René Descartes, son of Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard, was born in Touraine at La Haye (now known as Descartes) on March 31, 1596. Descartes observed in 1645 that having been “bom of a mother who died a few days after my birth of a lung illness caused by some distress, I inherited from her a dry cough and a pale color . . . so that the doctors condemned me to an early death” (AT, vol. IV, pp. 220–21). In fact, his mother died a year after his birth, on May 13, as a result of the birth of another son who lived only a few days (whom Descartes never mentioned). His father, a lawyer and magistrate, remarried around 1600 and had two more children with his second wife. René spent his childhood together with his older siblings, Pierre and Jeanne, at the home of his maternal grandmother, Jeanne Sain. Pierre left home in 1604 to study at the Jesuit institution, the Collège Henri IV, newly established at La Flèche, in Anjou, and René later followed him there, probably in 1607, at Easter. As he reported later in his letter on his birth, René was a sickly child, and his entrance into La Flèche was delayed due to illness. His delicate constitution perhaps explains the report of his biographer Adrien Baillet that, while he was in school, he was regularly allowed to stay in bed until late in the morning. The story is no doubt apocryphal; it is difficult to believe that his Jesuit teachers would have indulged him to this extent. In any event, the evidence indicates that Descartes spent about eight years at La Flèche, until approximately 1615.
The sponsors of La Flèche, the Society of Jesus, was a relatively new Catholic order, founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, and dedicated to education. The order had installed themselves in Paris under royal protection in 1561, despite the opposition of the Parlement and the University. However, the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1595, after a Jesuit theology student attempted to assassinate King Henry IV of France. La Flèche was established in 1604 to mark the readmission of the Jesuits into France and their reconciliation with King Henry. After the assassination of Henry in 1610, his heart was taken to La Flèche, where it was interred with great ceremony.
The education at La Flèche reflected the standard Jesuit course of study, consisting of four or five years of French and Latin grammar and a year of rhetoric from Greek and Roman authors, culminating in three years of the philosophy curriculum: logic and ethics; natural philosophy and mathematics; and metaphysics. Philosophical studies at La Flèche followed the model of textbooks written by the Jesuits of the University of Coimbra (for example, Peter Fonseca and the Conimbricenses) or those of the Collegio Romano (for example, Franciscus Toletus). They involved lectures and commentaries on the works of Aristotle, often interpreted in a Thomist fashion, reflecting an eclectic Thomism that had weathered three centuries of commentary and criticism. In 1640 Descartes recalled that 20 years before, in his school days, he had read the textbooks of the Coimbrans, Toletus, and Antonio Rubio, a Jesuit missionary to Mexico (AT, vol. III, p. 185).
Descartes’s education at La Flèche can be characterized as progressive. The emphasis of mathematics in their collegiate curriculum was an important innovation. Descartes is even reported to have said in 1646 that he had no other instruction in algebra than his reading of Clavius more than 30 years before—that is, before 1616, when he was a student at La Flèche (AT, vol. IV, pp. 730–31). The Jesuits also seemed to be at the forefront of scientific investigations. For example, a commemorative celebration was held at La Flèche on June 4, 1611, in honor of King Henry, patron of La Flèche. The same year as Henry’s assassination, in 1610, Galileo Galilei published in Venice the Starry Messenger, announcing the discovery of Jupiter’s satellites and suggesting that Nicolas Copernicus was right in placing the sun at the center of the universe and moving the earth around it. For the occasion of the memorial celebration, the students of La Flèche composed and performed verses. One of the poems had the unlikely title “Concerning the Death of King Henry the Great and the Discovery of Some New Planets or Wandering Stars around Jupiter Noted the Previous Year by Galileo, Famous Mathematician of the Grand-Duc of Florence.” In the sonnet the reader is treated to the image of the sun taking pity on the sorrow of the French people for the loss of their king, and offering them a new torch, the new stars around Jupiter. The young poet residing in the French Jesuit college was obviously taught about Galileo’s experiences in Venice within a year of their dissemination.
