Oxford World’s Classics The Passions of the Soul by René Descartes

Author:René Descartes [René Descartes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-10-10T16:49:00+00:00

3. To the Marquess of Newcastle, * Egmond-Binnen, 23 November 1646 [AT 4]

My Lord,

The favours conferred on me by the letters Your Excellency* has been pleased to send me, and the marks they contain of a mind that lends more distinction to your illustrious birth than it receives from it, oblige me to hold them in the highest esteem; but it seems, moreover, that fortune wishes to show that it regards them as among the greatest goods I could possess, since it has delayed them on their way, and not allowed me to receive them, until it has exhausted its efforts to prevent me from doing so.* Thus, I had the honour to receive one last year* which had taken four months to travel here from Paris; and the one I have just received is dated 5 January; but because M. de B.* assures me that you had already been informed of their delay, I need not excuse myself for not replying sooner. And since the matters it pleased you to write to me about are purely concerned with the sciences, which are not at the mercy of changes of time or fortune, I hope that the answer I am now able to give will be no less agreeable to you than if you had received it ten months ago.

I subscribe altogether to Your Excellency’s views about alchemists,* and believe that all they do is to utter words remote from common usage, to give the impression that they know what they know nothing about. I believe also that what they say about the resurrection of flowers by their salt is a mere groundless fantasy, and that their extracts have other properties than those of the plants from which they are taken. This is very clearly proved by experience, inasmuch as wine, vinegar, and brandy, three different products that can be extracted from the same grapes, have such different tastes and properties. Finally, in my view their salt, sulphur, and mercury differ no more from one another than the four elements of the philosophers, hardly more than water differs from ice, foam, and snow; for I think that all bodies are composed of the same matter, and that the sole cause of the variety among them is that the particles of this matter that form some bodies are different in shape or arrangement from those that form others. I hope that Your Excellency will soon be able to see a full explanation of this in my Principles of Philosophy, which are about to be published in French.*

I have no particular knowledge about the formation of stones, except that I distinguish them from metals in that the particles that compose metals are notably larger than those of which stones are composed; and I distinguish them from bones, from hard woods, and other parts of animals or vegetables, in that, unlike these, they do not grow by means of some kind of sap that flows through tiny channels into all the parts of

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