by E. T. Bell
There was much more. Out of it all Descartes says he was filled with “enthusiasm” (probably intended in a mystic sense) and that there had been revealed to him, as in the second dream, the magic key which would unlock the treasure house of nature and put him in possession of the true foundation, at least, of all the sciences.
What was this marvelous key? Descartes himself does not seem to have told anyone explicitly, but it is usually believed to have been nothing less than the application of algebra to geometry, analytic geometry in short and, more generally, the exploration of natural phenomena by mathematics, of which mathematical physics today is the most highly developed example.
November 10, 1619, then, is the official birthday of analytic geometry and therefore also of modern mathematics. Eighteen years were to pass before the method was published. In the meantime Descartes went on with his soldiering. On his behalf mathematics may thank Mars that no half-spent shot knocked his head off at the battle of Prague. A score or so of promising young mathematicians a few years short of three centuries later were less lucky, owing to the advance of that science which Descartes’ dream inspired.
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As never before the young soldier of twenty two now realized that if he was ever to find truth he must first reject absolutely all ideas acquired from others and rely upon the patient questioning of his own mortal mind to show him the way. All the knowledge he had received from authority must be cast aside; the whole fabric of his inherited moral and intellectual ideas must be destroyed, to be refashioned more enduringly by the primitive, earthy strength of human reason alone. To placate his conscience he prayed the Holy Virgin to help him in his heretical project. Anticipating her assistance he vowed a pilgrimage to the shrine of Notre-Dame de Lorette and proceeded forthwith to subject the accepted truths of religion to a scorching, devastating criticism. However, he duly discharged his part of the contract when he found the opportunity.
In the meantime he continued his soldiering, and in the spring of 1620 enjoyed some very real fighting at the battle of Prague. With the rest of the victors Descartes entered the city chanting praises to God. Among the terrified refugees was the four-year-old Princess Elisabeth,I who was later to become Descartes’ favorite disciple.
At last, in the spring of 1621, Descartes got his bellyful of war. With several other gay gentlemen soldiers he had accompanied the Austrians into Transylvania, seeking glory and finding it—on the other side. But if he was through with war for the moment he was not yet ripe for philosophy. The plague in Paris and the war against the Huguenots made France even less attractive than Austria. Northern Europe was both peaceful and clean; Descartes decided to pay it a visit. Things went well enough till Descartes dismissed all but one of his bodyguard before taking boat for east Frisia. Here was a Heavensent opportunity for the cut-throat crew. They decided to knock their prosperous passenger on the head, loot him, and pitch his carcase to the fish. Unfortunately for their plans Descartes understood their language. Whipping out his sword he compelled them to row him back to the shore, and once again analytic geometry escaped the accidents of battle, murder, and sudden death.
The following year passed quietly enough in visits to Holland and Rennes, where Descartes’ father lived. At the end of the year he returned to Paris, where his reserved manner and somewhat mysterious appearance immediately got him accused of being a Rosicrucian. Ignoring the gossip, Descartes philosophized and played politics to get himself a commission in the army. He was not really disappointed when he failed, as he was left free to visit Rome where he enjoyed the most gorgeous spectacle he had yet witnessed, the ceremony celebrated every quarter of a century by the Catholic Church. This Italian interlude is of importance in Descartes’ intellectual development for two reasons. His philosophy, so far as it fails to touch the common man, was permanently biased against that lowly individual by the fill which the bewildered philosopher got of unwashed humanity gathered from all corners of Europe to receive the papal benediction. Equally important was Descartes’ failure to meet Galileo. Had the mathematician been philosopher enough to sit for a week or two at the feet of the father of modern science, his own speculations on the physical universe might have been less fantastic. All that Descartes got out of his Italian journey was a grudging jealousy of his incomparable contemporary.