After La Flèche, René Descartes, like his father, his older brother, and his younger half brother, studied law and received an advanced degree in canon and civil law from the University of Poitiers in November 1616.
At the age of 21, having gained some independence from his father, Descartes enlisted at Breda, in the Netherlands, as a gentleman soldier in the army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, a Protestant ally of France during the war between the Netherlands and Spain. At the time there was a truce in the war, so Descartes did not participate in any military action. The precise nature of Descartes’s military duties is unknown; his biographer Baillet suggests that he was attracted by Prince Maurice’s ability in the art of fortifications and siege. Prince Maurice liked mathematicians and engineers; he understood fortifications and was known to have invented several mechanisms for fording streams and laying siege to cities. In any case, the army provided Descartes with the opportunity to travel and to study the differences in human societies and values.
While at Breda, on November 10, 1618, Descartes had a chance encounter with Isaac Beeckman, who translated for him into Latin a mathematical problem posted in Dutch. A warm friendship ensued, Descartes demonstrating his mathematical abilities to Beeckman and Beeckman teaching him the application of mathematics to problems of physics: “you alone have roused me from my state of indifference and reawakened the learning that had almost disappeared by then from my memory,” he later told Beeckman (AT, vol. X, p. 162). On New Year’s eve, Descartes offered him as a gift his first work, a mathematical treatise on musical theory called Compendium musicae. He also began writing his thoughts down in a notebook. Beeckman returned to his home in Middelburg, however, and in March 1619, Descartes set off to Germany at the start of the Thirty Years’ War, to enlist in the Catholic army of Maximilian of Bavaria, in search of military action.
Descartes seems not to have found any armed combat, but he witnessed the coronation of Emperor Ferdinand II at Frankfurt in the process and met the Rosicrucian mathematician Joannes Faulhaber at Ulm. He spent the winter in the Catholic principality of Neuberg, on the shores of the Danube, in a “stove-heated room,” as he described it (AT, vol. VI, p. 11). That winter, “full of enthusiasm,” he perceived “the foundations of a wonderful science” (AT, vol. X, p. 189). He recorded that, on the night of November 10, 1619, he had three strange dreams that set him on the right course of life. Baillet re-created the details of these dreams on the basis of documents now lost. In the third and most symbolic of the dreams, Descartes happens upon a dictionary and a book of verse. Opening the latter, he reads the words quod vitae sectabor iter (what course of life shall I follow?). According to Baillet, Descartes took these words to indicate that it was time for him to choose what sort of life he would lead, and took the presence of the dictionary to show that “the Spirit of Truth . . . wanted to open to him through this dream the treasurehouse of all of the branches of knowledge” (AT, vol. X, p. 186).
Descartes’s own work during this time reflects his concern to explore the treasurehouse of knowledge. He worked, for instance, on the Mathematical Treasury of Polybius the Cosmopolitan (a pseudonym he considered adopting) about universal mathematics. Moreover, this seems to be the time that he started his own Rules for the Direction of the Mind, a treatise on method in the sciences that he composed in various stages over the course of a decade but abandoned unfinished around 1628.
Descartes wrote most of the Rules in Paris, to which he returned sometime in 1621 after having definitively abandoned his military career. There he acquainted himself with Marin Mersenne, an older student from La Flèche who had joined the Minim order and had established a circle of physicists, mathematicians, and technicians meeting in his cell at the Minims’ convent near the Place Royale. Descartes worked with two members of that circle, the mathematician Claude Mydorge and the technician Jean Ferrier, on optics and the construction of lenses. He also took the opportunity to sell the inheritance left to him from his mother’s estate, providing himself with a modest income through most of his life, but also losing the title “Seigneur du Perron,” which he had adopted in his monogram RSP. Other financial matters required him to take a lengthy trip through Italy (though, apparently, he did not seek out or meet Galileo during his stay). While he was away, Parisians were discussing the trial of the libertine poet Théophile de Viau and the condemnation of 14 anti-Aristotelian theses posted by Etienne de Clave, Jean Bitaud, and Antoine Villon, who were sympathetic to atomism and alchemy. De Viau died shortly after being released from jail, and de Clave and the others were prohibited from defending their theses and exiled from Paris. On his return to Paris in April 1625, Descartes continued his association with the Mersenne circle, including exchanges with the chemist and engineer Etienne de Villebressieur and the mathematician-astrologer Jean-Baptiste Morin. He also frequented literary and theological circles and became friends with the religious apologist Jean de Silhon, the essayist Guez de Balzac, and the Oratorian theologian Guillaume Gibieuf, among others. Together with Mersenne, these became some of his principal correspondents.
