One ascendancy figure of the brave new age of materialism and mechanism was Thomas Hobbes — saying in effect that there was no God while Descartes, the other young Turk of that century, was absolutely convinced through ontological argument reminiscent of the venerable St Anselm that God was an unarguable principle of common sense.

As I indicated at the start, much more hangs on an honest tracing of metaphysics and the hard sciences of mechanics than is at first evident when confronting Cartesian causalities or explanations.

But it is also apparent that it is well nigh impossible to separate Descartes' philosophy of physics, at least psychologically, from his metaphysics. Contrary to some modern opinion, I propose that his system does not stem so much from physics (not his least virtue despite Hobbes' rather acerbic reservations) as from his faith in a form of Realism which was disguised under a cloak of what the scholastic examination of methods describes as Exaggerated Rationalism — and this in turn evades reasonable or objective control because, of its very nature, Rationalism is really an ontological approach whose principle datum is in itself ... "I think therefore X..."

I will attempt in the course of this chapter to demonstrate that Descartes did not so much discard metaphysics as attempt to assimilate it into a simpler structure, leaving out only what he considered to be tautological as it were; replacing the "proving of the obvious" with principles bluntly stated from a "physical" datum and from the considerations of common sense.

He is obviously trying to replace the "top down" deductions of classicism which he suspected of short-changing scientific rigour with the untestable suppositions of religious faith, with the "bottom up" inductiveness which Hobbes, and, ultimately, Newton, were to refine — an approach which, as I have already suggested, was not quite the philosophical universal scepticism which he postured in that rather pretentious "All is doubt but I think therefore I am" syllogism.

Fair-minded scholars, instead of dismissing the syllogism for a contradiction in terms, as perhaps to some extent it deserves, (universal scepticism has no conclusions by its own definition) agree to receive it as it was obviously primarily intended — as a rhetorical device proclaiming its author's intention to take nothing for granted but his capacity to think.

It is hard not to conclude that Descartes did not offer himself as a sceptic before he could prove himself, by practical application, to be an atomist of some merit.

Professor Etienne Gilson in his exhaustive and scholarly examination of the problems of knowledge of Being and Existence (Being and Some Philosophers) delicately touched upon a paradox of Descartes' time —when nobody would dream of denying God as the First Efficient Cause but when science was reaching towards unprecedented levels of professionalism — that not a few philosophers were, in a sense, but highly gifted amateurs rather than professional metaphysicians; even those who were also geniuses like Descartes.

He confessed: "I don't know if I will create scandal by saying that, apart from Spinoza, there was something amateurish in even the greatest of the 17^th and 18^th century philosophers. Their work was no longer that of professional teachers, and what it gained in freedom and originality, it lost in accurate technicality."

Few would argue that until Christian Wolff created a new and rigorous schola for "modern" metaphysics, or Immanuel Kant was roused from his uncritical slumber within that comfortably exclusive Wolffian construction by David Hume’s violent rejection of that ontology’s failure to attach to real existence (existentia), there were precious few thinkers who could even fully understand the time honoured system of Scholasticism (even those who thought they could and were merely immersed in its methody unaware). The implications that arose from the drama enclosed in these few introductory reflections are enormous — for at root was a lost problem of metaphysics and a failure — or a refusal — to recover or pursue its answers. And Descartes was eventually held responsible for the collapse of Metaphysics! He who had imagined himself part of it, who set out to perfect it even if perfecting it meant radical reappraisals of certain fundamental principles! (See Preface to Wolff’s Ontologia)

This ancient problem of knowledge of existence, or rather the answer which he chose to give it, was believed by a number of commentators to have set Descartes off in a direction wildly opposed to the Suarezian direction (but logically truer to the compass it employed) whose Scholasticism he had imbibed at La Flèche … For good or ill, when a journey ends up unexpectedly, a tiny miscalculation at the start may be the cause — as Aristotle and Aquinas warned,. The Suarezian course had deviated imperceptibly slightly from the Thomistic charting of Peripatetic essences —an essence being the primary datum of the intellect considering the intelligibility of some being. Classically this being (ens or entitas) was distinguished further into what is or what may be (essentia) and the very act of being (existentia).

