His residence in the Netherlands fell in the most prosperous and brilliant days of the Dutch state, under the stadtholdership of Frederick Henry (1625-1647). Abroad its navigators monopolized the commerce of the world, and explored unknown seas; at home the Dutch school of painting reached its acme in Rembrandt (1607-1669); and the philological reputation of the country was sustained by Grotius, Vossius and the elder Heinsius. And yet, though Rembrandt’s “Nightwatch” is dated the very year after the publication of the Meditations, not a word in Descartes breathes of any work of art or historical learning. The contempt of aesthetics and erudition is characteristic of the most typical members of what is known as the Cartesian school, especially Malebranche. Descartes was not in any strict sense a reader. His wisdom grew mainly out of his own reflections and experiments. The story of his disgust when he found that Queen Christina devoted some time every day to the study of Greek under the tuition of Vossius is at least true in substance.[8] It gives no evidence of science, he remarks, to possess a tolerable knowledge of the Roman tongue, such as once was possessed by the populace of Rome.[9] In all his travels he studied only the phenomena of nature and human life. He was a spectator rather than an actor on the stage of the world. He entered the army, merely because the position gave a vantage-ground from which to make his observations. In the political interests which these contests involved he took no part; his favourite disciple, the princess Elizabeth, was the daughter of the banished king, against whom he had served in Bohemia; and Queen Christina, his second royal follower, was the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus.
Thus Descartes is a type of that spirit of science to which erudition and all the heritage of the past seem but elegant trifling. The science of Descartes was physics in all its branches, but especially as applied to physiology. Science, he says, may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine and morals,—the three applications of our knowledge to the outward world, to the human body, and to the conduct of life.[10]
Such then was the work that Descartes had in view in Holland. His residence was generally divided into two parts—one his workshop for science, the other his reception-room for society. “Here are my books,” he is reported to have told a visitor, as he pointed to the animals he had dissected. He worked hard at his book on refraction, and dissected the heads of animals in order to explain imagination and memory, which he considered physical processes.[11] But he was not a laborious student. “I can say with truth,” he writes to the princess Elizabeth,[12] “that the principle which I have always observed in my studies, and which I believe has helped me most to gain what knowledge I have, has been never to spend beyond a very few hours daily in thoughts which occupy the imagination, and a very few hours yearly in those which occupy the understanding, and to give all the rest of my time to the relaxation of the senses and the repose of the mind.” But his expectations from the study of anatomy and physiology went a long way. “The conservation of health,” he writes in 1646, “has always been the principal end of my studies.”[13] In 1629 he asks Mersenne to take care of himself “till I find out if there is any means of getting a medical theory based on infallible demonstrations, which is what I am now inquiring.”[14] Astronomical inquiries in connexion with optics, meteorological phenomena, and, in a word, the whole field of natural laws, excited his desire to explain them. His own observation, and the reports of Mersenne, furnished his data. Of Bacon’s demand for observation and collection of facts he is an imitator; and he wishes (in a letter of 1632) that “some one would undertake to give a history of celestial phenomena after the method of Bacon, and describe the sky exactly as it appears at present, without introducing a single hypothesis.”[15]
He had several writings in hand during the early years of his residence in Holland, but the main work of this period was a physical doctrine of the universe which he termed The World. Shortly after his arrival he writes to Mersenne that it will probably be finished in 1633, but meanwhile asks him not to disclose the secret to his Parisian friends. Already anxieties appear as to the theological verdict upon two of his fundamental views—the infinitude of the universe, and the earth’s rotation round the sun.[16] But towards the end of year 1633 we find him writing as follows:—“I had intended sending you my World as a New Year’s gift, and a fortnight ago I was still minded to send you a fragment of the work, if the whole of it could not be transcribed in time. But I have just been at Leyden and Amsterdam to ask after Galileo’s cosmical system as I imagined I had heard of its being printed last year in Italy. I was told that it had been printed, but that every copy had been at the same time burnt at Rome, and that Galileo had been himself condemned to some penalty.”[17] He has also seen a copy of Galileo’s condemnation at Liége (September 20, 1633), with the words “although he professes that the [Copernican] theory was only adopted by him as a hypothesis.” His friend Beeckman lent him a copy of Galileo’s work, which he glanced through in his usual manner with other men’s books; he found it good, and “failing more in the points where it follows received opinions than where it diverges from them.”[18] The consequence of these reports of the hostility of the church led him to abandon all thoughts of publishing. The World was consigned to his desk; and although doctrines in all essential respects the same constitute the physical portion of his Principia, it was not till after the death of Descartes that fragments of the work, including Le Monde, or a treatise on light, and the physiological tracts L’Homme and La Formation du fœtus, were given to the world by his admirer Claude Clerselier (1614-1684) in 1664. Descartes was not disposed to be a martyr; he had a sincere respect for the church, and had no wish to begin an open conflict with established doctrines.
