CHAPTER THREE

I have proposed that the very shape and proclaimed purpose of Cartesianism, despite the not inconsiderable jewels that encrust it, (such as the crucial discovery of the linear in place of circular inertial motion — before Newton, see below) is too specific for science (as W. v. O Quinne and his like are too unspecific for science in any respect).

Cartesianism certainly denies by default non-biological evolutionary doctrine insofar as it insists on presenting itself as an explosive newcomer independently arrived at without roots or antecedents — as though science had died with the Ancient Greeks to rise from the dead in Descartes, Democritus redevivus, we might say. But despite his own protestations of originality in the fullest sense, that is, asking and acquiring nothing from the past upon which to build his opus, things are unlikely to be quite like that. It is all very well to boast that Descartes was the midwife of modern science but unless they are talking virgin birth, somebody begat the child in the first place.

"Could it not be that those who brought new ideas were often incapable of conceiving them as structures distinct from the pervading wisdom of their day — who could not test them as things sufficient in themselves but supplied what was lacking in them from the supports of the general wisdom in which they stood." (Commentary on Descartes' correspondence with Mersenne)

Even if in Descartes case he actively stated that his ideas were new, the same rule would apply.

"The graceful flight of the butterfly with glistening wings makes one forget the slow, painful crawling of the humble and sombre caterpillar", wrote the great theoretical physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem in a reflection on Claude Bernard's idée directrice about the "pride of the author of Cartesianism which duped the world into taking Cartesianism for a product curiously unforeseen and unsupported".

But what of Descartes majestic grasp of mathematics, his heroic development of geometry and his crucial perfecting of statics mechanics? If these had not borrowed life from his Cosmology at least intuitively, how else did they arrive?

Even if we place his physics prior to the metaphysics, was not one the companionable support and director of the other?

Leave aside the self-destruction of his Atomism and the failure of his associated grand theory of light which nevertheless left his empirical optics unscathed, we have only to consider his discovery of linear inertia to experience a real sense of awe. Whence this stroke of genius?

But at the same time we feel instinctively repulsed by the notion that its arrival was indeed part of the unprecedented "scientia mirabilis" it's author avowed.

Thankfully, investigation proves here too that nothing was uncaused. When considering Descartes' linear inertia it is not enough to applaud his cosmological concepts of homogeneity and mathematical extension as a probably means by which such a break-through might have become even intuitively probable.

The real issue is that something was already there in order to be changed and perfected, and from what turns out to have gone before, a number of links emerge, as a result of careful scrutiny, which re-attach the Cartesian legend to the Scientific reality in which Descartes actually operated.

In this regard, inertial mechanics has proved to me to provide the most crucial argument in favour of distinguishing the real Descartes from a less real system he had created in the cause of philosophy. But more crucially, it displays, despite some bombast and perhaps even evasion, a very human side to his genius. If he allowed others to believe he had initiated great discoveries which had actually developed in unbroken evolution from the middle ages (who received from the Peripatetics and passed the flame to the Renaissance and to da Vinci, thence to Galileo, Descartes and Newton) could not his blindness be excused in the glare of the great cosmology which had come upon him like a miracle vision from Wisdom herself? An old, perhaps neglected, thing seen from such a height can look irrelevant and even alien — even if it is one's own, it might be too easily disowned. What then if it be another's and a threat to one's grander scheme of things at that? Is it not possible that the most conscientious of men could allow themselves to be deluded in such a situation?

A careful study reveals that what Descartes had taken in from his teachers, and from the fecund intellectual ambience of his time was, indeed ,organically grown and its ancient provenance has now been thoroughly proved. [Ref Le Systeme du Monde and The Origin of Statics] [P. Tannery]

First of all recognition must be accorded to those who had earlier freed inertia from the unreconstructed fatalism and superstition of Peripateticism whose cosmology it is now generally agreed was practically indistinguishable from pagan theology, i.e. The study of void, planetary motions, and tides, by reference to theological pantheism and suppositions like the Great Year in whose rhythms the periodic life of the world was imagined to be embroiled. [Note. Aquinas however suggested that the ancient scientists were forced to wrap their wisdom in the lore of the gods]

And yet beginning from Descartes a misrepresentation of both early Greek and Medieval science which had entered the Renaissance almost apologetically had grown to become the received wisdom of the age — indeed in places it is with us still. It is entirely conveyed in the following paragraphs in the correspondence of Père Bulliot in 1911 concerning the use of scientific knowledge to attack not only philosophy but also theology — the justification for the proposition that non-belief is synonymous with scholarly scepticism.