Descartes must have been aware that he pressed his case unfairly at the expense of those he perceived as being against his new methode. But his point certainly hit a sometime deserving shirt front.

"When I say I think therefore I am, why should I bother explaining what existence is?" For Descartes, notions of distinctions of existence and being were idle and "they don't help us in acquiring the knowledge of any existing thing.." (Descartes, Principia philosophiae, Pars I, cap. 10, ed Adam-Tannery, Vol. VIII, p. 8.

But distinctions apart it is vitally important to remember that he was not a creature of the positivist century; essence, for example, itself was never in doubt then as a philosophical concept — and this must focus our attention, surely, on the philosophical spiritus of the man in his own time.

From all the available evidence essence as the first datum of metaphysics was universally acknowledged in the 17^th century, in fact it seems to be the unquestioned cornerstone of the philosophic mind. "No two philosophers would agree on their definition of God perhaps, but they all agreed He existed, and did so in virtue of His own essence." as Etienne Gilson accurately observed.

In Descartes’ Fifth Meditation, God’s being is synonymous with His essence. His essence necessarily entails His existence. He is "cause of Himself."

This must be borne in mind as we pursue his causalities (which he had no doubt held the high ground of Scholastic enquiry and from which he is today often mistakenly shouldered aside) to the "hard" sciences which he so magnificently adorned.

Gilson believes that Descartes had a good working knowledge of that Theologian's massive opus Metaphysicae Disputationes and that he even possessed a copy for a time but I have been unable so far to verify this — although throughout his work one finds some allusions and terminologies which, although Scholastic, are not couched in Thomas Aquinas's steely Latin style which is far more succinct than Suarez’s.

It did not surprise me to discover that Suarez's ambiguously non-conclusive approach to Being and Existence (he was the kind of gentle scholar who preferred suggestion to affirmation) became assertively fixed in Descartes — that is, that being and existence were indivisibly one and the same. Here indeed is found the nexus of the Cartesian rebellion insofar as it was a rebellion. But here too is a long line, one of a number of streams of Classicism which I shall also trace later.

To recap, Descartes teased the Scholastic as a man who "sees double" in imagining both matter and form in corporeal things (plus a multiplicity of accidents). He wrote: "To conceive the essence of a thing apart from its existence, is another way to conceive it than when it is conceived as existing, but the thing itself cannot be outside our thought without its existence."(Descartes, Letters, 1645, ed. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 349-350.) For him the only distinction here is one of reason. And "what is true of existence holds for all universals!"

Alas there arises from that very problem which he refused to recognise as a problem at-all, a necessary corollary; the properties of knowledge and knowing, the activity of the mind which forms abstracts (unless you wish to engage in the Babel justifications that seek to deny this on behalf of Hume!) or proposes, as if they were real beings, things that do not yet exist but may exist — and, therefore, he also lost sight of the desirability of those older distinctions and terms that could accommodate an a priori capacity of the intellectus agens to recognise such intangibles from the percepts of the baser realities brought to it by the five senses (the Intelligible apprehensions as against the Sensible apprehensions as proposed by Aristotle himself).

In order to justify the flow of this particular argument it can be argued against Hume’s rather simplistic experiment against the distinctiveness of ideas perceived to be percepts and precepts, that is, that which catches a notion and that which affirms it.

Hume asked who could have an idea of a triangle without at once recognising it as scalenum or isosceles. The trick here was in the choice of a subject, the idea of which is instantaneous with the judgement. There are many such subjects, but one of them is not a polygon, certainly not a myriagon.

However as the exigencies of Being further degenerated into irrelevance in the new, physically conceived and mathematically sufficient cosmos, other nuances of philosophical intellectualism also decayed until, in time, men forgot why they were once ever deemed to be important at all. But we must not forget that this had not yet happened when Descartes offered his reasons for things, his causes, or explanations.