In 1636 Descartes had resolved to publish some specimens of the fruits of his method, and some general observations on its nature which, under an appearance of simplicity, might sow the good seed of more adequate ideas on the world and man. “I should be glad,” he says, when talking of a publisher,[19] “if the whole book were printed in good type, on good paper, and I should like to have at least 200 copies for distribution. The book will contain four essays, all in French, with the general title of ‘Project of a Universal science, capable of raising our nature to its highest perfection; also Dioptrics, Meteors and Geometry, wherein the most curious matters which the author could select as a proof of the universal science which he proposes are explained in such a way that even the unlearned may understand them.’” The work appeared anonymously at Leiden (published by Jean Maire) in 1637, under the modest title of Essais philosophiques; and the project of a universal science becomes the Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. In 1644 it appeared in a Latin version, revised by Descartes, as Specimina philosophica. A work so widely circulated by the author naturally attracted attention, but in France it was principally the mathematicians who took it up, and their criticisms were more pungent than complimentary. Fermat, Roberval and Desargues took exception in their various ways to the methods employed in the geometry, and to the demonstrations of the laws of refraction given in the Dioptrics and Meteors. The dispute on the latter point between Fermat and Descartes was continued, even after the philosopher’s death, as late as 1662. In the youthful Dutch universities the effect of the essays was greater.
The first public teacher of Cartesian views was Henri Renery, a Belgian, who at Deventer and afterwards at Utrecht had introduced the new philosophy which he had learned Spread of Cartesianism. from personal intercourse with Descartes. Renery only survived five years at Utrecht, and it was reserved for Heinrich Regius (van Roy)—who in 1638 had been appointed to the new chair of botany and theoretical medicine at Utrecht, and who visited Descartes at Egmond in order more thoroughly to learn his views—to throw down the gauntlet to the adherents of the old methods. With more eloquence than judgment, he propounded theses bringing into relief the points in which the new doctrines clashed with the old. The attack was opened by Gisbert Voët, foremost among the orthodox theological professors and clergy of Utrecht. In 1639 he published a series of arguments against atheism, in which the Cartesian views were not obscurely indicated as perilous for the faith, though no name was mentioned. Next year he persuaded the magistracy to issue an order forbidding Regius to travel beyond the received doctrine. The magisterial views seem to have prevailed in the professoriate, which formally in March 1642 expressed its disapprobation of the new philosophy as well as of its expositors. As yet Descartes was not directly attacked. Voët now issued, under the name of Martin Schoock, one of his pupils, a pamphlet with the title of Methodus novae philosophiae Renati Descartes, in which atheism and infidelity were openly declared to be the effect of the new teaching. Descartes replied to Voët directly in a letter, published at Amsterdam in 1643. He was summoned before the magistrates of Utrecht to defend himself against charges of irreligion and slander. What might have happened we cannot tell; but Descartes threw himself on the protection of the French ambassador and the prince of Orange, and the city magistrates, from whom he vainly demanded satisfaction in a dignified letter,[20] were snubbed by their superiors. About the same time (April 1645) Schoock was summoned before the university of Groningen, of which he was a member, and forthwith disavowed the more abusive passages in his book. So did the effects of the odium theologicum, for the meanwhile at least, die away.
In the Discourse of Method Descartes had sketched the main points in his new views, with a mental autobiography which might explain their origin, and with some suggestions Discourse of Method, and Meditations. as to their applications. His second great work,. Meditations on the First Philosophy, which had been begun soon after his settlement in the Netherlands, expounded in more detail the foundations of his system, laying especial emphasis on the priority of mind to body, and on the absolute and ultimate dependence of mind as well as body on the existence of God. In 1640 a copy of the work in manuscript was despatched to Paris, and Mersenne was requested to lay it before as many thinkers and scholars as he deemed desirable, with a view to getting their views upon its argument and doctrine. Descartes soon had a formidable list of objections to reply to. Accordingly, when the work was published at Paris in August 1641, under the title of Meditationes de prima philosophia ubi de Dei existentia et animae immortalitate (though it was in fact not the immortality but the immateriality of the mind, or, as the second edition described it, animae humanae a corpore distinctio, which was maintained), the title went on to describe the larger part of the book as containing various objections of learned men, with the replies of the author. These objections in the first edition are arranged under six heads: the first came from Caterus, a theologian of Louvain; the second and sixth are anonymous criticisms from various hands; whilst the third, fourth and fifth belong respectively to Hobbes, Arnauld and Gassendi. In the second edition appeared the seventh—objections from Père Bourdin, a Jesuit teacher of mathematics in Paris; and subsequently another set of objections, known as those of Hyperaspistes, was included in the collection of Descartes’s letters. The anonymous objections are very much the statement of common-sense against philosophy; those of Caterus criticize the Cartesian argument from the traditional theology of the church; those of Arnauld are an appreciative inquiry into the bearings and consequences of the meditations for religion and morality; while those of [Hobbes] (q.v.) and Gassendi—both somewhat senior to Descartes and with a dogmatic system of their own already formed—are a keen assault upon the spiritualism of the Cartesian position from a generally “sensational” standpoint. The criticisms of the last two are the criticisms of a hostile school of thought; those of Arnauld are the difficulties of a possible disciple.