Around this same time, Descartes attended a meeting at the residence of the papal ambassador in which a M. de Chandoux, an alchemist, talked about his own new philosophy. Descartes wrote that he used the occasion to correct Chandoux: “I made the whole company acknowledge what the art of reasoning well can do for the mind of those who are only barely clever and how my principles are better established, more true, and more natural than any of the others received up to now by the learned world” (AT, vol. I, p. 213). The large and distinguished audience included Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the Oratorians. Following the meeting, according to Descartes, Bérulle granted him a private audience and encouraged him to develop his philosophy as an antidote to atheism. But Paris was not allowing Descartes sufficient uninterrupted time to work on his various projects and even the French countryside did not provide enough peace and quiet. Descartes left for the Netherlands near the end of 1628 and, although he moved frequently, he stayed there for most of the next 20 years (until his disastrous trip to Sweden in 1649), returning for the first time to Paris for a short visit in 1644. In a letter to Balzac, he described the charms of Amsterdam, contrasting it with Paris and the French countryside:
However accomplished a country home may be . . . the very solitude you hope for is never altogether perfect. . . . It can happen that you will have a quantity of little neighbors who will bother you at times, and whose visits will be even more bothersome than those you get in Paris. Instead, in this large city where I live, everyone but me is engaged in a trade, and as a result is so attentive to his own profit that I could live my whole life without ever being noticed by anyone. I walk each day amid the bustle of the crowd with as much freedom and tranquility as you could obtain in your country walks, and I pay no more attention to the people I meet than I would to the trees in your woods. (AT, vol. I, p. 203)
As soon as he arrived in the Netherlands, Descartes began a small treatise in metaphysics, now lost; as he said, “the first nine months I was in this country I worked at nothing else.” He revealed, in one of the famous letters he wrote to Mersenne on the creation of the eternal truths, that he thought he “found out how one can demonstrate the truths of metaphysics in a way that is more evident than the demonstrations of Geometry”; he claimed that he tried to begin his studies in this way and that he “would never have known how to discover the foundations of physics, if [he] had not sought them by that path”—a path consisting in attempting to know God and the self (AT, vol. I, p. 144).
However, by summer 1629, Descartes became intrigued with the reported phenomenon of multiple suns, and began working on meteorology, optics, and physics. The essays called Meteors and Dioptrics date from this period, as do the beginnings of The World with its lengthy chapter on man (published posthumously as two treatises, that is, The World or Treatise on Light and Treatise on Man). In 1633, Descartes was preparing The World for publication when he heard that the Catholic Church had condemned Galileo for defending the motion of the earth. Descartes stopped the publication of his own treatise that contained the proposition deemed heretical, because, as he said, all the things he explained in his treatise “were so completely dependent on one another, that the knowledge that one of them is false is sufficient for the recognition that all the arguments [he] made use of are worthless.” And Descartes added, he “would not for anything in the world maintain [these propositions] against the authority of the Church” (AT, vol. I, p. 285).
