DES CARTES.
The space which we can devote to this biography would be utterly insufficient to give the smallest account of the varied philosophical labours of its subject; still less to recount their consequences. We shall therefore confine ourselves almost entirely to his personal life; the more so, as the private history of Des Cartes is not so well known to the world in general, as is the history of the mathematician, the optician, the natural philosopher, the metaphysician, the anatomist, the musician, &c., to those who study these several sciences.
René Des Cartes[8]du Perron (the latter name being derived from a lordship inherited from his mother, by which he was distinguished from his elder brother) was born at La Haye, in Touraine, March 31, 1596. From his mother, who died shortly after, he inherited a feeble constitution. His father, Joachim Des Cartes, had served in the civil wars, and was of a noble family, of which, says Baillet, neither origin could be traced, normésalliancewhile it lasted.
8.The life of Des Cartes has been written with great minuteness by M. Baillet author of the ‘Jugemens des Savans,’ &c., in two vols. 4to., Paris, 1690; abridged, Paris, 1693; translated into English the same year. This appears to have been the source from which all accounts have been derived.
8.The life of Des Cartes has been written with great minuteness by M. Baillet author of the ‘Jugemens des Savans,’ &c., in two vols. 4to., Paris, 1690; abridged, Paris, 1693; translated into English the same year. This appears to have been the source from which all accounts have been derived.
His early inclination for study induced his father to send him to the College of La Flèche when he was only eight years old. We have the accounts of extraordinary progress which are usually related of men after they have become distinguished; but what is not so common, we find that he was allowed to keep his bed in the morning as long as he pleased, partly from the weakness of his health, and partly because he was observed to be of a meditative turn. We mentionthis because it afterwards became his usual habit to study in bed; and certainly some parts of his philosophy bear the marks of it.
He left La Flèche in eight years and a half, with great reputation, and a disgust for all books and methods then in use. He was sent to Paris at the age of seventeen, under the care of a servant, and fell into the fashionable vice of gambling; but at the same time he cultivated the acquaintance of Mydorge[9]and Mersenne. He finally became disgusted with his favourite pursuit, hired a solitary house in the Fauxbourg St. Germain, and resumed his studies.
9.To explain in the briefest terms who these and other friends of Des Cartes were, would make us exceed the prescribed bounds. Our reader must be content to be referred to a biographical dictionary for these and others not known, except to mathematicians.
9.To explain in the briefest terms who these and other friends of Des Cartes were, would make us exceed the prescribed bounds. Our reader must be content to be referred to a biographical dictionary for these and others not known, except to mathematicians.
At the age of twenty-one, he enlisted as a volunteer under the Prince of Orange. At Breda, the solution of a problem introduced him to Beekman. Here he wrote his ‘Treatise on Music,’ of which the latter (to whom it had been entrusted) gave himself out as the author. In 1619, he enlisted as a volunteer under the Duke of Bavaria; and while thus engaged, he tells us he laid the foundations of his philosophy (November 10); after three wonderful dreams. Quitting the service he was engaged in, after having been present at the siege of Prague, he travelled till the end of 1619. He then returned to Paris, where it was believed he was a Rosicrucian, and his continual presence in public was necessary to repel the suspicion. At this time he appears to have laid the foundation of his mathematical methods. After travelling into Italy, he settled again at Paris, and we now find him in habits of friendship with Beaune (afterwards his commentator), Morin, Frenicle, and others, and occupying himself with practical optics. In 1628, he served at the siege of Rochelle.
To avoid society, in 1629, he migrated to Holland, where he passed twenty years. He removed from town to town, hiding his actual residence from all but one or two friends. He occupied himself at first with his optics, and with the considerations which led him, in a few years, to publish his ‘Treatise on Meteors,’ as also with chemistry and anatomy. We now find him in communication with Reneri and Gassendi. He made a short voyage to England, of which nothing is recorded, except some magnetic observations made near London. About 1633, his philosophical opinions were first taught by Reneri, at Deventer. His ‘Treatise on the World,’ written about this time, was suppressed by him when he heard what had happened to Galileoin Italy; and except some meteorological observations, we find nothing to notice till 1637, when he published his ‘Principles of Philosophy,’ in which the well-known hypothesis of vortices is propounded, together with his dioptrical and meteorological theories. This publication was immediately combated in different parts by Roberval, Fromondus, Plempius, Fermat, the elder Pascal, and others. Without going into these and other now uninteresting disputes, it is only necessary to state, that Fermat, Pascal, Roberval, and several others, were soon after in friendly communication with Des Cartes. After the famous problem of the Cycloid, which was propounded about this time (1638–39), Des Cartes, as he had several times done before, renounced geometry; and his work bearing that title (but which is, in fact, his celebrated application of algebra to geometry) was not published by himself, but by his friend De Beaune, who wrote a comment on it at his desire.
In the meantime, his philosophy was fast rising into repute in Holland, where, in 1639, a public panegyric was made upon it at Utrecht, on the death of Reneri. We pass over the various disputes upon it, both at Utrecht and Paris. In 1640, Des Cartes was nearly induced to take up his residence in England, under the protection of Charles I.: but the domestic troubles, which within two years broke out into civil war, interfered with the completion of this arrangement. His father died at the end of the same year; in which he also lost a child named Francina, whom he owned as his daughter, but concerning whose parentage, whether it were legitimate or not, nothing certain is known. Des Cartes was attacked at this time by the Jesuits in France, and by a party in Holland, which asserted that he himself was a Jesuit. The hostility of his Dutch opponents did not materially retard the progress of his opinions, nor could the Jesuits prevent his receiving a flattering invitation from Louis XIII. to return to France.
