Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History by Euan Cameron

Author:Euan Cameron
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780198207603
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-02-15T07:00:00+00:00

Matter and Void: Descartes’s System and its Opponents

Whatever worries Descartes may have felt about theological orthodoxy, they did not finally prevent him from giving fresh impetus to the mechanical philosophy, which became increasingly identified with the new science. His audacious attempt to provide a complete model for a new world system, built entirely around the laws of motion and impact, was really no more than a brilliant fiction. On points of detail he was repeatedly wrong, even managing to distort and misapply Harvey’s great discovery of the circulation of the blood. Yet there is a sense in which these errors were unimportant, compared with the excitement and stimulus he created. Cartesianism was never a rigid school of thought, for all the significant thinkers who espoused it did so in a distinctly critical spirit; much of its importance was as a model for how a mechanistic world might operate.

Like his friend Hobbes, Descartes carried highly subversive ideas derived from science into the broader philosophical arena. His mechanical philosophy required a radical separation between mind and body, for material objects could not retain inherent qualities of the type previously ascribed to them. The physical world was governed by mathematical rules, not by sympathies, harmonies, and all the other purposive features imagined by both scholastic and occultist thinkers. Ideas were not something inherent to the cosmos; they were products of the human intellect, which had to be modified or discarded if they clashed with observed reality. This subjectivism, which found its most famous expression in the claim ‘I think therefore I am’, has become such an inherent part of modern thought that it is now hard to recognize just how revolutionary it was when first revealed in the 1630s and 1640s. Descartes had every reason to fear trouble with the Church, when his materialist position had drastic implications for the theory of transubstantiation, and his ontological proof of God’s existence scandalized traditional theologians. As it turned out his long residence in the Dutch Republic may have been an excessive precaution, because yet again the French authorities took a relatively liberal attitude, and as a private scholar he ran no serious personal risk. It remains true that the public teaching of Cartesianism was later banned in France, while some overt supporters were excluded from the Academy of Sciences when it was established in 1666. This did not stop the broader aspirations and methods of the new philosophy from exerting enormous influence, when they were developed by such figures as the great Dutch scientist Christian Huygens and the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. One should also recognize the less spectacular yet widespread interest in the ideas of Descartes’s contemporary and rival Pierre Gassendi. If his modified atomism was less clearly expressed as a system, it was just as challenging and subversive in its implications

When Descartes defined matter as extension he committed himself to the concept of a densely packed world, in which any void was a logical impossibility. His universe was composed of a great number

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