Immediately after his holiday in Rome, Descartes enjoyed another bloody spree of soldiering with the Duke of Savoy, in which he so distinguished himself that he was offered a lieutenant generalship. He had sense enough to decline. Returning to the Paris of Cardinal Richelieu and the swashing D’Artagnan—the latter near-fiction, the former less credible than a melodrama—Descartes settled down to three years of meditation. In spite of his lofty thoughts he was no gray-bearded savant in a dirty smock, but a dapper, well dressed man of the world, clad in fashionable taffeta and sporting a sword as befitted his gentlemanly rank. To put the finishing touch to his elegance he crowned himself with a sweeping, broad-brimmed, ostrich-plumed hat. Thus equipped he was ready for the cut-throats infesting church, state, and street. Once when a drunken lout insulted Descartes’ lady of the evening, the irate philosopher went after the rash fool quite in the stump-stirring fashion of D’Artagnan, and having flicked the sot’s sword out of his hand, spared his life, not because he was a rotten swordsman, but because he was too filthy to be butchered before a beautiful lady.
Having mentioned one of Descartes’ lady friends we may dispose of all but two of the rest here. Descartes liked women well enough to have a daughter by one. The child’s early death affected him deeply. Possibly his reason for never marrying may have been, as he informed one expectant lady, that he preferred truth to beauty; but it seems more probable that he was too shrewd to mortgage his tranquillity and repose to some fat, rich, Dutch widow. Descartes was only moderately well off, but he knew when he had enough. For this he has been called cold and selfish. It seems juster to say that he knew where he was going and that he realized the importance of his goal. Temperate and abstemious in his habits he was not mean, never inflicting on his household the Spartan regimen he occasionally prescribed for himself. His servants adored him, and he interested himself in their welfare long after they had left his service. The boy who was with him at his death was inconsolable for days at the loss of his master. All this does not sound like selfishness.
Descartes also has been accused of atheism. Nothing could be farther from the truth. His religious beliefs were unaffectedly simple in spite of his rational skepticism. He compared his religion, indeed, to the nurse from whom he had received it, and declared that he found it as comforting to lean upon one as on the other. A rational mind is sometimes the queerest mixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.
Another trait affected all Descartes’ actions till he gradually outgrew it under the rugged discipline of soldiering. The necessary coddling of his delicate childhood infected him with a deep tinge of hypochondria, and for years he was chilled by an oppressive dread of death. This, no doubt, is the origin of his biological researches. By middle age he could say sincerely that nature is the best physician and that the secret of keeping well is to lose the fear of death. He no longer fretted to discover means of prolonging existence.
His three years of peaceful meditation in Paris were the happiest of Descartes’ life. Galileo’s brilliant discoveries with his crudely constructed telescope had set half the natural philosophers of Europe to pottering with lenses. Descartes amused himself in this way, but did nothing of striking novelty. His genius was essentially mathematical and abstract. One discovery which he made at this time, that of the principle of virtual velocities in mechanics, is still of scientific importance. This really was first-rate work. Finding that few understood or appreciated it, he abandoned abstract matters and turned to what he considered the highest of all studies, that of man. But, as he dryly remarks, he soon discovered that the number of those who understand man is negligible in comparison with the number of those who think they und
erstand geometry.
Up till now Descartes had published nothing. His rapidly mounting reputation again attracted a horde of fashionable dilettantes, and once more Descartes sought tranquillity and repose on the battlefield, this time with the King of France at the siege of La Rochelle. There he met that engaging old rascal Cardinal Richelieu, who was later to do him a good turn, and was impressed, not by the Cardinal’s wiliness, but by his holiness. On the victorious conclusion of the war Descartes returned with a whole skin to Paris, this time to suffer his second conversion and abandon futilities forever.
He was now (1628) thirty two, and only his miraculous luck had preserved his body from destruction and his mind from oblivion. A stray bullet at La Rochelle might easily have deprived Descartes of all claim to remembrance, and he realized at last that if he was ever to arrive it was high time that he be on his way. He was aroused from his sterile state of passive indifference by two Cardinals, De Bérulle and De Bagné, to the first of whom in particular the scientific world owes an everlasting debt of gratitude for having induced Descartes to publish.