In 1641, appeared his Meditations De Primâ Philosophiâ, on the Soul, on Freewill, and on the Existence of a Creator. Various parts of this treatise were criticised by Hobbes, Gassendi, and some others; but so much was the reputation of Des Cartes increased in France, that the exertions of Mersenne, made by the desire of the author, could not obtain more than one opponent to this work out of all the Sorbonne. This was the afterwards celebrated Arnaud, between whom and Des Cartes a friendly controversy was maintained. But in Holland, the active enmity of Voet, the rector of the university of Utrecht, and others, raised a clamour against Regius, who publicly taught Cartesiandoctrines at Utrecht. Des Cartes himself, averse to controversy, wrote strongly to his pupil not to deny or reject any thing commonly admitted, but merely to assert that it was not necessary to the proper conception of the doctrine taught. But Voet, not content with writing books, instituted an unworthy course of clandestine persecution against Des Cartes, by which, in 1642, he obtained the condemnation of the ‘Meditations’ by the magistracy of Utrecht, and gave the author some personal trouble and anxiety. On the other hand, the new philosophy at this time made great progress among the Jesuits, its former opponents. In the middle of the year Des Cartes returned to France, and superintended a new edition of his Principles of Philosophy. But in the following year he went again to Holland, where some decisions in his favour, in matters of alleged libel, the too virulent enmity of Voet, the public teaching of Cartesian doctrines at Leyden by Heereboord, and other things of the same kind, made his reputation gain ground rapidly. About 1647, we find him clear of violent opposition, and actively engaged in the dissemination of various opinions by personal correspondence. He returned again to France, where a pension of 3000 livres was obtained for him: but he is said never to have received any part of it. He came back to Holland, but next year was recalled to France by the promise of another pension, which turned out to be fallacious. He once more returned to Holland, which he left the same year, to fix his residence in Sweden, at the desire of the queen Christina, with whom he had been some time in correspondence. He arrived at Stockholm in September, and while engaged in projecting an Academy of Sciences, at the desire of the queen, was seized with an inflammation of the lungs, which carried him off, February 11, 1650, at the age of 54. His body, seventeen years after, was removed to the church of St. Geneviève at Paris.
Des Cartes was under the middle size, and well proportioned, except that his head was rather too big for his body. His voice, owing to an hereditary weakness of the lungs, was unable to sustain any long conversation. He was very temperate, slept a good deal, and, as before noticed, wrote and thought much in bed. He was very particular in choosing his servants, engaging none but such as were both well-looking and intellectual; and several of his attendants afterwards rose in the world. Baillet mentions a physician, a Regius professor, a mathematician, and a judge, who had served Des Cartes in different capacities. He inherited from his mother an income of about 6000 livres a year. His expenses in experimenting were considerable, but he never would accept the offered assistance of his friends. He readlittle, and had few books. We have already noticed the obscure connection from which his daughter Francina derived her birth: he also paid his addresses to a lady, for whom he fought a duel with a rival. With these exceptions, he seems to have been insensible to female influence. He told the last-mentioned lady, somewhat bluntly, that he found nothing so beautiful as truth. He was a devout Catholic, and writers of that persuasion think that his doctrines were more favourable to them than those of Aristotle.
His character as a philosopher is that of extraordinary power of imagination, which frequently carried him beyond all firm foundations. His ingenuity is very great; and had he been contemporary with Newton and Leibnitz, he might have been a third inventor of fluxions. Father Castel says of him, that he built high, and Newton[10]deep; that he had an ambition to create a world, and Newton none whatever. It is usual to compare these two great men; but we do not think them proper objects of comparison. Des Cartes lived at a time when the power of mathematical analysis was but small, compared with what he himself, Wallis, Newton, and others afterwards made it. He pursued his studies before Stevinus and Galileo had yet made the first additions to the mathematical mechanics of Archimedes. It is not, therefore, with Newton that he ought to be tried, but with those philosophers of his own age, who were in the same position with himself, and wrote upon similar subjects with similar methods. And here if we had room we could easily show, that, for variety of power, and comparative soundness of thinking, he was above all his contemporaries, and well deserves his fame.
10.The good Father first transcribed Newton, then read him twenty times, then wrote his comparison of the two, and kept it twenty years; and finally, decided that Des Cartes was the better philosopher, for the reasons given in the text.Nous avons changé tout cela.
10.The good Father first transcribed Newton, then read him twenty times, then wrote his comparison of the two, and kept it twenty years; and finally, decided that Des Cartes was the better philosopher, for the reasons given in the text.Nous avons changé tout cela.
It were much to be wished that his writings were better known in this country, particularly by those who represent him as nothing but a wild schemer, because they hold the system of Newton. It is a sort of article of faith in many popular English works on astronomy, that Des Cartes was a fool. To any one who has imbibed that opinion, we recommend the perusal of some of his writings.
SPENSER.