Amongst these distinctions, which, some have since argued, were "babies thrown out with the bath-water" were, as I have just indicated, such terms as conceptus, which stands for apprehension, and judicium, for that process of mind which distinguishes or composes two or more concepts. Indeed from confirming this very hiatus, David Hume came to deny metaphysics, and even to attempt to refute its foundation in the human psyche. For him ideas and images were but the one process of ratiocination. Nor did the drift into subjectivity, implicit in Descartes’ Rationalism where the mind is made the measure of all things, thus abate as I will explain further on in an examination of the paradoxes produced when the intellect is either considered subordinate to extrinsically stimulated sensation or, the opposite, where the intellect is conceived to be the first datum of material explanations — as was the case with Descartes.

Again this appears also in Suarez in a conclusion about sensate apprehension and it follows the same track but in the more ancient vehicle of Scholasticism from the Avicenna, Duns Scotus, Suarez tributary. But it does not arrive in Aquinas for whom a sustained dynamic activity is sensed in all things in Being, "The human mind has a natural knowledge of Being and the things which are in themselves part of being as such, and this is the foundation of our knowledge of first principles."

While Suarez implies the mind’s immediate grasp of reality, Aquinas in his proportionate, moderation says: "The reason is the bridge between the mind and reality … that primary act of recognition of any reality is real." Had Wolff gone to Aquinas rather than Suarez, then perhaps his great aspirations would have been less dreamlike, perhaps lapidary enough to have seduced (or perhaps silenced) Hume leaving the reason of individual men secure and mysterious..

Could Kant ever have been aroused from such as this from Thomas or Descartes given leave to prove the universe from his trifling sensibilities?: For Aquinas insists; "The mind is certain of an external object, and not merely of an impression of that object; and yet, apparently, reaches it through a concept, though not merely through an impression."

From a lack of this, the rational soul as a substantial but unperfected entity within a formerly conceived compound substance, the living body which completes it, would come to be denied.

Descartes saw it as compound but without the subtle ingenuity supplied by that cause called Substantial Form by which Thomas could describe the soul as "the substantial form of the body." (Ref; Descartes’ Metaphysics page X).

There had then entered after Descartes through Hume a contempt for all metaphysics which was to change philosophy, perhaps, forever. Indeed both Wolff and Kant ruefully recognised in the 18^th century the depth to which Scholasticism had fallen in fashionable opinion. [See Wolff’s Ontologia, Preface; "Si Cartesius non fastidio philosophiae primae correptus fuisset .."]

He wrote regretfully: "Prime Philosophy (metaphysics) was first laden by the Scholastics with enviable praises, but ever after the success of the Cartesian philosophy, it fell into disrepute and has become a laughing stock to all."

And Kant bewailed: "There was a time when metaphysics used to be called the Queen of Sciences … Now in our own century, it is quite fashionable to show contempt for it." (Preface to The Critique of Pure Reason). Kant was so shocked by Hume’s intellectual determinism that his reaction is made quite apparent in the Critique.

Kirkegaard was later seen to aiming at Hegel with his: "There can be a logical system, but there can be no system of existence."

"To be or not to be"; it would appear that the problem that had first caused the erection of the science of philosophy itself in the womb of ancient genius had not, nor has it, gone away.

Mechanism, then, was not so easily picked clean of Scholastic flesh it seems. Such were the men who gnawed at the bone Descartes had actually dug up from where it had lain buried since merry Democritus’s time. He had revitalised Atomism on the threshold of phenomenal wonders which invited it in as a most welcome guest, but without, ever seeming to acknowledge its amazing provenance or to envisage where it would end. At least he does not seem to tell us so in all his written work so far found.

Answer to the first question:. I therefore conclude that, although to modern eyes, his physical sciences would seem suspect for having been associated with Atomism, they are in fact independent and ought to be judged purely on their merit — which is considerable. I am also inclined to the view, as a result of this study, that there is a psychological imperative in the human search for explanations, even if these are volitionally selected and limited only to mechanically envisaged tracings of cause and effect, and that Descartes had satisfied this instinct by employing a general cosmology which although illogical and inadequate for the purpose for which it had been intended by even ancient thinkers, gave the appearance of a supportive system of causalities.