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The Catholic clergy of the time cultivated and passionately loved the sciences, in grateful contrast to the fanatical Protestants whose bigotry had extinguished the sciences in Germany. On becoming acquainted with De Bérulle and De Bagné, Descartes blossomed out like a rose under their genial encouragement. In particular, during soirees at De Bagné’s, Descartes spoke freely of his new philosophy to a M. de Chandoux (who was later hanged for counterfeiting, not a result of Descartes’ lessons in casuistry, let us hope). To illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing the true from the false Descartes undertook to produce twelve irrefutable arguments showing the falsity of any incontestable truth and, conversely, to do the like for the truth of any admitted falsehood. How then, the bewildered listeners asked, shall mere human beings distinguish truth from falsehood? Descartes confided that he had (what he considered) an infallible method, drawn from mathematics, for making the required distinction. He hoped and planned, he said, to show how his method could be applied to science and human welfare through the medium of mechanical invention.
De Bérulle was profoundly stirred by the vision of all the kingdoms of the earth with which Descartes had tempted him from the pinnacle of philosophic speculation. In no uncertain terms he told Descartes that it was his duty to God to share his discoveries with the world, and threatened him with hell-fire—or at least the loss of his chance of heaven—if he did not. Being a devout practising Catholic Descartes could not possibly resist such an appeal. He decided to publish. This was his second conversion, at the age of thirty two. He straightway retired to Holland, where the colder climate suited him, to bring his decision to realization.
For the next twenty years he wandered about all over Holland, never settling for long in any one place, a silent recluse in obscure villages, country hotels and out-of-the-way corners of great cities, methodically carrying on a voluminous scientific and philosophical correspondence with the leading intellects of Europe, using as intermediary the trusted friend of his school days at La Flèche, Father Mersenne, who alone knew the secret at any time of Descartes’ address. The parlor of the cloister of the Minims, not far from Paris, became the exchange (through Mersenne) for questions, mathematical problems, scientific and philosophical theories, objections, and replies.
During his long vagabondage in Holland Descartes occupied himself with a number of studies in addition to his philosophy and mathematics. Optics, chemistry, physics, anatomy, embryology, medicine, astronomical observations, and meteorology, including a study of the rainbow, all claimed their share of his restless activity. Any man today spreading his effort over so diversified a miscellany would write himself down a fiddling dilettante. But it was not so in Descartes’ age; a man of talent might still hope to find something of interest in almost any science that took his fancy. Everything that came Descartes’ way was grist to his mill. A brief visit to England acquainted him with the mystifying behavior of the magnetic needle; forthwith magnetism had to be included in his comprehensive philosophy. The speculations of theology also called for his attention. All through his theorizing his mind was shadowed by the incubus of his early training. He would not have shaken it off if he could.
All of what Descartes had gathered and excogitated was to be incorporated into an imposing treatise, Le Monde. In 16S4, Descartes being then thirty eight, the treatise was undergoing its final revision. It was to have been a New Year’s gift to Father Mersenne. All learned Paris was agog to see the masterpiece. Mersenne had been granted many previews of selected portions but as yet he had not seen the completed, dovetailed work. Without irreverence Le Monde may be described as what the author of the Book of Genesis might have written had he known as much science and philosophy as Descartes did. Descartes intended his account of God’s creation of the universe to supply the lack which some readers had felt in the Bible story of the six days’ creation, namely, an element of rationality. From the distance of three hundred years there seems but little to choose between Genesis and Descartes, and it is somewhat difficult for us to realize that such a book as Le Monde could ever have caused a bishop or a pope to fly into a cold, murderous rage. As a matter of fact none did; Descartes saw to that.