Instead, he prepared drafts of the Dioptrics and Meteors, that is, scientific treatises on less controversial topics, and began to work on a preface linking them together, the successor to something he once called “the history of my mind” (AT, vol. I, p. 570), which became the Discourse on Method. At the start of 1636 he added the Geometry, as another of the essays appended to the Discourse to demonstrate the soundness of his method. The printing of Descartes’s first publication was completed in June 1637 and issued anonymously at Leyden; it was entitled Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason well and for Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, with Dioptrics, Meteors, and Geometry, which are Essays of this Method. Also dating from this period is something called the “Treatise on Mechanics,” which essentially consists of a few pages appended to one of Descartes’s letters to Constantijn Huygens (AT, vol. I, pp. 431–47). These pages might have been part of the larger project of The World. Huygens kept asking for “a piece of your World” (AT, vol. I, p. 604) and ultimately requested just “three pages of mechanics,” saying he was jealous of the gentleman for whom Descartes had written the Treatise on Music (AT, vol. I, p. 642). The gentleman, of course, was Beeckman, and the treatise, the Compendium musicae.
During his time in the Netherlands, Descartes became reacquainted with Beeckman. However, the two had a serious falling out in 1630, most likely because Descartes was worried that Beeckman would publish his own writings on mathematical physics before he had the chance to publish his own views on natural philosophy. There was a nasty exchange of letters, in which Descartes ridiculed the mild-mannered Beeckman and claimed to have learned nothing from him. By 1634, Descartes and Beeckman had had some sort of reconciliation, but Descartes reacted rather coldly to the news of Beeckman’s death in 1637, and continued to belittle his accomplishments. In this whole Beeckman episode, we see Descartes perhaps at his worst.
Even so, Descartes’s accomplishments were such that he developed a following in Dutch intellectual circles; among these were the physicians Henricus Reneri and Henricus Regius, the logician Adriaan Heereboord, and the statesman Huygens (father of the polymath Christiaan Huygens). Descartes’s relation to Regius was particularly tempestuous. He initially looked upon Regius as the favored disciple, and in 1641 he offered Regius advice for handling a dispute at Utrecht with the orthodox Calvinist theologian Gisbertius Voetius. However, Descartes broke openly with Regius after the latter published his Fundamenta Physices. Descartes (unjustly) charged that Regius had plagiarized his own work, but more fundamentally Descartes was disturbed that Regius denied the certainty of particular metaphysical claims, such as the distinction between mind and body, that Descartes himself took to provide the proper foundations for physics. Descartes expressed his reservations in a preface to the 1647 French edition of the Principles. Regius responded with a broadsheet that spells out his differences with Descartes, to which Descartes responded at the beginning of 1648 in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet.
In more personal matters, Descartes conceived a daughter, Francine, from a union with a servant named Helene Jans. Francine was born in June or July 1635 and baptized August 7, 1635, as the daughter of “René, son of Joachim.” In August 1637 Descartes arranged to have Francine join him as “his niece,” and employed her mother Helene as a servant. In 1640 Descartes planned a trip to France with Francine, in order to leave her and her education in the charge of a relative. However, Francine caught scarlet fever and died in September of that year. Descartes learned the next month of the death of his father, about whom it was reported that, because of the publication of the Discourse, he had talked about being disappointed in having a son who was ridiculous enough to have himself bound up in calf leather. Descartes’s sister Jeanne also died shortly thereafter. When Descartes tried to console a friend for the death of his brother, he told him that he shared his pain and that he was not one of those who thought that tears and sadness were not appropriate for men: “Not long ago I suffered the loss of two people who were very close to me, and I found out that those who wanted to prevent me from being sad only made things worse, whereas I was consoled by the kindness of those whom I saw to be touched by my grief” (AT, vol. III, pp. 278–79). Descartes did not specify which two of the three recent deaths made him sad, but it could be conjectured that he was thinking of his daughter and sister.
