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DesCartes’ Method of Doubt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
Lord Acton, in his letter to the contributors to the Cambridge Modern History, wrote: “By Universal History, I understand that which is distinct from the combined histories of all countries … and is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.” If we replace “history” by the more general term “knowledge,” we get the statement of an ideal cherished by the great men of every age—those lonely pioneers to whom book-learning is an intellectual gloom more treacherous than the natural gloom of night, since it fools men into thinking that it is a light by which men can see. The pioneers in thought, or indeed in any field, have made a secret treaty with nature. They smile with her at the robed and tassled scholar who, (Goethe's words) “Bewundrung von Kindern und Affen,” can (DesCartes speaks) “lecture plausibly about anything and get himself admired by the less learned.” Those pioneers, those men who—as someone has said—have thought according to no one and have made the human race think according to them, see by an intuitive insight, an illumination of the soul. Einstein, in his prologue to Planck's book Where is Science Going?, writes: “There is only the way of intuition. … The state of mind which furnishes the driving power here resembles that of the devotee or the lover. The long-sustained effort is not inspired by any set plan or purpose. It arises from a hunger of the soul.” We have not quoted a poet, but the greatest of mathematical physicists.
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- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1937
Footnotes
1
Public lecture delivered in 1937 at the Rice Institute in honor of the three-hundredth birth-year of the Discours de la Méthode.
References
2 Though Bacon formulates an inductive method of the sciences and DesCartes, later, a deductive one, DesCartes’ formulation savors more of actual observational science, because (1) he was a more alert observer of natural phenomena (“meteors”) than Bacon, and (2) unlike Bacon, he gave mathematics its proper prominent place in scientific procedure.
3 Towards the end of his life (1648), he thought of organizing “une sorte d'École des Arts et Métiers, fondée sur le principe d'une étroite collaboration entre les savants et les artisans.” See Gilson: René DesCartes, Discours de la Méthode, Texte et Commentaire; p. 446.
4 Oeuvres de DesCartes (Adam and Tannery edition), Vol. IV, p. 625.
5 See the significant excerpt in a letter to Mersenne, op cit., Vol. III, p. 648.
6 Op. cit., Vol. XII, p. 553.
7 DesCartes, in his earlier period, inferred the existence of God from clear and distinct ideas, then inferred the veracity of clear and distinct ideas from the existence of God. This argument became known as the “Cartesian circle.” That DesCartes profited by the objections brought against it is evident from an inspection of the thirteenth principle, Part One, of his Principes de la Philosophie (1647); op. cit., Vol. IX.
8 De Civitate, XI, 26.
9 Though students of DesCartes are more or less familiar with this Gilsonian interpretation of DesCartes, it is still an uncommon one for the layman. See The Discourse on Method (1637–1937) by Leon Roth: Mind, Jan., 1937.
10 See Article CXXIV of Les Passions de l'Ame; op. cit., Vol. XI, p. 419.
11 See Gilson: Éludes sur le Rôle de la Pensée Médiévale dans la Fürmalion du Système Cartésien, p. 52 ff.
12 In The Search After Truth by the Light of Nature, DesCartes makes Eudoxus say that the idea of existence is only confused by analysis and definition, since it is by nature an immediate datum of intuition. Cambridge Edition of DesCartes’ Works, Vol. I, p. 324.
13 Cf. A. Boyce Gibson: DesCartes, pp. 303-304.
14 This is what affiliates him with the Platonists of the “Oratory”—Bérulle, Gibieuf, etc.—and generally with the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition rather than with the Aristotelian.