Descartes was aware of the judgments of ecclesiastical justice. He also knew of the astronomical researches of Galileo and of that fearless man’s championship of the Copernican system. In fact he was impatiently waiting to see Galileo’s latest book before putting the final touches to his own. Instead of receiving the copy a friend had promised to send him, he got the stunning news that Galileo, in the seventieth year of his age, and in spite of the sincere friendship that the powerful Duke of Tuscany had for him, had been given up to the Inquisition and had been forced (June 22, 1633) on his knees to abjure as a heresy the Copernican doctrine that the Earth moves round the Sun. What would have happened to Galileo had he refused to forswear his scientific knowledge Descartes could only conjecture, but the names of Bruno, Vanini, and Campanella recurred to his mind.
Descartes was crushed. In his own book he had expounded the Copernican system as a matter of course. On his own account he had been far more daring than Copernicus or Galileo had ever had occasion to be, because he was interested in the theology of science whereas they were not. He had proved to his own satisfaction the necessity of the cosmos as it exists, and he thought he had shown that if God had created any number of distinct universes they must all, under the action of “natural law,” sooner or later have fallen into line with necessity and have evolved into the universe as it actually is. Descartes, in short, professed with his scientific knowledge to know a great deal more about the nature and ways of God than either the author of Genesis or the theologians had ever dreamed of. If Galileo had been forced to get down on his knees for his mild and conservative heresy, what could Descartes expect?
To say that fear alone stopped Descartes from publishing Le Monde is to miss the more important part of the truth. He was not only afraid—as any sane man might well have been; he was deeply hurt. He was as convinced of the truth of the Copernican system as he was of his own existence. But he was also convinced of the infallibility of the Pope. Here now was the Pope making a silly ass of himself by contradicting Copernicus. This was his first thought. His casuistical schooling came to his aid. In some way, through the mystical incomprehensibilities of some superhuman synthesis, the Pope and Copernicus would yet both be proved right. From this as yet unrevealed Pisgah height Descartes confidently hoped and expected some day to look down in philosophic serenity on the apparent contradiction and see it vanish in a glory of reconciliation. It was simply impossible for him to give up either the Pope or Copernicus. So he suppressed his book and kept both his belief in the infallibility of the Pope and the truth of the Copernican system. As a sop to his subconscious self-respect he decided that Le Monde should be published after his death. By that time perhaps the Pope too would be dead and
the contradiction would have resolved itself.
Descartes’ determination not to publish extended to all his work. But in 1637, when Descartes was forty one, his friends overcame his reluctance and induced him to permit the printing of his masterpiece, of which the title is translated as A Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting the Reason and seeking Truth in the Sciences. Further, the Dioptric, Meteors, and Geometry, essays in this Method. This work is known shortly as the Method. It was published on June 8, 1637. This is the day, then, on which analytic geometry was given to the world. Before describing wherein that geometry is superior to the synthetic geometry of the Greeks we shall finish with the life of its author.
After having given the reasons for Descartes’ delay in publication it is only fair to tell now the other and brighter side of the story.
The Church which Descartes had feared but which had never actually opposed him now came most generously to his aid. Cardinal Richelieu gave Descartes the privilege of publishing either in France or abroad anything he cared to write. (In passing we may ask, however, by what right, divine, or other, did Cardinal Richelieu, or any other human being, dictate to a philosopher and man of science what he should or should not publish?) But in Utrecht, Holland, the Protestant theologians savagely condemned Descartes’ work as atheistic and dangerous to that mystic entity known as “The State.” The liberal Prince of Orange threw his great weight on Descartes’ side and backed him to the limit.
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Since the autumn of 1641 Descartes had been living at a quiet little village near the Hague in Holland, where the exiled Princess Elisabeth, now a young woman with a penchant for learning, rusticated with her mother. The Princess does indeed seem to have been a prodigy of learning. After mastering six languages and digesting much literature she had turned to mathematics and science, hoping to find more nourishing fare. One theory to account for this remarkable young woman’s unusual appetite ascribes her hunger for knowledge to a disappointment in love. Neither mathematics nor science satisfied her. Then Descartes’ book came her way and she knew that she had found what she needed to fill her aching void—Descartes. An interview was arranged with the somewhat reluctant philosopher.