern thinker before Kant. Malebranche stemmed from him. Spinoza schooled himself in the Cartesian logic and found its weaknesses in expounding it. He imitated the Discours in his autobiographical fragment On the Improvement of the Understanding; he adopted the geometrical ideal of philosophy in his Ethics; he based his discussion of “human bondage” on Descartes’ Traité des passions. The idealistic tradition in modern philosophy from Berkele
y to Fichte started with the Cartesian emphasis on thought as the only reality directly known, just as the empirical tradition flowed from Hobbes to Spencer. But Descartes offered an antidote to idealism—the conception of an objective world completely mechanical. His attempt to understand organic as well as inorganic operations in mechanical terms gave a reckless but fruitful impetus to biology and physiology; and his mechanical analysis of sensation, imagination, memory, and volition became a major source of modern psychology. After the seventeenth century in France had buttressed orthodoxy with Descartes, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century found rich roots in his methodical doubt, his trust in reason, his interpretation of all animal life in the same terms as physics and chemistry.112 All the upholding pride of the expatriated Frenchman justified itself in his proliferating influence upon the mind of France.
The Great Debate between reason and faith was taking conscious form, but its modern history had only begun. Looking back over those ninety years from 1558 to 1648, from Elizabeth to Richelieu, from Shakespeare to Descartes, we perceive that the absorbing issues were still within the confines of Christianity, between competing varieties of religious faith based upon a Bible that all accepted as the word of God. Only in stray voices was there a suggestion that Christianity itself might be put on trial, and that philosophy might soon reject all forms of supernatural belief.
After these first steps in the conflict Catholicism remained supreme in Spain and Portugal, where the Inquisition still spread its terror and pall. In Italy the old religion had taken a humaner form, beautifying life with art and anointing mortality with hope. France compromised: Christianity survived vigorous and fruitful among the people, Catholic or Huguenot, while the upper classes frolicked with doubt, postponing piety to the eve of death. The Netherlands made a geographical compromise: the southern provinces kept Catholicism, while Calvinism triumphed in the north. In Germany Protestantism was saved by a French cardinal; but Bavaria and Austria were confirmed in their former allegiance, while Hungary and Bohemia were recaptured for the papacy. In Scandinavia Protestantism became the law of the land, but the Queen of Sweden preferred the ceremonies of Rome. In England Elizabeth proposed a gracious union of Roman ritual with national liberty, but English Protestantism, dividing into a swarm of sects, displayed its vitality and risked its life.
Amid this clash of armies and creeds the International of Science was laboring to lessen superstition and fear. It was inventing or improving the microscope, the telescope, the thermometer, and the barometer. It was devising the logarithmic and decimal systems, reforming the calendar, and developing analytical geometry; it was already dreaming of reducing all reality to an algebraic equation. Tycho Brahe had made the patiently repeated observations that enabled Kepler to formulate those laws of planetary motion which were to illuminate Newton’s vision of one universal law. Galileo was revealing new and vaster worlds through his ever larger telescopes, and was dramatizing the conflict of science and theology in the halls of the Inquisition. In philosophy Giordano Bruno was letting himself be burned to death in the attempt to reconceive deity and the cosmos in terms worthy of Copernicus; Francis Bacon, summoning the wits to science, was mapping its tasks for centuries to come; and Descartes, with his universal doubt, was giving another cue to the Age of Reason. Morals and manners were molded by the vicissitudes of belief. Literature itself was touched by the conflict, and the ideas of philosophers echoed in the poetry of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Donne. Soon all the wars and revolutions of the rival states would sink into minor significance compared with that mounting, spreading contest between faith and reason which was to agitate and transform the mind of Europe, perhaps of the world.
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I. La cena de le Ceneri (1584) (“The Ash Wednesday Supper”).
De la causa, principio, et uno (1584) (“Of Cause, Beginning, and the One”).
De l’infinito universo et mundi (1584) (“Of the Infinite Universe and the Worlds”).
Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (1584) (“Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast”).
Degl’ heroici furori (1585) (“Of the Heroic Frenzies”).
Cabal del cavallo Pegaseo (1585) (“The Revelation of the Horse of Pegasus”).
De magia (1590) (“Of Magic”).
De rerum principiis et elementis et causis (1590).