They show us how all the sciences are born of the fertile Greek philosophy whose most brilliant exponents left to the vulgar the ridiculous concern of believing in religious dogmas. They depict to us shockingly that night of the Middle Ages during which the schools, subservient to the agencies of Christianity and exclusively concerned with theological discussions, did not know how to gather the smallest parcel of the scientific bequest of the Greeks. They make shine into our very eyes the glories of the Renaissance where minds, liberated at long last of the yoke of the church, have found again the thread of scientific tradition at the same time as they found the secret of scientific and literary beauty…"

Everyone recognises that anthem, but it was just as strong, if not stronger in Descartes ears. It was not until the beginning of this century that A Dufourcq would record what at last had begun to dawn on the scientific world:

"The principles upon which modern science rests were formulated … before Descartes, before Newton, before Galileo, before Copernicus, before Leonardo himself, the master of the university of Paris during the 14^th century."

The knowledge of circular inertia, itself a marvel of human ingenuity and comprehension, had been handed on to Descartes from the past of Medieval Paris herself, indeed it had been available for generations to any scholar rigorous enough to pursue hard facts in the very archives of the Sorbonne. Although it remained to be "straightened out" by the brilliant Descartes one might say.

Commentator after commentator on the work of Descartes whose studies I have examined either fails to make this clear or blatantly obfuscates the issue. Why? One can only point to the perfectly clear and available evidence that the prejudice against the Middle Ages was less evident in Renaissance anti-religious humanism, than in post Reformationist and Enlightenment Europe where a number of causes (even as early as 16^th century ) viewed any attempted accommodation of whatever survived the Age of Faith as being tantamount to religious and nationalist subversion.

Surely, in order to preserve the true status of Descartes' genius and ensure its richly deserved place of honour for posterity, one must now free it from such ideologically driven prejudices — even his own — which do nothing but smother his clear ideas and increasingly threaten to devalue his intellectual deposit, especially by making it a mere justification for the most absurd practices of human vainglory and prejudice —and rendering it as redundant as the Atomism which I have so far proved to be quite irrelevant to it.

It would also be a tragedy if unformed disappointment at the vacuum left by the failure of Cartesian explanations were to be held to blame, even in part, for the present general loss of confidence in philosophy qua philosophy. Philosophy deserves better as the normal and instinctive urge of humanity to explain itself — ou sont nous, ou allons nous?

It would be even sadder if, because of a certain inadequacy shared by all "natural" Cosmologies to explain all phenomena, we were to make Cartesianism the scape-goat for Philosophy's present degeneration into the proliferating systems of obfuscation, elaborated evasion, relativism or, for me, if I may speak personally, the worst of all, idealism and solipsism. But such reflections, although indicating further reasons for renewing Descartes' best thought, are ultimately incidental to this thesis.

Advances within physical theory, (Duhem's incomparable Aim and Structure of Physical Theory for example) not to mention philosophical Quantum Mechanics as proposed in the Copenhagen school, have certainly diminished, unchallenged, what merely contains Descartes' real and abiding contributions — it is his Atomism and theories of philosophical explanation, both in the realms of metaphysical and natural philosophy that is beleaguered, perhaps rightly so as I suggest.

My concern in re-examining his causalities here is to help distinguish what is within the disintegrating container, and to attempt to preserve what it contains before that too is irremediably reduced.

Meanwhile, everywhere, impossible demands are made upon the methode and Descartes himself continues to languish, a victim to the older meaning of Dualism, taken to be true and false at the same time in the same respect from the evidence.

These intolerable strains are even further revealed in the fierce glare of the modern history of science which has made the old fashioned claim for Cartesianism look rather forlorn on its lonely pillar; for just as Galileo has had to bow to da Vinci so the great Renaissance icon now defers to an unbroken succession of medieval and early millennia predecessors (without any of these intellectual giants — including Descartes I argue — suffering any diminishment of his status as genius).

For Galileo can no longer be claimed as the true begetter of modern dynamics and before him Da Vinci's mechanics is recognised at last as a wonderful flowering but set organically upon branches and roots from a slowly evolving past, which like Darwinism suggests nothing alarming or sudden.