In 1644 the third great work of Descartes, the Principia philosophiae, appeared at Amsterdam. Passing briefly over the conclusions arrived at in the Meditations, it deals The Principia. in its second, third and fourth parts with the general principles of physical science, especially the laws of motion, with the theory of vortices, and with the phenomena of heat, light, gravity, magnetism, electricity, &c., upon the earth. This work exhibits some curious marks of caution. Undoubtedly, says Descartes, the world was in the beginning created in all its perfection. “But yet as it is best, if we wish to understand the nature of plants or of men, to consider how they may by degrees proceed from seeds, rather than how they were created by God in the beginning of the world, so, if we can excogitate some extremely simple and comprehensible principles, out of which, as if they were seeds, we can prove that stars, and earth and all this visible scene could have originated, although we know full well that they never did originate in such a way, we shall in that way expound their nature far better than if we merely described them as they exist at present.”[21] The Copernican theory is rejected in name, but retained in substance. The earth, or other planet, does not actually move round the sun; yet it is carried round the sun in the subtle matter of the great vortex, where it lies in equilibrium,—carried like the passenger in a boat, who may cross the sea and yet not rise from his berth.
In 1647 the difficulties that had arisen at Utrecht were repeated on a smaller scale at Leiden. There the Cartesian innovations had found a patron in Adrian Heerebord, and were openly discussed in theses and lectures. The theological professors took the alarm at passages in the Meditations; an attempt to prove the existence of God savoured, as they thought, of atheism and heresy. When Descartes complained to the authorities of this unfair treatment,[22] the only reply was an order by which all mention of the name of Cartesianism, whether favourable or adverse, was forbidden in the university. This was scarcely what Descartes wanted, and again he had to apply to the prince of Orange, whereupon the theologians were asked to behave with civility, and the name of Descartes was no longer proscribed. But other annoyances were not wanting from unfaithful disciples and unsympathetic critics. The Instantiae of Gassendi appeared at Amsterdam in 1644 as a reply to the reply which Descartes had published of his previous objections; and the publication by Heinrich Regius of his work on physical philosophy (Fundamenta physices, 1646) gave the world to understand that he had ceased to be a thorough adherent of the philosophy which he had so enthusiastically adopted.
It was about 1648 that Descartes lost his friends Mersenne and Mydorge by death. The place of Mersenne as his Parisian representative was in the main taken by Claude Clerselier (the French translator of the Objections and Responses), whom he had become acquainted with in Paris. Through Clerselier he came to know Pierre Chanut, who in 1645 was sent as French ambassador to the court of Sweden. Queen Christina was not yet twenty, and took a lively if a somewhat whimsical interest in literary and philosophical culture. Through Chanut, with whom she was on terms of familiarity, she came to hear of Descartes, and a correspondence which the latter nominally carried on with the ambassador was in reality intended for the eyes of the queen. The correspondence took an ethical tone. It began with a long letter on love in all its aspects (February 1647),[23] a topic suggested by Chanut, who had been discussing it with the queen; and this was soon followed by another to Christina herself on the chief good. An essay on the passions of the mind (Passions de l’âme), which had been written originally for the princess Elizabeth, in development of some ethical views suggested by the De vita beata of Seneca, was enclosed at the same time for Chanut. It was a draft of the work published in 1650 under the same title. Philosophy, particularly that of Descartes, was becoming a fashionable divertissement for the queen and her courtiers, and it was felt that the presence of the sage himself was necessary to complete the good work of education. An invitation to the Swedish court was urged upon Descartes, and after much hesitation accepted; a vessel of the royal navy was ordered to wait upon him, and in September 1649 he left Egmond for the north.