Although Descartes published the Discourse on Method anonymously, he also insisted on receiving many author’s copies as part of the publishing contract; these he sent to people far and wide: close friends, the nobility, Jesuits, and other intellectuals. For example, he indicated in a letter that, of the three copies of the Discourse enclosed, one was for the recipient of the letter, another for Cardinal Richelieu, and the third for the king himself (AT, vol. I, p. 387). He even sent the volume to one of his old teachers as a fruit belonging to him, since it was the recipient who sowed its first seeds in his mind (AT, vol. I, p. 383). When Descartes published the Meditations, he also published a series of Objections and Replies to the work. He had hoped to do the same thing previously. In part 6 of the Discourse, Descartes had announced: “I shall be very happy if [my writings] are examined, and, in order to have more of an opportunity to do this, I am imploring all who have any objections to make against them to take the trouble to send them to my publisher and, on being advised about them by him, I shall try at the same time to append my reply to the objections; and by this means, seeing both of them together, readers will judge the truth all the more easily” (AT, vol. VI, p. 75). However, his request for objections (and sending out copies) did not succeed as well as he wished. He wrote to Huygens: “As for my book, I do not know what opinion the worldly people will have of it; as for the people of the schools, I understand that they are keeping quiet, and that, displeased with not finding anything in it to grasp in order to exercise their arguments, they are content in saying that, if what is contained in it were true, all their philosophy would have to be false” (AT, vol. II, p. 48). Ultimately, Descartes received a number of responses to the Discourse; among them was a critique by Libertius Fromondus, an anti-atomist, and several sets of objections by Plempius, a student of Fromondus, and Jean-Baptiste Morin. Mersenne asked Descartes whether foreigners formulated better objections than the French. He replied that he did not count any of those received as French other than Morin’s, and referred to a dispute with Pierre Petit, saying that he did not take Petit seriously but simply mocked him in return. Descartes then listed the objections of the foreigners: Fromondus from Louvain, Plempius, an anonymous Jesuit from Louvain, and someone from The Hague (AT, vol. II, pp. 191–92). Descartes also reported the more hopeful response from someone at his old school: “I have just received a letter from one of the Jesuits at La Flèche; in it I find as much approbation as I would desire from anyone. Thus far he does not find difficulty with anything I wanted to explain, but only with what I did not want to write; as a result, he takes the occasion to request my physics and my metaphysics with great insistence” (AT, vol. II, p. 50). So, to satisfy this and other such demands, Descartes produced his metaphysics. In 1640, he expanded Part IV of the Discourse into the Meditations on First Philosophy (first published in 1641).
Descartes first sent the manuscript of the Meditations to some Dutch friends, who transmitted it to Johan de Kater (or Caterus), a Dutch Catholic theologian. He then appended Caterus’s objections and his replies to the manuscript and had Mersenne circulate the whole set to various intellectuals. Mersenne collected objections from Thomas Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Gassendi and put together two sets out of the objections of various philosophers and theologians. Separately, Descartes became embroiled in a controversy with the Jesuit mathematician Pierre Bourdin. Bourdin sent a set of objections, and Descartes published it with the second edition of the Meditations (in 1642). As an appendix to this work, Descartes also published a long letter to Jacques Dinet, Bourdin’s superior, complaining about Bourdin’s objections. The Objections and Replies enable one to see genuine philosophical debate conducted on the spot. This is true for the confrontation between Descartes and Caterus’s scholasticism. It is also true for Descartes’s battle with Hobbesian materialism. Hobbes accepted none of Descartes’s arguments and the exchange looks increasingly heated. The best set of objections was, arguably, the one written by Arnauld, at the time a theology doctoral candidate at the University of Paris. In the critical but sympathetic exchange one can see Arnauld’s keen analytical mind at work, from his criticism of Descartes’s notion of material falsity, to his comments on God as positive cause of himself, to his questioning whether the Meditations are circular.