De monade, numero, et figura (1591).
De innumerabilibus, immenso, et infigurabili
II. Chiefly Francisco a Victoria, professor of theology at Salamanca, in Relectiones (Lectures, 1557); Alberico Gentili, professor of civil law at Oxford, whose De iure belli (The Law of War, 1588; anticipated Grotius’ plea for freedom of the seas; and Francisco Suárez, whose massive Tractatus de legibus (1613) outlined a league of nations bound by international laws.
III.Written in 1629, published in 1637 in a volume containing also treatises on geometry, dioptrics, and meteors. Meditationes de prima philosophia followed in 1641, Principia philosophiae in 1644, Traite des passions de l’áme in 1650, Traité de l’homme in 1662.
IV.St. Augustine had used the same starting point in seeking to refute the pagan skeptics, who professed to doubt everything. But who “doubts that he lives and thinks?” he asked. “For if he doubts, he lives.”88 Montaigne used the same argument against the Pyrrhonists in his “Apologie de Raimond Scbond.” Descartes had read Montaigne.
FIG. I-ANONYMOUS: Queen Elizabeth. National Portrait Gallery, London
FIG. 2—ATTRIBUTED TO ZUCCARO: Sir Walter Raleigh. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 3—ANONYMOUS: Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 4—ANONYMOUS: William Cecil, First Lord Burghley. National Portrait Gallery, London
FIG. 5—Burghley House, Stamford, England. British Information Services Photo
FIG. 6—ANONYMOUS: Sir Philip Sidney. National Portrait Gallery, London
FIG. 7—Middle Temple Hall, London. British Information Services Photo
FIG. 8—The Signatures of Shakespeare. From E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 1930
FIG. 9—ATTRIBUTED TOP. OUDRY: Mary, Queen of Scots. National Portrait Gallery, London
FIG. 10—CORNELIS BOEL: Title Page of the King james Bible, 2611.
FIG. 11—CORNELIUS JANSSEN: Sir William Harvey. From Abraham Wolf, History of Science, Technology and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Macmillan Company
FIG. 12—ANONYMOUS: Benjamin Jonson. National Portrait Gallery, London
FIG. 13—PAUL VAN SOMER: Francis Bacon. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 14—SIMON VAN DE PASSE: Title Page of Bacon’s “Instauratio Magna,” 1620
FIG:. 15—ANTHONY VANDYCK: King Charles I. Louvre, Paris
FIG 16—ALESSANDRO ALLORI: Torquato Tasso. Uffizi, Florence
FIG. 17—SASSOFERRATO: Pope Sixtus V. Lateran Gallery, Rome
FIG. 18—GUIDO RENI: St. Joseph. Corsini Gallery, Rome
FIG. 19-BERNINI: Tomb of Pope Urban VIII. St. Peter’s, Rome
FIG. 20–TITIAN: Philip II. Prado, Madrid (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 21—The Escorial, Spain. Spanish National Tourist Office Photo
FIG. 22—JUAN DE JUAREGUI: Cervantes (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 23—VELÁZQUEZ: Philip IV of Spain. The Frick Collection, New York
FIG 24–EL GRECO: Burial of Count Orgaz. Church of Santo Tomé, Toledo, Spain
FIG. 25-EL GRECO: The Assumption of the Virgin. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Nancy Atwood Sprague memory of Albert Arnold Sprague
FIG. 26—VELÁZQUEZ: Pope Innocent X. Galleria Doria, Rome (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 27—VELáZQUEZ: Las Meninas. Prado, Madrid
FIG. 28—VELáZQUEZ: Self-portrait. Detail from Las Meninas. Prado, Madrid (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 29—MURILLO: λ Beggar Boy. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 30—AFTER CLOUET: Charles IX. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
FIG. 31—SCHOOL OF CLOUET: Catherine de Médicis. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 32—CLOUET: Admiral Coligny. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
FIG. 33— Death Mask of Henry IV. From Benkard, Undying Faces, W. W. Norton & Co.
FIG. 34— Michel de Montaigne. Musée de Condé, Chantilly (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 35—POUSSIN: Et Ego in Arcadia. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 36—PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE: Cardinal Richelieu. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 37—ATTRIBUTED TO WILLEM KEY: Duke of Alva. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Bettmann Archive)