Duhem's Gallic clarity of expression, which at first seems to harm Descartes, may be the seed of his fellow countryman's real restoration.

As I have already pointed out Descartes' physics also came from somewhere, despite that unfortunate belief in a grand hiatus (still too common in lesser centres of education) that would place the 17th century genius on an historical par with Topsy of Uncle Tom's Cabin "who just growed".

In fact to take just one example from the "many caterpillars" influencing the evolution of science, (but a most crucial one for this discussion), one matter being nibbled at for centuries culminated in Aquinas discerning and developing a staggering illumination concerning the motion of bodies and the nature of void which had been proposed and answered in embryonic form by Ibn Bajja (Avimpace).

Thus Thomas, the theologian came to distinguish three notes in a falling body: the weight, the mass, and the resistance of the medium — all the grist of modern dynamics, even today.

Whatever else may be gleaned from the paradoxical physicist, his Medieval slant on religion seemed to have been no bar to his grasp of science.

But more excitingly it was a matter central to the Statics of Descartes himself who died, seemingly unaware, that he had been part of a far greater whole.

In the 14th century John Buridan discerned the play of mass in projectile motion and also identified this mass with prime matter quantified by determinant extensions. This quantified body possessing mass, resists the motor acting against it, Aquinas noticed. Which led him to this thought: "Natural movement is accelerated at its end." He argued that a body opposes all motive forces by a resistance due to the quantity of matter it contains.

The evidence actually is overwhelming that Descartes borrowed in a number of vital instances from the Middle Ages. (See the Statics of René Descartes Appendix B)

This ascent of knowledge by careful progression, blind alleys visited, trial and error, rigour and intuition, things lost and then rediscovered, mistaken but then recognised, but always, always ascent, was known and celebrated by the key Renaissance savants.

Why then was this fact so selectively ignored by the 17th century and ever since then? It is not the thrust of this thesis to prove Descartes' own failure in this respect but we may leave the question at his door in support of out main contention, viz. That Descartes was not the originator he claimed to be and others claimed him to be; and, more importantly the cause of his illumination was unlikely to have been his cosmology. Like all life forms his activity seems to have been a progressive realisation of potential and driven (caused) by the activity of his mind against other minds.

We might say that his life answers to the Four Causes, as to material, efficient, formal, and final explanations.

From the high perspective of such lapidary scaffolding erected from the past without ceasing, and available to Leonardo da Vinci and to Galileo, both geniuses had reason to look back on the true provenance of their own scientific triumphs with decent humility.

Surely, viewed from an even higher historical platform the most striking thing about the new post 16th century ascendancy is its absolute lack of a similar generosity towards the same savants of the Middle Ages. Nay, more than a lack, we are even subjected, as I have shown, to a purposive, defiant denial that such industrious minds were even ever awake.

"The jump from the Ancient Greeks to Galileo was a hallowed cliché of intellectual history," Stanley L. Jaki reported in his exhaustive exhumation of Pierre Duhem's multi-volumed masterpiece Le Systeme du Monde which has dispelled forever the fallacy of a world citadel which, having fallen fast asleep for a thousand years under the opiates of an anti-scientific religion like the castle of Sleeping Beauty, was nevertheless, at the same time, identified by every culture on earth as the greatest civilisation of all.

Not before time professional historians of science have at last buried that politically inspired canard that reason had slept for a millennium and a half - from the Ancient Greeks until the 17th century. Sadly, the vulgar popularisers of "scientism" insist on digging it back up.

In re-examining Descartes and especially his causes not only he but science as a whole is vindicated I argue.

The only excuse every really advanced for the Medieval Sleepy Hollow fable seems rather specious to critical modern minds - that the sudden invention of printing overwhelmed the earlier information pool and the rare and painstakingly hand-written works of the Middle Ages, (wrought in the Latin Descartes had to employ a Protestant Divine to use on his behalf) had been all too easily forgotten then lost in dusty archives until Duhem.

The 17th Century was, nevertheless, the best possible time to claim an old thing to be a new thing. Harder to pin such dishonour on Rene. Yet he had made extravagant claims in the teeth of a well known caveat of Roger Bacon's:

"Never was any science invented at any particular time, but from the beginning of the world knowledge has grown slowly and is not complete at this very age.."