In 1644, Descartes further revised his philosophy into textbook form and disseminated it with his physics as Principles of Philosophy. Descartes dedicated the Principles to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, one of his more important correspondents from their first meeting in 1643 until his death. Interestingly, he wrote the bulk of Part I of the Principles at the same time as he was writing his replies to the various objections to the Meditations. On December 31, 1640, he said in a letter to Mersenne: “I have resolved to use this year for writing my philosophy in such an order that it can easily be taught. And the first part, which I am now working on, contains almost the same things as the Meditations that you have, except that it is in an entirely different style, and that what is said at length in the one is more abridged in the other, and vice versa” (AT, vol. III, p. 276). One of Descartes’s more colorful ways of describing the Principles is that it would make his World speak Latin, that is, with it he would be able to teach his physics to an educated 17th-century international audience: “Perhaps these scholastic wars will cause my World to be brought into the world. I believe it would be out already, were it not that I would want first to teach it to speak Latin. I would call it Summa Philosophiae, so that it would be more easily introduced into the conversation of the people of the schools, ministers as well as Jesuits, who are now persecuting it and trying to smother it before its birth” (AT, vol. III, p. 523). In keeping with this intent, the Principles was often published with the Latin translation of the Discourse on Method (Specimina philosophiae seu dissertatio de methodo, dioptrice et meteora, 1644). Together these treatises were responsible for Descartes’s considerable international scientific reputation.
Descartes became embroiled in several controversies during the period after the publication of the Meditations. In 1643, the academic senate of the University of Utrecht, following the recommendation of its rector, the previously mentioned Gisbertus Voetius, prohibited the teaching of the new philosophy. Here is a portion of the Utrecht edict, as quoted by Descartes himself:
The professors reject this new philosophy for three reasons. First, it is contrary to the ancient philosophy that universities throughout the world have taught thus far with the greatest success, and it undermines its foundations. Second, it turns away the young from this sound and ancient philosophy and prevents them from reaching the heights of erudition; once they have begun to rely on this so-called philosophy, they are unable to understand the technical terms used in the books of traditional authors and in the lectures and debates of their professors. And, finally, various false and absurd opinions either follow from the new philosophy or can be imprudently deduced from it by the young, opinions that are in conflict with other disciplines and faculties and, above all, with orthodox theology. (AT, vol. VII, p. 592; Descartes replies in AT, vol. VII, pp. 596–98)
The prohibition clearly ran the gamut from pragmatic to pedagogical to doctrinal concerns. Descartes wrote a vehement response to Voetius in 1643, but the city council of Utrecht regarded the letter as defamatory and issued a warrant against Descartes. Descartes sought the protection of the French ambassador against the warrant and the affair abated somewhat. The University of Utrecht reaffirmed its prohibition against the works of Descartes in 1645. Similar troubles arose at the University of Leyden in 1647, which resulted in a prohibition against the teaching of Descartes’s works in 1648.
During this same period, Descartes made a few trips to France (1644, 1647, and 1648), the first since his departure to the Netherlands in 1628. During the first two trips he resided with the abbé Claude Picot, who was a member of Mersenne’s circle and the future translator of the Principles. Descartes was able to review some of Picot’s translation as early as 1644 and, in 1646–1647, he made significant corrections to it, including the addition of replies to some objections. Thus, the French translation of the Principles ought to be seen as a separate revised edition of the work. Descartes’s trips to France allowed him to be reconciled with such critics as Bourdin and Gassendi. They also provided the occasion for him to meet Claude Clerselier, the future translator of the Objections and Replies and executor of his literary estate, and Hector-Pierre Chanut, Clerselier’s brother-in-law and future French ambassador to Sweden and to the Netherlands.
Descartes began a correspondence with Queen Christina of Sweden through the intermediary of Chanut. Queen Christina invited Descartes to spend the summer of 1649 at Stockholm, but Descartes delayed the visit. He even refused to board the ship the Queen sent for him. Descartes finally departed for Sweden in the fall, after a personal visit from Chanut. During this period Descartes published his final major work on philosophical psychology, the Passions of the Soul. In December 1649, Descartes began discussing philosophy with Queen Christina in her palace, at her bidding during the early hours of the morning, around five o’clock. He did not last the winter, catching pneumonia at the beginning of February and dying about a week later.