Answer to the second question: Descartes being a philosophical child of his metaphysical time could not conceive any body of knowledge as being necessarily unassociated with another, nor could he conceive of an unpurposed incoherent universe; so he imagined that he had found in Atomism a metaphysics to explain the profound realities of phenomena and at the same time free the mind of anything he believed would pollute or interfere with a rigorous, mechanistic examination of things. I firmly hold, after an exhaustive examination of his use of explanations, that these hold the key to a fuller grasp of his methode, his mind, his times, and the influence of his work for good or ill on all the science that followed him. In short to see his causes his to recognised what caused Descartes himself, and not only distinguishes his explanatory system (methode) from explanatory specifics, but sets out clearly other factors influencing his work, such as religion, the intellectual deposit of his age, the invisible prejudices he brought to his work despite his declared intention to guard against such dangers, and the psychological set of his own persona — the ghost from which none of us can seem to free himself.

In conclusion, any prima facie consideration of the enormously powerful realities confronting Cartesianism, in almost every element of that cosmology, increases one's wonder at its almost unfaltering survival, if not as a workable system in itself, at least as an icon for practically every philosophical over-view in the world of physical sciences to this day.

All in all, Cartesianism today displays a capacity for survival which cannot be dismissed as a mere historical freak.

Modern attitudes and principles are shot through with Descartes’ thought. There must surely be hard reasons for its ubiquitousness; and this study has at its centre a desire to initiate just such an examination.

In fact, having resurrected Mechanism which had died with the early pagan thinkers of antiquity, Descartes somehow dressed this once discredited methody in a suit of imperishable cloth — an impenetrable flak-jacket, some exasperated philosophers would argue — while others, like the boy who gaped at the emperor, cannot see any material substance in it at-all.

But Cartesianism, if not Descartes, has accomplished more; it somehow alarmed the mechanistic/anti-teleological spirit of the French Third Republic to mount sentinel over the comparatively new grave of Classical Philosophy which he himself had never intended to bury.

Is this guard still on duty; presumably to shoo away "Resurrection men" who might be tempted to raise Peripateticism again. But why this abiding fear of, say, Fra. Thomas Aquinas, or Fr. Francis Suarez? If Cartesian Atomism can be an unemphatic support for a thinker, why not another whose best use is in defending the autonomy of physics while, at the same time, permitting us to ask the questions that are summoned by the human contemplation of reality?

Some betray a quite irrational horror against the raising of that older but far more accommodating system of synthesis — as if they feared it were God Himself who might arise instead of a dusty philosophy which does not by its declared description set out to deny either deity or corporeal material or the sciences that attach to either.

And why can’t Logical Positivism shake off Cartesianism either; a now unfashionable Atomism which it would also like to see safely interred? Perhaps, having set out to extend Humean philosophy to deny even the human intellectual capacity to deduce consequences, it’s apostles require consequential systematy to explain itself or to warm, psychologically, the chill of utter Nihilism when the individual is left alone and naked in the wake of vast societal enthusiasms with no further earthly empires to subdue?

For many, René Descartes greatest nuisance is that he has set things down solidly, if not always logically. He is a high profile target offering visibility in an intellectual ambience which prefers chameleon accommodationism and unemphatic formlessness as it acts out its politically perceived social destiny — contemptuous of the older manner of man which was to brood (from the security of his ancient schools) upon his private fate.

So a third question in the thesis arises naturally and seeks an answer, just what makes René run and run? I can do more than offer an honest opinion in reply, for what science may grasp at ghosts? One suspects that it is not really his optics, or chemistry, or dynamics; not his philosophy, qua philosophy, intriguing as this may be. An embattled President of the US, while his enemies campaigned from high moral platforms, defeated them by setting his own campaign sights at a less elevated level: "It's the economy, stupid!"

In similar vein I can almost hear the buffeted Cartesian caution his more intellectually advantaged opponents: "It's the ideology stupid!"

However, as one contemplates the recent (and present) havoc of that fully extended, ideological, Comptean control of the entire human organism, and its power to manipulate our history towards unseen hells or unimaginable heavens on the promise of blind species fulfillment (or whatever) Descartes’ "clear and distinct ideas" are less obvious than he could have imagined.

ENDS