Descartes' Lost Works

While Descartes was dividing his time between military and philosophical exercises in Breda, the Prince of Orange was using all of his on the movements given to him by the Arminians in several cities of the United Provinces.

He disbanded their waiting soldiers, drove out their ministers, dispossessed the magistrates who favored them, and had the attorney general Barneveld, Hoogerbets, pensionary of Leiden, and Grotius, pensionary of Rotterdam, arrested as prisoners in The Hague. To pacify the religious differences and to try to restore uniformity of belief, a synod was convened in Dort or Dordrecht, which opened on Tuesday, November 13, 1618, and closed on May 9, 1619.

Although it could be called general for the entire Reformed religion, because deputies from all places where there were Calvinists (except from France, whose ministers did not have the freedom to leave) were brought there, the states general ordered that it should be qualified only as national, as if it had been proper and particular to the United Provinces alone.

The Gomarists, assisted by the sword of the Prince of Orange, were the strongest there and declared the Arminians heretics. Three days later, Mr. de Barneveldt was tried; and he was beheaded, at the age of 76, despite the high intercession of the Most Christian King in favor of this great man, whose only crime was to have maintained the laws of the country, not to have wanted to make himself a slave to the ambition of the Prince of Orange, and to have thwarted the projects that this prince had made to seize sovereignty.

Beeckman and Descartes were so little interested in all these public actions that they were not even spectators of them. The former, although rector of the college of the city where the national council was held, had no part in this assembly, either for not having been a deputy, or for not being a professional theologian.

He did nothing better during this interval than to cultivate his new habits with his friend, by proposing to him mathematical questions to solve.

Descartes did not stop at the answers he gave him. He also composed various small works that would have been excellent guarantees of the good use of his time, if he had let them see the light of day.

Chanut was:

• ambassador of France to Sweden
• the Baron of Kroneberg

Queen Christina sent him to make an inventory of what Descartes had left at his death.

He found among the writings of his composition, a bound register covered with parchment, containing various fragments of different pieces on which it appears he worked during that time.

It was:

1. Some considerations on the sciences in general
2. Something on algebra
3. Some thoughts as Democritica
4. A collection of observations as Experimenta
5. A treatise and a discourse entitled Olympica

This was only 12 pages long, and which contained in the margin, in a more recent ink, but still in the same hand of the author, a remark that still gives the curious something to do today.

The terms in which this remark was conceived read: “Xi Novembris 1620 (…),” of which neither Mr. Clerselier nor the other Cartesians have yet been able to give us the explanation.

This remark is found opposite a text that seems to persuade us that this writing is subsequent to the others that are in the register, and that it was not begun until November of the year 1619. This text bears these Latin terms, “(…)”.

But the principal of these fragments, and the first of those that were in the register, was a collection of mathematical considerations under the title of Parnassus, of which only 36 pages remained.

Borel believed that it was a book composed in 1619, based on a date of the first day of January, which Mr. Descartes had put at the head of the register.

But it may be that the date was only for the blank register, and that it only meant that Mr. Descartes would have begun to use this register on the first of January 1619, to continue to use it in the future according to his views and his will.

The opinion of Mr. Borel is nevertheless no less probable, since Mr. Chanut noted in the inventory of Mr. Descartes that all the writings contained in this register appear to have been composed in his youth.

To suppose that these works of Mr. Descartes are from the year 1619 is to give his opinion on the soul of beasts more than twenty years of seniority beyond the time to which his adversaries and some scholars with them had tried to fix it.

When it is known that it is in these works of his youth that this opinion was found, one will perhaps cease to say that he began and ended his meditations without thinking about the soul of beasts, and without having abandoned the opinion he had had of it since his childhood.

One will no longer believe that it was only by considering the consequences of his principle concerning the distinction between the thinking substance and the extended substance, that he noticed that the knowledge of animals would overthrow the entire economy of his system.

One will no longer be persuaded that the obligation to respond to the objections that have been formed on this subject, gave him a thought that he owed only to the freedom of his mind. He was not yet in any need to maintain that beasts have no feelings, since he did not have the gift of foreseeing what might happen to him twenty years later.

He had no principles to save then, having not yet established any for the new philosophy; at least, he had not yet read at that age, either Saint Augustine, or Pereira, or any author from whom he could have taken the opinion on the soul of beasts.

Five or six years later, Descartes having returned from his travels to Paris, revealed this opinion to some of his friends, and made them recognize that he could not imagine that beasts were anything other than automatons.

So that those who will find it difficult to attribute this feeling to him as early as the year 1619 will have less to believe that this opinion came to his mind at the latest around the year 1625. They will perhaps not refuse to stick to the testimony of Descartes, who teaches us that it had come to him fifteen or sixteen years before he had given his metaphysical meditations. Besides, this opinion of automatons is what Mr. Pascal esteemed the most in the philosophy of Mr. Descartes.

After the death of Barneveld, the Prince of Orange, who also had the obligation of the general government of the provinces on land and sea to him, believed he had smoothed out the difficulties that were in the way he was making for himself to sovereignty. He no longer thought of anything but to secure the assistance of the princes of Germany and the other northern quarters, but mainly of those who were his relatives, allies, or friends. He seemed to not have much to fear from the Catholic powers that were around Holland, and he presumed that no obstacles or diversions would be seen to arise from the part of the king of Spain, or the archdukes, governors of the Catholic Low Countries, as long as the truce which was not useless to the advancement of his particular affairs lasted.

But all these advantages were of no use to him in overcoming the difficulties of his plan. He was very surprised to see that those whom he had anticipated and animated against Barneveld to put them in his interests, showed themselves to be even more opposed to the loss of public liberty than Barneveld, when he sounded them out in earnest on the point of sovereignty. The large number of relatives, and other people who had remained in the interests of the honest people to whom he had brought death, imprisonment, or exile, made him know that he had attracted general aversion, and that republicans who had shaken off the domination of the House of Austria would not be in the mood to submit to the yoke of that of Nassau.

Descartes could not ignore the practices of this prince, nor the disposition of the peoples towards him.

This is perhaps what contributed to detaching him from a country where he did not find this variety of occupations that he had promised himself when leaving France. The news that had been brought to Breda of the great movements of Germany, awakened the curiosity he had to become a spectator of all that would happen of most considerable in Europe.

There was talk of a new emperor, there was talk of the revolt of the states of Bohemia against their king, and of a war ignited between the Catholics and the Protestants on this subject. Mr. Descartes, wanting to leave Holland, took as a pretext the little exercise that the suspension of arms that was between the troops of the Prince of Orange and those of the Marquis of Spinola, and which was to last for another two years according to the conventions of the truce, produced for him.

His resolution was to go to Germany to serve in the Catholic armies: but before deciding on any engagement, he was glad to attend the coronation of the new emperor who was to be held in the city of Frankfurt.