Descartes was buried in Stockholm; his body was transferred to Paris in 1667 and reburied at the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève with great ceremony. However, the funeral oration by Pierre Lallement was prohibited at the last minute. Descartes’s skull was separately sent to Paris and displayed in the Musée de l’Homme (where it still resides, though no longer on display). In 1793, the Revolution had passed an edict transferring his remains to the newly erected Pantheon, but the edict was never carried through. However, Descartes was reburied once more around 1817 in a chapel of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he still rests.
Chanut transferred Descartes’s literary estate to France. Clerselier received the manuscripts and proceeded to produce various posthumous publications: the Rules, The World, a three-volume set of Correspondence, and various collections and translations of Descartes’s works. He also became an advocate of Cartesian philosophy. The larger group around Clerselier wrote various commentaries on Descartes’s works. In 1659, Clerselier’s son-in-law, Jacques Rohault, began his popular Paris conferences on Cartesian natural philosophy (they continued until his death in 1672). In 1671, Rohault published his Traité de physique, a Cartesian physics text that was later translated into English and became part of the English collegiate curriculum. It was the main Cartesian text until Pierre-Sylvain Régis’s Système de philosophie (1690) in four volumes. Other Cartesians published important treatises during the 1660s and 1670s: Baruch Spinoza printed a commentary on the first two parts of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in 1663 and Nicolas Malebranche issued a major philosophical treatise, Search after Truth, in 1674–75.
Though Cartesianism gained a following during the second half of the 17th century, it also produced a severe backlash. As already indicated, Descartes’s philosophy had been condemned in the Netherlands during his own lifetime. However, in the decades following his death it was censured in other parts of Europe. In 1662, Catholics at Louvain condemned various propositions from Descartes concerning the nature of corporeal substance and its qualities. At one point there was the particular charge that Descartes’s denial of real accidents conflicts with Catholic teachings concerning the Eucharist. This controversy over Descartes led to an edition of his works being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, albeit only donec corrigantur (“until corrected”), by the censors of Rome in 1663. In France, Louis XIV issued an edict against the new philosophy in 1671, and there were renewed condemnations at Angers and Caen during 1675–78. Here again, a main issue was the compatibility of Cartesianism with Church teachings concerning the Eucharist. Another issue, however, was the purported alliance between Cartesianism and Jansenism, the theological movement triggered by the publication of Cornelius Jansenius’s Augustinus in 1640. Louis came to see both movements as a threat to the stability of the state, and thus in 1678 had the Oratorians condemn “the teaching of Descartes in philosophy and of Jansenius in theology.”
The war over Cartesianism intensified with numerous attacks in print, such as Louis de la Ville’s Sentiments de M. Descartes (1680) and Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Censura philosophiae cartesianae (1689). Huet’s work drew responses from Cartesians across Europe, the most prominent of whom was Régis. The anti-Cartesians also attacked Cartesianism with satire, the most notorious being Gabriel Daniel’s Voyage to the World of Cartesius.
There was a renewed effort against Cartesianism at the University of Paris in 1691, which lasted until the end of Louis XIV’s reign. In 1720, however, Descartes’s writings were officially accepted into the curriculum of the University of Paris, due in large part to the efforts of Edmond Pourchot, who was one of the first to introduce Cartesianism into the universities. For a time, Cartesian mechanism even provided a primary source of opposition on the Continent to the appeal to gravitational forces in the work of Sir Isaac Newton. By the middle of the 18th century, however, Newtonianism had for the most part won out over Cartesianism. A widespread view of Descartes during this time was that he had succumbed to the spirit of system.
But even Descartes’s opponents could not prevent themselves from showing their admiration in the midst of their criticism. For example, the Jesuit René Rapin wrote in Réflexions sur la philosophie that Descartes “is one of the most extraordinary geniuses of these times. . . . In truth, he teaches one to doubt too much, and that is not a good model for minds who are naturally credulous; however, in the end, he is more original than the others” (p. 366). Perhaps Descartes’s legacy can be best encapsulated by a comment from the often critical G. W. Leibniz: “When I think of everything Descartes has said that is beautiful and original, I am more astonished with what he has accomplished than with what he has failed to accomplish” (“Letter to Foucher,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, p. 2).